Chapter IV · (continued 2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"BASLE, Good Friday, April 14, 1876. "DEAR FRÄULEIN,—Four days or so back, finding myself alone on the shores of the Lake of Geneva, I spent a whole Sunday quite near you, from the earliest hour till the moon-bathed night. I have read you through and through, with a revived interest at every page, and I kept on repeating that never had I passed so blessed a Sunday. You have given me an impression of purity and love which will never leave me; and Nature, the day on which I read you, seemed to reflect this impression. You were before me as a superior form of my being, a very superior form; and which yet did not humiliate but encouraged me: thus you crossed my thoughts, and, measuring my life with yours, I am more easily able to feel what I lacked—so much! I thank you much more than I would do for a book.

"I was ill, I doubted my strength and my aims; I thought I should have to renounce everything, and my greatest fear was of the length of a life which can be but an atrocious burden if one renounces the highest aims. I am now saner and freer, and I can consider without torturing myself the duties I have to fulfil. How many times I have wished you near me to ask you some question which only a moral being higher than myself could answer! Your book gives me answers to such of these precise questions as touch me. I don't think I can ever be satisfied with my conduct, if I have not first your approbation. But it is possible that your book is a severer judge than you would be yourself. What should a man do, if, in comparing his life to yours, he does not wish to be taxed with unmanliness? I often ask myself this. He ought to do everything you have done and no more. But doubtless he could not; he lacks that sure guide, the instinct of a love that is always ready to give itself. One of the most elevated of moral themes [einer der höchsten Motive] that I have discovered, thanks to you, is maternal love without physical bonds between the mother and the child. It is one of the most magnificent manifestations of Caritas. Give me a little of that love, dear lady and dear friend, and think of me as one of those who need to be the son of such a mother. Ah! such a great need!

"We shall have lots of things to say to one another when we meet at Bayreuth. At present I again have hopes of being able to go, whereas, these two past months, I had put the very thought away from me. How I should like to be now the saner of us two, and capable of rendering you a service!

"Why can't I live near you?

"Adieu; I am and I remain, in all truth, yours,

"FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE."

Fräulein von Meysenbug answered at once. "If my book had only been worth this joy, your letter to me, I would have been happy to have written it. If I can help you, I want to do so. Next winter, leave Basle, you must; look for a milder climate and a brighter one; how I feel, as you do, the annoyance of our separation. I sheltered this winter your young Basle pupil, Alfred Brenner, who is still ill; you shall bring him back to me. I will be able to find the two of you a health-giving home. Come, promise me." Nietzsche wrote immediately: "To-day I shall answer you in one word; thank you, I shall come."

Assured henceforth of sanctuary, Friedrich Nietzsche regained confidence and courage.

"I have recovered my good conscience," he wrote to Gersdorff a few days after his return; "I know that up to the present I have done all I could to enfranchise myself, and that in working thus, I have not worked for myself alone. I want to start off again on this road, and nothing more will stop me, neither memories, nor despairing presentiments. This is what I have discovered—the only thing that men respect and before which they bow, is a noble deed. Compromise, never! never! Profound success can only be assured by remaining faithful to oneself. I know already by experience what influence I exercise, and that if I became weaker or more sceptical, I should impoverish, besides my own, the hearts of many who develop with me."

He needed a pride of this sort to confront the imminent crisis. The disciples of the master gave him a dinner, and Nietzsche, who did not want to be present, had to excuse himself. He wrote an impassioned letter of which Wagner comprehended perhaps the hidden signification.

"Seven years ago, at Triebschen, I paid you my first visit. And every year, in this month of May, on this same day upon which we all celebrate the anniversary of your birth, I myself celebrate the anniversary of my spiritual birth. For since then, you live and work in me always like a drop of fresh blood that had as it were entered into my veins. This element that I owe to you urges me on, humiliates, encourages and stimulates me. It never allows me to rest, so much so that I should perhaps bear a grudge against you for this eternal disquietude if I did not know that it ever drives me on towards a freer and better state."

