Nietzsche had the true ascetic's temperament. He lived the life of a strenuous saint, and his Beyond Good and Evil might land us in a barren desert, where austerity would rule our daily conduct. To become a Superman one must renounce the world. It was the easy-going, down-at-the-heel morality of the world, its carrying water on both shoulders, that stirred the wrath of this earnest man of blameless life and provoked from him so much brilliant and fascinating prose. He wrote a swift, golden German. He was a stylist. The great culture hero of his day, nourished on Latin and Greek, he waged war against the moral ideas of his generation and ruined his intellect in the unequal conflict. He turned on himself and rended his soul into shreds rather than join in the affirmations of recognised faith. Yet what eloquent, touching pages he has devoted to the founder of the Christian religion. His last signature in the letter to Brandes reveals the preoccupation of his memory with the religion he despised. Nietzsche made the great renunciation of inherited faith and committed spiritual suicide. Libraries are filled with the works of his commentators, eager to make of him what he was not. He has been shamelessly exploited. He has been called the forerunner of Pragmatism. He was a poet, an artist, who saw life as a gorgeously spun dream, not as a dreary phalanstery. He belonged rather to Goethe and Faust than to Schopenhauer or the positivists. Hellenism was his first and last love. The correspondence between Nietzsche and his famulus, the musician Peter Gast--whose real name is Heinrich Kôselitz--from 1876 to 1889, appeared last autumn and comprises 278 letters. Another Nietzsche appears--gentle, suffering, as usual still hopeful. He loves Italy; at the end, Turin is his favourite city. There is little except in the final communication to show a mind cracking asunder. No doubt this correspondence was given to the world as an offset to the Overbeck-Bernouilli letters.