_Ecce Homo_ is the last prose work that Nietzsche wrote. It is true
that the pamphlet _Nietzsche contra Wagner_ was prepared a month
later than the Autobiography; but we cannot consider this pamphlet as
anything more than a compilation, seeing that it consists entirely of
aphorisms drawn from such previous works as _Joyful Wisdom, Beyond
Good and Evil, The Genealogy of Morals,_ etc. Coming at the end of a
year in which he had produced the _Case of Wagner, The Twilight of the
Idols,_ and _The Antichrist, Ecce Homo_ is not only a coping-stone
worthy of the wonderful creations of that year, but also a fitting
conclusion to his whole life, in the form of a grand summing up of his
character as a man, his purpose as a reformer, and his achievement
as a thinker. As if half conscious of his approaching spiritual end,
Nietzsche here bids his friends farewell, just in the manner in which,
in the _Twilight of the Idols_ (Aph. 36, Part ix.), he declares that
every one should be able to take leave of his circle of relatives and
intimates when his time seems to have come--that is to say, while he
is still _himself_ while he still knows what he is about, and is able
to measure his own life and life in general, and speak of both in a
manner which is not vouchsafed to the groaning invalid, to the man
lying on his back, decrepit and exhausted, or to the moribund victim
of some wasting disease. Nietzsche's spiritual death, like his whole
life, was in singular harmony with his doctrine: he died suddenly
and proudly,--sword in hand. War, which he--and he alone among all
the philosophers of Christendom--had praised so whole-heartedly, at
last struck him down in the full vigour of his manhood, and left him
a victim on the battlefield--the terrible battlefield of thought, on
which there is no quarter, and for which no Geneva Convention has yet
been established or even thought of.
To those who know Nietzsche's life-work, no apology will be needed
for the form and content of this wonderful work. They will know, at
least, that a man either is, or is not, aware of his significance and
of the significance of what he has accomplished, and that if he is
aware of it, then self-realisation, even of the kind which we find
in these pages, is neither morbid nor suspicious, but necessary and
inevitable. Such chapter headings as "Why I am so Wise," "Why I am a
Fatality," "Why I write such Excellent Books,"--however much they may
have disturbed the equanimity, and "objectivity" in particular, of
certain Nietzsche biographers, can be regarded as pathological only
in a democratic age in which people have lost all sense of graduation
and rank and in which the virtues of modesty and humility have to be
preached far and wide as a corrective against the vulgar pretensions of
thousands of wretched nobodies. For little people can be endured only
as modest citizens; or humble Christians. If, however, they demand a
like modesty on the part of the truly great; if they raise their voices
against Nietzsche's lack of the very virtue they so abundantly possess
or pretend to possess, it is time to remind them of Goethe's famous
remark: "_Nur Lumpe sind bescheiden_" (Only nobodies are ever modest).
It took Nietzsche barely three weeks to write this story of his life.
Begun on the 15th of October 1888, his four-and-fourtieth birthday,
it was finished on the 4th of November of the same year, and, but
for a few trifling modifications and additions, is just as Nietzsche
left it. It was not published in Germany until the year 1908, eight
years after Nietzsche's death. In a letter dated the 27th of December
1888, addressed to the musical composer Fuchs, the author declares
the object of the work to be to dispose of all discussion, doubt, and
inquiry concerning his own personality, in order to leave the public
mind free to consider merely "the things for the sake of which he
existed" ("_die Dinge, derentwegen ich da bin_"). And, true to his
intention, Nietzsche's honesty in these pages is certainly one of
the most remarkable features about them. From the first chapter, in
which he frankly acknowledges the decadent elements within him, to
the last page, whereon he characterises his mission, his life-task,
and his achievement, by means of the one symbol, _Dionysus_ versus
_Christ,_--everything comes straight from the shoulder, without
hesitation, without fear of consequences, and, above all, without
concealment. Only in one place does he appear to conceal something, and
then he actually leads one to understand that he is doing so. It is in
regard to Wagner, the greatest friend of his life. "Who doubts," he
says, "that I, old artillery-man that I am, would be able if I liked to
point my heavy guns at Wagner?"--But he adds: "Everything decisive in
this question I kept to myself--I have loved Wagner" (p. 122).
To point, as many have done, to the proximity of all Nietzsche's autumn
work of the year 1888 to his breakdown at the beginning of 1889, and
to argue that in all its main features it foretells the catastrophe
that is imminent, seems a little too plausible, a little too obvious
and simple to require refutation. That Nietzsche really was in a state
which in medicine is known as _euphoria_--that is to say, that state
of highest well-being and capacity which often precedes a complete
breakdown, cannot, I suppose, be questioned; for his style, his
penetrating vision, and his vigour, reach their zenith in the works
written in this autumn of 1888; but the contention that the matter, the
substance, of these works reveals any signs whatsoever of waning mental
health, or, as a certain French biographer has it, of an inability to
"hold himself and his judgments in check," is best contradicted by
the internal evidence itself. To take just a few examples at random,
examine the cold and calculating tone of self-analysis in Chapter I. of
the present work; consider the reserve and the restraint with which the
idea in Aphorism 7 of that chapter is worked out,--not to speak of the
restraint and self-mastery in the idea itself, namely:--
"To be one's enemy's equal--this is the first condition of an
honourable duel. Where one despises one cannot wage war. Where one
commands, where one sees something beneath one, one ought not to wage
war. My war tactics can be reduced to four principles: First, I attack
only things that are triumphant--if necessary I wait until they become
triumphant. Secondly, I attack only those things against which I find
no allies, against which I stand alone--against which I compromise
nobody but myself.... Thirdly, I never make personal attacks--I use a
personality merely as a magnifying-glass, by means of which I render a
general, but elusive and scarcely noticeable evil, more apparent....
