THE PHILOSOPHY OF
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
BY H. L. MENCKEN
I shall be told, I suppose, that my philosophy is
comfortless--because I speak the truth; and people prefer to
believe that everything the Lord made is good. If you are
one such, go to the priests, and leave philosophers in peace!
_Arthur Schopenhauer._
_Third Edition_
BOSTON
LUCE AND COMPANY
1913
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
When this attempt to summarize and interpret the principal ideas of
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was first published, in the early part of
1908, several of his most important books were yet to be translated
into English and the existing commentaries were either fragmentary
and confusing or frankly addressed to the specialist in philosophy.
It was in an effort to make Nietzsche comprehensible to the general
reader, at sea in German and unfamiliar with the technicalities of
the seminaries, that the work was undertaken. It soon appeared that
a considerable public had awaited that effort, for the first edition
was quickly exhausted and there was an immediate demand for a special
edition in England. The larger American edition which followed has
since gone the way of its predecessor, and so the opportunity offers
for a general revision, eliminating certain errors in the first draft
and introducing facts and opinions brought forward by the publication
of Dr. Oscar Levy's admirable complete edition of Nietzsche in English
and by the appearance of several new and informative biographical
studies, and a large number of discussions and criticisms. The whole of
the section upon Nietzsche's intellectual origins has been rewritten,
as has been the section on his critics, and new matter has been added
to the biographical chapters. In addition, the middle portion of the
book has been carefully revised, and a final chapter upon the study of
Nietzsche, far more extensive than the original bibliographical note,
has been appended. The effect of these changes, it is believed, has
been to increase the usefulness of the book, not only to the reader
who will go no further, but also to the reader who plans to proceed to
Nietzsche's own writings and to the arguments of his principal critics
and defenders.
That Nietzsche has been making progress of late goes without saying.
No reader of current literature, nor even of current periodicals, can
have failed to notice the increasing pressure of his ideas. When his
name was first heard in England and America, toward the end of the
nineties, he suffered much by the fact that few of his advocates had
been at any pains to understand him. Thus misrepresented, he took on
the aspect of an horrific intellectual hobgoblin, half Bakúnin and half
Byron, a sacrilegious and sinister fellow, the father of all the wilder
ribaldries of the day. In brief, like Ibsen before him, he had to bear
many a burden that was not his. But in the course of time the truth
about him gradually precipitated itself from this cloud of unordered
enthusiasm, and his principal ideas began to show themselves clearly.
Then the discovery was made that the report of them had been far more
appalling than the substance. Some of them, indeed, had already slipped
into respectable society in disguise, as the original inspirations
of lesser sages, and others, on examination, turned out to be quite
harmless, and even comforting. The worst that could be said of most of
them was that they stood in somewhat violent opposition to the common
platitudes, that they were a bit vociferous in denying this planet to
be the best of all possible worlds. Heresy, of course, but falling,
fortunately enough, upon ears fast growing attuned to heretical music.
The old order now had fewer to defend it than in days gone by. The
feeling that it must yield to something better, that contentment must
give way to striving and struggle, that any change was better than no
change at all--this feeling was abroad in the world. And if the program
of change that Nietzsche offered was startling at first hearing, it
was at least no more startling than the programs offered by other
reformers. Thus he got his day in court at last and thus he won the
serious attention of open-minded and reflective folk.
Not, of course, that Nietzsche threatens, today or in the near future,
to make a grand conquest of Christendom, as Paul conquered, or the
unknown Father of Republics. Far from it, indeed. Filtered through
the comic sieve of a Shaw or sentimentalized by a Roosevelt, some
of his ideas show a considerable popularity, but in their original
state they are not likely to inflame millions. Broadly viewed, they
stand in direct opposition to every dream that soothes the slumber of
mankind in the mass, and therefore mankind in the mass must needs be
suspicious of them, at least for years to come. They are pre-eminently
for the man who is _not_ of the mass, for the man whose head is lifted,
however little, above the common level. They justify the success of
that man, as Christianity justifies the failure of the man below. And
so they give no promise of winning the race in general from its old
idols, despite the fact that the pull of natural laws and of elemental
appetites is on their side. But inasmuch as an idea, to make itself
felt in the world, need not convert the many who serve and wait but
only the few who rule, it must be manifest that the Nietzschean creed,
in the long run, gives promise of exercising a very real influence
upon human thought. Reduced to a single phrase, it may be called
a counterblast to sentimentality--and it is precisely by breaking
down sentimentality, with its fondness for moribund gods, that human
progress is made. If Nietzsche had left no other vital message to
his time, he would have at least forced and deserved a hearing for
his warning that Christianity is a theory for those who distrust and
despair of their strength, and not for those who hope and fight on.
To plat his principal ideas for the reader puzzled by conflicting
reports of them, to prepare the way for an orderly and profitable
reading of his own books--such is the purpose of the present volume.
The works of Nietzsche, as they have been done into English, fill
eighteen volumes as large as this one, and the best available account
of his life would make three or four more. But it is sincerely to be
hoped that the student, once he has learned the main paths through
this extensive country, will proceed to a diligent and thorough
exploration. Of all modern philosophers Nietzsche is the least dull.
