Affirmations

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AFFIRMATIONS

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE NEW SPIRIT
IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS
THE WORLD OF DREAMS
THE SOUL OF SPAIN

THE TASK OF SOCIAL HYGIENE

Etc

AFFIRMATIONS

BY

HAVELOCK ELLIS

SECOND EDITION WITH A NEW PREFACE

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

1915

printed in great britain by
Richard Clay and Sons, Limited,

jBRUNSWICK street, STAMFORD STREET, S.B.,
AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.

PREFACE.

There are at least two ways of looking at
books and at the personalities books express.
In its chief but rarer aspect literature is the
medium of art, and as such can raise no ethical
problems. Whatever morality or immorality art
may hold is quiescent, or lifted into an atmo-
sphere of radiant immortality where questioning
is irrelevant. Of the literature that is all art we
need not even speak, unless by chance we too
approach it as artists, trying to grasp it by im-
aginative insight. In literature, as elsewhere,
art should only be approached as we would
approach Paradise, for the sake of its joy. It
would be well, indeed, if we could destroy or
forget all that has ever been written about the
world's great books, even if it were once worth
while to write those books about books. How
happy, for instance, the world might be if there
were no literature about the Bible, if Augustine
and Aquinas and Calvin and thousands of

iv Preface.

smaller men had not danced on it so long,
stamping every page of it into mire, that now
the vision of a single line, in its simple sense, is
almost an effort of inspiration. All my life long
I have been casting away the knowledge I have
gained from books about literature, and from
opinions about life, and coming to literature
itself or to life itself, a slow and painful
progress towards that Heaven of knowledge
where a child is king.

But there is another kind of literature, a
literature which is not all art — the literature of
life. Literature differs from design or music by
being closer to life, by being fundamentally not
an art at all, but merely the development of
ordinary speech, only rising at intervals into the
region of art. It is so close to life that largely
it comes before us much as the actual facts of
life come before us. So that while we were best
silent about the literature of art, sanctified by
time and the reverence of many men, we cannot
question too keenly the literature of life. In
this book I deal with questions of life as they
are expressed in literature, or as they are
suggested by literature. Throughout I am dis-
cussing morality as revealed or disguised by
literature. I may not care, indeed, to pervert
my subjects in order to emphasise my opinions,
but I frankly take my subjects chiefly on those
sides which suit my own pleasure, and I select

Preface. v

them solely because they do that so well. I use
them as the ancient device of the stalking-horse
was used, to creep up more closely to the game
that my soul loves best.

So far as possible I dwell most on those
aspects of my subjects which are most question-
able. It was once brought against me that I
had a predilection for such aspects. Assuredly
it is so. If a subject is not questionable it
seems to me a waste of time to discuss it The
great facts of the world are not questionable;
they are there for us to enjoy, or to suffer, in
silence, not to talk about. Our best energies
should be spent in attacking and settling
questionable things that so we may enlarge
the sphere of the unquestionable — the sphere
of real life — and be ready to meet new questions
as they arise. It is only by dealing with the
questionable aspects of the world that criticism
of life can ever have any saving virtue for us.
It is waste of life to use literature for pawing
over the unquestionable. Even a healthy dog,
having once ascertained the essential virtue of a
bone, contentedly eats it, or buries it

And yet, it may well be, there is a time for
aiifirming the simple eternal facts of life, a time,
even, when those simple eternal facts have drifted
so far from us that we count them also question-
able. The present moment has seemed to me a
fitting one to set a few such affirmations in

vi Preface.

order. The century now nearly over has per-
formed many dirty and laborious tasks ; it has
had to organise its own unwieldiness, to cleanse
its Augean stables of the filth it has itself
deposited, to pull down the buildings it has
itself erected. When we witness such work
carried out — blunderingly, it may be, but yet,
we thought, humbly — we may well point out
what splendid fellows these modest, begrimed
toilers really were, what useful and noble work
they were engaged in, how large a promise they
bear for the future. That was my own point of
view. But the case is altered when these yet
unwashed toilers rise up around us in half-
intoxicated jubilation over the triumphs of
their own little epoch, well assured that there
never was such an age or such a race since the
world began. Then we may well pause. It is
time to recall the simple eternal facts of life. It
is time to affirm the existence of those verities
which are wrought into our very structure
everywhere and always, and in the face of
which the paltry triumphs of an " era " fall back
into insignificance.

Yet every man must make his own affirma-
tions. The great questions of life are immortal,
only because no one can answer them for his
fellows. I claim no general validity for my
affirmations. It has been well said that certain
books possess a value that is in the ratio of the

Preface. vii

spiritual vigour of those who use them, acting as
a tonic to the strong, still further dissolving and
enfeebling the weakness of the weak. It would
be presumptious to claim any potent and pecu-
liar energy for this book ; but the observation is
one which a reader may do well always to bear
in mind. The final value of any book is not in
the beliefs which it may give us or take away
from us, but in its power to reveal to us our
own real selves. If I can stimulate any one in
the search for his own proper affirmations, he
and I may well rest content. He is welcome
to cast aside mine as the idle conclusions of a
dreamer lying in the sunshine. Our own affirma-
tions are always the best. Let us but be sure
that they are our own, that they have grown up
slowly and quietly, fed with the strength of our
own blood and brain. Only with the help of
such affirmations can we find a staff to comfort
us through the valley of life. It is only when
they utter affirmations, one has said, that the
wands of the angels blossom.

H. E.
August 1897.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.

This book, first published in 1898, is here
reprinted without any changes. There arose,
indeed, the question : Ought I not to bring the
book up to date? For when I wrote it three
of the figures herein discussed — Nietzsche, Zola,
and Huysmans — were still alive. Two con-
siderations have guided me. In the first place,
the careers of all three of these men were then
drawing to a close, and Nietzsche was already
intellectually dead. What they published after
1898 could not in any degree affect a judgment
of their completed work ; the one illuminating
book by any of them not then available was
Nietzsche's Ecce Homo, and that had been written
long before. My estimates, therefore, of all of
them have no excuse but to stand. In the
second place, this volume was not put forward
as a series of literary studies, and so there is
no necessity that its literary data should possess
a perfunctory air of completeness. We are
concerned here with an attempt to pierce to
the core of numerous vital questions, using
certain intensely vital instruments to aid us in
that task. What became of those instruments

Preface. ix

at last happens not to matter at all. Dates
have their interest. But what are biographical
dictionaries for?

So the book remains as it was written. I
have not sought to bring it up to date, or to
revise it by the light of the latest changes in
my own feelings, or even to correct any mis-
statements. I must indeed sadly confess — for
I suppose it is sad to have developed so little in
fifteen years — that my feelings remain essentially
the same. And I am not acquainted with any
misstatements that need correction. One little
exception — to be completely accurate — is to be
made : I have stated that Wendell Holmes
was once heard defending Casanova. When
challenged for my authority for that statement
by Dr. Tage Bull, the chief of living Casan-
ovists, I had to acknowledge that it was only a
second-hand authority, and that I could posi-
tively state only that C. G. Leland remarks, in
his Memoirs, that at one of the weekly dinners
of the Atlantic Club in 1861 or 1862, when
Emerson, Lowell, Agassiz, and other distin-
guished men were present, no one (except
Leland) knew the M^moires of Casanova save
only Holmes. But what Holmes thought of
them remains, so far as I am aware, unrevealed.

If I were to enlarge — which would not be to
change — this book, it is precisely to the study
of Casanova, and to the earlier study of
Nietzsche, that my attention would be turned.

X Preface.

During the past ten years Casanova has at last
come to his own place. The serious interest of
his unique record of his age and of the problem
presented by his own unique personality are
now undisputed. At the same time, since he has
been subjected to microscopical investigation,
both the record and the personality are found
to possess at various points numerous puzzling
difficulties. In this way Casanova's reputation
may be said to have entered on its third stage.
At first he was a disreputable adventurer
who had written a discreditable and probably
fictitious narrative of his own unmentionable
experiences. Then by a natural reaction from
that extreme view, as his significance became
clear, he was promoted to a position of un-
disputed credit. Now he is viewed with more
critical discrimination. His essential veracity
cannot be questioned, and is at innumerable
points demonstrable. But we cannot take for
granted that he exerted in the narration of his
life a scrupulosity which, on his own showing,
he failed to exert in the living of it. Numerous
details of the narrative cannot be verified where
we should expect to find them verified ; various
episodes have, rightly or wrongly, been regarded
by some critics as imaginary interpolations ;
and it has been suspected that the creditable
motive of protecting persons who were still
living induced Casanova to change the character
of some incidents. Every future study of

Preface. xi

Casanova must face these controverted points.
It seems right that some mention should be
made of this difficulty here, although the
discussion of Casanova in the following pages
is based on broader ground now scarcely in
dispute.

The reputation of Nietzsche has also now
entered a phase, certainly a passing phase, which
could scarcely be ignored if I were now
publishing this book for the first time. Nietz-
sche was of the tribe of the great cosmopolitan
Germans of the eighteenth century. He was
not patriotic, he had loathing rather than
admiration for Germanism, France was for him
the great home of culture, and he desired to
be a good European rather than a good German.
He was, in most of these respects, and in
many others, the disciple of Goethe. But he
possessed a temperament narrower, if more
intense and perhaps more penetrating, than
Goethe, and over the last six years of his
active life there lay the distorting shadow of
approaching insanity. Moreover, unlike Goethe,
Nietzsche lived in a vigorously developing and
materially productive Germany. It was an
environment which violently antagonised him,
it is true, but at the same time its ideals could
not fail to have a certain influence. He seized
hold of them and, by the force of his potent
genius, transmuted them into gold. The
German was beginning to worship the idea of

xii Preface.

Power and to idealise the idea of War, both
alike for the greater glory of progressive
Germanism. The idea of Power and the idea
of War both entered into the work — the later
work, it is important to remember — of Nietzsche.
But in his hands they became spiritualised and
transformed. Power was no longer the force
of success in this world, and War was no longer
a method of overcoming mere human enemies,
but both alike belonged to the sphere of the
evolving soul. This ought to have been obvious
to every reader, but human imbecility is a sacred
and mysterious sea which no plummet has yet
sounded, and even for the man of highest genius
its revelations are for ever new. When the
Prussian organ of Junkerdom acclaimed Nietz-
sche as a champion his sarcasm at once flashed
forth ; but he could not have foreseen how the
same ineptitude would one day flow forth in a
torrent. Nor could I, ten years later. My
study of Nietzsche is not of the Nietzsche of the
moment but of the essential and significant
Nietzsche.

So I am glad to leave this book as it was
written. It is a statement of affirmations which
must stand independently of the fashions or the
passions of the passing day. If my affirmations
sometimes chance to strike athwart the pre-
judices of the day, that is as it should be.

H. E.

I ^ January, 1915.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

NIETZSCHE . . ... I

CASANOVA . . .... 86

ZOLA 131

HUYSMANS 158

ST. FRANCIS AND OTHERS . . 212

AFFIRMATIONS.

NIETZSCHE.

For some years the name of Friedrich Nietzsche
has been the war-cry of opposing factions in
Germany. It is not easy to take up a German
periodical without finding some trace of the
passionate admiration or denunciation which
this man has called forth. If we turn to
Scandinavia or to France, whither his fame
and his work are also penetrating, we find
that the same results have followed. And we
may expect a similar outburst in England now
that the translation of his works has at last
begun. At present, however, I know of no
attempt to deal with Nietzsche from the British
point of view, and that is my excuse for trying
to define his personality and influence.^ I do
not come forward as the champion of Nietz-
schianism or of Anti-Nietzschianism. It appears
to me that any human individuality that has

^ This statement (made at the end of 1895) has ceased to
be true, but it explains the genesis of this study, and I leave it
standing.

I

2 Affirmations.

strongly aroused the love and hatred of men
must be far too complex for absolute con-
demnation or absolute approval. Apart from
praise or blame, which seem here alike imper-
tinent, Nietzsche is without doubt an extra-
ordinarily interesting figure. He is the modern
incarnation of that image of intellectual pride
which Marlowe created in Faustus. A man
who has certainly stood at the finest summit of
modern culture, who has thence made the most
determined effort ever made to destroy modern
morals, and who now leads a life as near to
death as any life outside the grave can be, must
needs be a tragic figure. It is a figure full
of significance, for it represents one of the
greatest spiritual forces which have appeared
since Goethe, full of interest also to the psycho-
logist, and surely not without its pathos, perhaps
its horror, for the man in the street.

I.

It has only lately become possible to study
Nietzsche's life-history. For a considerable
period the Nietzsche-Archiv at Naumburg and
Weimar has been accumulating copious materials
which have now been utilised by Nietzsche's
sister, Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche, in the pro-
duction of an authoritative biography. This
sister is herself a remarkable person ; for many

Nietzsche. 3

years she lived in close association with her
brother, so that she was supposed, though
without reason, to have exerted an influence
over his thought; then she married Dr. Fbrster,
the founder of the New Germany colony in
Paraguay; on his death she returned home to
write the history of the colony, and has since
devoted herself to the care of her brother and
his fame. • Only the first two volumes of the
Leben NietzscMs have yet appeared, but they
enable us to trace his development to his
departure from Basel, and throw light on his
whole career.

Nietzsche belonged, according to the ancestral
tradition (though the name, I am told, is a com-
mon one in Wendish Silesia), to a noble Polish
family called Nietzky, who on account of strong
Protestant convictions abandoned their country
and their title during the eighteenth century and
settled in Germany. Notwithstanding the large
amount of German blood in his veins, he always
regarded himself as essentially a Pole. The
Poles seemed to him the best endowed and
most knightly of Sclavonic peoples, and he
once remarked that it was only by virtue of a
strong mixture of Sclavonic blood that the
Germans entered the ranks of gifted nations.
He termed the Polish Chopin the deliverer of
music from German heaviness and stupidity,
and when he speaks of another Pole, Copernicus,

4 Affirmations.

who reversed the judgment of the whole world,
one may divine a reference to what in later
years Nietzsche regarded as his own mission. In
adult life Nietzsche's keen and strongly marked
features were distinctly Polish, and when abroad
he was frequently greeted by Poles as a fellow-
countryman ; at Sorrento, where he once spent a
winter, the country people called him II Polacco.
Like Emerson (to whose writings he was
strongly attracted throughout life) and many
another strenuous philosophic revolutionary,
Nietzsche came of a long race of Christian
ministers. On both sides his ancestors were
preachers, and from first to last the preacher's
fervour was in his own blood. The eldest of
three children (of whom one died in infancy),
Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844 at Rocken,
near Liitzen, in Saxony. His father — who
shortly after his son's birth fell down the par-
sonage steps, injuring his head so severely that
he died within twelve months — is described as
a man of noble and poetic nature, with a special
talent for music, inherited by his son; though
once described by his son as " a tender, lovable,
morbid man," he belonged to a large and
very healthy family, who mostly lived to an
extreme old age, preserving their mental and
physical vigour to the last. The Nietzsches
were a proud, sincere folk, very clannish, look-
ing askance at all who were not Nietzsches.

Nietzsche. 5

Nietzsche's mother, said to be a charming
woman and possessed of much physical vigour,
was again a clergyman's daughter. The Oehler
family, to which she belonged, was also very
large, very healthy, and very long-lived ; she
was only eighteen at her son's birth, and is still
alive to care for him in his complete mental
decay. I note these facts, which are given with
much precision and detail in the biography,
because they certainly help us to understand
Nietzsche. It is evident that he is no frail
hectic flame of a degenerating race. There
seems to be no trace of insanity or nervous dis-
order at any point in the family history, as far
back as it is possible to go. On the contrary,
he belonged to extremely vigorous stocks, pos-
sessing unusual moral and physical force, people
of " character." A similar condition of things is
not seldom found in the history of genius. In
such a case the machine is, as it were, too highly
charged with inherited energy, and works at a
pressure which ultimately brings it to perdition.
All genius must work without rest, it cannot do
otherwise; only the most happily constituted
genius works without haste.

The sister's account of the children's early
life is a very charming part of this record, and
one which in the nature of things rarely finds
place in a biography. She describes her first
memories of the boy's pretty face, his long fair

6 Affirmations.

hair, and large, dark, serious eyes. He could not
speak until he was nearly three years old, but at
four he began to read and write. He was a
quiet, rather obstinate child, with fits of passion
which he learnt to control at a very early age ;
his self-control became so great that, as a boy,
on more than one occasion he deliberately burnt
his hand, to show that Mucins Scaevola's act was
but a trifling matter.

The widowed mother went with her children
to settle at Naumburg on the Saale with her
husband's mother, a woman of fine character
with views of her own, one of which was that
children of all classes should first be brought up
together. Little Fritz was therefore sent to the
town school, but the experiment was not alto-
gether successful. He was a serious child, fond
of solitude, and was called " the little parson " by
his comrades. "The fundamental note of his
disposition," writes a schoolfellow in after-life,
" was a certain melancholy which expressed
itself in his whole being." He avoided his
fellows and sought beautiful scenery, as he con-
tinued to do throughout life. At the same time
he was a well-developed, vigorous boy, who
loved games of various kinds, especially those
of his own invention. But although the child-
ren lived to the full the fantastic life of childhood,
the sister regretfully confesses that they re-
mained models of propriety. Fritz was " a very

Nietzsche. 7

pious child; he thought much about religious
matters, and was always concerned to put his
thoughts into practice" It is curious that, not-
withstanding his instinctive sympathy with the
Greek spirit and his philological aptitudes, he
found Greek specially difficult to learn. At the
age of ten appeared his taste for verse-making,
and also for music, and he soon began to show
that inherited gift for improvisation by which
he was always able to hold his audience spell-
bound. Even as a boy the future moralist made
a deep impression on those who knew him,
and he reminded one person of the youthful
Jesus in the Temple. "We Nietzsches hate
lies," an aunt was accustomed to say ; in Fried-
rich sincerity was a very deep-rooted treiit, and he
exercised an involuntary educational influence
on thos&who came near him.

In 1858 a place was found for him at Pforta,
a remarkable school of almost military discipline.
Here many of the lines of his future activity
were definitely laid down. At an even earlier date,
excited by the influence of Humboldt, he had
been fascinated by the ideal of universal culture,
and at Pforta his intellectual energies began to
expand. Here also, in 1859, when a piano-
forte edition of Tristan was first published,
Nietzsche became an enthusiastic Wagnerian,
and even to the last Tristan remained for him
"music par excellence!' Here, too, he began

8 Affirmations.

those philological studies which led some years
later to a professorship. He turned to philology,
however, as he himself recognised, because of
the need he felt: to anchor himself to some cool
logical study which would not grip his heart
like the restless and exciting artistic instincts
which had hitherto chiefly moved him. During
the latter part of his stay at this very strenu-
ous educational establishment young Nietzsche
was a less brilliant pupil than during the
earlier part His own individuality was silently
growing beneath the disciplinary pressure which
would have dwarfed a less vigorous individuality.
His philosophic aptitudes began to develop and
take form; he wished also to devote himself to
music ; and he pined at the confinement, long-
ing for the forest and the woodman's axe. It was
the beginning of a long struggle between the
impulses of his own self-centred nature and the
duties imposed from without, by the school,
the university, and, later, his professorship ; he
always strove to broaden and deepen these
duties to the scope of his own nature, but the
struggle remained. It was the immediate result
of this double strain that, during 1862, strong
and healthy as the youth appeared, he began to
suffer from headaches and eye-troubles, cured
by temporary removal from the school. He
remained extremely short-sighted, and it was
only by an absurd error in the routine examina-

Nietzsche. g

tion that, some years later, he was passed for
military service in the artillery.

In the following year, 1863, Nietzsche met a
schoolfellow's sister, an ethereal little Berlin girl,
who for a while appealed to " the large, broad-
shouldered, shy, rather solemn and stiff youth."
To this early experience, which never went
beyond poetic Schwdrmerei, his sister is inclined
to trace the origin of Nietzsche's view of women
as very fragile, tender little buds. The experience
is also interesting because it appears to stand
alone in his life. We strike here on an or-
ganic abnormality in this congenital philosopher.
Nietzsche's attitude was not the crude misogyny
of Schopenhauer, who knew women chiefly as
women of the streets. Nietzsche knew many of
the finest women of his time, and he sometimes
speaks with insight and sympathy of the world
as it appears to women; but there was clearly
nothing in him to answer to any appeal to passion,
and his attitude is well summed up in an
aphorism of his own Zarathustra : "It is better
to fall into the hands of a murderer than into
the dreams of an ardent woman." " All his life
long," his sister writes, "my brother remained
completely apart from either great passion or
vulgar pleasure. His whole passion lay in the
world of knowledge ; only very temperate emo-
tions remained over for anything else. In later
life he was grieved that he had never attained

10 Affirmations.

to amour passion, and that every inclination to
a feminine personality quickly changed to a
tender friendship, however fascinatingly pretty
the fair one might be." He would expend much
sympathy on unhappy lovers, yet he would
shake his head, saying to himself or others:
"And all that over a little girl!"

Young Nietzsche left Pforta, in 1863, with the
most various and incompatible scientific tastes
and interests (always excepting in mathematics,
for which he never possessed any aptitude), but,
as he himself remarked, none that would fit him
for any career. One point in regard to the
termination of his school-life is noteworthy: he
chose Theognis as the subject of his valedictory
dissertation. His meditations on this moralist
and aristocrat, so contemptuous of popular rule,
may have served as the starting-point of some
of his own later views on Greek culture. In
1864 he became a student at Bonn, and the year
that followed was of special import in his inner
development; he finally threw off the beliefs
of his early youth; he discovered his keen
critical faculty; and self-contained independence
became a visible mark of his character, though
always disguised by amiable and courteous
manners. At Bonn his life seems to have been
fairly happy, though he was by no means a
typical German student. He spent much money,
but it was chiefly on his artistic tastes — music

:

Nietzsche. 1 1

and the theatre — or on little tours. No one
could spend less on eating and drinking; like
Goethe and like Heine, he had no love for
tobacco or for beer, and he was repelled by
the thick, beery good-humour of the German
student People who drink beer and smoke
pipes every evening, he always held, were in-
capable of understanding his philosophy; for
they could not possibly possess the clarity of
mind needed to grasp any delicate or complex
intellectual problem. He returned home from
Bonn " a picture of health and strength, broad-
shouldered, brown, with rather fair thick hair,
and exactly the same height as Goethe ; " and
then went to continue his studies at Leipzig.

Notwithstanding the youth's efforts to subdue
his emotional and aesthetic restlessness by cool
and hard work, he was clearly tortured by the
effort to find a philosophic home for himself in
the world. This effort absorbed him all day
long, frequently nearly all the night At this
time he chanced to take up on a bookstall a
totally unknown work, entitled Der Welt als
Wille und Vorstellung; in obedience to an
unusual impulse he bought the book without
consideration, and from that moment began an
acquaintance with Schopenhauer which for many
years exerted a deep influence on his life. At
that time, probably, he could have had no better
guide into paths of peace; but even as a student

12 Affirmations.

he was a keen critic of Schopenhauer's system,
valuing him chiefly as, in opposition to Kant,
" the philosopher of a re-awakened classical
period, a Germanised Hellenism." Schumann's
music and long solitary walks aided in the work
of recuperation. A year or two later Nietzsche
met the other great god who shared with Scho-
penhauer his early worship. " I cannot bring my
heart to any degree of critical coolness before
this music," he wrote, in 1868, after listening to
the overture to the Meistersinger; "every fibre
and nerve in me thrills; it is a long time since
I have been so carried away." I quote these
words, for we shall, I think, find later that they
have their significance. A few weeks afterwards
he was invited to meet the master, and thus
began a relationship that for Nietzsche was
fateful.

Meanwhile his philological studies were bring-
ing him distinction. A lecture on Theognis was
pronounced by Ritschl to be the best work by a
student of Nietzsche's standing that he had ever
met with. Then followed investigations into
the sources of Suidas, a lengthy examination
De fontibus Diogenis Laertii, and palseographic
studies in connection with Terence, Statius, and
Orosius. He was now also consciously perfect-
ing his German style, treating language, he
remarks, as a musical instrument on which one
must be able to improvise, as well as play what

Nietsseke. 13

is merely learnt by heart. In 1869, when only
in his twenty-sixth year, and before he had
taken his doctor's degree, he accepted the chair
of classical philology at Basel. He was certainly,
as he himself said, not a born philologist He
had devoted himself to philology — I wish to
insist on this significant point — as a sedative
and tonic to his restless energy; in this he was
doubtless wise, though his sister seems to
suggest that he thereby increased his mental
strain. But he had no real vocation for
philology, and it is curious that when the
Basel chair was offered to him he was proposing
to himself to throw aside philology for chemistry.
Philologists, he declares again and again, are
but factory hands in the service of science. At
the best philology is a waste of acuteness, since
it merely enables us to state facts which the
study of the present would teach us much
more swiftly and surely. Thus it was that he
instinctively broadened and deepened every
philological question he took up, making it a
channel for philosophy and morals. With his
specifically philological work we are not further
concerned.

I have been careful to present the main facts
in Nietzsche's early development because they
seem to me to throw light on the whole of his
later development So far he had published
nothing except in philological journals. In

14 Affirmations.

1 87 1, after he had settled at Basel, appeared
his first work, an essay entitled Die Geburt der
Tragodie aus dem Geiste der Musik, dedicated to
Wagner. The conception of this essay was
academic, but in Nietzsche's hands the origin
of tragedy became merely the text for an
exposition of his own philosophy of art at this
period. He traces two art impulses in ancient
Greece : one, starting in the phenomena of
dreaming, which he associates with Apollo;
the other, starting in the phenomena of
intoxication, associated with Dionysus, and
through singing, music and dithyramb leading
up to the lyric. The union of these, which both
imply a pessimistic view of life, produced folk-
song and finally tragedy, which is thus the
outcome of Dionysiac music fertilised by Apol-
lonian imagery. Socrates the optimist, with his
views concerning virtue as knowledge, vice as
ignorance, and his identification of virtue with
happiness, led to the decay of tragedy and the
triumph of Alexandrian culture, in the net of
which the whole modern world is still held.
Now, however, German music is producing a
new birth of tragedy through Wagner, who has
again united music and myth, inaugurated an
era of art culture, and built the bridge to a new
German heathenism. This remarkable essay
produced considerable controversy and much
consternation among Nietzsche's philological

Nietzsche. 1 5

friends and teachers, who resented — reasonably
enough, we may well admit — the subordination
of philology to modern philosophy and art, and
could not understand the marvellous swan they
had hatched. A philologist Nietzsche could
never have continued, but this book publicly
put an end to any hope of academic advance-
ment It remains characteristic of Nietzsche's
first period, as we may call whatever he wrote
before 1876, in its insistence on the primary im-
portance of aesthetic as opposed to intellectual
culture ; and it is characteristic of his whole work
in its grip of the connection between the prob-
lems and solutions of Hellenic times and the
problems and solutions of the modern world.
For Nietzsche the Greek world was not the
model of beautiful mediocrity imagined by
Winckelmann and Goethe, nor did it date from
the era of rhetorical idealism inaugurated by
Plato. The real Hellenic world came earlier, and
the true Hellenes were sturdy realists enamoured
of life, reverencing all its manifestations and
signs, and holding in highest honour that
sexual symbol of life which Christianity, with
its denial of life, despises. Plato Nietzsche
hated ; he had wandered from all the funda-
mental instincts of the Hellene, His childish
dialectic can only appeal, Nietzsche said, to
those who are ignorant of French masters like
Fontenelle. The best cure for Plato, he held.

1 6 Affirmations.

is Thucydides, the last of the old Hellenes who
were brave in the face of reality; Plato fled
from reality into the ideal and was a Christian
before his* time. Heraclitus was Nietzsche's
favourite Greek thinker, and he liked to point
out that the moralists of the Stoa may be
traced back to the great philosopher of
Ephesus.

Die Geburt der Trag'ddie is the prelude to
all Nietzsche's work. He outgrew it, but in
one point at least it sounds a note which recurs
throughout all his work. He ever regarded the
Greek conception of Dionysus as the key to the
mystery of life. In Gdtzendammerung, the last
of his works, this is still affirmed, more distinctly
than ever. "The fundamental Hellenic in-
stinct," he there wrote, "was first revealed in
the Dionysiac mysteries. What was it the
Greek assured to himself in these mysteries?
Eternal life, the eternal return of life, the future
promised and consecrated in the present, the
triumphal affirmation of life over death and
change, true life or immortality through pro-
creation, through the mysteries of sexuality.
Thus the sexual symbol was to the Greeks
the profoundest and most venerable symbol in
the whole range of ancient piety. Every in-
dividual act of reproduction, of conception, of
birth was a festival awaking the loftiest emotions.
The doctrine of the mysteries proclaimed the

Nietzsche. 17

holiness of pain ; the pangs of childbirth sancti-
fied all pain. All growth and development,
every promise for the future, is conditioned
by pain. To ensure the eternal pleasure of
creation, the eternal affirmation of the vsfill to
live, the eternity of birth-pangs is absolutely
required. All this is signified by the word
Dionysus : I know no higher symbolism than
this Greek Dionysiac symbolism. In it the
deepest instinct of life, of the future of life,
the eternity of life, is experienced religiously;
generation, the way to life, is regarded as a
sacred way. Christianity alone, with its funda-
mental horror of life, has made sexuality an
impure thing, casting filth on the beginning,
the very condition, of our life.''

Between 1873 and 1876 Nietzsche wrote four
essays — on David Strauss, the Use and Abuse
of History in relation to Life, Schopenhauer as
an Educator, and Richard Wagner — which were
published as a series of Unzeitgemdsse Betracht-
ungen. The essay on Strauss was written soon
after the great war, amid the resulting outburst of
flamboyant patriotism and the widely-expressed
conviction that the war was a victory of " Ger-
man culture." Fresh from the world of Greece,
Nietzsche pours contempt on that assumption.
Culture, he says, is, above all, unity of artistic
style in every expression of a people's life. The
exuberance of knowledge in which a German

2

1 8 Affirmations.

glories is neither a necessary means of culture
nor a sign of it, being, indeed, more allied to the
opposite of culture — to barbarism. It is in this
barbarism that the modern German lives, that is
to say, in a chaotic mixture of all styles. Look
at his clothing, Nietzsche continues, his houses,
his streets, all his manners and customs. They
are a turmoil of all styles in which he peacefully
lives and moves. Such culture is really a phleg-
matic absence of all sense of culture. Largely,
also, it is merely a bad imitation of the real and
productive culture of France which it is sup-
posed to have conquered in 1870. Let there be
no chatter, he concludes, about the triumph of
German culture, for at present no real German
culture exists. The heroic figures of the
German past were not "classics," as some
imagine; they were seekers after a genuine
German culture, and so regarded themselves.
The would-be children of culture in Germany
to-day are Philistines without knowing it, and the
only unity they have achieved is a methodical
barbarism. Nietzsche attacks Strauss by no
means as a theologian, but as a typical '' culture-
Philistine." He was moved to this by the recent
publication of Der Alte und der Neue Glaube.
I can well understand the emotions with which
that book filled him, for I, too, read it soon after
its publication, and can vividly recall the painful
impression made on me by its homely pedes-

Nietzsche. 19

trianism, the dull unimaginativeness of the man
who could only compare the world to a piece
of machinery, an engine that creaks in the work-
ing, a sort of vast Lancashire mill in which we
must spend every moment in feverish labour,
and for our trouble perhaps be caught between
the wheels and cogs. But I was young, and my
youthful idealism, eager for some vital and
passionate picture of the world, inevitably
revolted against so tawdry and mechanical a
conception. Nietzsche, then and ever, failed to
perceive that there is room," after all, for the
modest sturdy bourgeois labourer who, at the
end of a hard life in the service of truth, sits
down to enjoy his brown beer and Haydn's
quartettes, and to repeat his homely confession
of faith in the world as he sees it. Nietzsche
failed to realise that Strauss's limitations were
essential to the work he had to do, and that he
remained a not unworthy follower of those
German heroes who were not "classics," but
honest seekers after the highest they knew. In
this hypertrophied repulsion for the everyday
work of the intellectual world we touch on a
defect in Nietzsche's temperament which we
must regard as fundamental, and which wrought
in him at last to wildest issues.

In another of these essays, Schopenhauer ah
Erzieher, Nietzsche sets forth his opinions con-
cerning his early master in philosophy. It is

20 Affirmations.

a significant indication of the qualities that
attracted him to Schopenhauer that he com-
pares him to Montaigne, thus at once revealing
his own essential optimism, and the admiration
which he then and always felt for the great
French masters of wisdom. He regards Scho-
penhauer as the leader from Kant's caves of
critical scepticism to the open sky with
its consoling stars. Schopenhauer saw the
world as a whole, and was not befooled by
the analysis of the colours and canvas where-
with the picture is painted. Kant, in spite of
the impulse of his genius, never became a
philosopher. "If any one thinks I am thus
doing Kant an injustice, he cannot know what
a philosopher is, i.e., not merely a great thinker
but also a real man ; " and he goes on to explain
that the mere scholar who is accustomed to let
opinions, ideas, and things in books always
intervene between him and facts, will never
see facts, and will never be a fact to himself;
whereas the philosopher must regard himself
as the symbol and abbreviation of all the facts
of the world. It remained an axiom with
Nietzsche that the philosopher must first of all
be a "real man."

In this essay, which Nietzsche always pre-
ferred to his other early works, he thus for the
first time clearly sets forth his conception of the
philosopher as a teacher, a liberator, a guide

Nietzsche. 21

to fine living; Schopenhauer's metaphysical
doctrine he casts aside with indifference. Un-
consciously, as in late years he seems to have
admitted, he was speaking of himself and setting
forth his own aims. Thus it is characteristic
that he here also first expressed his conception
of the value of individuality. Shakespeare had
asked :

" Which can say more
Than this rich praise, that you alone are you ? "

But Shakespeare was only addressing a single
beloved friend. Nietzsche addresses the same
thought to the common " you." " At bottom
every man well knows that he can only live one
single life in the world, and that never again
will so strange a chance shake together into
unity such singularly varied elements as he
holds: he knows that, but he hides it like a bad
conscience." This was a sane and democratic
individualism; in later years, as we shall see, it
assumed stranger shapes.

At Basel Nietzsche lived in close communion
with Wagner and Frau Cosima, who at this
time regarded him as the prophet of the music-
drama. The essay on Wagner, which starts
from the standpoint reached in the previous
essays, seems to justify this confidence. There
is a deep analogy for those to whom distance is
no obscuring cloud, Nietzsche remarks, between

22 Affirmations.

Kant and the Eleatics, Schopenhauer and
Empedocles, Wagner and ^schylus. " The
world has been orientalised long enough, and
men now seek to be hellenised." The Gordian
knot has been cut and its strands are fluttering
to the ends of the world; we need a series of
Anti-Alexanders mighty enough to bring to-
gether the scattered threads of life. Wagner
is such an Anti-Alexander, a great astringent
force in the world. For " it is not possible to
present the highest and purest operations of
dramatic art, and not therewith to renew morals
and the state, education and affairs." Bayreuth
is the sacred consecration on the morning of
battle. "The battles which art brings before
us are a simplification of the actual battles of
life; its problems are an abbreviation of the
endlessly involved reckoning of human action
and aspiration. But herein lies the greatness
and value of art, that it calls forth the appear-
ance of a simpler world, a shorter solution of the
problems of life. No one who suffers in life can
dispense with that appearance, just as no one can
dispense with sleep." Wagner has simplified the
world, Nietzsche continues ; he has related music
to life, the drama to music ; he has intensified the
visible things of the world, and made the audible
visible. Just as Goethe found in poetry an
expression for the painter's vocation he had
missed, so Wagner utilised in music his dramatic

Nietzsche. 23

instinct. And Nietzsche further notes the
democratic nature of Wagner's art, so strenu-
ously warm and bright as to reach even the
lowliest in spirit Wagner takes off the stigma
that clings to the word " common," and brings
to all the means of attaining spiritual freedom.
" For," says Nietzsche, " whosoever will be free,
must make himself free; freedom is no fairy's
gift to fall into any man's lap." Such are the
leading thoughts in an essay which remains an
interesting philosophic appreciation of the place
of Wagner's art in the modern world; yet one
may well admit that it is often over-strained,
with a strain that expresses the obscure struggle
of nascent antagonism.

It is, indeed, Wagner in Bayreuth which
brings to an end Nietzsche's first period, and
leads up to the crash which inaugurated his later
period. Hitherto Nietzsche's work was unques-
tionably sane both in substance and form. No
doubt it had called forth much criticism; work
so vigorous, sincere, and independent could not
fail to arouse hostility. But as we look back
to-day, these fine essays represent, with much
youthful enthusiasm, the best that was known
and thought in Germany a quarter of a century
ago. Nietzsche's opinions on Wagner and
Schopenhauer, on individualism and democracy,
the significance of early Hellenism for moderns,
the danger of an excessive historical sense, the

24 Affirmations.

conception of culture less as a striving after
intellectual knowledge than as that which
arouses within us the philosopher, the artist,
and the saint — all these ideas, wild as some of
them seemed to Nietzsche's German contempor-
aries, are the ideas which have now largely
permeated European culture. The same cannot
be said of his later ideas.

