IIINIETZSCHE THE RHAPSODIST

Tell me, where is justice to be found which is love with seeing eyes?—Also sprach Zarathustra.

A sane and complete estimate of the life and philosophical writings of Friedrich Nietzsche has yet to be made in English. Mentally dead since 1889, his death, in a private retreat at Weimar in 1900, created little stir; yet we predict that this great, if rhapsodical thinker, will occupy a place in the pantheon of philosophers. Like Emerson, he formulated no system; he is a stimulus to thought, an antiseptic critic of all philosophies, religions, theologies, and moral systems, an intellectual rebel, a very Lucifer among ancient and modern thinkers.

His life, barring his friendship with Wagner, and its sad conclusion, is rather barren of interest or incident. It was a fiery soul tragedy; outwardly the world saw a quiet, very reserved, almost timid man of cultivated bearing and disinclined to the pursuits of the ambitious. He was born at Röcken, near Lützen, October15, 1844. His father was a clergyman; indeed he descended from a long line of clerical ancestors, which possibly accounts for the austere strain in the man. This philosopher with a hammer, this demolisher of Antichrist, this writer who outraged all religious Europe, was a man of pure, upright life, a scholar, a gentleman, a poet. Taking up philology mainly as a makeshift, he occupied the chair of classical philology at the University of Basle. His weak eyesight—his life long he was a sufferer from headaches, a weak stomach, and crabbed nerves—drove him to a retirement, during which he busied himself with art and philosophy. The Birth of Tragedy in 1872 attracted Richard Wagner’s attention, for here was a partisan not to be despised. In 1876 Nietzsche published Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, and Wagnerism had found its philosophical exponent. A friendship, ideal in its quality, grew up between composer and thinker. But the sensitive nature of Nietzsche could brook no rivals, and he soon fell away from Wagner and Bayreuth. Many have sought to explain this defection. Nietzsche’s devoted sister, Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, accused Richard and Cosima Wagner of treachery, while Wagner, on his part, found this intense young disciple a trifle irksome. He could not stir, could not talk sportively—as was his wont—could not make bad puns, could not associate with others without a sorrowful apparition warninghim that he was not true to himself, not true to his higher nature. Wagner, being a natural man, sometimes a coarse and worldly man, resented this spiritual caretaker’s solicitude, and so in the rush and excitement of Bayreuth in 1876 he was forced to forget his Nietzsche. Then the usual thing happened: the other one went off in a sulk, and Wagnerism had lost its most fanatical adherent.

The truth in this affair is not difficult to discern. When Wagner was still undiscovered—that is, the latter-day Wagner—Nietzsche sailed his soul abroad for spiritual adventures and found the composer of Tristan and Isolde full of spiritual irony. Exclusive, haughty, jealous—a noble sort of jealousy—he published the good news to the world. Then the mob,hoi polloi, began to buy excursion tickets to Bayreuth, and Nietzsche shudderingly withdrew. Wagner’s music was no longer unique, no longer to be savored by the intellectually aristocratic few. So he sailed his bark for newer, rarer, stranger enterprises and discovered—Nietzsche. After that the madhouse yawned for him, and the world lost a wonderful man, an ecstatic, semi-deranged man, a freethinker who out-topped all freethinkers, one of the greatest individualists since Stirner, and a soul of poetic richness. In 1888 Der Fall Wagner was published and Nietzsche’s friends and foes alike noted the decline of a brilliantintellect. The book is extraordinary. In it are flashes of dazzling fugitive ideation; but it lacks logic, nobility of design; above all, it lacks coherency. Wagner is as bitterly arraigned and attacked as the apostle of degeneration, as before he was hailed as the Dispenser of the New Evangel of music, poetry, and philosophy. It is a pity that this violent work should have introduced Nietzsche to the English-speaking world. It is too fantastic, too ill-balanced, to serve as a dignified polemic, or yet as a corrective. In Germany it but strengthened Wagner’s cause. Yet its occasional meteoric lucidity, its wit, its blows with a hammer, are at times extremely diverting. The last of his writings, it should be read the last. We say the last, for his Transvaluation of All Values—the first part of which is Antichrist, need not concern us here—was begun when the author was struck down. After Wagner, Bizet; after Parsifal, Carmen; for he swore that Bizet was the greater, Bizet the creator of La Gaya Scienza. Nietzsche had to swing to the other extreme musically after his secession from Wagnerism. But Bizet——!

The Nietzsche philosophical pedigree is not difficult to trace. He comes intellectually from Max Stirner—especially Stirner—Bakounine, the anarchist, and Karl Gutzkow. As mad a Schopenhauerian as Richard Wagner, he threw over his allegiance to the Master Pessimist when he discovered that there can be no will to livewithout previous existence, and existence presupposes will. It is theWill to Powerthat is Nietzsche’s cardinal doctrine, and this will to power is neither evil nor good, for our Siegfried among philosophers would transvalue all moral values. In his divagations with a hammer—he called himself the Philosopher with a Hammer—smashed all idols, old, new, and to come. He likewise, in his intellectual fury and craving after universal knowledge, smashed the exceeding delicate mechanism of his own brain. Boasting of Polish blood, he, like Poland, represented a disintegrated individualism. Nietzsky was said to be the ancestral name, and with it was inherited all the pride of his nationality. He loathed the common herd more than Horace, more than Flaubert—to whom life was but a bad smell. Herbert Spencer’s philosophical moderation, the tepid piety of the middle classes, he equally scorned. He would have us all aristocrats in mind and body, and Wagner’s snobbery—so necessary to his worldly advancement—filled Nietzsche with disgust. No king, no pope, no democracy, could bind his rebellious intellect. Like Ibsen’s Brand he sought ever the steepest heights. A lonely soul is Zarathustra—Nietzsche, and one of the most saddening scenes in Also sprach Zarathustra (begun in 1883, finished in 1885, but not published until 1892) is his finding of the animals, the pope and Wagner worshipping the Jackassaccording to the ritual of the Roman Catholic church. It was Wagner’s Parsifal that stung him to madness. The anti-naturalism, the mysticism, the attempted revival in theatric form of—to him—hierarchical superstitions and various abnormalities, shocked the soul of Nietzsche. In his wonderful prose epic, Wagner appears masked as the Wizard, the prophet of pity, of redemption of all the formulas hated by this extraordinary thinker.

It is mere childishness, or else bigotry, to point at Nietzsche’s end as the moral tag of his life. If he had lived during the Middle Ages, either he would have been burnt alive or else have proved a formidable rival to some angelic doctor. But living in the nineteenth century, a century of indifference to men of his ardent temperament, he erected his own stake and fagots and the mad genius within him burnt up his mind. While he would not have so astonished the world if born to work in the dogmatic harness of the Roman Catholic church, yet its discipline might have quieted his throbbing nerves, and perhaps given the faith a second Rosmini.

A magnificent dialectician, Nietzsche threw overboard all metaphysical baggage. He despised the jargon of Schoolman and modern philosophers. For him Hegel was a verbalistic bat, blind to the realities of life; and it is just at this point that the influence of the insurgenthas been so provocative of good. He has overturned the barriers of a repulsive metaphysical terminology and dared to be naked and natural, though a philosopher. He erected no system, no vast, polyphonic edifice with winding staircase and darkened chambers. Nietzsche made no philosophical formula; rather, his formula is an image, the image of a lithe dancer. The writer of this résumé pretends to see the beginnings of Nietzsche’s philosophy, or poetry, in the second part of Faust. When Euphorion, that child of Helena and Faust, of Beauty and Intellect, the merging of the Classical and Romantic, sings:—

Let me be skipping,Let me be leaping,To soar and circleThrough ether sweeping,Is now the passionThat me hath won,

Let me be skipping,

Let me be leaping,

To soar and circle

Through ether sweeping,

Is now the passion

That me hath won,

he but set the pace for Nietzsche, the Dancing Philosopher. Dancing blithely over a tight rope stretched between two eternities, the Past and the Future, Man, gay, and unafraid, views the depths of Time and Space. It is “Man who is a rope connecting animal and Beyond Man” (Übermensch). “He is a bridge, not a goal; a transition and a destruction.” These seemingly startling statements, which may be found in Thus spake Zarathustra, are, after all, nothing new; Christianity, with its angels and Darwinism,with its bold hints at future evolutions and developments, do but say the same things, each in its own way. But Nietzsche, like his beloved Euphorion, must needs graze the rim of the sun in his flight, and Icarus-wise come tumbling to earth—and a Weimar retreat.

The Titanism of Nietzsche, might over right, power over weakness, impels him to hate all weakness, and Christianity, he declares, is a weakness, a degenerate sort of Judaism, complicated with the teachings of Greek mystagogues. He says that the first and only Christian was nailed to the cross, and this should please the heart of Tolstoy. Bolder still is Nietzsche’s wish that a Dostoïevsky might have depicted the Christ in all his childlike innocence and Godlike love. Nietzsche worships force and hates slave-morality,i.e.all modern religions, in which pity for the weak is basic. To him the symbol of the crucifix is degrading, a symbol of degenerating races. A very Spartan, he would have the great blond barbarian once more trample, Attila-like, the blood-stained soil of Europe and Asia, sparing none.Væ Victis!“What is best belongeth to my folk and myself. And if it is not given to us, we take it, the best food, the purest sky, the strongest thoughts, the most beautiful women.” Thus spake Zarathustra, and the voice is Nietzsche’s, but the hands are the hands of Esau—Bismarck: Blood and Iron!

It is in Also sprach Zarathustra that thegenius of Nietzsche is best studied. Like the Buddhistic Tripitaka, it is a book of highly colored Oriental aphorisms, interrupted by lofty lyric outbursts. It is an ironic, enigmatic rhetorical rhapsody, the Third Part of a half-mad Faust. In it may be seen flowing all the currents of modern cultures and philosophies, and if it teaches anything at all, it teaches the wisdom and beauty of air, sky, waters, and earth, and of laughter, not Pantagruelian, but “holy laughter.” The love of earth is preached in rapturous accents. A Dionysian ecstasy anoints the lips of this latter-day Sibyl on his tripod, when he speaks of earth. He is intoxicated with the fulness of its joys. No gloomy monasticism, no denial of the will to live, no futile thinking about thinking,—so despised by Goethe,—no denial of grand realities, may be found in the curriculum of this Bacchantic philosopher. A Pantheist, he is also a poet and seer like William Blake, and marvels at the symbol of nature, “the living garment of the Deity”—Nietzsche’s deity, of course. It is this realistic, working philosophy—if philosophy it be in the academic sense—that has endeared Nietzsche to the newer generation, that has set his triumphant standard on the very threshold of the new century. After the metaphysical cobweb spinners, the Hegels, Fichtes, Schellings, after the dreary pessimism of the soured Schopenhauer,—whose pessimism was temperamental, as is all pessimism,so James Sully has pointed out,—after many negations and stumblings, the vigorous affirmations of this Nihilist are stimulating, suggestive, refreshing, especially in Germany, the stronghold of philosophical and sentimental Philistinism. Not reward, but the sheer delight of living, of conquering self, of winning victories in the teeth of defeat,—thus spake the wisdom of Nietzsche.

For English-speaking readers the many attacks on Nietzsche have placed the philosopher under the cloud of a peculiar misconception. Viciously arguing that a man in a madhouse could only produce a mad philosophy, his assailants forgot that it was Nietzsche’s very intensity of mental vision, his phenomenal faculty of attention, his hopeless attempt to square the circle of things human, that brought about his sad plight. If he had not thought so madly, so strenuously, if he had put to slumber his irritable conscience, his insatiable curiosity, with current anodynes, Nietzsche might have been alive to-day.

In Also sprach Zarathustra he consciously or unconsciously vied with Goethe in Faust; with Wagner’s Ring, with Balzac’s Comédie Humaine, with Ibsen’s Brand, with Tolstoy’s War and Peace, with Senancour’s Oberman, with Browning’s Paracelsus. It is the history of his soul, as Leaves of Grass is Whitman’s—there are some curious parallelisms between thesetwo subjective epics. It is intimate, yet hints at universality; it contains some of Amiel’s introspection and some of Baudelaire’s morbidity; half mad, yet exhorting, comforting; Hamlet and John Bunyan.

Nietzsche then is a critical mode of viewing the universe, rather than creator of a formal philosophy. He has set his imprint on all European culture, from the dream novels of that Italian of the Renaissance, the new Cellini, Gabriele d’Annunzio, to the Pole Przybyszewski, who has transformed Nietzsche into a very Typhoon of emotion. The musician Heinrich Pudor has imitated the master in his attacks on modern music; while Gerhart Hauptmann, Richard Dehmel—all young Germany, young France, has patterned after the great Immoralist, as he chose to call himself. Among the composers affected by him we find Richard Strauss, not attempting to set the philosophy of Nietzsche to music—as many wrongfully suppose—but arranging, as in a huge phantasmagoria, the emotions excited by the close study of Thus spake Zarathustra. And a many-colored piece of music it is, full of frowning mountains, fragrant meads, and barren, ugly, waste places.

Nietzsche met the fate of all rebels from Lucifer to Byron—neglect and obloquy. With something of Heraclitus, of Democritus, of Bruno Giordano, of Luther in him, there was allied a sensitivity almost Chopin’s. The combinationis a poor one for practical purposes; so the brain died before the body,—humanity cannot transcend itself. Notwithstanding all his contradictions, limitations, cloudland rhapsodies, aversion from the banal, despite his futile flights into the Inane, his word-weaving, his impossible premisses and mad conclusions, the thunder-march of his ideas, the brilliancy and polish of his style—the greatest German prose since Schopenhauer’s—have insured Nietzsche immortality; as immortality goes among world thinkers: fifty years of quotation and then—the biographical dictionaries.

Friedrich Nietzsche is, as Havelock Ellis declares, “a great aboriginal force”; perhaps, with Max Stirner, the greatest in the last half of the nineteenth century. And that same Stirner is the true stock from which Nietzsche sprang—Stirner who dared to say, “My truth is the truth.”

Nietzsche died August 28, 1900, literally theMorgenrötheof the new century. It was at Weimar, once the home of Goethe and Liszt. Nietzsche was in an insane asylum from 1888. Dr. Hermann Turck asserts that his work was done during a comparatively sane interval between two incarcerations. In 1868 he met Richard Wagner, and under the spell of his synthetic genius he wrote Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geist der Musik, and dedicated it to Wagner, his “sublime forerunner.” Everyline of it, he declares in the preface, was “conceived in close communion with Wagner.” And let those who know only the later Nietzsche casually read this essay to be convinced of its sanity, its acuity, its penetrating originality. Here we find the enthusiastic, impetuous youth, fresh from his Grecian studies, a valiant champion of Hellenistic culture, an opponent of the orientalization of modern life and thought. Twelve years later he discovered in Parsifal this very despised orientalization, and did not hesitate to say so in The Wagner Case, that fatal illustration of George Moore’s pithy axiom: When we change our opinions we change our friends.

The man who marshalled in the most deadly array of attack his arguments against Wagnerism is also the man who wrote the most brilliant book of all on Wagner. Richard Wagner in Bayreuth is a masterpiece of critical rhapsody. The sister who nursed the sick-brained man for twelve years, Frau Friedrich Förster-Nietzsche, tells the story of the dissensions in this friendship, a friendship that could have endured only through a miracle. Both men had “nerves” in a highly irritable condition; and, while Wagner had weathered the storm and had, perforce, developed a stout integument of disdain, Nietzsche had always remained the sensitive, morbid, cloistered student. There is no doubt that Richard Wagner, at the triumphant culmination of his life-work, was an arrogant, exacting, and jealousbeing. Wahnfried was, as it now is, a Star Chamber, where theVehmgerichtjudged swiftly, fiercely. Here is one story told by the sister and quoted by H. E. Krehbiel in his too brief review of the episode:—

My brother and I heard the Triumphlied of Brahms in the Bâle Cathedral. It was a splendid performance and pleased Fritz very much. When he went to Bayreuth in August, he took the pianoforte arrangement with him, apparently in the naïve belief that Wagner would like it. I say “apparently,” for upon later reflection it has occurred to me that this red-bound Triumphlied was meant as a sort of goad, and therefore Wagner’s prodigious wrath seems to have been not altogether groundless. So I will leave the continuation of the tale to Wagner, who had an exquisite fashion of satirizing himself:—“Your brother set this red book on the piano; whenever I went into the drawing-room, the red thing stared me in the face; it exasperated me, as a red rag to a bull. Perhaps I guessed that Nietzsche wanted it to say to me, ‘See here another man who can turn out something good!’ and one evening I broke out with a vengeance.”Wagner had a hearty laugh at the recollection. “What did my brother say?” I asked in alarm. “Nothing at all,” answered Wagner. “He simply blushed, and looked at me in astonishment and modest dignity. I would give a hundred thousand marks to have such splendid manners as this Nietzsche, always distinguished, always well bred;it’s an immense advantage in the world.” That story of Wagner’s came back to my mind at this time (spring of 1875). “Fritz,” I said, “why didn’t you tell me that tale about Brahms’s Triumphlied? Wagner related the whole thing to me himself.” Fritz looked straight before him and held his tongue. At last he said, beneath his breath, “Lisbeth, then Wagner wasnotgreat.”

“Your brother set this red book on the piano; whenever I went into the drawing-room, the red thing stared me in the face; it exasperated me, as a red rag to a bull. Perhaps I guessed that Nietzsche wanted it to say to me, ‘See here another man who can turn out something good!’ and one evening I broke out with a vengeance.”

Wagner had a hearty laugh at the recollection. “What did my brother say?” I asked in alarm. “Nothing at all,” answered Wagner. “He simply blushed, and looked at me in astonishment and modest dignity. I would give a hundred thousand marks to have such splendid manners as this Nietzsche, always distinguished, always well bred;it’s an immense advantage in the world.” That story of Wagner’s came back to my mind at this time (spring of 1875). “Fritz,” I said, “why didn’t you tell me that tale about Brahms’s Triumphlied? Wagner related the whole thing to me himself.” Fritz looked straight before him and held his tongue. At last he said, beneath his breath, “Lisbeth, then Wagner wasnotgreat.”

Another time Wagner interfered with a walking tour that Nietzsche had planned to take with the son of Felix Mendelssohn, a professor at Freiburg. The young philosopher winced, but gave in to the elder man’s request. His commonplace book reveals his secret irritation. Here is a specimen of his early revolt from the banner of Bayreuth:—

How infinitely purer is the soul of a Bach or a Beethoven in comparison with the soul of a Wagner. In the same sense as Goethe was a painter strayed from his true vocation, and Schiller an orator, Wagner is an actormanqué....Who are the men who swell the ranks of his partisans? Singers who wish to appear more interesting by acting their parts as well as singing them to produce the maximum of effect with a minimum of voice; composers who hoodwink the public by a sort of glamour into a non-critical attitude; audiences who are bored by the old masters and find in Wagner a stimulant for their jaded nerves.

Who are the men who swell the ranks of his partisans? Singers who wish to appear more interesting by acting their parts as well as singing them to produce the maximum of effect with a minimum of voice; composers who hoodwink the public by a sort of glamour into a non-critical attitude; audiences who are bored by the old masters and find in Wagner a stimulant for their jaded nerves.

Yet earlier he had written in such an eloquent strain as this:—

Wagner is never more Wagner than when his difficulties increase tenfold, and he triumphs over them with all the legislative zeal of a victorious ruler, subduing rebellious elements, reducing them to simple rhythms, and imprinting the supreme power of his will on a vast multitude of contending emotions.... It can be said of him that he has endowed everything in nature with a language. He believed that nothing need be dumb. He cast his plummet into the mystery of sunrise, forest and mountain, mist and night shadows, and learned that all these cherished intense longing for a voice.

Houston Chamberlain believes that when the panegyrics and attacks upon Wagner have been consigned to that eternal limbo, the dust-heap, Nietzsche’s Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, will still survive. Perhaps back of the wounded vanity was the usual feeling that in Bayreuth and Wagner his last illusion had vanished; madness was coming on apace. Even his sister admits that he held aloof during the rejoicing and festivities of 1876, and Wagner’sGemüthlichkeitexpressed in exuberant spirits (probably he stood on his head more than once in those gay times; it was a trick of his, as Praeger relates,—his punning, his advice to his shy, shrinking disciple to get him a wife, useless advice to this ardent upholder of ideal friendship), and all these things told on his nerves. He went away, and later in his Menschliches Allzumenschliches appeared the first faint threadthat, in Der Fall Wagner, had become a scarlet skein of abuse. He depreciated genius as being “a product of atavism, its glory is cheap, its throne quickly reared, and bending the knee to it is a mere habit.” Wahnfried, quick to detect heresy, recognized the allusion; and Wagner, deeply pained at the defection of a real friend, forbade his name to be mentioned. And Wagner was, as Nietzsche declared, thegrande passionof his life.

M. Schuré thus described the personal appearances of Nietzsche:—

No one who conversed with him could fail to be struck by the powers of his mind, and the singularity of his looks. His closely cropped hair and heavy mustache gave him at first sight the air of a cavalry officer. There was combination of hauteur and timidity in his bearing. His voice, musical and deliberate, betrayed the artistic temperament; his meditative almost hesitating gait, the philosopher. Nothing was more deceptive than the apparent calm of his expression. He had the fixed eye of the thinker, but at the same time it was the eye of the searching and keen observer and the fanatical visionary. This dual character of the eye was almost uncanny, and had a disquieting effect on those who talked with him face to face. His expression in moments of enthusiasm could be one of dreamy sweetness, but almost instantly relapsed again into fierce hostility.... There was a distant, isolated atmosphere about the whole Nietzsche personality, a veiled disdain which is often characteristic of the aristocrat of thought.

In a brief tribute to the memory of Friedrich Nietzsche, “So solltet ihr Nietzsche verstehen,” in theBeilage zur Allgemeinen Zeitung, Frau Professor Wanda Bartels tells of her and her husband’s chance acquaintance with the famous thinker during a sojourn in Venice. She dwells upon the contrast of his own modest reserve and unassuming ways with those of the blustering youths who flaunt in public as his followers and believers in his “system”; for he had no system, and “did not write to teach the immature, but to free his own soul.” Frau Bartels’s protest calls to mind the more weighty and truly enlightening utterances of another personal friend of Nietzsche, Professor Paul Deussen, of Kiel, who, writing in theWiener Rundschauon the Truth about Friedrich Nietzsche, discusses with great clearness the two cardinal points of Nietzsche’s doctrine, viz. the Übermensch and the ewige Wiederkehr, or eternal repetition of the world process. The former, Professor Deussen holds, is an ideal of humanity which, in essential points, coincides with the Christ of the church; and when Nietzsche insists that the man within us must be overcome in order that the Übermensch may arise, he preaches what all great moralists and religious teachers have preached. Nietzsche errs in his conception of the nature of the “negation of the will,” and in substituting genius for morality (or the intellect for the will) as the means of attaining to an ideal humanity.

After many years of guessing in the dark as to Nietzsche’s madness, Dr. George M. Gould points out in a careful and convincing essay that the original trouble began with his eyes, with a faulty diagnosis of his complaint. Dr. Gould writes, after sifting all the evidence of Nietzsche’s day-books and his sister’s suspicions as to the real cause, in theMontreal Medical Journal:—

I have spoken of the physiologic cause of this morbidly feverish intensity of mental activity. It appears to me the inevitable irritation due to severe eye-strain. Nietzsche also thought of suicide. Nietzsche produced within twenty years sixteen volumes, all written by himself in small, clear handwriting, all the result of independent philosophic and original thinking, besides several other volumes of technical philologic studies. He was, moreover, a busy, conscientious teacher and lecturer.The influence of his disease upon his character and writings is everywhere painfully manifest. Nietzsche was seized with an enthusiasm for Schopenhauer and his works at the age of twenty-one. With greater intensity his devotion to Wagner and his music, I gather, was turned to morbid dislike by the influence of diseased cerebral activity. Deussen, I feel, is in error when he writes that “A deeper cause lay at the root of Nietzsche’s resignation of his professorship in 1879 than his ‘combined diseases of the nerves of his eyes, brain, and stomach.’ The philologic profession of teachers, like a coat, became too small for him, etc. His internal unrest, etc.”But if so, it is an error which only extends thepathologic to the deeper activities of his mind. How far his cerebral irritation was responsible for his “aristocratic anarchy,” his occasional lapses into egoistic disdain, etc., would be impossible to gauge. It surely was not wholly inoperative. Stringency, hardness, radicalism, it certainly helped to produce. Möbius thinks the Zarathustra would not have been written without the morbid cerebral irritation. It appears almost certain that the aphoristic form of much of his later writing is explained as the result of the manner in which he was forced to do his literary work,i.e.by thinking and note-making while walking. The serious reflexes to eyes, head, and digestive system, which were induced by writing, compelled him to collate these notes with the least overworking possible. Hence also result the growing contradictions and illogicalities, the discreteness and want of transitional, connecting, and modifying sentences.In one of the last days of December, 1888, or in the first days of January (dates not definite), Nietzsche fell, near his lodgings in Turin, and could not rise again. A servant found him and led him home with much difficulty. For two days he lay silent and still on his sofa, when abnormal cerebral activity and confusion were evident. He spoke much in monologue, sang and played the piano loud and long, lost the sense of money value, and wrote fantastically to and about his friends, etc. Overbeck hurried to him and brought him to Basle, to the sanatorium of Professor Binswanger, the alienist, where the diagnosis, according to Deussen, of progressive, later corrected to that of atypical, paralysis, wasmade. His mother had him brought to Naumburg, cared for him until her death in 1897, after which his sister moved with him to Weimar. He died August 25, 1900.According to Dr. Reicholdt the immediate cause of his death was pneumonia, with edema of the lungs. There was no autopsy; an examination of the brain would have revealed many secrets.

