Page 53 of 79
TO SORROW.
Wer kann dich fliehn, den du ergriffen hast,
Wenn du die ernsten Bliche auf ihn richtest?
Ich will nicht flchten, wenn du mich erfasst,
Ich glaube nimmer, dass du nur vernichtest!
Ich weiss, durch jedes Erden—Dasein muss du gehn,
Und nichts bleibt unberhrt von dir auf Erden:
Das Leben ohne dich—es wre schn,
Und doch—auch, du bist werth, gelebt zu werden.[5]
Peter Gast, having read these verses, thought they were Nietzsche's, who rejoiced over his error.
"No," he wrote to him, "this poetry is not by my hand. It is one of the things which exercise upon me a tyrannical power, I have never been able to read it without tears; it has the accent of a voice which I might have waited for, expected since my childhood. My friend Lou, of whom you have not yet heard, has written it. Lou is the daughter of a Russian general, she is twenty years old; her mind is as piercing as an eagle's vision, she has the courage of a lion, and yet she is a very feminine child, who, perhaps, will hardly live...."
He re-read his manuscript for the last time and sent it to the printer. He hesitated a little at the moment of publishing this new collection of aphorisms. His friends, as he knew, would find fault with these too numerous volumes, these too brief essays, these scarcely formed sketches. He listened to them, heard what they had to say, answered them with an apparent good will. No doubt his modesty was feigned; he could not bring himself to believe that his essays, short though they were, his sketches, which were so weak in form, were not worth being read.
He thought much of the Bayreuth festivals, but he dissembled or only half avowed his regrets. "I am well content that I cannot go," he wrote to Lou Salom. "And, nevertheless, if I could be at your side, in good humour to talk; if I could say in your ear this, that, well, I could endure the music of the Parsifal (otherwise I could not)."
Parsifal triumphed. Nietzsche mockingly welcomed the news. "Long live Cagliostro!" he wrote to Peter Gast. "The old enchanter has again had a prodigious success; the old gentlemen sobbed."
The "young Russian" came to rejoin him as soon as the festivals were over; Lisbeth Nietzsche accompanied her. The two ladies installed themselves in the hotel[Pg 248] where Friedrich Nietzsche awaited them; then he undertook to initiate his friend.
She had heard the Christian mystery at Bayreuth, the history of human sorrow traversed like an ordeal and consoled at last by beatitude. Friedrich Nietzsche taught her a more tragic mystery: sorrow is our life and our destiny itself; let us not hope to traverse it; let us accept it more entirely than the Christians ever did! Let us espouse it; let us love it with an active love; let us be, like it, ardent and pitiless; hard to others as to ourselves; cruel, let us accept it; brutal, let us accept it. To lessen it is to be cowardly; and let us meditate on the symbol of the Eternal Return to practise our courage. "Unforgettable for me are those hours in which he revealed to me his thoughts," wrote Miss Salom. "He confided them to me, as though they were a mystery unspeakably hard to tell; he only spoke of them in a low voice, with every appearance of the most profound horror. And truly life had been for him such bitter suffering that he suffered from the Eternal Return as from an atrocious certainty." That Miss Salom listened to these confessions with great intelligence and real emotion, the pages which she afterwards wrote assure us.
She conceived a brief hymn which she dedicated to Friedrich Nietzsche:
"As friend loves friend,
So love I thee, life surprising!
Do I weep or joy in thee,
Givest thou me joy or suffering,
I love thee with thy joy and pain.
And if thou must destroy me,
I shall suffer, leaving thee.
As the friend who teareth himself from the arms of the friend,
I caress thee with my whole strength:
Hast thou no other joy for me?
So be it, I have still—thy suffering."
Friedrich Nietzsche, delighted with the gift, wished to reply to it by another gift. For eight years he had forbidden himself musical composition, which enervated and exhausted him. He undertook to compose a sorrowful dithyramb on the verses of Miss Salom. This work was too moving and caused him great pain: neuralgia, crises of doubt, barrenness and satiety. He had to take to his bed. Even from his room he addressed short notes to Lou Salom. "In bed, terrible attack. I scorn life."
But these weeks at Tautenburg had their secret history of which we know little. Lou Salom, writes Frulein Nietzsche, was never the sincere friend of her brother; he roused her curiosity, but her passion, her enthusiasm, were only feigned, and she was often wearied by his terrible agitation. She wrote to Paul Re, from whom Frulein Nietzsche was surprised to receive a very singular message: "Your brother," he said, "tires our friend; shorten, if it be possible, the meeting."
We are inclined to think that Frulein Nietzsche was jealous of this initiation which she had not received, jealous, too, of this young Slav, whose charm was tinged with mystery, and that we must take what she has to say with caution.
No doubt, Nietzsche alarmed Lou Salom by the violence of his passions and by the loftiness of his demands. She had not foreseen, in offering to be his friend, the crises of a friendship ruder than a stormy love. He demanded an absolute assent to each of his thoughts. The young girl refused such assent: may the intellect, like the heart, be given? Nietzsche could not brook her proud reserve, and reproached her, as though it were a fault, for the independence which she wished to preserve. A letter to Peter Gast gives us a glimpse into these disputes.
"Lou remains another week with me," he wrote, on[Pg 250] the 20th of August, from Tautenburg. "She is the most intelligent of all women. Every five days a little tragical scene arises between us. All that I have written to you about her is absurd, and not less absurd, no doubt, than what I now write to you."
This somewhat cautious and reticent phrasing does not suggest that the heart had escaped its captivity. Lou Salom left Tautenburg; Friedrich Nietzsche continued to write letters to her, many of which are known to us. He confided his work and projects to Lou Salom: he wished to go to Paris or Vienna to study the physical sciences and deepen his theory of the Eternal Return; for it was not enough that it should be fascinating and beautiful, Nietzsche wished that it should be true. Thus we saw him, and always will see him, hampered by his critical spirit when he pursues a lyrical inspiration; hampered by his lyrical genius when he pursues a critical analysis. He related to her the happy success of the Hymn to Life which her verses had inspired, and which he was submitting to the judgment of his musical friends. An orchestral conductor gave him hope of a hearing: ready for hope as he was, he communicated the news. "By this little path," he writes, "we can reach posterity together—all other paths remaining open." On September 16th he wrote from Leipsic to Peter Gast. "Latest news: on the 2nd of October Lou comes here; two months later we leave for Paris; and we shall stay there, perhaps for years. Such are my projects."