He was undoubtedly the greatest German prose writer of his generation,
and even when one reads him through the English veil it is impossible
to escape the charm and color of his phrases and the pyrotechnic
brilliance of his thinking.
MENCKEN.
BALTIMORE, November, 1913.
CONTENTS
NIETZSCHE THE MAN
I. BOYHOOD AND YOUTH 3
II. THE BEGINNINGS OF THE PHILOSOPHER 16
III. BLAZING A NEW PATH 27
IV. THE PROPHET OF THE SUPERMAN 40
V. THE PHILOSOPHER AND THE MAN 50
NIETZSCHE THE PHILOSOPHER
I. DIONYSUS _vs._ APOLLO 63
II. THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY 74
III. BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL 88
IV. THE SUPERMAN 100
V. ETERNAL RECURRENCE 117
VI. CHRISTIANITY 126
VII. TRUTH 147
VIII. CIVILIZATION 162
IX. WOMEN AND MARRIAGE 174
X. GOVERNMENT 192
XI. CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 208
XII. EDUCATION 216
XIII. SUNDRY IDEAS 226
XIV. NIETZSCHE _vs._ WAGNER 242
NIETZSCHE THE PROPHET
I. NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINS 255
II. NIETZSCHE AND HIS CRITICS 268
HOW TO STUDY NIETZSCHE 290
INDEX 297
NIETZSCHE THE MAN
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
I
BOYHOOD AND YOUTH
Friedrich Nietzsche was a preacher's son, brought up in the fear of
the Lord. It is the ideal training for sham-smashers and freethinkers.
Let a boy of alert, restless intelligence come to early manhood in an
atmosphere of strong faith, wherein doubts are blasphemies and inquiry
is a crime, and rebellion is certain to appear with his beard. So
long as his mind feels itself puny beside the overwhelming pomp and
circumstance of parental authority, he will remain docile and even
pious. But so soon as he begins to see authority as something ever
finite, variable and all-too-human--when he begins to realize that his
father and his mother, in the last analysis, are mere human beings,
and fallible like himself--then he will fly precipitately toward the
intellectual wailing places, to think his own thoughts in his own way
and to worship his own gods beneath the open sky.
As a child Nietzsche was holy; as a man he was the symbol and
embodiment of all unholiness. At nine he was already versed in the
lore of the reverend doctors, and the pulpit, to his happy mother--a
preacher's daughter as well as a preacher's wife--seemed his logical
and lofty goal; at thirty he was chief among those who held that all
pulpits should be torn down and fashioned into bludgeons, to beat out
the silly brains of theologians.
The awakening came to him when he made his first venture away from the
maternal apron-string and fireside: when, as a boy of ten, he learned
that there were many, many men in the world and that these men were of
many minds. With the clash of authority came the end of authority. If
A. was right, B. was wrong--and B. had a disquieting habit of standing
for one's mother, one's grandmother or the holy prophets. Here was the
beginning of intelligence in the boy--the beginning of that weighing
and choosing faculty which seems to give man at once his sense of
mastery and his feeling of helplessness. The old notion that doubt was
a crime crept away. There remained in its place the new notion that
the only real crime in the world--the only unmanly, unspeakable and
unforgivable offense against the race--was unreasoning belief. Thus the
orthodoxy of the Nietzsche home turned upon and devoured itself.
The philosopher of the superman was born on October 15th, 1844, at
Röcken, a small town in the Prussian province of Saxony. His father,
Karl Ludwig Nietzsche, was a country pastor of the Lutheran Church
and a man of eminence in the countryside. But he was more than a mere
rural worthy, with an outlook limited by the fringe of trees on the
horizon, for in his time he had seen something of the great world and
had even played his humble part in it. Years before his son Friedrich
was born he had been tutor to the children of the Duke of Altenburg.
The duke was fond of him and took him, now and then, on memorable
and eventful journeys to Berlin, where that turbulent monarch, King
Friedrich Wilhelm IV, kept a tinsel court and made fast progress from
imbecility to acute dementia. The king met the young tutor and found
him a clever and agreeable person, with excellent opinions regarding
all those things whereon monarchs are wont to differ with mobs. When
the children of the duke became sufficiently saturated with learning,
the work of Pastor Nietzsche at Altenburg was done and he journeyed to
Berlin to face weary days in the anterooms of ecclesiastical magnates
and jobbers of places. The king, hearing by chance of his presence and
remembering him pleasantly, ordered that he be given without delay a
vicarage worthy of his talents. So he was sent to Röcken, and there,
when a son was born to him, he called the boy Friedrich Wilhelm, as a
graceful compliment to his royal patron and admirer.
There were two other children in the house. One was a boy, Josef, who
was named after the Duke of Altenburg, and died in infancy in 1850.
The other was a girl, Therese Elisabeth Alexandra, who became in after
years her brother's housekeeper, guardian angel and biographer. Her
three names were those of the three noble children her father had
grounded in the humanities. Elisabeth--who married toward middle age
and is best known as Frau Förster-Nietzsche--tells us practically all
that we know about the Nietzsche family and the private life of its
distinguished son.[1] The clan came out of Poland, like so many other
families of Eastern Germany, at the time of the sad, vain wars. Legend
maintains that it was noble in its day and Nietzsche himself liked to
think so. The name, says Elisabeth, was originally Nietzschy. "Germany
is a great nation," Nietzsche would say, "only because its people
have so much Polish blood in their veins.... I am proud of my Polish
descent. I remember that in former times a Polish noble, by his simple
veto, could overturn the resolution of a popular assembly. There were
giants in Poland in the time of my forefathers." He wrote a tract
with the French title "_L'Origine de la famille de Nietzsche_" and
presented the manuscript to his sister, as a document to be treasured
and held sacred. She tells us that he was fond of maintaining that the
Nietzsches had suffered greatly and fallen from vast grandeur for their
opinions, religious and political. He had no proof of this, but it
pleased him to think so.
Pastor Nietzsche was thrown from his horse in 1848 and died, after
a lingering illness, on July 28th, 1849, when Friedrich was barely
five years old. Frau Nietzsche then moved her little family to
Naumburg-on-the-Saale--"a Christian, conservative, loyal city." The
household consisted of the mother, the two children, their paternal
grandmother and two maiden aunts--the sisters of the dead pastor. The
grandmother was something of a bluestocking and had been, in her day, a
member of that queer circle of intellectuals and amateurs which raged
and roared around Goethe at Weimar. But that was in the long ago,
before she dreamed of becoming the wife of one preacher and the mother
of another. In the year '50 she was well of all such youthful fancies
and there was no doubt of the divine revelations beneath her pious
roof. Prayers began the day and ended the day. It was a house of holy
women, with something of a convent's placidity and quiet exaltation.
Little Friedrich was the idol in the shrine. It was the hope of all
that he would grow up into a man inimitably noble and impossibly good.
Pampered thus, the boy shrank from the touch of the world's rough
hand. His sister tells us that he disliked the bad little boys of the
neighborhood, who robbed bird's nests, raided orchards and played at
soldiers. There appeared in him a quaint fastidiousness which went
counter to the dearest ideals of the healthy young male. His school
fellows, in derision, called him "the little pastor" and took delight
in waylaying him and venting upon him their grotesque and barbarous
humor. He liked flowers and books and music and when he went abroad
it was for solitary walks. He could recite and sing and he knew the
Bible so well that he was able to dispute about its mysteries. "As I
think of him," said an old school-mate years afterward, "I am forced
irresistibly into a thought of the 12-year-old Jesus in the Temple."
"The serious introspective child, with his dignified politeness," says
his sister, "seemed so strange to other boys that friendly advances
from either side were out of the question."
There is a picture of the boy in all the glory of his first long-tailed
coat. His trousers stop above his shoe-tops, his hair is long and his
legs seem mere airy filaments. As one gazes upon the likeness one can
almost smell the soap that scoured that high, shiny brow and those
thin, white cheeks. The race of such seraphic boys has died out in
the world. Gone are their slick, plastered locks and their translucent
ears! Gone are their ruffled cuffs and their spouting of the golden
text!
Nietzsche wrote verses before he was ten: pious, plaintive verses that
scanned well and showed rhymes and metaphors made respectable by ages
of honorable employment. His maiden effort, so far as we know, was an
elegy entitled "The Grave of My Father." Later on he became aware of
material things and sang the praises of rose and sunset. He played the
piano, too, and knew his Beethoven well, from the snares for the left
hand in "_Für Elise_" to the raging tumults of the C minor symphony.
One Sunday--it was Ascension day--he went to the village church and
heard the choir sing the Hallelujah Chorus from "The Messiah." Here was
music that benumbed the senses and soothed the soul and, boy as he was,
he felt its supreme beauty. That night he covered pages of ruled paper
with impossible pot-hooks. He, too, would write music!
Later on the difficulties of thorough-bass, as it was taught in the
abysmal German text-books of the time, somewhat dampened his ardor,
but more than once during his youth he thought seriously of becoming a
musician. His first really ambitious composition was a piano _pièce_
called "_Mondschein auf der Pussta_"--"Moonlight on the Pussta"--the
pussta being the flat Bohemian prairie. The family circle was
delighted with this maiden _opus_, and we may conjure up a picture
of little Friedrich playing it of a quiet evening at home, while
mother, grandmother, sister and aunts gathered round and marvelled
at his genius. In later life he wrote songs and sonatas, and--if an
enemy is to be believed--an opera in the grand manner. His sister, in
her biography, prints some samples of his music. Candor compels the
admission that it is even worse than it sounds.
Nietzsche, at this time, still seemed like piety on a monument, but
as much as he revered his elders and as much as he relied upon their
infallibility, there were yet problems which assailed him and gave him
disquiet. When he did not walk and think alone, his sister was his
companion, and to her he opened his heart, as one might to a sexless,
impersonal confessor. In her presence, indeed, he really thought aloud,
and this remained his habit until the end of his life. His mind,
awakening, wandered beyond the little world hedged about by doting and
complacent women. Until he entered the gymnasium--that great weighing
place of German brains--he shrank from open revolt, and even from the
thought of it, but he could not help dwelling upon the mysteries that
rose before him. There were things upon which the scriptures, search
them as he might, seemed to throw no light, and of which mothers and
grandmothers and maiden aunts did not discourse. "One day," says
Elisabeth, "when he was yet very young, he said to me: 'You mustn't
expect me to believe those silly stories about storks bringing babies.
Man is a mammal and a mammal must get his own children for himself.'"
Every child, perhaps, ponders such problems, but in the vast majority
knowledge must wait until it may enter fortuitously and from without.
Nietzsche did not belong to the majority. To him ideas were ever things
to be sought out eagerly, to be weighed calmly, to be tried in the
fire. For weal or for woe, the cornerstones of his faith were brought
forth, with sweat and pain, from the quarry of his own mind.
Nietzsche went to various village schools--public and private--until
he was ten, dutifully trudging away each morning with knapsack and
lunch-basket. He kissed his mother at the gate when he departed and
she was waiting for him, with another kiss, when he returned. As
happiness goes, his was probably a happy childhood. The fierce joy of
boyish combat--of fighting, of robbing, of slaying--was never his, but
to a child so athirst for knowledge, each fresh discovery--about the
sayings of Luther, the lions of Africa, the properties of an inverted
fraction--must have brought its thrill. But as he came to the last year
of his first decade, unanswerable questions brought their discontent
and disquiet--as they do to all of us. There is a feeling of oppression
and poignant pain in facing problems that defy solution and facts that
refuse to fit into ordered chains. It is only when mastery follows
that the fine stimulation of conscious efficiency drowns out all moody
vapors.
When Nietzsche went to the gymnasium his whole world was overturned.
Here boys were no longer mute and hollow vessels, to be stuffed with
predigested learning, but human beings whose approach to separate
entity was recognized. It was possible to ask questions and to argue
moot points, and teaching became less the administration of a necessary
medicine and more the sharing of a delightful meal. Your German
school-master is commonly a martinet, and his birch is never idle, but
he has the saving grace of loving his trade and of readily recognizing
true diligence in his pupils. History does not record the name of
the pedagogue who taught Nietzsche at the Naumburg gymnasium, but he
must have been one who ill deserved his oblivion. He fed the eager,
inquiring mind of his little student and made a new boy of him. The
old unhealthy, uncanny embodiment of a fond household's impossible
dreams became more likeable and more human. His exclusiveness and
fastidiousness were native and ineradicable, perhaps, for they remained
with him, in some degree, his whole life long, but his thirst for
knowledge and yearning for disputation soon led him to the discovery
that there were other boys worth cultivating: other boys whose
thoughts, like his own, rose above misdemeanor and horse-play. With two
such he formed a quick friendship, and they were destined to influence
him greatly to the end of his youth. They organized a club for mutual
culture, gave it the sonorous name of "_Der litterarischen Vereinigung
Germania_" ("The German Literary Association") and drew up an elaborate
scheme of study. Once a week there was a meeting, at which each of
the three submitted an essay or a musical composition to the critical
scrutiny of the others. They waded out into the deep water. One week
they discussed "The Infancy of Nations," and after that, "The Dæmonic
Element in Music," "Napoleon III" and "Fatalism in History." Despite
its praiseworthy earnestness, this program causes a smile--and so does
the transformation of the retiring and well-scrubbed little Nietzsche
we have been observing into the long, gaunt Nietzsche of 14, with a
yearning for the companionship of his fellows, and a voice beginning
to grow comically harsh and deep, and a mind awhirl with unutterable
things.
Nietzsche was a brilliant and spectacular pupil and soon won a
scholarship at Pforta, a famous and ancient preparatory academy not far
away. Pforta, in those days, was of a dignity comparable to Eton's or
Harrow's. It was a great school, but tradition overpowered it. Violent
combats between amateur sages were not encouraged: it was a place for
gentlemen to acquire Euclid and the languages in a decent, gentlemanly
way, and not an arena for gawky country philosophers to prance about
in. But Nietzsche, by this time, had already become a frank rebel and
delighted in elaborating and controverting the doctrines of the learned
doctors. He drew up a series of epigrams under the head of "_Ideen_"
and thought so well of them that he sent them home, to astonish and
alarm his mother. Some of them exhibited a quite remarkable faculty
for pithy utterance--as, for example, "War begets poverty and poverty
begets peace"--while others were merely opaque renderings of thoughts
half formed. He began to believe in his own mental cunning, with a
sincerity which never left him, and, as a triumphant proof of it, he
drew up a series of syllogisms designed to make homesickness wither and
die. Thus he wrestled with life's problems as his boy's eyes saw them.
