CHILDHOOD
KARL-LUDWIG NIETZSCHE, A YOUNG CLERGYMAN of the Lutheran Church, came of an ecclesiastical family. His father and his grandfather had taught theology. His wife was the daughter and the granddaughter of clergy-men. Ignoring modern thought and all the agitations and desires of his time, he followed the safe path of the double tradition, which had at once been revealed by God to the faithful and indicated by Princes to their subjects. His superiors thought highly of him. Frederick William IV., King of Prussia, condescended to take him under his wing, and he might have hoped for a fine career had he not suffered from headaches and nerves. As it was, rest became essential.
He asked for a country parish, and that of Röcken was confided to him. The situation of this poor village, whose little houses uprear themselves in a vast plain on the confines of Prussia and Saxony, was melancholy; but Karl-Ludwig Nietzsche liked the place, for solitude was acceptable to him. He was a great musician, and often, at the fall of day, would shut himself up in his church and improvise upon the rustic organ whilst the good folk of his parish stood without and listened in admiration.
The pastor and his young wife waited four years for their first child, who was born on October 15,1844, the King’s birthday. The coincidence increased the father’s joy. “O month of October, blessed month,” he wrote in his church register, “ever have you overwhelmed me with joy. But of all the joys that you have brought me, this is the deepest, the most magnificent: I baptize my first child.... My son, Friedrich Wilhelm, such shall be your name on earth in remembrance of the royal benefactor whose birthday is yours.”
The child soon had a brother, then a sister. There are women who remember Friedrich’s infancy, and those quickly passing days of joy round the Nietzsches’ hearth. Friedrich was slow in learning to speak. He looked at everything with grave eyes, and kept silent. At the age of two and a half he spoke his first word. The pastor liked his silent boy, and was glad to have him as a companion of his walks. Never did Friedrich Nietzsche forget the sound of distant bells ringing over the immense pool-strewn plain as he wandered with his father, his hand nestled in that strong hand.
Misfortune came very quickly. In August, 1848, Nietzsche’s father fell from the top of the stone steps leading up to his door, and struck his head violently against the edge of one of them. The shock brought on a terrible attack, or, perhaps, for one cannot be certain, only hastened its approach: Karl-Ludwig Nietzsche lost his reason, and, after a year of aberration and decline, died. Friedrich Nietzsche was then four years old. The incidents of this tragic time made a deep impression upon his mind: night-alarms, the weeping in the house, the terrors of the closed chamber, the silence, the utter abandonment to woe; the tolling bells, the hymns, the funeral sermons; the coffin engulfed beneath the flagstones of the church. His understanding of such things had come too early, and he was shaken by it. His nights were troubled with visions, and he had a presentiment of some early disaster. He had dreams—here is the naïve recital that he makes in his fourteenth year:
“When one despoils a tree of its crown it withers and the birds desert its branches. Our family had been despoiled of its crown; joy departed from our hearts, and a profound sadness entered into possession of us. And our wounds were but closing when they were painfully reopened. About this time I had a dream in which I heard mournful organ music, as if at a burial. And as I was trying to discover the cause of this playing, a tomb opened sharply and my father appeared, clad in his shroud. He crossed the church, and returned with a little child in his arms. The tomb opened again, my father disappeared into it, and the stone swung back to its place. At once the wail of the organ ceased, and I awoke. The next morning I told the dream to my dear mother. A short while after, my little brother Joseph fell ill, and after a nervous crisis of a few hours, he died. Our grief was terrible. My dream was exactly fulfilled, for the little body was placed in the arms of its father. After this double calamity the Lord in heaven was our sole consolation. It was towards the end of January, 1850.”
In the spring of this year the pastor’s widow left the parochial house and went to reside in the neighbouring town of Naumburg-zur-Saale, where she was near her own people. Relations of hers lived in the neighbouring countryside. Her husband’s mother and his sister came to stay with her in the small house, 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.”
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. Many distinguished men owed their education to Pforta: Novalis, the Schlegels, Fichte—Fichte, philosopher, educator, patriot, and chief glory of the school. Nietzsche had long desired to study at Pforta, and in October, 1858, a scholarship being awarded him, he left his family to enter the school.
He now disappears for a time from our ken. An heroic and boyish anecdote is the sole memory of his first year. The story of Mucius Scævola seemed an improbable one to some of his comrades; they denied it: “No man would have the courage to put his hand in fire,” opined these young critics. Nietzsche did not deign to answer, but seized from the stove a flaming coal and placed it in the palm of his hand. He always carried the mark of this burn, the more visible because he had taken care to keep in repair and enlarge so glorious a wound by letting melted wax run over it.
Assuredly, he did not easily endure this new life of his. He played little, not caring to attach himself to unfamiliar people; moreover, the tender customs of the maternal hearth had ill prepared him for the disciplines of Pforta. He only went out once a week, on Sunday afternoon. Then his mother, his sister, and two Naumburg friends of his came to meet him at the school door, and spent the day with him in a neighbouring inn.
In July, 1859, Nietzsche had a month’s liberty. The holidays of pupils at Pforta were never longer. He revisited the people and places that he liked, and made a rapid voyage to Jena and Weimar. For a year he had written only what he had to write as a task, but now the inspiration and delight of the pen returned to him, and he composed out of his impressions of summer a sentimental fantasy which is not barren of pathos.
“The sun has already set,” he writes, “when we leave the dark enclosure. Behind us, the sky is bathed in gold; above us, there is a glow of rosy clouds: before us, we see the town, lying at rest under the gentle breeze of evening. Ah, Wilhelm, I say to my friend, is there any joy greater than that of wandering together across the world? Oh, pleasure of friendship, faithful friendship: oh, breath of this magnificent summer night, perfume of flowers, and redness of evening! Do you not feel your thoughts soar upward, to perch like the jubilant lark on a throne of golden clouds? The wonder of these evening landscapes! It is my own life that unveils itself to me. So are my own days arranged: some shut within the dark penumbra, others lifted up in the air of liberty! At this moment our ears are pierced by a shrill cry: it comes from the madhouse which stands near our path. Our hands join in a tighter clasp, as if some evil genius had touched us with a sweep of menacing wings. Go from us, ye powers of Evil! Even in this beautiful world there are unhappy souls! But what, then, is unhappiness?”
At the beginning of August he returned to Pforta, as sadly as he had gone there in the first instance. He could not accept the brusque constraint of the place, and, being unable to cease thinking of himself, he kept for some weeks an intimate diary which shows us how he employed his time and what his humours were from one day to another. We find, to begin with, certain courageous maxims against ennui, given him by his professor and transcribed; then a recital of his studies, his distractions, his readings, and the crises which depress him. The poetic soul of the child now resists, now resigns itself to its impressions and bows painfully beneath a discipline. When emotion urges him he abandons prose, which is not musical enough to express his melancholy. Rhythm and rhyme appear; under an inspiration he makes a few verses, a quatrain, a sextain; but he does not seek after the lyrical impulse, nor hold to it; he merely follows it when it rises within him; and, as soon as it weakens, prose takes its place, as in a Shakesperean dialogue.
Life at Pforta was, however, brightened by hours of simple and youthful joy. The pupils went out for walks, sang in chorus, bathed. Nietzsche took part in these delights, and related them. When the heat was too heavy, the life of the water replaced the life of study. The two hundred scholars would go down to the river, timing their steps to the tunes they had struck up. They would throw themselves into the water, following the current without upsetting the order of their ranks, accomplish a swim long enough to try, and yet elate, the youngest members of the party, then clamber up the bank at their master’s whistle, put on their uniforms, which a ferry boat had convoyed in their wake; then, still singing, still in good order, would march back to their work and to the old school. “It is absolutely stunning,” says Nietzsche in effect.
So time went by, and the end of August came. The Journal is silent for eight days, then for six, then for a whole month. When he reopens his notebook, it is to bring it to an end.
“Since the day on which I began this Journal my state of mind has completely changed. Then we were in the green abundance of the late summer: now, alas! we are in the late autumn. Then I was an unter-tertianer (a lower form boy); now I am in a higher form.... My birthday has come and gone, and I am older—time passes like the rose of spring, and pleasure like the foam of the brook.
“At this moment I feel myself seized by an extraordinary desire for knowledge, for universal culture. That impulse comes to me from Humboldt, whom I have just read. May it prove as lasting as my love for poetry!”
He now mapped out a vast programme of study in which geology, botany, and astronomy were combined with readings in the Latin stylists, Hebrew, military science, and all the techniques. “And above all things,” said he, “Religion, the foundation of all knowledge. Great is the domain of knowledge, infinite the search after truth.”
A winter and spring-time sped away while the boy worked on. But now came his second holidays, then the third return to school; it was when autumn had denuded the great oaks on the estate of Pforta. Friedrich Nietzsche is seventeen years of age, and he is sad. Too long had he imposed upon himself a painful obedience; he had read Schiller, Hölderlin, Byron; he dreams of the Gods of Greece, and of the sombre Manfred, that all-powerful magician who, weary of his omnipotence, vainly sought repose in the death which his art had conquered. What cares Nietzsche for the lessons of his professors? He meditates on the lines of the romantic poet:
“Sorrow is knowledge; they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth,
The tree of knowledge is not that of life.”
He grows weary at last. He longs to escape from the routine of classes, from tasks which absorb his whole life. He would listen to his soul alone, and thus come to understand the dreams with which his mind overflows. He confides in his mother and his sister, and declares that his projects for the future have changed. The thought of the University bores him; he now wants to be not a professor, but a musician. His mother reasons with him, and succeeds in appeasing him a little. But her success is not for long. The death of a master to whom he had been attached completes his confusion of mind. He neglects his work, isolates himself, and meditates.
He writes. From his earliest childhood he had had the instinct of the phrase and the word, the instinct of visible thought. He writes incessantly, and not one shade of his unrest has remained hidden from us. He surveys the vast universe of romanticism and of science, sombre, restless, and loveless. This monstrous vision fascinates and frightens him. The pious ways of his boyhood still hold him under their influence; he reproaches himself for his inclinations towards audacity and negation, as if for sins. He strives to retain his religious faith, which is dwindling day by day. He does not break with it sharply in the French and Catholic manner, but slowly and fearfully detaches himself; slowly, because he venerates those dogmas or symbols which stand for all his past, for his memories of his home and his father; fearfully, because he knows that in renouncing the old security he will find not a new security to take its place, but a surging throng of problems. Weighing the supreme gravity of the choice imposed on him, he meditates:
“Such an enterprise,” he writes, “is the work not of a few weeks but of a life-time: can it be that, armed solely with the results of a boy’s reflections, any one will venture to destroy the authority of two thousand years, guaranteed as it is by the deepest thinkers of all the centuries? Can it be that with his own mere fancies and rudiments of thought any one will venture to thrust aside from him all that anguish and benediction of religion with which history is profoundly penetrated?
“To decide at a stroke those philosophical problems about which human thought has maintained an unending war for many thousands of years; to revolutionise beliefs which, accepted by men of the weightiest authority, first lifted man up to the level of true humanity; to link up Philosophy with the natural sciences, without as much as knowing the general results of the one or the others; and finally to derive from those natural sciences a system of reality, when the mind has not yet grasped either the unity of universal history, or the most essential principles—it is a masterpiece of rashness....
“What then is humanity? We hardly know: one stage in a whole, one period in a process of Becoming, an arbitrary production of God? Is man aught else than a stone evolved through the intermediary worlds of flora and fauna? Is he from this time forward a completed being, or what has history in reserve for him? Is this eternal Becoming to have no end? What are the springs of this great clock? They are hidden; but however long be the duration of that vast hour which we call history, they are at every moment the same. The crises are inscribed on the dial-face: the hand moves on, and when it has reached the twelfth hour, it begins another series: it inaugurates a period in the history of humanity.
“To risk oneself, without guide or compass, on the ocean of doubt is for a young brain loss and madness; most adventurers on it are broken by the storms, few indeed are the discoverers of new lands.... All our philosophy has very often appeared to me a very Tower of Babel.... It has as its desolating result an infinite disturbance of popular thought; we must expect a vast upheaval when the multitude discovers that all Christianity is founded on gratuitous affirmations. The existence of God, immortality, the authority of the Bible, Revelation, will for ever be problems. I have attempted to deny everything: ah, to destroy is easy, but to construct!”
What a marvellous instinct appears in this page! Friedrich Nietzsche poses the precise questions which are later to occupy his thought and gives a foretaste of the energetic answers with which he is to trouble men’s souls: humanity is a nothing, an arbitrary production of God; an absurd Becoming impels it towards recommencements without a term, towards eternal returns; all sovereignty is referable in the last instance to force, and force is blind, following only chance....
Friedrich Nietzsche affirms nothing: he disapproves of rapid conclusions on grave subjects, and, so long as he is hesitant, likes to abstain from them. But when he commits himself, it will be with a whole heart. Meanwhile he stays his thought. But, despite himself, it overflows at times in its effort towards expression. “Very often,” he writes, “submission to the will of God and humility are but a mantle thrown over the cowardice and pusillanimity which we experience at the moment when we ought to face our destiny with courage.” All the Nietzschean ethics, all the Nietzschean heroism are included in these few words.
We have named the authors who were Nietzsche’s favourites at this time: Schiller, Byron, Hölderlin—of these he preferred Hölderlin, then so little known. He had discovered him, as one discovers, at a glance, a friend in a crowd. It was a singular encounter. The life of this child, now scarcely begun, was to resemble the life of the poet who had just died. Hölderlin, the son of a clergyman, had wished to follow his father’s vocation. In 1780 he is studying theology at the University of Tübingen with comrades whose names are Hegel, Sendling. He ceases to believe. He comes to know Rousseau, Goethe, Schiller, and the intoxication of romanticism. He loves the mystery of nature, and the lucid mind of Greece; he loves them together, and dreams of uniting their beauties in a German work. He is poor, and has to live the hard life of a needy poet. As a teacher, he endures the ennui of wealthy houses in which he is despised generally, and once is loved too much—a brief rapture that ends in distress. He returns to his native village, for its air and its people are pleasant to him. He works, writes at his leisure, but as it pains him to live at the expense of his own family, he goes away again. He has some of his verses published; but the public shows no taste for those fine poems in which the genius of an unknown German calls up the Gods of Olympus to people the deep forests of Suabia and the Rhineland. The unhappy Hölderlin dreams of vaster creations, but goes no farther than a dream: Germany is a world in itself, and Greece is another; the inspiration of a Goethe is needed to unite them, and to fix in eternal words the triumph of Faust, the ravisher of Helen. Hölderlin writes fragments of a poem in prose: his hero is a young Greek, who laments over the ruin of his race and, frail forerunner of Zarathustra, calls for the rebirth of a valorous humanity. He composes three scenes of a tragedy, taking for his hero Empedocles, tyrant of Agrigentum, poet, philosopher, haughty inspirer of the multitude, a Greek isolated among the Greeks by reason of his very greatness, a magician, who, possessing all nature, wearies of the satisfactions which one life can offer, retires to the summit of Etna, sends away his family, his friends, his appealing people, and flings himself, one evening, at sunset, into the crater.
The work is full of power; but Hölderlin abandons it. His melancholy enfeebles and exalts him. He wishes to leave Germany where he has suffered so much, and to free his relatives from the inconvenience of his presence. Employment is offered to him in France, at Bordeaux, and he disappears. Six months later he returns home sunburnt and in rags. He is questioned, but he does not reply. Enquiries are made and it is, with great difficulty, discovered that he had crossed France on foot under the August sun. His mind is gone, swallowed up in a torpor which is to last for forty years. He dies in 1843, a few months before the birth of Nietzsche. It might please a Platonist to think that the same genius passed from one body to the other. Surely the same German soul, romantic by nature, and classic in aspiration, broken at length by its desires, animated these two men, and predestined them to the same end. One seems to surprise across the tenor of their lives the blind labour of the race, which, pursuing its monotonous bent, sends into the world, from century to century, like children for like ordeals.
