Chapter III: Friedrich Nietzsche and Richard Wagner--Triebschen (2)

A profound instinct inspired and directed him. That old college of Pforta had been monachal in its origins, in its buildings and in its very walls, in the lasting gravity and ordered rule of life. Thus he had, as a child, received the impress of what was almost the life of a religious. He kept the memory of it, and the nostalgia. During his years at the University he had constantly sought to isolate himself from the world by surrounding himself with friends. He studied Greece, and the antique wisdom nourished his soul: he loved Pythagoras and Plato, the one the founder, the other the poet, of the finest brotherhood that man had ever conceived, the close and sovereign aristocracy of sages armed, of meditative knights. Thus did Christian humanity and Pagan humanity, united by a remote harmony, concur with his thoughts and his aspirations.

He wished to write an open letter to his friends, known and unknown; but he would only call them at the favourable moment, and till then would keep his secret. "Give me two years," he wrote to his friend Gersdorff enthusiastically and mysteriously, "and you will see a new conception of antiquity diffuse itself, which must bring a new spirit into the scientific and moral education of the nation!" Towards mid-December he believed that the moment had come. Erwin Rohde wrote him a melancholy letter, a very feeble echo of the passionate letters which Nietzsche had addressed to him. "Soon we shall need cloisters ..." he said, repeating the same idea expressed six months earlier by his friend. It was but a word; Friedrich Nietzsche saw in it a sign of spontaneous agreement, a presage of enthusiastic collaboration, and he wrote in a joyous transport:

"DEAR FRIEND,--I received your letter and I answer it without losing a minute. Above all I wish to tell you that I feel _altogether_ like you, and that we shall be, in my opinion, very weak, if, abandoning our feeble complaints, we do not deliver ourselves from ennui by an energetic act.... I have at last understood the bearing of Schopenhauer's judgments on the philosophy of the universities. No radical truth is possible there. No revolutionary truth can come out from there.... We shall reject this yoke; to me that is certain. And we shall then form a new Greek academy: Romundt will be of our company.

"You know, since your visit to Triebschen, the projects of Bayreuth. For a long time, without confiding in any one, I have been considering whether it would not be suitable for us to break with philology and _its perspectives of culture._ I am preparing a great _adhortatio_ for all those who are not yet completely captured and stifled by the manners of this present time. What a pity that I must write to you, and that for long we have not been able to examine in conversation each of my thoughts! To you who know not their turnings and their consequences, my plan will perhaps appear as an eccentric caprice. That, it is not; it is a necessity.

"... Let us try to reach a little island on which there will be no longer need to close one's ears with wax. Then we shall be one another's masters. Our books, from now till then, are but hooks to catch our friends, a public for our æsthetic and monachal association. Let us live, let us work, let us enjoy for one another's sake; in that manner only, perhaps, shall we be able to work for the _whole._ I may tell you (see how serious is my design) that I have already commenced to reduce my expenses in order to constitute a little reserve fund. We shall gamble in order to try our 'luck'; as to the books which we shall be able to write, I shall demand the highest honorarium as a provision for coming times. In brief, we shall neglect no lawful means of success in founding our cloister. We also have our duty for the next two years!

"May this plan seem to you worthy of meditation! Your last letter, moving as it was, signified to me that the time had come to unveil it for you.

"Shall we not be able to introduce a new form of Academy into the world?

'Und sollt' ich nicht, sehnsuchtigster Gewalt,
In's Leben ziehn die einzigster Gestalt?'

"Thus Faust speaks of Helen. No one knows anything of my project, and now it depends upon you to see that Romundt is advised of it.

"Assuredly, our school of philosophy is neither an historical reminiscence nor an arbitrary caprice; is it not a _necessity_ that pushes us on to that road? It seems that the plan of our student days, that voyage which we were to make together, returns in a new form, symbolic now and vaster than it was. On this occasion, I won't leave you in the lurch as I then did. That memory always annoys me.

"With my best hopes, your faithful

"FRATER FRIEDRICH.

"From the 23rd of December till the 1st of January I go to Triebschen, near Lucerne."

On the 22nd of December Friedrich Nietzsche left Lucerne: he had received no reply from Rohde. He found the house at Triebschen in high festival with children's games and the preparations for Christmas. Madame Wagner gave him a volume of Stendhal, _Les Promenades dans Rome._ He offered Wagner the famous woodcut of Dürer's of _The Knight, the Dog, and Death,_ on which he had written a commentary for the book he was then preparing, _The Origin of Tragedy:_ "A spirit which feels itself isolated, desperate and solitary," he wrote, "could choose no better symbol than that rider of Dürer's, who, unperturbed by his gruesome companions and yet wholly without hope, pursues his terrible path alone with dog and horse. This rider of Dürer's is our Schopenhauer: he was without hope, but he desired the truth. His like does not exist." Nietzsche would have been happy in the master's house if he had not been expecting Rohde's reply: the waiting worried him. He stopped for a week at Triebschen. Wagner was never done talking about Bayreuth and his vast projects. Nietzsche, too, had his thought which he would have joyfully uttered; but first he wanted his friend's approbation, and that approbation did not come. He left without having received a word or spoken one on the subject.

