Nietzsche installed himself at Basle, selected his domicile, and exchanged visits with his colleagues. But Richard Wagner was constantly in his thoughts. Three weeks after his arrival some friends joined with him in an expedition to the shores of the lake of the Four Cantons. One morning he left them and set off on foot by the river bank towards the master\'s retreat, Triebschen. Triebschen is the name of a little cape which protrudes into the lake; a solitary villa and a solitary garden, whose high poplars are seen from afar, occupy its expanse.
He stopped before the closed gate and rang. Trees hid the house. He looked around, as he waited, and listened: his attentive ear caught the resonance of a harmony which was soon muffled up in the noise of footsteps. A servant opened the door and Nietzsche sent in his card; then he was left to hear once more the same harmony, dolorous, obstinate, many times repeated. The invisible master ceased for a moment, but almost at once was busy again with his experiments, raising the strain, modulating it, until, by modulating once more, he had brought back the initial harmony. The servant returned. Herr Wagner wished to know if the visitor was the same Herr Nietzsche whom he had met one evening at Leipsic.[Pg 72] "Yes," said the young man. "Then would Herr Nietzsche be good enough to come back at luncheon time?" But Nietzsche\'s friends were awaiting him, and he had to excuse himself. The servant disappeared again, to return with another message. "Would Herr Nietzsche spend the Monday of Pentecost at Triebschen?" This invitation he was able to accept and did accept.
Nietzsche came to know Wagner at one of the finest moments of the latter\'s life. The great man was alone, far from the public, from journalists, and from crowds. He had just carried off and married the divorced wife of Hans von Bülow, the daughter of Liszt and of Madame d\'Agoult, an admirable being who was endowed with the gifts of two races. The adventure had scandalised all the Pharisees of old-fashioned Germany. Richard Wagner was completing his work in retreat: a gigantic work, a succession of four dramas, every one of which was immense: a work which was not conceived for the pleasure of men, but for the trouble and salvation of their souls; a work so prodigious that no public was worthy to hear it, no company of singers worthy to sing it, no stage, in short, vast enough or noble enough to make its representation possible. What matter! The world must stoop to Richard Wagner; it was not for him to yield to it. He had finished Rhinegold, and the Valkyries; Siegfried was soon to be completed; and he began to know the joy of the workman who has mastered his work, and is able at last to view it as a whole.
Restlessness and anger were mixed with his joy, for he was not of those who are content with the approbation of an élite. He had been moved by all the dreams of men, and he wished in his turn to move all men. He needed the crowd, wanted to be listened to by it, and never ceased to call to the Germans, always heavy and slow-footed in following him. "Aid me," he cries out in his books, "for you begin to be strong. Because of your[Pg 73] strength do not disdain, do not neglect those who have been your spiritual masters, Luther, Kant, Schiller and Beethoven: I am the heir of these masters. Assist me. I need a stage where I may be free; give me it! I need a people who shall listen to me; be that people! Aid me, it is your duty. And, in return, I will glorify you."
We may picture this first visit: Nietzsche with his soft manners, his nervous voice, his fiery and veiled look; his face which was so youthful in spite of the long, drooping moustache; Wagner in the strength of the fifty-nine years that he carried without sign of weakness, overflowing with intuitions and experiences, desires and expectations, exuberant in language and gesture. What was their first interview like? We have no record of it, but no doubt Wagner repeated what he was writing in his books, and said imperiously: "Young man, you too must help me."
The night was fine and conversation spirited. When it was time for Nietzsche to go, Wagner desired to accompany his guest on his way home along the river. They went out together. Nietzsche\'s joy was great. The want from which he had long suffered was now being supplied; he had needed to love, to admire, to listen. At last he had met a man worthy to be his master; at last he had met him for whom no admiration, no love could be too strong. He gave himself up entirely and resolved to serve this solitary and inspired being, to fight for him against the inert multitude, against the Germany of the Universities, of the Churches, of the Parliaments, and of the Courts. What was Wagner\'s impression? No doubt he too was happy. From the very beginning he had recognised the extraordinary gifts of his young visitor. He could converse with him; and to converse means to give and to receive. And so few men had been able to afford him that joy.
On the 22nd of May, eight days after this first visit,[Pg 74] a few very intimate friends came from Germany to Triebschen to celebrate the first day of their master\'s sixtieth year. Nietzsche was invited, but had to decline, for he was preparing his opening lecture and did not like to be distracted at his task. He was anxious to express straightway the conception that he had formed of his science and of its teaching. For his subject he took the Homeric problem, that problem which is an occasion of division between scholars who analyse antiquity and artists who delight in it. His argument was that the scholars must resolve this conflict by accepting the judgment of the artists. Their criticism, fecund in useful historical results, had restored the legend and the vast frame of the two poems. But it had decided nothing, and could have decided nothing. After all, the Iliad and the Odyssey were there before the world in clear shapes, and if Goethe chose to say: "The two poems are the work of a single poet "—the scholar had no reply. His task was modest, but useful and deserving of esteem. Let us not forget, said Nietzsche at the conclusion of his inaugural lecture, how but a few years ago these marvellous Greek masterpieces lay buried beneath an enormous accumulation of prejudices. The minute labour of our students has saved them for us. Philology is neither a Muse nor a Grace; she has not created this enchanted world, it is not she who has composed this immortal music. But she is its virtuoso, and we have to thank her that these accents, long forgotten and almost indecipherable, resound again, and that is surely a high merit. "And as the Muses formerly descended among the heavy and wretched B?otian peasants, this messenger comes to-day into a world filled with gloomy and baneful shapes, filled with profound and incurable sufferings, and consoles us by evoking the beautiful and luminous forms of the Gods, the outlines of a marvellous, an azure, a distant, a fortunate country...."
