He contemptuously reproaches slave-morality as being a utilitarian

morality,[392] and he ignores the fact that he extols his ‘noble

virtues,’ constituting the ‘morality of masters,’ only because

they are advantageous for the individual, for the ‘over-man.’[393]

Are, then, ‘advantageous’ and ‘useful’ not exactly synonymous?

Is, therefore, master-morality not every whit as utilitarian as

slave-morality? And the ‘deep’ Nietzsche does not see this! And he

ridicules English moralists because they have invented the ‘morality of

utilitarianism.’[394]

He believes he has unearthed something deeply hidden, not yet descried

by human eye, when he announces,[395] ‘What is there that is not

called love? Covetousness and love--what different feelings do we

experience at each of these words! And yet it might be the same

instinct.... Our love for our neighbours--is it not an ardent desire

for a possession?... When we see anyone suffering, we willingly

utilize the opportunity ‘ proferred us to take possession of him;

the pitying and charitable man, for example, does this; he also

calls by the name “love” the desire for a new possession awakened in

him, and takes pleasure in it, as he would in a fresh conquest which

beckons him on.’ Is it any longer necessary to criticise these silly

superficialities? Every act, even seemingly the most disinterested, is

admittedly egoistic in a certain sense, viz., that the doer promises

himself a benefit from it, and experiences a feeling of pleasure from

the anticipation of the expected benefit. Who has ever denied this? Is

it not expressly emphasized by all modern moralists?[396] Is it not

implied in the accepted definition of morality, as a knowledge of what

is useful? But Nietzsche has not even an inkling of the essence of the

subject. To him egoism is a feeling having for its content that which

is useful to a being, whom he pictures to himself as isolated in the

world, separated from the species, even hostile to it. To the moralist,

the egoism which Nietzsche believes himself to have discovered at the

base of all unselfishness, is the knowledge of what is useful not

alone to the individual, but to the species as well; to the moralist,

the creator of the knowledge of the useful is not the individual, but

the whole species; to the moralist also egoism is morality, but it is

a collective egoism of the species, an egoism of humanity in face of

the non-human co-habitants of the earth, and in the face of Nature.

The man whom the healthy-minded moralist has before his eyes is one

who has attained a sufficiently high development to extricate himself

from the illusion of his individual isolation, and to participate in

the existence of the species, to feel himself one of its members, to

picture to himself the states of his fellow-creatures--_i.e._, to be

able to sympathize with them. This man Nietzsche calls a herd animal--a

term which he has found used by all Darwinist writers, but which he

seems to regard as his own invention. He endows the word with a meaning

of contempt. The truth is that this herding animal--_i.e._, man, whose

‘I’ consciousness has expanded itself to the capacity of receiving

the consciousness of the species--represents the higher development,

to which mental cripples and degenerates, for ever enclosed in their

diseased isolation, cannot ascend.

Quite as ‘deep’ as his discovery of the egoism of all unselfishness

is Nietzsche’s harangue ‘to the teachers of unselfishness.’[397] The

virtues of a man are called good, not in respect of their effects upon

himself, but in respect of the effects which we suppose them to have

upon ourselves and society. ‘The virtues (such as diligence, obedience,

chastity, piety, justice), are for the most part pernicious to their

possessors.’ ‘Praise of the virtues is praise of something pernicious

to the individual--the praise of instincts which deprive a man of his

noblest egoism, and of the power of the highest self-protection.’

‘Education ... seeks to determine the individual to modes of thought

and conduct which, if they have become habit, instinct, and passion,

rule in him and over him, against his ultimate advantage, but “for

the general good.”’ This is the old silly objection against altruism

which we have seen floating in every gutter for the last sixty years.

‘If everyone were to act unselfishly, to sacrifice himself for his

neighbour, the result would be that everyone would injure himself,

and hence humanity, as a whole, would suffer great prejudice.’

Assuredly it would, if humanity were composed of isolated individuals

in no communication with each other. Whereas it is an organism; each

individual always gives to the higher organism only the surplus of

his effective force, and in his personal share of the collective

wealth profits by the prosperity of the whole organism, which he has

increased through his altruistic sacrifice. What would probably be said

to the canny householder who should argue in this way against fire

insurance: ‘Most houses do not burn down. The house-owner who insures

himself against fire pays premiums his life long, and as his house will

probably never burn down, he has thrown away his money to no purpose.

Fire insurance is consequently injurious.’ The objection against

altruism, that it injures each individual by imposing on him sacrifices

for others, is of exactly the same force.

We have had quite enough tests of the ‘depth’ of Nietzsche and

his system. I now wish to point out some of his most diverting

contradictions. His disciples do not deny these, but seek to palliate

them. Thus Kaatz says: ‘He had experienced a change in his own views

concerning so many things, that he warned men against the rigid

principle which would pass off dishonesty to self as “character.” In

view of the shifting of opinions as evidenced in Nietzsche’s works, it

is, of course, only that theory of life to which Nietzsche ultimately

wrestled his way that can be taken into consideration for the purposes

of this book.’[398] This is, however, a conscious and intended

falsification of the facts, and the hand of the falsifier ought, like

that of the cheater at cards, to be forthwith nailed to the table.

The fact is that the contradictions are to be found, not in works of

different periods, but in the same book, often on the same page. They

are not degrees of knowledge, of which the higher naturally surpass

the lower, but opposing, mutually incompatible opinions co-existing in

Nietzsche’s consciousness, which his judgment is neither capable of

reconciling, nor among which it can suppress either term.

In _Also sprach Zarathustra_, pt. iii., p. 29, we read: ‘Always love

your neighbour as yourself, but first be of those who love themselves.’

p. 56: ‘And at that time it happened also ... that his word praised

selfishness as blessed, hale, healthy selfishness, which wells forth

from the mighty soul.’ And p. 60: ‘One must learn to love one’s

self--thus I teach--with a hale and healthy love, so that one bear with

one’s self, and not rove about.’ In opposition to this, in the same

book, pt. i., p. 108: ‘The degenerating sense which says, “All for me,”

is to us a horror.’ Is this contradiction explained by an ‘effort to

wrestle his way to an ultimate theory of life’? The contrary assertions

are in the same book a few pages apart.

Another example. _Die fröhliche Wissenschaft_, p. 264: ‘The absence

of personality avenges itself everywhere; an enfeebled, thin, effaced

personality, denying and calumniating itself, is worthless for any

further good thing, most of all for philosophy.’ And only four pages

further in the same book, p. 268: ‘Have we not been seized with ...

the suspicion of a contrast--a contrast between the world--in which,

hitherto, we were at home with our venerations ... and of another

world, which is ourselves ... a suspicion which might place us

Europeans ... before the frightful alternative, Either--Or: “either do

away with your venerations or yourselves.”’ Here, therefore, he denies,

or, at least, doubts, his personality, even if in an interrogative

form; on which the reader need not dwell, since Nietzsche ‘loves

to mask his thoughts, or to express them hypothetically; and to

conclude the problems he raises by an interrupted phrase or a mark of

interrogation.’[399]

But he denies his personality, his ‘I,’ still more decidedly. In the

preface to _Jenseits von Gut und Böse_, p. 6, he explains that the

foundation of all philosophies up to the present time has been ‘some

popular superstition,’ such as ‘the superstition of the soul, which,

as a superstition of the subjective and the ‘I,’ as not ceased, even

in our days, to cause mischief.’ And in the same book, p. 139, he

exclaims: ‘Who has not already been sated to the point of death with

all subjectivity and his own accursed ipsissimosity!’ Hence the ‘I’

is a superstition! Sated to the point of death with ‘subjectivity’!

And yet the ‘I’ should be ‘proclaimed as holy.’[400] And yet the

‘ripest fruit of society and morality is the sovereign individual, who

resembles himself alone.’[401] And yet ‘a personality which denies

itself is no longer good for anything’!

The negation of the ‘I,’ the designation of it as a superstition,

is the more extraordinary, as Nietzsche’s whole philosophy--if one

may call his effusions by that name--is based only on the ‘Ego,’

recognising it as alone justifiable, or even as alone existing.

In all Nietzsche’s works we shall, it is true, find no more subversive

contradiction than this; but a few other examples will show to

what extent he holds mutually-destructive opposites in his mind in

uncompromising juxtaposition.

We have seen that his last piece of wisdom is: ‘Nothing is true;

all is permissible.’ At bottom all those ethics are repugnant to me

which say: ‘Do not do this! Renounce! Overcome self!’ ‘Self-command!’

Those ethical teachers who ... enjoin man to place himself in his own

power induce thereby in him a peculiar disease.[402] And now let the

following sentences be weighed: ‘Through auspicious marriage customs

there is a continual increase in the power and pleasure of willing,

in the will to command self.’ ‘Asceticism and puritanism are almost

indispensable means of education and ennoblement, if a race desires

to triumph over its plebeian origin, and raise itself at some time to

sovereignty.’ ‘The essential and priceless feature of every morality is

that it is a long constraint.’[403]

The characteristic of the over-human is his wish to stand alone, to

seek solitude, to flee from the society of the gregarious. ‘He should

be the greatest who can be the most solitary.’ ‘The lofty independent

spirituality--the will to stand alone.... (_Jenseits von Gut und

Böse_, pp. 154, 123.) ‘The strong are constrained by their nature to

segregate, as much as the feeble are by theirs to aggregate’ (_Zur

Genealogie der Moral_, p. 149). In opposition to this he teaches in

other places: ‘During the longest interval in the life of humanity

there was nothing more terrible than to feel one’s self alone’ (_Die

fröhliche Wissenschaft_, p. 147). Again: ‘We at present sometimes

undervalue the advantages of life in a community’ (_Zur Genealogie der

Moral_, p. 59). We? That is a calumny. We value these advantages at

their full worth. He alone does not value them who, in expressions of

admiration, vaunts ‘segregation,’ _i.e._, hostility to the community

and contempt of its advantages, as characterizing the strong.

At one time the primitive aristocratic man is the freely-roving,

splendid beast of prey, the blond beast; at another: ‘these men

are rigorously kept within bounds by morality, veneration, custom,

gratitude, still more by reciprocal surveillance, by jealousy _inter

pares_; and, on the other hand, in their attitude towards each other,

inventive in consideration, self-command, delicacy, fidelity, pride,

and friendship.’ Ay, if these be the attributes of ‘blond beasts,’

may someone speedily give us a society of ‘blond beasts’! But how

does ‘morality, veneration, self-command,’ etc., accord with the

‘free-roving’ of the splendid beast of prey? That remains an unsolved

enigma. It is true that Nietzsche, while making our mouths water by his

description, adds to it this limitation: ‘Towards what lies beyond,

where the stranger, and what is strange, begins, they are not much

better than beasts of prey set free’ (_Zur Genealogie der Moral_, p.

21). But this is in reality no limitation. Every organized community

regards itself, in respect of the rest of the world, as a conjoint

unity, and does not accord to the foreigner, the man from without,

the same rights as to a member of its own body. Rights, custom,

consideration, are not extended to the stranger, unless he knows how to

inspire fear and to compel a recognition of his rights. The progress in

civilization, however, consists in the very fact that the boundaries

of the community are continually enlarged, that which is strange and

without rights or claim to consideration being constantly made to

recede further and ever further. At first there existed in the horde

reciprocal forbearance and right alone; then the feeling of solidarity

extended itself to the tribe, the country, state, and race. At the

present day there is an international law even in war; the best among

contemporaries feel themselves one with all men, nay, no longer hold

even the animal to be without rights; and the time will come when the

forces of Nature will be the sole strange and external things which

may be treated according to man’s need and pleasure, and in regard to

which he may be the ‘freed beast of prey.’ The ‘deep’ Nietzsche is not

capable, it is true, of comprehending a state of the case so simple and

clear.

At one moment he makes merry over the ‘naïveté’ of those who believe

in an original social contract (_Zur Genealogie der Moral_, p. 80),

and then says (in the same book, p. 149): ‘If they’ (the strong, the

born masters, the ‘species of solitary beasts of prey’) ‘unite, it

is only with a view to a collective act of aggression, a collective

satisfaction of their volition to exert their power, with much

resistance from the individual conscience.’ With resistance or without,

does not a ‘union for the purpose of a collective satisfaction’ amount

to a relation of contract, the acceptation of which Nietzsche with

justice terms ‘a naïveté’?

At one time ‘agony is something which inspires pity’ (_Jenseits von

Gut und Böse_, p. 136), and a ‘succession of crimes is horrible’ (_Zur

Genealogie der Moral_, p. 21); and then, again, the ‘beauty’ of crime

is spoken of (_Jenseits von Gut und Böse_, p. 91), and complaint is

made that ‘crime is calumniated’ (the same book, p. 123).

Examples enough have been given. I do not wish to lose myself in

minutiæ and details, but I believe that I have demonstrated Nietzsche’s

own contradiction of every single one of his fundamental assertions,

most emphatically of the foremost and most important, viz., that the

‘I’ is the one real thing, that egoism alone is necessitated and

justifiable.

