On reading Nietzsche

Foreword

Nietzsche found in Emile Faguet one of his most qualified critics. It takes a French critic to display the wares of even the clearest of Teutonic philosophers. Nietzsche was a clear, honest (even in his errors), merciless thinker. Emile Faguet, without Nietzsche's depth of creative and imaginative power, was nevertheless as clear and honest a thinker and, to be sure, as merciless. The catholic taste of the French, their disregard of shams and that chivalrous instinct which prompts them, while jealously preserving their individuality as a nation, to recognize the good points in those strange, neighbouring yet foreign, nations whom they know they cannot appreciate and whom as a rule they do not wish to appreciate, are all eminently shown in this and in the other works of Faguet.

Would the late " Immortal " rewrite his conclusion, one wonders, if he were alive to witness the apogee of the war which he saw, but at its darkest period, for France? From what I knew of him, I doubt it. Emile Faguet was replete with that common-sense which made France the intellectual light of the educated classes all over the world. He would not have accepted the superficial idea which caused many to see in Nietzsche the inspirer of the German leaders and in his works the Bible of the

FOREWORD

German herds. German thinkers never quite knew what to make out of Nietzsche. Those who charge the author of Zarathustra with causing the war, acknowledge thereby that they have not read or have not understood him. Nietzsche was a symptom, not a cause. Moreover, Teutonic romanticism and lack of psychological acumen were his two chief bogeys. Nietzsche, with that Greek ideal ever before his dreamer's eyes, had no patience with Kultur. To card-index alleged scientific facts which lead nowhere but to a thirst for more " facts " — was that a Greek ideal? To clog the brains of a few men with unassimilated knowledge, and then inspire them to force it down the throat of the rest of mankind, that is Kultur — but was it Greek pre-Socratic culture? And where is the art, the beauty and the common-sense in the soul of German mental expansionists ?

Nietzsche was and remains beyond the ken of most Germans, even though a hasty glance at his works may have led a few extreme German Kulturists to fancy they had in him an apologist for their ravings. Through his French critic he may perhaps appear clearer than he was in reality. If the Greeks' saying " fieya /?i/?Aiov ficya kolkov" (a great book is a great evil) applies to Nietzsche, one must admit that Faguet deprives his work of much of the danger thereof, for only the unknown dangers find us unarmed. If there be poison in Nietzsche's writings, Faguet serves the antidote along with it as it were, in the course of his running, sometimes rambling, commentary. Nietzsche's notions are sifted; the essentials are all here and the con-

FOREWORD

tribution he brought to human thought is duly acknowledged. That contribution was real and will remain, long after the last trace of the present war has been eradicated by the work of human patience.

I have followed the French original as closely as the form of the Latin periods of Faguet allowed. A translator should try to preserve the flavour of the author's work, especially when such flavour is as delicate as that used by Faguet. As to the passages quoted from Nietzsche, I made my own version, exception made for those longer passages from Thus Spake Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil which I took from the translation in Messrs. Boni and Liveright's Modern Library. For those who wish to enjoy the " dangerous pleasure "of reading him and deciding for themselves, I should add that the only complete edition of Nietzsche's works in English which one may recommend is that undertaken by Dr. Oscar Levy, and published in this country by the Macmillan Co. Those in the Modern Library are published by arrangement between these two firms. A list of works will be found in an Appendix to this volume.

G. R.

North Cohasset, December, 191 7.

Contents

ihapter page

Foreword 4

I Nietzsche Seeks Himself 1

Chapter I. Nietzsche Seeks Himself

Often, if not always, while expressing his ideas, a philosopher merely analyzes his own character. Often, if not always, the philosopher's starting point is his own feelings. Then, gifted with the faculty of putting his feelings into thoughts, because he is a philosopher, he turns his feelings into ideas. Then, gifted with the synthetic faculty, he gathers all his ideas, which are but transformed feelings, into one general idea. Then perhaps, he looks around, perceives everything which, in the domain of ideas, thwarts and hampers his own general idea and criticizes it. His criticism is minute because he is a dialectician. It is bitter and bold because his general idea is at bottom nothing but a personal feeling to which he clings and even a passion which dominates him. Then, in the course of his critical operation, he discovers ideas which confirm his general thought and he welcomes them. His general thought becomes a system. Again, because he is honest, ideas come to him which contradict his

