The penalty of misrepresentation and misinterpretation seems to
be attached to every new idea that comes to birth through the
utterances of genius. At first with Wagner it was the "noise-making
Wagner"--whereas he is a master of plangent harmonies. Ibsen, we
were told, couldn't write a play. His dramatic technique is nearly
faultless; in reality, with its unities there is a suspicion of the
academic in it and a perilous approach to the Chinese ivory mechanism
of Scribe. And paint, Paris asserted, the late Edouard Manet could
not. It was precisely his almost miraculous manipulation of paint that
sets this artist apart from his fellows. The same tactless rating
of Friedrich Nietzsche has prevailed in the general critical and
popular imagination. Nietzsche has become the bugaboo of timid folk.
He has been denounced as the Antichrist; yet he has been the subject
of a discriminating study in such a conservative magazine as the
_Catholic World_. Thanks to the conception of some writers, Nietzsche
and the Nietzschians are gigantic brutes, a combination of Genghis
Khan and Bismarck, terrifying apparitions wearing mustachios like
yataghans, eyes rolling in frenzy, with a philosophy that ranged from
pitch-and-toss to manslaughter, and with a consuming atheism as a side
attraction. Need we protest that this is Nietzsche misread, Nietzsche
butchered to make a stupid novelist's holiday.
Ideas to be vitally effective must, like scenery, be run on during the
exact act of the contemporary drama. The aristocratic individualism of
Nietzsche came at a happy moment when the stage was bare yet encumbered
with the débris of socialistic theories left over from the storm that
first swept all Europe in 1848. It was necessary that the pendulum
should swing in another direction. The small voice of Max Stirner--who,
as the French would say, imitated Nietzsche in advance--was swallowed
in the universal gabble of sentimental humanitarianism preached from
pulpits and barricades. Nietzsche's appearance marked one of those
precise psychological moments when the rehabilitation of an old idea in
a new garment of glittering rhetoric would resemble a new dispensation.
For over a decade now the fame and writings of the Saxon-born
philosopher have traversed the intellectual life of the Continent. He
was translated into a dozen languages, he was expounded, schools sprang
up and his disciples fought furious battles in his name. His doctrines,
because of their dynamic revolutionary quality, were impudently annexed
by men whose principles would have been abhorrent to the unfortunate
thinker. Nietzsche, who his life long had attacked socialism in its
myriad shapes, was captured by the socialists. However, the regression
of the wave of admiration has begun not only in Germany but in France,
once his greatest stronghold. The real Nietzsche, undimmed by violent
partisanship and equally violent antagonism, has emerged. No longer is
he a bogey man, not a creature of blood and iron, not a constructive or
an academic philosopher, but simply a brilliant and suggestive thinker
who, because of the nature of his genius, could never have erected
an elaborate philosophic system, and a writer not quite as dangerous
to established religion and morals as some critics would have us
believe. He most prided himself on his common sense, on his "realism,"
as contradistinguished from the cobweb-spinning idealisms of his
philosophic predecessors.
Early in 1908 a book was published at Jena entitled Franz Overbeck
and Friedrich Nietzsche, by Carl Albrecht Bernouilli. In it at great
length and with clearness was described the friendship of Overbeck--a
well-known church historian and culture-novelist, born at St.
Petersburg of German and English parents--and Nietzsche during their
Basel period. Interesting is the story of his relations with Richard
Wagner and Jacob Burckhardt, the historian of the Renaissance. As a
youth Nietzsche had won the praises of both Rietschl and Burckhardt for
his essay on Theognis. This was before 1869, in which year at the age
of twenty-six he took his doctor's degree and accepted the chair of
classical philology at Basel. His friend Overbeck noted his dangerously
rapid intellectual development and does not fail to record, what has
never been acknowledged by the dyed-in-the-wool Nietzschians, that the
"Master" had read and inwardly digested Max Stirner's anarchistic work,
The Ego and His Own. Not only is this long-denied fact set forth, but
Overbeck, in a careful analysis, reaches the positive conclusion that,
notwithstanding his profound erudition, his richly endowed nature,
Friedrich Nietzsche is not one of the world's great men; that in his
mad endeavour to carve himself into the semblance of his own Superman
he wrecked brain and body.