That year, at the approach of summer, Nietzsche suffered severely from his head and eyes. The malady was uncertain in its nature, but possibly had its origin in the nerves. His holidays were spoilt. But he arranged to be able to stay at Naumburg until the end of August, and the joys of a prolonged leisure compensated him for previous vexations.
He returned to Pforta in a wholesome frame of mind. He had not resolved his doubts but he had explored them, and could without wronging himself become once more a laborious student. He was careful not to interrupt his reading, which was immense. From month to month he sent punctually to his two friends at Naumburg, poems, pieces of dance and song music, essays in criticism and philosophy. But these occupations were not allowed to interrupt his work as a student. Under the direction of excellent masters, he studied the languages and the literatures of antiquity.
He would have been happy, had not the pressing questions of the future and of a profession begun to torment him.
“I am much preoccupied with the problem of my future,” he wrote to his mother in May, 1862. “Many reasons, external and internal, make it appear to me troubled and uncertain. Doubtless I believe myself to be capable of success in whatever province I select. But strength fails me to put aside so many of the diverse objects which interest me. What shall I study? No idea of a decision presents itself to my mind, and yet with myself alone it lies to reflect and to make my choice. What is certain is that whatever I study I shall be eager to probe to its depths. But this fact only renders the choice more difficult, since the question is to discover the pursuit to which one can give one’s whole self. And how often they deceive us, these hopes of ours! How quickly one is put on the wrong track by a momentary predilection, a family tradition, a desire! To choose one’s profession is to make one in a game of lotto, in which there are many blanks, but only very few prizes! At this moment my position is uncomfortable. I have dispersed my interest over so many provinces that if I were to satisfy my tastes I would certainly become a very learned man, but only with great difficulty aprofessional animal. My task is to destroy many of my present tastes, that is clear, and, by the same process, to acquire new ones. But which are the unfortunates that I am to throw overboard? Precisely my dearest children, maybe!...”
His last holidays slipped by into the beginning of his last year. Nietzsche returned without vexation to the old school which he was soon to leave. The rules had grown lighter, and he had a room to himself, and certain liberties. He went out to dine on the invitation of this or that professor, and thus, even in the monastery, he had his first taste of the pleasures of the world. At the house of one of his tutors he met a charming girl; he saw her again, and, for the first time in his life, fell in love. For some days his dreams were all of the books which he wished to lend her, of the music which he wished to play with her. His emotion was delicious. But the girl left Pforta, and Nietzsche returned to his work. The Banquet of Plato, the tragedies of Æschylus, were his last diversions before he gave himself up to the ordinary round of tasks. Sometimes he sat down to the piano just before the supper hour; two comrades who were to remain his friends, Gersdorff and Paul Deussen, listening while he played them Beethoven or Schumann, or improvised.
Poetry is always by him. If he has the slightest leisure, if there is a delay of some hours in his work, the lyricist reappears. On Easter morning he leaves school, returns home, goes straight to his room, where he is alone, dreams for a moment; then finds himself assailed by a multitude of impressions. He writes with intense pleasure after his long privation. And is not the page, which we transcribe here, worthy of Zarathustra?
“Here I am on the evening of Easter Day, seated at my fire, enveloped in a dressing-gown. Outside a fine rain is falling. All about me is solitude. A sheet of white paper lies on my table; I look at it in a muse, rolling my pen between my fingers, embarrassed by the inextricable multitude of subjects, feelings, thoughts which press forward and ask to be written. Some of them clamour and make a great tumult: they are young and eager for life. Others gesture and struggle there also: they are old thoughts, well matured, well clarified; like elderly gentlemen they regard with displeasure the mêlée of young bloods. This struggle between an old world and a new it is that determines our mood; and the state of combat, the victory of these, the weakness of those, we call at any moment our state of mind, our Stimmung.... Often when I play the spy on my thoughts and feelings, and study them in religious silence, I am impressed as with the hum and ferment of savage factions, the air shudders and is torn across as if a thought or an eagle had shot up towards the sun.
“Combat is the food which gives strength to the soul. The soul has skill to pluck out of battle sweet and glorious fruits. Impelled by the desire for fresh nutriment, it destroys; it struggles fiercely—but how gentle it can be when it allures the adversary, gathers it close against itself, and wholly assimilates it.
