notion of the end and aim of existence. He had shown that the old
morality was like an apple rotten at the core--that the Christian
ideal of humility made mankind weak and miserable; that many
institutions regarded with superstitious reverence, as the direct
result of commands from the creator (such, for instance, as the family,
the church and the state), were mere products of man's "all-too-human"
cupidity, cowardice, stupidity and yearning for ease. He had turned
the searchlight of truth upon patriotism, charity and self-sacrifice.
He had shown that many things held to be utterly and unquestionably
good or bad by modern civilization were once given quite different
values--that the ancient Greeks considered hope a sign of weakness, and
mercy the attribute of a fool, and that the Jews, in their royal days,
looked upon wrath, not as a sin, but as a virtue--and in general he had
demonstrated, by countless instances and arguments, that all notions of
good and evil were mutable and that no man could ever say, with utter
certainty, that one thing was right and another wrong.
The ground was now cleared for the work of reconstruction and the first
structure that Nietzsche reared was "_Also sprach Zarathustra_" ("Thus
Spake Zoroaster"). This book, to which he gave the sub-title of _"Ein
Buch für Alle und Keinen_" ("A book for all and none"), took the form
of a fantastic, half-poetical half-philosophical rhapsody. Nietzsche
had been delving into oriental mysticism and from the law-giver of the
ancient Persians he borrowed the name of his hero--Zoroaster. But there
was no further resemblance between the two, and no likeness whatever
between Nietzsche's philosophy and that of the Persians.
The Zoroaster of the book is a sage who lives remote from mankind,
and with no attendants but a snake and an eagle. The book is in four
parts and all are made up of discourses by Zoroaster. These discourses
are delivered to various audiences during the prophet's occasional
wanderings and at the conferences he holds with various disciples in
the cave that he calls home. They are decidedly oriental in form and
recall the manner and phraseology of the biblical rhapsodists. Toward
the end Nietzsche throws all restraint to the winds and indulges to his
heart's content in the rare and exhilarating sport of blasphemy. There
is a sort of parody of the last supper and Zoroaster's backsliding
disciples engage in the grotesque and indecent worship of a jackass.
Wagner and other enemies of the author appear, thinly veiled, as
ridiculous buffoons.
In his discourses Zoroaster voices the Nietzschean idea of the
superman--the idea that has come to be associated with Nietzsche more
than any other. Later on, it will be set forth in detail. For the
present, suffice it to say that it is the natural child of the notions
put forward in Nietzsche's first book, "The Birth of Tragedy," and that
it binds his entire life work together into one consistent, harmonious
whole. The first part of "_Also sprach Zarathustra_" was published in
1883, the second part following in the same year, and the third part
was printed in 1884. The last part was privately circulated among the
author's friends in 1885, but was not given to the public until 1892,
when the entire work was printed in one volume. As showing Nietzsche's
wandering life, it may be recorded that the book was conceived in the
Engadine and written in Genoa, Sils Maria, Nice and Mentone.
_"Jenseits von Gut und Böse_" ("Beyond Good and Evil") appeared
in 1886. In this book Nietzsche elaborated and systematized his
criticism of morals, and undertook to show why he considered modern
civilization degrading. Here he finally formulated his definitions of
master-morality and slave-morality, and showed how Christianity was
necessarily the idea of a race oppressed and helpless, and eager to
escape the lash of its masters.
"_Zur Genealogie der Moral_" ("The Genealogy of Morals"), which
appeared in 1887, developed these propositions still further. In it
there was also a partial return to Nietzsche's earlier manner, with
its merciless analysis of moral concepts. In 1888 Nietzsche published
a most vitriolic attack upon Wagner, under the title of "_Der Fall
Wagner_" ("The Case of Wagner"), the burden of which was the author's
discovery that the composer, starting, with him, from Schopenhauer's
premises, had ended, not with the superman, but with the Man on the
cross. "_Götzendämmerung_" ("The Twilight of the Idols") a sort of
parody of Wagner's "_Götterdämmerung_" ("The Twilight of the Gods")
followed in 1889. "_Nietzsche contra Wagner_" ("Nietzsche versus
Wagner") was printed the same year. It was made up of extracts from the
philosopher's early works, and was designed to prove that, contrary to
the allegations of his enemies, he had not veered completely about in
his attitude toward Wagner.
