historical Jesus." Ibid., p. 10: "To see behind these stories the life of a real historical personage, would not occur to any man, if it were not for the influence of rationalistic theology." Ibid., p. 9: "The divine in Christ, always considered an inner attribute and one with the human, leads in a straight line backward from the scholarly man of God, through the Epistles and Gospels of the New Testament, to the Apocalypse of Daniel, in which the theological imprint of the figure of Christ has arisen. At every single point of this line Christ shows superhuman traits; nowhere is He that which critical theology wished to make Him, simply a natural man, an historic individual."
42 Compare J. Burckhardt's letter to Albert Brenner (pub. by Hans Brenner in the Basle Jahrbuch, 1901): "I have absolutely nothing stored away for the special interpretation of Faust. You are well provided with commentaries of all sorts. Hark! let us at once take the whole foolish pack back to the reading-room from whence they have come. What you are destined to find in Faust, that you will find by intuition. Faust is nothing else than pure and legitimate myth, a great primitive conception, so to speak, in which everyone can divine in his own way his own nature and destiny. Allow me to make a comparison: What would the ancient Greeks have said had a commentator interposed himself between them and the Oedipus legend? There was a chord of the Oedipus legend in every Greek which longed to be touched directly and respond in its own way. And thus it is with the German nation and Faust."
43 I will not conceal the fact that for a time I was in doubt whether I dare venture to reveal through analysis the intimate personality which the author, with a certain unselfish scientific interest, has exposed to public view. Yet it seemed to me that the writer would possess an understanding deeper than any objections of my critics. There is always some risk when one exposes one's self to the world. The absence of any personal relation with Miss Miller permits me free speech, and also exempts me from those considerations due woman which are prejudicial to conclusions. The person of the author is on that account just as shadowy to me as are her phantasies; and, like Odysseus, I have tried to let this phantom drink only enough blood to enable it to speak, and in so doing betray some of the secrets of the inner life.
I have not undertaken this analysis, for which the author owes me but little thanks, for the pleasure of revealing private and intimate matters, with the accompanying embarrassment of publicity, but because I wished to show the secret of the individual as one common to all.
CHAPTER II
1 A very beautiful example of this is found in C. A. Bernoulli: "Franz Overbeck und Friedrich Nietzsche. Eine Freundschaft," 1908 (Pt. 1, p. 72). This author depicts Nietzsche's behavior in Basle society: "Once at a dinner he said to the young lady at his side, 'I dreamed a short time ago that the skin of my hand, which lay before me on the table, suddenly became like glass, shiny and transparent, through which I saw distinctly the bones and the tissues and the play of the muscles. All at once I saw a toad sitting on my hand and at the same time I felt an irresistible compulsion to swallow the beast. I overcame my terrible aversion and gulped it down.' The young lady laughed. 'And do you laugh at that?' Nietzsche asked, his deep eyes fixed on his companion,
