George Nathan - The Collected Works of H. L. Mencken

1.That Wagner gave Nietzsche good reason to credit him with these qualities is amply proved. "I have never read anything better than your book," wrote the composer in 1872. "It is masterly." And Frau Cosima and Liszt, who were certainly familiar with Wagner's ideas, supported Nietzsche's assumption, too. "Oh, how fine is your book," wrote the former, "how fine and how deep—how deep and how keen!" Liszt sent from Prague (Feb. 29, 1872) a pompous, patronizing letter. "I have read your book twice," he said. In all of this correspondence there is no hint that Nietzsche had misunderstood Wagner's position or had laid down any propositions from which the composer dissented.

2.There is an interesting discussion of this in James Huneker's book, "Mezzotints in Modern Music," page 285 et. seq. , New York, 1899.

3.See "George Bernard Shaw: His Plays;" page 102 et seq. , Boston, 1905.

4."Wagner's creative instinct gave the lie to his theoretical system:" R. A. Streatfield, "Modern Music and Musicians," p. 272; New York, 1906.

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Table of Contents

The construction of philosophical family trees for Nietzsche has ever been one of the favorite pastimes of his critics and interpreters. Thus Dr. Oscar Levy, editor of the English translation of his works, makes him the heir of Goethe and Stendhal, and the culminating figure of the "Second Renaissance" launched by the latter, who was "the first man to cry halt to the Kantian philosophy which had flooded all Europe." 1Dr. M. A. Mügge agrees with this genealogy so far as it goes, but points out that Nietzsche was also the intellectual descendant of certain pre-Socratic Greeks, particularly Heracleitus, and of Spinoza and Stirner. 2Alfred Fouillée, the Frenchman, is another who gives him Greek blood, but in seeking his later forebears Fouillée passes over the four named by Levy and Mügge and puts Hobbes, Schopenhauer, Darwin, Rousseau and Diderot in place of them. 3Again, Thomas Common says that "perhaps Nietzsche is most indebted to Chamfort and Schopenhauer," but also allows a considerable influence to Hobbes, and endeavors to show how Nietzsche carried on, consciously and unconsciously, certain ideas originating with Darwin and developed by Huxley, Spencer and the other evolutionists. 4Dr. Alexander Tille has written a whole volume upon this latter relationship. 5Finally, Paul Elmer More, the American, taking the cue from Fouillée, finds the germs of many of Nietzsche's doctrines in Hobbes, and then proceeds to a somewhat elaborate discussion of the mutations of ethical theory during the past two centuries, showing how Hume superimposed the idea of sympathy as a motive upon Hobbes' idea of self-interest, and how this sympathy theory prevailed over that of self-interest, and degenerated into sentimentalism, and so opened the way for Socialism and other such delusions, and how Nietzsche instituted a sort of Hobbesian revival. 6Many more speculations of that sort, some of them very ingenious and some merely ingenuous, might be rehearsed. By one critic or another Nietzsche has been accused of more or less frank borrowings from Xenophanes, Democritus, Pythagoras, Callicles, Parmenides, Arcelaus, Empedocles, Pyrrho, Hegesippus, the Eleatic Zeno, Machiavelli, Comte, Montaigne, Mandeville, La Bruyère, Fontenelle, Voltaire, Kant, La Rochefoucauld, Helvétius, Adam Smith, Malthus, Butler, Blake, Proudhon, Paul Rée, Flaubert, Taine, Gobineau, Renan, and even from Karl Marx!—a long catalogue of meaningless names, an exhaustive roster of pathfinders and protestants. A Frenchman, Jules de Gaultier, has devoted a whole book to the fascinating subject. 7

But if we turn from this laborious and often irrelevant search for common ideas and parallel passages to the actual facts of Nietzsche's intellectual development, we shall find, perhaps, that his ancestry ran in two streams, the one coming down from the Greeks whom he studied as school-boy and undergraduate, and the other having its source in Schopenhauer, the great discovery of his early manhood and the most powerful single influence of his life. No need to argue the essentially Greek color of Nietzsche's apprentice thinking. It was, indeed, his interest in Greek literature and life that made him a philologist by profession, and the same interest that converted him from a philologist into a philosopher. The foundation of his system was laid when he arrived at his conception of the conflict between the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus, and all that followed belonged naturally to the working out of that idea. But what he got from the Greeks of his early adoration was more than a single idea and more than the body of miscellaneous ideas listed by the commentators: it was the Greek outlook, the Greek spirit, the Greek attitude toward God and man. In brief, he ceased to be a German pastor's son, brought up in the fear of the Lord, and became a citizen of those gorgeous and enchanted isles, much as Shelley had before him. The sentimentality of Christianity dropped from him like an old garment; he stood forth, as it were, bare and unashamed, a pagan in the springtime of the world, a ja-sager . More than the reading of books, of course, was needed to work that transformation—the blood that leaped had to be blood capable of leaping—but it was out of books that the stimulus came, and the feeling of surety, and the beginnings of a workable philosophy of life. It is not a German that speaks in "The Antichrist," nor even the Polish noble that Nietzsche liked to think himself, but a Greek of the brave days before Socrates, a spokesman of Hellenic innocence and youth.

No doubt it was the unmistakably Greek note in Schopenhauer—the delivery of instinct, so long condemned to the ethical dungeons—that engendered Nietzsche's first wild enthusiasm for the Frankfort sage. The atmosphere of Leipsic in 1865 was heavy with moral vapors, and the daring dissent of Schopenhauer must have seemed to blow through it like a sharp wind from the sea. And Nietzsche, being young and passionate, was carried away by the ecstasy of discovery, and so accepted the whole Schopenhauerean philosophy without examining it too critically—the bitter with the sweet, its pessimism no less than its rebellion. He, too, had to go through the green-sickness of youth, particularly of German youth. The Greek was yet but half way from Naumburg to Attica, and he now stopped a moment to look backward. "Every line," he tells us somewhere, "cried out renunciation, denial, resignation.... Evidences of this sudden change are still to be found in the restless melancholy of the leaves of my diary at that period, with all their useless self-reproach and their desperate gazing upward for recovery and for the transformation of the whole spirit of mankind. By drawing all my qualities and my aspirations before the forum of gloomy self-contempt I became bitter, unjust and unbridled in my hatred of myself. I even practised bodily penance. For instance, I forced myself for a fortnight at a stretch to go to bed at two o'clock in the morning and to rise punctually at six." But not for long. The fortnight of self-accusing and hair-shirts was soon over. The green-sickness vanished. 8The Greek emerged anew, more Hellenic than ever. And so, almost from the start, Nietzsche rejected quite as much of Schopenhauer as he accepted. The Schopenhauerean premise entered into his system—the will to live was destined to become the father, in a few years, of the will to power—but the Schopenhauerean conclusion held him no longer than it took him to inspect it calmly. Thus he gained doubly—first, by the acquisition of a definite theory of human conduct, one giving clarity to his own vague feelings, and secondly, by the reaction against an abject theory of human destiny, the very antithesis of that which rose within him.