More than ten years have gone by since I first called attention to Friedrich Nietzsche. My essay on "Aristocratic Radicalism" was the first study of any length to be devoted, in the whole of Europe, to this man, whose name has since flown round the world and is at this moment one of the most famous among our contemporaries. This thinker, then almost unknown and seldom mentioned, became, a few years later, the fashionable philosopher in every country of Europe, and this while the great man, to whose lot had suddenly fallen the universal fame he had so passionately desired, lived on without a suspicion of it all, a living corpse cut off from the world by incurable insanity.
Beginning with his native land, which so long as he retained his powers never gave him a sign of recognition, his writings have now made their way in every country. Even in France, usually so loth to admit foreign, and especially German, influence, his character and his doctrine have been studied and expounded again and again. In Germany, as well as outside it, a sort of school has been formed, which appeals to his authority and not unfrequently compromises him, or rather itself, a good deal. The opposition to him is conducted sometimes (as by Ludwig Stein) on serious and scientific lines, although from narrow pedagogic premises; sometimes (as by Herr Max Nordau) with sorry weapons and with the assumed superiority of presumptuous mediocrity.