Coleridge quotes Sir Joshua Reynolds as declaring that "the greatest
man is he who forms the taste of a nation; the next greatest is he
who corrupts it." It is an elastic epigram and not unlike the rule
which is poor because it won't work both ways. All master reformers,
heretics, and rebels were at first great corrupters. It is a prime
necessity in their propaganda. Aristophanes and Arius, Mohammed and
Napoleon, Montaigne and Rabelais, Paul and Augustine, Luther and
Calvin, Voltaire and Rousseau, Darwin and Newman, Liszt and Wagner,
Kant and Schopenhauer--here are a few names of men who undermined the
current beliefs and practices of their times, whether for good or evil.
Rousseau has been accused of being the greatest corrupter in history;
yet to him we may owe the Constitution of the United States. Pascal,
in prose of unequalled limpidity, denounced the Jesuits as corrupting
youth. Nevertheless, Dr. Georg Brandes, an "intellectual" and a
philosophic anarch, once wrote to Nietzsche: "I, too, love Pascal. But
even as a young man I was on the side of the Jesuits against Pascal.
Wise men, it was they who were right; he did not understand them; but
they understood him and ... they published his Provincial Letters with
notes themselves. The best edition is that of the Jesuits," Were not
Titian, Rubens, and Rembrandt the three unspeakable devils of painting
for Blake? Loosely speaking, then, it doesn't much matter whether one
considers a great man as a regenerator or a corrupter. Napoleon was
called the latter by Taine after he had been saluted as demigod by
his idolatrous contemporaries. Nor does the case of Nietzsche differ
much from his philosophic forerunners. He scolded Schopenhauer, though
borrowing his dialectic tools, as he later mocked at the one sincere
friendship of his lonely life, Richard Wagner's. We know the most
objective philosophies are tinged by the individual temperaments of
their makers, and perhaps the chief characteristic of all philosophers
is their unphilosophic contempt for their fellow-thinkers. Nietzsche
displayed this trait; so did Richard Wagner--who was in a lesser
fashion an amateur philosopher, his system adorned by plumes borrowed
from Feuerbach, Schelling, and Schopenhauer. Arthur Schopenhauer was
endowed with a more powerful intellect than either Wagner or Nietzsche.
He "corrupted" them both. He was materialist enough to echo the
epigram attributed to Fontenelle: To be happy a man must have a good
stomach and a wicked heart.
Friedrich Nietzsche was more poet than original thinker. Merely to say
Nay! to all existing institutions is not to give birth to a mighty
idea, though the gesture is brave. He substituted for Schopenhauer's
"Will to Live"--(an ingenious variation of Kant's "Thing in Itself")
the "Will to Power"; which phrase is mere verbal juggling. The late
Eduard von Hartmann built his house of philosophy in the fog of the
Unconscious; Nietzsche, despising Darwin as a dull grubber, returned
unknowingly to the very land of metaphysics he thought he had fled
forever. He was always the theologian--_toujours séminariste_, as they
said of Renan. Theology was in his blood. It stiffened his bones.
Abusing Christianity, particularly Protestant Christianity, he was
himself an exponent of a theological odium of the virulent sort, as
may be seen in his thundering polemics. He held a brief for the other
side of good and evil; but a man can't so easily empty his veins of the
theologic blood of his forebears. It was his Nessus shirt and ended
by consuming him. He had the romantic cult of great men, yet sneered
at Carlyle for his Titanism. He believed in human perfectibility. He
borrowed his Superman partly from the classic pantheon, partly from
the hierarchy of Christian saints--or perhaps from the very Cross he
vituperated. The only Christian, he was fond of saying, died on the
Cross. The only Nietzschian, one might reply, passed away when crumbled
the brilliant brain of Nietzsche. Saturated with the culture of Goethe,
his Superman was sent ballooning aloft by the poetic afflatus of
Nietzsche.
He was an apparition possible only in modern and rationalistic
Protestant Germany. Like a voice from the Middle Ages he has stirred
the profound phlegm and spiritual indifference of his fellow
countrymen. But he has in him more of Savonarola than Luther--Luther,
who was for him the apotheosis of all that is hateful in the German
character: the self-satisfied philistinism, sensuality, beer and
tobacco, unresponsiveness to all the finer issues of existence, pious
tactlessness and harsh dogmatism.
His truth is enclosed in a transcendental vacuum. Whether he had
Galton's science of Eugenics in his mind when he modelled his
Zarathustra we need not concern ourselves. His revaluation of
moral values has not shaken morality to its centre. He challenged
superficial conventional morality, but the ultimate pillars of faith
still stand. He reminds us of William Blake when he writes: "The
path to one's heaven ever leads through the voluptuousness of one's
own hell." And his psychical resemblance to Pascal is striking. Both
men were physically debilitated; their nervous systems, overwhelmed
by the burdens they imposed upon them, made their days and nights
a continuous agony. The Nietzschian philosophy may be negligible,
but the psychological aspects of this singularly versatile,
fascinating, and contradictory nature are not. His "Will to Power"
in his own case resolves itself into the will to suffer. Compared
to his, Schopenhauer's pessimism is the good-natured grumbling of a
healthy, witty man, with a tremendous vital temperament. Nietzsche
was delicate from youth. His experiences in the Franco-Prussian war
harmed him. Headache, eye trouble, a weak stomach, coupled with his
abuse of intellectual work, and, toward the last, indulgence in
narcotics for insomnia, all coloured his philosophy. The personal
bias was unescapable, and this bias favoured sickness, not health.
