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Towards mid-December, he accompanied Richard Wagner to Mannheim, where a two days' festival was being devoted to the works of the master.

"Oh, what a pity you were not there!" he wrote to Erwin Rohde. "All the sensations, all the recollections of art, what are they compared to these? I am like a man whose ideal has been realised. It is Music, and Music alone!... When I say to myself that a certain number of men of the generations to come—at least some hundreds among them—will be moved by this music as I am myself, I cannot augur for less than an entire renewal of our culture!"

He returned to his house in Basle: but the impression of his days in Mannheim remained with him. The[Pg 120] details of his everyday life caused him a strange and tenacious disgust. "All that cannot be translated into music," he wrote, "is repulsive and repugnant to me.... I have a horror of reality. Or, rather, I no longer see anything of the real, it is only a phantasmagoria." Under the stress of this emotion he acquired a clearer view of the problem which occupied him, he formulated more clearly the principle for which he was seeking. To "teach," to "uplift" men, what does that mean? It is to dispose their minds in such sort that the productions of genius will be assured, not of the understanding of all, for that cannot be, but of the respect of all.

As in the preceding years, Richard and Cosima Wagner invited him to spend Christmas at Triebschen. He excused himself; the work of his lectures occupied all his time. He offered Cosima Wagner, by way of homage, a musical fantasy on Saint Sylvester's Night, composed some weeks earlier. "I am very impatient to know what they will think of it down there," he wrote to Rohde. "I have never been criticised by any competent person." In reality, good judges had already often discouraged his musical enterprises, but he soon forgot their vexatious advice.

On the last day of 1871, his book appeared: Die Gebrt der Tragdie aus dem Geiste der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music). The sub-title which the current editions give, Hellenism and Pessimism, was added in 1885 on the issue of the second edition. Friedrich Nietzsche sent the first copy to Richard Wagner, from whom he received almost at once a frenzied letter.

"DEAR FRIEND,—I have never read a finer book than yours. It is all splendid! At this moment, I write to you very hurriedly because the reading has profoundly[Pg 121] moved me, and I expect that I wait for the return of my sang-froid to re-read you methodically. I said to Cosima: After you, he it is whom I love most; and then, at a long distance, Lenbach, who has made so striking and so true a portrait of me.... Adieu! Come soon to see us!

"Yours,

"R. W."

On the 10th of January Wagner wrote again:

"You have just published a book which is incomparable. All the influences which you may have undergone are reduced to nothing by the character of your book: what distinguishes it from every other, is the complete confidence with which a penetrating individuality displays itself. It is here that you satisfy the ardent desire of myself and of my wife: in short, a strange voice might have been talking of us, and we would have fully approved it! Twice we have read your book from the first line to the last—in the daytime, separately—at night, together—and we were lamenting that we had not at our disposal that second copy which you had promised. We deliver battle over that sole copy. I am constantly in need of it; between my breakfast and my working hours, it is it that sets me going; for since I have read you, I have begun again to work on my last act. Our readings, whether together or separately, are constantly interrupted by our exclamations. I am not yet recovered from the emotion which I experienced. There is the condition we are in!"

And Cosima Wagner wrote, for her part: "Oh, how fine your book is! How beautiful it is and how profound, how profound it is and how audacious!" On January 16th he delivered his first lecture. His[Pg 122] joy, his sense of security, were extreme. He knew that Jacob Burckhardt read and approved him; he knew that he had the admiration of Rohde, Gersdorff, Overbeck. "What they say of my book is incredible," he wrote to a friend. "... I have concluded an alliance with Wagner. You cannot imagine how we are bound to one another, and how identical are our views." He conceived his second work without delay; he would publish his lectures. It would be a popular book, an exoteric translation of his Tragedy. But the idea of an even more decisive action at once supervened. Germany was preparing to inaugurate the new University of Strassburg; and an apotheosis of professors on a soil that had been conquered by soldiers awoke the indignation of Friedrich Nietzsche. He wished to address a pamphlet to Bismarck, "under the form of an interpellation in the Reichstag." Have our pedants, he would ask, the right to go in triumph to Strassburg? Our soldiers have conquered the French soldiers, and that is glorious. But has our culture humiliated French culture? Who would dare to say so?

Some days went by. Whence came the less happy tone of his letters? Why was it that he did not write his interpellation, that he gave up the idea of it? We know: except for a few friends who had understood his book, no one read it, no one bought it; not a review, not a newspaper deigned to take notice of it. Ritchsl, the great philologist of Leipsic, kept silent. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote to him: "I want to know what you think." He received in reply a severe criticism and a reproof. Erwin Rohde offered an article for the Litterarische Centralblatt; it was not inserted. "It was the last chance of a serious voice being upraised for me in a scientific sheet," he wrote to Gersdorff; "now I expect nothing more—except spite or idiocy. But, as[Pg 123] I have told you, I count upon the peaceful journey of my book through the centuries with perfect confidence. For in it certain eternal verities are said for the first time: they must resound...."

Certainly Friedrich Nietzsche had not foreseen his ill-success: it astonished and disconcerted him. A sore throat obliged him to interrupt his lectures, and he found pleasure in the contretemps. He had let himself be drawn towards ideas which were very lofty and delicate, and difficult even to himself. He wished to show that two sorts of schools should be instituted, the one professional, for the majority; the other, classical and truly superior, for an infinitesimal number of chosen individuals, whose course would be extended as far as their thirtieth year. How was this isolated circle, aloof from the common herd, to be formed, and how was it to be taught? Friedrich Nietzsche recurred to his most intimate and familiar thought, to that aristocratic ideal to which his meditations always led him. He had often studied its problems. But to examine them in public he needed his whole strength, and also a sympathetic audience. He felt that he had been weakened by the failure of his book. His very slight indisposition did not last long: nevertheless he did not return to his lectures. It was vain to ask him to do so: he refused. It was vain to press him to have them published; Richard Wagner strongly insisted: he eluded this insistence. His notes have come to us in a sorry condition of incompleteness and disorder. They are the echoes, the vestiges of a dream.

"The aristocracy of the mind must conquer its entire liberty in respect of the State, which is now keeping Science in curb.