Chapter VI: The Labour of Zarathustra (2)

It was a painful labour. Friedrich Nietzsche, ill-disposed to conceive a hope, had frequent revolts against the task which he imposed on himself. Every morning on awakening from a sleep which chloral had rendered sweet, he rediscovered life with frightful bitterness. Conquered by melancholy and rancour, he wrote pages which he had at once to re-read attentively, to correct or erase. He dreaded these bad hours in which anger, seizing him like a vertigo, obscured his best thoughts. Then he would evoke his hero, Zarathustra, always noble, always serene, and seek from him some encouragement. Many a passage of his poem is the expression of this agony. Zarathustra speaks to him:

"Yea: I know thy danger. But by my love and hope,
I conjure thee: reject not thy love and thy hope.

"The noble one is always in danger of becoming an
insolent, a sneering one and a destroyer. Alas, I have
known noble ones who lost their highest hope. Then
they slandered all high hopes.

"By my love and my hope I conjure thee; do not cast
away the hero in thy soul! believe in the holiness of thy
highest hope."

The struggle was always perceptible; nevertheless Friedrich Nietzsche advanced his work. Every day he had to learn wisdom anew, and to moderate, crush, or deceive his desires. He succeeded in this rude exercise and managed to bring back his soul into a calm and fecund condition. He completed a poem which was but the opening of a vaster poem. Zarathustra, returning towards the mountains, abandons the world of men. Twice again, before he dictates the tables of his law, he is to descend to it. But what he says suffices to give us a glimpse of the essential forms of a humanity obedient to its élite. It consists of three castes: at the bottom, the popular caste, allowed to retain its humble beliefs; above, the caste of the chiefs, the organisers and warriors; above the chiefs themselves, the sacred caste, the poets who create the illusions and dictate the values. One recalls that essay by Richard Wagner on art, religion, and politics, formerly so much admired by Nietzsche: in it a similar hierarchy was proposed.

In its ensemble the work is serene. It is Friedrich Nietzsche's finest victory. He has repressed his melancholy; he exalts force, not brutality; expansion, not aggression. In the last days of February, 1882, he wrote these final pages, which are perhaps the most beautiful and the most religious ever inspired by naturalistic thought.

"My brethren, remain faithful to the earth, with all the force of your love! Let your great love and your knowledge be in accord with the meaning of the earth. I pray you and conjure you.

"Let not your virtue fly far from terrestrial things, and beat its wings against the eternal walls! Alas! there is always so much virtue gone astray!

"Like myself, bring back towards the earth the virtue which goes astray--yea, towards the flesh and towards life; that it may give a meaning to the earth, a human meaning...."

Whilst he completed the composition of this hymn on the Genoese coast, Richard Wagner died in Venice. Nietzsche learnt the news with a grave emotion, and recognised a sort of providential accord in the coincidence of events. The poet of _Siegfried_ was dead; so be it! humanity would not be for a moment deprived of poetry, since Zarathustra had already spoken.

For more than six years he had given no sign of life to Cosima Wagner; now he had to tell her that he had forgotten nothing of past days and that he shared her sorrows. "You will approve of me in this, I am sure" he wrote to Fräulein von Meysenbug.[7]

* * * * *

On the 14th of February he wrote to Schmeitzner, the publisher:

"To-day I have some news for you: I have just taken a decisive step--I mean, one profitable to you. It concerns a little work, scarcely 100 pages long, entitled: _Thus Spake Zarathustra,_ a book for all and none. It is a poem or it is a Fifth Gospel, or something which has no name; by far the most serious, and also the most happy, of my productions and one that is open to all."

He wrote to Peter Gast and to Fräulein von Meysenbug: "This year," said he, "no society. I shall go straight from Genoa to Sils!" Thus did Zarathustra, who left the great city and returned to the mountains. But Friedrich Nietzsche is not Zarathustra; he is feeble, solitude exalts and frightens him. Some weeks passed. Schmeitzner, the publisher, was slow: Nietzsche grew impatient and modified his projects for the summer; he wished to hear the sound of human speech. His sister, at Rome with Fräulein von Meysenbug, guessed that he was accessible and weary, and seized this opportunity of a reconciliation. He did not defend himself and promised to come.

Here he was at Rome. His old friend immediately introduced him into a brilliant society. Lenbach was there, and also that Countess Dönhoff, to-day Princess von Buelow, an amiable woman and a great musician. Friedrich Nietzsche felt with vexation how different he was from these happy talkers, how he belonged to another world, how they misunderstood him. A curious, a singular man, they think; a very eccentric man. A great mind? No one ventured to pass this rash judgment. And Friedrich Nietzsche, so proud when he was alone, was astonished, disturbed, and humiliated. It seemed that he had not the strength to despise these people who did not hearken to him; he was disquieted and began to fear for his well-beloved son, Zarathustra.

"They will run through my book," he wrote to Gast, "and it will be a subject of conversation. That inspires me with disgust. Who is serious enough to hear me? If I had the authority of old Wagner, my affairs would be in a better way. But at present _no one_ can save me from being delivered over to 'literary people.' To the devil!"

Other vexations affected him: he had taken to chloral, during the winter, in order to combat his insomnia. He deprived himself of it and recovered, not without difficulty, his normal sleep. Schmeitzner, the publisher, did not hurry to print _Thus Spake Zarathustra;_ what was the cause of the delay? Nietzsche enquired and was told: Five hundred thousand copies of a collection of hymns had first to be printed for the Sunday-schools. Nietzsche waited some weeks, received nothing, asked again; another story: the collection of hymns was published, but a big lot of anti-Semitic pamphlets had to be printed and thrown upon the world. June came: _Zarathustra_ had not yet appeared. Friedrich Nietzsche lost his temper and suffered for his hero, who was thwarted by the two platitudes, Pietism and anti-Semitism.

He was discouraged and ceased to write; he left his luggage at the station with the books and manuscripts which he had brought: one hundred and four kilos of paper. Everything in Rome harassed him: the nasty people, a mob of illegitimates; the priests, whom he could not tolerate; the churches, "caverns with unsavoury odours." His hatred of Catholicism is instinctive and has far-off origins; always when he approaches it, he shudders. It is not the philosopher who judges and reproves; it is the son of the pastor, who has remained a Lutheran: who cannot endure the other Church, full of incense and idols.

The desire came to him to leave this town. He heard the beauty of Aquila praised. Friedrich von Hohenstaufen, the Emperor of the Arabs and the Jews, the enemy of the popes, resided there; Friedrich Nietzsche wished to reside there, too. Still, the room which he occupied was a fine and well-situated one, Piazza Barberini, at the very top of a house. There one could forget the town: the murmur of water falling from a triton's horn stilled the noise of humanity and sheltered his melancholy. There it was that, one evening, he was to improvise the most poignant expression of his despair and solitude:

"I am light; alas if I were night! But this is my solitude, to be always surrounded by light.

"Alas that I am not shadow and gloom! How I would drink from the breasts of light!

"... But I live in my own light, I drink the flames which escape from me!"

_Thus Spake Zarathustra, a Book for All and None,_ at last appeared during the first days of June.

"I am very much on the move," wrote Nietzsche. "I am in agreeable society, but as soon as I am alone I feel moved as I have never been." He soon knew the fate of his book. His friends spoke to him very little of it; the newspapers, the reviews, did not mention it; no one was interested in this Zarathustra, the strange prophet who in a biblical tone taught unbelief. "How bitter it is!" said Lisbeth Nietzsche and Fräulein von Meysenbug; these two women, Christians at heart that they were, took offence. "And I," wrote Nietzsche to Peter Gast, "I who find my book so gentle!"

The heat dispersed this Roman society. Friedrich Nietzsche knew not where to go. He had hoped for such different days! He had been persuaded that he would move lettered Europe, that he would at last attract readers to himself, or (more precisely perhaps) that he would attract, not towards his feeble self, but towards Zarathustra, who was so strong, disciples or even servitors. "For this summer," he wrote in May to Peter Gast, "I have a project: to choose, in some forest, some castle formerly fitted up by the Benedictines for their meditations, and to fill it with companions, chosen men ... I must go on a quest for new friends." About the 20th June, thunderstruck by the loss of his hopes, he went up towards his favourite retreat, the Engadine.

Lisbeth Nietzsche, who was returning to Germany, accompanied him. Never had she seen him more brilliant or more gay, she said, than during these few hours of travel. He improvised epigrams, _bouts-rimes,_ the words of which his sister suggested; he laughed like a child, and, in fear of troublesome people who would have disturbed his delight, he called and tipped the guard at every station.

* * * * *

Friedrich Nietzsche had not seen the Engadine since that summer of 1881 in which he had conceived the Eternal Return and the words of Zarathustra. In the clutch of these memories and of the sudden solitude, carried away by a prodigious movement of inspiration, he wrote in ten days the second part of his work.

It was bitter. Friedrich Nietzsche could no longer repress the rancours, the menace of which he had felt last winter; he could no longer unite force to sweetness; "I am not a hunter of flies," Zarathustra used to say, and he disdained his adversaries. He had spoken as a benefactor, and he had not been heard. Nietzsche put into his mouth another speech: "Zarathustra the judge," he wrote in his short notes; "the manifestation of justice in its most grandiose form; of justice which fashions, which constructs, and which, as a consequence, must annihilate."

Zarathustra the judge has only insults and lamentations upon his lips. He sings this nocturnal chant which Nietzsche, at Rome, had one evening improvised for himself alone:

"I am light; alas if I were night! But this is my solitude, to be always surrounded by light."

This is no longer the hero whom Friedrich Nietzsche had created so superior to all humanity; it is a man in despair, it is Nietzsche, in short, too weak to express anything beyond his anger and his plaints.

"Verily, my friends, I walk among men as among the fragments and members of man.

"To see men broken and scattered as though they lay over a butcher's shambles, this is to my eye the most frightful thing.

"And when my eye fleeth from the present to the past, it ever findeth the same: fragments, members, and frightful catastrophes--but no men!

"The present and the past upon the earth--alas, my friends, these are to _me_ the most unbearable things; and I could not live were I not a visionary of what must come.

"A visionary, a creator, the future itself and a bridge unto the future--alas! in some sort also, a cripple upon this bridge: Zarathustra is all this.... I walk among men, the fragments of the future: of the future which I contemplate in my visions."

Friedrich Nietzsche derided the moral commandments which had upheld ancient humanity: he wished to abolish them and to establish his own. Shall we know it at length, this new law? He delays in telling it to us. "The qualities of the Superman become more and more visible," he writes in his notes. He would wish that it were so; but can he, absorbed as he is in discontent and bitterness, enunciate, define a form of virtue, a new good, a new evil, as he had promised? He tries. He is the prey of a bitter and violent mood, and the virtue which he exalts is naked force undisguised, that savage ardour which moral prescriptions have always wished to attenuate, vary, or overcome. He yields to the attraction which it exercises upon him.

"With delight I regard the miracles which the ardent sun brings to birth, says Zarathustra. They are tigers, palm-trees, rattlesnakes.... Verily, there is a future even for evil, and the hottest noon has not yet been discovered for man.... One day there will come to the world the greatest dragons.... Thy soul is so far from what is great that thou wouldst find the Superman awful in his goodness."

There is emphasis upon this page. The words are noisy rather than strong. Perhaps Nietzsche disguises in this way an embarrassment of thought: he does not insist upon this gospel of evil, and prefers to adjourn the difficult moment in which his prophet will announce his law. Zarathustra must first complete his duties as judge, the annihilator of the weak. He must strike: with what weapon? Here Nietzsche again takes up the idea of the Eternal Return which he had withdrawn from his first section. He modifies the sense and the application of it. It is no longer an exercise of spiritual life, a process of internal edification; it is a hammer, as he says, an instrument of moral terrorism, a symbol which disperses dreams.

Zarathustra assembles his disciples and wishes to communicate to them the doctrine, but his voice falters; he is silent. Suddenly he is moved by pity, and the prophet himself suffers as he evokes the terrible idea. He hesitates at the moment that he is about to destroy these illusions of a better future, these expectations of another life and of a spiritual beatitude which veil from men the misery of their state. He grows anxious. A hunchback, who divines this, interpolates with a sneer: "Why doth Zarathustra speak unto his disciples otherwise than he speaketh unto himself?" Zarathustra feels his fault and seeks a new solitude. The second part is thus completed.

On the 24th June of this year, 1882, Nietzsche was installed at Sils; before the 10th of July he wrote to his sister:

"I beg you instantly to see Schmeitzner and engage him orally or by writing, as you think best, to give the second part of _Zarathustra_ to the printer as soon as the manuscript is delivered. This second part exists to-day: try to imagine it, the vehemence of such a creation; you will scarcely be able to exaggerate it. There is the danger. In Heaven's name, arrange things with Schmeitzner; I am too irritable myself."

Schmeitzner promised and kept his word; in August the proofs arrived. Nietzsche had not strength enough to correct them and left the work to Peter Gast and his sister. The terrible things which he had said, the more terrible things which he had yet to say, bruised him.

* * * * *

Other vexations were added to the melancholy of his thought. An awkward step on his sister's part awoke again the dissensions of the previous summer. In the spring, during their reconcilement, he had said to her, aware of her quarrelsome nature: "Promise me never to go back on the stories of Lou Salomé and of Paul Rée." For three months she had kept her peace, then she broke her word and spoke. What did she say? We do not know; we are again in the obscurity of this obscure history. "Lisbeth," he wrote to Madame Overbeck, "absolutely wants to avenge herself on the young Russian." No doubt she reported to him some fact, some observation of which he was ignorant. A sickening irritation laid hold of him. He wrote to Paul Rée, and this is the letter, a sketch of which has been found. (Was it sent as we read it? It is not certain.)

"Too late, almost a year too late, I learn of the part which you took in the events of last summer, and my soul has never been so overwhelmed with disgust as it is at present, to think that an insidious individual of your kind, a liar and a knave, had been able to call himself my friend for years. It is a crime, in my opinion, and not only a crime against me, but above all against friendship, against this very empty word, friendship.

"Fie, sir! So you are the calumniator of my character, and Miss Salomé has only been the mouthpiece, the very unsatisfactory mouthpiece, of the judgment which you passed on me; so it is you who, in my absence, naturally, spoke of me as though I were a vulgar and low egoist, always ready to plunder others; so it is you who have accused me of having, so far as concerned Miss Salomé, pursued the most filthy designs under a mask of idealism; so it is you who dare to say of me that I was mad and did not know what I wanted? Now, of a surety, I understand better the whole of this business which has made men whom I venerated and many whom I esteemed, as my nearest and dearest, strangers to me.... And I thought you my friend; and nothing, perhaps, for seven years has done more harm to my prospects than the trouble that I took to defend you.

"It seems then that I am not very well advanced in the art of knowing men. That furnishes you no doubt with matter for mockery. What a fool you have made of me! Bravo! As regards men of your stamp, rather than understand them, I had rather they mocked me.

"I would have great pleasure in giving you a lesson in practical morals with a pair of pistols; I would succeed perhaps, under the most favourable circumstances, in interrupting once and for all your works on morals: one needs clean hands for that, Dr. Paul Rée, not dirty ones!"

This letter cannot be considered sufficient to condemn Paul Rée. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote it in a moment of anger upon information given by his sister, who was often more impassioned than accurate. It is a precious witness to his impression; to the ill-known data of the cause, it is a mediocre witness. What was the conduct of Paul Rée? What were the rights and wrongs? In April, 1883, six months after the difficulties of Leipsic, he had offered Nietzsche the dedication of a work on the origins of the moral conscience, a work altogether inspired by Nietzschean ideas. Nietzsche had refused this public compliment: "I no longer want," he wrote to Peter Gast, "to be confounded with any one." A letter written by George Brandes in 1888 shows us Paul Rée living in Berlin with Miss Salomé, as "brother and sister," according to both their accounts. There is no doubt that Rée helped Miss Salomé, towards 1883, to write her book on Friedrich Nietzsche: a very intelligent and a very noble book. We incline to believe that between these two men there was only the misfortune of a common love which the same woman inspired in them.

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote long and febrile letters. He complained of being alone at forty years, betrayed by his friends. Franz Overbeck grew anxious and went up to Sils-Maria to distract him from the solitude which wounded and consumed him. His sister, a prudent lady, and bourgeois in her tastes, advised him in answer to his complaints: "You are alone, it is true," said she to him; "have you not sought solitude? Get an appointment in some University: when you have a title and pupils, you will be recognised and people will cease to ignore your books." Nietzsche listened indulgently, but did listen, and wrote to the Rector of Leipsic, who, without hesitation, dissuaded him from making any overtures, no German University being in a position to allow an atheist, a declared anti-Christian, among its teachers. "This reply has given me courage!" wrote Nietzsche to Peter Gast; to his sister he sent a strong letter whose thrusts she felt.

"It is necessary that I be misunderstood, better still, I go to meet calumny and contempt. My 'near ones' will be the first against me: last summer I understood that, and I was magnificently conscious that I was at last on my road. When it comes to me to think, 'I can no longer endure solitude,' then I experience an unspeakable _humiliation before myself_--I feel myself in revolt against what there is of highest in me...."

In September he directed his steps towards Naumburg, where it was his intention to stay some weeks. His mother and sister inspired in him a mixed feeling, which baffles analysis. He liked his own people because they were his own, and because he was tender, faithful, infinitely sensible to memories. But every one of his ideas, every one of his desires, drew him from them, and his mind despised them. Nevertheless the old house of Naumburg was the only place in the world where there was, so long as he stayed there for a short time only, some sweetness of life for him.

Mother and daughter were quarrelling. Lisbeth loved a certain Förster, an agitator, an idealogue of Germanist and anti-Semitic views, who was organising a colonial enterprise in Paraguay. She wished to marry him and to follow him; her despairing mother wished to retain her. Madame Nietzsche welcomed her son as a saviour and related to him the mad projects which Lisbeth was forming. He was overwhelmed; he knew the person and his ideas, he despised the low and dull passions which the propaganda excited, and suspected him of having spoken maliciously of his work. That Lisbeth, the companion of his childhood, should follow this man was more than he could allow. He called her, spoke violently to her. She answered him bravely. There was little that was delicate or subtle in this woman's composition, but she had energy. Friedrich Nietzsche, so weak in the depth of his soul, valued in her the quality which he lacked. He might sermonise, scold, but he could not get his way.

* * * * *

The late autumn came, and Naumburg was covered with fogs. Nietzsche left and went to Genoa. These quarrels had lessened his self-respect.

"Things go badly with me, very badly," he wrote in October to Fräulein von Meysenbug; "my visit in Germany is the cause. I can live only at the seaside. Every other climate depresses me, destroys my nerves and eyes, makes me melancholy, puts me into a black humour--that awful tare; I have had to combat it in my life more than the hydras and other celebrated monsters. In trivial ennui is hidden the most dangerous enemy; great calamity adds to one's stature...."

Towards mid-November he left Genoa, and, circling the western coast, began the quest for a winter residence. He passed by San Remo, Mentone, Monaco, and stopped at Nice, which enchanted him. There he found that keen air and that plenitude of light, that multitude of bright days which he needed: "Light, light, light," he wrote'; "I have regained my equilibrium."

The cosmopolitan city displeased him, and at first he rented a room in a house of the old Italian city, not Nice, but Nizza, as he always wrote. For neighbours he had quite simple people, workmen, masons, employés, who all spoke Italian. It was in similar conditions that in 1881 he had enjoyed at Genoa a certain happiness.

He chased away his vain thoughts and made an energetic effort to complete _Zarathustra._ But then arose the greatest of his misfortunes: the difficulty of his work was extreme, perhaps insurmountable. To complete _Zarathustra_--what did that imply? The work was immense: it had to be a poem which would make the poems of Wagner forgotten; a gospel which should make the Gospel forgotten. From 1875 to 1881, during six years, Friedrich Nietzsche had examined all the moral systems and shown the illusion which is at their foundation; he had defined his idea of the Universe: it was a blind mechanism, a wheel which turned eternally and without object. Yet he wished to be a prophet, an enunciator of virtues and of purposes: "I am he who dictates the values for a thousand years," he said in those notes in which his pride bursts forth. "To imprint his hand on the centuries, as on soft wax, write on the will of millennia as upon brass, harder than brass, more noble than brass, there," Zarathustra was to say, "is the beatitude of the Creator."

What laws, what tables, did Nietzsche wish to dictate? What values would he choose to honour or depreciate? and what right had he to choose, to build up an order of beauty, an order of virtue, in nature, where a mechanical order reigns? He had the right of the poet, no doubt, whose genius, the creator of illusions, imposes upon the imagination of man this love or that hatred, this good or that evil. Thus Nietzsche would answer us, but he did not fail to recognise the difficulty. On the last pages of the second part of his poem he avowed it.

"This, this is my danger," says Zarathustra, "that my glance throweth itself to the summit, whereas my hand would fain grasp and rest upon--the void."

He wished to bring his task to a head. He had felt, this very summer, as something very close and urgent, the tragic menace that hung over his life. He was in haste to complete a work which he could at last present as the expression of his final desires, as his final thought. He had intended to complete his poem in three parts; three were written and almost nothing was said. The drama was not sketched. Zarathustra had to be shown at close quarters with men, announcing the Eternal Return, humiliating the feeble, strengthening the strong, destroying the ancient ways of humanity; Zarathustra as lawgiver dictating his Tables, dying at last of pity and of joy as he contemplates his work. Let us follow his notes:--

"Zarathustra reaches at the same moment the most extreme distress and his greatest happiness. At the most terrible moment of the contrast, he is broken.

"The most tragical history with a divine dénouement.

"Zarathustra becomes gradually more grand. His doctrine develops with his grandeur.

"The Eternal Return shines like a sun setting on the last catastrophe."

"In the last section great synthesis of him who creates, who loves, who destroys."

In the month of August, Nietzsche had indicated a dénouement. His condition of mind was then very bad, and his work suffered in consequence. He now took up the draft again, and tried to make the best of it.

It was a drama which he had the ambition to write. He places his action in an antique frame, in a city devastated by the pest. The inhabitants wish to commence a new era. They seek a lawgiver; they call Zarathustra, who descends among them, followed by his disciples.

"Go," said he to them, "announce the Eternal Return."

The disciples are afraid and avow it.

"We can endure thy doctrine," they say, "but can this multitude?"

"We must make an experiment with truth!" answers Zarathustra. "And if the truth should destroy humanity, so be it!"

The disciples hesitate again. He commands: "I have put in your hands the hammer which must strike men; strike!"

But they fear the people and abandon their master. Then Zarathustra speaks alone. The crowd as it hears him is terrified, loses its temper and its wits.

"A man kills himself: another goes mad. A divine pride of the poet animates him: everything _must_ be brought to light. And at the moment that he announces the Eternal Return and the Superman together, he yields to pity.

"Everyone disowns him. 'We must,' they say, 'stifle this doctrine and kill Zarathustra.'

"'There is now no soul on the earth who loves me,' he murmurs; 'how shall I be able to love life?'

"He dies of sadness on discovering the suffering which is his work.

_"'Through love I have caused the greatest sorrow;_ now I yield to the sorrow which I have caused.'

"All go, and Zarathustra, left alone, touches his serpent with his hand: 'Who counsels wisdom to me?'--The serpent bites him. The eagle tears the serpent to bits, the lion throws itself upon the eagle. As soon as Zarathustra sees the combat of the animals, he dies.

"Fifth Act: The Lauds.

"The league of the faithful who sacrifice themselves upon the tomb of Zarathustra. They had fled: now, seeing him dead, they become the inheritors of his soul and rise to his height.

"Funeral ceremony: 'It is we who have killed him.'--The Lauds.

"The great Noon. Midday and eternity."

Friedrich Nietzsche abandoned this plan, which yet gives glimpses of great beauty. Did he dislike displaying the humiliation of his hero? Probably, and we shall note his search for a triumphant dénouement. But it is chiefly to be noted that he has dashed against a fundamental difficulty, the nature of which he perhaps does not plainly conceive: the two symbols on which he bases his poem, the Eternal Return and the Superman, in conjunction create a misunderstanding which renders the completion of the work impossible. The Eternal Return is a bitter truth which suppresses all hope. The Superman is a hope, an illusion. From one to the other there is no passage, the contradiction is complete. If Zarathustra teaches the Eternal Return, he will fail to excite in men's souls an impassioned belief in superhumanity. And if he teaches the Superman, how can he propagate the moral terrorism of the Eternal Return? Nevertheless, Friedrich Nietzsche assigns him these two tasks; the breathless disorder of his thoughts drives him to this absurdity.

Does he clearly perceive the problem? We do not know. These real difficulties against which he breaks are never avowed. But if he perceives them ill, at least he feels the inconvenience and seeks by instinct some way of escape.

He writes a second sketch which is certainly skilful: the same scene, the same fever-stricken city, the same supplication to Zarathustra, who comes among a decimated people. But he comes as a benefactor and is careful about announcing the terrible doctrine. First, he gives his laws and has them accepted. Then, and only then, will he announce the Eternal Return. What are these laws which he has given? Friedrich Nietzsche indicates them. Here is one of the very rare pages, in which we discern the order which he has dreamed.

"_(a)_ The day divided afresh: physical exercises for all the ages of life. Competition as a principle.

. . . . . .

"_(b)_ The new nobility and its education. Unity. Obtained by selection. For the foundation of each family, a festival.

"_(c)_ The _experiments._ (With the _wicked, punishments._) Charity in a new form, based on a concern for the generations to come. The wicked respectable so far as they are destroyers, for destruction is necessary. And also as a source of strength.

"To let oneself be taught by the wicked, not to deny them competition. To utilise the degenerate.--Punishment justifiable when the criminal is utilised for experimental purposes (for a new aliment). Punishment is thus made holy.

"_(d)_ To save woman by keeping her woman.

"_(e)_ The _slaves_ (a hive). The humble and their virtues. To teach the enduring of repose. Multiplication of machines. Transformation of the machines into beauty.

"'For you faith and servitude!'

"The times of _solitude._ Division of the times and days. Food. Simplicity. A feature of union between the poor and the rich.

"Solitude necessary from time to time, that the being may examine himself and concentrate.

. . . . . .

"The _ordinance of festivals,_ founded on a system of the Universe: festival of cosmic relations, festival of the earth, festival of friendship, of the great Noon."

Zarathustra explains his laws, he makes them loved by all; he repeats his sermons nine times, and finally announces the Eternal Return. He speaks to the people; his words have the accent of a prayer.

_The great question:_

"The laws have already been given. Everything is ready for the production of the Superman--grand and awful moment! Zarathustra reveals his doctrine of the Eternal Return--which may now be endured; he himself, for the first time, endures it.

"_Decisive moment:_ Zarathustra interrogates all this multitude assembled for the festival.

"'Do you wish,' he says, 'the return of it all?' All reply: Yes!

"He dies of joy.

"Zarathustra dying holds the earth locked in his arms. And although no one said a word, they all knew that Zarathustra was dead."

It is a fine issue: Nietzsche was soon to find it too easy, too fine a one. This Platonic aristocracy, rather quickly established, left him in doubt. It corresponded exactly to his desires; did it correspond to his thoughts? Nietzsche, ready in the destruction of all the ancient moralities, did not find that he had the right of proposing another so soon? _All answered: Yes!_ Was that conceivable? Human societies would always draw after them an imperfect mass which would have to be constrained by force or by laws. Friedrich Nietzsche knew it: "I am a seer," he wrote in his notes; "but my conscience casts an inexorable light upon my vision, and I am myself the doubter." He gave up this last plan. Never was he to recount the active life and the death of Zarathustra.

No document admits us to the secret of his sadness. No letter, no word presents us with the expression of it, We may, surely, take this very silence as the avowal of his distress and humiliation. Friedrich Nietzsche had always wished to write a classical work, a history, system, or poem, worthy of the old Greeks whom he had chosen for masters. And never had he been able to give a form to this ambition.

At the end of this year 1883 he had made an all but despairing attempt; the abundance, the importance of his notes let us measure the vastness of a work which was entirely vain. He could neither found his moral ideal nor compose his tragic poem; at the same moment he fails in his two works and sees his dream vanish. What is he? An unhappy soul, capable of short efforts, of lyrical songs and cries.

The year 1884 opened sadly. Some chance fine weather in January reanimated him. Suddenly he improvised: no city, no people, no laws; a disorder of complaints, appeals, and moral fragments which seem to be the debris left over from the ruin of his great work. It is the third part of Zarathustra. The prophet, like Friedrich Nietzsche, lives alone and retired upon his mountain. He speaks to himself, deceives himself, forgets that he is alone; he threatens, he exhorts a humanity which neither fears nor hearkens to him. He preaches to it the contempt of customary virtues, the cult of courage, love of strength and of the nascent generations. But he does not go down to it, and no one hears his predication. He is sad, he desires to die. Then, Life, who surprises his desire, comes to him and raises his courage.

"O Zarathustra!" says the goddess, "do not crack thy whip so terribly. Thou knowest, noise murdereth thought. And even now I have very tender thoughts. Hear me, thou art not faithful enough unto me, thou lovest me not nearly as much as thou sayst, I know, for thou thinkest of leaving me...."

Zarathustra listens to the reproach, smiles and hesitates. "True," he says at last, "but thou also knowest. ..." They gaze at each other, and he tells her something in her ear, among all her confused, stupid yellow tresses. "What though I die?" he says; "nothing can separate, nothing can reconcile, for every moment has its return, every moment is eternal."

"What," answers the goddess, "that thou knowest, Zarathustra? That no one knoweth."

Their eyes meet. They look at the green meadow over which the cool of evening was spreading; they weep, then, in silence, they listen, they understand the eleven sayings of the old bell which strikes midnight in the mountain.

_One!_ Oh man! Lose not sight!

_Two!_ What saith the deep midnight?

_Three!_ I lay in sleep, in sleep;

_Four!_ From deep dream, I woke to light.

_Five!_ The world is deep,

_Six!_ And deeper than ever day thought it might.

_Seven!_ Deep is its woe--

_Eight!_ And deeper than woe--delight.

_Nine!_ Saith woe: Pass, go!

_Ten!_ Eternity's sought by all delight--_Eleven!_ Eternity deep by all delight.[8]

_Twelve!_

. . . . . .

Then Zarathustra rises: he has recovered his security, his sweetness, and his strength. He takes up his staff and sings as he goes down towards men. A similar versicle completes the seven strophes of his hymn:

"Never yet have I found the woman by whom I would like to
have children, if it be not the woman whom I love: for I
love thee, oh Eternity!

"For I love thee, oh Eternity!"

At the opening of the poem Zarathustra entered the great town--the Multi-coloured Cow he names it--and began his apostolate. At the end of the third part Zarathustra descends to the great town to recommence his apostolate there. Friedrich Nietzsche, a vanquished warrior, after two years of labour, has quailed. In 1872 he sent to Fräulein von Meysenbug the interrupted series of his lectures on the future of Universities: "It gives one a terrible thirst," he said to her, "and, in the long run, nothing to drink." The same words apply to his poem.

[6] Albergo la Poata (information given by M Lanzky).

[7] An unpublished letter, communicated by M. Romain Rolland.

[8] Translation published by T. Fisher Unwin.

III

_Heinrich von Stein_

In April, 1884, the third and fourth sections (of _Zarathustra)_ were published simultaneously. For the moment Nietzsche seems to have been happy.

"Everything comes in its own good time," he wrote to Peter Gast on March 5th. "I am forty and I find myself at the very point I proposed, when twenty, to reach at this age. It has been a fine, a long, and a formidable passage."

"To you," he wrote to Rohde, "who are _homo litteratus,_ I need not hesitate to avow that in my opinion I have with this _Zarathustra_ brought the German language to its pitch of perfection. After Luther and Goethe a third step remained to be taken--and consider, my old and dear comrade, were ever strength, subtlety, and beauty of sound so linked in our language? My style is a dance; I trifle with symmetries of all sorts, and I play on these symmetries even in my selection of vowels."

