Affirmations

FOR some years the name of Friedrich Nietzsche has been the war-cry of opposing factions in Germany. It is not easy to take up a German periodical without finding some trace of the passionate admiration or denunciation which this man has called forth. If we turn to Scandinavia or to France, whither his fame and his work are also penetrating, we find that the same results have followed. And we may expect a similar outburst in England now that the translation of his works has at last begun. At present, however, I know of no attempt to deal with Nietzsche from the British point of view, and that is my excuse for trying to define his personality and influence.[1] I do not come forward as the champion of Nietzschianism or of Anti-Nietzschianism. It appears to me that any human individuality that has strongly aroused the love and hatred of men must be far too complex for absolute condemnation or absolute approval. Apart from praise or blame, which seem here alike impertinent, Nietzsche is without doubt an extraordinarily interesting figure. He is the modern incarnation of that image of intellectual pride which Marlowe created in Faustus. A man who has certainly stood at the finest summit of modern culture, who has thence made the most determined effort ever made to destroy modern morals, and who now leads a life as near to death as any life outside the grave can be, must needs be a tragic figure. It is a figure full of significance, for it represents one of the greatest spiritual forces which have appeared since Goethe, full of interest also to the psychologist, and surely not without its pathos, perhaps its horror, for the man in the street.

I.

It has only lately become possible to study Nietzsche’s life-history. For a considerable period the Nietzsche-Archiv at Naumburg and Weimar has been accumulating copious materials which have now been utilised by Nietzsche’s sister, Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, in the production of an authoritative biography. This sister is herself a remarkable person; for many years she lived in close association with her brother, so that she was supposed, though without reason, to have exerted an influence over his thought; then she married Dr. Förster, the founder of the New Germany colony in Paraguay; on his death she returned home to write the history of the colony, and has since devoted herself to the care of her brother and his fame. Only the first two volumes of the Leben Nietzsche’s have yet appeared, but they enable us to trace his development to his departure from Basel, and throw light on his whole career.

Nietzsche belonged, according to the ancestral tradition (though the name, I am told, is a common one in Wendish Silesia), to a noble Polish family called Nietzky, who on account of strong Protestant convictions abandoned their country and their title during the eighteenth century and settled in Germany. Notwithstanding the large amount of German blood in his veins, he always regarded himself as essentially a Pole. The Poles seemed to him the best endowed and most knightly of Sclavonic peoples, and he once remarked that it was only by virtue of a strong mixture of Sclavonic blood that the Germans entered the ranks of gifted nations. He termed the Polish Chopin the deliverer of music from German heaviness and stupidity, and when he speaks of another Pole, Copernicus, who reversed the judgment of the whole world, one may divine a reference to what in later years Nietzsche regarded as his own mission. In adult life Nietzsche’s keen and strongly marked features were distinctly Polish, and when abroad he was frequently greeted by Poles as a fellow-countryman; at Sorrento, where he once spent a winter, the country people called him Il Polacco.

Like Emerson (to whose writings he was strongly attracted throughout life) and many another strenuous philosophic revolutionary, Nietzsche came of a long race of Christian ministers. On both sides his ancestors were preachers, and from first to last the preacher’s fervour was in his own blood. The eldest of three children (of whom one died in infancy), Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844 at Röcken, near Lützen, in Saxony. His father—who shortly after his son’s birth fell down the parsonage steps, injuring his head so severely that he died within twelve months—is described as a man of noble and poetic nature, with a special talent for music, inherited by his son; though once described by his son as “a tender, lovable, morbid man,” he belonged to a large and very healthy family, who mostly lived to an extreme old age, preserving their mental and physical vigour to the last. The Nietzsches were a proud, sincere folk, very clannish, looking askance at all who were not Nietzsches. Nietzsche’s mother, said to be a charming woman and possessed of much physical vigour, was again a clergyman’s daughter. The Oehler family, to which she belonged, was also very large, very healthy, and very long-lived; she was only eighteen at her son’s birth, and is still alive to care for him in his complete mental decay. I note these facts, which are given with much precision and detail in the biography, because they certainly help us to understand Nietzsche. It is evident that he is no frail hectic flame of a degenerating race. There seems to be no trace of insanity or nervous disorder at any point in the family history, as far back as it is possible to go. On the contrary, he belonged to extremely vigorous stocks, possessing unusual moral and physical force, people of “character.” A similar condition of things is not seldom found in the history of genius. In such a case the machine is, as it were, too highly charged with inherited energy, and works at a pressure which ultimately brings it to perdition. All genius must work without rest, it cannot do otherwise; only the most happily constituted genius works without haste.

The sister’s account of the children’s early life is a very charming part of this record, and one which in the nature of things rarely finds place in a biography. She describes her first memories of the boy’s pretty face, his long fair hair, and large, dark, serious eyes. He could not speak until he was nearly three years old, but at four he began to read and write. He was a quiet, rather obstinate child, with fits of passion which he learnt to control at a very early age; his self-control became so great that, as a boy, on more than one occasion he deliberately burnt his hand, to show that Mucius Scævola’s act was but a trifling matter.

The widowed mother went with her children to settle at Naumburg on the Saale with her husband’s mother, a woman of fine character with views of her own, one of which was that children of all classes should first be brought up together. Little Fritz was therefore sent to the town school, but the experiment was not altogether successful. He was a serious child, fond of solitude, and was called “the little parson” by his comrades. “The fundamental note of his disposition,” writes a schoolfellow in after-life, “was a certain melancholy which expressed itself in his whole being.” He avoided his fellows and sought beautiful scenery, as he continued to do throughout life. At the same time he was a well-developed, vigorous boy, who loved games of various kinds, especially those of his own invention. But although the children lived to the full the fantastic life of childhood, the sister regretfully confesses that they remained models of propriety. Fritz was “a very pious child; he thought much about religious matters, and was always concerned to put his thoughts into practice.” It is curious that, notwithstanding his instinctive sympathy with the Greek spirit and his philological aptitudes, he found Greek specially difficult to learn. At the age of ten appeared his taste for verse-making, and also for music, and he soon began to show that inherited gift for improvisation by which he was always able to hold his audience spellbound. Even as a boy the future moralist made a deep impression on those who knew him, and he reminded one person of the youthful Jesus in the Temple. “We Nietzsches hate lies,” an aunt was accustomed to say; in Friedrich sincerity was a very deep-rooted trait, and he exercised an involuntary educational influence on those who came near him.

In 1858 a place was found for him at Pforta, a remarkable school of almost military discipline. Here many of the lines of his future activity were definitely laid down. At an even earlier date, excited by the influence of Humboldt, he had been fascinated by the ideal of universal culture, and at Pforta his intellectual energies began to expand. Here also, in 1859, when a pianoforte edition of Tristan was first published, Nietzsche became an enthusiastic Wagnerian, and even to the last Tristan remained for him “music par excellence.” Here, too, he began those philological studies which led some years later to a professorship. He turned to philology, however, as he himself recognised, because of the need he felt to anchor himself to some cool logical study which would not grip his heart like the restless and exciting artistic instincts which had hitherto chiefly moved him. During the latter part of his stay at this very strenuous educational establishment young Nietzsche was a less brilliant pupil than during the earlier part. His own individuality was silently growing beneath the disciplinary pressure which would have dwarfed a less vigorous individuality. His philosophic aptitudes began to develop and take form; he wished also to devote himself to music; and he pined at the confinement, longing for the forest and the woodman’s axe. It was the beginning of a long struggle between the impulses of his own self-centred nature and the duties imposed from without, by the school, the university, and, later, his professorship; he always strove to broaden and deepen these duties to the scope of his own nature, but the struggle remained. It was the immediate result of this double strain that, during 1862, strong and healthy as the youth appeared, he began to suffer from headaches and eye-troubles, cured by temporary removal from the school. He remained extremely short-sighted, and it was only by an absurd error in the routine examination that, some years later, he was passed for military service in the artillery.