Meanwhile, despite the fact that his health was fast declining and he
was approaching the verge of insanity, Nietzsche made plans for a great
four volume work that was to sum up his philosophy and stand forever as
his _magnum opus._ The four volumes, as he planned them, were to bear
the following titles:
1. "_Der Antichrist: Versuch einer Kritik des Christenthums_" ("The
Anti-Christ: an Attempt at a Criticism of Christianity").
2. "_Der freie Geist: Kritik der Philosophie als einer nihilistischen
Bewegung_" ("The Free Spirit: a Criticism of Philosophy as a Nihilistic
Movement").
3. "_Der Immoralist: Kritik der verhängnissvollsten Art von
Unwissenheit, der Moral_" ("The Immoralist: a Criticism of That Fatal
Species of Ignorance, Morality").
4. "_Dionysus, Philosophie der ewigen Wiederkunft_" ("Dionysus, the
Philosophy of Eternal Recurrence").
This work was to be published under the general title of "_Der Wille
zur Macht: Versuch einer Umwerthung aller Werthe_" ("The Will to Power:
an Attempt at a Transvaluation of all Values"), but Nietzsche got no
further than the first book, "_Der Antichrist_" and a mass of rough
notes for the others. "_Der Antichrist_" probably the most brilliant
piece of writing that Germany had seen in half a century, was written
at great speed between September 3rd and September 30th, 1888, but it
was not published until 1895, six years after the philosopher had laid
down his work forever.
During that same year C. G. Naumann, the Leipsic publisher, began the
issue of a definite edition of all his writings, in fifteen volumes,
under the editorial direction of Frau Förster-Nietzsche, Dr. Fritz
Koegel, Peter Gast and E. von der Hellen. In this edition his notes
for "_Der Wille zur Macht_" and his early philological essays were
included. The notes are of great interest to the serious student of
Nietzsche, for they show how some of his ideas changed with the years
and point out the probable structure of his final system, but the
general reader will find them chaotic, and often incomprehensible.
In October, 1888, but three months before his breakdown, he began a
critical autobiography with the title of "_Ecce Homo_," and it was
completed in three weeks. It is an extremely frank and entertaining
book, with such chapter headings as "Why I am so Wise," "Why I Write
Such Excellent Books" and "Why I am a Fatality." In it Nietzsche sets
forth his private convictions regarding a great many things, from
cooking to climates, and discusses each of his books in detail. "_Ecce
Homo_" was not printed until 1908, when it appeared at Leipsic in a
limited edition of 1250 copies.
In January, 1889, at Turin, where he was living alone in very humble
quarters, Nietzsche suddenly became hopelessly insane. His friends got
news of it from his own hand. "I am Ferdinand de Lesseps," he wrote to
Prof. Burckhardt of Basel. To Cosima Wagner: "Ariadne, I love you!"
To Georg Brandes, the Danish critic, he sent a telegram signed "The
Crucified." Franz Overbeck, an old Basel friend, at once set out for
Turin, and there he found Nietzsche thumping the piano with his elbows
and singing wild songs. Overbeck brought him back to Basel and he was
confined in a private asylum, where his general health greatly improved
and hopes were entertained of his recovery. But he never got well
enough to be left alone, and so his old mother, with whom he had been
on bad terms for years, took him back to Naumburg. When, in 1893, his
sister Elizabeth returned from Paraguay, where her husband had died,
he was well enough to meet her at the railroad station. Four years
later, when their mother died, Elizabeth removed him to Weimar, where
she bought a villa called "_Silberblick_" (Silver View) in the suburbs.
This villa had a garden overlooking the hills and the lazy river Ilm,
and a wide, sheltered veranda for the invalid's couch. There he would
sit day after day, receiving old friends but saying little. His mind
never became clear enough for him to resume work, or even to read. He
had to grope for words, slowly and painfully, and he retained only a
cloudy memory of his own books. His chief delight was in music and he
was always glad when someone came who could play the piano for him.
There is something poignantly pathetic in the picture of this
valiant fighter--this arrogant _ja-sager_--this foe of men, gods and
devils--being nursed and coddled like a little child. His old fierce
pride and courage disappeared and he became docile and gentle. "You
and I, my sister--we are happy!" he would say, and then his hand
would slip out from his coverings and clasp that of the tender and
faithful Lisbeth. Once she mentioned Wagner to him. "_Den habe ich sehr
geliebt!_" he said. All his old fighting spirit was gone. He remembered
only the glad days and the dreams of his youth.