This joy lasted only for a little while. Without fresh work to hand Nietzsche's ardour had no purpose and turned to ennui. Should he arrange his system methodically, draw up a "philosophy of the future"? He considers this, but finds that he is weary of thought and of writing. What he needs is rest and the refreshment of music; but the music which he could love does not exist. Italian music is flabby, German music preachy, and his taste is for the live and the lyrical; for something grave and delicate; something rhythmical, scornful, and passionate. _Carmen_ pleases him well enough, and yet to _Carmen_ he prefers the compositions of his disciple, Peter Gast. "I need your music," he wrote to Gast.

Peter Gast was at this time in Venice, where Nietzsche wished to join him. But Venice was damp, and he dared not leave Nice before mid-April. Clearly an invalid's exigencies are becoming each year more and more urgent. A gloomy day lowers his spirits, a week without the sun prostrates him.

On the 26th of April he arrived in Venice. Peter Gast found rooms for him not far from the Rialto, with windows that opened on the Grand Canal. He had not been in Venice for four years, and it was with a child's pleasure that he remade the acquaintance of the loved city. He stayed in the labyrinth of Venice; Venice--whose spirit is compounded of the magic of sun and water, the gracefulness of a gay and tactful people, and glimpses of unexpected gardens with flowers and mosses springing among the stones. "One hundred profound solitudes," he notes, "compose Venice--hence her magic. A symbol for the men of the future." For four or five hours every day he walked the little streets as he had walked the hills, sometimes isolating himself, sometimes moving with the Italian crowd.

He was endlessly reflecting upon the difficulties of his task. What should he write next? He had thought of annotating some verses of his poem by means of a series of pamphlets, but then no one had read the words of Zarathustra. Those friends to whom they had been sent preserved a melancholy silence which constantly astonished him. A young author, Heinrich von Stein, was almost alone in sending him a word of warm congratulation. Nietzsche therefore gave up the idea, feeling that it would be ridiculous to comment upon a Bible which the public ignored.

Very seriously he considered a "philosophy of the future." His intention was to give up, or at least to defer, further work on his poem; he would confine himself to long study--"five, six years of meditation and of silence, maybe"--and formulate his system in a precise and definite manner. Various projects were in his mind when, towards the middle of June, he left Venice for Switzerland. He wished first to read certain books on historical and natural science in the libraries of Basle, but his stay in that town was brief, for he found the heavy heat oppressive and his friends there failed to please him. Either they had not read _Thus Spake Zarathustra_ or they had read it very badly. "I might have been among cows," he wrote to Peter Gast, and returned to the Engadine.

* * * * *

On the 20th of August Heinrich von Stein wrote that he was coming.

Stein was at this time a very young man, scarcely twenty-six years of age. But there was no German writer of whom greater things were expected than of him. In 1878 he had published a little volume called _The Ideals of Materialism, Lyrical Philosophy._ Friedrich Nietzsche made the acquaintance of the author, in whose essay he recognised a research analogous to his own. He thought that he had found a kindred spirit, a comrade in his task; but this hope deceived him. Fräulein von Meysenbug had prided herself on bringing Heinrich von Stein under Wagner's influence. It was her defect to be always more benevolent than far-sighted. Thanks to her good offices, Wagner's house was opened to Stein as it had been opened ten years earlier to Nietzsche, and there Stein lived in spite of Nietzsche's warning, "You admire Wagner, and it is right that you should do so--provided your admiration does not last long." Wagner talked, and Stein, who could neither free himself from the master's influence nor oppose it, listened. His intellectual quest, which had hitherto been unquiet but fruitful, now came to an end. He closed his notebooks; he was conquered by a man too great for him, sucked in and sucked dry.

The works which he published--he died at thirty--are temperate and acute, but they lack one quality, precisely that which gives a high value to his first essays--audacity, daring, the charm of a nascent thought, ill-expressed but intense.

Nietzsche continued to interest himself in Stein, and superintended the young man's work and his friendships. "Heinrich von Stein," he wrote in July to Madame Overbeck, "is at present the adorer of Miss Salomé. My successor in that employment as in much else." The danger that Stein ran caused him a great deal of uneasiness. Stein, however, read and appreciated his books, as Nietzsche rejoiced to know.

He was strangely moved on receiving the letter, for Stein had seemed to understand _Thus Spake Zarathustra,_ and it might be that a longing for liberty was the explanation of his visit. Stein would make up to him for all the friends that he had lost; and what a revenge, moreover, if he should conquer this disciple of Wagner's, this philosopher from Bayreuth! He hastily sent a welcome, signed "The Solitary of Sils-Maria."

There is a possible interpretation of Stein's movements which never occurred to Nietzsche.

It must be remembered that Stein was the intimate and faithful friend of Cosima Wagner; and certainly he did not now come to Nietzsche without first consulting this shrewd woman and receiving her approbation. Moreover, Nietzsche himself had not yet attacked, but had merely withdrawn from Wagner. In July, 1882, he had seemed favourable to a reconciliation. Fräulein von Meysenbug's endeavours, whether he had authorised them or no, caused him to consider the possibility; and in February, 1883, after Wagner's death, he wrote to Cosima Wagner. He had so far been able to avoid saying anything irreparable, and all his later work, even the very end of _Zarathustra,_ with its very vague lyricism, did not close the door on the hope of an understanding. This was Stein's own impression, and he wrote to Nietzsche:

"How I long for you to come this summer to Bayreuth and hear _Parsifal._ When I think of that work I imagine a poem of pure beauty, a spiritual adventure that is purely human, the development of a youth who becomes a man. I can find in _Parsifal_ no pseudo-Christianity of any sort and fewer tendencies than in any other of Wagner's works. If I write to you--in a spirit at once audacious and timid--it is not because I am a Wagnerian, but because I wish for _Parsifal_ such a hearer as you, and for such a hearer as you I wish _Parsifal._"

Cosima Wagner's judgments were sound, and she knew Nietzsche's worth. She now carried the heavy burden of Wagner's fame; she had a tradition to prolong, a heritage to maintain. By recalling Nietzsche to her side she would aid an extraordinary man, a rare soul that was wasting itself in solitary effort, and she would aid herself at the same time--or so she may have thought. One does not like to say in so many words that she chose Heinrich von Stein as emissary and conciliator. But one may be certain that she knew of, and did not disapprove, the young man's attempt.