i system. He does not dismiss them, because he loves ideas for their own sake but he throws them on the margin of his intellect, or at least he does his best more or less to bring them into his own system. Finally, he reaches the conception — which most of the time, he cannot realize nor even embrace — of a system which would exceed his own and could include in its greater breadth all the ideas that have come to him, those that were hostile and those that j were dear to him. He conceives a system beyond his own system, a general idea beyond his own general idea. This system he sketches. Of this idea he gets a glimpse. As a rule, especially if he dies young, he remains on the threshold of this Promised Land, which he leaves to others.

Such, it seems to me, was the progress of Friedrich Nietzsche. At any rate, it shall be mine as I follow his steps and attempt to recognize them. Such is the plan I shall follow in reading Nietzsche with a certain method. It is a good or a bad one. I need a method to read him in a well-connected way after having read him so often, as he wrote — that is, at random, according to the day and the hour.

As much as one can surmise from what is known of him and what he said of himself, Nietzsche was honest, proud and aggressive. He had many other characteristics but one must confine one's self within the essentials in order to see clearly and to avoid the risk of disentangling nothing through wishing to perceive everything.

He was honest, hated hypocrisy and that approximative conscience which is nothing but a kind of hypocrisy. He wished to see with a clear sight, absolutely and right down to their depths, others and himself, ideas and systems. Later he scoffed mercilessly at " that people," his own " which loves to be fuddled and makes a virtue of the lack of clearness." He exclaimed lyrically, thinking mostly of himself : " But at last we are getting clear ; we have become clear ! " This intellectual honesty, which is after all but a form of moral honesty, was with him uncompromising. It was that which later compelled him ever to lift the veils, ever to tear out the masks, ever to inquire " what else lies under this idea, what else is there beyond this first principle, what unacknowledged feeling, what unavowed tendency, which perhaps cannot be acknowledged? " It was that which compelled him to think, say and write down things which were contradictory and which contradicted his general thought, if they seemed true to him at the time he was conceiving them. It was that which gave to all he wrote the air of being a confession, a haughty one to be sure, but yet a public confession.

He was proud to the utmost. He was thoroughly convinced of the superiority of his intellect. He was haunted by the feeling, often enough a correct one, that all that he was thinking was being thought out for the first time. He was ever excited by the well-known itching which consists in always suspecting that what the majority of people think is stupid, that one can hardly err by being paradoxical and that paradox, being at least a flight out of the realm of stupidity, is a step towards truth.

His insatiable thirst for independence proceeded from his pride. He could bear no yoke, either from men, from circumstances or even from habits. Very significant was his remark on short habits. " My nature is altogether organized for short habits, even in the needs of physical health, and generally, as far as I can see, from the highest to the lowest. I always fancy that such and such a thing will satisfy me permanently. . . . One day, and it is gone. The short habit has had its time. . . . Already something new knocks and clamors at my door. . . . It is thus with me, whether in dishes, in ideas, men, towns, poetry, music, theories, arrangements for the day, or in my taste in wise men. . . . On the other hand, I hate lasting habits. They make me think of a tyrant, who would rule over me. I begin to fancy that the atmosphere of my life has darkened as soon as events shape themselves in such a way that lasting habits seem as if they would inevitably follow. In the depths of my soul, I feel even grateful for my physical misery and my sickness since they provide me with a hundred means of escape through which I can steal away from lasting habits."

Finally, out of his honesty and pride combined, there was born in Nietzsche a sane daring, a frank valor, a dauntlessness of opinion that made him quarrelsome, aggressive, pugnacious, an arrant contradictor, ever fighting and prone to exaggeration. He was not unlike a man that tells you before you speak : " You are wrong." And after you have spoken : " I knew it but now I am assured of it."