At last, at Basle, he received the too long-desired letter: an honest, affectionate, but negative reply. "You tell me that cloisters are necessary to-day," wrote Rohde. "I believe it. But there are necessities for which no remedy exists. How can we find the money? And even when we shall have found the money, I do not know that I shall follow you; I do not feel in me a creative force which renders me worthy of the solitude whither you call me. For a Schopenhauer, a Beethoven, a Wagner, the case is different, as it is for you, dear friend. But, as I am in question, no! I must hope for a different life. Still let us entertain the wish for such a retreat, among certain friends, in a cloister of the muses; I agree to that. Deprived of desires, what would we become?"

If Rohde refused to follow him, who would follow him? He did not write his _Adhortatio;_ Romundt was not advised, and even Wagner, it seems, knew nothing of the proposal.

* * * * *

Nietzsche made no vain complaints, but set to work to elaborate alone those revolutionary truths for which he would have wished to contrive a kindlier manner of birth. He turned his back upon Germany, upon those modern States which have it as their mission to flatter the servilities, soften the conflicts, and favour the idleness of men. He considered anew primitive Greece, the city of the seventh and the sixth centuries; thither a mysterious attraction ever drew him back. Was it the seduction of a perfect beauty? Doubtless, but it was also the seduction of that strength and cruelty which a modern conceals as he conceals a stain, and which the old Greeks practised with joy. Nietzsche loved strength; on the battlefield of Metz he had felt within him the appetite and instinct.

"If," he wrote, "genius and art are the final ends of Greek culture, then all the forms of Greek society must appear to us as necessary mechanisms and stepping-stones towards that final end. Let us discover what means were utilised by the will to act which animated the Greeks...." He discerns and names one of these means: slavery. "Frederick Augustus Wolf," he notes, "has shown us that slavery is necessary to culture. There is one of the powerful thoughts of my predecessor." He grasped it, held it to him, and forced it to disclose its whole meaning. This idea, suddenly discovered, inspired him; it was profound and moved him to the depths of his being; it was cruel, almost monstrous, and satisfied his romantic taste. He shuddered before it, he admired its sombre beauty.

"It may be that this knowledge fills us with terror," he wrote; 'I such terror is the almost necessary effect of all the most profound knowledge. For nature is still a frightful thing, even when intent on creating the most beautiful forms. It is so arranged that culture, in its triumphal march, benefits only a trivial minority of privileged mortals, and it is necessary that the slave service of the great masses be maintained, if one wish to attain to a full joy in becoming _(werde lust)._

"We moderns have been accustomed to oppose two principles against the Greeks, the one and the other invented to reassure a society of an altogether servile kind which anxiously avoids the world, _slave:_ we talk of the 'dignity of man' and the 'dignity of labour.'

"The language of the Greeks is other. They declare in simple terms that work is a disgrace, for it is impossible that a man occupied with the labour of gaining a livelihood should ever become an artist....

"So let us avow this cruel sounding truth: slavery is necessary to culture; a truth which assuredly leaves no doubt as to the absolute value of being.

"The misery of those men who live by labour must be made yet more vigorous, in order that a very few Olympian men may create a world of art.... At their expense, by the artifice of unpaid labour, the privileged classes should be relieved from the struggle for life, and given such conditions that they can create, and satisfy a new order of needs.... And if it is true to say that the Greeks were destroyed by slavery, this other affirmation is, most certainly, even truer: for lack of slavery, we are perishing."

But what was the origin of this very institution of slavery? How was the submission of the slave, that "blind mole of culture," secured? The Greeks teach us, answered Nietzsche: "The conquered belongs to the conqueror," they say, "with his wives and his children, his goods and his blood. Power gives the first _right,_ and there is no right which is not at bottom appropriation, usurpation, power." Thus Nietzsche's thought was brought back towards its first object. The war had inspired him in the first instance. Now he rediscovers that solution. In sorrow and in tragedy, men had invented beauty; into sorrow and into tragedy they must be plunged, and there retained that their sense of beauty might be preserved. In pages which have the accent and rhythm of a hymn, Friedrich Nietzsche glorifies and invokes war:

"Here you have the State, of shameful origin; for the greater part of men, a well of suffering that is never dried, a flame that consumes them in its frequent crises. And yet when it calls, our souls become forgetful of themselves; at its bloody appeal the multitude is urged to courage and uplifted to heroism. Yes, the State is to the blind masses, perhaps, the highest and most worthy of aims; it is, perhaps, the State which, in its formidable hours, stamps upon every face the singular expression of greatness.