The sad irony of this book lies in the fact that the sister of
Nietzsche, Frau Foerster-Nietzsche, who nursed the poet-philosopher
from the time of his breakdown in 1888 till his death in 1900; who
for twenty years has by pen and personally made such a successful
propaganda for his ideas, was in at least three letters--for the first
time published by Bernouilli--insulted grievously by her brother.
This posthumous hatred as expressed in the acrid prose of Nietzsche
is terribly disenchanting. He calls her a meddlesome woman without a
particle of understanding of his ideals. He declares that she martyred
him, made him ridiculous, and in the last letter he wrote her, dated
December, 1886, he wonders at the enigma of fate that made two persons
of such different temperaments blood-relatives. Bernouilli, the
editor of these Overbeck letters, adds insult to injury by calling
the unselfish, noble-minded sister and biographer of her brother a
tyrannical and not very intellectual person, who often wounded her
brother with her advice and criticism.
Peter Gast doubts the authenticity of these letters, for, as he
truthfully points out, the love of Nietzsche for his sister, as
evidenced by an ample correspondence, was great. We recall the touching
exclamation of the sick philosopher when once at his sister's house in
Weimar he saw her weeping: "Don't cry, little sister, we are all so
happy now." That "now" had a sinister significance, for the brilliant
thinker was quite helpless and incapable of reading through the page
of a book, though he was never the lunatic pictured by some of his
opponents. A deep melancholy had settled upon his soul and he died
without enjoying the light of a returned reason. It has not occurred to
German critics that these letters even if genuine are the product of a
diseased imagination. Nietzsche became a very suspicious man after his
break with Wagner. He suffered from the mania of persecution. He hated
mankind and fled to the heights of Sils-Maria to escape what Poe aptly
described as the "tyranny of the human face."
The first thing that occurs to one after reading Beyond Good and
Evil is that Nietzsche is more French than German. It is well known
that his favourites were the _pensée_ writers, Pascal, La Bruyère,
La Rochefoucauld, Fontenelle, Chamfort, Vauvenargues. A peripatetic
because of chronic ill health--he had the nerves of a Shelley and the
stomach of a Carlyle--his ideas were jotted down during his long
walks in the Engadine. Naturally they assumed the form of aphorisms,
epigrams, _jeux d'esprit_. With his increasing illness came the
inability to write more than a few pages of connected thoughts. His
best period was between the years 1877 and 1882. He had attacked
Schopenhauer; he wished to be free to go up to the "heights" unimpeded
by the baggage of other men's ideas. It was with disquietude that his
friends witnessed the growing self-exaltation that may be noted in the
rhapsodical Zarathustra.
He felt the ground sinking under him--his pride of intellect Luciferian
in intensity--and his latter works were a desperate challenge to his
darkening brain and the world that refused to recognize his value.
Nietzsche had the true ascetic's temperament. He lived the life of
a strenuous saint, and his Beyond Good and Evil might land us in
a barren desert, where austerity would rule our daily conduct. To
become a Superman one must renounce the world. It was the easy-going,
down-at-the-heel morality of the world, its carrying water on both
shoulders, that stirred the wrath of this earnest man of blameless
life and provoked from him so much brilliant and fascinating prose.
He wrote a swift, golden German. He was a stylist. The great culture
hero of his day, nourished on Latin and Greek, he waged war against the
moral ideas of his generation and ruined his intellect in the unequal
conflict. He turned on himself and rended his soul into shreds rather
than join in the affirmations of recognised faith. Yet what eloquent,
touching pages he has devoted to the founder of the Christian religion.
His last signature in the letter to Brandes reveals the preoccupation
of his memory with the religion he despised. Nietzsche made the great
renunciation of inherited faith and committed spiritual suicide.
Libraries are filled with the works of his commentators, eager to make
of him what he was not. He has been shamelessly exploited. He has
been called the forerunner of Pragmatism. He was a poet, an artist,
who saw life as a gorgeously spun dream, not as a dreary phalanstery.
He belonged rather to Goethe and Faust than to Schopenhauer or the
positivists. Hellenism was his first and last love.