And who was truly sure of it before as much as after. He was not unlike the man of whom we say : " He is coming up the stairs ; he is getting ready to contradict me." He was not unlike the man of whom we say : "lam going to take up the opposite of my opinion before him because he speaks well and I like to hear him express my own views." . . . All the exaggerations of Nietzsche come from there. There was in him much of the temperament of a Joseph de Maistre.

Thus had nature made him. Since he was born unwittingly a German, his first school was that of romanticism, of pessimism and of Wagner and until he gained full conscience of himself, he worshipped them. Goethe, by those sides of his nature which are accessible to the young and to the crowd, Schopenhauer and Wagner were his first teachers and idols. If not saturated, at least he was impregnated with German romanticism, so different from our own — I do not mean that it is either better or worse — which is made up especially of sensibility and emotion, of gemuthlichkeit, 1 of dreamy, tender and pitying melancholy and in which feeling greatly overpowers imagination.

He was more deeply penetrated with pessimism. That is a natural result of that long practiced and smouldering romanticism. That feeling of the incurable misery of all things leads one either to wish

1 This and the other italicized words throughout the volume were underlined by Nietzsche in the manuscripts of his works with the exception of a few cases when Faguet wished to call especial attention to one of his subject's main points, usually a paradox. — (Translator's Note.)

or to insist that they should cease to be, or to destroy them, as it were, within one's self so as to avoid feeling them, and to take refuge in an indifference which is analogous to the Nothingness or is at least a near- approach to Non-Being.

He was enthusiastic, for a long period, over the music of Wagner, which throws one into a kind of ecstatic state, which is vital and depicts life, but which paints it in its nervous, enervated, tired phases and especially in its longing for rest.

In short, he caught the romantic diathesis. He caught it complete, without missing any symptom thereof. A Frenchman cannot very well conceive this diathesis. French romanticism was French. The further away one examines it, the better one sees it and the more one is persuaded of this truth. It was clear, orderly, quick and passionate. Most of its great representatives threw themselves into action. It was optimistic with its two great leaders and pessimistic with the others only by fits and starts. No great philosopher was found to express the little pessimism it contained. Neither Comte nor Renan, nor Taine even were pessimists. Finally, it had no special musician, apart perhaps from one. French romantic music proper does not exist. Therefore if we take French romanticism as the type of romanticism, we must give the German romanticism another name. And if we take German romanticism as the type of the Nineteenth Century romanticism we must find another name for French romanticism. This I would feel inclined to do.

We have in France, no idea of what a young German romantic could have been about 1870. He was hemmed in on all sides by romanticism, saturated with it through every influence ; he received it through poetry, fiction, philosophy, music,, conversation and patriotism. He flattered himself with the thought that romanticism was something essentially German, a part of the national glory and patrimony. Such precisely was Friedrich Nietzsche a little before 1870.

It was his diathesis. It was not his temperament. He shook himself free from it. . . . It was not his temperament. It was not his temperament, I should say. It was somewhat his temperament and M. Fouillee perceived that fact very well. It was somewhat his temperament in this sense that he was sickly, often sad and also prone to exaggeration and to fall in love with anything colossal and gigantic, that he was a little disorderly and hardly able to bring material order in his ideas, that he was also very personal even in the bad sense of the word and did not dislike the literature that is a confidence, an outpouring and a confession. I am prepared to grant all this. After all, there must have been something romantic in his make-up since he remained relatively romantic for so long a period. Yet, the basis, or if you prefer — since I do not quite know what the basis was — some very considerable parts of his make-up were very different and contradictory. He was quick of thought, perhaps even too quick. He was fond of clearness. He liked order albeit not altogether wittingly. In his pride he was an aristocrat. Art is always aristocratic of course, but romantic art is nevertheless more popular, appealing as it does more to the emotions than to ideas and especially more than to exalted ideas. Again, Nietzsche was independent and aggressive. It may be merely circumstantial but it is important to note that, aside from other considerations, the fact that the whole of Germany was soaked in romanticism was a sufficient reason for him to turn rapidly the other way. He freed himself.