In the following year, 1863, Nietzsche met a schoolfellow’s sister, an ethereal little Berlin girl, who for a while appealed to “the large, broad-shouldered, shy, rather solemn and stiff youth.” To this early experience, which never went beyond poetic Schwärmerei, his sister is inclined to trace the origin of Nietzsche’s view of women as very fragile, tender little buds. The experience is also interesting because it appears to stand alone in his life. We strike here on an organic abnormality in this congenital philosopher. Nietzsche’s attitude was not the crude misogyny of Schopenhauer, who knew women chiefly as women of the streets. Nietzsche knew many of the finest women of his time, and he sometimes speaks with insight and sympathy of the world as it appears to women; but there was clearly nothing in him to answer to any appeal to passion, and his attitude is well summed up in an aphorism of his own Zarathustra: “It is better to fall into the hands of a murderer than into the dreams of an ardent woman.” “All his life long,” his sister writes, “my brother remained completely apart from either great passion or vulgar pleasure. His whole passion lay in the world of knowledge; only very temperate emotions remained over for anything else. In later life he was grieved that he had never attained to amour passion, and that every inclination to a feminine personality quickly changed to a tender friendship, however fascinatingly pretty the fair one might be.” He would expend much sympathy on unhappy lovers, yet he would shake his head, saying to himself or others: “And all that over a little girl!”

Young Nietzsche left Pforta, in 1863, with the most various and incompatible scientific tastes and interests (always excepting in mathematics, for which he never possessed any aptitude), but, as he himself remarked, none that would fit him for any career. One point in regard to the termination of his school-life is noteworthy: he chose Theognis as the subject of his valedictory dissertation. His meditations on this moralist and aristocrat, so contemptuous of popular rule, may have served as the starting-point of some of his own later views on Greek culture. In 1864 he became a student at Bonn, and the year that followed was of special import in his inner development; he finally threw off the beliefs of his early youth; he discovered his keen critical faculty; and self-contained independence became a visible mark of his character, though always disguised by amiable and courteous manners. At Bonn his life seems to have been fairly happy, though he was by no means a typical German student. He spent much money, but it was chiefly on his artistic tastes—music and the theatre—or on little tours. No one could spend less on eating and drinking; like Goethe and like Heine, he had no love for tobacco or for beer, and he was repelled by the thick, beery good-humour of the German student. People who drink beer and smoke pipes every evening, he always held, were incapable of understanding his philosophy; for they could not possibly possess the clarity of mind needed to grasp any delicate or complex intellectual problem. He returned home from Bonn “a picture of health and strength, broad-shouldered, brown, with rather fair thick hair, and exactly the same height as Goethe;” and then went to continue his studies at Leipzig.

Notwithstanding the youth’s efforts to subdue his emotional and æsthetic restlessness by cool and hard work, he was clearly tortured by the effort to find a philosophic home for himself in the world. This effort absorbed him all day long, frequently nearly all the night. At this time he chanced to take up on a bookstall a totally unknown work, entitled Der Welt als Wille und Vorstellung; in obedience to an unusual impulse he bought the book without consideration, and from that moment began an acquaintance with Schopenhauer which for many years exerted a deep influence on his life. At that time, probably, he could have had no better guide into paths of peace; but even as a student he was a keen critic of Schopenhauer’s system, valuing him chiefly as, in opposition to Kant, “the philosopher of a re-awakened classical period, a Germanised Hellenism.” Schumann’s music and long solitary walks aided in the work of recuperation. A year or two later Nietzsche met the other great god who shared with Schopenhauer his early worship. “I cannot bring my heart to any degree of critical coolness before this music,” he wrote, in 1868, after listening to the overture to the Meistersinger; “every fibre and nerve in me thrills; it is a long time since I have been so carried away.” I quote these words, for we shall, I think, find later that they have their significance. A few weeks afterwards he was invited to meet the master, and thus began a relationship that for Nietzsche was fateful.

Meanwhile his philological studies were bringing him distinction. A lecture on Theognis was pronounced by Ritschl to be the best work by a student of Nietzsche’s standing that he had ever met with. Then followed investigations into the sources of Suidas, a lengthy examination De fontibus Diogenis Laertii, and palæographic studies in connection with Terence, Statius, and Orosius. He was now also consciously perfecting his German style, treating language, he remarks, as a musical instrument on which one must be able to improvise, as well as play what is merely learnt by heart. In 1869, when only in his twenty-sixth year, and before he had taken his doctor’s degree, he accepted the chair of classical philology at Basel. He was certainly, as he himself said, not a born philologist. He had devoted himself to philology—I wish to insist on this significant point—as a sedative and tonic to his restless energy; in this he was doubtless wise, though his sister seems to suggest that he thereby increased his mental strain. But he had no real vocation for philology, and it is curious that when the Basel chair was offered to him he was proposing to himself to throw aside philology for chemistry. Philologists, he declares again and again, are but factory hands in the service of science. At the best philology is a waste of acuteness, since it merely enables us to state facts which the study of the present would teach us much more swiftly and surely. Thus it was that he instinctively broadened and deepened every philological question he took up, making it a channel for philosophy and morals. With his specifically philological work we are not further concerned.

I have been careful to present the main facts in Nietzsche’s early development because they seem to me to throw light on the whole of his later development. So far he had published nothing except in philological journals. In 1871, after he had settled at Basel, appeared his first work, an essay entitled Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, dedicated to Wagner. The conception of this essay was academic, but in Nietzsche’s hands the origin of tragedy became merely the text for an exposition of his own philosophy of art at this period. He traces two art impulses in ancient Greece: one, starting in the phenomena of dreaming, which he associates with Apollo; the other, starting in the phenomena of intoxication, associated with Dionysus, and through singing, music and dithyramb leading up to the lyric. The union of these, which both imply a pessimistic view of life, produced folksong and finally tragedy, which is thus the outcome of Dionysiac music fertilised by Apollonian imagery. Socrates the optimist, with his views concerning virtue as knowledge, vice as ignorance, and his identification of virtue with happiness, led to the decay of tragedy and the triumph of Alexandrian culture, in the net of which the whole modern world is still held. Now, however, German music is producing a new birth of tragedy through Wagner, who has again united music and myth, inaugurated an era of art culture, and built the bridge to a new German heathenism. This remarkable essay produced considerable controversy and much consternation among Nietzsche’s philological friends and teachers, who resented—reasonably enough, we may well admit—the subordination of philology to modern philosophy and art, and could not understand the marvellous swan they had hatched. A philologist Nietzsche could never have continued, but this book publicly put an end to any hope of academic advancement. It remains characteristic of Nietzsche’s first period, as we may call whatever he wrote before 1876, in its insistence on the primary importance of æsthetic as opposed to intellectual culture; and it is characteristic of his whole work in its grip of the connection between the problems and solutions of Hellenic times and the problems and solutions of the modern world. For Nietzsche the Greek world was not the model of beautiful mediocrity imagined by Winckelmann and Goethe, nor did it date from the era of rhetorical idealism inaugurated by Plato. The real Hellenic world came earlier, and the true Hellenes were sturdy realists enamoured of life, reverencing all its manifestations and signs, and holding in highest honour that sexual symbol of life which Christianity, with its denial of life, despises. Plato Nietzsche hated; he had wandered from all the fundamental instincts of the Hellene. His childish dialectic can only appeal, Nietzsche said, to those who are ignorant of French masters like Fontenelle. The best cure for Plato, he held, is Thucydides, the last of the old Hellenes who were brave in the face of reality; Plato fled from reality into the ideal and was a Christian before his time. Heraclitus was Nietzsche’s favourite Greek thinker, and he liked to point out that the moralists of the Stoa may be traced back to the great philosopher of Ephesus.

Die Geburt der Tragödie is the prelude to all Nietzsche’s work. He outgrew it, but in one point at least it sounds a note which recurs throughout all his work. He ever regarded the Greek conception of Dionysus as the key to the mystery of life. In Götzendämmerung, the last of his works, this is still affirmed, more distinctly than ever. “The fundamental Hellenic instinct,” he there wrote, “was first revealed in the Dionysiac mysteries. What was it the Greek assured to himself in these mysteries? Eternal life, the eternal return of life, the future promised and consecrated in the present, the triumphal affirmation of life over death and change, true life or immortality through procreation, through the mysteries of sexuality. Thus the sexual symbol was to the Greeks the profoundest and most venerable symbol in the whole range of ancient piety. Every individual act of reproduction, of conception, of birth was a festival awaking the loftiest emotions. The doctrine of the mysteries proclaimed the holiness of pain; the pangs of childbirth sanctified all pain. All growth and development, every promise for the future, is conditioned by pain. To ensure the eternal pleasure of creation, the eternal affirmation of the will to live, the eternity of birth-pangs is absolutely required. All this is signified by the word Dionysus: I know no higher symbolism than this Greek Dionysiac symbolism. In it the deepest instinct of life, of the future of life, the eternity of life, is experienced religiously; generation, the way to life, is regarded as a sacred way. Christianity alone, with its fundamental horror of life, has made sexuality an impure thing, casting filth on the beginning, the very condition, of our life.”

Between 1873 and 1876 Nietzsche wrote four essays—on David Strauss, the Use and Abuse of History in relation to Life, Schopenhauer as an Educator, and Richard Wagner—which were published as a series of Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen. The essay on Strauss was written soon after the great war, amid the resulting outburst of flamboyant patriotism and the widely-expressed conviction that the war was a victory of “German culture.” Fresh from the world of Greece, Nietzsche pours contempt on that assumption. Culture, he says, is, above all, unity of artistic style in every expression of a people’s life. The exuberance of knowledge in which a German glories is neither a necessary means of culture nor a sign of it, being, indeed, more allied to the opposite of culture—to barbarism. It is in this barbarism that the modern German lives, that is to say, in a chaotic mixture of all styles. Look at his clothing, Nietzsche continues, his houses, his streets, all his manners and customs. They are a turmoil of all styles in which he peacefully lives and moves. Such culture is really a phlegmatic absence of all sense of culture. Largely, also, it is merely a bad imitation of the real and productive culture of France which it is supposed to have conquered in 1870. Let there be no chatter, he concludes, about the triumph of German culture, for at present no real German culture exists. The heroic figures of the German past were not “classics,” as some imagine; they were seekers after a genuine German culture, and so regarded themselves. The would-be children of culture in Germany to-day are Philistines without knowing it, and the only unity they have achieved is a methodical barbarism. Nietzsche attacks Strauss by no means as a theologian, but as a typical “culture-Philistine.” He was moved to this by the recent publication of Der Alte und der Neue Glaube. I can well understand the emotions with which that book filled him, for I, too, read it soon after its publication, and can vividly recall the painful impression made on me by its homely pedestrianism, the dull unimaginativeness of the man who could only compare the world to a piece of machinery, an engine that creaks in the working, a sort of vast Lancashire mill in which we must spend every moment in feverish labour, and for our trouble perhaps be caught between the wheels and cogs. But I was young, and my youthful idealism, eager for some vital and passionate picture of the world, inevitably revolted against so tawdry and mechanical a conception. Nietzsche, then and ever, failed to perceive that there is room, after all, for the modest sturdy bourgeois labourer who, at the end of a hard life in the service of truth, sits down to enjoy his brown beer and Haydn’s quartettes, and to repeat his homely confession of faith in the world as he sees it. Nietzsche failed to realise that Strauss’s limitations were essential to the work he had to do, and that he remained a not unworthy follower of those German heroes who were not “classics,” but honest seekers after the highest they knew. In this hypertrophied repulsion for the everyday work of the intellectual world we touch on a defect in Nietzsche’s temperament which we must regard as fundamental, and which wrought in him at last to wildest issues.

In another of these essays, Schopenhauer als Erzieher, Nietzsche sets forth his opinions concerning his early master in philosophy. It is a significant indication of the qualities that attracted him to Schopenhauer that he compares him to Montaigne, thus at once revealing his own essential optimism, and the admiration which he then and always felt for the great French masters of wisdom. He regards Schopenhauer as the leader from Kant’s caves of critical scepticism to the open sky with its consoling stars. Schopenhauer saw the world as a whole, and was not befooled by the analysis of the colours and canvas wherewith the picture is painted. Kant, in spite of the impulse of his genius, never became a philosopher. “If any one thinks I am thus doing Kant an injustice, he cannot know what a philosopher is, i.e., not merely a great thinker but also a real man;” and he goes on to explain that the mere scholar who is accustomed to let opinions, ideas, and things in books always intervene between him and facts, will never see facts, and will never be a fact to himself; whereas the philosopher must regard himself as the symbol and abbreviation of all the facts of the world. It remained an axiom with Nietzsche that the philosopher must first of all be a “real man.”

In this essay, which Nietzsche always preferred to his other early works, he thus for the first time clearly sets forth his conception of the philosopher as a teacher, a liberator, a guide to fine living; Schopenhauer’s metaphysical doctrine he casts aside with indifference. Unconsciously, as in late years he seems to have admitted, he was speaking of himself and setting forth his own aims. Thus it is characteristic that he here also first expressed his conception of the value of individuality. Shakespeare had asked:

But Shakespeare was only addressing a single beloved friend. Nietzsche addresses the same thought to the common “you.” “At bottom every man well knows that he can only live one single life in the world, and that never again will so strange a chance shake together into unity such singularly varied elements as he holds: he knows that, but he hides it like a bad conscience.” This was a sane and democratic individualism; in later years, as we shall see, it assumed stranger shapes.

At Basel Nietzsche lived in close communion with Wagner and Frau Cosima, who at this time regarded him as the prophet of the music-drama. The essay on Wagner, which starts from the standpoint reached in the previous essays, seems to justify this confidence. There is a deep analogy for those to whom distance is no obscuring cloud, Nietzsche remarks, between Kant and the Eleatics, Schopenhauer and Empedocles, Wagner and Æschylus. “The world has been orientalised long enough, and men now seek to be hellenised.” The Gordian knot has been cut and its strands are fluttering to the ends of the world; we need a series of Anti-Alexanders mighty enough to bring together the scattered threads of life. Wagner is such an Anti-Alexander, a great astringent force in the world. For “it is not possible to present the highest and purest operations of dramatic art, and not therewith to renew morals and the state, education and affairs.” Bayreuth is the sacred consecration on the morning of battle. “The battles which art brings before us are a simplification of the actual battles of life; its problems are an abbreviation of the endlessly involved reckoning of human action and aspiration. But herein lies the greatness and value of art, that it calls forth the appearance of a simpler world, a shorter solution of the problems of life. No one who suffers in life can dispense with that appearance, just as no one can dispense with sleep.” Wagner has simplified the world, Nietzsche continues; he has related music to life, the drama to music; he has intensified the visible things of the world, and made the audible visible. Just as Goethe found in poetry an expression for the painter’s vocation he had missed, so Wagner utilised in music his dramatic instinct. And Nietzsche further notes the democratic nature of Wagner’s art, so strenuously warm and bright as to reach even the lowliest in spirit. Wagner takes off the stigma that clings to the word “common,” and brings to all the means of attaining spiritual freedom. “For,” says Nietzsche, “whosoever will be free, must make himself free; freedom is no fairy’s gift to fall into any man’s lap.” Such are the leading thoughts in an essay which remains an interesting philosophic appreciation of the place of Wagner’s art in the modern world; yet one may well admit that it is often over-strained, with a strain that expresses the obscure struggle of nascent antagonism.

