Part 20

In the same decade Nietzsche and Ibsen were sometimes compared. Ibsen, like Nietzsche, was a combative spirit and held entirely aloof from political and practical life. A first point of agreement between them is that they both laid stress on not having come of small folk. Ibsen made known to me in a letter that his parents, both on the father's and the mother's side, belonged to the most esteemed families of their day in Skien in Norway, related to all the patrician families of the place and country. Skien is no world-city, and the aristocracy of Skien is quite unknown outside it; but Ibsen wanted to make it clear that his bitterness against the upper class in Norway was in no wise due to the rancour and envy of the outsider.

Nietzsche always made it known to his acquaintances that he was descended from a Polish noble family, although he possessed no pedigree. His correspondents took this for an aristocratic whim, all the more because the name given out by him, Niëzky, by its very spelling betrayed itself as not Polish. But the fact is otherwise. The true spelling of the name is Nicki, and a young Polish admirer of Nietzsche, Mr. Bernard Scharlitt, has succeeded in proving Nietzsche's descent from the Nicki family, by pointing out that its crest is to be found in a signet which for centuries has been an heirloom in the family of Nietzsche. Perhaps not quite without reason, Scharlitt therefore sees in Nietzsche's master-morality and his whole aristocratising of the view of the world an expression of the szlachcic spirit inherited from Polish ancestors.

Nietzsche and Ibsen, independently of each other but like Renan, have sifted the thought of breeding moral aristocrats. It is the favourite idea of Ibsen's Rosmer; it remains Dr. Stockmann's. Thus Nietzsche speaks of the higher man as the preliminary aim of the race, before Zarathustra announces the superman.

They meet now and then on the territory of psychology. Ibsen speaks in The Wild Duck of the necessity of falsehood to life. Nietzsche loved life so greatly that even truth appeared to him of worth only in the case of its acting for the preservation and advancement of life. Falsehood is to him an injurious and destructive power only in so far as it is life-constricting. It is not objectionable where it is necessary to life.

It is strange that a thinker who abhorred Jesuitism as Nietzsche did should arrive at this standpoint, which leads directly to Jesuitism. Nietzsche agrees here with many of his opponents.

Ibsen and Nietzsche were both solitary, even if they were not at all careless as to the fate of their works. It is the strongest man, says Dr. Stockmann, who is most isolated. Who was most isolated, Ibsen or Nietzsche? Ibsen, who held back from every alliance with others, but exposed his work to the masses of the theatre-going public, or Nietzsche, who stood alone as a thinker but as a man continually--even if, as a rule, in vain--spied after the like-minded and after heralds, and whose works, in the time of his conscious life, remained unread by the great public, or in any case misunderstood.

Decision does not fall lightly to one who, by a whim of fate, was regarded by both as an ally. Still more difficult is the decision as to which of them has had the deepest effect on the contemporary mind and which will longest retain his fame. But this need not concern us. Wherever Nietzsche's teaching extends, and wherever his great and rare personality is mastered, its attraction and repulsion will alike be powerful; but everywhere it will contribute to the development and moulding of the individual personality.

(1909)

Since the publication of Nietzsche's collected works was completed, Frau Förster-Nietzsche has allowed the Insel-Verlag of Leipzig to issue, at a high price and for subscribers only, Friedrich Nietzsche's posthumous work Ecce Homo, which has been lying in manuscript for more than twenty years, and which she herself had formerly excluded from his works, considering that the German reading public was not ripe to receive it in the proper way--which we may doubtless interpret as a fear on her part that the attitude of the book towards Germanism and Christianity would raise a terrible outcry.

Now that Nietzsche holds undisputed sway over German minds and exercises an immense influence in the rest of Europe and in America, it will certainly be read with emotion and discreetly criticised.

It gives us an autobiography, written during Nietzsche's last productive months, almost immediately before the collapse of his powers, between October 15 and November 4, 1888; and in the course of this autobiography each of his books is briefly characterised.

Here as elsewhere Nietzsche's thoughts are centred on the primary conceptions of ascent and descent, growth and decay. Bringing himself into relation with them, he finds that, as the victim of stubborn illness and chronically recurring pain, he is a decadent; but at the same time, as one who in his inmost self is unaffected by his illness, nay, whose strength and fulness of life even increase during its attacks, he is the very reverse of a decadent, a being who is in process of raising himself to a higher form of life. He once more emphasises the fact that the years in which his vitality was lowest were just those in which he threw off all melancholy and recovered his joy in life, his enthusiasm for life, since he had a keen sense that a sick man has no right to pessimism.

He begins by giving us plain, matter-of-fact information about himself, speaking warmly and proudly of his father. The latter had been tutor to four princesses of Altenburg before he was appointed to his living. Out of respect-for Friedrich Wilhelm IV. he gave his son the Hohenzollern names of Friedrich Wilhelm, and he felt the events of 1848 very keenly. His father only reached the age of thirty-six, and Nietzsche lost him when he was himself five years old. But he ascribes to paternal heredity his ability to feel at home in a world of high and delicate things (in einer Welt hoher und zarter Dinge). For all that, Nietzsche does not forget to bring in, here as elsewhere, the supposition of his descent from Polish noblemen; but he did not know this for a fact, and it was only established by Scharlitt's investigation of the family seal.

He describes himself as what we should call a winning personality. He has "never understood the art of arousing ill-feeling against himself." He can tame every bear; he even makes clowns behave decently. However out of tune the instrument "man" may be, he can coax a pleasing tone out of it. During his years of teaching, even the laziest became diligent under him. Whatever offence has been done him, has not been the result of ill-will. The pitiful have wounded him more deeply than the malicious.

Nor has he given vent to feelings of revenge or rancour. His conflict with Christianity is only one instance among many of his antagonism to resentful feelings. It is an altogether different matter that his very nature is that of a warrior. But he confers distinction on the objects of his attacks, and he has never waged war on private individuals, only on types; thus in Strauss he saw nothing but the Culture-Philistine.

He attributes to himself an extremely vivid and sensitive instinct of cleanliness. At the first contact the filth lying at the base of another's nature is revealed to him. The unclean are therefore ill at ease in his presence; nor does the sense of being seen through make them any more fragrant.

And with true psychology he adds that his greatest danger--he means to his spiritual health and balance--is loathing of mankind.

The loathing of mankind is doubtless the best modern expression for what the ancients called misanthropy. No one knows what it is till he has experienced it. When we read, for instance, in our youth of Frederick the Great that in his later years he was possessed and fettered by contempt for men, this appears to us an unfortunate peculiarity which the king ought to have overcome; for of course he must have seen other men about him besides those who flattered him for the sake of advantage. But the loathing of mankind is a force that surprises and overwhelms one, fed by hundreds of springs concealed in subconsciousness. One only detects its presence after having long entertained it unawares.

Nietzsche cannot be said to have overcome it; he fled from it, took refuge in solitude, and lived outside the world of men, alone in the mountains among cold, fresh springs.

And even if he felt no loathing for individuals, his disgust with men found a collective outlet, since he entertained, or rather worked up, a positive horror of his countrymen, so powerful that at last it breaks out in everything he writes. It reminds us dimly of Byron's dislike of Englishmen, Stendhal's of Frenchmen, and Heine's of Germans. But it is of a more violent character than Stendhal's or Heine's, and it has a pathos and contempt of its own. He shows none of it at the outset. In his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, he is no less partial to Germany than Heine was in his first, romantically Teutonic period. But Nietzsche's development carried him with a rush away from Germanism, and in this last book of his the word "German" has become something like his worst term of abuse.

He believes only in French culture; all other culture is a misunderstanding. It makes him angry to see those Frenchmen he values most, infected by German spirit. Thus Taine is, in his opinion, corrupted by Hegel's influence. This impression is right in so far as Hegel deprived Taine of some of the essentially French element which he originally possessed, and of which certain of his admirers before now have painfully felt the loss. But he overlooks the effect of the study of Hegel in promoting at the same time what one might call the extension of Taine's intellectual horizon. And Nietzsche is satisfied with no narrower generalisation of the case than this: Wherever Germany extends, she ruins culture.

As though to make sure of wounding German national pride, he declares that Heinrich Heine (not Goethe) gave him the highest idea of lyric poetry, and that as concerns Byron's Manfred, he has no words, only a look, for those who in the presence of this work dare to utter the name of Faust. The Germans, he maintains in connection with Manfred, are incapable of any conception of greatness. So uncritical has he become that he puts Manfred above Faust.