"Some tie, some mysterious affinity, exists between the State and art, between political activity and artistic production, the battlefield and the work of art. What is the rôle of the State? It is the tenaille of steel which binds society together. Without the State, in natural conditions--_bellum omnium contra omnes_--society would remain limited by the family, and could not project its roots afar. By the universal institution of States, that instinct which formerly determined the _bellum omnium contra omnes_ has been concentrated; at certain epochs terrible clouds of war menace the peoples and discharge themselves at one great clap, in lightnings and thunders, fiercer as they are less frequent. But these crises are not continual; between one and another of them society breathes again; regenerated by the action of war, it breaks on every side into blossom and verdure, and, when the first fine days come, puts forth dazzling fruits of genius.

"If I leave the Greek world and examine our own, I recognise, I avow it, symptoms of degeneration which give me fears both for society and for art. Certain men, in whom the instinct of the State is lacking, wish, no longer to serve it, but to make it serve them, to use it for their personal ends. They see nothing of the divine in it; and, in order to utilise it, in a sure and rational manner, they are concerned to evade the shocks of war: they set out deliberately to organise things in such a manner that war becomes an impossibility. On the one hand they conjure up systems of European equilibrium, on the other hand they do their best to deprive absolute sovereigns of the right to declare war, in order that they may thus appeal the more easily to the egoism of the masses, and of those who represent them. They feel it incumbent on them to weaken the monarchical instinct of the masses, and do weaken it, by propagating among them the liberal and optimistic conception of the world, a conception which has its roots in the doctrines of French rationalism and the Revolution; that is, in a philosophy altogether foreign to the German spirit, a Latin platitude, devoid of any metaphysical meaning.

"The movement, to-day triumphant, of nationalities, the extension of universal suffrage which runs parallel to this movement, seem to me to be determined above all by _the fear of war._ And behind these diverse agitations, I perceive those who are chiefly moved by this alarm, the solitaries of international finance, who, being by nature denuded of any instinct for the State, subordinate politics, the State and society to their money-making and speculative ends.

"If the spirit of speculation is not thus to debase the spirit of the State, we must have war and war again--there is no other means. In the exaltation which it procures, it becomes clear to men that the State has not been founded to protect egoistical individuals against the demon of war; quite the contrary: love of country, devotion to one's prince, help to excite a moral impulse which is the symbol of a far higher destiny.... It will not therefore be thought that I do ill when I raise here the pæan of war. The resonance of its silver bow is terrible. It comes to us sombre as night: nevertheless Apollo accompanies it, Apollo, the rightful leader of states, the god who purifies them.... Let us say it then: war is necessary to the State, as the slave is to society. No one will be able to avoid these conclusions, if he have sought the causes of the perfection which Greek art attained, and Greek art alone."

_War and yet again war which exalts the peoples:_ such was the cry of the solitary. He had but to drop his pen, to listen and look around him, and he saw the pedantic empire and repressed his hopes. "We follow the trouble of his thought. He hesitates, he records at the same moment the abiding illusion and the inevitable disillusion:

"I could have imagined," he writes, "that the Germans had embarked on this war to save Venus from the Louvre, like a second Helen. It would have been the spiritual interpretation of their combat. The fine antique severity inaugurated by this war--for the time to be grave has come--we think that is the time for _art_ also."

He continued to write; his thought becomes clearer and more melancholy: "The State, when it cannot achieve its highest aim, grows beyond measure. The World Empire of the Romans, in face of Athens, has nothing of the sublime. This sap, which should all run to the flowers, resides now in the leaves and stalks, which swell to an immense size."

Rome troubled him; he disliked it; he judged it a slur upon antiquity. That city, warlike, but ever plebeian, victorious, but ever vulgar, filled him with gloomy fore-thought:

"Rome," he wrote, "is the typical barbaric state: the will cannot there attain to its noble ends. The organisation is more vigorous, the morality more oppressive ... who venerates this colossus?"

_Who venerates this colossus?_ Let us give a modern and pressing application to these interrogatory words. The colossus is not Rome, it is Prussia and her empire. Narrow was the soil of Athens or of Sparta, and brief their day; but what did that matter if the object, which was spiritual strength and beauty, was attained? Friedrich Nietzsche was haunted by this vision of Greece with its hundred rival cities, raising between mountains and sea their acropoles, their temples, their statues, all resounding with the rhythm of pæans, all glorious and alert.

"The sentiment of Hellenism," he wrote, "as soon as it is awakened, becomes aggressive and translates itself into a combat against the culture of the present day."

