In his deepest instincts Nietzsche is now, as he asserts, so foreign to everything German, that the mere presence of a German "retards his digestion." German intellect is to him indigestion; it can never be finished with anything. If he has been so enthusiastic in his devotion to Wagner, if he still regards his intimate relationship with Wagner as the most profound refreshment of his life, this was because in Wagner he honoured the foreigner, because in him he saw the incarnate protest against all German virtues. In his book, _The Case of Wagner_, he had already hinted that Richard Wagner, the glory of German nationalism, was of Jewish descent, since his real father seems to have been the step-father, Geyer. I could not have survived my youth without Wagner, he says; I was condemned to the society of Germans and had to take a counter-poison; Wagner was the counter-poison. Here, by way of exception, he generalises his feeling. We who were children in the 'fifties, he says, necessarily became pessimists in regard to the concept "German." We cannot be anything else than revolutionaries. And he explains this expression thus: We can assent to no state of affairs which allows the canting bigot to be at the top. (Höffding's protest against the use of the word "radicalism" applied to Nietzsche, in _Moderne Filosofer_, is thus beside the mark.) Wagner was a revolutionary; he fled from the Germans. And, Nietzsche adds, as an artist, a man has no other home than Paris--the city which, strangely enough, he was never, to see. He ranks Wagner among the later masters of French romanticism--Delacroix, Berlioz, Baudelaire--and wisely says nothing about the reception of Wagnerian opera in Paris under the Empire. In everything Nietzsche now adopts the French stand-point--the old and narrow French standpoint--that, for instance, of the elderly Voltaire towards Shakespeare. He declares here, as he has done before, that his artist's taste defends Molière, Corneille and Racine, not without bitterness (_nicht ohne Ingrimm_) against such a wild (_wüstes_) genius as Shakespeare. Strangely enough he repeats here his estimate of Shakespeare's Cæsar as his finest creation, weak as it is: "My highest formula for Shakespeare is that he conceived the type of Cæsar." It must be added that here again Nietzsche assents to the unhappy delusion that Shakespeare never wrote the works that bear his name. Nietzsche is "instinctively" certain that they are due to Bacon, and, ignoring repeated demonstrations of the impossibility of this fatuous notion, he supports his conjecture by the grotesque assertion that if he himself had christened his Zarathustra by a name not his own--by Wagner's, for instance--the acumen of two thousand years would not have sufficed to guess who was its originator; no one would have believed it possible that the author of _Human, all-too-Human_ had conceived the visions of Zarathustra.