Bayreuth has had a strange destiny. This little German town, so long obscure, scintillates in the eighteenth century, shines with a somewhat flickering brilliance, but becomes celebrated at last throughout all Europe. An intelligent Margravine—Frederick's sister, the friend of Voltaire and of French elegance—lives there, beautifies it, enlivens the barren country with castles, and lavishes on its fa?ades the singular volutes of the "rococo" style. The Margravine dies and Bayreuth is again forgotten. A century passes and suddenly its fame returns; the little town that the Margrave adorned becomes the Jerusalem of a new art and a new religion. A strange destiny, but a factitious one. It is a poet who has regulated the antitheses. The history of Bayreuth ought to be included among Wagner's works.
He wished to set up his theatre in a quiet and secluded town. It suited him, not to go to his audience, but rather to force his audience to come to him. He chose, from many others, this town; the two Germanys would be thus confronted, the one, that of the past, a slave to French customs, mean and shabby; the other, that of the future, his own, an emancipating and innovating Germany. The work was started without delay. The master decided that the foundation-stone of his theatre[Pg 128] should be laid with pomp on the 22nd of May, 1872, the anniversary of his birth.
"So we shall see one another again," wrote Nietzsche to his friend Rohde. "Our meetings are ever becoming more grandiose, more historical, are they not?"
They were present together at the ceremony, one of them coming from Basle, the other from Hamburg. Two thousand people were assembled in the little town. The weather was appalling. But the unceasing rain, the threatening sky, made the ceremony still more imposing. Wagnerian art is a serious thing and has no need of smiling heavens. The faithful disciples, standing in the open air at the mercy of the winds, saw the stone laid. In the hollow block Wagner deposited a piece of poetry written by himself, and then threw the first spadeful of plaster. In the evening he invited his friends to hear an execution of the "Symphony" with chorus, the orchestration of which he had in parts slightly strengthened. He personally conducted. Young Germany, assembled in the Margrave's theatre, listened piously to this work in which the nineteenth century declared its need, and when the final chorus struck up—"Millions of men embrace each other"—it really seemed, said a spectator, as if the sublime wish was about to be realised.
"Ah! my friend," wrote Nietzsche, "through what days we have lived! No one can rob us of these grave and sacred memories. We ought to go forth into life inspired to battle on their behalf. Above all, we ought to force ourselves to regulate all our acts, with as much gravity and force as is possible, so as to prove that we are worthy of the unique events at which we have assisted."
Nietzsche wanted to fight for Wagner, for he loved[Pg 129] Wagner and he loved battle. "To arms, to arms!" he writes to Rohde; "war is necessary to me, ich brauche den Krieg." But he had already proved many a time, what he now began sadly to understand, that his nature did not lend itself to reticence and to the prudence necessary in such a contest, in which public opinion was the stake. There was no instant but a word, an attitude ran foul of his radical idealism. He felt the instinctive constraint that he had already known at Triebschen. Wagner disturbed him. He hardly recognised the grave and pure hero whom he had loved so much. He saw another man, a powerful workman, brutal, vindictive, jealous. Nietzsche had thought of making a tour in Italy, with a relation of Mendelssohn's; he was obliged to give up this idea in order to humour the master, who detested the race, even to the very name of Mendelssohn.
"Why is Wagner so distrustful?" Nietzsche wrote in his diary; "it excites distrust."
Wagner was as dictatorial as he was distrustful. The days had become rare when he could converse at leisure with nobleness and freedom as he had done at Triebschen. He spoke briefly, he commanded.
Nietzsche was still ready to go on a mission to Northern Germany to speak, write, and found Vereine, and to "thrust under the noses of the German savants the things which their timid eyes failed to perceive." Wagner would not accept this proposal; he wished Nietzsche to publish his lectures on The Future of our Educational Systems. Nietzsche resisted a desire in which he thought he detected a certain egotism.
"Our Herr Nietzsche only wants to do what he likes," exclaimed the irritable Wagner.
His anger saddened and humiliated Nietzsche both on his own account and on his master's. He thought, "Ill, weighed down with work, have I no right to respect? Am I under any one's orders? Why is Wagner so tyrannical?"[Pg 130] We read in his diary, "Wagner has not the strength to make those around him free and great. Wagner is not loyal; he is, on the contrary, suspicious and haughty."
At the same time there appeared a pamphlet, The Philology of the Future, a reply to F. Nietzsche. The author was Willamowitz, who had been Nietzsche's comrade at the school of Pforta.
"DEAR FRIEND," he wrote to Gersdorff, who informed him of the pamphlet, "Don't worry over me. I am ready. I will never entangle myself in polemics. It is a pity it should be Willamowitz. Do you know that he came last autumn to pay me a friendly visit? Why should it be Willamowitz?"
Wagner, at whom the title itself of the pamphlet, The Philology of the Future, was aimed—it parodied his famous formula, The Music of the Future—wrote a reply, and profited by the occasion to renew his invitation to Friedrich Nietzsche.
"What must one think of our schools of culture?" he concludes. "It is for you to tell us what German culture ought to be, so as to direct the regenerated nation towards the most noble objects." Once again Nietzsche was firm in his determination. He was by no means satisfied with these lectures, being discontented with their form and uncertain even of their thought. "I do not wish to publish anything as to which my conscience is not as pure as that of the seraphim." He tried to express his Wagnerian faith in another style.
"I should have so much pleasure," he wrote to Rohde, "in writing something for the service of our cause, but I don't know what. All that I advance is so wounding, such an irritant, and more likely to hurt than to serve.[Pg 131] Why should my poor book, na?ve and enthusiastic as it was, have been received so badly? Singular! Now, what shall we do, we others?"
He began to write Reden eines Hoffenden (Words of a Man of Hope), which he soon gave up.
Friedrich Nietzsche re-opened his Greek books, so invariably beautiful and satisfying. He explained—before very few pupils, because the evil fame of the Gebürt withdrew young philologists from him—the Choephores of ?schylus and some passages of ante-Platonic philosophy.
Across a gulf of twenty-five centuries that clear radiance descended upon him, scattering all doubts and shadows. Nietzsche often heard with misgiving the fine words which it pleased his Wagnerian friends to use. "Millions of men embrace each other," the chorus sang at Bayreuth in the work of Wagner. It sang well, but, after all, men did not embrace each other; and here Nietzsche suspected a certain extravagance, a certain falsehood. Look at the ancient Greeks, those ambitious and evil men. They do not embrace each other much, their hymns never speak of embraces. They desire to excel, and are devoured by envy; their hymns glorify these passions. Nietzsche liked their na?ve energy, their precise speech. He refreshed himself at this source and wrote a short essay: Homer's Wettkampf (The Homeric Joust). We find ourselves driven at the very beginning far away from the Wagnerian mysticism.
"When you speak of Humanity," he writes, "you imagine an order of sentiment by which man distinguishes himself from nature, but such a separation does not exist; these qualities called 'natural' and those called 'human' grow together and are blended. Man in his noblest aspirations is still branded by sinister nature.
[Pg 132]
"These formidable tendencies which seem inhuman are perhaps the fruitful soil which supports all humanity, its agitations, its acts, and its work.
"Thus it is that the Greeks, the most human of all men, remain cruel, happy in destruction."
This rapid sketch was the occupation of a few days. Nietzsche undertook a long work. He studied the texts of Thales, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Empedocles. He tried to approach those philosophers who were truly worthy of the name which they themselves had invented, those masters of life, scornful of argument and of books; citizens and at the same time thinkers, and not déracinés like those who followed them—Socrates and his school of mockers, Plato and his school of dreamers, philosophers of whom each one dares to bring a philosophy of his own, that is to say, an individual point of view in the consideration of things, in the deliberation of acts. Nietzsche, in a few days, filled a copybook with notes.
All the same, he continued to be interested in the successes of his glorious friend. In July Tristan was played at Munich. He went, and met many other disciples; Gersdorff, Fr?ulein von Meysenbug, whom he had met at the May festivals of Bayreuth. She had preserved, despite her fifty years, that tender charm that never left her, and the physical grace of a frail and nervous body. Friedrich Nietzsche passed some pleasant days in the company of his comrade and his new friend. All three regretted them when they were gone, and at the moment of departure expressed a hope of meeting each other soon again. Gersdorff wished to return in August to hear Tristan, and once more Nietzsche promised to be there, but at the last moment Gersdorff was unable to be present, and Nietzsche had not the courage to return alone to Munich. "It is insupportable," he wrote to Fr?ulein von Meysenbug, "to find yourself face to face with an art so serious and profound. In short, I[Pg 133] remain at Basle." Parmenides, on whom he was meditating, consoled him for the loss of Tristan.
Fr?ulein von Meysenbug kept Nietzsche advised of all news, whether trivial or important, in connection with the Wagnerian campaign. The master had just terminated The Twilight of the Gods, the last of the four dramas of the Tetralogy. He had at last finished his great work. Fr?ulein von Meysenbug was informed in a note written to her by Cosima Wagner. "In my heart I hear sung 'Praise be to God,'" wrote the wife. "Praise be to God," repeated Fr?ulein von Meysenbug, and she adds—these few words indicate the tone of the place and of the time: "The disciples of the new spirit need new mysteries by which they may solemnise together their instinctive knowledge. Wagner creates them in his tragic works, and the world will not have recovered its beauty until we have built for the new Dionysian myth a Temple worthy of it." Fr?ulein von Meysenbug confided to Nietzsche the measures she was taking to win Marguerite of Savoy, the Queen of Italy, to the cause, and to make her accept the Presidency of a small circle of noble patronesses. A few women of the highest aristocracy, friends of Liszt's, initiated by him into the Wagnerian cult, composed this sublime Verein.
In all this there was an irritating atmosphere of snobbery and excessive religiosity. Yet Fr?ulein von Meysenbug was an exquisite woman with irreproachable intentions, pure with that purity which purifies all that it touches: Nietzsche did not practise his criticism on this friend's letters. He soon felt the fatigue of continuous work. He lost his sleep and was obliged to rest. Travel had often lightened his mind. He set out, at the end of summer, for Italy, and went as far as Bergamo but no further. This country, which he was afterwards to love so much, displeased him. "Here reigns the Apollonian cult," Fr?ulein von Meysenbug, who was[Pg 134] staying at Florence, told him; "it is good to bathe in." Nietzsche was very little of an Apollonian. He perceived only voluptuousness, excessive sweetness, harmony of line. His German tastes were disconcerted and he returned to the mountains, where he became, as he wrote, "more audacious and more noble." There, in a poor village inn at Splügen, he had a few days of happiness.
"Here, on the extreme border of Switzerland and Italy," he wrote in August, 1872, to Gersdorff, "I am alone, and I am very well satisfied with my choice. A rich and marvellous solitude, with the most magnificent roads in the world, along which I go meditating for hours, buried in my thoughts, and yet I never fall over a precipice. And whenever I look around me there is something new and great to see. No sign of life except when the diligence arrives and stops for relays. I take my meals with the men, our one contact. They pass like the Platonic shadows before my cave."
Until now Nietzsche had not cared much for high mountains; he preferred the moderate valleys and woods of the Jura, which reminded him of his native country, the hills of the Saale and Bohemia. At Splügen a new joy was revealed to him; the joy of solitude and of meditation in the mountain air. It was like a flash of lightning. He went down to the plains and forgot; but six years later, with the knowledge of his eternal loneliness on him, he found, sheltered in mean inns like this one, once again the same lyrical élan that he had discovered in October, 1872.
He soon left his sanctuary and returned without vexation to Basle, whither his professional duties drew him. There he had made friendships and established a way of life. He liked the town, and tolerated the inhabitants. Basle had truly become his centre. "Overbeck and[Pg 135] Romundt, my companions of table and of thought," he writes to Rohde, "are the best society in the world. With them I cease my lamentations and my gnashing of teeth. Overbeck is the most serious, the most broad-minded of philosophers, and the most simple and amiable of men. He has that radical temper, failing which I can agree with no one."
His first impression on his return was trying. All his pupils left him. He was not at a loss to understand the reason of this exodus; the German philologists had declared him to be "a man scientifically dead." They had condemned him personally, and put an interdict upon his lectures. "The Holy Vehmgericht has done its duty well," he wrote to Rohde. "Let us act as if nothing had happened. But I do not like the little University to suffer on my account, it hurts me. We lose twenty entries in the last half-year. I can hardly as much as give a course on Greek and Latin rhetoric. I have two pupils, one is a Germanist, the other a Jurist."
