Part 1

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

BY

GEORGE BRANDES

AUTHOR OF "WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE," ETC.

LONDON

WILLIAM HEINEMANN

1914

[Illustration: Sculptor: J. Davidson.--Photo: A. Langdon Coburn.]

I

AN ESSAY ON

ARISTOCRATIC RADICALISM[1]

(1889)

Friedrich Nietzsche appears to me the most interesting writer in German literature at the present time. Though little known even in his own country, he is a thinker of a high order, who fully deserves to be studied, discussed, contested and mastered. Among many good qualities he has that of imparting his mood to others and setting their thoughts in motion.

During a period of eighteen years Nietzsche has written a long series of books and pamphlets. Most of these volumes consist of aphorisms, and of these the greater part, as well as the more original, are concerned with moral prejudices. In this province will be found his lasting importance. But besides this he has dealt with the most varied problems; he has written on culture and history, on art and women, on companionship and solitude, on the State and society, on life's struggle and death.

He was born on October 15, 1844; studied philology; became in 1869 professor of philology at Basle; made the acquaintance of Richard Wagner and became warmly attached to him, and associated also with the distinguished historian of the Renaissance, Jakob Burkhardt. Nietzsche's admiration and affection for Burkhardt were lasting. His feeling for Wagner, on the other hand, underwent a complete revulsion in the course of years. From having been Wagner's prophet he developed into his most passionate opponent.

Nietzsche was always heart and soul a musician; he even tried his hand as a composer in his _Hymn to Life_ (for chorus and orchestra, 1888), and his intercourse with Wagner left deep traces in his earliest writings. But the opera of Parsifal, with its tendency to Catholicism and its advancement of the ascetic ideals which had previously been entirely foreign to Wagner, caused Nietzsche to see in the great composer a danger, an enemy, a morbid phenomenon, since this last work showed him all the earlier operas in a new light.

During his residence in Switzerland Nietzsche came to know a large circle of interesting people. He suffered, however, from extremely severe headaches, so frequent that they incapacitated him for about two hundred days in the year and brought him to the verge of the grave. In 1879 he resigned his professorship. From 1882 to 1888 his state of health improved, though extremely slowly. His eyes were still so weak that he was threatened with blindness. He was compelled to be extremely careful in his mode of life and to choose his place of residence in obedience to climatic and meteorological conditions. He usually spent the winter at Nice and the summer at Sils-Maria in the Upper Engadine. The years 1887 and 1888 were astonishingly rich in production; they saw the publication of the most remarkable works of widely different nature and the preparation of a whole series of new books. Then, at the close of the latter year, perhaps as the result of overstrain, a violent attack of mental disorder occurred, from which Nietzsche never recovered.

As a thinker his starting-point is Schopenhauer; in his first books he is actually his disciple. But, after several years of silence, during which he passes through his first intellectual crisis, he reappears emancipated from all ties of discipleship. He then undergoes so powerful and rapid a development--less in his thought itself than in the courage to express his thoughts--that each succeeding book marks a fresh stage, until by degrees he concentrates himself upon a single fundamental question, the question of moral values. On his earliest appearance as a thinker he had already entered a protest, in opposition to David Strauss, against any moral interpretation of the nature of the Cosmos and assigned to our morality its place in the world of phenomena, now as semblance or error, now as artificial arrangement. And his literary activity reached its highest point in an investigation of the origin of the moral concepts, while it was his hope and intention to give to the world an exhaustive criticism of moral values, an examination of the value of these values (regarded as fixed once for all). The first book of his work, _The Transvaluation of all Values_, was completed when his malady declared itself.

[1] "The expression 'aristocratic radicalism,' which you employ, is very good. It is, permit me to say, the cleverest thing I have yet read about myself,"--Nietzsche, Dec. 2, 1887.

I.

Nietzsche first received a good deal of notice, though not much commendation, for a caustic and juvenile polemical pamphlet against David Strauss, occasioned by the latter's book, _The Old Faith and the New_. His attack, irreverent in tone, is directed not against the first, warlike section of the book, but against the constructive and complementary section. The attack, however, is less concerned with the once great critic's last effort than with the mediocracy in Germany, to which Strauss's last word represented the last word of culture in general.