* * * * *

Friedrich Nietzsche suffered from the wounds which life inflicted upon his lyrical dream. His friends listened to him, but followed him imperfectly. The professor, Franz Overbeck, who lived in his house and saw him every day, was a man of distinction, with a strong and acute mind. A German by birth, a Frenchman by education, he understood the problems of the day, and joined in the anxieties and intentions of Nietzsche; but his ardour could not equal Nietzsche's. Jacob Burckhardt was a man of noble intellect and character, but he was without hope, and Friedrich Nietzsche passionately desired to hope. No doubt, there was Wagner, whom neither passion nor hope ever could surprise, but he had just published an Aristophanic buffoonery directed against the conquered Parisians. Friedrich Nietzsche read this gross work, and condemned it. Overbeck and Burckhardt lacked ardour; Wagner lacked delicacy; and Nietzsche confided in no one. A chair of philosophy had just been vacated in the University of Basle. Nietzsche took fire at once. He wrote to Erwin Rohde, and told him that he should apply for this chair, and that he would assuredly secure it. Thus the two friends were to meet again. Vain hope! Erwin Rohde presented himself as a candidate, but was not accepted. Nietzsche reproached himself for having lured on his friend. He grew melancholy. He felt himself drawn "like a little whirlpool into a dead sea of night and oblivion."

He had never recovered entirely from the ordeals of the war. Neither sleep nor sure and certain health were ever at his call again. In February the nervous force which had sustained him suddenly gave way, and his disorders assumed an acute form. Violent neuralgas, insomnia, troubles and weaknesses of the eyesight, stomach ills, jaundice represented the nature of the crisis which had been tormenting him for five months. The doctors, quite at a loss, advised him to give up work and to take a voyage. Friedrich Nietzsche sent for his sister, who came to Naumburg. He brought her to pay a farewell visit to Triebschen, and left for Lugano.

At that time the railway did not cross the Alps. Travellers went by diligence over the ridge of the St. Gothard. Chance furnished Nietzsche with a remarkable companion, an old man of a talkative humour, and with no desire to conceal his identity: it was Mazzini. The old humanitarian and the young apostle of slavery hit it off wonderfully well. Mazzini cited Goethe's phrase:

"_Sich des halben zu entwohnen und im Ganzen, Vollen, Schönen resolut zu leben_" (To abjure half-measures, and to live resolutely in the Whole, the Full, the Beautiful). Friedrich Nietzsche never forgot the energetic maxim, nor the man who had transmitted it to him, nor this day of rapid and healthful travel, not far from those summits which he was afterwards to love so much.

The fine mountain crossing amid the snow and silence of the Alps had sufficed. He was almost cured on his arrival at Lugano. His nature was still supple and youthful; his returns to life were prompt and radiant; a naïve gaiety re-animated all his being. He spent two happy months in Italian Switzerland. A Prussian officer, a relation of General von Moltke, was staying at his hotel. He lent him his manuscripts and often talked to him of the destinies of the new German Empire and of the aristocratic warrior's mission which the victory had conferred upon it. It was a fine springtide for the numerous Germans who had come to rest at the place: they liked to gather round their young philosopher and listen to him. February began, the war was over, and these happy people, freed from all anxieties, abandoned themselves for the first time to the pleasure of their triumph. They sang; they danced in public up to the Market-place, and Nietzsche was not the least prompt to rejoice with them, to dance and sing. "When I recall these days," writes Madame Förster-Nietzsche, who gives us a sad and gracious account of the time, "it seems to me that I am having a veritable dream of Carnival."

From Lugano, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote to Erwin Rohde:

"I have very often suffered from a heavy and depressed mood. But more than once inspiration has returned to me; my manuscript has benefited from it. I have given the go-by to philology in the most cavalier fashion. They may praise me, they may blame me, they may promise me the highest honours, they may talk as they choose; I turn my back upon it. Every day I go deeper into my philosophic domain, and I begin to have confidence in myself; better still, if I am ever to be a poet, from to-day I feel myself disposed towards it. I do not know, I have no means of knowing, whither my destiny guides me. And nevertheless, when I examine myself, everything is in perfect accord within me, as though I had followed some good genius. My ends are extremely hidden from me; no concern for office, for hierarchic honours, directs my efforts; and none the less I live in a surprising condition of clarity, of serenity. What a sensation it is to see one's world before one, a fine globe, round and complete! Now it is some fragment of a new metaphysic, now it is a new æsthetic which grows up within me, now another idea claims me, a new principle of education which entails the complete rejection of our Universities and gymnasia. I never learn any fact but it immediately finds a good place in some corner that has been long prepared for it. This sentiment of an interior world which springs up within me I feel in all its force when I think not coldly, but quietly and without exaggerated enthusiasm, on the history of these last ten months, on these events which I consider as the instruments of my noble designs. Pride, folly, are words that feebly express my condition of mental 'insomnia.'

"Ah, how I desire health! As soon as one has something in view which must last longer than oneself--how one gives thanks for every good night, for every mild ray of sun, even for every occasion on which one digests aright!"

