Lisbeth took him away. He thought himself a lost man, and expressed his last wishes. "Make me a promise, Lisbeth; let my friends only accompany my corpse; let none who are merely indifferent or curious be present. I shall no longer be able to defend myself, and you must do it. Let no priest, let no one come and speak insincere words over my coffin. See that I am buried like a loyal pagan, with no lies told."
He longed for the most desert and silent places, for the most complete solitude; she brought him to the valleys of the Upper Engadine. At that time very few people went up there. Nietzsche discovered this remote Switzerland and derived an unexpected comfort from the light and pure quality of the air, and the kindly light of the meadows, which soothed his worn-out eyes. He liked the scattered lakes, which recalled a Finland, the villages with their singing names, the fine peasant race, which proclaimed the presence of Italy beyond the glaciers. "This nature is familiar to me," he wrote to Rée; "it does not astonish me, there is an understanding between us." With a convalescent's surprise he began to live again. He wrote scarcely any letters; he wrote for himself, and it is in his work that we must seek the information which his correspondence formerly gave us. This is how he narrates his ascent towards the Engadine.
"Et in Arcadia ego.—Above the hills which take the shape of waves, across the austere pines and the old fir-trees, I have turned my gaze upon a little lake whose water is green and milky. Around me were rocks of every contour, a soil painted in discordant colours with grasses and flowers. Before me a flock moved, now scattering, now closing up its ranks; some cows, grouped afar-off, below a forest of pines, stood out in relief under the evening light; others, nearer, more sombre; and everything calm in the peace of the approaching twilight. My watch registered half-past five. The monarch of the herd was walking in the foam-white brook; he stepped out slowly, now stemming the fierce tide, now giving way to it: no doubt he found a kind of ferocious delight in so doing. Two human beings, brown skinned, of Bergamesque origin, were the shepherds of this flock: the young girl dressed almost like a boy. To the right, above a large belt of forest, edges of rocks, fields of snow; to the left, two enormous prongs of ice, far over me, in a veil of clear mist. Everything grand, calm, luminous. This beauty, thus suddenly perceived, thrilled, so as to bring into the soul a mute adoration of this moment of revelation. Into this world of pure light and sharp outline (exempt from disquiet and desire, expectation and regret), one was tempted to introduce Grecian heroes—involuntarily, as though it were the most natural thing. One had to feel in the manner of Poussin and his pupils; in a thoroughly heroic and idyllic manner. And it is thus that certain men have lived, thus that they have felt life, lastingly, within and without themselves; and I recognise among them one of the greatest of all men, one who discovered a style of heroic and idyllic philosopher: Epicurus."
Friedrich Nietzsche stayed in the Engadine, poorly lodged, sparingly fed, till September came; but he was satisfied, though deprived of friends, with his music and books. His sufferings were not intolerable: he could work and had soon filled six copybooks with pencil notes of his calmer thoughts, which, though always sceptical, were not bitter, but seemed, as it were, tempered by the unexpected indulgence. He had no illusions concerning this respite which he had received. It was a respite and no more, and he did not hope. Nevertheless he rejoiced that, before his breakdown, he had the opportunity of saying what happiness had been procured him by the simple contemplation of things, of human nature, of the mountains and the sky; he hastened to harvest this last felicity. At the beginning of September, 1879, he sent his completed work to Peter Gast.
"My dear, dear friend," he wrote, "when you receive these lines my manuscript will be in your hands. Perhaps you will feel a little of the pleasure which I have myself when I think of my work that is now completed. I am at the end of my thirty-fifth year, 'the middle of life,' they used to say some thousand years ago: it is the age at which Dante had his vision, as he tells us in the first verses of his poem. I am now in this middle of life, and on all sides so hard pressed by death, that at any hour it may take me; my life is such that I must foresee a rapid death, in spasms.... So I feel like a very old man, and the more because I have done the work of my life. I have poured out a good drop of oil, I know it, it will be accounted to me. I have experienced my manner of life to the full; many will experience it after me. My continual, my bitter sufferings have not altered my humour up to the present. On the contrary, it seems to me that I feel gayer, more kindly, than ever I was: whence comes this influence which fortifies me and ameliorates my condition? Not from men, for all but a few are provoked against me,[2] and do not grudge the trouble of letting me know it. Dear friend, read this last manuscript from end to end, and see if any trace of suffering or of depression is there disclosed. I think not, and this very conviction assures me that there must be some hidden strength in my thoughts, and not that lassitude, that powerlessness, which those who do not approve of me would like to find in them."
At this instant of his life Nietzsche made ready to die. How? It is not too hazardous to guess. He was waiting for that "rapid end in spasms," which had swept off his father in madness, and a pious sentiment brought him back to the domestic hearth. Released from the obligations which kept him at Basle, free to choose his retreat, he resisted the call of Peter Gast from Venice. It was no time for learning to know and to love a new beauty. "No," said he, "in spite of Overbeck, in spite of my sister, who press me to rejoin you, I shall not go. In certain circumstances, as I think, it is fitting that one should be closer to one's mother, one's hearth, one's souvenirs of childhood...."
It was to Naumburg, therefore, that he proceeded. He wished to lead there a life of entire peace, and to distract himself from thought by manual labour. In a tower of the old ramparts he hired a great room. Below the old wall there extended an unused piece of land, and this he took on lease and cultivated. "I have ten fruit trees," he wrote, "and roses, lilacs, carnations, strawberries, goose-berry bushes, and green gooseberries. At the beginning of next year I shall have ten rows of vegetables growing."
But the invalid was soon obliged to abandon these plans. The winter was rigorous. Friedrich Nietzsche could not withstand either the glare of the snow which dazzled his eyes, or the humid air which depressed and shattered his nerves. In a few weeks he had lost the benefit derived from his visit to the Engadine.
The Traveller and his Shadow, the proofs of which Peter Gast had corrected, was published. Apparently it was better understood than the preceding collections had been. Rohde wrote Nietzsche a letter which pleased him. Certainly he did not express unqualified admiration. "This clear but never emotional view of humanity," said he, "pains him who loves you and who hears the friend in every word." But, on the whole, he admired.