Fourthly, I attack only those things from which all personal
differences are excluded, in which any such thing as a background of
disagreeable experiences is lacking."
And now notice the gentleness with which, in Chapter II., Wagner--the
supposed mortal enemy, the supposed envied rival to Nietzsche--is
treated. Are these the words and the thoughts of a man who Has lost, or
who is losing control?
And even if we confine ourselves simply to the substance of this work
and put the question--Is it a new Nietzsche or the old Nietzsche that
we find in these pages? Is it the old countenance with which we are
familiar, or are the features distorted, awry, disfigured? What will
the answer be? Obviously there is no new or even deformed Nietzsche
here, because he is still faithful to the position which he assumed
in _Thus spake Zarathustra,_ five years previously, and is perfectly
conscious of this fidelity (see p. 141); neither can he be even on the
verge of any marked change, because the whole of the third chapter,
in which he reviews his life-work, is simply a reiteration and a
confirmation of his old points of view, which are here made all the
more telling by additional arguments suggested, no doubt, by maturer
thought. In fact, if anything at all is new in this work, it is its
cool certainty, its severe deliberateness, and its extraordinarily
incisive vision, as shown, for instance, in the summing up of the
genuine import of the third and fourth essays in the _Thoughts out of
Season_ (pp. 75-76, 80, 81, 82), a summing up which a most critical
analysis of the essays in question can but verify. Romanticism,
idealism, Christianity, are still scorned and despised; another
outlook, a nobler, braver, and more earthly outlook, is still upheld
and revered; the great yea to life, including all that it contains
that is terrible and questionable, is still pronounced in the teeth of
pessimists, nihilists, anarchists, Christians, and other decadents; and
Germany, "Europe's flatland," is still subjected to the most relentless
criticism. If there are any signs of change, besides those of mere
growth, in this work, they certainly succeed in eluding the most
careful search, undertaken with a full knowledge of Nietzsche's former
opinions, and it would be interesting to know precisely where they are
found by those writers whom the titles of the chapters, alone, seem so
radically to have perturbed.
But the most striking thing of all, the miracle, so to speak, of this
autobiography, is the absence from it of that loathing, that suggestion
of surfeit, with which a life such as the one Nietzsche had led, would
have filled any other man even of power approximate to his own. This
anchorite, who, in the last years of his life as a healthy human being,
suffered the experience of seeing even his oldest friends, including
Rhode, show the most complete indifference to his lot, this wrestler
with Fate, for whom recognition, in the persons of Brandes, Taine, and
Strindberg, had come all too late, and whom even support, sympathy, and
help, arriving as it did at last, through Deussen and from Madame de
Salis Marschlins, could no longer cheer or comfort,--this was the man
who was able notwithstanding to inscribe the device _amor fati_ upon
his shield on the very eve of his final collapse as a victim of the
unspeakable suffering he had endured.
And this final collapse might easily have been foreseen. Nietzsche's
sensorium, as his autobiography proves, was probably the most delicate
instrument ever possessed by a human being; and with this fragile
structure--the prerequisite, by the bye, of all genius,--his terrible
will compelled him to confront the most profound and most recondite
problems. We happen to know from another artist and profound thinker,
Benjamin Disraeli, who himself had experienced a dangerous breakdown,
what the consequences precisely are of indulging in excessive activity
in the sphere of the spirit, more particularly when that spirit is
highly organised. Disraeli says in _Contarini Fleming_ (Part iv. chap.
v.):--
"I have sometimes half believed, although the suspicion is
mortifying, that there is only one step between his state
who deeply indulges in imaginative meditation, and insanity;
for I well remember that at this period of my life, when
I indulged in meditation to a degree that would now be
impossible, and I hope unnecessary, my senses sometimes
appeared to be wandering."
And artists are the proper judges of artists,--not Oxford Dons, like
Dr. Schiller, who, in his imprudent attempt at dealing with something
for which his pragmatic hands are not sufficiently delicate, eagerly
av-ails himself of popular help in his article on Nietzsche in the
eleventh edition of the _Encyclopedia Britannica,_ and implies the
hackneyed and wholly exploded belief that Nietzsche's philosophy is
madness in the making. As German philosophies, however, are said to
go to Oxford only when they die, we may, perhaps, conclude from this
want of appreciation in that quarter, how very much alive Nietzsche's
doctrine still is.
Not that Nietzsche went mad so soon, but that he went mad so late is
the wonder of wonders. Considering the extraordinary amount of work
he did, the great task of the transvaluation of all values, which he
actually accomplished, and the fact that he endured such long years
of solitude, which to him, the sensitive artist to whom friends were
everything, must have been a terrible hardship, we can only wonder at
his great health, and can well believe his sister's account of the
phenomenal longevity and bodily vigour of his ancestors.
No one, however, who is initiated, no one who reads this work with
understanding, will be in need of this introductory note of mine; for,
to all who know, these pages must speak for themselves. We are no
longer in the nineteenth century. We have learned many things since
then, and if caution is only one of these things, at least it will
prevent us from judging a book such as this one, with all its apparent
pontifical pride and surging self-reliance, with undue haste, or with
that arrogant assurance with which the ignorance of "the humble" and
"the modest" has always confronted everything truly great.