The correspondence between Nietzsche and his famulus, the musician
Peter Gast--whose real name is Heinrich Kôselitz--from 1876 to 1889,
appeared last autumn and comprises 278 letters. Another Nietzsche
appears--gentle, suffering, as usual still hopeful. He loves Italy;
at the end, Turin is his favourite city. There is little except in
the final communication to show a mind cracking asunder. No doubt
this correspondence was given to the world as an offset to the
Overbeck-Bernouilli letters.
Leslie Stephen declared that no one ever wrote a dull autobiography,
and risking a bull, added, "The very dulness would be interesting." Yet
one is not afraid to maintain that Friedrich Nietzsche's autobiography
is rather a disappointment; possibly because too much was expected.
It should not be forgotten that Nietzsche, when at Wagner's villa
Triebschen, near Lucerne, read and corrected Wagner's autobiography,
which is yet to see the light of publication. He seems to have violated
certain confidences, for he was the first--that is, in latter years--to
revive the story of Wagner's blood relationship to his stepfather,
Ludwig Geyer. In Leipsic this was a thrice-told tale. Moreover, he
warned us to be suspicious of great men's autobiographies and then
wrote one himself, wrote it in three weeks, beginning October 15, 1888,
the forty-fourth anniversary of his birth, and ending with difficulty
November 4. It rings sincere, and was composed at white heat, but
unhappily for this present curious generation of Nietzsche readers it
tells very little that is new.
Notwithstanding Nietzsche's wish that the book should not exceed in
price over a mark and a half, a limited edition de luxe has been put
forth with the acquiescence of the Nietzsche archive, Weimar, and at
a high price. This edition is limited to 1,250 copies. It is clearly
printed, but the decorative element is rather bizarre. Henry Van
de Velde of the Weimar Art School is the designer of the title and
ornaments. Raoul Richter, professor at the Leipsic University, has
written a few appreciative words at the close.
Nietzsche was at Turin, November, 1888. There he wrote the following
to Professor Georg Brandes, the celebrated Copenhagen critic: "I
have now revealed myself with a cynicism that will become historical.
The book is called Ecce Homo and is against everything Christian....
I am after all the first psychologist of Christianity, and like the
old artillerist I am, I can bring forward cannon of which no opponent
of Christianity has even suspected the existence.... I lay down my
oath that in two years we shall have the whole earth in convulsions.
I am a fatality. Guess who it is that comes off worst in Ecce Homo?
The Germans! I have said awful things to them." This was the "golden
autumn" of his life, as he confessed to his sister Elizabeth. In a
little over four weeks from the date of the letter to Brandes Nietzsche
went mad, after a stroke of apoplexy in Turin. The collapse must have
taken place between January 1 and 3, 1889. Brandes received a card
signed "The Crucified One"; Overbeck, his old friend at Basel, was also
agitated by a few lines in which Nietzsche proclaimed himself the King
of Kings; while to Cosima Wagner at Bayreuth was sent a communication
which read, "Ariadne, I love you! Dionysos." Like Tolstoy, Nietzsche
suffered from theomania and prophecy madness.
These details are not in the autobiography but may be found in Dr.
Mügge's excellent study just published, Nietzsche, His Life and Work.
Overbeck started for Turin and there found his poor old companion
giving away his money, dancing, singing, declaiming verse, and playing
snatches of crazy music on the pianoforte. He was taken back to
Basel and was gentle on the trip except that in the Saint-Gothard
tunnel he sang a poem of his, "An der Brücke," which appears in the
autobiography. His mother brought him from Switzerland to Naumburg;
thence to Dr. Binswanger's establishment at Jena. Later he lived in his
sister's home at Upper Weimar, and from the balcony, where he spent
his days, he could see a beautiful landscape. He was melancholy rather
than mad, never violent--this his sister has personally assured me--and
occasionally surprised those about him by flashes of memory; but full
consciousness was not to be again enjoyed by him. Overwork, chloral,
and despair at the "conspiracy of silence" caused his brain to crumble.
He had attained his "Great Noon," Zarathustra's Noon, during the
closing days of 1888. In August, 1900, came the euthanasia for which he
had longed.
