The Dawn of Day

THOSE who wish to approach Nietzsche’s personality through the medium of English cannot but welcome a translation so satisfactory as this of Morgenröthe.¹ A few puzzles of punctuation, a few lapses from idiomatic English, rarely an error, but in the main an effective rendering with the poetic passages seemingly the better done. The work belongs to the earlier years of Nietzsche’s matured thought, and represents him at his best. It is divided into five books, into nearly four hundred paragraphs and aphorisms, coordinated by the vaguest threads of suggestion, yet throughout bearing the author’s characteristic challenge.

It is not likely that Nietzsche can arouse in the English-thinking world more than a shadow of the interest which he has called forth in Germany. For apart from the fact that receptivity to his appeal implies a German omnivorousness of speculative appetite, one may now fairly affirm that he is a figure in the literary rather than in the philosophical life of his nation. He invented for German a new style, giving it compactness combined with suggestiveness and form, and conquering the paragraph in a manner new to the tongue. Skill with the paragraph is no novelty in French and English; and it is by this that Nietzsche often achieves the semblance of vigor and originality in thought where these are really wanting.

For Nietzsche was not an original thinker. His ideas are current property of his age. Kant, Schopenhauer, Darwin, Comte, — all these appear in the medley, fantastic, fragmentary, and interlarded with innumerable trivialities; there is never any real reconstruction of elements, never any congruity. True, there are flashes of keen psychology and occasional sublimities of bitterness, all Nietzsche’s own ; but for the most part what he adds is merely the striking aspect, the harsh humanization of the idea.

Possibly the essence of his service to German thought lies just in the fact that the humanization is both vivid and harsh. His was a tormented soul with the ethical conscience ever on the rack. He could not accept speculation in the orthodox German way, as distantly ideal, abstruse, beyond the ken of practical interest; he felt that its meaning is very near human life. And however awry his conceptions, the intensity of his interest in moral significances emphasizes, as it is needful to emphasize, that the raison d’être of philosophy is its application to human conduct and desire.

But for us, interest is less in Nietzsche’s thought than in his personality. His is in many respects the characteristic case of the malady of the age. He began his speculative life as a disciple of Schopenhauer, that is, as a romantic pessimist. But he lacked the massiveness of temperament necessary to endure the pessimism after the romance was gone. The terror of it wrought revulsion and a struggling for the light in life. Perhaps the very desperation of his effort defeated its end, for he was never able to free himself from the strife. The bitterness of his attacks upon moral convention shows how gallingly that convention held him bound; his exaltations of prowess and power reveal his own sense of exasperated impotence ; his adorations of freedom tell only the hopelessness of his servitude. Nietzsche’s was a brilliant intellect, but he lacked the strength to hold it to the set task; he could only struggle on, desperately, till lost in mental darkness.

The Dawn of Day should not be read by those whose moral sensibility is easily offended, nor by those who care for thought wholly for the thought’s sake; but the student of life and of the times, if he be endowed with a certain catholicity of sentiment, will not read it without reward.

H. B. A.