Part 17

The first thing that occurs to one after reading Beyond Good and Evil is that Nietzsche is more French than German. It is well known that his favourites were the _pensée_ writers, Pascal, La Bruyère, La Rochefoucauld, Fontenelle, Chamfort, Vauvenargues. A peripatetic because of chronic ill health--he had the nerves of a Shelley and the stomach of a Carlyle--his ideas were jotted down during his long walks in the Engadine. Naturally they assumed the form of aphorisms, epigrams, _jeux d'esprit_. With his increasing illness came the inability to write more than a few pages of connected thoughts. His best period was between the years 1877 and 1882. He had attacked Schopenhauer; he wished to be free to go up to the "heights" unimpeded by the baggage of other men's ideas. It was with disquietude that his friends witnessed the growing self-exaltation that may be noted in the rhapsodical Zarathustra.

He felt the ground sinking under him--his pride of intellect Luciferian in intensity--and his latter works were a desperate challenge to his darkening brain and the world that refused to recognize his value.

Nietzsche had the true ascetic's temperament. He lived the life of a strenuous saint, and his Beyond Good and Evil might land us in a barren desert, where austerity would rule our daily conduct. To become a Superman one must renounce the world. It was the easy-going, down-at-the-heel morality of the world, its carrying water on both shoulders, that stirred the wrath of this earnest man of blameless life and provoked from him so much brilliant and fascinating prose. He wrote a swift, golden German. He was a stylist. The great culture hero of his day, nourished on Latin and Greek, he waged war against the moral ideas of his generation and ruined his intellect in the unequal conflict. He turned on himself and rended his soul into shreds rather than join in the affirmations of recognised faith. Yet what eloquent, touching pages he has devoted to the founder of the Christian religion. His last signature in the letter to Brandes reveals the preoccupation of his memory with the religion he despised. Nietzsche made the great renunciation of inherited faith and committed spiritual suicide. Libraries are filled with the works of his commentators, eager to make of him what he was not. He has been shamelessly exploited. He has been called the forerunner of Pragmatism. He was a poet, an artist, who saw life as a gorgeously spun dream, not as a dreary phalanstery. He belonged rather to Goethe and Faust than to Schopenhauer or the positivists. Hellenism was his first and last love.

The correspondence between Nietzsche and his famulus, the musician Peter Gast--whose real name is Heinrich Kôselitz--from 1876 to 1889, appeared last autumn and comprises 278 letters. Another Nietzsche appears--gentle, suffering, as usual still hopeful. He loves Italy; at the end, Turin is his favourite city. There is little except in the final communication to show a mind cracking asunder. No doubt this correspondence was given to the world as an offset to the Overbeck-Bernouilli letters.

Leslie Stephen declared that no one ever wrote a dull autobiography, and risking a bull, added, "The very dulness would be interesting." Yet one is not afraid to maintain that Friedrich Nietzsche's autobiography is rather a disappointment; possibly because too much was expected. It should not be forgotten that Nietzsche, when at Wagner's villa Triebschen, near Lucerne, read and corrected Wagner's autobiography, which is yet to see the light of publication. He seems to have violated certain confidences, for he was the first--that is, in latter years--to revive the story of Wagner's blood relationship to his stepfather, Ludwig Geyer. In Leipsic this was a thrice-told tale. Moreover, he warned us to be suspicious of great men's autobiographies and then wrote one himself, wrote it in three weeks, beginning October 15, 1888, the forty-fourth anniversary of his birth, and ending with difficulty November 4. It rings sincere, and was composed at white heat, but unhappily for this present curious generation of Nietzsche readers it tells very little that is new.

Notwithstanding Nietzsche's wish that the book should not exceed in price over a mark and a half, a limited edition de luxe has been put forth with the acquiescence of the Nietzsche archive, Weimar, and at a high price. This edition is limited to 1,250 copies. It is clearly printed, but the decorative element is rather bizarre. Henry Van de Velde of the Weimar Art School is the designer of the title and ornaments. Raoul Richter, professor at the Leipsic University, has written a few appreciative words at the close.

