CHAPTER III
HIS "MEGALOMANIA," PERIODS, CONSTANT POINTS OF VIEW, SPIRITUAL ANCESTRY
I
Nietzsche is sometimes charged with "megalomania." It must be admitted that he had, at least in sanguine moments, a high opinion of his place in the world of thought, and we should undoubtedly find it more becoming if he had left the expression of such an opinion—supposing there was ground for it—to others. The language is most offensive in private memoranda, in confidential letters to friends, and in the autobiographical notes, entitled Ecce Homo, which at first were not meant for publication and have only been given to the light since his death; still it occurs also in offensive form in a pamphlet and a small book which he published in the last year of his life, "The Case of Wagner," and Twilight of the Idols. Doubtless it would be fairer to Nietzsche to cite the various utterances in the connection in which they respectively belong, or at least at the end of the book after a general survey of his thought had been given, but it is convenient to take the matter up now.
I begin with the utterances (I take only the more extreme ones) which he himself gave to the public—only noting that he called "The Case of Wagner" and Twilight of the Idols his "recreations," and that in general they contain, as M. Taine remarked in a letter to him, "audaces et finesses,"[1] which we need not take quite literally. In one of the passages, after confessing that he is worse read in Germany than anywhere else and is somewhat indifferent to present fame anyway, he says that what he is concerned for is to "get a little immortality" and that the aphorism and the sentence, in which he is "the first master among Germans," are forms of "eternity"; his "ambition is to say in ten propositions what every one else says in a book—what every one else does not say in a book.
- ↑ Briefe, III, 206.
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