THE LIFE OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
BY
DANIEL HALÉVY
TRANSLATED BY J. M. MONE
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
T. M. KETTLE, M.P.
T. FISCHER UNWIN
LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE
LEIPSIC: INSELSTRASSE 20
1911
[INTRODUCTION] 7
[CHAPTER I]
CHILDHOOD 9
[CHAPTER II]
YEARS OF YOUTH 40
[CHAPTER III]
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE AND RICHARD WAGNER
—TRIEBSCHEN 71
[CHAPTER IV]
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE AND RICHARD WAGNER
—BAYREUTH 127
[CHAPTER V]
CRISIS AND CONVALESCENCE 195
[CHAPTER VI]
THE LABOUR OF ZARATHUSTRA 229
[CHAPTER VII]
THE FINAL SOLITUDE 298
[INDEX] 363
[INTRODUCTION]
The duel between Nietzsche and civilisation is long since over; and that high poet and calamitous philosopher is now to be judged as he appears in the serene atmosphere of history, which—need it be said?—he infinitely despised. The crowd, the common herd, the multitude—which he also despised—has recorded its verdict with its usual generosity to the dead, and that verdict happens to be an ample revenge. It has dismissed Nietzsche's ideas in order to praise his images. It has conceded him in literature a brilliant success, and has treated his philosophy as fundamental nonsense of the sort that calls for no response except a shrug of the shoulders. The immoralist who sought to shatter all the Tables of all the Laws, and to achieve a Transvaluation of all Values, ends by filling a page in Die Ernte and other Anthologies for the Young. And in certifying his style to be that of a rare and real master the "crowd" has followed a true instinct. More than Schopenhauer, more even than Goethe, Nietzsche is accounted by the critics of his country to have taught German prose to speak, as Falstaff says, like a man o' this world. The ungainly sentences, many-jointed as a dragon's tail, became short, definite, arrowy. "We must 'Mediterraneanise' German music," he wrote to Peter Gast, and in fact he did indisputably "Mediterraneanise" the style of German literature. That edged and glittering speech of his owed much to his acknowledged masters, La Rochefoucauld, Voltaire, and Stendhal, the lapidaries of French. But it was something very intimately his own; he was abundantly dowered with the insight of malice, and malice always writes briefly and well. It has not the time to be obscure. Nietzsche had this perfection of utterance, but a far richer range and volume. He was a poet by grace divine, and a true Romantic for all the acid he dropped on Romanticism; the life of his soul was an incessant creative surge of images, metaphors, symbolisms, mythologies. These two tendencies produced as their natural issue that gnomic and aphoristic tongue which sneers, preaches, prophesies, chants, intoxicates and dances through the pages of Also Sprach Zarathustra. German critics have applied to Nietzsche, and with even greater fitness, Heine's characterisation of Schiller: "With him thought celebrates its orgies. Abstract ideas, crowned with vine-leaves, brandish the thyrsus and dance like bacchantes; they are drunken reflections." Of many aspects of his own personality Nietzsche may have thought not wisely but too well; but in this regard it appears that he did not exaggerate himself. "After Luther and Goethe," he wrote to Rohde, "a third step remained to be taken.... I have the idea that with Zarathustra I have brought the German language to its point of perfection." The German world of letters has not said No! to a claim so proud as to seem mere vanity. Friedrich Nietzsche holds a safe, and even a supreme position in the history of literature.
What is to be said of his place in the history of philosophy? Höffding allows him a high "symptomatic value," but only that. His work has the merit of a drama, in which the contradictions of modern thought, vibrant with passion, clash and crash together in a tumultuous conflict which, unhappily, has no issue. M. Alfred Fouillée, who has contrasted him with Guyau—that noblest of "modern" thinkers—in his book Nietzsche et l'immoralisme, draws out a table of antitheses, and cancelling denials against affirmations, arrives at a result that looks remarkably like zero. Nietzsche in truth was a man of ecstasies and intuitions, rather than of consequent thought. He troubled little to purge himself of self-contradictions, as became a writer whose first word had been a vehement assault on that Socratic rationalism which, as he believed, had withered up the vital abundance of Greece. His instincts were those of an oracle, a mystagogue; and mystagogues do not argue. Heinrich von Stein, in styling his first book an Essay in Lyrical Philosophy, spoke in terms of his master's mind.
With Nietzsche reason deliberately abdicates, bearing with it into exile its categories of good and evil, cause and end. Schopenhauer had suggested to him that the true key to the riddle of existence was not intellect but will; behind the mask of phenomena the illuminated spirit discerned not a Contriving but a Striving, a monstrous Will, blind as old Œdipus, yearning like him through blood and anguish to a possible redemption. But in time he cast off Schopenhauer and pessimism. The Will to Live he "construed in an optimistic sense," and it darkened into that other mystery, at once vaguer and more malign, the Will to Power. The problem remained to find a ground for optimism, and a clue to the harmony, to the recurring rhythms and patterns of reality as we know it. So was born what is perhaps the characteristic idea of Nietzsche. The universe is not a phenomenon of Will, it is a phenomenon of Art. "In my preface to the book on Wagner I had already," wrote Nietzsche in 1886, "presented art, and not morality, as the essentially metaphysical activity of man: in the course of the present book I reproduce in many forms the singular proposition that the world is only to be justified as an artistic phenomenon." For the optimist quand-même this interpretation has many advantages. Cruelty, sorrow and disaster need no longer dismay him; since a world may at the same time be a very bad world and a very good tragedy. "It may be," the lyricist, turned philosopher, wrote later, "that my Zarathustra ought to be classified under the rubric Music." These two passages, with a hundred others, determine the atmosphere into which we are introduced. We have to deal not with a thinker who expounds a system, but with a prophet who dispenses a Revelation: Nietzsche is not the apologist but the mystic of Neo-Paganism.
Coming to closer range, we may dismiss at once a great part of his polemical writings. They were a sort of perpetual bonfire in which from time to time Nietzsche burned what he had once adored, and much more beside. They bear witness to that proud independence, one may almost say that savage isolation, which was the native climate of his soul. Niemandem war er Untertan, "he was no man's man," he wrote of Schopenhauer, and that iron phrase expressed his own ideal and practice. His brochures of abuse he regarded as a mode, though an unhappy mode, of liberation. He had little love of them himself in his creative moments: he desired with a fierce desire to rid his soul of hatreds and negatives and rise to a golden affirmation. "I have been a fighter," declares Zarathustra, "only that I might one day have my hands free to bless." "In dying I would offer men the richest of my gifts. It was from the sun I learned that, from the sun who when he sets is so rich; out of his inexhaustible riches he flings gold into the sea, so that the poorest fishermen row with golden oars." It is not the Will to Power that speaks here, but that older and more sacred fountain of civilisation, the Will to Love. But if Nietzsche had that inspiration one is tempted to say of him what he said of Renan: He is never so dangerous as when he loves. The truth is that he had the genius of belittlement. It was the other side of his vanity, a vanity so monstrous that it seems from the first to have eaten of the insane root. There is no humour, no integral view of things, behind his critical work. It is sick with subjectivity. And yet Zarathustra in a temper is, by times, far more amusing than sinister. What could be better than some of the characterisations in A Psychologist's Hedge-School, "Seneca, the Toreador of virtue ... Rousseau, or the return to nature in impuris naturalibus. ... John Stuart Mill; or wounding lucidity"? But when, in this mood, he gnaws and nibbles about the sanctuaries of life; when he tells us that the true Fall of Man was the Redemption, that the two most noxious corruptions known to history are Christianity and alcohol; when he presses his anti-Feminism to a point that goes beyond even the gross German tradition of which Luther's Table Talk is a monument, the best that one can do for him is to remember that he often took too much chloral. It may be that to the circles in these countries to whom the cult of Nietzscheanism appeals, this strain of his thought also appeals. This particular music is not played on many trumpets, but every Superman ought to know it. And he ought to know further that Zarathustra, being brave, gibes not only at St. Paul, but even at Herbert Spencer, and has no more toleration for the gospel according to Marx than for that according to Matthew.
What is the gospel of this ambiguous prophet? It is, he himself declares, a long "Memento vivere." His own experience taught him that the characteristic of life, in its highest moments, is to be unimaginably alive. From a mere process it becomes a sudden intoxication, and on the psychology of that intoxication, which is the psychology of the artist and also that of the lover and the saint, he has written pages which are a wonder of pure light. From this standpoint he criticises justly the mechanical theory of adjustments in which there is nothing to adjust, of adaptations in which there is nothing to adapt, the whole ab extra interpretation of life popularised by Darwin, Spencer, and the English school in general. The living unit is more than a mere node or knot in a tangle of natural selection; it is a fountain of force, of spontaneity, constantly overflowing. "The general aspect of life is not indigence and famine, but on the contrary richness, opulence, even an absurd prodigality." To live is for Nietzsche, as for the Scholastics, to be a centre of self-movement. With the Pragmatists he asserts the primacy of life over thought. But this tension of consciousness, this Dionysiac drunkenness, is only a foundation, it is not yet a philosophy. Philosophy, or at all events moral philosophy, begins with the discovery that there are other people in the world. Your ego, thus drunken and expansive, collides sharply with another ego, equally drunken and expansive, and it becomes at once necessary to frame a code of relations, a rule of the road. Is this force and spontaneity of the individual to flow out towards others through the channel of domination or through that of love?
Zarathustra had marched with the Germans over prostrate France, he had said in his Gargantuan egoism: "If there were Gods, how could I bear not to be a God? Consequently there are no Gods." If the Goths and the Vandals had read Hegelian metaphysics, observes Fouillée, they would have answered this question as Nietzsche answered it. The living unit accumulates a superabundance of force in order to impose its power on others ... an andern Macht auslassen. The Will to Power is the sole source of human activity. The strong must live as warriors and conquerors, adopting as their three cardinal virtues pride, pleasure, and the love of domination. Pity is the deepest of corruptions; it but doubles pain, adding to the pain of him who suffers the pain of him who pities. If you have helped any one, you must wash the hands that helped him, for they are unclean. The Crusaders brought home but one treasure, the formula, namely, of the Assassins, "Nothing is true, everything is permitted." Science is mere illusionism; but the warrior, knowing how to be hard—for that is the new law—will impose his own arbitrary values on all things, and will make life so good that he will desire it to be indefinitely repeated. The earth, thus disciplined, will bring forth the Superman, who, having danced out his day, will disappear to be recreated by the Eternal Return. Thus spake Zarathustra.
The greatest difficulty that one experiences before such a doctrine as this is the difficulty of taking it seriously. Nietzsche, who had a tendency to believe that every reminiscence was an inspiration, is by no means as original as he thought. After all, there were sceptics, optimists, tyrants and poets before Zarathustra. The "common herd" may not be given to discussing ethical dualism, but it knows that since society began there have been two laws, one for the rich and another for the poor. Scepticism as to the objectivity of human values, moral and intellectual, is no new heresy, but a tradition as old as science, and almost as old as faith. The notion of an Eternal Return, crystallised by Plato from a mist of earlier speculation, had exercised many modern thinkers; one has only to name Heine, Blanqui, von Naegeli, Guyau, Dostoievsky. The Romantics had, at the beginning of Nietzsche's century, as Schlegel wrote, "transcended all the ends of life," and, fascinated with the idea of mere power, had filled the imagination of Europe with seas and storms that raged for the sole sake of raging. There was no Scholastic compiler of a text-book on Ethics but had "posed morality as a problem," and asked in his first quæstio whether there was a science of good and evil. The Superman so passionately announced by Nietzsche had already been created by the enigmatic and dilettante fancy of Renan. The name itself was as old as Goethe, though it is to be recalled that not Goethe but Mephistopheles applies it to Faust as a sneer and a temptation. Zarathustra is not a prophet nor even a pioneer; he brings but a new mode of speech, his triumphant and dancing phrase sweeps into its whirl a thousand ghosts and phantoms. And what is to be said of the doctrine itself? Perhaps the most adequate answer to Nietzsche, on the plane of his own ideas, is that of Guyau. Both were poets, strayed into philosophy, both seize upon life as the key to all reality. But Guyau finds in the spontaneous outflow of individual life, itself the spring of sociability, fraternity, love. An organism is more perfect as it is more sociable, there can be no full intensity without wide expansion. "There is a certain generosity inseparable from existence, without which one withers up interiorly and dies. The mind must flower; morality, altruism are the flower of human life." The reduction of all consciousness to one mode—in Nietzsche the Will to Power—is neither new nor difficult. La Rochefoucauld tracked down behind all motives the motive of self-interest, and modern simplifiers have amused themselves by analysing passion into unconscious thought. The soul, as St. Augustine tells us, is all in every part; and since the same self is always present, it is obviously possible in some fashion or another to translate any one mood of its life into any other. But such suppression of the finer details, while interesting as a tour de force, is not scientific psychology. The Will to Power is not sufficiently definite to serve the turn of a moralist or even an immoralist. Power is of many kinds. Love hath its victories not less renowned than hate. Had Cleopatra's nose been shorter, history would, says Pascal, have been different, and in the phrase of the French chanson there are often more conquests ambushed in the hair of Delilah than in that of Samson. Nietzsche himself perceived that it was necessary to establish a hierarchy of values as between different manifestations of "power," but this Umwerthung aller Werthe was never either achieved or achievable. The evangel of Zarathustra dissolves into mere sound and fury for lack of what the Court of Equity calls reasonable particularity. Most notable is this in regard to the two laws. Am I a Superman—or rather a potential ancestor of the Superman, for in this case hereditary privilege runs backwards—with the right to found my life on pride, pleasure, and the love of power, or am I a slave with no right except to remain a slave? The test is astral, and even nebulous. If you can compel the stars to circle about you as their centre, if you have a chaos in you and are about to beget a dancing star, then you are of the seed of the Superman. Unhappily, the only people who could seriously entertain such an estimate of themselves are the very wealthy and the very mad. Zarathustra derides the mob in order to flatter the snob; he is malgré lui the casuist of the idle rich, the courtier of international finance.
Friedrich Nietzsche was an optimist. It was a paradox of courage. There is nothing nobler or more valiant in the history of thought than his refusal to let the sun be dimmed by the mist of his own suffering. "No invalid has the right to be a pessimist." "Let them beware: the years in which my vitality sank to its minimum were those in which I ceased to be a pessimist." That is magnificent, but it is not philosophy. If Nietzsche by his insomnia and his wounded eyes is pledged on the point of honour to optimism, is not Schopenhauer by his fixed income and excellent digestion similarly pledged to pessimism? But Zarathustra's optimism is not merely positive, it is ecstatic: to express its fulness he creates the formula of the Eternal Return. He claps his hands and cries "Encore!" to life. He is drunken with joy as men are in the taverns with corn and the grape, and he shouts "The same again!"
This Eternal Return is presented to us as a conclusion of mathematical physics and spectrum analysis. St. Thomas Aquinas taught, following Aristotle, that the stars were composed of a substance nobler than that of earth, not subject to birth or death, and so immune from corruption. But Fraunhofer and his successors have, with their prisms and telescopes, discovered in the stars the same eighty-one or eighty-two elements which constitute the earth. Since then we have but a finite number of indestructible elements and forces, and an infinite space and time—or at least a space and time to which we can conceive no limits—it must follow that the same combinations will repeat themselves incessantly both in space and time. There is not only an Eternal Return, but an Infinite Reduplication. And if thought, as Nietzsche assumed, is only the phosphorescence accompanying certain arrangements of matter, the same conscious life must also repeat itself. One does not stay to discuss this phantasy of mathematics except to say that whoever was entitled to entertain it Zarathustra was not. If science is, as he held, a mere linked illusionism, how can it give so absolute a prophecy? To Nietzsche it was no conclusion, but a reminiscence from Greek speculation which came to him, disguised in the flame of an inspiration, under that pyramidal rock near Sorlei, "six thousand feet above men and time." He accepted it because it seemed to him the supreme formula of optimism. His mind was incited to it perhaps by that sombre passage in which his rejected master, Schopenhauer, declares that if you were to knock on the graves, with power to summon forth the dead to rise up and live their lives again, none would answer to your call. Christianity agrees with Schopenhauer; for though Christianity is an optimism, it is founded on pessimism. It is an optimism poised on a centre that does not lie within the walls of space and time. Christianity called a new world into existence to redress the balance of the old; and were this old world all—a closed circuit, a rounded whole—Zarathustra might dance and chant through all its Campo Santos without finding more than a very few to rise up and follow him.
The practical consequences to which Nietzsche was led were in his own phrase inactual, out of time and out of season. Zarathustra is, by a natural kinship, a prophet of the Anarchists, but he hated Anarchism; by a strange transformation, the genius of a certain school of Socialists, but he despised Socialism. German officials in Poland may find in him a veritable Oppressors' Handbook; he danced through the streets at the victory over France, but he derided the German State and Empire as a new idol. He contemned women, but praised indissoluble marriage. He preached pleasure, but celebrated chastity in a noble hymn. He was all for authority and inequality, "a Joseph de Maistre," says Fouillée, "who believes in the hangman without believing in the Pope"; but when he looked at a criminal on trial he acquitted everybody except only the judge. He denounced Bismarck and the Kaiser for being too democratic; he regarded Science, too, as disastrously democratic, because it subjected all phenomena, great and small, to the same uniform laws. Will was his god, but he saw the world under the aspect of a Mahometan determinism, and submitted himself to a resignation, an adoption of the hostile ways of existence, an amor fati which a Stoic might think extravagant. A German proletarian, full of German prejudices, he thought himself Polish and noble, and boasted of being a sans-patrie and a "good European." Pity, generosity, self-immolation, the whole ritual of civilisation, were condemned by Zarathustra and practised by him. In brief, Nietzsche never rose above a sort of philosophical cinematograph; he had the glitter but never the hard definiteness of the diamond which he chose as his symbol.
But it would be very superficial to suppose that a thought so passionate could be altogether unreal. Zarathustra is a counter-poison to sentimentalism, that worst ailment of our day. He brings a sort of ethical strychnine which taken in large doses is fatal, but in small doses is an incomparable tonic. He disturbed many who were woefully at ease in Zion, and was a poet of the heroic life. Germany, so apt to lose herself in the jungle of scholarship, needed to be reminded that erudition exists for the sake of life and not life for the sake of erudition. To literature, when he wrote in conformity with its settled and common tradition, he gave great chants of courage, loneliness and friendship. In M. Halévy's book, founded on that of Madame Förster-Nietzsche, we have in English for the first time a portrait of him in the intimacies of his life and thought. It exhibits him as better than his gospel, a hundred times better than most of those disturbers of civilisation who call themselves his disciples.
