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 This file contains the exercises, hints, and solutions for Chapter 6 of the
book ”Introduction to the Design and Analysis of Algorithms,” 3rd edition, by
A. Levitin. The problems that might be challenging for at least some students
are marked by B; those that might be difficult for a majority of students are
marked by I 

Exercises 6.1
1. Consider the problem of finding the distance between the two closest num-
bers in an array of  numbers. (The distance between two numbers  and
 is computed as | − |.)

a. Design a presorting-based algorithm for solving this problem and de-

termine its efficiency class.

b. Compare the efficiency of this algorithm with that of the brute-force

algorithm (see Problem 9 in Exercises 1.2).
2. Let  = {1 ...  } and  = {1    } be two sets of numbers. Consider
the problem of finding their intersection, i.e., the set  of all the numbers
that are in both  and .

a. Design a brute-force algorithm for solving this problem and deter-

mine its efficiency class.

b. Design a presorting-based algorithm for solving this problem and de-

termine its efficiency class.
3. Consider the problem of finding the smallest and largest elements in an
array of  numbers.

a. Design a presorting-based algorithm for solving this problem and de-

termine its efficiency class.

b. Compare the efficiency of the three algorithms: (i) the brute-force

algorithm, (ii) this presorting-based algorithm, and (iii) the divide-and-
conquer algorithm (see Problem 2 in Exercises 5.1).
4. Estimate how many searches will be needed to justify time spent on pre-
sorting an array of 103 elements if sorting is done by mergesort and search-
ing is done by binary search. (You may assume that all searches are for
elements known to be in the array.) What about an array of 106 elements?
5. To sort or not to sort? Design a reasonably efficient algorithm for solving
each of the following problems and determine its efficiency class.

a. You are given  telephone bills and  checks sent to pay the bills

1
 ( ≥ ) Assuming that telephone numbers are written on the checks,
find out who failed to pay. (For simplicity, you may also assume that
only one check is written for a particular bill and that it covers the bill in
full.)

b. You have a file of  student records indicating each student’s num-

ber, name, home address, and date of birth. Find out the number of
students from each of the 50 U.S. states.
6. B Given a set of  ≥ 3 points in the Cartesian plane, connect them in a
simple polygon, i.e., a closed path through all the points so that its line
segments (the polygon’s edges) do not intersect (except for neighboring
edges at their common vertex). For example,

P P
3 3

P P
1 1
P P
6 6

P P
2 2
=⇒

P P
4 4

P P5
5

a. Does the problem always have a solution? Does it always have a unique
solution?

b. Design a reasonably efficient algorithm for solving this problem and

indicate its efficiency class.
7. B You have an array of  numbers and a number . Find out whether
the array contains two elements whose sum is  (For example, for the
array 5, 9, 1, 3 and  = 6 the answer is yes, but for the same array and
 = 7 the answer is no.) Design an algorithm for this problem with a
better than quadratic time efficiency.
8. B You have a list of  open intervals (1  1 ) (2  2 )..., (   ) on the
real line. (An open interval ( ) comprises all the points strictly between
its endpoints  and  i.e., ( ) = {|     }) Find the maximum
number of these intervals that have a common point. For example, for
the intervals (1, 4), (0, 3), (-1.5, 2), (3.6, 5), this maximum number is 3.
Design an algorithm for this problem with a better than quadratic time
efficiency.
9. Number placement Given a list of  distinct integers and a sequence of 
boxes with pre-set inequality signs inserted between them, design an algo-
rithm that places the numbers into the boxes to satisfy those inequalities.

2
 For example, the numbers 4, 6, 3, 1, 8 can be placed in the five boxes as
shown below:

1  8  3  4  6

10. B Maxima searching

a. A point (   ) in the Cartesian plane is said to be dominated by point
(   ) if  ≤  and  ≤  with at least one of the two inequalities being
strict. Given a set of  points, one of them is said to be a maximum of
the set if it is not dominated by any other point in the set. For example,
in the figure below, all the maximum points of the set of ten points are
circled.
y

x
Design an efficient algorithm for finding all the maximum points of a given
set of  points in the Cartesian plane. What is the time efficiency class
of your algorithm?

b. Give a few real-world applications of this algorithm.

11. B Anagram detection
a. Design an efficient algorithm for finding all sets of anagrams in a large
file such as a dictionary of English words [Ben00]. For example, eat, ate,
and tea belong to one such a set.

b. Write a program implementing the algorithm.

3
 Hints to Exercises 6.1
1. This problem is similar to one of the examples in this section.
2. a. Compare every element in one set with all the elements in the other.

b. In fact, you can use presorting in three different ways: sort elements of
just one of the sets, sort elements of each of the sets separately, and sort
elements of the two sets together.
3. a. How do we find the smallest and largest elements in a sorted list?

b. The brute-force algorithm and the divide-and-conquer algorithm are

both linear.
4. Use the known results about the average-case comparison numbers of the
algorithms in this question.
5. a. The problem is similar to one of the preceding problems in these exer-
cises.

b. How would you solve this problem if the student information were
written on index cards? Better yet, think how somebody else, who has
never taken a course on algorithms but possesses a good dose of common
sense, would solve this problem.
6. a. Many problems of this kind have exceptions for one particular config-
uration of points. As to the question about a solution’s uniqueness, you
can get the answer by considering a few small “random” instances of the
problem.

b. Construct a polygon for a few small “random” instances of the problem.

Try to construct polygons in some systematic fashion.
7. It helps to think about real numbers as ordered points on the real line.
Considering the special case of  = 0 with a given array containing both
negative and positive numbers, might be helpful, too.
8. After sorting the  ’s and  ’s, the problem can be solved in linear time.
9. Start by sorting the number list given.
10. a. Sort the points in nondecreasing order of their  coordinates and then
scan them right to left.

b. Think of choice problems with two desirable characteristics to take

into account.
11. Use the presorting idea twice.

4
Solutions to Exercises 6.1
1. a. Sort the array first and then scan it to find the smallest difference
between two successive elements [] and [ + 1] (0 ≤  ≤  − 2).

b. The time efficiency of the brute-force algorithm is in Θ(2 ) because

the algorithm considers ( − 1)2 pairs of the array’s elements. (In the
crude version given in Problem 9 of Exercises 1.2, the same pair is con-
sidered twice but this doesn’t change the efficiency’s order, of course.) If
the presorting is done with a ( log ) algorithm, the running time of
the entire algorithm will be in

( log ) + Θ() = ( log )

2. a. Initialize a list to contain elements of  =  ∩  to empty. Compare

every element  in  with successive elements of : if  =  , add this
value to the list  and proceed to the next element in  (In fact, if
 =    need not be compared with the remaining elements in  and
may be deleted from ) In the worst case of input sets with no common
elements, the total number of element comparisons will be equal to ,
putting the algorithm’s efficiency in ()

b. First solution: Sort elements of one of the sets, say, , stored in

an array. Then use binary search to search for each element of  in the
sorted array : if a match is found, add this value to the list . If sorting
is done with a ( log ) algorithm, the total running time will be in

( log ) + (log ) = (( + ) log )

Note that the efficiency formula implies that it is more efficient to sort the
smaller one of the two input sets.

Second solution: Sort the lists representing sets  and , respectively.

Scan the lists in the mergesort-like manner but output only the values
common to the two lists. If sorting is done with a ( log ) algorithm,
the total running time will be in

( log ) + ( log ) + ( + ) = ( log ) where  = max{ }

Third solution: Combine the elements of both  and  in a single list

and sort it. Then scan this sorted list by comparing pairs of its consec-
utive elements: if  = +1  add this common value to the list  and

5
 increment  by two. If sorting is done with an  log  algorithm, the total
running time will be in

(( + ) log( + )) + Θ( + ) = ( log ) where  = max{ }

3. a. Sort the list and return its first and last elements as the values of
the smallest and largest elements, respectively. Assuming the efficiency
of the sorting algorithm used is in ( log ) the time efficiency of the
entire algorithm will be in

( log ) + Θ(1) + Θ(1) = ( log )

b. The brute-force algorithm and the divide-and-conquer algorithm are

both linear, and, hence, superior to the presorting-based algorithm.

4. Let  be the smallest number of searches needed for the sort—binary search
algorithm to make fewer comparisons than  searches by sequential search
(for average successful searches). Assuming that a sorting algorithm
makes about  log  comparisons on the average and using the formulas
for the average number of key comparisons for binary search (about log2 )
and sequential search (about 2), we get the following inequality

 log2  +  log2  ≤ 2

Thus, we need to find the smallest value of  so that

 log2 
≥ 
2 − log2 

Substituting  = 103 into the right-hand side yields min = 21; substitut-
ing  = 106 yields min = 40

Note: For large values of  we can simplify the last inequality by elimi-
nating the relatively insignificant term log2  from the denominator of the
right-hand side to obtain
 log2 
≥ or  ≥ 2 log2 
2

This inequality would yield the answers of 20 and 40 for  = 103 and
 = 106  respectively.

5. a. The following algorithm will beat the brute-force comparisons of the

telephone numbers on the bills and the checks: Using an efficient sorting
algorithm, sort the bills and sort the checks. (In both cases, sorting has

6
 to be done with respect to their telephone numbers, say, in increasing or-
der.) Then do a merging-like scan of the two sorted lists by comparing the
telephone numbers  and  on the current bill and check, respectively:
if    , add  to the list of unpaid telephone numbers and increment
; if    , increment ; if  =   increment both  and  Stop as
soon as one of the two lists becomes empty and append all the remain-
ing telephone numbers on the bill list, if any, to the list of the unpaid ones.

The time efficiency of this algorithm will be in

( log ) + ( log ) + ( + ) = ( log )

≥

This is superior to the () efficiency of the brute-force algorithm (but

inferior, for the average case, to solving this problem with hashing dis-
cussed in Section 7.3).

b. Initialize 50 state counters to zero. Scan the list of student records and,
for a current student record, increment the corresponding state counter.
The algorithm’s time efficiency will be in Θ(), which is superior to any
algorithm that uses presorting of student records by a comparison-based
algorithm.

6. a. The problem has a solution if and only if all the points don’t lie on the
same line. And, if a solution exists, it may not be unique.

b. Find the lowest point  ∗  i.e., the one with the smallest  coordi-
nate. in the set. (If there is a tie, take, say, the leftmost among them,
i.e., the one with the smallest  coordinate.) For each of the other  − 1
points, compute its angle in the polar coordinate system with the origin
at  ∗ and sort the points in increasing order of these angles, breaking ties
in favor of a point closer to  ∗  (Instead of the angles, you can use the
line slopes with respect to the horizontal line through  ∗ .) Connect the
points in the order generated, adding the last segment to return to  ∗ .

P P
3 3

P P
1 1
P P
6 6

P P
2 2
=⇒

P P
4 4

P P5
5

7
 Finding the lowest point  ∗ is in Θ() computing the angles (slopes) is
in Θ() sorting the points according to their angles can be done with a
( log ) algorithm. The efficiency of the entire algorithm is in ( log )

7. Assume first that  = 0 Then [] + [] = 0 if and only if [] = −[]
i.e., these two elements have the same absolute value but opposite signs.
We can check for presence of such elements in a given array in several dif-
ferent ways. If all the elements are known to be distinct, we can simply
replace each element [] by its absolute value |[]| and solve the element
uniqueness problem for the array of the absolute values in ( log ) time
with the presorting based algorithm. If a given array can have equal ele-
ments, we can modify our approach as follows: We can sort the array in
nondecreasing order of their absolute values (e.g., -6, 3, -3, 1, 3 becomes
1, 3, -3, 3, -6), and then scan the array sorted in this fashion to check
whether it contains a consecutive pair of elements with the same absolute
value and opposite signs (e.g., 1, 3, -3, 3, -6 does). If such a pair of
elements exists, the algorithm returns yes, otherwise, it returns no.

The case of an arbitrary value of  is reduced to the case of  = 0 by the fol-

lowing substitution: []+[] =  if and only if ([]−2)+([]−2) =
0 In other words, we can start the algorithm by subtracting 2 from
each element and then proceed as described above.

(Note that we took advantage of the instance simplification idea twice:

by reducing the problem’s instance to one with  = 0 and by presorting
the array.)

8. Sort all the  ’s and  ’s by a ( log ) algorithm in a single nondecreas-

ing list, treating  as if it were smaller than  in case of the tie  =  
Scan the list left to right computing the running difference  between
the number of  ’s and  ’s seen so far. In other words, initialize  to 0
and then increment or decrement it by 1 depending on whether the next
element on the list is a left endpoint  or a right endpoint   respectively.
The maximum value of  is the number in question.

Note 1: One can also implement this algorithm by sorting  ’s and  ’s

separately and then computing the running difference  by merging-like
processing of the two sorted lists.

Note 2: This solution is suggested by D. Ginat in his paper "Algorith-

mic Pattern and the Case of the Sliding Delta," SIGCSE Bulletin, vol.
36, no. 2 (June 2004), pp. 29-33.

8
 9. Start by sorting the list in increasing order. Then repeat the following
 − 1 times: If the first inequality sign is "", place the first (smallest)
number in the first box; otherwise, place there the last (largest) number.
After that, delete the number from the list and the box it was put in.
Finally, when just a single number remains, place it in the remaining box.

Note: The problem was posted on a Web page of The Math Circle at
www.themathcircle.org/researchproblems.php (accessed Oct. 4, 2010).

10. a. Sort the points in nondecreasing order of their -coordinates resolving

ties by listing first a point with a smaller -coordinate. Then scan the
sorted list right to left outputting the points with the strictly largest -
coordinate seen so far during this scan. All the outputted points and only
them are the maximum points of the set.

x
Let (̄ ̄) be a point outputted by the algorithm. This means that it has
a larger -coordinate than any point previously encountered by the right-
to-left scan, i.e., any point with a larger  coordinate. Hence, none of
those points can dominate (̄ ̄) No any point to be encountered later in
the scan can dominate this point either: all of them have either a smaller
 coordinate or the same -coordinate but a smaller -coordinate. Con-
versely, if a point is not outputted by the algorithm, it is dominated by
another point in the set and hence is not a maximum point.

Note: The algorithm is mentioned by Jon Bentley in his paper "Mul-

tidimensional divide-and-conquer," Communications of the ACM, vol. 23,
no. 4 (April 1980), 214—229.
11. First, attach to every word in the file–as another field of the word’s record,
for example–its signature defined as the string of the word’s letters in al-
phabetical order. Obviously, words belong to the same anagram set if and

9
only if they have the same signature. Sort the records in alphabetical or-
der of their signatures. Scan the list to identify contiguous subsequences,
of length greater than one, of records with the same signature.

Note: Jon Bentley describes a real-life application where a similar problem

occurred in [Ben00], p.17, Problem 6.

10
Exercises 6.2
1. Solve the following system by Gaussian elimination.

1 + 2 + 3 = 2
21 + 2 + 3 = 3
1 − 2 + 33 = 8

2. a. Solve the system of the previous question by the  decomposition

method.

b. From the standpoint of general algorithm design techniques, how would

you classify the  -decomposition method?
3. Solve the system of Problem 1 by computing the inverse of its coefficient
matrix and then multiplying it by the vector on the right-hand side.
4. Would it be correct to get the efficiency class of the elimination stage of
Gaussian elimination as follows?
−1
X 
X +1
X −1
X
() = 1= ( + 2 − )( − )
=1 =+1 = =1
−1
X
= [( + 2) − (2 + 2) + 2 ]
=1
−1
X −1
X −1
X
= ( + 2) − (2 + 2) + 2 
=1 =1 =1
P−1 P−1
Since 1 () = =1 ( + 2) ∈ Θ(3 ) 2 () = =1 (2 + 2) ∈ Θ(3 )
P−1 2
and 3 () = =1  ∈ Θ(3 ) 1 () − 2 () + 3 () ∈ Θ(3 )
5. Write pseudocode for the back-substitution stage of Gaussian elimination
and show that its running time is in Θ(2 )
6. Assuming that division of two real numbers takes three times longer than
their multiplication, estimate how much faster BetterForwardElimination
is than ForwardElimination. (Of course, you should also assume that a
compiler is not going to eliminate the inefficiency in ForwardElimination.)
7. a. Give an example of a system of two linear equations in two unknowns
that has a unique solution and solve it by Gaussian elimination.

b. Give an example of a system of two linear equations in two unknowns

that has no solution and apply Gaussian elimination to it.

c. Give an example of a system of two linear equations in two unknowns

that has infinitely many solutions and apply Gaussian elimination to it.

11
 8. The Gauss-Jordan elimination method differs from Gaussian elimina-
tion in that the elements above the main diagonal of the coefficient matrix
are made zero at the same time and by the same use of a pivot row as the
elements below the main diagonal.

a. Apply the Gauss-Jordan method to the system of Problem 1 of these

exercises.

b. What general design technique is this algorithm based on?

c.B In general, how many multiplications are made by this method while
solving a system of  equations in  unknowns? How does this compare
with the number of multiplications made by the Gaussian elimination
method in both its elimination and its back-substitution stages?
9. A system  =  of  linear equations in  unknowns has a unique solution
if and only if det  6= 0 Is it a good idea to check this condition before
applying Gaussian elimination to the system?
10. a. Apply Cramer’s rule to solve the system of Problem 1 of these exercises.

b. Estimate how many times longer it will take to solve a system of 

linear equations in  unknowns by Cramer’s rule than by Gaussian elimi-
nation. Assume that all the determinants in Cramer’s rule formulas are
computed independently by Gaussian elimination.
11. I Lights out This one-person game is played on an × board composed
of 1 × 1 light panels. Each panel has a switch that can be turned on
and off, thereby toggling the on/off state of this and four vertically and
horizontally adjacent panels. (Of course, toggling a corner square affects
the total of three panels, and toggling a noncorner panel on the board’s
border affects the total of four squares.) Given an initial subset of lighted
squares, the goal is to turn all the lights off.

(a) Show that an answer can be found by solving a system of linear

equations with 0/1 coefficients and right-hand sides using modulo 2
arithmetic.
(b) Use Gaussian elimination to solve the 2×2 “all-ones” instance of this
problem, where all the panels of the 2 × 2 board are initially lit.
(c) Use Gaussian elimination to solve the 3×3 “all-ones” instance of this
problem, where all the panels of the 3 × 3 board are initially lit.

