Part 12

NIETZSCHE.

7. BRANDES to NIETZSCHE.

Copenhagen, March 7, 1888.

MY DEAR SIR,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your attentive and grateful reader,

GEORGE BRANDES.

8. NIETZSCHE to BRANDES.

Nice, March 27, 1888.

MY DEAR SIR,

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

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

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

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