Chapter IV: Friedrich Nietzsche and Richard Wagner--Bayreuth (2)

The first days of January came, and Friedrich Nietzsche applied himself to work once more. Since the strange misadventure at Bayreuth (no doubt the irritation of an author, whose aid has been rejected, accounts for these unforeseen changes), he has been tormented by anxieties and by doubts; he wished to clear them up. In two lines, which are like an introduction to his thoughts of the time, he brings the Wagnerian art into history. "Every thought that is great," he writes, "is dangerous, and dangerous, above all, in its newness. The impression is that of an isolated phenomenon which justifies itself by itself." Then, having posited this general principle, he approached the definitive questions: "What kind of man is Wagner? What does his art signify?"

It was a catastrophe in fairyland. The modern Æschylus, the modern Pindar vanished; the beautiful metaphysical and religious decorations fell in, and the art of Wagner appeared as it really was--an art, the late, magnificent, and often sickly flower of a humanity fifteen centuries old.

"Let us really ask ourselves," wrote Nietzsche in his notes, of which his friends did not know--"Let us really ask ourselves what is the value of the time which adopts the art of Wagner as its art? It is radically anarchical, a breathless thing, impious, greedy, shapeless, uncertain of its groundwork, quick to despair--it has no simplicity, it is self-conscious to the marrow, it lacks nobility, it is violent, cowardly. This art unites pell mell in one mass all that still attracts our modern German souls; aspects, ways of feeling, all comes pell mell. A monstrous attempt of art to affirm and dominate itself in an anti-artistic period. It is a poison against a poison."

The demi-god was gone, and in his place was a stage-player. Nietzsche recognised despairingly that he had allowed himself to be captured by the gambols of a giant. He had loved with simplicity and with the ardour of his youth, and had been deceived. There was jealousy in his anger, and a little of that hatred which is never far from love. His heart, his thought, of which he was so proud, he had given to a man: this man had trifled with these sacred gifts.

We may pass over these personal sorrows; others, even more profound, humiliated Friedrich Nietzsche. He was humiliated because he had betrayed Truth. He had desired to live for her; he now perceived that for four years he had lived for Wagner. He had dared to repeat after Voltaire, "It is necessary to tell the truth and sacrifice oneself;" he now saw that he had neglected her, that perhaps he had shunned her, in seeking consolation from the beauties of Wagner's art. "If you seek for ease, believe," he had written some years before to his young sister: "if you desire the truth, search"; and the duty which he had indicated to this child he had himself failed to observe. He had suffered himself to be seduced by images, by harmonies, by the magic of words; he had fed on lies.

His fault was graver yet, for he had consented to this abasement. The universe is evil, he had written in _The Origin of Tragedy_--cruel like a dissonance of notes, and the soul of man, dissonant like the universe, suffering from itself, would detach itself from life if it did not invent some illusion, some myth which deceives but appeases it and procures it a refuge of beauty. In truth, if we thus draw back, if we create our consolations for ourselves, whither will we not let ourselves be led? One hearkens to one's weakness; there is no cowardice that is not thus authorised. To accept is to deliver oneself over to the illusionist. Is it a noble or a vile illusion? How can we know if we are deceived, if we ask to be deceived? Nietzsche felt his memories degraded, and his hopes discouraged by the bitterness of remorse.

The _Use and Abuse of History_ appeared in February. It is a pamphlet directed against that science, history, the invention and pride of the moderns; it is a criticism of the faculty, recently acquired by men, by which they reanimate within themselves the sentiments of past centuries, at the risk of lessening the integrity of their instincts and perplexing their rectitude. A brief indication gives the spirit of the book.

"The man of the future: eccentric, energetic, hot-blooded, indefatigable, an artist, and an enemy of books. I should desire to hunt from my ideal State the self-styled 'cultivated' men, as Plato did the poets: it would be my terrorism."

Thus Nietzsche affronted the ten thousand "Herr Professors" to whom history is their daily bread and who guide the public. He was punished by their hatred and their silence. No one spoke of his book. His friends tried to find him some readers. Overbeck wrote to his student friend, Treischke, the political writer, the Prussian historiographer. "I am sure," he said to him, "that you will discern in these contemplations of Nietzsche's the most profound, the most serious, the most instinctive devotion to German greatness." Treischke refused his assent; Overbeck wrote again. "It is Nietzsche, my suffering friend, of whom I will and above all must talk to you." Treischke showed temper in his reply and the dispute became bitter. "Your Basle," he wrote, "is a boudoir, from which German culture is insulted!" "If you saw the three of us, Nietzsche, Romundt, and myself," said Overbeck, "you would see three good companions. Our difference strikes me as a painful symbol. It is so frequent an accident, so unfortunate a feature in our German history, this misunderstanding between political men and men of culture." "How unlucky for you," retorted Treischke, "that you met this Nietzsche, this madman, who tells us so much about his inactual thoughts, and who has nevertheless been bitten to the marrow by the most actual of all vices, the _folie des grandeurs._"

Overbeck, Gersdorff and Rohde wretchedly watched the failure of this book which they admired. "It is another thunderbolt," wrote Rohde; "it will have no more effect than fireworks in a cellar. But one day people will recognise it and will admire the courage and precision with which he has put his finger on our worst wound. How strong he is, our friend." And Overbeck: "The sensation of isolation that our friend experiences is growing in a painful manner. Ever and ever to sap the branch of the tree on which one supports oneself cannot be done without grievous consequences." And Gersdorff: "The best thing for our friend would be for him to imitate the Pythagoreans: five years without reading or writing. When I am free, which will be in two or three years, I shall return to my property: that asylum will be at his disposal."

