We moderns: enigmas and guesses

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IV. We Moderns

By Edwin Muir

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THE FREE'LANCE BOOKS f EDITED BY H. L. MENCKEN

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WE MODERNS:

ENIGMAS AND GUESSES

THE FREE-LANCE BOOKS

Edited with Introductions
By H. L. Mencken

i youth and egolatry
By Pio Baroja

ii ventures in common sense
By E. W. Howe

iii the antichrist

By F. W. Nietzsche

iv we moderns

By Edwin Muir

Other volumes in preparation.

For sale at all bookshops

ALFRED A. KNOPF, PUBLISHER

THE FREE LANCE BOOKS. IV

EDITED WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY H. L. MENCKEN

WE MODERNS:

ENIGMAS AND GUESSES
By EDWIN MUIR

NEW YORK ALFRED • A • KNOPF mcmxx

COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc.

JUL 30 19-2.0 *

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATEg OF AMKHIOA

©CI.A597138

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CONTENTS

Introduction, 7
I. The Old Age, 25
11. Original Sin, 69

III. What IS Modern? 103

IV. Art and Literature, 145
V. Creative Love, 185

VI. The Tragic View, 225

INTRODUCTION

That a young Scotsman, reacting from the
vast emotional assault of the late ferocious war,
should have withdrawn himself into an ivory
tower in Glasgow town, and there sat himself
down in heroic calm to wrestle with the vexa-
tious and no doubt intrinsically insoluble prob-
lems of being and becoming — this was surely
nothing to cause whispers among connoisseurs of
philosophical passion, for that grim, persistent,
cold-blooded concern with the fundamental
mysteries of the world has been the habit of the
Scots ever since they emerged from massacre
and blue paint. From blue paint, indeed, the
transition was almost instantaneous to blue souls,
and the conscience of Britain, such as it is, has
dwelt north of the Cheviot Hills ever since.
Find a Scot, and you are at once beset by a
metaphysician, or, at all events, by a theologian.
But for a young man of those damp, desolate
parts, throwing himself into the racial trance, to
emerge with a set of ideas reaching back, through
— 7 —

INTRODUCTION

Nietzsche and even worse heretics, to the
spacious, innocent, somewhat gaudy days of the
Greek illumination — for such a fellow, so bred
and circumscribed, to come out of his tower with
a concept of life as a grand and glittering adven-
ture, a tremendous spectacle, an overpowering
ecstasy, almost an orgy — such a phenomenon
was, and is, quite sufficient to lift the judicious
eyebrow. Yet here is this Mr. Edwin Muir of
Caledonia bearing just that outlandish contra-
band, offering just that strange flouting of all
things traditionally Scotch. What he preaches
in the ensuing aphorisms is the emancipation of
the modern spirit from its rotting heritage of
ingenuous fears and exploded certainties. What
he denounces most bitterly is the abandonment
of a world that is beautifully surprising and
charming to the rule of sordid, timid and un-
imaginative men — the regimentation of ideas
in a system that is half a denial of the obvious
and half a conglomeration of outworn metaphors,
all taken too literally. And what he pleads for
most eloquently, with his cold, reserved northern
eloquence, is the whole-hearted acceptance of
" life as a sacrament, . . . life as joy triumph-
ing over fate, . . . life made innocent, . . .
— 8 —

INTRODUCTION

life washed free from how much filth of re-
morse, guilt, contempt, ' sin '." . . .

It goes without saying that the red hand of
Nietzsche is in all this. The Naumburg Anti-
christ, damned for five years running by the
indignation of all right-thinking men, has made
steady and enormous progress under cover.
There has never been a time, indeed, when his
notions enjoyed a wider dispersion or were poll-
parrotted unwittingly by greater numbers of the
righteous. Excessive draughts of the democratic
cure-all, swallowed label, cork, testimonials and
all, have brought Christendom to bed with
Katzenjammer — and there stands the seductive
antidote in its leering blue bottles. Where
would philosophical opponents of Bolshevism
be without Nietzsche? Who would devise argu-
ments for them, eloquence for them, phrases for
them? On all sides one hears echoes of him —
often transformed from his harsh bass to a piping
falsetto, but nevertheless recognizable enough.
Any port in a storm! If God is asleep, then turn
to the Devil! The show offers the best laughing
that heathen have enjoyed, perhaps, since the
Hundred Years' War. And there is an extra
snicker in the fact that Scotland, once again,
_9_

INTRODUCTION

seems to resume the old trade of intellectual
smuggling. If one Scot is to the front with so
forthright a piece as " We Moderns," then
surely there must be a thousand other Scots hard
at it in a pianissimo manner. Thus, I suppose,
the crime of Carlyle is repeated on a wholesale
scale, and once again the poor Sassenach is
inoculated with pathogenic Prussian organisms.
On this side of the ocean the business is less
efficiently organized; we have no race of illicit
metaphysicians on our border. But the goods
come in all the same. I have heard more prat-
tling of stale Nietzscheism of late, from men
bearing the flag in one hand and the cross in the
other, than I ever heard in the old days from
parlour anarchists and unfrocked priests.
Nietzsche, belatedly discovered by a world beset
by terrors too great for it and mysteries too pro-
found, becomes almost respectable, nay, almost
Episcopalian!

What ails it, at bottom, is the delusion that all
the mysteries, given doctors enough, theories
enough, pills enough, may be solved — that it
is all a matter of finding a panacea, unearth-
ing a prophet, passing a bill. If it turns to
Nietzsche, however gingerly and suspiciously, it
— 10 —

INTRODUCTION

will turn only to fresh disappointment and dis-
may, for Nietzsche is no quack with another sure
cure, but simply an iconoclast who shows that
all the sure cures of the past and present have
failed, and must fail — and particularly the sure
cure of the mob, the scheme of determining the
diagnosis by taking a vote, the notion that the
medicine which most pleases the grossest palates
is the medicine to get the patient upon his legs.
Nietzsche is no reformer; he is an assassin of
reformers; if he preaches anything at all, it
is that reform is useless, illusory — above all,
unnecessary. The patient is really not dying at
all. Let him get up and dance! Let him pick
up his bed and employ it upon the skulls of his
physicians! Life is not a disease to be treated
with boluses and philtres, not an affliction to be
shirked and sentimentalized, but an adventure to
be savoured and enjoyed — life, here and now,
is the highest imaginable experience. What the
world needs is not a cure for it, but room for it,
freedom for it, innocent zest for it. So ac-
cepted and regarded, half of its terrors vanish at
once, and even its unescapable catastrophes take
on a certain high stateliness, a fine aesthetic
dignity. This is the tragic view that Mr. Muir
— 11 —

INTRODUCTION

cries up — life as joy triumphing over fate.
" For the character of tragedy is not negative
and condemnatory, but deeply affirmative and
joyous." The ideal man is not the time-serving
slave of Christendom, in endless terror of God,
forever flattering and bribing God, but the
Nietzschean Ja-sager, the yes-sayer, facing des-
tiny courageously and a bit proudly, living to
the full the life that lies within his grasp in the
present, accepting its terms as he finds them,
undaunted by the impenetrable shadows that
loom ahead.

What Mr. Muir, following Nietzsche, is most
dissatisfied with in the modern spirt is its intoler-
able legalism — its fatuous frenzy to work every-
thing out to nine places of constabulary decimals,
to establish windy theories and principles, to
break the soul of man to a rule. In part, of
course, that eff"ort is of respectable enough
origin. It springs from intelligent self-asser-
tion, healthy curiosity, the sense of compe-
tence; it is a by-product of the unexampled con-
quests of nature that have gone on in the modern
age. But in other parts it is no more than a by-
product of the democratic spirit, the rise of the
inferior, the emancipation of the essentially in-
— 12 —

INTRODUCTION

competent. Science is no longer self-sufficient,
isolated from moral ideas, an end in itself; it
tends to become a mere agent of mob tyranny;
it takes on gratuitous and incomprehensible
duties and responsibilities; like the theology that
it has supplanted, it has friendlier and friendlier
dealings with the secular arm. And art, too,
begins to be poisoned by this moral obsession of
the awakened proletariat. It ceases to be an
expression of well-being, of healthy function-
ing, of unpolluted joy in life, and becomes a
thing of obscure and snuffling purposes, a servant
of some low enterprise of the cocksure. The
mob is surely no scientist and no artist; it is,
in fact, eternally the anti-scientist, the anti-artist;
science and art offer it unscalable heights and
are hence its enemies. But in a world dominated
by mob yearnings and mob passions, even science
and art must take on some colour from below.
The enemies, if they cannot be met and over-
thrown on a fair field, can at least be degraded.
And when the mob degrades, it always degrades
to moral tunes. Morality is its one avenue
to superiority — false but none the less sooth-
ing. It can always be good. It can always
dignify its stupidity, its sordidness and its
— 13 —

INTRODUCTION

cowardice with terms borrowed from ethical
revelation. The good man is a numskull, but
nevertheless he is good.

Mr. Muir has at the modem spirit on many
other counts, but nearly all of them may be
converted with more or less plausibility into an
objection to its ethical obsession, its idiotic craze
to legislate and admonish. When he says, for
example, that realism in the novel and the drama
is hollow, he leaves his case but half stated;
there is undoubtedly a void where imagination,
feeling and a true sense of the tragic ought to
be, but it is filled with the common garbage of
mob thinking, to wit, with the common garbage
of moral purpose. All of the chief realists,
from Zola to Barbusse, are pre-eminently
moralists disguised as scientists; what one
derives from them, reading them sympatheti-
cally, is not illumination but merely indignation.
They are always violently against something —
and that something is usually the fact that the
world is not as secure and placid a place as a
Methodist Sunday-school. Their affectation of
moral agnosticism need deceive no one. They
are secretly appalled (and delighted) by their
own " scientific " pornographies, just as their
— 14 —

INTRODUCTION

brethren of the vice crusades are appalled and
delighted. Realism, of course, can never be
absolute. It must always stress something and
leave out something. What it commonly
stresses is the colossal failure of society to fit into
an orderly scheme of causes and effects, virtues
and rewards, crimes and punishments. What
it leaves out is the glow of romance that hangs
about that failure — the poignant drama of blind
chance, the fascination of the unknowable. The
realists are bad artists because they are
anaesthetic to beauty. And a good many scien-
tists are bad scientists for precisely the same rea-
son. In their hands the gorgeous struggle of
man against the mysteries and foul ambus-
cades of nature is converted into a banal cause
before a police court, with the complainant put
on the stand to prove that his own hands are
clean. One cannot read some of the modem
medical literature, particularly on the side of
public hygiene, without giving one's sympathy
to the tubercle bacilli and the spirochaetae.
Science of that sort ceases to be a fit concern for
men of dignity, superior men, gentlemen; it
becomes a concern for evangelists, uplifters,
bounders. Its aim is no longer to penetrate the
— 15 —

INTRODUCTION

impenetrable, to push forward the bounds of
human knowledge, to overreach the sinister
trickeries of God; its aim is simply to lengthen
the lives of human ciphers and to reinforce their
delusion that they confer a favour upon the
universe by living at all. Worse, it converts the
salvation of such vacuums into a moral obliga-
tion, and sets up the absurd doctrine that human
progress is furthered by diminishing the death-
rate in the Balkans, by rescuing Georgia crackers
from the hookworm and by reducing the whole
American people, the civilized minority with the
barbarian mass, to a race of teetotalling ascetics,
full of pious indignations and Freudian suppres-
sions.

The western world reeks with this new senti-
mentality. It came on in Europe with the fall
of feudalism and the rise of the lower orders.
Even war, the last surviving enterprise of
natural man, has been transformed from a
healthy play of innocent instincts into a combat
of moral ideas, nine-tenths of them obviously
unsound. It no longer offers a career to a
Gustavus Adolphus, a Prince Eugene or a
Napoleon I. It loses even the spirit of gallant
adventure that dignified the theological balder-
— 16 —

INTRODUCTION

dash of the Crusades — in which, as every one
knows, the balderdash was quickly absorbed
altogether by the adventure. It becomes the
business of specialists in moral indignation.
The modern general must not only know the
elements of military science; he must also show
some of the gifts of a chautauqua orator, includ-
ing particularly the gift of right-thinking; it
would do him more harm to speak of his oppo-
nent with professional politeness, as one lawyer
might speak of another, than it would do him to
lose an important battle. Worse, war gets out of
the hands of soldiers altogether. It becomes an
undertaking of boob-bumpers, spy-hunters,
emotion-pumpers, propaganda-mongers — all
sorts of disgusting cads. Its great prizes tend to
go, not to the men fighting in the field, but to the
man manufacturing shells, alarms, and moral in-
dignation. At the time of the last great series of
wars it was said that every musketeer of France
carried a marshal's baton in his haversack. The
haversack of the musketeer now contains only
official literature, informing him of the causes
of the war as most lately determined, the names
of its appointed moral heroes, and the penalties
for discussing its aims, for swapping tobacco
— 17 —

INTRODUCTION

with the boys on the other side, and for inviting
a pretty peasant-girl into his shell-hole. The
baton is being fought for by a press-agent, a
labour leader and a Y.M.C.A. secretary.

It is against such degradations that Mr. Muir
raises his voice, and in particular against such
degradations in the field of the fine arts. The
superficial, I daresay, will mistake him (once
they get over the sheer immorality of his rela-
tion to Nietzsche) as simply one more pleader
for I'art pour Vart — one more prophet of a
superior and disembodied aestheticism. Well,
tiirn to his singularly acute and accurate esti-
mate of Walter Pater: there is the answer to
that error. He has, in fact, no leanings what-
soever in any such direction. The thing he
argues for, despite all his fury against the de-
basement of art to mob uses, is not an art that
shall be transcendental, but an art that shall
relate itself to life primarily and unashamedly,
an art that shall accept and celebrate life. He
preaches, of course, out of season. There has
never been a time in the history of the world
when the natural delight of man in himself was
held in greater suspicion. Christianity, after
two thousand years, seems triumphant at last.
— 18 —

INTRODUCTION

From the ashes of its barbaric theology there
arises the phoenix of its maudlin sentimentality;
the worship of inferiority becomes its dominat-
ing cult. In all directions that worship goes
on. It gives a new colour to politics, and not
only to politics, but also to the sciences and the
arts. Perhaps we are at the mere beginning of
the process. The doctrine that all men are equal
in the sight of God is now defended and propa-
gated by machine guns; it becomes a felony to
deny it; one is already taxed in America to make
good the lofty aspirations of Poles, Jugo-Slavs
and Armenians. In England there are signs of
a further step. An Ehrlich or a Koch, miracu-
lously at work there, might be jailed for slitting
the throat of a white rat: all the lower animals,
too, it appears, are God's creatures. So viewed,
a guinea-pig becomes the peer of a Beethoven,
as a farm-hand is already the peer of a Bach.
It is too late to turn back; let us hope that the
logic of it is quickly worked out to its unescap-
able conclusion. Once the pediculus vestimenti
and the streptococcus are protected, there will
be a chance again, it may be, for the law of
natural selection to achieve its benign purga-
tion.

— 19 —

INTRODUCTION

Meanwhile, Mr. Muir cannot expect his ideas
to get much attention. A gaudy parade is pass-
ing and the populace is busy cheering. Never-
theless, they were ideas worth playing with, and
they are now worth printing and pondering. It
seems to me that, in more than one way, they
help to illuminate the central aesthetic question
— the problem as to the nature and function of
artistic representation. They start from Nietz-
schean beginnings, but they get further than
Nietzsche ever got. His whole aesthetic was
hampered by the backwardness of psychology in
his time. He made many a brilliant guess, but
more than once he was hauled up rather sharply
by his ignorance of the machinery of thought.
Mr. Muir not only has Nietzsche behind him;
he also has Freud, as he shows, for example,
in §145. Beyond him there is still a lot of room.
He will not stop the parade — but he will help
the next man.

Edwin Muir was bom in the Orkney Islands in
1887. His father was a small crofter there.
When he was fourteen years old the family
moved to Glasgow. Within four years his
father, his mother and two older brothers died,
— 20 —

INTRODUCTION

and he was forced to fend for himself. He be-
came a clerk in a Glasgow office and remained
there until very recently, when he moved to Lon-
don. Like all other young men with the itch to
write, he tried poetry before prose, and his
first verses were printed in The New Age. But
his discovery of Nietzsche, at the age of twenty-
two, exerted such a powerful influence upon him
that he soon turned to prose, and five or six years
later his first philosophical speculations were
printed, again in The New Age. They attracted
attention and were republished in book-form, in
1918, as " We Modems." At the last minute
the author succumbed to modesty and put the
nom de plume of Edward Moore upon his book.
But now, in this American edition (for which
he has made certain revisions), he returns to his
own name.

H. L. Mencken.

— 21 —

THE OLD AGE

The Old Age

The Advanced

Among the advanced one observes a strange
contradiction: the existence in one and the same
person of confidence and enthusiasm about cer-
tain aspects of life along with diffidence and
pessimism about life itself. The advanced have
made up their minds about all the problems of
existence but not about the problem of existence.
In dealing with these problems they find their
greatest happiness; they are there sure-footed,
convinced and convincing. But brought face to
face with that other problem, how helpless,
vacillating and spiritless are they! What! are
propaganda, reform, and even revolution, per-
chance, with many of them simply their escape
from their problem?

— 25 —

WE MODERNS

The Intellectual Coquettes

An intellectual coquetry is one of the worst
vices of this age. From what does it arise?
From fear of a decision? Or from love of free-
dom? It cannot be from the latter, for to ab-
stain from a choice is not freedom but irre-
sponsibility. To be free, is, on the contrary,
itself a choice, a decision involving, in its ac-
ceptance, responsibility. And it is responsibility
that the intellectual coquettes fear: rather than
admit that one burden they will bear all the
others of scepticism, pessimism and impotence.
To accept a new gospel, to live it out in all its
ramifications, is too troublesome, too dangerous.
The average man in them pleads, " Be prudent!
Where may not this resolution lead you?
Through what perils? Into what hells? " And
so they remain in their prison house of doubt,
neither Pagans nor Christians, neither Theists
nor Atheists, ignorant of the fact that they are
slaves and that a decision would set them free.

But in the end the soul has its revenge, for
their coquetry destroys not only the power but
the will to choose. To flirt with dangerous ideas
— 26 —

THE OLD AGE

in a graceful manner : that becomes their destiny.
For the intellectual coquette, like other coquettes,
dislikes above everything passion — passion with
its seriousness, sincerity and — demand for a
decision.

Modern Realism

How crude and shallow is the whole theory
of modern realism: a theory of art by the average
man for the average man! It makes art in-
telligible by simplifying or popularizing it; in
short, as Nietzsche would say, by vulgarizing it.
The average man perceives, for instance, that
there is in great drama an element of representa-
tion. Come, he says, let us make the repre-
sentation as " thorough " as possible! Let every
detail of the original be reproduced! Let us
have life as it is lived! And when he has
accomplished this, when representation has be-
come reproduction, he is very well pleased and
thinks how far he has advanced beyond the poor
Greeks. But it is hardly so! For the Greeks
did not aim at the reproduction but at the inter-
pretation of life, for which they would accept
no symbol less noble than those ideal figures
— 27 —

WE MODERNS

which move in the world of classical tragedy.
To the Greeks, indeed, the world of art was pre-
cisely jjiis world: not a paltry, sober and con-
scientious dexterity in the " catching " of the
aspects of existence (nothing so easy!), but a
symbolizing of the deepest questions and enigmas
of life — a thing infinitely more noble, profound
and subtle than realistic art. The Greeks would
have demanded of realism, Why do you exist?
What noble end is served by the reproduction of
ordinary existence? Are you not simply super-
fluous — and vilely smelling at that? And
realism could have given no reply, for the truth
is that realism is superfluous. It is without a
raison d'etre.

The average man, however, takes a second
glance at classical tragedy and reaches a second
discovery. There is something enigmatical, he
finds, behind the Greek clearness of representa-
tion, something unexplained; in short, a prob-
lem. This problem, however, is not sufficiently
clear. Let us state our problems clearly, he
cries! Let us have problems which can be recog-
nized at a glance by every one! Let us write a
play about " the marriage question," or bad-
housing, or the Labour Party! But, again, the
— 28 —

THE OLD AGE

theory of the Greeks, at least before Euripides,
was ahogether different. The " problem " in
their tragedies was precisely not a problem which
could be stated in a syllogism or solved in a
treatise: it was the eternal problem, and it was
not stated to be " solved."

Thus the Modems, in their attempt to simplify
art, to understand it or misunderstand it — what
does it matter which word is used? — have suc-
ceeded in destroying it. The realistic and the
" problem " drama alike are for the inartistic.
The first is drama without a raison d'etre, the
second is a raison d'etre without drama.

The Modern Tragic

In realistic novels and dramas a new type
of the tragic has been evolved. It may be called
tragedy without a meaning. In classical and
Shakespearean tragedy, the inevitable calamities
incident to human existence were given signifi-
cance and nobility by the poets. That inter-
pretive power of drama was, indeed, the essential
thing to the great artists, to whom representa-
tion was only a means. But the realists with
their shallow rationalizing of art have changed
— 29 —

WE MODERNS

all that. They have cut out the essential part
of drama so as to make the other part more
" complete " : in short, their tragedy is now
simply " tragedy " in the newspaper sense. And
it is obvious that this kind of " art " is much
easier to produce than tragedy in the grand
style: one has not even to read a meaning into
it. This absence of meaning, however, is itself,
in the long run, made to appear the last word
of an unfathomably ironical wisdom. And in
this light, how much modern wisdom is under-
stood! The superficiality which can see only
the surface here parades as the profundity which
has dived into every abyss and found it empty.
No! it is not tragedy but the modern tragedian
who is without a raison d'etre!

Realism as a Symptom of Poverty

In an age in which the power of creation is
weak, men will choose the easiest forms: those
in which sustained elevation is not demanded and
creation itself is eked out in various ways. The
world of our day has therefore as its charac-
teristic production the realistic novel, which in
form is more loose, in content and execution more
— 30 —

THE OLD AGE

unequal, and in imaginative power less rich and
inventive than poetic drama, or any of the higher
forms of literature. If we deduct from the
modern " literary artist," the diarist, the
sociologist, the reporter, and the collector of
documents, there is not much left. For creation
there is very little room in his works; perhaps
it is as well!

Compliments and Art

The convention of gallantry observed by the
sexes is the foundation of all refined understand-
ing between them. For in the mutual game of
compliment it is the spiritual attitude and not
the spoken word that matters. There is truth in
this attitude, however unreal the words may
seem: a thousand times more truth than in the
modem egalitarian, go-as-you-please camarad-
erie of the sexes. Here there is truth neither
in the spirit nor in the letter. To be candid,
about this new convention there is something
faintly fatuous: the people who act thus are not
subtle! Yet they are hardly to be blamed; it
is the age that is at fault. There is no time for
reflection upon men, women and manners, and
— 31 —

WE MODERNS

consequently no refinement of understanding, no
form in the true sense. We work so hard and
have so little leisure that when we meet we are
tired and wish to " stretch our legs," as
Nietzsche said. It is far from our thoughts that
a convention between men and women might be
necessary; we are not disposed to inquire why
this convention arose; it presents itself to us
as something naively false; and we have time
only to be unconventional.

The ceremonious in manners arose from the
recognition that between the sexes there must be
distance — respect as well as intimacy — un-
derstanding. The old gallantry enabled men
and women to be intimate and distant at the same
time: it was the perfection of the art of manners.
Indeed, we can hardly have sufficient respect for
this triumphant circumvention of a natural
difficulty, whereby it was made a source of actual
pleasure. But now distance and understanding
have alike disappeared. The moderns, so obtuse
have they become, see here no difficulty at all,
consequently no need for manners: brotherhood
— comradeship — laziness has superseded that.
Nothing is any longer understood; but a conven-
tion means essentially that something is under-
— 32 —

THE OLD AGE

stood. Indeed, it is already a gaucherie to ex-
plain the meaning of a good convention. But
what can one do? Against obtuseness the only
weapon is obtuseness.

In literature this decline into bad taste and
denseness is most clearly to be seen. So incapa-
ble have readers become, so resourceless writers,
that whatever is said now must be said right out;
sex must be called sex; and no one has sufficient
subtlety to suggest or to follow a suggestion.
Hence, Realism. An artist has to write exactly
what he means : the word must be word and noth-
ing more. But this is to misunderstand art.
For the words of the true artist undergo a transub-
stantiation and become flesh and blood, even
spirit. His words are deeds — to say nothing
of what he writes between his lines! Realism in
art and " comradeship " between the sexes are
two misunderstandings, or, rather, two aspects of
a misunderstanding. And that misunderstand-
ing is perhaps attributable to a lack of leisure?
And that to modern hurry? And that to the
industrial system?

33 —

WE MODERNS

A Modern Problem

It has been observed again and again that as
societies — forms of production, of government,
and so on — become more complex, the mastery
of the individual over his destiny grows weaker.
In other words, the more man subjugates " na-
ture," the more of a slave he becomes. The in-
dustrial system, for instance, which is the greatest
modem example of man's subjugation of nature,
is at the same time the greatest modem example
of man's enslavement. What are we to think,
then? Is the problem a moral one, and shall
we say that a conquest of nature which is not
preceded by a conquest of human nature is bound
to be bad? In a society which has not surpassed
the phase of slavery does every addition to man's
power over nature simply intensify the slavery?
Or is the problem intellectual? And when the
intellect concentrates upon one branch of knowl-
edge to the neglect of the other, is the outcome
bound to be the enslavement of the others? For
instance the nineteenth century devoted far more
of its brains to industry than to politics — its
politics, indeed, was merely the reflection of its
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THE OLD AGE

industry — with the resuh that industry has now
enslaved us all. Yes, it has enslaved us all —
not merely the wage-earners, not merely the
salariat! In the old days the workman, indeed,
wag a slave, but now the employer is a slave as
well.

In this age, therefore, in which man appears
as the helpless appendage of a machine too
mighty for him, it is natural that theories of De-
terminism should flourish. It is natural, also,
that the will should become weak and dis-
couraged, and, consequently, that the power of
creation should languish. And so the world of
art has withered and turned barren. The artist
needs above all things a sense of power; it is
out of the abundance of this sense that he creates.
But confronted with modem society, that vast
machine, and surrounded by its hopeless me-
chanics and slaves, he feels the sense dying within
him ; nor does the evil cease there, for along with
the sense of power, power itself dies.

Well, does not the moral become clearer and
clearer? If art and literature are to flourish
again, artists, writers, nay, the whole community
must regain the sense of power. Therefore,
economic emancipation first!
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8

Leisure and Good Things

The very greatest danger confronts a people
who renounce leisure: that people will become
shallow — just consider England! For of all
things noble it is hard to see the immediate
utility : patience and reverence are needed before
one can see in them a meaning at all. Art, litera-
ture and philosophy are not obvious goods: at
the first glance they appear even repellent: alas,
then, for them in an age of first glances! In
such an age, it is true, they will not altogether
disappear. Something worse will happen.
They will be degraded, made obvious, misunder-
stood ; in one word, popularized — the fate of
our time. Society should be organized so as to
give to its members the maximum of leisure;
thus would the dissemination of art and philos-
ophy be made at least possible. But society
should at the same time provide for a privileged
class of artists and philosophers, with absolute
leisure, who would work only when the inner
compulsion made them. The second condition is
at least as important as the first.

36

THE OLD AGE

Wanted: A History of Hurry

Is there a critic who wishes to be at once edify-
ing and entertaining? Let him write a history
of hurry in its relation to literature and art.
Has literature decayed as hurry has intensified?
Have standards of balance, repose and leisured
grace gradually shrunk since, say, the Industrial
Revolution? Has the curtailment of the realm
of literature, its reduction from the Romantic
school to the Victorian circle and from that to
the Decadent clique, been due to the everstrength-
ening encroachment of hurry? And has hurry
now become finally triumphant so that our critics
and even our artists and savants are nothing
more than journalists? For certainly they seem
to be so.

These are questions to be investigated by our
historian.

10

The Sex Novel

How did the vogue of the sex novel arise?
Perhaps from the great attention which was in
the last century given to the sciences of biology
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WE MODERNS

and physiology; and perhaps, more especially
from the popularization of these sciences. Love
was, under the spell of science, translated by the
novelists into sex. Not the psychology, but the
physiology of love was found interesting: with
the result that for the production of a modern
novel one qualification alone is now necessary:
a " knowledge of the simple facts of physiology,"
as the primer-writers say. Well, what is the
remedy for this? Not a denial of physiology:
those who have learned it cannot now erase it
from their memory and become voluntarily igno-
rant. No; let, rather, the opposite course be
taken! Let us popularize psychology as well!

11

These Advanced People

A. Free Love is all right in theory, but all
wrong in practice. B. On the contrary! I
think it is all right in practice, but all wrong in
theory.

12

Sex in Literature

In English literature, until very modern times,
sex was treated only within the limits of a very
— 38 —

THE OLD AGE

well-understood convention. From this conven-
tion the physiological was strictly excluded.
Yet, of our classical writers, even in the most
artificial periods, it cannot be said that they did
not understand sex. No matter how " unreal "
they might be in writing about Love, the physi-
ological contingencies of Love were unmistak-
ably implied in their works, but only, it is true,
implied. The modems, however, saw in this
treatment of Love nothing but a convention, a
" lie " ; and they became impatient of the arti-
ficiality, as if art could be anything but artificial!
To what was the change of attitude due? Not
to a failure in the artistic convention: that was
perfectly sound. No, it was the reader who had
failed: a generation of readers had arisen who
had not learnt the art of reading, who did not
understand reading as a cultured amateur of the
eighteenth century, for instance, understood it.
Literature was to this reader a document, not an
art. He had no eye for what is written between
the lines — for symbolism, idealization, " liter-
ature." And it was to satisfy him that the
realistic school arose: it arose, indeed, out of
himself. In the realist the modern reader has
become writer: the man who could not learn the
— 39 —

WE MODERNS

art of reading has here essayed the more difficult
art of writing — documentary art!

