Nice, Jan. 8, 1888.
You should not object to the expression "missionary of culture." What better way is there of being one in our day than that of "missionising" one's disbelief in culture? To have understood that our European culture is a vast problem and by no means a solution—is not such a degree of introspection and self-conquest nowadays culture itself?
I am surprised my books have not yet reached you. I shall not omit to send a reminder to Leipzig. At Christmas time Messieurs the publishers are apt to lose their heads. Meanwhile may I be allowed to bring to your notice a daring curiosity over which no publisher has authority, an ineditum of mine that is among the most personal things I can show. It is the fourth part of my Zarathustra; its proper title, with regard to what precedes and follows it, should be—
Zarathustra's Temptation
An Interlude.
Perhaps this is my best answer to your question about my problem of pity. Besides which, there are excellent reasons for gaining admission to "me" by this particular secret door; provided that one crosses the threshold with your eyes and ears. Your essay on Zola reminded me once more, like everything I have met with of yours (the last was an essay in the Goethe Year-book), in the most agreeable way of your natural tendency towards every kind of psychological optics. When working out the most difficult mathematical problems of the âme moderne you are as much in your element as a German scholar in such case is apt to be out of his. Or do you perhaps think more favourably of present-day Germans? It seems to me that they become year by year more clumsy and rectangular in rebus psychologicis (in direct contrast to the Parisians, with whom everything is becoming nuance and mosaic), so that all events below the surface escape their notice. For example, my Beyond Good and Evil—what an awkward position it has put them in! Not one intelligent word has reached me about this book, let alone an intelligent sentiment. I do not believe even the most well-disposed of my readers has discovered that he has here to deal with the logical results of a perfectly definite philosophical sensibility, and not with a medley of a hundred promiscuous paradoxes and heterodoxies. Nothing of the kind has been "experienced"; my readers do not bring to it a thousandth part of the passion and suffering that is needed. An "immoralist!" This does not suggest anything to them.
By the way, the Goncourts in one of their prefaces claim to have invented the phrase document humain. But for all that M. Taine may well be its real originator.
You are right in what you say about "haranguing an earthquake "; but such Quixotism is among the most honourable things on this earth.
With the greatest respect,
Yours,
NIETZSCHE.