Nietzsche died at Weimar on August 25, 1900, the immediate cause of
death being pneumonia. His ashes are buried in the little village of
Röcken, his birthplace.
[1] "_Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken_;" Vienna, 1894.
[2] Preface to "_Morgenröte_," § 2; autumn, 1886.
V
THE PHILOSOPHER AND THE MAN
"My brother," says Frau Förster-Nietzsche, in her biography, "was
stockily and broadly built and was anything but thin. He had a rather
dark, healthy, ruddy complexion. In all things he was tidy and orderly,
in speech he was soft-spoken, and in general, he was inclined to be
serene under all circumstances. All in all, he was the very antithesis
of a nervous man.
"In the fall of 1888, he said of himself, in a reminiscent memorandum:
'My blood moves slowly. A doctor who treated me a long while for what
was at first diagnosed as a nervous affection said: "No, your trouble
cannot be in your nerves. I myself am much more nervous than you."'...
"My brother, both before and after his long illness seized him, was
a believer in natural methods of healing. He took cold baths, rubbed
down every morning and was quite faithful in continuing light, bed-room
gymnastics."
At one time, she says, Nietzsche became a violent vegetarian and
afflicted his friends with the ancient vegetarian horror of making a
sarcophagus of one's stomach. It seems surprising that a man so quick
to perceive errors, saw none in the silly argument that, because an
ape's organs are designed for a vegetarian diet, a man's are so planned
also. An acquaintance with elementary anatomy and physiology would
have shown him the absurdity of this, but apparently he knew little
about the human body, despite his uncanny skill at unearthing the
secrets of the human mind. Nietzsche had read Emerson in his youth,
and those Emersonian seeds which have come to full flower in the
United States as the so-called New Thought movement--with Christian
Science, osteopathy, mental telepathy, occultism, pseudo-psychology and
that grand lodge of credulous _comiques_, the Society for Psychical
Research, as its final blossoms--all of this probably made its mark on
the philosopher of the superman, too.
Frau Förster-Nietzsche, in her biography, seeks to prove the impossible
thesis that her brother, despite his constant illness, was ever
well-balanced in mind. It is but fair to charge that her own evidence
is against her. From his youth onward, Nietzsche was undoubtedly a
neurasthenic, and after the Franco-Prussian war he was a constant
sufferer from all sorts of terrible ills--some imaginary, no doubt,
but others real enough. In many ways, his own account of his symptoms
recalls vividly the long catalogue of aches and pains given by Herbert
Spencer in his autobiography. Spencer had queer pains in his head and
so did Nietzsche. Spencer roved about all his life in search of health
and so did Nietzsche. Spencer's working hours were limited and so were
Nietzsche's. The latter tells us himself that, in a single year, 1878,
he was disabled 118 days by headaches and pains in the eyes.
Dr. Gould, the prophet of eye-strain, would have us believe that
both of these great philosophers suffered because they had read too
much during adolescence. It is more likely, however, that each was
the victim of some definite organic malady, and perhaps of more
than one. In Nietzsche's case things were constantly made worse by
his fondness for self-medication, that vice of fools. Preparatory to
his service as a hospital steward in 1870 he had attended a brief
course of first-aid lectures at the military hospital at Erlangen,
and thereafter he regarded himself as a finished pathologist and was
forever taking his own doses. The amount of medicine he thus swallowed
was truly appalling, and the only way he could break his appetite for
one drug was by acquiring an appetite for another. Chloral, however,
was his favorite, and toward the end he took it daily and in staggering
quantities.
Meanwhile, his mental disturbances grew more and more visible. At
times he would be highly excited and exalted, denouncing his foes, and
proclaiming his own genius. This was his state when his friends were
finally forced to put him under restraint. At other times he would show
symptoms of melancholia--a feeling of isolation and friendlessness,
a great sadness, a foreboding of death. The hostility with which his
books were received gave sharpness and plausibility to this mood, and
it pursued him through many a despairing day.
