GEORGE BRANDES (continued 2)

Zarathustra loves the brave. But not the bravery that takes up every challenge. There is often more bravery in holding back and passing by and reserving one's self for a worthier foe. Zarathustra does not teach: Ye shall love your enemies, but: Ye shall not engage in combat with enemies ye despise.

Why so hard? men cry to Zarathustra. He replies: Why so hard, once said the charcoal to the diamond; are we not near of kin? The creators are hard. Their blessedness it is to press their hand upon future centuries as upon wax.

No doctrine revolts Zarathustra more than that of the vanity and senselessness of life. This is in his eyes ancient babbling, old wives' babbling. And the pessimists who sum up life with a balance of aversion, and assert the badness of existence, are the objects of his positive loathing. He prefers pain to annihilation.

The same extravagant love of life is expressed in the Hymn to Life, written by his friend, Lou von Salomé, which Nietzsche set for chorus and orchestra. We read here—

"So truly loves a friend his friend As I love thee, O Life in myst'ry hidden! If joy or grief to me thou send; If loud I laugh or else to weep am bidden, Yet love I thee with all thy changeful faces; And should'st thou doom me to depart, So would I tear myself from thy embraces, As comrade from a comrade's heart."

And the poem concludes—

"And if thou hast now left no bliss to crown me. Lead on I thou hast thy sorrow still!"[8]

When Achilles chose to be a day-labourer on earth rather than a king in the realm of the shades, the expression was a weak one in comparison with this passionate outburst, which paradoxically thirsts even for the cup of pain.

Eduard von Hartmann believes in a beginning and end of the "world process." He concludes that no eternity can lie behind us; otherwise everything possible must already have happened, which—according to his contention—is not the case. In sharp contrast to him, on this point as on others, Zarathustra teaches, with, be it said, a somewhat shallow mysticism—which is derived from the ancient Pythagoreans' idea of the circular course of history and is influenced by Cohelet's Hebrew philosophy of life—the eternal recurrence; that is to say, that all things eternally return and we ourselves with them, that we have already existed an infinite number of times and all things with us. The great clock of the universe is to him an hour-glass, which is constantly turned and runs out again and again. This is the direct antithesis of Hartmann's doctrine of universal destruction, and curiously enough it was put forward at about the same time by two French thinkers: by Blanqui in L'Éternité par les Astres (1871), and by Gustave Le Bon in L'Homme et les Sociétés (1881).

At his death Zarathustra will say: Now I disappear and die; in a moment I shall be nothing, for the soul is mortal as the body; but the complex of causes in which I am involved will return, and it will continually reproduce me.

At the close of the third part of Zarathustra there is a chapter headed "The Second Dance Song." Dance, in Nietzsche's language, is always an expression for the lofty lightness of mind, which is exalted above the gravity of earth and above all stupid seriousness. This song, extremely remarkable in its language, is a good specimen of the style of the work, when it soars into its highest flights of poetry. Life appears to Zarathustra as a woman; she strikes her castanets and he dances with her, flinging out all his wrath with life and all his love of life.

"Lately looked I into thine eyes, O Life! Gold saw I gleaming in thy night-eye—my heart stood still with the joy of it.

"A golden skiff saw I gleaming upon shadowy waters, a sinking, drinking, reblinking, golden swinging-skiff.

"At my foot, dancing-mad, didst thou cast a glance, a laughing, questioning, melting, swinging-glance.

"Twice only did thy little hands strike the castanets—then was my foot swinging in the madness of the dance.

*************************************

"I fear thee near, I love thee far; thy flight allureth me, thy seeking secureth me; I suffer, but for thee, what would I not gladly bear!

"For thee, whose coldness inflameth, whose hatred mis-leadeth, whose flight enchaineth, whose mockery pleadeth!

"Who would not hate thee, thou great bindress, inwindress, temptress, seekress, findress! Who would not love thee, thou innocent, impatient, wind-swift, child-eyed sinner!"

In this dialogue between the dancers, Life and her lover, these words occur: O Zarathustra, thou art far from loving me as dearly as thou sayest; thou art not faithful enough to me. There is an old, heavy booming-clock; it boometh by night up to thy cave. When thou hearest this clock at midnight, then dost thou think until noon that soon thou wilt forsake me.

And then follows, in conclusion, the song of the old midnight clock. But in the fourth part of the work, in the section called "The Sleepwalker's Song," this short strophe is interpreted line by line; in form half like a mediæval watchman's chant, half like the hymn of a mystic, it contains the mysterious spirit of Nietzsche's esoteric doctrine concentrated in the shortest formula—

Midnight is drawing on, and as mysteriously, as terribly, and as cordially as the midnight bell speaketh to Zarathustra, so calleth he to the higher men: At midnight many a thing is heard which may not be heard by day; and the midnight speaketh: O man, take heed!

Whither hath time gone? Have I not sunk into deep wells? The world sleepeth. And shuddering it asketh: Who is to be master of the world? What saith the deep midnight?

The bell boometh, the wood-worm burroweth, the heart-worm gnaweth: Ah! the world is deep.

But the old bell is like a sonorous instrument; all pain hath bitten into its heart, the pain of fathers and forefathers; and all joy hath set it swinging, the joy of fathers and forefathers—there riseth from the bell an odour of eternity, a rosy-blessed, golden-wine perfume of old happiness, and this song: The world is deep, and deeper than the day had thought.

I am too pure for the rude hands of the day. The purest shall be masters of the world, the unacknowledged, the strongest, the midnight-souls, who are brighter and deeper than any day. Deep is its woe.

But joy goeth deeper than heart's grief. For grief saith: Break, my heart! Fly away, my pain! Woe saith: Begone!

But, ye higher men, said ye ever Yea to a single joy, then said ye also Yea unto all woe. For joy and woe are linked, enamoured, inseparable. And all beginneth again, all is eternal. All joys desire eternity, deep, deep, eternity.

This, then, is the midnight song—

"Oh Mensch! Gieb Acht! Was spricht die tiefe Mitternacht? 'Ich schlief, ich schlief— Aus tiefem Traum bin ich erwacht:— Die Welt ist tief, Und tiefer als der Tag gedacht. Tief ist ihr Weh— Lust—tiefer noch als Herzeleid: Weh spricht: Vergeh! Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit— —will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit!'"

6.

Such is he, then, this warlike mystic, poet and thinker, this immoralist who is never tired of preaching. Coming to him fresh from the English philosophers, one feels transported to another world. The Englishmen are all patient spirits, whose natural bent is towards the accumulation and investigation of a mass of small facts in order thereby to discover a law. The best of them are Aristotelian minds. Few of them fascinate us personally or seem to be of very complex personality. Their influence lies more in what they do than in what they are. Nietzsche, on the other hand, like Schopenhauer, is a guesser, a seer, an artist, less interesting in what he does than in what he is.

Little as he feels himself a German, he nevertheless continues the metaphysical and intuitive tradition of German philosophy and has the German thinker's profound dislike of any utilitarian point of view. In his passionate aphoristical form he is unquestionably original; in the substance of his thought he reminds one here and there of many another writer, both of contemporary Germany and of France; but he evidently regards, it as perfectly absurd that he should have to thank a contemporary for anything, and storms like a German at all those who resemble him in any point.

I have already mentioned how strongly he reminds one of Ernest Renan in his conception of culture and in his hope of an aristocracy of intellect that could seize the dominion of the world. Nevertheless he has not one appreciative word to say for Renan.

I have also alluded to the fact that Eduard von Hartmann was his predecessor in his fight against Schopenhauer's morality of pity. In this author, whose talent is indisputable, even though his importance may not correspond with his extraordinary reputation, Nietzsche, with the uncritical injustice of a German university professor, would only see a charlatan. Hartmann's nature is of heavier stuff than Nietzsche's. He is ponderous, self-complacent, fundamentally Teutonic, and, in contrast to Nietzsche, entirely unaffected by French spirit and southern sunshine. But there are points of resemblance between them, which are due to historical conditions in the Germany that reared them both.

In the first place, there was something analogous in their positions in life, since both as artillerymen had gone through a similar schooling; and in the second place, in their culture, inasmuch as the starting-point of both is Schopenhauer and both nevertheless retain a great respect for Hegel, thus uniting these two hostile brothers in their veneration. They are further in agreement in their equally estranged attitude to Christian piety and Christian morality, as well as in their contempt, so characteristic of modern Germany, for every kind of democracy.

Nietzsche resembles Hartmann in his attacks on socialists and anarchists, with the difference that Hartmann's attitude is here more that of the savant, while Nietzsche has the bad taste to delight in talking about "anarchist dogs," expressing in the same breath his own loathing of the State. Nietzsche further resembles Hartmann in his repeated demonstration of the impossibility of the ideals of equality and of peace, since life is nothing but inequality and war: "What is good? To be brave is good. I do not say, the good cause sanctifies war, but the good war sanctifies every cause." Like his predecessor, he dwells on the necessity of the struggle for power and on the supposed value of war to culture.

In both these authors, comparatively independent as they are, the one a mystical natural philosopher, the other a mystical immoralist, is reflected the all-dominating militarism of the new German Empire. Hartmann approaches on many points the German snobbish national feeling. Nietzsche is opposed to it on principle, as he is to the statesman "who has piled up for the Germans a new tower of Babel, a monster in extent of territory and power and for that reason called great," but something of Bismarck's spirit broods nevertheless over the works of both. As regards the question of war, the only difference between them is that Nietzsche does not desire war for the sake of a fantastic redemption of the world, but in order that manliness may not become extinct.

