philosophy by constantly writing against himself, find their chief
ammunition in his attitude toward the composer of "_Tristan und
Isolde_" In the decade from 1869 to 1878 the philosopher was the king
of German Wagnerians. In the decade from 1879 to 1889, he was the most
bitter, the most violent, the most resourceful and the most effective
of Wagner's enemies. On their face these things seem to indicate a
complete change of front and a careful examination bears out the
thought. But the same careful examination reveals another fact: that
the change of front was made, not by Nietzsche, but by Wagner.
As we have seen, the philosopher was an ardent musician from
boyhood and so it was not unnatural that he should be among the
first to recognize Wagner's genius. The sheer musicianship of the
man overwhelmed him and he tells us that from the moment the piano
transcription of "_Tristan und Isolde_" was printed he was a Wagnerian.
The music was bold and daring: it struck out into regions that the
_süsslich_ sentimentality of Donizetti and Bellini and the pallid
classicism of Beethoven and Bach had never even approached. In Wagner
Nietzsche saw a man of colossal originality and sublime courage, who
thought for himself and had skill at making his ideas comprehensible
to others. The opera of the past had been a mere _potpourri_ of songs,
strung together upon a filament of banal recitative. The opera of
Wagner was a symmetrical and homogeneous whole, in which the music was
unthinkable without the poetry and the poetry impossible without the
music.
Nietzsche, at the time, was saturated with Schopenhauer's brand of
individualism, and intensely eager to apply it to realities. In Wagner
he saw a living, breathing individualist--a man who scorned the laws
and customs of his craft and dared to work out his own salvation in
his own way. And when fate made it possible for him to meet Wagner,
he found the composer preaching as well as practising individualism.
In a word, Wagner was well nigh as enthusiastic a Schopenhauerean as
Nietzsche himself. His individualism almost touched the boundary of
anarchy. He had invented a new art of music and he was engaged in the
exciting task of smashing the old one to make room for it.
Nietzsche met Wagner in Leipsic and was invited to visit the composer
at his home near Tribschen, a suburb of Lucerne. He accepted, and
on May 15, 1869, got his first glimpse of that queer household in
which the erratic Richard, the ingenious Cosima and little Siegfried
lived and had their being. When he moved to Basel, he was not far
from Tribschen and so he fell into the habit of going there often
and staying long. He came, indeed, to occupy the position of an
adopted son, and spent the Christmas of 1869 and that of 1870 under
the Wagner rooftree. This last fact alone is sufficient to show the
intimate footing upon which he stood. Christmas, among the Germans,
is essentially a family festival and mere friends are seldom asked to
share its joys.
Nietzsche and Wagner had long and riotous disputations at Tribschen,
but in all things fundamental they agreed. Together they accepted
Schopenhauer's data and together they began to diverge from his
conclusions. Nietzsche saw in Wagner that old dionysian spirit
which had saved Greek art. The music of the day was colorless and
coldblooded. A too rigid formalism stood in the way of all expression
of actual life. Wagner proposed to batter this formalism to pieces and
Nietzsche was his prophet and _claque_.
It was this enthusiasm, indeed, which determined the plan of "_Die
Geburt der Tragödie_". Nietzsche had conceived it as a mere treatise
upon the philosophy of the Greek drama. His ardor as an apostle,
his yearning to convert the stolid Germans, his wild desire to do
something practical and effective for Wagner, made him turn it into a
gospel of the new art. To him Wagner was Dionysus, and the whole of
his argument against Apollo was nothing more than an argument against
classicism and for the Wagnerian romanticism. It was a bomb-shell and
its explosion made Germany stare, but another--perhaps many more--were
needed to shake the foundations of philistinism. Nietzsche loaded the
next one carefully and hurled it at him who stood at the very head of
that self-satisfied conservatism which lay upon all Germany. This
man was David Strauss. Strauss was the prophet of the good-enough. He
taught that German art was sound, that German culture was perfect.
Nietzsche saw in him the foe of Dionysus and made an example of him.
In every word of that scintillating philippic there was a plea for the
independence and individualism and outlawry that the philosopher saw in
Wagner.[1]
Unluckily the disciple here ran ahead of the master and before long
Nietzsche began to realize that he and Wagner were drifting apart.