At last he received some comfort. Rohde had written in defence of his book an article which no review would accept. Weary of refusal, he touched up his work and published it under the form of a letter addressed to Richard Wagner. Nietzsche thanked him. "Nobody dared to print my name," he wrote to Rohde.
"... It was as if I had committed a crime, and now your book comes, so ardent, so daring a witness to our fraternal combat! My friends are delighted with it. They are never tired of praising you, for the details and the whole; they think your polemics worthy of a Lessing. ... What pleases me most is the deep and threatening clamour of it, like the sound of a waterfall. We must be brave, dear, dear friend. I always have faith in progress, in our progress. I believe that we will always go on increasing in loyal ambitions, and in strength. I believe[Pg 136] in the success of our advance towards ends more noble yet, and more aspiring. Yes, we will reach them, and then as conquerors, who discover goals yet further off, we shall push on, always brave! What does it matter to us that they will be few, so few, those spectators whose eyes can follow the path we are pursuing? What does it matter if we have for spectators only those who have the necessary qualities for judging this combat? All the crowns which my time might give me I sacrifice to that unique spectator, Wagner. The ambition to satisfy him animates me more, and more nobly, than any other influence. Because he is difficult and he says everything, what pleases him and what displeases him; he is my good conscience, to praise and to punish."
At the commencement of December, Nietzsche was lucky enough to find his master again for a few hours, and to live with him in the intimate way that reminded him of the days at Triebschen. Wagner, passing through Strassburg, called to him; and he went at once. The meeting was untroubled by any discord, a harmony now, no doubt, rare enough; for Cosima Wagner, after having remarked this in one of her letters, expressed the hope that such perfect hours would suffice to dissipate all misunderstandings and to prevent their recrudescence.
Nietzsche worked a great deal during these last months of 1872. His studies on the tragic philosophies of the Greeks were well advanced; he left them over. Those wise men had restored his serenity, and he profited by the help which they had given him to contemplate once more the problems of his century. The problems—this is hardly a correct expression, for he knew of only one. He questioned himself how a culture should be founded, that is to say, a harmony of traditions, of rules, of beliefs, by submission to which a man may become nobler.[Pg 137] Actual modern societies have for their end the production of certain comforts; how should different societies be substituted which would not only satisfy men, but benefit them? Let us know our wretchedness; we are stripped of culture. Our thoughts and our acts are not ruled by the authority of any style; the idea even of such an authority is lost to us. We have perfected in an extraordinary manner the discipline of knowledge, and we seem to have forgotten that others exist. We succeed in describing the phenomena of life, in translating the Universe into an abstract language, and we scarcely perceive that, in writing and translating thus, we lose the reality of the Universe of Life. Science exercises on us a "barbarising action," wrote Nietzsche. He analysed this action.
"The essential point of all science has become merely accessory, or else it is entirely absent.
"The study of languages—without the discipline of style and rhetoric.
"Indian studies—without philosophy.
"Classical antiquity—without a suspicion of how closely everything in it is bound up with practical efforts.
"The sciences of nature—without that beneficent and serene atmosphere which Goethe found in them.
"History—without enthusiasm.
"In short, all the sciences without their practical uses, that is to say, studied otherwise than as really cultivated men would study them. Science as a means of livelihood."
It is necessary, therefore, that the sense of beauty, of virtue, and of strong and regulated passions should be restored. How can a philosopher employ himself in this task? Alas! the experience of antiquity teaches and discourages us. The philosopher is a hybrid being, half logician, half artist, a poet, an apostle, who constructs[Pg 138] his dreams and his commandments in a logical manner. Men listen willingly enough to poets and apostles, they do not listen to philosophers, they are not moved by their analyses and their deductions. Consider that long line of genius, the philosophers of tragic Greece. What did they realise? Their lives were given in vain to their race. Empedocles alone moved the mob, but he was as much a magician as philosopher; he invented myths and poems; he was eloquent, he was magnificent; it was the legend, and not the thought of Empedocles, that was effective. Pythagoras founded a sect, a philosopher cannot hope for more: his labour grouped together a few friends, a few disciples, who passed over the human masses like a ripple on the ocean; not one of the great philosophers has swayed the people, writes Nietzsche. Where they have failed, who will succeed? It is impossible to found a popular culture on philosophy.
What is then the destiny of these singular souls? Is their force, which is at times immense, lost? Will the philosopher always be a paradoxical being, and useless to men? Friedrich Nietzsche was troubled; it was the utility of his own life that he questioned. He would never be a musician, that he knew at last; never a poet, he had ceased to hope for it. He had not the faculty of conceiving the uniformities, of animating a drama, of creating a soul. One evening he confessed this to Overbeck with such sadness that his friend was moved. He was therefore a philosopher, moreover, a very ignorant one, an amateur of philosophy, an imperfect lyrical artist; and he questioned himself: Since I have for weapons only my thoughts, the thoughts of a philosopher, what can I do? He answered: I can help. Socrates did not create the truths that error kept prisoners in the souls of his interlocutors, he only aspired to the title of accoucheur. Such is the task of a philosopher. He is an inefficient creator, but a very efficient critic. He is obliged to[Pg 139] analyse the forces which are operative around him, in science, in religion, and in art; he is obliged to give the directions, to fix the values and the limits. Such shall be my task. I will study the souls of my contemporaries, and I shall have every authority to say to them: Neither science nor religion can save you; seek refuge in art, the power of modern times, and in the artist who is Richard Wagner. "The philosopher of the future," he wrote, "he must be the supreme judge of an ?sthetic culture, a censor of every digression."
Nietzsche went to Naumburg for the Christmas holidays. Wagner sent him word to ask him to stop at Bayreuth on his way home to Basle, but he was hard pressed by work and perhaps a little ill, and no doubt a secret instinct warned him that solitude would be best for the meditation of the problems which he had to determine for himself. He made his apologies. Besides, he had had for some weeks many opportunities of proving his attachment. He had written an article (the only one in all his work) in answer to an alienist who had undertaken to prove that Wagner was mad. He had offered a sum of money to help in the propaganda. This anonymous and distant manner was the only one that suited him at the time. Even at Basle he tried to found a Wagnerian Verein. He was therefore astounded when he discovered that the master was displeased at his absence. Already in the past year an invitation, also declined, had helped to provoke a mild lecture.
"It is Burckhardt who is keeping you at Basle," wrote Cosima Wagner. Nietzsche wrote and remedied things, but the painful impression remained.
"Everything is quieted," he told the friend who had informed him; "but I cannot quite forget. Wagner knows that I am ill, absorbed in work, and in need of a little liberty. I shall be, henceforth, whether I wish[Pg 140] it or no, more anxious than in the past. God knows how many times I have wounded him. Each time I am astonished, and I never succeed in precisely locating the point in which we have clashed."
This annoyance did not affect his thought; we can follow it to its smallest shades of meaning, thanks to the notes published in the tenth volume of his complete works. It is quite active and fecund. "I am the adventurer of the spirit," he was to write. "I wander in my thought. I go to the idea that calls me...."
He was never to wander so audaciously as in the first weeks of 1876.
He completed a finer and sober essay, Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge im ausser moralischen Sinne (On Truth and Falsehood in an Extra-Moral Sense.) (It is a pity that it is necessary to translate these high-sounding expressions, and we render them word for word.) Nietzsche always liked high-sounding words; he does not recoil here from using the word "untruth," and essays for the first time a "reversal of values." To the true he opposes the false and prefers it. He exalts the imaginary worlds which poets add to the real world. "Dare to deceive thyself and dream," Schiller had said; Friedrich Nietzsche repeats this advice. It was the happy audacity of the Greeks; they intoxicated themselves with their divine histories, their heroic myths, and this intoxication set their souls on high adventures. The loyal Athenian, persuaded that Pallas dwelt in his city, lived in a dream. More clear-sighted, would he have been stronger; more passionate, braver? Truth is good in proportion to the services which it assures, and illusion is preferable if it performs its duty better. Why deify the truth? It is the tendency of the moderns; Pereat vita, fiat veritas! they say readily. Why this[Pg 141] fanaticism? It is an inversion of the sane law for men: Pereat Veritas, fiat vita!
Nietzsche wrote down these dogmatic formulas, but did not stop at them. He went on writing. It was thus that he worked and advanced in his researches. Let us not forget that these thoughts, firm though they were in manner, were only indications, steps on the road. He would give birth to other and perhaps contrary thoughts. Friedrich Nietzsche had in him two instincts, opposed to each other; the one, that of the philosopher, and the other, that of the artist; the one was bent on truth, the other was ready to fabricate. He hesitated at the moment when he had to sacrifice one or the other. The instinct for the true protested within him. He did not abandon his formulas; he took them up again, he essayed new definitions, he indicated the difficulties, the hiatus. His thoughts had no disguise, and we can follow his researches. Let us translate this significant disorder:
"The philosopher of the tragic knowledge. He binds the disordered instinct of knowledge, but not by a new metaphysic. He does not establish new beliefs. He sees with a tragic emotion that the ground of metaphysics opens under him, and he knows that the many-coloured whirlwind of science can never satisfy him. He builds for himself a new life; to art he restores its rights.
"The philosopher of the desperate knowledge abandons himself to blind science: knowledge at any price.
"Even if metaphysics be only an anthropomorphic appearance, for the tragic philosopher that achieves the image of being. He is not sceptical. Here there is an idea to create; for scepticism is not the end. The instinct of knowledge forced to its extreme limits turns against itself to transform itself into a criticism of the faculty of knowledge. Knowledge in the service of the best[Pg 142] kind of life. One should even will illusion, therein lies the tragic."
What is then this philosopher of the desperate knowledge whose attitude Nietzsche defines in two lines. Must he not love him, having found for him already such a beautiful name? There is an idea to create, writes Nietzsche; what then is this idea? It seems that in many passages Nietzsche is pleased to contemplate, without its veils, that terrible reality, whose aspect alone, says the Hindu legend, means death.
"How," he writes, "do they dare talk of a destiny for the earth? In infinite time and space there are no ends: what is there, is eternally there, whatever the forms. What can result from it for a metaphysical world one does not see.
"Without support of this order humanity should stand firm; a terrible task for the artist!
"The terrible consequences of Darwinism, in which, moreover, I believe. We respect certain qualities which we hold as eternal, moral, artistic, religious, &c., &c., &c. The spirit, a production of the brain, to consider it as supernatural! To deify it, what folly!
"To speak of an unconscious end of humanity, to me, that is false. Humanity is not a whole like an ant-hill. Perhaps one may speak of the unconscious ends of an ant-hill—but of all the ant-hills of the world!
"Our duty is not to take shelter in metaphysics, but actively to sacrifice ourselves to the birth of culture. Hence my severity against misty idealism."
At that instant Nietzsche had almost reached the term of his thought, but with great labour and consequent suffering. Headaches, pains in the eyes and stomach, laid hold of him once more. The softest light hurt him,[Pg 143] he was obliged to give up reading. Nevertheless, his thought never halted. He was again occupied with the philosophers of tragic Greece; he listened to the words which come down to us diminished by the centuries, but always firm. He heard the concert of the everlasting responses—
Thales. Everything derives from a unique element. Anaximander. The flux of things is their punishment. Heraclitus. A law governs the flux and the institution of things.
Parmenides. The flux and the institution of things is illusion. The One alone exists.
Anaxagoras. All qualities are eternal; there is no becoming.
The Pythagoreans. All qualities are quantities. Empedocles. All causes are magical. Democritus. All causes are mechanical. Socrates. Nothing is constant except thought.
Friedrich Nietzsche is moved by these opposing voices, by these rhythms of thought which accuse nature in their eternal collisions. "The vicissitudes of the ideas and systems of man affect me more tragically than the vicissitudes of real life," said H?lderlin. Nietzsche's feeling was the same. He admired and envied those primitives who discovered nature and who found the first answers. He threw aside the devices of art, he confronted life as ?dipus confronted the Sphinx, and under this very title ?dipus he wrote a fragment to the mysterious language of which we may open our ears.
?dipus. I call myself the last philosopher because I am the last man. I speak alone and I hear my voice sounding like that of a dying man. With thee, dear voice, whose breath brings to me the last memories of[Pg 144] all human happiness, with thee let me speak yet a moment more: thou wilt deceive my solitude; thou wilt give me back the illusion of society and love, because my heart will not believe that love is dead. It cannot endure the terror of the most solitary solitude, and forces me to speak as if I were two. Is it thou that I hear, my voice? Thou murmurest, and thou cursest? Yet—thy malediction should rend the entrails of the world! Alas, in spite of everything it subsists, more dazzling and colder than ever; it looks at me with its stars pitilessly; it exists blind and deaf as before, and nothing dies but man. And yet, you still speak to me, beloved voice! I die not alone in this universe. I, the last man: the last plaint, your plaint, dies with me. Misery, misery! pity me, the last man of misery, ?dipus!
