XIINIETZSCHE: A NOTE

“And thus I wander alone like a rhinoceros.” Nietzsche writes in one of his letters that he had discovered this “strong closing sentence” in an English translation of the sacred books of the Buddhists and had made it a “household word.” It is at once a grotesque and an apt image of his isolation in a world of men and women. His solitude made him perilous: it ultimately exalted his egoism into madness. There are few more amazing passages in the annals of literature than those containing the last letters between the mad Nietzsche and the mad Strindberg. Nietzsche, signing himself “Nietzsche Cæsar,” wrote on New Year’s Eve, 1888:

I have appointed a meeting day of monarchs in Europe. I shall order ... to be shot.Au revoir! For we shall surely see each other again.On one condition only. Let us divorce.

I have appointed a meeting day of monarchs in Europe. I shall order ... to be shot.

Au revoir! For we shall surely see each other again.

On one condition only. Let us divorce.

Strindberg, writing on the same date and signing himself “The best, the highest God,” began his letter to Nietzsche: “I will, I will be raving mad,” and concluded it:

Meanwhile, let us rejoice in our madness. Fare you well and be true to yourStrindberg(The best, the highest God).

Meanwhile, let us rejoice in our madness. Fare you well and be true to your

Strindberg(The best, the highest God).

Nietzsche’s reply was:

Mr. Strindberg:Alas! ... no more! Let us divorce!“The Crucified.”

Mr. Strindberg:

Alas! ... no more! Let us divorce!

“The Crucified.”

Dr. Oscar Levy, in his introduction to an English selection from Nietzsche’s letters, vigorously objects to the emphasis that has been laid by some critics on Nietzsche’s madness. It is a reasonable protest, if the accusation is put forward in order to damage Nietzsche’s fame as an artist among philosophers. Dr. Levy, however, goes so far on the other side that he almost leaves us with a picture of Nietzsche as a perfectly normal man with all the normal “slave virtues.” “A good friend, a devoted son, an affectionate brother, and a generous enemy”—“not the slightest trace of any lack of judgment”—“perfectly healthy and lucid”—such arethe phrases in which the Nietzsche of these letters is portrayed. We are told that “even the curious last letter to Georg Brandes still gives a perfect sense.” Here is the letter:

To the Friend Georg.Having been discovered by you no trick was necessary for the others to find me. The difficulty is now to get rid of me.“The Crucified.”

To the Friend Georg.

Having been discovered by you no trick was necessary for the others to find me. The difficulty is now to get rid of me.

“The Crucified.”

It would, I agree, be ridiculous to dwell on the madness at the close of Nietzsche’s life, if such extravagant claims had not been made for him by his followers. But the madness of Nietzsche is relevant enough in a criticism of his philosophy, if we are asked to accept him as one of the inspired guides to life.

Nietzsche himself was at once terrified and intoxicated by his sense of his own abnormal difference from common men. He knew, in part of his nature, that this aloofness was an evil. He craved for sympathy so passionately at times that he cried to one of his friends: “The whole of my philosophy totters after one hour’s sympathetic intercourse even with total strangers!” About the same time—it was in 1880—he wrote:

One ceases from loving oneself properly when oneceasesfrom exercising oneself in love towards others,wherefore the latter (the ceasing from exercising, etc.) ought to be strongly deprecated. (This is from my own experience.)

Even before that, however he had definitely decided on the egocentric life. Writing to a friend on the subject of marriage, he declared: “I shall certainly not marry; on the whole, I hate the limitations and obligations of the whole civilised order of things so very much that it would be difficult to find a woman free-spirited enough to follow my lead.” He was himself the measure by which he measured all the values of life. “I am not quite satisfied with Nature,” he had said in an early letter, “who ought to have given me a little more intellect as well as a warmer heart.” But this mood of modesty did not last. At that time, he saw in his egoism his greatest weakness. “One begins to feel constantly as if one were covered with a hundred scars and every movement were painful.” As his consciousness of his genius grew, every scar and every pain seemed to him to bear witness, not to his egoism, but to his greatness. He assures his sister in 1883 that he is grateful even for his physical suffering because through it “I was torn away from an estimate of my life-task which was not only false but a hundred times toolow.” He declares that he naturally belonged to“the modest among men,” so that “some violent means were necessary in order to recall me to myself.” He was unquestionably heroic in the way in which he accepted all the miseries of his life as the natural lot of a saviour of mankind. He boasted of his isolation and his sufferings magnificently. No sooner, however, did the world begin to smile on him than he began to boast on a more normal plane of delighted vanity. His most attractive braggings were addressed to his mother. He wrote to her from Turin:

Oh, if you only knew on what terms the foremost personages of the world express their loyalty to me—the most charming women, aMadame la Princesse Tenicheflnot by any means excepted. I have genuine geniuses among my admirers—to-day there is no name that is treated with as much distinction and respect as my own. You see that is the feat—sans name, sans rank, and sans riches, I am nevertheless treated like a little prince here, by everybody, even down to my fruit-stall woman, who is never satisfied till she has picked me out the sweetest bunch from among her grapes.

Grateful though he was for the practical admiration of the fruit-stall woman, however he liked to pick and choose among his admirers. After he had received an enthusiastic greeting from a coterie of Viennese disciples, he wrote scornfullyto his mother of “such adolescent advances.” “I do not,” he declared, “write for men who are fermenting and immature.” He sneered if he was praised; he was infuriated if he was ignored. At one moment he would sneer at the barbarous Germans who did not understand him. At another, he would show how deeply he felt this want of appreciation in his own country for his “unrelenting subterranean war against all that mankind has hitherto honoured and loved.” Shortly before he went mad, he wrote to a friend:

... Although I am in my forty-fifth year and have published about fifteen books (—among them thatnon plus ultra“Zarathustra”), no one in Germany has yet succeeded in producing even a moderately good review of a single one of my works. They are now getting out of the difficulty with such words as “eccentric,” “pathological,” “psychiatric.” There have been evil and slanderous hints enough about me, and in the papers both scholarly and unscholarly, the prevailing attitude is one of ungoverned animosity—but how is it that no one protests against this? How is it that no one feels insulted when I am abused? And all these years no comfort, no drop of human sympathy, not a breath of love.

He reproached even his sister for her want of understanding. “You do not seem to be evenremotely conscious,” he told her, “of the fact that you are next of kin to the man and his destiny, in which the question of millenniums has been decided—speaking quite literally, I hold the Future of mankind in my hand.” It is because his correspondence is so full of passages in this and similar moods that we find in Nietzsche’s letters little of the intimacy that we expect in good letters. It is as though he were suffering from an obsession about his fame. Many of his letters are merely manifestoes about himself. He was not greatly interested in other people or in the little ordinary things that interest other people. His most enjoyable passages might be described as outbursts, and towards the end of his life he chose as his correspondents Strindberg and Brandes, who also had the genius of outburst but in a less superb degree. It was Brandes who wrote to him with regard to Dostoievsky:

He is a true and great poet, but a vile creature, absolutely Christian in his way of thinking and living, and at the same time quitesadique. His morals are wholly what you have christened “Slave Morality.”

“Just what I think,” replied Nietzsche.

Not that the letters are without an occasional touch of fun. There is a delightful early letter in which Nietzsche tells how, being invited to meetWagner, he ordered a dress suit. It was brought round to the house just in time to allow him to dress. The old messenger, however, brought not only the parcel but the bill, and presented it to Nietzsche:

I took it politely, but he declared he must be paid on delivery. I was surprised, and explained that I had nothing to do with him as the servant of my tailor, but that my dealings were with his master to whom I had given the order. The man grew more pressing, as did also the time. I snatched at the things and began to put them on. He snatched them too and did all he could to prevent me from dressing. What with violence on my part and violence on his, there was soon a scene, and all the time I was fighting in my shirt, as I wished to get the new trousers.At last, after a display of dignity, solemn threats, the utterance of curses on my tailor and his accomplice, and vows of vengeance, the little man vanished with my clothes.

At last, after a display of dignity, solemn threats, the utterance of curses on my tailor and his accomplice, and vows of vengeance, the little man vanished with my clothes.

There is another amusing letter to his sister, in which he tells her how, one Christmas Day at Nice, he drank too much:

Then your famous animal drank three quite large glasses of a sweet local wine, and was just the slightest bit top-heavy; at least, not long afterwards, when the breakers drew near to me, I said to them as one says to a bevy of farmyard fowls, “Shsh! Shsh! Shshh!”

This incident is comically symbolic of much of Nietzsche’s philosophy.

It is hardly necessary to go into Dr. Levy’s defence of Nietzsche against the charge that he was the “man who caused the war.” Dr. Levy points out quite justly that Nietzsche was as severe a critic of Prussians and Prussianism as any English leader-writer in war-time. This, however, does not meet the point of the anti-Nietzscheans. What they contend is that Prussianism is essentially the vulgar application of the principles that underlie the Nietzschean philosophy. It is obviously ridiculous to contend that Nietzsche caused the war. It is arguable, however, that he was the supreme poet of the supreme falsehood that is at the bottom of all unjust wars.

In any case, like Carlyle, he will probably survive as an artist rather than as a teacher. And even men who detest his gospel will delight in the lightning of his phrase as it shoots out of the thunder-clouds of his imagination.

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