V. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE…

V. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

AS in Ibsen ego-mania has found its poet, so in Nietzsche it has found its philosopher. The deification of filth by the Parnassians with ink, paint, and clay; the censing among the Diabolists and Decadents of licentiousness, disease, and corruption; the glorification, by Ibsen, of the person who ‘wills,’ is ‘free’ and ‘wholly himself’--of all this Nietzsche supplies the theory, or something which proclaims itself as such. We may remark, in passing, that this has ever been the task of philosophy. It plays in the race the same rôle as consciousness in the individual. Consciousness has the thankless task of discovering rational and elucidatory grounds for the explanation of the impulses and acts springing up in subconsciousness. In the same way philosophy endeavours to find formulæ of apparent profundity for the peculiarities of feeling, thought and deed, having their roots in the history of politics and civilization--in climatic and economic conditions--and to fit them with a sort of uniform of logic. The race lives on, conformably with the historical necessity of its evolution, not troubling itself about a theory of its peculiarities; and philosophy hobbles busily after it, gathers with more or less regularity into its album the scattered features of racial character, and the manifestations of its health and disease; methodically provides this album with a title, paging, and full stop, then places it with a contented air in the library, among the systems of the same regulation size. Genuine truths, real, apposite explanations--these are not contained in philosophical systems. But they furnish instructive evidence of the efforts of the racial consciousness to supply reason, skilfully or clumsily, with the excuses it demands for the unconscious impulses of the race during a given period of time.

From the first to the last page of Nietzsche’s writings the careful reader seems to hear a madman, with flashing eyes, wild gestures, and foaming mouth, spouting forth deafening bombast; and through it all, now breaking out into frenzied laughter, now sputtering expressions of filthy abuse and invective, now skipping about in a giddily agile dance, and now bursting upon the auditors with threatening mien and clenched fists. So far as any meaning at all can be extracted from the endless stream of phrases, it shows, as its fundamental elements, a series of constantly reiterated delirious ideas, having their source in illusions of sense and diseased organic processes, which will be pointed out in the course of this chapter. Here and there emerges a distinct idea, which, as is always the case with the insane, assumes the form of an imperious assertion, a sort of despotic command. Nietzsche never tries to argue. If the thought of the possibility of an objection arises in his mind, he treats it lightly, or sneers at it, or curtly and rudely decrees, ‘That is false!’ (‘How much more rational is that ... theory, for example, represented by Herbert Spencer!... According to this theory, good is that which has hitherto always proved itself to be useful, so that it may be estimated as valuable in the highest degree, as valuable in itself. Although this mode of explanation is also false, the explanation itself is at least rational and psychologically tenable.’--Zur Genealogie der Moral, 2 Aufl., p. 5. ‘This mode of explanation is also false.’ Full-stop! Why is it false? Wherein is it false? Because Nietzsche so orders it. The reader has no right to inquire further.) For that matter, he himself contradicts almost every one of his violently dictatorial dogmas. He first asserts something and then its opposite, and both with equal vehemence, most frequently in the same book, often on the same page. Now and then he becomes conscious of the self-contradiction, and then he pretends to have been amusing himself and making sport of the reader. (‘It is difficult to be understood, especially when one thinks and lives gangasrotogati, among plain men who think and live otherwise--in other words, kromagati, or under the most favourable circumstances, among mandeigati, who “have the frog’s mode of progression”--I just do all I can to make myself hard to understand.... But with regard to the “good friends” ... it is well to accord them in advance room for the play and exercise of misconception; in this way one has still something to laugh at--or wholly to abolish these good friends--and still laugh!’--Jenseits von Gut und Böse, 2 Aufl., p. 38. Similarly on p. 51: ‘All that is profound loves the mask; the most profound things even hate imagery and parable. Should not contrast rather be the right disguise in which the shamefacedness of a god might walk abroad?’)

The nature of the individual dogmatic assertions is very characteristic. First of all it is essential to become habituated to Nietzsche’s style. This is, I admit, unnecessary for the alienist. To him this sort of style is well known and familiar. He frequently reads writings (it is true, as a rule, unprinted) of a similar order of thought and diction, and he reads them, not for his pleasure, but that he may prescribe the confinement of the author in an asylum. The unprofessional reader, on the contrary, is easily confused by the tumult of phrases. Once, however, he has found his way, once he has acquired some practice in discerning the actual theme among the drums-and-fifes of this ear-splitting, merry-go-round music, and, in the hailstorm of rattling words, that render clear vision almost impossible, has learned to perceive the fundamental thought, he at once observes that Nietzsche’s assertions are either commonplaces, tricked out like Indian caciques with feather-crown, nose-ring, and tattooing (and of so mean a kind that a high-school girl would be ashamed to make use of them in a composition-exercise); or bellowing insanity, rambling far beyond the range of rational examination and refutation. I will give only one or two examples of each kind among the thousands that exist:

Also sprach Zarathustra[371] (‘Thus spake Zoroaster’), 3 Theil, p. 9: ‘We halted just by a gateway. “See this gateway, dwarf”--I said again--“it has two faces. Two roads meet here; no one has yet travelled to their end. This long road behind--it lasts an eternity. And that long road in front--that is another eternity. They contradict each other, these roads; they offend each other; and it is here at this gateway that they meet. The name of the gateway is inscribed above, “Now.” But if one continues to follow one of them further, and ever further, and ever further, believest thou, dwarf, that these roads eternally contradict each other?”’

Blow away the lather from these phrases. What do they really say? The fleeting instant of the present is the point of contact of the past and the future. Can one call this self-evident fact a thought?

Also sprach Zarathustra, 4 Theil, p. 124 ff.: ‘The world is deep, and deeper than the day thinks it. Forbear! forbear! I am too pure for thee. Disturb me not! Has my world not become exactly perfect? My flesh is too pure for thy hands. Forbear, thou dull doltish and obtuse day! Is not the midnight clearer? The purest are to be lords of earth, the most unknown, the strongest, the souls of midnight, who are clearer and deeper than each day.... My sorrow, my happiness, are deep, thou strange day; but yet am I no God, no Hell of God: deep is their woe. God’s woe is deeper, thou strange World! Grasp at God’s woe, not at me! What am I! A drunken sweet lyre--a lyre of midnight, a singing frog, understood by none, but who must speak before the deaf, O higher men! For ye understand me not! Hence! hence! O youth! O mid-day! O midnight! Now came evening and night and midnight.... Ah! ah! how it sighs! how it laughs, how it rattles and gasps, the midnight! How soberly even she speaks, this poetess! Without doubt she has overdrunk her drunkenness! She became too wide awake! She chews the cud! She chews the cud of her woe in dream, the old deep midnight, and still more her joy. For joy, if woe be already deep: joy is deeper still than heart-pain.... Woe says, “Away! get thee gone, woe!... But joy wishes for a second coming, wishes all to be eternally like itself. Woe says, “Break, bleed, O heart! Wander, limb! Wing, fly! Onward! Upward! Pain!” Well, then! Cheer up! Oh, my old heart! Woe says, “Away!” Ye higher men ... should ye ever wish for one time twice, should ye ever say, “Thou pleasest me, happiness! Quick! instant! then would ye wish all back again! All anew, all eternally, all enchained, bound, amorous. Oh! then loved ye the world; ye eternities love it eternally and always; and to woe also speak ye: hence, but return! For all pleasure wishes--eternity. All pleasure wishes for the eternity of all things, wishes for honey, for the lees, wishes for drunken midnight, tombs, the consolation of the tears of tombs, gilded twilight--what does pleasure not wish for! She is thirstier, heartier, hungrier, more terrible, more secret than all woe; she wishes for herself, she gnaws into herself, the will of the ring struggles in her.... Pleasure wishes for the eternity of all things, wishes for deep, deep eternity!’

And the sense of this crazy shower of whirling words? It is that men wish pain to cease and joy to endure! This the astounding discovery expounded by Nietzsche in this demented raving.

The following are obviously insane assertions or expressions:

Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 59: ‘What is life? Life--it is the ceaseless rejection from itself of something wishing to die. Life--it is the being cruel and pitiless towards all in us that is weak and old, and not in us alone.’

Persons capable of thought have hitherto always believed that life is the unceasing reception into itself of something agreeable; the rejection of what is used up is only an accompanying phenomenon of the reception of new material. Nietzsche’s phrase expresses in a highly mysterious Pythian form the idea of the matutinal visit to a certain place. Healthy men connect with the conception of life the idea rather of the dining-room than that of the privy.

Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 92: ‘It is a delicacy that God learned Greek when He wished to become an author--and that He did not learn it better.’ P. 95: ‘Advice in the form of an enigma. If the cord is not to snap ... thou must first bite on it.’

I have no explanation or interpretation of this profundity to offer.

The passages quoted will have given the reader an idea of Nietzsche’s literary style. In the dozen volumes, thick or thin, which he has published it is always the same. His books bear various titles, for the most part characteristically crack-brained, but they all amount to one single book. They can be changed by mistake in reading, and the fact will not be noticed. They are a succession of disconnected sallies, prose and doggerel mixed, without beginning or ending. Rarely is a thought developed to any extent; rarely are a few consecutive pages connected by any unity of purpose or logical argument. Nietzsche evidently had the habit of throwing on paper with feverish haste all that passed through his head, and when he had collected a heap of snippings he sent them to the printer, and there was a book. These sweepings of ideas he himself proudly terms ‘aphorisms,’ and the very incoherence of his language is regarded by his admirers as a special merit.[372] When Nietzsche’s moral system is spoken of, it must not be imagined that he has anywhere developed one. Through all his books, from the first to the last, there are scattered only views on moral problems, and on the relation of man to the species and to the universe, from which, taken together, there may be discerned something like a fundamental conception. This is what has been called Nietzsche’s philosophy. His disciples, e.g., Kaatz, already cited, and, in addition, Zerbst,[373] Schellwien,[374] and others, have attempted to give this pretended philosophy a certain form and unity by fishing out from Nietzsche’s books a number of passages in some measure agreeing with each other, and placing them in juxtaposition. It is true that it would be possible in this way to set up a philosophy of Nietzsche exactly opposed to the one accepted by his disciples. For, as has been said, each one of Nietzsche’s assertions is contradicted by himself in some place or other, and if it be resolved, with barefaced dishonesty, to pay regard to dicta of a definite kind only, and to pass over those in opposition to them, it would be possible at pleasure to extract from Nietzsche a philosophical view or its sheer opposite.

Nietzsche’s doctrine, promulgated as orthodox by his disciples, criticises the foundations of ethics, investigates the genesis of the concept of good and evil, examines the value of that which is called virtue and vice, both for the individual and for society, explains the origin of conscience, and seeks to give an idea of the end of the evolution of the race, and, consequently, of man’s ideal--the ‘over man’ (Uebermensch). I desire to condense these doctrines as closely as possible, and, for the most part, in Nietzsche’s own words, but without the cackle of his mazy digressions or useless phrases.

The morality now prevailing ‘gilds, deifies, transports beyond the tomb, the non-egoistical instincts of compassion, self-denial, and self-sacrifice.’ But this morality of compassion ‘is humanity’s great danger, the beginning of the end, the halting, the backward-glancing fatigue of the will, turning against life.’ ‘We need a criticism of moral values. The value of these values is first of all itself to be put in question. There has hitherto been no hesitation in setting up good as of higher value than evil, of higher value in the sense of advancement, utility, prosperity, as regards man in general, including the future of man. What if truth lay in the contrary? What if good were a symptom of retrogression, a danger, a seduction, a poison, a narcotic, by means of which the present should live at the cost of the future? Perhaps more comfortably, less dangerously, but also on a smaller scale, more basely? So that precisely morality would be to blame for the fact that the highest might and splendour possible to the human type should never be attained? So that morality should be precisely the danger of dangers?’

Nietzsche replies to these questions thrown out by him in the preface to the book Zur Genealogie der Moral, in developing his idea of the genesis of present morality.

He sees at the beginnings of civilization ‘a beast of prey, a magnificent blond brute, ranging about and lusting for booty and victory.’ These ‘unchained beasts of prey were free from every social restraint; in the innocence of their wild-beast conscience they returned as exultant monsters from a horrible train of murder, incendiarism, rapine, torture, with an arrogance and composure as if nothing but a student’s freak had been perpetrated.’ The blond beasts constituted the noble races. They fell upon the less noble races, conquered them, and made slaves of them. ‘A herd of blond beasts of prey, a race of conquerors and masters, with military organization’ (this word ‘organization’ should be noticed; we shall have to revert to it), ‘with the power to organize, unscrupulously placing their fearful paws upon a population perhaps vastly superior in numbers, but still amorphous and wandering--this herd founded the State. The dream is dispelled which made the State begin with a contract. What has he to do with contracts, who can command, who is master by nature, who comes on the scene with violence in deed and demeanour?’

In the State, then, thus established there were a race of masters and a race of slaves. The master-race first created moral ideas. It distinguished between good and evil. Good was with it synonymous with noble; evil with vulgar. All their own qualities they felt as good; those of the subject race as evil. Good meant severity, cruelty, pride, courage, contempt of danger, joy in risk, extreme unscrupulousness. Bad meant ‘the coward, the nervous, the mean, the narrow utilitarian, and also the distrustful with his disingenuous glance, the self-abasing, the human hound who allows himself to be abused, the begging flatterer--above all, the liar.’ Such is the morality of the masters. The radical meaning of the words now expressing the concept ‘good’ reveals what men represented to themselves as ‘good’ when the moral of the masters still held sway. ‘The Latin bonus I believe I may venture to interpret as “the warrior.” Provided I rightly trace bonus to a more ancient duonus (compare bellum, duellum, duen-lum, in which it seems to me that duonus is contained). Bonus, then, as a man of discord, of disunion (duo), as warrior: whereby it is seen what in ancient Rome constituted the “goodness” of a man.’

The subjugated race had naturally an opposing morality--the morality of the slaves. ‘The slave looks with envy on the virtues of the powerful; he is sceptical and distrustful; he has the cunning of distrust towards everything honoured by them as “good.” Conversely, those qualities were distinguished and glorified which served to ameliorate the existence of sufferers. Here the place of honour is given to compassion, to the complaisant hand ready to help, to the warm heart, to patience, diligence, humility, friendliness, for those are here the most useful qualities, and almost the only means by which the burden of existence can be borne. Slave-morality is essentially utilitarian morality.’

For a certain period the morality of masters and slaves subsisted side by side, or, more accurately, the one above the other. Then an extraordinary event occurred--slave-morality rebelled against master-morality, conquered and dethroned it, and set itself in the place thereof. Then ensued a new valuation of all moral concepts. (In his insane gibberish Nietzsche names this ‘transvaluation of values’--Umwerthung der Werthe.) That which, under the master-morals, had passed for good was now esteemed bad, and vice versâ. Weakness was meritorious, cruelty a crime; self-sacrifice, pity for the pain of others, unselfishness, were virtues. That is what Nietzsche terms ‘the slave revolt in morality.’ ‘The Jews have brought about that marvel of inversion in values. Their prophets have melted into one substance “rich,” “godless,” “wicked,” “violent,” “sensual,” and for the first time minted the word “world” as one of opprobrium. In this inversion of values (to which belongs the use of the word “poor” as a synonym of “holy” and “friend”) lies the importance of the Jewish race.’

The Jewish ‘slave-revolt in morality’ was an act of vengeance on the master-race which had long oppressed the Jews, and the instrument of this vast vengeance was the Saviour. ‘Has not Israel, by the very subterfuge of this “Redeemer,” this seeming adversary and destroyer of Israel, attained the final goal of its sublime rage for vengeance? Does it not belong to the secret black art of a truly grand policy of vengeance, of a far-seeing, underground, slowly-gripping, foreplanning vengeance, that Israel itself should deny the proper instrument of its vengeance before the whole world, as something deadly inimical, and nail him to the cross, in order that the “entire universe,” viz., the enemies of Israel, might unhesitatingly bite at this very bait? And on the other hand, would it be possible, by all the refinement of intellect, to imagine a more dangerous bait? Something that should resemble in enticing, intoxicating, bewildering, corrupting power that symbol of the “holy cross,” that awful paradox of a “God on the cross,” that mystery of an ineffable final and utmost cruelty, and self-crucifixion of God for the salvation of man? It is at least certain that sub hoc signo Israel, with its vengeance and transvaluation of all values, has hitherto triumphed again and again over all other ideals, over all nobler ideals.’

To this passage I would most specially direct the reader’s attention, and beg him to transform into mental images all that jingle and clatter of words. Well, then, Israel wished to revenge itself on all the world, and therefore decided to nail the Saviour to the cross, and thereby create a new morality. Who was this Israel which conceived and executed the plan? Was it a parliament, a ministry, a ruler, a popular assembly? Was the plan, before ‘Israel’ set about realizing it, submitted for general deliberation and resolution? Before the total insanity of this string of words can be distinctly seen, an effort must be made to bring clearly to the mind, in all its actual details, the event described by Nietzsche as premeditated, intended, and of conscious purpose.

Since the Jewish slave-revolt in morality, life, till then a delight, at least for the powerful and bold, or the nobles and masters, has become a torment. Since that revolt the unnatural holds sway, under which man is becoming dwarfed, enfeebled, vulgarized, and gradually degenerate. For the fundamental instinct of the healthy man is not unselfishness and pity, but selfishness and cruelty. ‘No injury, violence, exploitation, annihilation, can in itself be a “wrong,” inasmuch as life operates essentially--i.e., in its fundamental functions--by injuring, violating, exploiting, annihilating, and is absolutely inconceivable without this character. A legal regulation ... would be a principle hostile to existence, a destroyer and dissolver of man, a mark of lassitude, a crime against the future of man, a secret way to nothingness.’ ‘There is at present universal enthusiasm, even in scientific disguises, concerning coming conditions of society in which the exploiting character is to disappear. That sounds in my ears as if someone should promise to invent a life which should abstain from all organic functions. Exploitation does not belong to a decayed, imperfect, or primitive society: it belongs to the essence of living things, as organic function.’[375]

Thus the fundamental instinct of man is cruelty. For this, in the new slave-morality, there is no place. A fundamental instinct, however, is not to be uprooted. It still lives and demands its rights. Hence a series of diversions have been sought for it. ‘All instincts, not discharged outwardly, turn inwards. Those terrible bulwarks with which political organization protected itself against the ancient instincts of freedom--and punishments belong to the front line of these bulwarks--had for their result, that all those instincts of the savage roaming at large were turned backwards and against man. Animosity, cruelty, the joy of pursuit, of sudden assault, of change, of destruction--all that turns itself against the possessors of such instincts is the origin of a “bad conscience.” The man who, from the absence of external foes and opposition, forced into the oppressive constriction and regularity of custom, impatiently tore himself, persecuted, gnawed, hunted, maltreated himself--this animal which it is sought to “tame,” wounding himself against the bars of his cage; this destitute creature, consumed with homesickness for the desert, who had to create his adventures, his places of torture, his insecure and dangerous wildernesses, out of his own self--this fool, this yearning, despairing prisoner, became the inventor of the evil conscience.’ ‘That inclination to self-torture, that retreating cruelty, of the human brute, forced into inner life, scared back into himself, he who had invented evil conscience that he might torture himself, after the natural outlet of this wish to inflict pain was stopped up,’ formed also the concept of guilt and sin. ‘We are the inheritors of the vivisection of conscience and of animal self-torture of thousands of years.’ But all administration of justice, the punishment of ‘so-called’ criminals, the greater part of art, especially tragedy, are also disguises in which primitive cruelty can still manifest itself.

Slave-morality, with its ‘ascetic ideal’ of self-suppression and contempt of life, and its tormenting invention of conscience, allowed the slaves, it is true, to take vengeance on their masters; it also subjugated the mighty man-beasts of prey and created better conditions of existence for the small and weak, for the rabble, the gregarious animals; but it has been pernicious to humanity as a whole, because it has prevented the free evolution of precisely the highest human type. ‘The collective degeneration of man to that which, in the eyes of socialistic ninnies and blockheads of the present day, seems their “man of the future”--their ideal!--this degeneration and dwarfing of man to the perfect herd animal (or, as they say, to the man of “free society”), this brutalizing of man to the animal pigmy of equal rights and pretensions,’ is the destructive work of slave-morality. In order to discipline humanity to supreme splendour we must revert to nature, to the morality of the masters, to the unchaining of cruelty. ‘The well-being of the most and the well-being of the fewest are contrary standpoints of valuation; we will leave it to the simplicity of English biologists to hold that the first as such is undoubtedly of the higher value.’ ‘In opposition to the lying watchword of the privilege of the majority, in opposition to the desire for abasement, humiliation, levelling, for the downward and duskward of man,’ we must sound forth ‘the watchword of the privilege of the minority.’ ‘As a last indicator of the other way appeared Napoleon, man most unique, and latest born of all time, and in him the incarnate problem of the aristocratic ideal as such,--Napoleon, that synthesis of the inhuman and the superhuman (Unmensch und Uebermensch).’

The intellectually free man must stand ‘beyond good and evil’; these concepts do not exist for him; he tests his impulses and deeds by their value for himself, not by that which they have for others, for the herd; he does that which causes him pleasure, even when, and especially when, it torments and injures--nay, annihilates others; for him holds good the secret rule of life of the ancient Assassins of the Lebanon: ‘Nothing is true, all is permissible.’ With this new morality, humanity will finally be able to produce the ‘over-man.’ ‘Thus we find, as the ripest fruit on its tree, the sovereign individual, resembling himself alone, freed again from the morality of custom, the autonomous super-moral individual (for “autonomous” and “moral” are mutually exclusive)--in short, the man of his own, independent, long will.’ In Zarathustra the same thought is expressed dithyrambically: ‘“Man is wicked,” so spake to me in consolation all the wisest. Ah, if only it is yet true to-day! For wickedness is man’s best strength. Man must become better and more wicked, so I teach. The greatest wickedness is necessary to the best of the over-man. It might be good for that preacher of little people that he suffered and bore the sins of man. But I rejoice in great sins as my great consolation.’

This is Nietzsche’s moral philosophy which (disregarding contradictions) is deduced from separate concordant passages in his various books (in particular Menschliches Allzumenschliches, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, and Zur Genealogie der Moral). I will take it for a moment and subject it to criticism, before confronting it with Nietzsche’s own assertions diametrically opposed to it.

Firstly, the anthropological assertion. Man is supposed to have been a freely roaming solitary beast of prey, whose primordial instinct was egoism and the absence of any consideration for his congeners. This assertion contradicts all that we know concerning the beginnings of humanity. The Kjökkenmöddinge, or kitchen-middens, of quaternary man, discovered and investigated by Steenstrup, have in some places a thickness of three metres, and must have been formed by a very numerous horde. The piles of horses’ bones at Solutré are so enormous as quite to preclude the idea that a single hunter, or even any but a very large body of allied hunters, could have collected and killed such a large number of horses in one place. As far as our view penetrates into prehistoric time, every discovery shows us primitive man as a gregarious animal, who could not possibly have maintained himself if he had not possessed the instincts which are presupposed in life in a community, viz., sympathy, the feeling of solidarity and a certain degree of unselfishness. We find these instincts already existent in apes; and if, in those most like human beings, the ourang-outang and gibbon, these instincts fail to appear, it is to many investigators a sufficient proof that these animals are degenerating and dying out. Hence it is not true that at any time man was a ‘solitary, roving brute.’

