to characterize it. Professor Ziegler speaks of him as a "metaphysically dissatisfied" man, and Dr. Möbius has a similar view.[1] Nietzsche once spoke of himself as "profondément triste."[2] It does not appear, however, that he was temperamentally melancholy; Möbius describes him rather as "sanguine-choleric,"[3] and his sister says (despite what I have already quoted) that he was given to playfulness and jokes as a boy—it was his thoughts, his disillusionment about men and things, that saddened him. With the shadow lurking "only around the corner for most of us—a skepticism as to life's value" (to quote Miss Jane Addams)[4] he was only too familiar. Let one read not only the passages I have already cited, but one in Thus spake Zarathustra beginning "The sun is already long down,"[5] or a description of the proud sufferer,[6] or an almost bitter paragraph on the last sacrifice of religion, namely the sacrifice of God himself.[7] And yet he met his depression and triumphed over it. He suffered much, renounced much—we feel it particularly in the works of the middle period[8]—and yet he gained far more than he lost, and will probably go down in history as one of the great affirmers of life and the world. But his joy is ever a warrior's joy—it is never the easy serenity, the unruffled optimism of Emerson.
- ↑ Theobald Ziegler, Friedrich Nietzsche; P. J. Möbius, Nietzsche, p. 36.
- ↑ Briefe, II, 597.
- ↑ Op. cit., p. 56; cf. Nietzsche of himself, Werke, XI, 382, § 587.
- ↑ The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, p. 103.
- ↑ II, x.
- ↑ Dawn of Day, § 425.
- ↑ Beyond Good and Evil, § 55; cf. Will to Power, §§ 302-3.
- ↑ See preface, § 5, to Mixed Opinions and Sayings.