[Pg 75]
Nietzsche was highly applauded by the bourgeois of Basle, who had come in great numbers to hear the young master whose genius had been announced. His success pleased him, but his thoughts went otherwhere, towards another marvellous, azure, and distant land—Triebschen. On the 4th of June he received a note:
"Come and sleep a couple of nights under our roof," wrote Wagner. "We want to know what you are made of. Little joy I have so far from my German compatriots. Come and save the abiding faith which I still cling to, in what I call, with Goethe and some others, German liberty."
Nietzsche was able to spare these two days and henceforward was a familiar of the master\'s. He wrote to his friends:
"Wagner realises all our desires: a rich, great, and magnificent spirit; an energetic character, an enchanting man, worthy of all love, ardent for all knowledge. ... But I must stop; I am chanting a p?an....
"I beg you," he says further, "not to believe a word of what is written about Wagner by the journalists and the musicographers. No one in the world knows him, no one can judge him, since the whole world builds on foundations which are not his, and is lost in his atmosphere. Wagner is dominated by an idealism so absolute, a humanity so moving and so profound, that I feel in his presence as if I were in contact with divinity...."
Richard Wagner had written, at the request of Louis II., King of Bavaria, a short treatise on social metaphysics. This singular work, which had been conceived to fascinate a young and romantic prince,[Pg 76] was carefully withheld from publicity, and lent only to intimates. Wagner gave it to Nietzsche, and few things surely that the latter ever read went home more deeply. As traces of the impression he received from it are to be discovered in his work down to the very end, it will be worth our while to give some idea of its nature.
Wagner starts by explaining an old error of his: in 1848 he had been a Socialist. Not that he had ever welcomed the ideal of a levelling of men; his mind, avid of beauty and order, in other words, of superiorities, could not have welcomed a notion of the kind. But he hoped that a humanity liberated from the baser servitudes would rise with less effort to an understanding of art. In this he was mistaken, as he now understood.
"My friends, despite their fine courage," he wrote, "were vanquished; the emptiness of their effort proved to me that they were the victims of a basic error and that they had asked from the world what the world could not give them."
His view cleared and he recognised that the masses are powerless, their agitations vain, their co-operation illusory. He had believed them capable of introducing into history a progress of culture. Now he saw that they could not collaborate towards the mere maintenance of a culture already acquired. They experience only such needs as are gross, elementary, and short-lived. For them all noble ends are unattainable. And the problem which reality obliges us to solve is this: how are we to contrive things so that the masses shall serve a culture which must always be beyond their comprehension, and serve it with zeal and love, even to the sacrifice of life? All politics are comprised within this question, which appears insoluble, and yet is not. Consider Nature: no one understands her ends; and yet all beings serve her. How does Nature obtain their adhesion to life? She deceives her creatures. She puts them in[Pg 77] hope of an immutable and ever-delayed happiness. She gives them those instincts which constrain the humblest of animals to lengthy sacrifices and voluntary pains. She envelops in illusion all living beings, and thus persuades them to struggle and to suffer with unalterable constancy.
Society, wrote Wagner, ought to be upheld by similar artifices. It is illusions that assure its duration, and the task of those who rule men is to maintain and to propagate these conserving illusions. Patriotism is the most essential. Every child of the people should be brought up in love of the King, the living symbol of the fatherland, and this love must become an instinct, strong enough to render the most sublime abnegation an easy thing.
The patriotic illusion assures the permanence of the State but does not suffice to guarantee a high culture. It divides humanity, it favours cruelty, hatred, and narrowness of thought. The King, whose glance dominates the State, measures its limits, and is aware of purposes which extend beyond it. Here a second illusion is necessary, the religious illusion whose dogmas symbolise a profound unity and a universal love. The King must sustain it among his subjects.
The ordinary man, if he be penetrated with this double illusion, can live a happy and a worthy life: his way is made clear, he is saved. But the life of the prince and his counsellors is a graver and a more dangerous thing. They propagate the illusions, therefore they judge them. Life appears to them unveiled, and they know how tragic a thing it is. "The great man, the exceptional man," writes Wagner, "finds himself practically every day in the same condition in which the ordinary man despairs of life, and has recourse to suicide." The prince and the aristocracy which surrounds him, his nobles, are forearmed by their valour against so cowardly a temptation.[Pg 78] Nevertheless, they experience a bitter need to "turn their back on the world." They desire for themselves a restful illusion, of which they may be at the same time the authors and the accessories. Here art intervenes to save them, not to exalt the na?ve enthusiasm of the people, but to alleviate the unhappy life of the nobles and to sustain their valour. "Art," writes Richard Wagner, addressing Louis II., "I present to my very dear friend as the promised and benignant land. If Art cannot lift us in a real and complete manner above life, at least it lifts us in life itself to the very highest of regions. It gives life the appearance of a game, it withdraws us from the common lot, it ravishes and consoles us."
