II The Will to Power
Shall we say that he met friends? Is the word suitable to those vague figures, to those Russian, English, Jewish, and Swiss women who, seeing this charming man return each season, did not refuse him their quick sympathy? We set down their names: Mesdames Röder and Marasoff; Miss Zimmern and Fräulein von Salis Marschlins (this last a friend of Fräulein von Meysenbug); others, whose names remain unknown, may be guessed.
How did they judge him? Carefully he avoided any speech that might have pained or surprised them. He kept his dangerous thoughts to himself. So far as they were concerned, he wished to be, and knew how to be, an amiable companion... learned, refined, and reserved. Still, whatever secret he made of his work, his friends did not fail to get an inkling into the mystery of his reserve. One of them, an Englishwoman in delicate health, whom he often went to visit and distract, broached the subject.
“I know, Herr Nietzsche, why you won’t let us see your books. If one were to believe what you say in them, a poor, suffering creature like myself would have no right to live.”
Nietzsche was apologetic, and warded off the accusation as best he could.
Another, having said to him one day: “I have been told about your books. You’ve written in one of them, ‘If thou goest among women, do not forget thy whip.’”
“Dear lady, dear friend,” answered Nietzsche, in a pained voice, taking the hands of her who reproached him in his own; “do not misunderstand me; it is not thus that I am to be understood.”
Did they admire him? To dare to admire an unrecognised author a very sure judgment is needed; and no doubt they lacked in necessary daring. They esteemed, they liked their hotel companion, and recognised his singular genius in conversation; at the table d’hôte they looked to have the place near his: little enough it seems if one consider his present fame; then it was a great deal to him. He recovered in the Engadine, thanks to them, a little of the confidence which was necessary to his soul and which he had been losing in Germany. During the summer of 1886, some good musicians passed through Sils. In Nietzsche they discovered a very rare listener, and they liked to be heard by him. This courtesy touched him: “I notice,” he wrote to Peter Gast, “that our artists only sing and play for me. I should be greatly spoilt if this continued.”
A certain Oriental story narrates the adventures of a masked sovereign who travels in his provinces; he is not recognised but divined; an instinct of respect awakes at his approach. In this mountain hotel, does not Nietzsche appear as a masked, a half-divined sovereign?
Nevertheless it was but a poor comfort. Could these women lighten a distress which they could not measure? Nietzsche was traversing that grave moment of life in which a man, however unwilling to be taught, must learn at last what his fate with inexorable constancy gives and refuses him; he had to tear his last hopes from his heart. “I have been unspeakably sad in these latter days,” he wrote to Peter Gast, “and cares have deprived me of sleep.” The information is brief. To his sister he avows more; he addresses to her pages upon pages that are terrible in their power and monotony.
“Where are they, those old friends, with whom I formerly felt so closely bound? We inhabit different worlds, we no longer speak the same tongue! As a stranger, a proscribed man, I wander among them; never a word, never a look now reaches me. I hold my peace—for none understands my speech—ah, I can say it, they have never understood me!... It is terrible to be condemned to silence, when one has so many things to say. Am I created for solitude, never to find any one with whom I may make myself understood? Incommunicability is in truth the most awful of solitudes, to be different, to wear a mask of brass harder than any mask of brass—perfect friendship is only possible inter pares. Inter pares! a phrase which intoxicates me: what confidence, what hope, what perfume, what beatitude it promises the man who necessarily and constantly lives alone; to a man who is different—who has never met any one of his race. And nevertheless he is a good seeker; he has sought much. Ah, the swift folly of those hours in which the solitary thinks he has found a friend, embraces him and holds him in his arms; it is a present from heaven, an inestimable gift. An hour later he rejects him with disgust, he rejects himself with disgust, as though soiled, diminished, sick from his own society. A profound man needs friends, unless indeed he has a God. And I have neither God nor friend! Ah, my sister, those whom you call by this name, once they were friends—but now?
“Excuse this burst of passion; my last journey is the cause....
“My health is neither good nor bad; it is only the poor soul which is wounded and thirsting. Give me a little circle of men who will listen to me and understand—and I am in good health.
“Here everything takes its course; the two English-women and the old Russian lady, the musician, have come back; the latter very ill....”
Nietzsche now went on with his labours on the Wille zur Macht. His unfortunate passage through Germany had modified his arrangements. He thought: “What use is it my writing warlike books? Without allies, without readers, I cannot prevent the abasement of Europe; let it be brought about then. One day it will find its goal—a day which I shall not see. Then my books will be discovered, then I shall have my readers. For them I should write, for them I should determine my fundamental ideas. To-day, I cannot fight, for I have not enemies even....” At the beginning of July, when leaving the Germany which had tried him so hardly, he drew up a detailed plan. In September he wrote:
“I announce, for the next four years, the completion of my work in four volumes. The title alone is alarming: The Will to Power, an essay towards a Transvaluation of all Values. For this all is necessary to me—health, solitude, good humour—perhaps a wife (eine Frau) also.”
In what retirement should he compose this new work? Genoa had inspired the two books which he wrote as a convalescent, The Dawn of Day and The Gay Science; Rapallo, Nice, had inspired Zarathustra. He now thought of Corsica. For long he had been curious about this savage island, and, in the island itself, of a town, Corte—
“There Napoleon was not born but—what is perhaps more important—conceived, and is it not the clearly indicated spot in which I should undertake the transvaluation of all values?... For me, too, it is a conception that is in question.”
Alas! this Napoleonic work, the title of which alone should strike terror, thus struck its author. Nietzsche was not unaware whither that “via mala des consequences” which he had been long following led him. Since a covetous, conquering force is at the heart of nature, every act which does not correspond precisely with this force is inexact and feeble. He said this, he wrote it, and such indeed was his thought: man is never so great as when he combines an alertness and refinement of mind with a certain native brutality and cruelty of instinct. Thus the Greeks understood virtu, and the Italians virtù. The French politicians, and, after them, Frederick II., Napoleon and Bismarck, acted in accordance with these maxims. Troubled by his doubts, lost in his problem, Nietzsche firmly grasped this fragmentary but certain truth: one must have the courage of psychological nudity, he was to write. He trained himself to it, but remained dissatisfied. His mind was too clear, his soul too pensive, and this definition of the strongest men was too curt and icy for his dreams. Formerly he had chosen Schiller and Mazzini for masters. Did he admire them no longer? No soul was ever as constant as his. Only he feared that, in following them, he would gratify a certain feebleness, and the masters whom he now wished to prefer were called Napoleon and Cæsar Borgia.
