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"Let us avow it," he writes to his friend, the Baron von Gersdorff, "we are all, with all our past, responsible for the terrors which menace us to-day. We shall do wrong, if we consider with a peaceful conceit the unchaining of a war against culture, and if we impute the fault merely to the unfortunates who do the deed. When I heard of the firing of Paris, I was for some days utterly powerless, lost in tears and doubts; the life of science, of philosophy and of art appeared to me as an absurdity when I saw a single day suffice for the ruin of the finest works of art; what do I say?—of entire periods of art. I profoundly deplored the fact that the metaphysical value of art could not manifest itself to the lower classes; but it has a higher mission to fulfil. Never, however lively my affliction were, would I have cast the stone at the sacrilegious, who in my eyes are only carriers of the mistake of all—a mistake which gives cause for much thought...."
In the autobiographical notes written in 1878 these words may be read: "The War: my profoundest affliction, the burning of the Louvre."
Friedrich Nietzsche had gone back to his old way of life; almost every week he was Wagner's guest. But soon he perceived that since the German victory Triebschen had changed. Too many intimates made haste to the master's house, too many unknown people invaded the abode whose peaceful seclusion he had loved. They were not all of the sort that Nietzsche would have desired; but Wagner talked, discoursed, overflowed with them all.[Pg 116] Judging that the favourable moment had come, he had set out to rouse Germany and secure at last the construction and gift of the hall which he needed, the theatre, or the temple, of Bayreuth.
Friedrich Nietzsche heard and took part in these discussions with an uneasy ardour. Wagner's idea exalted him. But he had the soul of a solitary, and could not help being worried, and sometimes shocked, by these noises from the world which had to be tolerated. Wagner did not suffer: on the contrary, he seemed elated by the joy of feeling the crowd nearer to him; and Nietzsche, a little surprised, a little disappointed, sought, without precisely finding again, his hero. "To sway the people," he had written in his student notebooks, "is to put passions in the service of an idea." Wagner adapted himself to work of this kind. In the service of his art and of his fame he accepted all the passions. A Chauvinist with the Chauvinists, an idealist with the idealists, as much of a Gallophobe as was desired; restoring the schylian tragedy for some, for others re-animating the old German myths; willingly a pessimist, a Christian if it pleased, sincere moreover from moment to moment, this prodigious being, a great leader of men as well as a great poet, handled his compatriots most dexterously.
No one could resist the impulse which he gave: every one had to yield and to follow. He fixed the very details of the plans of the theatre whose site had just been chosen. He studied the practical organisation of the work, and laboured to create those Vereine in which propagandists and subscribers were to be grouped. He set himself out to procure rare and unexpected delights for the faithful. One day he surprised them with a performance for their benefit alone, in the gardens of Triebschen, of the Siegfried-Idyll, a gracious interlude written for the churching of his wife, a noble echo of the[Pg 117] most intimate times. He gave Nietzsche his rle, for he could not allow that voice, so passionate and hard to control, and yet so eloquent, to be lost. The young man offered to set out on a mission. He would stir up those circles in Northern Germany, so slow and heavy in its emotions. Bus proposal was not accepted; Wagner, no doubt, feared the violence of his apostolate: "No," he said to him, "finish and publish your book." Nietzsche felt somewhat melancholy at the refusal. Henceforth, it seems, difficulties began to arise between the two.
Moreover, the advice of the master was less easy to follow than it seemed. The Origin of Tragedy did not find a publisher. Nietzsche's applications failed, and his summer was spoilt by the check. He decided to print certain chapters of it in the reviews. "I put my little book into the world bit by bit," he wrote in July to Erwin Rohde; "what a childbirth! what tortures!"
At the beginning of October he was staying at Leipsic. Here he saw again his master Ritschl, and his friends Rohde, Gersdorff, who had come to meet him, and spent with them some happy days of conversation and comradeship. But the fate of his book remained uncertain: all the publishers of scientific and philological works bowed the author out. They were not tempted by a bizarre work, in which learning was allied with lyricism and the problems of ancient Greece with the problems of modern Germany. "The book is a centaur," said Nietzsche. This mythological assurance did not satisfy the book-sellers. Finally he had to address himself, not without regret—for he maintained that his work was a scientific work—to Richard Wagner's publisher, from whom he received, after a month's delay, a favourable reply. He wrote to his friend Gersdorff, in a free and relieved tone, which helps us to measure the vexation from which he had suffered.
"BASLE, November 19, 1871. "Pardon me, dear friend, I ought to have thanked you sooner. I had felt in your last letter, in every one of your words, your strong intellectual life. It seemed to me that you remained a soldier at soul and brought your military nature to art and philosophy. And that is good, for we have no right to live to-day, if we are not militants, militants who prepare a sculum to come, something of which we can guess at in ourselves, across our best instants. For those instants, which are what there is of best in us, draw us away in spirit from our time; nevertheless, in some manner, they need to have their hearthstone somewhere: whence I infer that at such instants we feel a confused breath of coming times pass over us. For instance, take our last meeting at Leipsic; has it not left in your memory the impression of such instants, as seemed to be strangers to everything, linked with another century? Whatever may be, this remains, 'Im Ganzen, Vollen, Schnen, resolut zu leben.' But it needs a strong will, such as is not given to the first comer!... To-day, only to-day, the excellent publisher Fritzsch replies to me."
Fritzsch proposed to him that he should give his book the format and character of a recent work of Wagner's: Die Bestimmung der Oper. Nietzsche rejoiced at the idea, and he wrote five concluding chapters which accentuated the Wagnerian tendency of the work. This rapid composition and the correction of the proofs did not deter him from another enterprise.
The Origin of Tragedy was about to appear. He did not doubt for a moment that it would be read, understood, acclaimed. His comrades, his masters, had always acknowledged the strength of his thought. Apparently, it never occurred to him that a vaster public remained callous; but he wished to affect it profoundly, at the first[Pg 119] blow, and he formed new projects by which he might make the most of his success. He wanted to talk: speech was a livelier weapon. He recalled the emotions which he had experienced when, as a young professor, he was given the singular task of teaching the most delicate language, the most difficult works, to chance audiences; he remembered his perhaps fanciful design: that seminary of philologists, that house of study and retreat, of which he was always dreaming. He wanted to denounce the schools, the gymnasia, the Universities, the heavy apparatus of pedantry which was stifling the German spirit, and define the new and necessary institutions, destined, no longer for the emancipation of the masses, but for the culture of the State. He had written to Erwin Rohde as early as the month of March: "A new idea claims me, a new principle of education which points to the entire rejection of oar Universities, of our gymnasia...." In December, he announced at Basle, for January, 1872, a series of lectures upon The Future of our Educational Institutions.