It was at the first Bayreuth festival in 1876
that this chapter in Nietzsche's life was finally
closed. His profound admiration for Wagner,
his intimate intercourse with the greatest figure
in the German world of art, had hitherto been
the chief fact in his life. All his ideals of life
and his hopes for the future had grown up
around the figure of Wagner, who seemed the
leader into a new Promised Land. During the
previous two years, however, Nietzsche had seen
little of Wagner, who had left Switzerland, and
he had been unable to realise either his own
development or Wagner's. Whatever enthusi-
asm Nietzsche may have felt in early life for
a return to German heathenism, he was yet
by race and training and taste by no means
allied to primitive Germanism; it was towards
Greece and towards France that his conception
of national culture really drew him. Wagner
was far more profoundly Teutonic, and in the
Nibelung cycle, which Nietzsche was about to
witness for the first time on the stage, Wagner

Nietzsche. 25

had incarnated the spirit of Teutonic heathenism
with an overwhelming barbaric energy which,
as Nietzsche could now realise, was utterly alien
to his own most native instincts. Thus it was
that Bayreuth marked the crisis of a subtle but
profound realisation, the most intense self-
realisation he had yet attained.

The whole history of this Wagner episode in
Nietzsche's life is full of interest. The circum-
stantial narrative in the second volume of the
Leben Nietzsche's renders it clear at every point,
and reveals a tragedy which has its significance
for the study of genius generally. Nietzsche,
it must be remembered, was more than thirty
years younger than Wagner. He was younger,
and also he was less corrupted by the world
than Wagner. The great artist of the music-
drama possessed, or had acquired, a practical
good sense in all that concerned the realisation
of his own mighty projects such as always
marks the greatest and most successful of the
world's supreme artists. Like Shakespeare, he
knew that the dyer's hand must ever be a little
subdued to what it works in, if the radiant
beauty of his stuffs is ever to be perfectly
achieved. But Nietzsche could never endure
any fleck on his hand; he shrank with horror
from every soiling contact; he was an artist
who regarded life itself as the highest art He
could never have carried through the rough

26 Affirmations,

task of dying the gorgeous garments of a
narrower but more perfectly attainable art.
Nietzsche's idealised admiration for Wagner
was complicated, after his appointment to the
Basel chair, by a deep personal friendship for
the Master, the chief friendship of his life. And
his friendships were deeper than those of most ;
although they show no traces of sexual tincture
they were hypertrophied by the defective sex-
uality of the man who always regarded friend-
ship as a more massive and poignant emotion
than love. That there were on either side any
petty faults to cause a rift in friendship there
is no reason whatever to believe. Nietzsche
was above such, and Wagner's friendship was
always hearty until he realised that Nietzsche
was no longer his disciple, and then he dropped
him, silently, as a workman drops a useless tool.
In addition it must be noted that Nietzsche was
probably at this time often over-strained, almost
hysterical, — at least so, we may gather, he im-
pressed Wagner, who urged him to marry a
rich wife and to travel, — and he was still
afflicted by a disorder which not even genius
can escape in youth, he was still something of
what we vulgarly call a " prig '' ; he had not
yet quite outgrown " the youthful Jesus in
the Temple." "Your brother with his air of
delicate distinction is a most uncomfortable
fellow," said Wagner to Frau Forster-Nietzsche;

Nietzsche. 27

" one can always see what he is thinking; some-
times he is quite embarrassed at my jokes — and
then I crack them more madly than ever."
Wagner's jokes, it appears, were of a homely
and plebeian sort, not appealing to one who
lived naturally and habitually in an atmosphere
of keen intellectual activity. Bearing all this
in mind, one can imagine the impression made
upon Nietzsche by the inaugural festival at
Bayreuth for which he had just written an
impassioned and yet philosophic prologue.
Wagner was absorbed in using all his consider-
able powers of managing men in finally van-
quishing the difficulties in his way. To any one
who could see the festival from the inside, as
Nietzsche was able to see it, there were all the
inevitable squabbles and scandals and comic
contretemps which must always mark the in-
ception of a great undertaking, but which to-
day are hidden from us, pilgrims from many
lands, as we ascend to that hillside structure
which is the chief living shrine of art in Europe.
And the people who were crowding in to this
" sacred consecration on the morning of battle "
were aristocrats and plutocrats — bejewelled,
corpulent, commonplace — headed by the old
Emperor, anxious to do his duty, decorously
joining in the applause as he whispered "Horrible!
horrible ! " to his aide-de-camp, and hurrying
away as quickly as possible to the military

28 Affirmations.

manoeuvres. There was more than enough here
to make his own just issued battle-cry seem
farcical to Nietzsche. All was conspiring to
one end. The conception of the sanctity of
Bayreuth, his personal reverence for Wagner
were slipping away together, and at the same time
he was forced to realise that the barbaric Ger-
manism of this overpowering Nibelung music
was not the music for him. His development
would inevitably have carried him away from
Wagner, but the festival brought on the crisis
with a sudden clash. Nietzsche had finally
conquered the mightiest of his false ideals, and
stood for ever after free and independent of all his
early gods; but the wounds of that victory were
never quite closed to the last: a completely
serene and harmonious conception of things, so
far as Wagner was concerned, Nietzsche never
attained.

It may well be that the change was also
physical. The excitement of the festival pre-
cipitated an organic catastrophe towards which
he had long been tending. His sister finds the
original source of this catastrophe in the war of
1870. He desired to serve his country as a com-
batant, but the University would only allow him
leave to attend to the wounded. The physical
and emotional over-tension involved by his con-
stant care of six young wounded men culminated
in a severe illness, which led on to a never-end-

Nietzsche. 29

ing train of symptoms — eye-troubles, dyspepsia,
headache, insomnia — which were perhaps aggra-
vated by the reckless use of drugs. I have
already noted passages which indicate that he
was himself aware of a consuming flame within,
and that from time to time he made efforts to
check its ravages. That it was this internal
flame which largely produced the breakdown
is shown by the narrative of Nietzsche's friend,
Dr. Kretzer, who was with him at Bayreuth.
It was evident he was seriously ill, Kretzer tells
us, utterly changed and broken down. His
eye-troubles were associated, if not with actual
brain disease, at all events with a high degree
of neurasthenia.^ At Bayreuth, Nietzsche was

1 The most convincing word-portrait of Nietzsche I have met
with (by M. Schur^) dates from the visit to Bayreuth : — "I was
struck both by the superiority of his intellect and the strangeness
of his face. A broad forehead, short hair brushed back, the
prominent cheek-bones of the Slav. The heavy moustache and
the bold outline of the face would have given him the aspect of
a cavalry officer if it had not been for his timid and haughty air.
The musical voice and slow speech indicated the artist's organi-
sation, while the circumspect meditative carriage was that of a
philosopher. Nothing more deceptive than the apparent calm
of his expression. The fixed eye revealed the painful travail of
thought. It was at once the eye of an acute observer and a
fanatical visionary. The double character of this gaze produced
a disquieted and disquieting impression, all the more so ^ince it
seemed to be always fixed on a single point. In moments of
effusion this gaze was softened to a dream-like sweetness, but
soon became hostile again." This picture is confirmed by
Nietzsche's sister, who also refers to his "unusually large,
beautiful, and brilliant eyes."

30 Affirmations.

forced to realise the peril of his position as
he had never realised it before. He could no
longer disguise from himself that he must break
with all the passionate interests of his past
It was an essential measure of hygiene, almost
a surgical operation. This is indeed how he
has himself put the matter. In the preface to
Der Fall Wagner, he said that it had been to
him a necessary self-discipline to take part
against all that was morbid within himself,
against Wagner, against Schopenhauer, against
all the impassioning interests of modern life,
and to view the world, so far as possible, with
the philosopher's eyes, from an immense height
And again he speaks of Wagner's art as a
beaker of ecstasy so subtle and profound that
it acts like poison and leaves no remedy at last
but flight from the siren's cave. Nietzsche was
henceforth in the position of a gouty subject
who is forced to abandon port wine and straight-
way becomes an apostle of total abstinence.
The remedy seems to have 'been fairly success-
ful. But the disease was in his bones. Im-
passioning interests that were far more subtly
poisonous slowly developed within him, and
twelve years later flight had become impossible,
even if he was still able to realise the need for
flight.

Nietzsche broke very thoroughly with his past,
yet the break has been exaggerated, and he

Nietzsche. 31

himself often helped to exaggerate it. He was
in the position of a beleaguered city which has
been forced to abandon its outer walls and
concentrate itself in the citadel ; and however
it may have been in ancient warfare, in spiritual
affairs such a state of things involves an offensive
attitude towards the former line of defence.
The positions we have abandoned constitute a
danger to the positions we have taken up.
Many of the world's fiercest persecutors have
but persecuted their old selves, and there seems
to be psychological necessity for such an atti-
tude. Yet a careful study of Nietzsche's earlier
activity reveals many germs of later develop-
ments. The critical attitude towards conven-
tional morality, the individualism, the optimism,
the ideal of heroism, which dominate his later
thought, exist as germs in his earlier work.
Even the flagrant contrast between Richard
Wagner in Bayreuth and Der Fall Wagner was
the outcome of a gradual development. In the
earlier essay Nietzsche had justly pointed out
that Wagner's instincts were fundamentally
dramatic. As years went on he brooded over
this idea ; the nimble and lambent wit of his
later days played around it until Wagner be-
came a mere actor in his work and in his life, a
rhetorician, an incarnate falsehood, the personi-
fication of latter-day decadence, the Victor Hugo
of music, the Bernini of music, the modern

32 Affirmations.

Cagliostro. At the same time he admits that
Wagner represents the modern spirit, and that
it is reasonable for a musician to say that
though he hates Wagner he can tolerate no
other music. The fact is, one may well repeat,
that Nietzsche was not Teuton enough to abide
for ever with Wagner. He compares him con-
temptuously with Hegel, cloud-compellers both,
masters of German mists and German mysticism,
worshippers of Wotan, the god of bad weather,
the god of the Germans. " How could they
miss what we, we Halcyonians, miss in Wagner
— la gaya scienza, the light feet, wit, fire, grace,
strong logic, the dance of the stars, arrogant
intellectuality, the quivering light of the south,
the smooth sea — perfection ? " It was scarcely,
however, the Halcyonian in Nietzsche that stood
between him and Wagner. That is well shown
by his attitude towards Parsifal. Whatever we
may think of the ideas embodied in Parsifal, it
may yet seem to us the most solemn, the most
graciously calm and beautiful spectacle that has
ever been fitly set to music. In Nietzsche the
thinker and the moralist were so much stronger
than the artist that he could, see nothing here
but bad psychology, bad thinking, and bad
religion.

The rebellion against Wagner was inevitable.
It is evident that Nietzsche had not gained com-
plete mastery of his own personality in his earlier

Nietzsche. 33

work. It is brilliant, full of fine perceptions and
critical insight, but as a personal utterance in-
complete. It renders the best ideas of the time,
not the best ideas that Nietzsche could contribute
to the time. The shock of 1876 may have been a
step towards the disintegration of his intellect, but
it was also a rally, a step towards a higher self-
realisation. Nietzsche had no genuine affinity
with Schopenhauer or with Wagner, though
they were helpful to his development ; he was
no pessimist, he was no democrat. As he himself
said, "I understood the philosophic pessimism
of the nineteenth century as the symptom of a
finer strength of thought, a more victorious
fulness of life. In the same way Wagner's
music signified to me the expression of a
Dionysiac mightiness of soul in which I seemed
to hear, as in an earthquake, the upheaval of
the primitive powers of life, after age-long re-
pression." Now he only needed relief, " golden,
tender, oily melodies," to soothe the leaden
weight of life, and these he found in Carmen.
Any discussion of the merits of the question
as between Wagner and Bizet, the earlier and
the later Nietzsche, seems to me out of place,
though much has been made of it by those who
delight to see a giant turn and rend himself.
Nietzsche himself said he was writing for psy-
chologists, and it is not unfair to add that it is
less " Wagner's case " that he presents to us than

3

34 Affirmations.

" Nietzsche's case." As to the merits of the
case, we may alike admit that Nietzsche's en-
thusiasm for Wagner was not excessive, and
that the pleasant things he said of Carmen are
fully justified; we may address both the early
and the late Nietzsche in the words habitually
used by the landlord of the " Rainbow" : " You're
both wrong and you're both right, as I alius
says." Most of the mighty quarrels that have
sent men to battle and the stake might have
been appeased had each side recognised that
both were right in their affirmations, both wrong
in their denials.

Nietzsche occupied his chair at Basel for some
years longer; in 1880 his health forced him to
resign and he was liberally pensioned. As a
professor he treated the most difficult questions
of Greek study, and devoted his chief attention
to his best pupils, who in their turn adored him.
Basel is an admirable residence for a cosmo-
politan thinker; it was easy for Nietzsche to
keep in touch with all that went on from Paris
to St Petersburg. He was also on terms of
more or less intimate friendship with the finest
spirits in Switzerland, with Keller the novelist,
Bocklin the painter, Burckhardt the historian.
We are told that he was a man of great per-
sonal charm in social intercourse. But his
associates at Basel never suspected that in this
courteous and amiable professor was stored up

Nietzsche. 35

an explosive energy which would one day be
felt in every civilised land. With pen in hand
his criticism of life was unflinching, his sincerity
arrogant ; when the pen was dropped he became
modest, reserved, almost timorous.

The work he produced between 1877 and
1882 seems to me to represent the maturity of
his genius. It includes Menschliches, Allzumen-
sMiches, Morgenroihe, and Die Frohliche Wis-
senschaft. In form all these volumes belong to
fensie literature. They deal with art, with re-
ligion, with morals and philosophy, with the
relation of all these to life. Nietzsche shows
himself in these pensies above all a freethinker,
emancipated from every law save that of sin-
cerity, wide-ranging, serious, penetrative, often
impassioned, as yet always able to follow his
own ideal of self-restraint.

After leaving Basel he spent the following
nine years chiefly at health resorts and in tra-
velling. We find him at Sorrento, Venice,
Genoa, Turin, Sils Maria, as well as at Leipzig.
Doubtless his fresh and poignant pens^es are
largely the outcome of strenuous solitary walks
in the Engadine or among the Italian lakes.
We may assume that during most of these
years he was fighting, on the whole successfully
fighting, for mental health. Yet passages that
occur throughout his books seem to suggest
that his thoughts may have sometimes turned

36 Affirmations.

to the goal towards which he was tending. It
is a mistake, he points out, to suppose that
insanity is always the symptom of a degenerat-
ing culture, although to nod towards the asylum
is a convenient modern way of slaying spiritual
tyrants ; it is in primitive and developing stages
of culture that insanity has played its chief
part ; only by virtue of what seemed to be the
"Divine" turbulence of insanity and epilepsy
could any new moral law make progress among
early cultures. Just as for us there seems a
little madness in all genius, so for them there
seemed a little genius in all madness; sorcerers
and saints agonised in solitude and abstinence
for some gleam of madness which would bring
them faith in themselves and openly justify their
mission.

What may perhaps be called Nietzsche's third
period began in 1883 with Also sprach Zara-
thustra, the most extraordinary of all his works,
mystical and oracular in form, but not mystical
in substance. Zarathustra has only a distant
relationship to his prototype Zoroaster, though
Nietzsche had a natural sympathy with the
symbolism of fire and water, with the reverence
for light and purity, which mark the rites asso-
ciated with the name of the Bactrian prophet;
he has here allowed himself to set forth his
own ideas and ideals in the free and oracular
manner of all ancient scriptures, and is thus

Nietsscke. 37

enabled to present his visions in a concrete
form. Zarathustra, for the first and last time,
gave scope to the artist within Nietzsche, and
with all its extravagance and imperfection it
must remain for good or evil his most per-
sonal utterance. It was followed by Jenseits
von Gut und B'dse, Zur Genealogie der Moral,
Der Fall Wagner, and Gdtzenddmmerung. It is
during this period that we trace the growth of
the magnification of his own personal mission
which finally became a sort of megalomania.
(" I have given to men the deepest book they
possess, my Zarathustra" he wrote towards the
end.) In form the books of this period are
sometimes less fragmentary than those of the
second period ; in substance they are marked
by their emphatic, often extravagant, almost
reckless insistence on certain views of morality.
If in the first period he was an apostle of culture,
in the second a freethinker, pronouncing judg-
ment on all things in heaven and earth, he was
now exclusively a moralist, or, as he would
prefer to say, an immoralist It was during this
period that he worked out his " master morality"
— the duty to be strong — in opposition to the
" slave morality" of Christianity, with its glorifi-
cation of weakness and pity, and that he con-
sistently sought to analyse and destroy the
traditional conceptions of good and evil on which
our current morality rests. The last work which

38 Affirmations.

he planned, but never completed, was a re-valua«
tion of all values, Umwerthung aller Werthe,
which would have been his final indictment of
the modern world, and the full statement of his
own immoralism and Dionysiac philosophy.

It is sometimes said that Nietzsche's mastery
of his thought and style was increasing up to
the last. This I can scarcely admit, even as
regards style. No doubt there is at the best a
light and swift vigour of movement in these last
writings which before he had never attained.
He can pour out now a shimmering stream of
golden phrases with which he has intoxicated
himself, and tries to intoxicate us. We may
lend ourselves to the charm, but it has no
enduring hold. This master of gay or bitter
invective no longer possesses the keenly reasoned
and piercing insight of the earlier Nietzsche.
We feel that he has become the victim of
obsessions which drive him like a leaf before
the wind, and all his exuberant wit is unsub-
stantial and pathetic as that of Falstaff. The
devouring flame has at length eaten the core
out of the man and his style, leaving only this
coruscating shell. And at a touch even this
thin shell collapsed into smouldering embers.

From a child Nietzsche was subject to strangely
prophetic dreams. In a dream which, when a
boy, he put into literary form, he tells how he
seemed to be travelling forward amid a glorious

Nietzsche. 39

landscape, while carolling larks ascended to the
clouds, and his whole life seemed to stretch
before him in a vista of happy years ; " and
suddenly a shrill cry reached our ears ; it came
from the neighbouring lunatic asylum." Even
in 1876 his friends began to see that Nietzsche
attached extraordinary importance to his own
work. After he wrote Zarathustra, this self-
exaltation increased, and began to find expres-
sion in his work. Latterly, it is said, he came
to regard himself as the incarnation of the genius
of humanity. It has always been found a
terrible matter to war with the moral system
of one's age ; it will have its revenge, one way
or another, from within or from without, what-
ever happens after. Nietzsche strove for nothing
less than to remodel the moral world after his
own heart's desire, and his brain was perishing
of exhaustion in the immense effort. In 1889 —
at the moment when his work at last began to
attract attention — he became hopelessly insane.
A period of severe hallucinatory delirium led on
to complete dementia, and he passes beyond our
sight

II.

Nietzsche was by temperament a philosopher
after the manner of the Greeks. In other words,
philosophy was not to him, as to the average
modem philosopher, a matter of books and the

40 Affirmations.

study, but a life to be lived. It seemed to him
to have much less concern with "truth" than
with the essentials of fine living. He loved
travel and movement, he loved scenery, he loved
cities and the spectacle of men ; above all, he
loved solitude. The solitude of cities drew him
strongly; he envied Heraclitus his desert study
amid the porticoes and peristyles of the immense
temple of Diana. He had, however, his own
favourite place of work, to which he often
alludes, the Piazza di San Marco at Venice,
amid the doves, in front of the strange and
beautiful structure which he " loved, feared, and
envied;" and here in the spring, between ten
o'clock and midday, he found his best philo-
sophic laboratory.

It was in Italy that Nietzsche seems to have
found himself most at home, although there are
no signs that he felt any special sympathy with
the Italians, that is to say in later than Renais-
sance days. For the most part he possessed
very decided sympathies and antipathies. His
antipathy to his own Germans lay in the nature
of things. Every prophet's message is primarily
directed to his own people. And Nietzsche was
unsparing in his keen criticism of the Germans.
He tells somewhere with a certain humour how
people abroad would ask him if Germany had
produced of late no great thinker or artist, no
really good book, and how with the courage of

Nietzsche. 41

despair he would at last reply, "Yes, Bismarck!"
Nietzsche was willing enough to recognise the
kind of virtue personified in Bismarck. But
with that recognition nearly all was said in
favour of Germany that Nietzsche had to say.
There is little in the German spirit that answered
to his demands. He admired clearness, analytic
precision, and highly organised intelligence, light
and alert. He saw no sufficient reason why
profundity should lack a fine superficies, nor
why strength should be ungainly. His in-
stinctive comparison for a good thinker was
always a good dancer. As a child he had been
struck by seeing a I'ope-dancer, and throughout
life dancing seemed to him the image of the
finest culture, supple to bend, strong to retain
its own equilibrium, an exercise demanding the
highest training and energy of all the muscles
of a well-knit organism. But the indubitable
intellectual virtues of the bulky and plodding
German are scarcely those which can well be
symbolised by an Otero or a Caicedo. " There
is too much beer in the German intellect,"
Nietzsche said. For the last ten centuries
Germany has wilfully stultified herself; "no-
where else has there been so vicious a misuse
of the two great European narcotics, alcohol
and Christianity," to which he was inclined to
add music. ("The theatre and music," he re-
marked in Die Frohliche Wissenschaft, "are

42 Affirmations.

the haschisch and betel of Europeans, and the
history of the so-called higher culture is largely
the history of narcotics.") "Germans regard
bad writing," he said, " as a national privilege ;
they do not write prose as one works at a
statue, they only improvise." Even "German
virtue " — and this was the unkindest cut of all —
had its origin in eighteenth century France, as
its early preachers, such as Kant and Schiller,
fully recognised. Thus it happens that the
German has no perceptions — coupling his
Goethe with a Schiller, and his Schopenhauer
with a Hartmann — and no tact, " no finger for
nuances" his fingers are all claws. The few
persons of high culture whom he had met in
Germany, he noted towards the end of his life,
and especially Frau Cosima Wagner, were all of
French origin. Nietzsche regarded it as merely
an accident that he was himself born in Ger-
many, just as it was merely an accident that
Heine the Jew, and Schopenhauer the Dutch-
man, were born there. Yet, as I have already
hinted, we may take these utterances too
seriously. There are passages in his works —
though we meet them rarely — which show that
Nietzsche recognised and admired the elemental
energy, the depth and the contradictions in the
German character; he attributed them largely
to mixture of races.

Nietzsche was not much attracted to the

Nietzsche. 43

English. It is true that he names Landor
as one of the four masters of prose this century
has produced, while another of these is Emerson,
with whom he had genuine affinity, although his
own intellect was keener and more passionate,
with less sunny serenity. For Shakespeare, also,
his admiration was deep. And when he had
outgrown his early enthusiasm for Schopenhauer,
the fine qualities which he still recognised in that
thinker — his concreteness, lucidity, reasonable-
ness — seemed to him English. He was usually
less flattering towards English thought Dar-
winism, for instance, he thought, savoured too
much of the population question, and was
invented by English men of science who were
oppressed by the problems of poverty. The
struggle for existence, he said, is only an excep-
tion in nature; it is exuberance, an even reckless
superfluity, which rules. For English philosophic
thought generally he had little but contempt.
J. S. Mill was one of his "impossibilities"; the
English and French sociologists of to-day, he
said, have only known degenerating types of
society, devoid of organising force, and they
take their own debased instincts as the standard
of social codes in general. Modern democracy,
modern utilitarianism, are largely of English
manufacture, and he came at last to hate them
both. During the past century, he asserted,
they have reduced the whole spiritual currency

44 Affirmations.

of Europe to a dull plebeian level, and they are
the chief causes of European vulgarity. It is
the English, he also asserted — George Eliot, for
instance — who, while abolishing Christian belief,
have sought to bolster up the moral system
which was created by Christianity, and which
must necessarily fall with it. It is, moreover,
the English, who with this democratic and
utilitarian plebeianism have seduced and per-
verted the fine genius of France.

Just as we owe to England the vulgarity
which threatens to overspread Europe, so to
France we owe the conception of a habit of
nobility, in every best sense of the word. On
that point Nietzsche's opinion never wavered.
The present subjection of the French spirit to
this damnable Anglo-mania, he declared, must
never lead us to forget the ardent and pas-
sionate energy, the intellectual distinction, which
belonged to the France of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries.^ The French, as Nietzsche

^ One may be allowed to regret that Nietzsche was not equally
discriminating in his judgment of our country. Had he not
been blinded by the spiritual plebeianism of the nineteenth
century in England, he might also have discerned in certain
periods some of the same ardent and heroic qualities which he
recognised in sixteenth century France, the more easily since
at that time the same Renaissance wave had effected a consider-
able degree of spiritual union between France and England.
In George Chapman, for instance, at his finest and lucidest
moments the typical ethical representative of our greatest literary
age, Nietzsche would have found a man after his own heart,

Nietzsche. 45

always held, are the one modern European
nation which may be compared with the Greeks.
In Menschliches, Allzumenschliches he names six
French writers — Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld,
La Bruyere, Fontenelle (in the Dialogues des
Marts), Vauvenarges, Chamfort — who bring us
nearer to Greek antiquity than any other group
of modern authors, and contain more real
thought than all the books of the German
philosophers put together. The only French
writer of the present century for whom he
cared much (putting aside M^rimde) was
Stendhal, who possesses some of the characters
of the earlier group. The French, he points
out, are the most Christian of all nations, and
have produced the greatest saints. He enumer-
ates Pascal ("the first among Christians, who
was able to unite fervour, intellect, and candour;
— think of what that means !"), F^nelon, Mme. de
Guyon, De Ranc6, the founder of the Trappists
who have flourished nowhere but in France, the
Huguenots, Port-Royal — truly, he exclaims, the
great French freethinkers encountered foemen
worthy of their steel ! The land which produced
the most perfect types of Anti-Christianity pro-

not only one who scarcely yielded to himself in generous admir-
ation of the great qualities of the French spirit but a man of
" absolute and fiill soul " who was almost a precursor of his
own " immoralism," a lover of freedom, of stoic self-reliance,
one who was ever seeking to enlarge the discipline of a fine
culture in the direction of moral freedom and dignity.

46 Affirmatidni.

duced also the most perfect types of Christianity.
He defends, also, that seeming superficiality
which in a great Frenchman, he says, is but
the natural epidermis of a rich and deep nature,
while a great German's profundity is too often
strangely bottled up from the light in a dark
and contorted phial.

I have briefly stated Nietzsche's feeling as
regards each of the three chief European
peoples, because we are thus led up to the
central points of his philosophy — his attitude
towards modern religion and his attitude to-
wards modern morals. We are often apt to
regard these matters as of little practical im-
portance; we think it the reasonable duty of
practical social politics to attend to the im-
mediate questions in hand, and leave these
wider questions to settle themselves. Rightly
or wrongly, that was not how Nietzsche looked
at the matter. He was too much of a philo-
sopher, he had too keen a sense of the vital
relation of things, to be content with the policy
of tinkering society, wherever it seems to need
mending most badly, avoiding any reference to
the whole. That is our English method, and
no doubt it is a very sane and safe method, but,
as we have seen, Nietzsche was not in sympathy
with English methods. His whole significance
lies in the thorough and passionate analysis with
which he sought to dissect and to dissolve, first,

Nietzsche. 47

" German culture," then Christianity, and lastly,
modern morals, with all that these involve.

It is scarcely necessary to point out, that
though Nietzsche rejoiced in the title of free-
thinker, he can by no means be confounded
with the ordinary secularist He is not bent
on destroying religion from any anaesthesia of
the religious sense, or even in order to set up
some religion of science which is practically no
religion at all. He is thus on different ground
from the great freethinkers of France, and to
some extent of England. Nietzsche was himself
of the stuff of which great religious teachers are
made, of the race of apostles. So when he
writes of the founder of Christianity and the
great Christian types, it is often with a poignant
sympathy which the secularist can never know;
and if his knife seems keen and cruel, it is not
the easy indifferent cruelty of the pachyder-
matous scoffer. When he analyses the souls of
these men and the impulses which have moved
them, he knows with what he is dealing : he is
analysing his own soul.

A mystic Nietzsche certainly was not ; he had
no moods of joyous resignation. It is chiefly
the religious ecstasy of active moral energy that
he was at one with. The sword of the spirit is
his weapon rather than the merely defensive
breastplate of faith. St. Paul is the consum-
mate type of such religious forces, and whatever

48 Affirmations.

Nietzsche wrote of that apostle — the Inventor of
Christianity, as he truly calls him — is peculiarly
interesting. He hates him, indeed, but even
his hatred thrills with a tone of intimate sym-
pathy. It is thus in a remarkable passage in
Morgenrothe, where he tells briefly the history
and struggles of that importunate soul, so super-
stitious and yet so shrewd, without whom there
would have been no Christianity. He describes
the self-torture of the neurotic, sensual, refined
"Jewish Pascal," who flagellated himself with
the law that he came to hate with the hatred of
one who had a genius for hatred ; who in one
dazzling flash of illumination realised that Jesus
by accomplishing the law had annihilated it, and
so furnished him with the instrument he desired
to wreak his passionate hatred on the law, and
to revel in the freedom of his joy. Nietzsche
possesses a natural insight in probing the
wounds of self-torturing souls. He excels also
in describing the effects of extreme pain in
chasing away the mists from life, in showing
to a man his own naked personality, in bringing
us face to face with the cold and terrible fact.
It is thus that, coupling the greatest figure in
history with the greatest figure in fiction, he
compares the pathetic utterance of Jesus on the
cross — " My God, my God, why hast thou for-
saken me?" — with the disillusionment of the
dying Don Quixote. Of Jesus himself he

Nietzsche. 49

speaks no harsh word, but he regarded the
atmosphere of Roman decay and languor —
though very favourable for the production of
fine personalities — as ill-adapted to the develop-
ment of a great religion. The Gospels lead us
into the atmosphere of a Russian novel, he
remarks in one of his last writings, Der Anti-
christ, an atmosphere in which the figuie of
Jesus had to be coarsened to be understood; it
became moulded in men's minds by memories of
more familiar types — prophet, Messiah, wonder-
worker, judge; the real man they could not
even see. " It must ever be a matter for regret
that no Dostoievsky lived in the neighbourhood
of this most interesting dicadent, I mean some
one who could understand the enthralling charm
of just this mixture of the sublime, the morbid,
and the child-like." Jesus, he continues, never
denied the world, the state, culture, work; he
simply never knew or realised their existence ;
his own inner experience — " life," " light,"
"truth" — was all in all to him. The only
realities to him were inner realities, so living
that they make one feel "in Heaven" and
" eternal " ; this it was to be " saved." And
Nietzsche notes, as so many have noted before
him, that the fact that men should bow the
knee in Christ's name to the very opposite of all
these things, and consecrate in the "Church"
all that he threw behind him, is an insoluble

4

50 Affirmations.

example of historical irony. " Strictly speaking,
there has only been one Christian, and he died
on the cross. The Gospel died on the cross."

There may seem a savour of contempt in the
allusion to Jesus as an "interesting dicadent"
and undoubtedly there is in Der Antichrist a
passionate bitterness which is not found in
Nietzsche's earlier books. But he habitually
used the word dicadent in a somewhat extended
and peculiar sense. The decadent, as Nietzsche
understood him, was the product of an age in
which virility was dead and weakness was
sanctified ; it was so with the Buddhist as well
as with the Christian, they both owe their origin
and their progress to " some monstrous disease
of will." They sprang up among creatures who
craved for some " Thou shalt," and who were apt
only for that one form of energy which the weak
possess, fanaticism. By an instinct which may
be regarded as sound by those who do not
accept his disparagement of either, Nietzsche
always coupled the Christian and the anarchist;
to him they were both products of decadence.
Both wish to revenge their own discomfort on
this present world, he asserted, the anarchist
immediately, the Christian at the last day.
Instead of feeling,"/ am worth nothing,'' the
decadent says, "Life is worth nothing," — a
terribly contagious state of mind which has
covered the world with the vitality of a tropical

Nietzsche. 5 1

jungle. It cannot be too often repeated,
Nietzsche continues, that Christianity was born
of the decay of antiquity, and on the degenerate
people of that time it worked like a soothing
balm ; their eyes and ears were sealed by age
and they could no longer understand Epicurus
and Epictetus. At such a time purity and
beneficence, large promises of future life, worked
sweetly and wholesomely. But for fresh young
barbarians Christianity is poison. It produces
a fundamental enfeeblement of such heroic,
childlike, and animal natures as the ancient
Germans, and to that enfeeblement, indeed, we
owe the revival of classic culture ; so that the
conclusion of the whole matter is here, as ever,
Nietzsche remarks, that " it is impossible to say
whether, in the language of Christianity, God
owes more thanks to the Devil, or the Devil to
God, for the way in which things have come
about" But in the interaction of the classic
spirit and the Christian spirit, Nietzsche's own
instincts were not on the side of Christianity,
and as the years went on he expresses himself
in ever more unmeasured language. He could
not take up the Imitation of Christ — the very
word " imitation " being, as indeed Michelet had
said before, the whole of Christianity — without
physical repugnance. And in the Gotzenddm-
merung" he compares the Bible with the Laws
of Manu (though at the same time asserting that

52 Affirmations.

it is a sin to name the two books in the same
breath) : " The sun lies on the whole book. All
those things on which Christianity vents its
bottomless vulgarity — procreation, for example,
woman, marriage — are here handled earnestly
and reverently, with love and trust. I know no
book in which so many tender and gracious
things are said about women as in the Laws of
Manu." Again in Der Antichrist — which repre-
sents, I repeat, the unbalanced judgments of
his last period — he tells how he turns from Paul
with delight to Petronius, a book of which it
can be said e tutto festo, "immortally sound,
immortally serene." In the whole New Testa-
ment, he adds, there is only one figure we can
genuinely honour — that of Pilate.

On the whole, Nietzsche's attitude towards
Christianity was one of repulsion and antagon-
ism. At first he appears indifferent, then he
becomes calmly judicial, finally he is bitterly
hostile. He admits that Christianity possesses
the virtues of a cunningly concocted narcotic to
soothe the leaden griefs and depressions of men
whose souls are physiologically weak. But from
first to last there is no sign of any genuine
personal sympathy with the religion of the
poor in spirit. Epicureanism, the pagan doc-
trine of salvation, had in it an element of Greek
energy, but the Christian doctrine of salvation,
he declares, raises its sublime development of

Nietzsche. 53

hedonism on a thoroughly morbid foundation.
Christianity hates the body ; the first act of
Christian triumph over the Moors, he recalls,
was to close the public baths which they had
everywhere erected. "With its contempt for
the body Christianity was the greatest mis-
fortune that ever befell humanity." And at the
end of Der Antichrist he sums up his concen-
trated hatred : " I condemn Christianity ; I raise
against the Christian Church the most terrible
accusation that any accuser has ever uttered.
It is to me the most profound of all thinkable
corruptions."

It is scarcely necessary to add that Nietzsche's
condemnation of Christianity extended to the
Christian God. He even went so far as to
assert that it was the development of Christian
morality itself — " the father-confessor sensitive-
ness of the Christian conscience translated and
sublimed into a scientific conscience" — which
had finally conquered the Christian God. He
held that polytheism had played an important
part in the evolution of culture. Gods, heroes,
supernatural beings generally, were inestimable
schoolmasters to bring us to the sovereignty of
the individual. Polytheism opened up divine
horizons of freedom to humanity. "Ye shall
be as gods." But it has not been so with
monotheism. The doctrine of a single God, in
whose presence all others were false gods,

54 Affirmations.

favours stagnation and unity of type; mono-
theism has thus perhaps constituted "the
greatest danger which humanity has had to
meet in past ages." Nor are we yet freed from
its influence. "For centuries after Buddha
died men showed his shadow in a cave — a vast
terrible shadow. God is dead : but thousands
of years hence there will probably be caves in
which his shadow may yet be seen. And we —
we must go on fighting that shadow ! " How
deeply rooted Nietzsche believed faith in a god
to be is shown by the fantastic conclusion to
Zarathustra. A strange collection of Ueber-
menschen — the men of the future — are gathered
together in Zarathustra's cave : two kings, the
last of the popes — thrown out of work by
the death of God — and many miscellaneous
creatures, including a donkey. As Zarathustra
returns to his cave he hears the sound of prayer
and smells the odour of incense ; on entering
he finds the Uebermenschen on their knees in-
toning an extraordinary litany to the donkey,
who has " created us all in his own image.''

In his opposition to the Christian faith and
the Christian God, Nietzsche by no means stands
alone, however independent he may have been
in the method and standpoint of his attack.
But in his opposition to Christian morality he
was more radically original. There is a very
general tendency among those who reject

Nietzsche, 5 5

Christian theology to shore up the superstruc-
ture of Christian morality which rests on that
theology. George Eliot, in her writings at all
events, has been an eloquent and distinguished
advocate of this process ; Mr. Myers, in an oft-
quoted passage, has described with considerable
melodramatic vigour the "sibyl in the gloom"
of the Trinity Fellows' Garden at Cambridge,
who withdrew God and Immortality from his
grasp, but, to his consternation, told him to go
on obeying Duty. What George Eliot pro-
posed was one of those compromises so dear
to our British minds. Nietzsche would none
of it. Hence his contemptuous treatment of
George Eliot, of J. S. Mill, of Herbert Spencer,
and so many more of our favourite intellectual
heroes who have striven to preserve Christian
morality while denying Christian theology.
Nietzsche regarded our current moral ideals,
whether formulated by bishops or by anarchists,
as alike founded on a Christian basis, and when
that foundation is sapped they cannot stand.

The motive of modern morality is pity, its
principle is altruistic, its motto is " Love your
neighbour as yourself," its ideal self-abnegation,
its end the greatest good of the greatest number.
All these things were abhorrent to Nietzsche,
or so far as he accepted them, it was in forms
which gave them new values. Modern morality,
he said, is founded on an extravagant dread of

56 Affirmations.

pain, in ourselves primarily, secondarily in
others. Sympathy is fellow-suffering; to love
one's neighbour as oneself is to dread his pain
as we dread our own pain. The religion of love
is built upon the fear of pain. " On n'est bon
que par la piti^ ; " the acceptance of that doc-
trine Nietzsche considers the chief outcome of
Christianity, although, he thinks, not essential
to Christianity, which rested on the egoistic
basis of personal salvation : " One thing is
needful." But it remains the most important
by-product of Christianity, and has ever been
gaining strength. Spinoza and Kant stood
firmly outside the stream, but the French free-
thinkers, from Voltaire onwards, were not to be
outdone in this direction by Christians, while
Comte with his " Vivre pour autrui" even out-
Christianised Christianity, and Schopenhauer in
Germany, J. S. Mill in England, carried on the
same doctrine. "The great question of life,"
said Benjamin Constant in Adolphe — and it is
a saying that our finest emotions are quick to
echo — " is the pain that we cause."

Both the sympathetic man and the unsym-
pathetic man, Nietzsche argues, are egoists. But
the unsympathetic man he held to be a more
admirable kind of egoist. It is best to win the
strength that comes of experience and suffering,
and to allow others also to play their own cards
and win the same strength, shedding our tears

Nietzsche. 57

in private, and abhorring soft-heartedness as the
foe of all manhood and courage. To call the
unsympathetic man "wicked," and the sympa-
thetic man "good," seemed to Nietzsche a
fashion in morals, a fashion which will have its
day. He believed he was the first to point out
the danger of the prevailing fashion as a sort
of moral impressionism, the outcome of the
hyperesthesia peculiar to periods of decadence.
Not indeed that Christianity is, or could be,
carried out among us to its fullest extent :
" That would be a serious matter. If we were
ever to become the object to others of the same
stupidities and importunities which they expend
on themselves, we should ilee wildly as soon as
we saw our 'neighbour' approach, and curse
sympathy as heartily as we now curse egoism."
Our deepest and most personal griefs, Nietzsche
remarks elsewhere, remain unrevealed and in-
comprehensible to nearly all other persons,
even to the "neighbour" who eats out of
the same dish with us. And even though
my grief should become visible, the dear sym-
pathetic neighbour can know nothing of its
complexity and results, of the organic economy
of my soul. That my grief may be bound up
with my happiness troubles him little. The
devotee of the " religion of pity " will heal my
sorrows without a moment's delay; he knows
not that the path to my Heaven must lie

58 Affirmations.

through my own Hell, that happiness and
unhappiness are twin sisters who grow up to-
gether, or remain stunted together.

" Morality is the mob-instinct working in the
individual." It rests, Nietzsche asserts, on two
thoughts : " the community is worth more than
the individual," and " a permanent advantage is
better than a temporary advantage ; " whence
it follows that all the advantages of the com-
munity are preferable to those of the individual.
Morality thus becomes a string of negative
injunctions, a series of " Thou shalt nots," with
scarcely a positive command amongst them ;
witness the well-known table of Jewish com-
mandments. Now Nietzsche could not endure
mere negative virtues. He resented the subtle
change which has taken place in the very
meaning of the word " virtue," and which has
perverted it from an expression of positive
masculine qualities into one of merely negative
feminine qualities. In his earliest essay he
referred to " active sin " as the Promethean
virtue which distinguishes the Aryans. The
only moral codes that commended themselves
to him were those that contained positive com-
mands alone : " Do this ! Do it with all your
heart, and all your strength, and all your
dreams ! — and all other things shall be taken
away from you ! " For if we are truly devoted
to the things that are good to do we need

Nietzsche. 59

trouble ourselves little about the things that are
good to leave undone.

Nietzsche compared himself to a mole boring
down into the ground and undermining w^hat
philosophers have for a couple of thousand years
considered the very surest ground to build on
— the trust in morals. One of his favourite
methods of attack is by the analysis of the
" conscience." He points out that whatever we
were regularly required to do in youth by those
we honoured and feared created our "good
conscience." The dictates of conscience, how-
ever urgent, thus have no true validity as
regards the person who experiences them.
" But," some one protests, " must we not trust
our feelings ? " " Yes," replies Nietzsche, " trust
your feelings, but still remember that the in-
spiration which springs from feelings is the
grandchild of an opinion, often a false one, and
in any case not your own. To trust one's
feelings — that means to yield more obedience
to one's grandfather and grandmother and their
grandparents than to the gods within our own
breasts: our own reason and our own experi-
ence." Faith in authority is thus the source of
conscience; it is not the voice of God in the
human heart but the voice of man. The sphere
of the moral is the sphere of tradition, and a
man is moral because he is dependent on a
tradition and not on himself. Originally every-

6o Affirmations.

thing was within the sphere of morals, and it
was only possible to escape from that sphere by
becoming a law-giver, medicine-man, demigod
— that is to say by making morals. To be
customary is to be moral, — I still closely follow
Nietzsche's thought and expression, — to be
individual is to be wicked. Every kind of
originality involves a bad conscience. Nietzsche
insists with fine eloquence, again and again,
that every good gift that has been given to man
put a bad conscience into the heart of the giver.
Every good thing was once new, unaccustomed,
immoral, and gnawed at the vitals of the finder
like a worm. Primitive men lived in hordes,
and must obey the horde-voice within them.
Every new doctrine is wicked. Science has
always come into the world with a bad con-
science, with the emotions of a criminal, at least
of a smuggler. No man can be disobedient to
custom and not be immoral, and feel that he is
immoral. The artist, the actor, the merchant,
the freethinker, the discoverer, were once
all criminals, and were persecuted, crushed,
rendered morbid, as all persons must be when
their virtues are not the virtues idealised by the
community. The whole phenomena of morals
are animal-like, and have their origin in the
search for prey and the avoidance of pursuit

Progress is thus a gradual emancipation from
morals. We have to recognise the services of

Nietzsche. 6i

the men who fight in this struggle against
morals, and who are crushed into the ranks of
criminals. Not that we need pity them. " It
is a new justice that is called for, a new
mot d^ordre. We need new philosophers. The
moral world also is round. The moral world
also has its antipodes, and the antipodes also
have their right to exist A new world remains
to be discovered — and more than one! Hoist
sail, O philosophers ! "

"Men must become both better and wickeder."
So spake Zarathustra; or, as he elsewhere has
it, " It is with man as with a tree, the higher he
would climb into the brightness above, the more
vigorously his roots must strive earthwards,
downwards, into the darkness and the depths —
into the wicked." Wickedness is just as in-
dispensable as goodness. It is the ploughshare
of wickedness which turns up and fertilises the
exhausted fields of goodness. We must no
longer be afraid to be wicked; we must no
longer be afraid to be hard. " Only the noblest
things are very hard. This new command, O
my brothers, I lay upon you — become hard."

In renewing our moral ideas we need also to
renew our whole conception of the function and
value of morals. Nietzsche advises moralists
to change their tactics: "Deny moral values,
deprive them of the applause of the crowd,
create obstacles to their free circulation; let

62 Affirmations.

them be the shame-faced secrets of a few
solitary souls; forbid morality! In so doing
you may perhaps accredit these things among
the only men whom one need have on one's
side, I mean heroic men. Let it be said of
morality to-day as Meister Eckard said: 'I
pray God that he may rid me of God ! ' " We
have altogether over-estimated the importance
of morality. Christianity knew better when
it placed " grace " above morals, and so also
did Buddhism. And if we turn to literature,
Nietzsche maintains, it is a vast mistake to
suppose that, for instance, great tragedies have,
or were intended to have, any moral effect
Look at Macbeth, at Tristan und Isolde, at
CEdipus. In all these cases it would have been
easy to make guilt the pivot of the drama. But
the great poet is in love with passion. " He
calls to us: It is the charm of charms, this
exciting, changing, dangerous, gloomy, yet often
sun-filled existence ! It is an adventure to live
— take this side or that, it will always be the
same ! ' So he speaks to us out of a restless
and vigorous time, half drunken and dazed with
excess of blood and energy, out of a wickeder
time than ours is; and we are obliged to set to
rights the aim of a Shakespeare and make it
righteous, that is to say, to misunderstand it"

We have to recognise a diversity of moral
ideals. Nothing is more profoundly dangerous

Nietzsche. 63

than, with Kant, to create impersonal categorical
imperatives after the Chinese fashion, to general-
ise " virtue," " duty," and " goodness," and sacri-
fice them to the Moloch of abstraction. " Every
man must find his own virtue, his own categori-
cal imperative;" it must be founded on inner
necessity, on deep personal choice. Only the
simpleton says : " Men ought to be like this or
like that" The real world presents to us a
dazzling wealth of types, a prodigious play of
forms and metamorphoses. Yet up comes a
poor devil of a moralist, and says to us : " No !
men ought to be something quite different!"
and straightway he paints a picture of himself
on the wall, and exclaims : " Ecce homo ! " But
one thing is needful, that a man should attain
the fullest satisfaction. Every man must be his
own moralist.

These views might be regarded as "lax," as
predisposing to easy self-indulgence. Nietzsche
would have smiled at such a notion. Not yield-
ing, but mastering, was the key to his personal
morality. " Every day is badly spent," he said,
"in which a man has not once denied himself;
this gymnastic is inevitable if a man will retain
the joy of being his own master." The four
cardinal virtues, as Nietzsche understood morals,
are sincerity, courage, generosity, and courtesy.
" Do what you will," said Zarathustra, " but first
be one of those who are able to will. Love your

64 Affirmations.

neighbour as yourself — but first be one of those
who are able to love themselves!' And again
Zarathustra spoke : " He who belongs to me
must be strong of bone and light of foot, eager
for fight and for feast, no sulker, no John o'
Dreams, as ready for the hardest task as for a
feast, sound and hale. The best things belong
to me and mine, and if men give us nothing,
then we take them : the best food, the purest
sky, the strongest thoughts, the fairest women ! "
There was no desire here to suppress effort and
pain. That Nietzsche regarded as a mark of
modern Christian morals. It is pain, more pain
and deeper, that we need. The discipline of
suffering alone creates man's pre-eminence.
" Man unites in Kmself the creature and" the
creator: there is in him the stuff of things,
the fragmentary and the superfluous, clay, mud,
madness, chaos ; but there is also in him the
creator, the sculptor, the hardness of the
hammer, the divine blessedness of the spectator
on the seventh da.y." Do you pity, he asks,
what must be fashioned, broken, forged, refined
as by fire ? But our pity is spent on one thing
alone, the most effeminate of all weaknesses —
pity. This was the source of Nietzsche's
admiration for war, and indifference to its
horror; he regarded it as the symbol of that
spiritual warfare and bloodshed in which to him
all human progress consisted. He might, had

Nietzsche. 65

he pleased, have said with the Jew and the
Christian, that without shedding of blood there
shall be no remission of sins. But with a
difference, for as he looked at the matter, every
man must be his own saviour, and it is his own
blood that must be shed ; there is no salvation
by proxy. That was expressed in his favourite
motto : Virescit volnere virtus.

Nietzsche's ideal man is the man of Epictetus,
as he describes him in Morgenr'dthe, the laconic,
brave, self-contained man, not lusting after ex-
pression like the modem idealist The man
whom Epictetus loved hated fanaticism, he
hated notoriety, he knew how to smile. And
the best was, added Nietzsche, that he had no
fear of God before his eyes ; he believed firmly
in reason, and relied, not on divine grace, but
on himself. Of all Shakespeare's plays Julius
CcBsar seemed to Nietzsche the greatest, because
it glorifies Brutus ; the finest thing that can be
said in Shakespeare's honour, Nietzsche thought,
was that — aided perhaps by some secret and
intimate experience — he believed in Brutus and
the virtues that Brutus personified. In course
of time, however, while not losing his sympathy
with Stoicism, it was Epicureanism, the heroic
aspects of Epicureanism, which chiefly appealed
to Nietzsche. He regarded Epicurus as one of
the world's greatest men, the discoverer of the
heroically idyllic method of living a philosophy ;

S

66 Affirmations.

for one to whom happiness could never be more
than an unending self-discipline, and whose ideal
of life had ever been that of a spiritual nomad,
the methods of Epicurus seemed to yield the
finest secrets of good living. Socrates, with his
joy in life and in himself, was also an object of
Nietzsche's admiration. Among later thinkers,
Helvetius appealed to him strongly. Goethe and
Napoleon were naturally among his favourite
heroes, as were Alcibiades and Caesar. The
latest great age of heroes was to him the Italian
Renaissance. Then came Luther, opposing the
rights of the peasants, yet himself initiating a
peasants' revolt of the intellect, and preparing
the way for that shallow plebeianism of the
spirit which has marked the last two centuries.

Latterly, in tracing the genealogy of modern
morals, Nietzsche's opinions hardened into a
formula. He recognised three stages of moral
evolution : first, the /^^-^uriz/ period of primitive
times, when the beast of prey was the model of
conduct, and the worth of an action was judged
by its results. Then came the moral period,
when the worth of an action was judged not by
its results, but by its origin ; this period has
been the triumph of what Nietzsche calls slave-
morality, the morality of the mob ; the goodness
and badness of actions is determined by atavism,
at best by survivals ; every man is occupied in
laying down laws for his neighbour instead of

Nietzsche. 67

for himself, and all are tamed and chastised into
weakness in order that they may be able to
obey these prescriptions. Nietzsche ingeniously
connected his slave-morality with the accepted
fact that for many centuries the large, fair-
haired aristocratic race has been dying out in
Europe, and the older down-trodden race —
short, dark, and broad-headed — has been slowly
gaining predominance. But now we stand at
the threshold of the extra-moral period. Slave-
morality, Nietzsche asserted, is about to give way
to master-morality ; the lion will take the place
of the camel. The instincts of life, refusing to
allow that anything is forbidden, will again
assert themselves, sweeping away the feeble
negative democratic morality of our time. The
day has now come for the man who is able to
rule himself, and who will be tolerant to others
not out of his weakness, but out of his strength ;
to him nothing is forbidden, for he has passed
beyond goodness and beyond wickedness.

III.

So far I have attempted to follow with little
or no comment what seems to me the main
current of Nietzsche's thought. It may be
admitted that there is some question as to
which is the main current For my own part
I have no hesitation in asserting that it is the

68 Affirmations.

current which expands to its fullest extent
between 1876 and 1883 in what I term
Nietzsche's second or middle period ; up to
then he had not gained complete individuality;
afterwards began the period of uncontrolled
aberrations. Thus I am inclined to pass
lightly over the third period, during which the
conception of " master-morality " attained its
chief and most rigid emphasis, although I
gather that to Nietzsche's disciples as to his
foes this conception seems of primary import-
ance. This idea of " master-morality " is in
fact a solid fossilised chunk, easy to handle for
friendly or unfriendly hands. The earlier and
more living work — the work of the man who
truly said that it is with thinkers as with
snakes : those that cannot shed their skins die
— is less obviously tangible. So the '' master-
morality" it is that your true Nietzschian is
most likely to close his fist over. It would be
unkind to say more, for Nietzsche himself has
been careful to scatter through his works, on
the subject of disciples and followers generally,
very scathing remarks which must be sufficiently
painful to any faithful Nietzschian.

We are helped in understanding Nietzsche's
philosophic significance if we understand his
precise ideal. The psychological analysis of
every great thinker's work seems to reveal some
underlying fundamental image or thought —

Nietzsche. 6g

often enough simple and homely in character —
which he has carried with him into the most
abstract regions. Thus Fraser has found good
reason to suppose that Hegel's main ideas were
suggested by the then recent discovery of
galvanism. In Nietzsche's case this key is
to be found in the persistent image of an
attitude. As a child, his sister tells us, he had
been greatly impressed by a rope-dancer who
had performed his feats over the market-place at
Naumburg, and throughout his work, as soon as
he had attained to real self-expression, we may
trace the image of the dancer. " I do not know,"
he somewhere says, " what the mind of a philo-
sopher need desire more than to be a good dancer.
For dancing is his ideal, his art also, indeed
his only piety, his 'divine worship.'" In all
Nietzsche's best work we are conscious of
this ideal of the dancer, strong, supple, vigorous,
yet harmonious and well-balanced. It is the
dance of the athlete and the acrobat rather than
the make-believe of the ball-room, and behind
the easy equipoise of such dancing lie patient
training and effort. The chief character of
good dancing is its union of the maximum
of energetic movement with the maximum of
well-balanced grace. The whole muscular
system is alive to restrain any excess, so that
however wild and free the movement may
seem it is always measured ; excess would

JO Affirmations.

mean ignominious collapse. When in his later
years Nietzsche began, as he said, to "philoso-
phise with the hammer," and to lay about him
savagely at every hollow " idol " within reach,
he departed from his better ideal of dancing,
and his thinking became intemperate, reckless,
desperate.

Nietzsche had no system, probably because
the idea that dominated his thought was an
image, and not a formula, the usual obsession
of philosophers, such as may be clapped on the
universe at any desired point. He remarks in
one place that a philosopher believes the worth
of his philosophy to lie in the structure, but
that what we ultimately value are the finely
carven and separate stones with which he
builded, and he was clearly anxious to supply
the elaborated stones direct. In time he
came to call himself a realist, using the term,
in no philosophic sense, to indicate his reverence
for the real and essential facts of life, the things
that conduce to fine living. He desired to
detach the " bad conscience " from the things
that are merely wicked traditionally, and to
attach it to the things that are anti-natural,
anti-instinctive, anti-sensuous. He sought to
inculcate veneration for the deep-lying sources
of life, to take us down to the bed-rock of life,
the rock whence we are hewn. He held that
man, as a reality, with all his courage and

Nietzsche. 71

cunning, is himself worthy of honour, but that
man's ideals are absurd and morbid, the mere
dregs in the drained cup of life ; or, as he
eventually said — and it is a saying which will
doubtless seal his fate in the minds of many
estimable persons — man's ideals are his only
partie honteuse, of which we may avoid any
close examination. Nietzsche's " realism " was
thus simply a vigorous hatred of all dreaming
that tends to depreciate the value of life,
and a vivid sense that man himself is the ens
realissimum.

A noteworthy point in Nietzsche's concep-
tion of philosophy is his increasingly clear
conception of its fundamentally psychological
character. I mean to say that Nietzsche knows
that a man's philosophy, to be real, must be the
inevitable outcome of his own psychic con-
stitution. It is a point that philosophers have
never seen. Perhaps Nietzsche was the first,
however hesitatingly, to realise it It is only
in the recognition of this fact that the eirenicon
of philosophies — and one might add, of religions
— can ever be found. The philosopher of old
said: "This is »«j/ conception of the universe;"
it was well. But he was apt to add : " It is the
conception of the universe," and so put himself
hopelessly in the wrong. It is as undignified
to think another man's philosophy as to wear
another man's cast-off clothes. Only the poor

72 Affirmations.

in spirit or in purse can find any satisfaction in
doing either. A philosophy or religion can
only fit the man for whom it was made.
"There has only been one Christian," as
Nietzsche put it, " and he died on the cross."
But why waste energy in trying to manufacture
a second Christian ? We may be very sure
that we can never find another Christian whom
Christianity would fit so admirably as it once
fitted Christ. Why not rest content with
Christ ? Let Brown be a Brownite and Robin-
son a Robinsonian. It is not good that they
should exchange their philosophies, or that
either should insist on thrusting his threadbare
misfits on Jones, who prefers to be metaphysi-
cally naked. When men have generally begun
to realise this the world will be a richer and
an honester world, and a pleasanter one as well.
That Nietzsche had vaguely begun to realise it
seems to me his chief claim to distinction in the
purely philosophic field.

To recognise the free and direct but dis-
connected nature of Nietzsche's many-sided
vision of the world is to lessen the force of his
own antagonisms as well as of the antagonisms
he has excited. Much of Nietzsche's work,
especially in the third period, is the utterance of
profound half-truths, keenly and personally felt,
but still half-truths of which he has himself
elsewhere supplied the complements. The

Nietzsche. 73

reason is that during that period he was not
so much expressing himself as appealing pas-
sionately against himself to those failing forces
whose tonic influence he thirsted after. The
hardness, the keen sword, the reckless energy
he idealised were the things that had slipped
utterly away and left him defenceless to the
world. He grew to worship cruel strength as
the consumptive Keats, the sickly Thoreau, loved
beauty and health, with " the desire of the moth
for the star." Such an attitude has its Tightness
and power, so long as we understand it, though
it comes short of the serenity of the greatest
spirits who seek, like Goethe, to live at each
moment in the whole. The master-morality of
Nietzsche's later days, on which friends and foes
have alike insisted, is a case in point. This
appears to have been hailed, or resented, as a
death-blow struck at the modern democratic
regime. To take a broad view of Nietzsche's
philosophic attitude is to realise that both views
are alike out of place. On this matter, as on
many others, Nietzsche moved in a line which
led him to face an opposite direction in his
decay from that which he faced in his imma-
turity. He began by regarding democracy as
the standard of righteousness, and ended by
asserting that the world only exists for the pro-
duction of a few great men. It would be foolish
to regard either of the termini as the last out-

74 Affirmations.

post of wisdom. But in the passage between
these two points many excellent things are said
by the way. Nietzsche was never enamoured
of socialism or democracy for its own sake;
reasonably enough, he will not even admit that
we have yet attained democracy; though the
horses, indeed, are new, as yet "the roads are
the same old roads, the wheels the same old
wheels." But he points out that the value of
democracy lies in its guarantee of individual
freedom: Cyclopean walls are being built, with
much toil and dust, but the walls will be a
rampart against any invasion of barbarians or
any new slavery, against the despotism of capital
and the despotism of party. The workers may
regard the walls as an end in themselves; we
are free to value them for the fine flowers of
culture which will grow in the gardens they
inclose. To me, at least, this attitude of
Nietzsche's maturity seems the ample justifi-
cation of democracy.

Nietzsche was not, however, greatly interested
in questions of government ; he was far more
deeply interested in questions of morals. In
his treatment of morals — no doubt chiefly in
the last period — -there is a certain element of
paradox. It must again be pointed out that
this is to be explained by the organic demands
of Nietzsche's own nature. In attacking the
excessive tendency to sympathy which he

Nietzsche. 75

seemed to see around him he was hygienically
defending himself from his own excessive sym-
pathy. His sister quotes with a smile the
declaration that his Paradise lay beneath the
shadow of his sword ; we scarcely need her
assurance of his tender-hearted sensitiveness.
He could attack relentlessly, but he never
attacked a person save as the symbol of what
he regarded as a false principle held in un-
deserved honour. When he realised that the
subject of such attack was really a living person
he was full of remorse. He attacked Strauss
because Strauss was the successful representa-
tive of a narrow ideal of culture ; a few months
later Strauss died, having, it now appears,
borne the onset philosophically enough, and
Nietzsche was full of grief lest he had em-
bittered the dying man's last houra It was
because he had himself suffered from the
excesses of his own sympathy that he was
able so keenly to analyse the secrets of sym-
pathy. He spoke as the Spanish poet says
that every poet — and indeed every seer — must
always speak, /or la boca de su herida, through
the mouth of his wound. That is why his voice
is often so poignantly intimate ; it is also why
we sometimes find this falsetto note of paradox.
In his last period, Nietzsche grows altogether
impatient of morals, calls himself an immoralist,
fervently exhorts us to become wickeder. But

^6 Affirmations,

if any young disciple came to the teacher
asking, " What must I do to become wickeder ? "
it does not appear that Nietzsche bade him to
steal, bear false witness, commit adultery, or
do any other of the familiar and commonly-
accepted wickednesses. Nietzsche preached
wickedness with the same solemn exaltation
that Carducci lauded Satan. What he desired
was far indeed from any rehabilitation of easy
vice ; it was the justification of neglected and
unsanctified virtues.

At the same time, and while Nietzsche's
immoralist is just as austere a person as the
mere moralists who have haunted the world
for many thousand years, it is clear that
Nietzsche wished strictly to limit the sphere
of morals. He never fails to point out how
large a region of life and art lies legitimately out-
side the moral jurisdiction. In an age in which
many moralists desire to force morals into every
part of life and art — and even assume a certain
air of virtue in so doing — the " immoralist " who
lawfully vindicates any region for free cultivation
is engaged in a proper and wholesome task.

No doubt, however, there will be some to
question the value of such a task. Nietzsche
the immoralist can scarcely be welcome in every
camp, although he remains always a force to
be reckoned with. The same may be said of
Nietzsche the freethinker. He was, perhaps.

Nietzsche. yy

the typical freethinker of the age that comes
after Renan. Nietzsche had nothing of Renan's
genial scepticism and smiling disillusionment;
he was less tender to human weakness, for all
his long Christian ancestry less Christian, than
the Breton seminarist remained to the last He
seems to have shaken himself altogether free of
Christianity — so free, that except in his last
period he even speaks of it without bitterness
— though by no means wholly untouched
by that nostalgia of the cloister which now
and then pursues even those of us who are
farthest from any faith in Christian dogma.
He never sought, as among ourselves Pater
sought, the germ of Christianity in things
pagan, the undying essence of paganism in
things Christian. Heathen as he was, I do
not think even Heine's visions of the gods in
exile could have touched him ; he never felt
the charm of fading and faded things. It is
remarkable. It is scarcely less remarkable that,
far as he was from Christianity, he was equally
far from what we usually call " paganism,"
the pasteboard paganism of easy self-indulg-
ence and cheerful irresponsibility. It was not
so that he understood Hellenism. Matthew
Arnold once remarked that the Greeks were
never sick or sad. Nietzsche knew better.
The greater part of Greek literature bears
witness that the Hellenes were for ever

78 Affirmations.

wrestling with the problems of pain. And
none who came after have more poignantly
uttered the pangs of human affairs, or more
sweetly the consolations of those pangs, than
the great disciples of the Greeks who created
the Roman world. The classic world of nymphs
and fauns is an invention of the moderns. The
real classic world, like the modern world, was
a world of suffering. The difference lay in the
method of facing that suffering. Nietzsche
chose the classic method from no desire to
sport with Amaryllis in the shade, but because
he had known forms of torture for which the
mild complacencies of modern faith seemed to
offer no relief. If we must regard Nietzsche
as a pagan, it is as the Pascal of paganism.
The freethinker, it is true, was more cheerful
and hopeful than the believer, but there is the
same tragic sincerity, the same restless self-
torment, the same sense of the abyss.^

' Pater's description of the transition we may trace from the
easy prose of Pascal's first book to the "perpetual agonia" ai
his later work, applies with scarcely a change to the similar
transition in Nietzsche : — " Everywhere in the Letters he had
seemed so great a master— a master of himself— never at a loss,
taking the conflict so lightly, with so light a heart : in the great
Atlantean travail of the Thoughts his feet sometimes ' are almost
gone.' In his soul's agony theological abstractions seem to
become personal powers. ... In truth, into his typical
diagnosis, as it may seem, of the tragedy of the human soul,
there have passed not merely the personal feelings, the tempera-
ment of an individual, but his malady also, a physical malady."

Nietzsche. 79

There still remains Nietzsche, the apostle of
culture, the philosopher engaged in the criticism
of life. From first to last, wherever you open
his books, you light on sayings that cut to the
core of the questions that every modern thinking
man must face. I take, almost at random, a
few passages from a single book : of convictions
he writes that "a man possesses opinions as he
possesses fish, in so far as he owns a fishing-net;
a man must go fishing and be lucky, then he
has his own fish, his own opinions ; I speak of
living opinions, living fish. Some men are
content to possess fossils in their cabinets —
and convictions in their heads.'' Of the
problem of the relation of science to culture
he says well : " The best and wholesomest
thing in science, as in mountains, is the air that
blows there. It is because of that air that we
spiritual weaklings avoid and defame science ;"
and he points out that the work of science —
with its need for sincerity, infinite patience,
complete self-abnegation — calls for men of
nobler make than poetry needa When we
have learnt to trust science and to learn from
it, then it will be possible so to tell natural
history that " every one who hears it is inspired
to health and gladness as the heir and continuer
of humanity." This is how he rebukes those
foolish persons who grow impatient with critics :
" Remember that critics are insects who only

8o Affirmations.

sting to live and not to hurt : they want our
blood and not our pain." And he utters this
wise saying, himself forgetting it in later years:
" Growth in wisdom may be exactly measured
by decrease in bitterness." Nietzsche desires
to prove nothing, and is reckless of consistency.
He looks at every question that comes before
him with the same simple, intent, penetrative
gaze, and whether the aspects that he reveals
are new or old, he seldom fails to bring us a
fresh stimulus. Culture, as he understood it,
consists for the modern man in the task of
choosing the simple and indispensable things
from the chaos of crude material which to-day
overwhelms us. The man who will live at the
level of the culture of his time is like the juggler
who must keep a number of plates spinning in
the air ; his life must be a constant training in
suppleness and skill so that he may be a good
athlete. But he is also called on to exert his
skill in the selection and limitation of his task.
Nietzsche is greatly occupied with the simpli-
fication of culture. Our suppleness and skill
moist be exercised alone on the things that are
vital, essential, primitive ; the rest may be
thrown aside. He is for ever challenging the
multifarious materials for culture, testing them
with eye and hand ; we cannot prove them too
severely, he seems to say, nor cast aside too
contemptuously the things that a real man has

Nietzsche. 8i

no need of for fine living. What must I do to
be saved? What do I need for the best and
fullest life? — that is the everlasting question
that the teacher of life is called upon to answer.
And we cannot be too grateful to Nietzsche for
the stern penetration — the more acute for his
ever-present sense of the limits of energy — with
which he points from amid the mass to the
things which most surely belong to our eternal
peace.

Nietzsche's style has often been praised. The
style was certainly the man. There can be
little doubt, moreover, that there is scarcely any
other German style to compare with it, though
such eminence means far less in a country
where style has rarely been cultivated than it
would mean in France or even England.
Sallust awoke his sense for style, and may
account for some characteristics of his style.
He also enthusiastically admired Horace as the
writer who had produced the maximum of energy
with the minimum of material. A concentrated
Roman style, significant and weighty at every
point, are ferennius, was always his ideal. Cer-
tainly the philologist's aptitudes helped here to
teach him the value and force of words, as jewels
for the goldsmith to work with, and not as mere
worn-out counters to slip through the fingers.
One may call it a muscular style, a style
wrought with the skilful strength of hand and

6

82 Affirmations.

arm. It scarcely appeals to the ear. It lacks
the restful simplicity of the greatest masters,
the plangent melody, the seemingly unconscious
magic quivering along our finest-fibred nerves.
Such effects we seem to hear now and again in
Schopenhauer, but rarely or never from any
other German. This style is titanic rather than
divine, but the titanic virtues it certainly pos-
sesses in fullest measure : robust and well-tem-
pered vigour, concentration, wonderful plastic
force in moulding expression. It becomes
over-emphatic at last. When Nietzsche threw
aside the dancer's ideal in order to " philosophise
with the hammer,'' the result on his style was
as disastrous as on his thought ; both alike took
on the violent and graceless character of the
same implement He speaks indeed of the
virtue of hitting a nail on the head, but it
is a less skilled form of virtue than good
dancing.

Whether he was dancing or hammering, how-
ever, Nietzsche certainly converted the whole of
himself into his work, as in his view every philo-
sopher is bound to do, " for just that art of
transformation is philosophy." That he was
entirely successful in being a "real man" one
may doubt. His excessive sensitiveness to the
commonplace in life, and his deficiency in the
sexual instinct — however highly he may have
rated the importance of sex in life — largely cut

Nietzsche. 83

him off from true fellowship with the men who
are most "real" to us. He was less tolerant
and less humane than his master Goethe ; his
incisive insight, and, in many respects, better
intellectual equipment, are more than compen-
sated by this lack of breadth. But, as his friend
the historian Burckhardt has said, he worked
mightily for the increase of independence in
the world. Every man, indeed, works with
the limitations of his qualities, just as we all
struggle beneath the weight of the superin-
cumbent atmosphere; our defects are even a
part of our qualities, and it would be foolish to
quarrel with them. Nietzsche succeeded in
being himself, and it was a finely rare success.
Whether he was a "real man" matters less. With
passionate sincerity he expressed his real self and
his best self, abhorring, on the one hand, what
with Voltaire and Verlaine he called "litera-
ture," and, on the other, all that mere indigested
material, the result of mental dyspepsia, of
which he regarded Carlyle as the supreme
warning. A man's real self, as he repeated so
often, consists of the things which he has truly
digested and assimilated ; he must always " con-
quer" his opinions; it is only such conquests
which he has the right to report to men as his
own. His thoughts are born of his pain ; he
has imparted to them of his own blood, his own
pleasure and torment. Nietzsche himself held

84 Affirmations.

that suffering and even disease are almost in-
dispensable to the philosopher ; great pain is
the final emancipator of the spirit, those great
slow pains that take their time, and burn us up
like green wood. " I doubt whether such pain
betters us," he remarks, " but I know that it
deepens us." That is the stuff of Nietzsche's
Hellenism, as expressed in the most light-
hearted of his books. Virescit volnere virtus.
It is that which makes him, when all is said, a
great critic of life.

It is a consolation to many — I have seen it so
stated in a respectable review — that Nietzsche
went mad. No doubt also it was once a con-
solation to many that Socrates was poisoned,
that Jesus was crucified, that Bruno was burnt.
But hemlock and the cross and the stake
proved sorry weapons against the might of
ideas even in those days, and there is no reason
to suppose that a doctor's certificate will be
more effectual in our own. Of old time we
killed our great men as soon as their visionary
claims became inconvenient ; now, in our mercy,
we leave the tragedy of genius to unroll itself to
the bitter close. The devils to whom the modern
Faustus is committed have waxed cunning with
the ages. Nietzsche has met, in its most re-
lentless form, the fate of Pascal and Swift and
Rousseau. That fact may carry what weight it
will in any final estimate of his place as a moral

Nietzsche. 85

teacher: it cannot touch his position as an
aboriginal force. He remains in the first rank
of the distinguished and significant personalities
our century has produced.

86

CASANOVA.

There are few more delightful books in the
world than Casanova's M^moires. — That is a
statement I have long vainly sought to see in
print. It is true, one learns casually that various
eminent literary personages have cherished a
high regard for this autobiography, have even
considered it the ideal autobiography, that
Wendell Holmes was once heard defending
Casanova, that Thackeray found him good
enough to steal from. But these eminent
personages — and how many more we shall
never know — locked up the secret of their
admiration for this book in some remote casket
of their breasts ; they never confided it to the
cynical world. Every properly constituted
" man of letters " has always recognised that
any public allusion to Casanova should begin
and end with lofty moral reprobation of his
unspeakable turpitude.

No doubt whatever — and this apart from the
question as to whether his autobiography should
be counted as moral or immoral literature —
Casanova delivered himself bound into the

Casanova. 87

hands of the moralists. He recognised this ;
his autobiography, as he himself truly said,
was " a confession, if ever there was one." But
he wrote at the end of a long and full life, in the
friendly seclusion of a lonely Bohemian castle,
when all things had become indifferent to him
save the vivid memories of the past. It
mattered little to him that the whirlwind of
1789 had just swept away the eighteenth
century together with the moral maxims that
passed current in that century. We have to
accept these facts at the outset when we
approach Casanova. And if a dweller in the
highly respectable nineteenth century may be
forgiven a first exclamation of horror at Casa-
nova's wickedness, he has wofully failed in
critical insight if he allows that exclamation
to be his last word concerning these M^moires.
There are at least three points of view from
which Casanova's Mimoires are of deep and
permanent interest. In the first place they '
constitute an important psychological docu-
ment as the full and veracious presentation of
a certain human type in its most complete
development. In the second place, as a mere
story of adventure and without reference to
their veracity, the Memories have never been
surpassed, and only equalled by books written
on a much smaller scale. In the third place,
we here possess an unrivalled picture of the

88 Affirmations.

eighteenth century in its most characteristic
aspects throughout Europe.

I.

Casanovi lived in an age which seems to
have been favourable to the spontaneous revela-
tion of human nature in literature. It vs^as not
only the age in which the novel reached full
development ; it was the age of diaries and
autobiographies. Pepys, indeed, though he died
in the eighteenth century, had written his diary
long before ; but during Casanova's lifetime
Boswell was writing that biography which is
so wonderful largely because it is so nearly
an autobiography. Casanova's communicative
countryman, Gozzi, was also his contemporary.
Rousseau's Confessions only preceded Casanova's
M^moires by a few years, and a little later Restif
de la Bretonne wrote Monsieur Nicolas, and
Madame Roland her M^moires Particulieres.
All these autobiographies are very unlike Casa-
nova's. They mostly seem to present the
shady sides of otherwise eminent and respectable
lives. The highly-placed government official
of versatile intellectual tastes exhibits himself
as a monster of petty weaknesses ; the eloquent
apostle of the return to Nature uncovers the
corroding morbidities we should else never
suspect; the philanthropic pioneer in social

Casanova. 89

reform exposes himself in a state of almost
maniacal eroticism ; the austere heroine who
was nourished on Plutarch confesses that she
is the victim of unhappy passion. We are
conscious of no such discords in Casanova's
autobiography. Partly it may be because we
have no other picture of Casanova before our
eyes. Moreover, he had no conventional ideals
to fall short of; he was an adventurer from the
first. " I am proud because I am nothing," he
used to say. He could not boast of his birth;
he never held high position ; for the greatest
part of his active career he was an exile ; at
every moment of his life he was forced to rely
on his own real and personal qualities. But
the chief reason why we feel no disturbing
discord in Casanova's M^moires lies in the
admirable skill with which he has therein
exploited his unquestionable sincerity. He is*''
a consummate master in the dignified narration
of undignified experiences. Fortified, it is true,
by a confessed and excessive amour propre, he
never loses his fine sense of equilibrium, his
power of presenting his own personality broadly
and harmoniously. He has done a few dubious
things in his time, he seems to say, and now and
again found himself in positions that were
ridiculous enough ; but as he looks back he
feels that the like may have happened to any
of us. He views these things with complete

90 Affirmations.

human tolerance as a necessary part of the
whole picture, which it would be idle to slur
over or apologise for. He records them simply,
not without a sense of humour, but with no
undue sense of shame. In his heart, perhaps,
he is confident that he has given the world one
of its greatest books, and that posterity will
require of him no such rhetorical justification
as Rousseau placed at the head of his Con-
fessions.

