Nietzsche

MAKERS OF MODERN EUROPE Edited by

DONALD C. McKAY in association with DUMAS MALONE

NIETZSCHE

LONDON

:

GEOFFREY CUMBERLEGE

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

NIETZSCHE BY

CRANE BRINTON McLean

Professor of Ancient

and Modern History,

Harvard University

CAMBRIDGE MASSACHUSETTS HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1948

COPYRIGHT, 1941

BY THE PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE

Second Printing

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

NO PART OF THIS

BOOK MAY BE REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM

WITHOUT PERMISSION FROM THE PUBLISHER.

PRINTED AT THE HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRINTING OFFICE CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS,

U.S.A.

To L.

J.

HENDERSON

EDITOR'S PREFACE present biographical series, initiated by the volume on JL Nietzsche by Crane Brinton, has no intention of offering to the public once again the biographies of men which appear with

almost monotonous regularity

Marx.

It

Napoleon, Cavour, Gladstone,

proposes instead to present the lives of

men

for

whom

no biography, or no adequate biography in English. At the same time these biographies will deal with men who left a significant impress on their age, men who may properly be con-

there

is

sidered as

"Makers

of

Modern Europe."

Contributors will be invited to keep steadily before them the historical biography involves constantly the

view that serious relation of

its

subject to his historical context.

in adequate detail the

They

will expose

problems with which the statesman

dealt,

which the thinker made. They themselves address constantly to the question: "What was

the significant contributions will

the significance of this

man

for his

epoch?"

The conception and development of the present series owes much to the counsel of others and especially of those here mentioned.

leagues

I

at

have consulted repeatedly various ones of my colHarvard, and have had the helpful advice of

Professor Charles K. Webster of the University of London, Professors Carl L. Becker and Philip E. Mosely of Cornell, Professors

Arthur M. Wilson of Dartmouth and Chester

W.

Clark

of the University of Iowa, and Drs. Edgar P. Dean and Robert G. Woolbert of the Council on Foreign Relations. In this, as in

EDITOR'S PREFACE

viii

my other projects, I

have enjoyed the stimulating

wife and have been saved from

and candid

many

errors

interest of

my

by her detached

criticism.

DONALD C. McKAY JOHN WINTHROP HOUSE

HARVARD UNIVERSITY January

/6,

7947

AUTHOR'S PREFACE to

make

IWJSH not attempt

quite clear that this study of Nietzsche does

to analyze his

work from

the point of view of

a professional philosopher, nor to estimate his place in the long line of such philosophers.

prepared. This study

work is

in the

is

That

a task for

is

which

I

am

not

rather an attempt to place Nietzsche's

more general currents

of "opinion" in our time. It

a study of Nietzsche as politiquc ct moralistc.

Begun before

Munich, finished after the defeat of France, it must bear some marks of contemporary events. Nazi commentators on Nietzsche are not agreeable and conciliating writers. There is, at least to an American brought up before the Four Years'

War, something very unpleasant about the Nazis, and about Nazi intellectuals.

Abusive epithets

like

especially

"barbarous,"

"uncivilized," "insane," "arrogant," "brutal," all carry

many

of the right overtones: you cannot fairly use nice words, nor

even neutral words dear to semanticists, about the group that has made contemporary Germany. Yet I confess I have not

me

been able to find what seems to Nazis: the nearest close

On

can come

I

Chapter VIII.

I

is

just the right

the

word

for the

metaphor with which

I

have not, then, written sine ira ct studio.

have not indulged in the now once more popular sport of Hun-baiting. This book is not the other hand,

meant I

my as

to indict the

owe much friends, a

I

group.

to

German

I

nation.

odds and ends of conversations with

whom I

hope that

I

many

of

cannot in these pages do more than thank

should

like,

however, to acknowledge more

PREFACE

X specifically

am

numerous

debts.

To

the

Macmillan Company

I

grateful for their generous permission to quote liberally

from the authorized English

translation of Nietzsche's works,

edited by Dr. Oscar Levy. Dr. Fritz Epstein, Professor Seelye Bixler,

Fay have drawn my attention to Nietzsche's life and influence which might

and Professor

specific phases of

S. B.

otherwise have escaped me.

My

editors,

Donald McKay and

Dumas Malone, have been most helpful. Mrs. Ruth Harris has been kind enough to read the whole manuscript, and make suggestions

from which

I

have profited greatly. Mrs. Harriet Dor-

man

has prepared the manuscript, read the proof, and made valuable suggestions. Professor A. O. Lovejoy has consented to

using in Chapter VIII large parts of my article on "The National Socialists' Use of Nietzsche," which appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideas in April, 1940; he has also helped

my

me

greatly in shaping the mass of material on Nietzsche to be

found in Nazi writings. To

all

these

I

am

especially grateful.

CRANE BRINTON DUNSTER HOUSE HARVARD UNIVERSITY November 7, 7940

CONTENTS INTRODUCTION I.

THE STUDENT

XV 3

'll.

THE PROFESSOR

2J

pi.

THE PROPHET

50

WHAT

NIETZSCHE HATED

74

,/V.

WHAT

NIETZSCHE WANTED

JVI.

NIETZSCHE-IN-HIMSELF

142

Vll.

THE GROWTH OF A REPUTATION

172

NIETZSCHE AND THE NAZIS

200

JV.

VIII.

ylX.

Il8

NIETZSCHE IN WESTERN THOUGHT: PROPHECY ON A

PROPHET

232

BIBLIOGRAPHY

247

INDEX

263

ILLUSTRATIONS NIETZSCHE IN His LAST YEAR OF LIFE

frontispiece photography, we have as good a record of Nietzsche's appearance as one might expect of a member of a German middle-class family in the late nineteenth century. He did not, however, become a subject for artists until the decade of his great fame, the 1890'*, by which time he was insane and bedridden. Elizabeth allowed several artists to have access to her brother at Jena and Weimar. In 1899 one of these, Dr. Hans Olde, made this now familiar drawing, showing the sick Nietzsche gazing sightlessly at the setting sun. There arc several better-known engravings from this drawing, in which only Nietzsche's head or head and shoulders are shown.

Thanks

to

NIETZSCHE AT SIXTEEN This is the familiar photograph which taken of the son at his confirmation.

22 all

good German families have

RICHARD AND COSIMA WAGNER

46

The famous couple posed at about the period when Nietzsche first an acquaintance which very rapidly became made their acquaintance friendship.

ELIZABETH NIETZSCHE

112

This is Elizabeth on the edge of middle age, just before she married Bernhard Forster. She did not assume the name by which she is known to students of Nietzsche, Frau Forster-Nietzsche, until the 1890'$, when her husband was dead and her brother famous.

NIETZSCHE IN UNIFORM

170

This photograph was taken in the fall of 1868, about the time of Nietzsche's appointment to the professorship at Basle.

HITLER AT THE NIETZSCHE-ARCHIV IN WEIMAR the

memory

208

she could to associate both Hitler and Mussolini with of her brother. The photographer has here, perhaps sym-

Elizabeth did

all

bolically, cut Nietzsche's bust in half.

The Fuehrer

is

there in full.

INTRODUCTION even in

world, must not be allowed to

this

make

MIGHT, right.

Ever since Socrates so readily refuted the unsubtle arguments of Thrasymachus, the best people, and cerhave in general agreed that Truth does not prevail. Yet successful might

tainly the best philosophers, is

great even though

forces itself

on the

it

and indeed indignant, attention of the ultimate victory of Truth and Right.

serious,

the firmest believers in

Successful might, perhaps unfortunately, ler's

is

never comic. Hit-

mustache, which looked funny on the crank

in the Beer-hall Putsch,

failed

looks menacing on the victorious

Similarly with Hitler's ideas.

Fuehrer.

hash of

now

who

Mcin Kampf,

racial superstitions, contorted history,

that

odds and ends

and cunning rhetorical of neuroses, seemed to most educated

of a soap-box orator's culture, crude

and several

violence,

sorts

people only a few years ago hardly worthy of serious criticism. if

Today,

Mcin Kampf

still

seems to the unconverted no mas-

terpiece of literature or of philosophy, even the unconverted

must admit Socialist

Not

that Hitler's

canon

all

now

of that

book

is

an important part of a National

established as the faith of millions.

canon

is

derived from culturally disreputable

Mcin Kampf itself, if it owes much to bad ethnologists Gobineau and to fakers like the anti-Semites, could hardly

sources. like

have been written without the aid of two of the great names in the cultural heritage of the West Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche. controversy:

neither

About both men is

a

serene and

there has always been

Olympian

figure like

INTRODUCTION

xvi

Goethe, forever safe in any are respectable in a

way

that

Nazi holy writings are not outside

list

of the

Hundred

Best.

But both

most of the other contributors

respectable.

Germany. The Nietzscheans,

if

to

Both have followings not so numerous nor

so noisy as the Wagnerites, have been quite as worshipful.

1

philosopher and an earthshaking composer, both of them enshrined among the beautiful and therefore good, should help make the faith professed

That

and most

a subtle

by Dr. Goebbels

is

literate

not the only bit of irony to stare at the

skeptical student of National Socialism. It is a fact, perhaps too obvious and too often remarked to be worth much as irony,

that a striking proportion of the

up

names

who have built the German race

of those

the canon of the National Socialist faith in

German. The Comte de Gobineau, Paul de Lagarde, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Treitschke, Nietzsche do not are not

sound very German. Indeed, these French, English, and Slavic names must ring discordantly through Valhalla. The men who bore them

make

any that ever made a faith; and if they have come in death to that most Germanic heaven, they must add appreciably to the pleasurable confusion of

its

a strange band, as disparate as

traditional melee.

Nietzsche, whose

memory

and not only German is now among the most honored of them all, has certainly fought his share, if not

on German earth rather

more than

among

his share; but

his fellow

presumably

kill

first

since in

is

happy Valhalla words

finally than do swords, he must be

brought to the attention of Americans the Nazi

Wagner as a thinker and prophet. His articles in Common November and December, 1939, are being expanded into a book to

canonization of

Sense for

Supermen. Indeed,

no more

*Mr. Peter Viereck

one doubts whether he

be published shortly.

INTRODUCTION

xvii

unless there is in Valhalla also a Sils-Maria. most unhappy For Nietzsche, living, got on very badly with flesh-and-blood Germans. He loved to badger them, to attack their most as-

sured superiorities. shall

I

never admit that a

Those musicians who arc foremost, are or Jews: or

mans

He

all

which

had no use whatever

is

now

is.

and most famous

Dutchmen

extinct.

2

which

for theories of race superiority,

mere swindles.

European," and he and Italy.

And

the greatest

Heinrich Schiitz, Bach and Handel, they arc Ger-

of a strong race

as

can understand what music

German,

foreigners, either Slavs, Croats, Italians,

else, like

he regarded

German

called

lived

He

most of

yet the writings of this

wrote of himself

as a

"good

his adult life in Switzerland

man

are in high

honor

in

Na-

Germany. They do not burn his books there: they print them by the thousands in popular editions. Their reasons on the whole are consistent with their doctrines, and tional Socialist

worth investigating. Nietzsche's career, in life and in death, is one of the most curious in modern intellectual history. It is a

which may help us understand the minds of the intellectual leaders

career

better

what goes on

in

of National Socialism.

For these revolutionary preachers of the deed, these blood and soil, these anti-intellectuals, are in a sense

lovers of as

much

intellectuals as those other revolutionaries, the children of the

Enlightenment, the philosophcs who made the articles of faith of 1776 and 1789. But the Nazi intellectuals are followers, not

Locke and

of

wherever he 1

Voltaire,

but of Nietzsche;

led, did not lead

Nietzsche, Eccc

Homo, "Why

I

and Nietzsche,

towards the Rights of Man.

am

so clever,"

7.

NIETZSCHE

CHAPTER

I

THE STUDENT OCTOBER IN of

15, 1844, a

son was born to the young wife

the Lutheran pastor of the

little

village of

Rocken

in a

Saxony which had fallen to Prussia after the War of Liberation. It was the birthday of the reigning king of Prussia, Frederick William IV, towards whom pastor Nietzsche felt part of

as a

his

clergyman of the Church of Luther should feel towards sovereign. Some of these feelings he managed to express

at the christening of his son:

O

blissful

In the I

name

of the

O

O

moment!

Lord

I

utter these words; Bring

exquisite festival! unspeakable holy duty! bless thce! From the bottom of my heart do

me, then,

him unto the Lord! My thou be named on earth, in honor

consecrate

this

my

beloved child, that

I

may

son, Friedrich Wilhclm, thus shalt of

my

royal benefactor

on whose

1 birthday thou wast born.

The boy grew up as Fritz to his family and as a grown man and a philosopher, he came king use

friends; to feel

and

since,

an ordinary

of Prussia rather far beneath him, he did not customarily

the

royal

name, but signed himself simply Friedrich

Nietzsche.

About Nietzsche's heredity biographers have indulged themin

such matters,

them an example. The

Slavic family

selves in the fine free speculation

Nietzsche himself 1

I,

set

E. Forstcr-Nictzschc,

12.

The

customary

Life of Nietzsche, English translation (1912),

NIETZSCHE

4

name, and some talcs of his grandmother, gave his imagination a few facts to work on, out of which, perhaps with the help

young sister Elizabeth, he spun out a decent from a family of refugee Polish nobles

of his always admiring

romantic

tale of

named Nicki

My so

or Nietzky.

ancestors were Polish noblemen:

much

race instinct in

liberum veto.

When

I

my

blood

it

is

number

think of the

owing

them

to

who knows?

that I have

perhaps even the

of times in

my

travels that

have been accosted as a Pole, even by Poles themselves, and how seldom I have been taken for a German, it seems to me as if I belonged to those 2 only who have a sprinkling of German in them. I

The tremendous mustache, America of

of the kind once

bicycle days Nietzsche grew with such care and pride,

worn

to accentuate his Polish,

known

in the

"handle-bar mustache," which

as a

may

well have been

and presumably

also his noble,

appearance.

There

is

nothing in the

Nietzsche, and

no very

story.

There was no Polish blood

recent or certain noble blood.

in

Five

generations back of Friedrich in the paternal line, patient research has found a Christoph Nietzsche in Burkau in Upper

Lusatia some time about the year 1600. There

is

further evi-

dence to push the family back across the border into Slavic I am so wise," 3. Except for his first book, The Birth Nietzsche's books are not systematically put together into long chapters, but are collections of aphorisms, verses, or parables (as in Zarathustra). References to Nietzsche's works are therefore usually given in the follow-

*Eccc

of

HomOy "Why

Tragedy

,

ing form: title of the book, section name or number, and aphorism number. This is a very convenient form of reference, and will be used in this study of Nietzsche. Unlike reference to page numbers, it permits the reader to refer to any edition in the original or in translation. Wherever possible, I have quoted the English translation in the authorized edition of Nietzsche's works edited by Dr. Oscar Levy, published in the United States by the Macmillan Company, who have kindly granted me permission to quote from this edition.

THE STUDENT Bohemia. The name Nietzsche spelling of the diminutive

Nietzsche's veins

metaphor into the

of

making

The

German

probably a variant

name

very popular

Some Czech blood, then flowed in since modern genetics repudiates the

or,

common

no more than basin.

is

of a saint's

Nicholas.

Slavs

among

form

5

of the

is

other

the like, sound

blood,

man

some Czech chromosomes went

Nietzsche. But not many, at least

among Germans

usual

names

in the

middle Elbe

in his ancestry, Oehler, Krause,

and

German enough. 3

Nietzsche's mental collapse has set

many

of his biographers

the task of finding an hereditary taint of insanity in his family.

They can

find one case of mental illness readily enough.

August, 1848, his father

fell

on

and

a flight of stone steps

fered a severe concussion. After a year of illness, during

In suf-

which

he never recovered mental or physical health, Pastor Nietzsche died.

Apart from the

fact that

we have no

satisfactory clinical

reports of his illness, there remains the difficulty that in such cases

it

is

impossible to assign any precise part to an hereditary

disposition to insanity.

the family history, but

parents

we have no

There are no known similar

cases in

beyond the maternal and paternal grandcertain

information

whatever.

Pastor

Nietzsche came later to stand in the minds of his son and daughter,

who

could not really remember

him

in the flesh, as a

sensitive, imaginative, scholarly man, held by fragile health to

a

country pastorate unworthy of his endowments of

mind and

His emotions, to judge from his words at the christening of his son, were of the kind that frequently required exclamation points to do them justice; this, however, is no

character.

a

M. Oehler, "Nietzsche's angeblichc polnischc Herkunft,"

Monatshcjte (February, 1938), XVIII, 679.

Ostdeutschc

NIETZSCHE

6

more than good German not in

itself

romantic

taste in the

and

1840*5,

is

evidence even of a mild neurosis.

Nietzsche's ancestors, so far as they can be traced, were ap-

parently substantial middle-class folk, with solid roots in the soil of Germany where it meets the westernmost bastion of the Slavs Saxony, Lusatia, Bohemia. Many of them were Lutheran clergymen. In Germany, as in England, pastorates in an established protestant church tend to be preserved in the family,

and

to give

by a landed of

which

it

a kind of distinction well short of that enjoyed

nobility.

Nietzsche's family background

in his writings he seems

now

proud,

was one

now ashamed:

sturdy, industrious, middle-class, respectable, undistinguished,

a

Germanic stock mixed with

Slavic elements

in brief,

some-

thing ccht dcutsch. After the death of her husband Frau Nietzsche retired with

her mother-in-law, two

sisters-in-law,

and her two children

to

the quiet market-town of Naumburg on the river Saale. There is no evidence that the family were ever in pinched circumstances.

Frau Nietzsche had

widow, and family, the

small pension as a pastor's

Naumburg she was in the midst of her own Oehlers, who were prosperous, well-established in

people. Fritz cally

a

grew up

in a

run in the traditions

household carefully and economi-

common

Nietzsches were never allowed to

European bourgeois. The be extravagant. But of the

to

poverty and uncertainty in which fatherless boys so often grow up there was none at all. Indeed, the boy's childhood was comfortable safe,

and sheltered beyond

domestic

Too

Germany

that of

most boys, even

in the

of the mid-nineteenth century.

sheltered, perhaps, for his future stability, Fritz

wholly surrounded by the determined love of

five

grew up

women,

THE STUDENT grandmother, mother, aunts, and

women, much ship.

7

They were

sister.

all

good

too good to distinguish between love and owner-

Aunt Augusta,

appeared to Elizabeth, will do as a

as she

sample: For years she suffered from exceedingly painful gastric troubles, which she bore, however, with great sweetness and patience; and in spite of her affliction, she did not cease from conducting the affairs of the household in a truly admirable manner.

would

say,

Though

when

she

was entreated

Elizabeth reports that

the papers,

none of the

"Leave

me

Aunt

one solace," she

this

to spare herself.

4

Rosalie regularly perused

which was unusual among women in those days, women seem to have been very intellectual, nor to

have possessed the supreme feminine wisdom which tells them when to let a man alone. Fritz, as the one boy left in the family, they worshipped not only with the fervor

women

in such social

groups commonly display towards the symbolically dominant male, but with the added fervor German women feel for the

man

of the family.

The

object of such worship

tinguish from any other object

of tyranny.

is

His

hard to

dis-

sister herself

reports her absolute subservience to her brother, her elder by

three years.

When

she

came

to study

Greek, for instance, she

always translated in her mind avro? $a by "Fritz says so." Yet it is clear throughout her biography of her famous brother that she always bossed

him

about, and that never, save in his

philosophical flights, could he twist himself loose

bonds of her submissive

affection.

most innocently transparent u

literature:

Thou

goest to

bits

Forstcr-Nictzschc, Nietzsche,

Thus Spake

Zarathustra>

I,

lived to write one of the

of wishful

women ? Do

* 8

He

I,

29,

chap,

xviii.

from the

thinking in

all

not forget thy whip!"

5

NIETZSCHE

8 Fritz

was

a

little

good

boy, studious, well-behaved, highly

esteemed by his teachers. In Anglo-Saxon countries, he would have been a horrible little prig, and it is possible that even in

Germany

the following anecdote, as told by his

virtues carried rather

uncomfortably

sister,

suggests

far:

One

day, just as school was over, there was a heavy downpour of and we looked out along the Priestergasse for our Fritz. All the at last little Fritz little boys were running like mad to their homes also appeared, walking slowly along, with his cap covering his slate and When our mother his little handkerchief spread over the whole. rain,

.

.

.

remonstrated with him for coming home soaked to the skin he replied seriously: "But, Mamma, in the rules of the school it is written: on leaving school, boys are forbidden to jump and run about in the street, but must

walk quietly and decorously to their homes." Fritz had obeyed under the most adverse circumstances. 6

The boy was known title

in

Naumburg

perhaps not given quite in the

reports

this rule

as "the little minister," a spirit in

which Elizabeth

it.

We need

not rely wholly on Elizabeth for our knowledge of this precocious and virtuous childhood. Excellent confirmation

comes from Fritz himself. At the age of fourteen he began an Fragments of this, together with other juveverses, and school exercises, have been published

autobiography. nilia, essays,

with the most thorough scholarly editing in the of the "Historical

and

Friedrich Nietzsche."

first

critical edition of the collected 7

The

lad

whose odd

volumes

works of

scraps of writing

e 7

Forster-Nietzsche, Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche, WerJ^e

gabe (1933-), Werfy. "Briefe der Schiller

i

I,

25.

und

Briefe, Historisch-lyitische

Gcsamtaus-

Band. "J u g en dschriften, 1854-1861." Briefe.

i

Band.

Studentenzeit, 1850-1865." The autobiography, in Werfa I, 1-32. All these papers were preserved by

und Bonner

"Aus meinem Leben,"

is

the especial care of Elizabeth.

No

one who has followed her determined use

THE STUDENT

9

have thus against all odds survived and found their way to print is now and then boyish enough. "I ate lots of cherries yesterday,

and

my

He was

uncles played several of Beethoven's sonatas for me." clearly a bright, bookish boy,

and already

omnivorous in

bitten with the desire to write.

He

8

his reading,

can, indeed, al-

ready write; for although the matter of these writings

is

conventional, their form shows

awkward

little

of the schoolboy's

wholly

stumbling. There are few attempts at purple passages, and even the conventional romantic soul-searchings are conducted in

amazingly

crisp

German

He

prose.

reads history, mythology,

and though Elizabeth reports

travels, poetry,

his fondness for

play-acting, the printed juvenilia are overwhelmingly didactic

or analytical, rather than narrative or dramatic. indeed, never was

an

effective

able to get far

mime.

No

Nietzsche,

enough outside himself

to be

one would expect originality in such

early writings; precocity

means

successful imitation, or

it

means

nothing. But one might expect a trace of mischievousness, some faint foreshadowing of the ironic laughter that was to

come. There

is,

wonders what

in fact, so little of

so serious a

such foreshadowing that one of Tristam Shandy, which

boy made

he resolved to buy for himself

as a birthday gift

on

his fifteenth

9

birthday. of the Nietzsche- Archiv in

Weimar

to

keep

to

memory

of her brother

as

and innocuously German, Christian, and middle-class as possible would dare assert that this represents all the boy Nietzsche a very hard job wrote. He may, like other little boys, have had naughty thoughts, and even put them on paper; but if he did, no trace of them remains, and it is always possible that he never had them. * Bricjc, I, 9. To his friend Gustav Krug.

spotlessly

l,

119.

NIETZSCHE

io

II

At

fourteen, the adolescent boy

was

from

at last separated

womenfolk, and entered on a scholarship at the boys' school in Pforta, five miles away from Naumburg on the river Saale. Schulpforta has always had an admirable intellec-

his adoring

and many writers and scholars have gone from the universities. Lutheran pastors and teachers had

tual tradition,

there to

taken over the place from mediaeval monks, and maintained some of the strictness, sobriety, and devotion to a classical educational discipline of the mediaeval school.

The boys worked

hard

its

But the school did not put

at Pforta.

pupils through

the essentially unintellectual social conditioning such nurseries

of a ruling class as Eton or the Prussian cadet schools im-

was probably already

Nietzsche

pose.

this

against

fifteen

But Shelley had

to

Nietzsche never came quite

as

proof

same

of conditioning as was, at the

sort

the lad Shelley. ford.

at

age,

undergo Eton and Oxso

close

to

this

harsh

world. Pforta was not of course entirely a cloister, a prison, or a library. It

was

in the garden,

filled

with adolescent boys

swam

in the river, joked,

holidays drank wine from the school's

who

played, strolled

and on Sundays and own vineyards. Yet this

kind of play was pleasantly anarchic, with nothing or restrain at first rising,

to gall

a lad already precociously intellectual. Fritz had

some trouble adapting himself to the routine of early meals, and ordered studying, but he was still

communal

young enough

to

bend

slightly.

A fragmentary diary, preserved

by Elizabeth's care, gives an interesting account of the daily life of this most German school, so different from any-

as usual

THE STUDENT

II

thing young Americans and young Englishmen have ever been 10

put through.

As

the boy

grows up

his letters, journals,

was always writing clarity.

With

begin

adolescence,

to

and

their

lose

the appropriate

for he

essays

straightforward

emotional

crisis

seems to come over Fritz, and gets expressed in ways which are

still

appropriately conventional.

"Vorbei, vorbei!

Herz,

du zerspringen?" Roses, and the world, must die. He writes poetry, pages and pages of it, lyric and dramatic. At his

willst

u

height, in

The Conspiracy

of Philotas," he achieves thirty-six

exclamation points in twenty-seven 11 ter than his father had done.

A

solemn tone comes into the

Granier, letters full

and

lively as

American

is

rather bet-

new and somewhat

from

letters

which

Pforta.

He

less

writes long

Krug and Finder, and to a new one, of self-conscious and literary jesting, wag-

old friends

letters to his

gish

lines,

though they came from a perpetually young

college professor of English:

The

Lord! you've already forgotten plan for my contrarious novel never mind! I threw overboard in annoyance as soon as I had

it

finished the

first

...

to use for

chapter.

well,

I'm sending you the monstrous manuscript will. Yours till we meet again soon

what you

.

F

.

.

W v Nietzky homme (votrc

The

lad

is

(alias

Muck)

ttudic en lettrcs

ami sans

12

lettrcs)

moments, of high spirits, just as, mother, his aunts, and his sister, he is capable

clearly capable, at

in his letters to his

of strong affection. Yet neither the spirits nor the affection ever

sound very earthy, c, I,

substantial, straightforward.

119-125.

11

u

Werfa Bricfe,

I, I,

129; 170. 193.

To Raimund

Granier, July 28, 1862.

Nietzsche

is

NIETZSCHE

12

already anointing himself with words. He does not leave the nothing as simple as that. impression of pose or insincerity

He

already, perhaps, impatient of the sluggish, wordless,

is

we humans

mostly live in, a world in which he was not only uncomfortable, but also inconspicuous. Nietzsche was confirmed at Easter in 1861 at the age of sixthoughtless world

in his

own

womenfolk's mind and probably for some time after, destined for the Lutheran min-

istry.

Yet

when he was

and was,

teen,

model

at school, the

He

certainly in his

and beginning

eighteen,

pupil, the bright boy,

lost interest in his classes;

began

he even slipped

his last year

to

off

go wrong. during the

school walk on Sunday, and got very drunk in a Bierstube.

Though

existing evidence cannot be pieced together to

the matter certain,

more than

it is

tant factor in his behavior

ministry.

Nietzsche

likely that

make

one very impor-

was doubt over

his call

to

the

Though the author of The Antichrist is still far off, may already have been afflicted with doubts about the

God

whom

he had been brought up on such excellent terms. Certainly he had come to doubt very much his own aptitude for the pulpit of his fathers. This was not an existence of the

easy matter to

with

communicate

to his

mother.

It

seems very likely

some human, all mother to understand

that the forthright moralist-to-be did

too-

human hedging;

that

he clearly gave his

he would take up the study of theology

as well

as that of

philology in his approaching university career.

Music, which had always meant

more and more u His boy.

I,

to the boy, occupied

of his attention in adolescence.

contrite letter to his

Bricjcy

much

209.

Nictzschc, Nietzsche,

April I,

105.

mother shows him

16,

1863.

An

still

in

He

played the

some ways

English translation

is

the schoolin Forstcr-

THE STUDENT

13

piano, apparently well short of excellently, and with

emotion.

He

wrote Liedcr,

worked such wonders

and other short

bits of sonatas,

of music, mostly for the piano.

The

much bits

which has hitherto

piety

in the Nietzsche- Archiv at

Weimar

has

spared us the publication of most of these musical outpourings. Elizabeth did print in her first German biography the score of a piano composition written

by her brother in 1858, entitled

"In the Moonlight on the Pussta." It has not won its way to the 14 Nietzsche's many gifts were not those that concert-stage.

make

great

musicians or great composers.

Nietzsche in after

life

a refuge

when words

Music was

to

him; and

failed

when words failed him he really had very little left. The boy's academic troubles, whatever their origin, were not serious, and he rallied to make his school record, in the "certifiwhich he

cate of proficiency" with sity,

on the whole

excellent.

he was marked excellent

;

in

left

Pforta for the Univer-

In religion, German, and Latin

Greek good\

in French, History

and Geography, and Natural Sciences, satisfactory. Only mathematics was he notably deficient. Here his masters had report,

"As he has never shown any regular industry

matics, he has always

written and in his

gone backwards, so 15 oral work."

to speak,

in

in to

mathe-

both in his

III

In October, 1864, at the age of twenty, Fricdrich Nietzsche

matriculated in theology and philosophy at the University of 14

E. Forstcr-Nictzschc,

Das Lcbcn Fricdrich Niftzsches (1895),

I,

80.

There

song of his printed in the same volume, p. 224. The "Hymn to Life," words by Lou Salome, music by Friedrich Nietzsche, can be found at the end of the English translation of Ecce Homo and the poems. is

also a

u

Forstcr-Nietzschc, Nietzsche,

I,

119-121.

NIETZSCHE

14

Bonn. The next few months are a

crisis

in his

life,

which

will

probably remain obscure, and therefore a constant temptation to his biographers. Nietzsche himself used afterwards to refer to

at his|"lost year"

Bonn|and

to the

whole experience

almost inexplicable straying from the path

as

of his destiny.

an

His

sympathetic biographers, such as Charles Andler, have regarded the year at

Bonn

as

an

essential part of their hero's Calvary, his

ennobling exposure to the life

in

full

its

Here

test

of withstanding

German

student-

comic-opera vulgarity. may be hazarded. Nietzsche was

a simpler explanation

making

a final

and determined

effort to

be one of the boys.

After his coddled childhood, his cloistral adolescence, after the

long domination of his womenfolk, of the ties,

of all sorts of high seriousness, the

for revolt. ventional.

modern

Naumburg proprieyoung man was ready

And his revolt was still, characteristically, very conHe was going to sow his wild oats, in our complex

society

one of the

ritual

forms through which the still one of the tribe,

adolescent becomes a man. Nietzsche was

most eager for the applause of the tribe. through a brave and boisterous initiation. still

He would go

Such ceremonies, varying in form from tribe to tribe, seem always a bit ludicrous to an outsider. The current American form, especially as caricatured in Hollywood moving pictures of "collegiate" life, may seem ludicrous even to an insider. Certainly takes

German

"student life" of the mid-nineteenth century

on today an absurdity mellowed

tically

something romanand buxom young enduring. Beer, metaphysics, song

love, the

manly touch

conquerable nostalgia patterns for ritual,

into

of the duel, the sweetness of a not unthis

and one

is

surely one of the world's great likely

to survive

a

number

of

THE STUDENT totalitarian dictatorships.

Sowing

15

one's wild oats, never a pur-

much

suit to give the subtle artistic sensibility

scope for inde-

pendent variation, was in nineteenth-century Germany limited by the national genius for organization, which seems as apt if

at

as unlovely

a military

beer

organizing

campaign.

Nietzsche tried his conia,

jollity as at

organizing youthful

best.

He

joined a student corps, the Fran-

which was composed mostly of Pforta men. He drank a drink for which he later expressed the greatest con-

at noisy student gatherings, took long walks, always tempt with groups, and even made a pathetic attempt to fight a duel.

For

this latter purpose,

he challenged a

man

of

whom

he was

was already at work within him. He must also have been appropri-

very fond; perhaps the ironist

The

duel produced no scars.

ately in love, or at least given his fellows this

most important human

man ought

to

talked about

women, which

activity

some evidence

that in

he was what a good GerHe may merely have

be in his student days.

done

if

at all skillfully, will qualify

among men. He may have had

go with a prostitute, and thus unfortunately caught the syphilis which ended his the talker

career twenty-five years later,

women

remain

16

a puzzle for

a

Nietzsche's actual relations with

most of

his

life.

In spite of the

pathetic efforts of his sister Elizabeth to bring in concrete instances of his

puppy loves and his adolescent flames, in spite of which she repeats that her Fritz was in this

the insistence with

as in all matters a sound,

"This in 1889.

subject

Here

it

must

later

will be

normal German

lad, the

impression

be considered in relation to Nietzsche's collapse to say that the fact that Nietzsche did have

enough

syphilis may be regarded as proved (as certainly as anything of the kind can be proved) by the publication of E. F. Podach's book, Nietzsche s Zusatnmcnbruch in 1930.

NIETZSCHE

16 persists,

from a reading

that he hadn't

much

to

Nietzsche's efforts to

he should be

of Nietzsche's

youthful writings,

17

do with the girls. live up to what his comrades thought

lasted several

months. In a long

he describes one of these excursions of write this the

own

letter to

Elizabeth

jolly fellows:

thing in the morning after having just torn myself disproving the notion that I may have a thick head. Maybe the expression "thick head" conveys nothing to your mind. Yesterday we had a great drinking bout and sang the solemn Landcsvater, I

from bed, thus

first

flatly

and there were endless torrents of punch; guests from Heidelberg and We numbered over forty men; the public-house was Gottingen, The festival was of a very splendid and beautifully decorated. .

.

.

.

.

.

elevating nature. On such evenings, believe me, there of enthusiasm which has little in common with the

is

a general spirit

mere conviviality of the beer-table. This afternoon we are all going to march through the High Street in parade garb, and there will be a good deal of shouting and singing. Then we go by steamer to Rolandseck, where we have a big dinner in the Hotel Croyen. The bout began on the evening of the day before yesterday; we drank until two o'clock in the morning, assembled yesterday at n a.m. for a morning pint, and then went on a 18 spree in the market-place, and had lunch and coffee together at Kley's. .

Here already Nietzsche ing and back-slapping

is

.

.

beginning to find the round of drinkthan "elevating," though on the

less

sounds like the normal young man boasting sheepishly about his ability to drink. As time went on, how-

whole

this letter

he dropped more and more out of the merry doings of the where he alFranconia, drew more and more into himself ever,

ways found plenty of room. His

letters

home become even

"Elizabeth goes so far as to publish, in the English edition of the Life, Hedwig Raabe, on the grounds that Fritz worshipped her during his University days. But she admits Fritz had but the slightest personal acquaintance with the lady. Forster-Nietzschc, Nietzsche, Sec also H. W. Brann, Nietzsche und die Fraucn (1931), chap. i. I, 161.

a full-page portrait of the actress

**

Briefe,

Nietzsche,

I,

I,

281.

Dec. n, 1864.

127-128.

English translation in Forstcr-Nictzsche,

THE STUDENT more

Finally he gives

forcedly cheerful.

admits that "the touch of this life

had vanished"

was "the

17

for

up altogether, and poetry which seemed to hang over him, and that all he could now see

coarse, Philistine spirit, reared in this excess of drink-

rowdyism, of running into debt." Nietzsche had made his last attempt

ing, of

19

to accept the world.

Perhaps the world might have been presented to him in a fairer shape than that of the Franconia Corps of the University of

Bonn

Yet the mere historian finds

very hard to conjure up the picture of a world which Nietzsche would have in 1864.

The

accepted.

"No." Such

And

it

great "Yea-sayer" spent most of his

is,

perhaps, the

mark

life

saying

of the profound moralist.

from any other than a profound moralist, Nietzsche's of resignation from his corps would sound somewhat

yet,

letter

priggish: beg to inform the Association, the Franconia, that

I

and

I

herewith return

resignation. By this I do not mean that I cease to value the principle of the Association. All I would frankly declare is that its present features are not very pleasing to me.

it

my

sash,

This may be effort for

regarded

me it

in so

in part

to

doing send

my

in

my own fault; in any case it has my membership over the year.

endure

as a duty to

become acquainted with the

no narrow bonds unite me with

that

May

it

I

bid

it

proved a great Nevertheless

I

and now

Society, a hearty farewell.

the Franconia soon

which it now its members.

stands,

grow out of that stage of development at and may it ever claim high-minded moral men for FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

Perhaps

this letter still

sounds a

bit priggish,

20

even from Fried-

rich Nietzsche.

Bonn had become *v

lf

unbearable. Well before he composed the

.

Forster-Nietzsche, Nietzsche

80

Bricfc,

Nietzsche,

I,

II,

12.

147.

,

I,

Oct. 20, 1865.

146.

English translation in Forster-Nictzsche,

NIETZSCHE

l8

above

letter,

Nietzsche had

left it

for the University of Leipzig.

Here he made no attempt to be one of the boys. study, classical philology, and a professor, Ritschl recent refugee

from Bonn

worthy of

He

found a

himself a

his attention,

and

in

what seems nowadays the almost incredible academic freedom German Universities in their great period, this was

of the

He might have eaten, drunk, and slept classical philology. No one would have disturbed him. Actually he had some relief from work. ^"Three things make up my recreation rare recreation my Schopenhauer, Schumann's music, and enough.

finally, solitary

*l

walks."

j

academic work he made out admirably. For these few years he summoned the patient industry, the care, the simple Sitzflcisch indispensable for scholarly success. Since he

With

also

his

had what

vaguely and knowingly called intelligence, a not altogether indispensable for such success, his

gift useful if

work

is

pleased Professor Ritschl very

much

indeed.