“That impression, which at this moment makes all your pleasure or all your pain, will, it may be, slip off in an instant, being the mere drapery of an impression still more profound, will disappear before something older and higher. Thus our impressions grave themselves deeper and deeper on our souls, being ever unique, incomparable, unspeakably young, swift as the instant that brought them.
“At this moment I am thinking of certain people whom I have loved; their names, their faces pass before my mind. I do not mean that in fact their natures become continually more profound and more beautiful; but it is at least true that each of these reminiscences, when I recover it, leads me on to some acuter impression, for the mind cannot endure to return to a level which it has already passed; it has a need of constant expansion. I salute you, dear impressions, marvellous undulations of an agitated soul. You are as numerous as Nature, but more grandiose, for you increase and strive perpetually—the plant, on the contrary, gives out to-day the same perfume that it gave out on the day of creation. I no longer love now as I loved a few weeks ago, and I find myself in a different disposition at this moment from that in which I was when I took up this pen.”
Nietzsche returned to Pforta to undergo his last examinations. He all but failed to pass; and, indeed, in mathematics he did not obtain the required number of marks. But the professors, overlooking this inadequacy, granted him his diploma. He left his old school, and left it with pain. His mind easily adjusted itself to the places where it lived, and clung with equal force to happy memories and to melancholy impressions.
The break-up of the school was a prescribed ceremony. The assembled students prayed together for the last time; then those who were about to leave presented their masters with a written testimony of gratitude. Friedrich Nietzsche’s letter moves one by its pathetic and solemn accent. First he addresses himself to God: “To Him who has given me all, my first thanks. What offering should I bring Him, if not the warm gratitude of my heart, confident of His love? It is He who has permitted me to live this glorious hour of my life. May He, the All-Bountiful, continue to watch over me.” Then he thanks the King, “through whose goodness I entered this school...; him and my country I hope one day to honour. Such is my resolve.” Then he speaks to his venerated masters, to his dear comrades, “and particularly to you, my dear friends: what shall I say to you at the instant of parting? I understand how it is that the plant when torn from the soil which has nourished it can only take root slowly and with difficulty in a foreign soil. Shall I be able to disaccustom myself to you? Shall I be able to accustom myself to another environment? Adieu!”
These long effusions were not enough, and he wrote, for himself alone, certain lines in which they are repeated:
“So be it—it is the way of the world:
Let life deal with me as with so many others:
They set forth, their frail skiff is shattered,
And no man can tell us the spot where it sank.
Adieu, adieu! the ship’s bell calls me,
And as I linger the shipmaster urges me on.
And now to confront bravely waves, storms, reefs.
Adieu, adieu!...”
YEARS OF YOUTH
IN THE MIDDLE OF OCTOBER, 1862, Nietzsche left Naumburg for the University of Bonn, accompanied by Paul Deussen, his comrade, and a cousin of the latter. The young people did not hurry. They made a halt on the banks of the Rhine. They were gay, a little irresponsible even, in their sudden enjoyment of complete liberty. Paul Deussen, to-day a professor at the University of Kiel, tells us of those days of exuberant laughter with all the satisfaction of a very good bourgeois who brightens up at the memory of his far-off pranks.
The three friends rode on horseback about the country-side. Nietzsche—perhaps he had appreciated too highly the beer supplied at the neighbouring inn—was less interested in the beauty of the landscape than in the long ears of his mount. He measured them carefully. “It’s a donkey,” he affirmed. “No,” replied Deussen and the other friend, “it’s a horse.” Nietzsche measured again and maintained, with praiseworthy firmness: “It’s a donkey.” They came back at the fall of day. They shouted, perorated, and generally scandalised the little town. Nietzsche warbled love songs, and girls, drawn by the noise to their windows and half-hidden behind curtains, peeped out at the cavalcade. Finally an honest citizen, who had left his house for the express purpose, cried shame on the roisterers, and, not without threats, put them back on the road to their inn.
