So far I have attempted to follow with little or no comment what seems
to me the main current of Nietzsche’s thought. It may be admitted
that there is some question as to which is the main current. For my
own part I have no hesitation in asserting that it is the current
which expands to its fullest extent between 1876 and 1883 in what I
term Nietzsche’s second or middle period; up to then he had not gained
complete individuality; afterwards began the period of uncontrolled
aberrations. Thus I am inclined to pass lightly over the third period,
during which the conception of “master-morality” attained its chief and
most rigid emphasis, although I gather that to Nietzsche’s disciples as
to his foes this conception seems of primary importance. This idea of
“master-morality” is in fact a solid fossilised chunk, easy to handle
for friendly or unfriendly hands. The earlier and more living work--the
work of the man who truly said that it is with thinkers as with snakes:
those that cannot shed their skins die--is less obviously tangible. So
the “master-morality” it is that your true Nietzschian is most likely
to close his fist over. It would be unkind to say more, for Nietzsche
himself has been careful to scatter through his works, on the subject
of disciples and followers generally, very scathing remarks which must
be sufficiently painful to any faithful Nietzschian.
We are helped in understanding Nietzsche’s philosophic significance if
we understand his precise ideal. The psychological analysis of every
great thinker’s work seems to reveal some underlying fundamental image
or thought--often enough simple and homely in character--which he has
carried with him into the most abstract regions. Thus Fraser has found
good reason to suppose that Hegel’s main ideas were suggested by the
then recent discovery of galvanism. In Nietzsche’s case this key is
to be found in the persistent image of an attitude. As a child, his
sister tells us, he had been greatly impressed by a rope-dancer who had
performed his feats over the market-place at Naumburg, and throughout
his work, as soon as he had attained to real self-expression, we may
trace the image of the dancer. “I do not know,” he somewhere says,
“what the mind of a philosopher need desire more than to be a good
dancer. For dancing is his ideal, his art also, indeed his only piety,
his ‘divine worship.’” In all Nietzsche’s best work we are conscious of
this ideal of the dancer, strong, supple, vigorous, yet harmonious and
well-balanced. It is the dance of the athlete and the acrobat rather
than the make-believe of the ball-room, and behind the easy equipoise
of such dancing lie patient training and effort. The chief character
of good dancing is its union of the maximum of energetic movement with
the maximum of well-balanced grace. The whole muscular system is alive
to restrain any excess, so that however wild and free the movement may
seem it is always measured; excess would mean ignominious collapse.
When in his later years Nietzsche began, as he said, to “philosophise
with the hammer,” and to lay about him savagely at every hollow “idol”
within reach, he departed from his better ideal of dancing, and his
thinking became intemperate, reckless, desperate.
Nietzsche had no system, probably because the idea that dominated
his thought was an image, and not a formula, the usual obsession of
philosophers, such as may be clapped on the universe at any desired
point. He remarks in one place that a philosopher believes the worth
of his philosophy to lie in the structure, but that what we ultimately
value are the finely carven and separate stones with which he builded,
and he was clearly anxious to supply the elaborated stones direct.
In time he came to call himself a realist, using the term, in no
philosophic sense, to indicate his reverence for the real and essential
facts of life, the things that conduce to fine living. He desired to
detach the “bad conscience” from the things that are merely wicked
traditionally, and to attach it to the things that are anti-natural,
anti-instinctive, anti-sensuous. He sought to inculcate veneration
for the deep-lying sources of life, to take us down to the bed-rock
of life, the rock whence we are hewn. He held that man, as a reality,
with all his courage and cunning, is himself worthy of honour, but
that man’s ideals are absurd and morbid, the mere dregs in the drained
cup of life; or, as he eventually said--and it is a saying which will
doubtless seal his fate in the minds of many estimable persons--man’s
ideals are his only _partie honteuse_, of which we may avoid any
close examination. Nietzsche’s “realism” was thus simply a vigorous
hatred of all dreaming that tends to depreciate the value of life, and
a vivid sense that man himself is the _ens realissimum_.
A noteworthy point in Nietzsche’s conception of philosophy is his
increasingly clear conception of its fundamentally psychological
character. I mean to say that Nietzsche knows that a man’s philosophy,
to be real, must be the inevitable outcome of his own psychic
constitution. It is a point that philosophers have never seen.
Perhaps Nietzsche was the first, however hesitatingly, to realise
it. It is only in the recognition of this fact that the eirenicon of
philosophies--and one might add, of religions--can ever be found.
The philosopher of old said: “This is _my_ conception of the
universe;” it was well. But he was apt to add: “It is _the_
conception of the universe,” and so put himself hopelessly in the
wrong. It is as undignified to think another man’s philosophy as to
wear another man’s cast-off clothes. Only the poor in spirit or in
purse can find any satisfaction in doing either. A philosophy or
religion can only fit the man for whom it was made. “There has only
been one Christian,” as Nietzsche put it, “and he died on the cross.”
