better and more talented than I am."[1] Plainly we have to make some allowance for one who speaks in ways like these. Secondly, he also had moods quite different from those of "colossal egotism." In the letter to Brandes, in which he spoke of himself as a capital event in the crisis of valuations, he immediately added, "but that may be an error—more than that, a stupidity—I wish to be obliged to believe nothing about myself." He had doubts about Zarathustra; when the first recognition of it came to his knowledge, he wrote to Gast, "So my life is not a failure after all—and just now least of all when I most believed it."[2] At another time he confessed to Gast that there trailed about in his heart an opposition to the whole Zarathustra-creation.[3] As we shall see later, he puts forth almost all his distinctive views tentatively, and is rarely without skeptical reserves.
The fact is that Nietzsche was not naturally a conceited being, and how he developed such a seemingly overweening self-regard, and what was its exact nature, is an interesting psychological problem. He wrote an old student friend, Freiherr von Seydlitz, who was on the point of visiting him in Sorrento in 1877, "Heaven knows you will find a very simple man who has no great opinion of himself;" yet to the same person ten years later he used language about as strong as that already quoted—though adding "between ourselves." c How is the development to be explained? So far as I can make out, the order of psychological fact was something like the following:
Increasingly with the years Nietzsche became a lonely man—physically, and above all spiritually. d His old masters—Schopenhauer and Wagner—had failed him, and no one came to take their place. It is a mistake to think that he wished no master. His early feeling is shown in "Schopenhauer as Educator,"[4] and as late as 1885 he wrote his sister, "I confront alone an immense problem: it is as if I were lost in a forest, a primeval one. I need help. I need disciples, I need a master. It would be so sweet to obey! If I were lost on a mountain,
