III Towards the Darkness
Here we should discontinue our story to forewarn the reader. Hitherto, we have been following the history of Nietzsche’s thought. Nietzsche’s thought has now no longer a history, for an influence, come not from the mind, but from the body, has affected it. People sometimes say that Nietzsche was mad long before this. It may be that they are right; it is impossible to reach an assured diagnosis. At least he had retained his power of reflection, his will. He could still hold himself and his judgments in check. In the spring of 1888 he lost this faculty. His intelligence is not yet darkened; there is not a word he writes but is penetrating and trenchant. His lucidity is extreme, but disastrous, since it exercises itself only to destroy. As one studies the last months of this life, one feels as though one were watching the work of some engine of war which is no longer governed by the hand of man.
Friedrich Nietzsche abandoned those moral researches which had strengthened his work till now, enriched and elevated it. Let us recall a letter addressed to Peter Gast in February, 1888: “I am in a state of chronic irritability which allows me, in my better moments, a sort of revenge, not the finest sort—it takes the form of an excess of hardness.” These words shed light on the three coming books: The Case of Wagner, The Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist.
We shall hurry on with the story of those months in which Nietzsche is no longer quite himself.
About the 7th of April he received an unexpected letter at Turin. Georges Brandes wrote informing him of a projected series of conferences which were to be devoted to his philosophy. “It annoys me,” wrote Brandes, “to think that no one knows you here, and I wish to make you known all of a sudden.” Nietzsche replied: “Truly, dear sir, this is a surprise. Where did you get such courage that you can speak in public of a vir obscurissimus?... Perhaps you imagine that I am known in my own country. They treat me as something singular and absurd, which it is not at all necessary to take seriously” He ended by remarking, “The long resistance has exasperated my pride a little. Am I a philosopher? What does it matter?”
The letter should have been an occasion of great joy; and, perhaps, had it been possible to save him, the occasion of his salvation. Assuredly he felt some happiness, but we scarcely discern it. The hour was late, and Nietzsche now followed the tracks whither his destiny had drawn him.
During these days of weariness and tension, he procured a translation of the Laws of Manu, for he wished to become familiar with the model of those hierarchic societies for whose renovation he hoped. He read, and his expectations were not deceived; this, the last study of his life, turned out to be one of the most important he had ever undertaken. It delighted him to ecstasy—here was a code on which were established the customs and the order of four castes, a language that was beautiful, simple, human in its very severity, a constant nobleness of thought. And the impression of security, of sweetness which detached itself from the book as a whole! Here are some commandments from its earlier pages:
“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 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 æsthetic 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 naïve formulæ 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 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 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 Fräulein 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 risqué 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.”
A letter addressed about this time to Fräulein von Meysenbug gives food for thought.
“I have given to men the most profound book,” he writes; “one pays dearly for that. The price of being immortal is sometimes life!... And always on my road that cretinism of Bayreuth! The old seducer Wagner, dead though he be, continues to draw away from me just those few men whom my influence might touch. But in Denmark—how absurd to think!—I have been celebrated this winter. Dr. Georges Brandes, whose mind is so full of vitality, has dared to talk about me before the University of Copenhagen. And with brilliant success! Always more than three hundred listeners! And a final ovation!—And something similar is being arranged in New York. I am the most independent mind in Europe and the only German writer—which is something!”
He added in a postscript: “Only a great soul can endure my writings. Thus I have had the good luck to provoke against myself all that is feeble and virtuous.” No doubt the indulgent Fräulein von Meysenbug saw in these lines a point directed against herself. She answered, as usual, in her kindly manner: “You say that everything feeble and virtuous is against you? Do not be so paradoxical. Virtue is not weakness but strength, words say it plainly enough. And are you not yourself the living contradiction of what you say? For you are virtuous, and the example of your life, if men could only know it, would, as I am assured, be more persuasive than your books.” Nietzsche replied: “I have read your charming letter, dear lady and dear friend, with real emotion; no doubt you are right—so am I.”
How headlong a thing is his life! Days spent in walking, in getting the rhythm of phrases, in sharpening thoughts. Often he works through the dawn and is writing still when the innkeeper rises and goes noiselessly out to follow the traces of the chamois among the mountains. “Am I not myself a hunter of chamois?” thinks Nietzsche, and goes on with his work.
The Case of Wagner being completed, Nietzsche began a new pamphlet, directed not against a man, but against ideas—against all ideas that men have found whereby to guide their acts. There is no metaphysical world, and the rationalists are dreamers; there is no moral world, and the moralists are dreamers. What then remains? “The world of appearances, perhaps? But no; for with the world of truth we have abolished the world of appearances!” Nothing exists but energy, renewed at every instant. “Incipiet Zarathustra.” Friedrich Nietzsche looked for a title for his new pamphlet: Leisure Hours of a Psychologist was his first idea; then, The Twilight of the Idols, or The Philosophy of the Hammer. On September 7th he sent his manuscript to the publisher. This little book—he wrote—must strike, scandalise, and strain people’s minds, and prepare them for the reception of his great work.
Of it he is always thinking, and his second pamphlet is scarcely finished when he starts on this labour. But we no longer recognise the calm and Goethean work which it had been his desire to write. He tries new titles: We other Immoralists, We other Hyperboreans: then returns to his old title and keeps to it—The Will to Power: An Essay towards the Transvaluation of all Values. Between September 3rd and September 30th he draws up a first section: The Antichrist; and it is a third pamphlet. This time he speaks outright, he indicates his Yea and his Nay, his straight line and his goal: he exalts the most brutal energy. All moral imperatives, whether dictated by Moses or by Manu, by the people or by the aristocracy, are lies. “Europe was near to greatness,” he writes, “when, during the first years of the sixteenth century, it was possible to hope that Cæsar Borgia would seize the Papacy.” Are we bound to accept these thoughts as definitive, because they are the last that Nietzsche expressed?
While he was drawing up The Antichrist, he returned again to his Dionysian Songs, outlined in 1884, and completed them. Here we find the sure expression of the presentiments that then agitated him.
“The sun sets,
Soon thy thirst shall be quenched,
Burning heart!
A freshness is in the air,
I breathe the breath of unknown mouths,
The great cold comes....
The sun is in its place, and burns upon my head at noon.
I salute ye, ye who come,
O swift winds,
O fresh spirits of the afternoon
The air stirs, peaceable and pure.
Has it not darted towards me a sidelong glance,
A seductive glance,
To-night?
Be strong, brave heart!
Ask not: why?
Eve of my life!
The sun sets.”
On the 21st September we find him at Turin. On the 22nd The Case of Wagner was published. Here at last was a book of which the newspapers spoke a little. But Nietzsche was exasperated by their comments. With the exception of a Swiss author, Carl Spiteler, no one had understood him. Every word gave him the measure of the public ignorance as regards his work. For ten years he had been seeking and following ideas found by him alone: of this the German critics knew nothing; they knew only that a certain Herr Nietzsche, a disciple of Wagner’s, had been an author; they read The Case of Wagner and surmised that Herr Nietzsche was just fallen out with his master. Besides, he felt that he had incurred the blame of some of his later friends. Jacob Burckhardt, always so precise, did not acknowledge the receipt of the pamphlet; the good Meysenbug wrote an indignant and severe letter.
“These are subjects,” Nietzsche answered him, “with regard to which I cannot permit any contradiction. Upon the question of decadence I am the highest authority (instance) in the world: the men of to-day, with their querulous and degenerate instinct, should consider themselves fortunate that they have by them some one who offers them a generous wine in their most sombre moments. That Wagner succeeded in making himself believed in, assuredly proves genius; but the genius of falsehood. I have the honour to be his opposite—a genius of truth.”
In spite of the agitation thus displayed, his letters expressed an unheard-of happiness. There is nothing which he does not admire. The autumn is splendid; the roads, the galleries, the palaces, the cafés of Turin, are magnificent; repasts are succulent and prices modest. He digests well, sleeps marvellously. He hears French operettas: there is nothing as perfect as their buoyant manner, “the paradise of all the refinements.” He listens to a concert: each piece, whether Beethoven, Schubert, Bossaro, Goldmarck, Vibac, or Bizet be its author, seems to him equally sublime. “I was in tears,” he wrote to Peter Gast. “I think that Turin, from the point of view of the musical sense, as from every other point of view, is the most solid town that I know.”