T. M. KETTLE
The Life of Friedrich Nietzsche
[CHAPTER I]
CHILDHOOD
Karl-Ludwig Nietzsche, a young clergyman of the Lutheran Church, came of an ecclesiastical family. His father and his grandfather had taught theology. His wife was the daughter and the granddaughter of clergy-men. Ignoring modern thought and all the agitations and desires of his time, he followed the safe path of the double tradition, which had at once been revealed by God to the faithful and indicated by Princes to their subjects. His superiors thought highly of him. Frederick William IV., King of Prussia, condescended to take him under his wing, and he might have hoped for a fine career had he not suffered from headaches and nerves. As it was, rest became essential.
He asked for a country parish, and that of Röcken was confided to him. The situation of this poor village, whose little houses uprear themselves in a vast plain on the confines of Prussia and Saxony, was melancholy; but Karl-Ludwig Nietzsche liked the place, for solitude was acceptable to him. He was a great musician, and often, at the fall of day, would shut himself up in his church and improvise upon the rustic organ whilst the good folk of his parish stood without and listened in admiration.
The pastor and his young wife waited four years for their first child, who was born on October 15,1844, the King's birthday. The coincidence increased the father's joy. "O month of October, blessed month," he wrote in his church register, "ever have you overwhelmed me with joy. But of all the joys that you have brought me, this is the deepest, the most magnificent: I baptize my first child.... My son, Friedrich Wilhelm, such shall be your name on earth in remembrance of the royal benefactor whose birthday is yours."
The child soon had a brother, then a sister. There are women who remember Friedrich's infancy, and those quickly passing days of joy round the Nietzsches' hearth. Friedrich was slow in learning to speak. He looked at everything with grave eyes, and kept silent. At the age of two and a half he spoke his first word. The pastor liked his silent boy, and was glad to have him as a companion of his walks. Never did Friedrich Nietzsche forget the sound of distant bells ringing over the immense pool-strewn plain as he wandered with his father, his hand nestled in that strong hand.
Misfortune came very quickly. In August, 1848, Nietzsche's father fell from the top of the stone steps leading up to his door, and struck his head violently against the edge of one of them. The shock brought on a terrible attack, or, perhaps, for one cannot be certain, only hastened its approach: Karl-Ludwig Nietzsche lost his reason, and, after a year of aberration and decline, died. Friedrich Nietzsche was then four years old. The incidents of this tragic time made a deep impression upon his mind: night-alarms, the weeping in the house, the terrors of the closed chamber, the silence, the utter abandonment to woe; the tolling bells, the hymns, the funeral sermons; the coffin engulfed beneath the flagstones of the church. His understanding of such things had come too early, and he was shaken by it. His nights were troubled with visions, and he had a presentiment of some early disaster. He had dreams—here is the naïve recital that he makes in his fourteenth year:
"When one despoils a tree of its crown it withers and the birds desert its branches. Our family had been despoiled of its crown; joy departed from our hearts, and a profound sadness entered into possession of us. And our wounds were but closing when they were painfully reopened. About this time I had a dream in which I heard mournful organ music, as if at a burial. And as I was trying to discover the cause of this playing, a tomb opened sharply and my father appeared, clad in his shroud. He crossed the church, and returned with a little child in his arms. The tomb opened again, my father disappeared into it, and the stone swung back to its place. At once the wail of the organ ceased, and I awoke. The next morning I told the dream to my dear mother. A short while after, my little brother Joseph fell ill, and after a nervous crisis of a few hours, he died. Our grief was terrible. My dream was exactly fulfilled, for the little body was placed in the arms of its father. After this double calamity the Lord in heaven was our sole consolation. It was towards the end of January, 1850."
In the spring of this year the pastor's widow left the parochial house and went to reside in the neighbouring town of Naumburg-zur-Saale, where she was near her own people. Relations of hers lived in the neighbouring countryside. Her husband's mother and his sister came to stay with her in the small house, to which the children, who at first had been disconsolate, gradually grew accustomed.
Naumburg was a royal city, favoured by the Hohenzollerns and devoted to their dynasty. A bourgeois society of officials and pastors, with some officers' families and a few country squires, lived within the grass-grown ramparts, pierced with five gates, which were closed every evening. Their existence was grave and measured. The bell of the metropolitan church, flinging its chimes across the little town, awoke it, sent it to sleep, assembled it to State and religious festivals. As a small boy Nietzsche was himself grave and measured. His instincts were in accord with the customs of Naumburg, and his active soul was quick to discover the beauties of his new life. He admired the military parades, the religious services with organ and choir, the majestic anniversary celebrations. He found himself deeply moved every year by the return of Christmas. His birthday stirred him less deeply, but was a source of great joy.
"My birthday being also that of our beloved King," he wrote, "I am awakened that day by military music. I receive my presents: the ceremony is quickly over, and we go together to the church. Although the sermon is not directed to my special benefit, I choose the best of it and apply it to myself. Afterwards we all assemble at the school to celebrate the great festival.... Before the break-up a fine patriotic chorus is sung, and the director concilium dimisit. Then comes for me the best moment of all; my friends arrive and we spend a happy day together."
Friedrich did not forget his father, and wished to follow his example and to become, like all the men of his race, a pastor, one of the elect who live near God and speak in His name. He could conceive no higher vocation, nor any more congenial to himself. Young as he was, he had an exacting and meticulous conscience. The slightest scolding pained him, and he liked to take his own line, unaided. Whenever he felt a scruple he would retire to some obscure hiding-place and examine his conscience, nor would he resume his play with his sister until he had deliberately arrived at a condemnation or a justification of his conduct. One day, when it was raining in torrents, his mother saw him coming back from school with slow, regular steps, although he was without umbrella or cloak. She called him, and he came sedately up to her. "We have always been told not to run in the streets," he explained. His companions nicknamed him "the little pastor," and listened, in respectful silence, when he read them aloud a chapter from the Bible.
He was careful of his prestige. "When one is master of oneself," he gravely taught his sister, "then one is master of the whole world." He was proud, and believed in the nobility of the Nietzsches. This was a family legend which his grandmother loved to relate, and of which he and his sister Lisbeth used to dream. Remote ancestors of theirs, Counts, Nietzski by name, had lived in Poland. During the Reformation they defied persecution, and broke with the Catholic Church. Thereafter they wandered wretchedly for three years, outcasts, pursued from village to village. With them was their son, who had been born on the eve of their flight. The mother nursed this child with devoted constancy, and he thus acquired, in spite of all ordeals, wonderful health, lived to a great age, and transmitted to his line the double virtue of strength and longevity.
Friedrich was never tired of listening to so fine an adventure. Often also he asked to be told the history of the Poles. The election of the King by the Nobles, gathered together on horseback in the midst of a great plain, and the right which the meanest of them had to oppose his veto to the will of all the rest, struck him with admiration: he had no doubt that this race was the greatest in the world. "A Count Nietzski must not lie," he declared to his sister. Indeed, the passions and the powerful desires which, thirty or forty years later, were to inspire his work, already animated this child with the bulging forehead and the big eyes, whom unhappy women loved to fold in their tender caresses. When he was nine years old his tastes widened, and music was revealed to him by a chorus from Handel, heard at church. He studied the piano. He improvised, he accompanied himself in chanting the Bible, and his mother, remembering her husband's fate, was troubled, for he, too, like the child, used to play and improvise on the organ at Röcken.
The instinct of creation—an instinct that was already tyrannical—seized hold of him; he composed melodies, fantasies, a succession of mazurkas, dedicated to his Polish ancestors. He wrote verses, and mother, grandmother, aunts, sister, received, every anniversary, a poem with his music. Games themselves became the pretext for work. He drew up didactic treatises, containing rules and advice, which he handed over to his comrades. First he taught them architecture; then, in 1854, during the siege of Sebastopol, the capture of which made him weep—for he loved all Slavs and hated the revolutionary French—he studied ballistics and the defence of fortified places. At the same time, he and two friends founded a theatre of arts, in which they played dramas of antiquity and of primitive civilisations, of which he was the author: The Gods of Olympus and an Orkadal.
He left school to enter college at Naumburg. There he showed from the first such conspicuous ability that his professors advised his mother to send him to study in a superior institute. The poor woman hesitated. She would have liked to keep her child near her.
This was in 1858. Nietzsche's vacation was of rather a serious character. He spent it as usual in the village of Pobles, under the shadow of wooded hills, on the banks of the fresh and lazy Saale, in which each morning he bathed. His maternal grandparents had him and his sister Lisbeth to stay with them. He was happy, with a heaped abundance of life; but his mind was preoccupied with the uncertainty of his future.
Adolescence was coming; and perhaps he was about to leave his own people and change his friends and his home. With some anxiety he foresaw the new course which his life was going to follow. He called to mind his boyish past, all the long years of childhood, at which one should not smile—thirteen years filled with the earliest affections and the earliest sorrows, with the first proud hopes of an ambitious soul, with the splendid discovery of music and poetry. Memories came, numerous, vivid, and touching: Nietzsche, who had a lyric soul, suddenly became, as it were, intoxicated with himself.
He took up his pen, and in twelve days the history of his childhood was written. He was happy when he had finished.
"Now I have brought my first notebook to a proper end," he writes, "and I am content with my work. I have written with the greatest pleasure and without a moment's fatigue. It is a grand thing to pass in review before one the course of one's first years, and to follow there the development of one's soul. I have sincerely recounted all the truth without poetry, without literary ornamentation. That I may write many more like it!"
Four little verses followed:
"Ein Spiegel ist das Leben
In ihm sich zu erkennen,
Möcht' ich das erste nennen
Wonach wir nur auch streben."[1]
[1] "Life is a mirror. I might say that the recognition of ourselves in it is the first object to which we all strive."
The school of Pforta is situated five miles from Naumburg, on the bank of the Saale. Ever since a Germany has existed there have been teachers and scholars in Pforta. Some Cistercian monks, come in the twelfth century from the Latin West to convert the Slavs, obtained possession of this property, which lies along both banks of the river. They built the high walls which surround it, the houses, the church, and founded a tradition which is not extinct. In the sixteenth century they were expelled by the Saxon princes, but their school was continued, and their methods conserved by the Lutherans who were installed in their place.
"The children shall be brought up to the religious life," says an instruction of 1540. "For six years they shall exercise themselves in the knowledge of letters, and in the disciplines of virtue." The pupils were kept separated from their families, cloistered with their teachers. The school had its fixed rules and customs: anything in the shape of easy manners was forbidden. There was a certain, established hierarchy: the oldest scholars had charge of the youngest and each master was the tutor of twenty pupils. Religion, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin were taught. In this old monastery German rigour, the spirit of humanism, and the ethic of Protestantism formed a singular and deep-rooted alliance, a fruitful type of life and sentiment. Many distinguished men owed their education to Pforta: Novalis, the Schlegels, Fichte—Fichte, philosopher, educator, patriot, and chief glory of the school. Nietzsche had long desired to study at Pforta, and in October, 1858, a scholarship being awarded him, he left his family to enter the school.
He now disappears for a time from our ken. An heroic and boyish anecdote is the sole memory of his first year. The story of Mucius Scævola seemed an improbable one to some of his comrades; they denied it: "No man would have the courage to put his hand in fire," opined these young critics. Nietzsche did not deign to answer, but seized from the stove a flaming coal and placed it in the palm of his hand. He always carried the mark of this burn, the more visible because he had taken care to keep in repair and enlarge so glorious a wound by letting melted wax run over it.
Assuredly, he did not easily endure this new life of his. He played little, not caring to attach himself to unfamiliar people; moreover, the tender customs of the maternal hearth had ill prepared him for the disciplines of Pforta. He only went out once a week, on Sunday afternoon. Then his mother, his sister, and two Naumburg friends of his came to meet him at the school door, and spent the day with him in a neighbouring inn.
In July, 1859, Nietzsche had a month's liberty. The holidays of pupils at Pforta were never longer. He revisited the people and places that he liked, and made a rapid voyage to Jena and Weimar. For a year he had written only what he had to write as a task, but now the inspiration and delight of the pen returned to him, and he composed out of his impressions of summer a sentimental fantasy which is not barren of pathos.
"The sun has already set," he writes, "when we leave the dark enclosure. Behind us, the sky is bathed in gold; above us, there is a glow of rosy clouds: before us, we see the town, lying at rest under the gentle breeze of evening. Ah, Wilhelm, I say to my friend, is there any joy greater than that of wandering together across the world? Oh, pleasure of friendship, faithful friendship: oh, breath of this magnificent summer night, perfume of flowers, and redness of evening! Do you not feel your thoughts soar upward, to perch like the jubilant lark on a throne of golden clouds? The wonder of these evening landscapes! It is my own life that unveils itself to me. So are my own days arranged: some shut within the dark penumbra, others lifted up in the air of liberty! At this moment our ears are pierced by a shrill cry: it comes from the madhouse which stands near our path. Our hands join in a tighter clasp, as if some evil genius had touched us with a sweep of menacing wings. Go from us, ye powers of Evil! Even in this beautiful world there are unhappy souls! But what, then, is unhappiness?"
At the beginning of August he returned to Pforta, as sadly as he had gone there in the first instance. He could not accept the brusque constraint of the place, and, being unable to cease thinking of himself, he kept for some weeks an intimate diary which shows us how he employed his time and what his humours were from one day to another. We find, to begin with, certain courageous maxims against ennui, given him by his professor and transcribed; then a recital of his studies, his distractions, his readings, and the crises which depress him. The poetic soul of the child now resists, now resigns itself to its impressions and bows painfully beneath a discipline. When emotion urges him he abandons prose, which is not musical enough to express his melancholy. Rhythm and rhyme appear; under an inspiration he makes a few verses, a quatrain, a sextain; but he does not seek after the lyrical impulse, nor hold to it; he merely follows it when it rises within him; and, as soon as it weakens, prose takes its place, as in a Shakesperean dialogue.
Life at Pforta was, however, brightened by hours of simple and youthful joy. The pupils went out for walks, sang in chorus, bathed. Nietzsche took part in these delights, and related them. When the heat was too heavy, the life of the water replaced the life of study. The two hundred scholars would go down to the river, timing their steps to the tunes they had struck up. They would throw themselves into the water, following the current without upsetting the order of their ranks, accomplish a swim long enough to try, and yet elate, the youngest members of the party, then clamber up the bank at their master's whistle, put on their uniforms, which a ferry boat had convoyed in their wake; then, still singing, still in good order, would march back to their work and to the old school. "It is absolutely stunning," says Nietzsche in effect.
So time went by, and the end of August came. The Journal is silent for eight days, then for six, then for a whole month. When he reopens his notebook, it is to bring it to an end.
"Since the day on which I began this Journal my state of mind has completely changed. Then we were in the green abundance of the late summer: now, alas! we are in the late autumn. Then I was an unter-tertianer (a lower form boy); now I am in a higher form.... My birthday has come and gone, and I am older—time passes like the rose of spring, and pleasure like the foam of the brook.
"At this moment I feel myself seized by an extraordinary desire for knowledge, for universal culture. That impulse comes to me from Humboldt, whom I have just read. May it prove as lasting as my love for poetry!"
He now mapped out a vast programme of study in which geology, botany, and astronomy were combined with readings in the Latin stylists, Hebrew, military science, and all the techniques. "And above all things," said he, "Religion, the foundation of all knowledge. Great is the domain of knowledge, infinite the search after truth."
A winter and spring-time sped away while the boy worked on. But now came his second holidays, then the third return to school; it was when autumn had denuded the great oaks on the estate of Pforta. Friedrich Nietzsche is seventeen years of age, and he is sad. Too long had he imposed upon himself a painful obedience; he had read Schiller, Hölderlin, Byron; he dreams of the Gods of Greece, and of the sombre Manfred, that all-powerful magician who, weary of his omnipotence, vainly sought repose in the death which his art had conquered. What cares Nietzsche for the lessons of his professors? He meditates on the lines of the romantic poet:
"Sorrow is knowledge; they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o'er the fatal truth,
The tree of knowledge is not that of life."
He grows weary at last. He longs to escape from the routine of classes, from tasks which absorb his whole life. He would listen to his soul alone, and thus come to understand the dreams with which his mind overflows. He confides in his mother and his sister, and declares that his projects for the future have changed. The thought of the University bores him; he now wants to be not a professor, but a musician. His mother reasons with him, and succeeds in appeasing him a little. But her success is not for long. The death of a master to whom he had been attached completes his confusion of mind. He neglects his work, isolates himself, and meditates.
He writes. From his earliest childhood he had had the instinct of the phrase and the word, the instinct of visible thought. He writes incessantly, and not one shade of his unrest has remained hidden from us. He surveys the vast universe of romanticism and of science, sombre, restless, and loveless. This monstrous vision fascinates and frightens him. The pious ways of his boyhood still hold him under their influence; he reproaches himself for his inclinations towards audacity and negation, as if for sins. He strives to retain his religious faith, which is dwindling day by day. He does not break with it sharply in the French and Catholic manner, but slowly and fearfully detaches himself; slowly, because he venerates those dogmas or symbols which stand for all his past, for his memories of his home and his father; fearfully, because he knows that in renouncing the old security he will find not a new security to take its place, but a surging throng of problems. Weighing the supreme gravity of the choice imposed on him, he meditates:
"Such an enterprise," he writes, "is the work not of a few weeks but of a life-time: can it be that, armed solely with the results of a boy's reflections, any one will venture to destroy the authority of two thousand years, guaranteed as it is by the deepest thinkers of all the centuries? Can it be that with his own mere fancies and rudiments of thought any one will venture to thrust aside from him all that anguish and benediction of religion with which history is profoundly penetrated?
"To decide at a stroke those philosophical problems about which human thought has maintained an unending war for many thousands of years; to revolutionise beliefs which, accepted by men of the weightiest authority, first lifted man up to the level of true humanity; to link up Philosophy with the natural sciences, without as much as knowing the general results of the one or the others; and finally to derive from those natural sciences a system of reality, when the mind has not yet grasped either the unity of universal history, or the most essential principles—it is a masterpiece of rashness....
