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,30 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.”31 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.”32
And so he fled, without a word to Wagner and in the midst of Wagner’s supreme triumph, while all the world worshipped; fled, “tired with disgust of all that is feminism and undisciplined rhapsody in that romanticism, that idealistic lying, that softening of the human conscience, which had conquered here one of the bravest souls.”33 And then, in faraway 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.”34 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 Buddhist 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.35
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 uncomfortable fellow,” said Wagner to Frau Förster-Nietzsche; “ . . . sometimes he is quite embarrassed at my jokes—and then I crack them more madly than ever.”36 There was so much of Plato in Nietzsche; he feared that art would unteach men to be hard;37 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”38 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.”39 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, 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.”40 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 naïve, 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.”41 He passed from Italy to the heights of the Alps at Sils-Maria in the Upper Engadine,—loving not man nor woman neither, and praying that Man might be surpassed. And there on the lonely heights came the inspiration of his greatest book.
I sat there waiting—waiting for nothing,
Enjoying, beyond good and evil, now
The light, now the shade; there was only
The day, the lake, the noon, time without end.
Then, my friend, suddenly one became two,