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"I know you, ye higher men, I know him,—I know also this fiend whom I love in spite of me, this Zarathustra: he himself often seemeth to me like the beautiful mask of a saint, —Like a new strange mummery in which mine evil spirit, the melancholy devil, delighteth:—I love Zarathustra, so doth it often seem to me, for the sake of mine evil spirit.— But already doth IT attack me and constrain me, this spirit of melancholy, this evening-twilight devil: and verily, ye higher men, it hath a longing— —Open your eyes!—it hath a longing to come NAKED, whether male or female, I do not yet know: but it cometh, it constraineth me, alas! open your wits! The day dieth out, unto all things cometh now the evening, also unto the best things; hear now, and see, ye higher men, what devil— man or woman—this spirit of evening-melancholy is!” Thus spake the old magician, looked cunningly about him, and then seized his harp. 3 In evening’s limpid air, What time the dew’s soothings Unto the earth downpour, Invisibly and unheard— For tender shoe-gear wear The soothing dews, like all that’s kind-gentle—: Bethinkst thou then, bethinkst thou, burning heart, How once thou thirstedest For heaven’s kindly teardrops and dew’s down-droppings, All singed and weary thirstedest, What time on yellow grass-pathways Wicked, occidental sunny glances Through sombre trees about thee sported, Blindingly sunny glow-glances, gladly-hurting? “Of TRUTH the wooer? Thou?”—so taunted they— “Nay! Merely poet! A brute insidious, plundering, grovelling, That aye must lie, That wittingly, wilfully, aye must lie: For booty lusting, Motley masked, Self-hidden, shrouded, Himself his booty— HE—of truth the wooer? Nay! Mere fool! Mere poet! Just motley speaking, From mask of fool confusedly shouting, Circumambling on fabricated word-bridges, On motley rainbow-arches, ‘Twixt the spurious heavenly, And spurious earthly, Round us roving, round us soaring,— MERE FOOL! MERE POET! HE—of truth the wooer? Not still, stiff, smooth and cold, Become an image, A godlike statue, Set up in front of temples, As a God’s own door-guard: Nay! hostile to all such truthfulness-statues, In every desert homelier than at temples, With cattish wantonness, Through every window leaping Quickly into chances, Every wild forest a-sniffing, Greedily-longingly, sniffing, That thou, in wild forests, ‘Mong the motley-speckled fierce creatures, Shouldest rove, sinful-sound and fine-coloured, With longing lips smacking, Blessedly mocking, blessedly hellish, blessedly bloodthirsty, Robbing, skulking, lying—roving:— Or unto eagles like which fixedly, Long adown the precipice look, Adown THEIR precipice:— Oh, how they whirl down now, Thereunder, therein, To ever deeper profoundness whirling!— Then, Sudden, With aim aright, With quivering flight, On LAMBKINS pouncing, Headlong down, sore-hungry, For lambkins longing, Fierce ‘gainst all lamb-spirits, Furious-fierce all that look Sheeplike, or lambeyed, or crisp-woolly, —Grey, with lambsheep kindliness! Even thus, Eaglelike, pantherlike, Are the poet’s desires, Are THINE OWN desires ‘neath a thousand guises, Thou fool! Thou poet! Thou who all mankind viewedst— So God, as sheep—: The God TO REND within mankind, As the sheep in mankind, And in rending LAUGHING— THAT, THAT is thine own blessedness! Of a panther and eagle—blessedness! Of a poet and fool—the blessedness!— In evening’s limpid air, What time the moon’s sickle, Green, ‘twixt the purple-glowings, And jealous, steal’th forth: —Of day the foe, With every step in secret, The rosy garland-hammocks Downsickling, till they’ve sunken Down nightwards, faded, downsunken:— Thus had I sunken one day From mine own truth-insanity, From mine own fervid day-longings, Of day aweary, sick of sunshine, —Sunk downwards, evenwards, shadowwards: By one sole trueness All scorched and thirsty: —Bethinkst thou still, bethinkst thou, burning heart, How then thou thirstedest?— THAT I SHOULD BANNED BE FROM ALL THE TRUENESS! MERE FOOL! MERE POET! LXXV. SCIENCE. Thus sang the magician; and all who were present went like birds unawares into the net of his artful and melancholy voluptuousness. Only the spiritually conscientious one had not been caught: he at once snatched the harp from the magician and called out: “Air! Let in good air! Let in Zarathustra! Thou makest this cave sultry and poisonous, thou bad old magician! Thou seducest, thou false one, thou subtle one, to unknown desires and deserts. And alas, that such as thou should talk and make ado about the TRUTH! Alas, to all free spirits who are not on their guard against SUCH magicians!"
"(It is possible that this is what happened to the Founder of Christianity when suspended from the Cross; for the bitterest words ever pronounced, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” if understood in their deepest sense, as they ought to be understood, contain the evidence of a complete disillusionment and enlightenment [pg 117] in regard to the deceptions of life: in that moment of supreme suffering Christ obtained a clear insight into Himself, just as in the poet's narrative did the poor dying Don Quixote.) The formidable tension of the intellect that wishes to hold its own against pain shows everything that one now looks upon in a new light, and the inexpressible charm of this new light is often powerful enough to withstand all the seductiveness of suicide and to make the continuation of life seem very desirable to the sufferer. His mind scornfully turns to the warm and comfortable dream-world in which the healthy man moves about thoughtlessly, and he thinks with contempt of the noblest and most cherished illusions in which he formerly indulged. He experiences delight in conjuring up this contempt as if from the depths of hell, and thus inflicting the bitterest sufferings upon his soul: it is by this counterpoise that he bears up against physical suffering—he feels that such a counterpoise is now essential! In one terrible moment of clear-sightedness he says to himself, “Be for once thine own accuser and hangman; for once regard thy suffering as a punishment which thou hast inflicted on thyself! Enjoy thy superiority as a judge: better still, enjoy thine own will and pleasure, thy tyrannical arbitrariness! Raise thyself above thy life as above thy suffering, and look down into the depth of reason and unreason!” Our pride revolts as it never did before, it experiences an incomparable charm in defending life against such a tyrant as suffering and against all the insinuations of this tyrant, who would fain urge [pg 118] us to give evidence against life,—we are taking the part of life in the face of this tyrant. In this state of mind we take up a bitter stand against all pessimism in order that it may not appear to be a consequence of our condition, and thus humiliate us as conquered ones. The charm of being just in our judgments was also never greater than now; for now this justice is a triumph over ourselves and over so irritated a state of mind that unfairness of judgment might be excused,—but we will not be excused, it is now, if ever, that we wish to show that we need no excuse. We pass through downright orgies of pride. And now appears the first ray of relief, of recovery, and one of its first effects is that we turn against the preponderance of our pride: we call ourselves foolish and vain, as if we had undergone some unique experience. We humiliate ungratefully this all-powerful pride, the aid of which enabled us to endure the pain we suffered, and we call vehemently for some antidote for this pride: we wish to become strangers to ourselves and to be freed from our own person after pain has forcibly made us personal too long. “Away with this pride,” we cry, “it was only another illness and convulsion!” Once more we look longingly at men and nature and recollect with a sorrowful smile that now since the veil has fallen we regard many things concerning them in a new and different light,—but we are refreshed by once more seeing the softened lights of life, and emerge from that fearfully dispassionate daylight in which we as sufferers saw things and through things. We [pg 119] do not get angry when we see the charms of health resume their play, and we contemplate the sight as if transformed, gently and still fatigued. In this state we cannot listen to music without weeping. 115. The so-called “Ego.”—Language and the prejudices upon which language is based very often act as obstacles in our paths when we proceed to explore internal phenomena and impulses: as one example, we may instance the fact that there are only words to express the superlative degrees of these phenomena and impulses."
"And as if there were a special secret access to knowledge, which CHOKETH UP for those who learn anything, so do we believe in the people and in their “wisdom.” This, however, do all poets believe: that whoever pricketh up his ears when lying in the grass or on lonely slopes, learneth something of the things that are betwixt heaven and earth. And if there come unto them tender emotions, then do the poets always think that nature herself is in love with them: And that she stealeth to their ear to whisper secrets into it, and amorous flatteries: of this do they plume and pride themselves, before all mortals! Ah, there are so many things betwixt heaven and earth of which only the poets have dreamed! And especially ABOVE the heavens: for all Gods are poetsymbolisations, poet-sophistications! Verily, ever are we drawn aloft—that is, to the realm of the clouds: on these do we set our gaudy puppets, and then call them Gods and Supermen:— Are not they light enough for those chairs!—all these Gods and Supermen?— Ah, how I am weary of all the inadequate that is insisted on as actual! Ah, how I am weary of the poets! When Zarathustra so spake, his disciple resented it, but was silent. And Zarathustra also was silent; and his eye directed itself inwardly, as if it gazed into the far distance. At last he sighed and drew breath.— I am of to-day and heretofore, said he thereupon; but something is in me that is of the morrow, and the day following, and the hereafter. I became weary of the poets, of the old and of the new: superficial are they all unto me, and shallow seas. They did not think sufficiently into the depth; therefore their feeling did not reach to the bottom. Some sensation of voluptuousness and some sensation of tedium: these have as yet been their best contemplation. Ghost-breathing and ghost-whisking, seemeth to me all the jinglejangling of their harps; what have they known hitherto of the fervour of tones!— They are also not pure enough for me: they all muddle their water that it may seem deep. And fain would they thereby prove themselves reconcilers: but mediaries and mixers are they unto me, and half-and-half, and impure!— Ah, I cast indeed my net into their sea, and meant to catch good fish; but always did I draw up the head of some ancient God. Thus did the sea give a stone to the hungry one. And they themselves may well originate from the sea. Certainly, one findeth pearls in them: thereby they are the more like hard molluscs. And instead of a soul, I have often found in them salt slime. They have learned from the sea also its vanity: is not the sea the peacock of peacocks? Even before the ugliest of all buffaloes doth it spread out its tail; never doth it tire of its lace-fan of silver and silk. Disdainfully doth the buffalo glance thereat, nigh to the sand with its soul, nigher still to the thicket, nighest, however, to the swamp. What is beauty and sea and peacock-splendour to it! This parable I speak unto the poets. Verily, their spirit itself is the peacock of peacocks, and a sea of vanity! Spectators, seeketh the spirit of the poet—should they even be buffaloes!— But of this spirit became I weary; and I see the time coming when it will become weary of itself. Yea, changed have I seen the poets, and their glance turned towards themselves. Penitents of the spirit have I seen appearing; they grew out of the poets.— Thus spake Zarathustra. . There is an isle in the sea—not far from the Happy Isles of Zarathustra—on which a volcano ever smoketh; of which isle the people, and especially the old women amongst them, say that it is placed as a rock before the gate of the nether-world; but that through the volcano itself the narrow way leadeth downwards which conducteth to this gate. Now about the time that Zarathustra sojourned on the Happy Isles, it happened that a ship anchored at the isle on which standeth the smoking mountain, and the crew went ashore to shoot rabbits. About the noontide hour, however, when the captain and his men were together again, they saw suddenly a man coming towards them through the air, and a voice said distinctly: “It is time!"
"Life is an adventure— whichever side you may take in life it will always retain this character!”—Thus speaks the poet of a restless and vigorous age, an age which is almost intoxicated and [pg 239] stupefied by its superabundance of blood and energy, in an age more evil than our own: and this is why it is necessary for us to adapt and accommodate ourselves first to the purpose of a Shakespearian play, that is, by misunderstanding it. 241. Fear and Intelligence.—If that which is now expressly maintained is true, viz. that the cause of the black pigment of the skin must not be sought in light, might this phenomenon perhaps be the ultimate effect of frequent fits of passion accumulated for century after century (and an afflux of blood under the skin)? while in other and more intelligent races the equally frequent spasms of fear and blanching may have resulted in the white colour of the skin?—For the degree of timidity is the standard by which the intelligence may be measured; and the fact that men give themselves up to blind anger is an indication that their animal nature is still near the surface, and is longing for an opportunity to make its presence felt once more. Thus a brownish-grey would probably be the primitive colour of man—something of the ape and the bear, as is only proper. 242. Independence.—Independence (which in its weakest form is called “freedom of thought”) is the type of resignation which the tyrannical man ends by accepting—he who for a long time had [pg 240] been looking for something to govern, but without finding anything except himself. 243. The two Courses.—When we endeavour to examine the mirror in itself we discover in the end that we can detect nothing there but the things which it reflects. If we wish to grasp the things reflected we touch nothing in the end but the mirror.—This is the general history of knowledge. 244. Delight in Reality.—Our present inclination to take delight in reality —for almost every one of us possesses it—can only be explained by the fact that we have taken delight in the unreal for such a long time that we have got tired of it. This inclination in its present form, without choice and without refinement, is not without danger—its least danger is its want of taste. 245. The Subtlety of the Feeling of Power.—Napoleon was greatly mortified at the fact that he could not speak well, and he did not deceive himself in this respect: but his thirst for power, which never despised the slightest opportunity of showing itself, and which was still more subtle than his subtle intellect, led him to speak even worse than he might have done. It was in this way that he revenged himself upon his own mortification (he was jealous [pg 241] of all his emotions because they possessed power) in order to enjoy his autocratic pleasure. He enjoyed this pleasure a second time in respect to the ears and judgment of his audience, as if it were good enough for them to be addressed in this way. He even secretly enjoyed the thought of bewildering their judgment and good taste by the thunder and lightning of his highest authority—that authority which lies in the union of power and genius—while both his judgment and his good taste held fast proudly and indifferently to the truth that he did not speak well.—Napoleon, as the complete and fully developed type of a single instinct, belongs to ancient humanity, whose characteristic— the simple construction and ingenious development and realisation of a single motive or a small number of motives—may be easily enough recognised. 246. Aristotle and Marriage.—Insanity makes its appearance in the children of great geniuses, and stupidity in those of the most virtuous —so says Aristotle. Did he mean by this to invite exceptional men to marry? 247. The Origin of a bad Temperament.—Injustice and instability in the minds of certain men, their disordered and immoderate manner, are the ultimate consequences of the innumerable logical inexactitudes, superficialities, and hasty conclusions of which their ancestors have been guilty. Men of a good temperament, on the other hand, are descended [pg 242] from solid and meditative races which have set a high value upon reason—whether for praiseworthy or evil purposes is of no great importance. 248."
"That the ship of Christianity threw overboard no inconsiderable part of its Jewish ballast, that it was able to sail into the waters of the heathen and actually did do so: this is due to the history of one single man, this apostle who was so greatly troubled in mind and so worthy of pity, but who was also very disagreeable to himself and to others. This man suffered from a fixed idea, or rather a fixed question, an ever-present and ever-burning question: what was the meaning of the Jewish Law? and, more especially, the fulfilment of this Law? In his youth he had done his best to satisfy it, thirsting as he did for that highest distinction which the Jews could imagine—this people, which raised the imagination of moral loftiness to a greater elevation than any other people, and which alone succeeded [pg 068] in uniting the conception of a holy God with the idea of sin considered as an offence against this holiness. St. Paul became at once the fanatic defender and guard-of-honour of this God and His Law. Ceaselessly battling against and lying in wait for all transgressors of this Law and those who presumed to doubt it, he was pitiless and cruel towards all evil-doers, whom he would fain have punished in the most rigorous fashion possible. Now, however, he was aware in his own person of the fact that such a man as himself—violent, sensual, melancholy, and malicious in his hatred—could not fulfil the Law; and furthermore, what seemed strangest of all to him, he saw that his boundless craving for power was continually provoked to break it, and that he could not help yielding to this impulse. Was it really “the flesh” which made him a trespasser time and again? Was it not rather, as it afterwards occurred to him, the Law itself, which continually showed itself to be impossible to fulfil, and seduced men into transgression with an irresistible charm? But at that time he had not thought of this means of escape. As he suggests here and there, he had many things on his conscience—hatred, murder, sorcery, idolatry, debauchery, drunkenness, and orgiastic revelry,—and to however great an extent he tried to soothe his conscience, and, even more, his desire for power, by the extreme fanaticism of his worship for and defence of the Law, there were times when the thought struck him: “It is all in vain! The anguish of the unfulfilled Law cannot be overcome.” Luther must have experienced similar [pg 069] feelings, when, in his cloister, he endeavoured to become the ideal man of his imagination; and, as Luther one day began to hate the ecclesiastical ideal, and the Pope, and the saints, and the whole clergy, with a hatred which was all the more deadly as he could not avow it even to himself, an analogous feeling took possession of St. Paul. The Law was the Cross on which he felt himself crucified. How he hated it! What a grudge he owed it! How he began to look round on all sides to find a means for its total annihilation, that he might no longer be obliged to fulfil it himself! And at last a liberating thought, together with a vision —which was only to be expected in the case of an epileptic like himself—flashed into his mind: to him, the stern upholder of the Law —who, in his innermost heart, was tired to death of it—there appeared on the lonely path that Christ, with the divine effulgence on His countenance, and Paul heard the words: “Why persecutest thou Me?” What actually took place, then, was this: his mind was suddenly enlightened, and he said to himself: “It is unreasonable to persecute this Jesus Christ! Here is my means of escape, here is my complete vengeance, here and nowhere else have I the destroyer of the Law in my hands!” The sufferer from anguished pride felt himself restored to health all at once, his moral despair disappeared in the air; for morality itself was blown away, annihilated—that is to say, fulfilled, there on the Cross! Up to that time that ignominious death had seemed to him to be the principal argument against the “Messiahship” [pg 070] proclaimed by the followers of the new doctrine: but what if it were necessary for doing away with the Law?"
"In Volker, Zeiten und Menschen, by Karl Hillebrand, you will find a few excellent essays on the first of the ""Thoughts Out of Season."" The essay against Strauss provoked a tremendous storm ; the essay on Schopen hauer, the perusal of which I particularly recommend, shows how an energetic and instinctively yea-saying spirit knows how to derive the most beneficent im pulses even from a Pessimist. For some years, which belong to the most precious of my life, I was bound to Wagner and Frau Cosima Wagner by feelings of the deepest confidence and most cordial friendship. If at the present day I belong to the opponents of the Wagnerian movement, it is obvious that no personal motives have induced me to assume this position. In Wagner's Collected Works, Vol. IX (if I remember rightly), there is a letter addressed to me which bears testimony to our relationship. I would fain believe that, thanks to their wealth of psychological experi ences, their fearlessness in the face of the most dan gerous things, and their lofty candour, my books are works of the highest rank. Moreover, in the art of exposition and in the matter of aesthetic quality, I would brook comparison with anybody. I am bound to the German language by long years of affection, secret intimacy and profound reverence. This is a sufficient explanation of why I can no longer read any books written in that language. I am, dear sir. Yours very truly, PROFESSOR DR. NIETZSCHE. 234 SELECTED LETTERS OF To KARL FUCHS. Sils-Maria, Oberengadine, Switzerland. June 30, 1888. MY DEAR FRIEND: How strange ! How strange ! As soon as I was able to transfer myself to a cooler clime (for in Turin the thermometer stood at 31° day after day) I intended to write you a nice letter of thanks. A pious inten tion, wasn't it? But who could have guessed that I was not only going back to a cooler clime, but into the most ghastly weather, weather that threatened to shatter my health ! Winter and summer in senseless alternation; twenty-six avalanches in the thaw; and now we have just had eight days of rain with the sky almost always grey — this is enough to account for my profound nervous exhaustion, together with the re turn of my old ailments. I don't think I can ever remember having had worse weather, and this in my Sils-Maria, whither I always fly in order to escape bad weather. Is it to be wondered at that even the parson here is acquiring the habit of swearing? From time to time in conversation his speech halts, and then he always swallows a curse. A few days ago, just as he was coming out of the snow-covered church, he thrashed his dog and exclaimed: ""The confounded cur spoiled the whole of my sermon !"" . . . Yours in gratitude and devotion, NIETZSCHE. FBIEDBICH NIETZSCHE 235 NIETZSCHE TO His MOTHER. Sils, July 23, 1888. MY DEAR MOTHER : I have yet to discuss the curious money affair with you.1 Yesterday evening your letter reached me, just after I had heard of this, and yesterday morning I had already sent off a letter to Professor Deussen. For he had announced the matter to me direct, in very much the same way as he had announced it to you, but in his letter to me there was an extra sentence which I repeat for your edification : ""I hope you will be kind and understanding enough to allow a few of us to repair the sins that mankind have committed against you."" In my answer I protested against the suggestion that mankind had sinned against me ; paid a tribute to the liberality and undeserved gratitude of the Bale people ; denied most emphatically that my case was a pressing one and, finally, exactly on the same lines as you yourself had thought of, I accepted the- money, simply and only in view of the impossibil ity of finding publishers, and the necessity of having my works printed at my own expense. (During the last four years, I have spent over 4,000 marks in print ing expenses.) The greater part of the money con stituting this presentation is probably all Deussen's (— last autumn he made me the most pressing offers of the same kind) ."
