"I looked too young," wrote Fräulein Nietzsche, who tells the anecdote, "and the gardener did not take us seriously." What are we to think of this affair? It is hard to know. Was it only the chatter of a young girl to which Friedrich Nietzsche had hearkened for an instant? Or was it, on the contrary, a serious notion? Probably the latter. His spirit, hospitable to chimeras, ill knew what the world admits and what it does not admit. He came back to Basle. His pamphlet had provoked a good deal of discussion. "I read it, and re-read it," wrote Wagner, "and I swear to the great gods that I hold you to be the only one who knows what I want." "Your pamphlet is a thunderbolt," wrote Hans von Bülow. "A modern Voltaire ought to write: écr.... l'inf.... This international æsthetic is for us a far more odious adversary than red or black bandits."
Other good judges, elderly men in many cases, approved of the young polemist; Ewald (of Gottingen), Bruno Bauer, Karl Hildebrandt, "dieses letzten humanen Deutschen," said Nietzsche—"this last of the human Germans"—declared for him. "This little book," wrote the critic, "may mark a return of the German spirit towards serious thought and intellectual passion."
But these friendly voices were few.
"The German Empire," he had written, "is extirpating the German spirit." He had wounded the pride of a conquering people. In return, he suffered many an insult, many an accusation of scurviness and treachery. He rejoiced over it. "I enter society with a duel," he said; "Stendhal gave that advice." Complete Stendhalian that he was (or at least he flattered himself that he was), Nietzsche was, notwithstanding, accessible to pity. David Strauss died but a few weeks after the publication of the pamphlet, and Nietzsche, imagining that his work had killed the old man, was sorely grieved. His sister and his friends tried in vain to reassure him; he did not wish to abandon a remorse which was, moreover, so glorious.
Stimulated by this first conflict, he dreamt of vaster conflicts. With extraordinary rapidity of conception he prepared a series of treatises which he wished to publish under a general title: Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen ("Thoughts Out of Season"). D. F. Strauss had furnished the subject of the first of the series. The second was to be entitled The Use and Abuse of History. Twenty others were to follow. His friends, ever the associates of his dreams, would contribute, he thought, to the work.
Franz Overbeck had just published a little book entitled The Christianity of our Modern Theology. He attacked the German savants and their too modernist tendencies, which attenuated Christianity, and allowed the irrevocable and serious doctrine, which was that of the early Christians, to fall into oblivion. Nietzsche had Overbeck's Christlichkeit and his D. F. Strauss bound together. On the outside page he wrote six lines of verse.
"Two twins of the same house enter joyfully into the world—to devour the dragons of the world. Two fathers, one work. Oh, miracle! The mother of these twins is called Friendship."[1]
Friedrich Nietzsche hoped for a series of similar volumes, the work of many hands but inspired by one spirit.
"With a hundred men bred up to the conflict of modern ideas, inured to heroism," he then wrote, "all our noisy and lazy culture would be reduced to eternal silence. A hundred men of that stamp carried the civilisation of the Renaissance on their shoulders." A double hope and a vain one: his friends failed him, and he himself did not write his twenty pamphlets. Only their titles, and a few pages of rough outline, are left to us. On The State, The City, The Social Crisis, Military Culture, on Religion, what had he to tell us? Let us moderate our regrets; little perhaps; little, at all events, that could be called precious, as distinct from his desires and his complaints.