Grateful though he was for the practical admiration of the fruit-stall woman, however he liked to pick and choose among his admirers. After he had received an enthusiastic greeting from a coterie of Viennese disciples, he wrote scornfully to his mother of “such adolescent advances.” “I do not,” he declared, “write for men who are fermenting and immature.” He sneered if he was praised; he was infuriated if he was ignored. At one moment he would sneer at the barbarous Germans who did not understand him. At another, he would show how deeply he felt this want of appreciation in his own country for his “unrelenting subterranean war against all that mankind has hitherto honoured and loved.” Shortly before he went mad, he wrote to a friend:
... Although I am in my forty-fifth year and have published about fifteen books (—among them that non plus ultra “Zarathustra”), no one in Germany has yet succeeded in producing even a moderately good review of a single one of my works. They are now getting out of the difficulty with such words as “eccentric,” “pathological,” “psychiatric.” There have been evil and slanderous hints enough about me, and in the papers both scholarly and unscholarly, the prevailing attitude is one of ungoverned animosity—but how is it that no one protests against this? How is it that no one feels insulted when I am abused? And all these years no comfort, no drop of human sympathy, not a breath of love.
He reproached even his sister for her want of understanding. “You do not seem to be even remotely conscious,” he told her, “of the fact that you are next of kin to the man and his destiny, in which the question of millenniums has been decided—speaking quite literally, I hold the Future of mankind in my hand.” It is because his correspondence is so full of passages in this and similar moods that we find in Nietzsche’s letters little of the intimacy that we expect in good letters. It is as though he were suffering from an obsession about his fame. Many of his letters are merely manifestoes about himself. He was not greatly interested in other people or in the little ordinary things that interest other people. His most enjoyable passages might be described as outbursts, and towards the end of his life he chose as his correspondents Strindberg and Brandes, who also had the genius of outburst but in a less superb degree. It was Brandes who wrote to him with regard to Dostoievsky:
He is a true and great poet, but a vile creature, absolutely Christian in his way of thinking and living, and at the same time quite sadique. His morals are wholly what you have christened “Slave Morality.”
“Just what I think,” replied Nietzsche.
Not that the letters are without an occasional touch of fun. There is a delightful early letter in which Nietzsche tells how, being invited to meet Wagner, he ordered a dress suit. It was brought round to the house just in time to allow him to dress. The old messenger, however, brought not only the parcel but the bill, and presented it to Nietzsche:
I took it politely, but he declared he must be paid on delivery. I was surprised, and explained that I had nothing to do with him as the servant of my tailor, but that my dealings were with his master to whom I had given the order. The man grew more pressing, as did also the time. I snatched at the things and began to put them on. He snatched them too and did all he could to prevent me from dressing. What with violence on my part and violence on his, there was soon a scene, and all the time I was fighting in my shirt, as I wished to get the new trousers.
At last, after a display of dignity, solemn threats, the utterance of curses on my tailor and his accomplice, and vows of vengeance, the little man vanished with my clothes.
There is another amusing letter to his sister, in which he tells her how, one Christmas Day at Nice, he drank too much:
Then your famous animal drank three quite large glasses of a sweet local wine, and was just the slightest bit top-heavy; at least, not long afterwards, when the breakers drew near to me, I said to them as one says to a bevy of farmyard fowls, “Shsh! Shsh! Shshh!”