In the preface to the M^moires, Casanova is
sufficiently frank. He has not scrupled, he tells
us, to defraud fools and rascals, " when neces-
sary," and he has never regretted it. But such
incidents have been but episodes in his life.
He is not a sensualist, he says, for he has never
neglected his duty — " when I had any " — for the
allurements of sense ; yet the main business of
his life has ever been in the world of sense ;
" there is none of greater importance." " I have
always loved women and have done my best
to make them love me. I have also delighted
in good cheer, and I have passionately followed
whatever has excited my curiosity." Now in
old age he reviews the joys of his life. He has
learnt to be content with one meal a day, in
spite of a sound digestion, but he recalls the
dishes that delighted him : Neapolitan macaroni,
Spanish olla podrida, Newfoundland cod, high-
flavoured game, old cheese (has he not collected

Casanova. 91

material for a Dictionnaire des Frontages ?), and
without any consciousness of abrupt transition
he passes on to speak of the fragrant sweetness
of the women he had loved. Then with a smile
of pity he turns on those who call such tastes
depraved, the poor insensate fools who think
the Almighty is only able to enjoy our sorrow
and abstinence, and bestows upon us for nought
the gift of self-respect, the love of praise, the
desire to excel, energy, strength, courage, and
the power to kill ourselves when we will. And
with the strain of Stoicism which is ever present
to give fibre to his Epicureanism, he quotes the
maxim which might well belong to both philo-
sophies : " Nemo laeditur nisi a seipso."

The fact that Casanova was on one side a
Venetian must count for something in any
attempt to explain him. Not indeed that
Venice ever produced more than one Casanova;
I would imply no such disrespect to Venice — or
to Casanova — but the racial soil was favourable
to such a personality. The Venetians are a
branch of a more northern people who long
since settled by the southern sea to grow
mellow in the sunshine. It suited them well,
for they expanded into one of the finest races
in Christendom, and certainly one of the least
Christian races there, a solid, well-tempered
race, self-controlled and self-respecting. The
Venetian genius is the genius of sensuous en-

92 Affirmations.

joyment, of tolerant humanity, of unashamed
earthliness. Whatever was sane and stable in
Casanova, and his instinctive distaste for the
morbid and perverse, he owes to his Venetian
maternal ancestry. If it is true that he was not
a mere sensualist, it was by no means because
of his devotion to duty — "when I had any," —
but because the genuine sensualist is only
alive on the passive side of his nature, and in
Casanova's nervous system the development of
the sensory fibres is compensated and held in
balance by the equal vigour of the motor fibres ;
what he is quick to enjoy he is strong and alert
to achieve. Thus he lived the full and varied
life that he created for himself at his own good
pleasure out of nothing, by the sole power of
his own magnificent wits. And now the self-
sufiicing Venetian sits down to survey his work
and finds that it is good. It has not always
been found so since. A " self-made " man, if
ever there was one, Casanova is not revered by
those who worship self-help. The record of his
life will easily outlive the largest fortune ever
made in any counting-house, but the life itself
remains what we call a " wasted " life. Thrift,
prudence, modesty, scrupulous integrity, strict
attention to business — it is useless to come to
Casanova for any of these virtues. They were
not even in his blood ; he was only half
Venetian.

Casanova 93

The Casanova family was originally Spanish,
The first Casanova on record was a certain Don
Jacobo, of illegitimate birth, who in the middle
of the fifteenth century became secretary to
King Alfonso. He fell in love with a lady
destined to the religious life, and the day
after she had pronounced her vows he carried
her off from her convent to Rome, where
he finally obtained the forgiveness and bene-
diction of the Pope. The son of this union,
Don Juan, killed an officer of the King of
Naples, fled from Rome, and sought fortune
with Columbus, dying on the voyage. Don
Juan's son, Marcantonio, secretary to a cardinal,
was noted in his day as an epigrammatic poet;
but his satire was too keen, and he also had to
flee from Rome. His son became a colonel,
and, unlike his forefathers, died peacefully, in
extreme old age, in France. In this soldier's
grandson, Casanova's father, the adventurous
impulsiveness of the family again came out;
he ran away from home at nineteen with a
young actress, and himself became an actor;
subsequently he left the actress and then fell
in love with a young Venetian beauty of
sixteen, Zanetta Farusi, a shoemaker's daughter.
But a mere actor could find no favour in a
respectable family, so the young couple ran
away and were married ; the hero of these
Mimoires, born on the 2nd April, 1725, was

94 Affirmations.

their first-born. There is probably no reason
to doubt the substantial accuracy of this family
history, but if one desired to invent an ancestry
for Casanova he could scarcely better it.

His race helps to account for Casanova, but
the real explanation of the man can only lie in
his own congenital organisation. That he was
a radically abnormal person is fairly clear. Not
that he was morbid either in body or mind.
On the contrary, he was a man of fine presence,
of abounding health — always looking ten years
younger than his age — of the most robust
appetites, a great eater, who delighted to see
others, especially women, eat heartily also, a
man of indubitable sexual vigour ; however
great the demands he rhade upon his physical
energy it seldom failed, to respond, and his
capacity for rest was equally great ; he could
sleep nineteen hours at a stretch. His mental
health was not less sound. The most punctilious
alienist, with this frank and copious history
before him, could not commit Casanova to an
asylum. Whatever offences against social codes
he may have committed, Casanova can scarcely
be said to have sinned against natural laws.
' He was only abnormal because so natural a
person within the gates of civilisation is neces-
sarily abnormal and at war with his environ-
ment. Far from being the victim of morbidities
and perversities, Casanova presents to us the

Casanova. 95

natural man in excelsis. He was a man for
whom the external world existed, and who
reacted to all the stimuli it presents t» the
healthy normal organism. His intelligence was
immensely keen and alert, his resourcefulness,
his sagacious audacity, his presence of mind,
were all of the first order. He was equally
swift to feel, to conceive, and to act. His
mental organisation was thus singularly har-
monious, and hence his success in gratifying
his eager and immense appetite for the world,
an appetite unsatiated and insatiable even to
the last, or he would have found no pleasure
in writing these M^moires. Casanova has been
described as a psychological type of instability.
That is to view him superficially. A man who
adapts himself so readily and so effectively to
any change in his environment or in his desires
only exhibits the instability which marks the
most intensely vita! organisms. The energy
and ability which Casanova displayed in gratify-
ing his instincts would have sufficed to make a
reputation of the first importance in any depart-
ment, as a popular statesman, a great judge, a
merchant prince, and enabled him to die worn
out by the monotonous and feverish toil of the
senate, the court, or the counting-house. Casa-
nova chose to live. A crude and barbarous
choice it seems to us, with our hereditary
instinct to spend our lives in wasting the

96 Affirmations.

reasons for living. But it is certain that Casa-
nova never repented his choice. Assuredly we
need not, for few judges, statesmen, or merchants
have ever left for the joy of humanity any legacy
of their toil equal to these M^moires.

But such swift energy of vital action and
reaction, such ardour of deed in keeping pace
with desire, are in themselves scarcely normal.
Casanova's abnormality is suggested by the
tendency to abnormality which we find in
his family. We have seen what men his
ancestors were ; in reading the M^moires we
gather incidentally that one of his brothers
had married, though impotent, and another
brother is described as a somewhat feeble-
minded ne'er-do-well. All the physical and
mental potency of the family was intensely
concentrated in Casanova. Yet he himself in
early childhood seems to have been little better
than an idiot either in body or mind. He could
recall nothing that happened before he was eight
years of age. He was not expected to live; he
suffered from prolonged haemorrhages from the
nose, and the vision of blood was his earliest
memory. As a child he habitually kept his mouth
open, and his face was stupid. "Thickness of
the blood," said the physicians of those days;
it seems probable that he suffered from growths
in the nose which, as we now know, produce
such physical and mental inferiority as Casa-

Casanova. 97

nova describes. The cure was spontaneous.
He was taken to Padua, and shortly afterwards
began to develop wonderfully both in stature
and intelligence. In after years he had little
cause to complain either of health or intellect.
It is notable, however, that when, still a boy, he
commenced his ecclesiastical training (against
his wishes, for he had chosen to be a doctor), he
failed miserably as a preacher, and broke down
in the pulpit ; thus the Church lost a strange
ornament. Moreover, with all his swift sensa-
tion and alert response, there was in Casanova
an anomalous dulness of moral sensibility. The
insults to Holy Religion which seem to have
brought him to that prison from which he
effected his marvellous escape, were scarcely
the serious protests of a convinced heretic;
his deliberate trickery of Mme. d'Urfd was not
only criminal but cruel. His sense of the bonds
of society was always somewhat veiled, and
although the veil never became thick, and
might be called the natural result of an adven-
turer's life, one might also, perhaps, maintain
that it was a certain degree of what is sometimes
called moral imbecility that made Casanova
an adventurer. But while we thus have to
recognise that he was a man of dulled moral
sensibility, we must also recognise that he
possessed a vigorous moral consciousness of
his own, or we misunderstand him altogether.

7

98 Affirmations.

The point to be remembered is that the thres-
hold of his moral sensibility was not easily
reached. There are some people whose tactile
sensibility is so obtuse that it requires a very
wide separation of the aesthesiometer to get the
right response. It was so with Casanova's
moral sensitiveness. But, once aroused, his
conscience responded energetically enough. It
seems doubtful whether, from his own point of
view, he ever fell into grave sin, and therefore
he is happily free from remorse. No great
credit is thus due to him ; the same psycho-
logical characteristic is familiar in all criminals.
It is not difficult to avoid plucking the apples of
shame when so singularly few grow on your
tree.

Casanova's moral sensibility and its limits
come out, where a man's moral sensibility will
come out, in his relations with women. Women
played a large part in Casanova's life; he was
nearly always in love. We may use the word
"love" here in no euphemistic sense, for al-
though Casanova's passions grew and ripened
with the rapidity born of long experience in
these matters, so fresh is the vitality of the
man that there is ever a virginal bloom on every
new ardour. He was as far removed from the
cold-blooded libertine typified in Laclos's Val-
mont, unscrupulously using women as the in-
struments of his own lust, as from Laura's

Casanova. 99

sonneteering lover. He had fully grasped what
the latest writer on the scientific psychology o^
sex calls the secondary law of courting, namely,^
the development in the male of an imaginative
attentiveness to the psychical and bodily states
of the female, in place of an exclusive attentive-
ness to his own gratification. It is not impossible
that in these matters Casanova could have given
a lesson to many virtuous husbands of our own
highly moral century. He never sank to the
level of the vulgar maxim that "ail's fair in
love and war." He sought his pleasure in the
pleasure, and not in the complaisance, of the
women he loved, and they seem to have grate-
fully and tenderly recognised his skill in the art
of love-making. Casanova loved many women,
but broke few hearts. The same women appear
again and again through his pages, and for the
most part no lapse of years seems to deaden the
gladness with which he goes forth to meet them
anew. That he knew himself well enough never
to take either wife or mistress must be counted
as a virtue, such as it was, in this incomparable
lover of so many women. A man of finer moral •
fibre could scarcely have loved so many women ;
a man of coarser fibre could never have left so
many women happy.

This very lack of moral delicacy which shuts
Casanova off from the finest human development
is an advantage to the autobiographer. It in-

100 Affirmations.

sures his sincerity because he is unconscious of
offence ; it saves us from any wearisome self-
justification, because, for all his amused self-
criticism, he sees no real need for justification.
In Rousseau's Confessions we hear the passionate
pleader against men at the tribunal of God;
here we are conscious neither of opponent nor
tribunal. Casanova is neither a pillar of society
nor yet one of the moral Samsons who delight
to pull down the pillars of society ; he has taken
the world as it is, and he has taken himself as
he is, and he has enjoyed them both hugely.
So he is free to set forth the whole of himself,
his achievements, his audacities, his failures, his
little weaknesses and superstitions, his amours,
his quarrels, his good fortune and his bad fortune
in the world that on the whole he has found so
interesting and happy a place to dwell in. And
his book remains an unending source of delight-
ful study of the man of impulse and action in all
his moods. The self-reliant man, immensely
apt for enjoyment, who plants himself solidly
with his single keen wit before the mighty oyster
of the world, has never revealed himself so
clearly before.

What manner of man Casanova seemed to
his contemporaries has only been discovered of
recent years ; and while the picture which we
obtain of him has been furnished by his enemies,
and was not meant to flatter, it admirably

Casanova. loi

supports the Mimoires. In 1755 a spy of the
Venetian Inquisition reported that Casanova
united impiety, imposture, and wantonness to
a degree that inspired horror. It was in
that same year that he was arrested, chiefly
on the charge of contempt for religion, and
sentenced to five years' imprisonment. Fif-
teen months later he had effected his famous
escape, and was able to pursue his career as an
assured and accomplished adventurer who had
brilliantly completed his apprenticeship. It is
not until many years later, in 1772, when his
long efforts to obtain pardon from his country
still remained unsuccessful, that we obtain an
admirable picture of him from the Venetian
agent at Ancona. " He comes and goes where
he will," the agent reports, " with open face and
haughty mien, always well equipped. He is a
man of some forty years at most [really about
forty-eight, thus confirming Casanova's state-
ment that he was alv/ays taken for some ten
years younger than his years], of lofty stature,
of fine and vigorous aspect, with bright eyes
and very brown skin. He wears a short,
chestnut-coloured peruke. I am told that his
character is bold and disdainful, but especially
that he is full of speech, and of witty and well-
instructed speech." Two years later Casanova
was at last permitted to return to Venice. He
there accepted the post of secret agent of the

102 Affirmations.

State Inquisition for service within the city.
Like Defoe and Toland, who were also secret
political agents, he attempted to justify himself
on grounds of public duty. In a few years,
however, he was dismissed, perhaps, as Baschet
suggests, on account of the fact that his reports
contained too much philosophy and not enough
espionage; probably it was realised that a man
of such powerful individuality and independence
was not fitted for servile uses. Finally, in 1782,
he was banished from Venice for an offence to
which the blood of the Casanovas had always
been easily inclined — he published an audacious
satire against a patrician. From Venice he went
to Trieste, and thence to Vienna. There he
met Count Waldstein, a fervent adept of Kabba-
listic science, a subject in which Casanova him-
self claimed to be proficient; he had found it
useful in certain dealings with credulous people.
In 1784 the count offered him the post of
librarian, with a salary of one thousand florins,
at his castle of Dux, in Bohemia It is said to
be a fine castle, and is still noted for its charm-
ing park. Here this prince of Bohemians spent
the remainder of his life, devoting seven years
to the Mimoires, on which he was still engaged
at his death. A terra-cotta bust discovered at
the castle (and etched some years ago for Le
Livre) shows him in mature age, a handsome,
energetic, and imposing head, with somewhat

Casanova. 103

deep-set eyes; it is by no means the head of
a scamp, but rather that of a philosopher, a
philosopher with unusual experience of affairs,
a successful statesman, one might say. A
medallion portrait, of later date, which has also
been reproduced, shows him at the age of sixty-
three with lean, eager face, and lofty, though
receding forehead, the type of the man of quick
perception and swift action, the eagle type of
man. The Prince de Ligne has also left a
description of him as he appeared in old age,
now grown very irritable, ready to flare up at
any imagined insult, engaged in perpetual war-
fare with domestics, but receiving the highest
consideration from those who knew how to
appreciate the great qualities of the man and
his unequalled experiences, and who knew also
how to indulge his susceptibilities and smile at
his antique fashions. Once he went off in a
huff to Weimar, and was graciously received by
the Duke, but he soon came back again ; all the
favours there were showered on a certain court
favourite, one Goethe. It is clear, as we read
the Prince de Ligne's detailed description, that
the restless old adventurer had need, even in
the peaceful seclusion of Dux, of all the con-
solation yielded by Socrates, Horace, Seneca,
and Boethius, his favourite philosophers. Here,
at Dux, on the 4th of June 1798, Casanova died.
" Bear witness that I have lived as a philosopher

I04 Affirmations.

and die as a Christian ; " that, we are told, was
his last utterance after he had received the sacra-
ments.

From that moment Casanova with everything
that concerned him was covered by a pall of
oblivion. He seems to have been carelessly cast
aside, together with the century of which he was
so characteristic, and, as it now appears, so
memorable a child. The world in which he
had lived so joyously and completely had been
transformed by the Revolution. The new age
of strenuous commercialism and complacent
philanthropy was in its vigorous youth, a sword
in its right hand and a Bible in its left. The
only adventurer who found favour now was he
who took the glad news of salvation to the
heathen, or mowed them down to make new
openings for trade. Had he been born later,
we may be well assured, Casanova would have
known how to play his part; he would not have
fallen short of Borrow, who became an agent of
the Bible Society. But as it was, what had the
new age to do with Casanova ? No one cared,
no one even yet has cared, so much as to
examine the drawers and cupboards full of
papers which he left behind at Dux. Only on
the 13th of February, 1820, was the oblivion a
little stirred. On that date a certain Carlo
Angiolieri appeared at Leipzig in the office
of the famous publisher, Brockhaus, carrying a

Casanova. 105

voluminous manuscript in the handwriting (as
we now know) of Casanova and bearing the
title, Histoire de ma Viej'usqu'd Fan 1797.

But even the appearance of Carlo Angiolieri
failed to dissipate the gloom. Fifty years more
were to pass before the figure of Casanova again
became clear. This man, so ardently alive in
every fibre, had now become a myth. The
sagacious world — which imparts the largest dole
of contempt to the pilgrim who brings back to
it the largest gifts — refused to take Casanova
seriously. The shrewd critic wondered who
wrote Casanova, just as he has since wondered
who wrote Shakespeare. Paul Lacroix paid
Stendhal the huge compliment of suggesting
that he had written the Mimoires, a sufficiently
ingenious suggestion, for in Stendhal's Dauphiny
spirit there is something of that love of adven-
ture which is supremely illustrated in Casanova.
But we now know that, as Armand Baschet first
proved, Casanova himself really wrote his own
Mimoires. Moreover, so far as investigation
has yet been able to go, he wrote with strict
regard to truth. Wherever it is possible to test
Casanova, his essential veracity has always been
vindicated. In the nature of things it is im-
possible to verify much that he narrates. When,
however, we remember that he was telling the
story of his life primarily for his own pleasure,
it is clear that he had no motive for deception ;

lo6 Affirmations.

and when we consider the surpassingly discredit-
able episodes which he has recorded, we may
recall that he has given not indeed positive
proof of sincerity, but certainly the best that
can be given in the absence of direct proof It
remains a question how far a man is able to
recollect the details of the far past — the con-
versations he held, the garments he wore, the
meals he ate — so precisely as Casanova professes
to recollect them. This is a psychological
problem which has not yet been experimentally
examined. There are, however, great individual
differences in memory, and there is reason to
believe that an organisation, such as Casanova's,
for which the external world is so vivid, is
associated with memory-power of high quality.
That this history is narrated with absolute
precision of detail Casanova himself would
probably not have asserted. But there is no
reason to doubt his good faith, and there is ex-
cellent reason to accept the substantial accuracy
of his narrative. It remains a personal docu-
ment of a value which will increase rather than
diminish as time goes by. It is one of the great
autobiographical revelations which the ages
have left us, with Augustine's, Cellini's, Rous-
seau's, of its own kind supreme.

Casanova. 107

II.

The M^moires are authentic ; they give us
what they profess to give us — ^the true story of
a man who unites (as it has been well said) the
characters of Gil Bias and of Figaro. Thus
Casanova was the incarnation in real life of the
two most typical imaginative figures of his
century. Yet even if the M^moires had been
the invention of some novelist of surpassing
genius they would still possess extraordinary
interest. We may forget that the book is an
autobiography, and still find it, as a story of
adventure, the apotheosis of the picaresque
novel.

The picaresque novel — although a French-
man brought it to perfection in Gil Bias — arose
and flourished in Spain, Casanova's ancestral
country, and its piquancy, variety, and audacity
seem to have been very congenial to the Spanish
spirit and the Spanish soil. Casanova's Memoires
carry this form of story on to a broader and in
some respects higher plane. The old picaro
never dared affront the world; he cringed before
it and slunk behind its back to make grimaces.
Casanova, too, was an adventurer living by his
wits, but he approached the world with the same
self-confidence as he approached a beautiful
woman, and having won its favours treats it
with the same consideration. Unlike the picaro

io8 Affirmations.

whose delight it is to reveal the pettinesses of
the men he has duped, Casanova shows his
magnificence in adventure by regarding the
world as a foeman worthy of all his courtesy;
and with incomparable impartiality, as well as
skill, he presents to us the narrative of all the
perils he encountered or sought Few old men
sitting down in the evening of their days to
chatter of old times have been so free as
Casanova from the vices of senile literature.
He never maunders of the things that are so
dear to the aged merely because they are past;
he introduces no superfluous reflections or com-
ments. We recognise that the hand which keeps
this pen so surely to the point is the hand of a
man of action. Casanova's skill in narrative is
conspicuously shown in the love - adventures
which form so large and important a part of
his book, as of his life. (Men usually regard
love as a bagatelle, he says somewhere, but, for
his own part, he adds, he has found no more
important business in life.) There would seem
to be nothing so difficult as to tell a long series
of amours, unshrinkingly, from first to last, with-
out drawing a curtain at any stage. Nearly
every writer in fiction or in autobiography who
has attempted this has only produced an effect
of weary monotony or else of oppressive close-
ness. But Casanova succeeds. Partly this is
due to the variety and individuality he is able

Casanova, log

to give, not only to every incident, but to every
woman he meets ; so that his book is a gallery
of delightful women, drawn with an art that
almost recalls his great contemporary, Goethe.
Partly it seems he was aided by his vivid and
sympathetic Venetian temperament ; his swift,
unliterary style finds time for no voluptuous
languors. He was aided even by his im-
modesty, for in literature as in the plastic arts
and in life itself, the nude is nearer to virtue
than the d^collet^. The firm and absolute pre-
cision of every episode in these M^moires leaves
no room for any undue dallying with the fringes
of love's garments. Casanova tells his story
swiftly and boldly, with 'no more delay than is
needed to record every essential detail ; he is the
absolute anti-type to Sterne as a narrator; the
most libertine of authors, he is yet free from
prurience. Thus the man of action covers the
romancer with confusion; this supreme book of
adventures is a real man's record of his own real
life.

But let us forget that it is an autobiography
and take it merely as a story. Its immense
range of human interest, its audacious realism,
its freedom from perversity, entitle us to regard
it as a typical story of adventure. And I ask
myself: What is the relation of such a book
to life ? what is the moral worth of Casanova's
Mdmoires ?

1 10 Affirmations.

A foolish, superfluous question, I know, it
seems to many. And I am willing to admit
that there may possibly be things in life which
it is desirable to do, and yet undesirable to
moralise over ; I would even assert that the
moral worth of many of our actions lies precisely
in their unconsciousness of any moral worth.
Yet beneath the freest moral movements there
must be a solid basis of social law, just as
beneath the most gracious movements of the
human body there lies the regulated play of
mechanical law. When we find it assumed that
there are things which are good to do and not
good to justify we may strongly suspect that
we have come across a mental muddle.

To see the matter rightly we must take it
at the beginning. No one can rightly see the
moral place of immoral literature — the literature
of adventure — in the case of adults unless he
sees it in the case of children. Of late years
the people who write in newspapers and
magazines have loudly abused all stories of
the crudely heroic order, the stories of im-
possible virtue and unheard-of villainy in far-
away lands, of marvellously brave bands under
extravagantly reckless leaders, who march on
through careless bloodshed to incredible
victory or incalculable treasure. The hero
of the average boy — magnificent sombrero
on head, pistols in belt, galloping off on his

Casanova. 1 1 1

mighty charger, a villain grasped by the scruff
of the neck in each outstretched hand — has
been severely mauled. The suggestions offered
for the displacement of this literature furnish
documents for the psychologist Let us have
cheap lives of Jesus and the Apostle Paul! let
us flood the world with the sober romances
licensed by religious societies ! — say those good
people in the newspapers and the magazines. If
they have ever themselves been children, and if
so, how they came into the world shrouded in an
impenetrable caul which will for ever shut them
out from insight into the hearts of the young, is
not known, and perhaps is no matter. Putting
aside these estimable persons, there is in every
heart a chamber dedicated to the impossible,
and the younger the heart the larger is this
golden ventricle. For the child who can just
read. Jack the Giant-killer, and the story of
those human-souled swans which make the
swan a mystic bird for all our lives, are better
worth knowing than any fact of the visible
world. Some day the Life of Jesus, and even
perhaps the Life of Paul, will seem to be among
the sweetest and strangest of the world's fairy-
tales; but that day will hardly come until every
church and chapel has been spiritually razed
to the ground. It cannot come to the genera-
tion which has had the name of Jesus thrust
down its throat in Sunday-schools and board-

112 Affirmations,

schools. We English are a practical, common-
sense people, and we cure our children of any
hearty taste for religion as confectioners are
said to cure their assistants of any excessive
taste for sweets, by a preliminary surfeit. No
doubt we are very wise, but we postpone in-
definitely the day when children will come to
our religious tales in the pure gladness of their
joy in the marvellous.

In the meantime there ought not to be any
doubt that children should be fed on fairy-tales
as their souls' most natural food. Nothing can
make up for the lack of them at the outset, just
as no later supply of milk can compensate for
the starvation involved in feeding infants on
starch. The power of assimilating fairy-tales
is soon lost, and unless the child has a rarely
powerful creative imagination its spiritual growth
on this side at least remains for ever stunted.

If then childhood needs its pure fairy -land, and
youth its fairy-land of impossible adventure, what
fairy-land is left for adult age? Scarcely the
novel. The modern novel in its finest manifesta-
tions, however engrossingly interesting, takes us
but a little step from the passionate interests of
our own lives. If I turn to the two recent
novels which have most powerfully interested
me — Huysmans' En Route and Hardy's /a^ij the
Obscure — I find that their interest lies largely in
the skill with which they present and concentrate

Casanova. 113

two mighty problems of actual life, the greatest
of all problems, religion and sex. In adult life
we seek a fairy-land occupied by beings at once
as real as ourselves, and yet far removed from
the sphere of our own actual interests and the
heavy burden of the atmosphere under which
we live; only so can it fascinate the imaginations
of those who have outgrown the simple imagin-
ative joys of early life. Casanova's Mimoires is
the perfected type of the books which answer
these requirements. It is unflinchingly real,
immensely varied, the audaciously truthful
narrative of undeniably human impulses. And
yet it carries us out of relation with the prob-
lems of our actual life; it leads us into the
realm of fairy-land.

But — analysing the matter a little more closely
— it may still fairly be asked whether a book
which, in spite of its remoteness, represents a
form of human life, must not have a certain
bearing on morals. Is not a part of its attrac-
tion, and indeed that of all fairy-lands, the
existence of a different code of morals? It
seems to me that this is so. But precisely in
that lies the moral value of such literature.
Indeed the whole question of the moral value
of art — that is to say, of aesthetic enjoyment
— is really involved here. The matter is worth
looking into.
^~~~~ It is one of Schopenhauer's unforgettable
^ 8

114 Affirmations.

sayings, that whatever course of action we take
in life there is always some element in our
nature which could only find satisfaction in an
exactly contrary course; so that, take what
road we will, we yet always remain restless and
unsatisfied in part. To Schopenhauer that re-
flection made for pessimism ; it need not The
more finely and adequately we adjust ourselves
to the actual conditions of our life the larger, no
doubt, the unused and unsatisfied region within
us. But it is just here that art comes in. Art
largely counts for its effects on playing on these
unused fibres of our organism, and by so doing
it serves to bring them into a state of harmoni-
ous satisfaction — moralises them, if you will.
Alienists have described a distressing form of
insanity peculiar to old maids who have led
honourable lives of abstinence and abnegation.
After years of seeming content with the con-
ditions of their lot they begin to manifest
uncontrollable obsessions and erotic impulses;
the unused elements of life, which they had shut
down in the cellars of their souls and almost
forgotten, have at last arisen in rebellion,
clamouring tumultuously for satisfaction. The
old orgies — the Saturnalian festival at Christmas
and the Midsummer Festival on St. John's Day
— bear witness that the ancients in their wisdom
recognised that the bonds of the actual daily
moral life must sometimes be relaxed lest they

Casanova. 115

break from over-tension. We have lost the
orgy, but in its place we have art. Our respect-
able matrons no longer send out their daughters
with torches at midnight into the woods
and among the hills, where dancing and
wine and blood may lash into their flesh the
knowledge of the mysteries of life, but they
take them to Tristan, and are fortunately
unable to see into those carefully brought-up
young souls on such occasions. The moral-
ising force of art lies, not in its capacity to
present a timid imitation of our experiences,
but in its power to go beyond our experience,
satisfying and harmonising the unfulfilled activi-
ties of our nature. That art should have such
an effect on those who contemplate it is not
surprising when we remember that, to some
extent, art has a similar influence on its creators.
" Libertin d'esprit mais sage de mceurs," it was
said of Watteau. Mohammed when he wrote
so voluptuously of the black-eyed houris of
Paradise was still young and the blameless
husband of an aged woman.

" Singing is sweet ; but be sure of this,
Lips only sing when they cannot kiss."

It has been said of Wagner that he had in him
the instincts of an ascetic and of a satyr, and
the first is just as necessary as the second to the
making of a great artist. It is a very ancient

1 16 Affirmations.

observation that the most unchaste verse has
often been written by the chastest poets, and
that the writers who have written most purely
have found their compensation in living im-
purely.i In the same manner it has always
been found in Christendom, both among Catho-
lics and Protestants, that much of the most
licentious literature has been written by the
clergy, by no means because the clergy are
a depraved class, but precisely because the
austerity of their lives renders necessary for
them these emotional athletics. Of course, from
the standpoint of simple nature, such literature
is bad, it is merely a form of that obscenity
which, as Huysmans has acutely remarked, can
only be produced by those who are chaste; in
Nature desire passes swiftly into action, leaving
little or no trace on the mind. A certain
degree of continence — I do not mean merely
in the region of sex but in the other fields of
human action also — is needed as a breeding-
ground for the dreams and images of desire to

' I take the first example which comes to hand, for whatever
it may be worth: — " Luttrell was talking of Moore and Rogers
— the poetry of the former so licentious, that of the latter so
pure; much of its popularity owing to its being so carefully
weeded of everything approaching to indelicacy; and the con-
trast between the lives and the works of the two men — the
former a pattern of conjugal and domestic regularity, the latter
of all the men he had ever known the greatest sensualist "
(Greville's Memoirs, vol. iii. p. 324).

Casanova, 117

develop into the perfected visions of art. But
the point of view of society is scarcely that of
unadulterated nature. In society we have not
always room for the swift and free passage of
impulse into action; to avoid the evils of re-
pressed impulse this play of the emotions on
a higher and serener plane becomes essential.
Just as we need athletics to expand and har-
monise the coarser unused energies of the
organism, so we need art and literature to ex-
pand and harmonise its finer energies, emotion
being, as it may not be superfluous to point
out, itself largely a muscular process, motion
in a more or less arrested form, so that there
is here more than a mere analogy. Art from
this point of view is the athletics of the emotions.

The adventures of fairy-land — of which for our
age I take Casanova's M^moires as the type —
constitute an important part of this athletics.
It may be abused, just as we have the grosser
excesses of the runner and the cyclist ; but it is
the abuse and not the use which is pernicious,
and under the artificial conditions of civilisation
the contemplation of the life and adventures of
the heroically natural man is an exercise with
fine spiritual uses. Such literature thus has
a moral value : it helps us to live peacefully
within the highly specialised routine of civilisa-
tion.

That is the underlying justification for Casa-

ii8 Affirmations.

nova's Mimoires as moral literature. But there
is no reason why it should emerge into con-
sciousness when we take up these Mimoires, any
more than a man need take up a branch of
physical athletics with any definite hygienic
aim. It is sufficient to be moved by the pure
enjoyment of it. And there must be something
unwholesome and abnormal — something corrupt
at the core — in any civilised man or woman who
cannot win some enjoyment from this book.

III.

The more I contemplate the eighteenth cen-
tury the more interesting I find it. In my youth
it seemed to me unworthy of a glance. The
books and the men, Shelley above all, who stirred
my young blood belonged to the early nine-
teenth century. I was led to regard the last
century as a dull period of stagnation and
decay, a tomb into which the spirit of man
sank after the slow death which followed the
Renaissance. The dawn of the nineteenth
century was an Easter Day of the human soul,
rising from the sepulchre and flinging aside the
old eighteenth century winding-sheet.

I have nothing yet to say against the early
nineteenth century, which was indeed only the
outcome of the years that went before, but I
have gained a new delight in the men of the

Casanova. 1 19

eighteenth century. It was in that age that the
English spirit found its most complete intel-
lectual expression, unaffected by foreign in-
fluence. When that spirit, reviving after the
wars that lamentably cut short the develop-
ment of Chaucer's magnificent song, again
began its free literary development — no doubt
with some stimulus from Humanism — it was
suddenly smothered at birth by the Renaissance
wave from Italy and France. We may divine
how it would have developed independently if
we think of John Hey wood's dramatic sketches —
pale as those are after the Miller's tale in which
for the first and last time Chaucer perfectly
mated English realism to the lyric grace of
English idealism — and to some extent, also,
when we turn to the later Heywood's plays,
or Dekker's, and especially to the robust and
tolerant humanity, the sober artistic breadth
of the one play of Porter's which has come
down to us. But the intoxicating melodies of
Ronsard and his fellows were heard from over
sea, and the men of the English Renaissance
arose — Lyly and Lodge and Campion with
their refinements, Greene and Nash with their gay
and brilliant music, Marlowe with his arrogant,
irresistible energy — and brought to birth an
absolutely new spirit, which may have been
English enough in its rich and virginal
elements, but received the seminal principle

I20 Affirmations.

from abroad. It needed a century and more
for that magnificent tumult to subside, and
for the old English spirit to reappear and
reach at last full maturity, by happy chance
again in association with France, though this
time it is England that chiefly plays the mas-
culine part and impregnates France. Thus the
eighteenth century was an age in which the
English spirit found complete self-expression,
and also an age in which England and France
joined hands intellectually, and stood together
at the summit of civilisation, with no rivals,
unless Goethe and Kant may suffice to stand
for a whole people. In the great Englishmen
of these days we find the qualities which are
truly native to Britain, and which have too
often been torn and distracted by insane aber-
rations. There is a fine sobriety and sagacity
in the English spirit, a mellow human solidity,
such as the Romans possessed always, but
which we in our misty and storm-swept island
have often exchanged, perhaps for better, but
certainly for other qualities. It was not so in
the eighteenth century, and by no accident
the historian who has most finely expressed
the genius of Rome was an eighteenth century
Englishman. All the most typical men of
that age possessed in varying degree the
same qualities : Locke, Swift, Fielding, Hume,
Richardson, Goldsmith, Hogarth, Johnson, God-

Casanova. 121 ^

win. Thus the eighteenth century should un-
doubtedly be a source of pride to the British
heart. England's reputation in the world rests
largely on our poetic aptitudes and our political
capacity. Eighteenth century England is not
obviously pre-eminent in either respect, although
it was the great age of our political development
and the seed-time of our second great poetic
age; it produced scarcely more than a single
first-class poet exclusively within its limits, and
it lost America. Yet our greatest philo-
sopher, our greatest historian, our greatest
biographer, nearly all our greatest novelists,
our great initiators in painting, who were in-
directly the initiators of the greater art of
France, belong wholly to this century, and an
unequalled cluster of our greatest poets belongs
to its close. And these men were marked by
sanity and catholicity, a superb solidity of
spirit; they became genuinely cosmopolitan
without losing any of their indigenous virtues.
Without the eighteenth century we should never
have known many of the greatest qualities which
are latent, and too often only latent, in our race.
Landor and Wordsworth alone were left to carry
something of the spirit of the English eighteenth
century far on into the literature of our own
wholly alien century.

And their brothers of France were their most
worthy peers. This spirit, indeed, which we see

122 Affirmations.

so conspicuously in the finest men of their age
in England and France, was singularly wide-
spread throughout Europe, a cheerful sobriety,
a solid humanity, little troubled by any of those
" movements " which were to become so prolific
and so noisy in the next century. Christianity,
it seemed, was decaying. Diderot, well informed
on English affairs, wrote to a friend that in a few
years it would be extinct, and looking at the
state of the English Church at that time,
no one could reasonably have surmised that
Zinzendorf in Germany, and after him Wesley
in England on a lower plane and Law on a
higher plane, had already initiated that revival
of Christianity which in our own century was des-
tined to work itself out so obstreperously. But
the world seemed none the worse for the apparent
subsidence of Christianity ; in the opinion of
many it seemed to be very much the better.
The tolerant paganism of classic days appeared
to be reasserting itself, robustly in England,
with a delicate refinement in France, — setting
the paganism of Watteau against the paganism
of Fielding — while Goethe and the Germans
generally were striving to rescue and harmonise
the best of Christianity with the best of antiquity.
European civilisation was fully expanded; for a
long time no great disturbing force had arisen,
and though on every side the tender buds of
coming growths might have been detected, they

Casanova. 123

could not yet reveal their strength. Such
a period certainly has its terrible defects;
mellowness is not far from rottenness. But then
youth also has its defects, and its crude acidity
is still further from perfection. The nineteenth
century has a higher moral standard than the
eighteenth, so at least we in our self-righteous-
ness have been accustomed to think. But even
if so, the abstract existence of a high moral
standard is another thing from the prevalence
of high moral living. Whatever the standard
may be, it is a question whether the lives are
much different. In the one case the standard
is much above the practice, in the other ofily a
little above it — that is the chief difference. And
the advantages of winding the standard up to
the higher pitch are not so unmixed as is
sometimes assumed. One need not question
these advantages, well recognised in the present
century. But the advantages of a lower standard
are less often recognised. There is especially
the great advantage that we attain a higher
degree of sincerity, and sincerity, if not itself
the prime virtue, is surely, whatever the virtue
may be, its chief accompaniment. A life that is
swathed and deformed in much drapery is not
so wholesome or so effective as one that can
live nearer to the sun. And the unrecognisable
villain is most pernicious ; the brigand who holds
a revolver at your head is better than the sleek

124 Affirmations.

and well-dressed thief who opens the proceed-
ings with prayer. The eighteenth has been
called a gross and unintelligent century. In
the department of criticism, indeed, this century
in England (for it was far otherwise in Germany)
comes very short of our own century, and it is
largely this failure to measure the precise value
of things in aesthetic perception which now
makes that age seem so shocking. From this
point of view every great age — and not least
our own greatest Elizabethan age — is equally
defective. A period of energetic life cannot
afford to spend much time on the solitary
contemplation of its own bowels of aesthetic
emotion. To produce a Pater is the one
exquisite function of a spiritually barren and
exhausted age. And still the eighteenth century
redeems its critical grossness by making even
this later development possible; it lifted the
man of letters from the place of a dependent
to the place of a free man boldly prophesying
in his own right ; and, moreover, it was the
first century which dared to claim the complete
equality of men and women with all which that
involves.

