Page 28 of 79
In all this there was an irritating atmosphere of snobbery and excessive religiosity. Yet Frulein von Meysenbug was an exquisite woman with irreproachable intentions, pure with that purity which purifies all that it touches: Nietzsche did not practise his criticism on this friend's letters. He soon felt the fatigue of continuous work. He lost his sleep and was obliged to rest. Travel had often lightened his mind. He set out, at the end of summer, for Italy, and went as far as Bergamo but no further. This country, which he was afterwards to love so much, displeased him. "Here reigns the Apollonian cult," Frulein von Meysenbug, who was[Pg 134] staying at Florence, told him; "it is good to bathe in." Nietzsche was very little of an Apollonian. He perceived only voluptuousness, excessive sweetness, harmony of line. His German tastes were disconcerted and he returned to the mountains, where he became, as he wrote, "more audacious and more noble." There, in a poor village inn at Splgen, he had a few days of happiness.
"Here, on the extreme border of Switzerland and Italy," he wrote in August, 1872, to Gersdorff, "I am alone, and I am very well satisfied with my choice. A rich and marvellous solitude, with the most magnificent roads in the world, along which I go meditating for hours, buried in my thoughts, and yet I never fall over a precipice. And whenever I look around me there is something new and great to see. No sign of life except when the diligence arrives and stops for relays. I take my meals with the men, our one contact. They pass like the Platonic shadows before my cave."
Until now Nietzsche had not cared much for high mountains; he preferred the moderate valleys and woods of the Jura, which reminded him of his native country, the hills of the Saale and Bohemia. At Splgen a new joy was revealed to him; the joy of solitude and of meditation in the mountain air. It was like a flash of lightning. He went down to the plains and forgot; but six years later, with the knowledge of his eternal loneliness on him, he found, sheltered in mean inns like this one, once again the same lyrical lan that he had discovered in October, 1872.
He soon left his sanctuary and returned without vexation to Basle, whither his professional duties drew him. There he had made friendships and established a way of life. He liked the town, and tolerated the inhabitants. Basle had truly become his centre. "Overbeck and[Pg 135] Romundt, my companions of table and of thought," he writes to Rohde, "are the best society in the world. With them I cease my lamentations and my gnashing of teeth. Overbeck is the most serious, the most broad-minded of philosophers, and the most simple and amiable of men. He has that radical temper, failing which I can agree with no one."
His first impression on his return was trying. All his pupils left him. He was not at a loss to understand the reason of this exodus; the German philologists had declared him to be "a man scientifically dead." They had condemned him personally, and put an interdict upon his lectures. "The Holy Vehmgericht has done its duty well," he wrote to Rohde. "Let us act as if nothing had happened. But I do not like the little University to suffer on my account, it hurts me. We lose twenty entries in the last half-year. I can hardly as much as give a course on Greek and Latin rhetoric. I have two pupils, one is a Germanist, the other a Jurist."
At last he received some comfort. Rohde had written in defence of his book an article which no review would accept. Weary of refusal, he touched up his work and published it under the form of a letter addressed to Richard Wagner. Nietzsche thanked him. "Nobody dared to print my name," he wrote to Rohde.
"... It was as if I had committed a crime, and now your book comes, so ardent, so daring a witness to our fraternal combat! My friends are delighted with it. They are never tired of praising you, for the details and the whole; they think your polemics worthy of a Lessing. ... What pleases me most is the deep and threatening clamour of it, like the sound of a waterfall. We must be brave, dear, dear friend. I always have faith in progress, in our progress. I believe that we will always go on increasing in loyal ambitions, and in strength. I believe[Pg 136] in the success of our advance towards ends more noble yet, and more aspiring. Yes, we will reach them, and then as conquerors, who discover goals yet further off, we shall push on, always brave! What does it matter to us that they will be few, so few, those spectators whose eyes can follow the path we are pursuing? What does it matter if we have for spectators only those who have the necessary qualities for judging this combat? All the crowns which my time might give me I sacrifice to that unique spectator, Wagner. The ambition to satisfy him animates me more, and more nobly, than any other influence. Because he is difficult and he says everything, what pleases him and what displeases him; he is my good conscience, to praise and to punish."
At the commencement of December, Nietzsche was lucky enough to find his master again for a few hours, and to live with him in the intimate way that reminded him of the days at Triebschen. Wagner, passing through Strassburg, called to him; and he went at once. The meeting was untroubled by any discord, a harmony now, no doubt, rare enough; for Cosima Wagner, after having remarked this in one of her letters, expressed the hope that such perfect hours would suffice to dissipate all misunderstandings and to prevent their recrudescence.
Nietzsche worked a great deal during these last months of 1872. His studies on the tragic philosophies of the Greeks were well advanced; he left them over. Those wise men had restored his serenity, and he profited by the help which they had given him to contemplate once more the problems of his century. The problems—this is hardly a correct expression, for he knew of only one. He questioned himself how a culture should be founded, that is to say, a harmony of traditions, of rules, of beliefs, by submission to which a man may become nobler.[Pg 137] Actual modern societies have for their end the production of certain comforts; how should different societies be substituted which would not only satisfy men, but benefit them? Let us know our wretchedness; we are stripped of culture. Our thoughts and our acts are not ruled by the authority of any style; the idea even of such an authority is lost to us. We have perfected in an extraordinary manner the discipline of knowledge, and we seem to have forgotten that others exist. We succeed in describing the phenomena of life, in translating the Universe into an abstract language, and we scarcely perceive that, in writing and translating thus, we lose the reality of the Universe of Life. Science exercises on us a "barbarising action," wrote Nietzsche. He analysed this action.
"The essential point of all science has become merely accessory, or else it is entirely absent.
"The study of languages—without the discipline of style and rhetoric.
"Indian studies—without philosophy.
"Classical antiquity—without a suspicion of how closely everything in it is bound up with practical efforts.
"The sciences of nature—without that beneficent and serene atmosphere which Goethe found in them.
"History—without enthusiasm.
"In short, all the sciences without their practical uses, that is to say, studied otherwise than as really cultivated men would study them. Science as a means of livelihood."
It is necessary, therefore, that the sense of beauty, of virtue, and of strong and regulated passions should be restored. How can a philosopher employ himself in this task? Alas! the experience of antiquity teaches and discourages us. The philosopher is a hybrid being, half logician, half artist, a poet, an apostle, who constructs[Pg 138] his dreams and his commandments in a logical manner. Men listen willingly enough to poets and apostles, they do not listen to philosophers, they are not moved by their analyses and their deductions. Consider that long line of genius, the philosophers of tragic Greece. What did they realise? Their lives were given in vain to their race. Empedocles alone moved the mob, but he was as much a magician as philosopher; he invented myths and poems; he was eloquent, he was magnificent; it was the legend, and not the thought of Empedocles, that was effective. Pythagoras founded a sect, a philosopher cannot hope for more: his labour grouped together a few friends, a few disciples, who passed over the human masses like a ripple on the ocean; not one of the great philosophers has swayed the people, writes Nietzsche. Where they have failed, who will succeed? It is impossible to found a popular culture on philosophy.
