remain to be done. Then at last I shall have said everything that
weighs upon us; and it may be that after this general confession, we
shall feel ourselves liberated, in however slight a degree.
"My heartfelt wishes are with you, dear Fräulein."
At last Friedrich Nietzsche began to work. His instinct brought him
back to the philosopher who had helped his first years. He wished to
consecrate to Schopenhauer his third "Unseasonable Thought." Ten years
before, he had led a miserable existence at Leipsic; Schopenhauer
saved him. His strange gaiety, his lyricism, the irony with which he
expresses his harshest thoughts, had restored to him the power of life.
If Schopenhauer "troubles you, burdens you," he wrote at that time to a
friend, "if he has not the power to raise you, and guide you, through
the keenest sorrows of external life, to that sorrowful, but happy
state of mind that takes hold on us when we hear great music, to that
state in which the surroundings of the earth seem to fall away from
us--then I do not claim to understand his philosophy."
Once more he experienced the impressions of his youth. He remembered
that the most productive crises of his life had been the most
sorrowful, and as a disciple in the school of his former master he
recovered his courage. "I have eleven fine melodies yet to sing," he
writes to Rohde, in announcement of the work which was to follow. And
his Schopenhauer is a melody, a hymn to Solitude, to the daring of
a thinker. His heart was full of music at that time. He rested from
writing and composed a hymn to Friendship. "My song is for all of you,"
he wrote to Erwin Rohde.
His sister joined him, and the two left Basle and settled together in
the country, near the falls of the Rhine. Friedrich Nietzsche recovered
the gaiety of his most childish days, partly, no doubt, to amuse the
girl who had come so tenderly to join him--_aliis lætus, sibi sapiens,_
according to the maxim that is found written in his diary of the
time--but also because he was truly happy, despite his sorrow: happy to
be himself, free and unspotted before life. "My sister is with me," he
writes to Gersdorff. "Every day we make the finest plans for our future
life, which is to be idyllic, hard-working, and simple. All is going
well: I have put well away, far from me, all weakness and melancholy."
He used to walk with his sister and talk, laugh, dream, and read. What
did he read? Schopenhauer, no doubt, and Montaigne, in that small and
elegant edition which became a sad reminder: Cosima Wagner had given
it to him in former days at Triebschen in gratitude for the dolls he
used to bring to the little girls. "Because that man wrote," he used
to say, "the pleasure of life on earth has been intensified. Since I
have had to do with this free and brave spirit I like to repeat what he
himself said of Plutarch--'Je ne le puis si peu raccointer que je n'en
tire cuisse ou aile.' If the duty were laid upon me, it would be in his
company that I would attempt to live on earth as at home." Schopenhauer
and Montaigne: these two ironists, one confessing his despair, the
other hiding it, are the men with whom Nietzsche elects to try to live.
But he read at the same time with deepest appreciation the work of a
younger thinker, one less unfavourable to his aspirations--the trustful
Emerson, the young prophet of a young people, one who in his slightest
expressions so happily renders the pure emotion that lightens the
eighteenth year of a man's life and passes away with that year.
Friedrich Nietzsche had read Emerson at Pforta, and he discovered him
again in the spring of 1874, and recommended him to his friends.
"The world is young," wrote Emerson at the end of his _Representative
Men._ "The former great men call to us affectionately. We too must
write Bibles, to unite again the heavens and the earthly world. The
secret of Genius is to suffer no fiction to exist for us; to realise
all that we know in the high refinement of modern life, in arts,
in sciences, in books, in men; to exact good faith, reality, and a
purpose: and first, last, midst, and without end, to honour every truth
by use."
Nietzsche had need of the comfort of such words and loved them.
* * * * *
Friedrich Nietzsche finished the manuscript of his _Schopenhauer as
Educator_ at the beginning of June. Intellectually he was almost
cured, but he had other sufferings. Madame Förster-Nietzsche tells
how one day, when her brother had expressed his disgust of novels and
their monotony of love, some one asked him what other sentiment could
have the power of inspiring passion. "Friendship," he said quickly. "It
produces absolutely the same crises as love, but in a purer atmosphere.
First of all, attraction brought about on both sides by common
convictions, mutual admiration and glorification: then, distrust on one
side, and on the other doubts as to the excellence of the friend and
his ideas: the certainty that a rupture is inevitable and yet will be
painful. In friendship there are all these sufferings, and others too
many to tell." Nietzsche had knowledge of every one from June, 1871,
onwards.
He loved Wagner; he had never ceased to love him. He had been able to
correct himself of his intellectual error. Richard Wagner was not a
philosopher or an educator of Europe. True enough, none the less he was
a wonderful artist, the source of all beauty and of all happiness, and
Nietzsche desired him still, as one desires a woman, because she gives
joy. Any idea of rupture was unbearable, and to none did he confess his
thoughts.
The situation was false and awkward. In January, at the worst moment of
the crisis, he had to write to Wagner to congratulate him on a truly
extraordinary and unexpected piece of news: the King of Bavaria, the
poor madman, had suddenly stepped in and rescued the enterprise of
Bayreuth by promising the necessary money. At the same time Nietzsche
despatched his pamphlet on _The Use and Abuse of History._ Now, there
was not one mention in it of the master's name. This created rather a
shock at Bayreuth, and Madame Cosima Wagner took upon herself the task
of delicately calling him to order.
"It has been given to you to take part in the sufferings of genius,"
she wrote, "and it is this that has made you capable of pronouncing
a general judgment on our culture and has lent to your works the
marvellous warmth which, I am convinced, will last long after our stars
of petroleum and gas have been extinguished. Perhaps you would not
have penetrated with so sure a look the colour-medley of Appearance if
you had not mingled so deeply in our lives. From this same source has
sprung your irony and humour, and this background of sufferings shared
has given them a far greater power than if they were simply a play of
the intellect."
"Alas!" said Nietzsche to his sister, "see what they think of me at
Bayreuth." On the 22nd of May, the anniversary of Wagner's birthday,
Nietzsche paid him his tribute of homage; Wagner answered him at once,
and asked him to come and spend a few days in "his room." Nietzsche
made some excuse and declined the invitation. A few days later he wrote
to Wagner--his letters have been lost or destroyed. He received the
following answer:
"DEAR FRIEND,--Why do you not come to see us?
"Do not isolate yourself so, or I shall be able to do nothing for you.
"Your room is ready.
"I have just received your last letter; I shall say more of it another
time.
"Yours cordially,
"R. W.
"WAHNFRIED, _the 9th June,_ 1874."
It is probable that Wagner liked Nietzsche as far as he was capable
of liking any man. From among all the admirers and too submissive
disciples who surrounded him he distinguished this zealous young man,
eager to give himself, eager for freedom. He was often impatient and
forgave quickly. He guessed, though he did not precisely understand,
that crises of tragedy shook this troubled life: so he wrote kindly.
But Nietzsche only suffered the more: he felt more keenly the value of
what he was going to lose. His courage failed him, and for the second
time he refused the master's invitation. An echo reached him of the
irritation caused at Bayreuth.
To a friend he wrote: "I hear that they are again worried about me
there, and that they consider me unsociable and ill-humoured as a sick
dog. Really, it is not my fault if there are some people whom I prefer
seeing at a distance to near at hand."
The faithful Gersdorff--faithful to both parties, master and
disciple--wrote to Nietzsche begging and pressing him to come;
Nietzsche resisted his insistence and revolted at it.
"DEAR FRIEND,--Where did you get this strange idea of compelling me by
a threat to spend a few days this summer at Bayreuth? We know, both of
us, that Wagner is naturally disposed to distrust, but I do not think
it wise to kindle this distrust further; besides, consider that I have
duties towards myself, and that they are difficult to discharge with my
health shattered as it is. Really, it is not right for any one to lay
constraint of any kind on me."
These revolts were only momentary. Nietzsche had not the strength to
break with Wagner. He longed with his whole being to preserve the
friendship. Certainly he had refused to go to Bayreuth. But he had
given excuses. He had asked for time, given urgent work as a pretext;
he had made arrangements for the future. And towards the end of July,
receiving a new invitation, tired at last of denying himself, he set
out.
Meanwhile a curious idea had occurred to him.
Did he merely wish to affirm his independence? or did he wish to
_correct_ Wagner? It may be that he conceived the fantastic dream of
influencing his master, purifying him, lifting him up to the height
of the devotion which he inspired. He took a score of Brahms, whom he
admired, and whom Wagner pursued with a jealousy that was comic at
times, slipped it in his trunk, and, early in the first evening, put
it well in view on the piano. It was bound in the most beautiful red.
Wagner perceived it, and, without doubt, understood; he had the sense
to say nothing. Next day, however, Nietzsche repeated the manœuvre.
Then the great man exploded; he screamed, raged, and foamed; then
dashed off, banging the doors behind him. He met Nietzsche's sister,
who had come with her brother, and, suddenly laughing at himself, gaily
related the anecdote.
"Your brother had again thrust that red score on the piano, and the
first thing I see on entering the room is it! Then I fell into a fury,
like a bull before a red rag. Nietzsche, as I knew well, wanted me
to understand that that man, too, had composed beautiful music. I
exploded--what is called exploding!"
And Wagner laughed noisily. The bewildered Fräulein Nietzsche sent for
her brother.
"Friedrich, what have you done? What has happened?"
"Ah! Lisbeth. Wagner has not been great...." Wagner had laughed; he was
appeased. That same evening, he made friends again with the _enfant
terrible._ But Nietzsche, as he shook hands with the master, allowed
himself no illusion: the gulf between them was deeper, the definitive
separation more menacing.
He left Bayreuth. His health, tolerable in the month of August, was
bad in September; well or ill, he worked, correcting the proofs of his
_Schopenhauer,_ which he published in October.
"You will know enough from my book," he wrote to Fräulein von
Meysenbug, "of the ordeals of my year, ordeals in reality more cruel
and more serious even, than you will be able to guess in reading me.
Still, _in summa,_ all's well, my life is bereft of sunshine, but
_I advance,_ and that is assuredly a great happiness, to advance in
one's duty.... At the moment, I want to make myself clear as regards
the system of antagonistic forces on which our 'modern world' rests.
Happily I have neither political nor social ambitions. No danger
menaces me, no considerations hinder me, nor am I inclined or forced
to compromise. In short, I have a free field, and I will know one day
in what degree our contemporaries, proud as they are of their liberty
of thought, tolerate free thoughts.... What will be my ardour when
at last I shall have thrown off all that mixes in me of negation and
refractoriness! And yet, I dare to hope that in about five years this
magnificent aim will be ready to be achieved."
It was a hope well charged with shadows. Friedrich Nietzsche, greedy to
possess, longing to act, had to look forward to five years of waiting,
of arid work, of criticism. "Thirty years," he put down in a note-book.
"Life becomes a difficult affair. I see no motive to be gay; but there
ought always to be a motive to be gay."
He returned to Basle and recommenced his course. This duty, which had
always been a burden, became heavier still: he was entrusted with the
charge of a Greek class for quite young men. He was conscious of the
value of his time, and knew that every hour given to the University
added to the delay, already so long, of the five years. He suffered
from each of them as from a remorse, as though he were failing in his
duty as a man of letters.
"I have before me work enough for fifty years," he wrote to his mother
in autumn, "and I must mark time under the yoke, and it is with
difficulty that I can throw a look to right or left. Alas! (a sigh).
The winter has quickly come, very quickly, a very hard one. It will
probably be cold at Christmas. Would I bother you if I went to see you?
I delight so much in the thought of being once more with you, free for
ten days of this cursed University work. So prepare me for Christmas a
little corner in the country, where I might end my life in peace and
write beautiful books.
"Alas! (a sigh)."
In these moments of depression he was always seized by memories of
Wagner, and of the almost serene existence that he had tasted in his
intimacy. The glory of the master, a moment faded, went on increasing;
the public bowed before success, and Nietzsche, who had fought in the
difficult times, had now to stand aside in the hour of triumph. The
idea that the art of Wagner was within his reach, always offering
the miracle of its "fifteen enchanted worlds "; the idea that Wagner
himself was there, offering himself also, ever genial, abundant,
laughing, tender, sublime, caressing, and like a god creating life
around him: the idea that he had possessed so much beauty, and that,
with a little cowardice, he could possess it again, and that never,
never again would he possess it; this was an everlasting sadness to
Nietzsche.
Finally, giving way to his need of an outlet, he wrote to the one
comforter, to Wagner. Like all his other letters to Wagner, this letter
is lost, or destroyed; but the tone of the letter which we are about to
quote, the tone of Wagner's reply, helps us to imagine its eloquence.
Wagner answered:
"DEAR FRIEND,--Your letter has again made us most anxious on your
account. Presently, my wife will write more fully than I. But I have
just a quarter of an hour's rest, and I want--to your great annoyance
possibly--to devote it to posting you up in what we say of you here.
It seems to me, amongst other things, that never have I had in my life
such intellectual society as you get in Basle, to amuse you in the
evenings. However, if you are all hypochondriacs, it is not a great
benefit, I admit. It is, I think, women that you need, you young men
of to-day. There is a difficulty, as I well know: as my friend Sulzer
used to say, 'Where take women without stealing them?' Besides, one
could steal at a pinch. I mean to say you ought to marry, or compose an
opera; one would be as good, or as bad, as the other. All the same, I
hold that marriage is the better.
"In the meanwhile, I could recommend you a palliative, but you always
settle your _régime_ in advance, so that one can say nothing to you.
For example: our household here is so organised that we have a place
such as was never offered me in the most difficult moments of my life,
here for you: you should come and spend all the summer holidays;--but
very prudently, you announced to us, at the beginning of winter, that
you had resolved to pass the summer holidays on a very high and very
solitary mountain in Switzerland! Does that not look like very careful
guarding against a possible invitation? We could be useful to you in
some directions: why do you despise that which is offered you in such
good part? Gersdorff and all the society of Basle would be happy here:
a thousand things are to be seen: I pass in review all my singers of
the _Nibelungen;_ the decorator decorates, the machinist machines; and
then we are there, in flesh and blood.
"But one knows the eccentricities of friend Nietzsche!
"So I shall say no more about you, because it serves no purpose.
"Ah! _mon Dieu!_ marry a rich woman! O, why should Gersdorff happen to
be of the masculine sex! Marry, and then travel, and enrich yourself
with those magnificent impressions which you desire so much! And then
... you will compose an opera which, surely, will be terribly difficult
to execute. What Satan was it that made a pedagogue of you?
"Now, to end up: next year, in the summer, complete rehearsals (perhaps
with orchestra) at Bayreuth. In 1876, the representations. Impossible
earlier.
"I bathe every day, I could no longer endure my stomach. Bathe you too!
And eat meat like me. "With all my heart,
"Your devoted,
"R. W."
Wagner had foreseen that his letter would be useless. He had not
foreseen that it would be hurtful. Nietzsche repented that he had drawn
forth these tender offers, which he could not accept. In writing,
he had been weak; he was ashamed. Finally, the announcement and the
approach of the Bayreuth rehearsals overwhelmed him. Should he go?
Should he not go? If he did not go, how was he to excuse himself? Could
he still hide his thoughts? Should he henceforth acknowledge all?
He had commenced a fourth "Unseasonable Thought," _We other
Philologists;_ he abandoned it, alleging, to explain this abandonment,
weariness and the weight of his University duties. When he speaks thus,
Nietzsche deceives either himself or us. Christmas came, and he went
to spend ten days at Naumburg with his mother. He was at liberty and
could work. But instead of writing, he composed and copied out his
_Hymn to Friendship_ for four voices. He spent Saint Sylvester's day in
re-reading his youthful compositions: this examination interested him.
"I have always seen admiringly," he wrote to Fräulein von Meysenbug,
"how the invariability of character manifests itself in music. What a
child expresses musically is in so clear a manner the language of his
most essential nature that the man afterwards desires to revise nothing
in it."
This musical debauch was a bad sign of his condition, a sign of
weakness and of fear before his thoughts. Two letters, one from
Gersdorff, the other from Cosima Wagner, came to disturb his solitary
commemoration. His friends spoke to him of Bayreuth. The reminder
plunged him in despair.
"Yesterday," he wrote to Fräulein von Meysenbug, "on the first day
of the year, I saw the future with a real fear. It is terrible and
dangerous to live--I should envy him who came by death in an honest
manner. For the rest, I am resolved to live to an old age. I have my
work. But it is not the satisfaction of living that will help me to
grow old. You understand this resolution."
During January and February, 1875, Nietzsche did not work. He let
depression get the better of him. "At very rare moments," he writes,
"ten minutes every fortnight, I compose a _Hymn to Solitude._ I will
show it in all its dreadful beauty."
In March, Gersdorff came to sojourn in Basle. Nietzsche, encouraged by
his arrival, dictated some notes to him. He seemed to have escaped
from his melancholy; then once more he was plunged into it by a fresh
sorrow.
It had become his habit, a kindly habit and one conformable to his
tastes, to live in common with his two colleagues, Overbeck and
Romundt, who formed the intellectual society of which Wagner spoke with
such esteem. Now, in February, 1875, Romundt announced to Overbeck and
to Nietzsche that he was obliged to leave them to enter into Orders.
Nietzsche experienced a feeling of stupefied indignation: for many
months he had lived with this man, he called him his friend. Yet he
had had no suspicion of the secret vocation now suddenly declared.
Romundt had not been open with him. Subjugated by religious faith, he
had lacked in simple good faith, and the duties of friendship of which
Nietzsche had such an exalted ideal. Romundt's treachery reminded him
of another treachery and made it easier for him to understand the news
which was rumoured among Wagnerians: the master was about to compose
a Christian Mystery--a _Parsifal._ Nothing was so displeasing to
Friedrich Nietzsche as a return to Christianity: nothing seemed to him
more weak or cowardly than such a capitulation to the problems of life.
Some years before, he had known and admired the different projects on
which Wagner conversed with his intimates: he then spoke of Luther,
of the Great Frederick; he wished to glorify a German hero and repeat
the happy experiment of _Die Meistersinger._ Why had he abandoned his
projects? Why did he prefer Parsifal to Luther? and to the rude and
singing life of the German Renaissance, the religiosity of the Graal?
Friedrich Nietzsche then understood and measured the perils of the
pessimism which accustoms souls to complaint, weakens and predisposes
them to mystical consolations. He reproached himself for having taught
Romundt a doctrine too cruel for his courage, and thus to have been the
cause of his weakness.
"Ah! our Protestant atmosphere, good and pure as it is!" he wrote
to Rohde; "I have never felt so strongly how well I am filled with
the spirit of Luther. And the unlucky man turns his back on so many
liberating geniuses! I ask myself if he is in his senses, and if it
would not be better to treat him with cold water and douches; so
incomprehensible is it to me, that such a spectre should rise up by me,
and take possession of a man for eight years my comrade. And to crown
all it is on me that the responsibility of this base conversion rests.
God knows, no egoistic thought induces me to speak thus. But I believe
too that I represent a sacred thing, and I should be bitterly ashamed
if I merited the reproach of having the slightest connection with this
Catholicism which I detest thoroughly."
