Page 43 of 79
"The man I venerate most," said he to Frulein von Meysenbug, "is Mazzini."
Could Frulein von Meysenbug have guessed that her young companion, this young, tender, and enthusiastic German, had just declared war within himself on those instincts of tenderness and enthusiasm which obstructed the clarity of his views?—that Nietzsche, the continuator of Schopenhauer, the friend of Wagner, was now choosing La Rochefoucauld, Chamfort, Stendhal for masters? Could she have guessed that this friend who dreamed with her of setting up a lay cloister was training himself, during his long walks, to face the melancholy of a life of revolt and of solitude? He formulated the rules of such a life:
You must neither love nor hate the people.
You must in no way occupy yourself with politics.
You must be neither rich nor poor.
You must avoid the path of those who are illustrious and powerful.
You must take a wife from outside your people.
You must leave to your friends the care of bringing up your children.
You must accept none of the ceremonies of the Church.
Frulein von Meysenbug knew at last. One day Nietzsche handed to her a pile of MSS. "Read," said he; "here are some impressions which came to me down there, under that tree; I have never sat down in its shade[Pg 202] without plucking a thought." Frulein von Meysenbug read, and discovered an unsuspected Nietzsche, a critic and a denier. "Do not publish that," she said. "Wait, reflect!" Nietzsche's only answer was a smile. She insisted; the conversation grew animated; they made peace in reading Thucydides.
At the beginning of May, Nietzsche, incommoded by the heat, wished to leave. Frulein von Meysenbug wanted him to postpone his departure in order that he might master his first fatigue before he began the trying voyage. He would not listen to her.
"Nietzsche is really going to-morrow," she wrote to Re; "you know that when he is thus determined upon something he carries it out, even though the sky sends the most serious warnings to turn him from it. In that he is no longer a Greek, as he is not attentive to oracles. Just as, in the most frightful weather, he starts out on an excursion, so now he goes, tired to death, in defiance of the raging wind which is lashing up the sea, and will certainly make him ill, for he is determined to make the voyage from Naples to Genoa by sea."
"Yes, he has gone," she wrote in another letter. "The charm of Sorrento in flower could not keep him; he must go, but it is horribly painful to me to let him travel thus; he is unpractical and so bad at extricating himself from a difficulty. Luckily the sea is a little calmer to-day.... Alas, there is so much to regret! Eight days ago we had sketched plans for his near and distant future. Was his brusque resolution dictated by a feverish desire to fly from his malady, which he suddenly fancied had some connection with our spring temperature, which is truly a little abnormal? But how could he have been any better elsewhere this miserable spring? I think that at the last moment it occurred to him[Pg 203] that his departure was nevertheless precipitate. But it was too late.... This melancholy multiplication of departures has quite upset me...."
Friedrich Nietzsche went to take a cure at the waters of Rosenlaui. He experienced very little benefit from it, and his immediate future preoccupied his thoughts. In September he had to resume his professorial duties. It was his daily bread, and a daily discipline from which he feared to be freed. But he also knew the horrible ennui of it. He had been given reason to hope that the authorities at Basle would consent to grant him, in consideration of his services and of his illness, a definite discharge with a sufficient pension. Frulein von Meysenbug advised him to retire; his sister, on the contrary, advised him to retain his office, and Nietzsche chose to listen to his sister. But the nearer came the date of his return, the more lively grew his revolt.
"It is a thing which I know, which I feel," he then wrote to a woman who was helping him in his work, the mother of one of his pupils, Marie Baumgarten, "that I have in store a loftier destiny. I can make use of Philology, but I am more than a Philologist. 'I misrepresent myself.' Such was the persistent theme of my last ten years. Now that a year of retired life has made everything so visible and so clear (I cannot express how rich I feel and how much of a creator of joy, in spite of every affliction, as soon as I am left alone with myself), now, I tell you with complete confidence that I am not returning to Basle to stay there. How will it come about? I do not know, but my liberty (Ah! how modest my material necessities are; little matters to me), my liberty, I shall conquer it for myself."
His sister came to join him at Basle and lived with him. At first his pleasure was great, but he soon recognised that he could not talk with this girl who was altogether a Wagnerian and quite devoted to the ideas of Bayreuth. Paul Re was the only man whose company he liked; but Paul Re was detained in North Germany by considerations of health, and could not, as Nietzsche had hoped, come to Basle.
"I hope that I shall soon learn," he wrote to him, "that the evil demons of sickness are leaving you in peace. All that I wish for you in the New Year is that you remain as you are, and that you remain for me as you have been.... Let me tell you that friendship has never been so sweet to me as in this last year, thanks to you.... When I hear of your work, my mouth waters, for I desire to be with you so much. We have been made to understand each other aright; we always come together, I think, like good neighbours, to whom the idea occurs, at the same moment, that they should pay each other a visit, and who meet on the confines of their lands.... When shall we have a good conversation upon human affairs, a personal, not an epistolary conversation?"
In December he wrote to Re: "Ten times a day I wish to be near you." Nevertheless he finished his book, or, to be more accurate, he did not finish it, for he preserved the attractive freedom of his notes. It was thus that they came to him, one after another, without any connection; and it pleased him that they should thus remain. His deplorable health prevented him from putting a weft across them, from imposing an order upon them. And what did it matter? He recalled those French writers whose loyalty he loved: Pascal, Larochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, Montaigne. He wished[Pg 205] to leave, after their example, some disorder and some discontinuity in his thoughts. He wished to write a simple book which should call the most urgent enthusiasts back to prudence. Round Wagner and Bayreuth, "beautiful souls" were innumerable. Friedrich Nietzsche, who had just missed being one of these, wished, by talking in the manner of old Socrates, to make them feel the absurdity of their faith. Human, All Too Human, was the title which he had chosen. Right at the end of his conscious life, he recounted the object of his book.
"A torch in my hand," he writes, "and the light not smoky,[1] I have cast a lively light upon this subterranean world of the Ideal. It is war, but war without powder and without smoke, without war-like attitudes, without pathos, without dislocated limbs—all that would still be 'idealism.' Error after error, I took them and placed them on the ice, and the ideal was not even refuted—it froze. Here, for example, freezes 'the Genius'; in this other corner freezes 'the Saint'; beneath a thick stopper of frozen ice 'the Hero'; and, lastly, it is 'the Faith' which freezes, she who is named 'Conviction'; and then here is 'Pity,' which notably grows cold—in fact, nearly everywhere freezes 'the thing in itself.'"
