Ecce Homo Complete Works, Volume Seventeen · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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It was Heinrich Heine who gave me the most perfect idea of what a lyrical poet could be. In vain do I search through all the kingdoms of antiquity or of modern times for anything to resemble his sweet and passionate music. He possessed that divine wickedness, without which perfection itself becomes unthinkable to me,--I estimate the value of men, of races, according to the extent to which they are unable to conceive of a god who has not a dash of the satyr in him. And with what mastery he wields his native tongue! One day it will be said of Heine and me that we were by far the greatest artists of the German language that have ever existed, and that we left all the efforts that mere Germans made in this language an incalculable distance behind us. I must be profoundly related to Byron's _Manfred:_ of all the dark abysses in this work I found the counterparts in my own soul--at the age of thirteen I was ripe for this book. Words fail me, I have only a look, for those who dare to utter the name of _Faust_ in the presence of _Manfred._ The Germans are _incapable_ of conceiving anything sublime: for a proof of this, look at Schumann!
Out of anger for this mawkish Saxon, I once deliberately composed a counter-overture to _Manfred,_ of which Hans von Bülow declared he had never seen the like before on paper: such compositions amounted to a violation of Euterpe. When I cast about me for my highest formula of Shakespeare, I find invariably but this one: that he conceived the type of Cæsar. Such things a man cannot guess--he either is the thing, or he is not. The great poet draws his creations only from out of his own reality. This is so to such an extent, that often after a lapse of time he can no longer endure his own work.... After casting a glance between the pages of my _Zarathustra,_ I pace my room to and fro for half an hour at a time, unable to overcome an insufferable fit of tears. I know of no more heartrending reading than Shakespeare: how a man must have suffered to be so much in need of playing the clown! Is Hamlet _understood_? It is not doubt, but certitude that drives one mad.... But in order to feel this, one must be profound, one must be an abyss, a philosopher.... We all fear the truth....
And, to make a confession; I feel instinctively certain and convinced that Lord Bacon is the originator, the self-torturer, of this most sinister kind of literature: what do I care about the miserable gabble of American muddlers and blockheads? But the power for the greatest realism in vision is not only compatible with the greatest realism in deeds, with the monstrous in deeds, with crime--_it actually presupposes the latter._ ... We do not know half enough about Lord Bacon--the first realist in all the highest acceptation of this word--to be sure of everything he did, everything he willed, and everything he experienced in his inmost soul.... Let the critics go to hell! Suppose I had christened my _Zarathustra_ with a name not my own,--let us say with Richard Wagner's name,--the acumen of two thousand years would not have sufficed to guess that the author of _Human, all-too-Human_ was the visionary of _Zarathustra._
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.