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?"
_Who venerates this colossus?_ Let us give a modern and pressing
application to these interrogatory words. The colossus is not Rome, it
is Prussia and her empire. Narrow was the soil of Athens or of Sparta,
and brief their day; but what did that matter if the object, which
was spiritual strength and beauty, was attained? Friedrich Nietzsche
was haunted by this vision of Greece with its hundred rival cities,
raising between mountains and sea their acropoles, their temples, their
statues, all resounding with the rhythm of pæans, all glorious and
alert.
"The sentiment of Hellenism," he wrote, "as soon as it is awakened,
becomes aggressive and translates itself into a combat against the
culture of the present day."
* * * * *
Friedrich Nietzsche suffered from the wounds which life inflicted
upon his lyrical dream. His friends listened to him, but followed him
imperfectly. The professor, Franz Overbeck, who lived in his house and
saw him every day, was a man of distinction, with a strong and acute
mind. A German by birth, a Frenchman by education, he understood the
problems of the day, and joined in the anxieties and intentions of
Nietzsche; but his ardour could not equal Nietzsche's. Jacob Burckhardt
was a man of noble intellect and character, but he was without hope,
and Friedrich Nietzsche passionately desired to hope. No doubt, there
was Wagner, whom neither passion nor hope ever could surprise, but he
had just published an Aristophanic buffoonery directed against the
conquered Parisians. Friedrich Nietzsche read this gross work, and
condemned it. Overbeck and Burckhardt lacked ardour; Wagner lacked
delicacy; and Nietzsche confided in no one. A chair of philosophy had
just been vacated in the University of Basle. Nietzsche took fire
at once. He wrote to Erwin Rohde, and told him that he should apply
for this chair, and that he would assuredly secure it. Thus the two
friends were to meet again. Vain hope! Erwin Rohde presented himself
as a candidate, but was not accepted. Nietzsche reproached himself for
having lured on his friend. He grew melancholy. He felt himself drawn
"like a little whirlpool into a dead sea of night and oblivion."
He had never recovered entirely from the ordeals of the war. Neither
sleep nor sure and certain health were ever at his call again. In
February the nervous force which had sustained him suddenly gave way,
and his disorders assumed an acute form. Violent neuralgas, insomnia,
troubles and weaknesses of the eyesight, stomach ills, jaundice
represented the nature of the crisis which had been tormenting him for
five months. The doctors, quite at a loss, advised him to give up work
and to take a voyage. Friedrich Nietzsche sent for his sister, who came
to Naumburg. He brought her to pay a farewell visit to Triebschen, and
left for Lugano.
At that time the railway did not cross the Alps. Travellers went by
diligence over the ridge of the St. Gothard. Chance furnished Nietzsche
with a remarkable companion, an old man of a talkative humour, and with
no desire to conceal his identity: it was Mazzini. The old humanitarian
and the young apostle of slavery hit it off wonderfully well. Mazzini
cited Goethe's phrase:
"_Sich des halben zu entwohnen und im Ganzen, Vollen, Schönen resolut
zu leben_" (To abjure half-measures, and to live resolutely in the
Whole, the Full, the Beautiful). Friedrich Nietzsche never forgot the
energetic maxim, nor the man who had transmitted it to him, nor this
day of rapid and healthful travel, not far from those summits which he
was afterwards to love so much.
The fine mountain crossing amid the snow and silence of the Alps had
sufficed. He was almost cured on his arrival at Lugano. His nature was
still supple and youthful; his returns to life were prompt and radiant;
a naïve gaiety re-animated all his being. He spent two happy months
in Italian Switzerland. A Prussian officer, a relation of General von
Moltke, was staying at his hotel. He lent him his manuscripts and often
talked to him of the destinies of the new German Empire and of the
aristocratic warrior's mission which the victory had conferred upon
it. It was a fine springtide for the numerous Germans who had come to
rest at the place: they liked to gather round their young philosopher
and listen to him. February began, the war was over, and these happy
people, freed from all anxieties, abandoned themselves for the first
time to the pleasure of their triumph. They sang; they danced in
public up to the Market-place, and Nietzsche was not the least prompt
to rejoice with them, to dance and sing. "When I recall these days,"
writes Madame Förster-Nietzsche, who gives us a sad and gracious
account of the time, "it seems to me that I am having a veritable dream
of Carnival."
From Lugano, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote to Erwin Rohde:
"I have very often suffered from a heavy and depressed mood. But more
than once inspiration has returned to me; my manuscript has benefited
from it. I have given the go-by to philology in the most cavalier
fashion. They may praise me, they may blame me, they may promise me
the highest honours, they may talk as they choose; I turn my back upon
it. Every day I go deeper into my philosophic domain, and I begin to
have confidence in myself; better still, if I am ever to be a poet,
from to-day I feel myself disposed towards it. I do not know, I have no
means of knowing, whither my destiny guides me. And nevertheless, when
I examine myself, everything is in perfect accord within me, as though
I had followed some good genius. My ends are extremely hidden from me;
no concern for office, for hierarchic honours, directs my efforts;
and none the less I live in a surprising condition of clarity, of
serenity. What a sensation it is to see one's world before one, a fine
globe, round and complete! Now it is some fragment of a new metaphysic,
now it is a new æsthetic which grows up within me, now another idea
claims me, a new principle of education which entails the complete
rejection of our Universities and gymnasia. I never learn any fact but
it immediately finds a good place in some corner that has been long
prepared for it. This sentiment of an interior world which springs up
within me I feel in all its force when I think not coldly, but quietly
and without exaggerated enthusiasm, on the history of these last ten
months, on these events which I consider as the instruments of my noble
designs. Pride, folly, are words that feebly express my condition of
mental 'insomnia.'
"Ah, how I desire health! As soon as one has something in view which
must last longer than oneself--how one gives thanks for every good
night, for every mild ray of sun, even for every occasion on which one
digests aright!"
On the 10th of April, Nietzsche had returned to Basle. He gathered his
notes together, re-read them for the last time, and fixed definitely
the plan of his work. He allowed those digressions upon war, slavery,
the city, of which we have already given some extracts, to drop,
and--Wagner, it is said, desired it--limited himself to his first
subject: ancient tragedy, the model and precursor of German musical
drama. Wagner's advice, Madame Förster-Nietzsche insinuates, was not
altogether disinterested; it suited him that his disciple's first work
should be consecrated to his fame. This has an air of probability;
still it certainly seems that Nietzsche had let himself be captured and
seduced by too many ideas, that he had not so much amassed the matter
for one book as begun, rather at hazard, a whole series of studies in
æsthetics, history, and politics. He needed to restrict himself, and
yet could not make up his mind to it. If Wagner helped him here, he did
well. Perhaps we owe the happy completion of this book to him--the only
real book which Nietzsche ever completed.
What was it that he had to say? He was to analyse the origin and the
essence of the Greek lyric spirit; he was to set the two Greeces over
against one another, the one intoxicated by its myths and Dionysian
chants, strong in illusions--Æschylus's Greece, tragic and conquering
Greece; the other impious, rational, anæmic--Socratic Greece,
Alexandrine Greece, which in dying corrupted the peoples who had
remained young around her, the pure blood of primitive humanity. Then
he was to display the two Germanys in conflict in a like manner, the
Germany of the Democrats and the savants, the Germany of the soldiers
and the poets; between these two one had to choose. Nietzsche declared
his choice: beholden to Wagner, as he was, for all his tranquillity
of thought, for all his joys, he indicated Wagner to his compatriots.
While the peace was being signed at Frankfort between the nations,
Friedrich Nietzsche, thus establishing peace within himself, ended the
rough draft of his work. He remarked upon this coincidence of dates,
for his internal conflicts and the revolutions of his thought did not
appear to him less important events than external conflicts and the
revolutions of races.
But the Peace of Frankfort did not terminate all the conflicts of this
terrible year. A civil war now broke out in France, and its calamities
stirred Europe even more profoundly than the battles of Frœschwiller
or Sedan. On the morning of the 23rd of May, the newspapers of Basle
announced the destruction of Paris and the burning of the Louvre.
Nietzsche learnt the news with a feeling of dismay: the most beautiful
works, the flower of human labour, were ruined; human hands, an unhappy
people, had dared this profanation. All Nietzsche's alarms were thus
confirmed. Without discipline, without an hierarchy, culture, he had
written, cannot subsist. All have not the right to share in beauty; the
immense majority should live humbly, work for their masters and revere
their lives. Such is the economy which assures strength to societies,
and, in return for their strength, delicacy, grace, beauty; and this
is the order which Europe hesitates to maintain. Nietzsche might now
have boasted of the correctness of his judgment; it was far from him
to do so. It was with alarm that he considered his perspicacity, his
solitude, and his responsibility. His thoughts suddenly turned to Jacob
Burckhardt; what melancholy must be his! He wished to see him, to talk
to him, to listen to him, to make his desolation his own. He hurried to
Burckhardt's house; but Burckhardt, though the hour was early, had gone
out. Nietzsche walked the roads like a desperate man. Finally he went
back. Jacob Burckhardt was in his study, and awaited him. He had gone
to seek his friend, as his friend had gone to seek him. The two men
remained for long together, and Fräulein Nietzsche, alone in the next
room, heard their sobs through the closed door.
