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"The ordinance of festivals, founded on a system of the Universe: festival of cosmic relations, festival of the earth, festival of friendship, of the great Noon."
Zarathustra explains his laws, he makes them loved by all; he repeats his sermons nine times, and finally announces the Eternal Return. He speaks to the people; his words have the accent of a prayer.
The great question:
"The laws have already been given. Everything is ready for the production of the Superman—grand and awful moment! Zarathustra reveals his doctrine of the Eternal Return—which may now be endured; he himself, for the first time, endures it.
"Decisive moment: Zarathustra interrogates all this multitude assembled for the festival.
"'Do you wish,' he says, 'the return of it all?' All reply: Yes!
"He dies of joy.
"Zarathustra dying holds the earth locked in his arms. And although no one said a word, they all knew that Zarathustra was dead."
It is a fine issue: Nietzsche was soon to find it too easy, too fine a one. This Platonic aristocracy, rather quickly established, left him in doubt. It corresponded exactly to his desires; did it correspond to his thoughts? Nietzsche, ready in the destruction of all the ancient[Pg 277] moralities, did not find that he had the right of proposing another so soon? All answered: Yes! Was that conceivable? Human societies would always draw after them an imperfect mass which would have to be constrained by force or by laws. Friedrich Nietzsche knew it: "I am a seer," he wrote in his notes; "but my conscience casts an inexorable light upon my vision, and I am myself the doubter." He gave up this last plan. Never was he to recount the active life and the death of Zarathustra.
No document admits us to the secret of his sadness. No letter, no word presents us with the expression of it, We may, surely, take this very silence as the avowal of his distress and humiliation. Friedrich Nietzsche had always wished to write a classical work, a history, system, or poem, worthy of the old Greeks whom he had chosen for masters. And never had he been able to give a form to this ambition.
At the end of this year 1883 he had made an all but despairing attempt; the abundance, the importance of his notes let us measure the vastness of a work which was entirely vain. He could neither found his moral ideal nor compose his tragic poem; at the same moment he fails in his two works and sees his dream vanish. What is he? An unhappy soul, capable of short efforts, of lyrical songs and cries.
The year 1884 opened sadly. Some chance fine weather in January reanimated him. Suddenly he improvised: no city, no people, no laws; a disorder of complaints, appeals, and moral fragments which seem to be the debris left over from the ruin of his great work. It is the third part of Zarathustra. The prophet, like Friedrich Nietzsche, lives alone and retired upon his mountain. He speaks to himself, deceives himself, forgets that he is alone; he threatens, he exhorts a humanity which neither fears nor hearkens to him.[Pg 278] He preaches to it the contempt of customary virtues, the cult of courage, love of strength and of the nascent generations. But he does not go down to it, and no one hears his predication. He is sad, he desires to die. Then, Life, who surprises his desire, comes to him and raises his courage.
"O Zarathustra!" says the goddess, "do not crack thy whip so terribly. Thou knowest, noise murdereth thought. And even now I have very tender thoughts. Hear me, thou art not faithful enough unto me, thou lovest me not nearly as much as thou sayst, I know, for thou thinkest of leaving me...."
Zarathustra listens to the reproach, smiles and hesitates. "True," he says at last, "but thou also knowest. ..." They gaze at each other, and he tells her something in her ear, among all her confused, stupid yellow tresses. "What though I die?" he says; "nothing can separate, nothing can reconcile, for every moment has its return, every moment is eternal."
"What," answers the goddess, "that thou knowest, Zarathustra? That no one knoweth."
Their eyes meet. They look at the green meadow over which the cool of evening was spreading; they weep, then, in silence, they listen, they understand the eleven sayings of the old bell which strikes midnight in the mountain.
One! Oh man! Lose not sight!
Two! What saith the deep midnight?
Three! I lay in sleep, in sleep;
Four! From deep dream, I woke to light.
Five! The world is deep,
Six! And deeper than ever day thought it might.
Seven! Deep is its woe—
Eight! And deeper than woe—delight.
Nine! Saith woe: Pass, go!
Ten! Eternity's sought by all delight[Pg 279]—Eleven! Eternity deep by all delight.[8]
Twelve!
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Then Zarathustra rises: he has recovered his security, his sweetness, and his strength. He takes up his staff and sings as he goes down towards men. A similar versicle completes the seven strophes of his hymn:
"Never yet have I found the woman by whom I would like to have children, if it be not the woman whom I love: for I love thee, oh Eternity!
"For I love thee, oh Eternity!"
At the opening of the poem Zarathustra entered the great town—the Multi-coloured Cow he names it—and began his apostolate. At the end of the third part Zarathustra descends to the great town to recommence his apostolate there. Friedrich Nietzsche, a vanquished warrior, after two years of labour, has quailed. In 1872 he sent to Frulein von Meysenbug the interrupted series of his lectures on the future of Universities: "It gives one a terrible thirst," he said to her, "and, in the long run, nothing to drink." The same words apply to his poem.
[6] Albergo la Poata (information given by M Lanzky).
[7] An unpublished letter, communicated by M. Romain Rolland.
[8] Translation published by T. Fisher Unwin.
In April, 1884, the third and fourth sections (of Zarathustra) were published simultaneously. For the moment Nietzsche seems to have been happy.
"Everything comes in its own good time," he wrote to[Pg 280] Peter Gast on March 5th. "I am forty and I find myself at the very point I proposed, when twenty, to reach at this age. It has been a fine, a long, and a formidable passage."
"To you," he wrote to Rohde, "who are homo litteratus, I need not hesitate to avow that in my opinion I have with this Zarathustra brought the German language to its pitch of perfection. After Luther and Goethe a third step remained to be taken—and consider, my old and dear comrade, were ever strength, subtlety, and beauty of sound so linked in our language? My style is a dance; I trifle with symmetries of all sorts, and I play on these symmetries even in my selection of vowels."
