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3. BRANDES TO NIETZSCHE.
Copenhagen, Dec. 15, 1887.
MY DEAR SIR,
The last words of your letter are those that have made most impression on me; those in which you tell me that your eyes are seriously affected. Have you consulted good oculists, the best? It alters one's whole psychological life if one cannot see well. You owe it to all who honour you to do everything possible for the preservation and improvement of your sight.
I have put off answering your letter because you announced the sending of a parcel of books, and I wished to thank you for them at the same time. But as the parcel has not yet arrived I will send you a few words to-day. I have your books back from the binder and have gone into them as deeply as I was able amid the stress of preparing lectures and all kinds of literary and political work.
December 17.
I am quite willing to be called a "good European," less so to be called a "missionary of culture." I have a horror of all missionary effort—because I have come across none but moralising missionaries—and I am afraid I do not altogether believe in what is called culture. Our culture as a whole cannot inspire enthusiasm, can it? and what would a missionary be without enthusiasm! In other words, I am more isolated than you think. All I meant by being German was that you write more for yourself, think more of yourself in writing, than for the general public; whereas most non—German writers have been obliged to force themselves into a certain discipline of style, which no doubt makes the latter clearer and more plastic, but necessarily deprives it of all profundity and compels the writer to keep to himself his most intimate and best individuality, the anonymous in him. I have thus been horrified at times to see how little of my inmost self is more than hinted at in my writings.
I am no connoisseur in music. The arts of which I have some notion are sculpture and painting; I have to thank them for my deepest artistic impressions. My ear is undeveloped. In my young days this was a great grief to me. I used to play a good deal and worked at thorough-bass for a few years, but nothing came of it. I can enjoy good music keenly, but still am one of the uninitiated.
I think I can trace in your works certain points of agreement with my own taste: your predilection for Beyle, for instance, and for Taine; but the latter I have not seen for seventeen years. I am not so enthusiastic about his work on the Revolution as you seem to be. He deplores and harangues an earthquake.
I used the expression "aristocratic radicalism" because it so exactly defines my own political convictions. I am a little hurt, however, at the offhand and impetuous pronouncements against such—phenomena as socialism and anarchism in your works. The anarchism of Prince Kropotkin, for instance, is no stupidity. The name, of course, is nothing. Your intellect, which is usually so dazzling, seems to me to fall a trifle short where truth is to be found in a nuance. Your views on the origin of the moral ideas interest me in the highest degree.
You share—to my delighted astonishment—a certain repugnance which I feel for Herbert Spencer. With us he passes for the god of philosophy. However, it is as a rule a distinct merit with these Englishmen that their not very high-soaring intellect shuns hypotheses, whereas hypothesis has destroyed the supremacy of German philosophy. Is not there a great deal that is hypothetical in your ideas of caste distinctions as the source of various moral concepts?
I know Re whom you attack, have met him in Berlin; he was a quiet man, rather distinguished in his bearing, but a somewhat dry and limited intellect. He was living—according to his own account, as brother and sister—with a quite young and intelligent Russian lady, who published a year or two ago a book called Der Kampf um Gott, but this gives no idea of her genuine gifts.
I am looking forward to receiving the books you promise me. I hope in future you will not lose sight of me.
Yours,
GEORGE BRANDES.
4. NIETZSCHE TO BRANDES.
Nice, Jan. 8, 1888.
You should not object to the expression "missionary of culture." What better way is there of being one in our day than that of "missionising" one's disbelief in culture? To have understood that our European culture is a vast problem and by no means a solution—is not such a degree of introspection and self-conquest nowadays culture itself?
I am surprised my books have not yet reached you. I shall not omit to send a reminder to Leipzig. At Christmas time Messieurs the publishers are apt to lose their heads. Meanwhile may I be allowed to bring to your notice a daring curiosity over which no publisher has authority, an ineditum of mine that is among the most personal things I can show. It is the fourth part of my Zarathustra; its proper title, with regard to what precedes and follows it, should be—
Zarathustra's Temptation
An Interlude.
Perhaps this is my best answer to your question about my problem of pity. Besides which, there are excellent reasons for gaining admission to "me" by this particular secret door; provided that one crosses the threshold with your eyes and ears. Your essay on Zola reminded me once more, like everything I have met with of yours (the last was an essay in the Goethe Year-book), in the most agreeable way of your natural tendency towards every kind of psychological optics. When working out the most difficult mathematical problems of the me moderne you are as much in your element as a German scholar in such case is apt to be out of his. Or do you perhaps think more favourably of present-day Germans? It seems to me that they become year by year more clumsy and rectangular in rebus psychologicis (in direct contrast to the Parisians, with whom everything is becoming nuance and mosaic), so that all events below the surface escape their notice. For example, my Beyond Good and Evil—what an awkward position it has put them in! Not one intelligent word has reached me about this book, let alone an intelligent sentiment. I do not believe even the most well-disposed of my readers has discovered that he has here to deal with the logical results of a perfectly definite philosophical sensibility, and not with a medley of a hundred promiscuous paradoxes and heterodoxies. Nothing of the kind has been "experienced"; my readers do not bring to it a thousandth part of the passion and suffering that is needed. An "immoralist!" This does not suggest anything to them.
By the way, the Goncourts in one of their prefaces claim to have invented the phrase document humain. But for all that M. Taine may well be its real originator.
You are right in what you say about "haranguing an earthquake "; but such Quixotism is among the most honourable things on this earth.
With the greatest respect,
Yours,
NIETZSCHE.
5. BRANDES TO NIETZSCHE.
Copenhagen, Jan. 11, 1888.
MY DEAR SIR,
Your publisher has apparently forgotten to send me your books, but I have to-day received your letter with thanks. I take the liberty of sending you herewith one of my books in proof (because unfortunately I have no other copy at hand), a collection of essays intended for export, therefore not my best wares. They date from various times and are all too polite, too laudatory, too idealistic in tone. I never really say all I think in them. The paper on Ibsen is no doubt the best, but the translation of the verses, which I had done for me, is unfortunately wretched.