If the conceits which he wildly ejaculates--as it were, shrieks

forth--are examined somewhat more closely, we cannot but marvel at

the profusion of fabulous stupidity and abecedarian ignorance they

contain. It is thus he terms the system of Copernicus (_Jenseits von

Gut und Böse_), ‘which has persuaded us, against all the senses,

that the earth is not immovable,’ ‘the greatest triumph over the

senses hitherto achieved on earth.’ Hence he does not suspect that

the system of Copernicus has for its basis exact observation of

the starry heavens, the movements of the moon and planets, and the

position of the sun in the zodiac; that this system was, therefore,

the triumph of exact sense-perceptions over sense-illusions--in other

words, of attentiveness over fugacity and distraction. He believes

that ‘consciousness developed itself under the pressure of the need of

communication,’ for ‘conscious thought eventuates in words, _i.e._,

in signs of communication, by which fact the origin of consciousness

itself is revealed’ (_Die fröhliche Wissenschaft_, p. 280). He does

not know, then, that animals without the power of speech also have

a consciousness; that it is possible also to think in images, in

representations of movement, without the help of a word, and that

speech is not added to consciousness until very late in the course of

development. The drollest thing is that Nietzsche very much fancies

himself as a psychologist, and wishes most particularly to be esteemed

as such! According to this profound man, socialism has its roots in

the fact that ‘hitherto manufacturers and entrepreneurs lack those

forms and signs of distinction of the higher races which alone make

persons interesting; if they had in look and gesture the distinction of

those born noble, there would, perhaps, be no socialism of the masses

[!!]. For the latter are at bottom ready for slavery of every kind,

on the condition that the higher class constantly legitimizes itself

as higher, as born to command, by outward distinction’ [!!] (_Die

fröhliche Wissenschaft_, p. 68). The concept ‘thou oughtest,’ the idea

of duty, of the necessity of a definite measure of self-command, is

a consequence of the fact that ‘at all times since men have existed,

human herds have also existed, and always a very large number of those

who obey relatively to the small number of those who command (_Jenseits

von Gut und Böse_, p. 118). Anyone less incapable of thought than

Nietzsche will understand that, on the contrary, human herds, those

obeying and those commanding, were possible at all, only after and

because the brain had acquired the power and capacity to elaborate

the idea, ‘thou oughtest,’ _i.e._, to inhibit an impulse by a thought

or a judgment. The descendant of mixed races ‘will on the average be

a weaker being’ (_Jenseits von Gut und Böse_, p. 120); indeed, the

‘European _Weltschmerz_, the pessimism of the nineteenth century, is

essentially the consequence of a sudden and irrational mixture of

classes’; social classes, however, always ‘express differences of

origin and of race as well’ (_Zur Genealogie der Moral_, p. 142). The

most competent investigators are convinced, as we well know, that the

crossing of one race with another is conducive to the progress of

both, and is ‘the first cause of development.’[404] ‘Darwinism, with

its incomprehensibly one-sided theory of the struggle for existence,’

is explained by Darwin’s origin. His ancestors were ‘poor and humble

persons who were only too familiar with the difficulty of making both

ends meet. Around the whole of English Darwinism there floats, as it

were, the mephitic vapour of English over-population, the odour of

humble life, of pinched and straitened circumstances’ (_Die fröhliche

Wissenschaft_, p. 273). It is presumably known to all my readers

that Darwin was a rich man, and was never compelled to follow any

profession, and that, for at least three or four generations, his

ancestors had lived in comfort.

Nietzsche lays special claim to extraordinary originality. He places

this epigraph at the beginning of his _Fröhliche Wissenschaft_:

‘I live in a house that’s my own,

I’ve never in nought copied no one,

And at every Master I’ve had my laugh,

Who had not first laughed at himself.’

His disciples believe in this brag, and, with upturned eyes, bleat

it after him in sheep-like chorus. The profound ignorance of this

flock of ruminants permits them, forsooth, to believe in Nietzsche’s

originality. As they have never learnt, read, or thought about,

anything, all that they pick up in bars, or in their loafings, is

naturally new and hitherto non-existent. Anyone, however, who regards

Nietzsche relatively to analogous phenomena of the age, will recognise

that his pretended originalities and temerities are the greasiest

commonplaces, such as a decent self-respecting thinker would not touch

with a pair of tongs.

Whenever he rants, Nietzsche is no doubt really original. On such

occasions his expressions contain no sense at all, not even nonsense;

hence it is impossible to unite them with anything previously thought

or said. When, on the contrary, there is a shimmer of reason in

his words, we at once recognise them as having their origin in the

paradoxes or platitudes of others. Nietzsche’s ‘individualism’ is an

exact reproduction of Max Stirner, a crazy Hegelian, who fifty years

ago exaggerated and involuntarily turned into ridicule the critical

idealism of his master to the extent of monstrously inflating the

importance--even the grossly empirical importance--of the ‘I’; whom,

even in his own day, no one took seriously, and who since then had

fallen into well-merited profound oblivion, from which at the present

time a few anarchists and philosophical ‘fops’--for the hysteria of

the time has created such beings--seek to disinter him.[405] Where

Nietzsche extols the ‘I,’ its rights, its claims, the necessity of

cultivating and developing it, the reader who has in mind the preceding

chapters of this book will recognise the phrases of Barrès, Wilde,

and Ibsen. His philosophy of will is appropriated from Schopenhauer,

who throughout has directed his thought and given colour to his

language. The complete similarity of his phrases concerning will with

Schopenhauer’s theory has evidently penetrated to his own consciousness

and made him uncomfortable; for, in order to obliterate it, he has

placed a false nose of his own invention on the cast he has made,

viz., he contests the fact that the motive force in every being

is the desire for self-preservation; in his view it is rather the

desire for power. This addition is pure child’s play. In the lower

orders of living beings it is never a ‘desire for power,’ but always

only a desire for self-preservation, that is perceptible; and among

men this seeming ‘desire for power’ can, by anyone but the ‘deep’

Nietzsche, be traced to two well-known roots--either to the effort to

make all organs act to the limit of their functional capacity, which

is connected with feelings of pleasure, or to procure for themselves

advantages ameliorative of the conditions of existence. But the effort

towards feelings of pleasure and better conditions of existence is

nothing but a form of the phenomenon of the desire for existence, and

he who regards the ‘desire for power’ as anything different from, and

even opposed to, the desire for existence, simply gives evidence of

his incapacity to pursue this idea of the desire for existence any

distance beyond the length of his nose. Nietzsche’s chief proof of the

difference between the desire for power and the desire for existence

is that the former often drives the desirer to the contemning and

endangering, even to the destruction, of his own life. But in that case

the whole struggle for existence, in which dangers are continually

incurred, and for that matter are often enough sought, would also be a

proof that the struggler did not desire his existence! Nietzsche would,

indeed, be quite capable of asserting this also.

The degenerates with whom we have become acquainted affirm that they

do not trouble themselves concerning Nature and its laws. Nietzsche is

not so far advanced in self-sufficiency as Rossetti, to whom it was a

matter of indifference whether the earth revolved around the sun or

the sun around the earth. He openly avows that this is not a matter of

indifference to him; he regrets it; it troubles him, that the earth is

no longer the central point of the universe, and be the chief thing

on the earth. ‘Since Copernicus, man seems to have fallen upon an

inclined plane; he is now rolling ever faster away from the central

point--whither?--into the nothing? into the piercing feeling of his

nothingness?’ He is very angry with Copernicus concerning this. Not

only with Copernicus, but with science in general. ‘All science is at

present busied in talking man out of the self-respect he has hitherto

possessed, just as if this had been nothing but a bizarre self-conceit’

(_Zur Genealogie der Moral_, p. 173). Is this not an echo of the words

of Oscar Wilde, who complains that Nature ‘is so indifferent’ to him,

‘so unappreciative,’ and that he ‘is no more to Nature than the cattle

that browse on the slope’?

In other places, again, we find the current of thought and almost

the very words of Oscar Wilde, Huysmans, and other Diabolists and

Decadents. The passage in _Zur Genealogie der Moral_ (p. 171) in

which he glorifies art, because ‘in it the lie sanctifies itself, and

the will to deceive has a quiet conscience on its side,’ might be

in the chapter in Wilde’s _Intentions_ on ‘The Decay of Lying,’ as,

conversely, Wilde’s aphorisms: ‘There is no sin except stupidity.’ ‘An

idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.’

And his praises of Wainwright, the poisoner, are in exact agreement

with Nietzsche’s ‘morality of assassins,’ and the latter’s remarks

that crime is calumniated, and that the defender of the criminal is

‘oftenest not artist enough to turn the beautiful terribleness of the

crime to the advantage of the doer.’ Again, by way of joke, compare

these passages: ‘It is necessary to get rid of the bad taste of wishing

to agree with many. Good is no longer good when a neighbour says it’s

good’ (Nietzsche, _Jenseits von Gut und Böse_, p. 54), and ‘Ah! don’t

say that you agree with me. When people agree with me, I always feel

that I must be wrong’ (Oscar Wilde, _Intentions_, p. 202). This is

more than a resemblance, is it not? To avoid being too diffuse, I

abstain from citing passages exactly resembling these from Huysmans’

_A Rebours_, and from Ibsen. At the same time it is unquestionable

that Nietzsche could not have known the French Decadents and English

Æsthetes whom he so frequently approaches, because his books are

in part antecedent to those of the latter; and neither could they

have drawn from him, because, perhaps with the exception of Ibsen,

it is only about two years since they could have heard as much as

Nietzsche’s name. The similarity, or rather identity, is not explained

by plagiarism; it is explained by the identity of mental qualities in

Nietzsche and the other ego-maniacal degenerates.

Nietzsche presents a specially droll aspect when he confronts truth, in

order to declare it unnecessary, or even to deny its existence. ‘Why

not rather untruth? And uncertainty? Or even ignorance?’ (_Jenseits von

Gut und Böse_, p. 3). ‘What, after all, are the truths of man? They are

the irrefutable errors of man’ (_Die fröhliche Wissenschaft_, p. 193).

‘The will for truth--that might be a hidden will for death’ (_Ibid._,

p. 263). The section of this book in which he deals with the question

of truth is entitled by him, ‘We the Fearless,’ and he prefixes to it,

as a motto, Turenne’s utterance: ‘Thou tremblest, carcass? Thou wouldst

tremble much more if thou knewest whither I shall soon lead thee!’ And

what is this terrible danger into which the fearless one runs with

such heroic mien? The investigation of the essence and value of truth.

But this investigation is really the A B C of all serious philosophy!

The question as to whether objective truth exists at all has been

also drawn up by him,[406] it is true with less blowing of trumpets,

beating of drums, and shaking of locks, as its prologue, accompaniment,

and conclusion. It is, moreover, highly characteristic that the same

dragon-slayer who, with such swaggering and snorting takes up the

challenge against ‘truth,’ finds submissive words of most humble

apology when he ventures very gently to doubt the perfection of Goethe

in all his pieces. Speaking of the ‘viscosity’ and ‘tediousness’ of

the German style, he says (_Jenseits von Gut und Böse_, p. 39): ‘I may

be pardoned for affirming that even Goethe’s prose, with its mixture

of stiffness and grace, is no exception.’ When he timidly criticises

Goethe, he begs pardon; his heroic attitude of contempt for death is

assumed only when he challenges morality and truth to combat. That is

to say, this ‘fearless one’ possesses the cunning often observed among

the insane, and comprehends that there is absolutely no danger in his

babbling before the imbeciles composing his congregation, that fabulous

philosophical nonsense, at which, on the contrary, they would be much

enraged the instant it shocked their æsthetic convictions or prejudices.

Even in the minutest details it is surprising how Nietzsche agrees,

word for word, with the other ego-maniacs with whom we have become

acquainted. Compare, for example, the phrase in _Jenseits von Gut und

Böse_, p. 168, where he vaunts, ‘What is really noble in works and

in men, their moment of smooth sea and halcyon self-sufficiency, the

_golden_ and the _cool_,’ with Baudelaire’s praise of immobility and

his enraptured description of a metallic landscape; or the remarks of

Des Esseintes, and the side-thrusts at the press put by Ibsen into

the mouths of his characters, with the insults continually heaped on

newspapers by Nietzsche. ‘Great ascetic spirits have an abhorrence of

bustle, veneration, newspaper’ (_Zur Genealogie der Moral_, p. 113).

The cause of ‘the undeniably gradual and already tangible desolation

of the German mind’ lies in being ‘all too exclusively nourished on

newspapers, politics, beer, and Wagnerian music’ (_Ibid._, p. 177).

‘Behold these superfluities!... They vomit their bile, and name it a

newspaper’ (_Also sprach Zarathustra_, pt. i., p. 67). ‘Dost thou not

see the souls hanging like limp dirty rags? And they make newspapers

out of those rags! Hearest thou not how the spirit has here become a

play on words? He vomits a loathsome swill of words. And of this swill

of words they make newspapers!’ (_Ibid._, pt. iii., p. 37). It would be

possible to multiply these examples tenfold, for Nietzsche harks back

to every idea with an obstinacy enough to make the most patient reader

of sound taste go wild.

Such is the appearance presented by Nietzsche’s originality. This

‘original’ and ‘audacious’ thinker, imitating the familiar practices

of tradesmen at ‘sales,’ endeavours to palm off as brand new goods

the most shop-worn rubbish of great philosophers. His most powerful

assaults are directed against doors that stand open. This ‘solitary

one,’ this ‘dweller on the highest mountain peaks,’ exhibits by the

dozen the physiognomy of all decadents. He who is continually talking

with the utmost contempt of the ‘herd’ and the ‘herd-animal’ is himself

the most ordinary herd-animal of all. Only the herd to which he

belongs, body and soul, is a special one; it is the flock of the mangy

sheep.