So long as they met upon the safe ground of Schopenhauer's data, the
two agreed, but after Nietzsche began to work out his inevitable
conclusions, Wagner abandoned him. To put it plainly, Wagner was the
artist before he was the philosopher, and when philosophy began to
grow ugly he turned from it without regret or qualm of conscience.
Theoretically, he saw things as Nietzsche saw them, but as an artist he
could not afford to be too literal. It was true enough, perhaps, that
self-sacrifice was a medieval superstition, but all the same it made
effective heroes on the stage.
Nietzsche was utterly unable, throughout his life, to acknowledge
anything but hypocrisy or ignorance in those who descended to such
compromises. When he wrote "_Richard Wagner in Bayreuth_" he was
already the prey of doubts, but it is probable that he still saw the
"ifs" and "buts" in Wagner's individualism but dimly. He could not
realize, in brief, that a composer who fought beneath the banner of
truth, against custom and convention, could ever turn aside from
the battle. Wagner agreed with Nietzsche, perhaps, that European
civilization and its child, the European art of the day, were founded
upon lies, but he was artist enough to see that, without these lies,
it would be impossible to make art understandable to the public. So in
his librettos he employed all of the old fallacies--that love has the
supernatural power of making a bad man good, that one man may save the
soul of another, that humility is a virtue.[2]
It is obvious from this, that the apostate was not Nietzsche, but
Wagner. Nietzsche started out in life as a seeker after truth, and
he sought the truth his whole life long, without regarding for an
instant the risks and dangers and consequences of the quest. Wagner,
so long as it remained a mere matter of philosophical disputation,
was equally radical and courageous, but he saw very clearly that it
was necessary to compromise with tradition in his operas. He was an
atheist and a mocker of the gods, but the mystery and beauty of the
Roman Catholic ritual appealed to his artistic sense, and so, instead
of penning an opera in which the hero spouted aphorisms by Huxley,
he wrote "_Parsifal_" And in the same way, in his other music dramas,
he made artistic use of all the ancient fallacies and devices in
the lumber room of chivalry. He was, indeed, a philosopher in his
hours of leisure only. When he was at work over his music paper, he
saw that St. Ignatius was a far more effective and appealing figure
than Herbert Spencer and that the conventional notion that marriage
was a union of two immortal souls was far more picturesque than the
Schopenhauer-Nietzschean idea that it was a mere symptom of the primary
will to live.
In 1876 Nietzsche began to realize that he had left Wagner far behind
and that thereafter he could expect no support from the composer. They
had not met since 1874, but Nietzsche went to Bayreuth for the first
opera season. A single conversation convinced him that his doubts were
well-founded--that Wagner was a mere dionysian of the chair and had
no intention of pushing the ideas they had discussed to their bitter
and revolutionary conclusion. Most other men would have seen in this
nothing more than an evidence of a common-sense decision to sacrifice
the whole truth for half the truth, but Nietzsche was a rabid hater of
compromise. To make terms with the philistines seemed to him to be even
worse than joining their ranks. He saw in Wagner only a traitor who
knew the truth and yet denied it.
Nietzsche was so much disgusted that he left Bayreuth and set out upon
a walking tour, but before the end of the season he returned and heard
some of the operas. But he was no longer a Wagnerian and the music of
the "Ring" did not delight him. It was impossible, indeed, for him
to separate the music from the philosophy set forth in the librettos.
He believed, with Wagner, that the two were indissolubly welded, and
so, after awhile, he came to condemn the whole fabric--harmonies and
melodies as well as heroes and dramatic situations.
When Wagner passed out of his life Nietzsche sought to cure his
loneliness by hard work and "_Menschliches allzu Menschliches_" was the
result. He sent a copy of the first volume to Wagner and on the way it
crossed a copy of "_Parsifal_." In this circumstance is well exhibited
the width of the breach between the two men. To Wagner "_Menschliches
allzu Menschliches_" seemed impossibly and insanely radical; to
Nietzsche "_Parsifal_", with all its exaltation of ritualism, was
unspeakable. Neither deigned to write to the other, but we have it from
reliable testimony that Wagner was disgusted and Nietzsche's sister
tells us how much the music-drama of the grail enraged him.
