IX
NIETZSCHE[1]
We owe a debt of love, all of us, to Friedrich Nietzsche, and it is time to pay it. His brain stopped thinking in January, 1889; his heart stopped beating in August, 1900. Ten years, twenty years, have passed; and we may smile again with the wise, sad smile of a poor Zarathustra who fainted on the mountain-tops for holy envy of heaven, a loving spirit eternally repulsed by fellow men unworthy of his love, a convalescent Siegfried banished to the pensions de luxe of the Darwinian and Wagnerian Europe of our childhood. How unkind we have been to him! That cold, white, plump face of his; those eyes, now soft as the poetry of a lonely lake, now fiery as if reflecting the mad course of a comet; that sonorous voice, too loud and full and orchestral, perhaps, for smaller and more sensitive ears—we have forgotten them all, and we have been willing to forget. His books are put aside, sold, lost, behind others, under others. His thought, if it ever passes before our thought, is like one of Hoffmann's revenants before an "oval mirror," like the last trace of a glowing, dazzling electric light fit for the Götterdämmerung, or like the memory of a thousand meteors that have sped hissing through the sky, mocking the rockets of men and the rays of the sun, and fallen, dust and ashes, into the silent dark of nothingness.
But who among us cannot recall some August day, some hour of intense heat and of manly joy, when the words of Nietzsche lashed our hearts to the gallop, pulsed in our veins, and brought us an Alpine wind of strength and liberty? Can you forget, O friend lost to me now though still alive, that lonely summit of Pratomagno whence our voices, musical with emotion, shouted the red and shameless phrases of the Zarathustra into the cool air of the Casentino? Later on came that criticism which trails greatness and seeks to belittle it; later still the senile calm of the years of reflection. As we grew serious we grew weak and faint in spirit. Philosophy opened its mouth, set all things in place, began and closed its paragraph; and life, that had overflowed and sped toward shores unnamed in atlases, shrank within the brick beds of straight canals, and mirrored without restlessness the white clouds of heaven and the grasses of the narrow banks.
Perhaps the time has come for setting sail again. Whither?
The turmoil of passions has been stilled, shipwreck no longer frightens us, the phantom vessels are all sunk in the luminous depths of the sea. We have learned the art of war without the blare of trumpets, without shouts of command, without the shedding of blood; yet our blood boils within us, and of this we shall die. We may well return to Nietzsche.
Others, forgers and traitors, have had their say. Are we rid of you now, you parlor wildcats, you little Neros drunk with undigested egotism, you hypocritical scoundrels who interpreted the winged words of Zarathustra after the fashion of butchers and harem-keepers? And you too, worthy doctors and illustrious professors, have you finished your petty post-mortems on the body of the hero who awaits his resurrection? Have you found all the sources, have you made all the comparisons, have you registered all the subtle interpretations, all the weighty objections? Posthumous spies have gathered his souvenirs; faithless correspondents have sold his letters for the sound of silver; the Archive is established; the catalogue is complete; the bibliography is ready; his poor Polish name has found its place in every “author index.” Your turn is past.
Our turn has come: the turn of those who loved him, scorned him, hated him, sought to forget him, were yet faithful to him, embraced him even amid scorn, stood by his side when he had been abandoned. Our turn has come at last. There is room now for love. The smirching caresses of fashion are bestowed elsewhere.
Years ago a swarm of noisy wasps hovered about the gentle paralytic of Weimar, and when a ray of light made their wings gleam they said that they had been turned to gold, that the world had been turned upside down, that man had stolen the keys of the earthly paradise, and that heaven had come down to hell. In those years no gentleman could linger in such company. Cowardly homicides might abide there, or nabobs smitten with meningitis, or nouvellistes without ideas—not men with hungering souls to nourish and to save. But now the chaffering crowd has been dispersed. The wasps have winged their way to new scenes of dissolution; and around him now there is that silence, that calm, that Mediterranean serenity which he himself breathed in the blue bays of Liguria. The last codicil of his will has been opened: Ecce Homo. He stands before us crowned with the thorns of the adoration that does not understand, buffeted by indifference, stabbed by doubt. His life lies open before us. We may be his friends, may press his hand, may offer him in death that fellowship in perilous pilgrimage that he never knew in life.
Think what you will of the philosophy of Nietzsche. I leave it freely to your caprice. His doctrine is one of those poetic, tragic doctrines which answer to the temper, the life, the spirit of a man. If your spirit is of other metal, if your temper is from another anvil, if you have sped through life on other tracks, you cannot understand, nor love, nor follow, the doctrine of Nietzsche. So be it. Different experiences call for different cosmic words and different moral banners. But if you will not respect his philosophy, if you will continue, like all the witless moths of all the continents, to regard it as a fricassee of paradoxes, fit for rude arrivistes, you must at least respect the soul of him who thought and wrote it.
I declare to you that I do not know of any modern life nobler, purer, sadder, lonelier, more hopeless than that of Friedrich Nietzsche. Being no hypocrite, I confess frankly that I owe the force of this conviction to the simple, clear, and searching biography of Nietzsche written recently by Daniel Halévy. Any man who can read this book and not be moved to the depths of his being, especially by the later chapters, is a groveling beast.
There stands revealed in these four hundred pages of calm, intelligent, French prose a Nietzsche whom we had glimpsed already from passages in his letters and from confessions sobbed out, but quickly denied and transcended, in his works—a pure, a saintly, a martyred Nietzsche. How different such a tribute from the utterances of the bloodthirsty monkeys who have disported themselves, in parlors and in novels, under the utterly false name of disciples of Zarathustra!
In 1880 Nietzsche was living in Genoa, at No. 8 Salita delle Battistine. He led a sober, poor, and lonely life. His Genoese neighbors called him the saint. This first judgment of humble and ingenuous Italians—the only judgment that Italy expressed, before 1894, of a man who for so great a part of his life suffered or found joy beside our seas—this judgment is perhaps the deepest and the sanest that our fellow-countrymen have as yet pronounced with regard to Nietzsche.
What other name, indeed, than that of saint would you give to a man who from his boyhood was fired with the pure thirst for truth, who through all his life scorned honors, winnings, friendships founded on fiction, triumphs owed to servility and to cowardice, the soft mattresses of faith, the embraces of militant Philistinism, half measures and half figures, compromises and reverences?
What other name can you give, if you please, to one who was never daunted by his own thought; who changed his mind only at the command of his severe self, never at the command of another; who sent his glance to the very bottom of the widest and darkest abysses of human fate; who loved danger, peril, suffering, who would not put a coat of mail upon a young and eager heart; who did not tremble when he beheld the constellations of the moral heaven grow pale, fall from their place, and die, nor when his Heraclitean fancy saw the wheel of the universe revolving ever on the same axis, returning ever to the same points at the same times? A man who was content with little bread, who scarcely knew the love of woman, who lived poor, wandering, a stranger ever, who had no friends of his own stature, who was half understood, who dragged his suffering body and his acid thought into the lowliest inns and the broadest solitudes of Alpine and Mediterranean Europe, and yet refused to draw back, to stop, to wear a mask or win ignoble comfort—a man who, with a manly soul full of pride, of poetry, and of grief, built up his moral personality hour by hour even to the expected day of his spiritual death—such a man, I say, whatever bigots or hagiographers or fools may call him, is a saint.
His was the love of a secret ideal, of another world, cleaner, free-aired, whereof his thoughts, solidified in fragments or in poems, give us but glimpses. How different this passion from the physical breathlessness that drove him from the mountains to the sea, his brain wounded as by the point of a compass—thought—which never found its centre, his princely heart loving madly, yet repulsing those about him, lest, if he gave way to love, love should bring death!
I am not inventing his idealism. He was idealistic even from his youth. Who would expect to find Mazzini entering the life of Nietzsche—the one the champion of the rights of men and our moral mission, the other the champion of the rights of the body and the reversal of values? In 1871 Nietzsche crossed the Gotthard to Lugano. In the diligence he found an old man, with whom he entered into conversation. The two became enthusiastic, finding each other in agreement on many things. The old man quoted to Nietzsche one of the noblest maxims of Goethe: “Sich des halben zu entwohnen und im Ganzen, Vollen, Schönen, resolut zu leben.” Nietzsche never forgot that thought, nor the man who had brought it to his attention. That man was Mazzini. Nietzsche said later, to Malwida von Meysenbug: “There is no other man whom I esteem as I esteem Mazzini.” And he was sincere. Let whoso will explain the apparent difference between two such heroes.
Nietzsche had neither wife nor mistress; he had friends among women; he had for some time a quasi-fiancée—Lou Salomé—he had a sister who pretended to understand him, and followed him as best she could. But if woman had but a slight part in his life—as is the case with all saints—friendship played a very great part in it. A man who felt friendship as deeply and solemnly as he did could not be common, though he should write no more than a manual of Piedmontese cookery. His days at Triebschen with Wagner and Cosima are the sunniest bay of his life. The affectionate esteem of Rohde and of Burcldiardt, the warm deference of Paul Rée, of Peter Gast, of Stein, of Lanzki, were the best of the few uncertain comforts that humanity gave him. But what pain as well! When Wagner ceased to understand him and he realized what Wagner was (sad discovery: a charlatan, perilous because he was inspired!); when Paul Rée betrayed him, when Erwin Rohde, a professor to the last auricle of his heart, refused the smile and the embrace that would have spared him overwhelming grief; when the others left him alone or treated him as an amiable decoy, as a poetic “original”; then the blood-drops of his wounded heart fell one by one, not outwardly upon his flesh—as in the crucifixions of ancient Rome—but within him. And little by little they killed him: “Where are ye, friends? Come, it is time, it is time!”
That song written at night in Rome within the eternal sound of the fountain—“my heart too is an overflowing fountain”—is perhaps the most ardent declaration of love that genius ever addressed to deaf humanity. But men are prone to prefer a casual flattery to the ennobling influence of a true love. And they gave no heed. “Evening of my life! the sun sets; soon thou wilt no longer thirst, O thirsty heart.” He wrote the Ecce Homo; he wrote to Peter Gast, signing himself “The Crucified,” and to Cosima Wagner, saying, “Ariadne, I love thee.” In these two last letters—which seemed to carry the final evidence of his madness—we have the clearest confessions of his destiny. Nietzsche was content to be an Antichrist, and in being an Antichrist he was perforce to some extent a Christ. He was a Dionysos of grief, a man tormented by others and by himself. He died, I assure you, as on a Palestinian cross.
To Cosima Wagner, in the last hour before the clouding of his mind, he wrote his love. Cosima Wagner was to him Ariadne, and Ariadne meant love. Perhaps he had loved her secretly; perhaps in his break with Wagner there was an element of jealousy. However that may be, that final declaration of his is far more profound, far more weighty than it seems. For Cosima-Ariadne was to him humanity itself, joyous, laughing, full of life and strength—that same humanity that had been the support of Wagner in his triumph.
For Nietzsche, that support had failed. His love had found no chance to spend itself in fullness and in liberty. It was indeed of love, shut in and unappeased, that Nietzsche died. We slew him—all of us—by our common human behavior. Nor will he be our last victim.
- ↑ Written à propos of Daniel Halévy's La Vie de F. Nietzsche, Paris, 1909.