It has only lately become possible to study Nietzsche’s life-history.
For a considerable period the Nietzsche-Archiv at Naumburg and Weimar
has been accumulating copious materials which have now been utilised by
Nietzsche’s sister, Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, in the production of
an authoritative biography. This sister is herself a remarkable person;
for many years she lived in close association with her brother, so
that she was supposed, though without reason, to have exerted an
influence over his thought; then she married Dr. Förster, the founder
of the New Germany colony in Paraguay; on his death she returned home
to write the history of the colony, and has since devoted herself to
the care of her brother and his fame. Only the first two volumes of the
_Leben Nietzsche’s_ have yet appeared, but they enable us to trace
his development to his departure from Basel, and throw light on his
whole career.
Nietzsche belonged, according to the ancestral tradition (though the
name, I am told, is a common one in Wendish Silesia), to a noble Polish
family called Nietzky, who on account of strong Protestant convictions
abandoned their country and their title during the eighteenth century
and settled in Germany. Notwithstanding the large amount of German
blood in his veins, he always regarded himself as essentially a Pole.
The Poles seemed to him the best endowed and most knightly of Sclavonic
peoples, and he once remarked that it was only by virtue of a strong
mixture of Sclavonic blood that the Germans entered the ranks of gifted
nations. He termed the Polish Chopin the deliverer of music from
German heaviness and stupidity, and when he speaks of another Pole,
Copernicus, who reversed the judgment of the whole world, one may
divine a reference to what in later years Nietzsche regarded as his own
mission. In adult life Nietzsche’s keen and strongly marked features
were distinctly Polish, and when abroad he was frequently greeted
by Poles as a fellow-countryman; at Sorrento, where he once spent a
winter, the country people called him Il Polacco.
Like Emerson (to whose writings he was strongly attracted throughout
life) and many another strenuous philosophic revolutionary, Nietzsche
came of a long race of Christian ministers. On both sides his ancestors
were preachers, and from first to last the preacher’s fervour was
in his own blood. The eldest of three children (of whom one died in
infancy), Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844 at Röcken, near Lützen,
in Saxony. His father--who shortly after his son’s birth fell down the
parsonage steps, injuring his head so severely that he died within
twelve months--is described as a man of noble and poetic nature,
with a special talent for music, inherited by his son; though once
described by his son as “a tender, lovable, morbid man,” he belonged
to a large and very healthy family, who mostly lived to an extreme
old age, preserving their mental and physical vigour to the last.
The Nietzsches were a proud, sincere folk, very clannish, looking
askance at all who were not Nietzsches. Nietzsche’s mother, said to
be a charming woman and possessed of much physical vigour, was again
a clergyman’s daughter. The Oehler family, to which she belonged,
was also very large, very healthy, and very long-lived; she was only
eighteen at her son’s birth, and is still alive to care for him in his
complete mental decay. I note these facts, which are given with much
precision and detail in the biography, because they certainly help
us to understand Nietzsche. It is evident that he is no frail hectic
flame of a degenerating race. There seems to be no trace of insanity
or nervous disorder at any point in the family history, as far back
as it is possible to go. On the contrary, he belonged to extremely
vigorous stocks, possessing unusual moral and physical force, people
of “character.” A similar condition of things is not seldom found in
the history of genius. In such a case the machine is, as it were, too
highly charged with inherited energy, and works at a pressure which
ultimately brings it to perdition. All genius must work without rest,
it cannot do otherwise; only the most happily constituted genius works
without haste.
The sister’s account of the children’s early life is a very charming
part of this record, and one which in the nature of things rarely finds
place in a biography. She describes her first memories of the boy’s
pretty face, his long fair hair, and large, dark, serious eyes. He
could not speak until he was nearly three years old, but at four he
began to read and write. He was a quiet, rather obstinate child, with
fits of passion which he learnt to control at a very early age; his
self-control became so great that, as a boy, on more than one occasion
he deliberately burnt his hand, to show that Mucius Scævola’s act was
but a trifling matter.
The widowed mother went with her children to settle at Naumburg on
the Saale with her husband’s mother, a woman of fine character with
views of her own, one of which was that children of all classes should
first be brought up together. Little Fritz was therefore sent to the
town school, but the experiment was not altogether successful. He was
a serious child, fond of solitude, and was called “the little parson”
by his comrades. “The fundamental note of his disposition,” writes a
schoolfellow in after-life, “was a certain melancholy which expressed
itself in his whole being.” He avoided his fellows and sought beautiful
scenery, as he continued to do throughout life. At the same time he
was a well-developed, vigorous boy, who loved games of various kinds,
especially those of his own invention. But although the children lived
to the full the fantastic life of childhood, the sister regretfully
confesses that they remained models of propriety. Fritz was “a very
pious child; he thought much about religious matters, and was always
concerned to put his thoughts into practice.” It is curious that,
notwithstanding his instinctive sympathy with the Greek spirit and his
philological aptitudes, he found Greek specially difficult to learn.
At the age of ten appeared his taste for verse-making, and also for
music, and he soon began to show that inherited gift for improvisation
by which he was always able to hold his audience spellbound. Even as
a boy the future moralist made a deep impression on those who knew
him, and he reminded one person of the youthful Jesus in the Temple.
