II Thus Spake Zarathustra
His departure was prompt, like a flight. He passed through Basle and stopped with his friends the Overbecks, who listened to his plaint. He had awakened from his last dream; everyone had betrayed him: Lou, Rée, feeble and perfidious; Lisbeth, his sister, who had acted grossly. Of what betrayal did he complain, and of what act? He did not say, and continued his bitter complaints. The Overbecks wished him to stay with them for some days. He escaped them; he wished to work, and surmount alone the sadness of having been deceived, the humiliation of having deceived himself. Perhaps he also wished to put to profit that condition of paroxysm and the lyrical sursum whither his despair had carried him. He left. “To-day,” said he to his friends, “I enter into a complete solitude.”
He left, and stopped in the first instance at Genoa. “Cold, sick. I suffer,” he wrote briefly to Peter Gast. He left this town, where he was importuned perhaps by memories of a happier time, and moved away along the coast. At the time of which we speak, Nervi, Santa Margherita, Rapallo, Zoagli, were places unknown to the tourist, market towns inhabited by fishermen who, each evening, drew in their barques to the recesses of the coves and sang as they mended their nets. Friedrich Nietzsche discovered these magnificent spots, and chose, to humiliate his misery there, the most magnificent of them, Rapallo. He relates, in simple language, the circumstances of his sojourn:
“I spent my winter, 1882 to 1883, in the charming and quiet bay of Rapallo that is hollowed out by the Mediterranean not far from Genoa, between the promontory of Portofino and Chiavari. My health was not of the best; the winter was cold, rainy; a little inn,6 situated at the very edge of the sea, so near it that the noise of the waves prevented me sleeping at night, offered me a shelter very unsatisfactory from all points of view. Nevertheless—and it is an instance of my maxim that all that is decisive comes ’nevertheless ‘—it was during this winter and in this discomfort that my noble Zarathustra was born. In the morning I would climb towards the south by the magnificent mountain road, towards Zoagli, among the pines and dominating the immense sea; in the evening (according as my health permitted it) I would go round the bay of Santa Margherita as far as Portofino.... On these two roads came to me all the first part of Zarathustra (fiel mir ein); and more, Zarathustra himself, as type; more exactly he fell upon me (überfiel mich)....”
In ten weeks he conceived and completed his poem. It is a new work and, if one affects to follow the genesis of his thought, a surprising one. No doubt, he meditated a lyrical work, a sacred book. But the essential doctrine of this work was to be given by the idea of the Eternal Return. Now, in the first part of Zarathustra, the idea of the Eternal Return does not appear. Nietzsche follows a different and opposing idea, the idea of the Superman, the symbol of a real progress which modifies things, the promise of a possible escape beyond chance and fatality.
Zarathustra announces the Superman, he is the prophet of good tidings. He has discovered in his solitude a promise of happiness, he bears this promise; his strength is sweet and benevolent, he predicts a great future as the reward of a great work. Friedrich Nietzsche, in other times, will put a more bitter speech into his mouth. If one reads this first part, and takes care not to confound it with those which immediately follow, one will feel the sanctity, the frequent suavity of the accent.
Why this abandonment of the Eternal Return? Nietzsche does not write a word which throws light upon this mystery. Miss Lou Salomé tells us that at Leipsic, during his short studies, he had realised the impossibility of founding his hypothesis in reason. But this did not diminish the lyrical value of which he knew how to take advantage a year later; and this cannot explain, in any case, the appearance of a contrary idea. What are we to think? Perhaps his stoicism was vanquished by the betrayal of his two friends. “In spite of all,” he wrote on December 3rd to Peter Gast, “I would not like to live these latter months over again.” We know that he never ceased to experience in himself the efficacy of his thoughts. Incapable of enduring the cruel symbol, he did not think that he could sincerely offer it to men, and he invented a new symbol, Uebermensch, the Superman. “I do not desire a recommencement,” he writes in his notes (ich will das leben nicht wieder). “How was I able to endure the idea? In creating, in fixing my view on the Superman, who says yea to life, I have myself tried to say Yea—alas!”
To the cry of his youth: Ist Veredlung möglich? (Is the ennobling of man possible?) Friedrich Nietzsche desires to reply, and to reply Yes. He wishes to believe in the Superman, and succeeds in doing so. He can grasp this hope; it suits the design of his work. What does he propose to himself? Among all the inclinations which urge him, this one is strong: to answer the Parsifal, to oppose work to work. Richard Wagner desired to depict humanity drawn from its languor by the Eucharistie mystery, the troubled blood of men renovated by the ever poured out blood of Christ. Friedrich Nietzsche wishes to depict humanity saved from languor by the glorification of its own essence, by the virtues of a chosen and willing few which purify and renew its blood. Is this all his desire? Surely not. Thus Spake Zarathustra is more than an answer to the Parsifal. The origins of Nietzsche’s thoughts are always grave and distant. What is his last wish? He desires to guide and direct the activity of men; he wishes to create their morals, assign to the humble their tasks, to the strong their duties and their commandments, and to raise them all towards a sublime destiny. As a child, as a youth, as a young man, he had this aspiration; at thirty-eight years of age, at this instant of crisis and of decision, he finds it again and desires to act. The Eternal Return no longer satisfies him: he cannot consent to live imprisoned in a blind nature. The idea of the Superman on the contrary captivates him: it is a principle of action, a hope of salvation.