13

History of a Realist

Who will write a series of biographies of
modem writers, illustrating this thesis: that they
are nothing more than modem readers wielding
a hasty pen? Such a set of memoirs would
almost compensate us for having read the works
of these writers. How interesting, for instance,
it would be to know how many years — surely
it would be years? — they spent in trying to
understand literature before they dedicated
themselves to its service. How interesting,
again, to discover how many hours each day X,
the celebrated novelist, devotes to contemplation,
how many to writing for the newspapers, and
how many to his present masterpiece. What!
one hour's thought has actually preceded five
hours' dictation! This revelation is, after all,
not so startling. On second thought, these
memoirs seem superfluous; we can read every-
thing we wish to know of the moderns in their
works.

Yet, for our better amusement, will not some
— 40 —

THE OLD AGE

one write his one and only novel, giving the true
history of the novelist? A novel against novels!
But for that we need a second Cervantes, yet how
unlike the first! For on this occasion it is not
Don Quixote that must be satirized, but Sancho
Panza.

14
Novelists by Habit

All of us who read are novelists more or less
nowadays: that is to say, we collect " impres-
sions," " analyse " ourselves, make a pother
about sex, and think that people, once they are
divorced, live happily ever after. The habit of
reading novels has turned us into this! When
one of us becomes articulate, however — in the
form of a novel — he only makes explicit his
kinship with the rest; he proclaims to all the
world that he is a mediocrity.

15

The Only Course

All the figures in this novel are paltry; we
despise them, and, if we were in danger of meet-
ing them in real life, would take steps to avoid
them; yet such is the author's adroitness that we
are led on helplessly through the narrative,
— 41 —

WE MODERNS

through unspeakable sordidness of circumstance
and soul, hating ourselves and him, and feeling
nothing better than slaves. To rouse our anxiety
lest Herbert lose five pounds, or Mabel find it
impossible to get a new dress, this is art, this is
modern art! But to feel anxiety about such
things is ignoble; and to live in a sordid
atmosphere, even if it be of a book, is the part
of a slave. And yet we cannot but admire. For
in this novel what subtlety in the treatment there
must be overlying the fundamental vulgarity of
the theme! How is Art, which should make
Man free, here transformed into a potent means
for enslaving him! It is impossible to yield
oneself to the sway of a modem realist without
a loss in one's self-respect. To what is due this
conspicuous absence of nobility in modem
writers? But is the question, indeed, worth
the asking? For to the artist and to him who
would retain freedom of soul, there is only one
course with the paltry in literature — to avoid
it.

16
The Average Man

It is surely one of G. K. Chesterton's para-
doxes that he praises the average man. For he
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THE OLD AGE

is not himself an average man, but a man of
genius; he does not write of the average man, but
of grotesques; he is not read by the average man,
but by intellectuals and the nonconformist
middle-class. The true prophets of the average
man are the popular realistic novelists. For they
write of him and for him — yes, even when
they write " for themselves," when they are
" serious artists." Who, then, but them should
extol him? It is their metier.

17

The " New " Writers

The fault of the most modem writers — and
especially of the novelists — is not that they are
too modern, but that they are too traditional. It
is true, they are not traditional in the historical
manner of G. K. Chesterton, who wishes to de-
stroy one tradition — the modern tradition — in
order to get back to another — the mediaeval.
To Mr. Chesterton tradition is a matter of selec-
tion; tiie dead tradition seems to him nobler than
the living; and, deliberately, therefore, he would
return to it. The new writers, however, fol-
low a tradition also, though a much narrower
one; they, too, believe in the past, but only, alas,
— 43 —

WE MODERNS

in the immediate past; they are slaves to the
generation which preceded theirs. In short, that
which is disgusting in them is their inability to
rise high enough to see their little decade or two,
and to challenge it, if they cannot from the stand-
point of a nobler future, then, at least, from that
of the noblest past. But how weak must a
generation be which is not strong enough to
challenge and supersede Arnold Bennett, for
instance.

18

The Modern Reader

What is it that the modern reader demands
from those who write for him? To be chal-
lenged, and again to be challenged, and ever-
more to be challenged — but on no account to be
asked to accept a challenge, on no account to be
expected to take sides! A seat at the tourna-
ment is all that he asks, where he may watch
the most sincere and intrepid spirits of his time
waging their desperate battle and spilling their
life blood upon the sand. How he loves them
when, with high gesture, they fling down their
gauntlets and utter their blasphemies! His
heart then exults within him; but, why?
— 44 —

THE OLD AGE

Simply because he is a connoisseur; simply
because he collects gauntlets!

19

The Public

Of the modern writers who are in earnest,
Mr. Chesterton has had the most ironical fate:
he has been read by the people who will never
agree with him. To the average man for whom
he writes he is an intellectual made doubly in-
accessible by his orthodoxy and his paradoxy.
It is the advanced, his bete noire, who read him,
admire him, and — disagree with him.

20

Reader and Writer

The modern reader loves to be challenged.
The modern writer, if he is in earnest, however,
is bound to challenge him. This is his greatest
burden; that he must fall a victim of the ad-
vanced idlers. But one day he thinks he see a
way of escape. He has noticed that the reader
desires not only to be challenged, but to be able
to understand the challenge at a glance. And
here he sees his advantage. I shall write, he
says, to himself, in a manner beautiful, exact,
— 45 —

WE MODERNS

and yet not easily understood; so I shall throw
off the intellectual coquettes and secure my
audience of artists, for my style is beautiful;
an audience of critics, for my style is exact; an
audience of patient, resolute, conscientious in-
tellects, for my style is difficult. This, per-
haps, was the conscious practice of Nietzsche.
But he did not foresee that, for the benefit of
the intellectual coquettes, who must have hold
of new thoughts by one end or another, a host
of popularizers would be bom; he did not
reckon with the Nietzscheans!

21

Popularity-
How amazingly popular he is. Even the man
in the street reads him. Yes; but it is because
he has first read the man in the street.

22

Middle Age's Betrayals

It is not easy to tell by a glance what is the
character of a young man; his soul has not yet
etched itself clearly enough upon his body. But
one may read a middle-aged man's soul with
perfect ease; and not only his soul but his
— 46 —

THE OLD AGE

history. For when a man has passed five-and-
forty, he looks — not what he is, perhaps —
but certainly what he has been. If he has been
invariably respectable, he is now the very pic-
ture of respectability. If he has been a man
about town or a secret toper, the fact is blazoned
so clearly on his face that even a child can read
it. If he has studied, his very walk, to use a
phrase of Nietzsche's, is learned. As for the
poet, we know how terribly poetical he looks in
middle age — poor devil ! Well, to every one
of you, I say, Beware!

23

The Novelists and the Artist

Is it the modem novelists who are to be blamed
for the degraded image of the artist which lives
in the minds of the cultured populace?
Turgenieff in " On the Eve," and Henry James in
" Roderick Hudson " display the artist simply as
a picturesque waster, an oh so. charming, im-
pulsive, childlike, naive waster. But, in doing
so, they surely confused the artist with the man
of artistic temperament. Of the artistic tempera-
ment, however, the great artists had very often
little or nothing — far less, certainly, than either
— 47 —

WE MODERNS

Shubin or Roderick. The great examples of
last century, the Goethes, Ibsens, and Nietzsches,
knew that there were qualities more essential to
them than temperament; discipline, for instance,
perseverance, truth to themselves, self-control.
How is it possible, indeed, without these virtues

— virtues of the most difficult and heroic kind

— for the artist to bring his gifts to maturity, to
become great? His discipline to beauty must be
as severe as the discipline of the saint to holiness.
And, then, how has his sensuousness been mis-
construed and vulgarized ; and treated precisely,
indeed, as if it were the licentiousness of a
present-day Tom Jones! That artists can be
thought about in such a way proves only one
thing, namely, in what poor esteem they are now
held. We need a new ideal of the artist; or,
failing that, an old one, that of Plato, perhaps, or
of Leonardo, or of Nietzsche.

24

Decadence and Health

It is in the decadent periods that the most

triumphantly healthy men — one or two —

appear. The corrupt Italy of the Renaissance

gave birth to Leonardo; the Europe of Gautier,

— 48 —

THE OLD AGE

Baudelaire and Wilde produced Nietzsche. In
decadent eras both disease and health become
more self-conscious; they are cultivated, en-
hanced and refined. It has been said that the
best way to remain healthy is not to think of
health. But lack of self-consciousness speaks
here. Perhaps the Middle Ages were as diseased
as our own — only they did not know it! Is
decadence nothing more than the symptom of a
self-conscious age? And is " objectivity " the
antidote? Well, we might believe this if we
could renounce our faith that mankind will yet
become healthy — if we could become optimists
in the present-day sense!

25

Art in Modern Society

An object of beauty has in modem surround-
ings a dangerous seduction which it did not
possess in less hideous eras. In this is there to
be found a contributory explanation of Decad-
ence — the decadent being one who feels the
power of beauty intensely, and the repulsion
from his environment as intensely, and who
plunges into the enjoyment of beauty madly,
with abandonment? In a society, however,
— 49 —

WE MODERNS

which was not hideous as ours is, and in which
beauty was distributed widely over all the
aspects and forms of existence, the intoxication
of beauty would not be felt with the same ter-
rible intensity; a beautiful object would be en-
joyed simply as one among many lovely things.
In short, it would be enjoyed in the manner of
health, not in that of sickness. It is the contrast
that is dangerous; the aridity of modern life
arouses a terrible thirst, which is suddenly pre-
sented with the spectacle of a beauty unaccount-
able and awful; and this produces a disloca-
tion and convulsion of the very soul. So that
the present-day artist, if he would retain his
health — if he would remain an artist — must
curb his very love of the beautiful, and treat
beauty, when he meets it, as he always does, in
the gutter, a little cynically. Otherwise he will
lose his wits, and Art will become his Circe.
Therefore, mockery and hard laughter — alas,
that it must be so!

26

Art in Industry

In those wildernesses of dirt, ugliness and
obscenity, our industrial towns, there are
— 50 —

THE OLD AGE

usually art galleries, where the daintiest and
most beautiful things, the flowers of Greek
statuary, for instance, bloom among the grime
like a band of gods imprisoned in a slum. The
spectacle of art in such surroundings sometimes
strikes us as being at once ludicrous and
pathetic, like something delicate and lovely
sprawling in the gutter, or an angel with a dirty
face.

27
Conventions

The revolt against conventions in art, thought,
life and manners may be due to at least more
than one cause. It is usually ascribed to
" vitality " which " breaks through " forms,
because it desires to be " free." But common
sense tells us that more than two or three of our
friends abjure convention for an altogether dif-
ferent reason — to be candid, on account of a
lack of vitality resulting in laziness and the
inability to endure restraint of any kind. And,
for the others, we shall judge their " vitality "
to be justified when they build new conventions
worthy of observance, instead of running their
heads finally into illimitable space. Or does
their strength not go just so far? There is some-
— 51 —

WE MODERNS

thing suspicious about tliis vitality which can-
not create: it resembles impotence so much!
Heaven preserve the modems from their " vital-
ity"!

28

" Vitality "

When modems talk of the " vitality " of their
most lauded writer, what they mean is finally the
size of his muscles, physical energy, or, at the
most, strong emotions; not vigour of mind.
Well, let us on no account make the opposite
mistake and revile the large muscle and
energetic feelings: they are admirable things.
Let us point out, however, that vitality of emo-
tion undisciplined by vitality of thought leads
nowhere, is often disruptive and cannot build.
But to build is our highest duty and our pecu-
liar form of freedom — we who have realized
that there is no freedom without power. As
for the old freedom — it is only the slaves who
are not already tired of it.

29

Decadence

The decisive thing, determining whether an
artist shall be major or minor, is very often not
— 52 —

THE OLD AGE

artistic at all, but moral. Yes, though it shock
our modem ears, let this be proclaimed! The
more " temperament " an artist has, the more
character he requires to govern it, to make it
fruitful for him, if he would not have it get
beyond control, and wreck both him and itself.
And, consequently, the great artists show, as a
rule, less " temperament " than the minor; they
appear more self-contained and less " artis-
tic." Indeed, they smile with the hint of irony
at the merely " artistic."

It is, perhaps, when the traditions of artistic
morality and discipline have broken down,
when the " temperament " has, therefore, be-
come unfettered and lawless, that decadence in
art is born. The sincerity of the artist, his
chief virtue, is gone — the sincerity which
commands him to create only under the pressure
of an artistic necessity, which tells him, in other
words, to produce nothing which is not genuine.
Without sincerity, severity and patience, noth-
ing great in art can be created. And it is pre-
cisely in these virtues that the decadent is lack-
ing. A love of beauty is his only credential
as an artist, but, undisciplined, it degenerates
very soon into a love of mere effect. An effect
— 53 —

JFE MODERNS

of beauty at all costs, whether it be the true
beauty or not! That becomes his object. With-
out a root in any soil, he aspires to the condi-
tion of the water lily, and, in due time, becomes
a full-blown aesthete. Is it because he is inca-
pable of becoming anything else? Has he in
despair grown " artistic " simply because he is
not an artist? Is Decadence the most subtle
disguise of impotence? And are decadents
those who, if they had submitted to an artistic
discipline of sincerity, would never have writ-
ten at all? Of some of them this is true, but
of others it is not; and in that lies the tragedy
of Decadence. Wilde himself was, perhaps, a
decadent by misadventure; for on occasion he
could rise above decadence into sincerity.
"The Ballad of Reading Gaol" proves that.
He was the victim of a bad aesthetic morality, to
which, it is true, he had a predisposition. And
if this is true of him, it is true, also, of his
followers. A baleful artistic ethic still rules,
demoralizing the young artist at the moment
when he should be disciplining himself; and
turning, perhaps, some one with the potentiality
of greatness into a minor artist. By neglect-
ing the harder virtues, the decadents have made
— 54 —

THE OLD AGE

minor art inevitable and great art almost im-
possible.

The old tradition of artistic discipline must
be regained, then, or a new and even more severe
tradition inaugurated. A text-book of moral-
ity for artists is now overdue. When it has
been written, and the new discipline has been
hailed and submitted to by the artists, who can
say if greatness may not again be possible?

30

Decadence Again

How is the dissolution of the tradition of
artistic discipline to be explained? To what
cause is it to be traced? Perhaps to the more
general dissolution of tradition which has taken
place in modem times. When theological dog-
mas and moral values are thrown into the melt-
ing-pot, and the discipline of centuries is dis-
solved into anarchy, it is natural that artistic
traditions should perish along with them. De-
cadence followjs free-thought: it appears at the
time when the old values lie deliquescent and the
new values have not yet risen, the dry land has
not yet appeared. But this does not happen
always: the old traditions of morality, theology,
— 55 —

WE MODERNS

politics and industry are overthrown, the begin-
nings of a new tradition appear tentatively,
everything fixed has vanished, the wildest hopes
and the most chilling despair are the common
possession of one and the same generation —
but, throughout, the artistic tradition is held
securely and confidently, it remains the one thing
fixed in a world of dissolution. Then an art
arises greater even than that of the eras of tradi-
tion. The pathos of the dying and the inex-
pressible hope of die newly born find expression
side by side; all chains are broken, and the world
appears suddenly to be immeasurable. Is this
what happened at the Renaissance?

31

Wilde

The refined degeneracy of Oscar Wilde might
be explained on the assumption that he was at
once over — and under — civilized : he had ac-
quired all the exquisite and superfluous without
the necessary virtues. These " exquisite " vir-
tues are unfortunately dangerous to all but those
who have become masters of the essential ones;
they are qualities of the body more than of the
mind; they are developments and embellish-
— 56 —

THE OLD AGE

ments of the shell of man. In acquiring them,
Wilde ministered to his body merely, and, as a
consequence, it became more and more powerful
and subtle — far more powerful and subtle than
his mind. Eventually this body — senses, pas-
sions and appetite — actually became the intel-
lectual principle in him, of which his mind was
merely a drugged and stupefied slave!

32

Wilde and the Sensualists

The so-called Paganism of our time, the move-
ment towards sensualism of the followers of
Wilde, is not an attempt, however absurd, to
supersede Christianity; nor is it even in essence
anti-Christian. At the most it is a reaction —
not a step beyond current religion into a new
world of the spirit, but a changing from one
foot to the other, a reliance on the senses for a
little, so that the over-laboured soul may rest.
And there is still much of Christianity in this
modern Paganism. Its devotees are too deeply
corrupted to be capable either of pure sensuous-
ness or of pure spirituality. They speak of
Christ like voluptuaries, and of Eros like peni-
tents. But it is impossible now to become a
— 57 —

WE MODERNS

Pagan: one must remember Ibsen's Julian and
take warning. Two thousand years of " bad
conscience," of Christian self-probing, with its
deepening of the soul, cannot be disavowed,
forgotten, unlived. For Paganism a simpler
spirit, mind and sensuousness are required than
we can reproduce. We cannot feel, we cannot
think, above all, we cannot feel without thinking
of our feelings, as the Pagans did. Our mod-
ern desire to take out our soul and look at it
separates us from the naive classic sensuousness.
What, then, does modern sensualism mean?
What satisfaction does it bring to those, by no
means few in number, its " followers "? A
respite, an escapade, a holiday from Christian-
ity, from the inevitable. For Christianity is as-
sumed by them to be the inevitable, and it fills
them with the loathing which is evoked by the
enforced contemplation of things tyrannical and
permanent. To escape from it they plunge
madly into sensuality as into a sea of redemp-
tion. But the disgust which drives them there
will eventually drive them forth again — into
asceticism and the denial of the senses. Christ-
ianity will then appear stronger than ever, hav-
ing been purged of its " uncleanness." Yes, the
— 58 —

THE OLD AGE

sensualists of our time are the best unconscious
friends of Christianity, its " saviours," who have
taken its sins upon their shoulders.

There still remain the few who do not assume
Christianity to be inevitable, who desire, no mat-
ter how hopeless the fight may seem, to sur-
mount it, and who see that men have played too
long the game of reaction. " To cure the senses
by the soul and the soul by the senses " seems
to them a creed for invalids. And, therefore,
that against which, above all, they guard, is a
mere relapse into sensualism. Not by fleeing
from Christianity do they hope to reach their
goal; but by understanding it, perhaps by " see-
ing through " it, certainly by benefiting in so
far as they can by it, and, finally, emancipating
themselves from it. They know that the soil no
longer exists out of which grew the flower of
Paganism, and that they must pass through
Christianity if they would reach a new sensuality
and a new spirituality. But their motto is.
Spirituality first, and, after that, only as much
sensuality as our spirituality can govern! They
hold that as men become more spiritual they may
safely become more sensual; but that, to the man
without spirit, sensuality and asceticism are alike
— 59 —

WE MODERNS

an indulgence and a curse. That the spirit
should rule — such is their desire ; but it must
rule as a constitutional governor, not as an arbi-
trary tyrant. For the senses, too, as Heine said,
have their rights.

33

Arnold Going Down the Hill

One section of the realist school — that repre-
sented by Bennett and John Galsworthy — may
be described as a reaction from asceticism.
Men had become tired of experiencing Life only
in its selected and costly " sensations," and
sought an escape from " sensations," sought the
ordinary. But another section of the school —
George Moore, for example — was merely a bad
translation of aestheticism. Equally tired of
the exquisite, already having sampled all that
luxury in " sensation " could provide, the artists
now sought new " sensations " — and nothing else
— in the squalid. It was the role of the
aesthetes to go downhill gracefully, but when
they turned realists they ceased even to do that.
They went downhill sans art. Yet, in doing so,
did they not rob aestheticism of its seductiveness?
And should we not, therefore, feel grateful to
— 60 —

THE OLD AGE

them? Alas, no; for to the taste of this age,
grace and art have little fascination: it is the
heavy, unlovely and sordid that seduces. To
disfigure aestheticism was to popularize it. And
now the very man in the street is — artistically
speaking — corrupted : a calamity second in im-
portance only to the corruption of the artists
and thinkers.

34

Pater and the /Esthetes

How much of Walter Pater's exclusiveness
and reclusiveness was a revulsion from the
ugliness of his time — an ugliness which he
was not strong enough to contemplate, far
less to fight — it is hard to say. Perhaps his
phase of the Decadence may be defined as
largely a reaction against industrialism, just
as that of Wilde may be defined as largely a
reaction against Christianity: but, in the
former case as in the latter, that against which
the reaction was made was assumed to be
permanent. Indeed, by escaping from indus-
trialism instead of fighting it, Pater and his
followers made its persistence only a little more
secure. It is true, there are excuses enough to
— 61 —

WE MODERNS

palliate their weakness: the delicateness of their
own nerves and senses, making them peculiarly
liable to suffering, the ugliness and apparent
invulnerability of industrialism, the beauty and
repose of the world of art wherein they might
take refuge and be happy. Art as forgetful-
ness, art as Lethe, the seduction of that cry was
strong! But to yield to it was none the less
unforgivable: it was an act traitorous not only
to society but to art itself. For what was the
confession underlying it? That the society of
today and of tomorrow is, and must be, barren;
that no great art can hereafter be produced;
that there is nothing left but to enjoy what has
been accomplished! Against that presumption,
not the Philistines but the great artists will cry
as the last word of Nihilism.

F^a'ter's creed marks, therefore, a degrada-
tion of the conception of art. Art as something
exclusive, fragile and a little odd, the occupa-
tion of a few aesthetic eccentrics — this is the
most pitiable caricature! To make themselves
understood by one another, this little clique in-
vented a jargon of their own; in this jargon
Pater's books are written, and not only his, but
those of his followers to this day. It is a style
— 62 —

THE OLD AGE

lacking, above all, in good taste; it very easily
drops into absurdity; indeed, it is always on
the verge of absurdity. It has no masculinity,
no hardness; and it is meant to be read by peo-
ple a little insincerely " aesthetic," who are con-
scious that they are open to ridicule, and who
are accordingly indulgent to the ridiculous; the
Fabians of art. To admire Pater's style, it is
necessary first to put oneself into the proper at-
titude.

35

Creator and TEsthete

The true creators and the mere aesthetes agree
in this, that they are not realists. Neither of
them copies existence in its external details:
wherein do they differ? In that the creators
write of certain realities behind life, and the
aesthetes — of the words standing for these reali-
ties.

36

Hypocrisy of Words

The aesthetes, and Pater and Wilde in par-
ticular, made a cult of the use of decorative
words. They demanded, not that a word should
— 63 —

WE MODERNS

be true, nor even that it should be true and
pretty at the same time, but simply that it
should be pretty. It cannot be denied that
writers here and there before them had been
guilty of using a fine word where a common one
was most honest; but this had been generally
regarded as a forgiveable, " artistic " weakness.
Wilde and his followers, however, chose
" exquisite " words systematically, in conform-
ity to an artistic dogma, and held that literature
consisted in doing nothing else. And that was
dangerous; for truth was thereby banished from
the realm of diction and a hypocrisy of words
arose. In short, language no longer grasped
at realities, and literature ceased to express any
thing at all, except a writer's taste in words.

37

The Average Man

In this welter of dissolving values, the intel-
lectuals of our time find themselves struggling,
and liable at any moment to be engulfed. A few
of them, however, have snatched at something
which, in the prevailing deliquescence, appears
to be solid — the average man. Encamped
upon him, they have won back sanity and hap-
— 64 —

THE OLD AGE

piness. But their act is nevertheless simply
a reaction; here the real problem has not yet
been faced! What is it that makes the average
man more sane and happy than the modern
man? The possession of dogmas, says G. K.
Chesterton; let us therefore have dogmas!
But, alas, for them he goes back and not for-
ward. And not only back, but back to the very
dogmas against which modern thought, and
Decadence with it, are a reaction, nay, the
inevitable reaction. What! has Mr. Chester-
ton, then, postponed the solution of the prob-
lem? And on the heels of his remedy does
there tread the old disease over again? Per-
haps it is so. The acceptance of the old dogmas
will be followed by a new reaction from them,
a new disintegration of values therefore, and
a new Decadence. The hands of the clock can
be put back, it is true; but they will eventually
reach the time when the hour shall strike again
for the solution of the modern problem.

And that is the criticism which modern men
must pass upon Mr. Chesterton; that he inter-
posed in the course of their malady to bring
relief with a remedy which was not a remedy.
The modem problem should have been worked
— 65 —

WE MODERNS

out to a new solution, to its own solution. In-
stead of going back to the old dogmas, we should
have strained on towards the new. And if, in
this generation, the new dogmas are still out of
sight, if we have meantime to live our lives with-
out peace or stability, does it matter so very-
much? To do so is, perhaps, our allotted task.
And as sacrifices to the future we justify our
very fruitlessness, our very modernity!

66 —

ORIGINAL SIN

II

Original Sin

38

Original Sin

Original Sin and the Future are essentially ir-
reconcilable conceptions. The believer in the
future looks upon humanity as plastic: the good
and the bad in man are not fixed quantities, al-
ways, in every age, past and future, to be found
in the same proportions: an " elevation of the
type man " is, therefore, possible. But the be-
liever in Original Sin regards mankind as that
in which — the less said about the good, the bet-
ter — there is, at any rate, a fixed substratum of
the bad. And that can never be lessened, never
weakened, never conquered. Therefore, man
has to fight constantly to escape the menace of
an ever-present defeat. A battle in which vic-
tory is impossible; a contest in which man has
to climb continually in order not to fall lower;
— 69 —

WE MODERNS

existence as the tread mill: that is what is meant
by Original Sin.

And as such it is the great enemy of the
Future, the believers in which hold that there is
not this metaphysical drag. But it is more.
At all things aspiring it sets the tongue in the
cheek, gladly provides a caricature for them,
and becomes their Sancho Panza. To the great
man it says, through the mouths of its chosen
apostles, the average men, " What matter how
high you climb! This load which you carry
even as we will bring you back to us at last.
And the higher you climb the greater will be
your fall. Humanity cannot rise above its own
level." And therefore, humility, equality,
radicalism, comradeship in sin — the ideas of
Christianity!

39

Again

Distrust of the future springs from the same
root as distrust of great men. It derives from
the belief in the average man, which derives
from the belief in Original Sin. The egali-
tarian sentiment strives always to become un-
conditional. It claims not only that all men
— 70 —

ORIGINAL SIN

are equal, but that the men who live now are
no more than the equals of those who lived one,
or five, thousand years ago, and no less than the
equals of those who will live in another one,
or five, thousand years. And it desires that this
should be so: its jealousy embraces not only
the living, but the dead and the unborn.

40

Again

Society is a conspiracy, said Emerson, against
the great man. And to blast him utterly in the
centre of his being, it invented Original Sin. Is
Original Sin, then, a theological dogma or a
political device?

41

Equality-
Is equality, in truth, a generous dogma?
Does it express, as every one assumes, the
solidarity of men in their higher attributes? It
is time to question this, and to ask if inequality
be not the more noble and generous belief.
For, surely, it is in their nobler qualities that
men are most unequal. It was not in his genius
that Shakespeare was only the equal, for
— 71 —

WE MODERNS

instance, of his commentators; it was in the
groundwork of his nature, in those feelings and
desires without which he would not have been
a man at all, in the things which made him
human, but which did not make him Shakes-
peare: in a word, in that which is for us of no
significance. Equality in the common part of
man's nature, equality in sin, equality before
God — it is the same thing — that is the only
equality which can be admitted. And if its ad-
mission is insisted upon by apologists for Chris-
tianity, that is because to the common part
of man's nature they give so much importance,
because they are believers in Original Sin. In
their equality there is accordingly more malice
than generosity. The belief that no one is other
than themselves, the will that no one shall be
other than themselves — there is nothing gener-
ous in that belief and that will. For man, ac-
cording to them, is guilty from the womb. And
what, then, is equality but the infinitely consol-
ing consciousness of tainted creatures that every
one on this earth is tainted?

The believer in Original Sin will, of course,
deny this, and say that in his philosophy men are
equals also in their higher role as " sons of God."
— 72 —

ORIGINAL SIN

But is this so? Is salvation, like sin, com-
mon to all men? Is it not, on the contrary,
something conferred as the reward of a belief
and a choice — a belief and a choice which an
Atheist, for instance, simply cannot embrace?
So that here, touching the highest part of men,
their soul, there is introduced, by Christianity
itself, a distinction, an inequality — the dis-
tinction, the inequality between the " saved "
and the " lost." Men are equal inasmuch as
they are all damned, but they are not equal inas-
much as they are not all redeemed.

Gazing at man, however, no longer through the
eyes of the serpent, shall we not be bound to
find, if we look high enough, distinction, superi-
ority, inferiority, valuation? The dogma of
equality is itself a device to evade valuation.
For valuation is difficult, and demands gener-
osity for its exercise. To recognize that one
is greater than you, and cheerfully to acknowl-
edge it; to see that another is less than you, and
to treat the inferiority as a trifling thing, that is
difficult, that requires generosity. But one who
believes in inequality will always be looking
for greatness in others; his eye, habituated to
the contemplation of lofty things, will become
— 73 —

WE MODERNS

subtle in the detection of concealed nobility;
while to the ignoble he will give only a glance —
and is it not good, where one may not help, to
pass on the other side? The egalitarians will
cry that it is ungenerous to believe that some
men are vile; but it is a strange generosity
which would persuade us with them that all
men are vile. Let us be frank. To those who
believe in the future, inequality is a holy thing;
their pledge that greatness shall not disappear
from the earth; the rainbow assuring them that
Man shall not go down beneath the vast tide
of mankind. All great men are to them at once
forerunners and sacrifices; the imperfect forms
which the Future has shattered in trying to
incarnate itself; the sublime ruins of future
greatness.

42

// Men Were Equal

If men had been equal at the beginning, they
would never have risen above the savage. For
in absolute equality even the concept of great-
ness could not have come into being. Inequal-
ity is the source of all advancement.

