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This Eternal Return is presented to us as a conclusion of mathematical physics and spectrum analysis. St. Thomas Aquinas taught, following Aristotle, that the stars were composed of a substance nobler than that of earth, not subject to birth or death, and so immune from corruption. But Fraunhofer and his successors have, with their prisms and telescopes, discovered in the stars the same eighty-one or eighty-two elements which constitute the earth. Since then we have but a finite number of indestructible elements and forces, and an infinite space and time—or at least a space and time to which we can conceive no limits—it must follow that the same combinations will repeat themselves incessantly both in space and time. There is not only an Eternal Return, but an Infinite Reduplication. And if thought, as Nietzsche assumed, is only the phosphorescence accompanying certain arrangements of matter, the same conscious life must also repeat itself. One does not stay to discuss this phantasy of mathematics except to say that whoever was entitled to entertain it Zarathustra was not. If science is, as he held, a mere linked illusionism, how can it give so absolute a prophecy? To Nietzsche it was no conclusion, but a reminiscence from Greek speculation which came to him, disguised in the flame of an inspiration, under that pyramidal rock near Sorlei, "six thousand feet above men and time." He accepted it because it seemed to him the supreme formula of optimism. His mind was incited to it perhaps by that sombre passage in which his rejected master, Schopenhauer, declares that if you were to knock on the graves, with power to summon forth the dead to rise up and live their lives again, none would answer to your call. Christianity agrees with Schopenhauer; for though Christianity is an optimism, it is founded on pessimism. It is an optimism poised on a centre that does not lie within the walls of space and time.[Pg 17] Christianity called a new world into existence to redress the balance of the old; and were this old world all—a closed circuit, a rounded whole—Zarathustra might dance and chant through all its Campo Santos without finding more than a very few to rise up and follow him.
The practical consequences to which Nietzsche was led were in his own phrase inactual, out of time and out of season. Zarathustra is, by a natural kinship, a prophet of the Anarchists, but he hated Anarchism; by a strange transformation, the genius of a certain school of Socialists, but he despised Socialism. German officials in Poland may find in him a veritable Oppressors' Handbook; he danced through the streets at the victory over France, but he derided the German State and Empire as a new idol. He contemned women, but praised indissoluble marriage. He preached pleasure, but celebrated chastity in a noble hymn. He was all for authority and inequality, "a Joseph de Maistre," says Fouille, "who believes in the hangman without believing in the Pope"; but when he looked at a criminal on trial he acquitted everybody except only the judge. He denounced Bismarck and the Kaiser for being too democratic; he regarded Science, too, as disastrously democratic, because it subjected all phenomena, great and small, to the same uniform laws. Will was his god, but he saw the world under the aspect of a Mahometan determinism, and submitted himself to a resignation, an adoption of the hostile ways of existence, an amor fati which a Stoic might think extravagant. A German proletarian, full of German prejudices, he thought himself Polish and noble, and boasted of being a sans-patrie and a "good European." Pity, generosity, self-immolation, the whole ritual of civilisation, were condemned by Zarathustra and practised by him. In brief, Nietzsche never rose above a sort of philosophical cinematograph; he had the glitter but never the hard definiteness of the diamond which he chose as his symbol.
But it would be very superficial to suppose that a thought so passionate could be altogether unreal. Zarathustra is a counter-poison to sentimentalism, that worst ailment of our day. He brings a sort of ethical strychnine which taken in large doses is fatal, but in small doses is an incomparable tonic. He disturbed many who were woefully at ease in Zion, and was a poet of the heroic life. Germany, so apt to lose herself in the jungle of scholarship, needed to be reminded that erudition exists for the sake of life and not life for the sake of erudition. To literature, when he wrote in conformity with its settled and common tradition, he gave great chants of courage, loneliness and friendship. In M. Halvy's book, founded on that of Madame Frster-Nietzsche, we have in English for the first time a portrait of him in the intimacies of his life and thought. It exhibits him as better than his gospel, a hundred times better than most of those disturbers of civilisation who call themselves his disciples.
T. M. KETTLE
Karl-Ludwig Nietzsche, a young clergyman of the Lutheran Church, came of an ecclesiastical family. His father and his grandfather had taught theology. His wife was the daughter and the granddaughter of clergy-men. Ignoring modern thought and all the agitations and desires of his time, he followed the safe path of the double tradition, which had at once been revealed by God to the faithful and indicated by Princes to their subjects. His superiors thought highly of him. Frederick William IV., King of Prussia, condescended to take him under his wing, and he might have hoped for a fine career had he not suffered from headaches and nerves. As it was, rest became essential.
He asked for a country parish, and that of Rcken was confided to him. The situation of this poor village, whose little houses uprear themselves in a vast plain on the confines of Prussia and Saxony, was melancholy; but Karl-Ludwig Nietzsche liked the place, for solitude was acceptable to him. He was a great musician, and often, at the fall of day, would shut himself up in his church and improvise upon the rustic organ whilst the good folk of his parish stood without and listened in admiration.
The pastor and his young wife waited four years for their first child, who was born on October 15,1844, the King's birthday. The coincidence increased the father's joy. "O month of October, blessed month," he wrote in his church register, "ever have you overwhelmed me with joy. But of all the joys that you have brought me, this is the deepest, the most magnificent: I baptize my first child.... My son, Friedrich Wilhelm, such shall be your name on earth in remembrance of the royal benefactor whose birthday is yours."
The child soon had a brother, then a sister. There are women who remember Friedrich's infancy, and those quickly passing days of joy round the Nietzsches' hearth. Friedrich was slow in learning to speak. He looked at everything with grave eyes, and kept silent. At the age of two and a half he spoke his first word. The pastor liked his silent boy, and was glad to have him as a companion of his walks. Never did Friedrich Nietzsche forget the sound of distant bells ringing over the immense pool-strewn plain as he wandered with his father, his hand nestled in that strong hand.
Misfortune came very quickly. In August, 1848, Nietzsche's father fell from the top of the stone steps leading up to his door, and struck his head violently against the edge of one of them. The shock brought on a terrible attack, or, perhaps, for one cannot be certain, only hastened its approach: Karl-Ludwig Nietzsche lost his reason, and, after a year of aberration and decline, died. Friedrich Nietzsche was then four years old. The incidents of this tragic time made a deep impression upon his mind: night-alarms, the weeping in the house, the terrors of the closed chamber, the silence, the utter abandonment to woe; the tolling bells, the hymns, the funeral sermons; the coffin engulfed beneath the flagstones of the church. His understanding of such things had come too early, and he was shaken by it. His nights were troubled[Pg 21] with visions, and he had a presentiment of some early disaster. He had dreams—here is the nave recital that he makes in his fourteenth year:
