H. L. MENCKEN

I shall be told, I suppose, that my philosophy is comfortless—because I speak the truth; and people prefer to believe that everything the Lord made is good. If you are one such, go to the priests, and leave philosophers in peace! Arthur Schopenhauer.

Third Edition

BOSTON

LUCE AND COMPANY

1913

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION

When this attempt to summarize and interpret the principal ideas of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was first published, in the early part of 1908, several of his most important books were yet to be translated into English and the existing commentaries were either fragmentary and confusing or frankly addressed to the specialist in philosophy. It was in an effort to make Nietzsche comprehensible to the general reader, at sea in German and unfamiliar with the technicalities of the seminaries, that the work was undertaken. It soon appeared that a considerable public had awaited that effort, for the first edition was quickly exhausted and there was an immediate demand for a special edition in England. The larger American edition which followed has since gone the way of its predecessor, and so the opportunity offers for a general revision, eliminating certain errors in the first draft and introducing facts and opinions brought forward by the publication of Dr. Oscar Levy's admirable complete edition of Nietzsche in English and by the appearance of several new and informative biographical studies, and a large number of discussions and criticisms. The whole of the section upon Nietzsche's intellectual origins has been rewritten, as has been the section on his critics, and new matter has been added to the biographical chapters. In addition, the middle portion of the book has been carefully revised, and a final chapter upon the study of Nietzsche, far more extensive than the original bibliographical note, has been appended. The effect of these changes, it is believed, has been to increase the usefulness of the book, not only to the reader who will go no further, but also to the reader who plans to proceed to Nietzsche's own writings and to the arguments of his principal critics and defenders.

That Nietzsche has been making progress of late goes without saying. No reader of current literature, nor even of current periodicals, can have failed to notice the increasing pressure of his ideas. When his name was first heard in England and America, toward the end of the nineties, he suffered much by the fact that few of his advocates had been at any pains to understand him. Thus misrepresented, he took on the aspect of an horrific intellectual hobgoblin, half Bakúnin and half Byron, a sacrilegious and sinister fellow, the father of all the wilder ribaldries of the day. In brief, like Ibsen before him, he had to bear many a burden that was not his. But in the course of time the truth about him gradually precipitated itself from this cloud of unordered enthusiasm, and his principal ideas began to show themselves clearly. Then the discovery was made that the report of them had been far more appalling than the substance. Some of them, indeed, had already slipped into respectable society in disguise, as the original inspirations of lesser sages, and others, on examination, turned out to be quite harmless, and even comforting. The worst that could be said of most of them was that they stood in somewhat violent opposition to the common platitudes, that they were a bit vociferous in denying this planet to be the best of all possible worlds. Heresy, of course, but falling, fortunately enough, upon ears fast growing attuned to heretical music. The old order now had fewer to defend it than in days gone by. The feeling that it must yield to something better, that contentment must give way to striving and struggle, that any change was better than no change at all—this feeling was abroad in the world. And if the program of change that Nietzsche offered was startling at first hearing, it was at least no more startling than the programs offered by other reformers. Thus he got his day in court at last and thus he won the serious attention of open-minded and reflective folk.

Not, of course, that Nietzsche threatens, today or in the near future, to make a grand conquest of Christendom, as Paul conquered, or the unknown Father of Republics. Far from it, indeed. Filtered through the comic sieve of a Shaw or sentimentalized by a Roosevelt, some of his ideas show a considerable popularity, but in their original state they are not likely to inflame millions. Broadly viewed, they stand in direct opposition to every dream that soothes the slumber of mankind in the mass, and therefore mankind in the mass must needs be suspicious of them, at least for years to come. They are pre-eminently for the man who is not of the mass, for the man whose head is lifted, however little, above the common level. They justify the success of that man, as Christianity justifies the failure of the man below. And so they give no promise of winning the race in general from its old idols, despite the fact that the pull of natural laws and of elemental appetites is on their side. But inasmuch as an idea, to make itself felt in the world, need not convert the many who serve and wait but only the few who rule, it must be manifest that the Nietzschean creed, in the long run, gives promise of exercising a very real influence upon human thought. Reduced to a single phrase, it may be called a counterblast to sentimentality—and it is precisely by breaking down sentimentality, with its fondness for moribund gods, that human progress is made. If Nietzsche had left no other vital message to his time, he would have at least forced and deserved a hearing for his warning that Christianity is a theory for those who distrust and despair of their strength, and not for those who hope and fight on.

To plat his principal ideas for the reader puzzled by conflicting reports of them, to prepare the way for an orderly and profitable reading of his own books—such is the purpose of the present volume. The works of Nietzsche, as they have been done into English, fill eighteen volumes as large as this one, and the best available account of his life would make three or four more. But it is sincerely to be hoped that the student, once he has learned the main paths through this extensive country, will proceed to a diligent and thorough exploration. Of all modern philosophers Nietzsche is the least dull. He was undoubtedly the greatest German prose writer of his generation, and even when one reads him through the English veil it is impossible to escape the charm and color of his phrases and the pyrotechnic brilliance of his thinking.

MENCKEN.

BALTIMORE, November, 1913.

CONTENTS

NIETZSCHE THE MAN

I.BOYHOOD AND YOUTH

II.THE BEGINNINGS OF THE PHILOSOPHER

III.BLAZING A NEW PATH

IV.THE PROPHET OF THE SUPERMAN

V.THE PHILOSOPHER AND THE MAN

NIETZSCHE THE PHILOSOPHER

I.DIONYSUS vs. APOLLO

II.THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY

III.BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL

IV.THE SUPERMAN

V.ETERNAL RECURRENCE

VI.CHRISTIANITY

VII.TRUTH

VIII.CIVILIZATION

IX.WOMEN AND MARRIAGE

X.GOVERNMENT

XI.CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

XII.EDUCATION

XIII.SUNDRY IDEAS

XIV.NIETZSCHE vs. WAGNER

NIETZSCHE THE PROPHET

I.NIETZSCHE'S ORIGINS

II.NIETZSCHE AND HIS CRITICS

HOW TO STUDY NIETZSCHE

INDEX

NIETZSCHE THE MAN

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

I

BOYHOOD AND YOUTH

Friedrich Nietzsche was a preacher's son, brought up in the fear of the Lord. It is the ideal training for sham-smashers and freethinkers. Let a boy of alert, restless intelligence come to early manhood in an atmosphere of strong faith, wherein doubts are blasphemies and inquiry is a crime, and rebellion is certain to appear with his beard. So long as his mind feels itself puny beside the overwhelming pomp and circumstance of parental authority, he will remain docile and even pious. But so soon as he begins to see authority as something ever finite, variable and all-too-human—when he begins to realize that his father and his mother, in the last analysis, are mere human beings, and fallible like himself—then he will fly precipitately toward the intellectual wailing places, to think his own thoughts in his own way and to worship his own gods beneath the open sky.

As a child Nietzsche was holy; as a man he was the symbol and embodiment of all unholiness. At nine he was already versed in the lore of the reverend doctors, and the pulpit, to his happy mother—a preacher's daughter as well as a preacher's wife—seemed his logical and lofty goal; at thirty he was chief among those who held that all pulpits should be torn down and fashioned into bludgeons, to beat out the silly brains of theologians.

The awakening came to him when he made his first venture away from the maternal apron-string and fireside: when, as a boy of ten, he learned that there were many, many men in the world and that these men were of many minds. With the clash of authority came the end of authority. If A. was right, B. was wrong—and B. had a disquieting habit of standing for one's mother, one's grandmother or the holy prophets. Here was the beginning of intelligence in the boy—the beginning of that weighing and choosing faculty which seems to give man at once his sense of mastery and his feeling of helplessness. The old notion that doubt was a crime crept away. There remained in its place the new notion that the only real crime in the world—the only unmanly, unspeakable and unforgivable offense against the race—was unreasoning belief. Thus the orthodoxy of the Nietzsche home turned upon and devoured itself.

The philosopher of the superman was born on October 15th, 1844, at Röcken, a small town in the Prussian province of Saxony. His father, Karl Ludwig Nietzsche, was a country pastor of the Lutheran Church and a man of eminence in the countryside. But he was more than a mere rural worthy, with an outlook limited by the fringe of trees on the horizon, for in his time he had seen something of the great world and had even played his humble part in it. Years before his son Friedrich was born he had been tutor to the children of the Duke of Altenburg. The duke was fond of him and took him, now and then, on memorable and eventful journeys to Berlin, where that turbulent monarch, King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, kept a tinsel court and made fast progress from imbecility to acute dementia. The king met the young tutor and found him a clever and agreeable person, with excellent opinions regarding all those things whereon monarchs are wont to differ with mobs. When the children of the duke became sufficiently saturated with learning, the work of Pastor Nietzsche at Altenburg was done and he journeyed to Berlin to face weary days in the anterooms of ecclesiastical magnates and jobbers of places. The king, hearing by chance of his presence and remembering him pleasantly, ordered that he be given without delay a vicarage worthy of his talents. So he was sent to Röcken, and there, when a son was born to him, he called the boy Friedrich Wilhelm, as a graceful compliment to his royal patron and admirer.

There were two other children in the house. One was a boy, Josef, who was named after the Duke of Altenburg, and died in infancy in 1850. The other was a girl, Therese Elisabeth Alexandra, who became in after years her brother's housekeeper, guardian angel and biographer. Her three names were those of the three noble children her father had grounded in the humanities. Elisabeth—who married toward middle age and is best known as Frau Förster-Nietzsche—tells us practically all that we know about the Nietzsche family and the private life of its distinguished son.[1] The clan came out of Poland, like so many other families of Eastern Germany, at the time of the sad, vain wars. Legend maintains that it was noble in its day and Nietzsche himself liked to think so. The name, says Elisabeth, was originally Nietzschy. "Germany is a great nation," Nietzsche would say, "only because its people have so much Polish blood in their veins.... I am proud of my Polish descent. I remember that in former times a Polish noble, by his simple veto, could overturn the resolution of a popular assembly. There were giants in Poland in the time of my forefathers." He wrote a tract with the French title "L'Origine de la famille de Nietzsche" and presented the manuscript to his sister, as a document to be treasured and held sacred. She tells us that he was fond of maintaining that the Nietzsches had suffered greatly and fallen from vast grandeur for their opinions, religious and political. He had no proof of this, but it pleased him to think so.

Pastor Nietzsche was thrown from his horse in 1848 and died, after a lingering illness, on July 28th, 1849, when Friedrich was barely five years old. Frau Nietzsche then moved her little family to Naumburg-on-the-Saale—"a Christian, conservative, loyal city." The household consisted of the mother, the two children, their paternal grandmother and two maiden aunts—the sisters of the dead pastor. The grandmother was something of a bluestocking and had been, in her day, a member of that queer circle of intellectuals and amateurs which raged and roared around Goethe at Weimar. But that was in the long ago, before she dreamed of becoming the wife of one preacher and the mother of another. In the year '50 she was well of all such youthful fancies and there was no doubt of the divine revelations beneath her pious roof. Prayers began the day and ended the day. It was a house of holy women, with something of a convent's placidity and quiet exaltation. Little Friedrich was the idol in the shrine. It was the hope of all that he would grow up into a man inimitably noble and impossibly good.

Pampered thus, the boy shrank from the touch of the world's rough hand. His sister tells us that he disliked the bad little boys of the neighborhood, who robbed bird's nests, raided orchards and played at soldiers. There appeared in him a quaint fastidiousness which went counter to the dearest ideals of the healthy young male. His school fellows, in derision, called him "the little pastor" and took delight in waylaying him and venting upon him their grotesque and barbarous humor. He liked flowers and books and music and when he went abroad it was for solitary walks. He could recite and sing and he knew the Bible so well that he was able to dispute about its mysteries. "As I think of him," said an old school-mate years afterward, "I am forced irresistibly into a thought of the 12-year-old Jesus in the Temple." "The serious introspective child, with his dignified politeness," says his sister, "seemed so strange to other boys that friendly advances from either side were out of the question."

There is a picture of the boy in all the glory of his first long-tailed coat. His trousers stop above his shoe-tops, his hair is long and his legs seem mere airy filaments. As one gazes upon the likeness one can almost smell the soap that scoured that high, shiny brow and those thin, white cheeks. The race of such seraphic boys has died out in the world. Gone are their slick, plastered locks and their translucent ears! Gone are their ruffled cuffs and their spouting of the golden text!

Nietzsche wrote verses before he was ten: pious, plaintive verses that scanned well and showed rhymes and metaphors made respectable by ages of honorable employment. His maiden effort, so far as we know, was an elegy entitled "The Grave of My Father." Later on he became aware of material things and sang the praises of rose and sunset. He played the piano, too, and knew his Beethoven well, from the snares for the left hand in "Für Elise" to the raging tumults of the C minor symphony. One Sunday—it was Ascension day—he went to the village church and heard the choir sing the Hallelujah Chorus from "The Messiah." Here was music that benumbed the senses and soothed the soul and, boy as he was, he felt its supreme beauty. That night he covered pages of ruled paper with impossible pot-hooks. He, too, would write music!

Later on the difficulties of thorough-bass, as it was taught in the abysmal German text-books of the time, somewhat dampened his ardor, but more than once during his youth he thought seriously of becoming a musician. His first really ambitious composition was a piano pièce called "Mondschein auf der Pussta"—"Moonlight on the Pussta"—the pussta being the flat Bohemian prairie. The family circle was delighted with this maiden opus, and we may conjure up a picture of little Friedrich playing it of a quiet evening at home, while mother, grandmother, sister and aunts gathered round and marvelled at his genius. In later life he wrote songs and sonatas, and—if an enemy is to be believed—an opera in the grand manner. His sister, in her biography, prints some samples of his music. Candor compels the admission that it is even worse than it sounds.

Nietzsche, at this time, still seemed like piety on a monument, but as much as he revered his elders and as much as he relied upon their infallibility, there were yet problems which assailed him and gave him disquiet. When he did not walk and think alone, his sister was his companion, and to her he opened his heart, as one might to a sexless, impersonal confessor. In her presence, indeed, he really thought aloud, and this remained his habit until the end of his life. His mind, awakening, wandered beyond the little world hedged about by doting and complacent women. Until he entered the gymnasium—that great weighing place of German brains—he shrank from open revolt, and even from the thought of it, but he could not help dwelling upon the mysteries that rose before him. There were things upon which the scriptures, search them as he might, seemed to throw no light, and of which mothers and grandmothers and maiden aunts did not discourse. "One day," says Elisabeth, "when he was yet very young, he said to me: 'You mustn't expect me to believe those silly stories about storks bringing babies. Man is a mammal and a mammal must get his own children for himself.'" Every child, perhaps, ponders such problems, but in the vast majority knowledge must wait until it may enter fortuitously and from without. Nietzsche did not belong to the majority. To him ideas were ever things to be sought out eagerly, to be weighed calmly, to be tried in the fire. For weal or for woe, the cornerstones of his faith were brought forth, with sweat and pain, from the quarry of his own mind.

Nietzsche went to various village schools—public and private—until he was ten, dutifully trudging away each morning with knapsack and lunch-basket. He kissed his mother at the gate when he departed and she was waiting for him, with another kiss, when he returned. As happiness goes, his was probably a happy childhood. The fierce joy of boyish combat—of fighting, of robbing, of slaying—was never his, but to a child so athirst for knowledge, each fresh discovery—about the sayings of Luther, the lions of Africa, the properties of an inverted fraction—must have brought its thrill. But as he came to the last year of his first decade, unanswerable questions brought their discontent and disquiet—as they do to all of us. There is a feeling of oppression and poignant pain in facing problems that defy solution and facts that refuse to fit into ordered chains. It is only when mastery follows that the fine stimulation of conscious efficiency drowns out all moody vapors.

When Nietzsche went to the gymnasium his whole world was overturned. Here boys were no longer mute and hollow vessels, to be stuffed with predigested learning, but human beings whose approach to separate entity was recognized. It was possible to ask questions and to argue moot points, and teaching became less the administration of a necessary medicine and more the sharing of a delightful meal. Your German school-master is commonly a martinet, and his birch is never idle, but he has the saving grace of loving his trade and of readily recognizing true diligence in his pupils. History does not record the name of the pedagogue who taught Nietzsche at the Naumburg gymnasium, but he must have been one who ill deserved his oblivion. He fed the eager, inquiring mind of his little student and made a new boy of him. The old unhealthy, uncanny embodiment of a fond household's impossible dreams became more likeable and more human. His exclusiveness and fastidiousness were native and ineradicable, perhaps, for they remained with him, in some degree, his whole life long, but his thirst for knowledge and yearning for disputation soon led him to the discovery that there were other boys worth cultivating: other boys whose thoughts, like his own, rose above misdemeanor and horse-play. With two such he formed a quick friendship, and they were destined to influence him greatly to the end of his youth. They organized a club for mutual culture, gave it the sonorous name of "Der litterarischen Vereinigung Germania" ("The German Literary Association") and drew up an elaborate scheme of study. Once a week there was a meeting, at which each of the three submitted an essay or a musical composition to the critical scrutiny of the others. They waded out into the deep water. One week they discussed "The Infancy of Nations," and after that, "The Dæmonic Element in Music," "Napoleon III" and "Fatalism in History." Despite its praiseworthy earnestness, this program causes a smile—and so does the transformation of the retiring and well-scrubbed little Nietzsche we have been observing into the long, gaunt Nietzsche of 14, with a yearning for the companionship of his fellows, and a voice beginning to grow comically harsh and deep, and a mind awhirl with unutterable things.

Nietzsche was a brilliant and spectacular pupil and soon won a scholarship at Pforta, a famous and ancient preparatory academy not far away. Pforta, in those days, was of a dignity comparable to Eton's or Harrow's. It was a great school, but tradition overpowered it. Violent combats between amateur sages were not encouraged: it was a place for gentlemen to acquire Euclid and the languages in a decent, gentlemanly way, and not an arena for gawky country philosophers to prance about in. But Nietzsche, by this time, had already become a frank rebel and delighted in elaborating and controverting the doctrines of the learned doctors. He drew up a series of epigrams under the head of "Ideen" and thought so well of them that he sent them home, to astonish and alarm his mother. Some of them exhibited a quite remarkable faculty for pithy utterance—as, for example, "War begets poverty and poverty begets peace"—while others were merely opaque renderings of thoughts half formed. He began to believe in his own mental cunning, with a sincerity which never left him, and, as a triumphant proof of it, he drew up a series of syllogisms designed to make homesickness wither and die. Thus he wrestled with life's problems as his boy's eyes saw them.

All this was good training for the philosopher, but to the Pforta professors it gave disquiet. Nietzsche became a bit too sure of himself and a bit too arrogant for discipline. It seemed to him a waste of time to wrestle with the studies that every oafish baron's son and future guardsman sought to master. He neglected mathematics and gave himself up to the hair-splitting of the Eleatics and the Pythagoreans, the Sophists and the Skeptics. He pronounced his high curse and anathema upon geography and would have none of it. The result was that when he went up for final examination he writhed and floundered miserably and came within an ace of being set down for further and more diligent labor with his books. Only his remarkable mastery of the German language and his vast knowledge of Christian doctrine—a legacy from his pious childhood—saved him. The old Nietzsche—the shrinking mother's darling of Naumburg—was now but a memory. The Nietzsche that went up to Bonn was a young man with a touch of cynicism and one not a little disposed to pit his sneer against the jurisprudence of the world: a young man with a swagger, a budding moustache and a head full of violently novel ideas about everything under the sun.

Nietzsche entered Bonn in October, 1864, when he was just 20 years old. He was enrolled as a student of philology and theology, but the latter was a mere concession to family faith and tradition, made grudgingly, and after the first semester, the reverend doctors of exegetics knew him no more. At the start he thought the university a delightful place and its people charming. The classrooms and beer gardens were full of young Germans like himself, who debated the doings of Bismarck, composed eulogies of Darwin, sang Rabelaisian songs in bad Latin, kept dogs, wore ribbons on their walking sticks, fought duels, and drank unlimited steins of pale beer. In the youth of every man there comes over him a sudden yearning to be a good fellow: to be "Bill" or "Jim" to multitudes, and to go down into legend with Sir John Falstaff and Tom Jones. This melancholy madness seized upon Nietzsche during his first year at Bonn. He frequented the theatres and posed as a connoisseur of opera bouffe, malt liquor and the female form divine. He went upon students' walking tours and carved his name upon the mutilated tables of country inns. He joined a student corps, bought him a little cap and set up shop as a devil of a fellow. His mother was not poor, but she could not afford the outlays that these ambitious enterprises required. Friedrich overdrew his allowance and the good woman, no doubt, wept about it, as mothers will, and wondered that learning came so dear.

But the inevitable reaction followed. Nietzsche was not designed by nature for a hero of pot-houses and duelling sheds. The old fastidiousness asserted itself—that queer, unhealthy fastidiousness which, in his childhood, had set him apart from other boys, and was destined, all his life long, to make him shrink from too intimate contact with his fellow-men. The touch of the crowd disgusted him: he had an almost insane fear of demeaning himself. All of this feeling had been obscured for awhile, by the strange charm of new delights and new companions, but in the end, the gloomy spinner of fancies triumphed over the university buck. Nietzsche resigned from his student corps, burned his walking sticks, foreswore smoking and roistering, and bade farewell to Johann Strauss and Offenbach forever. The days of his youth—of his carefree, merry gamboling—were over. Hereafter he was all solemnity and all seriousness.

"From these early experiences," says his sister, "there remained with him a life-long aversion to smoking, beer-drinking and the whole biergemüthlichkeit. He maintained that people who drank beer and smoked pipes were absolutely incapable of understanding him. Such people, he thought, lacked the delicacy and clearness of perception necessary to grasp profound and subtle problems."

II

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE PHILOSOPHER

At Bonn Nietzsche became a student of Ritschl, the famous philologist,[1] and when Ritschl left Bonn for Leipsic, Nietzsche followed him. All traces of the good fellow had disappeared and the student that remained was not unlike those sophomores of medieval Toulouse who "rose from bed at 4 o'clock, and having prayed to God, went at 5 o'clock to their studies, their big books under their arms, their inkhorns and candles in their hands." Between teacher and pupil there grew up a bond of strong friendship. Nietzsche was taken, too, under the wing of motherly old Frau Ritschl, who invited him to her afternoons of coffee and cinnamon cake and to her evening soirées, where he met the great men of the university world and the eminent strangers who came and went. To Ritschl the future philosopher owed many things, indeed, including his sound knowledge of the ancients, his first (and last) university appointment and his meeting with Richard Wagner. Nietzsche always looked back upon these days with pleasure and there was ever a warm spot in his heart for the kindly old professor who led him up to grace.

Two years or more were thus spent, and then, in the latter part of 1867, Nietzsche began his term of compulsory military service in the fourth regiment of Prussian field artillery. He had hoped to escape because he was near-sighted and the only son of a widow, but a watchful oberst-lieutenant found loopholes in the law and so ensnared him. He seems to have been some sort of officer, for a photograph of the period shows him with epaulets and a sword. But lieutenant or sergeant, soldiering was scarcely his forte, and he cut a sorry figure on a horse. After a few months of unwilling service, in fact, he had a riding accident and came near dying as his father had died before him. As it was he wrenched his breast muscles so badly that he was condemned by a medical survey and discharged from the army.

During his long convalescence he busied himself with philological studies and began his first serious professional work—essays on the Theogony of Hesiod, the sources of Diogenes Laërtius and the eternal strife between Hesiod and Homer. He also made an index to an elaborate collection of German historical fragments and performed odd tasks of like sort for various professors. In October, 1868, he returned to Leipsic—not as an undergraduate, but as a special student. This change was advantageous, for it gave him greater freedom of action and protected him from that student bonhomie he had learned to despise. Again old Ritschl was his teacher and friend and again Frau Ritschl welcomed him to her salon and gave him of her good counsel and her excellent coffee.

Meanwhile there had occurred something that was destined to direct and color the whole stream of his life. This was his discovery of Arthur Schopenhauer. In the 60's, it would appear, the great pessimist was still scarcely more than a name in the German universities, which, for all their later heterodoxy, clung long to their ancient first causes. Nietzsche knew nothing of him, and in the seminaries of Leipsic not a soul maintained him. Of Kant and of Hegel there was talk unlimited, and of Lotze and Fichte there were riotous disputations that roared and raged about the class-room of Fechner, then the university professor of philosophy. But of Schopenhauer nothing was heard, and so, when Nietzsche, rambling through an old Leipsic bookshop, happened upon a second-hand copy of "Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung"[2] a new world came floating into his view. This was in 1865.

"I took the book to my lodgings," he said years afterward, "and flung myself on a sofa and read and read and read. It seemed as if Schopenhauer were addressing me personally. I felt his enthusiasm and seemed to see him before me. Every line cried aloud for renunciation, denial, resignation!"

So much for the first flush of the ecstasy of discovery. That Nietzsche entirely agreed with everything in the book, even in his wildest transports of admiration, is rather doubtful. He was but 21—the age of great passions and great romance—and he was athirst for some writing that would solve the problems left unanswered by the accepted sages, but it is probable that when he shouted the Schopenhauer manifesto loudest he read into the text wild variations of his own. The premises of the pessimist gave credit and order to thoughts that had been rising up in his own mind; but the conclusions, if he subscribed to them at all, led him far afield. No doubt he was like one of those fantastic messiahs of new cults who search the scriptures for testimony—and find it. Late in life, when he was accused of inconsistency in first deifying Schopenhauer and then damning him, he made this defense, and despite the derisive sneers of his enemies, it seemed a fairly good one.

Schopenhauer's argument, to put it briefly, was that the will to exist—the primary instinct of life—was the eternal first cause of all human actions, motives and ideas. The old philosophers of Christendom had regarded intelligence as the superior of instinct. Some of them thought that an intelligent god ruled the universe and that nothing happened without his knowledge and desire. Others believed that man was a free agent, that whatever he did was the result of his own thought and choice, and that it was right, in consequence, to condemn him to hell for his sins and to exalt him to heaven for any goodness he might chance to show. Schopenhauer turned all this completely about. Intelligence, he said, was not the source of will, but its effect. When life first appeared upon earth, it had but one aim and object: that of perpetuating itself. This instinct, he said, was still at the bottom of every function of all living beings. Intelligence grew out of the fact that mankind, in the course of ages, began to notice that certain manifestations of the will to live were followed by certain invariable results. This capacity of perceiving was followed by a capacity for remembering, which in turn produced a capacity for anticipating. An intelligent man, said Schopenhauer, was merely one who remembered so many facts (the result either of personal experience or of the transmitted experience of others) that he could separate them into groups and observe their relationship, one to the other, and hazard a close guess as to their future effects: i.e. could reason about them.

Going further, Schopenhauer pointed out that this will to exist, this instinct to preserve and protect life, this old Adam, was to blame for the unpleasant things of life as well as for the good things—that it produced avarice, hatred and murder just as well as industry, resourcefulness and courage—that it led men to seek means of killing one another as well as means of tilling the earth and procuring food and raiment. He showed, yet further, that its bad effects were a great deal more numerous than its good effects and so accounted for the fact—which many men before him had observed—that life, at best, held more of sorrow than of joy.[3]

The will-to-live, argued Schopenhauer, was responsible for all this. Pain, he believed, would always outweigh pleasure in this sad old world until men ceased to want to live—until no one desired food or drink or house or wife or money. To put it more briefly, he held that true happiness would be impossible until mankind had killed will with will, which is to say, until the will-to-live was willed out of existence. Therefore the happiest man was the one who had come nearest this end—the man who had killed all the more obvious human desires, hopes and aspirations—the solitary ascetic—the monk in his cell—the soaring, starving poet—the cloud-enshrouded philosopher.

Nietzsche very soon diverged from this conclusion. He believed, with Schopenhauer, that human life, at best, was often an infliction and a torture, but in his very first book he showed that he admired, not the ascetic who tried to escape from the wear and tear of life altogether, but the proud, stiff-necked hero who held his balance in the face of both seductive pleasure and staggering pain; who cultivated within himself a sublime indifference, so that happiness and misery, to him, became mere words, and no catastrophe, human or superhuman, could affright or daunt him.[4]

It is obvious that there is a considerable difference between these ideas, for all their similarity in origin and for all Nietzsche's youthful worship of Schopenhauer. Nietzsche, in fact, was so enamoured by the honesty and originality of what may be called the data of Schopenhauer's philosophy that he took the philosophy itself rather on trust and did not begin to inquire into it closely or to compare it carefully with his own ideas until after he had committed himself in a most embarrassing fashion. The same phenomena is no curiosity in religion, science or politics.

Before a realization of these differences quite dawned upon Nietzsche he was busied with other affairs. In 1869, when he was barely 25, he was appointed, upon Ritschl's recommendation, to the chair of classical philology at the University of Basel, in Switzerland, an ancient stronghold of Lutheran theology. He had no degree, but the University of Leipsic promptly made him a doctor of philosophy, without thesis or examination, and on April 13th he left the old home at Naumburg to assume his duties. Thus passed that pious household. The grandmother had died long before—in 1856—and one of the maiden aunts had preceded her to the grave by a year. The other, long ill, had followed in 1867. But Nietzsche's mother lived until 1897, though gradually estranged from him by his opinions, and his sister, as we know, survived him.

Nietzsche was officially professor of philology, but he also became teacher of Greek in the pedagogium attached to the University. He worked like a Trojan and mixed Schopenhauer and Hesiod in his class-room discourses upon the origin of Greek verbs and other such dull subjects. But it is not recorded that he made a very profound impression, except upon a relatively small circle. His learning was abysmal, but he was far too impatient and unsympathetic to be a good teacher. His classes, in fact, were never large, except in the pedagogium. This, however, may have been partly due to the fact that in 1869, as in later years, there were comparatively few persons impractical enough to spend their days and nights in the study of philology.

In 1870 came the Franco-Prussian war and Nietzsche decided to go to the front. Despite his hatred of all the cant of cheap patriotism and his pious thankfulness that he was a Pole and not a German, he was at bottom a good citizen and perfectly willing to suffer and bleed for his country. But unluckily he had taken out Swiss naturalization papers in order to be able to accept his appointment at Basel, and so, as the subject of a neutral state, he had to go to the war, not as a warrior, but as a hospital steward.

Even as it was, Nietzsche came near giving his life to Germany. He was not strong physically—he had suffered from severe headaches as far back as 1862—and his hard work at Basel had further weakened him. On the battlefields of France he grew ill. Diphtheria and what seems to have been cholera morbus attacked him and when he finally reached home again he was a neurasthenic wreck. Ever thereafter his life was one long struggle against disease. He suffered from migraine, that most terrible disease of the nerves, and chronic catarrh of the stomach made him a dyspeptic. Unable to eat or sleep, he resorted to narcotics, and according to his sister, he continued their use throughout his life. "He wanted to get well quickly," she says, "and so took double doses." Nietzsche, indeed, was a slave to drugs, and more than once in after life, long before insanity finally ended his career, he gave evidence of it.

Despite his illness he insisted upon resuming work, but during the following winter he was obliged to take a vacation in Italy. Meanwhile he had delivered lectures to his classes on the Greek drama and two of these he revised and published, in 1872, as his first book, "Die Geburt der Tragödie" ("The Birth of Tragedy"). Engelmann, the great Leipsic publisher, declined it, but Fritsch, of the same city, put it into type.[5] This book greatly pleased his friends, but the old-line philologists of the time thought it wild and extravagant, and it almost cost Nietzsche his professorship. Students were advised to keep away from him, and during the winter of 1872-3, it is said, he had no pupils at all.

Nevertheless the book, for all its iconoclasm, was an event. It sounded Nietzsche's first, faint battle-cry and put the question mark behind many tilings that seemed honorable and holy in philology. Most of the philologists of that time were German savants of the comic-paper sort, and their lives were spent in wondering why one Greek poet made the name of a certain plant masculine while another made it feminine. Nietzsche, passing over such scholastic futilities, burrowed down into the heart of Greek literature. Why, he asked himself, did the Greeks take pleasure in witnessing representations of bitter, hopeless conflicts, and how did this form of entertainment arise among them? Later on, his conclusions will be given at length, but in this place it may be well to sketch them in outline, because of the bearing they have upon his later work, and even upon the trend of his life.

In ancient Greece, he pointed out at the start, Apollo was the god of art—of life as it was recorded and interpreted—and Bacchus Dionysus was the god of life itself—of eating, drinking and making merry, of dancing and roistering, of everything that made men acutely conscious of the vitality and will within them. The difference between the things they represented has been well set forth in certain homely verses addressed by Rudyard Kipling to Admiral Robley D. Evans, U. S. N.:

Zogbaum draws with a pencil And I do things with a pen, But you sit up in a conning tower, Bossing eight hundred men. To him that hath shall be given And that's why these books are sent To the man who has lived more stories Than Zogbaum or I could invent.

Here we have the plain distinction: Zogbaum and Kipling are apollonic, while Evans is dionysian. Epic poetry, sculpture, painting and story-telling are apollonic: they represent, not life itself, but some one man's visualized idea of life. But dancing, great deeds and, in some cases, music, are dionysian: they are part and parcel of life as some actual human being, or collection of human beings, is living it.

Nietzsche maintained that Greek art was at first apollonic, but that eventually there appeared a dionysian influence—the fruit, perhaps, of contact with primitive, barbarous peoples. Ever afterward there was constant conflict between them and this conflict was the essence of Greek tragedy. As Sarcey tells us, a play, to hold our attention, must depict some sort of battle, between man and man or idea and idea. In the melodrama of today the battle is between hero and villain; in the ancient Greek tragedy it was between Apollo and Dionysus, between the life contemplative and the life strenuous, between law and outlaw, between the devil and the seraphim.

Nietzsche, as we shall see, afterward applied this distinction in morals and life as well as in art. He called himself a dionysian and the crowning volume of his system of philosophy, which he had barely started when insanity overtook him, was to have been called "Dionysus."

III

BLAZING A NEW PATH

Having given birth, in this theory of Greek tragedy, to an idea which, whatever its defects otherwise, was at least original, understandable and workable, Nietzsche began to be conscious, as it were, of his own intellect—or, in his sister's phrase, "to understand what a great man he was." During his first years at Basel he had cut quite a figure in academic society, for he was an excellent musician, he enjoyed dancing and he had plenty of pretty things to say to the ladies. But as his ideas clarified and he found himself more and more in conflict with the pundits about him, he withdrew within himself, and in the end he had few friends save Richard and Cosima Wagner, who lived at Tribschen, not far away. To one of his turn of mind, indeed, the atmosphere of the college town was bound to grow oppressive soon or late. Acutely aware of his own superiority, he showed no patience with the unctuous complacency of dons and dignitaries, and so he became embroiled in various conflicts, and even his admirers among his colleagues seldom ventured upon friendly advances.

There are critics who see in all this proof that Nietzsche showed signs of insanity from early manhood, but as a matter of fact it was his abnormally accurate vision and not a vision gone awry, that made him stand so aloof from his fellows. In the vast majority of those about him he saw the coarse metal of sham and pretense beneath the showy gilding of learning. He had before him, at close range, a good many of the great men of his time—the intellectuals whose word was law in the schools. He saw them on parade and he saw them in their shirt sleeves. What wonder that he lost all false reverence for them and began to estimate them in terms, not of their dignity and reputation, but of their actual credibility and worth? It was inevitable that he should compare his own ideas to theirs, and it was inevitable that he should perceive the difference between his own fanatical striving for the truth and the easy dependence upon precedent and formula which lay beneath their booming bombast. Thus there arose in him a fiery loathing for all authority, and a firm belief that his own opinion regarding any matter to which he had given thought was as sound, at the least, as any other man's. Thenceforth the assertive "ich" began to besprinkle his discourse and his pages. "I condemn Christianity. I have given to mankind.... I was never yet modest.... I think.... I say.... I do...." Thus he hurled his javelin at authority until the end.

To those about him, perhaps, Nietzsche seemed wild and impossible, but it is not recorded that any one ever looked upon him as ridiculous. His high brow, bared by the way in which he brushed his hair; his keen eyes, with their monstrous overhanging brows, and his immense, untrimmed moustache gave him an air of alarming earnestness. Beside the pedagogues about him—with their well-barbered, professorial beards, their bald heads and their learned spectacles—he seemed like some incomprehensible foreigner. The exotic air he bore delighted him and he cultivated it assiduously. He regarded himself as a Polish grandee set down by an unkind fate among German shopkeepers, and it gave him vast pleasure when the hotel porters and street beggars, deceived by his disorderly façade, called him "The Polack."

Thus he lived and had his being. The inquisitive boy of old Naumburg, the impudent youth of Pforta and the academic free lance of Bonn and Leipsic had become merged into a man sure of himself and contemptuous of all whose search for the truth was hampered or hedged about by any respect for statute or precedent. He saw that the philosophers and sages of the day, in many of their most gorgeous flights of logic, started from false premises, and he observed the fact that certain of the dominant moral, political and social maxims of the time were mere foolishness. It struck him, too, that all of this faulty ratiocination—all of this assumption of outworn doctrines and dependence upon exploded creeds—was not confined to the confessedly orthodox. There was fallacy no less disgusting in the other camp. The professed apostles of revolt were becoming as bad as the old crusaders and apologists.

Nietzsche harbored a fevered yearning to call all of these false prophets to book and to reduce their fine axioms to absurdity. Accordingly, he planned a series of twenty-four pamphlets and decided to call them "Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen" which may be translated as "Inopportune Speculations," or more clearly, "Essays in Sham-Smashing." In looking about for a head to smash in essay number one, his eye, naturally enough, alighted upon that of David Strauss, the favorite philosopher and fashionable iconoclast of the day. Strauss had been a preacher but had renounced the cloth and set up shop as a critic of Christianity.[1] He had labored with good intentions, no doubt, but the net result of all his smug agnosticism was that his disciples were as self-satisfied, bigoted and prejudiced in the garb of agnostics as they had been before as Christians. Nietzsche's clear eye saw this and in the first of his little pamphlets, "David Strauss, der Bekenner und der Schriftsteller" ("David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer"), he bore down upon Strauss' bourgeoise pseudo-skepticism most savagely. This was in 1873.

"Strauss," he said, "utterly evades the question, What is the meaning of life? He had an opportunity to show courage, to turn his back upon the Philistines, and to boldly deduce a new morality from that constant warfare which destroys all but the fittest, but to do this would have required a love of truth infinitely higher than that which spends itself in violent invectives against parsons, miracles and the historical humbug of the resurrection. Strauss had no such courage. Had he worked out the Darwinian doctrine to its last decimal he would have had the Philistines against him to a man. As it is, they are with him. He has wasted his time in combatting Christianity's nonessentials. For the idea at the bottom of it he has proposed no substitute. In consequence, his philosophy is stale."[2]

As a distinguished critic has pointed out, Nietzsche's attack was notable, not only for its keen analysis and ruthless honesty, but also for its courage. It required no little bravery, three years after Sedan, to tell the Germans that the new culture which constituted their pride was rotten, and that, unless it were purified in the fire of absolute truth, it might one day wreck their civilization.

In the year following Nietzsche returned to the attack with a criticism of history, which was then the fashionable science of the German universities, on account, chiefly, of its usefulness in exploding the myths of Christianity. He called his essay "Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben" ("On the Good and Bad Effects of History upon Human Life") and in it he took issue with the reigning pedagogues and professors of the day. There was much hard thinking and no little good writing in this essay and it made its mark. The mere study of history, argued Nietzsche, unless some definite notion regarding the destiny of man were kept ever in mind, was misleading and confusing. There was great danger in assuming that everything which happened was part of some divine and mysterious plan for the ultimate attainment of perfection. As a matter of fact, many historical events were meaningless, and this was particularly true of those expressions of "governments, public opinion and majorities" which historians were prone to accentuate. To Nietzsche the ideas and doings of peoples seemed infinitely less important than the ideas and doings of exceptional individuals. To put it more simply, he believed that one man, Hannibal, was of vastly more importance to the world than all the other Carthaginians of his time taken together. Herein we have a reappearance of Dionysus and a foreshadowing of the herrenmoral and superman of later days.

Nietzsche's next essay was devoted to Schopenhauer and was printed in 1874. He called it "Schopenhauer als Erzieher" ("Schopenhauer as a Teacher") and in it he laid his burnt offering upon the altar of the great pessimist, who was destined to remain his hero, if no longer his god, until the end. Nietzsche was already beginning to read rebellious ideas of his own into "The World as Will and Idea," but in two things—the theory of will and the impulse toward truth—he and Schopenhauer were ever as one. He preached a holy war upon all those influences which had made the apostle of pessimism, in his life-time, an unheard outcast. He raged against the narrowness of university schools of philosophy and denounced all governmental interference in speculation—whether it were expressed crudely, by inquisitorial laws and the Index, or softly and insidiously, by the bribery of comfortable berths and public honors.

"Experience teaches us," he said, "that nothing stands so much in the way of developing great philosophers as the custom of supporting bad ones in state universities.... It is the popular theory that the posts given to the latter make them 'free' to do original work; as a matter of fact, the effect is quite the contrary.... No state would ever dare to patronize such men as Plato and Schopenhauer. And why? Because the state is always afraid of them.... It seems to me that there is need for a higher tribunal outside the universities to critically examine the doctrines they teach. As soon as philosophers are willing to resign their salaries, they will constitute such a tribunal. Without pay and without honors, it will be able to free itself from the prejudices of the age. Like Schopenhauer, it will be the judge of the so-called culture around it."[3]

Years later Nietzsche denied that, in this essay, he committed himself irretrievably to the whole philosophy of Schopenhauer and a fair reading bears him out. He was not defending Schopenhauer's doctrine of renunciation, but merely asking that he be given a hearing. He was pleading the case of foes as well as of friends: all he asked was that the forum be opened to every man who had something new to say.

Nietzsche regarded Schopenhauer as a king among philosophers because he shook himself entirely free of the dominant thought of his time. In an age marked, beyond everything, by humanity's rising reliance upon human reason, he sought to show that reason was a puny offshoot of an irresistible natural law—the law of self-preservation. Nietzsche admired the man's courage and agreed with him in his insistence that this law was at the bottom of all sentient activity, but he was never a subscriber to Schopenhauer's surrender and despair. From the very start, indeed, he was a prophet of defiance, and herein his divergence from Schopenhauer was infinite. As his knowledge broadened and his scope widened, he expanded and developed his philosophy, and often he found it necessary to modify it in detail. But that he ever turned upon himself in fundamentals is untrue. Nietzsche at 40 and Nietzsche at 25 were essentially the same. The germ of practically all his writings lies in his first book—nay, it is to be found further back: in the wild speculations of his youth.

The fourth of the "Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen" (and the last, for the original design of the series was not carried out) was "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth."[4] This was published in 1876 and neither it nor the general subject of Nietzsche's relations with Wagner need be considered here. In a subsequent chapter the whole matter will be discussed. For the present, it is sufficient to say that Nietzsche met Wagner through the medium of Ritschl's wife; that they became fast friends; that Nietzsche hailed the composer as a hero sent to make the drama an epitome of the life unfettered and unbounded, of life defiant and joyful; that Wagner, after starting from the Schopenhauer base, travelled toward St. Francis rather than toward Dionysus, and that Nietzsche, after vain expostulations, read the author of "Parsifal" out of meeting and pronounced him anathema. It was all a case of misunderstanding. Wagner was an artist, and not a philosopher. Right or wrong, Christianity was beautiful, and as a thing of beauty it called aloud to him. To Nietzsche beauty seemed a mere phase of truth.

It was during this period of preliminary skirmishing that Nietzsche's ultimate philosophy began to formulate itself. He saw clearly that there was something radically wrong with the German culture of the day—that many things esteemed right and holy were, in reality, unspeakable, and that many things under the ban of church and state were far from wrong in themselves. He saw, too, that there had grown up a false logic and that its taint was upon the whole of contemporary thought. Men maintained propositions plainly erroneous and excused themselves by the plea that ideals were greater than actualities. The race was subscribing to one thing and practicing another. Christianity was official, but not a single real Christian was to be found in all Christendom. Thousands bowed down to men and ideas that they despised and denounced things that every sane man knew were necessary and inevitable. The result was a flavor of dishonesty and hypocrisy in all human affairs. In the abstract the laws—of the church, the state and society—were looked upon as impeccable, but every man, in so far as they bore upon him personally, tried his best to evade them.

Other philosophers, in Germany and elsewhere, had made the same observation and there was in progress a grand assault-at-arms upon old ideas. Huxley and Spencer, in England, were laboring hard in the vineyard planted by Darwin; Ibsen, in Norway, was preparing for his epoch-making life-work, and in far America Andrew D. White and others were battling to free education from the bonds of theology. Thus it will be seen that, at the start, Nietzsche was no more a pioneer than any one of a dozen other men. Some of these other men, indeed, were far better equipped for the fray than he, and their services, for a long while, seemed a great deal more important. But it was his good fortune, before his working days were over, to press the conflict much further afield than the others. Beginning where they ended, he fought his way into the very citadel of the enemy.

His attack upon Christianity, which is described at length later on, well exemplifies this uncompromising thoroughness. Nietzsche saw that the same plan would have to be pursued in examining all other concepts—religious, political or social. It would be necessary to pass over surface symptoms and go to the heart of things: to tunnel down deep into ideas; to trace out their history and seek out their origins. There were no willing hands to help him in this: it was, in a sense, a work new to the world. In consequence Nietzsche perceived that he would have to go slowly and that it would be needful to make every step plain. It was out of the question to expect encouragement: if the task attracted notice at all, this notice would probably take the form of blundering opposition. But Nietzsche began his clearing and his road cutting with a light heart. The men of his day might call him accursed, but in time his honesty would shame all denial. This was his attitude always: he felt that neglect and opprobrium were all in his day's work and he used to say that if ever the generality of men endorsed any idea that he had advanced he would be convinced at once that he had made an error.

In his preliminary path-finding Nietzsche concerned himself much with the history of specific ideas. He showed how the thing which was a sin in one age became the virtue of the next. He attacked hope, faith and charity in this way, and he made excursions into nearly every field of human thought—from art to primary education. All of this occupied the first half of the 70's. Nietzsche was in indifferent health and his labors tired him so greatly that he thought more than once of giving up his post at Basel, with its dull round of lecturing and quizzing. But his private means at this time were not great enough to enable him to surrender his salary and so he had to hold on. He thought, too, of going to Vienna to study the natural sciences so that he might attain the wide and certain knowledge possessed by Spencer, but the same considerations forced him to abandon the plan. He spent his winters teaching and investigating and his summers at various watering-places—from Tribschen, in Switzerland, where the Wagners were his hosts, to Sorrento, in Italy.

At Sorrento he happened to take lodgings in a house which also sheltered Dr. Paul Rée, the author of "Psychological Observations," "The Origin of Moral Feelings," and other metaphysical works. That Rée gave him great assistance he acknowledged himself in later years, but that his ideas were, in any sense, due to this chance meeting (as Max Nordau would have us believe) is out of the question, for, as we have seen, they were already pretty clear in his mind a long while before. But Rée widened his outlook a great deal, it is evident, and undoubtedly made him acquainted with the English naturalists who had sprung up as spores of Darwin, and with a number of great Frenchmen—Montaigne, Larochefoucauld, La Bruyère, Fontenelle, Vauvenargues and Chamfort.

Nietzsche had been setting down his thoughts and conclusions in the form of brief memoranda and as he grew better acquainted with the French philosophers, many of whom published their works as collections of aphorisms, he decided to employ that form himself. Thus he began to arrange the notes which were to be given to the world as "Menschliches allzu Menschliches" ("Human, All-too Human"). In 1876 he got leave from Basel and gave his whole time to the work. During the winter of 1876-7, with the aid of a disciple named Bernhard Cron (better known as Peter Gast) he prepared the first volume for the press. Nietzsche was well aware that it would make a sensation and while it was being set up his courage apparently forsook him and he suggested to his publisher that it be sent forth anonymously. But the latter would not hear of it and so the first part left the press in 1878.

As the author had expected, the book provoked a fine frenzy of horror among the pious. The first title chosen for it, "Die Pflugschar" ("The Plowshare"), and the one finally selected, "Human, All-too Human," indicate that it was an attempt to examine the underside of human ideas. In it Nietzsche challenged the whole of current morality. He showed that moral ideas were not divine, but human, and that, like all things human, they were subject to change. He showed that good and evil were but relative terms, and that it was impossible to say, finally and absolutely, that a certain action was right and another wrong. He applied the acid of critical analysis to a hundred and one specific ideas, and his general conclusion, to put it briefly, was that no human being had a right, in any way or form, to judge or direct the actions of any other being. Herein we have, in a few words, that gospel of individualism which all our sages preach today.[5]

Nietzsche sent a copy of the book to Wagner and the great composer was so appalled that he was speechless. Even the author's devoted sister, who worshipped him as an intellectual god, was unable to follow him. Germany, in general, pronounced the work a conglomeration of crazy fantasies and wild absurdities—and Nietzsche smiled with satisfaction. In 1879 he published the second volume, to which he gave the sub-title of "Vermischte Meinungen und Sprüche" ("Miscellaneous Opinions and Aphorisms") and shortly thereafter he finally resigned his chair at Basel. The third part of the book appeared in 1880 as "Der Wanderer und sein Schatten" ("The Wanderer and His Shadow"). The three volumes were published as two in 1886 as "Menschliches allzu Menschliches" with the explanatory sub-title, "Ein Buch für Freie Geister" ("A Book for Free Spirits").

IV

THE PROPHET OF THE SUPERMAN

Nietzsche spent the winter of 1879-80 at Naumburg, his old home. During the ensuing year he was very ill, indeed, and for awhile he believed that he had but a short while to live. Like all such invalids he devoted a great deal of time to observing and discussing his condition. He became, indeed, a hypochondriac of the first water and began to take a sort of melancholy pleasure in his infirmities. He sought relief at all the baths and cures of Europe: he took hot baths, cold baths, salt-water baths and mud baths. Every new form of pseudo-therapy found him in its freshman class. To owners of sanatoria and to inventors of novel styles of massage, irrigation, sweating and feeding he was a joy unlimited. But he grew worse instead of better.

After 1880, his life was a wandering one. His sister, after her marriage, went to Paraguay for a while, and during her absence Nietzsche made his progress from the mountains to the sea, and then back to the mountains again. He gave up his professorship that he might spend his winters in Italy and his summers in the Engadine. In the face of all this suffering and travelling about, close application, of course, was out of the question. So he contented himself with working whenever and however his headaches, his doctors and the railway time-tables would permit—on hotel verandas, in cure-houses and in the woods. He would take long, solitary walks and struggle with his problems by the way. He swallowed more and more pills; he imbibed mineral waters by the gallon; he grew more and more moody and ungenial. One of his favorite haunts, in the winter time, was a verdant little neck of land that jutted out into Lake Maggiore. There he could think and dream undisturbed. One day, when he found that some one had placed a rustic bench on the diminutive peninsula, that passersby might rest, he was greatly incensed.

Nietzsche would make brief notes of his thoughts during his daylight rambles, and in the evenings would polish and expand them. As we have seen, his early books were sent to the printer as mere collections of aphorisms, without effort at continuity. Sometimes a dozen subjects are considered in two pages, and then again, there is occasionally a little essay of three or four pages. Nietzsche chose this form because it had been used by the French philosophers he admired, and because it well suited the methods of work that a pain-racked frame imposed upon him.

He was ever in great fear that some of his precious ideas would be lost to posterity—that death, the ever-threatening, would rob him of his rightful immortality and the world of his stupendous wisdom—and so he made efforts, several times, to engage an amanuensis capable of jotting down, after the fashion of Johnson's Boswell, the chance phrases that fell from his lips. His sister was too busy to undertake the task: whenever she was with him her whole time was employed in guarding him from lion-hunters, scrutinizing his daily fare and deftly inveigling him into answering his letters, brushing his clothes and getting his hair cut. Finally, Paul Rée and another friend, Fräulein von Meysenbug, brought to his notice a young Russian woman, Mlle. Lou Salomé, who professed vast interest in his work and offered to help him. But this arrangement quickly ended in disaster, for Nietzsche fell in love with the girl—she was only 20—and pursued her over half of Europe when she fled. To add to the humors of the situation Rée fell in love with her too, and the two friends thus became foes and there was even some talk of a duel. Mlle. Salomé, however, went to Rée, and with his aid she later wrote a book about Nietzsche.[1] Frau Förster-Nietzsche sneers at that book, but the fact is not to be forgotten that she was very jealous of Mlle. Salomé, and gave constant proof of it by unfriendly word and act. In the end, the latter married one Prof. Andreas and settled down in Göttingen.

Early in 1881 Nietzsche published "Morgenröte" ("The Dawn of Day"). It was begun at Venice in 1880 and continued at Marienbad, Lago Maggiore and Genoa. It was, in a broad way, a continuation of "Menschliches allzu Menschliches." It dealt with an infinite variety of subjects, from matrimony to Christianity, and from education to German patriotism. To all the test of fundamental truth was applied: of everything Nietzsche asked, not, Is it respectable or lawful? but, Is it essentially true? These early works, at best, were mere note-books. Nietzsche saw that the ground would have to be plowed, that people would have to grow accustomed to the idea of questioning high and holy things, before a new system of philosophy would be understandable or possible. In "Menschliches allzu Menschliches" and in "Morgenröte" he undertook this preparatory cultivation.

The book which followed, "Die fröhliche Wissenschaft" ("The Joyful Science") continued the same task. The first edition contained four parts and was published in 1882. In 1887 a fifth part was added. Nietzsche had now completed his plowing and was ready to sow his crop. He had demonstrated, by practical examples, that moral ideas were vulnerable, and that the Ten Commandments might be debated. Going further, he had adduced excellent historical evidence against the absolute truth of various current conceptions of right and wrong, and had traced a number of moral ideas back to decidedly lowly sources. His work so far had been entirely destructive and he had scarcely ventured to hint at his plans for a reconstruction of the scheme of things. As he himself says, he spent the four years between 1878 and 1882 in preparing the way for his later work.

"I descended," he says, "into the lowest depths, I searched to the bottom, I examined and pried into an old faith on which, for thousands of years, philosophers had built as upon a secure foundation. The old structures came tumbling down about me. I undermined our old faith in morals."[2]

This labor accomplished, Nietzsche was ready to set forth his own notion of the end and aim of existence. He had shown that the old morality was like an apple rotten at the core—that the Christian ideal of humility made mankind weak and miserable; that many institutions regarded with superstitious reverence, as the direct result of commands from the creator (such, for instance, as the family, the church and the state), were mere products of man's "all-too-human" cupidity, cowardice, stupidity and yearning for ease. He had turned the searchlight of truth upon patriotism, charity and self-sacrifice. He had shown that many things held to be utterly and unquestionably good or bad by modern civilization were once given quite different values—that the ancient Greeks considered hope a sign of weakness, and mercy the attribute of a fool, and that the Jews, in their royal days, looked upon wrath, not as a sin, but as a virtue—and in general he had demonstrated, by countless instances and arguments, that all notions of good and evil were mutable and that no man could ever say, with utter certainty, that one thing was right and another wrong.

The ground was now cleared for the work of reconstruction and the first structure that Nietzsche reared was "Also sprach Zarathustra" ("Thus Spake Zoroaster"). This book, to which he gave the sub-title of "Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen" ("A book for all and none"), took the form of a fantastic, half-poetical half-philosophical rhapsody. Nietzsche had been delving into oriental mysticism and from the law-giver of the ancient Persians he borrowed the name of his hero—Zoroaster. But there was no further resemblance between the two, and no likeness whatever between Nietzsche's philosophy and that of the Persians.

The Zoroaster of the book is a sage who lives remote from mankind, and with no attendants but a snake and an eagle. The book is in four parts and all are made up of discourses by Zoroaster. These discourses are delivered to various audiences during the prophet's occasional wanderings and at the conferences he holds with various disciples in the cave that he calls home. They are decidedly oriental in form and recall the manner and phraseology of the biblical rhapsodists. Toward the end Nietzsche throws all restraint to the winds and indulges to his heart's content in the rare and exhilarating sport of blasphemy. There is a sort of parody of the last supper and Zoroaster's backsliding disciples engage in the grotesque and indecent worship of a jackass. Wagner and other enemies of the author appear, thinly veiled, as ridiculous buffoons.

In his discourses Zoroaster voices the Nietzschean idea of the superman—the idea that has come to be associated with Nietzsche more than any other. Later on, it will be set forth in detail. For the present, suffice it to say that it is the natural child of the notions put forward in Nietzsche's first book, "The Birth of Tragedy," and that it binds his entire life work together into one consistent, harmonious whole. The first part of "Also sprach Zarathustra" was published in 1883, the second part following in the same year, and the third part was printed in 1884. The last part was privately circulated among the author's friends in 1885, but was not given to the public until 1892, when the entire work was printed in one volume. As showing Nietzsche's wandering life, it may be recorded that the book was conceived in the Engadine and written in Genoa, Sils Maria, Nice and Mentone.

"Jenseits von Gut und Böse" ("Beyond Good and Evil") appeared in 1886. In this book Nietzsche elaborated and systematized his criticism of morals, and undertook to show why he considered modern civilization degrading. Here he finally formulated his definitions of master-morality and slave-morality, and showed how Christianity was necessarily the idea of a race oppressed and helpless, and eager to escape the lash of its masters.

"Zur Genealogie der Moral" ("The Genealogy of Morals"), which appeared in 1887, developed these propositions still further. In it there was also a partial return to Nietzsche's earlier manner, with its merciless analysis of moral concepts. In 1888 Nietzsche published a most vitriolic attack upon Wagner, under the title of "Der Fall Wagner" ("The Case of Wagner"), the burden of which was the author's discovery that the composer, starting, with him, from Schopenhauer's premises, had ended, not with the superman, but with the Man on the cross. "Götzendämmerung" ("The Twilight of the Idols") a sort of parody of Wagner's "Götterdämmerung" ("The Twilight of the Gods") followed in 1889. "Nietzsche contra Wagner" ("Nietzsche versus Wagner") was printed the same year. It was made up of extracts from the philosopher's early works, and was designed to prove that, contrary to the allegations of his enemies, he had not veered completely about in his attitude toward Wagner.

Meanwhile, despite the fact that his health was fast declining and he was approaching the verge of insanity, Nietzsche made plans for a great four volume work that was to sum up his philosophy and stand forever as his magnum opus. The four volumes, as he planned them, were to bear the following titles:

1. "Der Antichrist: Versuch einer Kritik des Christenthums" ("The Anti-Christ: an Attempt at a Criticism of Christianity").

2. "Der freie Geist: Kritik der Philosophie als einer nihilistischen Bewegung" ("The Free Spirit: a Criticism of Philosophy as a Nihilistic Movement").

3. "Der Immoralist: Kritik der verhängnissvollsten Art von Unwissenheit, der Moral" ("The Immoralist: a Criticism of That Fatal Species of Ignorance, Morality").

4. "Dionysus, Philosophie der ewigen Wiederkunft" ("Dionysus, the Philosophy of Eternal Recurrence").

This work was to be published under the general title of "Der Wille zur Macht: Versuch einer Umwerthung aller Werthe" ("The Will to Power: an Attempt at a Transvaluation of all Values"), but Nietzsche got no further than the first book, "Der Antichrist" and a mass of rough notes for the others. "Der Antichrist" probably the most brilliant piece of writing that Germany had seen in half a century, was written at great speed between September 3rd and September 30th, 1888, but it was not published until 1895, six years after the philosopher had laid down his work forever.

During that same year C. G. Naumann, the Leipsic publisher, began the issue of a definite edition of all his writings, in fifteen volumes, under the editorial direction of Frau Förster-Nietzsche, Dr. Fritz Koegel, Peter Gast and E. von der Hellen. In this edition his notes for "Der Wille zur Macht" and his early philological essays were included. The notes are of great interest to the serious student of Nietzsche, for they show how some of his ideas changed with the years and point out the probable structure of his final system, but the general reader will find them chaotic, and often incomprehensible. In October, 1888, but three months before his breakdown, he began a critical autobiography with the title of "Ecce Homo," and it was completed in three weeks. It is an extremely frank and entertaining book, with such chapter headings as "Why I am so Wise," "Why I Write Such Excellent Books" and "Why I am a Fatality." In it Nietzsche sets forth his private convictions regarding a great many things, from cooking to climates, and discusses each of his books in detail. "Ecce Homo" was not printed until 1908, when it appeared at Leipsic in a limited edition of 1250 copies.

In January, 1889, at Turin, where he was living alone in very humble quarters, Nietzsche suddenly became hopelessly insane. His friends got news of it from his own hand. "I am Ferdinand de Lesseps," he wrote to Prof. Burckhardt of Basel. To Cosima Wagner: "Ariadne, I love you!" To Georg Brandes, the Danish critic, he sent a telegram signed "The Crucified." Franz Overbeck, an old Basel friend, at once set out for Turin, and there he found Nietzsche thumping the piano with his elbows and singing wild songs. Overbeck brought him back to Basel and he was confined in a private asylum, where his general health greatly improved and hopes were entertained of his recovery. But he never got well enough to be left alone, and so his old mother, with whom he had been on bad terms for years, took him back to Naumburg. When, in 1893, his sister Elizabeth returned from Paraguay, where her husband had died, he was well enough to meet her at the railroad station. Four years later, when their mother died, Elizabeth removed him to Weimar, where she bought a villa called "Silberblick" (Silver View) in the suburbs. This villa had a garden overlooking the hills and the lazy river Ilm, and a wide, sheltered veranda for the invalid's couch. There he would sit day after day, receiving old friends but saying little. His mind never became clear enough for him to resume work, or even to read. He had to grope for words, slowly and painfully, and he retained only a cloudy memory of his own books. His chief delight was in music and he was always glad when someone came who could play the piano for him.

There is something poignantly pathetic in the picture of this valiant fighter—this arrogant ja-sager—this foe of men, gods and devils—being nursed and coddled like a little child. His old fierce pride and courage disappeared and he became docile and gentle. "You and I, my sister—we are happy!" he would say, and then his hand would slip out from his coverings and clasp that of the tender and faithful Lisbeth. Once she mentioned Wagner to him. "Den habe ich sehr geliebt!" he said. All his old fighting spirit was gone. He remembered only the glad days and the dreams of his youth.

Nietzsche died at Weimar on August 25, 1900, the immediate cause of death being pneumonia. His ashes are buried in the little village of Röcken, his birthplace.

V

THE PHILOSOPHER AND THE MAN

"My brother," says Frau Förster-Nietzsche, in her biography, "was stockily and broadly built and was anything but thin. He had a rather dark, healthy, ruddy complexion. In all things he was tidy and orderly, in speech he was soft-spoken, and in general, he was inclined to be serene under all circumstances. All in all, he was the very antithesis of a nervous man.

"In the fall of 1888, he said of himself, in a reminiscent memorandum: 'My blood moves slowly. A doctor who treated me a long while for what was at first diagnosed as a nervous affection said: "No, your trouble cannot be in your nerves. I myself am much more nervous than you."'...

"My brother, both before and after his long illness seized him, was a believer in natural methods of healing. He took cold baths, rubbed down every morning and was quite faithful in continuing light, bed-room gymnastics."

At one time, she says, Nietzsche became a violent vegetarian and afflicted his friends with the ancient vegetarian horror of making a sarcophagus of one's stomach. It seems surprising that a man so quick to perceive errors, saw none in the silly argument that, because an ape's organs are designed for a vegetarian diet, a man's are so planned also. An acquaintance with elementary anatomy and physiology would have shown him the absurdity of this, but apparently he knew little about the human body, despite his uncanny skill at unearthing the secrets of the human mind. Nietzsche had read Emerson in his youth, and those Emersonian seeds which have come to full flower in the United States as the so-called New Thought movement—with Christian Science, osteopathy, mental telepathy, occultism, pseudo-psychology and that grand lodge of credulous comiques, the Society for Psychical Research, as its final blossoms—all of this probably made its mark on the philosopher of the superman, too.

Frau Förster-Nietzsche, in her biography, seeks to prove the impossible thesis that her brother, despite his constant illness, was ever well-balanced in mind. It is but fair to charge that her own evidence is against her. From his youth onward, Nietzsche was undoubtedly a neurasthenic, and after the Franco-Prussian war he was a constant sufferer from all sorts of terrible ills—some imaginary, no doubt, but others real enough. In many ways, his own account of his symptoms recalls vividly the long catalogue of aches and pains given by Herbert Spencer in his autobiography. Spencer had queer pains in his head and so did Nietzsche. Spencer roved about all his life in search of health and so did Nietzsche. Spencer's working hours were limited and so were Nietzsche's. The latter tells us himself that, in a single year, 1878, he was disabled 118 days by headaches and pains in the eyes.

Dr. Gould, the prophet of eye-strain, would have us believe that both of these great philosophers suffered because they had read too much during adolescence. It is more likely, however, that each was the victim of some definite organic malady, and perhaps of more than one. In Nietzsche's case things were constantly made worse by his fondness for self-medication, that vice of fools. Preparatory to his service as a hospital steward in 1870 he had attended a brief course of first-aid lectures at the military hospital at Erlangen, and thereafter he regarded himself as a finished pathologist and was forever taking his own doses. The amount of medicine he thus swallowed was truly appalling, and the only way he could break his appetite for one drug was by acquiring an appetite for another. Chloral, however, was his favorite, and toward the end he took it daily and in staggering quantities.

Meanwhile, his mental disturbances grew more and more visible. At times he would be highly excited and exalted, denouncing his foes, and proclaiming his own genius. This was his state when his friends were finally forced to put him under restraint. At other times he would show symptoms of melancholia—a feeling of isolation and friendlessness, a great sadness, a foreboding of death. The hostility with which his books were received gave sharpness and plausibility to this mood, and it pursued him through many a despairing day.

"An animal, when it is sick," he wrote to Baron von Seydlitz, in 1888, "slinks away to some dark cavern, and so, too, does the bête philosophe. I am alone—absurdly alone—and in my unflinching and toilsome struggle against all that men have hitherto held sacred and venerable, I have become a sort of dark cavern myself—something hidden and mysterious, which is not to be explored...." But the mood vanished as the words were penned, and the defiant dionysian roared his challenge at his foes. "It is not impossible," he said, "that I am the greatest philosopher of the century—perhaps even more than that! I may be the decisive and fateful link between two thousand centuries!"[1]

Max Nordau[2] says that Nietzsche was crazy from birth, but the facts do not bear him out. It is much more reasonable to hold that the philosopher came into the world a sound and healthy animal, and that it remained for overstudy in his youth, over-work and over drugging later on, exposure on the battle field, functional disorders and constant and violent strife to undermine and eventually overthrow his intellect.

But if we admit the indisputable fact that Nietzsche died a madman and the equally indisputable fact that his insanity was not sudden, but progressive, we by no means read him out of court as a thinker. A man's reasoning is to be judged, not by his physical condition, but by its own ingenuity and accuracy. If a raving maniac says that twice two make four, it is just as true as it would be if Pope Pius X or any other undoubtedly sane man were to maintain it. Judged in this way Nietzsche's philosophy is very far from insane. Later on we shall consider it as a workable system, and point out its apparent truths and apparent errors, but in no place (saving, perhaps, one) is his argument to be dismissed as the phantasm of a lunatic.

Nietzsche's sister says that, in the practical affairs of life, the philosopher was absurdly impractical. He cared nothing for money and during the better part of his life had little need to do so. His mother, for a country pastor's widow, was well-to-do, and when he was twenty-five his professorship at Basel brought him 3,000 francs a year. At Basel, in the late sixties, 3,000 francs was the income of an independent, not to say opulent man. Nietzsche was a bachelor and lived very simply. It was only upon books and music and travel that he was extravagant.

After two years' service at Basel, the university authorities raised his wage to 4,000 francs, and in 1879, when ill health forced him to resign, they gave him a pension of 3,000 francs a year. Besides that, he inherited 30,000 marks from one of his aunts, and so, altogether, he had an income of $900 or $1,000 a year—the sum which Herbert Spencer regarded, all his life, as an insurance of perfect tranquillity and happiness.

Nietzsche's passion and dissipation, throughout his life, was music. In all his books musical terms and figures of speech are constantly encountered. He played the piano very well, indeed, and was especially fond of performing transcriptions of the Wagner opera scores. "My three solaces," he wrote home from Leipsic, "are Schopenhauer's philosophy, Schumann's music and solitary walks." In his late youth, Wagner engrossed him, but his sympathies were broad enough to include Bach, Schubert and Mendelssohn. His admiration for the last named, in fact, helped to alienate him from Wagner, who regarded the Mendelssohn scheme of things as unspeakable.

Nietzsche's own compositions were decidedly heavy and scholastic. He was a skillful harmonist and contrapuntalist, but his musical ideas lacked life. Into the simplest songs he introduced harsh and far-fetched modulations. The music of Richard Strauss, who professes to be his disciple and has found inspiration in his "Also sprach Zarathustra" would have delighted him. Strauss has achieved the uncanny feat of writing in two keys at once. Such an effort would have enlisted Nietzsche's keen interest.

All the same, his music was not a mere creature of the study and of rules, and we have evidence that he was frequently inspired to composition by bursts of strong emotion. On his way to the Franco-Prussian war, he wrote a patriotic song, words and music, on the train. He called it "Adieu! I Must Go!" and arranged it for men's chorus, a capella. It would be worth while to hear a German männerchor, with its high, beery tenors, and ponderous basses, sing this curious composition. Certainly no more grotesque music was ever put on paper by mortal man.

Much has been written by various commentators about the strange charm of Nietzsche's prose style. He was, indeed, a master of the German language, but this mastery was not inborn. Like Spencer he made a deliberate effort, early in life, to acquire ease and force in writing. His success was far greater than Spencer's. Toward the end—in "Der Antichrist," for instance—he attained a degree of powerful and convincing utterance almost comparable to Huxley's. But his style never exhibited quite that wonderful air of clearness, of utter certainty, of inevitableness which makes the "Lay Sermons" so tremendously impressive. Nietzsche was ever nearer to Carlyle than to Addison. "His style," says a writer in the Athenæum, "is a shower of sparks, which scatter, like fireworks, all over the sky."

"My sense for form," says Nietzsche himself, "awakened on my coming in contact with Sallust." Later on he studied the great French stylists, particularly Larochefoucauld, and learned much from them. He became a master of the aphorism and the epigram, and this skill, very naturally, led him to descend, now and then, to mere violence and invective. He called his opponents all sorts of harsh names—liar, swindler, counterfeiter, ox, ass, snake and thief. Whatever he had to say, he hammered in with gigantic blows, and to the accompaniment of fearsome bellowing and grimacing. "Nervous, vivid and picturesques, full of fire and a splendid vitality," says one critic, "his style flashed and coruscated like a glowing flame, and had a sort of dithyrambic movement that at times recalls the swing of the Pindaric odes." Naturally, this very abandon made his poetry formless and grotesque. He scorned metres and rhymes and raged on in sheer savagery. Reading his verses one is forced irresistibly into the thought that they should be printed in varied fonts of type and in a dozen brilliant inks.

Nietzsche never married, but he was by no means a misogynist. His sister tells us, indeed, that he made a formal proposal of marriage to a young Dutch woman, Fräulein Tr——, at Geneva in 1876, and the story of his melodramatic affair with Mlle. Lou Salomé, six years later, was briefly rehearsed in the last chapter. There were also other women in his life, early and late, and certain scandal-mongers do not hesitate to accuse him of a passion for Cosima Wagner, apparently on the ground that he wrote to her, in his last mad days, "Ariadne, I love thee!" But his intentions were seldom serious. Even when he pursued Mlle. Salomé from Rome to Leipsic and quarrelled with his sister about her, and threatened poor Rée with fire-arms, there is good reason to believe that he shied at bell and book. His proposal, in brief, was rather one of a free union than one of marriage. For the rest, he kept safely to impossible flirtations. During all his wanderings he was much petted by the belles of pump room and hotel parlor, not only because he was a mysterious and romantic looking fellow, but also because his philosophy was thought to be blasphemous and indecent, particularly by those who knew nothing about it. But the fair admirers he singled out were either securely married or hopelessly antique. "For me to marry," he soliloquized in 1887, "would probably be sheer asininity."

There are sentimental critics who hold that Nietzsche's utter lack of geniality was due to his lack of a wife. A good woman—alike beautiful and sensible—would have rescued him, they say, from his gloomy fancies. He would have expanded and mellowed in the sunshine of her smiles, and children would have civilized him. The defect in this theory lies in the fact that philosophers do not seem to flourish amid scenes of connubial joy. High thinking, it would appear, presupposes boarding house fare and hall bed-rooms. Spinoza, munching his solitary herring up his desolate backstairs, makes a picture that pains us, perhaps, but it must be admitted that it also satisfies our sense of eternal fitness. A married Spinoza, with two sons at college, another managing the family lens business, a daughter busy with her trousseau and a wife growing querulous and fat—the vision, alas, is preposterous, outrageous and impossible! We must think of philosophers as beings alone but not lonesome. A married Schopenhauer or Kant or Nietzsche would be unthinkable.

That a venture into matrimony might have somewhat modified Nietzsche's view of womankind is not at all improbable, but that this change would have been in the direction of greater accuracy does not follow. He would have been either a ridiculously henpecked slave or a violent domestic tyrant. As a bachelor he was comparatively well-to-do, but with a wife and children his thousand a year would have meant genteel beggary. His sister had her own income and her own affairs. When he needed her, she was ever at his side, but when his working fits were upon him—when he felt efficient and self-sufficient—she discreetly disappeared. A wife's constant presence, day in and day out, would have irritated him beyond measure or reduced him to a state of compliance and sloth. Nietzsche himself sought to show, in more than one place, that a man whose whole existence was colored by one woman would inevitably acquire some trace of her feminine outlook, and so lose his own sure vision. The ideal state for a philosopher, indeed, is celibacy tempered by polygamy. He must study women, but he must be free, when he pleases, to close his note book and go away and digest its contents with an open mind.

Toward the end of his life, when increasing illness made him helpless, Nietzsche's faithful sister took the place of wife and mother in his clouding world. She made a home for him and she sat by and watched him. They talked for hours—Nietzsche propped up with pillows, his old ruddiness faded into a deathly white, and his Niagara of a moustache showing dark against his pallid skin. They talked of Naumburg and the days of long ago and the fiery prophet of the superman became simple Brother Fritz. We are apt to forget that a great man is thus not only great, but also a man: that a philosopher, in a life time, spends less hours pondering the destiny of the race than he gives over to wondering if it will rain tomorrow and to meditating upon the toughness of steaks, the dustiness of roads, the stuffiness of railway coaches and the brigandage of gas companies.

Nietzsche's sister was the only human being that ever saw him intimately, as a wife might have seen him. Her affection for him was perfect and her influence over him perfect, too. Love and understanding, faith and gentleness—these are the things which make women the angels of joyous illusion. Lisbeth, the calm and trusting, had all in boundless richness. There was, indeed, something noble, and almost holy in the eagerness with which she sought her brother's comfort and peace of mind during his days of stress and storm, and magnified his virtues after he was gone.

NIETZSCHE THE PHILOSOPHER

I

DIONYSUS VERSUS APOLLO

In one of the preceding chapters Nietzsche's theory of Greek tragedy was given in outline and its dependence upon the data of Schopenhauer's philosophy was indicated. It is now in order to examine this theory a bit more closely and to trace out its origin and development with greater dwelling upon detail. In itself it is of interest only as a step forward in the art of literary criticism, but in its influence upon Nietzsche's ultimate inquiries it has colored, to a measurable extent, the whole stream of modern thought.