On the 26th of April he arrived in Venice. Peter Gast found rooms for him not far from the Rialto, with windows that opened on the Grand Canal. He had not been in Venice for four years, and it was with a child's pleasure that he remade the acquaintance of the loved city. He stayed in the labyrinth of Venice; Venice—whose spirit is compounded of the magic of sun and water, the gracefulness of a gay and tactful people, and glimpses of unexpected gardens with flowers and mosses springing among the stones. "One hundred profound solitudes," he notes, "compose Venice—hence her magic. A symbol for the men of the future." For four or five hours every day he walked the little streets as he had walked the hills, sometimes isolating himself, sometimes moving with the Italian crowd.
He was endlessly reflecting upon the difficulties of his task. What should he write next? He had thought of annotating some verses of his poem by means of a series of pamphlets, but then no one had read the words of Zarathustra. Those friends to whom they had been sent preserved a melancholy silence which constantly astonished him. A young author, Heinrich von Stein, was almost alone in sending him a word of warm congratulation. Nietzsche therefore gave up the idea, feeling that it would be ridiculous to comment upon a Bible which the public ignored.
Very seriously he considered a "philosophy of the future." His intention was to give up, or at least to defer, further work on his poem; he would confine himself to long study—"five, six years of meditation and of silence, maybe"—and formulate his system in a precise and definite manner. Various projects were in his mind when, towards the middle of June, he left Venice for Switzerland. He wished first to read certain books on historical and natural science in the libraries of Basle, but his stay in that town was brief, for he found the heavy heat oppressive and his friends there failed to please him. Either they had not read Thus Spake Zarathustra or they had read it very badly. "I might have been among cows," he wrote to Peter Gast, and returned to the Engadine.
On the 20th of August Heinrich von Stein wrote that he was coming.
Stein was at this time a very young man, scarcely twenty-six years of age. But there was no German writer of whom greater things were expected than of him. In 1878 he had published a little volume called The Ideals of Materialism, Lyrical Philosophy. Friedrich Nietzsche made the acquaintance of the author, in whose essay he recognised a research analogous to his own. He thought that he had found a kindred spirit, a comrade in his task; but this hope deceived him. Fräulein von Meysenbug had prided herself on bringing Heinrich von Stein under Wagner's influence. It was her defect to be always more benevolent than far-sighted. Thanks to her good offices, Wagner's house was opened to Stein as it had been opened ten years earlier to Nietzsche, and there Stein lived in spite of Nietzsche's warning, "You admire Wagner, and it is right that you should do so—provided your admiration does not last long." Wagner talked, and Stein, who could neither free himself from the master's influence nor oppose it, listened. His intellectual quest, which had hitherto been unquiet but fruitful, now came to an end. He closed his notebooks; he was conquered by a man too great for him, sucked in and sucked dry.
The works which he published—he died at thirty—are temperate and acute, but they lack one quality, precisely that which gives a high value to his first essays—audacity, daring, the charm of a nascent thought, ill-expressed but intense.
Nietzsche continued to interest himself in Stein, and superintended the young man's work and his friendships. "Heinrich von Stein," he wrote in July to Madame Overbeck, "is at present the adorer of Miss Salomé. My successor in that employment as in much else." The danger that Stein ran caused him a great deal of uneasiness. Stein, however, read and appreciated his books, as Nietzsche rejoiced to know.
He was strangely moved on receiving the letter, for Stein had seemed to understand Thus Spake Zarathustra, and it might be that a longing for liberty was the explanation of his visit. Stein would make up to him for all the friends that he had lost; and what a revenge, moreover, if he should conquer this disciple of Wagner's, this philosopher from Bayreuth! He hastily sent a welcome, signed "The Solitary of Sils-Maria."
There is a possible interpretation of Stein's movements which never occurred to Nietzsche.