He freed himself first, I think, through France and then through Greece, perhaps through both at the same time. At all events, since that does not matter much and we must take them in order, let us begin with France. Let us note, moreover, that he was led to France and to Greece by his great friend Goethe who loved one as much as the other. The influence of Goethe upon Nietzsche cannot be exaggerated. One cannot be sure enough of it to say that all Nietzsche is to be found in Goethe, but we certainly find Goethe at every turn in the road followed by Nietzsche — at the chief landmarks of his evolution. The Traveler and his Shadow is one of Nietzsche's titles. He traveled in the great shadow of Goethe, attempting sometimes with some success to " jump out of his shadow." In this case it was a possible feat.

Be that as it may, he addressed himself to France. He read Montaigne, whose charming loquacity he praised. " A loquacity which springs from the joy of turning the same subject ever in a new fashion is what we find in Montaigne." He read Pascal, whom he quotes a hundred times. He read La Rochefoucauld, and as a matter of fact was his last editor, with plentiful commentaries. He read Corneille, whom he understood thoroughly and whom we shall meet again in his company in the course of this volume. He read La Bruyere, Voltaire and Vauvenargues. He read Cham fort, in whom he traced Schopenhauer. Nietzsche hated Chamfort and, at the same time, excused him for having belonged to the party of the Revolution. He found in Chamfort " a man rich in deep ideas and who touched the very bottom of the soul, gloomy, suffering, fiery and the most witty of all moralists." He represents him as " having remained a stranger to the French," but where did Nietzsche discover that? He read Fontenelle, whom he admired, I think, too much, as a man whose witty sayings and paradoxes have become so many truths. He read Stendhal, as one may well have expected. Since he would go no further than our XVIIIth century, he was bound to read Stendhal, who was of it. He judged Stendhal to be " of all Frenchmen of that century, perhaps, the man whose eyes and ears were richest in thoughts."

All this fascinated him and showed him where lay his true intellectual nature. He was classical. Here are the formulas of classical art, new or seemingly new to him, which gush forth under his pen. No personal literature. "An author must become silent when his work begins to speak. Reality, nothing but reality, yet not all that is reality."

Precisely as the good prose writer uses only words that belong to the language of conversation but is most careful not to use all the vocabulary of that language — thus precisely is a select style formed — in that way shall the good poet of the future represent nothing but real things, neglecting altogether vague and obsolete objects. In this, the ancient poets showed their strength. Nothing but reality, yet not at all the whole of it. Rather a selected reality. Scattered in the works of Nietzsche, one could find an almost complete theory of classical art, especially of French classical art. It is at least certain that clearness, precision, order and selection afforded him a kind of ravishing revelation. He evidently swore to himself to offer a sacrifice to these new idols or rather to consider as idols everything that did not pertain to these gods.

Did France lead him to Greece, or did Greece lead him back later to France ? The following quotation could illustrate either of the two contentions or again that which claims that he studied both Greek and French classics at the same time. " When one reads Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, Fontenelle, — especially his Dialogues of the Dead, — Vauvenargues and Chamfort, one is nearer to antiquity than with any group of six authors of any other nation. Through these six writers, the soul of the last centuries of the ancient era has come to life again. Joined together, they form an important link in the great endless chain of the Renaissance. Their books rise above change in national taste and those philosophical shades with which it is thought now-

NIETZSCHE SEEKS HIMSELF II

adays that each book should glitter in order to achieve fame. They contain more true ideas than all the books of German philosophy together. To voice a very intelligible praise, I should say that written in Greek, their works would have been understood by the Greeks. On the contrary, how much could a Plato have understood of the writings of our best German thinkers, say of Goethe or Schopenhauer, not to mention the repugnance he would have felt at their method of writing — I mean in what they have which is obscure, exaggerated and sometimes dry and stilted? These are faults which these two writers show -least of all German thinkers, and yet they show them overmuch ! Goethe, as a thinker, has embraced the clouds more willingly than one should wish he had. Schopenhauer threaded his way almost invariably among the symbols of things rather than among the things themselves. On the contrary, what clearness and delicate precision in these Frenchmen! The most subtle of the Greeks could have been compelled to approve of this art. There is one thing they would even have admired and worshiped — the French slyness of expression. They were very fond of that sort of thing without achieving great success in it."