It seems that Nietzsche, now at the extreme limits of his thought, experiences a sudden need of rest. He wants to speak to his friends, to feel himself surrounded by them and diverted. The Easter holidays in 1873 gave him a fortnight's release. He left for Bayreuth, where he was not expected.
"I leave this evening," he writes to Fr?ulein von Meysenbug. "Guess where I am going? You've guessed, and, height of bliss, I shall meet the best of men, Rohde, to-morrow at half-past four. I shall be staying with Wagner, and then see me quite happy! We shall speak much of you, much of Gersdorff. He has copied my lectures, you say? It touches me, and I will not forget it. What good friends I have! It is really shameful.
"I hope to bring back from Bayreuth courage and gaiety, and to strengthen myself in everything that is good. I dreamt last night that I was having my Gradus ad Parnassum carefully rebound. This mixture of bookbinding[Pg 145] and symbolism is comprehensible; moreover, very insipid. But it is a truth! It is necessary from time to time to rebind ourselves by frequenting men more valorous and stronger than ourselves or else we lose a few of our pages, then a few more, still a few more, until the last page is destroyed. And that our life should be a Gradus ad Parnassum, that also is a truth that we must often repeat to ourselves. The future to which I shall attain if I take plenty of trouble, if I have a little happiness and much time, is to become a more sober writer, and from the first and ever better to pursue my calling as a man of letters more soberly. From time to time I feel a childish repugnance to printed paper, I think that I see soiled paper. And I can very well picture a period when reading was not much liked, writing even less so; but one far preferred to think a lot, and to act still more. For everything to-day awaits that efficacious man, who, condemning in himself and us our millenarian routines, will live better and will give us his life to imitate."
Friedrich Nietzsche left for Bayreuth.
He there learnt a piece of unexpected news. Money was lacking. Of the twelve hundred thousand francs needed, eight hundred thousand only had been realised with great difficulty. The enterprise was compromised and perhaps ruined. Everyone was losing heart. The master alone was confident and calm. Since he had attained his manhood, he had desired to possess a theatre. He knew that a constant will prevails over chance, and a few months of crisis did not alarm him after forty years of waiting. Capitalists from Berlin, Munich, Vienna, London, and Chicago were making proposals to him which Richard Wagner invariably refused to entertain. He wished his theatre to belong to himself alone, and to[Pg 146] be near him: "It is not a question of the success of the affair," he said, "but of awakening the hidden forces of the German soul." But his remarkable serenity failed to reassure his friends. A panic was engendered at Bayreuth, and no one again dared to hope.
Friedrich Nietzsche looked on, listened, observed, and then fled to Naumburg. "My despair was deep," he has written; "there was nothing that did not seem criminal to me." He was rediscovering the world after ten months of solitude, and finding it even more cowardly and more miserable than he had ever judged it to be. There was worse to endure, for he was discontented with himself. He recalled his last meditations. "I call myself the last philosopher, because I am the last man." And he questioned himself: Was he really "the last philosopher "? "the last man "? Had he not flattered himself in assigning himself a r?le so difficult and magnificent? Had he not been ungrateful, cowardly, and vile, like the others, in abandoning the struggle at the decisive moment to shut himself up in his solitude and his selfish dreams? Had he not forgotten his master? He accused himself; remorse accentuated his despair. "I should not think of myself," was his reproach—" Wagner alone is a hero—Wagner, so great in misfortune, great as of old at Triebschen. It is he whom we must serve. I must henceforth be vowed to help him."
It had been his intention to publish a few chapters of his book on The Philosophers of Tragic Greece. He abstained from this delight; put away in a drawer—not without a pang—his almost finished manuscript. He wished to "spit out lava," to insult Germany and treat her like a brute, since, imbecile brute that she was, she would only yield to brutality.
"I return from Bayreuth in such a state of persistent melancholy," he wrote to Rohde, "that the only hope for me is holy wrath."
[Pg 147]
Friedrich Nietzsche looked for no joy in the work which he was about to undertake. To attack is to recognise, to condescend, to lower oneself. He would have preferred to have had no traffic with base humanity. But here was Richard Wagner; was it to be borne that he should be tormented and trammelled? that the Germans should sadden him as they saddened Goethe, and break him, as they broke Schiller? To-morrow other men of genius would be born: was it not necessary to fight from to-day to assure them their liberty and the freedom of their lives? It is impossible to ignore the masses that beset us. It is a bitter destiny, but one that may not be eluded. It is the destiny of the best-born, and above all of the best Germans, heroes begotten and misunderstood by a race insensible to beauty.
Friedrich Nietzsche remembered what Goethe had said of Lessing: "Pity this extraordinary man, pity him that he lived in such a pitiable era, that he was forced to act ceaselessly by polemics." He applied this to himself, but polemics seemed to be a duty to him, as in other times they had been to Lessing. He looked round for an adversary. The illustrious D. F. Strauss now represented official philosophy; he was its heavy pontiff. Having renounced the critical researches, in which he was a real master, he was affecting, in his old age, the attitude of a thinker, and was elaborating his Credo with sham elegances borrowed from Voltaire and About.
"I simply propose," he wrote in The Old Faith and the New, "to say how we live—how for long years past we have been wont to direct our lives. By the side of our professions—for we belong to the most diverse professions; we are not all artists or scholars, but also officials, soldiers, artisans, or proprietors, and, I have already said and I repeat it, our number is not small, we are many thousand, and not of the worst, in every[Pg 148] country—by the side of our professions, I say, we try, as far as possible, to keep our minds open to the highest interests of humanity; our hearts are exalted by these new destinies, as unforeseen as they are magnificent, assigned by Fate to our country which formerly endured so much. The better to understand these things, we study history, to which easy access is opened to the first comer by a number of both popular and attractive works. And then we try to extend our knowledge of nature by the aid of manuals which are within reach of everybody. Finally we find in reading our great poets, in hearing our great musicians, stimulants for spirit and feeling, for the imagination and the heart, stimulants which in truth leave nothing to be desired. Thus we live, thus we march forward in happiness."
So the Philistines are happy and very rightly, thought Nietzsche: this is the era of their power. Assuredly the species is not new. Even Attica had its abettors of "banausia." But the Philistine formerly lived under humiliating conditions. He was merely tolerated. He was not talked of, nor did he talk. Then a more indulgent period arrived, in which he was listened to, his follies flattered; he appeared droll. This was enough: he became a fop, proud of his prudhommerie. To-day he triumphs; it is impossible to hold him back. He becomes a fanatic, and founds a religion: it is the new faith, of which Strauss is the prophet. Friedrich Nietzsche would have assuredly approved of that classification of the ages which Gustave Flaubert suggested about this time: "Paganisme, christianisme, muflisme" (Paganism, Christianity, Snout-ism). The Philistine dictates his tastes, and imposes his mannerisms. A war breaks out: he reads his paper, the telegrams interest him, and contribute to his happiness. Great men have suffered, and have left us their works: the Philistine[Pg 149] knows these works, and appreciates them—they add to his well-being. Moreover, he appreciates with discernment. The Pastoral Symphony ravishes him, but he condemns the exaggerated uproar of the Symphony with chorus. David Friedrich Strauss says it distinctly: and that clear mind of his is not to be deceived.
Friedrich Nietzsche sought no further; he had found the man whom he wished to destroy. In the first days of May he had all his notes in hand, his work was ready. His strength suddenly gave out: his aching head, his eyes that could not bear the light without pain, played traitor to his desire to work; in a few days he was all but an invalid, almost blind. Overbeck and Romundt did their best to help him. But they had, both of them, other work; their time was measured by their professional duties. A third friend came to give assistance to the invalid. The Baron von Gersdorff, a man of leisure and a devoted friend, was travelling in Italy. He had been Friedrich Nietzsche's comrade at the college of Pforta, and since those already distant days had scarcely seen him again, but his friendship had remained intact. He hastened to Basle. He was a younger son of good family. His elder brothers having died, one in 1866 in the Austrian campaign, the other in 1871 in the French campaign, he had been obliged to sacrifice his tastes, to renounce philosophy and learn farming so as to be able to manage the family estate in North Germany. He was the only one of Nietzsche's friends who was not a slave to paper and books. "He is a fine type of the reserved and dignified gentleman, although extremely simple in his manners," wrote Overbeck; "at bottom the best fellow imaginable, and at the first glance you are left with the impression of a man who is entirely trustworthy." A friend of Romundt's, Paul Rée, also came to help or distract the invalid, who, thanks to so many kindnesses, was able to resist his sufferings. Lying always in semi-darkness, he[Pg 150] dictated: the faithful Gersdorff wrote down what he had to say, and by the end of June the manuscript was sent to the publisher.
Friedrich Nietzsche's condition improved when he had finished his work. He felt a great need of fresh air and of solitude. His sister, who had come from Naumburg, took him to the mountains of the Grisons. His headaches grew less severe, his eyesight became stronger. He rested for a few weeks, correcting his proofs, rejoicing in his new-found strength, but always haunted by his angers and his aspirations.
One day, while walking with his sister on the outskirts of Flimms, he came on a little chateau in a sequestered site. "What a beautiful retreat," he said; "what a beautiful spot in which to establish our lay convent." The chateau was for sale. "Let us visit it," said the young girl. They went in, and were delighted with everything: the garden, the terrace from which a wide view stretched out before them, the big hall with its chimney-piece of sculptured stone. The rooms were few, but why should there be more? This would be given to Richard Wagner, that to Cosima Wagner, this other would be at the disposal of friends of passage, Fr?ulein von Meysenbug or Jacob Burckhardt. Gersdorff, Deussen, Rohde, Overbeck, Romundt, would often reside there. "Here," declared Nietzsche, "we will build a covered walk, a sort of cloister. Thus, in every kind of weather, we can walk as we talk. For we shall talk much, we shall read but little, and write hardly at all."
He returned to his familiar dream once again, fraternal intercourse between disciples and masters. Fr?ulein Nietzsche grew very excited. "You will need a woman to keep house," she said. "It will be I." She enquired about the price and wrote to the proprietor, but matters were not arranged.
"I looked too young," wrote Fr?ulein Nietzsche,[Pg 151] who tells the anecdote, "and the gardener did not take us seriously." What are we to think of this affair? It is hard to know. Was it only the chatter of a young girl to which Friedrich Nietzsche had hearkened for an instant? Or was it, on the contrary, a serious notion? Probably the latter. His spirit, hospitable to chimeras, ill knew what the world admits and what it does not admit. He came back to Basle. His pamphlet had provoked a good deal of discussion. "I read it, and re-read it," wrote Wagner, "and I swear to the great gods that I hold you to be the only one who knows what I want." "Your pamphlet is a thunderbolt," wrote Hans von Bülow. "A modern Voltaire ought to write: écr.... l'inf.... This international ?sthetic is for us a far more odious adversary than red or black bandits."
Other good judges, elderly men in many cases, approved of the young polemist; Ewald (of Gottingen), Bruno Bauer, Karl Hildebrandt, "dieses letzten humanen Deutschen," said Nietzsche—"this last of the human Germans"—declared for him. "This little book," wrote the critic, "may mark a return of the German spirit towards serious thought and intellectual passion."
But these friendly voices were few.
"The German Empire," he had written, "is extirpating the German spirit." He had wounded the pride of a conquering people. In return, he suffered many an insult, many an accusation of scurviness and treachery. He rejoiced over it. "I enter society with a duel," he said; "Stendhal gave that advice." Complete Stendhalian that he was (or at least he flattered himself that he was), Nietzsche was, notwithstanding, accessible to pity. David Strauss died but a few weeks after the publication of the pamphlet, and Nietzsche, imagining that his work had killed the old man, was sorely grieved. His sister and his friends tried in vain to reassure him; he did not wish to abandon a remorse which was, moreover, so glorious.
[Pg 152]
Stimulated by this first conflict, he dreamt of vaster conflicts. With extraordinary rapidity of conception he prepared a series of treatises which he wished to publish under a general title: Unzeitgem?sse Betrachtungen ("Thoughts Out of Season"). D. F. Strauss had furnished the subject of the first of the series. The second was to be entitled The Use and Abuse of History. Twenty others were to follow. His friends, ever the associates of his dreams, would contribute, he thought, to the work.
Franz Overbeck had just published a little book entitled The Christianity of our Modern Theology. He attacked the German savants and their too modernist tendencies, which attenuated Christianity, and allowed the irrevocable and serious doctrine, which was that of the early Christians, to fall into oblivion. Nietzsche had Overbeck's Christlichkeit and his D. F. Strauss bound together. On the outside page he wrote six lines of verse.
