It was a great moment. You were twenty-five, ardent and retiring, with quiet gentle manners and fiery, deeply sunken eyes; Wagner fifty-nine, at the height of his powers, full of dreams and deeds, a natural force exploding over the heads of the younger generation. “I want a theater where I can create in freedom. Come and give it to me!” he called to the young. “I want a people that will understand me. You become my people! Help me—it is your duty. Help me, and I will glorify you!”
Art was the only deliverance. “In representing life as a game,” Wagner wrote to King Louis II, “art transforms life’s most frightening aspects into beautiful pictures, thus exalting and consoling us.”
You listened attentively and turned the master’s words into flesh and blood, fighting at his side. You cast your regard upon the pre-Socratic philosophers. Suddenly a great and heroic epoch surged up before you, an epoch full of extraordinary flashes of insight, terrifying legends, tragic thoughts, and tragic souls who conquered the abyss by covering it with cheerful myths. Here was no longer the idyllic Greece pictured for us by schoolmasters, the balanced, carefree land that confronted life and death with a simplehearted, smiling serenity. This serenity came at the end, the fruit of an ardent tree which had begun to wither. Chaos bellowed in Greek breasts before tranquility arrived. An unbridled God, Dionysus, led men and women in frenzied dances in the mountains and caves, and the whole of Greece danced like a maenad.
With the fever of tragic wisdom, you toiled now to fit the parts of your vision into a whole. Apollo and Dionysus were the sacred pair who gave birth to tragedy. Apollo dreams of the world’s harmony and beauty, beholding it in serene forms. Entrenched in his individuation, motionless, he stands tranquil and sure amidst the turbulent sea of phenomena and enjoys the billows presented in his dream. His look is full of light; even when sorrow or indignation overcome him, they do not shatter the divine equilibrium.
Dionysus shatters individuation, flings himself into the sea of phenomena and follows its terrible, kaleidoscopic waves. Men and beasts become brothers, death itself is seen as one of life’s masks, the multiform stalking-blind of illusion rips in two, and we find ourselves in breast-to-breast contact with truth. What truth? The truth that we all are one, that all of us together create God, that God is not man’s ancestor but his descendant.
Entrenched in the fortress of Apollo, the Greeks struggled at first to erect a barrier against these uncontrollable Dionysiac forces that were arriving by all the routes of land and sea to fling themselves upon the Greek land. But they were unable to tame Dionysus entirely. The two Gods met in combat, neither subduing the other. Then they became friends and created tragedy.
The Dionysiac orgies were relieved of their bestiality; the dream’s restrained gentleness bathed them in splendor. But Dionysus remained tragedy’s constant and only hero. All the heroes and heroines of tragedy are simply the god’s masks—becalmed smiles and tears glowing in the Apollonian grace.
But then Greek tragedy abruptly vanished. It was murdered by logical analysis. Socrates, with his dialectics, killed the Apollonian sobriety and Dionysiac intoxication. In the hands of Euripides, tragedy degenerated into a human rather than a divine passion, a sophistical sermon to propagandize new ideas. It lost its tragic essence and perished.
But the Dionysiac intoxication survived, perpetuating itself in mystery cults and in man’s great moments of ecstasy. Would it, you wondered, be able to dress itself ever again in the divine flesh of art? Would the Socratic spirit—in other words, science—keep Dionysus forever in chains? Or, now that human reason recognized its own limits, might a new civilization perhaps appear with Socrates as its symbol—Socrates at long last learning music?
The ideal of our civilization until this point had been the Alexandrian scholar. But the crown on science’s head had begun to totter; the Dionysiac spirit was continually reawakening. German music from Bach to Wagner proclaimed its coming. A new “tragic civilization” was dawning; tragedy was experiencing a renaissance. How that world of illusion, Schopenhauer’s dark desert, was being transformed! How everything dead and sedentary was being twirled about in the whirlpool of German criticism! “Yes, my friends,” cried the young prophet, “learn to believe, as I believe, in the Dionysiac life and in the renaissance of Dionysiac tragedy. The Socratic age is finished! Take the thyrsus in your hands, crown yourselves with ivy, dare to become tragic beings, prepare yourselves for great struggles, and have faith in your god Dionysus!”