He wished to bring back, to convince his friend, but no discussion was
possible. Romundt did not answer and held to his resolve. He left on
the fixed date. Nietzsche wrote to Gersdorff, and related the story of
this departure.
"It was horribly sad: Romundt knew, repeated endlessly that
henceforward he had lived the better and the happier part of his life.
He wept a great deal and asked our forgiveness. He could not hide
his misery. At the last moment I was seized with a veritable terror;
the porters were shutting the carriage doors, and Romundt, wishing
to continue speaking to us, wanted to let down the window, but it
stuck; he redoubled his efforts, and while he tormented himself thus,
hopelessly trying to make himself heard, the train went out slowly, and
we were reduced to making signs to each other. The awful symbolism of
the whole scene upset me terribly, and Overbeck as much as it did me
(he confessed as much to me later): it was hardly endurable; I stayed
in bed the next day with a bad headache that lasted thirty hours, and
much vomiting of bile."
This day of illness marked the beginning of a very long attack.
Nietzsche was obliged to leave Basle and to repose in the solitude
of the mountains and woods. "I wander always alone," he writes,
"clearing up many thoughts." What were these thoughts? We can ascertain
them. "Send me a comforting message," he wrote to Rohde: "that your
friendship may help me better to support this terrible affair. It is in
my sentiment of friendship that I am hurt. I hate more than ever that
insincere and hypocritical way of being a man of many friendships, and
I will have to be more circumspect in the future."
Fräulein Nietzsche, who had passed the month of March at Bayreuth with
the Wagners, came back to her brother, whose condition alarmed her. He
seemed obsessed by the memory of Romundt. "That such a misadventure
should occur between friends living under the same roof," he was
constantly saying. "It is appalling." In reality he was thinking of
the other friend, Richard Wagner, of the master he was losing. "What
a peril I have run," he said to himself. "I admired, I was happy, I
delivered myself over to and followed an illusion, but all illusions
are connected, and accomplices. Wagnerism borders upon Christianity."
Tirelessly he listened to his sister's accounts of the marvels of
Bayreuth, of the activity, the enthusiasm, the joy of all. Walking one
day with him in a public garden, she related for the tenth time this
same story: she noticed that her brother was listening to her with a
strange emotion. She interrogated him, plied him with questions, and
then the secret which he had kept for a year escaped him in a long,
eloquent plaint. He was suddenly silent. He remarked that a wayfarer
was following and spying on him. He dragged his sister precipitately
away, terrified by the idea that his words would be repeated at
Bayreuth. A few days later, having recognised again the too curious
wayfarer, he was able to learn his name: it was Ivan Turgenieff.
July, 1875, the month fixed for the rehearsals of the Tetralogy,
approached, and these rehearsals were the sole preoccupation of
Nietzsche's friends, the sole subject of their letters and their
conversations. He continued to dissemble and dared not decide the
question which was becoming urgent: Should he go to their rehearsals
or not? His enervation increased day by day, bringing on the ordinary
troubles; headaches, insomnia, sickness, internal cramp: finally his
health served for an excuse. "As you are going to Bayreuth," he wrote
to Gersdorff, "warn them that they will not see me. Wagner will be
greatly provoked, I am not less."
About the beginning of July, when his friends were hurrying towards
Bayreuth and the University of Basle had closed its doors, he retired
to the little therapeutic station which his doctor had recommended,
Steinabad, a spot lost in a valley of the Black Forest.
Friedrich Nietzsche had the faculty of occasionally rising above his
own sorrows and his own joys. He knew how to enjoy the spectacle of his
crises as though they were the intermingled voices of a symphony. Then
he ceased to suffer, and contemplated with a sort of mystical rapture
the tragic development of his existence. Such was his life during the
few weeks of his cure at Steinabad. It brought him nevertheless no
motive of happiness. His illness resisted remedies, and the doctors
let him guess, as at the origin of all these attacks, an identical,
indiscernible, and mysterious cause. He did not forget the nature of
the illness that had killed his father at thirty-six years of age. He
took the hint and felt the danger: but he even brought this menace into
the spectacle of his life and considered it bravely.
Steinabad is near Bayreuth; Nietzsche was once more tempted. Would
he go, or would he stay? This indecision was enough, he broke down
utterly. Towards the end of July, a terrible attack which kept him
two days in bed did away with these doubts. On the first of August he
wrote to Rohde: "To-day, dear friend, if I am not mistaken, you are all
meeting at Bayreuth. And I am not among you. In vain have I obstinately
believed that I could all of a sudden emerge in your society and enjoy
my friends. In vain; to-day, my cure being half completed, I say it
with certainty...."
The attack lost its force; he was able to get up and walk in the woods.
He had brought a _Don Quixote_ with him: he read this book, "the
bitterest of all," with its derision of every noble effort.
Still, he kept up his courage. He recalled without too poignant a
sorrow his past that had been filled with joy. He faced without fear
the menacing future; he thought of that grand work on Hellenism, an
old, unabandoned dream; he thought of the interrupted succession of
the "Thoughts out of Season;" and above all he delighted in conceiving
the beautiful book he would write when he was sure of himself. "To
this work," he thought, "I must sacrifice everything. For some years
I have been writing a great deal, I have written too much; I have
often made mistakes. Now I must keep silence and devote myself to many
years' work; seven, eight years. Shall I live as long? In eight years
I shall be forty. My father died four years earlier. Never mind, I
must accept the risk and peril. The time of silence has returned for
me. I have greatly slandered the modern men, yet I am one of them. I
suffer with them, and like them, because of the excess and the disorder
of my desires. As I shall have to be their master, I must first gain
the mastery of myself and repress my trouble. That I may dominate my
instincts, I must know them and judge them; I must restrict myself and
analyse. I have criticised science, I have exalted inspiration, but I
have not analysed the sources of inspiration; and to what unfathomable
depths have I not followed it! My youth was my excuse, I needed
intoxication. Now my youth is over. Rohde, Gersdorff, Overbeck, are at
Bayreuth: I envy, yet pity them. They have passed the age of dreams,
they ought not to be there. What task am I going to undertake? I will
study natural sciences, mathematics, physics, chemistry, history, and
political economy. I will accumulate an immense equipment for the
knowledge of men. I will read ancient history books, novels, letters.
The work will be hard, but I shall have Plato, Aristotle, Goethe, and
Schopenhauer constantly by me; thanks to my well loved geniuses my pain
will be less painful, my solitude less solitary."