All this was good training for the philosopher, but to the Pforta
professors it gave disquiet. Nietzsche became a bit too sure of himself
and a bit too arrogant for discipline. It seemed to him a waste of time
to wrestle with the studies that every oafish baron's son and future
guardsman sought to master. He neglected mathematics and gave himself
up to the hair-splitting of the Eleatics and the Pythagoreans, the
Sophists and the Skeptics. He pronounced his high curse and anathema
upon geography and would have none of it. The result was that when he
went up for final examination he writhed and floundered miserably and
came within an ace of being set down for further and more diligent
labor with his books. Only his remarkable mastery of the German
language and his vast knowledge of Christian doctrine--a legacy from
his pious childhood--saved him. The old Nietzsche--the shrinking
mother's darling of Naumburg--was now but a memory. The Nietzsche that
went up to Bonn was a young man with a touch of cynicism and one not
a little disposed to pit his sneer against the jurisprudence of the
world: a young man with a swagger, a budding moustache and a head full
of violently novel ideas about everything under the sun.
Nietzsche entered Bonn in October, 1864, when he was just 20 years old.
He was enrolled as a student of philology and theology, but the latter
was a mere concession to family faith and tradition, made grudgingly,
and after the first semester, the reverend doctors of exegetics knew
him no more. At the start he thought the university a delightful place
and its people charming. The classrooms and beer gardens were full
of young Germans like himself, who debated the doings of Bismarck,
composed eulogies of Darwin, sang Rabelaisian songs in bad Latin,
kept dogs, wore ribbons on their walking sticks, fought duels, and
drank unlimited steins of pale beer. In the youth of every man there
comes over him a sudden yearning to be a good fellow: to be "Bill" or
"Jim" to multitudes, and to go down into legend with Sir John Falstaff
and Tom Jones. This melancholy madness seized upon Nietzsche during
his first year at Bonn. He frequented the theatres and posed as a
connoisseur of opera _bouffe,_ malt liquor and the female form divine.
He went upon students' walking tours and carved his name upon the
mutilated tables of country inns. He joined a student corps, bought him
a little cap and set up shop as a devil of a fellow. His mother was
not poor, but she could not afford the outlays that these ambitious
enterprises required. Friedrich overdrew his allowance and the good
woman, no doubt, wept about it, as mothers will, and wondered that
learning came so dear.
But the inevitable reaction followed. Nietzsche was not designed
by nature for a hero of pot-houses and duelling sheds. The old
fastidiousness asserted itself--that queer, unhealthy fastidiousness
which, in his childhood, had set him apart from other boys, and was
destined, all his life long, to make him shrink from too intimate
contact with his fellow-men. The touch of the crowd disgusted him: he
had an almost insane fear of demeaning himself. All of this feeling had
been obscured for awhile, by the strange charm of new delights and new
companions, but in the end, the gloomy spinner of fancies triumphed
over the university buck. Nietzsche resigned from his student corps,
burned his walking sticks, foreswore smoking and roistering, and bade
farewell to Johann Strauss and Offenbach forever. The days of his
youth--of his carefree, merry gamboling--were over. Hereafter he was
all solemnity and all seriousness.
"From these early experiences," says his sister, "there remained with
him a life-long aversion to smoking, beer-drinking and the whole
_biergemüthlichkeit._ He maintained that people who drank beer and
smoked pipes were absolutely incapable of understanding him. Such
people, he thought, lacked the delicacy and clearness of perception
necessary to grasp profound and subtle problems."
[1] "_Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsche's,_" 3 vols. Leipsic, 1895-7-9.
II
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE PHILOSOPHER
At Bonn Nietzsche became a student of Ritschl, the famous
philologist,[1] and when Ritschl left Bonn for Leipsic, Nietzsche
followed him. All traces of the good fellow had disappeared and the
student that remained was not unlike those sophomores of medieval
Toulouse who "rose from bed at 4 o'clock, and having prayed to God,
went at 5 o'clock to their studies, their big books under their arms,
their inkhorns and candles in their hands." Between teacher and pupil
there grew up a bond of strong friendship. Nietzsche was taken, too,
under the wing of motherly old Frau Ritschl, who invited him to her
afternoons of coffee and cinnamon cake and to her evening soirées,
where he met the great men of the university world and the eminent
strangers who came and went. To Ritschl the future philosopher owed
many things, indeed, including his sound knowledge of the ancients, his
first (and last) university appointment and his meeting with Richard
Wagner. Nietzsche always looked back upon these days with pleasure and
there was ever a warm spot in his heart for the kindly old professor
who led him up to grace.
Two years or more were thus spent, and then, in the latter part of
1867, Nietzsche began his term of compulsory military service in the
fourth regiment of Prussian field artillery. He had hoped to escape
because he was near-sighted and the only son of a widow, but a watchful
_oberst-lieutenant_ found loopholes in the law and so ensnared him.
He seems to have been some sort of officer, for a photograph of the
period shows him with epaulets and a sword. But lieutenant or sergeant,
soldiering was scarcely his forte, and he cut a sorry figure on a
horse. After a few months of unwilling service, in fact, he had a
riding accident and came near dying as his father had died before him.
As it was he wrenched his breast muscles so badly that he was condemned
by a medical survey and discharged from the army.
During his long convalescence he busied himself with philological
studies and began his first serious professional work--essays on the
Theogony of Hesiod, the sources of Diogenes Laërtius and the eternal
strife between Hesiod and Homer. He also made an index to an elaborate
collection of German historical fragments and performed odd tasks
of like sort for various professors. In October, 1868, he returned
to Leipsic--not as an undergraduate, but as a special student. This
change was advantageous, for it gave him greater freedom of action and
protected him from that student _bonhomie_ he had learned to despise.