The influence of his disease upon his character and writings is everywhere painfully manifest. Nietzsche was seized with an enthusiasm for Schopenhauer and his works at the age of twenty-one. With greater intensity his devotion to Wagner and his music, I gather, was turned to morbid dislike by the influence of diseased cerebral activity. Deussen, I feel, is in error when he writes that “A deeper cause lay at the root of Nietzsche’s resignation of his professorship in 1879 than his ‘combined diseases of the nerves of his eyes, brain, and stomach.’ The philologic profession of teachers, like a coat, became too small for him, etc. His internal unrest, etc.”

But if so, it is an error which only extends thepathologic to the deeper activities of his mind. How far his cerebral irritation was responsible for his “aristocratic anarchy,” his occasional lapses into egoistic disdain, etc., would be impossible to gauge. It surely was not wholly inoperative. Stringency, hardness, radicalism, it certainly helped to produce. Möbius thinks the Zarathustra would not have been written without the morbid cerebral irritation. It appears almost certain that the aphoristic form of much of his later writing is explained as the result of the manner in which he was forced to do his literary work,i.e.by thinking and note-making while walking. The serious reflexes to eyes, head, and digestive system, which were induced by writing, compelled him to collate these notes with the least overworking possible. Hence also result the growing contradictions and illogicalities, the discreteness and want of transitional, connecting, and modifying sentences.

In one of the last days of December, 1888, or in the first days of January (dates not definite), Nietzsche fell, near his lodgings in Turin, and could not rise again. A servant found him and led him home with much difficulty. For two days he lay silent and still on his sofa, when abnormal cerebral activity and confusion were evident. He spoke much in monologue, sang and played the piano loud and long, lost the sense of money value, and wrote fantastically to and about his friends, etc. Overbeck hurried to him and brought him to Basle, to the sanatorium of Professor Binswanger, the alienist, where the diagnosis, according to Deussen, of progressive, later corrected to that of atypical, paralysis, wasmade. His mother had him brought to Naumburg, cared for him until her death in 1897, after which his sister moved with him to Weimar. He died August 25, 1900.

According to Dr. Reicholdt the immediate cause of his death was pneumonia, with edema of the lungs. There was no autopsy; an examination of the brain would have revealed many secrets.

Is it not an unusual coincidence that Bayreuth, the very hub of Wagner’s musical and of Nietzsche’s intellectual activities, is also the birthplace of a man who is one of Nietzsche’s forerunners, one is tempted to say, his real philosophical progenitor? In the thriving Bavarian village was born, October 25, 1806, Caspar Schmidt, later known to the world as Max Stirner, the author of The Individual and his Property (Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum, Leipsic, 1845), the very gospel of modern philosophical anarchy, and a book which, with Guyau’s system of morals, paved the way for Nietzsche. Stirner, poor, unknown, died in Berlin, June 26, 1856. There is a sympathetic study of his life by John Henry Mackay, the German poet with Scotch blood in his veins.

The best single study in the English language on Nietzsche is by Havelock Ellis. This writer hazards the just observation that there was a touch of the “prig” in the philosopher, and that Wagner’s free and easy manners often made him wince. “Your brother with his airof delicate distinction is a most uncomfortable fellow,” Wagner said to Frau Förster-Nietzsche, “one can always see what he is thinking; sometimes he is quite embarrassed at my jokes—and then I crack them more madly than ever.” And the motley crowd that was attracted to Bayreuth filled the exclusive Nietzsche with horror. An aristocrat, a promulgator of an aristocratic philosophy, writers on social science very properly refuse to class this thinker among the leaders of the anarchistic movement—Nietzsche loathed the promiscuous, the popular, in a word, the mob. Wagner was Teutonic (his friend doubted his Teutonism in a memorable passage); he was no longer Hellenic. And he seemed to be going Romeward. It was all too much for the idealist who broke away from his past; in reality, the attempt was made to break with himself. Impending madness was preceded by distressing melancholia.

He loved Wagner to the last, and previous to the tragic crisis, Lou Salomé says that he went to Lucerne, and in Triebschen sat and wept at his ineluctable fate. He even wrote after The Wagner Case such a sentiment as this:—

“Here, while I am speaking of the recreations of my life, I lack the word to express my gratitude for that which formed my deepest and my heartiest solace. This beyond all doubt was the intimate communion with Richard Wagner. I would give little for the rest of my human relations;at no price would I cut out of my life the days of Triebschen, days of trust, of cheerfulness, of sublime inspirations, of deep moments. I know not what others have gone through with Wagner; our heaven was never traversed by a cloud.”

Was Wagner to blame? Wagner, harassed by a thousand importunings—his gigantic Bayreuth scheme, his money troubles, his uncertain position despite his first big success! Ellis believes, rightly enough, that when Wagner realized Nietzsche was no longer his friend, “he dropped him silently, as a workman drops a useless tool.” This seems cruelly selfish; but Wagner had no time for unselfish moods, for fine-spun theories of friendship. He was a realist. Life had made him one; besides, was there not Ludwig of Bavaria to take the place of the once gentle dreamer, now doubter and scorner? And Wagner was old enough to recognize the value of money. No, the great composer is not to be alone censured. Yet must we exclaim, Alas! poor Nietzsche!