Now with regard to the historical assertion. At first the morality of masters is supposed to have prevailed, in which every selfish act of violence seemed good, every sort of unselfishness bad. The inverted valuation of deeds and feelings is said to have been the work of a slave-revolt. The Jews are said to have discovered ‘ascetic morality,’ i.e., the ideal of combating all desires, contempt of all pleasures of the flesh, pity, and brotherly love, in order to avenge themselves on their oppressors, the masters--the ‘blond beasts of prey.’ I have shown above, the insanity of this idea of a conscious and purposed act of vengeance on the part of the Jewish people. But is it, then, true that our present morality, with its conceptions of good and evil, is an invention of the Jews, directed against ‘blond beasts,’ an enterprise of slaves against a master-people? The leading doctrines of the present morality, falsely termed Christian, were expressed in Buddhism six hundred years prior to the rise of Christianity. Buddha preached them, himself no slave, but a king’s son, and they were the moral doctrines, not of slaves, not of the oppressed, but of the very masterfolk themselves, of the Brahmans, of the proper Aryans. The following are some of the Buddhist moral doctrines, extracted from the Hindu Dhammapada[376] and from the Chinese Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king:[377] ‘Do not speak harshly to anybody’ (Dhammapada, verse 133). ‘Let us live happily then, not hating those who hate us! Among men who hate us let us dwell free from hatred’ (verse 197). ‘Because he has pity on all living creatures, therefore is a man called Ariya’ (elect) (verse 270). ‘Be not thoughtless, watch your thoughts!’ (verse 327). ‘Good is restraint in all things’ (verse 361). ‘Him I call indeed a Brâhmana who, though he has committed no offence, endures reproach, bonds, and stripes’ (verse 399). ‘Be kind to all that lives’ (Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king, verse 2,024). ‘Conquer your foe by force, you increase his enmity; conquer by love, and you will reap no after-sorrow’ (verse 2,241). Is that a morality of slaves or of masters? Is it a notion of roving beasts of prey, or that of compassionate, unselfish, social human beings? And this notion did not spring up in Palestine, but in India, among the very people of the conquering Aryans, who were ruling a subordinate race; and in China, where at that time no conquering race held another in subjection. Self-sacrifice for others, pity and sympathy, are supposed to be the morality of Jewish slaves. Was the heroic baboon mentioned by Darwin,[378] after Brehm, a Jewish slave in revolt against the masterfolk of blond beasts?

In the ‘blond beast’ Nietzsche evidently is thinking of the ancient Germans of the migratory ages. They have inspired in him the idea of the roving beast of prey, falling upon weaker men for the voluptuous assuaging of their instincts of bloodthirstiness and destruction. This beast of prey never entered into contracts. ‘He who comes on the scene violent in deed and demeanour ... what has he to do with contracts?’[379] Very well; history teaches that the ‘blond beast,’ i.e., the ancient German of the migratory ages, not yet affected by the ‘slave-revolt in morals,’ was a vigorous but peace-loving peasant, who made war not to riot in murder, but to obtain arable land, and who always first sought to conclude peaceful treaties before necessity forced him to have recourse to the sword.[380] And long before intelligence of the ‘ascetic ideal’ of Jewish Christianity reached it, the same ‘blond beast’ developed the conception of feudal fidelity, i.e., the notion that it is most glorious for a man to divest himself of his own ‘I’; to know honour only as the resplendence of another’s honour, of whom one has become the ‘man’; and to sacrifice his life for the chief!

Conscience is supposed to be ‘cruelty introverted.’ As the man to whom it is an irrepressible want to inflict pain, to torture, and to rend, cannot assuage this want on others, he satisfies it on himself.[381]

If this were true, then the respectable, the virtuous man, who had never satisfied the pretended primeval instinct of causing pain by means of a crime against others, would be forced to rage the most violently against himself, and would therefore of necessity have the worst conscience. Conversely, the criminal directing his fundamental instinct outwardly, and hence having no need to seek satisfaction in self-rending, would necessarily live in the most delightful peace with his conscience. Does this agree with observation? Has a righteous man who has not given way to the instinct of cruelty ever been seen to suffer from the stings of conscience? Are these not, on the contrary, to be observed in the very persons who have yielded to their instinct, who have been cruel to others, and hence have attained to that satisfaction of their craving, vouchsafed them, according to Nietzsche, by the evil conscience? Nietzsche says,[382] ‘It is precisely among criminals and offenders that remorse is extremely rare; prisons and reformatories are not the brooding places in which this species of worm loves to thrive,’ and believes that in this remark he has given a proof of his assertion. But by the commission of crime prisoners have shown that in them the instinct of evil is developed in special strength; in the prison they are forcibly prevented from giving way to their instinct; it is, therefore, precisely in them that self-rending through remorse ought to be extraordinarily violent, and yet among them ‘the prick of conscience is extremely rare.’ It is evident that Nietzsche’s idea is nothing but a delirious sally, and not worthy for a moment to be weighed seriously against the explanation of conscience proposed by Darwin, and accepted by all moral philosophers.[383]

Now for the philological argument. Originally, bonus is supposed to have read duonus, and hence signified ‘man of discord, disunion (duo), warrior.’[384] The proof of the ancient form duonus is offered by ‘bellum = duellum = duen-lum.’ Now duen-lum is never met with, but is a free invention of Nietzsche, as is equally duonus. How admirable is this method! He invents a word duonus which does not exist, and bases it on the word duen-lum, which is just as non-existent and equally drawn from imagination. The philology here displayed by Nietzsche is on a level with that which has created the beautiful and convincing series of derivations alopex = lopex = pexpix = pux = fechs = fichs = Fuchs (fox). Nietzsche is uncommonly proud of his discovery, that the conception of Schuld (guilt) is derived from the very narrow and material conception of Schulden (debts).[385] Even if we admit the accuracy of this derivation, what has his theory gained by it? This would only prove that, in the course of time, the crudely material and limited conception had become enlarged, deepened, and spiritualized. To whom has it ever occurred to contest this fact? What dabbler in the history of civilization does not know that conceptions develop themselves? Did love and friendship, as primitively understood, ever convey the idea of the delicate and manifold states of mind now expressed by these words? It is possible that the first guilt of which men were conscious was the duty of restoring a loan. But neither can guilt, in the sense of a material obligation, arise amongst ‘blond brutes,’ or ‘cruel beasts of prey.’ It already presupposes a relation of contract, the recognition of a right of possession, respect for other individuals. It is not possible if there does not exist, on the part of the lender, the disposition to be agreeable to a fellow-creature, and a trust in the readiness of the latter to requite the benefit; and, on the part of the borrower, a voluntary submission to the disagreeable necessity of repayment. And all these feelings are really already morality--a simple, but true, morality--the real ‘slave-morality’ of duty, consideration, sympathy, self-constraint; not the ‘master-morality’ of selfishness, cruel violence, unbounded desires! Even if single words like the German schlecht (schlicht) (bad, plain, or straight) have to-day a meaning the opposite of their original one, this is not to be explained by a fabulous ‘transvaluation of values,’ but, naturally and obviously, by Abel’s theory of the ‘contrary double-meaning of primitive words.’ The same sound originally served to designate the two opposites of the same concept, appearing, in agreement with the law of association, simultaneously in consciousness, and it was only in the later life of language that the word became the exclusive vehicle of one or other of the contrary concepts. This phenomenon has not the remotest connection with a change in the moral valuation of feelings and acts.

Now the biological argument. The prevailing morality is supposed to be admittedly of a character tending to improve the chances of life in gregarious animals, but to be an obstacle to the cultivation of the highest human type, and hence pernicious to humanity as a whole, as it prevents the race from rising to the most perfect culture, and the attainment of its possible ideal. Hence the most perfect human type would, according to Nietzsche, be the ‘magnificent beast of prey,’ the ‘laughing lion,’ able to satisfy all his desires without consideration for good or evil. Observation teaches that this doctrine is rank idiocy. All ‘over-men’ known to history, who gave the reins to their instincts, were either diseased from the outset, or became diseased. Famous criminals--and Nietzsche expressly ranks these among the ‘over-men’[386]--have displayed, almost without exception, the bodily and mental stigmata characterizing them as degenerates, and hence as cripples or atavistic phenomena, not as specimens of the highest evolution and florescence. The Cæsars, whose monstrous selfishness could batten on all humanity, succumbed to madness, which it will hardly be wished to designate as an ideal condition. Nietzsche readily admits that the ‘splendid beast of prey’ is pernicious to the species, that he destroys and ravages; but of what consequence is the species? It exists for the sole purpose of making possible the perfect development of individual ‘over-men,’ and of satisfying their most extravagant needs.[387] But the ‘splendid beast of prey’ is pernicious to itself; it rages against itself, it even annihilates itself, and yet that cannot possibly be a useful result of highly-trained qualities. The biological truth is, that constant self-restraint is a necessity of existence as much for the strongest as for the weakest. It is the activity of the highest human cerebral centres. If these are not exercised they waste away, i.e., man ceases to be man, the pretended ‘over-man’ becomes sub-human--in other words, a beast. By the relaxation or breaking up of the mechanism of inhibition in the brain the organism sinks into irrecoverable anarchy in its constituent parts, and this leads, with absolute certainty, to ruin, to disease, madness and death, even if no resistance results from the external world against the frenzied egoism of the unbridled individual.

What now remains standing of Nietzsche’s entire system? We have recognised it as a collection of crazy and inflated phrases, which it is really impossible seriously to seize, since they possess hardly the solidity of the smoke-rings from a cigar. Nietzsche’s disciples are for ever murmuring about the ‘depth’ of his moral philosophy, and with himself the words ‘deep’ and ‘depth’ are a mental trick repeated so constantly as to be insufferable.[388] If we draw near to this ‘depth’ for the purpose of fathoming it, we can hardly trust our eyes. Nietzsche has not thought out one of his so-called ideas. Not one of his wild assertions is carried a finger’s-breadth beneath the uppermost surface, so that, at least, it might withstand the faintest puff of breath. It is probable that the entire history of philosophy does not record a second instance of a man having the impudence to give out as philosophy, and even as profound philosophy, such railway-bookstall humour and such tea-table wit. Nietzsche sees absolutely nothing of the moral problem, around which, nevertheless, he has poured out ten volumes of talk. Rationally treated, this problem can only run thus: Can human actions be divided into good and evil? Why should some be good, the others evil? What is to constrain men to perform the good and refrain from the evil?

Nietzsche would seem to deny the legitimacy of a classification of actions from moral standpoints. ‘Nothing is true, all is permissible.’[389] There is no good and no evil. It is a superstition and hereditary prejudice to cling to these artificial notions. He himself stands ‘beyond good and evil,’ and he invites the ‘free spirits’ and ‘good Europeans’ to follow him to this standpoint. And thereupon this ‘free spirit,’ standing ‘beyond good and evil,’ speaks with the greatest candour of the ‘aristocratic virtues,’[390] and of the ‘morality of the masters.’ Are there, then, virtues? Is there, then, a morality, even if it be opposed to the prevailing one? How is that compatible with the negation of all morality? Are men’s actions, therefore, not of equal value? Is it possible in these to distinguish good and evil? Does Nietzsche, therefore, undertake to classify them, designating some as virtues--‘aristocratic virtues’--others as ‘slave actions,’ bad for the ‘masters, the commanders,’ and hence wicked; how, then, can he still affirm that he stands ‘beyond good and evil’? He stands, in fact, mid-way between good and evil, only he indulges in the foolish jest of calling that evil which we call good, and vice-versâ--an intellectual performance of which every naughty and mischievous child of four is certainly capable.

This first and astounding non-comprehension of his own standpoint is already a good example of his ‘depth.’ But further. As the chief proof of the non-existence of morality, he adduces what he calls the ‘transvaluation of values.’ At one time good is said to have been that which is now esteemed evil, and conversely. We have seen that this idea is delirious, and expressed in a delirious way.[391] But let it be granted that Nietzsche is right; we will for once enter into the folly and accept the ‘revolt of slaves in morality’ as a fact. What has his fundamental idea gained by this? A ‘transvaluation of values’ would prove nothing against the existence of a morality, for it leaves the concept of value itself absolutely intact. These, then, are values; but now this, now that, species of action acquires the rank of value. No historian of civilization denies the fact that the notions concerning what is moral or immoral have changed in the course of history, that they continually change, that they will change in the future. The recognition of this has become a commonplace. If Nietzsche assumes this to be a discovery of his own, he deserves to be decked with a fool’s cap by the assistant teacher of a village school. But how can the evolution, the transformation, of moral concepts in any way contradict the fundamental fact of the existence of moral concepts? Not only does this transformation not contradict these, but it confirms them! They are the necessary premise of this transformation! A modification of moral concepts is evidently possible only if there are moral concepts; but this is exactly the problem--‘are there moral concepts?’ In spite of all his spouting about the ‘transvaluation of values’ and the ‘revolt of slaves in morality,’ Nietzsche never approaches this primary and all-important question.

He contemptuously reproaches slave-morality as being a utilitarian morality,[392] and he ignores the fact that he extols his ‘noble virtues,’ constituting the ‘morality of masters,’ only because they are advantageous for the individual, for the ‘over-man.’[393] Are, then, ‘advantageous’ and ‘useful’ not exactly synonymous? Is, therefore, master-morality not every whit as utilitarian as slave-morality? And the ‘deep’ Nietzsche does not see this! And he ridicules English moralists because they have invented the ‘morality of utilitarianism.’[394]

He believes he has unearthed something deeply hidden, not yet descried by human eye, when he announces,[395] ‘What is there that is not called love? Covetousness and love--what different feelings do we experience at each of these words! And yet it might be the same instinct.... Our love for our neighbours--is it not an ardent desire for a possession?... When we see anyone suffering, we willingly utilize the opportunity ‘ proferred us to take possession of him; the pitying and charitable man, for example, does this; he also calls by the name “love” the desire for a new possession awakened in him, and takes pleasure in it, as he would in a fresh conquest which beckons him on.’ Is it any longer necessary to criticise these silly superficialities? Every act, even seemingly the most disinterested, is admittedly egoistic in a certain sense, viz., that the doer promises himself a benefit from it, and experiences a feeling of pleasure from the anticipation of the expected benefit. Who has ever denied this? Is it not expressly emphasized by all modern moralists?[396] Is it not implied in the accepted definition of morality, as a knowledge of what is useful? But Nietzsche has not even an inkling of the essence of the subject. To him egoism is a feeling having for its content that which is useful to a being, whom he pictures to himself as isolated in the world, separated from the species, even hostile to it. To the moralist, the egoism which Nietzsche believes himself to have discovered at the base of all unselfishness, is the knowledge of what is useful not alone to the individual, but to the species as well; to the moralist, the creator of the knowledge of the useful is not the individual, but the whole species; to the moralist also egoism is morality, but it is a collective egoism of the species, an egoism of humanity in face of the non-human co-habitants of the earth, and in the face of Nature. The man whom the healthy-minded moralist has before his eyes is one who has attained a sufficiently high development to extricate himself from the illusion of his individual isolation, and to participate in the existence of the species, to feel himself one of its members, to picture to himself the states of his fellow-creatures--i.e., to be able to sympathize with them. This man Nietzsche calls a herd animal--a term which he has found used by all Darwinist writers, but which he seems to regard as his own invention. He endows the word with a meaning of contempt. The truth is that this herding animal--i.e., man, whose ‘I’ consciousness has expanded itself to the capacity of receiving the consciousness of the species--represents the higher development, to which mental cripples and degenerates, for ever enclosed in their diseased isolation, cannot ascend.

Quite as ‘deep’ as his discovery of the egoism of all unselfishness is Nietzsche’s harangue ‘to the teachers of unselfishness.’[397] The virtues of a man are called good, not in respect of their effects upon himself, but in respect of the effects which we suppose them to have upon ourselves and society. ‘The virtues (such as diligence, obedience, chastity, piety, justice), are for the most part pernicious to their possessors.’ ‘Praise of the virtues is praise of something pernicious to the individual--the praise of instincts which deprive a man of his noblest egoism, and of the power of the highest self-protection.’ ‘Education ... seeks to determine the individual to modes of thought and conduct which, if they have become habit, instinct, and passion, rule in him and over him, against his ultimate advantage, but “for the general good.”’ This is the old silly objection against altruism which we have seen floating in every gutter for the last sixty years. ‘If everyone were to act unselfishly, to sacrifice himself for his neighbour, the result would be that everyone would injure himself, and hence humanity, as a whole, would suffer great prejudice.’ Assuredly it would, if humanity were composed of isolated individuals in no communication with each other. Whereas it is an organism; each individual always gives to the higher organism only the surplus of his effective force, and in his personal share of the collective wealth profits by the prosperity of the whole organism, which he has increased through his altruistic sacrifice. What would probably be said to the canny householder who should argue in this way against fire insurance: ‘Most houses do not burn down. The house-owner who insures himself against fire pays premiums his life long, and as his house will probably never burn down, he has thrown away his money to no purpose. Fire insurance is consequently injurious.’ The objection against altruism, that it injures each individual by imposing on him sacrifices for others, is of exactly the same force.

We have had quite enough tests of the ‘depth’ of Nietzsche and his system. I now wish to point out some of his most diverting contradictions. His disciples do not deny these, but seek to palliate them. Thus Kaatz says: ‘He had experienced a change in his own views concerning so many things, that he warned men against the rigid principle which would pass off dishonesty to self as “character.” In view of the shifting of opinions as evidenced in Nietzsche’s works, it is, of course, only that theory of life to which Nietzsche ultimately wrestled his way that can be taken into consideration for the purposes of this book.’[398] This is, however, a conscious and intended falsification of the facts, and the hand of the falsifier ought, like that of the cheater at cards, to be forthwith nailed to the table. The fact is that the contradictions are to be found, not in works of different periods, but in the same book, often on the same page. They are not degrees of knowledge, of which the higher naturally surpass the lower, but opposing, mutually incompatible opinions co-existing in Nietzsche’s consciousness, which his judgment is neither capable of reconciling, nor among which it can suppress either term.

In Also sprach Zarathustra, pt. iii., p. 29, we read: ‘Always love your neighbour as yourself, but first be of those who love themselves.’ p. 56: ‘And at that time it happened also ... that his word praised selfishness as blessed, hale, healthy selfishness, which wells forth from the mighty soul.’ And p. 60: ‘One must learn to love one’s self--thus I teach--with a hale and healthy love, so that one bear with one’s self, and not rove about.’ In opposition to this, in the same book, pt. i., p. 108: ‘The degenerating sense which says, “All for me,” is to us a horror.’ Is this contradiction explained by an ‘effort to wrestle his way to an ultimate theory of life’? The contrary assertions are in the same book a few pages apart.

Another example. Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 264: ‘The absence of personality avenges itself everywhere; an enfeebled, thin, effaced personality, denying and calumniating itself, is worthless for any further good thing, most of all for philosophy.’ And only four pages further in the same book, p. 268: ‘Have we not been seized with ... the suspicion of a contrast--a contrast between the world--in which, hitherto, we were at home with our venerations ... and of another world, which is ourselves ... a suspicion which might place us Europeans ... before the frightful alternative, Either--Or: “either do away with your venerations or yourselves.”’ Here, therefore, he denies, or, at least, doubts, his personality, even if in an interrogative form; on which the reader need not dwell, since Nietzsche ‘loves to mask his thoughts, or to express them hypothetically; and to conclude the problems he raises by an interrupted phrase or a mark of interrogation.’[399]

But he denies his personality, his ‘I,’ still more decidedly. In the preface to Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 6, he explains that the foundation of all philosophies up to the present time has been ‘some popular superstition,’ such as ‘the superstition of the soul, which, as a superstition of the subjective and the ‘I,’ as not ceased, even in our days, to cause mischief.’ And in the same book, p. 139, he exclaims: ‘Who has not already been sated to the point of death with all subjectivity and his own accursed ipsissimosity!’ Hence the ‘I’ is a superstition! Sated to the point of death with ‘subjectivity’! And yet the ‘I’ should be ‘proclaimed as holy.’[400] And yet the ‘ripest fruit of society and morality is the sovereign individual, who resembles himself alone.’[401] And yet ‘a personality which denies itself is no longer good for anything’!

The negation of the ‘I,’ the designation of it as a superstition, is the more extraordinary, as Nietzsche’s whole philosophy--if one may call his effusions by that name--is based only on the ‘Ego,’ recognising it as alone justifiable, or even as alone existing.

In all Nietzsche’s works we shall, it is true, find no more subversive contradiction than this; but a few other examples will show to what extent he holds mutually-destructive opposites in his mind in uncompromising juxtaposition.

We have seen that his last piece of wisdom is: ‘Nothing is true; all is permissible.’ At bottom all those ethics are repugnant to me which say: ‘Do not do this! Renounce! Overcome self!’ ‘Self-command!’ Those ethical teachers who ... enjoin man to place himself in his own power induce thereby in him a peculiar disease.[402] And now let the following sentences be weighed: ‘Through auspicious marriage customs there is a continual increase in the power and pleasure of willing, in the will to command self.’ ‘Asceticism and puritanism are almost indispensable means of education and ennoblement, if a race desires to triumph over its plebeian origin, and raise itself at some time to sovereignty.’ ‘The essential and priceless feature of every morality is that it is a long constraint.’[403]

The characteristic of the over-human is his wish to stand alone, to seek solitude, to flee from the society of the gregarious. ‘He should be the greatest who can be the most solitary.’ ‘The lofty independent spirituality--the will to stand alone.... (Jenseits von Gut und Böse, pp. 154, 123.) ‘The strong are constrained by their nature to segregate, as much as the feeble are by theirs to aggregate’ (Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 149). In opposition to this he teaches in other places: ‘During the longest interval in the life of humanity there was nothing more terrible than to feel one’s self alone’ (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 147). Again: ‘We at present sometimes undervalue the advantages of life in a community’ (Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 59). We? That is a calumny. We value these advantages at their full worth. He alone does not value them who, in expressions of admiration, vaunts ‘segregation,’ i.e., hostility to the community and contempt of its advantages, as characterizing the strong.

At one time the primitive aristocratic man is the freely-roving, splendid beast of prey, the blond beast; at another: ‘these men are rigorously kept within bounds by morality, veneration, custom, gratitude, still more by reciprocal surveillance, by jealousy inter pares; and, on the other hand, in their attitude towards each other, inventive in consideration, self-command, delicacy, fidelity, pride, and friendship.’ Ay, if these be the attributes of ‘blond beasts,’ may someone speedily give us a society of ‘blond beasts’! But how does ‘morality, veneration, self-command,’ etc., accord with the ‘free-roving’ of the splendid beast of prey? That remains an unsolved enigma. It is true that Nietzsche, while making our mouths water by his description, adds to it this limitation: ‘Towards what lies beyond, where the stranger, and what is strange, begins, they are not much better than beasts of prey set free’ (Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 21). But this is in reality no limitation. Every organized community regards itself, in respect of the rest of the world, as a conjoint unity, and does not accord to the foreigner, the man from without, the same rights as to a member of its own body. Rights, custom, consideration, are not extended to the stranger, unless he knows how to inspire fear and to compel a recognition of his rights. The progress in civilization, however, consists in the very fact that the boundaries of the community are continually enlarged, that which is strange and without rights or claim to consideration being constantly made to recede further and ever further. At first there existed in the horde reciprocal forbearance and right alone; then the feeling of solidarity extended itself to the tribe, the country, state, and race. At the present day there is an international law even in war; the best among contemporaries feel themselves one with all men, nay, no longer hold even the animal to be without rights; and the time will come when the forces of Nature will be the sole strange and external things which may be treated according to man’s need and pleasure, and in regard to which he may be the ‘freed beast of prey.’ The ‘deep’ Nietzsche is not capable, it is true, of comprehending a state of the case so simple and clear.

At one moment he makes merry over the ‘naïveté’ of those who believe in an original social contract (Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 80), and then says (in the same book, p. 149): ‘If they’ (the strong, the born masters, the ‘species of solitary beasts of prey’) ‘unite, it is only with a view to a collective act of aggression, a collective satisfaction of their volition to exert their power, with much resistance from the individual conscience.’ With resistance or without, does not a ‘union for the purpose of a collective satisfaction’ amount to a relation of contract, the acceptation of which Nietzsche with justice terms ‘a naïveté’?

At one time ‘agony is something which inspires pity’ (Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 136), and a ‘succession of crimes is horrible’ (Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 21); and then, again, the ‘beauty’ of crime is spoken of (Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 91), and complaint is made that ‘crime is calumniated’ (the same book, p. 123).

Examples enough have been given. I do not wish to lose myself in minutiæ and details, but I believe that I have demonstrated Nietzsche’s own contradiction of every single one of his fundamental assertions, most emphatically of the foremost and most important, viz., that the ‘I’ is the one real thing, that egoism alone is necessitated and justifiable.

If the conceits which he wildly ejaculates--as it were, shrieks forth--are examined somewhat more closely, we cannot but marvel at the profusion of fabulous stupidity and abecedarian ignorance they contain. It is thus he terms the system of Copernicus (Jenseits von Gut und Böse), ‘which has persuaded us, against all the senses, that the earth is not immovable,’ ‘the greatest triumph over the senses hitherto achieved on earth.’ Hence he does not suspect that the system of Copernicus has for its basis exact observation of the starry heavens, the movements of the moon and planets, and the position of the sun in the zodiac; that this system was, therefore, the triumph of exact sense-perceptions over sense-illusions--in other words, of attentiveness over fugacity and distraction. He believes that ‘consciousness developed itself under the pressure of the need of communication,’ for ‘conscious thought eventuates in words, i.e., in signs of communication, by which fact the origin of consciousness itself is revealed’ (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 280). He does not know, then, that animals without the power of speech also have a consciousness; that it is possible also to think in images, in representations of movement, without the help of a word, and that speech is not added to consciousness until very late in the course of development. The drollest thing is that Nietzsche very much fancies himself as a psychologist, and wishes most particularly to be esteemed as such! According to this profound man, socialism has its roots in the fact that ‘hitherto manufacturers and entrepreneurs lack those forms and signs of distinction of the higher races which alone make persons interesting; if they had in look and gesture the distinction of those born noble, there would, perhaps, be no socialism of the masses [!!]. For the latter are at bottom ready for slavery of every kind, on the condition that the higher class constantly legitimizes itself as higher, as born to command, by outward distinction’ [!!] (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 68). The concept ‘thou oughtest,’ the idea of duty, of the necessity of a definite measure of self-command, is a consequence of the fact that ‘at all times since men have existed, human herds have also existed, and always a very large number of those who obey relatively to the small number of those who command (Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 118). Anyone less incapable of thought than Nietzsche will understand that, on the contrary, human herds, those obeying and those commanding, were possible at all, only after and because the brain had acquired the power and capacity to elaborate the idea, ‘thou oughtest,’ i.e., to inhibit an impulse by a thought or a judgment. The descendant of mixed races ‘will on the average be a weaker being’ (Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 120); indeed, the ‘European Weltschmerz, the pessimism of the nineteenth century, is essentially the consequence of a sudden and irrational mixture of classes’; social classes, however, always ‘express differences of origin and of race as well’ (Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 142). The most competent investigators are convinced, as we well know, that the crossing of one race with another is conducive to the progress of both, and is ‘the first cause of development.’[404] ‘Darwinism, with its incomprehensibly one-sided theory of the struggle for existence,’ is explained by Darwin’s origin. His ancestors were ‘poor and humble persons who were only too familiar with the difficulty of making both ends meet. Around the whole of English Darwinism there floats, as it were, the mephitic vapour of English over-population, the odour of humble life, of pinched and straitened circumstances’ (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 273). It is presumably known to all my readers that Darwin was a rich man, and was never compelled to follow any profession, and that, for at least three or four generations, his ancestors had lived in comfort.

Nietzsche lays special claim to extraordinary originality. He places this epigraph at the beginning of his Fröhliche Wissenschaft:

‘I live in a house that’s my own, I’ve never in nought copied no one, And at every Master I’ve had my laugh, Who had not first laughed at himself.’

His disciples believe in this brag, and, with upturned eyes, bleat it after him in sheep-like chorus. The profound ignorance of this flock of ruminants permits them, forsooth, to believe in Nietzsche’s originality. As they have never learnt, read, or thought about, anything, all that they pick up in bars, or in their loafings, is naturally new and hitherto non-existent. Anyone, however, who regards Nietzsche relatively to analogous phenomena of the age, will recognise that his pretended originalities and temerities are the greasiest commonplaces, such as a decent self-respecting thinker would not touch with a pair of tongs.

Whenever he rants, Nietzsche is no doubt really original. On such occasions his expressions contain no sense at all, not even nonsense; hence it is impossible to unite them with anything previously thought or said. When, on the contrary, there is a shimmer of reason in his words, we at once recognise them as having their origin in the paradoxes or platitudes of others. Nietzsche’s ‘individualism’ is an exact reproduction of Max Stirner, a crazy Hegelian, who fifty years ago exaggerated and involuntarily turned into ridicule the critical idealism of his master to the extent of monstrously inflating the importance--even the grossly empirical importance--of the ‘I’; whom, even in his own day, no one took seriously, and who since then had fallen into well-merited profound oblivion, from which at the present time a few anarchists and philosophical ‘fops’--for the hysteria of the time has created such beings--seek to disinter him.[405] Where Nietzsche extols the ‘I,’ its rights, its claims, the necessity of cultivating and developing it, the reader who has in mind the preceding chapters of this book will recognise the phrases of Barrès, Wilde, and Ibsen. His philosophy of will is appropriated from Schopenhauer, who throughout has directed his thought and given colour to his language. The complete similarity of his phrases concerning will with Schopenhauer’s theory has evidently penetrated to his own consciousness and made him uncomfortable; for, in order to obliterate it, he has placed a false nose of his own invention on the cast he has made, viz., he contests the fact that the motive force in every being is the desire for self-preservation; in his view it is rather the desire for power. This addition is pure child’s play. In the lower orders of living beings it is never a ‘desire for power,’ but always only a desire for self-preservation, that is perceptible; and among men this seeming ‘desire for power’ can, by anyone but the ‘deep’ Nietzsche, be traced to two well-known roots--either to the effort to make all organs act to the limit of their functional capacity, which is connected with feelings of pleasure, or to procure for themselves advantages ameliorative of the conditions of existence. But the effort towards feelings of pleasure and better conditions of existence is nothing but a form of the phenomenon of the desire for existence, and he who regards the ‘desire for power’ as anything different from, and even opposed to, the desire for existence, simply gives evidence of his incapacity to pursue this idea of the desire for existence any distance beyond the length of his nose. Nietzsche’s chief proof of the difference between the desire for power and the desire for existence is that the former often drives the desirer to the contemning and endangering, even to the destruction, of his own life. But in that case the whole struggle for existence, in which dangers are continually incurred, and for that matter are often enough sought, would also be a proof that the struggler did not desire his existence! Nietzsche would, indeed, be quite capable of asserting this also.

The degenerates with whom we have become acquainted affirm that they do not trouble themselves concerning Nature and its laws. Nietzsche is not so far advanced in self-sufficiency as Rossetti, to whom it was a matter of indifference whether the earth revolved around the sun or the sun around the earth. He openly avows that this is not a matter of indifference to him; he regrets it; it troubles him, that the earth is no longer the central point of the universe, and be the chief thing on the earth. ‘Since Copernicus, man seems to have fallen upon an inclined plane; he is now rolling ever faster away from the central point--whither?--into the nothing? into the piercing feeling of his nothingness?’ He is very angry with Copernicus concerning this. Not only with Copernicus, but with science in general. ‘All science is at present busied in talking man out of the self-respect he has hitherto possessed, just as if this had been nothing but a bizarre self-conceit’ (Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 173). Is this not an echo of the words of Oscar Wilde, who complains that Nature ‘is so indifferent’ to him, ‘so unappreciative,’ and that he ‘is no more to Nature than the cattle that browse on the slope’?

In other places, again, we find the current of thought and almost the very words of Oscar Wilde, Huysmans, and other Diabolists and Decadents. The passage in Zur Genealogie der Moral (p. 171) in which he glorifies art, because ‘in it the lie sanctifies itself, and the will to deceive has a quiet conscience on its side,’ might be in the chapter in Wilde’s Intentions on ‘The Decay of Lying,’ as, conversely, Wilde’s aphorisms: ‘There is no sin except stupidity.’ ‘An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.’ And his praises of Wainwright, the poisoner, are in exact agreement with Nietzsche’s ‘morality of assassins,’ and the latter’s remarks that crime is calumniated, and that the defender of the criminal is ‘oftenest not artist enough to turn the beautiful terribleness of the crime to the advantage of the doer.’ Again, by way of joke, compare these passages: ‘It is necessary to get rid of the bad taste of wishing to agree with many. Good is no longer good when a neighbour says it’s good’ (Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 54), and ‘Ah! don’t say that you agree with me. When people agree with me, I always feel that I must be wrong’ (Oscar Wilde, Intentions, p. 202). This is more than a resemblance, is it not? To avoid being too diffuse, I abstain from citing passages exactly resembling these from Huysmans’ A Rebours, and from Ibsen. At the same time it is unquestionable that Nietzsche could not have known the French Decadents and English Æsthetes whom he so frequently approaches, because his books are in part antecedent to those of the latter; and neither could they have drawn from him, because, perhaps with the exception of Ibsen, it is only about two years since they could have heard as much as Nietzsche’s name. The similarity, or rather identity, is not explained by plagiarism; it is explained by the identity of mental qualities in Nietzsche and the other ego-maniacal degenerates.

Nietzsche presents a specially droll aspect when he confronts truth, in order to declare it unnecessary, or even to deny its existence. ‘Why not rather untruth? And uncertainty? Or even ignorance?’ (Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 3). ‘What, after all, are the truths of man? They are the irrefutable errors of man’ (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 193). ‘The will for truth--that might be a hidden will for death’ (Ibid., p. 263). The section of this book in which he deals with the question of truth is entitled by him, ‘We the Fearless,’ and he prefixes to it, as a motto, Turenne’s utterance: ‘Thou tremblest, carcass? Thou wouldst tremble much more if thou knewest whither I shall soon lead thee!’ And what is this terrible danger into which the fearless one runs with such heroic mien? The investigation of the essence and value of truth. But this investigation is really the A B C of all serious philosophy! The question as to whether objective truth exists at all has been also drawn up by him,[406] it is true with less blowing of trumpets, beating of drums, and shaking of locks, as its prologue, accompaniment, and conclusion. It is, moreover, highly characteristic that the same dragon-slayer who, with such swaggering and snorting takes up the challenge against ‘truth,’ finds submissive words of most humble apology when he ventures very gently to doubt the perfection of Goethe in all his pieces. Speaking of the ‘viscosity’ and ‘tediousness’ of the German style, he says (Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 39): ‘I may be pardoned for affirming that even Goethe’s prose, with its mixture of stiffness and grace, is no exception.’ When he timidly criticises Goethe, he begs pardon; his heroic attitude of contempt for death is assumed only when he challenges morality and truth to combat. That is to say, this ‘fearless one’ possesses the cunning often observed among the insane, and comprehends that there is absolutely no danger in his babbling before the imbeciles composing his congregation, that fabulous philosophical nonsense, at which, on the contrary, they would be much enraged the instant it shocked their æsthetic convictions or prejudices.

Even in the minutest details it is surprising how Nietzsche agrees, word for word, with the other ego-maniacs with whom we have become acquainted. Compare, for example, the phrase in Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 168, where he vaunts, ‘What is really noble in works and in men, their moment of smooth sea and halcyon self-sufficiency, the golden and the cool,’ with Baudelaire’s praise of immobility and his enraptured description of a metallic landscape; or the remarks of Des Esseintes, and the side-thrusts at the press put by Ibsen into the mouths of his characters, with the insults continually heaped on newspapers by Nietzsche. ‘Great ascetic spirits have an abhorrence of bustle, veneration, newspaper’ (Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 113). The cause of ‘the undeniably gradual and already tangible desolation of the German mind’ lies in being ‘all too exclusively nourished on newspapers, politics, beer, and Wagnerian music’ (Ibid., p. 177). ‘Behold these superfluities!... They vomit their bile, and name it a newspaper’ (Also sprach Zarathustra, pt. i., p. 67). ‘Dost thou not see the souls hanging like limp dirty rags? And they make newspapers out of those rags! Hearest thou not how the spirit has here become a play on words? He vomits a loathsome swill of words. And of this swill of words they make newspapers!’ (Ibid., pt. iii., p. 37). It would be possible to multiply these examples tenfold, for Nietzsche harks back to every idea with an obstinacy enough to make the most patient reader of sound taste go wild.

Such is the appearance presented by Nietzsche’s originality. This ‘original’ and ‘audacious’ thinker, imitating the familiar practices of tradesmen at ‘sales,’ endeavours to palm off as brand new goods the most shop-worn rubbish of great philosophers. His most powerful assaults are directed against doors that stand open. This ‘solitary one,’ this ‘dweller on the highest mountain peaks,’ exhibits by the dozen the physiognomy of all decadents. He who is continually talking with the utmost contempt of the ‘herd’ and the ‘herd-animal’ is himself the most ordinary herd-animal of all. Only the herd to which he belongs, body and soul, is a special one; it is the flock of the mangy sheep.

Upon one occasion the habitual cunning of the insane has deserted him, and he has himself revealed to us the source of his ‘original’ philosophy. The passage is so characteristic that I must quote it at length:

‘The first impetus, to make known something of my hypotheses concerning the origin of morality, was given me by a clear, tidy, and clever--ay, precocious [!]--little book, in which there was for the first time presented to me an inverted and perverted kind of genealogical hypotheses, the truly English kind, and which attracted me with that attractive force possessed by everything contrary, everything antipodal. The title of this little book was Der Ursprung der moralischen Empfindunger [“The Origin of Moral Sensations”]; its author, Dr. Paul Rée; the year of its publication, 1877. I have, perhaps, never read anything to which I have in the same measure mentally said “No” as I did to every proposition and every conclusion in this book, yet without anger or impatience. In the previously-mentioned work on which I was at that time engaged [Menschliches Allzumenschliches--“Things Human, Things all too Human”], I referred, in season and out of season, to the propositions of that book, not refuting them--what have I to do with refutations?--but, as befits a positive spirit, to substitute the more probable for the improbable, and at times one error for another’ (Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 7).

This gives the reader the key to Nietzsche’s ‘originality.’ It consists in simple infantile inversion of a rational train of thought. If Nietzsche imagines that his insane negations and contradictions grew spontaneously in his head, he is really the victim of a self-delusion. His rant may have existed in his mind before he had read Dr. Rée’s book. But in that case it had sprung up as a contradiction to other books without his having been so clearly conscious of its origin as after the perusal of Dr. Rée’s work. But he pushes the self-delusion to an incredible height, in terming himself a ‘positive spirit,’ after he has just frankly confessed his method of procedure, viz., that he does not ‘refute’--he would not have found that so easy, either--but that ‘to every proposition, and every conclusion he says ‘No!’

This explanation of the source of his ‘original’ moral philosophy comprehends in itself a diagnosis, which at once obtrudes on the most short-sighted eye. Nietzsche’s system is the product of the mania of contradiction, the delirious form of that mental derangement, of which the melancholic form is the mania of doubt and negation, treated of in the earlier chapters of this work. His folie des négations betrays itself also in his peculiarities of language. There is ever in his consciousness a questioning impulse like a mark of interrogation. Of no word is he so fond as of the interrogative ‘What?’ constantly used by him in the most marvellous connection,[407] and he makes use ad nauseam of the turn of expression, that one should ‘say No’ to this and that, that this one and that one is a ‘No-sayer’--an expression which suggests to him by association the same immeasurably frequent use of the contrary expression, ‘say Yes’ and ‘Yes-sayer.’ This ‘saying-No’ and ‘saying-Yes’ is in his case a veritable Paraphasia vesana, or insane language opposed to usage, as the reader is shown by the examples cited in foot-note.[408]

Nietzsche’s assurance that ‘without anger or impatience’ he ‘said No’ to all Rée’s assertions may be believed. Persons afflicted with the mania of doubt and of denial do not get angry when they question or contradict; they do this under the coercion of their mental derangement. But those among them who are delirious have the conscious intention of making others angry, even if they themselves are not so. On this point Nietzsche allows an avowal to escape him: ‘My mode of thought demands a warlike soul, a wish to give pain, a pleasure in saying, No’ (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 63). This confession may be compared with the passages from Ibsen: ‘You were becoming reckless! In reality that you might anger these affected beings of both sexes here in the town’; and, ‘Something shall happen which will be a slap in the face to all this decorum’ (The Pillars of Society).

The origin of one of the most ‘original’ of Nietzsche’s doctrines, viz., the explanation of conscience as a satisfaction of the instinct of cruelty through inner self-rending, has already been gone into by Dr. Türck, in an excellent little work. He very justly recognises the diseased state of moral aberration at the base of this insane idea,[409] and continues thus:

‘Let us now picture to ourselves a man of this kind, with innate instincts of murder, or in general with ‘Anomalies or perversion of the moral feelings’ (Mendel); at the same time highly gifted, with the best instruction and an excellent education, reared in the midst of agreeable circumstances, and under the careful ... nurture of women ... and occupying at an early age a prominent position in society. It is clear that the better moral instincts must gain such strength as to be able to drive back to the deepest inner depths the bestial instinct of destruction and completely to curb it, yet without wholly annihilating it. It may not, indeed, be able to manifest itself in deeds, but, because it is inborn, the instinct remains in existence as an unfulfilled wish, cherished in the inmost heart ... as an ardent desire ... to yield itself up to its cruel lust. But every non-satisfaction of a ... deeply imprinted instinct has as its consequence pain and inner torment. Now, we men are very much inclined to regard as naturally good and justifiable that which gives us decided pleasure, and conversely to reprobate, as bad and contrary to nature, that which produces pain. Thus, it may happen that an intellectual and highly gifted man, born with perverted instincts, and feeling as torment ... the non-satisfaction of the instinct, will hit upon the idea of justifying the passion for murder, the extremest egoism ... as something good, beautiful, and according to Nature, and to characterize as morbid aberration the better opposing moral instincts, manifesting themselves in us as that which we call conscience.

Dr. Türck is right in admitting Nietzsche’s innate moral aberration and the inversion in him of healthy instincts. Nevertheless, in the interpretation of the particular phenomena in which the aberration manifests itself, he commits an error, which is explained by the fact that Dr. Türck is seemingly not deeply conversant with mental therapeutics. He assumes that in Nietzsche’s mind the evil instincts are in severe conflict with those better notions instilled in him by education, and that he experiences as pain the suppression of his instincts by judgment. That is hardly the true state of the case. It is not necessary that Nietzsche should have the wish to commit murder and other crimes. Not every aberrant person (pervers) is subject to impulsions. The perversion may be limited exclusively to the sphere of ideation, and get its satisfaction wholly in ideas. A subject thus affected never gets the notion of transforming his ideas into deeds. His derangement does not encroach upon the centres of will and movement, but carries on its fell work within the centres of ideation. We know forms of sexual perversion in which the sufferers never experience the impulse to seek satisfaction in acts, and who revel only in thought.[410] This astonishing rupture of the natural connection between idea and movement, between thought and act, this detachment of the organs of will and movement from the organs of conception and judgment which they normally obey, is in itself a proof of deepest disorder throughout the machinery of thought. Incompetent critics eagerly point to the fact that many authors and artists live unexceptionable lives in complete contrast to their works, which may be immoral or contrary to nature, and deduce from this fact that it is unjustifiable to draw from his works conclusions as to the mental and moral Nature of their author. Those who talk in this manner do not even suspect that there are purely mental perversions which are quite as much a mental disease as the impulsions of the ‘impulsivists.’

This is obviously the case with Nietzsche. His perversion is of a purely intellectual character, and has hardly ever impelled him to acts. Hence, in his mind there has been no conflict between instincts and the morality acquired by education. His explanation of conscience has quite another source than that assumed by Dr. Türck. It is one of those perverted interpretations of a sensation by the consciousness perceiving it which are so frequently observed. Nietzsche remarks that with him ideas of a cruel kind are accompanied by feelings of pleasure--that they are, as mental therapeutics expresses it, ‘voluptuously accentuated.’ In consequence of this accompaniment of pleasure he has the inclination to conjure up sensually sensuous representations of that kind, and to dwell on them with enjoyment.[411] Consciousness then seeks to give some sort of rational explanation of these experiences by assuming cruelty to be a powerful primordial instinct of man, that, since he may not actually commit cruel deeds, he may, at least, take pleasure in the representation of them, and that the rapturous lingering over representations of this kind, man calls his conscience. As I have shown above, it is Nietzsche’s opinion that stings of conscience are not the consequence of evil deeds, but appear in men who have never committed any evil. Hence he obviously makes use of the word in a sense quite different from that of current usage, a sense peculiar to himself; he designates by it, simply his revelling in voluptuously accentuated representations of cruelty.

The alienist, however, is familiar with the perversion in which the invalid experiences voluptuous stimulation from acts or representations of a cruel nature. Science has a name for it. It is called Sadism. Sadism is the opposite form of sexual perversion to masochism.[412] Nietzsche is a sufferer from Sadism in its most pronounced form, only with him it is confined to the intellectual sphere alone, and is satisfied by ideal debauchery. I do not wish to dwell too long on this repulsive subject, and will, therefore, quote only a few passages, showing that, in Nietzsche’s thought, images of cruelty are without exception accompanied by ideas of a sensual character, and are italicized by him: ‘The splendid beast ranging in its lust after prey and victory’ (Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 21). ‘The feeling of content at being able, without scruple, to wreak his power on a powerless being, the voluptuousness de faire le mal pour le plaisir de le faire, the enjoyment of vanquishing’ (Ibid., p. 51). ‘Do your pleasure, ye wantons; roar for very lust and wickedness’ (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 226). ‘The path to one’s own heaven ever leads through the voluptuousness of one’s own hell’ (Ibid., p. 249). ‘How comes it that I have yet met no one ... who knew morality as a problem, and this problem as his personal distress, torment, voluptuousness, passion?’ (Ibid., p. 264). ‘Hitherto he has felt most at ease on earth at the sight of tragedies, bull-fights, and crucifixions; and when he invented hell, behold, that was his heaven on earth. When the great man cries aloud, the little man runs swiftly thither, and his tongue hangs out from his throat for very lusting’ (Also sprach Zarathustra, pt. iii., p. 96), etc. I beg the unprofessional reader particularly to observe the association of the words italicized with those expressing something evil. This association is neither accidental nor arbitrary. It is a psychical necessity, for in Nietzsche’s consciousness no image of wickedness and crime can arise without exciting him sexually, and he is unable to experience any sexual stimulation without the immediate appearance in his consciousness of an image of some deed of violence and blood.

Hence the real source of Nietzsche’s doctrine is his Sadism. And I will here make a general remark on which I do not desire to linger, but which I should like to recommend to the particular attention of the reader. In the success of unhealthy tendencies in art and literature, no quality of their authors has so large and determining a share as their sexual psychopathy. All persons of unbalanced minds--the neurasthenic, the hysteric, the degenerate, the insane--have the keenest scent for perversions of a sexual kind, and perceive them under all disguises. As a rule, indeed, they are ignorant of what it is in certain works and artists which pleases them, but investigation always reveals in the object of their predilection a veiled manifestation of some Psychopathia sexualis. The masochism of Wagner and Ibsen, the Skoptzism of Tolstoi, the erotomania (folie amoureuse chaste) of the Diabolists, the Decadents, and of Nietzsche, unquestionably obtain for these authors and tendencies a large, and, at all events, the most sincere and fanatical fraction of their partisans. Works of a sexually psychopathic nature excite in abnormal subjects the corresponding perversion (till then slumbering and unconscious, perhaps also undeveloped, although present in the germ), and give them lively feelings of pleasure, which they, usually in good faith, regard as purely æsthetic or intellectual, whereas they are actually sexual. Only in the light of this explanation do the characteristic artistic tendencies of the abnormals, of which we have proof,[413] become wholly intelligible. This confounding of æsthetic with sexual feelings is not surprising, for the spheres of these two feelings are not only contiguous, but, as has been proved elsewhere, are for the most part even coincident.[414] At the base of all oddities of costume, especially that of women, there is hidden an unconscious speculation in something of a sexual-psychopathy, which finds incitation and attraction in the temporary fashion in dress. No professional person has yet viewed fashions from this standpoint. I may not here allow myself so broad a departure from my principal theme. The subject may, however, be most emphatically recommended to the consideration of experts. In the domain of fashions they will make the most remarkable psychiatrical discoveries.

I have devoted very much more space to the demonstration of the senselessness of Nietzsche’s so-called philosophical system than the man and his system deserve. It would have been enough simply to refer to the all-sufficient and expressive fact that, after having been repeatedly confined in lunatic asylums, he has for some years past been living as incurably mad in the establishment of Professor Binswanger at Jena--‘the right man in the right place.’ It is true that a critic is of the opinion that ‘it is possible for mental darkness to extinguish the clearest mental light; for this reason its appearance cannot with certitude be urged against the value and accuracy of what anyone has taught before the appearance of his affliction.’ The answer to this is that Nietzsche wrote his most important works between two detentions in a lunatic asylum, and hence not ‘before,’ but ‘after, the appearance of his affliction,’ and that the whole question hinges on the kind of mental disease appealed to as proof of the senselessness of any doctrine. It is clear that insanity caused by an accidental lesion of the brain, by a fall, blow, etc., can prove nothing against the accuracy of that which the patient may have taught previous to his accident. But the case is different when the malady is one which has undoubtedly existed in a latent condition from birth, and can with certainty be proved from the works themselves. Then it amply suffices to establish the fact that the author is a Bedlamite, and his work the daubing of a lunatic, and all further criticism, all efforts at rational refutation of individual inanities, become superfluous, and even--at least, in the eyes of those who are competent--a little ridiculous. And this is the case with Nietzsche. He is obviously insane from birth, and his books bear on every page the imprint of insanity. It may be cruel to insist on this fact.[415] It is, however, a painful, yet unavoidable, duty to refer to it anew, because Nietzsche has become the means of raising a mental pestilence, and the only hope of checking its propagation lies in placing Nietzsche’s insanity in the clearest light, and in branding his disciples also with the marks most suited to them, viz., as hysterical and imbecile.

Kaatz[416] affirms that Nietzsche’s ‘intellectual seed’ is everywhere ‘beginning to germinate. Now it is one of Nietzsche’s most incisive points which is chosen as the epigraph of a modern tragedy, now one of his pregnant turns of expression incorporated in the established usage of language.... At the present time one can ... read hardly any essay touching even lightly on the province of philosophy, without meeting with the name of Nietzsche.’ Now, that is certainly a calumnious exaggeration. Things are not quite so bad as that. The only ‘philosophers’ who have hitherto taken Nietzsche’s insane drivel seriously are those whom I have above named the ‘fops’ of philosophy. But the number of these ‘fops’ is, as a matter of fact, increasing in a disquieting way, and their effrontery surpasses anything ever witnessed.

It is, of course, unnecessary to say that Georges Brandès has numbered himself among Nietzsche’s apostles. We know, indeed, that this ingenious person winds himself around every human phenomenon in whom he scents a possible primadonna, in order to draw from her profit for himself as the impresario of her fame. He gave lectures in Copenhagen on Nietzsche, ‘and declaimed in words of enthusiasm about this German prophet, for whom Mill’s morality is nothing but a diseased symptom of a degenerate age; this radical “aristocrat,” who degrades to the rank of slave-revolts all the great popular movements in history for freedom--the Reformation, the French Revolution, modern socialism--and dares to assert that the millions on millions of individuals composing the nations exist only for the purpose of producing, a few times in each century, a great personality.’[417]

A series of imitators are eagerly busying themselves to make Nietzsche their model, whether in clearing the throat or in expectorating. His treatise Schopenhauer als Erzieher (Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, 3 Stück) has found a monstrous travesty in Rembrandt als Erzieher. True, the imbecile author of the latter parody could not imitate Nietzsche’s gushing redundancy of verbiage and the mad leaps of the maniac’s thought. This symptom of disease it were indeed hardly possible to simulate; but he has appropriated as his own the word-quibbling, the senseless echolalia of his model, and endeavours also stammeringly to imitate, as well as his small means allow, Nietzsche’s megalomaniacal and criminal individualism. Albert Kniepf,[418] another imbecile, has been smitten chiefly by Nietzsche’s affected superiority, and with princely mien and gestures struts about in the most diverting manner. He calls himself ‘a man of superior taste and more refined feeling’; he speaks contemptuously of the ‘profane daily bustle of the masses’; sees ‘the world beneath him’ and himself ‘exalted above the world of the multitude’; he does not wish to ‘go into the streets, and squander his wisdom on everyone,’ etc., quite in the style of Zarathustra, the dweller on the highest peaks. The already mentioned Dr. Max Zerbst affects, like Nietzsche, to regard himself as terrible, and to believe that his opponents tremble before him. When he makes them speak he puts whimpering tones into their mouths,[419] and he enjoys with cruelly superior scorn the mortal fear with which he inspires them. In a maniac this attitude is natural and excites pity. But when a fellow like this Dr. Max Zerbst assumes it, it produces an irresistibly comic effect, and calls to remembrance the young man with the weak legs in Pickwick, who ‘believes in blood alone,’ ‘will have blood.’ Zerbst dares to utter the words ‘natural science’ and ‘psycho-physiology.’ That is an agreement among Nietzsche’s disciples: they pass off the insane word-spouter whom they worship for a psycho-physiologist and a physicist! Ola Hansson speaks of Nietzsche’s ‘psycho-physiological intuition’! and in another place says: ‘With Nietzsche, that modern subtle psychologist, who possesses in the highest degree psycho-physical intuition [again], that peculiar power of the end of the nineteenth century, of listening to and spying out all the secret processes and hidden corners in itself,’ etc. ‘Psycho-physical intuition!’ ‘Listening to and spying out itself!’ Our very eyes deceive us. These men, therefore, have no suspicion of what constitutes ‘psychophysics,’ they do not suspect that it is the exact contrary of ancient psychology, which dealt with ‘intuition’ and introspection, i.e., ‘listening to one’s self’ and ‘spying out one’s self’; that it patiently counts and mixes with the apparatus in laboratories, and ‘spies and listens to,’ not itself, but its experimentists and instruments! And such babble of brainless parrots, who chatter in repetition the words they accidentally hear, without comprehending them, is able to make its way in Germany, the creator of the new science of psycho-physiology, the fatherland of Fechner, Weber, Wundt! And no professional has rapped with a ruler the knuckles of these youths, whose fabulous ignorance is surpassed only by their impudence!

But worse still has befallen--something at which all jesting really ceases. Kurt Eisner, who it is true does not agree with Nietzsche’s ‘philosophy,’ is, nevertheless, of the opinion that he has ‘bequeathed us some powerful poems,’[420] and goes so far as to make use of this unheard-of expression: ‘Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is a work of art like Faust.’ The question first of all obtruding itself is: Has Kurt Eisner at any time read a line of Faust? This, I take it, must be answered in the affirmative, for it is hardly conceivable that at this time of day there is in Germany any adult, seemingly able to read and write, into whose hands Faust has not fallen at some time or other. Then there remains only one other question: What may Kurt Eisner have understood of Faust? To name in the same breath the senseless spirting jet of words of a Zarathustra with Faust is such a defilement of our most precious poetical treasure that verily if a man of any greater importance than Kurt Eisner had perpetrated it there had been need of an expiatory festival to atone for the insult to Goethe, even as the Church newly consecrates a place of worship when it has been profaned by a sacrilegious act.

Not only in Germany is the Nietzsche gang working mischief; it is also infesting other lands. Ola Hansson,[421] already mentioned, entertains his Swedish fellow-countrymen most enthusiastically with ‘Nietzsche’s Poetry’ and ‘Nietzsche’s Midnight Hymn’; T. de Wysewa[422] assures the French, who are not in the position to prove the accuracy of his assertions, that ‘Nietzsche is the greatest thinker and most brilliant author produced by Germany in the last generation,’ etc.

It has, nevertheless, been reserved to a lady to beat the male disciples of Nietzsche, in the audacious denial of the most openly manifest truth. This feminine partisan of Nietzsche, Lou Salomé, with a cool imperturbability fit to take away the breath of the most callous spectator, turns her back on the fact that Nietzsche has for years been confined in a lunatic asylum, and proclaims with brazen brow that Nietzsche, from the aristocratic contempt of the world belonging to the ‘over-human,’ has voluntarily ceased to write, and withdrawn himself into solitude. Nietzsche is a man of science and a psycho-physiologist, and Nietzsche keeps silence, because he no longer finds it worth the trouble to speak to the men of the herd; these are the catch-words cried aloud throughout the world by the Nietzsche band. In the face of such a conspiracy against truth, honesty, sound reason, it is not enough to have proved the senselessness of Nietzsche’s system, it must also be shown that Nietzsche has always been insane, and that his writings are the abortions of frenzy (more exactly, of ‘maniacal exaltation’).

A few followers of Nietzsche, undoubtedly not fit to hold a candle to Lou Salomé, do not contest the fact of Nietzsche’s insanity, but say that he became insane because he withdrew himself too much from men, because he lived too long in the deepest solitude, because his speed of thought was so ruinously, unnaturally rapid. This unheard-of idiocy could circulate throughout the entire German press, and yet not a single newspaper had the gumption to remark that insanity can never be the consequence of solitude and too speedy thought, but that, on the contrary, a propensity for solitude and vertiginously rapid thought are the primary and best known signs of existing insanity, and that this prattle of Nietzsche’s partisans is, perhaps, of equal force with the assertion that someone had contracted lung disease through coughing and hæmorrhage!

For Nietzsche’s ‘anthropophobia’ we have the evidence of his biographers, who cite curious examples of it.[423] His rapid thought, however, is a phenomenon never absent in frenzied madness. That the unprofessional reader may know what he is to understand by this, we will present him with the clinical picture of this form of insanity traced by the hand of the most authoritative masters.

‘The acceleration of the course of thought in mania,’ says Griesinger, ‘is a consequence of the facilitation of the connection between representations, where the patient humbugs, romances, declaims, sings, calls into service all the modes of exteriorizing ideas, rambles incoherently from one topic to another, the ideas hurtling against and overthrowing each other. The same acceleration of ideation is found in certain forms of dementia and in secondary psychical enfeeblement, “with activity produced by hallucinations.” The logical concatenations are not in this case intact, as in argumentation and hypochondriacal dementia; or the precipitate sequence of representations no longer follows any law; or, again, only words and sounds devoid of meaning succeed each other with impetuous haste.... Thus there arises ... a ceaseless chase of ideas, in the torrent of which all is borne away in pell-mell flight. The latter conditions appear chiefly in raving madness; at its inception especially, a greater mental vivacity often manifests itself, and cases have been observed where the fact that the patient became witty was a sure sign of the imminence of an attack of frenzy.’[424]

Still more graphic is the description given by Krafft-Ebing.[425] ‘The content of consciousness is here [in ‘maniacal exaltation’] pleasure, psychical well-being. It is just as little induced by events of the external world as the opposite state of psychical pain in melancholia, and is, therefore, referable to an inner organic cause only. The patient literally revels in feelings of pleasure, and declares, after recovery, that never, when in good health, has he felt so contented, so buoyant, so happy, as during his illness. This spontaneous pleasure undergoes powerful increments ... through the perception by the patient of the facilitated processes of ideation ... through the intensive accentuation of ideas by feelings of pleasure and by agreeable cœnæstheses, especially in the domain of muscular sensation.... In this way the cheerful mood temporarily exalts itself to the height of pleasurable emotions (gay extravagance, exuberance), which find their motor exteriorization in songs, dances, leaps.... The patient becomes more plastic in his diction ... his faculties of conception act more rapidly, and, in accelerated association, he is at once more prompt in repartee, witty and humorous to the point of irony. The plethora of his consciousness supplies him with inexhaustible material for talk, and the enormous acceleration of his ideation, in which there spring up complete intermediate forms with the rapidity of thought, without undergoing exteriorization in speech, causes his current of ideas, in so far as they find expression, to seem rambling.... He continually exercises criticism in respect of his own condition, and proves that he is himself aware of his abnormal state by ... claiming, among other things, that he is only a fool, and that to such everything is permissible.... The invalid cannot find words enough to depict his maniacal well-being, his “primordial health.”’

And now every individual feature of this picture of disease shall be pointed out in Nietzsche’s writings. (I repeat my previous remark, that I am compelled to limit myself in citing examples, but that literally on every page of Nietzsche’s writing examples of the same kind are to be found.)

His cœnæstheses, or systemic sensations, continually inspire him with presentations of laughter, dancing, flying, buoyancy, generally of movement of the gayest and easiest kind--of rolling, flowing, plunging. ‘Let us guard ourselves from immediately making gloomy faces at the word “torture” ... even there something remains for laughter.’ ‘We are prepared for a carnival in the grand style, for the most spiritual carnival-laughter and exuberance, for the transcendental height of the most exalted idiocy and Aristophanic derision of the universe.... Perhaps if nothing else of to-day has a future, our very laughter still has a future.’ ‘I would even permit myself to classify philosophers according to the quality of their laughter--up to those capable of golden laughter[!] ... The gods are jocular. It seems as if, even in sacred deeds, they could not forbear laughing.’ ‘Ah! what are ye then, ye written and painted thoughts of mine? It is not long since ye were so fantastic, so young and naughty ... that ye made me sneeze and laugh.’ ‘Now the world laughs, the dismal veil is rent.’ ‘It is laughter that kills, not wrath. Come, let us kill the spirit of heaviness!’ ‘Truly there are beings chaste by nature; they are milder in heart; they laugh more agreeably and copiously than ye. They laugh as well over chastity, and ask, What is chastity?’ ‘Had He [Jesus Christ] remained in the desert, perhaps He would have learned to live and to love the earth--and to laugh besides.’ ‘The tension of my cloud was too great; between the laughters of the lightnings I will cast hail-showers into the deep.’ ‘To-day my shield quivered gently and laughed at me; that is the holy laughter and tremor of beauty.’

It will be seen that in all these cases the idea of laughter has no logical connection with the real thought; it is far rather an accompaniment of his intellection as a basic state, as a chronic obsession, having its explanation in the maniacal excitation of the centres of ideation. It is the same with the presentations of dancing, flying, etc. ‘I should only believe in a god who knew how to dance.’ ‘Truly, Zarathustra is no hurricane and whirlwind; and if he is a dancer, yet is he by no means a dancer of the tarantella.’ ‘And once upon a time I wished to dance, as I never yet have danced; away over the whole heaven did I wish to dance.... Only in the dance do I know of parables for the highest things.’ ‘I found this blessed security in all things also: that on the feet of chance they preferred--to dance. O thou heaven above me, O pure! O sublime! thy purity is now for me ... that thou art a dancing-floor for divine chances.’ ‘Ask of my foot ... truly after such a rhythm, such a tick-tack, it likes neither to dance nor rest.’ ‘And, above all, I learned to stand and walk and run and leap and climb and dance.’ ‘It is a fine fool’s jest this, of speech; thanks to it, man dances over all things.’ ‘O my soul, I taught thee to say “to-day,” as well as “once” and “formerly,” and to dance thy measure over all the “here” and “there” and “yonder.” Thou castest thy glance at my foot crazy for the dance.’ ‘If my virtue is a dancer’s virtue, and I often bounded with both feet into a rapture of golden emerald,’ etc.

(‘A state of mind he experienced with horror:’) ‘A perpetual movement between high and deep, and the feeling of high and deep, a constant feeling as if mounting steps, and at the same moment as if reposing on clouds.’ ‘Is there, indeed, one thing alone that remains uncomprehended by it ... that only in flight is it touched, beheld, lightened upon?’ ‘All my will would fly alone, would fly into thee.’ ‘Ready and impatient to fly, to fly away; that is now my nature.’ ‘My wise longing cried out from me, and laughed also ... my great longing, with rushing wings. And often it dragged me forth, and away in the midst of my laughter; then, indeed, I flew shuddering ... thither, where gods dance, ashamed of all clothes.’ ‘If I ever spread still heavens above me, and with my own wings flew in my own heavens.... If my malice is a laughing malice ... and if my Alpha and Omega is that all heaviness may become light, all body a dancer, all spirit a bird; and verily that is my Alpha and Omega,’ etc.

In the examples hitherto cited the insane ideas are mainly in the sphere of movement. In those that follow it is excitations of the sensorial centres that find expression. Nietzsche has all sorts of illusions of skin-sensibility (cold, warmth, being breathed upon), of sight (lustre, lightning, brightness), of hearing (rushing, roaring), and of smell, which he mixes up in his fugitive ideation. ‘I am too hot and burnt with my own thoughts.’ ‘Ah! ice surrounds me; my hand is burnt by iciness.’ ‘The sun of my love lay brooding upon me; Zarasthustra was stewing in his own juice.’ ‘Take care that there be honey ready to my hand ... good, icy-fresh, golden honeycomb.’ ‘Into the coldest water I plunged with head and heart.’ ‘There I am sitting ... lusting for a maiden’s round mouth, but still more for maidenly, icy-cold, snow-white, cutting, biting teeth.’ ‘For I deal with deep problems as with a cold bath--soon into it, soon out of it.... Ho! the great cold quickens.’ ‘Over thy surging sea I blew with the storm that is called spirit; I blew from it all clouds.’ ‘To their bodies and to their spirits our happiness would be as ice-caverns! and, like strong winds, we will live above them ... and like a wind will I once blow among them.’

‘I am light ... but this is my loneliness, that I am engirdled with light.... I live in my own light; I drink back into myself the flames that break forth from me.’

‘Mute over the roaring sea art thou this day arisen for me.’ ‘They divine nothing from the roaring of my happiness.’ ‘Sing, and riot in roaring, O Zarathustra!’ ‘Almost too fiercely for me thou dost gush forth, well-spring of joy ... too violently doth my heart gush forth to meet thee.’ ‘My desire now breaks forth from me like a fountain.’

‘There is often an odour in her wisdom, as if it came forth from a swamp.’ ‘Alas! that I should have so long lived in the midst of their noise and foul breath. O blessed stillness around me!’ ‘O pure odours around me!’ ‘That was the falsehood in my pity, that in each I saw and smelt what was mind enough for him.... With blissful nostrils again I breathed the freedom of the mountain! My nose is at length redeemed from the odour of all that is human!’ ‘Bad air! bad air!... Why must I smell the entrails of a misguided soul?’ ‘This workshop, where ideals are manufactured, meseems it stinks of nothing but lies.’ ‘We avoided the rabble ... the stink of shopkeepers ... the foul breath.’ ‘This rabble, that stinks to heaven.’ ‘O odours pure around me!... These crowds of superior men--perhaps they do not smell nice,’ etc.

As these examples show, Nietzsche’s thought receives its special colouring from his sense illusions, and from the excitation of the centres forming motor presentations, which, in consequence of a derangement of the mechanism of co-ordination, are not transformed into motor impulses, but remain as mere images, without influence on the muscles.

In respect of form, Nietzsche’s thought makes the two characteristic peculiarities of madness perceptible: the sole domination of the association of ideas, watched over and restrained by no attention, no logic, no judgment; and the giddy rapidity of the course of ideation.

As soon as any idea whatsoever springs up in Nietzsche’s mind, it immediately draws with it into consciousness all presentations related to it, and thus with flying hand he throws five, six, often eight, synonyms on paper, without noticing how overladen and turgid his literary style is thereby rendered: ‘The force of a mind measures itself ... by the degree to which it is obliged to attenuate, veil, sweeten, damp, falsify the truth.’ ‘We are of the opinion that severity, violence, slavery, danger in the street and in the heart, concealment, stoicism, the tempter’s art and devilry of every kind; that all things wicked, fearful, tyrannical, bestial, and serpent-like in man, are of as much service in the elevation of the species “man” as their opposites. He knows ... on what miserable things the loftiest Becoming has hitherto been shattered, snapped off, has fallen away, become miserable.’ ‘In man there is material, fragment, surplus, clay, mud, nonsense, chaos; but in man there is also creator, constructor, hammer-hardness, divinity-of-the-beholder, and the seventh day.... That which for this one must be formed, broken, forged, torn, burnt, made red-hot, purified.’ ‘It would sound more courteous if ... an unrestrained honesty were related, whispered, and praised (nachsagte, nachraunte, nachrühmte) of us.’ ‘Spit upon the town ... where swarms all that is rotten, tainted, lustful, gloomy, worm-eaten, ulcerous, seditious.’ ‘We forebode that it is ever growing downwards into the more attenuated, more debonnaire, more artful, more easy-going, more mediocre, more indifferent, more Chinese, more Christian.’ ‘All these pallid Atheists, Anti-Christians, Immoralists, Nihilists, Sceptics, Ephectics, Hectics of the mind,’ etc.