But why waste energy in trying to manufacture a second Christian?
We may be very sure that we can never find another Christian whom
Christianity would fit so admirably as it once fitted Christ. Why
not rest content with Christ? Let Brown be a Brownite and Robinson
a Robinsonian. It is not good that they should exchange their
philosophies, or that either should insist on thrusting his threadbare
misfits on Jones, who prefers to be metaphysically naked. When men
have generally begun to realise this the world will be a richer and
an honester world, and a pleasanter one as well. That Nietzsche had
vaguely begun to realise it seems to me his chief claim to distinction
in the purely philosophic field.
To recognise the free and direct but disconnected nature of Nietzsche’s
many-sided vision of the world is to lessen the force of his own
antagonisms as well as of the antagonisms he has excited. Much of
Nietzsche’s work, especially in the third period, is the utterance of
profound half-truths, keenly and personally felt, but still half-truths
of which he has himself elsewhere supplied the complements. The reason
is that during that period he was not so much expressing himself as
appealing passionately against himself to those failing forces whose
tonic influence he thirsted after. The hardness, the keen sword, the
reckless energy he idealised were the things that had slipped utterly
away and left him defenceless to the world. He grew to worship cruel
strength as the consumptive Keats, the sickly Thoreau, loved beauty and
health, with “the desire of the moth for the star.” Such an attitude
has its rightness and power, so long as we understand it, though it
comes short of the serenity of the greatest spirits who seek, like
Goethe, to live at each moment in the whole. The master-morality of
Nietzsche’s later days, on which friends and foes have alike insisted,
is a case in point. This appears to have been hailed, or resented, as
a death-blow struck at the modern democratic _régime_. To take
a broad view of Nietzsche’s philosophic attitude is to realise that
both views are alike out of place. On this matter, as on many others,
Nietzsche moved in a line which led him to face an opposite direction
in his decay from that which he faced in his immaturity. He began by
regarding democracy as the standard of righteousness, and ended by
asserting that the world only exists for the production of a few great
men. It would be foolish to regard either of the termini as the last
outpost of wisdom. But in the passage between these two points many
excellent things are said by the way. Nietzsche was never enamoured of
socialism or democracy for its own sake; reasonably enough, he will
not even admit that we have yet attained democracy; though the horses,
indeed, are new, as yet “the roads are the same old roads, the wheels
the same old wheels.” But he points out that the value of democracy
lies in its guarantee of individual freedom: Cyclopean walls are being
built, with much toil and dust, but the walls will be a rampart against
any invasion of barbarians or any new slavery, against the despotism of
capital and the despotism of party. The workers may regard the walls as
an end in themselves; we are free to value them for the fine flowers of
culture which will grow in the gardens they inclose. To me, at least,
this attitude of Nietzsche’s maturity seems the ample justification of
democracy.
Nietzsche was not, however, greatly interested in questions of
government; he was far more deeply interested in questions of morals.
In his treatment of morals--no doubt chiefly in the last period--there
is a certain element of paradox. It must again be pointed out that this
is to be explained by the organic demands of Nietzsche’s own nature.
In attacking the excessive tendency to sympathy which he seemed to
see around him he was hygienically defending himself from his own
excessive sympathy. His sister quotes with a smile the declaration
that his Paradise lay beneath the shadow of his sword; we scarcely
need her assurance of his tender-hearted sensitiveness. He could
attack relentlessly, but he never attacked a person save as the symbol
of what he regarded as a false principle held in undeserved honour.
When he realised that the subject of such attack was really a living
person he was full of remorse. He attacked Strauss because Strauss
was the successful representative of a narrow ideal of culture; a few
months later Strauss died, having, it now appears, borne the onset
philosophically enough, and Nietzsche was full of grief lest he had
embittered the dying man’s last hours. It was because he had himself
suffered from the excesses of his own sympathy that he was able so
keenly to analyse the secrets of sympathy. He spoke as the Spanish poet
says that every poet--and indeed every seer--must always speak, _por
la boca de su herida_, through the mouth of his wound. That is why
his voice is often so poignantly intimate; it is also why we sometimes
find this falsetto note of paradox. In his last period, Nietzsche grows
altogether impatient of morals, calls himself an immoralist, fervently
exhorts us to become wickeder. But if any young disciple came to the
teacher asking, “What must I do to become wickeder?” it does not appear
that Nietzsche bade him to steal, bear false witness, commit adultery,
or do any other of the familiar and commonly-accepted wickednesses.
Nietzsche preached wickedness with the same solemn exaltation that
Carducci lauded Satan. What he desired was far indeed from any
rehabilitation of easy vice; it was the justification of neglected and
unsanctified virtues.
