"the German Empire is extirpating the German spirit," he wrote.1 The victory of 1871 had brought a certain coarse conceit into the soul of Germany; and nothing could be more hostile to spiritual growth. An impish quality in Nietzsche made him restless before every idol; and he determined to assail this dulling complacency by attacking its most respected exponent―David Strauss. "I enter society with a duel: that advice." 2

Stendhal gave

In the second of his well-named Thoughts out of Season— "Schopenhauer as Educator"-he turned his fire upon the chauvinistic universities. "Experience teaches us that nothing stands so much in the way of developing great philosophers as the custom of supporting bad ones in state universities. . . No state would ever dare to patronize such men as Plato and Schopenhauer. . . . The state is always afraid of them." 3 He renewed the attack in "The Future of Our Educational Institutions"; and in "The Use and Abuse of History" he ridiculed the submergence of the German intellect in the minutia of antiquarian scholarship. Already in these essays two of his distinctive ideas found expression: that morality, as well as theology, must be reconstructed in terms of the evolution theory; and that the function of life is to bring about "not the betterment of the majority, who, taken as individuals, are the most worthless types," but "the creation of genius," the development and elevation of superior personalities.*

The most enthusiastic of these essays was called "Richard Wagner in Bayreuth." It hailed Wagner as a Siegfried "who has never learned the meaning of fear," 5 and as founder of the only real art, because the first to fuse all the arts into a great esthetic synthesis; and it called upon Germany to realize the majestic significance of the coming Wagner festival -"Bayreuth signifies for us the morning sacrament on the 1 Ibid., 151.

2 Ibid.

3 "Schopenhauer as Educator,” sect. 8.

4 Ibid., sect. 6.

5 T. O. S., i, 117.

day of battle." 1 This was the voice of youthful worship, the voice of an almost femininely refined spirit who saw in Wagner something of that masculine decisiveness and courage which went later into the conception of the Superman. But the worshipper was a philosopher too, and recognized in Wagner a certain dictatorial egotism offensive to an aristocratic soul. He could not bear Wagner's attack upon the French in 1871 (Paris had not been kind to Tannhäuser!); and he was astounded at Wagner's jealousy of Brahms.2 The central theme even of this laudatory essay boded no good for Wagner: "The world has been Orientalized long enough; and men now yearn to be Hellenized.” 8 But Nietzsche already knew that Wagner was half Semitic.

And then, in 1876, came Bayreuth itself, and Wagnerian opera night after night,—without cuts, and Wagnériennes, and emperors and princes and princelets, and the idle rich crowding out the impecunious devotees. Suddenly it dawned upon Nietzsche how much of Geyer there was in Wagner,* how much The Ring of the Nibelungs owed to the theatrical effects which abounded in it, and how far the melos that some missed in the music had passed into the drama. "I had had visions of a drama overspread with a symphony, a form growing out of the Lied. But the alien appeal of the opera drew Wagner irresistibly in the other direction.” 5 Nietzsche could not go in that direction; he detested the dramatic and the operatic. "I should be insane to stay here," he wrote. "I await with terror each of these long musical evenings. . . I can bear no more.” 6

And so he fled, without a word to Wagner and in the midst of Wagner's supreme triumph, while all the world worshiped; fled, “tired with disgust of all that is feminism and undis

1 Ibid., 104.

2 The Wagner-Nietzsche Correspondence, p. 223.

3 T. O. S., i, 122.

4 Nietzsche considered Wagner's father to be Ludwig Geyer, a Jewish actor. 5 The Wagner-Nietzsche Correspondence, p. 279.

6 In Halévy, p. 191.

ciplined rhapsody in that romanticism, that idealistic lying, that softening of the human conscience, which had conquered here one of the bravest souls." 1 And then, in far-away Sorrento, whom should he encounter but Wagner himself, resting from his victory, and full of a new opera he was writing— Parsifal. It was to be an exaltation of Christianity, pity, and fleshless love, and a world redeemed by a "pure fool," "the fool in Christ." Nietzsche turned away without a word, and never spoke to Wagner thereafter. "It is impossible for me to recognize greatness which is not united with candor and sincerity towards one's self. The moment I make a discovery of this sort, a man's achievements count for absolutely nothing with me." 2 He preferred Siegfried the rebel to Parsifal the saint, and could not forgive Wagner for coming to see in Christianity a moral value and beauty far outweighing its theological defects. In The Case of Wagner he lays about him with neurotic fury:

Wagner flatters every nihilistic Buddhistic instinct, and disguises it in music; he flatters every kind of Christianity and every religious form and expression of decadence. Richard Wagner, . . . a decrepit and desperate romantic, collapsed suddenly before the Holy Cross. Was there no German then with eyes to see, with pity in his conscience to bewail, this horrible spectacle? Am I then the only one he caused to suffer? And yet I was one of the most

corrupt Wagnerians.