These men, with their touching solicitude concerning their friend's lot, did not suspect either the true cause or the intensity of his distress. They pitied his solitude, they did not know how profound it was, or how lonely he was even with them. What mattered to him the failure of a book from which he was separated by a revolution of thought? "As to my book," he wrote to Rohde, "I can hardly think that I wrote it." He had discovered his error and his fault. Hence his sorrow, hence the agony which he dared not confess. "At the present moment," he announced to Gersdorff, "many things ferment within me, many extreme and daring things. I do not know in what measure I may communicate them to my best friends, but in any case I cannot write them." One evening, however, passion carried him away. He was alone with Overbeck; the conversation happened to turn on _Lohengrin,_ and, with a sudden fury, Nietzsche pulled to pieces this false and romantic work. Overbeck listened to him in amazement. Nietzsche became silent, and from that moment was more careful to practise the pretence which shamed him and disgusted him with himself.

"Dear, true friend," he wrote to Gersdorff in April, 1874 "if only you could have a far lower opinion of me! I am almost sure you will lose those illusions that you have about me, and I would wish to be the first to open your eyes, by explaining fully and conscientiously that I _deserve nothing._ If you could understand how radically I am discouraged, and from what melancholy I suffer on my own account. I do not know if I shall ever be capable of production. Henceforward I seek only a little liberty, a little of the real atmosphere of life, and I am arming myself against the numerous, the unspeakably numerous, revolting slaveries that encompass me. Shall I ever succeed? Doubt upon doubt. The aim is too distant, and if I ever succeed in reaching it, then I shall have consumed the better part of myself in long and trying struggles. I shall be free and languishing like an ephemeron at dusk. I express my lively fear! It is a misfortune to be so conscious of one's struggles, so clairvoyant...."

This letter was written on the 1st April On the 4th of April he sent Fräulein von Meysenbug a letter which was quite melancholy and yet less hopeless.

"Dear Fräulein, what pleasure you give, and how deeply you touch me! This is the first time that I have had flowers sent to me, but I know now that these numberless living colours, voiceless though they be, can speak plainly to us. These heralds of spring are blooming in my room, and I have been able to enjoy them for more than a week. It needs must be that, in our grey and painful lives, these flowers should come and lay bare to us a mystery of nature. They prevent our forgetting that it always is, and always must be, possible for us to find, somewhere in the world, life and hope and light and colour. How often do we lose this faith! And how beautiful and happy a thing it is when those who are battling confirm themselves and one another in courage, and by sending those symbols of flowers or books, recall their common pledge.

"My health (forgive a word on this subject) has been satisfactory since the new year, save that I have to be careful of my sight. But, as you know, there are states of physical suffering that are almost a blessing, for they produce forgetfulness of what one suffers _elsewhere._ Rather one tells oneself that there are remedies for the soul, as there are for the body. That is my philosophy of illness, and it gives hope for the soul. And is it not a work of art, still to hope?

"Wish me strength to write my eleven 'Unseasonable Thoughts' that still remain to be done. Then at last I shall have said everything that weighs upon us; and it may be that after this general confession, we shall feel ourselves liberated, in however slight a degree.

"My heartfelt wishes are with you, dear Fräulein."

At last Friedrich Nietzsche began to work. His instinct brought him back to the philosopher who had helped his first years. He wished to consecrate to Schopenhauer his third "Unseasonable Thought." Ten years before, he had led a miserable existence at Leipsic; Schopenhauer saved him. His strange gaiety, his lyricism, the irony with which he expresses his harshest thoughts, had restored to him the power of life. If Schopenhauer "troubles you, burdens you," he wrote at that time to a friend, "if he has not the power to raise you, and guide you, through the keenest sorrows of external life, to that sorrowful, but happy state of mind that takes hold on us when we hear great music, to that state in which the surroundings of the earth seem to fall away from us--then I do not claim to understand his philosophy."

Once more he experienced the impressions of his youth. He remembered that the most productive crises of his life had been the most sorrowful, and as a disciple in the school of his former master he recovered his courage. "I have eleven fine melodies yet to sing," he writes to Rohde, in announcement of the work which was to follow. And his Schopenhauer is a melody, a hymn to Solitude, to the daring of a thinker. His heart was full of music at that time. He rested from writing and composed a hymn to Friendship. "My song is for all of you," he wrote to Erwin Rohde.

His sister joined him, and the two left Basle and settled together in the country, near the falls of the Rhine. Friedrich Nietzsche recovered the gaiety of his most childish days, partly, no doubt, to amuse the girl who had come so tenderly to join him--_aliis lætus, sibi sapiens,_ according to the maxim that is found written in his diary of the time--but also because he was truly happy, despite his sorrow: happy to be himself, free and unspotted before life. "My sister is with me," he writes to Gersdorff. "Every day we make the finest plans for our future life, which is to be idyllic, hard-working, and simple. All is going well: I have put well away, far from me, all weakness and melancholy."

He used to walk with his sister and talk, laugh, dream, and read. What did he read? Schopenhauer, no doubt, and Montaigne, in that small and elegant edition which became a sad reminder: Cosima Wagner had given it to him in former days at Triebschen in gratitude for the dolls he used to bring to the little girls. "Because that man wrote," he used to say, "the pleasure of life on earth has been intensified. Since I have had to do with this free and brave spirit I like to repeat what he himself said of Plutarch--'Je ne le puis si peu raccointer que je n'en tire cuisse ou aile.' If the duty were laid upon me, it would be in his company that I would attempt to live on earth as at home." Schopenhauer and Montaigne: these two ironists, one confessing his despair, the other hiding it, are the men with whom Nietzsche elects to try to live. But he read at the same time with deepest appreciation the work of a younger thinker, one less unfavourable to his aspirations--the trustful Emerson, the young prophet of a young people, one who in his slightest expressions so happily renders the pure emotion that lightens the eighteenth year of a man's life and passes away with that year.

Friedrich Nietzsche had read Emerson at Pforta, and he discovered him again in the spring of 1874, and recommended him to his friends.

"The world is young," wrote Emerson at the end of his _Representative Men._ "The former great men call to us affectionately. We too must write Bibles, to unite again the heavens and the earthly world. The secret of Genius is to suffer no fiction to exist for us; to realise all that we know in the high refinement of modern life, in arts, in sciences, in books, in men; to exact good faith, reality, and a purpose: and first, last, midst, and without end, to honour every truth by use."

Nietzsche had need of the comfort of such words and loved them.

* * * * *

Friedrich Nietzsche finished the manuscript of his _Schopenhauer as Educator_ at the beginning of June. Intellectually he was almost cured, but he had other sufferings. Madame Förster-Nietzsche tells how one day, when her brother had expressed his disgust of novels and their monotony of love, some one asked him what other sentiment could have the power of inspiring passion. "Friendship," he said quickly. "It produces absolutely the same crises as love, but in a purer atmosphere. First of all, attraction brought about on both sides by common convictions, mutual admiration and glorification: then, distrust on one side, and on the other doubts as to the excellence of the friend and his ideas: the certainty that a rupture is inevitable and yet will be painful. In friendship there are all these sufferings, and others too many to tell." Nietzsche had knowledge of every one from June, 1871, onwards.

He loved Wagner; he had never ceased to love him. He had been able to correct himself of his intellectual error. Richard Wagner was not a philosopher or an educator of Europe. True enough, none the less he was a wonderful artist, the source of all beauty and of all happiness, and Nietzsche desired him still, as one desires a woman, because she gives joy. Any idea of rupture was unbearable, and to none did he confess his thoughts.

The situation was false and awkward. In January, at the worst moment of the crisis, he had to write to Wagner to congratulate him on a truly extraordinary and unexpected piece of news: the King of Bavaria, the poor madman, had suddenly stepped in and rescued the enterprise of Bayreuth by promising the necessary money. At the same time Nietzsche despatched his pamphlet on _The Use and Abuse of History._ Now, there was not one mention in it of the master's name. This created rather a shock at Bayreuth, and Madame Cosima Wagner took upon herself the task of delicately calling him to order.

"It has been given to you to take part in the sufferings of genius," she wrote, "and it is this that has made you capable of pronouncing a general judgment on our culture and has lent to your works the marvellous warmth which, I am convinced, will last long after our stars of petroleum and gas have been extinguished. Perhaps you would not have penetrated with so sure a look the colour-medley of Appearance if you had not mingled so deeply in our lives. From this same source has sprung your irony and humour, and this background of sufferings shared has given them a far greater power than if they were simply a play of the intellect."

"Alas!" said Nietzsche to his sister, "see what they think of me at Bayreuth." On the 22nd of May, the anniversary of Wagner's birthday, Nietzsche paid him his tribute of homage; Wagner answered him at once, and asked him to come and spend a few days in "his room." Nietzsche made some excuse and declined the invitation. A few days later he wrote to Wagner--his letters have been lost or destroyed. He received the following answer:

"DEAR FRIEND,--Why do you not come to see us?

"Do not isolate yourself so, or I shall be able to do nothing for you.

"Your room is ready.

"I have just received your last letter; I shall say more of it another time.

"Yours cordially,

"R. W.

"WAHNFRIED, _the 9th June,_ 1874."

It is probable that Wagner liked Nietzsche as far as he was capable of liking any man. From among all the admirers and too submissive disciples who surrounded him he distinguished this zealous young man, eager to give himself, eager for freedom. He was often impatient and forgave quickly. He guessed, though he did not precisely understand, that crises of tragedy shook this troubled life: so he wrote kindly. But Nietzsche only suffered the more: he felt more keenly the value of what he was going to lose. His courage failed him, and for the second time he refused the master's invitation. An echo reached him of the irritation caused at Bayreuth.

To a friend he wrote: "I hear that they are again worried about me there, and that they consider me unsociable and ill-humoured as a sick dog. Really, it is not my fault if there are some people whom I prefer seeing at a distance to near at hand."

The faithful Gersdorff--faithful to both parties, master and disciple--wrote to Nietzsche begging and pressing him to come; Nietzsche resisted his insistence and revolted at it.

"DEAR FRIEND,--Where did you get this strange idea of compelling me by a threat to spend a few days this summer at Bayreuth? We know, both of us, that Wagner is naturally disposed to distrust, but I do not think it wise to kindle this distrust further; besides, consider that I have duties towards myself, and that they are difficult to discharge with my health shattered as it is. Really, it is not right for any one to lay constraint of any kind on me."

These revolts were only momentary. Nietzsche had not the strength to break with Wagner. He longed with his whole being to preserve the friendship. Certainly he had refused to go to Bayreuth. But he had given excuses. He had asked for time, given urgent work as a pretext; he had made arrangements for the future. And towards the end of July, receiving a new invitation, tired at last of denying himself, he set out.

Meanwhile a curious idea had occurred to him.

Did he merely wish to affirm his independence? or did he wish to _correct_ Wagner? It may be that he conceived the fantastic dream of influencing his master, purifying him, lifting him up to the height of the devotion which he inspired. He took a score of Brahms, whom he admired, and whom Wagner pursued with a jealousy that was comic at times, slipped it in his trunk, and, early in the first evening, put it well in view on the piano. It was bound in the most beautiful red. Wagner perceived it, and, without doubt, understood; he had the sense to say nothing. Next day, however, Nietzsche repeated the manœuvre. Then the great man exploded; he screamed, raged, and foamed; then dashed off, banging the doors behind him. He met Nietzsche's sister, who had come with her brother, and, suddenly laughing at himself, gaily related the anecdote.

"Your brother had again thrust that red score on the piano, and the first thing I see on entering the room is it! Then I fell into a fury, like a bull before a red rag. Nietzsche, as I knew well, wanted me to understand that that man, too, had composed beautiful music. I exploded--what is called exploding!"

And Wagner laughed noisily. The bewildered Fräulein Nietzsche sent for her brother.

"Friedrich, what have you done? What has happened?"

"Ah! Lisbeth. Wagner has not been great...." Wagner had laughed; he was appeased. That same evening, he made friends again with the _enfant terrible._ But Nietzsche, as he shook hands with the master, allowed himself no illusion: the gulf between them was deeper, the definitive separation more menacing.

He left Bayreuth. His health, tolerable in the month of August, was bad in September; well or ill, he worked, correcting the proofs of his _Schopenhauer,_ which he published in October.

"You will know enough from my book," he wrote to Fräulein von Meysenbug, "of the ordeals of my year, ordeals in reality more cruel and more serious even, than you will be able to guess in reading me. Still, _in summa,_ all's well, my life is bereft of sunshine, but _I advance,_ and that is assuredly a great happiness, to advance in one's duty.... At the moment, I want to make myself clear as regards the system of antagonistic forces on which our 'modern world' rests. Happily I have neither political nor social ambitions. No danger menaces me, no considerations hinder me, nor am I inclined or forced to compromise. In short, I have a free field, and I will know one day in what degree our contemporaries, proud as they are of their liberty of thought, tolerate free thoughts.... What will be my ardour when at last I shall have thrown off all that mixes in me of negation and refractoriness! And yet, I dare to hope that in about five years this magnificent aim will be ready to be achieved."

It was a hope well charged with shadows. Friedrich Nietzsche, greedy to possess, longing to act, had to look forward to five years of waiting, of arid work, of criticism. "Thirty years," he put down in a note-book. "Life becomes a difficult affair. I see no motive to be gay; but there ought always to be a motive to be gay."

He returned to Basle and recommenced his course. This duty, which had always been a burden, became heavier still: he was entrusted with the charge of a Greek class for quite young men. He was conscious of the value of his time, and knew that every hour given to the University added to the delay, already so long, of the five years. He suffered from each of them as from a remorse, as though he were failing in his duty as a man of letters.

"I have before me work enough for fifty years," he wrote to his mother in autumn, "and I must mark time under the yoke, and it is with difficulty that I can throw a look to right or left. Alas! (a sigh). The winter has quickly come, very quickly, a very hard one. It will probably be cold at Christmas. Would I bother you if I went to see you? I delight so much in the thought of being once more with you, free for ten days of this cursed University work. So prepare me for Christmas a little corner in the country, where I might end my life in peace and write beautiful books.

"Alas! (a sigh)."

In these moments of depression he was always seized by memories of Wagner, and of the almost serene existence that he had tasted in his intimacy. The glory of the master, a moment faded, went on increasing; the public bowed before success, and Nietzsche, who had fought in the difficult times, had now to stand aside in the hour of triumph. The idea that the art of Wagner was within his reach, always offering the miracle of its "fifteen enchanted worlds "; the idea that Wagner himself was there, offering himself also, ever genial, abundant, laughing, tender, sublime, caressing, and like a god creating life around him: the idea that he had possessed so much beauty, and that, with a little cowardice, he could possess it again, and that never, never again would he possess it; this was an everlasting sadness to Nietzsche.

Finally, giving way to his need of an outlet, he wrote to the one comforter, to Wagner. Like all his other letters to Wagner, this letter is lost, or destroyed; but the tone of the letter which we are about to quote, the tone of Wagner's reply, helps us to imagine its eloquence.

Wagner answered:

"DEAR FRIEND,--Your letter has again made us most anxious on your account. Presently, my wife will write more fully than I. But I have just a quarter of an hour's rest, and I want--to your great annoyance possibly--to devote it to posting you up in what we say of you here. It seems to me, amongst other things, that never have I had in my life such intellectual society as you get in Basle, to amuse you in the evenings. However, if you are all hypochondriacs, it is not a great benefit, I admit. It is, I think, women that you need, you young men of to-day. There is a difficulty, as I well know: as my friend Sulzer used to say, 'Where take women without stealing them?' Besides, one could steal at a pinch. I mean to say you ought to marry, or compose an opera; one would be as good, or as bad, as the other. All the same, I hold that marriage is the better.