Friedrich Nietzsche's thoughts were almost every day diverted by a
letter from Bayreuth. He received and read it without bitterness. In a
few notes written for himself alone, he fixed the memory of the joys
he owed to Wagner. Then answering his friends: "I am with you in the
spirit during three-quarters of my days," he told them; "I roam like a
shadow around Bayreuth. Do not fear to excite my envy, tell me all the
news, dear friends. During my walks I conduct entire pieces of music
that I know by heart, and then I grumble and rage. Salute Wagner in my
name, salute him deeply! Good-by, my well loved friends, this is for
all of you. I love you with all my heart."
Friedrich Nietzsche came back to Basle somewhat the better for his
cure. His sister joined him and wished to stay with him. He continued
to lead the wholly meditative and almost happy existence of Steinabad,
with his papers, his books, and his piano.
"_I dream,_" he wrote (he underlines these words), "_I dream of an
association of unrestricted men, who know no circumspection and wish
to be called the 'destroyers'; they apply to everything the measure
of their criticism, and sacrifice themselves to the truth. Everything
that is suspect and false must be brought to light. We do not wish to
construct prematurely, we do not know if we can construct, and whether
it may not be better to construct nothing. There are cowardly and
resigned pessimists; of these we do not wish to be._"
He commenced the long studies which he had assigned himself. He
examined firstly Dühring's book, _The Value of Life._ Dühring was a
Positivist who led the combat against the disciples of Schopenhauer and
Wagner. "All idealism deceives," he told them, "all life that seeks to
escape beyond life vows itself to chimera." Friedrich Nietzsche had no
objection to offer to these premises. "A sane life carries its worth in
itself," said Dühring. "Asceticism is unhealthy and the sequel of an
error." "No," answered Nietzsche. Asceticism is an instinct which the
most noble, the strongest among men have felt: it is a fact, it must
be taken into account if the value of life is to be appreciated. And
even if a prodigious error be here indicated as being at work, then
the possibility of such an error should be placed amongst the sombre
features of being.
"The tragedy of life is not irreducible," said Dühring, "the
sovereignty of egoism is only apparent; the altruistic instincts work
in the human soul."
Egoism an appearance! exclaimed Nietzsche. Here Dühring falls into
childishness. _Ich wollte er machte mir hier nichts vor!_ God be
praised if it were true! He talks nonsense, and if he seriously
believes what he says, he is ripe for all the socialisms. Nietzsche
finally held out as against Dühring for the tragic philosophy that
Heraclitus and Schopenhauer had taught him. There is no possible
evasion, all evasion is a lure and a cowardice. Dühring says it and
he speaks truly; but he attenuates the task in presenting a sweetened
image of that life in which we are set. It is either stupidity or
falsehood: life is hard.
Friedrich Nietzsche was gay, or appeared so. In the evening (he did
not work because of his eyes) his sister read Walter Scott's novels to
him. He liked their simple narration. "The serene art, the andante," he
writes; he also liked the heroic, naïve, and complicated adventures.
"What fellows! what stomachs!" he exclaimed at the recitals of the
interminable feasts; and Fräulein Nietzsche, seeing him so cheerful,
was astonished to hear him a moment later play and develop at great
length his _Hymn to Solitude._
She was astonished not without reason: the gaiety of her brother was
artificial; his sadness was real; he dissembled with her, and doubtless
with himself.
He had begun to study Balfour Stewart's book on the conservation of
energy: he stopped at the first pages. It was odious to him to work
thus without the consolation of art, or the real joy of hoping. He
thought he would be more interested in the Indian wisdom, and took
up the English translation of the _Sutta Nipâta._ Only too well he
understood its radical nihilism.
"When I am ill and in bed," he writes in December to Gersdorff, "I let
myself be oppressed by the persuasion that life is without value, and
all our ends illusory...." His crises were frequent: every fortnight he
was disabled by the headaches, internal cramp, twitching of the eyes,
which laid hold of him.
_"I wander here and there, alone like a rhinoceros,"_ Nietzsche had
kept in mind this final phrase of a chapter of the _Sutta Nipâta,_ and
applied it to himself with melancholy humour. His best friends were
then marrying. Nietzsche was ready to abuse marriage and women: one is
rarely sincere when one speaks thus, and we know he was not.
"I have more and better friends than I deserve," he wrote in October,
1874, to Fräulein von Meysenbug; "what I now wish myself, I tell you
in confidence, is a good wife, and as soon as possible. Then life will
have given me all that I shall have asked of it. The rest is my affair."
Friedrich Nietzsche congratulated the fiancés, Gersdorff, Rohde,
Overbeck, and rejoiced with them, but felt the difference of his own
destiny.
"Be happy," he wrote to Gersdorff, "you who will no longer go wandering
here and there, alone like a rhinoceros."
* * * * *
The year 1876 was about to begin, the representations of the Tetralogy
were announced for the summer. Friedrich Nietzsche knew that his
irresolution must then cease: "I was exhausted," he wrote later, "by
the sadness of an inexorable presentiment--the presentiment that
after this disillusion I should be condemned to mistrust myself more
profoundly, to despise myself more profoundly, to live in a profounder
solitude than before."
The impression of the Christmas and New Year festivals, always strong
in him, aggravated his melancholy. He fell ill in December, only to get
up again in March. He was still weak.
"I find it an effort to write, I shall be brief," he wrote to Gersdorff
the 18th January, 1876; "I have never spent so sad and painful a
Christmas or one of such dreadful foreboding. I have had to give up
doubting. The malady which has attacked me is cerebral; my stomach, my
eyes, give me all this suffering from another cause, whose centre is
elsewhere. My father died at the age of thirty-six of inflammation of
the brain. It is quite possible that things may go even quicker with
me.... I am patient, but full of doubts as to what awaits me. I live
almost entirely on milk. It has a good result; I sleep well. Milk and
sleep are at present my best foods."
At the approach of spring, he wished to leave Basle: Gersdorff offered
to go with him, and the two friends settled on the shores of the Lake
of Geneva, at Chillon. They spent a bad fortnight there. Nietzsche's
nerves were irritated by the least variation of the atmosphere, which
was more or less humid and more or less charged with electricity, and
he suffered from the "föhne," a soft wind which melts the snows in
March. He let the softness and tepidity depress him, and could not
restrain the heartrending expression of his doubts and his agonies.
Gersdorff, obliged to return to Germany, went with an uneasy mind on
his friend's account.
But Nietzsche felt better once he was left alone. Perhaps finer weather
favoured him; perhaps he felt his distress less acutely when the
compassionate Gersdorff was not near by, ever ready to lend an ear to
his complaints. His humours became less bitter, and chance procured him
a decisive relief, a liberating hour. Fräulein von Meysenbug had just
published her _Memoirs of an Idealist._ Nietzsche had put these two
volumes in his bag. Of this woman of fifty he was very fond, and every
day he liked her more. She was always suffering and courageous, always
fine and good. He did not put her on the level of Cosima Wagner. The
superiority of her mind was not dazzling; but she was great-hearted,
and Nietzsche infinitely esteemed this woman who was faithful to the
real genius of women. Doubtless he began reading her book with moderate
expectations: yet the work held him. It is one of the most beautiful
records of the nineteenth century. Fräulein von Meysenbug had gone
all through it: she had known all the worlds, all the heroes, all
the hopes. Born in old Germany with its petty Courts--her father was
Minister in one of them--as a child she had listened to the friends of
Humboldt and Goethe; as a young girl, the humanitarian gospel touched
her: detached from Christianity, she abandoned its observances. Then
came 1848, and its dream; the Socialists, and their essays towards a
more noble, a more brotherly life: she admired them, and wanted to
work with them. Blamed by her people, she left them and went alone
without asking help or advice. An idealist of action, not of dreams,
she joined the communists of Hamburg; with them she instituted a sort
of phalanstery, a rationalistic school in which the masters lived
together. This school prospered under her direction; but, threatened by
the police, she had to fly. Next she was in London among its proscripts
of all the races, that mournful refuge, and tomb of the vanquished.
Fräulein von Meysenbug earned her living by giving lessons: she knew
Mazzini, Louis Blanc, Herzen: she was the friend and the consoler
of these unhappy men. At the time of the second Empire, of Napoleon
III., of Bismarck, and of the silence of the peoples--in Paris, with
its brilliant culture--Fräulein von Meysenbug met Richard Wagner. She
had long admired his music: she admired the man, listened to him,
succumbed to his ascendancy, and, renouncing the religion of humanity,
carried her fervour to the cult of art. But always she exercised and
lavished her active goodness: Herzen died; he left two children, whom
Fräulein von Meysenbug adopted, thus taking upon herself the anxiety of
a double maternity. Friedrich Nietzsche had known these young girls
and often admired the tenderness of their friend, her free and sane
self-sacrifice: he had not known of what life of entire devotion this
devotion was the flower.
He was encouraged by this book: Fräulein von Meysenbug reconciled him
to life. Again he found his confidence and health. "My health," he
wrote to Gersdorff, "is allied to my hopes. I am well when I hope."
He left his _pension_ and went to spend some days in Geneva. There he
discovered a friend, the musician Senger; he made the acquaintance
of a few Frenchmen, exiled communards, and liked talking to them.
He esteemed these fanatics with the square skulls, so prompt to
self-sacrifice. It appears that he flirted with two "exquisite"
Russians. Then he returned to Basle, and his first letter was sent to
Fräulein von Meysenbug.
"BASLE, _Good Friday, April_ 14, 1876.
"DEAR FRÄULEIN,--Four days or so back, finding myself alone on the
shores of the Lake of Geneva, I spent a whole Sunday quite near you,
from the earliest hour till the moon-bathed night. I have read you
through and through, with a revived interest at every page, and I
kept on repeating that never had I passed so blessed a Sunday. You
have given me an impression of purity and love which will never leave
me; and Nature, the day on which I read you, seemed to reflect this
impression. You were before me as a superior form of my being, a very
superior form; and which yet did not humiliate but encouraged me: thus
you crossed my thoughts, and, measuring my life with yours, I am more
easily able to feel what I lacked--so much! I thank you much more than
I would do for a book.
"I was ill, I doubted my strength and my aims; I thought I should have
to renounce everything, and my greatest fear was of the length of a
life which can be but an atrocious burden if one renounces the highest
aims. I am now saner and freer, and I can consider without torturing
myself the duties I have to fulfil. How many times I have wished you
near me to ask you some question which only a moral being higher than
myself could answer! Your book gives me answers to such of these
precise questions as touch me. I don't think I can ever be satisfied
with my conduct, if I have not first your approbation. But it is
possible that your book is a severer judge than you would be yourself.
What should a man do, if, in comparing his life to yours, he does not
wish to be taxed with unmanliness? I often ask myself this. He ought to
do everything you have done and no more. But doubtless he could not;
he lacks that sure guide, the instinct of a love that is always ready
to give itself. One of the most elevated of moral themes _[einer der
höchsten Motive]_ that I have discovered, thanks to you, is maternal
love without physical bonds between the mother and the child. It is one
of the most magnificent manifestations of _Caritas._ Give me a little
of that love, dear lady and dear friend, and think of me as one of
those who need to be the son of such a mother. Ah! such a great need!
"We shall have lots of things to say to one another when we meet at
Bayreuth. At present I again have hopes of being able to go, whereas,
these two past months, I had put the very thought away from me. How I
should like to be now the _saner_ of us two, and capable of rendering
you a service!
"Why can't I live near you?
"Adieu; I am and I remain, in all truth, yours,
"FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE."
Fräulein von Meysenbug answered at once. "If my book had only been
worth this joy, your letter to me, I would have been happy to have
written it. If I can help you, I want to do so. Next winter, leave
Basle, you must; look for a milder climate and a brighter one; how I
feel, as you do, the annoyance of our separation. I sheltered this
winter your young Basle pupil, Alfred Brenner, who is still ill; you
shall bring him back to me. I will be able to find the two of you a
health-giving home. Come, promise me." Nietzsche wrote immediately:
"To-day I shall answer you in one word; thank you, I shall come."
Assured henceforth of sanctuary, Friedrich Nietzsche regained
confidence and courage.
"I have recovered my good conscience," he wrote to Gersdorff a few
days after his return; "I know that up to the present I have done
all I could to enfranchise myself, and that in working thus, I have
not worked for myself alone. I want to start off again on this road,
and nothing more will stop me, neither memories, nor despairing
presentiments. This is what I have discovered--the only thing that men
respect and before which they bow, is a noble deed. Compromise, never!
never! Profound success can only be assured by remaining faithful to
oneself. I know already by experience what influence I exercise, and
that if I became weaker or more sceptical, I should impoverish, besides
my own, the hearts of many who develop with me."
He needed a pride of this sort to confront the imminent crisis. The
disciples of the master gave him a dinner, and Nietzsche, who did not
want to be present, had to excuse himself. He wrote an impassioned
letter of which Wagner comprehended perhaps the hidden signification.