What is the import of this idea? Is it a reality or a symbol? It is impossible to say. Nietzsche’s mind is rapid and always oscillating. The vehemence of the inspiration which carries him along leaves him neither leisure nor strength to define. He hardly succeeds in understanding the ideas which agitate him, and interprets them himself in divers ways. At times, the Superman appears to him as a very serious reality. But more often, it seems, he neglects or disdains all literal belief, and his idea is no more than a lyrical phantasy with which he trifles for the sake of animating base humanity. It is an illusion, a useful and beneficent illusion, he would say, were he still a Wagnerian, dared he to re-adopt the vocabulary of his thirtieth year. Then he had liked to repeat the maxim from Schiller: Dare to dream and to lie. We may believe that the Superman is chiefly the dream and falsehood of a lyrical poet. Every species has its limits which it cannot transgress. Nietzsche knows this and writes it.
It was a painful labour. Friedrich Nietzsche, ill-disposed to conceive a hope, had frequent revolts against the task which he imposed on himself. Every morning on awakening from a sleep which chloral had rendered sweet, he rediscovered life with frightful bitterness. Conquered by melancholy and rancour, he wrote pages which he had at once to re-read attentively, to correct or erase. He dreaded these bad hours in which anger, seizing him like a vertigo, obscured his best thoughts. Then he would evoke his hero, Zarathustra, always noble, always serene, and seek from him some encouragement. Many a passage of his poem is the expression of this agony. Zarathustra speaks to him:
“Yea: I know thy danger. But by my love and hope,
I conjure thee: reject not thy love and thy hope.
“The noble one is always in danger of becoming an
insolent, a sneering one and a destroyer. Alas, I have
known noble ones who lost their highest hope. Then
they slandered all high hopes.
“By my love and my hope I conjure thee; do not cast
away the hero in thy soul! believe in the holiness of thy
highest hope.”
The struggle was always perceptible; nevertheless Friedrich Nietzsche advanced his work. Every day he had to learn wisdom anew, and to moderate, crush, or deceive his desires. He succeeded in this rude exercise and managed to bring back his soul into a calm and fecund condition. He completed a poem which was but the opening of a vaster poem. Zarathustra, returning towards the mountains, abandons the world of men. Twice again, before he dictates the tables of his law, he is to descend to it. But what he says suffices to give us a glimpse of the essential forms of a humanity obedient to its élite. It consists of three castes: at the bottom, the popular caste, allowed to retain its humble beliefs; above, the caste of the chiefs, the organisers and warriors; above the chiefs themselves, the sacred caste, the poets who create the illusions and dictate the values. One recalls that essay by Richard Wagner on art, religion, and politics, formerly so much admired by Nietzsche: in it a similar hierarchy was proposed.
In its ensemble the work is serene. It is Friedrich Nietzsche’s finest victory. He has repressed his melancholy; he exalts force, not brutality; expansion, not aggression. In the last days of February, 1882, he wrote these final pages, which are perhaps the most beautiful and the most religious ever inspired by naturalistic thought.
“My brethren, remain faithful to the earth, with all the force of your love! Let your great love and your knowledge be in accord with the meaning of the earth. I pray you and conjure you.
“Let not your virtue fly far from terrestrial things, and beat its wings against the eternal walls! Alas! there is always so much virtue gone astray!
“Like myself, bring back towards the earth the virtue which goes astray—yea, towards the flesh and towards life; that it may give a meaning to the earth, a human meaning....”
Whilst he completed the composition of this hymn on the Genoese coast, Richard Wagner died in Venice. Nietzsche learnt the news with a grave emotion, and recognised a sort of providential accord in the coincidence of events. The poet of Siegfried was dead; so be it! humanity would not be for a moment deprived of poetry, since Zarathustra had already spoken.
For more than six years he had given no sign of life to Cosima Wagner; now he had to tell her that he had forgotten nothing of past days and that he shared her sorrows. “You will approve of me in this, I am sure” he wrote to Fräulein von Meysenbug.7
On the 14th of February he wrote to Schmeitzner, the publisher:
“To-day I have some news for you: I have just taken a decisive step—I mean, one profitable to you. It concerns a little work, scarcely 100 pages long, entitled: Thus Spake Zarathustra, a book for all and none. It is a poem or it is a Fifth Gospel, or something which has no name; by far the most serious, and also the most happy, of my productions and one that is open to all.”
