THE QUARTERLY REVIEW. ART. I.-1. Das Leben F. Nietzsche's. Von seiner Schwester. 2. Die Werke F. Nietzsche's. Eight Vols. Leipzig, 1896. 4. The Case of Wagner, &c. London, 1896. Translated by Dr. Tille. London, Translated by Thos. Common. 5. Der Einzige und sein' Eigenthum. Von Max Stirner. Zweite Auflage. Leipzig, 1882. And many other Works. NOMEWHERE about the year 1716, so runs the story, a Polish gentleman belonging to the noble house of Nietzsky was condemned to death for having conspired as a Protestant, with other Protestants, against the Republic. He made his escape, with wife and child, into German territory. Of him nothing more is known; and even these details may be little else than a legend. But Friedrich Nietzsche, whose life and opinions we are proposing to narrate, was proud of his Polish origin; nor did his restless, brilliant, self-centred, and unmanageable character, which at last broke down into madness, belie the affinities whereby we are led to think, if not, as he would persuade us, of Copernicus, yet certainly of Chopin. He is the latest, and by no means the least significant, of those spirits that, like the too often quoted Mephistopheles, 'say No' to an entire civilization. His one veto, his Nie pozwalam, or 'I decline to agree,' uttered with explosive rhetoric, and flowing out into ten thousand aphorisms, has made him the hero as well as the prophet of free-thinkers. To him the Church seems an effete superstition, the State mere tyranny, metaphysics the ghost of religion sitting upon its grave, morality a bugbear, Vol. 184.-No. 368. Y law law the enemy of life, and everything permissible so long as men please themselves. 6 This Great Charter, drawn in outline more than half a century ago by Max Stirner,-whom Dr. Nordau brushes aside as a crazy Hegelian,'-finds in Nietzsche such a wealth of light and colour-it is proclaimed with so sweeping an eloquence, and, we must add, with such damnable iteration'that none can marvel if the anarchists of all nations flock to his standard. What, in comparison with his laughing, singing, and dancing strophes are the pale arguments of a Max Stirner, the rants and furies of Bakunin, the geographical lectures and moral-revolutionary pleadings of Prince Kropotkin, or the halting deductions of Mr. Herbert Spencer? And in the deep gloom which hangs over Nietzsche, in his wanderings of the mind and the feet through so many high and wild landscapes, in the pathos of contrast suggested by his early and his latter years, in his present condition of insanity without hope, while his books are sumptuously edited, carefully translated, and studied from New York to St. Petersburg, all the elements of tragedy are mingled. Those who suffer persecution for a creed will naturally be drawn to preach it; and the family of the Polish fugitive, once established on a peaceful soil, dedicated themselves to the service of the Lutheran Church. Friedrich, the grandfather of our anarchist, born at Bibra in 1756, was Pastor of Wollmirstadt in Thuringia, Doctor of Divinity, and Superintendent at Eilenburg. He published Sermons, vindicated the Second Epistle of Peter against Grotius, offered a 'Rational View of Religion, Education, Loyalty, and Benevolence' to those whom the present excitement in the world of theology' seemed likely to trouble; and, dying at the age of seventy, left behind him the reputation of a worthy and learned parson. He was twice married, and had ten children. His second wife, sister of Dr. Krause and widow of Superintendent Krüger, exercised no small influence over the household in which young Friedrich grew up at Naumburg on the Saale. Like all his kinsfolk, she was sincerely religious, but in the somewhat light-tempered fashion which dwelt more upon making the world happy than upon her neighbours' sinfulness. Two of her sons became clergymen, and Karl Ludwig, the father of that boy who was to bring his Lutheran ancestors so much fame and shame, not only distinguished himself in his University course at Halle, but while quite a young man was appointed as tutor of the Princesses of Sachsen-Altenburg, one of whom afterwards became Grand Duchess of Oldenburg, and a second Grand Duchess Duchess Constantine of Russia. In 1841, when Ludwig was not yet thirty, he had gained the friendship as well as the personal acquaintance of his Sovereign, Frederick William IV., whose religious mysticism agreed in large measure with his own. The King gave him an excellent living at Röcken, a pleasant village, standing with its ivy-clad church-tower in a country of wood and water, not far from Lützen. There Friedrich was born, to his father's great joy, on the king's birthday, October 15, 1844. He received the pious monarch's name; and the event is recorded with trembling gratitude, in the pastor's baptismal register. What would have been that good man's feeling, had some unpitying genius shown him in vision the pages of Zarathustra,' which this child, whom he was dedicating with such solemn words, was destined one day to publish! But he foresaw no evil and died when Friedrich was not five years old. Meeting with a bad accident, by falling down a flight of steps, he underwent an illness which lasted some eleven months and terminated in softening of the brain. It does not appear, from the minute details given of her family by Madame Förster-Nietzsche, to whom we owe our knowledge, that there was any taint of unsoundness in the blood; neither would the copious early writings in prose and verse of Nietzsche himself, or his first published compositions, lead us to suspect in him congenital derangement of intellect. Young as he was, he felt deeply both his father's death and the change from Rücken, to which he was always attached,-from a country village, with its freedom and fresh air, to the rather melancholy streets of Naumburg. And in accordance with his grandmother's theory of education, he must attend the common school, and mix with the town-children,-an ordeal which this highly-sensitive, perhaps over-refined spirit could not endure. At first he