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"... Let us try to reach a little island on which there will be no longer need to close one's ears with wax. Then we shall be one another's masters. Our books, from now till then, are but hooks to catch our friends, a public for our sthetic and monachal association. Let us live, let us work, let us enjoy for one another's sake; in that manner only, perhaps, shall we be able to work for the whole. I may tell you (see how serious is my design) that I have already commenced to reduce my expenses in order to constitute a little reserve fund. We shall gamble in order to try our 'luck'; as to the books which we shall be able to write, I shall demand the highest honorarium as a provision for coming times. In brief, we shall neglect no lawful means of success in founding our cloister. We also have our duty for the next two years!
"May this plan seem to you worthy of meditation! Your last letter, moving as it was, signified to me that the time had come to unveil it for you.
"Shall we not be able to introduce a new form of Academy into the world?
'Und sollt' ich nicht, sehnsuchtigster Gewalt,
In's Leben ziehn die einzigster Gestalt?'
"Thus Faust speaks of Helen. No one knows anything of my project, and now it depends upon you to see that Romundt is advised of it.
"Assuredly, our school of philosophy is neither an historical reminiscence nor an arbitrary caprice; is it not a necessity that pushes us on to that road? It seems that the plan of our student days, that voyage which we were to make together, returns in a new form, symbolic now and vaster than it was. On this occasion, I won't leave you in the lurch as I then did. That memory always annoys me.
"With my best hopes, your faithful
"FRATER FRIEDRICH.
"From the 23rd of December till the 1st of January I go to Triebschen, near Lucerne."
On the 22nd of December Friedrich Nietzsche left Lucerne: he had received no reply from Rohde. He found the house at Triebschen in high festival with children's games and the preparations for Christmas. Madame Wagner gave him a volume of Stendhal, Les Promenades dans Rome. He offered Wagner the famous woodcut of Drer's of The Knight, the Dog, and Death, on which he had written a commentary for the book he was then preparing, The Origin of Tragedy: "A spirit which feels itself isolated, desperate and solitary," he wrote, "could choose no better symbol than that rider of[Pg 103] Drer's, who, unperturbed by his gruesome companions and yet wholly without hope, pursues his terrible path alone with dog and horse. This rider of Drer's is our Schopenhauer: he was without hope, but he desired the truth. His like does not exist." Nietzsche would have been happy in the master's house if he had not been expecting Rohde's reply: the waiting worried him. He stopped for a week at Triebschen. Wagner was never done talking about Bayreuth and his vast projects. Nietzsche, too, had his thought which he would have joyfully uttered; but first he wanted his friend's approbation, and that approbation did not come. He left without having received a word or spoken one on the subject.
At last, at Basle, he received the too long-desired letter: an honest, affectionate, but negative reply. "You tell me that cloisters are necessary to-day," wrote Rohde. "I believe it. But there are necessities for which no remedy exists. How can we find the money? And even when we shall have found the money, I do not know that I shall follow you; I do not feel in me a creative force which renders me worthy of the solitude whither you call me. For a Schopenhauer, a Beethoven, a Wagner, the case is different, as it is for you, dear friend. But, as I am in question, no! I must hope for a different life. Still let us entertain the wish for such a retreat, among certain friends, in a cloister of the muses; I agree to that. Deprived of desires, what would we become?"
If Rohde refused to follow him, who would follow him? He did not write his Adhortatio; Romundt was not advised, and even Wagner, it seems, knew nothing of the proposal.
Nietzsche made no vain complaints, but set to work to elaborate alone those revolutionary truths for which[Pg 104] he would have wished to contrive a kindlier manner of birth. He turned his back upon Germany, upon those modern States which have it as their mission to flatter the servilities, soften the conflicts, and favour the idleness of men. He considered anew primitive Greece, the city of the seventh and the sixth centuries; thither a mysterious attraction ever drew him back. Was it the seduction of a perfect beauty? Doubtless, but it was also the seduction of that strength and cruelty which a modern conceals as he conceals a stain, and which the old Greeks practised with joy. Nietzsche loved strength; on the battlefield of Metz he had felt within him the appetite and instinct.
"If," he wrote, "genius and art are the final ends of Greek culture, then all the forms of Greek society must appear to us as necessary mechanisms and stepping-stones towards that final end. Let us discover what means were utilised by the will to act which animated the Greeks...." He discerns and names one of these means: slavery. "Frederick Augustus Wolf," he notes, "has shown us that slavery is necessary to culture. There is one of the powerful thoughts of my predecessor." He grasped it, held it to him, and forced it to disclose its whole meaning. This idea, suddenly discovered, inspired him; it was profound and moved him to the depths of his being; it was cruel, almost monstrous, and satisfied his romantic taste. He shuddered before it, he admired its sombre beauty.
"It may be that this knowledge fills us with terror," he wrote; 'I such terror is the almost necessary effect of all the most profound knowledge. For nature is still a frightful thing, even when intent on creating the most beautiful forms. It is so arranged that culture, in its triumphal march, benefits only a trivial minority of privileged mortals, and it is necessary that the slave service of[Pg 105] the great masses be maintained, if one wish to attain to a full joy in becoming (werde lust).
"We moderns have been accustomed to oppose two principles against the Greeks, the one and the other invented to reassure a society of an altogether servile kind which anxiously avoids the world, slave: we talk of the 'dignity of man' and the 'dignity of labour.'
"The language of the Greeks is other. They declare in simple terms that work is a disgrace, for it is impossible that a man occupied with the labour of gaining a livelihood should ever become an artist....
"So let us avow this cruel sounding truth: slavery is necessary to culture; a truth which assuredly leaves no doubt as to the absolute value of being.
"The misery of those men who live by labour must be made yet more vigorous, in order that a very few Olympian men may create a world of art.... At their expense, by the artifice of unpaid labour, the privileged classes should be relieved from the struggle for life, and given such conditions that they can create, and satisfy a new order of needs.... And if it is true to say that the Greeks were destroyed by slavery, this other affirmation is, most certainly, even truer: for lack of slavery, we are perishing."
But what was the origin of this very institution of slavery? How was the submission of the slave, that "blind mole of culture," secured? The Greeks teach us, answered Nietzsche: "The conquered belongs to the conqueror," they say, "with his wives and his children, his goods and his blood. Power gives the first right, and there is no right which is not at bottom appropriation, usurpation, power." Thus Nietzsche's thought was brought back towards its first object. The war had inspired him in the first instance. Now he rediscovers that solution. In sorrow and in tragedy, men had[Pg 106] invented beauty; into sorrow and into tragedy they must be plunged, and there retained that their sense of beauty might be preserved. In pages which have the accent and rhythm of a hymn, Friedrich Nietzsche glorifies and invokes war:
