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There are few men that I have so uniformly praised in my life as you. Pardon! What right have I to "praise" you ! Meanwhile I have for years lived a little too near 276 SELECTED LETTERS OF to death, and what is worse — to pain. It seems my fate to be tormented and burnt as if by a slow fire; however, I know nothing of the sagacity "that makes one lose one's wits through it all." I will make no mention of the dangerous nature of my emotions, but this I must say, the altered manner in which I think and feel and which has been expressed even in my writings during the last six years, has sustained me in life and almost made me quite healthy. What do I care when my friends assert that my present attitude of a "free spirit" is an eccentric pose, a resolve made, as it wrere, with clenched teeth and wrung by force and imposed upon my genuine inclinations? So be it, let it be a "second nature" : but I will prove yet that with this second nature alone was I able to become possessed of my first nature. That is what I think of myself : as a matter of fact the whole world thinks very badly of me. My visit to Germany this year — a break in the midst of my profound solitude — taught me a good deal and fright ened me not a little. I found the dear German beast ready to spring at me — I am not "moral enough" for them any longer. In short, I am once more an anchorite, and more so than ever before, and consequently I am thinking out something new. It seems to me that the state of pregnancy is the only one that binds us ever anew to life. Well, then, I am what I have always been, one who respects you from his heart. Your devoted, DR. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE. [Santa Margherita Ligure (Italia) poste restante.] FEIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 277 NIETZSCHE TO HANS VON BULOW. [Venice, October 22, 1887] MY DEAR SIR : Once upon a time I sent you a piece of my music and you passed sentence of death upon it in the most justifiable manner possible in rebus musicis et musicantibus. And now, in spite of all that, I dare to send you something else — a Hymn to Life, to which I at tach all the more the hope that it will be allowed to live. One day either in the near or the remote future, it will be sung to my memory, to the memory of a philosopher who had no contemporaries, and who did not even wish to have them. Does he deserve it? . . . Be this as it may, it is quite possible that I may have learnt something during the last ten years, even as a musician. Always as of old, your devoted friend, DR. F. NIETZSCHE. MARIE VON BULOW (NfiE SCHANZER) TO NIETZSCHE. DEAR SIR : Hamburg, October 26, 1887. Alsterglacis. 10. During the course of this week my husband has been so overwhelmed with work that he has not been able to answer your kind letter himself, much less read the music you were good enough to send him. As I number myself among your admirers, dear sir— "at least, in so far as my limited intelligence permits" — I take the liberty of writing you these few lines 278 SELECTED LETTERS OF on Billow's behalf and conveying to you his regret at being unable to give any more satisfactory reply. With the expression of our deepest respect, I am, your devoted friend, MARIE VON BULOW. BURCKHARDT TO NIETZSCHE. Bale, February 25, 1874. MY DEAR COLLEAGUE : While thanking you most sincerely for the "Thoughts Out of Season," you so kindly sent me, I can for the present say only a few words about the work as the result of a rapid survey. As a matter of fact I have no right even to this, for the work is one which exacts very mature and careful consideration, but the subject lies so near one's heart that one is tempted to say something at once. In the first place my poor brain has never been able to reflect nearly deeply enough upon the ultimate principles, aims, and desiderata of the science of history, as you have been able to do.

As a teacher and a university lecturer I am entitled to say that I have never taught history for the sake of what is pathetically called Universal History, but essentially merely as a preliminary subject. I had to make my pupils familiar with that framework with which they could not dispense in the pursuit of all their other studies, if everything was not to hang meaninglessly in mid-air. I have done the best I could to guide them to an independent assimilation of the past — in whatever form — and to prevent this form of study FRIEDBICH NIETZSCHE 279 being distasteful to them. My desire was to enable them to pluck the fruit with their own hands. Nor did I ever dream of rearing a breed of scholars or disciples in the narrow sense; I merely aimed at in spiring each of my students with one desire and con viction — namely, that it was feasible and justifiable for him to make his own that portion of the past which was particularly suited to his own individuality, and that there was a chance of his deriving some enjoy ment from the process. I am well aware that such aspirations may be condemned as leading to amateurishness, and I con sole myself with the thought. At my advanced age one has to be grateful to Heaven if one has found, even for the particular institution one belongs to in concrete, an approximative guiding principle in re gard to teaching. I do not mean this as a vindication, nor do you, my dear colleague, expect anything of the sort from me. I mean it simply as a sort of rapid reflection upon that for which one has hitherto striven and con centrated all one's will. Your kind quotation of me on p. 29 has somewhat disturbed me.1 It occurred to me when I read it that the metaphor was after all not quite my own, and that Schnase may once have expressed himself in that way. Well, I only hope that no one will take me to task about it. This time you will stir a large number of readers inasmuch as you have brought sharply into focus a truly tragic incongruity — the antagonism between *See page 25 of the English Edition of "The Use and Abuse of History." (Vol. V of the Complete Authorized Edition.) 280 SELECTED LETTERS OF historical knowledge and ability, personality, and also that between the enormous accumulation of the col lecting science in general and the material impulses of the age. With reiterated thanks, I remain, Your devoted, J. BURCKHARDT. BURCKHARDT TO NIETZSCHE. Bale, April 5, 1879. Your letter reached me at a moment when I was just on the point of making a two-days' excursion in search of pleasant recreation, while you, dear friend, are obliged to suffer so ! If only the climate of Geneva would bring you some relief ! If a bise noire1 should come, don't forget to take refuge in the eastern cor ner of the lake. I duly received the supplement to "Human-all-tooHuman" from Messrs. Schmeitzner, and have read it and relished it with ever increasing astonishment at the abundance of your intellectual powers. As every body knows I have never penetrated into the temple of real thought, but all my life I have enjoyed my self in the court and halls of the peribolos where the figurative in the extremest sense of the word, reigns supreme. Now your book contains the most varied and richest supply of food for just such a careless pilgrim as myself. And even where I cannot quite follow you I watch with mingled fear and felicity the certainty of step with which you wander about the lfThe ill-famed north wind of Geneva. — Translator. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 281 most vertiginous precipices, and endeavour to form some sort of image of all you must be able to see in the depths and away across the plains. I wonder what Larochefoucauld, Labruyere, and Vauvenargues1 would think if they happened to read your book in Hades? And what would old Montaigne say? In any case I know of a number of aphorisms that would make Larochefoucauld, for instance, envy you most profoundly. With hearty thanks and best wishes forYours, your health, J. BURCKHARDT. BURCKHARDT TO NIETZSCHE. Bale, July 20, 1881. DEAR FRIEND :2 I am still turning over the leaves of your extraor dinarily rich book with great relish.

As you sus pected, it is quite true there is a good deal of it that goes against my grain, but then my grain is not neces sarily the only true grain. What I am principally and especially grateful to you for (as I have already been in the case of your earlier works, particularly "Human-all-too-Hunian," etc.), is the daring point of view from which you envisage the life of antiquity. I myself had the germs of a few of your ideas, but you see everything so clearly, and your glance carries so aB. was like N., an admirer of these French Moralists. aA letter of thanks on the receipt of Nietzsche's "Dawn of Day." 282 SELECTED LETTERS OF much further and takes in so much more. You will meet with many sympathisers in connection with that capital aphorism entitled: "The So-called Classical Education."1 As to the other parts of the book, it is with some giddiness that I, as an old man, watch the way in which you, without any signs of vertigo, wander about the highest precipices. In all probability a commu nity will gradually form and increase in the valley, whose members will at least be attracted by the sight of so daring a climber of precipitous heights. With my best and kindest wishes for your health, I am your devoted friend, J. BURCKHARDT. NIETZSCHE TO BURCKHARDT. Naumburg on the Saale, August, 1882. Well, my very dear friend2 — or what shall I call you — pray accept with good-will what I am sending you with good-will prepense. For, if you should not do this, my book, "The Joyful Wisdom" will provide you only with food for mockery (it is a little too personal, and everything personal is, as a matter of fact, comical). After all I have at last reached a point at which I am able to live as I think, and I may perhaps also have learned to express what I really think. On that Aphorism 195 in the above book. "•'Letter accompanying "The Joyful Wisdom." (Vol. X of the Complete Authorized English Translation of Nietzsche's Works.) FEIEDKICH NIETZSCHE 283 point I shall listen to your verdict as that of a final judge. I should be particularly glad if you could read Sanctus Januariiis (Book IV) consecutively so as to be able to tell me whether it conveys the impres sion of being a whole. And what about my verses? With cordial devotion, Yours, FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE. BURCKHARDT DEAREST FRIEND : TO NIETZSCHE. Bale, September 13, 1882. Your "Joyful Wisdom" reached me three days ago and you can imagine the renewed astonishment it produced in me. To begin with I marvelled at the unwonted cheerful lute-like Goethean ring of your verses, a thing Avhich I never expected from you — and then the whole book and Sanctus Jamiarius at the end! Am I mistaken, or is this last section not a special monument you raised to one of the last winters you spent in the south? It certainly appears a complete whole. The question that always puzzles me is what would happen if you ever taught history. At bottom, of course, you are always teaching his tory, and in this book you have suggested many a surprising historical standpoint, but I should like to suggest that quite ex professo you should shed your kind of light upon universal history and in the focus 284 SELECTED LETTERS OF which is within your illuminating power. How pret tily and how contrary to the present consensus populorum1 would a whole host of questions be turned topsy-turvy ! How glad I am that I have long since been in the habit of leaving the generally accepted desiderata ever more and more in the rear, and have contented myself with recording events without too many flattering comments or too many lamentations. However, a good deal of what you write (and the most excellent part, I fear) is far above my head; but wherever I am able to follow you I have a re freshing feeling of admiration for your enormous and so to speak concentrated wealth of thought, and real ize how well off we should be in our science if we could see things with your eyes.

Unfortunately, at my age one ought to be content if one is able to col lect new material without forgetting the old, and if as an aged coachman one can go on driving along the ac customed highway without mishap until the day comes when the order is given to unharness one's team. It will take some time before I can proceed from my hurried perusal of your book to a more careful reading of it ; but this has been so with all your books. I shall not be put out by the potentiality to tyranny which you reveal on p. 234, paragraph 325.2 [With hearty good wishes, I am ever your devoted, J. BUBCKHABDT. 'Unanimity of Nations." — Translator. 2Page 250 in the English Edition. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 285 NIETZSCHE TO BURCKHARDT. Rome, Via Polveriera 4. (Maire 2.) June, 1883. MY DEAR PROFESSOR1: I now want for nothing save a good chat with you ! After having cleared up the question of the "meaning of my life" how glad should I not be to listen to what you have to say on the "meaning of all life" (for the present I am more of an "ear" than anything else) ; but this time the summer has not directed me to Bale but to Rome! As to the little book I send herewith I can only say this : at one time or another every one of us unbosoms himself, and the kindness he thereby shows himself is so great that he can scarcely understand how deeply he has hurt every one else in the process. I have an inkling that this time I shall hurt you more than I have ever done hitherto, but I also know that you, who have always been so good to me, will be even more so henceforward! You know, don't you, how much I love and honour Yours NIETZSCHE. you! BURCKHARDT TO NIETZSCHE. Bale, September 10, 1883. MY DEAR FRIEND: On my return last Friday I found your kind letter and your "Thus spake Zarathustra." This time your 'This letter accompanied Zarathustra."— Translator. the first part of "Thus Spake 286 SELECTED LETTERS OF work does not consist of a series of settled individual reflections as has been the case hitherto, but of a re sounding and mighty discourse upon the whole of life from one pair of lips. It seems to me that in Ger man countries it must enter those homes where, hig gledy-piggledy, it will provoke both anger and enthus iasm. In any case it will be sure to provoke anger ; for, this time, dear friend, you have made things par ticularly difficult for poor mortal men. But even those who feel angry with the book canot help being attracted by it. As for myself, I find a peculiar pleas ure in listening to someone calling to me from a watchtower high up above my head and telling me of the horizons and depths he can descry. It is then that I realize how superficial I have been all my life, and, to judge by my sort of relative activity, that I am likely to remain so. For at my age a man is no longer capable of changing — the most he can do is to grow older and weaker. Hoping that the sky at Rome may prove beneficial to your health, T remain> Ever your devoted friend, J. BURCKHARDT. NIETZSCHE TO BURCKHARDT. Sils-Maria, Oberengadin, September 22, 1886. MY VERY DEAR PROFESSOR r1 I am truly pained at not having seen you or spoken to you for so long! With whom would I fain speak, lator.'This letter accompanied "Beyond Good and Evil."— Trans FEIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 287 forsooth, if I may no longer speak to you ! The "sir lentium" about me -increases daily. Meanwhile I trust C. G. Naumann has done his duty and sen* you my last book. Please read it (al though it says the same things as my "Zarathustra," but differently, very- differently). I can think of no one who has a greater number of first principles in common with me than you have. It seems to me that you have faced the same problems as I have — that you are working upon the same problems in a similar way, perhaps even in. a more powerful and more pro found way than I, because you are more silent. But then it should be remembered that I am the younger man. . . .

The terrible conditions that determine every advance in culture, the extremely ticklish re lation between what is called the "improvement" of mankind (or rather "humanization") and the "en hancement" of the type man; above all the conflict of every moral concept with every scientific notion of life — but enough, enough! Here is a problem which fortunately, it seems* to me, we may have in common with very few of our contemporaries or predecessors. To give expression to it is perhaps the greatest feat of daring on- earth, and that not so much on the part of him who dares it, as of those whom he addresses. My consolation is that, in the first place, the ears for apprehending my prodigious novelties are lacking — your ears excepted, my dear and honoured friend. But to you, on the other hand, they will not be "novelties" ! Your devoted friend, DR. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE. Address Gcnova, fcrma in posta. 288 SELECTED BURCKHARDT MY VERY DEAR SIR : LETTERS TO OF NIETZSCHE. Bale, September 26, 1886. First of all, let ine thank you most heartily for sending me your latest work, which reached me safely ; and let me congratulate you on the unimpaired vigour with which it is permeated. Unfortunately, as your letter which has since reached me clearly shows, you overrate my capacities far too much. I have never been able to follow up problems such as those you tackle, nor have I ever succeeded even in understanding their very premises. I have never in my life had a philosophical brain, and even the past history of philosophy is as good as a closed book to me. I could not even claim as much understanding as the scholars who have brought upon themselves your strictures on page 135.1 Whenever in the contemplation of history I have encountered more general intellectual facts, I have never done more than was absolutely necessary in the circumstances, but have referred to more accredited authorities. The elements in your work that I un derstand best are your historical judgments, and above all your glances into the age; your remarks on the will of nations, and its temporary paralysis; on the antithesis between the insurance of well-being on a grand scale and the desirability of education by means of danger ; on industry and "hard work" as de structive of the religious instinct ; on the herd-individ ual of to-day and his pretensions ; on democracy as the 'Aphorism 204 in the English Edition. — Translator. FKIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 289 lineal heir of Christianity; and especially on the fu ture strong men of the world! Here you describe and lay bare the probable conditions of their rise and their existence in a manner that cannot fail to arouse the deepest interest. Compared with this how confused and embarrassed appear the thoughts by which, at times men such as myself are troubled with regard to the general destiny of present-day Europeans. The book is far above my old head, and I feel quite foolish when I become conscious of the astonishing range of your vision over the whole domain of modern thought and your power and art of subtle differen tiation in defining individual phenomena. How gladly would I have gathered some news of your health from your kind letter. As for me, owing to my advanced years, I have resigned my Professor ship of History, and for the time being shall only con tinue my lectures on the history of art. With kindest regards, Your devoted friend, J. BURCKHARDT. NIETZSCHE TO BURCKHARDT. Nice (France) Pension de Geneve November 14, 1887. MY DEAR PROFESSOR : This autumn I once again crave permission to pre sent you with an example of my work, a moralo-historical study entitled "The Genealogy of Morals." And once more, as on every occasion hitherto, I send you my latest work not without misgivings. For, I know 290 SELECTED LETTERS OF' only too well, that all the dishes served up by me contain so many hard and indigestible elements that to invite guests to share them, especially when the guests are as distinguished as yourself, is more an abuse of friendliness and hospitality than anything else. With such feats of nut-cracking one ought to remain discreetly alone, and imperil only one's own teeth.

For in this latest of my works I deal with psychological problems of the very hardest descrip tion, so much so, indeed, that almost more courage is required to put them than to venture on any sort of answer to them. Will you grant me your attention once more? ... In any case I owe you these treatises, because they are most intimately connected with the last work I sent you ("Beyond Good and Evil"). Perhaps one or two of the leading princi ples of that difficult book are stated more plainly in this one — at least that was my intention. For the whole world has been unanimous in declaring that they could not discover the slightest meaning in "Be yond Good and Evil" and that it must be a book of "superior rubbish"; two readers only excepted: your self, my dear Professor, and Monsieur Taine, one of your most grateful admirers in France. Forgive me if I console myself with the thought that hitherto I have had only two readers, but such readers! The exceedingly spiritual and painfully complex life I have led hitherto (and thanks to which my constitu tion, which is at bottom* a strong one, has been shat tered) has gradually led me into a state of lonely iso lation for which there is now no cure. My favourite consolation is always to bear in mind those few men FKIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 291 who have endured similar conditions without falling to pieces, and have known how to preserve a kind and lofty soul in their breasts in spite of all. No one can be more grateful to you than I am, my dear distin guished friend. Ever your devoted and unchanging friend, NIETZSCHE. P. S. — Last, but not least, my best wishes for your health! This winter promises to be severe. Oh, if only you were here! NIETZSCHE TO BURCKHARDT. S<ls-Maria, Autumn, 1888. MY DEAR PROFESSOR' : Herewith I take the liberty of sending you a small aesthetic treatise which, however much it may have been intended as a respite amid the serious preoccu pations of my life task, is nevertheless in its way a serious work. You must not let yourself be led astray for one instant by its tone of levity and irony. Per haps I have a right to speak clearly for once about this "Case of Wagner" — maybe it is even my duty to do so. The movement is now at the zenith of its glory. Three-quarters of the musicians of Europe are now wholly or partly convinced, from St. Petersburg to Paris, Bologna and Montevideo, the theatres are living on this art, and only yesterday, even the young Ger man Kaiser characterized the whole of the Wagner movement as a national affair of the first magnitude, *This letter accompanied "The Case of Wagner." 292 SELECTED LETTERS OF and placed himself at the head of it. These are suf ficient reasons for allowing me to enter the lists. I admit that in view of the international European character of the problem, the essay should not have been written in German but in French. Up to a cer tain point it is written in French, and at all events it might prove an easier task to translate it into French than into German. . . . It is no secret to me that not long ago, on a certain day, a whole city, with reverential gratitude, piously showed its recognition of its first teacher and bene factor. With all due modesty I ventured to add my own personal feelings to those of that city. With deep love and respect, Yours, DR. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE. (My address till the middle of November will be Torino, poste restante. One word from you would make me happy). Frau Forster Nietzsche adds the following interest ing note to the Nietzsche-Burckhardt letters: "Jacob Burckhardt did not reply to this last let ter, in spite of the touching request it contained — and on the occasion of a flying visit to me in 1895 he told me that his reason for not doing so was that he had not understood the book which accompanied it. He had already found some difficulty in understanding 'The Genealogy of Morals,' and that is why on the receipt of this book he only thanked my brother very briefly and held out hopes of a letter to follow.

From FEIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 293 the way in which he spoke of these things, I could not help thinking that the last few books my brother sent him only distressed him, with the exception, of course, of 'Beyond Good and EviP, of which he wrote with appreciation. Although at the time of his visit to me he was already a great sufferer, and it was obviously difficult for him to recall the details of the past, he nevertheless seemed to remember the contents of 'Beyond Good and Evil.' He also seemed to be very glad when I told him how much his letter on the subject had pleased my brother, but he assured me that my brother had 'done him much too much honour' — a contention with which the readers of these letters will scarcely agree." HIPPOLYTE TAINE TO NIETZSCHE. Meuthin St. Bernard. Hte Savoie. October 17, 1886. (Translated from the French) SIR: I found the book you were good enough to send me awaiting me on my return home from a journey. It is, as you say, full of "hidden meanings". Its lively and literary form, its impassioned style and frequent paradoxical turns will prove an eye-opener to any reader who wishes to understand your meaning. I should recommend more particularly to philosophers the first part on philosophers and philosophy1 (Aph, 11, 13, 16, 20) ; though historians and critics will also certainly reap a rich harvest of new ideas (for inBeyond Good and Evil." 294 SELECTED LETTERS OF stance Aph. 28, 58, 209). What you say on the sub ject of national character in your 8th essay is ex tremely suggestive. I shall read that part again, though you are far too flattering about me. Your letter does me high honour in placing me beside Pro fessor Burckhardt of Bale, a man for whom I have the greatest admiration. I believe I was the first person in France to call attention in the press to his great work on "The Culture of the Renaissance in Italy." I beg you to accept my sincerest thanks and with kindest regards, I remain, Yours sincerely, H. TAINE. NIETZSCHE TO HIPPOLYTE TAINE. Sils-Maria, Oberengadin, July 4, 1887. MY DEAR SIR : There are so many things I have to thank you for — first and foremost for the indulgent kindness of your letter, in which your remarks about Jakob Burck hardt pleased me particularly, and also for your ex ceptionally powerful and simple characterization of Napoleon in the Revue which I came across by the merest chance last May, I was fairly well prepared for it (by a book recently published by M. Barbey d'Aurevilly, the last chapter of which — dealing with Napoleonic literature — sounded like a long drawn out cry of desire — for what? — undoubtedly for just such an explanation and solution as you have given us of FEIEDEICH NIETZSCHE 295 that tremendous problem of the Monster and the Su perman). Neither must I forget to tell you how de lighted I was to come across your name in the dedica tion of Monsieur Paul Bourget's last novel. But I do not like the book. Monsieur B. will never succeed in giving a convincing account of a physiological cavity in the breast of a fellow creature (a phenomenon of this sort is for him merely quelque chose d'ar~bitraire from which it is to be hoped his delicate taste will henceforward keep him aloof. But it would seem that Dostoiewsky's spirit allows this Parisian novelist no peace?) And now, dear sir, please be patient with me and permit me to hand you two of my books that have just appeared in a new edition. As you must know I am an anchorite and do not concern myself over much about readers or about being read. And yet ever since I was in my twenties (I am now fortythree) I have never lacked distinguished and ex tremely loyal individual readers (these have always been old men), among them, for instance, I reckon Richard Wagner, the old Hegelian Bruno Bauer, my honoured colleague Jakob Burckhardt, and that Swiss poet, Gottfried Keller/ whom I regard as the only living German poet. I should be most deeply gratified if I could also count the Frenchman whom I most admire among my readers. I am very fond of these two books of mine.

The first, "The Dawn of Day," I wrote in Genoa at a time when I was most seriously ill and in very great pain. I had been given up by the doctors, death was 'The well-known Swiss novelist. 296 SELECTED LETTERS OF facing me, and I was the victim of incredible priva tions and isolation. But at that time I did not wish things to be different, and in spite of all I was at peace with myself and completely resolute. The other work "The Joyful Wisdom," I owe to the first rays of sunlight and returning health. It was born one year later (1882) also in Genoa, during a sublimely bright and sunny fortnight in January. The prob lems with which these two books deal bring about isolation. May I beg you to accept these from me with good will? I am, With deep respect, Dear sir, Your devoted servant, FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE. HIPPOLYTE TAINE TO NIETZSCHE. Hotel Beausejour. Geneva, July 12, 1887. (Translated from the French.) Sm: I am extremely sorry to have been away from home when your two books arrived. I am still at Geneva undergoing a water-cure, so I must postpone the pleas ure of reading your work till my return. You are more up to date in your knowledge of contemporary French literature than I am, for I had never even heard of the article you mention by M. Barbey d'Aurevilly. I am so glad that my articles on Napoleon1 ''Revue des Deux Mondes. Spring, 1887. — Translator. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 297 seemed to you to ring true. Nothing could sum up my feelings about him better than the two German words you use — Monster and Superman.1 Pray, sir, accept my sincerest thanks and the as surance of my deep regard, Your devoted servant HIPPOLYTE TAINE. NIETZSCHE TO HIPPOLYTE TAINE. Turin, November, 1888. (From a Draft) Dear Sir :2 The book I now venture to place in your hands is perhaps the most peculiar book that has ever been written — and in respect of that for which it prepares the ground it is almost a piece of fate. It would be of incalculable value to me if it could only be read in French. I have readers now in all corners of the globe, incidentally there are some in Russia. It is unlucky for me that I should write in German, althought perhaps I write it better than any German has ever done before me. At last the French will be able to feel through this book the deep sympathy they deserve. All my instincts have declared war upon Germany (see a special section, p. 50, "Things the Germans Lack"). Could you just send me a hint or two as to whom I ought to send copies of this book? ... A perexpression is to be found in "The Genealogy Morals", p. 56. — Translator. 'Accompanying, "The Twilight of the Idols". of 298 SELECTED LETTEES OF feet and even masterly knowledge of German is cer tainly the first prerequisite for the task of translating it. Ever yours in deep respect, F. N. HIPPOLYTB TAINE TO NIETZSCHE. 23 Rue Cassette. Paris. December 14, 1888. (Translated from the French) SIR: You have done me a great honour in sending me your "Twilight of the Idols." I have read your whimsi cal remarks (boutades), your humorous Carlylean resumes, and your witty and profound dissertations on the subject of modern writers. You are quite right in thinking that your extremely literary and pictur esque German style requires readers who are well versed in German idiom. I am not a sufficiently good German scholar to be able to understand the full boldness and subtlety of your writing at the first reading. My knowledge of German is confined to a few philosophers and historians. As you are anxious to find a really competent reader for your work I do not think I should be far wrong in recommending Monsieur J. Bourdeau, the editor of Le Journal des Debats and La Revue des Deux Mondes. He is an extremely cultured broad-minded man acquainted with the whole of modern literature. He has travelled in Germany and has made a careful study of her history and literature from 1815 onwards, and is a FKIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 299 man of taste as well as a scholar. But I cannot say whether he has the time to spare at the present mo ment. His address is 18 Rue Marignan, Paris.

Pray accept my heartiest thanks and believe me, Sincerely yours, H. TAINE. NIETZSCHE TO STRINDBERG. November, 1888. DEAR SIR : The precious lines from Monsieur Taine that I en close embolden me to ask for your advice on a very serious matter. I should like to be read in France; nay more, it is necessary for me to be read there. Being as I am the most independent and possibly the most powerful intellect of the age, condemned to ful fill a stupendous mission, I cannot submit to the ab surd limits the accursed dynastic national politics of Europe have imposed upon her peoples, and I re fuse to let such limits prevent me from greeting the few whose ears are in the least attuned to the sound of my voice. And I readily confess, it is in France above all that I look for them. Nothing that happens in the intellectual life of France is strange to me. People tell me that in reality I write French although my medium is German, and especially in my "Zarathustra" I have attained something that even Ger mans have not attained. I venture to tell you that my paternal ancestors were Polish noblemen, that my maternal grandmother belonged to the Weimar of Goethe's time, reason enough for my being to an al most incredible degree the most lonely of Germans 300 SELECTED LETTERS OF to-day. No word has ever reached me — and to speak quite frankly, I have never expected it. ... Now I have readers everywhere, in Vienna, St. Petersburg, Stockholm, New York — all of them people of excep tional intellect who do me honour — I lack them in Ger many. The fact that even in Germany people are feel ing how little I am in keeping with them is proved by a very serious article that appeared in the Kumtwart, which I take the liberty to enclose. The author is a musician of the first rank, the only one, if I am en titled to an opinion in these matters, and consequently unknown. As it was my good fortune to be appointed a Uni versity Professor at Bale at the age of twenty-four I have not found it necessary constantly to wage war or to squander my powers in merely reactionary move ments. In Bale I found that distinguished man, Ja kob Burckhardt, who from the first was deeply in sympathy with me. With Richard Wagner and his wife, who in those days were living at Triebschen, near Lucerne, I enjoyed a friendly intimacy, which was of the greatest possible value to me. At bottom I am perhaps an old musician. Later on illness severed me from these connections and brought me into a state of such profound selfconsciousness as perhaps no man has ever attained before. And as there is nothing morbid or forced in my nature, I scarcely felt at all oppressed by this solitude, but regarded it rather as an invaluable dis tinction, as cleanliness so to speak. Nor has anyone yet complained to me of sullen looks, not even my self. It is possible that I have explored more terri- FKIEDRICE NIETZSCHE 301 ble and more questionable worlds of thought than any one else, but simply because it is in my nature to love the silent backwater. I reckon cheerfulness among the proofs of my philosophy. . . Perhaps this is best proved by the two books that I am pre Yours, senting to you to-day. FRIEDBICH NIETZSCHE. STRINDBERG TO NIETZSCHE. DEAR SIR: You have certainly given mankind the deepest book they possess, and not the least of your achievements is that you have had the courage and perhaps also the irrepressible impulse to spit all these magnificent words into the face of the rabble. I thank you for it. Nevertheless it strikes me that with all your in tellectual candour you have somewhat flattered the criminal type. Just look at the hundreds of photo graphs that illustrate Loinbroso's "Criminal Man," and you will agree that the criminal is an inferior ani mal, a degenerate, a weakling, not possessing the neces sary gifts to circumvent those laws that present too powerful an obstacle to his will and his strength. Just observe the stupidly moral appearance of these honest beasts ! What a disappointment for morality ! And so you wish to be translated into our Greenlandish language. Why not into French or English?

You can form an estimate of our intelligence from the fact that they wanted to put me into a nursing home on account of my tragedy, and that a spirit as 302 SELECTED LETTERS OF subtle and rich as that of Brandes is silenced by this "majority of duffers." I end all my letters to my friends with, "Read Nietzsche"! That is my Carthago cst delenda! At all events our greatness will diminish from the moment you are recognized and understood and the dear mob begins to hob-nob with you as if you were one of themselves. It were better if you maintained your noble seclusion and allowed us others, 10,000 higher mortals, to make a secret pilgrimage to your sanctuary in order to partake of your riches to our hearts' content. Let us guard the esoteric doctrine so as to keep it pure and unimpaired and not spread it broadcast without the instrumentality of devoted disciples among whom is AUGUST STRINDBEEG. NIETZSCHE TO STRINDBERG. DEAR SIR : I think our parcels must have crossed.1 I read your tragedy twice with the deepest emotion; it surprised me beyond all measure to discover a work in which my own concept of love — in its means, war; in its foun dation, the mortal hatred of the sexes — is erpressed in a grandiose manner. This work is predestined to be produced in Paris at Monsieur Antoine's Theatre Libre. Simply insist on Zola's seeing this through for you ! At the present moNietzsche's "Twilight of the Idols" and Strindberg's "Le Pere." FKIEDEICH NIETZSCHE 303 ment he attaches great importance to being treated with consideration. On the whole, I regret the Preface,1 although I should be loath to do without it ; it is so full of price less naivetes. The fact that Zola is not "enamoured of abstraction" reminds me of a German translator of one of Dostoiewski's novels, who was also not "enam oured of abstraction." He simply omitted "des raccourcis d' analyse" they annoyed him. And fancy Zola's not being able to distinguish types from "etres de raison"! To think that he insists upon the com plete "etat civil" for tragedy! But I almost shook with laughter when in the end he even made it a racial question ! As long as there was any taste left in France at all, it was always the race instinct that rejected precisely what Zola wants : it is precisely la 'This refers to Zola's preface to Strindberg's "Pere," which is as follows: Monsieur cherlong confrere! excuses a vous faire pour etmon silence. J'ai Maisde sibien vousgrandes saviez quelle existence est la mienne, que de travail et que de tracas! Te jene viens voulaisenfin pas devoustrouver renvoyer votre manuscrit 1'avoir lu, et le temps necessaire.sans Votre drame m'a personnages fortement interesse. philosophique est tres les en sont tresL'idee audacieusement campes. Voushardie, avez tire de toute la paternite des effets puissants, troublants. Enfin votre Laure est vraiment la femme dans son orgueil, dans 1'insouciance et dans ledans mystere de ses qualites et de sesvous defauts. Elle restera enfonce ma memoire. En somme avez ecrit une oeuvre curieuse et interessante, ou il y a, vers la fin surtout, de tres belles choses. Pour etre franc, des raccourcis d'analyse m'y genent un peu. Vous savez peut-etre que je ne suis pas pour 1'abstraction. J'aime que les personnages aient un etat civil complet, qu'on les coudoie, gu'ils trempent dans notre Et votre quicapitaine qui n'a de nom,ne V03 autres air. personnages sont presque des pas etresmeme de raison, me donnent pas de la vie la sensation complete que je demande. Mais il y a certainement la entre vous et moi, une question de race. Telle qu'elle est, je le repete, votre piece est une des rares oeuyres qui m'aient profondement Croyez moi votredramatiques devoue et bien sympatnique confrere. —remue. Emile Zola. 304 SELECTED LETTERS OF race latine that protests against Zola. After all, he is only a modern Italian — he swears by verisme. Yours sincerely, NIETZSCHE. NIETZSCHE TO STRINDBERG. Torino, Via Carlo Alberto, 6, III. MY DEAR SIR: Meanwhile someone in Germany has sent me "The Father" as a proof that I too am interesting my friends in the father of "The Father." Monsieur Antoine's Theatre Libre was surely founded with the idea of taking risks. Compared with what they have risked there during the last few months your work is completely innocent.

Things went so far that Al bert Wolf, in a leading article in the "Figaro," pub licly blushed in the name of France. But Monsieur Antoine is an eminent actor who would immediately select the part of the captain for himself. On second thought I now think you had better not involve Zola in the affair, but advise you simply to send a copy of the tragedy with a letter enclosed direct to Mon sieur Antoine, Directeur du Theatre Libre. They like to produce foreign plays. Outside a grand funeral procession is marching past with solemn pomp : il principe de Gavignani, a cousin of the King and High Admiral of the Italian Fleet i Oh, how splendidly you have posted me up about your Sweden! And how envious you have made me! 'The rest of this paragraph is illegible.— -Translator. FBI ED RICH NIETZSCHE 305 You undervalue your good fortune. 0 fortunates nimium sua si bona nesciunt — that is to say, that you are not a German. There is no other culture than that of France; there is nothing to object to in it; it is reason itself, it is necessarily the right culture Do you want a proof of this? But you yourself are the proof. I return the books with heartiest thanks, as I pre sume you have not many copies of them. Just as your letter arrived I also received one from Paris, from Monsieur Taine, full of the highest praise for the "Twilight of the Idols," its audaces et finesses and with a very serious recommendation to lay the whole question of my1 ... in France, including the means thereto, in the hands of his friend the Editor in Chief of the Journal des Debats and of the Revue des Deux Mondes, of whose profound and emanci pated intellect, style, knowledge of Germany and of German culture, he could not speak too highly. As it happens, I have read nothing but the Journal des Debats for years. In view of this opening of my Pan ama Canal into France, I have indefinitely postponed the further publication of new books (three are quite ready for press). First of all, the two principal books, "Beyond Good and Evil" and "The Twilight of the Idols," ought to be translated ; with these I shall be introduced into France. With all good wishes, Your devoted NIETZSCHE. 'Apparently illegible. — Translator. 306 SELECTED LETTERS OF NIETZSCHE TO STRINDBERG. Torino, via Carlo Alberto, 6, III. December 7, 1888. MY DEAR SIR: Has a letter of mine got lost? Immediately after reading "The Father" for the second time, I wrote to you, so deeply stirred was I by this masterpiece of severe psychology. I also assured you of my convic tion that the work is predestined to be produced in Paris now at Monsieur Antoine's Theatre Libre. Simply insist on Zola's seeing this through for you. The hereditary criminal is a decadent, even an idiot, that is certain ! But the history of criminal families, for which the Englishman Gal ton (Hereditary Ge nius) has collected the greatest amount of material, always leads back to an individual who was too strong for a particular social milieu. The last great crim inal case in Paris, Prado, was a man of the classical type. Prado was superior to his judges and his coun sel, even in self-control, wit and high spirits ; notwith standing the fact that the weight of the accusation had so reduced him physically that some of the witnesses recognized him only from early portraits. But, now, let me tell you a word or two between ourselves — very much between ourselves. When your letter reached me yesterday — the first letter in my life which ever did reach me — I had just completed the last revision of the MS. of Ecce Homo. And as there no longer remains any such thing as an accident in my life, you cannot be an accident either. Why do you write letters that arrive at such a moment! FEIEDEICH NIETZSCHE 307 "Ecce Homo" ought really to appear in German, French and English simultaneously. Only yesterday I sent the MS. to my printers ; as soon as the first sheet is ready, it will be sent to the translators. Who are these translators? Frankly I was not aware that you had been responsible for the excellent French of your "The Father." I thought it was a masterly transla tion.