"Let us avow it," he writes to his friend, the Baron von Gersdorff, "we
are all, with all our past, responsible for the terrors which menace
us to-day. We shall do wrong, if we consider with a peaceful conceit
the unchaining of a war against culture, and if we impute the fault
merely to the unfortunates who do the deed. When I heard of the firing
of Paris, I was for some days utterly powerless, lost in tears and
doubts; the life of science, of philosophy and of art appeared to me as
an absurdity when I saw a single day suffice for the ruin of the finest
works of art; what do I say?--of entire periods of art. I profoundly
deplored the fact that the metaphysical value of art could not manifest
itself to the lower classes; but it has a higher mission to fulfil.
Never, however lively my affliction were, would I have cast the stone
at the sacrilegious, who in my eyes are only carriers of the mistake of
all--a mistake which gives cause for much thought...."
In the autobiographical notes written in 1878 these words may be read:
"The War: my profoundest affliction, the burning of the Louvre."
* * * * *
Friedrich Nietzsche had gone back to his old way of life; almost every
week he was Wagner's guest. But soon he perceived that since the
German victory Triebschen had changed. Too many intimates made haste
to the master's house, too many unknown people invaded the abode whose
peaceful seclusion he had loved. They were not all of the sort that
Nietzsche would have desired; but Wagner talked, discoursed, overflowed
with them all. Judging that the favourable moment had come, he had set
out to rouse Germany and secure at last the construction and gift of
the hall which he needed, the theatre, or the temple, of Bayreuth.
Friedrich Nietzsche heard and took part in these discussions with an
uneasy ardour. Wagner's idea exalted him. But he had the soul of a
solitary, and could not help being worried, and sometimes shocked,
by these noises from the world which had to be tolerated. Wagner did
not suffer: on the contrary, he seemed elated by the joy of feeling
the crowd nearer to him; and Nietzsche, a little surprised, a little
disappointed, sought, without precisely finding again, his hero.
"To sway the people," he had written in his student notebooks, "is
to put passions in the service of an idea." Wagner adapted himself
to work of this kind. In the service of his art and of his fame he
accepted all the passions. A Chauvinist with the Chauvinists, an
idealist with the idealists, as much of a Gallophobe as was desired;
restoring the Æschylian tragedy for some, for others re-animating the
old German myths; willingly a pessimist, a Christian if it pleased,
sincere moreover from moment to moment, this prodigious being, a great
leader of men as well as a great poet, handled his compatriots most
dexterously.
No one could resist the impulse which he gave: every one had to
yield and to follow. He fixed the very details of the plans of the
theatre whose site had just been chosen. He studied the practical
organisation of the work, and laboured to create those _Vereine_ in
which propagandists and subscribers were to be grouped. He set himself
out to procure rare and unexpected delights for the faithful. One day
he surprised them with a performance for their benefit alone, in the
gardens of Triebschen, of the _Siegfried-Idyll,_ a gracious interlude
written for the churching of his wife, a noble echo of the most
intimate times. He gave Nietzsche his rôle, for he could not allow that
voice, so passionate and hard to control, and yet so eloquent, to be
lost. The young man offered to set out on a mission. He would stir up
those circles in Northern Germany, so slow and heavy in its emotions.
Bus proposal was not accepted; Wagner, no doubt, feared the violence of
his apostolate: "No," he said to him, "finish and publish your book."
Nietzsche felt somewhat melancholy at the refusal. Henceforth, it
seems, difficulties began to arise between the two.
Moreover, the advice of the master was less easy to follow than it
seemed. _The Origin of Tragedy_ did not find a publisher. Nietzsche's
applications failed, and his summer was spoilt by the check. He decided
to print certain chapters of it in the reviews. "I put my little book
into the world bit by bit," he wrote in July to Erwin Rohde; "what a
childbirth! what tortures!"
At the beginning of October he was staying at Leipsic. Here he saw
again his master Ritschl, and his friends Rohde, Gersdorff, who had
come to meet him, and spent with them some happy days of conversation
and comradeship. But the fate of his book remained uncertain: all the
publishers of scientific and philological works bowed the author out.
They were not tempted by a bizarre work, in which learning was allied
with lyricism and the problems of ancient Greece with the problems
of modern Germany. "The book is a centaur," said Nietzsche. This
mythological assurance did not satisfy the book-sellers. Finally he
had to address himself, not without regret--for he maintained that his
work was a scientific work--to Richard Wagner's publisher, from whom
he received, after a month's delay, a favourable reply. He wrote to
his friend Gersdorff, in a free and relieved tone, which helps us to
measure the vexation from which he had suffered.
"BASLE, _November_ 19, 1871.
"Pardon me, dear friend, I ought to have thanked you sooner. I had
felt in your last letter, in every one of your words, your strong
intellectual life. It seemed to me that you remained a soldier at soul
and brought your military nature to art and philosophy. And that is
good, for we have no right to live to-day, if we are not militants,
militants who prepare a _sæculum_ to come, something of which we can
guess at in ourselves, across our best instants. For those instants,
which are what there is of best in us, draw us away in spirit from
_our_ time; nevertheless, in some manner, they need to have their
hearthstone somewhere: whence I infer that at such instants we feel a
confused breath of coming times pass over us. For instance, take our
last meeting at Leipsic; has it not left in your memory the impression
of such instants, as seemed to be strangers to everything, linked with
another century? Whatever may be, this remains, '_Im Ganzen, Vollen,
Schönen, resolut zu leben._' But it needs a strong will, such as is
not given to the first comer!... To-day, only to-day, the excellent
publisher Fritzsch replies to me."
Fritzsch proposed to him that he should give his book the format and
character of a recent work of Wagner's: _Die Bestimmung der Oper._
Nietzsche rejoiced at the idea, and he wrote five concluding chapters
which accentuated the Wagnerian tendency of the work. This rapid
composition and the correction of the proofs did not deter him from
another enterprise.
_The Origin of Tragedy_ was about to appear. He did not doubt for a
moment that it would be read, understood, acclaimed. His comrades,
his masters, had always acknowledged the strength of his thought.
Apparently, it never occurred to him that a vaster public remained
callous; but he wished to affect it profoundly, at the first blow,
and he formed new projects by which he might make the most of his
success. He wanted to talk: speech was a livelier weapon. He recalled
the emotions which he had experienced when, as a young professor, he
was given the singular task of teaching the most delicate language, the
most difficult works, to chance audiences; he remembered his perhaps
fanciful design: that seminary of philologists, that house of study
and retreat, of which he was always dreaming. He wanted to denounce
the schools, the gymnasia, the Universities, the heavy apparatus of
pedantry which was stifling the German spirit, and define the new and
necessary institutions, destined, no longer for the emancipation of the
masses, but for the culture of the State. He had written to Erwin Rohde
as early as the month of March: "A new idea claims me, a new principle
of education which points to the entire rejection of oar Universities,
of our gymnasia...." In December, he announced at Basle, for January,
1872, a series of lectures upon _The Future of our Educational
Institutions._
Towards mid-December, he accompanied Richard Wagner to Mannheim, where
a two days' festival was being devoted to the works of the master.
"Oh, what a pity you were not there!" he wrote to Erwin Rohde. "All
the sensations, all the recollections of art, what are they compared
to these? I am like a man whose ideal has been realised. It is Music,
and Music alone! ... When I say to myself that a certain number of men
of the generations to come--at least some hundreds among them--will be
moved by this music as I am myself, I cannot augur for less than an
entire renewal of our culture!"
He returned to his house in Basle: but the impression of his days in
Mannheim remained with him. The details of his everyday life caused
him a strange and tenacious disgust. "All that cannot be translated
into music," he wrote, "is repulsive and repugnant to me.... I have a
horror of reality. Or, rather, I no longer see anything of the real, it
is only a phantasmagoria." Under the stress of this emotion he acquired
a clearer view of the problem which occupied him, he formulated
more clearly the principle for which he was seeking. To "teach," to
"uplift" men, what does that mean? It is to dispose their minds in
such sort that the productions of genius will be assured, not of the
understanding of all, for that cannot be, but of the respect of all.
As in the preceding years, Richard and Cosima Wagner invited him to
spend Christmas at Triebschen. He excused himself; the work of his
lectures occupied all his time. He offered Cosima Wagner, by way of
homage, a musical fantasy on Saint Sylvester's Night, composed some
weeks earlier. "I am very impatient to know what they will think of
it down there," he wrote to Rohde. "I have never been criticised by
any competent person." In reality, good judges had already often
discouraged his musical enterprises, but he soon forgot their vexatious
advice.
On the last day of 1871, his book appeared: _Die Gebürt der Tragödie
aus dem Geiste der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of
Music)_. The sub-title which the current editions give, _Hellenism
and Pessimism,_ was added in 1885 on the issue of the second edition.
Friedrich Nietzsche sent the first copy to Richard Wagner, from whom he
received almost at once a frenzied letter.
"DEAR FRIEND,--I have never read a finer book than yours. It is all
splendid! At this moment, I write to you very hurriedly because the
reading has profoundly moved me, and I expect that I wait for the
return of my sang-froid to re-read you methodically. I said to Cosima:
After you, he it is whom I love most; and then, at a long distance,
Lenbach, who has made so striking and so true a portrait of me....
Adieu! Come soon to see us!
"Yours,
"R. W."
On the 10th of January Wagner wrote again:
"You have just published a book which is incomparable. All the
influences which you may have undergone are reduced to nothing by the
character of your book: what distinguishes it from every other, is the
complete confidence with which a penetrating individuality displays
itself. It is here that you satisfy the ardent desire of myself and
of my wife: in short, a strange voice might have been talking of us,
and we would have fully approved it! Twice we have read your book from
the first line to the last--in the daytime, separately--at night,
together--and we were lamenting that we had not at our disposal that
second copy which you had promised. We deliver battle over that sole
copy. I am constantly in need of it; between my breakfast and my
working hours, it is it that sets me going; for since I have read
you, I have begun again to work on my last act. Our readings, whether
together or separately, are constantly interrupted by our exclamations.
I am not yet recovered from the emotion which I experienced. There is
the condition we are in!"
And Cosima Wagner wrote, for her part: "Oh, how fine your book is!
How beautiful it is and how profound, how profound it is and how
audacious!" On January 16th he delivered his first lecture. His joy,
his sense of security, were extreme. He knew that Jacob Burckhardt
read and approved him; he knew that he had the admiration of Rohde,
Gersdorff, Overbeck. "What they say of my book is incredible," he wrote
to a friend. "... I have concluded an alliance with Wagner. You cannot
imagine how we are bound to one another, and how identical are our
views." He conceived his second work without delay; he would publish
his lectures. It would be a popular book, an exoteric translation of
his _Tragedy._ But the idea of an even more decisive action at once
supervened. Germany was preparing to inaugurate the new University of
Strassburg; and an apotheosis of professors on a soil that had been
conquered by soldiers awoke the indignation of Friedrich Nietzsche.
He wished to address a pamphlet to Bismarck, "under the form of an
interpellation in the Reichstag." Have our pedants, he would ask, the
right to go in triumph to Strassburg? Our soldiers have conquered the
French soldiers, and that is glorious. But has our culture humiliated
French culture? Who would dare to say so?
Some days went by. Whence came the less happy tone of his letters? Why
was it that he did not write his interpellation, that he gave up the
idea of it? We know: except for a few friends who had understood his
book, no one read it, no one bought it; not a review, not a newspaper
deigned to take notice of it. Ritchsl, the great philologist of
Leipsic, kept silent. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote to him: "I want to know
what you think." He received in reply a severe criticism and a reproof.
Erwin Rohde offered an article for the _Litterarische Centralblatt;_
it was not inserted. "It was the last chance of a serious voice being
upraised for me in a scientific sheet," he wrote to Gersdorff; "now I
expect nothing more--except spite or idiocy. But, as I have told you,
I count upon the peaceful journey of my book through the centuries with
perfect confidence. For in it certain eternal verities are said for the
first time: they must resound...."
Certainly Friedrich Nietzsche had not foreseen his ill-success: it
astonished and disconcerted him. A sore throat obliged him to interrupt
his lectures, and he found pleasure in the contretemps. He had let
himself be drawn towards ideas which were very lofty and delicate,
and difficult even to himself. He wished to show that two sorts of
schools should be instituted, the one professional, for the majority;
the other, classical and truly superior, for an infinitesimal number
of chosen individuals, whose course would be extended as far as
their thirtieth year. How was this isolated circle, aloof from the
common herd, to be formed, and how was it to be taught? Friedrich
Nietzsche recurred to his most intimate and familiar thought, to that
aristocratic ideal to which his meditations always led him. He had
often studied its problems. But to examine them in public he needed his
whole strength, and also a sympathetic audience. He felt that he had
been weakened by the failure of his book. His very slight indisposition
did not last long: nevertheless he did not return to his lectures. It
was vain to ask him to do so: he refused. It was vain to press him
to have them published; Richard Wagner strongly insisted: he eluded
this insistence. His notes have come to us in a sorry condition of
incompleteness and disorder. They are the echoes, the vestiges of a
dream.
"The aristocracy of the mind must conquer its entire liberty in respect
of the State, which is now keeping Science in curb.
"Later, men will have to raise the tables of a new culture ... then
destruction of the gymnasia, destruction of the University ... an
areopagus, for the justice of the mind.
"_The culture of the future: its ideal of social problems._ The
imperative world of the beautiful and the sublime ... the only
safeguard against Socialism ..."
Finally these three interrogatory words, which sum up his doubts, his
desires, and perhaps his whole work: "_Ist Veredlung möglich?"_ (Is
ennoblement possible?)
Friedrich Nietzsche courageously renounced his hope and was silent.
He had lost his country: Prussia would not be the invincible
framework of a lyrical race; the German Empire would not realise the
"imperative world of the beautiful and the sublime." On April 30th
the new University of Strassburg was inaugurated. "I hear from here
the patriotic rejoicings," he wrote to Erwin Rohde. In January he had
refused an offer of employment which would have withdrawn him from
Basle. In April he spoke of leaving Basle and of going to Italy for two
or three years. "The first review of my book has at last appeared,"
he wrote, "and I find it very good. But where has it appeared? In
an Italian publication, _La Rivista Europea!_ That is pleasant and
symbolical!"
* * * * *
He had a second reason for melancholy: Richard Wagner was leaving to
make his home at Bayreuth. A letter of Cosima Wagner announced the
departure: "Yes, Bayreuth!... Adieu to dear Triebschen, where the
_Origin of Tragedy_ was conceived, and so many other things which
perhaps will never begin again!"
Three years before, in this spring season, Nietzsche had hazarded his
first visit to Triebschen; he wished to return again. He did return,
and found the house desolate. A few pieces of furniture, covered over
with horse-cloths and dispersed from room to room, seemed like flotsam
and jetsam from another time. Every small object, all the family
knick-knacks, had disappeared. The light entered, hard and crude,
through the curtainless windows. Wagner and his wife were completing
then-last packages, throwing the last of the books into the last of
the baskets. They welcomed the faithful Nietzsche, asked his aid; he
gave it at once. He wrapped up in packets the letters, the precious
manuscripts; then more books and scores. Suddenly his heart failed
him. So it was all over, Triebschen was done with! Three years of his
life, and what years they had been! How unexpected, how moving, how
delicious, and they were to escape in a day! Now he must renounce
the past, and follow the master without regret. Now he must forget
Triebschen and, for the future, think only of Bayreuth. No sooner was
this magical name pronounced than it fascinated Nietzsche and troubled
him. His hours at Triebschen had been so fine, hours of repose and
meditation, hours of work and silence. A man, a woman of genius; a nest
of children; an infinity of happy conversations, of beauty--Triebschen
had given all that. What would Bayreuth give? The crowd would come
there, and what would it bring with it? Friedrich Nietzsche left the
books which he was engaged in packing. The grand piano had remained
in the middle of the salon. He opened it, preluded, then improvised.
Richard and Cosima Wagner, leaving aside all their affairs, listened. A
harrowing, unforgettable rhapsody resounded through the empty salon. It
was the adieu.
In November, 1888, Friedrich Nietzsche, already stricken with madness,
set himself to recount his history. "Since I am here recalling the
consolations of my life, I ought to express in a word my gratitude for
what was by far my most profound and best-loved joy--my intimacy with
Richard Wagner. I wish to be just with regard to the rest of my human
relationships; but I absolutely cannot efface from my life the days at
Triebschen, days of confidence, of gaiety, of sublime flashes--days of
_profound_ perceptions. I do not know what Wagner was for others: our
sky was never darkened by a cloud."
[1] Cosima Wagner.