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"Our duty is not to take shelter in metaphysics, but actively to sacrifice ourselves to the birth of culture. Hence my severity against misty idealism."
At that instant Nietzsche had almost reached the term of his thought, but with great labour and consequent suffering. Headaches, pains in the eyes and stomach, laid hold of him once more. The softest light hurt him,[Pg 143] he was obliged to give up reading. Nevertheless, his thought never halted. He was again occupied with the philosophers of tragic Greece; he listened to the words which come down to us diminished by the centuries, but always firm. He heard the concert of the everlasting responses—
Thales. Everything derives from a unique element. Anaximander. The flux of things is their punishment. Heraclitus. A law governs the flux and the institution of things.
Parmenides. The flux and the institution of things is illusion. The One alone exists.
Anaxagoras. All qualities are eternal; there is no becoming.
The Pythagoreans. All qualities are quantities. Empedocles. All causes are magical. Democritus. All causes are mechanical. Socrates. Nothing is constant except thought.
Friedrich Nietzsche is moved by these opposing voices, by these rhythms of thought which accuse nature in their eternal collisions. "The vicissitudes of the ideas and systems of man affect me more tragically than the vicissitudes of real life," said Hlderlin. Nietzsche's feeling was the same. He admired and envied those primitives who discovered nature and who found the first answers. He threw aside the devices of art, he confronted life as dipus confronted the Sphinx, and under this very title dipus he wrote a fragment to the mysterious language of which we may open our ears.
dipus. I call myself the last philosopher because I am the last man. I speak alone and I hear my voice sounding like that of a dying man. With thee, dear voice, whose breath brings to me the last memories of[Pg 144] all human happiness, with thee let me speak yet a moment more: thou wilt deceive my solitude; thou wilt give me back the illusion of society and love, because my heart will not believe that love is dead. It cannot endure the terror of the most solitary solitude, and forces me to speak as if I were two. Is it thou that I hear, my voice? Thou murmurest, and thou cursest? Yet—thy malediction should rend the entrails of the world! Alas, in spite of everything it subsists, more dazzling and colder than ever; it looks at me with its stars pitilessly; it exists blind and deaf as before, and nothing dies but man. And yet, you still speak to me, beloved voice! I die not alone in this universe. I, the last man: the last plaint, your plaint, dies with me. Misery, misery! pity me, the last man of misery, dipus!
It seems that Nietzsche, now at the extreme limits of his thought, experiences a sudden need of rest. He wants to speak to his friends, to feel himself surrounded by them and diverted. The Easter holidays in 1873 gave him a fortnight's release. He left for Bayreuth, where he was not expected.
"I leave this evening," he writes to Frulein von Meysenbug. "Guess where I am going? You've guessed, and, height of bliss, I shall meet the best of men, Rohde, to-morrow at half-past four. I shall be staying with Wagner, and then see me quite happy! We shall speak much of you, much of Gersdorff. He has copied my lectures, you say? It touches me, and I will not forget it. What good friends I have! It is really shameful.
"I hope to bring back from Bayreuth courage and gaiety, and to strengthen myself in everything that is good. I dreamt last night that I was having my Gradus ad Parnassum carefully rebound. This mixture of bookbinding[Pg 145] and symbolism is comprehensible; moreover, very insipid. But it is a truth! It is necessary from time to time to rebind ourselves by frequenting men more valorous and stronger than ourselves or else we lose a few of our pages, then a few more, still a few more, until the last page is destroyed. And that our life should be a Gradus ad Parnassum, that also is a truth that we must often repeat to ourselves. The future to which I shall attain if I take plenty of trouble, if I have a little happiness and much time, is to become a more sober writer, and from the first and ever better to pursue my calling as a man of letters more soberly. From time to time I feel a childish repugnance to printed paper, I think that I see soiled paper. And I can very well picture a period when reading was not much liked, writing even less so; but one far preferred to think a lot, and to act still more. For everything to-day awaits that efficacious man, who, condemning in himself and us our millenarian routines, will live better and will give us his life to imitate."
Friedrich Nietzsche left for Bayreuth.
He there learnt a piece of unexpected news. Money was lacking. Of the twelve hundred thousand francs needed, eight hundred thousand only had been realised with great difficulty. The enterprise was compromised and perhaps ruined. Everyone was losing heart. The master alone was confident and calm. Since he had attained his manhood, he had desired to possess a theatre. He knew that a constant will prevails over chance, and a few months of crisis did not alarm him after forty years of waiting. Capitalists from Berlin, Munich, Vienna, London, and Chicago were making proposals to him which Richard Wagner invariably refused to entertain. He wished his theatre to belong to himself alone, and to[Pg 146] be near him: "It is not a question of the success of the affair," he said, "but of awakening the hidden forces of the German soul." But his remarkable serenity failed to reassure his friends. A panic was engendered at Bayreuth, and no one again dared to hope.
Friedrich Nietzsche looked on, listened, observed, and then fled to Naumburg. "My despair was deep," he has written; "there was nothing that did not seem criminal to me." He was rediscovering the world after ten months of solitude, and finding it even more cowardly and more miserable than he had ever judged it to be. There was worse to endure, for he was discontented with himself. He recalled his last meditations. "I call myself the last philosopher, because I am the last man." And he questioned himself: Was he really "the last philosopher "? "the last man "? Had he not flattered himself in assigning himself a rle so difficult and magnificent? Had he not been ungrateful, cowardly, and vile, like the others, in abandoning the struggle at the decisive moment to shut himself up in his solitude and his selfish dreams? Had he not forgotten his master? He accused himself; remorse accentuated his despair. "I should not think of myself," was his reproach—" Wagner alone is a hero—Wagner, so great in misfortune, great as of old at Triebschen. It is he whom we must serve. I must henceforth be vowed to help him."
It had been his intention to publish a few chapters of his book on The Philosophers of Tragic Greece. He abstained from this delight; put away in a drawer—not without a pang—his almost finished manuscript. He wished to "spit out lava," to insult Germany and treat her like a brute, since, imbecile brute that she was, she would only yield to brutality.
"I return from Bayreuth in such a state of persistent melancholy," he wrote to Rohde, "that the only hope for me is holy wrath."
Friedrich Nietzsche looked for no joy in the work which he was about to undertake. To attack is to recognise, to condescend, to lower oneself. He would have preferred to have had no traffic with base humanity. But here was Richard Wagner; was it to be borne that he should be tormented and trammelled? that the Germans should sadden him as they saddened Goethe, and break him, as they broke Schiller? To-morrow other men of genius would be born: was it not necessary to fight from to-day to assure them their liberty and the freedom of their lives? It is impossible to ignore the masses that beset us. It is a bitter destiny, but one that may not be eluded. It is the destiny of the best-born, and above all of the best Germans, heroes begotten and misunderstood by a race insensible to beauty.