In the event of your being willing to undertake the translation I could not congratulate myself suffi ciently on such a miracle of ingenious chance. For, between ourselves, for the translation of "Ecce Homo" a poet of the first rank would be required. It is an expression of subtle feeling, a thousand miles removed from all ordinary "translators." After all, it is not a thick book. I should think the French edition (pub lished perhaps by Lemerre, Paul Bourget's publisher) would just make a standard 3 fr. 50 volume. Since it is full of the most unheard of things and its language is at times in all innocence that of a world-ruler, we shall excel even "Nana"1 in the number of editions. On the other hand, it is anti-German to the point of annihilation. I have kept firmly on the side of French culture throughout (— I treat German phi losophers, en masse, as unconscious counterfeiters). Nor is the book tedious — here and there I have even written in the style of "Prado". In order to guard against German brutalities (confiscation ) I shall send the first copies, previous to publication, to Prince Bismarck and the young Kaiser, accompanied by a written declaration of war. Soldiers cannot answer 'The well-known novel by Zola. — Translator. 308 SELECTED LETTERS OF that sort of thing by police measures. I am a psycho logist. Just think it over a bit, my dear sir. It is a matter of the utmost importance. For I am strong enough to cleave the history of mankind in two. There still remains the question of the English translation. Can you make any suggestions about that? An antiGerman book in England! Yours, NIETZSCHE. STRINDBERG TO NIETZSCHE. MY DEAR SIR: I was overjoyed at receiving a word of appreciation from your master-hand regarding my misunderstood tragedy. I aught to tell you, my dear Sir, that I was compelled to give the publisher two editions gratis before I could hope to see my piece printed. Out of gratitude for this, when the piece was performed at the theatre, one old lady in the audience fell dead, an other was successfully delivered of a child, and at the sight of the straight-jacket, three-quarters of the peo ple present rose as one man and left the theatre amid maniacal yells. And, then, you ask me to get Zola to have the piece played before Henri Becque's Parisians! Why, it would lead to universal parturition in that city of cuckolds. And now to your affairs. Sometimes I write straight away in the French lan guage (just glance at the enclosed article with its FKIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 309 Boulevard, though picturesque, style), but at times I translate my own works. It is quite impossible to find a French translator who will not improve your style according to the rhetorical "Ecole Normale," and rob your mode of expression of all its pristine freshness. The shocking translation of "Married People'' was done by a SwissFrenchman (from French-Switzerland) for the sum of 1,000 francs. He was paid to the last farthing and then they demanded, in Paris, 500 francs for revising his work. From this you will understand that the translation of your work will be a matter of a good deal of money, and as I am a poor devil with a wife, three kids, two servants and debts, etc., I could not grant you any diminution in the matter of fees, par ticularly as I should be forced to work not as a lit erary hack but as a poet. If you are not appalled at the thought of what it will cost you, you can rely upon me and my talent. Otherwise, I should be happy to try and find a French translator for you who would be absolutely as reliable as possible. As regards England, I really do not feel in a posi tion to say anything whatever; for, as far as she is concerned, we have to deal with a nation of bigots that has delivered itself up into the hands of its women, and this is tantamount to hopeless decadence. You know, my dear Sir, what morality means in Eng land: Girls' High School libraries, Currer Bell, Miss Braddon and the rest; Don't soil your hands with that offal! In the French language you can pierce your way even into the uttermost depths of the negroworld, so you can safely let England's trousered 310 SELECTED LETTERS OF women go to the deuce.

Please think the matter over and consider my suggestions and let me hear from you about it as soon as possible. Awaiting your reply, I am, yours sincerely, AUGUST STRINDBERG. STRINDBERG TO NIETZSCHE. December 27, 1888. MY DEAR SIR: Many thanks for your kind letter and the copy of that splendid book "The Genealogy of Morals." Allow me to disturb your peace once again by sending for your perusal a short poetical sketch. It contains my views on the problem of conscience pangs, and had already been written before I came across your works. Please take no notice of such of my puerilities as the forecast of the future of women and the remarks about European peace, a subject which was an epi demic in Switzerland, where I was staying at the time I wrote "Pangs of Conscience." I wish you a Happy New Year and beg to assure you once again of my deepest admiration. Yours, AUGUST STRINDBERG. NIETZSCHE TO STRINDBERG. Turin, December 31, 1888. DEAR SIR: You will hear from me shortly about your short story — it goes off like a gunshot. I have appointed a meeting day of monarchs in Rome. I shall order to be shot. FKIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 311 Ail revoir! For we shall surely see each other again. On one condition only : let us divorce. NIETZSCHE CAESAR. STRINDBERG TO NIETZSCHE. December 31, 1888. (Written in Latin.) DEAREST DOCTOR: I will, I will be raving mad. I could not read your letter without a severe shock, and I thank you very much indeed. "You would lead a better life, Licinius, if you neither shaped your life constantly towards the open sea, nor, shivering tremulously in the face of the storm, held too closely to the treacherous coast." (Horace. ) Meanwhile let us rejoice in our madness. Fare you well and remain true to your STRINDBERG. (The best, the highest God.) NIETZSCHE TO STRINDBERG. MR. STRINDBERG: Alas! ... no more! Let us divorce! "THE CRUCIFIED." 312 SELECTED LETTERS OF °i <C( V*. I* * 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, FKIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 313 "And deeper than the day could read. "Deep is its woe — , "Joy — deeper still than grief can be: "Woesaith: Hence! Go! " — Want deep, profound eternity !" THE CORRESPONDENCE OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE WITH GEORG BRANDES Translated by BEATRICE MARSHALL The following letters which passed between Nietzsche and Georg Brandes, the eminent Danish litterateur and famous Continental critic of Shake speare, belong to Nietzsche's last and most anti-Ger man phase; the time when his magnificent intellect though on the eve of eclipse was at the height of its productivity and in the zenith of its splendour. One after the other those later writings, with their picturesque, suggestive titles, were struck off hot from the forge of his fiery brain as if he had some premoni tion of the coming catastrophe, and wished to work while "it is called to-day" before the darkness of eternal night overtook him. ... In loneliness and isolation, deprived of the society of his beloved sister, estranged from those with whom he had once been knit in bonds of close and romantic friendship, Nietzsche eagerly caught at the hand of goodwill held out to him from Denmark. The friendly relations between these two distin guished men began in the autumn of 1887. But al- 314 SELECTED LETTERS OF ready in 1883 Nietzsche had heard of Brandes' inter est in his work, and in the summer of 1886 a mutual acquaintance had told Nietzsche at Sils-Maria that Brandes had been making eager inquiries about him, and denouncing the German friends who ignored his books. This led to Nietzsche sending Brandes a copy of "Beyond Good and Evil," afterwards followed by the "Genealogy of Morals/' which Brandes acknowl edged with the first of the delightful letters given here. "I can truly say," Frau Forster-Nietzsche writes in her notes to this correspondence, "that these letters were the one bright spot in my brother's life during the winter of 1887 and 1888. I never hear the name of Georg Brandes without tears of gratitude springing to my eyes.

It was just when my brother wras in absolute despair of finding anyone who would take him seriously or understand what he meant for the world that Brandes, through his letters and even more through his lectures at the University of Copen hagen, showed that there was one man at least who was aware of the value and importance of this new philosophy and felt the strong necessity of bringing it to the notice of others." Many years were yet to elapse before the Univer sity professors of Germany were to prove wise in their generation and courageous enough to lecture on Friedrich Nietzsche. But now the time has come when nothing draws such large crowds to the class-rooms as lectures on the Transvaluation of Values. All honour is due, then, to Brandes, who recognised, be- FKIED&ICH NIETZSCHE 315 fore it was too late to give the philosopher pleasure by his recognition, the vast and far-reaching signifi cance of Nietzscheanism. TRANSLATOR. BRANDES TO NIETZSCHE. DEAR SIR: Copenhagen, November 26, 1887. A year ago your publisher sent me your interesting work, "Beyond Good and Evil," and in the same way I have recently received your newest book. Besides these I have in my possession another book of yours, "Human, All Too Human." I had just sent the two former volumes to the bookbinder when "The Geneal ogy of Morals" came to hand, so I have not been able to compare it with the others as I intend to do. I hope by degrees to read everything of yours very carefully. This time I feel that I must express my sincere thanks to you for your gift. I consider it an honour to be known by you, and to be so known that you wish to win me for a reader. Your books bring me in touch with a new and original mind. I do not yet altogether understand what I have read, nor do I exactly grasp your drift. But there is a great deal at first sight with which my own views are in sympathy, such as the underrating of ascetic ideals, the deeplyrooted aversion to democratic mediocrity, and your aristocratic radicalism. Your scorn of a morality of pity is not yet quite clear to me; nor was my line of thought completely at one with yours in your gen- 316 SELECTED LETTERS OF eralisations on Woman as a whole in the other book. You and I are so differently constituted that I ex perience some difficulty in getting at the back of your thought. In spite of your universality, you are very German in your method of thinking and writing. You are one of the few people with whom I should enjoy a talk. I know nothing of you personally. I am astonished to see that you are a Professor and Doctor, and I con gratulate you on being intellectually so little of the professor. I am equally ignorant of how much you know about myself. My writings merely attempt the solution of certain modest problems. The majority of them only exist in Danish. I have not written in German for several years. My best public, I believe, is among the Slav nationalities. I lectured two years running in the French language at Warsaw, and this year in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Thus I endeav our to avoid the grooves of my native country. Though no longer young, I am still one of those men who are devoured by a passion for learning and an insatiable hunger to know everything there is to know. You will never find me, for this reason, unopen to argument, however little I may be able to think and feel with you. I am often stupid, but I am never in the least biassed. Let me have the pleasure of hearing from you if you think it worth while to write. Yours gratefully, GEORG BRANDES. F R I E D R I r IT NIETZSCH E 317 NIETZSCHE TO BRANDES. Nice, December 2, 1887. MY DEAR SIR : To number a few readers whose opinion I esteem and to have no other readers is exactly in accordance with my wishes. But as far as the last part is con cerned, I see that it is never likely to be fulfilled. AIT the more fortunate am I in that "Satis sunt pauci,"1 the pauci are not lacking,, and never have been lacking.

Among those of them living (to name the ones you will know) are my distinguished friend Jakob Burckhardt; Hans von Billow, H. Taine, and the Swiss author, Gottfried Keller ; among the dead are the old Hegelian Bruno Bauer and Richard Wagner. It is a genuine pleasure to me to know that a good Euro pean and apostle of culture like yourself wishes to be of the company. I thank you from my heart for this expression of your goodwill. Naturally it will involve you in perplexities. I do not doubt myself that my writings still in some degree are "very German/' You will feel this all the more strongly, spoilt as you are by your own free and Gallically graceful art of expressing yourself (a genial art compared with mine). In my vocabulary many words have become encrusted with alien salts, and in consequence taste differently to my own palate from what they taste to my readers'. In the musical scale of my own experience and circumstances the balance irThe few are enough. — Translator. 318 SELECTED LETTEKS OP has been on the side of a rare, thin, distant pitch as opposed to the normal average. And to speak as an old musician, which I actually am, I have a fine ear for crotchets. Finally, what makes my books obscure is my distrust of dialectics, even of arguments. It seems to me that what a man already believes or does not yet believe to be true, depends rather upon his courage and the degree of his courage. (I have seldom the courage to face what I really know.) The phrase which you make use of, "aristocratic radicalism," is very good. It is the most illuminating, if I may be allowed to say so, that I have ever read with regard to myself. I hardly dare contemplate how far this method of thinking has carried me or will yet carry me in the realm of thought. But there are roads which once started along permit of no turning back. So I con tinue to go forward because I must go forward. My Leipzig publisher shall send you all my earlier books en bloc, that nothing be left undone on my side to simplify your entry into my subterranean vault, in other words, my philosophy. Especially would I rec ommend you to read all the fresh prefaces. (The books are nearly all new editions.) These prefaces read consecutively may, perhaps, throw light on me, provided that I am not darkness itself and dark to myself, obscurissimus obscurarum virorum,1 which is quite possible. I wonder if you are musical. A choral work of mine, with orchestra, is just being published, called 'The darkest of dark men. — Translator. FKIEDKICH NIETZSCHE 319 "A Hymn to Life."1 It is designed to go down to pos terity as my "musical remains," and to be sung in my memory, if enough of me is left to be remembered. You see on what posthumous prospects I am existing. A philosophy like mine resembles a tomb. One lives in it no longer. Bene vixit qui bene latuit2 is written on the grave of Descartes. That is an epitaph with a vengeance. I, too, wish that we could meet. Yours, NIETZSCHE. N. B. — I am staying this winter in Nice. My sum mer address is Sils-Maria, Upper Engadine, Switzer land. I have given up my Professorial Chair. I am three parts blind. BRANDES TO NIETZSCHE. DEAR SIR: Copenhagen, December 15, 1887. The last words of your postscript are those which left the deepest impression on me in your letter. You suffer from eye trouble. Have you consulted the best oculists? It changes the whole psychic aspect of life if a man does not see well. You owe it to all who respect and value you to do the utmost for the pres ervation and improvement of your sight. 'This interesting musical composition of Nietzsche's is to be found in the appendix to the authorized translation of his "Ecce Homo." — Translator. •'He has lived well, who hid himself well. — Translator. 320 SELECTED LETTERS OF I have postponed answering your letter because you mentioned the sending of a present of books, and I should have liked to thank you for these at the same time. But as the parcel has not yet arrived I will write a few lines to-day.

I have got your books back from the bookbinder, and though I am busy preparing lec tures and have all kind of literary and political work on hand, I have snatched as much time as I possibly could to plunge deeply into their contents. December 17. You may call me a good European if you like, but I am less willing to be dubbed an "apostle of culture." All apostolic mission-work has become to me an abom ination; 1 am acquainted with only moralising mis sionaries, and 1 am afraid that I am not altogether orthodox in my belief as to what is understood by culture. Is there anything at all inspiring in our cul ture taken as a whole, and who can conceive of an apostle without inspiration? You see that I am more isolated than you think. As for being German, I sim ply meant that you write for yourself, and in writing think more of pleasing yourself than of pleasing the great public, while the majority of non-German writ ers have to force themselves into a sort of stereotyped st}rle which may be clearer and more plastic, but tends to become shallow instead of deep. It necessitates the author's keeping his best and most intimate self for himself alone. I am often appalled at how little of my inner self is more than merely indicated in my writings. I have no real understanding of music. Sculp- FRIED RICH NIETZSCHE 321 ture and painting are the arts of which I have some idea, and to which I owe my deepest artistic impres sions. My ear is undeveloped. That it is so was a great grief to me in my youth. I once played a good deal, and for several years studied theory, but with out any success. I am capable of enjoying good music very thoroughly, but am one of the uninitiated. I fancy I trace in your works certain points of agreement in our tastes, a preference to Beyle,1 for example, and for Taine ; I have not seen the latter for seventeen years. I don't know whether I am quite so charmed with his work on the Revolution as you appear to be. To him it is a lamentable upheaval, an earthquake that gives him copy for harangues and jeremiads. I made use of the phrase "aristocratic radicalism," because it expresses so precisely my own political con victions. But it rather hurts me to find in your writ ings that you dismiss such phenomena as Socialism and Anarchism with summary violence. There is nothing stupid, for instance, in the anarchy of a Prince Kropotkin. The name, of course, counts for nothing. Your intellect, so dazzling as a rule in its brilliance, seems to me to fall short when truth is to be sought in the nuances of a subject. Your reflections on the origin of the moral idea are of the deepest interest to me. To my delighted amazement vou share a certain resentment that I har'Henri Beyle, the novelist who wrote under the pseudonyro of Stendhal. — Translator. 322 SELECTED LETTERS OF bour for Herbert Spencer. He stands, with us, for the God of Philosophy. One distinct advantage these Englishmen generally possess is that their unsoaring mind shirks hypotheses, while on the other hand hy pothesis has lost German philosophy the command of the world. Is there not much that is hypothetical in your notion of caste distinctions as the source of various moral ideas? I know Ree whom you attack ; I met him in Berlin. He was a quiet man, and in his way a distinguished personality, but he had a somewhat dry and limited brain. He lived (according to his own account, purely on platonic terms) with a quite young and very in telligent Russian woman, who a year or two ago published a book, Der Kampf um Gott, which, how ever, could give no idea of her really fine gifts. I am looking forward to the arrival of the works you prom ise me. I shall be glad if you do not lose sight of me in the future. Yours, GEORG BRANDES. NIETZSCHE TO BRANDES. DEAR SIR: Nice, January 8, 1888. You should not repudiate the expression "apostle of culture." How can anyone be such a thing in these days more than by making a mission of his unbelief in culture?

Does it not imply a degree of self-knowl edge and self-conquest which to-day is culture itself PRIED RICH NIETZSCHE 323 to have realised that our modern culture is a mon strous problem, and not by any means a solution? I am at a loss to understand why my books haven't yet reached you. I will not fail to give them a re minder at Leipzig. These publishing gentlemen at Christmas time are apt to lose their heads. In the meantime may I be permitted to convey to you an au dacious and unique document over which no publisher has yet the control, an ineditum that belongs to the most personal stuff which I am capable of producing. It is the fourth part of my Zarathustra. Properly speaking, its title in relation to what has preceded it and is to follow should be Zarathustra's Tempta tion ; an Interlude. Perhaps this will be the best an swer to your question concerning my problem of pity; besides, it will serve the purpose of a secret door which opens up a gangway to me, always pro viding that he who passes through the door has your eyes and ears. Your treatise on Zola, like everything I know of yours (the last by you that I have read is an essay in the Goethe Year-Book ) reminds me most pleas antly that you have a natural bent for every descrip tion of psychological optics. When you calculate the difficult sum of the a me modcrnc you are just as much in your element as a German savant when he attempts it is out of his. Or it may be, your opinion of presentday Germans is more favourable than mine. To me it seems that year after year, with regard to res psychologicis, they become ever clumsier and more angular (the exact opposite of the Parisians, who are all nuances and mosaic work), and so all profound 324 SELECTED LETTERS OF events escape them. Take, for example, my "Beyond Good and Evil." What bewilderment it has caused them. I have not heard of a single intelligent utter ance about it, much less of an intelligent sentiment. I believe that it has not dawned on the most wellintentioned of my readers that here is the outcome of a sane philosophic sensibility, and not a medley of a hundred outworn paradoxes and heterodoxes. Not a soul has experienced the same sort of thing as I have. I never meet anyone who lias been through a thousandth part of the same passionate struggle. An Immoralist, forsooth ! It conveys nothing to anybody. By the way, in one of their prefaces the phrase Document humain is claimed by the Goncourts. Yet for all that, Taine may still be the original coiner thereof. You are right about "harangues and jere miads," but that kind of Don Quixotism belongs to all that is most honourable on the face of the eartli, With expressions of my highest Yourregards, s, NIETZSCHE. BRANDES TO NIETZSCHE. Copenhagen, January 11, 1888. DEAR SIR: Your publisher has apparently forgotten to send me your promised books. But I have received your letter to-day, and thank you for it. I venture to send you in proof (because, unfortunately, I have no other copy at hand) one of my books, a collection of essays in- F R IE D R IC H NIETZSCHE 325 tended for exportation abroad, so for that reason not my best wares. They date from different periods, and are all too full of chivalry, praise, and idealism. Never in any of them do I give voice wholly to my true opinions. The essay on Ibsen is the best, but the translation of the verses which was done for me is un fortunately wretched. There is a Northern writer whose works would in terest you, if they were but translated, Soren Kierke gaard. He lived from 1813 to 1855, and is in my opin ion one of the profoundest psychologists to be met with anywhere. A little book which I have written about him (the translation published at Leipzig in 1879) gives no exhaustive idea of his genius, for the book is a kind of polemical tract written with the purpose of checking his influence. It is, nevertheless, from a psychological point of view the finest work I have pub lished. The essay in the Goethe Year-Book was, worse luck, made a third shorter because the space had been reserved for me.

It is better in Danish for that rea son. If by any chance you read Polish, I will send you a little book which I have published only in that language. I see that the new Ri vista Contemporanea of Florence has an article of mine on Danish litera ture. Pray don't road it. It is full of the most exasperating blunders, being translated from the Rus sian. I consented to its being translated into Russian from my French text, but I was unable to supervise the translation. So now it appears from the Russian in Italian with fresh absurdities, among other errors, always G for H in names because of the Russian pro nunciation. It rejoices me to think that you can find 326 SELECTED LETTERS OF anything useful in me. For the last four years I have been the best hated man in the North. The news papers rage furiously at me every day, especially since my last long feud with Bjornson, in which the moral German press has without exception taken sides against me. You may know his ridiculous drama, The Gauntlet; his propaganda for the chastity of men, and his compact with the female advocates of equality of the sexes. Anything of the kind was, of course, unheard of here before. In Sweden these shrieking viragoes have formed leagues, and take vows that they will only marry "virginal men." It strikes me that they will get their husbands guaranteed like watches, but with the future guarantee left out. The three of your books which I know, I have read over and over again. There are a few bridges? that connect my inner world with yours, such as Ca?sarism, hatred of ped antry, the appreciation of Beylo, &c., but for the most part it is all foreign to me. Our experiences seem to have been as wide as the poles asunder. You are of all modern German authors, without a doubt, the most suggestive and worth reading. As for German literature, I cannot think what is the mat ter with it ! It seems as if all the finest brains must be absorbed by the Army Staff or have gone into pol itics. The whole manner of life and all your insti tutions promote among you the most ghastly uniform ity and even authorship seems to be asphyxiated by publishing. With sentiments of honour and regard, GEORG BRANDES. F 1C 1 E D II I C H NIETZSCHE 327 NIETZSCHE TO BRANDES. Nice, February 19, 1888. DEAR SIR: You have put me in your debt in the most agreeable way possible with your treatise on the idea of "mod ernity." For during this very winter I am circling round the question which stands in the first rank as one worthy of consideration. I am trying, to the best of my ability, in as unmodern a way as can be, to take a very cursory bird's-eye, retrospective survey of things modern. I admire — let me confess it— your toleration in criticism and your reticence in judgment. How you "suffer the little ones to come unto you," even Heyse.1 I intend on my next journey into Germany to tackle Kierkegaard's psychological problems, and to renew my acquaintance with your older literature. That will be of use to me in the best sense of the word, and will serve to cajole my own critical harshness and arrogance into a good temper. Yesterday my pub lisher telegraphed to me that he had sent off the books. I will spare you and myself the explanation of why this has come to pass so late in the day. Make the best of a bad business, my dear Sir. I mean of this Nietzschean literature. For my part I rather fancy that I have given these "New Germans" the richest, most vital, and independ ent books that they possess, and at the same time I claim that my personality stands for a supreme event aPaul Heyse, a veteran German dramatist, writer of "Novelen," popular in the last century. — The Translator. 328 SELECTED LETTERS OF at the present crisis in our estimating of values. But this may be an error, and, what is more, a piece of crass stupidity. I don't want to be forced to believe in myself. A few remarks now relating to my first-born work ("Juvenilia and Juvenalia").

The pamphlet against Strauss, a malicious "making merry" on the part of an extreme free-thinker at the expense of one who imagined himself to be a free-thinker, stirred up a tremendous scandal. At that time I was already Pro fessor ordinarius, despite my tender age of twentyseven years, and in consequence a kind of authority, something recognized, as it were. The most ingenuous account of this controversy in which every notability took part for or against me, and over which an enormous quantity of ink was spilled, is in the second volume of Karl Hillebrand's "Zciten, Volkcr nnd Menschen." The head and front of my offending was not so much that I held up to ridicule the exploded machinery of an amazing method of criticism, but that I should catch our German taste in a flagrant and compromising lack of taste. Teu tonic taste had, in spite of all religious and party dif ferences, been unanimous in admiration of Strauss's "Old and New Faith," pronouncing it a masterpiece of acuteness and freedom of thought, and even of style. My pamphlet was the first attack on German culture, that culture which it was boasted had con quered France. A phrase of mine, "Culturephilistine," survived the thrusts of violent polemical controversy, and has taken root in the language. The two essays on Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner FBI ED RICH NIETZSCHE 329 represent, it appears to me to-day, more self-confes sions, above all, more avowals of self, than any real psychology of those masters who were both related to me as intimately as they were antagonistically. I was the first to distil, as it were, out of them both, a kind of unity. At present this superstition is very much in the foreground of German culture. All Wagnerites are disciples of Schopenhauer. It was quite the other way when I was young. In those days it was the last of the Hegelians who rallied round Wag ner. And "Wagner and Hegel" was the battle-cry of the 'fifties. Between "Thoughts Out of Season" and "Human, All Too Human/' there lies a crisis and a skin-casting. Moreover, I lay physically for years at the gates of death. This was, positively, a great piece of good for tune. I forgot myself, lived myself down. And I have accomplished the same feat a second time. Thus it comes about that you and I have exchanged courtesies. I think we are a pair of wanderers in the wilderness who are glad to have met each other. With true regards, I, remain, Yours, NIETZSCHE. BRANDES TO NIETZSCHE. DEAR SIR : Copenhagen, March 7, 1888. You are revelling, I expect, in beautiful spring weather, while up here we have had abominable snow storms, and have been cut off from Europe for sev- 330 SELECTED LETTERS OF eral days. What is more, I lectured to-night to some hundred more or less imbecile human beings. Things look grey and sad around me. A little to refresh my mind, I sit down to thank you for your letter of February 19th and the precious present of books. I sent you, as I was too bus}7 to write, a volume on German Romanticism which I found in my cupboard. But I do not wish you to think that my sending it is meant for anything else than a silent expression of thanks. The book was written in 1873 and revised in 1886, but my German publisher took upon himself to make no end of linguistic and other alterations, so that, for instance, the opening pages are hardly mine at all. In every place where he failed to understand or agree with my opinion he substituted something else on the plea that what I had written was not Ger man. Besides this, the. man promised to buy the rights of the old translation of my book, yet from quite in comprehensible reasons he has not done it; the con sequence is that in two instances my book has been suppressed by the German authorities on the ground of its being piracy ( !) and of my having used bits of the old translation, whereas the actual pirate of my work is allowed to sell it scot-free ! The result will be, in all probability, that I shall eventually withdraw altogether from contributing to German literature. I sent you the volume because I had not another to send.

But the first on the Emigrants, the fourth on the English, and the fifth on the French Romanticists are far better, having been written con amore. The FKIEDKICH NIETZSCHE 331 title of the book, "Modern Minds," is an accident. I have written some twenty volumes. I wanted to ar range a selection for abroad on well-known person alities, and thus it came into being. A good deal in it cost me much study ; for instance, the essay on Tegner, which is the first true account of him. Ibsen as a per sonality will be sure to interest you. He is unfor tunately not as a man equal to what he is as a poet. In thought he was much influenced by Kierkegaard, and has remained saturated with theology. Bjornson in his last phase has become a mere vulgar laypreacher. I have not published any book for more than three years. I have been too unhappy. These three years have been the hardest of my life, and I see no sign of things becoming more cheerful in the fu ture. Yet I now intend to start the sixth volume of my "Main Currents," and also to publish another book. It will take much time. I have taken hearty delight in all the fresh books from you, and have dipped into them and read here and there. Your youthful productions are of great value to me; they make everything much easier to understand. I can now climb comfortably the stairs that lead up to the tower of your intellect. I began too precipitately with "Zarathustra." I would rather ascend steadily and slowly than plunge headlong as into a sea. The essay by Hillebrand I knew, and I had also read some years ago bitter attacks on your book on Strauss. I am grateful to you for the phrase, "Culture-philistine." I had no notion that it originated with you. I do not take umbrage at your scarifying criticism of Strauss, though I cherish a pious regard for the old gentle- 332 SELECTED LETTERS OF man. He was and always remained the pupil of the Tubingen clerical college. Of the other works I have till now only properly and carefully studied "Dawn of Day/' I feel that I understand the book perfectly. Many of the thoughts have been my own ; others are new to me, or cast in a new form, which, however, does not estrange me from them. That this letter may not be too long, I will only touch on one more point. I delight in the aphorism concerning the hazard of marriage. But why do you not dig much deeper? In another place you even speak with a certain re spect of marriage which, through presupposing an ideal of emotional nature, has idealised sentiment. Here you are certainly bolder and stronger. But why not once for all speak the whole truth about it? I am of opinion that the institution of marriage, which might have been very useful as a muzzle for the pas sion of monsters, has caused more distress and misery among ordinary mankind than the Church itself. Church, monarchy, property, marriage, are the four old, time-honoured institutions which humanity must reform root and branch in order to be able to breathe freely. And alone of these marriage kills individual ity, paralyses freedom, and is a paradox incarnate. The awful part of it is that humanity is as yet too barbarous to be able to do without it. Authors of the so-called emancipated and advanced type still con tinue to speak of marriage with a mien of hearty de votion that enrages me. And, after all, they are in the right, for it is impossible to say what can be set up in its place for the rabble. Nothing is to be done but slowly to reverse public opinion. What do you think? FBIEDKICH NIETZSCHE 33 I should very much like to know how your eyes are. I was glad to see your handwriting so strong and clear. Is your life, externally at any rate, passing pretty peacefully down there in the south? Mine is a combat that consumes. I am still more detested in these climes than I was seventeen years ago. In it self, it is not a pleasant state of things, but there is this consolation to be derived from it, that it bears testimony to my being still militant, and in no point near to making my peace with mediocrity.

I am, your attentive and grateful reader, GEORG BRANDES. NIETZSCHE TO BRANDES. Nice, March 27, 1888. DEAR SIR: I have wanted to thank you much sooner than this for so pregnant and thoughtful a letter as your last, but I have had trouble with my health, and have been grievously hindered in all good works. I may men tion in passing that my eyes are the barometer of my general condition ; after fluctuations, they have en tered on a period of general progress and improve ment, and have become more sound and lasting than I could ever have believed possible. Indeed, they have falsified the prophecies of the very best German ocul ists. If Grafe, the celebrated specialist, et hoc genus omne, had been right, I should have been blind long ago. It is bad enough to have come to No. 3 spec tacles, but I can still see. I refer to this misery be cause you were kind and sympathetic enough to ask 334 SELECTED LETTERS OF after it, and because my eyes have been specially weak and irritable during the last few weeks. I pity you in your now more than usually dreary and wintry North ; how can a man contain his soul in such a cli mate! I admire nearly everyone who does not lose faith in himself under overcast, gloomy skies, not to speak of faith in "humanity," "marriage," "property," and the "State." In St. Petersburg I should be a Nihilist; here, I believe as a plant does, in the sun. The sun of Nice — there is really no prejudice about that. We have been enjoying him at the rest of Europe's cost. God allows the sun, with his custom ary cynicism, to shine on us idlers, "philosophers," and Greeks more beautifully than on the much worthier military heroes of the Fatherland! You are driven with the true instincts of the North erner to choose the strongest stimulant, by aid of which life in the North is made bearable. I mean war, an aggressive, Viking warfare. I discern in your writings the practised warrior, and not only is it mediocrity that perpetually challenges you to come out and fight in the open, but perhaps, too, the pecu liarities of the more independent and important repre sentatives of the Northern mind. How much "parson," how much theology, is still concealed in all this idealism? I should mind much more than gloomy skies being obliged to get exasperated over matters that did not a jot concern me. So much for to-day, and it is little enough. Your German Romantik made me reflect how the whole of this movement has only reached its goal in music (Schumann, Mendelssohn, Weber, Wagner, Brahms) ; FKIEDKICH NIETZSCHE 335 as literature, it has remained nothing but a splendid promise. The French have been happier. I am afraid that I am too much of a musician not to be a roman ticist. Life for me without music would be a blunder. With hearty and grateful greetings, dear Sir, Yours, NIETZSCHE. BRANDES TO NIETZSCHE. Copenhagen, April 3, 1888. MY DEAR SIR: You have called the post a medium for impertinent intrusion. As a rule, that is true enough; it ought also to be a sat sapienti that it should not be allowed to plague you. I am not by nature a pushing person. So much the reverse, indeed, that I live a nearly iso lated life, seldom write letters, and write, as a rule, with reluctance, as do all authors. But yesterday, when I had got your letter, and taken up one of your books, I was seized with a sudden spasm of anger to think that no one here in Scandi navia knew anything of you, and I resolved, at one stroke, to make you known. The enclosed little cut ting from the newspaper will tell you that (having just finished a course of lectures on Russia) I am going to start a new series on your writings. For many years I have had to repeat my lectures because the University cannot hold the audiences; that will hardly happen this time, your name being so abso lutely new, but those who will come to get an im pression of your works will not, I promise you, be of the dullards, 33G SELECTED LETTEKS OF As I am extremely anxious to know what you are like in appearance, I beg you to send me a portrait of yourself.

I enclose my own latest photograph. Might I ask you, too, to write me a brief and succinct account of when and where you were born, in what years your books were published (or, better still, were written), for they are not dated? If you happen to have any papers by you in which these facts are stated you need not trouble to write them. I am a very un methodical person, and keep no encyclopaedia of writers on my shelves, or any other book of reference in which I might find your name. Your early writings, the "out of season" ones, have been of great use to me. How young you were, how full of enthusiasm, how candid and naive ! The works of your riper years are still in parts not clearly in telligible to me. They seem too often to generalise from quite intimate and personal data, giving the reader an exquisite casket without the key. But I under stand the majority. I read with special enjoyment your youthful work on Schopenhauer, and although I owe personally little to Schopenhauer it struck me as being spoken from my soul. I offer a few pedantic corrections. On p. 116 of "Joyful Wisdom" the words quoted are not the last of Chamfort's; they are given by himself in Caracteres et Anecdotes. See conversation between M. D. and M. L. as an explanation of the saying, "Pen de per sonifies et pew de choses m' inter essent, mais Hen ne m'interesse moins que moi" The end is ". . . en vivant et en voyant les hommes II faut que le cceur se brise on se bronze." On p. 118 you speak of the F R I E D R I C II NIETZSCHE 337 sublime pinnacle on which Shakespeare places Caesar. To me Shakespeare's Caesar is pitiable, a piece of high treason. And what of the glorification of the wretched fellow who could find nothing better to do than thrust a knife into a great man? In "Human, All Too Human," II., p. 59, you say: "It is the one sacred lie that has become famous." No, the last words of Desdemona are perhaps more beautiful and just as famous, constantly quoted in Germany at the time Jacobi was writing about Lessing. Is this not so? These trivialities are cited merely to show you how attentively I read you. There are other matters, of course, which I should like to discuss with you, but this cannot be done by letter. If you read Danish, I should be pleased to send you a charmingly-got- up little book on Holberg. Tell me if you understand our language. Should you by any chance read Swedish, I must bring to your notice Sweden's one genius, August Strindberg. When you write about women you are very like him. Give me good news of your eyes. Yours respectfully, GEORG BBANDES. NIETZSCHE TO BRANDES. Turin, Italy, ferma in posta. April 10, 1888. This is indeed a surprise, my dear Sir ! Where have you acquired the courage to be desirous of speaking in public on a vir obscurissimusf . . . Do you 338 SELECTED LETTEKS OF imagine for a moment that I am known at all in the dear Fatherland? It is there above all places that I am regarded as something absurd and eccentric, some thing that is not wanted and need not be taken seri ously. Presumably they scent that I do not take them seriously, and how could I in these days when German Geist has become a contradiction in terms? I am much obliged to you for sending me your pho tograph. Unfortunately I am unable to return the compliment, my sister, who has married and gone to South America, having taken with her the last pho tographs of myself that I possessed. I enclose, however, a litle Vita, the first I have ever written. As to the dates of the separate books, they are given on the title-page flyleaf of "Beyond Good and Evil." But you may have mislaid the leaf. "The Birth of Tragedy" was composed between the summer of 1870 and the winter of 1871 (finished in Lugano when I was living with the family of the fieldmarshal Moltke). The "Thoughts out of Season," between 1872 and the summer of 1875 (there were to have been thirteen of them, but health happily said "No"). What you say about "Schopenhauer as a teacher" gives me infinite pleasure.

That little performance serves the purpose of a distinguishing mark; he for whom it does not contain much that is personal has in all probability nothing in common with me. The whole scheme according to which I have ever since lived is drawn up in it. It is a rigorous foreshad owing. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 339 "Human, All Too Human," with its two appendices, came into being in the summers of 1876-1879 ; "Dawn of Day," in 1880; "The Joyful Science/' January, 1882; "Zarathustra," 1883 to 1885, each part written in about ten days in circumstances completely "in spired." Every sentence came to me while taking long walks in the open air, with such absolute sureness that it might have been shouted into my ear. Intense physical exuberance and elasticity accompanied the writing. "Beyond Good and Evil" occupied the sum mer of 1885 in the Upper Engadine and the follow ing winter in Nice. Between the 10th and 30th of July, 1887, the idea of "The Genealogy of Morals" was caught, the work carried out, MS. completed, and sent to the printers in Leipzig. (There is, of course, be sides, Philologica of mine, only that is of no interest to either you or me.) I am now trying Turin, and shall be here till June 5th, when I go on to the Engadine. So far, I find it severely wintry and raw. But the town itself in its superb serenity appeals to my instincts. It has the most beautiful pavement in the world. Hearty greetings from Yours most gratefully, NIETZSCHE. Alas! I know neither Danish nor Swedish. VITA (enclosed) I was born on the 15th of October, 1844, on the bat tlefield of Ltitzen. The first name I remember was that of Gustavus Adolphus. My ancestors were Poles belonging to the aristocracy (Niezky). The type 340 SELECTED LETTERS OF seems to be well preserved, in spite of three German mothers. Abroad I am generally taken for a Pole. In the visitors' list at Nice only this winter I was en tered as a Pole. They tell me that my head is fa miliar in MatejkoV pictures. My grandmother mixed in the Schiller-Goethe circles of Weimar; her brother succeeded Herder in the post of Weimar's General-Su perintendent. It was my good fortune to be a pupil at the celebrated and historic Pforta School, where so many (Klopstock, Fichte, Schlegel, Ranke, &c.) who have added lustre to German literature preceded me. We had teachers who would have been (or have been) creditable to every University. I next studied in Bonn, later on at Leipzig, where the venerable Ritschl, at that time the premier philologist of Ger many, singled me out for distinction from the first. At twenty-two years of age I was a contributor to the Litter arischcs Ccutralblatt (edited by Zarncke). The founding of the Philological Society of Leipzig, which still exists, originated with me. In the winter of 186869 the University of Bale offered me a professorial chair, before I had even been made doctor. Where upon the Leipzig University did me the extraordinary honour of conferring on me the degree of Doctor with out any examination or dissertation being required. I stayed at Bale from 1869 till 1879. It became necessary for me to give up my rights as a German subject, owing to the fact that as an officer in the Horse Artillery I was too often called out and dis turbed in my academic duties. 'Famous Polish painter (1838-93).— Translator. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 341 Nevertheless. I understand the use at least of two weapons, sabre and cannon, and perhaps I know some thing about a third. All went smoothly at Bale. It often happened at promotion examinations for the Doctorate that the examiner was younger than the examinee! A great advantage I enjoyed there was the genial relations existing between Jakob Burckhardt and myself; something quite unusual on the part of that hermit-like thinker, who lived a very re tired life. Another still more incalculable advantage wTas that from the beginning of my residence in Bale a quite unusual intimacy sprang up between me and Richard and Cosima Wagner, who at that time were living on their country estate, Triebschen, on the lake of Lu cerne, as much cut off from all their earlier connec tions as if they were on a desert island. For several years we shared every joy and sorrow ; a friendship of unbounded confidence. You will find that in Wag ner's collected works, Vol.

VII., there is printed an epistle to me apropos of the "Birth of Tragedy." My relations with them brought me in contact with a large circle of interesting men and women, in fact, the best society that moves between St. Petersburg and Paris. Towards 1876 my health began to decline. I spent a winter in Sorrento with my old friend Baro ness Meysenbug (author of Memoireii einer Idealistin) and Dr. Ree, with whom I was then in sympathy. It did me no good. An exceedingly painful and stub born form of headache set in that exhausted all my strength. As years went on it increased, and reached such a. climax of habitual suffering that the year con- 342 SELECTED LETTERS DP tained for me at that time two hundred days of tor ture. The cause of the malady must have been en tirely local, as any kind of neuro-pathological grounds for it were absent. I never had the least sign of men tal disturbance, no fever, no fainting. My pulse was the whole time as slow as the first Napoleon's (60). My speciality was to endure excruciating pain and cru et vert with an absolutely clear brain for two or three days on end, vomiting bile the whole time. A report got wind that I was in an asylum (indeed, that I had died there). Nothing could have been further from the truth. My mind did not really mature until this frightful time. Evidence of it is "Dawn of Day", which I wrote in 1881 during a winter of unspeakable wretchedness in Genoa, beyond reach of doctors, friends, and relations. I composed the book with a minimum of health and strength, so it stands for a kind of Dynamometer of my powers. From 1882 on wards I progressed, even if slowly, towards recovery. The crisis was overcome (my father died young, at exactly the same age at which I myself was at death's door). Even to-day I have to be extremely careful; certain conditions, climatic and meteorological, are in dispensable. It is not choice, but compulsion, which takes me every summer to the Upper Engadine and every winter to the Riviera. Finally, this illness has been of the very greatest help to me ; it has set me free ; it has restored me the courage to be myself. My instincts are those of a brave, even of a military, beast. The prolonged strug gle has slightly exasperated my pride of spirit. After all, am I a philosopher? But what does it matter? FKIEDKICH NIETZSCHE 343 BBANDES TO NIETZSCHE. Copenhagen, April 29th, 1888. DEAR SIR : The first time I lectured on your works the hall was not quite full, so few knowing at all who and what you are. But a leading newspaper reported my lec ture, and I myself wrote an article on you, so that the next time there was hardly standing room in the hall. Nearly three hundred listeners follow with the utmost attention my exposition of your philosophy. Still, I have not dared to repeat the lecture in this in stance, as has been my custom for several years, be cause the theme is so far from popular. It is my hope in this manner to procure you some good readers in the North. Your books, very beautifully bound, are now ranged in one of my book-cases. I should like to possess everything that you have published. When you of fered me, in your first letter, a musical work which you had composed called "A Hymn to Life" I declined the gift out of modesty, feeling that I was not a very competent musician. Now I think that through my interest in it I may be deserving of the work, and shall be extremely indebted to you if you will kindly send it to me. I fancy that I may find a summary of the impression of my hearers in these words of a young painter: "All this is so interesting because it does not deal with books but with life." If there is anything that does not please in your ideas it is only that they sometimes put matters too much to ex tremes. It wasn't kind of you to send me no photo graph; my only reason for sending you mine was to 344 SELECTED LETTERS OF put you in my debt.

It really is not much trouble to sit for a few minutes before a camera, and one knows a man better when one has some notion of his appear ance. Yours with devoted regards, GEORG BRANDES. NIETZSCHE TO BRANDES. DEAR SIR: Turin, May 4th, 1888. What you tell me causes me the greatest pleasure, and I must confess even more surprise. Be assured that I shall not forget it of you. You know that all hermits have retentive memories ! Meanwhile, I hope my photograph has reached you. As a matter of course, I immediately took steps (not to get photo graphed exactly, for I entertain a profound mistrust of ordinary photographers), but to get someone who possesses a photograph of me to part with it ! I may have succeeded, but I do not know for certain. In any case, I will seize the opportunity the next time I am in Munich — probably this autumn — to get myself done in effigy. The "Hymn to Life" shall start on its journey to Copenhagen one day soon. We philoso phers appreciate nothing so much as to be mistaken for artists. Moreover, I am told by leading and com petent judges that the hymn is in every way good for representation, and its performance would be certain of success. The praise which pleases me most is that it is pronounced "pure in phrasing." Mottl, the distinguished Carlsruhe conductor (you know he con- FBIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 345 ducted the Bayreuth festivals) has suggested giving a performance of it. From Italy comes the news that my point of view in the second volume of "Thoughts Out of Season" was honoured by being very favourably alluded to in a resume on the history of German literature by a Viennese savant, Dr. von Zackauer, who winds up his article with it in the Archivio Storico of Flor ence. The last few weeks in Turin, where I shall be till June 5th, have been better than any I have had for years past. Above all, they have been more philo sophic. Nearly every day I have for two hours reached such a point of energy that I have been able to review from an eminence my conception as a whole, all the enormous host of problems lying spread out at my feet in relief and clear in outline. Such a feat re quires a maximum of strength which I scarcely dared hope ever would be mine again. Everything fits into its place, and for years has been tending in the right direction ; a man builds his philosophy like a beaver ; he is necessary, yet does not know it. ... Yet one must see it all as I have seen it to be able to be lieve his eyes. I am in such good form, so braced, so lightened of a burden — I can make a merry little quip out of the gravest matters. How has it all come about? Do I not owe it to the dear North winds, the North winds which do not always blow from the Alps, but bring messages too from Copenhagen? Grateful greetings from your NIETZSCHE. 346 SELECTED LETTEES OF NIETZSCHE TO BRANDES. Turin, May 23rd, 1888. DEAR SIR : I don't want to leave Turin without expressing to you once more what a large share you have had in my first, for a long time, satisfactory spring. The history of my springs for the last fifteen years at least is a ter rible tale of decadence and weakness. Places seem to make no difference ; it was as if there was no pana cea, no diet, no climate that could alter the essen tially depressing character of that season. But now, behold Turin! And the first good tidings, your tid ings, dear Sir, which have given proof that I live. . . . For I am in the habit now and then of forgetting that I am alive. An accident, a question reminded me this very day that a leading concept of life is extinguished in me. I mean the conception of "fu ture." No wish, not a breath of a wish in front of me! Simply a calm sea! Why should not a day in my seventieth year resemble exactly my days at pres ent? Is it that I have lived too long in proximity to death to open my eyes any more on beautiful possi bilities?

Anyhow it is a fact that I limit myself to taking no thought further than to-day and to-mor row. I arrange to-day for what is to happen to-mor row, but for no day beyond. That may be irrational, unpractical, and perhaps unchristian. Did not the Sermoniser on the Mount forbid this taking thought for the morrow — but it seems to me in the highest degree philosophic. ... It gives me a greater respect for myself than I formerly had. I have grasped FBI ED RICH NIETZSCHE 347 the fact that I have unlearnt the art of wishing with out having intended it. These halcyon weeks have been employed in "trans valuing values." You understand this process? In reality the alchemist is the most serviceable sort of creature there is; I mean that he converts something base and despised into something of value, and even into gold. He alone creates wealth, others only re fashion. My task this time has been quite unique; I have asked myself what has hitherto been most hated, feared, and scorned by men . . . and just out of that I have manufactured my gold. . . . It's only to be hoped that I shall not be reproached for counterfeit coinage. But I shall be, of course! Has my photograph reached you? In such an excep tional case my mother has kindly consented to save me from appearing ungracious. I trust, too, that my Leipzig publisher, G. W. Fritzsch, has discharged his duty and despatched the Hymn. To wind up with, I own to a piece of inquisitiveness. As it was not granted me to listen at a crack of the door in order to gain some information about myself, I should be glad to hear something iii another way. Three words to characterise the subject of your lectures. How much would I not glean from three words ! Most hearty good wishes, dear Sir, Your NIETZSCHE. 348 SELECTED LETTERS OP BBANDES TO NIETZSCHE. Copenhagen, May 23rd, 1888. DEAR SIR: Many thanks for letter, photo, and music. Letter and music gave me unmitigated delight, but the photo graph might have been better. It is a profile picture done at Naumburg, characteristic in outline, but with far too little expression. Surely you must look •dif ferent from that? The man who wrote "Zarathustra" must at the same time have inscribed many more secrets on his features. I finished my lectures on Friedrich Nietzsche be fore Whitsun. They ended, as the newspapers say, with an ovation. The "ovation" is almost entirely to your credit, not mine. I give myself the pleasure of transmitting it to you in writing. All I did was to interpret clearly and concisely and in a manner com prehensible to a Northern audience ideas that have their origin with you. I attempted also to define your attitude with regard to your various contemporaries, to penetrate into the workshop of your thoughts, to dwell on points where my own pet theories were at one with yours, to illus trate where I differed from you, and in short to pre sent a complete psychological picture of Nietzsche, the man of letters. This much I may say without exag geration : your name is now very popular in all intel ligent circles in Copenhagen, and at least known throughout Scandinavia. You have nothing to thank me for; it has been a real pleasure to immerse my self in your world of ideas. My lectures are not de- FRIED RICH NIETZSCHE 340 serving of publication for the simple reason that any thing purely philosophical is outside my province, and I would rather not print what treats of a subject in which I feel that I am not thoroughly competent. It rejoices me to know that you are feeling physically so "fit," and mentally refreshed. Here after the long winter we have a mild spring. We are delighting in the first young green of the trees, and also in a very perfectly arranged exhibition of Northern art, which is now opened in Copenhagen. Nearly all the leading French artists, both painters and sculptors, are ex hibiting in it as well. Nevertheless, I long to be on the wing, but am obliged to stay. I am afraid all this cannot interest you. I have for gotten to mention that if you don't know the Icelandic Sagas, you ought to study them.

You would find much in them to support your hypothesis and the ories concerning the morals of a master race. There is one very small detail in which you are not accurate. Gothic has certainly nothing to do with God, nor with good. It is connected with U lessen, to pour; he who emits the sperm, and signifies stallion or male. On the other hand, philologists here hold that your sug gestion bonus — duonus is strikingly apt. I trust that you and I are never to become quite I am, strangers again in future. Your faithful reader and admirer, GEORG BRANDES. 350 SELECTED LETTERS OF NIETZSCHE TO BRANDES. (Post-card.) Turin, May 27th, 1888. DEAR SIR : What eyes yours are! It is quite true that the Nietzsche of the photograph is not the author of "Zarathustra." He is two or three years too young. I am much indebted to you for the etymology of "Gote" (Goth) ; it is simply godly. I presume that to-day you will be reading a letter from me. Yours always gratefully, N . NIETZSCHE TO BRANDES. Sils-Maria, September 13, 1888. DEAR SIR: Herewith may I have the pleasure of recalling my self to you by sending you a present of a mischievous little piece of writing which all the same was very seriously meant? It dates from the bright days at Turin, but in the meanwhile evil days came in abun dance, and such a decline in health, courage, and "Will to live" — to use Schopenhauerean language — that soon the little spring idyll seemed almost as if it had never been. Luckily, I got out of it while it lasted yet another document, the "Case of Wagner: a Problem for Musicians." Malicious tongues are FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 351 sure to interpret this as "The Fall of Wagner."1 I insist on your just glancing at this bit of musi cian's psychology, no matter how much you may de fend yourself against music, the most importunate of all the Muses. For, my dear Sir Cosmopolitan, you are far too European in your tastes not to discern a hundred times more in it than my so-called compa triots, the "musical Germans." I am, to sum up, in such a case connoisseur in rebus ct personis,2 and hap pily a musician by instinct to such an extent that the problem of value which is the root of this matter can be (in my opinion) approached and solved via music. Really, the treatise might almost be said to be writ ten in French; it would possibly be easier to trans late into French than into German. Can you give me a few Russian and French addresses of people to whom it would be of some sense to post the treatise? In a few months you may expect something philo sophical from me under the title of "Musings of a Psychologist."'3 I manage to tell the world, including the talented nation of Germans, many home truths pleasant and unpleasant. But all this is chiefly noth ing but recreation from the subject-in-chief, which last is called "Transvaluation of all Values." Europe will be compelled to discover a Siberia bad enough for the originator of this tentative attempt at valuing. German title is Der Fall Wagner; Vol. VII of Eng lish 'The edition. — Translator. -In things and persons. — Translator. title later —to Translator. "Twilight of the Idols." Vol. XVI 3Heof changed authorizedthistranslation. 352 SELECTED LETTEKS OF I hope you will respond to my flippant letter with one of your characteristically "resolute" epistles. Yours always, With friendly regards and remembrances, DR. NIETZSCHE. (Address till middle of November, TURIN, ITALY (ferma in posta.) BRANDES TO NIETZSCHE. Copenhagen, October 6th, 1888. DEAR SIR : Your letter and your valuable present found me in a raging fever of overwork, hence the delay of my answer. The sight of your handwriting was enough to awaken within me enjoyable anticipations. It is sad and deplorable indeed that you should have had such a wretched summer. I was foolish enough to believe that you had once for all come out of the furnace of physical suffering. I have read the brochure with the most careful at tention and the most intense enjoyment. I am not so unmusical that I could not appreciate the humour of it. I am simply not a competent judge.

A few days before I got the little book I had been present at a performance of "Carmen." What splendid music it is ! All the same, at the risk of making you angry, I must confess that Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde" made a profound and indelible impression on me. I heard the opera once in Berlin, when my soul was bat- FRIEDBICH NIETZSCHE 353 tered and in a state of despair. I felt every note. I don't know whether the impression made on me was so deep, because I was so soul-sick. Do you know Bizet's widow? You ought to send her the brochure. It would delight her. She is the loveliest, most charming of women, with a chronic tic that, curious to say, is most becoming, but she is quite genuine, full of sincerity and fire. The one thing against her is that she has married again — a Parisian barrister, quite a sterling man, Straus by name. I believe she understands German. I could get her address for you, if it doesn't disgust you that she has no more remained faithful to her God, than the Vir gin Mary, Mozart's widow and Marie Louise did to theirs. Bizet's child is of indescribable beauty and charm. But I am gossiping. I have given a copy of the book to our great Swed ish author, Strindberg, whom I have completely con verted into an admirer of yours. He is a true genius, but a little mad, as are most geniuses (and nongeniuses!). I'll see that the other copy is suitably placed. I know little of Paris now, but you might send a copy to the following address : "Madame la Princesse Anna Dmitrievna Tenicheff, Quai Anglais, 20 Peters burg." This lady is a friend of mine. She is familiar with the musical world of St. Petersburg, and will make you known there. I asked her once before to buy your books, but all of them, with the exception of "Human, all too Human," were confiscated in Kussia. 354 SELECTED LETTERS OF It would perhaps be polite, too, to send a copy to Prince Urussow (known to readers of TurgeniefPs letters). He is keenly interested in everything Ger man, is highly gifted, and a literary gourmet. Just at this moment I cannot recollect his address, but I can easily procure it. I am glad that notwithstanding your physical disabilities you can do such daring and vigorous work. It would give me the greatest joy to be read by you, but, unfortunately, you do not understand my language. This summer I have ac complished an enormous quantity. I have written two new big books (consisting of twenty-four and twentyeight sheets), "Impressions of Poland" and "Impres sions of Russia" ; besides, I have entirely revised for a new edition one of my earliest works, "^Esthetic Studies," and corrected the proofs myself of all three books. In a week or so I shall have this work off my hands, and begin a course of French lectures, ajid in the depths of winter I shall be off to Russia in order to recuperate there. This is the plan I have arranged for my winter campaign. May it prove no retreat from Moscow! Trusting that you will always retain your friendly interest in me, Yours truly and respectfully, GEORG BRANDES. NIETZSCHE TO BRANDES. Turin, October 20th, 1888. DEAR SIR : Again a pleasant breeze was wafted to me from the North with your letter, the only letter till now which FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 355 has put a goad face, or any face, on my Wagner phi lippic. For nobody writes. Even among circles near est and dearest I have created an irreparable breach. There is, for example, my old friend Baron von Seydlitz, in Munich, who happens, as luck will have it, to be president at this moment of the Munich Wagner Society. My still older friend the attorney, Krug, in Cologne, president of the Wagner Union of that town; my brother-in-law, Dr. Bernhard Forster, in South America, the well-known anti-Semite, and one of the most zealous members of the Bayreuther Blat ter staff; and lastly, my revered friend, Malvida von Meysenbug, the author of "Memoiren einer Idealistin," who puts Wagner on the same plane as Michael Angelo. . . . Moreover, I understand that I must be on my guard against the female Wagnerite par excellence, who in extreme cases would show no mercy.

Probably Bayreuth will protect itself, after the manner of the Ger man Government, by interdicting my book on the ground that it is dangerous to public morals. My dictum "We all know the unaesthetic temperament of the Christian Junker" might in itself be interpreted as lese-majeste. Your digression on the subject of Bizet's widow en chanted me. Please send me her address with Prince Urussow's. A copy has already been sent to your friend, the Princess Dmitrievna Tenicheff. When my next production is ready, which will be before very long (the title is "Twilight of the Idols," or "How to Philosophise with the Hammer"), I should much 356 SELECTED LETTERS OF like to send a copy to the Swede1 whom you have in troduced to me with such honourable mention. Only I do not know where he lives. This tract is my phil osophy in a nutshell . . . radical to the verge of being criminal. I, too, was once miraculously affected by Tristan. A dose of soul torture seems to me to be a first-rate tonic to take before a Wagner repast. The barrister, Dr. Wiener, of Leipzig, gave me to understand that a cure at Karlsbad was also advisable. How industrious you are! And I, alas! such an idiot that I cannot understand Danish. I can per fectly believe that it is possible to recuperate in Russia. I count any sort of Russian book, especially one of Dostoiewski's, translated, not into German (Heaven forbid !), but into French, among those that have brought greatest relief to my mind.2 . . . From my heart I am grateful to you, as I have every reason to be. Your NIETZSCHE. BRANDES TO NIETZSCHE. Copenhagen, November 16th, 1888. DEAR SIR : In vain have I been waiting for an answer from Paris giving the address of Madame Bizet. On the other hand, I have obtained the address of Prince 'August Strindberg. 'Nietzsche apparently refers here to "The House of the Dead; or, Prison Life in Siberia." It confirmed his own theory that great criminals may be great characters. — Translator. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 357 Urussow. He lives at 79 Sargiewskaia, St. Peters burg. My three books are now out, and I have begun my lectures here. It is remarkable how what you write on Dostoiewski in your letter and in your book concur with my impressions of him. He is a true and great poet, but a vile creature, absolutely Christian in his way of thinking and living, and at the same time quite sadique. His morals are wholly what you have christened "Slave Morality." The mad Swede's name is August Strindberg; he lives here. His address is Holte, near Copenhagen. He has a special fondness for you, because he thinks that he finds in you all his own hatred of women. For that reason you are to him modern (irony of fate). When he read the report of my spring lec tures in the papers he said, "It is astonishing how much there seems to be in this Nietzsche that I might have written." His drama, "P£re," has just appeared in French, with a preface by Zola. I am melancholy when I think of Germany. What a development is going on there at present! How sad to reflect that from all appearances one will not see anything good in the history of one's lifetime. It is a pity that you, a learned philologist, cannot read Danish. I am doing all I can to prevent my two books on Po land and Russia being translated, so that I shall not be banished or, at any rate, forbidden to speak when next I travel there. Hoping that these lines will find you in Turin or be sent after I you, am, Yours sincerely, GEORG BRANDED 358 SELECTED LETTERS OF NIETZSCHE TO BRANDES. Torino, via Carlo Alberta 6, November 20th, 1888. Forgive me, dear Sir, for answering you on the spot. Curious things are passing at this crisis in my life, things which have never had their like. The day before yesterday, again to-day. Ah ! if you could only know what I had been writing when your letter reached me !

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.

FKIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 361 thing in common, though very remotely in common.1 Big and strong and unamiable is that eccentric, yet lovable withal. Strindberg will be delighted that yon appreciate him. I do not know the French translation you mention, but they say here that all the best parts in Giftas (Maries) are omitted, especially the witty polemic against Ibsen. You should read his play Pere. There is a fine scene in it. He would, of course, be glad to send it to you. Can you imagine that he abhors his wife psychically, but cannot physically abandon her? He is a monogamous misogynist. It is certainly extraordinary that the polemical trait should still be so strong in you. In my early youth I was passionately inclined to polemics; now I can only depict men and combat powers in being silent on them. It would be as impossible to me to attack Christianity as it would be impossible for me to attack werewolves ; I mean, as to write a brochure against, belief in werewolves. Yet I see that we are in sympathy. ... I, too, love Pascal. But I was early all for the Jesuits against Pascal (in the Provinciales). Clever men of the world, they were right; he did not understand them, but they have understood him, and — what a master-stroke of impudence and astuteness — they edited his PromncMes with notes. The best edition is that of the Jesuits. Another col lision of the same kind was Luther pitted against the Pope. Victor Hugo in the preface to the Feuilles d'Automne has this fine saying: "On convoque la 'In "Ecce Homo," p. 66, Nietzsche refers to Ibsen as "the typical old maid whose object is to poison the clean conscience of the natural spirit of sexual love." — Translator. 362 SELECTED LETTERS OF diete de Worms mais on peint la chapelle Sixtine. II y a Luther mats il y a Michel- An ge . . . et remarquons en passant qu-e Lutlier est dans les vieillerles qui cronlent autour de nous et que Michel- Ange n'y est pas." Look well at the face of Dostoiewski, half a Russian peasant's face, half a criminal physiognomy, flat nose, small, penetrating eyes beneath lids that quiver with a nervous affection ; look at the forehead, lofty, thor oughly well formed; the expressive mouth, eloquent of numberless torments of abysmal melancholy, of unnatural pleasures, of infinite compassion and pas sionate envy! An epileptic genius, whose exterior speaks of the mild milk of human kindness, with which his temperament was flooded, of the depth of an al most maniacal acuteness which mounted to his brain ; finally of ambition, of monstrous exertion, and of bitter grudges which create pettiness of soul. His characters are not only poor and pitiable, but refined simpletons, noble prostitutes, frequently suf ferers from hallucinations, gifted epileptics, inspired recruits for martyrdom, exactly the types we can im agine grouped round the apostles and disciples in the first era of Christianity. Undoubtedly no other crea tures could be more remote from the Renaissance! I am quite excited to know how I come into your book. Yours most sincerely, GEORG BRANDES. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 363 To THE FRIEND GEORG. Having been discovered by you no trick was neces sary for the others to find me. The difficulty is now to get rid of me. THE CRUCIFIED. Nietzsche's sister has added to the correspondence of her brother with Brandes, which ends here, the fol lowing note: — i "In answer to this his last letter Brandes only re ceived the few lines above on a slip of the ruled paper which my beloved brother used for writing his manu scripts. It reached Copenhagen after the stroke which paralysed his brain had fallen on him. . . . When one considers the enormous mental effort of the last six or seven months, the strain on his eyesight, in addi tion to violent attacks of illness, it is not difficult to understand how his strength must have been over taxed and his marvellous intellect devoured. . . . With the gallantry of a hero he did not shirk the tension of fighting against adverse circumstances, but it was only by the aid of narcotics that he could combat nights of sleeplessness and depression; not morphia and opium, but chloral and a drug unknown to me were these aids which always had a most strange effect on my brother. ...

This may account for cer tain inaccuracies in the letter to Brandes dated No vember 20th. "The attack on Christianity, for example, is in "Anti-Christ", and not in "Ecce Homo", though it is 364 SELECTED LETTERS possible that he was then still doubtful as to whether or not he should transfer a few pages out of "AntiChrist" to "Ecce Homo". Most decidedly, however, the whole of the "Transvaluation of all Values" only lay before him complete in conception, and was not actually finished. On the other hand, "Ecce Homo" was completed as early as the beginning of November before the painful attacks of illness had set in. It may have been altered afterwards under the influence of changed circumstances, so that much that is puz zling has crept in, but nowhere is there any personal animus. The touching allusion to Brandes referred to in the last letter to him remained unchanged." THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS GARDEN CITY, N. Y. '3223 DATE DUE 1 Rli\l I Y COM. (,i 978-5 851 *?nn3 JAN 1 : I LIB I- . . E S : P : : 1895 - , , . , 1918 T G , . . , . This book has been downloaded from www.aliceandbooks.com. You can find many more public domain books in our website Copyright, , By Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.Pocket Book Edition, Published September, Second Printing, November, Set up, electrotyped, and printed by the Vail-Ballou Press, Binghamton, N.;Y. Paper manufactured by W.;C. Hamilton; Sons, Miquon, Pa., and furnished by W.;F. Etherington; Co., New York. Manufactured in the United States of America. A complete list to date of this series of popular reprints, bound uniformly with a design and endpapers by Claude Bragdon, may be found at the back of this volume. One book will appear each month, numbered for convenience in ordering. Introduction by H. L. Mencken Author’s Preface The Antichrist Save for his raucous, rhapsodical autobiography, “Ecce Homo,” “The Antichrist” is the last thing that Nietzsche ever wrote, and so it may be accepted as a statement of some of his most salient ideas in their final form. Notes for it had been accumulating for years and it was to have constituted the first volume of his long-projected magnum opus, “The Will to Power.” His full plan for this work, as originally drawn up, was as follows: Vol. I. The Antichrist: an Attempt at a Criticism of Christianity. The Free Spirit: a Criticism of Philosophy as a Nihilistic Vol. II. Movement. The Immoralist: a Criticism of Morality, the Most Fatal Form Vol. III. of Ignorance. Vol. IV. Dionysus: the Philosophy of Eternal Recurrence. The first sketches for “The Will to Power” were made in , soon after the publication of the first three parts of “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” and thereafter, for four years, Nietzsche piled up notes. They were written at all the places he visited on his endless travels in search of health—at Nice, at Venice, at Sils-Maria in the Engadine (for long his favourite resort), at Cannobio, at Zürich, at Genoa, at Chur, at Leipzig. Several times his work was interrupted by other books, first by “Beyond Good and Evil,” then by “The Genealogy of Morals” (written in twenty days), then by his Wagner pamphlets. Almost as often he changed his plan. Once he decided to expand “The Will to Power” to ten volumes, with “An Attempt at a New Interpretation of the World” as a general sub-title. Again he adopted the sub-title of “An Interpretation of All That Happens.” Finally, he hit upon “An Attempt at a Transvaluation of All Values,” and went back to four volumes, though with a number of changes in their arrangement. In September, , he began actual work upon the first volume, and before the end of the month it was completed. The Summer had been one of almost hysterical creative activity. Since the middle of June he had written two other small books, “The Case of Wagner” and “The Twilight of the Idols,” and before the end of the year he was destined to write “Ecce Homo.” Some time during December his health began to fail rapidly, and soon after the New Year he was helpless. Thereafter he wrote no more.

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.

The things he chiefly argued for were anti-Christian things—the abandonment of the purely moral view of life, the rehabilitation of instinct, the dethronement of weakness and timidity as ideals, the renunciation of the whole hocus-pocus of dogmatic religion, the extermination of false aristocracies (of the priest, of the politician, of the plutocrat), the revival of the healthy, lordly “innocence” that was Greek. If he was anything in a word, Nietzsche was a Greek born two thousand years too late. His dreams were thoroughly Hellenic; his whole manner of thinking was Hellenic; his peculiar errors were Hellenic no less. But his Hellenism, I need not add, was anything but the pale neo-Platonism that has run like a thread through the thinking of the Western world since the days of the Christian Fathers. From Plato, to be sure, he got what all of us must get, but his real forefather was Heraclitus. It is in Heraclitus that one finds the germ of his primary view of the universe—a view, to wit, that sees it, not as moral phenomenon, but as mere aesthetic representation. The God that Nietzsche imagined, in the end, was not far from the God that such an artist as Joseph Conrad imagines —a supreme craftsman, ever experimenting, ever coming closer to an ideal balancing of lines and forces, and yet always failing to work out the final harmony. The late war, awakening all the primitive racial fury of the Western nations, and therewith all their ancient enthusiasm for religious taboos and sanctions, naturally focused attention upon Nietzsche, as upon the most daring and provocative of recent amateur theologians. The Germans, with their characteristic tendency to explain their every act in terms as realistic and unpleasant as possible, appear to have mauled him in a belated and unexpected embrace, to the horror, I daresay, of the Kaiser, and perhaps to the even greater horror of Nietzsche’s own ghost. The folks of Anglo-Saxondom, with their equally characteristic tendency to explain all their enterprises romantically, simultaneously set him up as the Antichrist he no doubt secretly longed to be. The result was a great deal of misrepresentation and misunderstanding of him. From the pulpits of the allied countries, and particularly from those of England and the United States, a horde of patriotic ecclesiastics denounced him in extravagant terms as the author of all the horrors of the time, and in the newspapers, until the Kaiser was elected sole bugaboo, he shared the honors of that office with von Hindenburg, the Crown Prince, Capt. Boy-Ed, von Bernstorff and von Tirpitz. Most of this denunciation, of course, was frankly idiotic—the naïve pishposh of suburban Methodists, notoriety-seeking college professors, almost illiterate editorial writers, and other such numskulls. In much of it, including not a few official hymns of hate, Nietzsche was gravely discovered to be the teacher of such spokesmen of the extremest sort of German nationalism as von Bernhardi and von Treitschke— which was just as intelligent as making George Bernard Shaw the mentor of Lloyd-George. In other solemn pronunciamentoes he was credited with being philosophically responsible for various imaginary crimes of the enemy—the wholesale slaughter or mutilation of prisoners of war, the deliberate burning down of Red Cross hospitals, the utilization of the corpses of the slain for soap-making. I amused myself, in those gaudy days, by collecting newspaper clippings to this general effect, and later on I shall probably publish a digest of them, as a contribution to the study of war hysteria. The thing went to unbelievable lengths. On the strength of the fact that I had published a book on Nietzsche in , six years after his death, I was called upon by agents of the Department of Justice, elaborately outfitted with badges, to meet the charge that I was an intimate associate and agent of “the German monster, Nietzsky.” I quote the official procès verbal, an indignant but often misspelled document. Alas, poor Nietzsche! After all his laborious efforts to prove that he was not a German, but a Pole—even after his heroic readiness, via anti-anti-Semitism, to meet the deduction that, if a Pole, then probably also a Jew!

But under all this alarmed and preposterous tosh there was at least a sound instinct, and that was the instinct which recognized Nietzsche as the most eloquent, pertinacious and effective of all the critics of the philosophy to which the Allies against Germany stood committed, and on the strength of which, at all events in theory, the United States had engaged itself in the war. He was not, in point of fact, involved with the visible enemy, save in remote and transient ways; the German, officially, remained the most ardent of Christians during the war and became a democrat at its close. But he was plainly a foe of democracy in all its forms, political, religious and epistemological, and what is worse, his opposition was set forth in terms that were not only extraordinarily penetrating and devastating, but also uncommonly offensive. It was thus quite natural that he should have aroused a degree of indignation verging upon the pathological in the two countries that had planted themselves upon the democratic platform most boldly, and that felt it most shaky, one may add, under their feet. I daresay that Nietzsche, had he been alive, would have got a lot of satisfaction out of the execration thus heaped upon him, not only because, being a vain fellow, he enjoyed execration as a tribute to his general singularity, and hence to his superiority, but also and more importantly because, being no mean psychologist, he would have recognized the disconcerting doubts underlying it. If Nietzsche’s criticism of democracy were as ignorant and empty, say, as the average evangelical clergyman’s criticism of Darwin’s hypothesis of natural selection, then the advocates of democracy could afford to dismiss it as loftily as the Darwinians dismiss the blather of the holy clerks. And if his attack upon Christianity were mere sound and fury, signifying nothing, then there would be no call for anathemas from the sacred desk. But these onslaughts, in point of fact, have behind them a tremendous learning and a great deal of point and plausibility—there are, in brief, bullets in the gun, teeth in the tiger,—and so it is no wonder that they excite the ire of men who hold, as a primary article of belief, that their acceptance would destroy civilization, darken the sun, and bring Jahveh to sobs upon His Throne. But in all this justifiable fear, of course, there remains a false assumption, and that is the assumption that Nietzsche proposed to destroy Christianity altogether, and so rob the plain people of the world of their virtue, their spiritual consolations, and their hope of heaven. Nothing could be more untrue. The fact is that Nietzsche had no interest whatever in the delusions of the plain people—that is, intrinsically. It seemed to him of small moment what they believed, so long as it was safely imbecile. What he stood against was not their beliefs, but the elevation of those beliefs, by any sort of democratic process, to the dignity of a state philosophy—what he feared most was the pollution and crippling of the superior minority by intellectual disease from below. His plain aim in “The Antichrist” was to combat that menace by completing the work begun, on the one hand, by Darwin and the other evolutionist philosophers, and, on the other hand, by German historians and philologians. The net effect of this earlier attack, in the eighties, had been the collapse of Christian theology as a serious concern of educated men. The mob, it must be obvious, was very little shaken; even to this day it has not put off its belief in the essential Christian doctrines. But the intelligentsia, by , had been pretty well convinced. No man of sound information, at the time Nietzsche planned “The Antichrist,” actually believed that the world was created in seven days, or that its fauna was once overwhelmed by a flood as a penalty for the sins of man, or that Noah saved the boa constrictor, the prairie dog and the pediculus capitis by taking a pair of each into the ark, or that Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt, or that a fragment of the True Cross could cure hydrophobia. Such notions, still almost universally prevalent in Christendom a century before, were now confined to the great body of ignorant and credulous men—that is, to ninety-five or ninety-six percent. of the race.

For a man of the superior minority to subscribe to one of them publicly was already sufficient to set him off as one in imminent need of psychiatrical attention. Belief in them had become a mark of inferiority, like the allied belief in madstones, magic and apparitions. But though the theology of Christianity had thus sunk to the lowly estate of a mere delusion of the rabble, propagated on that level by the ancient caste of sacerdotal parasites, the ethics of Christianity continued to enjoy the utmost acceptance, and perhaps even more acceptance than ever before. It seemed to be generally felt, in fact, that they simply must be saved from the wreck—that the world would vanish into chaos if they went the way of the revelations supporting them. In this fear a great many judicious men joined, and so there arose what was, in essence, an absolutely new Christian cult—a cult, to wit, purged of all the supernaturalism superimposed upon the older cult by generations of theologians, and harking back to what was conceived to be the pure ethical doctrine of Jesus. This cult still flourishes; Protestantism tends to become identical with it; it invades Catholicism as Modernism; it is supported by great numbers of men whose intelligence is manifest and whose sincerity is not open to question. Even Nietzsche himself yielded to it in weak moments, as you will discover on examining his somewhat laborious effort to make Paul the villain of Christian theology, and Jesus no more than an innocent bystander. But this sentimental yielding never went far enough to distract his attention for long from his main idea, which was this: that Christian ethics were quite as dubious, at bottom, as Christian theology—that they were founded, just as surely as such childish fables as the story of Jonah and the whale, upon the peculiar prejudices and credulities, the special desires and appetites, of inferior men—that they warred upon the best interests of men of a better sort quite as unmistakably as the most extravagant of objective superstitions. In brief, what he saw in Christian ethics, under all the poetry and all the fine show of altruism and all the theoretical benefits therein, was a democratic effort to curb the egoism of the strong—a conspiracy of the chandala against the free functioning of their superiors, nay, against the free progress of mankind. This theory is the thing he exposes in “The Antichrist,” bringing to the business his amazingly chromatic and exigent eloquence at its finest flower. This is the “conspiracy” he sets forth in all the panoply of his characteristic italics, dashes, sforzando interjections and exclamation points. Well, an idea is an idea. The present one may be right and it may be wrong. One thing is quite certain: that no progress will be made against it by denouncing it as merely immoral. If it is ever laid at all, it must be laid evidentially, logically. The notion to the contrary is thoroughly democratic; the mob is the most ruthless of tyrants; it is always in a democratic society that heresy and felony tend to be most constantly confused. One hears without surprise of a Bismarck philosophizing placidly (at least in his old age) upon the delusion of Socialism and of a Frederick the Great playing the hose of his cynicism upon the absolutism that was almost identical with his own person, but men in the mass never brook the destructive discussion of their fundamental beliefs, and that impatience is naturally most evident in those societies in which men in the mass are most influential. Democracy and free speech are not facets of one gem; democracy and free speech are eternal enemies. But in any battle between an institution and an idea, the idea, in the long run, has the better of it. Here I do not venture into the absurdity of arguing that, as the world wags on, the truth always survives. I believe nothing of the sort. As a matter of fact, it seems to me that an idea that happens to be true—or, more exactly, as near to truth as any human idea can be, and yet remain generally intelligible—it seems to me that such an idea carries a special and often fatal handicap. The majority of men prefer delusion to truth. It soothes. It is easy to grasp. Above all, it fits more snugly than the truth into a universe of false appearances—of complex and irrational phenomena, defectively grasped.