"An animal, when it is sick," he wrote to Baron von Seydlitz, in
1888, "slinks away to some dark cavern, and so, too, does the _bête
philosophe_. I am alone--absurdly alone--and in my unflinching and
toilsome struggle against all that men have hitherto held sacred and
venerable, I have become a sort of dark cavern myself--something hidden
and mysterious, which is not to be explored...." But the mood vanished
as the words were penned, and the defiant dionysian roared his
challenge at his foes. "It is not impossible," he said, "that I am the
greatest philosopher of the century--perhaps even more than that! I may
be the decisive and fateful link between two thousand centuries!"[1]
Max Nordau[2] says that Nietzsche was crazy from birth, but the facts
do not bear him out. It is much more reasonable to hold that the
philosopher came into the world a sound and healthy animal, and that it
remained for overstudy in his youth, over-work and over drugging later
on, exposure on the battle field, functional disorders and constant and
violent strife to undermine and eventually overthrow his intellect.
But if we admit the indisputable fact that Nietzsche died a madman
and the equally indisputable fact that his insanity was not sudden,
but progressive, we by no means read him out of court as a thinker. A
man's reasoning is to be judged, not by his physical condition, but
by its own ingenuity and accuracy. If a raving maniac says that twice
two make four, it is just as true as it would be if Pope Pius X or
any other undoubtedly sane man were to maintain it. Judged in this
way Nietzsche's philosophy is very far from insane. Later on we shall
consider it as a workable system, and point out its apparent truths and
apparent errors, but in no place (saving, perhaps, one) is his argument
to be dismissed as the phantasm of a lunatic.
Nietzsche's sister says that, in the practical affairs of life, the
philosopher was absurdly impractical. He cared nothing for money and
during the better part of his life had little need to do so. His
mother, for a country pastor's widow, was well-to-do, and when he was
twenty-five his professorship at Basel brought him 3,000 francs a
year. At Basel, in the late sixties, 3,000 francs was the income of an
independent, not to say opulent man. Nietzsche was a bachelor and lived
very simply. It was only upon books and music and travel that he was
extravagant.
After two years' service at Basel, the university authorities raised
his wage to 4,000 francs, and in 1879, when ill health forced him to
resign, they gave him a pension of 3,000 francs a year. Besides that,
he inherited 30,000 marks from one of his aunts, and so, altogether, he
had an income of $900 or $1,000 a year--the sum which Herbert Spencer
regarded, all his life, as an insurance of perfect tranquillity and
happiness.
Nietzsche's passion and dissipation, throughout his life, was music.
In all his books musical terms and figures of speech are constantly
encountered. He played the piano very well, indeed, and was especially
fond of performing transcriptions of the Wagner opera scores. "My three
solaces," he wrote home from Leipsic, "are Schopenhauer's philosophy,
Schumann's music and solitary walks." In his late youth, Wagner
engrossed him, but his sympathies were broad enough to include Bach,
Schubert and Mendelssohn. His admiration for the last named, in fact,
helped to alienate him from Wagner, who regarded the Mendelssohn scheme
of things as unspeakable.
Nietzsche's own compositions were decidedly heavy and scholastic.
He was a skillful harmonist and contrapuntalist, but his musical
ideas lacked life. Into the simplest songs he introduced harsh and
far-fetched modulations. The music of Richard Strauss, who professes
to be his disciple and has found inspiration in his "_Also sprach
Zarathustra_" would have delighted him. Strauss has achieved the
uncanny feat of writing in two keys at once. Such an effort would have
enlisted Nietzsche's keen interest.
All the same, his music was not a mere creature of the study and
of rules, and we have evidence that he was frequently inspired
to composition by bursts of strong emotion. On his way to the
Franco-Prussian war, he wrote a patriotic song, words and music,
on the train. He called it "Adieu! I Must Go!" and arranged it for
men's chorus, _a capella_. It would be worth while to hear a German
_männerchor_, with its high, beery tenors, and ponderous basses, sing
this curious composition. Certainly no more grotesque music was ever
put on paper by mortal man.
Much has been written by various commentators about the strange charm
of Nietzsche's prose style. He was, indeed, a master of the German
language, but this mastery was not inborn. Like Spencer he made a
deliberate effort, early in life, to acquire ease and force in writing.
His success was far greater than Spencer's. Toward the end--in "_Der
Antichrist_," for instance--he attained a degree of powerful and
convincing utterance almost comparable to Huxley's. But his style never
exhibited quite that wonderful air of clearness, of utter certainty,
of inevitableness which makes the "Lay Sermons" so tremendously
impressive. Nietzsche was ever nearer to Carlyle than to Addison. "His
style," says a writer in the _Athenæum,_ "is a shower of sparks, which
scatter, like fireworks, all over the sky."