It is, indeed, Wagner in Bayreuth which brings to an end Nietzsche’s first period, and leads up to the crash which inaugurated his later period. Hitherto Nietzsche’s work was unquestionably sane both in substance and form. No doubt it had called forth much criticism; work so vigorous, sincere, and independent could not fail to arouse hostility. But as we look back to-day, these fine essays represent, with much youthful enthusiasm, the best that was known and thought in Germany a quarter of a century ago. Nietzsche’s opinions on Wagner and Schopenhauer, on individualism and democracy, the significance of early Hellenism for moderns, the danger of an excessive historical sense, the conception of culture less as a striving after intellectual knowledge than as that which arouses within us the philosopher, the artist, and the saint—all these ideas, wild as some of them seemed to Nietzsche’s German contemporaries, are the ideas which have now largely permeated European culture. The same cannot be said of his later ideas.

It was at the first Bayreuth festival in 1876 that this chapter in Nietzsche’s life was finally closed. His profound admiration for Wagner, his intimate intercourse with the greatest figure in the German world of art, had hitherto been the chief fact in his life. All his ideals of life and his hopes for the future had grown up around the figure of Wagner, who seemed the leader into a new Promised Land. During the previous two years, however, Nietzsche had seen little of Wagner, who had left Switzerland, and he had been unable to realise either his own development or Wagner’s. Whatever enthusiasm Nietzsche may have felt in early life for a return to German heathenism, he was yet by race and training and taste by no means allied to primitive Germanism; it was towards Greece and towards France that his conception of national culture really drew him. Wagner was far more profoundly Teutonic, and in the Nibelung cycle, which Nietzsche was about to witness for the first time on the stage, Wagner had incarnated the spirit of Teutonic heathenism with an overwhelming barbaric energy which, as Nietzsche could now realise, was utterly alien to his own most native instincts. Thus it was that Bayreuth marked the crisis of a subtle but profound realisation, the most intense self-realisation he had yet attained.

The whole history of this Wagner episode in Nietzsche’s life is full of interest. The circumstantial narrative in the second volume of the Leben Nietzsche’s renders it clear at every point, and reveals a tragedy which has its significance for the study of genius generally. Nietzsche, it must be remembered, was more than thirty years younger than Wagner. He was younger, and also he was less corrupted by the world than Wagner. The great artist of the music-drama possessed, or had acquired, a practical good sense in all that concerned the realisation of his own mighty projects such as always marks the greatest and most successful of the world’s supreme artists. Like Shakespeare, he knew that the dyer’s hand must ever be a little subdued to what it works in, if the radiant beauty of his stuffs is ever to be perfectly achieved. But Nietzsche could never endure any fleck on his hand; he shrank with horror from every soiling contact; he was an artist who regarded life itself as the highest art. He could never have carried through the rough task of dying the gorgeous garments of a narrower but more perfectly attainable art. Nietzsche’s idealised admiration for Wagner was complicated, after his appointment to the Basel chair, by a deep personal friendship for the Master, the chief friendship of his life. And his friendships were deeper than those of most; although they show no traces of sexual tincture they were hypertrophied by the defective sexuality of the man who always regarded friendship as a more massive and poignant emotion than love. That there were on either side any petty faults to cause a rift in friendship there is no reason whatever to believe. Nietzsche was above such, and Wagner’s friendship was always hearty until he realised that Nietzsche was no longer his disciple, and then he dropped him, silently, as a workman drops a useless tool. In addition it must be noted that Nietzsche was probably at this time often over-strained, almost hysterical,—at least so, we may gather, he impressed Wagner, who urged him to marry a rich wife and to travel,—and he was still afflicted by a disorder which not even genius can escape in youth, he was still something of what we vulgarly call a “prig”; he had not yet quite outgrown “the youthful Jesus in the Temple.” “Your brother with his air of delicate distinction is a most uncomfortable fellow,” said Wagner to Frau Förster-Nietzsche; “one can always see what he is thinking; sometimes he is quite embarrassed at my jokes—and then I crack them more madly than ever.” Wagner’s jokes, it appears, were of a homely and plebeian sort, not appealing to one who lived naturally and habitually in an atmosphere of keen intellectual activity. Bearing all this in mind, one can imagine the impression made upon Nietzsche by the inaugural festival at Bayreuth for which he had just written an impassioned and yet philosophic prologue. Wagner was absorbed in using all his considerable powers of managing men in finally vanquishing the difficulties in his way. To any one who could see the festival from the inside, as Nietzsche was able to see it, there were all the inevitable squabbles and scandals and comic contretemps which must always mark the inception of a great undertaking, but which to-day are hidden from us, pilgrims from many lands, as we ascend to that hillside structure which is the chief living shrine of art in Europe. And the people who were crowding in to this “sacred consecration on the morning of battle” were aristocrats and plutocrats—bejewelled, corpulent, commonplace—headed by the old Emperor, anxious to do his duty, decorously joining in the applause as he whispered “Horrible! horrible!” to his aide-de-camp, and hurrying away as quickly as possible to the military manœuvres. There was more than enough here to make his own just issued battle-cry seem farcical to Nietzsche. All was conspiring to one end. The conception of the sanctity of Bayreuth, his personal reverence for Wagner were slipping away together, and at the same time he was forced to realise that the barbaric Germanism of this overpowering Nibelung music was not the music for him. His development would inevitably have carried him away from Wagner, but the festival brought on the crisis with a sudden clash. Nietzsche had finally conquered the mightiest of his false ideals, and stood for ever after free and independent of all his early gods; but the wounds of that victory were never quite closed to the last: a completely serene and harmonious conception of things, so far as Wagner was concerned, Nietzsche never attained.

It may well be that the change was also physical. The excitement of the festival precipitated an organic catastrophe towards which he had long been tending. His sister finds the original source of this catastrophe in the war of 1870. He desired to serve his country as a combatant, but the University would only allow him leave to attend to the wounded. The physical and emotional over-tension involved by his constant care of six young wounded men culminated in a severe illness, which led on to a never-ending train of symptoms—eye-troubles, dyspepsia, headache, insomnia—which were perhaps aggravated by the reckless use of drugs. I have already noted passages which indicate that he was himself aware of a consuming flame within, and that from time to time he made efforts to check its ravages. That it was this internal flame which largely produced the breakdown is shown by the narrative of Nietzsche’s friend, Dr. Kretzer, who was with him at Bayreuth. It was evident he was seriously ill, Kretzer tells us, utterly changed and broken down. His eye-troubles were associated, if not with actual brain disease, at all events with a high degree of neurasthenia.[2] At Bayreuth, Nietzsche was forced to realise the peril of his position as he had never realised it before. He could no longer disguise from himself that he must break with all the passionate interests of his past. It was an essential measure of hygiene, almost a surgical operation. This is indeed how he has himself put the matter. In the preface to Der Fall Wagner, he said that it had been to him a necessary self-discipline to take part against all that was morbid within himself, against Wagner, against Schopenhauer, against all the impassioning interests of modern life, and to view the world, so far as possible, with the philosopher’s eyes, from an immense height. And again he speaks of Wagner’s art as a beaker of ecstasy so subtle and profound that it acts like poison and leaves no remedy at last but flight from the siren’s cave. Nietzsche was henceforth in the position of a gouty subject who is forced to abandon port wine and straightway becomes an apostle of total abstinence. The remedy seems to have been fairly successful. But the disease was in his bones. Impassioning interests that were far more subtly poisonous slowly developed within him, and twelve years later flight had become impossible, even if he was still able to realise the need for fight.

Nietzsche broke very thoroughly with his past, yet the break has been exaggerated, and he himself often helped to exaggerate it. He was in the position of a beleaguered city which has been forced to abandon its outer walls and concentrate itself in the citadel; and however it may have been in ancient warfare, in spiritual affairs such a state of things involves an offensive attitude towards the former line of defence. The positions we have abandoned constitute a danger to the positions we have taken up. Many of the world’s fiercest persecutors have but persecuted their old selves, and there seems to be psychological necessity for such an attitude. Yet a careful study of Nietzsche’s earlier activity reveals many germs of later developments. The critical attitude towards conventional morality, the individualism, the optimism, the ideal of heroism, which dominate his later thought, exist as germs in his earlier work. Even the flagrant contrast between Richard Wagner in Bayreuth and Der Fall Wagner was the outcome of a gradual development. In the earlier essay Nietzsche had justly pointed out that Wagner’s instincts were fundamentally dramatic. As years went on he brooded over this idea; the nimble and lambent wit of his later days played around it until Wagner became a mere actor in his work and in his life, a rhetorician, an incarnate falsehood, the personification of latter-day decadence, the Victor Hugo of music, the Bernini of music, the modern Cagliostro. At the same time he admits that Wagner represents the modern spirit, and that it is reasonable for a musician to say that though he hates Wagner he can tolerate no other music. The fact is, one may well repeat, that Nietzsche was not Teuton enough to abide for ever with Wagner. He compares him contemptuously with Hegel, cloud-compellers both, masters of German mists and German mysticism, worshippers of Wotan, the god of bad weather, the god of the Germans. “How could they miss what we, we Halcyonians, miss in Wagner—la gaya scienza, the light feet, wit, fire, grace, strong logic, the dance of the stars, arrogant intellectuality, the quivering light of the south, the smooth sea—perfection?” It was scarcely, however, the Halcyonian in Nietzsche that stood between him and Wagner. That is well shown by his attitude towards Parsifal. Whatever we may think of the ideas embodied in Parsifal, it may yet seem to us the most solemn, the most graciously calm and beautiful spectacle that has ever been fitly set to music. In Nietzsche the thinker and the moralist were so much stronger than the artist that he could see nothing here but bad psychology, bad thinking, and bad religion.

The rebellion against Wagner was inevitable. It is evident that Nietzsche had not gained complete mastery of his own personality in his earlier work. It is brilliant, full of fine perceptions and critical insight, but as a personal utterance incomplete. It renders the best ideas of the time, not the best ideas that Nietzsche could contribute to the time. The shock of 1876 may have been a step towards the disintegration of his intellect, but it was also a rally, a step towards a higher self-realisation. Nietzsche had no genuine affinity with Schopenhauer or with Wagner, though they were helpful to his development; he was no pessimist, he was no democrat. As he himself said, “I understood the philosophic pessimism of the nineteenth century as the symptom of a finer strength of thought, a more victorious fulness of life. In the same way Wagner’s music signified to me the expression of a Dionysiac mightiness of soul in which I seemed to hear, as in an earthquake, the upheaval of the primitive powers of life, after age-long repression.” Now he only needed relief, “golden, tender, oily melodies,” to soothe the leaden weight of life, and these he found in Carmen.

Any discussion of the merits of the question as between Wagner and Bizet, the earlier and the later Nietzsche, seems to me out of place, though much has been made of it by those who delight to see a giant turn and rend himself. Nietzsche himself said he was writing for psychologists, and it is not unfair to add that it is less “Wagner’s case” that he presents to us than “Nietzsche’s case.” As to the merits of the case, we may alike admit that Nietzsche’s enthusiasm for Wagner was not excessive, and that the pleasant things he said of Carmen are fully justified; we may address both the early and the late Nietzsche in the words habitually used by the landlord of the “Rainbow”: “You’re both wrong and you’re both right, as I allus says.” Most of the mighty quarrels that have sent men to battle and the stake might have been appeased had each side recognised that both were right in their affirmations, both wrong in their denials.

Nietzsche occupied his chair at Basel for some years longer; in 1880 his health forced him to resign and he was liberally pensioned. As a professor he treated the most difficult questions of Greek study, and devoted his chief attention to his best pupils, who in their turn adored him. Basel is an admirable residence for a cosmopolitan thinker; it was easy for Nietzsche to keep in touch with all that went on from Paris to St. Petersburg. He was also on terms of more or less intimate friendship with the finest spirits in Switzerland, with Keller the novelist, Böcklin the painter, Burckhardt the historian. We are told that he was a man of great personal charm in social intercourse. But his associates at Basel never suspected that in this courteous and amiable professor was stored up an explosive energy which would one day be felt in every civilised land. With pen in hand his criticism of life was unflinching, his sincerity arrogant; when the pen was dropped he became modest, reserved, almost timorous.

The work he produced between 1877 and 1882 seems to me to represent the maturity of his genius. It includes Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, Morgenröthe, and Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft. In form all these volumes belong to pensée literature. They deal with art, with religion, with morals and philosophy, with the relation of all these to life. Nietzsche shows himself in these pensées above all a freethinker, emancipated from every law save that of sincerity, wide-ranging, serious, penetrative, often impassioned, as yet always able to follow his own ideal of self-restraint.

After leaving Basel he spent the following nine years chiefly at health resorts and in travelling. We find him at Sorrento, Venice, Genoa, Turin, Sils Maria, as well as at Leipzig. Doubtless his fresh and poignant pensées are largely the outcome of strenuous solitary walks in the Engadine or among the Italian lakes. We may assume that during most of these years he was fighting, on the whole successfully fighting, for mental health. Yet passages that occur throughout his books seem to suggest that his thoughts may have sometimes turned to the goal towards which he was tending. It is a mistake, he points out, to suppose that insanity is always the symptom of a degenerating culture, although to nod towards the asylum is a convenient modern way of slaying spiritual tyrants; it is in primitive and developing stages of culture that insanity has played its chief part; only by virtue of what seemed to be the “Divine” turbulence of insanity and epilepsy could any new moral law make progress among early cultures. Just as for us there seems a little madness in all genius, so for them there seemed a little genius in all madness; sorcerers and saints agonised in solitude and abstinence for some gleam of madness which would bring them faith in themselves and openly justify their mission.

