Chapter VII — The Final Solitude
I Beyond Good and Evil
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:
“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 Brossé (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 mélancoliques et folles1 like my defunct friends Stendhal and the Abbé 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 baïcoli!
“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 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 Röder, 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 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 Zürich,” 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 à la Irène von Seydlitz (we almost ‘thee and thou’ each other).”
He reached Tuscany. Lanzky received him, accompanied him, and brought him to the observatory of Arcetri, on the heights of San Miniato, where lived a man of a rare kind—a reader of his books. Leberecht Tempel kept on his table, near his bizarre instruments, the works of Herr Friedrich Nietzsche, many passages of which he knew by heart and willingly recited. Leberecht Tempel was a singularly noble, sincere, and disinterested nature. The two men talked for half an hour and, it seems, understood each other. When Nietzsche left he was deeply moved.
“I wish that this man had never known my books,” said he to Lanzky. “He is too sensible, too good. I shall harm him.”
For he knew the terrible consequences of his thoughts and feared for those who read them suffering similar to his own.
He did not stay in Tuscany: the harsh, cold air which descended from the mountains upon Florence incommoded him. He was recaptured by memories of Nice, the town with two hundred and twenty days of full sunshine—it was from Nice that he wrote to his sister, on the 15th of November, 1885:
“Do not be astonished, dear sister, if your brother, who has some of the blood of the mole and of Hamlet in his veins, writes to you not from Vallombrosa, but from Nice. It has been very precious to me to experiment almost simultaneously with the air of Leipsic, of Munich, of Florence, of Genoa, and of Nice. You would never believe how much Nice has triumphed in this group. I have put up, as last year, at the Pension de Genève, Petite Rue Saint-Etienne. I find it recarpeted, refurnished, repainted, become very comely. My neighbour at table is a bishop, a Monsignor who speaks German. I think of you a great deal. Your
“PRINCE EICHORN.”
“Here I am returned to Nice,” he wrote in another letter, “that is to say to reason.” His pleasure is such that he observes with some indulgence the cosmopolitan city, and is amused by it. “My window looks out on the square of the Phœnicians,” he wrote to Peter Gast. “What a prodigious cosmopolitanism in this alliance of words! Don’t you laugh? And it’s true, Phœnicians lived here. I hear sounding in the air something of the conqueror and the Super-European, a voice which gives me confidence and says to me: Here thou art in thy place.... How far one is from Germany here—‘Ausserdeutsch!’ I cannot say it with force enough.”
He returned to his habit of walking in the sun over the white roads which overlook the waves. The memories of seven years linked his thought with this sea, these strands, these mountains; his fantasy awoke, he listened to it and followed it. Not an hour passed vainly; each one was happy, and left, as the souvenir and witness of the gladness which it brought, an epigram, a poem in prose, a maxim, some lied or song.
He defamed the moderns; it was his pleasure, and, as he thought, his duty as a philosopher, who, speaking for coming times, must contradict his own period. In the sixteenth century a philosopher did well to praise obedience and kindliness. In the nineteenth century, in our Europe impaired by Parisian decadents and Wagnerian Germans, in this feeble Europe which is ever seeking the co-operation of the masses, the line of least effort and the least pain, a philosopher had to praise other virtues. He had to affirm: “That man is great who knows how to be the most solitary, the most hidden, the most distant; who knows how to live beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues, powerful in his will. Greatness is there. And he must urgently ask: Is greatness possible to-day?”—Ist Veredlung möglich? We never cease to hear this question which he first put at twenty-six.
He defamed the Germans; this was his other pleasure, a more intimate and lively one. Germanised Europe had unlearned freedom. She dissimulated her spites, her immodesties, her cunning. She needed to recover the spirit of the old world, of those Frenchmen of former times who lived in so fine a liberty, with so fine a clear-sightedness and force. “We must mediterraneanise music,” wrote he, “and our taste, our manners also.” Across these pages of Nietzsche, it is easy to hear the counsels of his “defunct friends,” Stendhal and the Abbé Galiani.
“Men of profound melancholy,” he wrote, “betray themselves when they are happy: they seize upon their happiness as though they would strangle it and stifle it out of jealousy.... Alas, they know too well that happiness flies before them!” December neared its end, and those festivals, the memories of which moved his faithful heart, approached; Nietzsche had seen his happiness in flight before him. The pleasure of lively thoughts, of beautiful images, did not entirely satisfy him. He was no longer amused by the crowd at Nice, the square of the Phœnicians diverted him no more. What mattered to him the Gai Saber and its precepts—sunlight, wind and Provençal song? He was a German, the son of a pastor, and it was with an oppressed heart that he watched Christmas and Saint Sylvester’s day approach—that venerated time.
He took a disgust for the poor pension in which he lodged: its furniture was touched by too many hands, its sitting-room degraded by being common property. Then the cold weather came. Being poor, he could not get the warmth he needed; he froze, bitterly regretting the stoves of Germany. Wretched places where he cannot ever be alone! To the right, a child is clattering its scales; above, two amateurs are practising on the trumpet and violin. Friedrich Nietzsche, yielding to bitterness, wrote to his sister, who was spending a last Christmas at Naumburg:
“How stupid it is that I have no one here who might laugh with me! If I were stronger, and if I were richer, I should set up in Japan, to know a little gaiety. At Venice I am happy because there one can live in the Japanese manner without too great difficulty. All the rest of Europe is pessimist and mournful; Wagner’s horrible perversion of music is a particular case of the perversion, of the universal trouble.
“Here is Christmas again, and it is sad to think that I must continue to live, as I have done for seven years, like a man proscribed, like a cynical contemner of men. No one bothers about my existence any more; the Lama has ‘better to do,’ and in any case enough to do.... Isn’t it fine, my Christmas letter? Long live the Lama!
“Your F.
“Why do you not go to Japan? It is the most sensible life, and so gay.”
Eight days later he wrote a better letter; perhaps he had reproached himself for his confession.
“Chérie, the weather is magnificent to-day, and your Fritz must afresh put on a good face for you, though in these latter times he has had nights and days that were most melancholy. By chance my Christmas was a real festival day. At noon, I receive your kind presents; very quickly I pass round my neck your watch-chain, and slide your pretty little calendar into my waistcoat pocket. As to the ‘money,’ if there was money in the letter (our mother wrote me that there was), it escaped my fingers. Excuse your blind animal who undid his packet in the road; something no doubt fell from it, as I opened your letters very impatiently. Let us hope that a poor old woman, passing there, found her ‘little child Jesus’ on the pavement. Then I go on foot to my peninsula of Saint Jean, I walk a great round along the coast, and finally install myself not far from the young soldiers who are playing at skittles. Fresh-blown roses, geraniums in the hedges, everything green, everything warm: nothing of the north! There, your Fritz drinks three glasses of a sweet wine of the country, and perhaps gets a trifle tipsy; at least he begins to talk to the waves, and, when they foam as they break too strongly against the shore, he says to them, as one does to fowl: ‘Butsch! Butsch! Butsch!’ Finally, I re-enter Nice and, in the evening, dine at my pension in princely style in the glitter of a great Christmas-tree. Would you believe it, I have found a baker de luxe who knows what ‘Quackkuchen’ is; he told me that the King of Würtemburg had ordered some of it, similar to the kind I like, for his birthday. I remembered this while I was writing ‘in princely style.’... In alter liebe,
“Your F.
“N.B.—I have begun to sleep again (without narcotics).”
In January, February, and March, 1886, his melancholy appeared to be less acute. He gave a form to his work, to those notes which his fantasy had dictated to him. For four years he had ceased to publish his aphorisms, his short essays. The matter with which his notebooks supplied him was immense. He proposed to extract a volume from it; his whole task was to arrange and select.
Had he forgotten the systematic work of which he had thought the previous winter? No, for he always felt the heavy necessity and the reproach of it. He wished to make peace with his own conscience in regard to the delay: he needed a little pleasure, the amusement of a lively book, before commencing the immense work. He found a title, Beyond Good and Evil; a sub-title, Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Thus he announced the more important and always deferred work. He deceived himself in connecting by an artificial tie his pleasure and his duty.
Remember how joyously he used to announce the completion of the book; how communicative he was and how confident! Confidence and joy are gone. He knows that he will not be read. But his ill-fortune always exceeds his expectation, and Nietzsche, once again, has not foreseen the ordeal which he must endure: Beyond Good and Evil finds no publisher. He negotiates with a house in Leipsic which declines his proposals. He writes to Berlin without better success. Everywhere his book is refused. What is he to do with it? He thinks of cutting it up into pamphlets which will perhaps reach the public more easily. He writes an experimental preface.
“These pamphlets,” he is to say, “form a sequel to the ‘Thoughts out of Season’ which I published some ten years ago in the hope of drawing to me ‘my fellows.’ I was then young enough to go fishing for associates with an impatient hope. To-day—after a hundred years: I measure the time by my measure—I am not yet old enough to have lost all hope and confidence.”
But he soon abandoned this idea too. “There is nothing else for me to do,” he wrote to his sister, “but to tie up my manuscript with a string and put it in a drawer.”
In the spring he stayed at Venice, as his custom was, but did not meet his friend, who was visiting the German towns in the vain hope of “placing” his music. Peter Gast had composed an opera, The Lion of Venice, which was being rejected by one theatre after another. Nietzsche wrote to comfort and encourage him. Like Nietzsche, Gast was a German by birth, a Mediterranean in taste. The one lived at Nice, the other at Venice; they had the same ambition, the same unhappy destiny.