“We Nietzsches hate lies,” an aunt was accustomed to say; in Friedrich
sincerity was a very deep-rooted trait, and he exercised an involuntary
educational influence on those who came near him.
In 1858 a place was found for him at Pforta, a remarkable school of
almost military discipline. Here many of the lines of his future
activity were definitely laid down. At an even earlier date, excited
by the influence of Humboldt, he had been fascinated by the ideal of
universal culture, and at Pforta his intellectual energies began to
expand. Here also, in 1859, when a pianoforte edition of _Tristan_
was first published, Nietzsche became an enthusiastic Wagnerian,
and even to the last _Tristan_ remained for him “music _par
excellence_.” Here, too, he began those philological studies which
led some years later to a professorship. He turned to philology,
however, as he himself recognised, because of the need he felt to
anchor himself to some cool logical study which would not grip his
heart like the restless and exciting artistic instincts which had
hitherto chiefly moved him. During the latter part of his stay at this
very strenuous educational establishment young Nietzsche was a less
brilliant pupil than during the earlier part. His own individuality
was silently growing beneath the disciplinary pressure which would
have dwarfed a less vigorous individuality. His philosophic aptitudes
began to develop and take form; he wished also to devote himself to
music; and he pined at the confinement, longing for the forest and the
woodman’s axe. It was the beginning of a long struggle between the
impulses of his own self-centred nature and the duties imposed from
without, by the school, the university, and, later, his professorship;
he always strove to broaden and deepen these duties to the scope of his
own nature, but the struggle remained. It was the immediate result of
this double strain that, during 1862, strong and healthy as the youth
appeared, he began to suffer from headaches and eye-troubles, cured by
temporary removal from the school. He remained extremely short-sighted,
and it was only by an absurd error in the routine examination that,
some years later, he was passed for military service in the artillery.
In the following year, 1863, Nietzsche met a schoolfellow’s sister, an
ethereal little Berlin girl, who for a while appealed to “the large,
broad-shouldered, shy, rather solemn and stiff youth.” To this early
experience, which never went beyond poetic _Schwärmerei_, his
sister is inclined to trace the origin of Nietzsche’s view of women as
very fragile, tender little buds. The experience is also interesting
because it appears to stand alone in his life. We strike here on
an organic abnormality in this congenital philosopher. Nietzsche’s
attitude was not the crude misogyny of Schopenhauer, who knew women
chiefly as women of the streets. Nietzsche knew many of the finest
women of his time, and he sometimes speaks with insight and sympathy
of the world as it appears to women; but there was clearly nothing in
him to answer to any appeal to passion, and his attitude is well summed
up in an aphorism of his own _Zarathustra_: “It is better to fall
into the hands of a murderer than into the dreams of an ardent woman.”
“All his life long,” his sister writes, “my brother remained completely
apart from either great passion or vulgar pleasure. His whole passion
lay in the world of knowledge; only very temperate emotions remained
over for anything else. In later life he was grieved that he had never
attained to _amour passion_, and that every inclination to a
feminine personality quickly changed to a tender friendship, however
fascinatingly pretty the fair one might be.” He would expend much
sympathy on unhappy lovers, yet he would shake his head, saying to
himself or others: “And all that over a little girl!”
Young Nietzsche left Pforta, in 1863, with the most various and
incompatible scientific tastes and interests (always excepting in
mathematics, for which he never possessed any aptitude), but, as he
himself remarked, none that would fit him for any career. One point
in regard to the termination of his school-life is noteworthy: he
chose Theognis as the subject of his valedictory dissertation. His
meditations on this moralist and aristocrat, so contemptuous of popular
rule, may have served as the starting-point of some of his own later
views on Greek culture. In 1864 he became a student at Bonn, and the
year that followed was of special import in his inner development; he
finally threw off the beliefs of his early youth; he discovered his
keen critical faculty; and self-contained independence became a visible
mark of his character, though always disguised by amiable and courteous
manners. At Bonn his life seems to have been fairly happy, though he
was by no means a typical German student. He spent much money, but
it was chiefly on his artistic tastes--music and the theatre--or on
little tours. No one could spend less on eating and drinking; like
Goethe and like Heine, he had no love for tobacco or for beer, and he
was repelled by the thick, beery good-humour of the German student.
People who drink beer and smoke pipes every evening, he always held,
were incapable of understanding his philosophy; for they could not
possibly possess the clarity of mind needed to grasp any delicate or
complex intellectual problem. He returned home from Bonn “a picture of
health and strength, broad-shouldered, brown, with rather fair thick
hair, and exactly the same height as Goethe;” and then went to continue
his studies at Leipzig.
Notwithstanding the youth’s efforts to subdue his emotional and
æsthetic restlessness by cool and hard work, he was clearly tortured by
the effort to find a philosophic home for himself in the world. This
effort absorbed him all day long, frequently nearly all the night. At
this time he chanced to take up on a bookstall a totally unknown work,
entitled _Der Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_; in obedience to an
unusual impulse he bought the book without consideration, and from that
moment began an acquaintance with Schopenhauer which for many years
exerted a deep influence on his life. At that time, probably, he could
have had no better guide into paths of peace; but even as a student
he was a keen critic of Schopenhauer’s system, valuing him chiefly as,
in opposition to Kant, “the philosopher of a re-awakened classical
period, a Germanised Hellenism.” Schumann’s music and long solitary
walks aided in the work of recuperation. A year or two later Nietzsche
met the other great god who shared with Schopenhauer his early worship.