"we think it more advisable to pretend that they are our own, and so well do we accustom ourselves to do so that it at last becomes second nature to us. A valuation of our own, which is the appreciation of a thing in accordance with the pleasure or displeasure it causes us and no one else, is something very rare indeed!—But must not our valuation of our neighbour—which [pg 101] is prompted by the motive that we adopt his valuation in most cases—proceed from ourselves and by our own decision? Of course, but then we come to these decisions during our childhood, and seldom change them. We often remain during our whole lifetime the dupes of our childish and accustomed judgments in our manner of judging our fellow-men (their minds, rank, morality, character, and reprehensibility), and we find it necessary to subscribe to their valuations. 105. Pseudo-egoism.—The great majority of people, whatever they may think and say about their “egoism,” do nothing for their ego all their life long, but only for a phantom of this ego which has been formed in regard to them by their friends and communicated to them. As a consequence, they all live in a haze of impersonal and half-personal opinions and of arbitrary and, as it were, poetic valuations: the one always in the head of another, and this head, again, in the head of somebody else—a queer world of phantoms which manages to give itself a rational appearance! This haze of opinions and habits grows in extent and lives almost independently of the people it surrounds; it is it which gives rise to the immense effect of general judgments on “man”—all those men, who do not know themselves, believe in a bloodless abstraction which they call “man,” i.e. in a fiction; and every change caused in this abstraction by the judgments of powerful individualities [pg 102] (such as princes and philosophers) produces an extraordinary and irrational effect on the great majority, —for the simple reason that not a single individual in this haze can oppose a real ego, an ego which is accessible to and fathomed by himself, to the universal pale fiction, which he could thereby destroy. 106. Against Definitions of Moral Aims.—On all sides we now hear the aim of morals defined as the preservation and advancement of humanity; but this is merely the expression of a wish to have a formula and nothing more. Preservation wherein? advancement whither? These are questions which must at once be asked. Is not the most essential point, the answer to this wherein? and whither? left out of the formula? What results therefrom, so far as our own actions and duties are concerned, which is not already tacitly and instinctively understood? Can we sufficiently understand from this formula whether we must prolong as far as possible the existence of the human race, or bring about the greatest possible disanimalisation of man? How different the means, i.e. the practical morals, would have to be in the two cases! Supposing that the greatest possible rationality were given to mankind, this certainly would not guarantee the longest possible existence for them! Or supposing that their “greatest happiness” was thought to be the answer to the questions put, do we thereby mean the highest degree of happiness which a few individuals [pg 103] might attain, or an incalculable, though finally attainable, average state of happiness for all? And why should morality be the way to it? Has not morality, considered as a whole, opened up so many sources of displeasure as to lead us to think that man up to the present, with every new refinement of morality, has become more and more discontented with himself, with his neighbour, and with his own lot? Has not the most moral of men hitherto believed that the only justifiable state of mankind in the face of morals is that of the deepest misery? 107. Our Right to our Folly.—How must we act? Why must we act? So far as the coarse and immediate needs of the individual are concerned, it is easy to answer these questions, but the more we enter upon the more important and more subtle domains of action, the more does the problem become uncertain and the more arbitrary its solution."
"The complete lack of psychological cleanliness in the priest—revealed by a glance at him—is a phenomenon resulting from décadence,—one may observe in hysterical women and in rachitic children how regularly the falsification of instincts, delight in lying for the mere sake of lying, and incapacity for looking straight and walking straight are symptoms of décadence. “Faith” means the will to avoid knowing what is true. The pietist, the priest of either sex, is a fraud because he is sick: his instinct demands that the truth shall never be allowed its rights on any point. “Whatever makes for illness is good; whatever issues from abundance, from superabundance, from power, is evil”: so argues the believer. The impulse to lie—it is by this that I recognize every foreordained theologian.—Another characteristic of the theologian is his unfitness for philology. What I here mean by philology is, in a general sense, the art of reading with profit—the capacity for absorbing facts without interpreting them falsely, and without losing caution, patience and subtlety in the effort to understand them. Philology as ephexis[ ] in interpretation: whether one be dealing with books, with newspaper reports, with the most fateful events or with weather statistics—not to mention the “salvation of the soul.”... The way in which a theologian, whether in Berlin or in Rome, is ready to explain, say, a “passage of Scripture,” or an experience, or a victory by the national army, by turning upon it the high illumination of the Psalms of David, is always so daring that it is enough to make a philologian run up a wall. But what shall he do when pietists and other such cows from Suabia[ ] use the “finger of God” to convert their miserably commonplace and huggermugger existence into a miracle of “grace,” a “providence” and an “experience of salvation”? The most modest exercise of the intellect, not to say of decency, should certainly be enough to convince these interpreters of the perfect childishness and unworthiness of such a misuse of the divine digital dexterity. However small our piety, if we ever encountered a god who always cured us of a cold in the head at just the right time, or got us into our carriage at the very instant heavy rain began to fall, he would seem so absurd a god that he’d have to be abolished even if he existed. God as a domestic servant, as a letter carrier, as an almanac-man—at bottom, he is a mere name for the stupidest sort of chance.... “Divine Providence,” which every third man in “educated Germany” still believes in, is so strong an argument against God that it would be impossible to think of a stronger. And in any case it is an argument against Germans!... [ ] That is, to say, scepticism. Among the Greeks scepticism was also occasionally called ephecticism. [ ] A reference to the University of Tübingen and its famous school of Biblical criticism. The leader of this school was F. C. Baur, and one of the men greatly influenced by it was Nietzsche’s pet abomination, David F. Strauss, himself a Suabian. Vide § and § . 53. —It is so little true that martyrs offer any support to the truth of a cause that I am inclined to deny that any martyr has ever had anything to do with the truth at all. In the very tone in which a martyr flings what he fancies to be true at the head of the world there appears so low a grade of intellectual honesty and such insensibility to the problem of “truth,” that it is never necessary to refute him. Truth is not something that one man has and another man has not: at best, only peasants, or peasant-apostles like Luther, can think of truth in any such way. One may rest assured that the greater the degree of a man’s intellectual conscience the greater will be his modesty, his discretion, on this point. To know in five cases, and to refuse, with delicacy, to know anything further.... “Truth,” as the word is understood by every prophet, every sectarian, every free-thinker, every Socialist and every churchman, is simply a complete proof that not even a beginning has been made in the intellectual discipline and self-control that are necessary to the unearthing of even the smallest truth.—The deaths of the martyrs, it may be said in passing, have been misfortunes of history: they have misled...."
"The one is driven on from place to place, and the heart of the other, the tender stay-at-home friend, breaks through it—so it always is. Affliction breaks the hearts of those who live to see that those whom they love best are deserting their former views and faith,—it is a tragedy brought about by the free spirits,—a tragedy which, indeed, occasionally comes to their own knowledge. Then, perhaps, they too, like Ulysses, will be forced to descend among the dead to get rid of their sorrow and to relieve their affliction. 563. The Illusion of the Moral Order of the Universe.—There is no “eternal justice” which [pg 391] requires that every fault shall be atoned and paid for,—the belief that such a justice existed was a terrible delusion, and useful only to a limited extent; just as it is also a delusion that everything is guilt which is felt as such. It is not the things themselves, but the opinions about things that do not exist, which have been such a source of trouble to mankind. 564. By the Side of Experience.—Even great intellects have only a hand-breadth experience—in the immediate proximity of this experience their reflection ceases, and its place is taken by unlimited vacuity and stupidity. 565. Dignity and Ignorance.—Wherever we understand we become amiable, happy, and ingenious; and when we have learnt enough, and have trained our eyes and ears, our souls show greater plasticity and charm. We understand so little, however, and are so insufficiently informed, that it rarely happens that we seize upon a thing and make ourselves lovable at the same time,—on the contrary we pass through cities, nature, and history with stiffness and indifference, at the same time taking a pride in our stiff and indifferent attitude, as if it were simply due to superiority. Thus our ignorance and our mediocre desire for knowledge understand quite well how to assume a mask of dignity and character. [pg 392] 566. Living Cheaply.—The cheapest and most innocent mode of life is that of the thinker; for, to mention at once its most important feature, he has the greatest need of those very things which others neglect and look upon with contempt. In the second place he is easily pleased and has no desire for any expensive pleasures. His task is not difficult, but, so to speak, southern; his days and nights are not wasted by remorse; he moves, eats, drinks, and sleeps in a manner suited to his intellect, in order that it may grow calmer, stronger, and clearer. Again, he takes pleasure in his body and has no reason to fear it; he does not require society, except from time to time in order that he may afterwards go back to his solitude with even greater delight. He seeks and finds in the dead compensation for the living, and can even replace his friends in this way—viz., by seeking out among the dead the best who have ever lived.—Let us consider whether it is not the contrary desires and habits which have made the life of man expensive, and as a consequence difficult and often unbearable. In another sense, however, the thinker's life is certainly the most expensive, for nothing is too good for him; and it would be an intolerable privation for him to be deprived of the best. 567. In the Field.—“We should take things more cheerfully than they deserve; especially because for [pg 393] a very long time we have taken them more seriously than they deserved.” So speak the brave soldiers of knowledge. 568. Poet and Bird.—The bird Phœnix showed the poet a glowing scroll which was being gradually consumed in the flames. “Be not alarmed,” said the bird, “it is your work! It does not contain the spirit of the age, and to a still less extent the spirit of those who are against the age: so it must be burnt. But that is a good sign. There is many a dawn of day.” 569. To the Lonely Ones.—If we do not respect the honour of others in our soliloquies as well as in what we say publicly, we are not gentlemen. 570. Losses.—There are some losses which communicate to the soul a sublimity in which it ceases from wailing, and wanders about silently, as if in the shade of some high and dark cypresses. 571. The Battle-Field Dispensary of the Soul.—What is the most efficacious remedy?—Victory. 572."
"Nietzsche says elsewhere, “Peoples and Countries,” aphorism 21, “Associate with no man who takes part in the mendacious race-swindle.”—Tr. 9. The fiercest protests against Nietzsche's teaching even now come from the “unfeeling people.” Hence the difficulty—now happily past—of introducing him into Anglo-Saxon countries.— Tr. 10. The German Jews are well known for their charity, by means of which they probably wish to prove that they are not so bad as the Anti-Semites paint them.—Tr. 11. That is, do not speak either of God or the devil. The German proverb runs: “Man soll den Teufel nicht an die Wand malen, sonst kommt er.”—Tr. 12. The case of that other witty Venetian, Casanova.—Tr. 13. The play upon the words gründlich (thorough) thinkers, and Untergründlichen (lit. those underground) cannot be rendered in English.—Tr. 14. A variation of the well-known proverb, Ubi bene, ibi patria.—Tr. 15. Hence the violence of all fanatics, who do not wish to shout down the outer world so much as to shout down their own inner enemy, viz. truth.—Tr. 16. This omission is in the original.—Tr. 17. This, of course, refers to Richard Wagner, as does also the following paragraph.—Tr. 18. The play upon the words Vorschritt (leading) and Fortschritt (progress) cannot be rendered in English.—Tr. This book has been downloaded from www.aliceandbooks.com. You can find many more public domain books in our website 1. Contents 2. Introduction. 3. Author's Preface. 1. 2. 2. 3. 3. 4. 4. 5. 4. Book I. 1. 1. 2. 2. 3. 3. 4. 4. 5. 5. 6. 6. 7. 7. 8. 8. 9. 9. 10. 10. 11. 11. 12. 12. 13. 13. 14. 14. 15. 15. 16. 16. 17. 17. 18. 18. 19. 19. 20. 20. 21. 21. 22. 22. 23. 23. 24. 24. 25. 25. 26. 26. 27. 27. 28. 28. 29. 29. 30. 30. 31. 31. 32. 32. 33. 33. 34. 34. 35. 35. 36. 36. 37. 37. 38. 38. 39. 39. 40. 40. 41. 41. 42. 42. 43. 43. 44. 44. 45. 45. 46. 46. 47. 47. 48. 48. 49. 49. 50. 50. 51. 51. 52. 52. 53. 53. 54. 54. 55. 55. 56. 56. 57. 57. 58. 58. 59. 59. 60. 60. 61. 61. 62. 62. 63. 63. 64. 64. 65. 65. 66. 66. 67. 67. 68. 68. 69. 69. 70. 70. 71. 71. 72. 72. 73. 73. 74. 74. 75. 75. 76. 76. 77. 77. 78. 78. 79. 79. 80. 80. 81. 81. 82. 82. 83. 83. 84. 84. 85. 85. 86. 86. 87. 87. 88. 88. 89. 89. 90. 90. 91. 91. 92. 92. 93. 93. 94. 94. 95. 95. 96. 96. 5. Book II. 1. 97. 2. 98. 3. 99. 4. 100. 5. 101. 6. 102. 7. 103. 8. 104. 9. 105. 10. 106. 11. 107. 12. 108. 13. 109. 14. 110. 15. 111. 16. 112. 17. 113. 18. 114. 19. 115. 20. 116. 21. 117. 22. 118. 23. 119. 24. 120. 25. 121. 26. 122. 27. 123. 28. 124. 29. 125. 30. 126. 31. 127. 32. 128. 33. 129. 34. 130. 35. 131. 36. 132. 37. 133. 38. 134. 39. 135. 40. 136. 41. 137. 42. 138. 43. 139. 44. 140. 45. 141. 46. 142. 47. 143. 48. 144. 49. 145. 50. 146. 51. 147. 52. 148. 6. Book III. 1. 149. 2. 150. 3. 151. 4. 152. 5. 153. 6. 154. 7. 155. 8. 156. 9. 157. 10. 158. 11. 159. 12. 160. 13. 161. 14. 162. 15. 163. 16. 164. 17. 165. 18. 166. 19. 167. 20. 168. 21. 169. 22. 170. 23. 171. 24. 172. 25. 173. 26. 174. 27. 175. 28. 176. 29. 177. 30. 178. 31. 179. 32. 180. 33. 181. 34. 182. 35. 183. 36. 184. 37. 185. 38. 186. 39. 187. 40. 188. 41. 189. 42. 190. 43. 191. 44. 192. 45. 193. 46. 194. 47. 195. 48. 196. 49. 197. 50. 198. 51. 199. 52. 200. 53. 201. 54. 202. 55. 203. 56. 204. 57. 205. 58. 206. 59. 207. 7. Book IV. 1. 208. 2. 209. 3. 210. 4. 211. 5. 212. 6. 213. 7. 214. 8. 215. 9. 216. 10. 217. 11. 218. 12. 219. 13. 220. 14. 221. 15. 222. 16. 223. 17. 224. 18. 225. 19. 226. 20. 227. 21. 228. 22. 229. 23. 230. 24. 231. 25. 232. 26. 233. 27. 234. 28. 235. 29. 236. 30. 237. 31. 238. 32. 239. 33. 240. 34. 241. 35. 242. 36. 243. 37. 244. 38. 245. 39. 246. 40. 247. 41. 248. 42. 249."
"156. Evil through Exuberance.—“Oh, that we should not feel too happy!”—such was the secret fear of the Greeks in their best age. That is why they preached moderation to themselves. And we? [pg 165] 157. The Worship of Natural Sounds.—What signification can we find in the fact that our culture is not only indulgent to the manifestations of grief, such as tears, complaints, reproaches, and attitudes of rage and humility, but even approves them and reckons them among the most noble and essential things?—while, on the other hand, the spirit of ancient philosophy looked down upon them with contempt, without admitting their necessity in any way. Let us remember how Plato—who was by no means one of the most inhuman of the philosophers—speaks of the Philoctetus of the tragic stage. Is it possible that our modern culture is wanting in “philosophy”? or, in accordance with the valuations of those old philosophers, do we perhaps all form part of the “mob”? 158. The Climate for Flattery.—In our day flatterers should no longer be sought at the courts of kings, since these have all acquired a taste for militarism, which cannot tolerate flattery. But this flower even now often grows in abundance in the neighbourhood of bankers and artists. 159. The Revivers.—Vain men value a fragment of the past more highly from the moment when they are able to revive it in their imagination (especially if it is difficult to do so), they would [pg 166] even like if possible to raise it from the dead. Since, however, the number of vain people is always very large, the danger presented by historical studies, if an entire epoch devotes its attention to them, is by no means small: too great an amount of strength is then wasted on all sorts of imaginable resurrections. The entire movement of romanticism is perhaps best understood from this point of view. 160. Vain, Greedy, and not very Wise.—Your desires are greater than your understanding, and your vanity is even greater than your desires,—to people of your type a great deal of Christian practice and a little Schopenhauerian theory may be strongly recommended. 161. Beauty corresponding to the Age.—If our sculptors, painters, and musicians wish to catch the significance of the age, they should represent beauty as bloated, gigantic, and nervous: just as the Greeks, under the influence of their morality of moderation, saw and represented beauty in the Apollo di Belvedere. We should, indeed, call him ugly! But the pedantic “classicists” have deprived us of all our honesty! 162. The Irony of the Present Time.—At the present day it is the habit of Europeans to treat all matters of great importance with irony, because, as [pg 167] the result of our activity in their service, we have no time to take them seriously. 163. Against Rousseau.—If it is true that there is something contemptible about our civilisation, we have two alternatives: of concluding with Rousseau that, “This despicable civilisation is to blame for our bad morality,” or to infer, contrary to Rousseau's view, that “Our good morality is to blame for this contemptible civilisation. Our social conceptions of good and evil, weak and effeminate as they are, and their enormous influence over both body and soul, have had the effect of weakening all bodies and souls and of crushing all unprejudiced, independent, and self-reliant men, the real pillars of a strong civilisation: wherever we still find the evil morality to-day, we see the last crumbling ruins of these pillars.” Thus let paradox be opposed by paradox! It is quite impossible for the truth to lie with both sides: and can we say, indeed, that it lies with either? Decide for yourself. 164. Perhaps Premature.—It would seem at the present time that, under many different and misleading names, and often with a great want of clearness, those who do not feel themselves attached to morals and to established laws are taking the first initial steps to organise themselves, and thus to create a right for themselves; whilst hitherto, [pg 168] as criminals, free-thinkers, immoral men and miscreants, they have lived beyond the pale of the law, under the bane of outlawry and bad conscience, corrupted and corrupting."
"Can it perhaps have been still another of the merits of the ancients that the deepest pathos was with them merely æsthetic play, whereas with us the truth of nature must co-operate in order to produce such a work?"" We can now answer in the affirmative this latter profound question after our glorious experiences, in which we have found to our astonishment in the case of musical tragedy itself, that the deepest pathos can in reality be merely æsthetic play: and therefore we are justified in believing that now for the first time the proto-phenomenon of the tragic can be portrayed with some degree of success. He who now will still persist in talking only of those vicarious effects proceeding from ultra-æsthetic spheres, and does not feel himself raised above the pathologically-moral process, may be left to despair of his æsthetic nature: for which we recommend to him, by way of innocent equivalent, the interpretation of Shakespeare after the fashion of Gervinus, and the diligent search for poetic justice. Thus with the re-birth of tragedy the æsthetic hearer is also born anew, in whose place in the theatre a curious quid pro quo was wont to sit with halfmoral and half-learned pretensions,—the ""critic."" In his sphere hitherto everything has been artificial and merely glossed over with a semblance of life. The performing artist was in fact at a loss what to do with such a critically comporting hearer, and hence he, as well as the dramatist or operatic composer who inspired him, searched anxiously for the last remains of life in a being so pretentiously barren and incapable of enjoyment. Such ""critics,"" however, have hitherto constituted the public; the student, the schoolboy, yea, even the most harmless womanly creature, were already unwittingly prepared by education and by journals for a similar perception of works of art. The nobler natures among the artists counted upon exciting the moral-religious forces in such a public, and the appeal to a moral order of the world operated vicariously, when in reality some powerful artistic spell should have enraptured the true hearer. Or again, some imposing or at all events exciting tendency of the contemporary political and social world was presented by the dramatist with such vividness that the hearer could forget his critical exhaustion and abandon himself to similar emotions, as, in patriotic or warlike moments, before the tribune of parliament, or at the condemnation of crime and vice:—an estrangement of the true aims of art which could not but lead directly now and then to a cult of tendency. But here there took place what has always taken place in the case of factitious arts, an extraordinary rapid depravation of these tendencies, so that for instance the tendency to employ the theatre as a means for the moral education of the people, which in Schiller's time was taken seriously, is already reckoned among the incredible antiquities of a surmounted culture. While the critic got the upper hand in the theatre and concert-hall, the journalist in the school, and the press in society, art degenerated into a topic of conversation of the most trivial kind, and æsthetic criticism was used as the cement of a vain, distracted, selfish and moreover piteously unoriginal sociality, the significance of which is suggested by the Schopenhauerian parable of the porcupines, so that there has never been so much gossip about art and so little esteem for it. But is it still possible to have intercourse with a man capable of conversing on Beethoven or Shakespeare? Let each answer this question according to his sentiments: he will at any rate show by his answer his conception of ""culture,"" provided he tries at least to answer the question, and has not already grown mute with astonishment. On the other hand, many a one more nobly and delicately endowed by nature, though he may have gradually become a critical barbarian in the manner described, could tell of the unexpected as well as totally unintelligible effect which a successful performance of Lohengrin, for example, exerted on him: except that perhaps every warning and interpreting hand was lacking to guide him; so that the incomprehensibly heterogeneous and altogether incomparable sensation which then affected him also remained isolated and became extinct, like a mysterious star after a brief brilliancy. He then divined what the æsthetic hearer is."
