It was Heinrich Heine who gave me the highest -conception of a lyrical poet. I search vainly through the kingdoms of all the ages for anything to equal his sweet and passionate music. He possessed that divine wickedness, without which I cannot conceive ,of perfection; I value men and races, according to the necessity they have to imagine a god partaking of the nature of the satyr. And how masterfully he handles German! Some day men will declare of Heine and myself that we were by far the greatest of all artists in the German language; that we outstripped incalculably all that pure Germans could do with this language. I must be profoundly related to Byron's Manfred: I discovered all his abysses in my own soul-at thirteen I was ripe for this book. Words fail me, I have merely a glance of contempt for those who dare to mention Faust in the presence of Manfred. The Germans are incapable of a conception of greatness-witness Schuniann! Angry at this cloying Saxon, I once composed a counter-overture to Manfred, of which Hans von Billow declared he had never seen the like@ before on paper: it was a sheer violation of Euterpe. Seeking for my highest formula for Shakespeare, I invariably find only this: he conceived the type of CTsar. Such things a man cannot guess-he either is the thing, or he is not. The great poet draws only from his own experience-to such an extent that later he can no longer endure his own work. After glancing at my ZarathWtra, I pace to and fro in my room for a half hour, unable to control an unbearable fit of sobbing. I know of no more, heart-rending reading than Shakespeare: what he must have suffered to be so much in need of playing the clown! Is Hamlet understood? Not doubt but certainty drives one mad. But to feel this,. one must be profound, abysmal, a philosopher.We all fear the truth. And, to make a confession: I feel instinctively certain that Lord Bacon is the originator, the self-torturer, of this most appalling literature: what do I care about the wretched gabble of American fools and half-wits? But the power for the greatest realism in vision is not only compatible with the greatest realism in deeds, with the monstrous, with crime-it actually presupposes the latter. . . . We hardly know enough about Lord Bacon-the first realist in the, highest sense of the word-to be sure of everything he did, everything he willed, and everything he experienced in himself. To the devil with the critics! Suppose I had christened my Zaratkustra with a name not my own-with Richard Wagner's, for instance -the insight of two thousand years would not have sufficed to guess that the author of Human, all-tooHuman was the visionary of Zaratkustra.
