It is in _Brand_ that Ibsen’s absurdity apparently achieves its

greatest triumph. Northern critics have reiterated _ad nauseam_ that

this silly piece is a dramatic translation of Kierkegaard’s crazy

‘Either-Or.’ Ibsen shows a fool who wishes to be ‘all or nothing,’

and who preaches the same to his fellow-citizens. What he especially

understands by these high-sounding words the piece nowhere reveals

by a single syllable. Brand, however, succeeds in infecting his

fellow-citizens with his madness, and one fine day they sally forth

from the village and are led by him into impassable mountain solitudes.

What his purpose is no one knows or suspects. The sexton, who seems

to be somewhat less crazy than the others, finally becomes uneasy

concerning this wholly senseless mountain climbing, and asks whither

Brand is really leading them, and what may be the object of this

scramble. Whereupon Brand gives him the following wonderful information

(p. 151): ‘How long will the struggle last?’ (viz., the climbing, for

there is no other struggle in this Act). ‘It lasts until life’s end.

Until you have sacrificed all; until you are freed from your compact;

until that which you may wish for you shall wish for unswervingly.’

(What this is which is to be wished for is not explained.) ‘Until

every doubt shall have vanished and nothing separates you from the

All or Nothing. And your sacrifices? All the gods which with you take

the place of the eternal God; the shining golden chains of slavery,

together with the beds of your languid slothfulness. The reward of

victory? Unity of will, activity of faith, pureness of soul.’ Naturally

on listening to this ranting the good people ‘come to their senses and

go home,’ but the lunatic Brand is offended because his fellow-citizens

do not want to pant uphill in order to ‘wish for something

unswervingly,’ to attain to ‘all or nothing,’ and to arrive at ‘unity

of will.’ For it is ‘the all’ which seems to inhabit mountains; not

merely freedom, which an early poet sought for there. (‘Liberty dwells

in the mountains,’ Schiller has said.)

And yet Brand is a remarkable figure. In him Ibsen has unconsciously

created a very instructive type of those deranged beings who run,

speak, and act at the bidding of a ruling impulse,[343] who with

furious passion are continually and reiteratingly talking of ‘the goal’

which they wish to attain, but who neither themselves have a suspicion

of what this goal really is, nor are in a position to indicate it to

others in an intelligible way. Brand thinks the power which impels

him is his inflexible iron will. It is in reality his inflexible

iron impulsion which his consciousness in vain seeks to grasp and to

interpret by the aid of a flood of unintelligible words.

Ibsen’s absurdity is not always so clearly apparent as in the examples

cited. It frequently manifests itself in a blurred and indefinite

phrase, plainly expressing the state of a mind which endeavours to

formulate in words a nebulous representation springing up in it,

but which lacks the necessary power and loses itself in mechanical

mutterings void of sense. There are three sorts of phrases of this

kind to be distinguished in Ibsen. One kind say absolutely nothing,

and contain no more of an idea than the ‘tra-la-la’ sung to a song of

which one has forgotten the words. They are a symptom of a temporary

arrest of function[344] in the cerebral centres of ideation, and appear

in healthy persons also in a state of extreme fatigue, under the form

of incidental embarrassment, causing hesitation in speech. In persons

suffering from hereditary exhaustion they are continuously present.

Another kind affect an appearance of profundity and significant

allusions, but exact observation recognises them as an empty jingle of

words devoid of all import. Finally, the third kind are such evident

and unequivocal idiocy that even unprofessional listeners regard each

other in consternation, and would feel it to be their duty to give

his family a gentle hint if they heard anything of the kind from one

of their table companions at the habitual café. I will give some

illustrations of each of these three kinds of phraseology.

Firstly, phrases saying absolutely nothing, interpolated between

intelligible words, and indicating a temporary paralysis of the centres

of ideation.

In _The Lady from the Sea_ (p. 25) Lyngstrand says: ‘I am to a certain

extent a little infirm.’[345] This ‘to a certain extent’ is admirable!

Lyngstrand, a sculptor, is speaking of his artistic projects (p. 51):

As soon as I can set about it, I am going to try if I can produce a

great work--a group, _as they call it_.

ARNHOLM. Is there anything else?

LYNGSTRAND. Yes, there is to be another figure--_a sort of apparition,

as they say_.

As Ibsen makes Lyngstrand a fool, it might be believed that he

intentionally put these idiotic turns of expression into the sculptor’s

mouth. But in _Hedda Gabler_, Brack, a sharp and clever _bon vivant_,

says (p. 87): ‘But as far as regards myself, you know very well that

I have always entertained a--a certain respect for the marriage tie,

_generally speaking_, Mrs. Hedda.’ In _Rosmersholm_ Brendel says (p.

24): ‘So you see when golden dreams descended and enwrapped me ... I

fashioned them into poems, into visions, into pictures--_in the rough_,

as it were, you understand. Oh, what pleasures, what intoxications I

have enjoyed in my time! The mysterious bliss of creation--_in the

rough_, as I said.’ Rector Kroll says (p. 18): ‘A family that now soon

for some centuries has held its place as the first in the land.’[346]

‘Now soon for some centuries’! That means that it is not yet ‘some

centuries,’ but ‘soon’ will be ‘some centuries.’ Hence ‘soon’ must

include in itself ‘some centuries.’ By what miracle? In _The Wild Duck_

we have the intentionally, but, in their exaggeration impossibly,

idiotic conversations of the ‘fat,’ ‘bald,’ and ‘short-sighted’

gentlemen in the first act, but also this remark by Gina, who is in no

way depicted as an idiot (p. 270):

Are you glad when you have some good news to tell father when he comes

home in the evening?

HEDWIG. Yes, for then we have a pleasanter time.

GINA. Yes, _there is something [true][347] in that_!!

In the conversation about the wild duck between Ekdal, Gregers and

Hjalmar we read (p. 289):

EKDAL. He was out in a boat, _you see_, and he shot her. But father’s

sight is pretty bad now. H’m; he only wounded her.

GREGERS. Ah! she got a couple of shot in her body, I suppose.

HJALMAR. Yes, _two or three_....

GREGERS. And she thrives all right in the garret there?

HJALMAR. Yes, wonderfully well. She’s got fat. She’s been in there

so long now that she’s forgotten her natural wild life, and it all

depends on that.

GREGERS. _You’re right there_, Hjalmar.

And in a dialogue between Hedwig and Gregers Werle (p. 305):

HEDWIG. ... If I had learnt basket-making, I could have made the new

basket for the wild duck.

GREGERS. So you could; and it was, strictly speaking, your business,

wasn’t it?

HEDWIG. Yes, for she’s _my_ wild duck.

GREGERS. _Of course she is!_

Now for some examples of phrases which sound excessively profound, but

in reality express nothing, or mere foolishness.

In _A Doll’s House_ (p. 25) Mrs. Linden expresses the opinion: ‘Well,

after all, it is better to open the door to the sick, and get them safe

in;’ to which Rank significantly replies: ‘Yes, so people say. And it

is that very consideration which turns society into a hospital.’ What

does this meditative and oracular speech mean? Is it Rank’s opinion

that society is a hospital because it cares for its sick, and that it

would be healthy if its sick were not cared for? Would the untended

sick be any less sick? If he believes that he believes an idiocy. Or

are the sick to be left to die uncared for, and in this manner got rid

of? If he preaches that, he preaches a barbarism and a crime, and that

is not in accordance with Rank’s character as Ibsen depicts him. We may

turn and twist the vague, mysterious words as we will, we shall always

find either stupidity or want of meaning.

In _Rosmersholm_, Rosmer (p. 30) wishes to ‘devote all his life and

all his energies to this one thing--the creation of a true democracy

in this country.’ And, wonderful to relate, the persons to whom Rosmer

says these words all seem to comprehend what the ‘true democracy’

is. Without being asked, Rosmer offers, besides, some explanation of

his Pythian utterance: ‘I want to awaken the democracy to its true

task--that of making all the people of this country noblemen ... by

setting free their minds and purifying their wills.... I will only try

to arouse them to their task. They themselves must accomplish it ...

by their own strength. There is no other.... Peace and joy and mutual

forbearance must once more enter into their souls.’ Rebecca repeats to

him his programme (p. 62):

You were to set resolutely to work in the world--the living world of

to-day, as you said. You were to go as a messenger of emancipation

from home to home; to win over minds and wills; to create noble men

around you in wider and wider circles. Noblemen.