made no friends, and was too earnest for his years. The boys called him 'little clergyman'; they took home stories of his extraordinary acquaintance with the Bible, and how he recited hymns that made them cry. Later on, his comrades made a hero of Friedrich; his sister worshipped him; and her recollections of his skill in amusements at home, his fantasies and fairy tales, his enthusiasm for the Russians during the Crimean War, his Homeric studies which infected all around, and his anxiety to understand as well as practise the religious principles taught him, furnish us with a child's biography, not very deep or philosophical, but pleasing and true. It is the old German home, with some added polish and an almost artistic clearness of feature, that charms by its combination of the picturesque and the natural. These two were pattern children, bred in the atmosphere of Lutheran piety, spending their holidays with a clerical grandfather in his country-living of Pobles, or with a clerical uncle at Nirmsdorf, and sheltered from the world by aunts and other feminine kindred, who might sometimes read the newspapers but were zealous for converting the heathen. They heard of Berlin, and studied the shop windows in Leipzig; but they feared no evil, for they knew no sin.' When the grandmother passed away, they moved into a smaller house, which had its old-fashioned garden to delight these old-fashioned little people; and Fritz, enamoured of music and verse-making, spent many hours in the arbour composing stanzas, some of which betray remarkable perfection of form, and a truth of emotion that is exceedingly rare in boys of twelve or thirteen. The fragments of autobiography which have been preserved from the same period are still more striking. Not only does the lad write with judgment and sense when to write at all would have been an uncommon merit, he looks before and after, knits up his literary enterprises into a whole, and displays a gift of introspection such as Goethe himself might have envied at that premature age. So promising a student was not likely to be overlooked; and in 1858 the Rector of the Land-School at Pforta gave Fritz a scholarship in that famous institution. The history of Pforta would be worth telling, had we space to describe its vicissitudes. Certain monks of the Order of St. Bernard, Cistercians, driven out by the heathen Slavs in the twelfth century, had taken refuge with Udo, Bishop of Naumburg, and founded their new monastery at Pforta in 1136, 'Cœnobium Stæ Mariæ de Porta.' By and by the Reformation came; and in 1543 Maurice Duke of Saxony, putting out the old monks, made of it a public school. The lines of this change were quaintly described by Duke Maurice himself as early as 1540. 'To the devout life,' says his instruction, shall the lads be brought up; and in the art of speaking, in discipline, and in virtue shall they be instructed six years long'; in consideration of all which, they shall be provided with masters and servants, teachers, living, and other necessaries, gratis. If the school accept them, for six years shall they be entertained and taught, I say gratis, yet so that they appear apt to study.' Fritz Nietzsche was, if ever a lad of his age, apt to study,' and he went to Pforta, 'willing, with reluctant mind.' For he was shy, solitary, and a prey to home sickness. Pforta had kept its walls, ten or twelve feet high, and was a vast enclosure of meadows watered by the Saale, and of buildings still severe and monastic in their grey old age. The discipline was strict, chapels frequent, and studies austere. There were two hundred students, including twenty externs. Fritz spent his six years in learning the classics, for which he felt a lifelong enthusiasm ; but he could make no way with mathematics, and his one other passion was music-luckily or unluckily for the European public which has read his criticisms on Wagner with admiration, wrath, and perplexity. The passion for reserve and reverie grew in solitude; he lived on his weekly visit home; and he breathed out in verse that deep depression no anodyne for which was anywhere accessible to him. With school-friends he founded the society Germania,' which, short-lived enough, gave him scope for the attempts in music and literature that he was ever making. Sometimes, thinking where he should travel during his holidays, he fell into strange dreams and travelled in his sleep; and once, thus roaming, as he thought, under comfortless vivid sunshine, there struck upon his ear a cry from the neighbouring asylum, which he records in a melancholy yet defiant tone. He did not foresee the future. are His school-days began to weary him; never could this intractable though modest-seeming temper submit to routine; and he hated the traditions as much as the advantages of the German scholar's life, long before he came to read Schopenhauer's diatribes against the University system. Neither was he impetuous in friendship, though attached and serviceable; he disliked the sentimental style; soon drew back from societies in which his quite un-German love of pure air and his refined courtesy met with no satisfaction; and was evidently thinking for himself, despite the almost military discipline under which he lived at Pforta. In many ways, now and later, we reminded of an unhappy English genius and New-Pagan, John Addington Symonds, whom Nietzsche not a little resembled. Both were outwardly diffident, at heart self-sustained and intractable; in either the capacity for mental suffering, heightened by illness and introspection, gave a keen sense of what pleasure there might be in life, were health its normal condition; each luxuriated in music yet was an imbecile in mathematics; and both combined an intense love of the Greek and Roman literature with the modern feeling for landscape, especially for the pictured shores of the Riviera, and high Alpine regions like the Engadine in which they found a home. Both, finally, turning from metaphysics as delusion, and convinced that religion, above all in its Christian dogmatic form, was |