Au revoir! For we shall surely see each other again. On one condition only. Let us divorce. Strindberg, writing on the same date and signing himself “The best, the highest God,” began his letter to Nietzsche: “I will, I will be raving mad,” and concluded it: Meanwhile, let us rejoice in our madness. Fare you well and be true to your STRINDBERG (The best, the highest God). Nietzsche’s reply was: MR. STRINDBERG: Alas! ... no more! Let us divorce! “THE CRUCIFIED.” Dr. Oscar Levy, in his introduction to an English selection from Nietzsche’s letters, vigorously objects to the emphasis that has been laid by some critics on Nietzsche’s madness. It is a reasonable protest, if the accusation is put forward in order to damage Nietzsche’s fame as an artist among philosophers. Dr. Levy, however, goes so far on the other side that he almost leaves us with a picture of Nietzsche as a perfectly normal man with all the normal “slave virtues.” “A good friend, a devoted son, an affectionate brother, and a generous enemy”--“not the slightest trace of any lack of judgment”--“perfectly healthy and lucid”--such are the phrases in which the Nietzsche of these letters is portrayed. We are told that “even the curious last letter to Georg Brandes still gives a perfect sense.” Here is the letter: TO THE FRIEND GEORG. Having been discovered by you no trick was necessary for the others to find me. The difficulty is now to get rid of me. “THE CRUCIFIED.” It would, I agree, be ridiculous to dwell on the madness at the close of Nietzsche’s life, if such extravagant claims had not been made for him by his followers. But the madness of Nietzsche is relevant enough in a criticism of his philosophy, if we are asked to accept him as one of the inspired guides to life. Nietzsche himself was at once terrified and intoxicated by his sense of his own abnormal difference from common men. He knew, in part of his nature, that this aloofness was an evil. He craved for sympathy so passionately at times that he cried to one of his friends: “The whole of my philosophy totters after one hour’s sympathetic intercourse even with total strangers!” About the same time--it was in 1880--he wrote: One ceases from loving oneself properly when one _ceases_ from exercising oneself in love towards others, wherefore the latter (the ceasing from exercising, etc.) ought to be strongly deprecated. (This is from my own experience.)