The life of Friedrich Nietzsche

by Daniel Halévy

No one could resist the impulse which he gave: every one had to yield and to follow. He fixed the very details of the plans of the theatre whose site had just been chosen. He studied the practical organisation of the work, and laboured to create those Vereine in which propagandists and subscribers were to be grouped. He set himself out to procure rare and unexpected delights for the faithful. One day he surprised them with a performance for their benefit alone, in the gardens of Triebschen, of the Siegfried-Idyll, a gracious interlude written for the churching of his wife, a noble echo of the most intimate times. He gave Nietzsche his rôle, for he could not allow that voice, so passionate and hard to control, and yet so eloquent, to be lost. The young man offered to set out on a mission. He would stir up those circles in Northern Germany, so slow and heavy in its emotions. Bus proposal was not accepted; Wagner, no doubt, feared the violence of his apostolate: "No," he said to him, "finish and publish your book." Nietzsche felt somewhat melancholy at the refusal. Henceforth, it seems, difficulties began to arise between the two.

Moreover, the advice of the master was less easy to follow than it seemed. The Origin of Tragedy did not find a publisher. Nietzsche's applications failed, and his summer was spoilt by the check. He decided to print certain chapters of it in the reviews. "I put my little book into the world bit by bit," he wrote in July to Erwin Rohde; "what a childbirth! what tortures!"

At the beginning of October he was staying at Leipsic. Here he saw again his master Ritschl, and his friends Rohde, Gersdorff, who had come to meet him, and spent with them some happy days of conversation and comradeship. But the fate of his book remained uncertain: all the publishers of scientific and philological works bowed the author out. They were not tempted by a bizarre work, in which learning was allied with lyricism and the problems of ancient Greece with the problems of modern Germany. "The book is a centaur," said Nietzsche. This mythological assurance did not satisfy the book-sellers. Finally he had to address himself, not without regret—for he maintained that his work was a scientific work—to Richard Wagner's publisher, from whom he received, after a month's delay, a favourable reply. He wrote to his friend Gersdorff, in a free and relieved tone, which helps us to measure the vexation from which he had suffered.

"BASLE, November 19, 1871. "Pardon me, dear friend, I ought to have thanked you sooner. I had felt in your last letter, in every one of your words, your strong intellectual life. It seemed to me that you remained a soldier at soul and brought your military nature to art and philosophy. And that is good, for we have no right to live to-day, if we are not militants, militants who prepare a sæculum to come, something of which we can guess at in ourselves, across our best instants. For those instants, which are what there is of best in us, draw us away in spirit from our time; nevertheless, in some manner, they need to have their hearthstone somewhere: whence I infer that at such instants we feel a confused breath of coming times pass over us. For instance, take our last meeting at Leipsic; has it not left in your memory the impression of such instants, as seemed to be strangers to everything, linked with another century? Whatever may be, this remains, 'Im Ganzen, Vollen, Schönen, resolut zu leben.' But it needs a strong will, such as is not given to the first comer!... To-day, only to-day, the excellent publisher Fritzsch replies to me."

Fritzsch proposed to him that he should give his book the format and character of a recent work of Wagner's: Die Bestimmung der Oper. Nietzsche rejoiced at the idea, and he wrote five concluding chapters which accentuated the Wagnerian tendency of the work. This rapid composition and the correction of the proofs did not deter him from another enterprise.

The Origin of Tragedy was about to appear. He did not doubt for a moment that it would be read, understood, acclaimed. His comrades, his masters, had always acknowledged the strength of his thought. Apparently, it never occurred to him that a vaster public remained callous; but he wished to affect it profoundly, at the first blow, and he formed new projects by which he might make the most of his success. He wanted to talk: speech was a livelier weapon. He recalled the emotions which he had experienced when, as a young professor, he was given the singular task of teaching the most delicate language, the most difficult works, to chance audiences; he remembered his perhaps fanciful design: that seminary of philologists, that house of study and retreat, of which he was always dreaming. He wanted to denounce the schools, the gymnasia, the Universities, the heavy apparatus of pedantry which was stifling the German spirit, and define the new and necessary institutions, destined, no longer for the emancipation of the masses, but for the culture of the State. He had written to Erwin Rohde as early as the month of March: "A new idea claims me, a new principle of education which points to the entire rejection of oar Universities, of our gymnasia...." In December, he announced at Basle, for January, 1872, a series of lectures upon The Future of our Educational Institutions.

Towards mid-December, he accompanied Richard Wagner to Mannheim, where a two days' festival was being devoted to the works of the master.

"Oh, what a pity you were not there!" he wrote to Erwin Rohde. "All the sensations, all the recollections of art, what are they compared to these? I am like a man whose ideal has been realised. It is Music, and Music alone!... When I say to myself that a certain number of men of the generations to come—at least some hundreds among them—will be moved by this music as I am myself, I cannot augur for less than an entire renewal of our culture!"

He returned to his house in Basle: but the impression of his days in Mannheim remained with him. The details of his everyday life caused him a strange and tenacious disgust. "All that cannot be translated into music," he wrote, "is repulsive and repugnant to me.... I have a horror of reality. Or, rather, I no longer see anything of the real, it is only a phantasmagoria." Under the stress of this emotion he acquired a clearer view of the problem which occupied him, he formulated more clearly the principle for which he was seeking. To "teach," to "uplift" men, what does that mean? It is to dispose their minds in such sort that the productions of genius will be assured, not of the understanding of all, for that cannot be, but of the respect of all.