Upon one occasion the habitual cunning of the insane has deserted

him, and he has himself revealed to us the source of his ‘original’

philosophy. The passage is so characteristic that I must quote it at

length:

‘The first impetus, to make known something of my hypotheses

concerning the origin of morality, was given me by a clear, tidy,

and clever--ay, precocious [!]--little book, in which there was

for the first time presented to me an inverted and perverted kind

of genealogical hypotheses, the truly _English_ kind, and which

attracted me with that attractive force possessed by everything

contrary, everything antipodal. The title of this little book was

_Der Ursprung der moralischen Empfindunger_ [“The Origin of Moral

Sensations”]; its author, Dr. Paul Rée; the year of its publication,

1877. I have, perhaps, never read anything to which I have in the

same measure mentally said “No” as I did to every proposition and

every conclusion in this book, yet without anger or impatience.

In the previously-mentioned work on which I was at that time

engaged [_Menschliches Allzumenschliches_--“Things Human, Things

all too Human”], I referred, in season and out of season, to the

propositions of that book, not refuting them--what have I to do with

refutations?--but, as befits a positive spirit, to substitute the more

probable for the improbable, and at times one error for another’ (_Zur

Genealogie der Moral_, p. 7).

This gives the reader the key to Nietzsche’s ‘originality.’ It consists

in simple infantile inversion of a rational train of thought. If

Nietzsche imagines that his insane negations and contradictions grew

spontaneously in his head, he is really the victim of a self-delusion.

His rant may have existed in his mind before he had read Dr. Rée’s

book. But in that case it had sprung up as a contradiction to other

books without his having been so clearly conscious of its origin as

after the perusal of Dr. Rée’s work. But he pushes the self-delusion to

an incredible height, in terming himself a ‘positive spirit,’ after he

has just frankly confessed his method of procedure, viz., that he does

not ‘refute’--he would not have found that so easy, either--but that

‘to every proposition, and every conclusion he says ‘No!’

This explanation of the source of his ‘original’ moral philosophy

comprehends in itself a diagnosis, which at once obtrudes on the most

short-sighted eye. Nietzsche’s system is the product of the mania of

contradiction, the delirious form of that mental derangement, of which

the melancholic form is the mania of doubt and negation, treated of in

the earlier chapters of this work. His _folie des négations_ betrays

itself also in his peculiarities of language. There is ever in his

consciousness a questioning impulse like a mark of interrogation. Of

no word is he so fond as of the interrogative ‘What?’ constantly used

by him in the most marvellous connection,[407] and he makes use _ad

nauseam_ of the turn of expression, that one should ‘say No’ to this

and that, that this one and that one is a ‘No-sayer’--an expression

which suggests to him by association the same immeasurably frequent use

of the contrary expression, ‘say Yes’ and ‘Yes-sayer.’ This ‘saying-No’

and ‘saying-Yes’ is in his case a veritable _Paraphasia vesana_,

or insane language opposed to usage, as the reader is shown by the

examples cited in foot-note.[408]

Nietzsche’s assurance that ‘without anger or impatience’ he ‘said

No’ to all Rée’s assertions may be believed. Persons afflicted with

the mania of doubt and of denial do not get angry when they question

or contradict; they do this under the coercion of their mental

derangement. But those among them who are delirious have the conscious

intention of making others angry, even if they themselves are not so.

On this point Nietzsche allows an avowal to escape him: ‘My mode of

thought demands a warlike soul, a wish to give pain, a pleasure in

saying, No’ (_Die fröhliche Wissenschaft_, p. 63). This confession may

be compared with the passages from Ibsen: ‘You were becoming reckless!

In reality that you might anger these affected beings of both sexes

here in the town’; and, ‘Something shall happen which will be a slap in

the face to all this decorum’ (_The Pillars of Society_).

The origin of one of the most ‘original’ of Nietzsche’s doctrines,

viz., the explanation of conscience as a satisfaction of the instinct

of cruelty through inner self-rending, has already been gone into by

Dr. Türck, in an excellent little work. He very justly recognises

the diseased state of moral aberration at the base of this insane

idea,[409] and continues thus:

‘Let us now picture to ourselves a man of this kind, with innate

instincts of murder, or in general with ‘Anomalies or perversion of

the moral feelings’ (Mendel); at the same time highly gifted, with the

best instruction and an excellent education, reared in the midst of

agreeable circumstances, and under the careful ... nurture of women ...

and occupying at an early age a prominent position in society. It is

clear that the better moral instincts must gain such strength as to be

able to drive back to the deepest inner depths the bestial instinct of

destruction and completely to curb it, yet without wholly annihilating

it. It may not, indeed, be able to manifest itself in deeds, but,

because it is inborn, the instinct remains in existence as an

unfulfilled wish, cherished in the inmost heart ... as an ardent desire

... to yield itself up to its cruel lust. But every non-satisfaction of

a ... deeply imprinted instinct has as its consequence pain and inner

torment. Now, we men are very much inclined to regard as naturally good

and justifiable that which gives us decided pleasure, and conversely

to reprobate, as bad and contrary to nature, that which produces

pain. Thus, it may happen that an intellectual and highly gifted

man, born with perverted instincts, and feeling as torment ... the

non-satisfaction of the instinct, will hit upon the idea of justifying

the passion for murder, the extremest egoism ... as something good,

beautiful, and according to Nature, and to characterize as morbid

aberration the better opposing moral instincts, manifesting themselves

in us as that which we call conscience.

Dr. Türck is right in admitting Nietzsche’s innate moral aberration

and the inversion in him of healthy instincts. Nevertheless, in the

interpretation of the particular phenomena in which the aberration

manifests itself, he commits an error, which is explained by the

fact that Dr. Türck is seemingly not deeply conversant with mental

therapeutics. He assumes that in Nietzsche’s mind the evil instincts

are in severe conflict with those better notions instilled in him by

education, and that he experiences as pain the suppression of his

instincts by judgment. That is hardly the true state of the case.

It is not necessary that Nietzsche should have the wish to commit

murder and other crimes. Not every aberrant person (_pervers_) is

subject to impulsions. The perversion may be limited exclusively to

the sphere of ideation, and get its satisfaction wholly in ideas. A

subject thus affected never gets the notion of transforming his ideas

into deeds. His derangement does not encroach upon the centres of

will and movement, but carries on its fell work within the centres of

ideation. We know forms of sexual perversion in which the sufferers

never experience the impulse to seek satisfaction in acts, and who

revel only in thought.[410] This astonishing rupture of the natural

connection between idea and movement, between thought and act, this

detachment of the organs of will and movement from the organs of

conception and judgment which they normally obey, is in itself a proof

of deepest disorder throughout the machinery of thought. Incompetent

critics eagerly point to the fact that many authors and artists live

unexceptionable lives in complete contrast to their works, which may

be immoral or contrary to nature, and deduce from this fact that it is

unjustifiable to draw from his works conclusions as to the mental and

moral Nature of their author. Those who talk in this manner do not even

suspect that there are purely mental perversions which are quite as

much a mental disease as the impulsions of the ‘impulsivists.’

This is obviously the case with Nietzsche. His perversion is of a

purely intellectual character, and has hardly ever impelled him to

acts. Hence, in his mind there has been no conflict between instincts

and the morality acquired by education. His explanation of conscience

has quite another source than that assumed by Dr. Türck. It is one of

those perverted interpretations of a sensation by the consciousness

perceiving it which are so frequently observed. Nietzsche remarks

that with him ideas of a cruel kind are accompanied by feelings

of pleasure--that they are, as mental therapeutics expresses it,

‘voluptuously accentuated.’ In consequence of this accompaniment of

pleasure he has the inclination to conjure up sensually sensuous

representations of that kind, and to dwell on them with enjoyment.[411]

Consciousness then seeks to give some sort of rational explanation

of these experiences by assuming cruelty to be a powerful primordial

instinct of man, that, since he may not actually commit cruel deeds, he

may, at least, take pleasure in the representation of them, and that

the rapturous lingering over representations of this kind, man calls

his conscience. As I have shown above, it is Nietzsche’s opinion that

stings of conscience are not the consequence of evil deeds, but appear

in men who have never committed any evil. Hence he obviously makes use

of the word in a sense quite different from that of current usage, a

sense peculiar to himself; he designates by it, simply his revelling in

voluptuously accentuated representations of cruelty.

The alienist, however, is familiar with the perversion in which the

invalid experiences voluptuous stimulation from acts or representations

of a cruel nature. Science has a name for it. It is called Sadism.

Sadism is the opposite form of sexual perversion to masochism.[412]

Nietzsche is a sufferer from Sadism in its most pronounced form,

only with him it is confined to the intellectual sphere alone, and

is satisfied by ideal debauchery. I do not wish to dwell too long

on this repulsive subject, and will, therefore, quote only a few

passages, showing that, in Nietzsche’s thought, images of cruelty are

without exception accompanied by ideas of a sensual character, and are

italicized by him: ‘The splendid beast ranging _in its lust_ after

prey and victory’ (_Zur Genealogie der Moral_, p. 21). ‘The _feeling

of content_ at being able, without scruple, to wreak his power on a

powerless being, the _voluptuousness de faire le mal pour le plaisir

de le faire_, the _enjoyment_ of vanquishing’ (_Ibid._, p. 51). ‘Do

your pleasure, ye wantons; roar for very _lust_ and wickedness’ (_Die

fröhliche Wissenschaft_, p. 226). ‘The path to one’s own heaven ever

leads through the _voluptuousness_ of one’s own hell’ (_Ibid._, p.

249). ‘How comes it that I have yet met no one ... who knew morality

as a problem, and this problem as his personal distress, torment,

_voluptuousness_, passion?’ (_Ibid._, p. 264). ‘Hitherto he has

felt most at ease on earth at the sight of tragedies, bull-fights,

and crucifixions; and when he invented hell, behold, that was his

heaven on earth. When the great man cries aloud, the little man runs

swiftly thither, and his tongue hangs out from his throat for very

_lusting_’ (_Also sprach Zarathustra_, pt. iii., p. 96), etc. I beg

the unprofessional reader particularly to observe the association

of the words italicized with those expressing something evil. This

association is neither accidental nor arbitrary. It is a psychical

necessity, for in Nietzsche’s consciousness no image of wickedness and

crime can arise without exciting him sexually, and he is unable to

experience any sexual stimulation without the immediate appearance in

his consciousness of an image of some deed of violence and blood.

Hence the real source of Nietzsche’s doctrine is his Sadism. And I will

here make a general remark on which I do not desire to linger, but

which I should like to recommend to the particular attention of the

reader. In the success of unhealthy tendencies in art and literature,

no quality of their authors has so large and determining a share

as their sexual psychopathy. All persons of unbalanced minds--the

neurasthenic, the hysteric, the degenerate, the insane--have the

keenest scent for perversions of a sexual kind, and perceive them under

all disguises. As a rule, indeed, they are ignorant of what it is in

certain works and artists which pleases them, but investigation always

reveals in the object of their predilection a veiled manifestation

of some _Psychopathia sexualis_. The masochism of Wagner and Ibsen,

the Skoptzism of Tolstoi, the erotomania (_folie amoureuse chaste_)

of the Diabolists, the Decadents, and of Nietzsche, unquestionably

obtain for these authors and tendencies a large, and, at all events,

the most sincere and fanatical fraction of their partisans. Works

of a sexually psychopathic nature excite in abnormal subjects the

corresponding perversion (till then slumbering and unconscious,

perhaps also undeveloped, although present in the germ), and give

them lively feelings of pleasure, which they, usually in good faith,

regard as purely æsthetic or intellectual, whereas they are actually

sexual. Only in the light of this explanation do the characteristic

artistic tendencies of the abnormals, of which we have proof,[413]

become wholly intelligible. This confounding of æsthetic with sexual

feelings is not surprising, for the spheres of these two feelings are

not only contiguous, but, as has been proved elsewhere, are for the

most part even coincident.[414] At the base of all oddities of costume,

especially that of women, there is hidden an unconscious speculation

in something of a sexual-psychopathy, which finds incitation and

attraction in the temporary fashion in dress. No professional person

has yet viewed fashions from this standpoint. I may not here allow

myself so broad a departure from my principal theme. The subject may,

however, be most emphatically recommended to the consideration of

experts. In the domain of fashions they will make the most remarkable

psychiatrical discoveries.

I have devoted very much more space to the demonstration of the

senselessness of Nietzsche’s so-called philosophical system than

the man and his system deserve. It would have been enough simply to

refer to the all-sufficient and expressive fact that, after having

been repeatedly confined in lunatic asylums, he has for some years

past been living as incurably mad in the establishment of Professor

Binswanger at Jena--‘the right man in the right place.’ It is true that

a critic is of the opinion that ‘it is possible for mental darkness to

extinguish the clearest mental light; for this reason its appearance

cannot with certitude be urged against the value and accuracy of what

anyone has taught before the appearance of his affliction.’ The answer

to this is that Nietzsche wrote his most important works between two

detentions in a lunatic asylum, and hence not ‘before,’ but ‘after, the

appearance of his affliction,’ and that the whole question hinges on

the kind of mental disease appealed to as proof of the senselessness

of any doctrine. It is clear that insanity caused by an accidental

lesion of the brain, by a fall, blow, etc., can prove nothing against

the accuracy of that which the patient may have taught previous to

his accident. But the case is different when the malady is one which

has undoubtedly existed in a latent condition from birth, and can

with certainty be proved from the works themselves. Then it amply

suffices to establish the fact that the author is a Bedlamite, and his

work the daubing of a lunatic, and all further criticism, all efforts

at rational refutation of individual inanities, become superfluous,

and even--at least, in the eyes of those who are competent--a little

ridiculous. And this is the case with Nietzsche. He is obviously insane

from birth, and his books bear on every page the imprint of insanity.

It may be cruel to insist on this fact.[415] It is, however, a painful,

yet unavoidable, duty to refer to it anew, because Nietzsche has become

the means of raising a mental pestilence, and the only hope of checking

its propagation lies in placing Nietzsche’s insanity in the clearest

light, and in branding his disciples also with the marks most suited to

them, viz., as hysterical and imbecile.

Kaatz[416] affirms that Nietzsche’s ‘intellectual seed’ is everywhere

‘beginning to germinate. Now it is one of Nietzsche’s most incisive

points which is chosen as the epigraph of a modern tragedy, now one

of his pregnant turns of expression incorporated in the established

usage of language.... At the present time one can ... read hardly

any essay touching even lightly on the province of philosophy,

without meeting with the name of Nietzsche.’ Now, that is certainly

a calumnious exaggeration. Things are not quite so bad as that. The

only ‘philosophers’ who have hitherto taken Nietzsche’s insane drivel

seriously are those whom I have above named the ‘fops’ of philosophy.

But the number of these ‘fops’ is, as a matter of fact, increasing in a

disquieting way, and their effrontery surpasses anything ever witnessed.

It is, of course, unnecessary to say that Georges Brandès has numbered

himself among Nietzsche’s apostles. We know, indeed, that this

ingenious person winds himself around every human phenomenon in whom

he scents a possible primadonna, in order to draw from her profit for

himself as the impresario of her fame. He gave lectures in Copenhagen

on Nietzsche, ‘and declaimed in words of enthusiasm about this German

prophet, for whom Mill’s morality is nothing but a diseased symptom

of a degenerate age; this radical “aristocrat,” who degrades to the

rank of slave-revolts all the great popular movements in history for

freedom--the Reformation, the French Revolution, modern socialism--and

dares to assert that the millions on millions of individuals composing

the nations exist only for the purpose of producing, a few times in

each century, a great personality.’[417]

A series of imitators are eagerly busying themselves to make Nietzsche

their model, whether in clearing the throat or in expectorating. His

treatise _Schopenhauer als Erzieher_ (_Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen,

3 Stück_) has found a monstrous travesty in _Rembrandt als

Erzieher_. True, the imbecile author of the latter parody could

not imitate Nietzsche’s gushing redundancy of verbiage and the mad

leaps of the maniac’s thought. This symptom of disease it were

indeed hardly possible to simulate; but he has appropriated as his

own the word-quibbling, the senseless echolalia of his model, and

endeavours also stammeringly to imitate, as well as his small means

allow, Nietzsche’s megalomaniacal and criminal individualism. Albert

Kniepf,[418] another imbecile, has been smitten chiefly by Nietzsche’s

affected superiority, and with princely mien and gestures struts about

in the most diverting manner. He calls himself ‘a man of superior taste

and more refined feeling’; he speaks contemptuously of the ‘profane

daily bustle of the masses’; sees ‘the world beneath him’ and himself

‘exalted above the world of the multitude’; he does not wish to ‘go

into the streets, and squander his wisdom on everyone,’ etc., quite

in the style of Zarathustra, the dweller on the highest peaks. The

already mentioned Dr. Max Zerbst affects, like Nietzsche, to regard

himself as terrible, and to believe that his opponents tremble before

him. When he makes them speak he puts whimpering tones into their

mouths,[419] and he enjoys with cruelly superior scorn the mortal fear

with which he inspires them. In a maniac this attitude is natural and

excites pity. But when a fellow like this Dr. Max Zerbst assumes it,

it produces an irresistibly comic effect, and calls to remembrance

the young man with the weak legs in _Pickwick_, who ‘believes in

blood alone,’ ‘will have blood.’ Zerbst dares to utter the words

‘natural science’ and ‘psycho-physiology.’ That is an agreement among

Nietzsche’s disciples: they pass off the insane word-spouter whom they

worship for a psycho-physiologist and a physicist! Ola Hansson speaks

of Nietzsche’s ‘psycho-physiological intuition’! and in another place

says: ‘With Nietzsche, that modern subtle psychologist, who possesses

in the highest degree psycho-physical intuition [again], that peculiar

power of the end of the nineteenth century, of listening to and spying

out all the secret processes and hidden corners in itself,’ etc.

‘Psycho-physical intuition!’ ‘Listening to and spying out itself!’

Our very eyes deceive us. These men, therefore, have no suspicion of

what constitutes ‘psychophysics,’ they do not suspect that it is the

exact contrary of ancient psychology, which dealt with ‘intuition’

and introspection, _i.e._, ‘listening to one’s self’ and ‘spying out

one’s self’; that it patiently counts and mixes with the apparatus

in laboratories, and ‘spies and listens to,’ not itself, but its

experimentists and instruments! And such babble of brainless parrots,

who chatter in repetition the words they accidentally hear, without

comprehending them, is able to make its way in Germany, the creator

of the new science of psycho-physiology, the fatherland of Fechner,

Weber, Wundt! And no professional has rapped with a ruler the knuckles

of these youths, whose fabulous ignorance is surpassed only by their

impudence!

But worse still has befallen--something at which all jesting really

ceases. Kurt Eisner, who it is true does not agree with Nietzsche’s

‘philosophy,’ is, nevertheless, of the opinion that he has ‘bequeathed

us some powerful poems,’[420] and goes so far as to make use of this

unheard-of expression: ‘Nietzsche’s _Zarathustra_ is a work of art

like _Faust_.’ The question first of all obtruding itself is: Has Kurt

Eisner at any time read a line of _Faust_? This, I take it, must be

answered in the affirmative, for it is hardly conceivable that at this

time of day there is in Germany any adult, seemingly able to read and

write, into whose hands _Faust_ has not fallen at some time or other.

Then there remains only one other question: What may Kurt Eisner

have understood of _Faust_? To name in the same breath the senseless

spirting jet of words of a _Zarathustra_ with _Faust_ is such a

defilement of our most precious poetical treasure that verily if a man

of any greater importance than Kurt Eisner had perpetrated it there had

been need of an expiatory festival to atone for the insult to Goethe,

even as the Church newly consecrates a place of worship when it has

been profaned by a sacrilegious act.

Not only in Germany is the Nietzsche gang working mischief; it is also

infesting other lands. Ola Hansson,[421] already mentioned, entertains

his Swedish fellow-countrymen most enthusiastically with ‘Nietzsche’s

Poetry’ and ‘Nietzsche’s Midnight Hymn’; T. de Wysewa[422] assures

the French, who are not in the position to prove the accuracy of his

assertions, that ‘Nietzsche is the greatest thinker and most brilliant

author produced by Germany in the last generation,’ etc.

It has, nevertheless, been reserved to a lady to beat the male

disciples of Nietzsche, in the audacious denial of the most openly

manifest truth. This feminine partisan of Nietzsche, Lou Salomé, with a

cool imperturbability fit to take away the breath of the most callous

spectator, turns her back on the fact that Nietzsche has for years

been confined in a lunatic asylum, and proclaims with brazen brow that

Nietzsche, from the aristocratic contempt of the world belonging to the

‘over-human,’ has voluntarily ceased to write, and withdrawn himself

into solitude. Nietzsche is a man of science and a psycho-physiologist,

and Nietzsche keeps silence, because he no longer finds it worth the

trouble to speak to the men of the herd; these are the catch-words

cried aloud throughout the world by the Nietzsche band. In the face

of such a conspiracy against truth, honesty, sound reason, it is not

enough to have proved the senselessness of Nietzsche’s system, it

must also be shown that Nietzsche has always been insane, and that

his writings are the abortions of frenzy (more exactly, of ‘maniacal

exaltation’).

A few followers of Nietzsche, undoubtedly not fit to hold a candle to

Lou Salomé, do not contest the fact of Nietzsche’s insanity, but say

that he became insane because he withdrew himself too much from men,

because he lived too long in the deepest solitude, because his speed

of thought was so ruinously, unnaturally rapid. This unheard-of idiocy

could circulate throughout the entire German press, and yet not a

single newspaper had the gumption to remark that insanity can never be

the consequence of solitude and too speedy thought, but that, on the

contrary, a propensity for solitude and vertiginously rapid thought are

the primary and best known signs of existing insanity, and that this

prattle of Nietzsche’s partisans is, perhaps, of equal force with the

assertion that someone had contracted lung disease through coughing and

hæmorrhage!

For Nietzsche’s ‘anthropophobia’ we have the evidence of his

biographers, who cite curious examples of it.[423] His rapid thought,

however, is a phenomenon never absent in frenzied madness. That the

unprofessional reader may know what he is to understand by this, we

will present him with the clinical picture of this form of insanity

traced by the hand of the most authoritative masters.

‘The acceleration of the course of thought in mania,’ says Griesinger,

‘is a consequence of the facilitation of the connection between

representations, where the patient humbugs, romances, declaims, sings,

calls into service all the modes of exteriorizing ideas, rambles

incoherently from one topic to another, the ideas hurtling against and

overthrowing each other. The same acceleration of ideation is found

in certain forms of dementia and in secondary psychical enfeeblement,

“with activity produced by hallucinations.” The logical concatenations

are not in this case intact, as in argumentation and hypochondriacal

dementia; or the precipitate sequence of representations no longer

follows any law; or, again, only words and sounds devoid of meaning

succeed each other with impetuous haste.... Thus there arises ... a

ceaseless chase of ideas, in the torrent of which all is borne away

in pell-mell flight. The latter conditions appear chiefly in raving

madness; at its inception especially, a greater mental vivacity often

manifests itself, and cases have been observed where the fact that the

patient became witty was a sure sign of the imminence of an attack of

frenzy.’[424]

Still more graphic is the description given by Krafft-Ebing.[425] ‘The

content of consciousness is here [in ‘maniacal exaltation’] pleasure,

psychical well-being. It is just as little induced by events of the

external world as the opposite state of psychical pain in melancholia,

and is, therefore, referable to an inner organic cause only. The

patient literally revels in feelings of pleasure, and declares, after

recovery, that never, when in good health, has he felt so contented,

so buoyant, so happy, as during his illness. This spontaneous pleasure

undergoes powerful increments ... through the perception by the patient

of the facilitated processes of ideation ... through the intensive

accentuation of ideas by feelings of pleasure and by agreeable

cœnæstheses, especially in the domain of muscular sensation.... In

this way the cheerful mood temporarily exalts itself to the height of

pleasurable emotions (gay extravagance, exuberance), which find their

motor exteriorization in songs, dances, leaps.... The patient becomes

more plastic in his diction ... his faculties of conception act more

rapidly, and, in accelerated association, he is at once more prompt in

repartee, witty and humorous to the point of irony. The plethora of

his consciousness supplies him with inexhaustible material for talk,

and the enormous acceleration of his ideation, in which there spring

up complete intermediate forms with the rapidity of thought, without

undergoing exteriorization in speech, causes his current of ideas, in

so far as they find expression, to seem rambling.... He continually

exercises criticism in respect of his own condition, and proves that

he is himself aware of his abnormal state by ... claiming, among

other things, that he is only a fool, and that to such everything is

permissible.... The invalid cannot find words enough to depict his

maniacal well-being, his “primordial health.”’

And now every individual feature of this picture of disease shall be

pointed out in Nietzsche’s writings. (I repeat my previous remark, that

I am compelled to limit myself in citing examples, but that literally

on every page of Nietzsche’s writing examples of the same kind are to

be found.)

His cœnæstheses, or systemic sensations, continually inspire him

with presentations of laughter, dancing, flying, buoyancy, generally

of movement of the gayest and easiest kind--of rolling, flowing,

plunging. ‘Let us guard ourselves from immediately making gloomy faces

at the word “torture” ... even there something remains for laughter.’

‘We are prepared for a carnival in the grand style, for the most

spiritual carnival-laughter and exuberance, for the transcendental

height of the most exalted idiocy and Aristophanic derision of the

universe.... Perhaps if nothing else of to-day has a future, our very

laughter still has a future.’ ‘I would even permit myself to classify

philosophers according to the quality of their laughter--up to those

capable of golden laughter[!] ... The gods are jocular. It seems as

if, even in sacred deeds, they could not forbear laughing.’ ‘Ah! what

are ye then, ye written and painted thoughts of mine? It is not long

since ye were so fantastic, so young and naughty ... that ye made me

sneeze and laugh.’ ‘Now the world laughs, the dismal veil is rent.’

‘It is laughter that kills, not wrath. Come, let us kill the spirit of

heaviness!’ ‘Truly there are beings chaste by nature; they are milder

in heart; they laugh more agreeably and copiously than ye. They laugh

as well over chastity, and ask, What is chastity?’ ‘Had He [Jesus

Christ] remained in the desert, perhaps He would have learned to live

and to love the earth--and to laugh besides.’ ‘The tension of my cloud

was too great; between the laughters of the lightnings I will cast

hail-showers into the deep.’ ‘To-day my shield quivered gently and

laughed at me; that is the holy laughter and tremor of beauty.’