12
Hints to Exercises 6.2
1. Trace the algorithm as we did in solving another system in the section.
2. a. Use the Gaussian elimination results as explained in the text.

b. It is one of the varieties of the transform-and-conquer technique. Which

one?
3. To find the inverse, you can either solve the system with three simul-
taneous right-hand side vectors representing the columns of the 3-by-3
identity matrix or use the  decomposition of the system’s coefficient
matrix found in Problem 2.
4. Though the final answer is correct, its derivation contains an error you
have to find.
5. Pseudocode of this algorithm is quite straightforward. If you are in doubt,
see the section’s example tracing the algorithm. The order of growth of
the algorithm’s running time can be estimated by following the standard
plan for the analysis of nonrecursive algorithms.
6. Estimate the ratio of the algorithm running times by using the approxi-
mate formulas for the number of divisions and the number of multiplica-
tions in both algorithms.
7. a. This is a “normal” case: one of the two equations should not be pro-
portional to the other.

b. The coefficients of one equation should be the same or proportional

to the corresponding coefficients of the other equation, whereas the right-
hand sides should not.

c. The two equations should be either the same or proportional to each

other (including the right-hand sides).
8. a. Manipulate the matrix rows above a pivot row the same way the rows
below the pivot row are changed.

b. Are the Gauss-Jordan method and Gaussian elimination based on the

same algorithm design technique or on different ones?

c. Derive the formula for the number of multiplications in the Gauss-

Jordan method the same way it was done for Gaussian elimination in the
section.
9. How long will it take to compute the determinant compared to the time
needed to apply Gaussian elimination to the system?

13
10. a. Apply Cramer’s rule to the system given.

b. How many distinct determinants are there in the Cramer’s rule for-
mulas?
11. a. If  is the number of times the panel in the th row and th column
needs to be toggled in a solution, what can be said about  ? After you
answer this question, show that the binary matrix representing an initial
state of the board can be represented as a linear combination (in modulo
2 arithmetic) of 2 binary matrices each representing the affect of toggling
an individual panel.

b. Set up a system of four equations in four unknowns (see part a) and

solve it by Gaussian elimination performing all operations in modulo-2
arithmetic.

c. If you believe that a system of nine equations in nine unknowns is too

large to solve by hand, write a program to solve the problem.

14
Solutions to Exercises 6.2
1. a. Solve the following system by Gaussian elimination

1 + 2 + 3 = 2
21 + 2 + 3 = 3
1 − 2 + 33 = 8

⎡ ⎤
1 1 1 2
⎣ 2 1 1 3 ⎦ row 2 - 21 row 1
1 −1 3 8 row 3 - 11 row 1
⎡ ⎤
1 1 1 2
⎣ 0 −1 −1 −1 ⎦
−2
0 −2 2 6 row 3 - −1 row 2
⎡ ⎤
1 1 1 2
⎣ 0 −1 −1 −1 ⎦
0 0 4 8

Then, by backward substitutions, we obtain the solution as follows:

3 = 84= 2 2 = ( − 1 + 3 )(−1) = −1 and 1 = (2 − 3 − 2 )1 = 1

2. a. Repeating the elimination stage (or using its results obtained in Prob-
lem 1), we get the following matrices  and  :
⎡ ⎤ ⎡ ⎤
1 0 0 1 1 1
 = ⎣ 2 1 0 ⎦   = ⎣ 0 −1 −1 ⎦ 
1 2 1 0 0 4

On substituting  =   into   =  the system  =  needs to be

solved first. Here, the augmented coefficient matrix is:
⎡ ⎤
1 0 0 2
⎣ 2 1 0 3 ⎦
1 2 1 8

Its solution is

1 = 2 2 = 3 − 21 = −1 3 = 8 − 1 − 22 = 8

Solving now the system   =  whose augmented coefficient matrix is

⎡ ⎤
1 1 1 2
⎣ 0 −1 −1 −1 ⎦ 
0 0 4 8

15
 yields the following solution to the system given:

3 = 2 2 = (−1 + 3 )(−1) = −1 1 = 2 − 3 − 2 = 1

b. The most fitting answer is the representation change technique.

3. Solving simultaneously the system with the three right-hand side vectors:
⎡ ⎤
1 1 1 1 0 0
⎣ 2 1 1 0 1 0 ⎦ row 2 - 21 row 1
1 −1 3 0 0 1 row 3 - 11 row 1
⎡ ⎤
1 1 1 1 0 0
⎣ 0 −1 −1 −2 1 0 ⎦
−2
0 −2 2 −1 0 1 row 3 - −1 row 1
⎡ ⎤
1 1 1 1 0 0
⎣ 0 −1 −1 −2 1 0 ⎦
0 0 4 3 −2 1

Solving the system with the first right-hand side column

⎡ ⎤
1
⎣ −2 ⎦
3

yields the following values of the first column of the inverse matrix:
⎡ ⎤
−1
⎣ 5 ⎦
4
3
4

Solving the system with the second right-hand side column

⎡ ⎤
0
⎣ 1 ⎦
−2

yields the following values of the second column of the inverse matrix:
⎡ ⎤
1
⎣ −1 ⎦ 
2
− 12

Solving the system with the third right-hand side column

⎡ ⎤
0
⎣ 0 ⎦
1

16
 yields the following values of the third column of the inverse matrix:
⎡ ⎤
0
⎣ −1 ⎦ 
4
1
4

Thus, the inverse of the coefficient matrix is

⎡ ⎤
−1 1 0
⎣ 5 −1 −1 ⎦ 
4 2 4
3
4 − 12 1
4

which leads to the following solution to the original system

⎡ ⎤⎡ ⎤ ⎡ ⎤
−1 1 0 2 1
 = −1  = ⎣ 54 − 12 − 14 ⎦ ⎣ 3 ⎦ = ⎣ −1 ⎦ 
3
4 − 12 1
4 8 2

4. In general, the fact that 1 () ∈ Θ(3 ) 2 () ∈ Θ(3 ) and 3 () ∈ Θ(3 )
does not necessarily imply that 1 ()−2 () +3 () ∈ Θ(3 ) because the
coefficients of the highest third-degree terms can cancel each other. As a
specific example, consider 1 () = 3 +  2 () = 23  and 3 () = 3 
Each of this functions is in Θ(3 ) but 1 ()− 2 () + 3 () =  ∈ Θ()

5. Algorithm GaussBackSub([1 1 + 1])

//Implements the backward substitution stage of Gaussian elimination
//by solving a given system with an upper-triangular coefficient matrix
//Input: Matrix [1 1  + 1], with the first  columns in the upper-
//triangular form
//Output: A solution of the system of  linear equations in  unknowns
//whose coefficient matrix and right-hand side are the first  columns
//of  and its ( + 1)st column, respectively
for  ←  downto 1 do
 ← 00
for  ←  downto  + 1
 ←  + [ ] ∗ []
[] ← ([  + 1] − )[ ]
return 

The basic operation is multiplication of two numbers. The number of

times it will be executed is given by the sum
 X
X  
X 
X
 () = 1= ( − ( + 1) + 1) = ( − )
=1 =+1 =1 =1
( − 1)
= ( − 1) + ( − 2) + · · · + 1 = ∈ Θ(2 )
2

17
6. Let () () and  () () be the numbers of divisions and multiplications
made by GaussElimination, respectively. Using the count formula derived
in Section 6.2, we obtain the following approximate counts:
−1
X  +1
X X 1 3
() () =  () () ≈ 1≈  
=1 =+1 =
3

Let () () and  () () be the numbers of divisions and multiplica-
tions made by BetterGaussElimination, respectively. We have the follow-
ing approximations:
−1
X 
X 1 2 1
() () ≈ 1≈  and  () () =  () () ≈ 3 
=1 =+1
2 3

Let  and  be the times of one division and of one multiplication,

respectively. We can estimate the ratio of the running times of the two
algorithms as follows:

 () ()  () () +   () ()  13 3 +  31 3

≈ ≈
 () ()  () () +   () ()  12 2 +  31 3
 31 3 +  31 3  +  
≈ 1 3 = = + 1 = 4
 3   

7. a. The elimination stage should yield a 2-by-2 upper-triangular matrix

with nonzero coefficients on its main diagonal.

b. The elimination stage should yield a 2-by-2 matrix whose second row
is 0 0  where  6= 0.

c. The elimination stage should yield a 2-by-2 matrix whose second row
is 0 0 0.
8. a. Solve the following system by the Gauss-Jordan method

1 + 2 + 3 = 2
21 + 2 + 3 = 3
1 − 2 + 33 = 8
⎡ ⎤ ⎡ ⎤ 1
1 1 1 2 1 1 1 2 row 1 − −1 row 2
⎣ 2 1 1 3 ⎦ row 2 − 1 row 1 ⎣ 0 −1 −1 −1 ⎦
2

1 −1 3 8 row 3 − 11 row 1 0 −2 2 6 row 3 − −2

−1 row 2
⎡ ⎤ ⎡ ⎤
1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1
⎣ 0 −1 −1 −1 ⎦ row 1 − 04 row 3 ⎣
−1 0 −1 0 1 ⎦
row 2 − 4 row 3
0 0 4 8 0 0 4 8

18
We obtain the solution by dividing the right hand side values by the cor-
responding elements of the diagonal matrix:
1 = 11 = 1 2 = 1 − 1 = −1 3 = 84 = 2
b. The Gauss-Jordan method is also an example of an algorithm based
on the instance simplification idea. The two algorithms differ in the kind
of a simpler instance to which they transfer a given system: Gaussian
elimination transforms a system to an equivalent system with an upper-
triangular coefficient matrix whereas the Gauss-Jordan method transforms
it to a system with a diagonal matrix.

c. Here is a basic pseudocode for the Gauss-Jordan elimination:

Algorithm GaussJordan([1 1] [1])
//Applies Gaussian-Jordan elimination to matrix  of a system’s
//coefficients, augmented with vector  of the system’s right-hand sides
//Input: Matrix [1 1 ] and column-vector [1]
//Output: An equivalent diagonal matrix in place of  with the
//corresponding right-hand side values in its ( + 1)st column
for  ← 1 to  do [  + 1] ← [] //augment the matrix
for  ← 1 to  do
for  ← 1 to  do
if  6= 
 ← [ ]  [ ] //assumes [ ] 6= 0
for  ←  to  + 1 do
[ ] ← [ ] − [ ] ∗ 

The number of multiplications made by the above algorithm can be com-

puted as follows:
X  +1
 X X X 
 X  X
X 
 () = 1= ( + 1 −  + 1) = ( + 2 − )
=1 =1 = =1 =1 =1 =1
6= 6= 6=


X 
X
= ( + 2 − )( − 1) = ( − 1) ( + 2 − )
=1 =1
= ( − 1)[( + 1) +  + · · · + 2] = ( − 1)[( + 1) +  + · · · + 1 − 1]
( + 1)( + 2) ( − 1)( + 3) 1
= ( − 1)[ − 1] = ≈ 3 
2 2 2
The total number of multiplications made in both elimination and back-
ward substitution stages of the Gaussian elimination method is equal to
( − 1)(2 + 5) ( − 1) ( − 1)( + 4) 1
+ = ≈ 3 
6 2 3 3
which is about 1.5 smaller than in the Gauss-Jordan method.

19
 Note: The Gauss-Jordan method has an important advantage over Gaussian
elimination: being more uniform, it is more suitable for efficient implemen-
tation on a parallel computer.

9. Since the time needed for computing the determinant of the system’s coef-
ficient matrix is about the same as the time needed for solving the system
(or detecting that the system does not have a unique solution) by Gaussian
elimination, computing the determinant of the coefficient matrix to check
whether it is equal to zero is not a good idea from the algorithmic point
of view.

10. a. Solve the following system by Cramer’s rule:

1 + 2 + 3 = 2
21 + 2 + 3 = 3
1 − 2 + 33 = 8
¯ ¯
¯ 1 1 1¯
¯ ¯
|| = ¯¯ 2 1 1¯ = 1 · 1 · 3 + 1 · 1 · 1 + 2 · (−1) · 1 − 1 · 1 · 1 − 2 · 1 · 3 − (−1) · 1 · 1 = −4,
¯
¯ 1 −1 3¯
¯ ¯
¯ 2 1 1 ¯¯
¯
|1 | = ¯¯ 3 1 1 ¯¯ = 2 · 1 · 3 + 1 · 1 · 8 + 3 · (−1) · 1 − 8 · 1 · 1 − 3 · 1 · 3 − (−1) · 1 · 2 = −4
¯ 8 −1 3 ¯
¯ ¯
¯ 1 2 1 ¯¯
¯
|2 | = ¯¯ 2 3 1 ¯¯ = 1 · 3 · 3 + 2 · 1 · 1 + 2 · 8 · 1 − 1 · 3 · 1 − 2 · 2 · 3 − 8 · 1 · 1 = 4
¯ 1 8 3 ¯
¯ ¯
¯ 1 1 2 ¯¯
¯
|3 | = ¯¯ 2 1 3 ¯¯ = 1 · 1 · 8 + 1 · 3 · 1 + 2 · (−1) · 2 − 1 · 1 · 2 − 2 · 1 · 8 − (−1) · 3 · 1 = −8
¯ 1 −1 8 ¯
Hence,

|1 | −4 |2 | 4 |3 | −8

1 = = = 1 2 = = = −1 3 = = = 2
|| −4 || −4 || −4

b. Cramer’s rule requires computing  + 1 distinct determinants. If each

of them is computed by applying Gaussian elimination, it will take about
 + 1 times longer than solving the system by Gaussian elimination. (The
time for the backward substitution stage was not accounted for in the
preceding argument because of its quadratic efficiency vs. cubic efficiency
of the elimination stage.)

20
11. a. Any feasible state of the board can be described by an  ×  binary
matrix, in which the element in the th row and th column is equal to
1 if and only if the corresponding panel is lit. Let  and  be such
matrices representing the initial and final (all-zeros) boards, respectively.
The impact of toggling the panel at ( ) on a board represented by a
binary matrix  can be interpreted as the modulo-2 matrix addition
 +  , where  is the matrix in which the only entries equal to 1 are
those that are in the ( ) and adjacent to it positions. For example, if
 is a 3-by-3 all-ones matrix representing a 3-by-3 board of all-lit panels,
then the impact of turning off the (2,2) panel can be represented as
⎡ ⎤ ⎡ ⎤ ⎡ ⎤
1 1 1 0 1 0 1 0 1
 + 22 = ⎣ 1 1 1 ⎦ + ⎣ 1 1 1 ⎦ = ⎣ 0 0 0 ⎦ 
1 1 1 0 1 0 1 0 1
Let  is the number of times the ( ) panel is toggled in a solution that
transforms the board from a starting state  to a final state  Since the
ultimate impact of toggling this panel depends only on whether  is even
or odd, we can assume with no loss in generality that  is either 0 or 1.
Then a solution to the puzzle can be expressed by the matrix equation

X
+   = 
=1

where all the operations are assumed to be performed modulo 2. Taking

into account that  = 0 the all-zeros  ×  matrix, the last equation is
equivalent to
X
  = 
=1

(The last equation can also be interpreted as transforming the final all-
zero board to the initial board )

Note: This solution follows Eric W. Weisstein et al. "Lights Out Puzzle"
from MathWorld—A Wolfram Web Resource at http://mathworld.wolfram.com/LightsOutPuzzle.html

b. The system of linear equations for the instance in question (see part a)
is
∙ ¸ ∙ ¸ ∙ ¸ ∙ ¸ ∙ ¸
1 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1
11 + 12 + 21 + 22 =
1 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

or
1 · 11 + 1 · 12 + 1 · 21 + 0 · 22 = 1
1 · 11 + 1 · 12 + 0 · 21 + 1 · 22 = 1
1 · 11 + 0 · 12 + 1 · 21 + 1 · 22 = 1
0 · 11 + 1 · 12 + 1 · 21 + 1 · 22 = 1

21
Solving this system in modulo-2 arithmetic by Gaussian elimination pro-
ceeds as follows:
⎡ ⎤ ⎡ ⎤ ⎡ ⎤
1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 1
⎢ 1 1 0 1 1 ⎥ ⎢ 0 0 1 1 0 ⎥ ⎢ 0 1 0 1 0 ⎥
⎢ ⎥ ⎢ ⎥ ⎢ ⎥
⎣ 1 0 1 1 1 ⎦ ⎣ 0 1 0 1 0 ⎦ ⎣ 0 0 1 1 0 ⎦
0 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1
⎡ ⎤ ⎡ ⎤
1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 1
⎢ 0 1 0 1 0 ⎥ ⎢ 0 1 0 1 0 ⎥
⎢ ⎥ ⎢ ⎥
⎣ 0 0 1 1 0 ⎦ ⎣ 0 0 1 1 0 ⎦
0 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 1
The backward substitutions yield the solution: 11 = 1 12 = 1 21 = 1
22 = 1 i.e., each of the four panel switches should be toggled once (in
any order).

c. The solution to this instance of the puzzle is 11 = 13 = 22 =

31 = 33 = 1 (with all the other components being 0).

22
Exercises 6.3
1. Which of the following binary trees are AVL trees?
5 5 5

3 6 4 6 3 6

2 8 2 8 1 2 7 9

1 3 7 9

(a) ( b) (c)

2. a. For  = 1 2 3 4 and 5, draw all the binary trees with  nodes that
satisfy the balance requirement of AVL trees.

b. Draw a binary tree of height 4 that can be an AVL tree and has
the smallest number of nodes among all such trees.
3. Draw diagrams of the single L-rotation and of the double RL-rotation in
their general form.
4. For each of the following lists, construct an AVL tree by inserting their
elements successively, starting with the empty tree.

a. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

b. 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1

c. 3, 6, 5, 1, 2, 4
5. a. For an AVL tree containing real numbers, design an algorithm for
computing the range (i.e., the difference between the largest and smallest
numbers in the tree) and determine its worst-case efficiency.

b.B True or false: The smallest and the largest keys in an AVL tree
can always be found on either the last level or the next-to-last level?
6. Write a program for constructing an AVL tree for a given list of  distinct
integers.
7. a. Construct a 2-3 tree for the list C, O, M, P, U, T, I, N, G. Use the
alphabetical order of the letters and insert them successively starting with
the empty tree.

b. Assuming that the probabilities of searching for each of the keys (i.e.,
the letters) are the same, find the largest number and the average number
of key comparisons for successful searches in this tree.

23
 8. Let  and 2-3 be, respectively, a classical binary search tree and a 2-3
tree constructed for the same list of keys inserted in the corresponding
trees in the same order. True or false: Searching for the same key in 2-3
always takes fewer or the same number of key comparisons as searching
in  ?
9. For a 2-3 tree containing real numbers, design an algorithm for computing
the range (i.e., the difference between the largest and smallest numbers in
the tree) and determine its worst-case efficiency.
10. Write a program for constructing a 2-3 tree for a given list of  integers.

24
 Hints to Exercises 6.3
1. Use the definition of AVL trees. Do not forget that an AVL tree is a
special case of a binary search tree.
2. For both questions, it is easier to construct the required trees bottom up,
i.e., for smaller values of  first.
3. The single -rotation and the double -rotation are the mirror images
of the single -rotation and the double -rotation, whose diagrams can
be found in the section.
4. Insert the keys one after another doing appropriate rotations the way it
was done in the section’s example.
5. a. An efficient algorithm immediately follows from the definition of the
binary search tree of which the AVL tree is a special case.

b. The correct answer is opposite to the one that immediately comes

to mind.
6. n/a
7. a. Trace the algorithm for the input given (see Figure 6.8 for an example).

b. Keep in mind that the number of key comparisons made in search-

ing for a key in a 2-3 tree depends not only on its node’s depth but also
whether the key is the first or second one in the node.
8. False; find a simple counterexample.
9. Where will the smallest and largest keys be located?
10. n/a

25
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appear to me troubled and uncertain. Doubtless I believe myself to be
capable of success in whatever province I select. But strength fails me
to put aside so many of the diverse objects which interest me. What
shall I study? No idea of a decision presents itself to my mind, and yet
with myself alone it lies to reflect and to make my choice. What is
certain is that whatever I study I shall be eager to probe to its depths.
But this fact only renders the choice more difficult, since the question is
to discover the pursuit to which one can give one's whole self. And how
often they deceive us, these hopes of ours! How quickly one is put on
the wrong track by a momentary predilection, a family tradition, a
desire! To choose one's profession is to make one in a game of lotto, in
which there are many blanks, but only very few prizes! At this moment
my position is uncomfortable. I have dispersed my interest over so
many provinces that if I were to satisfy my tastes I would certainly
become a very learned man, but only with great difficulty a professional
animal. My task is to destroy many of my present tastes, that is clear,
and, by the same process, to acquire new ones. But which are the
unfortunates that I am to throw overboard? Precisely my dearest
children, maybe!..."
His last holidays slipped by into the beginning of his last year. Nietzsche
returned without vexation to the old school which he was soon to leave.
The rules had grown lighter, and he had a room to himself, and certain
liberties. He went out to dine on the invitation of this or that professor,
and thus, even in the monastery, he had his first taste of the pleasures
of the world. At the house of one of his tutors he met a charming girl;
he saw her again, and, for the first time in his life, fell in love. For some
days his dreams were all of the books which he wished to lend her, of
the music which he wished to play with her. His emotion was delicious.
But the girl left Pforta, and Nietzsche returned to his work. The Banquet
of Plato, the tragedies of Æschylus, were his last diversions before he
gave himself up to the ordinary round of tasks. Sometimes he sat down
to the piano just before the supper hour; two comrades who were to
remain his friends, Gersdorff and Paul Deussen, listening while he
played them Beethoven or Schumann, or improvised.
Poetry is always by him. If he has the slightest leisure, if there is a
delay of some hours in his work, the lyricist reappears. On Easter
morning he leaves school, returns home, goes straight to his room,
where he is alone, dreams for a moment; then finds himself assailed by
a multitude of impressions. He writes with intense pleasure after his
long privation. And is not the page, which we transcribe here, worthy of
Zarathustra?
"Here I am on the evening of Easter Day, seated at my fire, enveloped
in a dressing-gown. Outside a fine rain is falling. All about me is
solitude. A sheet of white paper lies on my table; I look at it in a muse,
rolling my pen between my fingers, embarrassed by the inextricable
multitude of subjects, feelings, thoughts which press forward and ask to
be written. Some of them clamour and make a great tumult: they are
young and eager for life. Others gesture and struggle there also: they
are old thoughts, well matured, well clarified; like elderly gentlemen
they regard with displeasure the mêlée of young bloods. This struggle
between an old world and a new it is that determines our mood; and
the state of combat, the victory of these, the weakness of those, we call
at any moment our state of mind, our Stimmung.... Often when I play
the spy on my thoughts and feelings, and study them in religious
silence, I am impressed as with the hum and ferment of savage
factions, the air shudders and is torn across as if a thought or an eagle
had shot up towards the sun.
"Combat is the food which gives strength to the soul. The soul has skill
to pluck out of battle sweet and glorious fruits. Impelled by the desire
for fresh nutriment, it destroys; it struggles fiercely—but how gentle it
can be when it allures the adversary, gathers it close against itself, and
wholly assimilates it.
"That impression, which at this moment makes all your pleasure or all
your pain, will, it may be, slip off in an instant, being the mere drapery
of an impression still more profound, will disappear before something
older and higher. Thus our impressions grave themselves deeper and
deeper on our souls, being ever unique, incomparable, unspeakably
young, swift as the instant that brought them.
"At this moment I am thinking of certain people whom I have loved;
their names, their faces pass before my mind. I do not mean that in fact
their natures become continually more profound and more beautiful;
but it is at least true that each of these reminiscences, when I recover
it, leads me on to some acuter impression, for the mind cannot endure
to return to a level which it has already passed; it has a need of
constant expansion. I salute you, dear impressions, marvellous
undulations of an agitated soul. You are as numerous as Nature, but
more grandiose, for you increase and strive perpetually—the plant, on
the contrary, gives out to-day the same perfume that it gave out on the
day of creation. I no longer love now as I loved a few weeks ago, and I
find myself in a different disposition at this moment from that in which I
was when I took up this pen."
Nietzsche returned to Pforta to undergo his last examinations. He all but
failed to pass; and, indeed, in mathematics he did not obtain the
required number of marks. But the professors, overlooking this
inadequacy, granted him his diploma. He left his old school, and left it
with pain. His mind easily adjusted itself to the places where it lived,
and clung with equal force to happy memories and to melancholy
impressions.
The break-up of the school was a prescribed ceremony. The assembled
students prayed together for the last time; then those who were about
to leave presented their masters with a written testimony of gratitude.
Friedrich Nietzsche's letter moves one by its pathetic and solemn
accent. First he addresses himself to God: "To Him who has given me
all, my first thanks. What offering should I bring Him, if not the warm
gratitude of my heart, confident of His love? It is He who has permitted
me to live this glorious hour of my life. May He, the All-Bountiful,
continue to watch over me." Then he thanks the King, "through whose
goodness I entered this school...; him and my country I hope one day
to honour. Such is my resolve." Then he speaks to his venerated
masters, to his dear comrades, "and particularly to you, my dear
friends: what shall I say to you at the instant of parting? I understand
how it is that the plant when torn from the soil which has nourished it
can only take root slowly and with difficulty in a foreign soil. Shall I be
able to disaccustom myself to you? Shall I be able to accustom myself
to another environment? Adieu!"
These long effusions were not enough, and he wrote, for himself alone,
certain lines in which they are repeated:
"So be it—it is the way of the world:
Let life deal with me as with so many others:
They set forth, their frail skiff is shattered,
And no man can tell us the spot where it sank.

Adieu, adieu! the ship's bell calls me,

And as I linger the shipmaster urges me on.
And now to confront bravely waves, storms, reefs.
Adieu, adieu!..."

CHAPTER II
 YEARS OF YOUTH

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.
Little satisfied as he was by all the tendencies of his contemporaries,
what joy could he experience? Repelled by a base politics, a nerveless
metaphysics, a narrow science, whither could he direct his mind?
Certainly he had his clear and well-marked preferences. He was certain
of his tastes. He loved the Greek poets, he loved Bach, Beethoven,
Byron. But what was the drift of his own thought?
He had no answer to the problems of life, and now in his twenty-first,
as formerly in his seventeenth year, preferring silence to uncertain
speech, he kept himself under a discipline of silence. In his writings, his
letters, his conversation, he was always on his guard. His friend
Deussen suggested that prayer has no real virtue, and only gives to the
mind an illusory confidence. "That is one of the asininities of
Feuerbach," Nietzsche replied tartly. The same Deussen was speaking
on another occasion of the Life of Jesus which Strauss had just
published in a new edition, and expressing approval of the sense of the
book. Nietzsche refused to pronounce upon the subject. "The question
is important," said he. "If you sacrifice Jesus, you must also sacrifice
God." These words would seem to show that Nietzsche was still
attached to Christianity. A letter addressed to his sister removes this
impression. The young girl, who had remained a believer, wrote to him:
"One must always seek truth at the most painful side of things. Now
one does not believe in the Christian mysteries without difficulty.
Therefore the Christian mysteries are true." She at once received from
her brother a reply which betrays, by the harshness of its language, the
unhappy condition of his soul.
"Do you think that it is really so difficult to receive and accept all the
beliefs in which we have been brought up, which little by little have
struck deep roots into our lives, which are held as true by all our own
kith and kin, and a vast multitude of other excellent people, and which,
whether they be true or not, do assuredly console and elevate
humanity? Do you think that such acceptance is more difficult than a
struggle against the whole mass of one's habits, waged in doubt and
loneliness, and darkened by every kind of spiritual depression, nay
more, by remorse; a struggle which leaves a man often in despair, but
always loyal to his eternal quest, the discovery of the new paths that
lead to the True, the Beautiful, and the Good?
"What will be the end of it all? Shall we recover those ideas of God, the
world, and redemption which are familiar to us? To the genuine seeker
must not the result of his labours appear as something wholly
indifferent? What is it we are seeking? Rest and happiness? No, nothing
but Truth, however evil and terrible it may be.
"... So are the ways of men marked out; if you desire peace of soul and
happiness, believe; if you would be a disciple of Truth, enquire ..."
Nietzsche tried to endure this painful life. He walked in the country.
Alone in his room he studied the history of art and the life of
Beethoven. They were vain efforts; he could not forget the people of
Bonn. Twice he went to listen to the musical festivals at Cologne. But
each return added to his malaise. In the end he left the town.
"I left Bonn like a fugitive. At midnight I was on the quay of the Rhine
accompanied by my friend M. I was waiting for the steamship which
comes from Cologne, and I did not experience the slightest impression
of pain at the moment of leaving a country-side so flourishing, a place
so beautiful, and a band of young comrades. On the contrary, I was
actually flying from them. I do not wish to begin again to judge them
unjustly, as I have often done. But my nature could find no satisfaction
among them. I was still too timidly wrapt up in myself, and I had not
the strength to stick to my rôle amid so many influences which were
exercising themselves on me. Everything obtruded on me, and I could
not succeed in dominating my surroundings.... I felt in an oppressive
manner that I had done nothing for science, and little for life, and that I
had only clogged myself with faults. The steamer came, and took me
off. I stayed on the bridge in the damp wet night, and as I watched the
little lights which marked the river bank at Bonn slowly disappear,
everything conspired to give me the impression of flight."
He went to spend a fortnight at Berlin with a comrade whose father was
a rich bourgeois, ready with his censure and his regrets. "Prussia is
lost," this old man affirmed; "the Liberals and the Jews have destroyed
everything with their babblings ... they have destroyed tradition,
confidence, thought itself." Young Nietzsche welcomed these bitter
words. He judged Germany from the students of Bonn and saw his own
sick discomfort everywhere. At the concert he suffered from being in
community of impressions with a low public. In the cafés whither his
hosts took him he would neither drink nor smoke, nor did he address a
word to the people who were introduced to him.

He was determined not to see Bonn again, and decided to go to Leipsic

to complete his studies. He arrived in the unknown town and at once
inscribed himself on the roll of the University. The day was a festival. A
Rector harangued the students and told them that on that same date a
hundred years before Goethe had come to inscribe himself among their
elders. "Genius has its own ways," the prudent official was quick to add,
"and it is dangerous to follow them. Goethe was not a good student; do
not take him for model during your years of study." "Hou, hou!" roared
the laughing young men; and Friedrich Nietzsche, lost in the crowd, was
glad at the chance that had brought him thither at the moment of such
an anniversary.
He resumed work, burnt some verses which had remained among his
papers, and disciplined himself by studying philology according to the
most rigorous methods. Alas, weariness at once laid hold of him again.
He feared a year similar to that at Bonn, and one long complaint filled
his letters and notebooks. Soon there was an end, and this is the event
which delivered his soul. On a bookstall he picked up and turned over
the pages of a work by an author then unknown to him: it was Arthur
Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea. The vigour of a phrase, the
precision and flair of a word struck him. "I do not know," he wrote,
"what demon whispered to me, 'Go home and take that book with you.'
Hardly had I entered my room when I opened the treasure which I had
thus acquired, and began to submit myself to the influence of that
energetic and sombre genius."
The introduction to the book is grandiose: it consists of the three
prefaces which the neglected author wrote at long intervals, for each of
the three editions of 1818, 1844, and 1859. They are haughty and
bitter, but in no way unquiet; rich in profound thoughts, and in the
sharpest sarcasm; the lyricism of a Goethe shows itself in union with
the cutting realism of a Bismarck. They are beautiful with that classic
and measured beauty which is rare in German literature. Friedrich
Nietzsche was conquered by their loftiness, their artistic feeling, their
entire liberty. "I think," wrote Schopenhauer, "that the truth which a
man has discovered, or the light which he has projected on some
obscure point, may, one day, strike another thinking being, may move,
rejoice, and console him; and it is to this man one speaks, as other
spirits like to ours have spoken to us and consoled us in this desert of
life." Nietzsche was moved: it seemed to him that a strayed genius was
addressing him alone.
The world which Schopenhauer describes is formidable. No Providence
guides it, no God inhabits it, inflexible laws draw it in chains through
time and space; but its eternal essence is indifferent to laws, a stranger
to reason: it is that blind Will which urges us into life. All the
phenomena of the universe are rays from that Will, just as all the days
of the year are rays from a single sun. That Will is invariable, it is
infinite; divided, compressed in space. "It nourishes itself upon itself,
since outside of it there is nothing, and since it is a famishing Will."
Therefore, it tortures itself and suffers. Life is a desire, desire is an
unending torment. The good souls of the nineteenth century believe in
the dignity of man, in Progress. They are the dupes of a superstition.
The Will ignores men, the "last comers on the earth who live on an
average thirty years." Progress is a stupid invention of the philosophers,
under the inspiration of the crowd: Will, an offence to reason, has
neither origin nor end; it is absurd, and the universe which it animates
is without sense....
Friedrich Nietzsche read greedily the two thousand pages of this
metaphysical pamphlet, which had struck at all the naïve beliefs of the
nineteenth century with terrible force, and had struck from the head of
puerile humanity all its crown of dreams. He experienced a strange and
almost startling emotion. Schopenhauer condemns life, but so
vehement an energy is in him that in his accusing work it is yet life that
one finds and admires. For fourteen days Nietzsche scarcely slept; he
went to bed at two o'clock, rose at six, spent his days between his book
and the piano, meditated, and, in the intervals of his meditations,
composed a Kyrie. His soul was full to the brim: it had found its truth.
That truth was hard, but what matter? For a long time his instinct had
warned and prepared him for this. "What do we seek?" he had written
to his sister. "Is it repose or happiness? No, truth alone, however
terrible and evil it may be." He recognised the sombre universe of
Schopenhauer. He had had a presentiment of it in the reveries of his
boyhood, in his readings of Æschylus, of Byron, and of Goethe; he had
caught a glimpse of it across the symbolism of Christianity. What was
this evil Will, the slave of its desires, but under another name, that
fallen nature pictured by the Apostle, yet more tragic, now that it was
deprived of the divine ray which a Redeemer had left to it? The young
man, in alarm at his inexperience and his temerity, had recoiled before
so formidable a vision. Now he dared to look it in the face. He no longer
feared, for he was no longer alone. By trusting in Schopenhauer's
wisdom he satisfied at last one of the profoundest of his desires—he
had a master. He struck even a graver note in giving to Schopenhauer
the supreme name in which his orphaned childhood had enshrined a
mystery of strength and tenderness—he called him his father. He was
exalted; then, suddenly swept by a desolating regret. Six years earlier
Schopenhauer still lived; he might have approached him, listened to
him, told him of his veneration. Destiny had separated them! Intense
joy mixed with intense sorrow overwhelmed him; and he was shattered
by a nervous excitement. He grew alarmed, and it needed an energetic
effort on his part to bring him back to human life, to the work of the
day, to the sleep of the night.
Young people experience a need to admire, it is a form of love. When
they admire, when they love, all the servitudes of life become easy to
bear. It was as Schopenhauer's disciple that Friedrich Nietzsche knew
his first happiness. Philology caused him less weariness. Some pupils of
Ritschl, his comrades, founded a society of studies. He joined with
them, and, on the 18th of January, 1866, some weeks after his great
reading of Schopenhauer, he expounded to them the result of his
researches on the manuscripts and the variæ lectiones of Theognis. He
spoke with vigour and freedom, and was applauded. Nietzsche liked
success and tasted it with the simple vanity which he always avowed.
He was happy. When he brought his memoir to Ritschl and was
congratulated very warmly upon it, he was happier yet. He wished to
become, and in fact did become, his master's favourite pupil.
No doubt he had not ceased to consider philology as an inferior duty, as
a mere intellectual exercise and means of livelihood, and his soul was
hardly satisfied; but what vast soul is ever satisfied? Often, after a day
of parching labour, he was melancholy, but what young and ardent soul
is ignorant of melancholy? At least his sadness had ceased to be
mournful, and a fragment of a letter like the following, which opens
with a complaint and ends in enthusiastic emotion, suggests an
excessive plenitude rather than pain.
"Three things are my consolations," he wrote in April, 1866. "Rare
consolations! My Schopenhauer, the music of Schumann, and lastly
solitary walks. Yesterday a heavy storm gathered in the sky; I hastened
towards a neighbouring hill (it is called Leusch, can you explain the
word to me?), I climbed it; at the summit I found a hut and a man,
who, watched by his children, was cutting the throats of two lambs. The
storm broke in all its power, discharging thunder and hail, and I felt
inexpressibly well, full of strength and élan, and I realised with a
wonderful clearness that to understand Nature one must, as I had just
done, go to her to be saved, far from all worries and all our heavy
constraints. What mattered to me, then, man and his troubled Will!
What mattered to me then the Eternal Thou Shalt and Thou Shalt Not!
How different are lightning, storm, and hail, free powers without ethics!
How happy they are, how strong they are, those pure wills which the
mind has not troubled!"
At the beginning of the summer of 1866 Nietzsche was spending all his
days in the library of Leipsic, engaged in deciphering difficult Byzantine
manuscripts. Suddenly he allowed his attention to be distracted by a
spectacle of a grandiose kind; Prussia, discreetly active for fifty years,
reappeared in a warlike rôle. Frederick the Great's kingdom once more
found a chief: Bismarck, the passionate, irascible, and crafty aristocrat
who wished to realise at last the dream of all Germans and to found an
empire above all the little States. He quarrelled with Austria, whom
Moltke humiliated after twenty days of fighting. "I am finishing my
Theognidea for the Rheinisches Museum during the week of Sadowa,"
we read in a memorandum made by Nietzsche. He did not stop his
work, but political preoccupations entered into his thoughts. He felt the
pride of national victory; he recognised himself as a Prussian patriot,
and a little astonishment was mixed with his pleasure: "For me this is a
wholly new and rare enjoyment," he writes. Then he reflected on this
victory, and discerned its consequences, which he enunciated with
lucidity.
"We hold the cards; but as long as Paris remains the centre of Europe,
things will remain in the old condition. It is inevitable that we should
make an effort to upset this equilibrium, or at least to try to upset it. If
we fail, then let us hope to fall, each of us, on a field of battle, struck by
some French shell."
He is not troubled by this view of the future, which satisfies his taste for
the sombre and the pathetic. On the contrary, he grows animated and is
ready to admire.
"At certain moments," he writes, "I make an effort to free my opinions
from the turn which my momentary passion and my natural sympathies
for Prussia give them, and then what I see is this: an action conducted
with grandeur by a State, by a chief; an action carved out of the true
substance of which history is really made; assuredly by no means
moral; but, for him who contemplates it, sufficiently edifying and
beautiful."
Was it not a similar sentiment which he had experienced on that hill
with the queer name, Leusch, on a stormy day, by the side of that
peasant who was cutting the throats of two lambs with such calm
simplicity? "Free powers, without ethics! How happy they are, how
strong, those pure Wills which the mind has not troubled!"

The second year which he passed at Leipsic was perhaps the happiest
of his life. He enjoyed to the full that intellectual security which his
adhesion to his master Schopenhauer assured him. "You ask me for a
vindication of Schopenhauer," he wrote to his friend Deussen; "I will
simply say this to you: I look life in the face, with courage and liberty,
since my feet have found firm soil. The waters of trouble, to express
myself in images, do not sweep me out of my road, because they come
no higher than my head; I am at home in those obscure regions."
It was a year of composure and of comradeship. He did not worry
himself about public affairs. Prussia, on the morrow of her victory, fell
back to the low level of everyday life. The babblings of the tribune and
the press succeeded the action of great men, and Nietzsche turned
away from it all. "What a multitude of mediocre brains are occupied
with things of real importance and real effect!" he writes. "It is an
alarming thought." Perhaps he regretted having allowed himself to be
seduced by a dramatic incident. Nevertheless he knew—Schopenhauer
had taught him—that history and politics are illusory games. He had not
forgotten; he wrote in order to affirm his thought, and to define the
mediocre meaning and value of human agitations.
"What is history but the endless struggle for existence of innumerable
and diverse interests? The great 'ideas' in which many people believe
that they find the directing forces of this combat are but reflections
which pass across the surface of the swelling sea. They have no action
on the sea; but it often happens that they embellish the waves and thus
deceive him who contemplates them. It matters little whether this light
emanates from a moon, a sun, or a lighthouse; the waves will be a little
more or a little less lit up—that is all."
His enthusiasm had no other object but art and thought, the study of
the genius of antiquity. He conceived a passion for his master Ritschl:
"That man is my scientific conscience," said he. He took part in the
friendly soirées of the Verein, spoke, and discussed. He planned more
undertakings than he had time for, and then proposed them to his
friends. He elected to study the sources of Diogenes Laertius—that
compiler who has preserved for us such precious information with
regard to the philosophers of Greece. He dreamed of composing a
memoir which should be sagacious and rigorous, but also beautiful: "All
important work," he wrote to Deussen, "you must have felt it yourself,
exercises a moral influence. The effort to concentrate a given material,
and to find a harmonious form for it, I compare to a stone thrown into
our inner life: the first circle is narrow, but it multiplies itself, and other
more ample circles disengage themselves from it."
In April Nietzsche collected and systematised his notes, wholly
preoccupied with this concern for beauty. He did not wish to write in the
manner of scholars who misunderstand the savour of words, the
equilibrium of phrases. He wished to write, in the difficult and classical
sense of the word.
"The scales fall from my eyes," he wrote; "I have lived too long in a
state of innocence as regards style. The categorical imperative, 'Thou
shalt write, it is necessary that thou writest,' has awakened me. I have
tried to write well It is a thing which I had forgotten since leaving
Pforta, and all at once my pen lost its shape between my fingers. I was
impotent, out of temper. The principles of style enunciated by Lessing,
Lichtenberger, Schopenhauer were scolding in my ears. At least I
remembered, and it was my consolation, that these three authorities
agreed in saying that it is difficult to write well, that no man naturally
writes well, and that one must, in order to acquire a style, work
strenuously, hew blocks of hard wood.... Above all, I wish to imprison in
my style some joyous spirits; I shall apply myself to it as I apply myself
upon the keyboard, and I hope to play at length, not only the pieces
that I have learnt, but free fantasies, free as far as possible, though
always logical and beautiful."
A sentimental joy completed his happiness: he found a friend. Nietzsche
had long been faithful to the comrades of his early childhood: one was
dead, and the other, their lives and occupations having been separate
for ten years, was becoming a stranger to him. At Pforta he had been
fond of the studious Deussen, the faithful Gersdorff: the one was
studying at Tübingen, the other at Berlin. He wrote to them with much
zeal, but an exchange of letters could not satisfy that need for
friendship which was an instinct of his soul. Finally, he made the
acquaintance of Erwin Rohde, a vigorous and perspicacious spirit; he
liked him at once; he admired him, for he was incapable of loving
without admiring; he adorned him with the sublime qualities with which
his soul overflowed. Every evening, after laborious hours, the young
men came together. They walked or rode, talking incessantly. "I
experience for the first time," wrote Nietzsche, "the pleasure of a
friendship founded on a moral and philosophic groundwork. Ordinarily,
we dispute strongly, for we are in disagreement on a multitude of
points. But it suffices for our conversation to take a more profound turn;
and then at once our dissonant thoughts are silenced, and nothing
resounds between us but a peaceable and total accord."
They had promised each other that they would spend their first holiday
weeks together. At the beginning of August, being both free, they left
Leipsic and sought isolation in walks in a tramp on the frontiers of
Bohemia. It is a region of wooded heights, which recalls, with less
grandeur, the Vosges. Nietzsche and Rohde led the life of wandering
philosophers. Their luggage was light, they had no books, they walked
from inn to inn, and, throughout the days unspoilt by a care, they
talked about Schopenhauer, about Beethoven, about Germany, about
Greece. They judged and condemned, with youthful promptitude; they
were never weary of defaming their science. "Oh childishness of
erudition!" they said. "It was a poet, it was Goethe, who discovered the
genius of Greece. He it was who held it up to the Germans, absorbed
always on the confines of a dream, as an example of rich and clear
beauty, a model of perfect form. The professors followed him. They
have explained the ancient world, and, under their myopic eyes, that
wonderful work of art has become the object of a science. What is there
that they have not studied? In Tacitus, the ablative case, the evolution
of the gerund in the Latin authors of Africa; they have analysed to the
last detail the language of the Iliad, determined in what respect it is
connected with this other and that other Aryan language. What does it
all signify? The beauty of the Iliad is unique; it was felt by Goethe, and
they ignore it. We shall stop this game; that will be our task. We shall
go back to the tradition of Goethe; we shall not dissect the Greek
genius, we shall revitalise it, and teach men to feel it. For long enough
the scholars have carried out their minute enquiries. It is time to make
an end. The work of our generation shall be definitive; our generation
shall enter into possession of the grand legacy transmitted by the past.
And science, too, must serve progress."
After a month of conversation, the young men left the forest and went
to Meiningen, a little town in which the musicians of the Pessimist
school were giving a series of concerts. A letter of Friedrich Nietzsche's
has preserved a chronicle of the performance. "The Abbé Liszt
presided," he wrote. "They played a symphonic poem by Hans von
Bülow, Nirvana, an explanation of which was given on the programme
in maxims from Schopenhauer. But the music was awful. Liszt, on the
contrary, succeeded remarkably in finding the character of the Indian
Nirvana in some of his religious compositions; for example, in his
Beatitudes." Nietzsche and Rohde separated on the morrow of these
festivals, and returned to their families.

Alone at Naumburg, Nietzsche took up work of various kinds and read

widely. He studied the works of the young German philosophers,
Hartmann, Dühring, Lange, Bahnsen; he admired them all, with the
indulgence of a brother-in-arms, and dreamt of making their
acquaintance and collaborating with them in a review which they should
found together. He projected an essay, perhaps a sort of manifesto
upon the man whom he wished to give to his contemporaries as a
master, Schopenhauer. "Of all the philosophers," he writes, "he is the
truest." No false sensibility shackles his mind. He is brave, it is the first
quality of a chief. Friedrich Nietzsche notes rapidly: "Ours is the age of
Schopenhauer: a sane pessimism founded upon the ideal; the
seriousness of manly strength, the taste for what is simple and sane.
Schopenhauer is the philosopher of a revived classicism, of a Germanic
Hellenism...."
He was working ardently, and then, suddenly, his life was turned upside
down. He had been exempted from military service on account of his
very short sight. But the Prussian army in 1867 had great need of men;
and he was enrolled in a regiment of artillery, in barracks at Naumburg.
Nietzsche made the best of this vexation. It was always a maxim of his
that a man should know how to utilise the chances of his life, extracting
from them, as an artist does, the elements of a richer destiny.
Therefore, since he had to be a soldier, he resolved that he would learn
his new trade. The military obligation had, in this time of war, a
solemnity which it lacks to-day. Nietzsche thought it a good and healthy
thing that he should shut his dictionaries and get on horseback; that he
should become an artilleryman and a good artilleryman, a sort of
ascetic in the service of his fatherland, etwas ασκησις zu treiben, he
wrote in his German, mottled with Greek.
"This life is full of inconvenience," he wrote again, "but, tasted as one
would an entremets, it impresses me as altogether profitable. It is a
constant appeal to the energy of man which has a value above all as an
antidote against that paralysing scepticism the effects of which we have
observed together. In the barracks one learns to know one's nature, to
know what it has to give among strange men, the greater part of whom
are very rough.... Hitherto it has appeared to me that all have felt kindly
towards me, captain and privates alike; moreover, everything that I
must do, I do it with zeal and interest. Has one not reason to be proud,
if one be noted, among thirty recruits, as the best rider? In truth, that is
worth more than a philological diploma."
Whereupon he cites in full the fine Latin and Ciceronian testimonial
written by old Ritschl in praise of his memoir, De fontibus Laertii
Diogenii. He is happy in his success and does not conceal his pleasure
at it. The fact amuses him. "Thus are we made," he writes; "we know
what such praise is worth, and, in spite of everything, an agreeable
chuckle puts a grimace on our countenance."
This valiant mood lasted only a short time. Nietzsche was soon to avow
that an artilleryman on horseback is a very unhappy animal when he
has literary tastes, and reflected in the mess-room on the problems of
Democritus.
He deplored his slavery, and was delivered from it by an accident. He
fell from his horse and injured his side. He suffered, but he was able to
study and meditate at leisure, which was what he liked in life. However,
when the exquisite May days arrived and he had been laid up for a long
month, he grew impatient and sighed for the hours of exercise. "I who
used to ride the most difficult mounts!" he wrote to Gersdorff. To
distract himself he undertook a short work on a poem of Simonides,
The Complaint of Danaë. He corrected the doubtful words in the text
and wrote to Ritschl about a new study: "Since my schooldays," he
wrote, "this beautiful song of Danaë has remained in my memory as an
unforgettable melody: in this time of May can one do better than
become a trifle lyrical oneself? provided that on this occasion at least
you do not find in my essay too 'lyrical' a conjecture."
Danaë occupied him, and the complaints of the goddess, abandoned
with her child to the caprice of malevolent billows, mingled in his letters
with his own complaints. For he was suffering; his wound remained
open, and a splinter of a bone appeared one day with the discharge of
matter. "I had a queer impression at the sight," he wrote, "and little by
little it became clear to me that my plans for the examination, for a
voyage to Paris, might very easily be thwarted. The frailty of our being
never appears so plainly ad oculos as at the moment when one has just
seen a little piece of one's own skeleton."
The voyage to Paris, here mentioned, was the last conceived, and the
dearest of his dreams. He caressed the idea of it, and, as he was never
able to keep a joy to himself alone, he must write to Gersdorff and then
to Rohde, and to two other comrades, Kleimpaul and Romundt: "After
the last year of our studies," he said to them, "let us go to Paris
together and spend a winter there: let us forget our learning: let us
dispedantise ourselves (dépédantisons-nous); let us make the
acquaintance of the divin cancan, the green absinthe: we will drink of
it; let us go to Paris and live en camarades, and, marching the
boulevards, let us represent Germanism and Schopenhauer down there;
we shall not be altogether idle: from time to time we will send a little
copy to the newspapers, casting a few Parisian anecdotes athwart the
world; after a year and a half, after two years [he never ceased to
prolong the imaginary period], we will come back to pass our
examination." Rohde having promised his company, Nietzsche bore less
impatiently the weariness of a convalescence which lasted until the
summer.
At last he was cured. In the first days of October, feeling a lively need
for the pleasures which Naumburg had not to offer—music, society,
conversation, the theatre—he reinstalled himself at Leipsic. Both
masters and comrades gave him a warm welcome. His re-entry was
happy. He had scarcely completed his twenty-third year and a glorious
dawn already preceded him. An important review in Berlin asked him for
some historical studies, and he gave them. In Leipsic itself he was
offered the editorship of a musical review: this he refused, although
importuned. "Nego ac pernego," wrote he to Rohde, now in residence in
another University city.
He interested himself in everything, except politics. The din and
confusion of men in public meeting assembled was insupportable to
him. "Decidedly," said he, "I am not a ζῶον πολιτικον." And he wrote to
his friend Gersdorff, who had been giving him some information about
Parliamentary intrigues in Berlin:
"The course of events astonishes me; but I cannot well understand
them, nor take them in, unless I draw out of the crowd and consider
apart the activity of a determined man. Bismarck gives me immense
satisfaction. I read his speeches as though I were drinking a strong
wine; I hold back my tongue that it may not swallow too quickly and
that my enjoyment may last. The machinations of his adversaries, as
you relate them to me, I conceive without difficulty; for it is a necessity
that everything that is small, narrow, sectarian and limited should rebel
against such natures and wage an eternal war upon them."
Then to so many satisfactions, new and old, was added the greatest of
joys: the discovery of a new genius, Richard Wagner. The whole of
Germany was making the same discovery about this time. Already she
knew and admired this tumultuous man, poet, composer, publicist,
philosopher; a revolutionary at Dresden, a "damned" author at Paris, a
favourite at the Court of Munich; she had discussed his works and
laughed over his debts and his scarlet robes. It was by no means easy
to pass a clear judgment on this life which was a mixture of faith and
insincerity, of meanness and greatness; on this thought which was
sometimes so strong and often so wordy. What kind of man was
Richard Wagner? An uneasy spirit? a genius? One scarcely knew, and
Nietzsche had remained for a long time in a state of indecision. Tristan
and Isolde moved him infinitely; other works disconcerted him. "I have
just read the Valkyrie," he wrote to Gersdorff, in October, 1866, "and I
find myself impressed so confusedly that I can reach no judgment. Its
great beauties and virtutes are counterbalanced by so many defects and
deformities equally great; 0 + a + (-a) gives 0, all calculations made."
"Wagner is an insoluble problem," he said on another occasion. The
musician whom he then preferred was Schumann.
Wagner had the art of imposing his glory on the world. In July, 1868, he
produced at Munich the Meistersinger, that noble and familiar poem in
which the German people, heroes of the action, filled the stage with
their arguments, their sports, their labours, their loves, and themselves
glorified their own art, music. Germany was then experiencing the
proud desire of greatness. She had the confidence and the élan which
dare recognise the genius of an artist. Wagner was acclaimed; he
passed during the last months of 1868 that invisible border-line above
which a man is transfigured and exalted, above glory itself, into a light
of immortality.
Friedrich Nietzsche heard the Meistersinger. He was touched by its
marvellous beauty and his critical fancies vanished. "To be just towards
such a man," he wrote to Rohde, "one must have a little enthusiasm....
I try in vain to listen to his music in a cold and reserved frame of mind;
every nerve vibrates in me...." This miraculous art had taken hold of
him; he wished that his friends should share his new passion; he
confided his Wagnerian impressions to them: "Last night at the
concert," he wrote, "the overture to the Meistersinger caused me so
lasting a thrill that it was long since I had felt anything like it." Wagner's
sister, Madame Brockhaus, was living in Leipsic. She was a woman out
of the ordinary; and her friends affirmed that they recognised in her a
little of the genius of her brother. Nietzsche wanted to approach her.
This modest desire was soon satisfied.
"The other evening," he writes to Rohde, "on returning home I found a
letter addressed to me, a very short note: 'If you would care to meet
Richard Wagner come to the Café zum Theater at a quarter to four.—W.
... SCH.' The news, if you will forgive me, positively turned my head,
and I found myself as if tossed about by a whirlwind. It goes without
saying that I went out at once to seek the excellent Windisch, who was
able to give me some further information. He told me that Wagner was
at Leipsic, at his sister's, in the strictest incognito; that the Press knew
nothing about his visit, and that all the servants in the Brockhaus
household were as mute as liveried gravediggers. Madame Brockhaus,
Wagner's sister, had presented to him only one visitor, Madame Ritschl,
whose judgment and penetration of mind you know, thus allowing
herself the pleasure of being proud of her friend before her brother and
proud of her brother before her friend, the happy creature! While
Madame Ritschl was in the room Wagner played the Lied from the
Meistersinger, which you know well; and the excellent lady informed
him that the music was already familiar to her, mea opera. Thereupon
pleasure and surprise on the part of Wagner: he expresses a keen
desire to meet me incognito. They decide to invite me for Friday
evening. Windisch explains that that day is impossible to me on account
of my duties, my work, my engagements: and Sunday afternoon is
suggested. We went to the house, Windisch and I, and found the
professor's family there, but not Richard: he had gone out with his vast
skull hidden under some prodigious headdress. I was presented to this
very distinguished family, and received a most cordial invitation for
Sunday evening, which I accepted.
"I spent the next few days, I assure you, in a highly romantic mood:
and you must admit that this début, this unapproachable hero, have
something about them bordering on the world of legend.
"With such an important function before me I decide to dress in my
best. It so chanced that my tailor had promised to deliver me on
Sunday a black coat: everything promised well. Sunday was a frightful
day of snow and rain. One shuddered at the idea of leaving the house.
So I was far from displeased to receive a call during the afternoon from
R——, who babbled about the Eleatics and the nature of God in their
philosophy—because as candidandus he is going to take the thesis
prescribed by Abrens, The Development of the Idea of God down to
Aristotle, while Romundt proposes to solve the problem Of the Will, and
thereby to win the University prize. The evening draws on, the tailor
fails to arrive and Romundt departs. I go with him as far as my tailor's,
and entering the shop, I find his slaves very busy on my coat: they
promise that it will be delivered in three hours. I leave, more content
with the course of things; on my way home I pass Kintschy, read the
Kladderadatsch, and find with satisfaction a newspaper paragraph to
the effect that Wagner is in Switzerland, but that a beautiful house is
being built for him at Munich. As for me, I know that I am about to see
him, and that a letter arrived for him yesterday from the little King,
bearing the address: To the great German composer, Richard Wagner.
"I return home; no tailor. I read very comfortably a dissertation on the
Eudocia, a little distracted from time to time by a troublesome though
distant noise. At last I hear the sound of knocking at the old iron grille,
which is closed ..."
It was the tailor; Nietzsche tried on the suit, which fitted him well; he
thanked the journeyman, who, however, stayed on, and asked to be
paid. Nietzsche, being short of money, was of another opinion; the
journeyman repeated his demand, Nietzsche reiterated his refusal; the
journeyman would not yield, went off with the suit, and Nietzsche, left
abashed in his room, considered with displeasure a black frock-coat,
greatly doubting whether it would "do for Richard." Finally he put it on
again:
"Outside the rain is falling in torrents. A quarter past eight! At half past
Windisch is to meet me at the Café zum Theater. I precipitate myself
into the dark and rainy night, I too a poor man, all in black, without a
dress coat, but in the most romantic of humours. Fortune favours me;