Part 5

And with blessed nostrils he breathes again the freedom of the mountains. His nose is now released from the smell of all that is human. There sits Zarathustra with old broken tables of the law around him and new half-written tables, awaiting his hour; the hour when the lion shall come with the flock of doves, strength in company with gentleness, to do homage to him. And he holds out to men a new table, upon which such maxims as these are written--

Spare not thy neighbour! My great love for the remotest ones commands it. Thy neighbour is something that must be surpassed.

Say not: I will do unto others as I would they should do unto me. What _thou_ doest, that can no man do to thee again. There is no requital.

Do not believe that thou mayst not rob. A right which thou canst seize upon, shalt thou never allow to be given thee.

Beware of good men. They never speak the truth. For all that they call evil--the daring venture, the prolonged distrust, the cruel Nay, the deep disgust with men, the will and the power to cut into the quick--all this must be present where a truth is to be born.

All the past is at man's mercy. But, this being so, it might happen that the rabble became master and drowned all time in its shallow waters, or that a tyrant usurped it all. Therefore we need a new nobility, to be the adversary of all rabble and all tyranny, and to inscribe on new tables the word "noble." Certainly not a nobility that can be bought, nor a nobility whose virtue is love of country. No, teaches Zarathustra, exiles shall ye be from your fatherlands and forefatherlands. Not the land of your fathers shall ye love, but your children's land. This love is the new nobility--love of that new land, the undiscovered, far-off country in the remotest sea. To your children shall ye make amends for the misfortune of being your fathers' children. Thus shall ye redeem all the past.

Zarathustra is full of lenity. Others have said: Thou shalt not commit adultery. Zarathustra teaches: The honest should say to each other, "Let us see whether our love continue; let us fix a term, that we may find out whether we desire a longer term." What cannot be bent, will be broken. A woman said to Zarathustra, "Indeed, I broke the marriage, but first did the marriage break me."

Zarathustra is without mercy. It has been said: Push not a leaning waggon. But Zarathustra says: That which is ready to fall, shall ye also push. All that belongs to our day is falling and decaying. No one can preserve it, but Zarathustra will even help it to fall faster.

Zarathustra loves the brave. But not the bravery that takes up every challenge. There is often more bravery in holding back and passing by and reserving one's self for a worthier foe. Zarathustra does not teach: Ye shall love your enemies, but: Ye shall not engage in combat with enemies ye despise.

Why so hard? men cry to Zarathustra. He replies: Why so hard, once said the charcoal to the diamond; are we not near of kin? The creators are hard. Their blessedness it is to press their hand upon future centuries as upon wax.

No doctrine revolts Zarathustra more than that of the vanity and senselessness of life. This is in his eyes ancient babbling, old wives' babbling. And the pessimists who sum up life with a balance of aversion, and assert the badness of existence, are the objects of his positive loathing. He prefers pain to annihilation.

The same extravagant love of life is expressed in the _Hymn to Life_, written by his friend, Lou von Salomé, which Nietzsche set for chorus and orchestra. We read here--

"So truly loves a friend his friend As I love thee, O Life in myst'ry hidden! If joy or grief to me thou send; If loud I laugh or else to weep am bidden, Yet love I thee with all thy changeful faces; And should'st thou doom me to depart, So would I tear myself from thy embraces, As comrade from a comrade's heart."

And the poem concludes--

"And if thou hast now left no bliss to crown me. Lead on I thou hast thy sorrow still!"[8]

When Achilles chose to be a day-labourer on earth rather than a king in the realm of the shades, the expression was a weak one in comparison with this passionate outburst, which paradoxically thirsts even for the cup of pain.

Eduard von Hartmann believes in a beginning and end of the "world process." He concludes that no eternity can lie behind us; otherwise everything possible must already have happened, which--according to his contention--is not the case. In sharp contrast to him, on this point as on others, Zarathustra teaches, with, be it said, a somewhat shallow mysticism--which is derived from the ancient Pythagoreans' idea of the circular course of history and is influenced by Cohelet's Hebrew philosophy of life--the eternal recurrence; that is to say, that all things eternally return and we ourselves with them, that we have already existed an infinite number of times and all things with us. The great clock of the universe is to him an hour-glass, which is constantly turned and runs out again and again. This is the direct antithesis of Hartmann's doctrine of universal destruction, and curiously enough it was put forward at about the same time by two French thinkers: by Blanqui in _L'Éternité par les Astres_ (1871), and by Gustave Le Bon in _L'Homme et les Sociétés_ (1881).

At his death Zarathustra will say: Now I disappear and die; in a moment I shall be nothing, for the soul is mortal as the body; but the complex of causes in which I am involved will return, and it will continually reproduce me.

At the close of the third part of _Zarathustra_ there is a chapter headed "The Second Dance Song." Dance, in Nietzsche's language, is always an expression for the lofty lightness of mind, which is exalted above the gravity of earth and above all stupid seriousness. This song, extremely remarkable in its language, is a good specimen of the style of the work, when it soars into its highest flights of poetry. Life appears to Zarathustra as a woman; she strikes her castanets and he dances with her, flinging out all his wrath with life and all his love of life.

"Lately looked I into thine eyes, O Life! Gold saw I gleaming in thy night-eye--my heart stood still with the joy of it.

"A golden skiff saw I gleaming upon shadowy waters, a sinking, drinking, reblinking, golden swinging-skiff.

"At my foot, dancing-mad, didst thou cast a glance, a laughing, questioning, melting, swinging-glance.

"Twice only did thy little hands strike the castanets --then was my foot swinging in the madness of the dance.

********************************************************* "I fear thee near, I love thee far; thy flight allureth me, thy seeking secureth me; I suffer, but for thee, what would I not gladly bear!

"For thee, whose coldness inflameth, whose hatred mis-leadeth, whose flight enchaineth, whose mockery pleadeth!

"Who would not hate thee, thou great bindress, inwindress, temptress, seekress, findress! Who would not love thee, thou innocent, impatient, wind-swift, child-eyed sinner!"

In this dialogue between the dancers, Life and her lover, these words occur: O Zarathustra, thou art far from loving me as dearly as thou sayest; thou art not faithful enough to me. There is an old, heavy booming-clock; it boometh by night up to thy cave. When thou hearest this clock at midnight, then dost thou think until noon that soon thou wilt forsake me.

And then follows, in conclusion, the song of the old midnight clock. But in the fourth part of the work, in the section called "The Sleepwalker's Song," this short strophe is interpreted line by line; in form half like a mediæval watchman's chant, half like the hymn of a mystic, it contains the mysterious spirit of Nietzsche's esoteric doctrine concentrated in the shortest formula--

Midnight is drawing on, and as mysteriously, as terribly, and as cordially as the midnight bell speaketh to Zarathustra, so calleth he to the higher men: At midnight many a thing is heard which may not be heard by day; and the midnight speaketh: _O man, take heed_!

Whither hath time gone? Have I not sunk into deep wells? The world sleepeth. And shuddering it asketh: Who is to be master of the world? _What saith the deep midnight_?

The bell boometh, the wood-worm burroweth, the heart-worm gnaweth: _Ah! the world is deep_.

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!'"

[8] Translated by Herman Scheffauer. Text and pianoforte score are given in Vol. XVII (_Ecce Homo_) of the English edition of Nietzsche's works.

6.

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.

II

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.[1] As, of course, these polemical utterances of mine were not translated into foreign languages, no notice was taken of them anywhere abroad.