The second year which he passed at Leipsic was perhaps the happiest of his life. He enjoyed to the full that intellectual security which his adhesion to his master Schopenhauer assured him. "You ask me for a vindication of Schopenhauer," he wrote to his friend Deussen; "I will simply say this to you: I look life in the face, with courage and liberty, since my feet have found firm soil. The waters of trouble, to express myself in images, do not sweep me out of my road, because they come no higher than my head; I am at home in those obscure regions."
It was a year of composure and of comradeship. He did not worry himself about public affairs. Prussia, on the morrow of her victory, fell back to the low level of everyday life. The babblings of the tribune and the press succeeded the action of great men, and Nietzsche turned away from it all. "What a multitude of mediocre brains are occupied with things of real importance and real effect!" he writes. "It is an alarming thought." Perhaps he regretted having allowed himself to be seduced by a dramatic incident. Nevertheless he knew—Schopenhauer had taught him—that history and politics are illusory games. He had not forgotten; he wrote in order to affirm his thought, and to define the mediocre meaning and value of human agitations.
"What is history but the endless struggle for existence of innumerable and diverse interests? The great 'ideas' in which many people believe that they find the directing forces of this combat are but reflections which pass across the surface of the swelling sea. They have no action on the sea; but it often happens that they embellish the waves and thus deceive him who contemplates them. It matters little whether this light emanates from a moon, a sun, or a lighthouse; the waves will be a little more or a little less lit up—that is all."
His enthusiasm had no other object but art and thought, the study of the genius of antiquity. He conceived a passion for his master Ritschl: "That man is my scientific conscience," said he. He took part in the friendly soirées of the Verein, spoke, and discussed. He planned more undertakings than he had time for, and then proposed them to his friends. He elected to study the sources of Diogenes Laertius—that compiler who has preserved for us such precious information with regard to the philosophers of Greece. He dreamed of composing a memoir which should be sagacious and rigorous, but also beautiful: "All important work," he wrote to Deussen, "you must have felt it yourself, exercises a moral influence. The effort to concentrate a given material, and to find a harmonious form for it, I compare to a stone thrown into our inner life: the first circle is narrow, but it multiplies itself, and other more ample circles disengage themselves from it."
In April Nietzsche collected and systematised his notes, wholly preoccupied with this concern for beauty. He did not wish to write in the manner of scholars who misunderstand the savour of words, the equilibrium of phrases. He wished to write, in the difficult and classical sense of the word.
"The scales fall from my eyes," he wrote; "I have lived too long in a state of innocence as regards style. The categorical imperative, 'Thou shalt write, it is necessary that thou writest,' has awakened me. I have tried to write well It is a thing which I had forgotten since leaving Pforta, and all at once my pen lost its shape between my fingers. I was impotent, out of temper. The principles of style enunciated by Lessing, Lichtenberger, Schopenhauer were scolding in my ears. At least I remembered, and it was my consolation, that these three authorities agreed in saying that it is difficult to write well, that no man naturally writes well, and that one must, in order to acquire a style, work strenuously, hew blocks of hard wood.... Above all, I wish to imprison in my style some joyous spirits; I shall apply myself to it as I apply myself upon the keyboard, and I hope to play at length, not only the pieces that I have learnt, but free fantasies, free as far as possible, though always logical and beautiful."
A sentimental joy completed his happiness: he found a friend. Nietzsche had long been faithful to the comrades of his early childhood: one was dead, and the other, their lives and occupations having been separate for ten years, was becoming a stranger to him. At Pforta he had been fond of the studious Deussen, the faithful Gersdorff: the one was studying at Tübingen, the other at Berlin. He wrote to them with much zeal, but an exchange of letters could not satisfy that need for friendship which was an instinct of his soul. Finally, he made the acquaintance of Erwin Rohde, a vigorous and perspicacious spirit; he liked him at once; he admired him, for he was incapable of loving without admiring; he adorned him with the sublime qualities with which his soul overflowed. Every evening, after laborious hours, the young men came together. They walked or rode, talking incessantly. "I experience for the first time," wrote Nietzsche, "the pleasure of a friendship founded on a moral and philosophic groundwork. Ordinarily, we dispute strongly, for we are in disagreement on a multitude of points. But it suffices for our conversation to take a more profound turn; and then at once our dissonant thoughts are silenced, and nothing resounds between us but a peaceable and total accord."
They had promised each other that they would spend their first holiday weeks together. At the beginning of August, being both free, they left Leipsic and sought isolation in walks in a tramp on the frontiers of Bohemia. It is a region of wooded heights, which recalls, with less grandeur, the Vosges. Nietzsche and Rohde led the life of wandering philosophers. Their luggage was light, they had no books, they walked from inn to inn, and, throughout the days unspoilt by a care, they talked about Schopenhauer, about Beethoven, about Germany, about Greece. They judged and condemned, with youthful promptitude; they were never weary of defaming their science. "Oh childishness of erudition!" they said. "It was a poet, it was Goethe, who discovered the genius of Greece. He it was who held it up to the Germans, absorbed always on the confines of a dream, as an example of rich and clear beauty, a model of perfect form. The professors followed him. They have explained the ancient world, and, under their myopic eyes, that wonderful work of art has become the object of a science. What is there that they have not studied? In Tacitus, the ablative case, the evolution of the gerund in the Latin authors of Africa; they have analysed to the last detail the language of the Iliad, determined in what respect it is connected with this other and that other Aryan language. What does it all signify? The beauty of the Iliad is unique; it was felt by Goethe, and they ignore it. We shall stop this game; that will be our task. We shall go back to the tradition of Goethe; we shall not dissect the Greek genius, we shall revitalise it, and teach men to feel it. For long enough the scholars have carried out their minute enquiries. It is time to make an end. The work of our generation shall be definitive; our generation shall enter into possession of the grand legacy transmitted by the past. And science, too, must serve progress."
After a month of conversation, the young men left the forest and went to Meiningen, a little town in which the musicians of the Pessimist school were giving a series of concerts. A letter of Friedrich Nietzsche's has preserved a chronicle of the performance. "The Abbé Liszt presided," he wrote. "They played a symphonic poem by Hans von Bülow, Nirvana, an explanation of which was given on the programme in maxims from Schopenhauer. But the music was awful. Liszt, on the contrary, succeeded remarkably in finding the character of the Indian Nirvana in some of his religious compositions; for example, in his Beatitudes." Nietzsche and Rohde separated on the morrow of these festivals, and returned to their families.