But the most striking thing of all, the miracle, so to speak, of this autobiography, is the absence from it of that loathing, that suggestion of surfeit, with which a life such as the one Nietzsche had led, would have filled any other man even of power approximate to his own. This anchorite, who, in the last years of his life as a healthy human being, suffered the experience of seeing even his oldest friends, including Rhode, show the most complete indifference to his lot, this wrestler with Fate, for whom recognition, in the persons of Brandes, Taine, and Strindberg, had come all too late, and whom even support, sympathy, and help, arriving as it did at last, through Deussen and from Madame de Salis Marschlins, could no longer cheer or comfort,—this was the man who was able notwithstanding to inscribe the device amor fati upon his shield on the very eve of his final collapse as a victim of the unspeakable suffering he had endured.
And this final collapse might easily have been foreseen. Nietzsche’s sensorium, as his autobiography proves, was probably the most delicate instrument ever possessed by a human being; and with this fragile structure—the prerequisite, by the bye, of all genius,—his terrible will compelled him to confront the most profound and most recondite problems. We happen to know from another artist and profound thinker, Benjamin Disraeli, who himself had experienced a dangerous breakdown, what the consequences precisely are of indulging in excessive activity in the sphere of the spirit, more particularly when that spirit is highly organised. Disraeli says in Contarini Fleming (Part iv. chap. v.):—
“I have sometimes half believed, although the suspicion is mortifying, that there is only one step between his state who deeply indulges in imaginative meditation, and insanity; for I well remember that at this period of my life, when I indulged in meditation to a degree that would now be impossible, and I hope unnecessary, my senses sometimes appeared to be wandering.”
And artists are the proper judges of artists,—not Oxford Dons, like Dr. Schiller, who, in his imprudent attempt at dealing with something for which his pragmatic hands are not sufficiently delicate, eagerly av-ails himself of popular help in his article on Nietzsche in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and implies the hackneyed and wholly exploded belief that Nietzsche’s philosophy is madness in the making. As German philosophies, however, are said to go to Oxford only when they die, we may, perhaps, conclude from this want of appreciation in that quarter, how very much alive Nietzsche’s doctrine still is.
Not that Nietzsche went mad so soon, but that he went mad so late is the wonder of wonders. Considering the extraordinary amount of work he did, the great task of the transvaluation of all values, which he actually accomplished, and the fact that he endured such long years of solitude, which to him, the sensitive artist to whom friends were everything, must have been a terrible hardship, we can only wonder at his great health, and can well believe his sister’s account of the phenomenal longevity and bodily vigour of his ancestors.
No one, however, who is initiated, no one who reads this work with understanding, will be in need of this introductory note of mine; for, to all who know, these pages must speak for themselves. We are no longer in the nineteenth century. We have learned many things since then, and if caution is only one of these things, at least it will prevent us from judging a book such as this one, with all its apparent pontifical pride and surging self-reliance, with undue haste, or with that arrogant assurance with which the ignorance of “the humble” and “the modest” has always confronted everything truly great.
Anthony M. Ludovici
Preface
1
As it is my intention within a very short time to confront my fellow-men with the very greatest demand that has ever yet been made upon them, it seems to me above all necessary to declare here who and what I am. As a matter of fact, this ought to be pretty well known already, for I have not “held my tongue” about myself. But the disparity which obtains between the greatness of my task and the smallness of my contemporaries, is revealed by the fact that people have neither heard me nor yet seen me.
I live on my own self-made credit, and it is probably only a prejudice to suppose that I am alive at all. I do but require to speak to any one of the scholars who come to the Ober-Engadine in the summer in order to convince myself that I am not alive…. Under these circumstances, it is a duty—and one against which my customary reserve, and to a still greater degree the pride of my instincts, rebel—to say: Listen! for I am such and such a person. For Heaven’s sake do not confound me with any one else!
2
I am, for instance, in no wise a bogey man, or moral monster. On the contrary, I am the very opposite in nature to the kind of man that has been honoured hitherto as virtuous. Between ourselves, it seems to me that this is precisely a matter on which I may feel proud. I am a disciple of the philosopher Dionysus, and I would prefer to be even a satyr than a saint. But just read this book! Maybe I have here succeeded in expressing this contrast in a cheerful and at the same time sympathetic manner—maybe this is the only purpose of the present work.
The very last thing I should promise to accomplish would be to “improve” mankind. I do not set up any new idols; may old idols only learn what it costs to have legs of clay.
To overthrow idols (idols is the name I give to all ideals) is much more like my business. In proportion as an ideal world has been falsely assumed, reality has been robbed of its value, its meaning, and its truthfulness…. The “true world” and the “apparent world”—in plain English, the fictitious world and reality…. Hitherto the lie of the ideal has been the curse of reality; by means of it the very source of mankind’s instincts has become mendacious and false; so much so that those values have come to be worshipped which are the exact opposite of the ones which would ensure man’s prosperity, his future, and his great right to a future.
3
He who knows how to breathe in the air of my writings is conscious that it is the air of the heights, that it is bracing. A man must be built for it, otherwise the chances are that it will chill him. The ice is near, the loneliness is terrible—but how serenely everything lies in the sunshine! how freely one can breathe! how much, one feels, lies beneath one! Philosophy, as I have understood it hitherto, is a voluntary retirement into regions of ice and mountain-peaks—the seeking—out of everything strange and questionable in existence, everything upon which, hitherto, morality has set its ban.
Through long experience, derived from such wanderings in forbidden country, I acquired an opinion very different from that which may seem generally desirable, of the causes which hitherto have led to men’s moralising and idealising. The secret history of philosophers, the psychology of their great names, was revealed to me. How much truth can a certain mind endure; how much truth can it dare?—these questions became for me ever more and more the actual test of values. Error (the belief in the ideal) is not blindness; error is cowardice…. Every conquest, every step forward in knowledge, is the outcome of courage, of hardness towards one’s self, of cleanliness towards one’s self. I do not refute ideals; all I do is to draw on my gloves in their presence…. Nitimur in vetitum; with this device my philosophy will one day be victorious; for that which has hitherto been most stringently forbidden is, without exception, Truth.
4
In my lifework, my Zarathustra holds a place apart. With it, I gave my fellow-men the greatest gift that has ever been bestowed upon them. This book, the voice of which speaks out across the ages, is not only the loftiest book on earth, literally the book of mountain air,—the whole phenomenon, mankind, lies at an incalculable distance beneath it,—but it is also the deepest book, born of the inmost abundance of truth; an inexhaustible well, into which no pitcher can be lowered without coming up again laden with gold and with goodness. Here it is not a “prophet” who speaks, one of those gruesome hybrids of sickness and Will to Power, whom men call founders of religions. If a man would not do a sad wrong to his wisdom, he must, above all give proper heed to the tones—the halcyonic tones—that fall from the lips of Zarathustra:—
“The most silent words are harbingers of the storm; thoughts that come on dove’s feet lead the world.
“The figs fall from the trees; they are good and sweet, and, when they fall, their red skins are rent.
“A north wind am I unto ripe figs.
“Thus, like figs, do these precepts drop down to you, my friends; now drink their juice and their sweet pulp.
“It is autumn all around, and clear sky, and afternoon.”
No fanatic speaks to you here; this is not a “sermon”; no faith is demanded in these pages. From out