"Two twins of the same house enter joyfully into the world—to devour the dragons of the world. Two fathers, one work. Oh, miracle! The mother of these twins is called Friendship."[1]
Friedrich Nietzsche hoped for a series of similar volumes, the work of many hands but inspired by one spirit.
"With a hundred men bred up to the conflict of modern ideas, inured to heroism," he then wrote, "all our noisy and lazy culture would be reduced to eternal silence. A hundred men of that stamp carried the civilisation of the Renaissance on their shoulders." A double[Pg 153] hope and a vain one: his friends failed him, and he himself did not write his twenty pamphlets. Only their titles, and a few pages of rough outline, are left to us. On The State, The City, The Social Crisis, Military Culture, on Religion, what had he to tell us? Let us moderate our regrets; little perhaps; little, at all events, that could be called precious, as distinct from his desires and his complaints.
He was also busy with another work, and announced it to Gersdorff in mysterious terms: "Let it be enough for you to know that a danger, a terrible and unexpected one, menaces Bayreuth, and that the task of digging the countermine has fallen to me." In fact, Richard Wagner had begged him to write a supreme appeal to the Germans, and he applied himself to the task of drawing it up with all the gravity, all the profundity, all the solemnity of which he was capable. He demanded Erwin Rohde's assistance and advice. "Can I count on it that you will send me soon," he wrote, "a fragment drawn up in the Napoleonic style?" Erwin Rohde, a prudent man, declined. "One would have to be polite," he said, "when the only true thing for the rabble is insult." Friedrich Nietzsche did not embarrass himself with politeness.
At the end of October the presidents of the Wagner Vereine, assembled united at Bayreuth, invited Friedrich Nietzsche to read his manifesto, A Summons[2] to the Germans.
"We wish to be listened to, for we speak in order to give a warning; and he who warns, whoever he be, whatever he says, always has the right to be heard.... We lift our voices because you are in danger, and because, seeing you so mute, so indifferent, so callous, we fear for you.... We speak to you in all sincerity of heart, and[Pg 154] we seek and desire our good only because it is also yours: the salvation and the honour of the German spirit, and of the German name...."
The manifesto was developed in the same menacing and rather emphatic tone, and the reading was received in an embarrassing silence. There was no murmur of approval, no look of encouragement for the writer. He was silent. At last some voices made themselves heard. "It is too serious; it is not politic enough, there must be changes, a great many changes." Some opined, "It is a monk's sermon." He did not wish to argue, and withdrew his draft of a summons. Wagner alone had supported him with a great deal of energy. "Wait," said he; "in a little time, a very little time, they will be obliged to return to your challenge, they will all conform to it."
Nietzsche remained very few days at Bayreuth. The situation, which had been serious at Easter, was now desperate. The public, who for some months had gibed at the great enterprise, now forgot all about it. A formidable indifference stood in the way of the propagandists, and every day it seemed more difficult to collect the necessary money. All idea of a commercial loan, of a lottery, had been set aside. An appeal written in haste to replace that of Nietzsche was spread all over Germany; ten thousand copies were printed, an infinitesimal number were sold. A letter was addressed to the directors of one hundred German theatres. Each was asked to give as a subscription to Bayreuth its receipts at a single benefit performance. Three refused, the others did not reply.
Friedrich Nietzsche returned to Basle. He succeeded, with the aid of Gersdorff, in drawing up his second "Thoughts Out of Season," The Use and Abuse of History.[Pg 155] But he wrote few letters, few notes, he formed no new project, and for the moment almost entirely escapes from our study. The double hope of his youth, that he might assist at the triumph of Wagner, and have a share in achieving this triumph, was ruined. His help had been refused. He had been told: "Your text is too grave, too solemn." And he asks himself, What does this mean? Is not the art of Wagner a matter of supreme gravity and solemnity? He is unhappy, humiliated, wounded in his amour propre and in his dreams. During these last weeks of 1873 he lived like an earthworm in his room at Basle.
He went to spend the New Year holidays at Naumburg. There, alone with his own people, he picked up some strength. He had always liked the repose of anniversaries, which was so favourable to reflection, and, as a young man, never allowed the feast of Saint Sylvester to pass without putting on paper a meditation on his life, his memories, and his views of the future. On December 31, 1873, he wrote to Erwin Rohde; the tone of his letter recalls his former habit.
"The Letters of an Heretical ?sthete, by Karl Hildebrandt, have given me inordinate pleasure," he wrote. "What a refreshment! Read, admire, he is one of ours, he is of the society of those who hope. May it prosper in the New Year, this society, may we remain good comrades! Ah! dear friend, one has no choice, one must be either of those who hope, or of those who despair. Once and for all I have decided on hope. Let us remain faithful and helpful to one another in this year 1874 and until the end of our days.
"Yours,
"FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE.
"NAUMBURG, Saint Sylvester's, 1873-74."
[Pg 156]
The first days of January came, and Friedrich Nietzsche applied himself to work once more. Since the strange misadventure at Bayreuth (no doubt the irritation of an author, whose aid has been rejected, accounts for these unforeseen changes), he has been tormented by anxieties and by doubts; he wished to clear them up. In two lines, which are like an introduction to his thoughts of the time, he brings the Wagnerian art into history. "Every thought that is great," he writes, "is dangerous, and dangerous, above all, in its newness. The impression is that of an isolated phenomenon which justifies itself by itself." Then, having posited this general principle, he approached the definitive questions: "What kind of man is Wagner? What does his art signify?"
It was a catastrophe in fairyland. The modern ?schylus, the modern Pindar vanished; the beautiful metaphysical and religious decorations fell in, and the art of Wagner appeared as it really was—an art, the late, magnificent, and often sickly flower of a humanity fifteen centuries old.
"Let us really ask ourselves," wrote Nietzsche in his notes, of which his friends did not know—"Let us really ask ourselves what is the value of the time which adopts the art of Wagner as its art? It is radically anarchical, a breathless thing, impious, greedy, shapeless, uncertain of its groundwork, quick to despair—it has no simplicity, it is self-conscious to the marrow, it lacks nobility, it is violent, cowardly. This art unites pell mell in one mass all that still attracts our modern German souls; aspects, ways of feeling, all comes pell mell. A monstrous attempt of art to affirm and dominate itself in an anti-artistic period. It is a poison against a poison."
The demi-god was gone, and in his place was a[Pg 157] stage-player. Nietzsche recognised despairingly that he had allowed himself to be captured by the gambols of a giant. He had loved with simplicity and with the ardour of his youth, and had been deceived. There was jealousy in his anger, and a little of that hatred which is never far from love. His heart, his thought, of which he was so proud, he had given to a man: this man had trifled with these sacred gifts.
We may pass over these personal sorrows; others, even more profound, humiliated Friedrich Nietzsche. He was humiliated because he had betrayed Truth. He had desired to live for her; he now perceived that for four years he had lived for Wagner. He had dared to repeat after Voltaire, "It is necessary to tell the truth and sacrifice oneself;" he now saw that he had neglected her, that perhaps he had shunned her, in seeking consolation from the beauties of Wagner's art. "If you seek for ease, believe," he had written some years before to his young sister: "if you desire the truth, search "; and the duty which he had indicated to this child he had himself failed to observe. He had suffered himself to be seduced by images, by harmonies, by the magic of words; he had fed on lies.
His fault was graver yet, for he had consented to this abasement. The universe is evil, he had written in The Origin of Tragedy—cruel like a dissonance of notes, and the soul of man, dissonant like the universe, suffering from itself, would detach itself from life if it did not invent some illusion, some myth which deceives but appeases it and procures it a refuge of beauty. In truth, if we thus draw back, if we create our consolations for ourselves, whither will we not let ourselves be led? One hearkens to one's weakness; there is no cowardice that is not thus authorised. To accept is to deliver oneself over to the illusionist. Is it a noble or a vile illusion? How can we know if we are deceived, if we ask to be[Pg 158] deceived? Nietzsche felt his memories degraded, and his hopes discouraged by the bitterness of remorse.
The Use and Abuse of History appeared in February. It is a pamphlet directed against that science, history, the invention and pride of the moderns; it is a criticism of the faculty, recently acquired by men, by which they reanimate within themselves the sentiments of past centuries, at the risk of lessening the integrity of their instincts and perplexing their rectitude. A brief indication gives the spirit of the book.
"The man of the future: eccentric, energetic, hot-blooded, indefatigable, an artist, and an enemy of books. I should desire to hunt from my ideal State the self-styled 'cultivated' men, as Plato did the poets: it would be my terrorism."
Thus Nietzsche affronted the ten thousand "Herr Professors" to whom history is their daily bread and who guide the public. He was punished by their hatred and their silence. No one spoke of his book. His friends tried to find him some readers. Overbeck wrote to his student friend, Treischke, the political writer, the Prussian historiographer. "I am sure," he said to him, "that you will discern in these contemplations of Nietzsche's the most profound, the most serious, the most instinctive devotion to German greatness." Treischke refused his assent; Overbeck wrote again. "It is Nietzsche, my suffering friend, of whom I will and above all must talk to you." Treischke showed temper in his reply and the dispute became bitter. "Your Basle," he wrote, "is a boudoir, from which German culture is insulted!" "If you saw the three of us, Nietzsche, Romundt, and myself," said Overbeck, "you would see three good companions. Our difference strikes[Pg 159] me as a painful symbol. It is so frequent an accident, so unfortunate a feature in our German history, this misunderstanding between political men and men of culture." "How unlucky for you," retorted Treischke, "that you met this Nietzsche, this madman, who tells us so much about his inactual thoughts, and who has nevertheless been bitten to the marrow by the most actual of all vices, the folie des grandeurs."
Overbeck, Gersdorff and Rohde wretchedly watched the failure of this book which they admired. "It is another thunderbolt," wrote Rohde; "it will have no more effect than fireworks in a cellar. But one day people will recognise it and will admire the courage and precision with which he has put his finger on our worst wound. How strong he is, our friend." And Overbeck: "The sensation of isolation that our friend experiences is growing in a painful manner. Ever and ever to sap the branch of the tree on which one supports oneself cannot be done without grievous consequences." And Gersdorff: "The best thing for our friend would be for him to imitate the Pythagoreans: five years without reading or writing. When I am free, which will be in two or three years, I shall return to my property: that asylum will be at his disposal."
These men, with their touching solicitude concerning their friend's lot, did not suspect either the true cause or the intensity of his distress. They pitied his solitude, they did not know how profound it was, or how lonely he was even with them. What mattered to him the failure of a book from which he was separated by a revolution of thought? "As to my book," he wrote to Rohde, "I can hardly think that I wrote it." He had discovered his error and his fault. Hence his sorrow, hence the agony which he dared not confess. "At the present moment," he announced to Gersdorff, "many things ferment within me, many extreme and daring things. I do not know[Pg 160] in what measure I may communicate them to my best friends, but in any case I cannot write them." One evening, however, passion carried him away. He was alone with Overbeck; the conversation happened to turn on Lohengrin, and, with a sudden fury, Nietzsche pulled to pieces this false and romantic work. Overbeck listened to him in amazement. Nietzsche became silent, and from that moment was more careful to practise the pretence which shamed him and disgusted him with himself.
"Dear, true friend," he wrote to Gersdorff in April, 1874 "if only you could have a far lower opinion of me! I am almost sure you will lose those illusions that you have about me, and I would wish to be the first to open your eyes, by explaining fully and conscientiously that I deserve nothing. If you could understand how radically I am discouraged, and from what melancholy I suffer on my own account. I do not know if I shall ever be capable of production. Henceforward I seek only a little liberty, a little of the real atmosphere of life, and I am arming myself against the numerous, the unspeakably numerous, revolting slaveries that encompass me. Shall I ever succeed? Doubt upon doubt. The aim is too distant, and if I ever succeed in reaching it, then I shall have consumed the better part of myself in long and trying struggles. I shall be free and languishing like an ephemeron at dusk. I express my lively fear! It is a misfortune to be so conscious of one's struggles, so clairvoyant...."
This letter was written on the 1st April On the 4th of April he sent Fr?ulein von Meysenbug a letter which was quite melancholy and yet less hopeless.
"Dear Fr?ulein, what pleasure you give, and how deeply you touch me! This is the first time that[Pg 161] I have had flowers sent to me, but I know now that these numberless living colours, voiceless though they be, can speak plainly to us. These heralds of spring are blooming in my room, and I have been able to enjoy them for more than a week. It needs must be that, in our grey and painful lives, these flowers should come and lay bare to us a mystery of nature. They prevent our forgetting that it always is, and always must be, possible for us to find, somewhere in the world, life and hope and light and colour. How often do we lose this faith! And how beautiful and happy a thing it is when those who are battling confirm themselves and one another in courage, and by sending those symbols of flowers or books, recall their common pledge.
"My health (forgive a word on this subject) has been satisfactory since the new year, save that I have to be careful of my sight. But, as you know, there are states of physical suffering that are almost a blessing, for they produce forgetfulness of what one suffers elsewhere. Rather one tells oneself that there are remedies for the soul, as there are for the body. That is my philosophy of illness, and it gives hope for the soul. And is it not a work of art, still to hope?
"Wish me strength to write my eleven 'Unseasonable Thoughts' that still remain to be done. Then at last I shall have said everything that weighs upon us; and it may be that after this general confession, we shall feel ourselves liberated, in however slight a degree.
"My heartfelt wishes are with you, dear Fr?ulein."
At last Friedrich Nietzsche began to work. His instinct brought him back to the philosopher who had helped his first years. He wished to consecrate to Schopenhauer his third "Unseasonable Thought." Ten years before, he had led a miserable existence at Leipsic; Schopenhauer saved him. His strange gaiety, his lyricism, the irony with[Pg 162] which he expresses his harshest thoughts, had restored to him the power of life. If Schopenhauer "troubles you, burdens you," he wrote at that time to a friend, "if he has not the power to raise you, and guide you, through the keenest sorrows of external life, to that sorrowful, but happy state of mind that takes hold on us when we hear great music, to that state in which the surroundings of the earth seem to fall away from us—then I do not claim to understand his philosophy."
Once more he experienced the impressions of his youth. He remembered that the most productive crises of his life had been the most sorrowful, and as a disciple in the school of his former master he recovered his courage. "I have eleven fine melodies yet to sing," he writes to Rohde, in announcement of the work which was to follow. And his Schopenhauer is a melody, a hymn to Solitude, to the daring of a thinker. His heart was full of music at that time. He rested from writing and composed a hymn to Friendship. "My song is for all of you," he wrote to Erwin Rohde.
His sister joined him, and the two left Basle and settled together in the country, near the falls of the Rhine. Friedrich Nietzsche recovered the gaiety of his most childish days, partly, no doubt, to amuse the girl who had come so tenderly to join him—aliis l?tus, sibi sapiens, according to the maxim that is found written in his diary of the time—but also because he was truly happy, despite his sorrow: happy to be himself, free and unspotted before life. "My sister is with me," he writes to Gersdorff. "Every day we make the finest plans for our future life, which is to be idyllic, hard-working, and simple. All is going well: I have put well away, far from me, all weakness and melancholy."
He used to walk with his sister and talk, laugh, dream, and read. What did he read? Schopenhauer, no doubt, and Montaigne, in that small and elegant edition which[Pg 163] became a sad reminder: Cosima Wagner had given it to him in former days at Triebschen in gratitude for the dolls he used to bring to the little girls. "Because that man wrote," he used to say, "the pleasure of life on earth has been intensified. Since I have had to do with this free and brave spirit I like to repeat what he himself said of Plutarch—'Je ne le puis si peu raccointer que je n'en tire cuisse ou aile.' If the duty were laid upon me, it would be in his company that I would attempt to live on earth as at home." Schopenhauer and Montaigne: these two ironists, one confessing his despair, the other hiding it, are the men with whom Nietzsche elects to try to live. But he read at the same time with deepest appreciation the work of a younger thinker, one less unfavourable to his aspirations—the trustful Emerson, the young prophet of a young people, one who in his slightest expressions so happily renders the pure emotion that lightens the eighteenth year of a man's life and passes away with that year.
Friedrich Nietzsche had read Emerson at Pforta, and he discovered him again in the spring of 1874, and recommended him to his friends.
"The world is young," wrote Emerson at the end of his Representative Men. "The former great men call to us affectionately. We too must write Bibles, to unite again the heavens and the earthly world. The secret of Genius is to suffer no fiction to exist for us; to realise all that we know in the high refinement of modern life, in arts, in sciences, in books, in men; to exact good faith, reality, and a purpose: and first, last, midst, and without end, to honour every truth by use."
Nietzsche had need of the comfort of such words and loved them.
Friedrich Nietzsche finished the manuscript of his Schopenhauer as Educator at the beginning of June.[Pg 164] Intellectually he was almost cured, but he had other sufferings. Madame F?rster-Nietzsche tells how one day, when her brother had expressed his disgust of novels and their monotony of love, some one asked him what other sentiment could have the power of inspiring passion. "Friendship," he said quickly. "It produces absolutely the same crises as love, but in a purer atmosphere. First of all, attraction brought about on both sides by common convictions, mutual admiration and glorification: then, distrust on one side, and on the other doubts as to the excellence of the friend and his ideas: the certainty that a rupture is inevitable and yet will be painful. In friendship there are all these sufferings, and others too many to tell." Nietzsche had knowledge of every one from June, 1871, onwards.
He loved Wagner; he had never ceased to love him. He had been able to correct himself of his intellectual error. Richard Wagner was not a philosopher or an educator of Europe. True enough, none the less he was a wonderful artist, the source of all beauty and of all happiness, and Nietzsche desired him still, as one desires a woman, because she gives joy. Any idea of rupture was unbearable, and to none did he confess his thoughts.
The situation was false and awkward. In January, at the worst moment of the crisis, he had to write to Wagner to congratulate him on a truly extraordinary and unexpected piece of news: the King of Bavaria, the poor madman, had suddenly stepped in and rescued the enterprise of Bayreuth by promising the necessary money. At the same time Nietzsche despatched his pamphlet on The Use and Abuse of History. Now, there was not one mention in it of the master's name. This created rather a shock at Bayreuth, and Madame Cosima Wagner took upon herself the task of delicately calling him to order.
"It has been given to you to take part in the sufferings of genius," she wrote, "and it is this that has made you[Pg 165] capable of pronouncing a general judgment on our culture and has lent to your works the marvellous warmth which, I am convinced, will last long after our stars of petroleum and gas have been extinguished. Perhaps you would not have penetrated with so sure a look the colour-medley of Appearance if you had not mingled so deeply in our lives. From this same source has sprung your irony and humour, and this background of sufferings shared has given them a far greater power than if they were simply a play of the intellect."
"Alas!" said Nietzsche to his sister, "see what they think of me at Bayreuth." On the 22nd of May, the anniversary of Wagner's birthday, Nietzsche paid him his tribute of homage; Wagner answered him at once, and asked him to come and spend a few days in "his room." Nietzsche made some excuse and declined the invitation. A few days later he wrote to Wagner—his letters have been lost or destroyed. He received the following answer:
"DEAR FRIEND,—Why do you not come to see us?
"Do not isolate yourself so, or I shall be able to do nothing for you.
"Your room is ready.
"I have just received your last letter; I shall say more of it another time.
"Yours cordially,
"R. W.
"WAHNFRIED, the 9th June, 1874."
It is probable that Wagner liked Nietzsche as far as he was capable of liking any man. From among all the admirers and too submissive disciples who surrounded him he distinguished this zealous young man, eager to give himself, eager for freedom. He was often impatient and forgave quickly. He guessed,[Pg 166] though he did not precisely understand, that crises of tragedy shook this troubled life: so he wrote kindly. But Nietzsche only suffered the more: he felt more keenly the value of what he was going to lose. His courage failed him, and for the second time he refused the master's invitation. An echo reached him of the irritation caused at Bayreuth.
To a friend he wrote: "I hear that they are again worried about me there, and that they consider me unsociable and ill-humoured as a sick dog. Really, it is not my fault if there are some people whom I prefer seeing at a distance to near at hand."
The faithful Gersdorff—faithful to both parties, master and disciple—wrote to Nietzsche begging and pressing him to come; Nietzsche resisted his insistence and revolted at it.
"DEAR FRIEND,—Where did you get this strange idea of compelling me by a threat to spend a few days this summer at Bayreuth? We know, both of us, that Wagner is naturally disposed to distrust, but I do not think it wise to kindle this distrust further; besides, consider that I have duties towards myself, and that they are difficult to discharge with my health shattered as it is. Really, it is not right for any one to lay constraint of any kind on me."
These revolts were only momentary. Nietzsche had not the strength to break with Wagner. He longed with his whole being to preserve the friendship. Certainly he had refused to go to Bayreuth. But he had given excuses. He had asked for time, given urgent work as a pretext; he had made arrangements for the future. And towards the end of July, receiving a new invitation, tired at last of denying himself, he set out.
Meanwhile a curious idea had occurred to him.
[Pg 167]
Did he merely wish to affirm his independence? or did he wish to correct Wagner? It may be that he conceived the fantastic dream of influencing his master, purifying him, lifting him up to the height of the devotion which he inspired. He took a score of Brahms, whom he admired, and whom Wagner pursued with a jealousy that was comic at times, slipped it in his trunk, and, early in the first evening, put it well in view on the piano. It was bound in the most beautiful red. Wagner perceived it, and, without doubt, understood; he had the sense to say nothing. Next day, however, Nietzsche repeated the man?uvre. Then the great man exploded; he screamed, raged, and foamed; then dashed off, banging the doors behind him. He met Nietzsche's sister, who had come with her brother, and, suddenly laughing at himself, gaily related the anecdote.
"Your brother had again thrust that red score on the piano, and the first thing I see on entering the room is it! Then I fell into a fury, like a bull before a red rag. Nietzsche, as I knew well, wanted me to understand that that man, too, had composed beautiful music. I exploded—what is called exploding!"
And Wagner laughed noisily. The bewildered Fr?ulein Nietzsche sent for her brother.
"Friedrich, what have you done? What has happened?"
"Ah! Lisbeth. Wagner has not been great...." Wagner had laughed; he was appeased. That same evening, he made friends again with the enfant terrible. But Nietzsche, as he shook hands with the master, allowed himself no illusion: the gulf between them was deeper, the definitive separation more menacing.
He left Bayreuth. His health, tolerable in the month of August, was bad in September; well or ill, he worked, correcting the proofs of his Schopenhauer, which he published in October.
[Pg 168]
"You will know enough from my book," he wrote to Fr?ulein von Meysenbug, "of the ordeals of my year, ordeals in reality more cruel and more serious even, than you will be able to guess in reading me. Still, in summa, all's well, my life is bereft of sunshine, but I advance, and that is assuredly a great happiness, to advance in one's duty.... At the moment, I want to make myself clear as regards the system of antagonistic forces on which our 'modern world' rests. Happily I have neither political nor social ambitions. No danger menaces me, no considerations hinder me, nor am I inclined or forced to compromise. In short, I have a free field, and I will know one day in what degree our contemporaries, proud as they are of their liberty of thought, tolerate free thoughts.... What will be my ardour when at last I shall have thrown off all that mixes in me of negation and refractoriness! And yet, I dare to hope that in about five years this magnificent aim will be ready to be achieved."
It was a hope well charged with shadows. Friedrich Nietzsche, greedy to possess, longing to act, had to look forward to five years of waiting, of arid work, of criticism. "Thirty years," he put down in a note-book. "Life becomes a difficult affair. I see no motive to be gay; but there ought always to be a motive to be gay."
He returned to Basle and recommenced his course. This duty, which had always been a burden, became heavier still: he was entrusted with the charge of a Greek class for quite young men. He was conscious of the value of his time, and knew that every hour given to the University added to the delay, already so long, of the five years. He suffered from each of them as from a remorse, as though he were failing in his duty as a man of letters.
[Pg 169]
"I have before me work enough for fifty years," he wrote to his mother in autumn, "and I must mark time under the yoke, and it is with difficulty that I can throw a look to right or left. Alas! (a sigh). The winter has quickly come, very quickly, a very hard one. It will probably be cold at Christmas. Would I bother you if I went to see you? I delight so much in the thought of being once more with you, free for ten days of this cursed University work. So prepare me for Christmas a little corner in the country, where I might end my life in peace and write beautiful books.
"Alas! (a sigh)."
In these moments of depression he was always seized by memories of Wagner, and of the almost serene existence that he had tasted in his intimacy. The glory of the master, a moment faded, went on increasing; the public bowed before success, and Nietzsche, who had fought in the difficult times, had now to stand aside in the hour of triumph. The idea that the art of Wagner was within his reach, always offering the miracle of its "fifteen enchanted worlds "; the idea that Wagner himself was there, offering himself also, ever genial, abundant, laughing, tender, sublime, caressing, and like a god creating life around him: the idea that he had possessed so much beauty, and that, with a little cowardice, he could possess it again, and that never, never again would he possess it; this was an everlasting sadness to Nietzsche.
