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"Before the cutting of the navel string, a ceremony is prescribed at the birth of a male; he must be made, while sacred texts are pronounced, to taste a little honey and clarified butter from a golden dish.
"Let the father fulfil the ceremony of the giving of a name, on the tenth or twelfth day after birth, on a propitious lunary day, at a favourable moment, under a star of happy influence.
"Let the first name in the compound name of a Brahman express the propitious favour; that of a Kshatriya, power; that of a Vaisya, riches: that of a Sudra, abjection.
"Let the name of a girl be soft, clear, agreeable, propitious and easily spoken, terminating in long vowels, and resembling words of benediction."
Friedrich Nietzsche read and admired. He copied out many a passage, recognising in the old Hindu text that Goethean gaze, full of love and of good will, hearing in its pages that canto d' amore, which he had himself wished to sing.
But if he admired, he also judged. That Hindu order had as basis a mythology of which the priests who interpreted it were not the dupes. "These sages," wrote Nietzsche, "do not believe in all this—or they would not have found it...." The laws of Manu were clever and[Pg 349] beautiful lies. Necessarily so, since Nature is a chaos, a derision of all thought and of all order, and whoever aspires to the foundation of an order, must turn away from her and conceive an illusory world. Those master builders, the Hindoo lawgivers, are masters also in the art of lying. If Nietzsche were not careful, their genius would drag him into the path of falsehoods.
Here was the instant of a crisis of which we know nothing but the origin and the term. Nietzsche was alone at Turin, no one was by him as he worked, he had no confidant. What was he thinking? Doubtless he was studying, meditating continually over the old Aryan book which gave him the model of his dreams, that book which was the finest monument of sthetic and social perfection, and, at the same time, of intellectual knavery. How he must have loved and yet hated it! He mused, was amazed, and suspended his work. Four years earlier a similar difficulty had prevented him from completing his Zarathustra. It was no longer a question of the Superman, of an Eternal Return. These nave formul were abandoned, but the tendencies which they cloaked—the one, lyrical, avid of construction and of order, even though illusory; the other, avid of destruction and of lucidity—these unvarying tendencies again exercised their influence at this point. Nietzsche hesitated: should he finally listen to these Brahmins, these priests, these crafty leaders of men. No; loyalty is the virtue upon which he can never compound. Later perhaps, much later, when a few centuries are gone by, humanity, more learned in the meaning of its life, in the origins and values of its instincts, in the mechanism of heredities, may essay new lawgivings. To-day it cannot: it would only add falsehoods and hypocrisies to the old lies, the old hypocrisies, which already fetter it. Nietzsche turned away from the thoughts which he had followed with such energy for six months, and suddenly found himself[Pg 350] exactly as he had been in his thirtieth year, indifferent to all that was not in the service of truth.
"All that is suspect and false must be brought into the light!" he had then written. "We do not wish to build prematurely, we do not know that we can build, and that it may not be better to build nothing. There are pessimists who are cowardly and resigned—of those we do not wish to be."
When he had thus expressed himself, Nietzsche still possessed strength enough to consider calmly a labour made the easier by hope. But in ten years he has lost his old force, his old calm, and all hope has left him. His sick soul can no longer offer any resistance—irritability overcomes it. He gives up the composition of his great work, relinquishes it to write a pamphlet. By this circumstance our conjectures are solved and, indeed, terminated.
The days of serenity have gone by. Wounded to the death, Nietzsche wishes to return blow for blow. Richard Wagner is his mark, the false apostle of Parsifal, the illusionist who has seduced his period. If he formerly served Wagner, now he will disserve him, out of passion as out of a sense of duty. He thinks: "It is I who made Wagnerism; it is I who must unmake it." He wishes to liberate, by means of a violent attack, those of his contemporaries who, weaker than himself, still submit to the prestige of this art. He wants to humiliate this man whom he has loved, whom he still loves; he wishes to defame this master who was the benefactor of his youth; in short, if we do not mistake, he wishes to take vengeance on a lost happiness. So he insults Wagner; calls him a decadent, a low comedian, a modern Cagliostro. This indelicacy—an unheard-of thing in Nietzsche's life—suffices to prove the presence of the evil.
No scruple haunted him. A happy excitement favoured[Pg 351] and hastened on his work. Alienists are familiar with those singular conditions which precede the last crises of general paralysis, and Friedrich Nietzsche seemed to abandon himself to an afflux of joy. He attributed the benefit to the climate of Turin, which he was now trying.
"Turin, dear friend," wrote he to Peter Gast, "is a capital discovery. I tell you with the idea at the back of my mind that you may perhaps also profit from it. My humour is good, I work from morning to night—a little pamphlet on music occupies my fingers—I digest like a demi-god, I sleep in spite of the nocturnal noises of carriages: so many symptoms of the eminent suitability of Turin to Nietzsche."
In July, in the Engadine, some damp and cold weeks did him a great deal of harm. He lost his sleep. His happy excitement disappeared, or transformed itself into bitter and febrile humours. It was then that Frulein von Salis-Marschlins, who has recounted her recollections in an interesting brochure, saw him, after a separation of ten months. She remarked the change in his condition; how he walked alone, his hurried carriage, his sharp salute—he would stop scarcely or not at all, in such a hurry was he to get back to his inn and put down the thoughts which his walk had inspired in him. On the visits he paid her he did not conceal his preoccupations. He was in dread of pecuniary embarrassments: the capital which had constituted his little fortune was almost gone; and could he, with the three thousand francs which the University of Basle allowed him as a pension, provide for his everyday needs and for the publication, always onerous, of his books? It was in vain that he regulated his journeys and restricted himself to the simplest lodgings and food. He was reaching the limits of his resources.
The Case of Wagner was completed; to the text, a preliminary discourse, a postscript, a second postscript, and an epilogue were added. He could not cease extending his work, and making it more bitter. Nevertheless he was not satisfied, and felt, after having written it, some remorse.
"I hope that this very risqu pamphlet has pleased you," he wrote to Peter Gast on the 11th of August, 1888. "That would be for me a comfort by no means negligible. There are certain hours, above all, certain evenings, when I do not feel enough courage in myself for so many follies, for so much hardheartedness; I am in doubt over some passages. Perhaps I went too far (not in the matter, but in my manner of expressing the matter). Perhaps the note in which I speak of Wagner's family origins could be suppressed."