Wagner answered him at once in a few exuberant lines. He told of the toasts drunk to his glory and of his humorous responses, with so many puns, cock-and-bull stories and impenetrable allusions, that it is necessary to give up the attempt to translate. Nietzsche was moved by this letter. At the moment it arrived he was feeling very much the master of himself, very sure of his future. The history of his past years suddenly appeared as a grand adventure that was now for ever closed. He considered it with an indulgent regard, and, measuring the joys he owed to Wagner, he wished to express his gratitude. The other summer, at Steinabad, when in a similar state of mind, he had filled some pages of notes. He took them up again, in spite of a nervous affection of the eyes which prevented him from working without help, and undertook to draw from them the substance of a volume. Singular attempt! Disillusioned, he wrote an enthusiastic book, the most beautiful in Wagnerian literature. But a forewarned reader recognises almost from page to page the idea that Nietzsche expresses in masking it. He writes the eulogy of the poet; of the philosopher he does not speak; he denies, for him who can understand, the educative bearing of the work.

"For us," he writes, "Bayreuth signifies the consecration at the moment of battle.... The mysterious regard that tragedy turns towards us is not an enervating and paralysing charm, but its influence imposes repose. For beauty is not given to us for the very moment of battle; but for those moments of calm which precede and interrupt it, for those fugitive moments in which, reanimating the past, anticipating the future, we penetrate all the symbols; for those moments when, with the impression of a slight weariness, a refreshing dream descends upon us. The day and the strife are about to begin, the sacred shadows fade away, and art is once more far from us; but its consolation is still shed upon man, as a morning dew...."

There exists a radical opposition between these thoughts and those that inspired The Birth of Tragedy. Art is no longer a reason for living, but a preparation for life, a necessary repose. Three menacing lines end Nietzsche's little book: "Wagner is not the prophet of the future as we might fain believe, but the interpreter and the glorifier of a past." Nietzsche had not been able to keep back these admissions. Brief and disguised as they were, he had hoped that they might not be heard, and his hope, it seems, was justified. Wagner wrote as soon as the pamphlet had appeared:

"FRIEND!—Your book is prodigious!

"Where did you learn to know me so well? Come quickly, and stay here during rehearsals until the representations.

"Yours,

"R. W.

" July 12th."

The rehearsals began in the middle of July, and Nietzsche, who did not wish to miss one of them, went, in spite of the precarious state of his health, with an impatience that astonished his sister. Two days later she received a letter: "I almost regret ever having come; up till now, everything is wretched.... On Monday I went to the rehearsal; it displeased me, I was obliged to go out."

What was happening? Fräulein Nietzsche waited with great uneasiness. She was slightly reassured by a second letter: "MY DEAR GOOD SISTER,—At present things are better...." But the last sentence read strangely: "I must live very much to myself, and decline all invitations, even Wagner's. He finds that I make myself scarce." Almost immediately came the last letter: "I hope to leave: it is too senseless to stay here. I await with terror every one of these long musical evenings. Yet I stay. I can stand it no longer. I shall not be here even for the first performance ; I will go no matter where—but I want to leave; here everything is unbearable."

What had occurred? Had the mere sight of the world driven him away so soon? Nietzsche had led a very hard existence, during the past two years, "the friend of enigmas and problems." He had forgotten men: he suffered on encountering them again. A Titan, Wagner, held them captive, protected them against every enigma and too disquieting "problem"; and in this shadow they seemed satisfied. They never reflected, but repeated passionately the formulas that had been given them. Some Hegelians had come: Wagner offered himself to them as a second incarnation of their master. All the Schopenhauerians were there; they had been told that Wagner had translated into music the system of Schopenhauer. A few young people were calling themselves "idealists," "pure Germans": "My art," declared Wagner, "signifies the victory of German idealism over Gallic sensualism." All, Hegelians, Schopenhauerians, pure Germans, agreed in the pride of triumph: they had succeeded. Succeeded! Nietzsche heard this extraordinary word in silence. What man, he pondered, what race ever did succeed? Not even the Greek, which was bruised in its most beautiful flights. What effort had not been in vain? So, taking his eyes off the comedy, Nietzsche examined Wagner: was this dispenser of joys in the end great enough to become uneasy in the hour of victory? No; Wagner was happy, because he had succeeded; and the satisfaction of such a man was more shocking and sadder still than that of the crowd.

