Bayreuth has had a strange destiny. This little German town, so long obscure, scintillates in the eighteenth century, shines with a somewhat flickering brilliance, but becomes celebrated at last throughout all Europe. An intelligent Margravine—Frederick\'s sister, the friend of Voltaire and of French elegance—lives there, beautifies it, enlivens the barren country with castles, and lavishes on its fa?ades the singular volutes of the "rococo" style. The Margravine dies and Bayreuth is again forgotten. A century passes and suddenly its fame returns; the little town that the Margrave adorned becomes the Jerusalem of a new art and a new religion. A strange destiny, but a factitious one. It is a poet who has regulated the antitheses. The history of Bayreuth ought to be included among Wagner\'s works.

He wished to set up his theatre in a quiet and secluded town. It suited him, not to go to his audience, but rather to force his audience to come to him. He chose, from many others, this town; the two Germanys would be thus confronted, the one, that of the past, a slave to French customs, mean and shabby; the other, that of the future, his own, an emancipating and innovating Germany. The work was started without delay. The master decided that the foundation-stone of his theatre[Pg 128] should be laid with pomp on the 22nd of May, 1872, the anniversary of his birth.

"So we shall see one another again," wrote Nietzsche to his friend Rohde. "Our meetings are ever becoming more grandiose, more historical, are they not?"

They were present together at the ceremony, one of them coming from Basle, the other from Hamburg. Two thousand people were assembled in the little town. The weather was appalling. But the unceasing rain, the threatening sky, made the ceremony still more imposing. Wagnerian art is a serious thing and has no need of smiling heavens. The faithful disciples, standing in the open air at the mercy of the winds, saw the stone laid. In the hollow block Wagner deposited a piece of poetry written by himself, and then threw the first spadeful of plaster. In the evening he invited his friends to hear an execution of the "Symphony" with chorus, the orchestration of which he had in parts slightly strengthened. He personally conducted. Young Germany, assembled in the Margrave\'s theatre, listened piously to this work in which the nineteenth century declared its need, and when the final chorus struck up—"Millions of men embrace each other"—it really seemed, said a spectator, as if the sublime wish was about to be realised.

"Ah! my friend," wrote Nietzsche, "through what days we have lived! No one can rob us of these grave and sacred memories. We ought to go forth into life inspired to battle on their behalf. Above all, we ought to force ourselves to regulate all our acts, with as much gravity and force as is possible, so as to prove that we are worthy of the unique events at which we have assisted."

Nietzsche wanted to fight for Wagner, for he loved[Pg 129] Wagner and he loved battle. "To arms, to arms!" he writes to Rohde; "war is necessary to me, ich brauche den Krieg." But he had already proved many a time, what he now began sadly to understand, that his nature did not lend itself to reticence and to the prudence necessary in such a contest, in which public opinion was the stake. There was no instant but a word, an attitude ran foul of his radical idealism. He felt the instinctive constraint that he had already known at Triebschen. Wagner disturbed him. He hardly recognised the grave and pure hero whom he had loved so much. He saw another man, a powerful workman, brutal, vindictive, jealous. Nietzsche had thought of making a tour in Italy, with a relation of Mendelssohn\'s; he was obliged to give up this idea in order to humour the master, who detested the race, even to the very name of Mendelssohn.

"Why is Wagner so distrustful?" Nietzsche wrote in his diary; "it excites distrust."

Wagner was as dictatorial as he was distrustful. The days had become rare when he could converse at leisure with nobleness and freedom as he had done at Triebschen. He spoke briefly, he commanded.

Nietzsche was still ready to go on a mission to Northern Germany to speak, write, and found Vereine, and to "thrust under the noses of the German savants the things which their timid eyes failed to perceive." Wagner would not accept this proposal; he wished Nietzsche to publish his lectures on The Future of our Educational Systems. Nietzsche resisted a desire in which he thought he detected a certain egotism.

"Our Herr Nietzsche only wants to do what he likes," exclaimed the irritable Wagner.

His anger saddened and humiliated Nietzsche both on his own account and on his master\'s. He thought, "Ill, weighed down with work, have I no right to respect? Am I under any one\'s orders? Why is Wagner so tyrannical?"[Pg 130] We read in his diary, "Wagner has not the strength to make those around him free and great. Wagner is not loyal; he is, on the contrary, suspicious and haughty."

At the same time there appeared a pamphlet, The Philology of the Future, a reply to F. Nietzsche. The author was Willamowitz, who had been Nietzsche\'s comrade at the school of Pforta.

"DEAR FRIEND," he wrote to Gersdorff, who informed him of the pamphlet, "Don\'t worry over me. I am ready. I will never entangle myself in polemics. It is a pity it should be Willamowitz. Do you know that he came last autumn to pay me a friendly visit? Why should it be Willamowitz?"

Wagner, at whom the title itself of the pamphlet, The Philology of the Future, was aimed—it parodied his famous formula, The Music of the Future—wrote a reply, and profited by the occasion to renew his invitation to Friedrich Nietzsche.

"What must one think of our schools of culture?" he concludes. "It is for you to tell us what German culture ought to be, so as to direct the regenerated nation towards the most noble objects." Once again Nietzsche was firm in his determination. He was by no means satisfied with these lectures, being discontented with their form and uncertain even of their thought. "I do not wish to publish anything as to which my conscience is not as pure as that of the seraphim." He tried to express his Wagnerian faith in another style.

"I should have so much pleasure," he wrote to Rohde, "in writing something for the service of our cause, but I don\'t know what. All that I advance is so wounding, such an irritant, and more likely to hurt than to serve.[Pg 131] Why should my poor book, na?ve and enthusiastic as it was, have been received so badly? Singular! Now, what shall we do, we others?"

He began to write Reden eines Hoffenden (Words of a Man of Hope), which he soon gave up.

Friedrich Nietzsche re-opened his Greek books, so invariably beautiful and satisfying. He explained—before very few pupils, because the evil fame of the Gebürt withdrew young philologists from him—the Choephores of ?schylus and some passages of ante-Platonic philosophy.

Across a gulf of twenty-five centuries that clear radiance descended upon him, scattering all doubts and shadows. Nietzsche often heard with misgiving the fine words which it pleased his Wagnerian friends to use. "Millions of men embrace each other," the chorus sang at Bayreuth in the work of Wagner. It sang well, but, after all, men did not embrace each other; and here Nietzsche suspected a certain extravagance, a certain falsehood. Look at the ancient Greeks, those ambitious and evil men. They do not embrace each other much, their hymns never speak of embraces. They desire to excel, and are devoured by envy; their hymns glorify these passions. Nietzsche liked their na?ve energy, their precise speech. He refreshed himself at this source and wrote a short essay: Homer\'s Wettkampf (The Homeric Joust). We find ourselves driven at the very beginning far away from the Wagnerian mysticism.

"When you speak of Humanity," he writes, "you imagine an order of sentiment by which man distinguishes himself from nature, but such a separation does not exist; these qualities called \'natural\' and those called \'human\' grow together and are blended. Man in his noblest aspirations is still branded by sinister nature.

[Pg 132]

"These formidable tendencies which seem inhuman are perhaps the fruitful soil which supports all humanity, its agitations, its acts, and its work.

"Thus it is that the Greeks, the most human of all men, remain cruel, happy in destruction."

This rapid sketch was the occupation of a few days. Nietzsche undertook a long work. He studied the texts of Thales, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Empedocles. He tried to approach those philosophers who were truly worthy of the name which they themselves had invented, those masters of life, scornful of argument and of books; citizens and at the same time thinkers, and not déracinés like those who followed them—Socrates and his school of mockers, Plato and his school of dreamers, philosophers of whom each one dares to bring a philosophy of his own, that is to say, an individual point of view in the consideration of things, in the deliberation of acts. Nietzsche, in a few days, filled a copybook with notes.

All the same, he continued to be interested in the successes of his glorious friend. In July Tristan was played at Munich. He went, and met many other disciples; Gersdorff, Fr?ulein von Meysenbug, whom he had met at the May festivals of Bayreuth. She had preserved, despite her fifty years, that tender charm that never left her, and the physical grace of a frail and nervous body. Friedrich Nietzsche passed some pleasant days in the company of his comrade and his new friend. All three regretted them when they were gone, and at the moment of departure expressed a hope of meeting each other soon again. Gersdorff wished to return in August to hear Tristan, and once more Nietzsche promised to be there, but at the last moment Gersdorff was unable to be present, and Nietzsche had not the courage to return alone to Munich. "It is insupportable," he wrote to Fr?ulein von Meysenbug, "to find yourself face to face with an art so serious and profound. In short, I[Pg 133] remain at Basle." Parmenides, on whom he was meditating, consoled him for the loss of Tristan.

Fr?ulein von Meysenbug kept Nietzsche advised of all news, whether trivial or important, in connection with the Wagnerian campaign. The master had just terminated The Twilight of the Gods, the last of the four dramas of the Tetralogy. He had at last finished his great work. Fr?ulein von Meysenbug was informed in a note written to her by Cosima Wagner. "In my heart I hear sung \'Praise be to God,\'" wrote the wife. "Praise be to God," repeated Fr?ulein von Meysenbug, and she adds—these few words indicate the tone of the place and of the time: "The disciples of the new spirit need new mysteries by which they may solemnise together their instinctive knowledge. Wagner creates them in his tragic works, and the world will not have recovered its beauty until we have built for the new Dionysian myth a Temple worthy of it." Fr?ulein von Meysenbug confided to Nietzsche the measures she was taking to win Marguerite of Savoy, the Queen of Italy, to the cause, and to make her accept the Presidency of a small circle of noble patronesses. A few women of the highest aristocracy, friends of Liszt\'s, initiated by him into the Wagnerian cult, composed this sublime Verein.

In all this there was an irritating atmosphere of snobbery and excessive religiosity. Yet Fr?ulein von Meysenbug was an exquisite woman with irreproachable intentions, pure with that purity which purifies all that it touches: Nietzsche did not practise his criticism on this friend\'s letters. He soon felt the fatigue of continuous work. He lost his sleep and was obliged to rest. Travel had often lightened his mind. He set out, at the end of summer, for Italy, and went as far as Bergamo but no further. This country, which he was afterwards to love so much, displeased him. "Here reigns the Apollonian cult," Fr?ulein von Meysenbug, who was[Pg 134] staying at Florence, told him; "it is good to bathe in." Nietzsche was very little of an Apollonian. He perceived only voluptuousness, excessive sweetness, harmony of line. His German tastes were disconcerted and he returned to the mountains, where he became, as he wrote, "more audacious and more noble." There, in a poor village inn at Splügen, he had a few days of happiness.

