Nietzsche installed himself at Basle, selected his domicile, and exchanged visits with his colleagues. But Richard Wagner was constantly in his thoughts. Three weeks after his arrival some friends joined with him in an expedition to the shores of the lake of the Four Cantons. One morning he left them and set off on foot by the river bank towards the master's retreat, Triebschen. Triebschen is the name of a little cape which protrudes into the lake; a solitary villa and a solitary garden, whose high poplars are seen from afar, occupy its expanse.
He stopped before the closed gate and rang. Trees hid the house. He looked around, as he waited, and listened: his attentive ear caught the resonance of a harmony which was soon muffled up in the noise of footsteps. A servant opened the door and Nietzsche sent in his card; then he was left to hear once more the same harmony, dolorous, obstinate, many times repeated. The invisible master ceased for a moment, but almost at once was busy again with his experiments, raising the strain, modulating it, until, by modulating once more, he had brought back the initial harmony. The servant returned. Herr Wagner wished to know if the visitor was the same Herr Nietzsche whom he had met one evening at Leipsic.[Pg 72] "Yes," said the young man. "Then would Herr Nietzsche be good enough to come back at luncheon time?" But Nietzsche's friends were awaiting him, and he had to excuse himself. The servant disappeared again, to return with another message. "Would Herr Nietzsche spend the Monday of Pentecost at Triebschen?" This invitation he was able to accept and did accept.
Nietzsche came to know Wagner at one of the finest moments of the latter's life. The great man was alone, far from the public, from journalists, and from crowds. He had just carried off and married the divorced wife of Hans von Bülow, the daughter of Liszt and of Madame d'Agoult, an admirable being who was endowed with the gifts of two races. The adventure had scandalised all the Pharisees of old-fashioned Germany. Richard Wagner was completing his work in retreat: a gigantic work, a succession of four dramas, every one of which was immense: a work which was not conceived for the pleasure of men, but for the trouble and salvation of their souls; a work so prodigious that no public was worthy to hear it, no company of singers worthy to sing it, no stage, in short, vast enough or noble enough to make its representation possible. What matter! The world must stoop to Richard Wagner; it was not for him to yield to it. He had finished Rhinegold, and the Valkyries; Siegfried was soon to be completed; and he began to know the joy of the workman who has mastered his work, and is able at last to view it as a whole.
Restlessness and anger were mixed with his joy, for he was not of those who are content with the approbation of an élite. He had been moved by all the dreams of men, and he wished in his turn to move all men. He needed the crowd, wanted to be listened to by it, and never ceased to call to the Germans, always heavy and slow-footed in following him. "Aid me," he cries out in his books, "for you begin to be strong. Because of your[Pg 73] strength do not disdain, do not neglect those who have been your spiritual masters, Luther, Kant, Schiller and Beethoven: I am the heir of these masters. Assist me. I need a stage where I may be free; give me it! I need a people who shall listen to me; be that people! Aid me, it is your duty. And, in return, I will glorify you."
We may picture this first visit: Nietzsche with his soft manners, his nervous voice, his fiery and veiled look; his face which was so youthful in spite of the long, drooping moustache; Wagner in the strength of the fifty-nine years that he carried without sign of weakness, overflowing with intuitions and experiences, desires and expectations, exuberant in language and gesture. What was their first interview like? We have no record of it, but no doubt Wagner repeated what he was writing in his books, and said imperiously: "Young man, you too must help me."
The night was fine and conversation spirited. When it was time for Nietzsche to go, Wagner desired to accompany his guest on his way home along the river. They went out together. Nietzsche's joy was great. The want from which he had long suffered was now being supplied; he had needed to love, to admire, to listen. At last he had met a man worthy to be his master; at last he had met him for whom no admiration, no love could be too strong. He gave himself up entirely and resolved to serve this solitary and inspired being, to fight for him against the inert multitude, against the Germany of the Universities, of the Churches, of the Parliaments, and of the Courts. What was Wagner's impression? No doubt he too was happy. From the very beginning he had recognised the extraordinary gifts of his young visitor. He could converse with him; and to converse means to give and to receive. And so few men had been able to afford him that joy.
On the 22nd of May, eight days after this first visit,[Pg 74] a few very intimate friends came from Germany to Triebschen to celebrate the first day of their master's sixtieth year. Nietzsche was invited, but had to decline, for he was preparing his opening lecture and did not like to be distracted at his task. He was anxious to express straightway the conception that he had formed of his science and of its teaching. For his subject he took the Homeric problem, that problem which is an occasion of division between scholars who analyse antiquity and artists who delight in it. His argument was that the scholars must resolve this conflict by accepting the judgment of the artists. Their criticism, fecund in useful historical results, had restored the legend and the vast frame of the two poems. But it had decided nothing, and could have decided nothing. After all, the Iliad and the Odyssey were there before the world in clear shapes, and if Goethe chose to say: "The two poems are the work of a single poet "—the scholar had no reply. His task was modest, but useful and deserving of esteem. Let us not forget, said Nietzsche at the conclusion of his inaugural lecture, how but a few years ago these marvellous Greek masterpieces lay buried beneath an enormous accumulation of prejudices. The minute labour of our students has saved them for us. Philology is neither a Muse nor a Grace; she has not created this enchanted world, it is not she who has composed this immortal music. But she is its virtuoso, and we have to thank her that these accents, long forgotten and almost indecipherable, resound again, and that is surely a high merit. "And as the Muses formerly descended among the heavy and wretched B?otian peasants, this messenger comes to-day into a world filled with gloomy and baneful shapes, filled with profound and incurable sufferings, and consoles us by evoking the beautiful and luminous forms of the Gods, the outlines of a marvellous, an azure, a distant, a fortunate country...."
[Pg 75]
Nietzsche was highly applauded by the bourgeois of Basle, who had come in great numbers to hear the young master whose genius had been announced. His success pleased him, but his thoughts went otherwhere, towards another marvellous, azure, and distant land—Triebschen. On the 4th of June he received a note:
"Come and sleep a couple of nights under our roof," wrote Wagner. "We want to know what you are made of. Little joy I have so far from my German compatriots. Come and save the abiding faith which I still cling to, in what I call, with Goethe and some others, German liberty."
Nietzsche was able to spare these two days and henceforward was a familiar of the master's. He wrote to his friends:
"Wagner realises all our desires: a rich, great, and magnificent spirit; an energetic character, an enchanting man, worthy of all love, ardent for all knowledge. ... But I must stop; I am chanting a p?an....
"I beg you," he says further, "not to believe a word of what is written about Wagner by the journalists and the musicographers. No one in the world knows him, no one can judge him, since the whole world builds on foundations which are not his, and is lost in his atmosphere. Wagner is dominated by an idealism so absolute, a humanity so moving and so profound, that I feel in his presence as if I were in contact with divinity...."
Richard Wagner had written, at the request of Louis II., King of Bavaria, a short treatise on social metaphysics. This singular work, which had been conceived to fascinate a young and romantic prince,[Pg 76] was carefully withheld from publicity, and lent only to intimates. Wagner gave it to Nietzsche, and few things surely that the latter ever read went home more deeply. As traces of the impression he received from it are to be discovered in his work down to the very end, it will be worth our while to give some idea of its nature.
Wagner starts by explaining an old error of his: in 1848 he had been a Socialist. Not that he had ever welcomed the ideal of a levelling of men; his mind, avid of beauty and order, in other words, of superiorities, could not have welcomed a notion of the kind. But he hoped that a humanity liberated from the baser servitudes would rise with less effort to an understanding of art. In this he was mistaken, as he now understood.
"My friends, despite their fine courage," he wrote, "were vanquished; the emptiness of their effort proved to me that they were the victims of a basic error and that they had asked from the world what the world could not give them."
His view cleared and he recognised that the masses are powerless, their agitations vain, their co-operation illusory. He had believed them capable of introducing into history a progress of culture. Now he saw that they could not collaborate towards the mere maintenance of a culture already acquired. They experience only such needs as are gross, elementary, and short-lived. For them all noble ends are unattainable. And the problem which reality obliges us to solve is this: how are we to contrive things so that the masses shall serve a culture which must always be beyond their comprehension, and serve it with zeal and love, even to the sacrifice of life? All politics are comprised within this question, which appears insoluble, and yet is not. Consider Nature: no one understands her ends; and yet all beings serve her. How does Nature obtain their adhesion to life? She deceives her creatures. She puts them in[Pg 77] hope of an immutable and ever-delayed happiness. She gives them those instincts which constrain the humblest of animals to lengthy sacrifices and voluntary pains. She envelops in illusion all living beings, and thus persuades them to struggle and to suffer with unalterable constancy.
Society, wrote Wagner, ought to be upheld by similar artifices. It is illusions that assure its duration, and the task of those who rule men is to maintain and to propagate these conserving illusions. Patriotism is the most essential. Every child of the people should be brought up in love of the King, the living symbol of the fatherland, and this love must become an instinct, strong enough to render the most sublime abnegation an easy thing.
The patriotic illusion assures the permanence of the State but does not suffice to guarantee a high culture. It divides humanity, it favours cruelty, hatred, and narrowness of thought. The King, whose glance dominates the State, measures its limits, and is aware of purposes which extend beyond it. Here a second illusion is necessary, the religious illusion whose dogmas symbolise a profound unity and a universal love. The King must sustain it among his subjects.
The ordinary man, if he be penetrated with this double illusion, can live a happy and a worthy life: his way is made clear, he is saved. But the life of the prince and his counsellors is a graver and a more dangerous thing. They propagate the illusions, therefore they judge them. Life appears to them unveiled, and they know how tragic a thing it is. "The great man, the exceptional man," writes Wagner, "finds himself practically every day in the same condition in which the ordinary man despairs of life, and has recourse to suicide." The prince and the aristocracy which surrounds him, his nobles, are forearmed by their valour against so cowardly a temptation.[Pg 78] Nevertheless, they experience a bitter need to "turn their back on the world." They desire for themselves a restful illusion, of which they may be at the same time the authors and the accessories. Here art intervenes to save them, not to exalt the na?ve enthusiasm of the people, but to alleviate the unhappy life of the nobles and to sustain their valour. "Art," writes Richard Wagner, addressing Louis II., "I present to my very dear friend as the promised and benignant land. If Art cannot lift us in a real and complete manner above life, at least it lifts us in life itself to the very highest of regions. It gives life the appearance of a game, it withdraws us from the common lot, it ravishes and consoles us."
"Only yesterday"—wrote Nietzsche to Gersdorff on the 4th of August, 1869—"I was reading a manuscript which Wagner confided to me, Of the State and Religion, a treatise full of grandeur, composed in order to explain to 'his young friend,' the little King of Bavaria, his particular way of understanding the State and Religion. Never did any one speak to his King in a tone more worthy, more philosophical; I felt myself moved and uplifted by that ideality which the spirit of Schopenhauer seems constantly to inspire. Better than any other mortal, the King should understand the tragic essence of life."
In September, Friedrich Nietzsche, after a short stay in Germany, returned to a life divided between Basle and Triebschen. At Basle he had his work, his pupils, who listened to him with attention, the society of amiable colleagues. His wit, his musical talent, his friendship with Richard Wagner, his elegant manners and appearance, procured him a certain prestige. The best houses[Pg 79] liked his company, and he did not refuse their invitations. But all the pleasures of society are less acceptable than the simplest friendship, and Nietzsche had not a single friend in this honest bourgeois city; at Triebschen alone was he satisfied.
"Now," he writes to Erwin Rohde, who was living at Rome, "I, too, have my Italy, but I am able to visit it only on Saturdays and Sundays. My Italy is called Triebschen, and I already feel as if it were my home. Recently I have been there four times running, and into the bargain a letter travels the same road almost every week. My dear friend, what I see and hear and learn there I find it impossible to tell you. Schopenhauer and Goethe, Pindar and ?schylus are, believe me, still alive."
Each of his returns was an occasion of melancholy. A feeling of solitude depressed him. He confided in Erwin Rohde, speaking at the same time of the hopes he had in his work.
"Alas, dear friend," he said, "I have very few satisfactions, and solitary, always solitary, I must ruminate on them all within myself. Ah! I should not fear a good illness, if I could purchase at that price a night's conversation with you. Letters are so little use!... Men are constantly in need of midwives, and almost all go to be delivered in taverns, in colleges where little thoughts and little projects are as plentiful as litters of kittens. But when we are full of our thought no one is there to aid us, to assist us at the difficult accouchment: sombre and melancholy, we deposit in some dark hole our birth of thought, still heavy and shapeless. The sun of friendship does not shine upon them."
[Pg 80]
"I am becoming a virtuoso in the art of solitary walking," he says again; and he adds: "My friendship has something pathological about it." Nevertheless he is happy in the depths of his being; he says so himself one day, and warns his friend Rohde against his own letters:
"Correspondence has this that is vexatious about it: one would like to give the best of oneself, whereas, in fact, one gives what is most ephemeral, the accord and not the eternal melody. Each time that I sit down to write to you, the saying of H?lderlin (the favourite author of my schooldays) comes back to my mind: 'Denn liebend giebt der Sterbliche vom Besten!' And, as well as I remember, what have you found in my last letters? Negations, contrarieties, singularities, solitudes. Nevertheless, Zeus and the divine sky of autumn know it, a powerful current carries me towards positive ideas, each day I enjoy exuberant hours which delight me with full perceptions, with real conceptions—in such instants of exalting impressions, I never miss sending you a long letter full of thoughts and of vows; and I fling it athwart the blue sky, trusting, for its carriage towards you, to the electricity which is between our souls."
And we can get a glimpse of these positive ideas, these precious impressions, because we are in possession of all the notes and the blunders of the young man who was acquiring, at the price of constant effort, strength and mastery.
"My years of study," he wrote to Ritschl, "what have they been for me? A luxurious sauntering across the domains of philology and art; hence my gratitude is especially lively at this moment that I address you who have been till now the 'destiny' of my life; and hence[Pg 81] I recognise how necessary and opportune was the offer which changed me from a wandering into a fixed star, and obliged me to taste anew the satisfaction of galling but regular work, of an unchanging but certain object. A man's labour is quite another thing, when the holy anangkei of his profession helps him; how peaceful is his slumber, and, awakening, how sure is his knowledge of what the day demands. There, there is no philistinism. I feel as if I were gathering a multitude of scattered pages in a book."
The Origin of Tragedy proves to be the book the guiding ideas of which Nietzsche was now elaborating. Greek thought remains the centre round which his thought forms, and he meditates, in audacious fashion, on its history. A true historian, he thinks, should grasp its ensemble in a rapid view. "All the great advances in Philology," he writes in his notes, "are the issue of a creative gaze." The eyes of a Goethe discovered a Greece clear and serene. Being still under the domination of his genius, we continue to perceive the image which he has put before us. But we should seek and discover for ourselves. Goethe fixed his gaze on the centuries of Alexandrine culture. Nietzsche neglects these. He prefers the rude and primitive centuries, whither his instinct, since his eighteenth year, had led him when he elected to study the distiches of the aristocrat, Theognis of Megara. There he inhales an energy, a strength of thought, of action, of endurance, of infliction; a vital poetry, vital dreams which rejoice his soul.
Finally, in this very ancient Greece, he finds again, or thinks that he finds again, the spirit of Wagner, his master. Wagner wishes to renew tragedy, and, by using the theatre, as it were, as a spiritual instrument, to reanimate the diminished sense of poetry in the human soul. The "tragic" Greeks had a similar ambition;[Pg 82] they wished to raise their race and ennoble it again by the most striking evocation of myths. Their enterprise was a sublime one, but it failed, for the merchants of the Pir?us, the democracy of the towns, the vulgar herd of the market-place and of the port, did not care for a lyrical art which stipulated a too lofty manner of thought, too great a nobleness in deed. The noble families were vanquished and tragedy ceased to exist. Richard Wagner encounters similar enemies—they are the democrats, insipid thinkers, and base prophets of well-being and peace.
"Our world is being judaised, our prattling plebs, given over to politics, is hostile to the idealistic and profound art of Wagner," writes Nietzsche to Gersdorff. "His chivalrous nature is contrary to them. Is Wagner's art, as, in other times, ?schylus's art, to suffer defeat?" Friedrich Nietzsche is always occupied with a like combat.
He unfolds these very new views to his master. "We must renew the idea of Hellenism," he says to him; "we live on commonplaces which are false. We speak of the 'Greek joy,' the 'Greek serenity'; this joy, this serenity, are tardy fruits and of poor savour, the graces of centuries of servitudes. The Socratic subtlety, the Platonic sweetness, already bear the mark of the decline. We must study the older centuries, the seventh, the sixth. Then we touch the na?ve force, the original sap. Between the poems of Homer, which are the romance of her infancy, and the dramas of ?schylus, which are the act of her manhood, Greece, not without long effort, enters into the possession of her instincts and disciplines. It is the knowledge of these times which we should seek, because they resemble our own. Then the Greeks believed, as do the Europeans of to-day, in the fatality of natural forces; and they believed also that man must create for himself his virtues and his gods.[Pg 83] They were animated by a tragic sentiment, a brave pessimism, which did not turn them away from life. Between them and us there is a complete parallel and correspondence; pessimism and courage, and the will to establish a new beauty...."
Richard Wagner interested himself in the ideas of the young man, and associated him more and more intimately in his life. One day, Friedrich Nietzsche being present, he received from Germany the news that the Rhinegold and the Valkyries, badly executed far from his advice and direction, had had a double failure. He was sad and did not hide his disappointment; he was afflicted by this depreciation of the immense work which he had destined for a non-existent theatre and public, and which now crumbled before his eyes. His noble suffering moved Nietzsche.
Nietzsche took part in his master's work. Wagner was then composing the music of the Twilight of the Gods. Page after page the work grew, without haste or delay, as though from the regular overflowing of an invisible source. But no effort absorbed Wagner's thought, and, during these same days, he wrote an account of his life. Friedrich Nietzsche received the manuscript with directions to have it secretly printed, and to supervise the publication of an edition limited to twelve copies. He was asked to oblige with more intimate services. At Christmas, Wagner was preparing a Punch and Judy show for his children. He wanted to have pretty figurines, devils and angels. Madame Wagner begged Nietzsche to purchase them in Basle. "I forget that you are a professor, a doctor, and a philologist," she said graciously, "and remember only your five-and-twenty years." He examined the figurines of Basle, and, not finding them to his liking, wrote to Paris for the most frightful devils, the most beatific angels imaginable. Friedrich Nietzsche, admitted to the solemnity of the[Pg 84] Punch and Judy show, spent the Christmas festival with Wagner, his wife and family, in the most charming of intimacies. Cosima Wagner made him a present; she gave him a French edition of Montaigne, with whom, it seems, he was not acquainted, and of whom he soon became so fond. She was imprudent that day. Montaigne is perilous reading for a disciple.
"This winter I have to give two lectures on the ?sthetic of the Greek tragedies," wrote Nietzsche, about September, to his friend the Baron von Gersdorff; "and Wagner will come from Triebschen to hear them." Wagner did not go, but Nietzsche was listened to by a very large public.
He described an unknown Greece, vexed by the mysteries and intoxications of the god Dionysius, and through its trouble, through this very intoxication, initiated into poetry, into song, into tragic contemplation. It seems that he wished to define this eternal romanticism, always alike to him, whether in Greece of the sixth century B.C. or in Europe of the thirteenth century; the same, surely, which inspired Richard Wagner in his retreat at Triebschen. Nietzsche, however, abstained from mentioning this latter name.
"The Athenian coming to assist at the tragedy of the great Dionysos bore in his heart some spark of that elementary force from which tragedy was born. This is the irresistible outburst of springtime, that fury and delirium of mingled emotions which sweeps in springtime across the souls of all simple peoples and across the whole life of nature. It is an accepted thing that festivals of Easter and Carnival, travestied by the Church, were in their origin spring festivals. Every such fact can be traced to a most deep-rooted instinct: the old[Pg 85] soil of Greece bore on its bosom enthusiastic multitudes, full of Dionysos; in the Middle Ages in the same way the dances of the Feast of Saint John and of Saint Vitus drew out great crowds who went singing, leaping and dancing from town to town, gathering recruits in each. It is, of course, open to the doctors to regard these phenomena as diseases of the crowd: we content ourselves with saying that the drama of antiquity was the flower of such a disease, and if that of our modern art does not fountain forth from that mysterious source, that is its misfortune."
