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He returned to Basle and recommenced his course. This duty, which had always been a burden, became heavier still: he was entrusted with the charge of a Greek class for quite young men. He was conscious of the value of his time, and knew that every hour given to the University added to the delay, already so long, of the five years. He suffered from each of them as from a remorse, as though he were failing in his duty as a man of letters.
"I have before me work enough for fifty years," he wrote to his mother in autumn, "and I must mark time under the yoke, and it is with difficulty that I can throw a look to right or left. Alas! (a sigh). The winter has quickly come, very quickly, a very hard one. It will probably be cold at Christmas. Would I bother you if I went to see you? I delight so much in the thought of being once more with you, free for ten days of this cursed University work. So prepare me for Christmas a little corner in the country, where I might end my life in peace and write beautiful books.
"Alas! (a sigh)."
In these moments of depression he was always seized by memories of Wagner, and of the almost serene existence that he had tasted in his intimacy. The glory of the master, a moment faded, went on increasing; the public bowed before success, and Nietzsche, who had fought in the difficult times, had now to stand aside in the hour of triumph. The idea that the art of Wagner was within his reach, always offering the miracle of its "fifteen enchanted worlds "; the idea that Wagner himself was there, offering himself also, ever genial, abundant, laughing, tender, sublime, caressing, and like a god creating life around him: the idea that he had possessed so much beauty, and that, with a little cowardice, he could possess it again, and that never, never again would he possess it; this was an everlasting sadness to Nietzsche.
Finally, giving way to his need of an outlet, he wrote to the one comforter, to Wagner. Like all his other letters to Wagner, this letter is lost, or destroyed; but the tone of the letter which we are about to quote, the tone of Wagner's reply, helps us to imagine its eloquence.
Wagner answered:
"DEAR FRIEND,—Your letter has again made us most anxious on your account. Presently, my wife will write more fully than I. But I have just a quarter of an hour's rest, and I want—to your great annoyance possibly—to devote it to posting you up in what we say of you here. It seems to me, amongst other things, that never have I had in my life such intellectual society as you get in Basle, to amuse you in the evenings. However, if you are all hypochondriacs, it is not a great benefit, I admit. It is, I think, women that you need, you young men of to-day. There is a difficulty, as I well know: as my friend Sulzer used to say, 'Where take women without stealing them?' Besides, one could steal at a pinch. I mean to say you ought to marry, or compose an opera; one would be as good, or as bad, as the other. All the same, I hold that marriage is the better.
"In the meanwhile, I could recommend you a palliative, but you always settle your rgime in advance, so that one can say nothing to you. For example: our household here is so organised that we have a place such as was never offered me in the most difficult moments of my life, here for you: you should come and spend all the summer holidays;—but very prudently, you announced to us, at the beginning of winter, that you had resolved to pass the summer holidays on a very high and very solitary mountain in Switzerland! Does that not look like very careful guarding against a possible invitation? We could be useful to you in some directions: why do you despise that which is offered you in such good part? Gersdorff and all the society of Basle would be happy here: a thousand things are to be seen: I pass in review all my singers of the Nibelungen; the decorator decorates, the machinist machines; and then we are there, in flesh and blood.
"But one knows the eccentricities of friend Nietzsche!
"So I shall say no more about you, because it serves no purpose.
"Ah! mon Dieu! marry a rich woman! O, why should Gersdorff happen to be of the masculine sex! Marry, and then travel, and enrich yourself with those magnificent impressions which you desire so much! And then ... you will compose an opera which, surely, will be terribly difficult to execute. What Satan was it that made a pedagogue of you?
"Now, to end up: next year, in the summer, complete rehearsals (perhaps with orchestra) at Bayreuth. In 1876, the representations. Impossible earlier.
"I bathe every day, I could no longer endure my stomach. Bathe you too! And eat meat like me. "With all my heart,
"Your devoted,
"R. W."
Wagner had foreseen that his letter would be useless. He had not foreseen that it would be hurtful. Nietzsche repented that he had drawn forth these tender offers, which he could not accept. In writing, he had been weak; he was ashamed. Finally, the announcement and the approach of the Bayreuth rehearsals overwhelmed him. Should he go? Should he not go? If he did not go, how was he to excuse himself? Could he still hide his thoughts? Should he henceforth acknowledge all?
He had commenced a fourth "Unseasonable Thought," We other Philologists; he abandoned it, alleging, to explain this abandonment, weariness and the weight of his University duties. When he speaks thus, Nietzsche deceives either himself or us. Christmas came, and he[Pg 172] went to spend ten days at Naumburg with his mother. He was at liberty and could work. But instead of writing, he composed and copied out his Hymn to Friendship for four voices. He spent Saint Sylvester's day in re-reading his youthful compositions: this examination interested him. "I have always seen admiringly," he wrote to Frulein von Meysenbug, "how the invariability of character manifests itself in music. What a child expresses musically is in so clear a manner the language of his most essential nature that the man afterwards desires to revise nothing in it."
This musical debauch was a bad sign of his condition, a sign of weakness and of fear before his thoughts. Two letters, one from Gersdorff, the other from Cosima Wagner, came to disturb his solitary commemoration. His friends spoke to him of Bayreuth. The reminder plunged him in despair.
"Yesterday," he wrote to Frulein von Meysenbug, "on the first day of the year, I saw the future with a real fear. It is terrible and dangerous to live—I should envy him who came by death in an honest manner. For the rest, I am resolved to live to an old age. I have my work. But it is not the satisfaction of living that will help me to grow old. You understand this resolution."
During January and February, 1875, Nietzsche did not work. He let depression get the better of him. "At very rare moments," he writes, "ten minutes every fortnight, I compose a Hymn to Solitude. I will show it in all its dreadful beauty."
In March, Gersdorff came to sojourn in Basle. Nietzsche, encouraged by his arrival, dictated some[Pg 173] notes to him. He seemed to have escaped from his melancholy; then once more he was plunged into it by a fresh sorrow.
It had become his habit, a kindly habit and one conformable to his tastes, to live in common with his two colleagues, Overbeck and Romundt, who formed the intellectual society of which Wagner spoke with such esteem. Now, in February, 1875, Romundt announced to Overbeck and to Nietzsche that he was obliged to leave them to enter into Orders. Nietzsche experienced a feeling of stupefied indignation: for many months he had lived with this man, he called him his friend. Yet he had had no suspicion of the secret vocation now suddenly declared. Romundt had not been open with him. Subjugated by religious faith, he had lacked in simple good faith, and the duties of friendship of which Nietzsche had such an exalted ideal. Romundt's treachery reminded him of another treachery and made it easier for him to understand the news which was rumoured among Wagnerians: the master was about to compose a Christian Mystery—a Parsifal. Nothing was so displeasing to Friedrich Nietzsche as a return to Christianity: nothing seemed to him more weak or cowardly than such a capitulation to the problems of life. Some years before, he had known and admired the different projects on which Wagner conversed with his intimates: he then spoke of Luther, of the Great Frederick; he wished to glorify a German hero and repeat the happy experiment of Die Meistersinger. Why had he abandoned his projects? Why did he prefer Parsifal to Luther? and to the rude and singing life of the German Renaissance, the religiosity of the Graal? Friedrich Nietzsche then understood and measured the perils of the pessimism which accustoms souls to complaint, weakens and predisposes them to mystical consolations. He reproached himself for having taught[Pg 174] Romundt a doctrine too cruel for his courage, and thus to have been the cause of his weakness.