"Here, on the extreme border of Switzerland and Italy," he wrote in August, 1872, to Gersdorff, "I am alone, and I am very well satisfied with my choice. A rich and marvellous solitude, with the most magnificent roads in the world, along which I go meditating for hours, buried in my thoughts, and yet I never fall over a precipice. And whenever I look around me there is something new and great to see. No sign of life except when the diligence arrives and stops for relays. I take my meals with the men, our one contact. They pass like the Platonic shadows before my cave."

Until now Nietzsche had not cared much for high mountains; he preferred the moderate valleys and woods of the Jura, which reminded him of his native country, the hills of the Saale and Bohemia. At Splügen a new joy was revealed to him; the joy of solitude and of meditation in the mountain air. It was like a flash of lightning. He went down to the plains and forgot; but six years later, with the knowledge of his eternal loneliness on him, he found, sheltered in mean inns like this one, once again the same lyrical élan that he had discovered in October, 1872.

He soon left his sanctuary and returned without vexation to Basle, whither his professional duties drew him. There he had made friendships and established a way of life. He liked the town, and tolerated the inhabitants. Basle had truly become his centre. "Overbeck and[Pg 135] Romundt, my companions of table and of thought," he writes to Rohde, "are the best society in the world. With them I cease my lamentations and my gnashing of teeth. Overbeck is the most serious, the most broad-minded of philosophers, and the most simple and amiable of men. He has that radical temper, failing which I can agree with no one."

His first impression on his return was trying. All his pupils left him. He was not at a loss to understand the reason of this exodus; the German philologists had declared him to be "a man scientifically dead." They had condemned him personally, and put an interdict upon his lectures. "The Holy Vehmgericht has done its duty well," he wrote to Rohde. "Let us act as if nothing had happened. But I do not like the little University to suffer on my account, it hurts me. We lose twenty entries in the last half-year. I can hardly as much as give a course on Greek and Latin rhetoric. I have two pupils, one is a Germanist, the other a Jurist."

At last he received some comfort. Rohde had written in defence of his book an article which no review would accept. Weary of refusal, he touched up his work and published it under the form of a letter addressed to Richard Wagner. Nietzsche thanked him. "Nobody dared to print my name," he wrote to Rohde.

"... It was as if I had committed a crime, and now your book comes, so ardent, so daring a witness to our fraternal combat! My friends are delighted with it. They are never tired of praising you, for the details and the whole; they think your polemics worthy of a Lessing. ... What pleases me most is the deep and threatening clamour of it, like the sound of a waterfall. We must be brave, dear, dear friend. I always have faith in progress, in our progress. I believe that we will always go on increasing in loyal ambitions, and in strength. I believe[Pg 136] in the success of our advance towards ends more noble yet, and more aspiring. Yes, we will reach them, and then as conquerors, who discover goals yet further off, we shall push on, always brave! What does it matter to us that they will be few, so few, those spectators whose eyes can follow the path we are pursuing? What does it matter if we have for spectators only those who have the necessary qualities for judging this combat? All the crowns which my time might give me I sacrifice to that unique spectator, Wagner. The ambition to satisfy him animates me more, and more nobly, than any other influence. Because he is difficult and he says everything, what pleases him and what displeases him; he is my good conscience, to praise and to punish."

At the commencement of December, Nietzsche was lucky enough to find his master again for a few hours, and to live with him in the intimate way that reminded him of the days at Triebschen. Wagner, passing through Strassburg, called to him; and he went at once. The meeting was untroubled by any discord, a harmony now, no doubt, rare enough; for Cosima Wagner, after having remarked this in one of her letters, expressed the hope that such perfect hours would suffice to dissipate all misunderstandings and to prevent their recrudescence.

Nietzsche worked a great deal during these last months of 1872. His studies on the tragic philosophies of the Greeks were well advanced; he left them over. Those wise men had restored his serenity, and he profited by the help which they had given him to contemplate once more the problems of his century. The problems—this is hardly a correct expression, for he knew of only one. He questioned himself how a culture should be founded, that is to say, a harmony of traditions, of rules, of beliefs, by submission to which a man may become nobler.[Pg 137] Actual modern societies have for their end the production of certain comforts; how should different societies be substituted which would not only satisfy men, but benefit them? Let us know our wretchedness; we are stripped of culture. Our thoughts and our acts are not ruled by the authority of any style; the idea even of such an authority is lost to us. We have perfected in an extraordinary manner the discipline of knowledge, and we seem to have forgotten that others exist. We succeed in describing the phenomena of life, in translating the Universe into an abstract language, and we scarcely perceive that, in writing and translating thus, we lose the reality of the Universe of Life. Science exercises on us a "barbarising action," wrote Nietzsche. He analysed this action.

"The essential point of all science has become merely accessory, or else it is entirely absent.

"The study of languages—without the discipline of style and rhetoric.

"Indian studies—without philosophy.

"Classical antiquity—without a suspicion of how closely everything in it is bound up with practical efforts.

"The sciences of nature—without that beneficent and serene atmosphere which Goethe found in them.

"History—without enthusiasm.

"In short, all the sciences without their practical uses, that is to say, studied otherwise than as really cultivated men would study them. Science as a means of livelihood."

It is necessary, therefore, that the sense of beauty, of virtue, and of strong and regulated passions should be restored. How can a philosopher employ himself in this task? Alas! the experience of antiquity teaches and discourages us. The philosopher is a hybrid being, half logician, half artist, a poet, an apostle, who constructs[Pg 138] his dreams and his commandments in a logical manner. Men listen willingly enough to poets and apostles, they do not listen to philosophers, they are not moved by their analyses and their deductions. Consider that long line of genius, the philosophers of tragic Greece. What did they realise? Their lives were given in vain to their race. Empedocles alone moved the mob, but he was as much a magician as philosopher; he invented myths and poems; he was eloquent, he was magnificent; it was the legend, and not the thought of Empedocles, that was effective. Pythagoras founded a sect, a philosopher cannot hope for more: his labour grouped together a few friends, a few disciples, who passed over the human masses like a ripple on the ocean; not one of the great philosophers has swayed the people, writes Nietzsche. Where they have failed, who will succeed? It is impossible to found a popular culture on philosophy.

What is then the destiny of these singular souls? Is their force, which is at times immense, lost? Will the philosopher always be a paradoxical being, and useless to men? Friedrich Nietzsche was troubled; it was the utility of his own life that he questioned. He would never be a musician, that he knew at last; never a poet, he had ceased to hope for it. He had not the faculty of conceiving the uniformities, of animating a drama, of creating a soul. One evening he confessed this to Overbeck with such sadness that his friend was moved. He was therefore a philosopher, moreover, a very ignorant one, an amateur of philosophy, an imperfect lyrical artist; and he questioned himself: Since I have for weapons only my thoughts, the thoughts of a philosopher, what can I do? He answered: I can help. Socrates did not create the truths that error kept prisoners in the souls of his interlocutors, he only aspired to the title of accoucheur. Such is the task of a philosopher. He is an inefficient creator, but a very efficient critic. He is obliged to[Pg 139] analyse the forces which are operative around him, in science, in religion, and in art; he is obliged to give the directions, to fix the values and the limits. Such shall be my task. I will study the souls of my contemporaries, and I shall have every authority to say to them: Neither science nor religion can save you; seek refuge in art, the power of modern times, and in the artist who is Richard Wagner. "The philosopher of the future," he wrote, "he must be the supreme judge of an ?sthetic culture, a censor of every digression."

Nietzsche went to Naumburg for the Christmas holidays. Wagner sent him word to ask him to stop at Bayreuth on his way home to Basle, but he was hard pressed by work and perhaps a little ill, and no doubt a secret instinct warned him that solitude would be best for the meditation of the problems which he had to determine for himself. He made his apologies. Besides, he had had for some weeks many opportunities of proving his attachment. He had written an article (the only one in all his work) in answer to an alienist who had undertaken to prove that Wagner was mad. He had offered a sum of money to help in the propaganda. This anonymous and distant manner was the only one that suited him at the time. Even at Basle he tried to found a Wagnerian Verein. He was therefore astounded when he discovered that the master was displeased at his absence. Already in the past year an invitation, also declined, had helped to provoke a mild lecture.

"It is Burckhardt who is keeping you at Basle," wrote Cosima Wagner. Nietzsche wrote and remedied things, but the painful impression remained.

"Everything is quieted," he told the friend who had informed him; "but I cannot quite forget. Wagner knows that I am ill, absorbed in work, and in need of a little liberty. I shall be, henceforth, whether I wish[Pg 140] it or no, more anxious than in the past. God knows how many times I have wounded him. Each time I am astonished, and I never succeed in precisely locating the point in which we have clashed."

This annoyance did not affect his thought; we can follow it to its smallest shades of meaning, thanks to the notes published in the tenth volume of his complete works. It is quite active and fecund. "I am the adventurer of the spirit," he was to write. "I wander in my thought. I go to the idea that calls me...."

He was never to wander so audaciously as in the first weeks of 1876.

He completed a finer and sober essay, Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge im ausser moralischen Sinne (On Truth and Falsehood in an Extra-Moral Sense.) (It is a pity that it is necessary to translate these high-sounding expressions, and we render them word for word.) Nietzsche always liked high-sounding words; he does not recoil here from using the word "untruth," and essays for the first time a "reversal of values." To the true he opposes the false and prefers it. He exalts the imaginary worlds which poets add to the real world. "Dare to deceive thyself and dream," Schiller had said; Friedrich Nietzsche repeats this advice. It was the happy audacity of the Greeks; they intoxicated themselves with their divine histories, their heroic myths, and this intoxication set their souls on high adventures. The loyal Athenian, persuaded that Pallas dwelt in his city, lived in a dream. More clear-sighted, would he have been stronger; more passionate, braver? Truth is good in proportion to the services which it assures, and illusion is preferable if it performs its duty better. Why deify the truth? It is the tendency of the moderns; Pereat vita, fiat veritas! they say readily. Why this[Pg 141] fanaticism? It is an inversion of the sane law for men: Pereat Veritas, fiat vita!

Nietzsche wrote down these dogmatic formulas, but did not stop at them. He went on writing. It was thus that he worked and advanced in his researches. Let us not forget that these thoughts, firm though they were in manner, were only indications, steps on the road. He would give birth to other and perhaps contrary thoughts. Friedrich Nietzsche had in him two instincts, opposed to each other; the one, that of the philosopher, and the other, that of the artist; the one was bent on truth, the other was ready to fabricate. He hesitated at the moment when he had to sacrifice one or the other. The instinct for the true protested within him. He did not abandon his formulas; he took them up again, he essayed new definitions, he indicated the difficulties, the hiatus. His thoughts had no disguise, and we can follow his researches. Let us translate this significant disorder:

"The philosopher of the tragic knowledge. He binds the disordered instinct of knowledge, but not by a new metaphysic. He does not establish new beliefs. He sees with a tragic emotion that the ground of metaphysics opens under him, and he knows that the many-coloured whirlwind of science can never satisfy him. He builds for himself a new life; to art he restores its rights.