A year and a half had elapsed since the close of the Franco-German War. Never had the waves of German self esteem run so high. The exultation of victory had passed into a tumultuous self-glorification. The universal view was that German culture had vanquished French. Then this voice made itself heard, saying--

Admitting that this was really a conflict between two civilisations, there would still be no reason for crowning the victorious one; we should first have to know what the vanquished one was worth; if its value was very slight--and this is what is said of French culture--then there was no great honour in the victory. But in the next place there can be no question at all in this case of a victory of German culture; partly because French culture still persists, and partly because the Germans, now as heretofore, are dependent on it. It was military discipline, natural bravery, endurance, superiority on the part of the leaders and obedience on the part of the led, in short, _factors that have nothing to do with culture_, which gave Germany the victory. But finally and above all, German culture was not victorious for the good reason that Germany as yet has nothing that can be called culture.

It was then only a year since Nietzsche himself had formed the greatest expectations of Germany's future, had looked forward to her speedy liberation from the leading-strings of Latin civilisation, and heard the most favourable omens in German music.[2] The intellectual decline, which seemed to him--rightly, no doubt--to date indisputably from the foundation of the Empire, now made him oppose a ruthless defiance to the prevailing popular sentiment.

He maintains that culture shows itself above all else in a unity of artistic style running through every expression of a nation's life. On the other hand, the fact of having learnt much and knowing much is, as he points out, neither a necessary means to culture nor a sign of culture; it accords remarkably well with barbarism, that is to say, with want of style or a motley hotchpotch of styles. And his contention is simply this, that with a culture consisting of hotchpotch it is impossible to subdue any enemy, above all an enemy like the French, who have long possessed a genuine and productive culture, whether we attribute a greater or a lesser value to it.

He appeals to a saying of Goethe to Eckermann: "We Germans are of yesterday. No doubt in the last hundred years we have been cultivating ourselves quite diligently, but it may take a few centuries yet before our countrymen have absorbed sufficient intellect and higher culture for it to be said of them that it is a long time since they were barbarians."

To Nietzsche, as we see, the concepts of culture and homogeneous culture are equivalent. In order to be homogeneous a culture must have reached a certain age and have become strong enough in its peculiar character to have penetrated all forms of life. Homogeneous culture, however, is of course not the same thing as native culture. Ancient Iceland had a homogeneous culture, though its flourishing was brought about precisely by active intercourse with Europe; a homogeneous culture existed in Italy at the time of the Renaissance, in England in the sixteenth, in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, although Italy built up her culture of Greek, Roman and Spanish impressions, France hers of classical, Celtic, Spanish and Italian elements, and although the English are the mixed race beyond all others. True, it is only a century and a half since the Germans began to liberate themselves from French culture, and hardly more than a hundred years since they entirely escaped from the Frenchmen's school, whose influence may nevertheless be traced even to-day: but still no one can justly deny the existence of a German culture, even if it is yet comparatively young and in a state of growth. Nor will any one who has a sense for the agreement between German music and German philosophy, an ear for the harmony between German music and German lyrical poetry, an eye for the merits and defects of German painting and sculpture, which are the outcome of the same fundamental tendency that is revealed in the whole intellectual and emotional life of Germany, be disposed in advance to deny Germany a homogeneous culture. More precarious will be the state of such smaller countries whose dependence on foreign nations has not unfrequently been a dependence raised to the second power.

To Nietzsche, however, this point is of relatively small importance. He is convinced that the last hour of national cultures is at hand, since the time cannot be far off when it will only be a question of a European or European-American culture. He argues from the fact that the most highly developed people in every country already feel as Europeans, as fellow-countrymen, nay, as confederates, and from the belief that the twentieth century must bring with it the war for the dominion of the world.

When, therefore, from the result of this war a tempestuous wind sweeps over all national vanities, bending and breaking them, what will then be the question?

The question will then be, thinks Nietzsche, in exact agreement with the most eminent Frenchmen of our day, whether by that time it has been possible to train or rear a sort of caste of pre-eminent spirits who will be able to grasp the central power.

The real misfortune is, therefore, not that a country is still without a genuine, homogeneous and perfected culture, but that it thinks itself cultured. And with his eye upon Germany Nietzsche asks how it has come about that so prodigious a contradiction can exist as that between the lack of true culture and the self-satisfied belief in actually possessing the only true one--and he finds the answer in the circumstance that a class of men has come to the front which no former century has known, and to which (in 1873) he gave the name of "Culture-Philistines."