"My sense for form," says Nietzsche himself, "awakened on my coming in
contact with Sallust." Later on he studied the great French stylists,
particularly Larochefoucauld, and learned much from them. He became a
master of the aphorism and the epigram, and this skill, very naturally,
led him to descend, now and then, to mere violence and invective.
He called his opponents all sorts of harsh names--liar, swindler,
counterfeiter, ox, ass, snake and thief. Whatever he had to say, he
hammered in with gigantic blows, and to the accompaniment of fearsome
bellowing and grimacing. "Nervous, vivid and picturesques, full of
fire and a splendid vitality," says one critic, "his style flashed and
coruscated like a glowing flame, and had a sort of dithyrambic movement
that at times recalls the swing of the Pindaric odes." Naturally, this
very _abandon_ made his poetry formless and grotesque. He scorned
metres and rhymes and raged on in sheer savagery. Reading his verses
one is forced irresistibly into the thought that they should be printed
in varied fonts of type and in a dozen brilliant inks.
Nietzsche never married, but he was by no means a misogynist. His
sister tells us, indeed, that he made a formal proposal of marriage to
a young Dutch woman, Fräulein Tr----, at Geneva in 1876, and the story
of his melodramatic affair with Mlle. Lou Salomé, six years later, was
briefly rehearsed in the last chapter. There were also other women in
his life, early and late, and certain scandal-mongers do not hesitate
to accuse him of a passion for Cosima Wagner, apparently on the ground
that he wrote to her, in his last mad days, "Ariadne, I love thee!" But
his intentions were seldom serious. Even when he pursued Mlle. Salomé
from Rome to Leipsic and quarrelled with his sister about her, and
threatened poor Rée with fire-arms, there is good reason to believe
that he shied at bell and book. His proposal, in brief, was rather one
of a free union than one of marriage. For the rest, he kept safely to
impossible flirtations. During all his wanderings he was much petted
by the belles of pump room and hotel parlor, not only because he was a
mysterious and romantic looking fellow, but also because his philosophy
was thought to be blasphemous and indecent, particularly by those
who knew nothing about it. But the fair admirers he singled out were
either securely married or hopelessly antique. "For me to marry," he
soliloquized in 1887, "would probably be sheer asininity."
There are sentimental critics who hold that Nietzsche's utter lack
of geniality was due to his lack of a wife. A good woman--alike
beautiful and sensible--would have rescued him, they say, from his
gloomy fancies. He would have expanded and mellowed in the sunshine of
her smiles, and children would have civilized him. The defect in this
theory lies in the fact that philosophers do not seem to flourish amid
scenes of connubial joy. High thinking, it would appear, presupposes
boarding house fare and hall bed-rooms. Spinoza, munching his solitary
herring up his desolate backstairs, makes a picture that pains us,
perhaps, but it must be admitted that it also satisfies our sense
of eternal fitness. A married Spinoza, with two sons at college,
another managing the family lens business, a daughter busy with her
trousseau and a wife growing querulous and fat--the vision, alas, is
preposterous, outrageous and impossible! We must think of philosophers
as beings alone but not lonesome. A married Schopenhauer or Kant or
Nietzsche would be unthinkable.
That a venture into matrimony might have somewhat modified Nietzsche's
view of womankind is not at all improbable, but that this change would
have been in the direction of greater accuracy does not follow. He
would have been either a ridiculously henpecked slave or a violent
domestic tyrant. As a bachelor he was comparatively well-to-do, but
with a wife and children his thousand a year would have meant genteel
beggary. His sister had her own income and her own affairs. When he
needed her, she was ever at his side, but when his working fits were
upon him--when he felt efficient and self-sufficient--she discreetly
disappeared. A wife's constant presence, day in and day out, would have
irritated him beyond measure or reduced him to a state of compliance
and sloth. Nietzsche himself sought to show, in more than one place,
that a man whose whole existence was colored by one woman would
inevitably acquire some trace of her feminine outlook, and so lose his
own sure vision. The ideal state for a philosopher, indeed, is celibacy
tempered by polygamy. He must study women, but he must be free, when
he pleases, to close his note book and go away and digest its contents
with an open mind.