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"This winter I have to give two lectures on the sthetic of the Greek tragedies," wrote Nietzsche, about September, to his friend the Baron von Gersdorff; "and Wagner will come from Triebschen to hear them." Wagner did not go, but Nietzsche was listened to by a very large public.

He described an unknown Greece, vexed by the mysteries and intoxications of the god Dionysius, and through its trouble, through this very intoxication, initiated into poetry, into song, into tragic contemplation. It seems that he wished to define this eternal romanticism, always alike to him, whether in Greece of the sixth century B.C. or in Europe of the thirteenth century; the same, surely, which inspired Richard Wagner in his retreat at Triebschen. Nietzsche, however, abstained from mentioning this latter name.

"The Athenian coming to assist at the tragedy of the great Dionysos bore in his heart some spark of that elementary force from which tragedy was born. This is the irresistible outburst of springtime, that fury and delirium of mingled emotions which sweeps in springtime across the souls of all simple peoples and across the whole life of nature. It is an accepted thing that festivals of Easter and Carnival, travestied by the Church, were in their origin spring festivals. Every such fact can be traced to a most deep-rooted instinct: the old[Pg 85] soil of Greece bore on its bosom enthusiastic multitudes, full of Dionysos; in the Middle Ages in the same way the dances of the Feast of Saint John and of Saint Vitus drew out great crowds who went singing, leaping and dancing from town to town, gathering recruits in each. It is, of course, open to the doctors to regard these phenomena as diseases of the crowd: we content ourselves with saying that the drama of antiquity was the flower of such a disease, and if that of our modern art does not fountain forth from that mysterious source, that is its misfortune."

In his second lecture Nietzsche studied the end of tragic art. It is a singular phenomenon; all the other arts of Greece slowly and gloriously declined. Tragedy had no decline. After Sophocles it disappeared, as though a catastrophe had destroyed it. Nietzsche recounts the catastrophe, and names the destroyer, Socrates.

He dared to denounce the most revered of men. It was he, the poor Athenian, a man of the people, an ugly scoffer, who suppressed the ancient poetry. Socrates was neither an artist nor a philosopher; he did not write, he did not teach, he scarcely spoke; seated in the public place, he stopped the passers-by, astonished them by his pleasant logic, convinced them of their ignorance and absurdity, laughed, and obliged them to laugh at themselves. His irony dishonoured the nave beliefs which gave strength to the ancestors of the race, the myths which upheld their virtues. He despised tragedy, and made open declaration of his contempt for it; that was enough. Euripides was troubled, and suppressed his inspiration, while the young Plato, who perhaps would have surpassed Sophocles himself, listened to the new master, burnt his verses, and renounced art. He disconcerted the old instinctive lyrical humanity of Greece; and, by the voice of Plato, whom he had seduced, he[Pg 86] imposed the illusion, unknown to the ancients, of Nature as accessible to the reason of man, altogether penetrated by it, and always harmonious. Friedrich Nietzsche was to insert these pages in his book upon The Birth of Tragedy.

This charge pronounced against Socrates surprised his audience in Basle. Wagner knew it, and in September, 1870, wrote to Nietzsche an enthusiastic but extremely shrewd letter.

"As for me, I cry out to you: That's it! you have got hold of the truth, you touch the exact point with keen accuracy. I await with admiration the series of work in which you will combat the errors of popular dogmatism. But none the less you make me anxious, and I hope with all my heart that you are not going to come a cropper. I would also like to advise you not to expound your audacious views, which must be so difficult to establish, in short brochures of limited range. You are, I feel, profoundly penetrated with your ideas: you must gather them together into a larger book of much wider scope. Then you will find and will give us the mot juste on the divine blunders of Socrates and Plato, those creators so wonderful as to exact adoration even from us who forswear them! Our words, my dear friend, swell into hymns when we consider the incomprehensible harmony of those essences, so strange to our world! And what pride and hope animate us when, returning on ourselves, we feel strongly and clearly that we can and should achieve a work, outside the reach even of those masters!"

None of the letters addressed by Nietzsche to Wagner have been published. Have they been lost? Were they destroyed? Or are they merely refused by Madame Cosima Wagner, who is perhaps not incapable of rancour?[Pg 87] The facts are unknown. However, we may be certain that Nietzsche begged Wagner to ally himself with him, to aid him in rendering clear those difficult views of his. Wagner replied:

"MY DEAR FRIEND,—How good it is to be able to exchange such letters! There is no one to-day with whom I can talk as seriously as with you—the Unique[1] excepted. God only knows what would happen to me but for that! But I should be able to give myself up to the pleasure of fighting with you against "Socratism" only on one condition, that of having an enormous deal of time at my disposal, free from the temptation of any better project—to speak quite plainly, I should have to abandon all creative work. Division of labour is a good thing in this connection. You can do much for me: you can take on your shoulders a full half of the task assigned to me by fate. And so doing, you will perhaps achieve the whole of your own destiny. I have never had much success in my essays in Philology: you have never had much success in your essays in music: and it is well that things should be so. As a musician you would have come to much the same end to which I should have come had I stuck obstinately to Philology. But Philology remains in my blood; it directs me in my work as a musician. As for you, remain a philologist, and keeping to Philology, allow yourself to be directed by music. I mean what I say in a very serious spirit. You have taught me within what base preconceptions a professional philologist is to-day expected to imprison himself—I have taught you in what an unspeakable den a genuine 'absolute' musician must to-day waste himself. Show us what Philology ought to be, and help me to prepare the way for that great 'Renaissance' in which Plato will embrace Homer, and in which Homer, penetrated by the ideas of[Pg 88] Plato, will be at last and for the first time the sublime Homer ..."

At this instant Nietzsche had conceived his work, and was making ready to write it at a spurt. "Science, art, and philosophy grow so intimately within me," he said in February to Rohde, "that I am about to give birth to a centaur."

Professional duties, however, interrupted this flight. In March he was appointed titular professor. The honour flattered him, the duties kept him occupied. At the same time he was given the care of a class of higher rhetoric; then he was asked to draw up in the noblest Latin an address of congratulation to Professor Baumbrach, of Fribourg, who had taught for fifty years in the University of that town. Nietzsche, who never shirked anything, applied himself to the preparation of his class and the composition of his discourse. In April, more work. Ritschl founded a review, the Acta societatis philologic? Lipsi?, and desired that his best pupil should contribute to it. Nietzsche did not haggle over the help asked of him. He promised his copy, and wrote to Rohde to ask for his collaboration also.