Chapter VII: The Final Solitude (1)

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.