— 74^

ORIGINAL SIN

43

The Fall of Man

In very early times men must have had a
deep sense of the tragicality of existence: life
was then so full of pain; death, as a rule, so
sudden and unforeseen, and the world generally
so beset with terrors. The few who were for-
tunate enough to escape violent death had yet
to toil incessantly to retain a footing on this un-
kind star. Life would, accordingly, appear to
them in tlie most sombre tones and colours.
And it was to explain this human misfortune,
and not sin at all, that the whole fable of Adam
and Eve and the Fall was invented. The doc-
trine of Original Sin was simply an interpreta-
tion which was afterwards read into the story,
an interpretation, perhaps, as arbitrary as the
orthodox interpretation of the Song of Songs.

How would the fable arise? Well, a primi-
tive poet one day in a fit of melancholy made
the whole thing up. Out of his misery his
desires created for him an imaginary state, its
opposite, the Garden of Eden. But this state
being created, the problem arose, How did Man
fall from it? And the Tree was brought in.
— 75 —

WE MODERNS

But to the naive, untheological poet, this tree
had nothing to do with metaphysics or with sin,
the child of metaphysics. It was simply a
magical tree, and if Man ate of the fruit of it,
something terrible would happen to him. The
Fall of Man was a mystery to the poet, which he
did not rationalize or theologize. Well, Man
succumbed to curiosity, and pain and misfor-
tune befell the human race. But we must not
assume in the modern manner that with the eat-
ing of the fruit early man associated any idea
of guilt. Rather the contrary; he regarded the
act simply as unfortunate, just as at the present
day we regard as unfortunate the foolish prin-
cess in some fairy tale. So the Fall was not
to him a crime, branding all mankind with a
metaphysical stigma.

That conception came much later, when the
conscience had become deeper, more subtle and
more neurotic; w^hen individualism had been
introduced into morality. And at that time, too,
the ideal of the Redeemer became vitiated.
Early man, if he did envisage a Redeemer, en-
visaged him as one who would set him back in
the Garden of Eden again, in the literal, terres-
trial Garden of Eden, be it understood: the-
— 76 —

ORIGINAL SIN

ology had not yet been etherealized. And this
Redeemer would redeem all men: the distinc-
tion of the individual came afterwards. It was
not until later, too, that this ideal was " in-
terpreted," and, as a concession to the con-
science, salvation was made a conditional thing:
the reward of those who were sucessful in a
competition in credulity, in which the first prize
went to the most simple, most stupid. The
" guilt " now implicated in the Fall was not
purged away from all men by the Redeemer, but
only from such as would " accept " it. And,
lastly, with the passing of Jesus, the redemption
was still further de-actualized. It was found
that acceptance of the Redeemer did not rein-
state Man in an earthly Garden: paradise was,
therefore, drawn on the invisible wires of
theology into the inaccessible heavens. Salva-
tion lay at ihe other side of the grave, and there
it was safe from assault.

Nevertheless, what our primitive poet meant
by the Fall and the Redemption was probably
something entirely different. The Fall to him
was the fall into misfortune, not into sin: the
Redemption to him was the redemption from
misfortune, not from sin. And his Redeemer
— 77 —

WE MODERNS

would be, therefore — whom? Perhaps it is
impossible for us to imagine the nature of such
a being.

This is not an interpretation, but an attempted
explanation of the story of the Fall.

44

Interpretations

How inexhaustible is myth! In the story
of the Fall is a meaning for every age and
every creed. The interpretation called Original
Sin is only one of a thousand, and not the
greatest of them. Let us dip our bucket into
the well.

The tree of the knowledge of good and evil —
that was the tree of morality! And morality
was then the original sin? And through it
Man lost his innocence? The antithesis of
morality and innocence is as old as the world.
And if we are to capture innocence again, if
the world is to become aesthetically acceptable
to us, we must dispense more and more with
morality and limit its domain. This, one des-
perate glance into the depths of the myth tells
us. Instinct is upheld in it against isolated rea-
son and exterior law. Detached, " abstract "
— 78 —

ORIGINAL SIN

Reason brought sin into the world, but Instinct,
which is fundamentally Love, Creation, Will to
Power, is forever innocent, beyond good and evil.
It was when Reason, no longer the sagacity of
Instinct, no longer the eyes of Love, became its
opponent and oppressor, that morality arose and
Man fell.

Or to take another guess, granted we read
Original Sin in the Fall, must we not read there,
also, the way to get rid of it? If by Original
Sin Man fell, then by renouncing it let him arise
again. But how renounce it? What! Can-
not Man renounce a metaphor?

Yet how powerful is metaphor! Man is
ruled by metaphor. The gods were nothing but
that, some sublime, some terrible, some lovely,
all metaphors, Jehovah, Moloch, Apollo, Eros.
Life is now stained through and through with
metaphor. And there are further transfigura-
tions still possible! Yet we would not destroy
the beauty already starring Life's skies, the
lovely hues lent by Aphrodite, and Artemis, and
Dionysos, or the sublime colours of Jehovah and
Thor. But the heavy disfiguring blot tarnish-
ing all. Love, Innocence, Ecstasy, Wrath, that
we would rather altogether extirpate and annul.
— 79 —

WE MODERNS

Original Sin we would cut off as a disfigure-
ment and disease of Life.

Or, again, may not the myth be an attempt
to glorify Man and to clothe him with a sad
splendour. And not Original Sin, but Original
Innocence is the true reading of the fable? Its
raison d'etre is the Garden of Eden, not the
Fall? To glorify Humanity at its source it
set there a Superman. The fall from innocence
— that was the fall from the Superman into
Man. And how, then, is Man to be redeemed?
By the return of the Superman! Let that be
our reading of the myth!

45

The Use of Myth

In the early world myth was used to dignify
Man by idealizing his origin. Henceforward
it must be used to dignify him by idealizing his
goal. Thca is the task of the poets and artists.

46

Before the Fall

Innocence is the morality of the instincts.
Original Sin — that was war upon the instincts,
morality become abstract, separate, self-centred,
— 80 —

ORIGINAL SIN

accusing and tyrannical. This self-conscious-
ness of morality, this disruption in the nature of
Man, was the Fall.

47

Beyond Original Sin

How far is Man still from his goal? How
sexual, foul in word and thought, naively
hedonistic! How little of spirit is in him!
How clumsily his mind struggles in the dark-
ness! How far he is still from his goal! —
This is a cry which the believer in Original Sin
cannot understand, because he accepts all this
imperfection as inevitable, as the baleful heri-
tage of Man, from which he cannot escape.

The feeling of pure joy in life, the feeling
that Life is a sacrament — that also is forever
denied to the believer in Original Sin. For
Life is not a sacrament to him, but a sin of
which joy itself is only an aggravation.

48

The Eternal Bluestocking

The bluestocking is as old as mankind. Her
original was Eve, the first dabbler in moral
philosophy.

— 81 —

WE MODERNS

49

The Sin of Intellectualism

The first sin, the original sin was that of the
intellectuals. The knowledge of Good and Evil
was not an instantaneous "illumination"; it
was the result of long experiment and analysis:
the apple took perhaps hundreds of years to
eat! Before that, in the happy day of in-
nocence, Good and Evil were not, for instinct
and morality were one and not twain. As time
passed, however, the physically lazy, who had
been from the beginning, became weaker and
wiser. Enforced contemplation, the contempla-
tion of those who were not strong enough to
hunt or to labour, made them more subtle than
their simple brethren; they formed themselves
into a priesthood, and created a theology. In
these priests instinct was not strong: they were
invalids with powerful reason. But they had
the lust for power; they wished to conquer by
means of their reason; therefore, they said to
themselves, belittle instinct, tyrannize over in-
stinct, discover an absolute " good " and an ab-
solute " evil," become moral. Morality, which
had in the days of innocence been unconscious,
— 82 —

ORIGINAL SIN

the harmony of the instincts, was now given a
separate existence. The cry was morality
against the instincts. Thus triumphed the
priests, the intellectuals, by means of their rea-
son. Original Sin was their sin — the result of
the analysis by which they had separated moral-
ity and the instincts. If we are to speak of
Original Sin at all, let it be in this manner.

50

Once More

The belief in Original Sin — that was itself
Man's original sin.

51

Apropos Gautier

He had just read " Mile, de Maupin," " What
seduction there is still for Man in the senses! "
he exclaimed. " How much more of an animal
than a spirit he must be to be charmed and en-
slaved by this book ! " Yet, what ground had he
to conclude that because the sensual intoxicates
Man, therefore Man is more sensual than
spiritual? For we are most fatally attracted by
what is most alien to us.

— 83 —

WE MODERNS

52

Psychology of the Humble

There is something very naive in those who
speak of humility as a certain good and of
pride as a proven evil. In the first place these
are not opposites at all; there are a hundred
kinds of both, and humility is sometimes simply
a refined form of pride. Humility may be pru-
dence, or good taste, or timidity, or a conceal-
ment, or a sermon, or a snub. How much of it,
for instance, is simple prudence? Is not this,
indeed, its chief utility, that it saves men from
the dangers which accompany pride? On the
day on which some one discovered that " Pride
goeth before a fall," humility became no mean
virtue. For if one become the servant and pro-
claim himself the least of all, how can he still
fall? Yet if he does it is a fall into greater
humility, and his virtue only shows the brighter.
This is the sagacity of the humble, that they
turn even ignominy to their glorification.

Humility is most commonly used with a dif-
ferent meaning, however. There are people who
wish to be anonymous and uniform, and people
who desire to be personal and distinct. Or,
— 84 —

ORIGINAL SIN

more exactly, it is their instincts that seek these
ends. The first are humble in the fundamental
sense that they are instinctively so; the latter
are proud in the same sense. Humility, then,
is the desire to be as others are and to escape
notice; and this desire can only be realized in
conformity. It is true, people become con-
ceited after a while about their very conformity,
and would be wounded in their vanity if they
failed to comply with fashion; but vanity and
humility are not incompatible.

