Young people experience a need to admire, it is a form of love. When they admire, when they love, all the servitudes of life become easy to bear. It was as Schopenhauer's disciple that Friedrich Nietzsche knew his first happiness. Philology caused him less weariness. Some pupils of Ritschl, his comrades, founded a society of studies. He joined with them, and, on the 18th of January, 1866, some weeks after his great reading of Schopenhauer, he expounded to them the result of his researches on the manuscripts and the variæ lectiones of Theognis. He spoke with vigour and freedom, and was applauded. Nietzsche liked success and tasted it with the simple vanity which he always avowed. He was happy. When he brought his memoir to Ritschl and was congratulated very warmly upon it, he was happier yet. He wished to become, and in fact did become, his master's favourite pupil.
No doubt he had not ceased to consider philology as an inferior duty, as a mere intellectual exercise and means of livelihood, and his soul was hardly satisfied; but what vast soul is ever satisfied? Often, after a day of parching labour, he was melancholy, but what young and ardent soul is ignorant of melancholy? At least his sadness had ceased to be mournful, and a fragment of a letter like the following, which opens with a complaint and ends in enthusiastic emotion, suggests an excessive plenitude rather than pain.
"Three things are my consolations," he wrote in April, 1866. "Rare consolations! My Schopenhauer, the music of Schumann, and lastly solitary walks. Yesterday a heavy storm gathered in the sky; I hastened towards a neighbouring hill (it is called Leusch, can you explain the word to me?), I climbed it; at the summit I found a hut and a man, who, watched by his children, was cutting the throats of two lambs. The storm broke in all its power, discharging thunder and hail, and I felt inexpressibly well, full of strength and élan, and I realised with a wonderful clearness that to understand Nature one must, as I had just done, go to her to be saved, far from all worries and all our heavy constraints. What mattered to me, then, man and his troubled Will! What mattered to me then the Eternal Thou Shalt and Thou Shalt Not! How different are lightning, storm, and hail, free powers without ethics! How happy they are, how strong they are, those pure wills which the mind has not troubled!"
At the beginning of the summer of 1866 Nietzsche was spending all his days in the library of Leipsic, engaged in deciphering difficult Byzantine manuscripts. Suddenly he allowed his attention to be distracted by a spectacle of a grandiose kind; Prussia, discreetly active for fifty years, reappeared in a warlike rôle. Frederick the Great's kingdom once more found a chief: Bismarck, the passionate, irascible, and crafty aristocrat who wished to realise at last the dream of all Germans and to found an empire above all the little States. He quarrelled with Austria, whom Moltke humiliated after twenty days of fighting. "I am finishing my Theognidea for the Rheinisches Museum during the week of Sadowa," we read in a memorandum made by Nietzsche. He did not stop his work, but political preoccupations entered into his thoughts. He felt the pride of national victory; he recognised himself as a Prussian patriot, and a little astonishment was mixed with his pleasure: "For me this is a wholly new and rare enjoyment," he writes. Then he reflected on this victory, and discerned its consequences, which he enunciated with lucidity.
"We hold the cards; but as long as Paris remains the centre of Europe, things will remain in the old condition. It is inevitable that we should make an effort to upset this equilibrium, or at least to try to upset it. If we fail, then let us hope to fall, each of us, on a field of battle, struck by some French shell."
He is not troubled by this view of the future, which satisfies his taste for the sombre and the pathetic. On the contrary, he grows animated and is ready to admire.
"At certain moments," he writes, "I make an effort to free my opinions from the turn which my momentary passion and my natural sympathies for Prussia give them, and then what I see is this: an action conducted with grandeur by a State, by a chief; an action carved out of the true substance of which history is really made; assuredly by no means moral; but, for him who contemplates it, sufficiently edifying and beautiful."
Was it not a similar sentiment which he had experienced on that hill with the queer name, Leusch, on a stormy day, by the side of that peasant who was cutting the throats of two lambs with such calm simplicity? "Free powers, without ethics! How happy they are, how strong, those pure Wills which the mind has not troubled!"