"What then is humanity? We hardly know: one stage in a whole, one period in a process of Becoming, an arbitrary production of God? Is man aught else than a stone evolved through the intermediary worlds of flora and fauna? Is he from this time forward a completed being, or what has history in reserve for him? Is this eternal Becoming to have no end? What are the springs of this great clock? They are hidden; but however long be the duration of that vast hour which we call history, they are at every moment the same. The crises are inscribed on the dial-face: the hand moves on, and when it has reached the twelfth hour, it begins another series: it inaugurates a period in the history of humanity.
"To risk oneself, without guide or compass, on the ocean of doubt is for a young brain loss and madness; most adventurers on it are broken by the storms, few indeed are the discoverers of new lands.... All our philosophy has very often appeared to me a very Tower of Babel.... It has as its desolating result an infinite disturbance of popular thought; we must expect a vast upheaval when the multitude discovers that all Christianity is founded on gratuitous affirmations. The existence of God, immortality, the authority of the Bible, Revelation, will for ever be problems. I have attempted to deny everything: ah, to destroy is easy, but to construct!"
What a marvellous instinct appears in this page! Friedrich Nietzsche poses the precise questions which are later to occupy his thought and gives a foretaste of the energetic answers with which he is to trouble men's souls: humanity is a nothing, an arbitrary production of God; an absurd Becoming impels it towards recommencements without a term, towards eternal returns; all sovereignty is referable in the last instance to force, and force is blind, following only chance....
Friedrich Nietzsche affirms nothing: he disapproves of rapid conclusions on grave subjects, and, so long as he is hesitant, likes to abstain from them. But when he commits himself, it will be with a whole heart. Meanwhile he stays his thought. But, despite himself, it overflows at times in its effort towards expression. "Very often," he writes, "submission to the will of God and humility are but a mantle thrown over the cowardice and pusillanimity which we experience at the moment when we ought to face our destiny with courage." All the Nietzschean ethics, all the Nietzschean heroism are included in these few words.
We have named the authors who were Nietzsche's favourites at this time: Schiller, Byron, Hölderlin—of these he preferred Hölderlin, then so little known. He had discovered him, as one discovers, at a glance, a friend in a crowd. It was a singular encounter. The life of this child, now scarcely begun, was to resemble the life of the poet who had just died. Hölderlin, the son of a clergyman, had wished to follow his father's vocation. In 1780 he is studying theology at the University of Tübingen with comrades whose names are Hegel, Sendling. He ceases to believe. He comes to know Rousseau, Goethe, Schiller, and the intoxication of romanticism. He loves the mystery of nature, and the lucid mind of Greece; he loves them together, and dreams of uniting their beauties in a German work. He is poor, and has to live the hard life of a needy poet. As a teacher, he endures the ennui of wealthy houses in which he is despised generally, and once is loved too much—a brief rapture that ends in distress. He returns to his native village, for its air and its people are pleasant to him. He works, writes at his leisure, but as it pains him to live at the expense of his own family, he goes away again. He has some of his verses published; but the public shows no taste for those fine poems in which the genius of an unknown German calls up the Gods of Olympus to people the deep forests of Suabia and the Rhineland. The unhappy Hölderlin dreams of vaster creations, but goes no farther than a dream: Germany is a world in itself, and Greece is another; the inspiration of a Goethe is needed to unite them, and to fix in eternal words the triumph of Faust, the ravisher of Helen. Hölderlin writes fragments of a poem in prose: his hero is a young Greek, who laments over the ruin of his race and, frail forerunner of Zarathustra, calls for the rebirth of a valorous humanity. He composes three scenes of a tragedy, taking for his hero Empedocles, tyrant of Agrigentum, poet, philosopher, haughty inspirer of the multitude, a Greek isolated among the Greeks by reason of his very greatness, a magician, who, possessing all nature, wearies of the satisfactions which one life can offer, retires to the summit of Etna, sends away his family, his friends, his appealing people, and flings himself, one evening, at sunset, into the crater.
The work is full of power; but Hölderlin abandons it. His melancholy enfeebles and exalts him. He wishes to leave Germany where he has suffered so much, and to free his relatives from the inconvenience of his presence. Employment is offered to him in France, at Bordeaux, and he disappears. Six months later he returns home sunburnt and in rags. He is questioned, but he does not reply. Enquiries are made and it is, with great difficulty, discovered that he had crossed France on foot under the August sun. His mind is gone, swallowed up in a torpor which is to last for forty years. He dies in 1843, a few months before the birth of Nietzsche. It might please a Platonist to think that the same genius passed from one body to the other. Surely the same German soul, romantic by nature, and classic in aspiration, broken at length by its desires, animated these two men, and predestined them to the same end. One seems to surprise across the tenor of their lives the blind labour of the race, which, pursuing its monotonous bent, sends into the world, from century to century, like children for like ordeals.
That year, at the approach of summer, Nietzsche suffered severely from his head and eyes. The malady was uncertain in its nature, but possibly had its origin in the nerves. His holidays were spoilt. But he arranged to be able to stay at Naumburg until the end of August, and the joys of a prolonged leisure compensated him for previous vexations.
He returned to Pforta in a wholesome frame of mind. He had not resolved his doubts but he had explored them, and could without wronging himself become once more a laborious student. He was careful not to interrupt his reading, which was immense. From month to month he sent punctually to his two friends at Naumburg, poems, pieces of dance and song music, essays in criticism and philosophy. But these occupations were not allowed to interrupt his work as a student. Under the direction of excellent masters, he studied the languages and the literatures of antiquity.
He would have been happy, had not the pressing questions of the future and of a profession begun to torment him.
"I am much preoccupied with the problem of my future," he wrote to his mother in May, 1862. "Many reasons, external and internal, make it appear to me troubled and uncertain. Doubtless I believe myself to be capable of success in whatever province I select. But strength fails me to put aside so many of the diverse objects which interest me. What shall I study? No idea of a decision presents itself to my mind, and yet with myself alone it lies to reflect and to make my choice. What is certain is that whatever I study I shall be eager to probe to its depths. But this fact only renders the choice more difficult, since the question is to discover the pursuit to which one can give one's whole self. And how often they deceive us, these hopes of ours! How quickly one is put on the wrong track by a momentary predilection, a family tradition, a desire! To choose one's profession is to make one in a game of lotto, in which there are many blanks, but only very few prizes! At this moment my position is uncomfortable. I have dispersed my interest over so many provinces that if I were to satisfy my tastes I would certainly become a very learned man, but only with great difficulty a professional animal. My task is to destroy many of my present tastes, that is clear, and, by the same process, to acquire new ones. But which are the unfortunates that I am to throw overboard? Precisely my dearest children, maybe!..."
His last holidays slipped by into the beginning of his last year. Nietzsche returned without vexation to the old school which he was soon to leave. The rules had grown lighter, and he had a room to himself, and certain liberties. He went out to dine on the invitation of this or that professor, and thus, even in the monastery, he had his first taste of the pleasures of the world. At the house of one of his tutors he met a charming girl; he saw her again, and, for the first time in his life, fell in love. For some days his dreams were all of the books which he wished to lend her, of the music which he wished to play with her. His emotion was delicious. But the girl left Pforta, and Nietzsche returned to his work. The Banquet of Plato, the tragedies of Æschylus, were his last diversions before he gave himself up to the ordinary round of tasks. Sometimes he sat down to the piano just before the supper hour; two comrades who were to remain his friends, Gersdorff and Paul Deussen, listening while he played them Beethoven or Schumann, or improvised.
Poetry is always by him. If he has the slightest leisure, if there is a delay of some hours in his work, the lyricist reappears. On Easter morning he leaves school, returns home, goes straight to his room, where he is alone, dreams for a moment; then finds himself assailed by a multitude of impressions. He writes with intense pleasure after his long privation. And is not the page, which we transcribe here, worthy of Zarathustra?
"Here I am on the evening of Easter Day, seated at my fire, enveloped in a dressing-gown. Outside a fine rain is falling. All about me is solitude. A sheet of white paper lies on my table; I look at it in a muse, rolling my pen between my fingers, embarrassed by the inextricable multitude of subjects, feelings, thoughts which press forward and ask to be written. Some of them clamour and make a great tumult: they are young and eager for life. Others gesture and struggle there also: they are old thoughts, well matured, well clarified; like elderly gentlemen they regard with displeasure the mêlée of young bloods. This struggle between an old world and a new it is that determines our mood; and the state of combat, the victory of these, the weakness of those, we call at any moment our state of mind, our Stimmung.... Often when I play the spy on my thoughts and feelings, and study them in religious silence, I am impressed as with the hum and ferment of savage factions, the air shudders and is torn across as if a thought or an eagle had shot up towards the sun.
"Combat is the food which gives strength to the soul. The soul has skill to pluck out of battle sweet and glorious fruits. Impelled by the desire for fresh nutriment, it destroys; it struggles fiercely—but how gentle it can be when it allures the adversary, gathers it close against itself, and wholly assimilates it.
"That impression, which at this moment makes all your pleasure or all your pain, will, it may be, slip off in an instant, being the mere drapery of an impression still more profound, will disappear before something older and higher. Thus our impressions grave themselves deeper and deeper on our souls, being ever unique, incomparable, unspeakably young, swift as the instant that brought them.
"At this moment I am thinking of certain people whom I have loved; their names, their faces pass before my mind. I do not mean that in fact their natures become continually more profound and more beautiful; but it is at least true that each of these reminiscences, when I recover it, leads me on to some acuter impression, for the mind cannot endure to return to a level which it has already passed; it has a need of constant expansion. I salute you, dear impressions, marvellous undulations of an agitated soul. You are as numerous as Nature, but more grandiose, for you increase and strive perpetually—the plant, on the contrary, gives out to-day the same perfume that it gave out on the day of creation. I no longer love now as I loved a few weeks ago, and I find myself in a different disposition at this moment from that in which I was when I took up this pen."
Nietzsche returned to Pforta to undergo his last examinations. He all but failed to pass; and, indeed, in mathematics he did not obtain the required number of marks. But the professors, overlooking this inadequacy, granted him his diploma. He left his old school, and left it with pain. His mind easily adjusted itself to the places where it lived, and clung with equal force to happy memories and to melancholy impressions.
The break-up of the school was a prescribed ceremony. The assembled students prayed together for the last time; then those who were about to leave presented their masters with a written testimony of gratitude. Friedrich Nietzsche's letter moves one by its pathetic and solemn accent. First he addresses himself to God: "To Him who has given me all, my first thanks. What offering should I bring Him, if not the warm gratitude of my heart, confident of His love? It is He who has permitted me to live this glorious hour of my life. May He, the All-Bountiful, continue to watch over me." Then he thanks the King, "through whose goodness I entered this school...; him and my country I hope one day to honour. Such is my resolve." Then he speaks to his venerated masters, to his dear comrades, "and particularly to you, my dear friends: what shall I say to you at the instant of parting? I understand how it is that the plant when torn from the soil which has nourished it can only take root slowly and with difficulty in a foreign soil. Shall I be able to disaccustom myself to you? Shall I be able to accustom myself to another environment? Adieu!"
These long effusions were not enough, and he wrote, for himself alone, certain lines in which they are repeated:
"So be it—it is the way of the world:
Let life deal with me as with so many others:
They set forth, their frail skiff is shattered,
And no man can tell us the spot where it sank.
Adieu, adieu! the ship's bell calls me,
And as I linger the shipmaster urges me on.
And now to confront bravely waves, storms, reefs.
Adieu, adieu!..."
[CHAPTER II]
YEARS OF YOUTH
In the middle of October, 1862, Nietzsche left Naumburg for the University of Bonn, accompanied by Paul Deussen, his comrade, and a cousin of the latter. The young people did not hurry. They made a halt on the banks of the Rhine. They were gay, a little irresponsible even, in their sudden enjoyment of complete liberty. Paul Deussen, to-day a professor at the University of Kiel, tells us of those days of exuberant laughter with all the satisfaction of a very good bourgeois who brightens up at the memory of his far-off pranks.
The three friends rode on horseback about the country-side. Nietzsche—perhaps he had appreciated too highly the beer supplied at the neighbouring inn—was less interested in the beauty of the landscape than in the long ears of his mount. He measured them carefully. "It's a donkey," he affirmed. "No," replied Deussen and the other friend, "it's a horse." Nietzsche measured again and maintained, with praiseworthy firmness: "It's a donkey." They came back at the fall of day. They shouted, perorated, and generally scandalised the little town. Nietzsche warbled love songs, and girls, drawn by the noise to their windows and half-hidden behind curtains, peeped out at the cavalcade. Finally an honest citizen, who had left his house for the express purpose, cried shame on the roisterers, and, not without threats, put them back on the road to their inn.
The three friends installed themselves at Bonn. The Universities enjoyed at that time an uncommon prestige. They alone had remained free, and maintained in a divided Germany a powerful life in a weakly body. They had their history, which was glorious, and their legends, which were more glorious still. Every one knew how the young scholars of Leipsic, of Berlin, of Jena, of Heidelberg, and of Bonn, kindled by the exhortations of their teachers, had armed themselves against Napoleon for the salvation of the German race; every one also knew that these valiant fellows had fought, and were still fighting, against despots and priests to lay the foundations of German liberty; and the nation loved these grave professors, these tumultuous youths who represented the Fatherland in its most noble aspect, the laborious Fatherland, armed for labour. There was not a small boy but dreamt of his student years as the finest time of his life; there was not a tender girl but dreamt of some pure and noble student; and among all the dreams of dreamy Germany there was none more alluring than that of the Universities. She was infinitely proud of those illustrious schools of knowledge, bravery, virtue, and joy. Their arrival at Bonn moved Nietzsche and his comrades very deeply. "I arrived at Bonn," says one of the numerous essays in which Nietzsche recounts his own life to himself, "with the proud sense of an inexhaustibly rich future before me." He was conscious of his power, and impatient to make the acquaintance of his contemporaries, with whom, and on whom, his thoughts were to work.
Most of the students at Bonn lived grouped together in associations. Nietzsche hesitated a little before following this custom. But from fear of too unsociable a withdrawal should he not impose upon himself some obligation of comradeship, he joined one of these Vereine. "It was only after ripe reflection that I took this step, which, given my character, seemed to me an almost necessary one," he wrote to his friend Gersdorff.
During the next few weeks he allowed himself to be absorbed by the course of his new life. No doubt he never touched either beer or tobacco. But learned discussions; boatings upon the river; hours of light-headedness in the riverside inns, and, at evening on the way home, improvised choruses—Nietzsche made the best of these simple pleasures. He even wished to fight a duel so that he might become a "finished" student, and, lacking an enemy, chose for his adversary an agreeable comrade. "I am new this year," said he to him, "and I want to fight a duel. I rather like you. Let us fight." "Willingly," said the other. Nietzsche received a rapier thrust.
It was impossible that such a life should content him for long. The mood of infantile gaiety soon passed away. At the beginning of December he withdrew a little from this life. Disquiet was again gaining on him. The festival of Christmas and that of the New Year, passed far from his own people, were causes of sadness. A letter to his mother lets us divine his emotion:
"I like anniversaries, the feast of St. Sylvester or birthdays. To them we owe those hours in which the soul, brought to a pause, discovers a fragment of its own existence. No doubt it is in our own power to experience such moments more frequently; but we allow ourselves too few. They favour the birth of decisive resolutions. At such moments it is my custom to take up again the manuscripts, the letters, of the year that has just gone by, and to write for myself alone the reflections which come to me. During an hour or two, one is, as it were, raised above time, drawn out of one's own existence. One acquires a view of the past that is brief and certain, one resolves with a more valiant and a firmer heart to strike forward on the road once more. And when good wishes and family benedictions fall like soft rain on the soul's intents—Ah! that is fine!"
Of the reflections written by the young student "for himself alone" we possess some traces. He reproaches himself for wasted hours, and decides upon a more austere and concentrated life. Nevertheless, when the time came for him to break with his companions, he hesitated. They were somewhat coarse, it is true, but yet young and brave, like himself. Should he keep in with them? A delicate fear troubled him; he might, as the result of long indulgence, accustom himself to their low way of living, and so come to feel it less acutely. "Habit is a powerful force," he wrote to his friend Gersdorff. "One has already lost much when one has lost one's instinctive distrust of the evil things which present themselves in daily life." He took a third course, a very difficult course, and decided that he would talk frankly to his friends, that he would try to exercise an influence on them, to ennoble their lives. Thus he would commence the apostolate which he dreamed of extending one day over the whole of Germany. He proposed therefore a reform of the rules of the association; he called for the suppression, or at least for a reduction, of those smoking and drinking parties which provoked his disgust.
The proposal met with no success. The preacher was silenced, and set aside. Nietzsche, prompt with sarcasm, avenged himself with words which did not win him any love. Then he knew the worst of solitudes, the solitude of the vanquished. He had not retired from the world; he had been asked to leave it. He was proud, and his stay at Bonn became a misery. He worked energetically and joylessly. He studied philology, which did not interest him. It was an exercise which he had taken up to discipline his mind, to correct his tendencies towards a vague mysticism and dispersion of thought. But it pleased him in no way, this minute analysis of Greek texts the sudden beauty of which he felt by instinct. Ritschl, his master in philology, dissuaded him from any other study. "If you wish to become a strong man," he said, "acquire a speciality." Nietzsche obeyed. He renounced the idea, which he had entertained, of making a deep study of theology. In December he had composed some melodies: now he decided that he would not, for a whole year, allow himself the enjoyment of so vain a pleasure; he wished to submit, and to break himself in to ennui. He was recompensed for his pains, and was able to write a work which Ritschl commended for its rigour and sagacity.
A poor pleasure! It was thought that Nietzsche needed. He listened to the talk of the students. Some repeated without any ardour of conviction the formulas of Hegel, of Fichte, of Schelling: those great systems had lost all their power to stimulate. Others, preferring the positive sciences, read the materialistic treatises of Vogt and Büchner. Nietzsche read these treatises, but did not re-read them. He was a poet and had need of lyricism, intuition, and mystery; he could not be contented with the clear and cold world of science. Those same young people, who called themselves materialists, also called themselves democrats; they vaunted the humanitarian philosophy of Feuerbach; but Nietzsche was again too much of a poet and, by education or by temperament, too much of an aristocrat to interest himself in the politics of the masses. He conceived beauty, virtue, force, heroism, as desirable ends, and he desired them for himself. But he had never desired a happy life, a smooth and comfortable life: therefore he could not interest himself in men's happiness, in the poor ideal of moderate joy and moderate suffering.