But though an idea that is true is thus not likely to prevail, an idea that is attacked enjoys a great advantage. The evidence behind it is now supported by sympathy, the sporting instinct, sentimentality—and sentimentality is as powerful as an army with banners. One never hears of a martyr in history whose notions are seriously disputed today. The forgotten ideas are those of the men who put them forward soberly and quietly, hoping fatuously that they would conquer by the force of their truth; these are the ideas that we now struggle to rediscover. Had Nietzsche lived to be burned at the stake by outraged Mississippi Methodists, it would have been a glorious day for his doctrines. As it is, they are helped on their way every time they are denounced as immoral and against God. The war brought down upon them the maledictions of vast herds of rightthinking men. And now “The Antichrist,” after fifteen years of neglect, is being reprinted.... One imagines the author, a sardonic wraith, snickering somewhat sadly over the fact. His shade, wherever it suffers, is favoured in these days by many such consolations, some of them of much greater horsepower. Think of the facts and arguments, even the underlying theories and attitudes, that have been borrowed from him, consciously and unconsciously, by the foes of Bolshevism during these last thrilling years! The face of democracy, suddenly seen hideously close, has scared the guardians of the reigning plutocracy half to death, and they have gone to the devil himself for aid. Southern Senators, almost illiterate men, have mixed his acids with well water and spouted them like affrighted geysers, not knowing what they did. Nor are they the first to borrow from him. Years ago I called attention to the debt incurred with characteristic forgetfulness of obligation by the late Theodore Roosevelt, in “The Strenuous Life” and elsewhere. Roosevelt, a typical apologist for the existing order, adeptly dragging a herring across the trail whenever it was menaced, yet managed to delude the native boobery, at least until toward the end, into accepting him as a fiery exponent of pure democracy. Perhaps he even fooled himself; charlatans usually do so soon or late. A study of Nietzsche reveals the sources of much that was honest in him, and exposes the hollowness of much that was sham. Nietzsche, an infinitely harder and more courageous intellect, was incapable of any such confusion of ideas; he seldom allowed sentimentality to turn him from the glaring fact. What is called Bolshevism today he saw clearly a generation ago and described for what it was and is—democracy in another aspect, the old ressentiment of the lower orders in free function once more. Socialism, Puritanism, Philistinism, Christianity—he saw them all as allotropic forms of democracy, as variations upon the endless struggle of quantity against quality, of the weak and timorous against the strong and enterprising, of the botched against the fit. The world needed a staggering exaggeration to make it see even half of the truth. It trembles today as it trembled during the French Revolution. Perhaps it would tremble less if it could combat the monster with a clearer conscience and less burden of compromising theory—if it could launch its forces frankly at the fundamental doctrine, and not merely employ them to police the transient orgy. Nietzsche, in the long run, may help it toward that greater honesty. His notions, propagated by cuttings from cuttings from cuttings, may conceivably prepare the way for a sounder, more healthful theory of society and of the state, and so free human progress from the stupidities which now hamper it, and men of true vision from the despairs which now sicken them. I say it is conceivable, but I doubt that it is probable. The soul and the belly of mankind are too evenly balanced; it is not likely that the belly will ever put away its hunger or forget its power. Here, perhaps, there is an example of the eternal recurrence that Nietzsche was fond of mulling over in his blacker moods. We are in the midst of one of the perennial risings of the lower orders. It got under way long before any of the current Bolshevist demons was born; it was given its long, secure start by the intolerable tyranny of the plutocracy—the end product of the Eighteenth Century revolt against the old aristocracy.

It found resistance suddenly slackened by civil war within the plutocracy itself —one gang of traders falling upon another gang, to the tune of vast hymn-singing and yells to God. Perhaps it has already passed its apogee; the plutocracy, chastened, shows signs of a new solidarity; the wheel continues to swing ’round. But this combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world. What actual difference does it make to a civilized man, when there is a steel strike, whether the workmen win or the mill-owners win? The conflict can interest him only as spectacle, as the conflict between Bonaparte and the old order in Europe interested Goethe and Beethoven. The victory, whichever way it goes, will simply bring chaos nearer, and so set the stage for a genuine revolution later on, with (let us hope) a new feudalism or something better coming out of it, and a new Thirteenth Century at dawn. This seems to be the slow, costly way of the worst of habitable worlds. In the present case my money is laid upon the plutocracy. It will win because it will be able, in the long run, to enlist the finer intelligences. The mob and its maudlin causes attract only sentimentalists and scoundrels, chiefly the latter. Politics, under a democracy, reduces itself to a mere struggle for office by flatterers of the proletariat; even when a superior man prevails at that disgusting game he must prevail at the cost of his self-respect. Not many superior men make the attempt. The average great captain of the rabble, when he is not simply a weeper over irremediable wrongs, is a hypocrite so far gone that he is unconscious of his own hypocrisy —a slimy fellow, offensive to the nose. The plutocracy can recruit measurably more respectable janissaries, if only because it can make self-interest less obviously costly to amour propre. Its defect and its weakness lie in the fact that it is still too young to have acquired dignity. But lately sprung from the mob it now preys upon, it yet shows some of the habits of mind of that mob: it is blatant, stupid, ignorant, lacking in all delicate instinct and governmental finesse. Above all, it remains somewhat heavily moral. One seldom finds it undertaking one of its characteristic imbecilities without offering a sonorous moral reason; it spends almost as much to support the Y. M. C. A., vice-crusading, Prohibition and other such puerilities as it spends upon Congressmen, strike-breakers, gunmen, kept patriots and newspapers. In England the case is even worse. It is almost impossible to find a wealthy industrial over there who is not also an eminent non-conformist layman, and even among financiers there are praying brothers. On the Continent, the day is saved by the fact that the plutocracy tends to become more and more Jewish. Here the intellectual cynicism of the Jew almost counterbalances his social unpleasantness. If he is destined to lead the plutocracy of the world out of Little Bethel he will fail, of course, to turn it into an aristocracy—i. e., a caste of gentlemen—, but he will at least make it clever, and hence worthy of consideration. The case against the Jews is long and damning; it would justify ten thousand times as many pogroms as now go on in the world. But whenever you find a Davidsbündlerschaft making practise against the Philistines, there you will find a Jew laying on. Maybe it was this fact that caused Nietzsche to speak up for the children of Israel quite as often as he spoke against them. He was not blind to their faults, but when he set them beside Christians he could not deny their general superiority. Perhaps in America and England, as on the Continent, the increasing Jewishness of the plutocracy, while cutting it off from all chance of ever developing into an aristocracy, will yet lift it to such a dignity that it will at least deserve a certain grudging respect. But even so, it will remain in a sort of half-world, midway between the gutter and the stars. Above it will still stand the small group of men that constitutes the permanent aristocracy of the race—the men of imagination and high purpose, the makers of genuine progress, the brave and ardent spirits, above all petty fears and discontents and above all petty hopes and ideals no less.

There were heroes before Agamemnon; there will be Bachs after Johann Sebastian. And beneath the Judaized plutocracy, the sublimated bourgeoisie, there the immemorial proletariat, I venture to guess, will roar on, endlessly tortured by its vain hatreds and envies, stampeded and made to tremble by its ancient superstitions, prodded and made miserable by its sordid and degrading hopes. It seems to me very likely that, in this proletariat, Christianity will continue to survive. It is nonsense, true enough, but it is sweet. Nietzsche, denouncing its dangers as a poison, almost falls into the error of denying it its undoubtedly sugary smack. Of all the religions ever devised by the great practical jokers of the race, this is the one that offers most for the least money, so to speak, to the inferior man. It starts out by denying his inferiority in plain terms: all men are equal in the sight of God. It ends by erecting that inferiority into a sort of actual superiority: it is a merit to be stupid, and miserable, and sorely put upon—of such are the celestial elect. Not all the eloquence of a million Nietzsches, nor all the painful marshalling of evidence of a million Darwins and Harnacks, will ever empty that great consolation of its allure. The most they can ever accomplish is to make the superior orders of men acutely conscious of the exact nature of it, and so give them armament against the contagion. This is going on; this is being done. I think that “The Antichrist” has a useful place in that enterprise. It is strident, it is often extravagant, it is, to many sensitive men, in the worst of possible taste, but at bottom it is enormously apt and effective—and on the surface it is undoubtedly a good show. One somehow enjoys, with the malice that is native to man, the spectacle of anathemas batted back; it is refreshing to see the pitchfork employed against gentlemen who have doomed such innumerable caravans to hell. In Nietzsche they found, after many long years, a foeman worthy of them—not a mere fancy swordsman like Voltaire, or a mob orator like Tom Paine, or a pedant like the heretics of exegesis, but a gladiator armed with steel and armoured with steel, and showing all the ferocious gusto of a mediaeval bishop. It is a pity that Holy Church has no process for the elevation of demons, like its process for the canonization of saints. There must be a long roll of black miracles to the discredit of the Accursed Friedrich—sinners purged of conscience and made happy in their sinning, clerics shaken in their theology by visions of a new and better holy city, the strong made to exult, the weak robbed of their old sad romance. It would be a pleasure to see the Advocatus Diaboli turn from the table of the prosecution to the table of the defence, and move in solemn form for the damnation of the Naumburg hobgoblin.... Of all Nietzsche’s books, “The Antichrist” comes nearest to conventionality in form. It presents a connected argument with very few interludes, and has a beginning, a middle and an end. Most of his works are in the form of collections of apothegms, and sometimes the subject changes on every second page. This fact constitutes one of the counts in the orthodox indictment of him: it is cited as proof that his capacity for consecutive thought was limited, and that he was thus deficient mentally, and perhaps a downright moron. The argument, it must be obvious, is fundamentally nonsensical. What deceives the professors is the traditional prolixity of philosophers. Because the average philosophical writer, when he essays to expose his ideas, makes such inordinate drafts upon the parts of speech that the dictionary is almost emptied these defective observers jump to the conclusion that his intrinsic notions are of corresponding weight. This is not unseldom quite untrue. What makes philosophy so garrulous is not the profundity of philosophers, but their lack of art; they are like physicians who sought to cure a slight hyperacidity by giving the patient a carload of burned oystershells to eat. There is, too, the endless poll-parrotting that goes on: each new philosopher must prove his learning by laboriously rehearsing the ideas of all previous philosophers.... Nietzsche avoided both faults. He always assumed that his readers knew the books, and that it was thus unnecessary to rewrite them.

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!

of that sort only are my readers, my true readers, my readers foreordained: of what account are the rest?—The rest are merely humanity.—One must make one’s self superior to humanity, in power, in loftiness of soul,—in contempt. Friedrich W. Nietzsche. 1. —Let us look each other in the face. We are Hyperboreans—we know well enough how remote our place is. “Neither by land nor by water will you find the road to the Hyperboreans”: even Pindar,[ ] in his day, knew that much about us. Beyond the North, beyond the ice, beyond death—our life, our happiness.... We have discovered that happiness; we know the way; we got our knowledge of it from thousands of years in the labyrinth. Who else has found it?—The man of today?—“I don’t know either the way out or the way in; I am whatever doesn’t know either the way out or the way in”—so sighs the man of today.... This is the sort of modernity that made us ill,— we sickened on lazy peace, cowardly compromise, the whole virtuous dirtiness of the modern Yea and Nay. This tolerance and largeur of the heart that “forgives” everything because it “understands” everything is a sirocco to us. Rather live amid the ice than among modern virtues and other such south-winds!... We were brave enough; we spared neither ourselves nor others; but we were a long time finding out where to direct our courage. We grew dismal; they called us fatalists. Our fate—it was the fulness, the tension, the storing up of powers. We thirsted for the lightnings and great deeds; we kept as far as possible from the happiness of the weakling, from “resignation”... There was thunder in our air; nature, as we embodied it, became overcast—for we had not yet found the way. The formula of our happiness: a Yea, a Nay, a straight line, a goal.... [ ] Cf. the tenth Pythian ode. See also the fourth book of Herodotus. The Hyperboreans were a mythical people beyond the Rhipaean mountains, in the far North. They enjoyed unbroken happiness and perpetual youth. 2. What is good?—Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man. What is evil?—Whatever springs from weakness. What is happiness?—The feeling that power increases—that resistance is overcome. Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the Renaissance sense, virtu, virtue free of moral acid). The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity. And one should help them to it. What is more harmful than any vice?—Practical sympathy for the botched and the weak—Christianity.... 3. The problem that I set here is not what shall replace mankind in the order of living creatures (—man is an end—): but what type of man must be bred, must be willed, as being the most valuable, the most worthy of life, the most secure guarantee of the future. This more valuable type has appeared often enough in the past: but always as a happy accident, as an exception, never as deliberately willed. Very often it has been precisely the most feared; hitherto it has been almost the terror of terrors;—and out of that terror the contrary type has been willed, cultivated and attained: the domestic animal, the herd animal, the sick brute-man—the Christian.... 4. Mankind surely does not represent an evolution toward a better or stronger or higher level, as progress is now understood. This “progress” is merely a modern idea, which is to say, a false idea. The European of today, in his essential worth, falls far below the European of the Renaissance; the process of evolution does not necessarily mean elevation, enhancement, strengthening. True enough, it succeeds in isolated and individual cases in various parts of the earth and under the most widely different cultures, and in these cases a higher type certainly manifests itself; something which, compared to mankind in the mass, appears as a sort of superman. Such happy strokes of high success have always been possible, and will remain possible, perhaps, for all time to come. Even whole races, tribes and nations may occasionally represent such lucky accidents. 5.

We should not deck out and embellish Christianity: it has waged a war to the death against this higher type of man, it has put all the deepest instincts of this type under its ban, it has developed its concept of evil, of the Evil One himself, out of these instincts—the strong man as the typical reprobate, the “outcast among men.” Christianity has taken the part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an ideal out of antagonism to all the self-preservative instincts of sound life; it has corrupted even the faculties of those natures that are intellectually most vigorous, by representing the highest intellectual values as sinful, as misleading, as full of temptation. The most lamentable example: the corruption of Pascal, who believed that his intellect had been destroyed by original sin, whereas it was actually destroyed by Christianity!— 6. It is a painful and tragic spectacle that rises before me: I have drawn back the curtain from the rottenness of man. This word, in my mouth, is at least free from one suspicion: that it involves a moral accusation against humanity. It is used—and I wish to emphasize the fact again —without any moral significance: and this is so far true that the rottenness I speak of is most apparent to me precisely in those quarters where there has been most aspiration, hitherto, toward “virtue” and “godliness.” As you probably surmise, I understand rottenness in the sense of décadence: my argument is that all the values on which mankind now fixes its highest aspirations are décadence-values. I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt, when it loses its instincts, when it chooses, when it prefers, what is injurious to it. A history of the “higher feelings,” the “ideals of humanity”—and it is possible that I’ll have to write it—would almost explain why man is so degenerate. Life itself appears to me as an instinct for growth, for survival, for the accumulation of forces, for power: whenever the will to power fails there is disaster. My contention is that all the highest values of humanity have been emptied of this will—that the values of décadence, of nihilism, now prevail under the holiest names. 7. Christianity is called the religion of pity.—Pity stands in opposition to all the tonic passions that augment the energy of the feeling of aliveness: it is a depressant. A man loses power when he pities. Through pity that drain upon strength which suffering works is multiplied a thousandfold. Suffering is made contagious by pity; under certain circumstances it may lead to a total sacrifice of life and living energy—a loss out of all proportion to the magnitude of the cause (—the case of the death of the Nazarene). This is the first view of it; there is, however, a still more important one. If one measures the effects of pity by the gravity of the reactions it sets up, its character as a menace to life appears in a much clearer light. Pity thwarts the whole law of evolution, which is the law of natural selection. It preserves whatever is ripe for destruction; it fights on the side of those disinherited and condemned by life; by maintaining life in so many of the botched of all kinds, it gives life itself a gloomy and dubious aspect. Mankind has ventured to call pity a virtue (—in every superior moral system it appears as a weakness—); going still further, it has been called the virtue, the source and foundation of all other virtues—but let us always bear in mind that this was from the standpoint of a philosophy that was nihilistic, and upon whose shield the denial of life was inscribed. Schopenhauer was right in this: that by means of pity life is denied, and made worthy of denial—pity is the technic of nihilism. Let me repeat: this depressing and contagious instinct stands against all those instincts which work for the preservation and enhancement of life: in the rôle of protector of the miserable, it is a prime agent in the promotion of décadence— pity persuades to extinction.... Of course, one doesn’t say “extinction”: one says “the other world,” or “God,” or “the true life,” or Nirvana, salvation, blessedness.... This innocent rhetoric, from the realm of religious-ethical balderdash, appears a good deal less innocent when one reflects upon the tendency that it conceals beneath sublime words: the tendency to destroy life.

Schopenhauer was hostile to life: that is why pity appeared to him as a virtue.... Aristotle, as every one knows, saw in pity a sickly and dangerous state of mind, the remedy for which was an occasional purgative: he regarded tragedy as that purgative. The instinct of life should prompt us to seek some means of puncturing any such pathological and dangerous accumulation of pity as that appearing in Schopenhauer’s case (and also, alack, in that of our whole literary décadence, from St. Petersburg to Paris, from Tolstoi to Wagner), that it may burst and be discharged.... Nothing is more unhealthy, amid all our unhealthy modernism, than Christian pity. To be the doctors here, to be unmerciful here, to wield the knife here—all this is our business, all this is our sort of humanity, by this sign we are philosophers, we Hyperboreans!— 8. It is necessary to say just whom we regard as our antagonists: theologians and all who have any theological blood in their veins— this is our whole philosophy.... One must have faced that menace at close hand, better still, one must have had experience of it directly and almost succumbed to it, to realize that it is not to be taken lightly (—the alleged free-thinking of our naturalists and physiologists seems to me to be a joke—they have no passion about such things; they have not suffered—). This poisoning goes a great deal further than most people think: I find the arrogant habit of the theologian among all who regard themselves as “idealists”—among all who, by virtue of a higher point of departure, claim a right to rise above reality, and to look upon it with suspicion.... The idealist, like the ecclesiastic, carries all sorts of lofty concepts in his hand (—and not only in his hand!); he launches them with benevolent contempt against “understanding,” “the senses,” “honor,” “good living,” “science”; he sees such things as beneath him, as pernicious and seductive forces, on which “the soul” soars as a pure thing-in-itself— as if humility, chastity, poverty, in a word, holiness, had not already done much more damage to life than all imaginable horrors and vices.... The pure soul is a pure lie.... So long as the priest, that professional denier, calumniator and poisoner of life, is accepted as a higher variety of man, there can be no answer to the question, What is truth? Truth has already been stood on its head when the obvious attorney of mere emptiness is mistaken for its representative.... 9. Upon this theological instinct I make war: I find the tracks of it everywhere. Whoever has theological blood in his veins is shifty and dishonourable in all things. The pathetic thing that grows out of this condition is called faith: in other words, closing one’s eyes upon one’s self once for all, to avoid suffering the sight of incurable falsehood. People erect a concept of morality, of virtue, of holiness upon this false view of all things; they ground good conscience upon faulty vision; they argue that no other sort of vision has value any more, once they have made theirs sacrosanct with the names of “God,” “salvation” and “eternity.” I unearth this theological instinct in all directions: it is the most widespread and the most subterranean form of falsehood to be found on earth. Whatever a theologian regards as true must be false: there you have almost a criterion of truth. His profound instinct of self-preservation stands against truth ever coming into honour in any way, or even getting stated. Wherever the influence of theologians is felt there is a transvaluation of values, and the concepts “true” and “false” are forced to change places: whatever is most damaging to life is there called “true,” and whatever exalts it, intensifies it, approves it, justifies it and makes it triumphant is there called “false.”... When theologians, working through the “consciences” of princes (or of peoples—), stretch out their hands for power, there is never any doubt as to the fundamental issue: the will to make an end, the nihilistic will exerts that power.... 10. Among Germans I am immediately understood when I say that theological blood is the ruin of philosophy. The Protestant pastor is the grandfather of German philosophy; Protestantism itself is its peccatum originale. Definition of Protestantism: hemiplegic paralysis of Christianity—and of reason.... One need only utter the words “Tübingen School” to get an understanding of what German philosophy is at bottom—a very artful form of theology....

The Suabians are the best liars in Germany; they lie innocently.... Why all the rejoicing over the appearance of Kant that went through the learned world of Germany, three-fourths of which is made up of the sons of preachers and teachers—why the German conviction still echoing, that with Kant came a change for the better? The theological instinct of German scholars made them see clearly just what had become possible again.... A backstairs leading to the old ideal stood open; the concept of the “true world,” the concept of morality as the essence of the world (—the two most vicious errors that ever existed!), were once more, thanks to a subtle and wily scepticism, if not actually demonstrable, then at least no longer refutable.... Reason, the prerogative of reason, does not go so far.... Out of reality there had been made “appearance”; an absolutely false world, that of being, had been turned into reality.... The success of Kant is merely a theological success; he was, like Luther and Leibnitz, but one more impediment to German integrity, already far from steady.— 11. A word now against Kant as a moralist. A virtue must be our invention; it must spring out of our personal need and defence. In every other case it is a source of danger. That which does not belong to our life menaces it; a virtue which has its roots in mere respect for the concept of “virtue,” as Kant would have it, is pernicious. “Virtue,” “duty,” “good for its own sake,” goodness grounded upon impersonality or a notion of universal validity—these are all chimeras, and in them one finds only an expression of the decay, the last collapse of life, the Chinese spirit of Königsberg. Quite the contrary is demanded by the most profound laws of self-preservation and of growth: to wit, that every man find his own virtue, his own categorical imperative. A nation goes to pieces when it confounds its duty with the general concept of duty. Nothing works a more complete and penetrating disaster than every “impersonal” duty, every sacrifice before the Moloch of abstraction.—To think that no one has thought of Kant’s categorical imperative as dangerous to life!... The theological instinct alone took it under protection!—An action prompted by the life-instinct proves that it is a right action by the amount of pleasure that goes with it: and yet that Nihilist, with his bowels of Christian dogmatism, regarded pleasure as an objection.... What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure—as a mere automaton of duty? That is the recipe for décadence, and no less for idiocy.... Kant became an idiot.—And such a man was the contemporary of Goethe! This calamitous spinner of cobwebs passed for the German philosopher—still passes today!... I forbid myself to say what I think of the Germans.... Didn’t Kant see in the French Revolution the transformation of the state from the inorganic form to the organic? Didn’t he ask himself if there was a single event that could be explained save on the assumption of a moral faculty in man, so that on the basis of it, “the tendency of mankind toward the good” could be explained, once and for all time? Kant’s answer: “That is revolution.” Instinct at fault in everything and anything, instinct as a revolt against nature, German décadence as a philosophy—that is Kant!— 12. I put aside a few sceptics, the types of decency in the history of philosophy: the rest haven’t the slightest conception of intellectual integrity. They behave like women, all these great enthusiasts and prodigies—they regard “beautiful feelings” as arguments, the “heaving breast” as the bellows of divine inspiration, conviction as the criterion of truth. In the end, with “German” innocence, Kant tried to give a scientific flavour to this form of corruption, this dearth of intellectual conscience, by calling it “practical reason.” He deliberately invented a variety of reasons for use on occasions when it was desirable not to trouble with reason—that is, when morality, when the sublime command “thou shalt,” was heard. When one recalls the fact that, among all peoples, the philosopher is no more than a development from the old type of priest, this inheritance from the priest, this fraud upon self, ceases to be remarkable.

When a man feels that he has a divine mission, say to lift up, to save or to liberate mankind—when a man feels the divine spark in his heart and believes that he is the mouthpiece of supernatural imperatives— when such a mission inflames him, it is only natural that he should stand beyond all merely reasonable standards of judgment. He feels that he is himself sanctified by this mission, that he is himself a type of a higher order!... What has a priest to do with philosophy! He stands far above it!—And hitherto the priest has ruled!—He has determined the meaning of “true” and “not true”!... 13. Let us not underestimate this fact: that we ourselves, we free spirits, are already a “transvaluation of all values,” a visualized declaration of war and victory against all the old concepts of “true” and “not true.” The most valuable intuitions are the last to be attained; the most valuable of all are those which determine methods. All the methods, all the principles of the scientific spirit of today, were the targets for thousands of years of the most profound contempt; if a man inclined to them he was excluded from the society of “decent” people—he passed as “an enemy of God,” as a scoffer at the truth, as one “possessed.” As a man of science, he belonged to the Chandala[ ].... We have had the whole pathetic stupidity of mankind against us—their every notion of what the truth ought to be, of what the service of the truth ought to be—their every “thou shalt” was launched against us.... Our objectives, our methods, our quiet, cautious, distrustful manner—all appeared to them as absolutely discreditable and contemptible.—Looking back, one may almost ask one’s self with reason if it was not actually an aesthetic sense that kept men blind so long: what they demanded of the truth was picturesque effectiveness, and of the learned a strong appeal to their senses. It was our modesty that stood out longest against their taste.... How well they guessed that, these turkey-cocks of God! [ ] The lowest of the Hindu castes. 14. We have unlearned something. We have become more modest in every way. We no longer derive man from the “spirit,” from the “godhead”; we have dropped him back among the beasts. We regard him as the strongest of the beasts because he is the craftiest; one of the results thereof is his intellectuality. On the other hand, we guard ourselves against a conceit which would assert itself even here: that man is the great second thought in the process of organic evolution. He is, in truth, anything but the crown of creation: beside him stand many other animals, all at similar stages of development.... And even when we say that we say a bit too much, for man, relatively speaking, is the most botched of all the animals and the sickliest, and he has wandered the most dangerously from his instincts— though for all that, to be sure, he remains the most interesting!—As regards the lower animals, it was Descartes who first had the really admirable daring to describe them as machina; the whole of our physiology is directed toward proving the truth of this doctrine. Moreover, it is illogical to set man apart, as Descartes did: what we know of man today is limited precisely by the extent to which we have regarded him, too, as a machine. Formerly we accorded to man, as his inheritance from some higher order of beings, what was called “free will”; now we have taken even this will from him, for the term no longer describes anything that we can understand. The old word “will” now connotes only a sort of result, an individual reaction, that follows inevitably upon a series of partly discordant and partly harmonious stimuli—the will no longer “acts,” or “moves.”... Formerly it was thought that man’s consciousness, his “spirit,” offered evidence of his high origin, his divinity. That he might be perfected, he was advised, tortoise-like, to draw his senses in, to have no traffic with earthly things, to shuffle off his mortal coil—then only the important part of him, the “pure spirit,” would remain.

Here again we have thought out the thing better: to us consciousness, or “the spirit,” appears as a symptom of a relative imperfection of the organism, as an experiment, a groping, a misunderstanding, as an affliction which uses up nervous force unnecessarily—we deny that anything can be done perfectly so long as it is done consciously. The “pure spirit” is a piece of pure stupidity: take away the nervous system and the senses, the so-called “mortal shell,” and the rest is miscalculation— that is all!... 15. Under Christianity neither morality nor religion has any point of contact with actuality. It offers purely imaginary causes (“God,” “soul,” “ego,” “spirit,” “free will”—or even “unfree”), and purely imaginary effects (“sin,” “salvation,” “grace,” “punishment,” “forgiveness of sins”). Intercourse between imaginary beings (“God,” “spirits,” “souls”); an imaginary natural history (anthropocentric; a total denial of the concept of natural causes); an imaginary psychology (misunderstandings of self, misinterpretations of agreeable or disagreeable general feelings—for example, of the states of the nervus sympathicus with the help of the sign-language of religio-ethical balderdash—, “repentance,” “pangs of conscience,” “temptation by the devil,” “the presence of God”); an imaginary teleology (the “kingdom of God,” “the last judgment,” “eternal life”).— This purely fictitious world, greatly to its disadvantage, is to be differentiated from the world of dreams; the latter at least reflects reality, whereas the former falsifies it, cheapens it and denies it. Once the concept of “nature” had been opposed to the concept of “God,” the word “natural” necessarily took on the meaning of “abominable”—the whole of that fictitious world has its sources in hatred of the natural (—the real!—), and is no more than evidence of a profound uneasiness in the presence of reality.... This explains everything. Who alone has any reason for living his way out of reality? The man who suffers under it. But to suffer from reality one must be a botched reality.... The preponderance of pains over pleasures is the cause of this fictitious morality and religion: but such a preponderance also supplies the formula for décadence.... 16. A criticism of the Christian concept of God leads inevitably to the same conclusion.—A nation that still believes in itself holds fast to its own god. In him it does honour to the conditions which enable it to survive, to its virtues—it projects its joy in itself, its feeling of power, into a being to whom one may offer thanks. He who is rich will give of his riches; a proud people need a god to whom they can make sacrifices.... Religion, within these limits, is a form of gratitude. A man is grateful for his own existence: to that end he needs a god.— Such a god must be able to work both benefits and injuries; he must be able to play either friend or foe—he is wondered at for the good he does as well as for the evil he does. But the castration, against all nature, of such a god, making him a god of goodness alone, would be contrary to human inclination. Mankind has just as much need for an evil god as for a good god; it doesn’t have to thank mere tolerance and humanitarianism for its own existence.... What would be the value of a god who knew nothing of anger, revenge, envy, scorn, cunning, violence? who had perhaps never experienced the rapturous ardeurs of victory and of destruction? No one would understand such a god: why should any one want him?—True enough, when a nation is on the downward path, when it feels its belief in its own future, its hope of freedom slipping from it, when it begins to see submission as a first necessity and the virtues of submission as measures of self-preservation, then it must overhaul its god. He then becomes a hypocrite, timorous and demure; he counsels “peace of soul,” hate-no-more, leniency, “love” of friend and foe. He moralizes endlessly; he creeps into every private virtue; he becomes the god of every man; he becomes a private citizen, a cosmopolitan.... Formerly he represented a people, the strength of a people, everything aggressive and thirsty for power in the soul of a people; now he is simply the good god.... The truth is that there is no other alternative for gods: either they are the will to power—in which case they are national gods—or incapacity for power—in which case they have to be good.... 17.

Wherever the will to power begins to decline, in whatever form, there is always an accompanying decline physiologically, a décadence. The divinity of this décadence, shorn of its masculine virtues and passions, is converted perforce into a god of the physiologically degraded, of the weak. Of course, they do not call themselves the weak; they call themselves “the good.”... No hint is needed to indicate the moments in history at which the dualistic fiction of a good and an evil god first became possible. The same instinct which prompts the inferior to reduce their own god to “goodness-in-itself” also prompts them to eliminate all good qualities from the god of their superiors; they make revenge on their masters by making a devil of the latter’s god.—The good god, and the devil like him—both are abortions of décadence.—How can we be so tolerant of the naïveté of Christian theologians as to join in their doctrine that the evolution of the concept of god from “the god of Israel,” the god of a people, to the Christian god, the essence of all goodness, is to be described as progress?—But even Renan does this. As if Renan had a right to be naïve! The contrary actually stares one in the face. When everything necessary to ascending life; when all that is strong, courageous, masterful and proud has been eliminated from the concept of a god; when he has sunk step by step to the level of a staff for the weary, a sheet-anchor for the drowning; when he becomes the poor man’s god, the sinner’s god, the invalid’s god par excellence, and the attribute of “saviour” or “redeemer” remains as the one essential attribute of divinity—just what is the significance of such a metamorphosis? what does such a reduction of the godhead imply?—To be sure, the “kingdom of God” has thus grown larger. Formerly he had only his own people, his “chosen” people. But since then he has gone wandering, like his people themselves, into foreign parts; he has given up settling down quietly anywhere; finally he has come to feel at home everywhere, and is the great cosmopolitan— until now he has the “great majority” on his side, and half the earth. But this god of the “great majority,” this democrat among gods, has not become a proud heathen god: on the contrary, he remains a Jew, he remains a god in a corner, a god of all the dark nooks and crevices, of all the noisesome quarters of the world!... His earthly kingdom, now as always, is a kingdom of the underworld, a souterrain kingdom, a ghetto kingdom.... And he himself is so pale, so weak, so décadent.... Even the palest of the pale are able to master him—messieurs the metaphysicians, those albinos of the intellect. They spun their webs around him for so long that finally he was hypnotized, and began to spin himself, and became another metaphysician. Thereafter he resumed once more his old business of spinning the world out of his inmost being sub specie Spinozae; thereafter he became ever thinner and paler—became the “ideal,” became “pure spirit,” became “the absolute,” became “the thing-initself.”... The collapse of a god: he became a “thing-in-itself.” 18. The Christian concept of a god—the god as the patron of the sick, the god as a spinner of cobwebs, the god as a spirit—is one of the most corrupt concepts that has ever been set up in the world: it probably touches low-water mark in the ebbing evolution of the godtype. God degenerated into the contradiction of life. Instead of being its transfiguration and eternal Yea! In him war is declared on life, on nature, on the will to live! God becomes the formula for every slander upon the “here and now,” and for every lie about the “beyond”! In him nothingness is deified, and the will to nothingness is made holy!... 19. The fact that the strong races of northern Europe did not repudiate this Christian god does little credit to their gift for religion—and not much more to their taste. They ought to have been able to make an end of such a moribund and worn-out product of the décadence. A curse lies upon them because they were not equal to it; they made illness, decrepitude and contradiction a part of their instincts—and since then they have not managed to create any more gods. Two thousand years have come and gone—and not a single new god!

Instead, there still exists, and as if by some intrinsic right,—as if he were the ultimatum and maximum of the power to create gods, of the creator spiritus in mankind—this pitiful god of Christian monotonotheism! This hybrid image of decay, conjured up out of emptiness, contradiction and vain imagining, in which all the instincts of décadence, all the cowardices and wearinesses of the soul find their sanction!— 20. In my condemnation of Christianity I surely hope I do no injustice to a related religion with an even larger number of believers: I allude to Buddhism. Both are to be reckoned among the nihilistic religions— they are both décadence religions—but they are separated from each other in a very remarkable way. For the fact that he is able to compare them at all the critic of Christianity is indebted to the scholars of India.—Buddhism is a hundred times as realistic as Christianity—it is part of its living heritage that it is able to face problems objectively and coolly; it is the product of long centuries of philosophical speculation. The concept, “god,” was already disposed of before it appeared. Buddhism is the only genuinely positive religion to be encountered in history, and this applies even to its epistemology (which is a strict phenomenalism). It does not speak of a “struggle with sin,” but, yielding to reality, of the “struggle with suffering.” Sharply differentiating itself from Christianity, it puts the self-deception that lies in moral concepts behind it; it is, in my phrase, beyond good and evil.—The two physiological facts upon which it grounds itself and upon which it bestows its chief attention are: first, an excessive sensitiveness to sensation, which manifests itself as a refined susceptibility to pain, and secondly, an extraordinary spirituality, a too protracted concern with concepts and logical procedures, under the influence of which the instinct of personality has yielded to a notion of the “impersonal.” (—Both of these states will be familiar to a few of my readers, the objectivists, by experience, as they are to me). These physiological states produced a depression, and Buddha tried to combat it by hygienic measures. Against it he prescribed a life in the open, a life of travel; moderation in eating and a careful selection of foods; caution in the use of intoxicants; the same caution in arousing any of the passions that foster a bilious habit and heat the blood; finally, no worry, either on one’s own account or on account of others. He encourages ideas that make for either quiet contentment or good cheer—he finds means to combat ideas of other sorts. He understands good, the state of goodness, as something which promotes health. Prayer is not included, and neither is asceticism. There is no categorical imperative nor any disciplines, even within the walls of a monastery (—it is always possible to leave—). These things would have been simply means of increasing the excessive sensitiveness above mentioned. For the same reason he does not advocate any conflict with unbelievers; his teaching is antagonistic to nothing so much as to revenge, aversion, ressentiment (—“enmity never brings an end to enmity”: the moving refrain of all Buddhism....) And in all this he was right, for it is precisely these passions which, in view of his main regiminal purpose, are unhealthful. The mental fatigue that he observes, already plainly displayed in too much “objectivity” (that is, in the individual’s loss of interest in himself, in loss of balance and of “egoism”), he combats by strong efforts to lead even the spiritual interests back to the ego. In Buddha’s teaching egoism is a duty. The “one thing needful,” the question “how can you be delivered from suffering,” regulates and determines the whole spiritual diet. (— Perhaps one will here recall that Athenian who also declared war upon pure “scientificality,” to wit, Socrates, who also elevated egoism to the estate of a morality). 21. The things necessary to Buddhism are a very mild climate, customs of great gentleness and liberality, and no militarism; moreover, it must get its start among the higher and better educated classes. Cheerfulness, quiet and the absence of desire are the chief desiderata, and they are attained. Buddhism is not a religion in which perfection is merely an object of aspiration: perfection is actually normal.— Under Christianity the instincts of the subjugated and the oppressed come to the fore: it is only those who are at the bottom who seek their salvation in it.

Here the prevailing pastime, the favourite remedy for boredom is the discussion of sin, self-criticism, the inquisition of conscience; here the emotion produced by power (called “God”) is pumped up (by prayer); here the highest good is regarded as unattainable, as a gift, as “grace.” Here, too, open dealing is lacking; concealment and the darkened room are Christian. Here body is despised and hygiene is denounced as sensual; the church even ranges itself against cleanliness (—the first Christian order after the banishment of the Moors closed the public baths, of which there were in Cordova alone). Christian, too, is a certain cruelty toward one’s self and toward others; hatred of unbelievers; the will to persecute. Sombre and disquieting ideas are in the foreground; the most esteemed states of mind, bearing the most respectable names, are epileptoid; the diet is so regulated as to engender morbid symptoms and over-stimulate the nerves. Christian, again, is all deadly enmity to the rulers of the earth, to the “aristocratic”—along with a sort of secret rivalry with them (—one resigns one’s “body” to them; one wants only one’s “soul”...). And Christian is all hatred of the intellect, of pride, of courage, of freedom, of intellectual libertinage; Christian is all hatred of the senses, of joy in the senses, of joy in general.... 22. When Christianity departed from its native soil, that of the lowest orders, the underworld of the ancient world, and began seeking power among barbarian peoples, it no longer had to deal with exhausted men, but with men still inwardly savage and capable of self-torture—in brief, strong men, but bungled men. Here, unlike in the case of the Buddhists, the cause of discontent with self, suffering through self, is not merely a general sensitiveness and susceptibility to pain, but, on the contrary, an inordinate thirst for inflicting pain on others, a tendency to obtain subjective satisfaction in hostile deeds and ideas. Christianity had to embrace barbaric concepts and valuations in order to obtain mastery over barbarians: of such sort, for example, are the sacrifices of the first-born, the drinking of blood as a sacrament, the disdain of the intellect and of culture; torture in all its forms, whether bodily or not; the whole pomp of the cult. Buddhism is a religion for peoples in a further state of development, for races that have become kind, gentle and over-spiritualized (— Europe is not yet ripe for it—): it is a summons that takes them back to peace and cheerfulness, to a careful rationing of the spirit, to a certain hardening of the body. Christianity aims at mastering beasts of prey; its modus operandi is to make them ill—to make feeble is the Christian recipe for taming, for “civilizing.” Buddhism is a religion for the closing, over-wearied stages of civilization. Christianity appears before civilization has so much as begun—under certain circumstances it lays the very foundations thereof. 23. Buddhism, I repeat, is a hundred times more austere, more honest, more objective. It no longer has to justify its pains, its susceptibility to suffering, by interpreting these things in terms of sin—it simply says, as it simply thinks, “I suffer.” To the barbarian, however, suffering in itself is scarcely understandable: what he needs, first of all, is an explanation as to why he suffers. (His mere instinct prompts him to deny his suffering altogether, or to endure it in silence.) Here the word “devil” was a blessing: man had to have an omnipotent and terrible enemy—there was no need to be ashamed of suffering at the hands of such an enemy.— At the bottom of Christianity there are several subtleties that belong to the Orient. In the first place, it knows that it is of very little consequence whether a thing be true or not, so long as it is believed to be true. Truth and faith: here we have two wholly distinct worlds of ideas, almost two diametrically opposite worlds—the road to the one and the road to the other lie miles apart. To understand that fact thoroughly—this is almost enough, in the Orient, to make one a sage. The Brahmins knew it, Plato knew it, every student of the esoteric knows it. When, for example, a man gets any pleasure out of the notion that he has been saved from sin, it is not necessary for him to be actually sinful, but merely to feel sinful.

But when faith is thus exalted above everything else, it necessarily follows that reason, knowledge and patient inquiry have to be discredited: the road to the truth becomes a forbidden road.—Hope, in its stronger forms, is a great deal more powerful stimulans to life than any sort of realized joy can ever be. Man must be sustained in suffering by a hope so high that no conflict with actuality can dash it—so high, indeed, that no fulfilment can satisfy it: a hope reaching out beyond this world. (Precisely because of this power that hope has of making the suffering hold out, the Greeks regarded it as the evil of evils, as the most malign of evils; it remained behind at the source of all evil.) [ ]—In order that love may be possible, God must become a person; in order that the lower instincts may take a hand in the matter God must be young. To satisfy the ardor of the woman a beautiful saint must appear on the scene, and to satisfy that of the men there must be a virgin. These things are necessary if Christianity is to assume lordship over a soil on which some aphrodisiacal or Adonis cult has already established a notion as to what a cult ought to be. To insist upon chastity greatly strengthens the vehemence and subjectivity of the religious instinct—it makes the cult warmer, more enthusiastic, more soulful.—Love is the state in which man sees things most decidedly as they are not. The force of illusion reaches its highest here, and so does the capacity for sweetening, for transfiguring. When a man is in love he endures more than at any other time; he submits to anything. The problem was to devise a religion which would allow one to love: by this means the worst that life has to offer is overcome—it is scarcely even noticed.—So much for the three Christian virtues: faith, hope and charity: I call them the three Christian ingenuities.—Buddhism is in too late a stage of development, too full of positivism, to be shrewd in any such way.— [ ] That is, in Pandora’s box. 24. Here I barely touch upon the problem of the origin of Christianity. The first thing necessary to its solution is this: that Christianity is to be understood only by examining the soil from which it sprung—it is not a reaction against Jewish instincts; it is their inevitable product; it is simply one more step in the awe-inspiring logic of the Jews. In the words of the Saviour, “salvation is of the Jews.”[ ]—The second thing to remember is this: that the psychological type of the Galilean is still to be recognized, but it was only in its most degenerate form (which is at once maimed and overladen with foreign features) that it could serve in the manner in which it has been used: as a type of the Saviour of mankind.— [ ] John iv, . The Jews are the most remarkable people in the history of the world, for when they were confronted with the question, to be or not to be, they chose, with perfectly unearthly deliberation, to be at any price: this price involved a radical falsification of all nature, of all naturalness, of all reality, of the whole inner world, as well as of the outer. They put themselves against all those conditions under which, hitherto, a people had been able to live, or had even been permitted to live; out of themselves they evolved an idea which stood in direct opposition to natural conditions—one by one they distorted religion, civilization, morality, history and psychology until each became a contradiction of its natural significance. We meet with the same phenomenon later on, in an incalculably exaggerated form, but only as a copy: the Christian church, put beside the “people of God,” shows a complete lack of any claim to originality. Precisely for this reason the Jews are the most fateful people in the history of the world: their influence has so falsified the reasoning of mankind in this matter that today the Christian can cherish anti-Semitism without realizing that it is no more than the final consequence of Judaism. In my “Genealogy of Morals” I give the first psychological explanation of the concepts underlying those two antithetical things, a noble morality and a ressentiment morality, the second of which is a mere product of the denial of the former.

The Judaeo-Christian moral system belongs to the second division, and in every detail. In order to be able to say Nay to everything representing an ascending evolution of life—that is, to well-being, to power, to beauty, to selfapproval—the instincts of ressentiment, here become downright genius, had to invent an other world in which the acceptance of life appeared as the most evil and abominable thing imaginable. Psychologically, the Jews are a people gifted with the very strongest vitality, so much so that when they found themselves facing impossible conditions of life they chose voluntarily, and with a profound talent for self-preservation, the side of all those instincts which make for décadence—not as if mastered by them, but as if detecting in them a power by which “the world” could be defied. The Jews are the very opposite of décadents: they have simply been forced into appearing in that guise, and with a degree of skill approaching the non plus ultra of histrionic genius they have managed to put themselves at the head of all décadent movements (—for example, the Christianity of Paul—), and so make of them something stronger than any party frankly saying Yes to life. To the sort of men who reach out for power under Judaism and Christianity, —that is to say, to the priestly class—décadence is no more than a means to an end. Men of this sort have a vital interest in making mankind sick, and in confusing the values of “good” and “bad,” “true” and “false” in a manner that is not only dangerous to life, but also slanders it. 25. The history of Israel is invaluable as a typical history of an attempt to denaturize all natural values: I point to five facts which bear this out. Originally, and above all in the time of the monarchy, Israel maintained the right attitude of things, which is to say, the natural attitude. Its Jahveh was an expression of its consciousness of power, its joy in itself, its hopes for itself: to him the Jews looked for victory and salvation and through him they expected nature to give them whatever was necessary to their existence—above all, rain. Jahveh is the god of Israel, and consequently the god of justice: this is the logic of every race that has power in its hands and a good conscience in the use of it. In the religious ceremonial of the Jews both aspects of this self-approval stand revealed. The nation is grateful for the high destiny that has enabled it to obtain dominion; it is grateful for the benign procession of the seasons, and for the good fortune attending its herds and its crops.—This view of things remained an ideal for a long while, even after it had been robbed of validity by tragic blows: anarchy within and the Assyrian without. But the people still retained, as a projection of their highest yearnings, that vision of a king who was at once a gallant warrior and an upright judge—a vision best visualized in the typical prophet (i. e., critic and satirist of the moment), Isaiah.—But every hope remained unfulfilled. The old god no longer could do what he used to do. He ought to have been abandoned. But what actually happened? Simply this: the conception of him was changed—the conception of him was denaturized; this was the price that had to be paid for keeping him.— Jahveh, the god of “justice”—he is in accord with Israel no more, he no longer vizualizes the national egoism; he is now a god only conditionally.... The public notion of this god now becomes merely a weapon in the hands of clerical agitators, who interpret all happiness as a reward and all unhappiness as a punishment for obedience or disobedience to him, for “sin”: that most fraudulent of all imaginable interpretations, whereby a “moral order of the world” is set up, and the fundamental concepts, “cause” and “effect,” are stood on their heads. Once natural causation has been swept out of the world by doctrines of reward and punishment some sort of un-natural causation becomes necessary: and all other varieties of the denial of nature follow it. A god who demands—in place of a god who helps, who gives counsel, who is at bottom merely a name for every happy inspiration of courage and self-reliance....

Morality is no longer a reflection of the conditions which make for the sound life and development of the people; it is no longer the primary life-instinct; instead it has become abstract and in opposition to life—a fundamental perversion of the fancy, an “evil eye” on all things. What is Jewish, what is Christian morality? Chance robbed of its innocence; unhappiness polluted with the idea of “sin”; well-being represented as a danger, as a “temptation”; a physiological disorder produced by the canker worm of conscience.... 26. The concept of god falsified; the concept of morality falsified;—but even here Jewish priest-craft did not stop. The whole history of Israel ceased to be of any value: out with it!—These priests accomplished that miracle of falsification of which a great part of the Bible is the documentary evidence; with a degree of contempt unparalleled, and in the face of all tradition and all historical reality, they translated the past of their people into religious terms, which is to say, they converted it into an idiotic mechanism of salvation, whereby all offences against Jahveh were punished and all devotion to him was rewarded. We would regard this act of historical falsification as something far more shameful if familiarity with the ecclesiastical interpretation of history for thousands of years had not blunted our inclinations for uprightness in historicis. And the philosophers support the church: the lie about a “moral order of the world” runs through the whole of philosophy, even the newest. What is the meaning of a “moral order of the world”? That there is a thing called the will of God which, once and for all time, determines what man ought to do and what he ought not to do; that the worth of a people, or of an individual thereof, is to be measured by the extent to which they or he obey this will of God; that the destinies of a people or of an individual are controlled by this will of God, which rewards or punishes according to the degree of obedience manifested.—In place of all that pitiable lie reality has this to say: the priest, a parasitical variety of man who can exist only at the cost of every sound view of life, takes the name of God in vain: he calls that state of human society in which he himself determines the value of all things “the kingdom of God”; he calls the means whereby that state of affairs is attained “the will of God”; with cold-blooded cynicism he estimates all peoples, all ages and all individuals by the extent of their subservience or opposition to the power of the priestly order. One observes him at work: under the hand of the Jewish priesthood the great age of Israel became an age of decline; the Exile, with its long series of misfortunes, was transformed into a punishment for that great age—during which priests had not yet come into existence. Out of the powerful and wholly free heroes of Israel’s history they fashioned, according to their changing needs, either wretched bigots and hypocrites or men entirely “godless.” They reduced every great event to the idiotic formula: “obedient or disobedient to God.”—They went a step further: the “will of God” (in other words some means necessary for preserving the power of the priests) had to be determined—and to this end they had to have a “revelation.” In plain English, a gigantic literary fraud had to be perpetrated, and “holy scriptures” had to be concocted—and so, with the utmost hierarchical pomp, and days of penance and much lamentation over the long days of “sin” now ended, they were duly published. The “will of God,” it appears, had long stood like a rock; the trouble was that mankind had neglected the “holy scriptures”.... But the “will of God” had already been revealed to Moses.... What happened? Simply this: the priest had formulated, once and for all time and with the strictest meticulousness, what tithes were to be paid to him, from the largest to the smallest (—not forgetting the most appetizing cuts of meat, for the priest is a great consumer of beefsteaks); in brief, he let it be known just what he wanted, what “the will of God” was....

From this time forward things were so arranged that the priest became indispensable everywhere; at all the great natural events of life, at birth, at marriage, in sickness, at death, not to say at the “sacrifice” (that is, at meal-times), the holy parasite put in his appearance, and proceeded to denaturize it—in his own phrase, to “sanctify” it.... For this should be noted: that every natural habit, every natural institution (the state, the administration of justice, marriage, the care of the sick and of the poor), everything demanded by the life-instinct, in short, everything that has any value in itself, is reduced to absolute worthlessness and even made the reverse of valuable by the parasitism of priests (or, if you chose, by the “moral order of the world”). The fact requires a sanction—a power to grant values becomes necessary, and the only way it can create such values is by denying nature.... The priest depreciates and desecrates nature: it is only at this price that he can exist at all. —Disobedience to God, which actually means to the priest, to “the law,” now gets the name of “sin”; the means prescribed for “reconciliation with God” are, of course, precisely the means which bring one most effectively under the thumb of the priest; he alone can “save”.... Psychologically considered, “sins” are indispensable to every society organized on an ecclesiastical basis; they are the only reliable weapons of power; the priest lives upon sins; it is necessary to him that there be “sinning”.... Prime axiom: “God forgiveth him that repenteth”—in plain English, him that submitteth to the priest. 27. Christianity sprang from a soil so corrupt that on it everything natural, every natural value, every reality was opposed by the deepest instincts of the ruling class—it grew up as a sort of war to the death upon reality, and as such it has never been surpassed. The “holy people,” who had adopted priestly values and priestly names for all things, and who, with a terrible logical consistency, had rejected everything of the earth as “unholy,” “worldly,” “sinful”—this people put its instinct into a final formula that was logical to the point of selfannihilation: as Christianity it actually denied even the last form of reality, the “holy people,” the “chosen people,” Jewish reality itself. The phenomenon is of the first order of importance: the small insurrectionary movement which took the name of Jesus of Nazareth is simply the Jewish instinct redivivus—in other words, it is the priestly instinct come to such a pass that it can no longer endure the priest as a fact; it is the discovery of a state of existence even more fantastic than any before it, of a vision of life even more unreal than that necessary to an ecclesiastical organization. Christianity actually denies the church.... I am unable to determine what was the target of the insurrection said to have been led (whether rightly or wrongly) by Jesus, if it was not the Jewish church—“church” being here used in exactly the same sense that the word has today. It was an insurrection against the “good and just,” against the “prophets of Israel,” against the whole hierarchy of society—not against corruption, but against caste, privilege, order, formalism. It was unbelief in “superior men,” a Nay flung at everything that priests and theologians stood for. But the hierarchy that was called into question, if only for an instant, by this movement was the structure of piles which, above everything, was necessary to the safety of the Jewish people in the midst of the “waters”—it represented their last possibility of survival; it was the final residuum of their independent political existence; an attack upon it was an attack upon the most profound national instinct, the most powerful national will to live, that has ever appeared on earth. This saintly anarchist, who aroused the people of the abyss, the outcasts and “sinners,” the Chandala of Judaism, to rise in revolt against the established order of things—and in language which, if the Gospels are to be credited, would get him sent to Siberia today— this man was certainly a political criminal, at least in so far as it was possible to be one in so absurdly unpolitical a community. This is what brought him to the cross: the proof thereof is to be found in the inscription that was put upon the cross.

He died for his own sins— there is not the slightest ground for believing, no matter how often it is asserted, that he died for the sins of others.— 28. As to whether he himself was conscious of this contradiction— whether, in fact, this was the only contradiction he was cognizant of —that is quite another question. Here, for the first time, I touch upon the problem of the psychology of the Saviour.—I confess, to begin with, that there are very few books which offer me harder reading than the Gospels. My difficulties are quite different from those which enabled the learned curiosity of the German mind to achieve one of its most unforgettable triumphs. It is a long while since I, like all other young scholars, enjoyed with all the sapient laboriousness of a fastidious philologist the work of the incomparable Strauss.[ ] At that time I was twenty years old: now I am too serious for that sort of thing. What do I care for the contradictions of “tradition”? How can any one call pious legends “traditions”? The histories of saints present the most dubious variety of literature in existence; to examine them by the scientific method, in the entire absence of corroborative documents, seems to me to condemn the whole inquiry from the start—it is simply learned idling.... [ ] David Friedrich Strauss ( - ), author of “Das Leben Jesu” ( - ), a very famous work in its day. Nietzsche here refers to it. 29. What concerns me is the psychological type of the Saviour. This type might be depicted in the Gospels, in however mutilated a form and however much overladen with extraneous characters—that is, in spite of the Gospels; just as the figure of Francis of Assisi shows itself in his legends in spite of his legends. It is not a question of mere truthful evidence as to what he did, what he said and how he actually died; the question is, whether his type is still conceivable, whether it has been handed down to us.—All the attempts that I know of to read the history of a “soul” in the Gospels seem to me to reveal only a lamentable psychological levity. M. Renan, that mountebank in psychologicus, has contributed the two most unseemly notions to this business of explaining the type of Jesus: the notion of the genius and that of the hero (“héros”). But if there is anything essentially unevangelical, it is surely the concept of the hero. What the Gospels make instinctive is precisely the reverse of all heroic struggle, of all taste for conflict: the very incapacity for resistance is here converted into something moral: (“resist not evil!”—the most profound sentence in the Gospels, perhaps the true key to them), to wit, the blessedness of peace, of gentleness, the inability to be an enemy. What is the meaning of “glad tidings”?—The true life, the life eternal has been found—it is not merely promised, it is here, it is in you; it is the life that lies in love free from all retreats and exclusions, from all keeping of distances. Every one is the child of God—Jesus claims nothing for himself alone—as the child of God each man is the equal of every other man.... Imagine making Jesus a hero!—And what a tremendous misunderstanding appears in the word “genius”! Our whole conception of the “spiritual,” the whole conception of our civilization, could have had no meaning in the world that Jesus lived in. In the strict sense of the physiologist, a quite different word ought to be used here.... We all know that there is a morbid sensibility of the tactile nerves which causes those suffering from it to recoil from every touch, and from every effort to grasp a solid object. Brought to its logical conclusion, such a physiological habitus becomes an instinctive hatred of all reality, a flight into the “intangible,” into the “incomprehensible”; a distaste for all formulae, for all conceptions of time and space, for everything established—customs, institutions, the church—; a feeling of being at home in a world in which no sort of reality survives, a merely “inner” world, a “true” world, an “eternal” world.... “The Kingdom of God is within you”.... 30. The instinctive hatred of reality: the consequence of an extreme susceptibility to pain and irritation—so great that merely to be “touched” becomes unendurable, for every sensation is too profound.

The instinctive exclusion of all aversion, all hostility, all bounds and distances in feeling: the consequence of an extreme susceptibility to pain and irritation—so great that it senses all resistance, all compulsion to resistance, as unbearable anguish (—that is to say, as harmful, as prohibited by the instinct of self-preservation), and regards blessedness (joy) as possible only when it is no longer necessary to offer resistance to anybody or anything, however evil or dangerous—love, as the only, as the ultimate possibility of life.... These are the two physiological realities upon and out of which the doctrine of salvation has sprung. I call them a sublime superdevelopment of hedonism upon a thoroughly unsalubrious soil. What stands most closely related to them, though with a large admixture of Greek vitality and nerve-force, is epicureanism, the theory of salvation of paganism. Epicurus was a typical décadent: I was the first to recognize him.—The fear of pain, even of infinitely slight pain —the end of this can be nothing save a religion of love.... 31. I have already given my answer to the problem. The prerequisite to it is the assumption that the type of the Saviour has reached us only in a greatly distorted form. This distortion is very probable: there are many reasons why a type of that sort should not be handed down in a pure form, complete and free of additions. The milieu in which this strange figure moved must have left marks upon him, and more must have been imprinted by the history, the destiny, of the early Christian communities; the latter indeed, must have embellished the type retrospectively with characters which can be understood only as serving the purposes of war and of propaganda. That strange and sickly world into which the Gospels lead us—a world apparently out of a Russian novel, in which the scum of society, nervous maladies and “childish” idiocy keep a tryst—must, in any case, have coarsened the type: the first disciples, in particular, must have been forced to translate an existence visible only in symbols and incomprehensibilities into their own crudity, in order to understand it at all—in their sight the type could take on reality only after it had been recast in a familiar mould.... The prophet, the messiah, the future judge, the teacher of morals, the worker of wonders, John the Baptist—all these merely presented chances to misunderstand it.... Finally, let us not underrate the proprium of all great, and especially all sectarian veneration: it tends to erase from the venerated objects all its original traits and idiosyncrasies, often so painfully strange—it does not even see them. It is greatly to be regretted that no Dostoyevsky lived in the neighbourhood of this most interesting décadent—I mean some one who would have felt the poignant charm of such a compound of the sublime, the morbid and the childish. In the last analysis, the type, as a type of the décadence, may actually have been peculiarly complex and contradictory: such a possibility is not to be lost sight of. Nevertheless, the probabilities seem to be against it, for in that case tradition would have been particularly accurate and objective, whereas we have reasons for assuming the contrary. Meanwhile, there is a contradiction between the peaceful preacher of the mount, the sea-shore and the fields, who appears like a new Buddha on a soil very unlike India’s, and the aggressive fanatic, the mortal enemy of theologians and ecclesiastics, who stands glorified by Renan’s malice as “le grand maître en ironie.” I myself haven’t any doubt that the greater part of this venom (and no less of esprit) got itself into the concept of the Master only as a result of the excited nature of Christian propaganda: we all know the unscrupulousness of sectarians when they set out to turn their leader into an apologia for themselves. When the early Christians had need of an adroit, contentious, pugnacious and maliciously subtle theologian to tackle other theologians, they created a “god” that met that need, just as they put into his mouth without hesitation certain ideas that were necessary to them but that were utterly at odds with the Gospels—“the second coming,” “the last judgment,” all sorts of expectations and promises, current at the time.— 32. I can only repeat that I set myself against all efforts to intrude the fanatic into the figure of the Saviour: the very word impérieux, used by Renan, is alone enough to annul the type.

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.

“Sin,” which means anything that puts a distance between God and man, is abolished— this is precisely the “glad tidings.” Eternal bliss is not merely promised, nor is it bound up with conditions: it is conceived as the only reality—what remains consists merely of signs useful in speaking of it. The results of such a point of view project themselves into a new way of life, the special evangelical way of life. It is not a “belief” that marks off the Christian; he is distinguished by a different mode of action; he acts differently. He offers no resistance, either by word or in his heart, to those who stand against him. He draws no distinction between strangers and countrymen, Jews and Gentiles (“neighbour,” of course, means fellow-believer, Jew). He is angry with no one, and he despises no one. He neither appeals to the courts of justice nor heeds their mandates (“Swear not at all”).[ ] He never under any circumstances divorces his wife, even when he has proofs of her infidelity.—And under all of this is one principle; all of it arises from one instinct.— [ ] Matthew v, . The life of the Saviour was simply a carrying out of this way of life —and so was his death.... He no longer needed any formula or ritual in his relations with God—not even prayer. He had rejected the whole of the Jewish doctrine of repentance and atonement; he knew that it was only by a way of life that one could feel one’s self “divine,” “blessed,” “evangelical,” a “child of God.” Not by “repentance,” not by “prayer and forgiveness” is the way to God: only the Gospel way leads to God—it is itself “God!”—What the Gospels abolished was the Judaism in the concepts of “sin,” “forgiveness of sin,” “faith,” “salvation through faith”—the whole ecclesiastical dogma of the Jews was denied by the “glad tidings.” The deep instinct which prompts the Christian how to live so that he will feel that he is “in heaven” and is “immortal,” despite many reasons for feeling that he is not “in heaven”: this is the only psychological reality in “salvation.”—A new way of life, not a new faith.... 34. If I understand anything at all about this great symbolist, it is this: that he regarded only subjective realities as realities, as “truths”— that he saw everything else, everything natural, temporal, spatial and historical, merely as signs, as materials for parables. The concept of “the Son of God” does not connote a concrete person in history, an isolated and definite individual, but an “eternal” fact, a psychological symbol set free from the concept of time. The same thing is true, and in the highest sense, of the God of this typical symbolist, of the “kingdom of God,” and of the “sonship of God.” Nothing could be more un-Christian than the crude ecclesiastical notions of God as a person, of a “kingdom of God” that is to come, of a “kingdom of heaven” beyond, and of a “son of God” as the second person of the Trinity. All this—if I may be forgiven the phrase—is like thrusting one’s fist into the eye (and what an eye!) of the Gospels: a disrespect for symbols amounting to world-historical cynicism.... But it is nevertheless obvious enough what is meant by the symbols “Father” and “Son”—not, of course, to every one—: the word “Son” expresses entrance into the feeling that there is a general transformation of all things (beatitude), and “Father” expresses that feeling itself—the sensation of eternity and of perfection.—I am ashamed to remind you of what the church has made of this symbolism: has it not set an Amphitryon story[ ] at the threshold of the Christian “faith”? And a dogma of “immaculate conception” for good measure?... And thereby it has robbed conception of its immaculateness— [ ] Amphitryon was the son of Alcaeus, King of Tiryns. His wife was Alcmene. During his absence she was visited by Zeus, and bore Heracles. The “kingdom of heaven” is a state of the heart—not something to come “beyond the world” or “after death.” The whole idea of natural death is absent from the Gospels: death is not a bridge, not a passing; it is absent because it belongs to a quite different, a merely apparent world, useful only as a symbol. The “hour of death” is not a Christian idea—“hours,” time, the physical life and its crises have no existence for the bearer of “glad tidings.”...

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.

Even a man who makes the most modest pretensions to integrity must know that a theologian, a priest, a pope of today not only errs when he speaks, but actually lies—and that he no longer escapes blame for his lie through “innocence” or “ignorance.” The priest knows, as every one knows, that there is no longer any “God,” or any “sinner,” or any “Saviour”—that “free will” and the “moral order of the world” are lies—: serious reflection, the profound self-conquest of the spirit, allow no man to pretend that he does not know it.... All the ideas of the church are now recognized for what they are—as the worst counterfeits in existence, invented to debase nature and all natural values; the priest himself is seen as he actually is—as the most dangerous form of parasite, as the venomous spider of creation.... We know, our conscience now knows —just what the real value of all those sinister inventions of priest and church has been and what ends they have served, with their debasement of humanity to a state of self-pollution, the very sight of which excites loathing,—the concepts “the other world,” “the last judgment,” “the immortality of the soul,” the “soul” itself: they are all merely so many instruments of torture, systems of cruelty, whereby the priest becomes master and remains master.... Every one knows this, but nevertheless things remain as before. What has become of the last trace of decent feeling, of self-respect, when our statesmen, otherwise an unconventional class of men and thoroughly antiChristian in their acts, now call themselves Christians and go to the communion-table?... A prince at the head of his armies, magnificent as the expression of the egoism and arrogance of his people—and yet acknowledging, without any shame, that he is a Christian!... Whom, then, does Christianity deny? what does it call “the world”? To be a soldier, to be a judge, to be a patriot; to defend one’s self; to be careful of one’s honour; to desire one’s own advantage; to be proud ... every act of everyday, every instinct, every valuation that shows itself in a deed, is now anti-Christian: what a monster of falsehood the modern man must be to call himself nevertheless, and without shame, a Christian!— 39. —I shall go back a bit, and tell you the authentic history of Christianity.—The very word “Christianity” is a misunderstanding—at bottom there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross. The “Gospels” died on the cross. What, from that moment onward, was called the “Gospels” was the very reverse of what he had lived: “bad tidings,” a Dysangelium.[ ] It is an error amounting to nonsensicality to see in “faith,” and particularly in faith in salvation through Christ, the distinguishing mark of the Christian: only the Christian way of life, the life lived by him who died on the cross, is Christian.... To this day such a life is still possible, and for certain men even necessary: genuine, primitive Christianity will remain possible in all ages.... Not faith, but acts; above all, an avoidance of acts, a different state of being.... States of consciousness, faith of a sort, the acceptance, for example, of anything as true—as every psychologist knows, the value of these things is perfectly indifferent and fifth-rate compared to that of the instincts: strictly speaking, the whole concept of intellectual causality is false. To reduce being a Christian, the state of Christianity, to an acceptance of truth, to a mere phenomenon of consciousness, is to formulate the negation of Christianity. In fact, there are no Christians. The “Christian”—he who for two thousand years has passed as a Christian—is simply a psychological selfdelusion. Closely examined, it appears that, despite all his “faith,” he has been ruled only by his instincts—and what instincts!—In all ages —for example, in the case of Luther—“faith” has been no more than a cloak, a pretense, a curtain behind which the instincts have played their game—a shrewd blindness to the domination of certain of the instincts.... I have already called “faith” the specially Christian form of shrewdness—people always talk of their “faith” and act according to their instincts.... In the world of ideas of the Christian there is nothing that so much as touches reality: on the contrary, one recognizes an instinctive hatred of reality as the motive power, the only motive power at the bottom of Christianity. What follows therefrom?

That even here, in psychologicis, there is a radical error, which is to say one conditioning fundamentals, which is to say, one in substance. Take away one idea and put a genuine reality in its place—and the whole of Christianity crumbles to nothingness!—Viewed calmly, this strangest of all phenomena, a religion not only depending on errors, but inventive and ingenious only in devising injurious errors, poisonous to life and to the heart—this remains a spectacle for the gods—for those gods who are also philosophers, and whom I have encountered, for example, in the celebrated dialogues at Naxos. At the moment when their disgust leaves them (—and us!) they will be thankful for the spectacle afforded by the Christians: perhaps because of this curious exhibition alone the wretched little planet called the earth deserves a glance from omnipotence, a show of divine interest.... Therefore, let us not underestimate the Christians: the Christian, false to the point of innocence, is far above the ape— in its application to the Christians a well-known theory of descent becomes a mere piece of politeness.... [ ] So in the text. One of Nietzsche’s numerous coinages, obviously suggested by Evangelium, the German for gospel. 40. —The fate of the Gospels was decided by death—it hung on the “cross.”... It was only death, that unexpected and shameful death; it was only the cross, which was usually reserved for the canaille only —it was only this appalling paradox which brought the disciples face to face with the real riddle: “Who was it? what was it?”—The feeling of dismay, of profound affront and injury; the suspicion that such a death might involve a refutation of their cause; the terrible question, “Why just in this way?”—this state of mind is only too easy to understand. Here everything must be accounted for as necessary; everything must have a meaning, a reason, the highest sort of reason; the love of a disciple excludes all chance. Only then did the chasm of doubt yawn: “Who put him to death? who was his natural enemy?”—this question flashed like a lightning-stroke. Answer: dominant Judaism, its ruling class. From that moment, one found one’s self in revolt against the established order, and began to understand Jesus as in revolt against the established order. Until then this militant, this nay-saying, nay-doing element in his character had been lacking; what is more, he had appeared to present its opposite. Obviously, the little community had not understood what was precisely the most important thing of all: the example offered by this way of dying, the freedom from and superiority to every feeling of ressentiment—a plain indication of how little he was understood at all! All that Jesus could hope to accomplish by his death, in itself, was to offer the strongest possible proof, or example, of his teachings in the most public manner.... But his disciples were very far from forgiving his death—though to have done so would have accorded with the Gospels in the highest degree; and neither were they prepared to offer themselves, with gentle and serene calmness of heart, for a similar death.... On the contrary, it was precisely the most unevangelical of feelings, revenge, that now possessed them. It seemed impossible that the cause should perish with his death: “recompense” and “judgment” became necessary (—yet what could be less evangelical than “recompense,” “punishment,” and “sitting in judgment”!). Once more the popular belief in the coming of a messiah appeared in the foreground; attention was rivetted upon an historical moment: the “kingdom of God” is to come, with judgment upon his enemies.... But in all this there was a wholesale misunderstanding: imagine the “kingdom of God” as a last act, as a mere promise! The Gospels had been, in fact, the incarnation, the fulfilment, the realization of this “kingdom of God.” It was only now that all the familiar contempt for and bitterness against Pharisees and theologians began to appear in the character of the Master—he was thereby turned into a Pharisee and theologian himself! On the other hand, the savage veneration of these completely unbalanced souls could no longer endure the Gospel doctrine, taught by Jesus, of the equal right of all men to be children of God: their revenge took the form of elevating Jesus in an extravagant fashion, and thus separating him from themselves: just as, in earlier times, the Jews, to revenge themselves upon their enemies, separated themselves from their God, and placed him on a great height.

The One God and the Only Son of God: both were products of ressentiment.... 41. —And from that time onward an absurd problem offered itself: “how could God allow it!” To which the deranged reason of the little community formulated an answer that was terrifying in its absurdity: God gave his son as a sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins. At once there was an end of the gospels! Sacrifice for sin, and in its most obnoxious and barbarous form: sacrifice of the innocent for the sins of the guilty! What appalling paganism!—Jesus himself had done away with the very concept of “guilt,” he denied that there was any gulf fixed between God and man; he lived this unity between God and man, and that was precisely his “glad tidings”.... And not as a mere privilege!—From this time forward the type of the Saviour was corrupted, bit by bit, by the doctrine of judgment and of the second coming, the doctrine of death as a sacrifice, the doctrine of the resurrection, by means of which the entire concept of “blessedness,” the whole and only reality of the gospels, is juggled away—in favour of a state of existence after death!... St. Paul, with that rabbinical impudence which shows itself in all his doings, gave a logical quality to that conception, that indecent conception, in this way: “If Christ did not rise from the dead, then all our faith is in vain!”—And at once there sprang from the Gospels the most contemptible of all unfulfillable promises, the shameless doctrine of personal immortality.... Paul even preached it as a reward.... 42. One now begins to see just what it was that came to an end with the death on the cross: a new and thoroughly original effort to found a Buddhistic peace movement, and so establish happiness on earth— real, not merely promised. For this remains—as I have already pointed out—the essential difference between the two religions of décadence: Buddhism promises nothing, but actually fulfils; Christianity promises everything, but fulfils nothing.—Hard upon the heels of the “glad tidings” came the worst imaginable: those of Paul. In Paul is incarnated the very opposite of the “bearer of glad tidings”; he represents the genius for hatred, the vision of hatred, the relentless logic of hatred. What, indeed, has not this dysangelist sacrificed to hatred! Above all, the Saviour: he nailed him to his own cross. The life, the example, the teaching, the death of Christ, the meaning and the law of the whole gospels—nothing was left of all this after that counterfeiter in hatred had reduced it to his uses. Surely not reality; surely not historical truth!... Once more the priestly instinct of the Jew perpetrated the same old master crime against history—he simply struck out the yesterday and the day before yesterday of Christianity, and invented his own history of Christian beginnings. Going further, he treated the history of Israel to another falsification, so that it became a mere prologue to his achievement: all the prophets, it now appeared, had referred to his “Saviour.”... Later on the church even falsified the history of man in order to make it a prologue to Christianity.... The figure of the Saviour, his teaching, his way of life, his death, the meaning of his death, even the consequences of his death—nothing remained untouched, nothing remained in even remote contact with reality. Paul simply shifted the centre of gravity of that whole life to a place behind this existence— in the lie of the “risen” Jesus. At bottom, he had no use for the life of the Saviour—what he needed was the death on the cross, and something more. To see anything honest in such a man as Paul, whose home was at the centre of the Stoical enlightenment, when he converts an hallucination into a proof of the resurrection of the Saviour, or even to believe his tale that he suffered from this hallucination himself—this would be a genuine niaiserie in a psychologist. Paul willed the end; therefore he also willed the means.... What he himself didn’t believe was swallowed readily enough by the idiots among whom he spread his teaching.—What he wanted was power; in Paul the priest once more reached out for power—he had use only for such concepts, teachings and symbols as served the purpose of tyrannizing over the masses and organizing mobs. What was the only part of Christianity that Mohammed borrowed later on?

Paul’s invention, his device for establishing priestly tyranny and organizing the mob: the belief in the immortality of the soul—that is to say, the doctrine of “judgment”.... 43. When the centre of gravity of life is placed, not in life itself, but in “the beyond”—in nothingness—then one has taken away its centre of gravity altogether. The vast lie of personal immortality destroys all reason, all natural instinct—henceforth, everything in the instincts that is beneficial, that fosters life and that safeguards the future is a cause of suspicion. So to live that life no longer has any meaning: this is now the “meaning” of life.... Why be public-spirited? Why take any pride in descent and forefathers? Why labour together, trust one another, or concern one’s self about the common welfare, and try to serve it?... Merely so many “temptations,” so many strayings from the “straight path.”—“One thing only is necessary”.... That every man, because he has an “immortal soul,” is as good as every other man; that in an infinite universe of things the “salvation” of every individual may lay claim to eternal importance; that insignificant bigots and the three-fourths insane may assume that the laws of nature are constantly suspended in their behalf—it is impossible to lavish too much contempt upon such a magnification of every sort of selfishness to infinity, to insolence. And yet Christianity has to thank precisely this miserable flattery of personal vanity for its triumph—it was thus that it lured all the botched, the dissatisfied, the fallen upon evil days, the whole refuse and off-scouring of humanity to its side. The “salvation of the soul”—in plain English: “the world revolves around me.”... The poisonous doctrine, “equal rights for all,” has been propagated as a Christian principle: out of the secret nooks and crannies of bad instinct Christianity has waged a deadly war upon all feelings of reverence and distance between man and man, which is to say, upon the first prerequisite to every step upward, to every development of civilization—out of the ressentiment of the masses it has forged its chief weapons against us, against everything noble, joyous and high-spirited on earth, against our happiness on earth.... To allow “immortality” to every Peter and Paul was the greatest, the most vicious outrage upon noble humanity ever perpetrated.—And let us not underestimate the fatal influence that Christianity has had, even upon politics! Nowadays no one has courage any more for special rights, for the right of dominion, for feelings of honourable pride in himself and his equals—for the pathos of distance.... Our politics is sick with this lack of courage!— The aristocratic attitude of mind has been undermined by the lie of the equality of souls; and if belief in the “privileges of the majority” makes and will continue to make revolutions—it is Christianity, let us not doubt, and Christian valuations, which convert every revolution into a carnival of blood and crime! Christianity is a revolt of all creatures that creep on the ground against everything that is lofty: the gospel of the “lowly” lowers.... 44. —The gospels are invaluable as evidence of the corruption that was already persistent within the primitive community. That which Paul, with the cynical logic of a rabbi, later developed to a conclusion was at bottom merely a process of decay that had begun with the death of the Saviour.—These gospels cannot be read too carefully; difficulties lurk behind every word. I confess—I hope it will not be held against me—that it is precisely for this reason that they offer first-rate joy to a psychologist—as the opposite of all merely naïve corruption, as refinement par excellence, as an artistic triumph in psychological corruption. The gospels, in fact, stand alone. The Bible as a whole is not to be compared to them. Here we are among Jews: this is the first thing to be borne in mind if we are not to lose the thread of the matter. This positive genius for conjuring up a delusion of personal “holiness” unmatched anywhere else, either in books or by men; this elevation of fraud in word and attitude to the level of an art—all this is not an accident due to the chance talents of an individual, or to any violation of nature. The thing responsible is race. The whole of Judaism appears in Christianity as the art of concocting holy lies, and there, after many centuries of earnest Jewish training and hard practice of Jewish technic, the business comes to the stage of mastery.

The Christian, that ultima ratio of lying, is the Jew all over again—he is threefold the Jew.... The underlying will to make use only of such concepts, symbols and attitudes as fit into priestly practice, the instinctive repudiation of every other mode of thought, and every other method of estimating values and utilities—this is not only tradition, it is inheritance: only as an inheritance is it able to operate with the force of nature. The whole of mankind, even the best minds of the best ages (with one exception, perhaps hardly human—), have permitted themselves to be deceived. The gospels have been read as a book of innocence ... surely no small indication of the high skill with which the trick has been done.—Of course, if we could actually see these astounding bigots and bogus saints, even if only for an instant, the farce would come to an end,—and it is precisely because I cannot read a word of theirs without seeing their attitudinizing that I have made an end of them.... I simply cannot endure the way they have of rolling up their eyes.—For the majority, happily enough, books are mere literature.—Let us not be led astray: they say “judge not,” and yet they condemn to hell whoever stands in their way. In letting God sit in judgment they judge themselves; in glorifying God they glorify themselves; in demanding that every one show the virtues which they themselves happen to be capable of— still more, which they must have in order to remain on top—they assume the grand air of men struggling for virtue, of men engaging in a war that virtue may prevail. “We live, we die, we sacrifice ourselves for the good” (—“the truth,” “the light,” “the kingdom of God”): in point of fact, they simply do what they cannot help doing. Forced, like hypocrites, to be sneaky, to hide in corners, to slink along in the shadows, they convert their necessity into a duty: it is on grounds of duty that they account for their lives of humility, and that humility becomes merely one more proof of their piety.... Ah, that humble, chaste, charitable brand of fraud! “Virtue itself shall bear witness for us.”... One may read the gospels as books of moral seduction: these petty folks fasten themselves to morality—they know the uses of morality! Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose!—The fact is that the conscious conceit of the chosen here disguises itself as modesty: it is in this way that they, the “community,” the “good and just,” range themselves, once and for always, on one side, the side of “the truth”—and the rest of mankind, “the world,” on the other.... In that we observe the most fatal sort of megalomania that the earth has ever seen: little abortions of bigots and liars began to claim exclusive rights in the concepts of “God,” “the truth,” “the light,” “the spirit,” “love,” “wisdom” and “life,” as if these things were synonyms of themselves and thereby they sought to fence themselves off from the “world”; little super-Jews, ripe for some sort of madhouse, turned values upside down in order to meet their notions, just as if the Christian were the meaning, the salt, the standard and even the last judgment of all the rest.... The whole disaster was only made possible by the fact that there already existed in the world a similar megalomania, allied to this one in race, to wit, the Jewish: once a chasm began to yawn between Jews and Judaeo-Christians, the latter had no choice but to employ the self-preservative measures that the Jewish instinct had devised, even against the Jews themselves, whereas the Jews had employed them only against non-Jews. The Christian is simply a Jew of the “reformed” confession.— 45. —I offer a few examples of the sort of thing these petty people have got into their heads—what they have put into the mouth of the Master: the unalloyed creed of “beautiful souls.”— “And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear you, when ye depart thence, shake off the dust under your feet for a testimony against them. Verily I say unto you, it shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgment, than for that city” (Mark vi, )—How evangelical!...

“And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea” (Mark ix, ).—How evangelical!... “And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire; Where the worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.” (Mark ix, .[ ])—It is not exactly the eye that is meant.... [ ] To which, without mentioning it, Nietzsche adds verse . “Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power.” (Mark ix, .)—Well lied, lion![ ].... [ ] A paraphrase of Demetrius’ “Well roar’d, Lion!” in act v, scene of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The lion, of course, is the familiar Christian symbol for Mark. “Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For...” (Note of a psychologist. Christian morality is refuted by its fors: its reasons are against it,—this makes it Christian.) Mark viii, .— “Judge not, that ye be not judged. With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” (Matthew vii, .[ ])—What a notion of justice, of a “just” judge!... [ ] Nietzsche also quotes part of verse . “For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so?” (Matthew v, .[ ])—Principle of “Christian love”: it insists upon being well paid in the end.... [ ] The quotation also includes verse . “But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” (Matthew vi, .)—Very compromising for the said “father.”... “But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.” (Matthew vi, .)—All these things: namely, food, clothing, all the necessities of life. An error, to put it mildly.... A bit before this God appears as a tailor, at least in certain cases.... “Rejoice ye in that day, and leap for joy: for, behold, your reward is great in heaven: for in the like manner did their fathers unto the prophets.” (Luke vi, .)—Impudent rabble! It compares itself to the prophets.... “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the spirit of God dwelleth in you? If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are.” (Paul, Corinthians iii, .[ ])—For that sort of thing one cannot have enough contempt.... [ ] And . “Do ye not know that the saints shall judge the world? and if the world shall be judged by you, are ye unworthy to judge the smallest matters?” (Paul, Corinthians vi, .)—Unfortunately, not merely the speech of a lunatic.... This frightful impostor then proceeds: “Know ye not that we shall judge angels? how much more things that pertain to this life?”... “Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.... Not many wise men after the flesh, not men mighty, not many noble are called: But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are: That no flesh should glory in his presence.” (Paul, Corinthians i, ff.[ ])— In order to understand this passage, a first-rate example of the psychology underlying every Chandala-morality, one should read the first part of my “Genealogy of Morals”: there, for the first time, the antagonism between a noble morality and a morality born of ressentiment and impotent vengefulness is exhibited. Paul was the greatest of all apostles of revenge.... [ ] Verses , , , , , . 46. —What follows, then?

That one had better put on gloves before reading the New Testament. The presence of so much filth makes it very advisable. One would as little choose “early Christians” for companions as Polish Jews: not that one need seek out an objection to them.... Neither has a pleasant smell.—I have searched the New Testament in vain for a single sympathetic touch; nothing is there that is free, kindly, open-hearted or upright. In it humanity does not even make the first step upward—the instinct for cleanliness is lacking.... Only evil instincts are there, and there is not even the courage of these evil instincts. It is all cowardice; it is all a shutting of the eyes, a self-deception. Every other book becomes clean, once one has read the New Testament: for example, immediately after reading Paul I took up with delight that most charming and wanton of scoffers, Petronius, of whom one may say what Domenico Boccaccio wrote of Cæsar Borgia to the Duke of Parma: “è tutto festo”—immortally healthy, immortally cheerful and sound.... These petty bigots make a capital miscalculation. They attack, but everything they attack is thereby distinguished. Whoever is attacked by an “early Christian” is surely not befouled.... On the contrary, it is an honour to have an “early Christian” as an opponent. One cannot read the New Testament without acquired admiration for whatever it abuses—not to speak of the “wisdom of this world,” which an impudent wind-bag tries to dispose of “by the foolishness of preaching.”... Even the scribes and pharisees are benefitted by such opposition: they must certainly have been worth something to have been hated in such an indecent manner. Hypocrisy—as if this were a charge that the “early Christians” dared to make!—After all, they were the privileged, and that was enough: the hatred of the Chandala needed no other excuse. The “early Christian”—and also, I fear, the “last Christian,” whom I may perhaps live to see—is a rebel against all privilege by profound instinct—he lives and makes war for ever for “equal rights.”... Strictly speaking, he has no alternative. When a man proposes to represent, in his own person, the “chosen of God”—or to be a “temple of God,” or a “judge of the angels”—then every other criterion, whether based upon honesty, upon intellect, upon manliness and pride, or upon beauty and freedom of the heart, becomes simply “worldly”—evil in itself.... Moral: every word that comes from the lips of an “early Christian” is a lie, and his every act is instinctively dishonest—all his values, all his aims are noxious, but whoever he hates, whatever he hates, has real value.... The Christian, and particularly the Christian priest, is thus a criterion of values. —Must I add that, in the whole New Testament, there appears but a solitary figure worthy of honour? Pilate, the Roman viceroy. To regard a Jewish imbroglio seriously—that was quite beyond him. One Jew more or less—what did it matter?... The noble scorn of a Roman, before whom the word “truth” was shamelessly mishandled, enriched the New Testament with the only saying that has any value —and that is at once its criticism and its destruction: “What is truth?...” 47. —The thing that sets us apart is not that we are unable to find God, either in history, or in nature, or behind nature—but that we regard what has been honoured as God, not as “divine,” but as pitiable, as absurd, as injurious; not as a mere error, but as a crime against life.... We deny that God is God.... If any one were to show us this Christian God, we’d be still less inclined to believe in him.—In a formula: deus, qualem Paulus creavit, dei negatio.—Such a religion as Christianity, which does not touch reality at a single point and which goes to pieces the moment reality asserts its rights at any point, must be inevitably the deadly enemy of the “wisdom of this world,” which is to say, of science—and it will give the name of good to whatever means serve to poison, calumniate and cry down all intellectual discipline, all lucidity and strictness in matters of intellectual conscience, and all noble coolness and freedom of the mind. “Faith,” as an imperative, vetoes science—in praxi, lying at any price....

Paul well knew that lying—that “faith”—was necessary; later on the church borrowed the fact from Paul.—The God that Paul invented for himself, a God who “reduced to absurdity” “the wisdom of this world” (especially the two great enemies of superstition, philology and medicine), is in truth only an indication of Paul’s resolute determination to accomplish that very thing himself: to give one’s own will the name of God, thora—that is essentially Jewish. Paul wants to dispose of the “wisdom of this world”: his enemies are the good philologians and physicians of the Alexandrine school—on them he makes his war. As a matter of fact no man can be a philologian or a physician without being also Antichrist. That is to say, as a philologian a man sees behind the “holy books,” and as a physician he sees behind the physiological degeneration of the typical Christian. The physician says “incurable”; the philologian says “fraud.”... 48. —Has any one ever clearly understood the celebrated story at the beginning of the Bible—of God’s mortal terror of science?... No one, in fact, has understood it. This priest-book par excellence opens, as is fitting, with the great inner difficulty of the priest: he faces only one great danger; ergo, “God” faces only one great danger.— The old God, wholly “spirit,” wholly the high-priest, wholly perfect, is promenading his garden: he is bored and trying to kill time. Against boredom even gods struggle in vain.[ ] What does he do? He creates man—man is entertaining.... But then he notices that man is also bored. God’s pity for the only form of distress that invades all paradises knows no bounds: so he forthwith creates other animals. God’s first mistake: to man these other animals were not entertaining—he sought dominion over them; he did not want to be an “animal” himself.—So God created woman. In the act he brought boredom to an end—and also many other things! Woman was the second mistake of God.—“Woman, at bottom, is a serpent, Heva”—every priest knows that; “from woman comes every evil in the world”—every priest knows that, too. Ergo, she is also to blame for science.... It was through woman that man learned to taste of the tree of knowledge.—What happened? The old God was seized by mortal terror. Man himself had been his greatest blunder; he had created a rival to himself; science makes men godlike—it is all up with priests and gods when man becomes scientific!—Moral: science is the forbidden per se; it alone is forbidden. Science is the first of sins, the germ of all sins, the original sin. This is all there is of morality.—“Thou shall not know”:—the rest follows from that.—God’s mortal terror, however, did not hinder him from being shrewd. How is one to protect one’s self against science? For a long while this was the capital problem. Answer: Out of paradise with man! Happiness, leisure, foster thought—and all thoughts are bad thoughts!—Man must not think.—And so the priest invents distress, death, the mortal dangers of childbirth, all sorts of misery, old age, decrepitude, above all, sickness—nothing but devices for making war on science! The troubles of man don’t allow him to think.... Nevertheless—how terrible!—, the edifice of knowledge begins to tower aloft, invading heaven, shadowing the gods—what is to be done?—The old God invents war; he separates the peoples; he makes men destroy one another (—the priests have always had need of war....). War— among other things, a great disturber of science!—Incredible! Knowledge, deliverance from the priests, prospers in spite of war.— So the old God comes to his final resolution: “Man has become scientific—there is no help for it: he must be drowned!”... [ ] A paraphrase of Schiller’s “Against stupidity even gods struggle in vain.” 49. —I have been understood. At the opening of the Bible there is the whole psychology of the priest.—The priest knows of only one great danger: that is science—the sound comprehension of cause and effect. But science flourishes, on the whole, only under favourable conditions—a man must have time, he must have an overflowing intellect, in order to “know.”... “Therefore, man must be made unhappy,”—this has been, in all ages, the logic of the priest.—It is easy to see just what, by this logic, was the first thing to come into the world:—“sin.”... The concept of guilt and punishment, the whole “moral order of the world,” was set up against science—against the deliverance of man from priests.... Man must not look outward; he must look inward.

He must not look at things shrewdly and cautiously, to learn about them; he must not look at all; he must suffer.... And he must suffer so much that he is always in need of the priest.—Away with physicians! What is needed is a Saviour.—The concept of guilt and punishment, including the doctrines of “grace,” of “salvation,” of “forgiveness”—lies through and through, and absolutely without psychological reality—were devised to destroy man’s sense of causality: they are an attack upon the concept of cause and effect!—And not an attack with the fist, with the knife, with honesty in hate and love! On the contrary, one inspired by the most cowardly, the most crafty, the most ignoble of instincts! An attack of priests! An attack of parasites! The vampirism of pale, subterranean leeches!... When the natural consequences of an act are no longer “natural,” but are regarded as produced by the ghostly creations of superstition—by “God,” by “spirits,” by “souls”—and reckoned as merely “moral” consequences, as rewards, as punishments, as hints, as lessons, then the whole ground-work of knowledge is destroyed— then the greatest of crimes against humanity has been perpetrated. —I repeat that sin, man’s self-desecration par excellence, was invented in order to make science, culture, and every elevation and ennobling of man impossible; the priest rules through the invention of sin.— 50. —In this place I can’t permit myself to omit a psychology of “belief,” of the “believer,” for the special benefit of “believers.” If there remain any today who do not yet know how indecent it is to be “believing”— or how much a sign of décadence, of a broken will to live—then they will know it well enough tomorrow. My voice reaches even the deaf. —It appears, unless I have been incorrectly informed, that there prevails among Christians a sort of criterion of truth that is called “proof by power.” “Faith makes blessed: therefore it is true.”—It might be objected right here that blessedness is not demonstrated, it is merely promised: it hangs upon “faith” as a condition—one shall be blessed because one believes.... But what of the thing that the priest promises to the believer, the wholly transcendental “beyond”—how is that to be demonstrated?—The “proof by power,” thus assumed, is actually no more at bottom than a belief that the effects which faith promises will not fail to appear. In a formula: “I believe that faith makes for blessedness—therefore, it is true.”... But this is as far as we may go. This “therefore” would be absurdum itself as a criterion of truth.—But let us admit, for the sake of politeness, that blessedness by faith may be demonstrated (—not merely hoped for, and not merely promised by the suspicious lips of a priest): even so, could blessedness—in a technical term, pleasure—ever be a proof of truth? So little is this true that it is almost a proof against truth when sensations of pleasure influence the answer to the question “What is true?” or, at all events, it is enough to make that “truth” highly suspicious. The proof by “pleasure” is a proof of “pleasure”— nothing more; why in the world should it be assumed that true judgments give more pleasure than false ones, and that, in conformity to some pre-established harmony, they necessarily bring agreeable feelings in their train?—The experience of all disciplined and profound minds teaches the contrary. Man has had to fight for every atom of the truth, and has had to pay for it almost everything that the heart, that human love, that human trust cling to. Greatness of soul is needed for this business: the service of truth is the hardest of all services.—What, then, is the meaning of integrity in things intellectual? It means that a man must be severe with his own heart, that he must scorn “beautiful feelings,” and that he makes every Yea and Nay a matter of conscience!—Faith makes blessed: therefore, it lies.... 51. The fact that faith, under certain circumstances, may work for blessedness, but that this blessedness produced by an idée fixe by no means makes the idea itself true, and the fact that faith actually moves no mountains, but instead raises them up where there were none before: all this is made sufficiently clear by a walk through a lunatic asylum. Not, of course, to a priest: for his instincts prompt him to the lie that sickness is not sickness and lunatic asylums not lunatic asylums.

Christianity finds sickness necessary, just as the Greek spirit had need of a superabundance of health—the actual ulterior purpose of the whole system of salvation of the church is to make people ill. And the church itself—doesn’t it set up a Catholic lunatic asylum as the ultimate ideal?—The whole earth as a madhouse?— The sort of religious man that the church wants is a typical décadent; the moment at which a religious crisis dominates a people is always marked by epidemics of nervous disorder; the “inner world” of the religious man is so much like the “inner world” of the overstrung and exhausted that it is difficult to distinguish between them; the “highest” states of mind, held up before mankind by Christianity as of supreme worth, are actually epileptoid in form—the church has granted the name of holy only to lunatics or to gigantic frauds in majorem dei honorem.... Once I ventured to designate the whole Christian system of training[ ] in penance and salvation (now best studied in England) as a method of producing a folie circulaire upon a soil already prepared for it, which is to say, a soil thoroughly unhealthy. Not every one may be a Christian: one is not “converted” to Christianity—one must first be sick enough for it.... We others, who have the courage for health and likewise for contempt,—we may well despise a religion that teaches misunderstanding of the body! that refuses to rid itself of the superstition about the soul! that makes a “virtue” of insufficient nourishment! that combats health as a sort of enemy, devil, temptation! that persuades itself that it is possible to carry about a “perfect soul” in a cadaver of a body, and that, to this end, had to devise for itself a new concept of “perfection,” a pale, sickly, idiotically ecstatic state of existence, so-called “holiness”—a holiness that is itself merely a series of symptoms of an impoverished, enervated and incurably disordered body!... The Christian movement, as a European movement, was from the start no more than a general uprising of all sorts of outcast and refuse elements (—who now, under cover of Christianity, aspire to power). It does not represent the decay of a race; it represents, on the contrary, a conglomeration of décadence products from all directions, crowding together and seeking one another out. It was not, as has been thought, the corruption of antiquity, of noble antiquity, which made Christianity possible; one cannot too sharply challenge the learned imbecility which today maintains that theory. At the time when the sick and rotten Chandala classes in the whole imperium were Christianized, the contrary type, the nobility, reached its finest and ripest development. The majority became master; democracy, with its Christian instincts, triumphed.... Christianity was not “national,” it was not based on race—it appealed to all the varieties of men disinherited by life, it had its allies everywhere. Christianity has the rancour of the sick at its very core—the instinct against the healthy, against health. Everything that is wellconstituted, proud, gallant and, above all, beautiful gives offence to its ears and eyes. Again I remind you of Paul’s priceless saying: “And God hath chosen the weak things of the world, the foolish things of the world, the base things of the world, and things which are despised”:[ ] this was the formula; in hoc signo the décadence triumphed.—God on the cross—is man always to miss the frightful inner significance of this symbol?—Everything that suffers, everything that hangs on the cross, is divine.... We all hang on the cross, consequently we are divine.... We alone are divine.... Christianity was thus a victory: a nobler attitude of mind was destroyed by it—Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.— [ ] The word training is in English in the text. [ ] Corinthians i, , . 52. Christianity also stands in opposition to all intellectual well-being,— sick reasoning is the only sort that it can use as Christian reasoning; it takes the side of everything that is idiotic; it pronounces a curse upon “intellect,” upon the superbia of the healthy intellect. Since sickness is inherent in Christianity, it follows that the typically Christian state of “faith” must be a form of sickness too, and that all straight, straightforward and scientific paths to knowledge must be banned by the church as forbidden ways. Doubt is thus a sin from the start....

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 conclusion that all idiots, women and plebeians come to, that there must be something in a cause for which any one goes to his death (or which, as under primitive Christianity, sets off epidemics of death-seeking) —this conclusion has been an unspeakable drag upon the testing of facts, upon the whole spirit of inquiry and investigation. The martyrs have damaged the truth.... Even to this day the crude fact of persecution is enough to give an honourable name to the most empty sort of sectarianism.—But why? Is the worth of a cause altered by the fact that some one had laid down his life for it?—An error that becomes honourable is simply an error that has acquired one seductive charm the more: do you suppose, Messrs. Theologians, that we shall give you the chance to be martyred for your lies?—One best disposes of a cause by respectfully putting it on ice—that is also the best way to dispose of theologians.... This was precisely the world-historical stupidity of all the persecutors: that they gave the appearance of honour to the cause they opposed— that they made it a present of the fascination of martyrdom.... Women are still on their knees before an error because they have been told that some one died on the cross for it. Is the cross, then, an argument?—But about all these things there is one, and one only, who has said what has been needed for thousands of years— Zarathustra. They made signs in blood along the way that they went, and their folly taught them that the truth is proved by blood. But blood is the worst of all testimonies to the truth; blood poisoneth even the purest teaching and turneth it into madness and hatred in the heart. And when one goeth through fire for his teaching—what doth that prove? Verily, it is more when one’s teaching cometh out of one’s own burning![ ] [ ] The quotations are from “Also sprach Zarathustra” ii, Priests.” : “Of 54. Do not let yourself be deceived: great intellects are sceptical. Zarathustra is a sceptic. The strength, the freedom which proceed from intellectual power, from a superabundance of intellectual power, manifest themselves as scepticism. Men of fixed convictions do not count when it comes to determining what is fundamental in values and lack of values. Men of convictions are prisoners. They do not see far enough, they do not see what is below them: whereas a man who would talk to any purpose about value and non-value must be able to see five hundred convictions beneath him—and behind him.... A mind that aspires to great things, and that wills the means thereto, is necessarily sceptical. Freedom from any sort of conviction belongs to strength, and to an independent point of view.... That grand passion which is at once the foundation and the power of a sceptic’s existence, and is both more enlightened and more despotic than he is himself, drafts the whole of his intellect into its service; it makes him unscrupulous; it gives him courage to employ unholy means; under certain circumstances it does not begrudge him even convictions. Conviction as a means: one may achieve a good deal by means of a conviction. A grand passion makes use of and uses up convictions; it does not yield to them—it knows itself to be sovereign.—On the contrary, the need of faith, of something unconditioned by yea or nay, of Carlylism, if I may be allowed the word, is a need of weakness. The man of faith, the “believer” of any sort, is necessarily a dependent man—such a man cannot posit himself as a goal, nor can he find goals within himself. The “believer” does not belong to himself; he can only be a means to an end; he must be used up; he needs some one to use him up. His instinct gives the highest honours to an ethic of self-effacement; he is prompted to embrace it by everything: his prudence, his experience, his vanity. Every sort of faith is in itself an evidence of selfeffacement, of self-estrangement....

When one reflects how necessary it is to the great majority that there be regulations to restrain them from without and hold them fast, and to what extent control, or, in a higher sense, slavery, is the one and only condition which makes for the well-being of the weak-willed man, and especially woman, then one at once understands conviction and “faith.” To the man with convictions they are his backbone. To avoid seeing many things, to be impartial about nothing, to be a party man through and through, to estimate all values strictly and infallibly— these are conditions necessary to the existence of such a man. But by the same token they are antagonists of the truthful man—of the truth.... The believer is not free to answer the question, “true” or “not true,” according to the dictates of his own conscience: integrity on this point would work his instant downfall. The pathological limitations of his vision turn the man of convictions into a fanatic— Savonarola, Luther, Rousseau, Robespierre, Saint-Simon—these types stand in opposition to the strong, emancipated spirit. But the grandiose attitudes of these sick intellects, these intellectual epileptics, are of influence upon the great masses—fanatics are picturesque, and mankind prefers observing poses to listening to reasons.... 55. —One step further in the psychology of conviction, of “faith.” It is now a good while since I first proposed for consideration the question whether convictions are not even more dangerous enemies to truth than lies. (“Human, All-Too-Human,” I, aphorism .)[ ] This time I desire to put the question definitely: is there any actual difference between a lie and a conviction?—All the world believes that there is; but what is not believed by all the world!—Every conviction has its history, its primitive forms, its stage of tentativeness and error: it becomes a conviction only after having been, for a long time, not one, and then, for an even longer time, hardly one. What if falsehood be also one of these embryonic forms of conviction?—Sometimes all that is needed is a change in persons: what was a lie in the father becomes a conviction in the son.—I call it lying to refuse to see what one sees, or to refuse to see it as it is: whether the lie be uttered before witnesses or not before witnesses is of no consequence. The most common sort of lie is that by which a man deceives himself: the deception of others is a relatively rare offence.—Now, this will not to see what one sees, this will not to see it as it is, is almost the first requisite for all who belong to a party of whatever sort: the party man becomes inevitably a liar. For example, the German historians are convinced that Rome was synonymous with despotism and that the Germanic peoples brought the spirit of liberty into the world: what is the difference between this conviction and a lie? Is it to be wondered at that all partisans, including the German historians, instinctively roll the fine phrases of morality upon their tongues—that morality almost owes its very survival to the fact that the party man of every sort has need of it every moment?—“This is our conviction: we publish it to the whole world; we live and die for it—let us respect all who have convictions!”—I have actually heard such sentiments from the mouths of anti-Semites. On the contrary, gentlemen! An anti-Semite surely does not become more respectable because he lies on principle.... The priests, who have more finesse in such matters, and who well understand the objection that lies against the notion of a conviction, which is to say, of a falsehood that becomes a matter of principle because it serves a purpose, have borrowed from the Jews the shrewd device of sneaking in the concepts, “God,” “the will of God” and “the revelation of God” at this place. Kant, too, with his categorical imperative, was on the same road: this was his practical reason.[ ] There are questions regarding the truth or untruth of which it is not for man to decide; all the capital questions, all the capital problems of valuation, are beyond human reason.... To know the limits of reason—that alone is genuine philosophy.... Why did God make a revelation to man? Would God have done anything superfluous? Man could not find out for himself what was good and what was evil, so God taught him His will....

Moral: the priest does not lie—the question, “true” or “untrue,” has nothing to do with such things as the priest discusses; it is impossible to lie about these things. In order to lie here it would be necessary to know what is true. But this is more than man can know; therefore, the priest is simply the mouthpiece of God.—Such a priestly syllogism is by no means merely Jewish and Christian; the right to lie and the shrewd dodge of “revelation” belong to the general priestly type—to the priest of the décadence as well as to the priest of pagan times (— Pagans are all those who say yes to life, and to whom “God” is a word signifying acquiescence in all things).—The “law,” the “will of God,” the “holy book,” and “inspiration”—all these things are merely words for the conditions under which the priest comes to power and with which he maintains his power,—these concepts are to be found at the bottom of all priestly organizations, and of all priestly or priestly-philosophical schemes of governments. The “holy lie”— common alike to Confucius, to the Code of Manu, to Mohammed and to the Christian church—is not even wanting in Plato. “Truth is here”: this means, no matter where it is heard, the priest lies.... [ ] The aphorism, which is headed “The Enemies of Truth,” makes the direct statement: “Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.” [ ] A reference, of course, to Kant’s “Kritik der praktischen Vernunft” (Critique of Practical Reason). 56. —In the last analysis it comes to this: what is the end of lying? The fact that, in Christianity, “holy” ends are not visible is my objection to the means it employs. Only bad ends appear: the poisoning, the calumniation, the denial of life, the despising of the body, the degradation and self-contamination of man by the concept of sin— therefore, its means are also bad.—I have a contrary feeling when I read the Code of Manu, an incomparably more intellectual and superior work, which it would be a sin against the intelligence to so much as name in the same breath with the Bible. It is easy to see why: there is a genuine philosophy behind it, in it, not merely an evilsmelling mess of Jewish rabbinism and superstition,—it gives even the most fastidious psychologist something to sink his teeth into. And, not to forget what is most important, it differs fundamentally from every kind of Bible: by means of it the nobles, the philosophers and the warriors keep the whip-hand over the majority; it is full of noble valuations, it shows a feeling of perfection, an acceptance of life, and triumphant feeling toward self and life—the sun shines upon the whole book.—All the things on which Christianity vents its fathomless vulgarity—for example, procreation, women and marriage—are here handled earnestly, with reverence and with love and confidence. How can any one really put into the hands of children and ladies a book which contains such vile things as this: “to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband; ... it is better to marry than to burn”? [ ] And is it possible to be a Christian so long as the origin of man is Christianized, which is to say, befouled, by the doctrine of the immaculata conceptio?... I know of no book in which so many delicate and kindly things are said of women as in the Code of Manu; these old grey-beards and saints have a way of being gallant to women that it would be impossible, perhaps, to surpass. “The mouth of a woman,” it says in one place, “the breasts of a maiden, the prayer of a child and the smoke of sacrifice are always pure.” In another place: “there is nothing purer than the light of the sun, the shadow cast by a cow, air, water, fire and the breath of a maiden.” Finally, in still another place—perhaps this is also a holy lie—: “all the orifices of the body above the navel are pure, and all below are impure. Only in the maiden is the whole body pure.” [ ] Corinthians vii, , . 57. One catches the unholiness of Christian means in flagranti by the simple process of putting the ends sought by Christianity beside the ends sought by the Code of Manu—by putting these enormously antithetical ends under a strong light.

The critic of Christianity cannot evade the necessity of making Christianity contemptible.—A book of laws such as the Code of Manu has the same origin as every other good law-book: it epitomizes the experience, the sagacity and the ethical experimentation of long centuries; it brings things to a conclusion; it no longer creates. The prerequisite to a codification of this sort is recognition of the fact that the means which establish the authority of a slowly and painfully attained truth are fundamentally different from those which one would make use of to prove it. A lawbook never recites the utility, the grounds, the casuistical antecedents of a law: for if it did so it would lose the imperative tone, the “thou shall,” on which obedience is based. The problem lies exactly here.—At a certain point in the evolution of a people, the class within it of the greatest insight, which is to say, the greatest hindsight and foresight, declares that the series of experiences determining how all shall live—or can live—has come to an end. The object now is to reap as rich and as complete a harvest as possible from the days of experiment and hard experience. In consequence, the thing that is to be avoided above everything is further experimentation—the continuation of the state in which values are fluent, and are tested, chosen and criticized ad infinitum. Against this a double wall is set up: on the one hand, revelation, which is the assumption that the reasons lying behind the laws are not of human origin, that they were not sought out and found by a slow process and after many errors, but that they are of divine ancestry, and came into being complete, perfect, without a history, as a free gift, a miracle...; and on the other hand, tradition, which is the assumption that the law has stood unchanged from time immemorial, and that it is impious and a crime against one’s forefathers to bring it into question. The authority of the law is thus grounded on the thesis: God gave it, and the fathers lived it.—The higher motive of such procedure lies in the design to distract consciousness, step by step, from its concern with notions of right living (that is to say, those that have been proved to be right by wide and carefully considered experience), so that instinct attains to a perfect automatism—a primary necessity to every sort of mastery, to every sort of perfection in the art of life. To draw up such a law-book as Manu’s means to lay before a people the possibility of future mastery, of attainable perfection—it permits them to aspire to the highest reaches of the art of life. To that end the thing must be made unconscious: that is the aim of every holy lie.—The order of castes, the highest, the dominating law, is merely the ratification of an order of nature, of a natural law of the first rank, over which no arbitrary fiat, no “modern idea,” can exert any influence. In every healthy society there are three physiological types, gravitating toward differentiation but mutually conditioning one another, and each of these has its own hygiene, its own sphere of work, its own special mastery and feeling of perfection. It is not Manu but nature that sets off in one class those who are chiefly intellectual, in another those who are marked by muscular strength and temperament, and in a third those who are distinguished in neither one way or the other, but show only mediocrity—the last-named represents the great majority, and the first two the select. The superior caste—I call it the fewest—has, as the most perfect, the privileges of the few: it stands for happiness, for beauty, for everything good upon earth. Only the most intellectual of men have any right to beauty, to the beautiful; only in them can goodness escape being weakness. Pulchrum est paucorum hominum:[ ] goodness is a privilege. Nothing could be more unbecoming to them than uncouth manners or a pessimistic look, or an eye that sees ugliness—or indignation against the general aspect of things. Indignation is the privilege of the Chandala; so is pessimism. “The world is perfect”—so prompts the instinct of the intellectual, the instinct of the man who says yes to life.

“Imperfection, whatever is inferior to us, distance, the pathos of distance, even the Chandala themselves are parts of this perfection.” The most intelligent men, like the strongest, find their happiness where others would find only disaster: in the labyrinth, in being hard with themselves and with others, in effort; their delight is in selfmastery; in them asceticism becomes second nature, a necessity, an instinct. They regard a difficult task as a privilege; it is to them a recreation to play with burdens that would crush all others.... Knowledge—a form of asceticism.—They are the most honourable kind of men: but that does not prevent them being the most cheerful and most amiable. They rule, not because they want to, but because they are; they are not at liberty to play second.—The second caste: to this belong the guardians of the law, the keepers of order and security, the more noble warriors, above all, the king as the highest form of warrior, judge and preserver of the law. The second in rank constitute the executive arm of the intellectuals, the next to them in rank, taking from them all that is rough in the business of ruling— their followers, their right hand, their most apt disciples.—In all this, I repeat, there is nothing arbitrary, nothing “made up”; whatever is to the contrary is made up—by it nature is brought to shame.... The order of castes, the order of rank, simply formulates the supreme law of life itself; the separation of the three types is necessary to the maintenance of society, and to the evolution of higher types, and the highest types—the inequality of rights is essential to the existence of any rights at all.—A right is a privilege. Every one enjoys the privileges that accord with his state of existence. Let us not underestimate the privileges of the mediocre. Life is always harder as one mounts the heights—the cold increases, responsibility increases. A high civilization is a pyramid: it can stand only on a broad base; its primary prerequisite is a strong and soundly consolidated mediocrity. The handicrafts, commerce, agriculture, science, the greater part of art, in brief, the whole range of occupational activities, are compatible only with mediocre ability and aspiration; such callings would be out of place for exceptional men; the instincts which belong to them stand as much opposed to aristocracy as to anarchism. The fact that a man is publicly useful, that he is a wheel, a function, is evidence of a natural predisposition; it is not society, but the only sort of happiness that the majority are capable of, that makes them intelligent machines. To the mediocre mediocrity is a form of happiness; they have a natural instinct for mastering one thing, for specialization. It would be altogether unworthy of a profound intellect to see anything objectionable in mediocrity in itself. It is, in fact, the first prerequisite to the appearance of the exceptional: it is a necessary condition to a high degree of civilization. When the exceptional man handles the mediocre man with more delicate fingers than he applies to himself or to his equals, this is not merely kindness of heart—it is simply his duty.... Whom do I hate most heartily among the rabbles of today? The rabble of Socialists, the apostles to the Chandala, who undermine the workingman’s instincts, his pleasure, his feeling of contentment with his petty existence—who make him envious and teach him revenge.... Wrong never lies in unequal rights; it lies in the assertion of “equal” rights.... What is bad? But I have already answered: all that proceeds from weakness, from envy, from revenge.—The anarchist and the Christian have the same ancestry.... [ ] Few men are noble. 58. In point of fact, the end for which one lies makes a great difference: whether one preserves thereby or destroys. There is a perfect likeness between Christian and anarchist: their object, their instinct, points only toward destruction. One need only turn to history for a proof of this: there it appears with appalling distinctness. We have just studied a code of religious legislation whose object it was to convert the conditions which cause life to flourish into an “eternal” social organization,—Christianity found its mission in putting an end to such an organization, because life flourished under it.

There the benefits that reason had produced during long ages of experiment and insecurity were applied to the most remote uses, and an effort was made to bring in a harvest that should be as large, as rich and as complete as possible; here, on the contrary, the harvest is blighted overnight.... That which stood there aere perennis, the imperium Romanum, the most magnificent form of organization under difficult conditions that has ever been achieved, and compared to which everything before it and after it appears as patchwork, bungling, dilletantism—those holy anarchists made it a matter of “piety” to destroy “the world,” which is to say, the imperium Romanum, so that in the end not a stone stood upon another—and even Germans and other such louts were able to become its masters.... The Christian and the anarchist: both are décadents; both are incapable of any act that is not disintegrating, poisonous, degenerating, blood-sucking; both have an instinct of mortal hatred of everything that stands up, and is great, and has durability, and promises life a future.... Christianity was the vampire of the imperium Romanum,—overnight it destroyed the vast achievement of the Romans: the conquest of the soil for a great culture that could await its time. Can it be that this fact is not yet understood? The imperium Romanum that we know, and that the history of the Roman provinces teaches us to know better and better,—this most admirable of all works of art in the grand manner was merely the beginning, and the structure to follow was not to prove its worth for thousands of years. To this day, nothing on a like scale sub specie aeterni has been brought into being, or even dreamed of!—This organization was strong enough to withstand bad emperors: the accident of personality has nothing to do with such things—the first principle of all genuinely great architecture. But it was not strong enough to stand up against the corruptest of all forms of corruption— against Christians.... These stealthy worms, which under the cover of night, mist and duplicity, crept upon every individual, sucking him dry of all earnest interest in real things, of all instinct for reality—this cowardly, effeminate and sugar-coated gang gradually alienated all “souls,” step by step, from that colossal edifice, turning against it all the meritorious, manly and noble natures that had found in the cause of Rome their own cause, their own serious purpose, their own pride. The sneakishness of hypocrisy, the secrecy of the conventicle, concepts as black as hell, such as the sacrifice of the innocent, the unio mystica in the drinking of blood, above all, the slowly rekindled fire of revenge, of Chandala revenge—all that sort of thing became master of Rome: the same kind of religion which, in a pre-existent form, Epicurus had combatted. One has but to read Lucretius to know what Epicurus made war upon—not paganism, but “Christianity,” which is to say, the corruption of souls by means of the concepts of guilt, punishment and immortality.—He combatted the subterranean cults, the whole of latent Christianity—to deny immortality was already a form of genuine salvation.—Epicurus had triumphed, and every respectable intellect in Rome was Epicurean— when Paul appeared ... Paul, the Chandala hatred of Rome, of “the world,” in the flesh and inspired by genius—the Jew, the eternal Jew par excellence.... What he saw was how, with the aid of the small sectarian Christian movement that stood apart from Judaism, a “world conflagration” might be kindled; how, with the symbol of “God on the cross,” all secret seditions, all the fruits of anarchistic intrigues in the empire, might be amalgamated into one immense power. “Salvation is of the Jews.”—Christianity is the formula for exceeding and summing up the subterranean cults of all varieties, that of Osiris, that of the Great Mother, that of Mithras, for instance: in his discernment of this fact the genius of Paul showed itself. His instinct was here so sure that, with reckless violence to the truth, he put the ideas which lent fascination to every sort of Chandala religion into the mouth of the “Saviour” as his own inventions, and not only into the mouth—he made out of him something that even a priest of Mithras could understand....

This was his revelation at Damascus: he grasped the fact that he needed the belief in immortality in order to rob “the world” of its value, that the concept of “hell” would master Rome—that the notion of a “beyond” is the death of life.... Nihilist and Christian: they rhyme in German, and they do more than rhyme.... 59. The whole labour of the ancient world gone for naught: I have no word to describe the feelings that such an enormity arouses in me.— And, considering the fact that its labour was merely preparatory, that with adamantine self-consciousness it laid only the foundations for a work to go on for thousands of years, the whole meaning of antiquity disappears!... To what end the Greeks? to what end the Romans?— All the prerequisites to a learned culture, all the methods of science, were already there; man had already perfected the great and incomparable art of reading profitably—that first necessity to the tradition of culture, the unity of the sciences; the natural sciences, in alliance with mathematics and mechanics, were on the right road,— the sense of fact, the last and more valuable of all the senses, had its schools, and its traditions were already centuries old! Is all this properly understood? Every essential to the beginning of the work was ready:—and the most essential, it cannot be said too often, are methods, and also the most difficult to develop, and the longest opposed by habit and laziness. What we have today reconquered, with unspeakable self-discipline, for ourselves—for certain bad instincts, certain Christian instincts, still lurk in our bodies—that is to say, the keen eye for reality, the cautious hand, patience and seriousness in the smallest things, the whole integrity of knowledge —all these things were already there, and had been there for two thousand years! More, there was also a refined and excellent tact and taste! Not as mere brain-drilling! Not as “German” culture, with its loutish manners! But as body, as bearing, as instinct—in short, as reality.... All gone for naught! Overnight it became merely a memory! —The Greeks! The Romans! Instinctive nobility, taste, methodical inquiry, genius for organization and administration, faith in and the will to secure the future of man, a great yes to everything entering into the imperium Romanum and palpable to all the senses, a grand style that was beyond mere art, but had become reality, truth, life.... —All overwhelmed in a night, but not by a convulsion of nature! Not trampled to death by Teutons and others of heavy hoof! But brought to shame by crafty, sneaking, invisible, anæmic vampires! Not conquered,—only sucked dry!... Hidden vengefulness, petty envy, became master! Everything wretched, intrinsically ailing, and invaded by bad feelings, the whole ghetto-world of the soul, was at once on top!—One needs but read any of the Christian agitators, for example, St. Augustine, in order to realize, in order to smell, what filthy fellows came to the top. It would be an error, however, to assume that there was any lack of understanding in the leaders of the Christian movement:—ah, but they were clever, clever to the point of holiness, these fathers of the church! What they lacked was something quite different. Nature neglected—perhaps forgot—to give them even the most modest endowment of respectable, of upright, of cleanly instincts.... Between ourselves, they are not even men.... If Islam despises Christianity, it has a thousandfold right to do so: Islam at least assumes that it is dealing with men.... 60. Christianity destroyed for us the whole harvest of ancient civilization, and later it also destroyed for us the whole harvest of Mohammedan civilization. The wonderful culture of the Moors in Spain, which was fundamentally nearer to us and appealed more to our senses and tastes than that of Rome and Greece, was trampled down (—I do not say by what sort of feet—) Why? Because it had to thank noble and manly instincts for its origin—because it said yes to life, even to the rare and refined luxuriousness of Moorish life!... The crusaders later made war on something before which it would have been more fitting for them to have grovelled in the dust—a civilization beside which even that of our nineteenth century seems very poor and very “senile.”—What they wanted, of course, was booty: the orient was rich.... Let us put aside our prejudices! The crusades were a higher form of piracy, nothing more!

The German nobility, which is fundamentally a Viking nobility, was in its element there: the church knew only too well how the German nobility was to be won.... The German noble, always the “Swiss guard” of the church, always in the service of every bad instinct of the church—but well paid.... Consider the fact that it is precisely the aid of German swords and German blood and valour that has enabled the church to carry through its war to the death upon everything noble on earth! At this point a host of painful questions suggest themselves. The German nobility stands outside the history of the higher civilization: the reason is obvious.... Christianity, alcohol—the two great means of corruption.... Intrinsically there should be no more choice between Islam and Christianity than there is between an Arab and a Jew. The decision is already reached; nobody remains at liberty to choose here. Either a man is a Chandala or he is not.... “War to the knife with Rome! Peace and friendship with Islam!”: this was the feeling, this was the act, of that great free spirit, that genius among German emperors, Frederick II. What! must a German first be a genius, a free spirit, before he can feel decently? I can’t make out how a German could ever feel Christian.... 61. Here it becomes necessary to call up a memory that must be a hundred times more painful to Germans. The Germans have destroyed for Europe the last great harvest of civilization that Europe was ever to reap—the Renaissance. Is it understood at last, will it ever be understood, what the Renaissance was? The transvaluation of Christian values,—an attempt with all available means, all instincts and all the resources of genius to bring about a triumph of the opposite values, the more noble values.... This has been the one great war of the past; there has never been a more critical question than that of the Renaissance—it is my question too—; there has never been a form of attack more fundamental, more direct, or more violently delivered by a whole front upon the center of the enemy! To attack at the critical place, at the very seat of Christianity, and there enthrone the more noble values—that is to say, to insinuate them into the instincts, into the most fundamental needs and appetites of those sitting there.... I see before me the possibility of a perfectly heavenly enchantment and spectacle:—it seems to me to scintillate with all the vibrations of a fine and delicate beauty, and within it there is an art so divine, so infernally divine, that one might search in vain for thousands of years for another such possibility; I see a spectacle so rich in significance and at the same time so wonderfully full of paradox that it should arouse all the gods on Olympus to immortal laughter—Cæsar Borgia as pope!... Am I understood?... Well then, that would have been the sort of triumph that I alone am longing for today—: by it Christianity would have been swept away!—What happened? A German monk, Luther, came to Rome. This monk, with all the vengeful instincts of an unsuccessful priest in him, raised a rebellion against the Renaissance in Rome.... Instead of grasping, with profound thanksgiving, the miracle that had taken place: the conquest of Christianity at its capital—instead of this, his hatred was stimulated by the spectacle. A religious man thinks only of himself.— Luther saw only the depravity of the papacy at the very moment when the opposite was becoming apparent: the old corruption, the peccatum originale, Christianity itself, no longer occupied the papal chair! Instead there was life! Instead there was the triumph of life! Instead there was a great yea to all lofty, beautiful and daring things!... And Luther restored the church: he attacked it.... The Renaissance—an event without meaning, a great futility!—Ah, these Germans, what they have not cost us! Futility—that has always been the work of the Germans.—The Reformation; Leibnitz; Kant and socalled German philosophy; the war of “liberation”; the empire—every time a futile substitute for something that once existed, for something irrecoverable.... These Germans, I confess, are my enemies: I despise all their uncleanliness in concept and valuation, their cowardice before every honest yea and nay.

For nearly a thousand years they have tangled and confused everything their fingers have touched; they have on their conscience all the half-way measures, all the three-eighths-way measures, that Europe is sick of,—they also have on their conscience the uncleanest variety of Christianity that exists, and the most incurable and indestructible—Protestantism.... If mankind never manages to get rid of Christianity the Germans will be to blame.... 62. —With this I come to a conclusion and pronounce my judgment. I condemn Christianity; I bring against the Christian church the most terrible of all the accusations that an accuser has ever had in his mouth. It is, to me, the greatest of all imaginable corruptions; it seeks to work the ultimate corruption, the worst possible corruption. The Christian church has left nothing untouched by its depravity; it has turned every value into worthlessness, and every truth into a lie, and every integrity into baseness of soul. Let any one dare to speak to me of its “humanitarian” blessings! Its deepest necessities range it against any effort to abolish distress; it lives by distress; it creates distress to make itself immortal.... For example, the worm of sin: it was the church that first enriched mankind with this misery!—The “equality of souls before God”—this fraud, this pretext for the rancunes of all the base-minded—this explosive concept, ending in revolution, the modern idea, and the notion of overthrowing the whole social order—this is Christian dynamite.... The “humanitarian” blessings of Christianity forsooth! To breed out of humanitas a selfcontradiction, an art of self-pollution, a will to lie at any price, an aversion and contempt for all good and honest instincts! All this, to me, is the “humanitarianism” of Christianity!—Parasitism as the only practice of the church; with its anæmic and “holy” ideals, sucking all the blood, all the love, all the hope out of life; the beyond as the will to deny all reality; the cross as the distinguishing mark of the most subterranean conspiracy ever heard of,—against health, beauty, well-being, intellect, kindness of soul—against life itself.... This eternal accusation against Christianity I shall write upon all walls, wherever walls are to be found—I have letters that even the blind will be able to see.... I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough,—I call it the one immortal blemish upon the human race.... And mankind reckons time from the dies nefastus when this fatality befell—from the first day of Christianity!—Why not rather from its last?—From today?—The transvaluation of all values!... This book has been downloaded from www.aliceandbooks.com. You can find many more public domain books in our website THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE PUBLISHED: 1872 SOURCE: WIKISOURCE TRANSLATOR: HAUSSMANN, WILLIAM A. This book has been downloaded from www.aliceandbooks.com. You can find many more public domain books in our website THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY OR HELLENISM AND PESSIMISM BY FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE TRANSLATED BY WM. A. HAUSSMANN, PH.D. THE COMPLETE WORKS OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE THE FIRST COMPLETE AND AUTHORISED ENGLISH TRANSLATION EDITED BY DR OSCAR LEVY VOLUME ONE T.N. FOULIS 13 & 15 FREDERICK STREET EDINBURGH: AND LONDON 1910 CONTENTS. BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION AN ATTEMPT AT SELF-CRITICISM FOREWORD TO RICHARD WAGNER THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY INTRODUCTION.[1] Frederick Nietzsche was born at Röcken near Lützen, in the Prussian province of Saxony, on the 15th of October 1844, at 10 a.m. The day happened to be the anniversary of the birth of Frederick-William IV., then King of Prussia, and the peal of the local church-bells which was intended to celebrate this event, was, by a happy coincidence, just timed to greet my brother on his entrance into the world. In 1841, at the time when our father was tutor to the Altenburg Princesses, Theresa of Saxe-Altenburg, Elizabeth, Grand Duchess of Olden-burg, and Alexandra, Grand Duchess Constantine of Russia, he had had the honour of being presented to his witty and pious sovereign.

The meeting seems to have impressed both parties very favourably; for, very shortly after it had taken place, our father received his living at Röcken "by supreme command." His joy may well be imagined, therefore, when a first son was born to him on his beloved and august patron's birthday, and at the christening ceremony he spoke as follows: —"Thou blessed month of October!—for many years the most decisive events in my life have occurred within thy thirty-one days, and now I celebrate the greatest and most glorious of them all by baptising my little boy! O blissful moment! O exquisite festival! O unspeakably holy duty! In the Lord's name I bless thee!—With all my heart I utter these words: Bring me this, my beloved child, that I may consecrate it unto the Lord. My son, Frederick William, thus shalt thou be named on earth, as a memento of my royal benefactor on whose birthday thou wast born!" Our father was thirty-one years of age, and our mother not quite nineteen, when my brother was born. Our mother, who was the daughter of a clergyman, was good-looking and healthy, and was one of a very large family of sons and daughters. Our paternal grandparents, the Rev. Oehler and his wife, in Pobles, were typically healthy people. Strength, robustness, lively dispositions, and a cheerful outlook on life, were among the qualities which every one was pleased to observe in them. Our grandfather Oehler was a bright, clever man, and quite the old style of comfortable country parson, who thought it no sin to go hunting. He scarcely had a day's illness in his life, and would certainly not have met with his end as early as he did—that is to say, before his seventieth year—if his careless disregard of all caution, where his health was concerned, had not led to his catching a severe and fatal cold. In regard to our grand-mother Oehler, who died in her eighty-second year, all that can be said is, that if all German women were possessed of the health she enjoyed, the German nation would excel all others from the standpoint of vitality. She bore our grandfather eleven children; gave each of them the breast for nearly the whole of its first year, and reared them all It is said that the sight of these eleven children, at ages varying from nineteen years to one month, with their powerful build, rosy cheeks, beaming eyes, and wealth of curly locks, provoked the admiration of all visitors. Of course, despite their extraordinarily good health, the life of this family was not by any means all sunshine. Each of the children was very spirited, wilful, and obstinate, and it was therefore no simple matter to keep them in order. Moreover, though they always showed the utmost respect and most implicit obedience to their parents—even as middle-aged men and women— misunderstandings between themselves were of constant occurrence. Our Oehler grandparents were fairly well-to-do; for our grandmother hailed from a very old family, who had been extensive land-owners in the neighbourhood of Zeitz for centuries, and her father owned the baronial estate of Wehlitz and a magnificent seat near Zeitz in Pacht. When she married, her father gave her carriages and horses, a coachman, a cook, and a kitchenmaid, which for the wife of a German minister was then, and is still, something quite exceptional. As a result of the wars in the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, our great-grandfather lost the greater part of his property. Our father's family was also in fairly comfortable circumstances, and likewise very large. Our grandfather Dr. Nietzsche (D.D. and Superintendent) married twice, and had in all twelve children, of whom three died young. Our grandfather on this side, whom I never knew, must certainly have been a distinguished, dignified, very learned and reserved man; his second wife—our beloved grandmother—was an active-minded, intelligent, and exceptionally good-natured woman. The whole of our father's family, which I only got to know when they were very advanced in years, were remarkable for their great power of self-control, their lively interest in intellectual matters, and a strong sense of family unity, which manifested itself both in their splendid readiness to help one another and in their very excellent relations with each other.

Our father was the youngest son, and, thanks to his uncommonly lovable disposition, together with other gifts, which only tended to become more marked as he grew older, he was quite the favourite of the family. Blessed with a thoroughly sound constitution, as all averred who knew him at the convent-school in Rossleben, at the University, or later at the ducal court of Altenburg, he was tall and slender, possessed an undoubted gift for poetry and real musical talent, and was moreover a man of delicate sensibilities, full of consideration for his whole family, and distinguished in his manners. My brother often refers to his Polish descent, and in later years he even instituted research-work with the view of establishing it, which met with partial success. I know nothing definite concerning these investigations, because a large number of valuable documents were unfortunately destroyed after his breakdown in Turin. The family tradition was that a certain Polish nobleman Nicki (pronounced Nietzky) had obtained the special favour of Augustus the Strong, King of Poland, and had received the rank of Earl from him. When, however, Stanislas Leszcysski the Pole became king, our supposed ancestor became involved in a conspiracy in favour of the Saxons and Protestants. He was sentenced to death; but, taking flight, according to the evidence of the documents, he was ultimately befriended by a certain Earl of Brühl, who gave him a small post in an obscure little provincial town. Occasionally our aged aunts would speak of our great-grandfather Nietzsche, who was said to have died in his ninety-first year, and words always seemed to fail them when they attempted to describe his handsome appearance, good breeding, and vigour. Our ancestors, both on the Nietzsche and the Oehler side, were very long-lived. Of the four pairs of great- grandparents, one great-grandfather reached the age of ninety, five greatgrandmothers and-fathers died between eighty-two and eighty-six years of age, and two only failed to reach their seventieth year. The sorrow which hung as a cloud over our branch of the family was our father's death, as the result of a heavy fall, at the age of thirty-eight. One night, upon leaving some friends whom he had accompanied home, he was met at the door of the vicarage by our little dog. The little animal must have got between his feet, for he stumbled and fell backwards down seven stone steps on to the paving-stones of the vicarage courtyard. As a result of this fall, he was laid up with concussion of the brain, and, after a lingering illness, which lasted eleven months, he died on the 30th of July 1849. The early death of our beloved and highly-gifted father spread gloom over the whole of our childhood. In 1850 our mother withdrew with us to Naumburg on the Saale, where she took up her abode with our widowed grandmother Nietzsche; and there she brought us up with Spartan severity and simplicity, which, besides being typical of the period, was quite de rigeur in her family. Of course, Grand-mamma Nietzsche helped somewhat to temper her daughter-in-law's severity, and in this respect our Oehler grandparents, who were less rigorous with us, their eldest grandchildren, than with their own children, were also very influential. Grandfather Oehler was the first who seems to have recognised the extraordinary talents of his eldest grandchild. From his earliest childhood upwards, my brother was always strong and healthy; he often declared that he must have been taken for a peasant-boy throughout his childhood and youth, as he was so plump, brown, and rosy. The thick fair hair which fell picturesquely over his shoulders tended somewhat to modify his robust appearance. Had he not possessed those wonderfully beautiful, large, and expressive eyes, however, and had he not been so very ceremonious in his manner, neither his teachers nor his relatives would ever have noticed anything at all remarkable about the boy; for he was both modest and reserved. He received his early schooling at a preparatory school, and later at a grammar school in Naumburg. In the autumn of 1858, when he was fourteen years of age, he entered the Pforta school, so famous for the scholars it has produced. There, too, very severe discipline prevailed, and much was exacted from the pupils, with the view of inuring them to great mental and physical exertions.

Thus, if my brother seems to lay particular stress upon the value of rigorous training, free from all sentimentality, it should be remembered that he speaks from experience in this respect. At Pforta he followed the regular school course, and he did not enter a university until the comparatively late age of twenty. His extraordinary gifts manifested themselves chiefly in his independent and private studies and artistic efforts. As a boy his musical talent had already been so noticeable, that he himself and other competent judges were doubtful as to whether he ought not perhaps to devote himself altogether to music. It is, however, worth noting that everything he did in his later years, whether in Latin, Greek, or German work, bore the stamp of perfection—subject of course to the limitation imposed upon him by his years. His talents came very suddenly to the fore, because he had allowed them to grow for such a long time in concealment. His very first performance in philology, executed while he was a student under Ritschl, the famous philologist, was also typical of him in this respect, seeing that it was ordered to be printed for the Rheinische Museum. Of course this was done amid general and grave expressions of doubt; for, as Dr. Ritschl often declared, it was an unheard-of occurrence for a student in his third term to prepare such an excellent treatise. Being a great lover of out-door exercise, such as swimming, skating, and walking, he developed into a very sturdy lad. Rohde gives the following description of him as a student: with his healthy complexion, his outward and inner cleanliness, his austere chastity and his solemn aspect, he was the image of that delightful youth described by Adalbert Stifter. Though as a child he was always rather serious, as a lad and a man he was ever inclined to see the humorous side of things, while his whole being, and everything he said or did, was permeated by an extraordinary harmony. He belonged to the very few who could control even a bad mood and conceal it from others. All his friends are unanimous in their praise of his exceptional evenness of temper and behaviour, and his warm, hearty, and pleasant laugh that seemed to come from the very depths of his benevolent and affectionate nature. In him it might therefore be said, nature had produced a being who in body and spirit was a harmonious whole: his unusual intellect was fully in keeping with his uncommon bodily strength. The only abnormal thing about him, and something which we both inherited from our father, was short-sightedness, and this was very much aggravated in my brother's case, even in his earliest schooldays, owing to that in- describable anxiety to learn which always characterised him. When one listens to accounts given by his friends and schoolfellows, one is startled by the multiplicity of his studies even in his schooldays. In the autumn of 1864, he began his university life in Bonn, and studied philology and theology; at the end of six months he gave up theology, and in the autumn of 1865 followed his famous teacher Ritschl to the University of Leipzig. There he became an ardent philologist, and diligently sought to acquire a masterly grasp of this branch of knowledge. But in this respect it would be unfair to forget that the school of Pforta, with its staff of excellent teachers—scholars that would have adorned the chairs of any University— had already afforded the best of preparatory trainings to any one intending to take up philology as a study, more particularly as it gave all pupils ample scope to indulge any individual tastes they might have for any particular branch of ancient history. The last important Latin thesis which my brother wrote for the Landes-Schule, Pforta, dealt with the Megarian poet Theognis, and it was in the rôle of a lecturer on this very subject that, on the 18th January 1866, he made his first appearance in public before the philological society he had helped to found in Leipzig. The paper he read disclosed his investigations on the subject of Theognis the moralist and aristocrat, who, as is well known, described and dismissed the plebeians of his time in terms of the heartiest contempt The aristocratic ideal, which was always so dear to my brother, thus revealed itself for the first time.

Moreover, curiously enough, it was precisely this scientific thesis which was the cause of Ritschl's recognition of my brother and fondness for him. The whole of his Leipzig days proved of the utmost importance to my brother's career. There he was plunged into the very midst of a torrent of intellectual influences which found an impressionable medium in the fiery youth, and to which he eagerly made himself accessible. He did not, however, forget to discriminate among them, but tested and criticised the currents of thought he encountered, and selected accordingly. It is certainly of great importance to ascertain what those influences precisely were to which he yielded, and how long they maintained their sway over him, and it is likewise necessary to discover exactly when the matured mind threw off these fetters in order to work out its own salvation. The influences that exercised power over him in those days may be described in the three following terms: Hellenism, Schopenhauer, Wagner. His love of Hellenism certainly led him to philology; but, as a matter of fact, what concerned him most was to obtain a wide view of things in general, and this he hoped to derive from that science; philology in itself, with his splendid method and thorough way of going to work, served him only as a means to an end. If Hellenism was the first strong influence which already in Pforta obtained a sway over my brother, in the winter of 1865-66, a completely new, and therefore somewhat subversive, influence was introduced into his life with Schopenhauer's philosophy. When he reached Leipzig in the autumn of 1865, he was very downcast; for the experiences that had befallen him during his one year of student life in Bonn had deeply depressed him. He had sought at first to adapt himself to his surroundings there, with the hope of ultimately elevating them to his lofty views on things; but both these efforts proved vain, and now he had come to Leipzig with the purpose of framing his own manner of life. It can easily be imagined how the first reading of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea worked upon this man, still stinging from the bitterest experiences and disappointments. He writes: "Here I saw a mirror in which I espied the world, life, and my own nature depicted with frightful grandeur." As my brother, from his very earliest childhood, had always missed both the parent and the educator through our father's untimely death, he began to regard Schopenhauer with almost filial love and respect. He did not venerate him quite as other men did; Schopenhauer's personality was what attracted and enchanted him. From the first he was never blind to the faults in his master's system, and in proof of this we have only to refer to an essay he wrote in the autumn of 1867, which actually contains a criticism of Schopenhauer's philosophy. Now, in the autumn of 1865, to these two influences, Hellenism and Schopenhauer, a third influence was added—one which was to prove the strongest ever exercised over my brother—and it began with his personal introduction to Richard Wagner. He was introduced to Wagner by the latter's sister, Frau Professor Brockhaus, and his description of their first meeting, contained in a letter to Erwin Rohde, is really most affecting. For years, that is to say, from the time Billow's arrangement of Tristan and Isolde for the pianoforte, had appeared, he had already been a passionate admirer of Wagner's music; but now that the artist himself entered upon the scene of his life, with the whole fascinating strength of his strong will, my brother felt that he was in the presence of a being whom he, of all modern men, resembled most in regard to force of character. Again, in the case of Richard Wagner, my brother, from the first, laid the utmost stress upon the man's personality, and could only regard his works and views as an expression of the artist's whole being, despite the fact that he by no means understood every one of those works at that time. My brother was the first who ever manifested such enthusiastic affection for Schopenhauer and Wagner, and he was also the first of that numerous band of young followers who ultimately inscribed the two great names upon their banner.

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.

If we must live, let us at least do so in such wise that others may bless our life once we have been peacefully delivered from its toils." When I look back upon that month of May 1869, and ask both of friends and of myself, what the figure of this youthful University professor of fourand-twenty meant to the world at that time, the reply is naturally, in the first place: that he was one of Ritschl's best pupils; secondly, that he was an exceptionally capable exponent of classical antiquity with a brilliant career before him; and thirdly, that he was a passionate adorer of Wagner and Schopenhauer. But no one has any idea of my brother's independent attitude to the science he had selected, to his teachers and to his ideals, and he deceived both himself and us when he passed as a "disciple" who really shared all the views of his respected master. On the 28th May 1869, my brother delivered his inaugural address at Bale University, and it is said to have deeply impressed the authorities. The subject of the address was "Homer and Classical Philology." Musing deeply, the worthy councillors and professors walked homeward. What had they just heard? A young scholar discussing the very justification of his own science in a cool and philosophically critical spirit! A man able to impart so much artistic glamour to his subject, that the once stale and arid study of philology suddenly struck them—and they were certainly not impressionable men—as the messenger of the gods: "and just as the Muses descended upon the dull and tormented Boeotian peasants, so philology comes into a world full of gloomy colours and pictures, full of the deepest, most incurable woes, and speaks to men comfortingly of the beautiful and brilliant godlike figure of a distant, blue, and happy fairyland." "We have indeed got hold of a rare bird, Herr Ratsherr," said one of these gentlemen to his companion, and the latter heartily agreed, for my brother's appointment had been chiefly his doing. Even in Leipzig, it was reported that Jacob Burckhardt had said: "Nietzsche is as much an artist as a scholar." Privy-Councillor Ritschl told me of this himself, and then he added, with a smile: "I always said so; he can make his scientific discourses as palpitatingly interesting as a French novelist his novels." "Homer and Classical Philology"—my brother's inaugural address at the University—was by no means the first literary attempt he had made; for we have already seen that he had had papers published by the Rheinische Museum; still, this particular discourse is important, seeing that it practically contains the programme of many other subsequent essays. I must, however, emphasise this fact here, that neither "Homer and Classical Philology," nor The Birth of Tragedy, represents a beginning in my brother's career. It is re- ally surprising to see how very soon he actually began grappling with the questions which were to prove the problems of his life. If a beginning to his intellectual development be sought at all, then it must be traced to the years 1865-67 in Leipzig. The Birth of Tragedy, his maiden attempt at book-writing, with which he began his twenty-eighth year, is the last link of a long chain of developments, and the first fruit that was a long time coming to maturity. Nietzsche's was a polyphonic nature, in which the most different and apparently most antagonistic talents had come together. Philosophy, art, and science—in the form of philology, then—each certainly possessed a part of him. The most wonderful feature—perhaps it might even be called the real Nietzschean feature—of this versatile creature, was the fact that no eternal strife resulted from the juxtaposition of these inimical traits, that not one of them strove to dislodge, or to get the upper hand of, the others. When Nietzsche renounced the musical career, in order to devote himself to philology, and gave himself up to the most strenuous study, he did not find it essential completely to suppress his other tendencies: as before, he continued both to compose and derive pleasure from music, and even studied counterpoint somewhat seriously. Moreover, during his years at Leipzig, when he consciously gave himself up to philological research, he began to engross himself in Schopenhauer, and was thereby won by philosophy for ever. Everything that could find room took up its abode in him, and these juxtaposed factors, far from interfering with one another's existence, were rather mutually fertilising and stimulating.

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.

"A desire for tragic myth (for religion and even pessimistic religion) as for a forcing frame in which certain plants flourish. "Mistrust of science, although its ephemerally soothing optimism be strongly felt; the 'serenity' of the theoretical man. "Deep antagonism to Christianity. Why? The degeneration of the Germanic spirit is ascribed to its influence. "Any justification of the world can only be an æsthetic one. Profound suspicions about morality (—it is part and parcel of the world of appearance). "The happiness of existence is only possible as the happiness derived from appearance. ('Being' is a fiction invented by those who suffer from becoming.) "Happiness in becoming is possible only in the annihilation of the real, of the 'existing,' of the beautifully visionary,—in the pessimistic dissipation of illusions:—with the annihilation of the most beautiful phenomena in the world of appearance, Dionysian happiness reaches its zenith." The Birth of Tragedy is really only a portion of a much greater work on Hellenism, which my brother had always had in view from the time of his student days. But even the portion it represents was originally designed upon a much larger scale than the present one; the reason probably being, that Nietzsche desired only to be of service to Wagner. When a certain portion of the projected work on Hellenism was ready and had received the title Greek Cheerfulness, my brother happened to call upon Wagner at Tribschen in April 1871, and found him very low-spirited in regard to the mission of his life. My brother was very anxious to take some decisive step to help him, and, laying the plans of his great work on Greece aside, he selected a small portion from the already completed manuscript—a portion dealing with one distinct side of Hellenism,—to wit, its tragic art. He then associated Wagner's music with it and the name Dionysos, and thus took the first step towards that world-historical view through which we have since grown accustomed to regard Wagner. From the dates of the various notes relating to it, The Birth of Tragedy must have been written between the autumn of 1869 and November 1871— a period during which "a mass of æsthetic questions and answers" was fermenting in Nietzsche's mind. It was first published in January 1872 by E. W. Fritsch, in Leipzig, under the title The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. Later on the title was changed to The Birth of Tragedy, or Hellenism and Pessimism. ELIZABETH FORSTERNIETZSCHE. WEIMAR, September 1905. [1] This Introduction by E. Förster-Nietzsche, which appears in the front of the first volume of Naumann's Pocket Edition of Nietzsche, has been translated and arranged by Mr. A. M. Ludovici. AN ATTEMPT AT SELF-CRITICISM. I. Whatever may lie at the bottom of this doubtful book must be a question of the first rank and attractiveness, moreover a deeply personal question,—in proof thereof observe the time in which it originated, in spite of which it originated, the exciting period of the Franco-German war of 1870-71. While the thunder of the battle of Wörth rolled over Europe, the ruminator and riddle-lover, who had to be the parent of this book, sat somewhere in a nook of the Alps, lost in riddles and ruminations, consequently very much concerned and unconcerned at the same time, and wrote down his meditations on the Greeks,—the kernel of the curious and almost inaccessible book, to which this belated prologue (or epilogue) is to be devoted. A few weeks later: and he found himself under the walls of Metz, still wrestling with the notes of interrogation he had set down concerning the alleged "cheerfulness" of the Greeks and of Greek art; till at last, in that month of deep suspense, when peace was debated at Versailles, he too attained to peace with himself, and, slowly recovering from a disease brought home from the field, made up his mind definitely regarding the "Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music."—From music? Music and Tragedy? Greeks and tragic music? Greeks and the Art-work of pessimism? A race of men, wellfashioned, beautiful, envied, life-inspiring, like no other race hitherto, the Greeks—indeed? The Greeks were in need of tragedy? Yea—of art? Wherefore—Greek art?... We can thus guess where the great note of interrogation concerning the value of existence had been set.

Is pessimism necessarily the sign of decline, of decay, of failure, of exhausted and weakened instincts?—as was the case with the Indians, as is, to all appearance, the case with us "modern" men and Europeans? Is there a pessimism of strength? An intellectual predilection for what is hard, awful, evil, problematical in existence, owing to well-being, to exuberant health, to fullness of existence? Is there perhaps suffering in overfullness itself? A seductive fortitude with the keenest of glances, which yearns for the terrible, as for the enemy, the worthy enemy, with whom it may try its strength? from whom it is willing to learn what "fear" is? What means tragic myth to the Greeks of the best, strongest, bravest era? And the prodigious phenomenon of the Dionysian? And that which was born thereof, tragedy?—And again: that of which tragedy died, the Socratism of morality, the dialectics, contentedness and cheerfulness of the theoretical man—indeed? might not this very Socratism be a sign of decline, of weariness, of disease, of anarchically disintegrating instincts? And the "Hellenic cheerfulness" of the later Hellenism merely a glowing sunset? The Epicurean will counter to pessimism merely a precaution of the sufferer? And science itself, our science—ay, viewed as a symptom of life, what really signifies all science? Whither, worse still, whence—all science? Well? Is scientism perhaps only fear and evasion of pessimism? A subtle defence against—truth! Morally speaking, something like falsehood and cowardice? And, unmorally speaking, an artifice? O Socrates, Socrates, was this perhaps thy secret? Oh mysterious ironist, was this perhaps thine— irony?... 2. What I then laid hands on, something terrible and dangerous, a problem with horns, not necessarily a bull itself, but at all events a new problem: I should say to-day it was the problem of science itself—science conceived for the first time as problematic, as questionable. But the book, in which my youthful ardour and suspicion then discharged themselves—what an impossible book must needs grow out of a task so disagreeable to youth. Constructed of nought but precocious, unripened self-experiences, all of which lay close to the threshold of the communicable, based on the groundwork of art—for the problem of science cannot be discerned on the groundwork of science,—a book perhaps for artists, with collateral analytical and retrospective aptitudes (that is, an exceptional kind of artists, for whom one must seek and does not even care to seek ...), full of psychological innovations and artists' secrets, with an artists' metaphysics in the background, a work of youth, full of youth's mettle and youth's melancholy, independent, defiantly self-sufficient even when it seems to bow to some authority and self-veneration; in short, a firstling-work, even in every bad sense of the term; in spite of its senile problem, affected with every fault of youth, above all with youth's prolixity and youth's "storm and stress": on the other hand, in view of the success it had (especially with the great artist to whom it addressed itself, as it were, in a duologue, Richard Wagner) a demonstrated book, I mean a book which, at any rate, sufficed "for the best of its time." On this account, if for no other reason, it should be treated with some consideration and reserve; yet I shall not altogether conceal how disagreeable it now appears to me, how after sixteen years it stands a total stranger before me,— before an eye which is more mature, and a hundred times more fastidious, but which has by no means grown colder nor lost any of its interest in that self-same task essayed for the first time by this daring book,—to view science through the optics of the artist, and art moreover through the optics of life.... 3.