ROSMER. Joyful noblemen.

REBECCA. Yes, joyful.

ROSMER. For it is joy that ennobles the mind.

It is impossible to avoid calling up a comic picture of Rosmer going

‘from home to home’ ‘in wider and wider circles,’ and making the

persons before whom he talks into ‘joyful noblemen,’ while he ‘awakens’

them and ‘purifies their wills,’ and thus ‘creates a true democracy.’

This rigmarole is, it is true, incomprehensible; but, at all events, it

must be something agreeable, for Rosmer expressly says that he needs

‘joy’ to create ‘noblemen.’ And in spite of this Rebecca suddenly

discovers (p. 102): ‘The Rosmer view of life ennobles, but it kills

happiness.’ What! Rosmer kill happiness when he ‘goes from home to

home,’ awakening, winning, making people free, etc., and creating

joyful noblemen? The word ‘joyful’ includes, at least, something of

happiness, and yet the education of men to ‘joyful noblemen’ is to

kill happiness? Rosmer finds (p. 97) ‘the work of ennobling men’s

minds is not for him. And, besides, it is so hopeless in itself.’

This is in a measure intelligible, though it is not stated from what

experience Rosmer has been led to such a change in his views. But quite

beyond comprehension is Rebecca’s speech about the fatal influence

of ‘the Rosmer view of life.’ In _Ghosts_, Mrs. Alving endeavours

to explain her defunct husband’s vagaries in this balderdash (p.

187): ‘When he was a young lieutenant, he was brimming over with the

joy of life. It was like a breezy day only to look at him. And what

exuberant strength and vitality there was in him! And then, child of

joy as he was--for he _was_ like a child at the time--he had to live

here at home in a half-grown town, which had no joys to offer him,

but only amusements. He had no object in life, but only an office.

He had no work into which he could throw himself heart and soul; he

had only business. He had not a single comrade that knew what the joy

of life meant, only loungers and boon companions.’ These antitheses

seem to have something in them; but if we seriously set about hunting

for a definite idea in them, they vanish in smoke. ‘Object in

life--office’--‘work--business’--‘comrades--boon companions,’ are not

in themselves oppositions, but become such through the individual.

With a decent man they are perfectly coincident; with a base man they

fall into opposition. A large or a small town has nothing to do with

it. For Kant in the small town of Kœnigsberg, in the last century,

the ‘office’ was ‘the object in life,’ ‘work’ was ‘business,’ and he

so chose his ‘boon companions’ that they were at the same time his

‘comrades,’ as far, indeed, as he could have such. And, on the other

hand, there is, in the largest metropolis, no occupation and no circle

of men in which a degenerate, burdened with his disorder, could feel at

ease and in inward harmony.

In _Hedda Gabler_ we find quite a multitude of such words, apparently

saying much, but in reality saying nothing. ‘It was the passion for

life in you!’ exclaims Lövborg to Hedda (p. 128), with the seeming

conviction that he has, in this utterance, explained something to her.

And Hedda says (p. 142): ‘_I_ see him before me. With vine-leaves in

his hair. Hot and bold’ (p. 151). ‘And Ejlert Lövborg, he is sitting

with vine-leaves in his hair, and reading aloud’ (p. 157). ‘Had he

vine-leaves in his hair?’ (p. 171). ‘So that is how it all happened.

Then he did not have vine-leaves in his hair’ (p. 188).

HEDDA. Could you not contrive that it should be done gracefully?

LÖVBORG. Gracefully? With vine-leaves in my hair?

‘With vine-leaves in his hair;’ ‘the passion for life’--these are

words meaning, in the connection assigned to them, absolutely nothing,

but giving scope for dreaming. In a few instances Ibsen employs these

dreamily-nebulous, shadowy expressions with poetic licence, _e.g._,

when we read in _The Pillars of Society_ (p. 19):

RÖRLUND. Tell me, Dina, why you do like so much to be with me?

DINA. Because you teach me so much that is beautiful.

RÖRLUND. Beautiful? Do you call what I can teach you beautiful?

DINA. Yes; or, rather, you teach me nothing; but when I hear you

speak, it makes me think of so much that is beautiful.

RÖRLUND. What do you understand, then, by a beautiful thing?

DINA. I have never thought of that.

RÖRLUND. Then think of it now. What do you understand by a beautiful

thing?

DINA. A beautiful thing is something great and far away.

Dina is a young girl living under sad and painful conditions. It is

psychologically accurate that she should condense all her longing

for a new and happy existence in a word of emotional colouring, such

as ‘beautiful.’ It is the same with the dialogue between Gregers and

Hedwig in _The Wild Duck_ (p. 53):

GREGERS. And she [the wild duck] has been down in the depths of the

sea.

HEDWIG. Why do you say ‘in the depths of the sea’?

GREGERS. What else could I say?

HEDWIG. You could say ‘the bottom of the sea’ [or ‘at the bottom of

the water’].[348]

GREGERS. Oh, mayn’t I just as well say the depths of the sea?

HEDWIG. Yes; but it sounds so strange to me when other people speak of

the depths of the sea.

GREGERS. Why so?...

HEDWIG. ... It always seems to me that the whole room and everything

in it should be called the depths of the sea. But that’s so stupid....

Because it’s only a garret [the place where the wild duck lives, the

old Christmas-trees are put, where old Ekdal chases the rabbit, etc.].

Hedwig is a highly excitable child at the age of puberty (Ibsen thinks

it necessary expressly to affirm that her voice is changing, and that

she willingly plays with fire); hence it is natural that she should be

thrilled with presentiments, dreams, and obscure instincts, and invest

poetical expressions denoting something far away and wild, such as

‘in the depths of the sea,’ with the secret significance of all the

mysterious and marvellous surging in her. But when expressions of this

sort are used, not by little growing girls, but by full-grown persons

depicted as rational beings, it is no longer a question of dreaming

explicable on pathological grounds, but of diseased cerebral centres.

These words often assume the nature of an obsession. Ibsen obstinately

repeats them, at the same time imparting to them a mysterious

significance. It is thus, for example, that the words ‘joy of life’

appear in _Ghosts_ (p. 176):

OSWALD. ... She was full of the joy of life (p. 177).

MRS. ALVING. What were you saying about the joy of life?

OSWALD. Have you noticed that everything I have painted has turned

upon the joy of life?--always, always upon the joy of life? (p. 187).

MRS. ALVING. You spoke of the joy of life; and at that word a new

light burst for me over my life and all it has contained.... You ought

to have known your father.... He was brimming over with the joy of

life.

In _Hedda Gabler_ the word ‘beauty’ plays a similar part (p. 190):

HEDDA (_to_ Lövborg). _You_ use it [the pistol] now.... And do it

beautifully (p. 214).

_Hedda._ I say that there is something beautiful in this [Lövborg’s

suicide] (p. 219).

HEDDA. A relief to know that it is still possible for an act of

voluntary courage to take place in the world. Something over which

there falls a veil of unintentional beauty.... And then now--the great

act! That over which the sense of beauty falls!

The ‘vine-leaves in the hair,’ in the same piece, belongs with equal

exactness to this category of words, amounting to an obsession. The

use of expressions full of mystery, incomprehensible to the hearer,

and either freely coined by the speaker, or endowed by him with a

peculiar sense, deviating from that usually assigned them in speech,

is one of the most frequent phenomena among the mentally deranged.

Griesinger[349] often lays stress on this, and A. Marie[350] adduces

some characteristic examples of words and phrases, either newly

invented or employed in a sense differing from the customary one, which

have been repeated by the insane.

Ibsen is certainly not wholly diseased in mind, but only a dweller on

the borderland--a ‘mattoid.’ His use of formalized expressions does

not therefore go so far as the invention of new words, as cited by Dr.

Marie. But that he ascribes a mysterious meaning to the expressions

‘beauty,’ ‘joy of life,’ ‘courage of life,’ etc., and one which they

do not possess when rationally used, follows clearly enough from the

examples quoted.