What may perhaps be called Nietzsche’s third period began in 1883 with Also sprach Zarathustra, the most extraordinary of all his works, mystical and oracular in form, but not mystical in substance. Zarathustra has only a distant relationship to his prototype Zoroaster, though Nietzsche had a natural sympathy with the symbolism of fire and water, with the reverence for light and purity, which mark the rites associated with the name of the Bactrian prophet; he has here allowed himself to set forth his own ideas and ideals in the free and oracular manner of all ancient scriptures, and is thus enabled to present his visions in a concrete form. Zarathustra, for the first and last time, gave scope to the artist within Nietzsche, and with all its extravagance and imperfection it must remain for good or evil his most personal utterance. It was followed by Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Zur Genealogie der Moral, Der Fall Wagner, and Götzendämmerung. It is during this period that we trace the growth of the magnification of his own personal mission which finally became a sort of megalomania. (“I have given to men the deepest book they possess, my Zarathustra,” he wrote towards the end.) In form the books of this period are sometimes less fragmentary than those of the second period; in substance they are marked by their emphatic, often extravagant, almost reckless insistence on certain views of morality. If in the first period he was an apostle of culture, in the second a freethinker, pronouncing judgment on all things in heaven and earth, he was now exclusively a moralist, or, as he would prefer to say, an immoralist. It was during this period that he worked out his “master morality”—the duty to be strong—in opposition to the “slave morality” of Christianity, with its glorification of weakness and pity, and that he consistently sought to analyse and destroy the traditional conceptions of good and evil on which our current morality rests. The last work which he planned, but never completed, was a re-valuation of all values, Umwerthung aller Werthe, which would have been his final indictment of the modern world, and the full statement of his own immoralism and Dionysiac philosophy.

It is sometimes said that Nietzsche’s mastery of his thought and style was increasing up to the last. This I can scarcely admit, even as regards style. No doubt there is at the best a light and swift vigour of movement in these last writings which before he had never attained. He can pour out now a shimmering stream of golden phrases with which he has intoxicated himself, and tries to intoxicate us. We may lend ourselves to the charm, but it has no enduring hold. This master of gay or bitter invective no longer possesses the keenly reasoned and piercing insight of the earlier Nietzsche. We feel that he has become the victim of obsessions which drive him like a leaf before the wind, and all his exuberant wit is unsubstantial and pathetic as that of Falstaff. The devouring flame has at length eaten the core out of the man and his style, leaving only this coruscating shell. And at a touch even this thin shell collapsed into smouldering embers.

From a child Nietzsche was subject to strangely prophetic dreams. In a dream which, when a boy, he put into literary form, he tells how he seemed to be travelling forward amid a glorious landscape, while carolling larks ascended to the clouds, and his whole life seemed to stretch before him in a vista of happy years; “and suddenly a shrill cry reached our ears; it came from the neighbouring lunatic asylum.” Even in 1876 his friends began to see that Nietzsche attached extraordinary importance to his own work. After he wrote Zarathustra, this self-exaltation increased, and began to find expression in his work. Latterly, it is said, he came to regard himself as the incarnation of the genius of humanity. It has always been found a terrible matter to war with the moral system of one’s age; it will have its revenge, one way or another, from within or from without, whatever happens after. Nietzsche strove for nothing less than to remodel the moral world after his own heart’s desire, and his brain was perishing of exhaustion in the immense effort. In 1889—at the moment when his work at last began to attract attention—he became hopelessly insane. A period of severe hallucinatory delirium led on to complete dementia, and he passes beyond our sight.

II.

Nietzsche was by temperament a philosopher after the manner of the Greeks. In other words, philosophy was not to him, as to the average modern philosopher, a matter of books and the study, but a life to be lived. It seemed to him to have much less concern with “truth” than with the essentials of fine living. He loved travel and movement, he loved scenery, he loved cities and the spectacle of men; above all, he loved solitude. The solitude of cities drew him strongly; he envied Heraclitus his desert study amid the porticoes and peristyles of the immense temple of Diana. He had, however, his own favourite place of work, to which he often alludes, the Piazza di San Marco at Venice, amid the doves, in front of the strange and beautiful structure which he “loved, feared, and envied;” and here in the spring, between ten o’clock and midday, he found his best philosophic laboratory.

It was in Italy that Nietzsche seems to have found himself most at home, although there are no signs that he felt any special sympathy with the Italians, that is to say in later than Renaissance days. For the most part he possessed very decided sympathies and antipathies. His antipathy to his own Germans lay in the nature of things. Every prophet’s message is primarily directed to his own people. And Nietzsche was unsparing in his keen criticism of the Germans. He tells somewhere with a certain humour how people abroad would ask him if Germany had produced of late no great thinker or artist, no really good book, and how with the courage of despair he would at last reply, “Yes, Bismarck!” Nietzsche was willing enough to recognise the kind of virtue personified in Bismarck. But with that recognition nearly all was said in favour of Germany that Nietzsche had to say. There is little in the German spirit that answered to his demands. He admired clearness, analytic precision, and highly organised intelligence, light and alert. He saw no sufficient reason why profundity should lack a fine superficies, nor why strength should be ungainly. His instinctive comparison for a good thinker was always a good dancer. As a child he had been struck by seeing a rope-dancer, and throughout life dancing seemed to him the image of the finest culture, supple to bend, strong to retain its own equilibrium, an exercise demanding the highest training and energy of all the muscles of a well-knit organism. But the indubitable intellectual virtues of the bulky and plodding German are scarcely those which can well be symbolised by an Otero or a Caicedo. “There is too much beer in the German intellect,” Nietzsche said. For the last ten centuries Germany has wilfully stultified herself; “nowhere else has there been so vicious a misuse of the two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity,” to which he was inclined to add music. (“The theatre and music,” he remarked in Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft, “are the haschisch and betel of Europeans, and the history of the so-called higher culture is largely the history of narcotics.”) “Germans regard bad writing,” he said, “as a national privilege; they do not write prose as one works at a statue, they only improvise.” Even “German virtue”—and this was the unkindest cut of all—had its origin in eighteenth century France, as its early preachers, such as Kant and Schiller, fully recognised. Thus it happens that the German has no perceptions—coupling his Goethe with a Schiller, and his Schopenhauer with a Hartmann—and no tact, “no finger for nuances,” his fingers are all claws. The few persons of high culture whom he had met in Germany, he noted towards the end of his life, and especially Frau Cosima Wagner, were all of French origin. Nietzsche regarded it as merely an accident that he was himself born in Germany, just as it was merely an accident that Heine the Jew, and Schopenhauer the Dutchman, were born there. Yet, as I have already hinted, we may take these utterances too seriously. There are passages in his works—though we meet them rarely—which show that Nietzsche recognised and admired the elemental energy, the depth and the contradictions in the German character; he attributed them largely to mixture of races.

Nietzsche was not much attracted to the English. It is true that he names Landor as one of the four masters of prose this century has produced, while another of these is Emerson, with whom he had genuine affinity, although his own intellect was keener and more passionate, with less sunny serenity. For Shakespeare, also, his admiration was deep. And when he had outgrown his early enthusiasm for Schopenhauer, the fine qualities which he still recognised in that thinker—his concreteness, lucidity, reasonableness—seemed to him English. He was usually less flattering towards English thought. Darwinism, for instance, he thought, savoured too much of the population question, and was invented by English men of science who were oppressed by the problems of poverty. The struggle for existence, he said, is only an exception in nature; it is exuberance, an even reckless superfluity, which rules. For English philosophic thought generally he had little but contempt. J. S. Mill was one of his “impossibilities”; the English and French sociologists of to-day, he said, have only known degenerating types of society, devoid of organising force, and they take their own debased instincts as the standard of social codes in general. Modern democracy, modern utilitarianism, are largely of English manufacture, and he came at last to hate them both. During the past century, he asserted, they have reduced the whole spiritual currency of Europe to a dull plebeian level, and they are the chief causes of European vulgarity. It is the English, he also asserted—George Eliot, for instance—who, while abolishing Christian belief, have sought to bolster up the moral system which was created by Christianity, and which must necessarily fall with it. It is, moreover, the English, who with this democratic and utilitarian plebeianism have seduced and perverted the fine genius of France.