“I cannot bring my heart to any degree of critical coolness before
this music,” he wrote, in 1868, after listening to the overture to the
_Meistersinger_; “every fibre and nerve in me thrills; it is a
long time since I have been so carried away.” I quote these words, for
we shall, I think, find later that they have their significance. A few
weeks afterwards he was invited to meet the master, and thus began a
relationship that for Nietzsche was fateful.
Meanwhile his philological studies were bringing him distinction. A
lecture on Theognis was pronounced by Ritschl to be the best work
by a student of Nietzsche’s standing that he had ever met with.
Then followed investigations into the sources of Suidas, a lengthy
examination _De fontibus Diogenis Laertii_, and palæographic
studies in connection with Terence, Statius, and Orosius. He was now
also consciously perfecting his German style, treating language,
he remarks, as a musical instrument on which one must be able to
improvise, as well as play what is merely learnt by heart. In 1869,
when only in his twenty-sixth year, and before he had taken his
doctor’s degree, he accepted the chair of classical philology at Basel.
He was certainly, as he himself said, not a born philologist. He had
devoted himself to philology--I wish to insist on this significant
point--as a sedative and tonic to his restless energy; in this he was
doubtless wise, though his sister seems to suggest that he thereby
increased his mental strain. But he had no real vocation for philology,
and it is curious that when the Basel chair was offered to him he
was proposing to himself to throw aside philology for chemistry.
Philologists, he declares again and again, are but factory hands in
the service of science. At the best philology is a waste of acuteness,
since it merely enables us to state facts which the study of the
present would teach us much more swiftly and surely. Thus it was that
he instinctively broadened and deepened every philological question
he took up, making it a channel for philosophy and morals. With his
specifically philological work we are not further concerned.
I have been careful to present the main facts in Nietzsche’s early
development because they seem to me to throw light on the whole of
his later development. So far he had published nothing except in
philological journals. In 1871, after he had settled at Basel,
appeared his first work, an essay entitled _Die Geburt der Tragödie
aus dem Geiste der Musik_, dedicated to Wagner. The conception of
this essay was academic, but in Nietzsche’s hands the origin of tragedy
became merely the text for an exposition of his own philosophy of art
at this period. He traces two art impulses in ancient Greece: one,
starting in the phenomena of dreaming, which he associates with Apollo;
the other, starting in the phenomena of intoxication, associated with
Dionysus, and through singing, music and dithyramb leading up to
the lyric. The union of these, which both imply a pessimistic view
of life, produced folksong and finally tragedy, which is thus the
outcome of Dionysiac music fertilised by Apollonian imagery. Socrates
the optimist, with his views concerning virtue as knowledge, vice as
ignorance, and his identification of virtue with happiness, led to the
decay of tragedy and the triumph of Alexandrian culture, in the net
of which the whole modern world is still held. Now, however, German
music is producing a new birth of tragedy through Wagner, who has again
united music and myth, inaugurated an era of art culture, and built
the bridge to a new German heathenism. This remarkable essay produced
considerable controversy and much consternation among Nietzsche’s
philological friends and teachers, who resented--reasonably enough,
we may well admit--the subordination of philology to modern philosophy
and art, and could not understand the marvellous swan they had hatched.
A philologist Nietzsche could never have continued, but this book
publicly put an end to any hope of academic advancement. It remains
characteristic of Nietzsche’s first period, as we may call whatever
he wrote before 1876, in its insistence on the primary importance of
æsthetic as opposed to intellectual culture; and it is characteristic
of his whole work in its grip of the connection between the problems
and solutions of Hellenic times and the problems and solutions of
the modern world. For Nietzsche the Greek world was not the model of
beautiful mediocrity imagined by Winckelmann and Goethe, nor did it
date from the era of rhetorical idealism inaugurated by Plato. The
real Hellenic world came earlier, and the true Hellenes were sturdy
realists enamoured of life, reverencing all its manifestations and
signs, and holding in highest honour that sexual symbol of life which
Christianity, with its denial of life, despises. Plato Nietzsche hated;
he had wandered from all the fundamental instincts of the Hellene. His
childish dialectic can only appeal, Nietzsche said, to those who are
ignorant of French masters like Fontenelle. The best cure for Plato, he
held, is Thucydides, the last of the old Hellenes who were brave in
the face of reality; Plato fled from reality into the ideal and was a
Christian before his time. Heraclitus was Nietzsche’s favourite Greek
thinker, and he liked to point out that the moralists of the Stoa may
be traced back to the great philosopher of Ephesus.
_Die Geburt der Tragödie_ is the prelude to all Nietzsche’s work.
He outgrew it, but in one point at least it sounds a note which recurs
throughout all his work. He ever regarded the Greek conception of
Dionysus as the key to the mystery of life. In _Götzendämmerung_,
the last of his works, this is still affirmed, more distinctly than
ever. “The fundamental Hellenic instinct,” he there wrote, “was first
revealed in the Dionysiac mysteries. What was it the Greek assured to
himself in these mysteries? Eternal life, the eternal return of life,
the future promised and consecrated in the present, the triumphal
affirmation of life over death and change, _true_ life or
immortality through procreation, through the mysteries of sexuality.
