Читать книгу The life of Friedrich Nietzsche - Daniel Halevy - Страница 6

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.