In his second lecture Nietzsche studied the end of tragic art. It is a singular phenomenon; all the other arts of Greece slowly and gloriously declined. Tragedy had no decline. After Sophocles it disappeared, as though a catastrophe had destroyed it. Nietzsche recounts the catastrophe, and names the destroyer, Socrates.
He dared to denounce the most revered of men. It was he, the poor Athenian, a man of the people, an ugly scoffer, who suppressed the ancient poetry. Socrates was neither an artist nor a philosopher; he did not write, he did not teach, he scarcely spoke; seated in the public place, he stopped the passers-by, astonished them by his pleasant logic, convinced them of their ignorance and absurdity, laughed, and obliged them to laugh at themselves. His irony dishonoured the na?ve beliefs which gave strength to the ancestors of the race, the myths which upheld their virtues. He despised tragedy, and made open declaration of his contempt for it; that was enough. Euripides was troubled, and suppressed his inspiration, while the young Plato, who perhaps would have surpassed Sophocles himself, listened to the new master, burnt his verses, and renounced art. He disconcerted the old instinctive lyrical humanity of Greece; and, by the voice of Plato, whom he had seduced, he[Pg 86] imposed the illusion, unknown to the ancients, of Nature as accessible to the reason of man, altogether penetrated by it, and always harmonious. Friedrich Nietzsche was to insert these pages in his book upon The Birth of Tragedy.
This charge pronounced against Socrates surprised his audience in Basle. Wagner knew it, and in September, 1870, wrote to Nietzsche an enthusiastic but extremely shrewd letter.
"As for me, I cry out to you: That's it! you have got hold of the truth, you touch the exact point with keen accuracy. I await with admiration the series of work in which you will combat the errors of popular dogmatism. But none the less you make me anxious, and I hope with all my heart that you are not going to come a cropper. I would also like to advise you not to expound your audacious views, which must be so difficult to establish, in short brochures of limited range. You are, I feel, profoundly penetrated with your ideas: you must gather them together into a larger book of much wider scope. Then you will find and will give us the mot juste on the divine blunders of Socrates and Plato, those creators so wonderful as to exact adoration even from us who forswear them! Our words, my dear friend, swell into hymns when we consider the incomprehensible harmony of those essences, so strange to our world! And what pride and hope animate us when, returning on ourselves, we feel strongly and clearly that we can and should achieve a work, outside the reach even of those masters!"
None of the letters addressed by Nietzsche to Wagner have been published. Have they been lost? Were they destroyed? Or are they merely refused by Madame Cosima Wagner, who is perhaps not incapable of rancour?[Pg 87] The facts are unknown. However, we may be certain that Nietzsche begged Wagner to ally himself with him, to aid him in rendering clear those difficult views of his. Wagner replied:
"MY DEAR FRIEND,—How good it is to be able to exchange such letters! There is no one to-day with whom I can talk as seriously as with you—the Unique[1] excepted. God only knows what would happen to me but for that! But I should be able to give myself up to the pleasure of fighting with you against "Socratism" only on one condition, that of having an enormous deal of time at my disposal, free from the temptation of any better project—to speak quite plainly, I should have to abandon all creative work. Division of labour is a good thing in this connection. You can do much for me: you can take on your shoulders a full half of the task assigned to me by fate. And so doing, you will perhaps achieve the whole of your own destiny. I have never had much success in my essays in Philology: you have never had much success in your essays in music: and it is well that things should be so. As a musician you would have come to much the same end to which I should have come had I stuck obstinately to Philology. But Philology remains in my blood; it directs me in my work as a musician. As for you, remain a philologist, and keeping to Philology, allow yourself to be directed by music. I mean what I say in a very serious spirit. You have taught me within what base preconceptions a professional philologist is to-day expected to imprison himself—I have taught you in what an unspeakable den a genuine 'absolute' musician must to-day waste himself. Show us what Philology ought to be, and help me to prepare the way for that great 'Renaissance' in which Plato will embrace Homer, and in which Homer, penetrated by the ideas of[Pg 88] Plato, will be at last and for the first time the sublime Homer ..."
At this instant Nietzsche had conceived his work, and was making ready to write it at a spurt. "Science, art, and philosophy grow so intimately within me," he said in February to Rohde, "that I am about to give birth to a centaur."
Professional duties, however, interrupted this flight. In March he was appointed titular professor. The honour flattered him, the duties kept him occupied. At the same time he was given the care of a class of higher rhetoric; then he was asked to draw up in the noblest Latin an address of congratulation to Professor Baumbrach, of Fribourg, who had taught for fifty years in the University of that town. Nietzsche, who never shirked anything, applied himself to the preparation of his class and the composition of his discourse. In April, more work. Ritschl founded a review, the Acta societatis philologic? Lipsi?, and desired that his best pupil should contribute to it. Nietzsche did not haggle over the help asked of him. He promised his copy, and wrote to Rohde to ask for his collaboration also.
"Personally, I feel most strongly that I am under an obligation," he wrote. "And, notwithstanding that this work will put me out at the moment, I am quite committed to it. We must collaborate for the first number. You are aware that certain persons will read it with curiosity, with malevolence. Therefore, it must be good. I have promised my faithful help—answer me."
May and then June, 1870, came. Friedrich Nietzsche seems to have been occupied, above all else, with his work for the Acta. During the holidays at Pentecost,[Pg 89] Rohde, on his way back from Italy, stopped at Basle. Nietzsche was delighted, he wished Wagner to make his friend's acquaintance, and brought him to Triebschen. They spent a fine day together, on the brink of an abyss which none of them apparently perceived. Rohde, continuing on his road to Germany, left Basle. Nietzsche remained alone, the victim of a foolish accident. He had given himself a strain and was forced to be up.
Had he given any attention to the rumours of war which troubled Europe in 1870? It seems not. He was little curious of news, and scarcely read the newspapers. Not that he was indifferent to his country, but he conceived it, in the manner of Goethe, as a source of art and moral grandeur. One of his thoughts, one alone, is perhaps inspired by the public unrest. "No war," he writes; "the State would become too strong thereby." No doubt we have here, besides one of Nietzsche's own impressions, an echo of the conversations of Triebschen: Wagner recruited his most ardent admirers in Southern Germany, in the Rhineland, in Bavaria, where his protector Louis II. reigned; the Germans of the North appreciated him badly, the Berliners worst of all, and he had no wish for a warlike crisis which would certainly have the effect of adding to the weight of Prussian dictation. The State to which Nietzsche pointed in his short note was the Prussian State. He foresaw, and like his master dreaded, the imminent hegemony of Berlin, that despised town of bureaucrats and bankers, of journalists and Jews.
On July 14th, a convalescent, stretched out on his long chair, he wrote to his comrade, Erwin Rohde. He spoke to him of Richard Wagner and of Hans von Bülow, of art and of friendship. Suddenly he stops in the middle of a phrase, marking with a blank line the interruption of his thought.
[Pg 90]
"Here is a terrible thunderclap," he wrote. "The Franco-German war is declared; a demon alights upon all our culture, already worn threadbare. What are we about to experience?
"Friend, dear friend, we met once more in the twilight of peace. To-day what do all our aspirations signify? Perhaps we are at the beginning of the end! What a gloomy sight. Cloisters will become necessary. And we shall be the first friars."
He signed himself The Loyal Swiss. This unexpected signature may be explained in a literal manner. In order to be appointed a professor at Basle, Friedrich Nietzsche had had to renounce his nationality. But assuredly it indicated more than this. It announced his detachment of mind: he had decided on the r?le of the contemplator.
What a misunderstanding of himself! He was too young, too brave, too much enamoured of his race, to adopt the part of spectator only in the imminent drama. As "a loyal Swiss," and as such dispensed from military duties, he quietly took up his abode with his sister Lisbeth in a mountain inn, where he wrote out some pages on Greek lyricism. It was then that he formulated for the first time his definition of the Dionysian and Apollonian spirits. Nevertheless, the German armies were crossing the Rhine and gaining their first victories, and it was not without emotion that Nietzsche heard the news. The thought of lofty deeds in which he had no part, of perils from which he was preserved, troubled his meditations.
On July 20th, writing to Madame Ritschl, he expressed the thoughts which occupied his solitude. First he gave expression to a fear which, as it seemed, the memory of a Greece ruined by the conflict of Sparta and Athens inspired in him. "Unhappy, historical analogies teach us that the very traditions of culture may be[Pg 91] destroyed by the bitterness of such a war of nations." But he also expressed the emotion which had begun to seize him. "How I am ashamed of this inactivity in which I am kept, now that the instant has come when I might be applying what I learned in the artillery. Naturally I make myself ready for an energetic course of action, in case things should take a bad turn; do you know that the students of Kiel have enlisted together, with enthusiasm?" On the morning of August 7th he read in his paper the dispatches from W?rth: German victory: Enormous losses. He could no longer remain in his retreat. He returned to Basle, asked and obtained from the Swiss authorities permission to serve in the ambulance corps, and proceeded at once to Germany to enlist for the war which allured him.
He crossed conquered Alsace: he saw the charnel houses of Wissembourg and of W?rth: on August 29th he bivouacked not far from Strassburg, where conflagrations lit up the horizon; then he made his way, by Lunéville and Nancy, towards the country around Metz, now converted into an immense ambulance, where the wounded of Mars-la-Tour, Gravelotte and Saint-Privat, so numerous that it was difficult to nurse them, were dying of their wounds and of infectious illnesses. Some unfortunates were given into his charge: he did his duty with kindness and courage, but experienced a singular emotion, a sacred and almost enthusiastic horror. For the first time he considered without repulsion the labour of the masses. He watched those millions of beings, some struck down and marked by death, others marching the roads or standing under arms: he considered them without contempt, he esteemed their destiny. Under the menaces of war, these men have something momentous about them. They forget their vain thoughts; they march, they sing, they obey their chiefs; they die. Friedrich Nietzsche was recompensed for his pains; a fraternal[Pg 92] impulse uplifted his soul, he no longer felt his solitude, he loved the simple people who surrounded him. "All my military passions awake," he writes, "and I cannot satisfy them! I would have been at Rezonville, at Sedan, actively, passively perhaps. This Swiss neutrality always ties my hands."