If there was such a thing as a Wagnerian equal to the enterprise, it was Heinrich von Stein. He was the most open-minded of the disciples. For him that mysticism of doubtful quality which _Parsifal_ propagated was not the last word in religion. He included Schiller, Goethe, and Wagner in one tradition as the creators of myths and the educators of their age and race. For him the theatre of Bayreuth was not an apotheosis, but a promise, an instrument for the future, the symbol of a lyrical tradition.

Stein was anxious to acquit himself well of his mission, but he spoke little. It was Nietzsche himself, the man, to whom he appealed, who spoke, and who saw that he was heard. We may perhaps picture the interview and Nietzsche's words:

"You admire Wagner? Who does not? As well as you and better than you have I known, revered, and hearkened to him. I learnt from him not the style of his art, but the style of his life--his valour and enterprise. I am aware that I have been accused of ingratitude, which is a word I ill understand. I have continued my work. In the best sense of the word, I am his disciple. You frequent Bayreuth, which is very agreeable for you, too agreeable. Wagner offers you for your delight all the legends, all the beliefs of the past--German, Celtic, pagan, and Christian. You should leave him for the same reason that I left him, because this delight is destructive to the spirit which seeks truth. Mark you, I say no word against art or religion. I believe that their day will be again. Not one of the old values will be abandoned. They will re-appear, transfigured no doubt, and more powerful and more intense, in a world thoroughly illuminated to its depths by science. We shall rediscover all the things that we loved in our childhood and in our adolescence, all that has upheld and exalted our fathers--a poetry, a goodness, the most sublime virtues, the humblest, too, each in its glory and its dignity. But we must accept the darkness, we must renounce and search. ... The possibilities are unheard of, but alone I am weak. Help me, therefore; stay or come back here, six thousand feet above Bayreuth!"[9]

Stein listened. His diary reveals the growing vividness of his impressions:

"24 viii. '84. Sils-Maria. Evening with Nietzsche.

"27. His freedom of intellect, the imagery of his speech, a great impression. Snow and winter winds. Headaches. At night I watch him suffer.

"29. He has not slept, but has all the ardour of a young man. A sunny and magnificent day!"

After three days, the too-youthful emissary left, greatly moved by what had passed, and promising to rejoin Nietzsche at Nice, as the latter, at least, understood. Nietzsche felt that he had greatly carried the day. "Such an encounter as ours must have an early and far-reaching importance," he wrote to Stein a few days after his departure. "Believe me, you now belong to that little band whose fate, for good or ill, is linked to mine." Stein answered that the days at Sils-Maria were to him a great memory, a grave and solemn moment of his life; and then, rather prudently, went on to speak of the binding conditions imposed on him by his works and his profession. What he did _not_ say was, "Yes, I am yours."

Was Nietzsche's mind open enough to perceive the reservation? One cannot tell. He was making marvellous plans, and dreamt anew of an "ideal cloister." To Fräulein von Meysenbug he made the naïve proposal that she should come to Nice and spend the winter near him.

* * * * *

Chance permits us to discover the depths of his soul. He had gone down to Basle in September, and there Overbeck visited him at his hotel, and found him in bed, suffering from a sick headache, very low in himself, and at the same time exceedingly talkative. His excited speech troubled Overbeck, who was initiated into the mystery of the "Eternal Return." "One day we shall be here together again in this very place; I again, as I now am, sick; you again, as now you are, amazed at my words." He spoke in a low and trembling voice, and his face was troubled--this is the Nietzsche that Lou Salomé has described. Overbeck listened gently, but avoided argument of any sort, and left with evil forebodings. Not until the tragic meeting in Turin in January, 1889, was he again to see his friend.

Nietzsche merely passed through Basle. His sister, whom he had not seen since the quarrel of the previous autumn, gave him a rendezvous at Zürich. It was to announce her marriage, which had taken place in secret some months before. She was now no longer Fräulein Nietzsche but Madame Förster, ready to leave for Paraguay with the colonists who were under the charge of her husband. Recrimination would therefore have been a waste of time. The step had been taken; Nietzsche did not discuss it, and did his best to be pleasant once again to the sister who was lost to him. "My brother," wrote Madame Förster, "seems to be in a very satisfactory condition. He is bright and charming; we have been together for six weeks, talking, laughing over everything."

She has left us a record of these days which she supposes--or pretends to suppose--were happy. Nietzsche came upon the works of one Freiligrath, a mediocre and popular poet. On the cover of the volume was inscribed _Thirty--eighth Edition._ With comical solemnity he exclaimed, "Here, then, we have at last a true German poet. The Germans buy his verse!" He decided to be a good German for the day, and bought a copy. He read and was hugely diverted--

"Wüstenkönig ist der Löwe;
Will er sein Gebiet durchfliegen."

(King of deserts is the Hon:
Will he traverse his dominion.)

He declaimed the pompous hemistiches. The Zürich hotel resounded with his childish laughter as he amused himself improvising verses on every subject in the manner of a Freiligrath.