"It is my poverty that my hand never ceaseth bestowing; it is mine envy that I see waiting eyes and the brightened nights of longing. Oh, the misery of all bestowers! Oh, the darkening of my sun! Oh, the craving to crave! Oh, the violent hunger in satiety! They take from me: but do I yet touch their soul? There is a gap ‘twixt giving and receiving; and the smallest gap hath finally to be bridged over. A hunger ariseth out of my beauty: I should like to injure those I illumine; I should like to rob those I have gifted:—thus do I hunger for wickedness. Withdrawing my hand when another hand already stretcheth out to it; hesitating like the cascade, which hesitateth even in its leap:— thus do I hunger for wickedness! Such revenge doth mine abundance think of: such mischief welleth out of my lonesomeness. My happiness in bestowing died in bestowing; my virtue became weary of itself by its abundance! He who ever bestoweth is in danger of losing his shame; to him who ever dispenseth, the hand and heart become callous by very dispensing. Mine eye no longer overfloweth for the shame of suppliants; my hand hath become too hard for the trembling of filled hands. Whence have gone the tears of mine eye, and the down of my heart? Oh, the lonesomeness of all bestowers! Oh, the silence of all shining ones! Many suns circle in desert space: to all that is dark do they speak with their light—but to me they are silent. Oh, this is the hostility of light to the shining one: unpityingly doth it pursue its course. Unfair to the shining one in its innermost heart, cold to the suns:— thus travelleth every sun. Like a storm do the suns pursue their courses: that is their travelling. Their inexorable will do they follow: that is their coldness. Oh, ye only is it, ye dark, nightly ones, that extract warmth from the shining ones! Oh, ye only drink milk and refreshment from the light’s udders! Ah, there is ice around me; my hand burneth with the iciness! Ah, there is thirst in me; it panteth after your thirst! ‘Tis night: alas, that I have to be light! And thirst for the nightly! And lonesomeness! ‘Tis night: now doth my longing break forth in me as a fountain,— for speech do I long. ‘Tis night: now do all gushing fountains speak louder. And my soul also is a gushing fountain. ‘Tis night: now do all songs of loving ones awake. And my soul also is the song of a loving one.— Thus sang Zarathustra. . - One evening went Zarathustra and his disciples through the forest; and when he sought for a well, lo, he lighted upon a green meadow peacefully surrounded with trees and bushes, where maidens were dancing together. As soon as the maidens recognised Zarathustra, they ceased dancing; Zarathustra, however, approached them with friendly mien and spake these words: Cease not your dancing, ye lovely maidens! No game-spoiler hath come to you with evil eye, no enemy of maidens. God’s advocate am I with the devil: he, however, is the spirit of gravity. How could I, ye light-footed ones, be hostile to divine dances? Or to maidens’ feet with fine ankles? To be sure, I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses. And even the little God may he find, who is dearest to maidens: beside the well lieth he quietly, with closed eyes. Verily, in broad daylight did he fall asleep, the sluggard! Had he perhaps chased butterflies too much? Upbraid me not, ye beautiful dancers, when I chasten the little God somewhat! He will cry, certainly, and weep—but he is laughable even when weeping! And with tears in his eyes shall he ask you for a dance; and I myself will sing a song to his dance: A dance-song and satire on the spirit of gravity my supremest, powerfulest devil, who is said to be “lord of the world.”— And this is the song that Zarathustra sang when Cupid and the maidens danced together: Of late did I gaze into thine eye, O Life! And into the unfathomable did I there seem to sink. But thou pulledst me out with a golden angle; derisively didst thou laugh when I called thee unfathomable."
"To marry now would perhaps be simply an act of folly, which would immediately deprive me of the in dependence that I have won with such bloody strife. And then I should also have to choose some European State, to belong to and become a citizen of it. I should have to consider my wife, my child, my wife's family, the place I lived in, and the people we as sociated with, but to forbid myself the free expres sion of my ideas would kill me. I should prefer to be 194 SELECTED LETTERS OF miserable, ill, and feared, and live in some out of the way corner, than to be ""settled"" and given my place in modern mediocrity! I lack neither courage nor good spirits. Both have remained with me because I have no acts of cowardice or false compromise on my conscience. Incidentally I may say that I have not yet found a woman who would be suited to asso ciate with me, and whose presence would not bore me and make me nervous. (The Lama was a good housemate for whom I can find no substitute, but it wanted to vent its energy and to sacrifice itself. For whom? For a miserable foreign race of men, who will not even thank her — and not for me. And I would be such a grateful animal, and always ready for merry laughter. Are you still able to laugh at all? I am afraid that you will quite forget how to do it among these embittered people. ) Moreover I know the women folk of half Europe, and wherever I have observed the influence of women on men, I have noticed a sort of gradual decline as the result; for instance in the case of poor . Not very encouraging is it? I shall leave Nice at the beginning of next month in order to seek peaceful retirement on Lake Maggiore, where there are woods and shaded groves, and not this blindingly white incessant sunshine of Nice in the spring ! The address is : Villa Badia, Cannobio (Lago Maggiore), but before this letter reaches you who knows where I shall be? With love, Your F. FBIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 195 NIETZSCHE TO His SISTER. Cannobio, Lago Maggiore, Villa Badia, April 20, 1887. MY DEAR LAMA : Here I am in a magnificent spot, and every morn ing I marvel at the glory of the colouring. The noble cloisterly nature of the situation and the arrange ments also pleases me — and yet I am so out of sorts that I feel as if I could no longer be heartily glad about anything. Nothing comes to me from the out side world to give me courage or strength. My fel low-boarders are incomparably tedious! In that re spect I was better off in Nice this winter. There were a few people there who interested me. Our dear mother will have written to you all about it. And now about yourself, my dear Lama! I was very much impressed by the purchase of this huge piece of land, ""larger than many a German princi pality."" But I must confess that I am absolutely at sea about the whole affair. If I understand anything at all, it is that the real owner of that vast complex of territory is that rich Paraguayan who is so friendly with Forster. This would not prevent him from wish ing to serve his own interests by means of this ""Ger man colony."" He is certainly bent on turning it to his own profit. Now the principal thing to me seems to be, not that the colony should be inhabited, but that it should do some business, sell wood, etc. For without that I absolutely cannot see how such a great outlay of capital can get its proper return. Forster promised to invest a portion of your money securely either in Germany or in Paraguay; but, if 196 SELECTED LETTERS OF I know my sister well, this last portion will certainly find its way before long into the pockets of those numerous paupers.1 I confess that they are my one bugbear; remember that if anything goes wrong they constitute a most unpleasant element with which to deal. Then they always believe that one has unjustly led them into trouble; whereas success and failure often depend on accidents. To tell you the truth, my dear Lama, your letters do not comfort me in the least."
"All those who have read the first volume of the biography with attention must have been struck with the perfect way in which the various impulses in his nature combined in the end to form one general torrent, and how this flowed with ever greater force in the direction of a single goal. Thus science, art, and philosophy developed and became ever more closely related in him, until, in The Birth of Tragedy, they brought forth a ""centaur,"" that is to say, a work which would have been an impossible achievement to a man with only a single, special talent. This polyphony of different talents, all coming to utterance together and producing the richest and boldest of harmonies, is the fundamental feature not only of Nietzsche's early days, but of his whole development. It is once again the artist, philosopher, and man of science, who as one man in later years, after many wanderings, recantations, and revulsions of feeling, produces that other and rarer Centaur of highest rank—Zarathustra. The Birth of Tragedy requires perhaps a little explaining—more particularly as we have now ceased to use either Schopenhauerian or Wagnerian terms of expression. And it was for this reason that five years after its appearance, my brother wrote an introduction to it, in which he very plainly expresses his doubts concerning the views it contains, and the manner in which they are presented. The kernel of its thought he always recognised as perfectly correct; and all he deplored in later days was that he had spoiled the grand problem of Hellenism, as he understood it, by adulterating it with ingredients taken from the world of most modern ideas. As time went on, he grew ever more and more anxious to define the deep meaning of this book with greater precision and clearness. A very good elucidation of its aims, which unfortunately was never published, appears among his notes of the year 1886, and is as follows:— ""Concerning The Birth of Tragedy.—A book consisting of mere experiences relating to pleasurable and unpleasurable æsthetic states, with a metaphysico-artistic background. At the same time the confession of a romanticist the sufferer feels the deepest longing for beauty—he begets it; finally, a product of youth, full of youthful courage and melancholy. ""Fundamental psychological experiences: the word 'Apollonian' stands for that state of rapt repose in the presence of a visionary world, in the presence of the world of beautiful appearance designed as a deliverance from becoming; the word Dionysos, on the other hand, stands for strenuous becoming, grown self-conscious, in the form of the rampant voluptuousness of the creator, who is also perfectly conscious of the violent anger of the destroyer. ""The antagonism of these two attitudes and the desires that underlie them. The first-named would have the vision it conjures up eternal: in its light man must be quiescent, apathetic, peaceful, healed, and on friendly terms with himself and all existence; the second strives after creation, after the voluptuousness of wilful creation, i.e. constructing and destroying. Creation felt and explained as an instinct would be merely the unremitting inventive action of a dissatisfied being, overflowing with wealth and living at high tension and high pressure,—of a God who would overcome the sorrows of existence by means only of continual changes and transformations, —appearance as a transient and momentary deliverance; the world as an apparent sequence of godlike visions and deliverances. ""This metaphysico-artistic attitude is opposed to Schopenhauer's onesided view which values art, not from the artist's standpoint but from the spectator's, because it brings salvation and deliverance by means of the joy produced by unreal as opposed to the existing or the real (the experience only of him who is suffering and is in despair owing to himself and everything existing).—Deliverance in the form and its eternity (just as Plato may have pictured it, save that he rejoiced in a complete subordination of all too excitable sensibilities, even in the idea itself). To this is opposed the second point of view—art regarded as a phenomenon of the artist, above all of the musician; the torture of being obliged to create, as a Dionysian instinct. ""Tragic art, rich in both attitudes, represents the reconciliation of Apollo and Dionysos. Appearance is given the greatest importance by Dionysos; and yet it will be denied and cheerfully denied. This is directed against Schopenhauer's teaching of Resignation as the tragic attitude towards the world. ""Against Wagner's theory that music is a means and drama an end."
"But in the case in point there was damned little question of ""the attraction of loveli ness or the reverse,"" but only whether a highly gifted human being was to be brought to naught or not. So the proofs may once more be sent to you for correction, my old and helpful friend? My heartiest thanks for it all. F. N. 152 SELECTED LETTEKS OF NIETZSCHE TO PETER GAST. Genoa, March 22, 1883. MY DEAR FRIEND: I saw ""Carmen"" again last night — it was perhaps the twentieth performance this year; the house was packed to overflowing as usual; it is the opera of operas here. You ought to hear the death-like silence that reigns when the Genoese listen to their favourite piece — the prelude to the fourth act, and the yells for an encore that follow. They are also very fond of the ""Tarantella."" Well, dear old friend, I too was very happy once again ; when this music is played some very deep stratum seems to be stirred in me, and while listening to it I always feel resolved to hold out to the end and to unburden my heart of its supremest malice rather than perish beneath the weight of my own thoughts. During the performance I did little else than compose Dionysian songs, in which I made so bold as to say the most terrible things in the most terrible and laughable manner. This is the latest form my madness has taken. Forgive me for writing so often. I have so few people to confide in now. Your devoted F. N. NIETZSCHE TO PETER GAST. Genoa, April 27, 1883. DEAR FRIEND: . . . And last of all came Wagner's death. What recollections did not this news bring back to me! The whole of this relationship and broken relation- FKIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 153 ship with Wagner has proved my severest trial in connection with my justice toward people in general, and of late I had at last succeeded in practising that ""indolence"" in this matter of which you write. And what on earth could be more melancholy than in dolence, when I think of those times in which the latter part of ""Siegfried"" was written! Then we loved each other and hoped everything for each other —it was truly a profound love, free from all arrierepensee. . . . Your friend, NIETZSCHE. To FREIHERR KARL VON GERSDORFF. Sils-Maria, June 28, 1883. MY DEAR OLD FRIEND GERSDORFF: I have just heard of the terrible blow that has befallen you in the loss of your mother. When I learnt it, I derived genuine comfort from the thought that at least you are not alone in life, and called to mind the cordial and grateful words with which you spoke to me of your life companion in your last let ter. You and I have been through some rough times in our youth — rough for many reasons — and it would be only just and proper for our manhood to be blessed with milder, more comforting and encourag ing experiences. As for myself, a long and arduous asceticism of the spirit lies behind me, which I undertook quite voluntarily, though it would not be right for every body to expect it of himself. The last six years have, in this respect, been the years of my severest efforts 154 SELECTED LETTERS OF in self-controlfand this is leaving out of all reckoning what I have had to overcome in the way of ill-health, solitude, misunderstanding, and persecution.^? Suf fice it to say that I have overcome this stage in my life — and I shall use all that remains of life (not much, I imagine) in giving full and complete expres sion to the object for which I have so far endured life at all. The period of silence is over. My Zarathustra, which will be sent to you in a week or so, will perhaps show you to what lofty heights my_will has soared. Do not be deceived by the legendary charac ter of this little book. Beneath all these simple but outlandish words lie my whole philosophy and the things about which I am most in earnest. It is my first step in making myself known — nothing more! I know perfectly well that there is no one alive who could create anything like this Zarathustra. Well, my dear old friend, I am once more in the Ober-Engadine."
"Three things hitherto best-cursed and most calumniated on earth, are brought forward to be weighed. Voluptuousness, thirst of power, and selfishness,—the three forces in humanity which Christianity has done most to garble and besmirch,—Nietzsche endeavours to reinstate in their former places of honour. Voluptuousness, or sensual pleasure, is a dangerous thing to discuss nowadays. If we mention it with favour we may be regarded, however unjustly, as the advocate of savages, satyrs, and pure sensuality. If we condemn it, we either go over to the Puritans or we join those who are wont to come to table with no edge to their appetites and who therefore grumble at all good fare. There can be no doubt that the value of healthy innocent voluptuousness, like the value of health itself, must have been greatly discounted by all those who, resenting their inability to partake of this world’s goods, cried like St Paul: “I would that all men were even as I myself.” Now Nietzsche’s philosophy might be called an attempt at giving back to healthy and normal men innocence and a clean conscience in their desires—NOT to applaud the vulgar sensualists who respond to every stimulus and whose passions are out of hand; not to tell the mean, selfish individual, whose selfishness is a pollution (see Aphorism , “Twilight of the Idols”), that he is right, nor to assure the weak, the sick, and the crippled, that the thirst of power, which they gratify by exploiting the happier and healthier individuals, is justified;—but to save the clean healthy man from the values of those around him, who look at everything through the mud that is in their own bodies,—to give him, and him alone, a clean conscience in his manhood and the desires of his manhood. “Do I counsel you to slay your instincts? I counsel to innocence in your instincts.” In verse of the second paragraph (as in verse I of paragraph in “The Old and New Tables”) Nietzsche gives us a reason for his occasional obscurity (see also verses to of “Poets”). As I have already pointed out, his philosophy is quite esoteric. It can serve no purpose with the ordinary, mediocre type of man. I, personally, can no longer have any doubt that Nietzsche’s only object, in that part of his philosophy where he bids his friends stand “Beyond Good and Evil” with him, was to save higher men, whose growth and scope might be limited by the too strict observance of modern values from foundering on the rocks of a “Compromise” between their own genius and traditional conventions. The only possible way in which the great man can achieve greatness is by means of exceptional freedom—the freedom which assists him in experiencing HIMSELF. Verses to afford an excellent supplement to Nietzsche’s description of the attitude of the noble type towards the slaves in Aphorism of the work “Beyond Good and Evil” (see also Note B.) C LV. T S G . (See Note on Chapter XLVI.) In Part II. of this discourse we meet with a doctrine not touched upon hitherto, save indirectly;—I refer to the doctrine of self-love. We should try to understand this perfectly before proceeding; for it is precisely views of this sort which, after having been cut out of the original context, are repeated far and wide as internal evidence proving the general unsoundness of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Already in the last of the “Thoughts out of Season” Nietzsche speaks as follows about modern men: “...these modern creatures wish rather to be hunted down, wounded and torn to shreds, than to live alone with themselves in solitary calm. Alone with oneself!—this thought terrifies the modern soul; it is his one anxiety, his one ghastly fear” (English Edition, page ). In his feverish scurry to find entertainment and diversion, whether in a novel, a newspaper, or a play, the modern man condemns his own age utterly; for he shows that in his heart of hearts he despises himself. One cannot change a condition of this sort in a day; to become endurable to oneself an inner transformation is necessary. Too long have we lost ourselves in our friends and entertainments to be able to find ourselves so soon at another’s bidding. “And verily, it is no commandment for to-day and to-morrow to LEARN to love oneself. Rather is it of all arts the finest, subtlest, last, and patientest.” In the last verse Nietzsche challenges us to show that our way is the right way."
"This alteration of the position of the chorus, which Sophocles at any rate recommended by his practice, and, according to tradition, even by a treatise, is the first step towards the annihilation of the chorus, the phases of which follow one another with alarming rapidity in Euripides, Agathon, and the New Comedy. Optimistic dialectics drives, music out of tragedy with the scourge of its syllogisms: that is, it destroys the essence of tragedy, which can be explained only as a manifestation and illustration of Dionysian states, as the visible symbolisation of music, as the dream-world of Dionysian ecstasy. If, therefore, we are to assume an anti-Dionysian tendency operating even before Socrates, which received in him only an unprecedentedly grand expression, we must not shrink from the question as to what a phenomenon like that of Socrates indicates: whom in view of the Platonic dialogues we are certainly not entitled to regard as a purely disintegrating, negative power. And though there can be no doubt whatever that the most immediate effect of the Socratic impulse tended to the dissolution of Dionysian tragedy, yet a profound experience of Socrates' own life compels us to ask whether there is necessarily only an antipodal relation between Socratism and art, and whether the birth of an ""artistic Socrates"" is in general something contradictory in itself. For that despotic logician had now and then the feeling of a gap, or void, a sentiment of semi-reproach, as of a possibly neglected duty with respect to art. There often came to him, as he tells his friends in prison, one and the same dream-apparition, which kept constantly repeating to him: ""Socrates, practise music."" Up to his very last days he solaces himself with the opinion that his philosophising is the highest form of poetry, and finds it hard to believe that a deity will remind him of the ""common, popular music."" Finally, when in prison, he consents to practise also this despised music, in order thoroughly to unburden his conscience. And in this frame of mind he composes a poem on Apollo and turns a few Æsopian fables into verse. It was something similar to the demonian warning voice which urged him to these practices; it was because of his Apollonian insight that, like a barbaric king, he did not understand the noble image of a god and was in danger of sinning against a deity—through ignorance. The prompting voice of the Socratic dream-vision is the only sign of doubtfulness as to the limits of logical nature. ""Perhaps ""—thus he had to ask himself—""what is not intelligible to me is not therefore unreasonable? Perhaps there is a realm of wisdom from which the logician is banished? Perhaps art is even a necessary correlative of and supplement to science?"" [18] In me thou seest its benefit,— To him who hath but little wit, Through parables to tell the truth. [19] Scheinbild = ειδολον.—TR. 15. In the sense of these last portentous questions it must now be indicated how the influence of Socrates (extending to the present moment, indeed, to all futurity) has spread over posterity like an ever-increasing shadow in the evening sun, and how this influence again and again necessitates a regeneration of art,—yea, of art already with metaphysical, broadest and profoundest sense,—and its own eternity guarantees also the eternity of art. Before this could be perceived, before the intrinsic dependence of every art on the Greeks, the Greeks from Homer to Socrates, was conclusively demonstrated, it had to happen to us with regard to these Greeks as it hap- pened to the Athenians with regard to Socrates. Nearly every age and stage of culture has at some time or other sought with deep displeasure to free itself from the Greeks, because in their presence everything self-achieved, sincerely admired and apparently quite original, seemed all of a sudden to lose life and colour and shrink to an abortive copy, even to caricature. And so hearty indignation breaks forth time after time against this presumptuous little nation, which dared to designate as ""barbaric"" for all time everything not native: who are they, one asks one's self, who, though they possessed only an ephemeral historical splendour, ridiculously restricted institutions, a dubious excellence in their customs, and were even branded with ugly vices, yet lay claim to the dignity and singular position among the peoples to which genius is entitled among the masses."
"You are absolutely right — so am I.2 With all the heartiest wishes of your old friend, N. NIETZSCHE TO PETER GAST. Turin, Thursday, October 30, 1888. DEAR FRIEND : . . . The weather is so perfect that to do a thing well is no feat. On my birthday I again started some thing fresh — something that promises to be a success ""Then Professor of History at the Sorbonne. — Translator. aNietzsche here refers to a letter written to him by Fraulein von Meysenbug on August 12, 1888, in which the following passage occurs: you complain that the you lavish on the world evoke""When no response, no answer, let gifts me assure you that more than one heart beats in affectionate sympathy with you and your lot, and that it is chiefly your own fault if your experience is such an unhappy one, for 'he who surrenders himself to solitude/ you know well enough what happens to him. It is either a mistake or a paradox to say that you 'have the luck to embitter everything weak and virtuous against* you. The truly virtuous are not at all weak; on the contrary, 242 SELECTED LETTERS OF and is already well advanced. It is called Ecce Homo, or Hoiv one becomes what one is. It is a daring treatise about myself and my writings: in it I wish not only to represent myself as confronted by the weird and solitary task of the Transvaluation — I should also like for once to discover what I actually risk under cover of the German idea of the Freedom of the Press. What I suspect is that the first book of the Transvaluation will be suppressed on the spot — legally and with the best of all possible rights. With this Ecce Homo I should like to drive the ques tion to such a pitch of earnestness and curiosity that the customary and, at bottom, rational ideas as to what is allowable, should make an exception in this case. Moreover, I speak about myself with all possible psychological subtlety and good cheer — I should hate to come before my fellow men in the guise of a prophet, a monster, and a moral-scarecrow. In this sense, too, this book might do some goad: it may perhaps prevent my being confounded with my opposite. they are the truly strong: as the original concept virtu actually ? roves. And you yourself are the living proof of the contrary; or you are truly virtuous, and I believe that your example, if men only knew it, would convince them more than your books. For what constitutes the quality of being virtuous? It means that for the sake of a great idea, an ideal, one is prepared to endure life steadfastly with all its miseries, and to rescue it from the thraldom of blind will, by means of knowledge and the freedom of self-determination. You have done and in another form accomplished what the saints of an earlier faith used to achieve. The fact that the people in Germany are now on their knees before the idol of Might, is of course sad enough; but the time will come when even German intellect will awake anew from its slumber. And if not? Well, then, the further develop ment of mankind will be carried on by other stocks, as we see happening in Denmark and America. - — Translator. FKIEDRICH NIETZSCHE » 243 I am all agog about your Kunstwart-bumamty.1 Do you know, by-the-bye, that in the summer I wrote Herr Avenarius an extremely rude letter because of the way in which his paper dropped Heinrich Heine. Rude letters — in my case a sign of good cheer. With heartiest greetings and best wishes for the past, the present and the future. (""One thing is more necessary than another"" — Thus Spake Zarathustra) . N. NIETZSCHE TO His SISTER. Torino (Italia) via Carlo Alberto. 6. III. End of October, 1888. MY DEAR LAMA : . . . As you see I am again in my good city of Turin, the city of which Gobineau2 also was so fond — may be it is like us both. I, too, very much enjoy the ""'Kunstwart"" (arbiter of art) is the name of a German art journal. At the end of November, 1888, Cast's review of Nietzsche's ""The Case of Wagner"" appeared in this journal. — Translator."
"No belief, however, is nowadays more firmly believed in than this one, so we should not therefore shrink from drawing the inevitable conclusion and treating the criminal like a lunatic—above all, not with haughty pitifulness, but with medical skill and good will. He may perhaps be in need of a change of air, a change of society, or temporary absence: perhaps of solitude and new occupations—very well! He may perhaps feel that it would be to his advantage to live under surveillance for a short time in order thus to obtain protection from himself and from a troublesome tyrannical impulse—very well! We should make clear to him the possibility and the means of curing him (the extermination, transformation, and sublimation of these impulses), and also, in the worst cases, the improbability of a cure; and we should offer to the incurable criminal, who has become a useless burden to himself, the opportunity of committing suicide. While holding this in reserve [pg 206] as an extreme measure of relief, we should neglect nothing which would tend above all to restore to the criminal his good courage and freedom of spirit; we should free his soul from all remorse, as if it were something unclean, and show him how he may atone for a wrong which he may have done some one by benefiting some one else, perhaps the community at large, in such way that he might even do more than balance his previous offence. All this must be done with the greatest tact! The criminal must, above all, remain anonymous or adopt an assumed name, changing his place of residence frequently, so that his reputation and future life may suffer as little as possible. At the present time it is true that the man who has been injured, apart altogether from the manner in which this injury might be redressed, wishes for revenge in addition, and applies to the courts that he may obtain it—and this is why our dreadful penal laws are still in force: Justice, as it were, holding up a pair of shopkeeper's scales and endeavouring to balance the guilt by punishment; but can we not take a step beyond this? Would it not be a great relief to the general sentiment of life if, while getting rid of our belief in guilt, we could also get rid of our old craving for vengeance, and gradually come to believe that it is a refined wisdom for happy men to bless their enemies and to do good to those who have offended them, exactly in accordance with the spirit of Christian teaching! Let us free the world from this idea of sin, and take care to cast out with it the idea of punishment. May these monstrous ideas henceforth live banished far from the abodes [pg 207] of men—if, indeed, they must live at all, and do not perish from disgust with themselves. Let us not forget also, however, that the injury caused to society and to the individual by the criminal is of the same species as that caused by the sick: for the sick spread cares and ill-humour; they are non-productive, consume the earnings of others, and at the same time require attendance, doctors, and support, and they really live on the time and strength of the healthy. In spite of this, however, we should designate as inhuman any one who, for this reason, would wish to wreak vengeance on the sick. In past ages, indeed, this was actually done: in primitive conditions of society, and even now among certain savage peoples, the sick man is treated as a criminal and as a danger to the community, and it is believed that he is the resting-place of certain demoniacal beings who have entered into his body as the result of some offence he has committed—those ages and peoples hold that the sick are the guilty! And what of ourselves? Are we not yet ripe for the contrary conception? Shall we not be allowed to say, “The guilty are the sick”? No; the hour for that has not yet come. We still lack, above all, those physicians who have learnt something from what we have hitherto called practical morals and have transformed it into the art and science of healing. We still lack that intense interest in those things which some day perhaps may seem not unlike the “storm and stress” of those old religious ecstasies."
"By all that is luminous and strong and good in thee, O Zarathustra! Spit on this city of shopmen and return back! Here floweth all blood putridly and tepidly and frothily through all veins: spit on the great city, which is the great slum where all the scum frotheth together! Spit on the city of compressed souls and slender breasts, of pointed eyes and sticky fingers— —On the city of the obtrusive, the brazen-faced, the pendemagogues and tongue-demagogues, the overheated ambitious:— Where everything maimed, ill-famed, lustful, untrustful, overmellow, sickly-yellow and seditious, festereth pernicious:— —Spit on the great city and turn back!— Here, however, did Zarathustra interrupt the foaming fool, and shut his mouth.— Stop this at once! called out Zarathustra, long have thy speech and thy species disgusted me! Why didst thou live so long by the swamp, that thou thyself hadst to become a frog and a toad? Floweth there not a tainted, frothy, swamp-blood in thine own veins, when thou hast thus learned to croak and revile? Why wentest thou not into the forest? Or why didst thou not till the ground? Is the sea not full of green islands? I despise thy contempt; and when thou warnedst me—why didst thou not warn thyself? Out of love alone shall my contempt and my warning bird take wing; but not out of the swamp!— They call thee mine ape, thou foaming fool: but I call thee my grunting-pig,—by thy grunting, thou spoilest even my praise of folly. What was it that first made thee grunt? Because no one sufficiently FLATTERED thee:—therefore didst thou seat thyself beside this filth, that thou mightest have cause for much grunting,— —That thou mightest have cause for much VENGEANCE! For vengeance, thou vain fool, is all thy foaming; I have divined thee well! But thy fools’-word injureth ME, even when thou art right! And even if Zarathustra’s word WERE a hundred times justified, thou wouldst ever—DO wrong with my word! Thus spake Zarathustra. Then did he look on the great city and sighed, and was long silent. At last he spake thus: I loathe also this great city, and not only this fool. Here and there— there is nothing to better, nothing to worsen. Woe to this great city!—And I would that I already saw the pillar of fire in which it will be consumed! For such pillars of fire must precede the great noontide. But this hath its time and its own fate.— This precept, however, give I unto thee, in parting, thou fool: Where one can no longer love, there should one—PASS BY!— Thus spake Zarathustra, and passed by the fool and the great city. LII. THE APOSTATES. 1. Ah, lieth everything already withered and grey which but lately stood green and many-hued on this meadow! And how much honey of hope did I carry hence into my beehives! Those young hearts have already all become old—and not old even! only weary, ordinary, comfortable:—they declare it: “We have again become pious.” Of late did I see them run forth at early morn with valorous steps: but the feet of their knowledge became weary, and now do they malign even their morning valour! Verily, many of them once lifted their legs like the dancer; to them winked the laughter of my wisdom:—then did they bethink themselves. Just now have I seen them bent down—to creep to the cross. Around light and liberty did they once flutter like gnats and young poets. A little older, a little colder: and already are they mystifiers, and mumblers and mollycoddles. Did perhaps their hearts despond, because lonesomeness had swallowed me like a whale? Did their ear perhaps hearken yearningly-long for me IN VAIN, and for my trumpet-notes and herald-calls? —Ah! Ever are there but few of those whose hearts have persistent courage and exuberance; and in such remaineth also the spirit patient. The rest, however, are COWARDLY. The rest: these are always the great majority, the common-place, the superfluous, the far-too many—those all are cowardly!— Him who is of my type, will also the experiences of my type meet on the way: so that his first companions must be corpses and buffoons. His second companions, however—they will call themselves his BELIEVERS,—will be a living host, with much love, much folly, much unbearded veneration. To those believers shall he who is of my type among men not bind his heart; in those spring-times and many-hued meadows shall he not believe, who knoweth the fickly faint-hearted human species!"
"FOR JOYS ALL WANT—ETERNITY! . All joy wanteth the eternity of all things, it wanteth honey, it wanteth lees, it wanteth drunken midnight, it wanteth graves, it wanteth grave-tears’ consolation, it wanteth gilded evening-red— —WHAT doth not joy want! it is thirstier, heartier, hungrier, more frightful, more mysterious, than all woe: it wanteth ITSELF, it biteth into ITSELF, the ring’s will writheth in it,— —It wanteth love, it wanteth hate, it is over-rich, it bestoweth, it throweth away, it beggeth for some one to take from it, it thanketh the taker, it would fain be hated,— —So rich is joy that it thirsteth for woe, for hell, for hate, for shame, for the lame, for the WORLD,—for this world, Oh, ye know it indeed! Ye higher men, for you doth it long, this joy, this irrepressible, blessed joy—for your woe, ye failures! For failures, longeth all eternal joy. For joys all want themselves, therefore do they also want grief! O happiness, O pain! Oh break, thou heart! Ye higher men, do learn it, that joys want eternity. —Joys want the eternity of ALL things, they WANT DEEP, PROFOUND ETERNITY! . Have ye now learned my song? Have ye divined what it would say? Well! Cheer up! Ye higher men, sing now my roundelay! Sing now yourselves the song, the name of which is “Once more,” the signification of which is “Unto all eternity!”—sing, ye higher men, Zarathustra’s roundelay! O man! Take heed! What saith deep midnight’s voice indeed? “I slept my sleep—, “From deepest dream I’ve woke, and plead:— “The world is deep, “And deeper than the day could read. “Deep is its woe—, “Joy—deeper still than grief can be: “Woe saith: Hence! Go! “But joys all want eternity-, “-Want deep, profound eternity!” LXXX. THE SIGN. In the morning, however, after this night, Zarathustra jumped up from his couch, and, having girded his loins, he came out of his cave glowing and strong, like a morning sun coming out of gloomy mountains. “Thou great star,” spake he, as he had spoken once before, “thou deep eye of happiness, what would be all thy happiness if thou hadst not THOSE for whom thou shinest! And if they remained in their chambers whilst thou art already awake, and comest and bestowest and distributest, how would thy proud modesty upbraid for it! Well! they still sleep, these higher men, whilst I am awake: THEY are not my proper companions! Not for them do I wait here in my mountains. At my work I want to be, at my day: but they understand not what are the signs of my morning, my step—is not for them the awakening-call. They still sleep in my cave; their dream still drinketh at my drunken songs. The audient ear for ME—the OBEDIENT ear, is yet lacking in their limbs.” —This had Zarathustra spoken to his heart when the sun arose: then looked he inquiringly aloft, for he heard above him the sharp call of his eagle. “Well!” called he upwards, “thus is it pleasing and proper to me. Mine animals are awake, for I am awake. Mine eagle is awake, and like me honoureth the sun. With eagletalons doth it grasp at the new light. Ye are my proper animals; I love you. But still do I lack my proper men!”— Thus spake Zarathustra; then, however, it happened that all on a sudden he became aware that he was flocked around and fluttered around, as if by innumerable birds,—the whizzing of so many wings, however, and the crowding around his head was so great that he shut his eyes. And verily, there came down upon him as it were a cloud, like a cloud of arrows which poureth upon a new enemy. But behold, here it was a cloud of love, and showered upon a new friend. “What happeneth unto me?” thought Zarathustra in his astonished heart, and slowly seated himself on the big stone which lay close to the exit from his cave. But while he grasped about with his hands, around him, above him and below him, and repelled the tender birds, behold, there then happened to him something still stranger: for he grasped thereby unawares into a mass of thick, warm, shaggy hair; at the same time, however, there sounded before him a roar,—a long, soft lion-roar. “THE SIGN COMETH,” said Zarathustra, and a change came over his heart."
"After these general premisings and contrastings, let us now approach the Greeks in order to learn in what degree and to what height these art-impulses of nature were developed in them: whereby we shall be enabled to understand and appreciate more deeply the relation of the Greek artist to his archetypes, or, according to the Aristotelian expression, ""the imitation of nature."" In spite of all the dream-literature and the numerous dream-anecdotes of the Greeks, we can speak only conjecturally, though with a fair degree of certainty, of their dreams. Considering the incredibly precise and unerring plastic power of their eyes, as also their manifest and sincere delight in colours, we can hardly refrain (to the shame of every one born later) from assuming for their very dreams a logical causality of lines and contours, colours and groups, a sequence of scenes resembling their best reliefs, the perfection of which would certainly justify us, if a comparison were possible, in designating the dreaming Greeks as Homers and Homer as a dreaming Greek: in a deeper sense than when modern man, in respect to his dreams, ventures to compare himself with Shakespeare. On the other hand, we should not have to speak conjecturally, if asked to disclose the immense gap which separated the Dionysian Greek from the Dionysian barbarian. From all quarters of the Ancient World—to say nothing of the modern—from Rome as far as Babylon, we can prove the existence of Dionysian festivals, the type of which bears, at best, the same relation to the Greek festivals as the bearded satyr, who borrowed his name and attributes from the goat, does to Dionysus himself. In nearly every instance the centre of these festivals lay in extravagant sexual licentiousness, the waves of which overwhelmed all family life and its venerable traditions; the very wildest beasts of nature were let loose here, including that detestable mixture of lust and cruelty which has always seemed to me the genuine ""witches' draught."" For some time, however, it would seem that the Greeks were perfectly secure and guarded against the feverish agitations of these festivals (—the knowledge of which entered Greece by all the channels of land and sea) by the figure of Apollo himself rising here in full pride, who could not have held out the Gorgon's head to a more dangerous power than this grotesquely uncouth Dionysian. It is in Doric art that this majesticallyrejecting attitude of Apollo perpetuated itself. This opposition became more precarious and even impossible, when, from out of the deepest root of the Hellenic nature, similar impulses finally broke forth and made way for themselves: the Delphic god, by a seasonably effected reconciliation, was now contented with taking the destructive arms from the hands of his powerful antagonist. This reconciliation marks the most important moment in the history of the Greek cult: wherever we turn our eyes we may observe the revolutions resulting from this event. It was the reconciliation of two antagonists, with the sharp demarcation of the boundary-lines to be thenceforth observed by each, and with periodical transmission of testimonials;— in reality, the chasm was not bridged over. But if we observe how, under the pressure of this conclusion of peace, the Dionysian power manifested itself, we shall now recognise in the Dionysian orgies of the Greeks, as compared with the Babylonian Sacæa and their retrogression of man to the tiger and the ape, the significance of festivals of world-redemption and days of transfiguration. Not till then does nature attain her artistic jubilee; not till then does the rupture of the principium individuationis become an artistic phenomenon. That horrible ""witches' draught"" of sensuality and cruelty was here powerless: only the curious blending and duality in the emotions of the Dionysian revellers reminds one of it—just as medicines remind one of deadly poisons,—that phenomenon, to wit, that pains beget joy, that jubilation wrings painful sounds out of the breast. From the highest joy sounds the cry of horror or the yearning wail over an irretrievable loss. In these Greek festivals a sentimental trait, as it were, breaks forth from nature, as if she must sigh over her dismemberment into individuals. The song and pantomime of such dually-minded revellers was something new and unheard-of in the Homeric-Grecian world; and the Dionysian music in particular excited awe and horror."
"He requires that everything shall be according to his own will and humour, yet in such a way as to give him the appearance of always having sacrificed himself, and of rarely desiring anything for himself alone. [pg 262] 296. Duelling.—I think it a great advantage, said some one, to be able to fight a duel—if, of course, it is absolutely necessary; for I have at all times brave companions about me. The duel is the last means of thoroughly honourable suicide left to us; but it is unfortunately a circuitous means, and not even a certain one. 297. Pernicious.—A young man can be most surely corrupted when he is taught to value the like-minded more highly than the differently minded. 298. Hero-Worship and its Fanatics.—The fanatic of an ideal that possesses flesh and blood is right as a rule so long as he assumes a negative attitude, and he is terrible in his negation: he knows what he denies as well as he knows himself, for the simple reason that he comes thence, that he feels at home there, and that he has always the secret fear of being forced to return there some day. He therefore wishes to make his return impossible by the manner of his negation. As soon as he begins to affirm, however, he partly shuts his eyes and begins to idealise (frequently merely for the sake of annoying those who have stayed at home). We might say that there was something artistic about this—agreed, but there is also something dishonest about it. [pg 263] The idealist of a person imagines this person to be so far from him that he can no longer see him distinctly, and then he travesties that which he can just perceive into something “beautiful”—that is to say, symmetrical, vaguely outlined, uncertain. Since he wishes to worship from afar that ideal which floats on high in the distance, he finds it essential to build a temple for the object of his worship as a protection from the profanum vulgus. He brings into this temple for the object of his worship all the venerable and sanctified objects which he still possesses, so that his ideal may benefit by their charm, and that, nourished in this way, it may grow more and more divine. In the end he really succeeds in forming his God, but, alas for him! there is some one who knows how all this has been done, viz. his intellectual conscience; and there is also some one who, quite unconsciously, begins to protest against these things, viz. the deified one himself, who, in consequence of all this worship, praise, and incense, now becomes completely unbearable and shows himself in the most obvious and dreadful manner to be non-divine, and only too human. In a case like this there is only one means of escape left for such a fanatic; he patiently suffers himself and his fellows to be maltreated, and interprets all this misery in maiorem dei gloriam by a new kind of self-deceit and noble falsehood. He takes up a stand against himself, and in doing so experiences, as an interpreter and ill-treated person, something like martyrdom—and in this way he climbs to the height of his conceit. Men of this [pg 264] kind to be found, for example, in the entourage of Napoleon: indeed, perhaps it may have been he who inspired the soul of his century with that romantic prostration in the presence of the “genius” and the “hero,” which was so foreign to the spirit of rationalism of the nineteenth century—a man about whom even Byron was not ashamed to say that he was a “worm compared with such a being.” (The formulæ of this prostration have been discovered by Thomas Carlyle, that arrogant old muddle-head and grumbler, who spent his long life in trying to romanticise the common sense of his Englishmen: but in vain!) 299. The Appearance of Heroism.—Throwing ourselves in the midst of our enemies may be a sign of cowardice. 300. Condescending towards the Flatterer.—It is the ultimate prudence of insatiably ambitious men not only to conceal their contempt for man which the sight of flatterers causes them: but also to appear even condescending to them, like a God who can be nothing if not condescending. 301. “Strength of Character.”—“What I have said once I will do”— This manner of thinking is believed to indicate great strength of character."
"The Tortures of the Soul.—The whole world raises a shout of horror at the present day if one man presumes to torture the body of another: the indignation against such a being bursts forth almost spontaneously. Nay; we tremble even at the very thought of torture being inflicted on a man or an animal, and we undergo unspeakable [pg 079] misery when we hear of such an act having been accomplished. But the same feeling is experienced in a very much lesser degree and extent when it is a question of the tortures of the soul and the dreadfulness of their infliction. Christianity has introduced such tortures on an unprecedented scale, and still continues to preach this kind of martyrdom—yea, it even complains innocently of backsliding and indifference when it meets with a state of soul which is free from such agonies. From all this it now results that humanity, in the face of spiritual racks, tortures of the mind, and instruments of punishment, behaves even to-day with the same awesome patience and indecision which it exhibited in former times in the presence of the cruelties practised on the bodies of men or animals. Hell has certainly not remained merely an empty sound; and a new kind of pity has been devised to correspond to the newlycreated fears of hell—a horrible and ponderous compassion, hitherto unknown; with people “irrevocably condemned to hell,” as, for example, the Stony Guest gave Don Juan to understand, and which, during the Christian era, should often have made the very stones weep. Plutarch presents us with a gloomy picture of the state of mind of a superstitious man in pagan times: but this picture pales when compared with that of a Christian of the Middle Ages, who supposes that nothing can save him from “torments everlasting.” Dreadful omens appear to him: perhaps he sees a stork holding a snake in his beak and hesitating to swallow it. Or all nature suddenly becomes pale; or bright, fiery colours appear across the surface [pg 080] of the earth. Or the ghosts of his dead relations approach him, with features showing traces of dreadful sufferings. Or the dark walls of the room in which the man is sleeping are suddenly lighted up, and there, amidst a yellow flame, he perceives instruments of torture and a motley horde of snakes and devils. Christianity has surely turned this world of ours into a fearful habitation by raising the crucifix in all parts and thereby proclaiming the earth to be a place “where the just man is tortured to death!” And when the ardour of some great preacher for once disclosed to the public the secret sufferings of the individual, the agonies of the lonely souls, when, for example, Whitefield preached “like a dying man to the dying,” now bitterly weeping, now violently stamping his feet, speaking passionately, in abrupt and incisive tones, without fearing to turn the whole force of his attack upon any one individual present, excluding him from the assembly with excessive harshness—then indeed did it seem as if the earth were being transformed into a “field of evil.” The huge crowds were then seen to act as if seized with a sudden attack of madness: many were in fits of anguish; others lay unconscious and motionless; others, again, trembled or rent the air with their piercing shrieks. Everywhere there was a loud breathing, as of half-choked people who were gasping for the breath of life. “Indeed,” said an eyewitness once, “almost all the noises appeared to come from people who were dying in the bitterest agony.” Let us never forget that it was Christianity which first turned the death-bed into a bed of agony, and [pg 081] that, by the scenes which took place there, and the terrifying sounds which were made possible there for the first time, it has poisoned the senses and the blood of innumerable witnesses and their children. Imagine the ordinary man who can never efface the recollection of words like these: “Oh, eternity! Would that I had no soul! Would that I had never been born! My soul is damned, damned; lost for ever! Six days ago you might have helped me. But now all is over. I belong to the devil, and with him I will go down to hell. Break, break, ye poor hearts of stone! Ye will not break? What more can be done for hearts of stone? I am damned that ye may be saved! There he is!"
"let us therefore drink the sweet impudence of the panegyrist, let us overcome the disgust and profound contempt that we feel for the innermost substance of his praise, let us assume a look of thankful joy—for he wished to make himself agreeable to us! And now that it is all over we know [pg 255] that he feels greatly exalted; he has been victorious over us. Yes, and also over himself, the villain!—for it was no easy matter for him to wring this praise from himself. 274. The Rights and Privileges of Man.—We human beings are the only creatures who, when things do not go well with us, can blot ourselves out like a clumsy sentence,—whether we do so out of honour for humanity or pity for it, or on account of the aversion we feel towards ourselves. 275. The Transformed Being.—Now he becomes virtuous; but only for the sake of hurting others by being so. Don't pay so much attention to him. 276. How Often! How Unexpected!—How may married men have some morning awakened to the fact that their young wife is dull, although she thinks quite the contrary! not to speak of those wives whose flesh is willing but whose intellect is weak! 277. Warm and Cold Virtues.—Courage is sometimes the consequence of cold and unshaken resolution, and at other times of a fiery and reckless élan. For these two kinds of courage there is only the one name!—but how different, nevertheless, [pg 256] are cold virtues and warm virtues! and the man would be a fool who could suppose that “goodness” could only be brought about by warmth, and no less a fool he who would only attribute it to cold. The truth is that mankind has found both warm and cold courage very useful, yet not often enough to prevent it from setting them both in the category of precious stones. 278. The gracious Memory.—A man of high rank will do well to develop a gracious memory, that is, to note all the good qualities of people and remember them particularly; for in this way he holds them in an agreeable dependence. A man may also act in this way towards himself: whether or not he has a gracious memory determines in the end the superiority, gentleness, or distrust with which he observes his own inclinations and intentions, and finally even the nature of these inclinations and intentions. 279. Wherein we become Artists.—He who makes an idol of some one endeavours to justify himself in his own eyes by idealising this person: in other words, he becomes an artist that he may have a clear conscience. When he suffers he does not suffer from his ignorance, but from the lie he has told himself to make himself ignorant. The inmost misery and desire of such a man—and all passionate lovers are included in this category—cannot be exhausted by normal means. [pg 257] 280. Childlike.—Those who live like children—those who have not to struggle for their daily bread, and do not think that their actions have any ultimate signification—remain childlike. 281. Our Ego desires Everything.—It would seem as if men in general were only inspired by the desire to possess: languages at least would permit of this supposition, for they view past actions from the standpoint that we have been put in possession of something—“I have spoken, struggled, conquered”—as if to say, I am now in possession of my word, my struggle, my victory. How greedy man appears in this light! he cannot even let the past escape him: he even wishes to have it still! 282. Danger in Beauty.—This woman is beautiful and intelligent: alas, how much more intelligent she would have become if she had not been beautiful! 283. Domestic and Mental Peace.—Our habitual mood depends upon the mood in which we maintain our habitual entourage. 284. New Things as Old Ones.—Many people seem irritated when something new is told them: [pg 258] they feel the ascendancy which the news has given to the person who has learnt it first. 285. What are the Limits of the Ego.—The majority of people take under their protection, as it were, something that they know, as if the fact of knowing it was sufficient in itself to make it their property."
"With a cynicism which will become part of the world's history I have now related ""myself."" The book is called ""Ecce Homo"", and is an onslaught on the Crucified without the ghost of a scruple; it ends with thunderclaps and lightning flashes, that deafen and blind, against everything that is Chris tian or tainted with Christianity. I am, in short, the first psychologist of Christianity, and, old artil lery-man that I am, can fire heavier cannon than any opponent of Christianity has ever before dreamed the existence of. The whole is the prelude of ""The Transvaluation of all Values"", the work which lies ready before me. I vow to you that in two years we shall have the whole inhabited globe in convulsions. I am a Destiny. Guess who comes off the worst in ""Ecce Homo."" Messieurs the Germans! I have told them awful things. For instance, the Germans have it on their conscience that they ruined the conception of the last great epoch of history, the Renaissance, at a moment when Christian values, the decadence values, were humiliated, when these instincts in even princes of the Church were yielding to the instincts diametrically opposed thereto, the instincts of life. FKIEDKICH NIETZSCHE 359 It meant simply the restoration of Christianity to attack the Church. Caesar Borgia as Pope, that was the conception of the Renaissance, its genuine sym bol. You must not be angry, either, that in a decisive passage of the book you crop up. I wrote it as an indictment of the conduct of my friends, their leaving me completely in the lurch, both with regard to repu tation and philosophy. At this juncture you come on the scene with a halo of glory round your head.1 What you say of Dostoiewski is just what I think. On the other hand, I estimate him as the most valua ble psychological material I know. I am grateful to him in a quite remarkable fashion, however much he may stand in contradiction to my deepest-lying in stincts. As for my attitude to Pascal, I almost love him, because he has taught me an infinite amount. He is the one logical Christian. The day before yesterday I read and was charmed with Les Maries, by August Strindberg, and I found myself at home in his pages. The only detriment to my sincere admiration was the feeling that I was at the same time admiring myself! Turin is still my residence. Your NIETZSCHE. (Now a ""Monster"".) Where shall I address the Twilight of the Idols? Should you be in Copenhagen for the next fortnight, no answer is necessary. vici. 'See ""Ecce Homo,"" page 130. Translated by A. M. LudoVol. XVII of authorized edition.— Translator. 360 SELECTED LETTERS OF BEANDES TO NIETZSCHE. Copenhagen, November 23rd, 1888. DEAR SIR : Your letter found me in the thick of work; I am giving lectures here on Goethe, have to repeat each lecture twice, and yet people stand for three-quarters of an hour in the square in front of the University waiting to get standing room inside. It amuses me to make a study before such a crowd of the greatest among the great. I shall have to stay here till the end of the year. But as an antidote to this arises the distressing situation that one of my earlier books — so I am informed — translated recently into Russian has been condemned in Russia as irreligious, and ordered to be publicly burnt. I was afraid that owing to my two last books on Poland and Russia I should be ostracised ; now I must endeavour to enlist every possible interest in order to be protected and granted permission to speak in Russia. The worst is that nearly all letters from me and to me are being confiscated. After the disaster at Borki everyone is very anxious.1 It came so soon after the great assassinations. Every letter is snapped up. I take a lively pleasure in knowing that you have been so productive. Believe me when I say that I am spreading your propaganda in every way I can. A few weeks ago I earnestly recommended Henrik Ibsen to study your books. With him too, you have some'OctoberIII, 29th, attempt on the life the Emperor Alexander near1885, the an village of Borki. The oftrain went off the rails, but the Emperor escaped unhurt. — Translator."
"What have these truths in common with the sick condition of suffering and degenerate men that they should be useful to them? It is, of course, no proof against the truth of a plant when it is clearly established that it does not contribute in any way to the recovery of sick people. Formerly, however, people were so convinced that man was the ultimate end of nature that they believed that knowledge could reveal nothing that was not beneficial and useful to [pg 309] man—nay, there could not, should not be, any other things in existence. Perhaps all this leads to the conclusion that truth as an entity and a coherent whole exists only for those natures who, like Aristotle, are at once powerful and harmless, joyous and peaceful: just as none but these would be in a position to seek such truths; for the others seek remedies for themselves—however proud they may be of their intellect and its freedom, they do not seek truth. Hence it comes about that these others take no real joy in science, but reproach it for its coldness, dryness, and inhumanity. This is the judgment of sick people about the games of the healthy.—Even the Greek gods were unable to administer consolation; and when at length the entire Greek world fell ill, this was a reason for the destruction of such gods. 425. We Gods in Exile.—Owing to errors regarding their descent, their uniqueness, their mission, and by claims based upon these errors, men have again and again “surpassed themselves”; but through these same errors the world has been filled with unspeakable suffering, mutual persecution, suspicion, misunderstanding, and an even greater amount of individual misery. Men have become suffering creatures in consequence of their morals, and the sum-total of what they have obtained by those morals is simply the feeling that they are far too good and great for this world, and that they are enjoying merely a transitory existence on it. As [pg 310] yet the “proud sufferer” is the highest type of mankind. 426. The Colour-Blindness of Thinkers.—How differently from us the Greeks must have viewed nature, since, as we cannot help admitting, they were quite colour-blind in regard to blue and green, believing the former to be a deeper brown, and the latter to be yellow. Thus, for instance, they used the same word to describe the colour of dark hair, of the corn-flower, and the southern sea; and again they employed exactly the same expression for the colour of the greenest herbs, the human skin, honey, and yellow raisins: whence it follows that their greatest painters reproduced the world they lived in only in black, white, red, and yellow. How different and how much nearer to mankind, therefore, must nature have seemed to them, since in their eyes the tints of mankind predominated also in nature, and nature was, as it were, floating in the coloured ether of humanity! (blue and green more than anything else dehumanise nature). It is this defect which developed the playful facility that characterised the Greeks of seeing the phenomena of nature as gods and demi-gods—that is to say, as human forms. Let this, however, merely serve as a simile for another supposition. Every thinker paints his world and the things that surround him in fewer colours than really exist, and he is blind to individual colours. This is something more than a mere deficiency. Thanks to this nearer approach and [pg 311] simplification, he imagines he sees in things those harmonies of colours which possess a great charm, and may greatly enrich nature. Perhaps, indeed, it was in this way that men first learnt to take delight in viewing existence, owing to its being first of all presented to them in one or two shades, and consequently harmonised. They practised these few shades, so to speak, before they could pass on to any more. And even now certain individuals endeavour to get rid of a partial colour-blindness that they may obtain a richer faculty of sight and discernment, in the course of which they find that they not only discover new pleasures, but are also obliged to lose and give up some of their former ones. 427."
"Now, it is our habit no longer to observe accurately when words fail us, since it is difficult in such cases to think with precision: in former times, even, people involuntarily came to the conclusion that where the domain of words ceased, the domain of existence ceased also. Wrath, hatred, love, pity, desire, recognition, joy, pain: all these are names indicating extreme conditions; the milder and middle stages, and even more particularly the ever active lower stages, escape our attention, and yet it is they which weave the warp and woof of our character and destiny. It often happens that these extreme outbursts —and even the most moderate pleasure or displeasure of which we are actually conscious, whether in partaking of food or listening to a sound, is possibly, if properly estimated, merely an extreme outburst, —destroy the texture and are then violent exceptions, in most cases the consequences of some congestions,—and how easily as such can they [pg 120] mislead the observer! as indeed they mislead the person acting! We are all of us not what we appear to be according to the conditions for which alone we have consciousness and words, and consequently praise and blame. We fail to recognise ourselves after these coarse outbursts which are known to ourselves alone, we draw conclusions from data where the exceptions prove stronger than the rules; we misinterpret ourselves in reading our own ego's pronouncements, which appeared to be so clear. But our opinion of ourselves, this so-called ego which we have arrived at by this wrong method, contributes henceforth to form our character and destiny. 116. The Unknown World of the “Subject.”—What men have found it so difficult to understand from the most ancient times down to the present day is their ignorance in regard to themselves, not merely with respect to good and evil, but something even more essential. The oldest of illusions lives on, namely, that we know, and know precisely in each case, how human action is originated. Not only “God who looks into the heart,” not only the man who acts and reflects upon his action, but everybody does not doubt that he understands the phenomena of action in every one else. “I know what I want and what I have done, I am free and responsible for my act, and I make others responsible for their acts; I can mention by its name every moral possibility and every internal movement which precedes an act,—ye may act as [pg 121] ye will, I understand myself and I understand you all!” Such was what every one thought once upon a time, and almost every one thinks so even now. Socrates and Plato, who in this matter were great sceptics and admirable innovators, were nevertheless intensely credulous in regard to that fatal prejudice, that profound error, which holds that “The right knowledge must necessarily be followed by the right action.” In holding this principle they were still the heirs of the universal folly and presumption that knowledge exists concerning the essence of an action. “It would indeed be dreadful if the comprehension of the essence of a right action were not followed by that right action itself”—this was the only manner in which these great men thought it necessary to demonstrate this idea, the contrary seemed to them to be inconceivable and mad; and nevertheless this contrary corresponds to the naked reality which has been demonstrated daily and hourly from time immemorial. Is it not a “dreadful” truth that all that we know about an act is never sufficient to accomplish it, that the bridge connecting the knowledge of the act with the act itself has never yet been built? Acts are never what they appear to us to be. We have taken great pains to learn that external things are not as they appear to us.—Well! It is the same with internal phenomena. All moral acts are in reality “something different,”—we cannot say anything more about them, and all acts are essentially unknown to us."
"Whether Schopenhauer and Wagner ever really corresponded to the glorified pictures my brother painted of them, both in his letters and other writings, is a question which we can no longer answer in the affirmative. Perhaps what he saw in them was only what he himself wished to be some day. The amount of work my brother succeeded in accomplishing, during his student days, really seems almost incredible. When we examine his record for the years 1865-67, we can scarcely believe it refers to only two years' industry, for at a guess no one would hesitate to suggest four years at least. But in those days, as he himself declares, he still possessed the constitution of a bear. He knew neither what headaches nor indigestion meant, and, despite his short sight, his eyes were able to endure the greatest strain without giving him the smallest trouble. That is why, regardless of seriously interrupting his studies, he was so glad at the thought of becoming a soldier in the forthcoming autumn of 1867; for he was particularly anxious to discover some means of employing his bodily strength. He discharged his duties as a soldier with the utmost mental and physical freshness, was the crack rider among the recruits of his year, and was sincerely sorry when, owing to an accident, he was compelled to leave the colours before the completion of his service. As a result of this accident he had his first dangerous illness. While mounting his horse one day, the beast, which was an uncommonly restive one, suddenly reared, and, causing him to strike his chest sharply against the pommel of the saddle, threw him to the ground. My brother then made a second attempt to mount, and succeeded this time, notwithstanding the fact that he had severely sprained and torn two muscles in his chest, and had seriously bruised the adjacent ribs. For a whole day he did his utmost to pay no heed to the injury, and to overcome the pain it caused him; but in the end he only swooned, and a dangerously acute inflammation of the injured tissues was the result. Ultimately he was obliged to consult the famous specialist, Professor Volkmann, in Halle, who quickly put him right. In October 1868, my brother returned to his studies in Leipzig with double joy. These were his plans: to get his doctor's degree as soon as possible; to proceed to Paris, Italy, and Greece, make a lengthy stay in each place, and then to return to Leipzig in order to settle there as a privat docent. All these plans were, however, suddenly frustrated owing to his premature call to the University of Bale, where he was invited to assume the duties of professor. Some of the philological essays he had written in his student days, and which were published by the Rheinische Museum, had attracted the attention of the Educational Board at Bale. Ratsherr Wilhelm Vischer, as representing this body, appealed to Ritschl for fuller information. Now Ritschl, who had early recognised my brother's extraordinary talents, must have written a letter of such enthusiastic praise (""Nietzsche is a genius: he can do whatever he chooses to put his mind to""), that one of the more cautious members of the council is said to have observed: ""If the proposed candidate be really such a genius, then it were better did we not appoint him; for, in any case, he would only stay a short time at the little University of Bale."" My brother ultimately accepted the appointment, and, in view of his published philological works, he was immediately granted the doctor's degree by the University of Leipzig. He was twenty-four years and six months old when he took up his position as professor in Bale,—and it was with a heavy heart that he proceeded there, for he knew ""the golden period of untrammelled activity"" must cease. He was, however, inspired by the deep wish of being able ""to transfer to his pupils some of that Schopenhauerian earnestness which is stamped on the brow of the sublime man."" ""I should like to be something more than a mere trainer of capable philologists: the present generation of teachers, the care of the growing broods,—all this is in my mind."
"The Wagner diatribe and “The Twilight of the Idols” were published immediately, but “The Antichrist” did not get into type until .I suspect that the delay was due to the influence of the philosopher’s sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, an intelligent and ardent but by no means uniformly judicious propagandist of his ideas. During his dark days of neglect and misunderstanding, when even family and friends kept aloof, Frau Förster-Nietzsche went with him farther than any other, but there were bounds beyond which she, also, hesitated to go, and those bounds were marked by crosses. One notes, in her biography of him—a useful but not always accurate work—an evident desire to purge him of the accusation of mocking at sacred things. He had, she says, great admiration for “the elevating effect of Christianity ... upon the weak and ailing,” and “a real liking for sincere, pious Christians,” and “a tender love for the Founder of Christianity.” All his wrath, she continues, was reserved for “St. Paul and his like,” who perverted the Beatitudes, which Christ intended for the lowly only, into a universal religion which made war upon aristocratic values. Here, obviously, one is addressed by an interpreter who cannot forget that she is the daughter of a Lutheran pastor and the grand-daughter of two others; a touch of conscience gets into her reading of “The Antichrist.” She even hints that the text may have been garbled, after the author’s collapse, by some more sinister heretic. There is not the slightest reason to believe that any such garbling ever took place, nor is there any evidence that their common heritage of piety rested upon the brother as heavily as it rested upon the sister. On the contrary, it must be manifest that Nietzsche, in this book, intended to attack Christianity headlong and with all arms, that for all his rapid writing he put the utmost care into it, and that he wanted it to be printed exactly as it stands. The ideas in it were anything but new to him when he set them down. He had been developing them since the days of his beginning. You will find some of them, clearly recognizable, in the first book he ever wrote, “The Birth of Tragedy.” You will find the most important of all of them —the conception of Christianity as ressentiment—set forth at length in the first part of “The Genealogy of Morals,” published under his own supervision in . And the rest are scattered through the whole vast mass of his notes, sometimes as mere questionings but often worked out very carefully. Moreover, let it not be forgotten that it was Wagner’s yielding to Christian sentimentality in “Parsifal” that transformed Nietzsche from the first among his literary advocates into the most bitter of his opponents. He could forgive every other sort of mountebankery, but not that. “In me,” he once said, “the Christianity of my forbears reaches its logical conclusion. In me the stern intellectual conscience that Christianity fosters and makes paramount turns against Christianity. In me Christianity ... devours itself.” In truth, the present philippic is as necessary to the completeness of the whole of Nietzsche’s system as the keystone is to the arch. All the curves of his speculation lead up to it. What he flung himself against, from beginning to end of his days of writing, was always, in the last analysis, Christianity in some form or other—Christianity as a system of practical ethics, Christianity as a political code, Christianity as metaphysics, Christianity as a gauge of the truth. It would be difficult to think of any intellectual enterprise on his long list that did not, more or less directly and clearly, relate itself to this master enterprise of them all. It was as if his apostasy from the faith of his fathers, filling him with the fiery zeal of the convert, and particularly of the convert to heresy, had blinded him to every other element in the gigantic self-delusion of civilized man. The will to power was his answer to Christianity’s affectation of humility and self-sacrifice; eternal recurrence was his mocking criticism of Christian optimism and millennialism; the superman was his candidate for the place of the Christian ideal of the “good” man, prudently abased before the throne of God."
"Yea; there he is! Come, good devil! Come!” 78. Avenging Justice.—Misfortune and guilt: these two things have been put on one scale by Christianity; so that, when the misfortune which follows a fault is a serious one, this fault is always judged accordingly to be a very heinous one. But this was not the valuation of antiquity, and that is why Greek tragedy—in which misfortune and punishment are discussed at length, and yet in another sense— forms part of the great liberators of the mind to an extent which even the ancients themselves could not realise. They remained ingenuous enough not to set up an “adequate relation” between guilt and misfortune. The guilt of their tragic heroes is, indeed, the little pebble that makes them stumble, and on which account they [pg 082] sometimes happen to break an arm or knock out an eye. Upon this the feeling of antiquity made the comment, “Well, he should have gone his way with more caution and less pride.” It was reserved for Christianity, however, to say: “Here we have a great misfortune, and behind this great misfortune there must lie a great fault, an equally serious fault, though we cannot clearly see it! If, wretched man, you do not feel it, it is because your heart is hardened—and worse than this will happen to you!” Besides this, antiquity could point to examples of real misfortunes, misfortunes that were pure and innocent; it was only with the advent of Christianity that all punishment became well-merited punishment: in addition to this it renders the imagination of the sufferer still more suffering, so that the victim, in the midst of his distress, is seized with the feeling that he has been morally reproved and cast away. Poor humanity! The Greeks had a special word to stand for the feeling of indignation which was experienced at the misfortune of another: among Christian peoples this feeling was prohibited and was not permitted to develop; hence the reason why they have no name for this more virile brother of pity. 79. A Proposal.—If, according to the arguments of Pascal and Christianity, our ego is always hateful, how can we permit and suppose other people, whether God or men, to love it? It would be contrary to all good principles to let ourselves be [pg 083] loved when we know very well that we deserve nothing but hatred—not to speak of other repugnant feelings. “But this is the very Kingdom of Grace.” Then you look upon your love for your neighbour as a grace? Your pity as a grace? Well, then, if you can do all this, there is no reason why you should not go a step further: love yourselves through grace, and then you will no longer find your God necessary, and the entire drama of the Fall and Redemption of mankind will reach its last act in yourselves! 80. The Compassionate Christian.—A Christian's compassion in the presence of his neighbour's suffering has another side to it: viz. his profound suspicion of all the joy of his neighbour, of his neighbour's joy in everything that he wills and is able to do. 81. The Saint's Humanity.—A saint had fallen into the company of believers, and could no longer stand their continually expressed hatred for sin. At last he said to them: “God created all things, except sin: therefore it is no wonder that He does not like it. But man has created sin, and why, then, should he disown this only child of his merely because it is not regarded with a friendly eye by God, its grandfather? Is that human? Honour to whom honour is due—but one's heart and duty must speak, above all, in favour of the child— and only in the second place for the honour of the grandfather!” [pg 084] 82. The Theological Attack.—“You must arrange that with yourself; for your life is at stake!”—Luther it is who suddenly springs upon us with these words and imagines that we feel the knife at our throats. But we throw him off with the words of one higher and more considerate than he: “We need form no opinion in regard to this or that matter, and thus save our souls from trouble. For, by their very nature, the things themselves cannot compel us to express an opinion.” 83."
