His sister came to join him at Basle and lived with him. At first his pleasure was great, but he soon recognised that he could not talk with this girl who was altogether a Wagnerian and quite devoted to the ideas of Bayreuth. Paul Rée was the only man whose company he liked; but Paul Rée was detained in North Germany by considerations of health, and could not, as Nietzsche had hoped, come to Basle.
"I hope that I shall soon learn," he wrote to him, "that the evil demons of sickness are leaving you in peace. All that I wish for you in the New Year is that you remain as you are, and that you remain for me as you have been.... Let me tell you that friendship has never been so sweet to me as in this last year, thanks to you.... When I hear of your work, my mouth waters, for I desire to be with you so much. We have been made to understand each other aright; we always come together, I think, like good neighbours, to whom the idea occurs, at the same moment, that they should pay each other a visit, and who meet on the confines of their lands.... When shall we have a good conversation upon human affairs, a personal, not an epistolary conversation?"
In December he wrote to Rée: "Ten times a day I wish to be near you." Nevertheless he finished his book, or, to be more accurate, he did not finish it, for he preserved the attractive freedom of his notes. It was thus that they came to him, one after another, without any connection; and it pleased him that they should thus remain. His deplorable health prevented him from putting a weft across them, from imposing an order upon them. And what did it matter? He recalled those French writers whose loyalty he loved: Pascal, Larochefoucauld, Vauvenargues, Montaigne. He wished to leave, after their example, some disorder and some discontinuity in his thoughts. He wished to write a simple book which should call the most urgent enthusiasts back to prudence. Round Wagner and Bayreuth, "beautiful souls" were innumerable. Friedrich Nietzsche, who had just missed being one of these, wished, by talking in the manner of old Socrates, to make them feel the absurdity of their faith. Human, All Too Human, was the title which he had chosen. Right at the end of his conscious life, he recounted the object of his book.
"A torch in my hand," he writes, "and the light not smoky,[1] I have cast a lively light upon this subterranean world of the Ideal. It is war, but war without powder and without smoke, without war-like attitudes, without pathos, without dislocated limbs—all that would still be 'idealism.' Error after error, I took them and placed them on the ice, and the ideal was not even refuted—it froze. Here, for example, freezes 'the Genius'; in this other corner freezes 'the Saint'; beneath a thick stopper of frozen ice 'the Hero'; and, lastly, it is 'the Faith' which freezes, she who is named 'Conviction'; and then here is 'Pity,' which notably grows cold—in fact, nearly everywhere freezes 'the thing in itself.'"
Certainly this work is paradoxical. No one is so ardent as Friedrich Nietzsche, no one has such a belief in his work, in his mission, in the sublime ends of life; and yet he labours to scoff at them. He reverses every thesis that he has hitherto upheld. Pereat Veritas, fiat vita!—he had once written. Now he writes, Pereat vita, fiat Veritas! Above poetry he places science; above Æschylus, that same Socrates whom he had at other times denounced. No doubt it is only a pretence, and he knows it. The ideas which he expresses are not really his own. He arms himself with irony for a combat which will be short: for he is not an ironist. He wants to find, and is convinced that he will find, an unknown lyricism which shall inspire his great works. Human, All Too Human, is the sign of a time of crisis and of passage, but what a surprising crisis, what a difficult passage! "The book is there," wrote Nietzsche, "to the great astonishment of the prostrate invalid."
On January 3, 1879, he received the poem Parsifal, which Richard Wagner sent him. He read it, and could better measure the always increasing distance which separated him from his old master. He wrote to the Baron von Seydlitz:
"Impression from the first reading: more Liszt than Wagner; the spirit of the counter-reformation; for me who am too accustomed to the Greek and human atmosphere, all this belongs to a too limited Christianity; the psychology is fantastic; there is no flesh and far too much blood (the Last Supper especially has far too much blood about it for me); I do not like hysterical chambermaids. The style seems like a translation from a foreign language. But the situations and their developments—are they not in a vein of the greatest poetry? Never did a musician propose a higher task to his music."
Friedrich Nietzsche, in this letter, did not speak all his thoughts. Certain features of it (no flesh and far too much blood) let us divine, as already active and vehement within him, that repugnance which he was to express ten years later. Nevertheless he loved this incomparable master, and for the first time he was obliged to put clearly to himself the problem of the rupture. He had received the poem Parsifal; should he reply, and, if so, in what terms? or should he take the more frank and simple course of leaving it unanswered?
His doubts and vexations increased. It is not easy to gauge his condition at this time. He scarcely confided in his sister. His letters to Paul Rée, which would no doubt enlighten us, are not printed.
Since Christmas, 1877, Friedrich Nietzsche had more leisure, his professional work having been reduced by some hours. He took advantage of this to leave Basle every week and wander alone in the neighbouring regions. He did not go to the high mountains; he had little taste for these "monsters" and preferred the Jura, the Black Forest, whose wooded heights reminded him of the places of his childhood.