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Friedrich Nietzsche's thoughts were almost every day diverted by a letter from Bayreuth. He received and read it without bitterness. In a few notes written for himself alone, he fixed the memory of the joys he owed to Wagner. Then answering his friends: "I am with you in the spirit during three-quarters of my days," he told them; "I roam like a shadow around Bayreuth. Do not fear to excite my envy, tell me all the news, dear friends. During my walks I conduct entire pieces of music that I know by heart, and then I grumble and rage. Salute Wagner in my name, salute him deeply! Good-by, my well loved friends, this is for all of you. I love you with all my heart."
Friedrich Nietzsche came back to Basle somewhat the better for his cure. His sister joined him and wished to[Pg 179] stay with him. He continued to lead the wholly meditative and almost happy existence of Steinabad, with his papers, his books, and his piano.
"I dream," he wrote (he underlines these words), "I dream of an association of unrestricted men, who know no circumspection and wish to be called the 'destroyers'; they apply to everything the measure of their criticism, and sacrifice themselves to the truth. Everything that is suspect and false must be brought to light. We do not wish to construct prematurely, we do not know if we can construct, and whether it may not be better to construct nothing. There are cowardly and resigned pessimists; of these we do not wish to be."
He commenced the long studies which he had assigned himself. He examined firstly Dhring's book, The Value of Life. Dhring was a Positivist who led the combat against the disciples of Schopenhauer and Wagner. "All idealism deceives," he told them, "all life that seeks to escape beyond life vows itself to chimera." Friedrich Nietzsche had no objection to offer to these premises. "A sane life carries its worth in itself," said Dhring. "Asceticism is unhealthy and the sequel of an error." "No," answered Nietzsche. Asceticism is an instinct which the most noble, the strongest among men have felt: it is a fact, it must be taken into account if the value of life is to be appreciated. And even if a prodigious error be here indicated as being at work, then the possibility of such an error should be placed amongst the sombre features of being.
"The tragedy of life is not irreducible," said Dhring, "the sovereignty of egoism is only apparent; the altruistic instincts work in the human soul."
Egoism an appearance! exclaimed Nietzsche. Here Dhring falls into childishness. Ich wollte er machte mir[Pg 180] hier nichts vor! God be praised if it were true! He talks nonsense, and if he seriously believes what he says, he is ripe for all the socialisms. Nietzsche finally held out as against Dhring for the tragic philosophy that Heraclitus and Schopenhauer had taught him. There is no possible evasion, all evasion is a lure and a cowardice. Dhring says it and he speaks truly; but he attenuates the task in presenting a sweetened image of that life in which we are set. It is either stupidity or falsehood: life is hard.
Friedrich Nietzsche was gay, or appeared so. In the evening (he did not work because of his eyes) his sister read Walter Scott's novels to him. He liked their simple narration. "The serene art, the andante," he writes; he also liked the heroic, nave, and complicated adventures. "What fellows! what stomachs!" he exclaimed at the recitals of the interminable feasts; and Frulein Nietzsche, seeing him so cheerful, was astonished to hear him a moment later play and develop at great length his Hymn to Solitude.
She was astonished not without reason: the gaiety of her brother was artificial; his sadness was real; he dissembled with her, and doubtless with himself.
He had begun to study Balfour Stewart's book on the conservation of energy: he stopped at the first pages. It was odious to him to work thus without the consolation of art, or the real joy of hoping. He thought he would be more interested in the Indian wisdom, and took up the English translation of the Sutta Nipta. Only too well he understood its radical nihilism.
"When I am ill and in bed," he writes in December to Gersdorff, "I let myself be oppressed by the persuasion that life is without value, and all our ends illusory...." His crises were frequent: every fortnight he was disabled by the headaches, internal cramp, twitching of the eyes, which laid hold of him.
"I wander here and there, alone like a rhinoceros," Nietzsche had kept in mind this final phrase of a chapter of the Sutta Nipta, and applied it to himself with melancholy humour. His best friends were then marrying. Nietzsche was ready to abuse marriage and women: one is rarely sincere when one speaks thus, and we know he was not.
"I have more and better friends than I deserve," he wrote in October, 1874, to Frulein von Meysenbug; "what I now wish myself, I tell you in confidence, is a good wife, and as soon as possible. Then life will have given me all that I shall have asked of it. The rest is my affair."
