Perhaps this is my best answer to your question about my problem of pity. Besides which, there are excellent reasons for gaining admission to "me" by this particular secret door; provided that one crosses the threshold with your eyes and ears. Your essay on Zola reminded me once more, like everything I have met with of yours (the last was an essay in the Goethe Year-book), in the most agreeable way of your natural tendency towards every kind of psychological optics. When working out the most difficult mathematical problems of the _âme moderne_ you are as much in your element as a German scholar in such case is apt to be out of his. Or do you perhaps think more favourably of present-day Germans? It seems to me that they become year by year more clumsy and rectangular _in rebus psychologicis_ (in direct contrast to the Parisians, with whom everything is becoming _nuance_ and mosaic), so that all events below the surface escape their notice. For example, my _Beyond Good and Evil_--what an awkward position it has put them in! Not one intelligent word has reached me about this book, let alone an intelligent sentiment. I do not believe even the most well-disposed of my readers has discovered that he has here to deal with the logical results of a perfectly definite philosophical _sensibility_, and not with a medley of a hundred promiscuous paradoxes and heterodoxies. Nothing of the kind has been "experienced"; my readers do not bring to it a thousandth part of the passion and suffering that is needed. An "immoralist!" This does not suggest anything to them. By the way, the Goncourts in one of their prefaces claim to have invented the phrase _document humain_. But for all that M. Taine may well be its real originator. You are right in what you say about "haranguing an earthquake "; but such Quixotism is among the most honourable things on this earth. With the greatest respect, Yours, NIETZSCHE. 5. BRANDES to NIETZSCHE. _Copenhagen_, Jan. 11, 1888. MY DEAR SIR, Your publisher has apparently forgotten to send me your books, but I have to-day received your letter with thanks. I take the liberty of sending you herewith one of my books in proof (because unfortunately I have no other copy at hand), a collection of essays intended for _export_, therefore not my best wares. They date from various times and are all too polite, too laudatory, too idealistic in tone. I never really say all I think in them. The paper on Ibsen is no doubt the best, but the translation of the verses, which I had done for me, is unfortunately wretched.