The life of Friedrich Nietzsche. Daniel Halevy
to which the children, who at first had been disconsolate, gradually grew accustomed.
Naumburg was a royal city, favoured by the Hohenzollerns and devoted to their dynasty. A bourgeois society of officials and pastors, with some officers' families and a few country squires, lived within the grass-grown ramparts, pierced with five gates, which were closed every evening. Their existence was grave and measured. The bell of the metropolitan church, flinging its chimes across the little town, awoke it, sent it to sleep, assembled it to State and religious festivals. As a small boy Nietzsche was himself grave and measured. His instincts were in accord with the customs of Naumburg, and his active soul was quick to discover the beauties of his new life. He admired the military parades, the religious services with organ and choir, the majestic anniversary celebrations. He found himself deeply moved every year by the return of Christmas. His birthday stirred him less deeply, but was a source of great joy.
"My birthday being also that of our beloved King," he wrote, "I am awakened that day by military music. I receive my presents: the ceremony is quickly over, and we go together to the church. Although the sermon is not directed to my special benefit, I choose the best of it and apply it to myself. Afterwards we all assemble at the school to celebrate the great festival. … Before the break-up a fine patriotic chorus is sung, and the director concilium dimisit. Then comes for me the best moment of all; my friends arrive and we spend a happy day together."
Friedrich did not forget his father, and wished to follow his example and to become, like all the men of his race, a pastor, one of the elect who live near God and speak in His name. He could conceive no higher vocation, nor any more congenial to himself. Young as he was, he had an exacting and meticulous conscience. The slightest scolding pained him, and he liked to take his own line, unaided. Whenever he felt a scruple he would retire to some obscure hiding-place and examine his conscience, nor would he resume his play with his sister until he had deliberately arrived at a condemnation or a justification of his conduct. One day, when it was raining in torrents, his mother saw him coming back from school with slow, regular steps, although he was without umbrella or cloak. She called him, and he came sedately up to her. "We have always been told not to run in the streets," he explained. His companions nicknamed him "the little pastor," and listened, in respectful silence, when he read them aloud a chapter from the Bible.
He was careful of his prestige. "When one is master of oneself," he gravely taught his sister, "then one is master of the whole world." He was proud, and believed in the nobility of the Nietzsches. This was a family legend which his grandmother loved to relate, and of which he and his sister Lisbeth used to dream. Remote ancestors of theirs, Counts, Nietzski by name, had lived in Poland. During the Reformation they defied persecution, and broke with the Catholic Church. Thereafter they wandered wretchedly for three years, outcasts, pursued from village to village. With them was their son, who had been born on the eve of their flight. The mother nursed this child with devoted constancy, and he thus acquired, in spite of all ordeals, wonderful health, lived to a great age, and transmitted to his line the double virtue of strength and longevity.
Friedrich was never tired of listening to so fine an adventure. Often also he asked to be told the history of the Poles. The election of the King by the Nobles, gathered together on horseback in the midst of a great plain, and the right which the meanest of them had to oppose his veto to the will of all the rest, struck him with admiration: he had no doubt that this race was the greatest in the world. "A Count Nietzski must not lie," he declared to his sister. Indeed, the passions and the powerful desires which, thirty or forty years later, were to inspire his work, already animated this child with the bulging forehead and the big eyes, whom unhappy women loved to fold in their tender caresses. When he was nine years old his tastes widened, and music was revealed to him by a chorus from Handel, heard at church. He studied the piano. He improvised, he accompanied himself in chanting the Bible, and his mother, remembering her husband's fate, was troubled, for he, too, like the child, used to play and improvise on the organ at Röcken.
The instinct of creation—an instinct that was already tyrannical—seized hold of him; he composed melodies, fantasies, a succession of mazurkas, dedicated to his Polish ancestors. He wrote verses, and mother, grandmother, aunts, sister, received, every anniversary, a poem with his music. Games themselves became the pretext for work. He drew up didactic treatises, containing rules and advice, which he handed over to his comrades. First he taught them architecture; then, in 1854, during the siege of Sebastopol, the capture of which made him weep—for he loved all Slavs and hated the revolutionary French—he studied ballistics and the defence of fortified places. At the same time, he and two friends founded a theatre of arts, in which they played dramas of antiquity and of primitive civilisations, of which he was the author: The Gods of Olympus and an Orkadal.
He left school to enter college at Naumburg. There he showed from the first such conspicuous ability that his professors advised his mother to send him to study in a superior institute. The poor woman hesitated. She would have liked to keep her child near her.
This was in 1858. Nietzsche's vacation was of rather a serious character. He spent it as usual in the village of Pobles, under the shadow of wooded hills, on the banks of the fresh and lazy Saale, in which each morning he bathed. His maternal grandparents had him and his sister Lisbeth to stay with them. He was happy, with a heaped abundance of life; but his mind was preoccupied with the uncertainty of his future.
Adolescence was coming; and perhaps he was about to leave his own people and change his friends and his home. With some anxiety he foresaw the new course which his life was going to follow. He called to mind his boyish past, all the long years of childhood, at which one should not smile—thirteen years filled with the earliest affections and the earliest sorrows, with the first proud hopes of an ambitious soul, with the splendid discovery of music and poetry. Memories came, numerous, vivid, and touching: Nietzsche, who had a lyric soul, suddenly became, as it were, intoxicated with himself.
He took up his pen, and in twelve days the history of his childhood was written. He was happy when he had finished.
"Now I have brought my first notebook to a proper end," he writes, "and I am content with my work. I have written with the greatest pleasure and without a moment's fatigue. It is a grand thing to pass in review before one the course of one's first years, and to follow there the development of one's soul. I have sincerely recounted all the truth without poetry, without literary ornamentation. That I may write many more like it!"
Four little verses followed:
"Ein Spiegel ist das Leben
In ihm sich zu erkennen,
Möcht' ich das erste nennen
Wonach wir nur auch streben."[1]
[1] "Life is a mirror. I might say that the recognition of ourselves in it is the first object to which we all strive."
The school of Pforta is situated five miles from Naumburg, on the bank of the Saale. Ever since a Germany has existed there have been teachers and scholars in Pforta. Some Cistercian monks, come in the twelfth century from the Latin West to convert the Slavs, obtained possession of this property, which lies along both banks of the river. They built the high walls which surround it, the houses, the church, and founded a tradition which is not extinct. In the sixteenth century they were expelled by the Saxon princes, but their school was continued, and their methods conserved by the Lutherans who were installed in their place.
"The children shall be brought up to the religious life," says an instruction of 1540. "For six years they shall exercise themselves in the knowledge of letters, and in the disciplines of virtue." The pupils were kept separated from their families, cloistered with their teachers. The school had its fixed rules and customs: anything in the shape of easy manners was forbidden. There was a certain, established hierarchy: the oldest scholars had charge of the youngest and each master was the tutor of twenty pupils. Religion, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin were taught. In this old monastery German rigour, the spirit of humanism, and the ethic of Protestantism formed a singular and deep-rooted alliance, a fruitful type of life and sentiment.