Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche/the Nietzsche-Wagner Correspondence
ed. with a preface by ; authorized translation by Anthony M. Ludovici. New York and Toronto: Doubleday Page & Company. 1921. Large 8vo, xvi + 364 pp. $3.59.
ed. by ; translated by Caroline V. Kerr; introduction by H. L. Mencken. New York: Boni and Liveright. 1921. 8vo, xvii + 312 pp. $4.00.
THE Nietzsche letters so far published in German run to four volumes, and more will probably follow. In English they are reduced to two volumes: one made up of the Nietzsche-Wagner correspondence, edited by Frau Förster-Nietzsche and translated by Caroline V. Kerr, and the other of a miscellaneous selection, translated chiefly by Anthony M. Ludovici, with a preface by Dr. Oscar Levy. Dr. Levy, in his effort to prove that Nietzsche was not a 100 per cent German, somehow leaves in the air the notion that, if God had spared him until 1914, he might have been in favor of the ideals of the Allies. Do not be deceived. True enough, the great iconoclast, had a liking for the French, but certainly not as soldiers and politicians. As for the English, he loathed them with such fervor that even a Prussian lieutenant might have admired it as kolossal, and perhaps even as pyramidal. On all things English, from metaphysics to cookery, he heaped his most brilliant damns.
Unluckily, he died without having heard of the United States. Imagine Nietzsche on Prohibition! Or on the moralities of Dr. Wilson! Or on the literary style and epistemology of Dr. Harding!
The letters in these two volumes are by no means inspired compositions. The ideas in them might have occurred to any reasonably intelligent Privat Dozent; the personality they reveal to us is far more often professorial than satanic. Even when he writes to Georg Brandes, who made him known to Europe, Nietzsche seldom rises above the correct and the obvious. As a man and a citizen, indeed, he always stood a good deal nearer to the average Y.M.C. A. secretary than to Ludendorff, Lieut. Hard-Boiled Smith, or Genghis Khan. He served in the Red Cross in the war of 1870; he detested beer-drinkers and their raucous hochs; he subscribed (practically, not theoretically) to the single standard; he was afraid of his sister. In brief, a man with all the conventional virtues, and indistinguishable from the common fauna of his time and race save by his two piercing eyes, and his police captain’s moustache.
But that was the external professor. Within there was a heretic so cunning and so bold, so penetrating and so devastating that it is no wonder he is held in horror by all right-thinking folk. Put his books into the public schools, and in ten years Judge Gary and Gene Debs wall be hanging from the same gallows, and in the death-house, waiting their turn, will be Bishop Manning and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, Sam Gompers and Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, Dr. Frank Crane and Dr. Billy Sunday.
As I say, these volumes of letters are, in the main, dull and formal stuff. Two comedies, however, are in them: the comedy of Nietzsche’s effort to write music like Wagner, and the comedy of Wagner’s effort to become a metaphysician like Nietzsche. It is hard to say which made the worse failure. Most of Nietzsche’s music has been discreetly suppressed by his sister, but we have in the Selected Letters a very fair description of it — as it appeared to Hans von Bülow. Bülow first apologizes for being frank, and then lays on with a club: ‘the most extreme form of fantastic extravagance, . . .’ ‘ the most unedifying and most anti-musical composition,’ . . . ‘this aberration in the realm of music.’
Well, Nietzsche could console himself with the sufferings of Wagner in the philosophical cage. Wagner, flattered by the devotion of the young professor, tried to learn the Nietzschean lingo and the Nietzschean tricks of mind. It was, of course, hopeless. As well expect a Chautauqua orator to master the idiom of Henry James. Wagner was no philosopher: he was a great artist, and an even greater showman. In the end he threw Nietzscheism overboard, went to mass, and wrote Parsifal. Nietzsche answered by consigning him forth with to the deepest pit in Hell — far, far below even the crucibles inhabited by Prussians, Jews, Christians, lawyers, Gesangvereine, and Englishmen. H. L. MENCKEN.
NOTE. A much regretted error in printing last month caused one of our reviewers to ‘seem to say’ that Charmian London’s Book of Jack London was ‘not important’! The reviewer really said that the book was ‘not impartial,’ surely a pleasant thing to say about any wife’s story of her husband.
In response to requests from many librarians, the reviews printed each month in this department of the magazine will be reprinted separately in pamphlet form. Copies may be had by any librarian, without charge, on application to the Atlantic Monthly, 8 Arlington St., Boston.