The sickness and the soundness of life, both these were in Nietzsche. In his demand for an artistic culture he put his finger upon the wound of present humanity. This demand was accepted, the meaning of the demand was lost sight of. This was the fatality--as if Nietzsche required a new artistic culture only, and not at the same time a new life culture! Beauty the form of life indeed, but strength, will, deed, the content--that was the brave burden of the prophet's message.
Nietzsche was born into a time that marked the climax of a more than millennial cultus of Death. The old songs of death as bridge of sunset into the eternal day of Bliss, songs of earthly lamentation and heavenly yearning and anticipation, these no longer came from the heart, to be sure; though still sung, the voices of "the faithful" grew ever thinner and thinner; and the songs were a monument of past piety rather than a witness to a present. Like vice, this earth which was once "a monster of so frightful mien" was first endured, then pitied, then embraced--and even wedded by man; its sufferings were healed and its delights enjoyed. The pain, the pleasure of earth, what does it mean? man's heart again asked as it asked in happy Greece long ago. But as time went by, the human mind was bruised and broken over this question, until it concluded that all we call life is a great illusion. And back and behind this life, with its tumult and fitful fever, there is the "vasty deep" of the infinite nothing. Life is a cheat. And now there is Weltschmerz, Lebenschmerz--simply a naturalistic form of the old ecclesiastical longing for death. It said the same "No!" to life that the old church song said--it, too, valued the day of death higher than the day of birth; it, too, urged that, since life is intrinsically evil, the cure of the evil is to live as little as possible.
Into such a world Friedrich Nietzsche was born, breathed its atmosphere, was himself once drunk upon its drugged drinks. The preacher of this modern yearning for Nirvana,--i.e., not metaphysical non-existence but psychological desirelessness,--was Schopenhauer as well as his disciple von Hartmann. This is the worst possible world, croaked Schopenhauer; No, moaned von Hartmann, it is not the worst possible world, it is the best possible world, but it is worse than none! And once Nietzsche called Schopenhauer his teacher--went forth as an enthusiastic apostle of the message of passive resignation to the inevitable sorry scheme of things, nay, of the message that the world is the work of an anguished god seeking redemption from the infinite misery of existence by the infinite negation of life.