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."