From these examples, the attentive reader must have already remarked that the tumultuous rush of words frequently results from the merest resemblance in sound. Not seldom does the riot of words degenerate into paltry quibbling, into the silliest pun, into the automatic association of words according to their sound, without regard to their meaning. ‘If this turn (Wende) in all the need (Noth) is called necessity (Nothwendigkeit).’ ‘Thus ye boast (brüstet) of yourselves--alas! even without breasts (Brüste).’ ‘There is much pious lick-spittle-work (Speichel-Leckerie), baking-of-flattery (Schmeichel-Bäckerei) before the Lord of Hosts.’ ‘Spit upon the great town, which is the great slum (Abraum), where all the scum (Abschaum) froths together (zusammanschäumt).’ ‘Here and there there is nothing to better (bessern), nothing to worsen (bösern).’ ‘What have they to do there, far-seeing (weitsichtige), far-seeking (weit-süchtige) eyes?’ ‘In such processions (Zügen) goats (Ziegen) and geese, and the strong-headed and the wrong-headed (Kreuz und Querköpfe), were always running on before.... O, Will, turn of all need (Wende aller Noth)! O thou my necessity (Nothwendigkeit)!’ ‘Thus I look afar over the creeping and swarming of little gray waves (Wellen) and wills (Willen).’ ‘This seeking (Suchen) for my home was the visitation (Heimsuchung) of me.’ ‘Did not the world become perfect, round and ripe (reif)? O for the golden round ring (Reif)!’ ‘Yawns (Klafft) the abyss here too? Yelps (Kläfft) the dog of hell here too?’ ‘It stultifies, brutalizes (verthiert), and transforms into a bull (verstiert).’ ‘Life is at least (mindestens), at the mildest (mildestens), an exploiting.’ ‘Whom I deemed transformed akin to myself (verwandt-verwandelt),’ etc.

Nietzsche, in the wild hurry of his thought, many a time fails to comprehend the scintillating word-images elaborated in his centres of speech; his consciousness, as it were, hears wrongly, misses its aim in interpreting, and invents wondrous neologisms, which sound like known expressions, but have no sort of fellowship in meaning with these. He speaks, for example, of Hinterweltlern (inhabitants of remote worlds) from Hinterwäldlern (backwoodsmen), of a Kesselbauche (kettle’s belly) when he is thinking of Kesselpauche (kettledrum), etc.; or he even repeats, as his centres of speech prompt, wholly incomprehensible, meaningless sounds. ‘Then I went to the door: Alpa! I cried, who is carrying his ashes to the mountain? Alpa! Alpa! who is carrying his ashes to the mountain?’

He frequently associates his ideas, not according to the sound of the word, but according to the similarity or habitual contiguity of the concepts; then there arise ‘analogous’ intellection and the fugitive ideation, in which, to use Griesinger’s expression, he ‘rambles incoherently from one topic to another.’ Speaking of the ‘ascetic ideal,’ e.g., he elaborates the idea that strong and noble spirits take refuge in the desert, and, without any connection, adds: ‘Of course, too, they would not want for camels there.’ The representation of the desert has irresistibly drawn after it the representation of camels, habitually associated with it. At another time he says: ‘Beasts of prey and men of prey, e.g., Cæsar Borgia, are radically misunderstood; Nature is misunderstood so long as a fundamental diseased condition is sought for in these healthiest of all tropical monsters and growths. It seems that there is among moralists a hatred against the primeval forest and against the tropics, and that the tropical man must, at any price, be discredited. But why? For the benefit of the temperate zone? For the benefit of the temperate (moderate) men? Of the mediocre?’ In this case the contemplation of Cæsar Borgia forces upon him the comparison with a beast of prey; this makes him think of the tropics, the torrid zone; from the torrid zone he comes to the temperate zone, from this to the ‘temperate’ man, and, through the similarity of sound, to the ‘mediocre’ man (in German, gemässigt and mittelmässig).

‘In truth nothing remains of the world but green twilight and green lightnings. Do as it pleases ye, ye wantons ... shake your emeralds down into the deepest depth.’ The quite incomprehensible ‘emeralds’ are called up into consciousness by the representation of the ‘green’ twilight and lightnings.

In this and hundreds of other cases the course of ideation can, to a certain extent, be followed, because all the links in the chain of association are preserved. It often happens, however, that some of these links are suppressed, and then there occur leaps of thought, incomprehensible, and, consequently, bewildering to the reader: ‘It was the body who despaired of the earth, who heard the belly of being speaking to itself.’ ‘More honestly and more purely speaks the healthy body, the perfect and rectangular.’ ‘I am polite towards them as towards all petty vexation; to be prickly against pettiness seems to me wisdom for hedgehogs.’ ‘Deep yellow and hot red; so would my taste have it. This one mixes blood in all colours. He who whitewashes his house betrays to me his whitewashed soul.’ ‘We placed our seat in the midst--so their smirking tells me--and as far from dying gladiators as from contented pigs. But this is mediocrity.’ ‘Our Europe of to-day is ... sceptic ... at one time with that mobile scepticism which leaps impatiently and wantonly from branch to branch, at another gloomy as a cloud overladen with notes of interrogation.’ ‘Let us grant that he [the ‘courageous thinker’] has long enough hardened and pricked up his eye for himself.’ (Here the representation of ‘ear’ and ‘pricked-up ears’ has evidently crossed with confusing effect the associated idea of ‘eye.’) ‘It is already too much for me to keep my opinions to myself, and many a bird flies away. And sometimes I find flown into my dovecot an animal that is strange to me, and that trembles when I lay my hand on it.’ ‘What matters my justice? I do not see that I should be fire and coal.’ ‘They learned from the sea its vanity, too; is the sea not the peacock of peacocks?’ ‘How many things now go by the name of the greatest wickedness, which are only twelve feet wide and three months long! But greater dragons will one day come into the world.’ ‘And if all ladders now fail thee, then must thou understand how to mount on thine own head; how wouldst thou mount otherwise?’ ‘Here I sit, sniffing the best air, the very air of Paradise, luminous, light air, rayed with gold; as good an air as ever yet fell from the moon.’ ‘Ha! up dignity! Virtue’s dignity! European dignity! Blow, blow again, bellows of virtue! Ha! roar once more, morally roar! As a moral lion roar before the daughters of the desert! For virtue’s howl, ye dearest maidens, is more than all European fervour, European voraciousness! And here am I, already a European; I cannot otherwise, God help me! Amen! The desert grows, woe to him who hides deserts!’

The last passage is an example of complete fugitive ideation. Nietzsche often loses the clue, no longer knows what he is driving at, and finishes a sentence which began as if to develop into an argument, with a sudden stray jest. ‘Why should the world, which somewhat concerns us, not be a fiction? And to him who objects: “But a fiction must have an author,” could not the reply be roundly given: Why? Does not this “must” perhaps belong also to the fiction? Is it not permissible to be at last a little ironical towards the subject as well as towards the predicate and object? Ought not the philosopher to rise above a belief in grammar? With all respect for governesses [!], is it not time that philosophy should renounce its faith in governesses?’ ‘“One is always too many about me,” so thinks the hermit. One times one to infinity at last makes two!’ ‘What, then, do they call that which makes them proud? They name it culture; it distinguishes them from the goat-herds.’

Finally, the connection of the associated representations suddenly snaps, and he breaks off in the midst of a sentence to begin a new one: ‘For in religion the passions have once more rights of citizenship, provided that.’ ‘The psychologists of France ... have not yet enjoyed to the full their bitter and manifold pleasure in la bêtise bourgeoise, in a manner as if--enough; they betray something thereby.’ ‘There have been philosophers who knew how to lend yet another seductive ... expression to this admiration of the people ... instead of adducing the naked and thoroughly obvious truth, that disinterested conduct is very interesting and interested conduct, provided that---- And love?’

This is the form of Nietzsche’s intellection, sufficiently explaining why he has never set down three coherent pages, but only more or less short ‘aphorisms.’

The content of this incoherent fugitive ideation is formed by a small number of insane ideas, continually repeating themselves with exasperating monotony. We have already become acquainted with Nietzsche’s intellectual Sadism, and his mania of contradiction and doubt, or mania for questioning. In addition to these he evinces misanthropy, or anthropophobia, megalomania, and mysticism.

His anthropophobia expresses itself in numberless passages: ‘Knowledge is no longer sufficiently loved as soon as it is communicated.’ ‘Every community leads somehow, somewhen, somewhere--to vulgarity.’ ‘There are still many void places for the lonesome and twosome [!] around which wafts the odour of tranquil seas.’ ‘Flee, my friend, into thy lonesomeness!’ ‘And many a one who turned away from life, only turned away from the rabble ... and many a one who went into the desert and suffered thirst with the beasts of prey, only wished not to sit with filthy camel-drivers about the tank.’

His megalomania appears only exceptionally as monstrous self-conceit; but it is, nevertheless, clearly conceivable; as a rule it displays a strong and even predominant union of mysticism and supernaturalism. It is pure self-conceit when he says: ‘In that which concerns my “Zarathustra,” I accept no one as a connoisseur whom each of his words has not at some time deeply wounded and deeply enraptured; only then can he enjoy the privilege of reverentially participating in the halcyon element out of which every work is born, in its sunny brightness, distance, breadth, and certainty.’ Or when, after having criticised and belittled Bismarck, he cries, with transparent allusion to himself: ‘But I, in my happiness and my “beyond,” pondered how soon the stronger becomes master of the strong.’ On the other hand, the hidden, mystic, primary idea of his megalomania already distinctly comes out in this passage: ‘But at some given time ... must he nevertheless come, the redeeming man of great love and contempt, the creative spirit who his impulsive strength is ever driving away out of all that is apart and beyond, whose loneliness is misunderstood by the people as if it were flight from reality. It is only his immersion, interment, absorption [three synonyms for one concept!] into reality, in order that at some time if he again comes into the light, he may bring home the redemption of this reality.’

The nature of his megalomania is betrayed by the expressions ‘redeeming man’ and ‘redemption.’ He imagines himself a new Saviour, and plagiarizes the Gospel in form and substance. Also Sprach Zarathustra is a complete stereotype of the sacred writings of Oriental nations. The book aims at an external resemblance to the Bible and Koran. It is divided into chapters and verses; the language is the archaic and prophetic language of the books of Revelation (‘And Zarathustra looked at the people, and was astonished. Then he spake and said thus:’); there frequently appear long enumerations and sermons like litanies (‘I love those who do not seek a reason only behind the stars ...; I love him who lives to know ...; I love him who labours and invents ...; I love him who loves his virtue ...; I love him who withholds for himself not one drop of mind,’ etc.), and individual paragraphs point verbatim to analogous portions of the Gospel, e.g.: ‘When Zarathustra had taken leave of the city ... there followed him many who called themselves his disciples and bore him company. Thus they came to a cross-road; then said Zarathustra unto them, that thenceforth he would go alone.’ ‘And the happiness of the spirit is this: to be anointed by tears and consecrated as a beast of sacrifice.’ ‘Verily, said he to his disciples, yet a little and there comes this long twilight. Ah! how shall I save my light?’ ‘In this manner did Zarathustra go about, sore at heart, and for three days took no food or drink.... At length it came to pass that he fell into a deep sleep. And his disciples sat around him in long night-watches,’ etc. Many of the chapters have most expressive titles: ‘On Self-Conquest;’ ‘On Immaculate Knowledge;’ ‘On Great Events;’ ‘On the Redemption;’ ‘On the Mount of Olives;’ ‘On Apostates;’ ‘The Cry of Sore Need;’ ‘The Last Supper;’ ‘The Awakening,’ etc. Sometimes, it is true, it befalls him to say, atheistically: ‘If there were gods, how could I endure to be no god? Hence’ (italics his) ‘there are no gods;’ but such passages vanish among the countless ones in which he refers to himself as a god. ‘Thou hast the power and thou wilt not reign.’ ‘He who is of my nature escapes not such an hour--the hour which says to him: Only now art thou going the way of thy greatness.... Thou art entering on the way of thy greatness; that which has hitherto been thy last danger has now become thy last resource. Thou art entering on the way of thy greatness; now must thy best courage be, that there is no longer any way behind thee. Thou art going on the way of thy greatness; here shall no one slink behind thee,’ etc.

Nietzsche’s mysticism and megalomania manifest themselves not only in his somewhat more coherent thought, but also in his general mode of expression. The mystic numbers, three and seven, frequently appear. He sees the external world, as he does himself--vast, distant, deep; and the words expressing these concepts are repeated on every page, almost in every line: ‘The discipline of suffering, of great suffering....’ ‘The South is a great school of healing.’ ‘These last great searchers....’ ‘With the signs of great destiny.’ ‘Where together with great compassion he has learnt great contempt--to learn, at their side, great reverence.’ ‘Guilt is all great existence.’ ‘That I may celebrate the great noon with you.’ ‘Thus speaks all great love.’ ‘Not from you is great weariness to come to me.’ ‘Men who are nothing but a great eye, or a great mouth, or a great belly, or something great....’ ‘To love with great love, to love with great contempt.’ ‘But thou, O depth, thou sufferest too deeply.’ ‘Immovable is my depth, but it gleams with floating enigmas and laughters.’ (It is to be observed how, in this sentence, all the obsessions of the maniac crowd together--depth, brilliancy, mania of doubt, hilarious excitation.) ‘All depth shall ascend to my height.’ ‘They do not think enough into the deep,’ etc. With the idea of depth is connected that of abyss, which recurs with equal constancy. The words ‘abyss’ and ‘abysmal’ are among the most frequent in Nietzsche’s writings. His words which have the prefix ‘over’ are associated with his motor images, especially those of flying and hovering: ‘Over-moral sense’; ‘over-European music’; ‘climbing monkeys and over-heated’; ‘from the species to the over-species’; ‘the over-hero’; ‘the over-human’; ‘the over-dragon’; ‘the over-urgent’ and ‘over-compassionate,’ etc.

As is general in frenzied madness, Nietzsche is conscious of his diseased interior processes, and in countless places alludes to the furiously rapid outflow of his ideation and to his insanity: ‘That true philosophic reunion of a bold, unrestrained mentality, running presto.... They regard thought as something slow, hesitant, almost a toil; not at all as something light, divine, and nearest of kin to the dance, to exuberance.’ ‘The bold, light, tender march and flight of his thought.’ ‘We think too rapidly.... It is as if we carried about in our head an incessantly rolling machine.’ ‘It is in impatient spirits that there breaks out a veritable pleasure in insanity, because insanity has so joyous a tempo.’ ‘All talking runs too slowly for me; I leap into thy chariot, Storm!... Like a cry and a huzza would I glide away over vast seas.’ ‘Eruptive insanity forever hovers above humanity as its greatest danger.’ (He is, of course, thinking of himself when speaking of ‘humanity.’) ‘In these days it sometimes happens that a gentle, temperate, self-contained man becomes suddenly frenzied, breaks plates, upsets the table, shrieks, rages, offends everyone, and finally retires in shame and anger against himself.’ (Most decidedly ‘that sometimes happens,’ not only ‘in these days,’ but in all times; but among maniacs only.) ‘Where is the insanity with which ye were forced to be inoculated? Behold, I teach you the over-man, who is ... this insanity.’ ‘All things are worth the same; each is alike. He who feels otherwise goes voluntarily [?] into a madhouse.’ ‘I put this exuberance and this foolishness in the place of that will, as I taught; in all one thing is impossible--reasonableness.’ ‘My hand is a fool’s hand; woe to all tables and walls, and wherever there is yet room for the embellishments of fools--scribbling of fools!’ (In the original there is here a play on the words Zierrath, Schmierrath.)[426] He also, in the manner of maniacs, excuses his mental disease: ‘Finally, there would remain open the great question whether we could dispense with disease even for the development of our virtue, and especially if our thirst for knowledge and self-knowledge needed the sick soul as much as the healthy soul.’

Finally, he is not even wanting in the maniacal idea of his ‘primæval health.’ His soul is ‘always clearer and always healthier’; ‘we Argonauts of the ideal’ are ‘healthier than one would fain allow us to be--dangerously healthy, more and more healthy,’ etc.

The foregoing is a necessarily condensed summary of the special colour, form, and content of Nietzsche’s thought, originating in illusions of sense; and this unhappy lunatic has been earnestly treated as a ‘philosopher,’ and his drivel put forward as a ‘system’--this man whose scribbling is one single long divagation, in whose writings madness shrieks out from every line! Dr. Kirchner, a philosopher by profession, and the author of numerous philosophical writings, in a newspaper article on Nietzsche’s book, Der Fall Wagner, lays great stress on the fact that ‘it superabounds, as it were, in intellectual health.’ Ordinary university professors--such as G. Adler, in Freiburg, and others--extol Nietzsche as a ‘bold and original thinker,’ and with solemn seriousness take up a position in respect of his ‘philosophy’--some with avowed enthusiasm, and some with carefully considered reservations! In the face of such incurably deep mental obtuseness, it cannot excite wonder if the clear-thinking and healthy portion of the young spirits of the present generation should, with hasty generalization, extend to philosophy itself the contempt deserved by its officially-appointed teachers. These teachers undertake to introduce their students into mental philosophy, and are yet without the capacity to distinguish from rational thought the incoherent fugitive ideation of a maniac.

Dr. Hermann Türck[427] characterizes in excellent words the disciples of Nietzsche: ‘This piece of wisdom [‘nothing is true; all is permissible’] in the mouth of a morally insane man of letters has ... found ready response among persons who, in consequence of a moral defect, feel themselves to be in contradiction to the demands of society. This aforesaid intellectual proletariat of large towns is especially jubilant over the new magnificent discovery that all morality and all truth are completely superfluous and pernicious to the development of the individual. It is true that these persons have always in secret said to themselves, “Nothing is true--all is permissible,” and have also, as far as possible, acted accordingly. But now they can avow it openly, and with pride; for Friedrich Nietzsche, the new prophet, has vaunted this maxim as the most exalted truth of life.... It is not society which is right in its estimation of morality, science, and true art. Oh dear no! The individuals who follow their egoistical personal aims only--who act only as if truth were of consequence to them--they, the counterfeiters of truth, those unscrupulous penny-a-liners, lying critics, literary thieves, and manufacturers of pseudo-realistic brummagem--they are the true heroes, the masters of the situation, the truly free spirits.’

That is the truth, but not the whole truth. Without doubt, the real Nietzsche gang consists of born imbecile criminals, and of simpletons drunk with sonorous words. But besides these gallows birds without the courage and strength for criminal actions, and the imbeciles who allow themselves to be stupefied and, as it were, hypnotized by the roar and rush of fustian, the banner of the insane babbler is followed by others, who must be judged otherwise and in part more gently. In fact, Nietzsche’s ranting includes some ideas which, in part, respond to a widespread notion of the age, and in part are capable of awakening the deception that, in spite of all the exaggeration and insane distortion of exposition, they contain a germ of truth and right; and these ideas explain why many persons agree with them who can hardly be reproached with lack of clearness and critical capacity.

Nietzsche’s fundamental idea of utter disregard and brutal contempt for all the rights of others standing in the way of an egoistical desire, must please the generation reared under the Bismarckian system. Prince Bismarck is a monstrous personality, raging over a country like a tornado in the torrid zone; it crushes all in its devastating course, and leaves behind as traces, a widespread annihilation of character, destruction of notions of right, and demolition of morality. In political life the system of Bismarck is a sort of Jesuitism in cuirass. ‘The end sanctifies the means,’ and the means are not (as with the supple sons of Loyola) cunning, obstinacy, secret trickery, but open brutality, violence, the blow with the fist, and the stroke with the sword. The end which sanctifies the means of the Jesuit in cuirass may sometimes be of general utility; but it will quite as often, and oftener, be an egoistical one. In its author this system of the most primitive barbarism had ever a certain grandeur, for it had its origin in a powerful will, which with heroic boldness always placed itself at stake, and entered into every fight with the savage determination to ‘conquer or die.’ In its imitators, on the contrary, it has got stunted to ‘swaggering’ or ‘bullying,’ i.e., to that most abject and contemptible cowardice which crawls on its belly before the strong, but maltreats with the most extreme insolence the completely unarmed, the unconditionally harmless and weak, from whom no resistance and no danger are in any way to be apprehended. The ‘bullies’ gratefully recognise themselves in Nietzsche’s ‘over-man,’ and Nietzsche’s so-called ‘philosophy’ is in reality the philosophy of ‘bullying.’ His doctrine shows how Bismarck’s system is mirrored in the brain of a maniac. Nietzsche could not have come to the front and succeeded in any but the Bismarckian and post-Bismarckian era. He would, doubtless, have been delirious at whatever period he might have lived; but his insanity would not have assumed the special colour and tendency now perceptible in it. It is true that sometimes Nietzsche vexes himself over the fact that ‘the type of the new Germany most rich in success in all that has depth ... fails in “swagger,”’ and he then proclaims: ‘It were well for us not to exchange too cheaply our ancient renown as a people of depth for Prussian “swagger,” and the wit and sand of Berlin.’[428] But in other places he betrays what really displeases him in the ‘swagger,’ at which he directs his philosophical verse; it makes too much ado about the officer. ‘The moment he [the ‘Prussian officer’] speaks and moves, he is the most forward and tasteless figure in old Europe--unknown to himself.... And unknown also to the good Germans, who wonder at him as a man of the highest and most distinguished society, and willingly take their tone from him.’[429] Nietzsche cannot consent to that--Nietzsche, who apprehends that there can be no God, as in that case he himself must be this God. He cannot suffer the ‘good German’ to place the officer above him. But apart from this inconvenience, which is involved in the system of ‘swagger,’ he finds everything in it good and beautiful, and lauds it as ‘intrepidity of glance, courage and hardness of the cutting hand, an inflexible will for dangerous voyages of discovery, for spiritualized North-Polar expeditions under desolate and dangerous skies,’[430] and prophesies exultingly that for Europe there will soon begin an era of brass, an era of war, soldiers, arms, violence. Hence it is natural that ‘swaggerers’ should hail him as their very own peculiar philosopher.

Besides anarchists, born with incapacity for adaptation, his ‘individualism,’ i.e., his insane ego-mania, for which the external world is non-existent, was bound to attract those who instinctively feel that at the present day the State encroaches too deeply and too violently on the rights of the individual, and, in addition to the necessary sacrifices of strength and time, exacts from him such as he cannot undergo without destructive loss of self-esteem, viz., the sacrifice of judgment, knowledge, conviction, and human dignity. These thirsters for freedom believe that they have found in Nietzsche the spokesman of their healthy revolt against the State, as the oppressor of independent spirits, and as the crusher of strong characters. They commit the same error which I have already pointed out in the sincere adherents of the Decadents and of Ibsen; they do not see that Nietzsche confounds the conscious with the subconscious man; that the individual, for whom he demands perfect freedom, is the man, not of knowledge and judgment, but of blind craving, requiring the satisfaction of his lascivious instincts at any price; that he is not the moral, but the sensual, man.

Finally, his consequential airs have also increased the number of his followers. Many of those marching in his train reject his moral doctrine, but wax enthusiastic over such expressions as these: ‘It might some time happen that the masses should become masters.... Therefore, O my brothers, there is need of a new nobility, the adversary of all plebeians and all violent domination, and who inscribes anew on a new tablet the word “Nobility.”’[431]

There is at the present time a widespread conviction that the enthusiasm for equality was a grievous error of the great Revolution. A doctrine opposed to all natural laws is justly resisted. Humanity has need of a hierarchy. It must have leaders and models. It cannot do without an aristocracy. But the nobleman to whom the human herd may concede the most elevated place will certainly not be Nietzsche’s ‘over-man,’ the ego-maniac, the criminal, the robber, the slave of his maddened instincts, but the man of richer knowledge, higher intelligence, clearer judgment, and firmer self-discipline. The existence of humanity is a combat, which it cannot carry on without captains. As long as the combat is of men against men, the herd requires a herdsman of strong muscles and ready blow. In a more perfect state, in which all humanity fights collectively against Nature only, it chooses as its chief the man of richest brain, most disciplined will and concentrated attention. This man is the best observer, but he is also one who feels most acutely and rapidly, who can most vividly picture to himself the condition of the external world, hence the man of the liveliest sympathy and most comprehensive interest. The ‘over-man’ of the healthy development of the species is a Paraclete of knowledge and unselfish love, not a bloodthirsty ‘splendid beast of prey.’ This is not borne in mind by those who believe that in Nietzsche’s aristocratism they have found a clear expression of their own obscure views as to the need of noble natures of light and leading.

Nietzsche’s false individualism and aristocratism is capable of misleading superficial readers. Their error may be accounted a mitigating circumstance. But even taking this into consideration, it still ever remains a disgrace to the German intellectual life of the present age, that in Germany a pronounced maniac should have been regarded as a philosopher, and have founded a school.

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Book IV

REALISM.

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I. ZOLA AND HIS SCHOOL

IT was necessary to treat in detail the two forms of degeneracy in literature and art hitherto examined, i.e., mysticism and ego-mania, inasmuch as their career of development seems to be still in the ascendant, and they are actively at work in making themselves masters of the æsthetic conscience of our times. Concerning the third form, realism or naturalism, I can afford to be much briefer, for two reasons: one having to do with my subject, the other with myself. The former reason is that, in the land of its origin, naturalism is already wholly vanquished, and we do not kill a corpse--we bury it. The personal reason is that I have already devoted myself elsewhere to the thorough examination of naturalism.[432] The conclusions I there came to I continue to maintain, as regards the appreciation of its tendency, and I should only wish to limit them by a strong reservation, in so far as they greatly over-estimate M. Zola’s abilities.

That naturalism in France is done with is admitted by all the world, and is really only disputed by Zola himself. ‘There is no doubt whatever as to the tendencies of the new generation of literary men,’ says M. Rémy de Gourmont; ‘they are rigorously anti-naturalist. There has been no question of forming a party or issuing orders; no crusade was organized; it is individually that we have separated ourselves, horror-stricken, from a literature the baseness of which made us sick. Perhaps there is even less disgust than indifference. I remember, when M. Zola’s last novel but one came out, that, among the eight or ten collaborators of the Mercure de France (a Symbolist journal), it was impossible for us to find anyone who had read through La Bête humaine, or anyone who would have consented to read it with sufficient care to review it. This species of book, and the method which dictates it, appears to us quite antiquated with the flavour of bygone years; more remote and more superannuated than the most truculent follies of romanticism.’[433]

Among the disciples of Zola, among those who collaborated in the Soirées de Médan, as among those who followed him later, there is scarcely one who has remained faithful to his tendency. Guy de Maupassant, before he was placed in the lunatic asylum where he died, ended by turning more and more towards the psychological novel. Joris Karl Huysmans, whom we have studied above in his new skin as a Diabolist and Decadent, cannot find words bitter enough for naturalism. J. H. Rosny writes novels now in which the scene is laid in the Stone Age, and the subject of which is the abduction of a brawny brachycephalous pre-Aryan woman by a tall, white-skinned, dolichocephalous Aryan man.[434] When Zola’s La Terre appeared, five of his disciples--Paul Bonnetain, J. H. Rosny, just mentioned, Lucien Descaves, Paul Margueritte, and Gustave Guiches--deemed it necessary to protest, in a public manifesto, and with a solemnity somewhat comical, against the obscenities of this novel, and to disavow their master in proper and befitting form. If the novels of M. Zola himself still continue to find a very good and steady market, as he declares with pride, this in no way proves that his tendency is still popular. The masses persist in habits, once adopted, much longer than the leaders and creators do. If the former continue to follow M. Zola as before, the latter have already wholly left him. The success of his last novels is explained, moreover, on quite other than artistic grounds. His flair for what is occupying public opinion is, perhaps, the most essential part of his talent. He chooses from the outset subjects in favour of which he is assured of the positive interest of a numerous public, no matter how they may be treated. With books which relate, in the form of a novel, the story of the financial crisis of 1882, or the war of 1870, as L’Argent and La Débâcle, every known French author is sure to awaken in his own country a passionate interest even to this day. And M. Zola could equally count on a numerous connection of lovers of the obscene and nasty. This public remains faithful to him, and finds in him all it seeks. But it is a long time since he acquired any new adherents in his own country, and abroad he only obtains them among people who anxiously follow every fashion, whether it be in neckties or books, but who are too ignorant to know as yet that M. Zola, in France itself, has long since ceased to be the last fashion.

In the opinion of his disciples, M. Zola is the inventor of realism in literature. This is a pretension which only young fellows, who are ignorant beyond all conception, could raise, and for whom the history of the world only begins at the moment when they have deigned to recognise it.

First of all, the word ‘realism’ itself has no æsthetic significance. In philosophy it denotes an opinion for which the general phenomenon of the world is the expression of a material reality. Applied to art and literature, it possesses no conception whatever. This I have explicitly demonstrated in another place (Paris unter der dritten Republik), and will confine myself here to going very briefly over the argument.

Those ale-house æsthetics, who distinguish between realism and idealism, explain the former as the effort of the artist to observe things and to reproduce them with truth. But this attempt is common to every author, whoever he may be. No one of deliberate purpose wanders from the truth in his creations; and even if he wished to do so, he could not, as this would contradict all the laws of human thought. Every one of our presentations, in fact, is based on an observation once made by us, and even when we invent ad libitum, we only work with the memory-images recollected from previous observations. If, in spite of this, one work gives a greater impression of truth than another, it is a question, not of this or that æsthetic tendency, but exclusively of the degree of talent. A true poet is always true; an incapable imitator can never be so. The first is true even when he disdains always to adhere closely to reality in details; the latter is not so even when he clings, with punctilious attention, and with the method of a land-surveyor, to little external details.

If one bear in mind the psychological conditions in which a work of art comes into existence, all the rhodomontade of so-called ‘realism’ is immediately recognised. The origin of every veritable work of art is an emotion. This is aroused either by a vital process in the internal organs of the artist, or by a sense-impression which he receives from the external world. In both cases the artist feels the necessity of giving expression to his emotion in a work of art. If this emotion is of organic origin, he will choose from among his memory-images, or his sense-impressions of the moment, those which are in harmony with his emotion, and will compose with them. If its origin is external, he will employ in his composition mainly phenomena of the external world, sensuous experiences which have evoked in him the emotion demanding objective shape, and he will combine with this, similar memory-images in accordance with the laws of association. As may be seen, the process in the two cases is absolutely the same: the artist, under the control of an emotion, welds direct sense-perceptions and memory-images into a work of art which brings him relief; only, sometimes the former, sometimes the latter, are predominant, according to whether the emotion has its origin in sense-perceptions or in organic processes. Speaking roughly, the works which result from an emotion aroused by the phenomena of the world may well be called realistic, and those expressing an organic emotion idealistic. These denominations, however, have not any really distinctive value. Among thoroughly sane individuals the emotions originate almost solely from impressions of the external world; among those whose nervous life is more or less diseased, namely, among hysterical, neurasthenic, and degenerate subjects, and every kind of lunatic, they originate much more frequently in internal organic processes. Sane artists will produce works, as a rule, in which perception will predominate; artists unhealthily emotional will produce works in which the play of association of ideas predominates--in other words, imagination working principally on memory-images. And if a false designation is absolutely adhered to, it might be said that the first, as a general rule, will produce works which are so-called realistic, and the second, works so-called idealistic. In no case is the work of art a faithful image of material reality; its genesis excludes this possibility. It is always the incarnation of a subjective emotion only. To desire to know the world by means of a work of art is a false proceeding; but the whole essence of a personality reveals itself in it to him who knows how to read. The work of art is never a document in the sense attached by naturalistic cant to this word, i.e., a reliable objective presentation of external facts; but it is always a confession of the author; it betrays, consciously or unconsciously, his way of feeling and thinking; it lays bare his emotions, and shows what ideas fill his consciousness, and are at the disposal of the emotion which strives for expression. It is not a mirror of the world, but a reflection of the soul of the artist.

It might be thought, perhaps, that at least the mainly imitative arts, painting and sculpture, are capable of a faithful reproduction of reality, and thus are realisms properly so called. Even this is an error. It would never occur to a painter or a sculptor to place himself before a phenomenon, and reproduce it without selection, without accentuations and suppressions. And why does he do this? If he imitates an aspect, it is evidently because something in that aspect captivates or pleases him--a harmony of colours, an effect of light, a line of motion. Involuntarily he will accentuate and throw into relief the feature which has inspired him with the desire to imitate the aspect in question, and his work, consequently, will no more represent the phenomenon such as it really was, but as he saw it; it will only be a fresh proof, therefore, of his emotion, not the cast of a phenomenon. To work absolutely in the method of a camera obscura and a sensitive plate would be only possible to a very obtuse handicraftsman, who, in the presence of the visible world, had no feeling for anything, no pleasure, no disgust, no aspirations of any kind. However, it is not at all probable that so atrophied a being will ever have had the inclination to become an artist, and could acquire, even in a moderate degree, the technical skill necessary for such a profession.

And if literal realism, the positive actual imitation of the phenomenon, be interdicted even in the plastic arts by their intrinsic nature, with how much greater reason is it forbidden to imaginative writing! The painter can, after all, if he wishes to debase himself and his art to the lowest degree, reduce the co-operation of his personality in a work of art (or, to be more exact, to the work, for then there can be no question of art) to an extremely feeble, a scarcely perceptible point; he can reduce himself to the condition of a mere camera obscura, transmit his visual impressions in the most mechanical manner possible to his motor organs, and compel himself to think and feel nothing during the progress of the work. His picture is furnished for him by Nature itself: it is his optical horizon. If, then, he wishes to exercise no choice, to express nothing of his own, not even to compose, still there remains the possibility of copying the phenomena which are enclosed within the limits of his field of vision. His so-called picture is then no more than an expressionless fragment of the world, in which the artist’s personality is only represented by the frame which encloses it, not because the phenomena of Nature really terminates at that point, but because the eye of the painter only embraces that portion, and no more; nevertheless, it is a picture in a technical sense, i.e., a picture that can be hung upon the wall and looked at. The imaginative writer (dichter), on the contrary, does not find his work ready in this way. It is not provided for him by Nature itself. His subjects are not developed in space, but in time. They are not arranged by the side of one another in such a way that the eye perceives them and can retain all it sees; but they succeed each other, and the imaginative writer must by his own intellect assign them their limits, he must himself decide what he ought to seize upon and what he must let go; where the phenomenon begins which he wishes to utilize in his work, and where it ends. He cannot begin or end a conversation in the middle of a word, in imitation of M. Jean Béraud, for example, who in a well-known picture has made the frame cut off the wheels of a waggon in the middle. He may not produce an inexpressive photograph of the uniform course of events of life and the world. He must fence round and dam up certain places in the course of events. In doing this he clearly affirms himself and his personality. He betrays his original stamp. He allows his intentions, views, and sentiments to be recognised. If amongst a million of contemporary human destinies he relates one only, it is that for some reason or other this particular one has interested him more than the rest of the million. If he transmits to us only some few features, ideas, conversations, and actions of the person he has selected (not even a millionth part of all that makes up his actual life) it is because, for some reason or other, these seemed to him more important and more characteristic than all the rest; because in his opinion they prove something, they express an idea not conceived by things as they are, but which he believes he can deduce from reality, or which he desires to read into it. Thus, his ‘realistic’ work always reproduces his thoughts only, his interpretation of reality, his interest in it, and not reality itself. If the imaginative writer wished to transcribe the world phonographically or photographically, his work would no longer be a poem, even in a purely technical sense; it would not even be a book, to the extent that the work of the painter who only photographs still continues, in a purely technical sense, to be a picture; it would be something with neither form, sense, nor name; for, in reproducing the existence of a single human being during one day only, thousands of pages could be filled if all his sensations, thoughts, words, and actions were treated as of equal value. That selection is therefore made among them which is the subjectivity of the imaginative writer, i.e., the reverse of ‘realism.’

Besides, the work of the painter addresses itself to the same senses as the phenomenon of Nature itself, and reproduces it with the help of the same means by which the world itself is revealed to the senses, viz., with light and colour. Of course the lights, colours, and lines of the painter are not exactly those of the real phenomenon, and it is only in consequence of an illusion that, in his imitation, the phenomenon is recognised; but this illusion is the work of such inferior cerebral centres that even animals are capable of it, as is demonstrated by the classical anecdote so well known of the birds wishing to peck at the bunch of grapes painted by Zeuxis. The imaginative writer, on the contrary, does not address himself to the senses; to be more exact, he appeals by hearing or sight, to which he presents spoken or written words, not to the centres of perception, as the plastic artist does in the first instance, but to the higher centres of conception, judgment, and reasoning. Nor has he the means for directly reproducing the sensible phenomenon itself, but he must first translate the phenomenon into concepts under a linguistic, i.e., a conventional, form. This is, however, an excessively complicated and highly differentiated activity, which bears completely the impress of the personality exercising it. If even two eyes do not see in the same manner, how much less can two brains perceive and interpret in the same way what the eye has seen, class it with pre-existing concepts, associate it with feelings and representations, and clothe it in traditional forms of language? The activity of the imaginative writer, therefore, is incomparably more than that of the artist, essentially personal; the elaboration of sense-impressions into representations, and the translation of representations into words, are so peculiarly individual, so exclusively subjective, that for this cause also imaginative writing can never be reality itself, i.e., ‘realistic.’

The notion of so-called ‘realism’ cannot withstand either psychological or æsthetic criticism. We might, perhaps, attempt an external, superficial, practical conception of it, and say, for example, Realism is the method in the application of which the imaginative writer starts from his perceptions and observations, and seeks his subjects in the environment he knows personally; idealism is the opposite method, which that writer employs who, in creating, yields to the play of imagination, and who, in order not to impede its free energy, borrows his materials from remote times and countries, or from social strata of which he has no direct knowledge, but which he conceives only in the visions of aspiration, intuition, or surmise. Reasonable and plausible as this explanation appears, it, too, nevertheless, dissolves into blue mist when more closely examined. For, in fact, the choice of subject-matter, the surroundings from which it is borrowed, or in which it is placed, have no decisive signification; no method is therein manifested, but merely the author’s personality. One in whom observation predominates will be ‘realistic,’ i.e., will express experiences, even if he pretends to speak of men and things placed wholly beyond the reach of his observation; and the other in whom the mechanical association of ideas prevails will be ‘idealistic,’ i.e., he will simply follow the wanderings of his imagination, even when he desires to represent circumstances which may be personally familiar to him.

Let us give one example only of the two cases. What is more ‘idealistic’ than fairy-stories? Very well, here are some passages from the best-known fairy-tales of the brothers Grimm: ‘There was once upon a time a king’s daughter who went into the forest and seated herself on the brink of a cool fountain’ (The Frog Prince; or, Iron Henry). ‘But the little sister at home [he is speaking of the daughter of a king who had driven away his twelve sons] grew up, and remained the only child. Once there was a great washing-day, and amongst the washing were twelve men’s shirts. “For whom are these shirts?” demanded the princess; “they are much too small for my father.” Then the laundress told her that she had had twelve brothers,’ etc.; ‘and as the little sister sat in the meadow in the afternoon bleaching the linen, the words of the laundress came into her mind,’ etc. (The Twelve Brothers). ‘The wood-cutter obeyed; he fetched his child, and gave her to the Virgin Mary, who carried her up into heaven. There the child lived happily; she ate nothing but sweet cakes, and drank new milk,’ etc. ‘So fourteen years went by in heaven. Then the Virgin Mary had to take a long journey; but before she went away, she called the girl to her, and said, “Dear child, I entrust you with the keys of the thirteen doors of Paradise,”’ etc. (Mary’s Child). The unknown writer of these fairy-tales transports his stories into royal palaces, or even into heaven--i.e., into surroundings which he certainly does not know; but he endows beings and things, and even the Virgin Mary, with such traits as are known and familiar to him by observation. From the royal palace one enters a wood or a meadow as one might on leaving a farm; the princess runs to the fountain in the forest quite alone, looks after the linen, and bleaches it on the grass, just like a domestic servant. The Holy Virgin undertakes a journey, and confides the keys of the household to her adopted daughter, as a rich châtelaine might do. These fairy-tales are composed from a peasant’s own experience, who describes his own world with honest realism, and simply gives other names to the figures and circumstances with which he is familiar. M. Edmond de Goncourt, on the contrary, the great pioneer ‘realist,’ relates, in his novel La Faustin, the love-story of a Lord Annandale and an actress of the Théâtre Français, which elicits from M. F. Brunetière, the critic, these observations: ‘I should much like to hear M. Zola’s opinion on M. de Goncourt’s novel. What can M. Zola, who has jested so eloquently on the subject of novels of adventure--of those novels in which princes walked about incognito with their pockets full of diamonds--think in his inmost heart of this Lord Annandale throwing handfuls of gold out of the windows, and ruling from one day to another over fifty English servants in his mansion in Paris, without counting the retainers of his lady? What can M. Zola, who has made merry so comfortably over the idealistic novel, as he calls it, think of this one in which love triumphant carries off the lovers into the adorable world of dreams--what can he think to himself concerning this passionate tenderness which M. de Goncourt’s Englishman has for the tragedienne, this almost deified gallantry, this sensual liaison dans le bleu, this physical love in ideality, and all the rest of the jargon which I spare the reader?’[435] M. Edmond de Goncourt professes to depict a contemporary Englishman, an actress also of our own times, events in Parisian life--i.e., all of them matters he might have observed, and with which he ought to be familiar; but what he does relate is so incredible, so impossible, unprecedented, that one can only shrug one’s shoulders over the childish fable. Thus, the German story-teller who conducts us into a society of angels, saints, and kings, really shows us healthy, robust peasants and lasses whose living reality is in no way diminished by the carnival crowns and gilded-paper halos playfully placed on their heads; while the French realist who would transport us into Parisian life among Parisians, floats before our eyes fleshless phantoms moving in clouds of cigar-smoke, marsh-mists, and punch-flames, and who remain just as unreal, for all the effort of the author to conjure into them a distant resemblance to an Englishman in a frock-coat, and a hysterical lady in a lace-trimmed négligée. The author of the fairy-tales is a realist in the sense of the explanation given above; the novelist of Parisian manners, Edmond de Goncourt, is an idealist of the most aggravating type.

From whatever side we approach this pretended realism, we never succeed in seeing in it a concept, but only an empty word. Every method of investigation leads us to the same result--viz., that there is no realism in poetry, i.e., no impersonal, actual copy of reality; there are only the various personalities of the poet. The only decisive thing is the individuality of the poet. One of them draws from the phenomenon of Nature, another from his internal organic processes, those emotions which incite them to create. One is capable of attention, and observes; another is the slave of an unbridled association of ideas. In one the presentation of the ‘not-self’ predominates in consciousness, in another the ‘self.’ I do not hesitate to express the matter in a single word--one is healthy and in an evolution of growth; the other is changed more or less pathologically--has more or less fallen into degeneracy. The healthy poet mingles knowledge with every one of his works, whether it be Dante’s Inferno or Goethe’s Faust; and if held desirable, this element of knowledge, which it is not possible to acquire except by attention and observation, may be called realism. The degenerate poet never fashions anything but empty soap-bubbles of knowledge, even when he maintains, and is himself convinced, that he is giving out what he has observed; and this confused ebullition of ideas, shot in the best cases with changing hues, but most frequently simply dirty froth, is very often called, by a misnomer, idealism.

Still another and the latest meaning has been applied to realism; it stands for the systematic treatment of the lower ranks of life, and commonplace men and things. According to this definition, the works in which labourers, peasants, petty bourgeois, etc., appear, would be realistic, and those in which gods, heroes, kings, etc., take part, idealistic. Louis XIV., according to the well-known anecdote when Teniers’ tavern-scenes were exhibited before him, let fall the indignant and disdainful comment, ‘Take away these grotesque things!’ He would not have condemned an artistic method and manner of representation, but the baseness of the subject only would have offended his Olympian eye. This explanation of the term ‘realism’ is a little more comprehensible than the others; but I have no need to show how grossly external and how philosophically and æsthetically worthless it is. We have seen, in fact, above, how the simplest feelings and ideas of peasants may be attributed to gods and to kings; and, conversely, there is no lack of works in which a royal crown or a saintly halo hovers invisibly over the heads of human beings in the lowest social position. In Gregory Samarow’s novels, emperors and kings disport themselves who feel, think, and speak like the commercial travellers of a third-rate wine business; in Berthold Auerbach’s village stories we see peasants who in heart and head are of the highest nobility, sometimes even semi-divine. The one kind is as unreal as the other, only in the first we discern the craft of the sensation-monger, in the second there speaks to us the refined and tender-souled poet. In The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot, we find a farm-servant, Luke, and a miller’s daughter, Maggie, who would do honour to any Pantheon in the grandeur of their character and morals; in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair we are shown a Marquis of Steyne, very magnificent and very proud, and another such, Earl Bareacres, with neither of whom would any decent man shake hands. Those are as true as these; but whereas the former betray the heart of a poet full of love and pity, the latter reveal the soul of an artist overflowing with bitterness and wrath. Which, now, is noble--the emperors and kings of Samarow or the Black Forest peasants of Auerbach? Which is plebeian--the farming men of George Eliot or the powerful English peers of Thackeray? And which of these works must be qualified as realistic, which as idealistic, if realism signifies being occupied with inferior persons and conditions, idealism with those that are superior?

Hence to serious investigation, which does not stop at the mere jingle of words, the expressions ‘realism’ and ‘idealism’ convey no meaning. We will now see what the partisans of M. Emile Zola give out as his originality, in what he himself claims to be a model and a pioneer, and how he justifies his pretension of impersonating a totally new epoch in the history of literature.

M. Zola’s disciples boast of his art of description and his ‘impressionism.’ I make a great difference between the two. Description endeavours to seize upon the characteristic features of the phenomenon by all the senses at once, and convey them in words; impressionism shows the conscious state of a person receiving impressions in the domain of one sense only, seeing things only, hearing them only, feeling them only, etc. Description is the work of a brain which comprehends the things it perceives in their connection and their essence; impressionism is the work of a brain which receives from the phenomenon only the sensuous elements--and by a one-sided aspect--of knowledge, but not knowledge itself. The describer recognises in a tree, a tree, with all the ideas which this concept includes. The impressionist sees before him merely a mass of colour composed of spots of different greens, on which the sun flashes here and there points and rays of light. Description for its own sake, as well as impressionism, are, in poetry, an æsthetic and psychological error, as will be demonstrated as briefly as possible; but even this error was not invented by M. Zola, for long before him the romanticists, and Théophile Gautier particularly, cultivated the broad style of description, inorganically interpolated into literary composition; and, on the subject of impressionism, the brothers De Goncourt showed M. Zola the way.

The purely objective description of objects is science, when it is worth anyone’s while to acquire of them as clear a representation as may be communicated by words without the assistance of image or number. Such description is simply child’s play and waste of time, when no one is interested to pause and look at the things described, either because they are too well known or because they are without importance.[436] Finally, it rises into art while remaining of an inferior species, when it chooses words so well that it follows the most delicate peculiarities of the objects, and at the same time calls out the emotions that the observer experiences during his observations, i.e., when the words employed have not only the value of a just portrayal of sensuously perceptible properties, but have an emotional colouring, and appear accompanied by images and metaphors. We may cite as examples of art of portrayal all good descriptions of travel, from the Voyage to the Equinoxial Regions of the New Continent, by Alexander Humboldt, to Sahara and Soudan, by Nachtigal, Im Herzen Afrikas, by Schweinfurth, or Edmond de Amicis’ books on Constantinople, Morocco, Spain, Holland, etc. But these have nothing in common with imaginative writing, which always has for its object man, with his ideas and sentiments, not excepting fables of animals, parables, allegories, fairy-tales, all the hybrid forms in which the human element of all imagination appears disguised as an anthropomorphism applied to animals, and even to inanimate objects. The material frame, the scene and surrounding, have no importance in an imaginative work, except in so far as they affect the person or persons of whom it treats. The imaginative writer may be regarded either as a spectator who narrates human events as they develop before his eyes, or as an actor in these events, which he looks upon and feels with the consciousness of one of the personages concerned. In both cases he can naturally only perceive in the material surroundings whatever plays a part in the events themselves. If he is a spectator, he will certainly not let his eyes wander over the field of vision indifferently, but will pause before a scene which attracts his attention, and for which he seeks to arouse our interest. If he has himself adopted the disguise of one of the actors, he will be even more completely absorbed by the human events in which he himself co-operates, and will preserve still less any inclination to stroll indifferently by the side of scenes which have nothing to do with his given state of mind, and divert him from acts and feelings with which he is preoccupied at the moment. Hence an imaginative work which is true to human nature will only contain descriptions of such material surroundings as a spectator (absorbed in the actual events which form the subject of the work, or as one of its actors) is in a state to perceive, i.e., only what is directly connected with the events. If the description includes extraneous matter, it is psychologically false; it disturbs moods, interrupts events, diverts the attention from what ought to be the essential point in the work of art, and transforms the latter into a patchwork; showing signs that its author lacked artistic earnestness, that the work is not born from the need to give poetic expression to a genuine emotion.

A very much worse error than desultory, cold-blooded description in imaginative writing is impressionism. In painting it has its authorization. The latter reproduces the impressions of the visual senses, and the painter is within the limits of his art when he presents his purely optical perceptions without composing, or without relating a story, i.e., without introducing any idea into the scene he reproduces, without combining any activity of his highest centres of ideation with the activity of the centres of perception. The picture produced according to this method will be very inferior from an æsthetic point of view, but it will be a picture, and can be defended as such. Poetical impressionism, on the other hand, is a complete misconception of the essence of imaginative work; it is the negation and suppression of it. The medium of poetry is language. Now this is an activity, not of the centres of perception, but of the centres of ideation and judgment. The immediate phonetic reaction upon sensory excitations is merely an exclamation. Without the co-operation of the highest centres a perception cannot express itself phonetically except by an ‘Ah!’ or an ‘Oh!’ But in the same ratio that the purely emotional cry of an animal rises to the height of intelligible grammatically articulated human speech, the purely sensuous perception rises also to the height of concept and judgment, and it is psychologically quite false so to depict the language of the external world as if it set free only a sensation of colour or of sound, and provoked neither ideas, concepts, nor judgments. Impressionism in literature is an example of that atavism which we have noticed as the most distinctive feature in the mental life of degenerates. It carries back the human mind to its brute-beginnings, and the artistic activity of its present high differentiation to an embryonic state; that state in which all the arts (which were later to emerge and diverge) lay side by side inchoate and inseparate. Consider, as an example, these impressionist descriptions by the brothers De Goncourt: ‘Above it a great cloud lowered, a heavy mass of a sombre purple, a scud from the north.... This cloud rose and ended in sharp rents against a brightness where pale green merged into rose. Then the sky became dull, of the colour of tin, swept by fragments of other gray clouds.... Beyond the softly-swaying pinetops, under which the broad garden walk could be seen bare, leafless, red, almost carmine, ... the eye took in the whole space between the dome of the Salpétrière and the mass of the Observatory; first, a great plane of shadow resembling a wash of Indian ink on a red ground, a zone of warm bituminous tones, burnt with those frost-touched reds and those wintry glows that are found on an English artist’s water-colour palette; then, in the infinite delicacy of a degraded tint, a whitish streak arose, a milky nacreous vapour, pierced by the bright tones of new buildings.’ ‘The delicate tones of an old man’s complexion played on the yellowish and bluish pink of his face. Through his tender, wrinkled ears--ears of paper interwoven by filaments--the day in passing became orange.’ ‘The air, streaked with water, had an over-wash of that violet blue with which the painter imitates the transparency of thick glass.... The first vivid smile of green began on the black branches of the trees, where, like strokes from a brush, touches of spring could be discerned leaving behind it light coatings of green dust.’[437]

Such is the procedure of impressionism. The writer gives himself the air of a painter; he professes to seize the phenomenon, not as a concept, but to feel it as simple sense-stimulation. He writes down the names of colours as an artist lays on his washes, and he imagines that he has herewith given the reader a particularly strong impression of reality. But it is a childish illusion, for the reader, nevertheless, comes to see no colours, but merely words. He has to transform these names of colours, like every other word, into images, and with the same mental effort he would procure himself a much livelier impression if, instead of heavily enumerating to him one after another of the optical elements of the phenomenon, the phenomenon were presented to him ready elaborated into a concept. M. Zola has borrowed this absurdity from the De Goncourt brothers with some exactitude, but it was not he who invented it.

Another of his originalities is said to be the observation and reproduction of the milieu, the environment, human and material, of the persons represented. Coming after the indulgence in useless description, and after impressionism, the theory of the ‘milieu’ produces a most comical effect, since it is the exact contrary of the psychological theory which forms the point of departure of impressionism and of the mania for description. The impressionist places himself over against some phenomenon as a mere sense, as photographer or phonographist, etc. He registers the nerve-vibrations. He denies himself all higher comprehension, the elaboration of perceptions into concepts, and the classification of the concepts in the experiences which, as general knowledge, pre-exist in his consciousness. The theorist of the ‘milieu,’ on the contrary, systematically attributes the chief importance, not to the phenomenon, but to its causal connection; he is not a sense which perceives, but a philosopher who endeavours to interpret and explain according to a system. What, in fact, does the theory of the ‘milieu’ mean? It means that the imaginative writer asserts that the individuality and mode of conduct of any person are a consequence of the influences that his environment, living or dead, exert upon him, and that he is trying to discover these influences, and the nature of their action on that person. The theory in itself is right, but, again, it is not M. Zola who invented it, for it is as old as philosophic thought itself. In our own times, Taine has distinctly conceived and established it, and, long before M. Zola, Balzac and Flaubert sought to introduce its operation into their novels. And yet this theory, extremely fertile as it is in anthropology and sociology, and giving, as it does, an impulse to meritorious research, is in imaginative writing but another error, and constitutes a confusion of kinds engendered by vague thought. The task of the man of science is to investigate the causes of phenomena. Sometimes he finds them, frequently he does not; often he believes he has discovered them, till more exact observation subsequently tells him he has deceived himself and must rectify his hypotheses. The investigation of the conditions under which man acquires his various physical and mental qualities is in full progress, but is only at its commencement, and has as yet furnished extremely few positive facts. We do not even know why one human race is tall or another short in stature; why this one has blue eyes and fair hair, that one dark eyes and hair; and yet these are incomparably simpler, more external and more accessible properties than the subtle peculiarities of mind and character. On the causes of these peculiarities we know nothing definite. We can make conjectures on this subject, but, meanwhile, even the most plausible of these have still the character of hypotheses, of probable, but not of verified, truth. And here the imaginative writer would like to come upon the scene, carry off unfinished scientific hypotheses, complete them by means of his own fantastic conceits, and teach: ‘Do you see? this man whom I show you has become what he is because his parents have had such and such attributes, because he has lived here or there, because when a child he received such and such impressions, because he has been thus nurtured, thus educated, has had such and such intercourse, etc.’ He is here doing what is not his office. Instead of an artistic creation he attempts to give us science, and he gives us false science, since he has no suspicion of the influences which really form the man, and the details of the ‘milieu’ which he throws into relief as being the causes of individual peculiarities are probably the least essential, and, in any case, only a minimum portion of what, in the formation of the personality, has played a really determining part. Think of it for a moment. The one question as to the origin of the criminal has produced in these last twenty years thousands of books and pamphlets; hundreds of medical men, jurists, economists, and philosophers of the first rank, have devoted to it the most profound and assiduous research, and we are still far from being able to indicate with certainty what share heredity, social influences (i.e., the ‘milieu,’ properly so called) and unknown biological peculiarities of the individual, have in the formation of the criminal type. And then there comes a wholly ignorant writer, who, quite by himself, with the sovereign infallibility claimed for himself by the author in his own province, decides a question which the combined ten years’ labour of a whole generation of professional investigators has brought but very little nearer to a solution! This is an audacity only explicable by this fact, that the writer has not the very smallest idea of the weight of the task which he undertakes with so light a heart.

If, in spite of this, Balzac and Flaubert seem to have produced excellent works with this theory of the ‘milieu,’ it is an optical illusion. They have devoted great attention and detailed descriptions to the environment of their characters (especially Flaubert in Madame Bovary), and the superficial reader thereby receives the impression that there exists a connection of causality between the environment and the being and doing of the personages, it being one of the most elementary and tenacious peculiarities of human thought to link causally one with another all phenomena which present themselves simultaneously or successively. This peculiarity is one of the most fruitful sources of defective conclusions, and it cannot be overcome except by the most attentive observation, often even only with the help of experiment. In the novels of Balzac and Flaubert, where the ‘milieu’ plays so great a part, the ‘milieu,’ in fact, explains nothing. For the personages who move in the same ‘milieu’ are, notwithstanding, wholly different. Everyone reacts on the influences of the ‘milieu’ in his own particular way. This distinctive character must be the datum, it cannot be the result, of the ‘milieu.’ The latter has, at most, the significance of an immediate proximate cause, but the most remote causes of the effect in question are found in the distinctive character of the personality, and on the latter, the ‘milieu’ that the poet depicts gives us no real enlightenment.

On the pretension of M. Zola and his partisans, that his novels are ‘slices from real life’ (tranches de vie), it is useless to linger. We have seen above that M. Zola is far from being capable of transcribing in his novels life as real and as a whole. Like all the imaginative writers before him, he also makes a choice; from a million thoughts of his personages, he reproduces one only; from ten thousand functions and actions, one only; from years of their life, some minutes, or merely seconds; his supposed ‘slice from life’ is a condensed and rearranged conspectus of life, artificially ordered according to a definite design, and full of gaps. Like all other imaginative writers, he also makes his choice according to his particular personal inclinations, and the only difference is that these inclinations, which we shall at once recognise, are very dissimilar from those of other writers.

M. Zola calls his novels ‘human documents’ and ‘experimental novels.’ I have already, thirteen years ago, expressed myself so fully on this double pretension, that I have now nothing more to add to what I said then. Does he think that his novels are serious documents from which science can borrow facts? What childish folly! Science can have nothing to do with fiction. She has no need of invented persons and actions, however ben trovati they may be; but she wants beings who have lived, and actions which have taken place. The novel treats of individual destinies, or at most those of families; science has need of information on the destinies of millions. Police reports, lists of imposts, tables of commerce, statistics of crimes and suicides, information on the prices of provisions, salaries, the mean duration of human life, the marriage rate, the birth rate, legitimate and illegitimate--these are ‘human documents.’ From them we learn how people live, whether they progress, whether they are happy or unhappy, pure or corrupt. The history of civilization, when it wants facts, puts M. Zola’s entertaining novels aside as of no account, and has recourse to tedious statistical tables. And a very much more singular whim still is his ‘experimental novel.’ This term would prove that M. Zola, if he employs it in good faith, does not even suspect the nature of scientific experiment. He thinks he has made an experiment when he invents neuropathic personages, places them in imaginary conditions, and makes them perform imaginary actions. A scientific experiment is an intelligent question addressed to Nature, and to which Nature must reply, and not the questioner himself. M. Zola also puts questions. But to whom? To Nature? No; to his own imagination. And his answers are to have the force of proof. The result of scientific experiment is constraining. Every man in possession of his senses can perceive it. The results at which M. Zola arrives in his pretended ‘experiment’ do not exist objectively; they exist only in his imagination; they are not facts, but assertions, in which every man can believe, or not, at his pleasure. The difference between experiments, and what M. Zola calls such, is so great that it is difficult for me to impute the abusive application of the term to ignorance only, or to incapacity for thought. I believe rather in a conscious premeditated snare. The appearance of M. Zola occurred at a time when mysticism was not yet the fashion in France, and when the favourite catch-words of the writing and gossiping gang were positivism and natural science. In order to recommend himself to the masses, a man had to represent himself as a positivist and as scientific. Grocers, hotel-keepers, small inventors, etc., have everywhere and always the habit of decorating their sign-boards or their produce with a name which is connected with an idea dominant with the public. At the present day a hotel-keeper or a tradesman recommends his house or his shop by such titles as ‘The Progress’ or ‘International Commerce;’ and a manufacturer extols his goods as ‘Electric’ braces or ‘Magnetic’ ink. We have seen that the Nietzscheans designate their tendency as ‘psycho-physiological.’ In the same way Zola long before them hung out the catch-word sign to his novels--‘Y^e scientificke experimente.’ But his novels had no more visible connection with natural science and experiment than the ink above mentioned with magnetism, and the braces with electricity.

M. Zola boasts of his method of work; all his books emanate from ‘observation.’ The truth is that he has never ‘observed;’ that he has never, following Goethe, ‘plunged into the full tide of human life,’ but has always remained shut up in a world of paper, and has drawn all his subjects out of his own brain, all his ‘realistic’ details from newspapers and books read uncritically. I need only recall a few cases in which his sources have been placed within his reach. All the information on the life, manners, habits, and language of the Parisian workmen in L’Assommoir are borrowed from a study by M. Denis Poulot, Le Sublime. The adventure of Une Page d’Amour is taken from the Mémoires de Casanova. Certain features in which the masochism or passivism of Count Muffat is declared in Nana, M. Zola found in a quotation from Taine relative to the Venice Preserved of Thomas Otway.[438] The scene of the confinement, in La Joie de Vivre, the description of the Mass, in La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret, etc., are copied word for word from an obstetric manual and a Mass-book. One reads sometimes in the newspapers very pretentious statements of the ‘studies’ to which M. Zola gives himself up when he undertakes a new novel. These ‘studies’ consist, on his part, in making a visit to the Bourse when he wishes to write on speculation, in undertaking a trip on a locomotive when he desires to describe the working of a railway, in once casting a glance round some available bedroom when he means to depict the mode of life of the Parisian cocottes. Such a manner of ‘observation’ resembles that of a traveller who passes through a country in an express train. He may perceive some external details, he may notice some scenes and arrange them later in descriptions rich in colour, if wholly inaccurate; but he learns nothing of the real and essential peculiarities of the country, and the life and ways of its inhabitants. Like all degenerates, M. Zola, too, is a complete stranger to the world in which he lives. His eyes are never directed towards nature or humanity, but only to his own ‘Ego.’ He has no first-hand knowledge of anything, but acquires, by second or third hand, all that he knows of the world or life. Flaubert has created, in Bouvard et Pécuchet, the characters of two blockheads, who, with unsuspecting ingenuousness, attack all the arts and sciences, and imagine they have acquired them when they have dipped into, or, more correctly, have skimmed through, the first book on the subject which falls into their hands. Zola is an ‘observer’ of the Bouvard et Pécuchet species, and on reading Flaubert’s posthumous novel one is tempted to believe in places that when describing the ‘studies’ of his heroes he was thinking, at least amongst others, of Zola.

I think I have shown that M. Zola has not the priority in any one of the peculiarities which constitute his method. For all of them he has had models, and some few are as old as the world. The supposed realism, mania for description, impressionism, the emphasis on the ‘milieu,’ the human document, the slices of life--all these are so many æsthetic and psychological errors, but Zola has not even the doubtful merit of having conceived them. The only thing he has invented is the word ‘naturalism,’ substituted by him for ‘realism’ (the sole term in vogue till then), and the expression ‘experimental novel,’ which means absolutely nothing, but possesses a piquant little smattering of science which Zola’s public, at the period when this novelist made his appearance, felt as an agreeable seasoning.

The only real and true things contained in M. Zola’s novels are the little traits borrowed by him from the items of news in the daily papers and from technical works. But these also become false from the lack of criticism and taste with which he employs them. In fact, in order that the borrowed detail should remain faithful to reality, it must preserve its right relation to the whole phenomenon, and this is what never happens with M. Zola. To quote only two examples. In Pot-Bouille, among the inhabitants of a single house in the Rue de Choiseul, he brings to pass in the space of a few months all the infamous things he has learnt in the course of thirty years, by reports from his acquaintances, by cases in courts of law, and various facts from newspapers about apparently honourable bourgeois families; in La Terre, all the vices imputed to the French peasantry or rustic people in general, he crams into the character and conduct of a few inhabitants of a small village in Beauce; he may in these cases have supported every detail by cuttings from newspapers or jottings, but the whole is not the less monstrously and ridiculously untrue.

The self-styled innovator who, it is asserted, has invented hitherto unknown methods of construction and exposition in the province of the novel, is in reality a pupil of the French romanticists, from whom he has appropriated and employed all the tricks of the trade, and whose tradition he carries on, walking in the straight road of historical continuity, without interruption and without deviation. This is what is most clearly proved by the descriptions, which reflect not the world, but the view that the poet is capable of taking of the world. I will quote, for the sake of comparison, some characteristic passages from Notre Dame de Paris, by Victor Hugo, and from different novels by Zola, which will show the reader that both could be very easily confounded, the self-styled inventor of ‘naturalism’ and the extreme romanticist. ‘The broom ransacked the corners with an irritated growling.’ ‘The Kyrie Eleison ran like a shiver into this kind of stable.’ ‘The pulpit ... stood in front of a clock with weights, enclosed in a walnut wood case, and the hollow vibrations of which shook the whole church, like the beatings of an enormous heart, hidden somewhere beneath the flag-stones.’ ‘The rays [of the sun], more and more horizontal, withdraw slowly from the pavement of the square, and mount perpendicularly along the gabled front, making its thousand bas-reliefs spring out from their shadow, while the great central rose-window blazes like a Cyclop’s eye inflamed by the glow of the forge.’ ‘When the priest ... quitted the altar ... the sun remained sole master of the church. It had rested in its turn on the altar cloth, illuminated the door of the tabernacle with splendour, celebrating the fruitful promise of May. A warmth arose from the flag-stones. The whitewashed walls, the great Virgin, the great Christ himself, took on a shiver of vital sap [!], as if death had been vanquished by the eternal youth of the earth.’ ‘In a crevice of this spout two pretty gilliflowers in blossom, shaken and animated by the breath of the air, made sportive salutations to each other.’ ‘At one of the windows a great service-tree reared itself, throwing its branches across the broken panes, extending its shoots as if to look within.’ ‘Towards the east, the morning breeze chased some white flocks of down across the sky, torn from the foggy fleece of the hills.’ ‘The closed windows slept. Some few, here and there, brightly lit, opened their eyes, and seemed to make certain corners squint.’ ‘Already some whiffs of smoke were disgorged here and there over all that surface of roofs, as by the fissures of an immense sulphur-kiln.’ ‘A miserable guillotine, furtive, uneasy, ashamed, which seems always afraid of being caught in flagrante delicto, so quickly does it disappear after having given its blow.’ ‘The alembic went on dully, without a flame, or any gaiety in the extinct reflexions of its coppers, letting flow its alcoholic sweat, like a slow and obstinate spring, which should end by invading the rooms, spreading over the boulevards without inundating the immense hollow of Paris.’ ‘At the barrier, the herd-like trampling went on in the cold of the morning.... This crowd, from a distance, was a chalky blur, a neutral tone, in which a faded blue and dirty gray predominated. Occasionally, a workman stopped short ... while around him the others walked on, without a smile, without a word to a comrade, with cadaverous cheeks, faces turned towards Paris, which, one by one, devoured them by the gaping street of the Faubourg Poissonnière.’ ‘And then, as he dived farther into the street, legless cripples, blind and lame men multiplied around him; the one-armed and the one-eyed, and the lepers with their wounds, some coming from the houses, some from the adjacent small streets, some from the air-holes of cellars, howling, bellowing, screaming, all limpingly, lamely, rushing towards the light, and wallowing in the mire like snails after rain.’ ‘The square ... presented ... the appearance of a sea, in which five or six streets, like so many mouths of rivers, discharged new waves of heads at every instant.... The great stairs, ascended and descended without intermission by a double stream ... flowed incessantly into the square, like a cascade into a lake.’ ‘The flickering brightness of the flames made them appear to move. There were serpents which had the appearance of laughing, gargoyles that one seemed to hear yelping, salamanders which breathed in the fire, dragons which sneezed in the smoke.’ ‘And the steam-engine, ten paces off, went on steadily breathing, steadily spitting from its scorched metal throat.’ ‘These were no longer the cold windows of the morning; now they appeared as if warmed and vibrating with internal tremor. There were people looking at them, women, standing still, squeezing against the plate-glass, quite a crowd brutalized by covetousness. And the stuffs seemed alive in this passion of the pavement: the laces shivered, fell back and hid the depths of the shop, with a disquieting air of mystery.’ It would be easy to extend these comparisons to some hundreds of pages. I have indulged in the little joke of not adding the author’s name to the passages quoted. By the nature of the object described the specially attentive reader will perhaps be able to guess in one or another of these quotations, whether they are from Victor Hugo or from Emile Zola; I have tried to facilitate the matter by borrowing the passages by Victor Hugo from the Notre Dame de Paris alone; but the greatest number he will certainly not know to whom to attribute until I tell him that examples three, five, seven, nine, ten, thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen, are from Victor Hugo, and all the others from Zola.

