[THIS remarkable essay, on the puzzling theme of a great mind's tragedy, has aroused wide interest in Germanreading Europe.]

A great man is beaten back, driven back, tortured back into solitude.

'O SOLITUDE, solitude, my home!' This melancholy refrain breaks the silence of a glacier world. Zarathustra composes his evensong, his song before his last night, his song before his eternal home-going. For had not loneliness always been this wanderer's only home, his cold hearth, his stone roof? He had visited unnumbered cities; he had made interminable journeys of the spirit; he had often sought to escape from his haunting loneliness to other lands, but he always returned, wearied, footworn, and disillusioned, to 'solitude, my home.'

But as this loneliness had wandered with him, the wanderer, she had changed her aspect, and now he shrank back terrified from her forbidding countenance. For she had become startlingly like himself during their long companionship; hard, cruel, violent, she had learned to pain and to terrify. And though he still tenderly called her solitude, his old beloved, familiar solitude, that had long since ceased to be her true name; she was now isolation— that last, that sevenfold loneliness that is not merely solitude, but solitude plus desertion. For the world around Nietzsche at last became frightfully empty, terrify

1 From Neue Freie Presse (Vienna NationalistLiberal daily), February 21

ingly silent. No hermit, no desert anchorite, no pillar saint, was left so utterly alone; for they, fanatics of their faith, still had their God, whose shadow dwelt within their cell or fell athwart their column. But he, 'the murderer of God,' no longer had either God or man. The more he won himself, the more he lost the world; the farther he wandered, the wider the desert grew. Ordinarily a writer's books slowly and silently create a human-magnetic field around him, even in case of the most solitary; by some obscure attraction they draw an ever-growing invisible company to his presence. But Nietzsche's works had a repelling effect. They drove kindly influences from him and increasingly isolated him from his contemporaries. Each new book cost him a friend; each work severed a human tie. Little by little the last thin efflorescence of public interest in his writings faded. First he lost the philologists, then Wagner and his spiritual circle, and last of all his own young disciples. No publisher could be found in Germany who would print his books. The fruit of twenty years' labor, four and sixty hundredweight of unbound volumes, lay stored in his cellar. He must draw on his own frugal savings to get his writings into type.

But it was not alone that no one bought them. Even when he gave them away, Nietzsche, the Nietzsche of the last lucid years, no longer found a reader. When the fourth part of Zarathustra was finished, he printed at his own expense only forty copies, and then found but seven men among

the seventy million Germans in Europe to whom he could send a copy. So solitary, so incomprehensibly solitary, was Nietzsche at the height of his creative period. None showed him a shred of confidence, an iota of appreciation. On the contrary, that he might not lose Overbeck, the last friend of his youth, he must apologize to him for what he wrote, must humbly crave pardon. 'Old chap,'· one can almost hear the timidly pleading voice; one can almost see the pain-racked countenance, the appealing hands, the gesture to ward off a new stroke of the lash, —‘read it from the beginning and from the end. Do not let yourself be bewildered and estranged. Summon up all your good-will for my sake. If you find the book as a whole intolerable, perhaps a hundred details in it may not be so.' Thus did the greatest mind of his century proffer to his contemporaries the most wonderful books of his age; and the most heroic title he could give to a friendship was to say that nothing could destroy it 'even the Zarathustra.' Zarathustra.' Even the Zarathustra! Such a crucial test, a Calvary, had Nietzsche's creations become for his fellow men! So deep was the gulf that yawned between his genius and the inferiority of his age! Ever thinner became the atmosphere on his heights, ever stiller, ever emptier.

This silence made Nietzsche's last, sevenfold loneliness an inferno. He beat his head vainly against its unechoing wall. 'After such a cry of heart anguish as my Zarathustra, lifted from the uttermost depths of my soul, not to hear even a whisper of response. Nothing, nothing, only silence, only a thousandfold solitude that was terrible beyond all conception, something to crush the strongest.' And after this wild protest he added: 'And I am not the strongest. Since then I have been like one stricken unto death.' But

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it is not applause, assent, fame, that he craves. On the contrary, nothing would have pleased his combative temperament better than indignation, disagreement - aye, even contempt. 'When a person is like a tautly drawn bow any shock is welcome provided it be violent.' A response, warm, cold, or even lukewarm, anything to make him conscious that he was part of the living world. But even his friends sedulously avoided him, evaded mentioning his writings in their letters, as if they were a painful subject. That was the wound that ate deeper and deeper into his soul, that cut his pride to the quick, stung his self-respect, and branded upon his innermost being 'the burning scar of receiving no response.' That is what poisoned his solitude and made it a nightmare.

It was as if a sudden fever seized upon and consumed the stricken man. If we listen to the pulsation that throbs through the writings and the letters of his later years, we hear the blood hammering in his arteries, as if pumped by the heart of a climber who has reached the rarefied air of a lofty mountain-top where all life ceases. In his very latest letters this violent knocking, as of a machine about to burst asunder, becomes unendurably painful. An impatient, nervous spasm flashes through Nietzsche's usually tolerant and polished manner: 'Your long silence has stung my pride.' He insists upon, he demands, an answer at any cost. He drives his printer with letters and telegrams — quicker, quicker, as if all were staked on haste. He decides not to wait, as he originally planned, until his Will to Power, his masterpiece, is finished, but impatiently rushes each section to the press, as a man might cast a firebrand into a black abyss. His 'halcyon tone' is extinguished; his last writings groan with suppressed suffering and with a

measureless, defiant anger. They are lashed out of him with the scourge of impatience. This haughty, indifferent man, stung in his pride, bade studied defiance to his age in a vain effort to provoke its retaliation.

That this challenge might be the more provocative, he related the story of his life, Ecce Homo, 'with a cynicism that will go down in history.' Never before had books been written with such an intense craving, with such a morbid, twitching fever of impatience, for an answer as were Nietzsche's last monumental pamphlets. He lashed the callous indifference of his contemporaries with the scorpions of his pen, inspired by the same mad fury that made Xerxes bid his minions flog the disobedient ocean with their rods. An insane fear that he would not live be be heard, a demoniacal vehemence, characterized this greedy insistence on some response. We can see how he waited a second after delivering each new blow, bending with tense attention to catch the cry of those he struck. But nothing followed. No echo of an answer ascended to his 'azure' solitude. Silence gripped his throat like an iron ring not to be broken by any cry, even the most terrible mankind knows; until he realized that no god could redeem him henceforth from the engulfment of this final solitude.

At length, in his last hours, apocalyptic rage seized the outcast. Roaring with anger, he hurled boulders about him like blinded Polyphemus, heedless where they struck; and because he had no one to suffer with him, to feel with him, he tore at his own quivering heart. He had murdered the gods, so he deified himself. 'Must we not ourselves become gods to be worthy of such deeds?' He had shattered all altars; therefore he built an altar to himself, his Ecce Homo, to glorify him whom all men scorned. He built him an im

an

posing monument of words. His hammer-blows rang louder than any others in his century. In an ecstasy of exaltation he chanted his death song exaggerated, exuberant pæan of his deeds and victories. Darkness gathered about him with a great roaring as of coming tempests, through which broke shrieks of laughter - the shrill, malicious, insane laughter of despair the Ecce Homo swan song. Ever louder rose the chant, ever shriller rose the laughter, beating against the silent glaciers of his empyrean. Spasmodically he lifts his hands, dithyrambic impulse moves his feet, and suddenly begins the dance, the dance over the abyss, the abyss of his own destruction.

If you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss at length looks back into you.

The five months closing with the autumn of 1888, Nietzsche's last lucid interval, are unique in the annals of creative production. Probably never before or since has a single genius within so short a period thought so much, so intensely, so continuously, so hyperbolically, and so radically; never has a human brain been so flooded with ideas, so crowded with images, so rocked with music, as that of this doomed man. No parallel exists in the history of the human intellect for this abundance, for this overwhelming, all-compelling ecstasy, for this fanatical fury of creation unless it was during that very year, and under the same heaven, when a painter, likewise lashed by furies ambushed in eternal mystery, likewise poised on the verge of madness, experienced a similar onrush of productivity. Van Gogh, in the Garden of Arles and in an asylum, filled his canvases with the same incredible speed, with the same ecstatic ease, possessed by the same abnormal creative spirit. Scarcely had

he finished one of his pallid but radiant pictures before his unerring brush was flitting over a new canvas, without an instant's pause or respite, without premeditation, without taking breath for composition. To create had become an all-absorbing imperative, bestowing upon its slave demoniacal clairvoyance and facility, an unbroken continuity of visions. Friends who had left Van Gogh an hour previously stood speechless on their return before a picture completed during their brief absence, and watched him begin, with moist brush, feverish eyes, and breathless impatience, yet another. The demon that had him by the throat granted his victim no respite, no pause, careless how quickly he, the mad rider, drove the fainting and fevered body to destruction.

