Chapter I: The Will to Suffer

Coleridge quotes Sir Joshua Reynolds as declaring that "the greatest man is he who forms the taste of a nation; the next greatest is he who corrupts it." It is an elastic epigram and not unlike the rule which is poor because it won't work both ways. All master reformers, heretics, and rebels were at first great corrupters. It is a prime necessity in their propaganda. Aristophanes and Arius, Mohammed and Napoleon, Montaigne and Rabelais, Paul and Augustine, Luther and Calvin, Voltaire and Rousseau, Darwin and Newman, Liszt and Wagner, Kant and Schopenhauer--here are a few names of men who undermined the current beliefs and practices of their times, whether for good or evil. Rousseau has been accused of being the greatest corrupter in history; yet to him we may owe the Constitution of the United States. Pascal, in prose of unequalled limpidity, denounced the Jesuits as corrupting youth. Nevertheless, Dr. Georg Brandes, an "intellectual" and a philosophic anarch, once wrote to Nietzsche: "I, too, love Pascal. But even as a young man I was on the side of the Jesuits against Pascal. Wise men, it was they who were right; he did not understand them; but they understood him and ... they published his Provincial Letters with notes themselves. The best edition is that of the Jesuits," Were not Titian, Rubens, and Rembrandt the three unspeakable devils of painting for Blake? Loosely speaking, then, it doesn't much matter whether one considers a great man as a regenerator or a corrupter. Napoleon was called the latter by Taine after he had been saluted as demigod by his idolatrous contemporaries. Nor does the case of Nietzsche differ much from his philosophic forerunners. He scolded Schopenhauer, though borrowing his dialectic tools, as he later mocked at the one sincere friendship of his lonely life, Richard Wagner's. We know the most objective philosophies are tinged by the individual temperaments of their makers, and perhaps the chief characteristic of all philosophers is their unphilosophic contempt for their fellow-thinkers. Nietzsche displayed this trait; so did Richard Wagner--who was in a lesser fashion an amateur philosopher, his system adorned by plumes borrowed from Feuerbach, Schelling, and Schopenhauer. Arthur Schopenhauer was endowed with a more powerful intellect than either Wagner or Nietzsche. He "corrupted" them both. He was materialist enough to echo the epigram attributed to Fontenelle: To be happy a man must have a good stomach and a wicked heart.

Friedrich Nietzsche was more poet than original thinker. Merely to say Nay! to all existing institutions is not to give birth to a mighty idea, though the gesture is brave. He substituted for Schopenhauer's "Will to Live"--(an ingenious variation of Kant's "Thing in Itself") the "Will to Power"; which phrase is mere verbal juggling. The late Eduard von Hartmann built his house of philosophy in the fog of the Unconscious; Nietzsche, despising Darwin as a dull grubber, returned unknowingly to the very land of metaphysics he thought he had fled forever. He was always the theologian--_toujours séminariste_, as they said of Renan. Theology was in his blood. It stiffened his bones. Abusing Christianity, particularly Protestant Christianity, he was himself an exponent of a theological odium of the virulent sort, as may be seen in his thundering polemics. He held a brief for the other side of good and evil; but a man can't so easily empty his veins of the theologic blood of his forebears. It was his Nessus shirt and ended by consuming him. He had the romantic cult of great men, yet sneered at Carlyle for his Titanism. He believed in human perfectibility. He borrowed his Superman partly from the classic pantheon, partly from the hierarchy of Christian saints--or perhaps from the very Cross he vituperated. The only Christian, he was fond of saying, died on the Cross. The only Nietzschian, one might reply, passed away when crumbled the brilliant brain of Nietzsche. Saturated with the culture of Goethe, his Superman was sent ballooning aloft by the poetic afflatus of Nietzsche.

He was an apparition possible only in modern and rationalistic Protestant Germany. Like a voice from the Middle Ages he has stirred the profound phlegm and spiritual indifference of his fellow countrymen. But he has in him more of Savonarola than Luther--Luther, who was for him the apotheosis of all that is hateful in the German character: the self-satisfied philistinism, sensuality, beer and tobacco, unresponsiveness to all the finer issues of existence, pious tactlessness and harsh dogmatism.

