[Footnote 1: This statement (made at the end of 1895) has ceased to
be true, but it explains the genesis of this study, and I leave it
standing.]
[Footnote 2: The most convincing word-portrait of Nietzsche I have
met with (by M. Schuré) dates from the visit to Bayreuth:--“I was
struck both by the superiority of his intellect and the strangeness
of his face. A broad forehead, short hair brushed back, the prominent
cheek-bones of the Slav. The heavy moustache and the bold outline of
the face would have given him the aspect of a cavalry officer if it
had not been for his timid and haughty air. The musical voice and slow
speech indicated the artist’s organisation, while the circumspect
meditative carriage was that of a philosopher. Nothing more deceptive
than the apparent calm of his expression. The fixed eye revealed the
painful travail of thought. It was at once the eye of an acute observer
and a fanatical visionary. The double character of this gaze produced a
disquieted and disquieting impression, all the more so since it seemed
to be always fixed on a single point. In moments of effusion this gaze
was softened to a dream-like sweetness, but soon became hostile again.”
This picture is confirmed by Nietzsche’s sister, who also refers to his
“unusually large, beautiful, and brilliant eyes.”]
[Footnote 3: One may be allowed to regret that Nietzsche was not
equally discriminating in his judgment of our country. Had he not
been blinded by the spiritual plebeianism of the nineteenth century
in England, he might also have discerned in certain periods some of
the same ardent and heroic qualities which he recognised in sixteenth
century France, the more easily since at that time the same Renaissance
wave had effected a considerable degree of spiritual union between
France and England. In George Chapman, for instance, at his finest and
lucidest moments the typical ethical representative of our greatest
literary age, Nietzsche would have found a man after his own heart, not
only one who scarcely yielded to himself in generous admiration of the
great qualities of the French spirit but a man of “absolute and full
soul” who was almost a precursor of his own “immoralism,” a lover of
freedom, of stoic self-reliance, one who was ever seeking to enlarge
the discipline of a fine culture in the direction of moral freedom and
dignity.]
[Footnote 4: Pater’s description of the transition we may trace from
the easy prose of Pascal’s first book to the “perpetual _agonia_”
of his later work, applies with scarcely a change to the similar
transition in Nietzsche:--“Everywhere in the _Letters_ he had
seemed so great a master--a master of himself--never at a loss, taking
the conflict so lightly, with so light a heart: in the great Atlantean
travail of the _Thoughts_ his feet sometimes ‘are almost gone.’
In his soul’s agony theological abstractions seem to become personal
powers.... In truth, into his typical diagnosis, as it may seem, of the
tragedy of the human soul, there have passed not merely the personal
feelings, the temperament of an individual, but his malady also, a
physical malady.”]