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He had never recovered entirely from the ordeals of the war. Neither sleep nor sure and certain health were ever at his call again. In February the nervous force which had sustained him suddenly gave way, and his disorders assumed an acute form. Violent neuralgas, insomnia, troubles and weaknesses of the eyesight, stomach ills, jaundice represented the nature of the crisis which had been tormenting him for five months. The doctors, quite at a loss, advised him to give up work and to take a voyage. Friedrich Nietzsche sent for his sister, who came to Naumburg. He brought her to pay a farewell visit to Triebschen, and left for Lugano.
At that time the railway did not cross the Alps. Travellers went by diligence over the ridge of the St. Gothard. Chance furnished Nietzsche with a remarkable companion, an old man of a talkative humour, and with no desire to conceal his identity: it was Mazzini. The old humanitarian and the young apostle of slavery hit it off wonderfully well. Mazzini cited Goethe's phrase:
"Sich des halben zu entwohnen und im Ganzen, Vollen, Schnen resolut zu leben" (To abjure half-measures, and to live resolutely in the Whole, the Full, the Beautiful). Friedrich Nietzsche never forgot the energetic maxim, nor the man who had transmitted it to him, nor this day of rapid and healthful travel, not far from those summits which he was afterwards to love so much.
The fine mountain crossing amid the snow and silence of the Alps had sufficed. He was almost cured on his arrival at Lugano. His nature was still supple and youthful; his returns to life were prompt and radiant; a nave gaiety re-animated all his being. He spent two happy months in Italian Switzerland. A Prussian officer, a relation of General von Moltke, was staying at his hotel. He lent him his manuscripts and often talked to him of the destinies of the new German Empire and of the aristocratic warrior's mission which the victory had conferred upon it. It was a fine springtide for the numerous Germans who had come to rest at the place: they liked to gather round their young philosopher and listen to him. February began, the war was over, and these happy people, freed from all anxieties, abandoned themselves for the first time to the pleasure of their triumph. They sang; they danced in public up to the Market-place, and Nietzsche was not the least prompt to rejoice with them, to dance and sing. "When I recall these days," writes Madame Frster-Nietzsche, who gives us a sad and gracious account of the time, "it seems to me that I am having a veritable dream of Carnival."
From Lugano, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote to Erwin Rohde:
"I have very often suffered from a heavy and depressed mood. But more than once inspiration has returned to me; my manuscript has benefited from it. I have given[Pg 112] the go-by to philology in the most cavalier fashion. They may praise me, they may blame me, they may promise me the highest honours, they may talk as they choose; I turn my back upon it. Every day I go deeper into my philosophic domain, and I begin to have confidence in myself; better still, if I am ever to be a poet, from to-day I feel myself disposed towards it. I do not know, I have no means of knowing, whither my destiny guides me. And nevertheless, when I examine myself, everything is in perfect accord within me, as though I had followed some good genius. My ends are extremely hidden from me; no concern for office, for hierarchic honours, directs my efforts; and none the less I live in a surprising condition of clarity, of serenity. What a sensation it is to see one's world before one, a fine globe, round and complete! Now it is some fragment of a new metaphysic, now it is a new sthetic which grows up within me, now another idea claims me, a new principle of education which entails the complete rejection of our Universities and gymnasia. I never learn any fact but it immediately finds a good place in some corner that has been long prepared for it. This sentiment of an interior world which springs up within me I feel in all its force when I think not coldly, but quietly and without exaggerated enthusiasm, on the history of these last ten months, on these events which I consider as the instruments of my noble designs. Pride, folly, are words that feebly express my condition of mental 'insomnia.'
"Ah, how I desire health! As soon as one has something in view which must last longer than oneself—how one gives thanks for every good night, for every mild ray of sun, even for every occasion on which one digests aright!"
On the 10th of April, Nietzsche had returned to Basle.[Pg 113] He gathered his notes together, re-read them for the last time, and fixed definitely the plan of his work. He allowed those digressions upon war, slavery, the city, of which we have already given some extracts, to drop, and—Wagner, it is said, desired it—limited himself to his first subject: ancient tragedy, the model and precursor of German musical drama. Wagner's advice, Madame Frster-Nietzsche insinuates, was not altogether disinterested; it suited him that his disciple's first work should be consecrated to his fame. This has an air of probability; still it certainly seems that Nietzsche had let himself be captured and seduced by too many ideas, that he had not so much amassed the matter for one book as begun, rather at hazard, a whole series of studies in sthetics, history, and politics. He needed to restrict himself, and yet could not make up his mind to it. If Wagner helped him here, he did well. Perhaps we owe the happy completion of this book to him—the only real book which Nietzsche ever completed.
What was it that he had to say? He was to analyse the origin and the essence of the Greek lyric spirit; he was to set the two Greeces over against one another, the one intoxicated by its myths and Dionysian chants, strong in illusions—schylus's Greece, tragic and conquering Greece; the other impious, rational, anmic—Socratic Greece, Alexandrine Greece, which in dying corrupted the peoples who had remained young around her, the pure blood of primitive humanity. Then he was to display the two Germanys in conflict in a like manner, the Germany of the Democrats and the savants, the Germany of the soldiers and the poets; between these two one had to choose. Nietzsche declared his choice: beholden to Wagner, as he was, for all his tranquillity of thought, for all his joys, he indicated Wagner to his compatriots. While the peace was being signed at Frankfort between the nations, Friedrich Nietzsche,[Pg 114] thus establishing peace within himself, ended the rough draft of his work. He remarked upon this coincidence of dates, for his internal conflicts and the revolutions of his thought did not appear to him less important events than external conflicts and the revolutions of races.
But the Peace of Frankfort did not terminate all the conflicts of this terrible year. A civil war now broke out in France, and its calamities stirred Europe even more profoundly than the battles of Frschwiller or Sedan. On the morning of the 23rd of May, the newspapers of Basle announced the destruction of Paris and the burning of the Louvre. Nietzsche learnt the news with a feeling of dismay: the most beautiful works, the flower of human labour, were ruined; human hands, an unhappy people, had dared this profanation. All Nietzsche's alarms were thus confirmed. Without discipline, without an hierarchy, culture, he had written, cannot subsist. All have not the right to share in beauty; the immense majority should live humbly, work for their masters and revere their lives. Such is the economy which assures strength to societies, and, in return for their strength, delicacy, grace, beauty; and this is the order which Europe hesitates to maintain. Nietzsche might now have boasted of the correctness of his judgment; it was far from him to do so. It was with alarm that he considered his perspicacity, his solitude, and his responsibility. His thoughts suddenly turned to Jacob Burckhardt; what melancholy must be his! He wished to see him, to talk to him, to listen to him, to make his desolation his own. He hurried to Burckhardt's house; but Burckhardt, though the hour was early, had gone out. Nietzsche walked the roads like a desperate man. Finally he went back. Jacob Burckhardt was in his study, and awaited him. He had gone to seek his friend, as his friend had gone to[Pg 115] seek him. The two men remained for long together, and Frulein Nietzsche, alone in the next room, heard their sobs through the closed door.