The three friends installed themselves at Bonn. The Universities enjoyed at that time an uncommon prestige. They alone had remained free, and maintained in a divided Germany a powerful life in a weakly body. They had their history, which was glorious, and their legends, which were more glorious still. Every one knew how the young scholars of Leipsic, of Berlin, of Jena, of Heidelberg, and of Bonn, kindled by the exhortations of their teachers, had armed themselves against Napoleon for the salvation of the German race; every one also knew that these valiant fellows had fought, and were still fighting, against despots and priests to lay the foundations of German liberty; and the nation loved these grave professors, these tumultuous youths who represented the Fatherland in its most noble aspect, the laborious Fatherland, armed for labour. There was not a small boy but dreamt of his student years as the finest time of his life; there was not a tender girl but dreamt of some pure and noble student; and among all the dreams of dreamy Germany there was none more alluring than that of the Universities. She was infinitely proud of those illustrious schools of knowledge, bravery, virtue, and joy. Their arrival at Bonn moved Nietzsche and his comrades very deeply. “I arrived at Bonn,” says one of the numerous essays in which Nietzsche recounts his own life to himself, “with the proud sense of an inexhaustibly rich future before me.” He was conscious of his power, and impatient to make the acquaintance of his contemporaries, with whom, and on whom, his thoughts were to work.
Most of the students at Bonn lived grouped together in associations. Nietzsche hesitated a little before following this custom. But from fear of too unsociable a withdrawal should he not impose upon himself some obligation of comradeship, he joined one of these Vereine. “It was only after ripe reflection that I took this step, which, given my character, seemed to me an almost necessary one,” he wrote to his friend Gersdorff.
During the next few weeks he allowed himself to be absorbed by the course of his new life. No doubt he never touched either beer or tobacco. But learned discussions; boatings upon the river; hours of light-headedness in the riverside inns, and, at evening on the way home, improvised choruses—Nietzsche made the best of these simple pleasures. He even wished to fight a duel so that he might become a “finished” student, and, lacking an enemy, chose for his adversary an agreeable comrade. “I am new this year,” said he to him, “and I want to fight a duel. I rather like you. Let us fight.” “Willingly,” said the other. Nietzsche received a rapier thrust.
It was impossible that such a life should content him for long. The mood of infantile gaiety soon passed away. At the beginning of December he withdrew a little from this life. Disquiet was again gaining on him. The festival of Christmas and that of the New Year, passed far from his own people, were causes of sadness. A letter to his mother lets us divine his emotion:
“I like anniversaries, the feast of St. Sylvester or birthdays. To them we owe those hours in which the soul, brought to a pause, discovers a fragment of its own existence. No doubt it is in our own power to experience such moments more frequently; but we allow ourselves too few. They favour the birth of decisive resolutions. At such moments it is my custom to take up again the manuscripts, the letters, of the year that has just gone by, and to write for myself alone the reflections which come to me. During an hour or two, one is, as it were, raised above time, drawn out of one’s own existence. One acquires a view of the past that is brief and certain, one resolves with a more valiant and a firmer heart to strike forward on the road once more. And when good wishes and family benedictions fall like soft rain on the soul’s intents—Ah! that is fine!”
Of the reflections written by the young student “for himself alone” we possess some traces. He reproaches himself for wasted hours, and decides upon a more austere and concentrated life. Nevertheless, when the time came for him to break with his companions, he hesitated. They were somewhat coarse, it is true, but yet young and brave, like himself. Should he keep in with them? A delicate fear troubled him; he might, as the result of long indulgence, accustom himself to their low way of living, and so come to feel it less acutely. “Habit is a powerful force,” he wrote to his friend Gersdorff. “One has already lost much when one has lost one’s instinctive distrust of the evil things which present themselves in daily life.” He took a third course, a very difficult course, and decided that he would talk frankly to his friends, that he would try to exercise an influence on them, to ennoble their lives. Thus he would commence the apostolate which he dreamed of extending one day over the whole of Germany. He proposed therefore a reform of the rules of the association; he called for the suppression, or at least for a reduction, of those smoking and drinking parties which provoked his disgust.