On this occasion, too, he turned away from his task, shunning harsh affirmations. The publisher Fritsch consented, on the condition that he received pecuniary aid, to publish a second edition of the Origin of Tragedy, The Dawn of Day, and The Gay Science. This had long been one of Nietzsche’s desires: he wished to add prefaces to these old works, to touch them up, and perhaps to add to them. He undertook this new work and became absorbed in it.
Instead of going to Corsica he returned to the Genoese coast, to Ruta, not far from Rapallo, above Portofino, which thrusts its wooded crest out into the sea. Again he found the walks and familiar places in which Zarathustra had spoken to him. How sad he had then been! He had just lost his two last friends, Lou Salomé and Paul Rée. Nevertheless he had continued his task and, indeed, created, at the moment of his profoundest sorrow, his bravest book. Friedrich Nietzsche let himself be stirred by these memories of the past.
He now received a letter which was the first sign of his coming fame. In August, 1886, in despair of being listened to by his compatriots, he had sent his book, Beyond Good and Evil, to two foreign readers, to the Dane Georges Brandes, and to the Frenchman Hippolyte Taine. Georges Brandes did not reply. Hippolyte Taine wrote (October 17, 1886) a letter which gave Nietzsche some joy.
“On my return from a voyage, I found the book which you were good enough to send me; as you say, it is full of ‘thoughts from behind’ (’pensées de derrière’); the form, which is so lively, so literary, the impassioned style, the often paradoxical turn, will open the eyes of the reader who wants to understand; I will in particular recommend to philosophers your first piece on philosophers and philosophy (pp. 14, 17, 20, 25); but the historians and critics will also have their share in the booty of new ideas (for example 41, 75, 76, 149, 150, &c). What you say of national genius and character in your eighth essay is infinitely suggestive, and I shall re-read this piece, although I find there a far too flattering word relative to myself. You do me a great honour in your letter by putting me by the side of M. Burckhardt of Basle, whom I greatly admire; I think that I was the first man in France to announce in the press his great work upon the Culture of the Renaissance in Italy.... With best thanks, I am,
“Yours sincerely,
“H. TAINE.”
Paul Lanzky rejoined Friedrich Nietzsche at Ruta. Not having seen him for eighteen months, he was struck by the change which he observed in him. The body was weighed down, the features altered. But the man remained the same; however bitter his life had become, he was still affectionate and naïve, quick to laughter like a child. He brought Lanzky up the mountain which gives at every instant such magnificent views over the snowy Alps and the sea. The two rested in the most beautiful spots; then they gathered up bits of old timber and twigs from the autumn vines and lit fires, Nietzsche saluting the flames and the rising smoke with cries of joy.
It was then, it was in this inn at Ruta, that Nietzsche drew up the prefaces to The Dawn of Day and The Gay Science, in which he recounted with so strange a vivacity his spiritual Odyssey: Triebschen and Wagner’s friendship; Metz and the discovery of war; Bayreuth, hope and mishap; the rupture with Richard Wagner; the bruising of his love; the cruel years which he spent deprived of poetry and of art; finally Italy, which gave him back both; Venice and Genoa, the two towns which saved him, and the Ligurian coast, Zarathustra’s cradle.
While Nietzsche wrote thus and struggled against depression, may it not be that he was taking drugs to excite himself to work? There is some evidence to suggest it. But we shall never have exact information on this point. We know that he was absorbing chloral and an extract of Indian hemp which, in small doses, produced an inward calm; in large doses, excitement. Perhaps he handled a more complicated pharmacopoeia in secret; it is the habit of nervous persons.
Friedrich Nietzsche liked this coast. “Imagine,” he wrote to Peter Gast, “a little island in the Greek archipelago, pushed down here by the winds. It is a coast of pirates, swift, deceitful, dangerous....” He proposed to pass the winter there. But soon he modified his plans, and wished to return to Nice. Lanzky sought in vain to keep him back.
“You complain of being abandoned,” he said to him. “Whose fault is it? You have disciples and you discourage them. You call me here, you call Peter Gast; and you leave.”
“I need the light, the air of Nice,” answered Nietzsche; “I need the Bay of the Angels.”
He went alone. During this winter, he completed his prefaces, he re-read and touched-up his books. He lived, it seems, in a singular condition of relaxation, indecision and melancholy. He sent his manuscripts to Peter Gast, as he always did, but his requests for advice have an unusual accent of unrest and humility. “Bead me,” he wrote in February, 1887, “with more distrust than you generally do; say simply: this will do, this won’t do I like this, why not alter that, &c., &c.”
He read, and his readings seemed guided by a queer curiosity and less under the rigorous sway of his prejudices.
He familiarised himself with the works of the French decadents. He appreciated Baudelaire’s writings on Richard Wagner, Paul Bourget’s Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine. He read the Contes of Maupassant and admired this “great Latin.” He ran through some volumes by Zola and did not allow himself to be seduced by a merely popular style of thought, by a merely decorative art. He bought, and commented in pencil on the margin, the Esquisse d’une Morale sans obligation ni sanction. Guyau, like Nietzsche and at the same moment, had had the idea of founding a system of morals on the expansive modalities of life. But he understood them in another sense and interpreted as a force of love what Nietzsche understood as a conquering force. Nevertheless the initial agreement was certain. Nietzsche valued highly the purity and intelligence of idea which he found in the work of the French philosopher. The vogue of the Russian novelists was then beginning. Nietzsche took an interest in these poets of a young, violent, and sensitive race, whose charm he always felt. “Do you know Dostoievsky?” he wrote to Peter Gast. “No one, with the exception of Stendhal, has so satisfied and ravished me. There is a psychologist with whom I am in agreement!” He indicated the new author to all his correspondents. The religious fervour of the Slavs interested him and found him indulgent. It was not a symptom of weakness, he thought; it was the return of an energy which could not accept the cold constraints of modern society and whose insubordination took the form of a revolutionary Christianity. These barbarians, thwarted in their instincts, were disconcerted and self-accusatory; they had precipitated a crisis which was still undecided, and Nietzsche wrote: “This bad conscience is a malady, but a malady of the nature of pregnancy.” For, hoping always, he obstinately defended his thoughts against his disgusts. He wished his thoughts to remain free, kindly and confident, and when there rose within him and towards them a hatred of Europe and of its debased peoples; when he feared that he might yield to his bitter humour, he corrected himself at once: “No,” he kept on saying, “Europe is at present richer than ever in men, in ideas, in aspirations, better prepared for great tasks, and we must, contrary to all semblance, hope everything from these multitudes, though their ugly disposition seems to forbid hope.”
During these early months of 1887, Friedrich Nietzsche became intimate with a certain Madame V. P. They went together to San Remo and Monte Carlo. We do not know this woman’s name; we have no letter, either written by her or addressed to her. We may infer some mystery, perhaps a mystery of love.
Madame V. P. was no doubt Nietzsche’s companion2 when he heard the prelude to Parsifal at the concerts in the Casino at Monte Carlo. He listened without any bitterness, with the sudden indulgence of a worn-out adversary. “I loved Wagner,” he wrote in September to Peter Gast; “I still love him.” Assuredly he still loved him, when he could speak as he did of this symphony which he had just heard.
“I do not seek to know whether this art can or should serve some end,” he wrote to Peter Gast, “I ask myself: Has Wagner ever done better? And I find this: the most exact conscience and psychological precision in the manner of relating, expressing, and communicating emotion; the shortest and most direct form; every nuance of sentiment defined with an almost epigrammatical brevity: such descriptive clearness that in listening to this music one thinks of some buckler of marvellous workmanship; lastly, a sentiment, a musical experience of a soul which is extraordinary and sublime; a “haughtiness,” in the formidable meaning of the word;... a sympathy, a penetration, which enters like a knife into the soul—and a pity for what he has discovered and judged at the bottom of that soul. Such beauties one finds in Dante and nowhere else. What painter has ever painted so melancholy a look of love as Wagner in the last accents of his prelude?”
How easy it would have been for him to be a great critic, equal in his delicacy, superior in the largeness of his views, to that Sainte-Beuve whom he esteemed so highly! He knew it, and found it hard to resist the seductions of that “dilettantism of analysis”—the expression is his own. His best readers of ten remarked this. “What a historian you are!” Burckhardt used to say, and Hippolyte Taine repeated it. It did not satisfy Nietzsche. He despised the calling of historian or of critic. He was informed by a young German whom he met at Nice that the professors of Tübingen took him as a merely dissolvent mind, radical and nihilistic; it saddened him. He had not torn himself from the romanticism of pity and love to sink at last in the inverse romanticism of violence and energy. He admired Stendhal, but did not intend to be a Stendhalian. The Christian belief had nourished his infancy, the disciplines of Pforta had ripened it, Pythagoras, Plato, Wagner had increased, elevated his desires. He wished to be a poet and a moralist, an inventor of virtues, venerations, and serenities: none of his readers, none of his friends, had understood this intention. In correcting the proofs of The Dawn of Day, he re-read this old page, the truth of which still held good.
“We are still on our knees before power—according to the old custom of slaves—and yet, when the degree of venerability shall have to be fixed, only the degree of rationality in power will be decisive; we have to investigate to what extent power has indeed been overcome by something higher of which it is now the tool and instrument. But as yet there is an absolute lack of eyes for such investigations; nay, in most cases the appraisement of genius is even considered a crime. And thus perhaps the most beautiful of all spectacles still takes place in the dark and, after bursting into bloom, soon fades into perpetual night—I mean the spectacle of that power which a man of genius employs, not in his works, but in the development of himself, regarded as a work, that is, in the task of self-mastery, in the purification of his imagination, in his deliberate choice and ordering of the course of his tasks and inspirations. And yet the great man is still invisible in the greatest thing which claims worship, invisible like a distant star; his triumph over power continues to be without eyes, hence also without song and poets. As yet the order of greatness has not been settled for the sum total of human history....”
Alas, for victory over force, one must possess some exterior force, reason or faith. Nietzsche, denying to the one or to the other all their rights, has disarmed himself for the combat.
At the beginning of March a violent earthquake terrified the cosmopolitan flaneurs of Nice. Friedrich Nietzsche admired these movements of nature which reminded man of his nothingness. Two years earlier the catastrophe of Krakatoa, which destroyed two thousand human beings in Java, had filled him with enthusiasm. “It’s grand,” he said to Lanzky, whom he had asked to read the telegrams to him; “two thousand human beings annihilated at a stroke! It’s magnificent. This is how humanity should come to its end—how one day it will end.” And he hoped that a tidal wave would at least do away with Nice and its peoples. “But,” observed Lanzky, “we should be done away with ourselves.” “What matter!” answered Nietzsche. His almost realised desire amused him. He did not advance his departure by a single day.
“Hitherto,” he wrote on March 7th, “among these thousands of people in a condition of folly, I have lived with a sentiment of irony and cold curiosity. But one cannot answer for oneself; perhaps to-morrow I shall be as unreasonable as any one. Here there is an imprévu which has its charm.”
By the middle of March he would have ended his work on the prefaces; and, as he says in one of them: “What do Herr Nietzsche, his illnesses and recoveries, matter to us? Let us speak frankly, let us go straight to the problem.” Yes, surely, let us go straight to the problem; determine, among the many ends which men propose to themselves, those which truly elevate and ennoble them; succeed at last in gaining our triumph over power. On March 17th he sketched out a plan:
First Book: European Nihilism.