"Only yesterday"—wrote Nietzsche to Gersdorff on the 4th of August, 1869—"I was reading a manuscript which Wagner confided to me, Of the State and Religion, a treatise full of grandeur, composed in order to explain to \'his young friend,\' the little King of Bavaria, his particular way of understanding the State and Religion. Never did any one speak to his King in a tone more worthy, more philosophical; I felt myself moved and uplifted by that ideality which the spirit of Schopenhauer seems constantly to inspire. Better than any other mortal, the King should understand the tragic essence of life."
In September, Friedrich Nietzsche, after a short stay in Germany, returned to a life divided between Basle and Triebschen. At Basle he had his work, his pupils, who listened to him with attention, the society of amiable colleagues. His wit, his musical talent, his friendship with Richard Wagner, his elegant manners and appearance, procured him a certain prestige. The best houses[Pg 79] liked his company, and he did not refuse their invitations. But all the pleasures of society are less acceptable than the simplest friendship, and Nietzsche had not a single friend in this honest bourgeois city; at Triebschen alone was he satisfied.
"Now," he writes to Erwin Rohde, who was living at Rome, "I, too, have my Italy, but I am able to visit it only on Saturdays and Sundays. My Italy is called Triebschen, and I already feel as if it were my home. Recently I have been there four times running, and into the bargain a letter travels the same road almost every week. My dear friend, what I see and hear and learn there I find it impossible to tell you. Schopenhauer and Goethe, Pindar and ?schylus are, believe me, still alive."
Each of his returns was an occasion of melancholy. A feeling of solitude depressed him. He confided in Erwin Rohde, speaking at the same time of the hopes he had in his work.
"Alas, dear friend," he said, "I have very few satisfactions, and solitary, always solitary, I must ruminate on them all within myself. Ah! I should not fear a good illness, if I could purchase at that price a night\'s conversation with you. Letters are so little use!... Men are constantly in need of midwives, and almost all go to be delivered in taverns, in colleges where little thoughts and little projects are as plentiful as litters of kittens. But when we are full of our thought no one is there to aid us, to assist us at the difficult accouchment: sombre and melancholy, we deposit in some dark hole our birth of thought, still heavy and shapeless. The sun of friendship does not shine upon them."
[Pg 80]
"I am becoming a virtuoso in the art of solitary walking," he says again; and he adds: "My friendship has something pathological about it." Nevertheless he is happy in the depths of his being; he says so himself one day, and warns his friend Rohde against his own letters:
"Correspondence has this that is vexatious about it: one would like to give the best of oneself, whereas, in fact, one gives what is most ephemeral, the accord and not the eternal melody. Each time that I sit down to write to you, the saying of H?lderlin (the favourite author of my schooldays) comes back to my mind: \'Denn liebend giebt der Sterbliche vom Besten!\' And, as well as I remember, what have you found in my last letters? Negations, contrarieties, singularities, solitudes. Nevertheless, Zeus and the divine sky of autumn know it, a powerful current carries me towards positive ideas, each day I enjoy exuberant hours which delight me with full perceptions, with real conceptions—in such instants of exalting impressions, I never miss sending you a long letter full of thoughts and of vows; and I fling it athwart the blue sky, trusting, for its carriage towards you, to the electricity which is between our souls."
And we can get a glimpse of these positive ideas, these precious impressions, because we are in possession of all the notes and the blunders of the young man who was acquiring, at the price of constant effort, strength and mastery.
"My years of study," he wrote to Ritschl, "what have they been for me? A luxurious sauntering across the domains of philology and art; hence my gratitude is especially lively at this moment that I address you who have been till now the \'destiny\' of my life; and hence[Pg 81] I recognise how necessary and opportune was the offer which changed me from a wandering into a fixed star, and obliged me to taste anew the satisfaction of galling but regular work, of an unchanging but certain object. A man\'s labour is quite another thing, when the holy anangkei of his profession helps him; how peaceful is his slumber, and, awakening, how sure is his knowledge of what the day demands. There, there is no philistinism. I feel as if I were gathering a multitude of scattered pages in a book."
The Origin of Tragedy proves to be the book the guiding ideas of which Nietzsche was now elaborating. Greek thought remains the centre round which his thought forms, and he meditates, in audacious fashion, on its history. A true historian, he thinks, should grasp its ensemble in a rapid view. "All the great advances in Philology," he writes in his notes, "are the issue of a creative gaze." The eyes of a Goethe discovered a Greece clear and serene. Being still under the domination of his genius, we continue to perceive the image which he has put before us. But we should seek and discover for ourselves. Goethe fixed his gaze on the centuries of Alexandrine culture. Nietzsche neglects these. He prefers the rude and primitive centuries, whither his instinct, since his eighteenth year, had led him when he elected to study the distiches of the aristocrat, Theognis of Megara. There he inhales an energy, a strength of thought, of action, of endurance, of infliction; a vital poetry, vital dreams which rejoice his soul.
Finally, in this very ancient Greece, he finds again, or thinks that he finds again, the spirit of Wagner, his master. Wagner wishes to renew tragedy, and, by using the theatre, as it were, as a spiritual instrument, to reanimate the diminished sense of poetry in the human soul. The "tragic" Greeks had a similar ambition;[Pg 82] they wished to raise their race and ennoble it again by the most striking evocation of myths. Their enterprise was a sublime one, but it failed, for the merchants of the Pir?us, the democracy of the towns, the vulgar herd of the market-place and of the port, did not care for a lyrical art which stipulated a too lofty manner of thought, too great a nobleness in deed. The noble families were vanquished and tragedy ceased to exist. Richard Wagner encounters similar enemies—they are the democrats, insipid thinkers, and base prophets of well-being and peace.
"Our world is being judaised, our prattling plebs, given over to politics, is hostile to the idealistic and profound art of Wagner," writes Nietzsche to Gersdorff. "His chivalrous nature is contrary to them. Is Wagner\'s art, as, in other times, ?schylus\'s art, to suffer defeat?" Friedrich Nietzsche is always occupied with a like combat.
He unfolds these very new views to his master. "We must renew the idea of Hellenism," he says to him; "we live on commonplaces which are false. We speak of the \'Greek joy,\' the \'Greek serenity\'; this joy, this serenity, are tardy fruits and of poor savour, the graces of centuries of servitudes. The Socratic subtlety, the Platonic sweetness, already bear the mark of the decline. We must study the older centuries, the seventh, the sixth. Then we touch the na?ve force, the original sap. Between the poems of Homer, which are the romance of her infancy, and the dramas of ?schylus, which are the act of her manhood, Greece, not without long effort, enters into the possession of her instincts and disciplines. It is the knowledge of these times which we should seek, because they resemble our own. Then the Greeks believed, as do the Europeans of to-day, in the fatality of natural forces; and they believed also that man must create for himself his virtues and his gods.[Pg 83] They were animated by a tragic sentiment, a brave pessimism, which did not turn them away from life. Between them and us there is a complete parallel and correspondence; pessimism and courage, and the will to establish a new beauty...."
Richard Wagner interested himself in the ideas of the young man, and associated him more and more intimately in his life. One day, Friedrich Nietzsche being present, he received from Germany the news that the Rhinegold and the Valkyries, badly executed far from his advice and direction, had had a double failure. He was sad and did not hide his disappointment; he was afflicted by this depreciation of the immense work which he had destined for a non-existent theatre and public, and which now crumbled before his eyes. His noble suffering moved Nietzsche.
Nietzsche took part in his master\'s work. Wagner was then composing the music of the Twilight of the Gods. Page after page the work grew, without haste or delay, as though from the regular overflowing of an invisible source. But no effort absorbed Wagner\'s thought, and, during these same days, he wrote an account of his life. Friedrich Nietzsche received the manuscript with directions to have it secretly printed, and to supervise the publication of an edition limited to twelve copies. He was asked to oblige with more intimate services. At Christmas, Wagner was preparing a Punch and Judy show for his children. He wanted to have pretty figurines, devils and angels. Madame Wagner begged Nietzsche to purchase them in Basle. "I forget that you are a professor, a doctor, and a philologist," she said graciously, "and remember only your five-and-twenty years." He examined the figurines of Basle, and, not finding them to his liking, wrote to Paris for the most frightful devils, the most beatific angels imaginable. Friedrich Nietzsche, admitted to the solemnity of the[Pg 84] Punch and Judy show, spent the Christmas festival with Wagner, his wife and family, in the most charming of intimacies. Cosima Wagner made him a present; she gave him a French edition of Montaigne, with whom, it seems, he was not acquainted, and of whom he soon became so fond. She was imprudent that day. Montaigne is perilous reading for a disciple.
"This winter I have to give two lectures on the ?sthetic of the Greek tragedies," wrote Nietzsche, about September, to his friend the Baron von Gersdorff; "and Wagner will come from Triebschen to hear them." Wagner did not go, but Nietzsche was listened to by a very large public.
He described an unknown Greece, vexed by the mysteries and intoxications of the god Dionysius, and through its trouble, through this very intoxication, initiated into poetry, into song, into tragic contemplation. It seems that he wished to define this eternal romanticism, always alike to him, whether in Greece of the sixth century B.C. or in Europe of the thirteenth century; the same, surely, which inspired Richard Wagner in his retreat at Triebschen. Nietzsche, however, abstained from mentioning this latter name.
"The Athenian coming to assist at the tragedy of the great Dionysos bore in his heart some spark of that elementary force from which tragedy was born. This is the irresistible outburst of springtime, that fury and delirium of mingled emotions which sweeps in springtime across the souls of all simple peoples and across the whole life of nature. It is an accepted thing that festivals of Easter and Carnival, travestied by the Church, were in their origin spring festivals. Every such fact can be traced to a most deep-rooted instinct: the old[Pg 85] soil of Greece bore on its bosom enthusiastic multitudes, full of Dionysos; in the Middle Ages in the same way the dances of the Feast of Saint John and of Saint Vitus drew out great crowds who went singing, leaping and dancing from town to town, gathering recruits in each. It is, of course, open to the doctors to regard these phenomena as diseases of the crowd: we content ourselves with saying that the drama of antiquity was the flower of such a disease, and if that of our modern art does not fountain forth from that mysterious source, that is its misfortune."
In his second lecture Nietzsche studied the end of tragic art. It is a singular phenomenon; all the other arts of Greece slowly and gloriously declined. Tragedy had no decline. After Sophocles it disappeared, as though a catastrophe had destroyed it. Nietzsche recounts the catastrophe, and names the destroyer, Socrates.
He dared to denounce the most revered of men. It was he, the poor Athenian, a man of the people, an ugly scoffer, who suppressed the ancient poetry. Socrates was neither an artist nor a philosopher; he did not write, he did not teach, he scarcely spoke; seated in the public place, he stopped the passers-by, astonished them by his pleasant logic, convinced them of their ignorance and absurdity, laughed, and obliged them to laugh at themselves. His irony dishonoured the na?ve beliefs which gave strength to the ancestors of the race, the myths which upheld their virtues. He despised tragedy, and made open declaration of his contempt for it; that was enough. Euripides was troubled, and suppressed his inspiration, while the young Plato, who perhaps would have surpassed Sophocles himself, listened to the new master, burnt his verses, and renounced art. He disconcerted the old instinctive lyrical humanity of Greece; and, by the voice of Plato, whom he had seduced, he[Pg 86] imposed the illusion, unknown to the ancients, of Nature as accessible to the reason of man, altogether penetrated by it, and always harmonious. Friedrich Nietzsche was to insert these pages in his book upon The Birth of Tragedy.
This charge pronounced against Socrates surprised his audience in Basle. Wagner knew it, and in September, 1870, wrote to Nietzsche an enthusiastic but extremely shrewd letter.
"As for me, I cry out to you: That\'s it! you have got hold of the truth, you touch the exact point with keen accuracy. I await with admiration the series of work in which you will combat the errors of popular dogmatism. But none the less you make me anxious, and I hope with all my heart that you are not going to come a cropper. I would also like to advise you not to expound your audacious views, which must be so difficult to establish, in short brochures of limited range. You are, I feel, profoundly penetrated with your ideas: you must gather them together into a larger book of much wider scope. Then you will find and will give us the mot juste on the divine blunders of Socrates and Plato, those creators so wonderful as to exact adoration even from us who forswear them! Our words, my dear friend, swell into hymns when we consider the incomprehensible harmony of those essences, so strange to our world! And what pride and hope animate us when, returning on ourselves, we feel strongly and clearly that we can and should achieve a work, outside the reach even of those masters!"
None of the letters addressed by Nietzsche to Wagner have been published. Have they been lost? Were they destroyed? Or are they merely refused by Madame Cosima Wagner, who is perhaps not incapable of rancour?[Pg 87] The facts are unknown. However, we may be certain that Nietzsche begged Wagner to ally himself with him, to aid him in rendering clear those difficult views of his. Wagner replied:
"MY DEAR FRIEND,—How good it is to be able to exchange such letters! There is no one to-day with whom I can talk as seriously as with you—the Unique[1] excepted. God only knows what would happen to me but for that! But I should be able to give myself up to the pleasure of fighting with you against "Socratism" only on one condition, that of having an enormous deal of time at my disposal, free from the temptation of any better project—to speak quite plainly, I should have to abandon all creative work. Division of labour is a good thing in this connection. You can do much for me: you can take on your shoulders a full half of the task assigned to me by fate. And so doing, you will perhaps achieve the whole of your own destiny. I have never had much success in my essays in Philology: you have never had much success in your essays in music: and it is well that things should be so. As a musician you would have come to much the same end to which I should have come had I stuck obstinately to Philology. But Philology remains in my blood; it directs me in my work as a musician. As for you, remain a philologist, and keeping to Philology, allow yourself to be directed by music. I mean what I say in a very serious spirit. You have taught me within what base preconceptions a professional philologist is to-day expected to imprison himself—I have taught you in what an unspeakable den a genuine \'absolute\' musician must to-day waste himself. Show us what Philology ought to be, and help me to prepare the way for that great \'Renaissance\' in which Plato will embrace Homer, and in which Homer, penetrated by the ideas of[Pg 88] Plato, will be at last and for the first time the sublime Homer ..."
At this instant Nietzsche had conceived his work, and was making ready to write it at a spurt. "Science, art, and philosophy grow so intimately within me," he said in February to Rohde, "that I am about to give birth to a centaur."
Professional duties, however, interrupted this flight. In March he was appointed titular professor. The honour flattered him, the duties kept him occupied. At the same time he was given the care of a class of higher rhetoric; then he was asked to draw up in the noblest Latin an address of congratulation to Professor Baumbrach, of Fribourg, who had taught for fifty years in the University of that town. Nietzsche, who never shirked anything, applied himself to the preparation of his class and the composition of his discourse. In April, more work. Ritschl founded a review, the Acta societatis philologic? Lipsi?, and desired that his best pupil should contribute to it. Nietzsche did not haggle over the help asked of him. He promised his copy, and wrote to Rohde to ask for his collaboration also.
