The years which culminated in the writing of BT were the happiest in Nietzsche’s life, indeed the last that were not dogged by ill health, loneliness, and rejection. When the Wagners left Tribschen and moved to Bayreuth in 1872 Nietzsche’s most consistently warm and fruitful relationship(s) were at an end. Without Wagner’s presence, Nietzsche began to have doubts about the quality and purpose of his music dramas, on which he meditated to the end of his life. But he was still officially a Wagnerian, recruited to produce more propaganda for a cause that badly needed it. Anxious about the state of German culture, which he soon began to feel he had vastly overrated in BT, he embarked on a series of tracts for the times, therefore called Untimely Meditations. Thirteen were projected, but only four were written. Probably that is two too many. Upwards of fifty pages in length, as long essays, they show Nietzsche failing to discover a form that is suited to his gifts. Trying to expound and develop an argument in a manner less ecstatic than BT, he resorts for the only time in his life to diffuseness and padding.
But there is a more basic problem with UM than those. While he directs himself to assessing the health of contemporary culture, with an attack on the aged David Strauss, author of The Life of Jesus, but more perniciously for Nietzsche, of The Old Faith and the New; to the practice of historiography; and then to celebrations of the genius of Schopenhauer and Wagner, he had not, with the signal exception of the Second Meditation, ‘On the uses and disadvantages of history for life’, found subjects which coincided sufficiently closely with his concerns. The book by Strauss that he selects for critique in the First Meditation is so undemanding a pewside read, so unresisting an object for intelligent scorn, that one wonders why Nietzsche is bothering, and evidently so does he. Even so, it is worth reading through; it deals with very much the same topics as Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, and the most profitable way of reading it is side by side with that shallow and influential pamphlet, whose terminology it shares to a surprising degree. And it does contain one of Nietzsche’s most inspired coinages, ‘philistine of culture’, the man who knows about what he should, and makes sure that it has no effect on him.
The Second Meditation is a great work, a real meditation on the extent to which we can cope with the burden of knowledge, specifically historical knowledge, and still manage to be our own men. And it ends with a rousing appeal to us to embrace the Greek concept of culture as opposed to the Roman, the former being that ‘of culture as new and improved Nature [physis], without inner and outer, without dissimulation and convention, culture as a unanimity of life, thought, appearance and will’ (UM 2. 10). Excellent, but there is a speech-day quality about these sentiments that nothing in the body of the essay does much to fill out.
The Third Meditation, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, is bewildering mainly because it is so little concerned with Schopenhauer. Nietzsche’s discipleship of the compromised pessimist was waning, and what he chiefly has to praise about him is his scorn of university philosophers, but Schopenhauer had done it far better himself in Parerga and Paralipomena. The last Meditation, ‘Richard Wagner in Bayreuth’, makes painful reading. Even if we had no idea that Nietzsche was, while he wrote it, simultaneously entering in his notebooks grave questions about Wagner, we would feel something was wrong. It is the only occasion on which Nietzsche sounds insincere, trying to recapture a state of mind which had been wonderful while it lasted, but was moving with alarming speed into the past. The only explanation for Wagner’s enthusiasm for it – ‘Friend, how did you get to know me so well?’ – is that he was too busy to read it. It makes, in its way, a fitting prelude to the next crucial event (one of the few) in Nietzsche’s life: his attendance at the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876, and the break with Wagner.
Most of Nietzsche’s commentators greet with relief his becoming an anti-Wagnerian, possibly because they think it exempts them from knowing anything much about Wagner. Of course it does nothing of the kind, since Wagner is the person who continues to feature more often in Nietzsche’s writings than anyone else, including Socrates, Christ, or Goethe. But at a serious level they may feel that Nietzsche was not being true to himself when he was a Wagnerian, and became true to himself by causing the extremely painful rift, of which Wagner was not even aware for a long time. To decide what were, in order of importance, the factors which led to it is impossible. No doubt Nietzsche’s naïve expectations of what the Bayreuth Festival would be like were shatteringly disappointed; so were Wagner’s, but he knew what the practicalities of the situation were. The books had to be balanced, though they disastrously were not; but the attempt meant that the well-heeled had to be wooed, that what was intended to be a festival in which the community celebrated their shared values at minimal cost turned into something in which the fashionable world of philistines of culture was most in evidence, along with crowned heads and other irrelevances.