What does Nietzsche preach? What is his central doctrine divested of its increments of anti-Semitism, anti-Wagnerism, anti-Christianity, and anti-everything else? Simply, a doctrine as old as the first invertebrate organism whichfloated in torrid seas beneath a blazing moon: Egoism, individualism, personal freedom, selfhood. He is the apostle of theego, and he refuses to accept the system spinning of the Teutonic spider philosophers of the day. He is a proclaimer of the rank animalism of man. He believes in the body and not in the soul of theology.

From Heraclitus to Hobbes materialism has flowed, a sturdy current, parallel with hundreds of more spiritual creeds. I say “more spiritual creeds,” for the spiritualizing of what was once contemptuously called dead, inorganic matter is being steadily prosecuted by every man of science to-day, whether he be electrician, biologist, or chemist. Nietzsche’s voice is raised against the mystagogues, occultists, and reactionaries who, in the name of religion and art, would put science once more under the ban of a century ago. He is the strong pagan man who hates the weak and ailing. He therefore hates the religion of the weak and oppressed. He is an aristocrat in art, believing that there should be an art for artists, and an art—an inferior art—for inferior intelligences. He forgot that there is an art for the artist,—his own particular art, and that into it none but the equally gifted may have an entrance. And he forgot, too, that all great art is rooted in the soil of earth.

Nietzsche hates the music that is beloved of the world. Yet, after the twentieth hearing ofCarmen, he frantically asserts that Bizet is a greater man than Wagner, that he is blither, possesses the divine gayety, sparkle, and indescribable fascination of the Greeks! From his letters we learn that as a joke he put up Bizet as a man of straw to fight the Wagner idol. And a joke it is. But what would he have said to the music of Richard Strauss?

He rejects with contempt pity,—that pity which is akin to love; and therefore he hates Wagner, for in Wagner’s music is the note of yearning love and pity sounded by a master hand. To Nietzsche George Eliot’s

Oh may I join the choir invisibleOf those immortal dead who live againIn minds made better by their presence: liveIn pulses stirred to generosity,... in scornFor miserable aims that end with self

Oh may I join the choir invisible

Of those immortal dead who live again

In minds made better by their presence: live

In pulses stirred to generosity,

... in scorn

For miserable aims that end with self

would have been as silly as was the optimism of Leibnitz to Schopenhauer. This Nietzsche was a terrible fellow, a very Berserker in his mad rage against existing institutions. He used a battering ram of rare dialectic skill, and crash go the religious, social, and artistic fabrics reared ages since! But when the brilliant smoke of his style clears away, we still see standing the same venerable institutions. This tornadic philosopher does damage only to the outlying structures. He lets in light on some dark and dank places. He is a tonic for malaria, musical andreligious; and there is value even in his own fantastic Transvaluation of all Values. I fancy that if Friedrich Nietzsche had been a man of physical resources, he would have been a soldier hero. The late Anton Seidl once told me that he knew the unlucky man when he was a Wagnerian. He was slight of stature, evidently of delicate health, but in his eyes burned the restless fire of genius. If that same energy could have been transmuted into action, he might have been a sane, healthy man to-day. In all this he was not unlike Stendhal, of whom Jules Lemaître wrote:—

“A grand man of action, paralyzed little by little by his incomparable analysis.” Nietzsche burned his brain away by a too strenuous analysis of life.

I can recommend to all Wagnerites Nietzsche’s Der Fall Wagner. It is bound to take the edge off their uncritical worship. But read it after the first study, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. It will also demonstrate that Wagner is great, and Wagnerism dangerous. Nietzsche saw with clear eyes the peril that threatens music because of the Wagnerian principles. We must never lose sight of the fact that with Wagner the drama almost always takes precedence. His deviation from his own theory was his artistic salvation. But there lies the danger in him for young composers. He is a man of the theatre. His music, divested of all the metaphysical verbiage heaped upon it by Wagner and Wagneriancritics, is music of the footlights. A great formalist he is; but it is Wagner’s form, not the form for orchestral writers. It is all well enough to say that the symphony has had its day; but its structure, despite numberless modifications, will survive as long as absolute music itself. And music pure and simple, for itself, undefiled by costumes, scenery, limelights, and vocal virtuosi, is the noblest music of all.

Nietzsche writes of Germany as “being arbitrarily stupefied by itself for nearly a thousand years.”

“Nowhere have the two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity, been more wickedly misused. Recently a third has been introduced, with which alone every refined and bold activity of intellect can be wiped out—music, our sluggish, ever more sluggish, German music. How much moody heaviness, lameness, humidity, and dressing-gown mood, how much beer is in German intelligence!” You may readily understand that this Nietzsche is a Slav. He is agile of temperament, his mind is a supple one; he loves the keen rapier thrusts, the glancing thrust of the Celt. He hates Germany. Was he a German? He is wholly Slavic at times, and yet what a contradictory man and how naïve his egotism! More feminine altogether than masculine was this febrile, capricious mind, and a hater of the Teuton, a race that is at once both fat and nervous.

Nietzsche ispar excellencethe thinker for the artistic. If Wagner was a painter, or a symphonistmanqué, then Nietzsche was an artistmanqué. His prose, swift, weighty, concentrated and brilliant, attracts readers who dislike his doctrines. One must read what he says in his Roving Expeditions of an Inopportune Philosopher.

“Seneca, or the toreador of virtue.”

“Rousseau, or return to naturein impuris naturalibus.”

