Dear friend,
It was a delightful surprise to see your handwriting after so long a time. And yet, my first feeling was one of concern; in fact, you cause me more anxiety than pleasure at present, and this is saying a great deal, as I know of no one in whom I take greater delight than I do in you. And so the first and most important thing I have to say to you today is to acquaint you with my solicitude, and it is best that I begin at once to relieve my mind on this subject.
Did your physician really give you permission to write such a long and closely written letter? As for me, I shall take great pains to write as far apart as possible, contrary to my customary manner, and in this way to justify myself for writing at all. If I have refrained from doing this for a long time, it has been with a mournful determination, as, despite Gersdorff's willing intervention, I was vain enough to believe that you would wish to read my letter yourself, and feared that this would prove injurious to you.
And yet I am doing this very thing, notwithstanding the fact that I have very little faith in the concessions made by your physician, as I know from my own experience just how much confidence is to be placed in these gentlemen. My doctor has assured me, again and again, that I am an indestructibly sound person, despite the wretched complaints by which I am plagued day and night. All of these he laughingly dismisses as being the quite customary "maladies of genius."
Now God grant that your medicus is of a somewhat less optimistic temperament, and that he may be in the right.
But one thing was left out of this diagnosis of the "maladies of genius," and this is the thing, above all others, which causes me the most acute distress. Namely: an incorrigible aversion to expressing myself, particularly in writing (on the other hand, this could be of great advantage to your poor eyes). Since the third of May I have again been hard at work on the instrumentation of my Götterdämmerung, and how far do you think that I have progressed? That day on which I finish one page of the score deserves to be written down in red ink in the calendar of my life. Scarcely have I seated myself at my work when "letters" arrive or other delightful news, necessitating renewed ingenuity on my part for my intercourse with the world, and then my poor "genial" fantasy takes flight. And now you come with your "Strauss," and, worse than that, Overbeck with his "Christianity" to be imprinted upon "Theology."
This is enough to set a man crazy; in fact I am reminded of the Icelandic skald Egil, of whom I once told you, if I am not mistaken. Upon returning home from a very fatiguing journey, he found that one of his friends had left a magnificent shield in his house. Enraged at the discovery, he cried: "He has just hung this here in order to force me to write a poem upon it. Has he been gone very long? I will hasten after him and strike him dead." But he was unable to overtake him, so, greatly vexed, he turned back to his own house, took another good look at the shield and—wrote a poem upon it!
The moral is that Herr Overbeck must come himself if he wishes to have his poem. As far as you are concerned, I repeat the conceit which I recently expressed to my family, namely, that I foresee the time when I shall be obliged to defend your book against you yourself. I have been reading it again, and I swear to you by God that I consider you the only person who knows what I am driving at.
All the rest belongs in the chapter of "style," about which, as you know, I am incompetent of judging, as I bristle up every time the word "style" is mentioned, to your great vexation.
Joyful Wiedersehen on October 31 (Feast of the Reformation) and all other good wishes.
A thousand heartfelt greetings.
Source: The Nietzsche-Wagner Correspondence, ed. Elizabeth Foerster-Nietzsche, trans. Caroline V. Kerr (Boni and Liveright, 1921), No. 41