"The laws have already been given. Everything is ready for the production of the Superman—grand and awful moment! Zarathustra reveals his doctrine of the Eternal Return—which may now be endured; he himself, for the first time, endures it.
"Decisive moment: Zarathustra interrogates all this multitude assembled for the festival.
"'Do you wish,' he says, 'the return of it all?' All reply: Yes!
"He dies of joy.
"Zarathustra dying holds the earth locked in his arms. And although no one said a word, they all knew that Zarathustra was dead."
It is a fine issue: Nietzsche was soon to find it too easy, too fine a one. This Platonic aristocracy, rather quickly established, left him in doubt. It corresponded exactly to his desires; did it correspond to his thoughts? Nietzsche, ready in the destruction of all the ancient moralities, did not find that he had the right of proposing another so soon? All answered: Yes! Was that conceivable? Human societies would always draw after them an imperfect mass which would have to be constrained by force or by laws. Friedrich Nietzsche knew it: "I am a seer," he wrote in his notes; "but my conscience casts an inexorable light upon my vision, and I am myself the doubter." He gave up this last plan. Never was he to recount the active life and the death of Zarathustra.
No document admits us to the secret of his sadness. No letter, no word presents us with the expression of it, We may, surely, take this very silence as the avowal of his distress and humiliation. Friedrich Nietzsche had always wished to write a classical work, a history, system, or poem, worthy of the old Greeks whom he had chosen for masters. And never had he been able to give a form to this ambition.
At the end of this year 1883 he had made an all but despairing attempt; the abundance, the importance of his notes let us measure the vastness of a work which was entirely vain. He could neither found his moral ideal nor compose his tragic poem; at the same moment he fails in his two works and sees his dream vanish. What is he? An unhappy soul, capable of short efforts, of lyrical songs and cries.
The year 1884 opened sadly. Some chance fine weather in January reanimated him. Suddenly he improvised: no city, no people, no laws; a disorder of complaints, appeals, and moral fragments which seem to be the debris left over from the ruin of his great work. It is the third part of Zarathustra. The prophet, like Friedrich Nietzsche, lives alone and retired upon his mountain. He speaks to himself, deceives himself, forgets that he is alone; he threatens, he exhorts a humanity which neither fears nor hearkens to him. He preaches to it the contempt of customary virtues, the cult of courage, love of strength and of the nascent generations. But he does not go down to it, and no one hears his predication. He is sad, he desires to die. Then, Life, who surprises his desire, comes to him and raises his courage.
"O Zarathustra!" says the goddess, "do not crack thy whip so terribly. Thou knowest, noise murdereth thought. And even now I have very tender thoughts. Hear me, thou art not faithful enough unto me, thou lovest me not nearly as much as thou sayst, I know, for thou thinkest of leaving me...."