Hence his frantic apotheosis of health, the dance and laughter, and
his admiration for Bizet's Carmen. Hence his constant employment of
joyful imagery, of bold defiance to the sober workaday world. His
famous injunction: "Be hard!" was meant for his own unhappy soul, ever
nearing, like Pascal's, the abyss of black melancholy.
While we believe that too much stress has been laid upon the
pathologic side of Pascal's and Nietzsche's characters, there is no
evading the fact that both seemed tinged with what Kurt Eisner calls
_psychopathia spiritualis_. The references to suffering in Nietzsche's
books are significant. There is a vibrating accent of personal sorrow
on every page. He lived in an inferno, mental and physical. We are
given to praising Robert Louis Stevenson for his cheerfulness in the
dire straits of his illness. He was a mere amateur of misery, a
professional invalid, in comparison with Nietzsche. And how cruel was
the German poet to himself. He tied his soul to a stake and recorded
the poignant sensations of his spiritual _auto-da-fé_. At the close of
his sane days we find him taking a dolorous pride in his capacity for
suffering. "It is great affliction only--that long, slow affliction in
which we are burned as it were with green wood, which takes time--that
compels us philosophers to descend into our ultimate depth and divest
ourselves of all trust, all good nature, glossing, gentleness.... I
doubt whether such affliction improves us; but I know that it deepens
us.... Oh, how repugnant to one henceforth is gratification, coarse,
dull, drab-coloured gratification, as usually understood by those who
enjoy life!... Profound suffering makes noble; it separates. ... There
are free, insolent minds that would fain conceal and deny that at
the bottom they are disjointed, incurable souls--it is the case with
Hamlet." Nietzsche has the morbidly introspective Hamlet temper, and
Pascal has been called the Christian Hamlet.
We read in Overbeck's recollections that Nietzsche manifested deep
interest in the personality of Pascal. Both hated hypocrisy. But
the German thinker saw in the Frenchman of genius only a Christian
who hugged his chains, one who for his faith suffered "a continuous
suicide of reason." (Has not Nietzsche himself also said hard things
about Reason?) "One is punished best by one's virtues" ... or, "He
who fights with monsters, let him be careful lest he thereby become
a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also
gaze into thee." This last is unquestionably a reminiscence of Pascal.
He could not endure with equanimity Pascal's _sacrifizio dell'
intelletto_, not realizing that the Frenchman felt beneath his feet
the solid globe of faith. He discerned the Puritan in Pascal, though
failing to recognise the Puritan in himself. Despite his praise of
the Dionysian element in art and life, a puritan was buried in the
nerves of Nietzsche. He never could tolerate the common bourgeois joys.
Wine, Woman, Song, and their poets, were his detestations. Yet he
hated Puritanism in Protestant Christianity. "The dangerous thrill of
repentance spasms, the vivisection of conscience," he contemns; "even
in every desire for knowledge there is a drop of cruelty." He wrote
to Brandes: "Physically, too, I lived for years in the neighbourhood
of death. This was my great piece of good fortune; I forgot myself. I
outlived myself--a shedding of the skin." Pascal also knew the sting of
the flesh and brain. From the time he had an escape from sudden death,
he was conscious of an abyss at his side. "Men of genius," he wrote,
"have their heads higher but their feet lower than the rest of us."
With Nietzsche there was a darker _nuance_ of pain; he speaks somewhere
of "the philtre of the great Circe of mingled pleasure and cruelty."
His soul was a mysterious palimpsest. The heart has its reasons, cried
Pascal; of Nietzsche's heart the last word has not been written.
His criticism of Pascal was not clement. He said: "In Goethe the
superabundance becomes creative, in Flaubert the hatred; Flaubert,
a new edition of Pascal, but as an artist with instinctive judgment
at bottom.... He tortured himself when he composed, quite as Pascal
tortured himself when he thought." Yes, but Nietzsche was as fierce
a hater as Pascal or Flaubert. He set up for Christianity a straw
adversary and proceeded to demolish it. He forgot that, as Francis
Thompson has it: "It is the severed head that makes the Seraph."
Nietzsche would not look higher than the mud around the pedestal. He,
poor sufferer, was not genuinely impersonal. His tragedy was his sick
soul and body. "If a man cannot sing as he carries his cross, he had
better drop it," advises Havelock Ellis. Nietzsche bore a terrible
cross--like the men staggering with their chimeras in Baudelaire's
poem--but he did not bear it with equanimity. We must not be deceived
by his desperate gayety. As a married man he would never have enjoyed,
as did John Stuart Mill, spiritual henpeckery. He was afraid of life,
this dazzling Zarathustra, who went on Icarus-wings close to the sun.