Nietzsche was at Turin, November, 1888. There he wrote the following to Professor Georg Brandes, the celebrated Copenhagen critic: "I have now revealed myself with a cynicism that will become historical. The book is called Ecce Homo and is against everything Christian.... I am after all the first psychologist of Christianity, and like the old artillerist I am, I can bring forward cannon of which no opponent of Christianity has even suspected the existence.... I lay down my oath that in two years we shall have the whole earth in convulsions. I am a fatality. Guess who it is that comes off worst in Ecce Homo? The Germans! I have said awful things to them." This was the "golden autumn" of his life, as he confessed to his sister Elizabeth. In a little over four weeks from the date of the letter to Brandes Nietzsche went mad, after a stroke of apoplexy in Turin. The collapse must have taken place between January 1 and 3, 1889. Brandes received a card signed "The Crucified One"; Overbeck, his old friend at Basel, was also agitated by a few lines in which Nietzsche proclaimed himself the King of Kings; while to Cosima Wagner at Bayreuth was sent a communication which read, "Ariadne, I love you! Dionysos." Like Tolstoy, Nietzsche suffered from theomania and prophecy madness.

These details are not in the autobiography but may be found in Dr. Mügge's excellent study just published, Nietzsche, His Life and Work. Overbeck started for Turin and there found his poor old companion giving away his money, dancing, singing, declaiming verse, and playing snatches of crazy music on the pianoforte. He was taken back to Basel and was gentle on the trip except that in the Saint-Gothard tunnel he sang a poem of his, "An der Brücke," which appears in the autobiography. His mother brought him from Switzerland to Naumburg; thence to Dr. Binswanger's establishment at Jena. Later he lived in his sister's home at Upper Weimar, and from the balcony, where he spent his days, he could see a beautiful landscape. He was melancholy rather than mad, never violent--this his sister has personally assured me--and occasionally surprised those about him by flashes of memory; but full consciousness was not to be again enjoyed by him. Overwork, chloral, and despair at the "conspiracy of silence" caused his brain to crumble. He had attained his "Great Noon," Zarathustra's Noon, during the closing days of 1888. In August, 1900, came the euthanasia for which he had longed.

There is internal evidence that the autobiography was written under exalted nervous conditions. The aura of insanity hovers about its pages. Yet Nietzsche has seldom said so many brilliant, ironical, and savage things. He melts over memories of Wagner, the one friendship of a life crowded with friends and cursed by solitude. He sets out to smash Christianity, but he expressed the hope that the book would fall into the hands of the intellectual élite. He divides his theme into the following heads: Why I Am So Clever: Why I Am So Sage: Why I Write Such Good Books: Why I Am a Fatality. (You recall here the letter to Brandes.) He ranges from the abuse of bad German cookery to Kantian metaphysics. He calls Ibsen the typical old maid and denounces him as the creator of the "Emancipated Woman." Yes, he does insult Germany and the Germans, but no worse than in earlier books; and certainly not so effectively as did Goethe, Heine, and Schopenhauer. In calling the Germans the "Chinese of Europe" he but repeated the words of Goncourt in Charles Demailly. He speaks of Liszt as one "who surpasses all musicians by the noble accents of his orchestration" (vague phrase); and depreciates Schumann's "Manfred." He, Nietzsche, had composed a counter overture which Von Bülow declared extraordinary. True, Von Bülow did call it something of the sort, with the advice to throw it into the dust-bin as being an insult to good music. He analyses his recent readings of Baudelaire--whose diary touched him deeply--of Stendhal, Bourget, Maupassant, Anatole France, and others. Best of all, he minutely analyses the mental processes of his books from The Birth of Tragedy to The Wagner Case. He declares Zarathustra a dithyramb of solitude and purity, and proudly boasts that the Superman builds his nest in the trees of the future.