"Personally, I feel most strongly that I am under an obligation," he wrote. "And, notwithstanding that this work will put me out at the moment, I am quite committed to it. We must collaborate for the first number. You are aware that certain persons will read it with curiosity, with malevolence. Therefore, it must be good. I have promised my faithful help—answer me."
May and then June, 1870, came. Friedrich Nietzsche seems to have been occupied, above all else, with his work for the Acta. During the holidays at Pentecost,[Pg 89] Rohde, on his way back from Italy, stopped at Basle. Nietzsche was delighted, he wished Wagner to make his friend\'s acquaintance, and brought him to Triebschen. They spent a fine day together, on the brink of an abyss which none of them apparently perceived. Rohde, continuing on his road to Germany, left Basle. Nietzsche remained alone, the victim of a foolish accident. He had given himself a strain and was forced to be up.
Had he given any attention to the rumours of war which troubled Europe in 1870? It seems not. He was little curious of news, and scarcely read the newspapers. Not that he was indifferent to his country, but he conceived it, in the manner of Goethe, as a source of art and moral grandeur. One of his thoughts, one alone, is perhaps inspired by the public unrest. "No war," he writes; "the State would become too strong thereby." No doubt we have here, besides one of Nietzsche\'s own impressions, an echo of the conversations of Triebschen: Wagner recruited his most ardent admirers in Southern Germany, in the Rhineland, in Bavaria, where his protector Louis II. reigned; the Germans of the North appreciated him badly, the Berliners worst of all, and he had no wish for a warlike crisis which would certainly have the effect of adding to the weight of Prussian dictation. The State to which Nietzsche pointed in his short note was the Prussian State. He foresaw, and like his master dreaded, the imminent hegemony of Berlin, that despised town of bureaucrats and bankers, of journalists and Jews.
On July 14th, a convalescent, stretched out on his long chair, he wrote to his comrade, Erwin Rohde. He spoke to him of Richard Wagner and of Hans von Bülow, of art and of friendship. Suddenly he stops in the middle of a phrase, marking with a blank line the interruption of his thought.
[Pg 90]
"Here is a terrible thunderclap," he wrote. "The Franco-German war is declared; a demon alights upon all our culture, already worn threadbare. What are we about to experience?
"Friend, dear friend, we met once more in the twilight of peace. To-day what do all our aspirations signify? Perhaps we are at the beginning of the end! What a gloomy sight. Cloisters will become necessary. And we shall be the first friars."
He signed himself The Loyal Swiss. This unexpected signature may be explained in a literal manner. In order to be appointed a professor at Basle, Friedrich Nietzsche had had to renounce his nationality. But assuredly it indicated more than this. It announced his detachment of mind: he had decided on the r?le of the contemplator.
What a misunderstanding of himself! He was too young, too brave, too much enamoured of his race, to adopt the part of spectator only in the imminent drama. As "a loyal Swiss," and as such dispensed from military duties, he quietly took up his abode with his sister Lisbeth in a mountain inn, where he wrote out some pages on Greek lyricism. It was then that he formulated for the first time his definition of the Dionysian and Apollonian spirits. Nevertheless, the German armies were crossing the Rhine and gaining their first victories, and it was not without emotion that Nietzsche heard the news. The thought of lofty deeds in which he had no part, of perils from which he was preserved, troubled his meditations.
On July 20th, writing to Madame Ritschl, he expressed the thoughts which occupied his solitude. First he gave expression to a fear which, as it seemed, the memory of a Greece ruined by the conflict of Sparta and Athens inspired in him. "Unhappy, historical analogies teach us that the very traditions of culture may be[Pg 91] destroyed by the bitterness of such a war of nations." But he also expressed the emotion which had begun to seize him. "How I am ashamed of this inactivity in which I am kept, now that the instant has come when I might be applying what I learned in the artillery. Naturally I make myself ready for an energetic course of action, in case things should take a bad turn; do you know that the students of Kiel have enlisted together, with enthusiasm?" On the morning of August 7th he read in his paper the dispatches from W?rth: German victory: Enormous losses. He could no longer remain in his retreat. He returned to Basle, asked and obtained from the Swiss authorities permission to serve in the ambulance corps, and proceeded at once to Germany to enlist for the war which allured him.
He crossed conquered Alsace: he saw the charnel houses of Wissembourg and of W?rth: on August 29th he bivouacked not far from Strassburg, where conflagrations lit up the horizon; then he made his way, by Lunéville and Nancy, towards the country around Metz, now converted into an immense ambulance, where the wounded of Mars-la-Tour, Gravelotte and Saint-Privat, so numerous that it was difficult to nurse them, were dying of their wounds and of infectious illnesses. Some unfortunates were given into his charge: he did his duty with kindness and courage, but experienced a singular emotion, a sacred and almost enthusiastic horror. For the first time he considered without repulsion the labour of the masses. He watched those millions of beings, some struck down and marked by death, others marching the roads or standing under arms: he considered them without contempt, he esteemed their destiny. Under the menaces of war, these men have something momentous about them. They forget their vain thoughts; they march, they sing, they obey their chiefs; they die. Friedrich Nietzsche was recompensed for his pains; a fraternal[Pg 92] impulse uplifted his soul, he no longer felt his solitude, he loved the simple people who surrounded him. "All my military passions awake," he writes, "and I cannot satisfy them! I would have been at Rezonville, at Sedan, actively, passively perhaps. This Swiss neutrality always ties my hands."