Friedrich Nietzsche congratulated the fiancs, Gersdorff, Rohde, Overbeck, and rejoiced with them, but felt the difference of his own destiny.
"Be happy," he wrote to Gersdorff, "you who will no longer go wandering here and there, alone like a rhinoceros."
The year 1876 was about to begin, the representations of the Tetralogy were announced for the summer. Friedrich Nietzsche knew that his irresolution must then cease: "I was exhausted," he wrote later, "by the sadness of an inexorable presentiment—the presentiment that after this disillusion I should be condemned to mistrust myself more profoundly, to despise myself more profoundly, to live in a profounder solitude than before."
The impression of the Christmas and New Year festivals, always strong in him, aggravated his melancholy. He fell ill in December, only to get up again in March. He was still weak.
"I find it an effort to write, I shall be brief," he wrote to Gersdorff the 18th January, 1876; "I have never spent[Pg 182] so sad and painful a Christmas or one of such dreadful foreboding. I have had to give up doubting. The malady which has attacked me is cerebral; my stomach, my eyes, give me all this suffering from another cause, whose centre is elsewhere. My father died at the age of thirty-six of inflammation of the brain. It is quite possible that things may go even quicker with me.... I am patient, but full of doubts as to what awaits me. I live almost entirely on milk. It has a good result; I sleep well. Milk and sleep are at present my best foods."
At the approach of spring, he wished to leave Basle: Gersdorff offered to go with him, and the two friends settled on the shores of the Lake of Geneva, at Chillon. They spent a bad fortnight there. Nietzsche's nerves were irritated by the least variation of the atmosphere, which was more or less humid and more or less charged with electricity, and he suffered from the "fhne," a soft wind which melts the snows in March. He let the softness and tepidity depress him, and could not restrain the heartrending expression of his doubts and his agonies. Gersdorff, obliged to return to Germany, went with an uneasy mind on his friend's account.
But Nietzsche felt better once he was left alone. Perhaps finer weather favoured him; perhaps he felt his distress less acutely when the compassionate Gersdorff was not near by, ever ready to lend an ear to his complaints. His humours became less bitter, and chance procured him a decisive relief, a liberating hour. Frulein von Meysenbug had just published her Memoirs of an Idealist. Nietzsche had put these two volumes in his bag. Of this woman of fifty he was very fond, and every day he liked her more. She was always suffering and courageous, always fine and good. He did not put her on the level of Cosima Wagner. The superiority of her mind was not dazzling; but she was[Pg 183] great-hearted, and Nietzsche infinitely esteemed this woman who was faithful to the real genius of women. Doubtless he began reading her book with moderate expectations: yet the work held him. It is one of the most beautiful records of the nineteenth century. Frulein von Meysenbug had gone all through it: she had known all the worlds, all the heroes, all the hopes. Born in old Germany with its petty Courts—her father was Minister in one of them—as a child she had listened to the friends of Humboldt and Goethe; as a young girl, the humanitarian gospel touched her: detached from Christianity, she abandoned its observances. Then came 1848, and its dream; the Socialists, and their essays towards a more noble, a more brotherly life: she admired them, and wanted to work with them. Blamed by her people, she left them and went alone without asking help or advice. An idealist of action, not of dreams, she joined the communists of Hamburg; with them she instituted a sort of phalanstery, a rationalistic school in which the masters lived together. This school prospered under her direction; but, threatened by the police, she had to fly. Next she was in London among its proscripts of all the races, that mournful refuge, and tomb of the vanquished. Frulein von Meysenbug earned her living by giving lessons: she knew Mazzini, Louis Blanc, Herzen: she was the friend and the consoler of these unhappy men. At the time of the second Empire, of Napoleon III., of Bismarck, and of the silence of the peoples—in Paris, with its brilliant culture—Frulein von Meysenbug met Richard Wagner. She had long admired his music: she admired the man, listened to him, succumbed to his ascendancy, and, renouncing the religion of humanity, carried her fervour to the cult of art. But always she exercised and lavished her active goodness: Herzen died; he left two children, whom Frulein von Meysenbug adopted, thus taking upon herself the anxiety of a double[Pg 184] maternity. Friedrich Nietzsche had known these young girls and often admired the tenderness of their friend, her free and sane self-sacrifice: he had not known of what life of entire devotion this devotion was the flower.