Little satisfied as he was by all the tendencies of his contemporaries, what joy could he experience? Repelled by a base politics, a nerveless metaphysics, a narrow science, whither could he direct his mind? Certainly he had his clear and well-marked preferences. He was certain of his tastes. He loved the Greek poets, he loved Bach, Beethoven, Byron. But what was the drift of his own thought?
He had no answer to the problems of life, and now in his twenty-first, as formerly in his seventeenth year, preferring silence to uncertain speech, he kept himself under a discipline of silence. In his writings, his letters, his conversation, he was always on his guard. His friend Deussen suggested that prayer has no real virtue, and only gives to the mind an illusory confidence. "That is one of the asininities of Feuerbach," Nietzsche replied tartly. The same Deussen was speaking on another occasion of the Life of Jesus which Strauss had just published in a new edition, and expressing approval of the sense of the book. Nietzsche refused to pronounce upon the subject. "The question is important," said he. "If you sacrifice Jesus, you must also sacrifice God." These words would seem to show that Nietzsche was still attached to Christianity. A letter addressed to his sister removes this impression. The young girl, who had remained a believer, wrote to him: "One must always seek truth at the most painful side of things. Now one does not believe in the Christian mysteries without difficulty. Therefore the Christian mysteries are true." She at once received from her brother a reply which betrays, by the harshness of its language, the unhappy condition of his soul.
"Do you think that it is really so difficult to receive and accept all the beliefs in which we have been brought up, which little by little have struck deep roots into our lives, which are held as true by all our own kith and kin, and a vast multitude of other excellent people, and which, whether they be true or not, do assuredly console and elevate humanity? Do you think that such acceptance is more difficult than a struggle against the whole mass of one's habits, waged in doubt and loneliness, and darkened by every kind of spiritual depression, nay more, by remorse; a struggle which leaves a man often in despair, but always loyal to his eternal quest, the discovery of the new paths that lead to the True, the Beautiful, and the Good?
"What will be the end of it all? Shall we recover those ideas of God, the world, and redemption which are familiar to us? To the genuine seeker must not the result of his labours appear as something wholly indifferent? What is it we are seeking? Rest and happiness? No, nothing but Truth, however evil and terrible it may be.
"... So are the ways of men marked out; if you desire peace of soul and happiness, believe; if you would be a disciple of Truth, enquire ..."
Nietzsche tried to endure this painful life. He walked in the country. Alone in his room he studied the history of art and the life of Beethoven. They were vain efforts; he could not forget the people of Bonn. Twice he went to listen to the musical festivals at Cologne. But each return added to his malaise. In the end he left the town.
"I left Bonn like a fugitive. At midnight I was on the quay of the Rhine accompanied by my friend M. I was waiting for the steamship which comes from Cologne, and I did not experience the slightest impression of pain at the moment of leaving a country-side so flourishing, a place so beautiful, and a band of young comrades. On the contrary, I was actually flying from them. I do not wish to begin again to judge them unjustly, as I have often done. But my nature could find no satisfaction among them. I was still too timidly wrapt up in myself, and I had not the strength to stick to my rôle amid so many influences which were exercising themselves on me. Everything obtruded on me, and I could not succeed in dominating my surroundings.... I felt in an oppressive manner that I had done nothing for science, and little for life, and that I had only clogged myself with faults. The steamer came, and took me off. I stayed on the bridge in the damp wet night, and as I watched the little lights which marked the river bank at Bonn slowly disappear, everything conspired to give me the impression of flight."
He went to spend a fortnight at Berlin with a comrade whose father was a rich bourgeois, ready with his censure and his regrets. "Prussia is lost," this old man affirmed; "the Liberals and the Jews have destroyed everything with their babblings ... they have destroyed tradition, confidence, thought itself." Young Nietzsche welcomed these bitter words. He judged Germany from the students of Bonn and saw his own sick discomfort everywhere. At the concert he suffered from being in community of impressions with a low public. In the cafés whither his hosts took him he would neither drink nor smoke, nor did he address a word to the people who were introduced to him.
He was determined not to see Bonn again, and decided to go to Leipsic to complete his studies. He arrived in the unknown town and at once inscribed himself on the roll of the University. The day was a festival. A Rector harangued the students and told them that on that same date a hundred years before Goethe had come to inscribe himself among their elders. "Genius has its own ways," the prudent official was quick to add, "and it is dangerous to follow them. Goethe was not a good student; do not take him for model during your years of study." "Hou, hou!" roared the laughing young men; and Friedrich Nietzsche, lost in the crowd, was glad at the chance that had brought him thither at the moment of such an anniversary.
He resumed work, burnt some verses which had remained among his papers, and disciplined himself by studying philology according to the most rigorous methods. Alas, weariness at once laid hold of him again. He feared a year similar to that at Bonn, and one long complaint filled his letters and notebooks. Soon there was an end, and this is the event which delivered his soul. On a bookstall he picked up and turned over the pages of a work by an author then unknown to him: it was Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea. The vigour of a phrase, the precision and flair of a word struck him. "I do not know," he wrote, "what demon whispered to me, 'Go home and take that book with you.' Hardly had I entered my room when I opened the treasure which I had thus acquired, and began to submit myself to the influence of that energetic and sombre genius."
The introduction to the book is grandiose: it consists of the three prefaces which the neglected author wrote at long intervals, for each of the three editions of 1818, 1844, and 1859. They are haughty and bitter, but in no way unquiet; rich in profound thoughts, and in the sharpest sarcasm; the lyricism of a Goethe shows itself in union with the cutting realism of a Bismarck. They are beautiful with that classic and measured beauty which is rare in German literature. Friedrich Nietzsche was conquered by their loftiness, their artistic feeling, their entire liberty. "I think," wrote Schopenhauer, "that the truth which a man has discovered, or the light which he has projected on some obscure point, may, one day, strike another thinking being, may move, rejoice, and console him; and it is to this man one speaks, as other spirits like to ours have spoken to us and consoled us in this desert of life." Nietzsche was moved: it seemed to him that a strayed genius was addressing him alone.
The world which Schopenhauer describes is formidable. No Providence guides it, no God inhabits it, inflexible laws draw it in chains through time and space; but its eternal essence is indifferent to laws, a stranger to reason: it is that blind Will which urges us into life. All the phenomena of the universe are rays from that Will, just as all the days of the year are rays from a single sun. That Will is invariable, it is infinite; divided, compressed in space. "It nourishes itself upon itself, since outside of it there is nothing, and since it is a famishing Will." Therefore, it tortures itself and suffers. Life is a desire, desire is an unending torment. The good souls of the nineteenth century believe in the dignity of man, in Progress. They are the dupes of a superstition. The Will ignores men, the "last comers on the earth who live on an average thirty years." Progress is a stupid invention of the philosophers, under the inspiration of the crowd: Will, an offence to reason, has neither origin nor end; it is absurd, and the universe which it animates is without sense....
Friedrich Nietzsche read greedily the two thousand pages of this metaphysical pamphlet, which had struck at all the naïve beliefs of the nineteenth century with terrible force, and had struck from the head of puerile humanity all its crown of dreams. He experienced a strange and almost startling emotion. Schopenhauer condemns life, but so vehement an energy is in him that in his accusing work it is yet life that one finds and admires. For fourteen days Nietzsche scarcely slept; he went to bed at two o'clock, rose at six, spent his days between his book and the piano, meditated, and, in the intervals of his meditations, composed a Kyrie. His soul was full to the brim: it had found its truth. That truth was hard, but what matter? For a long time his instinct had warned and prepared him for this. "What do we seek?" he had written to his sister. "Is it repose or happiness? No, truth alone, however terrible and evil it may be." He recognised the sombre universe of Schopenhauer. He had had a presentiment of it in the reveries of his boyhood, in his readings of Æschylus, of Byron, and of Goethe; he had caught a glimpse of it across the symbolism of Christianity. What was this evil Will, the slave of its desires, but under another name, that fallen nature pictured by the Apostle, yet more tragic, now that it was deprived of the divine ray which a Redeemer had left to it? The young man, in alarm at his inexperience and his temerity, had recoiled before so formidable a vision. Now he dared to look it in the face. He no longer feared, for he was no longer alone. By trusting in Schopenhauer's wisdom he satisfied at last one of the profoundest of his desires—he had a master. He struck even a graver note in giving to Schopenhauer the supreme name in which his orphaned childhood had enshrined a mystery of strength and tenderness—he called him his father. He was exalted; then, suddenly swept by a desolating regret. Six years earlier Schopenhauer still lived; he might have approached him, listened to him, told him of his veneration. Destiny had separated them! Intense joy mixed with intense sorrow overwhelmed him; and he was shattered by a nervous excitement. He grew alarmed, and it needed an energetic effort on his part to bring him back to human life, to the work of the day, to the sleep of the night.
Young people experience a need to admire, it is a form of love. When they admire, when they love, all the servitudes of life become easy to bear. It was as Schopenhauer's disciple that Friedrich Nietzsche knew his first happiness. Philology caused him less weariness. Some pupils of Ritschl, his comrades, founded a society of studies. He joined with them, and, on the 18th of January, 1866, some weeks after his great reading of Schopenhauer, he expounded to them the result of his researches on the manuscripts and the variæ lectiones of Theognis. He spoke with vigour and freedom, and was applauded. Nietzsche liked success and tasted it with the simple vanity which he always avowed. He was happy. When he brought his memoir to Ritschl and was congratulated very warmly upon it, he was happier yet. He wished to become, and in fact did become, his master's favourite pupil.
No doubt he had not ceased to consider philology as an inferior duty, as a mere intellectual exercise and means of livelihood, and his soul was hardly satisfied; but what vast soul is ever satisfied? Often, after a day of parching labour, he was melancholy, but what young and ardent soul is ignorant of melancholy? At least his sadness had ceased to be mournful, and a fragment of a letter like the following, which opens with a complaint and ends in enthusiastic emotion, suggests an excessive plenitude rather than pain.
"Three things are my consolations," he wrote in April, 1866. "Rare consolations! My Schopenhauer, the music of Schumann, and lastly solitary walks. Yesterday a heavy storm gathered in the sky; I hastened towards a neighbouring hill (it is called Leusch, can you explain the word to me?), I climbed it; at the summit I found a hut and a man, who, watched by his children, was cutting the throats of two lambs. The storm broke in all its power, discharging thunder and hail, and I felt inexpressibly well, full of strength and élan, and I realised with a wonderful clearness that to understand Nature one must, as I had just done, go to her to be saved, far from all worries and all our heavy constraints. What mattered to me, then, man and his troubled Will! What mattered to me then the Eternal Thou Shalt and Thou Shalt Not! How different are lightning, storm, and hail, free powers without ethics! How happy they are, how strong they are, those pure wills which the mind has not troubled!"
At the beginning of the summer of 1866 Nietzsche was spending all his days in the library of Leipsic, engaged in deciphering difficult Byzantine manuscripts. Suddenly he allowed his attention to be distracted by a spectacle of a grandiose kind; Prussia, discreetly active for fifty years, reappeared in a warlike rôle. Frederick the Great's kingdom once more found a chief: Bismarck, the passionate, irascible, and crafty aristocrat who wished to realise at last the dream of all Germans and to found an empire above all the little States. He quarrelled with Austria, whom Moltke humiliated after twenty days of fighting. "I am finishing my Theognidea for the Rheinisches Museum during the week of Sadowa," we read in a memorandum made by Nietzsche. He did not stop his work, but political preoccupations entered into his thoughts. He felt the pride of national victory; he recognised himself as a Prussian patriot, and a little astonishment was mixed with his pleasure: "For me this is a wholly new and rare enjoyment," he writes. Then he reflected on this victory, and discerned its consequences, which he enunciated with lucidity.
"We hold the cards; but as long as Paris remains the centre of Europe, things will remain in the old condition. It is inevitable that we should make an effort to upset this equilibrium, or at least to try to upset it. If we fail, then let us hope to fall, each of us, on a field of battle, struck by some French shell."
He is not troubled by this view of the future, which satisfies his taste for the sombre and the pathetic. On the contrary, he grows animated and is ready to admire.
"At certain moments," he writes, "I make an effort to free my opinions from the turn which my momentary passion and my natural sympathies for Prussia give them, and then what I see is this: an action conducted with grandeur by a State, by a chief; an action carved out of the true substance of which history is really made; assuredly by no means moral; but, for him who contemplates it, sufficiently edifying and beautiful."
Was it not a similar sentiment which he had experienced on that hill with the queer name, Leusch, on a stormy day, by the side of that peasant who was cutting the throats of two lambs with such calm simplicity? "Free powers, without ethics! How happy they are, how strong, those pure Wills which the mind has not troubled!"
The second year which he passed at Leipsic was perhaps the happiest of his life. He enjoyed to the full that intellectual security which his adhesion to his master Schopenhauer assured him. "You ask me for a vindication of Schopenhauer," he wrote to his friend Deussen; "I will simply say this to you: I look life in the face, with courage and liberty, since my feet have found firm soil. The waters of trouble, to express myself in images, do not sweep me out of my road, because they come no higher than my head; I am at home in those obscure regions."
It was a year of composure and of comradeship. He did not worry himself about public affairs. Prussia, on the morrow of her victory, fell back to the low level of everyday life. The babblings of the tribune and the press succeeded the action of great men, and Nietzsche turned away from it all. "What a multitude of mediocre brains are occupied with things of real importance and real effect!" he writes. "It is an alarming thought." Perhaps he regretted having allowed himself to be seduced by a dramatic incident. Nevertheless he knew—Schopenhauer had taught him—that history and politics are illusory games. He had not forgotten; he wrote in order to affirm his thought, and to define the mediocre meaning and value of human agitations.
"What is history but the endless struggle for existence of innumerable and diverse interests? The great 'ideas' in which many people believe that they find the directing forces of this combat are but reflections which pass across the surface of the swelling sea. They have no action on the sea; but it often happens that they embellish the waves and thus deceive him who contemplates them. It matters little whether this light emanates from a moon, a sun, or a lighthouse; the waves will be a little more or a little less lit up—that is all."
His enthusiasm had no other object but art and thought, the study of the genius of antiquity. He conceived a passion for his master Ritschl: "That man is my scientific conscience," said he. He took part in the friendly soirées of the Verein, spoke, and discussed. He planned more undertakings than he had time for, and then proposed them to his friends. He elected to study the sources of Diogenes Laertius—that compiler who has preserved for us such precious information with regard to the philosophers of Greece. He dreamed of composing a memoir which should be sagacious and rigorous, but also beautiful: "All important work," he wrote to Deussen, "you must have felt it yourself, exercises a moral influence. The effort to concentrate a given material, and to find a harmonious form for it, I compare to a stone thrown into our inner life: the first circle is narrow, but it multiplies itself, and other more ample circles disengage themselves from it."
In April Nietzsche collected and systematised his notes, wholly preoccupied with this concern for beauty. He did not wish to write in the manner of scholars who misunderstand the savour of words, the equilibrium of phrases. He wished to write, in the difficult and classical sense of the word.
"The scales fall from my eyes," he wrote; "I have lived too long in a state of innocence as regards style. The categorical imperative, 'Thou shalt write, it is necessary that thou writest,' has awakened me. I have tried to write well It is a thing which I had forgotten since leaving Pforta, and all at once my pen lost its shape between my fingers. I was impotent, out of temper. The principles of style enunciated by Lessing, Lichtenberger, Schopenhauer were scolding in my ears. At least I remembered, and it was my consolation, that these three authorities agreed in saying that it is difficult to write well, that no man naturally writes well, and that one must, in order to acquire a style, work strenuously, hew blocks of hard wood.... Above all, I wish to imprison in my style some joyous spirits; I shall apply myself to it as I apply myself upon the keyboard, and I hope to play at length, not only the pieces that I have learnt, but free fantasies, free as far as possible, though always logical and beautiful."
A sentimental joy completed his happiness: he found a friend. Nietzsche had long been faithful to the comrades of his early childhood: one was dead, and the other, their lives and occupations having been separate for ten years, was becoming a stranger to him. At Pforta he had been fond of the studious Deussen, the faithful Gersdorff: the one was studying at Tübingen, the other at Berlin. He wrote to them with much zeal, but an exchange of letters could not satisfy that need for friendship which was an instinct of his soul. Finally, he made the acquaintance of Erwin Rohde, a vigorous and perspicacious spirit; he liked him at once; he admired him, for he was incapable of loving without admiring; he adorned him with the sublime qualities with which his soul overflowed. Every evening, after laborious hours, the young men came together. They walked or rode, talking incessantly. "I experience for the first time," wrote Nietzsche, "the pleasure of a friendship founded on a moral and philosophic groundwork. Ordinarily, we dispute strongly, for we are in disagreement on a multitude of points. But it suffices for our conversation to take a more profound turn; and then at once our dissonant thoughts are silenced, and nothing resounds between us but a peaceable and total accord."
They had promised each other that they would spend their first holiday weeks together. At the beginning of August, being both free, they left Leipsic and sought isolation in walks in a tramp on the frontiers of Bohemia. It is a region of wooded heights, which recalls, with less grandeur, the Vosges. Nietzsche and Rohde led the life of wandering philosophers. Their luggage was light, they had no books, they walked from inn to inn, and, throughout the days unspoilt by a care, they talked about Schopenhauer, about Beethoven, about Germany, about Greece. They judged and condemned, with youthful promptitude; they were never weary of defaming their science. "Oh childishness of erudition!" they said. "It was a poet, it was Goethe, who discovered the genius of Greece. He it was who held it up to the Germans, absorbed always on the confines of a dream, as an example of rich and clear beauty, a model of perfect form. The professors followed him. They have explained the ancient world, and, under their myopic eyes, that wonderful work of art has become the object of a science. What is there that they have not studied? In Tacitus, the ablative case, the evolution of the gerund in the Latin authors of Africa; they have analysed to the last detail the language of the Iliad, determined in what respect it is connected with this other and that other Aryan language. What does it all signify? The beauty of the Iliad is unique; it was felt by Goethe, and they ignore it. We shall stop this game; that will be our task. We shall go back to the tradition of Goethe; we shall not dissect the Greek genius, we shall revitalise it, and teach men to feel it. For long enough the scholars have carried out their minute enquiries. It is time to make an end. The work of our generation shall be definitive; our generation shall enter into possession of the grand legacy transmitted by the past. And science, too, must serve progress."
After a month of conversation, the young men left the forest and went to Meiningen, a little town in which the musicians of the Pessimist school were giving a series of concerts. A letter of Friedrich Nietzsche's has preserved a chronicle of the performance. "The Abbé Liszt presided," he wrote. "They played a symphonic poem by Hans von Bülow, Nirvana, an explanation of which was given on the programme in maxims from Schopenhauer. But the music was awful. Liszt, on the contrary, succeeded remarkably in finding the character of the Indian Nirvana in some of his religious compositions; for example, in his Beatitudes." Nietzsche and Rohde separated on the morrow of these festivals, and returned to their families.
Alone at Naumburg, Nietzsche took up work of various kinds and read widely. He studied the works of the young German philosophers, Hartmann, Dühring, Lange, Bahnsen; he admired them all, with the indulgence of a brother-in-arms, and dreamt of making their acquaintance and collaborating with them in a review which they should found together. He projected an essay, perhaps a sort of manifesto upon the man whom he wished to give to his contemporaries as a master, Schopenhauer. "Of all the philosophers," he writes, "he is the truest." No false sensibility shackles his mind. He is brave, it is the first quality of a chief. Friedrich Nietzsche notes rapidly: "Ours is the age of Schopenhauer: a sane pessimism founded upon the ideal; the seriousness of manly strength, the taste for what is simple and sane. Schopenhauer is the philosopher of a revived classicism, of a Germanic Hellenism...."
He was working ardently, and then, suddenly, his life was turned upside down. He had been exempted from military service on account of his very short sight. But the Prussian army in 1867 had great need of men; and he was enrolled in a regiment of artillery, in barracks at Naumburg.
Nietzsche made the best of this vexation. It was always a maxim of his that a man should know how to utilise the chances of his life, extracting from them, as an artist does, the elements of a richer destiny. Therefore, since he had to be a soldier, he resolved that he would learn his new trade. The military obligation had, in this time of war, a solemnity which it lacks to-day. Nietzsche thought it a good and healthy thing that he should shut his dictionaries and get on horseback; that he should become an artilleryman and a good artilleryman, a sort of ascetic in the service of his fatherland, etwas ασκησις zu treiben, he wrote in his German, mottled with Greek.
"This life is full of inconvenience," he wrote again, "but, tasted as one would an entremets, it impresses me as altogether profitable. It is a constant appeal to the energy of man which has a value above all as an antidote against that paralysing scepticism the effects of which we have observed together. In the barracks one learns to know one's nature, to know what it has to give among strange men, the greater part of whom are very rough.... Hitherto it has appeared to me that all have felt kindly towards me, captain and privates alike; moreover, everything that I must do, I do it with zeal and interest. Has one not reason to be proud, if one be noted, among thirty recruits, as the best rider? In truth, that is worth more than a philological diploma."
Whereupon he cites in full the fine Latin and Ciceronian testimonial written by old Ritschl in praise of his memoir, De fontibus Laertii Diogenii. He is happy in his success and does not conceal his pleasure at it. The fact amuses him. "Thus are we made," he writes; "we know what such praise is worth, and, in spite of everything, an agreeable chuckle puts a grimace on our countenance."
This valiant mood lasted only a short time. Nietzsche was soon to avow that an artilleryman on horseback is a very unhappy animal when he has literary tastes, and reflected in the mess-room on the problems of Democritus.
He deplored his slavery, and was delivered from it by an accident. He fell from his horse and injured his side. He suffered, but he was able to study and meditate at leisure, which was what he liked in life. However, when the exquisite May days arrived and he had been laid up for a long month, he grew impatient and sighed for the hours of exercise. "I who used to ride the most difficult mounts!" he wrote to Gersdorff. To distract himself he undertook a short work on a poem of Simonides, The Complaint of Danaë. He corrected the doubtful words in the text and wrote to Ritschl about a new study: "Since my schooldays," he wrote, "this beautiful song of Danaë has remained in my memory as an unforgettable melody: in this time of May can one do better than become a trifle lyrical oneself? provided that on this occasion at least you do not find in my essay too 'lyrical' a conjecture."
Danaë occupied him, and the complaints of the goddess, abandoned with her child to the caprice of malevolent billows, mingled in his letters with his own complaints. For he was suffering; his wound remained open, and a splinter of a bone appeared one day with the discharge of matter. "I had a queer impression at the sight," he wrote, "and little by little it became clear to me that my plans for the examination, for a voyage to Paris, might very easily be thwarted. The frailty of our being never appears so plainly ad oculos as at the moment when one has just seen a little piece of one's own skeleton."
The voyage to Paris, here mentioned, was the last conceived, and the dearest of his dreams. He caressed the idea of it, and, as he was never able to keep a joy to himself alone, he must write to Gersdorff and then to Rohde, and to two other comrades, Kleimpaul and Romundt: "After the last year of our studies," he said to them, "let us go to Paris together and spend a winter there: let us forget our learning: let us dispedantise ourselves (dépédantisons-nous); let us make the acquaintance of the divin cancan, the green absinthe: we will drink of it; let us go to Paris and live en camarades, and, marching the boulevards, let us represent Germanism and Schopenhauer down there; we shall not be altogether idle: from time to time we will send a little copy to the newspapers, casting a few Parisian anecdotes athwart the world; after a year and a half, after two years [he never ceased to prolong the imaginary period], we will come back to pass our examination." Rohde having promised his company, Nietzsche bore less impatiently the weariness of a convalescence which lasted until the summer.
At last he was cured. In the first days of October, feeling a lively need for the pleasures which Naumburg had not to offer—music, society, conversation, the theatre—he reinstalled himself at Leipsic. Both masters and comrades gave him a warm welcome. His re-entry was happy. He had scarcely completed his twenty-third year and a glorious dawn already preceded him. An important review in Berlin asked him for some historical studies, and he gave them. In Leipsic itself he was offered the editorship of a musical review: this he refused, although importuned. "Nego ac pernego," wrote he to Rohde, now in residence in another University city.
He interested himself in everything, except politics. The din and confusion of men in public meeting assembled was insupportable to him. "Decidedly," said he, "I am not a ζῶον πολιτικον." And he wrote to his friend Gersdorff, who had been giving him some information about Parliamentary intrigues in Berlin:
"The course of events astonishes me; but I cannot well understand them, nor take them in, unless I draw out of the crowd and consider apart the activity of a determined man. Bismarck gives me immense satisfaction. I read his speeches as though I were drinking a strong wine; I hold back my tongue that it may not swallow too quickly and that my enjoyment may last. The machinations of his adversaries, as you relate them to me, I conceive without difficulty; for it is a necessity that everything that is small, narrow, sectarian and limited should rebel against such natures and wage an eternal war upon them."
Then to so many satisfactions, new and old, was added the greatest of joys: the discovery of a new genius, Richard Wagner. The whole of Germany was making the same discovery about this time. Already she knew and admired this tumultuous man, poet, composer, publicist, philosopher; a revolutionary at Dresden, a "damned" author at Paris, a favourite at the Court of Munich; she had discussed his works and laughed over his debts and his scarlet robes. It was by no means easy to pass a clear judgment on this life which was a mixture of faith and insincerity, of meanness and greatness; on this thought which was sometimes so strong and often so wordy. What kind of man was Richard Wagner? An uneasy spirit? a genius? One scarcely knew, and Nietzsche had remained for a long time in a state of indecision. Tristan and Isolde moved him infinitely; other works disconcerted him. "I have just read the Valkyrie," he wrote to Gersdorff, in October, 1866, "and I find myself impressed so confusedly that I can reach no judgment. Its great beauties and virtutes are counterbalanced by so many defects and deformities equally great; 0 + a + (-a) gives 0, all calculations made." "Wagner is an insoluble problem," he said on another occasion. The musician whom he then preferred was Schumann.
Wagner had the art of imposing his glory on the world. In July, 1868, he produced at Munich the Meistersinger, that noble and familiar poem in which the German people, heroes of the action, filled the stage with their arguments, their sports, their labours, their loves, and themselves glorified their own art, music. Germany was then experiencing the proud desire of greatness. She had the confidence and the élan which dare recognise the genius of an artist. Wagner was acclaimed; he passed during the last months of 1868 that invisible border-line above which a man is transfigured and exalted, above glory itself, into a light of immortality.
Friedrich Nietzsche heard the Meistersinger. He was touched by its marvellous beauty and his critical fancies vanished. "To be just towards such a man," he wrote to Rohde, "one must have a little enthusiasm.... I try in vain to listen to his music in a cold and reserved frame of mind; every nerve vibrates in me...." This miraculous art had taken hold of him; he wished that his friends should share his new passion; he confided his Wagnerian impressions to them: "Last night at the concert," he wrote, "the overture to the Meistersinger caused me so lasting a thrill that it was long since I had felt anything like it." Wagner's sister, Madame Brockhaus, was living in Leipsic. She was a woman out of the ordinary; and her friends affirmed that they recognised in her a little of the genius of her brother. Nietzsche wanted to approach her. This modest desire was soon satisfied.
"The other evening," he writes to Rohde, "on returning home I found a letter addressed to me, a very short note: 'If you would care to meet Richard Wagner come to the Café zum Theater at a quarter to four.—W. ... SCH.' The news, if you will forgive me, positively turned my head, and I found myself as if tossed about by a whirlwind. It goes without saying that I went out at once to seek the excellent Windisch, who was able to give me some further information. He told me that Wagner was at Leipsic, at his sister's, in the strictest incognito; that the Press knew nothing about his visit, and that all the servants in the Brockhaus household were as mute as liveried gravediggers. Madame Brockhaus, Wagner's sister, had presented to him only one visitor, Madame Ritschl, whose judgment and penetration of mind you know, thus allowing herself the pleasure of being proud of her friend before her brother and proud of her brother before her friend, the happy creature! While Madame Ritschl was in the room Wagner played the Lied from the Meistersinger, which you know well; and the excellent lady informed him that the music was already familiar to her, mea opera. Thereupon pleasure and surprise on the part of Wagner: he expresses a keen desire to meet me incognito. They decide to invite me for Friday evening. Windisch explains that that day is impossible to me on account of my duties, my work, my engagements: and Sunday afternoon is suggested. We went to the house, Windisch and I, and found the professor's family there, but not Richard: he had gone out with his vast skull hidden under some prodigious headdress. I was presented to this very distinguished family, and received a most cordial invitation for Sunday evening, which I accepted.
"I spent the next few days, I assure you, in a highly romantic mood: and you must admit that this début, this unapproachable hero, have something about them bordering on the world of legend.
"With such an important function before me I decide to dress in my best. It so chanced that my tailor had promised to deliver me on Sunday a black coat: everything promised well. Sunday was a frightful day of snow and rain. One shuddered at the idea of leaving the house. So I was far from displeased to receive a call during the afternoon from R——, who babbled about the Eleatics and the nature of God in their philosophy—because as candidandus he is going to take the thesis prescribed by Abrens, The Development of the Idea of God down to Aristotle, while Romundt proposes to solve the problem Of the Will, and thereby to win the University prize. The evening draws on, the tailor fails to arrive and Romundt departs. I go with him as far as my tailor's, and entering the shop, I find his slaves very busy on my coat: they promise that it will be delivered in three hours. I leave, more content with the course of things; on my way home I pass Kintschy, read the Kladderadatsch, and find with satisfaction a newspaper paragraph to the effect that Wagner is in Switzerland, but that a beautiful house is being built for him at Munich. As for me, I know that I am about to see him, and that a letter arrived for him yesterday from the little King, bearing the address: To the great German composer, Richard Wagner.
"I return home; no tailor. I read very comfortably a dissertation on the Eudocia, a little distracted from time to time by a troublesome though distant noise. At last I hear the sound of knocking at the old iron grille, which is closed ..."
It was the tailor; Nietzsche tried on the suit, which fitted him well; he thanked the journeyman, who, however, stayed on, and asked to be paid. Nietzsche, being short of money, was of another opinion; the journeyman repeated his demand, Nietzsche reiterated his refusal; the journeyman would not yield, went off with the suit, and Nietzsche, left abashed in his room, considered with displeasure a black frock-coat, greatly doubting whether it would "do for Richard." Finally he put it on again:
"Outside the rain is falling in torrents. A quarter past eight! At half past Windisch is to meet me at the Café zum Theater. I precipitate myself into the dark and rainy night, I too a poor man, all in black, without a dress coat, but in the most romantic of humours. Fortune favours me; there is something mysterious and unusual in the very aspect of the streets on this night of snow.
"We enter the very comfortable parlour of the Brockhaus's; there is no one there but the closest relations of the family, and we two. I am introduced to Richard, to whom I express my veneration in a few words; he asks me very minutely how I became a faithful disciple of his music, bursts out in invectives against all the productions of his work, those of Munich, which are admirable, alone excepted; and gibes of the orchestra conductors who counsel paternally: 'Now, if you please, a little passion, gentlemen, a little more passion, my friends!' He imitates the accent of Leipsic very well.
"How I would like to give you an idea of the pleasures of the evening, of our enjoyments, which have been so lively, so peculiar, were it not that even to-day I have not yet recovered my old equilibrium, and cannot do better than tell you as I chatter along a 'fairy tale.' Afterwards, before dinner, Wagner played all the principal passages from the Meistersinger; he himself imitated all the voices: I can leave you to imagine that much was lost. As a talker he is incredibly swift and animated, and his abundance and humour are enough to convulse with gaiety a circle of intimates such as we were. Between whiles I had a long conversation with him about Schopenhauer. Ah, you wall understand what a joy it was for me to hear him speak with an indescribable warmth, explaining what he owes to our Schopenhauer, and telling me that Schopenhauer, alone among the philosophers, understood the essence of music. Then he wanted to know what is the present attitude of the philosophers with regard to Schopenhauer; he laughed very heartily at the Congress of Philosophers at Prague, and spoke of philosophical domesticity. Afterwards he read us a fragment of his Memoirs, which he is now writing, a scene from his student-life at Leipsic, overwhelmingly funny, of which I cannot think even now without laughing. His mind is amazingly supple and witty.
"At last, as we were preparing to leave, Windisch and I, he gave me a very warm handshake, and invited me, in the most friendly fashion, to pay him a visit, to talk of music and philosophy. He also entrusted me with the mission of making his music known to his sister and his parents: a mission which I shall discharge with enthusiasm. I will write you of the evening at greater length when I am able to review it from a little further off, and more objectively. To-day, a cordial greeting and, for your health, my best wishes."
That day of calm appreciation, which Nietzsche was waiting for, did not come. He had come in contact with a godlike man. He had felt the shock of genius, and his soul remained shaken by it. He studied the theoretical writings of Wagner, which he had hitherto neglected, and meditated seriously on the idea of the unique work of art which was to be a synthesis of the scattered beauties of poetry, the plastic arts, and harmony. He saw the German spirit renovated through the Wagnerian ideal, and his swift mind went off in that direction.
Ritschl said to him one day: "I am going to surprise you. Would you like to be appointed a Professor in the University of Basle?" Nietzsche's surprise was, in fact, extreme. He was in his twenty-fourth year, and had not obtained his final degrees. The astonishing proposition had to be repeated to him Ritschl explained that he had received a letter from Basle; he was asked what sort of man was Herr Friedrich Nietzsche, author of the fine essays published in the Rheinisches Museum; could he be entrusted with a Chair of Philology? Ritschl had answered that Herr Friedrich Nietzsche was a young man who had ability enough to do anything he chose to do. He had even dared to write that Herr Nietzsche had genius. The matter, though suspended for the moment, had already gone pretty far.
Nietzsche listened to the news with infinite anxiety. It made him proud and yet left him broken-hearted. The whole year of liberty which he had thought to be still before him suddenly vanished, and with it his projects of study, of vast reading, of travel. He was losing a happy life swollen with dreams. How could he reject so flattering an offer? He had, it appears, contrary to all good sense, a certain hesitation against which Ritschl had to fight. The old savant felt a real tenderness for this singular pupil of his, this sagacious philologist, metaphysician and poet; he loved him and believed in him. But he had one anxiety: he feared lest Nietzsche, under the incessant solicitation of instincts almost too numerous and too fine, should disperse his energy on too many objects and waste his gifts. For four years he had been iterating in his ears the same counsel: Restrict yourself in order to be strong; and he now repeated it in pressing terms. Nietzsche understood, and gave way. He wrote at once to Erwin Rohde: "As to our Parisian voyage, think of it no longer; it is certain that I am to be appointed to this Professorship at Basle; I who wished to study Chemistry! Henceforward I must learn how to renounce. Down there how much alone I shall be—without a friend whose thought resounds to mine like beautiful thirds, minor or major!"
He obtained his final diploma without examination, in consideration of his past performances and of the unique circumstance. The professors of Leipsic did not like the notion of examining their colleague of Basle.
Friedrich Nietzsche remained some weeks at Naumburg with his own people. The family were full of joy and pride: so young and a University professor! "What great matter is it?" retorted Nietzsche impatiently; "there is an usher the more in the world, that is all!" On April 13th he writes to his friend Gersdorff:
"Here I am at the last term, the last evening that I shall spend beside my hearth; to-morrow morning I strike out into the great world; I enter a profession which is new to me, in an atmosphere heavy and oppressive with duties and obligations. Once more I must say adieu: the golden time in which one's activities are free and unfettered; in which every instant is sovereign; in which art and the world are spread out before our eyes as a pure spectacle in which we hardly participate—that time is past beyond recall. Now begins the reign of the harsh goddess of daily duty. Bemooster Bursche zieh? ich aus. ... You know that poignant student-song. Yes, yes! now comes my turn to be a philistine!
"One day or another, here or there, the saying always comes true. Offices and dignities are not to be accepted with impunity. The whole thing is to know whether the chains which you are forced to carry are of iron or of thread. And I still have courage enough to break some link on occasion, and to risk some plunge or other into the perilous life. Of the compulsory gibbosity of the professor I do not as yet discern in myself any trace. To become a philistine, a man of the crowd, ἄνθρωπος ἄμουσος—Zeus and the Muses preserve me from such a fate! Moreover, I find it hard to see how I could contrive to become what I am not. I am more afraid of another kind of philistinism, the professional species. It is only too natural that a daily task, an incessant concentration on certain facts and certain problems, should hang like a weight on the free sensibility of the mind, and strike at the roots of the philosophic sense. But I imagine that I can confront this peril more calmly than most philologists: philosophical seriousness is too deeply rooted in me: the true and essential problems of life and thought have been too clearly revealed to me by the great mystagogue Schopenhauer to permit me to be ever guilty of shameful treachery to the 'Idea.' To vivify my science with this new blood; to communicate to my hearers that Schopenhauerian earnestness which glitters on the brow of that sublime thinker—such is my desire, my audacious hope: I want to be more than a pedagogue to honest savants. I am thinking of the duties of the masters of our time; I look forward, and my mind is filled with the thought of that next generation which follows at our heels. Since we must endure life, let us at least endeavour so to use it as to give it some worth in the eyes of others when we are happily delivered from it."