If it has required a certain insight for the
child of our own century to discover the great
qualities of the last century, there cannot be
much doubt about the final* judgment of the
most competent judges. The eighteenth was,

Casanova. 125

as Renouvier has called it, the first century of
humanity since Christ, while at the same time,
as Lange has said, it was penetrated through by
the search for the ideal, or, as a more recent
thinker concludes, it was a century dominated
by the maxim Salus populi suprema est lex,
holding in its noble aspirations after general
happiness the germs of all modern socialism.
In art and literature it saw the fresh spring
of those blossoms which opened so splendidly
and faded so swiftly in our century; it was
the century not only of Hogarth and Fielding
and Voltaire, but of Blake and Rousseau, of
Diderot, of Swedenborg and Mesmer, of
the development of modern music with
Mozart and Beethoven, of the unparalleled
enthusiasm awakened by the discovery of the
Keltic world. And as its crowning glory the
eighteenth century claims Goethe. Men will
scarcely look back to our own century as so
good to live in. One may well say that he
would have gladly lived in the thirteenth
century, perhaps the most interesting of all
since Christ, or in the sixteenth, probably the
most alive of all, or the eighteenth, surely the
most human. But why have lived in the nine-
teenth, the golden age of machinery, and of
men used as machines?

Eighteenth century Europe, being what it
was, formed a perfect stage for Casanova to play

126 Affirmations.

his part on. With his Spanish and Italian
blood, he was of the race of those who had
come so actively to the front in the last days
of old classic Rome, and his immediate ancestors
had lived in the centre of the pagan Rome of
the Renaissance. Thus he carried with him
traditions which consorted well with much in
the eighteenth century. And he had that in
him, moreover, which no tradition can give,
the incommunicable vitality in the presence of
which all tradition shrivels into nothingness.

Casanova knew not only Italy, France, Eng-
land, Germany, and Holland; he had visited
Spain, Russia, Poland, Greece, Turkey, and
Asia Minor. He was received by Benedict XII.,
by Frederick II. of Prussia, by the Empress
Catherine, by Joseph II. He was at home in
Paris, in London, in Berlin, in Vienna; he knew
Munich, Dresden, Moscow, St. Petersburg, War-
saw, Barcelona. His picture of London is of
great interest. He spent much of the year
1763 there, and some of his most interest-
ing experiences, romantic and psychological,
occurred during that period. He even dated
the close of what he calls the second act in
the comedy of his life from that visit to London,
the next and concluding act being one of slow
declination. So profound was his depression
at this time that one day he went towards
the Thames at the Tower with the deliberate

Casanova. 127

intention of drowning himself, having first filled
his pockets with bullets to ensure sinking.
Fortunately an English friend (to whom the
world owes thanks) met him on the way, read
his resolve in his face, and insisted on carrying
him off to a very convivial party, whose in-
decorous proceedings, although Casanova only
remained a passive witness, served to dissipate
all thoughts of suicide. He is not, however,
prejudiced against England; on the contrary,
he finds that no nation offers so many interesting
peculiarities to the attentive observer. As usual,
in London Casanova mixed indiscriminately
with the best and the worst society; his wit,
his knowledge, his imperturbable effrontery, his
charming conversation, served to open any door
that he desired to open. He gives us curious
glimpses into the lives of English noblemen of
the day, and not less intimate pictures of the
chevaliers dindustrie who preyed upon them.
In the course of one adventure with people
of the latter sort he was haled before the
eminent blind magistrate Sir John Fielding,
whom he seems to have mistaken, though this
is not quite clear, for his yet more eminent
brother Henry. He also met Kitty Fischer,
the most fashionable cocotte of her day, whom
we may yet see as Reynolds caught her in
a well-inspired moment, dilating her sensitive
nostrils, radiantly inhaling the joy of life, and

128 Affirmations.

he tells us anecdotes of her extravagance, of the
jewels she wore, of the thousand guinea bank-
note which she ate in a sandwich.^

Throughout Europe Casanova knew many of
the most celebrated people of his time, though
it is clear — as one would expect from a man of
his impartial humanity — he seldom went out of
his way to meet them. His visit to Voltaire is
a distinct contribution to our knowledge of that
sage; he admired Helvetius, and wondered how
a man of so many virtues could have denied
virtue; D'Alembert he thought the most truly
modest man he had ever met, an interesting

' For another side of life we may read his description of the
English Sunday: — "On Sunday one dares neither to play at cards
nor to perform music. The numerous spies who infest the streets
of this capital listen to the sounds which come from the parlours
of the houses, and if they suspect any gaming or singing they
conceal themselves and slip in at the first opportunity to seize
those bad Christians who dare to profane the Lord's Day by
amusements which everywhere else are counted innocent. In
revenge the English may go with impunity to sanctify the
holy day in the taverns and brothels which are so plentiful in
this city." One may compare with this Mme. de Stael's almost
Dantesque description — so at least it remains in the memory —
of the gloom of the Scotch Sabbath in the days of Burns. This
statement of the matter remained substantially accurate until
almost yesterday. So long it remained for the English spirit to
re-conquer Sunday ! It must be remembered that Puritanism,
while always a part of the English spirit, was not originally
its predominant note ; it only became so as an inevitable re-
action against the exotic Renaissance movement. Mary Stuart
made Knox, Charles I. made Cromwell, and both monarchs were
intimately associated with the last wave of the Renaissance.

Casanova. 1 29

tribute from the most truly immodest man of
that period. The value of Casanova's record ^
of the eighteenth century lies, however, by no
means in the glimpses he has given us of great
personalities: that has been much better done
by much more insignificant writers. It is as a I.
picture of the manners and customs of the
eighteenth century throughout Europe that the
Mimoires are invaluable. Casanova saw Europe
from the courts of kings to the lowest has fonds.
He lived in the castles of French and Italian
nobles, in the comfortable homes of Dutch
merchants, in his own house in Pall Mall, in
taverns and inns and peasants' cottages any-
where. He had no intellectual prejudices, he '
had an immense versatility in tastes and
practical aptitudes, he was genuinely interested
in all human things. Thus he approached life
with no stereotyped set of opinions, but with
all the aloofness of an unclassed adventurer,
who was at the same time a scholar and a
man of letters. It can scarcely be that there
is any record to compare with this as a vivid
and impartial picture of the eighteenth century,
in its robust solidity, its cheerful and tolerant
scepticism, its serene and easy gaiety, its
mellow decay. That is our final debt to this
unique and immortal book.

What should be our last word about Casa-

9

1 30 Affirmations,

nova? It is true that although — if indeed one
should not say because^he was so heroically
natural Casanova was not an average normal
man. It is scarcely given to the average man
to expend such versatile and reckless skill in
the field of the world, or to find so large a part
wherein to play off that skill. But neither are
the saints and philosophers normal ; St Bernard
was not normal, nor yet Spinoza. And surely
it is a poor picture of the world which would
show us St. Bernard and Spinoza and shut
out Casanova. "Vous avez I'outil universel,"
Fabrice said to Gil Bias. Casanova's brain
was just such a tool of universal use, and he
never failed to use it. For if you would find
the supreme type of the human animal in the
completest development of his rankness and
cunning, in the very plenitude of his most
excellent wits, I know not where you may
more safely go than to the Mimoires of the
self-ennobled Jacques Casanova Chevalier de
Seingalt

ni

ZOLA.

Zola's name — a barbarous, explosive name, like
an anarchist's bomb — has been tossed about
amid hoots and yells for a quarter of a century.
In every civilised country we have heard of the
man who has dragged literature into the gutter,
who has gone down to pick up the filth of the
streets, and has put it into books for the filthy
to read. And in every civilised country his
books have been read, by the hundred thousand.

To-day, his great life-work is completed. At
the same time, the uproar that it aroused has,
to a large extent, fallen silent. Not that there
is any general agreement as to the rank of the
author of the Rougon-Macquart series; but the
storms that greeted it have worn themselves
out, and it is recognised that there are at least
two sides to this as to any other question. Such
a time is favourable to the calm discussion of
Zola's precise position.

The fundamental assertion of those who, in
their irreconcilable opposition to Zola, have
rightly felt that abuse is not argument, has
always been that Zola is no artist. The matter

1 3 2 Affirmations.

has usually presented itself to them as a ques-
tion of Idealism versus Realism. Idealism, as
used by the literary critic, seems to mean a
careful selection of the facts of life for artistic
treatment, certain facts being suited for treat-
ment in the novel, certain other facts being not
so suited ; while the realist, from the literary
critic's point of view, is one who flings all facts
indiscriminately into his pages. I think that
is a fair statement of the matter, for the literary
critic does not define very clearly; still less does
he ask himself how far the idealism he advocates
is merely traditional, nor, usually, to what extent
the manner of presentation should influence us.
He does not ask himself these questions, nor
need we ask him, for in the case of Zola (or,
indeed, of any other so-called "realist") there
is no such distinction. There is no absolute
realism, merely a variety of idealisms; the
only absolute realism would be a phonographic
record, illustrated photographically, after the
manner of the cinematograph. Zola is just as
much an idealist as George Sand. It is true
that he selects very largely from material things,
and that he selects very profusely. But the
selection remains, and where there is deliberate
selection there is art. We need not trouble
ourselves here — and I doubt whether we are
ever called upon to trouble ourselves — about
" Realism " and " Idealism." The questions are:

Zola. 133

Has the artist selected the right materials?
Has he selected them with due restraint?

The first question is a large one, and, in
Zola's case at all events, it cannot, I think, be
answered on purely aesthetic grounds ; the second
may be answered without difficulty. Zola has
himself answered it; he admits that he has been
carried away by his enthusiasm, and perhaps,
also, by his extraordinary memory for recently-
acquired facts (a memory like a sponge, as he
has put it, quickly swollen and quickly emptied);
he has sown details across his page with too
profuse a hand. It is the same kind of error
as Whitman made, impelled by the same kind
of enthusiasm. Zola expends immense trouble
to get his facts ; he has told how he ransacked
the theologians to obtain body and colour for
La Faute de I'Abb^ Mouret, perhaps the best of
his earlier books. But he certainly spent no
more preliminary labour on it than Flaubert
spent on Madame Bovary, very far less than
Flaubert spent on the study of Carthage for
Salammbd. But the results are different ; the
one artist gets his effects by profusion and
multiplicity of touches, the other by the de-
liberate self-restraint with which he selects and
emphasises solely the salient and significant
touches. The latter method seems to strike
more swiftly and deeply the ends of art Three
strokes with the brush of Frans Hals are worth

134 Affirmations.

a thousand of Denner's. Rich and minute detail
may impress us, but it irritates and wearies in
the end. If a man takes his two children on to
his knees, it matters little whether he places
Ldnore on his right knee and Henri on his
left, or the other way about ; the man himself
may fail to know or to realise, and the more
intense his feelings the less likely is he to know.
When we are living deeply, the facts of our
external life do not present themselves to us in
elaborate detail ; a very few points are — as it
has been termed — focal in consciousness, while
the rest are marginal in subconsciousness. A
few things stand out vividly at each moment
of life ; the rest are dim. The supreme artist
is shown by the insight and boldness with which
he seizes and illuminates these bright points at
each stage, leaving the marginal elements in due
subordination. Dramatists so unlike as Ford
and Ibsen, novelists so unlike as Flaubert and
Tolstoi, yet alike impress us by the simple
vividness of their artistic effects. The methods
adopted by Zola render such effects extremely
difficult of attainment Perhaps the best proof
of Zola's remarkable art is the skill with which
he has neutralised the evil results of his ponderous
method. In His most characteristic novels, as
L'Assommoir, Nana, Germinal, his efforts to
attain salient perspective in the mass of trivial
or technical things — to build a single elaborate

Zola. 13s

effect out of manifold details — are often admir-
ably conducted. Take, for instance, the Voreux,
the coal-pit which may almost be said to be the
hero of Germinal rather than any of the persons
in the book. The details are not interesting, but
they are carefully elaborated, and the Voreux is
finally symbolised as a stupendous idol, sated
with human blood, crouching in its mysterious
sanctuary. Whenever Zola wishes to bring the
Voreux before us, this formula is repeated. And
it is the same, in a slighter degree, with the
other material personalities of the book. Some-
times, in the case of a crowd, this formula is
simply a cry. It is so with the Parisian mob
who yell " A Berlin ! " in the highly-wrought
conclusion to Nana; it is so with the crowd of
strikers in Germinal who shout for bread. It is
more than the tricky repetition of a word or a
gesture, overdone by Dickens and others ; it is
the artful manipulation of a carefully-elaborated,
significant phrase. Zola seems to have been the
first who has, deliberately and systematically,
introduced this sort of leit-m,otiv into literature, I
as a method of summarising a complex mass of
details, and bringing the total impression of them
before the reader. In this way he contrives to
minimise the defects of his method, and to render
his complex detail focal. He sometimes attains
poignantly simple effects by the mere repetition
of a leit-motiv at the right moment. And he is

1 36 Affirmations.

able at times, also, to throw aside his detailed
method altogether, and to reach effects of tragic
intensity. The mutilation of Maigrat's corpse is
a scene which can scarcely have been described
in a novel before. Given the subject, Zola's
treatment of it has the strength, brevity, and
certainty of touch which only belong to great
masters of art. That Zola is a great master of
his art, L' Assommoir and Germinal — which, so
far as I have read Zola, seem his two finest
works — are enough to prove. Such works are
related to the ordinary novel much as Wagner's
music-dramas are related to the ordinary Italian
opera. Wagner reaches a loftier height of art
than Zola ; he had a more complete grasp of all
the elements he took in hand to unite. Zola
has not seen with sufficient clearness the point
of view of science, and the limits of its capacity
for harmonising with fiction ; nor has he with
perfect sureness of vision always realised the
ends of art. He has left far too much of the
scaffolding standing amid his huge literary
structures ; there is too much mere brute, fact
which has not been wrought into art. But, if
Zola is not among the world's greatest artists, I
do not think we can finally deny that he is a
great artist.

To look at Zola from the purely artistic stand-
point, however, is scarcely to see him at all.
His significance for the world generally, and

Zola. 137

even for literature, lies less in a certain method
of using his material — as it may be said to lie,
for example, in the case of the Goncourts — than
in the material itself, and the impulses and ideas
that prompted his selection of that material.
These growing piles of large books are the
volcanic ejecta of an original and exuberant
temperament To understand^ them we must
investigate this temperament.

A considerable and confused amount of racial
energy was stored up in Zola. At once French,
Italian, and Greek — with a mother from the
central Beauce country of France, more fruitful
in corn than in intellect, and a father of mixed
Italian and Greek race, a mechanical genius in
his way, with enthusiastic energies and large
schemes — he presents a curious combination of
potential forces, perhaps not altogether a very
promising combination. One notes that the
mechanical engineer in the father seems to have
persisted in the son, not necessarily by heredity,
but perhaps by early familiarity and association.
Young Zola was a delicate child and by no
means a brilliant schoolboy, though he once
won a prize for memory; such ability as he
showed was in the direction of science; he
had no literary aptitudes. He seems to have
adopted literature chiefly because pen and ink
come handiest to the eager energies of a poor
clerk. It is scarcely fanciful to detect the

138 Affirmations.

mechanical aptitudes still. Just as all Huxley's
natural instincts were towards mechanics, and
in physiology he always sought for the "go"
of the organism, so Zola, however imperfect his
scientific equipment may be, has always sought
'for the "go" of the social organism. The
history of the Rougon-Macquart family is a
study in social mathematics: given certain
family strains, what is the dynamic hereditary
outcome of their contact ?

To the making of Zola there went, therefore,
this curious racial blend, as a soil ready to be
fertilised by any new seed, and a certain almost
instinctive tendency to look at things from the
mechanical and material point of view. To
these, in very early life, a third factor was added
of the first importance. During long years after
his father's death, Zola, as a child and youth,
suffered from poverty, poverty almost amounting
to actual starvation, the terrible poverty of
respectability. The whole temper of his work
and his outlook on the world are clearly con-
ditioned by this prolonged starvation of adoles-
cence. The timid and reserved youth — for such,
it is said, has been Zola's character both in
youth and manhood — was shut up with his
fresh energies in a garret while the panorama
of the Paris world was unfolded below him.
Forced both by circumstances and by tempera-
ment to practise the strictest chastity and

Zola. 139

sobriety, there was but one indulgence left open
to him, an orgy of vision. Of this, as we read
his books, we cannot doubt that he fully availed
himself, for each volume of the Rougon-Mac-
quart series is an orgy of material vision.^

Zola remained chaste, and, it is said, he is still
sober — though we are told that his melancholy
morose face lights up like a gourmet's at the hour
of his abstemious dinner — but this early eagerness
to absorb the sights as well as the sounds, and

* " Mes souvenirs," he told a psychological interviewer, " ont
une puissance, un relief extraordinaire; ma mtooire est ^norme,
prodigieuse, elle meg^ne; quand j'^voque les objets que j'ai vus, je
les revois tels qu'ils sont reellement avec leurs lignes, leurs formes,
leurs couleurs, leurs odeurs, leurs sons ; c^est une matirialisation h
oulrance ; le soleil qui les ^claire m'^blouit presque ; I'odeur me
suffoque, les details s'accrochent Jk moi et m'emp6chent de voir
I'ensemble. Aussi pour le ressaisir me faut-il attendre un certain
temps. Cette possibilite d'evocation ne dure pas tr^s longtemps ;
le relief de I'image est d'une exactitude, d'une intensite inouies,
puis I'image s'efFace, disparait, cela s'en va." This description
suggests myopia, and it is a fact that Zola has been short-sighted
from youth; he first realised it at sixteen. His other senses,
especially smell, are very keen — largely, however, as an outcome
of attention or practice. Thus while his tactile sensibility and
sensibility to pain are acute, his olfactory keenness is rather
qualitative than quantitative ; that is to say that it mainly con-
sists in a marked memory for odours, a tendency to be emotion-
ally impressed by them, and an ability to distinguish them in
which he resembles professional perfumers. All these and
many other facts have been very precisely ascertained by means
of the full psychological and anthropological study of M. Zola
which has been carried out by experts under the superintendence
of Dr. Toulouse.

140 Affirmations.

one may add the smells, of the external world,
has at length become moulded into a routine
method. To take some corner of life, and to
catalogue_^eyery d^air of^it, to place a living
, person there, and to describe every sight "and
smell and sound around him, although he him-
self may be quite unconscious of them — that, in
the simplest form, is the recipe for making a
roman expirimental. The method, I wish to
insist, was rooted in the author's, experience of
the world. Life only came to him as the sights,
sounds, smells, that reached his garret window.
His soul seems to have been starved at the
centre, and to have encamped at the sensory
{periphery. He never tasted deep of life, he
-stored up none of those wells of purely personal
emotion from which great artists have hoisted
up the precious fluid which makes the bright
living blood of their creations. How different
he is in this respect from the other great novelist
of our day, who has also been a volcanic force
of world-wide significance ! Tolstoi comes be-
fore us as a man who has himself lived deeply,
a man who has had an intense thirst for life,
and who has satisfied that thirst. He has
craved to know life, to know women, the joy
of wine, the fury of battle, the taste of the
ploughman's sweat in the field. He has known
all these things, not as material to make books,
but as the slaking of instinctive personal

Zola. 141

passions. And in knowing them he has stored
up a wealth of experiences from which he drew
as he came to make books, and which bear
about them that peculiar haunting fr^rance
only yielded by the things which have been
lived through, personally, in the far past Zola's
method has been quite otherwise: when he
wished to describe a great house he sat outside
the palatial residence of M. Menier, the choco-
late manufacturer, and imagined for himself the
luxurious fittings inside, discovering in after
years that his description had come far short of
the reality; before writing Nana, he obtained
an introduction to a courtesan, with whom he
was privileged_to lunch; his laborious prepara-
tion for~the "wbnderful account of the war of
1870, in La DSdcle, was purely one of books,
documents, and second-hand experiences ; when
he wished to write of labour he went to the'
mines and to the fields, but never appears to.
have done a day's manual work. Zola's literary
methods are those of the parvenu who has tried
to thrust himself in from outside, who has
never been seated at the table of life, who has
never really lived. That is their weakness. It
is also their virtue. There is no sense of satiety,
in Zola's work as there is in Tolstoi's. One
can understand how it is that, although their
methods are so unlike, Tolstoi himself regards
Zola as the one French novelist of the day who

142 Affirmations.

is really alive. The starved lad, whose eyes
were concentrated with longing on the visible
world, has reaped a certain reward from his
, intellectual chastity; he has preserved his clear-
ness of vision for material things, an eager,
insatiable, impartial vision. He is a zealot in
his devotion to life, to the smallest details of
life. He has fought like the doughtiest knight
of old-world romance for his lady's honour, and
has suffered more contumely than they all. " On
barde de fer nos urinoirs ! " he shouts in a fury
of indignation in one of his essays; it is a
curious instance of the fanatic's austere deter-
mination that no barrier shall be set up to shut
out the sights and smells of the external world.
The virgin freshness of his thirst for life gives
its swelling, youthful vigour to his work, its
irrepressible energy.

It has, indeed, happened with this unsatisfied
energy as it will happen with such energies ; it
has retained its robustness at the sacrifice of
the sweetness it might otherwise have gained.
There is a certain bitterness in Zola's fury of
vision, as there is also in his gospel of " Work !
work ! work ! " One is conscious of a savage
assault on a citadel which, the assailant now
well knows, can never be scaled. Life cannot
be reached by the senses alone; there is always
something that cannot be caught by the utmost
tension of eyes and ears and nose; a well-

Zola. 143

balanced soul is built up, not alone on sensory
memories, but also on the harmonious satis-
faction of the motor and emotional energies.
That cardinal fact must be faced even when
we are attempting tc define the fruitful and
positive element in Zola's activity.

The chief service which Zola has rendered to
his fellow-artists and successors, the reason of
the immense stimulus he supplies, seems to lie
in the proofs he has brought of the latent artistic
uses of the rough, neglected details of life. The
Rougon-Macquart series has been to his weaker
brethren like that great sheet knit at the four
corners, let down from Heaven full of four-
footed beasts and creeping things and fowls
of the air, and bearing in it the demonstration
that to the artist as to the moralist nothing can
be called common or unclean. It has hence-
forth become possible for other novelists to find
inspiration where before they could never have
turned, to touch life with a vigour and audacity
of phrase which, without Zola's example, they
would have trembled to use, while they still
remain free to bring to their work the simplicity,
precision, and inner experience which he has
never possessed. Zola has enlarged the field of,
the novel. He has brought the modern material
world into fiction in a more definite and thorough
manner than it has ever been brought before,
just as Richardson brought the modern emo-

144 Affirmations.

tional world into fiction; such an achievement
necessarily marks an epoch. In spite of all his
blunders, Zola has given the novel new power
and directness, a vigour of fibre which was hard
indeed to attain, but which, once attained, we
may chasten as we will. And in doing this he ■
has put out of court, perhaps for ever, those
unwholesome devotees of the novelist's art who
work out of their vacuity, having neither inner
nor outer world to tell of.

Zola's delight in exuberant detail, it is true, is
open to severe criticism. When, however, we
look at his work, not as great art but as an
important moment in the evolution of the novel,
this exuberance is amply justified. Such furious
energy in hammering home this demonstration
of the artistic utility of the whole visible modern
world may detract from the demonstrator's
reputation for skill ; it has certainly added to
the force of the demonstration. Zola's luxuri-,
ance of detail — the heritage of that rqmapjtigl
movement of which he was the child — has ex-
tended impartially to every aspect of life he
has investigated, to the working of a mine, to
the vegetation of the Paradou, to the ritual of
the Catholic Church. But it is not on the
details of inanimate life, or the elaborate
description of the industrial and religious
functions of men, that the rage of Zola's ad-
versaries has chiefly been spent It is rather

Zola, 145

on his use of the language of the common
people and on his descriptions of the sexual
and digestive functions of humanity. Zola
has used slang — the argot of the populace —
copiously, chiefly indeed in L' Assommoir, which
is professedly a study of low life, but to a less
extent in his other books. A considerable
part of the power of L' Assommoir, in many
respects Zola's most perfect work, lies in the
skill with which he uses the language of the
people he is dealing with ; the reader is bathed
throughout in an atmosphere of picturesque,
vigorous, often coarse argot. There is, no
doubt, a lack of critical sobriety in the pro-
fusion and reiteration of vulgarisms, of coarse
oaths, of the varied common synonyms for
common things. But they achieve the end
that Zola sought, and so justify themselves.

They are of even greater interest as a protest
against the exaggerated purism which has ruled
the French language for nearly three centuries,
and while rendering it a more delicate and
precise instrument for scientific purposes, has
caused it to become rather bloodless and colour-
less for the artist's purposes, as compared with
the speech used by Rabelais, Montaigne, and
even Moli^re, the great classics who have chiefly
influenced Zola. The romantic movement of
the present century, it is true, added colour to
the language, but scarcely blood ; it was an

10

146 Affirmations,

exotic, feverish colour which has not per-
manently enriched French speech. , A language
rendered anaemic by over-clarification cannot be
fed by exotic luxuries but by an increase in the
vigorous staples of speech^ and Zola was on the
right track when he went to the people's com-
mon speech, which is often classic in the true
sense and always robust. Doubtless he has
been indiscriminate and even inaccurate in his
use of argot, sometimes giving undue place to
what is of merely temporary growth. But the
main thing was to give literary place and
prestige to words and phrases which had fallen
so low in general esteem, in spite of their
admirable expressiveness, that only a writer of
the first rank and of unequalled audacity could
venture to lift them from the mire. This Zola
has done; and those who follow him may easily
exercise the judgment and discretion in which
he has been lacking.

Zola's treatment of the sexual and the
digestive functions, as I pointed out, has chiefly
aroused his critics. If you think of it, these
two functions are precisely the central functions
of life, the two poles of hunger and love around
which the world revolves. It is natural that it
should be precisely these fundamental aspects
of life which in the superficial contact of
ordinary social intercourse we are for ever
trying more and more to refine away and

Zoix. 147

ignore. They are subjected to an ever-encroach-
ing process of attenuation and circumlocution,
and as a social tendency this influence is
possibly harmless or even beneficial. But it
is constantly extending to literature also, and
here it is disastrous. It is true that a few great
authors — classics of the first rank — have gone to
extremes in their resistance to this tendency.
These extremes are of two kinds : the first
issuing in a sort of coprolalia, or inclination
to dwell on excrement, which we find to a
slight extent in Rabelais and to a marked
extent in the half-mad Swift; in its fully-
developed shape this coprolalia is an uncon-
trollable instinct found in some forms of
insanity. The other extreme is that of
pruriency, or the perpetual itch to circle round
sexual matters, accompanied by a timidity
which makes it impossible to come right up
to them ; this sort of impotent fumbling in
women's placket-holes finds its supreme literary
exponent in Sterne. Like coprolalia, when
uncontrolled, prurience is a well-recognised
characteristic of the insane, leading them to
find a vague eroticism everywhere. But both
these extreme tendencies have not been found
incompatible with the highest literary art
Moreover, their most pronounced exponents
have been clerics, the conventional represen-
tatives of the Almighty. However far Zola

148 Affirmations.

might go in these directions, he would still be
in what is universally recognised as very good
company. He has in these respects by no
means come up with Father Rabelais and Dean
Swift and the Rev. Laurence Sterne ; but there
can be little doubt that, along both lines, he
has missed the restraint of well-balanced art.
On the one hand he over-emphasises what is
repulsive in the nutritive side of life, and on the
other hand, with the timid obsession of chastity,
he over-emphasises the nakedness of flesh. In
so doing, he has revealed a certain flabbiness
in his art, although he has by no means dim-
inished his service in widening the horizon of
literary speech and subject. Bearing in mind
that many crowned kings of literature have
approached these subjects quite as closely as
Zola, and far less seriously, it does not seem
necessary to enter any severer judgment here.

To enlarge the sphere of language is an un-
thankful task, but in the long run literature owes
an immense debt to the writers who courageously
add to the stock of strong and simple words.
Our own literature for two centuries has been
hampered by the social tendency of life to
slur expression, and to paraphrase or suppress
all forceful and poignant words. If we go
back to Chaucer, or even to Shakespeare,
we realise what power of expression we have
lost It is enough, indeed, to turn to our

Zola. 149

English Bible. The literary power of the
English Bible is largely due to the uncon-
scious instinct for style which happened to be
in the air when it was chiefly moulded, to the
simple, direct, unashamed vigour of its speech.
Certainly, if the discovery of the Bible had been
left for us to make, any English translation
would have to be issued at a high price by some
esoteric society, for fear lest it should fall into
the hands of the British matron. It is our
British love of compromise, we say, that makes
it possible for a spade to be called a spade
on one day of the week, but on no other ; our
neighbours, whose minds are more logically
constituted, call it le cant Britannique. But our
mental compartments remain very water-tight,
and on the whole we are even worse off than
the French who have no Bible. For instance,
we have almost lost the indispensable words
" belly " and " bowels," both used so often and
with such admirable effect in the Psalms; we
talk of the " stomach," a word which is not only
an incorrect equivalent, but at best totally inapt
for serious or poetic uses. Any one who is
acquainted with our old literature, or with the
familiar speech of the common folk, will
recall similar instances of simple, powerful ex-
pressions which are lost or vanishing from
literary language, leaving no available substitute
behind. In modern literary language, indeed,

150 Affirmations.

man scarcely exists save in his extremities.
For we take the pubes as a centre, and we
thence describe a circle with a radius of some
eighteen inches — in America the radius is rather
longer — and we forbid any reference to any
organ within the circle, save that maid-of-all-
work the " stomach " ; in other words, we make
it impossible to say anything to the point
concerning the central functions of life

It is a question how far real literature can be
produced under such conditions, not merely
because literature is thus shut out from close
contact with the vital facts of life, but because
the writer who is willing to be so shut out, who
finds himself most at home within the social
limits of speech, will probably not be made of
the heroic stuff that goes to the moulding of a
great writer. The social limits of speech are
useful enough, for we are all members of society,
and it is well that we should have some protec-
tion against the assaults of unbridled vulgarity.
But in literature we may choose to read what
we will, or to read nothing, and the man who
enters the world of literature timidly equipped
with the topics and language of the drawing-
room is not likely to go far. I once saw it
stated depreciatingly in a grave literary review
that a certain novel by a woman writer dealt
with topics that are not even discussed by
men at their clubs. I had never read it, but it

Zola. 151

seemed to me then that there might be hope for
that novel. No doubt it is even possible in
literature to fall below the club standard, but
unless you can rise above the club standard,
better stay at the club, tell stories there, or
sweep the crossing outside.

All our great poets and novelists from Chaucer
to Fielding wrote sincerely and heroically con-
cerning the great facts of life. That is why they
are great, robustly sane, radiantly immortal. It
is a mistake to suppose that no heroism was
involved in their case ; for though no doubt
they had a freer general speech on their side
they went beyond their time in daring to mould
that speech to the ends of art, in bringing litera-
ture closer to life. It was so even with Chaucer;
compare him with his contemporaries and suc-
cessors ; observe how he seeks to soothe the
susceptibilities of his readers and to deprecate
the protests of the "precious folk." There is
no great art at any epoch without heroism,
though one epoch may be more favourable than
another to the exercise of such heroism in litera-
ture. In our own age and country daring has
passed out of the channels of art into those of
commerce, to find exercise, foolish enough some-
times, in the remotest corners of the earth. It
is because our literature is not heroic, but has
been confined within the stifling atmosphere
of the drawing-room, that English poets and

152 Affirmations.

novelists have ceased to be a power in the
world and are almost unknown outside the
parlours and nurseries of our own country. It
is because in France there have never ceased to
be writers here and there who have dared to
face life heroically and weld it into art that the
literature of France is a power in the world
wherever there are men intelligent enough to
recognise its achievements. When literature
that is not only fine but also great appears in
England we shall know it as such by its heroism,
if by no other mark.

Language has its immense significance be-
cause it is the final incarnation of a man's most
intimate ideals. Zola's style and method are
monotonous — with a monotony which makes
his* books unreadable when we have once
mastered his secret — and the burden they ex-
press is ever the same : the energy of natural
life. Whatever is robust, whatever is whole-
somely exuberant, whatever, wholesomely or
not, is possessed by the devouring fury of
life — of ^ch things Zola can never have
enough. I The admirable opening of La Terre,
in whictra young girl drives the cow, wild
for the male, to the farm where the stock-
bull is kept, then leading the appeased
animal home ag^un, symbolises Zola's whole
view of the world. J^ All the forces of Nature, it
seems to him, are raging in the fury of gener-

Zola. 153

ative desire or reposing in the fulness of
swelling maturity. The very earth itself, in the
impressive pages with which Germinal closes,
is impregnated with men, germinating beneath
the soil, one day to burst through the furrows
and renew the old world's failing life. In this
conception of the natural energies of the world
— as manifested in men and animals, in machines,
in every form of matter — perpetually conceiving
and generating, Zola reaches his rtiost impres-
sive effects, though these effects are woven
together of elements that are separately of
no very exquisite beauty, or subtle insight, or
radical novelty.

In considering Zola, we are indeed constantly
brought back to the fact that most of the things
that he has tried to do have been better done by
more accomplished artists. The Goncourts have
extended the sphere of language, even in the
direction of slang, and have faced many of the
matters that Zola has faced, and with far more
delicate, though usually more shadowy, art ;
Balzac has created as large and vivid a world of
people, though drawing more of it from his own
imagination ; Huysmans has greater skill in
stamping the vision of strange or sordid things
on the brain ; Tolstoi gives a deeper realisation
of life ; Flaubert is as audaciously naturalistic,
and has, as well, that perfect self-control which
should always accompany audacity. And in

X 54 Affirmations.

Flaubert, too, we find something of the same
irony as in Zola.

This irony, however, is a personal and char-
acteristic feature of Zola's work. It is irony
alone which gives it distinction and poignant
incisiveness. \ Irony may be called the soul of
Zola's work, the embodiment of his moral
attitude towards life. It has its source, doubt-
less, like so much else that is characteristic, in
his early days of poverty and aloofness from the
experiences of life. There is a fierce impartiality
— the impartiality of one who is outside and
shut off — in this manner of presenting the
brutalities and egoisms and pettinesses of men.
The fury of his irony is here equalled by his
self-restraint. He concentrates it into a word, a
smile, "a gesture. Zola believes, undoubtedly, in
a reformed, even perhaps a revolutionised, future
of society, but he has no illusions. He sets down
things as he sees them. He has no tendernesses
for the working-classes, no pictures of rough
diamonds. We may see this very clearly in
Germinal. Here every side of the problem of
modem capitalism is presented : the gentle-
natured shareholding class unable to realise a
state of society in which people should not live
on dividends and give charity; the official class
with their correct authoritative views, very sure
that they will always be needed to control labour
and maintain social order ; and the workers,

Zola. 155

some brutalised, some suffering like dumb beasts,
some cringing to the bosses, some rebelling
madly, a few striving blindly for justice.

There is no loophole in Zola's impartiality ;
the gradual development of the seeming hero of
Germinal, Etienne Lantier, the agitator, honest
in his revolt against oppression, but with an
unconscious bourgeois ideal at his heart, seems
unerringly right All are the victims of an evil
social system, as Zola sees the world, the en-
slaved workers as much as the overfed masters;
the only logical outcome is a clean sweep — the
burning up of the chaff and straw, the fresh
furrowing of the earth, the new spring of a sweet
and vigorous race. That is the logical outcome
of Zola's attitude, the attitude of one who regards
our present society as a thoroughly vicious circle.
His pity for men and women is boundless ; his
disdain is equally boundless. It is only towards
animals that his tenderness is untouched by con-
tempt; some of his most memorable passages
are concerned with the sufferings of animals.
The New Jerusalem may be fitted up, but the
Montsou miners will never reach it ; they will
fight for the first small, stuffy, middle-class villa
they meet on the way. And Zola pours out the
stream of his pitiful, pitiless irony on the weak,
helpless, erring children of men. It is this moral
energy, combined with his volcanic exuberance,
which lifts him to a position of influence above

156 Affirmations.

the greater artists with whom we may compare
him.