His passage through France was rapid. He received orders to convey the wounded in his care to the hospital at Carlsruhe.
He set out and was shut up, for three days and three nights, with eleven men, lying in a market cart closed fast against the cold and the rain. Two of the wounded who accompanied him were attacked by diphtheria, all had dysentery. "To reach truth," says a German mystic, "the most rapid mount is Affliction." Friedrich Nietzsche recalled this maxim of which he was so fond. He tried his courage, verified his thoughts. He dressed the sores of his wounded, he listened to their complaints, their appeals, and did not interrupt his meditation. Till now he had known only his books; now he knew life. He relished this bitter ordeal, always discerning some far-off beauty. "I, also, I have my hopes," he was to write; "thanks to them I was able to look on at the war and to pursue my meditations without pause, in presence of the worst horrors.... I recall a solitary night during which I lay stretched out in a market van with the wounded men confided to me and never ceased to explore in thought the three abysses of tragedy which have for names: Wahn, Wille, Wehe—Illusion, Will, Affliction. Whence then did I draw the confident certitude that he should undergo in birth a similar ordeal, the hero to come of tragic knowledge and Greek gaiety?"
He arrived at Carlsruhe with his sick and wounded; he had contracted their illness and was attacked by dysentery and diphtheria. An unknown who had been his[Pg 93] ambulance companion nursed him devotedly. As soon as he was well again, Nietzsche went to his home at Naumburg, there to seek not repose, but an entire leisure from work and thought.
"Yes," he wrote to his friend Gersdorff, who was fighting in France—"Yes, that conception of things which is common to us has undergone the ordeal by fire. I have had the same experience as you. For me, as for you, these weeks will remain in my life as an epoch in which each one of my principles re-affirmed itself in me; I would have risked death with them.... Now I am at Naumburg again, but poorly restored to health so far. The atmosphere in which I have lived has been long over me like a dark cloud; I heard an incessant lamentation."
Once already, in July, 1865, during the campaign at Sadowa, he had known war, and undergone its allurement. A simple and great aspiration had laid hold of him; and for a moment he had felt himself in accord with his race. "I feel a patriotic emotion," he wrote; "it is a new experience for me." He grasped at this sudden exaltation and cultivated it.
Indeed, his is a changed soul. He is no longer the "loyal Swiss" of another time; he is a man among men, a German proud of his Germany. A war has transformed him; he glorifies war. War awakes the energy of men; it even troubles their spirits. It obliges them to seek in an ideal order, an order of beauty and duty, the ends of a life which is too cruel. The lyric poet, the sage, misunderstood in ages of peace, are heard with respect in ages of war. Then men have need of them, and are conscious of their need. The same necessity which ranges them behind their chiefs renders them attentive to genius. Humanity is made[Pg 94] truly one, and is drawn towards the heroic and the sublime, only under the pressure of war.
Friedrich Nietzsche, though still very weak and suffering, again took up the notes of his book that he might record in it his new ideas. In Greece, he argues, art was the visible form of a society, disciplined by struggle, from the workshop, where the captive slave laboured, up to the gymnasium and the agora, where the free man played with arms. Such was that winged figure, that goddess of Samothrace, that had for companion of her flight a bloody trireme.
The Greek genius emanated from war, it sang war, it had war for its comrade. "It is the people of the tragic mysteries," wrote Friedrich Nietzsche, "who strike the great blow of the Persian battles; in return, the people who have maintained these wars need the salutary beverage of tragedy." We follow in his notes the movement of a mind which wishes to grasp the very idea of the tragic, athwart a vaguely-known Greece. Again and again we find this word tragic brought in as if it were a fundamental strain which the young thinker trains himself to repeat, like a child trying to learn a new word:—"Tragic Greece conquers the Persians.... Tragic man is nature itself in its highest strength of creation and knowledge: he trifles with sorrow...." Three formulas satisfy his research for a moment. "The tragic work of Art—the tragic Man—the tragic State." Thus he determined the three essential parts of his book, which he would entitle as a whole: The Tragic Man.
Let us not misunderstand the real object of his meditations: this society, this discipline which he discerned in the past, were in reality the ideal forms of the Fatherland which he desired and for which he dared to hope. He saw on the one hand Latin Europe, weakened by utilitarianism and the softness of life, on the other[Pg 95] Germany, rich in poets, in soldiers, in myths, in victories. She was suzerain of those races which were in process of decay. How would she exercise this suzerainty? Might not one augur from her triumph a new era, warlike and tragic, chivalrous and lyric? One could conceive it; and therefore one should hope for it, and this was enough to dictate one's duty. How glorious this Germany would be, with Bismarck as its chief, Moltke as its soldier, Wagner as its poet—its philosopher, too, existed, and was called Friedrich Nietzsche. This belief, though he expressed it nowhere, he surely had: for he had not a doubt as to his genius.
He was elated, but did not let his dreams lead him astray: he imagined an ideal Fatherland, yet never lost from sight the Fatherland, human, too human, which actually existed.
During October and the first days of November, alone with his own people in that Naumburg whose provincial virtues he did not love, he bore hardly with the vulgarity of the little people, of the functionaries with whom he mixed. Naumburg was a small Prussian town; Friedrich Nietzsche did not care for this robust and vulgar Prussia. Metz had capitulated; the finest army of France was taken captive: a delirium of conceit swept all Germany off its feet. Friedrich Nietzsche resisted the general tendency. The sentiment of triumph was a repose which his exacting soul might not know. On the contrary, he was disgusted and alarmed.
"I fear," he wrote to his friend Gersdorff, "that we shall have to pay for our marvellous national victories at a price to which I, for my part, will never consent. In confidence—I am of opinion that modern Prussia is a Power highly dangerous to culture.... The enterprise is not easy, but we must be philosophers enough to keep our sang-froid in the midst of all this smoke, we must[Pg 96] keep watch so that no robber may come and steal any part of what, in my opinion, is commensurable with nothing beside, not even the most heroic of military actions, not even our national exaltation."
Then a document appeared which deeply moved Friedrich Nietzsche. It was the date of the centenary of Beethoven. The Germans, occupied with their war, had neglected to commemorate it. Richard Wagner's voice was raised, it alone was strong enough to recall to the conquerors the memory of another glory: "Germans, you are brave," he cried; "remain brave in peace.... In this marvellous year 1870 nothing is better suited to your pride in being brave than the memory of the great Beethoven.... Let us celebrate that great pioneer and path-hewer, let us celebrate him worthily, not less worthily than the victory of German courage: for he who gives joy to the world is raised higher among men than he who conquers the world."
Germans, you are brave; remain brave in peace—no saying could move Friedrich Nietzsche more deeply. He desired to be near the master again, and, though not yet restored to health, he left Naumburg.
He saw Richard Wagner again and was not entirely satisfied. This man, who had been so splendid in misfortune, seemed to have lost stature. There was a vulgar quality in his joy. Well had the German victory avenged him for those Parisian cat-calls and railleries which he had had to endure; now he "ate Frenchmen" with an enormous and peaceable relish. Nevertheless he declined certain offers; he was promised the highest office and honours if he accepted residence in Berlin. He refused, being unwilling to let himself be enthroned[Pg 97] as poet-laureate of a Prussian Empire; and his disciple was thankful for the refusal.
Friedrich Nietzsche found at Basle an even better confidant of his anxieties. The historian Jacob Burckhardt, a great scholar of arts and civilisations, was melancholy; all brutality was odious to him, and he detested war and its destruction. A citizen of the last city in Europe which maintained its independence and its old customs, proud of this independence and of these customs, Jacob Burckhardt disliked those nations of thirty or forty millions of souls which he saw establishing themselves. To the designs of Bismarck and of Cavour he preferred the counsel of Aristotle—"So arrange that the number of citizens does not exceed ten thousand; otherwise they would not be able to meet together on the public square."
He had studied Athens, Venice, Florence, and Sienna. He held in high esteem the ancient and Latin disciplines, in very moderate esteem the German disciplines: he dreaded German hegemony. Burckhardt and Nietzsche were colleagues. They often met in the intervals between two lectures. Then they would talk and, on fine days, stroll together along that terrace over which all European travellers lean, that is between the cathedral of red sandstone and the Rhine, here so young still but already so strong, as it passes with a long murmur of ruffled waters. The simply-built University is situated quite near, on the slope, between the river and the Museum.
The two colleagues were eternally examining their common thought. How should that tradition of culture and beauty be continued, that fragile and oft-broken tradition which two tiny States, Attica and Tuscany, have transmitted to our care? France had not deserved censure; she had known how to maintain the methods and a school of taste. But had Prussia the qualities[Pg 98] fitting her heritage? Friedrich Nietzsche repeated the expression of his hope. "Perhaps," said he, "this war will have transformed our old Germany; I see her more virile, endowed with a firmer and more delicate taste." Jacob Burckhardt listened. "No," said he, "you are always thinking of the Greeks, for whom war had no doubt an educative virtue. But modern wars are superficial; they do not reach, they do not correct the bourgeois, laissez-aller style of life. They are rare; their impressions are soon effaced; they are soon forgotten; they do not exercise people's thought." What did Nietzsche answer? A letter to Erwin Rohde enables us to divine the ill-assured accent of his observations. "I am very anxious," he writes, "as regards the immediate future. I seem to recognise there the Middle Ages in disguise.... Be careful to free yourself from this fatal Prussia, with its repugnance to culture! Flunkeys and priests sprout from its soil like mushrooms, and they are going to darken all Germany with their smoke!"
Jacob Burckhardt, long a recluse amid his memories and his books, had the habit of melancholy and made the best of it. By way of discreet protest against the enthusiasms of his contemporaries, he delivered a lecture upon Historical Greatness. "Do not take for true greatness," said he to the students of Basle, "such and such a military triumph, such and such an expansion of a State. How many nations have been powerful who are forgotten and merit their oblivion! Historical greatness is a rarer thing; it lies wholly in the works of those men whom we call great men, using that vague term because we cannot truly fathom their nature. Some unknown genius leaves us Notre Dame de Paris; Goethe gives us his Faust; Newton his law of the Solar System. This is greatness, and this alone." Friedrich Nietzsche listened and applauded. "Burckhardt," wrote he, "is becoming a Schopenhauerian...." But a few[Pg 99] wise words do not satisfy his ardour. Nor can he so quickly renounce the hope which he has conceived; he wishes to act, to save his Fatherland from the moral disaster which in his judgment menaces her.
How act? Here was a sluggish people, not easily aroused, lacking in sensitiveness, a people stunted by democracy, a people in revolt against every noble aspiration: by what artifice could one sustain among them the imperilled ideal, the love of heroism and of the sublime? Nietzsche formed a project which was so audacious and so advanced that he meditated long upon it without confiding in any one. Richard Wagner was then working to establish that theatre of Bayreuth in which he hoped to realise his epic creation in complete freedom. Nietzsche dared to imagine a different institution, but one of the same order; a kind of seminary where the young philosophers, his friends, Rohde, Gersdorff, Deussen, Overbeck, Romundt should meet, live together and, free from duties, liberated from administrative tutelage, meditate, under the guidance of certain masters, on the problems of the hour. A double home of art and of thought would thus maintain at the heart of Germany, above the crowd and apart from the State, the traditions of the spiritual life. "Cloisters will become necessary," he had written to Erwin Rohde in July; six months' experience brought back this idea. "Here assuredly is the strangest thing which this time of war and victory has raised up; a modern anchoritism—an impossibility of living in accord with the State."
Friedrich Nietzsche let himself be drawn away by this dream, the unreality of which he failed to recognise. He was imagining a reunion of solitaries, similar to the Port Royal des Champs. He knew that such a society did not accord with the manners and tastes of his times, but he judged it to be necessary and believed that he had strength enough to establish or impose it.
[Pg 100]
A profound instinct inspired and directed him. That old college of Pforta had been monachal in its origins, in its buildings and in its very walls, in the lasting gravity and ordered rule of life. Thus he had, as a child, received the impress of what was almost the life of a religious. He kept the memory of it, and the nostalgia. During his years at the University he had constantly sought to isolate himself from the world by surrounding himself with friends. He studied Greece, and the antique wisdom nourished his soul: he loved Pythagoras and Plato, the one the founder, the other the poet, of the finest brotherhood that man had ever conceived, the close and sovereign aristocracy of sages armed, of meditative knights. Thus did Christian humanity and Pagan humanity, united by a remote harmony, concur with his thoughts and his aspirations.
He wished to write an open letter to his friends, known and unknown; but he would only call them at the favourable moment, and till then would keep his secret. "Give me two years," he wrote to his friend Gersdorff enthusiastically and mysteriously, "and you will see a new conception of antiquity diffuse itself, which must bring a new spirit into the scientific and moral education of the nation!" Towards mid-December he believed that the moment had come. Erwin Rohde wrote him a melancholy letter, a very feeble echo of the passionate letters which Nietzsche had addressed to him. "Soon we shall need cloisters ..." he said, repeating the same idea expressed six months earlier by his friend. It was but a word; Friedrich Nietzsche saw in it a sign of spontaneous agreement, a presage of enthusiastic collaboration, and he wrote in a joyous transport:
"DEAR FRIEND,—I received your letter and I answer it without losing a minute. Above all I wish to tell you that I feel altogether like you, and that we shall be, in[Pg 101] my opinion, very weak, if, abandoning our feeble complaints, we do not deliver ourselves from ennui by an energetic act.... I have at last understood the bearing of Schopenhauer's judgments on the philosophy of the universities. No radical truth is possible there. No revolutionary truth can come out from there.... We shall reject this yoke; to me that is certain. And we shall then form a new Greek academy: Romundt will be of our company.
"You know, since your visit to Triebschen, the projects of Bayreuth. For a long time, without confiding in any one, I have been considering whether it would not be suitable for us to break with philology and its perspectives of culture. I am preparing a great adhortatio for all those who are not yet completely captured and stifled by the manners of this present time. What a pity that I must write to you, and that for long we have not been able to examine in conversation each of my thoughts! To you who know not their turnings and their consequences, my plan will perhaps appear as an eccentric caprice. That, it is not; it is a necessity.
"... Let us try to reach a little island on which there will be no longer need to close one's ears with wax. Then we shall be one another's masters. Our books, from now till then, are but hooks to catch our friends, a public for our ?sthetic and monachal association. Let us live, let us work, let us enjoy for one another's sake; in that manner only, perhaps, shall we be able to work for the whole. I may tell you (see how serious is my design) that I have already commenced to reduce my expenses in order to constitute a little reserve fund. We shall gamble in order to try our 'luck'; as to the books which we shall be able to write, I shall demand the highest honorarium as a provision for coming times. In brief, we shall neglect no lawful means of success in founding our cloister. We also have our duty for the next two years!
[Pg 102]
"May this plan seem to you worthy of meditation! Your last letter, moving as it was, signified to me that the time had come to unveil it for you.
"Shall we not be able to introduce a new form of Academy into the world?
'Und sollt' ich nicht, sehnsuchtigster Gewalt,
In's Leben ziehn die einzigster Gestalt?'
"Thus Faust speaks of Helen. No one knows anything of my project, and now it depends upon you to see that Romundt is advised of it.
"Assuredly, our school of philosophy is neither an historical reminiscence nor an arbitrary caprice; is it not a necessity that pushes us on to that road? It seems that the plan of our student days, that voyage which we were to make together, returns in a new form, symbolic now and vaster than it was. On this occasion, I won't leave you in the lurch as I then did. That memory always annoys me.
"With my best hopes, your faithful
"FRATER FRIEDRICH.
"From the 23rd of December till the 1st of January I go to Triebschen, near Lucerne."
On the 22nd of December Friedrich Nietzsche left Lucerne: he had received no reply from Rohde. He found the house at Triebschen in high festival with children's games and the preparations for Christmas. Madame Wagner gave him a volume of Stendhal, Les Promenades dans Rome. He offered Wagner the famous woodcut of Dürer's of The Knight, the Dog, and Death, on which he had written a commentary for the book he was then preparing, The Origin of Tragedy: "A spirit which feels itself isolated, desperate and solitary," he wrote, "could choose no better symbol than that rider of[Pg 103] Dürer's, who, unperturbed by his gruesome companions and yet wholly without hope, pursues his terrible path alone with dog and horse. This rider of Dürer's is our Schopenhauer: he was without hope, but he desired the truth. His like does not exist." Nietzsche would have been happy in the master's house if he had not been expecting Rohde's reply: the waiting worried him. He stopped for a week at Triebschen. Wagner was never done talking about Bayreuth and his vast projects. Nietzsche, too, had his thought which he would have joyfully uttered; but first he wanted his friend's approbation, and that approbation did not come. He left without having received a word or spoken one on the subject.
At last, at Basle, he received the too long-desired letter: an honest, affectionate, but negative reply. "You tell me that cloisters are necessary to-day," wrote Rohde. "I believe it. But there are necessities for which no remedy exists. How can we find the money? And even when we shall have found the money, I do not know that I shall follow you; I do not feel in me a creative force which renders me worthy of the solitude whither you call me. For a Schopenhauer, a Beethoven, a Wagner, the case is different, as it is for you, dear friend. But, as I am in question, no! I must hope for a different life. Still let us entertain the wish for such a retreat, among certain friends, in a cloister of the muses; I agree to that. Deprived of desires, what would we become?"
If Rohde refused to follow him, who would follow him? He did not write his Adhortatio; Romundt was not advised, and even Wagner, it seems, knew nothing of the proposal.
Nietzsche made no vain complaints, but set to work to elaborate alone those revolutionary truths for which[Pg 104] he would have wished to contrive a kindlier manner of birth. He turned his back upon Germany, upon those modern States which have it as their mission to flatter the servilities, soften the conflicts, and favour the idleness of men. He considered anew primitive Greece, the city of the seventh and the sixth centuries; thither a mysterious attraction ever drew him back. Was it the seduction of a perfect beauty? Doubtless, but it was also the seduction of that strength and cruelty which a modern conceals as he conceals a stain, and which the old Greeks practised with joy. Nietzsche loved strength; on the battlefield of Metz he had felt within him the appetite and instinct.
"If," he wrote, "genius and art are the final ends of Greek culture, then all the forms of Greek society must appear to us as necessary mechanisms and stepping-stones towards that final end. Let us discover what means were utilised by the will to act which animated the Greeks...." He discerns and names one of these means: slavery. "Frederick Augustus Wolf," he notes, "has shown us that slavery is necessary to culture. There is one of the powerful thoughts of my predecessor." He grasped it, held it to him, and forced it to disclose its whole meaning. This idea, suddenly discovered, inspired him; it was profound and moved him to the depths of his being; it was cruel, almost monstrous, and satisfied his romantic taste. He shuddered before it, he admired its sombre beauty.
"It may be that this knowledge fills us with terror," he wrote; 'I such terror is the almost necessary effect of all the most profound knowledge. For nature is still a frightful thing, even when intent on creating the most beautiful forms. It is so arranged that culture, in its triumphal march, benefits only a trivial minority of privileged mortals, and it is necessary that the slave service of[Pg 105] the great masses be maintained, if one wish to attain to a full joy in becoming (werde lust).
"We moderns have been accustomed to oppose two principles against the Greeks, the one and the other invented to reassure a society of an altogether servile kind which anxiously avoids the world, slave: we talk of the 'dignity of man' and the 'dignity of labour.'
"The language of the Greeks is other. They declare in simple terms that work is a disgrace, for it is impossible that a man occupied with the labour of gaining a livelihood should ever become an artist....
"So let us avow this cruel sounding truth: slavery is necessary to culture; a truth which assuredly leaves no doubt as to the absolute value of being.
