THREE men, more than any others, have influenced the general trend of thought in modern Germany, Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche. Since the eclipse of France Germany has become more and more the workshop of ideas, and it might almost be said. of her that what she thinks to-day Europe will think to-morrow. None of the three belong, strictly speaking, to the ranks of the great thinkers of the world; but because they were all dowered with more than ordinary gifts of expression, their influence has been immediate and immense. For years the philosophy of Schopenhauer has affected the thought of cultured Europe. Of late that mighty stream of influence has seemed to divide into two currents; one tending to mysticism with the Wagner of PARSIFAL, the other with Nietzsche to a sort of aristocratic Nihilism. Nietzsche is the youngest of the three and the least known at present in England, though in Germany he has a growing band of ardent disciples. He was successively a disciple of Schopenhauer and Wagner before striking out his own line, and the study of his life must be to some extent a study of these influences also.

The tragedy of Friedrich Nietzsche's life is known in outline at least to all the world. From his early manhood he suffered from constant and disabling attacks of ill-health, and while still young, as youth is counted now, he became hopelessly insane. sister and life-long friend, whose biography of her hapless brother is as remarkable for its literary grace and interest as for its sincere and tender

His

feeling, deprecates what she holds to be the cruel and summary judgment by which the opponents of her brother's teaching have dismissed his later work as that of a madman. But in fact this work is of such unequal value, so remarkable in parts for wit, depth, insight, keen and ruthless satire, and again, so violent and bitter, affording so childish an exhibition of diseased egotism, that it is a charity to remember that the man who produced it, with all his great and noble gifts, was struggling for years with the forerunner of that foe which was finally to overwhelm one of the brightest intellects of our time in hopeless night.

The work of Nietzsche needs more than that of most men to be illustrated by a study of his life, because it is to an unusual extent the expression of a temperament. To those whose only acquaintance with his teaching is derived from the allusions to it in current literature and conversation, the knowledge of the man's individuality which is gained by the study of his life and letters will come as a surprise. Those who have taken the trouble to read his books, instead of merely reading about them, will have less to learn in coming face to face with the picture of this proud, diffident, self-centred, aspiring, and profoundly affectionate soul.

Friedrich Nietzsche was the son and grandson of Protestant pastors in Prussia, and his father had married a pastor's daughter. He was born into the straitest sect of the orthodox, and brought up in the little conservative town of Naumberg by a circle of

female relatives, his widowed mother, his grandmother, and aunts. In this eminently respectable, but perhaps rather confined and relaxing atmosphere he grew up a gentle, melancholy, studious lad, deeply attached to his mother and young sister, but tyrannising over them none the less from the heights of his masculine superiority, so free from childish blunders and naughtiness as never to need the wholesome rough discipline which teaches us our kinship with common clay. It seems likely that he missed that discipline all his life.

"We were pattern children" says his sister. When a wave of missionary enthusiasm passed over their little circle, Fritz sacrificed his tin soldiers to the good cause. He loved books and music, and had determined to be a pastor like his father and grandfather.

As a boy, there was an unusual dignity and refinement about him which exercised a strong influence over his companions. They dared not say a rude or coarse word before him. "What does he do to you?" one was asked. "Oh, it is not what he does. He just looks at you and the word sticks in your throat." He gained this influence, no doubt, on account of his power of self-mastery, which was unusual, almost unnatural, for his age. "Lisbeth," he used to say to his little sister, "he who has learned to command himself can also command others."

With the sequel of the story before one, the thought naturally arises that there was something ominous in this unusual moral and mental prococity. But Nietzsche began his student days at Bonn as the picture of health. Broad-shouldered and upright, with thick brown hair and dark complexion, he must have seemed to all who knew him at this time the picture of hopeful, earnest, aspiring youth.

He had already started on the path which was to lead him so far, to what lonely heights, into what desolate wildernesses of the spirit, he little suspected when in a letter to his sister he described the thinker's destiny: "To go on in the eternal pursuit of the true, the good, the beautiful, in all the uncertainty of a solitary path and in constant perplexity of spirit. Do we seek rest, peace, happiness? No, only truth, and though it were horrible and ugly, still we seek it." He had already comprehended,—and let us set that against all the follies into which an overweening intellectual conceit can lead a man,—that only such truth is of any worth as we make our own by personal effort and sacrifice, by the toil of our mind and the travail of our soul. Opinions, traditions, idly, carelessly accepted, fall away from us like dead leaves from a tree in the blasts of adversity, and when the being cries out for spiritual food they are like husks between the teeth of a starving man. But the faintest perception of the eternal truth of things which has revealed itself to passionate and persistent search, is life and the source of life; however mingled with error and pride, it bears its seed in it and it cannot perish.