"What are now to him the ethereal victories and honours to be met with in the realm of proofs and refutations, or the perpetuation of his fame in books, or the thrill of exultation in the soul of the reader? But the institution, on the other hand, is a temple, as he well knows—a temple of stone, a durable edifice, which will keep its god alive with more certainty than the sacrifices of rare and tender souls.17 Perhaps, too, at this period of his life the old thinker will for the first time meet with that love which is fitted for a god rather than for a human being, and his whole nature becomes softened and sweetened in the rays of such a sun, like fruit in autumn. Yes, he grows more divine and beautiful, this great old man,—and nevertheless it is old age and weariness which permit him to ripen in this way, to grow more silent, and to repose in the luminous adulation of a woman. Now it is all up with his former desire—a desire which was superior even to his own ego—for real disciples, followers who would carry on his thought, that is, true opponents. This desire arose from his hitherto undiminished energy, the conscious pride he felt in [pg 371] being able at any time to become an opponent himself,—nay, even the deadly enemy of his own doctrine,—but now his desire is for resolute partisans, unwavering comrades, auxiliary forces, heralds, a pompous train of followers. He is now no longer able to bear that dreadful isolation in which every intellect that advances beyond the others is compelled to live. From this time forward he surrounds himself with objects of veneration, companionship, tenderness, and love; but he also wishes to enjoy the privileges of all religious people, and to worship what he venerates most highly in his little community—he will even go as far as to invent a religion for the purpose of having a community. Thus lives the wise old man, and in living thus he falls almost imperceptibly into such a deplorable proximity to priestly and poetic extravagances that it is difficult to recollect all his wise and severe period of youth, the former rigid morality of his mind, and his truly virile dread of fancies and misplaced enthusiasm. When he was formerly in the habit of comparing himself with the older thinkers, he did so merely that he might measure his weakness against their strength, and that he might become colder and more audacious towards himself; but now he only makes this comparison to intoxicate himself with his own delusions. Formerly he looked forward with confidence to future thinkers, and he even took a delight in imagining himself to be cast into the shade by their brighter light. Now, however, he is mortified to think that he cannot be the last: he endeavours to discover some way of [pg 372] imposing upon mankind, together with the inheritance which he is leaving to them, a restriction of sovereign thinking. He fears and reviles the pride and the love of freedom of individual minds: after him no one must allow his intellect to govern with absolute unrestriction: he himself wishes to remain for ever the bulwark on which the waves of ideas may break—these are his secret wishes, and perhaps, indeed, they are not always secret. The hard fact upon which such wishes are based, however, is that he himself has come to a halt before his teaching, and has set up his boundary stone, his “thus far and no farther.” In canonising himself he has drawn up his own death warrant: from now on his mind cannot develop further. His race is run; the hour-hand stops. Whenever a great thinker tries to make himself a lasting institution for posterity, we may readily suppose that he has passed the climax of his powers, and is very tired, very near the setting of his sun. 543. We must not make Passion an Argument for Truth.—Oh, you kind-hearted and even noble enthusiasts, I know you! You wish to seem right in our eyes as well as in your own, but especially in your own!—and an irritable and subtle evil conscience so often spurs you on against your very enthusiasm! How ingenious you then become in deceiving your conscience, and lulling it to sleep! How you hate honest, simple, and clean souls; how you avoid their innocent glances!"
"160 SELECTED LETTERS OF kind, even including my mother and sister, had an inkling of what I am aiming at, they would have no alternative but to become my natural enemies. This cannot be helped ; the reasons for it lie in the nature of things. It spoils my love of life to live among such people, and I have to exercise considerable selfcontrol in order not to react constantly against this sanctimonious atmosphere of Naumburg (in which I include many uncles and aunts who do not live in Naumburg). Let us, my dear mother, do as we have done hither to, and avoid all these serious questions in our let ters. Moreover, I doubt whether our Lizzie could have read your letter. My spirits and health have once more been very much impaired by the fact that the ghastly affair of last year is once more abroad and adding woe to woe. As to the ultimate outcome of it all, as far as I am concerned, ever since last August I have had the most gloomy forebodings. I am now working like a man who is ""putting his house in order before de parting."" Don't say any more about it. I shall not either, and forgive me if this letter has turned out to be such a melancholy effusion. Your son, FRITZ. NIETZSCHE TO PETER GAST. Sils-Maria, August 16, 1883. DEAR FRIEND : Where do you get all these delightful Epicureaf I mean not only your Epicurea epigrams but every- FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 161 thing reminiscent of the air and fragrance of Epicurus's garden that has emanated from all your letters of late. Oh, I am so badly in need of such things —including that divine feat ""eluding the masses."" For, truth to tell, / am icell nigh crushed to death. But let me change the subject. f The fate of the Island of Ischia1 makes me more and more miserable, for apart from those features about it that concern all men, there is something in the event that hits very near home where I am con cerned and in a peculiarly terrible way. This island was so dear to me; if you have finished the second part of Zarathustra, where I speak of seeking my ""Happy Isles,"" this will be clear to you. ""Cupid dancing with the maidens"" can only be grasped im mediately in Ischia (the girls of Ischia speak of ""Cupido""). Scarcely have I finished my poem than the island goes to bits. You remember that the very hour I passed the first part of Zarathustra for press Wagner died.^ On this occasion, at the corresponding hour, I received news that made me so indignant that there will in all probability be a duel with pistols this autumn.2 Silentium! Dear friend! Meanwhile I have drafted out a plan of a ""morality for Moralists,"" and readjusted and rectified my views in many ways. The unconscious and involuntary congruity of thought and coherence prevalent in the multifarious mass of my later books has astonished me; one cannot escape from oneself; that is why one 'The gigantic earthquake on July ""The Lou Ree affair.— Translator. 28, 1883. 162 SELECTED LETTERS OF should dare to let oneself go ever further in one's own personality. I confess that what I should most like at present would be for some one else to compile a sort of digest of the results of all my thought, and thereby draw a comparison between me and all other thinkers up to my time. Out of a veritable abyss of the most un deserved and most enduring contempt in which the whole of my work and endeavour has lain since the year 1876, I long for a word of wisdom concerning myself. Yours, NIETZSCHE. NIETZSCHE TO PETER GAST. Sils-Maria, August 26, 1883. How your letter overjoyed me once again, my Ve netian friend!"
"If music, as it would seem, was previously known as an Apollonian art, it was, strictly speaking, only as the wave-beat of rhythm, the formative power of which was developed to the representation of Apollonian conditions. The music of Apollo was Doric architectonics in tones, but in merely suggested tones, such as those of the cithara. The very element which forms the essence of Dionysian music (and hence of music in general) is carefully excluded as un-Apollonian; namely, the thrilling power of the tone, the uniform stream of the melos, and the thoroughly incomparable world of harmony. In the Dionysian dithyramb man is incited to the highest exaltation of all his symbolic faculties; something never before experienced struggles for utterance—the annihilation of the veil of Mâyâ, Oneness as genius of the race, ay, of nature. The essence of nature is now to be expressed symbolically; a new world of symbols is required; for once the entire symbolism of the body, not only the symbolism of the lips, face, and speech, but the whole pantomime of dancing which sets all the members into rhythmical motion. Thereupon the other symbolic powers, those of music, in rhythmics, dynamics, and harmony, suddenly become impetuous. To comprehend this collective discharge of all the symbolic powers, a man must have already attained that height of self-abnegation, which wills to express itself symbolically through these powers: the Dithyrambic votary of Dionysus is therefore understood only by those like himself! With what astonishment must the Apollonian Greek have beheld him! With an astonishment, which was all the greater the more it was mingled with the shuddering suspicion that all this was in reality not so very foreign to him, yea, that, like unto a veil, his Apollonian consciousness only hid this Dionysian world from his view. 3. In order to comprehend this, we must take down the artistic structure of the Apollonian culture, as it were, stone by stone, till we behold the foundations on which it rests. Here we observe first of all the glorious Olympian figures of the gods, standing on the gables of this structure, whose deeds, represented in far-shining reliefs, adorn its friezes. Though Apollo stands among them as an individual deity, side by side with others, and without claim to priority of rank, we must not suffer this fact to mislead us. The same impulse which embodied itself in Apollo has, in general, given birth to this whole Olympian world, and in this sense we may regard Apollo as the father thereof. What was the enormous need from which proceeded such an illustrious group of Olympian beings? Whosoever, with another religion in his heart, approaches these Olympians and seeks among them for moral elevation, even for sanctity, for incorporeal spiritualisation, for sympathetic looks of love, will soon be obliged to turn his back on them, discouraged and disappointed. Here nothing suggests asceticism, spirituality, or duty: here only an exuberant, even triumphant life speaks to us, in which everything existing is deified, whether good or bad. And so the spectator will perhaps stand quite bewil- dered before this fantastic exuberance of life, and ask himself what magic potion these madly merry men could have used for enjoying life, so that, wherever they turned their eyes, Helena, the ideal image of their own existence ""floating in sweet sensuality,"" smiled upon them. But to this spectator, already turning backwards, we must call out: ""depart not hence, but hear rather what Greek folk-wisdom says of this same life, which with such inexplicable cheerfulness spreads out before thee."" There is an ancient story that king Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him. When at last he fell into his hands, the king asked what was best of all and most desirable for man. Fixed and immovable, the demon remained silent; till at last, forced by the king, he broke out with shrill laughter into these words: ""Oh, wretched race of a day, children of chance and misery, why do ye compel me to say to you what it were most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is for ever beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. The second best for you, however, is soon to die."" How is the Olympian world of deities related to this folk-wisdom? Even as the rapturous vision of the tortured martyr to his sufferings."
"Now lightning-struck by thee, Thou mocking eye that me in darkness watcheth: —Thus do I lie, Bend myself, twist myself, convulsed With all eternal torture, And smitten By thee, cruellest huntsman, Thou unfamiliar—GOD... Smite deeper! Smite yet once more! Pierce through and rend my heart! What mean’th this torture With dull, indented arrows? Why look’st thou hither, Of human pain not weary, With mischief-loving, godly flash-glances? Not murder wilt thou, But torture, torture? For why—ME torture, Thou mischief-loving, unfamiliar God?— Ha! Ha! Thou stealest nigh In midnight’s gloomy hour?... What wilt thou? Speak! Thou crowdst me, pressest— Ha! now far too closely! Thou hearst me breathing, Thou o’erhearst my heart, Thou ever jealous one! —Of what, pray, ever jealous? Off! Off! For why the ladder? Wouldst thou GET IN? To heart in-clamber? To mine own secretest Conceptions in-clamber? Shameless one! Thou unknown one!—Thief! What seekst thou by thy stealing? What seekst thou by thy hearkening? What seekst thou by thy torturing? Thou torturer! Thou—hangman-God! Or shall I, as the mastiffs do, Roll me before thee? And cringing, enraptured, frantical, My tail friendly—waggle! In vain! Goad further! Cruellest goader! No dog—thy game just am I, Cruellest huntsman! Thy proudest of captives, Thou robber ‘hind the cloud-banks... Speak finally! Thou lightning-veiled one! Thou unknown one! Speak! What wilt thou, highway-ambusher, from—ME? What WILT thou, unfamiliar—God? What? Ransom-gold? How much of ransom-gold? Solicit much—that bid’th my pride! And be concise—that bid’th mine other pride! Ha! Ha! ME—wantst thou? me? —Entire?... Ha! Ha! And torturest me, fool that thou art, Dead-torturest quite my pride? Give LOVE to me—who warm’th me still? Who lov’th me still?— Give ardent fingers Give heartening charcoal-warmers, Give me, the lonesomest, The ice (ah! seven-fold frozen ice For very enemies, For foes, doth make one thirst). Give, yield to me, Cruellest foe, —THYSELF!— Away! There fled he surely, My final, only comrade, My greatest foe, Mine unfamiliar— My hangman-God!... —Nay! Come thou back! WITH all of thy great tortures! To me the last of lonesome ones, Oh, come thou back! All my hot tears in streamlets trickle Their course to thee! And all my final hearty fervour— Up-glow’th to THEE! Oh, come thou back, Mine unfamiliar God! my PAIN! My final bliss! 2 —Here, however, Zarathustra could no longer restrain himself; he took his staff and struck the wailer with all his might. “Stop this,” cried he to him with wrathful laughter, “stop this, thou stage-player! Thou false coiner! Thou liar from the very heart! I know thee well! I will soon make warm legs to thee, thou evil magician: I know well how—to make it hot for such as thou!” —“Leave off,” said the old man, and sprang up from the ground, “strike me no more, O Zarathustra! I did it only for amusement! That kind of thing belongeth to mine art. Thee thyself, I wanted to put to the proof when I gave this performance. And verily, thou hast well detected me! But thou thyself—hast given me no small proof of thyself: thou art HARD, thou wise Zarathustra! Hard strikest thou with thy ‘truths,’ thy cudgel forceth from me—THIS truth!” —“Flatter not,” answered Zarathustra, still excited and frowning, “thou stage-player from the heart! Thou art false: why speakest thou —of truth! Thou peacock of peacocks, thou sea of vanity; WHAT didst thou represent before me, thou evil magician; WHOM was I meant to believe in when thou wailedst in such wise?” “THE PENITENT IN SPIRIT,” said the old man, “it was him—I represented; thou thyself once devisedst this expression— —The poet and magician who at last turneth his spirit against himself, the transformed one who freezeth to death by his bad science and conscience. And just acknowledge it: it was long, O Zarathustra, before thou discoveredst my trick and lie! Thou BELIEVEDST in my distress when thou heldest my head with both thy hands,— —I heard thee lament ‘we have loved him too little, loved him too little!’ Because I so far deceived thee, my wickedness rejoiced in me.” “Thou mayest have deceived subtler ones than I,” said Zarathustra sternly. “I am not on my guard against deceivers; I HAVE TO BE without precaution: so willeth my lot. Thou, however,—MUST deceive: so far do I know thee! Thou must ever be equivocal, trivocal, quadrivocal, and quinquivocal! Even what thou hast now confessed, is not nearly true enough nor false enough for me! Thou bad false coiner, how couldst thou do otherwise!"
"And, having an idea that seemed to him to be novel and original, he stated it in as few words as possible, and then shut down. Sometimes he got it into a hundred words; sometimes it took a thousand; now and then, as in the present case, he developed a series of related ideas into a connected book. But he never wrote a word too many. He never pumped up an idea to make it appear bigger than it actually was. The pedagogues, alas, are not accustomed to that sort of writing in serious fields. They resent it, and sometimes they even try to improve it. There exists, in fact, a huge and solemn tome on Nietzsche by a learned man of America in which all of his brilliancy is painfully translated into the windy phrases of the seminaries. The tome is satisfactorily ponderous, but the meat of the cocoanut is left out: there is actually no discussion of the Nietzschean view of Christianity!... Always Nietzsche daunts the pedants. He employed too few words for them—and he had too many ideas. The present translation of “The Antichrist” is published by agreement with Dr. Oscar Levy, editor of the English edition of Nietzsche. There are two earlier translations, one by Thomas Common and the other by Anthony M. Ludovici. That of Mr. Common follows the text very closely, and thus occasionally shows some essentially German turns of phrase; that of Mr. Ludovici is more fluent but rather less exact. I do not offer my own version on the plea that either of these is useless; on the contrary, I cheerfully acknowledge that they have much merit, and that they helped me at almost every line. I began this new Englishing of the book, not in any hope of supplanting them, and surely not with any notion of meeting a great public need, but simply as a private amusement in troubled days. But as I got on with it I began to see ways of putting some flavour of Nietzsche’s peculiar style into the English, and so amusement turned into a more or less serious labour. The result, of course, is far from satisfactory, but it at least represents a very diligent attempt. Nietzsche, always under the influence of French models, wrote a German that differs materially from any other German that I know. It is more nervous, more varied, more rapid in tempo; it runs to more effective climaxes; it is never stodgy. His marks begin to show upon the writing of the younger Germans of today. They are getting away from the old thunderous manner, with its long sentences and its tedious grammatical complexities. In the course of time, I daresay, they will develop a German almost as clear as French and almost as colourful and resilient as English. I owe thanks to Dr. Levy for his imprimatur, to Mr. Theodor Hemberger for criticism, and to Messrs. Common and Ludovici for showing me the way around many a difficulty. H. L. Mencken. This book belongs to the most rare of men. Perhaps not one of them is yet alive. It is possible that they may be among those who understand my “Zarathustra”: how could I confound myself with those who are now sprouting ears?—First the day after tomorrow must come for me. Some men are born posthumously. The conditions under which any one understands me, and necessarily understands me—I know them only too well. Even to endure my seriousness, my passion, he must carry intellectual integrity to the verge of hardness. He must be accustomed to living on mountain tops—and to looking upon the wretched gabble of politics and nationalism as beneath him. He must have become indifferent; he must never ask of the truth whether it brings profit to him or a fatality to him.... He must have an inclination, born of strength, for questions that no one has the courage for; the courage for the forbidden; predestination for the labyrinth. The experience of seven solitudes. New ears for new music. New eyes for what is most distant. A new conscience for truths that have hitherto remained unheard. And the will to economize in the grand manner—to hold together his strength, his enthusiasm.... Reverence for self; love of self; absolute freedom of self.... Very well, then!"
"He is one of those at whose hands Nietzsche had to suffer most during his lifetime, and at whose hands his philosophy has suffered most since his death. In this respect it may seem a little trivial to speak of extremes meeting; but it is wonderfully apt. Many have adopted Nietzsche’s mannerisms and word-coinages, who had nothing in common with him beyond the ideas and “business” they plagiarised; but the superficial observer and a large portion of the public, not knowing of these things,—not knowing perhaps that there are iconoclasts who destroy out of love and are therefore creators, and that there are others who destroy out of resentment and revengefulness and who are therefore revolutionists and anarchists,—are prone to confound the two, to the detriment of the nobler type. If we now read what the fool says to Zarathustra, and note the tricks of speech he has borrowed from him: if we carefully follow the attitude he assumes, we shall understand why Zarathustra finally interrupts him. “Stop this at once,” Zarathustra cries, “long have thy speech and thy species disgusted me...Out of love alone shall my contempt and my warning bird take wing; BUT NOT OUT OF THE SWAMP!” It were well if this discourse were taken to heart by all those who are too ready to associate Nietzsche with lesser and noiser men,—with mountebanks and mummers. C LII. T A . It is clear that this applies to all those breathless and hasty “tasters of everything,” who plunge too rashly into the sea of independent thought and “heresy,” and who, having miscalculated their strength, find it impossible to keep their head above water. “A little older, a little colder,” says Nietzsche. They soon clamber back to the conventions of the age they intended reforming. The French then say “le diable se fait hermite,” but these men, as a rule, have never been devils, neither do they become angels; for, in order to be really good or evil, some strength and deep breathing is required. Those who are more interested in supporting orthodoxy than in being over nice concerning the kind of support they give it, often refer to these people as evidence in favour of the true faith. C LIII. T R H . This is an example of a class of writing which may be passed over too lightly by those whom poetasters have made distrustful of poetry. From first to last it is extremely valuable as an autobiographical note. The inevitable superficiality of the rabble is contrasted with the peaceful and profound depths of the anchorite. Here we first get a direct hint concerning Nietzsche’s fundamental passion—the main force behind all his new values and scathing criticism of existing values. In verse we are told that pity was his greatest danger. The broad altruism of the law-giver, thinking over vast eras of time, was continually being pitted by Nietzsche, in himself, against that transient and meaner sympathy for the neighbour which he more perhaps than any of his contemporaries had suffered from, but which he was certain involved enormous dangers not only for himself but also to the next and subsequent generations (see Note B., where “pity” is mentioned among the degenerate virtues). Later in the book we shall see how his profound compassion leads him into temptation, and how frantically he struggles against it. In verses and , he tells us to what extent he had to modify himself in order to be endured by his fellows whom he loved (see also verse in “Manly Prudence”). Nietzsche’s great love for his fellows, which he confesses in the Prologue, and which is at the root of all his teaching, seems rather to elude the discerning powers of the average philanthropist and modern man. He cannot see the wood for the trees. A philanthropy that sacrifices the minority of the presentday for the majority constituting posterity, completely evades his mental grasp, and Nietzsche’s philosophy, because it declares Christian values to be a danger to the future of our kind, is therefore shelved as brutal, cold, and hard (see Note on Chapter XXXVI.). Nietzsche tried to be all things to all men; he was sufficiently fond of his fellows for that: in the Return Home he describes how he ultimately returns to loneliness in order to recover from the effects of his experiment. C LIV. T T E T . Nietzsche is here completely in his element."
"But all is alike, nothing is worth while, no seeking is of service, there are no longer any Happy Isles!”— Thus sighed the soothsayer; with his last sigh, however, Zarathustra again became serene and assured, like one who hath come out of a deep chasm into the light. “Nay! Nay! Three times Nay!” exclaimed he with a strong voice, and stroked his beard —“THAT do I know better! There are still Happy Isles! Silence THEREON, thou sighing sorrow-sack! Cease to splash THEREON, thou rain-cloud of the forenoon! Do I not already stand here wet with thy misery, and drenched like a dog? Now do I shake myself and run away from thee, that I may again become dry: thereat mayest thou not wonder! Do I seem to thee discourteous? Here however is MY court. But as regards the higher man: well! I shall seek him at once in those forests: FROM THENCE came his cry. Perhaps he is there hard beset by an evil beast. He is in MY domain: therein shall he receive no scath! And verily, there are many evil beasts about me.”— With those words Zarathustra turned around to depart. Then said the soothsayer: “O Zarathustra, thou art a rogue! I know it well: thou wouldst fain be rid of me! Rather wouldst thou run into the forest and lay snares for evil beasts! But what good will it do thee? In the evening wilt thou have me again: in thine own cave will I sit, patient and heavy like a block— and wait for thee!” “So be it!” shouted back Zarathustra, as he went away: “and what is mine in my cave belongeth also unto thee, my guest! Shouldst thou however find honey therein, well! just lick it up, thou growling bear, and sweeten thy soul! For in the evening we want both to be in good spirits; —In good spirits and joyful, because this day hath come to an end! And thou thyself shalt dance to my lays, as my dancing-bear. Thou dost not believe this? Thou shakest thy head? Well! Cheer up, old bear! But I also—am a soothsayer.” Thus spake Zarathustra. LXIII. TALK WITH THE KINGS. 1. Ere Zarathustra had been an hour on his way in the mountains and forests, he saw all at once a strange procession. Right on the path which he was about to descend came two kings walking, bedecked with crowns and purple girdles, and variegated like flamingoes: they drove before them a laden ass. “What do these kings want in my domain?” said Zarathustra in astonishment to his heart, and hid himself hastily behind a thicket. When however the kings approached to him, he said half-aloud, like one speaking only to himself: “Strange! Strange! How doth this harmonise? Two kings do I see—and only one ass!” Thereupon the two kings made a halt; they smiled and looked towards the spot whence the voice proceeded, and afterwards looked into each other’s faces. “Such things do we also think among ourselves,” said the king on the right, “but we do not utter them.” The king on the left, however, shrugged his shoulders and answered: “That may perhaps be a goat-herd. Or an anchorite who hath lived too long among rocks and trees. For no society at all spoileth also good manners.” “Good manners?” replied angrily and bitterly the other king: “what then do we run out of the way of? Is it not ‘good manners’? Our ‘good society’? Better, verily, to live among anchorites and goat-herds, than with our gilded, false, over-rouged populace—though it call itself ‘good society.’ —Though it call itself ‘nobility.’ But there all is false and foul, above all the blood—thanks to old evil diseases and worse curers. The best and dearest to me at present is still a sound peasant, coarse, artful, obstinate and enduring: that is at present the noblest type. The peasant is at present the best; and the peasant type should be master! But it is the kingdom of the populace—I no longer allow anything to be imposed upon me. The populace, however—that meaneth, hodgepodge. Populace-hodgepodge: therein is everything mixed with everything, saint and swindler, gentleman and Jew, and every beast out of Noah’s ark. Good manners! Everything is false and foul with us. No one knoweth any longer how to reverence: it is THAT precisely that we run away from. They are fulsome obtrusive dogs; they gild palmleaves."