"The misery of those men who live by labour must be made yet more vigorous, in order that a very few Olympian men may create a world of art.... At their expense, by the artifice of unpaid labour, the privileged classes should be relieved from the struggle for life, and given such conditions that they can create, and satisfy a new order of needs.... And if it is true to say that the Greeks were destroyed by slavery, this other affirmation is, most certainly, even truer: for lack of slavery, we are perishing."
But what was the origin of this very institution of slavery? How was the submission of the slave, that "blind mole of culture," secured? The Greeks teach us, answered Nietzsche: "The conquered belongs to the conqueror," they say, "with his wives and his children, his goods and his blood. Power gives the first right, and there is no right which is not at bottom appropriation, usurpation, power." Thus Nietzsche's thought was brought back towards its first object. The war had inspired him in the first instance. Now he rediscovers that solution. In sorrow and in tragedy, men had[Pg 106] invented beauty; into sorrow and into tragedy they must be plunged, and there retained that their sense of beauty might be preserved. In pages which have the accent and rhythm of a hymn, Friedrich Nietzsche glorifies and invokes war:
"Here you have the State, of shameful origin; for the greater part of men, a well of suffering that is never dried, a flame that consumes them in its frequent crises. And yet when it calls, our souls become forgetful of themselves; at its bloody appeal the multitude is urged to courage and uplifted to heroism. Yes, the State is to the blind masses, perhaps, the highest and most worthy of aims; it is, perhaps, the State which, in its formidable hours, stamps upon every face the singular expression of greatness.
"Some tie, some mysterious affinity, exists between the State and art, between political activity and artistic production, the battlefield and the work of art. What is the r?le of the State? It is the tenaille of steel which binds society together. Without the State, in natural conditions—bellum omnium contra omnes—society would remain limited by the family, and could not project its roots afar. By the universal institution of States, that instinct which formerly determined the bellum omnium contra omnes has been concentrated; at certain epochs terrible clouds of war menace the peoples and discharge themselves at one great clap, in lightnings and thunders, fiercer as they are less frequent. But these crises are not continual; between one and another of them society breathes again; regenerated by the action of war, it breaks on every side into blossom and verdure, and, when the first fine days come, puts forth dazzling fruits of genius.
"If I leave the Greek world and examine our own, I recognise, I avow it, symptoms of degeneration which give me fears both for society and for art. Certain men,[Pg 107] in whom the instinct of the State is lacking, wish, no longer to serve it, but to make it serve them, to use it for their personal ends. They see nothing of the divine in it; and, in order to utilise it, in a sure and rational manner, they are concerned to evade the shocks of war: they set out deliberately to organise things in such a manner that war becomes an impossibility. On the one hand they conjure up systems of European equilibrium, on the other hand they do their best to deprive absolute sovereigns of the right to declare war, in order that they may thus appeal the more easily to the egoism of the masses, and of those who represent them. They feel it incumbent on them to weaken the monarchical instinct of the masses, and do weaken it, by propagating among them the liberal and optimistic conception of the world, a conception which has its roots in the doctrines of French rationalism and the Revolution; that is, in a philosophy altogether foreign to the German spirit, a Latin platitude, devoid of any metaphysical meaning.
"The movement, to-day triumphant, of nationalities, the extension of universal suffrage which runs parallel to this movement, seem to me to be determined above all by the fear of war. And behind these diverse agitations, I perceive those who are chiefly moved by this alarm, the solitaries of international finance, who, being by nature denuded of any instinct for the State, subordinate politics, the State and society to their money-making and speculative ends.
"If the spirit of speculation is not thus to debase the spirit of the State, we must have war and war again—there is no other means. In the exaltation which it procures, it becomes clear to men that the State has not been founded to protect egoistical individuals against the demon of war; quite the contrary: love of country, devotion to one's prince, help to excite a moral impulse which is the symbol of a far higher destiny.... It[Pg 108] will not therefore be thought that I do ill when I raise here the p?an of war. The resonance of its silver bow is terrible. It comes to us sombre as night: nevertheless Apollo accompanies it, Apollo, the rightful leader of states, the god who purifies them.... Let us say it then: war is necessary to the State, as the slave is to society. No one will be able to avoid these conclusions, if he have sought the causes of the perfection which Greek art attained, and Greek art alone."
War and yet again war which exalts the peoples: such was the cry of the solitary. He had but to drop his pen, to listen and look around him, and he saw the pedantic empire and repressed his hopes. "We follow the trouble of his thought. He hesitates, he records at the same moment the abiding illusion and the inevitable disillusion:
"I could have imagined," he writes, "that the Germans had embarked on this war to save Venus from the Louvre, like a second Helen. It would have been the spiritual interpretation of their combat. The fine antique severity inaugurated by this war—for the time to be grave has come—we think that is the time for art also."
He continued to write; his thought becomes clearer and more melancholy: "The State, when it cannot achieve its highest aim, grows beyond measure. The World Empire of the Romans, in face of Athens, has nothing of the sublime. This sap, which should all run to the flowers, resides now in the leaves and stalks, which swell to an immense size."
[Pg 109]
Rome troubled him; he disliked it; he judged it a slur upon antiquity. That city, warlike, but ever plebeian, victorious, but ever vulgar, filled him with gloomy fore-thought:
"Rome," he wrote, "is the typical barbaric state: the will cannot there attain to its noble ends. The organisation is more vigorous, the morality more oppressive ... who venerates this colossus?"
Who venerates this colossus? Let us give a modern and pressing application to these interrogatory words. The colossus is not Rome, it is Prussia and her empire. Narrow was the soil of Athens or of Sparta, and brief their day; but what did that matter if the object, which was spiritual strength and beauty, was attained? Friedrich Nietzsche was haunted by this vision of Greece with its hundred rival cities, raising between mountains and sea their acropoles, their temples, their statues, all resounding with the rhythm of p?ans, all glorious and alert.
"The sentiment of Hellenism," he wrote, "as soon as it is awakened, becomes aggressive and translates itself into a combat against the culture of the present day."
Friedrich Nietzsche suffered from the wounds which life inflicted upon his lyrical dream. His friends listened to him, but followed him imperfectly. The professor, Franz Overbeck, who lived in his house and saw him every day, was a man of distinction, with a strong and acute mind. A German by birth, a Frenchman by education, he understood the problems of the day, and joined in the anxieties and intentions of Nietzsche; but his ardour could not equal Nietzsche's. Jacob Burckhardt was a man of noble intellect and character, but he was[Pg 110] without hope, and Friedrich Nietzsche passionately desired to hope. No doubt, there was Wagner, whom neither passion nor hope ever could surprise, but he had just published an Aristophanic buffoonery directed against the conquered Parisians. Friedrich Nietzsche read this gross work, and condemned it. Overbeck and Burckhardt lacked ardour; Wagner lacked delicacy; and Nietzsche confided in no one. A chair of philosophy had just been vacated in the University of Basle. Nietzsche took fire at once. He wrote to Erwin Rohde, and told him that he should apply for this chair, and that he would assuredly secure it. Thus the two friends were to meet again. Vain hope! Erwin Rohde presented himself as a candidate, but was not accepted. Nietzsche reproached himself for having lured on his friend. He grew melancholy. He felt himself drawn "like a little whirlpool into a dead sea of night and oblivion."
He had never recovered entirely from the ordeals of the war. Neither sleep nor sure and certain health were ever at his call again. In February the nervous force which had sustained him suddenly gave way, and his disorders assumed an acute form. Violent neuralgas, insomnia, troubles and weaknesses of the eyesight, stomach ills, jaundice represented the nature of the crisis which had been tormenting him for five months. The doctors, quite at a loss, advised him to give up work and to take a voyage. Friedrich Nietzsche sent for his sister, who came to Naumburg. He brought her to pay a farewell visit to Triebschen, and left for Lugano.
At that time the railway did not cross the Alps. Travellers went by diligence over the ridge of the St. Gothard. Chance furnished Nietzsche with a remarkable companion, an old man of a talkative humour, and with no desire to conceal his identity: it was Mazzini. The old humanitarian and the young apostle of slavery hit it off wonderfully well. Mazzini cited Goethe's phrase:
[Pg 111]
"Sich des halben zu entwohnen und im Ganzen, Vollen, Sch?nen resolut zu leben" (To abjure half-measures, and to live resolutely in the Whole, the Full, the Beautiful). Friedrich Nietzsche never forgot the energetic maxim, nor the man who had transmitted it to him, nor this day of rapid and healthful travel, not far from those summits which he was afterwards to love so much.
The fine mountain crossing amid the snow and silence of the Alps had sufficed. He was almost cured on his arrival at Lugano. His nature was still supple and youthful; his returns to life were prompt and radiant; a na?ve gaiety re-animated all his being. He spent two happy months in Italian Switzerland. A Prussian officer, a relation of General von Moltke, was staying at his hotel. He lent him his manuscripts and often talked to him of the destinies of the new German Empire and of the aristocratic warrior's mission which the victory had conferred upon it. It was a fine springtide for the numerous Germans who had come to rest at the place: they liked to gather round their young philosopher and listen to him. February began, the war was over, and these happy people, freed from all anxieties, abandoned themselves for the first time to the pleasure of their triumph. They sang; they danced in public up to the Market-place, and Nietzsche was not the least prompt to rejoice with them, to dance and sing. "When I recall these days," writes Madame F?rster-Nietzsche, who gives us a sad and gracious account of the time, "it seems to me that I am having a veritable dream of Carnival."
From Lugano, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote to Erwin Rohde:
"I have very often suffered from a heavy and depressed mood. But more than once inspiration has returned to me; my manuscript has benefited from it. I have given[Pg 112] the go-by to philology in the most cavalier fashion. They may praise me, they may blame me, they may promise me the highest honours, they may talk as they choose; I turn my back upon it. Every day I go deeper into my philosophic domain, and I begin to have confidence in myself; better still, if I am ever to be a poet, from to-day I feel myself disposed towards it. I do not know, I have no means of knowing, whither my destiny guides me. And nevertheless, when I examine myself, everything is in perfect accord within me, as though I had followed some good genius. My ends are extremely hidden from me; no concern for office, for hierarchic honours, directs my efforts; and none the less I live in a surprising condition of clarity, of serenity. What a sensation it is to see one's world before one, a fine globe, round and complete! Now it is some fragment of a new metaphysic, now it is a new ?sthetic which grows up within me, now another idea claims me, a new principle of education which entails the complete rejection of our Universities and gymnasia. I never learn any fact but it immediately finds a good place in some corner that has been long prepared for it. This sentiment of an interior world which springs up within me I feel in all its force when I think not coldly, but quietly and without exaggerated enthusiasm, on the history of these last ten months, on these events which I consider as the instruments of my noble designs. Pride, folly, are words that feebly express my condition of mental 'insomnia.'
