Chapter VI: The Labour of Zarathustra (3)

"Hullo!" said an old general to the brother and sister. "What is amusing you two? It makes one jealous to hear you. One wants to laugh like you."

It is unlikely that Nietzsche had much cause for laughter. One wonders whether he could contemplate those thirty-eight editions of Freiligrath without bitterness. During his stay in Zürich he went to the library to look through the files of the newspapers and reviews for his name. It would have meant a good deal to him to have read a capable criticism of his work, to have seen his thought reflected in another's; but no voice ever answered his labours.

"The sky is beautiful, worthy of Nice, and this has lasted for days," he wrote to Peter Gast on September 30th. "My sister is with me, and it is very agreeable for us to be doing each other good when for so long we had been doing harm only. My head is full of the most extravagant lyrics that ever haunted a poet's skull. I have had a letter from Stein. This year has brought me many good things, and one of the most precious of its gifts has been Stein, a new and a sincere friend.

"In short, let us be full of hope; or we may better express it by saying with old Keller--

"'Trinkt, O Augen, was die Wimper hält
Von dem goldnen Ueberfluss der Welt! '"

Brother and sister left Zürich, the one bound for Naumburg, the other for Nice. On the way Nietzsche stopped at Mentone. Hardly had he settled down there than he wrote: "This is a magnificent place. I have already discovered eight walks. I hope that no one will join me. I need absolute quiet."

It is possible that the project which he had formed at the beginning of the summer, when he spoke of six years of meditation and of silence, was again in his mind. But he lacked the force of will which long and silent meditation demands. He was, however, deeply moved by the hope of a friend and by the loss of a sister, and his lyric impatience broke the bonds. Yielding to instinct he composed poems off-hand--songs, short stanzas, epigrams. Practically all the poems which are to be found in his later works--the light verse, the biting distich, inserted in the second edition of the _Gaya Scienza,_ the grandiose Dionysian chants--were finished or conceived during these few weeks. And once more he began to think of the still incomplete _Thus Spake Zarathustra._ "A fourth, a fifth, a sixth part are inevitable," he writes. "Whatever happens I must bring my son Zarathustra to his noble end. Alive, he leaves me no peace."

At the end of October Nietzsche left Mentone. The sight of so many invalids disturbed him, and he set out for Nice.

* * * * *

There an unexpected companion, Paul Lanzky by name, soon joined him. Lanzky was an "intellectual," by birth a German and by taste a Florentine, who lived a wandering life. Chance had put the works of Nietzsche into his hands; and he had understood them. Applying to Schmeitzner, the publisher, for the author's address, he was told--" Herr Friedrich Nietzsche lives a very lonely life in Italy. Write to Poste Restante, Genoa." The philosopher replied promptly and graciously, "Come to Nice this winter and we will talk!" So Nietzsche was not so unsociable and solitary after all! This correspondence took place during the autumn of 1883, but Lanzky was not free at the moment, and begged to be excused. In October, 1884, he reached the rendezvous. Meanwhile he had had the opportunity of acquainting himself with the two last sections of _Zarathustra,_ and had published very intelligent summaries of them in a Leipsic magazine and in the _Rivista Europea_ of Florence.

On the very morning of his arrival in Nice there was a knock at his door. A gentle-looking man entered the room and came towards him smiling. "Also Sie sind gekommen!" said Nietzsche. "So here you are!" He took him by the arm, and examined curiously this student of his works. "Let's see what you are made of!"

Nietzsche's eyes were fixed upon him; those eyes which had once been beautiful, and were, at moments, still beautiful, clouded though they now were by reason of prolonged suffering. Lanzky was astonished. He had come to do honour to a redoubtable prophet, and here was the most affable, the simplest, and, as it seemed to him, the most modest of German professors.

As the two men went out together, Lanzky avowed his surprise--" Master," he began....

"You are the first to call me by that name," said Nietzsche with a smile. But he let the word pass, for he knew that he was a master.

"Master," continued Lanzky, "what a mistaken idea of you one gathers from your books; tell me ..."

"No, no, not to-day. You do not know Nice. I will do the honours, and show you this sea, these mountains, these walks.... Another day we shall talk, if you will."

By the time they returned it was six o'clock in the evening, and Lanzky had discovered how tireless a walker was his prophet.