Well, I am the child of this age,

just like Wagner,-i. e., a decadent; but I am conscious of it; I defended myself against it.

3

Nietzsche was more "Apollonian" than he supposed: a lover of the subtle and delicate and refined, not of wild Dionysian vigor, nor of the tenderness of wine and song and love.

"Your

brother, with his air of delicate distinction, is a most uncom

fortable fellow," said Wagner to Frau Förster-Nietzsche;

1 Correspondence, p. 310.

2 Ibid., p. 295.

8 C. W., pp. 46, 27, 9, 2; cf. Faguet, p. 21.

sometimes he is quite embarrassed at my jokes-and then I crack them more madly than ever." 1 There was so much of Plato in Nietzsche; he feared that art would unteach men to be hard; 2 being tender-minded, he supposed that all the world was like himself,—dangerously near to practising Christianity. There had not been wars enough to suit this gentle professor. And yet, in his quiet hours, he knew that Wagner was as right as Nietzsche, that Parsifal's gentleness was as necessary as Siegfried's strength, and that in some cosmic way these cruel oppositions merged into wholesome creative unities. He liked to think of this "stellar friendship" that still bound him, silently, to the man who had been the most valuable and fruitful experience of his life. And when, in a lucid moment of his final insanity, he saw a picture of the long-dead Wagner, he said softly, "Him I loved much."

IV. THE SONG OF ZARATHUSTRA

And now from art, which seemed to have failed him, he took refuge in science-whose cold Apollonian air cleansed his soul after the Dionysian heat and riot of Tribschen and Bayreuth— and in philosophy, which "offers an asylum where no tyranny can penetrate.” 4 Like Spinoza, he tried to calm his passions by examining them; we need, he said, "a chemistry of the emotions." And so, in his next book, Human All Too Human (1878-80), he became psychologist, and analyzed with a surgeon's ruthlessness the tenderest feelings and the most cherished beliefs,-dedicating it all bravely, in the midst of reaction, to the scandalous Voltaire. He sent the volumes to Wagner, and received in return the book of Parsifal. They never communicated again.

And then, at the very prime of life, in 1879, he broke down,

1 Quoted in Ellis, Affirmations, London, 1898; p. 27.

2 Cf. Z., pp. 258-264, and 364-374, which refer to Wagner.

3 Cf. Correspondence, p. 311.

4 T. O. S., ii, 122.

physically and mentally, and sank into the vicinity of death. He prepared for the end defiantly: "Promise me," he said to his sister, "that when I die only my friends shall stand about my coffin, and no inquisitive crowd. See that no priest or anyone else utter falsehoods at my graveside, when I can no longer protect myself; and let me descend into my tomb as an honest pagan.” 1 But he recovered, and this heroic funeral had to be postponed. Out of such illness came his love of health and the sun, of life and laughter and dance, and Carmen's "music of the south"; out of it too came a stronger will, born of fighting death, a "Yea-saying" that felt life's sweetness even in its bitterness and pain; and out of it perhaps a pitiful effort to rise to Spinoza's cheerful acceptance of natural limitations and human destiny. "My formula for greatness is Amor fati:

not only to bear up under every necessity, but to love it." Alas, it is more easily said than done.

The titles of his next books-The Dawn of Day (1881) and The Joyful Wisdom (1882)-reflect a grateful convalescence; here is a kindlier tone and a gentler tongue than in the later books. Now he had a year of quiet days, living modestly on the pension his university had given him. The proud philosopher could even thaw into a pretty frailty, and find himself suddenly in love. But Lou Salomé did not return his love; his eyes were too sharp and deep for comfort. Paul Rée was less dangerous, and played Dr. Pagello to Nietzsche's de Musset. Nietzsche fled in despair, composing aphorisms against women as he went. In truth he was naive, enthusiastic, romantic, tender to simplicity; his war against tenderness was an attempt to exorcise a virtue which had led to a bitter deception and to a wound that never healed.

He could not find solitude enough now: "it is difficult to live with men, because silence is difficult." 2 He passed from Italy to the heights of the Alps at Sils-Maria in the Upper Enga1 The Lonely Nietzsche, p. 65.

2 Z., 212.