He was growing away, more and more, not only from German romanticism but from Germany itself. No doubt he. was beginning to ask himself whether there " were any German classics." That is, whether there were German writers whose genius was sufficiently general and universal, who were sufficiently out of actuality, while establishing their reputation during their own lives, who had sufficiently conquered the future by the greatness of their thought and the imperishable force of their expression to remain, to grow greater or at least not to decline fifty years after their death. Perhaps he was beginning to answer in the negative, as he wrote later in Human, All too Human. " Of the six great ancestors of German literature, five are now unquestionably growing old or have already grown old. ... I am placing Goethe apart. . . . But what can I say of the five others ? Even before his death, Klopstock was venerably old and so thoroughly so that his Republic of the Savants, the mature work of his old age has never been seriously taken by any one to this very day. Herder had the misfortune always to write books which were too new and yet already out of date. In the eyes of the more subtle and more daring men like Lichtenberg, the chief work of Herder seemed somewhat obsolete from the day of its publication. Wieland who had abundantly lived and generated life was wise enough to forestall by death the decline of his influence. Lessing still stands to-day but only among the young and ever younger savants. Schiller has dropped out the hands of the young men to fall into those of the little boys, of all the little German boys. It is one way of getting old for a book to fall back upon less and less ripe generations."

The fact is Nietzsche was more and more shedding his Germanism and he felt himself attracted towards the lands where clearness ruled and towards the straight-lined horizons. At that time, that is about 1870, he discovered Greece. It would be interesting to know whether, as a schoolboy, at the gymnasium, he had already some inclination towards Hellenism. I do not know and after all the interest is only one of curiosity. The only education that counts is the second one, that which we give ourselves. The real tastes, the deep tastes, those that survive through life are formed between the twentieth and the thirtieth years. It was therefore about 1870, as he admitted it most clearly himself in his Preface to the Origins of Greek Tragedy and in his comments on that work, that he felt a deep taste, a truly passionate love, a sort of devotion for Greece. To him it was a new light. I am sure he must have said to himself:

This was the period of Nietzsche's great intellectual and even moral crisis. The whole of his final development dates from that crisis. He wished to discover the deep roots of the tragic art among the Athenians, its psychological springs, the state of mind which that art presupposed in those who practiced it, either as authors and interpreters, or as audiences. Gradually he conceived an idea, false I believe, but original, interesting and most fruitful in consequence, of the Greek soul, temperament and race. This idea he toyed with. It penetrated and intoxicated him. From it he was to build up a whole system of philosophy, of sociology and morality. All Nietzsche is truly in the Origins of the Greek Tragedy.

Here is the general idea Nietzsche formed of the tragic art of the Greeks and of the Greek soul. We can trace it in spite of much clumsiness, groping and obscurity.

A race there was whose people cared for nought but beauty and life. Especially they loved life, a strong and exuberant, a mighty and joyful, an enthusiastic and exultant life. This we may call their Dionysian soul. But they loved also beauty, purity of line, dignity of attitude, majesty of the brow and serenity of the eye. That we may call their Apollonian soul.

These two aspirations meet and unite as it were in the Olympian conception. Olympus is a dwelling place for superior beings, at once strongly alive and nobly beautiful, exultant in the joy of being alive and, in the will to live, immortal. We have too often repeated this word immortal and thereby lost the sense of its meaning. Immortal, — that is insatiable of life, wishing for a life eternal and wanting an ever inexhaustible life. These dwellers in Olympus delight also in being beautiful, in being tall, strong, noble and harmonious. They take delight in themselves and in an indefinite progression of beauty in themselves; they realize beauty and apply themselves ever more to realize it. The Olympian is a higher being who unites in his person the Dionysian and the Apollonian states.