One might hope that this intoxication of spirit kept Nietzsche from knowledge of his destiny. But a rare word sufficiently indicates his clairvoyance. He has a sense of the approaching disaster. His reason escapes from him and he measures its flight. On the 13th of November, 1888, he expressed to Peter Gast a desire to have him near, his regret that he could not come; this was his constant plaint, the very constancy of which indeed diminished its significance. Nietzsche, who knew this, warned his friend: “What I tell you, take tragically,” he wrote. On the 18th of November he sent a letter which seemed quite happy. He spoke of operettas which he had just heard, of Judic, and of Milly Meyer. “For our bodies and for our souls, dear friend,” he wrote, “a light Parisian intoxication, ’tis salvation.” He concluded: “This letter also, I pray you to take tragically.”
Thus the condition of physical jubilation to which imminent madness brought him let him escape neither presentiment nor anguish. He wished to reassemble for the last time the memories and impressions which life had left to him, and to compose a work which should be bizarre, triumphant, and desperate. Look at the titles of the chapters: “Why I am so prudent.—Why I am so wise.—Why I have written such good books.—Why I am a fatality.—Glory and eternity....” He calls his last work: Ecce Homo. What does he mean? Is he Antichrist or another Christ? He is both together. Like Christ, he has sacrificed himself. Christ is man and God: He has conquered the temptations to which He made Himself accessible. Nietzsche is man and Superman: he has known every feeble desire, every cowardly thought, and has cast them from him. None before him was so tender or so hard; no reality has alarmed him. He has taken upon himself not the sins of men, but all their passions in their greatest force. “Jesus on the Cross,” he writes, “is an anathema upon life; Dionysos broken in bits is a promise of life, of life indestructible and ever-renewed.” The solitary Christian had his God: Nietzsche lives alone and without God. The sage of old had his friends: Nietzsche lives alone and without friends. He lives nevertheless, and can sing, in his cruel extremity, the Dionysian hymn. “I am not a saint,” he writes, “but a satyr.” And again, “I have written so many books, and such beautiful ones: how should I not be grateful to life?”
No; Nietzsche was a saint, not a satyr, and a wounded saint who aspired to die. He said that he felt grateful to life; it was false, for his soul was quite embittered. He lied, but sometimes man has no other way to victory. When Arria, dying from the blow she had given herself, said to her husband as she passed him her weapon: “Pœte, non dolet...” she lied, and it was to her glory that she lied. And here, may we not pass on Nietzsche himself the judgment that he had passed upon her? “Her holy falsehood,” he wrote in 1879, “obscures all the truths that have ever been said by the dying.” Nietzsche had not triumphed. Ecce Homo: he was broken but would not avow it. A poet, he wished that his cry of agony should be a song; a last lyrical transport uplifted his soul and gave him the force to lie.
“Day of my life!
Thou sinkst to eve!
Thine eye already
Gleams half-bruised;
Drops from thy dew,
Like tears outstrewn,
Stream; the purple of thy love
Goes silent over the milky sea,
Thy ultimate, tardy blessedness....
All around, only the waves and their mirth.
What once was hard
Has foundered in a blue oblivion—
My boat lies idle now.
Tempest and travel—how unlearnt
Hope and desire are drowned,
The soul and the sea he sleek.
Seventh solitude
Never felt I
Closer to me the sweet serenity,
Warmer the rays of the sun.
—Shines not even the ice of my summit?
A rapid, silvery fish,
My bark glides away, afar.”
Nevertheless he was conscious that the fame, so long desired, approached. Georges Brandes, who was going to repeat and publish his lectures, found him a new reader, the Swede Auguste Strindberg. Very pleased, Nietzsche announced it to Peter Gast. “Strindberg has written to me,” he said, “and for the first time I receive a letter in which I find a world-historic (Welthistorik) accent.” In St. Petersburg they were getting ready to translate his Case of Wagner. In Paris, Hippolyte Taine sought and found him a correspondent: Jean Bordeau, contributor to the Débats and the Revue des Deux Mondes. “At last,” wrote Nietzsche, “the grand Panama Canal towards France has been opened.” His old comrade Deussen handed him two thousand francs, the offering of an unknown who wished to subscribe to an edition of his works. Madame de Salis Marschlins offered him a thousand. Friedrich Nietzsche should have been happy, but it was too late.