“Schiller, or the moral Trumpeter of Säckingen.”

“Dante, or the hyena poetising in tombs.”

“Kant, orcant, as an intelligent character.”

“Victor Hugo, or Pharos, in a sea of absurdity.”

“Michelet, or enthusiasm which strips off the coat.”

“Carlyle, or pessimism as an undigested dinner.”

“John Stuart Mill, or offensive transparency.”

“The Goncourts, or the two Ajaxes struggling with Homer; music by Offenbach.”

Nietzsche preached of the beauty and pride of the body. Of pride we cannot have too much. It is the salt of personality. Golden-mouthed Plato, in De Republica, makes outcry against the dullard who thinks shame of his body. The human body is truly a tabernacle,and woe to him that defileth it, says the wise man.

He once made a proposal to found a monastery for freethinkers. What an abbot he would have been!

Did Nietzsche not declare, in the words of the Apostle Matthew (xvi. 26), slightly altered:—

“For what is a man profited if he shall gain his own soul and lose the whole world?”

Consider his great opponent, Tolstoy, who preaches the doctrine of non-resistance, of altruism, of a depressing socialism which is saturated with the very Orientalism so despised by Nietzsche! But then, Tolstoy does not play fair in the game. He has reached the threescore and ten of Scriptures; he has led, by his own acknowledgment, a life of self-indulgence; he has gambled and drank deeply. His belly was his god. Then he ran the intellectual gamut of dissipation. He worshipped at the shrines of false gods, wrote great, gray, godless novels, won renown, family happiness, riches, love, admiration, applause, and notoriety. So, having lived too happily, he forthwith falls to railing at destiny, like the Englishman Mr. Krehbiel tells us of in his Music and Manners. Quoting Haydn he writes, “Mr. Brassey once cursed because he enjoyed too much happiness in this world.” Tolstoy, having tasted of everything, has damaged his palate. Man pleases him not, nor does woman. In every book of his later, lonesome years he gives awaythe secret of life’s illusion, like the mischievous rival of a conjuror. It is not fair to the young ones who, with mouth agape, gaze at the cunning pictures limned by that old arch-hypocrite, Nature. The young man who has not had the courage to make a fool of himself some time in his career has not lived. Robert Louis Stevenson said this, and he said it better. Away with your cynics! Throw pessimism to the dogs! Let Tolstoy swear that the inverted bowl of the firmament is full of ashes, full of burnt-out stars; youth will see the bravery of the cosmical circus, its streamers, its mad coursing through eternity. The only way to help others is to help yourself!

So, despite his age, which is democratic, the aristocrat Nietzsche caught its ears; in the teeth of a religious reaction he preached rank atheism; and he opposed to altruism a selfless egotism. In a word, all his tendencies were set against those of his time; yet he has succeeded in attracting the attention of his contemporaries. Brandes is right in declaring that in some secret way Nietzsche “must have agreed with much of the tumult of modern thought.”

In his Gay Science,—a mockingly ironic title for such a sad book,—Nietzsche wrote these sentences; as in a meteoric flare we realize the sickness of his prophetic soul. He alludes to his idea of Eternal Recurrence:—

How were it if, some day or night, a demon stole after thee into thy most solitary solitude, and said tothee: “This life, as thou livest it now, and hast lived it, thou shalt have to live over again, and not once but innumerable times; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every pleasure, and every thought and sigh, and everything in thy life, the great and the unspeakably petty alike, must come again to thee, and all in the same series and succession; this spider, too, and this moonlight betwixt the trees, and this moment likewise and I myself. The eternal sand-glass of time is always turned again, and thou with it, thou atom of dust.” Wouldest thou not cast thyself down, and with gnashing of teeth curse the demon who thus spoke? Or hast thou ever experienced the tremendous moment in which thou wouldest answer him, “Thou art a god, and never heard I anything more divine”?

Frau Andreas-Salomé, whose book on the philosopher is interesting, though disclaimed by Frau Förster-Nietzsche, adds this illuminating commentary on Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence doctrine:—

He struggled with it at first as with a fate from which there was no escape. Never can I forget the hours in which he first confided it to me as a secret, as something of whose verification and confirmation he had an unspeakable horror; he spoke of it only in a low voice and with every sign of the profoundest horror. And he suffered in truth so deeply in life that the certainty of life’s eternal recurrence could not but be for him a thing to shudder at. The quintessence of the doctrine of recurrence, the radiant apotheosis of life which Nietzsche afterwards taught, forms so profounda contrast to his own painful experiences of life that it impresses us as an uncanny mask.

And she further remarks: “Nietzsche contemplated the possibility that the theory might be scientifically deduced by physics from the doctrine of atoms.” And here we are almost back to the orthodox belief in eternity. All thought moves circle-wise, and Nietzsche’s ethical teaching is as old as Callicles in the Gorgias.

Nietzsche, then, is not such a revolutionary thinker. He is the perfect type of the old Greek rhapsodist, the impassioned rhetor, who with sonorous, beautiful phrases charmed and soothed his listeners as he pursued his peripatetic way. Sometimes the sound of what he says remains long after the memory of its sense has vanished. However, a perfect art or philosophy, or a perfect world itself, might soon grow monotonous. The ameliorating, if slightly hedonistic, philosophy of the Cardinal in John Inglesant comes back in pleasing sequence:—

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