The Outsider (24 page)

Such an experience is not strange to thinkers; James quotes John Stuart Mill
’
s case, which has much in common with this, and in the next chapter we shall examine early experiences of Tolstoy that resemble it closely. Nietzsche experienced it. More than one of his books tell us about it obliquely; we shall also touch on those in due course. Particularly there is a passage in
The Joyful Wisdom
that speaks of
‘
pn.in
...
that compels us philosophers to descend into our ultimate depths and divest ourselves of all trust and all good nature wherein we have formerly installed our humanity. I doubt whether such pain improves us, but I know it
deepens
us.
’
¹³
Nietzsche was used to being alone. He regarded it as part of the destiny of the man of genius. His hero, Schopenhauer, convinced him of it when he was barely twenty, and although he came later to reject Schopenhauer, he never rebelled against his destiny of aloneness.

Nietzsche read Schopenhauer at Leipzig University in 1865.

It was Schopenhauer who had informed a friend, when he was still in his teens:
‘
Life is a sorry affair, and I am determined to spend it in reflecting on it.
’
We have an account of Nietzsche
’
s first reading of the
^‘
gloomy philosopher
’
that affords us a moving glimpse of the
‘
artist as a young man
’
:

In young people, if they have a tendency to melancholy, ill humours and annoyances of a personal kind take on a general character. At the time, I was hanging in the air with a number of painful experiences and disappointments, without help, without fundamental beliefs. In the happy seclusion of my rooms I was able to gather myself together.... One day I happened to find this book in old Rohn
’
s secondhand book shop
...
picked it up and turned over the pages. I don
’
t know what demon whispered to me,
‘
Take this book home with you.
’
... At home, I threw myself into the corner of the sofa, and began to let that forceful, gloomy genius work upon me. Here, where, every line cried renunciation, denial, resignation, here I saw a mirror in which I observed the world, life and my own soul in frightful grandeur. Here there gazed at me the full, unbiased eye of Art, here I saw sickness and healing, exile and refuge, heaven and hell. The need to know oneself, even to gnaw at oneself, laid a powerful hold on me.
...
There remain the uneasy, melancholic pages of my diary for that time
...
with their desperate looking-upwards ... for the reshaping of the whole kernel of man. Even bodily penances were not lacking. For example, for 14 days on end, I forced myself to go to bed at 2 o
’
clock and get up at 6 o
’
clock. A nervous irritability overcame me...
¹⁴

We see that, as with Lawrence, intellectual awakening and physical penance go together. But more important is the change in Nietzsche
’
s way of regarding himself. Depressed, wretched, with a feeling of imprisonment in his brain and body, his earlier enthusiasm for Greek philosophy offered him no mirror to see his own face. Schopenhauer
’
s philosophy did. It confirmed what he felt about the nature of the world and his place in it. Schopenhauer gave Nietzsche that
detachment from himself
which is the first condition of self-knowledge.

There are two vital experiences in Nietzsche
’
s life that I shall refer to several times, and which I may as well quote here
together (although they are separated by several years); both are characteristic of Nietzsche in the way that the candle-flame episode was characteristic of Van Gogh. The first is related in a letter of 1865 to his friend Von Gersdorf
f
:

Yesterday an oppressive storm hung over the sky, and I hurried to a neighbouring hill called Leutch. ... At the top I found a hut, where a man was killing two
kid goats
while his son watched him. The storm broke with a tremendous crash, discharging thunder and hail, and I had an indescribable sense of well-being and zest.
...
Lightning and tempest are different worlds, free powers, without morality.
Pure Will, without the confusions of intellect—how happy, how free.
¹⁵

The experience seems simple enough, and yet its effect on his way of thinking was far-reaching. Normally the sight of blood would have been unpleasant to him; now, the exhilaration of the storm combined somehow with the smell of blood, the flash of the knife, the fascinated child looking on; and the result was the sudden intuition of pure Will, free of the troubles and perplexities of intellect: an intuition which was release from the
‘
thought-riddled nature
⁵
which had so far been his chief trouble.

The second episode happened some years later, during the Franco-Prussian War, when Nietzsche was serving as an orderly in the ambulance corps. He told it to his sister in later life, when she asked him once about the origin of his idea of the Will to Power.

For weeks Nietzsche had attended the sick and wounded on the battlefields until the sight of blood and gangrened limbs had swallowed up his horror into a numbness of
fa
tigue. One evening, after a hard day
’
s work with the wounded, he- was entering a small town near Strasbourg, on foot and alone. He heard the sound of approaching hoof beats and stood back under the wall to allow the regiment to pass. First the cavalry rode by at top speed, and then behind them marched the foot soldiers. It was Nietzsche
’
s old regiment. As he stood and watched them passing, these men going to battle, perhaps to death, the conviction came again that
‘
the strongest and highest will to life does not lie in the puny struggle to exist, but in the Will to war, the Will to Power....
’

Both experiences must be examined carefully and without prejudice. In a sense they were
‘
mystical experiences
’
. Normally Nietzsche was imprisoned in the
‘
thought-riddled nature
’
. These experiences point to an exaltation of Life. In Blake
’
s phrase: Energy is eternal delight. Tree powers without morality
’
,
‘
pure Will
’
. Such phrases are the foundation of Nietzsche
’
s philosophy, a memory of a mystical experience in which an unhealthy student saw a vision of complete health, free of his body
’
s limitations, free of the stupidity of personality and thought. This was Nietzsche
’
s profoundest knowledge. It is introduced into the first pages of his first book,
The Birth of Tragedy,
written when Nietzsche was a young professor at Basle University:

... the blissful ecstasy that arises from the innermost depths of man, ay, of nature, at this same collapse of the
principium individuations,
and we shall gain an insight into the Dionysian, which is brought into closest ken, perhaps, by the analogy of
drunkenness.
It is either under the influence of the narcotic draught, of which the hymns of all primitive men and peoples tell us, or by the powerful approach of Spring penetrating all nature with joy, that those Dionysian emotions awake, in which the subject vanishes to complete forgetfulness.
¹⁶

Nietzsche
knew
this emotion; it became the acid test by which he judged everything. According to Nietzsche, Socrates never knew it; therefore (he shocked the academic world by announcing) Socrates represents the decay of Greek culture; its apex had been the earlier worship of Bacchus, the god of raw, upsurging vitality. He applied the same test to most of the philosophers and literary men of his day; none of them survived it except Schopenhauer (and the day would come when even Schopenhauer would get kicked after the rest). And so, at the age of twenty-eight, Nietzsche stood alone, except for the two men for whom he still felt respect: Schopenhauer and Wagner. Three men against the world
...
but what men!

Nietzsche had known Wagner personally since 1868; he had met him in Leipzig before he was appointed professor at Basle when Wagner was fifty-nine, Nietzsche twenty-four. At Basle, Nietzsche was able to follow up the acquaintance, which soon developed into a warm friendship. Wagner was living at
Tribschen, on the Lake of Lucerne, working on the composition of
The Ring;
his companion there was Cosima von Biilow, daughter of Franz Liszt, who had deserted her husband to live with Wagner. In their unconventional household, Nietzsche felt at home at last; he and Wagner frequently sat up talking until the early hours of the morning. It was here that Wagner read Nietzsche his essay,
‘
On the State and Religion
’
, with its doctrine that religion and patriotism are indispensable as
‘
opiums of the people
’
; that only the King stands above it all, with the courage to suffer, to reject the common delusions, sustained by art
‘
that makes life appear like a game and withdraws us from the common fate
’
. (Only ten years later, Dostoevsky was to project the same idea into
The Brothers Karamazov,
substituting for the King his Grand Inquisitor.)

Nietzsche felt Wagner was a brother spirit; Wagner thought of Nietzsche as a brilliant young disciple. Both were wrong. The day would come when Nietzsche would write a pamphlet exalting Bizet above Wagner, and Wagner would write a pamphlet to prove that Nietzsche was a Jew. Those who, like myself, read Nietzsche unstintedly and listen to Wagner whenever they get the chance, may wonder why two such men had to fall out and denounce each other. The answer is that Nietzsche was a tireless poet-philosopher who never ceased to want to transcend himself, while Wagner (in 1868) was a very successful musician who was perfectly satisfied with himself as he was. The self-surmounter
[
Obtrganger,
literally ‘over-goer’ or ‘self-surmounter’]
can never put up with the man who has ceased to be dissatisfied with himself. One day Nietzsche would hear
Die Meistersinger
and be aware of nothing but self-satisfaction in the violins and French horns. And the prophet Wagner would feel bitter about the apostacy of his one-time disciple.

But in 1868 the two were on the best of terms; their capacity for enthusiasm obscured their basic unlikeness. Nietzsche added a chapter to his
Birth of Tragedy
to hail Wagner as the new artistic Messiah, and Wagner returned the compliment by declaring the book one of the finest he had ever read.

Nietzsche
’
s academic colleagues were less complimentary; they expected Nietzsche to write like a professor, and when he wrote like a prophet they all rounded on him and called him a conceited upstart. Nietzsche was unlucky; it would have taken
him another ten years establishing himself as a professor before such weighty
ex cathedra
pronouncements could be taken seriously. As a young man of genius, he could hardly be expected to realize this. But it is a pity he didn
’
t, for the failure to size up the situation would eventually cost him his sanity. The life-long persecution had begun. He would be driven further into his manner of dogmatic self-assertion by the opposition of diehards who considered him half-insane, until the chapters of his last book would be headed:
‘
Why am I so Wise?
’
,
‘
Why am I so Clever?
’
,
‘
Why I Write such Excellent Books
’
.

The remainder of Nietzsche
’
s life can be divided into three periods.
The Birth of Tragedy
exalted life above thought:
‘
Down with thought—long live life!
’
The books of the next ten years reversed the ideal:
‘
Down with life—long live thought!
’
Socrates is reinstated; truth becomes the only important aim. Then, at the time when ill-health forced him to retire from University duties, another change began with
The Joyful Wisdom
and
Thus Spake Zarathustra,
and again
‘
energy is eternal delight
’
. And so it was to the end.

The end came in 1899 (th
^e
same
Y
^ear
as
Van Gogh
’
s collapse). He began writing strange letters, signing them
‘
Caesar
’
and
‘
The King of Naples
’
and, more significantly,
‘
the crucified one
’
. His last letter to Cosima Wagner read:
‘
Ariadne, I love thee. Dionysus.
’
It was complete mental collapse. Nietzsche was insane until his death, ten years later.