Second Book: Criticism of Superior Values.
Third Book: Principle of a New Evaluation.
Fourth Book: Discipline and Selection.
He had sketched a very similar programme in July, 1886: two books of analysis and criticism; two books of doctrine and affirmation; in all four books—four volumes.
Every springtime brought him back to a condition of uncertainty and uneasiness; between Nice and the Engadine; he did not know where to find an air which should be bright enough and not too warm; a fine light that would not hurt his eyes. In this year, 1887, he let himself be tempted by the Italian lakes, and, leaving Nice, set out for Lake Maggiore. This midget Mediterranean, enclosed in the mountains, pleased him infinitely at first. “This place strikes me as more beautiful than any part of the Mediterranean,” he wrote, “and more moving—how is it that I took so many years to discover it? The sea, like all huge things, has something stupid and indecent which will not be found here.” He corrected the proofs of the Gaya Scienza; he re-read Human, Too Human, and again paused to contemplate with pity his unrecognised work.
But he recovered possession of himself. The coming work alone mattered. He forced himself to recommence his meditations, and at once became enervated and exhausted. He had planned a visit to Venice; suddenly he gave it up. “My health is against it,” he wrote to Peter Gast. “I am unworthy of seeing such beautiful things.”
From aggravation of ennui, an epistolary quarrel arose between Erwin Rohde and himself. He had occasion to write a word to the most intimate friend of past days, and could not resist the pleasure of adding a malicious touch. “I suit old people only,” he wrote; “Taine, Burckhardt, and even you are not old enough for me....” Erwin Rohde did not like this touch. A professor, whereas Nietzsche was nothing; a scholar with a reputation among European scholars, whereas Nietzsche was still unknown despite his eccentric books, he would not permit irreverence, and defended his dignity. His letter must have been strongly worded, for he had it restored to him later, and destroyed it.
This misadventure tried Nietzsche. His health was in every respect impaired; he resolved to follow a régime of waters, massage and baths, in a special establishment in Switzerland, at Coire. He went there, and surrendered himself to the doctors.
He kept on working, however, and made an energetic effort to discover and define the moral values which he wished to propound. But in vain; do what he would, the problem of his third book—Principle of a New Evaluation—remained unsolved. “We may here transcribe the more precise definition with which we are furnished by another draft.
“Third Book: the problem of the legislator. To bind anew the unregulated energies in such a manner that they are not mutually annihilated by running foul of one another; to mark the real augmentation of force.”
What does this mean? What real augmentation, what real direction of things is indicated us by these words? Is it an augmentation of intensity? Then every shade of energy, provided it be intense, will be good. But we must not take it in this sense. Nietzsche selected, preferred, excluded. This augmentation is then the sign of an order, of a natural hierarchy. But in every hierarchy there must be a criterion by which the ranks are distributed; what should this criterion be? Nietzsche would formerly have said: It will be my logical affirmation, the beliefs which I shall have given. Does he still think it? Doubtless; his thoughts hardly vary. But his audacity was lessened by his sorrows, his critical mind had been rendered more exacting by long indecisions. He desired, he sought, he seemed to ask science, the “doctor-philosopher,” for a real basis which all his habits of thought refused him.
Mournful news completed the ruin of his courage. Heinrich von Stein died, before his thirtieth year, of a heart failure.
“This has put me out of my senses,” wrote Nietzsche to Peter Gast; “I truly loved him. I always thought that he was reserved for me some day. He belonged to that little number of men whose existence rejoiced me; and he too had great confidence in me.... In this very place how we laughed!... He paid a two days’ visit to Sils, he had not a glance for Nature or Switzerland—he came straight from Bayreuth; he went back straight to Halle, to his father;—one of the rarest and most delicate homages I have ever received. It made an impression. He had said at the hotel: ‘If I come, it is not for the Engadine.’”
Three weeks passed. He complained of bitter inclinations, of susceptibility which lowered his soul. Nevertheless, he announced a new work. What was it?
It is not The Will to Power. His impatience, which is added to by fatigue, does not easily bend to the delays of meditation. Of his old gifts, his genius for improvising, his polemical genius alone survive. Herr Widmann, a Swiss critic, had just written a study on Beyond Good and Evil and saw in this work but a manual of anarchism: “This is dynamite,” he said. Friedrich Nietzsche wished to reply, and at once drew up at a spurt in fifteen days one, two, three short essays which he entitled as a whole, A Genealogy of Morals. “This work,” he wrote on the title-page, “is destined to complete and elucidate my last book, Beyond Good and Evil.”
“I have said,” he wrote in substance, “that I place myself beyond Good and Evil—Gut und Böse. Does this mean that I wish to liberate myself from every moral category? No. I challenge the exaltation of meekness which is called good; the defamation of energy which is called bad; but the history of the human conscience—do the moralists know that such a history exists?—displays to us a multitude of other moral values, other ways of being good, other ways of being bad, numerous shades of honour and of dishonour. Even here the reality is moving, initiative is free; one must seek, one must create.”
But Nietzsche developed his thought further: “I have wished,” he wrote some months later à propos of this little book, “I have wished to fire a cannon-shot with more sonorous powder.” He exposed the distinction between the two moralities, the one dictated by the masters, the other by the slaves; and he thought to recognise in the verbal roots of the words “good” and “evil,” their old meaning. Bonus, buonus, said he, comes from duonus, which signifies warrior; malus comes from μέλας, black: the blonde Aryans, the ancestors of the Greek, indicated by this word the type of conduct habitual to their slaves and subjects, the Mediterraneans crossed with Negro and Semitic blood. These primitive notions of what is noble and what is vile, Friedrich Nietzsche does not challenge.
On the 18th of July, writing from Sils-Maria, he announced the new work to Peter Gast.
“I have energetically employed these last days, which were better,” he wrote. “I have drawn up a little piece of work which, as I think, puts the problem of my last book in a clear light. Every one has complained of not having understood me; and the hundred copies sold do not permit me to doubt that in effect I am not understood. You know that for three years I have spent about 500 thalers to defray the cost of my books; no honorarium, it goes without saying, and I am 43 years old, and I have written fifteen books! Further: experience, and many applications, more painful to me than I care to say, force me to certify, as a fact, that no German editor wants to have anything to do with me (even if I abandon my author’s rights). Perhaps this little book which I am completing to-day will help to sell some copies of my last book (it always pains me to think of the poor Fritzsch on whom all the weight of my work rests). Perhaps my publishers will some day benefit from me. As for myself, I know only too well that when people begin to understand me, I shall not benefit from it.”
On the 20th of July, he despatched the manuscript to the publisher. On the 24th July, he called it back by telegram in order to add a few features, a few pages. All his summer was spent in discomfort, melancholy, and the correction of his book, which he never ceased to touch up, to draw out, to render more violent and more alive. Towards the end of August, perceiving an empty space on the last page of the first section, Nietzsche added this curious note, in which he indicated the unstudied problems which he was to have neither strength nor time to attack.
“Remark.—I take the opportunity presented by this essay to express publicly and formally a wish which, so far, I have only mentioned occasionally to certain scholars, in chance conversations. Some Faculty of Philosophy ought, by a series of academical prize-dissertations, to further studies in the history of morality; perhaps this book will serve to give a vigorous impetus in this direction. I would propose the following question:
“What hints are furnished by philology, more especially by etymological research, with reference to the history of the development of moral concepts?
“On the other hand it will be as necessary to interest physiologists and doctors in these problems. In fact and above all, all tables of values, every ‘thou shalt’ known to history and ethnological research, need to be explained and elucidated in the first place from their physiological side, before any attempt is made to interpret them through psychology.... The question: What is this or that table of values and morality worth? must be considered from the most varied perspectives. Especially ‘the worth for what?’ must be considered with extraordinary discernment and delicacy. A thing, for instance, which has evident value with reference to the greatest durability of a race might possess quite another value, if it were a question of creating a higher type. The good of the greatest number and the good of the smallest number are antithetical points of view in valuation; we shall let the simplicity of English biologists suppose that the former is by itself of higher value. All sciences must prepare the way for the philosopher of the future, whose task will consist in solving the problem of values and determining their hierarchy.”
September came. The proofs were corrected, the Engadine became cold. The wandering philosopher had to find new quarters and new work.
“To tell the truth,” he wrote to Peter Gast, “I hesitate between Venice and Leipsic; I should go there to work, I still have a lot to learn, many questions to ask and much to read for the great thought of my life of which I must now acquit myself. It would not be a matter of an autumn, but of a whole winter spent in Germany. And, weighing everything together, my health dissuades me very strongly from essaying a like experience this year. It will be then Venice or Nice; and from a quite personal point of view, that is better perhaps. Moreover, I need solitude and contemplation rather than study and inquiry into five thousand problems.”
Peter Gast was at Venice, and Venice, as one might have foreseen, carried the day. Nietzsche lived for some weeks, a flaneur and all but happy, in the town with a “hundred profound solitudes.” He scarcely wrote: his days, according to Peter Gast, were idle or seemed to be so. It was not to shut himself up in a room in Venice that he gave up the libraries of Leipsic. He walked, frequented the poor “trattoria,” where at midday the humblest, the most courteous of lower classes sit down to eat; when the light was too strong he went to rest his eyes in the shade of the basilica; when day began to decline he recommenced his perpetual walks. Then he could look at St. Mark, with its flocks of familiar pigeons, without suffering, at the lagoon with its islands and temples. He kept on thinking of his work. He imagined it logical and free, simple in its plan, numerous in its details, luminous with a little mystery, a little shade on every line; he wished in short that it should resemble that city which he loved, that Venice whose sovereign will allied itself to the play of all fantasy and grace.
Let us read this page of notes, written in November, 1887; L’Ombra di Venezia, is it not obvious there?
“A perfect book to consider:
“(1) Form. Style. An ideal monologue, all that has a learned appearance, absorbed in the depths. All the accents of profound passion, of unrest and also of weakness. Alleviations, sun tasks—short happiness, sublime serenity. To go beyond demonstration; to be absolutely personal, without employing the first person. Memoirs as it were; to say the most abstract things in the most concrete, in the most cutting manner. The whole history as if it had been lived and personally suffered. Visible things, precise things, examples, as many as possible. No description; all the problems transposed into sentiment as far as passion.
“(2) Expressive terms. Advantage of military terms. To find expressions to replace philosophical terms.”
On the 22nd of October he was at Nice.
Two events (the word is assuredly not too strong) occupied the first two weeks of his stay. He lost his oldest friend; he acquired a reader.
The lost friend was Erwin Rohde. The quarrel begun in the previous spring was then consummated. Nietzsche wrote to Rohde, and his first intention was not to wound. “Do not withdraw from me too lightly,” he wrote in announcing the despatch of his last book, The Genealogy of Morals; “at my age and in my solitude I can hardly bear to lose the few men in whom I formerly confided.” But he could not limit himself to these words. He had received a second note, a very amiable one, from Hippolyte Taine,3 whom Erwin Rohde had criticised disrespectfully in his letter of May. Nietzsche wished to defend his French correspondent, and continued:
“N.B.—I beg that you judge M. Taine more sensibly. The scurrilities that you express and think about him irritate me. I pardon them to the prince Napoleon, not to friend Rohde. It is difficult to me to think that any one who misunderstands this great-hearted and severe-minded race can understand anything of my task. Besides, you have never written me a word which shows that you have the least suspicion of the destiny which weighs me down. I have forty-three years behind me and am as alone as if I were a child.”
All relations were broken off.
The new reader acquired was Georges Brandes, who acknowledged the despatch of the Genealogy in an extraordinarily intelligent and vivid letter.
“I get the breath of a new mind from your books,” he wrote: “I do not always entirely understand what I read, I do not always see whither you are bound, but many features are in accord with my thoughts and sympathies; like you I hold the ascetic ideal in poor esteem; democratic mediocrity inspires in me, as in you, a profound repugnance; I appreciate your aristocratic radicalism. I am not quite clear with regard to your contempt for the ethic of pity...