Nietzsche, horrified by the company, fled into the nearby countryside to recover from his eclipsing headaches. There, and later, he took stock of his relationship with Wagner the man and the artist. He was certainly now in a mood where he did not want to be anyone’s disciple, and that must have been a key factor. He may have been in love with Cosima; the evidence is inconclusive but makes the idea reasonable. The least convincing explanation is the one on which Nietzsche put most public weight – that Wagner had become a Christian. Receiving the poem of Parsifal was allegedly the last straw. But he had been present in 1869 when Wagner read out the prose sketch, and had heard Wagner talking about the subject, so it cannot have been the bombshell that he claimed it was. Not to be discounted are Nietzsche’s own ambitions as a composer, the most embarrassing of his failures. A man who could play his own amateur piano pieces to Wagner, and who could continue to write, until much later, choral pieces that sound like Congregational Church hymns with a few wrong notes but are called ‘Hymn to Life’ or ‘Hymn to Friendship’ was evidently not able to judge his own gifts in this respect.
And it is not only as a composer that Nietzsche was frustrated. He was in a comprehensive way, a creative artist manqué. That accounts in large measure for the cavalier way in which he treats the great artists, even the ones he most admires, throughout his work. He is the most distinguished member of that class of writers, who at their best are incomparably insightful, at their worst arrogant and merely distorting; who, unable to produce art themselves, ransack other people’s in order to purvey their own vision. Perhaps all the great critics (a very small class in any case) are like that. One certainly does not go to them for accurate accounts of the works with which they deal – that can be left to merely very good critics. But seeing the great artists, whose images in any case tend to become marmoreal as they are routinely categorized as ‘classics’, in the light of a fervent imagination providing a strange and highly ‘interested’ slant on them, is exhilarating. It probably accounts better than anything else for the continuing impact of such works as BT.
Perhaps the most helpful way to look at the break is that in Wagner Nietzsche had, for the only time in his life, met one of his symbols in the flesh. It is clear from BT onwards that almost all proper names in his texts stand not for individuals, but for movements, tendencies, ways of living. This characteristic of Nietzsche’s is frequently inspired, occasionally perverse and misleading. The confusion in Wagner’s case is that for him Wagner did, in the first place, mean a person with whom he had a ‘star friendship’ (GS), and he was not able to separate, in his writings, what Wagner was from what he came to stand for, so that the degree of ambivalence he shows towards him exceeds that of his other hero-villains. If he had never met Wagner he would still almost inevitably have given him an important role in his works, because Wagner does sum up for him, in the most convenient way, traits in late nineteenth-century culture to which he was mostly bitterly opposed, though not as single-mindedly as he would have liked to be. But the loss of Wagner as friend and mentor, though it was necessary, cost Nietzsche more than he was ever able to come to terms with.
Nietzsche dealt with his problems in the only way that was ever available to him: he wrote prodigiously, producing a new book that in nearly all respects shows his fast-growing powers, and in the mode that from now on most of what he composed would be in. Human, All Too Human, subtitled ‘A book for free spirits’, is in nine books, with very general titles, and 638 numbered sections, many with their own titles (he was later to publish two very substantial sequels, so that the whole volume is by far the largest of his books). As with all books written in this mode, it makes exhausting reading. Even though the sections are grouped together according to subject-matter, Nietzsche allows himself plenty of latitude, so one is bombarded with particular points which are displaced by others at such a rate that the result is, to one’s dismay, unmemorable. The only way is to mark the sections that make a special impact, and return to them later. It is a crucial element in Nietzsche’s strategy of writing, though a risky one. Its deployment so lavishly and so suddenly in his writing is the expression of his revulsion from the pseudo-narrative of BT, a book easy to remember despite its turgidity, simply because it does have a connecting thread.
But for all its perennial freshness, there is something about HAH which leads one to feel that Nietzsche is not working at the level which is naturally his. The dedication to Voltaire is a warning. For although Voltaire’s breezy superficiality was what Nietzsche may have felt he wanted after the sustained effort to plumb the depths of Romantic pessimism, it is hard to think of two temperaments more essentially opposed. Candide, Voltaire’s critique of optimism, is itself an ineliminably upbeat book. What appealed to Nietzsche in him, as in the French aphorists of the seventeenth century, was the hardness of their style, an Apolline quality which suggests that experience can be tied up in neat, eye-catching little parcels. All good aphoristic writing is tiring to read, because one has to do so much of the writer’s work for him. He supplies a sentence, the reader turns it into a paragraph. Nietzsche wrote that he wanted to say in a page what anyone else would take a book to express – and what they even then would not have succeeded in expressing. But the kind of aphorisms and quasi-aphorisms that he aspired to write were ones that would have the effect of transforming the reader’s consciousness: in other words, they would have the opposite effect from those of, say, La Rochefoucauld. Nietzsche, at his most characteristic and best, is always producing the reverse of an encapsulation of experience: his subversions, teasings, and insults are directed towards making us feel ashamed not only of how we are, but also of our complacency in thinking that we possess the best set of categories for the realization of what we might be. They are not weary, nor do they induce weariness, because they lead us to an enhanced sense of the possibilities of escape from the routine of being ourselves. It has been characteristic of the French tradition of moralists that they are observers, reporting elegantly on the perennial human condition. They provide frissons of shame in the reader, but no expectation that he might ever be different.
So Nietzsche’s lengthy flirtation with them was more a matter of how they said things than of what they said. But that suggests something odd: for he is a stickler for the indissolubility of form and content, from the beginning to the end. How else could he have placed such a weight on genre in BT, where the fact that a work is a drama rather than an epic poem makes the whole difference to its impact? It can only be explained by his extreme turning-away from Romanticism: everything now had to be seen in the clear light of day, at the same time that it should be infinitely suggestive. In HAH he is more preoccupied with the former than the latter, and the result is that one feels, certainly in the light of his later work, that he is constraining himself, surveying the scene – human nature in its manifestations as social life, passion, the psychology of artists, solitude – without the will to transform which is his defining characteristic. So, to take at random one of his aperçus:
Thirst for profound pain. – When it has passed, passion leaves behind an obscure longing for itself and even in departing casts a seductive glance. To be scourged by it must have afforded us a kind of joy. The milder sensations, on the other hand, appear insipid; it seems we always prefer the more vehement displeasure to a feeble pleasure.
(HAH I. 606)
That is quite deep, and produces a sense, rather than a shock, of recognition. Elsewhere the accuracy can be painful: ‘Compelling oneself to pay attention. – As soon as we notice that anyone has to compel himself to pay attention when associating and talking with us, we have a valid proof that he does not love us or loves us no longer’ (HAH II. 247).
Writing HAH, a book which Wagner said, on receiving his signed copy of it, Nietzsche would one day thank him for not reading, revealed to Nietzsche some aspects of himself he must have been pleased to discover. First, that he belonged to that rare breed on whom nothing is wasted. His range of experience was, in many respects, extraordinarily narrow, but it was adequate for him to view his culture and his acquaintances and produce unnervingly comprehensive accounts of them. In Ecce Homo, his bizarre autobiography in which the mood alternates vertiginously between the apocalyptic and the parodistic, he congratulates himself on the possession of a remarkably fine nose, an organ that philosophers have tended to give short shrift to. The first devastating manifestation of its acuteness is in HAH. Secondly, it showed him that even under conditions as miserable and deprived as he was in he could work at a level of brilliance which was self-generating. As in BT, one feels that it is the momentum of the writing that generates much of what is most impressive in it. Thirdly, and most significant, he was able to dwell on subjects which had occasioned fearful pain and not exhibit the least degree of rancour; HAH is a work in which he demonstrates, what he had not yet advocated, that it is possible to turn the most harrowing things that happen to good purposes, and exhibit high spirits without advertising to us that that is what he is doing, a trying tendency in some of his later works.
His next book, Daybreak, subtitled ‘Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality’, continues the mode of HAH, but marks a crucial departure in content, and is much more of a piece with his later works. In between 1878, when HAH was published, to universal indifference, and 1880, when he wrote D, his pattern of life changed drastically, and the way in which he was to live for the next decade began. Most of his friends were bewildered by his change of direction, and he was alienated from all but the most loyal. In 1879, several years too late, he resigned his professorship at Basle, students having lost all interest in his teaching. In that year, too, he had 118 days of severe migraine, rendering him incapable of work. His health had been undermined by the combined attacks of dysentery and diphtheria which he had sustained in 1870, when serving as a medical orderly in the Franco-Prussian War; and it seems most likely that he contracted syphilis from a prostitute sometime in the late 1870s when he was in Italy, which led to his eventual insanity and paralysis. From then on he led a nomadic existence, looking for places which would alleviate his sickness, and permit him the maximum amount of solitude for writing. His preferred places were the towns of northern Italy in the winter, and the Swiss Alps in the summer, though it was not until 1882 that that became his annual routine.
Nietzsche proffers some advice on how to read D, though it comes late in the book; ‘A book such as this is not for reading straight through or reading aloud but for dipping into, especially when out walking or on a journey; you must be able to stick your head into it and out of it again and again and discover nothing familiar around you’ (D 454). Which is all very well, but if taken seriously might result in one’s never reading it all through. So once more it is a good idea to canter through it, and then to take Nietzsche’s advice, if at all. But it is not really good advice, and is probably even meant sarcastically. For this, one of Nietzsche’s least studied books, is where he gets back on to the high road of his life’s endeavour. It might even seem that it is where he properly begins it, but that is to overlook the extent to which BT set the agenda.