In his contempt for woman and his abuse of her efforts for emancipation Nietzsche again agrees with Hartmann, though only in so far as both here recall Schopenhauer, whose echo Hartmann is in this connection. But whereas Hartmann is here only a moralising doctrinaire with a somewhat offensive dash of pedantry, one can trace beneath Nietzsche's attacks on the female sex that subtle sense of woman's dangerousness which points to painful experience. He does not seem to have known many women, but those he did know, he evidently loved and hated, but above all despised. Again and again he returns to the unfitness of the free and great spirit for marriage. In many of these utterances there is a strongly personal note, especially in those which persistently assert the necessity of a solitary life for a thinker. But as regards the less personal arguments about woman, old-world Germany here speaks through the mouth of Nietzsche, as through that of Hartmann; the Germany whose women, in contrast to those of France and England, have for centuries been relegated to the domestic and strictly private life. We may recognise in these German writers generally that they have an eye for the profound antagonism and perpetual war between the sexes, which Stuart Mill neither saw nor understood. But the injustice to man and the rather tame fairness to woman, in which Mill's admirable emancipatory attempt occasionally results, is nevertheless greatly to be preferred to Nietzsche's brutal unfairness, which asserts that in our treatment of women we ought to return to "the vast common sense of old Asia."

Finally, in his conflict with pessimism Nietzsche had Eugen Dühring (especially in his Werth des Lebens) as a forerunner, and this circumstance seems to have inspired him with so much ill-will, so much exasperation indeed, that in a polemic now open, now disguised, he calls Dühring his ape. Dühring is a horror to him as a plebeian, as an Antisemite, as the apostle of revenge, and as the disciple of the Englishmen and of Comte; but Nietzsche has not a word to say about Dühring's very remarkable qualities, to which such epithets as these do not apply. But we can easily understand, taking Nietzsche's own destiny into consideration, that Dühring, the blind man, the neglected thinker who despises official scholars, the philosopher who teaches outside the universities, who, in spite of being so little pampered by life, loudly proclaims his love of life—should appear to Nietzsche as a caricature of himself. This was, however, no reason for his now and then adopting Dühring's abusive tone. And it must be confessed that, much as Nietzsche wished to be what, for that matter, he was—a Polish szlachcic, a European man of the world and a cosmopolitan thinker—in one respect he always remained the German professor: in the rude abuse in which his uncontrolled hatred of rivals found vent; and, after all, his only rivals as a modern German philosopher were Hartmann and Dühring.

It is strange that this man, who learned such an immense amount from French moralists and psychologists like La Rochefoucauld, Chamfort and Stendhal, was able to acquire so little of the self-control of their form. He was never subjected to the restraint which the literary tone of France imposes upon every writer as regards the mention and exhibition of his own person. For a long time he seems to have striven to discover himself and to become completely himself. In order to find himself he crept into his solitude, as Zarathustra into his cave. By the time he had succeeded in arriving at full independent development and felt the rich flow of individual thought within him, he had lost all external standards for measuring his own value; all bridges to the world around him were broken down. The fact that no recognition came from without only aggravated his self-esteem. The first glimmer of recognition further exalted this self-esteem. At last it closed above his head and darkened this rare and commanding intellect.

As he stands disclosed in his incompleted life-work, he is a writer well worth studying.

My principal reason for calling attention to him is that Scandinavian literature appears to me to have been living quite long enough on the ideas that were put forward and discussed in the last decade. It looks as though the power of conceiving great ideas were on the wane, and even as though receptivity for them were fast vanishing; people are still busy with the same doctrines, certain theories of heredity, a little Darwinism, a little emancipation of woman, a little morality of happiness, a little freethought, a little worship of democracy, etc. And as to the culture of our "cultured" people, the level represented approximately by the Revue des Deux Mondes threatens to become the high-water mark of taste. It does not seem yet to have dawned on the best among us that the finer, the only true culture begins on the far side of the Revue des Deux Mondes in the great personality, rich in ideas.

The intellectual development of Scandinavia has advanced comparatively rapidly in its literature. We have seen great authors rise above all orthodoxy, though they began by being perfectly simple-hearted believers. This is very honourable, but in the case of those who cannot rise higher still, it is nevertheless rather meagre. In the course of the 'seventies it became clear to almost all Scandinavian authors that it would no longer do to go on writing on the basis of the Augsburg Confession. Some quietly dropped it, others opposed it more or less noisily; while most of those who abandoned it entrenched themselves against the public, and to some extent against the bad conscience of their own childhood, behind the established Protestant morality; now and then, indeed, behind a good, everyday soup-stock morality—I call it thus because so many a soup has been served from it.

But be that as it may, attacks on existing prejudices and defence of existing institutions threaten at present to sink into one and the same commonplace familiarity.

Soon, I believe, we shall once more receive a lively impression that art cannot rest content with ideas and ideals for the average mediocrity, any more than with remnants of the old' catechisms; but that great art demands intellects that stand on a level with the most individual personalities of contemporary thought, in exceptionality, in independence, in defiance and in aristocratic self-supremacy.

II

DECEMBER 1899

More than ten years have gone by since I first called attention to Friedrich Nietzsche. My essay on "Aristocratic Radicalism" was the first study of any length to be devoted, in the whole of Europe, to this man, whose name has since flown round the world and is at this moment one of the most famous among our contemporaries. This thinker, then almost unknown and seldom mentioned, became, a few years later, the fashionable philosopher in every country of Europe, and this while the great man, to whose lot had suddenly fallen the universal fame he had so passionately desired, lived on without a suspicion of it all, a living corpse cut off from the world by incurable insanity.

Beginning with his native land, which so long as he retained his powers never gave him a sign of recognition, his writings have now made their way in every country. Even in France, usually so loth to admit foreign, and especially German, influence, his character and his doctrine have been studied and expounded again and again. In Germany, as well as outside it, a sort of school has been formed, which appeals to his authority and not unfrequently compromises him, or rather itself, a good deal. The opposition to him is conducted sometimes (as by Ludwig Stein) on serious and scientific lines, although from narrow pedagogic premises; sometimes (as by Herr Max Nordau) with sorry weapons and with the assumed superiority of presumptuous mediocrity.

Interesting articles and books on Nietzsche have been written by Peter Gast and Lou von Salomé in German and by Henri Lichtenberger in French; and in addition Nietzsche's sister, Frau Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, has not only published an excellent edition of his collected works (including his youthful sketches), but has written his Life (and published his Correspondence).

My old essay on Nietzsche has thus long ago been outstripped by later works, the writers of which were able to take a knowledge of Nietzsche's work for granted and therefore to examine his writings without at the same time having to acquaint the reader with their contents. That essay, it may be remembered, occasioned an exchange of words between Prof. Höffding and myself, in the course of which I had the opportunity of expressing my own views more clearly and of showing what points they had in common with Nietzsche's, and where they diverged from his.[1] As, of course, these polemical utterances of mine were not translated into foreign languages, no notice was taken of them anywhere abroad.

The first essay itself, on the other hand, which was soon translated, brought me in a number of attacks, which gradually acquired a perfectly stereotyped formula. In an article by a Germanised Swede, who wanted to be specially spiteful, I was praised for having in that essay broken with my past and resolutely renounced the set of liberal opinions and ideas I had hitherto championed. Whatever else I might be blamed for, it had to be acknowledged that twice in my life I had been the spokesman of German ideas, in my youth of Hegel's and in my maturer years of Nietzsche's. In a book by a noisy German charlatan living in Paris, Herr Nordau, it was shortly afterwards asserted that if Danish parents could guess what I was really teaching their children at the University of Copenhagen, they would kill me in the street—a downright incitement to murder, which was all the more comic in its pretext, as admission to my lectures has always been open to everybody, the greater part of these lectures has appeared in print, and, finally, twenty years ago the parents used very frequently to come and hear me. It was repeated in the same quarter that after being a follower of Stuart Mill, I had in that essay turned my back on my past, since I had now appeared as an adherent of Nietzsche. This last statement was afterwards copied in a very childish book by a Viennese lady who, without a notion of the actual facts, writes away, year in, year out, on Scandinavian literature for the benefit of the German public. This nonsense was finally disgorged once more in 1899 by Mr. Alfred Ipsen, who contributed to the London Athenæum surveys of Danish literature, among the virtues of which impartiality did not find a place.

In the face of these constantly repeated assertions from abroad, I may be permitted to make it clear once more—as I have already shown in Tilskueren in 1890 (p. 259)—that my principles have not been in the slightest way modified through contact with Nietzsche. When I became acquainted with him I was long past the age at which it is possible to change one's fundamental view of life. Moreover, I maintained many years ago, in reply to my Danish opponents, that my first thought with regard to a philosophical book was by no means to ask whether what it contains is right or wrong: "I go straight through the book to the man behind it. And my first question is this: What is the value of this man, is he interesting, or not? If he is, then his books are undoubtedly worth knowing. Questions of right or wrong are seldom applicable in the highest intellectual spheres, and their answering is not unfrequently of relatively small importance. The first lines I wrote about Nietzsche were therefore to the effect that he deserved to be studied and contested. I rejoiced in him, as I rejoice in every powerful and uncommon individuality." And three years later I replied to the attack of a worthy and able Swiss professor, who had branded Nietzsche as a reactionary and a cynic, in these words, amongst others: "No mature reader studies Nietzsche with the latent design of adopting his opinions, still less with that of propagating them. We are not children in search of instruction, but sceptics in search of men, and we rejoice when we have found a man—the rarest thing there is."

It seems to me that this is not exactly the language of an adherent, and that my critics might spare some of their powder and shot as regards my renunciation of ideas. It is a nuisance to be forced now and then to reply in person to all the allegations that are accumulated against one year by year in the European press; but when others never write a sensible word about one, it becomes an obligation at times to stand up for one's self.

My personal connection with Nietzsche began with his sending me his book, Beyond Good and Evil. I read it, received a strong impression, though not a clear or decided one, and did nothing further about it—for one reason, because I receive every day far too many books to be able to acknowledge them. But as in the following year The Genealogy of Morals was sent me by the author, and as this book was not only much clearer in itself, but also threw new light on the earlier one, I wrote Nietzsche a few lines of thanks, and this led to a correspondence which was interrupted by Nietzsche's attack of insanity thirteen months later.

The letters he sent me in that last year of his conscious life appear to me to be of no little psychological and biographical interest.

CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE AND GEORGE BRANDES

1. BRANDES TO NIETZSCHE.

Copenhagen, Nov. 26, 1887.

DEAR SIR,

A year ago I received through your publisher your work Beyond Good and Evil; the other day your latest book reached me in the same way. Of your other books I have Human, all-too-Human. I had just sent the two volumes I possess to the binder, when The Genealogy of Morals arrived, so that I have not been able to compare it with the earlier works, as I mean to do. By degrees I shall read everything of yours attentively.

This time, however, I am anxious to express at once my sincere thanks for the book sent. It is an honour to me to be known to you, and known in such a way that you should wish to gain me as a reader.

A new and original spirit breathes to me from your books. I do not yet fully understand what I have read; I cannot always see your intention. But I find much that harmonises with my own ideas and sympathies, the depreciation of the ascetic ideals and the profound disgust with democratic mediocrity, your aristocratic radicalism. Your contempt for the morality of pity is not yet clear to me. There were also in the other work some reflections on women in general which did not agree with my own line of thought. Your nature is so absolutely different from mine that it is not easy for me to feel at home. In spite of your universality you are very German in your mode of thinking and writing. You are one of the few people with whom I should enjoy a talk.

I know nothing about you. I see with astonishment that you are a professor and doctor. I congratulate you in any case on being intellectually so little of a professor.

I do not know what you have read of mine. My writings only attempt the solution of modest problems. For the most part they are only to be had in Danish. For many years I have not written German. I have my best public in the Slavonic countries, I believe. I have lectured in Warsaw for two years in succession, and this year in Petersburg and Moscow, in French. Thus I endeavour to break through the narrow limits of my native land.

Although no longer young, I am still one of the most inquisitive of men and one of the most eager to learn. You will therefore not find me closed against your ideas, even when I differ from you in thought and feeling. I am often stupid, but never in the least narrow.

Let me have the pleasure of a few lines if you think it worth the trouble.

Yours gratefully, GEORGE BRANDES.

2. NIETZSCHE TO BRANDES.

Nice, Dec. 2, 1887.

MY DEAR SIR,

A few readers whom one honours and beyond them no readers at all—that is really what I desire. As regards the latter part of this wish, I am bound to say my hope of its realisation is growing less and less. All the more happy am I in satis sunt pauci, that the pauci do not fail and have never failed me. Of the living amongst them I will mention (to name only those whom you are certain to know) my distinguished friend Jakob Burkhardt, Hans von Bülow, H. Taine, and the Swiss poet Keller; of the dead, the old Hegelian Bruno Bauer and Richard Wagner. It gives me sincere pleasure that so good a European and missionary of culture as yourself will in future be numbered amongst them; I thank you with all my heart for this proof of your goodwill.

I am afraid you will find it a difficult position. I myself have no doubt that my writings in one way or another are still "very German." You will, I am sure, feel this all the more markedly, being so spoilt by yourself; I mean, by the free and graceful French way in which you handle the language (a more familiar way than mine). With me a great many words have acquired an incrustation of foreign salts and taste differently on my tongue and on those of my readers. On the scale of my experiences and circumstances the predominance is given to the rarer, remoter, more attenuated tones as against the normal, medial ones. Besides (as an old musician, which is what I really am), I have an ear for quarter-tones. Finally—and this probably does most to make my books obscure—there is in me a distrust of dialectics, even of reasons. What a person already holds "true" or has not yet acknowledged as true; seems to me to depend mainly on his courage, on the relative strength of his courage (I seldom have the courage for what I really know).

The expression Aristocratic Radicalism, which you employ, is very good. It is, permit me to say, the cleverest thing I have yet read about myself.

How far this mode of thought has carried me already, how far it will carry me yet—I am almost afraid to imagine. But there are certain paths which do not allow one to go backward and so I go forward, because I must.

That I may not neglect anything on my part that might facilitate your access to my cave—that is, my philosophy—my Leipzig publisher shall send you all my older books en bloc. I recommend you especially to read the new prefaces to them (they have nearly all been republished); these prefaces, if read in order, will perhaps throw some light upon me, assuming that I am not obscurity in itself (obscure in myself) as obscurissimus obscurorum virorum. For that is quite possible.

Are you a musician? A work of mine for chorus and orchestra is just being published, a "Hymn to Life." This is intended to represent my music to posterity and one day to be sung "in my memory"; assuming that there is enough left of me for that. You see what posthumous thoughts I have. But a philosophy like mine is like a grave—it takes one from among the living. Bene vixit qui bene latuit—was inscribed on Descartes' tombstone. What an epitaph, to be sure!

I too hope we may meet some day,

Yours, NIETZSCHE.

N.B.—I am staying this winter at Nice. My summer address is Sils-Maria, Upper-Engadine, Switzerland—I have resigned my professorship at the University. I am three parts blind.

3. BRANDES TO NIETZSCHE.

Copenhagen, Dec. 15, 1887.

MY DEAR SIR,

The last words of your letter are those that have made most impression on me; those in which you tell me that your eyes are seriously affected. Have you consulted good oculists, the best? It alters one's whole psychological life if one cannot see well. You owe it to all who honour you to do everything possible for the preservation and improvement of your sight.

I have put off answering your letter because you announced the sending of a parcel of books, and I wished to thank you for them at the same time. But as the parcel has not yet arrived I will send you a few words to-day. I have your books back from the binder and have gone into them as deeply as I was able amid the stress of preparing lectures and all kinds of literary and political work.

December 17.

I am quite willing to be called a "good European," less so to be called a "missionary of culture." I have a horror of all missionary effort—because I have come across none but moralising missionaries—and I am afraid I do not altogether believe in what is called culture. Our culture as a whole cannot inspire enthusiasm, can it? and what would a missionary be without enthusiasm! In other words, I am more isolated than you think. All I meant by being German was that you write more for yourself, think more of yourself in writing, than for the general public; whereas most non—German writers have been obliged to force themselves into a certain discipline of style, which no doubt makes the latter clearer and more plastic, but necessarily deprives it of all profundity and compels the writer to keep to himself his most intimate and best individuality, the anonymous in him. I have thus been horrified at times to see how little of my inmost self is more than hinted at in my writings.

I am no connoisseur in music. The arts of which I have some notion are sculpture and painting; I have to thank them for my deepest artistic impressions. My ear is undeveloped. In my young days this was a great grief to me. I used to play a good deal and worked at thorough-bass for a few years, but nothing came of it. I can enjoy good music keenly, but still am one of the uninitiated.

I think I can trace in your works certain points of agreement with my own taste: your predilection for Beyle, for instance, and for Taine; but the latter I have not seen for seventeen years. I am not so enthusiastic about his work on the Revolution as you seem to be. He deplores and harangues an earthquake.

I used the expression "aristocratic radicalism" because it so exactly defines my own political convictions. I am a little hurt, however, at the offhand and impetuous pronouncements against such—phenomena as socialism and anarchism in your works. The anarchism of Prince Kropotkin, for instance, is no stupidity. The name, of course, is nothing. Your intellect, which is usually so dazzling, seems to me to fall a trifle short where truth is to be found in a nuance. Your views on the origin of the moral ideas interest me in the highest degree.

You share—to my delighted astonishment—a certain repugnance which I feel for Herbert Spencer. With us he passes for the god of philosophy. However, it is as a rule a distinct merit with these Englishmen that their not very high-soaring intellect shuns hypotheses, whereas hypothesis has destroyed the supremacy of German philosophy. Is not there a great deal that is hypothetical in your ideas of caste distinctions as the source of various moral concepts?

I know Rée whom you attack, have met him in Berlin; he was a quiet man, rather distinguished in his bearing, but a somewhat dry and limited intellect. He was living—according to his own account, as brother and sister—with a quite young and intelligent Russian lady, who published a year or two ago a book called Der Kampf um Gott, but this gives no idea of her genuine gifts.

I am looking forward to receiving the books you promise me. I hope in future you will not lose sight of me.

Yours, GEORGE BRANDES.

4. NIETZSCHE TO BRANDES.

Nice, Jan. 8, 1888.

You should not object to the expression "missionary of culture." What better way is there of being one in our day than that of "missionising" one's disbelief in culture? To have understood that our European culture is a vast problem and by no means a solution—is not such a degree of introspection and self-conquest nowadays culture itself?