A German, when indignation seizes him, rises straightway to make a loud
and vociferous protest. And so, although Nietzsche retained, to the end
of his life, a pleasant memory of the happy days he spent at Tribschen
and almost his last words voiced his loyal love for Wagner the man,
he conceived it to be his sacred duty to combat what he regarded as
the treason of Wagner the philosopher. This notion was doubtlessly
strengthened by his belief that he himself had done much to launch
Wagner's bark. He had praised, and now it was his duty to blame. He had
been enthusiastic at the first task, and he determined to be pitiless
at the second.
But he hesitated for ten years, because, as has been said, he could not
kill his affection for Wagner, the man. It takes courage to wound one's
nearest and dearest, and Nietzsche, for all his lack of sentiment, was
still no more than human. In the end, however, he brought himself to
the heroic surgery that confronted him, and the result was "_Der Fall
Wagner_". In this book all friendship and pleasant memories were put
aside. Wagner was his friend of old? Very well: that was a reason for
him to be all the more exact and all the more unpitying.
"What does a philosopher firstly and lastly require of himself?" he
asks. "To overcome his age in himself; to become timeless! With what,
then, has he to fight his hardest fight? With those characteristics and
ideas which most plainly stamp him as the child of his age." Herein we
perceive Nietzsche's fundamental error. Deceived by Wagner's enthusiasm
for Schopenhauer and his early, amateurish dabbling in philosophy, he
regarded; the composer as a philosopher. But Wagner, of course, was
first of all an artist, and it is the function of an artist, not to
reform humanity, but to depict it as he sees it, or as his age sees
it--fallacies, delusions and all. George Bernard Shaw, in his famous
criticism of Shakespeare, shows us how the Bard of Avon made just such
a compromise with the prevailing opinion of his time. Shakespeare,
he says, was too intelligent a man to regard Rosalind as a plausible
woman, but the theatre-goers of his day so regarded her and he drew
her to their taste.[3] An artist who failed to make such a concession
to convention would be an artist without an audience. Wagner was no
Christian, but he knew that the quest of the holy grail was an idea
which made a powerful appeal to nine-tenths of civilized humanity,
and so he turned it into a drama. This was not conscious lack of
sincerity, but merely a manifestation of the sub-conscious artistic
feeling for effectiveness.[4]
Therefore, it is plain that Nietzsche's whole case against Wagner is
based upon a fallacy and that, in consequence, it is not to be taken
too seriously. It is true enough that his book contains some remarkably
acute and searching observations upon art, and that, granting his
premises, his general conclusions would be correct, but we are by no
means granting his premises. Wagner may have been a traitor to his
philosophy, but if he had remained loyal to it, his art would have been
impossible. And in view of the sublime beauty of that art we may well
pardon him for not keeping the faith.
"_Der Fall Wagner_" caused a horde of stupid critics to maintain
that Nietzsche, and not Wagner, was the apostate, and that the mad
philosopher had begun to argue against himself. As an answer to this
ridiculous charge, Nietzsche published a little book called "_Nietzsche
contra Wagner_." It was made up entirely of passages from his earlier
books and these proved conclusively that, ever since his initial
divergence from Schopenhauer's conclusions, he had hoed a straight
row. He was a dionysian in "_Die Geburt der Tragödie_" and he was a
dionysian still in "_Also Sprach Zarathustra._"
[1] That Wagner gave Nietzsche good reason to credit him with these
qualities is amply proved. "I have never read anything better than your
book," wrote the composer in 1872. "It is masterly." And Frau Cosima
and Liszt, who were certainly familiar with Wagner's ideas, supported
Nietzsche's assumption, too. "Oh, how fine is your book," wrote the
former, "how fine and how deep--how deep and how keen!" Liszt sent from
Prague (Feb. 29, 1872) a pompous, patronizing letter. "I have read your
book twice," he said. In all of this correspondence there is no hint
that Nietzsche had misunderstood Wagner's position or had laid down any
propositions from which the composer dissented.
[2] There is an interesting discussion of this in James Huneker's book,
"Mezzotints in Modern Music," page 285 _et. seq._, New York, 1899.