He is the model of the Greek. In his own life and art, the Greek tries to approach that ideal. He seeks, in his tragedy, the synthesis or at least the union between the Dionysian and the Apollonian states of mind. He places the Dionysian state in the chorus (this is very doubtful) and the Apollonian in the characters. At any rate, he seeks a form of art where life and beauty can be realized and deeply welded, where beauty is shown alive, moving and active and where life is shown beautiful, ever beautiful and with all the forms of beauty, music, rhythm, verse, restful attitudes, intimate union of beauty and life, intimate union of the Apollonian and the Dionysian states of mind and the near-realization of Olympianism.

Even, in his own life, the Greek still sought to realize that union of his dream. Watch his conquering activity, political activity, colonizing activity, administrative activity. Withal there was art always; the art of the poets, of the sculptors, of the architects and the art of the painters. Greece poured out and wished to pour out together her life and her art over the Universe. To live and to live beautifully, to make the world live and make it live beautifully — such seems to have been her constant preoccupation and her changeless will.

We may therefore consider the Greek tragedy as the intermediary, one could risk saying as the mediator, between the Greek Heaven and the Greek Earth. That tragedy offers to men an approximate view of this union between the Apollonian and the Dionysian states which the immortals are realizing above. It places before them the example of this union between the Apollonian and the Dionysian states which they must realize here below. Through the medium of the Olympian tragedy, the Olympians say to men : " Be yourselves Olympians ; Life and Beauty in the Heavens, Life and Beauty upon Earth; Celestial Life and Beauty taught to the Earth by Tragedy."

Does not all this put many things in the tragedy of the Greeks? Did the Athenians seek anything else in tragedy but an opportunity to get cloyed with tears, as Homer said, and to satisfy their sentimentalism ?

Not at all, Nietzsche replies. It is sufficient to read both Plato and Aristotle to realize how the Greeks understood tragedy in the main, even when they disagreed. Plato expelled the poets from his Republic because he feared that they might with their sentimentalism cause the strong and joyful race to become effeminate. Aristotle, ever in contradiction with Plato, defended tragedy on the ground that, by applying the sentimentalism of its audiences to false notions, it purged them of that very sentimentalism and gave them back to life, energetic, joyful and strong. This means that both men wanted an energetic race, in love with life and that both well understood that art must not cause life to become languid and relaxed.

Nietzsche moreover went beyond Plato and Aristotle — to use a Nietzschean expression. He says that this very taste of the Greek race for an art which, albeit Dionysian and Apollonian, was pathetic, was sad and laid bare human horror and misery, that this taste reveals a strong and nimble race which did not shirk from a display of misery and sorrow, which did not demand happy endings, or optimistic lies, which had enough self-confidence to contemplate human wretchedness to find therein an aesthetic pleasure and not to be dismayed thereby. That race may have thus needed temporary diversion from its optimism in order to find it again whole and intact the next moment. Perhaps it felt a masculine and fierce joy in looking upon human woe, in feeling its threat, in feeling itself threatened by it and yet marching to action at the risk of seeing that woe befall it. Perhaps it derived a virile and sane pleasure from saying before Goethe " Over the tombs, forward ! " At any rate, that race sought in art no solace, no narcotic or stupefying draughts but, like the strong of the earth, I do not know what bitter and tonic beverage. . . . Thus possessed of a view of Greek art which is very much open to discussion but which he used as truth, Nietzsche meditated upon this revelation and became unsettled concerning all he had been taught. He had been brought up on German romanticism, that is on an art made of sadness, melancholy and a sentimentalism full of pity. He believed he had discovered a race and an art that were nimble, joyful, energetic, in love with life not with death, Apollonian in their calm periods, Dionysian in their moments of exaltation, looking towards life even when Apollonian, that is to say, remaining Dionysian even when they were Apollonian. . . . That was of course almost the opposite of romanticism.