Finally let us adduce a few specimens of sheer nonsense, corresponding

to conversations held in dreams, and the silly rambling speech of

persons suffering from fever or acute mania. In _The Lady from the

Sea_, Ellida says (p. 39): ‘The water in the fjord here is sick, ...

yes, sick. And I believe it makes one sick, too’ (p. 79). ‘We’ (Ellida

and the ‘stranger’) ‘spoke of the gulls and the eagles, and all the

other sea-birds. I think--isn’t it wonderful?--when we talked of such

things it seemed to me as if both the sea-beasts and sea-birds were one

with him.... I almost thought I belonged to them all, too’ (p. 100).

I don’t think the dry land is really our home.... I think that if only

men had from the beginning accustomed themselves to live on the sea,

or _in_ the sea, perhaps, we should be more perfect than we are--with

better and happier....

ARNHOLM (_jestingly_). Well, perhaps! But it can’t be helped. We’ve

once for all entered upon the wrong path, and have become land-beasts

instead of sea-beasts. Anyhow, I suppose it’s too late to make good

the mistake now.

ELLIDA. Yes, you’ve spoken a sad truth. And I think men instinctively

feel something of this themselves. And they bear it about with them as

a secret regret and sorrow. Believe me, herein lies the deepest cause

for the sadness of men.

And Dr. Wangel, who is depicted as a rational man, says (p. 129):

And then she is so changeable, so capricious--she varies so suddenly.

ARNHOLM. No doubt that is the result of her morbid state of mind.

WANGEL. Not altogether. Ellida belongs to the sea-folk. That is the

matter(!!).

We must insist that precisely the absurdities, the nugatory, blurred,

deep-sounding phrases, the formalized words, and the dream-like drivel,

have essentially conduced to obtain for Ibsen his particular admirers.

Over them hysterical mystics can dream, like Dina and Hedwig, over

the words ‘beautiful’ and ‘in the depths of the sea.’ As they mean

absolutely nothing, an inattentive and vagrant mind can impart to them

whatever significance may be suggested by the play of association under

the influence of momentary emotion. They are, moreover, exceedingly

grateful material for the (so-called) ‘comprehensives,’ for whom

nothing is ever obscure. ‘Comprehensives’ always explain everything.

The greater the idiocy, the more involved, the richer in import, the

more exhaustive is its interpretation, and the greater the arrogance

with which these beings of ‘perfect comprehension’ look down upon the

barbarian, who stoutly refuses to see in fustian anything but fustian.

In an exceedingly amusing French farce, _Le Homard_, a husband suddenly

returning home one evening surprises a stranger with his wife. The

latter does not lose her presence of mind, and says to the husband

that, having suddenly been seized with illness, she had sent her maid

for the first available doctor, and that this gentleman was the doctor.

The husband thanks the gallant for his speedy appearance, and asks if

he has already prescribed anything. The gallant, who, of course, is

not a doctor, tries to make himself scarce; but the anxious husband

insists on having a prescription, so that the Galen, bathed in cold

perspiration, is compelled to give one. The husband casts a glance

at it; it consists of wholly illegible marks. ‘And will the chemist

be able to read that?’ asks the husband, shaking his head. ‘As if it

were print,’ asseverates the false physician, again trying to make his

escape. The husband, however, adjures him to remain, and holds him

fast until the maid returns from the chemist. In a few minutes she

makes her appearance. The Galen prepares himself for a catastrophe.

No. The maid brings a phial of medicine, a box of pills, and some

powders. ‘Did the chemist give you those?’ demands the Galen in

bewilderment. ‘Certainly.’ ‘On my prescription?’ ‘Of course it was on

your prescription,’ replies the astonished maid. ‘Has the chemist made

some mistake?’ interposes the troubled husband. ‘No, no,’ our Galen

hastens to reply; but he contemplates the medicines for a long time,

and becomes lost in reverie.

These ‘comprehensives’ are like the chemist in _Le Homard_. They

read with fluency all Ibsen’s prescriptions, and especially those

containing absolutely no written characters, but simply crow’s feet

devoid of all meaning. It is also their trade to supply critical pills

and electuaries when a piece of paper is brought to them bearing the

signature of a self-styled doctor, and they dispense them without

wincing, be there anything of any sort, or even nothing, on the slip

of paper. Is it not significant that the sole thing in Ibsen which the

French mystic De Vogué, one of these ‘comprehensives,’ finds to praise

is one of the meaningless phrases above cited?[351]

A final stigma of Ibsen’s mysticism must be considered--his symbolism.

In _The Wild Duck_, this bird is the symbol of Hjalmar’s destiny, and

the garret next the photographic studio a symbol of the ‘living lie,’

of which, according to Relling, everyone stands in need. In _The Lady

from the Sea_, Lyngstrand wishes to make a group which shall be the

symbol of Ellida, as the ‘stranger’ with the changing eyes of a fish

is of the sea and the latter again of freedom, so that the ‘stranger’

is really the symbol of a symbol. In _Ghosts_, the burning of the

asylum is the symbol of the annihilation of Alving’s ‘living lie,’ and

the rainy weather prevailing throughout the whole piece the symbol of

the depressed and sullen frame of mind of the personages in action.

Ibsen’s earlier pieces, _Emperor and Galilean_, _Brand_, _Peer Gynt_,

literally swarm with symbols. A mysterious collateral significance

is given to every figure and every stage accessory, and every word

includes a double meaning. From the ‘Psychology of Mysticism’ we

already know this peculiarity of the mystic mind to divine obscure

relations between phenomena. It seeks so to explain the nexus of the

wholly unconnected representations springing up in consciousness

through the play of automatic association, that it attributes hidden

but essential reference to each other in these representations. The

‘comprehensives’ believe they have said all when, with an extremely

consequential and self-satisfied air, they demonstrate that the

‘stranger’ in _The Lady from the Sea_ signifies the sea, and the sea

freedom. They quite overlook the fact that the thing to be explained

is not what the poet intended by his symbol, but, firstly, and in

particular, why he hit upon the idea of making use of a symbol at all.

In the well-known words of the French satirist, a clear-headed poet

calls ‘a cat a cat.’ That to express so sober an idea as that persons

of fine feelings, living in narrow conditions, have a deep longing for

a free, expanded, unrestrained existence, one should have the whim

to invent a ‘stranger with fish-like eyes,’ presupposes a diseased

mental activity. In imbeciles, the tendency to allegory and symbolism

is very common. ‘Intricate arabesques, symbolical figures, cabalistic

gestures and attitudes, strange interpretations of natural events,

punning, word-coining, and peculiar modes of expression, frequently

occurring in paranoia, give the delirium a lively and grotesque

colouring.’ Thus writes Tanzi,[352] and in the symbolism of the insane

he saw, as Meynert had previously seen, a form of atavism. Among men

low in the grade of civilization symbolism is, in fact, the habitual

form of thought. We know the reason--their brain is not yet trained

to attention; it is too weak to suppress irrational associations,

and refers all that shoots through its consciousness to some chance

phenomenon either just perceived, or else remembered.

After all the mental stigmata of Ibsen with which we have become

acquainted--his theological obsessions of original sin, of confession

and redemption, the absurdities of his invention, the constant

contradiction in his uncertain opinions, his vague or senseless modes

of expression, his onomatomania and his symbolism--he might be numbered

among the mystic degenerates with which I have concerned myself in the

previous chapters. We are, however, justified in assigning him his

place among the ego-maniacs, because the diseased intensification of

his ego-consciousness is even more striking and characteristic than

his mysticism. His ego-mania assumes the form of anarchism. He is in a

state of constant revolt against all that exists. He never exercises

rational criticism with regard to this; he never shows what is bad,

why it is bad, and how it could be made better. No; he only reproaches

it with its existence, and has only one longing--to destroy it. ‘The

ruin of everything’ was the programme of certain destructives in 1848,

and has remained that of Ibsen. He condenses it with a clearness which

leaves nothing to be desired in his well-known poem, _To my Friend

the Destructive Orator_. In this he glorifies the deluge as the ‘sole

revolution not made by a half-and-half dabbler’ (_Halohedsfusker_); but

even it was not radically ruinous enough. ‘We want to make it still

more radical, but for that end we need men and orators. You charge

yourselves with flooding the terrestrial garden. I place blissfully

a torpedo under the ark.’[353] In a series of letters offered by

elephant-driver Brandes for the edification of the adorers of Ibsen,

the poet gives conspicuous specimens of his theories.[354] The state

must be destroyed. Unfortunately the Paris Communists bungled this

beautiful and fertile idea by clumsy execution. The fight for freedom

has not for its end the conquest of liberty, but is its own end. As

soon as we believe liberty to be attained, and cease to fight for it,

we prove it to be lost to us. The meritorious thing in the fight for

liberty is the state of permanent revolt against all existing things

which it presupposes. There is nothing fixed and permanent. ‘Who

warrants me that in the planet Jupiter twice two are not five?’ (This

remark is an unmistakable manifestation of the insanity of doubt,[355]

which in recent years has been deeply studied.) There is no true

marriage. Friends are a costly luxury. ‘They have long hindered me

from being myself.’ The care of the ‘I’ is the sole task of man. He

ought not to allow himself to be diverted from it by any law or any

consideration.

These thoughts, expressed by himself in his letters, he also puts into

the mouth of his dramatic characters. I have already cited some of

Mrs. Alving’s and Nora’s ego-maniacal and anarchical phrases. In _The

Pillars of Society_, Dina says (p. 19): ‘If only the people I lived

amongst weren’t so proper and moral. Every day Hilda and Netta come

here that I may take example by them. I can never be as well behaved as

they are, and I _won’t be_’ (p. 44).

But I wanted to know, too, if people over there [in America] are

very--very moral ... if they are so--so proper and well-behaved as

here.

JOHAN. Well, at any rate, they’re not so bad as people here think.

DINA. You don’t understand me. What I want is just that they should

not be so very proper and moral (p. 92). I am sick of all this

goodness.

MARTHA BERNICK. Oh, how we writhe under this tyranny of custom and

convention! Rebel against it, Dina. Do something to defy all this

use-and-wont!

In _An Enemy of the People_ (p. 278) Stockmann declares: ‘I detest

leading men ... they stand in the path of a free man wherever he

turns--and I should be glad if we could exterminate them like other

noxious animals.’ (p. 280) ‘The most dangerous enemies of truth and

freedom in our midst are the compact majority. Yes, this execrable

compact, Liberal majority--they it is.... The majority is never

right.... The minority is always right.’ Where Ibsen does not seriously

attack the majority he derides it--_e.g._, when he entrusts the

maintenance of society to grotesque Philistines, or makes self-styled

Radicals betray the hypocrisy of their Liberal views. In _An Enemy of

the People_ (p. 238):

BURGOMASTER. You want to fly in the face of your superiors; and that’s

an old habit of yours. You can’t endure any authority over you

In _Rosmersholm_ (p. 53):

MORTENSGAARD [the journalist who poses as a Freethinker]. We have

plenty of Freethinkers already, Pastor Rosmer--I almost might say too

many. What the party requires is a Christian element--something that

everyone must respect. That’s what we’re sadly in need of.

With the same purpose of anarchistic ridicule he always personifies the

sense of duty in idiots or contemptible Pharisees only. In _Ghosts_ the

blockhead, Pastor Manders, thus preaches (p. 142): ‘What right have we

human beings to happiness? No, we have to do our duty! And your duty

was to hold firmly to the man you had once chosen, and to whom you

are bound by a holy tie.’ In _The Pillars of Society_ it is the rogue

Bernick who is made to proclaim the necessity of the subordination of

the individual to the community (p. 58): ‘People must learn to moderate

their personal claims if they are to fulfil their duties in the

community in which they are placed.’ In _An Enemy of the People_ the

not less pitiable burgomaster sermonizes his brother Stockmann in this

fashion (p. 209): ‘Anyhow, you’ve an ingrained propensity for going

your own way. And that in a well-ordered community is almost always

dangerous. The individual must submit himself to the whole community.’

The trick is evident: to make the conception of the necessary

subordination of the individual ridiculous and contemptible, Ibsen

appoints as its mouthpieces ridiculous and contemptible beings. On the

other hand, it is the characters on whom he lavishes all the wealth

of his affection to whom he entrusts the duty of defending rebellion

against duty, the aspersion or derision of laws, morals, institutions,

self-discipline, and the proclaiming of unscrupulous ego-mania as the

sole guide of life.

The psychological roots of Ibsen’s anti-social impulses are well

known. They are the degenerate’s incapacity for self-adaptation, and

the resulting discomfort in the midst of circumstances to which, in

consequence of his organic deficiencies, he cannot accommodate himself.

‘The criminal,’ Lombroso[356] says, ‘in consequence of his neurotic

and impulsive nature, and his hatred of the institutions which have

punished or imprisoned him, is a perpetual latent political rebel, who

finds in insurrection the means not only of satisfying his passions,

but of even having them countenanced for the first time by a numerous

public.’ This utterance is exactly applicable to Ibsen, with the slight

change, that he is merely a theoretic criminal, his motor centres not

being powerful enough to transmute his anarchically criminal ideas into

deeds, and that he finds the satisfaction of his destructive impulses

not in the insurrection, but in the activity of dramatic composition.

His incapacity for self-adaptation makes him not only an anarchist, but

also a misanthrope, and fills him with a profound weariness of life.

The doctrine of _An Enemy of the People_ is contained in Stockmann’s

exclamation (p. 315): ‘The strongest man on earth is he who stands most

alone’; and in _Rosmersholm_ (p. 24), Brendel says: ‘I like to take my

pleasures in solitude, for then I enjoy them doubly.’ The same Brendel

subsequently laments (p. 105): ‘I am going homewards; I am home-sick

for the mighty Void.... Peter Mortensgaard never wills more than he can

do. Peter Mortensgaard is capable of living his life without ideals.

And that, do you see, that is just the mighty secret of action and

of victory. It is the sum of the whole world’s wisdom.... The dark

night is best. Peace be with you!’ Brendel’s words have a peculiar

significance, for, on the evidence of Ehrhard,[357] Ibsen wished to

portray himself in that personage. That which is expressed in these

passages is the _dégoût des gens_ and the _tedium vitæ_ of alienists,

phenomena never absent in depressed forms of mental alienation.

In addition to his mysticism and ego-mania, Ibsen’s extraordinary

poverty of ideas indicates another stigma of degeneracy. Superficial

or ignorant judges, who appraise an artist’s intellectual wealth by

the number of volumes he has produced, believe that when they point

at the high pile of a degenerate’s works they have victoriously

refuted the accusation of his infecundity. The well-informed are of

course not entrapped by this paltry method of proof. The history of

insane literature knows of a large number of cases in which fools

have written and published dozens of thick volumes. For tens of

years and in feverish haste they must have driven the pen, almost

continuously, night and day; but since all these bulky tomes contain

not a single idea of any utility, this restless activity is not to

be termed fruitful, in spite of the abundant typographical results.

We have seen that Richard Wagner never invented a tale, a figure, a

situation; but that he sponged on ancient poems or the Bible. Ibsen has

almost as little genuine original creative power as his intellectual

relative, and as he, in his beggar’s pride, disdains for the most part

to borrow from other poets of procreative capacity, or from popular

traditions exuberant with life, his poems reveal, when closely and

keenly examined, an even greater poverty than those of Wagner. If we

do not allow ourselves to be dazzled by the art of variation in a

contrapuntist extraordinarily clever in dramatic technique, and follow

the themes he so adroitly elaborates, we at once recognise their dreary

monotony.

At the central point of all his pieces (with the exception of those

of a romantic character, written by him in his first period of pure

imitation) stand two figures, always the same and fundamentally one,

but having now a negative and now a positive sign, a thesis and

antithesis in the Hegelian sense. They are, on the one hand, the human

being who obeys his inner law only (that is, his ego-mania), and

dauntlessly and defiantly makes a parade of it; and, on the other, the

individual who, it is true, really acts in obedience to his ego-mania

only, but has not the courage to display it, feigning respect for the

law of others and for the notions of the majority--in other words,

the avowed and violent anarchist, and his opposite, the crafty and

timorously deceitful anarchist.

The avowed ego-maniac is, with one single exception, always embodied

in a woman. The exception is Brand. On the contrary, the hypocrite

is always a man--again with a single exception, viz., that of Hedda

Gabler, who does not personify the idea in its purity, frank anarchism

in her nature being mingled with something of hypocrisy. Nora (_A

Doll’s House_), Mrs. Alving (_Ghosts_), Selma Malsberg (_The League

of the Young_), Dina, Martha Hessel, Mrs. Bernick (_The Pillars of

Society_), Hedda Gabler, Ellida Wangel (_The Lady from the Sea_),

Rebecca (_Rosmersholm_), are one and the same figure, but seen, as it

were, at different hours of the day, and consequently in different

lights. Some are in the major, others in the minor, key; some are

more, others less hysterically deranged; but essentially they are not

only similar, but identical. Selma Malsberg (p. 60) cries: ‘Bear our

unhappiness in common? Am I yet good enough? No. I can no longer keep

silent, be a hypocrite and a liar. Now you shall know.... O, how you

have wronged me! Infamously, all of you!... How I have thirsted for a

drop of your care! But when I begged for it you repulsed me with a

polite joke. You dressed me like a doll. You played with me as with a

child.... I want to go away from you.... Let me, let me.’ And Nora (p.

110): ‘I lived by performing tricks for you, Torvald.... You and your

father have sinned greatly against me. It is the fault of you two that

nothing has been made of me. I was never happy, only merry.... Our

house has been nothing but a nursery. Here I have been your doll-wife,

just as at home I used to be papa’s doll-child.... That is why I am

going away from you now.... I shall now leave your house at once.’

Ellida (_The Lady from the Sea_): ‘What I want is that we should, of

our own free will, release each other.... I am not what you took me

for. Now you see it yourself. Now we can separate as friends, and

freely.... Here there is no single thing that attracts me and binds me.

I am so absolutely rootless in your house, Wangel.’ Selma threatens

to leave, Ellida resolves to leave, Nora does leave, Mrs. Alving did

leave. (_Ghosts_, p. 144) Pastor Manders: ‘All your efforts have been

bent towards emancipation and lawlessness. You have never been willing

to endure any bond. Everything that has weighed upon you in life you

have cast away without care or conscience, like a burden you could

throw off at will. It did not please you to be a wife any longer, and

you left your husband. You found it troublesome to be a mother, and you

sent your child forth among strangers.’ Mrs. Bernick was, equally with

her double, Mrs. Alving, a stranger in her own house. She, however,

does not wish to leave, but to remain and endeavour to win over her

husband (p. 112): ‘For many years I believed that you had once been

mine, and I had lost you again. Now I know that you never were mine;

but I shall win you.’ Dina (_The Pillars of Society_) cannot leave

because she is not yet married, but as becomes her state of maidenhood,

she gives her rebellious thoughts this form (p. 93): ‘I will be

your wife; but first I will work, and become something for myself,

just as you are. I will give myself; I will not be taken.’ Rebecca

(_Rosmersholm_) is also unmarried, yet she runs away (p. 96):

I am going.

ROSMER. Where are you going, Rebecca?

REBECCA. North, by the steamer. It was there I came from.

ROSMER. But you have no ties there now.

REBECCA. I have none here either.

ROSMER. What do you think of doing?

REBECCA. I don’t know. I only want to have done with it all.

Now for the antithesis, the hypocritical egoist who satisfies his

ego-mania without giving offence to society. This personage presents

himself under the names successively of Torvald Helmer, Consul

Bernick, Curate Rörlund, Rector Kroll, Pastor Manders, Burgomaster

Stockmann, Werle, and once, to a certain extent, Hedda Gabler,

always with the same ideas and the same words. In _A Doll’s House_

(p. 104, _et seq._), after his wife’s confession, Helmer cries:

‘Oh, what an awful awakening!... No religion, no morality, no sense

of duty.... He can publish the whole story; and if he does publish

it, perhaps I should be suspected of having been a party to your

criminal transactions.... I must try to pacify him in one way or the

other. The story must be kept secret, cost what it may.’ In _Ghosts_

Pastor Manders on different occasions expresses himself thus: ‘One is

certainly not bound to account to everybody for what one reads and

thinks within one’s own four walls.... We must not expose ourselves to

false interpretations, and we have no right whatever to give offence to

our neighbours.... You go and risk your good name and reputation, and

nearly succeed in ruining other people’s reputation into the bargain.

It was unspeakably reckless of you to seek refuge with me.... Yes, that

is the only thing possible’ (to ‘hush the matter up’) ‘... yes, family

life is certainly not always so pure as it ought to be. But in such

a case as you point to’ (an incestuous union), ‘one can never know.’

Rörlund (_The Pillars of Society_): ‘See how the family is undermined

over there! how a brazen spirit of destruction is attacking the most

vital truths!... Of course, a tare now and then springs up among the

wheat, alas! but we honestly do our best to weed it out.... Oh, Dina,

you can form no conception of the thousand considerations! When a man

is placed as a moral pillar of the society he lives in, why--he cannot

be too careful.... Oh, Dina, you are so dear to me! Hush! someone is

coming. Dina, for my sake, go out to the others.... A good book forms

a refreshing contrast to what we unhappily see every day in newspapers

and magazines.’ Consul Bernick, in the same piece: ‘Just at this time,

when I depend so much on unmixed good feeling, both in the press and

in the town. There will be paragraphs in the papers all over the

country-side.... These newspaper scribblers are always covertly carping

at us.... I whose mission it is to be an example to my fellow-citizens,

must have such things thrown in my teeth! I cannot bear it. It won’t

do for me to have my name bespattered in this way.... I must keep

my conscience unspotted. Besides, it will make a good impression

on both the press and the public at large when they see that I set

aside all personal considerations, and let justice take its course.’

Kroll, in _Rosmersholm_: ‘Do you ever see the Radical papers?... But

you’ve seen, then, I suppose, how these gentlemen of “the people” have

been pleased to treat me? what infamous abuse they’ve dared to heap

upon me?’ Werle, in _The Wild Duck_: ‘Even if, out of attachment to

me, she were to disregard gossip and scandal and all that----?’ The

Burgomaster, in _An Enemy of the People_: ‘If, perhaps, I do watch over

my reputation with some anxiety, I do it for the good of the town....

Your statement ... must be kept back for the good of all ... we will

do the best we can quietly; but nothing whatever, not a single word,

of this unfortunate business must be made public.... And then you have

an unhappy propensity for rushing into print upon every possible and

impossible matter. You no sooner hit upon an idea than you must write

at once some newspaper article or a whole pamphlet about it.’ Finally,

Hedda Gabler: ‘And so you went off perfectly openly?... But what do you

suppose that people will say about you, then?... I so dread a scandal!

You should accept for your own sake, or, better still, for the world’s

sake.’

If all the Nora-like and all the Helmer-like utterances are read

successively, an impression must be formed that they are part of

the same _rôle_; and this impression is correct, for under all the

different names there is only one _rôle_. The same is true of the

women who, in contrast to the ego-maniac Nora, unselfishly sacrifice

themselves. Martha Bernick, Miss Hessel, Hedwig, Miss Tesman, etc., are

always the same figure in different guises. The monotony, moreover,

extends to minutest details. Rank’s inherited disease is in Oswald’s

case only carried further. Nora’s flight is repeated in almost every

piece, and in _The Wild Duck_ is travestied in Hjalmar’s departure from

his house. One feature of this scene appears word for word in all the

_réchauffés_ of it:

NORA. Here I lay the keys down. The maids know how to manage

everything in the house far better than I do.

ELLIDA. If I do go ... I haven’t a key to give up, an order to

give.... I am absolutely rootless in your house, etc.

In _A Doll’s House_, the heroine, who has settled her account with

life and is filled with dread of the impending catastrophe, makes Rank

play a wild tarantella on the piano, while she dances to it. In _Hedda

Gabler_, the heroine is heard ‘suddenly playing a wild dance’ before

she shoots herself. Rosmer says to Rebecca, when the latter makes known

her wish to die: ‘No; you recoil. You have not the heart to do what

_she_ dared.’ The extortioner Krogstad says to Nora, who threatens to

commit suicide: ‘Oh, you don’t frighten me! An elegant spoilt lady like

you.... People don’t do things of that sort.’ Brack says, in response

to Hedda Gabler’s outburst: ‘Rather die! That’s what people say, but

nobody does it!’ In much the same words Helmer reproaches his wife

Nora with having sacrificed her honour by the forgery, and Pastor

Manders upbraids Mrs. Alving for wishing to sacrifice her honour to

him. Lona Hessel demands confession from Consul Bernick, and Rebecca

from Rosmer, in the same terms. Werle’s crime was the seduction of

the maidservant Gina. Alving’s crime was the seduction of his own

maidservant. This pitiable and imbecile self-repetition in Ibsen, this

impotence of his indolent brain to wash out the imprint of an idea

once painfully elaborated, goes so far that, even in the invention of

names for his characters, he is, consciously or unconsciously, under

the influence of a reminiscence. In _A Doll’s House_ we have Helmer;

in _The Wild Duck_, Hjalmar; in _The Pillars of Society_, Hilmar, Mrs.