Such, O Nietzsche, were the universe-generating hopes you based on the work of Wagner. The new tragic civilization was going to spring from Germany. The new Aeschylus was alive and fighting in front of our eyes. He was creating, and he desired our aid.
But your prophecies awakened no response. The scholars scorned you, the younger generation remained unmoved. You grew bitter, doubts arose inside you, you began to wonder if it were possible for contemporary man to be ennobled. You fell ill, and at the university your students abandoned you.
Heartbreaking anguish. The poet in you covered the abyss with the flowers of art, but the philosopher in you, desiring to learn at all costs, scorned every comfort, even that of art. The first created, and found relief; the second analyzed, dissected, and found despair. Your critical intellect smashed the idols. What value does Wagner’s art have? you kept asking yourself. It was without form, without faith; nothing but panting rhetoric devoid of sacred intoxication and nobility—exactly like the art of Euripides. Good for hysterical ladies, hypocrites, and invalids. Your demigod had degenerated now into a hypocrite. He had hoaxed you, failed to keep his word. Now he was working on Christian themes, writing Parsifal. The hero had been defeated, had collapsed at the foot of the cross—the very man who promised to create new myths and hitch the leopard of reason to the Dionysiac chariot!
Art covers the horrible truth with beautiful pictures and is therefore a consolation for cowards. This was your new cry. As for us, let us find the truth even if the world perishes in the process!
This new cry was antithetical to the first. The critic in you triumphed over the poet, truth over beauty. But now even Schopenhauer failed to satisfy the exacerbated needs of your mind. Life was not only the will to live, it was something more intense—the will to dominate. Life was not appeased simply by self-preservation, it desired to expand and occupy.
Art was no longer the purpose of life, but rather a short respite in life’s struggle. Knowledge was higher than poetry, Socrates greater than Aeschylus. Truth, even though lethal, was superior to even the most brilliant and fertile of lies.
Your heart breaking in two, you wandered in sickness from place to place. Heat paralyzed you, snow wounded your eyes, wind flayed your nerves. Unable to sleep, you began to take sedatives. You lived in unheated rooms, comfortless and destitute. But the man who is sick, you kept saying with pride, has no right to curse life. Out of your pain arose, clear and unyielding, the hymn to joy and health.
You felt a great seed maturing inside you and devouring your bowels. As you were walking one day in Engadine, you suddenly halted. Terror-stricken, you had just reflected that time is illimitable, while matter is limited. Of necessity, therefore, a new moment would come when all these combinations of matter would be reborn precisely the same as before. Thousands of centuries from now a person like yourself, indeed your very self, would stand once more on that same rock and rediscover that same idea. And not only once, but innumerable times. Thus, there was no hope for a better future; there was no salvation. We would revolve forever the same, identical, on the wheel of time. In this way even the most ephemeral objects attained sempiternity and the most insignificant of our actions assumed an incalculable importance.
You plunged into an ecstasy of anguish. All this meant that your suffering was endless and the world’s suffering incurable. But your ascetic’s pride made you welcome the martyrdom joyfully.
You told yourself, A new work must be created, I have the duty to create—in order to preach the new gos
pel to humanity. But in what form? A philosophical system? No. The thought must pour out lyrically. An epic? Prophecies? Suddenly the form of Zarathustra flashed through your mind.
It was in the midst of this joyful anguish that Lou Salome found you. The fiery Slav with the trenchant intellect so full of excitement and curiosity bowed before you, Great Martyr, and listened insatiably. You lavished your soul on her and she, never sated, smilingly wrung it dry. How many years since you had opened your heart with such confidence, had enjoyed the fervor, turmoil, and productivity called forth in us by women, had felt your soft heart melting beneath your heavy martial armor! That evening when you entered your ascetic’s cell, the air of your life was fragrant for the very first time with a woman’s perfume, and you inhaled it deeply.
