III

BLAZING A NEW PATH

HAVING given birth, in this theory of Greek tragedy, to an idea which, whatever its defects otherwise, was at least original, understandable and workable, Nietzsche began to be conscious, as it were, of his own intellect or, in his sister's phrase, "to understand what a great man he was." He led a lonely and morose life at Basel, with an occasional visit to Richard Wagner — who lived then in Switzerland and not far away as his only recreation. In the prim, scholastic society of the university town he played no part whatever. To one of his turn of mind, indeed, the whole atmosphere of the place must have been oppressive. He was not a man to bear with equanimity the unctuous complacency of college dons and dignitaries, and he was devoid entirely of those graces which make a young professor a welcome guest at university dinner parties and a favorite of each frau professorin." His headaches, his sacrileges and his callous savagery made him more enemies than friends. To dispute with him, to controvert him, or even to agree with him, was a decidedly hazardous business.

There are critics who see in all this proof that Nietzsche showed signs of insanity from early manhood, but as a

matter of fact it was his abnormally accurate vision and not a vision gone awry, that made him stand so aloof from his fellows. In the vast majority of those about him he saw the coarse metal of sham and pretense beneath the showy gilding of learning. He had before him, at close range, a good many of the great men of his time the intellectuals whose word was law in the schools. He saw them on parade and he saw them in their shirt sleeves. What wonder that he lost all false reverence for them and began to estimate them in terms, not of their dignity and reputation, but of their actual credibility and worth? It was inevitable that he should compare his own ideas to theirs, and it was inevitable that he should perceive the difference between his own fanatical striving for the truth and the easy dependence upon precedent and formula which lay beneath their blooming bombast. Thus there arose in him a fiery loathing for all authority, and a firm belief that his own opinion regarding any matter to which he had given thought was as sound, at the least, as any other man's. Thenceforth the assertive “ich" began to besprinkle his discourse and his pages. "I condemn Christianity. I have given to mankind. . . . I was never yet modest. . . . I think. . . . I say. . . . I do. . . .” Thus he hurled his javelin at authority until the end.

To those about him, perhaps, Nietzsche seemed wild and impossible, but it is not recorded that any one ever looked upon him as ridiculous. His high brow, bared by the way in which he brushed his hair; his keen eyes, with their monstrous overhanging brows, and his immense, untrimmed moustache gave him an air of alarming earnestBeside the pedagogues about him with their

ness.

well-barbered, professorial beards, their bald heads and their learned spectacles - he seemed like some incomprehensible foreigner. The exotic air he bore delighted him and he cultivated it assiduously. He regarded himself as a Polish grandee set down by an unkind fate among German shopkeepers, and it gave him vast pleasure when the hotel porters and street beggars, deceived by his disorderly façade, called him "The Polack."

Thus he lived and had his being. The inquisitive boy of old Naumburg, the impudent youth of Pforta and the academic free lance of Bonn and Leipsic had become merged into a man sure of himself and contemptuous of all whose search for the truth was hampered or hedged about by any respect for statute or precedent. He saw that the philosophers and sages of the day, in many of their most gorgeous flights of logic, started from false premises, and he observed the fact that certain of the dominant moral, political and social maxims of the time were mere foolishness. It struck him, too, that all of this faulty ratiocination — all of this assumption of outworn doctrines and dependence upon exploded creeds not confined to the confessedly orthodox. There was fallacy no less disgusting in the other camp. The professed apostles of revolt were becoming as bad as the old crusaders and apologists.

was

Nietzsche harbored a fevered yearning to call all of these false prophets to book and to reduce their fine axioms to absurdity. Accordingly, he planned a series of twentyfour pamphlets and decided to call them " Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen," which may be translated as "Inopportune Speculations," or more clearly, "Essays in Sham-Smash

ing." In looking about for a head to smash in essay number one, his eye, naturally enough, alighted upon that of David Strauss, the favorite philosopher and fashionable iconoclast of the day. Strauss had been a preacher but had renounced the cloth and set up shop as a critic of Christianity. He had labored with good intentions, no doubt, but the net result of all his smug agnosticism was that his disciples were as self-satisfied, bigoted and prejudiced in the garb of agnostics, as they had been before as Christians. Nietzsche's clear eye saw this and in the first of his little pamphlets, " David Strauss, der Bekenner und der Schriftsteller " (" David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer"), he bore down upon Strauss' bourgeoise pseudoskepticism most savagely. This was in 1873.

Strauss," he said, " utterly evades the question, What is the meaning of life? He had an opportunity to show courage, to turn his back upon the Philistines, and to boldly deduce a new morality from that constant warfare which destroys all but the fittest, but to do this would have required a love of truth infinitely higher than that which spends itself in violent invectives against parsons, miracles and the historical humbug of the resurrection. Strauss had no such courage. Had he worked out the Darwinian doctrine to its last decimal he would have had the Philistines against him to a man. As it is, they are with him. He has wasted his time in combatting Christianity's nonessentials. For the idea at the bottom of it he has pro

'David Friedrich Strauss (1808-74) sprang into fame with his "Das Leben Jesu," 1835 (Eng. tr. by George Eliot, 1846), but the book which served as Nietzsche's target was " Der alte und der neue Glaube " (" The Old Faith and the New "), 1872.

posed no substitute. In consequence, his philosophy is stale." I

As a distinguished critic has pointed out, Nietzsche's attack was notable, not only for its keen analysis and ruthless honesty, but also for its courage. It required no little bravery, three years after Sedan, to tell the Germans that the new culture which constituted their pride was rotten, and that, unless it were purified in the fire of absolute truth, it might one day wreck their civilization.

In the year following Nietzsche returned to the attack with a criticism of history, which was then the fashionable science of the German universities, on account, chiefly, of its usefulness in exploding the myths of Christianity. He called his essay "Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben " ("On the Good and Bad Effects of History upon Human Life ") and in it he took issue with the reigning pedagogues and professors of the day. There was much hard thinking and no little good writing in this essay and it made its mark. The mere study of history, argued Nietzsche, unless some definite notion regarding the destiny of man were kept ever in mind, was misleading and confusing. There was great danger in assuming that everything which happened was part of some divine and mysterious plan for the ultimate attainment of perfection. As a matter of fact, many historical events were meaningless, and this was particularly true of those expressions of "governments, public opinion and majorities" which historians were prone to accentuate. To Nietzsche the ideas and doings of peoples seemed infinitely less important than the ideas and doings of

1 "David Strauss, der Bekenner und der Schriftsteller," § 7.