Reading Nietzsche without discipleship

In the face of these constantly repeated assertions from abroad, I may be permitted to make it clear once more--as I have already shown in Tilskueren in 1890 (p. 259)--that my principles have not been in the slightest way modified through contact with Nietzsche. When I became acquainted with him I was long past the age at which it is possible to change one's fundamental view of life. Moreover, I maintained many years ago, in reply to my Danish opponents, that my first thought with regard to a philosophical book was by no means to ask whether what it contains is right or wrong: "I go straight through the book to the man behind it. And my first question is this: What is the value of this man, is he interesting, or not? If he is, then his books are undoubtedly worth knowing. Questions of right or wrong are seldom applicable in the highest intellectual spheres, and their answering is not unfrequently of relatively small importance. The first lines I wrote about Nietzsche were therefore to the effect that he deserved to be studied and contested. I rejoiced in him, as I rejoice in every powerful and uncommon individuality." And three years later I replied to the attack of a worthy and able Swiss professor, who had branded Nietzsche as a reactionary and a cynic, in these words, amongst others: "No mature reader studies Nietzsche with the latent design of adopting his opinions, still less with that of propagating them. We are not children in search of instruction, but sceptics in search of men, and we rejoice when we have found a man--the rarest thing there is."