He wrote to Peter Gast and to Fräulein von Meysenbug: “This year,” said he, “no society. I shall go straight from Genoa to Sils!” Thus did Zarathustra, who left the great city and returned to the mountains. But Friedrich Nietzsche is not Zarathustra; he is feeble, solitude exalts and frightens him. Some weeks passed. Schmeitzner, the publisher, was slow: Nietzsche grew impatient and modified his projects for the summer; he wished to hear the sound of human speech. His sister, at Rome with Fräulein von Meysenbug, guessed that he was accessible and weary, and seized this opportunity of a reconciliation. He did not defend himself and promised to come.
Here he was at Rome. His old friend immediately introduced him into a brilliant society. Lenbach was there, and also that Countess Dönhoff, to-day Princess von Buelow, an amiable woman and a great musician. Friedrich Nietzsche felt with vexation how different he was from these happy talkers, how he belonged to another world, how they misunderstood him. A curious, a singular man, they think; a very eccentric man. A great mind? No one ventured to pass this rash judgment. And Friedrich Nietzsche, so proud when he was alone, was astonished, disturbed, and humiliated. It seemed that he had not the strength to despise these people who did not hearken to him; he was disquieted and began to fear for his well-beloved son, Zarathustra.
“They will run through my book,” he wrote to Gast, “and it will be a subject of conversation. That inspires me with disgust. Who is serious enough to hear me? If I had the authority of old Wagner, my affairs would be in a better way. But at present no one can save me from being delivered over to ‘literary people.’ To the devil!”
Other vexations affected him: he had taken to chloral, during the winter, in order to combat his insomnia. He deprived himself of it and recovered, not without difficulty, his normal sleep. Schmeitzner, the publisher, did not hurry to print Thus Spake Zarathustra; what was the cause of the delay? Nietzsche enquired and was told: Five hundred thousand copies of a collection of hymns had first to be printed for the Sunday-schools. Nietzsche waited some weeks, received nothing, asked again; another story: the collection of hymns was published, but a big lot of anti-Semitic pamphlets had to be printed and thrown upon the world. June came: Zarathustra had not yet appeared. Friedrich Nietzsche lost his temper and suffered for his hero, who was thwarted by the two platitudes, Pietism and anti-Semitism.
He was discouraged and ceased to write; he left his luggage at the station with the books and manuscripts which he had brought: one hundred and four kilos of paper. Everything in Rome harassed him: the nasty people, a mob of illegitimates; the priests, whom he could not tolerate; the churches, “caverns with unsavoury odours.” His hatred of Catholicism is instinctive and has far-off origins; always when he approaches it, he shudders. It is not the philosopher who judges and reproves; it is the son of the pastor, who has remained a Lutheran: who cannot endure the other Church, full of incense and idols.
The desire came to him to leave this town. He heard the beauty of Aquila praised. Friedrich von Hohenstaufen, the Emperor of the Arabs and the Jews, the enemy of the popes, resided there; Friedrich Nietzsche wished to reside there, too. Still, the room which he occupied was a fine and well-situated one, Piazza Barberini, at the very top of a house. There one could forget the town: the murmur of water falling from a triton’s horn stilled the noise of humanity and sheltered his melancholy. There it was that, one evening, he was to improvise the most poignant expression of his despair and solitude:
“I am light; alas if I were night! But this is my solitude, to be always surrounded by light.
“Alas that I am not shadow and gloom! How I would drink from the breasts of light!
“... But I live in my own light, I drink the flames which escape from me!”
Thus Spake Zarathustra, a Book for All and None, at last appeared during the first days of June.
“I am very much on the move,” wrote Nietzsche. “I am in agreeable society, but as soon as I am alone I feel moved as I have never been.” He soon knew the fate of his book. His friends spoke to him very little of it; the newspapers, the reviews, did not mention it; no one was interested in this Zarathustra, the strange prophet who in a biblical tone taught unbelief. “How bitter it is!” said Lisbeth Nietzsche and Fräulein von Meysenbug; these two women, Christians at heart that they were, took offence. “And I,” wrote Nietzsche to Peter Gast, “I who find my book so gentle!”
The heat dispersed this Roman society. Friedrich Nietzsche knew not where to go. He had hoped for such different days! He had been persuaded that he would move lettered Europe, that he would at last attract readers to himself, or (more precisely perhaps) that he would attract, not towards his feeble self, but towards Zarathustra, who was so strong, disciples or even servitors. “For this summer,” he wrote in May to Peter Gast, “I have a project: to choose, in some forest, some castle formerly fitted up by the Benedictines for their meditations, and to fill it with companions, chosen men... I must go on a quest for new friends.” About the 20th June, thunderstruck by the loss of his hopes, he went up towards his favourite retreat, the Engadine.
