This letter was obviously the letter of an excellent pupil, and it exasperated Nietzsche. Wagner was named, doubtless intentionally, and the Wagnerian Encyclopedia, the sum of an absurd and puerile theology, was indicated as the text of Stein's meditations. Here was the old adversary again standing in the way, Wagner, the quack of thought, the seducer of young men. Förster, who was taking his sister from him, was a Wagnerian; and Heinrich von Stein, on Wagner's account, refused him his devotion. It was a cruel liberty that he had won, alone and at the cost of a struggle whose wounds he still bore. He wrote to his sister:
"What a foolish letter Stein has written me in answer to such poetry! I am painfully affected. Here I am ill again. I have recourse to the old means [chloral], and I utterly hate all men, myself included, whom I have known. I sleep well, but on waking I experience misanthropy and rancour. And yet there can be few men living who are better disposed, more benevolent than I!"
Lanzky remarked Nietzsche's trouble of mind without suspecting the cause. The crisis was very severe, but Nietzsche did not allow himself to be crushed by it and laboured energetically. More often now than heretofore he walked alone, and Lanzky would watch him trip as lightly as a dancer across the Promenade des Anglais or over the mountain paths. He would leap and gambol at times, and then suddenly interrupt his capers to write down a few words with a pencil. What was the new work on which he was busy? Lanzky had no idea.
One morning in March he entered, as was his custom, the little room which the philosopher occupied, to find him in bed notwithstanding the advanced hour. He made anxious enquiries.
"I am ill," said Nietzsche; "I have just had my confinement."
"What's that you say?" asked Lanzky, much perturbed.
"The fourth part of Zarathustra is written."
This fourth section does not enable us to discover at length an advance in the work, an attained precision of thought. It is merely a singular fragment, an "interlude," as Nietzsche called it. It illustrates a strange episode in the life of the hero, one which has disconcerted many a reader. We may perhaps best understand it if we consider the deception to which Nietzsche has just been subjected.
The superior men go up to Zarathustra and surprise him in his mountainous solitude: an old pope, an old historian, an old king, unhappy beings who are suffering from their abasement and wish to ask succour of a sage whose strength they feel. Was it not thus that Stein, that distinguished young man, etiolated by Bayreuth, went to Nietzsche?