Finally, giving way to his need of an outlet, he wrote to the one comforter, to Wagner. Like all his other letters to Wagner, this letter is lost, or destroyed; but the tone of the letter which we are about to quote, the tone of Wagner's reply, helps us to imagine its eloquence.
Wagner answered:
[Pg 170]
"DEAR FRIEND,—Your letter has again made us most anxious on your account. Presently, my wife will write more fully than I. But I have just a quarter of an hour's rest, and I want—to your great annoyance possibly—to devote it to posting you up in what we say of you here. It seems to me, amongst other things, that never have I had in my life such intellectual society as you get in Basle, to amuse you in the evenings. However, if you are all hypochondriacs, it is not a great benefit, I admit. It is, I think, women that you need, you young men of to-day. There is a difficulty, as I well know: as my friend Sulzer used to say, 'Where take women without stealing them?' Besides, one could steal at a pinch. I mean to say you ought to marry, or compose an opera; one would be as good, or as bad, as the other. All the same, I hold that marriage is the better.
"In the meanwhile, I could recommend you a palliative, but you always settle your régime in advance, so that one can say nothing to you. For example: our household here is so organised that we have a place such as was never offered me in the most difficult moments of my life, here for you: you should come and spend all the summer holidays;—but very prudently, you announced to us, at the beginning of winter, that you had resolved to pass the summer holidays on a very high and very solitary mountain in Switzerland! Does that not look like very careful guarding against a possible invitation? We could be useful to you in some directions: why do you despise that which is offered you in such good part? Gersdorff and all the society of Basle would be happy here: a thousand things are to be seen: I pass in review all my singers of the Nibelungen; the decorator decorates, the machinist machines; and then we are there, in flesh and blood.
"But one knows the eccentricities of friend Nietzsche!
[Pg 171]
"So I shall say no more about you, because it serves no purpose.
"Ah! mon Dieu! marry a rich woman! O, why should Gersdorff happen to be of the masculine sex! Marry, and then travel, and enrich yourself with those magnificent impressions which you desire so much! And then ... you will compose an opera which, surely, will be terribly difficult to execute. What Satan was it that made a pedagogue of you?
"Now, to end up: next year, in the summer, complete rehearsals (perhaps with orchestra) at Bayreuth. In 1876, the representations. Impossible earlier.
"I bathe every day, I could no longer endure my stomach. Bathe you too! And eat meat like me. "With all my heart,
"Your devoted,
"R. W."
Wagner had foreseen that his letter would be useless. He had not foreseen that it would be hurtful. Nietzsche repented that he had drawn forth these tender offers, which he could not accept. In writing, he had been weak; he was ashamed. Finally, the announcement and the approach of the Bayreuth rehearsals overwhelmed him. Should he go? Should he not go? If he did not go, how was he to excuse himself? Could he still hide his thoughts? Should he henceforth acknowledge all?
He had commenced a fourth "Unseasonable Thought," We other Philologists; he abandoned it, alleging, to explain this abandonment, weariness and the weight of his University duties. When he speaks thus, Nietzsche deceives either himself or us. Christmas came, and he[Pg 172] went to spend ten days at Naumburg with his mother. He was at liberty and could work. But instead of writing, he composed and copied out his Hymn to Friendship for four voices. He spent Saint Sylvester's day in re-reading his youthful compositions: this examination interested him. "I have always seen admiringly," he wrote to Fr?ulein von Meysenbug, "how the invariability of character manifests itself in music. What a child expresses musically is in so clear a manner the language of his most essential nature that the man afterwards desires to revise nothing in it."
This musical debauch was a bad sign of his condition, a sign of weakness and of fear before his thoughts. Two letters, one from Gersdorff, the other from Cosima Wagner, came to disturb his solitary commemoration. His friends spoke to him of Bayreuth. The reminder plunged him in despair.
"Yesterday," he wrote to Fr?ulein von Meysenbug, "on the first day of the year, I saw the future with a real fear. It is terrible and dangerous to live—I should envy him who came by death in an honest manner. For the rest, I am resolved to live to an old age. I have my work. But it is not the satisfaction of living that will help me to grow old. You understand this resolution."
During January and February, 1875, Nietzsche did not work. He let depression get the better of him. "At very rare moments," he writes, "ten minutes every fortnight, I compose a Hymn to Solitude. I will show it in all its dreadful beauty."
In March, Gersdorff came to sojourn in Basle. Nietzsche, encouraged by his arrival, dictated some[Pg 173] notes to him. He seemed to have escaped from his melancholy; then once more he was plunged into it by a fresh sorrow.
It had become his habit, a kindly habit and one conformable to his tastes, to live in common with his two colleagues, Overbeck and Romundt, who formed the intellectual society of which Wagner spoke with such esteem. Now, in February, 1875, Romundt announced to Overbeck and to Nietzsche that he was obliged to leave them to enter into Orders. Nietzsche experienced a feeling of stupefied indignation: for many months he had lived with this man, he called him his friend. Yet he had had no suspicion of the secret vocation now suddenly declared. Romundt had not been open with him. Subjugated by religious faith, he had lacked in simple good faith, and the duties of friendship of which Nietzsche had such an exalted ideal. Romundt's treachery reminded him of another treachery and made it easier for him to understand the news which was rumoured among Wagnerians: the master was about to compose a Christian Mystery—a Parsifal. Nothing was so displeasing to Friedrich Nietzsche as a return to Christianity: nothing seemed to him more weak or cowardly than such a capitulation to the problems of life. Some years before, he had known and admired the different projects on which Wagner conversed with his intimates: he then spoke of Luther, of the Great Frederick; he wished to glorify a German hero and repeat the happy experiment of Die Meistersinger. Why had he abandoned his projects? Why did he prefer Parsifal to Luther? and to the rude and singing life of the German Renaissance, the religiosity of the Graal? Friedrich Nietzsche then understood and measured the perils of the pessimism which accustoms souls to complaint, weakens and predisposes them to mystical consolations. He reproached himself for having taught[Pg 174] Romundt a doctrine too cruel for his courage, and thus to have been the cause of his weakness.
"Ah! our Protestant atmosphere, good and pure as it is!" he wrote to Rohde; "I have never felt so strongly how well I am filled with the spirit of Luther. And the unlucky man turns his back on so many liberating geniuses! I ask myself if he is in his senses, and if it would not be better to treat him with cold water and douches; so incomprehensible is it to me, that such a spectre should rise up by me, and take possession of a man for eight years my comrade. And to crown all it is on me that the responsibility of this base conversion rests. God knows, no egoistic thought induces me to speak thus. But I believe too that I represent a sacred thing, and I should be bitterly ashamed if I merited the reproach of having the slightest connection with this Catholicism which I detest thoroughly."
He wished to bring back, to convince his friend, but no discussion was possible. Romundt did not answer and held to his resolve. He left on the fixed date. Nietzsche wrote to Gersdorff, and related the story of this departure.
"It was horribly sad: Romundt knew, repeated endlessly that henceforward he had lived the better and the happier part of his life. He wept a great deal and asked our forgiveness. He could not hide his misery. At the last moment I was seized with a veritable terror; the porters were shutting the carriage doors, and Romundt, wishing to continue speaking to us, wanted to let down the window, but it stuck; he redoubled his efforts, and while he tormented himself thus, hopelessly trying to make himself heard, the train went out slowly, and we were reduced to making signs to each other. The awful[Pg 175] symbolism of the whole scene upset me terribly, and Overbeck as much as it did me (he confessed as much to me later): it was hardly endurable; I stayed in bed the next day with a bad headache that lasted thirty hours, and much vomiting of bile."
This day of illness marked the beginning of a very long attack. Nietzsche was obliged to leave Basle and to repose in the solitude of the mountains and woods. "I wander always alone," he writes, "clearing up many thoughts." What were these thoughts? We can ascertain them. "Send me a comforting message," he wrote to Rohde: "that your friendship may help me better to support this terrible affair. It is in my sentiment of friendship that I am hurt. I hate more than ever that insincere and hypocritical way of being a man of many friendships, and I will have to be more circumspect in the future."
Fr?ulein Nietzsche, who had passed the month of March at Bayreuth with the Wagners, came back to her brother, whose condition alarmed her. He seemed obsessed by the memory of Romundt. "That such a misadventure should occur between friends living under the same roof," he was constantly saying. "It is appalling." In reality he was thinking of the other friend, Richard Wagner, of the master he was losing. "What a peril I have run," he said to himself. "I admired, I was happy, I delivered myself over to and followed an illusion, but all illusions are connected, and accomplices. Wagnerism borders upon Christianity." Tirelessly he listened to his sister's accounts of the marvels of Bayreuth, of the activity, the enthusiasm, the joy of all. Walking one day with him in a public garden, she related for the tenth time this same story: she noticed that her brother was listening to her with a strange emotion. She interrogated him, plied him with questions, and then the[Pg 176] secret which he had kept for a year escaped him in a long, eloquent plaint. He was suddenly silent. He remarked that a wayfarer was following and spying on him. He dragged his sister precipitately away, terrified by the idea that his words would be repeated at Bayreuth. A few days later, having recognised again the too curious wayfarer, he was able to learn his name: it was Ivan Turgenieff.
July, 1875, the month fixed for the rehearsals of the Tetralogy, approached, and these rehearsals were the sole preoccupation of Nietzsche's friends, the sole subject of their letters and their conversations. He continued to dissemble and dared not decide the question which was becoming urgent: Should he go to their rehearsals or not? His enervation increased day by day, bringing on the ordinary troubles; headaches, insomnia, sickness, internal cramp: finally his health served for an excuse. "As you are going to Bayreuth," he wrote to Gersdorff, "warn them that they will not see me. Wagner will be greatly provoked, I am not less."
About the beginning of July, when his friends were hurrying towards Bayreuth and the University of Basle had closed its doors, he retired to the little therapeutic station which his doctor had recommended, Steinabad, a spot lost in a valley of the Black Forest.
Friedrich Nietzsche had the faculty of occasionally rising above his own sorrows and his own joys. He knew how to enjoy the spectacle of his crises as though they were the intermingled voices of a symphony. Then he ceased to suffer, and contemplated with a sort of mystical rapture the tragic development of his existence. Such was his life during the few weeks of his cure at Steinabad. It brought him nevertheless no motive of happiness. His illness resisted remedies, and the doctors let him guess, as at the origin of all these attacks, an identical, indiscernible, and mysterious cause. He did not forget the nature[Pg 177] of the illness that had killed his father at thirty-six years of age. He took the hint and felt the danger: but he even brought this menace into the spectacle of his life and considered it bravely.
Steinabad is near Bayreuth; Nietzsche was once more tempted. Would he go, or would he stay? This indecision was enough, he broke down utterly. Towards the end of July, a terrible attack which kept him two days in bed did away with these doubts. On the first of August he wrote to Rohde: "To-day, dear friend, if I am not mistaken, you are all meeting at Bayreuth. And I am not among you. In vain have I obstinately believed that I could all of a sudden emerge in your society and enjoy my friends. In vain; to-day, my cure being half completed, I say it with certainty...."
The attack lost its force; he was able to get up and walk in the woods. He had brought a Don Quixote with him: he read this book, "the bitterest of all," with its derision of every noble effort.
Still, he kept up his courage. He recalled without too poignant a sorrow his past that had been filled with joy. He faced without fear the menacing future; he thought of that grand work on Hellenism, an old, unabandoned dream; he thought of the interrupted succession of the "Thoughts out of Season;" and above all he delighted in conceiving the beautiful book he would write when he was sure of himself. "To this work," he thought, "I must sacrifice everything. For some years I have been writing a great deal, I have written too much; I have often made mistakes. Now I must keep silence and devote myself to many years' work; seven, eight years. Shall I live as long? In eight years I shall be forty. My father died four years earlier. Never mind, I must accept the risk and peril. The time of silence has returned for me. I have greatly slandered the modern[Pg 178] men, yet I am one of them. I suffer with them, and like them, because of the excess and the disorder of my desires. As I shall have to be their master, I must first gain the mastery of myself and repress my trouble. That I may dominate my instincts, I must know them and judge them; I must restrict myself and analyse. I have criticised science, I have exalted inspiration, but I have not analysed the sources of inspiration; and to what unfathomable depths have I not followed it! My youth was my excuse, I needed intoxication. Now my youth is over. Rohde, Gersdorff, Overbeck, are at Bayreuth: I envy, yet pity them. They have passed the age of dreams, they ought not to be there. What task am I going to undertake? I will study natural sciences, mathematics, physics, chemistry, history, and political economy. I will accumulate an immense equipment for the knowledge of men. I will read ancient history books, novels, letters. The work will be hard, but I shall have Plato, Aristotle, Goethe, and Schopenhauer constantly by me; thanks to my well loved geniuses my pain will be less painful, my solitude less solitary."
Friedrich Nietzsche's thoughts were almost every day diverted by a letter from Bayreuth. He received and read it without bitterness. In a few notes written for himself alone, he fixed the memory of the joys he owed to Wagner. Then answering his friends: "I am with you in the spirit during three-quarters of my days," he told them; "I roam like a shadow around Bayreuth. Do not fear to excite my envy, tell me all the news, dear friends. During my walks I conduct entire pieces of music that I know by heart, and then I grumble and rage. Salute Wagner in my name, salute him deeply! Good-by, my well loved friends, this is for all of you. I love you with all my heart."
Friedrich Nietzsche came back to Basle somewhat the better for his cure. His sister joined him and wished to[Pg 179] stay with him. He continued to lead the wholly meditative and almost happy existence of Steinabad, with his papers, his books, and his piano.
"I dream," he wrote (he underlines these words), "I dream of an association of unrestricted men, who know no circumspection and wish to be called the 'destroyers'; they apply to everything the measure of their criticism, and sacrifice themselves to the truth. Everything that is suspect and false must be brought to light. We do not wish to construct prematurely, we do not know if we can construct, and whether it may not be better to construct nothing. There are cowardly and resigned pessimists; of these we do not wish to be."
He commenced the long studies which he had assigned himself. He examined firstly Dühring's book, The Value of Life. Dühring was a Positivist who led the combat against the disciples of Schopenhauer and Wagner. "All idealism deceives," he told them, "all life that seeks to escape beyond life vows itself to chimera." Friedrich Nietzsche had no objection to offer to these premises. "A sane life carries its worth in itself," said Dühring. "Asceticism is unhealthy and the sequel of an error." "No," answered Nietzsche. Asceticism is an instinct which the most noble, the strongest among men have felt: it is a fact, it must be taken into account if the value of life is to be appreciated. And even if a prodigious error be here indicated as being at work, then the possibility of such an error should be placed amongst the sombre features of being.
"The tragedy of life is not irreducible," said Dühring, "the sovereignty of egoism is only apparent; the altruistic instincts work in the human soul."
Egoism an appearance! exclaimed Nietzsche. Here Dühring falls into childishness. Ich wollte er machte mir[Pg 180] hier nichts vor! God be praised if it were true! He talks nonsense, and if he seriously believes what he says, he is ripe for all the socialisms. Nietzsche finally held out as against Dühring for the tragic philosophy that Heraclitus and Schopenhauer had taught him. There is no possible evasion, all evasion is a lure and a cowardice. Dühring says it and he speaks truly; but he attenuates the task in presenting a sweetened image of that life in which we are set. It is either stupidity or falsehood: life is hard.
Friedrich Nietzsche was gay, or appeared so. In the evening (he did not work because of his eyes) his sister read Walter Scott's novels to him. He liked their simple narration. "The serene art, the andante," he writes; he also liked the heroic, na?ve, and complicated adventures. "What fellows! what stomachs!" he exclaimed at the recitals of the interminable feasts; and Fr?ulein Nietzsche, seeing him so cheerful, was astonished to hear him a moment later play and develop at great length his Hymn to Solitude.
She was astonished not without reason: the gaiety of her brother was artificial; his sadness was real; he dissembled with her, and doubtless with himself.
He had begun to study Balfour Stewart's book on the conservation of energy: he stopped at the first pages. It was odious to him to work thus without the consolation of art, or the real joy of hoping. He thought he would be more interested in the Indian wisdom, and took up the English translation of the Sutta Nipata. Only too well he understood its radical nihilism.
"When I am ill and in bed," he writes in December to Gersdorff, "I let myself be oppressed by the persuasion that life is without value, and all our ends illusory...." His crises were frequent: every fortnight he was disabled by the headaches, internal cramp, twitching of the eyes, which laid hold of him.
[Pg 181]
"I wander here and there, alone like a rhinoceros," Nietzsche had kept in mind this final phrase of a chapter of the Sutta Nipata, and applied it to himself with melancholy humour. His best friends were then marrying. Nietzsche was ready to abuse marriage and women: one is rarely sincere when one speaks thus, and we know he was not.
"I have more and better friends than I deserve," he wrote in October, 1874, to Fr?ulein von Meysenbug; "what I now wish myself, I tell you in confidence, is a good wife, and as soon as possible. Then life will have given me all that I shall have asked of it. The rest is my affair."
Friedrich Nietzsche congratulated the fiancés, Gersdorff, Rohde, Overbeck, and rejoiced with them, but felt the difference of his own destiny.
"Be happy," he wrote to Gersdorff, "you who will no longer go wandering here and there, alone like a rhinoceros."
The year 1876 was about to begin, the representations of the Tetralogy were announced for the summer. Friedrich Nietzsche knew that his irresolution must then cease: "I was exhausted," he wrote later, "by the sadness of an inexorable presentiment—the presentiment that after this disillusion I should be condemned to mistrust myself more profoundly, to despise myself more profoundly, to live in a profounder solitude than before."
The impression of the Christmas and New Year festivals, always strong in him, aggravated his melancholy. He fell ill in December, only to get up again in March. He was still weak.
"I find it an effort to write, I shall be brief," he wrote to Gersdorff the 18th January, 1876; "I have never spent[Pg 182] so sad and painful a Christmas or one of such dreadful foreboding. I have had to give up doubting. The malady which has attacked me is cerebral; my stomach, my eyes, give me all this suffering from another cause, whose centre is elsewhere. My father died at the age of thirty-six of inflammation of the brain. It is quite possible that things may go even quicker with me.... I am patient, but full of doubts as to what awaits me. I live almost entirely on milk. It has a good result; I sleep well. Milk and sleep are at present my best foods."
At the approach of spring, he wished to leave Basle: Gersdorff offered to go with him, and the two friends settled on the shores of the Lake of Geneva, at Chillon. They spent a bad fortnight there. Nietzsche's nerves were irritated by the least variation of the atmosphere, which was more or less humid and more or less charged with electricity, and he suffered from the "f?hne," a soft wind which melts the snows in March. He let the softness and tepidity depress him, and could not restrain the heartrending expression of his doubts and his agonies. Gersdorff, obliged to return to Germany, went with an uneasy mind on his friend's account.
But Nietzsche felt better once he was left alone. Perhaps finer weather favoured him; perhaps he felt his distress less acutely when the compassionate Gersdorff was not near by, ever ready to lend an ear to his complaints. His humours became less bitter, and chance procured him a decisive relief, a liberating hour. Fr?ulein von Meysenbug had just published her Memoirs of an Idealist. Nietzsche had put these two volumes in his bag. Of this woman of fifty he was very fond, and every day he liked her more. She was always suffering and courageous, always fine and good. He did not put her on the level of Cosima Wagner. The superiority of her mind was not dazzling; but she was[Pg 183] great-hearted, and Nietzsche infinitely esteemed this woman who was faithful to the real genius of women. Doubtless he began reading her book with moderate expectations: yet the work held him. It is one of the most beautiful records of the nineteenth century. Fr?ulein von Meysenbug had gone all through it: she had known all the worlds, all the heroes, all the hopes. Born in old Germany with its petty Courts—her father was Minister in one of them—as a child she had listened to the friends of Humboldt and Goethe; as a young girl, the humanitarian gospel touched her: detached from Christianity, she abandoned its observances. Then came 1848, and its dream; the Socialists, and their essays towards a more noble, a more brotherly life: she admired them, and wanted to work with them. Blamed by her people, she left them and went alone without asking help or advice. An idealist of action, not of dreams, she joined the communists of Hamburg; with them she instituted a sort of phalanstery, a rationalistic school in which the masters lived together. This school prospered under her direction; but, threatened by the police, she had to fly. Next she was in London among its proscripts of all the races, that mournful refuge, and tomb of the vanquished. Fr?ulein von Meysenbug earned her living by giving lessons: she knew Mazzini, Louis Blanc, Herzen: she was the friend and the consoler of these unhappy men. At the time of the second Empire, of Napoleon III., of Bismarck, and of the silence of the peoples—in Paris, with its brilliant culture—Fr?ulein von Meysenbug met Richard Wagner. She had long admired his music: she admired the man, listened to him, succumbed to his ascendancy, and, renouncing the religion of humanity, carried her fervour to the cult of art. But always she exercised and lavished her active goodness: Herzen died; he left two children, whom Fr?ulein von Meysenbug adopted, thus taking upon herself the anxiety of a double[Pg 184] maternity. Friedrich Nietzsche had known these young girls and often admired the tenderness of their friend, her free and sane self-sacrifice: he had not known of what life of entire devotion this devotion was the flower.
He was encouraged by this book: Fr?ulein von Meysenbug reconciled him to life. Again he found his confidence and health. "My health," he wrote to Gersdorff, "is allied to my hopes. I am well when I hope."
He left his pension and went to spend some days in Geneva. There he discovered a friend, the musician Senger; he made the acquaintance of a few Frenchmen, exiled communards, and liked talking to them. He esteemed these fanatics with the square skulls, so prompt to self-sacrifice. It appears that he flirted with two "exquisite" Russians. Then he returned to Basle, and his first letter was sent to Fr?ulein von Meysenbug.
"BASLE, Good Friday, April 14, 1876. "DEAR FR?ULEIN,—Four days or so back, finding myself alone on the shores of the Lake of Geneva, I spent a whole Sunday quite near you, from the earliest hour till the moon-bathed night. I have read you through and through, with a revived interest at every page, and I kept on repeating that never had I passed so blessed a Sunday. You have given me an impression of purity and love which will never leave me; and Nature, the day on which I read you, seemed to reflect this impression. You were before me as a superior form of my being, a very superior form; and which yet did not humiliate but encouraged me: thus you crossed my thoughts, and, measuring my life with yours, I am more easily able to feel what I lacked—so much! I thank you much more than I would do for a book.
[Pg 185]
"I was ill, I doubted my strength and my aims; I thought I should have to renounce everything, and my greatest fear was of the length of a life which can be but an atrocious burden if one renounces the highest aims. I am now saner and freer, and I can consider without torturing myself the duties I have to fulfil. How many times I have wished you near me to ask you some question which only a moral being higher than myself could answer! Your book gives me answers to such of these precise questions as touch me. I don't think I can ever be satisfied with my conduct, if I have not first your approbation. But it is possible that your book is a severer judge than you would be yourself. What should a man do, if, in comparing his life to yours, he does not wish to be taxed with unmanliness? I often ask myself this. He ought to do everything you have done and no more. But doubtless he could not; he lacks that sure guide, the instinct of a love that is always ready to give itself. One of the most elevated of moral themes [einer der h?chsten Motive] that I have discovered, thanks to you, is maternal love without physical bonds between the mother and the child. It is one of the most magnificent manifestations of Caritas. Give me a little of that love, dear lady and dear friend, and think of me as one of those who need to be the son of such a mother. Ah! such a great need!
"We shall have lots of things to say to one another when we meet at Bayreuth. At present I again have hopes of being able to go, whereas, these two past months, I had put the very thought away from me. How I should like to be now the saner of us two, and capable of rendering you a service!
"Why can't I live near you?
"Adieu; I am and I remain, in all truth, yours,
"FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE."
[Pg 186]
Fr?ulein von Meysenbug answered at once. "If my book had only been worth this joy, your letter to me, I would have been happy to have written it. If I can help you, I want to do so. Next winter, leave Basle, you must; look for a milder climate and a brighter one; how I feel, as you do, the annoyance of our separation. I sheltered this winter your young Basle pupil, Alfred Brenner, who is still ill; you shall bring him back to me. I will be able to find the two of you a health-giving home. Come, promise me." Nietzsche wrote immediately: "To-day I shall answer you in one word; thank you, I shall come."
Assured henceforth of sanctuary, Friedrich Nietzsche regained confidence and courage.
"I have recovered my good conscience," he wrote to Gersdorff a few days after his return; "I know that up to the present I have done all I could to enfranchise myself, and that in working thus, I have not worked for myself alone. I want to start off again on this road, and nothing more will stop me, neither memories, nor despairing presentiments. This is what I have discovered—the only thing that men respect and before which they bow, is a noble deed. Compromise, never! never! Profound success can only be assured by remaining faithful to oneself. I know already by experience what influence I exercise, and that if I became weaker or more sceptical, I should impoverish, besides my own, the hearts of many who develop with me."