Lisbeth Nietzsche, who was returning to Germany, accompanied him. Never had she seen him more brilliant or more gay, she said, than during these few hours of travel. He improvised epigrams, bouts-rimes, the words of which his sister suggested; he laughed like a child, and, in fear of troublesome people who would have disturbed his delight, he called and tipped the guard at every station.
Friedrich Nietzsche had not seen the Engadine since that summer of 1881 in which he had conceived the Eternal Return and the words of Zarathustra. In the clutch of these memories and of the sudden solitude, carried away by a prodigious movement of inspiration, he wrote in ten days the second part of his work.
It was bitter. Friedrich Nietzsche could no longer repress the rancours, the menace of which he had felt last winter; he could no longer unite force to sweetness; “I am not a hunter of flies,” Zarathustra used to say, and he disdained his adversaries. He had spoken as a benefactor, and he had not been heard. Nietzsche put into his mouth another speech: “Zarathustra the judge,” he wrote in his short notes; “the manifestation of justice in its most grandiose form; of justice which fashions, which constructs, and which, as a consequence, must annihilate.”
Zarathustra the judge has only insults and lamentations upon his lips. He sings this nocturnal chant which Nietzsche, at Rome, had one evening improvised for himself alone:
“I am light; alas if I were night! But this is my solitude, to be always surrounded by light.”
This is no longer the hero whom Friedrich Nietzsche had created so superior to all humanity; it is a man in despair, it is Nietzsche, in short, too weak to express anything beyond his anger and his plaints.
“Verily, my friends, I walk among men as among the fragments and members of man.
“To see men broken and scattered as though they lay over a butcher’s shambles, this is to my eye the most frightful thing.
“And when my eye fleeth from the present to the past, it ever findeth the same: fragments, members, and frightful catastrophes—but no men!
“The present and the past upon the earth—alas, my friends, these are to me the most unbearable things; and I could not live were I not a visionary of what must come.
“A visionary, a creator, the future itself and a bridge unto the future—alas! in some sort also, a cripple upon this bridge: Zarathustra is all this.... I walk among men, the fragments of the future: of the future which I contemplate in my visions.”
Friedrich Nietzsche derided the moral commandments which had upheld ancient humanity: he wished to abolish them and to establish his own. Shall we know it at length, this new law? He delays in telling it to us. “The qualities of the Superman become more and more visible,” he writes in his notes. He would wish that it were so; but can he, absorbed as he is in discontent and bitterness, enunciate, define a form of virtue, a new good, a new evil, as he had promised? He tries. He is the prey of a bitter and violent mood, and the virtue which he exalts is naked force undisguised, that savage ardour which moral prescriptions have always wished to attenuate, vary, or overcome. He yields to the attraction which it exercises upon him.
“With delight I regard the miracles which the ardent sun brings to birth, says Zarathustra. They are tigers, palm-trees, rattlesnakes.... Verily, there is a future even for evil, and the hottest noon has not yet been discovered for man.... One day there will come to the world the greatest dragons.... Thy soul is so far from what is great that thou wouldst find the Superman awful in his goodness.”
There is emphasis upon this page. The words are noisy rather than strong. Perhaps Nietzsche disguises in this way an embarrassment of thought: he does not insist upon this gospel of evil, and prefers to adjourn the difficult moment in which his prophet will announce his law. Zarathustra must first complete his duties as judge, the annihilator of the weak. He must strike: with what weapon? Here Nietzsche again takes up the idea of the Eternal Return which he had withdrawn from his first section. He modifies the sense and the application of it. It is no longer an exercise of spiritual life, a process of internal edification; it is a hammer, as he says, an instrument of moral terrorism, a symbol which disperses dreams.
Zarathustra assembles his disciples and wishes to communicate to them the doctrine, but his voice falters; he is silent. Suddenly he is moved by pity, and the prophet himself suffers as he evokes the terrible idea. He hesitates at the moment that he is about to destroy these illusions of a better future, these expectations of another life and of a spiritual beatitude which veil from men the misery of their state. He grows anxious. A hunchback, who divines this, interpolates with a sneer: “Why doth Zarathustra speak unto his disciples otherwise than he speaketh unto himself?” Zarathustra feels his fault and seeks a new solitude. The second part is thus completed.
On the 24th June of this year, 1882, Nietzsche was installed at Sils; before the 10th of July he wrote to his sister:
“I beg you instantly to see Schmeitzner and engage him orally or by writing, as you think best, to give the second part of Zarathustra to the printer as soon as the manuscript is delivered. This second part exists to-day: try to imagine it, the vehemence of such a creation; you will scarcely be able to exaggerate it. There is the danger. In Heaven’s name, arrange things with Schmeitzner; I am too irritable myself.”