In his deepest instincts Nietzsche is now, as he asserts, so foreign to everything German, that the mere presence of a German "retards his digestion." German intellect is to him indigestion; it can never be finished with anything. If he has been so enthusiastic in his devotion to Wagner, if he still regards his intimate relationship with Wagner as the most profound refreshment of his life, this was because in Wagner he honoured the foreigner, because in him he saw the incarnate protest against all German virtues. In his book, The Case of Wagner, he had already hinted that Richard Wagner, the glory of German nationalism, was of Jewish descent, since his real father seems to have been the step-father, Geyer. I could not have survived my youth without Wagner, he says; I was condemned to the society of Germans and had to take a counter-poison; Wagner was the counter-poison.

Here, by way of exception, he generalises his feeling. We who were children in the 'fifties, he says, necessarily became pessimists in regard to the concept "German." We cannot be anything else than revolutionaries. And he explains this expression thus: We can assent to no state of affairs which allows the canting bigot to be at the top. (Höffding's protest against the use of the word "radicalism" applied to Nietzsche, in Moderne Filosofer, is thus beside the mark.) Wagner was a revolutionary; he fled from the Germans. And, Nietzsche adds, as an artist, a man has no other home than Paris--the city which, strangely enough, he was never, to see. He ranks Wagner among the later masters of French romanticism--Delacroix, Berlioz, Baudelaire--and wisely says nothing about the reception of Wagnerian opera in Paris under the Empire.

In everything Nietzsche now adopts the French stand-point--the old and narrow French standpoint--that, for instance, of the elderly Voltaire towards Shakespeare. He declares here, as he has done before, that his artist's taste defends Molière, Corneille and Racine, not without bitterness (nicht ohne Ingrimm) against such a wild (wüstes) genius as Shakespeare. Strangely enough he repeats here his estimate of Shakespeare's Cæsar as his finest creation, weak as it is: "My highest formula for Shakespeare is that he conceived the type of Cæsar." It must be added that here again Nietzsche assents to the unhappy delusion that Shakespeare never wrote the works that bear his name. Nietzsche is "instinctively" certain that they are due to Bacon, and, ignoring repeated demonstrations of the impossibility of this fatuous notion, he supports his conjecture by the grotesque assertion that if he himself had christened his Zarathustra by a name not his own--by Wagner's, for instance--the acumen of two thousand years would not have sufficed to guess who was its originator; no one would have believed it possible that the author of Human, all-too-Human had conceived the visions of Zarathustra.

He allows the Germans no honour as philosophers: Leibniz and Kant were "the two greatest clogs upon the intellectual integrity of Europe." Just when a perfectly scientific attitude of mind had been attained, they managed to find byways back to "the old ideal." And no less passionately does he deny to the Germans all honour as musicians: "A German cannot know what music is. The men who pass as German musicians are foreigners, Slavs, Croats, Italians, Dutchmen or Jews. I am Pole enough to give up all other music for Chopin--except Wagner's Siegfried-Idyll, some things of Liszt, and the Italians Rossini and Pietro Gasti" (by this last name he appears to mean his favourite disciple, Köselitz, who wrote under the pseudonym of Peter Gast).

He abhors the Germans as "idealists." All idealism is falsehood in the face of necessity. He finds a pernicious idealism in Henrik Ibsen too, "that typical old maid," as well, as in others whose object it is to poison the clean conscience, the natural spirit, of sexual love. And he gives us a clause of his moral code, in which, under the head of Vice, he combats every kind of opposition to Nature, or if fine words are preferred, every kind of idealism. The clause runs: "Preaching of chastity is a public incitement to unnatural practices. All, depreciation of the sexual life, all sullying of it with the word 'impure,' is a crime against Life itself--is the real sin against the holy Spirit of Life."

Finally he attacks what he calls the "licentiousness" of the Germans in historical matters. German historians, he declares, have lost all eye for the values of culture; in fact, they have put this power of vision under the ban of the Empire. They claim that a man must in the first place be a German, must belong to the race. If he does, he is in a position to determine values or their absence: the Germans are thus the "moral order of the universe" in history; compared with the power of the Roman Empire they are the champions of liberty; compared with the eighteenth century they are the restorers of morality and of the Categorical Imperative. "History is actually written on Imperial German and Antisemitic lines--and Herr von Treitschke is not ashamed of himself."