He needed a pride of this sort to confront the imminent crisis. The disciples of the master gave him a dinner, and Nietzsche, who did not want to be present, had to excuse himself. He wrote an impassioned letter of which Wagner comprehended perhaps the hidden signification.
[Pg 187]
"Seven years ago, at Triebschen, I paid you my first visit. And every year, in this month of May, on this same day upon which we all celebrate the anniversary of your birth, I myself celebrate the anniversary of my spiritual birth. For since then, you live and work in me always like a drop of fresh blood that had as it were entered into my veins. This element that I owe to you urges me on, humiliates, encourages and stimulates me. It never allows me to rest, so much so that I should perhaps bear a grudge against you for this eternal disquietude if I did not know that it ever drives me on towards a freer and better state."
Wagner answered him at once in a few exuberant lines. He told of the toasts drunk to his glory and of his humorous responses, with so many puns, cock-and-bull stories and impenetrable allusions, that it is necessary to give up the attempt to translate. Nietzsche was moved by this letter. At the moment it arrived he was feeling very much the master of himself, very sure of his future. The history of his past years suddenly appeared as a grand adventure that was now for ever closed. He considered it with an indulgent regard, and, measuring the joys he owed to Wagner, he wished to express his gratitude. The other summer, at Steinabad, when in a similar state of mind, he had filled some pages of notes. He took them up again, in spite of a nervous affection of the eyes which prevented him from working without help, and undertook to draw from them the substance of a volume. Singular attempt! Disillusioned, he wrote an enthusiastic book, the most beautiful in Wagnerian literature. But a forewarned reader recognises almost from page to page the idea that Nietzsche expresses in masking it. He writes the eulogy of the poet; of the philosopher he does not[Pg 188] speak; he denies, for him who can understand, the educative bearing of the work.
"For us," he writes, "Bayreuth signifies the consecration at the moment of battle.... The mysterious regard that tragedy turns towards us is not an enervating and paralysing charm, but its influence imposes repose. For beauty is not given to us for the very moment of battle; but for those moments of calm which precede and interrupt it, for those fugitive moments in which, reanimating the past, anticipating the future, we penetrate all the symbols; for those moments when, with the impression of a slight weariness, a refreshing dream descends upon us. The day and the strife are about to begin, the sacred shadows fade away, and art is once more far from us; but its consolation is still shed upon man, as a morning dew...."
There exists a radical opposition between these thoughts and those that inspired The Birth of Tragedy. Art is no longer a reason for living, but a preparation for life, a necessary repose. Three menacing lines end Nietzsche's little book: "Wagner is not the prophet of the future as we might fain believe, but the interpreter and the glorifier of a past." Nietzsche had not been able to keep back these admissions. Brief and disguised as they were, he had hoped that they might not be heard, and his hope, it seems, was justified. Wagner wrote as soon as the pamphlet had appeared:
"FRIEND!—Your book is prodigious!
"Where did you learn to know me so well? Come quickly, and stay here during rehearsals until the representations.
"Yours,
"R. W.
" July 12th."
[Pg 189]
The rehearsals began in the middle of July, and Nietzsche, who did not wish to miss one of them, went, in spite of the precarious state of his health, with an impatience that astonished his sister. Two days later she received a letter: "I almost regret ever having come; up till now, everything is wretched.... On Monday I went to the rehearsal; it displeased me, I was obliged to go out."
What was happening? Fr?ulein Nietzsche waited with great uneasiness. She was slightly reassured by a second letter: "MY DEAR GOOD SISTER,—At present things are better...." But the last sentence read strangely: "I must live very much to myself, and decline all invitations, even Wagner's. He finds that I make myself scarce." Almost immediately came the last letter: "I hope to leave: it is too senseless to stay here. I await with terror every one of these long musical evenings. Yet I stay. I can stand it no longer. I shall not be here even for the first performance ; I will go no matter where—but I want to leave; here everything is unbearable."
What had occurred? Had the mere sight of the world driven him away so soon? Nietzsche had led a very hard existence, during the past two years, "the friend of enigmas and problems." He had forgotten men: he suffered on encountering them again. A Titan, Wagner, held them captive, protected them against every enigma and too disquieting "problem"; and in this shadow they seemed satisfied. They never reflected, but repeated passionately the formulas that had been given them. Some Hegelians had come: Wagner offered himself to them as a second incarnation of their master. All the Schopenhauerians were there; they had been told that Wagner had translated into music the system of Schopenhauer. A few young people were calling themselves "idealists," "pure Germans": "My art," declared[Pg 190] Wagner, "signifies the victory of German idealism over Gallic sensualism." All, Hegelians, Schopenhauerians, pure Germans, agreed in the pride of triumph: they had succeeded. Succeeded! Nietzsche heard this extraordinary word in silence. What man, he pondered, what race ever did succeed? Not even the Greek, which was bruised in its most beautiful flights. What effort had not been in vain? So, taking his eyes off the comedy, Nietzsche examined Wagner: was this dispenser of joys in the end great enough to become uneasy in the hour of victory? No; Wagner was happy, because he had succeeded; and the satisfaction of such a man was more shocking and sadder still than that of the crowd.
But happiness, however low it be, is still happiness. An exquisite intoxication had seized the little town of Bayreuth. Nietzsche had felt and shared this intoxication; he kept the remorse and envy of it. He listened to a rehearsal: the entrance into the sacred theatre, the emotion of the public, the presence of Wagner, the darkness, the marvellous sounds, touched him. How sensible he had remained to the Wagnerian infection. He got up in haste and went out; it is the explanation of his letter: "Yesterday evening, I went to a rehearsal; it displeased me; I was obliged to go out."
A new element aggravated his trouble. He was informed definitely of the significance of the forthcoming work, Parsifal. Richard Wagner was about to declare himself a Christian. Thus, in eighteen months, Nietzsche observed two conversions: Romundt was weak and perhaps the victim of chance; but Nietzsche knew that with Wagner everything was grave, and answered to the necessities of the century. Neo-Christianity did not yet exist: Nietzsche felt it all through Parsifal. He perceived the danger run by the modern man, so uncertain of himself, and tempted by this Christian faith, which is so firm a thing, which calls, which promises and can give peace.[Pg 191] If he did not redouble his efforts to discover in himself a new "possibility of life," it was certain that he would fall back into a Christianity, cowardly like his inspiration. Then Nietzsche saw these men, whose happiness he had instinctively despised, menaced by a final collapse, and led gently, and as if by the hand, towards this collapse by the master, by the impostor who had subjugated them. Not one of them knew whither this powerful hand might not soon lead them, scarcely one of them was a Christian, but they were all on the eve of becoming Christians. How far away was that May day of 1872 in which Richard Wagner conducted, in this same Bayreuth, Schiller and Beethoven's ode to liberty and joy!
Friedrich Nietzsche saw clearly for them all: the spectacle of these unconscious lives made him feel desperate, as the sight of the world in the Middle Ages had made those mystics desperate, who had always before their eyes the accusing and bleeding image of the Christ. He would have liked to have torn these people from their torpor, to have warned them by a word, prevented them with a cry. "I ought to," he thought, "as I alone understand what is happening...." But who would have listened to him? He held his peace, he dissembled his dreadful impressions, and wished to observe without weakness or desertion the tragic solemnities.
But he could not. Soon he weakened and had to fly. "I should be insane to stay here. I await with terror each of these long musical evenings, and yet I stay. I can bear no more.... I shall go, no matter where, but I will go: here everything is torture to me...."
The heights which separate Bohemia from Franconia rise some miles from Bayreuth, and the village of Klingenbrunn, where Nietzsche retired, is situated in the forests which cover them. The crisis was brief and less[Pg 192] severe than he had dreaded. Now that he had perceived in a clearer manner the dangers of the Wagnerian art, he saw the remedy more plainly. "Religiosity," he wrote, "when it is not upheld by a clear thought, rouses disgust." He renewed his Steinabad meditations and re-affirmed the resolutions then made. He would make a clean sweep of the past; resist the seductions of metaphysics; deprive himself of art; reserve judgment; like Descartes, begin by doubting. Then, if some new security could be discovered, he would raise the new grandeur on immovable foundations.
He wandered up and down the silent forests; their severe peace was a discipline: "If we do not give firm and serene horizons to our souls like those of the woods and mountains," he wrote, "then our inner life will lose all serenity. It will be broken up like that of the men of towns; it will not know happiness and will not be able to give it." Then, all of a sudden he released the cry of his sick soul: "I shall give back to men," said he, "the serenity which is the condition of all culture. And the simplicity. Serenity, Simplicity, Greatness!"
Nietzsche, once more master of himself, returned to Bayreuth without delay: he wished to complete his experience. The excitement of the crowd was even greater than on the day of his departure. The old Emperor William was present, on his way to the grand man?uvres. He had paid Wagner the compliment of being present on two evenings. From all Bavaria and Franconia, citizens and peasants had hurried hither to salute their Emperor, and there was almost a famine in the little invaded town.
The performances began; Nietzsche heard them all. He listened in silence to the observations of the faithful and measured the abyss which he had so long skirted. He continued to see his friends: Fr?ulein von Meysenbug,[Pg 193] Miss Zimmern, Gabriel Monod, E. Schuré, Alfred Brenner, who did not fail to notice in him a reserve and a silence singular at times. Often he went off alone, during the intervals or in the afternoons, with a pleasant and charming spectator, Madame O——, who was slightly Parisian, slightly Russian. He liked the delicate and surprising conversation of women, and he excused this one for being a Wagnerian.
M. Schuré, who met Nietzsche at these festivals, gives a description of him which merits repetition. "As I talked to him I was struck by the superiority of his mind and the strangeness of his physiognomy. A large forehead; short hair brushed up off his forehead; the projecting cheekbones of the Slav. The strong drooping moustache, the sharp cut of the face, would have given him the air of a cavalry officer, had it not been for an indescribable something in his address that was at the same time timid and haughty. The musical voice, the slow speech, denoted the organism of the artist; the prudent and meditative bearing was a philosopher's. Nothing was more deceiving than the apparent calm of his expression. The fixed glance betrayed the melancholy labour of his thought. It was the glance of a fanatic, of a keen observer, and of a visionary. This double character added a disturbed and disturbing element, the more so because it always seemed riveted upon one point. In his effusive moments this look was moistened with the softness of a dream, but very soon it became hostile again.... During the general rehearsals, and the first three performances of the Tetralogy, Nietzsche appeared to be sad and dejected...."
Each evening was a triumph, and each of them added to Nietzsche's distress. The Rhinegold, the Valkyrie—these old pieces recalled his youth, his enthusiasms for Wagner, whom he did not know, whom he did not dare hope to know. Siegfried: souvenirs of Triebschen;[Pg 194] Wagner was completing this score when Nietzsche entered into his intimacy.
Siegfried was Nietzsche's favourite among the Wagnerian heroes. He found himself again in this young man, who had never known fear. "We are the knights of the spirit," he had then written in his notes, "we understand the song of the birds and follow them." No doubt he was almost happy when he heard Siegfried; it was the only one of Wagner's dramas which he could listen to without remorse. Lastly, The Twilight of the Gods. Siegfried has mixed in the crowd of men; they deceive him; one evening he na?vely relates his life; a traitor strikes him from behind and kills him. The giants are annihilated, the dwarfs vanquished, the heroes powerless; the gods abdicate; the gold is given back to the depths of the Rhine, whose surging waters cover over the world, and as they await death, men contemplate the universal disaster.
It was the end. The curtain fell slowly, the symphony was extinguished in the night, and the spectators rose suddenly, with one accord, and gave vent to a loud burst of cheering. Then the curtain rose once more and Richard Wagner appeared, alone, dressed in a redingote and cloth trousers, holding his little figure erect. With a sign he called for silence; every murmur ceased.
"We have shown you what we wished to show you," he cried, "and what we can show you when all wills are directed to one object; if on your side you support us, then you will have an art."
He retired, then returned; again and again he was recalled. Nietzsche watched his master standing in the limelight, and he alone in the hall did not applaud.
"There he is," he thought, "my ally... the Homer who has been fertilised by Plato...."
The curtain fell for the last time, and Nietzsche, silent, lost in the crowd, followed his tide like a wreck.
[1]
"Ein Zwillingspaar von einem Haus,
Gieng muthig in die Welt hinaus,
Welt—Drachen zu zerreissen.
Zwi'r V?ter—Werk! Ein Wunder war's!
Die Mutter doch des Zwillingpaars
Freundschaft ist sie geheissen."
[2] Mahnruf.