Schmeitzner promised and kept his word; in August the proofs arrived. Nietzsche had not strength enough to correct them and left the work to Peter Gast and his sister. The terrible things which he had said, the more terrible things which he had yet to say, bruised him.
Other vexations were added to the melancholy of his thought. An awkward step on his sister’s part awoke again the dissensions of the previous summer. In the spring, during their reconcilement, he had said to her, aware of her quarrelsome nature: “Promise me never to go back on the stories of Lou Salomé and of Paul Rée.” For three months she had kept her peace, then she broke her word and spoke. What did she say? We do not know; we are again in the obscurity of this obscure history. “Lisbeth,” he wrote to Madame Overbeck, “absolutely wants to avenge herself on the young Russian.” No doubt she reported to him some fact, some observation of which he was ignorant. A sickening irritation laid hold of him. He wrote to Paul Rée, and this is the letter, a sketch of which has been found. (Was it sent as we read it? It is not certain.)
“Too late, almost a year too late, I learn of the part which you took in the events of last summer, and my soul has never been so overwhelmed with disgust as it is at present, to think that an insidious individual of your kind, a liar and a knave, had been able to call himself my friend for years. It is a crime, in my opinion, and not only a crime against me, but above all against friendship, against this very empty word, friendship.
“Fie, sir! So you are the calumniator of my character, and Miss Salomé has only been the mouthpiece, the very unsatisfactory mouthpiece, of the judgment which you passed on me; so it is you who, in my absence, naturally, spoke of me as though I were a vulgar and low egoist, always ready to plunder others; so it is you who have accused me of having, so far as concerned Miss Salomé, pursued the most filthy designs under a mask of idealism; so it is you who dare to say of me that I was mad and did not know what I wanted? Now, of a surety, I understand better the whole of this business which has made men whom I venerated and many whom I esteemed, as my nearest and dearest, strangers to me.... And I thought you my friend; and nothing, perhaps, for seven years has done more harm to my prospects than the trouble that I took to defend you.
“It seems then that I am not very well advanced in the art of knowing men. That furnishes you no doubt with matter for mockery. What a fool you have made of me! Bravo! As regards men of your stamp, rather than understand them, I had rather they mocked me.
“I would have great pleasure in giving you a lesson in practical morals with a pair of pistols; I would succeed perhaps, under the most favourable circumstances, in interrupting once and for all your works on morals: one needs clean hands for that, Dr. Paul Rée, not dirty ones!”
This letter cannot be considered sufficient to condemn Paul Rée. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote it in a moment of anger upon information given by his sister, who was often more impassioned than accurate. It is a precious witness to his impression; to the ill-known data of the cause, it is a mediocre witness. What was the conduct of Paul Rée? What were the rights and wrongs? In April, 1883, six months after the difficulties of Leipsic, he had offered Nietzsche the dedication of a work on the origins of the moral conscience, a work altogether inspired by Nietzschean ideas. Nietzsche had refused this public compliment: “I no longer want,” he wrote to Peter Gast, “to be confounded with any one.” A letter written by George Brandes in 1888 shows us Paul Rée living in Berlin with Miss Salomé, as “brother and sister,” according to both their accounts. There is no doubt that Rée helped Miss Salomé, towards 1883, to write her book on Friedrich Nietzsche: a very intelligent and a very noble book. We incline to believe that between these two men there was only the misfortune of a common love which the same woman inspired in them.
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote long and febrile letters. He complained of being alone at forty years, betrayed by his friends. Franz Overbeck grew anxious and went up to Sils-Maria to distract him from the solitude which wounded and consumed him. His sister, a prudent lady, and bourgeois in her tastes, advised him in answer to his complaints: “You are alone, it is true,” said she to him; “have you not sought solitude? Get an appointment in some University: when you have a title and pupils, you will be recognised and people will cease to ignore your books.” Nietzsche listened indulgently, but did listen, and wrote to the Rector of Leipsic, who, without hesitation, dissuaded him from making any overtures, no German University being in a position to allow an atheist, a declared anti-Christian, among its teachers. “This reply has given me courage!” wrote Nietzsche to Peter Gast; to his sister he sent a strong letter whose thrusts she felt.
“It is necessary that I be misunderstood, better still, I go to meet calumny and contempt. My ‘near ones’ will be the first against me: last summer I understood that, and I was magnificently conscious that I was at last on my road. When it comes to me to think, ‘I can no longer endure solitude,’ then I experience an unspeakable humiliation before myself—I feel myself in revolt against what there is of highest in me....”