The

piety

of the Nietzsche- Archiv has spread out in the third and fourth

volumes of the

definitive edition of his

works whatever

is left

of the apparatus of his scholarship, from finished dissertations

mere embryos of notes. To the layman, this mass of Greek and Latin is impressive, and often incomprehensible. What for

to

instance

lies

behind

this

entry?

Homer

Hcsiod 1

6 Biichcr

13

Nach

Tzetzes

Thcogonie

Aspis

Epithal

Catalog

Aigimius

Ccyc. gam.

Eoccn

Theseus* Kara/?

Trept

c,

II,

45.

Wcrkc, IV,

April

126.

7,

1866.

To

Carl von Gcrsdorff.

'iSaiwv

22

THE STUDENT Yet

it is

clear

from

these notes seen as a

19

whole that Nietzsche

and a curious worker, that he kept asking himself questions about his Greeks that went far beyond mere cataloguing. His most finished work in the field, DC Lacrtii Di-

was

a careful

ogcnis jontibuSy was printed in the Rheinischcs Philologic in 1868

and

1869,

fur

and gave the twenty-four year old

scholar a European reputation

More important

Museum

in the long

among

professional philologists.

run for Nietzsche's career was

discovery of Schopenhauer's philosophy. In one of his

his

numer-

ous autobiographical fragments he has described how, rum-

bookshop during the lonely days after he had broken with Bonn and the Franconia, he came across

maging

in a Leipzig

Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea, took the book home, and devoured it with increasing excitement. This was

than what had happened to St. Paul on the road to Damascus or to Rousseau on the road to Vincennes, but it

something too

was

less

a great conversion.

Schopenhauer's slightly Biedermeier stoicism, though it could not for long satisfy the emotional needs of a man as God-ridden as Nietzsche, solved in this

crisis

and

for a

moment

the

problem of the universe. "Here

each line," he wrote a few years later of his

first

reading of

Schopenhauer, "cried out renunciation, denial, resignation; here I saw a mirror in which the world, life, my own mind

were

Here the wholly disinterlooked at me, here I saw illness

reflected in fearful grandeur.

and heavenly eye of art 23 salvation, banishment and refuge, hell and heaven." The world makes no sense intellectually; Kant and the eightested

and

eenth-century philosophes were no

more than

whistlers in the

dark. Will, the blind striving of millions of organisms, * Wcrfa,

III,

298.

"Riickblick auf meinc zwci Leipzigcr Jahre."

is

what

NIETZSCHE

20 really

makes the world

cruelly.

All that

is

And

go.

left for

it

goes crazily, stupidly,

a philosopher

which

is

renunciation, the

the will to evil. Schopenhauer came in the end to a kind of Nordic Nirvana most attracextinction of the will to live

tive to the lonely

young

is

philologist.

Nietzsche decided, not

without pride, that he too was a philosopher. Yet the Leipzig years were by no means pathologically tary years. Nietzsche

made

a

few new

friends,

and

soli-

especially

Erwin Rohde, like himself young, intellectual, seeking his way. Rohde found it in the relatively serene paths of German academic preferment, and though he later lost touch with the academically outlawed Nietzsche, he remains one of the best sources of information on Nietzsche's personal history. Old Pforta friends and especially the Prussian officer and gentleman

Baron von Gersdorff and the quiet scholarly Paul Deussen, later a distinguished expert in Sanskrit, remained close to the young Nietzsche,

who

wrote them long

seems any longer to write.

Music

letters of the still

was

kind no one

a solace

and

a ful-

though by now Nietzsche probably knew he was not be a great composer. He did, however, meet casually a great

fillment, to

composer, Richard Wagner,

who

with Schopenhauer was

to

provide the setting for Nietzsche's flight from scholarship to

philosophy and preaching. For the present, he was

still

a very promising philologist, a

favorite pupil of Professor Ritschl, a candidate for the degree

of Doctor of Philosophy.

He

never had to write his

thesis.

In

1868 a chair in philology at the University of Basle in Switzer-

land

fell

vacant,

and Ritschl managed

young student chosen, without 84 He was at once given the degree by of his previous record.

benefit

to

of

have his the

brilliant

doctorate.

24

Leipzig University on the strength

THE STUDENT Nietzsche had an almost incredible twenty-four he was Hcrr Professor raptures.

Their

little

Fritz

had

21

start in the profession: at I

His womenfolk were in

justified their loving care; a

university professor perhaps even higher in the hierarchy of virtue and respectability than a Lutheran pastor. is

IV Hero-worship has produced flattering descriptions of the young Nietzsche. We have some help from photographs, and notably from one his

sister gives us,

The

the age of sixteen.

at

mustache of

mouth

his maturity

is

taken

at his

confirmation

portentous Polish cavalryman's

not yet there.

The

lad's rather large

firmly. His eyes look dark and for so young a boy, surprisingly deep-sunken. His face is round and full, yet sensitive. He is certainly no Nordic, but he might be almost any-

thing

He

is set

else.

appears

at

Bonn

"a picture of health and strength, broad-

shouldered, brown, with rather thick fair hair, and of exactly ~' f

same height as Goethe." Goethe, of course, is for Germans strength and beauty made flesh, and to associate him ever the

so tenuously

thing of

swam,

with Nietzsche

Olympian

skated,

health.

is

to

make

Nietzsche share some-

Elizabeth reports that her brother

and rode horseback, and that only

sightedness prevented his being

still

more

athletic.

his short-

Later ob-

servers were not struck with any such evidence of physical prowess. They are, indeed, usually reporting after Nietzsche

which was only

had become famous W.

after

he had become

Nietzsche the Thinker (1917), 7, from H. Ellis, described as slightly above the average height, but looking taller than he really was.

"Quoted

Affirmations,

in

K.

Salter,

u. Goethe

is

NIETZSCHE

22 insane and inaccessible.

More than

usually, perhaps,

their

what they saw than of what they thought have seen. At any rate, they describe Slavic

reports are less of

they ought to restlessness,

high cheek-bones, piercing and unquiet

timidity of the scholar

The problem exercised

all his

his adult

life,

the faithful

deny.

They

soul of a prophet.

ill

a great deal during

he died insane, not even Elizabeth and workers of the Nietzsche-Archiv have been able to

and

that

insist,

sports.

however, that he was born and grew up a

For

German

youth, normal, healthy, cheerful,

his later ill-health they

able explanation in circumstances sort could

and mental health has

biographers. That he was

splendid example of

fond of

and the

of Nietzsche's bodily

eyes, the

26

have avoided.

from Nietzsche's poor

must find an honor-

no decent German lad of

It all started,

eyesight. This,

this

according to Elizabeth, if

an organic weakness,

one that suggests nobility and spirituality of character. Poor light at Pforta, over-study, carelessness about is

at

any

rate

glasses (Fritz

would not

listen to his

led to splitting headaches.

mother and

Headaches led

to

his sister!),

sleeplessness.

Later this sleeplessness drove the young professor to drugs, and to the serious undermining of his health. Moreover, with his

mind on higher things, Nietzsche neglected himself, ate wrong things, ate irregularly as bachelors do. Then, with

the his

good health undermined, he took to doctoring himand gradually developed into a mild hypochondriac. Yet

natural self,

underneath

and very tragic in a sense superficial, there remained a

this ill-health, very real

sequences, but in **

its

con-

basis of

One of the most plausible of these descriptions is that made by a Frenchman, Edouard Schure, who saw Nietzsche in Bayreuth in the 1870*5, and reported in the 1890*5.

It is

given in Salter, Nietzsche, 476.

THE STUDENT hearty,

sane Germanic health.

Forster-Nietzsche gives us.

23

Such

is

account Frau

the

27

The medical problems of Nietzsche's life are puzzling enough to the physician. They are quite insoluble to the layman. One can only note that Elizabeth herself was no physician, and that she could not bear to think of her brother as in any way abnormal.

He

"genius"

was, she is

is

But

quite willing to admit, a genius.

a very nice word, and "abnormal"

Nietzsche's career his behavior

was

is

not. Later in

clearly that of an extreme

and though "neurotic" is also a word of pejorative overtones, and though it has somewhat different meanings for physician and for layman, most of us know neurotic behavior neurotic;

when we

see

and sometimes, even when we indulge

it

Whatever name we give

this

it.

it

is

behavior of Nietzsche's,

evident enough, in milder forms, in school and university student.

in

what we know

The young

Nietzsche,

of the

swim

did, seems always to have been awkward in the use of his body. Sensitive and self-conscious, he did not

and skate though he like to

appear awkward.

a perfectionist,

from the

first

do

you prefer, you may say that he was and that he would do nothing he could not If

pretty well.

Or you may

was proud, Whatever the

say that he

or vain, and that he hated to seem ridiculous.

reason, save for a tempestuous facility with the piano, he

had

no bodily

skills. Bodily energy he had, or at least a kind of nervous restlessness for which he found an outlet in long walks. 17

is scattered through both volumes of Forstcr-Nictzsche, Most of Elizabeth's points are recorded for purposes of debate Podach in the chapter "Das Pathologische bei Nietzsche" in his

This explanation

Nietzsche.

by E. F.

Nietzsches Zusammenbruch, 21-35. (There is an English translation of this book, The Madness of Nietzsche, 1931, and a French translation, L'Effondrement de Nietzsche t published in Les documents bleus in 1931.)

NIETZSCHE

24

Much

was composed during these walks and hurriedly on his return home. Again, save for his studies, he had undergone no very important discipline. A short and uncomfortable period of milinoted

of his writing

down

tary service in the Prussian cavalry

had been brought

by an accident incurred in mounting

his horse.

his saddle struck his chest, tore muscles

to

an end

The pommel

and fractured

of

ribs.

wound only 28 thanks "to the excellence and the purity of his blood." Neither home, school nor university life gave him the kind of Elizabeth informs us that he recovered from this

discipline that tames,

person.

does not subdue, the self-centered

if it

His family had done little but admire him and take His womenfolk had been too devoted to leave

care of him.

him any

but intellectual

work

to do.

He

seems not to have had

any hand in the family finances, nor to have had any other kind of responsibility, except that of spending an allowance. Already, at the beginning of his professorship at Basle, he shows signs of an inability to attend to the bothersome details of the external world, an inability not necessarily philosophical in origin.

what

Nietzsche, in short, was call

an

intellectual.

He

it

is

nowadays fashionable

was, to an extent rare even

to

among

from people whose main concern lies with rituals and traditions, with handling other

intellectuals, insulated

with things, people, with

affairs,

with

dull, undignified,

unyielding "real-

He was

about to join a group of intellectuals, many of whom were indeed sober, dull and conforming enough, but who in general could hardly give the young Nietzsche a taste ity."

for social discipline, for cooperation with his fellows, or even an 88

Forstcr-Nietzsche, Nietzsche,

I,

173.

THE STUDENT German

abiding sense of self-satisfaction. in the later nineteenth century

else

is

university professors

were not infrequently brilliant a body they seem notably lack-

men, indeed great men, but as ing in cohesion, good manners and most of what

25

in controversy, worldly sense,

make an

necessary to

intellectual

aristocracy an effective aristocracy. One gift, one skill, Herr Professor Nietzsche had already

shown himself

From

write.

to possess in a very high degree.

earliest

he had a

to say

which increased with this gift for

words

exercise

as others

special,

and

have

which we

acteristically, a gift for the written

training.

gifts for

word. Nietzsche was

dren,

facility

is

Nietzsche had

music, for painting, It

was, char-

rather than the spoken

man for oratory. uncommon among bright

far too shy a

with words, not

probably only indirectly

process of thinking.

word

shall

inborn aptitude, and

for mathematics, for cookery, or for gymnastics.

This

could

childhood, he had been developing this

technical skill in handling words, a skill for

no doubt have

He

and obscurely

Like great technical

musical instrument, or like

chil-

related to the

facility in

playing a

facility in arithmetical calculation,

be very highly developed in individuals incapable of making anything important out of their skills. So far, Nieit

may

had done

with the words he poured out so freely. His youthful writings show an eager, sensitive, dutiful young

tzsche

little

German intellectual, who has gone through the appropriate emotional and religious crises of adolescence. They show, not very far beneath the surface, an ambitious, self-centered young

man who

wants

to shine,

"the Will to Power."

any evidence of

and who

They do not,

originality.

is

one day to write about

save to the eye of faith,

show

NIETZSCHE

26

Yet the very possession of a

young man about

to

this

command

over words was, to

become a professor of

classical philology,

a danger. Professors, of course, should be able to write, but they

ought not

The to

to write well, or at

not freely and easily.

and he ought not without good, honest and obviwas to Nietzsche find himself sweating. shortly badly to the surface

adjusted in a dozen ways to the sion*

rate,

professor should dig deep for his truths

bring them

ous

any

demands

They were unreasonable,

of the learned profes-

unlovely, unjust

demands

if

but they were definite and inescapable. As he left Leipzig for Basle, however, only a very wise man indeed, and

you

like,

one

who knew

Nietzsche well, could have foreseen his early

and complete

failure as a professor of classical philology.

even the wise

man might have been

the written

wrong. Great fluency with

word has not always proved

a barrier to success in

the learned world, and the will to shine has illuminated

an academic

chair.

And

many

CHAPTER

II

THE PROFESSOR Basle in

on May THE

28,

which young Professor Nietzsche delivered 1869 his inaugural lecture on "Homer and

Classical Philology" its

was an old and prosperous town, proud

independent past as a South

its

German

city-state,

content with

present part in the Swiss Confederation, perhaps a

conscious, over against the great

new Germany

of

little

to the north, of

being provincial. Its university, though it lacked the wealth, equipment, and enrollment of the greater German universities,

was by no means an intellectual backwater. The merchant aristocracy of Basle had long been devoted to the support of culture. Several generations of the mathematical and scientific dynasty of the Bernoulli had brought a European distinction to their native town. Jakob Burckhardt, the great historian of the Renaissance, sity

was the most famous member

Faculty. In 1869, he

reputation, in

was

at the

no sense below the

Berlin could offer.

height of his powers and

best Leipzig, Heidelberg, or

Bachofen, whose productive

matriarchate were opening

new

of the Univer-

studies of the

fields to anthropologists

and

had occupied a chair of Roman Law in the and was now a scholarly judge in the city. Riiti-

legal historians,

university,

meyer, professor of zoology, was anticipating Mr. G. B. Shaw in the consoling, if not very fruitful, journey back to La-

marck.

A good many others, not earth shakers, but well deserv-

ing of the humble immortality of the biographical dictionary,

NIETZSCHE

28

helped bring distinction to town and Basle.

gown

in Nietzsche's

1

Into the

made

a

life

of Basle Nietzsche never really entered.

few intimate

friends,

almost normal social

life.

with

In the

whom first

He

he led for a while an

few

years, at least,

he

carried out faithfully the formal teaching obligations of his

which meant, in addition to university lecturing, six hours a week of classroom work in Greek with picked students in

post,

Gymnasium or high-school attached He made the necessary minimum of formal

the Padagogiurn, a sort of to the university.

and attended the necessary minimum of university meetings. He was not yet the recluse of Sils-Maria and the

social calls

Riviera, not yet the Zarathustra en pension of his last years.

But

was from the beginning lonely and harassed,

his life at Basle

lightened only by his

work

or at least his writing

his

ambitions, and his chosen friendships.

Only

a

few months

feel so alien

and

colleagues that

I

after his arrival,

turn

he wrote to Rohde, "I my honored

the mass of

indifferent

among down with pleasure

the invitations

and

Even the enjoyment of mountains, somewhat spoiled for me by the herd of my

requests that flow in daily. forest,

and lake

is

fellow-teachers."

2

Elizabeth also. has frequently to record this

aspect of her brother's behavior, though she tries hard to pre-

tend he was a social success at Basle. 1

The

cultural

background of Basle

On

one of

in Nietzsche's

day

their is

numerous

sketched with

Andler

surprising brevity in C. Andler, Nietzsche, II, 113-125. 3 Nietzsche, Gcsammeltc Briefe (1902-1909), II, 148. To Rohde, June 16, 1869. I have translated Nietzsche's plebecula by "herd," which is perhaps

for

save for a few letters unduly mild. The great Gesamtausgabe is not yet of 1869 available for letters or works after the Leipzig period. This is not a serious gap as far as the major writings go, but it is a real loss in the

correspondence.

The above

edition, presided over

by Frau Forster-Nietzsche

THE PROFESSOR little

29

vacation trips together, she writes, for instance, that they

ran up a huge

the table d'hote.

and on

He

this occasion

paid the

bill,

Constance because Fritz would not eat in

bill at

called such meals "the

had

all

he remarked

browsing of herds/' their meals served privately. As he one always has

sadly, "Lizzie,

3

One more

dearly for grazing

away from the herd."

close to neurosis.

Piccard, a colleague, tells

Nietzsche to see the cathedral

at

Lausanne,

to

pay

instance,

how he advised and how carefully

whole city. he described the best way Nietzsche got lost, walked around aimlessly for hours, and came back to the railway station without having seen anything of the city itself, let alone the cathedral. "But why didn't you to see the sights of the

ask some one the

"You know,

way?"

And

said Piccard.

Nietzsche replied, 4

might have laughed at me!" Nietzsche, then, had a kind of neurotic dislike for mingling with his fellows, a dislike which the professional psychologist Piccard, they

could no doubt break ridicule

was

certainly

down

complex parts. Fear of one of the most important of these. into

Nietzsche himself was sure that

its

this feeling of

discomfort in

crowds was

a most aristocratic trait. His admiring biographers have repeated the word "aristocratic" in constant admiration of their hero's behavior. Though this comforting adjective has

not infrequently been given such an application, especially since the rise of the

European history is

in

middle

classes, in the

aristocratic folk

have not behaved

the best single collection of Nietzsche's letters.

two

general course of

It

like

Nie-

has six volumes (volume

V

parts).

1

Forster-Nictzschc, 4

I,

314.

C. A. Bernoulli, Ovcrbcc\

und

L/'/r,

would probably have had but did not speak well.

Nietzsche,

to use French, a

II,

169.

In Lausanne, Nietzsche

language which he read

easily,

NIETZSCHE

30

There

tzsche.

is

something insecure, timid, and defeated about young professor that in no way seems aristo-

the over-sensitive cratic.

some ways or belong. They must not

Aristocrats have to be fairly insensitive in

they cease to stay up where aristocrats

be afraid of crowds, nor even of vulgarity

Nietzsche was, in simple

themselves,

least

of all in

fact, a middle-class in-

most of the ways of his class. "F. W. von Nietzky," the would-be descendant of Polish noblemen, was hardly more of an aristocrat than was Keats. Both, no tellectual in revolt against

doubt, belong with the eternal aristocracy of the spirit; but

would have been willing mise on some more earthly and more immediate

Nietzsche, one suspects,

to

compro-

distinction,

which he was never quite to obtain. Whatever its roots, whatever its explanation, Nietzsche's inability to lead a conventional social life has

important conse-

quences in any estimate of his work. In spite of the many insights he achieved, in spite of the intensity of his search for a

of life for

good way

study of of his first

man

men on

as a social

work

political

from the

suffers

hand, of other

and

this earth, at

human

animal

fact that

beings.

To

bottom Nietzsche's

and

this

he knew so

is

most

little,

at

a sufficiently transcen-

dental critic, this is of course hardly a serious deficiency. But Nietzsche himself tried hard not to set up as a transcendentalist, directed indeed

some

of his sharpest barbs at innocent old

Kant

Nietzsche's

own

untrodden ways of pure spirit. On grounds, his withdrawal from this world was

a limitation

and

a weakness.

and other dwellers

It

was

a

weakness

in the

reflected rather in his attempts at practical

judgments, in his sense of what materials, in the facts

is

possible,

than in the actual

and observations he worked with. Nie-

THE PROFESSOR tzsche

was

not, like so

that

a

wrapped up, insulated

buzzed around inside

man

of the philosophically inclined

many

Coleridge, for instance

31

in,

the thoughts

He

read a good deal, for with chronic eye-trouble, and on the whole he read the

kind of books

his skull.

memoirs,

histories,

possible to obtain a useful, 5

things,

He

from which

travels

vicarious, experience of

if

it is

men and

did not altogether avoid the market-place; indeed

he prowled about it quietly, looking and listening, and possibly even learning. And, though he quarreled with them frequently,

and otherwise plagued them

he had in these years friends who listened to him, and, indeed, talked back at him. Distantly and faintly, perhaps, he seems to have heard them,

and

greatly,

for a while to have tried to adjust himself to their worlds as

well as to his own.

Burckhardt was too old

to be

distinguished to be neglected. the herd, and cultivated

an intimate, but he was too

Nietzsche excepted

his acquaintance.

talked together not infrequently.

No

him from

They walked and

doubt Nietzsche's devo-

was strengthened by the historian of the athletic age we call the Renaissance. For Burckhardt, too, a glory had gone from a world in which machines, banks, insurtion to the heroic

was becoming a European center) were more important than virtu. The two must ance companies (for which

latter Basle

have spent

moments

many

pleasant

together

mourning the

world's decay.

In long

letters

the

young

professor kept

up

his ties

with

Schopenhauerian, and on his way to a professorship of philosophy in Kiel, and with von Gersdorflf, the

Rohde,

*

still

solidly

Nietzsche's Belesenheit

Nietzsche, and

more

is

exhaustively treated in the course of Andler's II and IV.

especially in vols.

NIETZSCHE

32 Prussian squire he had

known

so well at school,

and who was

beginning to display a Prussian willingness to rescue the

world

from Latin skepticism and decay. Romundt, another of his Leipzig circle, and a lover of Schopenhauer, he helped to an appointment

as Privat-dozcnt at the University in Basle,

a while lived with

him on

and

for

intimate terms. But for

Romundt, a and finally to

pessimism led on to Christianity holy orders. Nietzsche never forgave him this treason. delicate soul,

Of

Nietzsche's friendships, however, the firmest, longest,

all

Franz Overbeck, who joined the faculty at Basle as professor of church history one year after Nietzsche entered on his professorate. Overbeck, seven

and most unclouded was

years Nietzsche's senior,

that with

was an

intelligent, rather conventional,

scholar, a careful research worker, with the professional skep-

ticism his training as a historian

had brought, and no great

desire to attain the unattainable in himself or the Universe.

Nietzsche he found

full of ideas, willing

and able

to talk

on

almost anything, and, once the barriers were down, extraordinarily unreserved. The two had bachelor quarters together in

house in the Schiitzgraben, Nietzsche on the first floor, Overbeck on the ground floor. Overbeck's marriage a few years later lessened somewhat the intimacy, though Frau Overbeck

a

little

made

on with the temperamental NieElizabeth Nietzsche never liked the Overbecks, and

valiant efforts to get

tzsche.

when

in 1908 Carl Albrecht Bernoulli published in his

Overbeck. beck's

und

own

Franz

Friedrich Nietzsche: Eine Freundschajt Over-

honest observations on his friend's character and

behavior, she lost herself in indignation. According to Elizabeth, all jealousy.

Overbeck

says of her brother

is

false,

and inspired by

Overbeck, however, seems to a neutral observer to

THE PROFESSOR

33

have had to the end the greatest admiration and love for Nietzsche, whom he held to be a genius, an unquestioned mem-

though certainly not the

ber

German men

of supremely great

thought he was daily

life

greatest

justified

of the small group

of letters.

But Overbeck

from intimate experience of Nietzsche's was also selfish, absurdly

in noting that his friend

given to self-doctoring, an awkward figure in society, a thinker impatient of criticism, assured and intolerant. For all that, and indeed because of it, Overbeck to sensitive, a neurotic invalid

the end cherished towards Nietzsche an affection he himself 6

called "unclouded."

It

the competent in this petent,

was, in part, no doubt, the affection

narrow world often have

for the incom-

an affection that grows on irritation. Nietzsche may man; he was certainly not a competent

well have been a great one.

was perhaps unduly concentrated had no great abstract loyalties to take

Nietzsche's great sensibility

on

his

few

He

friends.

his energies

up no hobby, no

and

his vanity,

no routine administrative

duties,

doing nothing. Even proved for him a confused and un-

gift at all for idleness, for

the Franco-Prussian

War He had had

to

become

Swiss citizen, and so could not join the

German

profitable interlude.

a

naturalized

armies.

At

the

news, he was proudly cosmopolitan and superior. But soon the itch to take part in this marvellous redemption of the

first

Teutonic race from Latin vices and Latin rationalism grew too strong.

He

enlisted in the

German ambulance

after a short period of training

was

service,

and

sent out to the battlefields,

where he promptly took very ill with dysentery and diphtheria, and had to be invalided out of the service. Elizabeth regards *

Bernoulli, Overbcc^

und

Nietzsche,

I,

63.

NIETZSCHE

34 this as

an important part of the martyrdom which broke down Nietzsche himself took a patriotic pride in the victory, though hardly had he come back to his teach-

his health.

German

ing at Basle than he began to have his doubts. This new Empire of Bismarck's seemed a little vulgar and materialistic. He could think of better things. For a time, he dreamed of a kind

modern

of

cloister,

wherein he and a few choice

spirits

would

purge themselves, and somehow through themselves the world, of this vile materialism.

Friendships, indeed

hausting to Nietzsche. of his

own

7

all

personal relations, were always ex-

They did not free him from his feeling make up for the deficiencies of How intense and demanding friendship

ineptness, did not

peoples and empires.

was for him can be gathered from

Romundt, about

to

a description of his farewell

to take holy orders:

It was horribly sad, wrote Nietzsche to Gersdorff. Romundt knew, repeated endlessly that henceforward he had lived the better and the happier part of his life. He wept and asked our forgiveness. ... At the

moment I was seized with a veritable terror; the porters were shutting the doors, and Romundt, wishing to continue to speak to us, wanted to let down the window, but it stuck; he redoubled his efforts, and while

last

he tormented himself, trying in vain to make himself heard, the train went slowly off, and we were reduced to making signs to each other.

The awful symbolism of the whole scene upset me beck as much as it did me: it was hardly endurable.

terribly, I

and Over-

stayed in bed the

next day with a bad headache that lasted thirty hours, and

much vomiting

of bile. 8 7 8

is

See his

letter to

Gesammelte

Rohde, Dec.

Briefe,

I,

312.

To

15, 1870.

Gesammelte

Briefc,

Gersdorff, April 17, 1875.

represented by asterisks in the original.

II,

214.

Romundt's name

THE PROFESSOR

35

II

Of

all

Richard

the

men and women who

Wagner

tainly tfie

is

most

perhaps the most important, as he

men

takes

Nietzsche's professorate; of his conscious

The

striking.

between the two

touched Nietzsche's

its

brief

cer-

and intense friendship filled the rest

long disintegration

madness Nietzsche

printed a series of violent attacks on the now-dead

The problems

life,

up most of the early years of

Just before his final

life.

is

Wagner.

of the relationship, complicated by the fact that

Nietzsche was in some senses in love with Wagner's mistress and wife, Cosima, have tempted all sorts of writers, and there is

already a large Wagner-Nietzsche literature.

have their

disciples

and

charms are perhaps a

9

Both Masters

though Wagner, whose more obvious, has here the numeri-

their defenders,

little

cal advantage.

Nietzsche had met of a

mere

Wagner

social occasion

upon the composer.

briefly at Leipzig,

had had no chance

Now

but in the rush

impress himself he learned that Wagner, having been to

forced into the open in his relations with Cosima, the wife of

Wagner's friend von Biilow, had left the scandal behind him, and had retreated with Cosima and his Art to the peace of the near-by Swiss village of Triebschen. Admiration and ambition aiding, Nietzsche so far overcame his natural diffidence as to

on the great man. He was politely, and then cordially, received. He was young, eager, admiring, a professor and

call

hence perhaps not without some influence on public opinion.

Wagner, who had not yet entirely conquered public opinion, even in Germany, welcomed a new disciple. Soon Nietzsche *

For a brief discussion of

it,

sec the bibliography, p. 255.

NIETZSCHE

36

was spending

much

as

of his spare time as possible in Trieb-

schen, listening to Wagner's music, discussing the supreme

human

synthesis of

culture

Wagner was preparing

deed practically achieved

talking, eating, strolling

had

in-

by the

running errands for the household. Triebschen is removed from us by an awkward interval of

lake,

time and finish.

its

The

idyll necessarily

setting

is

wrong:

seems to us to

fall

short of classic

a Swiss villa of the 1870'$ will

do

comic opera. The characters lack serenity and noThey seem to come from a slightly depressing novel, or

at best for bility.

from self,

Wagner, high-priest even each moment and each act in a supreme, too real

real

living

life.

to

him-

intense,

and wearing dedication; Frau Cosima, nursing, protecting, flattering and cajoling this man who had brought her fame, he had not quite made her Isolde; the four children of Cosima and von Billow, with the fifth, little Siegfried, child of Cosima if

and Wagner,

all

of

them

tively uninhibited; the

lively,

and, in such a household, rela-

awkward young

professor

and

philolo-

gist, protective cavalryman's mustache just grown, listening, and when Wagadmiring, and when opportunity presented

ner allowed someone of eloquence in

man from Time

else to talk

breaking into long periods soul of animal

which the Master saved the clean

the corruptness of Socrates and Christ.

made almost everything about Triebschen slightly The villa itself, furnished "in accordance with the

has

ludicrous.

company, who had been somewhat lavish in their use of pink satin and little Cupids," seems no fit birthplace for a pure Teutonic Siegfried. Then there is Frau Cosima strolling by the lake, "dressed in a pink cashmere style of a Paris furniture

gown with broad

revers of real lace,

on her arm a large Tuscan

THE PROFESSOR hat a

trimmed with

dignified,

a

crown

heavy and

And Wagner

dog."

of pink roses gigantic,

37 .

.

.

behind her pacing

coal-black

Newfoundland

himself, "in a Flemish painter's costume,

consisting of a black velvet coat, black satin knee-breeches,

black silk stockings, a light blue satin cravat tied in a rich

bow, with a piece of his fine linen and lace shirt showing below, and a painter's beret on his head." Finally, by no mere metaphor the culmination and purpose of Triebschen, there are the high thoughts, as Cosima recorded them:

When I contemplate our peaceful existence which, in view of the Master's genius, may well be called sublime, and feel at the same time that the sufferings we have previously endured are indelibly stamped on souls, I say to myself that the greatest joy on earth is vision, 10 that this vision has fallen to the lot of us poor creatures.

our

The

vision has inevitably

dimmed

and

for us, or perhaps merely

We see the papier-mache in the Master's stage-dragon. hear above the Liebestod, the unpleasant voice of Wagner the Jew-baiter, Wagner the German fanatic, Wagner the un-

altered.

We

buttoned

more

egotist.

recent

tesgaden,

is

We

hear above the commotion other voices,

and even more unpleasant. Triebschen, like Berchnot for us an idyllic spot.

What Nietzsche sought from Wagner he undoubtedly got. The brilliant young philologist was really, like many another academic light, a professor in spite of himself. He had no deep love for the patient ways of scholarly research. He wanted to bookish young fellow he had already shone academically as long as he could. Now he wanted to illuminate shine,

and

as a

the world, and Diogenes Laertius obviously did not provide

nearly enough light.

He

wanted

to

16

Forster-Nietzsche, Nietzsche,

I,

223-224.

move and

be moved, to

NIETZSCHE

38

and sound the depths, to solve the problems of Eternity and the Universe. He wanted to be a philosopher. He wanted, as he had wanted at Bonn, tribal initiation and

scale the heights

The

tribal admiration.

clan of philologists

little

had not been

enough. This scorner of the crowd could never do without the homage of the crowd.

Luck

or instinct served

The composer was

him

well in sending

him

to

Wagner.

already a national, indeed a world figure.

His music, acclaimed by the fervent groups of Wagnerites

1870*5,

coming

to

as

human

life, was gradually, in the be accepted by calmer people for what it is,

the supreme experience of

great music pieced out with long stretches of dull music. To Wagner and the Wagnerites, however, the master was no mere

musician.

and

The Ring,

a prophecy, a

a synthesis of

all

notably,

was

at

once a history of

Germany

Germany. Wagner had achieved program the arts, and the arts were obviously all of life for

worth having. Wagner was therefore the supreme philosopher, law-giver, prophet. in

which

cast,

his

whole

life,

He

teacher,

was, in the aesthetic

like his tam-o'-shantered

frame

costume, was

the Master; but he might just as well have been the

Fuehrer.

book grew directly out of this association with Wagner. It was an association at first unquestionably based on mutual liking and respect, though also from the first Nietzsche's

first

mixed naturally and

profitably with a

mutual desire

to exploit

the partner in the relationship. Nietzsche's great contribution was his book, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music,

published with Wagner's blessing in 1872.

composer

bless a

of the best in

work

Greek

in

And

which he appeared

art, as

deed, of Dionysos himself.

the

modern

well might the

as the re-discoverer

heir of Aeschylus, in-

THE PROFESSOR

39

Nietzsche's book took a spectacular farewell to philology and scholarship. It was no careful account of Greek tragedy,

but a brief,

lively,

and

among German

philosophy, an old folk-belief

According

to Nietzsche, art

thing in human Apollinian. The

an old

literary defense of

and

thesis in

intellectuals.

therefore, of course, every-

has two poles, the Dionysian and the Good Thing: it is God's and Dionysian is

life

A

Nature's primal strength, the unending turbulent lust and

longing in

men which

drives

them

to conquest, to

ness, to mystic ecstasy, to love-deaths.

The

drunkenis

Apollinian

Bad Thing

A

though not unattractive in its proper place it is man's attempt to stop this unending struggle, to find peace, harmony, balance, to restrain the brute in himself. But the brute

is life,

we

as

:

and cannot be long if we go back

can find

Dionysian. With linian element

Socrates

won

restrained.

life

was

and

originally

were cut

off.

The

living springs

Greek culture became

harmonious, gentlemanly, reasonable, beautiful

strained,

art,

and Euripides, however, the Apol-

a too-conclusive victory.

of Dionysian strength

Greek

to the sources,

re-

and

dead.

an unduly simple outline of an idea which Nietzsche developed with all the subtlety of his literary skill. But such an This

is

outline does bare the

commonplace, indeed

ter of Nietzsche's basic

linian,

romantic against

traditional, charac-

assumption. Dionysian against Apolrealism against idealism, natural

classic,

Germanic (or Nordic) against Latin the has provided great fun for critics and philosophers for

against artificial, antithesis

had played with it; Spengterms a bit and predict the

generations. Herder, Schiller, Hegel ler

was

to take

it

up, transpose

its

downfall of a European civilization

Germany had

at the

hands of which

suffered temporary defeat in the

his

Four Years'

NIETZSCHE

40

War. For Germans, at least, this favorite antithesis has usually had a common feature: the Germans possess the quality X which makes

and

Spirit

for profundity, strength, survival.

Nietzsche

is

union with the World-

no exception:

... in some inaccessible abyss the German spirit still rests and dreams, undestroyed, in glorious health, profundity, and Dionysian strength, like a knight sunk in slumber; from which abyss the Dionysian song rises to our ears to let us know that this German knight even now is dreaming

Dionysian myth in

his primitive

the

German

blissfully earnest visions.

spirit will find itself

awake

in all the

.

Someday

morning

freshness

.

.

following a deep sleep; then it will slay the dragons, destroy the maligand Wotan's spear itself will be unable nant dwarfs, waken Brunhilde to obstruct

theme.

if

course!

n

The Dionysian

What in

to this old

good, but apparently rather exhaustthe Dionysos-ridden man wants infinitely he gets

he gets anything

ment

own

true that Nietzsche gives a twist of his

It is

ing.

its

its

is

at all

finitely.

Unaware

of the predica-

fresh youth, a Dionysian civilization as

it

grows

older comes face to face with this most dialectical difficulty.

Awareness of the predicament

when

is

tragedy, the brief

the Dionysian wild-man, self-conscious at

delights of the Apollinian gentleman.

ment

This

is

moment

last, tastes

the costly

the

mo-

Ver%larung> that nobly German experipoor Anglo-Saxons have only the inadequate

of Verfylarung

ence for which

we

and borrowed Latin

"transfiguration."

What

tragic

myth was

Wagner's music is for the Germans. Wagner's dissonance expresses our "desire to hear and at the same

for the Greeks, artful

time have a longing beyond hearing." Wagner's

and 11

13

original artistic force."

The The

12

Birth of Tragedy, chap. xxiv. Birth of Tragedy, chaps, xxiv

and xxv.

is

"the eternal

THE PROFESSOR There seems

however, a joker in this pack of fine words. Wagner But Dionysos is clearly not enough:

cast for Dionysos.

we man

If is

is,

41

could conceive of an incarnation of dissonance

illusion to cover

its

and what

else

dissonance would need a glorious might features with a veil of beauty. This is the true artistic

then, that

live, this

it

function of Apollo, in whose name we include all the countless manifestations of the fair realm of illusion, which at each moment render life in general

worth living and impel one

to the experience of the next

moment.

And

therefore:

When

the Dionysian powers rise with such strength as we are experican be no doubt that, wrapped in a cloud, Apollo

at present, there

encing has already descended to us.

Wrapped vague.

But

in a cloud it

?

13 .

.

.

Fanciful language, of course, and a bit

would have been most

inartistic to write "dis-

guised as a professor of philology at the University of Basle." Ill

Nietzsche almost from the

first

seems to have regarded his

duties at the University as an unpleasant interruption of the serious

work

of his

life.

He

took

maximum

advantages of

vacations and holidays; he was ill with increasing frequency, and in one way or another managed to pare down his actual

teaching to a

Tragedy and

minimum. The

its

effect

on

publication of

The

Birth of

his reputation further diminished his

teaching load. Serious students began to avoid him.

The

little

book was hailed favorably by the Wagnerites, neglected by the general public, and damned almost unanimously by Nietzsche's professional colleagues in the study of philology.

u

The

Birth of Tragedy , chap. xxv.

Had

Nie-

NIETZSCHE

42

tzsche been a professor of philosophy, his colleagues would not have been surprised at his unverifiable assertions about the Dionysian and the Apollinian; but philologists were used to the

methods

ship.

if

Young

you

prefer, the limitations

of exact scholar-

Ulrich von Wilamowitz, destined to a great unburdened himself in a pamphlet,

career as a classical scholar,

Philology of the Future, which was a merciless riddling of

himself,

came

in doubt.

to

The

and confident

14

Rohde, and Wagner Nietzsche's defense, but the result was never

Nietzsche's careless

prose.

learned gentlemen rose to the defense of their

threatened standards, and shut Nietzsche out.

unrepentant nearly sixty years afterwards.

They are still Wilamowitz wrote

in his recollections: Boyish as

much

the bull's-eye.

of my work in question is, with the conclusion I hit Nietzsche did what I called on him to do, gave up his

office and science, and became the prophet of a non-religious and an unphilosophical philosophy. His daemon justified him religion in that: he had the genius and strength for it. Whether self- worship and blasphemy against the teaching of Socrates and Christ will give him the

teaching

victory, let the future

show. 15

Nietzsche was, as a matter of at Basle for

fact, to

continue on the faculty

another seven years. In the university proper there

were not infrequent periods when he had no students at all: the philologists were very effective as boycotters. Public lectures were not a severe

strain.

take schoolboys through

and worse,

his absences

In the lower school he continued to

Greek

more

texts.

But

his health

frequent, and

14

U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Zut(itnjtsphilologie. auf F. Nietzsche's Geburt dcr Tragodie (1872). 15

U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff,

tion, 1930), p. 152.

My

grew worse

his unfitness for his

Recollections

Eine Erwiderung (English

transla-

THE PROFESSOR more apparent. At

job

in the

last,

43

summer

was very

of 1879, he

by the university with a pension of 3,000

generously retired

Swiss francs a year, though he was only thirty-four years old and had taught at Basle but ten years, and that rather fitfully.

From now

on, the genius of Nietzsche was freed from what knew to be the worst shackle a poet or a thinker then everyone can wear a university post.

He had

not been a bad teacher, certainly not in his earlier

numbers

years at Basle. Shyness, fear of

much

less

once he

felt

beneath

him

of

men,

afflicted

platform. His delivery was clear and authoritative, torically very skilled. is

He

usually called "ideas,"

always had what in

this

if

not ora-

connection

and could hold the attention even of

or cautious

the pedantic

him

the security of the lecture-

among

his classes.

Even

in the

lower school he seems to have had no serious troubles. Here he rather shot over the heads of

all

save the ablest of his pupils.

But though he was absent-minded, near-sighted, and highly intellectual, these schoolboys at least kept discipline under him. After

even in Swiss Basle, they were

all,

and knew

their place.

German

schoolboys,

16

Apart from the visits to Triebschen and a few vacation trips, the Basle years were to Nietzsche mostly unhappy, and increasingly so. Elizabeth attributes everything to her brother's bad health and to his irregular are

all sorts

My

diets,

temperate account of Nietzsche as professor

at the job as is

Burckhardt. See her

To

lyrical

I,

66-71.

is

Elizabeth, Fritz

summing-up

here, as usual, sympathetic but critical.

Nietzsche,

He

experimented for him-

vegetarian and otherwise, cooked

tradition of the Nietzsche- Archiv.

beck

an unworldly bachelor. There

of stories about his eccentricities.

with various 16

life as

not, of course, in the

was

at least as

in the Life,

II,

61.

good Over-

See Bernoulli, Overbec^

und

NIETZSCHE

44 self,

ate

raw

and doctored himself with a

food,

fine array of

medicines. His letters are full of complaints about nausea, head-

He

ache, sleeplessness.

work

estimates he

is

incapacitated for normal

nearly two-thirds of the time. Traveling seems to bring

him some

and returning to Basle to work almost always him on a particularly bad spell. Wilamowitz's attack

starts

made him

relief,

ill.

Wagner's growing preoccupation with the Bay-

reuth scheme affected his health unpleasantly. In general,

when

or rather, fell more he didn't get what he wanted, he fell ill conspicuously ill. This is by no means an uncommon form of

behavior

among human

beings,

and not in

itself

an indication

of genius.

The Nietzsche adoring

of these years, clear even in the pages of his

sister, still

clearer in his correspondence

beck's recollections,

is

a figure rather

in Over-

more unpleasant than

pathetic, a vain, touchy, prematurely old tric,

and

young man, an eccen-

querulous hypochondriac, a preacher unheard, a writer

unread and soured. Yet

shift the

emphasis ever so

slightly,

a quite different figure emerges, the poet tortured by

man, Prometheus exposed not only

and

God and

to the vultures, but to the

myriads of biting insects, a noble soul ripened by martyrdom. So Nietzsche later regarded himself, and so his followers still regard him. At any

rate,

essential to his mission. little

it

was a martyrdom, and

As martyrdoms

go,

it

as such quite

now

seems a

inglorious, even shabby. Psychiatry, above all in the sim-

plified

forms with which

it

has penetrated to popular conscious-

been hard on martyrs. Nietzsche obviously had forty different kinds of inferiority complex. ness, has

THE PROFESSOR

45

IV

One

series of gestures

Nietzsche did make, in the middle

towards reconciling his sense of mission mission to do something great, mission to reform the universe with

seventies,

his position as a university professor.

He

projected

tures,

then as essays, a

issues

which, as editorial writers like to put

kind.

Of

series of discussions

these, four longish essays

on it,

first as lec-

all

the great

confront

were actually written, and

published between 1873 and 1876 under a

title officially

lated in the English edition of Nietzsche's

works

out of Season: the untranslatable

gemdsse Bctrachtungen,

may

man-

German

as

trans-

Thoughts

original,

Unzcit-

be roughly given as Considera-

tions contrary to the Spirit of the Age. In these essays praising

an educator, damning the philistine and complacent rationalism of the famous Strduss of The Life of Jesus, worrying about the deadening effect of our modern interest in

Schopenhauer

history

as

on our energies and

originality, praising

Wagner

in

Bayreuth, Nietzsche conscientiously carries out the promise of his title. Everything is wrong in the nineteenth century. The

age

materialistic, vulgar, corrupt, leveling all distinction of

is

mind

or spirit in a democratic tyranny,

and

so

on

tzsche's tone

in a vein familiar is

and omniscient.

much

very It is

century Americans,

doomed

nowadays

to extinction

to everyone.

Nie-

assured, very superior, very earnest

a tone recognizable

among whom

it is

enough

for twentieth-

rather oddly

known

as

"liberal."

These thoughts were apparently a little too far out of season. They were not appreciated save by the now narrowing circle of Nietzsche's own friends. The philologists no longer even

NIETZSCHE

46

bothered to attack the young professor. The Germans, after 1870, felt pretty much in tune with the times. They didn't even listen to

Nietzsche as he urged them to gather behind

him and

go somewhere Bismarck couldn't possibly lead. But not only was Thoughts out of Season a failure. The one great corporate effort into which the young man had put the devouring enthusiasm of his ambition was turning out badly.

Wagner was

going wrong; he was succeeding.

The composer had long wanted

to build a center

wherein his

the complete and reverent

music-dramas could receive

per-

formance impossible in theatres built for the limited operas of Gluck and Mozart. It was not fitting, indeed it was hardly possible, to present

Gotterddmmerung

Cost fan tutte. In the 1870*5, he finally

in a setting

set seriously to

ultimately supplied by the

for

work on what

became the shrine of Bayreuth. The money

the undertaking

meant

essential to

mad King

of

Wagner at first tried to raise by an appeal to his an devotees, appeal conducted with a very modern apparatus Bavaria

of publicity, meetings, committees, a "campaign," in short.

Nietzsche, high in the esteem of the Master, was given an

important place in the campaign. His essay on "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth," included in Thoughts out of Season, was originally

campaign

literature,

though in the three years or so

was being put together, it lost a bit of its early freshness. Nietzsche was chosen to write a particularly important piece of publicity, a direct appeal for funds. His draft was severely it

criticized

by

who found it better philosophy was cast aside as much too high-falutin',

his co-workers,

than advertising. It and Nietzsche received another of the innumerable wounds he collected all his life

with

profit, if

not with pleasure.

RICHARD AND COSIMA WAGNER From

a photograph, 1870

THE PROFESSOR More and more people kept

Wagner, They were noble, snobbish, vulgar, worldly. They did not seem to

rich,

find

47

discovering

at all superior to the Spirit of the

Wagner

not, unless they

had happened

him

edy, think of

to glance at

as Dionysos.

They did

The

Age. They did Birth of Trag-

not, in fact, often

Herr Nietzsche. They took up most of Wagner's time. The Master not only did not mind them: he seemed to like

notice

them. They were helping him build Bayreuth.

Bayreuth was built, and in 1876 the first of the festivals opened with performances of the whole Ring of the Nibclungen. Nietzsche could hardly refuse the invitation to be an honored

He

guest.

came, and was

lost in the press of visitors.

Bayreuth

was no Heavenly City: it was already no more than a summer 17 Nietzsche took ill, and went off to resort, a watering-place. the quiet

woods

of near-by

face the dress rehearsals

operas.

He

with

The

it.

Klingenbrunn

to get strength to

and formal performances of the four

returned to Bayreuth but could not dress rehearsals

were enough.

go through been look-

He had

ing for some supreme, unearthly experience, some touch of eternity.

My breast,

He

found himself looking

blunder was

this.

I travelled to

and was thus doomed

The preponderance

at

Grand Opera.

Bayreuth with an ideal in

my

to experience the bitterest disappointment.

of ugliness, grotesqueness

and strong pepper

thor-

18 oughly repelled me.

After Nietzsche's sudden departure from the triumph of the first season of Bayreuth, his friendship with Wagner died a lingering death, beyond the

power of Elizabeth, who retained

an innocent German love of Wagner's music, to keep 1T The Case * The Case

of

Wagner,

Postscript.

of Wagner, Selected aphorisms,

i.

alive.

NIETZSCHE

48

They never

really

met again on the old

terms. Nietzsche said

unkind things about the Master: but he did not as yet print them. It had always been an unstable friendship, for both men were

and ternperamentvoll Germans both lacked most even of the purely outward restraints

egotists, intellectuals,

that

is,

that

keep

men from

behaving

like game-cocks.

materialist alike, to suppose that to the exclusion of ideals, or ests.

Friendship, notably,

based on

by

is

On

Nietzsche's

means lacked the impulcommon to idealist and

part, certainly, the relation had by no sion of high ideals. It is a mistake,

men

are driven by interests

ideals to the exclusion of inter-

a relation

much

such abstract distinctions as that

too solid to be

between

ideals

and

interests. felt that Wagner at Bayreuth had some ideal he had at Triebschen promised to great betrayed serve. What is more important, Nietzsche really felt that the

Nietzsche, then, really

music-dramas were unsatisfactory, that for him

at least they

unlocked no pent-up Dionysian ecstasy. That he also felt neglected, that he was jealous, that his old fear of the press of people came back on him in crowded Bayreuth, that he was not shining in this Germany of Richard Wagner surely such considerations can but add to the depth and honesty, as well as to the completeness, of his revulsion sos.

Even

from Wagner-Dionyhad hinted

in 1872, in the Birth of Tragedy, he

that Nietzsche-Apollo

was needed

to

make

a

new

Hellas of

Germany.

The revulsion led him, as such revulsions have often led German intellectuals, to France. Those who construct periods in

Nietzsche's

Wagner

life

and works discern

period a second or

which he was

critical

and

after

his

first

or

rational period, for

in part prepared by careful reading of Montaigne,

THE PROFESSOR Pascal,

49

La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, Stendhal and

other

masters of French prose. In his travels he had met a bright young Jewish intellectual, Dr. Paul Ree, who prided himself

on a cynical realism

in the study of

fashionable, he thought,

among

foil for

over Wagner. Other

a realism never

such sentimental

the Germans. Ree was undoubtedly a

proved a good

men,

idealists as

tenth-rate figure, but

he

Nietzsche emerging from his disillusion

new

faces

came

into Nietzsche's circle as

he withdrew from Basle and entered the cosmopolitan group that shuttled

among

them was Peter

of

name

Swiss and Italian pensions and

known by

Kosselitz, better

villas.

his

One

assumed

of Peter Cast, an undistinguished musician devoutly

immersed

in his art, a

German

plunged, as only Germans can

be plunged, in what he thought was soul, a born disciple. Another

Italy,

an

arty, sensitive

was Mathilda von Meysenbug,

an incredibly innocent old lady, a close friend of the Wagners, a collector of experiences and geniuses, a sort of spiritual, or possibly only

In these

German, Madame de Warens.

new

of aphorisms

surroundings, Nietzsche put together the series which he published in 1878 under the title of

Human, All Too Human. It was dedicated to Voltaire. For the German Wagner, who had just published in Parsifal his reconciliation with priestly Christianity, and who had hated the French since his failure at Paris, this It

was indeed an

insult.

was, in a sense, Nietzsche's declaration of independence. not only independence of Wagner. It was also a declara-

And

tion of independence

Nietzsche was

from

the professorate.

One

year later,

he was barely occuwas a career which, The free to undertake pying. professor even in twentieth-century America, is commonly regarded as a

bit

officially retired

from

unacademic: that of the prophet.

a post

CHAPTER

III

THE PROPHET in 1880

had twenty years of

life

ahead of

him: a decade of extraordinarily active writing in which NIETZSCHE all his

greatest

works were composed, and another decade of

complete invalidism, the hopeless isolation of the incurably insane. The marvellous decade of the i88o's in Nietzsche's life

and admirers

with great moments, inspired with the high, tragic contrast between the petty details

is

for his disciples

of his apparent

To

life

filled

and the god-like grandeur of

the unconverted, blind to this real

life,

his real

life.

his only too apparent

not without elements of comedy. Financially, at least, Nietzsche never sank into picturesque want, and the impression current in the 1890*8 that he had, like

life is

all

the really great geniuses of art and

as well as scorned,

is

not true.

letters,

been "penniless"

His Basle pension of 3,000

would go in America he this add about as and could much again from his to today; mother. For a single man, $3,000 a year is far indeed from

Swiss francs went

It

poverty.

some

permitted Nietzsche, not luxury and display, but

of the subtle

that gave

perhaps as far as $1,500

little

him such

indulgences in food, clothes, and books

aristocratic satisfaction.

No

doubt

it

was

an income unworthy of a Polish nobleman. Poor Nietzsche, even here, was at a level well below his estimate of himself. He was, in

fact, that characteristic

figure, the rentier

nineteenth-century, middle-class

the petit rentier, at that.

THE PROPHET

51

Freed from any settled obligations, he could live where he to. His great decade was spent mostly in Italy and in

wanted

Switzerland, with a few brief

visits

Germany. In

to

Italy,

where he spent the long winters, he never quite found the perfect spot. One season he had earlier spent at Sorrento, along with others

as a

member

and here he had 1877.

of Mathilda

von Meysenbug's manage, with

his last constrained interview

After that he stayed alone, with occasional

friends like Peter Cast or

from

Lake Maggiore, and various Genoa, Nice France, and

his sister.

He

Wagner visits

in

from

tried Stresa

on

places along the Riviera, Rapallo,

the latter at that time but recently annexed to still

in

many ways

Italian.

His

last

winter before

breakdown he spent at Turin, where he seemed very conWherever he went in Italy, he tried to settle down for

his

tented.

house, eating about in

room

some quiet boarding inexpensive restaurants, walking, com-

part of the season at least, taking a

in

posing, lying in the sun.

In Switzerland he returned time and again to the Engadine, l He a region which he used to say "gave me back my life."

went there

from

valesce

a

had signalized the

little

with his

first

sister in

more than

the

summer

of 1879, to con-

usually severe bout of illness

his last days as a professor.

village of Sils-Maria,

which

Later he settled in

from which he took long walks

through the high valley of the Inn. The piety of the Nietzscheans has associated Nietzsche with the Engadine as Words-

worth

is

Concord.

associated with the

A

District, or

monument now marks

Silvaplana, not

beyond

Lake

far

Man and

from

Surlei,

Thoreau with

the spot on the lake of

where, "six-thousand feet

Time," Nietzsche was struck with the idea

1

Forster-Nictzschc, Nietzsche,

II,

67.

NIETZSCHE

52

of eternal recurrence, "the highest formula of affirmation that

can ever be achieved."

Engadine of

No

doubt that Nietzsche loved the

his day, before St.

able a center;

him

2

no doubt

that

to the sustained effort

its

Moritz had become too fashioncool, clear air

needed for

his

and quiet helped work. But Thus

Spafe Zarathustra is only incidentally a book to be associated with a place. Nietzsche's thoughts were spun out in an at-

mosphere far more rarefied than that at six thousand feet. He a philosopher to notice the or too orthodox was too good save his as they got into his moods. facts of environment, petty

He hated cold, dampness, dark, and loved the sunshine and clear air. He was lucky in the Engadine and in the Riviera but you ;

would not learn much on Nietzsche's works.

about those regions

if

you

relied solely

3

In some ways, Nietzsche's health did improve in these years. His correspondence is always spotted with complaints about his health: "It has

been

except for ten days,

my

gloomiest and unhealthiest winter,

which were

just

enough

to

allow of

my

doing something [writing on Thus Spake Zarathustra} that 4 His makes up for all my days of sadness and ill health." and about and this headaches time, sleeplessness continued; according to his

sister,

he began

to take a mysterious

mixture

she calls the "Javanese sedative." Podach, the most sensible of those

who

have written about Nietzsche's

diseases, has

about the very existence of this sedative,

doubts

which he thinks

Elizabeth brought forth as a rebuttal to the unpleasant rumors

Homo, "Thus Spake Zarathustra," "He could do an occasional descriptive Human, "The Wanderer and his Shadow," *Ecce

i.

piece,

295.

as

Human,

in

with a lake and pines, he ends with Epicurus. Gesammelte Briefe, V, part II, 507. To his sister, April

starts 4

All

Too

But even here, though he 27, 1883.

THE PROPHET

53

about her brother's syphilis. Even Nietzsche's doses of chloral,

Podach argues, are, to take him at his own word, by no means 5 heroic, and can hardly have seriously undermined his health. That Nietzsche suffered

real pain there

can be no doubt; but

he was also a hypochondriac, that he was proud of his sufferings, that he loved to complain of them, is also undeniable. He complained almost as much about the way he was dethat

serted by his fellows, about his lack of friends, about the absence in his life of the love so necessary to the genius.

Naturally,

Elizabeth got the brunt of these complaints. So far

as friendship is concerned, I have, in fact, altogether managed forego a good deal. ... In the deeper sense I have no comrades no one knows when I need comfort, encouragement, or a (Genossen)

to

grip of the hand. a right to it

wreak

.

its

consolation, pity,

the fate of such

Yet with

.

.

And

if I

complain, the whole world thinks

it

has

power upon me as a sufferer: they call and so forth. But this has always been

petty sense of

good advice,

men

all his

as

I.

6

complaining, he somehow contrived health And as time goes on, he complains a

enough

to write books.

bit less,

even admits that he

there

the touch of exaggeration, the tension of the extreme,

is

somewhat

feels

better.

the queer instability rarely absent in Nietzsche's

life.

Here, too,

He

never

seems to write quietly, dutifully, and dully: he is always in ecstasy, always panting. As madness approaches, the feeling of euphoria is plain. As far back as Zarathustra, he had felt the divine touch.

A

He had written

under revelation.

tremendous pitch which sometimes seeks relief in a perfect ecstasy, with the most distinct consciousness of an endless number of delicate shocks and thrills to one's very toes; joy, strained to a

a flood of tears

"Podach, Nictzsches Zusammenbruch *Gesammelte Brieje, V, part II, 541.

y

25-28.

To

his sister,

August, 1883.

NIETZSCHE

54

a feeling of happiness, in which the most gloomy and painful feelings act, not as a contrast, but as something expected and inevitable, as an essential coloring within such an overflow of light; an instinct for rhythm that bridges tion.

I

wide gulfs of form.

of years before we 7 as well."

.

.

.

This

is

my

experience of inspira-

we

have no doubt that

should have to go back many thousands could find anyone who would dare say to me: "It is

mine

was a strange

It little

life,

and Nietzsche must have seemed

among whom

people

he moved

to the

the hotel-keepers, the

chambermaids

most extraordinary fellow. Unfortunately, such people rarely write their memoirs. A few observations from a concierge or a waiter might throw waiters, the porters, the

light

on Nietzsche

in

ways

a

that have not occurred to the high-

minded and highly educated people who have written about him. With his eyeglasses, his mustaches, his height and his brownness, he must have been to his Italian hosts the clumsy

German,

stupid

and

exploitable.

He

was absent-minded,

shy,

not given to scraping casual acquaintances, fond of mooning about alone. Under inspiration, he could talk to himself, compose aloud, even in Genoa. He looked like a German professor, which, in a sense, he never ceased to be. But, even at the end in

Turin he kept himself

neat, well-dressed, almost, in a con-

sciously careless way, dandyish.

a

somewhat bewildered

Eccentric, he never quite lost

dignity: he never wholly looked the

crank.

II

There

is

not

detail of his T

much

use trying to follow Nietzsche in the

wanderings during

this decade,

nor in trying to

Written in 1888, and quoted in Forster-Nietzsche, "Nietzsche,

II,

155-156.

THE PROPHET trace the ups

there

is

and downs

one phase of

man, and

of his health

55

and

his friendships.

8

But

his relations to his fellows so characteristic

worth dwelling upon. As at Triebschen, it is a triangular relation, and as at Triebschen, it is a tragi-comic idyll. The figures were Nietzsche, Paul Ree, of the

so illuminating, that

and a young and very

it is

intellectual Jewish girl, Russian

or

by nationality, Mile. Lou Salome. The three in the circle of Mathilda von Meysenbug. Lou was a girl, with literary and philosophical aspirations and

rather, Finnish

met

first

precocious

T

tew more ordinary, if not more the feminine, aspirations. She was chaperoned

most probably specifically

word

also with a

by a not too clearly designing mother. The interplay of emotion among the three is most complicated and confused, and has not been cleared up very satisfactorily is

a bit strong

by the letters, confessions, and memoirs of the participants, 9 and the debates of Nietzsche's biographers and hagiographers. Nietzsche certainly saw in tender, respectful disciple,

"she confided to

ler

Lou

a

prospective disciple, a

cwig weibliche. When, writes And-

him her

intention of sacrificing her

life to 10

At Truth, he recognized in her a predestined companion." any rate, he made her a formal proposal of marriage, to be delivered through Ree. uncertain.

That Lou was

Whether Ree

delivered

also interested in Ree,

it

or not

have found rather easier to get along with than Nietzsche, 'This

is

is

whom she must is

done, moreover, in very great detail in Andler, Nietzsche, IV,

and rather more rapidly

in Forstcr-Nietzsche, Nietzsche,

II.

*C. A. Bernoulli, "Nietzsches Lou Erlebnis." I,

is

perhaps the most sensible account.

tragiquc," Nietzsche^

III,

280-306,

academic, and maudlin. 10

Andler, Nietzsche, IV, 284.

is

Raschers Jahrbuch (1910), Andler's chapter, entitled "Idylle

astonishingly sentimental, at once French,

NIETZSCHE

56 certain.

She seems

keeping both

men

Nietzsche's

and Lou

have found a very natural pleasure in

dangling for a while.

Lou went

to the proposal. visit

to

sister.

No

In the

summer

lived together for six

weeks

pursuit of truth. Nietzsche, already

and then

to

of 1882, Nietzsche, Ree,

at

Leipzig in a

warned by

Lou had been

came

reply ever

off to visit Ree's family,

common

his sister,

when

whose

she found

first good impressions of the girl actually thought the philosopher rather funny at times,

altered

have unpleasant suspicions. He caught Lou and Ree whispering together; he found their language unpleasantly

began

to

familiar.

The manage

h trots broke up, and back

home

in

Naumburg

with mother and letters

sister, Nietzsche began writing reproachful to Lou. She hadn't lived up to her promise to sacrifice

herself to Truth.

She was irreverent, light-headed, even in the 11 In his last letter to her he wrote:

presence of Zarathustra.

have never yet made a mistake about any human being, and in you recognize that impulse towards a sublime selfishness which is an inI

I

stinctive obedience to the highest law.

made you confound

it

with

its

the cat, that_wants nothing but

Not

Some

curse or other,

opposite, the selfishness life.

Now

this feline

it

and

egotism

seems, has rapacity of .

.

.

a lover's letter: not, at any rate, an accepted or an accept-

able lover's letter.

held Ree guiltless of treachery or betrayal. reflection, grim, painful chewing over his grievances, with

Nietzsche

But

at first

the help of Elizabeth

who

did not like Ree, and of Mathilda

von Meysenbug, whose carelessness let Nietzsche see a letter from Lou's mother complaining that the now altogether too emancipated young lady had been living with Ree in Berlin, u

Quoted

in Forster-Nietzsche, Nietzsche,

II,

140.

all

THE PROPHET

57

pointed to Ree. Nietzsche decided he had been duped and insulted. He drafted a letter to Ree, a very strong letter though the one he actually sent

may have been

milder:

I should very much like to give you a lesson in practical morality with the help of a few bullets. Perhaps, if I am lucky, I shall manage to make for this you give up occupying yourself with morality once for all

occupation needs clean hands, Herr Dr. Ree, not muck-raking fingers like yours!

12

This, even though

would seem

it

came from

Perhaps Ree was not duel was never fought.

There are some things

unamusing

episode.

mistress of Ree; she

Lou

pen of a German

professor,

Perhaps Nietzsche never sent the

to call for a duel.

letter.

the

easily insulted.

fairly clear in this

At any

unlovely but not

possibly, even probably,

was almost

rate, the

became the

certainly never the mistress of

Nietzsche. Elizabeth, jealous of her brother, and inclined

al-

ready to anti-semitism, interfered deliberately and sharpened

antagonisms that might have tapered off into forgetfulness. But Nietzsche himself appears almost incredibly inept and emotionally immature.

Perhaps the philosopher-prophet was

too

commerce

good

for the earthly

unfortunate, however, that he

felt

of love

and friendship.

It is

obliged to attempt a course

much more difficult than putting words together Nietzsche nicely. simply could not, by this time, leave the private world he was building for himself, and move about of action so

with people who occasionally, and even habitually, take the world as they find it. Nietzsche could never relax; he could liardly expect to love.

The

I

episode confirmed

him

in his self-righteousness, in his

M Forster-Nietzschc, 'Nietzsche,

II,

176.

NIETZSCHE

58

and hatred of everybody

fear

own

his determination to build his

and

even Elizabeth

else

private

in

world into some-

thing colossal, overpowering. It may have helped to shake his already badly shaken nervous system. It must have increased the feeling of personal inferiority for which his writings are

^sometimes an almost absurdly simple form of compensation: Every defamation, every misunderstanding has made me more free: I less and less from humanity, and can give it more and more. The

want

severance of every individual

grows

in

tie is

hard to bear, but

in each case a

wing

13

its

place.

Adler and Jung and Freud are hardly necessary here: almost any kind of life is clinical experience enough to give an understanding of such a case. Even Nietzsche himself could have

understood

in another.

it

Ill

This

is

written

the decade

when

Nietzsche's best

though "written"

is

known books were

a modest, routine

Nietzsche himself regarded as a cosmic process.

them

in

all

sorts of places

and

word

for

what

He composed

in all sorts of conditions

sitting on the sea-shore near Genoa, strolling the back-ways of Nice, striding in ecstasy by Lake Silvaplana, hunched near-

sightedly over a table in a dozen rooming-houses.

was

to think out the matter occupying his

His habit

mind while he was

walking; in times of great excitement he could walk for hours at a rate apparently quite inconsistent with his invalidism.

Back

in his

room, he would put

his thoughts together in a series

of aphoristic passages, or in a short chapter. a "

few weeks, of

these erratic efforts

u Forster-Nietzsche, Nictzschf,

II,

181.

A few days, at most

would exhaust

his strength.

THE PROPHET

59

Headaches, sleeplessness, and chloral would follow, until calm returned, and inspiration began again

The books he wrote under not systematic, orderly

and

lesser thoughts,

wearing course.

its

these conditions were naturally

They were

treatises.

collections of great

beaded together on the string of Nietzsche's have inevitably found a higher unity,

Critics

temperament.

indeed, several higher unities, in his work. But on the surface

and

surfaces are important

form and

continuity.

except in small doses, devotion.

14

He

book of Nietzsche's lacks

a

He

is

always a

bit out of breath.

he

is

likely to

weary readers

repeats himself perhaps

only more obviously

than

usual

is

more

And, short on

often

perhaps

among more formal

philosophers.

We shall have to return to this problem of how far Nietzsche's work holds

together.

Here we

are concerned with the cata-

by a publisher's no doubt confined standards, successful books. His Birth of Tragedy and logue of his books.

They were

not,

Thoughts out of Season had been published by E. of Leipzig,

Wagner's own

recommended All

Too

as

Human

publisher, to

one of the inner

whom

W.

Fritsch

he had been

Wagnerites.

Human,

was not the kind of book Fritsch

dealt in.

circle of

Nietzsche transferred his patronage to Schmeitzner of nitz, who continued to publish for him down to 1884.

Chem-

When

Wagner's death, consolidated his list and took back Nietzsche's books, there were still "62 hundredweight" Fritsch, after

of these earlier writings unsold. lishers,

nagging them

"Ovcrbeck himself friend wrote.

"

15

Nietzsche was hard on pub-

over details of printing,

always unsatis-

notes the limitations of the "books of aphorisms" his

Bernoulli, Qvcrbec\

Forster-Nietzschc, Nietzsche,

und II,

Nietzsche,

267.

I,

228.

NIETZSCHE

60 fied

with

sales

natural slaves

and promotion, convinced that publishers were and herd-men who owed their unnatural power

over authors to the perverse structure of nineteenth-century

In 1884, after years of wrangling with his publishers and after finding it very hard if not impossible to get a new

society.

he decided to have Part IV of Zarathustra printed and

one

published at his

own

Beyond Good and Evil was

expense.

so

published in 1886, and all the rest of his works to the end of his sane life. The great man was reduced to the expedient of buy-

ing his

way

among his Human,

into print.

The

swinish public wouldn't even root

pearls.

All Too

published in 1878, inaugurates a series of books which clearly belong together. All are frankly aphoristic, modeled as to form on the great French aphorists like

Human,

La Rochefoucauld. They

men and

are collections of thoughts

morals, at once chaotic and encyclopaedic.

somewhat

in tone, but they are

called "the free spirit"

all

anti-intellectual,

contemptuous of the plush many, sure that most men are tic,

who

are wise.

They

expressions of

They

on

vary

what Nietzsche

but also anti-roman-

civilization of Bismarck's

Ger-

unsure as to

just

are part of the field of belles lcttrcs\

had

fools,

but

still

Nietzsche never written anything more, he would certainly not be known as a philosopher, but at most as a German imitator of the

French

aphorists.

Human, All Too Human was followed in 1881 by The Dawn of Day and in 1882 by The Joyful Wisdom. These are the books that celebrate Nietzsche's emancipation

from teaching and

his

smiling Italy, free of damp, beer, corsetry, Protestantism, and Wagner's music. The Joyful the Provencal gai sabery the Wisdom is or aspires to be discovery of Italy

sunny,

classic,

THE PROPHET

6l

flashing southern wit, never morose, never befuddled with

metaphysics, but capable of tragic depth and penetration. Both

books are more cheerful than

Human,

All

Too Human,

bitterly critical of life as ordinary people live

modeled on French

patterns.

They

it,

less

less

closely

are Nietzsche's best-tem-

pered books.

While they were being

written, Nietzsche

was meditating

much grander things. He was not going to content himself with being a German Montaigne, resigned to writing wisely and still

skeptically about a

world he could not change. He was Thoughts out of Season, had really

the Nietzsche who, in

change the German season. After all, there were a lot of clever writers in the world, even in the i88o's, and the world

hoped

to

wasn't very clearly the better for their being in

wanted was someone

of the

stamp

it.

What was

of the great religious leaders,

Buddha, Zoroaster, Jesus, Mohammed, but someone who could do the job much better than they had done. Nietzsche thustra:

set

himself up as prophet in Thus Spa\e Zara-

A Boo\ for All and None, published in four short parts

between 1883 and 1885. The book is in form no more unified than all his other books after The Birth of Tragedy. It is a collection of parables, sermons, is,

no doubt

and

reflections, written in

justly, called poetic prose,

what

and giving an account of

the mission of Zarathustra to pave the

way for the coming of the Superman. Zarathustra has no more than the name in common with his historical original, Zoroaster, and is as much nineteenth-century Nietzsche as the Persians, Hottentots, or

Hurons taire,

of eighteenth-century letters

or Diderot.

The

throughout is exceedingly elevated; without his "saith," and "thou" and

style

Zarathustra would be lost

were Montesquieu, Vol-

NIETZSCHE

62

without his exclamation points. In English translation he sounds very pseudo-biblical, like the King James

"ye," helpless

version gone wrong,

and almost

inevitably suggests the literary

style of the angel Moroni, as transcribed by another

and

less

highly educated prophet, Joseph Smith. Indeed, Thus Spakf Zarathustra has become, for a certain type of half-educated intellectual throughout the world, a kind of Enchiridion.

This

is,

Thus Spa\e Zarathustra

Nietzscheans,

Nietzsche himself was of Zarathustra," he

this opinion.

said, "I

tinues, it is

an undoubted master-

"Whenever

I

dip into

walk up and down my room

my

half-an-hour, unable to repress

"The

is

depth and dignity to none.

piece, a sacred writing inferior in

my

For the

of course, the report of an unbeliever.

figure of Zarathustra

is

sobs."

And

for

his sister con-

the poet's highest creation,

a type of feternal beauty, of a divine transfiguration of the

world

it is

Whatever

its

of the flesh

16

Superman himself." probably, depth and beauties

the

is

depth and beauties an enigmatic work. Nietzsche seems

so limited, because of

Thus Spake Zarathustra

is

world

since the

its

pretty clearly to have set himself next the deliberate task of

bringing

it

down

to earth, of

expounding

analytically

plain prose the elevated obscurities that give the

hold on the seeker. result

book

and

its first

After the Word, comes exegesis.

was two books which,

to

many

in

The

limited intellects outside

the circles of convinced Nietzscheans, are his masterpieces:

Beyond Good and

Evil, published in 1886,

and The Genealogy

of Morals, published in 1887, an Part

II,

chap, xxxix, "Poets."

all

3;

that of a

"'Reason* in

NIETZSCHE

76

German

intellectual of the late nineteenth century, his ideas

have in part an origin in the books other men wrote. He did, indeed, transmute those ideas in the process of working them

mind

over in his

or his consciousness, or his temperament,

or his will, or whatever else you like to call

Nietzsche.

What came

though not quite

Many

what was

peculiarly

out of the process was indeed original,

as original as Nietzsche liked to think.

scholars have devoted themselves to the pleasant task

of tracing the affiliation of Nietzsche's ideas in the vast of ideas

which make up 4 There is, indeed,

civilization.

research.

than

network

the intellectual heritage of Western

We know

we do

perhaps

a

less

fundamental

difficulty in

such

about the inheritance of ideas

about biological inheritance. Thus, for instance,

Nietzsche's grand and much-prized conception of the "Eternal

Recurrence"

from the pure

which he considered absolutely unique, snatched air of the

Engadine

has

much

in

common

with notions prevalent in Eastern philosophy and theology, in Stoicism, and even in modern mathematical speculation. Yet

we

cannot say absolutely that he took it from any of these sources. He read much, if rather desultorily, in translations of

and commentaries on Indian and Persian philosophy. The name, at least, of Zarathustra he proudly borrowed from the East.

Greek philosophy he knew very well indeed. Of modern

mathematics he knew very little. It seems likely, then, that he built the Eternal Recurrence out of confused memories of his reading, fused together in the ecstasy of poetic composition, 4

As

a matter of fact, Charles Andler did the job so thoroughly that it The first of his six volumes is entirely devoted

hardly needs additional work. to Nietzsche's "precursors"

including Emerson,

who

wrote of the "Over-

Scattered through the other five volumes are notes on read, whom he talked to, what he talked about. soul."

what Nietzsche

WHAT

NIETZSCHE HATED

77

during which he could almost forget himself, to say nothing of others.

Nietzsche was trained as a his learning

of a later

was not

classical philologist,

and though

sufficient to satisfy the exacting standards

Wilamowitz, it remained as a solid background for his work. Greek and Latin he had mastered as a schoolboy,

philosophers and historians, as well as with the Greek dramatists, he had the kind of familiarity that

and with the cannot be

classical

easily

Nietzsche, like

acquired unless one begins as a schoolboy.

most lovers

of classical antiquity,

found what

with which to belabor his contemporaries. He found, especially among the Greeks before they were corrupted by Socrates-Plato, the Will to Power in all its fierce

he wanted there

a club

The Greeks, he insisted, were not the sober lovers of Golden Mean stuffy German academics found them to be, the rapt dawn-folk German romantics found them to be,

violence.

the

not

but energetic fighters, at once disciplined and furious. Burckhardt had helped him to this conception. Fancy judging the Greeks in the German style, from their philosophers; fancy using the suburban respectability of the Socratic schools as a key to what is fundamentally Hellenic! The philosophers are of course the decadents of Hellas, the counter-movement directed against the old tribe (against the agonal instinct, against the polls, against the value of the race, against the authority of tradition). 5

and noble

These old Greeks might almost have read Nietzsche, and joined the Nazi party.

Much more

Romans in Nietzsche's intellectual inheritance were the Germans among whom he was brought up. He had a good staple German 1

The Twilight

important than the Greeks and

of the Idols,

"Things

I

owe

to the Ancients,"

3

and

4.