At the same time, and while Nietzsche’s immoralist is just as austere
a person as the mere moralists who have haunted the world for many
thousand years, it is clear that Nietzsche wished strictly to limit the
sphere of morals. He never fails to point out how large a region of
life and art lies legitimately outside the moral jurisdiction. In an
age in which many moralists desire to force morals into every part of
life and art--and even assume a certain air of virtue in so doing--the
“immoralist” who lawfully vindicates any region for free cultivation is
engaged in a proper and wholesome task.
No doubt, however, there will be some to question the value of such a
task. Nietzsche the immoralist can scarcely be welcome in every camp,
although he remains always a force to be reckoned with. The same may
be said of Nietzsche the freethinker. He was, perhaps, the typical
freethinker of the age that comes after Renan. Nietzsche had nothing
of Renan’s genial scepticism and smiling disillusionment; he was
less tender to human weakness, for all his long Christian ancestry
less Christian, than the Breton seminarist remained to the last. He
seems to have shaken himself altogether free of Christianity--so
free, that except in his last period he even speaks of it without
bitterness--though by no means wholly untouched by that nostalgia
of the cloister which now and then pursues even those of us who are
farthest from any faith in Christian dogma. He never sought, as
among ourselves Pater sought, the germ of Christianity in things
pagan, the undying essence of paganism in things Christian. Heathen
as he was, I do not think even Heine’s visions of the gods in exile
could have touched him; he never felt the charm of fading and faded
things. It is remarkable. It is scarcely less remarkable that, far
as he was from Christianity, he was equally far from what we usually
call “paganism,” the pasteboard paganism of easy self-indulgence and
cheerful irresponsibility. It was not so that he understood Hellenism.
Matthew Arnold once remarked that the Greeks were never sick or sad.
Nietzsche knew better. The greater part of Greek literature bears
witness that the Hellenes were for ever wrestling with the problems of
pain. And none who came after have more poignantly uttered the pangs of
human affairs, or more sweetly the consolations of those pangs, than
the great disciples of the Greeks who created the Roman world. The
classic world of nymphs and fauns is an invention of the moderns. The
real classic world, like the modern world, was a world of suffering.
The difference lay in the method of facing that suffering. Nietzsche
chose the classic method from no desire to sport with Amaryllis in
the shade, but because he had known forms of torture for which the
mild complacencies of modern faith seemed to offer no relief. If we
must regard Nietzsche as a pagan, it is as the Pascal of paganism.
The freethinker, it is true, was more cheerful and hopeful than the
believer, but there is the same tragic sincerity, the same restless
self-torment, the same sense of the abyss.[4]
There still remains Nietzsche, the apostle of culture, the philosopher
engaged in the criticism of life. From first to last, wherever you
open his books, you light on sayings that cut to the core of the
questions that every modern thinking man must face. I take, almost at
random, a few passages from a single book: of convictions he writes
that “a man possesses opinions as he possesses fish, in so far as he
owns a fishing-net; a man must go fishing and be lucky, then he has
his own fish, his own opinions; I speak of living opinions, living
fish. Some men are content to possess fossils in their cabinets--and
convictions in their heads.” Of the problem of the relation of science
to culture he says well: “The best and wholesomest thing in science, as
in mountains, is the air that blows there. It is because of that air
that we spiritual weaklings avoid and defame science;” and he points
out that the work of science--with its need for sincerity, infinite
patience, complete self-abnegation--calls for men of nobler make than
poetry needs. When we have learnt to trust science and to learn from
it, then it will be possible so to tell natural history that “every
one who hears it is inspired to health and gladness as the heir and
continuer of humanity.” This is how he rebukes those foolish persons
who grow impatient with critics: “Remember that critics are insects
who only sting to live and not to hurt: they want our blood and not
our pain.” And he utters this wise saying, himself forgetting it in
later years: “Growth in wisdom may be exactly measured by decrease in
bitterness.” Nietzsche desires to prove nothing, and is reckless of
consistency. He looks at every question that comes before him with the
same simple, intent, penetrative gaze, and whether the aspects that he
reveals are new or old, he seldom fails to bring us a fresh stimulus.
Culture, as he understood it, consists for the modern man in the task
of choosing the simple and indispensable things from the chaos of crude
material which to-day overwhelms us. The man who will live at the level
of the culture of his time is like the juggler who must keep a number
of plates spinning in the air; his life must be a constant training in
suppleness and skill so that he may be a good athlete. But he is also
called on to exert his skill in the selection and limitation of his
task. Nietzsche is greatly occupied with the simplification of culture.
