THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

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THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
suspiciously like Schiller's Karl Moor and Goethe's Gotz; Nietzsche took
more than the word Uebermensch from the young Goethe whose later
Olympian calm he scorned so enviously. His letters are full of romantic
sentiment and tenderness; "I suffer" recurs in them almost as frequently
as "I die" in Heine. 106 He calls himself "a mystic and almost mxnadic
soul," and speaks of The Birth of Tragedy as "the confession of a romanticist."
107 "I am afraid/' he writes to Brandes, "that I am too much of a
musician not to be a romanticist." 108 "An author must become silent
100 when his work begins to speak" ; but Nietzsche never conceals himself,
and rushes into the first person on every page. His exaltation of instinct
against thought, of the individual against society, of the "Dionysian"
against the "Apollonian" (i. e., the romantic against the classic typo),
betrays his time as definitely as the dates of his birth and his death. He
was, for the philosophy of his age, what Wagner was for its music, the
culmination of the Romantic movement, the high tide of the Romantic
stream; he liberated and exalted the "will" and the "genius" of Schopenhauer
from all social restraint, as Wagner liberated and exalted the
passion that had torn at its classic bonds in the Sonata Pathetique and
the Fifth and Ninth Symphonies. He was the last great scion of the
lineage of Rousseau.
Let us go back now on the road we have traveled with Nietzsche, anet
tell him, however ineffectually, some of the objections with which we
were so often tempted to interrupt him. He was wise enough to see for
himself, in his later years, how much absurdity had contributed to the
originality of The Birth of Tragedy. 110 Scholars like Wilamowitz-Moellendorff
laughed the book out of the philologic court. The attempt to deduce
Wagner from -^Eschylus was the self-immolation of a young devotee before
a despotic god. Who would have thought that the Reformation was
"Dionysian" i. e., wild, unmoral, vinous, Bacchanalian; and that the
Renaissance was quite the opposite of these, quiet, restrained, moderate,
"Apollonian"? Who would have suspected that "Socratism was thes culture
of the opera"? 111 The attack on Socrates was the disdain of a
Wagnerian for logical thought; the admiration for Dionysus was a
sedentary man's idolatry of action (hence also the apotheosis of Napoleon),
and a bashful bachelor's secret envy of masculine bibulousne&s
and sexuality.
Perhaps Nietzsche was right in considering the pre-Socratic age as the
halcyon days of Greece; no doubt the Peloponnesian War undermined the
economic and political basis of Periclean culture. But it was a little absurd
to see in Socrates only a disintegrating criticism (as if Nietoche's own
function was not chiefly this) and not also a work of salvage for a society
"E. g., cf. HaleVy, * 3 i. "*. T., 6, XKV.
""Quoted by Huneker, Egoists, 851. '"Quoted by Faguet, 9.
""Gf. B. T,, pp. i and 4 of the Introduction, m B. T. t 148,