“Of you I know nothing. I see with astonishment that you are a professor. In any case I offer you my best compliments on being, intellectually, so little of a professor.... You are of the small number of men with whom I would like to talk.”
It would seem as if Nietzsche ought to have felt very strongly the comfort of having found two witnesses to his work, and of so rare a quality: Brandes and Taine. Did he not learn, about this time, that Brahms was reading Beyond, Good and Evil with much relish? But the iron had entered into his soul, and the faculty of receiving happy impressions was, as it were, extinguished in him. He had lost that interior joy, that resistant serenity of which he was formerly so proud, and his letters displayed only melancholy.
With this disaster there survived the activity of his mind alone, which worked with singular energy. We can with difficulty enumerate the objects which occupied his attention. Peter Gast transcribed his Hymn to Life for the orchestra; Nietzsche superintended, sometimes corrected, always naïvely admired, this new form of his work.
The journal of the Goncourts appeared; he read this “very interesting novelty,” and sat down to table at Magny’s with Flaubert, Sainte-Beuve, Gautier, Taine, Gavarri and Renan. All these distractions did not prevent him from embarking resolutely on his new work, the decisive work in which his wisdom and not his rage would speak; the calm work in which polemics would be without rights. He defined in six lines the design which he had formed.
“To have run through every chamber of the modern soul, to have eaten in each of its corners: my pride, my torture, and my joy. To transcend pessimism effectively, and, in short, a Goethean regard full of love and good-will.”
Friedrich Nietzsche in this note designated the inspirer of his last work; it was to be Goethe. No nature differed so much from his own, and this very difference determined his choice. Goethe had humiliated no mode of human activity, he had excluded no idea from his intellectual world; he had received and administered as a benevolent lord the immense heritage of human culture. Such was Friedrich Nietzsche’s last ideal, his last dream. He wished, in this extremity of life (he knew his destiny), to spread, like the sinking sun, his softest lights; to penetrate everywhere, to justify and illumine everything, so that not one shadow should exist upon the surface of things, not one sorrow in the privacy of souls.
He easily determined the directing ideas of his first two volumes: European Nihilism, The Criticism of Higher Values. For four years he had not written a line which was not a part of this analysis or criticism. He wrote rapidly, angrily. “A little fresh air,” he cried; “this absurd state of Europe cannot last much longer.” It was only a cry, and very quickly suppressed. Nietzsche put patience behind him, like a weakness; with a song of love that he would answer the attacks of life. He wished to return, and did, in fact, return, to calmer thoughts. He put this question: “Is it true that the condition of Europe is absurd? Perhaps a reason for the facts exists, and escapes us. Perhaps in this debility of the will, in this democratic abasement, one should rightly recognise a certain utility, a certain value of conservation. They seem irrepressible; perhaps they are necessary, perhaps in the long run salutary, though to-day, and, so far as we are concerned, they must be deplored.
“Reflexion: It is madness to suppose that all this victory of values can be anti-biological; one must seek to explain it by a vital interest for the maintenance of the type man, even though it must be attained by the preponderance of the feeble and the disinherited. Perhaps if things went differently, man would cease to exist?—Problem.
“The elevation of the type is dangerous to the conservation of the species. Why?
“The strong races are the prodigal races.... Here we are confronted by a problem of economy....”
He repressed all disgust, refused to allow himself the use of abusive speech, tried to consider, and did consider, serenely, those tendencies which he condemned. He asked: Must we deny to the masses the right to seek their truths, their vital beliefs? The masses are the basis of all humanity, the foundation of all cultures. Without them, what would become of the masters? They require that the masses be happy. We must be patient; we must suffer our insurgent slaves (for the moment our masters) to invent the illusions which are favourable to them. Let them believe in the dignity of work! If they thus become more docile in work, their belief is salutary.
“The problem,” he writes, “is to render man as utilisable as possible, and make him approximate, as far as may be done, as closely as possible to the machine which never makes a mistake; for this, he must be armed with the virtues of the machine, he must be taught to endure ennui, to lend to ennui a superior charm...; the agreeable sentiments must be put back to a lower rank.... The mechanical form of existence, considered as the noblest, the highest, should adore itself.
“A high culture can only be raised on a vast site, over a firm and well-consolidated mediocrity....
“The sole end must, for a long while yet, be the lessening of man: for there must first be created a large foundation on which the race of strong men may be raised....
“The lessening of the European man is the great process which may not be impeded; it should be accelerated again. It is the active force which allows one to hope for the arrival of a stronger race, of a race which should possess to excess those very qualities which the impoverished species lack (will, responsibility, certitude, the faculty of fixing an end for oneself).”
Thus at the end of 1887, Nietzsche had succeeded in drawing up a first sketch of the work of synthesis which he had proposed to himself. He concedes a certain right, a certain dignity, to those motives which he formerly reviled. The final rough drafts of Zarathustra had already given us similar indications. “The disciples of Zarathustra,” wrote Nietzsche, “give to the humblest, not to themselves, the expectation of happiness.... They distribute religions and systems, according to a hierarchy.” Nietzsche now writes, and the intention is similar: “The humanitarian tendencies are not anti-vital, they suit the masses who live slowly, and thus suit humanity which needs the satisfaction of the masses. The Christian tendencies are also benevolent, and nothing is so desirable,” writes Nietzsche, “as their permanence; for they suit all those who suffer, all the feeble, and it is necessary for the health of human societies that suffering, that inevitable weaknesses, be accepted without revolt, with submission, and, if possible, with love.” “Whatever I may happen to say of Christianity,” wrote Nietzsche in 1881 to Peter Gast, “I cannot forget that I owe to it the best experiences of my spiritual life; and I hope never to be ungrateful to it at the bottom of my heart.” This thought, this hope, has never left him; and he rejoices to have found a word of justice for the religion of his childhood, the only one which still offers itself to souls.
On December 14, 1887, he addressed a letter to an old correspondent of the Basle days, Carl Fuchs. The accent is a proud one.