On the 10th of April, Nietzsche had returned to Basle. He gathered his notes together, re-read them for the last time, and fixed definitely the plan of his work. He allowed those digressions upon war, slavery, the city, of which we have already given some extracts, to drop, and--Wagner, it is said, desired it--limited himself to his first subject: ancient tragedy, the model and precursor of German musical drama. Wagner's advice, Madame Förster-Nietzsche insinuates, was not altogether disinterested; it suited him that his disciple's first work should be consecrated to his fame. This has an air of probability; still it certainly seems that Nietzsche had let himself be captured and seduced by too many ideas, that he had not so much amassed the matter for one book as begun, rather at hazard, a whole series of studies in æsthetics, history, and politics. He needed to restrict himself, and yet could not make up his mind to it. If Wagner helped him here, he did well. Perhaps we owe the happy completion of this book to him--the only real book which Nietzsche ever completed.

What was it that he had to say? He was to analyse the origin and the essence of the Greek lyric spirit; he was to set the two Greeces over against one another, the one intoxicated by its myths and Dionysian chants, strong in illusions--Æschylus's Greece, tragic and conquering Greece; the other impious, rational, anæmic--Socratic Greece, Alexandrine Greece, which in dying corrupted the peoples who had remained young around her, the pure blood of primitive humanity. Then he was to display the two Germanys in conflict in a like manner, the Germany of the Democrats and the savants, the Germany of the soldiers and the poets; between these two one had to choose. Nietzsche declared his choice: beholden to Wagner, as he was, for all his tranquillity of thought, for all his joys, he indicated Wagner to his compatriots. While the peace was being signed at Frankfort between the nations, Friedrich Nietzsche, thus establishing peace within himself, ended the rough draft of his work. He remarked upon this coincidence of dates, for his internal conflicts and the revolutions of his thought did not appear to him less important events than external conflicts and the revolutions of races.

But the Peace of Frankfort did not terminate all the conflicts of this terrible year. A civil war now broke out in France, and its calamities stirred Europe even more profoundly than the battles of Frœschwiller or Sedan. On the morning of the 23rd of May, the newspapers of Basle announced the destruction of Paris and the burning of the Louvre. Nietzsche learnt the news with a feeling of dismay: the most beautiful works, the flower of human labour, were ruined; human hands, an unhappy people, had dared this profanation. All Nietzsche's alarms were thus confirmed. Without discipline, without an hierarchy, culture, he had written, cannot subsist. All have not the right to share in beauty; the immense majority should live humbly, work for their masters and revere their lives. Such is the economy which assures strength to societies, and, in return for their strength, delicacy, grace, beauty; and this is the order which Europe hesitates to maintain. Nietzsche might now have boasted of the correctness of his judgment; it was far from him to do so. It was with alarm that he considered his perspicacity, his solitude, and his responsibility. His thoughts suddenly turned to Jacob Burckhardt; what melancholy must be his! He wished to see him, to talk to him, to listen to him, to make his desolation his own. He hurried to Burckhardt's house; but Burckhardt, though the hour was early, had gone out. Nietzsche walked the roads like a desperate man. Finally he went back. Jacob Burckhardt was in his study, and awaited him. He had gone to seek his friend, as his friend had gone to seek him. The two men remained for long together, and Fräulein Nietzsche, alone in the next room, heard their sobs through the closed door.

"Let us avow it," he writes to his friend, the Baron von Gersdorff, "we are all, with all our past, responsible for the terrors which menace us to-day. We shall do wrong, if we consider with a peaceful conceit the unchaining of a war against culture, and if we impute the fault merely to the unfortunates who do the deed. When I heard of the firing of Paris, I was for some days utterly powerless, lost in tears and doubts; the life of science, of philosophy and of art appeared to me as an absurdity when I saw a single day suffice for the ruin of the finest works of art; what do I say?--of entire periods of art. I profoundly deplored the fact that the metaphysical value of art could not manifest itself to the lower classes; but it has a higher mission to fulfil. Never, however lively my affliction were, would I have cast the stone at the sacrilegious, who in my eyes are only carriers of the mistake of all--a mistake which gives cause for much thought...."

In the autobiographical notes written in 1878 these words may be read: "The War: my profoundest affliction, the burning of the Louvre."

* * * * *

Friedrich Nietzsche had gone back to his old way of life; almost every week he was Wagner's guest. But soon he perceived that since the German victory Triebschen had changed. Too many intimates made haste to the master's house, too many unknown people invaded the abode whose peaceful seclusion he had loved. They were not all of the sort that Nietzsche would have desired; but Wagner talked, discoursed, overflowed with them all. Judging that the favourable moment had come, he had set out to rouse Germany and secure at last the construction and gift of the hall which he needed, the theatre, or the temple, of Bayreuth.