[3] See "George Bernard Shaw: His Plays;" page 102 _et seq._, Boston,
1905.
[4] "Wagner's creative instinct gave the lie to his theoretical
system:" R. A. Streatfield, "Modern Music and Musicians," p. 272; New
York, 1906.
NIETZSCHE THE PROPHET
I
NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINS
The construction of philosophical family trees for Nietzsche has ever
been one of the favorite pastimes of his critics and interpreters.
Thus Dr. Oscar Levy, editor of the English translation of his works,
makes him the heir of Goethe and Stendhal, and the culminating figure
of the "Second Renaissance" launched by the latter, who was "the
first man to cry halt to the Kantian philosophy which had flooded
all Europe."[1] Dr. M. A. Mügge agrees with this genealogy so far
as it goes, but points out that Nietzsche was also the intellectual
descendant of certain pre-Socratic Greeks, particularly Heracleitus,
and of Spinoza and Stirner.[2] Alfred Fouillée, the Frenchman, is
another who gives him Greek blood, but in seeking his later forebears
Fouillée passes over the four named by Levy and Mügge and puts Hobbes,
Schopenhauer, Darwin, Rousseau and Diderot in place of them.[3] Again,
Thomas Common says that "perhaps Nietzsche is most indebted to Chamfort
and Schopenhauer," but also allows a considerable influence to Hobbes,
and endeavors to show how Nietzsche carried on, consciously and
unconsciously, certain ideas originating with Darwin and developed by
Huxley, Spencer and the other evolutionists.[4] Dr. Alexander Tille has
written a whole volume upon this latter relationship.[5] Finally, Paul
Elmer More, the American, taking the cue from Fouillée, finds the germs
of many of Nietzsche's doctrines in Hobbes, and then proceeds to a
somewhat elaborate discussion of the mutations of ethical theory during
the past two centuries, showing how Hume superimposed the idea of
sympathy as a motive upon Hobbes' idea of self-interest, and how this
sympathy theory prevailed over that of self-interest, and degenerated
into sentimentalism, and so opened the way for Socialism and other such
delusions, and how Nietzsche instituted a sort of Hobbesian revival.[6]
Many more speculations of that sort, some of them very ingenious and
some merely ingenuous, might be rehearsed. By one critic or another
Nietzsche has been accused of more or less frank borrowings from
Xenophanes, Democritus, Pythagoras, Callicles, Parmenides, Arcelaus,
Empedocles, Pyrrho, Hegesippus, the Eleatic Zeno, Machiavelli, Comte,
Montaigne, Mandeville, La Bruyère, Fontenelle, Voltaire, Kant, La
Rochefoucauld, Helvétius, Adam Smith, Malthus, Butler, Blake, Proudhon,
Paul Rée, Flaubert, Taine, Gobineau, Renan, and even from Karl
Marx!--a long catalogue of meaningless names, an exhaustive roster
of pathfinders and protestants. A Frenchman, Jules de Gaultier, has
devoted a whole book to the fascinating subject.[7]
But if we turn from this laborious and often irrelevant search for
common ideas and parallel passages to the actual facts of Nietzsche's
intellectual development, we shall find, perhaps, that his ancestry
ran in two streams, the one coming down from the Greeks whom he
studied as school-boy and undergraduate, and the other having its
source in Schopenhauer, the great discovery of his early manhood and
the most powerful single influence of his life. No need to argue the
essentially Greek color of Nietzsche's apprentice thinking. It was,
indeed, his interest in Greek literature and life that made him a
philologist by profession, and the same interest that converted him
from a philologist into a philosopher. The foundation of his system
was laid when he arrived at his conception of the conflict between
the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus, and all that followed belonged
naturally to the working out of that idea. But what he got from the
Greeks of his early adoration was more than a single idea and more
than the body of miscellaneous ideas listed by the commentators: it
was the Greek outlook, the Greek spirit, the Greek attitude toward God
and man. In brief, he ceased to be a German pastor's son, brought up
in the fear of the Lord, and became a citizen of those gorgeous and
enchanted isles, much as Shelley had before him. The sentimentality of
Christianity dropped from him like an old garment; he stood forth, as
it were, bare and unashamed, a pagan in the springtime of the world, a
_ja-sager_. More than the reading of books, of course, was needed to
work that transformation--the blood that leaped had to be blood capable
of leaping--but it was out of books that the stimulus came, and the
feeling of surety, and the beginnings of a workable philosophy of life.