In September he directed his steps towards Naumburg, where it was his intention to stay some weeks. His mother and sister inspired in him a mixed feeling, which baffles analysis. He liked his own people because they were his own, and because he was tender, faithful, infinitely sensible to memories. But every one of his ideas, every one of his desires, drew him from them, and his mind despised them. Nevertheless the old house of Naumburg was the only place in the world where there was, so long as he stayed there for a short time only, some sweetness of life for him.
Mother and daughter were quarrelling. Lisbeth loved a certain Förster, an agitator, an idealogue of Germanist and anti-Semitic views, who was organising a colonial enterprise in Paraguay. She wished to marry him and to follow him; her despairing mother wished to retain her. Madame Nietzsche welcomed her son as a saviour and related to him the mad projects which Lisbeth was forming. He was overwhelmed; he knew the person and his ideas, he despised the low and dull passions which the propaganda excited, and suspected him of having spoken maliciously of his work. That Lisbeth, the companion of his childhood, should follow this man was more than he could allow. He called her, spoke violently to her. She answered him bravely. There was little that was delicate or subtle in this woman’s composition, but she had energy. Friedrich Nietzsche, so weak in the depth of his soul, valued in her the quality which he lacked. He might sermonise, scold, but he could not get his way.
The late autumn came, and Naumburg was covered with fogs. Nietzsche left and went to Genoa. These quarrels had lessened his self-respect.
“Things go badly with me, very badly,” he wrote in October to Fräulein von Meysenbug; “my visit in Germany is the cause. I can live only at the seaside. Every other climate depresses me, destroys my nerves and eyes, makes me melancholy, puts me into a black humour—that awful tare; I have had to combat it in my life more than the hydras and other celebrated monsters. In trivial ennui is hidden the most dangerous enemy; great calamity adds to one’s stature....”
Towards mid-November he left Genoa, and, circling the western coast, began the quest for a winter residence. He passed by San Remo, Mentone, Monaco, and stopped at Nice, which enchanted him. There he found that keen air and that plenitude of light, that multitude of bright days which he needed: “Light, light, light,” he wrote’; “I have regained my equilibrium.”
The cosmopolitan city displeased him, and at first he rented a room in a house of the old Italian city, not Nice, but Nizza, as he always wrote. For neighbours he had quite simple people, workmen, masons, employés, who all spoke Italian. It was in similar conditions that in 1881 he had enjoyed at Genoa a certain happiness.
He chased away his vain thoughts and made an energetic effort to complete Zarathustra. But then arose the greatest of his misfortunes: the difficulty of his work was extreme, perhaps insurmountable. To complete Zarathustra—what did that imply? The work was immense: it had to be a poem which would make the poems of Wagner forgotten; a gospel which should make the Gospel forgotten. From 1875 to 1881, during six years, Friedrich Nietzsche had examined all the moral systems and shown the illusion which is at their foundation; he had defined his idea of the Universe: it was a blind mechanism, a wheel which turned eternally and without object. Yet he wished to be a prophet, an enunciator of virtues and of purposes: “I am he who dictates the values for a thousand years,” he said in those notes in which his pride bursts forth. “To imprint his hand on the centuries, as on soft wax, write on the will of millennia as upon brass, harder than brass, more noble than brass, there,” Zarathustra was to say, “is the beatitude of the Creator.”
What laws, what tables, did Nietzsche wish to dictate? What values would he choose to honour or depreciate? and what right had he to choose, to build up an order of beauty, an order of virtue, in nature, where a mechanical order reigns? He had the right of the poet, no doubt, whose genius, the creator of illusions, imposes upon the imagination of man this love or that hatred, this good or that evil. Thus Nietzsche would answer us, but he did not fail to recognise the difficulty. On the last pages of the second part of his poem he avowed it.
“This, this is my danger,” says Zarathustra, “that my glance throweth itself to the summit, whereas my hand would fain grasp and rest upon—the void.”
He wished to bring his task to a head. He had felt, this very summer, as something very close and urgent, the tragic menace that hung over his life. He was in haste to complete a work which he could at last present as the expression of his final desires, as his final thought. He had intended to complete his poem in three parts; three were written and almost nothing was said. The drama was not sketched. Zarathustra had to be shown at close quarters with men, announcing the Eternal Return, humiliating the feeble, strengthening the strong, destroying the ancient ways of humanity; Zarathustra as lawgiver dictating his Tables, dying at last of pity and of joy as he contemplates his work. Let us follow his notes:—
“Zarathustra reaches at the same moment the most extreme distress and his greatest happiness. At the most terrible moment of the contrast, he is broken.
“The most tragical history with a divine dénouement.
“Zarathustra becomes gradually more grand. His doctrine develops with his grandeur.
“The Eternal Return shines like a sun setting on the last catastrophe.”
“In the last section great synthesis of him who creates, who loves, who destroys.”