Friedrich Nietzsche heard and took part in these discussions with an uneasy ardour. Wagner's idea exalted him. But he had the soul of a solitary, and could not help being worried, and sometimes shocked, by these noises from the world which had to be tolerated. Wagner did not suffer: on the contrary, he seemed elated by the joy of feeling the crowd nearer to him; and Nietzsche, a little surprised, a little disappointed, sought, without precisely finding again, his hero. "To sway the people," he had written in his student notebooks, "is to put passions in the service of an idea." Wagner adapted himself to work of this kind. In the service of his art and of his fame he accepted all the passions. A Chauvinist with the Chauvinists, an idealist with the idealists, as much of a Gallophobe as was desired; restoring the Æschylian tragedy for some, for others re-animating the old German myths; willingly a pessimist, a Christian if it pleased, sincere moreover from moment to moment, this prodigious being, a great leader of men as well as a great poet, handled his compatriots most dexterously.

No one could resist the impulse which he gave: every one had to yield and to follow. He fixed the very details of the plans of the theatre whose site had just been chosen. He studied the practical organisation of the work, and laboured to create those _Vereine_ in which propagandists and subscribers were to be grouped. He set himself out to procure rare and unexpected delights for the faithful. One day he surprised them with a performance for their benefit alone, in the gardens of Triebschen, of the _Siegfried-Idyll,_ a gracious interlude written for the churching of his wife, a noble echo of the most intimate times. He gave Nietzsche his rôle, for he could not allow that voice, so passionate and hard to control, and yet so eloquent, to be lost. The young man offered to set out on a mission. He would stir up those circles in Northern Germany, so slow and heavy in its emotions. Bus proposal was not accepted; Wagner, no doubt, feared the violence of his apostolate: "No," he said to him, "finish and publish your book." Nietzsche felt somewhat melancholy at the refusal. Henceforth, it seems, difficulties began to arise between the two.

Moreover, the advice of the master was less easy to follow than it seemed. _The Origin of Tragedy_ did not find a publisher. Nietzsche's applications failed, and his summer was spoilt by the check. He decided to print certain chapters of it in the reviews. "I put my little book into the world bit by bit," he wrote in July to Erwin Rohde; "what a childbirth! what tortures!"

At the beginning of October he was staying at Leipsic. Here he saw again his master Ritschl, and his friends Rohde, Gersdorff, who had come to meet him, and spent with them some happy days of conversation and comradeship. But the fate of his book remained uncertain: all the publishers of scientific and philological works bowed the author out. They were not tempted by a bizarre work, in which learning was allied with lyricism and the problems of ancient Greece with the problems of modern Germany. "The book is a centaur," said Nietzsche. This mythological assurance did not satisfy the book-sellers. Finally he had to address himself, not without regret--for he maintained that his work was a scientific work--to Richard Wagner's publisher, from whom he received, after a month's delay, a favourable reply. He wrote to his friend Gersdorff, in a free and relieved tone, which helps us to measure the vexation from which he had suffered.

"BASLE, _November_ 19, 1871.

"Pardon me, dear friend, I ought to have thanked you sooner. I had felt in your last letter, in every one of your words, your strong intellectual life. It seemed to me that you remained a soldier at soul and brought your military nature to art and philosophy. And that is good, for we have no right to live to-day, if we are not militants, militants who prepare a _sæculum_ to come, something of which we can guess at in ourselves, across our best instants. For those instants, which are what there is of best in us, draw us away in spirit from _our_ time; nevertheless, in some manner, they need to have their hearthstone somewhere: whence I infer that at such instants we feel a confused breath of coming times pass over us. For instance, take our last meeting at Leipsic; has it not left in your memory the impression of such instants, as seemed to be strangers to everything, linked with another century? Whatever may be, this remains, '_Im Ganzen, Vollen, Schönen, resolut zu leben._' But it needs a strong will, such as is not given to the first comer!... To-day, only to-day, the excellent publisher Fritzsch replies to me."

Fritzsch proposed to him that he should give his book the format and character of a recent work of Wagner's: _Die Bestimmung der Oper._ Nietzsche rejoiced at the idea, and he wrote five concluding chapters which accentuated the Wagnerian tendency of the work. This rapid composition and the correction of the proofs did not deter him from another enterprise.

_The Origin of Tragedy_ was about to appear. He did not doubt for a moment that it would be read, understood, acclaimed. His comrades, his masters, had always acknowledged the strength of his thought. Apparently, it never occurred to him that a vaster public remained callous; but he wished to affect it profoundly, at the first blow, and he formed new projects by which he might make the most of his success. He wanted to talk: speech was a livelier weapon. He recalled the emotions which he had experienced when, as a young professor, he was given the singular task of teaching the most delicate language, the most difficult works, to chance audiences; he remembered his perhaps fanciful design: that seminary of philologists, that house of study and retreat, of which he was always dreaming. He wanted to denounce the schools, the gymnasia, the Universities, the heavy apparatus of pedantry which was stifling the German spirit, and define the new and necessary institutions, destined, no longer for the emancipation of the masses, but for the culture of the State. He had written to Erwin Rohde as early as the month of March: "A new idea claims me, a new principle of education which points to the entire rejection of oar Universities, of our gymnasia...." In December, he announced at Basle, for January, 1872, a series of lectures upon _The Future of our Educational Institutions._

Towards mid-December, he accompanied Richard Wagner to Mannheim, where a two days' festival was being devoted to the works of the master.