Just as we owe to England the vulgarity which threatens to overspread Europe, so to France we owe the conception of a habit of nobility, in every best sense of the word. On that point Nietzsche’s opinion never wavered. The present subjection of the French spirit to this damnable Anglo-mania, he declared, must never lead us to forget the ardent and passionate energy, the intellectual distinction, which belonged to the France of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.[3] The French, as Nietzsche always held, are the one modern European nation which may be compared with the Greeks. In Menschliches, Allzumenschliches he names six French writers—Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, Fontenelle (in the Dialogues des Morts), Vauvenarges, Chamfort—who bring us nearer to Greek antiquity than any other group of modern authors, and contain more real thought than all the books of the German philosophers put together. The only French writer of the present century for whom he cared much (putting aside Mérimée) was Stendhal, who possesses some of the characters of the earlier group. The French, he points out, are the most Christian of all nations, and have produced the greatest saints. He enumerates Pascal (“the first among Christians, who was able to unite fervour, intellect, and candour;—think of what that means!”), Fénelon, Mme. de Guyon, De Rancé, the founder of the Trappists who have flourished nowhere but in France, the Huguenots, Port-Royal—truly, he exclaims, the great French freethinkers encountered foemen worthy of their steel! The land which produced the most perfect types of Anti-Christianity produced also the most perfect types of Christianity. He defends, also, that seeming superficiality which in a great Frenchman, he says, is but the natural epidermis of a rich and deep nature, while a great German’s profundity is too often strangely bottled up from the light in a dark and contorted phial.

I have briefly stated Nietzsche’s feeling as regards each of the three chief European peoples, because we are thus led up to the central points of his philosophy—his attitude towards modern religion and his attitude towards modern morals. We are often apt to regard these matters as of little practical importance; we think it the reasonable duty of practical social politics to attend to the immediate questions in hand, and leave these wider questions to settle themselves. Rightly or wrongly, that was not how Nietzsche looked at the matter. He was too much of a philosopher, he had too keen a sense of the vital relation of things, to be content with the policy of tinkering society, wherever it seems to need mending most badly, avoiding any reference to the whole. That is our English method, and no doubt it is a very sane and safe method, but, as we have seen, Nietzsche was not in sympathy with English methods. His whole significance lies in the thorough and passionate analysis with which he sought to dissect and to dissolve, first, “German culture,” then Christianity, and lastly, modern morals, with all that these involve.

It is scarcely necessary to point out, that though Nietzsche rejoiced in the title of freethinker, he can by no means be confounded with the ordinary secularist. He is not bent on destroying religion from any anæsthesia of the religious sense, or even in order to set up some religion of science which is practically no religion at all. He is thus on different ground from the great freethinkers of France, and to some extent of England. Nietzsche was himself of the stuff of which great religious teachers are made, of the race of apostles. So when he writes of the founder of Christianity and the great Christian types, it is often with a poignant sympathy which the secularist can never know; and if his knife seems keen and cruel, it is not the easy indifferent cruelty of the pachydermatous scoffer. When he analyses the souls of these men and the impulses which have moved them, he knows with what he is dealing: he is analysing his own soul.

A mystic Nietzsche certainly was not; he had no moods of joyous resignation. It is chiefly the religious ecstasy of active moral energy that he was at one with. The sword of the spirit is his weapon rather than the merely defensive breastplate of faith. St. Paul is the consummate type of such religious forces, and whatever Nietzsche wrote of that apostle—the inventor of Christianity, as he truly calls him—is peculiarly interesting. He hates him, indeed, but even his hatred thrills with a tone of intimate sympathy. It is thus in a remarkable passage in Morgenröthe, where he tells briefly the history and struggles of that importunate soul, so superstitious and yet so shrewd, without whom there would have been no Christianity. He describes the self-torture of the neurotic, sensual, refined “Jewish Pascal,” who flagellated himself with the law that he came to hate with the hatred of one who had a genius for hatred; who in one dazzling flash of illumination realised that Jesus by accomplishing the law had annihilated it, and so furnished him with the instrument he desired to wreak his passionate hatred on the law, and to revel in the freedom of his joy. Nietzsche possesses a natural insight in probing the wounds of self-torturing souls. He excels also in describing the effects of extreme pain in chasing away the mists from life, in showing to a man his own naked personality, in bringing us face to face with the cold and terrible fact. It is thus that, coupling the greatest figure in history with the greatest figure in fiction, he compares the pathetic utterance of Jesus on the cross—“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”—with the disillusionment of the dying Don Quixote. Of Jesus himself he speaks no harsh word, but he regarded the atmosphere of Roman decay and languor—though very favourable for the production of fine personalities—as ill-adapted to the development of a great religion. The Gospels lead us into the atmosphere of a Russian novel, he remarks in one of his last writings, Der Antichrist, an atmosphere in which the figure of Jesus had to be coarsened to be understood; it became moulded in men’s minds by memories of more familiar types—prophet, Messiah, wonder-worker, judge; the real man they could not even see. “It must ever be a matter for regret that no Dostoievsky lived in the neighbourhood of this most interesting décadent, I mean some one who could understand the enthralling charm of just this mixture of the sublime, the morbid, and the childlike.” Jesus, he continues, never denied the world, the state, culture, work; he simply never knew or realised their existence; his own inner experience—“life,” “light,” “truth”—was all in all to him. The only realities to him were inner realities, so living that they make one feel “in Heaven” and “eternal”; this it was to be “saved.” And Nietzsche notes, as so many have noted before him, that the fact that men should bow the knee in Christ’s name to the very opposite of all these things, and consecrate in the “Church” all that he threw behind him, is an insoluble example of historical irony. “Strictly speaking, there has only been one Christian, and he died on the cross. The Gospel died on the cross.”

There may seem a savour of contempt in the allusion to Jesus as an “interesting décadent,” and undoubtedly there is in Der Antichrist a passionate bitterness which is not found in Nietzsche’s earlier books. But he habitually used the word décadent in a somewhat extended and peculiar sense. The décadent, as Nietzsche understood him, was the product of an age in which virility was dead and weakness was sanctified; it was so with the Buddhist as well as with the Christian, they both owe their origin and their progress to “some monstrous disease of will.” They sprang up among creatures who craved for some “Thou shalt,” and who were apt only for that one form of energy which the weak possess, fanaticism. By an instinct which may be regarded as sound by those who do not accept his disparagement of either, Nietzsche always coupled the Christian and the anarchist; to him they were both products of decadence. Both wish to revenge their own discomfort on this present world, he asserted, the anarchist immediately, the Christian at the last day. Instead of feeling, “I am worth nothing,” the décadent says, “Life is worth nothing,”—a terribly contagious state of mind which has covered the world with the vitality of a tropical jungle. It cannot be too often repeated, Nietzsche continues, that Christianity was born of the decay of antiquity, and on the degenerate people of that time it worked like a soothing balm; their eyes and ears were sealed by age and they could no longer understand Epicurus and Epictetus. At such a time purity and beneficence, large promises of future life, worked sweetly and wholesomely. But for fresh young barbarians Christianity is poison. It produces a fundamental enfeeblement of such heroic, childlike, and animal natures as the ancient Germans, and to that enfeeblement, indeed, we owe the revival of classic culture; so that the conclusion of the whole matter is here, as ever, Nietzsche remarks, that “it is impossible to say whether, in the language of Christianity, God owes more thanks to the Devil, or the Devil to God, for the way in which things have come about.” But in the interaction of the classic spirit and the Christian spirit, Nietzsche’s own instincts were not on the side of Christianity, and as the years went on he expresses himself in ever more unmeasured language. He could not take up the Imitation of Christ—the very word “imitation” being, as indeed Michelet had said before, the whole of Christianity—without physical repugnance. And in the Götzendämmerung he compares the Bible with the Laws of Manu (though at the same time asserting that it is a sin to name the two books in the same breath): “The sun lies on the whole book. All those things on which Christianity vents its bottomless vulgarity—procreation, for example, woman, marriage—are here handled earnestly and reverently, with love and trust. I know no book in which so many tender and gracious things are said about women as in the Laws of Manu.” Again in Der Antichrist—which represents, I repeat, the unbalanced judgments of his last period—he tells how he turns from Paul with delight to Petronius, a book of which it can be said è tutto festo, “immortally sound, immortally serene.” In the whole New Testament, he adds, there is only one figure we can genuinely honour—that of Pilate.

