Part 19

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

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

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

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

Certainly nothing could be farther removed from the Renaissance.

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

I remain your faithfully devoted

GEORGE BRANDES.

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

TO THE FRIEND GEORG

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

The Crucified.

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

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

It was exceedingly sad thus to witness the change that in the course of a few weeks reduced a genius without equal to a poor helpless creature, in whom almost the last gleam of mental life was extinguished for ever.

III

(AUGUST 1900)

It sometimes happens that the death of a great individual recalls a half-forgotten name to our memory, and we then disinter for a brief moment the circumstances, events, writings or achievements which gave that name its renown. Although Friedrich Nietzsche in his silent madness had survived himself for eleven and a half years, there is no need at his death to resuscitate his works or his fame. For during those very years in which he lived on in the night of insanity, his name has acquired a lustre unsurpassed by any contemporary reputation, and his works have been translated into every language and are known all over the world.

To the older among us, who have followed Nietzsche from the time of his arduous and embittered struggle against the total indifference of the reading world, this prodigiously rapid attainment of the most absolute and world-wide renown has in it something in the highest degree surprising. No one in our time has experienced anything like it. In the course of five or six years Nietzsche's intellectual tendency --now more or less understood, now misunderstood, now involuntarily caricatured--became the ruling tendency of a great part of the literature of France, Germany, England, Italy, Norway, Sweden and Russia. Note, for example, the influence of this spirit on Gabriele d'Annunzio. To all that was tragic in Nietzsche's life was added this--that, after thirsting for recognition to the point of morbidity, he attained it in an altogether fantastic degree when, though still living, he was shut out from life. But certain it is that in the decade 1890-1900 no one engaged and impressed the minds of his contemporaries as did this son of a North German clergyman, who tried so hard to be taken for a Polish nobleman, and whose pride it was that his works were conceived in French, though written in German. The little weaknesses of his character were forgotten in the grandeur of the style he imparted to his life and his production.

To be able to explain Nietzsche's rapid and overwhelming triumph, one would want the key to the secret of the psychological life of our time. He bewitched the age, though he seems opposed to all its instincts. The age is ultra-democratic; he won its favour as an aristocrat. The age is borne on a rising wave of religious reaction; he conquered with his pronounced irreligion. The age is struggling with social questions of the most difficult and far-reaching kind; he, the thinker of the age, left all these questions on one side as of secondary importance. He was an enemy of the humanitarianism of the present day and of its doctrine of happiness; he had a passion for proving how much that is base and mean may conceal itself beneath the guise of pity, love of one's neighbour and unselfishness; he assailed pessimism and scorned optimism; he attacked the ethics of the philosophers with the same violence as the thinkers of the eighteenth century had attacked the dogmas of the theologians. As he became an atheist from religion, so did he become an immoralist from morality. Nevertheless the Voltairians of the age could not claim him, since he was a mystic; and contemporary anarchists had to reject him as an enthusiast for rulers and castes.

For all that, he must in some hidden way have been in accord with much that is fermenting in our time, otherwise it would not have adopted him as it has done. The fact of having known Nietzsche, or having been in any way connected with him, is enough at present to make an author famous--more famous, sometimes, than all his writings have made him.

What Nietzsche, as a young man admired more than anything else in Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner was "the indomitable energy with which they maintained their self-reliance in the midst of the hue and cry raised against them by the whole cultured world." He made this self-reliance his own, and this was no doubt the first thing to make an impression.

In the next place the artist in him won over those to whom the aphorisms of the thinker were obscure. With all his mental acuteness he was a pronounced lyricist. In the autumn of 1888 he wrote of Heine: "How he handled German! One day it will be said that Heine and I were without comparison the supreme artists of the German language." One who is not a German is but an imperfect judge of Nietzsche's treatment of language; but in our day all German connoisseurs are agreed in calling him the greatest stylist of German prose.

He further impressed his contemporaries by his psychological profundity and abstruseness. His spiritual life has its abysses and labyrinths. Self-contemplation provides him with immense material for investigation. And he is not content with self-contemplation. His craving for knowledge is a passion; covetousness he calls it: "In this soul there dwells no unselfishness; on the contrary, an all-desiring self that would see by the help of many as with its own eyes and grasp as with its own hands; this soul of mine would even choose to bring back all the past and not lose anything that might belong to it. What a flame is this covetousness of mine!"

The equally strong development of his lyrical and critical qualities made a fascinating combination. But it was the cause of those reversals of his personal relations which deprive his career (in much the same way as Sören Kierkegaard's) of some of the dignity it might have possessed. When a great personality crossed his path he called all his lyricism to arms and with clash of sword on shield hailed the person in question as a demigod or a god (Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner). When later on he discovered the limitations of his hero, his enthusiasm was apt to turn to hatred, and this hatred found vent without the smallest regard to his former worship. This characteristic is offensively conspicuous in Nietzsche's behaviour to Wagner. But who knows whether this very lack of dignity has not contributed to increase the number of Nietzsche's admirers in an age that is somewhat undignified on this point!

In the last period of his life Nietzsche appeared rather as a prophet than as a thinker. He predicts the Superman. And he makes no attempt at logical proof, but proceeds from a reliance on the correctness and sureness of his instinct, convinced that he himself represents a life-promoting principle and his opponents one hostile to life.

To him the object of existence is, everywhere the production of genius. The higher man in our day is like a vessel in which the future of the race is fermenting in an impenetrable way, and more than one of these vessels is burst or broken in the process. But the human race is not ruined by the failure of a single creature. Man, as we know him, is only a bridge, a transition from the animal to the superman. What the ape is in relation to man, a laughingstock or a thing of shame, that will man be to the superman. Hitherto every species has produced something superior to itself. Nietzsche teaches that man too will and must do the same. He has drawn a conclusion from Darwinism which Darwin himself did not see.

In the last decade of the nineteenth century Nietzsche and Tolstoy appeared as the two opposite poles. Nietzsche's morality is aristocratic as Tolstoy's is popular, individualistic as Tolstoy's is evangelical; it asserts the self-majesty of the individual, where Tolstoy's proclaims the necessity of self-sacrifice.