He could speak of women thus: "We think woman deep--why? Because we
never find any foundation in her. Woman is not even shallow." Or,
"Woman would like to believe that love can do all--it is a superstition
peculiar to herself. Alas! he who knows the heart finds out how poor,
helpless, pretentious, and liable to error even the best, the deepest
love is--how it rather destroys than saves."
_Der Dichter spricht!_ Also the bachelor. Once a Hilda of the younger
generation, Lou Salomé by name, came knocking at the door of the poet's
heart. It was in vain. The wings of a great happiness touched his brow
as it passed, No wonder he wrote: "The desert grows; woe to him who
hides deserts"; "Woman unlearns the fear of man"; "Thou goest to women!
Remember thy whip." (Always this resounding motive of cruelty.) "Thy
soul will be dead even sooner than thy body"; "Once spirit became God;
then it became man; and now it is becoming mob"; "And many a one who
went into the desert and suffered thirst with the camels, merely did
not care to sit around the cistern with dirty camel-drivers." Here is
the aristocratic radical.
It is weakness, admitted Goethe, not to possess the capacity for noble
indignation; but Nietzsche was obsessed by his indignations. His voice,
that golden poet's voice, becomes too often shrill, cracked, and
falsetto. Voltaire has remarked that the first man who compared a woman
to a rose was a poet, the second a fool. In his attitude toward Woman,
Nietzsche was neither fool nor poet; but he never called her a rose.
Nor was he a cynic; he saw too clearly for that, and he had suffered.
Suffering, however, should have been a bond with women. Despite his
cruel utterances he enjoyed several ideal friendships with cultivated
women. "There is no happy life for woman--the advantage that the world
offers her is her choice in self-sacrifice," wrote Mr. Howells. Gossip
has whispered that he was hopelessly in love with Cosima Wagner. A
charming theme for a psychological novel. So was Von Bülow, once--until
he married her; so, Anton Rubinstein. Both abused Wagner's music;
Von Bülow after he became an advocate of Brahms; Rubinstein always.
Nietzsche, just before 1876, experienced the pangs of a Wagnerian
reactionary. A pretty commentary this upon masculine mental superiority
if one woman (even such a remarkable creature as Cosima) could upset
the stanchest convictions of these three men. And convictions, asserted
Nietzsche, are prisons. He contrived to escape from many intellectual
prisons. Cosima had proved the one inflexible jailer.
Merciless to himself, he did not spare others. Of Altruism, with its
fundamental contradictions, he wrote:
A being capable of purely altruistic actions alone is more
fabulous than the Phœnix. Never has a man done anything
solely for others, and without any personal motive; how
could the Ego act without Ego? ... Suppose a man wished
to do and to will everything for others, nothing for
himself, the latter would be impossible, for the very good
reason that he must do very much for himself, in order to
do anything at all for others. Moreover, it presupposes
that the other is egoist enough constantly to accept
these sacrifices made for him; so that the men of love and
self-sacrifice have an interest in the continued existence
of loveless egoists who are incapable of self-sacrifice.
In order to subsist, the highest morality must positively
enforce the existence of immorality.--(Menschliches, I,
137-8).
"Nietzsche's criticism on this point," remarks Professor Seth Pattison,
"must be accepted as conclusive. Every theory which attempts to
divorce the ethical end from the personality of the moral agent must
necessarily fall into this vicious circle; in a sense, the moral centre
and the moral motive must always ultimately be self, the satisfaction
of the self, the perfection of the self. The altruistic virtues, and
self-sacrifice in general, can only enter into the moral ideal so far
as they minister to the realisation of what is recognised to be the
highest type of manhood, the self which finds its own in all men's
good. Apart from this, self-sacrifice, self-mortification for its
own sake, would be a mere negation, and, as such, of no moral value
whatever."
Hasn't this the familiar ring of Max Stirner and his doctrine of the
Ego?
Nietzsche with Pascal would have assented that "illness is the natural
state of the true Christian." There was in both thinkers a tendency
toward self-laceration of the conscience. "Il faut s'abêtir," wrote
Pascal; and Nietzsche's pride vanished in the hot fire of suffering.
The Pascal injunction to stupefy ourselves was not to imitate the
beasts of the field, but was a counsel of humility. Montaigne in his
essay on Raymond de Sebonde wrote before Pascal concerning the danger
of overwrought sensibility; (Il nous faut abestir pour nous assagir,
is the original old French). It would have been wise for Nietzsche to
follow Pascal's advice. "We live alone, we die alone," sorrowfully
wrote the greatest religious force of the past century, Cardinal Newman
(a transposition of Pascal's "Nous mourrons seuls"). Nietzsche was the
loneliest of poets. He lived on the heights and paid the penalty, like
other exalted searchers after the vanished vase of the ideal.