I am surprised my books have not yet reached you. I shall not omit to send a reminder to Leipzig. At Christmas time Messieurs the publishers are apt to lose their heads. Meanwhile may I be allowed to bring to your notice a daring curiosity over which no publisher has authority, an ineditum of mine that is among the most personal things I can show. It is the fourth part of my Zarathustra; its proper title, with regard to what precedes and follows it, should be—

Zarathustra's Temptation

An Interlude.

Perhaps this is my best answer to your question about my problem of pity. Besides which, there are excellent reasons for gaining admission to "me" by this particular secret door; provided that one crosses the threshold with your eyes and ears. Your essay on Zola reminded me once more, like everything I have met with of yours (the last was an essay in the Goethe Year-book), in the most agreeable way of your natural tendency towards every kind of psychological optics. When working out the most difficult mathematical problems of the âme moderne you are as much in your element as a German scholar in such case is apt to be out of his. Or do you perhaps think more favourably of present-day Germans? It seems to me that they become year by year more clumsy and rectangular in rebus psychologicis (in direct contrast to the Parisians, with whom everything is becoming nuance and mosaic), so that all events below the surface escape their notice. For example, my Beyond Good and Evil—what an awkward position it has put them in! Not one intelligent word has reached me about this book, let alone an intelligent sentiment. I do not believe even the most well-disposed of my readers has discovered that he has here to deal with the logical results of a perfectly definite philosophical sensibility, and not with a medley of a hundred promiscuous paradoxes and heterodoxies. Nothing of the kind has been "experienced"; my readers do not bring to it a thousandth part of the passion and suffering that is needed. An "immoralist!" This does not suggest anything to them.

By the way, the Goncourts in one of their prefaces claim to have invented the phrase document humain. But for all that M. Taine may well be its real originator.

You are right in what you say about "haranguing an earthquake "; but such Quixotism is among the most honourable things on this earth.

With the greatest respect,

Yours, NIETZSCHE.

5. BRANDES TO NIETZSCHE.

Copenhagen, Jan. 11, 1888.

MY DEAR SIR,

Your publisher has apparently forgotten to send me your books, but I have to-day received your letter with thanks. I take the liberty of sending you herewith one of my books in proof (because unfortunately I have no other copy at hand), a collection of essays intended for export, therefore not my best wares. They date from various times and are all too polite, too laudatory, too idealistic in tone. I never really say all I think in them. The paper on Ibsen is no doubt the best, but the translation of the verses, which I had done for me, is unfortunately wretched.

There is one Scandinavian writer whose works would interest you, if only they were translated: Sören Kierkegaard; he lived from 1813 to 1855, and is in my opinion one of the profoundest psychologists that have ever existed. A little book I wrote about him (translated, Leipzig, 1879) gives no adequate idea of his genius, as it is a sort of polemical pamphlet written to counteract his influence. But in a psychological respect it is, I think, the most subtle thing I have published.

The essay in the Goethe Year-book was unfortunately shortened by more than a third, as the space had been reserved for me. It is a good deal better in Danish.

If you happen to read Polish, I will send you a little book that I have published only in that language.

I see the new Rivista Contemporanea of Florence has printed a paper of mine on Danish literature. You must not read it. It is full of the most ridiculous mistakes. It is translated from the Russian, I must tell you. I had allowed it to be translated into Russian from my French text, but could not check this translation; now it appears in Italian from the Russian with fresh absurdities; amongst others in the names (on account of the Russian pronunciation), G for H throughout.

I am glad you find in me something serviceable to yourself. For the last four years I have been the most detested man in Scandinavia. Every day the papers rage against me, especially since my last long quarrel with Björnson, in which the moral German papers all took part against me. I dare say you know his absurd play, A Gauntlet, his propaganda for male virginity and his covenant with the spokeswomen of "the demand for equality in morals." Anything like it was certainly unheard of till now. In Sweden these insane women have formed great leagues in which they vow "only to marry virgin men." I suppose they get a guarantee with them, like watches, only the guarantee for the future is not likely to be forthcoming.

I have read the three books of yours that I know again and again. There are two or three bridges leading from my inner world to yours: Cæsarism, hatred of pedantry, a sense for Beyle, etc., but still most of it is strange to me. Our experiences appear to be so infinitely dissimilar. You are without doubt the most suggestive of all German writers.

Your German literature! I don't know what is the matter with it. I fancy all the brains must go into the General Staff or the administration. The whole life of Germany and all your institutions are spreading the most hideous uniformity, and even authorship is stifled by publishing.

Your obliged and respectful, GEORGE BRANDES.

6. NIETZSCHE TO BRANDES.

Nice, Feb. 19, 1888.

You have laid me under a most agreeable obligation with your contribution to the idea of "Modernity," for it happens that this winter I am circling round this paramount problem of values, very much from above and in the manner of a bird, and with the best intention of looking down upon the modern world with as unmodern an eye as possible. I admire—let me confess it—the tolerance of your judgment, as much as the moderation of your sentences. How you suffer these "little children" to come unto you! Even Heyse!

On my next visit to Germany I propose to take up the psychological problem of Kierkegaard and at the same time to renew acquaintance with your older literature. It will be of use to me in the best sense of the word—and will serve to restore good humour to my own severity and arrogance of judgment.

My publisher telegraphed to me yesterday that the books had gone to you. I will spare you and myself the story of why they were delayed. Now, my dear Sir, may you put a good face on a bad bargain, I mean on this Nietzsche literature.

I myself cherish the notion of having given the "new Germans" the richest, most actual and most independent books of any they possess; also of being in my own person a capital event in the crisis of the determination of values. But this may be an error; and, what is more, a piece of foolishness—I do not want to have to believe anything [of the sort] about myself.

One or two further remarks: they concern my firstlings (the Juvenilia and Juvenalia).

The pamphlet against Strauss, the wicked merrymaking of a "very free spirit" at the expense of one who thought himself such, led to a terrific scandal; I was already a Professor Ordinarius at the time, therefore in spite of my twenty-seven years a kind of authority and something acknowledged. The most unbiassed view of this affair, in which almost every "notability" took part for or against me, and in which an insane quantity of paper was covered with printer's ink, is to be found in Karl Hillebrand's Zeiten, Völker und Menschen, second volume. The trouble was not that I had jeered at the senile bungling of an eminent critic, but that I had caught German taste in flagranti in compromising tastelessness; for in spite of all party differences of religion and theology it had unanimously admired Strauss's Alten und Neuen Glauben as a masterpiece of freedom and subtlety of thought (even the style!). My pamphlet was the first onslaught on German culture (that "culture" which they imagined to have gained the victory over France). The word "Culture-Philistine," which I then invented, has remained in the language as a survival of the raging turmoil of that polemic.

The two papers on Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner appear to me to-day to contain self-confessions, above all promises to myself, rather than any real psychology of those two masters, who are at the same time profoundly related and profoundly antagonistic to me—(I was the first to distill a sort of unity out of them both; at present this superstition is much to the fore in German culture—that all Wagnerites are followers of Schopenhauer. It was otherwise when I was young. Then it was the last of the Hegelians who adhered to Wagner, and "Wagner and Hegel" was still the watchword of the 'fifties).

Between Thoughts out of Season and Human, all-too-Human there lies a crisis and a skin-casting. Physically too: I lived for years in extreme proximity to death. This was my great good fortune: I forgot myself, I outlived myself ... I have performed the same trick once again.

So now we have each presented gifts to the other: two travellers, it seems to me, who are glad to have met.

I remain, Yours most sincerely, NIETZSCHE.

7. BRANDES TO NIETZSCHE.

Copenhagen, March 7, 1888.

MY DEAR SIR,

I imagine you to be living in fine spring weather; up here we are buried in abominable snowdrifts and have been cut off from Europe for several days. To make things worse, I have this evening been talking to some hundred imbeciles, and everything looks grey and dreary around me, so to revive my spirits a little I will thank you for your letter of February 19 and your generous present of books.

As I was too busy to write to you at once, I sent you a volume on German Romanticism which I found on my shelves. I should be very sorry, however, that you should interpret my sending it otherwise than as a silent expression of thanks.

The book was written in 1873 and revised in 1886; but my German publisher has permitted himself a number of linguistic and other alterations, so that the first two pages, for instance, are hardly mine at all. Wherever he does not understand my meaning, he puts something else, and declares that what I have written is not German.

Moreover, the man promised to buy the rights of the old translation of my book, but from very foolish economy has not done so; the consequence is that the German courts have suppressed my book in two instances as pirated(!)—because I had included in it fragments of the old translation—while the real pirate is allowed to sell my works freely.

The probable result of this will be that I shall withdraw entirely from German literature.

I sent that volume because I had no other. But the first one on the émigrés, the fourth on the English and the fifth on the French romanticists are all far, far better; written con amore.

The title of the book, Moderne Geister, is fortuitous. I have written some twenty volumes. I wanted to put together for abroad a volume on personalities whose names would be familiar. That is how it came about. Some things in it have cost a good deal of study, such as the paper on Tegnér, which tells the truth about him for the first time. Ibsen will certainly interest you as a personality. Unfortunately as a man he does not stand on the same level that he reaches as a poet. Intellectually he owes much to Kierkegaard, and he is still strongly permeated by theology. Björnson in his latest phase has become just an ordinary lay-preacher.

For more than three years I have not published a book; I felt too unhappy. These three years have been among the hardest of my life, and I see no sign of the approach of better times. However, I am now going to set about the publication of the sixth volume of my work and another book besides. It will take a deal of time.

I was delighted with all the fresh books, turning them over and reading them.

The youthful books are of great value to me; they make it far easier to understand you; I am now leisurely ascending the steps that lead up to your intellect. With Zarathustra I began too precipitately. I prefer to advance upwards rather than to dive head first as though into a sea.

I knew Hillebrand's essay and read years ago some bitter attacks on the book about Strauss. I am grateful to you for the word culture-philistine; I had no idea it was yours. I take no offence at the criticism of Strauss, although I have feelings of piety for the old gentleman. Yet he was always the Tübingen collegian.

Of the other works I have at present only studied The Dawn of Day at all closely. I believe I understand the book thoroughly, many of its ideas have also been mine, others are new to me or put into a new shape, but not on that account strange to me.

One solitary remark, so as not to make this letter too long. I am delighted with the aphorism on the hazard of marriage (Aphorism 150). But why do you not dig deeper here? You speak somewhere with a certain reverence of marriage, which by implying an emotional ideal has idealised emotion—here, however, you are more blunt and forcible. Why not for once say the full truth about it? I am of opinion that the institution of marriage, which may have been very useful in taming brutes, causes more misery to mankind than even the Church has done. Church, monarchy, marriage, property, these are to my mind four old venerable institutions which mankind will have to reform from the foundations in order to be able to breathe freely. And of these marriage alone kills the individuality, paralyses liberty and is the embodiment of a paradox. But the shocking thing about it is that humanity is still too coarse to be able to shake it off. The most emancipated writers, so called, still speak of marriage with a devout and virtuous air which maddens me. And they gain their point, since it is impossible to say what one could put in its place for the mob. There is nothing else to be done but slowly to transform opinion. What do you think about it?

I should like very much to hear how it is with your eyes. I was glad to see how plain and clear your writing is.

Externally, I suppose, you lead a calm and peaceful life down there? Mine is a life of conflict which wears one out. In these realms I am even more hated now than I was seventeen years ago; this is not pleasant in itself, though it is gratifying in so far as it proves to me that I have not yet lost my vigour nor come to terms on any point with sovereign mediocrity.

Your attentive and grateful reader, GEORGE BRANDES.

8. NIETZSCHE TO BRANDES.

Nice, March 27, 1888.

MY DEAR SIR,

I should much have liked to thank you before this for so rich and thoughtful a letter: but my health has been troubling me, so that I have fallen badly into arrears with all good things. In my eyes, I may say in passing, I have a dynamometer for my general state; since my health in the main has once more improved, they have become stronger than I had ever believed possible—they have put to shame the prophecies of the very best German oculists. If Messieurs Gräfe et hoc genus omne had turned out right, I should long ago have been blind. As it is, I have come to No. 3 spectacles—bad enough!—but I still see. I speak of this worry because you were sympathetic enough to inquire about it, and because during the last few weeks my eyes have been particularly weak and irritable.

I feel for you in the North, now so wintry and gloomy; how does one manage to keep one's soul erect there? I admire almost every man who does not lose faith in himself under a cloudy sky, to say nothing of his faith in "humanity," in "marriage," in "property," in the "State." ... In Petersburg I should be a nihilist: here I believe as a plant believes, in the sun. The sun of Nice—you cannot call that a prejudice. We have had it at the expense of all the rest of Europe. God, with the cynicism peculiar to him, lets it shine upon us idlers, "philosophers" and sharpers more brightly than upon the far worthier military heroes of the "Fatherland."

But then, with the instinct of the Northerner, you have chosen the strongest of all stimulants to help you to endure life in the North: war, the excitement of aggression, the Viking raid. I divine in your writings the practised soldier; and not only "mediocrity," but perhaps especially the more independent or individual characters of the Northern mind may be constantly challenging you to fight. How much of the "parson," how much theology is still left behind in all this idealism!... To me it would be still worse than a cloudy sky, to have to make oneself angry over things which do not concern one.

So much for this time; it is little enough. Your German Romanticism has set me thinking, how this whole movement actually only reached its goal as music (Schumann, Mendelssohn, Weber, Wagner, Brahms); as literature it remained a great promise. The French were more fortunate. I am afraid I am too much of a musician not to be a romanticist. Without music life to me would be a mistake.

With cordial and grateful regards I remain, dear Sir, Yours, NIETZSCHE.

9. BRANDES TO NIETZSCHE.

Copenhagen, April 3, 1888.

MY DEAR SIR,

You have called the postman the medium of ill-mannered invasions. That is very true as a rule, and should be sat. sapienti not to trouble you. I am not an intruder by nature, so little in fact that I lead an almost isolated life, am indeed loth to write letters and, like all authors, loth to write at all.

Yesterday, however, when I had received your letter and taken up one of your books, I suddenly felt a sort of vexation at the idea that nobody here in Scandinavia knew anything about you, and I soon determined to make you known at a stroke. The newspaper cutting will tell you that (having just finished a series of lectures on Russia) I am announcing fresh lectures on your writings. For many years I have been obliged to repeat all my lectures, as the University cannot hold the audiences; that is not likely to be the case this time, as your name is so absolutely new, but the people who will come and get an impression of your works will not be of the dullest.

As I should very much like to have an idea of your appearance, I beg you to give me a portrait of yourself. I enclose my last photograph. I would also ask you to tell me quite briefly when and where you were born and in what years you published (or better, wrote) your works, as they are not dated. If you have any newspaper that contains these details, there will be no need to write. I am an unmethodical person and possess neither dictionaries of authors nor other books of reference in which your name might be found.

The youthful works—the Thoughts out of Season—have been very useful to me. How young you were and enthusiastic, how frank and naïve I There is much in the maturer books that I do not yet understand; you appear to me often to hint at or generalise about entirely intimate, personal data, giving the reader a beautiful casket without the key. But most of it I understand. I was enchanted by the youthful work on Schopenhauer; although personally I owe little to Schopenhauer, it seemed to speak to me from the soul.

One or two pedantic corrections: Joyful Wisdom, p. 116. The words quoted are not Chamfort's last, they are to be found in his Caractères et Anecdotes: dialogue between M. D. and M. L. in explanation of the sentence: Peu de personnes et pen de choses m'intéressent, mais rien ne m'intéresse moins que moi. The concluding words are: en vivant et en voyant les hommes, il faut que le cour se brise ou se bronze.

On p. 118 you speak of the elevation "in which Shakespeare places Cæsar." I find Shakespeare's Cæsar pitiable. An act of high treason. And this glorification of the miserable fellow whose only achievement was to plunge a knife into a great man!

Human, all-too-Human, II, p. 59. A holy lie. "It is the only holy lie that has become famous." No, Desdemona's last words are perhaps still more beautiful and just as famous, often quoted in Germany at the time when Jacobi was writing on Lessing. Am I not right?

These trifles are only to show you that I read you attentively. Of course, there are very different matters that I might discuss with you, but a letter is not the place for them.

If you read Danish, I should like to send you a handsomely got-up little book on Holberg, which will appear in a week. Let me know whether you understand our language. If you read Swedish, I call your attention to Sweden's only genius, August Strindberg. When you write about women you are very like him.

I hope you will have nothing but good to tell me of your eyes.

Yours sincerely, GEORGE BRANDES.

10. NIETZSCHE TO BRANDES.

Torino (Italia) ferma in posta, April 10, 1888.

But, my dear Sir, what a surprise is this!—Where have you found the courage to propose to speak in public of a vir obscurissimus?... Do you imagine that I am known in the beloved Fatherland? They treat me there as if I were something singular and absurd, something that for the present need not be taken seriously.... Evidently they have an inkling that I do not take them seriously either: and how could I, nowadays, when "German intellect" has become a contradictio in adjecto!—My best thanks for the photograph. Unfortunately I have none to send in return: my sister, who is married and lives in South America, took with her the last portraits I possessed.

Enclosed is a little vita, the first I have ever written.

As regards the dates of composition of the different books, they are to be found on the back of the cover of Beyond Good and Evil. Perhaps you no longer have this cover.

The Birth of Tragedy was written between the summer of 1870 and the winter of 1871 (finished at Lugano, where I was living with the family of Field-Marshal Moltke).

The Thoughts out of Season between 1872 and the summer of 1875 (there were to have been thirteen; luckily my health said No!).

What you say about Schopenhauer as Educator gives me great pleasure. This little work serves me as a touchstone; he to whom it says nothing personal has probably nothing to do with me either. In reality it contains the whole plan according to which I have hitherto lived; it is a rigorous promise.

Human, all-too-Human, with its two continuations, summer of 1876-1879. The Dawn of Day, 1880. The Joyful Wisdom, January 1882. Zarathustra, 1883-1885 (each part in about ten days. Perfect state of "inspiration." All conceived in the course of rapid walks: absolute certainty, as though each sentence were shouted to one. While writing the book, the greatest physical elasticity and sense of power).

Beyond Good and Evil, summer of 1885 in the Upper Engadine and the following winter at Nice.

The Genealogy decided on, carried out and sent ready for press to the printer at Leipzig, all between July 10 and 30, 1887. (Of course there are also philologica of mine, but they do not concern you and me.)

I am now making an experiment with Turin; I shall stay here till June 5 and then go to the Engadine. The weather so far is wintry, harsh and unpleasant. But the town superbly calm and favourable to my instincts. The finest pavement in the world.

Sincere greetings from Yours gratefully, NIETZSCHE.