Friedrich Nietzsche disquieted himself needlessly. If he could have guessed what the approaching days held for him, his joy would have been immense. Richard Wagner lived not far from Basle, and was to become his friend.
[CHAPTER III]
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE AND RICHARD WAGNER—TRIEBSCHEN
Nietzsche installed himself at Basle, selected his domicile, and exchanged visits with his colleagues. But Richard Wagner was constantly in his thoughts. Three weeks after his arrival some friends joined with him in an expedition to the shores of the lake of the Four Cantons. One morning he left them and set off on foot by the river bank towards the master's retreat, Triebschen. Triebschen is the name of a little cape which protrudes into the lake; a solitary villa and a solitary garden, whose high poplars are seen from afar, occupy its expanse.
He stopped before the closed gate and rang. Trees hid the house. He looked around, as he waited, and listened: his attentive ear caught the resonance of a harmony which was soon muffled up in the noise of footsteps. A servant opened the door and Nietzsche sent in his card; then he was left to hear once more the same harmony, dolorous, obstinate, many times repeated. The invisible master ceased for a moment, but almost at once was busy again with his experiments, raising the strain, modulating it, until, by modulating once more, he had brought back the initial harmony. The servant returned. Herr Wagner wished to know if the visitor was the same Herr Nietzsche whom he had met one evening at Leipsic. "Yes," said the young man. "Then would Herr Nietzsche be good enough to come back at luncheon time?" But Nietzsche's friends were awaiting him, and he had to excuse himself. The servant disappeared again, to return with another message. "Would Herr Nietzsche spend the Monday of Pentecost at Triebschen?" This invitation he was able to accept and did accept.
Nietzsche came to know Wagner at one of the finest moments of the latter's life. The great man was alone, far from the public, from journalists, and from crowds. He had just carried off and married the divorced wife of Hans von Bülow, the daughter of Liszt and of Madame d'Agoult, an admirable being who was endowed with the gifts of two races. The adventure had scandalised all the Pharisees of old-fashioned Germany. Richard Wagner was completing his work in retreat: a gigantic work, a succession of four dramas, every one of which was immense: a work which was not conceived for the pleasure of men, but for the trouble and salvation of their souls; a work so prodigious that no public was worthy to hear it, no company of singers worthy to sing it, no stage, in short, vast enough or noble enough to make its representation possible. What matter! The world must stoop to Richard Wagner; it was not for him to yield to it. He had finished Rhinegold, and the Valkyries; Siegfried was soon to be completed; and he began to know the joy of the workman who has mastered his work, and is able at last to view it as a whole.
Restlessness and anger were mixed with his joy, for he was not of those who are content with the approbation of an élite. He had been moved by all the dreams of men, and he wished in his turn to move all men. He needed the crowd, wanted to be listened to by it, and never ceased to call to the Germans, always heavy and slow-footed in following him. "Aid me," he cries out in his books, "for you begin to be strong. Because of your strength do not disdain, do not neglect those who have been your spiritual masters, Luther, Kant, Schiller and Beethoven: I am the heir of these masters. Assist me. I need a stage where I may be free; give me it! I need a people who shall listen to me; be that people! Aid me, it is your duty. And, in return, I will glorify you."
We may picture this first visit: Nietzsche with his soft manners, his nervous voice, his fiery and veiled look; his face which was so youthful in spite of the long, drooping moustache; Wagner in the strength of the fifty-nine years that he carried without sign of weakness, overflowing with intuitions and experiences, desires and expectations, exuberant in language and gesture. What was their first interview like? We have no record of it, but no doubt Wagner repeated what he was writing in his books, and said imperiously: "Young man, you too must help me."
The night was fine and conversation spirited. When it was time for Nietzsche to go, Wagner desired to accompany his guest on his way home along the river. They went out together. Nietzsche's joy was great. The want from which he had long suffered was now being supplied; he had needed to love, to admire, to listen. At last he had met a man worthy to be his master; at last he had met him for whom no admiration, no love could be too strong. He gave himself up entirely and resolved to serve this solitary and inspired being, to fight for him against the inert multitude, against the Germany of the Universities, of the Churches, of the Parliaments, and of the Courts. What was Wagner's impression? No doubt he too was happy. From the very beginning he had recognised the extraordinary gifts of his young visitor. He could converse with him; and to converse means to give and to receive. And so few men had been able to afford him that joy.
On the 22nd of May, eight days after this first visit, a few very intimate friends came from Germany to Triebschen to celebrate the first day of their master's sixtieth year. Nietzsche was invited, but had to decline, for he was preparing his opening lecture and did not like to be distracted at his task. He was anxious to express straightway the conception that he had formed of his science and of its teaching. For his subject he took the Homeric problem, that problem which is an occasion of division between scholars who analyse antiquity and artists who delight in it. His argument was that the scholars must resolve this conflict by accepting the judgment of the artists. Their criticism, fecund in useful historical results, had restored the legend and the vast frame of the two poems. But it had decided nothing, and could have decided nothing. After all, the Iliad and the Odyssey were there before the world in clear shapes, and if Goethe chose to say: "The two poems are the work of a single poet "—the scholar had no reply. His task was modest, but useful and deserving of esteem. Let us not forget, said Nietzsche at the conclusion of his inaugural lecture, how but a few years ago these marvellous Greek masterpieces lay buried beneath an enormous accumulation of prejudices. The minute labour of our students has saved them for us. Philology is neither a Muse nor a Grace; she has not created this enchanted world, it is not she who has composed this immortal music. But she is its virtuoso, and we have to thank her that these accents, long forgotten and almost indecipherable, resound again, and that is surely a high merit. "And as the Muses formerly descended among the heavy and wretched Bœotian peasants, this messenger comes to-day into a world filled with gloomy and baneful shapes, filled with profound and incurable sufferings, and consoles us by evoking the beautiful and luminous forms of the Gods, the outlines of a marvellous, an azure, a distant, a fortunate country...."
Nietzsche was highly applauded by the bourgeois of Basle, who had come in great numbers to hear the young master whose genius had been announced. His success pleased him, but his thoughts went otherwhere, towards another marvellous, azure, and distant land—Triebschen. On the 4th of June he received a note:
"Come and sleep a couple of nights under our roof," wrote Wagner. "We want to know what you are made of. Little joy I have so far from my German compatriots. Come and save the abiding faith which I still cling to, in what I call, with Goethe and some others, German liberty."
Nietzsche was able to spare these two days and henceforward was a familiar of the master's. He wrote to his friends:
"Wagner realises all our desires: a rich, great, and magnificent spirit; an energetic character, an enchanting man, worthy of all love, ardent for all knowledge. ... But I must stop; I am chanting a pæan....
"I beg you," he says further, "not to believe a word of what is written about Wagner by the journalists and the musicographers. No one in the world knows him, no one can judge him, since the whole world builds on foundations which are not his, and is lost in his atmosphere. Wagner is dominated by an idealism so absolute, a humanity so moving and so profound, that I feel in his presence as if I were in contact with divinity...."
Richard Wagner had written, at the request of Louis II., King of Bavaria, a short treatise on social metaphysics. This singular work, which had been conceived to fascinate a young and romantic prince, was carefully withheld from publicity, and lent only to intimates. Wagner gave it to Nietzsche, and few things surely that the latter ever read went home more deeply. As traces of the impression he received from it are to be discovered in his work down to the very end, it will be worth our while to give some idea of its nature.
Wagner starts by explaining an old error of his: in 1848 he had been a Socialist. Not that he had ever welcomed the ideal of a levelling of men; his mind, avid of beauty and order, in other words, of superiorities, could not have welcomed a notion of the kind. But he hoped that a humanity liberated from the baser servitudes would rise with less effort to an understanding of art. In this he was mistaken, as he now understood.
"My friends, despite their fine courage," he wrote, "were vanquished; the emptiness of their effort proved to me that they were the victims of a basic error and that they had asked from the world what the world could not give them."
His view cleared and he recognised that the masses are powerless, their agitations vain, their co-operation illusory. He had believed them capable of introducing into history a progress of culture. Now he saw that they could not collaborate towards the mere maintenance of a culture already acquired. They experience only such needs as are gross, elementary, and short-lived. For them all noble ends are unattainable. And the problem which reality obliges us to solve is this: how are we to contrive things so that the masses shall serve a culture which must always be beyond their comprehension, and serve it with zeal and love, even to the sacrifice of life? All politics are comprised within this question, which appears insoluble, and yet is not. Consider Nature: no one understands her ends; and yet all beings serve her. How does Nature obtain their adhesion to life? She deceives her creatures. She puts them in hope of an immutable and ever-delayed happiness. She gives them those instincts which constrain the humblest of animals to lengthy sacrifices and voluntary pains. She envelops in illusion all living beings, and thus persuades them to struggle and to suffer with unalterable constancy.
Society, wrote Wagner, ought to be upheld by similar artifices. It is illusions that assure its duration, and the task of those who rule men is to maintain and to propagate these conserving illusions. Patriotism is the most essential. Every child of the people should be brought up in love of the King, the living symbol of the fatherland, and this love must become an instinct, strong enough to render the most sublime abnegation an easy thing.
The patriotic illusion assures the permanence of the State but does not suffice to guarantee a high culture. It divides humanity, it favours cruelty, hatred, and narrowness of thought. The King, whose glance dominates the State, measures its limits, and is aware of purposes which extend beyond it. Here a second illusion is necessary, the religious illusion whose dogmas symbolise a profound unity and a universal love. The King must sustain it among his subjects.
The ordinary man, if he be penetrated with this double illusion, can live a happy and a worthy life: his way is made clear, he is saved. But the life of the prince and his counsellors is a graver and a more dangerous thing. They propagate the illusions, therefore they judge them. Life appears to them unveiled, and they know how tragic a thing it is. "The great man, the exceptional man," writes Wagner, "finds himself practically every day in the same condition in which the ordinary man despairs of life, and has recourse to suicide." The prince and the aristocracy which surrounds him, his nobles, are forearmed by their valour against so cowardly a temptation. Nevertheless, they experience a bitter need to "turn their back on the world." They desire for themselves a restful illusion, of which they may be at the same time the authors and the accessories. Here art intervenes to save them, not to exalt the naïve enthusiasm of the people, but to alleviate the unhappy life of the nobles and to sustain their valour. "Art," writes Richard Wagner, addressing Louis II., "I present to my very dear friend as the promised and benignant land. If Art cannot lift us in a real and complete manner above life, at least it lifts us in life itself to the very highest of regions. It gives life the appearance of a game, it withdraws us from the common lot, it ravishes and consoles us."
"Only yesterday"—wrote Nietzsche to Gersdorff on the 4th of August, 1869—"I was reading a manuscript which Wagner confided to me, Of the State and Religion, a treatise full of grandeur, composed in order to explain to 'his young friend,' the little King of Bavaria, his particular way of understanding the State and Religion. Never did any one speak to his King in a tone more worthy, more philosophical; I felt myself moved and uplifted by that ideality which the spirit of Schopenhauer seems constantly to inspire. Better than any other mortal, the King should understand the tragic essence of life."
In September, Friedrich Nietzsche, after a short stay in Germany, returned to a life divided between Basle and Triebschen. At Basle he had his work, his pupils, who listened to him with attention, the society of amiable colleagues. His wit, his musical talent, his friendship with Richard Wagner, his elegant manners and appearance, procured him a certain prestige. The best houses liked his company, and he did not refuse their invitations. But all the pleasures of society are less acceptable than the simplest friendship, and Nietzsche had not a single friend in this honest bourgeois city; at Triebschen alone was he satisfied.
"Now," he writes to Erwin Rohde, who was living at Rome, "I, too, have my Italy, but I am able to visit it only on Saturdays and Sundays. My Italy is called Triebschen, and I already feel as if it were my home. Recently I have been there four times running, and into the bargain a letter travels the same road almost every week. My dear friend, what I see and hear and learn there I find it impossible to tell you. Schopenhauer and Goethe, Pindar and Æschylus are, believe me, still alive."
Each of his returns was an occasion of melancholy. A feeling of solitude depressed him. He confided in Erwin Rohde, speaking at the same time of the hopes he had in his work.
"Alas, dear friend," he said, "I have very few satisfactions, and solitary, always solitary, I must ruminate on them all within myself. Ah! I should not fear a good illness, if I could purchase at that price a night's conversation with you. Letters are so little use!... Men are constantly in need of midwives, and almost all go to be delivered in taverns, in colleges where little thoughts and little projects are as plentiful as litters of kittens. But when we are full of our thought no one is there to aid us, to assist us at the difficult accouchment: sombre and melancholy, we deposit in some dark hole our birth of thought, still heavy and shapeless. The sun of friendship does not shine upon them."
"I am becoming a virtuoso in the art of solitary walking," he says again; and he adds: "My friendship has something pathological about it." Nevertheless he is happy in the depths of his being; he says so himself one day, and warns his friend Rohde against his own letters:
"Correspondence has this that is vexatious about it: one would like to give the best of oneself, whereas, in fact, one gives what is most ephemeral, the accord and not the eternal melody. Each time that I sit down to write to you, the saying of Hölderlin (the favourite author of my schooldays) comes back to my mind: 'Denn liebend giebt der Sterbliche vom Besten!' And, as well as I remember, what have you found in my last letters? Negations, contrarieties, singularities, solitudes. Nevertheless, Zeus and the divine sky of autumn know it, a powerful current carries me towards positive ideas, each day I enjoy exuberant hours which delight me with full perceptions, with real conceptions—in such instants of exalting impressions, I never miss sending you a long letter full of thoughts and of vows; and I fling it athwart the blue sky, trusting, for its carriage towards you, to the electricity which is between our souls."
And we can get a glimpse of these positive ideas, these precious impressions, because we are in possession of all the notes and the blunders of the young man who was acquiring, at the price of constant effort, strength and mastery.
"My years of study," he wrote to Ritschl, "what have they been for me? A luxurious sauntering across the domains of philology and art; hence my gratitude is especially lively at this moment that I address you who have been till now the 'destiny' of my life; and hence I recognise how necessary and opportune was the offer which changed me from a wandering into a fixed star, and obliged me to taste anew the satisfaction of galling but regular work, of an unchanging but certain object. A man's labour is quite another thing, when the holy anangkei of his profession helps him; how peaceful is his slumber, and, awakening, how sure is his knowledge of what the day demands. There, there is no philistinism. I feel as if I were gathering a multitude of scattered pages in a book."
The Origin of Tragedy proves to be the book the guiding ideas of which Nietzsche was now elaborating. Greek thought remains the centre round which his thought forms, and he meditates, in audacious fashion, on its history. A true historian, he thinks, should grasp its ensemble in a rapid view. "All the great advances in Philology," he writes in his notes, "are the issue of a creative gaze." The eyes of a Goethe discovered a Greece clear and serene. Being still under the domination of his genius, we continue to perceive the image which he has put before us. But we should seek and discover for ourselves. Goethe fixed his gaze on the centuries of Alexandrine culture. Nietzsche neglects these. He prefers the rude and primitive centuries, whither his instinct, since his eighteenth year, had led him when he elected to study the distiches of the aristocrat, Theognis of Megara. There he inhales an energy, a strength of thought, of action, of endurance, of infliction; a vital poetry, vital dreams which rejoice his soul.
Finally, in this very ancient Greece, he finds again, or thinks that he finds again, the spirit of Wagner, his master. Wagner wishes to renew tragedy, and, by using the theatre, as it were, as a spiritual instrument, to reanimate the diminished sense of poetry in the human soul. The "tragic" Greeks had a similar ambition; they wished to raise their race and ennoble it again by the most striking evocation of myths. Their enterprise was a sublime one, but it failed, for the merchants of the Piræus, the democracy of the towns, the vulgar herd of the market-place and of the port, did not care for a lyrical art which stipulated a too lofty manner of thought, too great a nobleness in deed. The noble families were vanquished and tragedy ceased to exist. Richard Wagner encounters similar enemies—they are the democrats, insipid thinkers, and base prophets of well-being and peace.
"Our world is being judaised, our prattling plebs, given over to politics, is hostile to the idealistic and profound art of Wagner," writes Nietzsche to Gersdorff. "His chivalrous nature is contrary to them. Is Wagner's art, as, in other times, Æschylus's art, to suffer defeat?" Friedrich Nietzsche is always occupied with a like combat.
He unfolds these very new views to his master. "We must renew the idea of Hellenism," he says to him; "we live on commonplaces which are false. We speak of the 'Greek joy,' the 'Greek serenity'; this joy, this serenity, are tardy fruits and of poor savour, the graces of centuries of servitudes. The Socratic subtlety, the Platonic sweetness, already bear the mark of the decline. We must study the older centuries, the seventh, the sixth. Then we touch the naïve force, the original sap. Between the poems of Homer, which are the romance of her infancy, and the dramas of Æschylus, which are the act of her manhood, Greece, not without long effort, enters into the possession of her instincts and disciplines. It is the knowledge of these times which we should seek, because they resemble our own. Then the Greeks believed, as do the Europeans of to-day, in the fatality of natural forces; and they believed also that man must create for himself his virtues and his gods. They were animated by a tragic sentiment, a brave pessimism, which did not turn them away from life. Between them and us there is a complete parallel and correspondence; pessimism and courage, and the will to establish a new beauty...."
Richard Wagner interested himself in the ideas of the young man, and associated him more and more intimately in his life. One day, Friedrich Nietzsche being present, he received from Germany the news that the Rhinegold and the Valkyries, badly executed far from his advice and direction, had had a double failure. He was sad and did not hide his disappointment; he was afflicted by this depreciation of the immense work which he had destined for a non-existent theatre and public, and which now crumbled before his eyes. His noble suffering moved Nietzsche.
