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"Why is Wagner so distrustful?" Nietzsche wrote in his diary; "it excites distrust."
Wagner was as dictatorial as he was distrustful. The days had become rare when he could converse at leisure with nobleness and freedom as he had done at Triebschen. He spoke briefly, he commanded.
Nietzsche was still ready to go on a mission to Northern Germany to speak, write, and found Vereine, and to "thrust under the noses of the German savants the things which their timid eyes failed to perceive." Wagner would not accept this proposal; he wished Nietzsche to publish his lectures on The Future of our Educational Systems. Nietzsche resisted a desire in which he thought he detected a certain egotism.
"Our Herr Nietzsche only wants to do what he likes," exclaimed the irritable Wagner.
His anger saddened and humiliated Nietzsche both on his own account and on his master's. He thought, "Ill, weighed down with work, have I no right to respect? Am I under any one's orders? Why is Wagner so tyrannical?"[Pg 130] We read in his diary, "Wagner has not the strength to make those around him free and great. Wagner is not loyal; he is, on the contrary, suspicious and haughty."
At the same time there appeared a pamphlet, The Philology of the Future, a reply to F. Nietzsche. The author was Willamowitz, who had been Nietzsche's comrade at the school of Pforta.
"DEAR FRIEND," he wrote to Gersdorff, who informed him of the pamphlet, "Don't worry over me. I am ready. I will never entangle myself in polemics. It is a pity it should be Willamowitz. Do you know that he came last autumn to pay me a friendly visit? Why should it be Willamowitz?"
Wagner, at whom the title itself of the pamphlet, The Philology of the Future, was aimed—it parodied his famous formula, The Music of the Future—wrote a reply, and profited by the occasion to renew his invitation to Friedrich Nietzsche.
"What must one think of our schools of culture?" he concludes. "It is for you to tell us what German culture ought to be, so as to direct the regenerated nation towards the most noble objects." Once again Nietzsche was firm in his determination. He was by no means satisfied with these lectures, being discontented with their form and uncertain even of their thought. "I do not wish to publish anything as to which my conscience is not as pure as that of the seraphim." He tried to express his Wagnerian faith in another style.
"I should have so much pleasure," he wrote to Rohde, "in writing something for the service of our cause, but I don't know what. All that I advance is so wounding, such an irritant, and more likely to hurt than to serve.[Pg 131] Why should my poor book, nave and enthusiastic as it was, have been received so badly? Singular! Now, what shall we do, we others?"
He began to write Reden eines Hoffenden (Words of a Man of Hope), which he soon gave up.
Friedrich Nietzsche re-opened his Greek books, so invariably beautiful and satisfying. He explained—before very few pupils, because the evil fame of the Gebrt withdrew young philologists from him—the Choephores of schylus and some passages of ante-Platonic philosophy.
Across a gulf of twenty-five centuries that clear radiance descended upon him, scattering all doubts and shadows. Nietzsche often heard with misgiving the fine words which it pleased his Wagnerian friends to use. "Millions of men embrace each other," the chorus sang at Bayreuth in the work of Wagner. It sang well, but, after all, men did not embrace each other; and here Nietzsche suspected a certain extravagance, a certain falsehood. Look at the ancient Greeks, those ambitious and evil men. They do not embrace each other much, their hymns never speak of embraces. They desire to excel, and are devoured by envy; their hymns glorify these passions. Nietzsche liked their nave energy, their precise speech. He refreshed himself at this source and wrote a short essay: Homer's Wettkampf (The Homeric Joust). We find ourselves driven at the very beginning far away from the Wagnerian mysticism.
"When you speak of Humanity," he writes, "you imagine an order of sentiment by which man distinguishes himself from nature, but such a separation does not exist; these qualities called 'natural' and those called 'human' grow together and are blended. Man in his noblest aspirations is still branded by sinister nature.
"These formidable tendencies which seem inhuman are perhaps the fruitful soil which supports all humanity, its agitations, its acts, and its work.
"Thus it is that the Greeks, the most human of all men, remain cruel, happy in destruction."
This rapid sketch was the occupation of a few days. Nietzsche undertook a long work. He studied the texts of Thales, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Empedocles. He tried to approach those philosophers who were truly worthy of the name which they themselves had invented, those masters of life, scornful of argument and of books; citizens and at the same time thinkers, and not dracins like those who followed them—Socrates and his school of mockers, Plato and his school of dreamers, philosophers of whom each one dares to bring a philosophy of his own, that is to say, an individual point of view in the consideration of things, in the deliberation of acts. Nietzsche, in a few days, filled a copybook with notes.
All the same, he continued to be interested in the successes of his glorious friend. In July Tristan was played at Munich. He went, and met many other disciples; Gersdorff, Frulein von Meysenbug, whom he had met at the May festivals of Bayreuth. She had preserved, despite her fifty years, that tender charm that never left her, and the physical grace of a frail and nervous body. Friedrich Nietzsche passed some pleasant days in the company of his comrade and his new friend. All three regretted them when they were gone, and at the moment of departure expressed a hope of meeting each other soon again. Gersdorff wished to return in August to hear Tristan, and once more Nietzsche promised to be there, but at the last moment Gersdorff was unable to be present, and Nietzsche had not the courage to return alone to Munich. "It is insupportable," he wrote to Frulein von Meysenbug, "to find yourself face to face with an art so serious and profound. In short, I[Pg 133] remain at Basle." Parmenides, on whom he was meditating, consoled him for the loss of Tristan.
Frulein von Meysenbug kept Nietzsche advised of all news, whether trivial or important, in connection with the Wagnerian campaign. The master had just terminated The Twilight of the Gods, the last of the four dramas of the Tetralogy. He had at last finished his great work. Frulein von Meysenbug was informed in a note written to her by Cosima Wagner. "In my heart I hear sung 'Praise be to God,'" wrote the wife. "Praise be to God," repeated Frulein von Meysenbug, and she adds—these few words indicate the tone of the place and of the time: "The disciples of the new spirit need new mysteries by which they may solemnise together their instinctive knowledge. Wagner creates them in his tragic works, and the world will not have recovered its beauty until we have built for the new Dionysian myth a Temple worthy of it." Frulein von Meysenbug confided to Nietzsche the measures she was taking to win Marguerite of Savoy, the Queen of Italy, to the cause, and to make her accept the Presidency of a small circle of noble patronesses. A few women of the highest aristocracy, friends of Liszt's, initiated by him into the Wagnerian cult, composed this sublime Verein.
