aphorisms of the thinker were obscure. With all his mental acuteness
he was a pronounced lyricist. In the autumn of 1888 he wrote of Heine:
"How he handled German! One day it will be said that Heine and I were
without comparison the supreme artists of the German language." One who
is not a German is but an imperfect judge of Nietzsche's treatment of
language; but in our day all German connoisseurs are agreed in calling
him the greatest stylist of German prose.
He further impressed his contemporaries by his psychological
profundity and abstruseness. His spiritual life has its abysses and
labyrinths. Self-contemplation provides him with immense material for
investigation. And he is not content with self-contemplation. His
craving for knowledge is a passion; covetousness he calls it: "In this
soul there dwells no unselfishness; on the contrary, an all-desiring
self that would see by the help of many as with its own eyes and grasp
as with its _own_ hands; this soul of mine would even choose to bring
back all the past and not lose anything that might belong to it. What a
flame is this covetousness of mine!"
The equally strong development of his lyrical and critical qualities
made a fascinating combination. But it was the cause of those reversals
of his personal relations which deprive his career (in much the same
way as Sören Kierkegaard's) of some of the dignity it might have
possessed. When a great personality crossed his path he called all his
lyricism to arms and with clash of sword on shield hailed the person in
question as a demigod or a god (Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner). When
later on he discovered the limitations of his hero, his enthusiasm was
apt to turn to hatred, and this hatred found vent without the smallest
regard to his former worship. This characteristic is offensively
conspicuous in Nietzsche's behaviour to Wagner. But who knows whether
this very lack of dignity has not contributed to increase the number
of Nietzsche's admirers in an age that is somewhat undignified on this
point!
In the last period of his life Nietzsche appeared rather as a prophet
than as a thinker. He predicts the Superman. And he makes no attempt
at logical proof, but proceeds from a reliance on the correctness
and sureness of his instinct, convinced that he himself represents a
life-promoting principle and his opponents one hostile to life.
To him the object of existence is, everywhere the production of genius.
The higher man in our day is like a vessel in which the future of the
race is fermenting in an impenetrable way, and more than one of these
vessels is burst or broken in the process. But the human race is not
ruined by the failure of a single creature. Man, as we know him, is
only a bridge, a transition from the animal to the superman. What
the ape is in relation to man, a laughingstock or a thing of shame,
that will man be to the superman. Hitherto every species has produced
something superior to itself. Nietzsche teaches that man too will and
must do the same. He has drawn a conclusion from Darwinism which Darwin
himself did not see.
In the last decade of the nineteenth century Nietzsche and Tolstoy
appeared as the two opposite poles. Nietzsche's morality is
aristocratic as Tolstoy's is popular, individualistic as Tolstoy's
is evangelical; it asserts the self-majesty of the individual, where
Tolstoy's proclaims the necessity of self-sacrifice.
In the same decade Nietzsche and Ibsen were sometimes compared. Ibsen,
like Nietzsche, was a combative spirit and held entirely aloof from
political and practical life. A first point of agreement between them
is that they both laid stress on not having come of small folk. Ibsen
made known to me in a letter that his parents, both on the father's and
the mother's side, belonged to the most esteemed families of their day
in Skien in Norway, related to all the patrician families of the place
and country. Skien is no world-city, and the aristocracy of Skien is
quite unknown outside it; but Ibsen wanted to make it clear that his
bitterness against the upper class in Norway was in no wise due to the
rancour and envy of the outsider.
Nietzsche always made it known to his acquaintances that he was
descended from a Polish noble family, although he possessed no
pedigree. His correspondents took this for an aristocratic whim,
all the more because the name given out by him, Niëzky, by its very
spelling betrayed itself as not Polish. But the fact is otherwise.
The true spelling of the name is Nicki, and a young Polish admirer
of Nietzsche, Mr. Bernard Scharlitt, has succeeded in proving
Nietzsche's descent from the Nicki family, by pointing out that its
crest is to be found in a signet which for centuries has been an
heirloom in the family of Nietzsche. Perhaps not quite without reason,
Scharlitt therefore sees in Nietzsche's master-morality and his whole
aristocratising of the view of the world an expression of the szlachcic
spirit inherited from Polish ancestors.
Nietzsche and Ibsen, independently of each other but like Renan, have
sifted the thought of breeding moral aristocrats. It is the favourite
idea of Ibsen's Rosmer; it remains Dr. Stockmann's. Thus Nietzsche
speaks of the higher man as the preliminary aim of the race, before
Zarathustra announces the superman.
They meet now and then on the territory of psychology. Ibsen speaks
in _The Wild Duck_ of the necessity of falsehood to life. Nietzsche
loved life so greatly that even truth appeared to him of worth only in
the case of its acting for the preservation and advancement of life.
Falsehood is to him an injurious and destructive power only in so
far as it is life-constricting. It is not objectionable where it is
necessary to life.
It is strange that a thinker who abhorred Jesuitism as Nietzsche did
should arrive at this standpoint, which leads directly to Jesuitism.
Nietzsche agrees here with many of his opponents.
Ibsen and Nietzsche were both solitary, even if they were not at all
careless as to the fate of their works. It is the strongest man, says
Dr. Stockmann, who is most isolated. Who was most isolated, Ibsen or
Nietzsche? Ibsen, who held back from every alliance with others,
but exposed his work to the masses of the theatre-going public, or
Nietzsche, who stood alone as a thinker but as a man continually--even
if, as a rule, in vain--spied after the like-minded and after heralds,
and whose works, in the time of his conscious life, remained unread by
the great public, or in any case misunderstood.
Decision does not fall lightly to one who, by a whim of fate, was
regarded by both as an ally. Still more difficult is the decision as
to which of them has had the deepest effect on the contemporary mind
and which will longest retain his fame. But this need not concern us.
Wherever Nietzsche's teaching extends, and wherever his great and rare
personality is mastered, its attraction and repulsion will alike be
powerful; but everywhere it will contribute to the development and
moulding of the individual personality.
IV
(1909)
Since the publication of Nietzsche's collected works was completed,
Frau Förster-Nietzsche has allowed the Insel-Verlag of Leipzig to
issue, at a high price and for subscribers only, Friedrich Nietzsche's
posthumous work _Ecce Homo_, which has been lying in manuscript for
more than twenty years, and which she herself had formerly excluded
from his works, considering that the German reading public was not ripe
to receive it in the proper way--which we may doubtless interpret as a
fear on her part that the attitude of the book towards Germanism and
Christianity would raise a terrible outcry.
Now that Nietzsche holds undisputed sway over German minds and
exercises an immense influence in the rest of Europe and in America, it
will certainly be read with emotion and discreetly criticised.
It gives us an autobiography, written during Nietzsche's last
productive months, almost immediately before the collapse of his
powers, between October 15 and November 4, 1888; and in the course of
this autobiography each of his books is briefly characterised.
Here as elsewhere Nietzsche's thoughts are centred on the primary
conceptions of ascent and descent, growth and decay. Bringing himself
into relation with them, he finds that, as the victim of stubborn
illness and chronically recurring pain, he is a decadent; but at
the same time, as one who in his inmost self is unaffected by his
illness, nay, whose strength and fulness of life even increase during
its attacks, he is the very reverse of a decadent, a being who is
in process of raising himself to a higher form of life. He once more
emphasises the fact that the years in which his vitality was lowest
were just those in which he threw off all melancholy and recovered his
joy in life, his enthusiasm for life, since he had a keen sense that a
sick man has no right to pessimism.
He begins by giving us plain, matter-of-fact information about
himself, speaking warmly and proudly of his father. The latter had
been tutor to four princesses of Altenburg before he was appointed to
his living. Out of respect-for Friedrich Wilhelm IV. he gave his son
the Hohenzollern names of Friedrich Wilhelm, and he felt the events of
1848 very keenly. His father only reached the age of thirty-six, and
Nietzsche lost him when he was himself five years old. But he ascribes
to paternal heredity his ability to feel at home in a world of high
and delicate things (_in einer Welt hoher und zarter Dinge_). For
all that, Nietzsche does not forget to bring in, here as elsewhere,
the supposition of his descent from Polish noblemen; but he did not
know this for a fact, and it was only established by Scharlitt's
investigation of the family seal.
He describes himself as what we should call a winning personality. He
has "never understood the art of arousing ill-feeling against himself."
He can tame every bear; he even makes clowns behave decently. However
out of tune the instrument "man" may be, he can coax a pleasing tone
out of it. During his years of teaching, even the laziest became
diligent under him. Whatever offence has been done him, has not been
the result of ill-will. The pitiful have wounded him more deeply than
the malicious.
