Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/507

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NOTES
491

but Charles Francis Adams remarks in his recently published autobiography (Charles Francis Adams, 1835-1915: An autobiography, p. 196): "I have known, and known tolerably well, a good many 'successful' men—'big' financially—men famous during the last half century; and a less interesting crowd I do not care to encounter. Not one that I have ever known would I care to meet again, either in this world or the next; nor is one of them associated in my mind with the idea of humor, thought, or refinement. A set of mere money-makers and traders, they were essentially unattractive and uninteresting."

e Nietzsche's earliest reference (i.e., in his first, semi-metaphysical period) to the doctrines of the French Revolution was uncomplimentary—they were an un-German, superficial, and unmetaphysical philosophy of the Romanic order (Werke, IX, 161). He thinks that the Revolution would have been much tamer and no such seduction for men of intellect as it proved to be, had not Chamfort cast in his lot with it (Joyful Science, § 95; cf . § 350). He, however, speaks with unstinted admiration of Carnot, "the soldier and the republican," calling him "great, brave, simple, silent" (Dawn of Day, § 167).

f Nietzsche views democracy in other aspects on which I have not space to dwell. But I may note what he says of its influence on music. He finds German music more European than any other, since it alone reflects the changed European spirit; in Italian operas we still hear choruses of servants and soldiers, not of the people. Explicable also in this way is a kind of middle-class attitude of jealousy toward noblesse, particularly toward esprit and elegance, which is observable in German music; it is no longer music like that of Goethe's singer before the castle-gate, which pleases the hall and the king. Beethoven represents the new tendency, who, as compared with Goethe (one thinks of their encounter at Teplitz) appears like half-barbarism alongside of culture, the people alongside of the noble class. Nietzsche even raises the question whether the increasing contempt of melody among Germans is not a democratic symptom (Unart) and an after-effect of the Revolution—melody being akin to law-abidingness, as contrasted with the revolutionary spirit of change. See Joyful Science, § 103.

g Alfred Fouillée (Nietzsche et l'Immoralisme, p. 11) notes that a German writer (Gistrow) has tried to make a place for Nietzsche's ideas under evolutionary socialism.

h He once goes so far as to describe the socialists as angry with the commandment, "Thou shalt not steal," and wishing to have it read instead, "Thou shalt not own" (The Wanderer etc., § 285). In Human, etc., § 460, there is a picture of "the great man of the masses," which is displeasing enough. After considering in still another passage (Dawn of Day, § 188) the tendency to drunkenness among the people, he asks dubiously whether we are to intrust politics to them, and his sister tells us that he was angry with the socialist leaders because they did not contend with all their might against the excessive use of alcohol among the workers, since it was a worse enemy to them than all else which they counted hostile (Werke, pocket ed., V, xix; cf. xx).

i Nietzsche even thinks that for the time being at least culture on a military basis stands high above all so-called industrial culture—soldiers and their leaders having still a much higher relation to each other than workers and their employers; he sets down industrial culture in its present form as the lowest (gemeinste) form of existence that has ever been, expressly disagreeing with Herbert Spencer. "Here works simply the law of necessity: men want to live and have to sell themselves, but they despise the one who exploits this necessity and buys them" (Joyful Science, § 40; Werke, XI, 369, § 557).

j Even a European style of dress, as distinguished from national