THE FINAL SOLITUDE
I
_Beyond Good and Evil_
The lyrical work was abandoned. At moments Friedrich Nietzsche was
to regret and wish to resume it; but these were brief velleities.
"Henceforth," he wrote (this time the assurance is exact), "I shall
speak, and not Zarathustra."
The work remained in an incomplete condition. Nietzsche knew it, and
the mass of thoughts which he had not expressed saddened him like a
remorse. He was about to attempt another test. It was without joy that
he returned to philosophy and strove to express in abstract terms what,
as poet, he had failed to utter. He opened new notebooks, he essayed
titles: _The Will to Power, a new interpretation of Nature ... The Will
to Power, an essay towards a new interpretation of the universe ..._.
These formulas, the first that he had found, were to stand. Nietzsche
resumed and developed here the Schopenhauerian datum. The foundation of
things, he thinks, is not a blind _will to live;_ to live is to expand,
it is to grow, to conquer: the foundation of things may be better
defined as a blind _will to power,_ and all the phenomena that arise in
the human soul may be interpreted as a function of this will.
It was an immense work of prudent reflection which Nietzsche envisaged
with fear. How should one discern in the soul of men what is power and
what is, without doubt, weakness? Perhaps the anger of Alexander is
weakness, and the mystic's exaltation power. Nietzsche had hoped that
disciples, philosophers or physiologists, would have made the necessary
analyses for him. Heinrich von Stein's help would have been precious.
But, being alone, he had to assume every task. He grew sad. Denuded
of lyricism, thought had no attraction for him. What does he love?
Instinctive strength, finesse, grace, ordered and rhythmical sounds--he
loves Venice and dreams of the fine weather which will allow him to fly
from this Nice pension where the food and the company are so bad. On
the 30th of March he writes to Peter Gast:
"DEAR FRIEND,--It seldom happens that I consider a removal with
pleasure. Bat on this occasion:--when I think that I shall soon be at
Venice, and near you, I grow animated, am ravished; it is like the hope
of cure after a long and terrible sickness. I have made this discovery:
Venice remains till to-day the only place which is always sweet and
good to me.... Sils-Maria as a place of passage suits me very well; but
not as a residence. Ah! if I could contrive to live there worthily as a
hermit or solitary! But--Sils-Maria becomes fashionable!
"My dear friend and maestro, you and Venice are linked for me. Nothing
gives me more pleasure than your persistent taste for this town. How
much I have thought of you in these times! I was reading the memoirs
of old De Brossé (1739-40) on Venice and on the maestro who was then
admired there, Hasse (il detto Sassonne). Do not get angry, I haven't
the least intention of making disrespectful comparisons between you.
"I have just written to Malvida: thanks to Peter Gast, our friends the
low comedians, the self-styled geniuses of music, gone hence very soon,
will cease to corrupt taste. 'Gone hence very soon'--is, perhaps, a
gross exaggeration. In a _democratic_ period few men discern beauty:
_pulchrum paucorum est hominum,_ I rejoice that for you I am one of
these 'few.' The profound and joyous men who please me, _avec des
ames mélancoliques et folles_[1] like my defunct friends Stendhal and
the Abbé Galiani, could not have stayed on the earth if they had not
loved some musician of joy (Galiani without Puccini, Stendhal without
Cimarosa and Mozart).
"Ah, if you knew how alone I am in the world at present! and how I must
play a comedy to prevent myself from spitting, now and again, in some
one's face, out of satiety. Happily some of the courteous manners of my
son Zarathustra exist also in his rather crazed father.
"But when I shall be with you, and in Venice, then, for a time, there
will be an end of 'courtesy' and 'comedy' and 'satiety' and of all the
malediction of Nice, won't there, my good friend?
"Not to be forgotten: we shall eat _baïcoli_!
"Cordially,
"F. N."
In April and May Nietzsche sojourned at Venice, and found the joy
for which he had hoped. He wandered through the little sheltered and
murmurous streets, he contemplated the beautiful town. He listened to
the music of his friend. The galleries of St. Mark's Square shaded
his walks and he compared them to those porticoes of Ephesus whither
Heraclitus went to forget the agitation of the Greeks and the sombre
menace of the Persian Empire. "How easily," he thinks, "one here
forgets the sombre Empire--our own; let us not defame our Europe;
she still offers us beautiful refuges! It is my finest workroom,
this Piazza San Marco...." This shortlived happiness awoke the
poetic impulse in him. He wished to chant the triumph and death of
Zarathustra, now for some hours drawn from oblivion. He wrote out a
sketch, but soon abandoned it; it was his last.
June brought him back to the Engadine. The chances of hotel life
procured him a secretary; a certain Madame Röder, otherwise unknown,
offered to help him. He dictated and tried to grasp his problem more
closely. What was his end? To criticise that multitude of moral
judgments, prejudices and routines which fetter modern Europeans; to
appraise their vital value, that is to say, the quantity of energy
which they express, and thus to fix a hierarchy of virtues. He wished
finally to realise the _Umwerthung aller Werthe_ (he found this
formula), "the transvaluation of all values." "All," he writes; his
pride was not content with less. He then recognised, and succeeded in
defining, certain modes of virtue which the professional moralists
knew not how to observe: mastery over oneself, dissimulation of one's
intimate sentiments, politeness, gaiety, exactitude in obedience and
command, deference, exigence of respect, taste for responsibilities and
for dangers. Such were the usages, the tendencies, to-day depreciated,
of the old aristocratic life, the sources of a morality more virile
than our own.
It is probable that he then undertook some serious enough readings. He
studied the _Biological Problems_ of Rolph, where he could find the
analysis of that vital growth which was the basis of his metaphysic.
Perhaps he then read again some book by Gobineau (he admired the man
and his works); one may hazard this conjecture. But what mattered his
readings? Nietzsche was forty-two years old. He had passed the age of
learning, he had gathered in all his ideas. Reading helped, nourished
his meditations, but never directed them.
The difficulty of his work was great and insomnia overcame him.
Nevertheless he persevered, and denied himself the sad joy of a final
embrace of his sister Lisbeth, who was about to follow her husband to
South America. "You will live down there then," he wrote to her, "and I
here, in a solitude more unattainable than all the Paraguays. My mother
will have to live alone and we must all be courageous. I love you and I
weep.--FRIEDRICH."
A week passed, and he had formed other projects. He was negotiating
with his publisher in regard to the repurchase of his books and their
republication. It was a pretext that he grasped for going to Germany.
"A business matter, which makes my presence of use, comes to the aid of
my desire," he wrote, and set out for Naumburg without delay.
The meeting was a grave one: brother and sister conversed tenderly on
the eve of a separation which they knew to be definitive. Nietzsche
made no secret of the difficulties of his life. "Alone I confront a
tremendous problem," he said; "it is a forest in which I lose myself, a
virgin forest--_Wald und Urwald._ I need help. I need disciples, I need
a master. To obey would be sweet! If I had lost myself on a mountain,
I would obey the man who knew that mountain; sick, I would obey a
doctor; and if I should meet a man capable of enlightening me on moral
ideas, I would listen to him, I would follow him; but I find no one,
no disciples and fewer masters. "... I am alone." His sister repeated
the advice which she had constantly given: that Friedrich should return
to some University; young men had always listened to him, they would
listen to him, they would understand him. "Young men are so stupid!"
answered Nietzsche, "and professors still more stupid! Besides, all the
German Universities repel me; where could I teach?" "In Zürich," his
sister suggested. "There is only one town that I can tolerate, and it
is Venice."
He went to Leipsic to negotiate with his publisher, who received
him without much attention; his books did not sell. He returned to
Naumburg, said a final farewell, and left.
Where was he to find a refuge for the winter? On the last occasion
he had been irritated by the noisy swarms of Nice. He thinks of
Vallombrosa. Lanzky had recommended this beautiful forest in the
Tuscan Apennines, and was waiting for him at Florence. Before leaving
Germany, Nietzsche, passing through Munich, visited a former friend,
the Baron von Seydlitz, who introduced him to his wife and showed him
his Japanese collection. The wife was young and charming, the Japanese
things pleased Nietzsche; he discovered this art, he liked these
stamps, these little gay objects which conformed so little to the sad
modern taste, so very little to the sad taste of the Germans. Seydlitz
understood beautiful things, and knew how to live; Nietzsche envied him
a little. "Perhaps it is time, dear Lisbeth," he wrote to his sister,
"for you to find me a wife. Let us say, still young, pretty, gay; in
short, a courageous little being _à la Irène von Seydlitz_ (we almost
'thee and thou' each other)."
He reached Tuscany. Lanzky received him, accompanied him, and brought
him to the observatory of Arcetri, on the heights of San Miniato,
where lived a man of a rare kind--a reader of his books. Leberecht
Tempel kept on his table, near his bizarre instruments, the works of
Herr Friedrich Nietzsche, many passages of which he knew by heart and
willingly recited. Leberecht Tempel was a singularly noble, sincere,
and disinterested nature. The two men talked for half an hour and, it
seems, understood each other. When Nietzsche left he was deeply moved.
"I wish that this man had never known my books," said he to Lanzky. "He
is too sensible, too good. I shall harm him."
For he knew the terrible consequences of his thoughts and feared for
those who read them suffering similar to his own.
He did not stay in Tuscany: the harsh, cold air which descended from
the mountains upon Florence incommoded him. He was recaptured by
memories of Nice, the town with two hundred and twenty days of full
sunshine--it was from Nice that he wrote to his sister, on the 15th of
November, 1885:
"Do not be astonished, dear sister, if your brother, who has some of
the blood of the mole and of Hamlet in his veins, writes to you not
from Vallombrosa, but from Nice. It has been very precious to me to
experiment almost simultaneously with the air of Leipsic, of Munich,
of Florence, of Genoa, and of Nice. You would never believe how much
Nice has triumphed in this group. I have put up, as last year, at the
Pension de Genève, Petite Rue Saint-Etienne. I find it recarpeted,
refurnished, repainted, become very comely. My neighbour at table is a
bishop, a Monsignor who speaks German. I think of you a great deal. Your
"PRINCE EICHORN."
"Here I am returned to Nice," he wrote in another letter, "that is
to say to reason." His pleasure is such that he observes with some
indulgence the cosmopolitan city, and is amused by it. "My window looks
out on the square of the Phœnicians," he wrote to Peter Gast. "What
a prodigious cosmopolitanism in this alliance of words! Don't you
laugh? And it's true, Phœnicians lived here. I hear sounding in the
air something of the conqueror and the Super-European, a voice which
gives me confidence and says to me: _Here thou art in thy place ..._.
How far one is from Germany here--'_Ausserdeutsch!_' I cannot say it
with force enough."
* * * * *
He returned to his habit of walking in the sun over the white roads
which overlook the waves. The memories of seven years linked his
thought with this sea, these strands, these mountains; his fantasy
awoke, he listened to it and followed it. Not an hour passed vainly;
each one was happy, and left, as the souvenir and witness of the
gladness which it brought, an epigram, a poem in prose, a maxim, some
_lied_ or song.
He defamed the moderns; it was his pleasure, and, as he thought, his
duty as a philosopher, who, speaking for coming times, must contradict
his own period. In the sixteenth century a philosopher did well to
praise obedience and kindliness. In the nineteenth century, in our
Europe impaired by Parisian decadents and Wagnerian Germans, in this
feeble Europe which is ever seeking the co-operation of the masses, the
line of least effort and the least pain, a philosopher had to praise
other virtues. He had to affirm: "That man is great who knows how to
be the most solitary, the most hidden, the most distant; who knows how
to live beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues, powerful in
his will. Greatness is there. And he must urgently ask: Is greatness
possible to-day?"--_Ist Veredlung möglich?_ We never cease to hear this
question which he first put at twenty-six.
He defamed the Germans; this was his other pleasure, a more intimate
and lively one. Germanised Europe had unlearned freedom. She
dissimulated her spites, her immodesties, her cunning. She needed to
recover the spirit of the old world, of those Frenchmen of former times
who lived in so fine a liberty, with so fine a clear-sightedness and
force. "We must _mediterraneanise_ music," wrote he, "and our taste,
our manners also." Across these pages of Nietzsche, it is easy to hear
the counsels of his "defunct friends," Stendhal and the Abbé Galiani.
"Men of profound melancholy," he wrote, "betray themselves when they
are happy: they seize upon their happiness as though they would
strangle it and stifle it out of jealousy.... Alas, they know too well
that happiness flies before them!" December neared its end, and those
festivals, the memories of which moved his faithful heart, approached;
Nietzsche had seen his happiness in flight before him. The pleasure
of lively thoughts, of beautiful images, did not entirely satisfy
him. He was no longer amused by the crowd at Nice, the square of the
Phœnicians diverted him no more. What mattered to him the _Gai
Saber_ and its precepts--sunlight, wind and Provençal song? He was a
German, the son of a pastor, and it was with an oppressed heart that he
watched Christmas and Saint Sylvester's day approach--that venerated
time.
He took a disgust for the poor pension in which he lodged: its
furniture was touched by too many hands, its sitting-room degraded
by being common property. Then the cold weather came. Being poor, he
could not get the warmth he needed; he froze, bitterly regretting the
stoves of Germany. Wretched places where he cannot ever be alone! To
the right, a child is clattering its scales; above, two amateurs are
practising on the trumpet and violin. Friedrich Nietzsche, yielding to
bitterness, wrote to his sister, who was spending a last Christmas at
Naumburg:
"How stupid it is that I have no one here who might laugh with me! If I
were stronger, and if I were richer, I should set up in Japan, to know
a little gaiety. At Venice I am happy because there one can live in the
Japanese manner without too great difficulty. All the rest of Europe
is pessimist and mournful; Wagner's horrible perversion of music is a
particular case of the perversion, of the universal trouble.
"Here is Christmas again, and it is sad to think that I must continue
to live, as I have done for seven years, like a man proscribed, like a
cynical contemner of men. No one bothers about my existence any more;
the Lama has 'better to do,' and in any case enough to _do...._ Isn't
it fine, my Christmas letter? Long live the Lama!
"Your F.
"Why do you not go to Japan? It is the most sensible life, and so gay."
Eight days later he wrote a better letter; perhaps he had reproached
himself for his confession.
"_Chérie,_ the weather is magnificent to-day, and your Fritz must
afresh put on a good face for you, though in these latter times he has
had nights and days that were most melancholy. By chance my Christmas
was a real festival day. At noon, I receive your kind presents; very
quickly I pass round my neck your watch-chain, and slide your pretty
little calendar into my waistcoat pocket. As to the 'money,' if there
was money in the letter (our mother wrote me that there was), it
escaped my fingers. Excuse your blind animal who undid his packet in
the road; something no doubt fell from it, as I opened your letters
very impatiently. Let us hope that a poor old woman, passing there,
found her 'little child Jesus' on the pavement. Then I go on foot to
my peninsula of Saint Jean, I walk a great round along the coast, and
finally install myself not far from the young soldiers who are playing
at skittles. Fresh-blown roses, geraniums in the hedges, everything
green, everything warm: nothing of the north! There, your Fritz drinks
three glasses of a sweet wine of the country, and perhaps gets a trifle
tipsy; at least he begins to talk to the waves, and, when they foam as
they break too strongly against the shore, he says to them, as one does
to fowl: 'Butsch! Butsch! Butsch!' Finally, I re-enter Nice and, in the
evening, dine at my pension in princely style in the glitter of a great
Christmas-tree. Would you believe it, I have found a baker _de luxe_
who knows what 'Quackkuchen' is; he told me that the King of Würtemburg
had ordered some of it, similar to the kind I like, for his birthday. I
remembered this while I was writing _'in princely style.'_ ... In alter
liebe,
"Your F.
"N.B.--I have begun to sleep again (without narcotics)."
In January, February, and March, 1886, his melancholy appeared to
be less acute. He gave a form to his work, to those notes which his
fantasy had dictated to him. For four years he had ceased to publish
his aphorisms, his short essays. The matter with which his notebooks
supplied him was immense. He proposed to extract a volume from it; his
whole task was to arrange and select.