It is by no means probable that the world will
continue to read Zola much longer. His work
is already done; but when the nineteenth century
is well past it may be that he will still have his
interest. There will be plenty of material,
especially in the newspapers, for the future
historian to reconstruct the social life of the
latter half of the nineteenth century. But the
material is so vast that these historians will
possibly be even more biassed and one-sided
than our own. For a vivid, impartial picture —
on the whole a faithful picture — of certain of
the most characteristic aspects of this period,
seen indeed from the outside, but drawn by a
contemporary in all its intimate and even repul-
sive details, the reader of a future age can best
go to Zola. What would we not give for a
thirteenth century Zola ! We should read with
painful, absorbed interest a narrative of the
Black Death as exact as that of nineteenth
century alcoholism in L'Assommoir. The story
of how the serf lived, as fully told as in La
Terre, would be of incomparable value The
early merchant and usurer would be a less dim
figure if L' Argent had been written about him.
The abbeys and churches of those days have in
part come down to us, but no Germinal remains
to tell of the lives and thoughts of the men who

Zola. 157

hewed those stones, and piled them, and carved
them. How precious such record would have
been we may realise when we recall the incom-
parable charm of Chaucer's prologue to The
Canterbury Tales. But our children's children,
with the same passions alive at their hearts
under incalculably different circumstances, will
in the pages of the Rougon-Macquart series find
themselves back again among all the strange
remote details of a vanished world. What a
fantastic and terrible page of old-world romance!

15«

HUYSMANS.

In trying to represent the man who wrote the
extraordinary books grouped around A Rebours
and En Route, I find myself carried back to the
decline of the Latin world. I recall those rest-
less Africans who were drawn into the vortex of
decadent Rome, who absorbed its corruptions
with all the barbaric fervour of their race, and
then with a more natural impetus of that youth-
ful fervour threw themselves into the young
current of Christianity, yet retaining in their
flesh the brand of an exotic culture. Tertullian,
Augustine, and the rest gained much of their
power, as well as their charm, because they in-
carnated a fantastic mingling of youth and age,
of decayed Latinity, of tumultuously youthful
Christianity. Huysmans, too, incarnates the old
and the new, but with a curious, a very vital
difference. To-day the rdles are reversed ; it is
another culture that is now young, with its
aspirations after human perfection and social
solidarity, while Christianity has exchanged the
robust beauty of youth for the subtler beauty
of age. " The most perfect analogy to our time

Huysmans. 159

which I can find," wrote Renan to his sister amid
the tumults of Paris in 1848, a few weeks after
Huysmans had been born in the same city, "is
the moment when Christianity and paganism
stood face to face." Huysmans had wandered
from ancestral haunts of mediaeval peace into
the forefront of the struggles of our day, bring-
ing the clear, refined perceptions of old culture
to the intensest vision of the modern world yet
attained, but never at rest, never once grasping
except on the purely aesthetic side the signifi-
cance of the new age, always haunted by the
memory of the past and perpetually feeling his
way back to what seems to him the home of his
soul. — The fervent seeker of those early days,
indeed, but d, rebours !

This is scarcely a mere impression ; one might
be tempted to say that it is strictly the formula
of this complex and interesting personality.
Coming on the maternal side from an ordinary
Parisian bourgeois stock, though there chanced to
be a sculptor even along this line, on the paternal
side he belongs to an alien aristocracy of art.
From father to son his ancestors were painters,
of whom at least one, Cornelius Huysmans,
still figures honourably in our public galleries,
while the last of them left Breda to take up his
domicile in Paris. Here his son, Joris Karl, has
been the first of the race to use the pen instead
of the brush, yet retaining precisely those char-

i6o Affirmations.

acters of " veracity of imitation, jewel-like rich-
ness of colour, perfection of finish, emphasis of
character," which their historian finds in the
painters of his land from the fourteenth century
onwards. Where the Meuse approaches the
Rhine valley we find the home of the men
who, almost alone in the north, created paint-
ing and the arts that are grouped around paint-
ing, and evolved religious music. On the side
of art the Church had found its chief builders
in the men of these valleys, and even on
the spiritual side also, for here is the northern
home of mysticisni. Their latest child has
fixed his attention on the feverish activities of
Paris with the concentrated gaze of a stranger
in a strange land, held by a fascination which is
more than half repulsion, always missing some-
thing, he scarcely knows what. He has ever
been seeking the satisfaction he had missed,
sometimes in the aesthetic vision of common
things, sometimes in the refined Thebaid of his
own visions, at length more joyfully in the sur-
vivals of mediaeval mysticism. Yet as those early
Africans still retained their acquired Roman in-
stincts, and that fantastic style which could not
be shaken off, so Huysmans will surely retain
to the last the tincture of Parisian modernity.

Yet we can by no means altogether account
for Huysmans by race and environment. Every
man of genius is a stranger and a pilgrim on the

Huysmans. i6i

earth, unlike other men, seeing everything as it
were at a different angle, mirroring the world in
his mind as in those concave or convex mirrors
which elongate or abbreviate absurdly all who
approach them. No one ever had a keener
sense of the distressing absurdity of human
affairs than M. Huysmans. The Trocadero is
not a beautiful building, but to no one else
probably has it appeared as an old hag lying
on her back and elevating her spindle shanks
towards the sky. Such images of men's works
and ways abound in Huysmans' books, and
they express his unaffected vision of life, his
disgust for men and things, a shuddering dis-
gust, yet patient, half-amused. ( I can well recall
an evening spent some years ago in M. Huys-
mans' company. His face, with the sensitive,
luminous eyes, reminded one of Baudelaire's
portraits, the face of a resigned and benevolent
Mephistopheles who has discovered the absurdity
of the Divine order but has no wish to make
any improper use of his discovery. He talked
in low and even tones, never eagerly, without
any emphasis or gesture, not addressing any
special person ; human imbecility was the burden
of nearly all that he said, while a faint twinkle
of amused wonderment lit up his eyes. And
throughout all his books until almost the last
"I'^ternelle b^tise de I'humanitd" is the ever-
recurring refrain. J

' II

1 62 Affirmations.

Always leading a retired life, and specially
abhorring the society and conversation of the
average literary man, M. Huysmans has for
many years been a government servant — a
model official, it is said — at the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs. Here, like our own officials at
Whitehall, he serves his country in dignified
leisure — on the only occasion on which I have
seen him in his large and pleasant bureau, he
was gazing affectionately at Ch^ret's latest affij:he,
which a lady of his acquaintance had just
brought to show him — and such duties of
routine, with the close contact with practical
affairs they involve, must always be beneficial
in preserving the sane equipoise of an imagin-
ative temperament. In this matter Huysmans
has been more fortunate than his intimate friend
Villiers de I'lsle-Adam, who had wandered so
far into the world of dreams that he lost touch
with the external world and ceased to distinguish
them clearly. One is at first a little surprised
to hear of the patient tact and diplomacy which
the author of A Rebours spent round the death-
bed of the author of Contes Cruels to obtain
the dying dreamer's consent to a ceremony of
marriage which would legitimate his child. But
Huysmans' sensitive nervous system and ex-
travagant imagination have ever been under
the control of a sane and forceful intellect;
his very idealism has been nourished by the

Huysmans. 163

contemplation of a world which he has seen
too vividly ever to ignore. We may read
that in the reflective deliberation of his grave
and courteous bearing, somewhat recalling, as
more than one observer has noted, his own
favourite animal, the cat, whose outward repose
of Buddhistic contemplation envelops a highly-
strung nervous system, while its capacity to
enjoy the refinements of human civilisation
comports a large measure of spiritual freedom
and ferocity. Like many another man of letters,
Huysmans suffers from neuralgia and dyspepsia;
but no novelist has described so persistently and
so poignantly the pangs of toothache or the
miseries of maux d'estomac, a curious proof of
the peculiarly personal character of Huysmans'
work throughout. His sole pre-occupation has
been with his own impressions. He possessed
no native genius for the novel. But with a very
sound instinct he set himself, almost at the
outset of his career, to describe intimately and
faithfully the crudest things of life, the things
most remote from his own esoteric tastes but
at that time counted peculiarly "real." There
could be no better discipline for an idealist.
Step by step he has left the region of vulgar
actualities to attain his proper sphere, but the
marvellous and slowly won power of expressing
the spiritually impalpable in concrete imagery
is the fruit of that laborious apprenticeship.

164 Affirmations.

He was influenced in his novels at first by
Goncourt, afterwards a little by Zola, as he
sought to reproduce his own vivid and personal
vision of the world. This vision is like that
of a man with an intense exaltation of the
senses, especially the senses of sight and smell.
Essentially Huysmans is less a novelist than a
poet, with an instinct to use not verse but prose
as his medium. Thus he early fell under the
influence of Baudelaire's prose-poems. His
small and slight first volume, Le Drageoir A
Epices, bears witness to this influence, while yet
revealing a personality clearly distinct from
Baudelaire's. This personality is already wholly
revealed in the quaint audacity of the little
prose-poem entitled " L'Extase." Here, at the
very outset of Huysmans' career, we catch an
unconscious echo of mediaeval asceticism, the
voice, it might be, of Odo of Cluny, who
nearly a thousand years before had shrunk
with horror from embracing a " sack of dung ; "
•'quomodo ipsum stercoris saccum amplecti desi-
deramus ! " " L'Extase" describes how the lover
lies in the wood clasping the hand of the beloved
and bathed in a rapture of blissful emotion ;
"suddenly she rose, disengaged her hand, dis-
appeared in the bushes, and I heard as it were
the rustling of rain on the leaves ; " at once the
delicious dream fled and the lover awakes to
the reality of commonplace human things. That

Huysmans, 165

is a parable of the high-strang idealism, having
only contempt for whatever breaks in on its
ideal, which has ever been the mark of Huys-
mans. His sensitive ear is alive to the
gentlest ripple of nature, and it jars on him; it
becomes the deafening Niagara of "the in-
cessant deluge of human foolishness ; " all his art
is the research for a Heaven where the voice
of Nature shall no more be heard. Baudelaire
was also such a hyperaesthetic idealist, but the
human tenderness which vibrates beneath the
surface of Baudelaire's work has been the last
quality to make itself more than casually felt
in Huysmans. It is the defect which vitiated
his early work in the novel, when he was still
oscillating between the prose-poem and the
novel, clearly conscious that while the first
suited him best only in the second could
mastery be won. His early novels are some-
times portentously dull, with a lack of interest,
or even attempt to interest, which itself almost
makes them interesting, as frank ugliness is.
They are realistic with a veracious and courage-
ously abject realism, never, like Zola's, care-
fully calculated for its pictorial effectiveness,
but dealing simply with the trivialest and
sordidest human miseries. His first novel
Marthe — which inaugurated the long series
of novels devoted to state-regulated prosti-
tution in those slaughter-houses of love, as

1 66 Affirmations.

Huysmans later described them, where Desire
is slain at a single stroke, — sufficiently repul-
sive on the whole, is not without flashes of
insight which reveal the future artist, and to
some readers indeed make it more interesting
than La Fille Elisa, which the Goncourts
published shortly afterwards. Unlike the crude
and awkward Marthe — though that book reveals
the influence of the Goncourts — La Fille Elisa
shows the hand of an accomplished artist, but
it is also the work of a philanthropist writing
with an avowed object, and of a fine gentleman
ostentatiously anxious not to touch pitch with
more than a finger-tip. The Preface to Marthe
contains a declaration which remains true for
the whole of Huysmans' work : " I set down
what I see, what I feel, what I have lived,
writing it as well as I am able, et voild tout ! "
But it has ever been a dangerous task to set
down what one sees and feels and has lived ;
for no obvious reason, except the subject,
Marthe was immediately suppressed by the
police. This first novel remains the least
personal of Huysmans' books ; in his next novel,
Les Sceurs Vatard — a study of Parisian work-
girls and their lovers — a more characteristic
vision of the world begins to be revealed, and
from that time forward there is a continuous
though irregular development both in intellec-
tual grip and artistic mastery. "Sac au Dos,"

Huysmans. 167

which appeared in the Soirhs de Medan, re-
presents a notable stage in this development,
for here, as he has since acknowledged, Huys-
mans' hero is himself. It is the story of a
young student who serves during the great
war in the Garde Mobile of the Seine, and is
invalided with dysentery before reaching the
front. There is no story, no striking impres-
sion to record — nothing to compare with Guy
de Maupassant's incomparably more brilliant
" Boule-de-Suif," also dealing with the fringe
of war, which appears in the same volume —
no opportunity for literary display, nothing
but a record of individual feelings with
which the writer seems satisfied because they
are interesting to himself It is, in fact, the
germ of that method which Huysmans has
since carried to so brilliant a climax in En
Route. All the glamour of war and the
enthusiasm of patriotism are here — long before
Zola wrote his D^b&cle — reduced to their simplest
terms in the miseries of the individual soldier
whose chief aspiration it becomes at last to
return to a home where the necessities of
nature may be satisfied in comfort and peace.
At that time Huysmans' lack of patriotic
enthusiasm seemed almost scandalous; but
when we bear in mind his racial affinities it
is natural that he should, as he once remarked
to an interviewer, "prefer a Leipzig man to

1 68 Affirmations.

a Marseilles man," " the big, phlegmatic, taciturn
Germans" to the gesticulating and rhetorical
people of the French south. In Ld-Bas, at a
later date, through the mouth of one of his
characters, Huysmans goes so far as to regret
the intervention of Joan of Arc in French
history, for had it not been for Joan France
and England would have been restored to their
racial and prehistoric unity, consolidated into
one great kingdom under Norman Plantagenets,
instead of being given up to the southerners of
Latin race who surrounded Charles VII.

The best of Huysmans' early novels is
undoubtedly En Manage. It is the intimate
history of a young literary man who, having
married a wife whom he shortly afterwards finds
unfaithful, leaves her, returns to his bachelor
life, and in the end becomes reconciled to her.
This picture of a studious man who goes away
with his books to fight over again the petty
battles of bachelorhood with the bonne and
the concierge and his own cravings for womanly
love and companionship, reveals clearly for the
first time Huysmans' power of analysing states
of mind that are at once simple and subtle.
Perhaps no writer surprises us more by his
revealing insight into the commonplace experi-
ences which all a novelist's traditions lead him
to idealise or ignore. As a whole, however. En
Manage is scarcely yet a master's work, a little

Huysmans. l6g

laboured, with labour which cannot yet achieve
splendour of effect. Nor can a much slighter
story, A Vau VEau, which appeared a little later,
be said to mark a further stage in develop-
ment, though it is a characteristic study, this
sordid history of Folantin, the poor, lame,
discontented, middle-aged clerk. Cheated and
bullied on every side, falling a prey to the
vulgar woman of the street who boisterously
takes possession of him in the climax of the
story, all the time feeling poignantly the whole
absurdity of the situation, there is yet one spot
where hope seems possible. He has no religious
faith; "and yet," he reflects, "yet mysticism
alone could heal the wound that tortures me."
Thus Folantin, though like Andr^ in En
Manage he resigns themselves to the inevitable
stupidity of life, yet stretches out his hands
towards the Durtal of Huysmans' latest work.

In all these novels we feel that Huysmans has
not attained to full self-expression. Intellectual
mastery, indeed, he is attaining, but scarcely yet
the expression of his own personal ideals. The
poet in Huysmans, the painter enamoured of
beauty and seeking it in unfamiliar places, has
little scope in these detailed pictures of sordid
or commonplace life. At this early period it
is still in prose-poems, especially in Croquis
Parisiens, that this craving finds satisfaction.
Des Esseintes, the hero of A Rebours, who on

I/O Affirmations.

so many matters is Huysmans' mouthpiece,
of all forms of literature preferred the prose-
poem when, in the hands of an alchemist
of genius, it reveals a novel concentrated into
a few pages or a few lines, the concrete juice,
the essential oil of art. It was " a communion
of thought between a magical writer and an
ideal reader, a spiritual collaboration among a
dozen superior persons scattered throughout
the world, a delectation offered to the finest
wits, and to them alone accessible." Huysmans
took up this form where Baudelaire and Mallarm6
had left it, and sought to carry it yet further.
In that he was scarcely successful. The excess
of tension in the tortured language with which
he elaborates his effects too often holds him
back from the goal of perfection. We must yet
value in Croquis Parisiens its highly wrought
and individual effects of rhythm and colour and
form. In France, at all events, Huysmans is
held to inaugurate the poetic treatment of
modern things — a characteristic already trace-
able in Les Sceurs Vatard — and this book deals
with the assthetic aspects of latter-day Paris, with
the things that are " ugly and superb, outrageous
and yet exquisite," as a type of which he selects
the Folies-Bergere, at that time the most charac-
teristic of Parisian music-halls, and he was thus
the first to discuss the aesthetic value of the variety
stage which has been made cheaper since. For

Huysmans. 171

the most part, however, these Croquis are of
the simplest and most commonplace things —
the forlorn Bi^vre district, the poor man's caf^,
the roast-chestnut seller — extracting the beauty
or pathos or strangeness of all these things.
"Thy garment is the palette of setting suns,
the rust of old copper, the brown gilt of Cordo-
van leather, the sandal and saffron tints of the
autumn foliage. . . . When I contemplate thy
coat of mail I think of Rembrandt's pictures,
I see again his superb heads, his sunny
flesh, his gleaming jewels on black velvet I
see again his rays of light in the night, his
trailing gold in the shade, the dawning of suns
through dark arches." The humble bloater has
surely never before been sung in language which
recalls the Beloved of the " Song of Songs."
Huysmans has carried to an even extravagant
degree that re-valuation of the world's good in
which genius has ever found its chief function.
To abase the mighty and exalt the humble
seems to man the divinest of prerogatives, for
it is that which he himself exercises in his
moments of finest inspiration. To find a new
vision of the world, a new path to truth, is the
instinct of the artist or the thinker. He changes
the whole system of our organised perceptions.
That is why he seems to us at first an incarnate
paradox, a scoffer at our most sacred verities,
making mountains of our mole-hills and count-

172 Affirmations.

ing as mere mole-hills our everlasting mountains,
always keeping time to a music that clashes
with ours, at our hilarity tristis, in tristitia
hilaris.

In 1889 A Rebours appeared. Not perhaps
his greatest achievement, it must ever remain
the central work in which he has most power-
fully concentrated his whole vision of life. It
sums up the progress he had already made,
foretells the progress he was afterwards to
make, in a style that is always individual,
always masterly in its individuality. Tech-
nically, it may be said that the power of A
Rebours lies in the fact that here for the first
time Huysmans has succeeded in uniting the
two lines of his literary development : the austere
analysis in the novels of commonplace things
mostly alien to the writer, and the freer elabora-
tion in the prose-poems of his own more in-
timate personal impressions. In their union
the two streams attain a new power and a
more intimately personal note. Des Esseintes,
the hero of this book, may possibly have been
at a few points suggested by a much less in-
teresting real personage in contemporary Paris,
the Comte de Montesquiou-Fezensac, but in the
main he was certainly created by Huysmans'
own brain, as the representative of his author's
hyperaesthetic experience of the world and the
mouthpiece of his most personal judgments.

Huysmans. 173

The victim of over-wrought nerves, of neuralgia
and dyspepsia, Des Esseintes retires for a season
from Paris to the solitude of his country house
at Fontenay, which he has fitted up, on almost
cloistral methods, to soothe his fantasy and
to gratify his complex aesthetic sensations, his
love of reading and contemplation. The finest
pictures of Gustave Moreau hang on the walls,
with the fantastic engravings of Luyken, and
the strange visions of Odilon Redon. He has
a tortoise curiously inlaid with precious stones;
he delights in all those exotic plants which
reveal Nature's most unnatural freaks; he is
a sensitive amateur of perfumes, and considers
that the pleasures of smell are equal to those of
sight or sound; he possesses a row of little
barrels of liqueurs so arranged that he can blend
in infinite variety the contents of this instru-
ment, his "mouth-organ" he calls it, and pro-
duce harmonies which seem to him comparable
to those yielded by a musical orchestra. But
the solitary pleasures of this palace of art only
increase the nervous strain he is suffering from ;
and at the urgent bidding of his doctor Des
Esseintes returns to the society of his abhorred
fellow-beings in Paris, himself opening the dyke
that admitted the "' waves of human mediocrity "
to engulf his refuge. And this wonderful
confession of aesthetic faith — with its long
series of deliberately searching and decisive

174 Affirmations.

affirmations on life, religion, literature, art —
ends with a sudden solemn invocation that is
surprisingly tremulous : " Take pity, O Lord,
on the Christian who doubts, on the sceptic who
desires to believe, on the convict of life who
embarks alone, in the night, beneath a sky no
longer lit by the consoling beacons of ancient
faith."

" He who carries his own most intimate
emotions to their highest point becomes the
first in file of a long series of men ; " that saying
is peculiarly true of Huysmans. But to be a
leader of men one must turn one's back on men.
Huysmans' attitude towards his readers was
somewhat like that of Thoreau, who spoke
with lofty disdain of such writers as "would
fain have one reader before they die." As he
has since remarked, Huysmans wrote A Rebours
for a dozen persons, and was himself more sur-
prised than any one at the wide interest it
evoked. Yet that interest was no accident.
Certain esthetic ideals of the latter half of the
nineteenth century are more quintessentially
expressed in A Rebours than in any other book.
Intensely personal, audaciously independent, it
yet sums up a movement which has scarcely
now worked itself out. We may read it and
re-read, not only for the light which it casts on
that movement, but upon every similar period
of acute aesthetic perception in the past.

Huysmans. 175

II.

The aesthetic attitude towards art which A
Rebours illuminates is that commonly called
decadent. Decadence in art, though a fairly
simple phenomenon, and world-wide as art
itself, is still so ill understood that it may be
worth while to discuss briefly its precise nature,
more especially as manifested in literature.

Technically, a decadent style is only such
in relation to a classic style. It is simply a
further development of a classic style, a further
specialisation, the homogeneous, in Spencerian
phraseology, having become heterogeneous.
The first is beautiful because the parts are
subordinated to the whole ; the second is
beautiful because the whole is subordinated to
the parts. Among our own early prose-writers
Sir Thomas Browne represents the type of
decadence in style. Swift's prose is classic,
Pater's decadent. Hume and Gibbon are
classic, Emerson and Carlyle decadent. In
architecture, which is the key to all the arts, we
see the distinction between the classic and the
decadent visibly demonstrated ; Roman archi-
tecture is classic, to become in its Byzantine
developments completely decadent, and St.
Mark's is the perfected type of decadence in
art ; pure early Gothic, again, is strictly classic
in the highest degree because it shows an

176 Affirmations.

absolute subordination of detail to the bold
harmonies of structure, while later Gothic,
grown weary of the commonplaces of structure
and predominantly interested in beauty of
detail, is again decadent. In each case the
earlier and classic manner — for the classic
manner, being more closely related to the
ends of utility, must always be earlier — sub-
ordinates the parts to the whole, and strives
after those virtues which the whole may best
express ; the later manner depreciates the im-
portance of the whole for the benefit of its
, parts, and strives after the virtues of individual-
ism. All art is the rising and falling of the
slopes of a rhythmic curve between these two
classic and decadent extremes.

Decadence suggests to us going down, falling,
decay. If we walk down a real hill we do not
feel that we commit a more wicked act than
when we walked up it. But if it is a figurative
hill then we view Hell at the bottom. The
word " corruption " — used in a precise and
technical sense to indicate the breaking up of
the whole for the benefit of its parts — serves also
to indicate a period or manner of decadence in
art. This makes confusion worse, for here the
moralist feels that surely he is on safe ground.
But as Nietzsche, with his usual acuteness in
cutting at the root of vulgar prejudice, has well
remarked (in Die Fr'dhliche Wissenschafi), even

Huysmans, 177

as regards what is called the period of " corrup-
tion " in the evolution of societies, we are apt
to overlook the fact that the energy which in
more primitive times marked the operations of
the community as a whole has now simply been
transferred to the individuals themselves, and
this aggrandisement of the individual really
produces an even greater amount of energy.
The individual has gained more than the com-
munity has lost. An age of social decadence
is not only the age of sinners and degenerates,
but of saints and martyrs, and decadent Rome
produced an Antoninus as well as a Heliogabalus.
No doubt social " corruption '' and literary " cor-
ruption " tend to go together ; an age of indi-
vidualism is usually an age of artistic decadence,
and we may note that the chief literary artists
of America — Poe, Hawthorne; Whitman — are
for the most part in the technical sense deca-
dents.

Rome supplies the first clear types of classic
and decadent literature, and the small group of
recent French writers to whom the term has
been more specifically applied were for the most
part peculiarly attracted by later Latin literature.
So far as I can make out, it is to the profound
and penetrating genius of Baudelaire that we
owe the first clear apprehension of the legitimate
part which decadence plays in literature. We
may trace it, indeed, in his own style, clear, pure,

12

178 Affirmations.

and correct as that style always remains, as well
as in his literary preferences. He was a good
Latinist, and his favourite Latin authors were
Apuleius, Juvenal, Petronius, Saint Augustine,
Tertullian, and other writers in prose and verse
of the early Christian Church. He himself wrote
a love-poem in rhymed Latin verse, adding to it
a note concerning the late Latin decadence re-
garded as "the supreme sigh of a vigorous
person already transformed and prepared for
the spiritual life," and specially apt to express
passion as the modern world feels it, one pole
of the magnet at the opposite end of which
are Catullus and his band. " In this marvellous
tongue," he added, "solecism and barbarism
seem to me to render the forced negligences of
a passion which forgets itself and mocks at
rules. Words taken in a new meaning reveal
the charming awkwardness of the northern
barbarian kneeling before the Roman beauty."
But the best early statement of the meaning of
decadence in style — though doubtless inspired
by Baudelaire — was furnished by Gautier in
1868 in the course of the essay on Baudelaire
which is probably the most interesting piece of
criticism he ever achieved. The passage is long,
but so precise and accurate that it must here in
part be quoted : " The poet of the Fleurs du
Mai loved what is improperly called the style
of decadence, and which is nothing else but art

Huysmans. 179

arrived at that point of extreme maturity yielded
by the slanting suns of aged civilisations : an
ingenious complicated style, full of shades and
of research, constantly pushing back the bound-
aries of speech, borrowing from all the technical
vocabularies, taking colour from all palettes and
notes from all key-boards, struggling to render
what is most inexpressible in thought, what is
vague and most elusive in the outlines of form,
listening to translate the subtle confidences of
neurosis, the dying confessions of passion grown
depraved, and the strange hallucinations of the
obsession which is turning to madness. The
style of decadence is the ultimate utterance of
the Word, summoned to final expression and
driven to its last hiding-place. One may recall
in this connection the language of the later
Roman Empire, already marbled with the green-
ness of decomposition, and, so to speak, gamy,
and the complicated refinements of the Byzantine
school, the last forms of Greek art falling into
deliquescence. Such indeed is the necessary and
inevitable idiom of peoples and civilisations in
which factitious life has replaced natural life,
and developed unknown wants in men. It is,
besides, no easy thing, this style disdained of
pedants, for it expresses new ideas in new forms,
and in words which have not yet been heard.
Unlike the classic style it admits shadow. . . ,
One may well imagine that the fourteen hundred

1 80 Affirmations.

words of the Racinian vocabulary scarcely suffice
the author who has undertaken the laborious
task of rendering modern ideas and things in
their infinite complexity and multiple coloura-
tion."

Some fifteen years later, Bourget, again in an
essay on Baudelaire {Essais de Psychologic Con-
temporaine), continued the exposition of the
theory of decadence, elaborating the analogy to
the social organism which enters the state of
decadence as soon as the individual life of the
parts is no longer subordinated to the whole.
" A similar law governs the development and
decadence of that other organism which we call
language. A style of decadence is one in which
the unity of the book is decomposed to give
place to the independence of the page, in which
the page is decomposed to give place to the
independence of the phrase, and the phrase to
give place to the independence of the word."
It was at this time (about 1884) that the term
"decadent" seems first to have been applied
by Barres and others to the group of which
Verlaine, Huysmans, Mallarme were the most
distinguished members, and in so far as it
signified an ardent and elaborate search for
perfection of detail beyond that attained by
Parnassian classicality it was tolerated or ac-
cepted. Verlaine, indeed, was for the most
part indifferent to labels, neither accepting nor

Huysmans. i8i

rejecting them, and his work was not bound
up with any theory. But (Huysmans, with the
intellectual passion of the pioneer in art,
deliberate and relentless, has carried both the
theory and the practice of decadence in style
to the farthest point. In practice he goes
beyond Baudelaire, who, however enamoured
he may have been of what he called the
phosphorescence of putrescence, always retained
in his own style much of what is best in the
classic manner. Huysmans' vocabulary is vast,
his images, whether remote or familiar, always
daring, — "dragged," in the words of one critic,
"by the hair or by the feet, down the worm-
eaten staircase of terrified Syntax," — but a
heart-felt pulse of emotion is restrained beneath
the sombre and extravagant magnificence of this
style, and imparts at the best that modulated
surge of life which only the great masters can
control. 1

Des Esseintes's predilections in literature are
elaborated through several chapters, and with-
out question he faithfully reflects his creator's
impressions. He was indifferent or contempt-
uous towards the writers of the Latin Augustan
age; Virgil seenjed to him thin and mechanical,
Horace a detestable clown; the fat redundancy
of Cicero, we are told, and the dry constipation
of Caesar alike disgusted him ; Sallust, Livy,
Juvenal, even Tacitus and Plautus, though for

1 82 Affirmations.

these he had words of praise, seemed to him for
the most part merely the delights of pseudo-
literary readers. Latin only began to be in-
teresting to Des Esseintes in Lucan, for here
at least, in spite of the underlying hollowness,
it became expressive and studded with bril-
liant jewels. The author whom above all he
delighted in was Petronius — who reminded
Des Esseintes of the modern French novelists
he most admired — and several eloquent pages
are devoted to that profound observer, delicate
analyst, and marvellous painter who modelled
his own vivid and precise style out of all the
idioms and slang of his day. After Petronius
there was a gap in his collection of Latin
authors until the second century of our own era
is reached with Apuleius and the sterner Christian
contemporaries of that jovial pagan, TertuUian
and the rest, in whose hands the tongue that in
Petronius had reached supreme maturity now
began to dissolve. For TertuUian he had little
admiration, and none for Augustine, though
sympathising with his City of God and his
general disgust for the world. But the special
odour which the Christians had by the fourth
century imparted to decomposing pagan Latin
was delightful to him in such authors as Com-
modian of Gaza, whose tawny, sombre, and
tortuous style he even preferred to Claudian's
sonorous blasts, in which the trumpet of

Huysmans. 183

paganism was last heard in the world. He
was also able to maintain interest in Pru-
dentius, Sedulius, and a host of unknown
Christians who combined Catholic fervour with
a Latinity which had become, as it were, com-
pletely putrid, leaving but a few shreds of torn
flesh for the Christians to " marinate in the brine
of their new tongue." His shelves continued
to show Latin books of the sixth, seventh,
and eighth centuries, among which he found
special pleasure in the Anglo-Saxon writers,
and only finally ceased at the beginning of
the tenth century, when "the curiosity, the
complicated natveti" of the earlier tongue
were finally lost in scholastic philosophy and
mere cartalaries and chronicles.^ Then, with
a formidable leap of ten centuries, his Latin
books gave place to nineteenth century French
books.

Des Esseintes is no admirer of Rabelais or
Moli^re, of Voltaire or Rousseau. Among the
61der French writers he read only Villon,
D'Aubign^, Bossuet, Bourdaloue, Nicole, and
especially Pascal. Putting these aside, his
French library began with Baudelaire, whose
works he had printed in an edition of one copy,

' It may be gathered from the Preface he wrote at a later
date for M. Remy de Gourmont's delightful volume, Le Latin
Mystique, that Huysmans would no longer draw a line at this
point ; for he here speaks with enthusiasm of the styles of St.
Bernard, St. Bonaventure, and St. Thomas d'Aquinas.

1 84 Affirmations.

in episcopal letters, in large missal format,
bound in flesh-coloured pig-skin; he found an
unspeakable delight in reading this poet who,
" in an age when verse only served to express
the external aspects of things, had succeeded in
expressing the inexpressible, by virtue of a mus-
cular and sinewy speech which more than any
other possessed the marvellous power of fixing
with strange sanity of expression the most
morbid, fleeting, tremulous states of weary brains
and sorrowful souls." After Baudelaire the few
French books on Des Esseintes's shelves fall into
two groups, one religious, one secular. Most of
the French clerical writers he disregarded, for
they yield a pale flux of words which seemed to
him to come from a school-girl in a convent.
Lacordaire he regarded as an exception, for his
language had been fused and moulded by ardent
eloquence, but for the most part the Catholic
writers he preferred were outside the Church.
For Hello's Homme, especially, he cherished pro-
found admiration, and an inevitable sympathy
for its author, who seemed to him " a cunning
engineer of the soul, a skilful watchmaker of the
brain, delighting to examine the mechanism of
a passion and to explain the play of the wheel-
work," and yet united to this power of analysis
all the fanaticism of a Biblical prophet, and the
tortured ingenuity of a master of style — an ill-
balanced, incoherent, yet subtle personality.

Huysmans. 185

But above all he delighted in Barbey d'Aure-
villy, shut out from the Church as an unclean
and pestiferous heretic, yet glorying to sing
her praises, insinuating into that praise a note
of almost sadistic sacrilege, a writer at once
devout and impious, altogether after Des
Esseintes's own heart, so that a special copy
of the Diaboliques, in episcopal violet and
cardinal purple, printed on sanctified vellum
with initials adorned by satanic tails, formed one
of his most cherished possessions. In D'Aure-
villy's style alone he truly recognised the same
gaminess, the speckled morbidity, the flavour as
of a sleepy pear which he loved in decadent
Latin and the monastic writers of old time.
Of contemporary secular books he possessed not
many; by force of passing them through the
screw-press of his brain few were finally found
solid enough to emerge intact and bear re-
reading, and in this process he had accelerated
"the incurable conflict which existed between
his ideas and those of the world into which by
chance he had been born.'' Certain selected
works of the three great French novelists of his
time — Flaubert, Goncourt, and Zola — still re-
mained, for in all three he found in various
forms that " nostalgie des au-del4 " by which he
was himself haunted ; and with Baudelaire, these
three were, in modern profane literature, the
authors by whom he had chiefly been moulded.

1 86 Affirmations.

The scanty collection also included Verlaine,
Mallarm^, Poe, and Villiers de I'lsle-Adam,
whose firm fantastic style and poignantly ironic
attitude towards the utilitarian modern world
he found entirely to his taste. Finally, there
only remained the little anthology of prose-
poems. Des Esseintes thought it improbable
that he would ever make any additions to his
library; it seemed impossible to him that a
decadent language — " struggling on its death-
bed to repair all the omissions of joy and bequeath
the subtlest memories of pain " — would ever go
beyond Mallarmd This brief summary of the
three chapters, all full of keen if wayward
critical insight, which describe Des Esseintes's
library, may serve at once both to indicate the
chief moulding influences on Huysmans' own
style and to illustrate the precise nature of
decadence in art and the fundamental part it
plays.

We have to recognise that decadence is an
zesthetic and not a moral conception. The
power of words is great, but they need not
befool us. The classic herring should suggest
no moral superiority over the decadent bloater.
We are not called upon to air our moral indigna-
tion over the bass end of the musical clef All
confusion of intellectual substances is foolish,
and one may well sympathise with that fervid
unknown metaphysician to whom we owe the

Huysmans. 1 87

Athanasian creed when he went so far as to
assert that it is damnable. It is not least so
in the weak-headed decadent who falls into
the moralist's snare and complacently admits
his own exceeding wickedness. We may well
reserve our finest admiration for the classic
in art, for therein are included the largest and
most imposing works of human skill; but our
admiration is of little worth if it is founded
on incapacity to appreciate the decadent
Each has its virtues, each is equally right
and necessary. One ignorant of plants might
well say, on gazing at a seed-capsule with its
seeds disposed in harmonious rows, that there
was the eternally natural and wholesome order
of things, and on seeing the same capsule wither
and cast abroad its seeds to germinate at random
in the earth, that here was an unwholesome and
deplorable period of decay. But he would know
little of the transmutations of life. And we have
to recognise that those persons who bring the
same crude notions into the field of art know as
little of the life of the spirit.

III.

For some years after the appearance of A
Rebours Huysmans produced nothing of any
magnitude. En Rade, his next novel, the
experience of a Parisian married couple who,

V

1 8 8 Affirmations.

under the stress of temporary pecuniary diffi-
culties, go into the country to stay at an
uncle's farm, dwells in the memory chiefly by
virtue of two vividly naturalistic episodes, the
birth of a calf and the death of a cat. More
interesting, more intimately personal, are the
two volumes of art criticism, L'Art Moderne
and Certains, which Huysmans published at
about this period. Degas, Rops, Raffaelli,
Odilon Redon are among the artists of very
various temperament whom Huysmans either
discovered, or at all events first appreciated in
their full significance, and when he writes of
them it is not alone critical insight which he
reveals, but his own personal vision of the
world.