"The Donor's Modesty.—There is such a want of generosity in always posing as the donor and benefactor, and showing one's face when doing so! But to give and bestow, and at the same time to conceal one's name and favour! or not to have a name at all, like nature, in whom this fact is more refreshing to us than anything else —here at last we no more meet with the giver and bestower, no more with a “gracious countenance.”—It is true that you have now forfeited even this comfort, for you have placed a God in this nature —and now everything is once again fettered and oppressed! Well? are we never to have the right of [pg 331] remaining alone with ourselves? are we always to be watched, guarded, surrounded by leading strings and gifts? If there is always some one round about us, the best part of courage and kindness will ever remain impossible of attainment in this world. Are we not tempted to fly to hell before this continual obtrusiveness of heaven, this inevitable supernatural neighbour? Never mind, it was only a dream; let us wake up! 465. At a Meeting.— A. What are you looking at? you have been standing here for a very long time. B. Always the new and the old over again! the helplessness of a thing urges me on to plunge into it so deeply that I end by penetrating to its deepest depths, and perceive that in reality it is not worth so very much. At the end of all experiences of this kind we meet with a kind of sorrow and stupor. I experience this on a small scale several times a day. 466. A Loss of Renown.—What an advantage it is to be able to speak as a stranger to mankind! When they take away our anonymity, and make us famous, the gods deprive us of “half our virtue.” 467. Doubly Patient.—“By doing this you will hurt many people.”—I know that, and I also know [pg 332] that I shall have to suffer for it doubly: in the first place out of pity for their suffering, and secondly from the revenge they will take on me. But in spite of this I cannot help doing what I do. 468. The Kingdom of Beauty is Greater.—We move about in nature, cunning and cheerful, in order that we may surprise everything in the beauty peculiar to it; we make an effort, whether in sunshine or under a stormy sky, to see a distant part of the coast with its rocks, bays, and olive and pine trees under an aspect in which it achieves its perfection and consummation. Thus also we should walk about among men as their discoverers and explorers, meting out to them good and evil in order that we may unveil the peculiar beauty which is seen with some in the sunshine, in others under thunder-clouds, or with others again only in twilight and under a rainy sky. Are we then forbidden to enjoy the evil man like some savage landscape which possesses its own bold and daring lines and luminous effects, while this same man, so long as he behaves well, and in conformity with the law, appears to us to be an error of drawing, and a mere caricature which offends us like a defect in nature?—Yes, this is forbidden: for as yet we have only been permitted to seek beauty in anything that is morally good,—and this is sufficient to explain why we have found so little and have been compelled to look for beauty without either flesh or bones!—in the same way as [pg 333] evil men are familiar with innumerable kinds of happiness which the virtuous never dream of, we may also find among them innumerable types of beauty, many of them as yet undiscovered. 469. The Inhumanity of the Sage.—The heavy and grinding progress of the sage, who in the words of the Buddhist song, “Wanders lonely like the rhinoceros,” now and again stands in need of proofs of a conciliatory and softened humanity, and not only proofs of those accelerated steps, those polite and sociable witticisms; not only of humour and a certain self-mockery, but likewise of contradictions and occasional returns to the predominating inconsistencies."
"It is not for YOU that I have waited here in these mountains.” (“‘Plain language and plainly?’ Good God!” said here the king on the left to himself; “one seeth he doth not know the good Occidentals, this sage out of the Orient! But he meaneth ‘blunt language and bluntly’—well! That is not the worst taste in these days!”) “Ye may, verily, all of you be higher men,” continued Zarathustra; “but for me—ye are neither high enough, nor strong enough. For me, that is to say, for the inexorable which is now silent in me, but will not always be silent. And if ye appertain to me, still it is not as my right arm. For he who himself standeth, like you, on sickly and tender legs, wisheth above all to be TREATED INDULGENTLY, whether he be conscious of it or hide it from himself. My arms and my legs, however, I do not treat indulgently, I DO NOT TREAT MY WARRIORS INDULGENTLY: how then could ye be fit for MY warfare? With you I should spoil all my victories. And many of you would tumble over if ye but heard the loud beating of my drums. Moreover, ye are not sufficiently beautiful and well-born for me. I require pure, smooth mirrors for my doctrines; on your surface even mine own likeness is distorted. On your shoulders presseth many a burden, many a recollection; many a mischievous dwarf squatteth in your corners. There is concealed populace also in you. And though ye be high and of a higher type, much in you is crooked and misshapen. There is no smith in the world that could hammer you right and straight for me. Ye are only bridges: may higher ones pass over upon you! Ye signify steps: so do not upbraid him who ascendeth beyond you into HIS height! Out of your seed there may one day arise for me a genuine son and perfect heir: but that time is distant. Ye yourselves are not those unto whom my heritage and name belong. Not for you do I wait here in these mountains; not with you may I descend for the last time. Ye have come unto me only as a presage that higher ones are on the way to me,— —NOT the men of great longing, of great loathing, of great satiety, and that which ye call the remnant of God; —Nay! Nay! Three times Nay! For OTHERS do I wait here in these mountains, and will not lift my foot from thence without them; —For higher ones, stronger ones, triumphanter ones, merrier ones, for such as are built squarely in body and soul: LAUGHING LIONS must come! O my guests, ye strange ones—have ye yet heard nothing of my children? And that they are on the way to me? Do speak unto me of my gardens, of my Happy Isles, of my new beautiful race—why do ye not speak unto me thereof? This guests’-present do I solicit of your love, that ye speak unto me of my children. For them am I rich, for them I became poor: what have I not surrendered, —What would I not surrender that I might have one thing: THESE children, THIS living plantation, THESE life-trees of my will and of my highest hope!” Thus spake Zarathustra, and stopped suddenly in his discourse: for his longing came over him, and he closed his eyes and his mouth, because of the agitation of his heart. And all his guests also were silent, and stood still and confounded: except only that the old soothsayer made signs with his hands and his gestures. LXXII. THE SUPPER. For at this point the soothsayer interrupted the greeting of Zarathustra and his guests: he pressed forward as one who had no time to lose, seized Zarathustra’s hand and exclaimed: “But Zarathustra! One thing is more necessary than the other, so sayest thou thyself: well, one thing is now more necessary UNTO ME than all others. A word at the right time: didst thou not invite me to TABLE? And here are many who have made long journeys. Thou dost not mean to feed us merely with discourses? Besides, all of you have thought too much about freezing, drowning, suffocating, and other bodily dangers: none of you, however, have thought of MY danger, namely, perishing of hunger-” (Thus spake the soothsayer. When Zarathustra’s animals, however, heard these words, they ran away in terror."
"They themselves know very well that the conquest of Europe or any act of violence is not to be thought of; but they also know that some day or other Europe may, like a ripe fruit, fall into their hands, if they do not clutch at it too eagerly. In the meantime, it is necessary for them to distinguish themselves in all departments of European distinction and to stand in the front rank: until they shall have advanced so far as to determine themselves what distinction shall mean. Then they will be called the pioneers and guides of the Europeans whose modesty they will no longer offend. And then where shall an outlet be found for this abundant wealth of great impressions accumulated during such an extended period and representing Jewish history for every Jewish family, this wealth of passions, virtues, resolutions, resignations, struggles, and conquests of all kinds—where can it find an outlet but in great intellectual men and works! On the day when the Jews will be able to exhibit to us as their own work such jewels and golden vessels as no European nation, with its shorter and less profound experience, can or could produce, when Israel shall have changed its eternal vengeance into [pg 214] an eternal benediction for Europe: then that seventh day will once more appear when old Jehovah may rejoice in Himself, in His creation, in His chosen people—and all, all of us, will rejoice with Him! 206. The Impossible Class.—Poverty, cheerfulness, and independence —it is possible to find these three qualities combined in one individual; poverty, cheerfulness, and slavery—this is likewise a possible combination: and I can say nothing better to the workmen who serve as factory slaves; presuming that it does not appear to them altogether to be a shameful thing to be utilised as they are, as the screws of a machine and the stopgaps, as it were, of the human spirit of invention. Fie on the thought that merely by means of higher wages the essential part of their misery, i.e. their impersonal enslavement, might be removed! Fie, that we should allow ourselves to be convinced that, by an increase of this impersonality within the mechanical working of a new society, the disgrace of slavery could be changed into a virtue! Fie, that there should be a regular price at which a man should cease to be a personality and become a screw instead! Are you accomplices in the present madness of nations which desire above all to produce as much as possible, and to be as rich as possible? Would it not be your duty to present a counterclaim to them, and to show them what large sums of internal value are wasted in the pursuit of such an external object? [pg 215] But where is your internal value when you no longer know what it is to breathe freely; when you have scarcely any command over your own selves, and often feel disgusted with yourselves as with some stale food; when you zealously study the newspapers and look enviously at your wealthy neighbour, made covetous by the rapid rise and fall of power, money, and opinions; when you no longer believe in a philosophy in rags, or in the freedom of spirit of a man who has few needs; when a voluntary and idyllic poverty without profession or marriage, such as should suit the more intellectual ones among you, has become for you an object of derision? On the other hand, the piping of the Socialistic rat-catchers who wish to inspire you with foolish hopes is continually sounding in your ears: they tell you to be ready and nothing further, ready from this day to the next, so that you wait and wait for something to come from outside, though living in all other respects as you lived before—until this waiting is at length changed into hunger and thirst and fever and madness, and the clay of the bestia triumphans at last dawns in all its glory."
"With great difficulty — that is to say, with a splitting headache — I reached Weesen and the Lake of Wallenstatt in the dead of night. I found the Schwert Hotel 'bus and got into it, and it set me down at a fine, comfortable, though completely empty, hotel. On the following morning 1 rose with a headache. My window looked on to the Lake of Wallenstatt, which you can imagine as being like the Lake of Lucerne, but much simpler and not so sublime. Then I went on to Chur, feeling unfor tunately ever more and more ill at ease — so much so that I went through Ragaz, etc., almost without feel ing the slightest interest. I was very glad to be able to leave the train at Chur, refused the post official's offer to drive with him — which after all was the plan —and, putting up at the Hotel Lukmanier, I went straight to bed. It was 10 a. m. I slept well until 2 p. m., felt better and ate a little. A smart and wellinformed waiter recommended me to walk as far as Pessug, a place that was imprinted on my memory by a picture I had seen of it in an illustrated paper. Sabbath peace and an afternoon mood prevailed in the town of Chur. I walked up the main road at a leisurely pace ; as on the previous day, everything lay before me transfigured by the glow of autumn. The scenery behind me was magnificent, while the view constantly changed and widened. After about half an hour's walk I came to a little side path which was beautifully shaded; until then the road had been FKIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 83 rather hot. Then I reached the gorge through which the Rabiusa pours; its beauty defies description. I pressed on over bridges and paths winding round the side of the rock for about half an hour, and at last discovered Bad Passug indicated by a flag. At first it disappointed me, for I had expected a Pension and saw only a second-rate inn, full of Sunday excur sionists from Chur — a crowd of comfortably feasting and coffee-sipping families. The first thing I did was to drink three glassfuls of the saline-soda spring; then the improved state of my head soon allowed me to add a bottle of white Asti Spumante — you remem ber it !— together with the softest of goat's milk cheese. A man with Chinese eyes, who sat at my table, also had some of the Asti to drink ; he thanked me, drank and was much gratified. Then the proprietess handed me a number of analyses of the water, etc. Finally, Sprecher, the proprietor of the watering place, an excitable sort of man, showed me all over his property, the incredibly fantastic position of which I was obliged to acknowledge. Again I drank copious draughts of water from three entirely different springs. The proprietor promised the opening of im portant new springs, and noticing my interest in the matter offered to make me his partner in the founding of a hotel, etc., etc. — irony ! The valley is extremely fascinating for a geologist of unfathomable versatility —aye, and even whimsicality. There are seams of graphite and there is also quartz with ochre. The proprietor even hinted at gold. You can see the most different kinds of stone strata and varieties of stone, bending hither and thither and cracked as in the Axen- 84 SELECTED LETTERS OF stein on the Lake of Lucerne, but here they are much smaller and less rugged. Late in the evening, just as it was getting dusk, I returned delighted with my afternoon, although my mind often wandered back to the reception I ought to have been enjoying at Naumburg.1 A little child with flaxen hair was looking about for nuts, and was very amusing. At last an aged couple came towards me, father and daughter. They had a few words to say, and listened in turn. He was a very old, hoary cabinet maker, had been in Naumburg fifty-two years ago while on his wander ings, and remembered a very hot day there. His son has been a missionary in India since 1858, and is ex pected to come to Chur next year in order to see his father once more. The daughter said she had often been to Egypt, and spoke of Bale as an unpleasant, hot, and stuffy town."
"The “kingdom of God” is not something that men wait for: it had no yesterday and no day after tomorrow, it is not going to come at a “millennium”—it is an experience of the heart, it is everywhere and it is nowhere.... 35. This “bearer of glad tidings” died as he lived and taught—not to “save mankind,” but to show mankind how to live. It was a way of life that he bequeathed to man: his demeanour before the judges, before the officers, before his accusers—his demeanour on the cross. He does not resist; he does not defend his rights; he makes no effort to ward off the most extreme penalty—more, he invites it.... And he prays, suffers and loves with those, in those, who do him evil.... Not to defend one’s self, not to show anger, not to lay blames.... On the contrary, to submit even to the Evil One—to love him.... 36. —We free spirits—we are the first to have the necessary prerequisite to understanding what nineteen centuries have misunderstood—that instinct and passion for integrity which makes war upon the “holy lie” even more than upon all other lies.... Mankind was unspeakably far from our benevolent and cautious neutrality, from that discipline of the spirit which alone makes possible the solution of such strange and subtle things: what men always sought, with shameless egoism, was their own advantage therein; they created the church out of denial of the Gospels.... Whoever sought for signs of an ironical divinity’s hand in the great drama of existence would find no small indication thereof in the stupendous question-mark that is called Christianity. That mankind should be on its knees before the very antithesis of what was the origin, the meaning and the law of the Gospels—that in the concept of the “church” the very things should be pronounced holy that the “bearer of glad tidings” regards as beneath him and behind him—it would be impossible to surpass this as a grand example of worldhistorical irony— 37. —Our age is proud of its historical sense: how, then, could it delude itself into believing that the crude fable of the wonder-worker and Saviour constituted the beginnings of Christianity—and that everything spiritual and symbolical in it only came later? Quite to the contrary, the whole history of Christianity—from the death on the cross onward—is the history of a progressively clumsier misunderstanding of an original symbolism. With every extension of Christianity among larger and ruder masses, even less capable of grasping the principles that gave birth to it, the need arose to make it more and more vulgar and barbarous—it absorbed the teachings and rites of all the subterranean cults of the imperium Romanum, and the absurdities engendered by all sorts of sickly reasoning. It was the fate of Christianity that its faith had to become as sickly, as low and as vulgar as the needs were sickly, low and vulgar to which it had to administer. A sickly barbarism finally lifts itself to power as the church—the church, that incarnation of deadly hostility to all honesty, to all loftiness of soul, to all discipline of the spirit, to all spontaneous and kindly humanity.—Christian values—noble values: it is only we, we free spirits, who have re-established this greatest of all antitheses in values!... 38. —I cannot, at this place, avoid a sigh. There are days when I am visited by a feeling blacker than the blackest melancholy—contempt of man. Let me leave no doubt as to what I despise, whom I despise: it is the man of today, the man with whom I am unhappily contemporaneous. The man of today—I am suffocated by his foul breath!... Toward the past, like all who understand, I am full of tolerance, which is to say, generous self-control: with gloomy caution I pass through whole millenniums of this madhouse of a world, call it “Christianity,” “Christian faith” or the “Christian church,” as you will—I take care not to hold mankind responsible for its lunacies. But my feeling changes and breaks out irresistibly the moment I enter modern times, our times. Our age knows better.... What was formerly merely sickly now becomes indecent—it is indecent to be a Christian today. And here my disgust begins.—I look about me: not a word survives of what was once called “truth”; we can no longer bear to hear a priest pronounce the word."
"To those would they thereby do injury who have power at present: for with those the preaching of death is still most at home. Were it otherwise, then would the tarantulas teach otherwise: and they themselves were formerly the best world-maligners and hereticburners. With these preachers of equality will I not be mixed up and confounded. For thus speaketh justice UNTO ME: “Men are not equal.” And neither shall they become so! What would be my love to the Superman, if I spake otherwise? On a thousand bridges and piers shall they throng to the future, and always shall there be more war and inequality among them: thus doth my great love make me speak! Inventors of figures and phantoms shall they be in their hostilities; and with those figures and phantoms shall they yet fight with each other the supreme fight! Good and evil, and rich and poor, and high and low, and all names of values: weapons shall they be, and sounding signs, that life must again and again surpass itself! Aloft will it build itself with columns and stairs—life itself: into remote distances would it gaze, and out towards blissful beauties— THEREFORE doth it require elevation! And because it requireth elevation, therefore doth it require steps, and variance of steps and climbers! To rise striveth life, and in rising to surpass itself. And just behold, my friends! Here where the tarantula’s den is, riseth aloft an ancient temple’s ruins—just behold it with enlightened eyes! Verily, he who here towered aloft his thoughts in stone, knew as well as the wisest ones about the secret of life! That there is struggle and inequality even in beauty, and war for power and supremacy: that doth he here teach us in the plainest parable. How divinely do vault and arch here contrast in the struggle: how with light and shade they strive against each other, the divinely striving ones.— Thus, steadfast and beautiful, let us also be enemies, my friends! Divinely will we strive AGAINST one another!— Alas! There hath the tarantula bit me myself, mine old enemy! Divinely steadfast and beautiful, it hath bit me on the finger! “Punishment must there be, and justice”—so thinketh it: “not gratuitously shall he here sing songs in honour of enmity!” Yea, it hath revenged itself! And alas! now will it make my soul also dizzy with revenge! That I may NOT turn dizzy, however, bind me fast, my friends, to this pillar! Rather will I be a pillar-saint than a whirl of vengeance! Verily, no cyclone or whirlwind is Zarathustra: and if he be a dancer, he is not at all a tarantula-dancer!— Thus spake Zarathustra. . The people have ye served and the people’s superstition—NOT the truth!—all ye famous wise ones! And just on that account did they pay you reverence. And on that account also did they tolerate your unbelief, because it was a pleasantry and a by-path for the people. Thus doth the master give free scope to his slaves, and even enjoyeth their presumptuousness. But he who is hated by the people, as the wolf by the dogs—is the free spirit, the enemy of fetters, the non-adorer, the dweller in the woods. To hunt him out of his lair—that was always called “sense of right” by the people: on him do they still hound their sharpest-toothed dogs. “For there the truth is, where the people are! Woe, woe to the seeking ones!”—thus hath it echoed through all time. Your people would ye justify in their reverence: that called ye “Will to Truth,” ye famous wise ones! And your heart hath always said to itself: “From the people have I come: from thence came to me also the voice of God.” Stiff-necked and artful, like the ass, have ye always been, as the advocates of the people. And many a powerful one who wanted to run well with the people, hath harnessed in front of his horses—a donkey, a famous wise man. And now, ye famous wise ones, I would have you finally throw off entirely the skin of the lion! The skin of the beast of prey, the speckled skin, and the dishevelled locks of the investigator, the searcher, and the conqueror! Ah! for me to learn to believe in your “conscientiousness,” ye would first have to break your venerating will. Conscientious—so call I him who goeth into God-forsaken wildernesses, and hath broken his venerating heart."