What a master of invective! He often descends to the street in his tongue-lashing, as, for instance, when he groups "shopkeepers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen, and other democrats." Woman is always the enemy. The only way to tame her is to make her a mother. As for female suffrage, he sets it down to psychological disorders. He is a _nuance_, and is the first German to understand women! Alas! And not the last man who will repeat this speech surely hailing from the Stone Age. He seems rather proud of his double personality, and hints at a third. Oddly enough, Nietzsche asked that his Ecce Homo (the title proves his constant preoccupation with Christianity) be translated into French by Strindberg, the Swedish poet and the first dramatist to incorporate into his plays the Nietzschian philosophy, or what he conceived to be such. (Daniel Lesueur has written of the various adaptations for gorillas of a teaching that really demands from man the utmost that is in him.) Nietzsche was a hater of Christianity; above all of Christian morals, but he was a brave and honest fighter. He raged at George Eliot, Herbert Spencer, and Carlyle for their half-heartedness. To give up the belief in Christ and His mission meant for Nietzsche to drop the moral system, to transvalue old moral values. This, he truthfully asserted, George Eliot and Spencer had not the courage to do. He did not skulk behind such masks as the Higher Criticism, Modernism, or quacksalver Christian socialism. Compromise was abhorrent to him. His Superman, with its echoes of Wagner's Siegfried, Ibsen's Brand, Stendhal's wicked heroes, the Renaissance Borgias, the second Faust of Goethe, and not a little of Hamlet, is a monster of perfection that may some day become a demigod for a new religion--and no worse than contemporary mud-gods manufactured daily. Nietzsche's particular virtue, even for the orthodox, is that though he assails their faith he also puts to rout with the fiery blasts of his rhetoric all the belly-gods, the false-culture gods, the gods who "heal," and other "ghosts"--as Max Stirner calls them. But to every generation its truths (or lies).

A recently published anecdote of Ibsen quotes a statement of his _a propos_ of Brand. "The whole drama is only meant as irony. For the man who wants all or nothing is certainly crazy." Well, Friedrich Nietzsche was such a man. No half-way parleyings. Fight the Bogey. Don't go around. He went more serenely than did Brand to his ice cathedral on the heights. His prayer uttered years before came true: "Give me, ye gods, give me madness! Madness to make me believe at last in myself."

Nietzsche is the most dynamically emotional writer of his times. He sums up an epoch. He is the expiring voice of the old nineteenth-century romanticism in philosophy. His message to unborn generations we may easily leave to those unborn, and enjoy the wit, the profound criticisms of life, the bewildering gamut of his ideas; above all, pity the tragic blotting out of such a vivid intellectual life.

VIII

MYSTICS

I

ERNEST HELLO

It occurred in the beautiful gardens of the Paris exposition during that summer of 1867 when Glory and France were synonymous expressions. To the music, cynical and voluptuous, of Offenbach and Strauss the world enjoyed itself, applauding equally Renan's latest book and Thérésa's vulgarity; amused by Ponson de Terrail's fatuous indecencies and speaking of Proudhon in the same breath. Bismarck and his Prussians seemed far away. Babel or Pompeii? The tower of the Second Empire reached to the clouds; below, the people danced on the edge of the crater. A time for prophets and their lamentations. Jeremiah walked in the gardens. He was a terrible man, with sombre fatidical gaze, eyes in which were the smothered fires of hatred. His thin hair waved in the wind. He said to his friends: "I come from the Tuileries Palace; it is not yet consumed; the Barbarians delay their coming. What is Attila doing?" He passed. "A madman!" exclaimed a companion to Henri Lasserre. "Not in the least," replied that writer. "He is Ernest Hello." After reading this episode as related by Hello's friend and editor, the disquieting figure is evoked of that son of Hanan, who prowled through the streets of the holy city in the year A.D. 62 crying aloud: "Woe, woe upon Jerusalem!" The prophecy of Hello was realized in a few years. Attila came and Attila went, and after his departure the polemical writer, who could be both a spouting volcano and a subtle doctor of theology, wrote his masterpiece, L'Homme, a remarkable book, a seed-bearing book.

Why is there so little known of Ernest Hello? He was born 1828, died 1885, and was a voluminous author, who wrote much for the _Univers_ and other periodicals and passed away as he had lived, fighting in harness for the truths of his religion. Possibly the less sensitive texture of Louis Veuillot's mind and character threw the talents of Hello into shadow; perhaps his avowed hatred of mediocrity, his Old Testament power of vituperation, and his apocalyptic style militated against his acceptance by the majority of Roman Catholic readers. Notwithstanding his gifts as a writer and thinker, Hello was never popular, and it is only a few years ago that his works began to be republished. Let us hasten to add that they are rich in suggestion for lovers of apologetic or hortatory literature.

It was Huysmans and Remy de Gourmont who sent me to the amazing Hello. In A Rebours Huysmans discusses him with Léon Bloy, Barbey d'Aurevilly, and Ozanam. "Hello is a cunning engineer of the soul, a skilful watchmaker of the brain, delighting to examine the mechanism of a passion and to explain the play of a wheel work." United to his power of analysis there is the fanaticism of a Biblical prophet and the tortured ingenuity of a master of style. A little John of Patmos, one who, complex and precious, is a sort of epileptic mystic--vindictive, proud, a despiser of the commonplace. All these things was Hello to Huysmans, who did not seem to relish him very much. De Gourmont described him as one who believed with genius. A believing genius he was, Ernest Hello, and his genius, his dynamic faith--apart from any consideration of his qualities as a prose artist or his extraordinary powers of analysis. Without his faith, which was, one is tempted to add, his thematic material, he might have been a huge force vainly flapping his wings in the void, or, as Lasserre puts it, he was impatient with God because of His infinite patience. He longed to see Him strike dumb the enemies of His revealed word. He lived in a continuous thunder-storm of the spirit. He was a mystic, yet a warrior on the fighting line of the church militant.

Joachim of Flora has written: "The true ascetic counts nothing his own save his harp." Hello, less subjective than Newman, less lyric though a "son of thunder," counted but the harp of his faith. All else he cast away. And this faith was published to the heathen with the hot rhetoric of a propagandist. The nations must be aroused from their slumber. He whirls his readers off their feet by the torrential flow of his argument. He never winds calmly into his subject, but smites vehemently the opening bars of his hardy discourse. He writes pure, untroubled prose at times, the line, if agitated, unbroken, the balance of sound and sense perfect. But too often he employs a staccato, declamatory, tropical, inflated style which recalls Victor Hugo at his worst; the short sentence; the single paragraph; the vicious abuse of antithesis; if it were not for the subject-matter whole pages might masquerade as the explosive mannerisms of Hugo. "Christianity is _naturally_ impossible. However, it exists. Therefore it is supernatural!" This is Hello logic. Or, speaking of St. Joseph of Cupertino: "If he had not existed, no one could have invented him," which is a very witty inversion of Voltaire's celebrated _mot_. God-intoxicated as were St. Francis of Assisi or Père Ratisbonne, Hello was not; when absent from the tripod of vaticination he was a meek, loving man; then the walls of his _Turris eburnea_ echoed the inevitable: _Ora pro nobis!_ Even when the soul seems empty, it may, like a hollow shell, murmur of eternity. Hello's faith was in the fourth spiritual dimension. It demanded the affirmation of his virile intellect and the concurrence of his overarching emotional temperament.

In the black-and-white sketch by Vallotton he resembles both Remenyi, the Hungarian violin virtuoso, and Louise Michel, the anarchist. The brow is vast, the expression exalted, the mouth belligerent, disputatious, and the chin slightly receding. One would say a man of violent passions, in equilibrium unsteady, a skirter of abysses, a good hater--did he not once propose a History of Hatred? Yet how submissive he was to papal decrees; many of his books contain instead of a preface his act of submission to Catholic dogma. More so than Huysmans was he a mediæval man. For him modern science did not exist. The Angelic Doctor will outlive Darwin, he cried, and the powers and principalities of darkness are as active in these days as in the age when the saints of the desert warred with the demons of doubt and concupiscence. "To wring from man's tongue the denial of his existence is proof of Satan's greatest power," was a sentiment of Père Ravignan to which Hello would have heartily subscribed. He detested Renan--_Renan, voilà l'ennemi!_ Jeremy Taylor's vision of hell as an abode crowded with a million dead dogs would not be too severe a punishment for that silken sophist, whose writings are the veriest flotsam and jetsam of a disordered spiritual life. Hello has written eloquent pages about Hugo, whose poetry he admired, whose ideas he combated. Napoleon was a genius, but a foe of God.

Shakespeare for him vacillated between obscenity and melancholy; Hamlet was a character hardly sounded by Hello; doubt was a psychological impossibility to one of his faith. He was convinced that the John of the Apocalyptic books was not John the Presbyter, nor any one of the five Johns of the Johannic writings, but John the Apostle. He has often the colour of Bossuet's moral indignation. A master of theological odium, his favourite denunciation was "Horma, Anathema, Anathème, Amen!" His favourite symbol of confusion is Babel--Paris. He loved, among many saints, Denys the Areopagite; he extolled the study of St. Thomas Aquinas. To the unhappy Abbé de Lamenais's Paroles d'un Croyant (1834), he opposed his own Paroles de Dieu. He could have, phrase for phrase, book for book, retorted with tenfold interest to Nietzsche's vilification of Christianity. Society will again become a theocracy, else pay the penalty in anarchy. One moment beating his breast, he cries aloud: "_Maranatha! Maranatha!_ Our Lord is at hand!" The next we find him with the icy contemptuousness of a mystic quoting from the Admirable Ruysbroeck (a thirteenth-century mystic whom he had translated, whose writings influenced Huysmans, and at one period of his development, Maurice Maeterlinck) these brave words: "Needs must I rejoice beyond the age, though the world has horror of my joy, and its grossness cannot understand what I say." Notwithstanding this aloofness, there are some who after reading Ernest Hello's Man may agree with Havelock Ellis: "Hello is the real psychologist of the century, not Stendhal."

It is indeed a work of penetrating criticism and clairvoyance, this study of man, of life. Read his analysis of the Miser and you will recall Plautus or Molière. He has something of Saint-Simon's power in presenting a finished portrait and La Bruyère's cameo concision. He is reactionary in all that concerns modern æsthetics or the natural sciences. There is but one science, the knowledge of God. Avoiding the devious webs of metaphysics, he sets before us his ideas with a crystal clarity. Despite its religious bias, L'Homme may be recommended as a book for mundane minds. Nor is Le Siècle to be missed. Those views of the world, of men and women, are written by a shrewd observer and a profound thinker. Philosophie et Athéisme is just what its title foretells--a battering-ram of dialectic. The scholastic learning of Hello is enormous. He had at his back the Bible, the patristic writers, the schoolmen, and all the moderns from De Maistre to Father Faber. He execrated Modernism. Physionomies de Saintes, Angelo de Foligno, and half a dozen other volumes prove how versed he was in Holy Writ. "The Scriptures are an abysm," he declared. He wrote short stories, Contes extraordinaires, which display excellent workmanship, no little fantasy, yet are rather slow reading. In literature Hello was a belated romantic, a Don Quixote of the ideal who charged ferociously the windmills of indifference.

In 1881 he was a collaborator with an American religious publication called _Propagateur Catholique_ (I give the French title because I do not know whether it was published here or in Canada). His contributions were incorporated later in his Words of God. I confess to knowing little of Hello but his works, the Life by Lasserre being out of print. Impressive as is his genius, it is often repellent, because love of his fellow-man is not a dominant part of it. The central flame burns brightly, fiercely; the tiny taper of charity is often missing. With his beloved Ruysbroeck (Rusbrock, he names him) he seems to be muttering too often a disdainful adieu to his gross and ignorant brethren as if abandoning them to their lies and ruin. However, his translation of this same Ruysbroeck is a genuine accession to contemplative literature. And perhaps, if one too hastily criticises the almost elemental faith of Hello and its rude assaults of the portals of pride, luxury, and worldliness, perhaps the old wisdom may cruelly rebound upon his detractors: "Dixit insipiens in corde suo: Non est Deus."

II

"MAD, NAKED BLAKE"

I