"In the meanwhile, I could recommend you a palliative, but you always settle your _régime_ in advance, so that one can say nothing to you. For example: our household here is so organised that we have a place such as was never offered me in the most difficult moments of my life, here for you: you should come and spend all the summer holidays;--but very prudently, you announced to us, at the beginning of winter, that you had resolved to pass the summer holidays on a very high and very solitary mountain in Switzerland! Does that not look like very careful guarding against a possible invitation? We could be useful to you in some directions: why do you despise that which is offered you in such good part? Gersdorff and all the society of Basle would be happy here: a thousand things are to be seen: I pass in review all my singers of the _Nibelungen;_ the decorator decorates, the machinist machines; and then we are there, in flesh and blood.

"But one knows the eccentricities of friend Nietzsche!

"So I shall say no more about you, because it serves no purpose.

"Ah! _mon Dieu!_ marry a rich woman! O, why should Gersdorff happen to be of the masculine sex! Marry, and then travel, and enrich yourself with those magnificent impressions which you desire so much! And then ... you will compose an opera which, surely, will be terribly difficult to execute. What Satan was it that made a pedagogue of you?

"Now, to end up: next year, in the summer, complete rehearsals (perhaps with orchestra) at Bayreuth. In 1876, the representations. Impossible earlier.

"I bathe every day, I could no longer endure my stomach. Bathe you too! And eat meat like me. "With all my heart,

"Your devoted,

"R. W."

Wagner had foreseen that his letter would be useless. He had not foreseen that it would be hurtful. Nietzsche repented that he had drawn forth these tender offers, which he could not accept. In writing, he had been weak; he was ashamed. Finally, the announcement and the approach of the Bayreuth rehearsals overwhelmed him. Should he go? Should he not go? If he did not go, how was he to excuse himself? Could he still hide his thoughts? Should he henceforth acknowledge all?

He had commenced a fourth "Unseasonable Thought," _We other Philologists;_ he abandoned it, alleging, to explain this abandonment, weariness and the weight of his University duties. When he speaks thus, Nietzsche deceives either himself or us. Christmas came, and he went to spend ten days at Naumburg with his mother. He was at liberty and could work. But instead of writing, he composed and copied out his _Hymn to Friendship_ for four voices. He spent Saint Sylvester's day in re-reading his youthful compositions: this examination interested him. "I have always seen admiringly," he wrote to Fräulein von Meysenbug, "how the invariability of character manifests itself in music. What a child expresses musically is in so clear a manner the language of his most essential nature that the man afterwards desires to revise nothing in it."

This musical debauch was a bad sign of his condition, a sign of weakness and of fear before his thoughts. Two letters, one from Gersdorff, the other from Cosima Wagner, came to disturb his solitary commemoration. His friends spoke to him of Bayreuth. The reminder plunged him in despair.

"Yesterday," he wrote to Fräulein von Meysenbug, "on the first day of the year, I saw the future with a real fear. It is terrible and dangerous to live--I should envy him who came by death in an honest manner. For the rest, I am resolved to live to an old age. I have my work. But it is not the satisfaction of living that will help me to grow old. You understand this resolution."

During January and February, 1875, Nietzsche did not work. He let depression get the better of him. "At very rare moments," he writes, "ten minutes every fortnight, I compose a _Hymn to Solitude._ I will show it in all its dreadful beauty."

In March, Gersdorff came to sojourn in Basle. Nietzsche, encouraged by his arrival, dictated some notes to him. He seemed to have escaped from his melancholy; then once more he was plunged into it by a fresh sorrow.

It had become his habit, a kindly habit and one conformable to his tastes, to live in common with his two colleagues, Overbeck and Romundt, who formed the intellectual society of which Wagner spoke with such esteem. Now, in February, 1875, Romundt announced to Overbeck and to Nietzsche that he was obliged to leave them to enter into Orders. Nietzsche experienced a feeling of stupefied indignation: for many months he had lived with this man, he called him his friend. Yet he had had no suspicion of the secret vocation now suddenly declared. Romundt had not been open with him. Subjugated by religious faith, he had lacked in simple good faith, and the duties of friendship of which Nietzsche had such an exalted ideal. Romundt's treachery reminded him of another treachery and made it easier for him to understand the news which was rumoured among Wagnerians: the master was about to compose a Christian Mystery--a _Parsifal._ Nothing was so displeasing to Friedrich Nietzsche as a return to Christianity: nothing seemed to him more weak or cowardly than such a capitulation to the problems of life. Some years before, he had known and admired the different projects on which Wagner conversed with his intimates: he then spoke of Luther, of the Great Frederick; he wished to glorify a German hero and repeat the happy experiment of _Die Meistersinger._ Why had he abandoned his projects? Why did he prefer Parsifal to Luther? and to the rude and singing life of the German Renaissance, the religiosity of the Graal? Friedrich Nietzsche then understood and measured the perils of the pessimism which accustoms souls to complaint, weakens and predisposes them to mystical consolations. He reproached himself for having taught Romundt a doctrine too cruel for his courage, and thus to have been the cause of his weakness.

