Who venerates this colossus? Let us give a modern and pressing application to these interrogatory words. The colossus is not Rome, it is Prussia and her empire. Narrow was the soil of Athens or of Sparta, and brief their day; but what did that matter if the object, which was spiritual strength and beauty, was attained? Friedrich Nietzsche was haunted by this vision of Greece with its hundred rival cities, raising between mountains and sea their acropoles, their temples, their statues, all resounding with the rhythm of pæans, all glorious and alert.
"The sentiment of Hellenism," he wrote, "as soon as it is awakened, becomes aggressive and translates itself into a combat against the culture of the present day."
Friedrich Nietzsche suffered from the wounds which life inflicted upon his lyrical dream. His friends listened to him, but followed him imperfectly. The professor, Franz Overbeck, who lived in his house and saw him every day, was a man of distinction, with a strong and acute mind. A German by birth, a Frenchman by education, he understood the problems of the day, and joined in the anxieties and intentions of Nietzsche; but his ardour could not equal Nietzsche's. Jacob Burckhardt was a man of noble intellect and character, but he was without hope, and Friedrich Nietzsche passionately desired to hope. No doubt, there was Wagner, whom neither passion nor hope ever could surprise, but he had just published an Aristophanic buffoonery directed against the conquered Parisians. Friedrich Nietzsche read this gross work, and condemned it. Overbeck and Burckhardt lacked ardour; Wagner lacked delicacy; and Nietzsche confided in no one. A chair of philosophy had just been vacated in the University of Basle. Nietzsche took fire at once. He wrote to Erwin Rohde, and told him that he should apply for this chair, and that he would assuredly secure it. Thus the two friends were to meet again. Vain hope! Erwin Rohde presented himself as a candidate, but was not accepted. Nietzsche reproached himself for having lured on his friend. He grew melancholy. He felt himself drawn "like a little whirlpool into a dead sea of night and oblivion."
He had never recovered entirely from the ordeals of the war. Neither sleep nor sure and certain health were ever at his call again. In February the nervous force which had sustained him suddenly gave way, and his disorders assumed an acute form. Violent neuralgas, insomnia, troubles and weaknesses of the eyesight, stomach ills, jaundice represented the nature of the crisis which had been tormenting him for five months. The doctors, quite at a loss, advised him to give up work and to take a voyage. Friedrich Nietzsche sent for his sister, who came to Naumburg. He brought her to pay a farewell visit to Triebschen, and left for Lugano.
At that time the railway did not cross the Alps. Travellers went by diligence over the ridge of the St. Gothard. Chance furnished Nietzsche with a remarkable companion, an old man of a talkative humour, and with no desire to conceal his identity: it was Mazzini. The old humanitarian and the young apostle of slavery hit it off wonderfully well. Mazzini cited Goethe's phrase:
"Sich des halben zu entwohnen und im Ganzen, Vollen, Schönen resolut zu leben" (To abjure half-measures, and to live resolutely in the Whole, the Full, the Beautiful). Friedrich Nietzsche never forgot the energetic maxim, nor the man who had transmitted it to him, nor this day of rapid and healthful travel, not far from those summits which he was afterwards to love so much.
The fine mountain crossing amid the snow and silence of the Alps had sufficed. He was almost cured on his arrival at Lugano. His nature was still supple and youthful; his returns to life were prompt and radiant; a naïve gaiety re-animated all his being. He spent two happy months in Italian Switzerland. A Prussian officer, a relation of General von Moltke, was staying at his hotel. He lent him his manuscripts and often talked to him of the destinies of the new German Empire and of the aristocratic warrior's mission which the victory had conferred upon it. It was a fine springtide for the numerous Germans who had come to rest at the place: they liked to gather round their young philosopher and listen to him. February began, the war was over, and these happy people, freed from all anxieties, abandoned themselves for the first time to the pleasure of their triumph. They sang; they danced in public up to the Market-place, and Nietzsche was not the least prompt to rejoice with them, to dance and sing. "When I recall these days," writes Madame Förster-Nietzsche, who gives us a sad and gracious account of the time, "it seems to me that I am having a veritable dream of Carnival."
From Lugano, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote to Erwin Rohde: