Friedrich Nietzsche: Thus Spake Zarathustra

APPENDIX 81. NOTES ON "THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA" BY ANTHONY M. LUDOVICI. (continued)

At the last eight verses many readers may be tempted to laugh. In England we almost always laugh when a man takes himself seriously at anything save sport. And there is of course no reason why the reader should not be hilarious.--A certain greatness is requisite, both in order to be sublime and to have reverence for the sublime. Nietzsche earnestly believed that the Zarathustra-kingdom--his dynasty of a thousand years--would one day come; if he had not believed it so earnestly, if every artist in fact had not believed so earnestly in his Hazar, whether of ten, fifteen, a hundred, or a thousand years, we should have lost all our higher men; they would have become pessimists, suicides, or merchants. If the minor poet and philosopher has made us shy of the prophetic seriousness which characterized an Isaiah or a Jeremiah, it is surely our loss and the minor poet's gain.

Chapter LXII. The Cry of Distress.

We now meet with Zarathustra in extraordinary circumstances. He is confronted with Schopenhauer and tempted by the old Soothsayer to commit the sin of pity. "I have come that I may seduce thee to thy last sin!" says the Soothsayer to Zarathustra. It will be remembered that in Schopenhauer's ethics, pity is elevated to the highest place among the virtues, and very consistently too, seeing that the Weltanschauung is a pessimistic one. Schopenhauer appeals to Nietzsche's deepest and strongest sentiment--his sympathy for higher men. "Why dost thou conceal thyself?" he cries. "It is THE HIGHER MAN that calleth for thee!" Zarathustra is almost overcome by the Soothsayer's pleading, as he had been once already in the past, but he resists him step by step. At length he can withstand him no longer, and, on the plea that the higher man is on his ground and therefore under his protection, Zarathustra departs in search of him, leaving Schopenhauer--a higher man in Nietzsche's opinion--in the cave as a guest.

Chapter LXIII. Talk with the Kings.