Had he forgotten the systematic work of which he had thought the
previous winter? No, for he always felt the heavy necessity and the
reproach of it. He wished to make peace with his own conscience in
regard to the delay: he needed a little pleasure, the amusement of a
lively book, before commencing the immense work. He found a title,
_Beyond Good and Evil;_ a sub-title, _Prelude to a Philosophy of the
Future._ Thus he announced the more important and always deferred work.
He deceived himself in connecting by an artificial tie his pleasure and
his duty.
* * * * *
Remember how joyously he used to announce the completion of the book;
how communicative he was and how confident! Confidence and joy are
gone. He knows that he will not be read. But his ill-fortune always
exceeds his expectation, and Nietzsche, once again, has not foreseen
the ordeal which he must endure: _Beyond Good and Evil_ finds no
publisher. He negotiates with a house in Leipsic which declines his
proposals. He writes to Berlin without better success. Everywhere his
book is refused. What is he to do with it? He thinks of cutting it up
into pamphlets which will perhaps reach the public more easily. He
writes an experimental preface.
"These pamphlets," he is to say, "form a sequel to the 'Thoughts out of
Season' which I published some ten years ago in the hope of drawing to
me 'my fellows.' I was then young enough to go fishing for associates
with an impatient hope. To-day--after a hundred years: I measure the
time by my measure--I am not yet old enough to have lost all hope and
confidence."
But he soon abandoned this idea too. "There is nothing else for me to
do," he wrote to his sister, "but to tie up my manuscript with a string
and put it in a drawer."
In the spring he stayed at Venice, as his custom was, but did not
meet his friend, who was visiting the German towns in the vain hope
of "placing" his music. Peter Gast had composed an opera, _The Lion
of Venice,_ which was being rejected by one theatre after another.
Nietzsche wrote to comfort and encourage him. Like Nietzsche, Gast was
a German by birth, a Mediterranean in taste. The one lived at Nice, the
other at Venice; they had the same ambition, the same unhappy destiny.
"Come back," he wrote to him, "come back to the solitude in which
we both know how to live, in which we alone know how to live! It is
Wagnerism which bars your road, and it's also that German grossness and
thickness which, since the 'Empire,' goes growing, growing. We must be
circumspect and march under arms, you and I, to prevent ourselves from
being forced to die of silence...."
Friedrich Nietzsche felt his solitude alleviated by this comradeship in
a difficult lot. Peter Gast's distress was similar to his own; he spoke
to him as to a brother. Peter Gast was poor: "Let us share my purse,"
said Nietzsche; "let us share the little that I have." Peter Gast grew
discouraged and lost confidence in himself: Nietzsche knew this agony;
he knew the great necessity of confidence to the man who worked, and
how quickly the contempt of the public must overwhelm him. "Courage,"
he wrote; "do not let yourself be cast down; be sure that I, at least,
believe in you; I need your music; without it I could not live." We
need not doubt that Nietzsche was sincere when he thus expressed
himself. All his power of love and admiration, which was immense, he
brought to bear upon this last companion who remained to him, and his
friendship transfigured the music of Peter Gast.
He was unhappy, even at Venice; the light hurt the delicate nerves of
his eyes. As at Basle in former times, he was obliged to shut himself
up behind closed shutters, and deny himself the pleasure of the fine
Italian days. What refuge could he find? He recalled the vast German
forests, so shady and beneficent to his eyes, and he took to regretting
his country. Though she angered him, though he revolted against her,
he loved Germany; how could he help loving her? Without her divine
music, which had governed the impulses of his first desires, his soul
would have been other; without her tongue, that splendid and difficult
instrument, his thought would have been other. Schopenhauer and Wagner,
two Germans, were his real masters, and remained so (he secretly avowed
it); his true disciples, if ever they were to exist, would be born in
Germany, that cruel Fatherland which he could not abjure.
Thence he received a piece of news which moved him: Rohde was appointed
professor in the University of Leipsic. Nietzsche was happy for his
friend, and congratulated him in exquisite terms. Nevertheless, he
could not prevent himself from sadly drawing a personal moral. "At
present," he wrote to Peter Gast, "the Faculty of Philosophy is half
composed of my 'good friends' (Zarncke, Heinze, Leskien, Windisch,
Rohde, &c.)." Suddenly he wished to depart; he wanted to see his
mother, whom her two children had left; he wished to attend his old
comrade's course; lastly, he wished to confront those famous publishers
who printed twenty thousand volumes a year, and refused his own. He
left Venice and went straight to Leipsic.
He stepped up to Rohde's rooms; the time was badly chosen. He found
a busy and preoccupied man, who received this unexpected visitor,
this too singular personage who had failed in life, with vexation and
constraint. "I saw Nietzsche," Rohde wrote later in a few lines in
which he explained his cold welcome. "All his person was marked with an
indescribable strangeness, and it disquieted me. There was about him
something that I had never known, and of the Nietzsche whom I had known
many features were effaced. He seemed to have come from an uninhabited
land." Nietzsche said: "I would like to hear you speak." Rohde brought
him, and put him to sit among young men who were ignorant of his work
and of his very name. Nietzsche listened, then went away. "I have heard
Rohde at the University," he wrote to his sister briefly. "I can no
longer communicate with any one. Leipsic is, it is clear, no place of
refuge or of repose for me."
He would have fled from Leipsic, as he had fled from Venice and Nice;
but the difficulty of his negotiations obliged him to remain there.
He applied to various publishers, and applied in vain. Finally, his
dignity revolted. He wished his book to appear, and, however heavy the
cost, he resolved to pay out of his own pocket the cost of the printing.
His mother was waiting for him at Naumburg, where since Lisbeth's
departure she lived alone. Nietzsche felt a very lively pity for her;
he knew her to be desolated by the loss of her family, and in despair
over the impieties which he published in his books. "Don't read them,
ignore them," he told her ceaselessly: "it is not for you that I
write." Nevertheless, she could not repress her curiosity, and her
discontent was never appeased. Nietzsche did not wish to leave without
giving her a little happiness. He went to spend a week at home; but he
had not the strength to keep the secret of his vexations to himself;
he bewailed himself, he grew exalted; he saddened the poor woman, whom
finally he left in a more unhappy condition than ever.
Passing through Munich, he called on the Baron and Baroness von
Seydlitz. He wished to snatch a brief repose under the roof of his
amiable host; but Seydlitz was away from home, and his house was shut
up.
Nietzsche, having left this Germany which he was never again to see,
continued on his road towards the Upper Engadine, from which he
always expected some benefit. Here in July he found himself among icy
fogs, and felt the first symptoms of a long crisis of neuralgia and
melancholy.
II
_The Will to Power_
Shall we say that he met friends? Is the word suitable to those vague
figures, to those Russian, English, Jewish, and Swiss women who,
seeing this charming man return each season, did not refuse him their
quick sympathy? We set down their names: Mesdames Röder and Marasoff;
Miss Zimmern and Fräulein von Salis Marschlins (this last a friend of
Fräulein von Meysenbug); others, whose names remain unknown, may be
guessed.
How did they judge him? Carefully he avoided any speech that might have
pained or surprised them. He kept his dangerous thoughts to himself.
So far as they were concerned, he wished to be, and knew how to be, an
amiable companion ... learned, refined, and reserved. Still, whatever
secret he made of his work, his friends did not fail to get an inkling
into the mystery of his reserve. One of them, an Englishwoman in
delicate health, whom he often went to visit and distract, broached the
subject.
"I know, Herr Nietzsche, why you won't let us see your books. If one
were to believe what you say in them, a poor, suffering creature like
myself would have no right to live."
Nietzsche was apologetic, and warded off the accusation as best he
could.
Another, having said to him one day: "I have been told about your
books. You've written in one of them, '_If thou goest among women, do
not forget thy whip._'"
"Dear lady, dear friend," answered Nietzsche, in a pained voice, taking
the hands of her who reproached him in his own; "do not misunderstand
me; it is not thus that I am to be understood."
Did they admire him? To dare to admire an unrecognised author a very
sure judgment is needed; and no doubt they lacked in necessary daring.
