His new disciple seemed to comprehend it all. Nietzsche was convinced that Wagner had discovered the “Dionysian power” of the German soul. The composer’s art was “the earthquake through which some primeval force that had been dammed up for ages finally liberated itself.” He called Wagner “Pater Seraphicus” (the epithet of Saint Francis of Assisi), a being who, like the Seraphim of Isaiah, was distinguished by the fervor of his love.
The rule of flattery proposed by Disraeli in connection with royalty pertains to artists as well: it must be laid on with a trowel. Wagner grew fond of the young man who seemed likely to burn a quantity of useful incense in his name. “At that time,” Nietzsche later wrote, “we loved each other and hoped everything for each other: it was truly a profound love, without a single arrière-pensée.” Only when, at dinner, the meat was served did Wagner’s brow darken. Nietzsche was a vegetarian. The composer reproved his acolyte for this; the “contest of all against all,” he said, “ran through the whole of creation, so that it was necessary for man to get strength through his food in order to accomplish great things.” Nietzsche nodded his head in agreement, but continued to abstain. This obstinacy, one witness said, “made the Meister really cross.” Evidently it was necessary to retreat to the safer conversational ground of the art-ideal.
Still the friendship flourished. “I’d let go cheap the whole rest of my human relationships,” Nietzsche later said: “I should not want to give away out of my life at any price the days of Triebschen—days of trust, of cheerfulness, of sublime accidents, of profound moments.” But what he called the “secret work and artistry” of his instinct (the call of “heights that no bird ever reached in its flight,” the summons of abysses “into which no foot ever strayed”) would not suffer him to remain forever in a condition of discipleship. Had Wagner looked more closely into the eyes of his nearsighted proselyte, he might have detected in them a gleam of apostasy, one that flashed something more than an antipathy to carnivorousness.
Possibly the young professor was a throwback to an older European type; for in his later life, after he broke with Wagner and the world, Nietzsche conformed to the pattern of the itinerant shaman, seeking the secret of existence while passing back and forth between the mountains and the Mediterranean littoral. He possessed the reflexive asceticism of a mage. Not only was he a vegetarian, he was also, it would seem, a celibate, shunning the flesh of women as well as of beasts; there was something in the intensity of his daydreaming that was compatible only with chastity, or with some close approximation to it.29 He was a myopic, migraine-burdened dreamer, “a philosopher and solitary by instinct,” searching for the elixir of vitality betwixt the Alps and the Riviera.
Nietzsche’s progress would possess only a personal and a psychological interest had he not, during his chase after health, conceived a poetry which was to play a part in the world crisis. Nietzsche created his myths in a mood of hostility to Wagner and to Germany’s romantic aspirations—but as he himself observed, the artist knows not what he does.
Chapter 27
UNRIPE FRUIT
Berlin and Madrid, July 1870
COUNT BENEDETTI, stepping into the train at Berlin, had at last got away, and was about to begin a holiday journey to Wildbad, in the south of Germany The Prussian capital was a cruel post for the French diplomat, who had been bred under Mediterranean stars; his escape from the court of Wilhelm must have come as a relief. Europe, to his chagrin, still talked of the way Bismarck had tricked him four years before, in the aftermath of Sadowa. Nor had his old antagonist in the Wilhelmstrasse ever helped him to obtain, for his poor master in Paris, compensatory territory in the Low Countries. The omission seemed to Benedetti all the more unaccountable when he recollected how eager Bismarck had been, four years before, to have him write out a draft of a treaty for the subjugation of the Belgians—in his own hand, no less, the better to preserve the secret. At all events, Benedetti could breathe more easily now; the mercurial Prussian was far away, in the woods of Pomerania, undergoing another cure for his unruly digestive tract. Riding the train southward, the French Ambassador could look forward to a spell of unbroken tranquility at Wildbad, where, in the depths of the Black Forest, he intended to enjoy a much needed rest.
Across Europe, envoys and élevé consuls were forsaking the labor of their dispatch boxes for the pleasures of the promenade, the cure-house, and the gaming table. Rarely had the peace of Europe seemed more assured than it did in the first days of July 1870, and the spas and resorts of the Continent were crowded with diplomatists in mufti, seeking an interval of repose. Fatigued by the sun and the rigors of their cures, many of those who drowsed over their newspapers on the morning of July 5, 1870, doubtless failed to perceive the significance of a little item of news that appeared that day. It was announced from Madrid that the Spanish Cabinet was to assemble in the palace at La Granja, at the foot of the Sierra de Guadarrama, to consider the candidature, for the Crown of Spain, of Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, a thirty-five-year-old Prussian colonel connected, by a remote affinity of blood, to the ruling house at Berlin.
Two years before, a revolution had taken place in Spain. The stout and easygoing Queen, Isabella, had been driven from her throne. After toying with the idea of establishing a republic, the victorious rebels, led by Don Juan Prim, Count of Reus and Marquess of Castillejos, had endeavored to settle the Crown. It was suggested that Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen would make a suitable king. The Prince, it was admitted on all sides, was without distinction of mind or manner, but he looked splendid in a uniform, and his very aristocratic dullness, in a position so tediously ceremonial, might almost be a virtue. Leopold spent his winters drilling on the parade grounds of Berlin, and his summers lounging at Benrath, his seat on the Rhine; his most notable achievement in life, before he succeeded in disturbing the peace of Europe, was his marriage to a Portuguese Princess who was both beautiful and (it was said) accomplished. But there were difficulties. In France the prospect of a Prussian Prince ruling at Madrid was regarded with passionate aversion; and the Prince himself was reluctant to surrender himself to the hazards of Spanish destiny. The prospect of a Hohenzollern candidature faded.
Here the matter might have ended, and Leopold’s name might today slumber in placid obscurity in the pages of the Almanack de Gotha. But one man, vigilant, artful, and patient, was watching developments at Madrid closely, and was determined that the candidature of Leopold should not die.
Bismarck secretly embraced the cause of the Hohenzollern Prince.
He dispatched to Spain one of his secret agents, the military attaché Theodor von Bernhardi, and he supplied him with £50,000 drawn on the “reptile funds”30 to smooth the way for Leopold. A final step remained. In the last days of June 1870, Bismarck obtained, for his stratagem, the tepid approval of King Wilhelm, who had for some time opposed the scheme.
The trap was laid, and it only remained for Louis-Napoleon to fall into it.
Boston, Washington, and Utah Territory, July 1868-May 1869
ON A HOT JULY NIGHT, Henry Adams returned to America after seven years in Europe. He and his parents disembarked from a Cunard steamer at the mouth of Boston Harbor. A government tugboat conveyed them to the North River Pier. From the moment they set foot on shore, it was evident that a revolution had taken place. “Had they been Tyrian traders of the year B.C. 1000, landing from a galley fresh from Gibraltar,” Adams wrote, “they could hardly have been stranger on the shore of a world, so changed from what it had been ten years before.”
Henry Adams returned eager to obtain power in the Republic Lincoln’s revolution had remade. But he was perplexed by the absence, in America, of a path to it. There was no cursus honorum—course of honors— like those of the aristocratic societies of the Old World. In the United States, one must blaze one’s own trail. Adams sought a path through British precedents. He intended to become a literary journalist on the model of Lord Macaulay and Lord Robert Cecil. He went to Wash
ington as a newspaper correspondent, hoping to make a name for himself by exposing corruption. The age of Lincoln had been succeeded by the age of the robber baron; Adams intended to reveal the lucrative trade in favors that enabled men like Jay Gould and Jim Fisk to establish their ascendancies. Once he made his reputation, he would lay his hands on power.