His truth is enclosed in a transcendental vacuum. Whether he had Galton's science of Eugenics in his mind when he modelled his Zarathustra we need not concern ourselves. His revaluation of moral values has not shaken morality to its centre. He challenged superficial conventional morality, but the ultimate pillars of faith still stand. He reminds us of William Blake when he writes: "The path to one's heaven ever leads through the voluptuousness of one's own hell." And his psychical resemblance to Pascal is striking. Both men were physically debilitated; their nervous systems, overwhelmed by the burdens they imposed upon them, made their days and nights a continuous agony. The Nietzschian philosophy may be negligible, but the psychological aspects of this singularly versatile, fascinating, and contradictory nature are not. His "Will to Power" in his own case resolves itself into the will to suffer. Compared to his, Schopenhauer's pessimism is the good-natured grumbling of a healthy, witty man, with a tremendous vital temperament. Nietzsche was delicate from youth. His experiences in the Franco-Prussian war harmed him. Headache, eye trouble, a weak stomach, coupled with his abuse of intellectual work, and, toward the last, indulgence in narcotics for insomnia, all coloured his philosophy. The personal bias was unescapable, and this bias favoured sickness, not health. Hence his frantic apotheosis of health, the dance and laughter, and his admiration for Bizet's Carmen. Hence his constant employment of joyful imagery, of bold defiance to the sober workaday world. His famous injunction: "Be hard!" was meant for his own unhappy soul, ever nearing, like Pascal's, the abyss of black melancholy.

While we believe that too much stress has been laid upon the pathologic side of Pascal's and Nietzsche's characters, there is no evading the fact that both seemed tinged with what Kurt Eisner calls _psychopathia spiritualis_. The references to suffering in Nietzsche's books are significant. There is a vibrating accent of personal sorrow on every page. He lived in an inferno, mental and physical. We are given to praising Robert Louis Stevenson for his cheerfulness in the dire straits of his illness. He was a mere amateur of misery, a professional invalid, in comparison with Nietzsche. And how cruel was the German poet to himself. He tied his soul to a stake and recorded the poignant sensations of his spiritual _auto-da-fé_. At the close of his sane days we find him taking a dolorous pride in his capacity for suffering. "It is great affliction only--that long, slow affliction in which we are burned as it were with green wood, which takes time--that compels us philosophers to descend into our ultimate depth and divest ourselves of all trust, all good nature, glossing, gentleness.... I doubt whether such affliction improves us; but I know that it deepens us.... Oh, how repugnant to one henceforth is gratification, coarse, dull, drab-coloured gratification, as usually understood by those who enjoy life!... Profound suffering makes noble; it separates. ... There are free, insolent minds that would fain conceal and deny that at the bottom they are disjointed, incurable souls--it is the case with Hamlet." Nietzsche has the morbidly introspective Hamlet temper, and Pascal has been called the Christian Hamlet.

We read in Overbeck's recollections that Nietzsche manifested deep interest in the personality of Pascal. Both hated hypocrisy. But the German thinker saw in the Frenchman of genius only a Christian who hugged his chains, one who for his faith suffered "a continuous suicide of reason." (Has not Nietzsche himself also said hard things about Reason?) "One is punished best by one's virtues" ... or, "He who fights with monsters, let him be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee." This last is unquestionably a reminiscence of Pascal. He could not endure with equanimity Pascal's _sacrifizio dell' intelletto_, not realizing that the Frenchman felt beneath his feet the solid globe of faith. He discerned the Puritan in Pascal, though failing to recognise the Puritan in himself. Despite his praise of the Dionysian element in art and life, a puritan was buried in the nerves of Nietzsche. He never could tolerate the common bourgeois joys. Wine, Woman, Song, and their poets, were his detestations. Yet he hated Puritanism in Protestant Christianity. "The dangerous thrill of repentance spasms, the vivisection of conscience," he contemns; "even in every desire for knowledge there is a drop of cruelty." He wrote to Brandes: "Physically, too, I lived for years in the neighbourhood of death. This was my great piece of good fortune; I forgot myself. I outlived myself--a shedding of the skin." Pascal also knew the sting of the flesh and brain. From the time he had an escape from sudden death, he was conscious of an abyss at his side. "Men of genius," he wrote, "have their heads higher but their feet lower than the rest of us." With Nietzsche there was a darker _nuance_ of pain; he speaks somewhere of "the philtre of the great Circe of mingled pleasure and cruelty." His soul was a mysterious palimpsest. The heart has its reasons, cried Pascal; of Nietzsche's heart the last word has not been written.

His criticism of Pascal was not clement. He said: "In Goethe the superabundance becomes creative, in Flaubert the hatred; Flaubert, a new edition of Pascal, but as an artist with instinctive judgment at bottom.... He tortured himself when he composed, quite as Pascal tortured himself when he thought." Yes, but Nietzsche was as fierce a hater as Pascal or Flaubert. He set up for Christianity a straw adversary and proceeded to demolish it. He forgot that, as Francis Thompson has it: "It is the severed head that makes the Seraph." Nietzsche would not look higher than the mud around the pedestal. He, poor sufferer, was not genuinely impersonal. His tragedy was his sick soul and body. "If a man cannot sing as he carries his cross, he had better drop it," advises Havelock Ellis. Nietzsche bore a terrible cross--like the men staggering with their chimeras in Baudelaire's poem--but he did not bear it with equanimity. We must not be deceived by his desperate gayety. As a married man he would never have enjoyed, as did John Stuart Mill, spiritual henpeckery. He was afraid of life, this dazzling Zarathustra, who went on Icarus-wings close to the sun. He could speak of women thus: "We think woman deep--why? Because we never find any foundation in her. Woman is not even shallow." Or, "Woman would like to believe that love can do all--it is a superstition peculiar to herself. Alas! he who knows the heart finds out how poor, helpless, pretentious, and liable to error even the best, the deepest love is--how it rather destroys than saves."