In the month of August, Nietzsche had indicated a dénouement. His condition of mind was then very bad, and his work suffered in consequence. He now took up the draft again, and tried to make the best of it.
It was a drama which he had the ambition to write. He places his action in an antique frame, in a city devastated by the pest. The inhabitants wish to commence a new era. They seek a lawgiver; they call Zarathustra, who descends among them, followed by his disciples.
“Go,” said he to them, “announce the Eternal Return.”
The disciples are afraid and avow it.
“We can endure thy doctrine,” they say, “but can this multitude?”
“We must make an experiment with truth!” answers Zarathustra. “And if the truth should destroy humanity, so be it!”
The disciples hesitate again. He commands: “I have put in your hands the hammer which must strike men; strike!”
But they fear the people and abandon their master. Then Zarathustra speaks alone. The crowd as it hears him is terrified, loses its temper and its wits.
“A man kills himself: another goes mad. A divine pride of the poet animates him: everything must be brought to light. And at the moment that he announces the Eternal Return and the Superman together, he yields to pity.
“Everyone disowns him. ‘We must,’ they say, ‘stifle this doctrine and kill Zarathustra.’
“‘There is now no soul on the earth who loves me,’ he murmurs; ‘how shall I be able to love life?’
“He dies of sadness on discovering the suffering which is his work.
“‘Through love I have caused the greatest sorrow; now I yield to the sorrow which I have caused.’
“All go, and Zarathustra, left alone, touches his serpent with his hand: ‘Who counsels wisdom to me?’—The serpent bites him. The eagle tears the serpent to bits, the lion throws itself upon the eagle. As soon as Zarathustra sees the combat of the animals, he dies.
“Fifth Act: The Lauds.
“The league of the faithful who sacrifice themselves upon the tomb of Zarathustra. They had fled: now, seeing him dead, they become the inheritors of his soul and rise to his height.
“Funeral ceremony: ‘It is we who have killed him.’—The Lauds.
“The great Noon. Midday and eternity.”
Friedrich Nietzsche abandoned this plan, which yet gives glimpses of great beauty. Did he dislike displaying the humiliation of his hero? Probably, and we shall note his search for a triumphant dénouement. But it is chiefly to be noted that he has dashed against a fundamental difficulty, the nature of which he perhaps does not plainly conceive: the two symbols on which he bases his poem, the Eternal Return and the Superman, in conjunction create a misunderstanding which renders the completion of the work impossible. The Eternal Return is a bitter truth which suppresses all hope. The Superman is a hope, an illusion. From one to the other there is no passage, the contradiction is complete. If Zarathustra teaches the Eternal Return, he will fail to excite in men’s souls an impassioned belief in superhumanity. And if he teaches the Superman, how can he propagate the moral terrorism of the Eternal Return? Nevertheless, Friedrich Nietzsche assigns him these two tasks; the breathless disorder of his thoughts drives him to this absurdity.
Does he clearly perceive the problem? We do not know. These real difficulties against which he breaks are never avowed. But if he perceives them ill, at least he feels the inconvenience and seeks by instinct some way of escape.
He writes a second sketch which is certainly skilful: the same scene, the same fever-stricken city, the same supplication to Zarathustra, who comes among a decimated people. But he comes as a benefactor and is careful about announcing the terrible doctrine. First, he gives his laws and has them accepted. Then, and only then, will he announce the Eternal Return. What are these laws which he has given? Friedrich Nietzsche indicates them. Here is one of the very rare pages, in which we discern the order which he has dreamed.
“(a) The day divided afresh: physical exercises for all the ages of life. Competition as a principle.
“(b) The new nobility and its education. Unity. Obtained by selection. For the foundation of each family, a festival.
“(c) The experiments. (With the wicked, punishments.) Charity in a new form, based on a concern for the generations to come. The wicked respectable so far as they are destroyers, for destruction is necessary. And also as a source of strength.
“To let oneself be taught by the wicked, not to deny them competition. To utilise the degenerate.—Punishment justifiable when the criminal is utilised for experimental purposes (for a new aliment). Punishment is thus made holy.
“(d) To save woman by keeping her woman.
“(e) The slaves (a hive). The humble and their virtues. To teach the enduring of repose. Multiplication of machines. Transformation of the machines into beauty.
“‘For you faith and servitude!’
“The times of solitude. Division of the times and days. Food. Simplicity. A feature of union between the poor and the rich.
“Solitude necessary from time to time, that the being may examine himself and concentrate.
“The ordinance of festivals, founded on a system of the Universe: festival of cosmic relations, festival of the earth, festival of friendship, of the great Noon.”
Zarathustra explains his laws, he makes them loved by all; he repeats his sermons nine times, and finally announces the Eternal Return. He speaks to the people; his words have the accent of a prayer.
