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This low style of judgment grieved Friedrich Nietzsche. He now proposed to explain, in a tone of serenity and respect, his attitude in respect to his old masters, Schopenhauer and Wagner. Only it seemed to him that the time for courtesies had gone by, and, after reconsidering his Sorrento notes, he undertook to write a sequel to the thoughts of Human, All Too Human.
His sister had left him; in September he was leading a painful and miserable life, a few features of which we can apprehend. He was avoided, for his agitated condition gave alarm. Often, on coming out of the University, he would meet Jacob Burckhardt. The wise historian would slip off by a clever manuvre; he esteemed his colleague, but dreaded him. In vain Nietzsche sought to gather new disciples around him. "I am hunting for men," he wrote, "like a veritable corsair, not to sell them into slavery, but to carry them off with me to liberty." This unsociable liberty which he proposed failed to seduce the young men. A student, Herr Schaffler, has recorded his recollections: "I attended Nietzsche's lectures," says he; "I knew him very slightly. Once, at the end of a lecture, he chanced to be near me, and we walked out side by side. There were light clouds passing over the sky. 'The beautiful clouds,' he said to me, 'how rapid they are!' 'They resemble the clouds of Paul Veronese,' I answered. Suddenly his hand seized my arm. 'Listen,' said he; 'the holidays are coming; I am leaving soon, come with me, and we shall go together to see the clouds at Venice.' ... I was surprised, I stammered out some hesitating words; then I saw Nietzsche turn from me, his face icy and rigid as death. He moved away without saying a word, leaving me alone."
The break with Wagner was his great and lasting sorrow. "Such a farewell," he wrote, "when one parts because agreement is impossible between one's manner of feeling and one's manner of judging, puts us back in contact with that other person, and we throw ourselves with all our strength against that wall which nature has set up between us and him." In February, 1879, Lisbeth Nietzsche wrote to Cosima Wagner: had her brother advised her to make the overture? Did he know of it? Did he approve of it? We cannot say. Cosima answered with an imperial and sweet firmness. "Do not speak to me of Human, All Too Human," she wrote. "The only thing that I care to remember in writing to you is this, that your brother once wrote for me some of the most beautiful pages that I know.... I bear no malice against him: he has been broken by suffering. He has lost the mastery of himself, and this explains his felony." She added, with more spirit than sense, "To say that his present writings are not definitive, that they represent the stages of a mind that seeks itself, is, I think, curious. It is almost as if Beethoven had said: 'See me in my third manner!' Moreover, one recognises as one reads that the author is not convinced by his work; it is merely sophism without impulse, and one is moved to pity."
Miscellaneous Opinions and Apophthegms, which formed the sequel to Human, All Too Human, appeared in 1879. But the offence which this second volume might have given was attenuated and, as it were, warded off, by reason of the pity which Nietzsche now inspired in those who had formerly known him. His state of health grew worse. His head, his stomach, his eyes, tormented him without intermission. The doctors began to be disquieted by symptoms which they could not ascertain, by an invalid whom they could not cure. It appeared to them that his eyesight, and perhaps his reason, were threatened. He divined their alarms. Peter Gast[Pg 212] waited at Venice, called to him from there; but Nietzsche was forced to abandon the project of a voyage; he had to shut himself up in his room at Basle behind closed shutters and drawn curtains.
What was to become of him? Rohde, Gersdorff, touched by the wreck of this man of whom they had hoped so much, wrote to Overbeck: "They say that Nietzsche is lost, advise us." "Alas," replied Overbeck, "his condition is desperate." Even Richard Wagner remembered and was touched. "Can I forget him," he wrote to Overbeck, "my friend who separated from me with such violence? I clearly see that it would not have been right to demand conventional considerations from a soul torn by such passions. One must be silent and have pity. But I am in absolute ignorance of his life, and of his sufferings; this afflicts me. Would it be indiscreet if I asked you to write me news of my friend?"
Apparently Nietzsche did not know of this letter. He had written, a few months earlier, among other notes: "Gratitude is a bourgeois virtue; it cannot be applied to a man like Wagner." His happiness would have been great, had he been able to read the identical thought, written by his master, "It would not have been right to demand conventional considerations from a Nietzsche."
Overbeck and his wife attended the invalid. They wrote to his sister that she ought to be at his side. She came at once and scarcely recognised the stooping, devastated man, aged in one year by ten years, who thanked her for coming with a gesture of his hand.
Friedrich Nietzsche gave up his professorship; he sent in his resignation, which was accepted. In recompense for his services he was to receive a pension of three thousand francs.
Lisbeth took him away. He thought himself a lost[Pg 213] man, and expressed his last wishes. "Make me a promise, Lisbeth; let my friends only accompany my corpse; let none who are merely indifferent or curious be present. I shall no longer be able to defend myself, and you must do it. Let no priest, let no one come and speak insincere words over my coffin. See that I am buried like a loyal pagan, with no lies told."
He longed for the most desert and silent places, for the most complete solitude; she brought him to the valleys of the Upper Engadine. At that time very few people went up there. Nietzsche discovered this remote Switzerland and derived an unexpected comfort from the light and pure quality of the air, and the kindly light of the meadows, which soothed his worn-out eyes. He liked the scattered lakes, which recalled a Finland, the villages with their singing names, the fine peasant race, which proclaimed the presence of Italy beyond the glaciers. "This nature is familiar to me," he wrote to Re; "it does not astonish me, there is an understanding between us." With a convalescent's surprise he began to live again. He wrote scarcely any letters; he wrote for himself, and it is in his work that we must seek the information which his correspondence formerly gave us. This is how he narrates his ascent towards the Engadine.
"Et in Arcadia ego.—Above the hills which take the shape of waves, across the austere pines and the old fir-trees, I have turned my gaze upon a little lake whose water is green and milky. Around me were rocks of every contour, a soil painted in discordant colours with grasses and flowers. Before me a flock moved, now scattering, now closing up its ranks; some cows, grouped afar-off, below a forest of pines, stood out in relief under the evening light; others, nearer, more sombre; and everything calm in the peace of the approaching twilight. My watch registered half-past five. The monarch of the[Pg 214] herd was walking in the foam-white brook; he stepped out slowly, now stemming the fierce tide, now giving way to it: no doubt he found a kind of ferocious delight in so doing. Two human beings, brown skinned, of Bergamesque origin, were the shepherds of this flock: the young girl dressed almost like a boy. To the right, above a large belt of forest, edges of rocks, fields of snow; to the left, two enormous prongs of ice, far over me, in a veil of clear mist. Everything grand, calm, luminous. This beauty, thus suddenly perceived, thrilled, so as to bring into the soul a mute adoration of this moment of revelation. Into this world of pure light and sharp outline (exempt from disquiet and desire, expectation and regret), one was tempted to introduce Grecian heroes—involuntarily, as though it were the most natural thing. One had to feel in the manner of Poussin and his pupils; in a thoroughly heroic and idyllic manner. And it is thus that certain men have lived, thus that they have felt life, lastingly, within and without themselves; and I recognise among them one of the greatest of all men, one who discovered a style of heroic and idyllic philosopher: Epicurus."
