He had commenced a fourth "Unseasonable Thought," We other Philologists; he abandoned it, alleging, to explain this abandonment, weariness and the weight of his University duties. When he speaks thus, Nietzsche deceives either himself or us. Christmas came, and he went to spend ten days at Naumburg with his mother. He was at liberty and could work. But instead of writing, he composed and copied out his Hymn to Friendship for four voices. He spent Saint Sylvester's day in re-reading his youthful compositions: this examination interested him. "I have always seen admiringly," he wrote to Fräulein von Meysenbug, "how the invariability of character manifests itself in music. What a child expresses musically is in so clear a manner the language of his most essential nature that the man afterwards desires to revise nothing in it."
This musical debauch was a bad sign of his condition, a sign of weakness and of fear before his thoughts. Two letters, one from Gersdorff, the other from Cosima Wagner, came to disturb his solitary commemoration. His friends spoke to him of Bayreuth. The reminder plunged him in despair.
"Yesterday," he wrote to Fräulein von Meysenbug, "on the first day of the year, I saw the future with a real fear. It is terrible and dangerous to live—I should envy him who came by death in an honest manner. For the rest, I am resolved to live to an old age. I have my work. But it is not the satisfaction of living that will help me to grow old. You understand this resolution."
During January and February, 1875, Nietzsche did not work. He let depression get the better of him. "At very rare moments," he writes, "ten minutes every fortnight, I compose a Hymn to Solitude. I will show it in all its dreadful beauty."
In March, Gersdorff came to sojourn in Basle. Nietzsche, encouraged by his arrival, dictated some notes to him. He seemed to have escaped from his melancholy; then once more he was plunged into it by a fresh sorrow.
It had become his habit, a kindly habit and one conformable to his tastes, to live in common with his two colleagues, Overbeck and Romundt, who formed the intellectual society of which Wagner spoke with such esteem. Now, in February, 1875, Romundt announced to Overbeck and to Nietzsche that he was obliged to leave them to enter into Orders. Nietzsche experienced a feeling of stupefied indignation: for many months he had lived with this man, he called him his friend. Yet he had had no suspicion of the secret vocation now suddenly declared. Romundt had not been open with him. Subjugated by religious faith, he had lacked in simple good faith, and the duties of friendship of which Nietzsche had such an exalted ideal. Romundt's treachery reminded him of another treachery and made it easier for him to understand the news which was rumoured among Wagnerians: the master was about to compose a Christian Mystery—a Parsifal. Nothing was so displeasing to Friedrich Nietzsche as a return to Christianity: nothing seemed to him more weak or cowardly than such a capitulation to the problems of life. Some years before, he had known and admired the different projects on which Wagner conversed with his intimates: he then spoke of Luther, of the Great Frederick; he wished to glorify a German hero and repeat the happy experiment of Die Meistersinger. Why had he abandoned his projects? Why did he prefer Parsifal to Luther? and to the rude and singing life of the German Renaissance, the religiosity of the Graal? Friedrich Nietzsche then understood and measured the perils of the pessimism which accustoms souls to complaint, weakens and predisposes them to mystical consolations. He reproached himself for having taught Romundt a doctrine too cruel for his courage, and thus to have been the cause of his weakness.
"Ah! our Protestant atmosphere, good and pure as it is!" he wrote to Rohde; "I have never felt so strongly how well I am filled with the spirit of Luther. And the unlucky man turns his back on so many liberating geniuses! I ask myself if he is in his senses, and if it would not be better to treat him with cold water and douches; so incomprehensible is it to me, that such a spectre should rise up by me, and take possession of a man for eight years my comrade. And to crown all it is on me that the responsibility of this base conversion rests. God knows, no egoistic thought induces me to speak thus. But I believe too that I represent a sacred thing, and I should be bitterly ashamed if I merited the reproach of having the slightest connection with this Catholicism which I detest thoroughly."
He wished to bring back, to convince his friend, but no discussion was possible. Romundt did not answer and held to his resolve. He left on the fixed date. Nietzsche wrote to Gersdorff, and related the story of this departure.
"It was horribly sad: Romundt knew, repeated endlessly that henceforward he had lived the better and the happier part of his life. He wept a great deal and asked our forgiveness. He could not hide his misery. At the last moment I was seized with a veritable terror; the porters were shutting the carriage doors, and Romundt, wishing to continue speaking to us, wanted to let down the window, but it stuck; he redoubled his efforts, and while he tormented himself thus, hopelessly trying to make himself heard, the train went out slowly, and we were reduced to making signs to each other. The awful symbolism of the whole scene upset me terribly, and Overbeck as much as it did me (he confessed as much to me later): it was hardly endurable; I stayed in bed the next day with a bad headache that lasted thirty hours, and much vomiting of bile."
This day of illness marked the beginning of a very long attack. Nietzsche was obliged to leave Basle and to repose in the solitude of the mountains and woods. "I wander always alone," he writes, "clearing up many thoughts." What were these thoughts? We can ascertain them. "Send me a comforting message," he wrote to Rohde: "that your friendship may help me better to support this terrible affair. It is in my sentiment of friendship that I am hurt. I hate more than ever that insincere and hypocritical way of being a man of many friendships, and I will have to be more circumspect in the future."