He was soon disillusioned. Politics, if it was amusing as a spectacle, was greasy as a way of life. There was in America no place, Adams came to believe, for the kind of cultivated intelligence he admired in European political figures, men who in temperament if not in blood were more or less aristocratic. There was another, deeper problem. Could Adams have believed that, in descending to the arena, he should be battling for an idea, he might have brought himself to do it. His ancestors, in founding the Republic, had been building a city on a hill; his greatgrandfather, John Adams, in serving his country, was serving his God. But for Henry Adams, God was dead. No great idea drove him to enter the lists of power—the reforms he advocated were all little ideas; and (so much of the old New England spirit did he retain) he thought power divorced from ideal purpose poison. “I suppose every man who has looked on at the game,” he wrote to his friend Henry Cabot Lodge, “has been struck by the way in which politics deteriorate the moral tone of everyone who mixes in them. The deterioration is far more marked than in any other occupation I know of except the turf, stock-jobbing, and gambling. . . . Politicians as a class must be as mean as card-sharpers, turf-men, or Wall Street curb-stone operators. There is no respectable industry in existence which will not average a higher morality.”
What had gone wrong? Why had the idea, part Puritan, part Plutarch, which had sustained John Adams amid all the perplexities of politics failed to inspire his great-grandson? The “inner light” of Protestantism could not yet be wholly archaic; it had precipitated the country’s most recent revolution. But the flame which had burned so brightly during the Civil War proved to be the last radiance of a candle before it is put out. No sooner had the children of the Puritans defeated the sons of the Cavaliers than their own energies dissipated. The best and brightest Yankees of Henry Adams’s generation found themselves, after Appomattox, sitting on the ashes of their youth, disheartened by the world Lincoln’s revolution had made.
Some of Adams’s friends attempted to suppress their ideal instincts and make a place for themselves in business or the professions. Adams himself was almost driven to wish that he possessed the soul of a banker. He pictured himself making an expiatory pilgrimage to State Street in Boston, to seek the fatted calf of his grandfather Brooks. (Peter Chardon Brooks, his maternal grandfather, had left at his death an estate worth two million dollars.) But the thing was impossible; he was not cut out for a clerkship in the Suffolk Bank.
After offending President Grant by writing an article on Jay Gould’s conspiracy to corner gold, Adams returned to Massachusetts, accepted a professorship at Harvard, and began to teach history. When, several years later, he went again to Washington, he did so in the capacity not of a power-seeker but of an historian, one who devoted his leisure to cultivating a select circle of friends, each as exquisite, as a type, as the carefully chosen volumes of his library. He fell into the vocation of a flâneur, and like many of his peers he became a moral tourist. He traveled to Chartres, and found solace amid its roses and apses. He went to Rome, and sat musing on the silent oracles of paganism.
In the course of their pilgrimages the most gifted figures of Adams’s generation found new inspirations; but only a few, like Wendell Holmes, who was furiously applying himself to the law, discovered anything that could be of use to them in the public service. Most shunned civic virtue, or failed in the effort to practice it. Some left the country altogether. Henry James crossed the ocean to seek the “denser, richer, warmer European spectacle.” There he remained; for he was, he told his friend William Dean Howells, “less a sufferer in Europe than in America.” How-ells himself did not flee; he stayed home, vowing to “speak out plainly about the life men lead in America.” But he too became disenchanted, and would in time confess to James that, though he lived in New York, he also was an “exile from America.”
On May 10, 1869, two rail lines were joined at Promontory Summit, in the Utah Territory. The Central Pacific’s locomotive, Jupiter, and the Union Pacific’s engine, No. 119, kissed cowcatchers. The country had gained a continent. Leland Stanford, the President of Central Pacific, brought with him a golden spike, one of several commemorative devices furnished for the occasion. (The ornamental spikes were for show; ordinary iron spikes were used to secure the last tie.) Engraved on Stanford’s spike were the words: “May God continue the unity of our Country, as the Railroad unites the two great Oceans of the world.”
The United States was now what its founders had dreamt it would become, a transcontinental “empire of liberty.” Cars and engines thundered down its rails, smoking, rumbling, roaring, flaming; Walt Whitman, counting freight trains on the railway that ran along the Hudson, said that “there cannot be less than a hundred a day.” But Henry Adams shook his head. The country, he said, was rapidly becoming little more than a “mechanical consolidation of force,” one that threatened to consign men of his type, men of culture and idealistic aspiration, to the ash-heap.