NIETZSCHE

78

education in the Bible and Lutheran piety, in Goethe and Schiller, in the nineteenth-century romantics. Although he

turned against them in later

finding imperfections even wrong about the Greeks, and his life,

Goethe (the poet was all prose style was often heavy), their stamp was on him. Nietzsche had to the full that eternal German sense of cultural inferiority in

which appears as a perpetual striving, discontent, sense of imperfection and incompleteness. He turned in passage after passage to the dissection of this

"German

and

soul"

his

own.

For instance, of Die Meistersinger, something German in the best and worst sense of the word, something in the German style, manifold, formless, and inexhaustible; a German potency and superplenitude of soul, which is not afraid itself

under the raffincments of decadence

most

at ease there; a real,

at the

certain to hide

which, perhaps, feels itself token of German soul, which is the genuine

same time young and aged, too

ripe

and

yet

still

too rich in futurity.

This kind of music expresses best what I think of the Germans: they belong to the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow they have as yet no today?

Among

these

Germans, Schopenhauer and Wagner were

two great masters of the young Nietzsche, by his own admission, men who helped turn him from the safe paths of philology the

and delights of high thinking and strong feeling. or ingratitude noble detachment he damned

to the dangers

With them

A

truly

specifically afterwards:

number

of the higher

and better-endowed men

will, I hope, be able to get rid of their bad taste for affectation and sentimental darkness, and to turn against Richard

large

have in the end so

much

self-restraint as to

as much as against Schopenhauer. These two us ruin: they flatter our dangerous qualities. to ing

Wagner

*

Beyond Good and Evil "Peoples and Countries," y

Germans

A

240.

are lead-

stronger future

WHAT

NIETZSCHE HATED

his

younger days these two were

taught him

to distrust the comforts of logic

But in

his Masters.

something endless, which he was to spend his life trying to

describe.

They

in these

They

and common-sense, indefinable, and indescrib-

to seek refuge in able,

79

and Bismarck than

prepared for us in Goethe, Beethoven, 7 racial aberrations. is

did not

firmed his romanticism.

make him

He

limit, define,

and

a romantic, but they con-

shake off Schopenhauer's

tried to

pessimism, but succeeded only in calling it optimism. His his ideas on women, for inconcrete debt to Schopenhauer stance

remained very

great.

He

tried to

shake

off

confused bumbling by going to those masters of

Wagner's

clarity, the

French morcdistcs. Nietzsche learned

much from the French. He

did not need to

learn to write, for even as a schoolboy he could write a clear, impatient

German. But he learned

to write better, to

mould

a

sharper phrase, to twist suddenly into irony, to condense and to shade. His was still, however, a German style, full of striv-

ing and parentheses, and hitched to to

La Rochefoucauld and Beyle

all

for

the heavens.

German had much any-

an antidote

Gcmutlich}(cit and idealism, of which he never

He went

to

way, just as he went to Bizet for an antidote to Wagner's music. But an antidote is not in itself a form of nourishment, and in

"middle period" of aphoristic books like Human, All Too Human, and The Dawn of Day, he never attained the spite of his

sure

good judgment of the more serene

of his models, like

Montaigne, nor the delicate sensitivity of the more troubled, like Pascal. Proof of what he failed to get from the French is T

The Genealogy

of Morals, "Peoples

and Countries,"

12.

NIETZSCHE

8o

understand and appreciate the achievement of a Frenchman as Sainte Beuve, of whom he wrote,

his inability to

so final

naught of man spirits. He wanders

There virile

in

is

him, he

erratically:

is

he

full of petty spite is

towards

all

subtle, inquisitive, a little at bottom a woman, with

bored, forever with his ear to key-holes, all a woman's revengefulness and sensuality. ... In his fundamental instincts he is plebeian, and next of kin to Rousseau's resentful spirit:

consequently he

A man who

a Romanticist. 8

is

could write such perverse nonsense was hardly what is best of France. That phrase about

capable of learning "virile spirits"

some ways

And

a

even as

the stock

is

German

defense against France, in

good defense, but not a form of understanding. a defense, it has had its weaknesses in the past, and

will have

them

masculine

fire in

again.

What

Frenchmen

Nietzsche mistook for a lack of like Sainte

of tranquillity rarely attained by

by Nietzsche. Here,

Beuve

is

Germans, and

really a

certainly not

as so often, the labored originality

fierce individualism of

kind

and

Nietzsche turns out to be the old feeling

of the tribe.

Nietzsche got very little. He could French, in the original. not read as he could English well, He seems to have read little in translation, though as a good

From Anglo-Saxon thought

nineteenth-century intellectual he had picked up, if only from conversation and reviews, all the necessary names and tags. He

had what was

in the i88o's

among Germans

a

most foresighted

whom

he regarded as a shallow race incapable of philosophy and devoted to the decadent illusions of Trade and Science. He took out his dislike in epigrams dislike for the English,

which 8

are not

The Twilight

among

his best: "Carlyle, or

of the Idols, "Skirmishes in a

War

pessimism after

with the Age,"

3.

WHAT

NIETZSCHE HATED

8l 9

John Stuart Mill, or offensive lucidity." Of America he thought very little: we were too innocent to

undigested meals.

young man he had read Emerson in and he always thought more highly of him than count.

His

As

sister

a

read

him some

of

translation,

of Carlyle.

Mark Twain, whom he found

amusing and harmless. But on the whole, he liked

to think of

the Anglo-Saxon peoples as not really counting.

They were

numerous, and apparently

And

only the deep survive

ment

of the tribe again.

successful, but they lacked

or ought to survive.

Depth.

The

judg-

Like most "imaginative" writers who crusade against what they call science, Nietzsche had no first-hand acquaintance with any

scientific discipline.

He

was, however, too

much

a

child of the nineteenth century he loathed so vocally not to

dabble in writings about biology. He may have read Darwin in translation; at any rate he read enough about Darwin to

know

were wrong. Zarawas uninfluenced current doctrines of insisted, by evolution; the race of Supermen was not to come by any such that Darwin's theories of evolution

thustra, he

suspiciously British process as natural selection, but by a Dio-

nysian exercise of the Will to Power. In general, Nietzsche's reading and education, save for his brief apprenticeship in classical philology,

was

that of a serious

you prefer, a philosopher. In working up to the Antichrist he read widely in the history of religions, and

dabbler

or, if

especially in that of Christianity

but even here he neglected what

and is

its

Eastern antecedents;

perhaps the most important

*

The Twilight of the Idols, "Skirmishes in a War with the Age,** i. For a long and typical passage blaming England for "the European ignobleness, the plebcianism of

modern

ideas/' see

Beyond Good and

Evil,

253.

NIETZSCHE

82

part of the history of religions, institutional history.

contemptuous of the Middle Ages

Age

of Enlightenment,

and knew

as

He was

as

any philosopher in the of the actual workings

little

Such study he felt was unnecessary, and indeed harmful. History, as he explained in one of his first of the Mediaeval Church.

"On

the Use and Abuse of History" in Thoughts out can of Season, really tell us nothing important about the present, and can woefully distract us from the flashing sureness of

essays,

and

the play of instinct piece,

will. Nietzsche, especially in his

Beyond Good and

Evil,

pher's habit of taking the

was most

word

for the deed. Yet in his study

of Christianity he himself concentrated articulate

and

Christian

intellectual

avoided the difficult study of behave. Professional habit

is

master-

critical of the philoso-

on what the more

apologists

wrote,

and

how

ordinary Christians really strong, even among philosophers

with a hammer. II

From

all this

miscellaneous, but on the whole overwhelm-

and second-hand experience, Nietzsche many ways a unique and original inter-

ingly literary, abstract,

produced what pretation of It

was

not, as

we

unzcitgemass, as it

to be.

part of a

in

is

what must be grandly

meaning

of

life.

by any means an interpretation as contrary to the spirit of the age, as he believed shall see,

Indeed, Nietzsche's importance for us

movement among

temporaries which alism, a

called the

is

his contemporaries

is

that he

is

a

and near-con-

rather unfortunately called anti-intellectu-

movement which

is

in

some

sense at least as old as

Greek thought, but which in our time has taken on a complexity and a thoroughness perhaps new. Nietzsche belongs in

WHAT

NIETZSCHE HATED

83

the history of thought with Marx, Georges Sorel, Freud, Pareto,

and hundreds of semantics. His

lesser

work

men, down

mad

either the enfant terrible or the

or both. But he scorner of history

is

is

part of a

terly

we

theirs.

prophet of the

movement, and no

least,

him on

accept

from

He

is

movement

solitary.

This

a product of history.

Nietzsche himself, at if

to the latest popularizers of

in part differs greatly

could hardly complain too

own

his

bit-

grounds, and attempt

to

arrange his ideas according to a thoroughly anti-intellectualist scheme. shall attempt to see what he hated and what he

We

more

and perhaps misleading ones, to distinguish between the negative and the positive aspects of his work, between Nietzsche the destroyer and wanted; or to use

abstract terms,

Nietzsche the builder. Again, he has reputation as the "philosopher with a hardly object

if

we

concentrate at

regarded as his destructive labors. with what Nietzsche hated.

He

made himself so great a hammer" that he could

first

upon what he proudly

We shall begin appropriately

hated extensively and energetically, so that

distinguish

among

his hatreds.

One

of the

it

is

hard

to

most constant of

them, however, one which appears clearly in his very

first

a hatred for the tradition of

European rationalism. heroes one of the of that tradition, is for Socrates, great Nietzsche a villain. Before Socrates, the Greeks had been,

book,

is

according to Nietzsche, happy creatures of instinct and habit, fighters, revelers, builders, singers, "the men who fought at not to think Marathon." With Socrates they began to think as

healthy animals probably think, and as the old Greeks

thought, simply to find ways of getting what they wanted, getting

what

their wills

and

instincts

made them

strive for.

NIETZSCHE

84

about what they wanted! He carried the process a step farther, as far indeed as it can ever be carried, into the final abyss of the unconscious: he invented in his daemon an intellectualized perversion of Socrates actually told

them

to thinly

instinct:

This voice, wherever

mal nature

instinctive

it

comes, always dissuades. In this utterly abnorin order to hinder here and

wisdom only appears

there the progress of conscious perception. Whereas in all productive men it is instinct that is the creatively affirmative force, and consciousness

and dissuasively; with Socrates it is and consciousness that becomes creator

that acts critically

comes strosity

critic,

instinct that be-

a perfect

mon-

per dcjectum.

After Socrates and his pupil Plato, Nietzsche thinks, the way was open for the ravages of Christianity. Still other perversions

were indeed necessary

to

make

Christianity finally victorious,

but the basic perversion was achieved

when

the Greeks aban-

doned Dionysos for Apollo, Homer and Aeschylus for Socrates and Plato. In its more or less easily isolated form of rationalism, the Socratic virus has persisted

notably,

is

hardly more than

a

down

to

mass of

own

day. England,

infection,

with her Dar-

our

wins, Mills, and Herbert Spencers. But Nietzsche could find

which deadly rationalism almost everywhere he looked one of the comforts of hating. It was clear to him in the

this is

fashionable

David

critics of Christianity, in

Strauss,

who were merely

men

like

stuffier

Tom

Christians, ethical-

society bores without the capacity for mystic feeling

Christianity a touch of

life.

It

was even

clearer to

science, the devouring heresy of the age.

It

Paine and

was

which gave

him

in natural

clear too in the

absurd disguise of conventional philosophic idealism. 10

The

Birth of Tragedy, chap.

xiii.

Poor

WHAT

NIETZSCHE HATED

Hegel missed the Life Force by

at least as

85

much

as did

John Jumbled together in the minds of little men, the European herd-men who believed in science, progress, democracy, bigger and better things ahead, all these ideas were a sign Stuart Mill.

of the decadence of the age.

Nietzsche innocently called

it

decadence: his followers today repudiate the corrupt French

on the good German word Entartung. Nietzsche's hatred of rationalism, vigorous and clear

word and

insist

in his

seems to weaken in his "French" period, when he wrote Human, All Too Human, The Dawn of Day, and earlier writings,

The

Joyful

Wisdom.

Now

and then

in these

books he sounds

almost like a shallow Englishman. "The most important result of the past effort of

humanity

is

that

we need no

longer go about in continual fear of wild beasts, barbarians, gods, and our own dreams." n His prophetic gifts were in abeyance when he

wrote

aphorism; not only Hitler, but Freud escaped his Yet even in these books Nietzsche never really

this

foresight.

abandons

his anti-intellectualism.

non ridere, non

He comments

on Spinoza's

lugere, neque dete start, sed intelligere (not to

laugh, not to lament, nor to abhor, but to understand)

think that intelligere

something

is

something conciliating,

:

"We

and good, whereas it is

just

essentially antithetical to the impulses;

only a certain relation of the impulses to one another." And he adds, "Conscious thinking, and especially that of the philosopher, is the weakest, and on that account also relatively the mildest and quietest the philosopher of knowledge." 11

"

mode

of thinking;

who is most 12

The Dawn of Day, The Joyful Wisdom,

5.

334.

and thus

it is

precisely

easily misled concerning the nature

NIETZSCHE

86 In his

last

years,

this

hatred for traditional rationalism

reaches the pitch of obsession, and he repeats over and over again, sometimes in an involved style

philosopher, what Thomas Hardy

worthy of any German

said so simply: thought

is

a

disease of the flesh. docs not suffice for you to sec in what ignorance man and beast live; you must also have and learn the desire for ignorance. It is necessary that you should know that without this form of ignorance life It

now

itself would be impossible, that it is merely a vital condition under which, alone, a living organism can preserve itself and prosper; a great solid belt of ignorance must stand about you. 13

Zarathustra was

more eloquent and

abusive, as

is

fitting in a

poet:

For

that

fear

is

man's original and fundamental

feeling.

.

.

.

Such

prolonged ancient fear, at last become subtle, spiritual, and intellectual 1* at present, methinketh, it is called Science.

Science, then, that fine flower of the

Western mind,

is

for

but of a per-

Nietzsche really but a refinement of feeling

cunning and arms the weak against the strong. Darwin rightly saw that thought in this sense is an instrument making for survival; but

verse

form

of feeling, the fear

he was wrong in claiming that the survival of the

fit.

On

which makes

it is

for

an instrument making for

the contrary, "species

do not evolve

towards perfection: the weak always prevail over the strong simply because they are the majority, and because they are also the

more

15

crafty."

Will to Power, 609. For an example of Nietzsche at play like any other philosopher among Being and Becoming, see 617 of this same work. He is on the side of Becoming. 14

15

Thus Spafc Zarathustra, chap. Ixxv, "Science." The Twilight of the Idols, "Skirmishes in a War with

the Age,"

14.

WHAT

NIETZSCHE HATED

87

HI Nietzsche, then, rejected with contempt that current of Euro-

pean rationalism represented in

his time

by natural science and,

in ethics, political theory, philosophy in general,

by positivism,

materialism, empiricism, by the French philosophes and the

But he disliked quite as vigorously that strain in European rationalism which is usually labeled "idealism," a strain clear in the formal philosophy of Plato, the pupil English

utilitarians.

and fixed by Leibnitz and dominant form of German philosophy. In his

of the original rationalist, Socrates,

Kant

as the

on philosophic idealism, Nietzsche's hatred ripens into some of his most remarkable pages of criticism, pages which

attacks

ironically

foreshadow the attacks on philosophic idealism made

by such modern

scientists as Pareto.

We

can study best this

phase of Nietzsche's work in his famous comments on Kant in

Beyond Good and

Evil.

Kant, says Nietzsche, was proud of having

made what he

thought was a discovery, the existence in men of the faculty of synthetic judgment a priori. In other words, Kant, like Plato, was hunting for an absolute, a formula in words to which all

men would

showing

that

subscribe as the Truth.

He

had no trouble

in

sense-experience could not provide any such

eternal, changeless, absolute Truth,

that scientific laws

But he dug up an absolute

were not truths

in this sense.

words, where

can always be found.

it

and

in

"How

are synthetic judgments a priori possible?" Kant asks himself is really his answer? "By means of a means (faculty)" but unfortunately not in five words, but so circumstantially, imposingly,

and what

and with such display of German profundity and verbal flourishes, that one altogether loses sight of the comical niaiseric allemandc involved in

NIETZSCHE

88

An explanation ? Or is But is that an answer ? not rather merely a repetition of the question? How docs opium induce sleep? "By means of a means (faculty)" namely, the virtus dorsuch an answer.

.

.

.

it

mativa> replies the doctor in Moliere, est in

Quia Cujus

eo virtus dormativa

natura sensus assoupire. 1 *

est

Indeed, Nietzsche wrote as bitterly about idealists as he did

about everybody else. He is not always as good-tempered as in the above passage on Kant. In the midst of The Antichrist, for instance, he breaks out: I find the arrogant habit of the theologian among all who regard themselves as "idealists" all who, by virtue of a higher point of among

departure, claim a right to rise above reality and to look upon it with The idealist, like the ecclesiastic, carries all sorts of lofty suspicion. in his hand ( and not only in his hand!), he launches them concepts .

.

.

with benevolent contempt against "understanding," "the senses," "honor," "good living," "science"; he sees such things as beneath him, as pernicious

and seductive itself.

The their

up

forces over

which "the soul"

soars as a pure thing in

17

idealists, then,

own minds

a lot of nice

have, according to Nietzsche, fished in

really, in their

words

own

like "idea"

desires

and "the

and brought thing-in-itself."

Nietzsche occasionally admits that this process is even more delusive, even more remote from normal human experience,

than the processes of common-sense rationalism. Such philosophers let "conceptions, opinions, events, books" come between themselves and "things."

18

Nietzsche could even, in a

of apparent nihilism, admit that "will"

is

moment

only a word.

ia

Beyond Good and Evil, chap, " The Antichrist, 8. M

i,

11.

Thoughts out of Season, "Schopenhauer

10

See above,

p. 75.

as Educator," chap. vii.

19

But

WHAT this

NIETZSCHE HATED

89

Schopenhauer and others used the not Nietzsche's own precious Will to Power.

was no doubt "will"

word Here Nietzsche

as

rescues himself by a device central to

modern

We must not, he says, worry ourselves over

anti-intellectualism.

the problems raised by such

men

Kant.

as

of philosophy are simply insoluble.

The

classic

The "new"

problems

philosophers

world will not ask whether an opinion but whether it is useful or harmful.

so necessary to the

true or false,

The

falseness of an opinion

is

not for us any objection to

it:

it

is

is

here,

perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely. The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving;

perhaps species-rearing; and that the falsest opinions (to are the fictions,

we

are fundamentally inclined to maintain

which synthetic judgments a

priori belong)

most indispensable to us; that without a recognition of logical without a comparison of reality with the purely imagined world

of the absolute

and immutable

.

.

.

man

could not live

nunciation of false opinion would be a renunciation of life. To recognize untruth as a condition of life: that ideas of value in a dangerous

pugn the traditional phy which ventures and evil. 20

to

do

so,

life, is

that the rea negation of

certainly to im-

manner, and a philoso-

has thereby alone placed

itself

beyond good

Nietzsche does not, however, consistently accept his conclusion that idealism,

He

though

"false,"

is

"indispensable to us."

admits that such opinions as Kant's have a long history and

a "natural" origin, that they are a product of the philosopher's instincts, of physiological

traces

them

European

to a

demands

common

of

life.

He

even

peoples, a function of the prehistoric formation of

perhaps a lover, *

mode

origin in the language of Indo-

our vocabulary and grammar.

*

for a

and

Beyond Good and Beyond Good and

certainly

Evil, chap,

Evil, chap,

i, i,

21

no

But Nietzsche was a hater, skeptic. He is soon back in

4.

20.

NIETZSCHE

90 his old strain.

witch

it

"

'Reason' in language

has been!

I

we

fear

!

oh what a deceptive old

shall never be rid of

God,

so long

grammar." The idealists have really invented harmful fictions, and the age and long prevalence of these fictions is far from proof of their usefulness to us nowas

we

still

believe in

On the contrary, that we should so respect them is a sign

adays.

of our degeneracy, of our blind attachment to history, that

muse

of unprofitable illusions.

The

characteristics

with which

man

has endowed the "true Being"

things are characteristics of non-Being, of nonentity. The "true world" has been erected on a contradiction of the real world; and it is

of

indeed an apparent world, seeing that sion.

... To

whether

after the

in disguise),

is

it is

merely a moralo-optical deluand an "apparent" world,

divide the world into a "true"

manner

of Christianity or of

only a sign of decadence, a

It is significant

Kant

symptom

(after all a Christian

of degenerating

life.

22

that Nietzsche does not put the skeptic's

quotation-marks around "real world" in the above passage. fact is that, attack the idealists as he might, he could not

The

get over a certain fascination for them, notably for Plato

Spinoza.

He

wavered much, and

every point, to find

him

at

it is

some time

himself. But he rarely shows any

or empirical philosophers.

possible here, as

He

is

and

on almost

or other contradicting

sympathy with

materialistic

convinced there

world" beyond the lying evidence of the

senses,

is

a "real

beyond the

misleading organization scientific thought gives to the evidence of the senses. But he cannot accept for long the gentle, orderly

world of love and pity finding.

was M

a

He wanted

idealistic

philosophers always end by

something better

something more.

German.

The Twilight

of the Idols,

"

'Reason* in Philosophy,"

6.

He

WHAT

NIETZSCHE HATED

91

IV Nietzsche, then,

condemned both

him essentially bottom, both were merely more or less inboth were to

idealistic philosophical solutions:

intellectualist at

the materialistic and the

genious metaphysical dodging of a problem essentially moral: right conduct here and now. But he was at least as violent in

condemnation of a solution

many

modern

other

he, like the late Irving Babbitt

and

thinkers, always associated chiefly with

Rousseau. In spite of his frequent

damning

of "intellect," his

frequent praise of "instinct," "impulse," "nature," he insisted over and over again that he did not mean by any of these nice words what Rousseau and his followers seemed to mean by

them. "Rousseau, or the return to nature, in impuris naturali-

bus?

Significantly, the

from which

of Nietzsche's "impossible people"

drawn, ends with and unsubtle condemnation: "Zola, or the love

this malicious characterization is

a very earnest

of stinking."

The

list

28

Rousseauists, Nietzsche

felt,

preached that the lowest

and cheapest human feelings were the best guide to conduct. They appealed from reason to sentiment, and beyond sentiment to the deepest well-springs of desire in the

animal man, the

herd-man. They were

justified in attacking the silly

"right reason" of the philosophes

and the commonsense school;

plcbs, the

but they themselves fell into even sorrier depths when they appealed from reason and commonsense to common feeling.

Rousseau was

really the father of all the

worst modern heresies,

democracy, socialism, humanitarianism, pacifism (they had, of course,

*

many

mothers!).

The Twilight

He

and

his followers gave Christian-

of the Idols, "Skirmishes in a

War

with the Age,"

r.

NIETZSCHE

92 ity,

which had become

harmless,

and

if

mere

a

tradition,

and hence an almost

not actually beneficial, opiate for the people, a

baleful energy. This

man" and

new

new

political Christianity, this appeal

General Will, aspired to a world at best mere organized mediocrity, at worst a chaos of stupid to "natural

conflicts

To

his

among dog-men.

Nietzsche, Rousseau's influence was not at

all

limited to

the "romanticists" so labeled in our manuals of literary history,

but extended to "realists" as well. Zola was, in

fact, the foster-

son of Rousseau. Take away, as Rousseau preached and as our modern democracies have done, the restraints of convention

and

tradition, of a society organized hierarchically, feudally,

and

at least as

much

according to high aristocratic unreason as according to priestly reason, and you unchain, not the bright violence of the saving few, but the meagre ambitions or the

many. The old feudal sance successor did protect a few great

dirty lusts of the

society

souls

and

its

Renais-

and bodies, did

allow scope for a Frederick of Hohenstaufen, a Michelangelo, a Cesare Borgia. The new democratic society swamps all such great

spirits.

Nietzsche, like

many

another moralist, was not

sure whether democracy tended to produce a society flatly con-

forming

to the

dull mediocrity of the greengrocer's actual

madly pursuing the unpleasant extremes of sensual indulgence which he was sure were the greengrocer's

habits, or a society

not very secret desires. He seems to have felt that democracy could quite inconsistently be both things at once both an

organized mediocrity and a disorganized and very vulgar rout. We are in Nietzsche's mind on the brink of a volcano, and ready for several other cliches. Perhaps his general formula provided for a period of conformity and mediocrity, to be ended by the ratastrnnhir HiQinfeoratinn nf a snriefv in whirh mnral Hicri-

WHAT pline

had

NIETZSCHE HATED

93

so long lacked the sanction of true aristocratic leader-

on democracy are somewhat confused, are most of those of our prophets of doom. Needless to

ship. Nietzsche's attacks

but so

he had no first-hand knowledge of the working of a demoHis acquaintance with common men was limited

say,

cratic society. to waiters,

knew he

hotelkeepers and professors. All he

from newspapers, and introspection. Nietzsche's hatreds are hard to weigh. But Rousseauists

was

learned

his hatred for the

certainly one of his strongest. This romantic

opponent of the great tradition of European rationalism could not bear his fellow-romantics. His Will to Power, as befits a philosopher, was really a Will to Belief. Like most strong believers,

he hated heretics even more than unbelievers.

own

his

pope, and infallible.

It is

strange that so insistent a

psychologist as Nietzsche did not recognize this

Perhaps he did.

He was

He was

fond enough of

trait in

himself.

self-analysis,

and

could write that he too was a decadent, could confess that

"My

danger

is

the loathing of

mankind."

24

At any

rate, rail

against "reason" and "idealism" though he did, he could not bring himself to accept the simple alternative to these con-

emancipation of "natural" man, the "natural goodness of man," the "life of instinct." He wanted to say "Yea":

cepts, the

"Voluptuousness, passion for power, and selfishness: these three things have hitherto been best cursed, and have been in worst

and

falsest

well."

these three things will

repute

But he found himself saying "Nay":

of your doggish lust." lust.

Do we

Nothing *

Eccc

25

Good

weigh humanly

I

"I

am

distrustful

voluptuousness and doggish

hear echoes of the virtus dormativa?

in Nietzsche

Homo, "Why

I

am

is

harder to expound than his position

a fatality,"

6;

The Case

of

Wagner,

preface.

NIETZSCHE

94

on

His range

this old question of "reason" versus "instinct."

with his immediate polemical purpose. He can be quoted, as Lutheran divines have discovered, in an edifying vein: varies

To cling to life, blindly and madly, with no other aim, to be ignorant of the reason or even of the fact, of one's punishment, nay, to thirst after this is it as if it were a pleasure, with all the perverted desire of a fool what it means to be an animal. If universal nature leads up to man, it is to show us that he is necessary to redeem her from the curse of the beast's life. We should consider where the beast ends and man .

.

.

28

begins.

He He

could, indeed, be

more than

edifying: he could be priggish.

wrote of Lou Salome: "She told

morals

(I

anyone

else)."

far-fetched

herself she

had no

me, she had stricter morals than Moreover, and in spite of the ecstatic and

thought 27

me

that, like

comments

of followers like Klages,

who

hold that

Nietzsche actually felt the intellect to be a weakness in men, Nietzsche himself rarely went the whole way in condemning the intellect. It was the abuse of thinking by savants, Chris*

tians,

and

"practical"

rather than a

means

men

he objected

of the intellect

to,

the

and of

making an end

intellectual effort.

he write in the vein of "Gcjtihl ist allcs"\ usually he employs words like "intellect," "intelligence," and

Only

rarely does

28

"reason" in a clearly eulogistic sense. Here, as so often, Nietzsche will not be pruned down.

is

modern, most zeitgcmass\ his thought part of what he called the "morbid multiformity of modern

complex, refined, is

He

* **

subtle,

Thoughts out of Season, "Schopenhauer as Educator," chap. Quoted in Forstcr-Nietzsche, Nietzsche, II, 142.

*Sce

for instance the last paragraph of

part below, p. 101.

The

Antichrist,

v.

21,

quoted in

WHAT 29

life."

NIETZSCHE HATED

Yet, in a final attempt to pin

two texts which and

for science

reveal, perhaps, a

95

him down, we may

take

common ground in his hatred Both are from

for Rousseauistic romanticism.

In one of the essays in Thoughts out of

his earlier writings.

Season he writes: Science

.

.

.

and therefore

considers only that view of things to be true and right which regards something as finished and his-

scientific,

not as continuing and eternal. Thus towards the powers that make for eternity torical,

This

is

it

lives in a

a complete misunderstanding of

scientist docs,

and

method

scientific

it

as

and

art

deep antagonism 30

religion.

what the

practising

runs counter to such modern theorists of

von Mach and Poincare. But

it

is

not a

misunderstanding of what such contemporaries of Nietzsche as Herbert Spencer thought science to be. Nietzsche's

serious

outburst

a revulsion against the notion of science as a closed

is

system of absolute laws which

still

prevails today

among

lesser

and among major non-scientists. In the history of thought, it places him more or less clearly in the company of such thinkers as Croce, Bergson, and even Whitehead, who

scientists,

insist that the "scientific

positivism" of the nineteenth-century

no place for novelty and adventure. has an even earlier origin, in the reflections of

tradition provides

A second

text

the Leipzig student Self-observation

it

:

betrays.

Know

thyself.

Through

not

acting,

through observing. Observation confines and limits energy: it breaks up, disintegrates. Instinct is the best. Our deeds must be brought about 31

unconsciously.

* 80

Thoughts out of Season, "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth," chap. ii. Thoughts out of Season, "On the Use and Abuse of History," chap.

11

Wtr\e

(Historisch-ty-itische

Ausgabe), IV,

126.

x.

NIETZSCHE

96

Both Spencer and Rousseau, both against this precept.

Knowing

Laws and

enjoying.

indulgence.

is

lyrics are

Men must

act;

scientist

and

romanticist, sin

doing, not formulating nor

both evasions, forms of

and for a guide

seek neither in the lessons of the past

to action they

self-

must

in the too-neat patterns

of science or history, or of that deadening combination,

sci-

nor in tortured searchings of the heart; but entific history, in a difficult and most human skill, a skill impossible to define,

hard to learn, but which can be recognized in

its

results.

Nietzsche here takes refuge in the word "unconscious," but

he clearly does not mean the romantic "impulse from a vernal wood." He means rather the acquired unconscious, the unconscious

ment

of the trained craftsman,

skill

an

effective adjust-

which can be gained never or while only by thinking acting, never, solely, by thinkc about Here Nietzsche's ing again acting. position, where he to the complexities of experience

does not exaggerate a

hammer,

is

it

for the purposes of philosophizing with

essentially that of

contemporary

anti-intellectu-

alism.

V Before Nietzsche, then,

own

Master's

immersed

Western thinkers

in the high problems of philosophy

in three ways. their

to simplify, but not to falsify the

analysis of his predecessors

had gone

astray

Materialistic or empirical rationalists, taking

cue from Socrates, had falsified and suppressed full

human

experience by erecting the dream-world

science.

Socrates,

Idealistic

rationalists,

had achieved

erecting the even

taking

their

fantastic

cue

also

call

from

and suppression by dream-world of idealism, a

a similar falsification

more

we now

WHAT

NIETZSCHE HATED

97

world especially familiar to Germans, who had produced Kant and Hegel. Finally, gross men miscalled artists, hardly obliged

Greek masters, though Epicurus and others were needed, had tried to do without these intellectual

to appeal to

there

if

dream-worlds, and had fallen back on their "doggish lusts" and sentimental memories as guides to conduct and exhaustive descriptions of reality.

combined

For Nietzsche,

all

form

in Christianity, the historic

which

in

had been brought within the

sophical speculation

were

these errors

philo-

capacities of

men

brought deliberately by designing thinkers, weaklings perversely turned men of action: that is, by priests. All Nietzsche's more general and abstract hatreds were focussed ordinary

in his hatred for

what he

the idealist, hardly at lusts

called Christianity.

He

suppressed only to crop up in subtler and

forms; even the empirical rationalist call themselves Christian?

more

shut

up

as a

speed in the

last

and

his

is

The

Anti-

few months before he was

madman, and charged with

hatred, his literary gifts,

tortured

did not the English

Nietzsche's most famous attack on Christianity christ, written at top

found there

disguised; the sensualist, his simpler

all

the full energy of his

tautened nerves about to

only because of its intensity and skill in invective, it makes conventional anti-Christian literature seem pale and

break.

lifeless.

If

It

has become a kind of handbook for lustier anti-

Christians like Mr.

H. L. Mencken and

meat much too strong want to keep Christian perstitions."

for Nazis,

though

for the mild, vegetarian radicals

it is

who

ethics while discarding Christian "su-

Hardly any of Nietzsche's writings

is

without

passages directed against the Christian religion; but in

Antichrist his hatreds, magnificently,

The

madly, indecently gath-

NIETZSCHE

98

ered together, burst in a final explosion. The book ends with a passage which reveals the overwhelming ambition of the

The Nietzsche who signed himself in his madness The Crucified One would supplant Jesus with Nietzsche: prophet.

And

time

is

reckoned from the dies nejastus upon which

came

into being

from

its last

from the

first

day of Christianity!

From today?

day?

this fatality

not rather Values! 32

why

Transvaluation of

all

The base from which Nietzsche works, he had already clearly laid down in earlier writings. What we call morality among men,

if

studied as the natural historian studies the behavior of

other organisms (Nietzsche, by the way, was willing to adopt "scientific"

methods when he found them convenient), this seen to be no divine command, no thing-in-itself,

morality is but an instrument by which a few

men

benefit the activities of their fellows.

"good" and "bad"

control for their

The

distinction

own

between

wholly man-made; Nature, the universe revealed to us by our sense-experience and by our desires, knows nothing of such a distinction. "There are no moral phenomena, is

only a moral interpretation of phenomena; the origin of this 33

beyond the pale of morality." want. And since we must give names, we

interpretation

All

men

lies

shall,

writes Nietzsche, call this wanting, this fundamental attitude of

human

consciousness,

which

uses the intellect as a tool, but

hardly ever guided by the intellect

and weakened by the Will to Power. in

intellect

peoples

it

shall call

may be corrupted this wanting The

Now some men are stronger in body, more alert

mind, more driven by

among

we

though

is

we

call

than others. Very

primitive or savage, this fact

83

The Antichrist, 62. tt The Will to Power,

this Will,

258.

early,

became

WHAT Nietzsche

clear.

place within

whole

all

is

NIETZSCHE HATED

99

uncertain whether this differentiation took

those groups of

men we

whether

call races, or

races, in respect to other races, possessed these superior

He

powers.

inclines to accept both descriptions as true.

Within

any group, a few men possess such powers, and become masters; but au fond the northern peoples of Europe do possess them in greater strength than the southern peoples.

and Nietzsche

gins

is

Whatever

emphatic that they are not

ple as innocent theorists of

German

their ori-

at all as sim-

racial "purity"

make

out

Nordics, Teutons, "blond beasts," do in fact possess this superi34

There

ority.

races, these

are purified races,

no pure

if

groups of superior men,

if

ones.

And have

these set

up "good" and "bad." "The pathos of nobility and distance, the chronic and despotic esprit dc corps and fundamental instinct of a higher dominant race those potent abstractions

we

you

prefer,

call

meaner

an 'under-race,' 35 this is the origin of the antithesis of good and bad." There are, then, a minority of "masters" and a majority of

coming

"herd."

into association with a

This means that there are two moralities, master-

morality and herd-morality.

"Good"

thetical.

84

race,

They

for the masters

are different, indeed anti-

is

the pure exertion of the

know

that there is much in Nietzsche that can be quoted against such attacked theories of "race" as products of nineteenth-century herd morality, of unaristocratic looseness of thought and feeling. He wrote bitter 1

a view.

He

things against the Germans, who had so stupidly neglected him. But in one of his bitterest attacks on the Germans, he wrote that they display "a number

more manly than any that other European countries can show." The Twilight of the Idols, "Things the Germans lack," i. To anyone who knows the supreme value Nietzsche set on what he called "manly," the above passage is final. The Nazis have had no trouble in adopting him as their

of virtues

prophet.

u

Sec also Chapter VIII below.

The Genealogy

of Morals, First Essay,

2.

NIETZSCHE

100

Will to Power, which in our decadent times

name without using words

"Good"

greed, lying, voluptuousness.

men and

we cannot even

of ill-repute, like fighting, cruelty,

we

for the herd

herd-

Christians can describe in nice words, like peace,

compassion, obedience, with "bad."

self-restraint.

And

similarly, of course,

from the terms used above, that Nietzsche is facing the ineluctable and insoluble problem of the origin of evil. He has decided that somehow, sometime, men behaved somewhere perhaps in Greece before Socrates Already

as

should be

it

clear,

he liked to think of them

as

Eden, a place extraordinarily

and cheated

all

behaving. This

is

his

Garden

of

where heroes fought wounds miraculously no wounds,

like Valhalla,

day, and, their

Once the distinction between master-morality and slave-morality had been as clear on earth and in reality as

feasted all night.

it

was

in Nietzsche's

mind. But no longer. There had been

a

Man, and the slaves had come to rule the masters. Good had somehow become evil, evil good. Inexplicably ? Not quite, unfortunately. History, aided by Nietzsche, was equal to the Fall of

explanation. Christianity

is

for

him

the key. Christ, and even

more

the

apostle Paul, inspired by Jewish malevolence and Greek philosophy, undid the work of Nature, and set slaves over masters.

What

they did was indeed no more than priests everywhere have tried with varying success to do. But they did it more

completely and more disastrously than it has ever been done more so even than in India. There Buddha, a natural if some-

what gentle

aristocrat,

"super-spiritualization."

"He

came

to the rescue of the victims of

Buddha was primarily

understands goodness

as

being good

a "hygienist," as

promoting

WHAT health. Prayer

out of the question, as

is

But Christianity,

men who disease.

