_Friedrich Nietzsche_, by George Brandes, recently published by the Macmillan company, adds little new to the vast interpretative literature on the creator of Zarathustra. The book contains a moderate essay on Aristocratic Radicalism, written in 1889, a necrolog, a brief note on _Ecce Homo_, and a few letters interchanged between the philosopher and the critic. In the last twenty-five years life and literature (perhaps I ought to say art in general) have been so profoundly influenced by Nietzschean views that the source of those views has ceased to be discernable. From Gorky's _Bosyaki_ and the types of D'Annunzio down to the Manifestoes of the Futurists, the aphorisms and paradoxes of Nietzsche have been sounded and resounded on various scales, and the slogan of Transvaluation of Values has been echoed and re-echoed from the college platform, from the pulpit, from the soap-box, from the stage, even from the cabaret and music-halls (the _Ueberbrettl'_ movement in central Europe). Perhaps the American public has been too "busy" to be touched by that hurricane, so that it was left to Dr. Foster to appear in our day and proclaim with prophetic fervor and pathos the "new" Decalogue; but then our neophytes will hardly find adequate Dr. Brandes' Essay written in 1889, when Nietzsche was practically unknown. Yet this belated book in its somewhat belated English translation contains an invaluable feature--the correspondence between Nietzsche and Brandes. "The letters he sent me in that last year of his conscious life" says the famous critic, "appear to me to be of no little psychological and biographical interest." Indeed so, and what is more, they reveal a bit of the reserved personality of Brandes and provoke the reader to venture a comparison between the correspondents. From the very first we mark the distinct characteristics of the Priest and the Prophet. The careful, correct, and clear interpreter, and the bewildering, cascading revaluator of life, or, to use Ben-Zakkay's metaphor, the plastered well that does not lose a drop, and the powerful spring ever shooting forth new streams; the earnest professor offering practical suggestions, telling of the book-binder, of the copyright business, and of the big audiences at his lectures, and the seething, "three parts blind" sufferer who swings his imagination on revolutionizing Europe, bringing "the whole world into convulsions." The difference in the style of writing is also characteristic. As against Brandes' "free and graceful French way in which he handles the language," Nietzsche thus explains his "difficult position."