A pity I understand neither Danish nor Swedish.

Vita.—I was born on October 15, 1844, on the battlefield of Lützen. The first name I heard was that of Gustavus Adolphus. My ancestors were Polish noblemen (Niëzky); it seems the type has been well maintained, in spite of three generations of German mothers. Abroad I am usually taken for a Pole; this very winter the visitors' list at Nice entered me comme Polonais. I am told my head occurs in Matejko's pictures. My grandmother belonged to the Schiller-Goethe circles of Weimar; her brother was Herder's successor in the position of General Superintendent at Weimar. I had the good fortune to be a pupil of the venerable Pforta School, from which so many who have made a name in German literature have proceeded (Klopstock, Fichte, Schlegel, Ranke, etc., etc.). We had masters who would have (or have) done honour to any university. I studied at Bonn, afterwards at Leipzig; old Ritschl, then the first philologist in Germany, singled me out almost from the first. At twenty-two I was a contributor to the Litterarisches Centralblatt (Zarncke). The foundation of the Philological Society of Leipzig, which still exists, is due to me. In the winter of 1868-1869 the University of Basle offered me a professorship; I was as yet not even a Doctor. The University of Leipzig afterwards conferred the doctor's degree on me, in a very honourable way, without any examination, and even without a dissertation. From Easter 1869 to 1879 I was at Basle; I was obliged to give up my rights as a German subject, since as an officer (Horse Artillery) I should have been called up too frequently and my academic duties would have been interfered with. I am none the less master of two weapons, the sabre and the cannon—and perhaps of a third as well.... At Basle everything went very well, in spite of my youth; it sometimes happened, especially with candidates for the doctor's degree, that the examinee was older than the examiner.

I had the great good fortune to form a cordial friendship with Jakob Burkhardt, an unusual thing with that very hermit-like and secluded thinker. A still greater piece of good fortune was that from the earliest days of my Basle existence an indescribably close intimacy sprang up between me and Richard and Cosima Wagner, who were then living on their estate of Triebschen, near Lucerne, as though on an island, and were cut off from all former ties. For some years we had everything, great and small, in common, a confidence without bounds. (You will find printed in Volume VII of Wagner's complete works a "message" to me, referring to The Birth of Tragedy.) As a result of these relations I came to know a large circle of persons (and "personesses"), in fact pretty nearly everything that grows between Paris and Petersburg. By about 1876 my health became worse. I then spent a winter at Sorrento, with my old friend, Baroness Meysenbug (Memoirs of an Idealist) and the sympathetic Dr. Rée. There was no improvement. I suffered from an extremely painful and persistent headache, which exhausted all my strength. This went on for a number of years, till it reached such a climax of habitual suffering, that at that time I had 200 days of torment in the year. The trouble must have been due entirely to local causes, there is no neuropathic basis for it of any sort. I have never had a symptom of mental disturbance; not even of fever, nor of fainting. My pulse was at that time as slow as that of the first Napoleon (= 60). My speciality was to endure extreme pain, cru, vert, with perfect clarity, for two or three consecutive days, accompanied by constant vomiting of bile. The report has been put about that I was in a madhouse (and indeed that I died there). Nothing is further from the truth. As a matter of fact my intellect only came to maturity during that terrible time: witness the Dawn of Day, which I wrote in 1881 during a winter of incredible suffering at Genoa, away from doctors, friends or relations. This book serves me as a sort of "dynamometer": I composed it with a minimum of strength and health. From 1882 on I went forward again, very slowly, it is true: the crisis was past (my father died very young, just at the age at which I was myself so near to death). I have to use extreme care even to-day; certain conditions of a climatic and meteorological order are indispensable to me. It is not from choice but from necessity that I spend the summer in the Upper Engadine and the winter at Nice.... After all, my illness has been of the greatest use to me: it has released me, it has restored to me the courage to be myself.... And, indeed, in virtue of my instincts, I am a brave animal, a military one even. The long resistance has somewhat exasperated my pride. Am I a philosopher, do you ask?—But what does that matter!...

11. BRANDES TO NIETZSCHE.

Copenhagen, April 29, 1888.

MY DEAR SIR,

The first time I lectured on your works, the hall was not quite full, an audience of perhaps a hundred and fifty, since no one knew who and what you are. But as an important newspaper reported my first lecture, and as I have myself written an article on you, interest was roused, and next time the hall was full to bursting. Some three hundred people listened with the greatest attention to my exposition of your works. Nevertheless, I have not ventured to repeat the lectures, as has been my practice for many years, since the subject is hardly of a popular nature. I hope the result will be to get you some good readers in the North.

Your books now stand on one of my shelves, very handsomely bound. I should be very glad to possess everything you have published.

When, in your first letter, you offered me a musical work of yours, a Hymn to Life, I declined the gift from modesty, being no great judge of music. Now I think I have deserved the work through my interest in it and should be much obliged if you would have it sent to me.

I believe I may sum up the impression of my audience in the feeling of a young painter, who said to me: "What makes this so interesting is that it has not to do with books, but with life." If any objection is taken to your ideas, it is that they are "too out-and-out."

It was unkind of you not to send me a photograph; I really only sent mine to put you under an obligation. It is so little trouble to sit to a photographer for a minute or two, and one knows a man far better when one has an idea of his appearance.

Yours very sincerely, GEORGE BRANDES.

12. NIETZSCHE TO BRANDES.

Turin, May 4, 1888.

MY DEAR SIR,

What you tell me gives me great pleasure and—let me confess it—still more surprise. Be sure I shall owe you for it: you know, hermits are not given to forgetting.

Meanwhile I hope my photograph will have reached you. It goes without saying that I took steps, not exactly to be photographed (for I am extremely distrustful of haphazard photographs), but to abstract a photograph from somebody who had one of me. Perhaps I have succeeded; I have not yet heard. If not, I shall avail myself of my next visit to Munich (this autumn probably) to be taken again.

The Hymn to Life will start on its journey to Copenhagen one of these days. We philosophers are never more grateful than when we are mistaken for artists. I am assured, moreover, by the best judges that the Hymn is thoroughly fit for performance, singable, and sure in its effect (—clear in form; this praise gave me the greatest pleasure). Mottl, the excellent court conductor at Carlsruhe (the conductor of the Bayreuth festival performances, you know), has given me hopes of a performance.

I have just heard from Italy that the point of view of my second Thought out of Season has been very honourably mentioned in a survey of German literature contributed by the Viennese scholar, Dr. von Zackauer, at the invitation of the Archivio storico of Florence. He concludes his paper with it.

These last weeks at Turin, where I shall stay till June 5, have turned out better than any I have known for years, above all more philosophic. Almost every day for one or two hours I have reached such a pitch of energy as to be able to view my whole conception from top to bottom; so that the immense multiplicity of problems lies spread out beneath me, as though in relief and clear in its outlines. This requires a maximum of strength, for which I had almost given up hope. It all hangs together; years ago it was already on the right course; one builds one's philosophy like a beaver, one is forced to and does not know it: but one has to see all this, as I have now seen it, in order to believe it.

I am so relieved, so strengthened, in such good humour—I hang a little farcical tail on to the most serious things. What is the reason of all this? Have I not the good north winds to thank for it, the north winds which do not always come from the Alps?—they come now and then even from Copenhagen!

With greetings, Your gratefully devoted, NIETZSCHE.

13. NIETZSCHE TO BRANDES.

Turin, May 23, 1888.

MY DEAR SIR,

I should not like to leave Turin without telling you once more what a great share you have had in my first successful spring. The history of my springs, for the last fifteen years at least, has been, I must tell you, a tale of horror, a fatality of decadence and infirmity. Places made no difference; it was as though no prescription, no diet, no climate could change the essentially depressing character of this time of year. But behold, Turin! And the first good news, your news, my dear Sir, which proved to me that I am alive.... For I am sometimes apt to forget that I am alive. An accident, a question reminded me the other day that one of life's leading ideas is positively quenched in me, the idea of the future. No, wish, not the smallest cloudlet of a wish before me! A bare expanse! Why should not a day from my seventieth year be exactly like my day to-day? Have I lived too long in proximity to death to be able any longer to open my eyes to fair possibilities. —But certain it is that I now limit myself to thinking from day to day—that I settle to-day what is to be done to-morrow—and not for a single day beyond it! This may be irrational, unpractical, perhaps also unchristian—that preacher on the Mount forbade this very "taking thought for the morrow"—but it seems to me in the highest degree philosophical. I gained more respect for myself than I had before:—I understood that I had unlearnt how to wish, without even wanting to do so.

These weeks I have employed in "transvaluing values."—You understand this trope?—After all, the alchemist is the most deserving kind of man there is! I mean the man who makes of what is base and despised something valuable, even gold. He alone confers wealth, the others merely give change. My problem this time is rather a curious one: I have asked myself what hitherto has been best hated, feared, despised by mankind—and of that and nothing else I have made my "gold"....

If only I am not accused of false-coining! Or rather; that is what will happen.

Has my photograph reached you? My mother has shown me the great kindness of relieving me from the appearance of ungratefulness in such a special case. It is to be hoped the Leipzig publisher, E. W. Fritzsch, has also done his duty and sent off the Hymn.

In conclusion I confess to a feeling of curiosity. As it was denied me to listen at the crack of the door to learn something about myself, I should like to hear something in another way. Three words to characterise the subjects of your different lectures—how much should I learn from three words!

With cordial and devoted greetings , Your NIETZSCHE.

14. BRANDES TO NIETZSCHE.

Copenhagen May 23, 1888.

MY DEAR SIR,

For letter, portrait and music I send you my best thanks. The letter and the music were an unqualified pleasure, the portrait might have been better. It is a profile taken at Naumburg, characteristic in its attitude, but with too little expression. You must look different from this; the writer of Zarathustra must have many more secrets written in his own face.

I concluded my lectures on Fr. Nietzsche before Whitsuntide. They ended, as the papers say, in applause "which took the form of an ovation." The ovation is yours almost entirely. I take the liberty of communicating it to you herewith in writing. For I can only claim the credit of reproducing, clearly and connectedly, and intelligibly to a Northern audience, what you had originated.

I also tried to indicate your relation to various contemporaries, to introduce my hearers into the workshop of your thought, to put forward my own favourite ideas, where they coincided with yours, to define the points on which I differed from you, and to give a psychological portrait of Nietzsche the author. Thus much I may say without exaggeration: your name is now very popular in all intelligent circles in Copenhagen, and all over Scandinavia it is at least known. You have nothing to thank me for; it has been a pleasure to me to penetrate into the world of your thoughts. My lectures are not worth printing, as I do not regard pure philosophy as my special province and am unwilling to print anything dealing with a subject in which I do not feel sufficiently competent.

I am very glad you feel so invigorated physically and so well disposed mentally. Here, after a long winter, we have mild spring weather. We are rejoicing in the first green leaves and in a very well-arranged Northern exhibition that has been opened at Copenhagen. All the French artists of eminence (painters and sculptors) are also exhibiting here. Nevertheless, I am longing to get away, but have to stay.

But this cannot interest you. I forgot to tell you: if you do not know the Icelandic sagas, you must study them. You will find there a great deal to confirm your hypotheses and theories about the morality of a master race.

In one trifling detail you seem to have missed the mark. Gothic has certainly nothing to do with good or God. It is connected with giessen, he who emits the seed, and means stallion, man.

On the other hand, our philologists here think your suggestion of bonus—duonus is much to the point.

I hope that in future we shall never become entirely strangers to one another.

I remain your faithful reader and admirer, GEORGE BRANDES.

15. NIETZSCHE to BRANDES. (Post-card.)

Turin, May 27, 1888.

What eyes you have! You are right, the Nietzsche of the photograph is not yet the author of Zarathustra—he is a few years too young for that.

I am very grateful for the etymology of Goth; it is simply godlike.

I presume you are reading another letter of mine to-day.

Your gratefully attached N.

16. NIETZSCHE TO BRANDES.

Sils-Maria, Sept. 13, 1888.

MY DEAR SIR,

Herewith I do myself a pleasure—that of recalling myself to your memory, by sending you a wicked little book, but one that is none the less very seriously meant; the product of the good days of Turin. For I must tell you that since then there have been evil days in Superfluity; such a decline in health, courage and "will to life," to talk Schopenhauer, that the little spring idyll scarcely seemed credible any longer. Fortunately I still possessed a document belonging to it, the Case of Wagner. A Musician's Problem. Spiteful tongues will prefer to call it The Fall of Wagner.

Much as you may disclaim music (—the most importunate of all the Muses), and with however good reason, yet pray look at this piece of musician's psychology. You, my dear Mr. Cosmopolitan, are far too European in your ideas not to hear in it a hundred times more than my so-called countrymen, the "musical" Germans.

After all, in this case I am a connoisseur in rebus et personis—and, fortunately, enough of a musician by instinct to see that in this ultimate question of values, the problem is accessible and soluble through music.

In reality this pamphlet is almost written in French—I dare say it would be easier to translate it into French than into German.

Could you give me one or two more Russian or French addresses to which there would be some sense in sending the pamphlet?

In a month or two something philosophical may be expected; under the very inoffensive title of Leisure Hours of à Psychologist I am saying agreeable and disagreeable things to the world at large—including that intelligent nation, the Germans.

But all this is in the main nothing but recreation beside the main thing: the name of the latter is Transvaluation of all Values. Europe will have to discover a new Siberia, to which to consign the author of these experiments with values.

I hope this high-spirited letter will find you in one of your usual resolute moods.

With kind remembrances, Yours, DR. NIETZSCHE.

Address till middle of November: Torino (Italia) ferma in posta.

17. BRANDES TO NIETZSCHE.

Copenhagen, Oct. 6, 1888.

MY DEAR SIR,

Your letter and valued gift found me in a raging fever of work. This accounts for my delay in answering.

The mere sight of your handwriting gave me pleasurable excitement.

It is sad news that you have had a bad summer. I was foolish enough to think that you had already got over all your physical troubles.

I have read the pamphlet with the greatest attention and much enjoyment. I am not so unmusical that I cannot enter into the fun of it. I am merely not an expert. A few days before receiving the little book I heard a very fine performance of Carmen; what glorious music! However, at the risk of exciting your wrath I confess that Wagner's Tristan und Isolde made an indelible impression on me. I once heard this opera in Berlin, in a despondent, altogether shattered state of mind, and I felt every note. I do not know whether the impression was so deep because I was so ill.

Do you know Bizet's widow? You ought to send her the pamphlet. She would like it. She is the sweetest, most charming of women, with a nervous tic that is curiously becoming, but perfectly genuine, perfectly sincere and full of fire. Only she has married again (an excellent man, a barrister named Straus, of Paris). I believe she knows some German. I could get you her address, if it does not put you against her that she has not remained true to her god—any more than the Virgin Mary, Mozart's widow or Marie Louise.

Bizet's child is ideally beautiful and charming.—But I am gossiping.

I have given a copy of the book to the greatest of Swedish writers, August Strindberg, whom I have entirely won over to you. He is a true genius, only a trifle mad like most geniuses (and non-geniuses). The other copy I shall also place with care.

Paris I am not well acquainted with now. But send a copy to the following address: Madame la Princesse Anna Dmitrievna Ténicheff, Quai Anglais 20, Petersburg. This lady is a friend of mine; she is also acquainted with the musical world of Petersburg and will make you known there. I have asked her before now to buy your works, but they were all forbidden in Russia, even Human, all-too-Human.

It would also be as well to send a copy to Prince Urussov (who is mentioned in Turgeniev's letters). He is greatly interested in everything German, and is a man of rich gifts, an intellectual gourmet. I do not remember his address for the moment, but can find it out.

I am glad that in spite of all bodily ills you are working so vigorously and keenly. I am looking forward to all the things you promise me.

It would give me great pleasure to be read by you, but unfortunately you do not understand my language. I have produced an enormous amount this summer. I have written two long new books (of twenty-four and twenty-eight sheets), Impressions of Poland and Impressions of Russia, besides entirely rewriting one of my oldest books, Æsthetic Studies, for a new edition and correcting the proofs of all three books myself. In another week or so I shall have finished this work; then I give a series of lectures, writing at the same time another series in French, and leave for Russia in the depth of winter to revive there.

That is the plan I propose for my winter campaign. May it not be a Russian campaign in the bad sense.

I hope you will continue your friendly interest in me.

I remain, Your faithfully devoted, GEORGE BRANDES.

18. NIETZSCHE TO BRANDES.

Turin, Oct. 20, 1888.

MY DEAR SIR,

Once more your letter brought me a pleasant wind from the north; it is in fact so far the only letter that puts a "good face," or any face at all on my attack on Wagner. For people do not write to me. I have irreparably offended even my nearest and dearest. There is, for instance, my old friend, Baron Seydlitz of Munich, who unfortunately happens to be President of the Munich Wagner Society; my still older friend, Justizrath Krug of Cologne, president of the local Wagner Society; my brother-in-law, Dr. Bernhard Förster in South America, the not unknown Anti—Semite, one of the keenest contributors to the Bayreuther Blätter—and my respected friend, Malwida von Meysenbug, the authoress of Memoirs of an Idealist, who continues to confuse Wagner with Michel Angelo....

On the other side I have been given to understand that I must be on my guard against the female Wagnerite: in certain cases she is said to be without scruple. Perhaps Bayreuth will defend itself in the German Imperial manner, by the prohibition of my writings—as "dangerous to public morals"; for here the Emperor is a party to the case.

My dictum, "we all know the inæsthetic concept of the Christian Junker," might even be interpreted as lèse-majesté.

Your intervention on behalf of Bizet's widow gave me great pleasure. Please let me have her address; also that of prince Urussov. A copy has been sent to your friend, the Princess Dmitrievna Ténicheff. When my next book is published, which will be before very long (the title is now The Twilight of the Idols. Or, How to Philosophise with the Hammer), I should much like to send a copy to the Swede you introduce to me in such laudatory terms. But I do not know where he lives. This book is my philosophy in nuce—radical to the point of criminality....

As to the effect of Tristan, I, too, could tell strange tales. A regular dose of mental anguish seems to me a splendid tonic before a Wagnerian repast. The Reichsgerichtsrath Dr. Wiener of Leipzig gave me to understand that a Carlsbad cure was also a good thing....

Ah, how industrious you are! And idiot that I am, not to understand Danish! I am quite willing to take your word for it that one can "revive" in Russia better than elsewhere; I count any Russian book, above all Dostoievsky (translated into French, for Heaven's sake not German!!) among my greatest sources of relief.

Cordially and, with good reason, gratefully, Yours, NIETZSCHE.

19. BRANDES TO NIETZSCHE.

Copenhagen, Nov. 16, 1888.

MY DEAR SIR,

I have waited in vain for an answer from Paris to learn the address of Madame Bizet. On the other hand, I now have the address of Prince Urussov. He lives in Petersburg, Sergievskaia 79.

My three books are now out. I have begun my lectures here.

Curious it is how something in your letter and in your book about Dostoievsky coincides with my own impressions of him. I have mentioned you, too, in my work on Russia, when dealing with Dostoievsky. He is a great poet, but an abominable creature, quite Christian in his emotions and at the same time quite sadique. His whole morality is what you have baptised slave-morality.

The mad Swede's name is August Strindberg; he lives here. His address is Holte, near Copenhagen. He is particularly fond of you, because he thinks he finds in you his own hatred of women. On this account he calls you "modern" (irony of fate). On reading the newspaper reports of my spring lectures, he said: "It is an astonishing thing about this Nietzsche; much of what he says is just what I might have written." His drama, Père, has appeared in French with a preface by Zola.

I feel mournful whenever I think of Germany. What a development is now going on there! How sad to think that to all appearance one will never in one's lifetime be a historical witness of the smallest good thing.

What a pity that so learned a philologist as you should not understand Danish. I am doing all I can to prevent my books on Poland and Russia being translated, so that I may not be expelled, or at least refused the right of speaking when I next go there.

Hoping that these lines will find you still at Turin or will be forwarded to you, I am,

Yours very sincerely, GEORGE BRANDES.

20. NIETZSCHE TO BRANDES.

Torino, via Carlo Alberto, 6, III.

Nov. 20, 1888.

MY DEAR SIR,

Forgive me for answering at once. Curious things are now happening in my life, things that are without precedent. First the day before yesterday; now again. Ah, if you knew what I had just written when your letter paid me its visit.

With a cynicism that will become famous in the world's history, I have now related myself. The book is called Ecce Homo, and is an attack on the Crucified without the slightest reservation; it ends in thunders and lightnings against everything that is Christian or infected with Christianity, till one is blinded and deafened. I am in fact the first psychologist of Christianity and, as an old artilleryman, can bring heavy guns into action, the existence of which no opponent of Christianity has even suspected. The whole is the prelude to the Transvaluation of all Values, the work that lies ready before me: I swear to you that in two years we shall have the whole world in convulsions. I am a fate.

Guess who come off worst in Ecce Homo? Messieurs the Germans! I have told them terrible things.... The Germans, for instance, have it on their conscience that they deprived the last great epoch of history, the Renaissance, of its meaning—at a moment when the Christian values, the décadence values, were worsted, when they were conquered in the instincts even of the highest ranks of the clergy by the opposite instincts, the instincts of life. To attack the Church—that meant to re-establish Christianity. (Cesare Borgia as pope—that would have been the meaning of the Renaissance, its proper symbol.)

You must not be angry either, to find yourself brought forward at a critical passage in the book—I wrote it just now—where I stigmatise the conduct of my German friends towards me, their absolute leaving me in the lurch as regards both fame and philosophy. Then you suddenly appear, surrounded by a halo....

I believe implicitly what you say about Dostoievsky; I esteem him, on the other hand, as the most valuable psychological material I know—I am grateful to him in an extraordinary way, however antagonistic he may be to my deepest instincts. Much the same as my relation to Pascal, whom I almost love, since he has taught me such an infinite amount; the only logical Christian.

The day before yesterday I read, with delight and with a feeling of being thoroughly at home, Les mariés, by Herr August Strindberg. My sincerest admiration, which is only prejudiced by the feeling that I am admiring myself a little at the same time.

Turin is still my residence.

Your NIETZSCHE, now a monster.

Where may I send you the Twilight of the Idols? If you will be at Copenhagen another fortnight, no answer is necessary.

21. BRANDES TO NIETZSCHE.

Copenhagen, Nov. 23, 1888.

MY DEAR SIR,

Your letter found me to-day in full fever of work; I am lecturing here on Goethe, repeat each lecture twice and yet people wait in line for three quarters of an hour in the square before the University to get standing-room. It amuses me to study the greatest of the great before so many. I must stay here till the end of the year.

But on the other side there is the unfortunate circumstance that—as I am informed—one of my old books, lately translated into Russian, has been condemned in Russia to be publicly burnt as "irreligious."

I already had to fear expulsion on account of my two last works on Poland and Russia; now I must try to set in motion all the influence I can command, in order to obtain permission to lecture in Russia this winter. To make matters worse, nearly all letters to and from me are now confiscated. There is great anxiety since the disaster at Borki. It was just the same shortly after the famous attempts. Every letter was snapped up.

It gives me lively satisfaction to see that you have again got through so much. Believe me, I spread your propaganda wherever I can. So late as last week I earnestly recommended Henrik Ibsen to study your works. With him too you have some kinship, even if it is a very distant kinship. Great and strong and unamiable, but yet worthy of love, is this singular person. Strindberg will be glad to hear of your appreciation. I do not know the French translation you mention; but they say here that all the best things in Giftas (Mariés) have been left out, especially the witty polemic against Ibsen. But read his drama Père; there is a great scene in it. I am sure he would gladly send it you. But I see him so seldom; he is so shy on account of an extremely unhappy marriage. Imagine it, he abhors his wife intellectually and cannot get away from her physically. He is a monogamous misogynist!

It seems curious to me that the polemical trait is still so strong in you. In my early days I was passionately polemical; now I can only expound; silence is my only weapon of offence. I should as soon think of attacking Christianity as of writing a pamphlet against werewolves, I mean against the belief in werewolves.

But I see we understand one another. I too love Pascal. But even as a young man I was for the Jesuits against Pascal (in the Provinciales). The worldly-wise, they were right, of course; he did not understand them; but they understood him and—what a master-stroke of impudence and sagacity!—they themselves published his Provinciales with notes. The best edition is that of the Jesuits.

Luther against the Pope, there we have the same collision. Victor Hugo in the preface to the Feuilles d'Automne has this fine saying: On convoque la diète de Worms mais on peint la chapelle Sixtine. Il y a Luther, mais il y a Michel-Ange ... et remarquons en passant que Luther est dans les vieilleries qui croulent autour de nous et que Michel-Ange n'y est pas.

Study the face of Dostoievsky: half a Russian peasant's face, half a criminal physiognomy, flat nose, little piercing eyes under lids quivering with nervousness, this lofty and well-formed forehead, this expressive mouth that speaks of torments innumerable, of abysmal melancholy, of unhealthy appetites, of infinite pity, passionate envy! An epileptic genius, whose exterior alone speaks of the stream of gentleness that filled his spirit, of the wave of acuteness almost amounting to madness that mounted to his head, and finally of the ambition, the immense effort, and of the ill-will that results from pettiness of soul.

His heroes are not only poor and pitiable creatures, but simple-minded sensitive ones, noble strumpets, often victims of hallucination, gifted epileptics, enthusiastic candidates for martyrdom—just those types which we should suspect in the apostles and disciples of the early days of Christianity.

Certainly nothing could be farther removed from the Renaissance.

I am excited to know how I can come into your book.

I remain your faithfully devoted GEORGE BRANDES.

22. Unstamped. Without further address, undated. Written in a large hand on a piece of paper (not note-paper) ruled in pencil, such as children use. Post-mark: Turin, January 4, 1889.

TO THE FRIEND GEORG

When once you had discovered me, it was easy enough to find me: the difficulty now is to get rid of me ...

The Crucified.

As Herr Max Nordau has attempted with incredible coarseness to brand Nietzsche's whole life-work as the production of a madman, I call attention to the fact that signs of powerful exaltation only appear in the last letter but one, and that insanity is only evident in the last letter of all, and then not in an unqualified form.

But at the close of the year 1888 this dear and masterly mind began to be deranged. His self-esteem, which had always been very great, acquired a morbid character. His light and delicate self-irony, which appears not unfrequently in the letters here given, gave place to constantly recurring outbursts of anger with the German public's failure to appreciate the value of his works. It ill became a man of Nietzsche's intellect, who only a year before (see Letter No. 2) had desired a small number of intelligent readers, to take such offence at the indifference of the mob. He now gave expression to the most exalted ideas about himself. In his last book but one he had said: "I have given the Germans the profoundest books of any they possess "; in his last he wrote: "I have given mankind the profoundest book it possesses." At the same time he yielded to an impulse to describe the fame he hoped to attain in the future as already his. As the reader will see, he had asked me to furnish him with the addresses of persons in Paris and Petersburg who might be able to make his name known in France and Russia. I chose them to the best of my judgment. But even before the books he sent had reached their destinations, Nietzsche wrote in a German review: "And thus I am treated in Germany, I who am already studied in Petersburg and Paris." That his sense of propriety was beginning to be deranged was already shown when sending the book to Princess Ténicheff (see Letter No. 18). This lady wrote to me in astonishment, asking what kind of a strange friend I had recommended to her: he had been sufficiently wanting in taste to give the sender's name on the parcel itself as "The Antichrist." Some time after I had received the last deranged and touching letter, another was shown me, which Nietzsche had presumably sent the same day, and in which he wrote that he intended to summon a meeting of sovereigns in Rome to have the young German Emperor shot there; this was signed "Nietzsche-Cæsar." The letter to me was signed "The Crucified." It was thus evident that this great mind in its final megalomania had oscillated between attributing to itself the two greatest names in history, so strongly contrasted.