NIETZSCHE HATED

as finally established,

loved their

"Christian

is

own

weaknesses,

is

101

also asceticism"

36

was the -work of herd-

who

strove to further

the hatred of the intellect, of pride, of

courage, freedom, intellectual libcrtinage\ Christian is the hatred 37 of the senses, of the joys of the senses, of joy in general."

How

can anything so unnatural as the victory of the slaves over the masters take place ? As easily, surely, as the regrettable elevation of the

moralists vastly

Lower Law above

the

Higher

more orthodox than Nietzsche. The

more numerous than

the masters.

Law

noted by

slaves are always

Normally they remain

with their slave-morality. Indeed, Christianity, were limited to the masses, and used, as it was used during

quiet, content if it

the best days of the Renaissance, to keep

them

quiet,

might be

and a useful thing. But perversely some of the slaves are born intelligent, or at least crafty, and they become priests. a natural

Even more

some

perversely,

of the masters are born weaklings,

but intelligent; or at any rate catch the mysterious disease called

moral idealism. They too become or socialist.

Now

priests

Christian, Jacobin,

the priest in this broad sense

is

a

man

with a

very strong Will to Power, but without the great gifts of bodily strength, without the capacity for masculine joy in

its

disci-

plined exercise, without the reverent attachment for this earth so essential to the true aristocrat instance. to rule,

The

and

priest's

Will to

throw of the masters. * The w The

drives

him

to seek a

way

way; he invents a religion of of equality, and rallies the slaves to the over-

his craft finds this

pity, of softness,

the old Prussian Junker, for

Power

Antichrist,

20.

Antichrist,

21.

NIETZSCHE

102 Especially religions this

he

when he

and of

dealing with the origins of primitive Christianity, Nietzsche leans rather heavily on is

somewhat outmoded

is

But

"priest-hypocrite-villain" theory.

far too subtle a psychologist, too

good a child

of the late

nineteenth century, to repeat here the simplicities of French anti-clericals of the eighteenth century. Nietzsche's priest is no plain hypocrite. This priest believes, perhaps from the very first,

He

the pious fictions he invents.

meek

really believes the

is meek, and that His hatred he thinks is love. He

are blessed; he even believes that he himself

he ought

to inherit the earth.

And

takes joy in his disease, in his weakness. of the primal sources of strength in

men, the

since joy

is

one

priest achieves the

extraordinary and very Christian feat of turning his weakness into a kind of personal strength, not consciously, not hypocritically,

but unconsciously. That

the full

is

and paradoxical

horror of religion, and especially of Christianity; grettably natural.

When he

comes

religion of humanity, Nietzsche

involved.

Men

like

to

is

it

seems

re-

modern exponents of the no hypocrisy is

sure that

Condorcet and Tolstoy have not the

intelli-

gence to be hypocrites.

Among diseases

Christianity

partly because

and capable

that

religions of gentleness

all

it

is

among

social

has succeeded in corrupting the most manly

of the

human

Europe, partly because

it

is

race,

the

peoples of Northern

so perfectly tailored to

desires of the groveling herd. "Faith, hope

a complete charter for the slaves.

is,

for Nietzsche by all odds the worst,

meet the

and charity" make

domination of the masters by the

Christian morals are consistently, coherently, the ex-

pression of the basic instincts of

them try to avoid real living

low men, that

is,

instincts that

make

to try to perpetuate

WHAT

NIETZSCHE HATED

103

existence at the lowest possible level. Christianity fouls life at its

very source, in the relations of the sexes.

"How can

one pos-

hands of children and women, a book that contains those vile words: 'it is better to marry than to burn.'

sibly place in the

And man

decent to be a Christian so long as the very origin of that is to say, befouled by the idea of Christianized,

is it is

the immaculata conception

form

>38

Christianity

of decadence, the denial of

itself.

Jesus

life,

is

thus the perfect

the use of instinct against

and Paul finished the deadly work of

Socrates's

daemon. "Let us not underestimate the Christians: the Christian, false to the

point of innocence in

jalsity, is far

above the

with regard to the Christians a certain well-known 89 becomes a mere good-natured compliment."

apes,

theory of Descent

Nietzsche recognizes

many

historical reasons for the peculiar

virulence of Christianity: the importance of Paul,

makes the

he

an insane, vengeful Jew, a with which Greek idealism was

arch-villain of the piece,

destroyer, a hater; the skill

woven

whom

into Christian theology, giving

it

a specious intellectual

respectability; the perverted discipline of

Church organization;

the existence of a great proletariat of slaves, thirsting for salvation

and revenge. But he puts

particular emphasis

on two broad

considerations, the Christian doctrine of personal immortality

and the Jewish origin of

The

Christianity.

doctrine of immortality as

for Nietzsche one of the

most

it

appears in Christianity

is

diabolical of priestly inventions.

Believers are not promised that pity, self-abnegation, chastity,

asceticism will bring

them

success in this world.

turn the other cheek to get caresses, but blows. 98

w

The The

Antichrist,

56.

Antichrist,

39.

By

They do not the ingenious

NIETZSCHE

104 device of the

of

Heaven, however, they are promised complete fulfillment of their crudest desires in an after-life. Without this promise, even herd-men might come to realize

Kingdom

that the Christian virtues failed to pay dividends

The

on

this earth.

Christian doctrine of personal immortality provides an

almost unbelievably effective in

life

degenerate

unnatural, the

more

And

this is

more

is

men

to accept the

The more

supreme.

more hopeless

the lot of the

certain his eternal bliss above.

Hell

not the worst.

in preventing

of getting

priest

diseased, the

believer here below, the

Heaven

way

which the

is

even more effective than

men from becoming what

they might

become. The more natural, healthy, and hopeful the believer here below, the

a

still

more

certain his eternal

lot of a

punishment in

lower region. The hope of Heaven and the fear of Hell to botch existence for all men, save for the tiny

combine

is

minority Gcistcr)

it

a minority of one?

beyond Heaven and

of free spirits

Hell, beyond good and

real horror of Christianity for Nietzsche

coddles the deed, he

is

weak

as that

it

not so

much

The

that

it

suppresses and cows the strong. In-

willing at times to

by which, in

is

(freie

evil.

welcome

Christianity as a

means

better times, a minority of masters, free spirits,

might keep in useful contentment a majority of slaves, herdmen. At other times, however, he will have nothing less than

new race of Supermen, an earth untainted even by the memory of Christianity, with no men as we now know them left. He a

was no Utopian, however, neither a Morris nor a Bellamy. He does not bother to ask what these Supermen will do about the mean little routine tasks. Perhaps there will be no such tasks ? Nietzsche-Zarathustra was a very exalted fellow,

above Nirvana as well as above Heaven.

who

rose

WHAT

A

NIETZSCHE HATED

105

second element in the triumph of Christianity, according was its Jewish origin. In The Antichrist, at least,

to Nietzsche,

40

Nietzsche can write as crudely as any Nazi Jew-baiter. The Jews first invented the lie of monotheism. Their Jehovah was originally, in the days of. Israel's prevailing, a

and

justice;

jealousy

God

of dignity

with the Captivity he became a monstrous god of

and philosophy,

a figure

on

whom

the disappointed

Jewish intellectuals spilled out their wounded pride, their unrealized ambitions. Jehovah became their revenge on the world, their flight from the world. But he was tribal God, at whose threats the Gentiles could laugh.

There remained the

tuals like

Paul took.

This

God

a

mere

and did

which Jewish

final step, tribal

still

intellec-

could, by a gigantic

conspiracy, be foisted on ignorant Gentiles. As the Christian God, he would sap the strength and confidence of the enemies of Israel.

Jerusalem would be revenged, and the Jews would

rule over a

world corrupted by Jewish poison. It would be a rule over a world sunk in weakness and

dark, womanish despair, but a

world of which Jerusalem would once more be

the center. This was the most

fatal

on earth: insignificant

kind of megalomania that had ever yet existed

little

sole claim to the concepts

abortions of bigots and liars began to lay

"God," "Truth," "Light,"

"Spirit," "Love,"

these things were, so to speak, synonyms of to themselves off from "the world"; little in fence order themselves,

"Wisdom,"

"Life," as

if

ultra-Jews, ripe for every kind of madhouse, twisted values round in order to suit themselves just as if the Christian, alone, were the meaning, the salt, the standard and even the "ultimate tribunal" of all the rest

of

mankind. 41 M The 41

The

key passages arc in The Antichrist, Antichrist,

44.

24 and 25.

NIETZSCHE

106

But another

God

is

may we

coining

not say invented?

Another megalomania? Has and another people, scorned humiliated, produced a new and

and Nietzsche

his prophet.

is

successful gospel of revenge is

?

We can only hope that Nietzsche

bad a prophet as he is a historian. For his account of the origins of Christianity as

is

certainly not

The

notion that Christianity began as a Jewish good history. conspiracy is melodramatic nonsense.. Conspirators, even in very recent times, are rarely philosophers of history. Saint John, and .certainly Saint Paul, were not quite innocent enough for conspiracy.

Even the major

thesis of Nietzsche's attack

on

Christianity contains a paradox that strains the limits of logic. Christianity, according to

the strong.

But

if

really the strong?

him,

weak Have not

the

the victory of the

is

weak over

are victorious, are they not then

they carried out successfully the

supreme demands of the Will to Power ? There is certainly an obvious reply here. The Will to Power of the Christians is not

good one. But if there or of bad kinds and success, then there are power, good standards of judgment with which we can criticize the results the right kind of Will to Power, not a are

of the struggle for power. There

Will to Power.

We

are back in

Socrates. Perhaps Nietzsche too

An

analysis

of

Nietzsche's

power than the the company of Kant and

is

a "higher"

had

his

attitude

daemon ? towards Christianity

would be incomplete without some mention of his attitude towards what he regarded as the final, and most decadent, form the contemporary movement towards democof Christianity racy

and

socialism.

Nietzsche hated

all

forms of Western

parliamentary governments, lumping together in his hatred English liberalism and continental socialism. In his opinion,

WHAT the great popular

movements

American, and French to earth.

No

of

modern

107

times, the English,

revolutions, represent the herd-men's

to bring the unlovely

attempt

down

NIETZSCHE HATED

and impossible Christian heaven

longer content with the vicarious other-

worldly realization of his low desires for comfort and indulgence which the

self-

success of the Jewish conspiracy brought

him, the democrat or the

socialist is

trying to be comfortable

and self-indulgent here and now, trying

to

remake

this earth

image. And the result? A mad scramble for the wares of the factory, for the pleasures of a vulgarized cheap

own

in his

art,

for

the satisfactions of that base

form

of envy called

patriotism.

An

absolute uprooting of culture in the increasing rush and hurry of and the decay of all reflection and simplicity. The waters of religion are ebbing, and leaving swamps and stagnant pools; the nations are drawing away in enmity again, and long to tear each other to pieces. The sciences, blindly driving on according to a system of laissez-faire, are life,

splitting up. ... The educated classes are swept along in the contemptible struggle for wealth. Never was the world more worldly, never poorer in goodness and love. Everything bows before the coming bar42 barism, art and science included.

We

are ripe for the final disintegration, for universal nihil-

The one

ism.

ponement

of

saving factor in the older Christianity, the post-

its

deadly egalitarianism to an after-world, which

permitted a fruitful inequality in this world,

still

equality of souls before

been

made

God was

harmless, but the equality of

a fatal lure, a final decadence;

The seducer

u

a doctrine that

it is

men

is

lost.

before Society

is

nihilism.

The woman, who thenceforward

protraction of Christianity through the French Revolution. is

The

might have

Rousseau, he once again liberates

Thoughts out of Season, "Schopenhauer

as Educator," chap. iv.

NIETZSCHE

108

suffering. Then come always represented as ever more interesting Mrs. Beecher Then the slaves and Stowe. the poor and the workmen. is

sick. Then comes the cursing of all and Schopenhauer): the most decided convoluptuousness (Baudelaire viction that the lust for power is the greatest vice; absolute certainty that morality and disinterestedness are identical things: that the "happiness of all" is a goal worth striving after (i.e. Christ's Kingdom of Heaven). We are on the best road to it: the Kingdom of Heaven of

Then

and the

the vicious

.

.

.

the poor in spirit has begun. 43

VI

On

such blanket-terms

as

rationalism,

Christianity,

democracy Nietzsche centered hatreds which,

own

his

terms, are rather

more than

certain consistency in their variety.

to take

philosophical.

him

There

Nietzsche hates

and

all

is

in

a

that

seems to him hostile to Life, to struggling, to the free expression of a restless energy in men he called the Will to Power.

He

hates anything finished, complete, contented, "dead." Per-

worshipper of succeeding hates anything successful ? At any rate, we shall not stop now to pursue Nietzsche's per-

haps

this

sonality into

Our

places.

its

final

list

and not very well concealed

abstract, has concentrated

ized expression.

hiding-

of his hatreds has perhaps been a bit too

We shall

on

and most generalconsider some of his more

their broadest

do well

to

They are many, and we can but choose a few among them. They are also, and not unnaturally, greatly specialized hatreds.

mixed with

He

Nietzsche might have written, odi, ergo amo. wrote some bitter things, which, values having been love.

properly transvalued, he regarded as just and kindly things, about women. Nietzsche's opinions on women are at least as

well-known "The

as the very similar ones expressed

Will to Power,

94.

by

his master

WHAT

NIETZSCHE HATED

109

Schopenhauer. Historically, both represent a reaction against some of the views about women held in the nineteenth century,

England, America, and Germany, and commonly "Victorian." Such views really were held: read John

especially in

known

as

Stuart Mill's Autobiography

common

if

you doubt

it.

Women,

ran the

men. They are Their minds and desires

version, are really morally superior to

gentle, kindly, idealistic, yet sensible.

on higher things. They put up, because they have to, with the wicked lusts of men. They are ignorant now of many imare

portant worldly matters because

men

conspire to keep

them

uneducated, and this ignorance gives them a certain charm. But since they are really so much better than men, they should

an equal chance with men, for our common should be given equal educational opportunities, good. They should be welcomed into the world of business and politics. be given

at least

This, indeed,

The

is

the

more

radical version dear to

men

like Mill.

ordinary Victorian accepted the premises of Mill's version, women as ministering angels; but he preferred to

the view of

keep them

in their present satisfactory place,

and

to continue

to receive their ministrations.

Against such notions Nietzsche wrote aphorisms scattered works, and the famous eighteenth chapter of

through

all his

the

part of

first

Women."

It is

writing about

Thus Spa\e

roughly possible

to

women. In the first manner by

notions in his usual posites.

Women

make good

"Old and Young distinguish two veins in his

Zarathustra,

vein,

he attacks Victorian

affirming loudly their op-

are unscrupulous, self-centered, sensual; they

schemers,

liars,

and

haters.

They

are admirable

practitioners of the art of slave-morality, using with intelligent

hypocrisy the "Christian" virtues to establish their regrettable

no

NIETZSCHE

domination over men.

And

they are intelligent, in a low ideas in the nineteenth century

way. Established European have got the truth just reversed.

Men

have "character,"

women

"intelligence."

The

intellect of

women

manifests

perfect mastery, presence of

itself as

mind, and utilization of all advantages. They transmit it as a fundamental quality to their children, and the father adds thereto the darker

For those who know how to put a thing background of the will. 44 properly: women have intelligence, men have character and passion. .

.

.

concerned with putting women in their proper place. Here, as so often when he has a concrete program, he sounds very like a Nazi. He might In his second vein, Nietzsche

is

directly

almost have used their formula, Church, Children, Cooking. Women must not be given an equal voice with men in affairs of

any kind,

rights for

Women

state, business,

women

is

or family.

one of the

are really not 45

The movement

sorriest signs of

much

for equal

our decadence.

of anything.

good They are But in the economy of the world they for

not even good cooks. must be used for something, and, properly mastered, they make tolerable slaves. The real danger is not the direct rule the suffragettes it

is

that

and

their sympathizers,

women

eunuchs

like Mill,

will rule indirectly, in the

want;

manner

of a

or a Maintenon

by using their talents for love-making and Christian piety to obtain an unnatural mas-

Pompadour "

Human, All Too Human, "Wife and Child," Human, All Too Human, 377-437,

division of

The whole together with The 411.

of this

Joyful

Wisdom, Book II, 57-75, makes up perhaps the best sample of Nietzsche's ideas on women, much fuller and more typical than anything in Thus Spa1(c Zarathustra. 48

"Stupidity in the kitchen: woman as cook. stand what food means." Beyond Good and Evil,

never faced an American female "salad"!

Woman 234.

does not under-

And

Nietzsche had

WHAT

NIETZSCHE HATED

III

order of society, women must be kept in their ordained position of inferiors, must be limited to the functions of child-bearing and housekeeping, tery over their masters.

men may

In the

new

46

become Supermen. from a Nietzsche loved and hated women

that

at last

The determined have known at

Elizabeth was the only all

well.

safe distance.

woman whom he

Cosima he loved

could

in secret, as the

Ariadne of a most transparent sublimation. The ludicrous passage with Lou was too brief and wordy to have taught him

much. Fraulein von Meysenbug was not even a good mothersubstitute. In real life, there was always something fumbling and unsatisfactory is

why he

owned

in his relations with

women. Perhaps

wrote so assuredly about them.

one,

which

is

perhaps

And

why he was

this

he never really

so confident they

should be owned. Nietzsche also hated professors, and here at

ample opportunity

to

know

least

he had

intimately the objects of his hatred.

The academic mind, according

to this professor of classical

devoted to the process of embalming; it does not philology, it has not energy enough for that. What priests and kill women kill, the savant embalms, preserves to clutter the world is

so that there

is

no room

for anything alive.

Professors are

hopeless herd-men, conservatives in the negative sense of "This summary Joyful

Wisdom

is

not wholly

fair to

his least embittered

mere

Nietzsche, since, especially in The he can occasionally write about

book

women

discerningly, fair-mindedly, almost sympathetically. See for instance the aphorism (71) "On Female Chastity" in Book II of The Joyful Wisdom, where he discusses the "psychic entanglement" of the ordinary upper and

woman who faces marriage after being educated "with ignorance as possible in croticis" Not that Nietzsche is untrue to his major premises: even in this book, he insists that "Man's attribute is will, middle-class European

as

much

woman's

attribute

is

willingness."

(68).

NIETZSCHE

112

conforming; they are hostile to novelty, enterprise, adventure; they form a guild responsible for the spread of Socratic rational-

ism in

its

modern and deadly forms

conspire

they

and scholarship;

and suppress the rare

against

who

Nietzsche

of science

can use the

to set fire to, the world.

spirits

like

stuff of history to illuminate, nay,

47

new and

daring in the 1870'$ and i88o's as were Nietzsche's opinions about women. It had all been said before, and has been said since. It is the eternal complaint of All this was not as

the adventurous

as

and imaginative

battling for a living

among

free-lance

writer, himself

the realities of competitive exist-

ence, while the cloistered professor rests secure in his believe

world of academic tenure.

It is

make-

the cry of the free artist

against the enslaved scholar, of the creator against Dryasdust,

of the thinker against the

mere cataloguer. The kind

of thing

Nietzsche said about professors has been said so often that it must be worth saying. It has become almost a piece of ritualistic consolation for the imaginative and the profound in this dull

world. brilliant

And

this

must indeed be a dull world,

and fascinating a fellow

as

in

which

so

Nietzsche has to spend so

energy in warning his fellow men against the contagion, not the charm, of academic dullness and stupidity.

much if

Wagner

is

almost a

test case

of Nietzsche's capacity for love-

In the Triebschen period, Nietzsche felt, as much as he could ever feel, the worship of the disciple for the master. in-hate.

Wagner's music was then the unattainable perfection of Dionysian striving. His emotions never recovered from the crash of

Wagner's music, and 47

Here the locus

Educator," chap.

vi.

classicus

to the last is

he never denied

its

unholy

Thoughts out of Season, "Schopenhauer

as

ELIZABETH NIETZSCHE From

a photograph, about 1880

WHAT

NIETZSCHE HATED

But he came

greatness.

to hate the

113

Theseus

who

still

held

Ariadne's body, though her soul must obviously belong to Dionysos; he came to envy the successful Master who had the

admiration of the

always denied to Nietzsche. His

tribe,

in music, too, changed.

Well ahead of

his time,

and a

taste little

against the grain, one suspects, of so unbridled a yearncr, he

reverted to the "classical" in music.

48

He came

to prefer music

before Beethoven to music after Beethoven, though he also

and

liked the unpretentious clarity

men." In

this

lightness of Bizet's "Car-

mood, he wrote about Wagner

as

only a

disillu-

sioned romantic could: Wagner's heroines one and If

it

all,

once they have been divested of their

indistinguishable from Madame Bovary. . . were not for Wagner, who would teach us that innocence has a

heroic husks, are almost

all

.

preference for saving interesting sinners? (the case in "Tannhauser"). that corrupted old females prefer to be saved by chaste young men? (the case of Kundry). Or that young hysterics like to be saved by their

Or

doctor? (the case in "Lohengrin"). Or that beautiful girls must love to be saved by a knight who also happens to be a Wagnerite? (the case in the "Mastersingers"). Or that even married women also like to be saved by a knight? (the case of Isolde). Let us wander in the clouds, let us harangue eternity, let us be careful to group great symbols .

all

around

us.

Bumbuml

Sursuml

there

.

.

is

no

better advice.

The

"heaving breast" shall be our argument, "beautiful feelings" our advocates.

Virtue

still

carries

its

49

point against counterpoint.

According to Nietzsche, then, Wagner was no musician; he was an actor, a panderer to the low tastes of the public who **A remark of Hans von Billow makes very in music.

Of

a "Bacchanal" of Nietzsche's

clear Nietzsche's native taste

own composing

submitted to him

he wrote, "habc ich mchr an den lendemain eines Bacchanals selbst

denken miissen"

than of a Bacchanal

M

The Case

of

"it

itself."

Wagner,

makes

me

Nietzsche, Gcsammeltc Brieje, 9; 3; 6.

als

an

dieses

think rather of the day after a Bacchanal III,

350.

NIETZSCHE

114

"the cultured crttins the

assemble at that "Hydro," Bayreuth

',

blast pigmies, the eternally feminine, the gastrically happy, in 50

Wagner's works are an encyclopaedia of decadence. They end, appropriately, with the worst kind of short, the people."

decadence

the Christian religiosity of "Parsifal."

Finally, there are the

Germans. Nietzsche was fond of

call-

ing himself a "good European," but he never forgot that he was a German. He thought the racial movement a swindle, but he contributed much to its spread. He was certainly in the ordinary sense not a

good German, and,

especially in

Germans

his later years, wrote very violently against the

which

is

why we

have considered

this

subject

among

his

hatreds. It is

part of

my

ambition to be considered as a despiser of Germans

The Germans are impossible for me. When I try who runs counter to all my instincts, the result is German. The Germans are canaille. ... A man debases

. . par excellence. to think of a man .

always a

.

.

.

... I cannot endure this race bad always company, which has no feeling for nuances (and alas! I am a nuance). The Germans have no idea of how vulgar they are which is itself the very acme of vulgarity they are not ashamed of being merely Germans. 51

himself by consorting with Germans.

with which a

man

in

is

.

Yet here Nietzsche's hatred love.

He had wooed

turned

.

.

most transparently disappointed and they had

is

his fellow-countrymen,

him down. They had

not followed Zarathustra.

They

had not even stoned him; they had simply paid him no

atten-

tion at

And

all.

he had

tried very hard.

weaknesses, had 80 ll

still

seemed

The Case of Wagner, Homo, "The Case

Ecce

The Germans,

to Zarathustra the

6.

of

in spite of their

Wagner,"

4.

most hopeful

WHAT stuff

a

out of which to

few

NIETZSCHE HATED

make Supermen. Save for a few professors, David

dull bourgeois like

Strauss, they

the false light of Socratic rationalism. in the

something

German

is

soul,

it is

had not followed

Some deep

instinct,

forever hostile to the shallow

and English

glibness of French philosophe

Germans had,

115

utilitarian.

But according loving dalliance with the

idealism.

to Nietzsche, even this absurd thing-in-itself

is

The

Kantian

true, their philosophical weakness:

and

Germans

really for

nothing more than a form of amusement, and perhaps a not altogether useless and innocent form of amusement, since it bewilders foreigners into thinking that the

Germans

really are

good-natured metaphysical maunderers, and conceals from

them the

German hardness. "German depth among we perhaps take the liberty to laugh at it ... we are not called the do honor to our name

basic

ourselves alone

we should

'tiusche Volk' (deceptive people) for nothing."

of this

German

race

is

found a

to be

fine

52

At

the core

blond strength, a an

capacity for disciplined obedience, for efficient cooperation,

energy that can be stimulated into Dionysian activity and clear even in men like Luther enjoyment, a noble discontent

with the world as is

a sign of the

it is.

etwas von uns, was

wollen etwas

Even the German search

German Will mehr"

Over against

to

for "depth" Power. "Wir Deutschen wollcn

man von

uns noch nicht wollte

wir

6S

this strength,

Nietzsche finds serious

weaknesses which have hitherto prevented M Beyond Good and Evil, 244. I doubt whether

its

German

highest develop-

Nietzsche's derivation of

good etymology, but it makes fine irony. M "We Germans will get something from ourselves, which no one has yet wanted of us we want something more." The Will to Power, 108. This is understandably a favorite text in Nazi Germany.

"Teutonic"

is

NIETZSCHE

Ii6

The

ment.

do not have

right instincts are there, but they

play; they are suppressed, overlaid by bad habits tions. is

They emerge awkwardly,

how

never quite sure

if at all,

and

full

institu-

into action. Nietzsche

came

this regrettable failure

about, but

in the

how it shows itself at present in Wagner- worship, new Empire with its striving after worldly goods and

empty

political prestige, in national

he knows

arrogance and obtuseness,

whoring after the strange gods of parliamentary government and socialism, in decadence, in neglect of Nietzsche. The Ger-

in

mans

are

even more complex and contradictory

an enigma

than women.

As a people made up

of the

most extraordinary mixing and mingling

of races, perhaps even with a preponderance of the pre-Aryan element, as the "people of the center" in every sense of the term, the Germans

more intangible, more ample, more contradictory, more unknown, more incalculable, more surprising, and even more terrifying than other they escape definition, and are thereby alone peoples are to themselves:

are

54 the despair of the French.

We have, however, spent enough time on Nietzsche's hatreds. The

could be extended to great length, from Dante, "the

list

hyena

that writes poetry in tombs," to fanatical reformers,

"that 'noble*

little

community

of geniuses, too

people

of unbridled, fantastic, half-mad

who

cannot control themselves, or

experience any inward joy, until they have 55

completely." 54

mary

But

it

will be

more

Beyond Good and of Nietzsche's

lost

Evil, 244. This whole passage mature position on the Germans.

is

an admirable sum-

See also the section

"Peoples and Countries," appended to the English translation of of Morals.

"The

Twilight of the Idols, "Skirmishes in a

The Dawn

of Day,

the latter quotation

Book is

themselves

profitable to try to under-

War

The Genealogy

with the Age,"

i;

no sign in the passage from which taken that Nietzsche was indulging in self-analysis. I,

50.

There

is

WHAT

NIETZSCHE HATED

117

what Nietzsche loved which is, as we have seen, what he hated but what from indistinguishable

tand, not isually

Nietzsche wanted. ifficult task

ction, in his

We

shall in the next chapter

attempt the

of finding a program, a platform for concrete

work.

CHAPTER V

WHAT *

^HE

I

JL its

WANTED

NIETZSCHE

or the confusion

variety

of Nietzsche's thought

is

apparent on what we may call, conventionally, side as on its negative side. There is one constant:

at least as

positive

Nietzsche was concerned, as a politiquc and mowith the problems of men in society. There are many

all his life

ralistc,

variables.

He

is

now

critic, essayist

moralist in the French tradition,

on

now

always, perhaps, philosopher. In his

aesthetic problems,

preacher, first

now

work, he

now

prophet

is

primarily

interested in ethics as aesthetics. In his last book, the skeleton

Will to Powery he

is

interested in ethics as high politics, religion.

work, he seems torn between the contrary ideals of anarchy and authority; rarely, if ever, does he solve

Throughout

his

the conflict with the true liberty

is

common

true obedience.

play on words, the assertion that

He

is

certainly not fairly labeled

though enemies and interpret him as one or the

either as anarchist or as authoritarian,

friends alike have not hesitated to other.

Perhaps he believed in the anarchical solution for an

the Supermen, in the authoritarian solution for the

many, herd-men? Certainly he is always vividly aware of a contrast between the able few and the incompetent many, and the

elite,

the

distinction

between "masters" and "slaves" runs throughout

thinking.

But,

morality"

is

obedience,

morality"

is

what we know

if

it

is

his

not true that for

him "slavehim "master-

We

must put the

in general true that for it

is

as anarchy.

WHAT

NIETZSCHE

question of his ethics in

wanted men

its

WANTED

simplest form,

119

and ask how he

to behave.

an Anglo-Saxon mind trained to ask just such empirical questions, a perfectly fair question. But it is surprising, and in a sense no doubt illuminating, to learn This seems,

how

at least to

difficult

is

it

to

answer from Nietzsche's writings.

He

does not admit sharing Carlyle's noble scorn for any concrete proposal of reform as a mere "Morrison's pill." He does not in so

many words

all will

say that

be well, that

if

the soul of

we need

man

sees the

a spiritual revolution in

new

light,

which the

petty details of institutional change will take care of themselves.

Any

such barefaced preaching would seem to be

with his tough-minded attacks idealism. But listen to him:

And

it

is

the great noontide,

on

at

odds

theological and philosophical

when man

is

in the

middle of his course

between animal and Superman, and celebrating his advance to the evening as his highest hope: for it is the advance to a new morning. At such time will the down-goer bless himself, that he should be an over-goer; and the sun of his knowledge will be at noontide. "Dead arc all the Gods: now do we desire the Superman to live?

Let this be our

Thus spake

No

doubt

final will at the great

noontide!

Zarathustra. 1

it

is,

in

one of Nietzsche's favorite words, hope-

lessly vulgar to ask for some indications of what Supermen will be like in the flesh for we understand that they are to have

The mere

asking such a question marks the questioner as one not chosen to advance to the new morning. Nietzsche is not going to imitate his Christian opponents, and come down

flesh.

to details

1

such as the white robes and the harps of the Christian

Thus Spa^e Zarathustra, Part

I,

chap. xxii.

NIETZSCHE

120

The

heaven.

conception of the Superman

is

of course pure

he can

eschatology, incomprehensible to the outsider, save as

observe the behavior of

men who

moments Nietzsche

Nevertheless, in his less exalted

much

how he wanted men

about

say they "believe in"

to

behave in

Even when he

period of the "great noontide."

it.

did write

this transitional is

dealing with

such problems of conduct, he is more often than not the preacher, urging the masters to be bold, active, brave, cruel, hard, voluptuous, manly, and to keep the slaves in their places.

recommend some vague institutional such behavior, but not often. And when he does, it

Occasionally he will

frame for is

not at

all clear

whether he

is

thinking of masters or

slaves,

or of both.

Take, for instance, the family. He believes in monogamy as the best general rule both for masters and slaves. For both, he

man must be master within woman is in the home. Marriage

holds that the

the family, that the

place of

is

an institution for

should have nothing to do with love. Modern breeding. bourgeois marriage has been corrupted by romantic notions about love. In the good society, it may well be necessary to It

supervise marriages in order to prevent the birth of the weak,

the misfit. Society, as the trustee of

life, is

responsible to

life

for every botched

comes into existence ... it should in many cases actually prevent the act of procreation and may, without any regard for rank, descent, or intellect, hold in readiness the most rigorous forms of compulsion and restriction, and, under certain circumstances, have recourse to castration. that

life

The Mosaic puerility

law, "Thou shalt do no murder/' is a piece of ingenuous compared with the earnestness of this forbidding of life to

decadents, 8

"Thou

The Will

to

shalt not beget"!!!

Power,

734.

2

WHAT

NIETZSCHE

WANTED

121

Note here the vagueness of "under

certain circumstances"

the failure to define "decadents."

Both the doctrine and the

and

vagueness are proving useful to the Nazis,

The Will

Power

to

Rassen hygiene.

On tory.

is

this passage

very popular with their theorists of

education Nietzsche

is

again vague and often contradic-

in the Prussian officer-caste

training and discipline,

its

in

4

precisely

its

rigorous

acceptance of tradition,

its

freedom

from "decadent" questionings.

now needed

was

German What he

future of

culture rests with the sons of Prussian officers."

is

from

3

Hewrotethe famous aphorism, "The

admired

and

Germany

is

And

yet he also wrote,

"What

independent educational estab-

lishments which actively oppose the State system of slave5

The

drilling."

Prussians were clearly not quite Supermen.

Nietzsche wants something more: "The education which rears those ruling virtues that allow a man to become master of his

benevolence and his pity: the great disciplinary virtues and the passions of the creator, must be elevated to the heights .

we must

cease

from carving marble!"

.

.

8

But although Nietzsche never gives us a curriciilum, he knows what he doesn't want. The kind of formal education he himself had, for instance. In one of his longer passages it is almost an on "The So-called Classical Education" essay he writes: Only think of this wasted youth, when we were inoculated clumsily and painfully with an imperfect knowledge of the Greeks and the

Romans 1

4

1 6

as well as of their languages, contrary to the highest principle

See below,

p. 215.

Genealogy of Morals, "Peoples and Countries," Quoted in Forster-Nictzsche, Nietzsche, II, 250.

The Will

to

Power,

983.

14.

NIETZSCHE

122

which holds that we should not give food except to those it. Think of that period in our lives when we had mathematics and physics forced down our throats, instead of first of of all culture,

who hunger

for

being made acquainted with the despair of ignorance, instead of having our little daily life, our activities, and everything occurring in all

our houses, our workshops, in the sky and in nature, split up into thousands of problems, painful, humiliating and irritating problems and thus having our curiosity made acquainted with the fact that we first

we

of

all

require a mathematical and mechanical knowledge before

can be allowed to rejoice in the absolute logic of this knowledge! we had only been imbued with reverence for those branches of

If

if

science,

we had

only been made to tremble with emotion at the and the renewed combats of those great men, of

struggles, the defeats

martyrdom which

is the history of pure science! But, on the contrary allowed to develop a certain contempt for those sciences in favor of historical training, formal education, and "classicism." 7

the

we were

As

for

what

called "popular education" (Volfabildung),

is

the very notion

is

unspeakable.

You cannot

"educate" the

masses by submitting them to smatterings and distillations of what our time calls knowledge. Their true education they do not get from schoolmasters in their

where the

tion they find "there, instincts,

where

its

customs,

its

speech."

its

new

schools.

Volf( cherishes

This educaits

builds

The only

its

result of trying to give the people a

formal academic education

is

to destroy in part this organic

growth which keeps them volfysch and contented. course

all

And

of

"popular educators" are at heart envious radicals and

bungling little 8 natural Order of Rank.

socialists,

T

religious

mythical figures, where it guards sense of right, its home-soil (Heimatsboden) , it

The Dawn

of Day,

intellectuals

195.

Even

who want

to destroy the

the natural sciences are good,

Nietzsche wants to use them to club something else! 'From Nietzsche's unpublished literary remains. See

Werfy

when

(Grossoctav-

WHAT One would economics,

Supermen

NIETZSCHE

WANTED

not expect Nietzsche to pay

to the ordinary details of

will be supported

123

much

making

attention to

a living.

by the herd-men,

The

as aristocratic

foreshadowing the Supermen, have been supported by the masses. Apparently the deep habits and instincts of the masses, if undisturbed, will be sufficient to pro-

classes in the past,

duce

men

needed in economic goods. Certainly the Superwill not even guide the masses in economic life. The true all

that

is

can have nothing to do with trade. "Not to underTo sell one's virtue only at the highest stand trade is noble

aristocrat

even to carry on usury with it as a teacher, a civil servant, or an artist, for instance, brings genius and talent down to the level of the common tradesman. We must be careful not

price, or

to

be clever with our wisdom!"

9

Nevertheless, Nietzsche

brings himself to consider such matters

now and

The modern

then.

importance of the industrialist and the entrepreneur in society is for him a sign of disease. Sudden wealth makes unnatural leaders,

men

without

the steadying force of tradition

taste,

without honor, without

without what Pareto called

"persistent aggregates." In order that property

may

henceforth inspire

become more moral, we should keep open

all

more confidence and work for small

paths of

and sudden acquisition of the of transport and branches Accordingly, trade which favor the accumulation of large fortunes especially, there-

fortunes, but should prevent the effortless [!]

wealth.

we should

take

all

out of the hands of private persons and private money-market look and companies, upon those who own too much, just as upon those who own nothing, as types fraught with danger to the community. 10 fore, the

The whole long passage is a most interesting what the Nazis call their voltysche Weltanschauung. 9 The Dawn of Day, 308, 10 Human, All Too Human, "The Wanderer and his Shadow,"

ausgabe), IX, 357. of

anticipation

285.

,

NIETZSCHE

124

again, Nietzsche stops short very conveniently for him-

Here

"Out

self.

of the hands of private persons,"

hands? Nietzsche does not

say.

and into whose

His Nazi commentators have

answered for him. Into the hands of the National

Socialist

state as now organized, writes one of them, who finds that 11 Not too much, not Nietzsche foresaw the corporative state.

Robespierre once said that in the republic to come, no one should have much over, or much under, 3,000 francs a too

little.

but Robespierre is strange company for Nietzsche. Capitalist society, Nietzsche continues, has exploited the

year

The

once are right. But their egalitarian remedies are a poison worse than the disease. The worker must be restored to his proper place in the Order of Rank. We laborer.

socialists for

have got to get rid of the cash-nexus.

Workmen should learn to regard their duties as soldiers do. They should receive emoluments, support, but they should not get wages! There

is

no

relation

between wor\ done and money

received-,

the

individual should, according to his fynd, be so placed as to perform the 12 highest that is compatible with his powers.

We

need, in order to dissolve this cash-nexus, a revolution, a

great renewal of society. Before economic life can be put in the

modest place where it belongs, it must be properly subordinated to the moral and political life of the community. Justice, not 13 wealth, must be the measure of utility.

And

justice ?

It is at

capitalistic spirit.

Socialism

envy of his masters.

upper ll

classes

To

rate the opposite of the prevailing is

cure the

merely the workman's aping

workman

must cure themselves of

Haertle, Nietzsche

u The

any

of his socialism, the

their capitalism.

und der Nazionalsozialismus

(1937), 31.

Will to Power, 763. "Human, All Too Human, "The Wanderer and his Shadow,"

286.

WHAT

NIETZSCHE

WANTED

125

The

only remedy against Socialism that still lies in your power is to avoid provoking Socialism in other words, to live in moderation and

contentment, to prevent as far as possible

all

the State as far as possible in You do not like this remedy?

its

all superfluities

selves "Liberals," confess that

it is

terrible

and menacing if

Then, you

rich bourgeois

your own

and to aid and luxuries.

lavish display,

who

inclination that

call

your-

you find so

in Socialists, but allow to prevail in yourselves as

with you it were something different. As you are you had not your fortune and the cares of maintaining it,

unavoidable, as constituted,

taxing of

if

this bent of yours

would make

Socialists of you.

Possession alone differ-

you from them. If you wish to conquer the assailants of your And if that prosperity prosperity, you must first conquer yourselves. only meant well-being, it would not be so external and provocative of entiates

it would be more generous, more benevolent, more compensatory, more helpful. But the spurious, histrionic element in your pleasures, which lie more in the feeling of contrast (because others have them not, and feel envious) than in feelings of realised and heightened power your houses, dresses, carriages, shops, the demands of your palates and your tables, your noisy operatic and musical enthusiasm; lastly your women, formed and fashioned but of base metal, gilded but without the ring of gold, chosen by you for show and considering themselves meant for show these are the things that spread the poison of that national which seizes the masses ever more and more as a Socialistic disease, its but has heart-itch, origin and breeding-place in you. Who shall now

envy;

arrest this

14

epidemic? II

No

more

economic

than as to family life, education, and can one expect from Nietzsche concrete pro-

as to politics

life,

posals for reform.

philosopher.

He

He

is

certainly

no conventional

political

uses the classic terms of political theory

in no fresh senses. In the democracy abstract, "democracy" sounds bad to him, "aristocracy" and "monarchy" good. But with the actual governments of his

monarchy,

14

Human,

aristocracy,

All

Too Human, "Miscellaneous Maxims and Opinions,"

304.

NIETZSCHE

126 time,

no matter what they

are called, he

is

disgusted. France

and England have frankly committed themselves to democracy and therefore to decadence. Germany, in which the strong old instincts for a society founded on the Order of Rank were still alive

under Frederick the Great, has since 1813 given way

increasingly to her almost equally old weakness, the desire to

and

imitate,

Even

own game,

excel at their

so intelligent

and

realistic

Western powers. an "old" German as Bismarck the

himself obliged to introduce parliamentary government and in many other ways to compromise with the West. The

has

felt

result

is

an unstable mixture of elements natural and unnatural

Germans, a society enjoying its own peculiar decadence; the era of a stupefied Germany" (Aera "the era of Bismarck in

dcr dcutschcn

Verdummung)

In this sad situation, only

Russia seems to hold a promise, "Russia, the only great nation today that has some lasting power and grit in her, that can bide

her time, that can

still

promise something

Russia, the op-

wretched European petty-statism and neurasthenia, which the foundation of the German Empire has brought to a

posite of all 16

crisis."

was an

As

aside,

for America,

all

"no American future."

tion-mark after the phrase.

The

Nietzsche thought It is

deserved

true he put a ques-

17

European and American

politics of all

we

states in the nine-

with the possible exception of Russia Nietzsche impossibly corrupt. And they were deeply

teenth century, then,

were

to

corrupt, not with the petty graft old-maidish reformers

about

that

was

at

most a symptom

worry

but with the funda-

16

Wer\e (Grossoctavausgabe) XIII, 350. The Twilight of the Idols, "Skirmishes in a War with The Genealogy of Morals, "Peoples and Countries," ,

1<J

17

the Age," 17.

39.

WHAT

NIETZSCHE

WANTED

127

mental corruption of democratized Christianity. They were organized to achieve the ignoble ends of herd-men, peace, animal comfort, the survival of the mean, the stupid, the botched. But they were not even successful in achieving these ends.

The

nineteenth century had seen the

new

nationalism, a

era of wars

on a grand

democratic

rise of

scale,

wars between

huge armies raised by universal conscription, not between the small armies of professional fighters of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

In these wars, the comfortable decadence of

was made impossible. International politics were than domestic politics. if that was possible in a worse mess the bourgeois

Nietzsche approved wars in principle, and wrote flowingly 18 But he did not altogether like in praise of war and warriors. the specific wars of his

own

time.

as so often,

Perhaps here,

Nietzsche simply displays the unsubtle neurosis that made him and he clearly hadn't disapprove anything he hadn't invented

He

invented Bismarck's wars.

does, however,

try

hard

to

rationalize his feeling that the wars of his time are inglorious

wars.

They

are inglorious partly because, of course, they are

unnaturally fought

the herd-men,

among

limited to their proper function of hewers of

who ought

to

be

wood and drawers

of water for the real warriors, the master-men.

European

an emotion of the herd, the pooled egotisms of men. But not even these emotions are really natural,

nationalism

common

most

is

from which grows the Volf(. stupid contemporary world of ours,

really rooted in the strong soil

Like everything else in this the emotions we call nationalistic are mere perverse and corrupted sentiments, 18

The

classic

passage

artificially cultivated is

in

Thus

by

men

SpaJ(e Zarathustra, Part

mostly "inI,

chap. x.

NIETZSCHE

128

infected with the Socratic virus.

tellectuals"

Germans

that at present holds the

a pure love of blood

and

soil,

The

nationalism

together, for instance,

is

but a ferment of Rousseau,

not

Wag-

ner, "progress," egalitarianism, hedonism, beer and fine ideals

generally.

This nation has deliberately abused itself for almost a thousand years: else have the two great European narcotics, alcohol and Chris-

nowhere

been so viciously abused as in Germany. Recently a third opiate to the list, our music, our costive and constipating

tianity,

was added

German

.

.

.

How much

music.

peevish ponderousness, paralysis, is there not in German

dressing-gown languor, and beer,

ness,

dampintelli-

19

gence!

Europe so fundamentally ill, Nietzsche will supply no narrow sense of mere clinical experience. That remedy is not his way: he is nothing so limited as a clinician. But he For

a

in the

he

with the magic of words. Against he is always against someone the petty nationalists of his time or something he declares himself to be a "good European." will prophesy,

I

see over

whatever I

It

will play

and above

all

these national wars,

What

else lies in the

am

I

new "empires" and concerned with for

foreground. is the United slowly and hesitatingly Europe. was the only real work, the one impulse in the souls of all broad-

see

it

itself

preparing

minded and deep-thinking men the

new

synthesis,

"the European."

I

of this century

this

am

tentative effort to anticipate the future of thinking of men like Napoleon, Heinrich Heine,

Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, Schopenhauer. But to the help of such minds as feel the need of a .

.

.

comes a great explanatory economic fact: the small I refer to all our present kingdoms and "empires"

become economically untenable, owing

"The

to the

new

states of

unity there

Europe

will in a short

Part

I,

discussion of "artificial 475.

time

mad, uncontrolled struggle

Twilight of the Idols, "Things the Germans Lack,"

more moderate

Human,

preparation of

and the

nationalism," see

Human,

2.

For a

All

Too

WHAT

NIETZSCHE

WANTED

129

for the possession of local and international trade. ... In order, however, that Europe may enter into the battle for the mastery of the world

she must probably "come to an with good prospects of victory The with England. English colonies are needed for this understanding" as much as modern Germany to play her new role of broker struggle, just .

.

.

and middleman, requires the colonial possessions of Holland. For no one any longer believes that England alone is strong enough to continue to act her old part for fifty years more [that is, to 1940] here, as in .

.

.

other matters, the coming century will be following in the footsteps of Napoleon, the first man, and the man of greatest initiative and advanced views, of

This

modern is

times.

20

certainly prophecy in the

grand manner. Nietzsche

at times seems to be almost grateful to democratic nationalism it is

something

to

overcome.

to a better state of affairs.

It is,

The

:

indeed, the necessary prelude last

few hundred years have

been a time of marvellous and necessary destruction: they have at last leveled the

ground on which the coming Supermen, the

Cyclopeans, can build a noble work of masonry. They have destroyed, or are destroying, the last remnants of

barbarism,

all

the crude

and tyrannical

instincts of

European mere ani-

mal man. Whether we

call

it

"civilization," or

"humanity," or "progress," which

now

distinguishes the European: whether we call it simply, without praise or blame, by the political formula: the democratic movement in

behind all the moral and political foregrounds pointed to by such formulas, an immense physiological process goes on, which is ever

Europe

extending: the process of the assimilation of Europeans; their increasing detachment from the conditions under which, climatically and hereditarily,

united races originate; their increasing independence of every

definite milieu, that for centuries

demands on essentially

would

fain inscribe itself with equal

and body; that is to say, the slow emergence of an super-national and nomadic species of man, who possesses, soul

**The Genealogy of Morals, "Peoples and Countries/' Wisdom, Part V, 362.

Joyful

18.

See also

The

NIETZSCHE

130

physiologically speaking, a maximum of the art and power of adaptation as his typical distinction. This process of the evolving European . . . will probably arrive at results on which its naive propagators and pane-

"modern ideas," would least care to reckon. The same new conditions under which on an average a levelling and cheapgyrists, the apostles of

man

will take place a useful, industrious, variously serviceare in the highest degree suitable to clever gregarious man use to men of most dangerous and attractive qualithe give exceptional ties. For, while the collective impression of such future Europeans will

ening of

and

able

probably be that of numerous, talkative, weak-willed, and very handy workmen who require a master, a commander, as they require their daily bread; while, therefore, the democratising of Europe will tend to the production of a type prepared for slavery in the most subtle sense

man will necessarily in individual and exceptional become stronger and richer than he has perhaps ever been before owing to the unprejudicedness of his schooling, owing to the immense variety of practice, art, and disguise. I meant to say that the democratising of Europe is at the same time an involuntary arrangement for the rearing of tyrants taking the word in all its meanings, even in its most spiritual

of the term: the strong cases,

sense.

21

Therefore: "The leveling of the mankind of Europe is the great process which should not be arrested; it should even be accelerated."

22

Nietzsche has achieved the philosopher's favorite task, the reconciliation of the irreconcilable. Hegel could have found

no

better

example of the benign workings of the

dialectic; out

of democracy, dictatorship; out of the rule of the herd-men, the

Supermen. The cosmic process is at work smoothly and surely. It would almost seem as if there were nothing to

rule of the

But the cosmic process needs the aid of

get excited about.

cosmic thinkers. Nietzsche

is

at least as excited as another,

and

more open, Hegelian, Karl Marx. He, too, has blue-prints for the future, blue-prints a bit vague for mere practising architects 21

Beyond Good and

88

The

Evil,

Will to Power,

898.

242.

WHAT and

NIETZSCHE

WANTED

builders, but all that a philosopher

131

and a prophet ever need.

him might not really turn out to be a future. The heart of his work is what he sets forth as a new eschatology, a new morality. Our study of what

Nietzsche foresaw a future which without

Nietzsche wanted in family life, education, economic life, and politics has led us naturally and inevitably to the traditionally

and generalized form of what this anti-philosopher wanted to his philosophy. We must try now to come to grips

abstract

with those famous phrases of Nietzsche's which his followers "the Will to Power," "immoralhave turned into slogans ism,"

"the

transvaluation

of

all

values,"

"the

Superman"

(Uebermensch}, "the Eternal Recurrence" (cwigc Wicderkunfi). Ill

Nietzsche learned from Schopenhauer that Will principle of the Universe, or at least of verse

and

that the intellect

is

human

life

is

the

first

in the Uni-

the servant of the Will.

But

Schopenhauer's pessimism held human life, as an evil, to be palliated if not transcended by "living" as little as possible. This near-death in life he would attain by a kind

and hence Will,

of pseudo-oriental quietism, a Nirvana-like state of philosophic

calm and contempt. Nietzsche early decided he would say "Yea" where his Master had said "Nay," that he would accept with delight the endless struggles to which his Will invited him. What Schopenhauer had called the Will to Life, and

A

Bad Thing, he would

call the

Will to Power, and

A

Good

Thing.

What is good? All that enhances the feeling of power, the Will to all that proceeds from Power, and power itself in man. What is bad? weakness. What is happiness? the feeling that power is increasing that resistance has been overcome.

NIETZSCHE

132

Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the Renaissance sense, virtu, free from all moralic acid). The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle

And

of our humanity.

The Will

23 they ought even to be helped to perish.

Power, as Nietzsche used the term, is no doubt a philosophic rather than a scientific term. It will not satisfy to

contemporary logical positivists and students of semantics. Mr. Stuart Chase might ask in vain for a "referent" for this Will

to

Power and Mr.

operational

test

W. Bridgman

might find that no could be performed on it. Yet Nietzsche P.

grand phrase, the "Will

certainly does not use even this

Power,"

as

Kant used the

to

"Thing-in-itself" or Plato "idea."

He

struggles very hard not to hypostatize the term, not to make it an absolute; he avoids as meaningless the simple old problem of free-will versus determinism; and he makes a genuine effort to attain

term.

24

what he

At any

back on such

rate,

fine,

an "unphilosophical" definition of the though Nietzsche finds himself falling

calls

vague terms

as

"good," "bad," "happiness,"

"contentment" and "overcoming" as soon as he tries to define the Will to Power, he is perhaps in a position not much worse than the physicist struggling with the concept of Energy, of the economist struggling with the concept of Wealth. The Will to Power is for Nietzsche a convenient blanket-term, a generalization, a consciously invented abstraction

time and enabled

amount

of

The Will 28

him

to avoid repetition

which saved him well, a certain

repetition.

to

Power manifests

itself,

according to Nietzsche

The Antichrist, 2. The key passage, in Beyond Good and Evil, 19, is much too long for quotation. The reader is advised to go to the passage himself, and to judge how far Nietzsche avoids the usual philosophical traps and trappings. 24

WHAT (and it is only in the lives of

with what

man, to

we

WANTED

NIETZSCHE

133

to be known by its manifestations}^ very diversely human beings; since it is practically synonymous call "life,"

artist, priest,

it is

to be

found in them

peasant and banker are

impose themselves,

all

all.

trying to prevail, includ-

to arrange their surroundings

human

beings ing surrounding indeed in most men, this effort

to suit themselves. is

States-

In some,

a limited one, easily satisfied

by rough-and-ready adjustment which is hardly more than mere staying alive. But there are a few stronger spirits whom the Will to Power impels to a wider range of action. These are the

men who mould

and even

society,

who determine for their own times,

for posterity, the conditions of life

They must work with

on

recalcitrant material, both

this earth.

human and

non-human, and they do not commonly perform are usually groups of

They

miracles.

men, "they" rather than "he."

Nietzsche believed firmly, however, in the "great man" theory, and he held that sometimes individuals like Napoleon, gifted

with an extraordinary Will to Power, intelligent and wellhave brought about major trained and favored by luck

changes in the conditions of life on this earth. Saint Paul, too, which brings us to a very important was one of these men point. It

is

possible to distinguish

especially the past of

forms which the Will

makers of

history.

from

a study of the past,

European men, two broadly to

Power has taken

The dualism

is

Nietzsche will admit, and there are

antithetical

in the lives of these

of course a

all sorts

and

rough one,

as

of shadings in actual

between the two poles we set up for our convenience in ordering the facts; but the dualism is convenient, since it cor-

fact

responds, however roughly, to facts.

At one pole

is

the Will to

NIETZSCHE

134

Power as represented by the Warrior; to Power as represented by the Priest.

The Warrior

is

essentially noble.

the "good" and also,

at the other is the

Will

He represents for Nietzsche

for Nietzsche

was

as

fond of the word

the "natural." The as any eighteenth-century philosophc Warrior is frank and open in his exercise of the Will to Power.

He

has a strong body, good health, handsome features, noble

bearing; he delights in the use of his strength in bodily combat, in the indulgence of all the fine gifts of

senses afford him.

He

is

of the religious mystic

his lusty

from the

spiritual

masturbation

which Nietzsche liked

to call "Dio-

so different

physical ecstasy

enjoyment

capable, at his best, of that flashing

He is guided by honor, not by interest. He loves form, punctiliousness, ceremony. He has a keen sense of the Order nysian."

own high place in that order. He hates as strongly and as much as he loves perhaps he hates rather more than he loves ? He has a "loathing of demaof Rank,

and

will defend his

gogism, of enlightenment, of amiability, and plebeian famil25 He is not, except when he hates, very much like iarity." Friedrich Nietzsche.

The

Priest

is

essentially ignoble.

He

represents for Nietzsche

He He is

the "bad" and also the "unnatural." diseased in

mind

if

not in body.

straightforward voluptuousness.

He

is

physically weak,

incapable of clean,

cannot be truly proud or

honorable, since he lacks the gifts of enable

him

with the Warrior. But his strong,

and

body and soul which and honor in open combat Will to Power is strong, perversely

to establish his pride

his intelligence

is

sharpened, as compensation for

his bodily weakness, into a craftiness, 28

The Will

to

Power,

943.

an ignoble

ability to

WHAT

WANTED

NIETZSCHE

135

manipulate words and concepts. This craftiness, the servant of his Will to Power, he uses to confound and overthrow the Warrior.

He

many ways an extraordinary named Friedrich Nietzsche.

bears in

to a philosopher

resemblance

Contemporary Europe, or rather, the whole civilized world, was produced by the collective victory of Priests over Warriors. Indeed, and in a sense rather oddly, the Warrior has never yet

had

his rightful place in society.

This more valuable type has appeared often enough already: but as a accident, as an exception, never as willed. He has rather been

happy

most feared; hitherto he has been almost the terrible in and from the very fear he provoked there arose the will to the type which has now been reared, attained: the domestic animal,

precisely the itself;

rear

the gregarious animal, the sick animal

The

clever

and degenerate

the Christian. 26

man,

Priests, realizing that

compete with the Warriors

Warriors'

at the

they could not

own

level,

have

enlisted the aid of the masses against their "natural" masters,

and have This the ligion,

established themselves as their "unnatural" masters. priests

and

religion.

especially their masterpiece, Christian morality

The

individuals

have achieved by inventing morality and

wak

are, in the

would always

most

go down

literal sense,

and organized

are very numerous,

and

weak and

before the strong

good, bodily strong, the nobles, the Warriors.

re-

as

the

But the weak

into a collectivity > they can

overcome the strong. This organization has been achieved in the Christian Church and in its contemporary adaptation, the religion of

democracy and progress.

We have already tion of the nature

*The

seen

how

Nietzsche works out his explana-

and triumph

of Christianity.

K Antichrist,

3.

27

The upshot

See above, pp. 97-108.

NIETZSCHE

136 of

for Nietzsche that at present the

it all is

seem

the ignoble

to represent the actual

human beings. did, we might say

we

weak, the botched, working-out of the

Will to Power in

If

as Nietzsche

that the Will to

loved paradox as

denied, has annihilated, the Will to Power.

shocking

hardly adequate.

we might

Well, that this

worked

is

to

Clearly this

try a little juggling

for the priests,

is

a is

be done?

with words.

way of doing, but and we must not be

a rather priestly

is

Power has

which the word "decadence"

state of affairs, for

What

much

it

It is

true

seems to have

too nice, or the

Will to Power will perish from the earth. Why not fight fire a vulgar activity, and certainly expressed in a with fire ? vulgar

way unworthy

times of

crisis.

And

of the subtlest aphorist, but these are

it is

a simple way, refreshingly,

and

per-

Since the priests have given a good

haps deceptively, simple. name to bad actions, and called them "moral," immoralists. Their good shall

good. But

we

become our

we

will

become

evil, their evil

are really better moralists than they;

we

our

are really

and we cannot forego the help the established uses language can give us. So we shall call the standards we want

in the right,

of to

have prevail

(Umwertung

among men

aller

a transvaluation

of all values

Werte}.

manipulation of words charged with sentiment is by no means easy to carry out consistently, and Nietzsche is fre-

Such

a

quently in trouble. Sometimes he consistent: "evil, be thou my good!"

words that

men

common

is

logically

He

and defiantly

uses as terms of praise

usage makes terms of blame.

He

wants

to be cruel, hard, ruthless, pitiless, unscrupulous, deceitful,

boastful, truculent, sensual, frivolous.

uses as terms of praise

words

that

Sometimes, however, he

common

usage makes terms

WHAT He

of praise.

NIETZSCHE

men

wants

137

to be brave, honorable, strong, serious,

Sometimes he uses words the Christians them-

lofty, noble.

good words; and then he has

selves regard as

to explain that these are

not

WANTED

to be very careful

indeed transvalued values, that he does

mean by them what

He

the Christians mean.

can praise

asceticism, even chastity; but he will have men ascetic only towards the coarser indulgences, ascetic only as the athlete who trains himself for struggle by disciplining his body; and as for chastity "it

means

in eroticis

he

that a man's taste has

likes neither the brutal,

remained noble, that the morbid, nor the

28

Again, that constant definition by negation. Nietzsche can rarely keep on in the affirmative for more than a sentence or so. Listen to him attempt to answer a question

clever."

which should bring out Yea-saying:

The

"What one

is

to the full his capacity for

Dionysian

noble ?"

constantly forced to be playing a part. That one constantly searching for situations in which one is forced to put on airs. That one leaves happiness to the greatest number, the happiness fact that

is

is

which

consists of inner peacefulness, of virtue, of comfort,

angelic-back-parlor-smugness, a la Spencer.

and of Anglo-

That one

instinctively seeks for heavy responsibilities. That one knows how to create enemies everywhere, at a pinch even in one's self. That one contradicts the greatest

number, not

in

words

at all,

but by continually behaving differently from

them.

Or, from a longer

We

series of

[the noble ones]

are not quick to admire. hold the belief that no morality

towards the "gifted";

we

out good birth.

We

.

.

.

dispense honors; while he

honoring

us.

* The Will

... to

We

Power,

answers to the same question .

always is

feel

as

not found too

.

.

We is

:

are ironical

possible with-

we were those who had often who would be worthy

if

to

of

are capable of otium y of the unconventional con-

947.

NIETZSCHE

138 viction, that

although a handicraft does not shame one in any sense, it We collect precious things, the needs

certainly reduces one's rank. . of higher and fastidious souls;

We

want

to

have our

.

.

we wish to own books, our own

possess nothing in

common.

29

landscapes.

\

Thus

is

"noble" transvalued

from, shall

we

say, that

characterizes the behavior of a conventional, satisfied of an

aristocratic

European

family into that

which

member

which characterizes

the behavior of an unconventional, neurotic, dissatisfied

and

who would

like

intellectual

very

much

member

of a middle-class family,

indeed to be considered an aristocrat?

There are

words much simpler than "transvaluation of all values" which one might apply to such a process: "snobbery," for instance. Assuming, however, that we know what we mean by the "transvaluation of It

seems

all

there are

how

values,"

no end

can

human Somehow

that the present condition of

of transvaluation of values.

it

be brought about?

of paradoxes in Nietzsche's thought

rule the strong; the slaves have

affairs is in itself a

the

kind

weak have come

to

overcome the masters. Nature

experiment with nobility. We shall have to and devise a new nobility, aid her possibly to supplant her a new kind of master-class. These we shall call the "Super-

failed in her first

men." They

will accomplish the final transvaluation of values.

They

will live the bright, clean

life

their

Dionysian prophet

which he caught in moments of inspiration such tantalizing glimpses, and which he struggled so hard to capture in the feeble words which are all that the greatest of mere

longed for, of

men

can command.

Do not be

not ask Nietzsche

made

* The

how

to

in our time, nor in

Will to Power,

944, 943.

make Supermen. They will our children's. They will not

WHAT come through

NIETZSCHE

WANTED

139

the kind of biological evolution our Darwinian

Evolution in Darwin's sense can perhaps make Englishmen, but certainly not Supermen. They will not even be achieved by what later biologists were to call a muta-

superstitions evoke.

tion.

And

they will certainly not be achieved by "planning,"

by the exercise of our petty selves comfortable.

They

little

will

human

tricks for

the prophetic

our-

come, these pure creatures of the

Deed, by the miraculous exercise of the

Word,

making

Word

the poetic

Word. Nietzsche-Zarathustra has not quite

words enough: ^ I teach

you the Superman. Man is something that ye done to surpass man?

is

to be surpassed.

What have

All beings hitherto have created something beyond themselves; and ye want to be the ebb of that great tide, and would rather go back to the beast than surpass man? What is the ape to man? just the same shall of shame.

man

A laughing-stock, a thing of shame. And be to the Superman: a laughing-stock, a thing

Ye have made your way from you is still worm. Once ye were

the apes,

worm

to

and even

man, and much within yet man is more of an

ape than any of the apes.

Even

the wisest of you is only a disharmony and hybrid of plant and I bid you become phantoms or plants?

phantom. But do Lo,

I

teach you the Superman! is the meaning of the earth.

The Superman Superman

shall be the

The Superman is

is

meaning

of the earth!

Let your will say:

not quite Nietzsche's highest

yet the Eternal Recurrence, a concept

The

30

flight.

There

which Nietzsche seems

held firmly by the strongest of mere men, enable them to live as a kind of bridge to the Supermen. And the

to feel will,

if

Supermen themselves, " Thus

so far as Zarathustra can achieve the

Spat(e Zarathustra, Part

I,

Prologue,

3.

NIETZSCHE

140

impossible feat of seeing into their minds-to-come, will nourish

and

fortify themselves in their

superhuman world by

their

contemplation of the eternal verity of the Eternal

fearless

"somewhere between golden

Recurrence,

heaven."

ice

and

a

pure

31

Nietzsche's concept of the Eternal Recurrence

is

an unrefined

mixture of oriental speculation on metempsychosis, old European striving for a metaphysical absolute, and misunderstood theoretical physics of the late nineteenth century, the latter of

which held it

held for

much

same horrifying fascination Henry Adams. Energy, says Nietzsche, was once for Nietzsche

the

thought to be unlimited. Now we know that it is limited. It is eternally active, but it cannot eternally create new forms.

must repeat itself. "Everything has returned: spider, and thy thoughts at this moment, and 32 There thought of thine that all things will return."

Therefore Sirius,

this last is

it

and the

no order

which

all

change

in

in the universe, other than this circular process in

things repeat themselves.

any

sions, the notions call

Notions of growth, of

direction, of purpose in the universe, are all illu-

we

call "scientific" as

"moral." Abandon, as

we

well as the notions

we

must, any system of theism, of

belief in a creator, and we have only this endless and almost unbearable Becoming. A thousand Nietzsches have written a thousand appeals to create the Superman, and a thousand more

n

"Notes on the Eternal Recurrence,"

42,

appended, in the English edition,

volume containing The Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist. These may be found in German in A. Baeumler's edition of Nietzsche's remains, Die Unschuld des Werdens, II, 1296-1351. The quotation above is from 1351. 83 "Notes on the Eternal Recurrence," 22. In Die Unschuld des Werdens, to

II,

the

1330.

WHAT

NIETZSCHE

WANTED

141

same appeal, world without end and words without end. But no Nietzsche will ever have the slightest

will write again the

memory It

of another Nietzsche.

would seem

tempt

its

that belief in the Eternal Recurrence

adept to cease trying to

might

change the universe. But this

grand and complete determinism no more makes Nietzsche a determinist in the fleeting life of his consciousness than an

made Marx a practising spurs him to intense moral

almost equally grand determinism determinist. effort.

We

the contrary

We must live

must

world.

On

so that

it

we may

be worthy of living again.

fight theism, fight beliefs that

We

must struggle

We

this life

and

this

pure heights on which that of the Eternal Recurrence can

to attain the

alone so stark a doctrine as

be endured.

deny

must put

off softness

and take on hardness.

We must give up the little hopes, and cherish the great hope of never, hopelessness. We must be what has never been before in the little rondo Eternal Recurrence. We our at least, during must become Supermen

once more.

CHAPTER

VI

NIETZSCHE-IN-HIMSELF critic of

THE

he could imitate

that

and

Nietzsche's

work must not

infrequently wish

his subject's fine careless freedom,

form

cast his reflections in the

of loosely connected apho-

"Nietzsche on being noble," "The best 'Yea' " "How to exercise the Will to Power is an explosive 'Nay,' without sweating," "Will the Supermen use exclamation-

ristic

passages

marks?"

It is

dangerous, however, for the

critic to desert

the

conventions of his craft to follow even so successful a rebel against these

and other conventions

better try to bring the Master

himself was always in flight

seemed never

down

as

was Nietzsche.

He had

though the Master high above Lake Silvaplana, and

to descend, not

to earth,

even to

re-fuel.

He

did at least

take off from this earth somewhere, sometime.

He took off from the soil of late nineteenth-century Germany. Nietzsche was so far from being out of tune with the his age, unzeitgem'dss, that cally Nietzsche's

one

is

tempted

to

employ mechaniand declare

favorite intellectual device

most zeitgemass, most representative of his age. was irritated, indeed infuriated, by the way most of his

that his

He

work

own

spirit of

fellow

men

is

behaved. But so were most intellectuals of his time.

Nietzsche wrote well after the brief era of Victorian peace and contentment with the world had reached its peak; and besides, that feeling of contentment with the

the intellectuals.

The bulk

world had never captured

of surviving nineteenth-century

NIETZSCHE-IN-HIMSELF

143

any language is a literature of protest, and of proof the things Nietzsche hated middle-class most against morality, industrial civilization, materialism, ostentation and

literature in test

and

vulgarity in art, the leveling process in manners, morals, politics.

Nietzsche's originality was largely a matter of intem-

He swore at common man. He

perate vocabulary. trusting the

much

he wore

sleeve

the herd instead of merely dis-

not only wore his heart on his sentimental organs there. He is

less

the nineteenth-century intellectual in a frenzy. If you like the frenzy, you

may

Nietzsche's

of course call

work

fits

it

a transcendence.

neatly into the late nineteenth century

two very broad ways: ment, change, and in its

in

contempt for history and

emphasis on growth, developanti-intellectualism. In spite of his

in

its

historians,

he was himself a historian,

or at least a philosopher of history. In spite of his hatred for

Rousseau and the Rousseauists, he was in his distrust for the instrument of thought a direct descendant of the Genevan and, no doubt, of old

Adam

have achieved the transvaluation of are

more

"trans," to

Nietzsche

himself. all

values; but

recalcitrant than others to the easy

and

it

seems to be a

fact that

on

some

magic of the

this earth a

have contemporaries; which means that a

rary, that his thoughts are contemporary.

indeed

may

man

is

facts

prefix

man

has

contempo-

Nietzsche was,

if

unfashionable and unpopular in his day; but he was very greatly influenced by what was fashionable and popular in his day. And those influences worked far more subtly than

you

is

like,

implied in Nietzsche's proud boast that he was everything

his contemporaries

We

were

not.

have already outlined

history, the curious

briefly Nietzsche's

philosophy of

and sketchy account of man's long

rise

from

NIETZSCHE

144

mere animal self into

European, about to transform himThis sketchy and very intellectual phi-

to decadent 1

Superman.

he himself has summed up

losophy of history

characteristic passage,

analysis clear

quoting

elliptical,

The

under

sardonic, cryptic, yet

and almost Comtean

in

its

simplicity. It

most

is

worth

at length:

THE HISTORY 1.

a

in

OF AN ERROR

true world, attainable to the sage, the pious

he

of virtue,

lives in

he

it,

man and

the

man

is it.

(The most ancient form of the idea was relatively clever, It was a paraphrase of the proposition "I, Plato,

convincing.

simple, the

am

truth.")

The

2.

true world

which

is

unattainable for the

man and

to the sage, to the pious

to the

man

moment,

is

promised

of virtue ("to the sinner

who

repents"). (Progress of the idea: it becomes more subtle, more insidious, more // becomes a woman, it becomes Christian.) evasive,

The

3.

true world

is

unattainable,

it

cannot be proved,

promise anything; but even as a thought, alone, tion, a

it is

it

a comfort,

cannot

an obliga-

command.

(At bottom

this is

still

skepticism: the idea has

the old sun; but seen through mist and

become sublime,

pale, northern,

Konigsber-

gian.)

The

4.

And

true world

as unattained

forts,

is it is

unattainable?

At

all

also

events

unknown. Consequently nor saves, nor constrains: what could something it

it

it is

unattained.

no longer com-

unknown

con-

strain us to?

(The grey

of

dawn. Reason

The cock-crow The "true world"

time.

stretches itself

of positivism.) an idea that

and yawns

for the first

no longer serves any purpose, a useless idea that has no longer constrains one to anything, become quite superfluous, consequently an exploded idea: let us abolish it! (Bright daylight; breakfast; the return of common sense and of 5.

that

*Sce above, pp. 131-141.

NIETZSCHE-IN-HIMSELF shame and

cheerfulness; Plato blushes for

145

free-spirits kick

all

up

a

shindy.) 6.

We

have suppressed the true world: what world survives? the

apparent world perhaps? Certainly not! In abolishing the true world we have also abolished the world of appearance! (Noon; the moment of the shortest shadows; the end of the longest error; mankind's zenith; Incipit Zarathustra? .

There a period

is,

apparently, a

when men

.

.

first

stage omitted

lived without

from

this

summary,

worrying about the "true

world," lived in simple acceptance of the world of the senses, the world of willing but of willing innocently undisturbed

by the necessity of choice between good and evil. Once men got to worrying about good and evil, however, the priests could begin their sorry work.

What

is

most noticeable

in this account

of men's overcoming the illusions of abstract thought Comte's theological, metaphysical, and positivistic stages all Hisis its highly intellectualist form. successively overcome

tory seems to be for Nietzsche the

of an idea,

working out

men's actions for him to be determined by their response

to

the "first principles" of abstract thinkers. This of course will

never do, and Nietzsche himself in most of his work goes to great pains to escape

from

a position so

annoyingly

like a cari-

cature of Hegel's.

He

other times into what looks like a caricature of

falls at

Darwin's position. Life

a struggle

is

among men

exercising to

the best of their abilities their Will to Power. In this struggle the 1

weak and The Twilight

Fable.'*

Nietzsche,

of the Will historians,

The

to

"In

or should be

the botched are

"How

of the Idols,

who

loved to

mock

the

Power

wrote that in

my own

way,

Will to Power,

63.

I

am

True World*

himself spite

beaten by the

became a and easy exercise attacks on history and ultimately

a pleasant

of his

attempting a justification of history."

NIETZSCHE

146

strong and the competent.

What we

are but the instruments with

and make them minister

call

morality and religion

which the strong subdue the weak,

to the process of evolution, a process

which higher and higher types of strength emerge from a conflict ever more tense. Or should emerge, for as we have

in

already seen, there

a catch in the process.

is

gone wrong. Under

Christianity, the

dodge the Will to Power, or to pervert

to

Something has

weak have found it.

a

way

They have ham-

strung the strong with a religion of gentleness, love, pity, and general glorification of weakness. Christianity is the reverse of the principle of selection. If the degenerate sick man ("the Christian") is to be of the same value as the

and the

healthy man ("the pagan"), or if he is even to be valued higher than the latter, as Pascal's view of health and sickness would have us value

him, the natural course of evolution is thwarted and the unnatural becomes law. ... In practice this general love of mankind is nothing more than deliberately favoring all the suffering, the botched and the degenerate;

it is

this love that

lofty duty of sacrificing

There

is

difficulty

an

has weakened the power, responsibility, and

men.8

old, old philosophical difficulty

of explaining

how

unsolved here, the

the unnatural

became

natural.

deep down he however much with the traditional underneath, may play methods and vocabulary of philosophers, and he is willing to

But Nietzsche

is

really a consistent anti-philosopher

the insoluble stay unsolved.

let

notion of a struggle for is

life,

so

Sufficient for

much

him

that the

in the air in his generation,

one that he finds satisfying and useful. But he will be no conventional Darwinian. In Nietzsche's

view the English scientist belonged, like all Englishmen, to the His doctrine of evolution, as Herbert Spencer has un-

herd. 1

The Will

to

Power,

246.

NIETZSCHE-IN-HIMSELF consciously shown,

is

no

call to battle to

147

prepare the earth for

the Supermen, but a sedative belief that the process of evolution will take care of itself, that our

environment

is

automatically

turning out better men, that natural selection is still going on. (It is doubtful whether Nietzsche ever really read Darwin.)

What Darwin,

according to Nietzsche, failed to understand

that the Will to

Power

no mere process

is

is

to be

analyzed by method," but something that only poets and prophets can get at and stir up. Such a poet-prophet could, for instance, find the Will to Power even in the amoebae so-called "scientific

not, of course,

by objective observation and the other

superstitions of science, but

by

intuition.

"Among

the

silly

amoebae

propagation appears as a process of jetsam, as an advantage to 4 Wherever the them. It is an excretion of useless matter." seer looks, he sees the

Will to Power.

He

also sees himself,

perhaps nothing but himself. But that is the prerogative of the god-like, even if jealous little scholars call it naive anthropo-

morphism. Nietzsche thought he saw through Darwin as well as through the amoebae.

Darwin depicted organisms

to adapt themselves to

as trying to survive,

an environment, rather than

as trying

extend their power, to mould their environment, because, like most inquirers into nature, Darwin was not an aristocrat. to

men

"belong to the people, their forefathers have been poor and humble persons, who knew too well by immediate experience the difficulty of making a living." Small wonder

Such

that "over the

whole of English Darwinism there hovers some-

thing of the suffocating thing of the odor of 4

The Will

to

air of

over-crowded England, some5 in need and in straits:

humble people '

Power,

653.

The

Joyful

Wisdom, V,

349.

NIETZSCHE

148

kind of bright idea which makes interesting reading, the kind of thing one finds in essayists and critics of the livelier sort. It may even have some This, by the way,

But there

relation to facts.

On

typical of the

is

the other hand,

no way

is

of proving such a relation.

origin in Nietzsche's

its

mind

clear

is

enough. He was very anxious to show that he was an aristocrat, that he had always been able to vivre noblement. He could not, however, altogether Nietzsche, then,

phy of

resist

is

a

which

history

that in this field his

the plebeian temptation to write.

good child is

of his age.

work

is

It is

somewhat involved and

really

have no business evolving

trine,

which

is

has a philoso-

also a doctrine of evolution.

dictory, that his evolving organisms

or biological,

He

and

true

contra-

his evolving societies

as they do.

His positive doc-

eminently philosophical rather than historical in the end to a kind of Lamarckianism,

comes

duly "transvalued" to accord with Nietzsche's sentiments. No species ever evolves, but only fit individuals within a given species (biologists, being

on the

6

species).

The

herd-men, have naturally concentrated

fit

individuals are not "selected" because

any accidental biological variation by which they are passively adapted to an environment, but because they possess

of

something of their own, something inside them, something ultimate and real; not the "consciousness" or the "ego" of com-

mon if

philosophical talk, but something

we might

call

the Christians hadn't spoiled the word, something

"soul"

we

shall

"Will to Power." Inspired by the Will to Power, these happy individuals dominate, increase their domination by struggle, and since they are, almost by definition, lusty folk,

call the

they exercise the Will to

The

Will to Power,

Power

679-683.

in sexual relations,

and beget

NIETZSCHE-IN-HIMSELF strong children

who

in turn

149

dominate and expound

their

domination. This looks like a procession onward and upward in the best nineteenth-century style. But at just this point the Devil enters in the shape of Socrates-Paul-Pascal-Spinoza-Kant-

Darwin, wickedly weakens the strong, and reverses the whole

makes

process

Jews,

who

it,

indeed, hardly

more than

a legend.

are an intelligent as well as vicious race,

seem

to

The have

understood matters very well; did they not invent the story of

Samson and Delilah ? II

Nietzsche's anti-intellectualism

makes him

as

much

of his age as does his evolutionism, an eccentric

a child

and spoiled

child, perhaps, but certainly no changeling of Time. Indeed, in Nietzsche as in his tamer contemporaries, both anti-intellec-

tualism and evolutionism are manifestations of a "climate of

opinion" hard to pin down with a single descriptive label. To use very old philosophical terms, we may say that the nineteenth century was very strongly inspired with a Heraclitan feeling that all things flow.

At

all

times,

no doubt, men

are

aware of experiencing sameness (or repetition or permanence) and also of experiencing difference (or change). Ordinary,

aware of both, and do not much bother themselves with the question as to which is real, or more real.

unreflecting

men

are

Philosophers, of course, have readily discerned that one sort of experience is real, or more real, and the other unreal, or less

have not agreed as to which is which. A historian content himself with the statement that the manifesta-

real; but they

may

tions of

observed

human

feelings about

phenomena

permanence and change in and places. Note

vary in different times

NIETZSCHE

150

well that the manifestations of men's sentiments and opinions about change may also be observed phenomena, Plato's opinion

on the matter,

famous metaphor of the

as recorded in the

prisoners in the cave, for instance,

be observed. Plato,

it

a

is

phenomenon

need hardly be remarked, was

that can

all

for the

reality of permanence.

Now, although no mathematical historian can be pretty sure of a

about

this

formulation

number

changed

less

teenth than in the nineteenth century.

possible, the

of generalizations

matter of permanence and change.

aspects of Paris, for instance,

is

The

physical

rapidly in the thir-

That

is

certain. Parisians in the thirteenth century felt, or

simple and

were of the

and changes in laws, clothes, Parisians in the nineteenth century not were habits, very rapid; felt, or were of the opinion, that such changes were very rapid. This is almost as simple and certain as the fact of changes in opinion, that changes of this sort,

buildings and

streets,

and you can

of recorded intellectual history.

verify

We

it

from the materials

need not bother ourselves

about the question (which is insoluble) as to whether "physical" change caused "mental" change, or vice versa. can, however, safely take another step, and state that in general

We

thirteenth-century Parisians were less favorable towards, less desirous of, changes of a great of the nineteenth century.

generalization,

and

Western Europe was

many We may

sorts

than were Parisians

extend the scope of the

state

that the climate of opinion in all

less

favorable to change in the thirteenth

than in the nineteenth century. This is not of course to deal with absolutes and to say that nothing changed in the thirteenth century and that everything changed in the nineteenth century. It is a cautious and rather platitudinous generalization about a

NIETZSCHE-IN-HIMSELF scries of relations

need

at least a

unphilosophically

The

observed phenomena, which would

among

volume

151

to be given a

semblance of what

we may

call reality.

anti-intellectualism of the later nineteenth century

part of

its

attitude towards change,

is

a

an attitude extraordinarily

receptive and eager towards all sorts of change. Perhaps sum total life for Western men changed more rapidly

in the in the

Certainly in the series of

men on phenomena we group

together as the Industrial Revolution,

change was more con-

nineteenth century than this earth.

tinuously obvious than

it

it

has ever before changed for

has ever been before, so obvious that

the intellectuals took over

from Renaissance Latin the neutral

term "progress," and made

it

into

belief in the desirability of change.

pean mind, working and even, in a sense,

at

an almost-popular religious But traditionally the Euro-

the level of theological, philosophical,

"scientific,"

thought, had tended to reach

conclusions that seemed inconsistent with the facts of change, that

seemed

to

make change

not by any means clear

is

undesirable, impossible, unreal.

how

far such thought, such "intel-

lectualism," influenced the course of events.

the

minds

all

his life

They

of certain

men

was analyzing

and its

It

that

is

But

after all

as a process in

what Nietzsche

implications are clear.

are perhaps clearest of

all

in that manifestation of

intellectualism Nietzsche attacked as "idealism."

7

The

ideal-

in the opinion of such critics as Nietzsche, cannot accept

ist,

the evidence of his senses as to the reality of change.

not want change.

He

wants

He

does

to escape the flow of all things,

and take refuge in the absolute, the eternal, the unchanging. He can do this by a trick of his mind, by using what we call 7

See above, pp. 87-90.

NIETZSCHE

152

after all, out of his experience, which must be an experience of change a system of absolutes which he calls the "true world." This "true world" is of course a

the intellect to construct

we

one; but since

false

recognize that construct

who

it

it

is

critics

are

only relatively

good false.

affects the lives of those

live in it;

ness,"

means

people

who

it is

in simplest terms that

hold

it,

who

live

in

That

who made

a part of reality.

it,

we must

relativists,

as a

is,

it

mental

and of those

Its "falseness," its

we

"bad-

don't like the

behave.

We

way

don't, for

way people behave under the influence of too much alcohol; we don't like drunks. Similarly, we don't like the way people behave under the influence of too much philosophical idealism; we don't like Kantians. We don't like them because, having persuaded themselves instance, like the

that

change

we want

is

unreal, they try to prevent the kind of changes

They do not, of preventing change; indeed they commonly to bring about.

course, succeed in let

themselves and

us in for the most unforeseen and catastrophic changes. the intellect, as these searchers after the absolute use

it, is

For

readily

with over-simple formulae, which it erects into "laws" sorts, moral, political, scientific; it then seeks to make all

satisfied

of

all

experience conform to these laws. But human experithis is a fact of experience ence cannot be so confined

human

prolonged and serious attempt is made to so conaccumulates under pressure and finally blows off

and when fine

it, it

a

a kind of experience

When we lary

we do

we have one

who

like.

relativists feel like exercising

we

dry up the well-springs of all

not

our noblest vocabu-

accuse the absolutists of trying to

human

life,

of intolerance towards

refuse to repeat their meaningless litanies, of a

haughty

NIETZSCHE-IN-HIMSELF

153

disregard for the fruitful difficulties in attempting the conquest of which the true scientist and the true artist are one; we accuse

them

of

of verbalism, of seeking death-in-life, of

sterility,

hating adventurousness, novelty, growth; we accuse them of being intellectuals, even though we ourselves are by no means blacksmiths.

Nietzsche in his middle period was fond of this "we"

"we

fearless ones,"

though

"we

in his later years the "I"

until the final crescendo of

out his career he

is

wherever he finds

"we good Europeans,"

free spirits,"

sounds out louder and louder,

"Why I am

a fatality."

crying out against intellectual absolutism,

and he

it

finds

it

sophical idealists, but in the historians

The

But through-

not only in the philo-

and

in the positivists.

nineteenth century had, he grants, recognized, though

often reluctantly, the fact of growth.

Even Hegel's was

a phi-

losophy which aspired to explain growth. That, in fact, was just the trouble. In his wilder moments, Nietzsche comes close to saying

what some

of his

Nazi followers put

that one

must not

words

exclamation-marks are enough.

often fairly sober,

in his

mouth,

try to explain anything, at least not

and

as

words

critic

with

But Nietzsche was

rather than as prophet, he

about the inadequacy of much of the thought of the eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries, feelings which were shared by many of his contried

to

put

into

feelings

temporaries.

Nietzsche's major point

ment, an interpretation, of

is

that all thinking

is

an arrange-

facts (receptor-experiences)

which

changing, relative. Thinking is not a form of magic by which the thinker somehow gets out of himself

must be

tentative,

and thereby "discovers"

static,

objective truth.

The

thing-in-

NIETZSCHE

154 itself

of Kant, the past "as

it

really

happened" (wic cs cigcntlich and immutable laws of the

gewesen) of von Ranke, the eternal

physical universe of the conventional

Newtonian

physicist, are

products of the thinking of Kant, von Ranke, and in the

all

Newton filtered down into an ordinary mind. not to say that these products of thought are wholly

case, of

last

This

is

Indeed, the very antithesis of subject and object

"subjective."

merely one of the simple tools of thought, apparently necessary in the past and perhaps still not useless in the present, but

is

an imperfect tainly

tool

we must

no more than

All knowledge,

organisms to perhaps

live

all

live;

more

try very

not a final truth, not a certainty. theories, are but the attempts of human

and fully

is

living if

we

can, indeed,

go

inevitably also dying.

give

further,

up

We may

the quest for the absolute,

of values

than the question of certainty."

We

cer-

a tool

"The question

for certainty.

hard to improve, and

is

more fundamental

8

and

as relativists, give a relativist

explanation of the search for the absolute. The categories of thought, even the transparent dodges of traditional philosophical

thought, have been useful

they have helped

men

get

what they wanted. Nietzsche put this neatly in one of the bare notes that were collected after his death and published in The Will to Power.

"End and means"

As interpretations (not as estaband in what respect lished facts)

"Cause and effect" "Subject and object"

were they perhaps necessary

"Action and suffering" "Thing-in-itself

and appearance"

to

8

The Will

to

Power. 9 *

Power,

588.

inter-

pretations? (as "preservative measall in the sense of a Will ures")

The Will

to

Power,

589.

NIETZSCHE-IN-HIMSELF

We may

say then, according to Nietzsche, that the attaining

words

in

155

of the absolute has

say they have attained

it

seem

had

to act in

a value, since

some

men who

respects differently

say they have attained it. We may justithat value, the kind of life it tends to promote.

from men who do not fiably criticize

Here we must be concerned rather with moral

absolutes than

with the kind of absolute the nineteenth-century physicist thought he had attained. Nietzsche sometimes comes near suggesting that conception of scientific laws as absolutes

a con-

ception certainly held by men like Herbert Spencer, though equally certainly not used as a guide by effective practising is not a useful one for the experimental scientists of his time

purposes of scientific investigation. But he himself had no scientific training, and shared the contempt for science common

among

He

the aesthetic and the philosophic.

concerned to note that

as private citizens

cepted the moral values of their time,

and

most

it is

much more

is

scientists ac-

these values that

he finds most important to attack. If then we test with Nietzsche these moral "truths," not by their coherence according to the logic with which they are

spun

out, but

by the standard of

life

they

set,

we

they represent "the struggle of sickly, desperate to a beyond, against healthier,

and fresher one kind of

life.

life

Thus

it is

more

foolish,

shall find that

false, richer

not 'truth' struggling with

with another kind.

Here we must prove

order of rank

that the

necessary,

life,

but

But the former would

fain be the higher kind! is

cleaving

life,

more

first

problem

that is

some

the order

10

of ran\

among

\inds of life" Here, however, Nietzsche himself becomes an absolutist, 10

The Will

to

Power,

592.

NIETZSCHE

156

Having demolished as mere disguises Power the best and happiest phrases of his

becomes Zarathustra. for the Will to

predecessors

the

scientific

thing-in-itself,

laws,

objective

God he insists that the Will to Power is no such disguise. He has found the philosopher's stone, the neat ultimate to which all human experience can be reduced. He has been fooling us all along reality, free will, utility, force, justice,

by pretending

to evade the quest for certainty.

German

As

if

a philoso-

could be such a renegade! He has merely been feigning indifference, in order to catch certainty off its guard, and pounce upon it once and for all. Kant, it seems to the skeptic, attempted a similar tour dc force.

pher

a

philosopher

Having pursued with interminable skill certainty as pure reason (rcinc Vernunji) and proving that it could not be caught, he turned up with

its

pelt neatly stuffed in a beautiful job of

taxidermy called practical reason (pratyischc Vernunji}. And now Nietzsche with his Will to Power. Not only the Eternal Recurrence repeats itself! If

Power may be go

as

good

a one as has yet been

to the roots of the matter, the Will to

deepest root. But perhaps there

no

roots

Will to

to the universe, the

you are looking for the key

is

made.

If

you must

Power may be

the

no key? Perhaps there are

?

Ill

Nietzsche, then,

is

not only true to his age in his preoccupa-

tion with questions of growth, development, flow; he

his profession of philosopher in his attempt to find for

sum up more than words. The

final answer, to

words experiences historian and skeptic in

true to

is

them

that are

the

a

much

two can

NIETZSCHE-IN-HIMSELF

157

may, however, refuse to perhaps be combined in one person follow Nietzsche in his final flight to the Will to Power and the Eternal Recurrence, and content himself with noting and commenting upon what Nietzsche fished up out of the flow of all things.

For Nietzsche's conviction that manifestations of the Will to

all

things can be reduced to

Power by no means prevented

his

recognizing the variety and changefulness of human experience. In fact, the doctrines of the Will to Power and its curious

companion and served

him

derivative,

the Eternal

Recurrence, merely

as buttresses for his private hates

and

loves, as

In his more rapt moods,

colossal extensions of his personality.

to his followers they helped him to live in a prophetic and in his as well as himself more polemic consoling world;

moods, they helped him feel sure of the pettiness and undesirability of what he could make out of other people's worlds; and at all times they acted as a limitation on his ability to widen and deepen his experience but perhaps no experience.

At

that

more than

least a

small

is

made him essential to make

is,

they

amount

intolerant

sense out of

of metaphysics

is,

like the

presence of certain minerals in the human diet, perhaps necessary to human life. And Nietzsche's dose of metaphysics was

not a very big one.

The common

opinion,

which

refuses to

him with men like Kant and Hegel as all philosopher, but him partly in the field of literature, is well justified.

rank puts

He

belongs in the field of literature because, for one thing, he could write. This is a gift not always lacking in philosophers. Plato, James, Santayana, to take a

Aristotle

to

and Hegel do

judge from what not.

few

at

we have

There are great

random, possess of

him

obstacles in the

it;

Bentham,

way

of a

NIETZSCHE

158

German

philosopher's writing well. In a sense,

no language,

an adequate instrument for the philosopher. Unlike the mathematician and the chemist, the philosopher

living or dead,

is

cannot use a special language. Unless he limits himself to symbolic logic, he has to adapt to his purposes an instrument made for the coarser

takes the

form

work

of ordinary

men. This adaptation usually on the con-

of a technical jargon superimposed

ventional vocabulary of the

workaday language. The

special

German as a philosopher's language or so it seems to one who is neither a philosopher nor a German is that in German the union of the technical jargon and the common tongue is deceptively easy to make. The resultant hybrid

difficulty of

looks quite healthy and normal, and only with the lapse of time does it become clear that the hybrid is sterile.

Now

Nietzsche often wrote like any other philosophical German. Much of the two volumes of The Will to Power are often written in a technical jargon worthy of Kant, and are full of passages that call for

of the reader.

labored concentration on the part

But Nietzsche never meant these notes

to be

published as they stood, and they are not representative of him at his best. In his earlier work, written under Wagnerian influ-

young German storming the heavens and sounding the deeps with the aid of a pair of nice words, "Dionysian" and "Apollinian." But with Human, All ence, he writes like the earnest

Too Human he

learned to shorten his sentences, point

them

with irony, color them with unexpected images, season them with common words too undignified for the conventional philosopher.

With

his later

works, like

The Twilight

of the

he acquired the knack of making his sentences explode. Sometimes, indeed, they explode rather hollowly, and even

Idols,

NIETZSCHE-IN-HIMSELF

159

at his very best Nietzsche's prose

protests a

little

too

inoffensive clarity.

wanted

He

much.

always strives a little too hard, never achieved ease, simplicity,

But of course he did not want

he

to

to offend. Let others strive for the subtle phrasing that

makes every whisper instance.

the

clear

womanish

Nietzsche will shout like a man.

Sainte Beuve, for

We

have already

quoted him so much, and in such varied moods, that the reader will hardly need more examples of his writing. As far as the limitations of translation will allow, he can

conclusions on Nietzsche as a writer.

come

to his

But one more

own

specific

may be given, one that shows very well his strength and his weakness. He is writing of George Sand:

illustration

have been reading the

I

I

"Lettrcs d'un Voyagcur": like everything

from Rousseau's influence

and exaggerated! than

first

it is false, made-up, blown out, cannot endure this bright wallpaper style, any more can bear the vulgar striving after generous feelings. The worst

that springs

feature about

it is

I

certainly the coquettish adoption of male attributes by manner of ill-bred schoolboys. And how cold she

this female, after the

must have been inwardly all the while, this insufferable artist! She wound herself up like a clock and wrote. As cold as Hugo and Balzac,

And how

as cold as all Romanticists are as soon as they begin to write!

self-complacently she must have lain there, this prolific ink-yielding cow. For she had something German in her (German in the bad sense), just as Rousseau, her master, had;

something which could only have been

when French

and Renan adores

possible

taste

was declining!

her!

.

.

.

n

Always the exclamation-mark, of course; perhaps this too is Pelion piled upon Ossa and a few German in the bad sense Matterhorns but, like Wagner's brasses, it wakes you up.

The

things Nietzsche wrote about, and the

wrote about them,

He 11

might, in

make him

this respect,

The Twilight

way

in

which he

a writer as well as a philosopher.

be variously catalogued, but

of the Idols, "Skirmishes in a

War

we

with the Age,"

shall 6.

NIETZSCHE

160 consider

him

and

briefly as a poet, a critic

very proudly assumed

a

title

he himself

a psychologist.

Nietzsche wrote a scattering of poems in verse form, which collected make a slender volume. They would not in themselves

have made him a great figure in

German

literature.

The

most famous of them, "The Drunken Song," "Venice," and a few others, sound well to a foreign ear, and are held by most

German critics to be technically admirable. Nietzsche could often make good moody music with words, if not with the medium of formal musical composition. In content his most successful

poems

are mournfully mysterious contemplations of

night, eternity, the

German and

weary riddle of

existence,

poems thoroughly

romantic. In a lighter vein, poems like the "Songs

of Prince Free-as-a-bird" are a

terranean, whistle a

little

little

too self-consciously Medi-

too shrilly.

Also sprach Zarathustra, though written formally in prose, is Nietzsche's highest poetic flight. In this work he is attempting not so

move

much it

to persuade,

nor even to annoy, his audience,

by the incantation of

dictionary.

Zarathustra

is

words well beyond

logic

as to

and the

a poet-prophet, a divine teacher, a

most cultivated medicine-man, and

his

medium

is

rhapsodic prose that chants along interminably.

a didactic,

To many

people, he is a great poet, a peer of the Hebrew prophets whose style he has, in the opinion of other people, imitated a little

There

hardly any middle ground from which to judge the poetry of Also sprach Zarathustra. Either the book seems to you a masterpiece of insight

too deliberately.

into

the highest

is,

human

at

any

rate,

aspirations,

a

brilliant

flight

into

regions forever shut to the pedestrian calculations and limited

emotions of the unresponsive, or

it

seems to you the elevated

NIETZSCHE-IN-HIMSELF maunderings of a

man

161

struggling to express the inexpres-

sible.

Nietzsche's gifts as a

critic,

both of literature and of music,

require for their appreciation a discipleship than

do

less

intimate initiation and

his gifts as a poet.

They

are evident

work, scattered everywhere among the unsystematic reflections that are assembled to make the great throughout

all

his

majority of his books. He liked in others almost the opposite of what he himself produced in his "creative" flights into music, poetry,

and world-shaking

in general; that

is,

he liked

clarity,

simplicity, naturalness, restraint, incisive wit, mastery of form.

To

use once

critic

No

and

more

a

much-used pair of words, he was

a "classic"

a "romantic" practitioner of the arts.

doubt because he was himself so self-conscious and arro-

gant a romanticist

a romanticist to the point of squeezing

he wrote penetratingly and harshly about European romanticism. In a single again, a mere note jotted passage from The Will to Power the ultimate paradox out of his self-torture

down

he packs into development and polishing a few words a book of the late Irving Babbitt's. for future

False "accentuation": (i) In romanticism; this unremitting "expresis not a sign of strength, but of a feeling of deficiency;

sivo"

(2) Picturesque music, the so-called dramatic kind, is above all easier (as is also the brutal scandal-mongering and the juxtaposition of facts

and

traits in realistic novels); (3) "Passion" as a matter of nerves and exhausted souls; likewise the

delight in high mountains, deserts, storms, orgies, and disgusting details, in bulkiness and massiveness (historians, for instance); as a matter of fact, there is actually a cult of exaggerated feelings (how is it that in a restraint of passion?); stronger ages are desired just the opposite (4) The preference for exciting materials (Erotica or Socialistica or

Pathologica)'.

all

these things are the signs of the style of public that

is

NIETZSCHE

162

that

being catered for to-day or enfeebled people.

is

to say, for overworked, absentminded, in order to be affected. 12

Such people must be tyrannised over

Or

in a single sentence,

from

exit

art

and

writings before Nietzsche; his

skill, his ability to

revealed in the

lie

critical

many little

add

minded

spirits

spice to a

word "emergency."

aphorism deceptively simple, "Both

two

only an emergency substance of this remark

art is

The

defective 'reality.'"

can be found in

own

"Romantic

species

13

and romantically

classically

that

always

commonplace, Or finally, an cherish

exist

vision of the future; but the former derive their vision

strength of their time, the latter

Nietzsche

is

from

its

at his best in these brief

about his fellow-artists.

He has,

it is

a

from the

weaknesses."

14

and pungent remarks

true, a

grand, philosophical

generalization he often uses as a measuring-rod in criticism, the famous distinction between "Dionysian" and "Apollinian."

He

can sometimes pursue the distinction into wordy disquisiremote from concrete works of art, as in the last

tions rather

The Birth

and

The Will

Power, where he returns to worry this, his first philosophic love. But as such distinctions go, his is by no means the most sterile effort that men have made to put into words a contrast as real as any in part of

of Tragedy,

in

to

the contrast between the cathedral of Chartres experience and the Parthenon, between Shakespeare and Sophocles, be-

tween Mozart and Wagner.

If there is a possible

of art," Nietzsche's deserves a high rank.

to preach, or perhaps better, preach in terms of 131

18 14

The Will The Will

Human,

to to

All

Power, Power,

"philosophy

Here he can

forget

an emotional

826.

829.

Too Human, "The Wanderer and

his

Shadow,"

217.

NIETZSCHE-IN-HIMSELF

163

response to things immediately observed, known. Here he can use to the full his craftsman's skill with words, words that

even earthy evoke for most of us earthly experience in a and Will to the that Power, down-going over-going to way the Superman,

and the Eternal Recurrence, do not. When that the music of Wagner sweats, we think,

Nietzsche says even if we are offended by having the thought suggested to us in this way, of Wagner's music; when Zarathustra says "All 'It

was'

is

a fragment, a riddle, a fearful chance

creating Will saith thereto: 'But thus

we

just "think"; unless, indeed,

I

until the

would have

are already

it!',"

drugged

happy stupor well beyond, and possibly above, thought. These same craftsman's

gifts

what they

as well as

how men say,

and

synthesis, a coherent description of that behavior,

can be verified in experience tzsche's

work

is

same

gifts

which

make

a

in turn

appear in Nie-

by no means content to do the job of the

He

perhaps more interested in getto behave as he feels they should behave than in

observer, the describer.

men

these

actually

to

as a psychologist, or as a politique et moraliste.

Here again he ting

15

they are hard to describe,

but they include ability to note accurately behave, what they do

we

into a

learning how, and

if

possible

is

why, they behave

as they do.

The

he sometimes described as the petty task of science. But he himself was in some ways too much of a scientist or a

latter job

and Supermen go ahead planning for men without paying any attention to the kind of men surrounding him. He had not much skill at mixing with these men, and

"realist" to

for the purist in empirical research,

he skimped sadly the

first

steps in an inquiry, first-hand, intimate, habitual contact with u See above, p. 64 and Thus Spafe Zarathustra, Part II, chap. xlii.

NIETZSCHE

164

what

is

studied. But his shyness

to his using

men

save in his last

and aloofness were rather bars

than to his understanding them. He was not, years, an actual recluse. He had excellent

few

opportunities to observe quite a variety of cated Germans,

and

his inability to

men,

mingle

freely

especially edu-

and pleasantly detachment

with them gave him some of the advantages of if, indeed, it was not in fact itself a kind of detachment. Witness, for instance, the basic accuracy

the people

who came

to Bayreuth.

16

with which he sized up

He

describes these

nerites in the acid terms of caricature, but

it is

Wag-

caricature,

and

He

can always see enough of himself in others to recognize their weaknesses. not fantasy.

Nietzsche's great

work

tellectual" as a type;

as a moralist

and here

his

him ample

temperament give generalization which he study

aiming

we have at the

own

the study of the "in-

is

experience and his

clinical

The

materials.

own great

characteristically produced out of his

insisted that as a philosopher

he was always

most comprehensive generalization

is

his con-

clusion that the intellectual par excellence, priest in older times,

reformer, politician, writer, professor, socialist, democrat, humanitarian in our own, uses the instrument of thought to build

up out

of his desires a neat picture of

what he

world" (or the beautiful and the good, or

and then attempts

calls

the "true

right, or the classless

to persuade, or force,

everybody to live as in his picture; that he is usually quite unconscious of going through this process; that in the process he commonly neglects facts that simply are, and that therefore when he and

society)

others try to live as in his picture, they stumble into

things they hadn't thought were there at "Sec above,

p. 114.

all;

and

all sorts

of

finally, that

NIETZSCHE-IN-HIMSELF although in some senses

human where For

makes

it

it

what we

threatens the existence of

men do try

call civilization.

to live according to the picture the intellectual

of the "true world"; or rather, they try to live according

to the pictures the intellectuals

them, and they are not the

seems a necessary part of has been carried to a point

this process

modern world

in the

life,

165

overwhelming

all

make, for there are many

the same.

It is

fortunately true that

majority of the things people do, even in

modern Europe, are not at all influenced by intellectuals. The routine of getting a living, and hating and doing^

begetting, of loving

the

habitual, traditional

unsatisfactorily ;

work

still

something

something for

is

vague terms

of the

marrying and

of is

older and deeper than our very nicest theories,

which we must use

of

like instinctive,

or in post-Nietzschean terms, these things

are a matter of conditioned reflexes, persistent aggregates.

human

affairs,

and

a very

enters into the activities of

men

organ-

there remains a marginal area in

important one, since

it

But

ized in social and political groups, in

which the

by the intellectuals seem to have an effect

pictures

on men's

made actual

conduct.

Here Nietzsche's thought bifurcates. At times he assumes a position which seems the logical result of his previous analysis, as

on

it

does that of most contemporary anti-intellectualist attacks

reform, "planning," constitution-making and other

political

conscious efforts to

This

"builders."

servatism.

is

Make no

make

blue-prints for conscious political

the position of

what must be

changes, especially

no

deliberate, logically

worked-out changes. Distrust the theorist; man, the man of affairs, above all the man peasant and

the aristocrat, and the

called con-

trust the practical

who

man who has

a

has roots, the

manual

skill,

NIETZSCHE

166

the artisan and the surgeon. Let nature take it is

a hard course.

know

There

is

its

course, even

some power in the world,

we cannot

know

according to logic, but

especially

in matters moral, economic, political,

physician

for

let it

all

is

which makes

which

for rightness

a vis medicatrix naturae, which, is

a better

ailing humanity than Jefferson, or Mill, or in Nietzsche's eyes the

Spencer, or

them

There

alone.

yet

as

it

of

we know when

we only we think if we only

that

if

Saint Paul.

most harmful quack of

17

Nietzsche does not long occupy a position so sensible and unheroic as this. Having decided that all other physicians to

humanity were quacks, he cannot leave humanity without physician.

Having shown

tures of the "true world,"

the inadequacies of

he makes one of

his

all

own.

a

other picIt is

not a

very clear picture, but as we shall see, it is well enough drawn for the Nazis to put it to uses the Master would most probably

have found very objectionable. as unreal as ever a

German

It is

a picture of a

world surely

philosopher spun out of his inner

consciousness, a world in which, by a final exercise of the will to neglect facts,

of the paradox

men become Supermen.

made

flesh, in

It is

a

which the immoral

weak

strong and the strong weak, and the Fact the Ideal, each having devoured the other.

grand world is

lies

moral, the

down with

17

Nietzsche takes something like this position time and time again throughout his work, especially in praise of "tradition" and in condemnation of "theory." It appears very early: "All states are badly managed when other men than politicians busy themselves with politics, and they deserve to be

Thoughts Out of Season, "Schopenhauer admirable passage on the authority of tradition "which is obeyed, not because it commands what is useful to us, but merely because it commands" is in The Dawn of Day, 9. See also the collected ruined by these

political

as Educator," chap. vii.

amateurs."

An

fragments, vol. XI of the

Wer\c (Grossoctavausgabe)

,

36.

NIETZSCHE-IN-HIMSELF

167

however, fair to Nietzsche to conclude on such a note as this. His work is packed with admirable observations on how men behave here and now, before they give way to the It is not,

They not by any means Supermen.

to be

human

the study of

more

are one-sided, unsympathetic observations,

recommended

nature.

else in

men

Had

live by.

complete course in

But they bring

clearly than anywhere

basic illusions

as a

our

to light perhaps

literature,

some

of the

Nietzsche never produced

anything but The Genealogy of Morals, and especially the admirable chapter on "Ascetic Ideals," he would still have to be

ranked high among writers

who

know

have helped us

ourselves.

IV Nietzsche's

work

is

a great armory, by

no means

filled en-

with weapons of precision; there are some fowling-pieces of great age, and even a few sling-shots, as well as some very tirely

accurate

modern

effective

than his heavy

pieces.

On

the whole, his light guns are

artillery, though the latter

makes

more

a very

To

drop the metaphor: Nietzsche's work contains a great variety of ideas, sometimes mutually contradictory, difficult if not impossible to reduce to a "system," made still loud noise.

more bewilderingly varied by

the aphoristic

form

in

which

This variety is the reflection of a many-sided temperament. Nietzsche had an excellent mind, well if rather they are

cast.

bookishly trained, great aesthetic sensibility, a natural gift for writing, strong emotions which he could focus in the sacva indignatio

we

often call moral purpose, an untrained body, an

unstable nervous system, a total personality never successfully

conditioned to living together with anyone

not in the fam-

NIETZSCHE

168

not in the occupational or social group, not in church or state. He had, finally, a devouring ambition to be admired, a

ily,

thirst for disciples, a will to shine

he

built

up

which, as the Will to Power,

and

into a characteristic philosophical ultimate,

which, syphilis aiding, ended in paranoia.

which compose the unending and Nietzsche, perhaps made him great, one which will serve well to sum up the man and his

Among

the stresses

there

is

work. This

and

strains

made

conflicts that

is

the conflict between the observer

former, between the

and Zarathustra.

a conflict discernible,

heroic proportions, in the lives of

and which we

of us hardly feel,

routine of living.

It is

not,

common The first

most

We

are

describe the conflict as

in putting Nietzsche

and

his

work within

and

of all

all his

other organs of sense

on the immense body of receptor-experiences we

He

does not merely passively record or report these but tries to arrange them as uniformities put in relation

that

is,

scheme

in such a

way

that they can be "verified"

experienced again as receptor-experiences

his order

is

"true"

relation with facts

by himself

an order. The observer's

others, but this time in

whether Its

a conflict

resolve comfortably in the

which we

observer has his eye

to a conceptual

and

It is

experience.

call facts. facts,

men.

all

by the way, an ultimate.

using the dualistic terms in

mere conveniences

re-

and the prophet, between Nietzsche no doubt, in less

artist

It is

and the

is

a relational

test for

and instrumental one.

must be continuous;

if it ties

a falling

barometer and rain together in the formula, a falling barometer is followed by rain, rain must always follow a falling barometer or the order ("theory")

is

not altogether true, and must be

modified, at least to some extent.

Its

instrumental character

is

NIETZSCHE-IN-HIMSELF a

more complicated

matter, but

is

169

always, for the type of person

we call the observer, subordinated to its relation with facts. The reformer, on the other hand, subordinates the relational character of the order he constructs out of experience to

instrumental character.

The extreme

type of reformer

its

may

even refuse to bother himself about the relational character of

he has decided that a falling be followed by rain, he will do something

his "order," his "theories."

If

barometer ought to almost anything, in about it

under which rain actually falls. and lovely barometers, and try

fact,

but observe the conditions

He

will construct complicated

to

make everybody

use them;

he will pass a law requiring falling barometers to be followed by rain; he will define rain to include fair weather; he will refuse to admit that

it

is

raining, unless the barometer has

fallen, or that the barometer has fallen, unless

We

it is

raining.

have, of course, caricatured the reformer. But any full

we have attempted

treatment of the distinction

to

make

be-

tween the observer and the reformer would run into a volume.

The important thinking

is

thing here

to note that

though all conscious an ordering of experience, some kinds of thinking is

are directed by the thinker rather towards sorting experience into recognizable uniformities predictable, qualities

and which seem

which are

repetitive, verifiable,

to the thinker to possess these

whether he wants them

to or not;

and

that

some

kinds of thinking are directed by the thinker towards sorting experience into an order which is a modification of experience into

something

true for himself

"better,"

and

something which he

others,

feels

can be

made

something which he rather proudly

holds comes from himself (through God, perhaps) or from "things" independent of himself.

We

have, perhaps, done no

NIETZSCHE

170

more than put

rather confusingly the well-worn distinction

between "objective" and "subjective" which has exhausted generations of philosophers, but seems itself inexhaustible.

no one ever put his a subject or an object. Con-

a useful distinction, even though

It is

or his mind on either we can recognize that a biologist attempting to find cretely, order in human heredity is likely to think "objectively" and that a preacher of eugenics attempting to get human beings to finger

breed as he wants them to breed

The two kinds

is

likely to think "subjectively."

of thinkers are constantly borrowing one

the other, are indeed frequently the

they certainly

same person. But

and not only in the

exist,

the scientist and the preacher. Literature

stark contrast is

as

much

from

as types

between

a matter of

science, and some very great writers, like good Shakespeare, have been much more interested in what is than in what it ought to be. Even philosophers have their grada-

observing as

tions; Aristotle

was a

is

was a

was

better observer than

Plato. Nietzsche

better observer than Zarathustra.

The

we have

up between Nietzsche the observer and Nietzsche the reformer is by no means an imaginary one. It

contrast

was

real

enough

set

so that

it

must have contributed

to his

mental suffering, to have given him a kind of split personality. There are people so immersed in understanding and coping with their experience of what is, that they do not bother themselves

much

immersed

they are not

can

live

with what ought to be; and there are people so what ought to be that

in satisfying themselves about

much

happily in

disturbed by this

what

is.

There are people who

world, and others

who

can

live

happily

any number of other worlds. Nietzsche could do neither. He was too acute an observer, too sensitive an artist, to spin in

NIETZSCHE-IN-HIMSELF

171

out theories without regard for facts; and he was too bitten

with reforming zeal, too impatient, too exalted, perhaps at bottom too insanely or divinely convinced that he alone was the

measure of

things, to accept the

all

posed by regard for

facts.

And

so

humbling

he made

his

limitations im-

unhappy down-

going and over-going to that strangest of "true worlds," the world of the Supermen, beyond good and evil, beyond you and me, beyond himself.

But not beyond an

beyond an some of us, dis-

Italian socialist hack, not

Austrian corporal. One of the strange, and to couraging things about the activities of reformers

is

the unpre-

The

dictable effects their labors so often have in practice.

noblest dreams of the prophet turn into nightmares

when

they Nietzsche called for the Supermen. Mussolini and Hitler answered the call. It does not much matter that in all

come

true.

probability Nietzsche

would have scorned them

as perverters

would have opposed them bitterly. It does not even matter that had Nietzsche never written these men would of his doctrine,

in all probability

have come to power

much

as they did.