His life at Bonn was not altogether satisfactory. He disliked and despised the gross conviviality of a German university town in those days. His fastidiousness diminished his influence with his fellow-students, and this was galling for one who loved to lead. Thrown back upon himself, he fell into the morbid tone of a youth aloof from and consciously above his fellows. In this frame of mind he came upon a copy of Schopenhauer's book, DIE WELT ALS WILLE UND VORSTELLUNG, and received it as a new gospel.

It is not as a mere metaphysician

that Schopenhauer has become the teacher of thousands, the majority of whom care very little for metaphysical science. It is rather be cause in him is expressed the reaction from that dream of human perfectibility which inspired so many generous minds at the beginning of our century. That great idea of evolution which has made а continuous chain between man and the dust of the field had entered into his imagination. He saw inorganic atoms attracted to each other by the blind forces of chemical affinity, and these combinations, touched by the mysterious breath of life, entering into new forms, aspiring to more complex manifestations of existence, -everything striving upwards to the point where human consciousness unfolds, the flower of creation. Only in his mind no such smiling image expressed the culmination of terrestrial things. To be conscious of life was to be conscious of misery. The whole creation groaned and travailed, but only in man did it become fully conscious of its helplessness and its need. Life was desire, unsatisfied desire; it was greed, envy, hatred, strife; it was disillusion and despair. The will to live was original sin; not St. Peter himself could speak more convincingly of the corruption that is in the world through desire. Salvation, according to him, is only to be found in the negation of desire, the denial of the will to live. Hence on the subject of renunciation, humility, and self-denial one finds him in unexpected agreement with Thomas à Kempis. But, though like another modern teacher, he claimed to have elucidated the secret of Jesus, his system of ethics is nearer to Buddhism than to Christianity. Christianity is no enemy of life; it only seeks to give our life its true centre; it aims not at denying the will, but at transforming it.

Such as his teaching was, however, young Nietzsche accepted it with enthusiasm. "One day," he says, “I picked up the volume, and I know not what demon said to me, 'Take this book home.' I took it home and throwing myself with my new treasure into a corner of the sofa I began to let the energetic gloomy genius work upon me. Every line spoke of selfdenial, renunciation, resignation."

He had rejected the asceticism of Schopenhauer by the time that, in his own words, he had "brought all his qualities and efforts before the tribunal of a gloomy self-scorn." He was "bitter, unjust, and uncontrollable in his hate against himself," carrying his self-denial so far as to deprive himself of his proper allowance of sleep, not going to bed till two in the morning and rising again at six.

It was at Leipzic that he began to study Schopenhauer's philosophy, and here he made an acquaintance which was destined to have an influence equally great on his career. has been much controversy about the relations between Nietzsche and

There

Richard Wagner. All the world knows that they were warm friends, that they quarrelled, and that Nietzsche printed some violent diatribes against Wagner. But in spite of all, it appears that Nietzsche's affection for Wagner was one of the strongest passions of his life, and that the estrangement between them gave him a wound that he carried to his grave.

This friend ship might be called the romance of a life which, so far as we know, was barren of romance in the ordinary sense. In spite of the affected contempt for women which his master Schopenhauer had taught him, Nietzsche had many friends among them whose character and intellect he admired and for whom he evinced a tender respect; but he seems never to have really loved any woman.

One day, so his sister tells us, long after the rupture with Wagner, while discussing literary questions with a friend, he suddenly enquired why the tedious theme of love should eternally form the subject of drama and romance. To this question, which has often been put, the friend gave the usual reply that no other feeling known to man calls forth such conflict of emotions, or presents in so strong a light the oppositions of character. "Well, friendship for example," Nietzsche replied, "calls forth the same spiritual emotions as love, but on a much higher plane. First of all comes the drawing together of two souls on the basis of a common conviction; then the bliss of belonging one to another in mutual admiration and idealisation; then suspicion on one side, and on the other fear that the loved one is falling away from his high ideal; then disenchantment, the pain of parting, and other unspeakable sorrows."

