At last Friedrich Nietzsche began to work. His instinct brought him back to the philosopher who had helped his first years. He wished to consecrate to Schopenhauer his third "Unseasonable Thought." Ten years before, he had led a miserable existence at Leipsic; Schopenhauer saved him. His strange gaiety, his lyricism, the irony with which he expresses his harshest thoughts, had restored to him the power of life. If Schopenhauer "troubles you, burdens you," he wrote at that time to a friend, "if he has not the power to raise you, and guide you, through the keenest sorrows of external life, to that sorrowful, but happy state of mind that takes hold on us when we hear great music, to that state in which the surroundings of the earth seem to fall away from us—then I do not claim to understand his philosophy."
Once more he experienced the impressions of his youth. He remembered that the most productive crises of his life had been the most sorrowful, and as a disciple in the school of his former master he recovered his courage. "I have eleven fine melodies yet to sing," he writes to Rohde, in announcement of the work which was to follow. And his Schopenhauer is a melody, a hymn to Solitude, to the daring of a thinker. His heart was full of music at that time. He rested from writing and composed a hymn to Friendship. "My song is for all of you," he wrote to Erwin Rohde.
His sister joined him, and the two left Basle and settled together in the country, near the falls of the Rhine. Friedrich Nietzsche recovered the gaiety of his most childish days, partly, no doubt, to amuse the girl who had come so tenderly to join him—aliis lætus, sibi sapiens, according to the maxim that is found written in his diary of the time—but also because he was truly happy, despite his sorrow: happy to be himself, free and unspotted before life. "My sister is with me," he writes to Gersdorff. "Every day we make the finest plans for our future life, which is to be idyllic, hard-working, and simple. All is going well: I have put well away, far from me, all weakness and melancholy."
He used to walk with his sister and talk, laugh, dream, and read. What did he read? Schopenhauer, no doubt, and Montaigne, in that small and elegant edition which became a sad reminder: Cosima Wagner had given it to him in former days at Triebschen in gratitude for the dolls he used to bring to the little girls. "Because that man wrote," he used to say, "the pleasure of life on earth has been intensified. Since I have had to do with this free and brave spirit I like to repeat what he himself said of Plutarch—'Je ne le puis si peu raccointer que je n'en tire cuisse ou aile.' If the duty were laid upon me, it would be in his company that I would attempt to live on earth as at home." Schopenhauer and Montaigne: these two ironists, one confessing his despair, the other hiding it, are the men with whom Nietzsche elects to try to live. But he read at the same time with deepest appreciation the work of a younger thinker, one less unfavourable to his aspirations—the trustful Emerson, the young prophet of a young people, one who in his slightest expressions so happily renders the pure emotion that lightens the eighteenth year of a man's life and passes away with that year.
Friedrich Nietzsche had read Emerson at Pforta, and he discovered him again in the spring of 1874, and recommended him to his friends.
"The world is young," wrote Emerson at the end of his Representative Men. "The former great men call to us affectionately. We too must write Bibles, to unite again the heavens and the earthly world. The secret of Genius is to suffer no fiction to exist for us; to realise all that we know in the high refinement of modern life, in arts, in sciences, in books, in men; to exact good faith, reality, and a purpose: and first, last, midst, and without end, to honour every truth by use."
Nietzsche had need of the comfort of such words and loved them.
Friedrich Nietzsche finished the manuscript of his Schopenhauer as Educator at the beginning of June. Intellectually he was almost cured, but he had other sufferings. Madame Förster-Nietzsche tells how one day, when her brother had expressed his disgust of novels and their monotony of love, some one asked him what other sentiment could have the power of inspiring passion. "Friendship," he said quickly. "It produces absolutely the same crises as love, but in a purer atmosphere. First of all, attraction brought about on both sides by common convictions, mutual admiration and glorification: then, distrust on one side, and on the other doubts as to the excellence of the friend and his ideas: the certainty that a rupture is inevitable and yet will be painful. In friendship there are all these sufferings, and others too many to tell." Nietzsche had knowledge of every one from June, 1871, onwards.
He loved Wagner; he had never ceased to love him. He had been able to correct himself of his intellectual error. Richard Wagner was not a philosopher or an educator of Europe. True enough, none the less he was a wonderful artist, the source of all beauty and of all happiness, and Nietzsche desired him still, as one desires a woman, because she gives joy. Any idea of rupture was unbearable, and to none did he confess his thoughts.