It will be seen that in all these cases the idea of laughter has

no logical connection with the real thought; it is far rather an

accompaniment of his intellection as a basic state, as a chronic

obsession, having its explanation in the maniacal excitation of the

centres of ideation. It is the same with the presentations of dancing,

flying, etc. ‘I should only believe in a god who knew how to dance.’

‘Truly, Zarathustra is no hurricane and whirlwind; and if he is a

dancer, yet is he by no means a dancer of the tarantella.’ ‘And once

upon a time I wished to dance, as I never yet have danced; away over

the whole heaven did I wish to dance.... Only in the dance do I know

of parables for the highest things.’ ‘I found this blessed security in

all things also: that on the feet of chance they preferred--to dance. O

thou heaven above me, O pure! O sublime! thy purity is now for me ...

that thou art a dancing-floor for divine chances.’ ‘Ask of my foot ...

truly after such a rhythm, such a tick-tack, it likes neither to dance

nor rest.’ ‘And, above all, I learned to stand and walk and run and

leap and climb and dance.’ ‘It is a fine fool’s jest this, of speech;

thanks to it, man dances over all things.’ ‘O my soul, I taught thee

to say “to-day,” as well as “once” and “formerly,” and to dance thy

measure over all the “here” and “there” and “yonder.” Thou castest thy

glance at my foot crazy for the dance.’ ‘If my virtue is a dancer’s

virtue, and I often bounded with both feet into a rapture of golden

emerald,’ etc.

(‘A state of mind he experienced with horror:’) ‘A perpetual movement

between high and deep, and the feeling of high and deep, a constant

feeling as if mounting steps, and at the same moment as if reposing on

clouds.’ ‘Is there, indeed, one thing alone that remains uncomprehended

by it ... that only in flight is it touched, beheld, lightened

upon?’ ‘All my will would fly alone, would fly into thee.’ ‘Ready

and impatient to fly, to fly away; that is now my nature.’ ‘My wise

longing cried out from me, and laughed also ... my great longing, with

rushing wings. And often it dragged me forth, and away in the midst of

my laughter; then, indeed, I flew shuddering ... thither, where gods

dance, ashamed of all clothes.’ ‘If I ever spread still heavens above

me, and with my own wings flew in my own heavens.... If my malice is a

laughing malice ... and if my Alpha and Omega is that all heaviness may

become light, all body a dancer, all spirit a bird; and verily that is

my Alpha and Omega,’ etc.

In the examples hitherto cited the insane ideas are mainly in the

sphere of movement. In those that follow it is excitations of the

sensorial centres that find expression. Nietzsche has all sorts of

illusions of skin-sensibility (cold, warmth, being breathed upon), of

sight (lustre, lightning, brightness), of hearing (rushing, roaring),

and of smell, which he mixes up in his fugitive ideation. ‘I am too

hot and burnt with my own thoughts.’ ‘Ah! ice surrounds me; my hand

is burnt by iciness.’ ‘The sun of my love lay brooding upon me;

Zarasthustra was stewing in his own juice.’ ‘Take care that there be

honey ready to my hand ... good, icy-fresh, golden honeycomb.’ ‘Into

the coldest water I plunged with head and heart.’ ‘There I am sitting

... lusting for a maiden’s round mouth, but still more for maidenly,

icy-cold, snow-white, cutting, biting teeth.’ ‘For I deal with deep

problems as with a cold bath--soon into it, soon out of it.... Ho! the

great cold quickens.’ ‘Over thy surging sea I blew with the storm that

is called spirit; I blew from it all clouds.’ ‘To their bodies and to

their spirits our happiness would be as ice-caverns! and, like strong

winds, we will live above them ... and like a wind will I once blow

among them.’

‘I am light ... but this is my loneliness, that I am engirdled with

light.... I live in my own light; I drink back into myself the flames

that break forth from me.’

‘Mute over the roaring sea art thou this day arisen for me.’ ‘They

divine nothing from the roaring of my happiness.’ ‘Sing, and riot in

roaring, O Zarathustra!’ ‘Almost too fiercely for me thou dost gush

forth, well-spring of joy ... too violently doth my heart gush forth to

meet thee.’ ‘My desire now breaks forth from me like a fountain.’

‘There is often an odour in her wisdom, as if it came forth from a

swamp.’ ‘Alas! that I should have so long lived in the midst of their

noise and foul breath. O blessed stillness around me!’ ‘O pure odours

around me!’ ‘That was the falsehood in my pity, that in each I saw and

smelt what was mind enough for him.... With blissful nostrils again I

breathed the freedom of the mountain! My nose is at length redeemed

from the odour of all that is human!’ ‘Bad air! bad air!... Why must I

smell the entrails of a misguided soul?’ ‘This workshop, where ideals

are manufactured, meseems it stinks of nothing but lies.’ ‘We avoided

the rabble ... the stink of shopkeepers ... the foul breath.’ ‘This

rabble, that stinks to heaven.’ ‘O odours pure around me!... These

crowds of superior men--perhaps they do not smell nice,’ etc.

As these examples show, Nietzsche’s thought receives its special

colouring from his sense illusions, and from the excitation of the

centres forming motor presentations, which, in consequence of a

derangement of the mechanism of co-ordination, are not transformed into

motor impulses, but remain as mere images, without influence on the

muscles.

In respect of form, Nietzsche’s thought makes the two characteristic

peculiarities of madness perceptible: the sole domination of the

association of ideas, watched over and restrained by no attention, no

logic, no judgment; and the giddy rapidity of the course of ideation.

As soon as any idea whatsoever springs up in Nietzsche’s mind, it

immediately draws with it into consciousness all presentations related

to it, and thus with flying hand he throws five, six, often eight,

synonyms on paper, without noticing how overladen and turgid his

literary style is thereby rendered: ‘The force of a mind measures

itself ... by the degree to which it is obliged to attenuate, veil,

sweeten, damp, falsify the truth.’ ‘We are of the opinion that

severity, violence, slavery, danger in the street and in the heart,

concealment, stoicism, the tempter’s art and devilry of every kind;

that all things wicked, fearful, tyrannical, bestial, and serpent-like

in man, are of as much service in the elevation of the species “man”

as their opposites. He knows ... on what miserable things the loftiest

Becoming has hitherto been shattered, snapped off, has fallen away,

become miserable.’ ‘In man there is material, fragment, surplus, clay,

mud, nonsense, chaos; but in man there is also creator, constructor,

hammer-hardness, divinity-of-the-beholder, and the seventh day....

That which for this one must be formed, broken, forged, torn,

burnt, made red-hot, purified.’ ‘It would sound more courteous if

... an unrestrained honesty were related, whispered, and praised

(_nachsagte_, _nachraunte_, _nachrühmte_) of us.’ ‘Spit upon the

town ... where swarms all that is rotten, tainted, lustful, gloomy,

worm-eaten, ulcerous, seditious.’ ‘We forebode that it is ever growing

downwards into the more attenuated, more debonnaire, more artful,

more easy-going, more mediocre, more indifferent, more Chinese, more

Christian.’ ‘All these pallid Atheists, Anti-Christians, Immoralists,

Nihilists, Sceptics, Ephectics, Hectics of the mind,’ etc.

From these examples, the attentive reader must have already remarked

that the tumultuous rush of words frequently results from the merest

resemblance in sound. Not seldom does the riot of words degenerate

into paltry quibbling, into the silliest pun, into the automatic

association of words according to their sound, without regard to

their meaning. ‘If this turn (_Wende_) in all the need (_Noth_) is

called necessity (_Nothwendigkeit_).’ ‘Thus ye boast (_brüstet_) of

yourselves--alas! even without breasts (_Brüste_).’ ‘There is much

pious lick-spittle-work (_Speichel-Leckerie_), baking-of-flattery

(_Schmeichel-Bäckerei_) before the Lord of Hosts.’ ‘Spit upon the

great town, which is the great slum (_Abraum_), where all the scum

(_Abschaum_) froths together (_zusammanschäumt_).’ ‘Here and there

there is nothing to better (_bessern_), nothing to worsen (_bösern_).’

‘What have they to do there, far-seeing (weitsichtige), far-seeking

(_weit-süchtige_) eyes?’ ‘In such processions (_Zügen_) goats

(_Ziegen_) and geese, and the strong-headed and the wrong-headed

(_Kreuz und Querköpfe_), were always running on before.... O,

Will, turn of all need (_Wende aller Noth_)! O thou my necessity

(_Nothwendigkeit_)!’ ‘Thus I look afar over the creeping and swarming

of little gray waves (_Wellen_) and wills (_Willen_).’ ‘This seeking

(_Suchen_) for my home was the visitation (_Heimsuchung_) of me.’

‘Did not the world become perfect, round and ripe (_reif_)? O for the

golden round ring (_Reif_)!’ ‘Yawns (_Klafft_) the abyss here too?

Yelps (_Kläfft_) the dog of hell here too?’ ‘It stultifies, brutalizes

(_verthiert_), and transforms into a bull (_verstiert_).’ ‘Life is at

least (_mindestens_), at the mildest (_mildestens_), an exploiting.’

‘Whom I deemed transformed akin to myself (_verwandt-verwandelt_),’ etc.

Nietzsche, in the wild hurry of his thought, many a time fails to

comprehend the scintillating word-images elaborated in his centres of

speech; his consciousness, as it were, hears wrongly, misses its aim in

interpreting, and invents wondrous neologisms, which sound like known

expressions, but have no sort of fellowship in meaning with these. He

speaks, for example, of _Hinterweltlern_ (inhabitants of remote worlds)

from _Hinterwäldlern_ (backwoodsmen), of a _Kesselbauche_ (kettle’s

belly) when he is thinking of _Kesselpauche_ (kettledrum), etc.; or he

even repeats, as his centres of speech prompt, wholly incomprehensible,

meaningless sounds. ‘Then I went to the door: Alpa! I cried, who is

carrying his ashes to the mountain? Alpa! Alpa! who is carrying his

ashes to the mountain?’

He frequently associates his ideas, not according to the sound of the

word, but according to the similarity or habitual contiguity of the

concepts; then there arise ‘analogous’ intellection and the fugitive

ideation, in which, to use Griesinger’s expression, he ‘rambles

incoherently from one topic to another.’ Speaking of the ‘ascetic

ideal,’ _e.g._, he elaborates the idea that strong and noble spirits

take refuge in the desert, and, without any connection, adds: ‘Of

course, too, they would not want for camels there.’ The representation

of the desert has irresistibly drawn after it the representation

of camels, habitually associated with it. At another time he says:

‘Beasts of prey and men of prey, _e.g._, Cæsar Borgia, are radically

misunderstood; Nature is misunderstood so long as a fundamental

diseased condition is sought for in these healthiest of all tropical

monsters and growths. It seems that there is among moralists a hatred

against the primeval forest and against the tropics, and that the

tropical man must, at any price, be discredited. But why? For the

benefit of the temperate zone? For the benefit of the temperate

(moderate) men? Of the mediocre?’ In this case the contemplation of

Cæsar Borgia forces upon him the comparison with a beast of prey; this

makes him think of the tropics, the torrid zone; from the torrid zone

he comes to the temperate zone, from this to the ‘temperate’ man, and,

through the similarity of sound, to the ‘mediocre’ man (in German,

_gemässigt_ and _mittelmässig_).

‘In truth nothing remains of the world but green twilight and green

lightnings. Do as it pleases ye, ye wantons ... shake your emeralds

down into the deepest depth.’ The quite incomprehensible ‘emeralds’

are called up into consciousness by the representation of the ‘green’

twilight and lightnings.

In this and hundreds of other cases the course of ideation can, to a

certain extent, be followed, because all the links in the chain of

association are preserved. It often happens, however, that some of

these links are suppressed, and then there occur leaps of thought,

incomprehensible, and, consequently, bewildering to the reader: ‘It

was the body who despaired of the earth, who heard the belly of being

speaking to itself.’ ‘More honestly and more purely speaks the healthy

body, the perfect and rectangular.’ ‘I am polite towards them as

towards all petty vexation; to be prickly against pettiness seems to

me wisdom for hedgehogs.’ ‘Deep yellow and hot red; so would my taste

have it. This one mixes blood in all colours. He who whitewashes his

house betrays to me his whitewashed soul.’ ‘We placed our seat in the

midst--so their smirking tells me--and as far from dying gladiators as

from contented pigs. But this is mediocrity.’ ‘Our Europe of to-day is

... sceptic ... at one time with that mobile scepticism which leaps

impatiently and wantonly from branch to branch, at another gloomy as

a cloud overladen with notes of interrogation.’ ‘Let us grant that he

[the ‘courageous thinker’] has long enough hardened and pricked up his

eye for himself.’ (Here the representation of ‘ear’ and ‘pricked-up

ears’ has evidently crossed with confusing effect the associated idea

of ‘eye.’) ‘It is already too much for me to keep my opinions to

myself, and many a bird flies away. And sometimes I find flown into my

dovecot an animal that is strange to me, and that trembles when I lay

my hand on it.’ ‘What matters my justice? I do not see that I should

be fire and coal.’ ‘They learned from the sea its vanity, too; is the

sea not the peacock of peacocks?’ ‘How many things now go by the name

of the greatest wickedness, which are only twelve feet wide and three

months long! But greater dragons will one day come into the world.’

‘And if all ladders now fail thee, then must thou understand how to

mount on thine own head; how wouldst thou mount otherwise?’ ‘Here I

sit, sniffing the best air, the very air of Paradise, luminous, light

air, rayed with gold; as good an air as ever yet fell from the moon.’

‘Ha! up dignity! Virtue’s dignity! European dignity! Blow, blow again,

bellows of virtue! Ha! roar once more, morally roar! As a moral lion

roar before the daughters of the desert! For virtue’s howl, ye dearest

maidens, is more than all European fervour, European voraciousness! And

here am I, already a European; I cannot otherwise, God help me! Amen!

The desert grows, woe to him who hides deserts!’

The last passage is an example of complete fugitive ideation. Nietzsche

often loses the clue, no longer knows what he is driving at, and

finishes a sentence which began as if to develop into an argument, with

a sudden stray jest. ‘Why should the world, which somewhat concerns

us, not be a fiction? And to him who objects: “But a fiction must have

an author,” could not the reply be roundly given: Why? Does not this

“must” perhaps belong also to the fiction? Is it not permissible to be

at last a little ironical towards the subject as well as towards the

predicate and object? Ought not the philosopher to rise above a belief

in grammar? With all respect for governesses [!], is it not time that

philosophy should renounce its faith in governesses?’ ‘“One is always

too many about me,” so thinks the hermit. One times one to infinity at

last makes two!’ ‘What, then, do they call that which makes them proud?

They name it culture; it distinguishes them from the goat-herds.’

Finally, the connection of the associated representations suddenly

snaps, and he breaks off in the midst of a sentence to begin a new one:

‘For in religion the passions have once more rights of citizenship,

provided that.’ ‘The psychologists of France ... have not yet

enjoyed to the full their bitter and manifold pleasure in _la bêtise

bourgeoise_, in a manner as if--enough; they betray something thereby.’

‘There have been philosophers who knew how to lend yet another

seductive ... expression to this admiration of the people ... instead

of adducing the naked and thoroughly obvious truth, that disinterested

conduct is very interesting and interested conduct, provided that----

And love?’

This is the form of Nietzsche’s intellection, sufficiently explaining

why he has never set down three coherent pages, but only more or less

short ‘aphorisms.’

The content of this incoherent fugitive ideation is formed by a

small number of insane ideas, continually repeating themselves

with exasperating monotony. We have already become acquainted with

Nietzsche’s intellectual Sadism, and his mania of contradiction and

doubt, or mania for questioning. In addition to these he evinces

misanthropy, or anthropophobia, megalomania, and mysticism.

His anthropophobia expresses itself in numberless passages: ‘Knowledge

is no longer sufficiently loved as soon as it is communicated.’ ‘Every

community leads somehow, somewhen, somewhere--to vulgarity.’ ‘There

are still many void places for the lonesome and twosome [!] around

which wafts the odour of tranquil seas.’ ‘Flee, my friend, into thy

lonesomeness!’ ‘And many a one who turned away from life, only turned

away from the rabble ... and many a one who went into the desert and

suffered thirst with the beasts of prey, only wished not to sit with

filthy camel-drivers about the tank.’

His megalomania appears only exceptionally as monstrous self-conceit;

but it is, nevertheless, clearly conceivable; as a rule it displays a

strong and even predominant union of mysticism and supernaturalism.

It is pure self-conceit when he says: ‘In that which concerns my

“Zarathustra,” I accept no one as a connoisseur whom each of his

words has not at some time deeply wounded and deeply enraptured; only

then can he enjoy the privilege of reverentially participating in

the halcyon element out of which every work is born, in its sunny

brightness, distance, breadth, and certainty.’ Or when, after having

criticised and belittled Bismarck, he cries, with transparent allusion

to himself: ‘But I, in my happiness and my “beyond,” pondered how soon

the stronger becomes master of the strong.’ On the other hand, the

hidden, mystic, primary idea of his megalomania already distinctly

comes out in this passage: ‘But at some given time ... must he

nevertheless come, the redeeming man of great love and contempt, the

creative spirit who his impulsive strength is ever driving away out of

all that is apart and beyond, whose loneliness is misunderstood by the

people as if it were flight from reality. It is only his immersion,

interment, absorption [three synonyms for one concept!] into reality,

in order that at some time if he again comes into the light, he may

bring home the redemption of this reality.’

The nature of his megalomania is betrayed by the expressions ‘redeeming

man’ and ‘redemption.’ He imagines himself a new Saviour, and

plagiarizes the Gospel in form and substance. _Also Sprach Zarathustra_

is a complete stereotype of the sacred writings of Oriental nations.

The book aims at an external resemblance to the Bible and Koran. It

is divided into chapters and verses; the language is the archaic and

prophetic language of the books of Revelation (‘And Zarathustra looked

at the people, and was astonished. Then he spake and said thus:’);

there frequently appear long enumerations and sermons like litanies

(‘I love those who do not seek a reason only behind the stars ...; I

love him who lives to know ...; I love him who labours and invents

...; I love him who loves his virtue ...; I love him who withholds

for himself not one drop of mind,’ etc.), and individual paragraphs

point _verbatim_ to analogous portions of the Gospel, _e.g._: ‘When

Zarathustra had taken leave of the city ... there followed him many

who called themselves his disciples and bore him company. Thus they

came to a cross-road; then said Zarathustra unto them, that thenceforth

he would go alone.’ ‘And the happiness of the spirit is this: to

be anointed by tears and consecrated as a beast of sacrifice.’

‘Verily, said he to his disciples, yet a little and there comes this

long twilight. Ah! how shall I save my light?’ ‘In this manner did

Zarathustra go about, sore at heart, and for three days took no food

or drink.... At length it came to pass that he fell into a deep sleep.

And his disciples sat around him in long night-watches,’ etc. Many

of the chapters have most expressive titles: ‘On Self-Conquest;’ ‘On

Immaculate Knowledge;’ ‘On Great Events;’ ‘On the Redemption;’ ‘On the

Mount of Olives;’ ‘On Apostates;’ ‘The Cry of Sore Need;’ ‘The Last

Supper;’ ‘The Awakening,’ etc. Sometimes, it is true, it befalls him

to say, atheistically: ‘If there were gods, how could I endure to be

no god? _Hence_’ (italics his) ‘there are no gods;’ but such passages

vanish among the countless ones in which he refers to himself as a god.

‘Thou hast the power and thou wilt not reign.’ ‘He who is of my nature

escapes not such an hour--the hour which says to him: Only now art thou

going the way of thy greatness.... Thou art entering on the way of thy

greatness; that which has hitherto been thy last danger has now become

thy last resource. Thou art entering on the way of thy greatness; now

must thy best courage be, that there is no longer any way behind thee.

Thou art going on the way of thy greatness; here shall no one slink

behind thee,’ etc.

Nietzsche’s mysticism and megalomania manifest themselves not only in

his somewhat more coherent thought, but also in his general mode of

expression. The mystic numbers, three and seven, frequently appear. He

sees the external world, as he does himself--vast, distant, deep; and

the words expressing these concepts are repeated on every page, almost

in every line: ‘The discipline of suffering, of great suffering....’

‘The South is a great school of healing.’ ‘These last great

searchers....’ ‘With the signs of great destiny.’ ‘Where together with

great compassion he has learnt great contempt--to learn, at their side,

great reverence.’ ‘Guilt is all great existence.’ ‘That I may celebrate

the great noon with you.’ ‘Thus speaks all great love.’ ‘Not from you

is great weariness to come to me.’ ‘Men who are nothing but a great

eye, or a great mouth, or a great belly, or something great....’ ‘To

love with great love, to love with great contempt.’ ‘But thou, O depth,

thou sufferest too deeply.’ ‘Immovable is my depth, but it gleams with

floating enigmas and laughters.’ (It is to be observed how, in this

sentence, all the obsessions of the maniac crowd together--depth,

brilliancy, mania of doubt, hilarious excitation.) ‘All depth shall

ascend to my height.’ ‘They do not think enough into the deep,’ etc.

With the idea of depth is connected that of abyss, which recurs with

equal constancy. The words ‘abyss’ and ‘abysmal’ are among the most

frequent in Nietzsche’s writings. His words which have the prefix

‘over’ are associated with his motor images, especially those of flying

and hovering: ‘Over-moral sense’; ‘over-European music’; ‘climbing

monkeys and over-heated’; ‘from the species to the over-species’; ‘the

over-hero’; ‘the over-human’; ‘the over-dragon’; ‘the over-urgent’ and

‘over-compassionate,’ etc.

As is general in frenzied madness, Nietzsche is conscious of his

diseased interior processes, and in countless places alludes to the

furiously rapid outflow of his ideation and to his insanity: ‘That

true philosophic reunion of a bold, unrestrained mentality, running

_presto_.... They regard thought as something slow, hesitant, almost a

toil; not at all as something light, divine, and nearest of kin to the

dance, to exuberance.’ ‘The bold, light, tender march and flight of his

thought.’ ‘We think too rapidly.... It is as if we carried about in our

head an incessantly rolling machine.’ ‘It is in impatient spirits that

there breaks out a veritable pleasure in insanity, because insanity

has so joyous a _tempo_.’ ‘All talking runs too slowly for me; I leap

into thy chariot, Storm!... Like a cry and a huzza would I glide away

over vast seas.’ ‘Eruptive insanity forever hovers above humanity as

its greatest danger.’ (He is, of course, thinking of himself when

speaking of ‘humanity.’) ‘In these days it sometimes happens that a

gentle, temperate, self-contained man becomes suddenly frenzied, breaks

plates, upsets the table, shrieks, rages, offends everyone, and finally

retires in shame and anger against himself.’ (Most decidedly ‘that

sometimes happens,’ not only ‘in these days,’ but in all times; but

among maniacs only.) ‘Where is the insanity with which ye were forced

to be inoculated? Behold, I teach you the over-man, who is ... this

insanity.’ ‘All things are worth the same; each is alike. He who feels

otherwise goes voluntarily [?] into a madhouse.’ ‘I put this exuberance

and this foolishness in the place of that will, as I taught; in all

one thing is impossible--reasonableness.’ ‘My hand is a fool’s hand;

woe to all tables and walls, and wherever there is yet room for the

embellishments of fools--scribbling of fools!’ (In the original there

is here a play on the words _Zierrath_, _Schmierrath_.)[426] He also,

in the manner of maniacs, excuses his mental disease: ‘Finally, there

would remain open the great question whether we could dispense with

disease even for the development of our virtue, and especially if our

thirst for knowledge and self-knowledge needed the sick soul as much as

the healthy soul.’

Finally, he is not even wanting in the maniacal idea of his ‘primæval

health.’ His soul is ‘always clearer and always healthier’; ‘we

Argonauts of the ideal’ are ‘healthier than one would fain allow us to

be--dangerously healthy, more and more healthy,’ etc.

The foregoing is a necessarily condensed summary of the special colour,

form, and content of Nietzsche’s thought, originating in illusions

of sense; and this unhappy lunatic has been earnestly treated as a

‘philosopher,’ and his drivel put forward as a ‘system’--this man

whose scribbling is one single long divagation, in whose writings

madness shrieks out from every line! Dr. Kirchner, a philosopher by

profession, and the author of numerous philosophical writings, in a

newspaper article on Nietzsche’s book, _Der Fall Wagner_, lays great

stress on the fact that ‘it superabounds, as it were, in intellectual

health.’ Ordinary university professors--such as G. Adler, in Freiburg,

and others--extol Nietzsche as a ‘bold and original thinker,’

and with solemn seriousness take up a position in respect of his

‘philosophy’--some with avowed enthusiasm, and some with carefully

considered reservations! In the face of such incurably deep mental

obtuseness, it cannot excite wonder if the clear-thinking and healthy

portion of the young spirits of the present generation should, with

hasty generalization, extend to philosophy itself the contempt deserved

by its officially-appointed teachers. These teachers undertake to

introduce their students into mental philosophy, and are yet without

the capacity to distinguish from rational thought the incoherent

fugitive ideation of a maniac.

Dr. Hermann Türck[427] characterizes in excellent words the disciples

of Nietzsche: ‘This piece of wisdom [‘nothing is true; all is

permissible’] in the mouth of a morally insane man of letters has

... found ready response among persons who, in consequence of a

moral defect, feel themselves to be in contradiction to the demands

of society. This aforesaid intellectual proletariat of large towns

is especially jubilant over the new magnificent discovery that all

morality and all truth are completely superfluous and pernicious to

the development of the individual. It is true that these persons

have always in secret said to themselves, “Nothing is true--all is

permissible,” and have also, as far as possible, acted accordingly.

But now they can avow it openly, and with pride; for Friedrich

Nietzsche, the new prophet, has vaunted this maxim as the most exalted

truth of life.... It is not society which is right in its estimation

of morality, science, and true art. Oh dear no! The individuals who

follow their egoistical personal aims only--who act only as if truth

were of consequence to them--they, the counterfeiters of truth, those

unscrupulous penny-a-liners, lying critics, literary thieves, and

manufacturers of pseudo-realistic brummagem--they are the true heroes,

the masters of the situation, the truly free spirits.’