To Huysmans the world has ever been above
all a vision ; it was no accident that the art that
appeals most purely to the eyes is that of which
he has been the finest critic. One is tempted,
indeed, to suggest that this aptitude is the out-
come of heredity, of long generations devoted
to laborious watchfulness of the desire of the
eye in the external world, not indeed by actual
accumulation of acquired qualities, but by the
passing on of a nervous organism long found so
apt for this task. He has ever been intensely
preoccupied with the effort to express those
visible aspects of things which the arts of design
were made to express, which the art of speech

Huysmans. 1 89

can perhaps never express. The tortured elabora-
tion of his style is chiefly due to this perpetual
effort to squeeze tones and colours out of this
foreign medium. The painter's brain holds
only a pen and cannot rest until it has wrung
from it a brush's work. But not only is the
sense of vision marked in Huysmans. We are
conscious of a general hypersesthesia, an in-
tense alertness to the inrush of sensations,
which we might well term morbid if it were not
so completely intellectualised and controlled.
Hearing, indeed, appears to be less acutely
sensitive than sight, the poet is subordinated
to the painter, though that sense still makes
itself felt, and the heavy multicoloured para-
graphs often fall at the close into a melancholy
and poignant rhythm laden with sighs. It is
the sense of smell which Huysmans' work would
lead us to regard as most highly developed after
that of sight The serious way in which Des
Esseintes treats perfumes is characteristic, and
one of the most curious and elaborate of the
Croquis Parisiens is " Le Gousset," in which the
capacities of language are strained to define and
differentiate the odours of feminine arm-pits.
Again, earlier, in a preface written for Hannon's
Rimes de Joie, Huysmans points out that that
writer — who failed to fulfil his early promise
— alone of contemporary poets possessed "la
curiosite des parfums," and that his chief poem

1 90 Affirmations.

was written in honour of what Huysmans called
"the libertine virtues of that glorious perfume,"
opoponax. This sensitiveness to odour is
less marked in Huysmans' later work, but the
dominance of vision remains, j

The two volumes of essays on art incidentally
serve to throw considerable light on Huysmans'
conception of life. For special illustration we
may take his attitude towards women, whom in
his novels he usually treats, from a rather conven-
tionally sexual point of view, as a fact in man's
life rather than as a subject for independent
analysis. In these essays we may trace the
development of his own personal point of view,
and in comparing the earlier with the later
volume we find a change which is significant of
the general evolution of Huysmans' attitude
towards life. He is at once the ultra-modern
child of a refined civilisation and the victim of
nostalgia for an ascetic mediaevalism ; his origin-
ality lies in the fact that in him these two
tendencies are not opposed but harmonious,
although the second has only of late reached
full development. In a notable passage in En
Rade, Jacques, the hero, confesses that he can
see nothing really great or beautiful in a harvest
field, with its anodyne toil, as compared with a
workshop or a steamboat, " the horrible magnifi-
cence of machines, that one beauty which the
modern world has been able to create." It is so

Huysmans. 191

that Huysmans views women also ; he is as
indifferent to the feminine ideals of classic art
as to its literary ideals. In L'Art Moderne,
speaking with admiration of a study of the nude
by Gauguin, he proceeds to lament that no one
has painted the unclothed modern woman with-
out falsification or premeditated arrangement,
real, alive in her own intimate personality, with
her own joys and pains incarnated in the curves
of her flesh, and the lash of child-birth traceable
on her flanks. We go to the Louvre to learn
how to paint, he remarks, forgetting that "beauty
is not uniform and invariable, but changes with
the age and the climate, that the Venus of Milo,
for instance, is now not more beautiful and in-
teresting than those ancient statues of the New
World, streaked and tattooed and adorned with
feathers ; that both are but diverse manifesta-
tions of the same ideal of beauty pursued by
different races ; that at the present date there
can be no question of reaching the beautiful by
Venetian, Greek, Dutch, or Flemish rites ; but
only by striving to disengage it from contem-
porary life, from the world that surrounds us.''
"Un nu fatigu6, ddicat, affind, vibrant" can
alone conform to our own time ; and he adds
that no one has truly painted the nude since
Rembrandt It is instructive to turn from this
essay to that on Degas, written some six years
later. It may fairly be said that to Degas

192 Affirmations.

belongs the honour of taking up the study of
the nude at the point where Rembrandt left it;
and like Rembrandt, he has realised that the
nude can only be rightly represented in those
movements, postures, and avocations by which
it is naturally and habitually exposed. It is
scarcely surprising, therefore, that Huysmans at
once grasped the full significance of the painter's
achievement. But he has nothing now to say
of the beauty that lies beneath the confinement
of modern garments, " the delicious charm of
youth, grown languid, rendered as it were divine
by the debilitating air of cities." On the con-
trary, he emphasises the vision which Degas
presents of women at the bath-tub revealing in
every "frog-like and simian attitude" their
pitiful homeliness, " the humid horror of a body
which no washing can purify." Such a glorified
contempt of the flesh, he adds, has never been
achieved since the Middle Ages. There we catch
what had now become the dominant tone in
Huysmans' vision; the most modern things in
art now suggest to him, they seem to merge
into, the most mediaeval and ascetic. And if
we turn to the essay on Fdlicien Rops in the
same volume — the most masterly of his essays
— we find the same point developed to the
utmost. Rops in his own way is as modern
and as daring an artist of the nude as Degas.
But, as Huysmans perceives, in delineating the

Htfysmans. 193

essentially modern he is scarcely a supreme
artist, is even inferior to Forain, who in his own
circumscribed region is insurpassable. Rops, as
Huysmans points out, is the great artist of the
symbolical rather than the naturalistic modern, a
great artist who furnishes the counterpart to Mem-
line and Fra Angelico. All art, Huysmans pro-
ceeds, " must gravitate, like humanity which has
given birth to it and the earth which carries it,
between the two poles of Purity and Wanton-
ness, the Heaven and the Hell of art." Rops
has taken the latter pole, in no vulgar nympho-
maniacal shapes, but " to divulge its causes, to
summarise it Catholically, if one may say so, in
ardent and sorrowful images " ; he has drawn
women who are "diabolical Theresas, satanised
saints." Following in the path initiated by
Baudelaire and Barbey D'Aurevilly, Huysmans
concludes, Rops has restored Wantonness to her
ancient and Catholic dignity. Thus is Huysmans
almost imperceptibly led back to the old stand-
point from which woman and the Devil are one.
Certains was immediately followed by La-
bas. This novel is mainly a study of Satan-
ism, in which Huysmans interested himself long
before it attracted the general attention it has
since received in France. There are, however,
three lines of interest in the book, the story of
Gilles de Rais and his Sadism, the discussion
of Satanism culminating in an extraordinary

13

194 Affirmations.

description of a modern celebration of the
Black Mass, and the narration of Durtal's
liaison with Madame Chantelouve, wherein
Huysmans reaches, by firm precision and trium-
phant audacity, the highest point he has attained
in the analysis of the secrets of passion. But
though full of excellent matter, the book loses
in impressiveness from the multiplicity of these
insufficiently compacted elements of interest.

While not among his finest achievements,
however, it serves to mark the definite attain-
ment of a new stage in both the spirit and the
method of his work. Hitherto he had been a
realist, in method if not in spirit, and had
conquered the finest secrets of naturalistic art ;
by the help of En Manage alone, as Hennequin,
one of his earliest and best critics has said,
" it will always be possible to restore the exact
physiognomy of Paris to-day." At the outset
of Ld-bas there is a discussion concerning the
naturalistic novel and its functions which makes
plain the standpoint to which Huysmans had
now attained. Pondering the matter, Durtal,
the hero of the book, considers that we need, on
the one hand, the veracity of document, the
precision of detail, the nervous strength of
language, which realism has supplied ; but
also, on the other hand, we must draw water
from the wells of the soul. We cannot explain
everything by sexuality and insanity ; we need

Huysmans. 195

the soul and the body in their natural reactions,
their conflict and their union. "We must, in
short, follow the great high-way so deeply dug
out by Zola, but it is also necessary to trace a
parallel path in the air, another road by which
we may reach the Beyond and the Afterward,
to achieve thus, in one word, a spiritualistic
naturalism." Dostoievsky comes nearest to this
achievement, he remarks, and the real psycho-
logist of the century is not Stendhal but Hello.
In another form of art the early painters —
Italian, German, especially Flemish — realised
this ideal. Durtal sees a consummate revela-
tion of such spiritual naturalism in Matthasus
Griinewald's crucifixion at Cassel — the Christ
who was at once a putrid and unaureoled
corpse and yet a manifest god bathed in
invisible light, the union of outrageous realism
and outrageous idealism. "Thus from trium-
phal ordure Griinewald extracted the finest
mints of dilection, the sharpest essences of
tears." One may say that the tendency Huys-
mans here so clearly asserts had ever been
present in his work. But in his previous novels
his own native impulse was always a little
unduly oppressed by the naturalistic formulas
of Goncourt and Zola. The methods of these
great masters had laid a burden on his work,
and although the work developed beneath, and
because of, that burden, a sense of laborious

196 Affirmations.

pain and obscurity too often resulted. Hence-
forth this disappears. Huysmans retains his
own complexity of style, but he has won a
certain measure of simplicity and lucidity. It
was a natural development, no doubt furthered
also by the position which Huysmans had now
won in the world of letters. A Rebours, which
he had written for his own pleasure, had found
an echo in thousands of readers, and the con-
sciousness of an audience inspired a certain
clarity of speech. From this time we miss the
insults directed at the bitise of humanity. These
characteristics clearly mark Huysmans' next and
perhaps greatest book, in which the writer who
had conquered all the secrets of decadent art
now sets his face towards the ideals of classic
art.

In En Route, indeed, these new qualities
of simplicity, lucidity, humanity, and intensity
of interest attain so high a degree that the book
has reached a vast number of readers who could
not realise the marvellous liberation from slavery
to its material which the slow elaboration of art
has here reached. In A Rebours Huysmans
succeeded in taking up the prose-poem into his
novel form, while at the same time certainly
sacrificing something of the fine analysis of
familiar things which he had developed in En
Minage. In En Route he takes the novel from
the point he had reache(J in A Rebours, incor-

Huy smarts. 197

porates into it that power of analysis which
has now reached incomparable simplicity and
acuity, and thus wields the whole of the artistic
means which he has acquired during a quarter
of a century to one end, the presentation of a
spiritual state which has become of absorbing
personal interest to himself. A

I well remember hearing M. Huysmans, many
years ago, tell how a muddle-headed person had
wished to commission him to paint a head of
Christ. It seemed then a deliciously absurd
request to make of the author of A Rebours,
and his face wore the patient smile which the
spectacle of human stupidity was wont to evoke,
but I have since thought that that muddle-
headed person was wiser than he knew. As
we look back on Huysmans' earlier work it is
now easy to see how he has steadily progressed
towards his present standpoint. En Route does
not represent, as some might imagine, the
reaction of an exhausted debauchee or even
the self-deception of a disappointed man of the
world. The temperament of Durtal is that of
Andr6 and Folantin and Des Esseintes ; from
the first, in the Drageoir d Epices, Huysmans
has been an idealist and a seeker, by no means
an ascetic, rather a man whose inquisitive senses
and restless imagination had led him to taste of
every forbidden fruit, but never one to whom
the vulgar pleasures of life could offer any

1 98 Affirmations.

abiding satisfaction. The more precise record
of Des Esseintes's early sexual life may help
us here ; while for the penultimate stage Durtal's
relations with Madame Chantelouve in Ld-bas^
and the mingled attraction and repulsion which
he felt for her, are certainly significant In En
Route Durtal magnifies his own wickedness, as
Bunyan did in his Grace Abounding ; the saints
have always striven to magnify their wickedness,
leaving to the sinners the congenial function of
playing at righteousness. To trace the real
permanence of Huysmans' attitude towards re-
ligion it is enough to turn back to A Rebours.
Des Esseintes had been educated by the Jesuits,
and it sometimes seemed to him that that
education had put into him some extra-terres-
trial ferment which never after ceased to work,
driving him in search of a new world and impos-
sible ideals. He could find no earthly place of
rest ; he sought to build for himself a " refined
Thebaid " as a warm and comfortable ark
wherein to find shelter from the flood of human
imbecility. He was already drawn towards the
Church by many bonds, by his predilection for
early Christian Latinity, by the exquisite beauty
of the ecclesiastical art of the Middle Ages, by
his love for monastic mediaeval music, " that
emaciated music which acted instinctively on his
nerves " and seemed to him precious beyond all
other. Just as Nietzsche was always haunted by

Huysmans. 199

the desire for a monastery for freethinkers, so
Des Esseintes dreamed of a hermitage, of the
advantages of the cloistered life of convents,
wherein men are persecuted by the world for
meting out to it the just contempt of silence.

Des Esseintes, and even the Durtal of Lh-
bas, always put aside these thoughts with the
reflection that, after all, the Church is only an
out-worn legend, a magnificent imposture. In
En Route Durtal has taken a decisive step. He
has undergone that psychological experience
commonly called '' conversion." It is only of
recent years that the phenomena of conversion
have been seriously studied, but we know at all
events that it is not intellectual, not even neces-
sarily moral transformation, though it may react
in either direction, but primarily an emotional
phenomenon ; and that it occurs especially in
those who have undergone long and torturing
disquietude, coming at last as the spontaneous
resolution of all their doubts, the eruption of a
soothing flood of peace, the silent explosion of
inner light. The insight with which this state
is described in En Route seems to testify to a
real knowledge of it. No obvious moral or
intellectual change is effected in Durtal, but
he receives a new experience of reposeful faith,
a conviction deeper than all argument. It is
really the sudden emergence into consciousness
of a very gradual process, and the concrete

200 Affirmations.

artistic temperament which had been subjected
to the process reacts in its own way. A more
abstract intelligence would have asked : " But,
after all, is my faith true?" Durtal, in the
presence of the growing structure of sensory
and imaginative forms within him, which has
become as it were a home, feels that the question
of its truth has fallen into the background. Its
perfect fitness has become the affirmation of its
truth. Henceforth it is the task of his life to
learn how best to adapt himself to what he
recognises as his eternal home. En Route
represents a stage in this adaptation.

By a rare chance — a happier chance than
befell Tolstoi under somewhat similar circum-
stances — a new development in artistic achieve-
ment has here run parallel, and in exquisite
harmony, with the new spiritual development.
The growing simplicity of Huysmans' work has
reached a point beyond which it could not
perhaps be carried without injury to his vivid
and concrete style. And the new simplicity
of spirit, of which it is the reflection, marks
the final retreat into the background of that
unreasonable contempt for humanity which ran
through nearly all the previous books, and now
at last passes even into an ecstasy of adoration
in the passages concerning old Simon, the
monastery swine-herd. Huysmans has chiefly
shown his art, however, by relying almost solely

Huysmans. 201

for the interest of his book on his now con-
summate power of analysis. This power,
which we may perhaps first clearly trace in
"Sac au Dos," had developed in En Manage
into a wonderful skill to light up the unexplored
corners of the soul and to lay bare those terrible
thoughts which are, as he has somewhere said,
the lamentable incarnation of " the unconscious
ignominy of pure souls." In his earlier master-
piece, A Rebours, however, it is little seen,
having mostly passed into aesthetic criticism.
The finest episode of emotional analysis here is
the admirable chapter in which Des Esseintes's
attempt to visit London is narrated. All his
life he had wished to see two countries, Holland
and England. (And here we may recall that
the former is Huysmans' own ancestral land,
and that his French critics find in his work a
distinct flavour of English humour.) He had
actually been to Holland, and with visions won
from the pictures of Rembrandt, Steen, and
Teniers he had returned disillusioned. Now he
went to Galignani's, bought an English Baedeker,
entered the bodega in the Rue de Rivoli to
drink of that port which the English love, and
then proceeded to a tavern opposite the Gare
St. Lazare to eat what he imagined to be a
characteristic English meal, surrounded by
English people, and haunted by memories of
Dickens, And as time went by he continued

202 Affirmations.

to sit still, while all the sensations of England
seemed to pass along his nerves, still sat until
at last the London mail had started. "Why
stir," he asked himself, "when one can travel
so magnificently in a chair? . . . Besides, what
can one expect save fresh disillusionment, as in
Holland? . . . And then I have experienced
and seen what I wanted to experience and see.
I have saturated myself with English life ; it
would be madness to lose by an awkward
change of place these imperishable sensations.
. . . He called a cab and returned with his
portmanteaus, parcels, valises, rugs, umbrellas,
and sticks to Fontenay, feeling the physical and
mental fatigue of a man who returns home after
a long and perilous journey." There could be
no happier picture of the imaginative life of the
artistic temperament. But in En Route analysis
is the prime element of interest ; from first to
last there is nothing to hold us but this
searching and poignant analysis of the fluctua-
tions of Durtal's soul through the small section
which he here travels in the road towards
spiritual peace. And on the way, lightly, as by
chance, the author drops the finest appreciations
of liturgical aesthetics, of plain-chant, of the way
of the Church with the soul, of the everlasting
struggle with the Evil One. There could, for
instance, be no better statement than this of
one of the mystic's secrets ; " There are two ways

Huysmans. 203

of ridding ourselves of a thing which burdens
us, casting it away or letting it fall. To cast
away requires an effort of which we may not
be capable, to let fall imposes no labour, is
simpler, without peril, within reach of all. To
cast away, again, implies a certain interest, a
certain animation, even a certain fear ; to let
fall is absolute indifference, absolute contempt ;
believe me, use this method, and Satan will
flee." How many forms of Satan there are in
the world before which we may profitably
meditate on these words ! To strive or cry in
the face of human stupidity is not the way to
set it to flight ; that is the lesson which Des
Esseintes would never listen to, which Durtal
has at last learnt.^

En Route is the first of a trilogy, and the names
of the succeeding volumes. La CatMdrale and
L'Oblat, sufficiently indicate the end of the path
on which Durtal, if not indeed his creator, has
started. But however that may prove, whatever
Huysmans' own final stage may be, there can be
little doubt that he is the greatest master of

' In the seventeenth century a great English man of science,
Stephen Hales, had discovered the same truth, for we are
told that " he could look even upon wicked men, and those
who did him unkind offices, without any emotion of particular
indignation, not from want of discernment or sensibility ; but he
used to consider them only like those experiments which, upon
trial, he found could never be applied to any useful purpose,
and which he therefore calmly and dispassionately laid aside,"

204 Affirmations.

style, and within his own limits the subtlest
thinker and the acutest psychologist who in
France to-day uses the medium of the novel.
Only Zola can be compared with him, and be-
tween them there can be no kind of rivalry. Zola,
with his immense and exuberant temperament,
his sanity and width of view, his robust and
plebeian art, has his own place on the high-road
of modern literature. Huysmans, an intellectual
and aesthetic aristocrat, has followed with un-
flinching sincerity the by-path along which his
own more high-strung and exceptional tempera-
ment has led him, and his place, if seemingly a
smaller one, is at least as sure; wherever men
occupy themselves with the literature of the late
nineteenth century they will certainly sometimes
talk about Zola, sometimes read Huysmans.
Zola's Cyclopean architecture can only be seen
as a whole when we have completed the weary
task of investigating it in detail ; in Huysmans
we seek the expressiveness of the page, the
sentence, the word. Strange as it may seem to
some, it is the so-called realist who has given us
the more idealised rendering of life; the con-
centrated vision of the idealist in his own
smaller sphere has revealed not alone mysteries
of the soul, but even the exterior secrets of
life. True it is that Huysmans has passed by
with serene indifference, or else with contempt,
the things which through the ages we have

Huysmans. 205

slowly learnt to count beautiful. But on the
other hand, he has helped to enlarge the sphere
of our delight by a new vision of beauty where
before to our eyes there was no beauty, exer-
cising the proper function of the artist who ever
chooses the base and despised things of the
world, even the things that are not, to put to
nought the things that are. Therein the
decadent has his justification. And while we
may accept the pioneer's new vision of beauty,
we are not called upon to reject those old
familiar visions for which he has no eyes, only
because his gaze must be fixed upon that
unfamiliar height towards which he is leading
the men who come after.

IV.

Huysmans very exquisitely represents one
aspect of the complex modern soul, that aspect
which shrinks from the grosser forces of Nature,
from the bare simplicity of the naked sky or
the naked body, the "incessant deluge of human
foolishness," the eternal oppression of the com-
monplace, to find a sedative for its exasperated
nerves in the contemplation of esoteric beauty
and the difficult search for the mystic peace
which passes all understanding. "Needs must
I rejoice beyond the age," runs the motto from
the old Flemish mystic Ruysbroeck set on the

2o6 Affirmations.

front of A Rebours, "though the world has
horror of my joy and its grossness cannot under-
stand what I would say." Such is decadence ;
such, indeed, is religion, in the wide and true
sense of the word. Christianity itself, as we
know it in the western church, sprang from the
baptism of young barbarism into Latin deca-
dence. Pagan art and its clear serenity, science,
rationalism, the bright, rough vigour of the sun
and the sea, the adorable mystery of common
life and commonplace human love, are left to
make up the spirit that in any age we call
" classic."

Thus what we call classic corresponds on the
spiritual side to the love of natural things, and
what we call decadent to the research for the
things which seem to lie beyond Nature. "Cor-
porea pulchritudo in pelle solummodo constat.
Nam si viderent homines hoc quod subtus pellem
est, sicutlynces in Beotia cernere interiore dicun-
tur, mulieres videre nausearent. Iste decor in
flegmate et sanguine et humore ac felle constitit."
That is St. Odo of Cluny's acute analysis of
woman, who for man is ever the symbol of
Nature : beauty is skin-deep, drowned in excre-
tions which we should scarcely care to touch
with the finger's tip. And for the classic vision '
of Nature, listen to that fantastic and gigantic
Englishman, Sir Kenelm Digby, whose Memoirs,
whose whole personality, embodied the final

Huysmans. 207

efflorescence of the pagan English Renaissance.
He has been admitted by her maids to the bed-
chamber of Venetia Stanley, the famous beauty
who afterwards became his wife ; she is still sleep-
ing, and he cannot resist the temptation to undress
and lie gently and reverently beside her, as half
disturbed in her slumber she rolled on to her
side from beneath the clothes ; " and her smock
was so twisted about her fair body that all her
legs and the best part of her thighs were naked,
which lay so one over the other that they made
a deep shadow where the never-satisfied eyes
wished for the greatest light. A natural ruddi-
ness did shine through the skin, as the sun-
beams do through crystal or water, and ascer-
tained him that it was flesh that he gazed upon,
which yet he durst not touch for fear of melting
it, so like snow it looked. Her belly was
covered with her smock, which it raised up with
a gentle swelling, and expressed the perfect
figure of it through the folds of that discourteous
veil. Her paps were like two globus — wherein
the glories of the heaven and the earth were
designed, and the azure veins seemed to divide
constellations and kingdoms — between both
which began the milky way which leadeth
lovers to their Paradise, somewhat shadowed by
the yielding downwards of the uppermost of
them as she lay upon her side, and out of that
darkness did glisten a few drops of sweat like

2o8 Affirmations.

diamond sparks, and a more fragrant odour
than the violets or primroses, whose season was
nearly passed, to give way to the warmer sun
and the longest days." They play with the same
counters, you observe, these two, Odo and Digby,
with skin, sweat, and so forth, each placing upon
them his own values. Idealists both of them,
the one idealises along the line of death, the
other along the line of life which the whole race
has followed, and both on their own grounds
are irrefutable, the logic of life and the logic of
death, alike solidly founded in the very structure
of the world, of which man is the measuring-rod.
The classic party of Nature seems, indeed,
the stronger — in seeming only, and one recalls
that, of the two witnesses just cited, the abbot of
Cluny was the most venerated man of his age,
while no one troubled even to publish Digby's
Memoirs until our own century — but it carries
weakness in its very strength, the weakness of
a great political party formed by coalition. It
has not alone idealists on its side, but for the
most part also the blind forces of robust vul-
garity. So that the more fine-strung spirits are
sometimes driven to a reaction against Nature
and rationalism, like that of which Huysmans,
from "L'Extase" onwards, has been the con-
sistent representative. At the present moment
such a reaction has attained a certain ascend-
ency.

Huystnans. 269

Christianity once fitted nearly every person
born into the European world ; there must needs
be some to whom, in no modern devitalised form
but in its purest essence, it is still the one refuge
possible. No doubt conditions have changed;
the very world itself is not what it was to the
mediaeval man. One has to recognise that the
modern European differs in this from his medi-
aeval ancestor that now we know how largely
the world is of our own making. The sense of
interiority, as the psychologists say, is of much
later development than the sense of exteriority.
For the mediaeval man, — as still to-day for the
child in the darkness, — his dreams and his
fancies, every organic thrill in eye or ear, seemed
to be flashed on him from a world of angels and
demons without In a sense which is scarcely
true to-day the average man of those days — not
the finer or the coarser natures, it may well be
— might be said to be the victim of a species
of madness, a paranoia, a systematised persecu-
tional delusion. He could not look serenely in
the face of the stars or lie at rest among the
fir-cones in the wood, for who knew what ambush
of the Enemy might not lurk behind these
things? Even in flowers, as St Cyprian said,
the Enemy lay hidden.

" Nil jocundum, nil amoenum,
Nil salubre, nil serenum.
Nihil dulce, nihil plenum."

14

210 Affirmations.

There \yas only one spot where men might
huddle together in safety — the church. There
the blessed sound of the bells, the contact of
holy water, the smell of incense, the sight of
the Divine Flesh, wove a spiritual coat of mail
over every sensory avenue to the soul. The
winds of hell might rave, the birds of night dash
themselves against the leaden spires of that
fortress whence alone the sky seemed blue with
hope.

Huysmans, notwithstanding a very high
degree of intellectual subtlety, is by virtue of
his special aesthetic and imaginative tempera-
ment carried back to the more childlike attitude
of this earlier age. The whole universe appears
to him as a process of living images ; he cannot
reason in abstractions, cannot rationalise; that
indeed is why he is inevitably an artist. Thus
he is a born leader in a certain modern emo-
tional movement.

That movement, as we know, is one of a
group of movements now peculiarly active. We
see them on every hand, occultism, theosophy,
spiritualism, all those vague forms on the border-
land of the unknown which call to tired men
weary of too much living, or never strong enough
to live at all, to hide their faces from the sun of
nature and grope into cool, delicious darkness,
soothing the fever of life. It is foolish to
resent this tendency ; it has its Tightness ; it

Huysmans. 211

suits some, who may well cling to their private
dream if life itself is but a dream. At the worst
we may remember that, however repugnant such
movements may be, to let fall remains a better
way of putting Satan to flight than to cast away.
And at the best one should know that this is
part of the vital process by which the spiritual
world moves on its axis, alternating between
darkness and light.

Therefore soak yourself in mysticism, follow
every intoxicating path to every impossible Be-
yond, be drunken with medisevalism, occultism,
spiritualism, theosophy, and even, if you will,
protestantism — the cup that cheers, possibly, but
surely not inebriates — for the satisfaction that
comes of all these is good while it lasts. Yet
be sure that Nature is your home, and that from
the farthest excursions you will return the more
certainly to those fundamental instincts which
are rooted in the zoological series at the summit
of which we stand. For the whole spiritual
cosmogony finally rests, not indeed on a tortoise,
but on the emotional impulses of the mammal
vertebrate which constitute us men.

Meanwhile we will not grieve because in the
course of our pilgrimage on earth the sun sets.
It has always risen again. We may lighten the
darkness of the journey by admiring the beauty
of night, plucking back the cowl if needs must
we wear it. — Eia, fratres, pergamus.

212

ST. FRANCIS AND OTHERS.

The religion of Jesus was the invention of a race
which itself never accepted that religion. In the
East religions spring up, for the most part, as
naturally as flowers, and, like flowers, are scarcely
a matter for furious propaganda. These deep
sagacious Eastern men threw us of old this
rejected flower, as they have since sent us the
vases and fans they found too tawdry; and
when we send our missionaries out to barter
back the gift at a profit, they say no word, but
their faces wear the mysterious Eastern smile.
Yet for us, at all events, the figure of Jesus
symbolises, and will always symbolise, a special
attitude towards life, made up of tender human
sympathy and mystical reliance on the unseen
forces of the world. In certain stories of the
Gospels, certain sayings, in many of the parables,
this attitude finds the completest expression of
its sweetest abandonment. But to us, men of
another race living in far distant corners of the
world, it seems .altogether oriental and ascetic,
a morbid exceptional phenomenon. And as
a matter of fact Jesus found no successor.

St. Francis and Others. 213

Over the stage of those gracious and radiant
scenes swiftly fell a fire-proof curtain, wrought
of systematic theology and formal metaphysics,
which even the divine flames of that wonderful
personality were unable to melt

Something feven stronger than theology or
metaphysics has served to cut us off from the
spirit of Jesus, and that is the spirit of Paul,
certainly the real founder of " Christianity," as
we know it, for Jerome, Augustine, Luther, were
all the children of Paul, and in no respect the
children of Jesus. That marvellous little Jew
painted in its main outlines the picture of
Christianity which in the theatre of this world
has for so many centuries shut us off from Jesus.
Impelled by the intense and concentrated energy
•^ of his twisted suffering nature, Paul brought
" moral force " into our western world, and after
it that infinite procession of hypocrisies and
cruelties and artificialities which still trains loath-
somely across the scene of civilised life. Jesus
may have been a visionary, but his visions were in
divine harmony with the course of nature, with
the wine and the bread of life, with children and
with flowers. We may be very sure that Paul
never considered the lilies, or found benediction
with children. He trampled on nature when it
came in his way, and for the rest never saw it.
He was not, as Festus thought, a madman, but
whether or not, as his experiences seem to indi-

214 Affirmations.

cate, he was a victim to the " sacred disease " of
epilepsy, concerning his profoundly neurotic
temperament there can be no manner of ques-
tion.

He flung himself on to men, this terrible
apostle of the " Gentiles," thrusting faith down
their throats at the point of a spiritual sword
so fiery and keen that, by no miracle, it soon
became a sword of steel with red blood dripping
from its point Well-nigh everything that has
ever been evil in Christianity, its temporal power,
its accursed intolerance, its contempt for reason,
for beautiful living, for every sweet and sunny
and simple aspect of the world — all that is in-
volved in the awful conception of "moral force"
— flows directly from Paul. What eternal tor-
ture could be adequate for so monstrous an
offender? And yet, when you think of the
potent personality concentrated in this morbid
man, of his courage, of the intolerance that he
wreaked on himself, the flashes of divine insight
in his restless and turbulent spirit, of the
humility of the neuropath who desired to be
" altogether mad," the pathos of it all, indigna-
tion falls silent. What can be said ?

Thus Paul and not Peter was the rock on
which the Church was built, and whatever
virtues the Church may have possessed have
not been the virtues of Jesus but the quite other
virtues of Paul. Yet Jesus has not wholly been

Si. Francis and Others. 215

left without witness even in Europe, and it is
the special charm and significance of Francis of
Assisi that he, if not alone certainly chief
among European men, has incarnated some
measure of the graciousness that was in Jesus,
and made it visible and real to the European
world. And he has done that by no means
through the influence of the Church, or by
imitation, but by wholly natural and spontaneous
impulse. To understand Francis we must first
of all realise that he was in no sense and at no
time the creature of the Church, being indeed
from first to last in a very real sense antagonistic
to the Church. The whole world as Francis
knew it was Christian, and he was by no means
a man of inquisitive analytic intellectual type, a
Bruno or a Campanella; he accepted Christianity
because it was there, and while remaining in it
was never of it, resenting fiercely any attempt of
the Church to encroach on the free activity of his
personality, dispensing himself of any intimate
adherence not by intellectual sophistries, but
by lightly brushing away science and theology
altogether as useless superfluities.

An acute psychologist has well remarked that
those famous historical persons who have passed
through two antithetical phases of character,
survive for us usually only in one of those
phases, that we can remember only the post-
conversion Augustine and the pre-abdication

2i6 Affirmations.

Diocletian. Such one-sided views of great and
complex characters suit our rough and lazy
methods of ordinary thought, content to regard
a man only on that side which has been most
prominently displayed to the world. But such
methods are fatal to any clear psychological
conception of character or to any sound ethical
conception of life. Francis lived one of these
double-sided lives, and the Francis we remem-
ber is the emaciated saint already developing
the stigmata of divine grace. In his earlier bio-
graphies we catch glimpses of a younger and quite
other Francis, in vanitatibus nutritus insolenter,
the spendthrift companion of nobles, proud to
surpass them in youthful extravagance and dissi-
pation, the head of a band which dazzled the
citizens of Assisi with the luxury of their rich
garments and the sound of their festive songs by
night, a passionate lover of chivalry and the
troubadours, whose music then filled the air, so
full of gaiety that he sometimes seemed almost
mad to the grave citizens of his town, one whose
nature it was from the first to go to excess,
always to a fine and generous excess, that
spiritual excess which Blake called the road to
the palace of wisdom.

The later Francis survived ; the early Francis
is forgotten. But we may be assured that there
would have been no Francis the saint if there
had not been Francis the sinner. That grace

St. Francis and Others. 217

and elation, the tender humanity and infinite
delight in natural things, even the profound
contempt for luxury and superfluity, were not
learnt in any of the saint's beloved Umbrian
cells; they were the final outcome of a beauti-
fully free and excessive life acting on an ex-
quisitely fine-strung organism. Rarely has any
follower of Francis attained in any measure to
his level of exalted freedom, joy, and simplicity
in saintliness. It was not alone that they could
not possess his organism, but they had not lived
his life. Their piety even blinded their eyes,
and just as the biographers of Jesus omitted
all reference to the formative years of his life,
so also the biographers of Francis gradually
eliminated the early records, terrified at the
thought that their founder may not have been
a virgin. We do not win any clear psycho-
logical insight into the man until we realise
this.

It is not alone the psychological aspect
which becomes clear in the light of Francis's
early life. These stages of development have
their ethical significance also. It seems to be
too often forgotten that repression and licence
are two sides of the same fact. We can only
attain a fine temperance through a fine freedom,
even a fine excess. The women who think that
they must at all costs repress themselves, and
the men who — usually with the help of certain

2 1 8 Affirmations.

private " accommodements " — consider repres-
sion as the proper ideal, have missed the true
safeguards against licence, and flounder for ever
in a turbid sea, at war with themselves, at war
with nature. The saints knew better. By a
process of spiritual Pasteurism, a natural and
spontaneous process, they guaranteed their eter-
nal peace. All the real saints, so far as we
know them, had many phases, such of them as
were saints from their mothers' wombs possess-
ing a significance which for human beings
generally is minimal. The real saints in all
ages have forgotten so many beautiful things,
storing so many wonderful experiences in their
past. We should not dye our clothes, says St.
Clement of Alexandria, our life should now be
anything but a pageant. Flower-like garments
should be abandoned, and Bacchic revelries,
" useful for tragedies, not for life." The dyes
of Sardis — olive, green, rose-coloured, scarlet,
and ten thousand other hues — invented for
voluptuousness, the garments of embroidered
gold and purple, dipped in perfume, stained in
saffron, the bright diaphonous tissues of the
dancing girl — to all these we must bid farewell.
But we cannot bid them farewell unless we have
known them. If you would be a saint you must
begin by being something other than a saint.
This it was that St. Clement forgot, or never
knew.

St. Francis and Others. 219

In youth we are so full of energy, and life
seems so long. In our ethical fervour we accept
Clement's theory of conduct at his own valua-
tion. One is so scrupulous of others, so anxious
lest he hurt them ; and another is so contempt-
uous of others, so eager to hold himself back
from all but the highest good, and never to let
himself fully go. And there is a fine thrill of
pleasure in the self-restraint, an athletic tension
of the souL It is as if the infant at the breast
should say, I will hold myself back from
sucking ; I will take only just ever so little, and
not let myself go and draw in the delicious
stream with no after-thought ; there will be time
for that when I am grown up. But it is not
so. There is only one time in life for milk,
only one time for youth; we cannot postpone
life or retrace its milestones, and what is once
lost is lost for ever. The cold waters of self-
restraint and self-denial, as we first put our
young feet in them, send a tonic shiver along
the nerves, and we go on and on. But suddenly
we find that the water has risen to our breasts,
to our chins, that it is too late, too late, that we
shall never again move and breathe freely in the
open air and sunshine. That is the fate that
overtakes the young ascetic ideal. Unhappier
yet are those who snatch the cup of life so
hastily in youth and fill it with such muddy
waters that the dregs cling to their lips for ever,

220 Affirmations.

spoiling the taste of the most exquisite things.
To live remains an art, an art which every one
must learn, and which no one can teach.

It may seem that I speak of out-worn things,
and that the problem of saintliness has little
relation to the moral problems of our time. It
is far otherwise. You have never seen the world
if you have not realised that an element of
asceticism lies at the foundation of life. You
may expel it with the fork of reason or of self-
enjoyment, but being part of Nature herself it
must ever return. All the art of living lies in a
fine mingling of letting go and holding in. The
man who makes the one or the other his ex-
clusive aim in life will die before he has ever
begun to live. The man who has carried one
part of the process to excess before turning to
the other will indeed learn what life is, and may
leave behind him the memory of a pattern saint.
But he alone is the wise master of living who
from first to last has held the double ideal in
true honour. In these, as in other matters, we
cannot know the spiritual facts unless we realise
the physical facts of life. All life is a building
up and a breaking down, a taking in and a
giving out, a perpetually anabolic and katabolic
rhythm. To live rightly we must imitate both
the luxury of Nature and her austerity.

What should be the place of asceticism in
modern life? Evidently there is in human

St. Brands and Others. 2.1\

nature an instinct which craves for the sharpen-
ing of enjoyment which comes from simplicity
and a finely-tempered abstinence, a measured
drawing back when also it were possible reck-
lessly to let ga It is easy to wave aside
religious asceticism. That, it seems, may well
be left to those who decide to invest their enjoy-
ments in a heavenly bank which will pay large
dividends in another world. There still remains
the rational asceticism that is sweet either for
its own sake, or for its immediate and visible
results in human joy.

When we contemplate the modern world
from a broadly biological standpoint, there can
be but little difficulty in finding free and whole-
some scope for the ascetic instinct For the
Christian or Buddhist ascetic of old (as in
some measure for his feeble modern imitator,
the theosophist) asceticism was a rapturous
indifference to life for the sake of something
that seemed more than life, something that was
itself a " higher life," and only to be achieved in
the treading under foot of all that men counted
life. Such conceptions belong to the past, and
can only be revivified in the failing imaginations
of the weary and the aged who belong to the
past. The more subtle and complex conception
of life which has grown up in the modern world
traces life to its roots and finds it most precious
where it is most intense. When we wish to

222 Affirmations.

carve out a world for ourselves it is the periphery
which we cut away and not the core. The
immense accretions of that periphery in the
modern world make clearer to us than it was
to our predecessors that it is in the simple and
elementary things that our life consists. It is
to the honour of Francis that in a vague, im-
perfect way he foresaw this. Aided by his
early experiences, he cast aside the superfluities
of knowledge and labour and skill — all that vain
plethora of mere formal things and prescribed
acts which men foolishly count life — and sym-
bolising them in wealth, joyfully espoused
Poverty as a bride. For poverty to Francis
meant contact with Nature and with men. The
free play of the individual soul in contact with
Nature and men, Francis instinctively felt, is
joy and liberation ; and if the simple-minded
saint went farther than this, and allowed a
certain set of dogmatic opinions and conven-
tional abstentions, we may be sure that herein
he had no warrant of personal inspiration, but
was content to follow the well-nigh unques- ,
tioned traditions of his day. Francis fought,
not for Christianity and still less for the Church,
but for the great secret of fine living which he
had personally divined. It was by a true
instinct that his modern biographer finds the
motto of his life in the exquisite saying of the
saint's great precursor, Joachim of Flora, that

St. Francis and Others. 223

the true ascetic counts nothing his own, save
only his harp : " Qui vere monachus est nihil
reputat esse suum nisi citharam."

In former days we used to regard the civi-
lised man as in some way incorporating in his
organism and bringing into the world with him
the inheritance of the ages of human culture.
Now the tendency is to regard civilisation as a
growth totally outside man, and to consider the
man himself as a savage who merely adapts
himself to civilisation as he grows up, bringing,
it may be, his own little contribution to its
development, but himself remaining practically
a savage. Thus Weismann has argued that
the development of music is purely a develop-
ment of traditions, and that given the traditions
any savage has a chance of becoming a Bach
or a Beethoven. I think this is a more extreme
view than the facts warrant us in taking. But
it is fairly obvious that there has been no growth
of the human intellect during at least the last
two or three thousand years. We cannot beat
the Romans at government ; we cannot express
passion better than Sappho, or form better than
Phidias. We have produced no more truly
scientific physicians than Hippocrates or Galen;
we cannot map out the world more philo-
sophically than Aristotle, nor play at ball with
it with a greater dialectical facility than Plato.
What we have done is to burden ourse.lves with

2^4 Affirmations.

a vaster mass of tradition. Civilisation is the
garment which man makes to clothe himself
with. It is for each of us to help to put
in a patch here, to sew on a button there, or
to work in more embroidery. But the indi-
vidual himself, with his own personal organic
passions, never becomes part of the garment, he
only wears it. Not, indeed, that we are called
upon to refuse to wear it The person who can
so refuse to follow the whole tradition of the
race whence he springs is organically abnormal,
not to say morbid. His fellows have a fair
right to call him a lunatic or a criminal. The
real question is whether we shall allow ourselves
to be crushed to the earth, lame, impotent, and
anaemic, by the mere garment of civilisation, or
whether we shall so strive to live that we wear
it loosely and easily and athletically, recognis-
ing that it is infinitely less precious than the
humanity it clothes, still not without its beauty
and its use.

If we wish to realise how many things are
not required for fine living we may contemplate
the "triumphs of the Victotian era." Contem-
plating these we are enabled also to see that
they mostly belong to the mechanical side of
existence, among the things that are remote
from the core of life. The new energy that all
these inventions may give you on one side they
take from you on the other. They run on the

S(. Francis and Others. 225

energy that you yourself supply. They are but
devices for burdening your progress and drain-
ing away your energy. For what does it avail
though tons of food are piled before you at the
banquet of life if the capacity of your stomach
remains strictly limited? Only the more ex-
quisite quality of the banquet, with a finer
equity in its distribution, could have brought
you new joy and strength. The exquisite
things of life are to-day as rare and as precious
as ever they were. If the Victorian era had
given a keener sauce to hunger, a more ravishing
delight to love, if it had added a new joy to the
sunlight, or a more delicious thrill to the spring-
time, if it had made any of these things a larger
part of the common life, there indeed were a
triumph to boast of ! But so far as one can see,
the Victorian era has mostly helped to cover
over and push away from men the essential
joys of living. Even those who prate so glee-
fully of its triumphs find chief of these its nar-
cotics. Let us use these " triumphs " as much
as we will, they belong to the unessential back-
ground against which the real drama of our life
must still be played.

We waste so much, of our time on the things
that are not truly essential, worrying ourselves
and others. Only one thing is really needful,
whether with this man we say "Seek first the
kingdom of Heaven," or with that, " Make to

IS

226 Affirmations.

yourself a perfect body." It matters little,
because he who pointed to the kingdom of
Heaven came eating and drinking, the friend of
publicans and sinners, and he who pointed to
the body sought solitude and the keenest
spiritual austerity. The body includes the soul,
and the kingdom of Heaven includes the body.
The one thing needful is to seek wisely the
fullest organic satisfaction. The more closely
we cling to that which satisfies the deepest
cravings of the organism, the more gladly we
shall let fall the intolerable burden of restraints
and licences which are not required for fine
living. " The true ascetic counts nothing his own
save only his harp." It is best to feel light and
elate, free in every limb. Every man may have
his burden to bear; let him only beware that he
bears no burden which is not a joy to carry. If
a man cannot sing as he carries his cross he had
better drop it.

One has to admit that among English-speak-
ing races at all events the conditions have not
been favourable for fine living. The racial
elements that have chiefly gone to making the
English-speaking peoples have been mainly
characterised by energy, and while energy is
the prime constituent of living, it is scarcely
sufficient for fine living. It is quality rather
than quantity of life which finally counts: that
is the terrible fact it has taken so long for our

Sf. Francis and Others. 227

race to learn. To plough deep in the furrows
of life, to scatter human seed broadcast, to bring
to birth your random millions to wilt and fade
in the black fog of London alleys or the hot
steam of Lancashire mills, casting abroad the
residue to wreak the vengeance in their blood
on every fair and unspoilt land the world may
hold — that is scarcely yet civilisation ; fishes
that spawn in the deep have carried the art of
living as far as that. Not energy, even when it
shows itself in the blind fury of righteousness,
suffices to make civilisation, but sincerity, intel-
ligence, sympathy, grace, and all those subtle
amenities which go to what we call, perhaps
imperfectly enough, humanity — therein more
truly lie the virtues of fine living.

It seems not unnecessary to point out that
civilisation was immortal long before the first
Englishman was born. The races that have
given the world the chief examples of fine living
have never, save sometimes in their decay,
sought quantity rather thart quality of life.
Some of the world's most eternal cities are its
smallest cities. If indeed the reckless excess
of human life tended to produce happiness, we
might well recognise compensation, and rest
content. But, as we know, that is not so. The
country that men call the wealthiest is the
poorest in humanity when the lives and safeties
of its workers are concerned, the law of our

228 Affirmations.

righteousness demanding that the weakest shall
go to the wall.

One asks oneself if such a condition of things
is fatally necessary. If that were so, then indeed
the outlook of the world is dark. If the ideal
of quantity before quality, of brute energy, of
complacent self-righteousness, is for ever to
dominate a large part of the world through the
English-speaking peoples, then indeed we may
die happy that the memory and the vision of
better things were yet extant in our time.

Yet surely it is not necessary. If civilisation
is a tradition then we may mould that tradition
We are no longer fatally damned into the world.
If our fathers ate sour grapes our teeth are not
on edge. And even so far as the influence of
race counts, there is yet to be set against it the
influence of climate. In sunnier English-speak-
ing lands we may already trace a new foreign
element of grace and suavity, a deeper insight
into the art of living, clearly due in large
measure to sky alone. When races change their
sky, unlike individuals, they change their dis-
positions also.

But if we put aside this factor — though
it is one of much significance when we recall
the accumulating evidence that under proper
conditions the white races can live and flourish
in hot climes — are there no reasons for think-
ing that even the English in England may

St. Francis and Others. 229

acquire those aptitudes which make not only for
the grosser virtues of civilisation, but also for
those finer qualities which alone make life truly
worth living ? I think there are.

It is common for pessimists of the baser sort
to lament the relative decay of English supre-
macy in manufacturing and commercial energy,
and to look enviously at the development in
these directions of other and younger lands.
Such an attitude is in any case inhuman, since
these younger countries, especially Germany, are
undertaking the cruder tasks of civilisation in
at once a more scientific and a more humane
spirit than we have ever been able to achieve.
But it is also uncalled for. As a civilisation
declines in brutal material energy it gains in
spiritual refinement, thus winning more subtle
and permanent influence. Egypt in her old age
helped to mould young Greece, which in turn as
she fell civilised her barbarian Roman con-
querors. Of early vigorous Rome nothing
remains save the empty echo of heroic virtue;
but on the magnificent compost of Roman, Alex-
andrian, and Byzantine decay we northerners
are flourishing even to-day. France has not
taken a leading part in the grosser work of
modern civilisation, but her laboratories of ideas,
her workshops of beauty, above all her skill in
the fine art of living, have given her an influence
over men's minds which swarming millions of

230 Affirmations.

pale factory hands and an inconceivable tonnagis
of mercantile shipping have not so far given to
us. But in the very dying down of these grosser
energies there is hope, for we may be sure that
the forces of life are not yet extinct, and that
worthier and subtler ends will float before our
eyes as the sculleries and outhouse offices of life
are gradually removed elsewhere. England,
there can be little doubt, is peculiarly fitted to
exercise the finer functions of civilisation, if not
indeed for the world generally, at all events for
those peoples of the globe which are allied to
her wholly by language and largely by race.
In new countries, in the hurry of cities, in the
barren solitude of plains and hills, men have
no time or no chance to elaborate the ideals and
visions for which they yet thirst ; they are not
in touch with those great traditions on which
alone all worthy and abiding effort must finally
rest. The little group of islands hidden in this
far corner of the Atlantic, bathed in their ever-
lasting halo of iridescent mist, will be a sacred
shrine for fully half the world. It was the
womb in which the world's most energetic race
was elaborated ; we may be sure that the mother
feeling will never die out. Every great name
and episode in the slow incubation of the race
has its place and association there. Nothing
there which is not visibly bathed in that glory
v/hich for ever touches us in the far past. In

St. Francis and Others. 231

the light of a newer civilisation every aspect of
it will claim the picturesque beauty of the past.
And if, as Ribot has iately asserted, the factories
of this century will haunt the minds of future
men with the same picturesque suggestion as
the ruins of thirteenth century abbeys to-day
haunt us, how rich a treasure England will
possess here ! Men will come from afar to
wander among the ruined factories and furnaces
of Lancashire and the Midlands, to gaze at
the crumbling charm of those structures once
mortared by tears and blood. They will seek
the massive whirr of vanished mills at dawn,
the prolonged clatter of clogs along the pave-
ment, the flutter of shawls down dark alleys,
the echo of brutal forgotten oaths. Their eyes
will vainly try to recall the men and women of
the Victorian era, huddled together in pathetic
self-satisfaction beneath a black pall of smoke
and disease and death, playing out the tragedy
they called life. A tender melancholy mightier
than beauty will cling to the decay of that
vanished past

So far we have been developing the modern
applications of that spirit oi simplicity — of sincere
and natural asceticism — which was a chief part
of the secret of the Umbrian saint's charm.
Francis — as in an earlier age the great Cynics ot
Greece, and in a later age the New England
transcendentalists — enables us to see that asceti-

232 Affirmations.

cism is a natural instinct ; he knew that so far
from being an effort to crush the body it was an
effort to give elation and freedom to the body —
Gaude,frater corpus ! — and that so far from being
an appeal to sorrow it was a perpetual appeal to
joy. Let us throw aside the useless burdens of
life, he seems to say, the things that oppress
body and mind, — care and wealth and learning
and books, — that thus we may become free to
concentrate ourselves on the natural things of
the world, attaining therein the joy of living.
That was the simplicity of Francis. There is
another vaguer and subtler aspect of his person-
ality which may be expressed by the allied word
purity. I mean that clearness and perfect
crystalline transparency symbolised by water,
in which it has its source. That Francis, with
all his fine natural instincts, fully realised all the
implications of purity, either on its physical or
its spiritual sides, one may well doubt. Purity
has never been a great Christian virtue, though
ever greatly talked about in Christendom ; and
while the reliance of Francis on instinct carried
him far beyond the age and the faith in which
he lived, his indifference to the intellectual grip
of things which was part of that natural instinct
caused him to be often swayed by the con-
ventions and traditions around him.

It has been well said that purity — which in the
last analysis is physical cleanness — is the final

Sf. Francis and Others. 233

result of eyolution after which Nature is ever
striving. When she had attained to the pro-
duction of naked savage man, a creature no
longer encumbered with, the care of his fur but
freely and constantly bathed by the elements,
the perfection of purity was attained. With the
wearing of clothes dirt was again brought into
the world ; and so-called civilised man — except
when he possesses leisure for prolonged attention
to his person and his clothes — is once more
brought to the level of the lower animals, indeed
below them, for few animals spend so little time
and trouble in attaining cleanliness as garmented
man. Pagan classic times, no doubt, cherished
a cult of the body which involved a high regard
for physical purity. That is the very reason
why such purity has never been a Christian or
modern virtue. The early Church, feeling pro-
found antagonism to the vices which in classic
times were associated with the bath, from the
outset frequently denied that there was any
need for cleanliness at all. Even so cultured a
Christian as Clement of Alexandria would only
admit that women should be clean ; it was not
necessary for men ; " the bath is to be taken
by women for cleanliness and health, by men for
health alone ; " in later days the hatred of clean-
liness often became quite whole-hearted. Thus it
happens that throughout Europe and wherever
the influence of Christianity has spread there

234 Affirmations.

has been on the whole an indifference to dirt,
which is indeed not uncommonly found among
degraded peoples untouched by Christianity, but
is certainly nowhere else found in association
with a grade of culture in most other matters so
high. To the Roman the rites of the bath
formed one of the very chief occupations of life,
and to this race it has happened, as probably to
no other ancient race, that their baths have often
survived their temples ; Rome holds no more
memorable relic than the Baths of Caracalla.
For the Mohammedan the love of water is part
of religion, and the energy and skill with which
in its prime Islamic civilisation exploited the
free and beautiful use of water, are still to be
traced throughout southern Spain. In the fine
civilisation of Japan, again, the pursuit of
physical purity has ever been a simple and
unashamed public duty, and "a Japanese crowd,"
says Professor Chamberlain, " is the sweetest in
the world." How different things are in Christ-
endom one need not insist.

It is, however, impossible to overrate the
magnitude of the issues which are directly and
indirectly enfolded in this question of physical
purity. Christianity, with its studied indiffer-
ence to cleanliness, is, after all, a force from
the outside so far as we are concerned ; every
spontaneous reflective movement of progress
involves a reaction against it On the physical

St. Francis and Others. 235

side it is the mark of the better social classes
that they are clean, and any striving for better-
ment among the masses is on the physical side
a striving for greater cleanliness. Personal
dirtiness is the real and permanent dividing
line of classes. The instinctive physical shrink-
ing of the clean person from the dirty person —
except at the rare moments when some stronger
emotion comes into play — is profound and in-
evitable. Nearly every form of honest natural
vulgarity it is possible to find tolerable
and sometimes even charming, but personal
physical unwholesomeness remains an impos-
sible barrier. There is no social equality be-
tween the clean and the dirty. The question
of physical purity lies at the root of the real
democratic problem.

Our attitude towards physical purity inevitably
determines our attitude towards the body gener-
ally. Without the ideal of cleanliness the body
becomes impure. It cannot be shown. Complete
concealment becomes the ideal of the impure.
And however pure and excellent the body may
actually be among ourselves, the traditions of the
past remain. The Greeks considered the dislike
to nakedness as a mark of Persian and other
barbarians ; the Japanese — the Greeks of another
age and clime — had not conceived the reasons
for avoiding nakedness until taught by the lustful
and shame-faced eyes of western barbarians.

236 Affirmations.

Among ourselves it is " disgusting " even to-day
to show so much as the foot.^ We certainly
could not imitate St. Francis, who broke with
his old life by abandoning his father's house and
all that he owned, absolutely naked.

There is no real line of demarcation between
physical purity and spiritual purity, and the
spiritual impurity which marks our civilisation
is certainly related to the physical impurity
which has so long been a tradition of Christen-
dom. Both alike are a consciousness of unclean-
ness involving a cloak of hypocrisy. We may
well recall that sincerity, if we carry its history
sufficiently far back, is one with physical purity.
In some districts of Italy a girl shows that she
is chaste by joining in a certain procession and
bearing the symbols of purity in her hand. At
all events so it was once. All women now walk
in the procession of the chaste. In civilised
modern life everywhere, indeed, we all walk in
that procession, and bright lustful eyes mingled
with faint starved eyes both look out incon-
gruously from behind the same monotonously
chaste masks. We have forgotten, if we ever

1 Thus one learns from the newspapers that the offence of
wearing sandals has involved ejection even from so great a
centre of enlightenment as the Reading Room of the British
Museum, while the mere assertion that an actress appeared on
the stage with bare legs was so damaging that it involved an
action for slander, a public apology, and the payment of "a
substantial sum " in compensation.

St. Francis and Others. 237

knew, that the filthy rags of our righteousness
have alike robbed desire of its purity and
restraint of its beauty.

How far Francis had instinctively divined the
meaning and significance of purity, either on
the physical or the moral side, it would be idle
to attempt to inquire too precisely. But this
delicate and admirable saint' brings us into an
atmosphere in which the true grace of purity
may at least be discerned. His indifference to
nakedness, his affection for animals and interest
in their loves, his audacious banding together of
men and women in one order, his gospel of joy
and his everlasting delight in all natural and
elementary things, make up a whole inconceiv-
ably different from that vision of the world
which the great mediaeval monks, from St.
Bernard downwards, spent their lives in main-
taining. He brings us to a point at which
we are enabled to go beyond his own insight,
a point at which we may not only see that
asceticism is a simple and natural instinct, not
alone recognise the beauty of sex in flowers and
birds, but in human creatures also, and learn at
last that the finest secrets of purity are known
only to the man and woman who have mingled
the scent of their sweat with the wild thyme.

At the present moment it may indeed be said
that the purity which is one with sincerity
presents itself to us more broadly and more

238 Affirmations.

clearly in the road of our evolution than it ever
has before. Even on the physical side secrecy
is becoming impossible, and as the progress of
physical science makes matter more and more
transparent to our eyes, sincerity must ever
become a more stringent and inevitable virtue,
And on the psychic side, also, purity — if you
will, sincerity — is even more surely imposing
itself. Within our own time we have been
privileged to see psychology taken from the
study into the laboratory and into the market-
place. There is no recess of the soul — however
intimate, however, as we have been taught to
think, disgusting — that is not now opened to
the child-like, all-scrutinising curiosity of science.
We may perhaps rebel, but so it is. There are
no mysteries left, no noisome abysses of ignor-
ance veiled by the pretty mists of innocence.
In the face of this tendency private vice must
ever become more difficult ; we are learning to
detect the whole man in the slightest quiver of
his muscles. Thus, again, purity becomes yet
more stringent and inevitable. We gaze at all
facts now, and find none too mean or too sacred
for study. But it is fatal to gaze at certain facts
if you cannot gaze purely. In that lies the
final triumph of purity. We may rebel, I repeat,
but so it is, so it must remain.

I do not wish to insist here on the moral
aspects of purity — grave and profound as these

St. Francis and Others. 239

are — for I am dealing less with the social aspects
of simplicity and purity than with what I would
call their religious aspects, their power to win
our personal peace and joy. How far we are
to-day, at all events in England, from the sim-
plicity and purity of Francis in the search for
peace and joy is brought home very clearly to
those who have ever made it their business to
observe the masses of our population in their
finest moments of would-be peace and joy.
Many years ago a curious fascination drew me
every Bank Holiday to haunt the structure and
grounds of the Crystal Palace, near which I then
lived. The vision of humanity in the mass,
when it has lost the interest which individuals
possess, and taken on the more abstract interest
belonging to the species, has for me at least
always had a certain attraction. But these
Bank Holiday crowds had a more special
interest. They summed up and wrote large
the characteristics of a nation. These thirty
thousand persons belonging to the class which
by virtue of greater fertility furnishes the ulti-
mate substance of all classes, seemed to reveal
to me the heart of my own people. The per-
petual, violent movement, the meaningless shouts
and yells, the haggard bands of young women
standing in the corridors to tramp wearily a
treadmill variation of the Irish jig until they fell
into an almost hypnotic state, the wistful, weary

240 Affirmations,

looks in the dull eyes of these seekers, rushing on
among the plaster images of old serene gods,
seeing nothing but always moving, moving they
knew not whither, faint, yet pursuing they knew
not what, — the whole of the northern soul, the
English soul above all, was there. On ! on !
never mind how or where : that seemed the
perpetual cry of these pale, lean, awkward
youths and women. And I would think of the
bands of boys and girls in the mediaeval crusad-
ing epidemics, starting from the north with the
same eyes, asking for Jerusalem at every town,
soon to be slain or drowned in unknown obscure
ways. Or sometimes I recalled the bas-reliefs
in the museum at Naples — that most fascinat-
ing of museums — which show how the failing
Greek genius concentrated its now spiritualised
energy in the forms of Dionysus and his maenads.
With eager face grown languid he leans on the
great thyrsus, which bends beneath his weight,
and in front his maenads, upheld by the ardour
of the search, with heads thrown back and
flying hair, still beat their cymbals desper-
ately, seeking, until they have grown almost
unconscious of search, a far-away joy, an ever-
fleeting ideal, of which they have at last for-
gotten the name. And so for hours my gaze
would be fixed on the pathetic vulgarity of those
terrible crowds.

Of late I have been able to see how the other

St Francis and Others. 241

vigorous and reproductive race — the race that
chiefly shares with England the partition of the
uncivilised world — comports itself at its great
festivals. The Russians are a profoundly and
consciously religious race, and I recall above all
the unforgettable scene at the ancient monastery
of Troitsa, near Moscow, as it appeared on
the festival of the Assumption, when pilgrims,
women mostly, in every variety of gay cos-
tume, crowded thither on foot from all parts of
Russia. There, at length within the walls of
that monastery-fortress on the hill at Sergievo,
they fervently kiss the sacred relics, and having
been served by the dark-robed, long-haired
monks with soup and black bread, they lie
down and fall asleep, placid and motionless, on
all sides. Young women, grasping the pilgrim's
staff, a little droop sometimes in the lips, yet
with large brawny thighs beneath the short
skirts, stolid great-breasted women of middle
age, wrinkled old women decked in their ancient
traditional adornments — all this gay-coloured
multitude fling themselves down to sleep on
the church steps, around its walls, over the silent
graves, heaped up anywhere that the march
of on-coming pilgrims leaves a little space,
tired maenads filled for once with the wine
their souls craved, colossal images of immense
appeasement It is the orgy of a strong, silent,
much-suffering race, with all the charm of child-

16

242 Affirmations.

hood yet upon it, too humane to be ferocious
in its energy.

We English subordinate the sensory to the
motor side of Hfe, and even find our virtue in so
doing. To live in the present, to suffer and
to enjoy our actual evil and good, facing it
squarely and making our account with it — that
we cannot do: that was the way of the Greeks
and Romans ; it is not our way. We are ever
poets and idealists, down to the dregs of life's
cup. We must strive and push, using our
muscles to narcotise our senses, ever con-
temptuous of the people who more fully
exercise their senses to grasp the world
around them. For the sake of this muscular
auto-intoxication we miss the finest moments
life has to give. The Japanese masses, who fix
their popular festival for the day when the
cherry-tree is in finest bloom, and take their
families into the woods to sip tea and pass the
day deliciously with the flowers, are born to
a knowledge of that mystery which Francis
painfully conquered. The people to whom
such an art of enjoyment is the common
practice of the common people may possibly
not succeed in sending ugly and shoddy goods
to clothe and kill the beautiful skins of every
savage tribe under heaven, but we need not fear
to affirm that they have learnt secrets of civilisa-
tion which are yet hidden from us in England.

St. Francis and Others. 243

The worth of a civilisation, we m^y be very
sure, is more surely measured by its power to
multiply among the common people the possi-
bility of having and enjoying such moments
than by the mileage of cotton goods its factories
can yield, or even by the output of Bibles its
weary factory hands can stitch. We can know
no moments of finer or purer exhilaration,
whether we breathe the bright air of Australian
solitudes and watch the virgin hills lie fold
within fold beneath the stainless sunlight, or
in the dimmer and damper air of this old
country recline on Surrey heights by the great
beeches of the old deserted Pilgrim's Way and
meditate of the past There are few things
sweeter or more profitable than to lie on the
velvety floor of a little pine wood on a forgotten
southern height in May, where tall clumps of
full-flowered rhododendra blend with the
fragrant gorse which spreads down to the
sparkling sea, and to throw aside everything
and dream. In such moments at such spots we
reach the summits of life, learning those secrets
of asceticism which Francis knew so well.

Thus by his words and by his deeds Francis
still has his significance for us. He brought
asceticism from the cell into the fields, and
became the monk of Nature. One may doubt
whether, as Ren an thought, the Song to the
Sun is the supreme modern expression of the

244 Affirmations.

religious spirit, but without doubt it gathers up
vaguely and broadly the things that most surely
belong to our eternal peace in this world. That
it is the simplest and naturalest things to which
eternal joy belongs is the divine secret which
makes Francis a prince among saints, and it
was by a true inspiration that he dedicated the
chief utterance of his worship of joy in life to
the sun.

If it should ever chance that a sane instinct of
worship is born again on earth among civilised
men, let us be sure that nothing will seem more
worthy of worship than the sun, the source of
that energy out of which we and all our ideals
ultimately spring. Some day, again, perhaps,
men will greet the rising of the sun at the
summer solstice on the hills with music and
song and dance, framing their most exquisite
liturgical art to the honour of that supreme
source of all earthly life. It was natural, doubt-
less, that at some stage of human progress
new-found moral conceptions should intrude
themselves as worthier of human worship. But
even the cross itself — if not its great rival the
lunar Mohammedan crescent — was first the
symbol of sun-worship, of the source of life.
We may yet rescue that sacred symbol, now
fallen to such sorrowful uses, bearing it onwards
to sunnier heights of wholeness and joy.

Religions are many, and in the mass they

Sf. Francis and Others. 245

seem to us — blinded to4he social functions that
religions originally subserved — endlessly harsh
and cruel. But in their summits, in their finest
personalities, they are simple and natural enough,
and alike lovely. Look at the Jesus of the
Gospels, the friend of publicans and sinners,
the marriage guest at Cana, so tender-hearted
in the house of Simon, the author of those
sayings of quintessential natural wisdom pre-
served to us in that string of adorable pearls men
call the Sermon on the Mount. Look at the
prophet of Islam, when gazing back at the earth
as it seemed to recede into the distance at the
end of his long career, he counted as first among
its claims the simple natural joys : " I love your
world because of its women and its perfumes."
And we remember the depths to which Chris-
tianity and Mohammedanism have alike fallen.
Look, again, at Francis, who in no prim
academical sense may be called the first modern
apostle of sweetness and light, a man who found
joy unspeakable in inhaling the fragrance of
flowers, in watching the limpid waters of
mountain streams, and whose most character-
istic symbol is the soaring lark he loved so
well. And we remember that a century later
even Chaucer, that sweetest and most sym-
pathetic of poets, can only speak of his friar
in words that seem to be of inevitable and
unconscious irony. For every religion begins

246 Affirmations.

as the glorious living flame of a lovely human
personality, — or so it seems, — and continues as
a barren cinder-heap. As such, as a Church,
whether pagan or Christian, it can scarcely
afford us either light or heat.

Why, one asks oneself, is it necessary for me
to choose between Paul and Petronius? Why
pester me on the one hand with the breastplate
of faith and the helmet of salvation, on the other
with the feast of Trimalchio and the kisses of
Giton ? "A plague of both your houses ! " We
are not barbarians, tortured by a moral law,
neither are we all pagans with unmixed instincts
of luxury. We are the outcome of a civilisation
in which not only has what we are pleased to
regard as the sensual fury of the ape and tiger
become somewhat chastened, but the ascetic
fury of the monk and priest also. Let the child
of the south feast still in the house of Trimalchio
with unwounded conscience, if he can; we will
not forbid him. And let the barbarian still
flagellate his tense rebellious nerves with knotted
spiritual scourges, if only so can he draw out the
best music they yield; we will be the first
to applaud. But most of us have little to do
with the one or the other. The palmiest days
of both ended a thousand years ere we were
born. Before the threshold of our modern world
was reached Francis sang in the sun and smiled
away the spectres that squatted on the beautiful

St. Francis and Others. 247

things of the earth. On the threshold of our
world Rabelais built his Abbey of Thel^me,
in whose rule was but one clause, Fay ce que
vouldras, a rule which no pagan or Christian
had ever set up before, because never before
except as involved in the abstract conceptions
of philosophers, had the thought of voluntary
co-operation, of the unsolicited freedom to do
well, appeared before European men.

What have we to do also, it may be added,
with modernity, with the fashions of an hour ?
It is well, indeed, to live in the present, what-
ever that present may be, but sooner or later
we are pushed back, weary or disillusioned, on
the inspiration of our own personality. All the
activity of Francis only wrought a plague of
grey friars, scattered like dust on the highways of
Europe. But Francis still remains, and all things
wither into nothingness in the presence of one
natural man who dared to be himself The
best of us can scarcely hope to be more
successful than Francis. But at least we
may be ourselves. " Whatever happens I must
be emerald : " that, Antoninus said, is the
emerald's morality; that must remain our finest
affirmation.

Our feet cling to the earth, and it is well that
we should learn to grip it closely and nakedly.
But the earth beneath us is not all of Nature ;
there are instincts within us that lead elsewhere,

248 Affirmations.

and it is part of the art of living to use naturally
all those instincts. In so doing the spiritual
burdens which the ages have laid upon us glide
away into thin air.

And for us, as for him who wrote De Imita-
tione Chris tt — however far differently — there are
still two wings by which we may raise ourselves
above the earth, simplicity, that is to say, and
purity.

INDEX.

Agassiz, ix

Acgiolieri, Carlo, 104
Architecture, classic and de-
cadent, 175-176
Arnold, Matthew, 77
Asceticism, 220 et seqq.
Atlantic Club, ix

Baschet, Armand, 105

Baudelaire, 165, 177, 178, 181

Bayreuth, 22, 27

Bible, the, 49-50

Bismarck, 41

Bocklin, 34

Bourget, Essais de Psychologic

Cmtemporaine, 180
Browne, Sir Thomas, J75
Bull, Dr. Tage, be
Burckhardt, 34, 83

Carlyle, 83, 17S

Casanova : birth and parents^e,
93-94 ; character, 94-101 ;
appearance, 94, 101-103 ;
imprisonment, lOI ; secret
agent, 101-102 ; banishment,
102 ; life at Dui, 102-103 ;
death, 103 ; visit to London,
126-128

Memoirs, ix-xi, 86-130 ;

publication of, 105, suggested
authorship of, 105 ; accuracy
of, 105-106 ; moral worth of,
109-118

Chamberlain, Professor, 234

Chamfort, 45

Chapman, George, 44 note

Chaucer, 151

Christianity, 44, 47-67, 122,

209-210, 212-215, 245
Civilisation, 224-231
Clement of Alexandria, St., 218,

233
Comte, 56
Conscience, 59-60
Constant, Benjamin, 56
Culture, 79-81

D'Alembert, 128

Darwinism, 43

De Ranee, 45

Decadence, 49, 50, 175-187

Degas, 192

Democracy, 74

Diderot, 122

Digby, Sir Kenelm," Memoirs,

206-208
Dostoievsky, 49, 195
D'Urfe, Madame, 97

Eckard, Meister, 62
Eliot, George, 44, 55
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, ix, 4,

43. I7S
English, the, 118, 224-231, 239-

240, 242 ; Nietzsche's opinion

of, 42-44
Epicureanism, 65-66

2SO

Index.

Fielding, Henry, 120

Fielding, Sir John, 127

Fisher, Kitty, 127-128

Flaubert, 133

Fontenelle, 45

Forain, 193

Forster, Dr., 3

Forster - Nietzsche, Elizabeth,

2-3

France, in the l8th century,

121
Francis of Assisi, St., 215-248 ;

Song of the Sun, 243-244
Fraser, 69
French, the : Nietzsche's opinion

of, 44-46

Gauguin, 191

Gautier, 1 78

Germany, Nietzsche's opinion

of, 17-19, 40-42
Gibbon, 175
Godwin, 120-121
Goethe, xi, 11, 22, 103
Goldsmith, 120
Goncourts, the, 153
Greece, 14-16

Hannon, Rimes de foie, 189

Hardy, Thomas, Jude the Ob-
scure, 112

Hawthorne, 177

Hegel, 32, 69

Hello, I9S

Helvetius, 128

Hennequin, 194

Hey wood, John, 119

Hogarth, 120

Holmes, Wendell, ix, 86

Hume, 120, t75

Huysmans, viii, 116, 158-21 1 ;
parentage, 159

— —Works: Marthe, 165-166;
Lts Soeurs Vatard, 166 ; Sac
au Dos, 166-167 ; Lh-Bas,

168, 193-195 ; En M'enagt,
168-169, 194 ; Croquis Par-
isiens, 169-172, 189; A Vau
VEau 169; A Sebcntrs, 169,
172-187, 196 — 199, 201 ; En
Rode, 187-188, 190 ; Cer-
taines, 188, 190; VArt
Moderne, 188, 190, 191-193 ;
En Route, 196-203 ; L'Oblat,
203 ; La CathidraU, 203

Idealism, 132

Japanese, the, 234, 242

Jesus Christ, 48-50, 212-215,

24s
Johnson, 120

Kant, 20, 22, 42, 56, 63
Keller, Gottfried, 34
Kretzer, Dr., 29

La Bruy^re, 45

La Rochefoucauld, 45

Lacroix, Paul, 105

Landor, 43

Lange, 125

Laws of Manu, 51-52

Leiand, C. G., ix

Ligne, Prince de, 103

London, Casanova's visit to,

126
Lowell, ix
Luther, 66

Mill, J. S., 43.55. 56

Montaigne, 45

Montesquieu- Fezensac, Comte
de, 172

Morality, Nietzsche's views on,
55-67, 74-79 ; in literature,
1 09-1 18; standards of, 123

Myers, Mr., 55

Index.

251

Nietzsche, Friediich, viii, xi-xii,
I— 8s> 198; birth and parent-
age, 3-5 ; childhood and
education, 5-1 1 ; and women,
9-10 ; lectureship at Basle,
13, 34 ; on Germany, 17-19,
40-42 ; and Wagner, 21-34 5
personal appearance, 29 note ;
style, 38, 81-82 ; mental
breakdown, 39 ; philosophy
of, 39-85 ; on the English,
42-44 ; on the French, 44-46 ;
on Christianity, 47-67 ; on
morals, 55-67, 74-79

Works : Ecce Homo, viii ;

Der Antichrist, 49, 50, 52,
S3 ; Der Fall Wagner, 30,
31, 37 ; Die Frohlicht fVissen-
schaft, 35, 41, 176 ; Die Ge-
burt der TragSdie aus dem
Geiste der Musik, 14—16 ;
GStzendammerung, 16, 37,
SI ; Jenseits von Gut und
£Sse, 37 ; Mensckliches, All-
zumenschliches, 35, 45 ; Mor-
genrothe, 35, 48, 65 ; Schopen-
hauer als Erzieher, 19-21 ;
Umwerthung aller Werthe,
38 ; Unzeitgemdsse Betracht-
ungen, 17 ; Wagner in Bay-
retitk, 23, 31 ; Zarathustra,
9. 36-37, 39. 54. 61, 63,
64 ; Zur Genealogie der
Moral, 37

Odoof Cluny, St., 206, 208

Parsifal, 32

Pascal, 4S

Pater, Walter, 77, 78 note, 124,

175
Paul, St., 47-48, 213-214
Pepys, 88
Pilate, 52

Poe, 177
Purity, 232-240

Rabelais, 147-148, 247

Realism, 132

Renan, 77, 159, 243

Renouvier, 125

Restif de la Bretonne, Monsieur

Nicholas, 88
Ribot, 231
Richardson, 120
Ritschl, 12
Roland, Madame, Mimoires

Particulieres, 88
Rops, Felicien, Essay on by

Huysmans, 192
Rousseau, Confessions, 88
Russians, the, 241-242

Schiller, 42

Schopenhauer, 9, 11-12, 19-22,

42, 43. "3-1 H
Schur^, M. , 29 note
Shakespeare, 65
Shelley, 118
Simplicity, 231-232
Socrates, 14, 66
Soiries de Medan, 167
Spencer, Herbert, 55
Spinoza, 56
Stanley, Venetia, 207
Stendhal, 45
Sterne, 147, 148
Strauss, David, 17, 18, 19, 75
Swift, 120, 147, 148, 175

Thackeray, W. M., 86
Tolstoi, 140

Vauvenarges, 45
Verlaine, 180, 181
Villiers de I'Isle Adam, 162
Voltaire, 128

252 Index.

Wagner, Cosima, 21, 42 Zola, Emile, viii, 131-157 ;

Wagner, Richard, 7, 12, 14, parentage, 137

21- u works : Germinal, 134,

Waldstein, Count, 102 '3S,iS3. IS4-ISS ; Nana 134,

' ' lT,c„\i,l ; La FauU de r Abb(

Weismann, 223 Mouret, 133; L'Assommoir,

Whitman, 177 134, 145 ; La Dib&cle, 141 ;

Winckelmann, 15 La Terre, 152

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