This is because the latter is an out-and-out romanticist in his way of envisaging the world and in his artistic method. He constantly practises in the most extensive and intensive fashion that atavistic anthropomorphism and symbolism, consequent on undeveloped or mystically confused thought, which is found among savages in a natural form, and among the whole category of degenerates in an atavistic form of mental activity. Like Victor Hugo, and like second-class romanticists, M. Zola sees every phenomenon monstrously magnified and weirdly distorted. It becomes for him, as for the savage, a fetish to which he attributes evil and hostile designs. Machines are horrible monsters dreaming of destruction; the streets of Paris open the jaws of Moloch to devour the human masses; a magasin de modes is an alarming, supernaturally powerful being, panting, fascinating, stifling, etc. Criticism has long since declared, though without comprehending the psychiatrical significance of this trait, that in every one of M. Zola’s novels some phenomenon dominates, like an obsession, forms the main feature of the work, and penetrates, like an appalling symbol, into the life and actions of all the characters. Thus, in L’Assommoir, the still; in Pot-Bouille, the ‘solemn staircase’; in Au Bonheur des Dames, the draper’s shop; in Nana, the heroine herself, who is no ordinary harlot, but ‘je ne sais quel monstre géant à la croupe gonflée de vices, une enorme Vénus populaire, aussi lourdement bête que grossièrement impudique, une espèce d’idole hindoue qui n’a seulement qu’à laisser tomber ses voiles pour faire tomber en arrêt les vieillards et les collégiens, et qui, par instants, se sent elle-même planer sur Paris et sur le monde.’[439] This symbolism we have encountered among all degenerates, among symbolists properly so called, and other mystics, as well as among diabolists, and principally in Ibsen. It never fails in the madness of doubt or negation.[440] The would-be ‘realist’ sees the sober reality as little as a superstitiously timid savage, or a lunatic afflicted by hallucinations. He puts into it his own mental dispositions. He disposes of phenomena arbitrarily, so that they appear to express an idea which is dominating him. He gives to inanimate objects a fantastic life, and metamorphoses them into so many goblins endowed with feeling, will, cunning and ideas; but of human beings he makes automata through whom a mysterious power declares itself, a fatality in the ancient sense, a force of Nature, a principle of destruction. His endless descriptions delineate nothing but his own mental condition. No image of reality is ever obtained by them, for the picture of the world is to him like a freshly varnished oil-painting to which one stands too close in a disadvantageous light, and in which the reflection of one’s own face may be discerned.

M. Zola calls his series of novels ‘The Natural and Social History of a Family under the Second Empire,’ and he seeks in this way to awaken the double idea that the Rougon-Macquarts are a typical average family of the French middle class, and that their history represents the general social life of France in the time of Napoleon III. He expressly asserts, as the fundamental principle of art, that the novelist should only relate the everyday life observed by himself.[441] I allowed myself for thirteen years to be led astray by his swagger, and credulously accepted his novels as sociological contributions to the knowledge of French life. Now I know better. The family whose history Zola presents to us in twenty mighty volumes is entirely outside normal daily life, and has no necessary connection whatever with France and the Second Empire. It might just as well have lived in Patagonia, and at the time of the Thirty Years’ War. He who ridicules the ‘idealists’ as being narrators of ‘exceptional cases,’ of that which ‘never happened,’ has chosen for the subject of his magnum opus the most exceptional case he could possibly have found--a group of degenerates, lunatics, criminals, prostitutes, and ‘mattoids,’ whose morbid nature places them apart from the species; who do not belong to a regular society, but are expelled from it, and at strife with it; who conduct themselves as complete strangers to their epoch and country, and are, by their manner of existence, not members of any modern civilized people whatever, but belong to a horde of primitive wild men of bygone ages. M. Zola affirms that he describes life as he has observed it, and persons he has seen. He has in reality seen nothing and observed nothing, but has drawn the idea of his magnum opus, all the details of his plan, all the characters of his twenty novels, solely from one printed source, remaining hitherto unknown to all his critics, a characteristic circumstance due to the fact that not one of them possesses the least knowledge of the literature of mental therapeutics. There is in France a family of the name of Kérangal, who came originally from Saint-Brieuc, in Brittany, and whose history has for the last sixty years filled the annals of criminal justice and mental therapeutics. In two generations it has hitherto produced, to the knowledge of the authorities, seven murderers and murderesses, nine persons who have led an immoral life (one the keeper of a disorderly house, one a prostitute who was at the same time an incendiary, committed incest, and was condemned for a public outrage on modesty, etc.), and besides all these, a painter, a poet, an architect, an actress, several who were blind, and one musician.[442] The history of this Kérangal family has supplied M. Zola with material for all his novels. What would never have been afforded him in the life he really knows he found ready to his hand in the police and medical reports on the Kérangals, viz., an abundant assortment of the most execrable crimes, the most unheard-of adventures, and the maddest and most disordered careers, permeated by artistic inclinations which make the whole particularly piquant. If any common fabricator of newspaper novels had had the luck to discover the treasure he would probably have made a hash of the subject. M. Zola, with his great power and his sombre emotionalism, has known how to profit very effectively by it. Nevertheless, the subject he broaches is the roman du colportage, i.e., of a perishing romanticism which transports his dreams into no palaces like the flourishing romanticism, but into dens, prisons, and lunatic asylums, which are quite as far from the middle stratum of sane life as the latter, only in an opposite direction, tending not upwards, but downwards. But if M. Zola has infinitely more talent than the German romanticists, to whom we owe such works as Rinaldo Rinaldini, Die blutige Nonne um Mitternacht, Der Scharfrichter vom Schreckenstein, etc., he has, on the other hand, infinitely less honesty than they. For they, at least, admit that they relate the most marvellous and unique horrors of their kind, while Zola issues his chronicles of criminals and madmen, the fruits of his reading, as a normal account of French society, drawn from the observation of daily life.

By choosing his subject in the domain of the most extraordinary and most exceptional, by the childish or crazy symbolism and anthropomorphism displayed in his extremely unreal survey of the world, the ‘realist’ Zola proves himself to be the immediate descendant in a direct line of the romanticists. His works are distinguished from those of his literary ancestors by only two peculiarities, which M. Brunetière has well discerned, viz., by ‘pessimism and premeditated coarseness.’[443] These peculiarities of M. Zola furnish us finally with a characteristic sign also of so-called realism or naturalism, which we should have in vain attempted to discover by psychological, æsthetic, historical, and literary inquiries. Naturalism, which has nothing to do with Nature or reality, is, taken all in all, the premeditated worship of pessimism and obscenity.

Pessimism, as a philosophy, is the last remains of the superstition of primitive times, which looked upon man as the centre and end of the universe. It is one of the philosophic forms of ego-mania. All the objections of pessimist philosophers to Nature and life have but one meaning, if their premise be correct as to the sovereignty of man in the Cosmos. When the philosopher says, Nature is irrational, Nature is immoral, Nature is cruel, what is this, in other words, but: I do not understand Nature, and yet she is only there that I may understand her; Nature does not consider what is for my utility alone, and yet she has no other task than to be useful to me; Nature grants me but a short period of existence, often crossed by troubles, and yet it is her duty to make provision for the eternity of my life and my continual joys? When Oscar Wilde is indignant that Nature makes no difference between himself and the grazing ox, we smile at his childishness. But have Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Mainländer, Bahnsen, done anything more than inflate into thick books Oscar Wilde’s ingenuous self-conceit? and that with terrible seriousness. Philosophic pessimism has the geocentric conception of the world as its postulate. It stands and falls with the Ptolemaic doctrine. As soon as we recognise the Copernican point of view we lose the right, and also the desire to apply to Nature the measure of our logic, our morals, and our own advantage, and there ceases to be any meaning in calling it irrational, immoral, or cruel.

But what is also true is that pessimism is not a philosophy, but a temperament. ‘The systemic or organic sensations which arise from the simultaneous states of the several organs, digestive, respiratory, etc.,’ says Professor James Sully, ‘appear, as Professor Ferrier has lately pointed out, to be the basis of our emotional life. When the condition of these organs is a healthy one, and their functions vigorous, the psychical result is an undiscriminated mass of agreeable feeling. When the state of the organs is unhealthy, and their functions feeble or impeded, the psychical result is a similar mass of disagreeable feeling.’[444] Pessimism is always the form under which the patient becomes conscious of certain morbid conditions, and first and foremost of his nervous exhaustion. Tædium vitæ, or disgust of life, is an early premonition of insanity, and constantly accompanies neurasthenia and hysteria. It is evident that a period which suffers from general organic fatigue must necessarily be a pessimistic period. We recognise also the constant habit which consciousness has of inventing, post facto, apparently plausible motives, borrowed from its store of representations, and in conformity with the rules of its formal logic, to justify the emotional states of which it has acquired the knowledge. Thus, for the datum of the pessimistic disposition of mind, which is the consequence of organic fatigue, there arises the pessimist philosophy as an ulterior creation of interpretative consciousness. In Germany, in conformity with the speculative tendency and high intellectual culture of the German people, this state of mind has sought expression in philosophical systems. In France it has adopted an artistic form in accordance with the predominating æsthetic character of the national mind. M. Emile Zola and his naturalism are the French equivalent of the German Schopenhauer and his philosophical pessimism. That naturalism should see nothing in the world but brutality, infamy, ugliness, and corruption, corresponds with all that we know of the laws of thought. We know that the association of ideas is strongly influenced by emotion. A Zola, filled from the outset with organically unpleasant sensations, perceives in the world those phenomena alone which accord with his organically fundamental disposition, and does not notice or take into consideration those which differ from or contradict it. And from the associated ideas which every perception awakens in him, consciousness likewise only retains the disagreeable, which are in sympathy with the fundamentally sour disposition, and suppresses the others. Zola’s novels do not prove that things are badly managed in this world, but merely that Zola’s nervous system is out of order.

His predilection also for coarseness is a well-known morbid phenomenon. ‘They’ (the imbeciles), says Sollier, ‘love to talk of obscenities.... This is a peculiar tendency of mind observable specially among degenerates; it is as natural to them as a wholesome “tone” is to normal minds.’[445] Gilles de la Tourette has coined the word ‘coprolalia’ (mucktalk) for obsessional explosions of blasphemies and obscenities which characterize a malady described most exhaustively by M. Catrou, and called by him ‘disease of convulsive tics.’[446] M. Zola is affected by coprolalia to a very high degree. It is a necessity for him to employ foul expressions, and his consciousness is continually pursued by representations referring to ordure, abdominal functions, and everything connected with them. Andreas Verga described some years ago a form of onomatomania, or word-madness, which he called mania blasphematoria, or oath-madness. It is manifested when the patient experiences an irresistible desire to utter curses or blasphemies. Verga’s diagnosis applies completely to Zola. It can only be interpreted as mania blasphematoria, when in La Terre he gives the nickname of Jesus Christ to a creature afflicted with flatulency, and that without any artistic necessity or any aiming thereby at æsthetic effect either of cheerfulness or of local colour. Finally, he has a striking predilection for slang, for the professional language of thieves and bullies, etc., which he does not only employ when making personages of this kind speak, but makes use of himself, as an author, in descriptions or reflections. This inclination for slang is expressly noticed by Lombroso as an indication of degeneration in the born criminal.[447]

The confusion of thought which is shown in his theoretic writings, in his invention of the word ‘naturalism,’ in his conception of the ‘experimental novel,’ his instinctive inclination to depict demented persons, criminals, prostitutes, and semi-maniacs,[448] his anthropomorphism and his symbolism, his pessimism, his coprolalia, and his predilection for slang, sufficiently characterize M. Zola as a high-class degenerate. But he shows in addition some peculiarly characteristic stigmata, which completely establish the diagnosis.

That he is a sexual psychopath is betrayed on every page of his novels. He revels continually in representations from the region of the basest sensuality, and interweaves them in all the events of his novels without being able in any way to assign an artistic reason for this forced introduction. His consciousness is peopled with images of unnatural vice, bestiality, passivism, and other aberrations, and he is not satisfied with lingering libidinously over human acts of such a nature, but he even produces pairing animals (see La Terre, pp. 9, 10). The sight of a woman’s linen produces a peculiar excitation in him, and he can never speak without betraying, by the emotional colouring of his descriptions, that representations of this kind are voluptuously accentuated in him. This effect of female linen on degenerates affected by sexual psychopathy is well known in mental therapeutics, and has often been described by Krafft-Ebing, Lombroso, and others.[449]

Connected with the sexual psychopathy of M. Zola is the part played in him by the olfactory sensations. The predominance of the sense of smell and its connection with the sexual life is very striking among many degenerates. Scents acquire a high importance in their works. Tolstoi (in War and Peace) represents to us Prince Pierre suddenly deciding on marrying the Princess Hélène when he smells her fragrance at a ball.[450] In the narrative entitled The Cossacks he never mentions the uncle Ieroschka without speaking of the smell he emitted.[451] We have seen in the previous chapters with what satisfaction the Diabolists and Decadents, Baudelaire, Huysmans, etc., lingered on odours, and especially on bad odours. M. Barrès makes his little princess say, in L’Ennemi des Lois: ‘I go every morning to the stables. Oh, that little stabley smell, so warm and pleasant! And she inhaled with a pretty[!] sensual expression....’[452] M. de Goncourt describes, in La Faustin, how the actress lets her Lord Annandale smell her bosom: ‘“Smell! What do you smell?” she asked Lord Annandale. “Why, carnations!” he replied, tasting it with his lips. “And what else?” “Your skin!”’[453] M. A. Binet declares that ‘it is the odours of the human body which are the causes responsible for a certain number of marriages contracted by clever men with female subordinates belonging to their households. For certain men, the most essential thing in a woman is not beauty, mind, or elevation of character; it is her smell. The pursuit of the beloved odour determines them to pursue some ugly, old, vicious, degraded woman. Carried to this point, the pleasure in smell becomes a malady of love’[454]--a malady, I will add, from which only the degenerate suffer. The examples that Binet quotes in the course of his work, and which can be there referred to, as I have no inclination to repeat them here, prove this abundantly; and Krafft-Ebing, while insisting on the ‘close connection between the sexual and the olfactory sense,’ nevertheless expressly declares: ‘At all events, the perceptions of smell play a very subordinate part within the physiological limits (i.e., within the limits of the healthy life).[455] Even after the abstraction of its sexual significance, the development of the sense of smell among degenerates, not only of the higher, but even of the lowest type, has struck many observers. Séguin speaks of ‘idiots who discriminated species of woods and stones merely by smell without having recourse to sight, and who, nevertheless, were not disagreeably affected by the smell and taste of human ordure, and whose sense of touch was obtuse and unequal.’[456]

M. Zola’s case belongs to this series. He shows at times an unhealthy predominance of the sensations of smell in his consciousness, and a perversion of the olfactory sense which make the worst odours, especially those of all human excretions, appear to him particularly agreeable and sensually stimulating. The inspector of the Montpellier Academy, Leopold Bernard, has taken the trouble, in an elaborate work--which, curiously, has remained almost unknown[457]--to bring together all the passages in Zola’s novels which touch on the question of odours, and to show that men and things do not present themselves to him as to normal individuals, viz., in the first instance as optical and acoustic phenomena, but as olfactory perceptions. He characterizes all his personages by their smell. In La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret, Albine appears ‘like a great nosegay of strong scent.’ Serge, at the seminary, was ‘a lily whose sweet scent charmed his masters’(!!) Désirée ‘smells of health.’ Nana ‘dégage une odeur de vie, une toute-puissance de femme.’ In Pot-Bouille, Bachelard exhales ‘une odeur de débauche canaille’; Madame Campardon has ‘a good fresh perfume of autumn fruit.’ In Le Ventre de Paris, Françoise ‘smells of earth, hay, the open air, the open sky.’ In the same novel the ‘cheese-symphony’ occurs, as celebrated among Zola’s enthusiasts as the minute description of the variety of offensive smells of the dirty linen in L’Assommoir.

To the ‘comprehensives’ whom we have learnt to know, this insistence on the odours emitted by men and things is naturally one more merit and perfection. A poet who scents so well and receives through the nose such rich impressions of the world, is ‘a more keenly vibrating instrument of observation,’ and his art in representing things is more many-sided than that of poets who reproduce their impressions from fewer senses. Why should the sense of smell be neglected in poetry? Has it not the same rights as all the other senses? And thereupon they rapidly built an æsthetic theory which, as we have seen, induces Huysmans’ Des Esseintes to compose a symphony of perfumes, and prompts the Symbolists to accompany the recital of their compositions on the stage with odours, which they pretend are assorted to the contents of the verses. The ‘comprehensive’ drivellers do not for a moment suspect that they are simply fencing with the march of organic evolution in the animal kingdom. It does not depend on the good pleasure of a being to construct for himself his idea of the external world with the help of a group of such or such sense-perceptions. In this respect he is completely subservient to the conformation of his nervous system. The senses which predominate are those which his being utilizes in acquiring knowledge. The undeveloped or insufficiently developed senses help the brain little or not at all, to know and understand the world. To the vulture and condor the world is a picture; to the bat and the mole it is a sound and a tactile sensation; to the dog it is a collection of smells. Concerning the sense of smell in particular, it has its central seat in the so-called olfactory lobe of the brain, which diminishes in proportion as the frontal lobe is developed. The more we descend in the vertebrates the greater is the olfactory, the smaller the frontal, lobe. In man the olfactory lobe is quite subordinated, and the frontal lobe, the presumable seat of the highest mental functions, including language, greatly predominates. The consequence of these anatomical relations, which evade our influence, is that the sense of smell has scarcely any further share in man’s knowledge. He obtains his impressions of the external world no longer by the nose, but principally by the eye and ear. The olfactory perceptions only furnish a minimum contribution to the concepts which are formed out of ideational elements. It is only in the most limited degree that smells can awaken abstract concepts, i.e., a higher and complex mental activity, and stimulate their accompanying emotions; a ‘symphony of perfumes’ in the Des Esseintes sense can, therefore, no longer give the impression of moral beauty, this being an idea which is elaborated by the centres of conception. In order to inspire a man with logical sequences of ideas and judgments, with abstract concepts by scents alone; to make him conceive the phenomenon of the world, its changes and causes of motion, by a succession of perfumes, his frontal lobe must be depressed and the olfactory lobe of a dog substituted for it, and this, it must be admitted, is beyond the capacity of ‘comprehensive’ imbeciles, however fanatically they may preach their æsthetic folly. Smellers among degenerates represent an atavism going back, not only to the primeval period of man, but infinitely more remote still, to an epoch anterior to man. Their atavism retrogrades to animals amongst whom sexual activity was directly excited by odoriferous substances, as it is still at the present day in the muskdeer, or who, like the dog, obtained their knowledge of the world by the action of their noses.

The extraordinary success of Zola among his contemporaries is not explained by his high qualifications as an author, that is, by the extraordinary force and power of his romantic descriptions, and by the intensity and truth of his pessimistic emotion, which makes his representation of suffering and sorrow irresistibly impressive; but by his worst faults, his triviality and lasciviousness. This can be proved by the surest of methods, that of figures. Let us consult as to the diffusion of his different novels, the printed indications, for example, at the beginning of the last edition of L’Assommoir (bearing the date 1893). They have been put down as follows: Of Nana, 160,000; La Débâcle, 143,000; L’Assommoir, 127,000; La Terre, 100,000; Germinal, 88,000; La Bête humaine and Le Rêve, each 83,000; Pot-Bouille, 82,000; as a contrast, L’[Œuvre, 55,000; La Joie de Vivre, 44,000; La Curée, 36,000; La Conquête de Plassans, 25,000; of the Contes à Ninon not even 2,000 copies, etc. Thus, the novels which have had the greatest sale are those in which lust and bestial coarseness appear most flagrantly, and the demand diminishes with mathematical exactitude in proportion as the layer of obscenity, spread by Zola over his work as with a mason’s trowel, becomes more thin and less ill-smelling. Three novels appear as an exception to this rule: La Débâcle, Germinal, and Le Rêve. Their high position as regards the number of the editions is explained by the fact that the first treats of the war of 1870, the second of socialism, the third of mysticism. These three works appeal to the frame of mind of the period. They swim with the fashionable current. But all the rest have owed their success to the lowest instincts of the masses, to its brutish passion for the sight of crime and voluptuousness.

M. Zola was bound to make a school--first, because of his successes in the book trade, which drove into his wake the whole riff-raff of literary intriguers and plagiarists, and then because of the facility with which his most striking peculiarities can be imitated. His art is accessible to every bungler of the day who dishonours the literary vocation by his slovenly hand. An empty and mechanical enumeration of completely indifferent aspects under the pretext of description exacts no effort. Every porter of a brothel is capable of relating a low debauch with the coarsest expressions. The only thing which might offer some difficulty would be the invention of a plot, the construction of a frame of action. But M. Zola, whose strength does not lie in the gift of story-telling, boasts of this imperfection as a special merit, and proclaims as a rule of art that the poet must have nothing to relate. This rule suits excellently the noxious insects who crawl behind him. Their impotence becomes their most brilliant qualification. They know nothing, they can do nothing, and they are on that account particularly adapted to ‘die Moderne,’ as they say in Germany. Their so-called ‘novels’ depict neither human beings, nor characters, nor destinies; but, thou poor Philistine who canst not see it, it is precisely this which constitutes their value!

Moreover, justice exacts that among Zola’s imitators two groups should be distinguished. The one cultivates chiefly his pessimism, and accepts his obscenities into the bargain, though without enthusiasm, and often even with visible embarrassment and secret repugnance. It consists of hysteric and degenerate subjects who are bonâ fide, who, in consequence of their organic constitution, actually feel pessimistic, and have found in Zola the artistic formula which corresponds most truly with their sentiments. I place in this group some dramatic authors of the ‘Théâtre-Libre’ in Paris, directed by M. Antoine; and the Italian ‘Verists.’ The naturalistic theatre is the most untrue thing that has been seen hitherto, even more untrue than the operetta and the fairy-play. It cultivates the so-called ‘cruel terms,’ i.e., phrases in which the persons openly make a display of all the pitiable, infamous and cowardly ideas and feelings which surge through their consciousness, and systematically neglect this most primitive and palpable fact, that by far the most widespread and tenacious characteristic of man is hypocrisy and dissimulation. The forms of customs survive incalculably longer than morality, and man simulates the greater honesty, and hides his baseness under appearances so much the more seeming-pious, as his instincts are more crafty and mean. The Verists, among whom are many powerful literary natures, are one of the most surprising and distressing phenomena in contemporary literature. One understands pessimism in sorely-tried France; one comprehends it also in the insupportable narrowness of social life in the crepuscular North, with its cloudy gray skies and its scourge of alcoholism. Eroticism, too, is comprehensible among the overexcited and exhausted Parisian population, and in the Scandinavian North, as a kind of revolt against the zealous discipline and morose constraint of a bigotry without joy, and mortifying to the flesh. But how could pessimism spring up under the radiant sunshine and eternally blue sky of Italy, in the midst of a handsome and joyous people who sing even in speaking (invalids like Leopardi might naturally appear as exceptions everywhere)? and how did Italians arrive at insane lubricity, when in their country there still exists, living in the temples and in the fields, a souvenir of the artlessly robust sensuality of the pagan world, with its symbols of fecundity; where also natural and healthy sexuality has always preserved through centuries the right to express itself innocently in art and literature? If Verism is anything else but an example of the propagation of intellectual epidemics by imitation, the task devolves upon the scientific Italian critic to explain this paradox in the history of manners.

The other group of Zola’s imitators is not composed of superior degenerates, unhealthy persons who sincerely give themselves out for what they are, and express often with talent what they feel; but of people who morally and mentally stand on a level with supporters of evil, who, instead of the trade of night-birds, have chosen the less dangerous and hitherto more esteemed vocation of authors of novels and dramas, when the theory of naturalism had made it accessible to them. This brood has only taken immodesty from M. Zola, and conformably with the degree of culture has carried it into obscenity without circumlocution. To this group belong the professional Parisian pornographers, whose daily and weekly papers, stories, pictures, and theatrical representations in M. de Chirac’s style, continually give employment to the correctional tribunals; the Norwegian authors of novels on street-walkers; and, unhappily, also a portion of our ‘Young German’ realists. This group stands outside of literature. It forms a portion of that riff-raff of great towns who professionally cultivate immorality, and have chosen this trade with full responsibility, solely from horror of honest work and greed for lucre. It is not mental therapeutics, but criminal justice, which is competent to judge them.

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