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People have sometimes said that Nietzsche had no sense of humour. Here we seem to have a puzzle. Zarathustra himself, while relating his experience with the fire-dog to his disciples, fails to get them interested in his narrative, and we also may be only too ready to turn over these pages under the impression that they are little more than a mere phantasy or poetical flight.
And another of these diseases is called "the fire-dog": concerning HIM men have greatly deceived themselves, and let themselves be deceived. To fathom this mystery did I go o'er the sea; and I have seen the truth naked, verily! barefooted up to the neck.
Now do I know how it is concerning the fire-dog; and likewise concerning all the spouting and subversive devils, of which not only old women are afraid. "Up with thee, fire-dog, out of thy depth!" cried I, "and confess how deep that depth is! Whence cometh that which thou snortest up? Thou drinkest copiously at the sea: that doth thine embittered eloquence betray!
Thus spake I before the fire-dog: then did he interrupt me sullenly, and asked: "Church? What is that?" "Church?" answered I, "that is a kind of state, and indeed the most mendacious. But remain quiet, thou dissembling dog! Thou surely knowest thine own species best!
Zarathustra's interview with the fire-dog is, however, of great importance. In it we find Nietzsche face to face with the creature he most sincerely loathes the spirit of revolution, and we obtain fresh hints concerning his hatred of the anarchist and rebel.
When the fire-dog heard this, he could no longer endure to listen to me. Abashed did he draw in his tail, said "bow-wow!" in a cowed voice, and crept down into his cave. Thus told Zarathustra. His disciples, however, hardly listened to him: so great was their eagerness to tell him about the sailors, the rabbits, and the flying man. "What am I to think of it!" said Zarathustra.
But at the bottom of their hearts they were all full of anxiety and longing: so their joy was great when on the fifth day Zarathustra appeared amongst them. And this is the account of Zarathustra's interview with the fire-dog: The earth, said he, hath a skin; and this skin hath diseases. One of these diseases, for example, is called "man."
The other mummers have never spoken to me in their lives, so that it would be safe enough; and if it were not, I should not mind. Now, what must I give you to agree to this? Half a crown?" The youth shook his head "Five shillings?" He shook his head again. "Money won't do it," he said, brushing the iron head of the fire-dog with the hollow of his hand.
It consisted of numerous horses in the last stage of decrepitude, the animals being such mere skeletons that at first Ethelberta hardly recognized them to be horses at all; they seemed rather to be specimens of some attenuated heraldic animal, scarcely thick enough through the body to throw a shadow: or enlarged castings of the fire-dog of past times.
"'Freedom' ye all roar most eagerly," he says to the fire-dog, "but I have unlearned the belief in 'Great Events' when there is much roaring and smoke about them. Not around the inventors of new noise, but around the inventors of new values, doth the world revolve; INAUDIBLY it revolveth." This refers, of course, to Schopenhauer.
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