Such friendship as this is too delicate a plant for the kitchen-garden of the ordinary man, and perhaps it is as well; but Nietzsche's analysis gives, accurately enough from his point of view, the course of his relations with the great musician. He met him first at Leipsic, where he was continuing his studies. Wagner had heard of him as a young man of promise and a passionate admirer of his music, which was still caviare to the general and the passionate cult of a few. Nietzsche has described the musician as he first found him:

In 1869 Nietzsche became Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basle, a brilliant position for a young man of twenty-five. At this time Wagner and his second wife were living in retirement at Triebschen on the Lake of Lucerne, and Nietzsche with his sister were welcome guests at the pretty home. "Triebschen," writes Mme. Forster-Nietzsche, was an enchanting idyll, the ideal pair at the head of the house, the children, as pretty as pictures, with their cleverness and amusing ways, the faithful servants, the old picturesque gabled house with its garden and park, set in the splendid landscape." Wagner had built a hermitage on the highest point of the estate overlooking the lake, and there, in the moonlight, the two guests with Wagner and Frau Cosima discussed of the passion and pathos of human things, of the Greek art that had been, and the German art that was to be. "Never a cloud passed over our heaven," said Nietzsche; and Wagner appeared to him as the ideal man described by Schopenhauer, withdrawn from the sordid struggle of the will to live in the diviner air of a perpetual contemplation and service of beauty. Wagner on his side was full of confidence and cordiality. "With the exception of the Only One (die Einzige)" he said, "I have no one to whom I can speak so seriously as to you."

The roll of the war-drum broke

in upon his dreams. The conflict between France and Germany called all Germans to the defence of the fatherland. Nietzsche, prevented by

his position in a neutral State from serving as a combatant, set off with his sister to nurse the wounded, but was attacked with an illness which proved the precursor of the troubles which shadowed his later life.

He returned to his work and in 1871 published THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY, a copy of which he sent to his old teacher and friend, the famous scholar Ritschl. The scope of it may be judged by the old man's reply: "For me, as well as for you, Greece is the ever-retreating goal of the world's culture; but whether we are to attach ourselves to the same forms, is a question which the whole human race is now engaged in solving." He himself, he said, looked for the solution in that personal effort for the good of the race, in that loving devotion to others, by which men attained the freedom of self-forgetfulness. And of this, he added, even the most insignificant was capable. The Wagners on the contrary were delighted with the book. The musician hoped that the brilliant literary gift of his young friend would be employed in popularising his principles; but Nietzsche, with his passionate pride, was very far from regarding himself as the expositor of Wagner. This was the rock on which their friendship was destined to split. In 1872 the Wagners left Switzerland and the idyll of Triebschen came to an end.

Nietzsche, however, still hoped for nothing better than to work hand in hand with Wagner in the regeneration of German culture. He was disgusted with the arrogant tone adopted by his countrymen after the war, and occupied himself for some time with the scheme of a new system of education, which came to nothing.

By this time Nietzsche had travelled fast and far from his early influences. His overweening personal pride, his

consciousness of mental power and moral dignity, made Schopenhauer's picture of the abjectness of human life and the nothingness of human effort repellent to him. Schopenhauer's teaching is saturated with the sense of sin; for him existence is the great transgression, which can only be atoned for by incessant selfstultification. Man alone realises himself, and by so doing realises all the misery of existence. What escape or salvation has he but to die daily till Death the Deliverer calls him to the last sleep?

Wagner escaped this pessimism by his vision of love as the great redemptive force of the world. His last work, PARSIFAL, marks a definite return to the leading principles of Christianity. But when he first met Nietzsche he was under the influence of the ideas of 1848. Tyranny, oppression and convention were the source of the evils of the world. The perfectly natural and healthy man would do right by instinct and without thinking about it. Siegfried, in THE NIBELUNGEN RING, is a hero of this type, and it was one with which Nietzsche felt himself in full sympathy. His cult for the Greek spirit arose from his imagination of the Hellenes as a joyful careless people, untroubled by a sense of sin or moral obligation, and attaining to the highest bodily and mental perfection in a serene unconsciousness. This fancy picture, to which all great Greek literature gives the lie, entirely dominated his thoughts, and as Wagner approached more and more to Christian sentiment and belief, Nietzsche felt himself ever more remote from his friend. Other motives also came into play. His book on David Strauss, concerning which he boasted of being the first Immoralist (a term the full meaning of which will appear later), did not please his