But happiness, however low it be, is still happiness. An exquisite intoxication had seized the little town of Bayreuth. Nietzsche had felt and shared this intoxication; he kept the remorse and envy of it. He listened to a rehearsal: the entrance into the sacred theatre, the emotion of the public, the presence of Wagner, the darkness, the marvellous sounds, touched him. How sensible he had remained to the Wagnerian infection. He got up in haste and went out; it is the explanation of his letter: "Yesterday evening, I went to a rehearsal; it displeased me; I was obliged to go out."

A new element aggravated his trouble. He was informed definitely of the significance of the forthcoming work, Parsifal. Richard Wagner was about to declare himself a Christian. Thus, in eighteen months, Nietzsche observed two conversions: Romundt was weak and perhaps the victim of chance; but Nietzsche knew that with Wagner everything was grave, and answered to the necessities of the century. Neo-Christianity did not yet exist: Nietzsche felt it all through Parsifal. He perceived the danger run by the modern man, so uncertain of himself, and tempted by this Christian faith, which is so firm a thing, which calls, which promises and can give peace. If he did not redouble his efforts to discover in himself a new "possibility of life," it was certain that he would fall back into a Christianity, cowardly like his inspiration. Then Nietzsche saw these men, whose happiness he had instinctively despised, menaced by a final collapse, and led gently, and as if by the hand, towards this collapse by the master, by the impostor who had subjugated them. Not one of them knew whither this powerful hand might not soon lead them, scarcely one of them was a Christian, but they were all on the eve of becoming Christians. How far away was that May day of 1872 in which Richard Wagner conducted, in this same Bayreuth, Schiller and Beethoven's ode to liberty and joy!

Friedrich Nietzsche saw clearly for them all: the spectacle of these unconscious lives made him feel desperate, as the sight of the world in the Middle Ages had made those mystics desperate, who had always before their eyes the accusing and bleeding image of the Christ. He would have liked to have torn these people from their torpor, to have warned them by a word, prevented them with a cry. "I ought to," he thought, "as I alone understand what is happening...." But who would have listened to him? He held his peace, he dissembled his dreadful impressions, and wished to observe without weakness or desertion the tragic solemnities.

But he could not. Soon he weakened and had to fly. "I should be insane to stay here. I await with terror each of these long musical evenings, and yet I stay. I can bear no more.... I shall go, no matter where, but I will go: here everything is torture to me...."

The heights which separate Bohemia from Franconia rise some miles from Bayreuth, and the village of Klingenbrunn, where Nietzsche retired, is situated in the forests which cover them. The crisis was brief and less severe than he had dreaded. Now that he had perceived in a clearer manner the dangers of the Wagnerian art, he saw the remedy more plainly. "Religiosity," he wrote, "when it is not upheld by a clear thought, rouses disgust." He renewed his Steinabad meditations and re-affirmed the resolutions then made. He would make a clean sweep of the past; resist the seductions of metaphysics; deprive himself of art; reserve judgment; like Descartes, begin by doubting. Then, if some new security could be discovered, he would raise the new grandeur on immovable foundations.

He wandered up and down the silent forests; their severe peace was a discipline: "If we do not give firm and serene horizons to our souls like those of the woods and mountains," he wrote, "then our inner life will lose all serenity. It will be broken up like that of the men of towns; it will not know happiness and will not be able to give it." Then, all of a sudden he released the cry of his sick soul: "I shall give back to men," said he, "the serenity which is the condition of all culture. And the simplicity. Serenity, Simplicity, Greatness!"

