THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 303
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 biergemiitlichkeit
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 en-
thusiasm, and seemed to see him before me. Every line cried aloud for
renunciation, denial, resignation." The dark color of Schopenhauer's
'Mencken, The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, Boston, 1913; p. 10.
4 Thus Spake Zarathustra t p. 129. This work will be referred to hereafter as "Z";
and the following (in the English translation) will be referred to by their initials:
The Birth of Tragedy ( 1872), Thoughts Out of Season ( 1873-76), Human All Too
Human (1876-80), The Dawn of Day (1881), The Joyful Wisdom (1882), Beyond
Good and Evil (1886), The Genealogy of Morals (1887), The Case of Wagner
(1888), The Twilight of the Idols (1888), Antichrist (1889), Ecce Homo (1889),
The Will to Power (1889). Perhaps the best of these as an introduction to
Nietzsche himself is Beyond^ Good and Evil. Zarathustra is obscure, and its latter
half tends towards elaboration. The Will to Power contains more meat than any
of the other books. The most complete biography is by Frau Forster-Nietzsche;
HaleVy's, much shorter, is also good. SalteVs Nietzsche the Thinker (New York,
1917) is a scholarly exposition.
*B. T., introd., p, xvii
"Quoted by Mencken, p. 18.