Bernick’s brother.

Thus Ibsen’s drama is like a kaleidoscope in a sixpenny bazaar. When

one looks through the peep-hole, one sees, at each shaking of the

cardboard tube, new and parti-coloured combinations. Children are

amused at this toy. But adults know that it contains only splinters

of coloured glass, always the same, inserted haphazard, and united

into symmetrical figures by three bits of looking-glass, and they

soon tire of the expressionless arabesques. My simile applies not

only to Ibsen’s plays, but to the author himself. In reality, he is

the kaleidoscope. The few paltry bits of glass which for thirty years

he has rattled and thrown into cheap mosaic patterns, these are his

obsessions. These have existed in his own diseased mind, and have not

sprung from observation of the world’s drama. The pretended ‘realist’

knows nothing of real life. He does not comprehend it; he does not even

see it, and cannot, therefore, renew from it his store of impressions,

ideas, and judgments. The well-known method of manufacturing cannon

is to take a tube and pour molten metal round it. Ibsen proceeds in

a similar way with his poems. He has a thesis--more accurately, some

anarchistic folly; this is the tube. It is now only a question of

enveloping this tube with the metal of life’s realities. But that

lies beyond Ibsen’s power. At best he occasionally finds some bits of

worn-down horseshoe-nails, or castaway sardine-box, by rummaging among

dust-heaps; but this small quantity of metal does not suffice for a

cannon. Where Ibsen makes strenuous efforts to produce a picture of

actual contemporaneous events, he astounds us with the niggardliness in

incidents and human beings evinced by the range of his experience.

Philistine, ultra-provincial, these are no fit words for this. It sinks

below the level of the human. The naturalist Huber and Sir John Lubbock

have recorded incidents of this sort in their observations of colonies

of ants. The small features pinned by Ibsen to his two-legged theses,

to give them, at least, as much resemblance to humanity as is possessed

by a scarecrow, are borrowed from the society of a hideous hole on the

Norwegian coast, composed of drunkards and silly louts, of idiots and

crazed hysterical geese, who in their whole life have never formed a

clearer thought than: ‘How can I get hold of a bottle of brandy?’ or

‘How can I make myself interesting to men?’ The sole characteristic

distinguishing these Lövborgs, Ekdals, Oswald Alvings, etc., from

beasts is that they are given to drink. The Noras, Heddas, Ellidas,

do not tipple, but make up for that by raving so wildly as to require

strait-jackets. The great events of their lives are the obtaining of

a position in a bank (_A Doll’s House_); their catastrophes, that one

no longer believes in the articles of their creed (_Rosmersholm_);

the loss of an appointment as physician at a watering-place (_An

Enemy of the People_); the raked-up rumours of an amorous nocturnal

_péché de jeunesse_ (_The Pillars of Society_); the frightful crimes

darkening, like a thunder-cloud, the lives of these beings and their

social circle are an intrigue with a maidservant (_Ghosts_, _The Wild

Duck_); a _liaison_ with an itinerant music-hall singer (_An Enemy of

the People_); the felling, by mistake, of wood in a state-forest (_The

Wild Duck_); the visit to a house of ill-fame after a good dinner

(_Hedda Gabler_). It sometimes happens to me to pass a half-hour in

the nursery, amusing myself with the chatter and play of the little

ones. One day the children by accident saw the arrest of someone in the

street. Although their attendant hurried them away from the unpleasant

spectacle, they had seen enough of the tumult to be violently excited

by it. Some days afterwards on entering the nursery I found them full

of the great event, and I became the auditor of the following dialogue:

MATILDA (_aged three years_). Why did they put the gentleman in prison?

RICHARD (_five years old, very dignified and sententious_). It wasn’t

a gentleman; it was a bad man. They put him in prison because he was

wicked.

MATILDA. What had he done then?

RICHARD (_after reflecting a little_). His mamma had said he wasn’t to

take chocolate; but he did take chocolate. That’s why his mamma had

him put in prison.

This childish conversation always came into my mind when I lighted,

in Ibsen’s plays, upon one of his crimes treated with such overawing

importance.

We have now made the complete tour of Ibsen. At the risk of being

prolix and tedious, I have made copious quotations from his writings,

in order that the reader might himself see the matter from which I

have formed my judgments. Ibsen stands before us as a mystic and an

ego-maniac, who would willingly prove the world and mankind not worth

powder and shot, but who only proves that he has not the faintest

inkling of one or the other. Incapable of adapting himself to any state

of things whatsoever, he first abuses the state of things in Norway,

then that of Europe generally. In no one of his productions is a single

thought to be met with belonging to, or having an active influence

on, the present age, unless we bestow this honour on his anarchism,

which is explained by the diseased constitution of his mind, and his

travesties of the least certain results of investigations in hypnotism

and telepathy. He is a skilful dramatic technician, and knows how to

represent with great poetic power personages in the background, and

situations out of the chief current of the piece. This, however, is

all that a conscientious and lucid analysis can really find in him.

He has dared to speak of his ‘moral ideas,’ and his admirers glibly

repeat the expression. Ibsen’s moral ideas! Any reader of the Ibsen

drama, who finds in _them_ no food for laughter, has truly no sense

of humour. He seems to preach apostacy, yet cannot free himself from

the religious ideas of confession, original sin, and the Saviour’s act

of redemption. He sets up egoism and the freedom of the individual

from all scruples as an ideal, yet hardly has anyone acted somewhat

unscrupulously, but he begins to whimper contritely, and continues

until his heart, full to suffocation, has poured itself out in

confession; while the only persons with whom he succeeds are women,

who sacrifice their individuality to the point of annihilation for the

sake of others. He extols every offence against morality as heroism,

while he punishes, with nothing less than death, the smallest and

stupidest love affair. He uses the words freedom, progress, etc., as

a gargle, and in his best works honours lying and stagnation. And all

these contradictions appear forsooth not successively as stations on

the road of his development, but at one and the same time, and side by

side. His French admirer, Ehrhard,[358] sees this disconcerting fact,

and endeavours as best he can to excuse it. His Norwegian interpreter,

Henrik Jaeger, on the contrary, asserts with the utmost placidity[359]

that the most prominent characteristic of Ibsen’s works is their

unity (_Enhed_). The Frenchman and the Norwegian were most incautious

in not preconcerting, prior to praising their great man in manners

so divergent. The single discoverable unity in Ibsen is his faculty

of distortion. The point in which he always resembles himself is his

entire incapacity to elaborate a single clear thought, to comprehend a

single one of the watchwords daubed here and there on to his works, or

to deduce the true conclusions from a single one of his premises.

And this malignant, anti-social simpleton, highly gifted, it must be

admitted, in the technique of the stage, they have had the audacity to

try to raise upon the shield as the great world-poet of the closing

century. His partizans have continued to shout, ‘Ibsen is a great

poet!’ until all stronger judgments have become at least hesitating,

and feebler ones wholly subjugated. In a recent book on Simon

Magus,[360] there occurs this pretty story: ‘Apsethus, the Libyan,

wished to become a god. In spite, however, of his most strenuous

efforts he could not succeed in satisfying his longing. But, at any

rate, he would make the people believe that he had become a god. He

therefore collected a large number of parrots, in which Libya abounds,

and shut them all in a cage. He kept them so for some time, and

taught them to say, “Apsethus is a god.” When the birds had learnt

this, he opened the cage and set them free. And the birds spread

themselves throughout Libya, so that the words penetrated to the Greek

settlements. And the Libyans, astonished at the voice of the birds,

and not suspecting the trick Apsethus had played, looked upon him as a

god.’ In imitation of the ingenious Apsethus, Ibsen has taught a few

‘comprehensives’--the Brandes, Ehrhards, Jaegers, etc.--the words:

‘Ibsen is a modern! Ibsen is a poet of the future!’ and the parrots

have spread over all the lands, and are chattering with deafening din

in books and papers, ‘Ibsen is great! Ibsen is a modern spirit!’ and

imbeciles among the public murmur the cry after them, because they

hear it frequently repeated, and because, on such as they, every word

uttered with emphasis and assurance makes an impression.