"The Four Virtues.—Honest towards ourselves, and to all and everything friendly to us; brave in the face of our enemy; generous towards the vanquished; polite at all times: such do the four cardinal virtues wish us to be. 557. Marching Against an Enemy.—How pleasant is the sound of even bad music and bad motives when we are setting out to march against an enemy! 558. Not Concealing One's Virtues.—I love those men who are as transparent as water, and who, to use Pope's expression, hide not from view the turbid bottom of their stream. Even they, however, possess a certain vanity, though of a rare and more sublimated kind: some of them would wish us to see nothing but the mud, and to take no notice of the clearness of the water which enables us to look right to the bottom. No less a man than [pg 388] Gautama Buddha has imagined the vanity of these few in the formula, “Let your sins appear before men, and conceal your virtues.” But this would exhibit a disagreeable spectacle to the world—it would be a sin against good taste. 559. ""Nothing in Excess!""—How often is the individual recommended to set up a goal which it is beyond his power to reach, in order that he may at least attain that which lies within the scope of his abilities and most strenuous efforts! Is it really so desirable, however, that he should do so? Do not the best men who try to act according to this doctrine, together with their best deeds, necessarily assume a somewhat exaggerated and distorted appearance on account of their excessive tension? and in the future will not a grey mist of failure envelop the world, owing to the fact that we may see everywhere struggling athletes and tremendous gestures, but nowhere a conqueror crowned with the laurel, and rejoicing in his victory? 560. What we are Free to do.—We can act as the gardeners of our impulses, and—which few people know—we may cultivate the seeds of anger, pity, vanity, or excessive brooding, and make these things fecund and productive, just as we can train a beautiful plant to grow along trellis-work. We may do this with the good or bad taste of a [pg 389] gardener, and as it were, in the French, English, Dutch, or Chinese style. We may let nature take its own course, only trimming and embellishing a little here and there; and finally, without any knowledge or consideration, we may even allow the plants to spring up in accordance with their own natural growth and limitations, and fight out their battle among themselves,—nay, we can even take delight in such chaos, though we may possibly have a hard time with it! All this is at our option: but how many know that it is? Do not the majority of people believe in themselves as complete and perfect facts? and have not the great philosophers set their seal on this prejudice through their doctrine of the unchangeability of character? 561. Letting our Happiness also Shine.—In the same way as painters are unable to reproduce the deep brilliant hue of the natural sky, and are compelled to use all the colours they require for their landscapes a few shades deeper than nature has made them—just as they, by means of this trick, succeed in approaching the brilliancy and harmony of nature's own hues, so also must poets and philosophers, for whom the luminous rays of happiness are inaccessible, endeavour to find an expedient. By picturing all things a shade or two darker than they really are, their light, in which they excel, will produce almost exactly the same effect as the sunlight, and will resemble the light of true happiness.—The pessimist, on the other hand, who paints [pg 390] all things in the blackest and most sombre hues, only makes use of bright flames, lightning, celestial glories, and everything that possesses a glaring, dazzling power, and bewilders our eyes: to him light only serves the purpose of increasing the horror, and of making us look upon things as being more dreadful than they really are. 562. The Settled and the Free.—It is only in the Underworld that we catch a glimpse of that gloomy background of all that bliss of adventure which forms an everlasting halo around Ulysses and his like, rivalling the eternal phosphorescence of the sea,—that background which we can never forget: the mother of Ulysses died of grief and yearning for her child."
"[November 13, 1888.] DEAR FRIEND : . . . My ""Ecce Homo, How One Becomes What One Is,"" came into being between October 15, my birthday and my precious King's day, and November 4, and it was produced with so much of the selfglorification of antiquity and such good spirits that it seems to me too worthy an object to be joked about. The last parts, by-the-bye, are conceived in harmonics which appear to be absent from the Meistersinger, ""the manner of the world-ruler"" . . . The last chapter bears the disagreeable title: ""Why I am a Fatality."" The fact that this is so is proved so con clusively that in the end people are forced to halt in front of me, as before a ""spectre"" and a ""feeling breast.""1 The manuscript in question has already performed the crab-march to the printers. As to the form of the production, I have selected the same as that decided upon for the ""Transvaluation,"" to which it is a firespitting introduction. Herr Carl Spitteler has vented his delight over ""The Case of Wagner"" in the Bund of Berne. He finds extraordinarily apt expressions. In the letter he also congratulated me on having followed up my thoughts to their extremest consequences. He seems to regard my general indictment of modern music as the music of decadence, as a contribution of the 'From Schiller's ""Taucher,"" Verse 21.— Translator. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 247 highest value to the history of civilization. Inciden tally he had first applied to the Kunstwart. I hear from Paris that I may expect an article in the Revue Nouvelle. I was also approached by a fresh sympathizer from St. Petersburg: Princess Anna Dmitrivna T£nicheff . A day or two ago I also re ceived the address of Bizet's charming widow, whom I am especially requested to please by sending a copy of my Wagner pamphlet. Our wonderful little ladies of the Turin aristocracy have planned a Concorso di bellezza, for January; they have grown quite wanton since the portraits of the Spa beauty-prize winners reached here. As early as the spring I noticed a similar contest in the matter of portraits at the last exhibition. Wherein they no doubt feel superior to the whole world outside Turin in the perfect naivete with which they entrust their bosoms to the painter. Our new citoyenne, the beautiful Latitia Bonaparte, recently married to the Duke of Aosta, and now a resident here, will in any case be one of the com pany. . . . Your friend, NIETZSCHE. NIETZSCHE TO PETER GAST. Turin, November 18, 1888. DEAR FRIEND: Your letter has led to consequences. I feel some thing in the nature of an electric shock. . . . Without a moment's delay a little note was despatched to Fritzsch of which the last line read: ""In sincere 248 SELECTED LETTERS OF contempt — Nietzsche."" In two days' time I shall write to him and say, ""Let us come to terms, Herr Fritzsch. In these circumstances it is not possible for me to leave my work in your hands. How much do you want for the whole lot?"" If things can be so arranged that all my works are restored to me and transferred to Naumann it would be a masterly stroke at the present juncture — two years later Herr Fritzsch might want to consider the matter very seriously. . . . Mille grazie! It may be that you have proved yourself to be the founder of my fortune. I reckon that he will ask for £450 ; if I am not utterly at fault he paid Schmeitzner £300. Think of it! I shall be come the owner of ""Zarathustra !"" ""Ecce Homo"" alone will open people's eyes. I am almost falling off my chair with joy. But all this is merely incidental. I am deeply con cerned about a very different question — the question of light opera to which your letter refers. We have not seen each other since the time I received so much enlightenment on this question — oh, so much enlight enment! So long as you confound the idea of light opera with anything in which there is condescension or vulgarity of taste, you are — excuse the drastic ex pression — only a German! . . . Just enquire how Monsieur Audran defines light opera : ""the Para dise of all delicate and refined things,"" sublime sweetstuffs included."
"Nor has the taunt in Aphorism 84 elicited an answer from the quarter whither it was directed; and the “free” (not to say dishonest) interpretation of the Bible by Christian scholars and theologians, which is still proceeding merrily, is now being turned to Nietzsche's own writings. For the philosopher's works are now being “explained away” by German theologians in a most naïve and daring fashion, and with an ability which has no doubt been acquired as the result of centuries of skilful interpretation of the Holy Writ. Nor are professional theologians the only ones who have failed to answer Nietzsche; for in other than religious matters the majority of savants have not succeeded in plumbing his depths. There is, for example, the question of race. Ten years ago, twenty years after the publication of The Dawn of Day, Nietzsche's countrymen enthusiastically hailed a book which has recently been translated into English, Chamberlain's Foundations of [pg vii]the Nineteenth Century. In this book the Teutons are said to be superior to all the other peoples in the world, the reason given being that they have kept their race pure. It is due to this purity of race that they have produced so many great men; for every “good” man in history is a Teuton, and every bad man something else. Considerable skill is exhibited by the author in filching from his opponents the Latins their best trump cards, and likewise the trump card, Jesus Christ, from the Jews; for Jesus Christ, according to Chamberlain's very plausible argument, was not a Jew but an Aryan, i.e. a member of that great family of which the Teutons are a branch. What would Nietzsche have said to this legerdemain? He has constantly pointed out that the Teutons are so far from being a pure race that they have, on the contrary, done everything in their power to ruin even the idea of a pure race for ever. For the Teutons, through their Reformation and their Puritan revolt in England, and the philosophies developed by the democracies that necessarily followed, were the spiritual forbears of the French Revolution and of the Socialistic régime under which we are beginning to suffer nowadays. Thus this noble race has left nothing undone to blot out the last remnant of race in Europe, and it even stands in the way of the creation of a new race. And with such a record in history the Germans write books, eulogising themselves as the salt of the earth, the people of peoples, the race of races, while in truth they are nothing else than nouveaux-riches endeavouring to draw up a decent pedigree for themselves. [pg viii] We know that honesty is not a prerequisite of such pedigrees, and that patriotism may be considered as a good excuse even for a wrong pedigree; but the race-pandemonium that followed the publication of Mr. Chamberlain's book in Germany was really a very unwise proceeding in view of the false and misleading document produced. What, it may be asked again, would Nietzsche have said if he had heard his countrymen screaming odes to their own glory as the “flower of Europe”? He would assuredly have dismissed their exalted pretensions with a good-natured smile; for his study of history had shown him that even slaves must have their saturnalia now and then. But as to his philosophical answer there can be no doubt; for in Aphorism 272 of The Dawn of Day there is a single sentence which completely refutes the view of modern racemongers like Chamberlain and his followers: “It is probable,” we read, “that there are no pure races, but only races which have become purified, and even these are extremely rare.” There are even stronger expressions to be met with in “Peoples and Countries” (Aphorism 20; see the Genealogy of Morals, p. 226): “What quagmires and mendacity must there be about if it is possible, in the modern European hotch-potch, to raise the question of ‘race’!” and again, in Aphorism 21: “Maxim— to associate with no man who takes any part in the mendacious race-swindle.” A man like Nietzsche, who makes so little impression upon mankind in general, is certainly not, as some people have thought and openly said, a public danger, so the guardians of the State need not [pg ix] be uneasy."
"What the “glad tidings” tell us is simply that there are no more contradictions; the kingdom of heaven belongs to children; the faith that is voiced here is no more an embattled faith—it is at hand, it has been from the beginning, it is a sort of recrudescent childishness of the spirit. The physiologists, at all events, are familiar with such a delayed and incomplete puberty in the living organism, the result of degeneration. A faith of this sort is not furious, it does not denounce, it does not defend itself: it does not come with “the sword”—it does not realize how it will one day set man against man. It does not manifest itself either by miracles, or by rewards and promises, or by “scriptures”: it is itself, first and last, its own miracle, its own reward, its own promise, its own “kingdom of God.” This faith does not formulate itself—it simply lives, and so guards itself against formulae. To be sure, the accident of environment, of educational background gives prominence to concepts of a certain sort: in primitive Christianity one finds only concepts of a Judaeo-Semitic character (—that of eating and drinking at the last supper belongs to this category—an idea which, like everything else Jewish, has been badly mauled by the church). But let us be careful not to see in all this anything more than symbolical language, semantics[ ] an opportunity to speak in parables. It is only on the theory that no work is to be taken literally that this anti-realist is able to speak at all. Set down among Hindus he would have made use of the concepts of Sankhya,[ ] and among Chinese he would have employed those of Lao-tse[ ]—and in neither case would it have made any difference to him.—With a little freedom in the use of words, one might actually call Jesus a “free spirit”[ ]—he cares nothing for what is established: the word killeth, [ ] whatever is established killeth. The idea of “life” as an experience, as he alone conceives it, stands opposed to his mind to every sort of word, formula, law, belief and dogma. He speaks only of inner things: “life” or “truth” or “light” is his word for the innermost —in his sight everything else, the whole of reality, all nature, even language, has significance only as sign, as allegory.—Here it is of paramount importance to be led into no error by the temptations lying in Christian, or rather ecclesiastical prejudices: such a symbolism par excellence stands outside all religion, all notions of worship, all history, all natural science, all worldly experience, all knowledge, all politics, all psychology, all books, all art—his “wisdom” is precisely a pure ignorance[ ] of all such things. He has never heard of culture; he doesn’t have to make war on it—he doesn’t even deny it.... The same thing may be said of the state, of the whole bourgeoise social order, of labour, of war—he has no ground for denying “the world,” for he knows nothing of the ecclesiastical concept of “the world”.... Denial is precisely the thing that is impossible to him.—In the same way he lacks argumentative capacity, and has no belief that an article of faith, a “truth,” may be established by proofs (—his proofs are inner “lights,” subjective sensations of happiness and self-approval, simple “proofs of power”—). Such a doctrine cannot contradict: it doesn’t know that other doctrines exist, or can exist, and is wholly incapable of imagining anything opposed to it.... If anything of the sort is ever encountered, it laments the “blindness” with sincere sympathy—for it alone has “light”—but it does not offer objections.... [ ] The word Semiotik is in the text, but it is probable that Semantik is what Nietzsche had in mind. [ ] One of the six great systems of Hindu philosophy. [ ] The reputed founder of Taoism. [ ] Nietzsche’s name for one accepting his own philosophy. [ ] That is, the strict letter of the law—the chief target of Jesus’s early preaching. [ ] A reference to the “pure ignorance” (reine Thorheit) of Parsifal. 33. In the whole psychology of the “Gospels” the concepts of guilt and punishment are lacking, and so is that of reward."
"Should one lay hold of them, then do they raise a dust like floursacks, and involuntarily: but who would divine that their dust came from corn, and from the yellow delight of the summer fields? When they give themselves out as wise, then do their petty sayings and truths chill me: in their wisdom there is often an odour as if it came from the swamp; and verily, I have even heard the frog croak in it! Clever are they—they have dexterous fingers: what doth MY simplicity pretend to beside their multiplicity! All threading and knitting and weaving do their fingers understand: thus do they make the hose of the spirit! Good clockworks are they: only be careful to wind them up properly! Then do they indicate the hour without mistake, and make a modest noise thereby. Like millstones do they work, and like pestles: throw only seedcorn unto them!—they know well how to grind corn small, and make white dust out of it. They keep a sharp eye on one another, and do not trust each other the best. Ingenious in little artifices, they wait for those whose knowledge walketh on lame feet,—like spiders do they wait. I saw them always prepare their poison with precaution; and always did they put glass gloves on their fingers in doing so. They also know how to play with false dice; and so eagerly did I find them playing, that they perspired thereby. We are alien to each other, and their virtues are even more repugnant to my taste than their falsehoods and false dice. And when I lived with them, then did I live above them. Therefore did they take a dislike to me. They want to hear nothing of any one walking above their heads; and so they put wood and earth and rubbish betwixt me and their heads. Thus did they deafen the sound of my tread: and least have I hitherto been heard by the most learned. All mankind’s faults and weaknesses did they put betwixt themselves and me:—they call it “false ceiling” in their houses. But nevertheless I walk with my thoughts ABOVE their heads; and even should I walk on mine own errors, still would I be above them and their heads. For men are NOT equal: so speaketh justice. And what I will, THEY may not will!— Thus spake Zarathustra. . “Since I have known the body better”—said Zarathustra to one of his disciples—“the spirit hath only been to me symbolically spirit; and all the ‘imperishable’—that is also but a simile.” “So have I heard thee say once before,” answered the disciple, “and then thou addedst: ‘But the poets lie too much.’ Why didst thou say that the poets lie too much?” “Why?” said Zarathustra. “Thou askest why? I do not belong to those who may be asked after their Why. Is my experience but of yesterday? It is long ago that I experienced the reasons for mine opinions. Should I not have to be a cask of memory, if I also wanted to have my reasons with me? It is already too much for me even to retain mine opinions; and many a bird flieth away. And sometimes, also, do I find a fugitive creature in my dovecote, which is alien to me, and trembleth when I lay my hand upon it. But what did Zarathustra once say unto thee? That the poets lie too much?—But Zarathustra also is a poet. Believest thou that he there spake the truth? Why dost thou believe it?” The disciple answered: “I believe in Zarathustra.” But Zarathustra shook his head and smiled.— Belief doth not sanctify me, said he, least of all the belief in myself. But granting that some one did say in all seriousness that the poets lie too much: he was right—WE do lie too much. We also know too little, and are bad learners: so we are obliged to lie. And which of us poets hath not adulterated his wine? Many a poisonous hotchpotch hath evolved in our cellars: many an indescribable thing hath there been done. And because we know little, therefore are we pleased from the heart with the poor in spirit, especially when they are young women! And even of those things are we desirous, which old women tell one another in the evening. This do we call the eternally feminine in us."
"[24] In the sea of pleasure's Billowing roll, In the ether-waves Knelling and toll, In the world-breath's Wavering whole— To drown in, go down in— Lost in swoon—greatest boon! 23. He who wishes to test himself rigorously as to how he is related to the true æsthetic hearer, or whether he belongs rather to the community of the Socrato-critical man, has only to enquire sincerely concerning the sentiment with which he accepts the wonder represented on the stage: whether he feels his historical sense, which insists on strict psychological causality, insulted by it, whether with benevolent concession he as it were admits the wonder as a phenomenon intelligible to childhood, but relinquished by him, or whether he experiences anything else thereby. For he will thus be enabled to determine how far he is on the whole capable of understanding myth, that is to say, the concentrated picture of the world, which, as abbreviature of phenomena, cannot dispense with wonder. It is probable, however, that nearly every one, upon close examination, feels so disintegrated by the critico-historical spirit of our culture, that he can only perhaps make the former existence of myth credible to himself by learned means through intermediary abstractions. Without myth, however, every culture loses its healthy, creative natural power: it is only a horizon encompassed with myths which rounds off to unity a social movement. It is only by myth that all the powers of the imagination and of the Apollonian dream are freed from their random rovings. The mythical figures have to be the invisibly omnipresent genii, under the care of which the young soul grows to maturity, by the signs of which the man gives a meaning to his life and struggles: and the state itself knows no more powerful unwritten law than the mythical foundation which vouches for its connection with religion and its growth from mythical ideas. Let us now place alongside thereof the abstract man proceeding independently of myth, the abstract education, the abstract usage, the abstract right, the abstract state: let us picture to ourselves the lawless roving of the artistic imagination, not bridled by any native myth: let us imagine a culture which has no fixed and sacred primitive seat, but is doomed to exhaust all its possibilities, and has to nourish itself wretchedly from the other cultures—such is the Present, as the result of Socratism, which is bent on the destruction of myth. And now the myth-less man remains eternally hungering among all the bygones, and digs and grubs for roots, though he have to dig for them even among the remotest antiquities. The stupendous historical exigency of the unsatisfied modern culture, the gathering around one of countless other cultures, the consuming desire for knowledge—what does all this point to, if not to the loss of myth, the loss of the mythical home, the mythical source? Let us ask ourselves whether the feverish and so uncanny stirring of this culture is aught but the eager seizing and snatching at food of the hungerer—and who would care to contribute anything more to a culture which cannot be appeased by all it devours, and in contact with which the most vigorous and wholesome nourishment is wont to change into ""history and criticism""? We should also have to regard our German character with despair and sorrow, if it had already become inextricably entangled in, or even identical with this culture, in a similar manner as we can observe it to our horror to be the case in civilised France; and that which for a long time was the great advantage of France and the cause of her vast preponderance, to wit, this very identity of people and culture, might compel us at the sight thereof to congratulate ourselves that this culture of ours, which is so questionable, has hitherto had nothing in common with the noble kernel of the character of our people. All our hopes, on the contrary, stretch out longingly towards the perception that beneath this restlessly palpitating civilised life and educational convulsion there is concealed a glorious, intrinsically healthy, primeval power, which, to be sure, stirs vigorously only at intervals in stupendous moments, and then dreams on again in view of a future awakening. It is from this abyss that the German Reformation came forth: in the choral- hymn of which the future melody of German music first resounded."
"But like the snout of the boar shall my word grub up the basis of your souls; a ploughshare will I be called by you. All the secrets of your heart shall be brought to light; and when ye lie in the sun, grubbed up and broken, then will also your falsehood be separated from your truth. For this is your truth: ye are TOO PURE for the filth of the words: vengeance, punishment, recompense, retribution. Ye love your virtue as a mother loveth her child; but when did one hear of a mother wanting to be paid for her love? It is your dearest Self, your virtue. The ring’s thirst is in you: to reach itself again struggleth every ring, and turneth itself. And like the star that goeth out, so is every work of your virtue: ever is its light on its way and travelling—and when will it cease to be on its way? Thus is the light of your virtue still on its way, even when its work is done. Be it forgotten and dead, still its ray of light liveth and travelleth. That your virtue is your Self, and not an outward thing, a skin, or a cloak: that is the truth from the basis of your souls, ye virtuous ones! — But sure enough there are those to whom virtue meaneth writhing under the lash: and ye have hearkened too much unto their crying! And others are there who call virtue the slothfulness of their vices; and when once their hatred and jealousy relax the limbs, their “justice” becometh lively and rubbeth its sleepy eyes. And others are there who are drawn downwards: their devils draw them. But the more they sink, the more ardently gloweth their eye, and the longing for their God. Ah! their crying also hath reached your ears, ye virtuous ones: “What I am NOT, that, that is God to me, and virtue!” And others are there who go along heavily and creakingly, like carts taking stones downhill: they talk much of dignity and virtue— their drag they call virtue! And others are there who are like eight-day clocks when wound up; they tick, and want people to call ticking—virtue. Verily, in those have I mine amusement: wherever I find such clocks I shall wind them up with my mockery, and they shall even whirr thereby! And others are proud of their modicum of righteousness, and for the sake of it do violence to all things: so that the world is drowned in their unrighteousness. Ah! how ineptly cometh the word “virtue” out of their mouth! And when they say: “I am just,” it always soundeth like: “I am just— revenged!” With their virtues they want to scratch out the eyes of their enemies; and they elevate themselves only that they may lower others. And again there are those who sit in their swamp, and speak thus from among the bulrushes: “Virtue—that is to sit quietly in the swamp. We bite no one, and go out of the way of him who would bite; and in all matters we have the opinion that is given us.” And again there are those who love attitudes, and think that virtue is a sort of attitude. Their knees continually adore, and their hands are eulogies of virtue, but their heart knoweth naught thereof. And again there are those who regard it as virtue to say: “Virtue is necessary”; but after all they believe only that policemen are necessary. And many a one who cannot see men’s loftiness, calleth it virtue to see their baseness far too well: thus calleth he his evil eye virtue.— And some want to be edified and raised up, and call it virtue: and others want to be cast down,—and likewise call it virtue. And thus do almost all think that they participate in virtue; and at least every one claimeth to be an authority on “good” and “evil.” But Zarathustra came not to say unto all those liars and fools: “What do YE know of virtue! What COULD ye know of virtue!”— But that ye, my friends, might become weary of the old words which ye have learned from the fools and liars: That ye might become weary of the words “reward,” “retribution,” “punishment,” “righteous vengeance.”— That ye might become weary of saying: “That an action is good is because it is unselfish.” Ah! my friends!"