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Lanzky remarked Nietzsche's trouble of mind without suspecting the cause. The crisis was very severe, but[Pg 294] Nietzsche did not allow himself to be crushed by it and laboured energetically. More often now than heretofore he walked alone, and Lanzky would watch him trip as lightly as a dancer across the Promenade des Anglais or over the mountain paths. He would leap and gambol at times, and then suddenly interrupt his capers to write down a few words with a pencil. What was the new work on which he was busy? Lanzky had no idea.
One morning in March he entered, as was his custom, the little room which the philosopher occupied, to find him in bed notwithstanding the advanced hour. He made anxious enquiries.
"I am ill," said Nietzsche; "I have just had my confinement."
"What's that you say?" asked Lanzky, much perturbed.
"The fourth part of Zarathustra is written."
This fourth section does not enable us to discover at length an advance in the work, an attained precision of thought. It is merely a singular fragment, an "interlude," as Nietzsche called it. It illustrates a strange episode in the life of the hero, one which has disconcerted many a reader. We may perhaps best understand it if we consider the deception to which Nietzsche has just been subjected.
The superior men go up to Zarathustra and surprise him in his mountainous solitude: an old pope, an old historian, an old king, unhappy beings who are suffering from their abasement and wish to ask succour of a sage whose strength they feel. Was it not thus that Stein, that distinguished young man, etiolated by Bayreuth, went to Nietzsche?
Zarathustra admits these superior men to his presence,[Pg 295] and keeping in check his savage humour, makes them sit down in his cave, is sorry for their disquietude, listens and talks to them. Was it not thus that Nietzsche had received Stein?
Zarathustra's soul is in its depths less hard than it should be, and he allows himself to be seduced by the morbid charm and delicacy of the superior men; he takes pity on them and, forgetting that their misery is irremediable, yields to the pleasures of hope. He had looked for friends, and, perhaps, with these "superior men" they have come at last. Had not Nietzsche hoped for some help from Stein?
Zarathustra leaves his friends for a moment, and ascends alone to the mountain. He returns to his cave to find the "superior men," all of them prostrate before a donkey. The aged pope is saying Mass before the new idol. In this posture Stein, interpreting a Wagnerian bible with two friends, had been surprised by Nietzsche.
Zarathustra hunts his guests away, and calls for new workmen for a new world. But will he ever find them?
"My children, my pure-blooded race, my beautiful new race; what is it that keeps my children upon their isles?
"Is it not time, full time—I murmur it in thine ear, good spirit of the tempests,—that they should return to their father? do they not know that my hair grows gray and whitens in waiting?
"Go, go, spirit of the tempests, indomitable and beneficent! Leave thy gorges and thy mountains, precipitate thyself upon the seas and bless my children before the night has come.
"Bear them the benediction of my happiness, the benediction of that crown of happy roses! Let these roses fall upon their isles, let them remain fallen there,[Pg 296] as a sign, which asks: 'Whence can such a happiness come? '
. . . . . .
"Then they shall ask: 'Still lives he, our father Zarathustra? What, can our father Zarathustra be still alive? Does our old father, Zarathustra, still love his children?'
"The wind breathes, the wind breathes, the moon shines bright—Oh my far-off, far-off children, why are ye not here, with your father? The wind breathes no cloud passes over the sky, the world sleeps. Oh, joy! Oh, joy!"
Nietzsche omitted this page from his work. Perhaps he felt ashamed of so plain and so melancholy an avowal.
The fourth part of Zarathustra found no publisher. A few months earlier Schmeitzner had informed Nietzsche that "the public would not read his aphorisms." He now contented himself with stating that the public had chosen to ignore Zarathustra; and there the matter rested, so far as he was concerned.
Nietzsche then made certain overtures which only hurt his pride and had no result; then he took a more dignified course and had the manuscript printed at his own expense in an edition limited to forty copies. To tell the truth, his friends were not so numerous. He found seven consignees—none of whom were truly worthy. If we may guess, these were the seven: his sister—whose loss he never ceased to deplore; Overbeck -a strict friend, an intelligent reader, but cautious and reserved; Burckhardt, the Basle historian—who always replied to Nietzsche's messages, but was too polite to be easily fathomed; Peter Gast—the faithful disciple whom, no doubt, Nietzsche found too faithful and obedient; Lanzky—his good companion of the wintertide; Rohde[Pg 297]—who scarcely disguised the ennui that these forced readings gave him. These were the seven, we may presume, who received copies of the work, and not all of them troubled to read this fourth and last section, the interlude which ends, and yet does not complete, Thus Spake Zarathustra.
[9] Phrase in a passage from Ecce Homo.
"Oh Lebens Mittag! Feierliche Zeit!
Oh Sommergarten!
Unruhig Glck im Stehn und Spahn und Warten!
Der Freunde harr' Ich, Tag und Nacht bereit;
Wo bleibt ihr, Freunde? Kommt! s'ist Zeit! s'ist Zeit!"
The lyrical work was abandoned. At moments Friedrich Nietzsche was to regret and wish to resume it; but these were brief velleities. "Henceforth," he wrote (this time the assurance is exact), "I shall speak, and not Zarathustra."
The work remained in an incomplete condition. Nietzsche knew it, and the mass of thoughts which he had not expressed saddened him like a remorse. He was about to attempt another test. It was without joy that he returned to philosophy and strove to express in abstract terms what, as poet, he had failed to utter. He opened new notebooks, he essayed titles: The Will to Power, a new interpretation of Nature ... The Will to Power, an essay towards a new interpretation of the universe .... These formulas, the first that he had found, were to stand. Nietzsche resumed and developed here the Schopenhauerian datum. The foundation of things, he thinks, is not a blind will to live; to live is to expand, it is to grow, to conquer: the foundation of things may be better defined as a blind will to power, and all the phenomena that arise in the human soul may be interpreted as a function of this will.
It was an immense work of prudent reflection which Nietzsche envisaged with fear. How should one discern in the soul of men what is power and what is, without doubt, weakness? Perhaps the anger of Alexander is weakness, and the mystic's exaltation power. Nietzsche had hoped that disciples, philosophers or physiologists, would have made the necessary analyses for him. Heinrich von Stein's help would have been precious. But, being alone, he had to assume every task. He grew sad. Denuded of lyricism, thought had no attraction for him. What does he love? Instinctive strength, finesse, grace, ordered and rhythmical sounds—he loves Venice and dreams of the fine weather which will allow him to fly from this Nice pension where the food and the company are so bad. On the 30th of March he writes to Peter Gast:
