think of such men as Napoleon, Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, Heinrich Heine, Schopenhauer. . . . They are akin, fundamentally akin, in all the heights and depths of their requirements; it is Europe, the one Europe, whose soul presses urgently and longingly outwards and upwards, in their multifarious and boisterous art— whither? into a new light? towards a new sun?"
It was while tramping the white roads in the blazing sun, as Nietzsche loved to do, that he evolved his philosophy. As he walked he thought, and when he returned at the close of the day to his humble lodging, his modest meal, and his piano, he reduced to writing his thoughts of the day. He was suffering, too, from a persistent neuralgia and from an insomnia which could only be dealt with by a constant drugging with chloral. One can accordingly imagine the state of this unfortunate man's mind and body at the time. As soon as he could accumulate in this fashion three or four hundred pages of manuscript, he had them printed and published. The matter they contained was more or less confused. Yet here and there, characterised by an apparent brilliancy, could be found a vigour of expression and uncompromising thoroughness in the pursuit of some logical subtlety. To these collections of manuscript he would give titles which represented hardly at all the matter dealt with. Thus we find volumes with such titles as "Human, All-too-Human "; " Thus spake Zarathustra"; "Beyond Good and Evil," and so on. And yet perhaps there was an excuse for this, inasmuch as it would have been impossible to have found anything in the shape of a title which could have summed up or indicated the main proposition, if any, of a particular work.
These were not by any means happy years in the life of Nietzsche. Publishers could only be found if and when he could pay for the publication of his works. When published, his works found no readers at all, for he was regarded in Germany, at that time, as a simple unintelligible eccentric. One poor soul alone called him "master"—the title of all others which a German philosopher would love. Nietzsche on more than one occasion would say to him, "You are the first who has called me this."
During this period of wandering, thinking, and writing, he was seized with an impulse to return for a moment to Germany. He went from Venice, where he was then staying, to Leipzig to see an old friend. He was received very coolly, and so he left Germany at once. His appearance and conversation may be imagined from the description which his friend gave of him. "He looked," he said, "as though he had come from a country where no one lived."