The Culture-Philistine regards his own impersonal education as the real culture; if he has been told that culture presupposes a homogeneous stamp of mind, he is confirmed in his good opinion of himself, since everywhere he meets with educated people of his own sort, and since schools, universities and academies are adapted to his requirements and fashioned on the model corresponding to his cultivation. Since he finds almost everywhere the same tacit conventions with respect to religion, morality and literature, with respect to marriage, the family, the community and the State, he considers it demonstrated that this imposing homogeneity is culture. It never enters his head that this systematic and well-organised philistinism, which is set up in all high places and installed at every editorial desk, is not by any means made culture just because its organs are in concert. It is not even bad culture, says Nietzsche; it is barbarism fortified to the best of its ability, but entirely lacking the freshness and savage force of original barbarism; and he has many graphic expressions to describe Culture-Philistinism as the morass in which all weariness is stuck fast, and in the poisonous mists of which all endeavour languishes.

All of us are now born into the society of cultured philistinism, in it we all grow up. It confronts us with prevailing opinions, which we unconsciously adopt; and even when opinions are divided, the division is only into party opinions--public opinions.

An aphorism of Nietzsche's reads: "What is public opinion? It is private indolence." The dictum requires qualification. There are cases where public opinion is worth something: John Morley has written a good book on the subject. In the face of certain gross breaches of faith and law, certain monstrous violations of human rights, public opinion may now and then assert itself as a power worthy to be followed. Otherwise it is as a rule a factory working for the benefit of Culture-Philistinism.

On entering life, then, young people meet with various collective opinions, more or less narrow-minded. The more the individual has it in him to become a real personality, the more he will resist following a herd. But even if an inner voice says to him: "Become thyself! Be thyself!" he hears its appeal with despondency. Has he a self? He does not know; he is not yet aware of it.

He therefore looks about for a teacher, an educator, one who will teach him, not something foreign, but how to become his own individual self.

We had in Denmark a great man who with impressive force exhorted his contemporaries to become individuals. But Sören Kierkegaard's appeal was not intended to be taken so unconditionally as it sounded. For the goal was fixed. They were to become individuals, not in order to develop into free personalities, but in order by this means to become true Christians. Their freedom was only apparent; above them was suspended a "Thou shalt believe!" and a "Thou shalt obey!" Even as individuals they had a halter round their necks, and on the farther side of the narrow passage of individualism, through which the herd was driven, the herd awaited them again--one flock, one shepherd.

It is not with this idea of immediately resigning his personality again that the young man in our day desires to become himself and seeks an educator. He will not have a dogma set up before him, at which he is expected to arrive. But he has an uneasy feeling that he is packed with dogmas. How is he to find himself in himself, how is he to dig himself out of himself? This is where the educator should help him. An educator can only be a liberator.

It was a liberating educator of this kind that Nietzsche as a young man looked for and found in Schopenhauer. Such a one will be found by every seeker in the personality that has the most liberating effect on him during his period of development. Nietzsche says that as soon as he had read a single page of Schopenhauer, he knew he would read every page of him and pay heed to every word, even to the errors he might find. Every intellectual aspirant will be able to name men whom he has read in this way.

It is true that for Nietzsche, as for any other aspirant, there remained one more step to be taken, that of liberating himself from the liberator. We find in his earliest writings certain favourite expressions of Schopenhauer's which no longer appear in his later works. But the liberation is here a tranquil development to independence, throughout which he retains his deep gratitude; not, as in his relations with Wagner, a violent revulsion which leads him to deny any value to the works he had once regarded as the most valuable of all.

He praises Schopenhauer's lofty honesty, beside which he can only place Montaigne's, his lucidity, his constancy, and the purity of his relations with society, State and State-religion, which are in such sharp contrast with those of Kant. With Schopenhauer there is never a concession, never a dallying.

And Nietzsche is astounded by the fact that Schopenhauer could endure life in Germany at all. A modern Englishman has said: "Shelley could never have lived in England: a race of Shelleys would have been impossible." Spirits of this kind are early broken, then become melancholy, morbid or insane. The society of the Culture-Philistines makes life a burden to exceptional men. Examples of this occur in plenty in the literature of every country, and the trial is constantly being made. We need only think of the number of talented men who sooner or later make their apologies and concessions to philistinism, so as to be permitted to exist. But even in the strongest the vain and weary struggle with Culture-Philistinism shows itself in lines and wrinkles. Nietzsche quotes the saying of the old diplomatist, who had only casually seen and spoken to Goethe: "_Voilà un homme qui a eu de grands chagrins_," and Goethe's comment, when repeating it to his friends: "If the traces of our sufferings and activities are indelible even in our features, it is no wonder that all that survives of us and our struggles should bear the same marks." And this is Goethe, who is looked upon as the favourite of fortune!

Schopenhauer, as is well known, was until his latest years a solitary man. No one understood him, no one read him. The greater part of the first edition of his work, _Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_, had to be sold as waste paper.