The proposal met with no success. The preacher was silenced, and set aside. Nietzsche, prompt with sarcasm, avenged himself with words which did not win him any love. Then he knew the worst of solitudes, the solitude of the vanquished. He had not retired from the world; he had been asked to leave it. He was proud, and his stay at Bonn became a misery. He worked energetically and joylessly. He studied philology, which did not interest him. It was an exercise which he had taken up to discipline his mind, to correct his tendencies towards a vague mysticism and dispersion of thought. But it pleased him in no way, this minute analysis of Greek texts the sudden beauty of which he felt by instinct. Ritschl, his master in philology, dissuaded him from any other study. “If you wish to become a strong man,” he said, “acquire a speciality.” Nietzsche obeyed. He renounced the idea, which he had entertained, of making a deep study of theology. In December he had composed some melodies: now he decided that he would not, for a whole year, allow himself the enjoyment of so vain a pleasure; he wished to submit, and to break himself in to ennui. He was recompensed for his pains, and was able to write a work which Ritschl commended for its rigour and sagacity.
A poor pleasure! It was thought that Nietzsche needed. He listened to the talk of the students. Some repeated without any ardour of conviction the formulas of Hegel, of Fichte, of Schelling: those great systems had lost all their power to stimulate. Others, preferring the positive sciences, read the materialistic treatises of Vogt and Büchner. Nietzsche read these treatises, but did not re-read them. He was a poet and had need of lyricism, intuition, and mystery; he could not be contented with the clear and cold world of science. Those same young people, who called themselves materialists, also called themselves democrats; they vaunted the humanitarian philosophy of Feuerbach; but Nietzsche was again too much of a poet and, by education or by temperament, too much of an aristocrat to interest himself in the politics of the masses. He conceived beauty, virtue, force, heroism, as desirable ends, and he desired them for himself. But he had never desired a happy life, a smooth and comfortable life: therefore he could not interest himself in men’s happiness, in the poor ideal of moderate joy and moderate suffering.
Little satisfied as he was by all the tendencies of his contemporaries, what joy could he experience? Repelled by a base politics, a nerveless metaphysics, a narrow science, whither could he direct his mind? Certainly he had his clear and well-marked preferences. He was certain of his tastes. He loved the Greek poets, he loved Bach, Beethoven, Byron. But what was the drift of his own thought?
He had no answer to the problems of life, and now in his twenty-first, as formerly in his seventeenth year, preferring silence to uncertain speech, he kept himself under a discipline of silence. In his writings, his letters, his conversation, he was always on his guard. His friend Deussen suggested that prayer has no real virtue, and only gives to the mind an illusory confidence. “That is one of the asininities of Feuerbach,” Nietzsche replied tartly. The same Deussen was speaking on another occasion of the Life of Jesus which Strauss had just published in a new edition, and expressing approval of the sense of the book. Nietzsche refused to pronounce upon the subject. “The question is important,” said he. “If you sacrifice Jesus, you must also sacrifice God.” These words would seem to show that Nietzsche was still attached to Christianity. A letter addressed to his sister removes this impression. The young girl, who had remained a believer, wrote to him: “One must always seek truth at the most painful side of things. Now one does not believe in the Christian mysteries without difficulty. Therefore the Christian mysteries are true.” She at once received from her brother a reply which betrays, by the harshness of its language, the unhappy condition of his soul.
“Do you think that it is really so difficult to receive and accept all the beliefs in which we have been brought up, which little by little have struck deep roots into our lives, which are held as true by all our own kith and kin, and a vast multitude of other excellent people, and which, whether they be true or not, do assuredly console and elevate humanity? Do you think that such acceptance is more difficult than a struggle against the whole mass of one’s habits, waged in doubt and loneliness, and darkened by every kind of spiritual depression, nay more, by remorse; a struggle which leaves a man often in despair, but always loyal to his eternal quest, the discovery of the new paths that lead to the True, the Beautiful, and the Good?
“What will be the end of it all? Shall we recover those ideas of God, the world, and redemption which are familiar to us? To the genuine seeker must not the result of his labours appear as something wholly indifferent? What is it we are seeking? Rest and happiness? No, nothing but Truth, however evil and terrible it may be.
“... So are the ways of men marked out; if you desire peace of soul and happiness, believe; if you would be a disciple of Truth, enquire ...”