"The philosopher of the desperate knowledge abandons himself to blind science: knowledge at any price.

"Even if metaphysics be only an anthropomorphic appearance, for the tragic philosopher that achieves the image of being. He is not sceptical. Here there is an idea to create; for scepticism is not the end. The instinct of knowledge forced to its extreme limits turns against itself to transform itself into a criticism of the faculty of knowledge. Knowledge in the service of the best[Pg 142] kind of life. One should even will illusion, therein lies the tragic."

What is then this philosopher of the desperate knowledge whose attitude Nietzsche defines in two lines. Must he not love him, having found for him already such a beautiful name? There is an idea to create, writes Nietzsche; what then is this idea? It seems that in many passages Nietzsche is pleased to contemplate, without its veils, that terrible reality, whose aspect alone, says the Hindu legend, means death.

"How," he writes, "do they dare talk of a destiny for the earth? In infinite time and space there are no ends: what is there, is eternally there, whatever the forms. What can result from it for a metaphysical world one does not see.

"Without support of this order humanity should stand firm; a terrible task for the artist!

"The terrible consequences of Darwinism, in which, moreover, I believe. We respect certain qualities which we hold as eternal, moral, artistic, religious, &c., &c., &c. The spirit, a production of the brain, to consider it as supernatural! To deify it, what folly!

"To speak of an unconscious end of humanity, to me, that is false. Humanity is not a whole like an ant-hill. Perhaps one may speak of the unconscious ends of an ant-hill—but of all the ant-hills of the world!

"Our duty is not to take shelter in metaphysics, but actively to sacrifice ourselves to the birth of culture. Hence my severity against misty idealism."

At that instant Nietzsche had almost reached the term of his thought, but with great labour and consequent suffering. Headaches, pains in the eyes and stomach, laid hold of him once more. The softest light hurt him,[Pg 143] he was obliged to give up reading. Nevertheless, his thought never halted. He was again occupied with the philosophers of tragic Greece; he listened to the words which come down to us diminished by the centuries, but always firm. He heard the concert of the everlasting responses—

Thales. Everything derives from a unique element. Anaximander. The flux of things is their punishment. Heraclitus. A law governs the flux and the institution of things.

Parmenides. The flux and the institution of things is illusion. The One alone exists.

Anaxagoras. All qualities are eternal; there is no becoming.

The Pythagoreans. All qualities are quantities. Empedocles. All causes are magical. Democritus. All causes are mechanical. Socrates. Nothing is constant except thought.

Friedrich Nietzsche is moved by these opposing voices, by these rhythms of thought which accuse nature in their eternal collisions. "The vicissitudes of the ideas and systems of man affect me more tragically than the vicissitudes of real life," said H?lderlin. Nietzsche\'s feeling was the same. He admired and envied those primitives who discovered nature and who found the first answers. He threw aside the devices of art, he confronted life as ?dipus confronted the Sphinx, and under this very title ?dipus he wrote a fragment to the mysterious language of which we may open our ears.

?dipus. I call myself the last philosopher because I am the last man. I speak alone and I hear my voice sounding like that of a dying man. With thee, dear voice, whose breath brings to me the last memories of[Pg 144] all human happiness, with thee let me speak yet a moment more: thou wilt deceive my solitude; thou wilt give me back the illusion of society and love, because my heart will not believe that love is dead. It cannot endure the terror of the most solitary solitude, and forces me to speak as if I were two. Is it thou that I hear, my voice? Thou murmurest, and thou cursest? Yet—thy malediction should rend the entrails of the world! Alas, in spite of everything it subsists, more dazzling and colder than ever; it looks at me with its stars pitilessly; it exists blind and deaf as before, and nothing dies but man. And yet, you still speak to me, beloved voice! I die not alone in this universe. I, the last man: the last plaint, your plaint, dies with me. Misery, misery! pity me, the last man of misery, ?dipus!

It seems that Nietzsche, now at the extreme limits of his thought, experiences a sudden need of rest. He wants to speak to his friends, to feel himself surrounded by them and diverted. The Easter holidays in 1873 gave him a fortnight\'s release. He left for Bayreuth, where he was not expected.

"I leave this evening," he writes to Fr?ulein von Meysenbug. "Guess where I am going? You\'ve guessed, and, height of bliss, I shall meet the best of men, Rohde, to-morrow at half-past four. I shall be staying with Wagner, and then see me quite happy! We shall speak much of you, much of Gersdorff. He has copied my lectures, you say? It touches me, and I will not forget it. What good friends I have! It is really shameful.

"I hope to bring back from Bayreuth courage and gaiety, and to strengthen myself in everything that is good. I dreamt last night that I was having my Gradus ad Parnassum carefully rebound. This mixture of bookbinding[Pg 145] and symbolism is comprehensible; moreover, very insipid. But it is a truth! It is necessary from time to time to rebind ourselves by frequenting men more valorous and stronger than ourselves or else we lose a few of our pages, then a few more, still a few more, until the last page is destroyed. And that our life should be a Gradus ad Parnassum, that also is a truth that we must often repeat to ourselves. The future to which I shall attain if I take plenty of trouble, if I have a little happiness and much time, is to become a more sober writer, and from the first and ever better to pursue my calling as a man of letters more soberly. From time to time I feel a childish repugnance to printed paper, I think that I see soiled paper. And I can very well picture a period when reading was not much liked, writing even less so; but one far preferred to think a lot, and to act still more. For everything to-day awaits that efficacious man, who, condemning in himself and us our millenarian routines, will live better and will give us his life to imitate."