There is internal evidence that the autobiography was written under
exalted nervous conditions. The aura of insanity hovers about its
pages. Yet Nietzsche has seldom said so many brilliant, ironical, and
savage things. He melts over memories of Wagner, the one friendship
of a life crowded with friends and cursed by solitude. He sets out to
smash Christianity, but he expressed the hope that the book would fall
into the hands of the intellectual élite. He divides his theme into
the following heads: Why I Am So Clever: Why I Am So Sage: Why I Write
Such Good Books: Why I Am a Fatality. (You recall here the letter to
Brandes.) He ranges from the abuse of bad German cookery to Kantian
metaphysics. He calls Ibsen the typical old maid and denounces him as
the creator of the "Emancipated Woman." Yes, he does insult Germany
and the Germans, but no worse than in earlier books; and certainly not
so effectively as did Goethe, Heine, and Schopenhauer. In calling the
Germans the "Chinese of Europe" he but repeated the words of Goncourt
in Charles Demailly. He speaks of Liszt as one "who surpasses all
musicians by the noble accents of his orchestration" (vague phrase);
and depreciates Schumann's "Manfred." He, Nietzsche, had composed a
counter overture which Von Bülow declared extraordinary. True, Von
Bülow did call it something of the sort, with the advice to throw it
into the dust-bin as being an insult to good music. He analyses his
recent readings of Baudelaire--whose diary touched him deeply--of
Stendhal, Bourget, Maupassant, Anatole France, and others. Best of all,
he minutely analyses the mental processes of his books from The Birth
of Tragedy to The Wagner Case. He declares Zarathustra a dithyramb of
solitude and purity, and proudly boasts that the Superman builds his
nest in the trees of the future.
What a master of invective! He often descends to the street in his
tongue-lashing, as, for instance, when he groups "shopkeepers,
Christians, cows, women, Englishmen, and other democrats." Woman is
always the enemy. The only way to tame her is to make her a mother.
As for female suffrage, he sets it down to psychological disorders.
He is a _nuance_, and is the first German to understand women! Alas!
And not the last man who will repeat this speech surely hailing from
the Stone Age. He seems rather proud of his double personality, and
hints at a third. Oddly enough, Nietzsche asked that his Ecce Homo
(the title proves his constant preoccupation with Christianity) be
translated into French by Strindberg, the Swedish poet and the first
dramatist to incorporate into his plays the Nietzschian philosophy,
or what he conceived to be such. (Daniel Lesueur has written of the
various adaptations for gorillas of a teaching that really demands from
man the utmost that is in him.) Nietzsche was a hater of Christianity;
above all of Christian morals, but he was a brave and honest fighter.
He raged at George Eliot, Herbert Spencer, and Carlyle for their
half-heartedness. To give up the belief in Christ and His mission
meant for Nietzsche to drop the moral system, to transvalue old moral
values. This, he truthfully asserted, George Eliot and Spencer had not
the courage to do. He did not skulk behind such masks as the Higher
Criticism, Modernism, or quacksalver Christian socialism. Compromise
was abhorrent to him. His Superman, with its echoes of Wagner's
Siegfried, Ibsen's Brand, Stendhal's wicked heroes, the Renaissance
Borgias, the second Faust of Goethe, and not a little of Hamlet, is
a monster of perfection that may some day become a demigod for a new
religion--and no worse than contemporary mud-gods manufactured daily.
Nietzsche's particular virtue, even for the orthodox, is that though
he assails their faith he also puts to rout with the fiery blasts of
his rhetoric all the belly-gods, the false-culture gods, the gods who
"heal," and other "ghosts"--as Max Stirner calls them. But to every
generation its truths (or lies).
A recently published anecdote of Ibsen quotes a statement of his _a
propos_ of Brand. "The whole drama is only meant as irony. For the man
who wants all or nothing is certainly crazy." Well, Friedrich Nietzsche
was such a man. No half-way parleyings. Fight the Bogey. Don't go
around. He went more serenely than did Brand to his ice cathedral on
the heights. His prayer uttered years before came true: "Give me, ye
gods, give me madness! Madness to make me believe at last in myself."
Nietzsche is the most dynamically emotional writer of his
times. He sums up an epoch. He is the expiring voice of the old
nineteenth-century romanticism in philosophy. His message to unborn
generations we may easily leave to those unborn, and enjoy the wit, the
profound criticisms of life, the bewildering gamut of his ideas; above
all, pity the tragic blotting out of such a vivid intellectual life.