Again old Ritschl was his teacher and friend and again Frau Ritschl
welcomed him to her _salon_ and gave him of her good counsel and her
excellent coffee.
Meanwhile there had occurred something that was destined to direct and
color the whole stream of his life. This was his discovery of Arthur
Schopenhauer. In the 60's, it would appear, the great pessimist was
still scarcely more than a name in the German universities, which, for
all their later heterodoxy, clung long to their ancient first causes.
Nietzsche knew nothing of him, and in the seminaries of Leipsic not a
soul maintained him. Of Kant and of Hegel there was talk unlimited, and
of Lotze and Fichte there were riotous disputations that roared and
raged about the class-room of Fechner, then the university professor
of philosophy. But of Schopenhauer nothing was heard, and so, when
Nietzsche, rambling through an old Leipsic bookshop, happened upon a
second-hand copy of "_Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_"[2] a new
world came floating into his view. This was in 1865.
"I took the book to my lodgings," he said years afterward, "and
flung myself on a sofa and read and read and read. It seemed as if
Schopenhauer were addressing me personally. I felt his enthusiasm and
seemed to see him before me. Every line cried aloud for renunciation,
denial, resignation!"
So much for the first flush of the ecstasy of discovery. That Nietzsche
entirely agreed with everything in the book, even in his wildest
transports of admiration, is rather doubtful. He was but 21--the age of
great passions and great romance--and he was athirst for some writing
that would solve the problems left unanswered by the accepted sages,
but it is probable that when he shouted the Schopenhauer manifesto
loudest he read into the text wild variations of his own. The premises
of the pessimist gave credit and order to thoughts that had been rising
up in his own mind; but the conclusions, if he subscribed to them at
all, led him far afield. No doubt he was like one of those fantastic
messiahs of new cults who search the scriptures for testimony--and
find it. Late in life, when he was accused of inconsistency in first
deifying Schopenhauer and then damning him, he made this defense, and
despite the derisive sneers of his enemies, it seemed a fairly good one.
Schopenhauer's argument, to put it briefly, was that the will to
exist--the primary instinct of life--was the eternal first cause of all
human actions, motives and ideas. The old philosophers of Christendom
had regarded intelligence as the superior of instinct. Some of them
thought that an intelligent god ruled the universe and that nothing
happened without his knowledge and desire. Others believed that man was
a free agent, that whatever he did was the result of his own thought
and choice, and that it was right, in consequence, to condemn him
to hell for his sins and to exalt him to heaven for any goodness he
might chance to show. Schopenhauer turned all this completely about.
Intelligence, he said, was not the source of will, but its effect. When
life first appeared upon earth, it had but one aim and object: that of
perpetuating itself. This instinct, he said, was still at the bottom
of every function of all living beings. Intelligence grew out of the
fact that mankind, in the course of ages, began to notice that certain
manifestations of the will to live were followed by certain invariable
results. This capacity of perceiving was followed by a capacity for
remembering, which in turn produced a capacity for anticipating. An
intelligent man, said Schopenhauer, was merely one who remembered
so many facts (the result either of personal experience or of the
transmitted experience of others) that he could separate them into
groups and observe their relationship, one to the other, and hazard a
close guess as to their future effects: _i.e._ could reason about them.
Going further, Schopenhauer pointed out that this will to exist, this
instinct to preserve and protect life, this old Adam, was to blame for
the unpleasant things of life as well as for the good things--that
it produced avarice, hatred and murder just as well as industry,
resourcefulness and courage--that it led men to seek means of killing
one another as well as means of tilling the earth and procuring food
and raiment. He showed, yet further, that its bad effects were a great
deal more numerous than its good effects and so accounted for the
fact--which many men before him had observed--that life, at best, held
more of sorrow than of joy.[3]
The will-to-live, argued Schopenhauer, was responsible for all this.
Pain, he believed, would always outweigh pleasure in this sad old
world until men ceased to want to live--until no one desired food or
drink or house or wife or money. To put it more briefly, he held that
true happiness would be impossible until mankind had killed will
with will, which is to say, until the will-to-live was willed out of
existence. Therefore the happiest man was the one who had come nearest
this end--the man who had killed all the more obvious human desires,
hopes and aspirations--the solitary ascetic--the monk in his cell--the
soaring, starving poet--the cloud-enshrouded philosopher.
Nietzsche very soon diverged from this conclusion. He believed, with
Schopenhauer, that human life, at best, was often an infliction and a
torture, but in his very first book he showed that he admired, not the
ascetic who tried to escape from the wear and tear of life altogether,
but the proud, stiff-necked hero who held his balance in the face of
both seductive pleasure and staggering pain; who cultivated within
himself a sublime indifference, so that happiness and misery, to him,
became mere words, and no catastrophe, human or superhuman, could
affright or daunt him.[4]
It is obvious that there is a considerable difference between these
ideas, for all their similarity in origin and for all Nietzsche's
youthful worship of Schopenhauer. Nietzsche, in fact, was so enamoured
by the honesty and originality of what may be called the data of
Schopenhauer's philosophy that he took the philosophy itself rather
on trust and did not begin to inquire into it closely or to compare
it carefully with his own ideas until after he had committed himself
in a most embarrassing fashion. The same phenomena is no curiosity in
religion, science or politics.