How were his last days spent? We do not know. He lived in a furnished apartment, the guest of a humble family, which lodged him and, if he wished, fed him. He corrected the proofs of Ecce Homo, adding a postscript to the early text, then a dithyrambic poem; meanwhile he prepared a new pamphlet for publication, Nietzsche contra Wagner. “Before launching the first edition of my great work,” he wrote to his publisher, “we must prepare the public, we must create a genuine tension—or it will be Zarathustra over again.” On the 8th of December he wrote to Peter Gast: “I have re-read Ecce Homo, I have weighed every word in scales of gold: literally it cuts the history of humanity into two sections—the highest superlative of dynamite.” On the 29th of December he wrote to his publisher: “I am of your opinion, as to Ecce Homo; let us not exceed 1,000 copies; a thousand copies for Germany of a book, written in the grand style, is indeed rather more than reasonable. But in France, I say it quite seriously, I count on an issue of 80,000—or 40,000 copies.” On the 2nd of January another letter (in a rough and deformed hand): “Return me the poem—on with Ecce!”
There exists a tradition, difficult to verify, that, during these latter days, Nietzsche often played fragments of Wagner to his hosts. He would say to them: “I knew him,” and talk of Triebschen. The thing does not seem improbable, for now his memories of his greatest happiness may well have visited him, and he may have found delight in recounting them to simple people ignorant of his life. Had he not just written in Ecce Homo:
“Since I am here recalling the consolations of my life, I ought to express in a word my gratitude for what was by far my most profound and best-loved joy—my intimacy with Richard Wagner. I wish to be just with regard to the rest of my human relationships; but I absolutely cannot efface from my life the days at Triebschen, days of confidence, of gaiety; of sublime flashes—days of profound happiness. I do not know what Wagner was for others: our sky was never darkened by a cloud.”
On the 9th of January, 1889, Franz Overbeck was sitting, with his wife, at the window of his quiet house in Basle, when he saw old Burckhardt stop and ring at his door. He was surprised: Burckhardt was not an intimate, and some intuition warned him that Nietzsche, their common friend, was the cause of this visit. For some weeks he had had disquieting notes from Turin. Burckhardt brought him a long letter which all too clearly confirmed his presentiments. Nietzsche was mad. “I am Ferdinand de Lesseps,” he wrote, “I am Prado, I am Chambige [the two assassins with whom the Paris newspapers were then occupied]; I have been buried twice this autumn.”
A few moments later Overbeck received a similar letter, and all Nietzsche’s friends were likewise advised. He had written to each of them.
“Friend Georges,” he wrote to Brandes, “since you have discovered me, it is not wonderful to find me: what is now difficult is to lose me.
“THE CRUCIFIED.”
Peter Gast received a message the tragic significance of which he did not understand:
“A mon maestro Pietro.
“Sing me a new song. The world is clear and all the skies rejoice.”
“Ariadne, I love you,” he wrote to Cosima Wagner.
Overbeck started immediately. He found Nietzsche, watched over by his hosts, ploughing the piano with his elbow, singing and crying his Dionysian glory. He was able to bring him back to Basle, and introduce him, without too painful a scene, into a hospital, where his mother came to seek him.
He lived another ten years. The first of them were cruel, the later more kindly; sometimes even there seemed to be hope. He would recall his work.
“Have I not written fine books?” he would say.
He was shown portraits of Wagner.
“Him,” he would say, “I loved much.”
These returns of consciousness might have been frightful; it seems that they were not. One day his sister, as she sat by his side, could not restrain her tears.
“Lisbeth,” he said, “why do you cry? Are we not happy?”
The ruined intellect could not be saved, but the uncorrupted soul kept sweet and charming, open to pure impressions.
One day a young man who was occupied with the publication of his work was out with him on his short walk. Nietzsche perceived a little girl at the side of the road, and was charmed. He went up to her, stopped, and with a hand drew back the hair which lay low on her forehead; then, contemplating the frank face with a smile, he said:
“Is it not the picture of innocence?”
Friedrich Nietzsche died at Weimar on the 25th of August, 1900.
Notes
1 In French in the text.
2 Morals are free in the pensions on the Mediterranean, and no doubt we are unaware of all the episodes of Friedrich Nietzsche’s life. But this reservation must be made. According to evidence which we have been able to gather, his manner of life, in the Engadine, never gave occasion for the least gossip. On the contrary he seems, we are told, to have avoided young women.
3 “I am very happy,” wrote Taine, “that my articles on Napoleon have struck you as true, and nothing can more exactly sum up my impression than the two German words which you use: Unmensch und Uebermensch.”—Letter of July 12, 1887.