He was born at Röcken, Prussia, on October 15, 1844,—which happened to be the birthday of the reigning Prussian king, Frederick William IV. His father, who had tutored several members of the royal family, rejoiced at this patriotic coincidence, and named the boy after the King. “There was at all events one advantage in the choice of this day for my birth; my birthday throughout the whole of my childhood was a day of public rejoicing.”2
The early death of his father left him a victim to the holy women of the household, who petted him into an almost feminine delicacy and sensibility. He disliked the bad boys of the neighborhood, who robbed birds’ nests, raided orchards, played soldier, and told lies. His schoolmates called him “the little minister,” and one of them described him as “a Jesus in the Temple.” It was his delight to seclude himself and read the Bible, or to read it to others so feelingly as to bring tears to their eyes. But there was a hidden nervous stoicism and pride in him: when his school-fellows doubted the story of Mutius Scaevola he ignited a batch of matches in the palm of his hand and let them lie there till they were burnt out.3 It was a typical incident: all his life long he was to seek physical and intellectual means of hardening himself into an idealized masculinity. “What I am not, that for me is God and virtue.”4
At eighteen he lost his faith in the God of his fathers, and spent the remainder of his life looking for a new deity; he thought he found one in the Superman. He said later that he had taken the change easily; but he had a habit of easily deceiving himself, and is an unreliable autobiographer. He became cynical, like one who had staked all on a single throw of the dice, and had lost; religion had been the very marrow of his life, and now life seemed empty and meaningless. He passed suddenly into a period of sensual riot with his college mates at Bonn and Leipzig, and even overcame the fastidiousness that had made so difficult for him the male arts of smoking and drinking. But soon wine, woman and tobacco disgusted him; he reacted into a great scorn of the whole biergemütlichkeit of his country and his time; people who drank beer and smoked pipes were incapable of clear perception or subtle thought.
It was about this time, in 1865, that he discovered Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Idea, and found in it “a mirror in which I espied the world, life, and my own nature depicted with frightful grandeur.”5 He took the book to his lodgings, and read every word of it hungrily. “It seemed as if Schopenhauer were addressing me personally. I felt his enthusiasm, and seemed to see him before me. Every line cried aloud for renunciation, denial, resignation.”6 The dark color of Schopenhauer’s philosophy impressed itself permanently upon his thought: and not only when he was a devoted follower of “Schopenhauer as Educator” (the title of one of his essays), but even when he came to denounce pessimism as a form of decadence, he remained at bottom an unhappy man, whose nervous system seemed to have been carefully designed for suffering, and whose exaltation of tragedy as the joy of life was but another self-deception. Only Spinoza or Goethe could have saved him from Schopenhauer; but though he preached æquanimitas and amor fati, he never practised them; the serenity of the sage and the calm of the balanced mind were never his.
At the age of twenty-three he was conscripted into military service. He would have been glad to get exemption as nearsighted and the only son of a widow, but the army claimed him nevertheless; even philosophers were welcomed as cannon-fodder in the great days of Sadowa and Sedan. However, a fall from a horse so wrenched his breast-muscles that the recruiting-sergeant was forced to yield up his prey. Nietzsche never quite recovered from that hurt. His military experience was so brief that he left the army with almost as many delusions about soldiers as he had had on entering it; the hard Spartan life of commanding and obeying, of endurance and discipline, appealed to his imagination, now that he was free from the necessity of realizing this ideal himself; he came to worship the soldier because his health would not permit him to become one.
From military life he passed to its antipodes—the academic life of a philologist; instead of becoming a warrior he became a Ph.D. At twenty-five he was appointed to the chair of classical philology at the University of Basle, from whose safe distance he could admire the bloody ironies of Bismarck. He had queer regrets on taking up this unheroically sedentary work: on the one hand he wished he had gone into a practical and active profession, such as medicine; and at the same time he found himself drawn towards music. He had become something of a pianist, and had written sonatas; “without music,” he said, “life would be a mistake.”7
Not far from Basle was Tribschen, where that giant of music, Richard Wagner, was living with another man’s wife. Nietzsche was invited to come and spend his Christmas there, in 1869. He was a warm enthusiast for the music of the future, and Wagner did not despise recruits who could lend to his cause something of the prestige that goes with scholarship and universities. Under the spell of the great composer, Nietzsche began to write his first book, which was to begin with the Greek drama and end with The Ring of the Nibelungs, preaching Wagner to the world as the modern Æschylus. He went up into the Alps to write in peace, far from the madding crowd; and there, in 1870, came to him the news that Germany and France had gone to war.
He hesitated; the spirit of Greece, and all the muses of poetry and drama and philosophy and music had laid their consecrating hands upon him. But he could not resist the call of his country; here was poetry too. “Here,” he wrote, “you have the state, of shameful origin; for the greater part of men a well of suffering that is never dried, a flame that consumes them in its frequent crises. And yet when it calls, our souls become forgetful of themselves; at its bloody appeal the multitude is urged to courage and uplifted to heroism.”8 At Frankfort, on his way to the front, he saw a troop of cavalry passing with magnificent clatter and display through the town; there and then, he says, came the perception, the vision, out of which was to grow his entire philosophy. “I felt for the first time that the strongest and highest Will to Life does not find expression in a miserable struggle for existence, but in a Will to War, a Will to Power, a Will to Overpower!”9 Bad eyesight disqualified him from active soldiering, and he had to be content with nursing; and though he saw horrors enough, he never knew the actual brutality of those battle-fields which his timid soul was later to idealize with all the imaginative intensity of inexperience. Even for nursing he was too sensitively delicate; the sight of blood made him ill; he fell sick, and was sent home in ruins. Ever afterward he had the nerves of a Shelley and the stomach of a Carlyle; the soul of a girl under the armor of a warrior.
III. Nietzsche and Wagner
Early in 1872 he published his first, and his only complete, book—The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music.10
Never had a philologist spoken so lyrically. He told of the two gods whom Greek art had worshipped: at first Dionysus (or Bacchus), the god of wine and revelry, of ascending life, of joy in action, of ecstatic emotion and inspiration, of instinct and adventure and dauntless suffering, the god of song and music and dance and drama;—and then, later, Apollo, the god of peace and leisure and repose, of esthetic emotion and intellectual contemplation, of logical order and philosophic calm, the god of painting and sculpture and epic poetry. The noblest Greek art was a union of the two ideals,—the restless masculine power of Dionysus and the quiet feminine beauty of Apollo. In drama Dionysus inspired the chorus, and Apollo the dialogue; the chorus grew directly out of the procession of the satyr-dressed devotees of Dionysus; the dialogue was an after-thought, a reflective appendage to an emotional experience.