More than ten years have gone by since I first called attention to Friedrich Nietzsche. My essay on "Aristocratic Radicalism" was the first study of any length to be devoted, in the whole of Europe, to this man, whose name has since flown round the world and is at this moment one of the most famous among our contemporaries. This thinker, then almost unknown and seldom mentioned, became, a few years later, the fashionable philosopher in every country of Europe, and this while the great man, to whose lot had suddenly fallen the universal fame he had so passionately desired, lived on without a suspicion of it all, a living corpse cut off from the world by incurable insanity.
Beginning with his native land, which so long as he retained his powers never gave him a sign of recognition, his writings have now made their way in every country. Even in France, usually so loth to admit foreign, and especially German, influence, his character and his doctrine have been studied and expounded again and again. In Germany, as well as outside it, a sort of school has been formed, which appeals to his authority and not unfrequently compromises him, or rather itself, a good deal. The opposition to him is conducted sometimes (as by Ludwig Stein) on serious and scientific lines, although from narrow pedagogic premises; sometimes (as by Herr Max Nordau) with sorry weapons and with the assumed superiority of presumptuous mediocrity.
Interesting articles and books on Nietzsche have been written by Peter Gast and Lou von Salomé in German and by Henri Lichtenberger in French; and in addition Nietzsche's sister, Frau Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, has not only published an excellent edition of his collected works (including his youthful sketches), but has written his Life (and published his Correspondence).
My old essay on Nietzsche has thus long ago been outstripped by later works, the writers of which were able to take a knowledge of Nietzsche's work for granted and therefore to examine his writings without at the same time having to acquaint the reader with their contents. That essay, it may be remembered, occasioned an exchange of words between Prof. Höffding and myself, in the course of which I had the opportunity of expressing my own views more clearly and of showing what points they had in common with Nietzsche's, and where they diverged from his.[1] As, of course, these polemical utterances of mine were not translated into foreign languages, no notice was taken of them anywhere abroad.
The first essay itself, on the other hand, which was soon translated, brought me in a number of attacks, which gradually acquired a perfectly stereotyped formula. In an article by a Germanised Swede, who wanted to be specially spiteful, I was praised for having in that essay broken with my past and resolutely renounced the set of liberal opinions and ideas I had hitherto championed. Whatever else I might be blamed for, it had to be acknowledged that twice in my life I had been the spokesman of German ideas, in my youth of Hegel's and in my maturer years of Nietzsche's. In a book by a noisy German charlatan living in Paris, Herr Nordau, it was shortly afterwards asserted that if Danish parents could guess what I was really teaching their children at the University of Copenhagen, they would kill me in the street—a downright incitement to murder, which was all the more comic in its pretext, as admission to my lectures has always been open to everybody, the greater part of these lectures has appeared in print, and, finally, twenty years ago the parents used very frequently to come and hear me. It was repeated in the same quarter that after being a follower of Stuart Mill, I had in that essay turned my back on my past, since I had now appeared as an adherent of Nietzsche. This last statement was afterwards copied in a very childish book by a Viennese lady who, without a notion of the actual facts, writes away, year in, year out, on Scandinavian literature for the benefit of the German public. This nonsense was finally disgorged once more in 1899 by Mr. Alfred Ipsen, who contributed to the London Athenæum surveys of Danish literature, among the virtues of which impartiality did not find a place.
In the face of these constantly repeated assertions from abroad, I may be permitted to make it clear once more—as I have already shown in Tilskueren in 1890 (p. 259)—that my principles have not been in the slightest way modified through contact with Nietzsche. When I became acquainted with him I was long past the age at which it is possible to change one's fundamental view of life. Moreover, I maintained many years ago, in reply to my Danish opponents, that my first thought with regard to a philosophical book was by no means to ask whether what it contains is right or wrong: "I go straight through the book to the man behind it. And my first question is this: What is the value of this man, is he interesting, or not? If he is, then his books are undoubtedly worth knowing. Questions of right or wrong are seldom applicable in the highest intellectual spheres, and their answering is not unfrequently of relatively small importance. The first lines I wrote about Nietzsche were therefore to the effect that he deserved to be studied and contested. I rejoiced in him, as I rejoice in every powerful and uncommon individuality." And three years later I replied to the attack of a worthy and able Swiss professor, who had branded Nietzsche as a reactionary and a cynic, in these words, amongst others: "No mature reader studies Nietzsche with the latent design of adopting his opinions, still less with that of propagating them. We are not children in search of instruction, but sceptics in search of men, and we rejoice when we have found a man—the rarest thing there is."
It seems to me that this is not exactly the language of an adherent, and that my critics might spare some of their powder and shot as regards my renunciation of ideas. It is a nuisance to be forced now and then to reply in person to all the allegations that are accumulated against one year by year in the European press; but when others never write a sensible word about one, it becomes an obligation at times to stand up for one's self.
My personal connection with Nietzsche began with his sending me his book, Beyond Good and Evil. I read it, received a strong impression, though not a clear or decided one, and did nothing further about it—for one reason, because I receive every day far too many books to be able to acknowledge them. But as in the following year The Genealogy of Morals was sent me by the author, and as this book was not only much clearer in itself, but also threw new light on the earlier one, I wrote Nietzsche a few lines of thanks, and this led to a correspondence which was interrupted by Nietzsche's attack of insanity thirteen months later.
The letters he sent me in that last year of his conscious life appear to me to be of no little psychological and biographical interest.
[1] See Tilskueren (Copenhagen) for August and November-December 1889, January, February-March, April and May 1890.