_Der Dichter spricht!_ Also the bachelor. Once a Hilda of the younger generation, Lou Salomé by name, came knocking at the door of the poet's heart. It was in vain. The wings of a great happiness touched his brow as it passed, No wonder he wrote: "The desert grows; woe to him who hides deserts"; "Woman unlearns the fear of man"; "Thou goest to women! Remember thy whip." (Always this resounding motive of cruelty.) "Thy soul will be dead even sooner than thy body"; "Once spirit became God; then it became man; and now it is becoming mob"; "And many a one who went into the desert and suffered thirst with the camels, merely did not care to sit around the cistern with dirty camel-drivers." Here is the aristocratic radical.

It is weakness, admitted Goethe, not to possess the capacity for noble indignation; but Nietzsche was obsessed by his indignations. His voice, that golden poet's voice, becomes too often shrill, cracked, and falsetto. Voltaire has remarked that the first man who compared a woman to a rose was a poet, the second a fool. In his attitude toward Woman, Nietzsche was neither fool nor poet; but he never called her a rose. Nor was he a cynic; he saw too clearly for that, and he had suffered. Suffering, however, should have been a bond with women. Despite his cruel utterances he enjoyed several ideal friendships with cultivated women. "There is no happy life for woman--the advantage that the world offers her is her choice in self-sacrifice," wrote Mr. Howells. Gossip has whispered that he was hopelessly in love with Cosima Wagner. A charming theme for a psychological novel. So was Von Bülow, once--until he married her; so, Anton Rubinstein. Both abused Wagner's music; Von Bülow after he became an advocate of Brahms; Rubinstein always. Nietzsche, just before 1876, experienced the pangs of a Wagnerian reactionary. A pretty commentary this upon masculine mental superiority if one woman (even such a remarkable creature as Cosima) could upset the stanchest convictions of these three men. And convictions, asserted Nietzsche, are prisons. He contrived to escape from many intellectual prisons. Cosima had proved the one inflexible jailer.

Merciless to himself, he did not spare others. Of Altruism, with its fundamental contradictions, he wrote:

A being capable of purely altruistic actions alone is more
fabulous than the Phœnix. Never has a man done anything
solely for others, and without any personal motive; how
could the Ego act without Ego? ... Suppose a man wished
to do and to will everything for others, nothing for
himself, the latter would be impossible, for the very good
reason that he must do very much for himself, in order to
do anything at all for others. Moreover, it presupposes
that the other is egoist enough constantly to accept
these sacrifices made for him; so that the men of love and
self-sacrifice have an interest in the continued existence
of loveless egoists who are incapable of self-sacrifice.
In order to subsist, the highest morality must positively
enforce the existence of immorality.--(Menschliches, I,
137-8).

"Nietzsche's criticism on this point," remarks Professor Seth Pattison, "must be accepted as conclusive. Every theory which attempts to divorce the ethical end from the personality of the moral agent must necessarily fall into this vicious circle; in a sense, the moral centre and the moral motive must always ultimately be self, the satisfaction of the self, the perfection of the self. The altruistic virtues, and self-sacrifice in general, can only enter into the moral ideal so far as they minister to the realisation of what is recognised to be the highest type of manhood, the self which finds its own in all men's good. Apart from this, self-sacrifice, self-mortification for its own sake, would be a mere negation, and, as such, of no moral value whatever."

Hasn't this the familiar ring of Max Stirner and his doctrine of the Ego?

Nietzsche with Pascal would have assented that "illness is the natural state of the true Christian." There was in both thinkers a tendency toward self-laceration of the conscience. "Il faut s'abêtir," wrote Pascal; and Nietzsche's pride vanished in the hot fire of suffering. The Pascal injunction to stupefy ourselves was not to imitate the beasts of the field, but was a counsel of humility. Montaigne in his essay on Raymond de Sebonde wrote before Pascal concerning the danger of overwrought sensibility; (Il nous faut abestir pour nous assagir, is the original old French). It would have been wise for Nietzsche to follow Pascal's advice. "We live alone, we die alone," sorrowfully wrote the greatest religious force of the past century, Cardinal Newman (a transposition of Pascal's "Nous mourrons seuls"). Nietzsche was the loneliest of poets. He lived on the heights and paid the penalty, like other exalted searchers after the vanished vase of the ideal.