I say again, to-day it is an impossible book to me,—I call it badly written, heavy, painful, image-angling and image-entangling, maudlin, sugared at times even to femininism, uneven in tempo, void of the will to logical cleanliness, very convinced and therefore rising above the necessity of demonstration, distrustful even of the propriety of demonstration, as being a book for initiates, as "music" for those who are baptised with the name of Music, who are united from the beginning of things by common ties of rare experiences in art, as a countersign for blood-relations in artibus.—a haughty and fantastic book, which from the very first withdraws even more from the profanum vulgus of the "cultured" than from the "people," but which also, as its effect has shown and still shows, knows very well how to seek fellow-enthusiasts and lure them to new by-ways and dancinggrounds. Here, at any rate—thus much was acknowledged with curiosity as well as with aversion—a strange voice spoke, the disciple of a still "unknown God," who for the time being had hidden himself under the hood of the scholar, under the German's gravity and disinclination for dialectics, even under the bad manners of the Wagnerian; here was a spirit with strange and still nameless needs, a memory bristling with questions, experiences and obscurities, beside which stood the name Dionysos like one more note of interrogation; here spoke—people said to themselves with misgiv- ings— something like a mystic and almost mænadic soul, which, undecided whether it should disclose or conceal itself, stammers with an effort and capriciously as in a strange tongue. It should have sung, this "new soul"— and not spoken! What a pity, that I did not dare to say what I then had to say, as a poet: I could have done so perhaps! Or at least as a philologist:— for even at the present day well-nigh everything in this domain remains to be discovered and disinterred by the philologist! Above all the problem, that here there is a problem before us,—and that, so long as we have no answer to the question "what is Dionysian?" the Greeks are now as ever wholly unknown and inconceivable.... 4. Ay, what is Dionysian?—In this book may be found an answer,—a "knowing one" speaks here, the votary and disciple of his god. Perhaps I should now speak more guardedly and less eloquently of a psychological question so difficult as the origin of tragedy among the Greeks. A fundamental question is the relation of the Greek to pain, his degree of sensibility,—did this relation remain constant? or did it veer about?—the question, whether his ever-increasing longing for beauty, for festivals, gaieties, new cults, did really grow out of want, privation, melancholy, pain? For suppose even this to be true—and Pericles (or Thucydides) intimates as much in the great Funeral Speech:—whence then the opposite longing, which appeared first in the order of time, the longing for the ugly, the good, resolute desire of the Old Hellene for pessimism, for tragic myth, for the picture of all that is terrible, evil, enigmatical, destructive, fatal at the basis of existence,—whence then must tragedy have sprung? Perhaps from joy, from strength, from exuberant health, from over-fullness. And what then, physiologically speaking, is the meaning of that madness, out of which comic as well as tragic art has grown, the Dionysian madness? What? perhaps madness is not necessarily the symptom of degeneration, of decline, of belated culture? Perhaps there are—a question for alienists—neuroses of health? of folk-youth and youthfulness? What does that synthesis of god and goat in the Satyr point to? What self-experience what "stress," made the Greek think of the Dionysian reveller and primitive man as a satyr? And as regards the origin of the tragic chorus: perhaps there were endemic ecstasies in the eras when the Greek body bloomed and the Greek soul brimmed over with life? Visions and hallucinations, which took hold of entire communities, entire cult-assemblies? What if the Greeks in the very wealth of their youth had the will to be tragic and were pessimists? What if it was madness itself, to use a word of Plato's, which brought the greatest blessings upon Hellas? And what if, on the other hand and conversely, at the very time of their dissolution and weakness, the Greeks became always more optimistic, more superficial, more histrionic, also more ardent for logic and the logicising of the world,—consequently at the same time more "cheerful" and more "scientific"?

Ay, despite all "modern ideas" and prejudices of the democratic taste, may not the triumph of optimism, the common sense that has gained the upper hand, the practical and theoretical utilitarianism, like democracy itself, with which it is synchronous—be symptomatic of declining vigour, of approaching age, of physiological weariness? And not at all—pessimism? Was Epicurus an optimist—because a sufferer?... We see it is a whole bundle of weighty questions which this book has taken upon itself,—let us not fail to add its weightiest question! Viewed through the optics of life, what is the meaning of—morality?... 5. Already in the foreword to Richard Wagner, art—-and not morality—is set down as the properly metaphysical activity of man; in the book itself the piquant proposition recurs time and again, that the existence of the world is justified only as an æsthetic phenomenon. Indeed, the entire book recognises only an artist-thought and artist-after-thought behind all occurrences,—a "God," if you will, but certainly only an altogether thoughtless and unmoral artist-God, who, in construction as in destruction, in good as in evil, desires to become conscious of his own equable joy and sovereign glory; who, in creating worlds, frees himself from the anguish of fullness and overfullness, from the suffering of the contradictions concentrated within him. The world, that is, the redemption of God attained at every moment, as the per- petually changing, perpetually new vision of the most suffering, most antithetical, most contradictory being, who contrives to redeem himself only in appearance: this entire artist-metaphysics, call it arbitrary, idle, fantastic, if you will,—the point is, that it already betrays a spirit, which is determined some day, at all hazards, to make a stand against the moral interpretation and significance of life. Here, perhaps for the first time, a pessimism "Beyond Good and Evil" announces itself, here that "perverseness of disposition" obtains expression and formulation, against which Schopenhauer never grew tired of hurling beforehand his angriest imprecations and thunderbolts,—a philosophy which dares to put, derogatorily put, morality itself in the world of phenomena, and not only among "phenomena" (in the sense of the idealistic terminus technicus), but among the "illusions," as appearance, semblance, error, interpretation, accommodation, art. Perhaps the depth of this antimoral tendency may be best estimated from the guarded and hostile silence with which Christianity is treated throughout this book,—Christianity, as being the most extravagant burlesque of the moral theme to which mankind has hitherto been obliged to listen. In fact, to the purely æsthetic world-interpretation and justification taught in this book, there is no greater antithesis than the Christian dogma, which is only and will be only moral, and which, with its absolute standards, for instance, its truthfulness of God, relegates—that is, disowns, convicts, condemns—art, all art, to the realm of falsehood. Behind such a mode of thought and valuation, which, if at all genuine, must be hostile to art, I always experienced what was hostile to life, the wrathful, vindictive counterwill to life itself: for all life rests on appearance, art, illusion, optics, necessity of perspective and error. From the very first Christianity was, essentially and thoroughly, the nausea and surfeit of Life for Life, which only disguised, concealed and decked itself out under the belief in "another" or "better" life. The hatred of the "world," the curse on the affections, the fear of beauty and sensuality, another world, invented for the purpose of slandering this world the more, at bottom a longing for. Nothingness, for the end, for rest, for the "Sabbath of Sabbaths"— all this, as also the unconditional will of Christianity to recognise only moral values, has always appeared to me as the most dangerous and ominous of all possible forms of a "will to perish"; at the least, as the symptom of a most fatal disease, of profoundest weariness, despondency, exhaustion, impoverishment of life,—for before the tribunal of morality (especially Christian, that is, unconditional morality) life must constantly and in- evitably be the loser, because life is something essentially unmoral,—indeed, oppressed with the weight of contempt and the everlasting No, life must finally be regarded as unworthy of desire, as in itself unworthy. Morality itself what?—may not morality be a "will to disown life," a secret instinct for annihilation, a principle of decay, of depreciation, of slander, a beginning of the end? And, consequently, the danger of dangers?...

It was against morality, therefore, that my instinct, as an intercessory-instinct for life, turned in this questionable book, inventing for itself a fundamental counter—dogma and counter-valuation of life, purely artistic, purely antiChristian. What should I call it? As a philologist and man of words I baptised it, not without some liberty—for who could be sure of the proper name of the Antichrist?—with the name of a Greek god: I called it Dionysian. 6. You see which problem I ventured to touch upon in this early work?... How I now regret, that I had not then the courage (or immodesty?) to allow myself, in all respects, the use of an individual language for such individual contemplations and ventures in the field of thought—that I laboured to express, in Kantian and Schopenhauerian formulæ, strange and new valuations, which ran fundamentally counter to the spirit of Kant and Schopenhauer, as well as to their taste! What, forsooth, were Schopenhauer's views on tragedy? "What gives"—he says in Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, II. 495—"to all tragedy that singular swing towards elevation, is the awakening of the knowledge that the world, that life, cannot satisfy us thoroughly, and consequently is not worthy of our attachment In this consists the tragic spirit: it therefore leads to resignation." Oh, how differently Dionysos spoke to me! Oh how far from me then was just this entire resignationism!—But there is something far worse in this book, which I now regret even more than having obscured and spoiled Dionysian anticipations with Schopenhauerian formulæ: to wit, that, in general, I spoiled the grand Hellenic problem, as it had opened up before me, by the admixture of the most modern things! That I entertained hopes, where nothing was to be hoped for, where everything pointed all-too-clearly to an approaching end! That, on the basis of our latter-day German music, I began to fable about the "spirit of Teutonism," as if it were on the point of discovering and returning to itself,—ay, at the very time that the German spirit which not so very long before had had the will to the lordship over Europe, the strength to lead and govern Europe, testamentarily and conclusively resigned and, under the pompous pretence of empire-founding, effected its transition to mediocritisation, democracy, and "modern ideas." In very fact, I have since learned to regard this "spirit of Teutonism" as something to be despaired of and unsparingly treated, as also our present German music, which is Romanticism through and through and the most un-Grecian of all possible forms of art: and moreover a firstrate nerve-destroyer, doubly dangerous for a people given to drinking and revering the unclear as a virtue, namely, in its twofold capacity of an intoxicating and stupefying narcotic. Of course, apart from all precipitate hopes and faulty applications to matters specially modern, with which I then spoiled my first book, the great Dionysian note of interrogation, as set down therein, continues standing on and on, even with reference to music: how must we conceive of a music, which is no longer of Romantic origin, like the German; but of Dionysian?... 7. —But, my dear Sir, if your book is not Romanticism, what in the world is? Can the deep hatred of the present, of "reality" and "modern ideas" be pushed farther than has been done in your artist-metaphysics?—which would rather believe in Nothing, or in the devil, than in the "Now"? Does not a radical bass of wrath and annihilative pleasure growl on beneath all your contrapuntal vocal art and aural seduction, a mad determination to oppose all that "now" is, a will which is not so very far removed from practical nihilism and which seems to say: "rather let nothing be true, than that you should be in the right, than that your truth should prevail!" Hear, yourself, my dear Sir Pessimist and art-deifier, with ever so unlocked ears, a single select passage of your own book, that not ineloquent dragon-slayer passage, which may sound insidiously rat-charming to young ears and hearts. What? is not that the true blue romanticist-confession of 1830 under the mask of the pessimism of 1850? After which, of course, the usual romanticist finale at once strikes up,—rupture, collapse, return and prostration before an old belief, before the old God.... What? is not your pessimist book itself a piece of anti-Hellenism and Romanticism, something "equally intoxicating and befogging," a narcotic at all events, ay, a piece of music, of German music?

But listen: Let us imagine a rising generation with this undauntedness of vision, with this heroic impulse towards the prodigious, let us imagine the bold step of these dragon-slayers, the proud daring with which they turn their backs on all the effeminate doctrines of optimism, in order "to live resolutely" in the Whole and in the Full: would it not be necessary for the tragic man of this culture, with his self-discipline to earnestness and terror, to desire a new art, the art of metaphysical comfort, tragedy as the Helena belonging to him, and that he should exclaim with Faust: "Und sollt ich nicht, sehnsüchtigster Gewalt, In's Leben ziehn die einzigste Gestalt?"[1] "Would it not be necessary?" ... No, thrice no! ye young romanticists: it would not be necessary! But it is very probable, that things may end thus, that ye may end thus, namely "comforted," as it is written, in spite of all self-discipline to earnestness and terror; metaphysically comforted, in short, as Romanticists are wont to end, as Christians.... No! ye should first of all learn the art of earthly comfort, ye should learn to laugh, my young friends, if ye are at all determined to remain pessimists: if so, you will perhaps, as laughing ones, eventually send all metaphysical comfortism to the devil— and metaphysics first of all! Or, to say it in the language of that Dionysian ogre, called Zarathustra: "Lift up your hearts, my brethren, high, higher! And do not forget your legs! Lift up also your legs, ye good dancers—and better still if ye stand also on your heads! "This crown of the laughter, this rose-garland crown—I myself have put on this crown; I myself have consecrated my laughter. No one else have I found to-day strong enough for this. "Zarathustra the dancer, Zarathustra the light one, who beckoneth with his pinions, one ready for flight, beckoning unto all birds, ready and prepared, a blissfully light-spirited one:— "Zarathustra the soothsayer, Zarathustra the sooth-laugher, no impatient one, no absolute one, one who loveth leaps and side-leaps: I myself have put on this crown! "This crown of the laughter, this rose-garland crown—to you my brethren do I cast this crown! Laughing have I consecrated: ye higher men, learn, I pray you—to laugh!" Thus spake Zarathustra, lxxiii. 17, 18, and 20. SILS-MARIA, OBERENGADIN, August 1886. [1] And shall not I, by mightiest desire, In living shape that sole fair form acquire? SWANWICK, trans. of Faust. THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY FROM THE SPIRIT OF MUSIC FOREWORD TO RICHARD WAGNER. In order to keep at a distance all the possible scruples, excitements, and misunderstandings to which the thoughts gathered in this essay will give occasion, considering the peculiar character of our æsthetic publicity, and to be able also Co write the introductory remarks with the same contemplative delight, the impress of which, as the petrifaction of good and elevating hours, it bears on every page, I form a conception of the moment when you, my highly honoured friend, will receive this essay; how you, say after an evening walk in the winter snow, will behold the unbound Prometheus on the title-page, read my name, and be forthwith convinced that, whatever this essay may contain, the author has something earnest and impressive to say, and, moreover, that in all his meditations he communed with you as with one present and could thus write only what befitted your presence. You will thus remember that it was at the same time as your magnificent dissertation on Beethoven originated, viz., amidst the horrors and sublimities of the war which had just then broken out, that I collected myself for these thoughts. But those persons would err, to whom this collection suggests no more perhaps than the antithesis of patriotic excitement and æsthetic revelry, of gallant earnestness and sportive delight. Upon a real perusal of this essay, such readers will, rather to their surprise, discover how earnest is the German problem we have to deal with, which we properly place, as a vortex and turning-point, in the very midst of German hopes.

Perhaps, however, this same class of readers will be shocked at seeing an æsthetic problem taken so seriously, especially if they can recognise in art no more than a merry diversion, a readily dispensable court-jester to the "earnestness of existence": as if no one were aware of the real meaning of this confrontation with the "earnestness of existence." These earnest ones may be informed that I am convinced that art is the highest task and the properly metaphysical activity of this life, as it is understood by the man, to whom, as my sublime protagonist on this path, I would now dedicate this essay. BASEL, end of the year 1871. THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY. 1. We shall have gained much for the science of æsthetics, when once we have perceived not only by logical inference, but by the immediate certainty of intuition, that the continuous development of art is bound up with the duplexity of the Apollonian and the Dionysian: in like manner as procreation is dependent on the duality of the sexes, involving perpetual conflicts with only periodically intervening reconciliations. These names we borrow from the Greeks, who disclose to the intelligent observer the profound mysteries of their view of art, not indeed in concepts, but in the impressively clear figures of their world of deities. It is in connection with Apollo and Dionysus, the two art-deities of the Greeks, that we learn that there existed in the Grecian world a wide antithesis, in origin and aims, between the art of the shaper, the Apollonian, and the non-plastic art of music, that of Dionysus: both these so heterogeneous tendencies run parallel to each other, for the most part openly at variance, and continually inciting each other to new and more powerful births, to perpetuate in them the strife of this antithesis, which is but seemingly bridged over by their mutual term "Art"; till at last, by a metaphysical miracle of the Hellenic will, they appear paired with each other, and through this pairing eventually generate the equally Dionysian and Apollonian art-work of Attic tragedy. In order to bring these two tendencies within closer range, let us conceive them first of all as the separate art-worlds of dreamland and drunkenness; between which physiological phenomena a contrast may be observed analogous to that existing between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. In dreams, according to the conception of Lucretius, the glorious divine figures first appeared to the souls of men, in dreams the great shaper beheld the charming corporeal structure of superhuman beings, and the Hellenic poet, if consulted on the mysteries of poetic inspiration, would likewise have suggested dreams and would have offered an explanation resembling that of Hans Sachs in the Meistersingers:— Mein Freund, das grad' ist Dichters Werk, dass er sein Träumen deut' und merk'. Glaubt mir, des Menschen wahrster Wahn wird ihm im Traume aufgethan: all' Dichtkunst und Poeterei ist nichts als Wahrtraum-Deuterei.[1] The beauteous appearance of the dream-worlds, in the production of which every man is a perfect artist, is the presupposition of all plastic art, and in fact, as we shall see, of an important half of poetry also. We take delight in the immediate apprehension of form; all forms speak to us; there is nothing indifferent, nothing superfluous. But, together with the highest life of this dream-reality we also have, glimmering through it, the sensation of its appearance: such at least is my experience, as to the frequency, ay, normality of which I could adduce many proofs, as also the sayings of the poets. Indeed, the man of philosophic turn has a foreboding that underneath this reality in which we live and have our being, another and altogether different reality lies concealed, and that therefore it is also an appearance; and Schopenhauer actually designates the gift of occasionally regarding men and things as mere phantoms and dream-pictures as the criterion of philosophical ability. Accordingly, the man susceptible to art stands in the same relation to the reality of dreams as the philosopher to the reality of existence; he is a close and willing observer, for from these pictures he reads the meaning of life, and by these processes he trains himself for life.

And it is perhaps not only the agreeable and friendly pictures that he realises in himself with such perfect understanding: the earnest, the troubled, the dreary, the gloomy, the sudden checks, the tricks of fortune, the uneasy presentiments, in short, the whole "Divine Comedy" of life, and the Inferno, also pass before him, not merely like pictures on the wall—for he too lives and suffers in these scenes,—and yet not without that fleeting sensation of appearance. And perhaps many a one will, like myself, recollect having sometimes called out cheeringly and not without success amid the dangers and terrors of dream-life: "It is a dream! I will dream on!" I have likewise been told of persons capable of continuing the causality of one and the same dream for three and even more successive nights: all of which facts clearly testify that our innermost being, the common substratum of all of us, experiences our dreams with deep joy and cheerful acquiescence. This cheerful acquiescence in the dream-experience has likewise been embodied by the Greeks in their Apollo: for Apollo, as the god of all shaping energies, is also the soothsaying god. He, who (as the etymology of the name indicates) is the "shining one," the deity of light, also rules over the fair appearance of the inner world of fantasies. The higher truth, the perfection of these states in contrast to the only partially intelligible everyday world, ay, the deep consciousness of nature, healing and helping in sleep and dream, is at the same time the symbolical analogue of the faculty of soothsaying and, in general, of the arts, through which life is made possible and worth living. But also that delicate line, which the dream-picture must not overstep—lest it act pathologically (in which case appearance, being reality pure and simple, would impose upon us)—must not be wanting in the picture of Apollo: that measured limitation, that freedom from the wilder emotions, that philosophical calmness of the sculptor-god. His eye must be "sunlike," according to his origin; even when it is angry and looks displeased, the sacredness of his beauteous appearance is still there. And so we might apply to Apollo, in an eccentric sense, what Schopenhauer says of the man wrapt in the veil of Mâyâ[2]: Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, I. p. 416: "Just as in a stormy sea, unbounded in every direction, rising and falling with howling mountainous waves, a sailor sits in a boat and trusts in his frail barque: so in the midst of a world of sorrows the individual sits quietly supported by and trusting in his principium individuationis." Indeed, we might say of Apollo, that in him the unshaken faith in this principium and the quiet sitting of the man wrapt therein have received their sublimest expression; and we might even designate Apollo as the glorious divine image of the principium individuationis, from out of the gestures and looks of which all the joy and wisdom of "appearance," together with its beauty, speak to us. In the same work Schopenhauer has described to us the stupendous awe which seizes upon man, when of a sudden he is at a loss to account for the cognitive forms of a phenomenon, in that the principle of reason, in some one of its manifestations, seems to admit of an exception. Add to this awe the blissful ecstasy which rises from the innermost depths of man, ay, of nature, at this same collapse of the principium individuationis, and we shall gain an insight into the being of the Dionysian, which is brought within 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 the augmentation of which the subjective vanishes to complete self-forgetfulness. So also in the German Middle Ages singing and dancing crowds, ever increasing in number, were borne from place to place under this same Dionysian power. In these St. John's and St. Vitus's dancers we again perceive the Bacchic choruses of the Greeks, with their previous history in Asia Minor, as far back as Babylon and the orgiastic Sacæa.

There are some, who, from lack of experience or obtuseness, will turn away from such phenomena as "folkdiseases" with a smile of contempt or pity prompted by the consciousness of their own health: of course, the poor wretches do not divine what a cadaverous-looking and ghastly aspect this very "health" of theirs presents when the glowing life of the Dionysian revellers rushes past them. Under the charm of the Dionysian not only is the covenant between man and man again established, but also estranged, hostile or subjugated nature again celebrates her reconciliation with her lost son, man. Of her own accord earth proffers her gifts, and peacefully the beasts of prey approach from the desert and the rocks. The chariot of Dionysus is bedecked with flowers and garlands: panthers and tigers pass beneath his yoke. Change Beethoven's "jubilee-song" into a painting, and, if your imagination be equal to the occasion when the awestruck millions sink into the dust, you will then be able to approach the Dionysian. Now is the slave a free man, now all the stubborn, hostile barriers, which necessity, caprice, or "shameless fashion" has set up between man and man, are broken down. Now, at the evangel of cosmic harmony, each one feels himself not only united, reconciled, blended with his neighbour, but as one with him, as if the veil of Mâyâ has been torn and were now merely fluttering in tatters before the mysterious Primordial Unity. In song and in dance man exhibits himself as a member of a higher community, he has forgotten how to walk and speak, and is on the point of taking a dancing flight into the air. His gestures bespeak enchantment. Even as the animals now talk, and as the earth yields milk and honey, so also something super-natural sounds forth from him: he feels himself a god, he himself now walks about enchanted and elated even as the gods whom he saw walking about in his dreams. Man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art: the artistic power of all nature here reveals itself in the tremors of drunkenness to the highest gratification of the Primordial Unity. The noblest clay, the costliest marble, namely man, is here kneaded and cut, and the chisel strokes of the Dionysian world-artist are accompanied with the cry of the Eleusinian mysteries: "Ihr stürzt nieder, Millionen? Ahnest du den Schöpfer, Welt?"[3] [1] My friend, just this is poet's task: His dreams to read and to unmask. Trust me, illusion's truths thrice sealed In dream to man will be revealed. All verse-craft and poetisation Is but soothdream interpretation. [2] Cf. World and Will as Idea, 1. 455 ff., trans, by Haldane and Kemp. [3] Te bow in the dust, oh millions? Thy maker, mortal, dost divine? Cf. Schiller's "Hymn to Joy"; and Beethoven, Ninth Symphony.—TR. 2. Thus far we have considered the Apollonian and his antithesis, the Dionysian, as artistic powers, which burst forth from nature herself, without the mediation of the human artist, and in which her art-impulses are satisfied in the most immediate and direct way: first, as the pictorial world of dreams, the perfection of which has no connection whatever with the intellectual height or artistic culture of the unit man, and again, as drunken reality, which likewise does not heed the unit man, but even seeks to destroy the individual and redeem him by a mystic feeling of Oneness. Anent these immediate art-states of nature every artist is either an "imitator," to wit, either an Apollonian, an artist in dreams, or a Dionysian, an artist in ecstasies, or finally—as for instance in Greek tragedy—an artist in both dreams and ecstasies: so we may perhaps picture him, as in his Dionysian drunkenness and mystical self-abnegation, lonesome and apart from the revelling choruses, he sinks down, and how now, through Apollonian dream-inspiration, his own state, i.e., his oneness with the primal source of the universe, reveals itself to him in a symbolical dream-picture.

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.

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 the Olympian magic mountain opens, as it were, to our view and shows to us its roots. The Greek knew and felt the terrors and horrors of existence: to be able to live at all, he had to interpose the shining dream-birth of the Olympian world between himself and them. The excessive distrust of the titanic powers of nature, the Moira throning inexorably over all knowledge, the vulture of the great philanthropist Prometheus, the terrible fate of the wise Œdipus, the family curse of the Atridæ which drove Orestes to matricide; in short, that entire philosophy of the sylvan god, with its mythical exemplars, which wrought the ruin of the melancholy Etruscans—was again and again surmounted anew by the Greeks through the artistic middle world of the Olympians, or at least veiled and withdrawn from sight. To be able to live, the Greeks had, from direst necessity, to create these gods: which process we may perhaps picture to ourselves in this manner: that out of the original Titan thearchy of terror the Olympian thearchy of joy was evolved, by slow transitions, through the Apollonian impulse to beauty, even as roses break forth from thorny bushes. How else could this so sensitive people, so vehement in its desires, so singularly qualified for sufferings have endured existence, if it had not been exhibited to them in their gods, surrounded with a higher glory? The same impulse which calls art into being, as the complement and consummation of existence, seducing to a continuation of life, caused also the Olympian world to arise, in which the Hellenic "will" held up before itself a transfiguring mirror. Thus do the gods justify the life of man, in that they themselves live it—the only satisfactory Theodicy! Existence under the bright sunshine of such gods is regarded as that which is desirable in itself, and the real grief of the Homeric men has reference to parting from it, especially to early parting: so that we might now say of them, with a reversion of the Silenian wisdom, that "to die early is worst of all for them, the second worst is—some day to die at all." If once the lamentation is heard, it will ring out again, of the short-lived Achilles, of the leaf-like change and vicissitude of the human race, of the decay of the heroic age. It is not unworthy of the greatest hero to long for a continuation of life, ay, even as a day-labourer. So vehemently does the "will," at the Apollonian stage of development, long for this existence, so completely at one does the Homeric man feel himself with it, that the very lamentation becomes its song of praise. Here we must observe that this harmony which is so eagerly contemplated by modern man, in fact, this oneness of man with nature, to express which Schiller introduced the technical term "naïve," is by no means such a simple, naturally resulting and, as it were, inevitable condition, which must be found at the gate of every culture leading to a paradise of man: this could be believed only by an age which sought to picture to itself Rousseau's Émile also as an artist, and imagined it had found in Homer such an artist Émile, reared at Nature's bosom. Wherever we meet with the "naïve" in art, it behoves us to recognise the highest effect of the Apollonian culture, which in the first place has always to overthrow some Titanic empire and slay monsters, and which, through powerful dazzling representations and pleasurable illusions, must have triumphed over a terrible depth of worldcontemplation and a most keen susceptibility to suffering. But how seldom is the naïve—that complete absorption, in the beauty of appearance—attained! And hence how inexpressibly sublime is Homer, who, as unit being, bears the same relation to this Apollonian folk-culture as the unit dreamartist does to the dream-faculty of the people and of Nature in general. The Homeric "naïveté" can be comprehended only as the complete triumph of the Apollonian illusion: it is the same kind of illusion as Nature so frequently employs to compass her ends. The true goal is veiled by a phantasm: we stretch out our hands for the latter, while Nature attains the former through our illusion.

In the Greeks the "will" desired to contemplate itself in the transfiguration of the genius and the world of art; in order to glorify themselves, its creatures had to feel themselves worthy of glory; they had to behold themselves again in a higher sphere, without this consummate world of contemplation acting as an imperative or reproach. Such is the sphere of beauty, in which, as in a mirror, they saw their images, the Olympians. With this mirroring of beauty the Hellenic will combated its talent—correlative to the artistic—for suffering and for the wisdom of suffering: and, as a monument of its victory, Homer, the naïve artist, stands before us. 4. Concerning this naïve artist the analogy of dreams will enlighten us to some extent. When we realise to ourselves the dreamer, as, in the midst of the illusion of the dream-world and without disturbing it, he calls out to himself: "it is a dream, I will dream on"; when we must thence infer a deep inner joy in dream-contemplation; when, on the other hand, to be at all able to dream with this inner joy in contemplation, we must have completely forgotten the day and its terrible obtrusiveness, we may, under the direction of the dreamreading Apollo, interpret all these phenomena to ourselves somewhat as follows. Though it is certain that of the two halves of life, the waking and the dreaming, the former appeals to us as by far the more preferred, important, excellent and worthy of being lived, indeed, as that which alone is lived: yet, with reference to that mysterious ground of our being of which we are the phenomenon, I should, paradoxical as it may seem, be inclined to maintain the very opposite estimate of the value of dream life. For the more clearly I perceive in nature those all-powerful art impulses, and in them a fervent longing for appearance, for redemption through appearance, the more I feel myself driven to the metaphysical assumption that the VerilyExistent and Primordial Unity, as the Eternally Suffering and Self-Contradictory, requires the rapturous vision, the joyful appearance, for its continuous salvation: which appearance we, who are completely wrapt in it and composed of it, must regard as the Verily Non-existent,—i.e., as a perpetual unfolding in time, space and causality,—in other words, as empiric reality. If we therefore waive the consideration of our own "reality" for the present, if we conceive our empiric existence, and that of the world generally, as a representation of the Primordial Unity generated every moment, we shall then have to regard the dream as an appearance of appearance, hence as a still higher gratification of the primordial desire for appearance. It is for this same reason that the innermost heart of Nature experiences that indescribable joy in the naïve artist and in the naïve work of art, which is likewise only "an appearance of appearance." In a symbolic painting, Raphael, himself one of these immortal "naïve" ones, has represented to us this depotentiating of appearance to appearance, the primordial process of the naïve artist and at the same time of Apollonian culture. In his Transfiguration, the lower half, with the possessed boy, the despairing bearers, the helpless, terrified disciples, shows to us the reflection of eternal primordial pain, the sole basis of the world: the "appearance" here is the counter-appearance of eternal Contradiction, the father of things. Out of this appearance then arises, like an ambrosial vapour, a visionlike new world of appearances, of which those wrapt in the first appearance see nothing—a radiant floating in purest bliss and painless Contemplation beaming from wide-open eyes. Here there is presented to our view, in the highest symbolism of art, that Apollonian world of beauty and its substratum, the terrible wisdom of Silenus, and we comprehend, by intuition, their necessary interdependence. Apollo, however, again appears to us as the apotheosis of the principium individuationis, in which alone the perpetually attained end of the Primordial Unity, its redemption through appearance, is consummated: he shows us, with sublime attitudes, how the entire world of torment is necessary, that thereby the individual may be impelled to realise the redeeming vision, and then, sunk in contemplation thereof, quietly sit in his fluctuating barque, in the midst of the sea. This apotheosis of individuation, if it be at all conceived as imperative and laying down precepts, knows but one law—the individual, i.e., the observance of the boundaries of the individual, measure in the Hellenic sense.

Apollo, as ethical deity, demands due proportion of his disciples, and, that this may be observed, he demands self-knowledge. And thus, parallel to the æsthetic necessity for beauty, there run the demands "know thyself" and "not too much," while presumption and undueness are regarded as the truly hostile demons of the non-Apollonian sphere, hence as characteristics of the pre-Apollonian age, that of the Titans, and of the extra-Apollonian world, that of the barbarians. Because of his Titan-like love for man, Prometheus had to be torn to pieces by vultures; because of his excessive wisdom, which solved the riddle of the Sphinx, Œdipus had to plunge into a bewildering vortex of monstrous crimes: thus did the Delphic god interpret the Grecian past. So also the effects wrought by the Dionysian appeared "titanic" and "barbaric" to the Apollonian Greek: while at the same time he could not conceal from himself that he too was inwardly related to these overthrown Titans and heroes. Indeed, he had to recognise still more than this: his entire existence, with all its beauty and moderation, rested on a hidden substratum of suffering and of knowledge, which was again disclosed to him by the Dionysian. And lo! Apollo could not live without Dionysus! The "titanic" and the "barbaric" were in the end not less necessary than the Apollonian. And now let us imagine to ourselves how the ecstatic tone of the Dionysian festival sounded in ever more luring and bewitching strains into this artificially confined world built on appearance and moderation, how in these strains all the undueness of nature, in joy, sorrow, and knowledge, even to the transpiercing shriek, became audible: let us ask ourselves what meaning could be attached to the psalmodising artist of Apollo, with the phantom harp-sound, as compared with this demonic folk-song! The muses of the arts of "appearance" paled before an art which, in its intoxication, spoke the truth, the wisdom of Silenus cried "woe! woe!" against the cheerful Olympians. The individual, with all his boundaries and due proportions, went under in the self-oblivion of the Dionysian states and forgot the Apollonian precepts. The Undueness revealed itself as truth, contradiction, the bliss born of pain, declared itself but of the heart of nature. And thus, wherever the Dionysian prevailed, the Apollonian was routed and annihilated. But it is quite as certain that, where the first assault was successfully withstood, the authority and majesty of the Delphic god exhibited itself as more rigid and menacing than ever. For I can only explain to myself the Doric state and Doric art as a permanent war-camp of the Apollonian: only by incessant opposition to the titanic-barbaric nature of the Dionysian was it possible for an art so defiantly-prim, so encompassed with bulwarks, a training so warlike and rigorous, a constitution so cruel and relentless, to last for any length of time. Up to this point we have enlarged upon the observation made at the beginning of this essay: how the Dionysian and the Apollonian, in ever new births succeeding and mutually augmenting one another, controlled the Hellenic genius: how from out the age of "bronze," with its Titan struggles and rigorous folk-philosophy, the Homeric world develops under the fostering sway of the Apollonian impulse to beauty, how this "naïve" splendour is again overwhelmed by the inbursting flood of the Dionysian, and how against this new power the Apollonian rises to the austere majesty of Doric art and the Doric view of things. If, then, in this way, in the strife of these two hostile principles, the older Hellenic history falls into four great periods of art, we are now driven to inquire after the ulterior purpose of these unfoldings and processes, unless perchance we should regard the last-attained period, the period of Doric art, as the end and aim of these artistic impulses: and here the sublime and highly celebrated art-work of Attic tragedy and dramatic dithyramb presents itself to our view as the common goal of both these impulses, whose mysterious union, after many and long precursory struggles, found its glorious consummation in such a child,—which is at once Antigone and Cassandra. 5. We now approach the real purpose of our investigation, which aims at acquiring a knowledge of the Dionyso-Apollonian genius and his art-work, or at least an anticipatory understanding of the mystery of the aforesaid union.

Here we shall ask first of all where that new germ which subsequently developed into tragedy and dramatic dithyramb first makes itself perceptible in the Hellenic world. The ancients themselves supply the answer in symbolic form, when they place Homer and Archilochus as the forefathers and torch-bearers of Greek poetry side by side on gems, sculptures, etc., in the sure conviction that only these two thoroughly original compeers, from whom a stream of fire flows over the whole of Greek posterity, should be taken into consideration. Homer, the aged dreamer sunk in himself, the type of the Apollonian naïve artist, beholds now with astonishment the impassioned genius of the warlike votary of the muses, Archilochus, violently tossed to and fro on the billows of existence: and modern æsthetics could only add by way of interpretation, that here the "objective" artist is confronted by the first "subjective" artist. But this interpretation is of little service to us, because we know the subjective artist only as the poor artist, and in every type and elevation of art we demand specially and first of all the conquest of the Subjective, the redemption from the "ego" and the cessation of every individual will and desire; indeed, we find it impossible to believe in any truly artistic production, however insignificant, without objectivity, without pure, interestless contemplation. Hence our æsthetics must first solve the problem as to how the "lyrist" is possible as an artist: he who according to the experience of all ages continually says "I" and sings off to us the entire chromatic scale of his passions and desires. This very Archilochus appals us, alongside of Homer, by his cries of hatred and scorn, by the drunken outbursts of his desire. Is not just he then, who has been called the first subjective artist, the non-artist proper? But whence then the reverence which was shown to him—the poet—in very remarkable utterances by the Delphic oracle itself, the focus of "objective" art? Schiller has enlightened us concerning his poetic procedure by a psychological observation, inexplicable to himself, yet not apparently open to any objection. He acknowledges that as the preparatory state to the act of poetising he had not perhaps before him or within him a series of pictures with co-ordinate causality of thoughts, but rather a musical mood ("The perception with me is at first without a clear and definite object; this forms itself later. A certain musical mood of mind precedes, and only after this does the poetical idea follow with me.") Add to this the most important phenomenon of all ancient lyric poetry, the union, regarded everywhere as natural, of the lyrist with the musician, their very identity, indeed,—compared with which our modern lyric poetry is like the statue of a god without a head,—and we may now, on the basis of our metaphysics of æsthetics set forth above, interpret the lyrist to ourselves as follows. As Dionysian artist he is in the first place become altogether one with the Primordial Unity, its pain and contradiction, and he produces the copy of this Primordial Unity as music, granting that music has been correctly termed a repetition and a recast of the world; but now, under the Apollonian dream-inspiration, this music again becomes visible to him as in a symbolic dream-picture. The formless and intangible reflection of the primordial pain in music, with its redemption in appearance, then generates a second mirroring as a concrete symbol or ex- ample. The artist has already surrendered his subjectivity in the Dionysian process: the picture which now shows to him his oneness with the heart of the world, is a dream-scene, which embodies the primordial contradiction and primordial pain, together with the primordial joy, of appearance. The "I" of the lyrist sounds therefore from the abyss of being: its "subjectivity," in the sense of the modern æsthetes, is a fiction. When Archilochus, the first lyrist of the Greeks, makes known both his mad love and his contempt to the daughters of Lycambes, it is not his passion which dances before us in orgiastic frenzy: we see Dionysus and the Mænads, we see the drunken reveller Archilochus sunk down to sleep—as Euripides depicts it in the Bacchæ, the sleep on the high Alpine pasture, in the noonday sun:—and now Apollo approaches and touches him with the laurel. The Dionyso-musical enchantment of the sleeper now emits, as it were, picture sparks, lyrical poems, which in their highest development are called tragedies and dramatic dithyrambs.