Part 19

Meanwhile, the reader who cares to go into the matter further will find Nietzsche elbowing other sages in a multitude of places. He himself has testified to his debt to Stendhal (Marie Henri Beyle), that great apologist for Napoleon Bonaparte and exponent of the Napoleonic philosophy. "Stendhal," he says, "was one of the happiest accidents of my life.... He is quite priceless, with his penetrating psychologist's eye and his grip upon facts, recalling that of the greatest of all masters of facts (_ex ungue Napoleon_--); and last, but not least, as an _honest_ atheist--one of a species rare and hard to find in France.... Maybe I myself am jealous of Stendhal? He took from me the best of atheistic jokes, that I might best have made: 'the only excuse for God is that He doesn't exist.'"[9] Of his debt to Max Stirner the evidence is less clear, but it has been frequently alleged, and, as Dr. Mügge says, "quite a literature has grown up around the question." Stirner's chief work, "_Der Einzige und sein Eigentum_,"[10] was first published in 1844, the year of Nietzsche's birth, and in its strong plea for the emancipation of the individual there are many ideas and even phrases that were later voiced by Nietzsche. Dr. Mügge quotes a few of them: "What is good and what is evil? I myself am my own rule, and I am neither good nor evil. Neither word means anything to me.... Between the two vicissitudes of victory and defeat swings the fate of the struggle--master or slave!... Egoism, not love, must decide." Others will greet the reader of Stirner's book: "As long as you believe in the truth, you do not believe in yourself; you are a servant, a religious man. You alone are the truth.... Whether what I think and do is Christian, what do I care? Whether it is human, liberal, humane, whether unhuman, illiberal, unhumane, what do I ask about that? If only it accomplishes what I want, if only I satisfy myself in it, then overlay it with predicates if you will: it is all one to me...." But, as Dr. J. L. Walker well says, in his introduction to Mr. Byington's English translation, there is a considerable gulf between Stirner and Nietzsche, even here. The former's plea is for absolute liberty for all men, great and small. The latter is for liberty only in the higher castes: the chandala he would keep in chains. Therefore, if Nietzsche actually got anything from Stirner, it certainly did not enter unchanged into the ultimate structure of his system.

The other attempts to convict him of appropriating ideas come to little more. Dr. Mügge, for example, quotes these pre-Nietzschean passages from Heracleitus: "War is universal and right, and by strife all things arise and are made use of ... Good and evil are the same.... To me, one is worth ten thousand, if he be the best." And Mr. More quotes this from Hobbes: "In the first place, I put forth, for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only with death"--to which the reader may add, "Whatsoever is the object of any man's appetite or desire, that is it which he for his part calleth good ... for these words of good, evil and contemptible are ever used with relation to the person that useth them; there being nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any common rule of good and evil, to be taken for the nature of objects themselves."[11] But all these passages prove no more than that men of past ages saw the mutability of criteria, and their origin in human aspiration and striving. Not only Heracleitus, but many other Greeks, voiced that ethical scepticism. It was for many years, indeed, one of the dominant influences in Greek philosophy, and so, if Nietzsche is accused of borrowing it, that is no more than saying what I have already said: that he ate Greek grapes in his youth and became, to all intellectual intents and purposes, a Greek himself. A man must needs have a point of view, a manner of approach to life, and that point of view is no less authentic when he reaches it through his reading and by the exercise of a certain degree of free choice than when he accepts it unthinkingly from the folk about him. The service of Heracleitus and the other Greeks to Nietzsche was not that they gave him his philosophy, but that they made him a philosopher. It was the questions they asked rather than the answers they made that interested and stimulated him, and if, at times, he answered much as they had done, that was only proof of his genuine kinship with them.

On the artistic, as opposed to the analytical side, Nietzsche's most influential teacher, perhaps, was Goethe, the noblest intellectual figure of modern Germany, the common _stammvater_ of all the warring schools of today--in Nietzsche's own phrase, "not only a good and great man, but a culture itself." His writings are full of praises of his hero, whom he began to read as a boy of eight or ten years. His grandmother, Frau Erdmuthe Nietzsche, was a sister to Dr. Krause, professor of divinity at Weimar in Goethe's day, and she lived in the town while the poet held his court there, and undoubtedly came into contact with him. Her mother, Frau Pastor Krause, was probably the Muthgen of Goethe's diary. But despite all this, she thought that "Faust" and "Elective Affinities" were "not fit for little boys" and so it remained for Judge Pindar, the father of one of young Nietzsche's Naumburg playmates, to conduct the initiation.[12] Thirty years afterward, Nietzsche gratefully acknowledged his debt to Herr Pindar, and his vastly greater debt to Goethe--"a thorough-going realist in the midst of an unreal age.... He did not sever himself from life, but entered into it. Undaunted, he took as much as possible to himself.... What he sought was _totality_."[13]