Thus the sexual symbol was to the Greeks the profoundest and most
venerable symbol in the whole range of ancient piety. Every individual
act of reproduction, of conception, of birth was a festival awaking
the loftiest emotions. The doctrine of the mysteries proclaimed the
holiness of pain; the pangs of childbirth sanctified all pain. All
growth and development, every promise for the future, is conditioned
by pain. To ensure the eternal pleasure of creation, the eternal
affirmation of the will to live, the eternity of birth-pangs is
absolutely required. All this is signified by the word Dionysus: I know
no higher symbolism than this Greek Dionysiac symbolism. In it the
deepest instinct of life, of the future of life, the eternity of life,
is experienced religiously; generation, the way to life, is regarded as
a sacred way. Christianity alone, with its fundamental horror of life,
has made sexuality an impure thing, casting filth on the beginning, the
very condition, of our life.”
Between 1873 and 1876 Nietzsche wrote four essays--on David Strauss,
the Use and Abuse of History in relation to Life, Schopenhauer as an
Educator, and Richard Wagner--which were published as a series of
_Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen_. The essay on Strauss was written
soon after the great war, amid the resulting outburst of flamboyant
patriotism and the widely-expressed conviction that the war was a
victory of “German culture.” Fresh from the world of Greece, Nietzsche
pours contempt on that assumption. Culture, he says, is, above all,
unity of artistic style in every expression of a people’s life.
The exuberance of knowledge in which a German glories is neither
a necessary means of culture nor a sign of it, being, indeed, more
allied to the opposite of culture--to barbarism. It is in this
barbarism that the modern German lives, that is to say, in a chaotic
mixture of all styles. Look at his clothing, Nietzsche continues, his
houses, his streets, all his manners and customs. They are a turmoil
of all styles in which he peacefully lives and moves. Such culture is
really a phlegmatic absence of all sense of culture. Largely, also,
it is merely a bad imitation of the real and productive culture of
France which it is supposed to have conquered in 1870. Let there be
no chatter, he concludes, about the triumph of German culture, for at
present no real German culture exists. The heroic figures of the German
past were not “classics,” as some imagine; they were seekers after
a genuine German culture, and so regarded themselves. The would-be
children of culture in Germany to-day are Philistines without knowing
it, and the only unity they have achieved is a methodical barbarism.
Nietzsche attacks Strauss by no means as a theologian, but as a typical
“culture-Philistine.” He was moved to this by the recent publication
of _Der Alte und der Neue Glaube_. I can well understand the
emotions with which that book filled him, for I, too, read it soon
after its publication, and can vividly recall the painful impression
made on me by its homely pedestrianism, the dull unimaginativeness
of the man who could only compare the world to a piece of machinery,
an engine that creaks in the working, a sort of vast Lancashire mill
in which we must spend every moment in feverish labour, and for our
trouble perhaps be caught between the wheels and cogs. But I was young,
and my youthful idealism, eager for some vital and passionate picture
of the world, inevitably revolted against so tawdry and mechanical a
conception. Nietzsche, then and ever, failed to perceive that there
is room, after all, for the modest sturdy bourgeois labourer who, at
the end of a hard life in the service of truth, sits down to enjoy his
brown beer and Haydn’s quartettes, and to repeat his homely confession
of faith in the world as he sees it. Nietzsche failed to realise that
Strauss’s limitations were essential to the work he had to do, and that
he remained a not unworthy follower of those German heroes who were not
“classics,” but honest seekers after the highest they knew. In this
hypertrophied repulsion for the everyday work of the intellectual world
we touch on a defect in Nietzsche’s temperament which we must regard as
fundamental, and which wrought in him at last to wildest issues.
In another of these essays, _Schopenhauer als Erzieher_, Nietzsche
sets forth his opinions concerning his early master in philosophy. It
is a significant indication of the qualities that attracted him to
Schopenhauer that he compares him to Montaigne, thus at once revealing
his own essential optimism, and the admiration which he then and always
felt for the great French masters of wisdom. He regards Schopenhauer
as the leader from Kant’s caves of critical scepticism to the open sky
with its consoling stars. Schopenhauer saw the world as a whole, and
was not befooled by the analysis of the colours and canvas wherewith
the picture is painted. Kant, in spite of the impulse of his genius,
never became a philosopher. “If any one thinks I am thus doing Kant
an injustice, he cannot know what a philosopher is, _i.e._, not
merely a great thinker but also a real man;” and he goes on to explain
that the mere scholar who is accustomed to let opinions, ideas, and
things in books always intervene between him and facts, will never see
facts, and will never be a fact to himself; whereas the philosopher
must regard himself as the symbol and abbreviation of all the facts of
the world. It remained an axiom with Nietzsche that the philosopher
must first of all be a “real man.”
In this essay, which Nietzsche always preferred to his other early
works, he thus for the first time clearly sets forth his conception of
the philosopher as a teacher, a liberator, a guide to fine living;
Schopenhauer’s metaphysical doctrine he casts aside with indifference.
Unconsciously, as in late years he seems to have admitted, he was
speaking of himself and setting forth his own aims. Thus it is
characteristic that he here also first expressed his conception of the
value of individuality. Shakespeare had asked:
“Which can say more
Than this rich praise, that you alone are you?”
But Shakespeare was only addressing a single beloved friend. Nietzsche
addresses the same thought to the common “you.” “At bottom every man
well knows that he can only live one single life in the world, and that
never again will so strange a chance shake together into unity such
singularly varied elements as he holds: he knows that, but he hides it
like a bad conscience.” This was a sane and democratic individualism;
in later years, as we shall see, it assumed stranger shapes.
At Basel Nietzsche lived in close communion with Wagner and Frau
Cosima, who at this time regarded him as the prophet of the
music-drama. The essay on Wagner, which starts from the standpoint
reached in the previous essays, seems to justify this confidence.
There is a deep analogy for those to whom distance is no obscuring
cloud, Nietzsche remarks, between Kant and the Eleatics, Schopenhauer
and Empedocles, Wagner and Æschylus. “The world has been orientalised
long enough, and men now seek to be hellenised.” The Gordian knot has
been cut and its strands are fluttering to the ends of the world; we
need a series of Anti-Alexanders mighty enough to bring together the
scattered threads of life. Wagner is such an Anti-Alexander, a great
astringent force in the world. For “it is not possible to present the
highest and purest operations of dramatic art, and not therewith to
renew morals and the state, education and affairs.” Bayreuth is the
sacred consecration on the morning of battle. “The battles which art
brings before us are a simplification of the actual battles of life;
its problems are an abbreviation of the endlessly involved reckoning of
human action and aspiration. But herein lies the greatness and value of
art, that it calls forth the appearance of a simpler world, a shorter
solution of the problems of life. No one who suffers in life can
dispense with that appearance, just as no one can dispense with sleep.”
Wagner has simplified the world, Nietzsche continues; he has related
music to life, the drama to music; he has intensified the visible
things of the world, and made the audible visible. Just as Goethe found
in poetry an expression for the painter’s vocation he had missed, so
Wagner utilised in music his dramatic instinct. And Nietzsche further
notes the democratic nature of Wagner’s art, so strenuously warm and
bright as to reach even the lowliest in spirit. Wagner takes off the
stigma that clings to the word “common,” and brings to all the means
of attaining spiritual freedom. “For,” says Nietzsche, “whosoever
will be free, must make himself free; freedom is no fairy’s gift to
fall into any man’s lap.” Such are the leading thoughts in an essay
which remains an interesting philosophic appreciation of the place of
Wagner’s art in the modern world; yet one may well admit that it is
often over-strained, with a strain that expresses the obscure struggle
of nascent antagonism.
It is, indeed, _Wagner in Bayreuth_ which brings to an end
Nietzsche’s first period, and leads up to the crash which inaugurated
his later period. Hitherto Nietzsche’s work was unquestionably
sane both in substance and form. No doubt it had called forth much
criticism; work so vigorous, sincere, and independent could not fail
to arouse hostility. But as we look back to-day, these fine essays
represent, with much youthful enthusiasm, the best that was known and
thought in Germany a quarter of a century ago. Nietzsche’s opinions
on Wagner and Schopenhauer, on individualism and democracy, the
significance of early Hellenism for moderns, the danger of an excessive
historical sense, the conception of culture less as a striving after
intellectual knowledge than as that which arouses within us the
philosopher, the artist, and the saint--all these ideas, wild as some
of them seemed to Nietzsche’s German contemporaries, are the ideas
which have now largely permeated European culture. The same cannot be
said of his later ideas.
It was at the first Bayreuth festival in 1876 that this chapter in
Nietzsche’s life was finally closed. His profound admiration for
Wagner, his intimate intercourse with the greatest figure in the German
world of art, had hitherto been the chief fact in his life. All his
ideals of life and his hopes for the future had grown up around the
figure of Wagner, who seemed the leader into a new Promised Land.
During the previous two years, however, Nietzsche had seen little of
Wagner, who had left Switzerland, and he had been unable to realise
either his own development or Wagner’s. Whatever enthusiasm Nietzsche
may have felt in early life for a return to German heathenism, he was
yet by race and training and taste by no means allied to primitive
Germanism; it was towards Greece and towards France that his conception
of national culture really drew him. Wagner was far more profoundly
Teutonic, and in the Nibelung cycle, which Nietzsche was about to
witness for the first time on the stage, Wagner had incarnated the
spirit of Teutonic heathenism with an overwhelming barbaric energy
which, as Nietzsche could now realise, was utterly alien to his own
most native instincts. Thus it was that Bayreuth marked the crisis of a
subtle but profound realisation, the most intense self-realisation he
had yet attained.
The whole history of this Wagner episode in Nietzsche’s life is full
of interest. The circumstantial narrative in the second volume of the
_Leben Nietzsche’s_ renders it clear at every point, and reveals a
tragedy which has its significance for the study of genius generally.