That is the truth, but not the whole truth. Without doubt, the real

Nietzsche gang consists of born imbecile criminals, and of simpletons

drunk with sonorous words. But besides these gallows birds without the

courage and strength for criminal actions, and the imbeciles who allow

themselves to be stupefied and, as it were, hypnotized by the roar

and rush of fustian, the banner of the insane babbler is followed by

others, who must be judged otherwise and in part more gently. In fact,

Nietzsche’s ranting includes some ideas which, in part, respond to a

widespread notion of the age, and in part are capable of awakening the

deception that, in spite of all the exaggeration and insane distortion

of exposition, they contain a germ of truth and right; and these ideas

explain why many persons agree with them who can hardly be reproached

with lack of clearness and critical capacity.

Nietzsche’s fundamental idea of utter disregard and brutal contempt

for all the rights of others standing in the way of an egoistical

desire, must please the generation reared under the Bismarckian system.

Prince Bismarck is a monstrous personality, raging over a country

like a tornado in the torrid zone; it crushes all in its devastating

course, and leaves behind as traces, a widespread annihilation of

character, destruction of notions of right, and demolition of morality.

In political life the system of Bismarck is a sort of Jesuitism in

cuirass. ‘The end sanctifies the means,’ and the means are not (as with

the supple sons of Loyola) cunning, obstinacy, secret trickery, but

open brutality, violence, the blow with the fist, and the stroke with

the sword. The end which sanctifies the means of the Jesuit in cuirass

may sometimes be of general utility; but it will quite as often, and

oftener, be an egoistical one. In its author this system of the most

primitive barbarism had ever a certain grandeur, for it had its origin

in a powerful will, which with heroic boldness always placed itself

at stake, and entered into every fight with the savage determination

to ‘conquer or die.’ In its imitators, on the contrary, it has got

stunted to ‘swaggering’ or ‘bullying,’ _i.e._, to that most abject and

contemptible cowardice which crawls on its belly before the strong,

but maltreats with the most extreme insolence the completely unarmed,

the unconditionally harmless and weak, from whom no resistance and

no danger are in any way to be apprehended. The ‘bullies’ gratefully

recognise themselves in Nietzsche’s ‘over-man,’ and Nietzsche’s

so-called ‘philosophy’ is in reality the philosophy of ‘bullying.’ His

doctrine shows how Bismarck’s system is mirrored in the brain of a

maniac. Nietzsche could not have come to the front and succeeded in any

but the Bismarckian and post-Bismarckian era. He would, doubtless, have

been delirious at whatever period he might have lived; but his insanity

would not have assumed the special colour and tendency now perceptible

in it. It is true that sometimes Nietzsche vexes himself over the fact

that ‘the type of the new Germany most rich in success in all that has

depth ... fails in “swagger,”’ and he then proclaims: ‘It were well for

us not to exchange too cheaply our ancient renown as a people of depth

for Prussian “swagger,” and the wit and sand of Berlin.’[428] But in

other places he betrays what really displeases him in the ‘swagger,’ at

which he directs his philosophical verse; it makes too much ado about

the officer. ‘The moment he [the ‘Prussian officer’] speaks and moves,

he is the most forward and tasteless figure in old Europe--unknown

to himself.... And unknown also to the good Germans, who wonder at

him as a man of the highest and most distinguished society, and

willingly take their tone from him.’[429] Nietzsche cannot consent to

that--Nietzsche, who apprehends that there can be no God, as in that

case he himself must be this God. He cannot suffer the ‘good German’ to

place the officer above him. But apart from this inconvenience, which

is involved in the system of ‘swagger,’ he finds everything in it good

and beautiful, and lauds it as ‘intrepidity of glance, courage and

hardness of the cutting hand, an inflexible will for dangerous voyages

of discovery, for spiritualized North-Polar expeditions under desolate

and dangerous skies,’[430] and prophesies exultingly that for Europe

there will soon begin an era of brass, an era of war, soldiers, arms,

violence. Hence it is natural that ‘swaggerers’ should hail him as

their very own peculiar philosopher.

Besides anarchists, born with incapacity for adaptation, his

‘individualism,’ _i.e._, his insane ego-mania, for which the external

world is non-existent, was bound to attract those who instinctively

feel that at the present day the State encroaches too deeply and too

violently on the rights of the individual, and, in addition to the

necessary sacrifices of strength and time, exacts from him such as

he cannot undergo without destructive loss of self-esteem, viz., the

sacrifice of judgment, knowledge, conviction, and human dignity. These

thirsters for freedom believe that they have found in Nietzsche the

spokesman of their healthy revolt against the State, as the oppressor

of independent spirits, and as the crusher of strong characters. They

commit the same error which I have already pointed out in the sincere

adherents of the Decadents and of Ibsen; they do not see that Nietzsche

confounds the conscious with the subconscious man; that the individual,

for whom he demands perfect freedom, is the man, not of knowledge and

judgment, but of blind craving, requiring the satisfaction of his

lascivious instincts at any price; that he is not the moral, but the

sensual, man.

Finally, his consequential airs have also increased the number of

his followers. Many of those marching in his train reject his moral

doctrine, but wax enthusiastic over such expressions as these: ‘It

might some time happen that the masses should become masters....

Therefore, O my brothers, there is need of a new nobility, the

adversary of all plebeians and all violent domination, and who

inscribes anew on a new tablet the word “Nobility.”’[431]

There is at the present time a widespread conviction that the

enthusiasm for equality was a grievous error of the great Revolution.

A doctrine opposed to all natural laws is justly resisted. Humanity

has need of a hierarchy. It must have leaders and models. It cannot

do without an aristocracy. But the nobleman to whom the human herd

may concede the most elevated place will certainly not be Nietzsche’s

‘over-man,’ the ego-maniac, the criminal, the robber, the slave of

his maddened instincts, but the man of richer knowledge, higher

intelligence, clearer judgment, and firmer self-discipline. The

existence of humanity is a combat, which it cannot carry on without

captains. As long as the combat is of men against men, the herd

requires a herdsman of strong muscles and ready blow. In a more perfect

state, in which all humanity fights collectively against Nature only,

it chooses as its chief the man of richest brain, most disciplined

will and concentrated attention. This man is the best observer, but he

is also one who feels most acutely and rapidly, who can most vividly

picture to himself the condition of the external world, hence the

man of the liveliest sympathy and most comprehensive interest. The

‘over-man’ of the healthy development of the species is a Paraclete

of knowledge and unselfish love, not a bloodthirsty ‘splendid beast

of prey.’ This is not borne in mind by those who believe that in

Nietzsche’s aristocratism they have found a clear expression of their

own obscure views as to the need of noble natures of light and leading.

Nietzsche’s false individualism and aristocratism is capable of

misleading superficial readers. Their error may be accounted a

mitigating circumstance. But even taking this into consideration, it

still ever remains a disgrace to the German intellectual life of the

present age, that in Germany a pronounced maniac should have been

regarded as a philosopher, and have founded a school.

BOOK IV.

_REALISM._

CHAPTER I.

ZOLA AND HIS SCHOOL.

IT was necessary to treat in detail the two forms of degeneracy in

literature and art hitherto examined, _i.e._, mysticism and ego-mania,

inasmuch as their career of development seems to be still in the

ascendant, and they are actively at work in making themselves masters

of the æsthetic conscience of our times. Concerning the third form,

realism or naturalism, I can afford to be much briefer, for two

reasons: one having to do with my subject, the other with myself.

The former reason is that, in the land of its origin, naturalism is

already wholly vanquished, and we do not kill a corpse--we bury it. The

personal reason is that I have already devoted myself elsewhere to the

thorough examination of naturalism.[432] The conclusions I there came

to I continue to maintain, as regards the appreciation of its tendency,

and I should only wish to limit them by a strong reservation, in so far

as they greatly over-estimate M. Zola’s abilities.

That naturalism in France is done with is admitted by all the world,

and is really only disputed by Zola himself. ‘There is no doubt

whatever as to the tendencies of the new generation of literary men,’

says M. Rémy de Gourmont; ‘they are rigorously anti-naturalist. There

has been no question of forming a party or issuing orders; no crusade

was organized; it is individually that we have separated ourselves,

horror-stricken, from a literature the baseness of which made us sick.

Perhaps there is even less disgust than indifference. I remember, when

M. Zola’s last novel but one came out, that, among the eight or ten

collaborators of the _Mercure de France_ (a Symbolist journal), it

was impossible for us to find anyone who had read through _La Bête

humaine_, or anyone who would have consented to read it with sufficient

care to review it. This species of book, and the method which dictates

it, appears to us quite antiquated with the flavour of bygone years;

more remote and more superannuated than the most truculent follies of

romanticism.’[433]

Among the disciples of Zola, among those who collaborated in the

_Soirées de Médan_, as among those who followed him later, there

is scarcely one who has remained faithful to his tendency. Guy de

Maupassant, before he was placed in the lunatic asylum where he

died, ended by turning more and more towards the psychological

novel. Joris Karl Huysmans, whom we have studied above in his new

skin as a Diabolist and Decadent, cannot find words bitter enough

for naturalism. J. H. Rosny writes novels now in which the scene is

laid in the Stone Age, and the subject of which is the abduction of

a brawny brachycephalous pre-Aryan woman by a tall, white-skinned,

dolichocephalous Aryan man.[434] When Zola’s _La Terre_ appeared, five

of his disciples--Paul Bonnetain, J. H. Rosny, just mentioned, Lucien

Descaves, Paul Margueritte, and Gustave Guiches--deemed it necessary to

protest, in a public manifesto, and with a solemnity somewhat comical,

against the obscenities of this novel, and to disavow their master

in proper and befitting form. If the novels of M. Zola himself still

continue to find a very good and steady market, as he declares with

pride, this in no way proves that his tendency is still popular. The

masses persist in habits, once adopted, much longer than the leaders

and creators do. If the former continue to follow M. Zola as before,

the latter have already wholly left him. The success of his last

novels is explained, moreover, on quite other than artistic grounds.

His _flair_ for what is occupying public opinion is, perhaps, the most

essential part of his talent. He chooses from the outset subjects in

favour of which he is assured of the positive interest of a numerous

public, no matter how they may be treated. With books which relate, in

the form of a novel, the story of the financial crisis of 1882, or the

war of 1870, as _L’Argent_ and _La Débâcle_, every known French author

is sure to awaken in his own country a passionate interest even to this

day. And M. Zola could equally count on a numerous connection of lovers

of the obscene and nasty. This public remains faithful to him, and

finds in him all it seeks. But it is a long time since he acquired any

new adherents in his own country, and abroad he only obtains them among

people who anxiously follow every fashion, whether it be in neckties

or books, but who are too ignorant to know as yet that M. Zola, in

France itself, has long since ceased to be the last fashion.

In the opinion of his disciples, M. Zola is the inventor of realism

in literature. This is a pretension which only young fellows, who are

ignorant beyond all conception, could raise, and for whom the history

of the world only begins at the moment when they have deigned to

recognise it.

First of all, the word ‘realism’ itself has no æsthetic significance.

In philosophy it denotes an opinion for which the general phenomenon of

the world is the expression of a material reality. Applied to art and

literature, it possesses no conception whatever. This I have explicitly

demonstrated in another place (_Paris unter der dritten Republik_), and

will confine myself here to going very briefly over the argument.

Those ale-house æsthetics, who distinguish between realism and

idealism, explain the former as the effort of the artist to observe

things and to reproduce them with truth. But this attempt is common to

every author, whoever he may be. No one of deliberate purpose wanders

from the truth in his creations; and even if he wished to do so, he

could not, as this would contradict all the laws of human thought.

Every one of our presentations, in fact, is based on an observation

once made by us, and even when we invent _ad libitum_, we only work

with the memory-images recollected from previous observations. If,

in spite of this, one work gives a greater impression of truth than

another, it is a question, not of this or that æsthetic tendency, but

exclusively of the degree of talent. A true poet is always true; an

incapable imitator can never be so. The first is true even when he

disdains always to adhere closely to reality in details; the latter is

not so even when he clings, with punctilious attention, and with the

method of a land-surveyor, to little external details.

If one bear in mind the psychological conditions in which a work of art

comes into existence, all the rhodomontade of so-called ‘realism’ is

immediately recognised. The origin of every veritable work of art is

an emotion. This is aroused either by a vital process in the internal

organs of the artist, or by a sense-impression which he receives from

the external world. In both cases the artist feels the necessity of

giving expression to his emotion in a work of art. If this emotion is

of organic origin, he will choose from among his memory-images, or

his sense-impressions of the moment, those which are in harmony with

his emotion, and will compose with them. If its origin is external,

he will employ in his composition mainly phenomena of the external

world, sensuous experiences which have evoked in him the emotion

demanding objective shape, and he will combine with this, similar

memory-images in accordance with the laws of association. As may be

seen, the process in the two cases is absolutely the same: the artist,

under the control of an emotion, welds direct sense-perceptions and

memory-images into a work of art which brings him relief; only,

sometimes the former, sometimes the latter, are predominant, according

to whether the emotion has its origin in sense-perceptions or in

organic processes. Speaking roughly, the works which result from an

emotion aroused by the phenomena of the world may well be called

realistic, and those expressing an organic emotion idealistic. These

denominations, however, have not any really distinctive value. Among

thoroughly sane individuals the emotions originate almost solely from

impressions of the external world; among those whose nervous life

is more or less diseased, namely, among hysterical, neurasthenic,

and degenerate subjects, and every kind of lunatic, they originate

much more frequently in internal organic processes. Sane artists

will produce works, as a rule, in which perception will predominate;

artists unhealthily emotional will produce works in which the play of

association of ideas predominates--in other words, imagination working

principally on memory-images. And if a false designation is absolutely

adhered to, it might be said that the first, as a general rule, will

produce works which are so-called realistic, and the second, works

so-called idealistic. In no case is the work of art a faithful image of

material reality; its genesis excludes this possibility. It is always

the incarnation of a subjective emotion only. To desire to know the

world by means of a work of art is a false proceeding; but the whole

essence of a personality reveals itself in it to him who knows how

to read. The work of art is never a document in the sense attached

by naturalistic cant to this word, _i.e._, a reliable objective

presentation of external facts; but it is always a confession of the

author; it betrays, consciously or unconsciously, his way of feeling

and thinking; it lays bare his emotions, and shows what ideas fill his

consciousness, and are at the disposal of the emotion which strives for

expression. It is not a mirror of the world, but a reflection of the

soul of the artist.