His passage through France was rapid. He received orders to convey the wounded in his care to the hospital at Carlsruhe.
He set out and was shut up, for three days and three nights, with eleven men, lying in a market cart closed fast against the cold and the rain. Two of the wounded who accompanied him were attacked by diphtheria, all had dysentery. "To reach truth," says a German mystic, "the most rapid mount is Affliction." Friedrich Nietzsche recalled this maxim of which he was so fond. He tried his courage, verified his thoughts. He dressed the sores of his wounded, he listened to their complaints, their appeals, and did not interrupt his meditation. Till now he had known only his books; now he knew life. He relished this bitter ordeal, always discerning some far-off beauty. "I, also, I have my hopes," he was to write; "thanks to them I was able to look on at the war and to pursue my meditations without pause, in presence of the worst horrors.... I recall a solitary night during which I lay stretched out in a market van with the wounded men confided to me and never ceased to explore in thought the three abysses of tragedy which have for names: Wahn, Wille, Wehe—Illusion, Will, Affliction. Whence then did I draw the confident certitude that he should undergo in birth a similar ordeal, the hero to come of tragic knowledge and Greek gaiety?"
He arrived at Carlsruhe with his sick and wounded; he had contracted their illness and was attacked by dysentery and diphtheria. An unknown who had been his[Pg 93] ambulance companion nursed him devotedly. As soon as he was well again, Nietzsche went to his home at Naumburg, there to seek not repose, but an entire leisure from work and thought.
"Yes," he wrote to his friend Gersdorff, who was fighting in France—"Yes, that conception of things which is common to us has undergone the ordeal by fire. I have had the same experience as you. For me, as for you, these weeks will remain in my life as an epoch in which each one of my principles re-affirmed itself in me; I would have risked death with them.... Now I am at Naumburg again, but poorly restored to health so far. The atmosphere in which I have lived has been long over me like a dark cloud; I heard an incessant lamentation."
Once already, in July, 1865, during the campaign at Sadowa, he had known war, and undergone its allurement. A simple and great aspiration had laid hold of him; and for a moment he had felt himself in accord with his race. "I feel a patriotic emotion," he wrote; "it is a new experience for me." He grasped at this sudden exaltation and cultivated it.
Indeed, his is a changed soul. He is no longer the "loyal Swiss" of another time; he is a man among men, a German proud of his Germany. A war has transformed him; he glorifies war. War awakes the energy of men; it even troubles their spirits. It obliges them to seek in an ideal order, an order of beauty and duty, the ends of a life which is too cruel. The lyric poet, the sage, misunderstood in ages of peace, are heard with respect in ages of war. Then men have need of them, and are conscious of their need. The same necessity which ranges them behind their chiefs renders them attentive to genius. Humanity is made[Pg 94] truly one, and is drawn towards the heroic and the sublime, only under the pressure of war.
Friedrich Nietzsche, though still very weak and suffering, again took up the notes of his book that he might record in it his new ideas. In Greece, he argues, art was the visible form of a society, disciplined by struggle, from the workshop, where the captive slave laboured, up to the gymnasium and the agora, where the free man played with arms. Such was that winged figure, that goddess of Samothrace, that had for companion of her flight a bloody trireme.
The Greek genius emanated from war, it sang war, it had war for its comrade. "It is the people of the tragic mysteries," wrote Friedrich Nietzsche, "who strike the great blow of the Persian battles; in return, the people who have maintained these wars need the salutary beverage of tragedy." We follow in his notes the movement of a mind which wishes to grasp the very idea of the tragic, athwart a vaguely-known Greece. Again and again we find this word tragic brought in as if it were a fundamental strain which the young thinker trains himself to repeat, like a child trying to learn a new word:—"Tragic Greece conquers the Persians.... Tragic man is nature itself in its highest strength of creation and knowledge: he trifles with sorrow...." Three formulas satisfy his research for a moment. "The tragic work of Art—the tragic Man—the tragic State." Thus he determined the three essential parts of his book, which he would entitle as a whole: The Tragic Man.
Let us not misunderstand the real object of his meditations: this society, this discipline which he discerned in the past, were in reality the ideal forms of the Fatherland which he desired and for which he dared to hope. He saw on the one hand Latin Europe, weakened by utilitarianism and the softness of life, on the other[Pg 95] Germany, rich in poets, in soldiers, in myths, in victories. She was suzerain of those races which were in process of decay. How would she exercise this suzerainty? Might not one augur from her triumph a new era, warlike and tragic, chivalrous and lyric? One could conceive it; and therefore one should hope for it, and this was enough to dictate one\'s duty. How glorious this Germany would be, with Bismarck as its chief, Moltke as its soldier, Wagner as its poet—its philosopher, too, existed, and was called Friedrich Nietzsche. This belief, though he expressed it nowhere, he surely had: for he had not a doubt as to his genius.
He was elated, but did not let his dreams lead him astray: he imagined an ideal Fatherland, yet never lost from sight the Fatherland, human, too human, which actually existed.