They

have found a use for Nietzsche, a use he probably never intended his words to provide. That is a risk all men run who build with words, but

it

is

a risk peculiarly great for those

who

out of

with grand words a refuge from this poor world, a noble castle in the philosophic air. Such castles are often roomy and comfortable, but very hard to keep clean. their discontents build

CHAPTER

VII

THE GROWTH OF A REPUTATION of

BIOGRAPHERS Andler, who took

Nietzsche, six

including

volumes to

tell

even his

Charles

story,

stop

most inconveniently with the death of their hero in 1900, or indeed with his entrance into an asylum for the insane in 1889. Yet

and

dox

Nietzsche's

this is

hardly a metaphor, and certainly not a paralife only began with his insanity and death.

The

depressing notion that the really great thinkers are ignored or reviled by their own generation, and appreciated only by the

next generation, seems not true generally in the history of thought. But for Nietzsche it is true in all its simplicity. The contrast

between the obscurity of

and the continuing greatness of

his

name during

his lifetime

his reputation since his death

with a very different, and even more obscure, contemporary, Gregor Mendel. Nietzsche is still talked about and written about. Diminishing returns have at least as striking as

is

at least, not to the point of lessening the pronot yet set in duction of books about him. Heinrich Mann could write in

1939:

One

thinker and writer has lived on for

present, he in the past.

are

still

ents

fifty

years since the con-

forty since his death. As if constantly has occupied the attention of a world less and less interested

clusion of his work,

One

and nearly

cannot be considered present merely because one's works The number of a man's adher-

read and historically assimilated.

and

imitators proves nothing for his

work

or

its

fruitfulness.

What

THE GROWTH OF A REPUTATION The work

173

man who

has passed on grows and changes; he is still finishing it from beyond. It has long since moved from the point where we once found it, when we were young and Nietzsche was is

the test?

alive.

of a

1

This passage would no doubt have pleased Nietzsche immensely, so much indeed that he would probably have forborne to point out that much of it is nonsense. For Nietzsche, as we have seen, burned to be read, to have disciples, to make a stir in the world. Before he

went mad only a mere handful

had read him, only the inept Peter Cast still looked like a disciple, and he had clearly made no stir at all in the world.

Two

boyhood friends, Rohde and Deussen, nice, forward German Herren Professoren without any of of his

of thought or style,

man

were actually much

known

his gifts in Ger-

intellectual circles than the author of Zarathustra.

long ago, he had Master of Masters, and such

been qne of the bright

the

better

straight-

book

savior of

little

fame

Once, around the

young men he had went back

as

to

which he had announced Wagner Dionysos as the German culture. Certainly none of Nietzsche's sub-

in

sequent books were successes.

remarked of the you

failure of

see Nietzsche

otherwise, no."

2

the late eighties,

is

read

Wagner himself is said to have Human, All Too Human, "Now only when he defends our cause;

Wagner, recently dead, was in apotheosis in and the Wagnerites were conquering the earth.

But Friedrich Nietzsche was

still

as obscure as

if

there

had

never been a Triebschen. His books, which were to do better things than Jesus, Buddha, or 1

done, had to be

H. Mann, "Presenting Nietzsche," The Living Thoughts of Nietzsche

(i939), 1

Mohammed had

I-

Daniel Halevy, The Life of Friedrich Nietzsche, 209.

NIETZSCHE

174

brought out author's

own

expense of the author. Publication at the expense usually marks the author as a dilettante

at the

or an unread scholar, as an unimportant as a crank, a crackpot, a failure;

man, perhaps even and Nietzsche knew, with in-

sane certainty, that he was not an unimportant man, not a crank, not a failure.

There were, in the last few years of Nietzsche's active life, some signs of coming fame. Georg Brandes, the Danish critic whose European reputation was already established, probably deserves the distinction of having discovered Nietzsche.

3

It is

true that Nietzsche himself helped the discovery by having his

Beyond Good and Evil to various dispersons. This by no means uncommon

publisher send copies of

tinguished literary

one suspects, very

fruitful.

But Nietzsche

practice

is

had the

satisfaction of receiving intelligent letters of apprecia-

rarely,

from Taine and Brandes, and through Brandes, from Strindberg. Brandes actually lectured on Nietzsche's ideas at tion

Copenhagen, and the two kept up a lively correspondence until Nietzsche went mad. Nietzsche had, then, the pleasure of hearing the first faint rumblings of the great noise his name was to

make

in the world.

But by the time Brandes got around

printing, in 1889, a long article

on "Nietzsche:

Aristocratic Radicalism," his subject

An

to

Essay on

was no longer able

to

understand what fame meant. indeed no danger that the Nietzscheans will let us forget the way the world neglected the Master. We must not exaggerate. Even during his lifetime Nietzsche was not abso-

There

is

lutely unheard. *

At any

rate,

The conspicuous

Brandes

Friedrich Nietzsche.

critics

left

him

alone, but

later claimed the distinction for himself. G. Brandes, Translated from the Danish by A. C. Chater (n.d.), 59.

THE GROWTH OF A REPUTATION every

now and

175

then a magazine brought up his name, and in

1880 a writer in the popular weekly Die Gegenwart gave five

whole columns is

not

unknown

and the

larger

to this

"modern

'free spirit'

to our literature."

4

His

.

.

.

,

whose name

little circle

number he no longer considered

of friends,

his friends,

served to spread his reputation. Brandes's article on Nietzsche the aristocratic radical

was

lished in April 1890 in the

America

in

Deutsche Rundschau^ equivalent

to the accolade of the Atlantic or Harper's.

beginning of the 1890*5

begun

German and pub-

translated into

little trickles

to unite into a stream, Nietzsche's reputation

amazing speed

after 1890, but

it

By

the

from various sources had

grew with

by no means sprang up over

night.

him up first, and made his name quite suddenly the fashion among the kind of people who need to talk fashionably so much so that when ten years later the distinguished philosopher Hans Vaihinger wrote a book about

The

periodicals took

Nietzsche, he had to defend himself against the charge of writing about "a merely fashionable writer" (ein blosser Mo-

Die Gegenwart published articles on Nieand tzsche in 1889 in 1891, the second by a well-known writer of Swedish origin, Ola Hansson. Lou Salome could scarcely

deschrijtsteller}?

a chance like this slip by.

let

Nietzsche had been a great

It

man

began

to look as

after all.

though She published in

the

Sunday Supplement of the Vossische Zeitung during January 1891 some articles on Nietzsche which were shortly after*

H. Herrig, "Ein moderner Freigeist," Die Gegenwart (August 7, 1880), XVIII, 85. For other examples see M. Wirth, "Die Zukunft der Rcminisccnz: Variationen uber Themen von Friedrich Nietzsche," Die Kunstwart (1888), II,

Das musi\alischc Wochenblatt (1887), XVIII, 441. H. Vaihinger, Nietzsche als Philosoph (1902), 13.

52; 5

NIETZSCHE

176

wards expanded into

a book.

It

was by no means

a

bad book,

rather pretentious philosophically, but sensible about Nietzsche as a person.

and more attention his

heresies

were attracting more the musical press. They were still

Nietzsche's

Wagner

in

remarks about

heresies

Bizet's superiority over

were of course beneath disdain

The Allgemeine Zcitung

but they

Wagner made good copy.

des Judentums published in 1892

on Nietzsche and the Jewish question. The quality magazines were now working the new vein very hard. The Deutsche Rundschau^ Nord und Sud, the

what

probably the

is

first

Westermanns Monatshe]te assigned to writers. One of these was

Preussische Jahrbucher,

him long

articles

essay

by well-known

Eduard von Hartmann, a now almost forgotten professor of philosophy, who had synthetized one of the most extraordinary brews ever made, in which Hegel, Schopenhauer, and the inductive method so successful in the natural sciences were mixed

Hartmann's word was "reconciled." Hartmann was already going out of fashion, and Nietzsche was coming into fashion, but as

Hartmann was

not altogether aware of

this,

he

treats

Nietzsche soberly and without bitterness Nietzsche's "sys6 tem" he found, of course, inadequate, and not even new. In 1892 and 1893, the original a j.

German volumes

Mahly, "Friedrich Nietzsche," Die Gegenwart (Sept.

148; O. Hansson, "Friedrich Nietzsche

wart (May

2,

1891),

XXXIX,

7,

of

1889),

Max

XXXVI,

und der Naturalismus," Die Gegcn-

275; G. Adler, "Friedrich Nietzsche der Social-

Philosoph der Aristokratie," Nord und Sud (March, 1891), LVI, 225; T. Achelis, "Friedrich Nietzsche," Westermanns Monatshejte (April, 1894), 99; E. von bticher (May, 1891),

Hartmann, "Nietzsches neue Moral," Preussische ]ahrXLVII, 505. This is by no means an exhaustive list. See H. Albert, "Friedrich Nietzsche," Mercure de France (Jan. 1893), VII, 47, notes 2 and 3 for a good bibliography of the "discoverers" of Nietzsche in

LXXVI,

Germany.

THE GROWTH OF A REPUTATION

177

Nordau's Degeneration appeared, and spread rapidly in translation through all the important languages. Nordau's huge public learned that Nietzsche, though undoubtedly a literary genius,

had been insane

all his life,

that his books

were written

during acute spasms of dementia, that he was a characteristically modern degenerate. Nordau seems to have known nothing of Nietzsche

beyond some of

his

more notorious books, and the

we have

literature

contemporary periodical

just

described.

Degeneration at least further stimulated interest in Nietzsche. It seems to have made Elizabeth all the more determined to publish at once what she considered the real truth about her brother, her sound, steady, normal brother, whose health had

been destroyed by bad eyesight, hard work, and malevolent enemies. The first of her piously untrustworthy biographies of her brother appeared in 1895. Nietzsche had become one of the spiritual heroes of the 1890'$, a decade which professed to distrust both spirit and heroes. In 1897, Ferdinand Tonnies

began a pamphlet on "The

Cult of Nietzsche" with the words:

A

philosophical writer

But suppose

who

is

this writer

thing. readers should call themselves

received as an emancipation feel that in the thinker they

The kind

read by many is already a remarkable should be read with enthusiasm, that disciples,

that his

thoughts should be

and a revelation, that these people should had found a leader (Fuehrer) ? 7

whose pushing adulation of Wagner had sickened Nietzsche at Beyreuth were now worshipping

so

of people

Nietzsche himself.

And

the object of their worship, secluded

once more under Elizabeth's loving care, was dragging out his life quite unconscious of this sudden glory. It is a situation 7

F. Tonnies,

Der Nietzsche-Kultus (1897),

J*

NIETZSCHE

178

and the Nietzscheans have been quite willing to improve the situation. How the Master, had he known what was going on, would have scorned this unwelcome that tempts to rhetoric;

tribute

from the herd!

How

his irony

would have whipped

back these fawning fools! Perhaps. But success has achieved some remarkable transvaluation of values on its own account.

The

gods,

we may

believe,

find pleasing the incense

that

reaches their nostrils- above the sweat of their worshippers. is

possible that Nietzsche

From Germany

would have enjoyed

his success.

Nietzsche's reputation quickly spread to

France, a country whose intellectuals have ever since

de Stael been

It

much more

closely

in

touch with

Madame German

thought than is commonly realized though recent pronouncements from Vichy should drive the fact home to all. Here, too, as in

Germany

the periodical press led the way,

and

1890'$ called attention to the remarkable writer

make

the ponderous

German language

flash into

in the early

who

could

aphorisms

worthy of a La Rochefoucauld. Barely behind the French were the English, whose magazines and reviews began to take 8 up Nietzsche by the middle of the decade. With the interest French and English stirred, Nietzsche's European reputation was made. Translation into the major modern lanof writers in

guages soon followed. At his death in 1900, Nietzsche's reputation had conquered "For instance: T. de Wyzewa, "Friedrich Nietzsche, le dernier metaphysiRevue bleue (7 Nov. 1891), XLVIII, 586; J. de Nethy, "NietzscheZarathustra," Revue blanche (Apr. 1892), II, 206. G. B. S.[haw], "Nietzsche in English," Saturday Review (n Apr. 1896), LXXXI, 373. The decisive article in English it is still worth reading appeared as "The Ideals of Friedrich Nietzsche" in the Quarterly Review (Oct. 1896), Anarchy cien,"

CLXXXIV,

299.

THE GROWTH OF A REPUTATION almost

all

179

modern

the elaborate channels of publicity in the

world. His works were appearing in new editions; books were being written about his life and his ideas; a steady stream of

and reviews was flowing through the periodical press; and he was about to achieve the final consecration, about to be

articles

the subject of a doctoral dissertation.

9

His name was heard from

pulpits

and from lecture-platforms.

finding

him an admirable

arrived.

A French critic wrote of him in

No name

matter what

critical

Editorial

were

writers

subject for indignation.

He had

1893:

review one thumbs, one finds Nietzsche's His work, commented on even in its

in the table of contents.

minor

exalted to the skies by some, attacked energetically by provoked a whole literature of pamphlets, booklets, articles.

details,

others, has

The Every day the army of his disciples and imitators increases. anthologies are adorned with his sayings, the poets make use of his .

.

.

10 magnificent aphorisms as epigraphs for their verses.

II

We

are today hesitant about referring to the "influence" of a

no doubt because

writer, partly

himself.

Ideas are

no longer

were for our grandfathers. or genealogy of ideas. lectuals

apparently

perhaps those of

for us the

We

Some

hold

Marx when

of the influence of Nietzsche

wonder-workers they

distrust studies in the affiliation

of our

that

all

more innocent generalizations

properly interpreted

anti-intel-

except

are increas-

ingly useless disguises for our simpler lusts. Yet in those impor9

One

of the

dcr Gedan\cn

first

of these

was W. Jesinghaus, Der innere Zusammenhang

vom Uebermcnsch

bci Nietzsche.

Inaugural Dissertation at

the University of Bonn (1901). There have been dozens and dozens of them since and on some very remarkable phases of Nietzsche's life and influence.

My own 10

favorite

is

F. Sprengel, Nietzsche

und das Ding-an-sich

H. Albert, "Friedrich Nietzsche/* Mercure de France

47-48.

(Jan.

(1933). 1893), VII,

NIETZSCHE

l8o tant

moments

of carelessness

which

reveal the habits of routine,

uninspired,

and useful thinking, the most conscientious

intellectual

is

likely to let

anti-

drop the phrase "influence of the on the world, in the

ideas of" so-and-so. Nietzsche's influence

mere

sense of

stir

in the world, has been considerable,

Without attempting yet if any problem of what relation on the actions of men, we may try varied.

the discoverers of Nietzsche were, this first

The

to

come that

stir

to see first

to grips

and very with the

has had on events,

what kind

what they found

in

of

men

him

in

decade of his fame.

intellectuals of the 1890'$

What

were not

as

wicked

as they

one looking back on them from the 1940'$ is the energy, liveliness, indeed the optimism, with which they sought disillusion. They could defy most enjoyably the aspired to be.

philistine class

was

strikes

conventions of middle-class society. still

The middle

there, apparently solidly established

and well

worth defying. Anarchism was one of the very best of attitudes for defying the middle class. On the whole, it seemed to give

more

substantial

nourishment

to the pride of the defiant artist,

though of course, the two together made a nice combination. Nietzsche's ideas seemed to most of those who read him in the 1890'$ a new and attractive writer,

and thinker than socialism

variant of anarchism, an aristocratic, radical, aesthetic anar-

chism, unsullied by the vulgar conspiratorial atmosphere and Nietzsche silly humanitarian aims of traditional anarchism. appears

first,

therefore, in the history of opinion as the complete

anti-philistine, the ter of those

He called

who

emancipated poet of dionysian

mas-

live.

appears, of course, in

him

joy, the

no such simple terms. Brandes which gave

the "aristocratic radical," a phrase

THE GROWTH OF A REPUTATION Nietzsche himself

much

was the "anarchist par

viewer, he

one of his

first

To an

pleasure.

modernized version of

philosopher-tyrant.

known

To Mr. Shaw,

English admirers, he was the "champion of

To von Hartmann he was whose Superman was

the philosopher of "radical egotism,"

come

early English re-

excellence."

privilege, of power, of inequality."

really a

181

Plato's philosopher-king, be-

To Franz Mehring,

already well-

Social-Democrat historian, he was "the philosopher To finance-capitalism (Philosoph des Gross fyipitals)."

of

as a

Dilthey he had fished up the notion of the Superman from Greek and Renaissance history, and turned it into a character-

modern form of irrational individualism. To the youthful Andre Gide he was the immoralist, the man who had

istically

cut through conventions in morals as the earlier scientists cut through the superstitions of astrology

Not

to all his critics

were words

like

ualism," "egotism," words of praise. infuriated

many

literary gifts.

An

people

who

early critic

"anarchism," "individ-

Nietzsche shocked and

could not be disarmed by his Tiirck is as violent as any

named

opponent

of Nietzsche has ever been.

Tiirck

a degenerate

is

and alchemy.

madman, an

Nietzsche according to

apologist for

crimes, a perverse scorner of that divinest of

mind, an exalter of blind, animal has 11

made

the

"human

LXXI,

374;

E.

von

all sorts

human

striving, in short, a

beast" a systematic ideal.

Quarterly Review (1896),

(1896),

had

11

CLXXXIV,

12

gifts,

of

the

man who

British

318; G.B.S. in Saturday

Hartmann, Preussischer ]ahrbucher

war

Review (1891),

LXVII, 520; F. Mehring, "Nietzsche/* Neue Zeit, 30. Jan. 1897; W. Dilthey, Gesammelte Wer^e (1898), IV, 528; G. Bianquis, Nietzsche en France (1929), 62. 18

H.

63-69.

Tiirck,

Nietzsches philosophise he Irrwcge,

Neue Ausgabe

(1894),

NIETZSCHE

182

propaganda during the War of 1914-1918 was not more singleminded and vehement in condemnation of Nietzsche. All over

when Nietzsche

the world,

first is

known, he appears

as de-

lightfully or horribly shocking, as a disturbing thinker, a rebel

not to be dismissed as a mere crank. Almost from the interested all sorts of

men, and made

all sorts

first,

of disciples.

he

One

disciple has not infrequently found in the Master the exact in logic and even in commonsense of what ancontrary

other disciple has found.

among

This, however,

is

almost a habit

disciples. Ill

To some of the reasons for Nietzsche's charm over his readers we shall return. The amazing variety of things his readers and have said they have found in him

disciples

by the variety of people his

charm has

is

explicable partly

attracted.

It

is

also

explicable partly by the fact that his published writings actually

do contain varied and in some senses contradictory materials. In the after

he

place, Nietzsche

first

Wagner. Some

left

seems

of his

have changed direction

to

more unyielding worshippers

though he may have developed, he never changed, his writings, of youth as well as of maturity, form one

insist that,

that all

13

Some such remark has certainly been made all of them it may have a degree many an observer, the Nietzsche of The Birth

splendid unity. all

and about

thinkers,

truth.

But

to

Tragedy seemed a

The Dawn

different

man from

of of of

the aphorisitc Nietzsche

and the "philosopher with a hammer" of the Twilight of the Idols seemed still another man if, indeed, of

"This 'Nietzsche

is

of Day,

now

und

the fashionable view

die deutsche

among

Zu^unft (1935).

the Nazis.

See R. Oehlcr,

THE GROWTH OF A REPUTATION he were a

man

at all.

In other words, Nietzsche's works can

more

be divided into "periods" perhaps a bit men's.

It is

183

easily

than most

then possible to say that the "real" Nietzsche was

the Nietzsche of a certain period,

and that the

rest of his

work

not truly Nietzschean. Moreover, Nietzsche wrote almost entirely in brief aphoristic passages, composed in moments of high excitement, noted down is

and strung together trouble finding

into a book. Here, too, critics have

that Nietzsche

was not

his books, that

he had no

to

adapt himself

down by any

tied

He

to.

brief to follow,

had,

it

neatness and bite in phrasing, a

dulged

at the

But

of underlying unity.

all sorts

it

had no

is

a fact

formal structure in

no

special audience

must be admitted, a love for love which he sometimes in-

expense of accuracy in reflecting his actual judg-

The works

kind of running note-book, a written Table-Talk, in which anyone can find ments.

are a

mass of

reflections, a

contradictions.

body of written work, at least outside the natural and exact sciences scholarship, lives on at the mercy of fashion. What Nietzsche had to say was necessarily inexact, for he dealt Finally, any

with matters about which men's feelings and habits have always been more trustworthy expressions than their words though they cannot,

if

they are

perate task of fitting

men

them

to

up the deswords. Nietzsche's work survives like Nietzsche, give

as the subject of great disputes, partly because

he failed to say

what he meant; and no one who has tried to say the kind of thing Nietzsche tried to say has succeeded much exactly

better.

We

are

still

Jesus of Nazareth.

men

differ

disputing about some of the things said by

And

so

we ought

on what Nietzsche wrote,

not to be surprised that differ in

some

senses al-

NIETZSCHE

184

A

contemporary Nietzschean writes, perhaps a

most

totally.

little

too indignantly:

An

old game of the human imagination has begun. The past is called into the present, and there begins that ceremony of consultation, of seeking for authority, the end of which is already pretty clear, since the consultant and the consulted are substantially one. For this reason

almost

all

current writing on Nietzsche has interest only as a part of

our contemporary history, and one may say of it what Lichtenberg said of other books, "Such works are mirrors; when a monkey gapes into one,

no

apostle can look back out."

All sorts of themselves.

men

Any

their variety.

14

It

have looked into Nietzsche's works, and seen attempt to classify them will be unworthy of

may

be well, therefore, to adopt a frankly

dualistic device, a neat conceptual polarity.

There are two

of Nietzscheans, the gentle and the tough.

There are no doubt

sorts

many in between the extremes, who might almost be called medium Nietzscheans. Though the Master himself was most immoderate, one might without too much violence to good sense find some followers who could be called "moderate" Nietzscheans. But the simple polar distinction between gentle

Nietzscheans and tough ones is a useful one, which one may expect of a distinction.

The

is

about

all

gentle Nietzscheans regard the Master, in a

cant phrase, as a

man

of

good

will.

nowadays For them, Nietzsche's work

marked by Socrates, and children of God. Nietzsche, other Jesus, Buddha, Luther, they hold, wanted men to be good; and by good he meant what is

in a central great tradition of ethics

and morals have always meant by somewhat stoic sense. Because men were not

the great heroes of religion

good, good 14

A.

in a

Kesser,

"Elemente zur Beurteilung Nietzsches," Neue Schweizer

Rundschau (1937), IV,

535.

THE GROWTH OF A REPUTATION good

in the nineteenth-century

Western world, he

185 lost his

tem-

per with them, and broke into prophetic violence. But at heart he wanted them to be peaceful, happy, just, pure, honest, kindly, humane. The gentle Nietzscheans have had to do a lot of explaining.

They have taken

in stride paradoxes that

would have

given their Master pause. One of their favorites, phrased in a dozen ways, runs something like this: Nietzsche was a most Christian anti-Christian; he hated the

sham

Christianity of his

age as only a true follower of Jesus could hate it. The tough Nietzscheans have had rather easier going, at least with their logic. For them the Master was an aristocrat of the heart

and the head,

a

man

filled

pig-men about him, a tortured,

with a great contempt for the

sensitive, subtle soul in rebellion

against the middle-class stupidities of the nineteenth century.

When, according

them, he damned Christianity for

to

its

slave-

compassion for the weak, its distrust of the flesh, he meant that he regarded Christianity as a bad thing. They add the gloss that Nietzsche did not object to Christianity as a morality,

its

solace for the masses,

but that he hated

it

who

could never be more than masses,

for corrupting the minority capable of

bright strength and cruelty, for preventing aristocrats from

behaving

like aristocrats.

Their Nietzsche was the dionysian

unashamed pagan, the joyous fighter, the flashing thinker, the superb ironist, whose wit danced merrily through the bewildered herd, and now and then knocked down some

rebel, the

loud bawling beast.

IV Elizabeth's biography of her brother, together with

magazine

articles

many

pointing out Nietzsche's great literary virtues,

NIETZSCHE

186

no doubt helped

to lay the foundations

Nietzscheans have

built.

Yet

it

was

on which the gentle

his adoption as a philoso-

philosophers that first gave him the which the gentle Nietzscheans might without respectability have labored in vain. Why these academic philosophers should

pher by

German academic

have accepted him did,

as a philosopher

is

hard

to

make

out.

true, frequently refer to himself as a philosopher;

it is

German

He but

writers all call themselves philosophers, somewhere,

He

an unpublished set of aphorisms labelled The Will to Power, which he often referred to

before they get through.

as his systematic

left

opus mains, but which looks and sounds ex-

actly like the rest of his unsystematic works, save that

much

The

duller.

best of Nietzsche's

work

is

in fact

more

it

is

like

La Rochefoucauld than like that of Frenchmen were also philosophers? not find much attention paid them in

that of Montaigne, Pascal,

Kant or Hegel. But

the

Perhaps, but you will

formal manuals of philosophy.

The

best of

German

15

philosophical writing on Nietzsche has

been of a high order. Books like those of Alois Riehl, Hans Vaihinger, Raoul Richter, Richard Meyer have, in a good sense, brought him down to earth, have made him an understandable figure.

16

These writers must, on the whole, be classed

as

gentle Nietzscheans. Even when, as with Vaihinger, they limit themselves to expounding systematically what Nietzsche wrote in a rush of words, they tend to

"In one insists that

the point

I

of the best

Nietzsche

is

have made

tame him a bit,

to

subdue him to

and briefest critical studies of Nietzsche, Vaihinger properly designated a philosopher. But he also makes above, that Montaigne and his company are properly

H. Vaihinger, Nietzsche als Philosophy 15. Here there is no use about words. disputing "A. Riehl, Friedrich Nietzsche, der Ktinstler und der Denser (1897); H. Vaihinger, Nietzsche als Philosoph (1902); R. Richter, Friedrich Nietzsche philosophers.

scin

Lebcn und

sein WerJ^ (1903); R.

W.

Meyer, Nietzsche (1913).

THE GROWTH OF A REPUTATION

187

the kind of professional sobriety he himself could never attain

up with. They

or put

classify in

terms of individualism, collec-

tivism, evolution,

epistemology, metaphysics, culture-history, had Nietzsche what poured out in more concrete, or at least

Some

them

more

poetic, terms.

tion.

Richter, for instance, classified Nietzsche as an evolu-

tionist

in

essentially

Power" becomes

a

the

form

of

carry this process to distor-

Darwinian

tradition;

of the struggle for

The

understood that phrase.

his

"Will to

life as his

century Eternal Recurrence, and most of

Nietzsche's metaphysics, can hardly be fitted into such an interpretation.

These gentlemen are not inclined to approve Nietzsche's wildest flights and proposals. But on the whole they feel that

some valuable way he renewed German philosophy, that he fundamental problems fundamentally. They do not

in

restated

however, like the extremists

among

the gentle Nietzscheans,

attempt to make him a Christian in spite of himself. They soften, but they do not bowdlerize him. To their ranks may well be added a Frenchman, Henri Lichtenberger, whose little book on Nietzsche came out in France in 1898. Lichtenberger

knew Germany and he

fell

its

intellectual

life

so thoroughly that

quite naturally into the professorial interpretation of

Nietzsche.

France tzscheans, of

is

the country

and perhaps

which has nursed the

gentlest Nie-

also the greatest variety of Nietzscheans

probably impossible to give a satisfactory explanation of the great interest Frenchmen have shown in the 17 writings of Nietzsche. Perhaps they were overcome with all sorts.

admiration 17

It is

at

finding a

German who wrote

like a

Frenchman.

The facts are admirably assembled in G. Bianquis, Nietzsche en France The bibliography, pp. 119-126 is especially useful.

(1929).

NIETZSCHE

l88 of

Many

them were doubtless

attracted to Nietzsche by his

violent and well-phrased hatred for Bismarck's new Reich. Others were impressed with his profundity, his prophetic wisdom, his dionysian contempt for stupid geometric "reason" in short, with the presses a

whole apparatus of Zarathustra, which im-

Frenchman

in French. tzsche's life

Still ;

the

more because

it

is

utterly incredible

others were touched by the sorrows of Nie-

here was a martyr to ideas, to the

life

of the spirit,

unbowed. This again has long been a which can bring out to the full the great French capacity

a thinker bloody but

subject

for sentimentality.

one of the most popular short lives of Nietzsche, by Daniel Halevy, published in French in 1909 and shortly thereafter translated into English. This life throbs In this latter vein

throughout with

is

Nietzsche

pity.

is

the great compassionate

one, the tender idealist, embittered by exposure to the vulgarities

and

expanding Germany of his day, driven to intelligence and his wounded sensibilities,

crudities of the

mockery by

his

driven possibly to certain exaggerations. But at heart Nietzsche is

Halevy a witness

for

to the eternal strength of the

a witness against Bismarck, against Moltke,

spirit,

German

industrialists, against

Wagner and

human

and the great

the vicious pan-

Germanists, against the anti-Semites, against the materialist

Nietzsche follows in the footsteps of But Luther was in a worldly way successful. Nie-

successes of the day.

Luther.

tzsche's greatness lies partly in his worldly failure.

The

late

Charles Andler, however,

more extraordinary

He made him flesh,

made something even

and unrecognizable

a Socialist.

out of Nietzsche.

Whether Nietzsche

would have been angrier

at

himself, in the

being called a Socialist than

THE GROWTH OF A REPUTATION

189

being called a Christian is a nice question. Since the Socialists were committed to even more love for the common man than at

the Christians of his day, one suspects that he felt a stronger

contempt for Socialists than for Christians, and this in general is borne out by his writings. Yet Andler could write "one may

The

legitimately call the system of Nietzsche a socialism."

Master wanted "a European working-class which would be a 18

Before Andler worked himself up to this point, he had written four volumes on Nietzsche, in which he class of masters."

had gradually Andler's great

up a picture much like that of Halevy's. work is an invaluable source of information

built

about Nietzsche and his

emerges from

circle.

man who

But the

finally

huge accumulation of facts looks very little like the Nietzsche most other men have seen. Nietzsche radicalthis

Nietzsche in the cartel des gauches and the republique des professeurs? Surely the Master never meant his famous phrase, "the transvaluation of all values" to be taken

socialiste

quite so fantastically?

Not

all

Frenchmen have been

as

innocent about Nietzsche as

Halevy and Andler. Andre Gide, one of discoverers, seems at

first

glance to be almost a tough Nie-

tzschean. Joy, not sadness, inspires the a mistake to think of to his

own

tzscheanism

him

at

writes Gide; it is Yet Gide soon comes

man,

as a destroyer.

curious formula: Nietzsche is

French

his earliest

is

a Jansenist.

once a manifestation of abundant

"Nie-

life

.

.

.

and

a tendency which, according to the times, has been called

18

C. Andler, Nietzsche, sa vie et sa pensce, V, 321. Andler was not the Nietzsche a Socialist. E. Gystrovv, in the Sozialistischc Monatsheft

first to call

October 1900 wrote ecstatically, der Gesetzgcbcr (1930), 183-184. for

"He was one

of us!" See F. Mess, Nietzsche

NIETZSCHE

190

'Jansenism/ or 'Protestantism/ and which will

now

be called

Nietzscheanism, because Nietzsche dared formulate to the very

extreme that which was

One trines

still

latently

murmuring

in

19

it."

most thorough jobs of softening Nietzsche's docwas done by an American, the late W. M. Salter, whose of the

Nietzsche the Thinker appeared in 1917. Salter is no Andler; he does not try to make Nietzsche out a lover of his fellow-men,

nor even a primitive Christian. At no one point does he seem to do much more than quote or paraphrase Nietzsche. Yet the net impression one gets from Salter's book is of a Nietzsche no longer very excited or exciting.

All the impatience,

all

the

drum-beating, all the mystic exaltation have disappeared, and we are left with a wise old gentleman thoughtfully pursuing dp6T7J

and

virtu for the

good of generations

feels constantly obliged to

hero

to

come.

20

Salter

defend the personal qualities of his

his sanity, modesty, honesty, attractiveness, general all-

around balance of character. Nietzsche has sages have to be mellow, like

to be a sage,

and

Goethe or Emerson. But nothing

can be more certain than that Nietzsche's personal qualities were most unendearing, that during the decade in which he

wrote his great books he was as unpleasant a person as any clinical record of literature can show. Nietzsche's greatness

may it is

have come from his more than Promethean suffering; but a tortured, frenetic, shrilly intellectual cry that

his suffering, a cry

one does not hear in

comes from

Salter's conscientious

book.

The English Nietzscheans formed century a devoted band, 19 80

now

Gide, Oeuvres completes,

W. M.

III,

Salter, "Nietzsche the

in the earlier years of the

rather broken

up by time and two

237, "Lettres a Angcle."

Thinker, especially

p. 375.

THE GROWTH OF A REPUTATION

191

wars against Nietzsche's fatherland. Some of them were, least in

As

appearance, tough Nietzscheans.

at

a band, however,

they tended to support, and spread abroad among literate Englishmen, the conception of Nietzsche as at bottom a profound a

evolutionist,

moralist

who

Spencer wanted, peace and

wanted what Herbert

really

plenty, but saw that nineteenth-

century Englishmen weren't getting it very fast. somewhat disparate and not very popular group,

They were

who

a

centered

their work around the eighteen-volume translation of the Master into English, edited by Oscar Levy. J. M. Kennedy, who

some of the volumes, was perhaps

translated

pundit.

He

published during the

volume on Nietzsche,

ironically

War

their

leading

of 1914-1918 a short

sub-titled

"The Mind

that

caused the Great War," and aiming to prove that Nietzsche

had

in

no

sense influenced the

Germans

to

make

war. That

thing Treitschke had done, not Nietzsche. The good 21 Master, urging force, wrote "with an ideal Europe in mind."

evil

Kennedy

indeed, as did most of the English Nietzscheans, took

the Master's

anti-democratic ideas very seriously.

Some

of

Kennedy's schemes for keeping the lower classes lower sound almost tough. But so do some of Plato's schemes for achieving

same end, and no one ever called Plato tough. The philosophical and the aesthetic strains are the ones most

the

heard

among

the gentle Nietzscheans of any country. Brandes,

d'Annunzio, Andre Gide, Havelock gathering, are first

all

of all a Poet.

81

J.

22

otherwise a strange

who found

the Master

Poets, in spite of the authority of Shelley,

M. Kennedy, Nietzsche (1914),

"Ellis's essay

Ellis,

gentle Nietzscheans

9.

on Nietzsche was published

in Affirmations (1898)

mains an admirable specimen of the aesthetic touch applied

and

re-

to the Master.

NIETZSCHE

192 are not

have

commonly

legislators.

programs

specific

spiritual rebirth deeper than

are exceptions.

Few

of the gentle Nietzscheans

of reform for a world they feel needs a

Andler and

any program.

Now and then there

his followers in

France have tried

to tie Nietzsche into a popular front. Some of the German Nietzscheans hoped to translate the Master's ideas into action in ways not strictly conforming to Nazi achievements. Such,

who saw

Nietzsche as a kind of potential German Lycurgus, a law-giver who might inspire a code for a stratified society, a society of Supermen, but not of storm for instance,

troopers

The

is

Dr. Mess,

and Labor Fronts.

23

tradition of Nietzsche as a

man

of

good

will,

once

established, has continued in spite of the tough Nietzscheans,

and

in spite of the identification various interested persons,

from

propagandists to philosophers, have tried to make between the ideas of Nietzsche and the practises of modern German gov-

ernments.

It

has been largely instrumental in

a great

and respected

studies,

some

making Nietzsche

world of culture, a figure about whom a small library has already been written. It has, especially in the last twenty years, given rise to many admirable of

figure in the

which

are actually

more

interested in under-

standing Nietzsche than in defending him. At long last, Nietzsche's contributions to our knowledge of how human beings

behave have been pointed out and evaluated. Nietzsche's place in the history of thought has been studied without undue emphasis on the uniqueness of that place. 23

24

There are signs

Nietzsche der Gesetzgeber (1930). The book is almost, but not quite, good Nazi doctrine. It is a wonderful example of the Teutonic gift for in the air. spinning endless and exact details 24 For instance, M. Scheler, Ober Ressentimcnt und moralischcs Werturteil (1912); K. Joel, Nietzsche

und

die Romantit^ (1923).

THE GROWTH OF A REPUTATION

193

But they

that the gentle Nietzscheans as a sect are dying out.

are far

from

extinct.

The

increasing use of Nietzsche's

name

by the German National Socialists in defense of the way of life of the Third Reich, the attempt to make of him a kind of John the Baptist for the Savior Hitler, has infuriated the gentle

Nietzscheans, and

The Nazis]

of the

.

.

.

of

them

"roaming blond is

productivity,

against the "good European/'

long.

One

vocal again.

'The Higher Man/' from the main line of his

herald of

aberration

life

made them

writes:

beast," this

played up [by the

which he remained

his

whole

He, who appreciated the chivalrous greatness of the

English spirit just as he did the deep leaning to psychology of the Russians, he the enthusiastic worshipper of Stendhal, the admirer of Sterne, Heine, Voltaire, is above every suspicion of having glorified Power in the sense of nationalistic racial arrogance. What final tragic fate it is, that this martyr of thought, whose life has been an eternal battle against the traditional

in his own heart, this actual martyr to should be held aloft as their approving prophet by the

and the outworn

truthfulness,

untruthful of today. 25

And

French Nietzschean of the gentlest the Left in politics, devotes a whole book a

ing that great

spirits

are always

to

who

Master against the wicked calumniators

He

Hitler actually learned from Nietzsche.

sort, a

follower of

defending the maintain that

begins by remark-

hounded by

the pack: for

Socrates the hemlock, for Christ the cross, for others silence,

calumny. Nietzsche has undergone tion. But like Socrates and Christ nately not silence. 25

P.

M.

lished as

.

.

.

The

rest

is

unfortu-

26

Gutmann, "Nict/schc, The 'Good European,'" Queen's Quarterly

(Spring, 1938), 20

three forms of persecu-

all

XLV, 21. DC Nietzsche

P. Nicolas,

From Nietzsche Down