In our day Taine's view has widely gained ground, that the great man is entirely determined by the age whose child he is, that he unconsciously sums it up and ought consciously to give it expression.[3] But although, of course, the great man does not stand outside the course of history and must always depend upon predecessors, an idea nevertheless always germinates in a single individual or in a few individuals; and these individuals are not scattered points in the low-lying mass, but highly gifted ones who draw the mass to them instead of being drawn by it. What is called the spirit of the age originates in quite a small number of brains.

Nietzsche who, mainly no doubt through Schopenhauer's influence, had originally been strongly impressed by the dictum that the great man is not the child of his age but its step-child, demands that the educator shall help the young to educate themselves _in opposition to the age_.

It appears to him that the modern age has produced for imitation three particular types of man, one after the other. First Rousseau's man; the Titan who raises himself, oppressed and bound by the higher castes, and in his need calls upon holy Nature. Then Goethe's man; not Werther or the revolutionary figures related to him, who are still derived from Rousseau, nor the original Faust figure, but Faust as he gradually develops. He is no liberator, but a spectator, of the world. He is not the man of action. Nietzsche reminds us of Jarno's words to Wilhelm Meister: "You are vexed and bitter, that is a very good thing. If you could be thoroughly angry for once, it would be better still."

To become thoroughly angry in order to make things better, this, in the view of the Nietzsche of thirty, will be the exhortation of Schopenhauer's man. This man voluntarily takes upon himself the pain of telling the truth. His fundamental idea is this: A life of happiness is impossible; the highest a man can attain to is a heroic life, one in which he fights against the greatest difficulties for something which, in one way or another, will be for the good of all. To what is truly human, only true human beings can raise us; those who seem to have come into being by a leap in Nature; thinkers and educators, artists and creators, and those who influence us more by their nature than by their activity: the noble, the good in a grand style, those in whom the genius of good is at work.

These men are the aim of history.

Nietzsche formulates this proposition: "Humanity must work unceasingly for the production of solitary great men--this and nothing else is its task." This is the same formula at which several aristocratic spirits among his contemporaries have arrived. Thus Renan says, almost in the same words: "In fine, the object of humanity is the production of great men ... nothing but great men; salvation will come from great men." And we see from Flaubert's letters to George Sand how convinced he was of the same thing. He says, for instance: "The only rational thing is and always will be a government of mandarins, provided that the mandarins can do something, or rather, can do much.... It matters little whether a greater or smaller number of peasants are able to read instead of listening to their priest, but it is infinitely important that many men like Renan and Littré may live and be heard. Our salvation now lies in a real aristocracy."[4] Both Renan and Flaubert would have subscribed to Nietzsche's fundamental idea that a nation is the roundabout way Nature goes in order to produce a dozen great men.

Yet, although the idea does not lack advocates, this does not make it a dominant thought in European philosophy. In Germany, for instance, Eduard von Hartmann thinks very differently of the aim--of history. His published utterances on the subject are well known. In conversation he once hinted how his idea had originated in his mind: "It was clear to me long ago," he said, "that history, or, to use a wider expression, the world process, must have an aim, and that this aim could only be negative. For a golden age is too foolish a figment." Hence his visions of a destruction of the world voluntarily brought about by the most gifted men. And connected with this is his doctrine that humanity has now reached man's estate, that is, has passed the stage of development in which geniuses were necessary.

In the face of all this talk of the world process, the aim of which is annihilation or deliverance--deliverance even of the suffering godhead from existence--Nietzsche takes a very sober and sensible stand with his simple belief that the goal of humanity is not to be infinitely deferred, but must be found in the highest examples of humanity itself.

And herewith he has arrived at his final answer to the question, What is culture? For upon this relation depend the fundamental idea of culture and the duties culture imposes. It imposes on me the duty of associating myself by my own activity with the great human ideals. Its fundamental idea is this: it assigns to every individual who wishes to work for it and participate in it, the task of striving to produce, within and without himself, the thinker and artist, the lover of truth and beauty, the pure and good personality, and thereby striving for the perfection of Nature, towards the goal of a perfected Nature.

When does a state of culture prevail? When the men of a community are steadily working for the production of single great men. From this highest aim all the others follow. And what state is farthest removed from a state of culture? That in which men energetically and with united forces resist the appearance of great men, partly by preventing the cultivation of the soil required for the growth of genius, partly by obstinately opposing everything in the shape of genius that appears amongst them. Such a state is more remote from culture than that of sheer barbarism.