They organised their life in common. At six o'clock in the morning it was Nietzsche's custom to make himself a cup of tea, which he took alone; towards eight Lanzky would knock at his door and ask how he had passed the night--Nietzsche often slept badly--and how he intended to employ his morning. Usually Nietzsche began the day by skimming the newspapers in a public reading hall; he then went to the shore, where Lanzky either joined him or respected his desire for a solitary walk. Both of them lunched in their pension. In the afternoon they walked out together. At night, Nietzsche wrote or Lanzky read to him aloud, often from some French book, such as the _Letters_ of the Abbé Galiani, Stendhal's _Le Rouge et le Noir, La Chartreuse, L'Armance._

To live courteously, yet withhold from ordinary gaze the secret of one's life, is a whole art in itself; and this art Nietzsche had mastered. Indeed, as regards the scheme of manners that he had composed for himself, this solitary of the table d'hôte was, deliberately, hypocritical and almost cunning. More than once Lanzky was nonplussed. One Sunday a young lady asked Nietzsche had he been to church.

"To-day, no," he replied courteously.

To Lanzky, who admired his prudence, he explained that every truth was not good for everyone. "If I had troubled that girl's mind," he added, "I should be horrified."

Occasionally it amused him to announce his future greatness. He would tell his neighbours during meals that in forty years' time he would be illustrious throughout Europe.

They would say: "Well, then lend us your books."

He refused their requests most positively, and again explained to Lanzky that his writings were not for the man in the street.

"Master," asked Lanzky, "why do you print them?"

It appears that no answer was given to this reasonable question.

Nietzsche, however, dissembled even with Lanzky. The formation of a society of friends, of an idealistic phalanstery similar to that in which Emerson lived--this old dream of his he loved to repeat and elaborate for him.

He often led Lanzky to the peninsula of Saint-Jean. "Here," he would say in Biblical phrase--"Here we shall pitch our tents." He went so far as to select a group of little villas which seemed to be suitable for his purpose. But the members were not yet decided upon, and the name of Heinrich von Stein, the only friend, the only disciple whom he really wanted, was never mentioned in Lanzky's presence.

There was no news of Stein's coming, nor of his plans. To Nietzsche he gave no sign. We may assume that he had gone to Sils-Maria to conciliate, if possible, the two masters. But one of them had said that he must choose between the two: perhaps he had been disturbed for a moment. He returned, however, to his Germany, and there he saw Cosima Wagner again. Nietzsche had required that he should choose, and he remained faithful to Wagner.

Nietzsche anticipated a new desertion. He was afraid, and, yielding to a humble and mournful impulse, wrote, in the form of a poem, an appeal which he addressed to the young man:

O midday of life! O solemn time!
O garden of summer!
Unquiet happiness I am there: listening, waiting!
Night and day, living in hope of the friend;
"Where are ye, friends? Come! It is time, it is time!"[10]

Heinrich von Stein felt it incumbent upon him to reply. He wrote: "To an appeal such as yours there is but one suitable reply. It is that I should come and give myself entirely to you, vowing, as to the noblest of tasks, all my time to the understanding of the new Gospel which you have to preach. But this is forbidden me. An idea, however, strikes me. Every month I entertain two friends and read with them some article from the Wagner-Lexicon. It is taken as text, and, on it, I speak to them. These conversations are becoming more and more lofty and free. Latterly we have found this definition of æsthetic emotion--a passage to the impersonal through very fulness of personality. I think that our meetings would please you. And how if Nietzsche should now and again send us the text? Would you communicate with us in this way? Would you not see in such a correspondence an introduction, a step towards your idea of a cloister?"

This letter was obviously the letter of an excellent pupil, and it exasperated Nietzsche. Wagner was named, doubtless intentionally, and the Wagnerian Encyclopedia, the sum of an absurd and puerile theology, was indicated as the text of Stein's meditations. Here was the old adversary again standing in the way, Wagner, the quack of thought, the seducer of young men. Förster, who was taking his sister from him, was a Wagnerian; and Heinrich von Stein, on Wagner's account, refused him his devotion. It was a cruel liberty that he had won, alone and at the cost of a struggle whose wounds he still bore. He wrote to his sister:

"What a foolish letter Stein has written me in answer to such poetry! I am painfully affected. Here I am ill again. I have recourse to the old means [chloral], and I utterly hate all men, myself included, whom I have known. I sleep well, but on waking I experience misanthropy and rancour. And yet there can be few men living who are better disposed, more benevolent than I!"

Lanzky remarked Nietzsche's trouble of mind without suspecting the cause. The crisis was very severe, but Nietzsche did not allow himself to be crushed by it and laboured energetically. More often now than heretofore he walked alone, and Lanzky would watch him trip as lightly as a dancer across the Promenade des Anglais or over the mountain paths. He would leap and gambol at times, and then suddenly interrupt his capers to write down a few words with a pencil. What was the new work on which he was busy? Lanzky had no idea.

One morning in March he entered, as was his custom, the little room which the philosopher occupied, to find him in bed notwithstanding the advanced hour. He made anxious enquiries.

"I am ill," said Nietzsche; "I have just had my confinement."

"What's that you say?" asked Lanzky, much perturbed.

"The fourth part of _Zarathustra_ is written."

* * * * *

This fourth section does not enable us to discover at length an advance in the work, an attained precision of thought. It is merely a singular fragment, an "interlude," as Nietzsche called it. It illustrates a strange episode in the life of the hero, one which has disconcerted many a reader. We may perhaps best understand it if we consider the deception to which Nietzsche has just been subjected.

The superior men go up to Zarathustra and surprise him in his mountainous solitude: an old pope, an old historian, an old king, unhappy beings who are suffering from their abasement and wish to ask succour of a sage whose strength they feel. Was it not thus that Stein, that distinguished young man, etiolated by Bayreuth, went to Nietzsche?

Zarathustra admits these superior men to his presence, and keeping in check his savage humour, makes them sit down in his cave, is sorry for their disquietude, listens and talks to them. Was it not thus that Nietzsche had received Stein?

Zarathustra's soul is in its depths less hard than it should be, and he allows himself to be seduced by the morbid charm and delicacy of the superior men; he takes pity on them and, forgetting that their misery is irremediable, yields to the pleasures of hope. He had looked for friends, and, perhaps, with these "superior men" they have come at last. Had not Nietzsche hoped for some help from Stein?

Zarathustra leaves his friends for a moment, and ascends alone to the mountain. He returns to his cave to find the "superior men," all of them prostrate before a donkey. The aged pope is saying Mass before the new idol. In this posture Stein, interpreting a Wagnerian bible with two friends, had been surprised by Nietzsche.

Zarathustra hunts his guests away, and calls for new workmen for a new world. But will he ever find them?

"My children, my pure-blooded race, my beautiful new race; what is it that keeps my children upon their isles?

"Is it not time, full time--I murmur it in thine ear, good spirit of the tempests,--that they should return to their father? do they not know that my hair grows gray and whitens in waiting?

"Go, go, spirit of the tempests, indomitable and beneficent! Leave thy gorges and thy mountains, precipitate thyself upon the seas and bless my children before the night has come.

"Bear them the benediction of my happiness, the benediction of that crown of happy roses! Let these roses fall upon their isles, let them remain fallen there, as a sign, which asks: 'Whence can such a happiness come?'

. . . . . .

"Then they shall ask: 'Still lives he, our father Zarathustra? What, can our father Zarathustra be still alive? Does our old father, Zarathustra, still love his children?'

"The wind breathes, the wind breathes, the moon shines bright--Oh my far-off, far-off children, why are ye not here, with your father? The wind breathes no cloud passes over the sky, the world sleeps. Oh, joy! Oh, joy!"

Nietzsche omitted this page from his work. Perhaps he felt ashamed of so plain and so melancholy an avowal.

The fourth part of _Zarathustra_ found no publisher. A few months earlier Schmeitzner had informed Nietzsche that "the public would not read his aphorisms." He now contented himself with stating that the public had chosen to ignore _Zarathustra;_ and there the matter rested, so far as he was concerned.

Nietzsche then made certain overtures which only hurt his pride and had no result; then he took a more dignified course and had the manuscript printed at his own expense in an edition limited to forty copies. To tell the truth, his friends were not so numerous. He found seven consignees--none of whom were truly worthy. If we may guess, these were the seven: his sister--whose loss he never ceased to deplore; Overbeck -a strict friend, an intelligent reader, but cautious and reserved; Burckhardt, the Basle historian--who always replied to Nietzsche's messages, but was too polite to be easily fathomed; Peter Gast--the faithful disciple whom, no doubt, Nietzsche found too faithful and obedient; Lanzky--his good companion of the wintertide; Rohde--who scarcely disguised the ennui that these forced readings gave him. These were the seven, we may presume, who received copies of the work, and not all of them troubled to read this fourth and last section, the interlude which ends, and yet does not complete, _Thus Spake Zarathustra._

[9] Phrase in a passage from _Ecce Homo._

[10]

"Oh Lebens Mittag! Feierliche Zeit!
Oh Sommergarten!
Unruhig Glück im Stehn und Spahn und Warten!
Der Freunde harr' Ich, Tag und Nacht bereit;
Wo bleibt ihr, Freunde? Kommt! s'ist Zeit! s'ist Zeit!"