It would certainly be a proof of superficiality to believe that the

audacity of his Corybantes alone explains the high place to which

Ibsen has been fraudulently elevated. Without question he possesses

characteristics by which he could not but act upon his contemporaries.

Firstly, we have his vague phrases and indefinite incidental hints

concerning ‘the great epoch in which we live,’ ‘the new era about

to dawn,’ ‘freedom,’ ‘progress,’ etc. These phrases were bound to

please all dreamers and drivellers, for they give free scope to any

interpretation, and, in particular, allow the presumption that their

author is possessed of modernity and a bold spirit of progress. They

are not discouraged by the fact that Ibsen himself makes cruel sport

of these ‘comprehensives,’ when, in _The Wild Duck_, he makes Relling

(p. 361) use the word ‘demoniac,’ while admitting it to be wholly

meaningless, just as the poet himself employs his own bunkum about

progress and freedom. They are ‘comprehensives’ precisely because they

interpret every passage according to their own sweet will.

Then there is Ibsen’s doctrine of the right of the individual to live

in accordance with his own law. Is this really his doctrine? This must

be denied when, after struggling through his countless contradictions

and self-refutations, we see that he treats with peculiar affection

the sacrificial lambs, who are all negation of their own ‘I,’ all

suppression of their most natural impulses, all neighbourly love and

consideration for others. In any case, his apostles have brought

forward anarchistic individualism as the central doctrine of his drama.

Ehrhard[361] sums up this doctrine in these words: ‘The revolt of the

individual against society. In other words, Ibsen is the apostle of

moral autonomy (_autonomie morale_).’ Now such a doctrine is surely

well fitted to cause ravages among the intellectually indolent or

intellectually incapable.

Ehrhard dares to use the expression ‘moral autonomy.’ In the name of

this fine principle Ibsen’s critical heralds persuade the youth who

gather round him that they have the right to ‘live out their lives,’

and they smile approvingly when their auditors understand by this term

the right to yield to their basest instincts and to free themselves

from all discipline. As the scoundrels in Mediterranean ports do with

well-dressed travellers, they whisper in the ear of their public,

‘Amuse yourselves! Enjoy yourselves! Come with me; I will show you the

way!’ But to confound ‘moral autonomy’ with absence of restraint is, on

the part of their faith, a monstrous error, and in the corrupters of

youth, hoping for the pay of procuration, an infamous deception.

These two notions are not only not synonymous, they are diametrically

opposed and mutually exclusive. Liberty of the individual! The right to

autonomy! The Ego its own legislator! Who is this ‘I’ that is to make

laws for itself? Who is this ‘Self’ for whom Ibsen demands the right

of autonomy? Who is this free individual? That the entire notion of a

Self opposed to the rest of the world as something alien and exclusive

is an illusion of consciousness, we have already seen in the chapter

on the ‘Psychology of Ego-mania,’ and I need not, therefore, dwell

again on the subject in this place. We know that man, like every other

complex and highly developed living being, is a society or state, of

simpler, and of simplest, living beings, of cells and cell-systems,

or organs, all having their own functions and wants. In the course of

the development of life on earth they have become associated, and have

undergone changes, in order to be able to perform higher functions than

are possible to the simple cell and primitive agglomeration of cells.

The highest function of life yet known to us is clear consciousness;

the most elevated content of consciousness is knowledge; and the most

obvious and immediate aim of knowledge is constantly to procure better

conditions of life for the organism, hence to preserve its existence

as long as possible, and to fill it with the greatest possible number

of pleasurable sensations. In order that the collective organism may

be able to perform its task, its constituent parts are bound to submit

to a severe hierarchical order. Anarchy in its interior is disease,

and leads rapidly to death. The single cell executes its chemical work

of decomposition and of integration without troubling itself about

aught else. It labours almost for itself alone. Its consciousness is

the most limited conceivable; it has hardly any prevision; its own

power of adaptation is so minute that if a cell is in the smallest

degree less well nourished than its neighbour, it cannot hold its

ground against the latter, and is immediately devoured by it.[362]

The differentiated cell-group, or organ, already possesses a wider

consciousness, whose seat is its own nerve-ganglia; its function is

more complex, and no longer operates wholly, or even chiefly, for its

own benefit, but for that of the collective organism; it also has

already, I might say, a constitutional influence on the direction of

the affairs of the whole organism, asserting itself in the power of

the organ to suggest to consciousness presentations prompting the will

to acts. The most exalted organ, however, the condensation of all the

other organs, is the gray cerebral cortex. It is the seat of clear

consciousness. It works least of all for itself, most of all for the

commonwealth--_i.e._, for the whole organism. It is the government of

the State. To it come all reports from the interior as well as the

exterior; it has to find its way in the midst of all complications;

it has to exercise foresight, and to take into consideration not only

the immediate effect of an act, but also the more remote consequences

for the commonwealth. When, therefore, it is a question of the ‘I,’

the ‘Self,’ the ‘Individual,’ it cannot be any subordinate part of the

organism which is meant, such as the little toe or the rectum, but

only the gray cerebral cortex. To it certainly belongs the right and

duty of directing the individual and of prescribing its law. It is

consciousness itself. But how does consciousness form its judgments and

its decisions? It forms them from representations awakened in it by

excitations proceeding from the internal organs and from the senses.

If consciousness allows itself to be directed solely by the organic

excitations, it seeks to gratify its momentary appetites, on the spot,

at the cost of well-being, it injures an organ by favouring the need

of another, and it neglects to take into consideration circumstances

of the external world which must be dealt with in the interest of

the whole organism. Let me give some quite simple illustrations. A

man is swimming under water. His cells know nothing of it, and do

not trouble themselves about it. They quietly absorb from the blood

the oxygen which they need at the moment, and set free, in exchange,

carbonic dioxide. The decomposed blood excites the medulla oblongata,

and the latter impetuously demands a movement of inspiration. Were

the gray cerebral cortex to yield to the perfectly justifiable demand

of one organ, and allow an impulse to inspire to proceed to the

muscles concerned, the consequence would be the filling of the lungs

with water, and death of the entire organism in consequence. Hence

consciousness does not obey the demand of the medulla oblongata, and,

instead of sending motor impulses to the intercostal muscles and

those of the diaphragm, communicates them to the muscles of the arms

and legs; instead of breathing under water, the swimmer emerges at

the surface. Another instance. A typhoid convalescent feels ragingly

hungry. Were he to yield to this desire, he might give himself a

momentary satisfaction, but twenty-four hours later he would probably

die from perforation of the intestines. Hence his consciousness resists

the desire of his organs for the benefit of the whole organism. The

cases are, of course, generally much more complex. But it is always the

task of consciousness to test the stimuli which it receives from the

depths of the organs, to comprise in the motor images which they excite

all its earlier experiences, its knowledge, the directions given by the

external world, and to disregard the stimuli if the judgments opposed

to them are more powerful than they.

Even a perfectly healthy organism quickly goes to rack and ruin if the

inhibitive activity of consciousness is not exercised, and if, through

this want of exercise, its inhibitive strength becomes atrophied.

Cæsarian madness[363] is nothing but the consequence of the systematic

indulgence by consciousness of every demand of the organs. If, however,

the organism is not perfectly healthy; if it is degenerate, its ruin is

much more speedy and certain when it obeys the urging of its organs,

for in such a case these organs are suffering from perversions; they

exact satisfactions, not only pernicious in their remote consequences

to the whole organism, but immediately so to the organs themselves.

When, therefore, the ‘I’ is spoken of, which is to have the right

to dispose of itself, only the conscious ‘Ego’ can be meant, the

pondering, remembering, observing, comparing intellect, not, however,

the sub-’Egos’--unconnected, and for the most part at strife with each

other--which are included in subconsciousness.[364] The individual

is the judging, not the instinctive, human being. Liberty is the

capacity of consciousness to derive excitations, not only from

the stimuli of the organs, but from those of the senses, and from

original memory-images. Ibsen’s liberty is the most abject, and always

suicidal,[365] slavery. It is the subjugation of judgment to instinct,

and the revolt of some single organ against the domination of that

power, which has to watch over the well-being of the whole organism.