Nietzsche, once more master of himself, returned to Bayreuth without delay: he wished to complete his experience. The excitement of the crowd was even greater than on the day of his departure. The old Emperor William was present, on his way to the grand manœuvres. He had paid Wagner the compliment of being present on two evenings. From all Bavaria and Franconia, citizens and peasants had hurried hither to salute their Emperor, and there was almost a famine in the little invaded town.

The performances began; Nietzsche heard them all. He listened in silence to the observations of the faithful and measured the abyss which he had so long skirted. He continued to see his friends: Fräulein von Meysenbug, Miss Zimmern, Gabriel Monod, E. Schuré, Alfred Brenner, who did not fail to notice in him a reserve and a silence singular at times. Often he went off alone, during the intervals or in the afternoons, with a pleasant and charming spectator, Madame O——, who was slightly Parisian, slightly Russian. He liked the delicate and surprising conversation of women, and he excused this one for being a Wagnerian.

M. Schuré, who met Nietzsche at these festivals, gives a description of him which merits repetition. "As I talked to him I was struck by the superiority of his mind and the strangeness of his physiognomy. A large forehead; short hair brushed up off his forehead; the projecting cheekbones of the Slav. The strong drooping moustache, the sharp cut of the face, would have given him the air of a cavalry officer, had it not been for an indescribable something in his address that was at the same time timid and haughty. The musical voice, the slow speech, denoted the organism of the artist; the prudent and meditative bearing was a philosopher's. Nothing was more deceiving than the apparent calm of his expression. The fixed glance betrayed the melancholy labour of his thought. It was the glance of a fanatic, of a keen observer, and of a visionary. This double character added a disturbed and disturbing element, the more so because it always seemed riveted upon one point. In his effusive moments this look was moistened with the softness of a dream, but very soon it became hostile again.... During the general rehearsals, and the first three performances of the Tetralogy, Nietzsche appeared to be sad and dejected...."

Each evening was a triumph, and each of them added to Nietzsche's distress. The Rhinegold, the Valkyrie—these old pieces recalled his youth, his enthusiasms for Wagner, whom he did not know, whom he did not dare hope to know. Siegfried: souvenirs of Triebschen; Wagner was completing this score when Nietzsche entered into his intimacy.

Siegfried was Nietzsche's favourite among the Wagnerian heroes. He found himself again in this young man, who had never known fear. "We are the knights of the spirit," he had then written in his notes, "we understand the song of the birds and follow them." No doubt he was almost happy when he heard Siegfried; it was the only one of Wagner's dramas which he could listen to without remorse. Lastly, The Twilight of the Gods. Siegfried has mixed in the crowd of men; they deceive him; one evening he naïvely relates his life; a traitor strikes him from behind and kills him. The giants are annihilated, the dwarfs vanquished, the heroes powerless; the gods abdicate; the gold is given back to the depths of the Rhine, whose surging waters cover over the world, and as they await death, men contemplate the universal disaster.

It was the end. The curtain fell slowly, the symphony was extinguished in the night, and the spectators rose suddenly, with one accord, and gave vent to a loud burst of cheering. Then the curtain rose once more and Richard Wagner appeared, alone, dressed in a redingote and cloth trousers, holding his little figure erect. With a sign he called for silence; every murmur ceased.

"We have shown you what we wished to show you," he cried, "and what we can show you when all wills are directed to one object; if on your side you support us, then you will have an art."

He retired, then returned; again and again he was recalled. Nietzsche watched his master standing in the limelight, and he alone in the hall did not applaud.

"There he is," he thought, "my ally... the Homer who has been fertilised by Plato...."

The curtain fell for the last time, and Nietzsche, silent, lost in the crowd, followed his tide like a wreck.