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"To whom should I say all this if not to you? I think—but it is immodest to say so—that our characters resemble each other. For instance: both of us are brave, and neither distress nor contempt has been able to turn us from the path which we recognised as the right path. And both of us have known, in us, around us, many a truth, the dazzling splendour of which few of our contemporaries have perceived—we hope for humanity and, silently, offer ourselves in sacrifice for it, do we not?
"Have you good news of the Wagners? For three years I have heard nothing of them. They, too, have forsaken me. I knew for long that Wagner would separate from me as soon as he should have recognised the difference of our efforts. I have been told that he writes against me. Let him: all means must be used to bring the truth to light! I think of him with a lasting[Pg 220] gratitude, for I owe him some of the strongest incitements towards spiritual liberty. Madame Wagner, as you know, is the most sympathetic woman whom I have met. But our relations are ended, and assuredly I am not the man to resume them. It is too late.
"Receive, dear friend, who are a sister to me, the salutation of a young old man to whom life has not been cruel, although it has come about that he desires to die."
He lived, nevertheless. Paul Re came to see him, read to him, and succeeded in distracting his thoughts. The weather, which had tried him so severely, grew warmer, and the snow, which had dimmed his eyesight, melted. Peter Gast, living as in the previous year at Venice, steadily wrote and called to him. In the middle of February he felt, with surprise, a reawakening of strength; his desires, his curiosities returned to him, and he set out at once.
He stayed for a month on the shores of Lake Garda, at Riva, and the improvement in his letters gave his relatives some hope. On the 13th of March he was at Venice: from that day the end of this crisis and his convalescence must be dated.
He had not yet loved Italy. What parts of it did he know? The Lakes: but their somewhat oppressive tepidity was ill-suited to him, and he did not relish their over-soft harmonies. Naples and its Gulf: but he was repelled by the Neapolitan crowd; the splendour of the spectacle had no doubt conquered, but it had scarcely charmed him. No intimate union had been established between this dazzling scenery and his spiritual passions. But from the first moment he yielded to the fascination of Venice. In Venice he found, at a glance, without effort, what his Greek masters—Homer, Theognis, Thucydides—had formerly given him: the sensation of[Pg 221] a lucid intellect, which lived without dreams or scruples. Against dreams, against scruples, against the prestige of a romantic art, he had been fighting for four years. The beauty of Venice was his deliverance. He remembered his agonies and smiled at himself. Had he not flattered himself in supposing that he was the most wretched of men? What man who suffered has not had this thought, this childish conceit?
"When a first dawn of assuagement, of recovery, supervenes," he wrote, "then we ungratefully humiliate the pride which formerly made us bear our sorrow, we deal with ourselves like nave simpletons—as if something unique had happened to us! Again we look around at men and at nature, with desire; the tempered lights of life recomfort us; again health plays its magical tricks with us. We contemplate the spectacle as if we were transformed, benevolent and still fatigued. In this condition one cannot hear music without weeping."
Peter Gast attended him with touching kindness. He accompanied him in his walks, read to him, played him his favourite music. At this period Friedrich Nietzsche liked Chopin above all musicians; he discovered a daring, a freedom of passion in his rhapsodies, which is seldom the gift of German art. Doubtless we must think of Chopin in reading those last words, "In this condition one cannot hear music without weeping."
Peter Gast also played the part of secretary, for Nietzsche had recovered his ardour for work. Day by day he dictated his thoughts. He chose, immediately, the title for a new collection (he gave up the idea quickly), L'Ombra di Venezia. Indeed, did he not owe to the presence of Venice this richness, this force, this subtlety of his mind? He essayed new researches. Was[Pg 222] it true, as he had written, that a cold calculation of interest determines the actions of men? that a mean desire for safety, for ease, for happiness, had created that excessive beauty to which Venice stands witness? Venice is unique; nevertheless, she exists and must be explained. A spiritual portent must explain the physical marvel. What, then, are the hidden springs which determine our acts? Life, Schopenhauer used to say, is a pure Will to Live; every being desires to persevere in being. We may go further, thinks Friedrich Nietzsche, and say that life aspires ever to extend and surpass itself. Its desire is, not conservation, but growth; a principle of conquest and of exaltation must be linked to its essence. How is this principle to be formulated? Nietzsche did not yet know; but the idea was with him, and importunate. He felt that he was on the eve of a discovery, on the threshold of an unknown world; and he wrote, or dictated, to his friend:
"Actions are never what they appear to be. We have had such difficulty in learning that external things are not what they appear to us. Well, it is the same with the internal world! Deeds are in reality 'something other'—more we cannot say of them, and all deeds are essentially unknown."
In July he tried the waters of Marienbad. He lived in a little inn, situated opposite the wood, where he walked all the length of the day.
"I am absorbed, and excavate zealously in my moral mines," he wrote to Peter Gast, "and it seems to me that I have become an altogether subterranean being—it seems to me, at this moment, that I have found a passage, an opening; a hundred times I shall be thus persuaded and then deceived."
In September he was at Naumburg; he seemed to be in a joyful and talkative humour; his sister Lisbeth recognised on his face that expression of cheerful sweetness which denotes good mental work, a plenitude and an afflux of thoughts. On the 8th of October, fearing the fogs, he descended towards Italy. He stopped at Stresa, on the shore of the Lake Maggiore. But the climate did not agree with his nerves, and unsettled his meditations. It was with terror that he recognised once more that the tyranny of external influences held him at its mercy. He took fright; could he, if he lived always in a state of suffering, express those innumerable ideas, philosophical and lyrical, which pressed on him? To acquire health was, he thought, his first duty. He left Stresa and travelled towards Sorrento.
Genoa was on his road, and there he stopped. The place charmed him at first sight. Its people were vigorous, frugal, and gay; the temperature, in November, almost that of summer. In Genoa was combined the double energy of mountain and of sea. Nietzsche liked those robust palaces that stood athwart the little streets. Such monuments had been raised by Corsair merchants to their own glory, by men whose instincts were fettered by no scruples. And his visionary spirit evoked them, for he stood in need of those Italians of a former time who were so lucid, so grasping, and who had in them so little of the Christian; who lied to others, but were frank towards themselves, without sophistry. He needed them in order to repress that romantic reverie which was not to be extinguished in him. He desired, like Rousseau, a return to nature. But Rousseau's Europe was one thing, and Nietzsche's another. Rousseau's offended against the sentiments of piety, against human sympathy, against goodness; Nietzsche's was a sluggish Europe under the domination of the herd, and it offended against other sentiments; very different, too, was the[Pg 224] oppressed nature which he exalted and in which he sought the cure and the refreshment of his soul.