Even so individualistic a philosopher as Herbert Spencer[366] says: ‘To

become fitted for the social state, it is necessary that the man ...

should possess the energy capable of renouncing a small enjoyment of

the moment, in order to obtain a greater one in the future.’ A healthy

man in the full vigour of intellect cannot sacrifice his judgment. The

_sacrifizio dell’ intelletto_ is the only one he cannot afford. If law

and custom impose upon him acts which he recognises as absurd because

they defeat their end, not only will he have the right, but it will

be his duty, to defend reason against nonsense, and knowledge against

error. But his revolt will always be in the name of judgment, not in

the name of instinct.

All this philosophy of self-restraint can, it is true, be preached to

healthy human beings only. It has no application to degenerates. Their

defective brain and nervous system are not in a state to respond to its

demands. The processes within their organs are morbidly intensified.

Hence the latter send particularly powerful stimuli to consciousness.

The sensory nerves conduct badly. The memory-images in the brain are

faint. Perceptions of the external world, representations of anterior

experiences, are, therefore, non-existent or too feeble to subdue the

stimulus originating in the organs. Such persons can do nought else

but follow their desires and impulsions. They are the ‘instinctivists’

and ‘impulsivists’ of mental therapeutics. To this species belong the

Noras, Ellidas, Rebeccas, Stockmanns, Brands, etc. This company, being

dangerous to themselves and to others, require to be put under the

guardianship of rational men, or, better still, in lunatic asylums.

Such must be the answer to those fools or charlatans who vaunt

Ibsen’s figures as ‘free men’ and ‘strong personalities,’ and with

the sweet-sounding tones of a Pied Piper’s air on ‘self-disposal,’

‘moral independence,’ and ‘living life out,’ attract children devoid of

judgment heaven knows whither, but in any case to their ruin.

The third feature of Ibsen’s drama accounting for his success is the

light in which he shows woman. ‘Women are the pillars of society,’ he

makes Bernick say (in _The Pillars of Society_, p. 114). With Ibsen

woman has no duties and all rights. The tie of marriage does not bind

her. She runs away when she longs for liberty, or when she believes she

has cause of complaint against her husband, or when he pleases her a

little less than another man. The man who plays the Joseph, and does

not comply with the will of Madame Potiphar, does not draw on himself

the customary ridicule; he is roundly pronounced a criminal (_Ghosts_,

p. 158):

PASTOR MANDERS. It was my greatest victory, Helen--the victory over

myself.

MRS. ALVING. It was a crime against us both.

Woman is always the clever, strong, courageous being; man always the

simpleton and coward. In every encounter the wife is victorious,

and the man flattened out like a pancake. Woman need live for

herself alone. With Ibsen she has even overcome her most primitive

instinct--that of motherhood--and abandons her brood without

twitching an eyelid when the caprice seizes her to seek satisfactions

elsewhere. Such abject adoration of woman--a pendant to Wagner’s

woman-idolatry--such unqualified approval of all feminine depravities,

was bound to secure the applause of those women who in the viragoes

of Ibsen’s drama--hysterical, nymphomaniacal, perverted in maternal

instinct[367]--recognise either their own portrait or the ideal of

development of their degenerate imagination. Women of this species

find, as a matter of fact, all discipline intolerable. They are by

birth _les femmes de ruisseau_ of Dumas fils. They are not fit for

marriage--for European marriage with one man only. Promiscuous sexual

intercourse and prostitution are their most deeply-seated instincts,

according to Ferrero[368] the atavistic form of degeneration in women,

and they are grateful to Ibsen for having catalogued, under the fine

designations of ‘The struggle of woman for moral independence’ and ‘The

right of woman to assert her own personality,’ those propensities to

which opprobrious names are usually given.

In his fiercely travestied exaggerations of Ibsen’s doctrines, entitled

_Der Vater_, _Gräfin Julie_, _Gläubiger_, etc., poor Grindberg, whose

brain is equally deranged, but who possesses great creative power, goes

to the greatest pains to show the absurdity of Ibsen’s notions on the

nature of woman, her rights, her relations to man. His method, however,

is a false one. He will never convince Ibsen by rational arguments that

his doctrines are foolish, for they do not spring from his reason,

but from his unconscious instincts. His figures of women and their

destinies are the poetical expression of that sexual perversion of

degenerates called by Krafft-Ebing ‘masochism.’[369] Masochism is a

sub-species of ‘contrary sexual sensation.’ The man affected by this

perversion feels himself, as regards woman, to be the weaker party; as

the one standing in need of protection; as the slave who rolls on the

ground, compelled to obey the behests of his mistress, and finding his

happiness in obedience. It is the inversion of the healthy and natural

relation between the sexes. In Sacher-Masoch imperious and triumphant

woman wields the knout; in Ibsen she exacts confessions, inflicts

inflammatory reprimands, and leaves in a flare of Bengal lights. In

essence, Ibsen’s heroines are the same as Sacher-Masoch’s, though the

expression of feminine superiority is a little less brutal. It is

remarkable that the women who exult over Ibsen’s Nora-types are not

shocked by the Hedwigs, Miss Tesmans, and other womanly embodiments

of sacrifice, in whom the highly contradictory thoughts and feelings

of the confused mystic come to light. But it has been psychologically

established that human beings overlook what is in dissonance with their

own propinquities, and dwell on that only which is in harmony with them.

Ibsen’s feminine clientèle is, moreover, not composed merely of

hysterical and degenerate characters, but includes also those women

who are leading an unhappy married life, or believe themselves

misunderstood, or suffer from the discontent and inner void resulting

from insufficient occupation. Clear thinking is not the most prominent

quality of this species of woman. Otherwise they would not have found

their advocate in Ibsen. Ibsen is not their friend. No one is who, as

long as the present order of society exists, attacks the institution of

marriage.

A serious and healthy reformer will contend for the principle that

marriage should acquire a moral and emotional import, and not remain

a lying form. He will condemn the marriage for interest, a dowry or

business marriage; he will brand as a crime the action of married

couples who feel for some other human being a strong, true love,

tested by time and struggle, and yet remain together in a cowardly

pseudo-union, deceiving and contaminating each other, instead of

honourably separating and contracting genuine connections elsewhere;

he will demand that marriage be based on reciprocal inclination,

maintained by confidence, respect, and gratitude, consolidated by

consideration for the offspring; but he will guard himself from saying

anything against marriage itself, this bulwark of the relations

between the sexes afforded by definite, permanent duty. Marriage is a

high advance from the free copulation of savages. To abandon it and

return to primitive promiscuity would be the most profound atavism of

degeneracy. Marriage, moreover, was not instituted for the man, but

for the woman and the child. It is a protective social institution for

the benefit of the weaker part. Man has not yet conquered and humanized

his polygamous animal instincts to the same extent as woman. It would

for the most part be quite agreeable to him to exchange the woman he

possesses for a new one. Departures à la Nora are as a rule not of a

nature to frighten him. He could open the door very wide for Nora,

and bestow on her his parting benediction with much pleasure. Were it

once the law and custom in a society where each was forced to care for

himself alone (and needed only to trouble himself about the offspring

of others, when it was a question of orphan, abandoned, or begging

children) that man and wife should separate as soon as they ceased

to be agreeable to each other, it would be the men and not the women

who would first make use of the new liberty. Departures à la Nora are

perhaps without danger for rich wives, or those eminently capable of

acquiring means of support, and hence pecuniarily independent. Such,

however, in present society constitute a minute minority. Under Ibsen’s

code of morals the vast majority of wives would have everything to

lose. The severe discipline of matrimony is their bulwark. It obliges

the man to take care of the children and of the wife as she declines in

years. Hence it should be the true duty of rational wives to declare

Ibsen infamous, and to revolt against Ibsenism, which criminally

threatens them and their rights. Only through error can women of spirit

and indisputable morality join the ranks of Ibsen’s followers. It is

necessary to enlighten them concerning the range of his doctrines, and

in particular concerning their effect on the position of woman, so that

they may abandon a company which can never be their own. May he remain

surrounded by those only who are spirit of his spirit, that is to say,

by hysterical women and masculine masochists, who, with Ehrhard,[370]

believe that ‘sound common-sense and optimism are the two destructive

principles of all poetry’!

CHAPTER 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.