Our suppleness and skill must be exercised alone on the things that
are vital, essential, primitive; the rest may be thrown aside. He is
for ever challenging the multifarious materials for culture, testing
them with eye and hand; we cannot prove them too severely, he seems
to say, nor cast aside too contemptuously the things that a real man
has no need of for fine living. What must I do to be saved? What do I
need for the best and fullest life?--that is the everlasting question
that the teacher of life is called upon to answer. And we cannot be too
grateful to Nietzsche for the stern penetration--the more acute for his
ever-present sense of the limits of energy--with which he points from
amid the mass to the things which most surely belong to our eternal
peace.
Nietzsche’s style has often been praised. The style was certainly the
man. There can be little doubt, moreover, that there is scarcely any
other German style to compare with it, though such eminence means
far less in a country where style has rarely been cultivated than it
would mean in France or even England. Sallust awoke his sense for
style, and may account for some characteristics of his style. He also
enthusiastically admired Horace as the writer who had produced the
maximum of energy with the minimum of material. A concentrated Roman
style, significant and weighty at every point, _ære perennius_,
was always his ideal. Certainly the philologist’s aptitudes helped
here to teach him the value and force of words, as jewels for the
goldsmith to work with, and not as mere worn-out counters to slip
through the fingers. One may call it a muscular style, a style wrought
with the skilful strength of hand and arm. It scarcely appeals to
the ear. It lacks the restful simplicity of the greatest masters, the
plangent melody, the seemingly unconscious magic quivering along our
finest-fibred nerves. Such effects we seem to hear now and again in
Schopenhauer, but rarely or never from any other German. This style
is titanic rather than divine, but the titanic virtues it certainly
possesses in fullest measure: robust and well-tempered vigour,
concentration, wonderful plastic force in moulding expression. It
becomes over-emphatic at last. When Nietzsche threw aside the dancer’s
ideal in order to “philosophise with the hammer,” the result on his
style was as disastrous as on his thought; both alike took on the
violent and graceless character of the same implement. He speaks indeed
of the virtue of hitting a nail on the head, but it is a less skilled
form of virtue than good dancing.
Whether he was dancing or hammering, however, Nietzsche certainly
converted the whole of himself into his work, as in his view every
philosopher is bound to do, “for just that art of transformation
_is_ philosophy.” That he was entirely successful in being a “real
man” one may doubt. His excessive sensitiveness to the commonplace in
life, and his deficiency in the sexual instinct--however highly he
may have rated the importance of sex in life--largely cut him off
from true fellowship with the men who are most “real” to us. He was
less tolerant and less humane than his master Goethe; his incisive
insight, and, in many respects, better intellectual equipment, are
more than compensated by this lack of breadth. But, as his friend the
historian Burckhardt has said, he worked mightily for the increase
of independence in the world. Every man, indeed, works with the
limitations of his qualities, just as we all struggle beneath the
weight of the superincumbent atmosphere; our defects are even a part
of our qualities, and it would be foolish to quarrel with them.
Nietzsche succeeded in being himself, and it was a finely rare success.
Whether he was a “real man” matters less. With passionate sincerity
he expressed his real self and his best self, abhorring, on the one
hand, what with Voltaire and Verlaine he called “literature,” and, on
the other, all that mere indigested material, the result of mental
dyspepsia, of which he regarded Carlyle as the supreme warning. A
man’s real self, as he repeated so often, consists of the things which
he has truly digested and assimilated; he must always “conquer” his
opinions; it is only such conquests which he has the right to report to
men as his own. His thoughts are born of his pain; he has imparted to
them of his own blood, his own pleasure and torment. Nietzsche himself
held that suffering and even disease are almost indispensable to the
philosopher; great pain is the final emancipator of the spirit, those
great slow pains that take their time, and burn us up like green wood.
“I doubt whether such pain betters us,” he remarks, “but I know that it
deepens us.” That is the stuff of Nietzsche’s Hellenism, as expressed
in the most lighthearted of his books. _Virescit volnere virtus._
It is that which makes him, when all is said, a great critic of life.
It is a consolation to many--I have seen it so stated in a respectable
review--that Nietzsche went mad. No doubt also it was once a
consolation to many that Socrates was poisoned, that Jesus was
crucified, that Bruno was burnt. But hemlock and the cross and the
stake proved sorry weapons against the might of ideas even in those
days, and there is no reason to suppose that a doctor’s certificate
will be more effectual in our own. Of old time we killed our great men
as soon as their visionary claims became inconvenient; now, in our
mercy, we leave the tragedy of genius to unroll itself to the bitter
close. The devils to whom the modern Faustus is committed have waxed
cunning with the ages. Nietzsche has met, in its most relentless form,
the fate of Pascal and Swift and Rousseau. That fact may carry what
weight it will in any final estimate of his place as a moral teacher:
it cannot touch his position as an aboriginal force. He remains in
the first rank of the distinguished and significant personalities our
century has produced.