During October and the first days of November, alone with his own people in that Naumburg whose provincial virtues he did not love, he bore hardly with the vulgarity of the little people, of the functionaries with whom he mixed. Naumburg was a small Prussian town; Friedrich Nietzsche did not care for this robust and vulgar Prussia. Metz had capitulated; the finest army of France was taken captive: a delirium of conceit swept all Germany off its feet. Friedrich Nietzsche resisted the general tendency. The sentiment of triumph was a repose which his exacting soul might not know. On the contrary, he was disgusted and alarmed.
"I fear," he wrote to his friend Gersdorff, "that we shall have to pay for our marvellous national victories at a price to which I, for my part, will never consent. In confidence—I am of opinion that modern Prussia is a Power highly dangerous to culture.... The enterprise is not easy, but we must be philosophers enough to keep our sang-froid in the midst of all this smoke, we must[Pg 96] keep watch so that no robber may come and steal any part of what, in my opinion, is commensurable with nothing beside, not even the most heroic of military actions, not even our national exaltation."
Then a document appeared which deeply moved Friedrich Nietzsche. It was the date of the centenary of Beethoven. The Germans, occupied with their war, had neglected to commemorate it. Richard Wagner\'s voice was raised, it alone was strong enough to recall to the conquerors the memory of another glory: "Germans, you are brave," he cried; "remain brave in peace.... In this marvellous year 1870 nothing is better suited to your pride in being brave than the memory of the great Beethoven.... Let us celebrate that great pioneer and path-hewer, let us celebrate him worthily, not less worthily than the victory of German courage: for he who gives joy to the world is raised higher among men than he who conquers the world."
Germans, you are brave; remain brave in peace—no saying could move Friedrich Nietzsche more deeply. He desired to be near the master again, and, though not yet restored to health, he left Naumburg.
He saw Richard Wagner again and was not entirely satisfied. This man, who had been so splendid in misfortune, seemed to have lost stature. There was a vulgar quality in his joy. Well had the German victory avenged him for those Parisian cat-calls and railleries which he had had to endure; now he "ate Frenchmen" with an enormous and peaceable relish. Nevertheless he declined certain offers; he was promised the highest office and honours if he accepted residence in Berlin. He refused, being unwilling to let himself be enthroned[Pg 97] as poet-laureate of a Prussian Empire; and his disciple was thankful for the refusal.
Friedrich Nietzsche found at Basle an even better confidant of his anxieties. The historian Jacob Burckhardt, a great scholar of arts and civilisations, was melancholy; all brutality was odious to him, and he detested war and its destruction. A citizen of the last city in Europe which maintained its independence and its old customs, proud of this independence and of these customs, Jacob Burckhardt disliked those nations of thirty or forty millions of souls which he saw establishing themselves. To the designs of Bismarck and of Cavour he preferred the counsel of Aristotle—"So arrange that the number of citizens does not exceed ten thousand; otherwise they would not be able to meet together on the public square."
He had studied Athens, Venice, Florence, and Sienna. He held in high esteem the ancient and Latin disciplines, in very moderate esteem the German disciplines: he dreaded German hegemony. Burckhardt and Nietzsche were colleagues. They often met in the intervals between two lectures. Then they would talk and, on fine days, stroll together along that terrace over which all European travellers lean, that is between the cathedral of red sandstone and the Rhine, here so young still but already so strong, as it passes with a long murmur of ruffled waters. The simply-built University is situated quite near, on the slope, between the river and the Museum.
The two colleagues were eternally examining their common thought. How should that tradition of culture and beauty be continued, that fragile and oft-broken tradition which two tiny States, Attica and Tuscany, have transmitted to our care? France had not deserved censure; she had known how to maintain the methods and a school of taste. But had Prussia the qualities[Pg 98] fitting her heritage? Friedrich Nietzsche repeated the expression of his hope. "Perhaps," said he, "this war will have transformed our old Germany; I see her more virile, endowed with a firmer and more delicate taste." Jacob Burckhardt listened. "No," said he, "you are always thinking of the Greeks, for whom war had no doubt an educative virtue. But modern wars are superficial; they do not reach, they do not correct the bourgeois, laissez-aller style of life. They are rare; their impressions are soon effaced; they are soon forgotten; they do not exercise people\'s thought." What did Nietzsche answer? A letter to Erwin Rohde enables us to divine the ill-assured accent of his observations. "I am very anxious," he writes, "as regards the immediate future. I seem to recognise there the Middle Ages in disguise.... Be careful to free yourself from this fatal Prussia, with its repugnance to culture! Flunkeys and priests sprout from its soil like mushrooms, and they are going to darken all Germany with their smoke!"
Jacob Burckhardt, long a recluse amid his memories and his books, had the habit of melancholy and made the best of it. By way of discreet protest against the enthusiasms of his contemporaries, he delivered a lecture upon Historical Greatness. "Do not take for true greatness," said he to the students of Basle, "such and such a military triumph, such and such an expansion of a State. How many nations have been powerful who are forgotten and merit their oblivion! Historical greatness is a rarer thing; it lies wholly in the works of those men whom we call great men, using that vague term because we cannot truly fathom their ............