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.