Nietzsche, it must be remembered, was more than thirty years younger
than Wagner. He was younger, and also he was less corrupted by the
world than Wagner. The great artist of the music-drama possessed,
or had acquired, a practical good sense in all that concerned the
realisation of his own mighty projects such as always marks the
greatest and most successful of the world’s supreme artists. Like
Shakespeare, he knew that the dyer’s hand must ever be a little subdued
to what it works in, if the radiant beauty of his stuffs is ever to
be perfectly achieved. But Nietzsche could never endure any fleck on
his hand; he shrank with horror from every soiling contact; he was an
artist who regarded life itself as the highest art. He could never
have carried through the rough task of dying the gorgeous garments of
a narrower but more perfectly attainable art. Nietzsche’s idealised
admiration for Wagner was complicated, after his appointment to
the Basel chair, by a deep personal friendship for the Master, the
chief friendship of his life. And his friendships were deeper than
those of most; although they show no traces of sexual tincture they
were hypertrophied by the defective sexuality of the man who always
regarded friendship as a more massive and poignant emotion than love.
That there were on either side any petty faults to cause a rift in
friendship there is no reason whatever to believe. Nietzsche was above
such, and Wagner’s friendship was always hearty until he realised
that Nietzsche was no longer his disciple, and then he dropped him,
silently, as a workman drops a useless tool. In addition it must be
noted that Nietzsche was probably at this time often over-strained,
almost hysterical,--at least so, we may gather, he impressed Wagner,
who urged him to marry a rich wife and to travel,--and he was still
afflicted by a disorder which not even genius can escape in youth,
he was still something of what we vulgarly call a “prig”; he had not
yet quite outgrown “the youthful Jesus in the Temple.” “Your brother
with his air of delicate distinction is a most uncomfortable fellow,”
said Wagner to Frau Förster-Nietzsche; “one can always see what he is
thinking; sometimes he is quite embarrassed at my jokes--and then I
crack them more madly than ever.” Wagner’s jokes, it appears, were of
a homely and plebeian sort, not appealing to one who lived naturally
and habitually in an atmosphere of keen intellectual activity. Bearing
all this in mind, one can imagine the impression made upon Nietzsche
by the inaugural festival at Bayreuth for which he had just written an
impassioned and yet philosophic prologue. Wagner was absorbed in using
all his considerable powers of managing men in finally vanquishing
the difficulties in his way. To any one who could see the festival
from the inside, as Nietzsche was able to see it, there were all the
inevitable squabbles and scandals and comic _contretemps_ which
must always mark the inception of a great undertaking, but which to-day
are hidden from us, pilgrims from many lands, as we ascend to that
hillside structure which is the chief living shrine of art in Europe.
And the people who were crowding in to this “sacred consecration on
the morning of battle” were aristocrats and plutocrats--bejewelled,
corpulent, commonplace--headed by the old Emperor, anxious to do his
duty, decorously joining in the applause as he whispered “Horrible!
horrible!” to his _aide-de-camp_, and hurrying away as quickly as
possible to the military manœuvres. There was more than enough here
to make his own just issued battle-cry seem farcical to Nietzsche. All
was conspiring to one end. The conception of the sanctity of Bayreuth,
his personal reverence for Wagner were slipping away together, and at
the same time he was forced to realise that the barbaric Germanism
of this overpowering Nibelung music was not the music for him. His
development would inevitably have carried him away from Wagner, but
the festival brought on the crisis with a sudden clash. Nietzsche had
finally conquered the mightiest of his false ideals, and stood for ever
after free and independent of all his early gods; but the wounds of
that victory were never quite closed to the last: a completely serene
and harmonious conception of things, so far as Wagner was concerned,
Nietzsche never attained.
It may well be that the change was also physical. The excitement of the
festival precipitated an organic catastrophe towards which he had long
been tending. His sister finds the original source of this catastrophe
in the war of 1870. He desired to serve his country as a combatant, but
the University would only allow him leave to attend to the wounded. The
physical and emotional over-tension involved by his constant care of
six young wounded men culminated in a severe illness, which led on to
a never-ending train of symptoms--eye-troubles, dyspepsia, headache,
insomnia--which were perhaps aggravated by the reckless use of drugs.
I have already noted passages which indicate that he was himself
aware of a consuming flame within, and that from time to time he made
efforts to check its ravages. That it was this internal flame which
largely produced the breakdown is shown by the narrative of Nietzsche’s
friend, Dr. Kretzer, who was with him at Bayreuth. It was evident he
was seriously ill, Kretzer tells us, utterly changed and broken down.
His eye-troubles were associated, if not with actual brain disease,
at all events with a high degree of neurasthenia.[2] At Bayreuth,
Nietzsche was forced to realise the peril of his position as he had
never realised it before. He could no longer disguise from himself that
he must break with all the passionate interests of his past. It was
an essential measure of hygiene, almost a surgical operation. This is
indeed how he has himself put the matter. In the preface to _Der Fall
Wagner_, he said that it had been to him a necessary self-discipline
to take part against all that was morbid within himself, against
Wagner, against Schopenhauer, against all the impassioning interests
of modern life, and to view the world, so far as possible, with the
philosopher’s eyes, from an immense height. And again he speaks of
Wagner’s art as a beaker of ecstasy so subtle and profound that it acts
like poison and leaves no remedy at last but flight from the siren’s
cave. Nietzsche was henceforth in the position of a gouty subject who
is forced to abandon port wine and straightway becomes an apostle of
total abstinence. The remedy seems to have been fairly successful. But
the disease was in his bones. Impassioning interests that were far more
subtly poisonous slowly developed within him, and twelve years later
flight had become impossible, even if he was still able to realise the
need for fight.
