The life of Friedrich Nietzsche. Daniel Halevy
other Aryan language. What does it all signify? The beauty of the Iliad is unique; it was felt by Goethe, and they ignore it. We shall stop this game; that will be our task. We shall go back to the tradition of Goethe; we shall not dissect the Greek genius, we shall revitalise it, and teach men to feel it. For long enough the scholars have carried out their minute enquiries. It is time to make an end. The work of our generation shall be definitive; our generation shall enter into possession of the grand legacy transmitted by the past. And science, too, must serve progress."
After a month of conversation, the young men left the forest and went to Meiningen, a little town in which the musicians of the Pessimist school were giving a series of concerts. A letter of Friedrich Nietzsche's has preserved a chronicle of the performance. "The Abbé Liszt presided," he wrote. "They played a symphonic poem by Hans von Bülow, Nirvana, an explanation of which was given on the programme in maxims from Schopenhauer. But the music was awful. Liszt, on the contrary, succeeded remarkably in finding the character of the Indian Nirvana in some of his religious compositions; for example, in his Beatitudes." Nietzsche and Rohde separated on the morrow of these festivals, and returned to their families.
Alone at Naumburg, Nietzsche took up work of various kinds and read widely. He studied the works of the young German philosophers, Hartmann, Dühring, Lange, Bahnsen; he admired them all, with the indulgence of a brother-in-arms, and dreamt of making their acquaintance and collaborating with them in a review which they should found together. He projected an essay, perhaps a sort of manifesto upon the man whom he wished to give to his contemporaries as a master, Schopenhauer. "Of all the philosophers," he writes, "he is the truest." No false sensibility shackles his mind. He is brave, it is the first quality of a chief. Friedrich Nietzsche notes rapidly: "Ours is the age of Schopenhauer: a sane pessimism founded upon the ideal; the seriousness of manly strength, the taste for what is simple and sane. Schopenhauer is the philosopher of a revived classicism, of a Germanic Hellenism. … "
He was working ardently, and then, suddenly, his life was turned upside down. He had been exempted from military service on account of his very short sight. But the Prussian army in 1867 had great need of men; and he was enrolled in a regiment of artillery, in barracks at Naumburg.
Nietzsche made the best of this vexation. It was always a maxim of his that a man should know how to utilise the chances of his life, extracting from them, as an artist does, the elements of a richer destiny. Therefore, since he had to be a soldier, he resolved that he would learn his new trade. The military obligation had, in this time of war, a solemnity which it lacks to-day. Nietzsche thought it a good and healthy thing that he should shut his dictionaries and get on horseback; that he should become an artilleryman and a good artilleryman, a sort of ascetic in the service of his fatherland, etwas ασκησις zu treiben, he wrote in his German, mottled with Greek.
"This life is full of inconvenience," he wrote again, "but, tasted as one would an entremets, it impresses me as altogether profitable. It is a constant appeal to the energy of man which has a value above all as an antidote against that paralysing scepticism the effects of which we have observed together. In the barracks one learns to know one's nature, to know what it has to give among strange men, the greater part of whom are very rough. … Hitherto it has appeared to me that all have felt kindly towards me, captain and privates alike; moreover, everything that I must do, I do it with zeal and interest. Has one not reason to be proud, if one be noted, among thirty recruits, as the best rider? In truth, that is worth more than a philological diploma."
Whereupon he cites in full the fine Latin and Ciceronian testimonial written by old Ritschl in praise of his memoir, De fontibus Laertii Diogenii. He is happy in his success and does not conceal his pleasure at it. The fact amuses him. "Thus are we made," he writes; "we know what such praise is worth, and, in spite of everything, an agreeable chuckle puts a grimace on our countenance."
This valiant mood lasted only a short time. Nietzsche was soon to avow that an artilleryman on horseback is a very unhappy animal when he has literary tastes, and reflected in the mess-room on the problems of Democritus.
He deplored his slavery, and was delivered from it by an accident. He fell from his horse and injured his side. He suffered, but he was able to study and meditate at leisure, which was what he liked in life. However, when the exquisite May days arrived and he had been laid up for a long month, he grew impatient and sighed for the hours of exercise. "I who used to ride the most difficult mounts!" he wrote to Gersdorff. To distract himself he undertook a short work on a poem of Simonides, The Complaint of Danaë. He corrected the doubtful words in the text and wrote to Ritschl about a new study: "Since my schooldays," he wrote, "this beautiful song of Danaë has remained in my memory as an unforgettable melody: in this time of May can one do better than become a trifle lyrical oneself? provided that on this occasion at least you do not find in my essay too 'lyrical' a conjecture."
Danaë occupied him, and the complaints of the goddess, abandoned with her child to the caprice of malevolent billows, mingled in his letters with his own complaints. For he was suffering; his wound remained open, and a splinter of a bone appeared one day with the discharge of matter. "I had a queer impression at the sight," he wrote, "and little by little it became clear to me that my plans for the examination, for a voyage to Paris, might very easily be thwarted. The frailty of our being never appears so plainly ad oculos as at the moment when one has just seen a little piece of one's own skeleton."
The voyage to Paris, here mentioned, was the last conceived, and the dearest of his dreams. He caressed the idea of it, and, as he was never able to keep a joy to himself alone, he must write to Gersdorff and then to Rohde, and to two other comrades, Kleimpaul and Romundt: "After the last year of our studies," he said to them, "let us go to Paris together and spend a winter there: let us forget our learning: let us dispedantise ourselves (dépédantisons-nous); let us make the acquaintance of the divin cancan, the green absinthe: we will drink of it; let us go to Paris and live en camarades, and, marching the boulevards, let us represent Germanism and Schopenhauer down there; we shall not be altogether idle: from time to time we will send a little copy to the newspapers, casting a few Parisian anecdotes athwart the world; after a year and a half, after two years [he never ceased to prolong the imaginary period], we will come back to pass our examination." Rohde having promised his company, Nietzsche bore less impatiently the weariness of a convalescence which lasted until the summer.
At last he was cured. In the first days of October, feeling a lively need for the pleasures which Naumburg had not to offer—music, society, conversation, the theatre—he reinstalled himself at Leipsic. Both masters and comrades gave him a warm welcome. His re-entry was happy. He had scarcely completed his twenty-third year and a glorious dawn already preceded him. An important review in Berlin asked him for some historical studies, and he gave them. In Leipsic itself he was offered the editorship of a musical review: this he refused, although importuned. "Nego ac pernego," wrote he to Rohde, now in residence in another University city.
He interested himself in everything, except politics. The din and confusion of men in public meeting assembled was insupportable to him. "Decidedly," said he, "I am not a ζῶον πολιτικον." And he wrote to his friend Gersdorff, who had been giving him some information about Parliamentary intrigues in Berlin:
"The course of events astonishes me; but I cannot well understand them, nor take them in, unless I draw out of the crowd and consider apart the activity of a determined man. Bismarck gives me immense satisfaction. I read his speeches as though I were drinking a strong wine; I hold back my tongue that it may not swallow too quickly and that my enjoyment may last. The machinations of his adversaries, as you relate them to me, I conceive without difficulty; for it is a necessity that everything that is small, narrow, sectarian and limited should rebel against such natures and wage an eternal war upon them."
Then to so many satisfactions, new and old, was added the greatest of joys: the discovery of a new genius, Richard Wagner. The whole of Germany was making the same discovery about this time. Already she knew and admired this tumultuous man, poet, composer, publicist, philosopher; a revolutionary at Dresden, a "damned" author at Paris, a favourite at the Court of Munich; she