Part 8

But the old bell is like a sonorous instrument; all pain hath bitten into its heart, the pain of fathers and forefathers; and all joy hath set it swinging, the joy of fathers and forefathers--there riseth from the bell an odour of eternity, a rosy-blessed, golden-wine perfume of old happiness, and this song: The world is deep, and deeper than the day had thought.

I am too pure for the rude hands of the day. The purest shall be masters of the world, the unacknowledged, the strongest, the midnight-souls, who are brighter and deeper than any day. Deep is its woe.

But joy goeth deeper than heart's grief. For grief saith: Break, my heart! Fly away, my pain! Woe saith: Begone!

But, ye higher men, said ye ever Yea to a single joy, then said ye also Yea unto all woe. For joy and woe are linked, enamoured, inseparable. And all beginneth again, all is eternal. All joys desire eternity, deep, deep, eternity.

This, then, is the midnight song--

"Oh Mensch! Gieb Acht! Was spricht die tiefe Mitternacht? 'Ich schlief, ich schlief-- Aus tiefem Traum bin ich erwacht:-- Die Welt ist tief, Und tiefer als der Tag gedacht. Tief ist ihr Weh-- Lust--tiefer noch als Herzeleid: Weh spricht: Vergeh! Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit-- --will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit!'"

Translated by Herman Scheffauer. Text and pianoforte score are given in Vol. XVII (Ecce Homo) of the English edition of Nietzsche's works.

Such is he, then, this warlike mystic, poet and thinker, this immoralist who is never tired of preaching. Coming to him fresh from the English philosophers, one feels transported to another world. The Englishmen are all patient spirits, whose natural bent is towards the accumulation and investigation of a mass of small facts in order thereby to discover a law. The best of them are Aristotelian minds. Few of them fascinate us personally or seem to be of very complex personality. Their influence lies more in what they do than in what they are. Nietzsche, on the other hand, like Schopenhauer, is a guesser, a seer, an artist, less interesting in what he does than in what he is.

Little as he feels himself a German, he nevertheless continues the metaphysical and intuitive tradition of German philosophy and has the German thinker's profound dislike of any utilitarian point of view. In his passionate aphoristical form he is unquestionably original; in the substance of his thought he reminds one here and there of many another writer, both of contemporary Germany and of France; but he evidently regards, it as perfectly absurd that he should have to thank a contemporary for anything, and storms like a German at all those who resemble him in any point.

I have already mentioned how strongly he reminds one of Ernest Renan in his conception of culture and in his hope of an aristocracy of intellect that could seize the dominion of the world. Nevertheless he has not one appreciative word to say for Renan.

I have also alluded to the fact that Eduard von Hartmann was his predecessor in his fight against Schopenhauer's morality of pity. In this author, whose talent is indisputable, even though his importance may not correspond with his extraordinary reputation, Nietzsche, with the uncritical injustice of a German university professor, would only see a charlatan. Hartmann's nature is of heavier stuff than Nietzsche's. He is ponderous, self-complacent, fundamentally Teutonic, and, in contrast to Nietzsche, entirely unaffected by French spirit and southern sunshine. But there are points of resemblance between them, which are due to historical conditions in the Germany that reared them both.

In the first place, there was something analogous in their positions in life, since both as artillerymen had gone through a similar schooling; and in the second place, in their culture, inasmuch as the starting-point of both is Schopenhauer and both nevertheless retain a great respect for Hegel, thus uniting these two hostile brothers in their veneration. They are further in agreement in their equally estranged attitude to Christian piety and Christian morality, as well as in their contempt, so characteristic of modern Germany, for every kind of democracy.

Nietzsche resembles Hartmann in his attacks on socialists and anarchists, with the difference that Hartmann's attitude is here more that of the savant, while Nietzsche has the bad taste to delight in talking about "anarchist dogs," expressing in the same breath his own loathing of the State. Nietzsche further resembles Hartmann in his repeated demonstration of the impossibility of the ideals of equality and of peace, since life is nothing but inequality and war: "What is good? To be brave is good. I do not say, the good cause sanctifies war, but the good war sanctifies every cause." Like his predecessor, he dwells on the necessity of the struggle for power and on the supposed value of war to culture.