Friedrich Nietzsche left for Bayreuth.

He there learnt a piece of unexpected news. Money was lacking. Of the twelve hundred thousand francs needed, eight hundred thousand only had been realised with great difficulty. The enterprise was compromised and perhaps ruined. Everyone was losing heart. The master alone was confident and calm. Since he had attained his manhood, he had desired to possess a theatre. He knew that a constant will prevails over chance, and a few months of crisis did not alarm him after forty years of waiting. Capitalists from Berlin, Munich, Vienna, London, and Chicago were making proposals to him which Richard Wagner invariably refused to entertain. He wished his theatre to belong to himself alone, and to[Pg 146] be near him: "It is not a question of the success of the affair," he said, "but of awakening the hidden forces of the German soul." But his remarkable serenity failed to reassure his friends. A panic was engendered at Bayreuth, and no one again dared to hope.

Friedrich Nietzsche looked on, listened, observed, and then fled to Naumburg. "My despair was deep," he has written; "there was nothing that did not seem criminal to me." He was rediscovering the world after ten months of solitude, and finding it even more cowardly and more miserable than he had ever judged it to be. There was worse to endure, for he was discontented with himself. He recalled his last meditations. "I call myself the last philosopher, because I am the last man." And he questioned himself: Was he really "the last philosopher "? "the last man "? Had he not flattered himself in assigning himself a r?le so difficult and magnificent? Had he not been ungrateful, cowardly, and vile, like the others, in abandoning the struggle at the decisive moment to shut himself up in his solitude and his selfish dreams? Had he not forgotten his master? He accused himself; remorse accentuated his despair. "I should not think of myself," was his reproach—" Wagner alone is a hero—Wagner, so great in misfortune, great as of old at Triebschen. It is he whom we must serve. I must henceforth be vowed to help him."

It had been his intention to publish a few chapters of his book on The Philosophers of Tragic Greece. He abstained from this delight; put away in a drawer—not without a pang—his almost finished manuscript. He wished to "spit out lava," to insult Germany and treat her like a brute, since, imbecile brute that she was, she would only yield to brutality.

"I return from Bayreuth in such a state of persistent melancholy," he wrote to Rohde, "that the only hope for me is holy wrath."

[Pg 147]

Friedrich Nietzsche looked for no joy in the work which he was about to undertake. To attack is to recognise, to condescend, to lower oneself. He would have preferred to have had no traffic with base humanity. But here was Richard Wagner; was it to be borne that he should be tormented and trammelled? that the Germans should sadden him as they saddened Goethe, and break him, as they broke Schiller? To-morrow other men of genius would be born: was it not necessary to fight from to-day to assure them their liberty and the freedom of their lives? It is impossible to ignore the masses that beset us. It is a bitter destiny, but one that may not be eluded. It is the destiny of the best-born, and above all of the best Germans, heroes begotten and misunderstood by a race insensible to beauty.

Friedrich Nietzsche remembered what Goethe had said of Lessing: "Pity this extraordinary man, pity him that he lived in such a pitiable era, that he was forced to act ceaselessly by polemics." He applied this to himself, but polemics seemed to be a duty to him, as in other times they had been to Lessing. He looked round for an adversary. The illustrious D. F. Strauss now represented official philosophy; he was its heavy pontiff. Having renounced the critical researches, in which he was a real master, he was affecting, in his old age, the attitude of a thinker, and was elaborating his Credo with sham elegances borrowed from Voltaire and About.

"I simply propose," he wrote in The Old Faith and the New, "to say how we live—how for long years past we have been wont to direct our lives. By the side of our professions—for we belong to the most diverse professions; we are not all artists or scholars, but also officials, soldiers, artisans, or proprietors, and, I have already said and I repeat it, our number is not small, we are many thousand, and not of the worst, in every[Pg 148] country—by the side of our professions, I say, we try, as far as possible, to keep our minds open to the highest interests of humanity; our hearts are exalted by these new destinies, as unforeseen as they are magnificent, assigned by Fate to our country which formerly endured so much. The better to understand these things, we study history, to which easy access is opened to the first comer by a number of both popular and attractive works. And then we try to extend our knowledge of nature by the aid of manuals which are within reach of everybody. Finally we find in reading our great poets, in hearing our great musicians, stimulants for spirit and feeling, for the imagination and the heart, stimulants which in truth leave nothing to be desired. Thus we live, thus we march forward in happiness."

So the Philistines are happy and very rightly, thought Nietzsche: this is the era of their power. Assuredly the species is not new. Even Attica had its abettors of "banausia." But the Philistine formerly lived under humiliating conditions. He was merely tolerated. He was not talked of, nor did he talk. Then a more indulgent period arrived, in which he was listened to, his follies flattered; he appeared droll. This was enough: he became a fop, proud of his prudhommerie. To-day he triumphs; it is impossible to hold him back. He becomes a fanatic, and founds a religion: it is the new faith, of which Strauss is the prophet. Friedrich Nietzsche would have assuredly approved of that classification of the ages which Gustave Flaubert suggested about this time: "Paganisme, christianisme, muflisme" (Paganism, Christianity, Snout-ism). The Philistine dictates his tastes, and imposes his mannerisms. A war breaks out: he reads his paper, the telegrams interest him, and contribute to his happiness. Great men have suffered, and have left us their works: the Philistine[Pg 149] knows these works, and appreciates them—they add to his well-being. Moreover, he appreciates with discernment. The Pastoral Symphony ravishes him, but he condemns the exaggerated uproar of the Symphony with chorus. David Friedrich Strauss says it distinctly: and that clear mind of his is not to be deceived.

Friedrich Nietzsche sought no further; he had found the man whom he wished to destroy. In the first days of May he had all his notes in hand, his work was ready. His strength suddenly gave out: his aching head, his eyes that could not bear the light without pain, played traitor to his desire to work; in a few days he was all but an invalid, almost blind. Overbeck and Romundt did their best to help him. But they had, both of them, other work; their time was measured by their professional duties. A third friend came to give assistance to the invalid. The Baron von Gersdorff, a man of leisure and a devoted friend, was travelling in Italy. He had been Friedrich Nietzsche\'s comrade at the college of Pforta, and since those already distant days had scarcely seen him again, but his friendship had remained intact. He hastened to Basle. He was a younger son of good family. His elder brothers having died, one in 1866 in the Austrian campaign, the other in 1871 in the French campaign, he had been obliged to sacrifice his tastes, to renounce philosophy and learn farming so as to be able to manage the family estate in North Germany. He was the only one of Nietzsche\'s friends who was not a slave to paper and books. "He is a fine type of the reserved and dignified gentleman, although extremely simple in his manners," wrote Overbeck; "at bottom the best fellow imaginable, and at the first glance you are left with the impression of a man who is entirely trustworthy." A friend of Romundt\'s, Paul Rée, also came to help or distract the invalid, who, thanks to so many kindnesses, was able to resist his sufferings. Lying always in semi-darkness, he[Pg 150] dictated: the faithful Gersdorff wrote down what he had to say, and by the end of June the manuscript was sent to the publisher.

Friedrich Nietzsche\'s condition improved when he had finished his work. He felt a great need of fresh air and of solitude. His sister, who had come from Naumburg, took him to the mountains of the Grisons. His headaches grew less severe, his eyesight became stronger. He rested for a few weeks, correcting his proofs, rejoicing in his new-found strength, but always haunted by his angers and his aspirations.

One day, while walking with his sister on the outskirts of Flimms, he came on a little chateau in a sequestered site. "What a beautiful retreat," he said; "what a beautiful spot in which to establish our lay convent." The chateau was for sale. "Let us visit it," said the young girl. They went in, and were delighted with everything: the garden, the terrace from which a wide view stretched out before them, the big hall with its chimney-piece of sculptured stone. The rooms were few, but why should there be more? This would be given to Richard Wagner, that to Cosima Wagner, this other would be at the disposal of friends of passage, Fr?ulein von Meysenbug or Jacob Burckhardt. Gersdorff, Deussen, Rohde, Overbeck, Romundt, would often reside there. "Here," declared Nietzsche, "we will build a covered walk, a sort of cloister. Thus, in every kind of weather, we can walk as we talk. For we shall talk much, we shall read but little, and write hardly at all."

He returned to his familiar dream once again, fraternal intercourse between disciples and masters. Fr?ulein Nietzsche grew very excited. "You will need a woman to keep house," she said. "It will be I." She enquired about the price and wrote to the proprietor, but matters were not arranged.

"I looked too young," wrote Fr?ulein Nietzsche,[Pg 151] who tells the anecdote, "and the gardener did not take us seriously." What are we to think of this affair? It is hard to know. Was it only the chatter of a young girl to which Friedrich Nietzsche had hearkened for an instant? Or was it, on the contrary, a serious notion? Probably the latter. His spirit, hospitable to chimeras, ill knew what the world admits and what it does not admit. He came back to Basle. His pamphlet had provoked a good deal of discussion. "I read it, and re-read it," wrote Wagner, "and I swear to the great gods that I hold you to be the only one who knows what I want." "Your pamphlet is a thunderbolt," wrote Hans von Bülow. "A modern Voltaire ought to write: écr.... l\'inf.... This international ?sthetic is for us a far more odious adversary than red or black bandits."

Other good judges, elderly men in many cases, approved of the young polemist; Ewald (of Gottingen), Bruno Bauer, Karl Hildebrandt, "dieses letzten humanen Deutschen," said Nietzsche—"this last of the human Germans"—declared for him. "This little book," wrote the critic, "may mark a return of the German spirit towards serious thought and intellectual passion."

But these friendly voices were few.

"The German Empire," he had written, "is extirpating the German spirit." He had wounded the pride of a conquering people. In return, he suffered many an insult, many an accusation of scurviness and treachery. He rejoiced over it. "I enter society with a duel," he said; "Stendhal gave that advice." Complete Stendhalian that he was (or at least he flattered himself that he was), Nietzsche was, notwithstanding, accessible to pity. David Strauss died but a few weeks after the publication of the pamphlet, and Nietzsche, imagining that his work had killed the old man, was sorely grieved. His sister and his friends tried in vain to reassure him; he did not wish to abandon a remorse which was, moreover, so glorious.

[Pg 152]

Stimulated by this first conflict, he dreamt of vaster conflicts. With extraordinary rapidity of conception he prepared a series of treatises which he wished to publish under a general title: Unzeitgem?sse Betrachtungen ("Thoughts Out of Season"). D. F. Strauss had furnished the subject of the first of the series. The second was to be entitled The Use and Abuse of History. Twenty others were to follow. His friends, ever the associates of his dreams, would contribute, he thought, to the work.

Franz Overbeck had just published a little book entitled The Christianity of our Modern Theology. He attacked the German savants and their too modernist tendencies, which attenuated Christianity, and allowed the irrevocable and serious doctrine, which was that of the early Christians, to fall into oblivion. Nietzsche had Overbeck\'s Christlichkeit and his D. F. Strauss bound together. On the outside page he wrote six lines of verse.

"Two twins of the same house enter joyfully into the world—to devour the dragons of the world. Two fathers, one work. Oh, miracle! The mother of these twins is called Friendship."[1]

Friedrich Nietzsche hoped for a series of similar volumes, the work of many hands but inspired by one spirit.

"With a hundred men bred up to the conflict of modern ideas, inured to heroism," he then wrote, "all our noisy and lazy culture would be reduced to eternal silence. A hundred men of that stamp carried the civilisation of the Renaissance on their shoulders." A double[Pg 153] hope and a vain one: his friends failed him, and he himself did not write his twenty pamphlets. Only their titles, and a few pages of rough outline, are left to us. On The State, The City, The Social Crisis, Military Culture, on Religion, what had he to tell us? Let us moderate our regrets; little perhaps; little, at all events, that could be called precious, as distinct from his desires and his complaints.

He was also busy with another work, and announced it to Gersdorff in mysterious terms: "Let it be enough for you to know that a danger, a terrible and unexpected one, menaces Bayreuth, and that the task of digging the countermine has fallen to me." In fact, Richard Wagner had begged him to write a supreme appeal to the Germans, and he applied himself to the task of drawing it up with all the gravity, all the profundity, all the solemnity of which he was capable. He demanded Erwin Rohde\'s assistance and advice. "Can I count on it that you will send me soon," he wrote, "a fragment drawn up in the Napoleonic style?" Erwin Rohde, a prudent man, declined. "One would have to be polite," he said, "when the only true thing for the rabble is insult." Friedrich Nietzsche did not embarrass himself with politeness.

At the end of October the presidents of the Wagner Vereine, assembled united at Bayreuth, invited Friedrich Nietzsche to read his manifesto, A Summons[2] to the Germans.

"We wish to be listened to, for we speak in order to give a warning; and he who warns, whoever he be, whatever he says, always has the right to be heard.... We lift our voices because you are in danger, and because, seeing you so mute, so indifferent, so callous, we fear for you.... We speak to you in all sincerity of heart, and[Pg 154] we seek and desire our good only because it is also yours: the salvation and the honour of the German spirit, and of the German name...."

The manifesto was developed in the same menacing and rather emphatic tone, and the reading was received in an embarrassing silence. There was no murmur of approval, no look of encouragement for the writer. He was silent. At last some voices made themselves heard. "It is too serious; it is not politic enough, there must be changes, a great many changes." Some opined, "It is a monk\'s sermon." He did not wish to argue, and withdrew his draft of a summons. Wagner alone had supported him with a great deal of energy. "Wait," said he; "in a little time, a very little time, they will be obliged to return to your challenge, they will all conform to it."

Nietzsche remained very few days at Bayreuth. The situation, which had been serious at Easter, was now desperate. The public, who for some months had gibed at the great enterprise, now forgot all about it. A formidable indifference stood in the way of the propagandists, and every day it seemed more difficult to collect the necessary money. All idea of a commercial loan, of a lottery, had been set aside. An appeal written in haste to replace that of Nietzsche was spread all over Germany; ten thousand copies were printed, an infinitesimal number were sold. A letter was addressed to the directors of one hundred German theatres. Each was asked to give as a subscription to Bayreuth its receipts at a single benefit performance. Three refused, the others did not reply.

Friedrich Nietzsche returned to Basle. He succeeded, with the aid of Gersdorff, in drawing up his second "Thoughts Out of Season," The Use and Abuse of History.[Pg 155] But he wrote few letters, few notes, he formed no new project, and for the moment almost entirely escapes from our study. The double hope of his youth, that he might assist at the triumph of Wagner, and have a share in achieving this triumph, was ruined. His help had been refused. He had been told: "Your text is too grave, too solemn." And he asks himself, What does this mean? Is not the art of Wagner a matter of supreme gravity and solemnity? He is unhappy, humiliated, wounded in his amour propre and in his dreams. During these last weeks of 1873 he lived like an earthworm in his room at Basle.

He went to spend the New Year holidays at Naumburg. There, alone with his own people, he picked up some strength. He had always liked the repose of anniversaries, which was so favourable to reflection, and, as a young man, never allowed the feast of Saint Sylvester to pass without putting on paper a meditation on his life, his memories, and his views of the future. On December 31, 1873, he wrote to Erwin Rohde; the tone of his letter recalls his former habit.

"The Letters of an Heretical ?sthete, by Karl Hildebrandt, have given me inordinate pleasure," he wrote. "What a refreshment! Read, admire, he is one of ours, he is of the society of those who hope. May it prosper in the New Year, this society, may we remain good comrades! Ah! dear friend, one has no choice, one must be either of those who hope, or of those who despair. Once and for all I have decided on hope. Let us remain faithful and helpful to one another in this year 1874 and until the end of our days.

"Yours,

"FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE.

"NAUMBURG, Saint Sylvester\'s, 1873-74."

[Pg 156]

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 ?schylus, 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[Pg 157] 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[Pg 158] 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[Pg 159] 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[Pg 160] 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 Fr?ulein von Meysenbug a letter which was quite melancholy and yet less hopeless.

"Dear Fr?ulein, what pleasure you give, and how deeply you touch me! This is the first time that[Pg 161] 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 ............