They esteemed, they liked their hotel companion, and recognised his
singular genius in conversation; at the _table d'hôte_ they looked
to have the place near his: little enough it seems if one consider
his present fame; then it was a great deal to him. He recovered in
the Engadine, thanks to them, a little of the confidence which was
necessary to his soul and which he had been losing in Germany. During
the summer of 1886, some good musicians passed through Sils. In
Nietzsche they discovered a very rare listener, and they liked to be
heard by him. This courtesy touched him: "I notice," he wrote to Peter
Gast, "that our artists only sing and play for me. I should be greatly
spoilt if this continued."
A certain Oriental story narrates the adventures of a masked sovereign
who travels in his provinces; he is not recognised but divined; an
instinct of respect awakes at his approach. In this mountain hotel,
does not Nietzsche appear as a masked, a half-divined sovereign?
Nevertheless it was but a poor comfort. Could these women lighten a
distress which they could not measure? Nietzsche was traversing that
grave moment of life in which a man, however unwilling to be taught,
must learn at last what his fate with inexorable constancy gives and
refuses him; he had to tear his last hopes from his heart. "I have been
unspeakably sad in these latter days," he wrote to Peter Gast, "and
cares have deprived me of sleep." The information is brief. To his
sister he avows more; he addresses to her pages upon pages that are
terrible in their power and monotony.
"Where are they, those old friends, with whom I formerly felt so
closely bound? We inhabit different worlds, we no longer speak the
same tongue! As a stranger, a proscribed man, I wander among them;
never a word, never a look now reaches me. I hold my peace--for none
understands my speech--ah, I can say it, they have never understood
me! ... It is terrible to be condemned to silence, when one has so
many things to say. Am I created for solitude, never to find any
one with whom I may make myself understood? Incommunicability is in
truth the most awful of solitudes, to be _different,_ to wear a mask
of brass harder than any mask of brass--perfect friendship is only
possible _inter pares. Inter pares!_ a phrase which intoxicates me:
what confidence, what hope, what perfume, what beatitude it promises
the man who necessarily and constantly lives alone; to a man who is
_different_--who has never met any one of his race. And nevertheless
he is a good seeker; he has sought much. Ah, the swift folly of those
hours in which the solitary thinks he has found a friend, embraces him
and holds him in his arms; it is a present from heaven, an inestimable
gift. An hour later he rejects him with disgust, he rejects himself
with disgust, as though soiled, diminished, sick from his own society.
A _profound_ man needs friends, unless indeed he has a God. And I have
neither God nor friend! Ah, my sister, those whom you call by this
name, once they were friends--but now?
"Excuse this burst of passion; my last journey is the cause....
"My health is neither good nor bad; it is only the poor soul which is
wounded and thirsting. Give me a little circle of men who will listen
to me and understand--and I am in good health.
"Here everything takes its course; the two English-women and the old
Russian lady, the musician, have come back; the latter very ill...."
Nietzsche now went on with his labours on the _Wille zur Macht._ His
unfortunate passage through Germany had modified his arrangements. He
thought: "What use is it my writing warlike books? Without allies,
without readers, I cannot prevent the abasement of Europe; let it
be brought about then. One day it will find its goal--a day which I
shall not see. Then my books will be discovered, then I shall have
my readers. For them I should write, for them I should determine my
fundamental ideas. To-day, I cannot fight, for I have not enemies
even...." At the beginning of July, when leaving the Germany which had
tried him so hardly, he drew up a detailed plan. In September he wrote:
"I announce, for the next four years, the completion of my work in four
volumes. The title alone is alarming: _The Will to Power, an essay
towards a Transvaluation of all Values._ For this all is necessary to
me--health, solitude, good humour--perhaps a wife _(eine Frau)_ also."
In what retirement should he compose this new work? Genoa had inspired
the two books which he wrote as a convalescent, _The Dawn of Day_ and
_The Gay Science;_ Rapallo, Nice, had inspired _Zarathustra._ He now
thought of Corsica. For long he had been curious about this savage
island, and, in the island itself, of a town, Corte--
"There Napoleon was not born but--what is perhaps more
important--conceived, and is it not the clearly indicated spot in which
I should undertake the transvaluation of all values? ... For me, too,
it is a _conception_ that is in question."
Alas! this Napoleonic work, the title of which alone should strike
terror, thus struck its author. Nietzsche was not unaware whither that
_"via mala des consequences"_ which he had been long following led him.
Since a covetous, conquering force is at the heart of nature, every
act which does not correspond precisely with this force is inexact and
feeble. He said this, he wrote it, and such indeed was his thought:
man is never so great as when he combines an alertness and refinement
of mind with a certain native brutality and cruelty of instinct. Thus
the Greeks understood _virtu,_ and the Italians _virtù._ The French
politicians, and, after them, Frederick II., Napoleon and Bismarck,
acted in accordance with these maxims. Troubled by his doubts, lost
in his problem, Nietzsche firmly grasped this fragmentary but certain
truth: _one must have the courage of psychological nudity,_ he was
to write. He trained himself to it, but remained dissatisfied. His
mind was too clear, his soul too pensive, and this definition of the
strongest men was too curt and icy for his dreams. Formerly he had
chosen Schiller and Mazzini for masters. Did he admire them no longer?
No soul was ever as constant as his. Only he feared that, in following
them, he would gratify a certain feebleness, and the masters whom he
now wished to prefer were called Napoleon and Cæsar Borgia.
On this occasion, too, he turned away from his task, shunning harsh
affirmations. The publisher Fritsch consented, on the condition that he
received pecuniary aid, to publish a second edition of the _Origin of
Tragedy, The Dawn of Day,_ and _The Gay Science._ This had long been
one of Nietzsche's desires: he wished to add prefaces to these old
works, to touch them up, and perhaps to add to them. He undertook this
new work and became absorbed in it.
Instead of going to Corsica he returned to the Genoese coast, to Ruta,
not far from Rapallo, above Portofino, which thrusts its wooded crest
out into the sea. Again he found the walks and familiar places in
which Zarathustra had spoken to him. How sad he had then been! He had
just lost his two last friends, Lou Salomé and Paul Rée. Nevertheless
he had continued his task and, indeed, created, at the moment of his
profoundest sorrow, his bravest book. Friedrich Nietzsche let himself
be stirred by these memories of the past.
He now received a letter which was the first sign of his coming fame.
In August, 1886, in despair of being listened to by his compatriots,
he had sent his book, _Beyond Good and Evil,_ to two foreign readers,
to the Dane Georges Brandes, and to the Frenchman Hippolyte Taine.
Georges Brandes did not reply. Hippolyte Taine wrote (October 17, 1886)
a letter which gave Nietzsche some joy.
"On my return from a voyage, I found the book which you were good
enough to send me; as you say, it is full of 'thoughts from behind'
(_'pensées de derrière_'); the form, which is so lively, so literary,
the impassioned style, the often paradoxical turn, will open the eyes
of the reader who wants to understand; I will in particular recommend
to philosophers your first piece on philosophers and philosophy (pp.
14, 17, 20, 25); but the historians and critics will also have their
share in the booty of new ideas (for example 41, 75, 76, 149, 150, &c).
What you say of national genius and character in your eighth essay
is infinitely suggestive, and I shall re-read this piece, although I
find there a far too flattering word relative to myself. You do me a
great honour in your letter by putting me by the side of M. Burckhardt
of Basle, whom I greatly admire; I think that I was the first man in
France to announce in the press his great work upon the _Culture of the
Renaissance in Italy...._ With best thanks, I am,
"Yours sincerely,
"H. TAINE."
Paul Lanzky rejoined Friedrich Nietzsche at Ruta. Not having seen him
for eighteen months, he was struck by the change which he observed
in him. The body was weighed down, the features altered. But the man
remained the same; however bitter his life had become, he was still
affectionate and naïve, quick to laughter like a child. He brought
Lanzky up the mountain which gives at every instant such magnificent
views over the snowy Alps and the sea. The two rested in the most
beautiful spots; then they gathered up bits of old timber and twigs
from the autumn vines and lit fires, Nietzsche saluting the flames and
the rising smoke with cries of joy.
It was then, it was in this inn at Ruta, that Nietzsche drew up
the prefaces to _The Dawn of Day_ and _The Gay Science,_ in which
he recounted with so strange a vivacity his spiritual _Odyssey:_
Triebschen and Wagner's friendship; Metz and the discovery of war;
Bayreuth, hope and mishap; the rupture with Richard Wagner; the
bruising of his love; the cruel years which he spent deprived of poetry
and of art; finally Italy, which gave him back both; Venice and Genoa,
the two towns which saved him, and the Ligurian coast, Zarathustra's
cradle.
While Nietzsche wrote thus and struggled against depression, may it not
be that he was taking drugs to excite himself to work? There is some
evidence to suggest it. But we shall never have exact information on
this point. We know that he was absorbing chloral and an extract of
Indian hemp which, in small doses, produced an inward calm; in large
doses, excitement. Perhaps he handled a more complicated pharmacopoeia
in secret; it is the habit of nervous persons.
Friedrich Nietzsche liked this coast. "Imagine," he wrote to Peter
Gast, "a little island in the Greek archipelago, pushed down here by
the winds. It is a coast of pirates, swift, deceitful, dangerous...."
He proposed to pass the winter there. But soon he modified his plans,
and wished to return to Nice. Lanzky sought in vain to keep him back.
"You complain of being abandoned," he said to him. "Whose fault is it?
You have disciples and you discourage them. You call me here, you call
Peter Gast; and you leave."
"I need the light, the air of Nice," answered Nietzsche; "I need the
Bay of the Angels."
He went alone. During this winter, he completed his prefaces, he
re-read and touched-up his books. He lived, it seems, in a singular
condition of relaxation, indecision and melancholy. He sent his
manuscripts to Peter Gast, as he always did, but his requests for
advice have an unusual accent of unrest and humility. "Bead me," he
wrote in February, 1887, "with more distrust than you generally do; say
simply: this will do, this won't do I like this, why not alter that,
&c, &c."
He read, and his readings seemed guided by a queer curiosity and less
under the rigorous sway of his prejudices.
He familiarised himself with the works of the French decadents. He
appreciated Baudelaire's writings on Richard Wagner, Paul Bourget's
_Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine._ He read the _Contes_ of
Maupassant and admired this "great Latin." He ran through some volumes
by Zola and did not allow himself to be seduced by a merely popular
style of thought, by a merely decorative art. He bought, and commented
in pencil on the margin, the _Esquisse d'une Morale sans obligation
ni sanction._ Guyau, like Nietzsche and at the same moment, had had
the idea of founding a system of morals on the expansive modalities
of life. But he understood them in another sense and interpreted as
a force of love what Nietzsche understood as a conquering force.
Nevertheless the initial agreement was certain. Nietzsche valued
highly the purity and intelligence of idea which he found in the work
of the French philosopher. The vogue of the Russian novelists was
then beginning. Nietzsche took an interest in these poets of a young,
violent, and sensitive race, whose charm he always felt. "Do you know
Dostoievsky?" he wrote to Peter Gast. "No one, with the exception of
Stendhal, has so satisfied and ravished me. There is a psychologist
with whom I am in agreement!" He indicated the new author to all
his correspondents. The religious fervour of the Slavs interested
him and found him indulgent. It was not a symptom of weakness, he
thought; it was the return of an energy which could not accept the
cold constraints of modern society and whose insubordination took
the form of a revolutionary Christianity. These barbarians, thwarted
in their instincts, were disconcerted and self-accusatory; they had
precipitated a crisis which was still undecided, and Nietzsche wrote:
"This bad conscience is a malady, but a malady of the nature of
pregnancy." For, hoping always, he obstinately defended his thoughts
against his disgusts. He wished his thoughts to remain free, kindly and
confident, and when there rose within him and towards them a hatred of
Europe and of its debased peoples; when he feared that he might yield
to his bitter humour, he corrected himself at once: "No," he kept on
saying, "Europe is at present richer than ever in men, in ideas, in
aspirations, better prepared for great tasks, and we must, contrary to
all semblance, hope everything from these multitudes, though their ugly
disposition seems to forbid hope."
During these early months of 1887, Friedrich Nietzsche became intimate
with a certain Madame V. P. They went together to San Remo and Monte
Carlo. We do not know this woman's name; we have no letter, either
written by her or addressed to her. We may infer some mystery, perhaps
a mystery of love.
Madame V. P. was no doubt Nietzsche's companion[2] when he heard the
prelude to _Parsifal_ at the concerts in the Casino at Monte Carlo.
He listened without any bitterness, with the sudden indulgence of a
worn-out adversary. "I loved Wagner," he wrote in September to Peter
Gast; "I still love him." Assuredly he still loved him, when he could
speak as he did of this symphony which he had just heard.
"I do not seek to know whether this art can or should serve some end,"
he wrote to Peter Gast, "I ask myself: Has Wagner ever done better?
And I find this: the most exact conscience and psychological precision
in the manner of relating, expressing, and communicating emotion; the
shortest and most direct form; every nuance of sentiment defined with
an almost epigrammatical brevity: such descriptive clearness that
in listening to this music one thinks of some buckler of marvellous
workmanship; lastly, a sentiment, a musical experience of a soul which
is extraordinary and sublime; a "haughtiness," in the formidable
meaning of the word; ... a sympathy, a penetration, which enters like a
knife into the soul--and a pity for what he has discovered and judged
at the bottom of that soul. Such beauties one finds in Dante and
nowhere else. What painter has ever painted so melancholy a look of
love as Wagner in the last accents of his prelude?"
How easy it would have been for him to be a great critic, equal in his
delicacy, superior in the largeness of his views, to that Sainte-Beuve
whom he esteemed so highly! He knew it, and found it hard to resist
the seductions of that "dilettantism of analysis"--the expression is
his own. His best readers of ten remarked this. "What a historian
you are!" Burckhardt used to say, and Hippolyte Taine repeated it.
It did not satisfy Nietzsche. He despised the calling of historian
or of critic. He was informed by a young German whom he met at Nice
that the professors of Tübingen took him as a merely dissolvent mind,
radical and nihilistic; it saddened him. He had not torn himself
from the romanticism of pity and love to sink at last in the inverse
romanticism of violence and energy. He admired Stendhal, but did not
intend to be a Stendhalian. The Christian belief had nourished his
infancy, the disciplines of Pforta had ripened it, Pythagoras, Plato,
Wagner had increased, elevated his desires. He wished to be a poet and
a moralist, an inventor of virtues, venerations, and serenities: none
of his readers, none of his friends, had understood this intention. In
correcting the proofs of _The Dawn of Day,_ he re-read this old page,
the truth of which still held good.
"We are still on our knees before power--according to the old custom
of slaves--and yet, when the degree of _venerability_ shall have to be
fixed, only the degree of _rationality in power_ will be decisive; we
have to investigate to what extent power has indeed been overcome by
something higher of which it is now the tool and instrument. But as yet
there is an absolute lack of eyes for such investigations; nay, in most
cases the appraisement of genius is even considered a crime. And thus
perhaps the most beautiful of all spectacles still takes place in the
dark and, after bursting into bloom, soon fades into perpetual night--I
mean the spectacle of that power which a man of genius employs, not
in his works, but in the development of himself, regarded as a work,
that is, in the task of self-mastery, in the purification of his
imagination, in his deliberate choice and ordering of the course of his
tasks and inspirations. And yet the great man is still invisible in the
greatest thing which claims worship, invisible like a distant star; his
triumph over power continues to be without eyes, hence also without
song and poets. As yet the order of greatness has not been settled for
the sum total of human history...."
Alas, for victory over force, one must possess some exterior force,
reason or faith. Nietzsche, denying to the one or to the other all
their rights, has disarmed himself for the combat.
* * * * *
At the beginning of March a violent earthquake terrified the
cosmopolitan _flaneurs_ of Nice. Friedrich Nietzsche admired these
movements of nature which reminded man of his nothingness. Two years
earlier the catastrophe of Krakatoa, which destroyed two thousand
human beings in Java, had filled him with enthusiasm. "It's grand,"
he said to Lanzky, whom he had asked to read the telegrams to him;
"two thousand human beings annihilated at a stroke! It's magnificent.
