Page:Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche (1921).djvu/11

Rh, and only once, towards the end, a sign of the threatening doom: everything, apart from this, is per fectly healthy and lucid, and even the curious last letter to Georg Brandes still gives a perfect sense. Why the cry of insanity should ever have been raised against Nietzsche is hard to understand, all the more so as a similar reproach has never been thought sufficient to discredit the work of other famous authors or philosophers who happened to be visited by the same afflic tion. No one has ever doubted Swift s genius because his brain became clouded towards the end of his life, and August Comte, who actually published his principal books after a confinement in a lunatic asylum and an attempted suicide in the Seine, is still a highly esteemed philosopher.

But there is another and still more serious legend which should be destroyed by this publication. It is Nietzsche s reputed responsibility for the World War. We all remember that he together with some minor authors was accused of being the poisoner of the modern German mind whose former "idealism" and &quot;romanticism&quot; Nietzsche was said to have entirely perverted and led into unwholesome materialistic channels. Now it will be seen from these letters that there was no more outspoken critic of the German Empire and its crude and superficial "Kultur" than Friedrich Nietzsche. Throughout his whole life this lonely man fought against his Fatherland and for true enlightenment: for harmony between body and soul, between peoples and races, between authorities and subjects. It will be a revelation to many who are still under the influence of the singular misunderstanding