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"Come and sleep a couple of nights under our roof," wrote Wagner. "We want to know what you are made of. Little joy I have so far from my German compatriots. Come and save the abiding faith which I still cling to, in what I call, with Goethe and some others, German liberty."
Nietzsche was able to spare these two days and henceforward was a familiar of the master's. He wrote to his friends:
"Wagner realises all our desires: a rich, great, and magnificent spirit; an energetic character, an enchanting man, worthy of all love, ardent for all knowledge. ... But I must stop; I am chanting a pan....
"I beg you," he says further, "not to believe a word of what is written about Wagner by the journalists and the musicographers. No one in the world knows him, no one can judge him, since the whole world builds on foundations which are not his, and is lost in his atmosphere. Wagner is dominated by an idealism so absolute, a humanity so moving and so profound, that I feel in his presence as if I were in contact with divinity...."
Richard Wagner had written, at the request of Louis II., King of Bavaria, a short treatise on social metaphysics. This singular work, which had been conceived to fascinate a young and romantic prince,[Pg 76] was carefully withheld from publicity, and lent only to intimates. Wagner gave it to Nietzsche, and few things surely that the latter ever read went home more deeply. As traces of the impression he received from it are to be discovered in his work down to the very end, it will be worth our while to give some idea of its nature.
Wagner starts by explaining an old error of his: in 1848 he had been a Socialist. Not that he had ever welcomed the ideal of a levelling of men; his mind, avid of beauty and order, in other words, of superiorities, could not have welcomed a notion of the kind. But he hoped that a humanity liberated from the baser servitudes would rise with less effort to an understanding of art. In this he was mistaken, as he now understood.
"My friends, despite their fine courage," he wrote, "were vanquished; the emptiness of their effort proved to me that they were the victims of a basic error and that they had asked from the world what the world could not give them."
His view cleared and he recognised that the masses are powerless, their agitations vain, their co-operation illusory. He had believed them capable of introducing into history a progress of culture. Now he saw that they could not collaborate towards the mere maintenance of a culture already acquired. They experience only such needs as are gross, elementary, and short-lived. For them all noble ends are unattainable. And the problem which reality obliges us to solve is this: how are we to contrive things so that the masses shall serve a culture which must always be beyond their comprehension, and serve it with zeal and love, even to the sacrifice of life? All politics are comprised within this question, which appears insoluble, and yet is not. Consider Nature: no one understands her ends; and yet all beings serve her. How does Nature obtain their adhesion to life? She deceives her creatures. She puts them in[Pg 77] hope of an immutable and ever-delayed happiness. She gives them those instincts which constrain the humblest of animals to lengthy sacrifices and voluntary pains. She envelops in illusion all living beings, and thus persuades them to struggle and to suffer with unalterable constancy.
Society, wrote Wagner, ought to be upheld by similar artifices. It is illusions that assure its duration, and the task of those who rule men is to maintain and to propagate these conserving illusions. Patriotism is the most essential. Every child of the people should be brought up in love of the King, the living symbol of the fatherland, and this love must become an instinct, strong enough to render the most sublime abnegation an easy thing.
The patriotic illusion assures the permanence of the State but does not suffice to guarantee a high culture. It divides humanity, it favours cruelty, hatred, and narrowness of thought. The King, whose glance dominates the State, measures its limits, and is aware of purposes which extend beyond it. Here a second illusion is necessary, the religious illusion whose dogmas symbolise a profound unity and a universal love. The King must sustain it among his subjects.
The ordinary man, if he be penetrated with this double illusion, can live a happy and a worthy life: his way is made clear, he is saved. But the life of the prince and his counsellors is a graver and a more dangerous thing. They propagate the illusions, therefore they judge them. Life appears to them unveiled, and they know how tragic a thing it is. "The great man, the exceptional man," writes Wagner, "finds himself practically every day in the same condition in which the ordinary man despairs of life, and has recourse to suicide." The prince and the aristocracy which surrounds him, his nobles, are forearmed by their valour against so cowardly a temptation.[Pg 78] Nevertheless, they experience a bitter need to "turn their back on the world." They desire for themselves a restful illusion, of which they may be at the same time the authors and the accessories. Here art intervenes to save them, not to exalt the nave enthusiasm of the people, but to alleviate the unhappy life of the nobles and to sustain their valour. "Art," writes Richard Wagner, addressing Louis II., "I present to my very dear friend as the promised and benignant land. If Art cannot lift us in a real and complete manner above life, at least it lifts us in life itself to the very highest of regions. It gives life the appearance of a game, it withdraws us from the common lot, it ravishes and consoles us."
"Only yesterday"—wrote Nietzsche to Gersdorff on the 4th of August, 1869—"I was reading a manuscript which Wagner confided to me, Of the State and Religion, a treatise full of grandeur, composed in order to explain to 'his young friend,' the little King of Bavaria, his particular way of understanding the State and Religion. Never did any one speak to his King in a tone more worthy, more philosophical; I felt myself moved and uplifted by that ideality which the spirit of Schopenhauer seems constantly to inspire. Better than any other mortal, the King should understand the tragic essence of life."
In September, Friedrich Nietzsche, after a short stay in Germany, returned to a life divided between Basle and Triebschen. At Basle he had his work, his pupils, who listened to him with attention, the society of amiable colleagues. His wit, his musical talent, his friendship with Richard Wagner, his elegant manners and appearance, procured him a certain prestige. The best houses[Pg 79] liked his company, and he did not refuse their invitations. But all the pleasures of society are less acceptable than the simplest friendship, and Nietzsche had not a single friend in this honest bourgeois city; at Triebschen alone was he satisfied.
"Now," he writes to Erwin Rohde, who was living at Rome, "I, too, have my Italy, but I am able to visit it only on Saturdays and Sundays. My Italy is called Triebschen, and I already feel as if it were my home. Recently I have been there four times running, and into the bargain a letter travels the same road almost every week. My dear friend, what I see and hear and learn there I find it impossible to tell you. Schopenhauer and Goethe, Pindar and schylus are, believe me, still alive."
Each of his returns was an occasion of melancholy. A feeling of solitude depressed him. He confided in Erwin Rohde, speaking at the same time of the hopes he had in his work.