Nietzsche broke very thoroughly with his past, yet the break has
been exaggerated, and he himself often helped to exaggerate it. He
was in the position of a beleaguered city which has been forced to
abandon its outer walls and concentrate itself in the citadel; and
however it may have been in ancient warfare, in spiritual affairs
such a state of things involves an offensive attitude towards the
former line of defence. The positions we have abandoned constitute a
danger to the positions we have taken up. Many of the world’s fiercest
persecutors have but persecuted their old selves, and there seems to be
psychological necessity for such an attitude. Yet a careful study of
Nietzsche’s earlier activity reveals many germs of later developments.
The critical attitude towards conventional morality, the individualism,
the optimism, the ideal of heroism, which dominate his later thought,
exist as germs in his earlier work. Even the flagrant contrast between
_Richard Wagner in Bayreuth_ and _Der Fall Wagner_ was the
outcome of a gradual development. In the earlier essay Nietzsche had
justly pointed out that Wagner’s instincts were fundamentally dramatic.
As years went on he brooded over this idea; the nimble and lambent wit
of his later days played around it until Wagner became a mere actor in
his work and in his life, a rhetorician, an incarnate falsehood, the
personification of latter-day decadence, the Victor Hugo of music, the
Bernini of music, the modern Cagliostro. At the same time he admits
that Wagner represents the modern spirit, and that it is reasonable for
a musician to say that though he hates Wagner he can tolerate no other
music. The fact is, one may well repeat, that Nietzsche was not Teuton
enough to abide for ever with Wagner. He compares him contemptuously
with Hegel, cloud-compellers both, masters of German mists and German
mysticism, worshippers of Wotan, the god of bad weather, the god of
the Germans. “How could they miss what we, we Halcyonians, miss in
Wagner--_la gaya scienza_, the light feet, wit, fire, grace,
strong logic, the dance of the stars, arrogant intellectuality, the
quivering light of the south, the smooth sea--perfection?” It was
scarcely, however, the Halcyonian in Nietzsche that stood between him
and Wagner. That is well shown by his attitude towards _Parsifal_.
Whatever we may think of the ideas embodied in _Parsifal_, it may
yet seem to us the most solemn, the most graciously calm and beautiful
spectacle that has ever been fitly set to music. In Nietzsche the
thinker and the moralist were so much stronger than the artist that
he could see nothing here but bad psychology, bad thinking, and bad
religion.
The rebellion against Wagner was inevitable. It is evident that
Nietzsche had not gained complete mastery of his own personality in
his earlier work. It is brilliant, full of fine perceptions and
critical insight, but as a personal utterance incomplete. It renders
the best ideas of the time, not the best ideas that Nietzsche could
contribute to the time. The shock of 1876 may have been a step towards
the disintegration of his intellect, but it was also a rally, a step
towards a higher self-realisation. Nietzsche had no genuine affinity
with Schopenhauer or with Wagner, though they were helpful to his
development; he was no pessimist, he was no democrat. As he himself
said, “I understood the philosophic pessimism of the nineteenth century
as the symptom of a finer strength of thought, a more victorious
fulness of life. In the same way Wagner’s music signified to me the
expression of a Dionysiac mightiness of soul in which I seemed to hear,
as in an earthquake, the upheaval of the primitive powers of life,
after age-long repression.” Now he only needed relief, “golden, tender,
oily melodies,” to soothe the leaden weight of life, and these he found
in _Carmen_.
Any discussion of the merits of the question as between Wagner and
Bizet, the earlier and the later Nietzsche, seems to me out of place,
though much has been made of it by those who delight to see a giant
turn and rend himself. Nietzsche himself said he was writing for
psychologists, and it is not unfair to add that it is less “Wagner’s
case” that he presents to us than “Nietzsche’s case.” As to the
merits of the case, we may alike admit that Nietzsche’s enthusiasm
for Wagner was not excessive, and that the pleasant things he said of
_Carmen_ are fully justified; we may address both the early and
the late Nietzsche in the words habitually used by the landlord of the
“Rainbow”: “You’re both wrong and you’re both right, as I allus says.”
Most of the mighty quarrels that have sent men to battle and the stake
might have been appeased had each side recognised that both were right
in their affirmations, both wrong in their denials.
Nietzsche occupied his chair at Basel for some years longer; in 1880
his health forced him to resign and he was liberally pensioned. As
a professor he treated the most difficult questions of Greek study,
and devoted his chief attention to his best pupils, who in their turn
adored him. Basel is an admirable residence for a cosmopolitan thinker;
it was easy for Nietzsche to keep in touch with all that went on from
Paris to St. Petersburg. He was also on terms of more or less intimate
friendship with the finest spirits in Switzerland, with Keller the
novelist, Böcklin the painter, Burckhardt the historian. We are told
that he was a man of great personal charm in social intercourse. But
his associates at Basel never suspected that in this courteous and
amiable professor was stored up an explosive energy which would one
day be felt in every civilised land. With pen in hand his criticism of
life was unflinching, his sincerity arrogant; when the pen was dropped
he became modest, reserved, almost timorous.