“Almost all that I have written should be erased. During these latter years the vehemence of my internal agitations has been terrible. To-day, at the moment when I should be rising higher, my first task is to modify myself, to depersonalise myself towards higher forms.
“Am I old? I do not know, and moreover I do not know what kind of youth is necessary to me.
“In Germany, people complain strongly of my ‘eccentricities.’ But as they do not know where my centre is, they can hardly discern when or how I happen to be eccentric.”
From the dates of his notes, it seems that Nietzsche approached a different problem in the month of January, 1888. Those humble multitudes whose rights he admits and measures would not deserve to live, if their activity were not, in the last instance, governed by an élite, utilised for glorious ends. What would be the virtues of this élite, what ends would it serve? Nietzsche was thus brought back to the problem which was his torment. Would he define at length this unknown, and perhaps unattainable grandeur, towards which his soul had for so long aspired? He was again a prey to sadness. He complained of his sensibility, of his irritability, which had become such that each day, on the arrival of the post, he hesitated and shivered before opening his letters.
“Never has life appeared so difficult to me,” he wrote to Peter Gast on January 15th. “I can no longer keep on terms with any sort of reality: when I do not succeed in forgetting them, they break me.... There are nights when I am overwhelmed with distress. And so much remains to be done—all, so to say!—Therefore I must hold out. To this wisdom I apply myself, at least in the mornings. Music, these days, gives me sensations which I had never known. It frees me, it lets me recover from the intoxication of myself; I seem to consider myself from a great height, to feel myself from a great height; thus it renders me stronger, and regularly, after an evening’s music (I have heard Carmen four times), I have a morning full of energetic perceptions and lucky discoveries. It is quite admirable. It is as though I had bathed myself in a more natural element. Without music life is merely a mistake, a weariness, an exile.”
Let us try to follow the course of his work. He subjected himself to an historical research and attempted to discover the social class, the nation, the race or the party which authorised the hope of a more noble humanity. Here was the modern European:
“How could a race of strong men disengage itself from it? a race with the classical taste? The classical taste, that is, the will to simplification, to accentuation... the courage of psychological nudity.... To raise oneself from this chaos to this organisation, one must be constrained by a necessity. One must be without choice; disappear or impose oneself. A dominant race can only have terrible and violent origins. Problem: where are the barbarians of the twentieth century? Evidently they will only be able to appear and impose themselves after huge socialistic crises—these will be the elements most capable of the most persistent hardness in respect of themselves, and who will be able to become the guarantees of the most persistent will.”
Is it possible to discern in modern Europe these elements predestined to victory? Nietzsche busied himself with this problem, and wrote down the results of his researches in his notebook.
“The most favourable impediments and remedies against modernity.
“And first:
“1. Obligatory military service, with genuine wars which put an end to all lightness of mind.
“2. National narrowness which simplifies and concentrates.”
Other indications corroborate the above.
“The maintenance of the military state, which is the only means left to us, whether for the maintenance of the great traditions, or for the institution of the superior type of man. And all circumstances which perpetuate unfriendliness, distance between states, find themselves thus justified.”
What an unforeseen conclusion to Nietzschean polemics! He had dishonoured nationalism; and for the support which he sought in this grave hour he fell back on nationalism. A yet more unexpected discovery was to come. Nietzsche, proceeding with his researches, foresaw, defined, and approved of a party which can be but a form or a reform of Positivist democracy. He discerned the lineaments of the two vigorous and sane groupings which suffice to discipline man.
“A party of peace, not sentimental, which denies war to itself and its members, which also denies them recourse to the courts of law; which provokes against itself, struggle, contradiction, persecution: a party of the oppressed, at least for a time; soon the great party opposed to sentiments of rancour and vengeance.
“A party of war, which with the same logic and severity against itself, proceeds in an opposite sense.”
Should we recognise in these two parties the organised forces which will produce that tragical era of Europe which Nietzsche announces? Perhaps; but let us be careful not to exaggerate the value of these notes. They are rapidly written; as they surged and passed in Nietzsche’s mind, they should surge and pass before us. His view pierces in every direction: it never settles upon one object. No working-class Puritanism can satisfy him, for he knows that the brilliancy of human culture stands or falls with the freedom of the aristocracies. No nationalism can satisfy him, for he loves Europe and her innumerable traditions.
What resource is left to him? He has bound himself to seek in his own time the points of support for a higher culture. For a moment he thinks he has found them; he has deceived himself, and turns away, for these supports impose a narrowness of direction which his mind cannot tolerate. “There is this that is extraordinary in the life of a thinker,” he wrote in 1875—the age of the text proves the permanence of the conflict—” that two contrary inclinations oblige him to follow, at the same moment, two different directions and hold him under their yokes; on the one hand he wishes to know and, abandoning without weariness the firm ground which sustains the life of men, he adventures into unknown regions; on the other hand he wishes to live, and, without ever wearying, he seeks a place in which to five....” Nietzsche had abandoned Wagner, wandered in uncertain regions. He seeks a final security; what does he find? The narrow refuge of nationalism. He withdraws from it: it may be a vulgar recourse, a useful artifice for maintaining some solidity in the crowds, a certain principle of taste and of severity; it may not be, it must not be, the doctrine of the European élite, a scattered and, no doubt, non-existent élite to whom his thoughts are addressed.
Nietzsche put the idea of nationalism out of his mind; it was the expedient of a weak century. He ceased to devote himself to his search. What mattered to him the beliefs which should be beneficent to the humble? He thought of Napoleon and of Goethe, both of whom rose superior to their times, and to the prejudices of their countries. Napoleon was contemptuous of the Revolution, but artfully turned its energy to advantage; he despised France, but ruled her. Goethe held Germany in poor esteem and took little interest in her struggles: he wished to possess and reanimate all the ideas, all the dreams of men, to conserve and enrich the vast heritage of moral riches which Europe had created. Napoleon knew the grandeur of Goethe, and Goethe joyfully observed the life of the conqueror, ens realissimum. The soldier, the poet, the one who kept men in submission and silence, held them to effort, the other who watched, meditated, and glorified, such is the ideal couple that reappear at every decisive instant in Friedrich Nietzsche’s life. He had admired the Greece of Theognis and Pindar, the Germany of Bismarck and Wagner; a long winding course led him back towards his dream, towards that unrealised Europe of strength and beauty of which Goethe and Napoleon were, upon the morrow of the Revolution, the solitary representatives.
We can tell, from a letter addressed to Peter Gast (February 13, 1887), that Nietzsche was at this date by no means satisfied with his work. “I am still in the tentative, the introductory, the expectant stage...” he wrote, and he added: “The first rough draft of my Essay towards a Transvaluation is ready; it has been, on the whole, a torture, and I have no longer the courage to think of it. In ten years I shall do better.” What was the cause of this dissatisfaction? Was he weary of that tolerance, that condescension to the needs of the feeble and of the crowd which he had imposed on himself for three months? Was he impatient to express his anger?
The letters which he then addressed to his mother and sister let us approach him in a more intimate manner. (They have not all been published.) He wrote to these two women from whom he was separated with a tenderness which rendered difficult dissimulation and even courage itself. He let himself go, as though it pleased him to find himself at their knees a child again. He was gentle, obedient with his mother; he signed himself humbly: ta vieille créature. With his sister he talked like a comrade; he seemed to have forgotten all the grievances he had had against her in other times; he knew that she would never return from far-off Paraguay: he regretted her, he loved her because she was lost. She is energetic, is Lisbeth, and valiantly risks her life. Nietzsche admired in her the virtues which he esteemed above all virtues, and which are, he thinks, the virtues of his race, the noble race of the Counts Nietzki. “How strongly I feel,” he wrote her, “in all you do and say, that the same blood runs in our veins.” He hearkened to her, but she did not cease to offer him overwise advice. As he complains of being alone, why does he not get made a professor, why does he not marry? Nietzsche answered too easily: “Where would I find a wife? and if by chance I did find one, would I have the right to ask her to share my life?” He knew nevertheless, and said so, that a wife would be sweet to him.
“NICE, January 25, 1888. “I must relate a little adventure to you: yesterday, as I was taking my usual walk, I heard, not far off, a warm and frank laugh (I thought that I heard your laugh); and when this laughing person came near me—I saw a very charming girl, with brown eyes, delicate as a deer. The sight warmed my heart, my old solitary philosopher’s heart—I thought of your matrimonial advice, and for the rest of my walk, I could not rid myself of the image of this young and gracious girl. Assuredly it would do me good to have so gracious a thing by me—but would it do her good? Would not I, with my ideas, make this girl unhappy? And would not my heart break (we assume that I love her) if I saw so amiable a creature suffering? No, no marriage!”
Was it not now that a singular and unwholesome idea fixed itself in his thought? At every moment he was picturing to himself the joys of which he was deprived: fame, love, and friendship; he thought rancourously of those who possessed them, and above all of Richard Wagner, whose genius had been always so sumptuously rewarded. How beautiful she had been, when he knew her at Triebschen, this incomparable woman Cosima Lizst, come, while yet married, to the scandal of the world, to live with Wagner and help in his work! Attentive and clear-minded, active and helpful, she assured him the security which he had hitherto lacked. Without her, what would have become of him? Could he have mastered his impatient, restless, excitable temperament? would he have been capable of realising those great works which he was for ever announcing? Cosima appeased him, directed him; thanks to her, he achieved the Tetralogy, he reared Bayreuth, he wrote Parsifal.... Nietzsche recalled those fine days at Triebschen. Cosima welcomed him, listened to his ideas and projects, read his manuscripts, was benevolent, talked brightly to him. Suffering and irritation deformed his memories; he became infatuated with the thought that he had loved Cosima Wagner and that she, perhaps, had loved him. Nietzsche wished to believe this, and came to believe it. Yes, there had been love between them, and Cosima would have saved him, as she saved Wagner, if, by lucky chance, she had only known him a few years earlier. But every circumstance had been unfavourable to Nietzsche. Here again Wagner had robbed him. He had taken all, fame, love, friendship.
We can divine this strange romance in the last works of Friedrich Nietzsche. A Greek myth helps him to express and veil his thoughts; it is the myth of Ariadne, Theseus, and Bacchus. Theseus was lost; Ariadne has met him and led him to the exit from the labyrinth; but Theseus is treacherous: he abandons upon the rock the woman who has saved him; Ariadne would die alone and in despair if Bacchus did not intervene, Bacchus-Dionysios who loves her. The enigma of these three names may be solved: Ariadne is Cosima; Theseus, Wagner; Bacchus-Dionysios, Nietzsche.
On the 31st of March he wrote again, and his language was that of a lost soul.
“Night and day, I am in a state of unbearable tension and oppression, by reason of the duty imposed upon me and also on account of my conditions of life, which are absolutely opposed to the accomplishment of this duty; here no doubt the cause of my distress must be sought.
.... My health, thanks to an extraordinarily fine winter, to good nourishment, to long walks, has remained sufficiently good. Nothing is sick, but the poor soul. Besides, I will not conceal the fact that my winter has been very rich in spiritual acquisitions for my great work: so the mind is not sick; nothing is sick, but the poor soul.”
Nietzsche left Nice next day. He wished, before going up to the Engadine, to make the experiment of a stay in Turin. Its dry air and spacious streets had been praised in his hearing. He travelled with difficulty; he lost his luggage and his temper, quarrelled with the porters, and remained for two days ill at Sampiedarena, near Genoa; in Genoa itself, he spent three days of rest, fully occupied with the happy memories which he found again. “I thank my luck,” he wrote to Peter Gast, “that it led me back to this town, where the will rises, where one cannot be cowardly. I have never felt more gratitude than during this pilgrimage to Genoa....” On Saturday, April 6th, he arrived at Turin, broken with fatigue. “I am no longer capable of travelling alone,” he said to Peter Gast in the same letter. “It agitates me too much, everything affects me stupidly.”