In both these authors, comparatively independent as they are, the one a mystical natural philosopher, the other a mystical immoralist, is reflected the all-dominating militarism of the new German Empire. Hartmann approaches on many points the German snobbish national feeling. Nietzsche is opposed to it on principle, as he is to the statesman "who has piled up for the Germans a new tower of Babel, a monster in extent of territory and power and for that reason called great," but something of Bismarck's spirit broods nevertheless over the works of both. As regards the question of war, the only difference between them is that Nietzsche does not desire war for the sake of a fantastic redemption of the world, but in order that manliness may not become extinct.

In his contempt for woman and his abuse of her efforts for emancipation Nietzsche again agrees with Hartmann, though only in so far as both here recall Schopenhauer, whose echo Hartmann is in this connection. But whereas Hartmann is here only a moralising doctrinaire with a somewhat offensive dash of pedantry, one can trace beneath Nietzsche's attacks on the female sex that subtle sense of woman's dangerousness which points to painful experience. He does not seem to have known many women, but those he did know, he evidently loved and hated, but above all despised. Again and again he returns to the unfitness of the free and great spirit for marriage. In many of these utterances there is a strongly personal note, especially in those which persistently assert the necessity of a solitary life for a thinker. But as regards the less personal arguments about woman, old-world Germany here speaks through the mouth of Nietzsche, as through that of Hartmann; the Germany whose women, in contrast to those of France and England, have for centuries been relegated to the domestic and strictly private life. We may recognise in these German writers generally that they have an eye for the profound antagonism and perpetual war between the sexes, which Stuart Mill neither saw nor understood. But the injustice to man and the rather tame fairness to woman, in which Mill's admirable emancipatory attempt occasionally results, is nevertheless greatly to be preferred to Nietzsche's brutal unfairness, which asserts that in our treatment of women we ought to return to "the vast common sense of old Asia."

Finally, in his conflict with pessimism Nietzsche had Eugen Dühring (especially in his Werth des Lebens) as a forerunner, and this circumstance seems to have inspired him with so much ill-will, so much exasperation indeed, that in a polemic now open, now disguised, he calls Dühring his ape. Dühring is a horror to him as a plebeian, as an Antisemite, as the apostle of revenge, and as the disciple of the Englishmen and of Comte; but Nietzsche has not a word to say about Dühring's very remarkable qualities, to which such epithets as these do not apply. But we can easily understand, taking Nietzsche's own destiny into consideration, that Dühring, the blind man, the neglected thinker who despises official scholars, the philosopher who teaches outside the universities, who, in spite of being so little pampered by life, loudly proclaims his love of life--should appear to Nietzsche as a caricature of himself. This was, however, no reason for his now and then adopting Dühring's abusive tone. And it must be confessed that, much as Nietzsche wished to be what, for that matter, he was--a Polish szlachcic, a European man of the world and a cosmopolitan thinker--in one respect he always remained the German professor: in the rude abuse in which his uncontrolled hatred of rivals found vent; and, after all, his only rivals as a modern German philosopher were Hartmann and Dühring.

It is strange that this man, who learned such an immense amount from French moralists and psychologists like La Rochefoucauld, Chamfort and Stendhal, was able to acquire so little of the self-control of their form. He was never subjected to the restraint which the literary tone of France imposes upon every writer as regards the mention and exhibition of his own person. For a long time he seems to have striven to discover himself and to become completely himself. In order to find himself he crept into his solitude, as Zarathustra into his cave. By the time he had succeeded in arriving at full independent development and felt the rich flow of individual thought within him, he had lost all external standards for measuring his own value; all bridges to the world around him were broken down. The fact that no recognition came from without only aggravated his self-esteem. The first glimmer of recognition further exalted this self-esteem. At last it closed above his head and darkened this rare and commanding intellect.

As he stands disclosed in his incompleted life-work, he is a writer well worth studying.

My principal reason for calling attention to him is that Scandinavian literature appears to me to have been living quite long enough on the ideas that were put forward and discussed in the last decade. It looks as though the power of conceiving great ideas were on the wane, and even as though receptivity for them were fast vanishing; people are still busy with the same doctrines, certain theories of heredity, a little Darwinism, a little emancipation of woman, a little morality of happiness, a little freethought, a little worship of democracy, etc. And as to the culture of our "cultured" people, the level represented approximately by the Revue des Deux Mondes threatens to become the high-water mark of taste. It does not seem yet to have dawned on the best among us that the finer, the only true culture begins on the far side of the Revue des Deux Mondes in the great personality, rich in ideas.