The work he produced between 1877 and 1882 seems to me to represent the
maturity of his genius. It includes _Menschliches, Allzumenschliches_,
_Morgenröthe_, and _Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft_. In form all these
volumes belong to _pensée_ literature. They deal with art, with
religion, with morals and philosophy, with the relation of all
these to life. Nietzsche shows himself in these _pensées_ above all
a freethinker, emancipated from every law save that of sincerity,
wide-ranging, serious, penetrative, often impassioned, as yet always
able to follow his own ideal of self-restraint.
After leaving Basel he spent the following nine years chiefly at health
resorts and in travelling. We find him at Sorrento, Venice, Genoa,
Turin, Sils Maria, as well as at Leipzig. Doubtless his fresh and
poignant _pensées_ are largely the outcome of strenuous solitary
walks in the Engadine or among the Italian lakes. We may assume that
during most of these years he was fighting, on the whole successfully
fighting, for mental health. Yet passages that occur throughout his
books seem to suggest that his thoughts may have sometimes turned
to the goal towards which he was tending. It is a mistake, he points
out, to suppose that insanity is always the symptom of a degenerating
culture, although to nod towards the asylum is a convenient modern way
of slaying spiritual tyrants; it is in primitive and developing stages
of culture that insanity has played its chief part; only by virtue of
what seemed to be the “Divine” turbulence of insanity and epilepsy
could any new moral law make progress among early cultures. Just as
for us there seems a little madness in all genius, so for them there
seemed a little genius in all madness; sorcerers and saints agonised
in solitude and abstinence for some gleam of madness which would bring
them faith in themselves and openly justify their mission.
What may perhaps be called Nietzsche’s third period began in 1883 with
_Also sprach Zarathustra_, the most extraordinary of all his
works, mystical and oracular in form, but not mystical in substance.
Zarathustra has only a distant relationship to his prototype Zoroaster,
though Nietzsche had a natural sympathy with the symbolism of fire and
water, with the reverence for light and purity, which mark the rites
associated with the name of the Bactrian prophet; he has here allowed
himself to set forth his own ideas and ideals in the free and oracular
manner of all ancient scriptures, and is thus enabled to present his
visions in a concrete form. _Zarathustra_, for the first and
last time, gave scope to the artist within Nietzsche, and with all
its extravagance and imperfection it must remain for good or evil his
most personal utterance. It was followed by _Jenseits von Gut und
Böse_, _Zur Genealogie der Moral_, _Der Fall Wagner_, and
_Götzendämmerung_. It is during this period that we trace the
growth of the magnification of his own personal mission which finally
became a sort of megalomania. (“I have given to men the deepest book
they possess, my _Zarathustra_,” he wrote towards the end.) In
form the books of this period are sometimes less fragmentary than those
of the second period; in substance they are marked by their emphatic,
often extravagant, almost reckless insistence on certain views of
morality. If in the first period he was an apostle of culture, in the
second a freethinker, pronouncing judgment on all things in heaven and
earth, he was now exclusively a moralist, or, as he would prefer to
say, an immoralist. It was during this period that he worked out his
“master morality”--the duty to be strong--in opposition to the “slave
morality” of Christianity, with its glorification of weakness and pity,
and that he consistently sought to analyse and destroy the traditional
conceptions of good and evil on which our current morality rests. The
last work which he planned, but never completed, was a re-valuation of
all values, _Umwerthung aller Werthe_, which would have been his
final indictment of the modern world, and the full statement of his own
immoralism and Dionysiac philosophy.
It is sometimes said that Nietzsche’s mastery of his thought and style
was increasing up to the last. This I can scarcely admit, even as
regards style. No doubt there is at the best a light and swift vigour
of movement in these last writings which before he had never attained.
He can pour out now a shimmering stream of golden phrases with which
he has intoxicated himself, and tries to intoxicate us. We may lend
ourselves to the charm, but it has no enduring hold. This master of
gay or bitter invective no longer possesses the keenly reasoned and
piercing insight of the earlier Nietzsche. We feel that he has become
the victim of obsessions which drive him like a leaf before the wind,
and all his exuberant wit is unsubstantial and pathetic as that of
Falstaff. The devouring flame has at length eaten the core out of the
man and his style, leaving only this coruscating shell. And at a touch
even this thin shell collapsed into smouldering embers.
From a child Nietzsche was subject to strangely prophetic dreams. In
a dream which, when a boy, he put into literary form, he tells how
he seemed to be travelling forward amid a glorious landscape, while
carolling larks ascended to the clouds, and his whole life seemed
to stretch before him in a vista of happy years; “and suddenly a
shrill cry reached our ears; it came from the neighbouring lunatic
asylum.” Even in 1876 his friends began to see that Nietzsche
attached extraordinary importance to his own work. After he wrote
_Zarathustra_, this self-exaltation increased, and began to find
expression in his work. Latterly, it is said, he came to regard himself
as the incarnation of the genius of humanity. It has always been found
a terrible matter to war with the moral system of one’s age; it will
have its revenge, one way or another, from within or from without,
whatever happens after. Nietzsche strove for nothing less than to
remodel the moral world after his own heart’s desire, and his brain was
perishing of exhaustion in the immense effort. In 1889--at the moment
when his work at last began to attract attention--he became hopelessly
insane. A period of severe hallucinatory delirium led on to complete
dementia, and he passes beyond our sight.