have disported themselves, in parlors and in novels, under the utterly false name of disciples of Zarathustra!
In 1880 Nietzsche was living in Genoa, at No. 8 Salita delle Battistine. He led a sober, poor, and lonely life. His Genoese neighbors called him the saint. This first judgment of humble and ingenuous Italians—the only judgment that Italy expressed, before 1894, of a man who for so great a part of his life suffered or found joy beside our seas—this judgment is perhaps the deepest and the sanest that our fellow-countrymen have as yet pronounced with regard to Nietzsche.
What other name, indeed, than that of saint would you give to a man who from his boyhood was fired with the pure thirst for truth, who through all his life scorned honors, winnings, friendships founded on fiction, triumphs owed to servility and to cowardice, the soft mattresses of faith, the embraces of militant Philistinism, half measures and half figures, compromises and reverences?
What other name can you give, if you please, to one who was never daunted by his own thought; who changed his mind only at the command of his severe self, never at the command of another; who sent his glance to the very bottom of the widest and darkest abysses of human fate; who loved danger, peril, suffering, who