It was precisely thus that Nietzsche threw off work after work, breathlessly, without pause, with the same unprecedented lucidity and speed. Ten days, fourteen days, three weeks - these were the periods required for his last books, for their conception, planning, completion. There was no period of incubation, no interval of repose, no tentative approach to the subject from different angles, no changing, no revising; they sprang forth from his pen spotless, final, finished at the same time incandescent and tempered from the forge. Never has a brain functioned so long at such high pressure. Never have associations tied themselves together in a human mind with such magic speed. The vision instantly suggested the word; the idea instantly stood forth precise and clear. And this marvelous abundance came without a trace of effort. Creation had long since ceased to be a labor. It had become merely a laissez faire, a passive serving as a vehicle for higher powers. Possessed by the spirit, Nietzsche had only to lift his eyes, those farsighted, deep

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thinking eyes, and his vision compassed infinite time—both past and future. To him, the clairvoyant, his visions were palpably present. He need only stretch forth his hand, that feverish, eager hand, to seize them. Scarcely had he seized them when they became alive, thronged with figures, pulsating with music, living, thinking entities.

This inflow of ideas, of images, did not cease for one second of these Napoleonic days. His spirit was flooded with them, swept away on their irresistible current. 'Zarathustra seized me.' He is ever speaking of thus being carried away, overmastered by some irresistible power; as if somewhere in the remoter reaches of his consciousness there were still a secret bulwark of rationality, an instinctive resistance to the mysterious forces that took possession of him. 'Possibly nothing was ever produced out of such an overflow of power,' Nietzsche exclaimed ecstatically of these last works. But he never ventured to say that it was his own power. On the contrary, he felt himself intoxicated with the spirit, 'a mere mouthpiece of some transcendental imperative.'

Who can presume to portray this miracle of inspiration, and yet the terror and the dread of these last months of incessant mind-and-body-exhausting creation, when he himself has described it in the transport of gratitude, in the vivid rapture, of the immediate experience? It is enough to catch these flashing glimpses from his pen:'Has anyone at the end of the nineteenth century a clear conception of what poets of a greater age called inspiration? I shall try to describe it. A man with even the faintest trace of superstition in himself will be unable to escape the feeling that he is merely an incarnation, a mouthpiece, a medium of superior powers. The conception of revelation, in the sense that suddenly,

with indescribable certainty and perfection, something visible, audible, comes to him, something that thrills and stirs his deepest being, simply records a fact. A man hears and does not seek; a man receives and does not ask who gives. A thought flashes into the mind like lightning, final and irrefutable. It has never been of my choosing. A rapture so intense that it dissolves in tears, that makes a man involuntarily hasten or slacken his steps; a feeling of complete disembodiment combined with a distinct consciousness of a succession of tremors, and thrills running over one from head to toe; a sensation of deep joy in which the most painful and poignant experiences seem not discords but only necessary shadowings in an overwhelming flood of light; an instinct of rhythmic relations spanning the infinite universe of forms, indeed, the expansion, the conscious necessity, of an all-embracing rhythm is pretty nearly a measure of the power of an inspiration, a sort of compensation for its pressure and tension, all this comes upon one involuntarily, in a whirlwind of sensations of freedom, illimitability, power, divinity. . . . The spontaneousness of the image, of the simile, is its most remarkable characteristic. A man is no longer conscious that it is an image, a simile. It comes to him directly as the immediate, the original, the simple form of expression. It really seems, to recall a saying of Zarathustra, as if the thing in itself came to one and offered itself as a simile: "Hereupon all things come caressingly to thy speech and flatter thee, for they will ride upon thy back. On every simile thou ridest to every truth. The words and treasurestores of words of all existence fly open for thee; all being seeks embodiment in words; all that comes into being would learn to speak from thee." This is my experience of inspiration. I doubt not

that one would have to go back ten thousand years to find another who would dare to say to me, "It is also mine.'

I know that the psychiater will see in this exhilarated, ecstatic self-glorification the euphoria, the final flash of joy, of the doomed, the stigma of megalomania, the self-exaltation typical in certain forms of insanity. But yet I ask, has any other man immortalized with such crystalline clearness the state of creative frenzy? For this is the unique, the unprecedented miracle of Nietzsche's last work — that a supreme degree of clarity accompanied the climax of his somnambulistic frenzy, that the wisdom of the serpent dwelt with him in the very midst of its bacchantic fury. All others thus selfdeified, those whose souls Dionysus has made drunken, have maundered and lost themselves in misty obscurities. They have spoken vaguely and confusedly, as men in dreams. All others who have gazed into the abyss have used an Orphic, a Pythian, a weird, mysterious speech that carries dread but not understanding to our minds, and that our intellect refuses to comprehend. But Nietzsche was as clear as crystal in the midst of his frenzy. His words are keen and precise in the very flame of the tripod. Possibly there never was another living man who bent over the brink of madness so intensely clear-sighted and conscious, so unshrinking and free from dizziness. Nietzsche's language is never colored, never clouded with mystery. On the contrary, at no time was he clearer and truer than during those last few moments when he was, so to speak, irradiated by the mystery of existence. To be sure, it was a dangerous radiance that made his soul so luminous. It was the weird, morbid glow of a midnight sun falling over icebergs. It was a northern light of the soul that fills the