H. L. MENCKEN (continued 5)

Therefore, it is plain that Nietzsche's whole case against Wagner is based upon a fallacy and that, in consequence, it is not to be taken too seriously. It is true enough that his book contains some remarkably acute and searching observations upon art, and that, granting his premises, his general conclusions would be correct, but we are by no means granting his premises. Wagner may have been a traitor to his philosophy, but if he had remained loyal to it, his art would have been impossible. And in view of the sublime beauty of that art we may well pardon him for not keeping the faith.

"Der Fall Wagner" caused a horde of stupid critics to maintain that Nietzsche, and not Wagner, was the apostate, and that the mad philosopher had begun to argue against himself. As an answer to this ridiculous charge, Nietzsche published a little book called "Nietzsche contra Wagner." It was made up entirely of passages from his earlier books and these proved conclusively that, ever since his initial divergence from Schopenhauer's conclusions, he had hoed a straight row. He was a dionysian in "Die Geburt der Tragödie" and he was a dionysian still in "Also Sprach Zarathustra."

NIETZSCHE THE PROPHET

I

NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINS

The construction of philosophical family trees for Nietzsche has ever been one of the favorite pastimes of his critics and interpreters. Thus Dr. Oscar Levy, editor of the English translation of his works, makes him the heir of Goethe and Stendhal, and the culminating figure of the "Second Renaissance" launched by the latter, who was "the first man to cry halt to the Kantian philosophy which had flooded all Europe."[1] Dr. M. A. Mügge agrees with this genealogy so far as it goes, but points out that Nietzsche was also the intellectual descendant of certain pre-Socratic Greeks, particularly Heracleitus, and of Spinoza and Stirner.[2] Alfred Fouillée, the Frenchman, is another who gives him Greek blood, but in seeking his later forebears Fouillée passes over the four named by Levy and Mügge and puts Hobbes, Schopenhauer, Darwin, Rousseau and Diderot in place of them.[3] Again, Thomas Common says that "perhaps Nietzsche is most indebted to Chamfort and Schopenhauer," but also allows a considerable influence to Hobbes, and endeavors to show how Nietzsche carried on, consciously and unconsciously, certain ideas originating with Darwin and developed by Huxley, Spencer and the other evolutionists.[4] Dr. Alexander Tille has written a whole volume upon this latter relationship.[5] Finally, Paul Elmer More, the American, taking the cue from Fouillée, finds the germs of many of Nietzsche's doctrines in Hobbes, and then proceeds to a somewhat elaborate discussion of the mutations of ethical theory during the past two centuries, showing how Hume superimposed the idea of sympathy as a motive upon Hobbes' idea of self-interest, and how this sympathy theory prevailed over that of self-interest, and degenerated into sentimentalism, and so opened the way for Socialism and other such delusions, and how Nietzsche instituted a sort of Hobbesian revival.[6] Many more speculations of that sort, some of them very ingenious and some merely ingenuous, might be rehearsed. By one critic or another Nietzsche has been accused of more or less frank borrowings from Xenophanes, Democritus, Pythagoras, Callicles, Parmenides, Arcelaus, Empedocles, Pyrrho, Hegesippus, the Eleatic Zeno, Machiavelli, Comte, Montaigne, Mandeville, La Bruyère, Fontenelle, Voltaire, Kant, La Rochefoucauld, Helvétius, Adam Smith, Malthus, Butler, Blake, Proudhon, Paul Rée, Flaubert, Taine, Gobineau, Renan, and even from Karl Marx!—a long catalogue of meaningless names, an exhaustive roster of pathfinders and protestants. A Frenchman, Jules de Gaultier, has devoted a whole book to the fascinating subject.[7]

But if we turn from this laborious and often irrelevant search for common ideas and parallel passages to the actual facts of Nietzsche's intellectual development, we shall find, perhaps, that his ancestry ran in two streams, the one coming down from the Greeks whom he studied as school-boy and undergraduate, and the other having its source in Schopenhauer, the great discovery of his early manhood and the most powerful single influence of his life. No need to argue the essentially Greek color of Nietzsche's apprentice thinking. It was, indeed, his interest in Greek literature and life that made him a philologist by profession, and the same interest that converted him from a philologist into a philosopher. The foundation of his system was laid when he arrived at his conception of the conflict between the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus, and all that followed belonged naturally to the working out of that idea. But what he got from the Greeks of his early adoration was more than a single idea and more than the body of miscellaneous ideas listed by the commentators: it was the Greek outlook, the Greek spirit, the Greek attitude toward God and man. In brief, he ceased to be a German pastor's son, brought up in the fear of the Lord, and became a citizen of those gorgeous and enchanted isles, much as Shelley had before him. The sentimentality of Christianity dropped from him like an old garment; he stood forth, as it were, bare and unashamed, a pagan in the springtime of the world, a ja-sager. More than the reading of books, of course, was needed to work that transformation—the blood that leaped had to be blood capable of leaping—but it was out of books that the stimulus came, and the feeling of surety, and the beginnings of a workable philosophy of life. It is not a German that speaks in "The Antichrist," nor even the Polish noble that Nietzsche liked to think himself, but a Greek of the brave days before Socrates, a spokesman of Hellenic innocence and youth.

No doubt it was the unmistakably Greek note in Schopenhauer—the delivery of instinct, so long condemned to the ethical dungeons—that engendered Nietzsche's first wild enthusiasm for the Frankfort sage. The atmosphere of Leipsic in 1865 was heavy with moral vapors, and the daring dissent of Schopenhauer must have seemed to blow through it like a sharp wind from the sea. And Nietzsche, being young and passionate, was carried away by the ecstasy of discovery, and so accepted the whole Schopenhauerean philosophy without examining it too critically—the bitter with the sweet, its pessimism no less than its rebellion. He, too, had to go through the green-sickness of youth, particularly of German youth. The Greek was yet but half way from Naumburg to Attica, and he now stopped a moment to look backward. "Every line," he tells us somewhere, "cried out renunciation, denial, resignation.... Evidences of this sudden change are still to be found in the restless melancholy of the leaves of my diary at that period, with all their useless self-reproach and their desperate gazing upward for recovery and for the transformation of the whole spirit of mankind. By drawing all my qualities and my aspirations before the forum of gloomy self-contempt I became bitter, unjust and unbridled in my hatred of myself. I even practised bodily penance. For instance, I forced myself for a fortnight at a stretch to go to bed at two o'clock in the morning and to rise punctually at six." But not for long. The fortnight of self-accusing and hair-shirts was soon over. The green-sickness vanished.[8] The Greek emerged anew, more Hellenic than ever. And so, almost from the start, Nietzsche rejected quite as much of Schopenhauer as he accepted. The Schopenhauerean premise entered into his system—the will to live was destined to become the father, in a few years, of the will to power—but the Schopenhauerean conclusion held him no longer than it took him to inspect it calmly. Thus he gained doubly—first, by the acquisition of a definite theory of human conduct, one giving clarity to his own vague feelings, and secondly, by the reaction against an abject theory of human destiny, the very antithesis of that which rose within him.

And yet, for all his dissent, for all his instinctive revolt against the resignationism which overwhelmed him for an hour, Nietzsche nevertheless carried away with him, and kept throughout his life, some touch of Schopenhauer's distrust of the search for happiness. Nine years after his great discovery we find him quoting and approving his teacher's words: "A happy life is impossible; the highest thing that man can aspire to is a heroic life." And still later we find him thundering against "the green-grazing happiness of the herd." What is more, he gave his assent later on, though always more by fascination than by conviction, to the doctrine of eternal recurrence, the most hopeless idea, perhaps, ever formulated by man. But in all this a certain distinction is to be noted: Schopenhauer, despairing of the happy life, renounced even the heroic life, but Nietzsche never did anything of the sort. On the contrary, his whole philosophy is a protest against that very despair. The heroic life may not bring happiness, and it may even fail to bring good, but at all events it will shine gloriously in the light of its own heroism. In brief, high endeavor is an end in itself—nay, the noblest of all ends. The higher man does not work for a wage, not even for the wage of bliss: his reward is in the struggle, the danger, the aspiration. As for the happiness born of peace and love, of prosperity and tranquillity, that is for "shopkeepers, women, Englishmen and cows." The man who seeks it thereby confesses his incapacity for the loftier joys and hazards of the free spirit, and the man who wails because he cannot find it thereby confesses his unfitness to live in the world. "My formula for greatness," said Nietzsche toward the end of his life, "is amor fati ... not only to bear up under necessity, but to love it." Thus, borrowing Schopenhauer's pessimism, he turned it, in the end, into a defiant and irreconcilable optimism—not the slave optimism of hope, with its vain courting of gods, but the master optimism of courage.

So much for the larger of the direct influences upon Nietzsche's thinking. Scarcely less was the influence of that great revolution in man's view of man, that genuine "transvaluation of all values," set in motion by the publication of Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species," in 1859. In the chapter on Christianity I have sketched briefly the part that Nietzsche played in the matter, and have shown how it rested squarely upon the parts played by those who went before him. He himself was fond of attacking Darwin, whom he disliked as he disliked all Englishmen, and of denying that he had gotten anything of value out of Darwin's work, but it is not well to take such denunciations and denials too seriously. Like Ibsen, Nietzsche was often an unreliable witness as to his own intellectual obligations. So long as he dealt with ideas his thinking was frank and clear, but when he turned to the human beings behind them, and particularly when he discussed those who had presumed to approach the problems he undertook to solve himself, his incredible intolerance, jealousy, spitefulness and egomania, and his savage lust for bitter, useless and unmerciful strife, combined to make his statements dubious, and sometimes even absurd. Thus with his sneers at Darwin and the other evolutionists, especially Spencer. If he did not actually follow them, then he at least walked side by side with them, and every time they cleared another bit of the path he profited by it too. One thing, at all events, they gave to the world that entered into Nietzsche's final philosophy, and without which it would have stopped short of its ultimate development, and that was the conception of man as a mammal. Their great service to human knowledge was precisely this. They found man a loiterer at the gates of heaven, a courtier in the ante-chambers of gods. They brought him back to earth and bade him help himself.

Meanwhile, the reader who cares to go into the matter further will find Nietzsche elbowing other sages in a multitude of places. He himself has testified to his debt to Stendhal (Marie Henri Beyle), that great apologist for Napoleon Bonaparte and exponent of the Napoleonic philosophy. "Stendhal," he says, "was one of the happiest accidents of my life.... He is quite priceless, with his penetrating psychologist's eye and his grip upon facts, recalling that of the greatest of all masters of facts (ex ungue Napoleon—); and last, but not least, as an honest atheist—one of a species rare and hard to find in France.... Maybe I myself am jealous of Stendhal? He took from me the best of atheistic jokes, that I might best have made: 'the only excuse for God is that He doesn't exist.'"[9] Of his debt to Max Stirner the evidence is less clear, but it has been frequently alleged, and, as Dr. Mügge says, "quite a literature has grown up around the question." Stirner's chief work, "Der Einzige und sein Eigentum,"[10] was first published in 1844, the year of Nietzsche's birth, and in its strong plea for the emancipation of the individual there are many ideas and even phrases that were later voiced by Nietzsche. Dr. Mügge quotes a few of them: "What is good and what is evil? I myself am my own rule, and I am neither good nor evil. Neither word means anything to me.... Between the two vicissitudes of victory and defeat swings the fate of the struggle—master or slave!... Egoism, not love, must decide." Others will greet the reader of Stirner's book: "As long as you believe in the truth, you do not believe in yourself; you are a servant, a religious man. You alone are the truth.... Whether what I think and do is Christian, what do I care? Whether it is human, liberal, humane, whether unhuman, illiberal, unhumane, what do I ask about that? If only it accomplishes what I want, if only I satisfy myself in it, then overlay it with predicates if you will: it is all one to me...." But, as Dr. J. L. Walker well says, in his introduction to Mr. Byington's English translation, there is a considerable gulf between Stirner and Nietzsche, even here. The former's plea is for absolute liberty for all men, great and small. The latter is for liberty only in the higher castes: the chandala he would keep in chains. Therefore, if Nietzsche actually got anything from Stirner, it certainly did not enter unchanged into the ultimate structure of his system.

The other attempts to convict him of appropriating ideas come to little more. Dr. Mügge, for example, quotes these pre-Nietzschean passages from Heracleitus: "War is universal and right, and by strife all things arise and are made use of ... Good and evil are the same.... To me, one is worth ten thousand, if he be the best." And Mr. More quotes this from Hobbes: "In the first place, I put forth, for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only with death"—to which the reader may add, "Whatsoever is the object of any man's appetite or desire, that is it which he for his part calleth good ... for these words of good, evil and contemptible are ever used with relation to the person that useth them; there being nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any common rule of good and evil, to be taken for the nature of objects themselves."[11] But all these passages prove no more than that men of past ages saw the mutability of criteria, and their origin in human aspiration and striving. Not only Heracleitus, but many other Greeks, voiced that ethical scepticism. It was for many years, indeed, one of the dominant influences in Greek philosophy, and so, if Nietzsche is accused of borrowing it, that is no more than saying what I have already said: that he ate Greek grapes in his youth and became, to all intellectual intents and purposes, a Greek himself. A man must needs have a point of view, a manner of approach to life, and that point of view is no less authentic when he reaches it through his reading and by the exercise of a certain degree of free choice than when he accepts it unthinkingly from the folk about him. The service of Heracleitus and the other Greeks to Nietzsche was not that they gave him his philosophy, but that they made him a philosopher. It was the questions they asked rather than the answers they made that interested and stimulated him, and if, at times, he answered much as they had done, that was only proof of his genuine kinship with them.

On the artistic, as opposed to the analytical side, Nietzsche's most influential teacher, perhaps, was Goethe, the noblest intellectual figure of modern Germany, the common stammvater of all the warring schools of today—in Nietzsche's own phrase, "not only a good and great man, but a culture itself." His writings are full of praises of his hero, whom he began to read as a boy of eight or ten years. His grandmother, Frau Erdmuthe Nietzsche, was a sister to Dr. Krause, professor of divinity at Weimar in Goethe's day, and she lived in the town while the poet held his court there, and undoubtedly came into contact with him. Her mother, Frau Pastor Krause, was probably the Muthgen of Goethe's diary. But despite all this, she thought that "Faust" and "Elective Affinities" were "not fit for little boys" and so it remained for Judge Pindar, the father of one of young Nietzsche's Naumburg playmates, to conduct the initiation.[12] Thirty years afterward, Nietzsche gratefully acknowledged his debt to Herr Pindar, and his vastly greater debt to Goethe—"a thorough-going realist in the midst of an unreal age.... He did not sever himself from life, but entered into it. Undaunted, he took as much as possible to himself.... What he sought was totality."[13]

Nietzsche was also an extravagant admirer of Heinrich Heine, and tried to imitate that poet's "sweet and passionate music." "People will say some day," he declared, "that Heine and I were the greatest artists, by far, that ever wrote in German, and that we left the best any mere German[14] could do an incalculable distance behind us."[15] Another poet he greatly revered was Friedrich Hölderlin, a South German rhapsodist of the Goethe-Schiller period, who wrote odes in free rhythms and philosophical novels in gorgeous prose, and died the year before Nietzsche was born, after forty years of insanity. Karl Joel,[16] Dr. Mügge and other critics have sought to connect Nietzsche, through Hölderlin, with the romantic movement in Germany, but the truth is that both Nietzsche and Hölderlin, if they were romantics at all, were of the Greek school rather than the German. Certainly, nothing could be further from genuine German romanticism, with its sentimentality, its begging of questions and its booming patriotism, than the gospel of the superman. What Nietzsche undoubtedly got from the romantics was a feeling of ease in the German language, a disregard for the artificial bonds of the schools, a sense of hospitality to the gipsy phrase. In brief, they taught him how to write. But they certainly did not teach him what to write.

Even so, it is probable that he was as much influenced by certain Frenchmen as he ever was by Germans—particularly by Montaigne, La Bruyère, La Rochefoucauld, Fontenelle, Vauvenargues and Chamfort, his constant companions on his wanderings. He borrowed from them, not only the somewhat obvious device of putting his argument into the form of apothegms and epigrams, but also their conception of the dialectic as one of the fine arts—in other words, their striving after style. "It is to a small number of French authors," he once said, "that I return again and again. I believe only in French culture, and regard all that is called culture elsewhere in Europe, especially in Germany, as mere misunderstanding.... The few persons of higher culture that I have met in Germany have had French training—above all, Frau Cosima Wagner, by long odds the best authority on questions of taste I ever heard of."[17] This preference carried him so far, indeed, that he usually wrote more like a Frenchman than like a German, toying with words, experimenting with their combinations, matching them as carefully as pearls for a necklace. "Nietzsche," says one critic,[18] "whether for good or evil, introduced Romance (not romantic!) qualities of terseness and clearness into German prose; it was his endeavor to free it from those elements which he described as deutsch und schwer." (German and heavy.)

For the rest, he denounced Klopstock, Herder, Wieland, Lessing and Schiller, the remaining gods in Germany's literary valhalla, even more bitterly than he denounced Kant and Hegel, the giants of orthodox German philosophy.

II

NIETZSCHE AND HIS CRITICS

Let us set aside at the start that great host of critics whose chief objection to Nietzsche is that he is blasphemous, that his philosophy and his manner outrage the piety and prudery of the world. Of such sort are the pale parsons who arise in suburban pulpits to dispose of him in the half hour between the first and second lessons, as their predecessors of the 70's and 80's disposed of Darwin, Huxley and Spencer. Let them read their indictments and bring in their verdicts and pronounce their bitter sentences! The student of Nietzsche must perceive at once the irrelevance of that sort of criticism. It was the deliberate effort of the philosopher, from the very start of what he calls his tunnelling period, to provoke and deserve the accusation of sacrilege. In framing his accusations against Christian morality he tried to make them, not only persuasive and just, but also as offensive as possible. No man ever had more belief in the propagandist value of a succès de scandale. He tried his best to shock the guardians of the sacred vessels, to force upon them the burdens of an active defense, to bring them out into the open, to attract attention to the combat by accentuating its mere fuming and fury. If he succeeded in the effort, if he really outraged Christendom, then it is certainly absurd to bring forward that deliberate achievement as an exhibit against itself.

The more pertinent and plausible criticisms of Nietzsche, launched against him in Europe and America by many industrious foes, may be reduced for convenience to five fundamental propositions, to wit:

(a) He was a decadent and a lunatic, and in consequence his philosophy is not worthy of attention.

(b) His writings are chaotic and contradictory and it is impossible to find in them any connected philosophical system.

(c) His argument that self-sacrifice costs more than it yields, and that it thus reduces the average fitness of a race practising it, is contradicted by human experience.

(d) The scheme of things proposed by him is opposed by ideas inherent in all civilized men.

(e) Even admitting that his criticism of Christian morality is well-founded, he offers nothing in place of it that would work as well.

It is scarcely worth while to linger over the first and second of these propositions. The first has been defended most speciously by Max Nordau, in "Degeneration," a book which made as much noise, when it was first published in 1893, as any of Nietzsche's own. Nordau's argument is based upon a theory of degeneration borrowed quite frankly from Cesare Lombroso, an Italian quasi-scientist whose modest contributions to psychiatry were offset by many volumes of rubbish about spooks, table-tapping, mental telepathy, spirit photography and the alleged stigmata of criminals and men of genius. Degeneracy and decadence were terms that filled the public imagination in the 80's and 90's, and even Nietzsche himself seemed to think, at times, that they had definite meanings and that his own type of mind was degenerate. As Nordau defines degeneracy it is "a morbid deviation from the original type"—i.e. from the physical and mental norm of the species—and he lays stress upon the fact that by "morbid" he means "infirm" or "incapable of fulfilling normal functions." But straightway he begins to regard any deviation as morbid and degenerate, despite the obvious fact that it may be quite the reverse. He says, for example, that a man with web toes is a degenerate, and then proceeds to argue elaborately from that premise, entirely overlooking the fact that web toes, under easily imaginable circumstances, might be an advantage instead of a handicap, and that, under the ordinary conditions of life, we are unable to determine with any accuracy whether they are the one thing or the other. So with the symptoms of degeneracy that he discovers in Nietzsche. He shows that Nietzsche differed vastly from the average, every-day German of his time, and even from the average German of superior culture—that he thought differently, wrote differently, admired different heroes and believed in different gods—but he by no means proves thereby that Nietzsche's processes of thought were morbid or infirm, or that the conclusions he reached were invalid a priori. Since Nordau startled the world with his book, the Lombrosan theory of degeneracy has lost ground among psychologists and pathologists, but it is still launched against Nietzsche by an occasional critic, and so it deserves to be noticed.

Nordau's discussion of Nietzsche's insanity is rather more intelligent than his discussion of the philosopher's alleged degeneracy, if only because his facts are less open to dispute, but here, too, he forgets that the proof of an idea is not to be sought in the soundness of the man fathering it, but in the soundness of the idea itself. One asks of a pudding, not if the cook who offers it is a good woman, but if the pudding itself is good. Nordau, in attempting to dispose of Nietzsche's philosophy on the ground that the author died a madman, succeeds only in piling up a mass of uncontroverted but irrelevant accusations. He shows that Nietzsche was an utter believer in his own wisdom, that he had a fondness for repeating certain favorite arguments ad nauseam, that he was violently impatient of criticism, that he chronically underestimated the man opposed to him, that he sometimes indulged in blasphemy for the sheer joy of shocking folks, and that he was often hypnotized by the exuberance of his own verbosity, but it must be plain that this indictment has its effective answer in the fact that it might be found with equal justice against almost any revolutionary enthusiast one selected at random—for example, Savonarola, Tolstoi, Luther, Ibsen, Garrison, Phillips, Wilkes, Bakúnin, Marx, or Nordau himself. That Nietzsche died insane is undoubted, and that his insanity was not sudden in its onset is also plain, and one may even admit frankly that it is visible, here and there, in his writings, particularly those of his last year or two; but that his principal doctrines, the ideas upon which his fame are based, are the fantasies of a maniac is certainly wholly false. Had he sought to prove that cows had wings, it might be fair today to dismiss him as Nordau attempts to dismiss him. But when he essayed to prove that Christianity impeded progress, he laid down a proposition that, whatever its novelty and daring, was obviously not irrational, and neither was there anything irrational in the reasoning whereby he supported it. One need go no further for proof of this than the fact that multitudes of sane men, while he lived and since his death, have debated that proposition in all seriousness and found a plentiful food for sober thought in Nietzsche's statement and defense of it. Ibsen also passed out of life in mental darkness, and so did Schumann, but no reasonable critic would seek thereby to deny all intelligibility to "Peer Gynt" or to the piano quintet in E flat.

Again, it is Nordau who chiefly voices the second of the objections noted at the beginning of this chapter, though here many another self-confessed serpent of wisdom follows him. Nietzsche, he says, tore down without building up, and died without having formulated any workable substitute for the Christian morality he denounced. Even to the reader who has got no further into Nietzsche than the preceding chapters of this book, the absurdity of such a charge must be manifest without argument. No man, indeed, ever left a more comprehensive system of ethics, not even Comte or Herbert Spencer, and if it be true that he scattered it through a dozen books and that he occasionally modified it in some of its details, it is equally true that his fundamental principles were always stated with perfect clearness and that they remained substantially unchanged from first to last. But even supposing that he had died before he had arranged his ideas in a connected and coherent form, and that it had remained for his disciples to deduce and group his final conclusions, and to rid the whole of inconsistency—even then it would have been possible to study those conclusions seriously and to accept them for what they were worth. Nordau lays it down as an axiom that a man cannot be a reformer unless he proposes some ready-made and perfectly symmetrical scheme of things to take the place of the notions he seeks to overturn, that if he does not do this he is a mere hurler of bricks and shouter of blasphemies. But all of us know that this is not true. Nearly every considerable reform the world knows has been accomplished, not by one man, but by many men working in series. It seldom happens, indeed, that the man who first points out the necessity for change lives long enough to see that change accomplished, or even to define its precise manner and terms. Nietzsche himself was not the first critic of Christian morality, nor did he so far dispose of the question that he left no room for successors. But he made a larger contribution to it than any man had ever made before him, and the ideas he contributed were so acute and so convincing that they must needs be taken into account by every critic who comes after him.

So much for the first two arguments against the prophet of the superman. Both raise immaterial objections and the second makes an allegation that is grotesquely untrue. The other three are founded upon sounder logic, and, when maintained skillfully, afford more reasonable ground for objecting to the Nietzschean system, either as a whole or in part. It would be interesting, perhaps, to attempt a complete review of the literature embodying them, but that would take a great deal more space than is here available, and so we must be content with a glance at a few typical efforts at refutation. One of the most familiar of these appears in the argument that the messianic obligation of self-sacrifice, whatever its cost, has yet yielded the race a large profit—that we are the better for our Christian charity and that we owe it entirely to Christianity. This argument has been best put forward, perhaps, by Bennett Hume, an Englishman. If it were not for Christian charity, says Mr. Hume, there would be no hospitals and asylums for the sick and insane, and in consequence, no concerted and effective effort to make man more healthy and efficient. Therefore, he maintains, it must be admitted that the influence of Christianity, as a moral system, has been for the good of the race. But this argument, in inspection, quickly goes to pieces, and for two reasons. In the first place, it must be obvious that the advantages of preserving the unfit, few of whom ever become wholly fit again, are more than dubious; and in the second place, it must be plain that modern humanitarianism, in so far as it is scientific and unsentimental and hence profitable, is so little a purely Christian idea that the Christian church, even down to our own time, has actually opposed it. No man, indeed, can read Dr. Andrew D. White's great history of the warfare between science and the church without carrying away the conviction that such great boons as the conquest of smallpox and malaria, the development of surgery, the improved treatment of the insane, and the general lowering of the death rate have been brought about, not by the maudlin alms-giving of Christian priests, but by the intelligent meliorism of rebels against a blind faith, ruthless in their ways and means but stupendously successful in their achievement.

Another critic, this time a Frenchman, Alfred Fouillée by name,[1] chooses as his point of attack the Nietzschean doctrine that a struggle is welcome and beneficial to the strong, that intelligent self-seeking, accompanied by a certain willingness to take risks, is the road of progress. A struggle, argues M. Fouillée, always means an expenditure of strength, and strength, when so expended, is further weakened by the opposing strength it arouses and stimulates. Darwin is summoned from his tomb to substantiate this argument, but its exponent seems to forget (while actually stating it!) the familiar physiological axiom, so often turned to by Darwin, that strength is one of the effects of use, and the Darwinian corollary that disuse, whether produced by organized protection or in some other way, leads inevitably to weakness and atrophy. In other words, the ideal strong man of M. Fouillée's dream is one who seeks, with great enthusiasm, the readiest possible way of ridding himself of his strength.

Nordau, Violet Paget and various other critics attack Nietzsche from much the same side. That is to say, they endeavor to controvert his criticism of humility and self-sacrifice and to show that the law of natural selection, with its insistence that only the fittest shall survive, is insufficient to insure human progress. Miss Paget, for example,[2] argues that if there were no belief in every man's duty to yield something to his weaker brother the race would soon become a herd of mere wild beasts. She sees humility as a sort of brake or governor, placed upon humanity to keep it from running amuck. A human being is so constituted, she says, that he necessarily looms in his own view as large as all the rest of the world put together. This distortion of values is met with in the consciousness of every individual, and if there were nothing to oppose it, it would lead to a hopeless conflict between exaggerated egos. Humility, says Miss Paget, tempers the conflict, without wholly ending it. A man's inherent tendency to magnify his own importance and to invite death by trying to force that view upon others is held in check by the idea that it is his duty to consider the welfare of those others. The objection to all this is that the picture of humility Miss Paget draws is not at all a picture of self-sacrifice, of something founded upon an unselfish idea of duty, but a picture of highly intelligent egoism. Whatever his pharisaical account of his motives, it must be obvious that her Christian gentleman is merely a man who throws bones to the dogs about him. Between such wise prudence and the immolation of the Beatitudes a wide gulf is fixed. As a matter of fact, that prudence is certainly not opposed by Nietzsche. The higher man of his visions is far from a mere brawler. He is not afraid of an open fight, and he is never held back by fear of hurting his antagonist, but he also understands that there are times for truce and guile. In brief, his self-seeking is conducted, not alone by his fists, but also by his head. He knows when to pounce upon his foes and rivals, but he also knows when to keep them from pouncing upon him. Thus Miss Paget's somewhat elaborate refutation, though it leads to an undoubtedly sound conclusion, by no means disposes of Nietzsche.

The other branches of the argument that self-sacrifice is beneficial open an endless field of debate, in which the same set of facts is often susceptible of diametrically opposite interpretations. We have already glanced at the alleged effects of Christian charity upon progress, and observed the enormous difference between sentimental efforts to preserve the unfit and intelligent efforts to make them fit, and we have seen how practical Christianity, whatever its theoretical effects, has had the actual effect of furthering the former and hindering the latter. It is often argued that there is unfairness in thus burdening the creed with the crimes of the church, but how the two are to be separated is never explained. What sounder test of a creed's essential value can we imagine than that of its visible influence upon the men who subscribe to it? And what sounder test of its terms than the statement of its ordained teachers and interpreters, supported by the unanimous approval of all who profess it? We are here dealing, let it be remembered, not with esoteric doctrines, but with practical doctrines—that is to say, with working policies. If the Christian ideal of charity is to be defended as a working policy, then it is certainly fair to examine it at work. And when that is done the reflective observer is almost certain to conclude that it is opposed to true progress, that it acts as a sentimental shield to the unfit without helping them in the slightest to shake off their unfitness. What is more, it stands contrary to that wise forethought which sacrifices one man today that ten may be saved tomorrow. Nothing could be more patent, indeed, than the high cost to humanity of the Christian teaching that it is immoral to seek the truth outside the Word of God, or to take thought of an earthly tomorrow, or to draw distinctions in value between beings who all possess souls of infinite, and therefore of exactly equal preciousness.

But setting aside the doctrine that self-sacrifice is a religious duty, there remains the doctrine that it is a measure of expediency, that when the strong help the weak they also help themselves. Let it be said at once that this second doctrine, provided only it be applied intelligently and without any admixture of sentimentality, is not in opposition to anything in Nietzsche's philosophy. On the contrary, he is at pains to point out the value of exploiting the inefficient masses, and obviously that exploitation is impossible without some concession to their habits and desires, some offer, however fraudulent, of a quid pro quo—and unprofitable unless they can be made to yield more than they absorb. For one thing, there is the business of keeping the lower castes in health. They themselves are too ignorant and lazy to manage it, and therefore it must be managed by their betters. When we appropriate money from the public funds to pay for vaccinating a horde of negroes, we do not do it because we have any sympathy for them or because we crave their blessings, but simply because we don't want them to be falling ill of smallpox in our kitchens and stables, to the peril of our own health and the neglect of our necessary drudgery.[3] In so far as the negroes have any voice in the matter at all, they protest against vaccination, for they can't understand its theory and so they see only its tyranny, but we vaccinate them nevertheless, and thus increase their mass efficiency in spite of them. It costs something to do the work, but we see a profit in it. Here we have a good example of self-sacrifice based frankly upon expediency, and Nietzsche has nothing to say against it.

But what he does insist upon is that we must beware of mixing sentimentality with the business, that we must keep the idea of expediency clear of any idea of altruism. The trouble with the world, as he describes it, is that such a corruption almost always takes place. That is to say, we too often practise charity, not because it is worth while, but merely because it is pleasant. The Christian ideal, he says, "knows how to enrapture." Starting out from the safe premise, approved by human experience, that it is sometimes a virtue—i.e., a measure of intelligent prudence—to help the weak, we proceed to the illogical conclusion that it is always a virtue. Hence our wholesale coddling of the unfit, our enormous expenditure upon vain schemes of amelioration, our vain efforts to combat the laws of nature. We nurse the defective children of the lower classes into some appearance of health, and then turn them out to beget their kind. We parole the pickpocket, launch him upon society with a tract in his hand—and lose our pocket-books next day. We send missionaries to the heathen, build hospitals for them, civilize and educate them—and later on have to fight them. We save a pauper consumptive today, on the ostensible theory that he is more valuable saved than dead—and so open the way for saving his innumerable grandchildren in the future. In brief, our self-sacrifice of expediency seldom remains undefiled. Nine times out of ten a sentimental color quickly overcomes it, and soon or late there is apt to be more sentimentality in it than expediency.

What is worse, this sentimentalism results in attaching a sort of romantic glamour to its objects. Just as the Sunday-school teaching virgin, beginning by trying to save the Chinese laundryman's soul, commonly ends by falling in love with him, so the virtuoso of any other sort of charity commonly ends by endowing its beneficiary with a variety of imaginary virtues. Sympathy, by some subtle alchemy, is converted into a sneaking admiration. "Blessed are the poor in spirit" becomes "Blessed are the poor." This exaltation of inefficiency, it must be manifest, is a dangerous error. There is, in fact, nothing at all honorable about unfitness, considered in the mass. On the contrary, it is invariably a symptom of actual dishonor—of neglect, laziness, ignorance and depravity—if not primarily in the individual himself, then at least in his forebears, whose weakness he carries on. It is highly important that this fact should be kept in mind by the human race, that the essential inferiority of the inefficient should be insisted upon, that the penalties of deliberate slackness should be swift and merciless. But as it is, those penalties are too often reduced to nothing by charity, while the offense they should punish is elevated to a fictitious martyrdom. Thus we have charity converted into an instrument of debauchery. Thus we have it playing the part of an active agent of decay, and so increasing the hazards of life on earth. "We may compare civilized man," says Sir Ray Lankester,[4] "to a successful rebel against nature, who by every step forward renders himself liable to greater and greater penalties." No need to offer cases in point. Every one of us knows what the Poor Laws of England have accomplished in a hundred years—how they have multiplied misery enormously and created a caste of professional paupers—how they have seduced that caste downward into depths of degradation untouched by any other civilized race in history—and how, by hanging the crushing burden of that caste about the necks of the English people, they have helped to weaken and sicken the whole stock and to imperil the future of the nation.

So much for the utility of self-sacrifice—undeniable, perhaps, so long as a wise and ruthless foresight rules, but immediately questionable when sentimentality enters into the matter. There remains the answer in rebuttal that sentimentality, after all, is native to the soul of man, that we couldn't get rid of it if we tried. Herein, if we look closely, we will observe tracks of an idea that has colored the whole stream of human thought since the dawn of Western philosophy, and is accepted today, as irrefutably true, by all who pound pulpits and wave their arms and call upon their fellow men to repent. It has clogged all ethical inquiry for two thousand years, it has been a premise in a million moral syllogisms, it has survived the assaults of all the iconoclasts that ever lived. It is taught in all our schools today and lies at the bottom of all our laws, prophecies and revelations. It is the foundation and cornerstone, not only of Christianity, but also of every other compound of theology and morality known in the world. And what is this king of all axioms and emperor of all fallacies? Simply the idea that there are rules of "natural morality" engraven indelibly upon the hearts of man—that all men, at all times and everywhere, have ever agreed, do now agree and will agree forevermore, unanimously and without reservation, that certain things are right and certain other things are wrong, that certain things are nice and certain other things are not nice, that certain things are pleasing to God and certain other things are offensive to God.

In every treatise upon Christian ethics and "natural theology," so called, you will find these rules of "natural morality" in the first chapter. Thomas Aquinas called them "the eternal law." Even the Greeks and Romans, for all their skepticism in morals, had a sneaking belief in them. Aristotle tried to formulate them and the Latin lawyers constantly assumed their existence. Most of them are held in firm faith today by all save a small minority of the folk of Christendom. The most familiar of them, perhaps, is the rule against murder—the sixth commandment. Another is the rule against the violation of property in goods, wives and cattle—the eighth and tenth commandments. A third is the rule upon which the solidity of the family is based, and with it the solidity of the tribe—the fifth commandment. The theory behind these rules is, not only that they are wise, but that they are innate and sempiternal, that every truly enlightened man recognizes their validity intuitively, and is conscious of sin when he breaks them. To them Christianity added an eleventh commandment, a sort of infinite extension of the fifth, "that ye love one another"[5]—and in two thousand years it has been converted from a novelty into a universality. That is to say, its point of definite origin has been lost sight of, and it has been moved over into the group of "natural virtues," of "eternal laws." When Christ first voiced it, in his discourse at the Last Supper, it was so far from general acceptance that he named a belief in it as one of the distinguishing marks of his disciples, but now our moralists tell us that it is in the blood of all of us, and that we couldn't repudiate it if we would. Brotherhood, indeed, is the very soul of Christianity, and the only effort of the pious today is to raise it from a universal theory to a universal fact.

But the truth is, of course, that it is not universal at all, and that nothing in the so-called soul of man prompts him to subscribe to it. We cling to it today, not because it is inherent in us, but simply because it is the moral fashion of our age. When the disciples first heard it put into terms, it probably struck them as a revolutionary novelty, and on some dim tomorrow our descendants may regard it as an archaic absurdity. In brief, rules of morality are wholly temporal and temporary, for the good and sufficient reason that there is no "natural morality" in man—and the sentimental rule that the strong shall give of their strength to the weak is no exception. There have been times in the history of the race when few, if any intelligent men subscribed to it, and there are thousands of intelligent men who refuse to subscribe to it today, and no doubt there will come a time when those who are against it will once more greatly outnumber those who are in favor of it. So with all other "eternal laws." Their eternality exists only in the imagination of those who seek to glorify them. Nietzsche himself spent his best years demonstrating this, and we have seen how he set about the task—how he showed that the "good" of one race and age was the "bad" of some other race and age—how the "natural morality" of the Periclean Greeks, for example, differed diametrically from the "natural morality" of the captive Jews. All history bears him out. Mankind is ever revising and abandoning its "inherent" ideas. We say today that the human mind instinctively revolts against cruel punishments, and yet a moment's reflection recalls the fact that the world is, and always has been peopled by millions to whom cruelty, not only to enemies but to the weak in general, seems and has seemed wholly natural and agreeable. We say that man has an "innate" impulse to be fair and just, and yet it is a commonplace observation that multitudes of men, in the midst of our most civilized societies, have little more sense of justice than so many jackals. Therefore, we may safely set aside the argument that a "natural" instinct for sentimental self-sacrifice stands as an impassable barrier to Nietzsche's dionysian philosophy. There is no such barrier. There is no such instinct. It is an idea merely—an idea powerful and persistent, but still mutable and mortal. Certainly, it is absurd to plead it in proof against the one man who did most to establish its mutability.

We come now to the final argument against Nietzsche—the argument, to wit, that, even admitting his criticism of Christian morality to be well-founded, he offers nothing in place of it that would serve the world as well. The principal spokesman of this objection, perhaps, is Paul Elmer More, who sets it forth at some length in his hostile but very ingenious little study of Nietzsche.[6] Mr. More goes back to Locke to show the growth of the two ideas which stand opposed as Socialism and individualism, Christianity and Nietzscheism today. So long, he says, as man believed in revelation, there was no genuine effort to get at the springs of human action, for every impulse that was ratified by the Scriptures was believed to be natural and moral, and every impulse that went counter to the Scriptures was believed to be sinful, even by those who yielded to it habitually. But when that idea was cleared away, there arose a need for something to take its place, and Locke came forward with his theory that the notion of good was founded upon sensations of pleasure and that of bad upon sensations of pain. There followed Hume, with his elaborate effort to prove that sympathy was a source of pleasure, by reason of its grateful tickling of the sense of virtue, and so the new conception of good finally stood erect, with one foot on frank self-interest and the other on sympathy. Mr. More shows how, during the century following, the importance of the second of these factors began to be accentuated, under the influence of Rousseau and his followers, and how, in the end, the first was forgotten almost entirely and there arose a non-Christian sentimentality which was worse, if anything, than the sentimentality of the Beatitudes. In England, France and Germany it colored almost the whole of philosophy, literature and politics. Stray men, true enough, raised their voices against it, but its sweep was irresistible. Its fruits were diverse and memorable—the romantic movement in Germany, humanitarianism in England, the Kantian note in ethics, and, most important of all, Socialism.

That this exaltation of sympathy was imprudent, and that its effects, in our own time, are far from satisfactory, Mr. More is disposed to grant freely. It is perfectly true, as Nietzsche argues, that humanitarianism has been guilty of gross excesses, that there is a "danger that threatens true progress in any system of education and government which makes the advantage of the average rather than the distinguished man its chief object." But Mr. More holds that the danger thus inherent in sympathy is matched by a danger inherent in selfishness, that we are no worse off on one horn of Hume's dual ethic than we should be on the other. Sympathy unbalanced by self-seeking leads us into maudlin futilities and crimes against efficiency; self-seeking unchecked by sympathy would lead us into sheer savagery. If there is any choice between the two, that choice is probably in favor of sympathy, for the reason that it is happily impossible of realization. The most lachrymose of the romantics, in the midst of their sentimentalizing, were yet careful of their own welfare. Many of them, indeed, displayed a quite extraordinary egoism, and there was some justice in Byron's sneer that Sterne, for one, preferred weeping over a dead ass to relieving the want (at cost to himself) of a living mother.

But in urging all this against Nietzsche, Mr. More and the other destructive critics of the superman make a serious error, and that is the error of assuming that Nietzsche hoped to abolish Christian morality completely, that he proposed a unanimous desertion of the idea of sympathy for the idea of intelligent self-seeking. As a matter of fact, he had no such hope and made no such proposal. Nothing was more firmly fixed in his mind, indeed, than the notion that the vast majority of men would cling indefinitely, and perhaps for all time, to some system of morality more or less resembling the Christian morality of today. Not only did he have no expectation of winning that majority from its idols, but he bitterly resented any suggestion that such a result might follow from his work. The whole of his preaching was addressed, not to men in the mass, but to the small minority of exceptional men—not to those who live by obeying, but to those who live by commanding—not to the race as a race, but only to its masters. It would seem to be impossible that any reader of Nietzsche should overlook this important fact, and yet it is constantly overlooked by most of his critics. They proceed to prove, elaborately and, it must be said, quite convincingly, that if his transvaluation of values were made by all men, the world would be no better off than it is today, and perhaps a good deal worse, but all they accomplish thereby is to demolish a hobgoblin of straw. Nietzsche himself sensed the essential value of Hume's dualism. What he sought to do was not to destroy it, but to restore it, and, restoring it, to raise it to a state of active conflict—to dignify self-interest as sympathy has been dignified, and so to put the two in perpetual opposition. He believed that the former was by long odds the safer impulse for the higher castes of men to follow, if only because of its obviously closer kinship to the natural laws which make for progress upward, but by the same token he saw that these higher castes could gain nothing by disturbing the narcotic contentment of the castes lower down. Therefore, he was, to that extent, an actual apologist for the thing he elsewhere so bitterly attacked. Sympathy, self-sacrifice, charity—these ideas lulled and satisfied the chandala, and so he was content to have the chandala hold to them. "Whom do I hate most among the rabble of today? The Socialist who undermines the workingman's instincts, who destroys his satisfaction with his insignificant existence, who makes him envious and teaches him revenge."[7] In brief, Nietzsche dreamed no dream of all mankind converted into a race of supermen: the only vision he saw was one of supermen at the top.

To make an end, his philosophy was wholly aristocratic, in aim as well as in terms. He believed that superior men, by which he meant alert and restless men, were held in chains by the illusions and inertia of the mass—that their impulse to move forward and upward, at whatever cost to those below, was restrained by false notions of duty and responsibility. It was his effort to break down those false notions, to show that the progress of the race was more important than the comfort of the herd, to combat and destroy the lingering spectre of sin—in his own phrase, to make man innocent. But when he said man he always meant the higher man, the man of tomorrow, and not mere men. For the latter he had only contempt: he sneered at their heroes, at their ideals, at their definitions of good and evil. "There are only three ways," he said, "in which the masses appear to me to deserve a glance: first, as blurred copies of their betters, printed on bad paper and from worn-out plates; secondly, as a necessary opposition; and thirdly, as tools. Further than that I hand them over to statistics—and the devil.[8] ... I am writing for a race of men which does not yet exist. I am writing for the lords of the earth."[9]

HOW TO STUDY NIETZSCHE

Through the diligence and enthusiasm of Dr. Oscar Levy, author of "The Revival of Aristocracy," a German by birth but for some time a resident of London, the whole canon of Nietzsche's writings is now to be had in English translation. So long ago as 1896 a complete edition in eleven volumes was projected, and Dr. Alexander Tille, lecturer on German in the University of Glasgow, and author of "Von Darwin bis Nietzsche," was engaged to edit it. But though it started fairly with a volume including "The Case of Wagner" and "The Antichrist," and four more volumes followed after a year or so, it got no further than that. Ten years later came Dr. Levy. He met with little encouragement when he began, but by dint of unfailing perseverance he finally gathered about him a corps of competent translators, made arrangements with publishers in Great Britain and the United States, and got the work under way. His eighteenth and last volume was published early in 1913.

These translations, in the main, are excellent, and explanatory prefaces and notes are added wherever needed. The contents of the various volumes are as follows:

I. "The Birth of Tragedy," translated by Wm. A. Haussmann, Ph. D., with a biographical introduction by Frau Förster-Nietzsche, a portrait of Nietzsche, and a facsimile of his manuscript.

II. "Early Greek Philosophy and Other Essays," translated by Maximilian A. Mügge, Ph. D., author of "Friedrich Nietzsche: His Life and Work." Contents: "The Greek Woman," "On Music and Words," "Homer's Contest," "The Relation of Schopenhauer's Philosophy to a German Culture," "Philosophy During the Tragic Age of the Greeks," and "On Truth and Falsity in Their Ultramoral Sense."

III. "On the Future of Our Educational Institutions" and "Homer and Classical Philology," translated by J. M. Kennedy, author of "The Quintessence of Nietzsche," with an introduction by the translator.

IV. "Thoughts Out of Season," I ("David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer" and "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth"), translated by Anthony M. Ludovici, author of "Nietzsche: His Life and Works," "Nietzsche and Art," and "Who is to be Master of the World?" with an introduction by Dr. Levy and a preface by the translator.

V. "Thoughts Out of Season," II ("The Use and Abuse of History" and "Schopenhauer as Educator"), translated by Adrian Collins, M. A., with an introduction by the translator.

VI. "Human All-Too Human," I, translated by Helen Zimmern, with an introduction by J. M. Kennedy.

VII. "Human All-Too Human," II, translated by Paul V. Cohn, B. A., with an introduction by the translator.

VIII. "The Case of Wagner" (including "Nietzsche contra Wagner" and selected aphorisms), translated by A. M. Ludovici, and "We Philologists," translated by J. M. Kennedy, with prefaces by the translators.

IX. "The Dawn of Day," translated by J. M. Kennedy, with an introduction by the translator.

X. "The Joyful Wisdom," translated by Thomas Common, author of "Nietzsche as Critic, Philosopher, Poet and Prophet" (including "Songs of Prince Free-as-a-Bird," translated by Paul V. Cohn and Maude D. Petre).

XI. "Thus Spake Zarathustra," translated by Thomas Common, with an introduction by Frau Förster-Nietzsche and explanatory notes by A. M. Ludovici.

XII. "Beyond Good and Evil," translated by Helen Zimmern, with an introduction by Thomas Common.

XIII. "The Genealogy of Morals," translated by Horace B. Samuel, M. A., and "People and Countries," translated by J. M. Kennedy, with an editor's note by Dr. Levy.

XIV. "The Will to Power," I, translated by A. M. Ludovici, with a preface by the translator.

XV. "The Will to Power," II, translated by A. M. Ludovici, with a preface by the translator.

XVI. "The Twilight of the Idols" (including "The Antichrist," "Eternal Recurrence" and explanatory notes to "Thus Spake Zarathustra"), translated by A. M. Ludovici, with a preface by the translator.

XVII. "Ecce Homo," translated by A. M. Ludovici; various songs, epigrams and dithyrambs, translated by Paul V. Cohn, Herman Scheffauer, Francis Bickley and Dr. G. T. Wrench; and the music of Nietzsche's "Hymn to Life" (words by Lou Salomé), with an introduction by Mr. Ludovici, a note to the poetry by Dr. Levy, and a reproduction of Karl Donndorf's bust of Nietzsche.

XVIII. Index.

The student who would read Nietzsche had better begin with one of the aphoristic books, preferably "The Dawn of Day." From that let him proceed to "Beyond Good and Evil," "The Genealogy of Morals" and "The Antichrist." He will then be ready to understand "Thus Spake Zarathustra." Later on he may read "Ecce Homo" and dip into "The Joyful Wisdom," "Human All-Too Human" and "The Will to Power," as his fancy suggests. The Wagner pamphlets are of more importance to Wagnerians than to students of Nietzsche's ideas, and the early philological and critical essays have lost much of their interest by the passage of time. Nietzsche's poetry had better be avoided by all who cannot read it in the original German. The English translations are mostly very free and seldom satisfactory.

Of the larger Nietzschean commentaries in English the best is "Friedrich Nietzsche: His Life and Work," by M. A. Mügge. Appended to it is a bibliography of 850 titles—striking evidence of the attention that Nietzsche's ideas have gained in the world. Other books that will be found useful are "The Quintessence of Nietzsche," by J. M. Kennedy; "Nietzsche: His Life and Works," by Anthony M. Ludovici; "The Gospel of Superman," by Henri Lichtenberger, translated from the French by J. M. Kennedy; "The Philosophy of Nietzsche," by Georges Chatterton-Hill, and "The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche," by Grace Neal Dolson, Ph. D., this last a pioneer work of permanent value. Lesser studies are to be found in "Friedrich Nietzsche," by A. R. Orage; "Nietzsche as Critic, Philosopher, Poet and Prophet," by Thomas Common; "Friedrich Nietzsche and His New Gospel," by Emily S. Hamblen, and "Nietzsche," by Paul Elmer More. Interesting discussions of various Nietzschean ideas are in "The Revival of Aristocracy," by Dr. Oscar Levy; "Who is to be Master of the World?" by A. M. Ludovici; "On the Tracks of Life," by Leo G. Sera, translated from the Italian by J. M. Kennedy; "Nietzsche and Art," by A. M. Ludovici, and "The Mastery of Life," by G. T. Wrench. Selections from Nietzsche's writings are put together under subject headings in "Nietzsche in Outline and Aphorism," by A. R. Orage; "Nietzsche: His Maxims," by J. M. Kennedy, and "The Gist of Nietzsche," by H. L. Mencken. An elaborate and invaluable summary of all Nietzsche's writings, book by book, is to be found in "What Nietzsche Taught," by Willard H. Wright. This volume, the fruit of very diligent labor, is admirably concise and well-ordered.

The standard biography of Nietzsche is "Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsches" by Frau Förster-Nietzsche, a large work in three volumes. In 1911 Frau Förster-Nietzsche prepared a shorter version and this has since been done into English by A. M. Ludovici, and published in two volumes, under the title of "The Life of Nietzsche." Unluckily, so devoted a sister was not the best person to deal with certain episodes in the life of her brother and hero. The gaps she left and the ameliorations she attempted are filled and corrected in "The Life of Friedrich Nietzsche," by Daniel Halévy, translated from the French by J. M. Hone, with an extraordinarily brilliant introduction by T. M. Kettle, M. P.

Small but suggestive studies of Nietzsche and his ideas are to be found in "Egoists," "Mezzotints in Modern Music," and "The Pathos of Distance," by James Huneker; "Degeneration," by Max Nordau; "Affirmations," by Havelock Ellis; "Aristocracy and Evolution," by W. H. Mallock; "Heretics" and "Orthodoxy," by G. K. Chesterton; "Lectures and Essays on Natural Theology," by William Wallace; "Heralds of Revolt," by William Barry, D. D.; "Essays in Sociology," by J. M. Robertson; "The Larger Aspects of Socialism," by William English Walling; "Three Modern Seers," by Mrs. Havelock Ellis; "Slaves to Duty," by J. Badcock; "In Peril of Change," by C. F. G. Masterman; "Man's Place in the Cosmos," by A. Seth Pringle Pattison; and "Gospels of Anarchy," by Vernon Lee (Violet Paget). George Bernard Shaw's variations upon Nietzschean themes are in "The Revolutionist's Handbook," appended to "Man and Superman." Of magazine articles dealing with the prophet of the superman there has been no end of late. Most of them are worthless, but any bearing the name of Grace Neal Dolson, Thomas Common, Thomas Stockham Baker or Maude D. Petre may be read with profit. One of the best discussions of Nietzsche I have ever encountered was contributed to the Catholic World during December, 1905, and January, February, March, May and June, 1906, by Miss Petre. It is to be regretted that these excellent papers, which sought to rescue Nietzsche from the misunderstandings of Christian critics, have not been re-printed in book-form.

INDEX Adieu, I Must Go!, patriotic song, 55. Amor fati, 260. Anarchism, 98-99, 192, 196, 197, 200. Andreas-Salomé, see Salomé. Antichrist, The— Publication of, 47. Quotations from, 64, 77, 102, 127, 133, 135, 138, 154, 158, 164, 169, 289. Style of, 55. English translation of, 292. Apollo— First conception of, 25, 257. God of music and poetry, 67. Influence of, 67, 74. Conflict with Dionysus, 68 et seq. Aquinas, Thomas, 282. Arcelaus, 256. Aristocracy, 73, 102, 163-164, 166 et seq., 195, 240, 289. Art for art's sake, 234-235. Asceticism, 21 footnote, 179, 214, 259. Atheism, 215, 262. Bacchus Dionysus— First conception of, 25, 257. Imported into Greece, 68. God of strenuous life, 68-69. Conflict with Apollo, 25, 69 et seq. Nietzsche a Dionysian, 26, 73. Bad, definition of, 101, 205. Badcock, J., 295. Baker, Thomas Stockham, 295. Balfour, A. J., 141. Barry, Wm., 295. Basel, University of— Nietzsche appointed prof., 22. Lectures on Greek drama, 24. In academic society, 27. Leave of absence, 38. Resigns professorship, 40. In asylum at, 48. Income at, 54. Beauty, the idea of, 234. Beer, Nietzsche's dislike of, 15. Beyle, Marie Henri, see Stendhal. Beyond Good and Evil— Publication of, 46. Quotations from, 84, 94, 102, 157. Argument of, 88-99. English translation of, 292. Beyond-man, see Higher man. Bible, Nietzsche's knowledge of, 7, 13. Bible, quotations from, 76, 110, 127, 129, 130, 283. Bickley, Francis, 292. Birth of Tragedy, The— Its genesis and publication, 24, 244. Doctrine of, 24-26, 63-73. Quotation from, 66. Revised, 24 footnote. English translation of, 291. Bizet's music, 173. Blake, William, 256. Blond beast, 112. Bonn, Nietzsche's career at, 13-15. Bradley, Henry, 83. Brandes, Georg, 48. Buddhism, 101. Burkhardt, Prof., 48. Butler, Samuel, 256. Callicles, 256. Castes, 163-164. Catholic World, 295. Celibacy, 179, 186, 214. Chamfort, 38, 266. Chandala, see Masses. Charity. 86, 136, 274, 281, 288. Chatterton-Hill, Georges, 293. Chesterton, G. K., 295. Chivalry, 186. Chloral, Nietzsche's use of, 52. Christian Science, 51, 101, 120. Christianity— Nietzsche's indictment of, 36, 126. Scientific revolt against, 128. Its dogmas examined, 129-131, 214. Free will vs. determinism, 130. Its slave-morality, 85-87, 88, 101, 133 et seq., 273. Charity, 136, 274-275, 281. Opposition to natural selection, 74, 133 et seq. Nietzsche's attack on self-sacrifice, 142. Origin of Christianity, 85-86, 145. Cohn, Paul V., 291. College, American, 224. Collins, Adrian, 291. Commercialism, 199. Common, Thomas, 53 footnote, 255, 293, 295. Comte, Auguste, 115, 124, 150, 256, 272. Conscience, the nature of, 212. Costume, 211 footnote. Cron, Bernard, see Gast. Crucifixion, the, 128. Culture, German, 35. Dancing, 175. Darwin, Charles, 37, 198, 255, 256, 261, 268, 275. David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer— Publication of, 30. Quotation from, 30-31. English translation of, 291. See also Strauss, David. Dawn of Day, The— Publication of, 42. Quotations from, 77, 95, 96, 172, 179, 182, 188, 201, 202-203 footnote, 206, 223, 231, 233, 237, 239, 241. English translation of, 292. Death— The right to die, 226-227. Regulation of, 169, 228. Attitude at, 228. Death of Nietzsche, 49. Decalogue, 80, 91, 202, 283. Degeneracy, Nietzsche's alleged, 270. Degeneration, Nordau's book, 269. Democracy, 193, 236. Descartes, 149. Desire, 180-182. Determinism, 130, 157, 161. Diderot, 255. Diogenes Laërtius, early essay on, 17. Dionysus, see Bacchus. Dionysus, the Philosophy of Eternal Recurrence, plan of proposed book, 47. Doctor of philosophy, 22. Dolson, Grace Neal, 293, 295. Donndorf, Karl, 292. Drama, Greek, 26, 65 et seq. Draper, J. W., 148. Dreams, 241. Dualism, 140, 288. Ecce Homo— Publication of, 48. Quotations from, 262, 266, 267. English translation of, 292. Education, perils of State aid, 32, 218. Egoism, Stirner's, 262-263. Elective Affinities, 265. Ellis, Havelock, 295. Ellis, Mrs. Havelock, 295. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 51. Empedocles, 256. Encyclopedists, French, 128. Engadine, summers in, 40, 45. English translation of Nietzsche, 290. Englishmen, 236, 260. Eternal recurrence— Origin of the idea, 118. Its fascinations for Nietzsche, 118. Effect on superman, 121. European, the good, 206. Eusebius, Pamphilius, 76 footnote. Evil, definition of, 205; see also Bad. Falckenberg, Richard, 148. Faust, 265. Fiske, John, 140. Fite, Warner, 203. Flaubert, Gustav, 256. Fontenelle, 38, 256, 266. Förster-Nietzsche, Elisabeth, Nietzsche's sister— Her biography of her brother, 6, 50-51, 294. Editor of his works, 47, 291. Marriage and widowhood, 40, 49. Relations with Nietzsche, 9, 42, 49, 59. Fouillée, Alfred, 255, 256, 275. Franco-Prussian war, service in, 23, 51, 55. Free spirit, 201. Free Spirit, The, plan of proposed book, 47. Free will, 130, 160-161. Freedom, 235. Friedrich Wilhelm IV., 5. Gast, Peter, 38, 48. Gaultier, Jules de, 257. Genealogy of Morals, The— Publication of, 46. Quotations from, 87, 94, 179 footnote, 208, 209, 210, 231. English translation of, 292. Genoa, 42, 45. Gentleman, the, 240. Gobineau, 256. God, the idea of, 232. Goethe, 120, 255, 265. Golden Rule, 106-108, 136, 161, 169. Good, definition of, 101, 169, 205. Gould, Dr. George M., 51. Grave of My Father, The, early poem, 8. Greatness, definition of, 260. Greek art, Nietzsche's theory of, 25-26, 67 et seq. Greek drama, early essays on, 24. Greek Philosophy and Other Essays, 291. Greek Woman, The, essay, 291. Greeks, influence on Nietzsche, 257-259, 264. Greeley, Horace, 78. Haeckel, Ernst, 138, 141, 161, 198. Halévy, Daniel, 294. Hamblen, Emily S., 294. Happiness, definitions of, 64, 101, 164, 171, 188, 237. Happiness, unattainable, 259-260. Haussmann, William A., 222, 290. Headaches, Nietzsche's, 51. Hegel, 267. Hegesippus, 256. Heine, Heinrich, 265-266. Hellen, E. von der, 48. Helvétius, 256. Heracleitus, 255, 263. Herder, 267. Herrenmoral, see Master-morality. Hesiod, 17, 22, 205. Higher man, 163, 169, 197 et seq. History, function of, 31, 222-223. History, On the Good and Bad Effects of upon Human Life— Publication of, 31. Quotations from, 172, 289. English translation of, 291. Hobbes, Thomas, 79, 198, 255, 256, 263. Hölderlin, Friedrich, 266. Homer and Classical Philology, essay, 291. Hone, J. M., 294. Human, All-too Human— Publication of first volume, 38. Effect of upon friends and public, 39, 249. Quotations from, 21, 91, 158, 180, 228, 229. Second and third volumes, 39. English translation of, 291. Hume, Bennett, 274. Hume, David, 128, 286-287. Humility, 44, 86, 92, 276-277. Huneker, James, 246 footnote, 295. Huxley, Thomas H., 35, 56, 98, 128, 132, 140, 149, 198, 256, 268. Hymn to Life, 292. Hypochondria, Nietzsche's, 40, 51. Ibsen, Henrik, 35, 261, 272. Ideen, 12. Immoralist, The, plan of proposed book, 47. Income, Nietzsche's, 54. Inopportune Speculations— First volume, 29. Plan of, 34. Quotation from, 141 footnote. English translation of, 291. Insanity, Nietzsche's, 48, 51-54, 269, 271-272. Jenner, 198. Jews, 44, 75, 85-87, 88, 106, 145, 237-239. Joel, Karl, 266. Jones, Henry Arthur, 188. Joyful Science, The— Publication of, 43. Quotation from, 207. English translation of, 292. Kant, Immanuel, 172, 255, 256, 267. Kennedy, J. M., 291, 292, 293, 294. Kettle, T. M., 294. Kipling, Rudyard, 25. Klopstock, 267. Koegel, Fritz, 47. Krafft-Ebing, R. von, 188. Krause, Dr., Nietzsche's great-uncle, 265. Krause, Frau, Nietzsche's great-grandmother, 265. La Bruyère, 38, 256, 266. Lady, the, 189. La Monte, Robert Rives, 279 footnote. Lankester, E. Ray, 281. La Rochefoucauld, 37, 56, 256, 266. Law, origin of, 209. Legislation, freak, 196. Leipsic, student days at, 16-17, 259. Lessing, 128, 267. Levy, Oscar, vii, 255, 290-292, 294. Liberty, the worth of, 235. Lichtenberger, Henri, 293. Liszt, Franz, 245 footnote. Litterarischen Vereinigung mania, Der, 11. Locke, John, 285-286. Lombroso, Cesare, 269. L'Origine de la famille de Nietzsche 6. Love, nature of, 180-182, 187. Low, Sidney, 165. Ludovici, Anthony M., 291, 293, 294. Machiavelli, 198, 256. Maggiore, Lake, 41, 42. Mallock, W. H., 295. Malthus, 256. Mammal, man as a, 261. Man, meaning of the word, 209. Mandeville, 256. Marienbad, 42. Markby, William, 90. Marriage, see Women. Marx, Karl, 197, 256. Masochism, 188. Masses, the, 159, 164, 172, 193-194, 205, 230, 289. Masterman, C. F. G., 295. Master-morality, 82-85, 94 et seq. Maternity, 175, 188, 191. Mencken, H. L., 279, 294. Mentone, 45. Messiah, The, Handel oratorio, 8. Meysenbug, Fräulein von, 42. Military service, 17, 23. Miscellaneous Opinions and Aphorisms, 39. Mohammedanism, 101. Monarchy, 193. Monism, 109, 138. Montaigne, 37, 143 footnote, 256, 266. Moonlight on the Pussta, composition, 8. Moral order of the world, 160. Morality— Definitions of, 75, 172. Expression of expedience, 75-78, 89 et seq., 210. How it becomes fixed, 80-81. Master and slave morality, 82 et seq., 93 et seq. Nietzsche's criticism of, 92 et seq. More, Paul Elmer, 256, 263, 285-289, 294. Mügge, M. A., 255, 262, 263, 266, 291, 293. Music, Nietzsche's compositions, 8, 55, 292. Music, Nietzsche's love of, 8-9, 27, 54-55. Natural morality, 202, 282-283. Natural selection, see Struggle for existence. Naumann, C. G., 47. Naumburg, Nietzsche at, 6-12, 22, 49. New Thought, 51. Nice, 45. Nicholas of Cusa, 148-150, 153. Nietzsche, Ermentrude, Nietzsche's grandmother, 6-7, 22, 265. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, his characteristics— As a boy, 7-9. Pride in his Polish descent, 6, 23, 29, 266. Love of music, 8-9, 54-55. A brilliant pupil, 12. His dislike of biergemüthlichkeit, 14-15. Drug-taking, 23, 52. As a professor, 22, 27-29. Method of writing, 41, 51. His intolerance, 28, 133, 261, 268, 271. Personal appearance, 50. Illnesses, 23, 40-41, 48, 51-52. Insanity, 48, 52-54. Literary style, 55-56, 133. Women, 56-58. Relations to his sister, 59. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, his life— Birth, 4. Boyhood at Naumburg, 7-12. First writings, 8-11. At Pforta, 12-13. Matriculates at Bonn, 13. Student of Ritschl, 16. Removes to Leipsic, 16. Military service, 17, 23. First philological work, 17. Discovery of Schopenhauer, 18 et seq. Takes his degree, 22. Professor at Basel, 22. First breakdown, 23. Publishes "The Birth of Tragedy," 23. Other early essays, 30-36. Meeting with Wagner, 16. Meeting with Rée, 37. Human, All-too Human, 38, 39. Affair with Lou Salomé, 42. Failing health, 40. Income, 54. Breakdown at Turin, 48. Death, 49. Nietzsche, Josef, Nietzsche's brother, 5. Nietzsche, Karl Ludwig, Nietzsche's father, 4-6. Nietzsche, Therese Elisabeth Alexandra, Nietzsche's sister, see Förster-Nietzsche. Nietzsche versus Wagner— Publication of, 46. English translation of, 291. Nietzschy, 6. Nirvana, 101. Nobility, 165, 166. Nordau, Max, 37, 53, 269-273, 275, 295. Orage, A. R., 293, 294. Osler, William, 132 footnote, 159. Overbeck, Franz, 48. Paganism, Nietzsche's, 257-259. Paget, Violet (Vernon Lee), 120, 172-173, 275-277, 295. Paine, Thomas, 128. Parmenides, 256. Parsons, Elsie Clews, 184. Pasteur, Louis, 198. Pattison, A. Seth Pringle, 295. Peace, universal, 162. Petre, Maude D., 292, 295. Pfleiderer, Otto, 91, 128. Pforta, 12-13. Philologists, We, essay, 291. Philosophy, 32, 218, 229. Pindar, Judge, of Naumburg, 265. Pleasure and pain, 20 footnote. Plowshare, The, 38. Poetry, Nietzsche's, 6, 293. Polish origin of Nietzsche family, 6. Poor Laws, effect of English, 281. Prayer, 129-130. Predestination, 130-131. Priestcraft, 231. Professor at Basel, 22. Progress, Nietzsche's program of, 114, 163, 172, 201. Property rights, 165. Proudhon, 256. Pussta, 8. Pyrrho, 256. Pythagoras, 118 footnote, 256. Rée, Paul— Nietzsche's meeting with, 37. Rivals in love, 42, 57. Influence on Nietzsche, 37, 256. Renaissance, Second, 255. Richard Wagner in Bayreuth— Publication of, 34. English translation of, 291. See also Wagner. Ritschl, Albrecht, 128. Ritschl, Frau, 16-17. Ritschl, Friedrich Wilhelm, 16-17. Robertson, J. M., 295. Röcken, 4-5, 49. Romantic movement in Germany, 266, 286. Roosevelt, Theodore, ix. Rousseau, 255. St. Austin, 76 footnote. Sallust, 56. Salomé, Lou— Meeting with Nietzsche, 42. Book on Nietzsche, 42, 118. Marriage, 42. Nietzsche's affair with, 42-57. Hymn to Life, 292. Samuel, Horace B., 292. Science, its aims, 236. Scheffauer, Hermann, 292. Schiller, 267. Schooldays at Naumburg, 10-12. Schopenhauer, Arthur— Nietzsche's discovery of, 18. The will-to-live, 19-21, 101. Nietzsche's divergence, 21, 33. Essay on, 32, 291. Influence on Nietzsche, 22, 32-33, 54, 63-64, 100, 174, 177, 189, 242 et seq., 255, 257-260. Schopenhauer as a Teacher— Publication of, 32. Quotations from, 32, 33, 219. English translation of, 291. Schumann, Robert, 272. Self-control, 233. Sera, Leo G., 294. Seydlitz, Baron von, 52. Shaw, G. Bernard, ix, 82, 250, 295. Silberblick, 49. Sils Maria, 45. Sin, the Christian idea of, 214. Skepticism, 148-151, 158, 214, 264. Sklavmoral, see Slave-morality. Slave-morality, 85-87, 105, 106, 133, 175, 237. Smith, Adam, 256. Social contract, 203 et seq., 209. Socialism, 98, 164, 256, 286, 288, 295. Socrates, 91, 153, 155. Sorrento, 37. Spencer, Herbert, 35, 51, 54, 55, 98, 99, 115, 140, 221, 247, 261, 268, 272. Spinoza, 255. State, origin of, 204. Stendhal, 255, 262. Stirner, Max, 255, 262-263. Strauss, David Friedrich, 30, 128; see also David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer. Strauss, Richard, 55. Struggle for existence, 94, 102, 133, 138 et seq., 163, 204, 223. Style, Nietzsche's German, 55-56, 133, 266. Suicide, 226, 227-228. Superman— Described, 109-113. His purposes, 113-114, 169. His characteristics, 115, 122 et seq. Sympathy, 136-137, 280, 287, 288. Taine, 256. Teacher, Nietzsche as a, 22-23. Teachers, their characteristics, 217, 219-220. Thoughts Out of Season, see Inopportune Speculations. Tille, Alexander, 140, 222, 256, 290. Tobacco, Nietzsche's dislike of, 15. Tr——, Fräulein, Nietzsche's proposal to, 18. Tragedy, its origin, 26, 65 et seq. Tribschen, 25, 27, 37, 244. Truth— Definitions of, 147 et seq., 159. Its origin in error, 154. The scientific method, 151-157, 236. Turck, Dr., 172-173. Turin, breakdown at, 48. Twilight of the Idols, The— Publication of, 46. Quotations from, 66, 142 footnote, 161, 234, 235, 236, 265. English translation of, 292. Vauvenarges, 38, 266. Venice, 42. Voltaire, 128, 256. Wagner, The Case of— Publication of, 46, 249. Quotation from, 249. English translation of, 291. Wagner, Cosima, 25, 27, 48, 57, 244, 245, 266. Wagner, Richard— Meeting with Nietzsche, 16, 244. Nietzsche visits at Tribschen, 25, 27, 37, 244. Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, 34, 246. Burlesqued in Thus Spake Zarathustra, 45. The Case of Wagner, 46, 249. Nietzsche vs. Wagner, 46, 251. Nietzsche as a Wagnerian, 242. Wagner and Schopenhauer, 243. Parsifal, 247, 248. Bayreuth opening, 247. Break with Nietzsche, 245, 251. Nietzsche's last words on, 49. Walker, J. L., 263. Wallace, Alfred Russell, 140 footnote. Wallace, William, 295. Walling, William English, 295. Wanderer and His Shadow, The, 39. War, benefits of, 169, 175, 236. War, Heracleitus on, 263. Weimar, 48-49. White, Andrew D., 35, 89, 274. Wieland, 267. Wife, 182, 185. Will-to-live, 19-22, 64, 114. Will-to-power, 64, 105, 114, 157, 188. Will-to-Power, The— Plan of proposed work, 47. Notes published, 48. Quotation from, 289. English translation of, 292. Windelband, Wilhelm, 69 footnote. Women— Nietzsche's personal attitude, 57, 186. Their chief duty, 175, 188. Their slave-morality, 175, 179, 186. Sources of their weakness, 176. Their guile, 177, 180, 187. Man's attitude toward them, 178-179. Marriage, 180 et seq. "Don't forget thy whip!", 187. Schopenhauer on, 57, 174, 189. The lady, 189. Wrench, G. T., 292, 294. Wright, Willard H., 294. Zarathustra, Thus Spake— Publication of, 44. Plan of, 45. Quotations from, 90, 102, 104, 105, 106, 109, 111, 112, 113, 115, 119, 169, 175, 184, 185, 187, 188, 193, 228. Richard Strauss' tone-poem, 55. English translation of, 292. Zeno, 256. Zimmern, Helen, 291. Zoroaster, see Zarathustra.