It sometimes happens that the death of a great individual recalls a half-forgotten name to our memory, and we then disinter for a brief moment the circumstances, events, writings or achievements which gave that name its renown. Although Friedrich Nietzsche in his silent madness had survived himself for eleven and a half years, there is no need at his death to resuscitate his works or his fame. For during those very years in which he lived on in the night of insanity, his name has acquired a lustre unsurpassed by any contemporary reputation, and his works have been translated into every language and are known all over the world. To the older among us, who have followed Nietzsche from the time of his arduous and embittered struggle against the total indifference of the reading world, this prodigiously rapid attainment of the most absolute and world-wide renown has in it something in the highest degree surprising. No one in our time has experienced anything like it. In the course of five or six years Nietzsche's intellectual tendency --now more or less understood, now misunderstood, now involuntarily caricatured--became the ruling tendency of a great part of the literature of France, Germany, England, Italy, Norway, Sweden and Russia. Note, for example, the influence of this spirit on Gabriele d'Annunzio. To all that was tragic in Nietzsche's life was added this--that, after thirsting for recognition to the point of morbidity, he attained it in an altogether fantastic degree when, though still living, he was shut out from life. But certain it is that in the decade 1890-1900 no one engaged and impressed the minds of his contemporaries as did this son of a North German clergyman, who tried so hard to be taken for a Polish nobleman, and whose pride it was that his works were conceived in French, though written in German. The little weaknesses of his character were forgotten in the grandeur of the style he imparted to his life and his production.