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"DEAR FRIEND,—It seldom happens that I consider a removal with pleasure. Bat on this occasion:—when I think that I shall soon be at Venice, and near you, I grow animated, am ravished; it is like the hope of cure after a long and terrible sickness. I have made this discovery: Venice remains till to-day the only place which is always sweet and good to me.... Sils-Maria as a place of passage suits me very well; but not as a residence. Ah! if I could contrive to live there worthily as a hermit or solitary! But—Sils-Maria becomes fashionable!
"My dear friend and maestro, you and Venice are linked for me. Nothing gives me more pleasure than your persistent taste for this town. How much I have thought of you in these times! I was reading the memoirs of old De Bross (1739-40) on Venice and on the maestro who was then admired there, Hasse (il detto Sassonne). Do not get angry, I haven't the least intention of making disrespectful comparisons between you.
"I have just written to Malvida: thanks to Peter Gast, our friends the low comedians, the self-styled geniuses of music, gone hence very soon, will cease to corrupt taste. 'Gone hence very soon'—is, perhaps, a gross exaggeration. In a democratic period few men discern beauty: pulchrum paucorum est hominum, I rejoice that for you I am one of these 'few.' The profound and joyous men who please me, avec des ames mlancoliques et folles[1] like my defunct friends Stendhal and the Abb Galiani, could not have stayed on the earth if they had not loved some musician of joy (Galiani without Puccini, Stendhal without Cimarosa and Mozart).
"Ah, if you knew how alone I am in the world at present! and how I must play a comedy to prevent myself from spitting, now and again, in some one's face, out of satiety. Happily some of the courteous manners of my son Zarathustra exist also in his rather crazed father.
"But when I shall be with you, and in Venice, then, for a time, there will be an end of 'courtesy' and 'comedy' and 'satiety' and of all the malediction of Nice, won't there, my good friend?
"Not to be forgotten: we shall eat bacoli!
"Cordially,
"F. N."
In April and May Nietzsche sojourned at Venice, and found the joy for which he had hoped. He wandered through the little sheltered and murmurous streets, he contemplated the beautiful town. He listened to the music of his friend. The galleries of St. Mark's Square shaded his walks and he compared them to those porticoes of Ephesus whither Heraclitus went to forget the agitation of the Greeks and the sombre menace of the Persian Empire. "How easily," he thinks, "one here[Pg 301] forgets the sombre Empire—our own; let us not defame our Europe; she still offers us beautiful refuges! It is my finest workroom, this Piazza San Marco...." This shortlived happiness awoke the poetic impulse in him. He wished to chant the triumph and death of Zarathustra, now for some hours drawn from oblivion. He wrote out a sketch, but soon abandoned it; it was his last.
June brought him back to the Engadine. The chances of hotel life procured him a secretary; a certain Madame Rder, otherwise unknown, offered to help him. He dictated and tried to grasp his problem more closely. What was his end? To criticise that multitude of moral judgments, prejudices and routines which fetter modern Europeans; to appraise their vital value, that is to say, the quantity of energy which they express, and thus to fix a hierarchy of virtues. He wished finally to realise the Umwerthung aller Werthe (he found this formula), "the transvaluation of all values." "All," he writes; his pride was not content with less. He then recognised, and succeeded in defining, certain modes of virtue which the professional moralists knew not how to observe: mastery over oneself, dissimulation of one's intimate sentiments, politeness, gaiety, exactitude in obedience and command, deference, exigence of respect, taste for responsibilities and for dangers. Such were the usages, the tendencies, to-day depreciated, of the old aristocratic life, the sources of a morality more virile than our own.
It is probable that he then undertook some serious enough readings. He studied the Biological Problems of Rolph, where he could find the analysis of that vital growth which was the basis of his metaphysic. Perhaps he then read again some book by Gobineau (he admired the man and his works); one may hazard this conjecture. But what mattered his readings? Nietzsche was forty-two years old. He had passed the age of learning, he[Pg 302] had gathered in all his ideas. Reading helped, nourished his meditations, but never directed them.
The difficulty of his work was great and insomnia overcame him. Nevertheless he persevered, and denied himself the sad joy of a final embrace of his sister Lisbeth, who was about to follow her husband to South America. "You will live down there then," he wrote to her, "and I here, in a solitude more unattainable than all the Paraguays. My mother will have to live alone and we must all be courageous. I love you and I weep.—FRIEDRICH."
A week passed, and he had formed other projects. He was negotiating with his publisher in regard to the repurchase of his books and their republication. It was a pretext that he grasped for going to Germany. "A business matter, which makes my presence of use, comes to the aid of my desire," he wrote, and set out for Naumburg without delay.
The meeting was a grave one: brother and sister conversed tenderly on the eve of a separation which they knew to be definitive. Nietzsche made no secret of the difficulties of his life. "Alone I confront a tremendous problem," he said; "it is a forest in which I lose myself, a virgin forest—Wald und Urwald. I need help. I need disciples, I need a master. To obey would be sweet! If I had lost myself on a mountain, I would obey the man who knew that mountain; sick, I would obey a doctor; and if I should meet a man capable of enlightening me on moral ideas, I would listen to him, I would follow him; but I find no one, no disciples and fewer masters. "... I am alone." His sister repeated the advice which she had constantly given: that Friedrich should return to some University; young men had always listened to him, they would listen to him, they would understand him. "Young men are so stupid!" answered Nietzsche, "and professors still more stupid! Besides, all the German Universities repel me; where could I teach?" "In[Pg 303] Zrich," his sister suggested. "There is only one town that I can tolerate, and it is Venice."
He went to Leipsic to negotiate with his publisher, who received him without much attention; his books did not sell. He returned to Naumburg, said a final farewell, and left.
Where was he to find a refuge for the winter? On the last occasion he had been irritated by the noisy swarms of Nice. He thinks of Vallombrosa. Lanzky had recommended this beautiful forest in the Tuscan Apennines, and was waiting for him at Florence. Before leaving Germany, Nietzsche, passing through Munich, visited a former friend, the Baron von Seydlitz, who introduced him to his wife and showed him his Japanese collection. The wife was young and charming, the Japanese things pleased Nietzsche; he discovered this art, he liked these stamps, these little gay objects which conformed so little to the sad modern taste, so very little to the sad taste of the Germans. Seydlitz understood beautiful things, and knew how to live; Nietzsche envied him a little. "Perhaps it is time, dear Lisbeth," he wrote to his sister, "for you to find me a wife. Let us say, still young, pretty, gay; in short, a courageous little being la Irne von Seydlitz (we almost 'thee and thou' each other)."