Nietzsche was also an extravagant admirer of Heinrich Heine, and tried to imitate that poet's "sweet and passionate music." "People will say some day," he declared, "that Heine and I were the greatest artists, by far, that ever wrote in German, and that we left the best any mere German[14] could do an incalculable distance behind us."[15] Another poet he greatly revered was Friedrich Hölderlin, a South German rhapsodist of the Goethe-Schiller period, who wrote odes in free rhythms and philosophical novels in gorgeous prose, and died the year before Nietzsche was born, after forty years of insanity. Karl Joel,[16] Dr. Mügge and other critics have sought to connect Nietzsche, through Hölderlin, with the romantic movement in Germany, but the truth is that both Nietzsche and Hölderlin, if they were romantics at all, were of the Greek school rather than the German. Certainly, nothing could be further from genuine German romanticism, with its sentimentality, its begging of questions and its booming patriotism, than the gospel of the superman. What Nietzsche undoubtedly got from the romantics was a feeling of ease in the German language, a disregard for the artificial bonds of the schools, a sense of hospitality to the gipsy phrase. In brief, they taught him how to write. But they certainly did not teach him what to write.

Even so, it is probable that he was as much influenced by certain Frenchmen as he ever was by Germans--particularly by Montaigne, La Bruyère, La Rochefoucauld, Fontenelle, Vauvenargues and Chamfort, his constant companions on his wanderings. He borrowed from them, not only the somewhat obvious device of putting his argument into the form of apothegms and epigrams, but also their conception of the dialectic as one of the fine arts--in other words, their striving after style. "It is to a small number of French authors," he once said, "that I return again and again. I believe only in French culture, and regard all that is called culture elsewhere in Europe, especially in Germany, as mere misunderstanding.... The few persons of higher culture that I have met in Germany have had French training--above all, Frau Cosima Wagner, by long odds the best authority on questions of taste I ever heard of."[17] This preference carried him so far, indeed, that he usually wrote more like a Frenchman than like a German, toying with words, experimenting with their combinations, matching them as carefully as pearls for a necklace. "Nietzsche," says one critic,[18] "whether for good or evil, introduced Romance (not romantic!) qualities of terseness and clearness into German prose; it was his endeavor to free it from those elements which he described as _deutsch und schwer_." (German and heavy.)

For the rest, he denounced Klopstock, Herder, Wieland, Lessing and Schiller, the remaining gods in Germany's literary valhalla, even more bitterly than he denounced Kant and Hegel, the giants of orthodox German philosophy.

[1] "The Revival of Aristocracy," London, 1906, pp. 14-59.

[2] "Friedrich Nietzsche: His Life and Work," New York, 1909, pp. 315-320.

[3] "_Nietzsche et l'Immoralisme_," Paris, 1902, p. 294.

[4] "Nietzsche as Critic, Philosopher, Poet and Prophet," London, 1901, pp. xi-xxiii.

[5] "_Von Darwin bis Nietzsche_," Leipsic, 1895.

[6] "Nietzsche," Boston, 1912, pp. 18-45.

[7] "_De Kant à Nietzsche,_" Paris, 1900.

[8] Nietzsche himself, in after years, viewed this attack humorously, and was wont to say that it was caused, not by Schopenhauer alone, but also (and chiefly) by the bad cooking of Leipsic. See "_Ecce Homo_," II, i.

[9] "_Ecce Homo_," II, 3.

[10] Eng. tr. by Steven T. Byington, "The Ego and His Own," New York, 1907.

[11] The Leviathan, I, vi; London, 1651.

[12] Frau Förster-Nietzsche: "The Life of Nietzsche" (Eng. tr.), Vol. I, p. 31.

[13] "_Götzendämmerung_," IX, 49.

[14] Heine was a Jew--and Nietzsche, as we know, liked to think himself a Pole.

[15] "_Ecce Homo_," II, 4.

[16] "_Nietzsche und die Romantik_," Jena, 1905.

[17] "_Ecce Homo_," II, 3.

[18] J. G. Robertson: "A History of German Literature," Edinburgh, 1902, pp. 611-615.

II

NIETZSCHE AND HIS CRITICS

Let us set aside at the start that great host of critics whose chief objection to Nietzsche is that he is blasphemous, that his philosophy and his manner outrage the piety and prudery of the world. Of such sort are the pale parsons who arise in suburban pulpits to dispose of him in the half hour between the first and second lessons, as their predecessors of the 70's and 80's disposed of Darwin, Huxley and Spencer. Let them read their indictments and bring in their verdicts and pronounce their bitter sentences! The student of Nietzsche must perceive at once the irrelevance of that sort of criticism. It was the deliberate effort of the philosopher, from the very start of what he calls his tunnelling period, to provoke and deserve the accusation of sacrilege. In framing his accusations against Christian morality he tried to make them, not only persuasive and just, but also as offensive as possible. No man ever had more belief in the propagandist value of a _succès de scandale._ He tried his best to shock the guardians of the sacred vessels, to force upon them the burdens of an active defense, to bring them out into the open, to attract attention to the combat by accentuating its mere fuming and fury. If he succeeded in the effort, if he really outraged Christendom, then it is certainly absurd to bring forward that deliberate achievement as an exhibit against itself.

The more pertinent and plausible criticisms of Nietzsche, launched against him in Europe and America by many industrious foes, may be reduced for convenience to five fundamental propositions, to wit:

(_a_) He was a decadent and a lunatic, and in consequence his philosophy is not worthy of attention.

(_b_) His writings are chaotic and contradictory and it is impossible to find in them any connected philosophical system.

(_c_) His argument that self-sacrifice costs more than it yields, and that it thus reduces the average fitness of a race practising it, is contradicted by human experience.

(_d_) The scheme of things proposed by him is opposed by ideas inherent in all civilized men.

(_e_) Even admitting that his criticism of Christian morality is well-founded, he offers nothing in place of it that would work as well.

It is scarcely worth while to linger over the first and second of these propositions. The first has been defended most speciously by Max Nordau, in "Degeneration," a book which made as much noise, when it was first published in 1893, as any of Nietzsche's own. Nordau's argument is based upon a theory of degeneration borrowed quite frankly from Cesare Lombroso, an Italian quasi-scientist whose modest contributions to psychiatry were offset by many volumes of rubbish about spooks, table-tapping, mental telepathy, spirit photography and the alleged stigmata of criminals and men of genius. Degeneracy and decadence were terms that filled the public imagination in the 80's and 90's, and even Nietzsche himself seemed to think, at times, that they had definite meanings and that his own type of mind was degenerate. As Nordau defines degeneracy it is "a morbid deviation from the original type"--_i.e._ from the physical and mental norm of the species--and he lays stress upon the fact that by "morbid" he means "infirm" or "incapable of fulfilling normal functions." But straightway he begins to regard _any_ deviation as morbid and degenerate, despite the obvious fact that it may be quite the reverse. He says, for example, that a man with web toes is a degenerate, and then proceeds to argue elaborately from that premise, entirely overlooking the fact that web toes, under easily imaginable circumstances, might be an advantage instead of a handicap, and that, under the ordinary conditions of life, we are unable to determine with any accuracy whether they are the one thing or the other. So with the symptoms of degeneracy that he discovers in Nietzsche. He shows that Nietzsche differed vastly from the average, every-day German of his time, and even from the average German of superior culture--that he thought differently, wrote differently, admired different heroes and believed in different gods--but he by no means proves thereby that Nietzsche's processes of thought were morbid or infirm, or that the conclusions he reached were invalid _a priori._ Since Nordau startled the world with his book, the Lombrosan theory of degeneracy has lost ground among psychologists and pathologists, but it is still launched against Nietzsche by an occasional critic, and so it deserves to be noticed.

Nordau's discussion of Nietzsche's insanity is rather more intelligent than his discussion of the philosopher's alleged degeneracy, if only because his facts are less open to dispute, but here, too, he forgets that the proof of an idea is not to be sought in the soundness of the man fathering it, but in the soundness of the idea itself. One asks of a pudding, not if the cook who offers it is a good woman, but if the pudding itself is good. Nordau, in attempting to dispose of Nietzsche's philosophy on the ground that the author died a madman, succeeds only in piling up a mass of uncontroverted but irrelevant accusations. He shows that Nietzsche was an utter believer in his own wisdom, that he had a fondness for repeating certain favorite arguments _ad nauseam_, that he was violently impatient of criticism, that he chronically underestimated the man opposed to him, that he sometimes indulged in blasphemy for the sheer joy of shocking folks, and that he was often hypnotized by the exuberance of his own verbosity, but it must be plain that this indictment has its effective answer in the fact that it might be found with equal justice against almost any revolutionary enthusiast one selected at random--for example, Savonarola, Tolstoi, Luther, Ibsen, Garrison, Phillips, Wilkes, Bakúnin, Marx, or Nordau himself. That Nietzsche died insane is undoubted, and that his insanity was not sudden in its onset is also plain, and one may even admit frankly that it is visible, here and there, in his writings, particularly those of his last year or two; but that his principal doctrines, the ideas upon which his fame are based, are the fantasies of a maniac is certainly wholly false. Had he sought to prove that cows had wings, it might be fair today to dismiss him as Nordau attempts to dismiss him. But when he essayed to prove that Christianity impeded progress, he laid down a proposition that, whatever its novelty and daring, was obviously not irrational, and neither was there anything irrational in the reasoning whereby he supported it. One need go no further for proof of this than the fact that multitudes of sane men, while he lived and since his death, have debated that proposition in all seriousness and found a plentiful food for sober thought in Nietzsche's statement and defense of it. Ibsen also passed out of life in mental darkness, and so did Schumann, but no reasonable critic would seek thereby to deny all intelligibility to "Peer Gynt" or to the piano quintet in E flat.