"Ah, how I desire health! As soon as one has something in view which must last longer than oneself—how one gives thanks for every good night, for every mild ray of sun, even for every occasion on which one digests aright!"
On the 10th of April, Nietzsche had returned to Basle.[Pg 113] He gathered his notes together, re-read them for the last time, and fixed definitely the plan of his work. He allowed those digressions upon war, slavery, the city, of which we have already given some extracts, to drop, and—Wagner, it is said, desired it—limited himself to his first subject: ancient tragedy, the model and precursor of German musical drama. Wagner's advice, Madame F?rster-Nietzsche insinuates, was not altogether disinterested; it suited him that his disciple's first work should be consecrated to his fame. This has an air of probability; still it certainly seems that Nietzsche had let himself be captured and seduced by too many ideas, that he had not so much amassed the matter for one book as begun, rather at hazard, a whole series of studies in ?sthetics, history, and politics. He needed to restrict himself, and yet could not make up his mind to it. If Wagner helped him here, he did well. Perhaps we owe the happy completion of this book to him—the only real book which Nietzsche ever completed.
What was it that he had to say? He was to analyse the origin and the essence of the Greek lyric spirit; he was to set the two Greeces over against one another, the one intoxicated by its myths and Dionysian chants, strong in illusions—?schylus's Greece, tragic and conquering Greece; the other impious, rational, an?mic—Socratic Greece, Alexandrine Greece, which in dying corrupted the peoples who had remained young around her, the pure blood of primitive humanity. Then he was to display the two Germanys in conflict in a like manner, the Germany of the Democrats and the savants, the Germany of the soldiers and the poets; between these two one had to choose. Nietzsche declared his choice: beholden to Wagner, as he was, for all his tranquillity of thought, for all his joys, he indicated Wagner to his compatriots. While the peace was being signed at Frankfort between the nations, Friedrich Nietzsche,[Pg 114] thus establishing peace within himself, ended the rough draft of his work. He remarked upon this coincidence of dates, for his internal conflicts and the revolutions of his thought did not appear to him less important events than external conflicts and the revolutions of races.
But the Peace of Frankfort did not terminate all the conflicts of this terrible year. A civil war now broke out in France, and its calamities stirred Europe even more profoundly than the battles of Fr?schwiller or Sedan. On the morning of the 23rd of May, the newspapers of Basle announced the destruction of Paris and the burning of the Louvre. Nietzsche learnt the news with a feeling of dismay: the most beautiful works, the flower of human labour, were ruined; human hands, an unhappy people, had dared this profanation. All Nietzsche's alarms were thus confirmed. Without discipline, without an hierarchy, culture, he had written, cannot subsist. All have not the right to share in beauty; the immense majority should live humbly, work for their masters and revere their lives. Such is the economy which assures strength to societies, and, in return for their strength, delicacy, grace, beauty; and this is the order which Europe hesitates to maintain. Nietzsche might now have boasted of the correctness of his judgment; it was far from him to do so. It was with alarm that he considered his perspicacity, his solitude, and his responsibility. His thoughts suddenly turned to Jacob Burckhardt; what melancholy must be his! He wished to see him, to talk to him, to listen to him, to make his desolation his own. He hurried to Burckhardt's house; but Burckhardt, though the hour was early, had gone out. Nietzsche walked the roads like a desperate man. Finally he went back. Jacob Burckhardt was in his study, and awaited him. He had gone to seek his friend, as his friend had gone to[Pg 115] seek him. The two men remained for long together, and Fr?ulein Nietzsche, alone in the next room, heard their sobs through the closed door.
"Let us avow it," he writes to his friend, the Baron von Gersdorff, "we are all, with all our past, responsible for the terrors which menace us to-day. We shall do wrong, if we consider with a peaceful conceit the unchaining of a war against culture, and if we impute the fault merely to the unfortunates who do the deed. When I heard of the firing of Paris, I was for some days utterly powerless, lost in tears and doubts; the life of science, of philosophy and of art appeared to me as an absurdity when I saw a single day suffice for the ruin of the finest works of art; what do I say?—of entire periods of art. I profoundly deplored the fact that the metaphysical value of art could not manifest itself to the lower classes; but it has a higher mission to fulfil. Never, however lively my affliction were, would I have cast the stone at the sacrilegious, who in my eyes are only carriers of the mistake of all—a mistake which gives cause for much thought...."
In the autobiographical notes written in 1878 these words may be read: "The War: my profoundest affliction, the burning of the Louvre."
Friedrich Nietzsche had gone back to his old way of life; almost every week he was Wagner's guest. But soon he perceived that since the German victory Triebschen had changed. Too many intimates made haste to the master's house, too many unknown people invaded the abode whose peaceful seclusion he had loved. They were not all of the sort that Nietzsche would have desired; but Wagner talked, discoursed, overflowed with them all.[Pg 116] Judging that the favourable moment had come, he had set out to rouse Germany and secure at last the construction and gift of the hall which he needed, the theatre, or the temple, of Bayreuth.
Friedrich Nietzsche heard and took part in these discussions with an uneasy ardour. Wagner's idea exalted him. But he had the soul of a solitary, and could not help being worried, and sometimes shocked, by these noises from the world which had to be tolerated. Wagner did not suffer: on the contrary, he seemed elated by the joy of feeling the crowd nearer to him; and Nietzsche, a little surprised, a little disappointed, sought, without precisely finding again, his hero. "To sway the people," he had written in his student notebooks, "is to put passions in the service of an idea." Wagner adapted himself to work of this kind. In the service of his art and of his fame he accepted all the passions. A Chauvinist with the Chauvinists, an idealist with the idealists, as much of a Gallophobe as was desired; restoring the ?schylian tragedy for some, for others re-animating the old German myths; willingly a pessimist, a Christian if it pleased, sincere moreover from moment to moment, this prodigious being, a great leader of men as well as a great poet, handled his compatriots most dexterously.
No one could resist the impulse which he gave: every one had to yield and to follow. He fixed the very details of the plans of the theatre whose site had just been chosen. He studied the practical organisation of the work, and laboured to create those Vereine in which propagandists and subscribers were to be grouped. He set himself out to procure rare and unexpected delights for the faithful. One day he surprised them with a performance for their benefit alone, in the gardens of Triebschen, of the Siegfried-Idyll, a gracious interlude written for the churching of his wife, a noble echo of the[Pg 117] most intimate times. He gave Nietzsche his r?le, for he could not allow that voice, so passionate and hard to control, and yet so eloquent, to be lost. The young man offered to set out on a mission. He would stir up those circles in Northern Germany, so slow and heavy in its emotions. Bus proposal was not accepted; Wagner, no doubt, feared the violence of his apostolate: "No," he said to him, "finish and publish your book." Nietzsche felt somewhat melancholy at the refusal. Henceforth, it seems, difficulties began to arise between the two.
Moreover, the advice of the master was less easy to follow than it seemed. The Origin of Tragedy did not find a publisher. Nietzsche's applications failed, and his summer was spoilt by the check. He decided to print certain chapters of it in the reviews. "I put my little book into the world bit by bit," he wrote in July to Erwin Rohde; "what a childbirth! what tortures!"
At the beginning of October he was staying at Leipsic. Here he saw again his master Ritschl, and his friends Rohde, Gersdorff, who had come to meet him, and spent with them some happy days of conversation and comradeship. But the fate of his book remained uncertain: all the publishers of scientific and philological works bowed the author out. They were not tempted by a bizarre work, in which learning was allied with lyricism and the problems of ancient Greece with the problems of modern Germany. "The book is a centaur," said Nietzsche. This mythological assurance did not satisfy the book-sellers. Finally he had to address himself, not without regret—for he maintained that his work was a scientific work—to Richard Wagner's publisher, from whom he received, after a month's delay, a favourable reply. He wrote to his friend Gersdorff, in a free and relieved tone, which helps us to measure the vexation from which he had suffered.
[Pg 118]
"BASLE, November 19, 1871. "Pardon me, dear friend, I ought to have thanked you sooner. I had felt in your last letter, in every one of your words, your strong intellectual life. It seemed to me that you remained a soldier at soul and brought your military nature to art and philosophy. And that is good, for we have no right to live to-day, if we are not militants, militants who prepare a s?culum to come, something of which we can guess at in ourselves, across our best instants. For those instants, which are what there is of best in us, draw us away in spirit from our time; nevertheless, in some manner, they need to have their hearthstone somewhere: whence I infer that at such instants we feel a confused breath of coming times pass over us. For instance, take our last meeting at Leipsic; has it not left in your memory the impression of such instants, as seemed to be strangers to everything, linked with another century? Whatever may be, this remains, 'Im Ganzen, Vollen, Sch?nen, resolut zu leben.' But it needs a strong will, such as is not given to the first comer!... To-day, only to-day, the excellent publisher Fritzsch replies to me."
Fritzsch proposed to him that he should give his book the format and character of a recent work of Wagner's: Die Bestimmung der Oper. Nietzsche rejoiced at the idea, and he wrote five concluding chapters which accentuated the Wagnerian tendency of the work. This rapid composition and the correction of the proofs did not deter him from another enterprise.
The Origin of Tragedy was about to appear. He did not doubt for a moment that it would be read, understood, acclaimed. His comrades, his masters, had always acknowledged the strength of his thought. Apparently, it never occurred to him that a vaster public remained callous; but he wished to affect it profoundly, at the first[Pg 119] blow, and he formed new projects by which he might make the most of his success. He wanted to talk: speech was a livelier weapon. He recalled the emotions which he had experienced when, as a young professor, he was given the singular task of teaching the most delicate language, the most difficult works, to chance audiences; he remembered his perhaps fanciful design: that seminary of philologists, that house of study and retreat, of which he was always dreaming. He wanted to denounce the schools, the gymnasia, the Universities, the heavy apparatus of pedantry which was stifling the German spirit, and define the new and necessary institutions, destined, no longer for the emancipation of the masses, but for the culture of the State. He had written to Erwin Rohde as early as the month of March: "A new idea claims me, a new principle of education which points to the entire rejection of oar Universities, of our gymnasia...." In December, he announced at Basle, for January, 1872, a series of lectures upon The Future of our Educational Institutions.
Towards mid-December, he accompanied Richard Wagner to Mannheim, where a two days' festival was being devoted to the works of the master.
"Oh, what a pity you were not there!" he wrote to Erwin Rohde. "All the sensations, all the recollections of art, what are they compared to these? I am like a man whose ideal has been realised. It is Music, and Music alone!... When I say to myself that a certain number of men of the generations to come—at least some hundreds among them—will be moved by this music as I am myself, I cannot augur for less than an entire renewal of our culture!"
He returned to his house in Basle: but the impression of his days in Mannheim remained with him. The[Pg 120] details of his everyday life caused him a strange and tenacious disgust. "All that cannot be translated into music," he wrote, "is repulsive and repugnant to me.... I have a horror of reality. Or, rather, I no longer see anything of the real, it is only a phantasmagoria." Under the stress of this emotion he acquired a clearer view of the problem which occupied him, he formulated more clearly the principle for which he was seeking. To "teach," to "uplift" men, what does that mean? It is to dispose their minds in such sort that the productions of genius will be assured, not of the understanding of all, for that cannot be, but of the respect of all.
As in the preceding years, Richard and Cosima Wagner invited him to spend Christmas at Triebschen. He excused himself; the work of his lectures occupied all his time. He offered Cosima Wagner, by way of homage, a musical fantasy on Saint Sylvester's Night, composed some weeks earlier. "I am very impatient to know what they will think of it down there," he wrote to Rohde. "I have never been criticised by any competent person." In reality, good judges had already often discouraged his musical enterprises, but he soon forgot their vexatious advice.
On the last day of 1871, his book appeared: Die Gebürt der Trag?die aus dem Geiste der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music). The sub-title which the current editions give, Hellenism and Pessimism, was added in 1885 on the issue of the second edition. Friedrich Nietzsche sent the first copy to Richard Wagner, from whom he received almost at once a frenzied letter.
"DEAR FRIEND,—I have never read a finer book than yours. It is all splendid! At this moment, I write to you very hurriedly because the reading has profoundly[Pg 121] moved me, and I expect that I wait for the return of my sang-froid to re-read you methodically. I said to Cosima: After you, he it is whom I love most; and then, at a long distance, Lenbach, who has made so striking and so true a portrait of me.... Adieu! Come soon to see us!
"Yours,
"R. W."
On the 10th of January Wagner wrote again:
"You have just published a book which is incomparable. All the influences which you may have undergone are reduced to nothing by the character of your book: what distinguishes it from every other, is the complete confidence with which a penetrating individuality displays itself. It is here that you satisfy the ardent desire of myself and of my wife: in short, a strange voice might have been talking of us, and we would have fully approved it! Twice we have read your book from the first line to the last—in the daytime, separately—at night, together—and we were lamenting that we had not at our disposal that second copy which you had promised. We deliver battle over that sole copy. I am constantly in need of it; between my breakfast and my working hours, it is it that sets me going; for since I have read you, I have begun again to work on my last act. Our readings, whether together or separately, are constantly interrupted by our exclamations. I am not yet recovered from the emotion which I experienced. There is the condition we are in!"
And Cosima Wagner wrote, for her part: "Oh, how fine your book is! How beautiful it is and how profound, how profound it is and how audacious!" On January 16th he delivered his first lecture. His[Pg 122] joy, his sense of security, were extreme. He knew that Jacob Burckhardt read and approved him; he knew that he had the admiration of Rohde, Gersdorff, Overbeck. "What they say of my book is incredible," he wrote to a friend. "... I have concluded an alliance with Wagner. You cannot imagine how we are bound to one another, and how identical are our views." He conceived his second work without delay; he would publish his lectures. It would be a popular book, an exoteric translation of his Tragedy. But the idea of an even more decisive action at once supervened. Germany was preparing to inaugurate the new University of Strassburg; and an apotheosis of professors on a soil that had been conquered by soldiers awoke the indignation of Friedrich Nietzsche. He wished to address a pamphlet to Bismarck, "under the form of an interpellation in the Reichstag." Have our pedants, he would ask, the right to go in triumph to Strassburg? Our soldiers have conquered the French soldiers, and that is glorious. But has our culture humiliated French culture? Who would dare to say so?
Some days went by. Whence came the less happy tone of his letters? Why was it that he did not write his interpellation, that he gave up the idea of it? We know: except for a few friends who had understood his book, no one read it, no one bought it; not a review, not a newspaper deigned to take notice of it. Ritchsl, the great philologist of Leipsic, kept silent. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote to him: "I want to know what you think." He received in reply a severe criticism and a reproof. Erwin Rohde offered an article for the Litterarische Centralblatt; it was not inserted. "It was the last chance of a serious voice being upraised for me in a scientific sheet," he wrote to Gersdorff; "now I expect nothing more—except spite or idiocy. But, as[Pg 123] I have told you, I count upon the peaceful journey of my book through the centuries with perfect confidence. For in it certain eternal verities are said for the first time: they must resound...."
Certainly Friedrich Nietzsche had not foreseen his ill-success: it astonished and disconcerted him. A sore throat obliged him to interrupt his lectures, and he found pleasure in the contretemps. He had let himself be drawn towards ideas which were very lofty and delicate, and difficult even to himself. He wished to show that two sorts of schools should be instituted, the one professional, for the majority; the other, classical and truly superior, for an infinitesimal number of chosen individuals, whose course would be extended as far as their thirtieth year. How was this isolated circle, aloof from the common herd, to be formed, and how was it to be taught? Friedrich Nietzsche recurred to his most intimate and familiar thought, to that aristocratic ideal to which his meditations always led him. He had often studied its problems. But to examine them in public he needed his whole strength, and also a sympathetic audience. He felt that he had been weakened by the failure of his book. His very slight indisposition did not last long: nevertheless he did not return to his lectures. It was vain to ask him to do so: he refused. It was vain to press him to have them published; Richard Wagner strongly insisted: he eluded this insistence. His notes have come to us in a sorry condition of incompleteness and disorder. They are the echoes, the vestiges of a dream.
"The aristocracy of the mind must conquer its entire liberty in respect of the State, which is now keeping Science in curb.
"Later, men will have to raise the tables of a new culture ... then destruction of the gymnasia, destruction[Pg 124] of the University ... an areopagus, for the justice of the mind.
"The culture of the future: its ideal of social problems. The imperative world of the beautiful and the sublime ... the only safeguard against Socialism ..."
Finally these three interrogatory words, which sum up his doubts, his desires, and perhaps his whole work: "Ist Veredlung m?glich?" (Is ennoblement possible?)
Friedrich Nietzsche courageously renounced his hope and was silent. He had lost his country: Prussia would not be the invincible framework of a lyrical race; the German Empire would not realise the "imperative world of the beautiful and the sublime." On April 30th the new University of Strassburg was inaugurated. "I hear from here the patriotic rejoicings," he wrote to Erwin Rohde. In January he had refused an offer of employment which would have withdrawn him from Basle. In April he spoke of leaving Basle and of going to Italy for two or three years. "The first review of my book has at last appeared," he wrote, "and I find it very good. But where has it appeared? In an Italian publication, La Rivista Europea! That is pleasant and symbolical!"
He had a second reason for melancholy: Richard Wagner was leaving to make his home at Bayreuth. A letter of Cosima Wagner announced the departure: "Yes, Bayreuth!... Adieu to dear Triebschen, where the Origin of Tragedy was conceived, and so many other things which perhaps will never begin again!"
Three years before, in this spring season, Nietzsche had hazarded his first visit to Triebschen; he wished to return again. He did return, and found the house desolate. A few pieces of furniture, covered over with horse-cloths[Pg 125] and dispersed from room to room, seemed like flotsam and jetsam from another time. Every small object, all the family knick-knacks, had disappeared. The light entered, hard and crude, through the curtainless windows. Wagner and his wife were completing then-last packages, throwing the last of the books into the last of the baskets. They welcomed the faithful Nietzsche, asked his aid; he gave it at once. He wrapped up in packets the letters, the precious manuscripts; then more books and scores. Suddenly his heart failed him. So it was all over, Triebschen was done with! Three years of his life, and what years they had been! How unexpected, how moving, how delicious, and they were to escape in a day! Now he must renounce the past, and follow the master without regret. Now he must forget Triebschen and, for the future, think only of Bayreuth. No sooner was this magical name pronounced than it fascinated Nietzsche and troubled him. His hours at Triebschen had been so fine, hours of repose and meditation, hours of work and silence. A man, a woman of genius; a nest of children; an infinity of happy conversations, of beauty—Triebschen had given all that. What would Bayreuth give? The crowd would come there, and what would it bring with it? Friedrich Nietzsche left the books which he was engaged in packing. The grand piano had remained in the middle of the salon. He opened it, preluded, then improvised. Richard and Cosima Wagner, leaving aside all their affairs, listened. A harrowing, unforgettable rhapsody resounded through the empty salon. It was the adieu.
In November, 1888, Friedrich Nietzsche, already stricken with madness, set himself to recount his history. "Since I am here recalling the consolations of my life, I ought to express in a word my gratitude for what was by far my most profound and best-loved joy—my intimacy with Richard Wagner. I wish to be[Pg 126] just with regard to the rest of my human relationships; but I absolutely cannot efface from my life the days at Triebschen, days of confidence, of gaiety, of sublime flashes—days of profound perceptions. I do not know what Wagner was for others: our sky was never darkened by a cloud."