This is how humanity should come to its end--how one day it will end."
And he hoped that a tidal wave would at least do away with Nice and
its peoples. "But," observed Lanzky, "we should be done away with
ourselves." "What matter!" answered Nietzsche. His almost realised
desire amused him. He did not advance his departure by a single day.
"Hitherto," he wrote on March 7th, "among these thousands of people in
a condition of folly, I have lived with a sentiment of irony and cold
curiosity. But one cannot answer for oneself; perhaps to-morrow I shall
be as unreasonable as any one. Here there is an _imprévu_ which has its
charm."
By the middle of March he would have ended his work on the prefaces;
and, as he says in one of them: "What do Herr Nietzsche, his illnesses
and recoveries, matter to us? Let us speak frankly, let us go straight
to the problem." Yes, surely, let us go straight to the problem;
determine, among the many ends which men propose to themselves, those
which truly elevate and ennoble them; succeed at last in gaining our
_triumph over power. _ On March 17th he sketched out a plan:
First Book: _European Nihilism._
Second Book: _Criticism of Superior Values._
Third Book: _Principle of a New Evaluation._
Fourth Book: _Discipline and Selection._
He had sketched a very similar programme in July, 1886: two books of
analysis and criticism; two books of doctrine and affirmation; in all
four books--four volumes.
Every springtime brought him back to a condition of uncertainty and
uneasiness; between Nice and the Engadine; he did not know where to
find an air which should be bright enough and not too warm; a fine
light that would not hurt his eyes. In this year, 1887, he let himself
be tempted by the Italian lakes, and, leaving Nice, set out for Lake
Maggiore. This midget Mediterranean, enclosed in the mountains, pleased
him infinitely at first. "This place strikes me as more beautiful than
any part of the Mediterranean," he wrote, "and more moving--how is
it that I took so many years to discover it? The sea, like all huge
things, has something stupid and indecent which will not be found
here." He corrected the proofs of the _Gaya Scienza;_ he re-read
_Human, Too Human,_ and again paused to contemplate with pity his
unrecognised work.
But he recovered possession of himself. The coming work alone mattered.
He forced himself to recommence his meditations, and at once became
enervated and exhausted. He had planned a visit to Venice; suddenly he
gave it up. "My health is against it," he wrote to Peter Gast. "I am
unworthy of seeing such beautiful things."
From aggravation of ennui, an epistolary quarrel arose between Erwin
Rohde and himself. He had occasion to write a word to the most
intimate friend of past days, and could not resist the pleasure of
adding a malicious touch. "I suit old people only," he wrote; "Taine,
Burckhardt, and even you are not old enough for me...." Erwin Rohde
did not like this touch. A professor, whereas Nietzsche was nothing; a
scholar with a reputation among European scholars, whereas Nietzsche
was still unknown despite his eccentric books, he would not permit
irreverence, and defended his dignity. His letter must have been
strongly worded, for he had it restored to him later, and destroyed it.
This misadventure tried Nietzsche. His health was in every respect
impaired; he resolved to follow a régime of waters, massage and baths,
in a special establishment in Switzerland, at Coire. He went there, and
surrendered himself to the doctors.
He kept on working, however, and made an energetic effort to discover
and define the moral values which he wished to propound. But in vain;
do what he would, the problem of his third book--_Principle of a New
Evaluation_--remained unsolved. "We may here transcribe the more
precise definition with which we are furnished by another draft.
"_Third Book:_ the problem of the legislator. To bind anew the
unregulated energies in such a manner that they are not mutually
annihilated by running foul of one another; to mark the _real
augmentation_ of force."
What does this mean? What real augmentation, what real direction of
things is indicated us by these words? Is it an augmentation of
intensity? Then every shade of energy, provided it be intense, will
be good. But we must not take it in this sense. Nietzsche selected,
preferred, excluded. This augmentation is then the sign of an order, of
a natural hierarchy. But in every hierarchy there must be a criterion
by which the ranks are distributed; what should this criterion be?
Nietzsche would formerly have said: It will be my logical affirmation,
the beliefs which I shall have given. Does he still think it?
Doubtless; his thoughts hardly vary. But his audacity was lessened
by his sorrows, his critical mind had been rendered more exacting by
long indecisions. He desired, he sought, he seemed to ask science, the
"doctor-philosopher," for a real basis which all his habits of thought
refused him.
Mournful news completed the ruin of his courage. Heinrich von Stein
died, before his thirtieth year, of a heart failure.
"This has put me out of my senses," wrote Nietzsche to Peter Gast; "I
truly loved him. I always thought that he was reserved for me some day.
He belonged to that little number of men whose _existence_ rejoiced
me; and he too had great confidence in me.... In this very place how
we laughed! ... He paid a two days' visit to Sils, he had not a glance
for Nature or Switzerland--he came straight from Bayreuth; he went back
straight to Halle, to his father;--one of the rarest and most delicate
homages I have ever received. It made an impression. He had said at the
hotel: 'If I come, it is not for the Engadine.'"
Three weeks passed. He complained of bitter inclinations, of
susceptibility which lowered his soul. Nevertheless, he announced a
new work. What was it?
* * * * *
It is not _The Will to Power._ His impatience, which is added to by
fatigue, does not easily bend to the delays of meditation. Of his old
gifts, his genius for improvising, his polemical genius alone survive.
Herr Widmann, a Swiss critic, had just written a study on _Beyond Good
and Evil_ and saw in this work but a manual of anarchism: "This is
dynamite," he said. Friedrich Nietzsche wished to reply, and at once
drew up at a spurt in fifteen days one, two, three short essays which
he entitled as a whole, _A Genealogy of Morals._ "This work," he wrote
on the title-page, "is destined to complete and elucidate my last book,
_Beyond Good and Evil._"
"I have said," he wrote in substance, "that I place myself beyond Good
and Evil--_Gut und Böse._ Does this mean that I wish to liberate myself
from every moral category? No. I challenge the exaltation of meekness
which is called good; the defamation of energy which is called bad; but
the history of the human conscience--do the moralists know that such
a history exists?--displays to us a multitude of other moral values,
other ways of being good, other ways of being bad, numerous shades of
honour and of dishonour. Even here the reality is moving, initiative is
free; one must seek, one must create."
But Nietzsche developed his thought further: "I have wished," he wrote
some months later à propos of this little book, "I have wished to fire
a cannon-shot with more sonorous powder." He exposed the distinction
between the two moralities, the one dictated by the masters, the other
by the slaves; and he thought to recognise in the verbal roots of the
words "good" and "evil," their old meaning. _Bonus, buonus,_ said he,
comes from _duonus,_ which signifies warrior; _malus_ comes from
μέλας, black: the blonde Aryans, the ancestors of the Greek,
indicated by this word the type of conduct habitual to their slaves
and subjects, the Mediterraneans crossed with Negro and Semitic blood.
These primitive notions of what is noble and what is vile, Friedrich
Nietzsche does not challenge.
On the 18th of July, writing from Sils-Maria, he announced the new work
to Peter Gast.
"I have energetically employed these last days, which were better," he
wrote. "I have drawn up a little piece of work which, as I think, puts
the problem of my last book in a clear light. Every one has complained
of not having understood me; and the hundred copies sold do not permit
me to doubt that in effect I am not understood. You know that for three
years I have spent about 500 thalers to defray the cost of my books;
no honorarium, it goes without saying, and I am 43 years old, and I
have written fifteen books! Further: experience, and many applications,
more painful to me than I care to say, force me to certify, as a fact,
that no German editor wants to have anything to do with me (even if
I abandon my author's rights). Perhaps this little book which I am
completing to-day will help to sell some copies of my last book (it
always pains me to think of the poor Fritzsch on whom all the weight of
my work rests). Perhaps my publishers will some day benefit from me. As
for myself, I know only too well that when people begin to understand
me, _I shall not benefit from it._"
On the 20th of July, he despatched the manuscript to the publisher.
On the 24th July, he called it back by telegram in order to add a
few features, a few pages. All his summer was spent in discomfort,
melancholy, and the correction of his book, which he never ceased to
touch up, to draw out, to render more violent and more alive. Towards
the end of August, perceiving an empty space on the last page of the
first section, Nietzsche added this curious note, in which he indicated
the unstudied problems which he was to have neither strength nor time
to attack.
"_Remark._--I take the opportunity presented by this essay to express
publicly and formally a wish which, so far, I have only mentioned
occasionally to certain scholars, in chance conversations. Some Faculty
of Philosophy ought, by a series of academical prize-dissertations, to
further studies in the _history of morality;_ perhaps this book will
serve to give a vigorous impetus in this direction. I would propose the
following question:
"_What hints are furnished by philology, more especially by
etymological research, with reference to the history of the development
of moral concepts?_
"On the other hand it will be as necessary to interest physiologists
and doctors in these problems. In fact and above all, all tables of
values, every 'thou shalt' known to history and ethnological research,
need to be explained and elucidated in the first place from their
_physiological_ side, before any attempt is made to interpret them
through psychology.... The question: What is this or that table of
values and morality _worth?_ must be considered from the most varied
perspectives. Especially 'the worth for what?' must be considered with
extraordinary discernment and delicacy. A thing, for instance, which
has evident value with reference to the greatest durability of a race
might possess quite another value, if it were a question of creating
a higher type. The good of the greatest number and the good of the
smallest number are antithetical points of view in valuation; we shall
let the simplicity of English biologists suppose that the former is
_by itself_ of higher value. All sciences must prepare the way for
the philosopher of the future, whose task will consist in solving the
_problem of values_ and determining _their hierarchy_."
September came. The proofs were corrected, the Engadine became cold.
The wandering philosopher had to find new quarters and new work.
"To tell the truth," he wrote to Peter Gast, "I hesitate between Venice
and Leipsic; I should go there to work, I still have a lot to learn,
many questions to ask and much to read for the great thought of my
life of which I must now acquit myself. It would not be a matter of
an autumn, but of a _whole winter_ spent in Germany. And, weighing
everything together, my health dissuades me very strongly from essaying
a like experience this year. It will be then Venice or Nice; and from
a quite personal point of view, that is better perhaps. Moreover, I
need solitude and contemplation rather than study and inquiry into five
thousand problems."
Peter Gast was at Venice, and Venice, as one might have foreseen,
carried the day. Nietzsche lived for some weeks, a _flaneur_ and all
but happy, in the town with a "hundred profound solitudes." He scarcely
wrote: his days, according to Peter Gast, were idle or seemed to be
so. It was not to shut himself up in a room in Venice that he gave up
the libraries of Leipsic. He walked, frequented the poor "trattoria,"
where at midday the humblest, the most courteous of lower classes sit
down to eat; when the light was too strong he went to rest his eyes in
the shade of the basilica; when day began to decline he recommenced
his perpetual walks. Then he could look at St. Mark, with its flocks
of familiar pigeons, without suffering, at the lagoon with its islands
and temples. He kept on thinking of his work. He imagined it logical
and free, simple in its plan, numerous in its details, luminous with
a little mystery, a little shade on every line; he wished in short
that it should resemble that city which he loved, that Venice whose
sovereign will allied itself to the play of all fantasy and grace.
Let us read this page of notes, written in November, 1887; L'_Ombra di
Venezia,_ is it not obvious there?
"_A perfect_ book to consider:
"(1) Form. Style. _An ideal monologue,_ all that has a learned
appearance, absorbed in the depths. All the accents of profound
passion, of unrest and also of weakness. Alleviations, sun tasks--short
happiness, sublime serenity. To go beyond demonstration; to be
absolutely personal, without employing the first person. Memoirs as
it were; to say the most abstract things in the most concrete, in the
most cutting manner. The whole history as if it had been _lived_ and
_personally suffered._ Visible things, precise things, examples, as
many as possible. No description; all the problems transposed into
sentiment as far as passion.
"(2) Expressive terms. Advantage of military terms. To find expressions
to replace philosophical terms."
On the 22nd of October he was at Nice.
* * * * *
Two events (the word is assuredly not too strong) occupied the first
two weeks of his stay. He lost his oldest friend; he acquired a reader.
The lost friend was Erwin Rohde. The quarrel begun in the previous
spring was then consummated. Nietzsche wrote to Rohde, and his first
intention was not to wound. "Do not withdraw from me too lightly," he
wrote in announcing the despatch of his last book, _The Genealogy of
Morals;_ "at my age and in my solitude I can hardly bear to lose the
few men in whom I formerly confided." But he could not limit himself to
these words. He had received a second note, a very amiable one, from
Hippolyte Taine,[3] whom Erwin Rohde had criticised disrespectfully in
his letter of May. Nietzsche wished to defend his French correspondent,
and continued:
"N.B.--I beg that you judge M. Taine more sensibly. The scurrilities
that you express and think about him irritate me. I pardon them to the
prince Napoleon, not to friend Rohde. It is difficult to me to think
that any one who misunderstands this great-hearted and severe-minded
race can understand anything of my task. Besides, you have never
written me a word which shows that you have the least suspicion of the
destiny which weighs me down. I have forty-three years behind me and am
as alone as if I were a child."
All relations were broken off.
The new reader acquired was Georges Brandes, who acknowledged the
despatch of the _Genealogy_ in an extraordinarily intelligent and vivid
letter.
"I get the breath of a new mind from your books," he wrote: "I do not
always entirely understand what I read, I do not always see whither
you are bound, but many features are in accord with my thoughts
and sympathies; like you I hold the ascetic ideal in poor esteem;
democratic mediocrity inspires in me, as in you, a profound repugnance;
I appreciate your aristocratic radicalism. I am not quite clear with
regard to your contempt for the ethic of pity ...
"Of you I know nothing. I see with astonishment that you are a
professor. In any case I offer you my best compliments on being,
intellectually, so little of a professor.... You are of the small
number of men with whom I would like to talk."
It would seem as if Nietzsche ought to have felt very strongly the
comfort of having found two witnesses to his work, and of so rare a
quality: Brandes and Taine. Did he not learn, about this time, that
Brahms was reading _Beyond, Good and Evil_ with much relish? But the
iron had entered into his soul, and the faculty of receiving happy
impressions was, as it were, extinguished in him. He had lost that
interior joy, that resistant serenity of which he was formerly so
proud, and his letters displayed only melancholy.
With this disaster there survived the activity of his mind alone,
which worked with singular energy. We can with difficulty enumerate
the objects which occupied his attention. Peter Gast transcribed his
_Hymn to Life_ for the orchestra; Nietzsche superintended, sometimes
corrected, always naïvely admired, this new form of his work.
The journal of the Goncourts appeared; he read this "very interesting
novelty," and sat down to table at Magny's with Flaubert, Sainte-Beuve,
Gautier, Taine, Gavarri and Renan. All these distractions did not
prevent him from embarking resolutely on his new work, the decisive
work in which his wisdom and not his rage would speak; the calm work
in which polemics would be without rights. He defined in six lines the
design which he had formed.
"To have run through every chamber of the modern soul, to have eaten
in each of its corners: my pride, my torture, and my joy. To transcend
pessimism effectively, and, in short, a Goethean regard full of love
and good-will."
Friedrich Nietzsche in this note designated the inspirer of his last
work; it was to be Goethe. No nature differed so much from his own, and
this very difference determined his choice. Goethe had humiliated no
mode of human activity, he had excluded no idea from his intellectual
world; he had received and administered as a benevolent lord the
immense heritage of human culture. Such was Friedrich Nietzsche's last
ideal, his last dream. He wished, in this extremity of life (he knew
his destiny), to spread, like the sinking sun, his softest lights; to
penetrate everywhere, to justify and illumine everything, so that not
one shadow should exist upon the surface of things, not one sorrow in
the privacy of souls.
He easily determined the directing ideas of his first two volumes:
_European Nihilism, The Criticism of Higher Values._ For four years
he had not written a line which was not a part of this analysis or
criticism. He wrote rapidly, angrily. "A little fresh air," he cried;
"this absurd state of Europe cannot last much longer." It was only a
cry, and very quickly suppressed. Nietzsche put patience behind him,
like a weakness; with a song of love that he would answer the attacks
of life. He wished to return, and did, in fact, return, to calmer
thoughts. He put this question: "Is it true that the condition of
Europe is absurd? Perhaps a reason for the facts exists, and escapes
us. Perhaps in this debility of the will, in this democratic abasement,
one should rightly recognise a certain utility, a certain value of
conservation. They seem irrepressible; perhaps they are necessary,
perhaps in the long run salutary, though to-day, and, so far as we are
concerned, they must be deplored.
"_Reflexion:_ It is madness to suppose that all this victory of values
can be anti-biological; one must seek to explain it by a _vital_
interest for the maintenance of the type _man,_ even though it must
be attained by the preponderance of the feeble and the disinherited.
Perhaps if things went differently, man would cease to exist?--Problem.
"The elevation of the type is dangerous to the conservation of the
species. Why?
"The strong races are the prodigal races.... Here we are confronted by
a problem of economy...."
He repressed all disgust, refused to allow himself the use of abusive
speech, tried to consider, and did consider, serenely, those tendencies
which he condemned. He asked: Must we deny to the masses the right to
seek their truths, their vital beliefs? The masses are the basis of
all humanity, the foundation of all cultures. Without them, what would
become of the masters? They require that the masses be happy. We must
be patient; we must suffer our insurgent slaves (for the moment our
masters) to invent the illusions which are favourable to them. Let them
believe in the dignity of work! If they thus become more docile in
work, their belief is salutary.
"The problem," he writes, "is to render man as utilisable as possible,
and make him approximate, as far as may be done, as closely as possible
to the machine which never makes a mistake; for this, he must be armed
with the virtues of the machine, he must be taught to endure ennui, to
lend to ennui a superior charm ...; the _agreeable_ sentiments must
be put back to a lower rank.... The mechanical form of existence,
considered as the noblest, the highest, should adore itself.
"A high culture can only be raised on a vast site, over a firm and
well-consolidated mediocrity....
"The sole end must, for a long while yet, be the _lessening_ of man:
for there must first be created a large foundation on which the race of
strong men may be raised....
"The _lessening_ of the European man is the great process which may
not be impeded; it should be accelerated again. It is the active
force which allows one to hope for the arrival of a stronger race, of
a race which should possess to excess those very qualities which the
impoverished species lack (will, responsibility, certitude, the faculty
of fixing an end for oneself)."
Thus at the end of 1887, Nietzsche had succeeded in drawing up a first
sketch of the work of synthesis which he had proposed to himself. He
concedes a certain right, a certain dignity, to those motives which he
formerly reviled. The final rough drafts of _Zarathustra_ had already
given us similar indications. "The disciples of Zarathustra," wrote
Nietzsche, "give to the humblest, not to themselves, the expectation
of happiness. ... They distribute religions and systems, according to
a hierarchy." Nietzsche now writes, and the intention is similar: "The
humanitarian tendencies are not anti-vital, they suit the masses who
live slowly, and thus suit humanity which needs the satisfaction of the
masses. The Christian tendencies are also benevolent, and nothing is so
desirable," writes Nietzsche, "as their permanence; for they suit all
those who suffer, all the feeble, and it is necessary for the health
of human societies that suffering, that inevitable weaknesses, be
accepted without revolt, with submission, and, if possible, with love."
"Whatever I may happen to say of Christianity," wrote Nietzsche in 1881
to Peter Gast, "I cannot forget that I owe to it the best experiences
of my spiritual life; and I hope never to be ungrateful to it at the
bottom of my heart." This thought, this hope, has never left him; and
he rejoices to have found a word of justice for the religion of his
childhood, the only one which still offers itself to souls.
On December 14, 1887, he addressed a letter to an old correspondent of
the Basle days, Carl Fuchs. The accent is a proud one.
"Almost all that I have written should be erased. During these latter
years the vehemence of my internal agitations has been terrible.
To-day, at the moment when I should be rising higher, my first task is
to modify myself, to _depersonalise_ myself towards higher forms.
"Am I old? I do not know, and moreover I do not know what kind of youth
is necessary to me.
"In Germany, people complain strongly of my 'eccentricities.' But as
they do not know where my centre is, they can hardly discern when or
how I happen to be eccentric."
From the dates of his notes, it seems that Nietzsche approached
a different problem in the month of January, 1888. Those humble
multitudes whose rights he admits and measures would not deserve to
live, if their activity were not, in the last instance, governed by an
élite, utilised for glorious ends. What would be the virtues of this
élite, what ends would it serve? Nietzsche was thus brought back to the
problem which was his torment. Would he define at length this unknown,
and perhaps unattainable grandeur, towards which his soul had for so
long aspired? He was again a prey to sadness. He complained of his
sensibility, of his irritability, which had become such that each day,
on the arrival of the post, he hesitated and shivered before opening
his letters.
"Never has life appeared so difficult to me," he wrote to Peter Gast on
January 15th. "I can no longer keep on terms with any sort of reality:
when I do not succeed in forgetting them, they break me.... There are
nights when I am overwhelmed with distress. And so much remains to be
done--all, so to say!--Therefore I must hold out. To this wisdom I
apply myself, at least in the mornings. Music, these days, gives me
sensations which I had never known. It frees me, it lets me recover
from the intoxication of myself; I seem to consider myself from a
great height, to _feel_ myself from a great height; thus it renders
me stronger, and regularly, after an evening's music (I have heard
_Carmen_ four times), I have a morning full of energetic perceptions
and lucky discoveries. It is quite admirable. It is as though I had
bathed myself in a _more natural_ element. Without music life is merely
a mistake, a weariness, an exile."
Let us try to follow the course of his work. He subjected himself to
an historical research and attempted to discover the social class, the
nation, the race or the party which authorised the hope of a more noble
humanity. Here was the modern European:
"How could a race of strong men disengage itself from it? a race
with the classical taste? The classical taste, that is, the will to
simplification, to accentuation ... the courage of psychological
nudity.... To raise oneself from this chaos to this organisation, one
must be constrained by a _necessity._ One must be without choice;
disappear or impose oneself. A dominant race can only have terrible and
violent origins. Problem: where are the _barbarians_ of the twentieth
century? Evidently they will only be able to appear and impose
themselves after huge socialistic crises--these will be the elements
most capable of the most persistent hardness in respect of themselves,
and who will be able to become the guarantees of _the most persistent
will._"
Is it possible to discern in modern Europe these elements predestined
to victory? Nietzsche busied himself with this problem, and wrote down
the results of his researches in his notebook.
"The most favourable impediments and remedies against modernity.
"And first:
"1. _Obligatory military service,_ with genuine wars which put an end
to all lightness of mind.
"2. _National narrowness_ which simplifies and concentrates."
Other indications corroborate the above.
"The maintenance of the _military state,_ which is the only means left
to us, whether for the maintenance of the great traditions, or for the
institution of the superior type of man. And all circumstances which
perpetuate unfriendliness, distance between states, find themselves
thus justified."
What an unforeseen conclusion to Nietzschean polemics! He had
dishonoured nationalism; and for the support which he sought in this
grave hour he fell back on nationalism. A yet more unexpected discovery
was to come. Nietzsche, proceeding with his researches, foresaw,
defined, and approved of a party which can be but a form or a reform of
Positivist democracy. He discerned the lineaments of the two vigorous
and sane groupings which suffice to discipline man.
"_A party of peace,_ not sentimental, which denies war to itself and
its members, which also denies them recourse to the courts of law;
which provokes against itself, struggle, contradiction, persecution:
a party of the oppressed, at least for a time; soon the great party
opposed to sentiments of rancour and vengeance.
"A _party of war,_ which with the same logic and severity against
itself, proceeds in an opposite sense."
Should we recognise in these two parties the organised forces
which will produce that _tragical era of Europe_ which Nietzsche
announces? Perhaps; but let us be careful not to exaggerate the
value of these notes. They are rapidly written; as they surged and
passed in Nietzsche's mind, they should surge and pass before us. His
view pierces in every direction: it never settles upon one object.
No working-class Puritanism can satisfy him, for he knows that the
brilliancy of human culture stands or falls with the freedom of the
aristocracies. No nationalism can satisfy him, for he loves Europe and
her innumerable traditions.