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The heat dispersed this Roman society. Friedrich Nietzsche knew not where to go. He had hoped for such different days! He had been persuaded that he would move lettered Europe, that he would at last attract readers to himself, or (more precisely perhaps)[Pg 263] that he would attract, not towards his feeble self, but towards Zarathustra, who was so strong, disciples or even servitors. "For this summer," he wrote in May to Peter Gast, "I have a project: to choose, in some forest, some castle formerly fitted up by the Benedictines for their meditations, and to fill it with companions, chosen men ... I must go on a quest for new friends." About the 20th June, thunderstruck by the loss of his hopes, he went up towards his favourite retreat, the Engadine.
Lisbeth Nietzsche, who was returning to Germany, accompanied him. Never had she seen him more brilliant or more gay, she said, than during these few hours of travel. He improvised epigrams, bouts-rimes, the words of which his sister suggested; he laughed like a child, and, in fear of troublesome people who would have disturbed his delight, he called and tipped the guard at every station.
Friedrich Nietzsche had not seen the Engadine since that summer of 1881 in which he had conceived the Eternal Return and the words of Zarathustra. In the clutch of these memories and of the sudden solitude, carried away by a prodigious movement of inspiration, he wrote in ten days the second part of his work.
It was bitter. Friedrich Nietzsche could no longer repress the rancours, the menace of which he had felt last winter; he could no longer unite force to sweetness; "I am not a hunter of flies," Zarathustra used to say, and he disdained his adversaries. He had spoken as a benefactor, and he had not been heard. Nietzsche put into his mouth another speech: "Zarathustra the judge," he wrote in his short notes; "the manifestation of justice in its most grandiose form; of justice which fashions, which constructs, and which, as a consequence, must annihilate."
Zarathustra the judge has only insults and lamentations[Pg 264] upon his lips. He sings this nocturnal chant which Nietzsche, at Rome, had one evening improvised for himself alone:
"I am light; alas if I were night! But this is my solitude, to be always surrounded by light."
This is no longer the hero whom Friedrich Nietzsche had created so superior to all humanity; it is a man in despair, it is Nietzsche, in short, too weak to express anything beyond his anger and his plaints.
"Verily, my friends, I walk among men as among the fragments and members of man.
"To see men broken and scattered as though they lay over a butcher's shambles, this is to my eye the most frightful thing.
"And when my eye fleeth from the present to the past, it ever findeth the same: fragments, members, and frightful catastrophes—but no men!
"The present and the past upon the earth—alas, my friends, these are to me the most unbearable things; and I could not live were I not a visionary of what must come.
"A visionary, a creator, the future itself and a bridge unto the future—alas! in some sort also, a cripple upon this bridge: Zarathustra is all this.... I walk among men, the fragments of the future: of the future which I contemplate in my visions."
Friedrich Nietzsche derided the moral commandments which had upheld ancient humanity: he wished to abolish them and to establish his own. Shall we know it at length, this new law? He delays in telling it to us. "The qualities of the Superman become more and more visible," he writes in his notes. He would wish that it were so; but can he, absorbed as he is in discontent and bitterness, enunciate, define a form of virtue,[Pg 265] a new good, a new evil, as he had promised? He tries. He is the prey of a bitter and violent mood, and the virtue which he exalts is naked force undisguised, that savage ardour which moral prescriptions have always wished to attenuate, vary, or overcome. He yields to the attraction which it exercises upon him.
"With delight I regard the miracles which the ardent sun brings to birth, says Zarathustra. They are tigers, palm-trees, rattlesnakes.... Verily, there is a future even for evil, and the hottest noon has not yet been discovered for man.... One day there will come to the world the greatest dragons.... Thy soul is so far from what is great that thou wouldst find the Superman awful in his goodness."
There is emphasis upon this page. The words are noisy rather than strong. Perhaps Nietzsche disguises in this way an embarrassment of thought: he does not insist upon this gospel of evil, and prefers to adjourn the difficult moment in which his prophet will announce his law. Zarathustra must first complete his duties as judge, the annihilator of the weak. He must strike: with what weapon? Here Nietzsche again takes up the idea of the Eternal Return which he had withdrawn from his first section. He modifies the sense and the application of it. It is no longer an exercise of spiritual life, a process of internal edification; it is a hammer, as he says, an instrument of moral terrorism, a symbol which disperses dreams.
Zarathustra assembles his disciples and wishes to communicate to them the doctrine, but his voice falters; he is silent. Suddenly he is moved by pity, and the prophet himself suffers as he evokes the terrible idea. He hesitates at the moment that he is about to destroy these illusions of a better future, these expectations of another[Pg 266] life and of a spiritual beatitude which veil from men the misery of their state. He grows anxious. A hunchback, who divines this, interpolates with a sneer: "Why doth Zarathustra speak unto his disciples otherwise than he speaketh unto himself?" Zarathustra feels his fault and seeks a new solitude. The second part is thus completed.
On the 24th June of this year, 1882, Nietzsche was installed at Sils; before the 10th of July he wrote to his sister:
"I beg you instantly to see Schmeitzner and engage him orally or by writing, as you think best, to give the second part of Zarathustra to the printer as soon as the manuscript is delivered. This second part exists to-day: try to imagine it, the vehemence of such a creation; you will scarcely be able to exaggerate it. There is the danger. In Heaven's name, arrange things with Schmeitzner; I am too irritable myself."
Schmeitzner promised and kept his word; in August the proofs arrived. Nietzsche had not strength enough to correct them and left the work to Peter Gast and his sister. The terrible things which he had said, the more terrible things which he had yet to say, bruised him.
Other vexations were added to the melancholy of his thought. An awkward step on his sister's part awoke again the dissensions of the previous summer. In the spring, during their reconcilement, he had said to her, aware of her quarrelsome nature: "Promise me never to go back on the stories of Lou Salom and of Paul Re." For three months she had kept her peace, then she broke her word and spoke. What did she say? We do not know; we are again in the obscurity[Pg 267] of this obscure history. "Lisbeth," he wrote to Madame Overbeck, "absolutely wants to avenge herself on the young Russian." No doubt she reported to him some fact, some observation of which he was ignorant. A sickening irritation laid hold of him. He wrote to Paul Re, and this is the letter, a sketch of which has been found. (Was it sent as we read it? It is not certain.)
"Too late, almost a year too late, I learn of the part which you took in the events of last summer, and my soul has never been so overwhelmed with disgust as it is at present, to think that an insidious individual of your kind, a liar and a knave, had been able to call himself my friend for years. It is a crime, in my opinion, and not only a crime against me, but above all against friendship, against this very empty word, friendship.