Again, it is Nordau who chiefly voices the second of the objections noted at the beginning of this chapter, though here many another self-confessed serpent of wisdom follows him. Nietzsche, he says, tore down without building up, and died without having formulated any workable substitute for the Christian morality he denounced. Even to the reader who has got no further into Nietzsche than the preceding chapters of this book, the absurdity of such a charge must be manifest without argument. No man, indeed, ever left a more comprehensive system of ethics, not even Comte or Herbert Spencer, and if it be true that he scattered it through a dozen books and that he occasionally modified it in some of its details, it is equally true that his fundamental principles were always stated with perfect clearness and that they remained substantially unchanged from first to last. But even supposing that he had died before he had arranged his ideas in a connected and coherent form, and that it had remained for his disciples to deduce and group his final conclusions, and to rid the whole of inconsistency--even then it would have been possible to study those conclusions seriously and to accept them for what they were worth. Nordau lays it down as an axiom that a man cannot be a reformer unless he proposes some ready-made and perfectly symmetrical scheme of things to take the place of the notions he seeks to overturn, that if he does not do this he is a mere hurler of bricks and shouter of blasphemies. But all of us know that this is not true. Nearly every considerable reform the world knows has been accomplished, not by one man, but by many men working in series. It seldom happens, indeed, that the man who first points out the necessity for change lives long enough to see that change accomplished, or even to define its precise manner and terms. Nietzsche himself was not the first critic of Christian morality, nor did he so far dispose of the question that he left no room for successors. But he made a larger contribution to it than any man had ever made before him, and the ideas he contributed were so acute and so convincing that they must needs be taken into account by every critic who comes after him.

So much for the first two arguments against the prophet of the superman. Both raise immaterial objections and the second makes an allegation that is grotesquely untrue. The other three are founded upon sounder logic, and, when maintained skillfully, afford more reasonable ground for objecting to the Nietzschean system, either as a whole or in part. It would be interesting, perhaps, to attempt a complete review of the literature embodying them, but that would take a great deal more space than is here available, and so we must be content with a glance at a few typical efforts at refutation. One of the most familiar of these appears in the argument that the messianic obligation of self-sacrifice, whatever its cost, has yet yielded the race a large profit--that we are the better for our Christian charity and that we owe it entirely to Christianity. This argument has been best put forward, perhaps, by Bennett Hume, an Englishman. If it were not for Christian charity, says Mr. Hume, there would be no hospitals and asylums for the sick and insane, and in consequence, no concerted and effective effort to make man more healthy and efficient. Therefore, he maintains, it must be admitted that the influence of Christianity, as a moral system, has been for the good of the race. But this argument, in inspection, quickly goes to pieces, and for two reasons. In the first place, it must be obvious that the advantages of preserving the unfit, few of whom ever become wholly fit again, are more than dubious; and in the second place, it must be plain that modern humanitarianism, in so far as it is scientific and unsentimental and hence profitable, is so little a purely Christian idea that the Christian church, even down to our own time, has actually opposed it. No man, indeed, can read Dr. Andrew D. White's great history of the warfare between science and the church without carrying away the conviction that such great boons as the conquest of smallpox and malaria, the development of surgery, the improved treatment of the insane, and the general lowering of the death rate have been brought about, not by the maudlin alms-giving of Christian priests, but by the intelligent meliorism of rebels against a blind faith, ruthless in their ways and means but stupendously successful in their achievement.

Another critic, this time a Frenchman, Alfred Fouillée by name,[1] chooses as his point of attack the Nietzschean doctrine that a struggle is welcome and beneficial to the strong, that intelligent self-seeking, accompanied by a certain willingness to take risks, is the road of progress. A struggle, argues M. Fouillée, always means an expenditure of strength, and strength, when so expended, is further weakened by the opposing strength it arouses and stimulates. Darwin is summoned from his tomb to substantiate this argument, but its exponent seems to forget (while actually stating it!) the familiar physiological axiom, so often turned to by Darwin, that strength is one of the effects of use, and the Darwinian corollary that disuse, whether produced by organized protection or in some other way, leads inevitably to weakness and atrophy. In other words, the ideal strong man of M. Fouillée's dream is one who seeks, with great enthusiasm, the readiest possible way of ridding himself of his strength.