It might be thought, perhaps, that at least the mainly imitative arts,

painting and sculpture, are capable of a faithful reproduction of

reality, and thus are realisms properly so called. Even this is an

error. It would never occur to a painter or a sculptor to place himself

before a phenomenon, and reproduce it without selection, without

accentuations and suppressions. And why does he do this? If he imitates

an aspect, it is evidently because something in that aspect captivates

or pleases him--a harmony of colours, an effect of light, a line of

motion. Involuntarily he will accentuate and throw into relief the

feature which has inspired him with the desire to imitate the aspect

in question, and his work, consequently, will no more represent the

phenomenon such as it really was, but as he saw it; it will only be a

fresh proof, therefore, of his emotion, not the cast of a phenomenon.

To work absolutely in the method of a camera obscura and a sensitive

plate would be only possible to a very obtuse handicraftsman, who,

in the presence of the visible world, had no feeling for anything,

no pleasure, no disgust, no aspirations of any kind. However, it is

not at all probable that so atrophied a being will ever have had the

inclination to become an artist, and could acquire, even in a moderate

degree, the technical skill necessary for such a profession.

And if literal realism, the positive actual imitation of the

phenomenon, be interdicted even in the plastic arts by their intrinsic

nature, with how much greater reason is it forbidden to imaginative

writing! The painter can, after all, if he wishes to debase himself

and his art to the lowest degree, reduce the co-operation of his

personality in a work of art (or, to be more exact, to the _work_,

for then there can be no question of art) to an extremely feeble, a

scarcely perceptible point; he can reduce himself to the condition of

a mere camera obscura, transmit his visual impressions in the most

mechanical manner possible to his motor organs, and compel himself to

think and feel nothing during the progress of the work. His picture

is furnished for him by Nature itself: it is his optical horizon. If,

then, he wishes to exercise no choice, to express nothing of his own,

not even to compose, still there remains the possibility of copying the

phenomena which are enclosed within the limits of his field of vision.

His so-called picture is then no more than an expressionless fragment

of the world, in which the artist’s personality is only represented

by the frame which encloses it, not because the phenomena of Nature

really terminates at that point, but because the eye of the painter

only embraces that portion, and no more; nevertheless, it is a picture

in a technical sense, _i.e._, a picture that can be hung upon the wall

and looked at. The imaginative writer (dichter), on the contrary, does

not find his work ready in this way. It is not provided for him by

Nature itself. His subjects are not developed in space, but in time.

They are not arranged by the side of one another in such a way that

the eye perceives them and can retain all it sees; but they succeed

each other, and the imaginative writer must by his own intellect assign

them their limits, he must himself decide what he ought to seize

upon and what he must let go; where the phenomenon begins which he

wishes to utilize in his work, and where it ends. He cannot begin or

end a conversation in the middle of a word, in imitation of M. Jean

Béraud, for example, who in a well-known picture has made the frame

cut off the wheels of a waggon in the middle. He may not produce an

inexpressive photograph of the uniform course of events of life and the

world. He must fence round and dam up certain places in the course of

events. In doing this he clearly affirms himself and his personality.

He betrays his original stamp. He allows his intentions, views, and

sentiments to be recognised. If amongst a million of contemporary

human destinies he relates one only, it is that for some reason or

other this particular one has interested him more than the rest of

the million. If he transmits to us only some few features, ideas,

conversations, and actions of the person he has selected (not even a

millionth part of all that makes up his actual life) it is because,

for some reason or other, these seemed to him more important and more

characteristic than all the rest; because in his opinion they prove

something, they express an idea not conceived by things as they are,

but which he believes he can deduce from reality, or which he desires

to read into it. Thus, his ‘realistic’ work always reproduces his

thoughts only, his interpretation of reality, his interest in it, and

not reality itself. If the imaginative writer wished to transcribe the

world phonographically or photographically, his work would no longer

be a poem, even in a purely technical sense; it would not even be a

book, to the extent that the work of the painter who only photographs

still continues, in a purely technical sense, to be a picture; it would

be something with neither form, sense, nor name; for, in reproducing

the existence of a single human being during one day only, thousands

of pages could be filled if all his sensations, thoughts, words, and

actions were treated as of equal value. That selection is therefore

made among them which is the subjectivity of the imaginative writer,

_i.e._, the reverse of ‘realism.’

Besides, the work of the painter addresses itself to the same senses as

the phenomenon of Nature itself, and reproduces it with the help of the

same means by which the world itself is revealed to the senses, viz.,

with light and colour. Of course the lights, colours, and lines of the

painter are not exactly those of the real phenomenon, and it is only

in consequence of an illusion that, in his imitation, the phenomenon

is recognised; but this illusion is the work of such inferior cerebral

centres that even animals are capable of it, as is demonstrated by

the classical anecdote so well known of the birds wishing to peck

at the bunch of grapes painted by Zeuxis. The imaginative writer,

on the contrary, does not address himself to the senses; to be

more exact, he appeals by hearing or sight, to which he presents

spoken or written words, not to the centres of perception, as the

plastic artist does in the first instance, but to the higher centres

of conception, judgment, and reasoning. Nor has he the means for

directly reproducing the sensible phenomenon itself, but he must first

translate the phenomenon into concepts under a linguistic, _i.e._, a

conventional, form. This is, however, an excessively complicated and

highly differentiated activity, which bears completely the impress of

the personality exercising it. If even two eyes do not see in the same

manner, how much less can two brains perceive and interpret in the

same way what the eye has seen, class it with pre-existing concepts,

associate it with feelings and representations, and clothe it in

traditional forms of language? The activity of the imaginative writer,

therefore, is incomparably more than that of the artist, essentially

personal; the elaboration of sense-impressions into representations,

and the translation of representations into words, are so peculiarly

individual, so exclusively subjective, that for this cause also

imaginative writing can never be reality itself, _i.e._, ‘realistic.’

The notion of so-called ‘realism’ cannot withstand either psychological

or æsthetic criticism. We might, perhaps, attempt an external,

superficial, practical conception of it, and say, for example, Realism

is the method in the application of which the imaginative writer starts

from his perceptions and observations, and seeks his subjects in the

environment he knows personally; idealism is the opposite method,

which that writer employs who, in creating, yields to the play of

imagination, and who, in order not to impede its free energy, borrows

his materials from remote times and countries, or from social strata

of which he has no direct knowledge, but which he conceives only in

the visions of aspiration, intuition, or surmise. Reasonable and

plausible as this explanation appears, it, too, nevertheless, dissolves

into blue mist when more closely examined. For, in fact, the choice

of subject-matter, the surroundings from which it is borrowed, or

in which it is placed, have no decisive signification; no method is

therein manifested, but merely the author’s personality. One in whom

observation predominates will be ‘realistic,’ _i.e._, will express

experiences, even if he pretends to speak of men and things placed

wholly beyond the reach of his observation; and the other in whom the

mechanical association of ideas prevails will be ‘idealistic,’ _i.e._,

he will simply follow the wanderings of his imagination, even when he

desires to represent circumstances which may be personally familiar to

him.

Let us give one example only of the two cases. What is more

‘idealistic’ than fairy-stories? Very well, here are some passages

from the best-known fairy-tales of the brothers Grimm: ‘There was once

upon a time a king’s daughter who went into the forest and seated

herself on the brink of a cool fountain’ (_The Frog Prince; or, Iron

Henry_). ‘But the little sister at home [he is speaking of the daughter

of a king who had driven away his twelve sons] grew up, and remained

the only child. Once there was a great washing-day, and amongst

the washing were twelve men’s shirts. “For whom are these shirts?”

demanded the princess; “they are much too small for my father.” Then

the laundress told her that she had had twelve brothers,’ etc.; ‘and

as the little sister sat in the meadow in the afternoon bleaching the

linen, the words of the laundress came into her mind,’ etc. (_The

Twelve Brothers_). ‘The wood-cutter obeyed; he fetched his child, and

gave her to the Virgin Mary, who carried her up into heaven. There

the child lived happily; she ate nothing but sweet cakes, and drank

new milk,’ etc. ‘So fourteen years went by in heaven. Then the Virgin

Mary had to take a long journey; but before she went away, she called

the girl to her, and said, “Dear child, I entrust you with the keys of

the thirteen doors of Paradise,”’ etc. (_Mary’s Child_). The unknown

writer of these fairy-tales transports his stories into royal palaces,

or even into heaven--_i.e._, into surroundings which he certainly does

not know; but he endows beings and things, and even the Virgin Mary,

with such traits as are known and familiar to him by observation.

From the royal palace one enters a wood or a meadow as one might on

leaving a farm; the princess runs to the fountain in the forest quite

alone, looks after the linen, and bleaches it on the grass, just

like a domestic servant. The Holy Virgin undertakes a journey, and

confides the keys of the household to her adopted daughter, as a rich

châtelaine might do. These fairy-tales are composed from a peasant’s

own experience, who describes his own world with honest realism, and

simply gives other names to the figures and circumstances with which he

is familiar. M. Edmond de Goncourt, on the contrary, the great pioneer

‘realist,’ relates, in his novel _La Faustin_, the love-story of a Lord

Annandale and an actress of the Théâtre Français, which elicits from

M. F. Brunetière, the critic, these observations: ‘I should much like

to hear M. Zola’s opinion on M. de Goncourt’s novel. What can M. Zola,

who has jested so eloquently on the subject of novels of adventure--of

those novels in which princes walked about incognito with their pockets

full of diamonds--think in his inmost heart of this Lord Annandale

throwing handfuls of gold out of the windows, and ruling from one day

to another over fifty English servants in his mansion in Paris, without

counting the retainers of his lady? What can M. Zola, who has made

merry so comfortably over the idealistic novel, as he calls it, think

of this one in which love triumphant carries off the lovers into the

adorable world of dreams--what can he think to himself concerning

this passionate tenderness which M. de Goncourt’s Englishman has for

the tragedienne, this almost deified gallantry, this sensual liaison

_dans le bleu_, this physical love in ideality, and all the rest of the

jargon which I spare the reader?’[435] M. Edmond de Goncourt professes

to depict a contemporary Englishman, an actress also of our own times,

events in Parisian life--_i.e._, all of them matters he might have

observed, and with which he ought to be familiar; but what he does

relate is so incredible, so impossible, unprecedented, that one can

only shrug one’s shoulders over the childish fable. Thus, the German

story-teller who conducts us into a society of angels, saints, and

kings, really shows us healthy, robust peasants and lasses whose living

reality is in no way diminished by the carnival crowns and gilded-paper

halos playfully placed on their heads; while the French realist

who would transport us into Parisian life among Parisians, floats

before our eyes fleshless phantoms moving in clouds of cigar-smoke,

marsh-mists, and punch-flames, and who remain just as unreal, for all

the effort of the author to conjure into them a distant resemblance to

an Englishman in a frock-coat, and a hysterical lady in a lace-trimmed

négligée. The author of the fairy-tales is a realist in the sense of

the explanation given above; the novelist of Parisian manners, Edmond

de Goncourt, is an idealist of the most aggravating type.

From whatever side we approach this pretended realism, we never succeed

in seeing in it a concept, but only an empty word. Every method of

investigation leads us to the same result--viz., that there is no

realism in poetry, _i.e._, no impersonal, actual copy of reality; there

are only the various personalities of the poet. The only decisive thing

is the individuality of the poet. One of them draws from the phenomenon

of Nature, another from his internal organic processes, those emotions

which incite them to create. One is capable of attention, and observes;

another is the slave of an unbridled association of ideas. In one

the presentation of the ‘not-self’ predominates in consciousness,

in another the ‘self.’ I do not hesitate to express the matter in a

single word--one is healthy and in an evolution of growth; the other

is changed more or less pathologically--has more or less fallen into

degeneracy. The healthy poet mingles knowledge with every one of his

works, whether it be Dante’s _Inferno_ or Goethe’s _Faust_; and if

held desirable, this element of knowledge, which it is not possible to

acquire except by attention and observation, may be called realism.

The degenerate poet never fashions anything but empty soap-bubbles of

knowledge, even when he maintains, and is himself convinced, that he is

giving out what he has observed; and this confused ebullition of ideas,

shot in the best cases with changing hues, but most frequently simply

dirty froth, is very often called, by a misnomer, idealism.