THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

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THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
and not
philosophy impressed itself permanently upon his thought:
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 cequanimitas and amor fait, 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 near-sighted 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 twentyfive
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 scholar*
ship 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 ^Eschylus. 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
'Letter to Brandes, in Huneker, Egoists, New York, 19x0; p. 851.