"Seven years ago, at Triebschen, I paid you my first visit. And
every year, in this month of May, on this same day upon which we
all celebrate the anniversary of your birth, I myself celebrate the
anniversary of my spiritual birth. For since then, you live and work
in me always like a drop of fresh blood that had as it were entered
into my veins. This element that I owe to you urges me on, humiliates,
encourages and stimulates me. It never allows me to rest, so much
so that I should perhaps bear a grudge against you for this eternal
disquietude if I did not know that it ever drives me on towards a freer
and better state."
Wagner answered him at once in a few exuberant lines. He told of the
toasts drunk to his glory and of his humorous responses, with so many
puns, cock-and-bull stories and impenetrable allusions, that it is
necessary to give up the attempt to translate. Nietzsche was moved by
this letter. At the moment it arrived he was feeling very much the
master of himself, very sure of his future. The history of his past
years suddenly appeared as a grand adventure that was now for ever
closed. He considered it with an indulgent regard, and, measuring the
joys he owed to Wagner, he wished to express his gratitude. The other
summer, at Steinabad, when in a similar state of mind, he had filled
some pages of notes. He took them up again, in spite of a nervous
affection of the eyes which prevented him from working without help,
and undertook to draw from them the substance of a volume. Singular
attempt! Disillusioned, he wrote an enthusiastic book, the most
beautiful in Wagnerian literature. But a forewarned reader recognises
almost from page to page the idea that Nietzsche expresses in masking
it. He writes the eulogy of the poet; of the philosopher he does not
speak; he denies, for him who can understand, the educative bearing of
the work.
"For us," he writes, "Bayreuth signifies the consecration at the moment
of battle.... The mysterious regard that tragedy turns towards us is
not an enervating and paralysing charm, but its influence imposes
repose. For beauty is not given to us for the very moment of battle;
but for those moments of calm which precede and interrupt it, for
those fugitive moments in which, reanimating the past, anticipating
the future, we penetrate all the symbols; for those moments when, with
the impression of a slight weariness, a refreshing dream descends upon
us. The day and the strife are about to begin, the sacred shadows fade
away, and art is once more far from us; but its consolation is still
shed upon man, as a morning dew...."
There exists a radical opposition between these thoughts and those that
inspired _The Birth of Tragedy._ Art is no longer a reason for living,
but a preparation for life, a necessary repose. Three menacing lines
end Nietzsche's little book: "Wagner is not the prophet of the future
as we might fain believe, but the interpreter and the glorifier of a
past." Nietzsche had not been able to keep back these admissions. Brief
and disguised as they were, he had hoped that they might not be heard,
and his hope, it seems, was justified. Wagner wrote as soon as the
pamphlet had appeared:
"FRIEND!--Your book is prodigious!
"Where did you learn to know me so well? Come quickly, and stay here
during rehearsals until the representations.
"Yours,
"R. W.
_" July 12th."_
* * * * *
The rehearsals began in the middle of July, and Nietzsche, who did not
wish to miss one of them, went, in spite of the precarious state of
his health, with an impatience that astonished his sister. Two days
later she received a letter: "I almost regret ever having come; up till
now, everything is wretched.... On Monday I went to the rehearsal; it
displeased me, I was obliged to go out."
What was happening? Fräulein Nietzsche waited with great uneasiness.
She was slightly reassured by a second letter:
"MY DEAR GOOD SISTER,--At present things are better...." But the last
sentence read strangely: "I must live very much to myself, and decline
all invitations, even Wagner's. He finds that I make myself scarce."
Almost immediately came the last letter: "I hope to leave: it is too
senseless to stay here. I await with terror every one of these long
musical evenings. Yet I stay. I can stand it no longer. I shall not be
here even for the first performance; I will go no matter where--but I
want to leave; here everything is unbearable."
What had occurred? Had the mere sight of the world driven him away
so soon? Nietzsche had led a very hard existence, during the past
two years, "the friend of enigmas and problems." He had forgotten
men: he suffered on encountering them again. A Titan, Wagner, held
them captive, protected them against every enigma and too disquieting
"problem"; and in this shadow they seemed satisfied. They never
reflected, but repeated passionately the formulas that had been given
them. Some Hegelians had come: Wagner offered himself to them as a
second incarnation of their master. All the Schopenhauerians were
there; they had been told that Wagner had translated into music the
system of Schopenhauer. A few young people were calling themselves
"idealists," "pure Germans": "My art," declared Wagner, "signifies the
victory of German idealism over Gallic sensualism." All, Hegelians,
Schopenhauerians, pure Germans, agreed in the pride of triumph: they
had _succeeded._ Succeeded! Nietzsche heard this extraordinary word in
silence. What man, he pondered, what race ever did succeed? Not even
the Greek, which was bruised in its most beautiful flights. What effort
had not been in vain? So, taking his eyes off the comedy, Nietzsche
examined Wagner: was this dispenser of joys in the end great enough to
become uneasy in the hour of victory? No; Wagner was happy, because he
had succeeded; and the satisfaction of such a man was more shocking and
sadder still than that of the crowd.
But happiness, however low it be, is still happiness. An exquisite
intoxication had seized the little town of Bayreuth. Nietzsche had
felt and shared this intoxication; he kept the remorse and envy of
it. He listened to a rehearsal: the entrance into the sacred theatre,
the emotion of the public, the presence of Wagner, the darkness,
the marvellous sounds, touched him. How sensible he had remained to
the Wagnerian infection. He got up in haste and went out; it is the
explanation of his letter: "_Yesterday evening, I went to a rehearsal;
it displeased me; I was obliged to go out._"
A new element aggravated his trouble. He was informed definitely of
the significance of the forthcoming work, _Parsifal_. Richard Wagner
was about to declare himself a Christian. Thus, in eighteen months,
Nietzsche observed two conversions: Romundt was weak and perhaps the
victim of chance; but Nietzsche knew that with Wagner everything was
grave, and answered to the necessities of the century. Neo-Christianity
did not yet exist: Nietzsche felt it all through _Parsifal._ He
perceived the danger run by the modern man, so uncertain of himself,
and tempted by this Christian faith, which is so firm a thing, which
calls, which promises and can give peace. If he did not redouble his
efforts to discover in himself a new "possibility of life," it was
certain that he would fall back into a Christianity, cowardly like
his inspiration. Then Nietzsche saw these men, whose happiness he had
instinctively despised, menaced by a final collapse, and led gently,
and as if by the hand, towards this collapse by the master, by the
impostor who had subjugated them. Not one of them knew whither this
powerful hand might not soon lead them, scarcely one of them was a
Christian, but they were all on the eve of becoming Christians. How far
away was that May day of 1872 in which Richard Wagner conducted, in
this same Bayreuth, Schiller and Beethoven's ode to liberty and joy!