Nietzsche took part in his master's work. Wagner was then composing the music of the Twilight of the Gods. Page after page the work grew, without haste or delay, as though from the regular overflowing of an invisible source. But no effort absorbed Wagner's thought, and, during these same days, he wrote an account of his life. Friedrich Nietzsche received the manuscript with directions to have it secretly printed, and to supervise the publication of an edition limited to twelve copies. He was asked to oblige with more intimate services. At Christmas, Wagner was preparing a Punch and Judy show for his children. He wanted to have pretty figurines, devils and angels. Madame Wagner begged Nietzsche to purchase them in Basle. "I forget that you are a professor, a doctor, and a philologist," she said graciously, "and remember only your five-and-twenty years." He examined the figurines of Basle, and, not finding them to his liking, wrote to Paris for the most frightful devils, the most beatific angels imaginable. Friedrich Nietzsche, admitted to the solemnity of the Punch and Judy show, spent the Christmas festival with Wagner, his wife and family, in the most charming of intimacies. Cosima Wagner made him a present; she gave him a French edition of Montaigne, with whom, it seems, he was not acquainted, and of whom he soon became so fond. She was imprudent that day. Montaigne is perilous reading for a disciple.
"This winter I have to give two lectures on the æsthetic of the Greek tragedies," wrote Nietzsche, about September, to his friend the Baron von Gersdorff; "and Wagner will come from Triebschen to hear them." Wagner did not go, but Nietzsche was listened to by a very large public.
He described an unknown Greece, vexed by the mysteries and intoxications of the god Dionysius, and through its trouble, through this very intoxication, initiated into poetry, into song, into tragic contemplation. It seems that he wished to define this eternal romanticism, always alike to him, whether in Greece of the sixth century B.C. or in Europe of the thirteenth century; the same, surely, which inspired Richard Wagner in his retreat at Triebschen. Nietzsche, however, abstained from mentioning this latter name.
"The Athenian coming to assist at the tragedy of the great Dionysos bore in his heart some spark of that elementary force from which tragedy was born. This is the irresistible outburst of springtime, that fury and delirium of mingled emotions which sweeps in springtime across the souls of all simple peoples and across the whole life of nature. It is an accepted thing that festivals of Easter and Carnival, travestied by the Church, were in their origin spring festivals. Every such fact can be traced to a most deep-rooted instinct: the old soil of Greece bore on its bosom enthusiastic multitudes, full of Dionysos; in the Middle Ages in the same way the dances of the Feast of Saint John and of Saint Vitus drew out great crowds who went singing, leaping and dancing from town to town, gathering recruits in each. It is, of course, open to the doctors to regard these phenomena as diseases of the crowd: we content ourselves with saying that the drama of antiquity was the flower of such a disease, and if that of our modern art does not fountain forth from that mysterious source, that is its misfortune."
In his second lecture Nietzsche studied the end of tragic art. It is a singular phenomenon; all the other arts of Greece slowly and gloriously declined. Tragedy had no decline. After Sophocles it disappeared, as though a catastrophe had destroyed it. Nietzsche recounts the catastrophe, and names the destroyer, Socrates.
He dared to denounce the most revered of men. It was he, the poor Athenian, a man of the people, an ugly scoffer, who suppressed the ancient poetry. Socrates was neither an artist nor a philosopher; he did not write, he did not teach, he scarcely spoke; seated in the public place, he stopped the passers-by, astonished them by his pleasant logic, convinced them of their ignorance and absurdity, laughed, and obliged them to laugh at themselves. His irony dishonoured the naïve beliefs which gave strength to the ancestors of the race, the myths which upheld their virtues. He despised tragedy, and made open declaration of his contempt for it; that was enough. Euripides was troubled, and suppressed his inspiration, while the young Plato, who perhaps would have surpassed Sophocles himself, listened to the new master, burnt his verses, and renounced art. He disconcerted the old instinctive lyrical humanity of Greece; and, by the voice of Plato, whom he had seduced, he imposed the illusion, unknown to the ancients, of Nature as accessible to the reason of man, altogether penetrated by it, and always harmonious. Friedrich Nietzsche was to insert these pages in his book upon The Birth of Tragedy.
This charge pronounced against Socrates surprised his audience in Basle. Wagner knew it, and in September, 1870, wrote to Nietzsche an enthusiastic but extremely shrewd letter.
"As for me, I cry out to you: That's it! you have got hold of the truth, you touch the exact point with keen accuracy. I await with admiration the series of work in which you will combat the errors of popular dogmatism. But none the less you make me anxious, and I hope with all my heart that you are not going to come a cropper. I would also like to advise you not to expound your audacious views, which must be so difficult to establish, in short brochures of limited range. You are, I feel, profoundly penetrated with your ideas: you must gather them together into a larger book of much wider scope. Then you will find and will give us the mot juste on the divine blunders of Socrates and Plato, those creators so wonderful as to exact adoration even from us who forswear them! Our words, my dear friend, swell into hymns when we consider the incomprehensible harmony of those essences, so strange to our world! And what pride and hope animate us when, returning on ourselves, we feel strongly and clearly that we can and should achieve a work, outside the reach even of those masters!"
None of the letters addressed by Nietzsche to Wagner have been published. Have they been lost? Were they destroyed? Or are they merely refused by Madame Cosima Wagner, who is perhaps not incapable of rancour? The facts are unknown. However, we may be certain that Nietzsche begged Wagner to ally himself with him, to aid him in rendering clear those difficult views of his. Wagner replied:
"MY DEAR FRIEND,—How good it is to be able to exchange such letters! There is no one to-day with whom I can talk as seriously as with you—the Unique[1] excepted. God only knows what would happen to me but for that! But I should be able to give myself up to the pleasure of fighting with you against "Socratism" only on one condition, that of having an enormous deal of time at my disposal, free from the temptation of any better project—to speak quite plainly, I should have to abandon all creative work. Division of labour is a good thing in this connection. You can do much for me: you can take on your shoulders a full half of the task assigned to me by fate. And so doing, you will perhaps achieve the whole of your own destiny. I have never had much success in my essays in Philology: you have never had much success in your essays in music: and it is well that things should be so. As a musician you would have come to much the same end to which I should have come had I stuck obstinately to Philology. But Philology remains in my blood; it directs me in my work as a musician. As for you, remain a philologist, and keeping to Philology, allow yourself to be directed by music. I mean what I say in a very serious spirit. You have taught me within what base preconceptions a professional philologist is to-day expected to imprison himself—I have taught you in what an unspeakable den a genuine 'absolute' musician must to-day waste himself. Show us what Philology ought to be, and help me to prepare the way for that great 'Renaissance' in which Plato will embrace Homer, and in which Homer, penetrated by the ideas of Plato, will be at last and for the first time the sublime Homer ..."
At this instant Nietzsche had conceived his work, and was making ready to write it at a spurt. "Science, art, and philosophy grow so intimately within me," he said in February to Rohde, "that I am about to give birth to a centaur."
Professional duties, however, interrupted this flight. In March he was appointed titular professor. The honour flattered him, the duties kept him occupied. At the same time he was given the care of a class of higher rhetoric; then he was asked to draw up in the noblest Latin an address of congratulation to Professor Baumbrach, of Fribourg, who had taught for fifty years in the University of that town. Nietzsche, who never shirked anything, applied himself to the preparation of his class and the composition of his discourse. In April, more work. Ritschl founded a review, the Acta societatis philologic? Lipsi?, and desired that his best pupil should contribute to it. Nietzsche did not haggle over the help asked of him. He promised his copy, and wrote to Rohde to ask for his collaboration also.
"Personally, I feel most strongly that I am under an obligation," he wrote. "And, notwithstanding that this work will put me out at the moment, I am quite committed to it. We must collaborate for the first number. You are aware that certain persons will read it with curiosity, with malevolence. Therefore, it must be good. I have promised my faithful help—answer me."
May and then June, 1870, came. Friedrich Nietzsche seems to have been occupied, above all else, with his work for the Acta. During the holidays at Pentecost, Rohde, on his way back from Italy, stopped at Basle. Nietzsche was delighted, he wished Wagner to make his friend's acquaintance, and brought him to Triebschen. They spent a fine day together, on the brink of an abyss which none of them apparently perceived. Rohde, continuing on his road to Germany, left Basle. Nietzsche remained alone, the victim of a foolish accident. He had given himself a strain and was forced to be up.
Had he given any attention to the rumours of war which troubled Europe in 1870? It seems not. He was little curious of news, and scarcely read the newspapers. Not that he was indifferent to his country, but he conceived it, in the manner of Goethe, as a source of art and moral grandeur. One of his thoughts, one alone, is perhaps inspired by the public unrest. "No war," he writes; "the State would become too strong thereby." No doubt we have here, besides one of Nietzsche's own impressions, an echo of the conversations of Triebschen: Wagner recruited his most ardent admirers in Southern Germany, in the Rhineland, in Bavaria, where his protector Louis II. reigned; the Germans of the North appreciated him badly, the Berliners worst of all, and he had no wish for a warlike crisis which would certainly have the effect of adding to the weight of Prussian dictation. The State to which Nietzsche pointed in his short note was the Prussian State. He foresaw, and like his master dreaded, the imminent hegemony of Berlin, that despised town of bureaucrats and bankers, of journalists and Jews.
On July 14th, a convalescent, stretched out on his long chair, he wrote to his comrade, Erwin Rohde. He spoke to him of Richard Wagner and of Hans von Bülow, of art and of friendship. Suddenly he stops in the middle of a phrase, marking with a blank line the interruption of his thought.
"Here is a terrible thunderclap," he wrote. "The Franco-German war is declared; a demon alights upon all our culture, already worn threadbare. What are we about to experience?
"Friend, dear friend, we met once more in the twilight of peace. To-day what do all our aspirations signify? Perhaps we are at the beginning of the end! What a gloomy sight. Cloisters will become necessary. And we shall be the first friars."
He signed himself The Loyal Swiss. This unexpected signature may be explained in a literal manner. In order to be appointed a professor at Basle, Friedrich Nietzsche had had to renounce his nationality. But assuredly it indicated more than this. It announced his detachment of mind: he had decided on the rôle of the contemplator.
What a misunderstanding of himself! He was too young, too brave, too much enamoured of his race, to adopt the part of spectator only in the imminent drama. As "a loyal Swiss," and as such dispensed from military duties, he quietly took up his abode with his sister Lisbeth in a mountain inn, where he wrote out some pages on Greek lyricism. It was then that he formulated for the first time his definition of the Dionysian and Apollonian spirits. Nevertheless, the German armies were crossing the Rhine and gaining their first victories, and it was not without emotion that Nietzsche heard the news. The thought of lofty deeds in which he had no part, of perils from which he was preserved, troubled his meditations.
On July 20th, writing to Madame Ritschl, he expressed the thoughts which occupied his solitude. First he gave expression to a fear which, as it seemed, the memory of a Greece ruined by the conflict of Sparta and Athens inspired in him. "Unhappy, historical analogies teach us that the very traditions of culture may be destroyed by the bitterness of such a war of nations." But he also expressed the emotion which had begun to seize him. "How I am ashamed of this inactivity in which I am kept, now that the instant has come when I might be applying what I learned in the artillery. Naturally I make myself ready for an energetic course of action, in case things should take a bad turn; do you know that the students of Kiel have enlisted together, with enthusiasm?" On the morning of August 7th he read in his paper the dispatches from Wörth: German victory: Enormous losses. He could no longer remain in his retreat. He returned to Basle, asked and obtained from the Swiss authorities permission to serve in the ambulance corps, and proceeded at once to Germany to enlist for the war which allured him.
He crossed conquered Alsace: he saw the charnel houses of Wissembourg and of Wörth: on August 29th he bivouacked not far from Strassburg, where conflagrations lit up the horizon; then he made his way, by Lunéville and Nancy, towards the country around Metz, now converted into an immense ambulance, where the wounded of Mars-la-Tour, Gravelotte and Saint-Privat, so numerous that it was difficult to nurse them, were dying of their wounds and of infectious illnesses. Some unfortunates were given into his charge: he did his duty with kindness and courage, but experienced a singular emotion, a sacred and almost enthusiastic horror. For the first time he considered without repulsion the labour of the masses. He watched those millions of beings, some struck down and marked by death, others marching the roads or standing under arms: he considered them without contempt, he esteemed their destiny. Under the menaces of war, these men have something momentous about them. They forget their vain thoughts; they march, they sing, they obey their chiefs; they die. Friedrich Nietzsche was recompensed for his pains; a fraternal impulse uplifted his soul, he no longer felt his solitude, he loved the simple people who surrounded him. "All my military passions awake," he writes, "and I cannot satisfy them! I would have been at Rezonville, at Sedan, actively, passively perhaps. This Swiss neutrality always ties my hands."
His passage through France was rapid. He received orders to convey the wounded in his care to the hospital at Carlsruhe.
He set out and was shut up, for three days and three nights, with eleven men, lying in a market cart closed fast against the cold and the rain. Two of the wounded who accompanied him were attacked by diphtheria, all had dysentery. "To reach truth," says a German mystic, "the most rapid mount is Affliction." Friedrich Nietzsche recalled this maxim of which he was so fond. He tried his courage, verified his thoughts. He dressed the sores of his wounded, he listened to their complaints, their appeals, and did not interrupt his meditation. Till now he had known only his books; now he knew life. He relished this bitter ordeal, always discerning some far-off beauty. "I, also, I have my hopes," he was to write; "thanks to them I was able to look on at the war and to pursue my meditations without pause, in presence of the worst horrors.... I recall a solitary night during which I lay stretched out in a market van with the wounded men confided to me and never ceased to explore in thought the three abysses of tragedy which have for names: Wahn, Wille, Wehe—Illusion, Will, Affliction. Whence then did I draw the confident certitude that he should undergo in birth a similar ordeal, the hero to come of tragic knowledge and Greek gaiety?"
He arrived at Carlsruhe with his sick and wounded; he had contracted their illness and was attacked by dysentery and diphtheria. An unknown who had been his ambulance companion nursed him devotedly. As soon as he was well again, Nietzsche went to his home at Naumburg, there to seek not repose, but an entire leisure from work and thought.
"Yes," he wrote to his friend Gersdorff, who was fighting in France—"Yes, that conception of things which is common to us has undergone the ordeal by fire. I have had the same experience as you. For me, as for you, these weeks will remain in my life as an epoch in which each one of my principles re-affirmed itself in me; I would have risked death with them.... Now I am at Naumburg again, but poorly restored to health so far. The atmosphere in which I have lived has been long over me like a dark cloud; I heard an incessant lamentation."
Once already, in July, 1865, during the campaign at Sadowa, he had known war, and undergone its allurement. A simple and great aspiration had laid hold of him; and for a moment he had felt himself in accord with his race. "I feel a patriotic emotion," he wrote; "it is a new experience for me." He grasped at this sudden exaltation and cultivated it.
Indeed, his is a changed soul. He is no longer the "loyal Swiss" of another time; he is a man among men, a German proud of his Germany. A war has transformed him; he glorifies war. War awakes the energy of men; it even troubles their spirits. It obliges them to seek in an ideal order, an order of beauty and duty, the ends of a life which is too cruel. The lyric poet, the sage, misunderstood in ages of peace, are heard with respect in ages of war. Then men have need of them, and are conscious of their need. The same necessity which ranges them behind their chiefs renders them attentive to genius. Humanity is made truly one, and is drawn towards the heroic and the sublime, only under the pressure of war.
Friedrich Nietzsche, though still very weak and suffering, again took up the notes of his book that he might record in it his new ideas. In Greece, he argues, art was the visible form of a society, disciplined by struggle, from the workshop, where the captive slave laboured, up to the gymnasium and the agora, where the free man played with arms. Such was that winged figure, that goddess of Samothrace, that had for companion of her flight a bloody trireme.
The Greek genius emanated from war, it sang war, it had war for its comrade. "It is the people of the tragic mysteries," wrote Friedrich Nietzsche, "who strike the great blow of the Persian battles; in return, the people who have maintained these wars need the salutary beverage of tragedy." We follow in his notes the movement of a mind which wishes to grasp the very idea of the tragic, athwart a vaguely-known Greece. Again and again we find this word tragic brought in as if it were a fundamental strain which the young thinker trains himself to repeat, like a child trying to learn a new word:—"Tragic Greece conquers the Persians.... Tragic man is nature itself in its highest strength of creation and knowledge: he trifles with sorrow...." Three formulas satisfy his research for a moment. "The tragic work of Art—the tragic Man—the tragic State." Thus he determined the three essential parts of his book, which he would entitle as a whole: The Tragic Man.
Let us not misunderstand the real object of his meditations: this society, this discipline which he discerned in the past, were in reality the ideal forms of the Fatherland which he desired and for which he dared to hope. He saw on the one hand Latin Europe, weakened by utilitarianism and the softness of life, on the other Germany, rich in poets, in soldiers, in myths, in victories. She was suzerain of those races which were in process of decay. How would she exercise this suzerainty? Might not one augur from her triumph a new era, warlike and tragic, chivalrous and lyric? One could conceive it; and therefore one should hope for it, and this was enough to dictate one's duty. How glorious this Germany would be, with Bismarck as its chief, Moltke as its soldier, Wagner as its poet—its philosopher, too, existed, and was called Friedrich Nietzsche. This belief, though he expressed it nowhere, he surely had: for he had not a doubt as to his genius.
He was elated, but did not let his dreams lead him astray: he imagined an ideal Fatherland, yet never lost from sight the Fatherland, human, too human, which actually existed.
During October and the first days of November, alone with his own people in that Naumburg whose provincial virtues he did not love, he bore hardly with the vulgarity of the little people, of the functionaries with whom he mixed. Naumburg was a small Prussian town; Friedrich Nietzsche did not care for this robust and vulgar Prussia. Metz had capitulated; the finest army of France was taken captive: a delirium of conceit swept all Germany off its feet. Friedrich Nietzsche resisted the general tendency. The sentiment of triumph was a repose which his exacting soul might not know. On the contrary, he was disgusted and alarmed.
"I fear," he wrote to his friend Gersdorff, "that we shall have to pay for our marvellous national victories at a price to which I, for my part, will never consent. In confidence—I am of opinion that modern Prussia is a Power highly dangerous to culture.... The enterprise is not easy, but we must be philosophers enough to keep our sang-froid in the midst of all this smoke, we must keep watch so that no robber may come and steal any part of what, in my opinion, is commensurable with nothing beside, not even the most heroic of military actions, not even our national exaltation."
Then a document appeared which deeply moved Friedrich Nietzsche. It was the date of the centenary of Beethoven. The Germans, occupied with their war, had neglected to commemorate it. Richard Wagner's voice was raised, it alone was strong enough to recall to the conquerors the memory of another glory: "Germans, you are brave," he cried; "remain brave in peace.... In this marvellous year 1870 nothing is better suited to your pride in being brave than the memory of the great Beethoven.... Let us celebrate that great pioneer and path-hewer, let us celebrate him worthily, not less worthily than the victory of German courage: for he who gives joy to the world is raised higher among men than he who conquers the world."