Before a realization of these differences quite dawned upon Nietzsche
he was busied with other affairs. In 1869, when he was barely 25, he
was appointed, upon Ritschl's recommendation, to the chair of classical
philology at the University of Basel, in Switzerland, an ancient
stronghold of Lutheran theology. He had no degree, but the University
of Leipsic promptly made him a doctor of philosophy, without thesis
or examination, and on April 13th he left the old home at Naumburg to
assume his duties. Thus passed that pious household. The grandmother
had died long before--in 1856--and one of the maiden aunts had preceded
her to the grave by a year. The other, long ill, had followed in 1867.
But Nietzsche's mother lived until 1897, though gradually estranged
from him by his opinions, and his sister, as we know, survived him.
Nietzsche was officially professor of philology, but he also became
teacher of Greek in the pedagogium attached to the University.
He worked like a Trojan and mixed Schopenhauer and Hesiod in his
class-room discourses upon the origin of Greek verbs and other such
dull subjects. But it is not recorded that he made a very profound
impression, except upon a relatively small circle. His learning was
abysmal, but he was far too impatient and unsympathetic to be a
good teacher. His classes, in fact, were never large, except in the
pedagogium. This, however, may have been partly due to the fact that
in 1869, as in later years, there were comparatively few persons
impractical enough to spend their days and nights in the study of
philology.
In 1870 came the Franco-Prussian war and Nietzsche decided to go to
the front. Despite his hatred of all the cant of cheap patriotism and
his pious thankfulness that he was a Pole and not a German, he was at
bottom a good citizen and perfectly willing to suffer and bleed for his
country. But unluckily he had taken out Swiss naturalization papers in
order to be able to accept his appointment at Basel, and so, as the
subject of a neutral state, he had to go to the war, not as a warrior,
but as a hospital steward.
Even as it was, Nietzsche came near giving his life to Germany. He was
not strong physically--he had suffered from severe headaches as far
back as 1862--and his hard work at Basel had further weakened him. On
the battlefields of France he grew ill. Diphtheria and what seems to
have been cholera morbus attacked him and when he finally reached home
again he was a neurasthenic wreck. Ever thereafter his life was one
long struggle against disease. He suffered from migraine, that most
terrible disease of the nerves, and chronic catarrh of the stomach made
him a dyspeptic. Unable to eat or sleep, he resorted to narcotics, and
according to his sister, he continued their use throughout his life.
"He wanted to get well quickly," she says, "and so took double doses."
Nietzsche, indeed, was a slave to drugs, and more than once in after
life, long before insanity finally ended his career, he gave evidence
of it.
Despite his illness he insisted upon resuming work, but during the
following winter he was obliged to take a vacation in Italy. Meanwhile
he had delivered lectures to his classes on the Greek drama and two
of these he revised and published, in 1872, as his first book, "_Die
Geburt der Tragödie_" ("The Birth of Tragedy"). Engelmann, the great
Leipsic publisher, declined it, but Fritsch, of the same city, put it
into type.[5] This book greatly pleased his friends, but the old-line
philologists of the time thought it wild and extravagant, and it almost
cost Nietzsche his professorship. Students were advised to keep away
from him, and during the winter of 1872-3, it is said, he had no pupils
at all.
Nevertheless the book, for all its iconoclasm, was an event. It sounded
Nietzsche's first, faint battle-cry and put the question mark behind
many tilings that seemed honorable and holy in philology. Most of
the philologists of that time were German savants of the comic-paper
sort, and their lives were spent in wondering why one Greek poet made
the name of a certain plant masculine while another made it feminine.
Nietzsche, passing over such scholastic futilities, burrowed down
into the heart of Greek literature. Why, he asked himself, did the
Greeks take pleasure in witnessing representations of bitter, hopeless
conflicts, and how did this form of entertainment arise among them?
Later on, his conclusions will be given at length, but in this place it
may be well to sketch them in outline, because of the bearing they have
upon his later work, and even upon the trend of his life.
In ancient Greece, he pointed out at the start, Apollo was the god of
art--of life as it was recorded and interpreted--and Bacchus Dionysus
was the god of life itself--of eating, drinking and making merry, of
dancing and roistering, of everything that made men acutely conscious
of the vitality and will within them. The difference between the things
they represented has been well set forth in certain homely verses
addressed by Rudyard Kipling to Admiral Robley D. Evans, U. S. N.:
Zogbaum draws with a pencil
And I do things with a pen,
But you sit up in a conning tower,
Bossing eight hundred men.
To him that hath shall be given
And that's why these books are sent
To the man who has _lived_ more stories
Than Zogbaum or I could _invent_.
Here we have the plain distinction: Zogbaum and Kipling are apollonic,
while Evans is dionysian. Epic poetry, sculpture, painting and
story-telling are apollonic: they represent, not life itself, but some
one man's visualized idea of life. But dancing, great deeds and, in
some cases, music, are dionysian: they are part and parcel of life as
some actual human being, or collection of human beings, is living it.