Friedrich Nietzsche saw clearly for them all: the spectacle of these
unconscious lives made him feel desperate, as the sight of the world in
the Middle Ages had made those mystics desperate, who had always before
their eyes the accusing and bleeding image of the Christ. He would have
liked to have torn these people from their torpor, to have warned them
by a word, prevented them with a cry. "I ought to," he thought, "as I
alone understand what is happening...." But who would have listened to
him? He held his peace, he dissembled his dreadful impressions, and
wished to observe without weakness or desertion the tragic solemnities.
But he could not. Soon he weakened and had to fly. "_I should be insane
to stay here. I await with terror each of these long musical evenings,
and yet I stay. I can bear no more.... I shall go, no matter where, but
I will go: here everything is torture to me...._"
* * * * *
The heights which separate Bohemia from Franconia rise some miles from
Bayreuth, and the village of Klingenbrunn, where Nietzsche retired,
is situated in the forests which cover them. The crisis was brief
and less severe than he had dreaded. Now that he had perceived in a
clearer manner the dangers of the Wagnerian art, he saw the remedy
more plainly. "Religiosity," he wrote, "when it is not upheld by a
clear thought, rouses disgust." He renewed his Steinabad meditations
and re-affirmed the resolutions then made. He would make a clean sweep
of the past; resist the seductions of metaphysics; deprive himself of
art; reserve judgment; like Descartes, begin by doubting. Then, if some
new security could be discovered, he would raise the new grandeur on
immovable foundations.
He wandered up and down the silent forests; their severe peace was a
discipline: "If we do not give firm and serene horizons to our souls
like those of the woods and mountains," he wrote, "then our inner life
will lose all serenity. It will be broken up like that of the men of
towns; it will not know happiness and will not be able to give it."
Then, all of a sudden he released the cry of his sick soul: "I shall
give back to men," said he, "the serenity which is the condition of all
culture. And the simplicity. _Serenity, Simplicity, Greatness!_"
Nietzsche, once more master of himself, returned to Bayreuth without
delay: he wished to complete his experience. The excitement of the
crowd was even greater than on the day of his departure. The old
Emperor William was present, on his way to the grand manœuvres. He
had paid Wagner the compliment of being present on two evenings. From
all Bavaria and Franconia, citizens and peasants had hurried hither
to salute their Emperor, and there was almost a famine in the little
invaded town.
The performances began; Nietzsche heard them all. He listened in
silence to the observations of the faithful and measured the abyss
which he had so long skirted. He continued to see his friends: Fräulein
von Meysenbug, Miss Zimmern, Gabriel Monod, E. Schuré, Alfred Brenner,
who did not fail to notice in him a reserve and a silence singular
at times. Often he went off alone, during the intervals or in the
afternoons, with a pleasant and charming spectator, Madame O----, who
was slightly Parisian, slightly Russian. He liked the delicate and
surprising conversation of women, and he excused this one for being a
Wagnerian.
M. Schuré, who met Nietzsche at these festivals, gives a description
of him which merits repetition. "As I talked to him I was struck by
the superiority of his mind and the strangeness of his physiognomy. A
large forehead; short hair brushed up off his forehead; the projecting
cheekbones of the Slav. The strong drooping moustache, the sharp cut
of the face, would have given him the air of a cavalry officer, had
it not been for an indescribable something in his address that was at
the same time timid and haughty. The musical voice, the slow speech,
denoted the organism of the artist; the prudent and meditative bearing
was a philosopher's. Nothing was more deceiving than the apparent calm
of his expression. The fixed glance betrayed the melancholy labour of
his thought. It was the glance of a fanatic, of a keen observer, and
of a visionary. This double character added a disturbed and disturbing
element, the more so because it always seemed riveted upon one point.
In his effusive moments this look was moistened with the softness
of a dream, but very soon it became hostile again.... During the
general rehearsals, and the first three performances of the Tetralogy,
Nietzsche appeared to be sad and dejected...."
Each evening was a triumph, and each of them added to Nietzsche's
distress. The _Rhinegold,_ the _Valkyrie_--these old pieces recalled
his youth, his enthusiasms for Wagner, whom he did not know, whom he
did not dare hope to know. _Siegfried:_ souvenirs of Triebschen;
Wagner was completing this score when Nietzsche entered into his
intimacy.
Siegfried was Nietzsche's favourite among the Wagnerian heroes. He
found himself again in this young man, who had never known fear. "We
are the knights of the spirit," he had then written in his notes, "we
understand the song of the birds and follow them." No doubt he was
almost happy when he heard _Siegfried;_ it was the only one of Wagner's
dramas which he could listen to without remorse. Lastly, _The Twilight
of the Gods._ Siegfried has mixed in the crowd of men; they deceive
him; one evening he naïvely relates his life; a traitor strikes him
from behind and kills him. The giants are annihilated, the dwarfs
vanquished, the heroes powerless; the gods abdicate; the gold is given
back to the depths of the Rhine, whose surging waters cover over the
world, and as they await death, men contemplate the universal disaster.
It was the end. The curtain fell slowly, the symphony was extinguished
in the night, and the spectators rose suddenly, with one accord, and
gave vent to a loud burst of cheering. Then the curtain rose once more
and Richard Wagner appeared, alone, dressed in a redingote and cloth
trousers, holding his little figure erect. With a sign he called for
silence; every murmur ceased.
"We have shown you what we wished to show you," he cried, "and what we
can show you when all wills are directed to one object; if on your side
you support us, then you will have an art."
He retired, then returned; again and again he was recalled. Nietzsche
watched his master standing in the limelight, and he alone in the hall
did not applaud.
"There he is," he thought, "_my ally._.. the Homer who has been
fertilised by Plato...."
The curtain fell for the last time, and Nietzsche, silent, lost in the
crowd, followed his tide like a wreck.
[1]
"Ein Zwillingspaar von einem Haus,
Gieng muthig in die Welt hinaus,
Welt--Drachen zu zerreissen.
Zwi'r Väter--Werk! Ein Wunder war's!
Die Mutter doch des Zwillingpaars
Freundschaft ist sie geheissen."
[2] _Mahnruf._