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In the Dawn of Day Nietzsche for the first time begins to reveal his real personality. This book is literally the dawn of his great life work, and in it we find him grappling with all the problems which he was subsequently to tackle with such a masterly and courageous hand. It appeared in July 1881 and met with but a poor reception. Indeed, after the publication of the last of the Thoughts out of Season Nietzsche appears to have created very little stir among his countrymen—a fact which, though it greatly depressed him, only made him redouble his energies.
In September 1882 The Joyful Wisdom was published—a book written during one of the happiest periods of his life. It is a veritable fanfare of trumpets announcing the triumphal entry of its distinguished follower Zarathustra. With it Nietzsche's final philosophical views are already making headway, and it is full of the love of life and energy which permeates the grand philosophical poem which was to come after it.
Disappointed by the meagre success of his works, and hurt by the attitude of various friends, Nietzsche now retired into loneliness, and, settling down on the beautiful bay of Rapallo, began work on that wonderful moral, psychological, and critical rhapsody, Thus Spake Zarathustra, which was to prove the greatest of his creations. During the years 1883–84, the three first parts of this work were published, and, though each part was issued separately and met with the same cold reception which had been given to his other works of recent years, Nietzsche never once lost heart or wavered in his resolve. It required, however, all the sublime inspirations which we find expressed in that wonderful Book for all and None, to enable a man to stand firmly and absolutely alone amid all the hardships and reverses that beset our anchorite poet throughout this period.
It was about this time that Nietzsche began to take chloral in the hope of overcoming his insomnia; it was now, too, that his sister —the only relative for whom, despite some misunderstandings, he had a real affection—became engaged to a man with whom he was utterly out of sympathy; and all the while negotiations, into which Nietzsche had entered with the Leipzig University for the purpose of securing another professorial chair, were becoming ever more hopeless.
In the course of this exposition I shall have to treat of the doctrines enunciated in Thus Spake Zarathustra—indeed, seeing that this work contains all Nietzsche's thought in a poetical form, it would be quite impossible to discuss any single tenet of his philosophy without in some way referring to the book in question. I cannot therefore say much about it at present, save that it is generally admitted to be Nietzsche's opus magnum. Besides the philosophical views expounded in the four parts of which it consists, the value of its autobiographical passages is enormous. In it we find the history of his most intimate experiences, friendships, feuds, disappointments, triumphs, and the like; and the whole is written in a style so magnetic and poetical, that, as a specimen of belles-lettres alone, entirely apart from the questions it treats, the work cannot and ought not to be overlooked.
Although there is now scarcely a European language into which Zarathustra has not been translated, although the fame of the work, at present, is almost universal, the reception it met with at the time of its publication was so unsatisfactory, and misunderstanding relative to its teaching became so general, that within a year of the issue of its first part, Nietzsche was already beginning to see the necessity of bringing his doctrines before the public in a more definite and unmistakable form. During the years that followed—that is to say, between 1883 and 1886—this plan was matured, and between 1886 and 1889—the year of our author's final breakdown, three important books were published which may be regarded as prose-sequels to the poem Zarathustra. These books are: Beyond Good and Evil (1886), The Genealogy of Morals (1887), and The Twilight of the Idols (1889); while the posthumous works The Will to Power (1901) and the little volume Antichrist, published in 1895, when its author was lying hopelessly ill at Naumburg, also belong to the period in which Nietzsche wished to make his Zarathustra clear and comprehensible to his fellows. In the ensuing chapters it will be my endeavour to state briefly all that is vital in the works just referred to.
What remains to be related of Nietzsche's life is sad enough, and is almost common knowledge. When his sister Elizabeth married Dr. Frster and went to Paraguay with her spouse, Nietzsche was practically without a friend, and, had it not been for Peter Gast's devotion and help, he would probably have succumbed to his constitutional and mental troubles much sooner than he actually did. Before his last breakdown in Turin, in January 1889, the only real encouragement he is ever known to have received in regard to his philosophical works came to him from Copenhagen and Paris. In the latter city it was Taine who committed himself by praising Nietzsche, and in the former it was Dr. George Brandes, a clever and learned professor, who delivered a series of lectures on the new message of the German philosopher. The news of Brandes' success in Copenhagen in 1888 greatly brightened Nietzsche's last year of authorship, and he corresponded with the Danish professor until the end. It has been rightly observed that these lectures were the dawn of Nietzscheism in Europe.
As the result of over-work, excessive indulgence in drugs, and a host of disappointments and anxieties, Nietzsche's great mind at last collapsed on the 2nd or 3rd of January 1889, never again to recover.
The last words he wrote, which were subsequently found on a slip of paper in his study, throw more light upon the tragedy of his breakdown than all the learned medical treatises that have been written about his case. "I am taking narcotic after narcotic," he said, "in order to drown my anguish; but still I cannot sleep. To-day I will certainly take such a quantity as will drive me out of my mind."
From that time to the day of his death (25th August 1900) he lingered a helpless and unconscious invalid, first in the care of his aged mother, and ultimately, when Elizabeth returned a widow from Paraguay, as his sister's beloved charge.
For an opinion of Nietzsche during his last phase I cannot do better than quote Professor Henri Lichtenberger of Nancy, who saw the invalid in 1898; and with this sympathetic Frenchman's valuable observations, I shall draw this chapter to a close:—
"In the gradual wane of this enthusiastic lover of life, of this apologist of energy, of this prophet of Superman there is something inexpressibly sad—inexpressibly beautiful and peaceful. His brow is still magnificent—his eyes, the light of which seems to be directed inwards, have an expression which is indefinably and profoundly moving. What is going on within his soul? Nobody can say. It is just possible that he may have preserved a dim recollection of his life as a thinker and a poet."
[1] Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsche's by Frau Frster-Nietzsche.
From a casual study of Nietzsche's life it might be gathered that he had little time for private meditation or for any lonely brooding over problems foreign to his school and university studies. Indeed, from the very moment when it was decided that he should become a scholar, to the day when the University of Leipzig granted him his doctor's degree without examination, his existence seems to have been so wholly occupied by strenuous application to the duties which his aspirations imposed upon him that, even if he had had the will to do so, it would seem that he could not have had the leisure to become engaged in any serious thought outside his regular work. Nevertheless, if we inquire into the matter more deeply, we find to our astonishment, that during the whole of that arduous period—from his thirteenth to this twenty-fourth year—his imagination did not once cease from playing around problems of the highest import, quite unrelated to his school and university subjects.