"Ah! our Protestant atmosphere, good and pure as it is!" he wrote to Rohde; "I have never felt so strongly how well I am filled with the spirit of Luther. And the unlucky man turns his back on so many liberating geniuses! I ask myself if he is in his senses, and if it would not be better to treat him with cold water and douches; so incomprehensible is it to me, that such a spectre should rise up by me, and take possession of a man for eight years my comrade. And to crown all it is on me that the responsibility of this base conversion rests. God knows, no egoistic thought induces me to speak thus. But I believe too that I represent a sacred thing, and I should be bitterly ashamed if I merited the reproach of having the slightest connection with this Catholicism which I detest thoroughly."

He wished to bring back, to convince his friend, but no discussion was possible. Romundt did not answer and held to his resolve. He left on the fixed date. Nietzsche wrote to Gersdorff, and related the story of this departure.

"It was horribly sad: Romundt knew, repeated endlessly that henceforward he had lived the better and the happier part of his life. He wept a great deal and asked our forgiveness. He could not hide his misery. At the last moment I was seized with a veritable terror; the porters were shutting the carriage doors, and Romundt, wishing to continue speaking to us, wanted to let down the window, but it stuck; he redoubled his efforts, and while he tormented himself thus, hopelessly trying to make himself heard, the train went out slowly, and we were reduced to making signs to each other. The awful symbolism of the whole scene upset me terribly, and Overbeck as much as it did me (he confessed as much to me later): it was hardly endurable; I stayed in bed the next day with a bad headache that lasted thirty hours, and much vomiting of bile."

This day of illness marked the beginning of a very long attack. Nietzsche was obliged to leave Basle and to repose in the solitude of the mountains and woods. "I wander always alone," he writes, "clearing up many thoughts." What were these thoughts? We can ascertain them. "Send me a comforting message," he wrote to Rohde: "that your friendship may help me better to support this terrible affair. It is in my sentiment of friendship that I am hurt. I hate more than ever that insincere and hypocritical way of being a man of many friendships, and I will have to be more circumspect in the future."

Fräulein Nietzsche, who had passed the month of March at Bayreuth with the Wagners, came back to her brother, whose condition alarmed her. He seemed obsessed by the memory of Romundt. "That such a misadventure should occur between friends living under the same roof," he was constantly saying. "It is appalling." In reality he was thinking of the other friend, Richard Wagner, of the master he was losing. "What a peril I have run," he said to himself. "I admired, I was happy, I delivered myself over to and followed an illusion, but all illusions are connected, and accomplices. Wagnerism borders upon Christianity." Tirelessly he listened to his sister's accounts of the marvels of Bayreuth, of the activity, the enthusiasm, the joy of all. Walking one day with him in a public garden, she related for the tenth time this same story: she noticed that her brother was listening to her with a strange emotion. She interrogated him, plied him with questions, and then the secret which he had kept for a year escaped him in a long, eloquent plaint. He was suddenly silent. He remarked that a wayfarer was following and spying on him. He dragged his sister precipitately away, terrified by the idea that his words would be repeated at Bayreuth. A few days later, having recognised again the too curious wayfarer, he was able to learn his name: it was Ivan Turgenieff.

July, 1875, the month fixed for the rehearsals of the Tetralogy, approached, and these rehearsals were the sole preoccupation of Nietzsche's friends, the sole subject of their letters and their conversations. He continued to dissemble and dared not decide the question which was becoming urgent: Should he go to their rehearsals or not? His enervation increased day by day, bringing on the ordinary troubles; headaches, insomnia, sickness, internal cramp: finally his health served for an excuse. "As you are going to Bayreuth," he wrote to Gersdorff, "warn them that they will not see me. Wagner will be greatly provoked, I am not less."

About the beginning of July, when his friends were hurrying towards Bayreuth and the University of Basle had closed its doors, he retired to the little therapeutic station which his doctor had recommended, Steinabad, a spot lost in a valley of the Black Forest.

Friedrich Nietzsche had the faculty of occasionally rising above his own sorrows and his own joys. He knew how to enjoy the spectacle of his crises as though they were the intermingled voices of a symphony. Then he ceased to suffer, and contemplated with a sort of mystical rapture the tragic development of his existence. Such was his life during the few weeks of his cure at Steinabad. It brought him nevertheless no motive of happiness. His illness resisted remedies, and the doctors let him guess, as at the origin of all these attacks, an identical, indiscernible, and mysterious cause. He did not forget the nature of the illness that had killed his father at thirty-six years of age. He took the hint and felt the danger: but he even brought this menace into the spectacle of his life and considered it bravely.

Steinabad is near Bayreuth; Nietzsche was once more tempted. Would he go, or would he stay? This indecision was enough, he broke down utterly. Towards the end of July, a terrible attack which kept him two days in bed did away with these doubts. On the first of August he wrote to Rohde: "To-day, dear friend, if I am not mistaken, you are all meeting at Bayreuth. And I am not among you. In vain have I obstinately believed that I could all of a sudden emerge in your society and enjoy my friends. In vain; to-day, my cure being half completed, I say it with certainty...."

The attack lost its force; he was able to get up and walk in the woods. He had brought a _Don Quixote_ with him: he read this book, "the bitterest of all," with its derision of every noble effort.

Still, he kept up his courage. He recalled without too poignant a sorrow his past that had been filled with joy. He faced without fear the menacing future; he thought of that grand work on Hellenism, an old, unabandoned dream; he thought of the interrupted succession of the "Thoughts out of Season;" and above all he delighted in conceiving the beautiful book he would write when he was sure of himself. "To this work," he thought, "I must sacrifice everything. For some years I have been writing a great deal, I have written too much; I have often made mistakes. Now I must keep silence and devote myself to many years' work; seven, eight years. Shall I live as long? In eight years I shall be forty. My father died four years earlier. Never mind, I must accept the risk and peril. The time of silence has returned for me. I have greatly slandered the modern men, yet I am one of them. I suffer with them, and like them, because of the excess and the disorder of my desires. As I shall have to be their master, I must first gain the mastery of myself and repress my trouble. That I may dominate my instincts, I must know them and judge them; I must restrict myself and analyse. I have criticised science, I have exalted inspiration, but I have not analysed the sources of inspiration; and to what unfathomable depths have I not followed it! My youth was my excuse, I needed intoxication. Now my youth is over. Rohde, Gersdorff, Overbeck, are at Bayreuth: I envy, yet pity them. They have passed the age of dreams, they ought not to be there. What task am I going to undertake? I will study natural sciences, mathematics, physics, chemistry, history, and political economy. I will accumulate an immense equipment for the knowledge of men. I will read ancient history books, novels, letters. The work will be hard, but I shall have Plato, Aristotle, Goethe, and Schopenhauer constantly by me; thanks to my well loved geniuses my pain will be less painful, my solitude less solitary."

Friedrich Nietzsche's thoughts were almost every day diverted by a letter from Bayreuth. He received and read it without bitterness. In a few notes written for himself alone, he fixed the memory of the joys he owed to Wagner. Then answering his friends: "I am with you in the spirit during three-quarters of my days," he told them; "I roam like a shadow around Bayreuth. Do not fear to excite my envy, tell me all the news, dear friends. During my walks I conduct entire pieces of music that I know by heart, and then I grumble and rage. Salute Wagner in my name, salute him deeply! Good-by, my well loved friends, this is for all of you. I love you with all my heart."

Friedrich Nietzsche came back to Basle somewhat the better for his cure. His sister joined him and wished to stay with him. He continued to lead the wholly meditative and almost happy existence of Steinabad, with his papers, his books, and his piano.

"_I dream,_" he wrote (he underlines these words), "_I dream of an association of unrestricted men, who know no circumspection and wish to be called the 'destroyers'; they apply to everything the measure of their criticism, and sacrifice themselves to the truth. Everything that is suspect and false must be brought to light. We do not wish to construct prematurely, we do not know if we can construct, and whether it may not be better to construct nothing. There are cowardly and resigned pessimists; of these we do not wish to be._"

He commenced the long studies which he had assigned himself. He examined firstly Dühring's book, _The Value of Life._ Dühring was a Positivist who led the combat against the disciples of Schopenhauer and Wagner. "All idealism deceives," he told them, "all life that seeks to escape beyond life vows itself to chimera." Friedrich Nietzsche had no objection to offer to these premises. "A sane life carries its worth in itself," said Dühring. "Asceticism is unhealthy and the sequel of an error." "No," answered Nietzsche. Asceticism is an instinct which the most noble, the strongest among men have felt: it is a fact, it must be taken into account if the value of life is to be appreciated. And even if a prodigious error be here indicated as being at work, then the possibility of such an error should be placed amongst the sombre features of being.

"The tragedy of life is not irreducible," said Dühring, "the sovereignty of egoism is only apparent; the altruistic instincts work in the human soul."

Egoism an appearance! exclaimed Nietzsche. Here Dühring falls into childishness. _Ich wollte er machte mir hier nichts vor!_ God be praised if it were true! He talks nonsense, and if he seriously believes what he says, he is ripe for all the socialisms. Nietzsche finally held out as against Dühring for the tragic philosophy that Heraclitus and Schopenhauer had taught him. There is no possible evasion, all evasion is a lure and a cowardice. Dühring says it and he speaks truly; but he attenuates the task in presenting a sweetened image of that life in which we are set. It is either stupidity or falsehood: life is hard.

Friedrich Nietzsche was gay, or appeared so. In the evening (he did not work because of his eyes) his sister read Walter Scott's novels to him. He liked their simple narration. "The serene art, the andante," he writes; he also liked the heroic, naïve, and complicated adventures. "What fellows! what stomachs!" he exclaimed at the recitals of the interminable feasts; and Fräulein Nietzsche, seeing him so cheerful, was astonished to hear him a moment later play and develop at great length his _Hymn to Solitude._

She was astonished not without reason: the gaiety of her brother was artificial; his sadness was real; he dissembled with her, and doubtless with himself.

He had begun to study Balfour Stewart's book on the conservation of energy: he stopped at the first pages. It was odious to him to work thus without the consolation of art, or the real joy of hoping. He thought he would be more interested in the Indian wisdom, and took up the English translation of the _Sutta Nipâta._ Only too well he understood its radical nihilism.

"When I am ill and in bed," he writes in December to Gersdorff, "I let myself be oppressed by the persuasion that life is without value, and all our ends illusory...." His crises were frequent: every fortnight he was disabled by the headaches, internal cramp, twitching of the eyes, which laid hold of him.

