IX
NIETZSCHE[1]
We owe a debt of love, all of us, to Friedrich Nietzsche, and it is time to pay it. His brain stopped thinking in January, 1889; his heart stopped beating in August, 1900. Ten years, twenty years, have passed; and we may smile again with the wise, sad smile of a poor Zarathustra who fainted on the mountain-tops for holy envy of heaven, a loving spirit eternally repulsed by fellow men unworthy of his love, a convalescent Siegfried banished to the pensions de luxe of the Darwinian and Wagnerian Europe of our childhood. How unkind we have been to him! That cold, white, plump face of his; those eyes, now soft as the poetry of a lonely lake, now fiery as if reflecting the mad course of a comet; that sonorous voice, too loud and full and orchestral, perhaps, for smaller and more sensitive ears—we have forgotten them all, and we have been willing to forget. His books are put aside, sold, lost, behind others, under others. His thought, if it ever passes before our thought, is
- ↑ Written à propos of Daniel Halévy's La Vie de F. Nietzsche, Paris, 1909.
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