The intellectual development of Scandinavia has advanced comparatively rapidly in its literature. We have seen great authors rise above all orthodoxy, though they began by being perfectly simple-hearted believers. This is very honourable, but in the case of those who cannot rise higher still, it is nevertheless rather meagre. In the course of the 'seventies it became clear to almost all Scandinavian authors that it would no longer do to go on writing on the basis of the Augsburg Confession. Some quietly dropped it, others opposed it more or less noisily; while most of those who abandoned it entrenched themselves against the public, and to some extent against the bad conscience of their own childhood, behind the established Protestant morality; now and then, indeed, behind a good, everyday soup-stock morality--I call it thus because so many a soup has been served from it.

But be that as it may, attacks on existing prejudices and defence of existing institutions threaten at present to sink into one and the same commonplace familiarity.

Soon, I believe, we shall once more receive a lively impression that art cannot rest content with ideas and ideals for the average mediocrity, any more than with remnants of the old' catechisms; but that great art demands intellects that stand on a level with the most individual personalities of contemporary thought, in exceptionality, in independence, in defiance and in aristocratic self-supremacy.

DECEMBER 1899

More than ten years have gone by since I first called attention to Friedrich Nietzsche. My essay on "Aristocratic Radicalism" was the first study of any length to be devoted, in the whole of Europe, to this man, whose name has since flown round the world and is at this moment one of the most famous among our contemporaries. This thinker, then almost unknown and seldom mentioned, became, a few years later, the fashionable philosopher in every country of Europe, and this while the great man, to whose lot had suddenly fallen the universal fame he had so passionately desired, lived on without a suspicion of it all, a living corpse cut off from the world by incurable insanity.

Beginning with his native land, which so long as he retained his powers never gave him a sign of recognition, his writings have now made their way in every country. Even in France, usually so loth to admit foreign, and especially German, influence, his character and his doctrine have been studied and expounded again and again. In Germany, as well as outside it, a sort of school has been formed, which appeals to his authority and not unfrequently compromises him, or rather itself, a good deal. The opposition to him is conducted sometimes (as by Ludwig Stein) on serious and scientific lines, although from narrow pedagogic premises; sometimes (as by Herr Max Nordau) with sorry weapons and with the assumed superiority of presumptuous mediocrity.

Interesting articles and books on Nietzsche have been written by Peter Gast and Lou von Salomé in German and by Henri Lichtenberger in French; and in addition Nietzsche's sister, Frau Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, has not only published an excellent edition of his collected works (including his youthful sketches), but has written his Life (and published his Correspondence).

My old essay on Nietzsche has thus long ago been outstripped by later works, the writers of which were able to take a knowledge of Nietzsche's work for granted and therefore to examine his writings without at the same time having to acquaint the reader with their contents. That essay, it may be remembered, occasioned an exchange of words between Prof. Höffding and myself, in the course of which I had the opportunity of expressing my own views more clearly and of showing what points they had in common with Nietzsche's, and where they diverged from his. As, of course, these polemical utterances of mine were not translated into foreign languages, no notice was taken of them anywhere abroad.

The first essay itself, on the other hand, which was soon translated, brought me in a number of attacks, which gradually acquired a perfectly stereotyped formula. In an article by a Germanised Swede, who wanted to be specially spiteful, I was praised for having in that essay broken with my past and resolutely renounced the set of liberal opinions and ideas I had hitherto championed. Whatever else I might be blamed for, it had to be acknowledged that twice in my life I had been the spokesman of German ideas, in my youth of Hegel's and in my maturer years of Nietzsche's. In a book by a noisy German charlatan living in Paris, Herr Nordau, it was shortly afterwards asserted that if Danish parents could guess what I was really teaching their children at the University of Copenhagen, they would kill me in the street--a downright incitement to murder, which was all the more comic in its pretext, as admission to my lectures has always been open to everybody, the greater part of these lectures has appeared in print, and, finally, twenty years ago the parents used very frequently to come and hear me. It was repeated in the same quarter that after being a follower of Stuart Mill, I had in that essay turned my back on my past, since I had now appeared as an adherent of Nietzsche. This last statement was afterwards copied in a very childish book by a Viennese lady who, without a notion of the actual facts, writes away, year in, year out, on Scandinavian literature for the benefit of the German public. This nonsense was finally disgorged once more in 1899 by Mr. Alfred Ipsen, who contributed to the London Athenæum surveys of Danish literature, among the virtues of which impartiality did not find a place.