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At the end of October Nietzsche left Mentone. The sight of so many invalids disturbed him, and he set out for Nice.
There an unexpected companion, Paul Lanzky by name, soon joined him. Lanzky was an "intellectual," by birth a German and by taste a Florentine, who lived a wandering life. Chance had put the works of Nietzsche into his hands; and he had understood them. Applying to Schmeitzner, the publisher, for the author's address, he was told—" Herr Friedrich Nietzsche lives a very lonely life in Italy. Write to Poste Restante, Genoa." The philosopher replied promptly and graciously, "Come to Nice this winter and we will talk!" So Nietzsche was not so unsociable and solitary after all! This correspondence took place during the autumn of 1883, but Lanzky was not free at the moment, and begged to be excused. In October, 1884, he reached the rendezvous. Meanwhile he had had the opportunity of acquainting himself with the two last sections of Zarathustra, and had published very intelligent summaries of them in a Leipsic magazine and in the Rivista Europea of Florence.
On the very morning of his arrival in Nice there was[Pg 290] a knock at his door. A gentle-looking man entered the room and came towards him smiling. "Also Sie sind gekommen!" said Nietzsche. "So here you are!" He took him by the arm, and examined curiously this student of his works. "Let's see what you are made of!"
Nietzsche's eyes were fixed upon him; those eyes which had once been beautiful, and were, at moments, still beautiful, clouded though they now were by reason of prolonged suffering. Lanzky was astonished. He had come to do honour to a redoubtable prophet, and here was the most affable, the simplest, and, as it seemed to him, the most modest of German professors.
As the two men went out together, Lanzky avowed his surprise—" Master," he began....
"You are the first to call me by that name," said Nietzsche with a smile. But he let the word pass, for he knew that he was a master.
"Master," continued Lanzky, "what a mistaken idea of you one gathers from your books; tell me ..."
"No, no, not to-day. You do not know Nice. I will do the honours, and show you this sea, these mountains, these walks.... Another day we shall talk, if you will."
By the time they returned it was six o'clock in the evening, and Lanzky had discovered how tireless a walker was his prophet.
They organised their life in common. At six o'clock in the morning it was Nietzsche's custom to make himself a cup of tea, which he took alone; towards eight Lanzky would knock at his door and ask how he had passed the night—Nietzsche often slept badly—and how he intended to employ his morning. Usually Nietzsche began the day by skimming the newspapers in a public reading hall; he then went to the shore, where Lanzky either joined him or respected his desire for a solitary walk. Both of them lunched in their pension. In the afternoon they walked out together. At night,[Pg 291] Nietzsche wrote or Lanzky read to him aloud, often from some French book, such as the Letters of the Abb Galiani, Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir, La Chartreuse, L'Armance.
To live courteously, yet withhold from ordinary gaze the secret of one's life, is a whole art in itself; and this art Nietzsche had mastered. Indeed, as regards the scheme of manners that he had composed for himself, this solitary of the table d'hte was, deliberately, hypocritical and almost cunning. More than once Lanzky was nonplussed. One Sunday a young lady asked Nietzsche had he been to church.
"To-day, no," he replied courteously.
To Lanzky, who admired his prudence, he explained that every truth was not good for everyone. "If I had troubled that girl's mind," he added, "I should be horrified."
Occasionally it amused him to announce his future greatness. He would tell his neighbours during meals that in forty years' time he would be illustrious throughout Europe.
They would say: "Well, then lend us your books."
He refused their requests most positively, and again explained to Lanzky that his writings were not for the man in the street.
"Master," asked Lanzky, "why do you print them?"
It appears that no answer was given to this reasonable question.
Nietzsche, however, dissembled even with Lanzky. The formation of a society of friends, of an idealistic phalanstery similar to that in which Emerson lived—this old dream of his he loved to repeat and elaborate for him.
He often led Lanzky to the peninsula of Saint-Jean. "Here," he would say in Biblical phrase—"Here we shall pitch our tents." He went so far as to select a group[Pg 292] of little villas which seemed to be suitable for his purpose. But the members were not yet decided upon, and the name of Heinrich von Stein, the only friend, the only disciple whom he really wanted, was never mentioned in Lanzky's presence.
There was no news of Stein's coming, nor of his plans. To Nietzsche he gave no sign. We may assume that he had gone to Sils-Maria to conciliate, if possible, the two masters. But one of them had said that he must choose between the two: perhaps he had been disturbed for a moment. He returned, however, to his Germany, and there he saw Cosima Wagner again. Nietzsche had required that he should choose, and he remained faithful to Wagner.
Nietzsche anticipated a new desertion. He was afraid, and, yielding to a humble and mournful impulse, wrote, in the form of a poem, an appeal which he addressed to the young man:
O midday of life! O solemn time!
O garden of summer!
Unquiet happiness I am there: listening, waiting!
Night and day, living in hope of the friend;
"Where are ye, friends? Come! It is time, it is time!"[10]
Heinrich von Stein felt it incumbent upon him to reply. He wrote: "To an appeal such as yours there is but one suitable reply. It is that I should come and give myself entirely to you, vowing, as to the noblest of tasks, all my time to the understanding of the new Gospel which you have to preach. But this is forbidden me. An idea, however, strikes me. Every month I[Pg 293] entertain two friends and read with them some article from the Wagner-Lexicon. It is taken as text, and, on it, I speak to them. These conversations are becoming more and more lofty and free. Latterly we have found this definition of sthetic emotion—a passage to the impersonal through very fulness of personality. I think that our meetings would please you. And how if Nietzsche should now and again send us the text? Would you communicate with us in this way? Would you not see in such a correspondence an introduction, a step towards your idea of a cloister?"
This letter was obviously the letter of an excellent pupil, and it exasperated Nietzsche. Wagner was named, doubtless intentionally, and the Wagnerian Encyclopedia, the sum of an absurd and puerile theology, was indicated as the text of Stein's meditations. Here was the old adversary again standing in the way, Wagner, the quack of thought, the seducer of young men. Frster, who was taking his sister from him, was a Wagnerian; and Heinrich von Stein, on Wagner's account, refused him his devotion. It was a cruel liberty that he had won, alone and at the cost of a struggle whose wounds he still bore. He wrote to his sister:
"What a foolish letter Stein has written me in answer to such poetry! I am painfully affected. Here I am ill again. I have recourse to the old means [chloral], and I utterly hate all men, myself included, whom I have known. I sleep well, but on waking I experience misanthropy and rancour. And yet there can be few men living who are better disposed, more benevolent than I!"