_"I wander here and there, alone like a rhinoceros,"_ Nietzsche had kept in mind this final phrase of a chapter of the _Sutta Nipâta,_ and applied it to himself with melancholy humour. His best friends were then marrying. Nietzsche was ready to abuse marriage and women: one is rarely sincere when one speaks thus, and we know he was not.

"I have more and better friends than I deserve," he wrote in October, 1874, to Fräulein von Meysenbug; "what I now wish myself, I tell you in confidence, is a good wife, and as soon as possible. Then life will have given me all that I shall have asked of it. The rest is my affair."

Friedrich Nietzsche congratulated the fiancés, Gersdorff, Rohde, Overbeck, and rejoiced with them, but felt the difference of his own destiny.

"Be happy," he wrote to Gersdorff, "you who will no longer go wandering here and there, alone like a rhinoceros."

* * * * *

The year 1876 was about to begin, the representations of the Tetralogy were announced for the summer. Friedrich Nietzsche knew that his irresolution must then cease: "I was exhausted," he wrote later, "by the sadness of an inexorable presentiment--the presentiment that after this disillusion I should be condemned to mistrust myself more profoundly, to despise myself more profoundly, to live in a profounder solitude than before."

The impression of the Christmas and New Year festivals, always strong in him, aggravated his melancholy. He fell ill in December, only to get up again in March. He was still weak.

"I find it an effort to write, I shall be brief," he wrote to Gersdorff the 18th January, 1876; "I have never spent so sad and painful a Christmas or one of such dreadful foreboding. I have had to give up doubting. The malady which has attacked me is cerebral; my stomach, my eyes, give me all this suffering from another cause, whose centre is elsewhere. My father died at the age of thirty-six of inflammation of the brain. It is quite possible that things may go even quicker with me.... I am patient, but full of doubts as to what awaits me. I live almost entirely on milk. It has a good result; I sleep well. Milk and sleep are at present my best foods."

At the approach of spring, he wished to leave Basle: Gersdorff offered to go with him, and the two friends settled on the shores of the Lake of Geneva, at Chillon. They spent a bad fortnight there. Nietzsche's nerves were irritated by the least variation of the atmosphere, which was more or less humid and more or less charged with electricity, and he suffered from the "föhne," a soft wind which melts the snows in March. He let the softness and tepidity depress him, and could not restrain the heartrending expression of his doubts and his agonies. Gersdorff, obliged to return to Germany, went with an uneasy mind on his friend's account.

But Nietzsche felt better once he was left alone. Perhaps finer weather favoured him; perhaps he felt his distress less acutely when the compassionate Gersdorff was not near by, ever ready to lend an ear to his complaints. His humours became less bitter, and chance procured him a decisive relief, a liberating hour. Fräulein von Meysenbug had just published her _Memoirs of an Idealist._ Nietzsche had put these two volumes in his bag. Of this woman of fifty he was very fond, and every day he liked her more. She was always suffering and courageous, always fine and good. He did not put her on the level of Cosima Wagner. The superiority of her mind was not dazzling; but she was great-hearted, and Nietzsche infinitely esteemed this woman who was faithful to the real genius of women. Doubtless he began reading her book with moderate expectations: yet the work held him. It is one of the most beautiful records of the nineteenth century. Fräulein von Meysenbug had gone all through it: she had known all the worlds, all the heroes, all the hopes. Born in old Germany with its petty Courts--her father was Minister in one of them--as a child she had listened to the friends of Humboldt and Goethe; as a young girl, the humanitarian gospel touched her: detached from Christianity, she abandoned its observances. Then came 1848, and its dream; the Socialists, and their essays towards a more noble, a more brotherly life: she admired them, and wanted to work with them. Blamed by her people, she left them and went alone without asking help or advice. An idealist of action, not of dreams, she joined the communists of Hamburg; with them she instituted a sort of phalanstery, a rationalistic school in which the masters lived together. This school prospered under her direction; but, threatened by the police, she had to fly. Next she was in London among its proscripts of all the races, that mournful refuge, and tomb of the vanquished. Fräulein von Meysenbug earned her living by giving lessons: she knew Mazzini, Louis Blanc, Herzen: she was the friend and the consoler of these unhappy men. At the time of the second Empire, of Napoleon III., of Bismarck, and of the silence of the peoples--in Paris, with its brilliant culture--Fräulein von Meysenbug met Richard Wagner. She had long admired his music: she admired the man, listened to him, succumbed to his ascendancy, and, renouncing the religion of humanity, carried her fervour to the cult of art. But always she exercised and lavished her active goodness: Herzen died; he left two children, whom Fräulein von Meysenbug adopted, thus taking upon herself the anxiety of a double maternity. Friedrich Nietzsche had known these young girls and often admired the tenderness of their friend, her free and sane self-sacrifice: he had not known of what life of entire devotion this devotion was the flower.

He was encouraged by this book: Fräulein von Meysenbug reconciled him to life. Again he found his confidence and health. "My health," he wrote to Gersdorff, "is allied to my hopes. I am well when I hope."

He left his _pension_ and went to spend some days in Geneva. There he discovered a friend, the musician Senger; he made the acquaintance of a few Frenchmen, exiled communards, and liked talking to them. He esteemed these fanatics with the square skulls, so prompt to self-sacrifice. It appears that he flirted with two "exquisite" Russians. Then he returned to Basle, and his first letter was sent to Fräulein von Meysenbug.

"BASLE, _Good Friday, April_ 14, 1876.