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

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. 12Thirty 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 14could do an incalculable distance behind us." 15Another 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, 16Dr. 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." 17This 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.

Table of Contents

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.