Nor has he given vent to feelings of revenge or rancour. His conflict
with Christianity is only one instance among many of his antagonism to
resentful feelings. It is an altogether different matter that his very
nature is that of a warrior. But he confers distinction on the objects
of his attacks, and he has never waged war on private individuals, only
on types; thus in Strauss he saw nothing but the Culture-Philistine.
He attributes to himself an extremely vivid and sensitive instinct
of cleanliness. At the first contact the filth lying at the base of
another's nature is revealed to him. The unclean are therefore ill at
ease in his presence; nor does the sense of being seen through make
them any more fragrant.
And with true psychology he adds that his greatest danger--he means to
his spiritual health and balance--is loathing of mankind.
The loathing of mankind is doubtless the best modern expression for
what the ancients called misanthropy. No one knows what it is till
he has experienced it. When we read, for instance, in our youth of
Frederick the Great that in his later years he was possessed and
fettered by contempt for men, this appears to us an unfortunate
peculiarity which the king ought to have overcome; for of course he
must have seen other men about him besides those who flattered him for
the sake of advantage. But the loathing of mankind is a force that
surprises and overwhelms one, fed by hundreds of springs concealed
in subconsciousness. One only detects its presence after having long
entertained it unawares.
Nietzsche cannot be said to have overcome it; he fled from it, took
refuge in solitude, and lived outside the world of men, alone in the
mountains among cold, fresh springs.
And even if he felt no loathing for individuals, his disgust with men
found a collective outlet, since he entertained, or rather worked up, a
positive horror of his countrymen, so powerful that at last it breaks
out in everything he writes. It reminds us dimly of Byron's dislike of
Englishmen, Stendhal's of Frenchmen, and Heine's of Germans. But it
is of a more violent character than Stendhal's or Heine's, and it has
a pathos and contempt of its own. He shows none of it at the outset.
In his first book, _The Birth of Tragedy_, he is no less partial to
Germany than Heine was in his first, romantically Teutonic period. But
Nietzsche's development carried him with a rush away from Germanism,
and in this last book of his the word "German" has become something
like his worst term of abuse.
He believes only in French culture; all other culture is a
misunderstanding. It makes him angry to see those Frenchmen he values
most, infected by German spirit. Thus Taine is, in his opinion,
corrupted by Hegel's influence. This impression is right in so far as
Hegel deprived Taine of some of the essentially French element which
he originally possessed, and of which certain of his admirers before
now have painfully felt the loss. But he overlooks the effect of the
study of Hegel in promoting at the same time what one might call the
extension of Taine's intellectual horizon. And Nietzsche is satisfied
with no narrower generalisation of the case than this: Wherever Germany
extends, she ruins culture.
As though to make sure of wounding German national pride, he declares
that Heinrich Heine (not Goethe) gave him the highest idea of lyric
poetry, and that as concerns Byron's _Manfred_, he has no words, only a
look, for those who in the presence of this work dare to utter the name
of _Faust_. The Germans, he maintains in connection with _Manfred_, are
incapable of any conception of greatness. So uncritical has he become
that he puts _Manfred_ above _Faust_.
In his deepest instincts Nietzsche is now, as he asserts, so foreign
to everything German, that the mere presence of a German "retards his
digestion." German intellect is to him indigestion; it can never be
finished with anything. If he has been so enthusiastic in his devotion
to Wagner, if he still regards his intimate relationship with Wagner as
the most profound refreshment of his life, this was because in Wagner
he honoured the foreigner, because in him he saw the incarnate protest
against all German virtues. In his book, _The Case of Wagner_, he had
already hinted that Richard Wagner, the glory of German nationalism,
was of Jewish descent, since his real father seems to have been the
step-father, Geyer. I could not have survived my youth without Wagner,
he says; I was condemned to the society of Germans and had to take a
counter-poison; Wagner was the counter-poison.
Here, by way of exception, he generalises his feeling. We who were
children in the 'fifties, he says, necessarily became pessimists
in regard to the concept "German." We cannot be anything else than
revolutionaries. And he explains this expression thus: We can assent to
no state of affairs which allows the canting bigot to be at the top.
(Höffding's protest against the use of the word "radicalism" applied to
Nietzsche, in _Moderne Filosofer_, is thus beside the mark.) Wagner was
a revolutionary; he fled from the Germans. And, Nietzsche adds, as an
artist, a man has no other home than Paris--the city which, strangely
enough, he was never, to see. He ranks Wagner among the later masters
of French romanticism--Delacroix, Berlioz, Baudelaire--and wisely says
nothing about the reception of Wagnerian opera in Paris under the
Empire.