The great question:
“The laws have already been given. Everything is ready for the production of the Superman—grand and awful moment! Zarathustra reveals his doctrine of the Eternal Return—which may now be endured; he himself, for the first time, endures it.
“Decisive moment: Zarathustra interrogates all this multitude assembled for the festival.
“‘Do you wish,’ he says, ‘the return of it all?’ All reply: Yes!
“He dies of joy.
“Zarathustra dying holds the earth locked in his arms. And although no one said a word, they all knew that Zarathustra was dead.”
It is a fine issue: Nietzsche was soon to find it too easy, too fine a one. This Platonic aristocracy, rather quickly established, left him in doubt. It corresponded exactly to his desires; did it correspond to his thoughts? Nietzsche, ready in the destruction of all the ancient moralities, did not find that he had the right of proposing another so soon? All answered: Yes! Was that conceivable? Human societies would always draw after them an imperfect mass which would have to be constrained by force or by laws. Friedrich Nietzsche knew it: “I am a seer,” he wrote in his notes; “but my conscience casts an inexorable light upon my vision, and I am myself the doubter.” He gave up this last plan. Never was he to recount the active life and the death of Zarathustra.
No document admits us to the secret of his sadness. No letter, no word presents us with the expression of it, We may, surely, take this very silence as the avowal of his distress and humiliation. Friedrich Nietzsche had always wished to write a classical work, a history, system, or poem, worthy of the old Greeks whom he had chosen for masters. And never had he been able to give a form to this ambition.
At the end of this year 1883 he had made an all but despairing attempt; the abundance, the importance of his notes let us measure the vastness of a work which was entirely vain. He could neither found his moral ideal nor compose his tragic poem; at the same moment he fails in his two works and sees his dream vanish. What is he? An unhappy soul, capable of short efforts, of lyrical songs and cries.
The year 1884 opened sadly. Some chance fine weather in January reanimated him. Suddenly he improvised: no city, no people, no laws; a disorder of complaints, appeals, and moral fragments which seem to be the debris left over from the ruin of his great work. It is the third part of Zarathustra. The prophet, like Friedrich Nietzsche, lives alone and retired upon his mountain. He speaks to himself, deceives himself, forgets that he is alone; he threatens, he exhorts a humanity which neither fears nor hearkens to him. He preaches to it the contempt of customary virtues, the cult of courage, love of strength and of the nascent generations. But he does not go down to it, and no one hears his predication. He is sad, he desires to die. Then, Life, who surprises his desire, comes to him and raises his courage.
“O Zarathustra!” says the goddess, “do not crack thy whip so terribly. Thou knowest, noise murdereth thought. And even now I have very tender thoughts. Hear me, thou art not faithful enough unto me, thou lovest me not nearly as much as thou sayst, I know, for thou thinkest of leaving me....”
Zarathustra listens to the reproach, smiles and hesitates. “True,” he says at last, “but thou also knowest....” They gaze at each other, and he tells her something in her ear, among all her confused, stupid yellow tresses. “What though I die?” he says; “nothing can separate, nothing can reconcile, for every moment has its return, every moment is eternal.”
“What,” answers the goddess, “that thou knowest, Zarathustra? That no one knoweth.”
Their eyes meet. They look at the green meadow over which the cool of evening was spreading; they weep, then, in silence, they listen, they understand the eleven sayings of the old bell which strikes midnight in the mountain.
One! Oh man! Lose not sight!
Two! What saith the deep midnight?
Three! I lay in sleep, in sleep;
Four! From deep dream, I woke to light.
Five! The world is deep,
Six! And deeper than ever day thought it might.
Seven! Deep is its woe—
Eight! And deeper than woe—delight.
Nine! Saith woe: Pass, go!
Ten! Eternity’s sought by all delight—Eleven! Eternity deep by all delight.8
Twelve!
Then Zarathustra rises: he has recovered his security, his sweetness, and his strength. He takes up his staff and sings as he goes down towards men. A similar versicle completes the seven strophes of his hymn:
“Never yet have I found the woman by whom I would like to have children, if it be not the woman whom I love: for I love thee, oh Eternity!
“For I love thee, oh Eternity!”
At the opening of the poem Zarathustra entered the great town—the Multi-coloured Cow he names it—and began his apostolate. At the end of the third part Zarathustra descends to the great town to recommence his apostolate there. Friedrich Nietzsche, a vanquished warrior, after two years of labour, has quailed. In 1872 he sent to Fräulein von Meysenbug the interrupted series of his lectures on the future of Universities: “It gives one a terrible thirst,” he said to her, “and, in the long run, nothing to drink.” The same words apply to his poem.
Notes
6 Albergo la Poata (information given by M Lanzky).
7 An unpublished letter, communicated by M. Romain Rolland.
8 Translation published by T. Fisher Unwin.