[7] An unpublished letter, communicated by M. Romain Rolland.
[8] Translation published by T. Fisher Unwin.
III
Heinrich von Stein
In April, 1884, the third and fourth sections (of Zarathustra) were published simultaneously. For the moment Nietzsche seems to have been happy.
"Everything comes in its own good time," he wrote to Peter Gast on March 5th. "I am forty and I find myself at the very point I proposed, when twenty, to reach at this age. It has been a fine, a long, and a formidable passage."
"To you," he wrote to Rohde, "who are homo litteratus, I need not hesitate to avow that in my opinion I have with this Zarathustra brought the German language to its pitch of perfection. After Luther and Goethe a third step remained to be taken—and consider, my old and dear comrade, were ever strength, subtlety, and beauty of sound so linked in our language? My style is a dance; I trifle with symmetries of all sorts, and I play on these symmetries even in my selection of vowels."
This joy lasted only for a little while. Without fresh work to hand Nietzsche's ardour had no purpose and turned to ennui. Should he arrange his system methodically, draw up a "philosophy of the future"? He considers this, but finds that he is weary of thought and of writing. What he needs is rest and the refreshment of music; but the music which he could love does not exist. Italian music is flabby, German music preachy, and his taste is for the live and the lyrical; for something grave and delicate; something rhythmical, scornful, and passionate. Carmen pleases him well enough, and yet to Carmen he prefers the compositions of his disciple, Peter Gast. "I need your music," he wrote to Gast.
Peter Gast was at this time in Venice, where Nietzsche wished to join him. But Venice was damp, and he dared not leave Nice before mid-April. Clearly an invalid's exigencies are becoming each year more and more urgent. A gloomy day lowers his spirits, a week without the sun prostrates him.