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They had promised each other that they would spend their first holiday weeks together. At the beginning of August, being both free, they left Leipsic and sought isolation in walks in a tramp on the frontiers of Bohemia. It is a region of wooded heights, which recalls, with less grandeur, the Vosges. Nietzsche and Rohde led the life of wandering philosophers. Their luggage was light, they had no books, they walked from inn to inn, and, throughout the days unspoilt by a care, they talked about Schopenhauer, about Beethoven, about Germany, about Greece. They judged and condemned, with youthful promptitude; they were never weary of defaming their science. "Oh childishness of erudition!" they said. "It was a poet, it was Goethe, who discovered the genius of Greece. He it was who held it up to the Germans, absorbed always on the confines of a dream, as an example of rich and clear beauty, a model of perfect form. The professors followed him. They have explained the[Pg 57] ancient world, and, under their myopic eyes, that wonderful work of art has become the object of a science. What is there that they have not studied? In Tacitus, the ablative case, the evolution of the gerund in the Latin authors of Africa; they have analysed to the last detail the language of the Iliad, determined in what respect it is connected with this other and that other Aryan language. What does it all signify? The beauty of the Iliad is unique; it was felt by Goethe, and they ignore it. We shall stop this game; that will be our task. We shall go back to the tradition of Goethe; we shall not dissect the Greek genius, we shall revitalise it, and teach men to feel it. For long enough the scholars have carried out their minute enquiries. It is time to make an end. The work of our generation shall be definitive; our generation shall enter into possession of the grand legacy transmitted by the past. And science, too, must serve progress."
After a month of conversation, the young men left the forest and went to Meiningen, a little town in which the musicians of the Pessimist school were giving a series of concerts. A letter of Friedrich Nietzsche's has preserved a chronicle of the performance. "The Abb Liszt presided," he wrote. "They played a symphonic poem by Hans von Blow, Nirvana, an explanation of which was given on the programme in maxims from Schopenhauer. But the music was awful. Liszt, on the contrary, succeeded remarkably in finding the character of the Indian Nirvana in some of his religious compositions; for example, in his Beatitudes." Nietzsche and Rohde separated on the morrow of these festivals, and returned to their families.
Alone at Naumburg, Nietzsche took up work of various kinds and read widely. He studied the works of the young German philosophers, Hartmann, Dhring, Lange, Bahnsen; he admired them all, with the indulgence of a[Pg 58] brother-in-arms, and dreamt of making their acquaintance and collaborating with them in a review which they should found together. He projected an essay, perhaps a sort of manifesto upon the man whom he wished to give to his contemporaries as a master, Schopenhauer. "Of all the philosophers," he writes, "he is the truest." No false sensibility shackles his mind. He is brave, it is the first quality of a chief. Friedrich Nietzsche notes rapidly: "Ours is the age of Schopenhauer: a sane pessimism founded upon the ideal; the seriousness of manly strength, the taste for what is simple and sane. Schopenhauer is the philosopher of a revived classicism, of a Germanic Hellenism...."
He was working ardently, and then, suddenly, his life was turned upside down. He had been exempted from military service on account of his very short sight. But the Prussian army in 1867 had great need of men; and he was enrolled in a regiment of artillery, in barracks at Naumburg.
Nietzsche made the best of this vexation. It was always a maxim of his that a man should know how to utilise the chances of his life, extracting from them, as an artist does, the elements of a richer destiny. Therefore, since he had to be a soldier, he resolved that he would learn his new trade. The military obligation had, in this time of war, a solemnity which it lacks to-day. Nietzsche thought it a good and healthy thing that he should shut his dictionaries and get on horseback; that he should become an artilleryman and a good artilleryman, a sort of ascetic in the service of his fatherland, etwas zu treiben, he wrote in his German, mottled with Greek.
"This life is full of inconvenience," he wrote again, "but, tasted as one would an entremets, it impresses me as altogether profitable. It is a constant appeal to the energy of man which has a value above all as an antidote against that paralysing scepticism the effects of which[Pg 59] we have observed together. In the barracks one learns to know one's nature, to know what it has to give among strange men, the greater part of whom are very rough.... Hitherto it has appeared to me that all have felt kindly towards me, captain and privates alike; moreover, everything that I must do, I do it with zeal and interest. Has one not reason to be proud, if one be noted, among thirty recruits, as the best rider? In truth, that is worth more than a philological diploma."
Whereupon he cites in full the fine Latin and Ciceronian testimonial written by old Ritschl in praise of his memoir, De fontibus Laertii Diogenii. He is happy in his success and does not conceal his pleasure at it. The fact amuses him. "Thus are we made," he writes; "we know what such praise is worth, and, in spite of everything, an agreeable chuckle puts a grimace on our countenance."
This valiant mood lasted only a short time. Nietzsche was soon to avow that an artilleryman on horseback is a very unhappy animal when he has literary tastes, and reflected in the mess-room on the problems of Democritus.
He deplored his slavery, and was delivered from it by an accident. He fell from his horse and injured his side. He suffered, but he was able to study and meditate at leisure, which was what he liked in life. However, when the exquisite May days arrived and he had been laid up for a long month, he grew impatient and sighed for the hours of exercise. "I who used to ride the most difficult mounts!" he wrote to Gersdorff. To distract himself he undertook a short work on a poem of Simonides, The Complaint of Dana. He corrected the doubtful words in the text and wrote to Ritschl about a new study: "Since my schooldays," he wrote, "this beautiful song of Dana has remained in my memory as an unforgettable melody: in this time of May can one do better than become a trifle lyrical oneself? provided that on this[Pg 60] occasion at least you do not find in my essay too 'lyrical' a conjecture."
Dana occupied him, and the complaints of the goddess, abandoned with her child to the caprice of malevolent billows, mingled in his letters with his own complaints. For he was suffering; his wound remained open, and a splinter of a bone appeared one day with the discharge of matter. "I had a queer impression at the sight," he wrote, "and little by little it became clear to me that my plans for the examination, for a voyage to Paris, might very easily be thwarted. The frailty of our being never appears so plainly ad oculos as at the moment when one has just seen a little piece of one's own skeleton."
The voyage to Paris, here mentioned, was the last conceived, and the dearest of his dreams. He caressed the idea of it, and, as he was never able to keep a joy to himself alone, he must write to Gersdorff and then to Rohde, and to two other comrades, Kleimpaul and Romundt: "After the last year of our studies," he said to them, "let us go to Paris together and spend a winter there: let us forget our learning: let us dispedantise ourselves (dpdantisons-nous); let us make the acquaintance of the divin cancan, the green absinthe: we will drink of it; let us go to Paris and live en camarades, and, marching the boulevards, let us represent Germanism and Schopenhauer down there; we shall not be altogether idle: from time to time we will send a little copy to the newspapers, casting a few Parisian anecdotes athwart the world; after a year and a half, after two years [he never ceased to prolong the imaginary period], we will come back to pass our examination." Rohde having promised his company, Nietzsche bore less impatiently the weariness of a convalescence which lasted until the summer.