Saint-Cloud and Paris, July 1870
THE FRENCH EMPEROR stood on the balcony off his dressing room at Saint-Cloud, languidly smoking a cigarette as the sun rose over the valley of the Seine. The fates had woven for him another net of troubles. Three days before he had learned of the attempt by Bismarck to place Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen on the throne of Spain.
The Emperor likened the prospect of a Prussian dynast reigning at Madrid to a dagger pointed at the heart of France. Of course, he must bestir himself to meet the threat to his Empire, but—alas—it would be no easy thing. Bismarck’s démarche could scarcely have come at a worse time. The torment to which Louis-Napoleon’s bladder subjected him had grown more excruciating, and the opiates to which he had now a frequent recourse clouded his mind and debilitated all his powers of decision. He found it difficult to walk unassisted, and in the privacy of the palace he supported himself on the arms of his chamberlains. “Le vin est tiré,” he was heard to say, “il faut le boire” (The wine is drawn; it must be drunk).
His throne was in as sorry a state as his urinary tract. The dynastic inspirations of the Bonapartes had always been paleolithic, but never had the Golden Eagles seemed more obsolete than they did in the summer of 1870. The Second Empire had lost its will, and even its self-respect. Grave personages were appalled by the spectacle of the imperial residences, where amid the gilt and parquet men staggered about drunk, and women abandoned themselves to the voluptuous motions of the Can-Can. The Emperor himself ceased to believe in his romance. He knew that his régime was an anachronism, and in order to save his dynasty and appease the growing discontent of his people he had, the previous winter, relinquished, or affected to relinquish, the last tattered shreds of his despotism. He summoned one of his opponents and asked him to form a government. Emile Ollivier, an idealistic barrister devoted to the free state, was designated a “constitutional minister,” responsible for his acts to the legislature.
But six months after Ollivier kissed hands, the state of France was not good. In parts of the country the harvest had failed, and the authorities would soon be forced to look to America for bread. The financial markets, it is true, were in a flourishing condition, but the workers were discontented. Nor was Louis-Napoleon able, at this conjuncture, to draw on reserves of success in foreign affairs to pay his domestic debts. His most recent adventure, in Mexico, had ended in ruin. Three years before, Marshal Bazaine had returned to Toulon with the last of the French forces, and the puppet-Emperor Maximilian, fallen into the hands of the rebels, had been taken out and shot in a ragged courtyard at Querétaro. Now a new shadow had fallen across Louis-Napoleon’s path, and so peevish was the temper of his people that any miscalculation on his par
t was likely to prove fatal to his dynasty.
Shortly before noon, Ollivier arrived at Saint-Cloud. He was ushered, past the Roman motifs of the château, into the presence of the Emperor. The slim, bespectacled premier more nearly resembled a student leader in the Quartier Latin than he did a successor to Richelieu and Mazarin. Forty-five years old in the summer of 1870, Ollivier had met with success at the bar, but his inner vocation was philosophical. To those who knew him well, it was obvious that he was more suited to pursuing, inwardly and imaginatively, the life of the mind than he was to playing the mixed game of power and politics that was carried on in the palaces of Paris.
A third figure soon joined the Emperor and the premier at Saint-Cloud. Ollivier might seem to possess the principal authority of the government, but he was not, in reality, the moving power in Louis-Napoleon’s Cabinet. The pre-eminent figure, both in abilities and in influence, was the Foreign Minister, Antoine-Alfred Agénor, Duc de Gramont. Gramont was descended from the ancient noblesse of France, and he possessed in a high degree the haughtiness of his race. He had nothing but contempt for the plebeian who in theory presided in the Cabinet, and he regarded Ollivier’s pacific liberalism as dangerously naïve. With each passing day, Prussia, Gramont argued, was growing stronger. Her population, her industry, her armaments were all rapidly growing. Unchecked, the rising power of the Prussians would soon overthrow the existing balance of power: the Kingdom would extend her dominion over Europe: she might possibly, and not unreasonably, aspire to rule the world. France’s wisest course, the Foreign Minister contended, was to fight the Prussians now, before they became so irresistibly strong that no power on earth could stop them.
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