“Come back,” he wrote to him, “come back to the solitude in which we both know how to live, in which we alone know how to live! It is Wagnerism which bars your road, and it’s also that German grossness and thickness which, since the ‘Empire,’ goes growing, growing. We must be circumspect and march under arms, you and I, to prevent ourselves from being forced to die of silence....”
Friedrich Nietzsche felt his solitude alleviated by this comradeship in a difficult lot. Peter Gast’s distress was similar to his own; he spoke to him as to a brother. Peter Gast was poor: “Let us share my purse,” said Nietzsche; “let us share the little that I have.” Peter Gast grew discouraged and lost confidence in himself: Nietzsche knew this agony; he knew the great necessity of confidence to the man who worked, and how quickly the contempt of the public must overwhelm him. “Courage,” he wrote; “do not let yourself be cast down; be sure that I, at least, believe in you; I need your music; without it I could not live.” We need not doubt that Nietzsche was sincere when he thus expressed himself. All his power of love and admiration, which was immense, he brought to bear upon this last companion who remained to him, and his friendship transfigured the music of Peter Gast.
He was unhappy, even at Venice; the light hurt the delicate nerves of his eyes. As at Basle in former times, he was obliged to shut himself up behind closed shutters, and deny himself the pleasure of the fine Italian days. What refuge could he find? He recalled the vast German forests, so shady and beneficent to his eyes, and he took to regretting his country. Though she angered him, though he revolted against her, he loved Germany; how could he help loving her? Without her divine music, which had governed the impulses of his first desires, his soul would have been other; without her tongue, that splendid and difficult instrument, his thought would have been other. Schopenhauer and Wagner, two Germans, were his real masters, and remained so (he secretly avowed it); his true disciples, if ever they were to exist, would be born in Germany, that cruel Fatherland which he could not abjure.
Thence he received a piece of news which moved him: Rohde was appointed professor in the University of Leipsic. Nietzsche was happy for his friend, and congratulated him in exquisite terms. Nevertheless, he could not prevent himself from sadly drawing a personal moral. “At present,” he wrote to Peter Gast, “the Faculty of Philosophy is half composed of my ‘good friends’ (Zarncke, Heinze, Leskien, Windisch, Rohde, &c.).” Suddenly he wished to depart; he wanted to see his mother, whom her two children had left; he wished to attend his old comrade’s course; lastly, he wished to confront those famous publishers who printed twenty thousand volumes a year, and refused his own. He left Venice and went straight to Leipsic.
He stepped up to Rohde’s rooms; the time was badly chosen. He found a busy and preoccupied man, who received this unexpected visitor, this too singular personage who had failed in life, with vexation and constraint. “I saw Nietzsche,” Rohde wrote later in a few lines in which he explained his cold welcome. “All his person was marked with an indescribable strangeness, and it disquieted me. There was about him something that I had never known, and of the Nietzsche whom I had known many features were effaced. He seemed to have come from an uninhabited land.” Nietzsche said: “I would like to hear you speak.” Rohde brought him, and put him to sit among young men who were ignorant of his work and of his very name. Nietzsche listened, then went away. “I have heard Rohde at the University,” he wrote to his sister briefly. “I can no longer communicate with any one. Leipsic is, it is clear, no place of refuge or of repose for me.”
He would have fled from Leipsic, as he had fled from Venice and Nice; but the difficulty of his negotiations obliged him to remain there. He applied to various publishers, and applied in vain. Finally, his dignity revolted. He wished his book to appear, and, however heavy the cost, he resolved to pay out of his own pocket the cost of the printing.
His mother was waiting for him at Naumburg, where since Lisbeth’s departure she lived alone. Nietzsche felt a very lively pity for her; he knew her to be desolated by the loss of her family, and in despair over the impieties which he published in his books. “Don’t read them, ignore them,” he told her ceaselessly: “it is not for you that I write.” Nevertheless, she could not repress her curiosity, and her discontent was never appeased. Nietzsche did not wish to leave without giving her a little happiness. He went to spend a week at home; but he had not the strength to keep the secret of his vexations to himself; he bewailed himself, he grew exalted; he saddened the poor woman, whom finally he left in a more unhappy condition than ever.
Passing through Munich, he called on the Baron and Baroness von Seydlitz. He wished to snatch a brief repose under the roof of his amiable host; but Seydlitz was away from home, and his house was shut up.
Nietzsche, having left this Germany which he was never again to see, continued on his road towards the Upper Engadine, from which he always expected some benefit. Here in July he found himself among icy fogs, and felt the first symptoms of a long crisis of neuralgia and melancholy.