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Friedrich Nietzsche again found the happiness which he had enjoyed in the preceding year; a like happiness, but sustained by a graver kind of emotion: the full midday of his thought rose after the dawn. Towards the end of December he passed a crisis and surmounted it. A sort of poem in prose commemorated this crisis. We will translate it here. It is the consequence of his meditations, of those examinations of conscience which he used to write down, as a young man, each Saint Sylvester's Day:
"For the New Year.—I still live, I still think: I must still live, for I must still think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum. This is the day upon which every one is permitted to express his desire and his dearest thought: I, too, shall then express the inner wish which I form to-day, and say what thought I take to heart, this year, before all other—what thought I have chosen as the reason, guarantee, and sweetness of my life to come! I wish to try each day to see in all things necessity as a beauty—thus shall I be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati, let that be henceforward my love! I do not wish to go to battle against the hideous. I do not wish to accuse, I do not even wish to accuse the[Pg 238] accusers. To avert my gaze, let that be my sole negation. In a word, I wish to be, in every circumstance, a Yea-Sayer!"
The thirty days of January passed without a cloud appearing in the sky. He was to dedicate to this fine month, as a sign of gratitude, the fourth book of the Gay Science, which he entitled Sanctus Januarius; an admirable book rich in critical thought, in intimate refinements, and from the first to the last line dominated by a sacred emotion—Amor fati.
In February Paul Re, passing through Genoa, stayed some days with his friend, who showed him his favourite walks and brought him to those rocky creeks "where in some six hundred years, some thousand years," he wrote gaily to Peter Gast, "they will raise a statue to the author of The Dawn" Then Paul Re went on to Rome, where Frulein von Meysenbug was waiting for him. He had a curiosity to penetrate into the Wagnerian world there, which was greatly excited in expectation of Parsifal; it was in July, at Bayreuth, that the Christian mystery was to be presented. Friedrich Nietzsche did not wish to accompany Paul Re, and the approaching performance of the Parsifal only made his ardour for work the more active. Had he not—he, too—a great work which he must ripen? Had he not to write his anti-Christian mystery, his poem of the Eternal Return? It was his constant thought. It procured him a happiness, thanks to which he could recall with less torturing regret the master of by-gone days. Richard Wagner seemed very far and very near; very far as regards his ideas, but what are ideas worth to a poet? Very near in sentiments, desires, lyrical emotion; and were not these the essential things? All disaccord between poets is only a question of shades, for they inhabit the same universe, they work with a like[Pg 239] heart to give a significance and a supreme value to the movements of the human soul. Reading this page which Nietzsche then wrote, it is easier to understand the condition of his mind:
"Stellar Friendship.—We were friends, and we have become strangers to each other. Ah, yes; but it is well so, and we wish to hide nothing, to disguise nothing from one another; we have nothing to be ashamed of. We are two ships, each with a bourne and a way. By chance we have crossed paths; we have made holiday together—and then our two good ships have so tranquilly reposed in the one port and under the same sun, that it seemed as though they had both attained their bourne. But the all-powerful force of our mission has driven us afresh towards divers seas and suns—and perhaps we shall not meet, or recognise one another again: the divers seas and suns will have transformed us! We had to become strangers; a reason the more why we should mutually respect ourselves! No doubt there exists a far off, invisible and prodigious cycle which gives a common law to our little divagations: let us uplift ourselves to this thought! But our life is too short, our vision too feeble; we must content ourselves with this sublime possibility. And if we must be enemies upon earth, in spite of all we believe in our stellar friendship."
What form did the poetical exposition of the Eternal Return then take in his soul? We do not know. Nietzsche did not care to talk about his work; he liked to complete it before making announcements. However, he wished that his friends should know the new movement in which his thought was engaged. He addressed to Frulein von Meysenbug a letter in which Wagner was treated without deference, then he added a[Pg 240] mysterious enough promise: "If I am not illusioned as to my future, it is by my work that what is best in the work of Wagner will be continued—and here, perhaps, is the comical side to the adventure."
At the beginning of spring Friedrich Nietzsche, following out a caprice, made a bargain with the captain of an Italian sailing vessel bound for Messina and crossed the Mediterranean. The passage was a terrible one, and he was sick to death. But his stay was at first happy: he wrote verses, a pleasure which he had not known for several years. They are impromptus and epigrams, perhaps inspired by those Goethean sallies which Peter Gast had put to music. Nietzsche then sought for a corner of nature and of humanity favourable to the production of his great work: Sicily, "Curb of the world where Happiness has her habitation," as old Homer teaches, struck him as an ideal refuge, and, suddenly forgetting that he could not bear the heat, he decided to stay in Messina for the whole summer. Some days of sirocco, towards the end of April, prostrated him, and he prepared for departure. It was in these circumstances that he received a message from Frulein von Meysenbug, who urged him very keenly to stop at Rome. Rome was a natural stage on his journey, and he accepted. Why was Frulein von Meysenbug thus insistent? We know. This excellent woman had never been resigned to the unhappiness of the friend whose destiny she had vainly sought to sweeten. She knew the delicacy, the tenderness of his heart, and often wished to find him a companion; had he not written to her, "I tell you in confidence, what I need is a good woman"? In the spring of this year she thought that she had found her.[2]
This accounted for her letter. It was Frulein von Meysenbug's habit to do good, and her taste; but perhaps she sometimes forgot that goodness is a difficult art in which the results of defeat are cruel.
The girl whom Frulein von Meysenbug had met was called Lou Salom. She was scarcely twenty years old; she was a Russian and admirable as regards her intelligence and intellectual ardour; her beauty was not perfect, but the more exquisite for its imperfections, and she was fascinating in the extreme. Sometimes it happens that there arises, in Paris, in Florence, in Rome, some excited young lady, a native of Philadelphia, of Bucharest, or of Kief, who comes with a barbarous impatience to be initiated into culture and to conquer a hearth in our old capital. The lady in question was of rare quality assuredly; her mother followed her across Europe, carrying the cloaks and the shawls.
Frulein von Meysenbug conceived an affection for her. She gave her Nietzsche's works; Lou Salom read them and seemed to understand. She talked to her at great length of this extraordinary man who had sacrificed friendship with Wagner for the maintenance of his liberty: He is a very rugged philosopher, she said, but[Pg 242] he is the most sensitive, the most affectionate friend, and, for those who know him, the thought of his solitary life is a source of sadness. Miss Salom displayed a great deal of enthusiasm and longing; she declared that she felt vowed to a spiritual share in such a life, and that she wished to make Nietzsche's acquaintance. In concert with Paul Re, who, it seems, had known her for a longer time, and also appreciated her, Frulein von Meysenbug wrote to Friedrich Nietzsche.