"Oh, what a pity you were not there!" he wrote to Erwin Rohde. "All the sensations, all the recollections of art, what are they compared to these? I am like a man whose ideal has been realised. It is Music, and Music alone! ... When I say to myself that a certain number of men of the generations to come--at least some hundreds among them--will be moved by this music as I am myself, I cannot augur for less than an entire renewal of our culture!"

He returned to his house in Basle: but the impression of his days in Mannheim remained with him. The details of his everyday life caused him a strange and tenacious disgust. "All that cannot be translated into music," he wrote, "is repulsive and repugnant to me.... I have a horror of reality. Or, rather, I no longer see anything of the real, it is only a phantasmagoria." Under the stress of this emotion he acquired a clearer view of the problem which occupied him, he formulated more clearly the principle for which he was seeking. To "teach," to "uplift" men, what does that mean? It is to dispose their minds in such sort that the productions of genius will be assured, not of the understanding of all, for that cannot be, but of the respect of all.

As in the preceding years, Richard and Cosima Wagner invited him to spend Christmas at Triebschen. He excused himself; the work of his lectures occupied all his time. He offered Cosima Wagner, by way of homage, a musical fantasy on Saint Sylvester's Night, composed some weeks earlier. "I am very impatient to know what they will think of it down there," he wrote to Rohde. "I have never been criticised by any competent person." In reality, good judges had already often discouraged his musical enterprises, but he soon forgot their vexatious advice.

On the last day of 1871, his book appeared: _Die Gebürt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music)_. The sub-title which the current editions give, _Hellenism and Pessimism,_ was added in 1885 on the issue of the second edition. Friedrich Nietzsche sent the first copy to Richard Wagner, from whom he received almost at once a frenzied letter.

"DEAR FRIEND,--I have never read a finer book than yours. It is all splendid! At this moment, I write to you very hurriedly because the reading has profoundly moved me, and I expect that I wait for the return of my sang-froid to re-read you methodically. I said to Cosima: After you, he it is whom I love most; and then, at a long distance, Lenbach, who has made so striking and so true a portrait of me.... Adieu! Come soon to see us!

"Yours,

"R. W."

On the 10th of January Wagner wrote again:

"You have just published a book which is incomparable. All the influences which you may have undergone are reduced to nothing by the character of your book: what distinguishes it from every other, is the complete confidence with which a penetrating individuality displays itself. It is here that you satisfy the ardent desire of myself and of my wife: in short, a strange voice might have been talking of us, and we would have fully approved it! Twice we have read your book from the first line to the last--in the daytime, separately--at night, together--and we were lamenting that we had not at our disposal that second copy which you had promised. We deliver battle over that sole copy. I am constantly in need of it; between my breakfast and my working hours, it is it that sets me going; for since I have read you, I have begun again to work on my last act. Our readings, whether together or separately, are constantly interrupted by our exclamations. I am not yet recovered from the emotion which I experienced. There is the condition we are in!"

And Cosima Wagner wrote, for her part: "Oh, how fine your book is! How beautiful it is and how profound, how profound it is and how audacious!" On January 16th he delivered his first lecture. His joy, his sense of security, were extreme. He knew that Jacob Burckhardt read and approved him; he knew that he had the admiration of Rohde, Gersdorff, Overbeck. "What they say of my book is incredible," he wrote to a friend. "... I have concluded an alliance with Wagner. You cannot imagine how we are bound to one another, and how identical are our views." He conceived his second work without delay; he would publish his lectures. It would be a popular book, an exoteric translation of his _Tragedy._ But the idea of an even more decisive action at once supervened. Germany was preparing to inaugurate the new University of Strassburg; and an apotheosis of professors on a soil that had been conquered by soldiers awoke the indignation of Friedrich Nietzsche. He wished to address a pamphlet to Bismarck, "under the form of an interpellation in the Reichstag." Have our pedants, he would ask, the right to go in triumph to Strassburg? Our soldiers have conquered the French soldiers, and that is glorious. But has our culture humiliated French culture? Who would dare to say so?

Some days went by. Whence came the less happy tone of his letters? Why was it that he did not write his interpellation, that he gave up the idea of it? We know: except for a few friends who had understood his book, no one read it, no one bought it; not a review, not a newspaper deigned to take notice of it. Ritchsl, the great philologist of Leipsic, kept silent. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote to him: "I want to know what you think." He received in reply a severe criticism and a reproof. Erwin Rohde offered an article for the _Litterarische Centralblatt;_ it was not inserted. "It was the last chance of a serious voice being upraised for me in a scientific sheet," he wrote to Gersdorff; "now I expect nothing more--except spite or idiocy. But, as I have told you, I count upon the peaceful journey of my book through the centuries with perfect confidence. For in it certain eternal verities are said for the first time: they must resound...."