It is not a German that speaks in "The Antichrist," nor even the Polish
noble that Nietzsche liked to think himself, but a Greek of the brave
days before Socrates, a spokesman of Hellenic innocence and youth.
No doubt it was the unmistakably Greek note in Schopenhauer--the
delivery of instinct, so long condemned to the ethical dungeons--that
engendered Nietzsche's first wild enthusiasm for the Frankfort sage.
The atmosphere of Leipsic in 1865 was heavy with moral vapors, and the
daring dissent of Schopenhauer must have seemed to blow through it like
a sharp wind from the sea. And Nietzsche, being young and passionate,
was carried away by the ecstasy of discovery, and so accepted the whole
Schopenhauerean philosophy without examining it too critically--the
bitter with the sweet, its pessimism no less than its rebellion. He,
too, had to go through the green-sickness of youth, particularly of
German youth. The Greek was yet but half way from Naumburg to Attica,
and he now stopped a moment to look backward. "Every line," he tells us
somewhere, "cried out renunciation, denial, resignation.... Evidences
of this sudden change are still to be found in the restless melancholy
of the leaves of my diary at that period, with all their useless
self-reproach and their desperate gazing upward for recovery and for
the transformation of the whole spirit of mankind. By drawing all my
qualities and my aspirations before the forum of gloomy self-contempt
I became bitter, unjust and unbridled in my hatred of myself. I even
practised bodily penance. For instance, I forced myself for a fortnight
at a stretch to go to bed at two o'clock in the morning and to rise
punctually at six." But not for long. The fortnight of self-accusing
and hair-shirts was soon over. The green-sickness vanished.[8] The
Greek emerged anew, more Hellenic than ever. And so, almost from the
start, Nietzsche rejected quite as much of Schopenhauer as he accepted.
The Schopenhauerean premise entered into his system--the will to live
was destined to become the father, in a few years, of the will to
power--but the Schopenhauerean conclusion held him no longer than it
took him to inspect it calmly. Thus he gained doubly--first, by the
acquisition of a definite theory of human conduct, one giving clarity
to his own vague feelings, and secondly, by the reaction against an
abject theory of human destiny, the very antithesis of that which rose
within him.
And yet, for all his dissent, for all his instinctive revolt against
the resignationism which overwhelmed him for an hour, Nietzsche
nevertheless carried away with him, and kept throughout his life, some
touch of Schopenhauer's distrust of the search for happiness. Nine
years after his great discovery we find him quoting and approving his
teacher's words: "A happy life is impossible; the highest thing that
man can aspire to is a _heroic_ life." And still later we find him
thundering against "the green-grazing happiness of the herd." What is
more, he gave his assent later on, though always more by fascination
than by conviction, to the doctrine of eternal recurrence, the most
hopeless idea, perhaps, ever formulated by man. But in all this a
certain distinction is to be noted: Schopenhauer, despairing of the
happy life, renounced even the heroic life, but Nietzsche never did
anything of the sort. On the contrary, his whole philosophy is a
protest against that very despair. The heroic life may not bring
happiness, and it may even fail to bring good, but at all events it
will shine gloriously in the light of its own heroism. In brief,
high endeavor is an end in itself--nay, the noblest of all ends. The
higher man does not work for a wage, not even for the wage of bliss:
his reward is in the struggle, the danger, the aspiration. As for the
happiness born of peace and love, of prosperity and tranquillity, that
is for "shopkeepers, women, Englishmen and cows." The man who seeks
it thereby confesses his incapacity for the loftier joys and hazards
of the free spirit, and the man who wails because he cannot find it
thereby confesses his unfitness to live in the world. "My formula for
greatness," said Nietzsche toward the end of his life, "is _amor fati_
... not only to bear up under necessity, but to _love_ it." Thus,
borrowing Schopenhauer's pessimism, he turned it, in the end, into a
defiant and irreconcilable optimism--not the slave optimism of hope,
with its vain courting of gods, but the master optimism of courage.