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He resumed work, burnt some verses which had remained among his papers, and disciplined himself by studying philology according to the most rigorous methods. Alas, weariness at once laid hold of him again. He feared a year similar to that at Bonn, and one long complaint filled his letters and notebooks. Soon there was an end, and this is the event which delivered his soul. On a bookstall he picked up and turned over the pages of a work by an author then unknown to him: it was Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea. The vigour of a phrase, the precision and flair of a word struck him. "I do not know," he wrote, "what demon whispered to me, 'Go home and take that book with you.' Hardly had I entered my room when I opened the treasure which I had thus acquired, and began to submit myself to the influence of that energetic and sombre genius."

The introduction to the book is grandiose: it consists of the three prefaces which the neglected author wrote at long intervals, for each of the three editions of 1818, 1844, and 1859. They are haughty and bitter, but in no way unquiet; rich in profound thoughts, and in the sharpest[Pg 49] sarcasm; the lyricism of a Goethe shows itself in union with the cutting realism of a Bismarck. They are beautiful with that classic and measured beauty which is rare in German literature. Friedrich Nietzsche was conquered by their loftiness, their artistic feeling, their entire liberty. "I think," wrote Schopenhauer, "that the truth which a man has discovered, or the light which he has projected on some obscure point, may, one day, strike another thinking being, may move, rejoice, and console him; and it is to this man one speaks, as other spirits like to ours have spoken to us and consoled us in this desert of life." Nietzsche was moved: it seemed to him that a strayed genius was addressing him alone.

The world which Schopenhauer describes is formidable. No Providence guides it, no God inhabits it, inflexible laws draw it in chains through time and space; but its eternal essence is indifferent to laws, a stranger to reason: it is that blind Will which urges us into life. All the phenomena of the universe are rays from that Will, just as all the days of the year are rays from a single sun. That Will is invariable, it is infinite; divided, compressed in space. "It nourishes itself upon itself, since outside of it there is nothing, and since it is a famishing Will." Therefore, it tortures itself and suffers. Life is a desire, desire is an unending torment. The good souls of the nineteenth century believe in the dignity of man, in Progress. They are the dupes of a superstition. The Will ignores men, the "last comers on the earth who live on an average thirty years." Progress is a stupid invention of the philosophers, under the inspiration of the crowd: Will, an offence to reason, has neither origin nor end; it is absurd, and the universe which it animates is without sense....

Friedrich Nietzsche read greedily the two thousand pages of this metaphysical pamphlet, which had struck at all the nave beliefs of the nineteenth century with[Pg 50] terrible force, and had struck from the head of puerile humanity all its crown of dreams. He experienced a strange and almost startling emotion. Schopenhauer condemns life, but so vehement an energy is in him that in his accusing work it is yet life that one finds and admires. For fourteen days Nietzsche scarcely slept; he went to bed at two o'clock, rose at six, spent his days between his book and the piano, meditated, and, in the intervals of his meditations, composed a Kyrie. His soul was full to the brim: it had found its truth. That truth was hard, but what matter? For a long time his instinct had warned and prepared him for this. "What do we seek?" he had written to his sister. "Is it repose or happiness? No, truth alone, however terrible and evil it may be." He recognised the sombre universe of Schopenhauer. He had had a presentiment of it in the reveries of his boyhood, in his readings of schylus, of Byron, and of Goethe; he had caught a glimpse of it across the symbolism of Christianity. What was this evil Will, the slave of its desires, but under another name, that fallen nature pictured by the Apostle, yet more tragic, now that it was deprived of the divine ray which a Redeemer had left to it? The young man, in alarm at his inexperience and his temerity, had recoiled before so formidable a vision. Now he dared to look it in the face. He no longer feared, for he was no longer alone. By trusting in Schopenhauer's wisdom he satisfied at last one of the profoundest of his desires—he had a master. He struck even a graver note in giving to Schopenhauer the supreme name in which his orphaned childhood had enshrined a mystery of strength and tenderness—he called him his father. He was exalted; then, suddenly swept by a desolating regret. Six years earlier Schopenhauer still lived; he might have approached him, listened to him, told him of his veneration. Destiny had separated them! Intense joy mixed[Pg 51] with intense sorrow overwhelmed him; and he was shattered by a nervous excitement. He grew alarmed, and it needed an energetic effort on his part to bring him back to human life, to the work of the day, to the sleep of the night.

Young people experience a need to admire, it is a form of love. When they admire, when they love, all the servitudes of life become easy to bear. It was as Schopenhauer's disciple that Friedrich Nietzsche knew his first happiness. Philology caused him less weariness. Some pupils of Ritschl, his comrades, founded a society of studies. He joined with them, and, on the 18th of January, 1866, some weeks after his great reading of Schopenhauer, he expounded to them the result of his researches on the manuscripts and the vari lectiones of Theognis. He spoke with vigour and freedom, and was applauded. Nietzsche liked success and tasted it with the simple vanity which he always avowed. He was happy. When he brought his memoir to Ritschl and was congratulated very warmly upon it, he was happier yet. He wished to become, and in fact did become, his master's favourite pupil.

No doubt he had not ceased to consider philology as an inferior duty, as a mere intellectual exercise and means of livelihood, and his soul was hardly satisfied; but what vast soul is ever satisfied? Often, after a day of parching labour, he was melancholy, but what young and ardent soul is ignorant of melancholy? At least his sadness had ceased to be mournful, and a fragment of a letter like the following, which opens with a complaint and ends in enthusiastic emotion, suggests an excessive plenitude rather than pain.

"Three things are my consolations," he wrote in April, 1866. "Rare consolations! My Schopenhauer, the music of Schumann, and lastly solitary walks. Yesterday a heavy storm gathered in the sky; I hastened towards a[Pg 52] neighbouring hill (it is called Leusch, can you explain the word to me?), I climbed it; at the summit I found a hut and a man, who, watched by his children, was cutting the throats of two lambs. The storm broke in all its power, discharging thunder and hail, and I felt inexpressibly well, full of strength and lan, and I realised with a wonderful clearness that to understand Nature one must, as I had just done, go to her to be saved, far from all worries and all our heavy constraints. What mattered to me, then, man and his troubled Will! What mattered to me then the Eternal Thou Shalt and Thou Shalt Not! How different are lightning, storm, and hail, free powers without ethics! How happy they are, how strong they are, those pure wills which the mind has not troubled!"