Chapter VII: The Final Solitude (2)

Mournful news completed the ruin of his courage. Heinrich von Stein died, before his thirtieth year, of a heart failure.

"This has put me out of my senses," wrote Nietzsche to Peter Gast; "I truly loved him. I always thought that he was reserved for me some day. He belonged to that little number of men whose _existence_ rejoiced me; and he too had great confidence in me.... In this very place how we laughed! ... He paid a two days' visit to Sils, he had not a glance for Nature or Switzerland--he came straight from Bayreuth; he went back straight to Halle, to his father;--one of the rarest and most delicate homages I have ever received. It made an impression. He had said at the hotel: 'If I come, it is not for the Engadine.'"

Three weeks passed. He complained of bitter inclinations, of susceptibility which lowered his soul. Nevertheless, he announced a new work. What was it?

* * * * *

It is not _The Will to Power._ His impatience, which is added to by fatigue, does not easily bend to the delays of meditation. Of his old gifts, his genius for improvising, his polemical genius alone survive. Herr Widmann, a Swiss critic, had just written a study on _Beyond Good and Evil_ and saw in this work but a manual of anarchism: "This is dynamite," he said. Friedrich Nietzsche wished to reply, and at once drew up at a spurt in fifteen days one, two, three short essays which he entitled as a whole, _A Genealogy of Morals._ "This work," he wrote on the title-page, "is destined to complete and elucidate my last book, _Beyond Good and Evil._"

"I have said," he wrote in substance, "that I place myself beyond Good and Evil--_Gut und Böse._ Does this mean that I wish to liberate myself from every moral category? No. I challenge the exaltation of meekness which is called good; the defamation of energy which is called bad; but the history of the human conscience--do the moralists know that such a history exists?--displays to us a multitude of other moral values, other ways of being good, other ways of being bad, numerous shades of honour and of dishonour. Even here the reality is moving, initiative is free; one must seek, one must create."

But Nietzsche developed his thought further: "I have wished," he wrote some months later à propos of this little book, "I have wished to fire a cannon-shot with more sonorous powder." He exposed the distinction between the two moralities, the one dictated by the masters, the other by the slaves; and he thought to recognise in the verbal roots of the words "good" and "evil," their old meaning. _Bonus, buonus,_ said he, comes from _duonus,_ which signifies warrior; _malus_ comes from μέλας, black: the blonde Aryans, the ancestors of the Greek, indicated by this word the type of conduct habitual to their slaves and subjects, the Mediterraneans crossed with Negro and Semitic blood. These primitive notions of what is noble and what is vile, Friedrich Nietzsche does not challenge.

On the 18th of July, writing from Sils-Maria, he announced the new work to Peter Gast.

"I have energetically employed these last days, which were better," he wrote. "I have drawn up a little piece of work which, as I think, puts the problem of my last book in a clear light. Every one has complained of not having understood me; and the hundred copies sold do not permit me to doubt that in effect I am not understood. You know that for three years I have spent about 500 thalers to defray the cost of my books; no honorarium, it goes without saying, and I am 43 years old, and I have written fifteen books! Further: experience, and many applications, more painful to me than I care to say, force me to certify, as a fact, that no German editor wants to have anything to do with me (even if I abandon my author's rights). Perhaps this little book which I am completing to-day will help to sell some copies of my last book (it always pains me to think of the poor Fritzsch on whom all the weight of my work rests). Perhaps my publishers will some day benefit from me. As for myself, I know only too well that when people begin to understand me, _I shall not benefit from it._"

On the 20th of July, he despatched the manuscript to the publisher. On the 24th July, he called it back by telegram in order to add a few features, a few pages. All his summer was spent in discomfort, melancholy, and the correction of his book, which he never ceased to touch up, to draw out, to render more violent and more alive. Towards the end of August, perceiving an empty space on the last page of the first section, Nietzsche added this curious note, in which he indicated the unstudied problems which he was to have neither strength nor time to attack.

"_Remark._--I take the opportunity presented by this essay to express publicly and formally a wish which, so far, I have only mentioned occasionally to certain scholars, in chance conversations. Some Faculty of Philosophy ought, by a series of academical prize-dissertations, to further studies in the _history of morality;_ perhaps this book will serve to give a vigorous impetus in this direction. I would propose the following question:

"_What hints are furnished by philology, more especially by etymological research, with reference to the history of the development of moral concepts?_

"On the other hand it will be as necessary to interest physiologists and doctors in these problems. In fact and above all, all tables of values, every 'thou shalt' known to history and ethnological research, need to be explained and elucidated in the first place from their _physiological_ side, before any attempt is made to interpret them through psychology.... The question: What is this or that table of values and morality _worth?_ must be considered from the most varied perspectives. Especially 'the worth for what?' must be considered with extraordinary discernment and delicacy. A thing, for instance, which has evident value with reference to the greatest durability of a race might possess quite another value, if it were a question of creating a higher type. The good of the greatest number and the good of the smallest number are antithetical points of view in valuation; we shall let the simplicity of English biologists suppose that the former is _by itself_ of higher value. All sciences must prepare the way for the philosopher of the future, whose task will consist in solving the _problem of values_ and determining _their hierarchy_."

September came. The proofs were corrected, the Engadine became cold. The wandering philosopher had to find new quarters and new work.

"To tell the truth," he wrote to Peter Gast, "I hesitate between Venice and Leipsic; I should go there to work, I still have a lot to learn, many questions to ask and much to read for the great thought of my life of which I must now acquit myself. It would not be a matter of an autumn, but of a _whole winter_ spent in Germany. And, weighing everything together, my health dissuades me very strongly from essaying a like experience this year. It will be then Venice or Nice; and from a quite personal point of view, that is better perhaps. Moreover, I need solitude and contemplation rather than study and inquiry into five thousand problems."

Peter Gast was at Venice, and Venice, as one might have foreseen, carried the day. Nietzsche lived for some weeks, a _flaneur_ and all but happy, in the town with a "hundred profound solitudes." He scarcely wrote: his days, according to Peter Gast, were idle or seemed to be so. It was not to shut himself up in a room in Venice that he gave up the libraries of Leipsic. He walked, frequented the poor "trattoria," where at midday the humblest, the most courteous of lower classes sit down to eat; when the light was too strong he went to rest his eyes in the shade of the basilica; when day began to decline he recommenced his perpetual walks. Then he could look at St. Mark, with its flocks of familiar pigeons, without suffering, at the lagoon with its islands and temples. He kept on thinking of his work. He imagined it logical and free, simple in its plan, numerous in its details, luminous with a little mystery, a little shade on every line; he wished in short that it should resemble that city which he loved, that Venice whose sovereign will allied itself to the play of all fantasy and grace.

Let us read this page of notes, written in November, 1887; L'_Ombra di Venezia,_ is it not obvious there?

"_A perfect_ book to consider:

"(1) Form. Style. _An ideal monologue,_ all that has a learned appearance, absorbed in the depths. All the accents of profound passion, of unrest and also of weakness. Alleviations, sun tasks--short happiness, sublime serenity. To go beyond demonstration; to be absolutely personal, without employing the first person. Memoirs as it were; to say the most abstract things in the most concrete, in the most cutting manner. The whole history as if it had been _lived_ and _personally suffered._ Visible things, precise things, examples, as many as possible. No description; all the problems transposed into sentiment as far as passion.

"(2) Expressive terms. Advantage of military terms. To find expressions to replace philosophical terms."

On the 22nd of October he was at Nice.

* * * * *

Two events (the word is assuredly not too strong) occupied the first two weeks of his stay. He lost his oldest friend; he acquired a reader.

The lost friend was Erwin Rohde. The quarrel begun in the previous spring was then consummated. Nietzsche wrote to Rohde, and his first intention was not to wound. "Do not withdraw from me too lightly," he wrote in announcing the despatch of his last book, _The Genealogy of Morals;_ "at my age and in my solitude I can hardly bear to lose the few men in whom I formerly confided." But he could not limit himself to these words. He had received a second note, a very amiable one, from Hippolyte Taine,[3] whom Erwin Rohde had criticised disrespectfully in his letter of May. Nietzsche wished to defend his French correspondent, and continued:

"N.B.--I beg that you judge M. Taine more sensibly. The scurrilities that you express and think about him irritate me. I pardon them to the prince Napoleon, not to friend Rohde. It is difficult to me to think that any one who misunderstands this great-hearted and severe-minded race can understand anything of my task. Besides, you have never written me a word which shows that you have the least suspicion of the destiny which weighs me down. I have forty-three years behind me and am as alone as if I were a child."

All relations were broken off.

The new reader acquired was Georges Brandes, who acknowledged the despatch of the _Genealogy_ in an extraordinarily intelligent and vivid letter.

"I get the breath of a new mind from your books," he wrote: "I do not always entirely understand what I read, I do not always see whither you are bound, but many features are in accord with my thoughts and sympathies; like you I hold the ascetic ideal in poor esteem; democratic mediocrity inspires in me, as in you, a profound repugnance; I appreciate your aristocratic radicalism. I am not quite clear with regard to your contempt for the ethic of pity ...

"Of you I know nothing. I see with astonishment that you are a professor. In any case I offer you my best compliments on being, intellectually, so little of a professor.... You are of the small number of men with whom I would like to talk."

It would seem as if Nietzsche ought to have felt very strongly the comfort of having found two witnesses to his work, and of so rare a quality: Brandes and Taine. Did he not learn, about this time, that Brahms was reading _Beyond, Good and Evil_ with much relish? But the iron had entered into his soul, and the faculty of receiving happy impressions was, as it were, extinguished in him. He had lost that interior joy, that resistant serenity of which he was formerly so proud, and his letters displayed only melancholy.

With this disaster there survived the activity of his mind alone, which worked with singular energy. We can with difficulty enumerate the objects which occupied his attention. Peter Gast transcribed his _Hymn to Life_ for the orchestra; Nietzsche superintended, sometimes corrected, always naïvely admired, this new form of his work.

The journal of the Goncourts appeared; he read this "very interesting novelty," and sat down to table at Magny's with Flaubert, Sainte-Beuve, Gautier, Taine, Gavarri and Renan. All these distractions did not prevent him from embarking resolutely on his new work, the decisive work in which his wisdom and not his rage would speak; the calm work in which polemics would be without rights. He defined in six lines the design which he had formed.

"To have run through every chamber of the modern soul, to have eaten in each of its corners: my pride, my torture, and my joy. To transcend pessimism effectively, and, in short, a Goethean regard full of love and good-will."

Friedrich Nietzsche in this note designated the inspirer of his last work; it was to be Goethe. No nature differed so much from his own, and this very difference determined his choice. Goethe had humiliated no mode of human activity, he had excluded no idea from his intellectual world; he had received and administered as a benevolent lord the immense heritage of human culture. Such was Friedrich Nietzsche's last ideal, his last dream. He wished, in this extremity of life (he knew his destiny), to spread, like the sinking sun, his softest lights; to penetrate everywhere, to justify and illumine everything, so that not one shadow should exist upon the surface of things, not one sorrow in the privacy of souls.

He easily determined the directing ideas of his first two volumes: _European Nihilism, The Criticism of Higher Values._ For four years he had not written a line which was not a part of this analysis or criticism. He wrote rapidly, angrily. "A little fresh air," he cried; "this absurd state of Europe cannot last much longer." It was only a cry, and very quickly suppressed. Nietzsche put patience behind him, like a weakness; with a song of love that he would answer the attacks of life. He wished to return, and did, in fact, return, to calmer thoughts. He put this question: "Is it true that the condition of Europe is absurd? Perhaps a reason for the facts exists, and escapes us. Perhaps in this debility of the will, in this democratic abasement, one should rightly recognise a certain utility, a certain value of conservation. They seem irrepressible; perhaps they are necessary, perhaps in the long run salutary, though to-day, and, so far as we are concerned, they must be deplored.

"_Reflexion:_ It is madness to suppose that all this victory of values can be anti-biological; one must seek to explain it by a _vital_ interest for the maintenance of the type _man,_ even though it must be attained by the preponderance of the feeble and the disinherited. Perhaps if things went differently, man would cease to exist?--Problem.

"The elevation of the type is dangerous to the conservation of the species. Why?

"The strong races are the prodigal races.... Here we are confronted by a problem of economy...."

He repressed all disgust, refused to allow himself the use of abusive speech, tried to consider, and did consider, serenely, those tendencies which he condemned. He asked: Must we deny to the masses the right to seek their truths, their vital beliefs? The masses are the basis of all humanity, the foundation of all cultures. Without them, what would become of the masters? They require that the masses be happy. We must be patient; we must suffer our insurgent slaves (for the moment our masters) to invent the illusions which are favourable to them. Let them believe in the dignity of work! If they thus become more docile in work, their belief is salutary.

"The problem," he writes, "is to render man as utilisable as possible, and make him approximate, as far as may be done, as closely as possible to the machine which never makes a mistake; for this, he must be armed with the virtues of the machine, he must be taught to endure ennui, to lend to ennui a superior charm ...; the _agreeable_ sentiments must be put back to a lower rank.... The mechanical form of existence, considered as the noblest, the highest, should adore itself.

"A high culture can only be raised on a vast site, over a firm and well-consolidated mediocrity....

"The sole end must, for a long while yet, be the _lessening_ of man: for there must first be created a large foundation on which the race of strong men may be raised....

"The _lessening_ of the European man is the great process which may not be impeded; it should be accelerated again. It is the active force which allows one to hope for the arrival of a stronger race, of a race which should possess to excess those very qualities which the impoverished species lack (will, responsibility, certitude, the faculty of fixing an end for oneself)."

Thus at the end of 1887, Nietzsche had succeeded in drawing up a first sketch of the work of synthesis which he had proposed to himself. He concedes a certain right, a certain dignity, to those motives which he formerly reviled. The final rough drafts of _Zarathustra_ had already given us similar indications. "The disciples of Zarathustra," wrote Nietzsche, "give to the humblest, not to themselves, the expectation of happiness. ... They distribute religions and systems, according to a hierarchy." Nietzsche now writes, and the intention is similar: "The humanitarian tendencies are not anti-vital, they suit the masses who live slowly, and thus suit humanity which needs the satisfaction of the masses. The Christian tendencies are also benevolent, and nothing is so desirable," writes Nietzsche, "as their permanence; for they suit all those who suffer, all the feeble, and it is necessary for the health of human societies that suffering, that inevitable weaknesses, be accepted without revolt, with submission, and, if possible, with love." "Whatever I may happen to say of Christianity," wrote Nietzsche in 1881 to Peter Gast, "I cannot forget that I owe to it the best experiences of my spiritual life; and I hope never to be ungrateful to it at the bottom of my heart." This thought, this hope, has never left him; and he rejoices to have found a word of justice for the religion of his childhood, the only one which still offers itself to souls.

On December 14, 1887, he addressed a letter to an old correspondent of the Basle days, Carl Fuchs. The accent is a proud one.

"Almost all that I have written should be erased. During these latter years the vehemence of my internal agitations has been terrible. To-day, at the moment when I should be rising higher, my first task is to modify myself, to _depersonalise_ myself towards higher forms.

"Am I old? I do not know, and moreover I do not know what kind of youth is necessary to me.

"In Germany, people complain strongly of my 'eccentricities.' But as they do not know where my centre is, they can hardly discern when or how I happen to be eccentric."

From the dates of his notes, it seems that Nietzsche approached a different problem in the month of January, 1888. Those humble multitudes whose rights he admits and measures would not deserve to live, if their activity were not, in the last instance, governed by an élite, utilised for glorious ends. What would be the virtues of this élite, what ends would it serve? Nietzsche was thus brought back to the problem which was his torment. Would he define at length this unknown, and perhaps unattainable grandeur, towards which his soul had for so long aspired? He was again a prey to sadness. He complained of his sensibility, of his irritability, which had become such that each day, on the arrival of the post, he hesitated and shivered before opening his letters.

"Never has life appeared so difficult to me," he wrote to Peter Gast on January 15th. "I can no longer keep on terms with any sort of reality: when I do not succeed in forgetting them, they break me.... There are nights when I am overwhelmed with distress. And so much remains to be done--all, so to say!--Therefore I must hold out. To this wisdom I apply myself, at least in the mornings. Music, these days, gives me sensations which I had never known. It frees me, it lets me recover from the intoxication of myself; I seem to consider myself from a great height, to _feel_ myself from a great height; thus it renders me stronger, and regularly, after an evening's music (I have heard _Carmen_ four times), I have a morning full of energetic perceptions and lucky discoveries. It is quite admirable. It is as though I had bathed myself in a _more natural_ element. Without music life is merely a mistake, a weariness, an exile."

Let us try to follow the course of his work. He subjected himself to an historical research and attempted to discover the social class, the nation, the race or the party which authorised the hope of a more noble humanity. Here was the modern European:

"How could a race of strong men disengage itself from it? a race with the classical taste? The classical taste, that is, the will to simplification, to accentuation ... the courage of psychological nudity.... To raise oneself from this chaos to this organisation, one must be constrained by a _necessity._ One must be without choice; disappear or impose oneself. A dominant race can only have terrible and violent origins. Problem: where are the _barbarians_ of the twentieth century? Evidently they will only be able to appear and impose themselves after huge socialistic crises--these will be the elements most capable of the most persistent hardness in respect of themselves, and who will be able to become the guarantees of _the most persistent will._"

Is it possible to discern in modern Europe these elements predestined to victory? Nietzsche busied himself with this problem, and wrote down the results of his researches in his notebook.

"The most favourable impediments and remedies against modernity.

"And first:

"1. _Obligatory military service,_ with genuine wars which put an end to all lightness of mind.

"2. _National narrowness_ which simplifies and concentrates."

Other indications corroborate the above.

"The maintenance of the _military state,_ which is the only means left to us, whether for the maintenance of the great traditions, or for the institution of the superior type of man. And all circumstances which perpetuate unfriendliness, distance between states, find themselves thus justified."

What an unforeseen conclusion to Nietzschean polemics! He had dishonoured nationalism; and for the support which he sought in this grave hour he fell back on nationalism. A yet more unexpected discovery was to come. Nietzsche, proceeding with his researches, foresaw, defined, and approved of a party which can be but a form or a reform of Positivist democracy. He discerned the lineaments of the two vigorous and sane groupings which suffice to discipline man.

"_A party of peace,_ not sentimental, which denies war to itself and its members, which also denies them recourse to the courts of law; which provokes against itself, struggle, contradiction, persecution: a party of the oppressed, at least for a time; soon the great party opposed to sentiments of rancour and vengeance.

"A _party of war,_ which with the same logic and severity against itself, proceeds in an opposite sense."

Should we recognise in these two parties the organised forces which will produce that _tragical era of Europe_ which Nietzsche announces? Perhaps; but let us be careful not to exaggerate the value of these notes. They are rapidly written; as they surged and passed in Nietzsche's mind, they should surge and pass before us. His view pierces in every direction: it never settles upon one object. No working-class Puritanism can satisfy him, for he knows that the brilliancy of human culture stands or falls with the freedom of the aristocracies. No nationalism can satisfy him, for he loves Europe and her innumerable traditions.

What resource is left to him? He has bound himself to seek in his own time the points of support for a higher culture. For a moment he thinks he has found them; he has deceived himself, and turns away, for these supports impose a narrowness of direction which his mind cannot tolerate. "There is this that is extraordinary in the life of a thinker," he wrote in 1875--the age of the text proves the permanence of the conflict--" that two contrary inclinations oblige him to follow, at the same moment, two different directions and hold him under their yokes; on the one hand he wishes to know and, abandoning without weariness the firm ground which sustains the life of men, he adventures into unknown regions; on the other hand he wishes to live, and, without ever wearying, he seeks a place in which to five...." Nietzsche had abandoned Wagner, wandered in uncertain regions. He seeks a final security; what does he find? The narrow refuge of nationalism. He withdraws from it: it may be a vulgar recourse, a useful artifice for maintaining some solidity in the crowds, a certain principle of taste and of severity; it may not be, it must not be, the doctrine of the European élite, a scattered and, no doubt, non-existent élite to whom his thoughts are addressed.

Nietzsche put the idea of nationalism out of his mind; it was the expedient of a weak century. He ceased to devote himself to his search. What mattered to him the beliefs which should be beneficent to the humble? He thought of Napoleon and of Goethe, both of whom rose superior to their times, and to the prejudices of their countries. Napoleon was contemptuous of the Revolution, but artfully turned its energy to advantage; he despised France, but ruled her. Goethe held Germany in poor esteem and took little interest in her struggles: he wished to possess and reanimate all the ideas, all the dreams of men, to conserve and enrich the vast heritage of moral riches which Europe had created. Napoleon knew the grandeur of Goethe, and Goethe joyfully observed the life of the conqueror, _ens realissimum._ The soldier, the poet, the one who kept men in submission and silence, held them to effort, the other who watched, meditated, and glorified, such is the ideal couple that reappear at every decisive instant in Friedrich Nietzsche's life. He had admired the Greece of Theognis and Pindar, the Germany of Bismarck and Wagner; a long winding course led him back towards his dream, towards that unrealised Europe of strength and beauty of which Goethe and Napoleon were, upon the morrow of the Revolution, the solitary representatives.

* * * * *

We can tell, from a letter addressed to Peter Gast (February 13, 1887), that Nietzsche was at this date by no means satisfied with his work. "I am still in the tentative, the introductory, the expectant stage ..." he wrote, and he added: "The first rough draft of my _Essay towards a Transvaluation_ is ready; it has been, on the whole, a torture, and I have no longer the courage to think of it. In ten years I shall do better." What was the cause of this dissatisfaction? Was he weary of that tolerance, that condescension to the needs of the feeble and of the crowd which he had imposed on himself for three months? Was he impatient to express his anger?

The letters which he then addressed to his mother and sister let us approach him in a more intimate manner. (They have not all been published.) He wrote to these two women from whom he was separated with a tenderness which rendered difficult dissimulation and even courage itself. He let himself go, as though it pleased him to find himself at their knees a child again. He was gentle, obedient with his mother; he signed himself humbly: _ta vieille créature._ With his sister he talked like a comrade; he seemed to have forgotten all the grievances he had had against her in other times; he knew that she would never return from far-off Paraguay: he regretted her, he loved her because she was lost. She is energetic, is Lisbeth, and valiantly risks her life. Nietzsche admired in her the virtues which he esteemed above all virtues, and which are, he thinks, the virtues of his race, the noble race of the Counts Nietzki. "How strongly I feel," he wrote her, "in all you do and say, that the same blood runs in our veins." He hearkened to her, but she did not cease to offer him overwise advice. As he complains of being alone, why does he not get made a professor, why does he not marry? Nietzsche answered too easily: "Where would I find a wife? and if by chance I did find one, would I have the right to ask her to share my life?" He knew nevertheless, and said so, that a wife would be sweet to him.

"NICE, _January_ 25, 1888. "I must relate a little adventure to you: yesterday, as I was taking my usual walk, I heard, not far off, a warm and frank laugh (I thought that I heard your laugh); and when this laughing person came near me--I saw a very charming girl, with brown eyes, delicate as a deer. The sight warmed my heart, my old solitary philosopher's heart--I thought of your matrimonial advice, and for the rest of my walk, I could not rid myself of the image of this young and gracious girl. Assuredly it would do me good to have so gracious a thing by me--but would it do her good? Would not I, with my ideas, make this girl unhappy? And would not my heart break (we assume that I love her) if I saw so amiable a creature suffering? No, no marriage!"

Was it not now that a singular and unwholesome idea fixed itself in his thought? At every moment he was picturing to himself the joys of which he was deprived: fame, love, and friendship; he thought rancourously of those who possessed them, and above all of Richard Wagner, whose genius had been always so sumptuously rewarded. How beautiful she had been, when he knew her at Triebschen, this incomparable woman Cosima Lizst, come, while yet married, to the scandal of the world, to live with Wagner and help in his work! Attentive and clear-minded, active and helpful, she assured him the security which he had hitherto lacked. Without her, what would have become of him? Could he have mastered his impatient, restless, excitable temperament? would he have been capable of realising those great works which he was for ever announcing? Cosima appeased him, directed him; thanks to her, he achieved the Tetralogy, he reared Bayreuth, he wrote _Parsifal...._ Nietzsche recalled those fine days at Triebschen. Cosima welcomed him, listened to his ideas and projects, read his manuscripts, was benevolent, talked brightly to him. Suffering and irritation deformed his memories; he became infatuated with the thought that he had loved Cosima Wagner and that she, perhaps, had loved him. Nietzsche wished to believe this, and came to believe it. Yes, there had been love between them, and Cosima would have saved him, as she saved Wagner, if, by lucky chance, she had only known him a few years earlier. But every circumstance had been unfavourable to Nietzsche. Here again Wagner had robbed him. He had taken all, fame, love, friendship.

We can divine this strange romance in the last works of Friedrich Nietzsche. A Greek myth helps him to express and veil his thoughts; it is the myth of Ariadne, Theseus, and Bacchus. Theseus was lost; Ariadne has met him and led him to the exit from the labyrinth; but Theseus is treacherous: he abandons upon the rock the woman who has saved him; Ariadne would die alone and in despair if Bacchus did not intervene, Bacchus-Dionysios who loves her. The enigma of these three names may be solved: Ariadne is Cosima; Theseus, Wagner; Bacchus-Dionysios, Nietzsche.

On the 31st of March he wrote again, and his language was that of a lost soul.

"Night and day, I am in a state of unbearable tension and oppression, by reason of the duty imposed upon me and also on account of my conditions of life, which are absolutely opposed to the accomplishment of this duty; here no doubt the cause of my distress must be sought.

"... My health, thanks to an extraordinarily fine winter, to good nourishment, to long walks, has remained sufficiently good. Nothing is sick, but the poor soul. Besides, I will not conceal the fact that my winter has been very rich in spiritual acquisitions for my great work: so the mind is not sick; nothing is sick, but the poor soul."

Nietzsche left Nice next day. He wished, before going up to the Engadine, to make the experiment of a stay in Turin. Its dry air and spacious streets had been praised in his hearing. He travelled with difficulty; he lost his luggage and his temper, quarrelled with the porters, and remained for two days ill at Sampiedarena, near Genoa; in Genoa itself, he spent three days of rest, fully occupied with the happy memories which he found again. "I thank my luck," he wrote to Peter Gast, "that it led me back to this town, where the will rises, where one cannot be cowardly. I have never felt more gratitude than during this pilgrimage to Genoa...." On Saturday, April 6th, he arrived at Turin, broken with fatigue. "I am no longer capable of travelling alone," he said to Peter Gast in the same letter. "It agitates me too much, everything affects me stupidly."

III

_Towards the Darkness_

Here we should discontinue our story to forewarn the reader. Hitherto, we have been following the history of Nietzsche's thought. Nietzsche's thought has now no longer a history, for an influence, come not from the mind, but from the body, has affected it. People sometimes say that Nietzsche was mad long before this. It may be that they are right; it is impossible to reach an assured diagnosis. At least he had retained his power of reflection, his will. He could still hold himself and his judgments in check. In the spring of 1888 he lost this faculty. His intelligence is not yet darkened; there is not a word he writes but is penetrating and trenchant. His lucidity is extreme, but disastrous, since it exercises itself only to destroy. As one studies the last months of this life, one feels as though one were watching the work of some engine of war which is no longer governed by the hand of man.

Friedrich Nietzsche abandoned those moral researches which had strengthened his work till now, enriched and elevated it. Let us recall a letter addressed to Peter Gast in February, 1888: "I am in a state of chronic irritability which allows me, in my better moments, a sort of revenge, not the finest sort--it takes the form of an excess of hardness." These words shed light on the three coming books: _The Case of Wagner, The Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist._

We shall hurry on with the story of those months in which Nietzsche is no longer quite himself.

* * * * *

About the 7th of April he received an unexpected letter at Turin. Georges Brandes wrote informing him of a projected series of conferences which were to be devoted to his philosophy. "It annoys me," wrote Brandes, "to think that no one knows you here, and I wish to make you known all of a sudden." Nietzsche replied: "Truly, dear sir, this is a surprise. Where did you get such courage that you can speak in public of a _vir obscurissimus?.._. Perhaps you imagine that I am known in my own country. They treat me as something singular and absurd, which it is not at all necessary _to take seriously"_ He ended by remarking, "The long resistance has exasperated my pride a little. Am I a philosopher? What does it matter?"

The letter should have been an occasion of great joy; and, perhaps, had it been possible to save him, the occasion of his salvation. Assuredly he felt some happiness, but we scarcely discern it. The hour was late, and Nietzsche now followed the tracks whither his destiny had drawn him.

During these days of weariness and tension, he procured a translation of the _Laws of Manu,_ for he wished to become familiar with the model of those hierarchic societies for whose renovation he hoped. He read, and his expectations were not deceived; this, the last study of his life, turned out to be one of the most important he had ever undertaken. It delighted him to ecstasy--here was a code on which were established the customs and the order of four castes, a language that was beautiful, simple, human in its very severity, a constant nobleness of thought. And the impression of security, of sweetness which detached itself from the book as a whole! Here are some commandments from its earlier pages:

"Before the cutting of the navel string, a ceremony is prescribed at the birth of a male; he must be made, while sacred texts are pronounced, to taste a little honey and clarified butter from a golden dish.

"Let the father fulfil the ceremony of the giving of a name, on the tenth or twelfth day after birth, on a propitious lunary day, at a favourable moment, under a star of happy influence.

"Let the first name in the compound name of a Brahman express the propitious favour; that of a Kshatriya, power; that of a Vaisya, riches: that of a Sudra, abjection.

"Let the name of a girl be soft, clear, agreeable, propitious and easily spoken, terminating in long vowels, and resembling words of benediction."

Friedrich Nietzsche read and admired. He copied out many a passage, recognising in the old Hindu text that _Goethean gaze, full of love and of good will,_ hearing in its pages that _canto d' amore,_ which he had himself wished to sing.

But if he admired, he also judged. That Hindu order had as basis a mythology of which the priests who interpreted it were not the dupes. "These sages," wrote Nietzsche, "do not believe in all this--or they would not have found it...." The laws of Manu were clever and beautiful lies. Necessarily so, since Nature is a chaos, a derision of all thought and of all order, and whoever aspires to the foundation of an order, must turn away from her and conceive an illusory world. Those master builders, the Hindoo lawgivers, are masters also in the art of lying. If Nietzsche were not careful, their genius would drag him into the path of falsehoods.

Here was the instant of a crisis of which we know nothing but the origin and the term. Nietzsche was alone at Turin, no one was by him as he worked, he had no confidant. What was he thinking? Doubtless he was studying, meditating continually over the old Aryan book which gave him the model of his dreams, that book which was the finest monument of æsthetic and social perfection, and, at the same time, of intellectual knavery. How he must have loved and yet hated it! He mused, was amazed, and suspended his work. Four years earlier a similar difficulty had prevented him from completing his _Zarathustra._ It was no longer a question of the _Superman,_ of an _Eternal Return._ These naïve formulæ were abandoned, but the tendencies which they cloaked--the one, lyrical, avid of construction and of order, even though illusory; the other, avid of destruction and of lucidity--these unvarying tendencies again exercised their influence at this point. Nietzsche hesitated: should he finally listen to these Brahmins, these priests, these crafty leaders of men. No; loyalty is the virtue upon which he can never compound. Later perhaps, much later, when a few centuries are gone by, humanity, more learned in the meaning of its life, in the origins and values of its instincts, in the mechanism of heredities, may essay new lawgivings. To-day it cannot: it would only add falsehoods and hypocrisies to the old lies, the old hypocrisies, which already fetter it. Nietzsche turned away from the thoughts which he had followed with such energy for six months, and suddenly found himself exactly as he had been in his thirtieth year, indifferent to all that was not in the service of truth.

"All that is suspect and false must be brought into the light!" he had then written. "We do not wish to build prematurely, we do not know that we can build, and that it may not be better to build nothing. There are pessimists who are cowardly and resigned--of those we do not wish to be."

When he had thus expressed himself, Nietzsche still possessed strength enough to consider calmly a labour made the easier by hope. But in ten years he has lost his old force, his old calm, and all hope has left him. His sick soul can no longer offer any resistance--irritability overcomes it. He gives up the composition of his great work, relinquishes it to write a pamphlet. By this circumstance our conjectures are solved and, indeed, terminated.

The days of serenity have gone by. Wounded to the death, Nietzsche wishes to return blow for blow. Richard Wagner is his mark, the false apostle of _Parsifal,_ the illusionist who has seduced his period. If he formerly served Wagner, now he will disserve him, out of passion as out of a sense of duty. He thinks: "It is I who made Wagnerism; it is I who must unmake it." He wishes to liberate, by means of a violent attack, those of his contemporaries who, weaker than himself, still submit to the prestige of this art. He wants to humiliate this man whom he has loved, whom he still loves; he wishes to defame this master who was the benefactor of his youth; in short, if we do not mistake, he wishes to take vengeance on a lost happiness. So he insults Wagner; calls him a decadent, a low comedian, a modern Cagliostro. This indelicacy--an unheard-of thing in Nietzsche's life--suffices to prove the presence of the evil.

No scruple haunted him. A happy excitement favoured and hastened on his work. Alienists are familiar with those singular conditions which precede the last crises of general paralysis, and Friedrich Nietzsche seemed to abandon himself to an afflux of joy. He attributed the benefit to the climate of Turin, which he was now trying.

"Turin, dear friend," wrote he to Peter Gast, "is a capital discovery. I tell you with the idea at the back of my mind that you may perhaps also profit from it. My humour is good, I work from morning to night--a little pamphlet on music occupies my fingers--I digest like a demi-god, I sleep in spite of the nocturnal noises of carriages: so many symptoms of the eminent suitability of Turin to Nietzsche."

In July, in the Engadine, some damp and cold weeks did him a great deal of harm. He lost his sleep. His happy excitement disappeared, or transformed itself into bitter and febrile humours. It was then that Fräulein von Salis-Marschlins, who has recounted her recollections in an interesting brochure, saw him, after a separation of ten months. She remarked the change in his condition; how he walked alone, his hurried carriage, his sharp salute--he would stop scarcely or not at all, in such a hurry was he to get back to his inn and put down the thoughts which his walk had inspired in him. On the visits he paid her he did not conceal his preoccupations. He was in dread of pecuniary embarrassments: the capital which had constituted his little fortune was almost gone; and could he, with the three thousand francs which the University of Basle allowed him as a pension, provide for his everyday needs and for the publication, always onerous, of his books? It was in vain that he regulated his journeys and restricted himself to the simplest lodgings and food. He was reaching the limits of his resources.

_The Case of Wagner_ was completed; to the text, a preliminary discourse, a postscript, a second postscript, and an epilogue were added. He could not cease extending his work, and making it more bitter. Nevertheless he was not satisfied, and felt, after having written it, some remorse.

"I hope that this very _risqué_ pamphlet has pleased you," he wrote to Peter Gast on the 11th of August, 1888. "That would be for me a comfort by no means negligible. There are certain hours, above all, certain evenings, when I do not feel enough courage in myself for so many follies, for so much hardheartedness; I am in doubt over some passages. Perhaps I went too far (not in the matter, but in my manner of expressing the matter). Perhaps the note in which I speak of Wagner's family origins could be suppressed."

A letter addressed about this time to Fräulein von Meysenbug gives food for thought.

"I have given to men the most profound book," he writes; "one pays dearly for that. The price of being immortal is sometimes life! ... And always on my road that cretinism of Bayreuth! The old seducer Wagner, dead though he be, continues to draw away from me just those few men whom my influence might touch. But in Denmark--how absurd to think!--I have been celebrated this winter. Dr. Georges Brandes, whose mind is so full of vitality, has dared to talk about me before the University of Copenhagen. And with brilliant success! Always more than three hundred listeners! And a final ovation!--And something similar is being arranged in New York. I am the most _independent_ mind in Europe and the _only_ German writer--which is something!"

He added in a postscript: "Only a great soul can endure my writings. Thus I have had the good luck to provoke against myself all that is feeble and virtuous." No doubt the indulgent Fräulein von Meysenbug saw in these lines a point directed against herself. She answered, as usual, in her kindly manner: "You say that everything feeble and virtuous is against you? Do not be so paradoxical. Virtue is not weakness but strength, words say it plainly enough. And are you not yourself the living contradiction of what you say? For you are virtuous, and the example of your life, if men could only know it, would, as I am assured, be more persuasive than your books." Nietzsche replied: "I have read your charming letter, dear lady and dear friend, with real emotion; no doubt you are right--so am I."

How headlong a thing is his life! Days spent in walking, in getting the rhythm of phrases, in sharpening thoughts. Often he works through the dawn and is writing still when the innkeeper rises and goes noiselessly out to follow the traces of the chamois among the mountains. "Am I not myself a hunter of chamois?" thinks Nietzsche, and goes on with his work.

The _Case of Wagner_ being completed, Nietzsche began a new pamphlet, directed not against a man, but against ideas--against all ideas that men have found whereby to guide their acts. There is no metaphysical world, and the rationalists are dreamers; there is no moral world, and the moralists are dreamers. What then remains? "The world of appearances, perhaps? But no; for with the world of truth we have abolished the world of appearances!" Nothing exists but energy, renewed at every instant. "Incipiet Zarathustra." Friedrich Nietzsche looked for a title for his new pamphlet: _Leisure Hours of a Psychologist_ was his first idea; then, _The Twilight of the Idols, or The Philosophy of the Hammer. _ On September 7th he sent his manuscript to the publisher. This little book--he wrote--must strike, scandalise, and strain people's minds, and prepare them for the reception of his great work.

Of it he is always thinking, and his second pamphlet is scarcely finished when he starts on this labour. But we no longer recognise the calm and Goethean work which it had been his desire to write. He tries new titles: _We other Immoralists, We other Hyperboreans:_ then returns to his old title and keeps to it--_The Will to Power: An Essay towards the Transvaluation of all Values._ Between September 3rd and September 30th he draws up a first section: _The Antichrist;_ and it is a third pamphlet. This time he speaks outright, he indicates his Yea and his Nay, his straight line and his goal: he exalts the most brutal energy. All moral imperatives, whether dictated by Moses or by Manu, by the people or by the aristocracy, are lies. "Europe was near to greatness," he writes, "when, during the first years of the sixteenth century, it was possible to hope that Cæsar Borgia would seize the Papacy." Are we bound to accept these thoughts as definitive, because they are the last that Nietzsche expressed?

While he was drawing up _The Antichrist,_ he returned again to his _Dionysian Songs,_ outlined in 1884, and completed them. Here we find the sure expression of the presentiments that then agitated him.

"The sun sets,
Soon thy thirst shall be quenched,
Burning heart!
A freshness is in the air,
I breathe the breath of unknown mouths,
The great cold comes....

The sun is in its place, and burns upon my head at noon.
I salute ye, ye who come,
O swift winds,
O fresh spirits of the afternoon

The air stirs, peaceable and pure.
Has it not darted towards me a sidelong glance,
A seductive glance,
To-night?

Be strong, brave heart!
Ask not: why?

Eve of my life!
The sun sets."

On the 21st September we find him at Turin. On the 22nd _The Case of Wagner_ was published. Here at last was a book of which the newspapers spoke a little. But Nietzsche was exasperated by their comments. With the exception of a Swiss author, Carl Spiteler, no one had understood him. Every word gave him the measure of the public ignorance as regards his work. For ten years he had been seeking and following ideas found by him alone: of this the German critics knew nothing; they knew only that a certain Herr Nietzsche, a disciple of Wagner's, had been an author; they read _The Case of Wagner_ and surmised that Herr Nietzsche was just fallen out with his master. Besides, he felt that he had incurred the blame of some of his later friends. Jacob Burckhardt, always so precise, did not acknowledge the receipt of the pamphlet; the good Meysenbug wrote an indignant and severe letter.

"These are subjects," Nietzsche answered him, "with regard to which I cannot permit any contradiction. Upon the question of _decadence_ I am the highest authority (instance) in the world: the men of to-day, with their querulous and degenerate instinct, should consider themselves fortunate that they have by them some one who offers them a generous wine in their most sombre moments. That Wagner succeeded in making himself believed in, assuredly proves genius; but the genius of falsehood. I have the honour to be his opposite--a genius of truth."

In spite of the agitation thus displayed, his letters expressed an unheard-of happiness. There is nothing which he does not admire. The autumn is splendid; the roads, the galleries, the palaces, the cafés of Turin, are magnificent; repasts are succulent and prices modest. He digests well, sleeps marvellously. He hears French operettas: there is nothing as perfect as their buoyant manner, "the paradise of all the refinements." He listens to a concert: each piece, whether Beethoven, Schubert, Bossaro, Goldmarck, Vibac, or Bizet be its author, seems to him equally sublime. "I was in tears," he wrote to Peter Gast. "I think that Turin, from the point of view of the musical sense, as from every other point of view, is the _most solid_ town that I know."

One might hope that this intoxication of spirit kept Nietzsche from knowledge of his destiny. But a rare word sufficiently indicates his clairvoyance. He has a sense of the approaching disaster. His reason escapes from him and he measures its flight. On the 13th of November, 1888, he expressed to Peter Gast a desire to have him near, his regret that he could not come; this was his constant plaint, the very constancy of which indeed diminished its significance. Nietzsche, who knew this, warned his friend: "What I tell you, take tragically," he wrote. On the 18th of November he sent a letter which seemed quite happy. He spoke of operettas which he had just heard, of Judic, and of Milly Meyer. "For our bodies and for our souls, dear friend," he wrote, "a light Parisian intoxication, 'tis salvation." He concluded: "This letter also, I pray you to take tragically."