Germans, you are brave; remain brave in peace—no saying could move Friedrich Nietzsche more deeply. He desired to be near the master again, and, though not yet restored to health, he left Naumburg.
He saw Richard Wagner again and was not entirely satisfied. This man, who had been so splendid in misfortune, seemed to have lost stature. There was a vulgar quality in his joy. Well had the German victory avenged him for those Parisian cat-calls and railleries which he had had to endure; now he "ate Frenchmen" with an enormous and peaceable relish. Nevertheless he declined certain offers; he was promised the highest office and honours if he accepted residence in Berlin. He refused, being unwilling to let himself be enthroned as poet-laureate of a Prussian Empire; and his disciple was thankful for the refusal.
Friedrich Nietzsche found at Basle an even better confidant of his anxieties. The historian Jacob Burckhardt, a great scholar of arts and civilisations, was melancholy; all brutality was odious to him, and he detested war and its destruction. A citizen of the last city in Europe which maintained its independence and its old customs, proud of this independence and of these customs, Jacob Burckhardt disliked those nations of thirty or forty millions of souls which he saw establishing themselves. To the designs of Bismarck and of Cavour he preferred the counsel of Aristotle—"So arrange that the number of citizens does not exceed ten thousand; otherwise they would not be able to meet together on the public square."
He had studied Athens, Venice, Florence, and Sienna. He held in high esteem the ancient and Latin disciplines, in very moderate esteem the German disciplines: he dreaded German hegemony. Burckhardt and Nietzsche were colleagues. They often met in the intervals between two lectures. Then they would talk and, on fine days, stroll together along that terrace over which all European travellers lean, that is between the cathedral of red sandstone and the Rhine, here so young still but already so strong, as it passes with a long murmur of ruffled waters. The simply-built University is situated quite near, on the slope, between the river and the Museum.
The two colleagues were eternally examining their common thought. How should that tradition of culture and beauty be continued, that fragile and oft-broken tradition which two tiny States, Attica and Tuscany, have transmitted to our care? France had not deserved censure; she had known how to maintain the methods and a school of taste. But had Prussia the qualities fitting her heritage? Friedrich Nietzsche repeated the expression of his hope. "Perhaps," said he, "this war will have transformed our old Germany; I see her more virile, endowed with a firmer and more delicate taste." Jacob Burckhardt listened. "No," said he, "you are always thinking of the Greeks, for whom war had no doubt an educative virtue. But modern wars are superficial; they do not reach, they do not correct the bourgeois, laissez-aller style of life. They are rare; their impressions are soon effaced; they are soon forgotten; they do not exercise people's thought." What did Nietzsche answer? A letter to Erwin Rohde enables us to divine the ill-assured accent of his observations. "I am very anxious," he writes, "as regards the immediate future. I seem to recognise there the Middle Ages in disguise.... Be careful to free yourself from this fatal Prussia, with its repugnance to culture! Flunkeys and priests sprout from its soil like mushrooms, and they are going to darken all Germany with their smoke!"
Jacob Burckhardt, long a recluse amid his memories and his books, had the habit of melancholy and made the best of it. By way of discreet protest against the enthusiasms of his contemporaries, he delivered a lecture upon Historical Greatness. "Do not take for true greatness," said he to the students of Basle, "such and such a military triumph, such and such an expansion of a State. How many nations have been powerful who are forgotten and merit their oblivion! Historical greatness is a rarer thing; it lies wholly in the works of those men whom we call great men, using that vague term because we cannot truly fathom their nature. Some unknown genius leaves us Notre Dame de Paris; Goethe gives us his Faust; Newton his law of the Solar System. This is greatness, and this alone." Friedrich Nietzsche listened and applauded. "Burckhardt," wrote he, "is becoming a Schopenhauerian...." But a few wise words do not satisfy his ardour. Nor can he so quickly renounce the hope which he has conceived; he wishes to act, to save his Fatherland from the moral disaster which in his judgment menaces her.
How act? Here was a sluggish people, not easily aroused, lacking in sensitiveness, a people stunted by democracy, a people in revolt against every noble aspiration: by what artifice could one sustain among them the imperilled ideal, the love of heroism and of the sublime? Nietzsche formed a project which was so audacious and so advanced that he meditated long upon it without confiding in any one. Richard Wagner was then working to establish that theatre of Bayreuth in which he hoped to realise his epic creation in complete freedom. Nietzsche dared to imagine a different institution, but one of the same order; a kind of seminary where the young philosophers, his friends, Rohde, Gersdorff, Deussen, Overbeck, Romundt should meet, live together and, free from duties, liberated from administrative tutelage, meditate, under the guidance of certain masters, on the problems of the hour. A double home of art and of thought would thus maintain at the heart of Germany, above the crowd and apart from the State, the traditions of the spiritual life. "Cloisters will become necessary," he had written to Erwin Rohde in July; six months' experience brought back this idea. "Here assuredly is the strangest thing which this time of war and victory has raised up; a modern anchoritism—an impossibility of living in accord with the State."
Friedrich Nietzsche let himself be drawn away by this dream, the unreality of which he failed to recognise. He was imagining a reunion of solitaries, similar to the Port Royal des Champs. He knew that such a society did not accord with the manners and tastes of his times, but he judged it to be necessary and believed that he had strength enough to establish or impose it.
A profound instinct inspired and directed him. That old college of Pforta had been monachal in its origins, in its buildings and in its very walls, in the lasting gravity and ordered rule of life. Thus he had, as a child, received the impress of what was almost the life of a religious. He kept the memory of it, and the nostalgia. During his years at the University he had constantly sought to isolate himself from the world by surrounding himself with friends. He studied Greece, and the antique wisdom nourished his soul: he loved Pythagoras and Plato, the one the founder, the other the poet, of the finest brotherhood that man had ever conceived, the close and sovereign aristocracy of sages armed, of meditative knights. Thus did Christian humanity and Pagan humanity, united by a remote harmony, concur with his thoughts and his aspirations.
He wished to write an open letter to his friends, known and unknown; but he would only call them at the favourable moment, and till then would keep his secret. "Give me two years," he wrote to his friend Gersdorff enthusiastically and mysteriously, "and you will see a new conception of antiquity diffuse itself, which must bring a new spirit into the scientific and moral education of the nation!" Towards mid-December he believed that the moment had come. Erwin Rohde wrote him a melancholy letter, a very feeble echo of the passionate letters which Nietzsche had addressed to him. "Soon we shall need cloisters ..." he said, repeating the same idea expressed six months earlier by his friend. It was but a word; Friedrich Nietzsche saw in it a sign of spontaneous agreement, a presage of enthusiastic collaboration, and he wrote in a joyous transport:
"DEAR FRIEND,—I received your letter and I answer it without losing a minute. Above all I wish to tell you that I feel altogether like you, and that we shall be, in my opinion, very weak, if, abandoning our feeble complaints, we do not deliver ourselves from ennui by an energetic act.... I have at last understood the bearing of Schopenhauer's judgments on the philosophy of the universities. No radical truth is possible there. No revolutionary truth can come out from there.... We shall reject this yoke; to me that is certain. And we shall then form a new Greek academy: Romundt will be of our company.
"You know, since your visit to Triebschen, the projects of Bayreuth. For a long time, without confiding in any one, I have been considering whether it would not be suitable for us to break with philology and its perspectives of culture. I am preparing a great adhortatio for all those who are not yet completely captured and stifled by the manners of this present time. What a pity that I must write to you, and that for long we have not been able to examine in conversation each of my thoughts! To you who know not their turnings and their consequences, my plan will perhaps appear as an eccentric caprice. That, it is not; it is a necessity.
"... Let us try to reach a little island on which there will be no longer need to close one's ears with wax. Then we shall be one another's masters. Our books, from now till then, are but hooks to catch our friends, a public for our æsthetic and monachal association. Let us live, let us work, let us enjoy for one another's sake; in that manner only, perhaps, shall we be able to work for the whole. I may tell you (see how serious is my design) that I have already commenced to reduce my expenses in order to constitute a little reserve fund. We shall gamble in order to try our 'luck'; as to the books which we shall be able to write, I shall demand the highest honorarium as a provision for coming times. In brief, we shall neglect no lawful means of success in founding our cloister. We also have our duty for the next two years!
"May this plan seem to you worthy of meditation! Your last letter, moving as it was, signified to me that the time had come to unveil it for you.
"Shall we not be able to introduce a new form of Academy into the world?
'Und sollt' ich nicht, sehnsuchtigster Gewalt,
In's Leben ziehn die einzigster Gestalt?'"Thus Faust speaks of Helen. No one knows anything of my project, and now it depends upon you to see that Romundt is advised of it.
"Assuredly, our school of philosophy is neither an historical reminiscence nor an arbitrary caprice; is it not a necessity that pushes us on to that road? It seems that the plan of our student days, that voyage which we were to make together, returns in a new form, symbolic now and vaster than it was. On this occasion, I won't leave you in the lurch as I then did. That memory always annoys me.
"With my best hopes, your faithful
"FRATER FRIEDRICH.
"From the 23rd of December till the 1st of January I go to Triebschen, near Lucerne."
On the 22nd of December Friedrich Nietzsche left Lucerne: he had received no reply from Rohde. He found the house at Triebschen in high festival with children's games and the preparations for Christmas. Madame Wagner gave him a volume of Stendhal, Les Promenades dans Rome. He offered Wagner the famous woodcut of Dürer's of The Knight, the Dog, and Death, on which he had written a commentary for the book he was then preparing, The Origin of Tragedy: "A spirit which feels itself isolated, desperate and solitary," he wrote, "could choose no better symbol than that rider of Dürer's, who, unperturbed by his gruesome companions and yet wholly without hope, pursues his terrible path alone with dog and horse. This rider of Dürer's is our Schopenhauer: he was without hope, but he desired the truth. His like does not exist." Nietzsche would have been happy in the master's house if he had not been expecting Rohde's reply: the waiting worried him. He stopped for a week at Triebschen. Wagner was never done talking about Bayreuth and his vast projects. Nietzsche, too, had his thought which he would have joyfully uttered; but first he wanted his friend's approbation, and that approbation did not come. He left without having received a word or spoken one on the subject.
At last, at Basle, he received the too long-desired letter: an honest, affectionate, but negative reply. "You tell me that cloisters are necessary to-day," wrote Rohde. "I believe it. But there are necessities for which no remedy exists. How can we find the money? And even when we shall have found the money, I do not know that I shall follow you; I do not feel in me a creative force which renders me worthy of the solitude whither you call me. For a Schopenhauer, a Beethoven, a Wagner, the case is different, as it is for you, dear friend. But, as I am in question, no! I must hope for a different life. Still let us entertain the wish for such a retreat, among certain friends, in a cloister of the muses; I agree to that. Deprived of desires, what would we become?"
If Rohde refused to follow him, who would follow him? He did not write his Adhortatio; Romundt was not advised, and even Wagner, it seems, knew nothing of the proposal.
Nietzsche made no vain complaints, but set to work to elaborate alone those revolutionary truths for which he would have wished to contrive a kindlier manner of birth. He turned his back upon Germany, upon those modern States which have it as their mission to flatter the servilities, soften the conflicts, and favour the idleness of men. He considered anew primitive Greece, the city of the seventh and the sixth centuries; thither a mysterious attraction ever drew him back. Was it the seduction of a perfect beauty? Doubtless, but it was also the seduction of that strength and cruelty which a modern conceals as he conceals a stain, and which the old Greeks practised with joy. Nietzsche loved strength; on the battlefield of Metz he had felt within him the appetite and instinct.
"If," he wrote, "genius and art are the final ends of Greek culture, then all the forms of Greek society must appear to us as necessary mechanisms and stepping-stones towards that final end. Let us discover what means were utilised by the will to act which animated the Greeks...." He discerns and names one of these means: slavery. "Frederick Augustus Wolf," he notes, "has shown us that slavery is necessary to culture. There is one of the powerful thoughts of my predecessor." He grasped it, held it to him, and forced it to disclose its whole meaning. This idea, suddenly discovered, inspired him; it was profound and moved him to the depths of his being; it was cruel, almost monstrous, and satisfied his romantic taste. He shuddered before it, he admired its sombre beauty.
"It may be that this knowledge fills us with terror," he wrote; 'I such terror is the almost necessary effect of all the most profound knowledge. For nature is still a frightful thing, even when intent on creating the most beautiful forms. It is so arranged that culture, in its triumphal march, benefits only a trivial minority of privileged mortals, and it is necessary that the slave service of the great masses be maintained, if one wish to attain to a full joy in becoming (werde lust).
"We moderns have been accustomed to oppose two principles against the Greeks, the one and the other invented to reassure a society of an altogether servile kind which anxiously avoids the world, slave: we talk of the 'dignity of man' and the 'dignity of labour.'
"The language of the Greeks is other. They declare in simple terms that work is a disgrace, for it is impossible that a man occupied with the labour of gaining a livelihood should ever become an artist....
"So let us avow this cruel sounding truth: slavery is necessary to culture; a truth which assuredly leaves no doubt as to the absolute value of being.
"The misery of those men who live by labour must be made yet more vigorous, in order that a very few Olympian men may create a world of art.... At their expense, by the artifice of unpaid labour, the privileged classes should be relieved from the struggle for life, and given such conditions that they can create, and satisfy a new order of needs.... And if it is true to say that the Greeks were destroyed by slavery, this other affirmation is, most certainly, even truer: for lack of slavery, we are perishing."
But what was the origin of this very institution of slavery? How was the submission of the slave, that "blind mole of culture," secured? The Greeks teach us, answered Nietzsche: "The conquered belongs to the conqueror," they say, "with his wives and his children, his goods and his blood. Power gives the first right, and there is no right which is not at bottom appropriation, usurpation, power." Thus Nietzsche's thought was brought back towards its first object. The war had inspired him in the first instance. Now he rediscovers that solution. In sorrow and in tragedy, men had invented beauty; into sorrow and into tragedy they must be plunged, and there retained that their sense of beauty might be preserved. In pages which have the accent and rhythm of a hymn, Friedrich Nietzsche glorifies and invokes war:
"Here you have the State, of shameful origin; for the greater part of men, a well of suffering that is never dried, a flame that consumes them in its frequent crises. And yet when it calls, our souls become forgetful of themselves; at its bloody appeal the multitude is urged to courage and uplifted to heroism. Yes, the State is to the blind masses, perhaps, the highest and most worthy of aims; it is, perhaps, the State which, in its formidable hours, stamps upon every face the singular expression of greatness.
"Some tie, some mysterious affinity, exists between the State and art, between political activity and artistic production, the battlefield and the work of art. What is the rôle of the State? It is the tenaille of steel which binds society together. Without the State, in natural conditions—bellum omnium contra omnes—society would remain limited by the family, and could not project its roots afar. By the universal institution of States, that instinct which formerly determined the bellum omnium contra omnes has been concentrated; at certain epochs terrible clouds of war menace the peoples and discharge themselves at one great clap, in lightnings and thunders, fiercer as they are less frequent. But these crises are not continual; between one and another of them society breathes again; regenerated by the action of war, it breaks on every side into blossom and verdure, and, when the first fine days come, puts forth dazzling fruits of genius.
"If I leave the Greek world and examine our own, I recognise, I avow it, symptoms of degeneration which give me fears both for society and for art. Certain men, in whom the instinct of the State is lacking, wish, no longer to serve it, but to make it serve them, to use it for their personal ends. They see nothing of the divine in it; and, in order to utilise it, in a sure and rational manner, they are concerned to evade the shocks of war: they set out deliberately to organise things in such a manner that war becomes an impossibility. On the one hand they conjure up systems of European equilibrium, on the other hand they do their best to deprive absolute sovereigns of the right to declare war, in order that they may thus appeal the more easily to the egoism of the masses, and of those who represent them. They feel it incumbent on them to weaken the monarchical instinct of the masses, and do weaken it, by propagating among them the liberal and optimistic conception of the world, a conception which has its roots in the doctrines of French rationalism and the Revolution; that is, in a philosophy altogether foreign to the German spirit, a Latin platitude, devoid of any metaphysical meaning.
"The movement, to-day triumphant, of nationalities, the extension of universal suffrage which runs parallel to this movement, seem to me to be determined above all by the fear of war. And behind these diverse agitations, I perceive those who are chiefly moved by this alarm, the solitaries of international finance, who, being by nature denuded of any instinct for the State, subordinate politics, the State and society to their money-making and speculative ends.
"If the spirit of speculation is not thus to debase the spirit of the State, we must have war and war again—there is no other means. In the exaltation which it procures, it becomes clear to men that the State has not been founded to protect egoistical individuals against the demon of war; quite the contrary: love of country, devotion to one's prince, help to excite a moral impulse which is the symbol of a far higher destiny.... It will not therefore be thought that I do ill when I raise here the pæan of war. The resonance of its silver bow is terrible. It comes to us sombre as night: nevertheless Apollo accompanies it, Apollo, the rightful leader of states, the god who purifies them.... Let us say it then: war is necessary to the State, as the slave is to society. No one will be able to avoid these conclusions, if he have sought the causes of the perfection which Greek art attained, and Greek art alone."
War and yet again war which exalts the peoples: such was the cry of the solitary. He had but to drop his pen, to listen and look around him, and he saw the pedantic empire and repressed his hopes. "We follow the trouble of his thought. He hesitates, he records at the same moment the abiding illusion and the inevitable disillusion:
"I could have imagined," he writes, "that the Germans had embarked on this war to save Venus from the Louvre, like a second Helen. It would have been the spiritual interpretation of their combat. The fine antique severity inaugurated by this war—for the time to be grave has come—we think that is the time for art also."
He continued to write; his thought becomes clearer and more melancholy: "The State, when it cannot achieve its highest aim, grows beyond measure. The World Empire of the Romans, in face of Athens, has nothing of the sublime. This sap, which should all run to the flowers, resides now in the leaves and stalks, which swell to an immense size."
Rome troubled him; he disliked it; he judged it a slur upon antiquity. That city, warlike, but ever plebeian, victorious, but ever vulgar, filled him with gloomy fore-thought:
"Rome," he wrote, "is the typical barbaric state: the will cannot there attain to its noble ends. The organisation is more vigorous, the morality more oppressive ... who venerates this colossus?"