In everything Nietzsche now adopts the French stand-point--the old and
narrow French standpoint--that, for instance, of the elderly Voltaire
towards Shakespeare. He declares here, as he has done before, that
his artist's taste defends Molière, Corneille and Racine, not without
bitterness (_nicht ohne Ingrimm_) against such a wild (_wüstes_) genius
as Shakespeare. Strangely enough he repeats here his estimate of
Shakespeare's Cæsar as his finest creation, weak as it is: "My highest
formula for Shakespeare is that he conceived the type of Cæsar." It
must be added that here again Nietzsche assents to the unhappy delusion
that Shakespeare never wrote the works that bear his name. Nietzsche
is "instinctively" certain that they are due to Bacon, and, ignoring
repeated demonstrations of the impossibility of this fatuous notion, he
supports his conjecture by the grotesque assertion that if he himself
had christened his Zarathustra by a name not his own--by Wagner's, for
instance--the acumen of two thousand years would not have sufficed to
guess who was its originator; no one would have believed it possible
that the author of _Human, all-too-Human_ had conceived the visions of
Zarathustra.
He allows the Germans no honour as philosophers: Leibniz and Kant were
"the two greatest clogs upon the intellectual integrity of Europe."
Just when a perfectly scientific attitude of mind had been attained,
they managed to find byways back to "the old ideal." And no less
passionately does he deny to the Germans all honour as musicians:
"A German _cannot_ know what music is. The men who pass as German
musicians are foreigners, Slavs, Croats, Italians, Dutchmen or Jews. I
am Pole enough to give up all other music for Chopin--except Wagner's
_Siegfried-Idyll_, some things of Liszt, and the Italians Rossini and
Pietro Gasti" (by this last name he appears to mean his favourite
disciple, Köselitz, who wrote under the pseudonym of Peter Gast).
He abhors the Germans as "idealists." All idealism is falsehood in
the face of necessity. He finds a pernicious idealism in Henrik Ibsen
too, "that typical old maid," as well, as in others whose object it
is to poison the clean conscience, the natural spirit, of sexual
love. And he gives us a clause of his moral code, in which, under the
head of Vice, he combats every kind of opposition to Nature, or if
fine words are preferred, every kind of idealism. The clause runs:
"Preaching of chastity is a public incitement to unnatural practices.
All, depreciation of the sexual life, all sullying of it with the word
'impure,' is a crime against Life itself--is the real sin against the
holy Spirit of Life."
Finally he attacks what he calls the "licentiousness" of the Germans
in historical matters. German historians, he declares, have lost all
eye for the values of culture; in fact, they have put this power of
vision under the ban of the Empire. They claim that a man must in the
first place be a German, must belong to the race. If he does, he is
in a position to determine values or their absence: the Germans are
thus the "moral order of the universe" in history; compared with the
power of the Roman Empire they are the champions of liberty; compared
with the eighteenth century they are the restorers of morality and of
the Categorical Imperative. "History is actually written on Imperial
German and Antisemitic lines--and Herr von Treitschke is not ashamed of
himself."
The Germans have on their conscience every crime against culture
committed in the last four centuries. As Nietzsche in his later years
was never tired of asserting, they deprived the Renaissance of its
meaning, they wrecked it by the Reformation; that is, by Luther, an
impossible monk who, owing to his impossibility, attacked the Church
and in so doing restored it. The Catholics would have every reason to
honour Luther's name.
And when, upon the bridge between two centuries of decadence, a _force
majeure_ of genius and will revealed itself, strong enough to weld
Europe into political and economic unity, the Germans finally, with
their "Wars of Liberation," robbed Europe of the meaning of Napoleon's
existence, a prodigy of meaning. Thus they have upon their conscience
all that followed, nationalism, the _névrose nationale_ from which
Europe is suffering, and the perpetuation of the system of little
states, of petty politics.
Last of all, the Germans have upon their conscience their attitude to
himself, their indifference, their lack of recognition, the silence
in which they buried his life's work. The Germans are bad company.
And although his autobiography ends with a poem in which he affects a
scorn of fame, "that coin in which the whole world pays, but which he
receives with gloved hands and tramples underfoot with loathing "--yet
his failure to win renown in Germany during his lifetime contributed
powerfully to foster his antipathy.
The exaltation that marks the whole tone of the work, the unrestrained
self-esteem which animates it and is ominous of the near approach of
madness, have not deprived _Ecce Homo_ of its character of surpassing
greatness.