This sweetest of thrills followed you, O Ascetic, to the mountains where you had taken refuge. Breathlessly you awaited the woman’s letter. One day she sent you eight verses. Your heart throbbing as though you were a twenty-year-old lad, you declaimed them aloud beneath the deserted fir trees.
Who can ever flee if grasped by you,
if you turn on him your earnest eye?
Fly I never will if seized by you,
nor believe you can only destroy.
You pass, I know, through every earthly being;
on earth no thing remains untouched by you.
Life without you would be beautiful,
and yet you too are worthy to be lived.
Immediately afterward came the fatal days of separation. You frightened the woman. You were like a benighted forest; in your darkness she failed to see the little god smiling at her with his finger to his lips. Your martyrdom—disease, abandonment, silence—began anew. You felt like a tree bowed beneath the weight of its fruit, and you longed for hands to come and gather up the harvest. Though you stood at the end of the road and gazed out over the cities of men below you, no one came. Is there no one to love me? you cried in your solitude; no one to insult or ridicule me? Where is the Church to call down its curses? Where is the State to take my head? I cry and cry—does no one hear?
Oh, this solitude, this separation from the person one loves! No, you said to yourself, never, never again may I relive these hours. I must open a door of salvation in the closed circle of Eternal Recurrence.
A new hope sprang up inside your bowels—a new seed, the Superman. The Superman constituted the world’s purpose. He it was who held salvation in his hands and formed the answer to your old question of whether contemporary man could be ennobled. Yes, he could. And not by Christ, as that apostate Wagner was then preaching in his new work, but by man himself, by the virtues and struggles of a new aristocracy. Man was capable of begetting the Superman. Eternal Recurrence was strangling you. The Superman was the new Chimera which would exorcise life’s horror. Not art any more, but energy. You took God for a windmill, O Don Quixote, and demolished Him.
“God is dead,” you proclaimed, bringing us to the edge of the abyss. There is only one hope: Man must surpass his nature and create the Superman. Full administration of the cosmos will fall upon his shoulders then and he will have the power to undertake such a responsibility. God is dead, His throne vacant; we shall enthrone ourselves in His place. Do we remain all alone now in the world? Has the master passed away? So much the better! From now on we shall work not because He commands us to, not because we fear or hope, but because we ourselves want to work.
Eternal Recurrence was devoid of hope, the Superman a great hope. How could these two clashing world views be reconciled? Untold anguish. From that time onward your soul beat its wings over the abyss of madness. Zarathustra remained only a Cry. Abandoning this tragic poem in a half-completed state, you fought now to prove scientifically that life’s essence was the will to power.
Europe is perishing, you cried. It must submit to the strict discipline of the leaders. Today’s reigning morality is the work of slaves, a conspiracy organized by the weak against the strong, the flock against the shepherd. With cunning self-interest the slaves have turned values upside down; the strong person becomes bad, the sickly and weak good. They cannot endure pain, these slaves; they are philanthropists, Christians, and socialists. Only the Superman, who first of all acts harshly himself, is able to inscribe new commandments and give the masses new, superior goals.
The nature of these goals, the proper organization of the elect and the multitude, the role of war in this new tragic period of European history: these were the problems which harassed your final years of lucidity. Unable to answer them, your mind tottering, you devoted yourself again to your old Dionysiac poems, and with most bitter foreboding sang your swan song.
The sun is setting.
Soon you will no longer thirst,
O my burning heart.
A freshness is in the air,
I feel breaths from unknown mouths—
the great coldness comes. . . .
The air is strange and pure.
Did not this night cast
a wry and seductive
glance at me?
Keep strong, O my brave heart!
Do not ask why.
Eve of my life!
The sun is setting.
You saw what man is not permitted to see, and your sight was taken from you; you danced beyond human endurance at the brink of the abyss, and into the abyss you plunged.
The darkness quickly overwhelmed your mind. This darkness lasted eleven years, until your death. Sometimes you grasped a book in your hands and asked, “I wrote splendid books also, did I not?” And when you were shown Wagner’s picture, you said, “I greatly loved that man.”
Never had a more heart-rending cry sprung from a human breast. And never had I lived the life of a saint with such intensity, not even when I read the holy legends as a child. I believe that after my pilgrimage to the new Golgotha came to an end and I returned to Paris, my heart (more than my mind) had changed. To such a degree had I experienced this great atheist martyr’s anguish, so severely had my old wounds begun again to rankle as I followed his bloody tracks, that I felt ashamed of my staid, well-ordered, cowardly life, which dared not destroy all its bridges behind it and enter, completely alone, the realm of utmost bravery and despair. What had this prophet done? What did he tell us, above all, to do? He told us to deny all consolations—gods, fatherlands, moralities, truths—and, remaining apart and companionless, using nothing but our own strength, to begin to fashion a world which would not shame our hearts. Which is the most dangerous way? That is the one I want! Where is the abyss? That is where I am headed. What is the most valiant joy? To assume complete responsibility!
Sometimes I suddenly felt his shadow next to mine as I strolled beneath Paris’s chestnuts or along the banks of its famous river. We proceeded side by side in silence until the sun went down. He was always short of breath, gasping, and tinged with the smell of sulphur. It occurred to me that he must be returning from hell—my own breath caught in my throat and I began to gasp. But we did not wrestle now; we had become friends. He looked at me, and I perceived my face in the pupils of his eyes. Anguish is contagious, however. He had given me all his troubles. Together with him I had begun my own battle to match the unmatchable—to reconcile utmost hope with utmost despair, and to open a door beyond reason and certainty.
One evening as the sun was setting and we were about to part, he who never spoke to me turned and said, “I am the crucified Dionysus—I am, he is not!” His voice was full of envy, hate, and love.
My heart’s calmness always returned when I went to hear Bergson’s magical voice the following day. His words were a bewitching spell that opened a small door in the bowels of necessity and allowed light to pour in. But the wound, the blood, the giant sigh—all those elements so fascinating to youth—were missing, and I used to go and walk once more beneath the chestnuts in order to meet the other, the one who wounded.
In those days the wound never penetrated me deeply. I shared his hurts, but only superficially. Li
ke Saint Francis, I was stamped with stigmata wherever the fierce prophet had a running wound; my skin turned black and blue, that was all. It was later, when the apocalyptic angels he had envisioned finally plunged down upon mankind, that my own wounds began to open. This was in London, I remember, many years later. Autumn had come again; I was sitting on a bench in some park. The air was filled with terror. Somewhere the Superman had been born; somewhere a bloodthirsty tiger imagined he was a Superman. Unable to fit in his lair any longer, he was possessed by the rage for domination. Genghis Khan wore an iron ring with two words engraved upon it: Rastí Roustí—“Might Is Right.” Our age had donned this same iron ring. The demon of our age was like that legendary African king who mounted his highest tower with twelve women, twelve singers, and twenty-four goatskins of wine. He was as tall as a steeple, fat as butter, and covered with hair. The entire city shook with dancing and song; the oldest huts collapsed to the ground. At first the king danced. Then, growing tired, he sat down on a stone and began to laugh. Then he grew tired of laughing and began to yawn, and in order to pass the time he hurled from the tower first the women, then the singers, and finally the empty wineskins. But his heart felt no relief, and he began to bewail the inconsolable suffering of kings. . . .
A newsboy came along proclaiming the latest war communiqués. People stopped short in the street, as though their hearts had ceased beating. Some ran headlong toward their homes; they seemed anxious to see if their children were still alive.
A shadow came and sat down beside me on the bench. Turning, I shuddered. It was he. Who was the man who proclaimed that the essence of life is the longing to expand and dominate, and that only power is worthy of having rights? Who was the man who prophesied the Superman, and in prophesying him, brought him? The Superman had arrived, and here was his cowering prophet, struggling to hide beneath an autumn tree!