Certainly Friedrich Nietzsche had not foreseen his ill-success: it astonished and disconcerted him. A sore throat obliged him to interrupt his lectures, and he found pleasure in the contretemps. He had let himself be drawn towards ideas which were very lofty and delicate, and difficult even to himself. He wished to show that two sorts of schools should be instituted, the one professional, for the majority; the other, classical and truly superior, for an infinitesimal number of chosen individuals, whose course would be extended as far as their thirtieth year. How was this isolated circle, aloof from the common herd, to be formed, and how was it to be taught? Friedrich Nietzsche recurred to his most intimate and familiar thought, to that aristocratic ideal to which his meditations always led him. He had often studied its problems. But to examine them in public he needed his whole strength, and also a sympathetic audience. He felt that he had been weakened by the failure of his book. His very slight indisposition did not last long: nevertheless he did not return to his lectures. It was vain to ask him to do so: he refused. It was vain to press him to have them published; Richard Wagner strongly insisted: he eluded this insistence. His notes have come to us in a sorry condition of incompleteness and disorder. They are the echoes, the vestiges of a dream.

"The aristocracy of the mind must conquer its entire liberty in respect of the State, which is now keeping Science in curb.

"Later, men will have to raise the tables of a new culture ... then destruction of the gymnasia, destruction of the University ... an areopagus, for the justice of the mind.

"_The culture of the future: its ideal of social problems._ The imperative world of the beautiful and the sublime ... the only safeguard against Socialism ..."

Finally these three interrogatory words, which sum up his doubts, his desires, and perhaps his whole work: "_Ist Veredlung möglich?"_ (Is ennoblement possible?)

Friedrich Nietzsche courageously renounced his hope and was silent. He had lost his country: Prussia would not be the invincible framework of a lyrical race; the German Empire would not realise the "imperative world of the beautiful and the sublime." On April 30th the new University of Strassburg was inaugurated. "I hear from here the patriotic rejoicings," he wrote to Erwin Rohde. In January he had refused an offer of employment which would have withdrawn him from Basle. In April he spoke of leaving Basle and of going to Italy for two or three years. "The first review of my book has at last appeared," he wrote, "and I find it very good. But where has it appeared? In an Italian publication, _La Rivista Europea!_ That is pleasant and symbolical!"

* * * * *

He had a second reason for melancholy: Richard Wagner was leaving to make his home at Bayreuth. A letter of Cosima Wagner announced the departure: "Yes, Bayreuth!... Adieu to dear Triebschen, where the _Origin of Tragedy_ was conceived, and so many other things which perhaps will never begin again!"

Three years before, in this spring season, Nietzsche had hazarded his first visit to Triebschen; he wished to return again. He did return, and found the house desolate. A few pieces of furniture, covered over with horse-cloths and dispersed from room to room, seemed like flotsam and jetsam from another time. Every small object, all the family knick-knacks, had disappeared. The light entered, hard and crude, through the curtainless windows. Wagner and his wife were completing then-last packages, throwing the last of the books into the last of the baskets. They welcomed the faithful Nietzsche, asked his aid; he gave it at once. He wrapped up in packets the letters, the precious manuscripts; then more books and scores. Suddenly his heart failed him. So it was all over, Triebschen was done with! Three years of his life, and what years they had been! How unexpected, how moving, how delicious, and they were to escape in a day! Now he must renounce the past, and follow the master without regret. Now he must forget Triebschen and, for the future, think only of Bayreuth. No sooner was this magical name pronounced than it fascinated Nietzsche and troubled him. His hours at Triebschen had been so fine, hours of repose and meditation, hours of work and silence. A man, a woman of genius; a nest of children; an infinity of happy conversations, of beauty--Triebschen had given all that. What would Bayreuth give? The crowd would come there, and what would it bring with it? Friedrich Nietzsche left the books which he was engaged in packing. The grand piano had remained in the middle of the salon. He opened it, preluded, then improvised. Richard and Cosima Wagner, leaving aside all their affairs, listened. A harrowing, unforgettable rhapsody resounded through the empty salon. It was the adieu.

In November, 1888, Friedrich Nietzsche, already stricken with madness, set himself to recount his history. "Since I am here recalling the consolations of my life, I ought to express in a word my gratitude for what was by far my most profound and best-loved joy--my intimacy with Richard Wagner. I wish to be just with regard to the rest of my human relationships; but I absolutely cannot efface from my life the days at Triebschen, days of confidence, of gaiety, of sublime flashes--days of _profound_ perceptions. I do not know what Wagner was for others: our sky was never darkened by a cloud."

[1] Cosima Wagner.