Nietzsche maintained that Greek art was at first apollonic, but that
eventually there appeared a dionysian influence--the fruit, perhaps,
of contact with primitive, barbarous peoples. Ever afterward there
was constant conflict between them and this conflict was the essence
of Greek tragedy. As Sarcey tells us, a play, to hold our attention,
must depict some sort of battle, between man and man or idea and idea.
In the melodrama of today the battle is between hero and villain; in
the ancient Greek tragedy it was between Apollo and Dionysus, between
the life contemplative and the life strenuous, between law and outlaw,
between the devil and the seraphim.
Nietzsche, as we shall see, afterward applied this distinction in
morals and life as well as in art. He called himself a dionysian and
the crowning volume of his system of philosophy, which he had barely
started when insanity overtook him, was to have been called "Dionysus."
[1] Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl (1806-1876), the foremost philologist
of modern times. He became a professor of classical literature and
rhetoric in 1839 and founded the science of historical literary
criticism, as we know it today.
[2] Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) published this book, his _magnum
opus_, at Leipsic in 1819. It has been translated into English as "The
World as Will and Idea" and has appeared in many editions.
[3] Schopenhauer (_"Nachträge für Lehre vom Leiden der Welt_") puts the
argument thus: "Pleasure is never as pleasant as we expect it to be and
pain is always more painful. The pain in the world always outweighs the
pleasure. If you don't believe it, compare the respective feelings of
two animals, one of which is eating the other."
[4] Later on, in "_Menschliches allzu Menschliches_," II, Nietzsche
argued that the ascetic was either a coward, who feared the temptations
of pleasure and the agonies of pain, or an exhausted worldling who had
become satiated with life.
[5] Begun in 1869, this maiden work was dedicated to Richard Wagner.
At Wagner's suggestion Nietzsche eliminated a great deal of matter in
the original draft. The full title was "The Birth of Tragedy from the
Spirit of Music," but this was changed, in 1886, when a third edition
was printed, to "The Birth of Tragedy, or Hellenism and Pessimism."
Nietzsche then also added a long preface, entitled "An Attempt at
Self-Criticism." The material originally excluded was published in
1896.
III
BLAZING A NEW PATH
Having given birth, in this theory of Greek tragedy, to an idea which,
whatever its defects otherwise, was at least original, understandable
and workable, Nietzsche began to be conscious, as it were, of his own
intellect--or, in his sister's phrase, "to understand what a great man
he was." During his first years at Basel he had cut quite a figure in
academic society, for he was an excellent musician, he enjoyed dancing
and he had plenty of pretty things to say to the ladies. But as his
ideas clarified and he found himself more and more in conflict with the
pundits about him, he withdrew within himself, and in the end he had
few friends save Richard and Cosima Wagner, who lived at Tribschen,
not far away. To one of his turn of mind, indeed, the atmosphere of
the college town was bound to grow oppressive soon or late. Acutely
aware of his own superiority, he showed no patience with the unctuous
complacency of dons and dignitaries, and so he became embroiled in
various conflicts, and even his admirers among his colleagues seldom
ventured upon friendly advances.
There are critics who see in all this proof that Nietzsche showed signs
of insanity from early manhood, but as a matter of fact it was his
abnormally accurate vision and not a vision gone awry, that made him
stand so aloof from his fellows. In the vast majority of those about
him he saw the coarse metal of sham and pretense beneath the showy
gilding of learning. He had before him, at close range, a good many
of the great men of his time--the intellectuals whose word was law
in the schools. He saw them on parade and he saw them in their shirt
sleeves. What wonder that he lost all false reverence for them and
began to estimate them in terms, not of their dignity and reputation,
but of their actual credibility and worth? It was inevitable that he
should compare his own ideas to theirs, and it was inevitable that he
should perceive the difference between his own fanatical striving for
the truth and the easy dependence upon precedent and formula which lay
beneath their booming bombast. Thus there arose in him a fiery loathing
for all authority, and a firm belief that his own opinion regarding any
matter to which he had given thought was as sound, at the least, as any
other man's. Thenceforth the assertive "_ich_" began to besprinkle his
discourse and his pages. "I condemn Christianity. _I_ have given to
mankind.... _I_ was never yet modest.... _I_ think.... _I_ say.... _I_
do...." Thus he hurled his javelin at authority until the end.
To those about him, perhaps, Nietzsche seemed wild and impossible, but
it is not recorded that any one ever looked upon him as ridiculous.
His high brow, bared by the way in which he brushed his hair; his
keen eyes, with their monstrous overhanging brows, and his immense,
untrimmed moustache gave him an air of alarming earnestness. Beside the
pedagogues about him--with their well-barbered, professorial beards,
their bald heads and their learned spectacles--he seemed like some
incomprehensible foreigner. The exotic air he bore delighted him and he
cultivated it assiduously. He regarded himself as a Polish grandee set
down by an unkind fate among German shopkeepers, and it gave him vast
pleasure when the hotel porters and street beggars, deceived by his
disorderly façade, called him "The Polack."