Remy de Gourmont, “Nietzsche on the Mountain” (1902/13)

Draft translation. “Nietzsche sur le montagne,” Promenades philosophiques, tenth ed. (Paris: Mercure de France, 1913), pp. 176–7, dated 1902. Gourmont was far- and deep-sighted to have seen, already in 1902, the extent to which Nietzsche would determine the twentieth century.

PDF at academia.edu.

 

The last century, if one admit this slice of time, began with the literary Catholicism of Chateaubriand; it ends with the mystic Protestantism of Tolstoy. This was a placidly religious century; wise like a wise child, it never slipped its hand from the hand of its grandmother, Religion. This dame, truth be told, old, tired, but always the coquette, very often changed her costume and jewellery. She was Romantic, philosophical, humanitarian, socialist, nationalist, bellicose or pacific, ironical or lachrymose, moralistic, mystic or sensual, and even literary, and even scientific—and even arty: under all her hats and all her wigs, her eyeshadow and her blusher, she remained the same; and her grip did not ease for a second from the bruised wrist of the little child, even grown into a sad old man.

The new century is born under another star, which is not that of Bethlehem. It was during its first months of caterwauling that Nietzsche took possession of intelligent minds. So its prospects would be profoundly different, were we to dare to read its palm. Whatever the coming years hold, its first were placid. When one lives by one’s wit, one ought rather to live now, under Nietzsche, than under Chateaubriand, under Cousin, under Comte or under Tolstoy.

Tolstoy is the thought of the plain, of the steppe. The horizon, ever the same, is grey; pines and birches bend with the wind; the brush is as grey as the sky. Nietzsche is the thought of the mountain. The horizon is tormented, stormy. Black clouds fight like giants. A great laceration commences: distant truths appear, set aflame by the rays of a rising sun. Nietzsche wrote his last books at Sils-Maria in the Engadin. Dreamt amid oxygen and ozone, his philosophy has real respiratory benefits. It has the purity of the air at the peaks; it increases vital energies.

Nietzsche thought on the mountain.