On the whole, Nietzsche’s attitude towards Christianity was one of repulsion and antagonism. At first he appears indifferent, then he becomes calmly judicial, finally he is bitterly hostile. He admits that Christianity possesses the virtues of a cunningly concocted narcotic to soothe the leaden griefs and depressions of men whose souls are physiologically weak. But from first to last there is no sign of any genuine personal sympathy with the religion of the poor in spirit. Epicureanism, the pagan doctrine of salvation, had in it an element of Greek energy, but the Christian doctrine of salvation, he declares, raises its sublime development of hedonism on a thoroughly morbid foundation. Christianity hates the body; the first act of Christian triumph over the Moors, he recalls, was to close the public baths which they had everywhere erected. “With its contempt for the body Christianity was the greatest misfortune that ever befell humanity.” And at the end of Der Antichrist he sums up his concentrated hatred: “I condemn Christianity; I raise against the Christian Church the most terrible accusation that any accuser has ever uttered. It is to me the most profound of all thinkable corruptions.”

It is scarcely necessary to add that Nietzsche’s condemnation of Christianity extended to the Christian God. He even went so far as to assert that it was the development of Christian morality itself—“the father-confessor sensitiveness of the Christian conscience translated and sublimed into a scientific conscience”—which had finally conquered the Christian God. He held that polytheism had played an important part in the evolution of culture. Gods, heroes, supernatural beings generally, were inestimable schoolmasters to bring us to the sovereignty of the individual. Polytheism opened up divine horizons of freedom to humanity. “Ye shall be as gods.” But it has not been so with monotheism. The doctrine of a single God, in whose presence all others were false gods, favours stagnation and unity of type; monotheism has thus perhaps constituted “the greatest danger which humanity has had to meet in past ages.” Nor are we yet freed from its influence. “For centuries after Buddha died men showed his shadow in a cave—a vast terrible shadow. God is dead: but thousands of years hence there will probably be caves in which his shadow may yet be seen. And we—we must go on fighting that shadow!” How deeply rooted Nietzsche believed faith in a god to be is shown by the fantastic conclusion to Zarathustra. A strange collection of Uebermenschen—the men of the future—are gathered together in Zarathustra’s cave: two kings, the last of the popes—thrown out of work by the death of God—and many miscellaneous creatures, including a donkey. As Zarathustra returns to his cave he hears the sound of prayer and smells the odour of incense; on entering he finds the Uebermenschen on their knees intoning an extraordinary litany to the donkey, who has “created us all in his own image.”

In his opposition to the Christian faith and the Christian God, Nietzsche by no means stands alone, however independent he may have been in the method and standpoint of his attack. But in his opposition to Christian morality he was more radically original. There is a very general tendency among those who reject Christian theology to shore up the superstructure of Christian morality which rests on that theology. George Eliot, in her writings at all events, has been an eloquent and distinguished advocate of this process; Mr. Myers, in an oft-quoted passage, has described with considerable melodramatic vigour the “sibyl in the gloom” of the Trinity Fellows’ Garden at Cambridge, who withdrew God and Immortality from his grasp, but, to his consternation, told him to go on obeying Duty. What George Eliot proposed was one of those compromises so dear to our British minds. Nietzsche would none of it. Hence his contemptuous treatment of George Eliot, of J. S. Mill, of Herbert Spencer, and so many more of our favourite intellectual heroes who have striven to preserve Christian morality while denying Christian theology. Nietzsche regarded our current moral ideals, whether formulated by bishops or by anarchists, as alike founded on a Christian basis, and when that foundation is sapped they cannot stand.

The motive of modern morality is pity, its principle is altruistic, its motto is “Love your neighbour as yourself,” its ideal self-abnegation, its end the greatest good of the greatest number. All these things were abhorrent to Nietzsche, or so far as he accepted them, it was in forms which gave them new values. Modern morality, he said, is founded on an extravagant dread of pain, in ourselves primarily, secondarily in others. Sympathy is fellow-suffering; to love one’s neighbour as oneself is to dread his pain as we dread our own pain. The religion of love is built upon the fear of pain. “On n’est bon que par la pitié;” the acceptance of that doctrine Nietzsche considers the chief outcome of Christianity, although, he thinks, not essential to Christianity, which rested on the egoistic basis of personal salvation: “One thing is needful.” But it remains the most important by-product of Christianity, and has ever been gaining strength. Spinoza and Kant stood firmly outside the stream, but the French freethinkers, from Voltaire onwards, were not to be outdone in this direction by Christians, while Comte with his “Vivre pour autrui” even out-Christianised Christianity, and Schopenhauer in Germany, J. S. Mill in England, carried on the same doctrine. “The great question of life,” said Benjamin Constant in Adolphe—and it is a saying that our finest emotions are quick to echo—“is the pain that we cause.”

Both the sympathetic man and the unsympathetic man, Nietzsche argues, are egoists. But the unsympathetic man he held to be a more admirable kind of egoist. It is best to win the strength that comes of experience and suffering, and to allow others also to play their own cards and win the same strength, shedding our tears in private, and abhorring soft-heartedness as the foe of all manhood and courage. To call the unsympathetic man “wicked,” and the sympathetic man “good,” seemed to Nietzsche a fashion in morals, a fashion which will have its day. He believed he was the first to point out the danger of the prevailing fashion as a sort of moral impressionism, the outcome of the hyperæsthesia peculiar to periods of decadence. Not indeed that Christianity is, or could be, carried out among us to its fullest extent: “That would be a serious matter. If we were ever to become the object to others of the same stupidities and importunities which they expend on themselves, we should flee wildly as soon as we saw our ‘neighbour’ approach, and curse sympathy as heartily as we now curse egoism.” Our deepest and most personal griefs, Nietzsche remarks elsewhere, remain unrevealed and incomprehensible to nearly all other persons, even to the “neighbour” who eats out of the same dish with us. And even though my grief should become visible, the dear sympathetic neighbour can know nothing of its complexity and results, of the organic economy of my soul. That my grief may be bound up with my happiness troubles him little. The devotee of the “religion of pity” will heal my sorrows without a moment’s delay; he knows not that the path to my Heaven must lie through my own Hell, that happiness and unhappiness are twin sisters who grow up together, or remain stunted together.