Pride, however, is something much more
subtle. The naive, unconditional contemners
of pride, who plead with men to cast it out, have
certainly no idea what would happen if they
were obeyed. For pride is the condition of all
fruitful action. This thought must be con-
sciously or subconsciously present in the doer.
What I do is of value! I am capable of doing
a thing which is worth doing! The Christian,
it is true, still acts, though he is convinced that
all action is sinful and of little worth. But it
is only his mind that is convinced: his instincts
are by no means persuaded of the truth of this!
For though in the conscious there may be self-
doubt, in the unconscious there must be pride,
— 85 —

WE MODERISS

or actions would not be performed at all.
Moreover, in all those qualities which are per-
sonal and not common — in personality —
pride is an essential ingredient. The pronoun
" I " is itself an affirmation of pride. The feel-
ing, This is mjself, this quality is my quality,
by possessing it I am different from you, these
things constitute my personality and are me:
what a na'ive assumption of the valuableness of
these qualities do we have there, how much pride
is there in that unconscious confession! And
without this instinctive pride, these qualities,
personality could never have been possible. In
the heart of all distinct, valuable and heroic
things, pride lies coiled. Yes, even in the
heart of humility, of the most refined, spiritual
humility. For such humility is not a conform-
ity; it separates and individualizes its possessor
as effectually as pride could; it takes its own
path and not that of the crowd; and so its source
must be in an inward sense of worth, of indepen-
dence: it is a form of pride. But pride is so
closely woven into life that to wound it is to
wound life; to abolish it, if that were possible,
would be to abolish life. Well do its subtler
— 86 —

ORIGINAL SIN

defamers know that! And when they shoot
their arrows at pride, it is Life they hope to hit.

53

Les Humbles

Humility is the chief virtue, said a humble
man. Then are you the vainest man, said his
friend, for you are renowned for your humility.
Good taste demands from writers who praise
humility a little aggressiveness and dogmatism,
lest they be taken for humble, and, therefore,
proud. On the other hand, if humility is the
chief virtue, it is immoral not to practise it.
And, therefore, one should praise humility, and
practise it? Or praise it and not practise it?
Or not praise it and practise it? There is con-
tradiction in every course. That is the worst
of believing in paradoxical virtues!

54

Against the Ostentatiously Humble

He who is truly humble conceals even his
humility.

— 87 —

E MODERNS

55

The Pessimists

In pessimistic valuations of Life, the alterna-
tive contemplated is generally not between Life
and Death, but between different types of Life.
The real goal of Schopenhauerism is not the
extinction of life, for death is a perfectly normal
aspect of existence, and Life would not be
denied even if death became universal. In
order to deny Life and to triumph over it, the
pessimist must continue at least to exist, in a
sort of death in life: he must be dead, but he
must also know it. That is the goal of
Schopenhauerism; perhaps not so difficult, per-
haps frequently attained! "They have not
enough life even to die," said Nietzsche.

56

Sickness and Health

Some men have such unconquerable faith in
Life that they defy their very maladies, creat-
ing out of them forms of ecstasy: that is their
way of triumphing over them. Perhaps some
poetry, certainly not a little religion has sprung
from this. In religions defaming the senses
— 88 —

ORIGINAL SIN

and enjoining asceticism, or, in other words, a
lowering of vitality, the chronic sufferers affirm
Life in their own way; for sickness is their life:
their praise of sickness is their praise of Life.
And if they sometimes morbidly invite death,
that is because death is nothing but another form
of experience, of Life. To the sick, if they are
to retain self-respect and pride, these doctrines
are perhaps the best possible; it is only to the
healthy that they are noxious. For the healthy
who are converted by them, become sick through
them, yet not so sick as to find comfort in them.
The aspiration after an ascetic life contends in
these men with their old health, their desire to
live fully, and causes untold perplexities and
conflicts; leaving them at last with nothing but
a despairing desire for release. Thus, a
religion of consolation becomes for the strong
a Will to Death — the very opposite of that
which it was to those who created it.

57

The Pride of the Sterile

Ecclesiastical, ceremonious humility is the
pride of those who cannot create or initiate,
either because they are sterile, or because the
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obstacles in their way are too great. Their
pride is centred, not on what they can do, but on
what they can endure. The anchorite goes into
the wilderness, perhaps rather to get his back-
ground than to escape attention, and there im-
poses upon himself the most difficult and loath-
some tasks, enduring not only outward penances,
fasting and goading of the flesh, but such inward
convulsions, portents and horrors, as the soul
of man has by no other means experienced.
Here, in endurance, is his power, and here,
therefore, is his pride : the poor Atlas, who does
not remove, but supports mountains, and these
of his own making!

Men who have the power to create but are
at the same time extremely timid belong to this
class. Rather than venture outside themselves
they will do violence to their own nature. The
forces which in creation would have been
liberated are pent within them and cause untold
restlessness, uneasiness and pain. Religions
which stigmatize " self-expression," separating
the individual into an " outward " and an " in-
ward " and raising a barrier between the two,
encourage the growth of this type of man.
These religions themselves have their roots in a
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ORIGINAL SIN

timidity, a fear of pain. For self-expression is
by no means painless; it is, on the contrary, a
great cause of suffering. Essentially its out-
come is strife, the clash of egos: Tragedy is the
great recognition in Art of this truth. Christi-
anity saw the suffering which conflict brought
with it, said it was altogether evil, and sought
to abolish it. But a law of Life cannot be
abolished: strife, driven from the world of out-
ward event, retreated into the very core of man,
and there became baleful, indeed, disintegrating,
and subversive. The early Christians did not
see that men would suffer more from that in-
ward psychic conflict than from the other. It
was the Greeks who elevated conflict to an
honourable position in their outward actions;
with them, as Nietzsche said, there was no dis-
tinction between the " outward " and " in-
ward " ; they lived completely and died once.
But the Christians, to use the words of St. Paul,
" died daily." How true was that of those
proudly humble anchorites! What a light it
throws upon their sternly endured convulsions
of the soul! In the end. Death itself came no
doubt to many of them as a relief from this
terribly protracted " dying." Perhaps one
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thing, however, made their lives bearable and
even enjoyable — the power of the soul to
plumb its own sufferings and capacity for en-
durance. Psychology arose first among the ec-
clesiastically humble men.

Well, let us count up our gains and losses.
Spiritual humility, wherever it has spread, has
certainly weakened the expression of Life: for
it has weakened man by introducing within him
a disrupting conflict. But it has also made
Life subtler and deeper; it has enlarged the in-
ward world of man, even if it has straitened the
world outside. So that when we return — as
we must — to the Pagan ideal of " expression,"
our works shall be richer than those of the
Pagans, for man has now more to express.

58

When Pride is Necessary

Perhaps in all great undertakings into which
uncertainty enters pride is necessary. In the
Elizabethan age, our most productive and ad-
venturous age, pride was at its zenith. Was that
pride the necessary condition of that productive-
ness? Would the poets, the thinkers and the dis-
coverers have attempted what they did attempt,
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ORIGINAL SIN

had they been humble men? What is needed
is more enquiry: a new psychology, and, above
all, a new history of pride.

59

Humility and the Artists

There is one man, at any rate, who has always
owed more to pride than to humility — the
artist. Whether it be in himself, where it is
almost the condition of productiveness, or in
others, where it is the cause of all actions and
movements aesthetically agreeable. Pride is his
great benefactor. All artists are proud, but not
all have the good conscience of their pride. In
their thoughts they permit themselves to be per-
suaded too much by the theologians; they have
not enough " free spirit " to say, " Pride is my
atmosphere, in which I create. I do not choose
to refuse my atmosphere."

But if pride were banished even from the
remainder of Life, how poor would the artists
be left! For every gesture that is beautiful, all
free, spirited, swift movement and all noble
repose have in them pride. Humility uglifies,
except, indeed, the humility which is a form of
pride; that has a sublimity of its own. Even
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the Christian Church — the Church of the
humble — had to make its ceremonies magnif-
icent to make itself aesthetically presentable;
without its magnificence it would have been an
impossible institution. Humility, to be sup-
portable, must have in it an admixture of pride.
That gives it standing. It was His subtle pride
that communicated to the humility of Jesus its
gracious " charm."

Poetic tragedy and pride are profoundly as-
sociated. No event is tragic which has not
arisen out of pride, and has not been borne
proudly: the Greeks knew that. But, as well,
is not pride at times laughable and absurd?
Well, what does that prove, except that comedy
as well as tragedy has been occasioned by it?
Humility is not even laughable!

60

Love and Pride

Pride is so indissolubly bound up with every-
thing great — Joy, Beauty, Courage, Creation —
that surely it must have had some celestial origin.
Who created it? Was it Love, who wished to
shape a weapon for itself, the better to fashion
things? Pride has so much to do with creation
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ORIGINAL SIN

that sometimes it imagines it is a creator. But
that it is not. Only Love can create. Pride
was fashioned out of a rib taken from the side
of Love.

61

Pride and the Fall

It was not humilty that was the parent of the
fable of the Fall. Or is it humility to boast of
one's high ancestry, and if the ancestry does not
exist, to invent it? The naive poet who created
that old allegory did not foresee the number of
interpretations which would be read into it. He
did not foresee that it would be used to humili-
ate Man instead of to exalt him; he did not at
all foresee Original Sin. As less than justice,
then, has been meted to him, let us now accord
him more than justice. Let us say that he was
a divine philosopher who perceived that in un-
conditional morality lay the grand misfortune
of mankind. Man is innocent; thus, he said, it
is an absolute ethic that defiles him — the knowl-
edge of Good and Evil. Sweep that away, and
he is innocent and back in the Garden of Eden
again. Let us say this of the first poet, for cer-
tainly he did not mean it! Perhaps he knew
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nothing at all about morality! All that he
wished for was to provide a dignified family
tree for his generation.

62

The Good Conscience

What a revolution for mankind it would be
to get back " the good conscience "? Life made
innocent, washed free from how much filth of
remorse, guilt, contempt, " sin " — that vision
arouses a longing more intense than that of the
religious for any heaven. And it seems at least
equally possible of realization! Bad con-
science arises when religion and the instincts
are in opposition; the more comprehensive and
deep this conflict, the more guilty the conscience.
But there have been religions not antagonistic
to the instincts, which, instead of condemning
them, have thought so well of them as to become
their rule, their discipline. The religion of the
Greeks was an example of this; and in Greece,
accordingly, there was no " bad conscience '* in
our sense. Well, how is it possible, if it is
possible, to regain " the good conscience "?
Not by any miracle! Not by an instantaneous
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ORIGINAL SIN

" change of heart," for even the heart changes
slowly. But suppose that a new instinctive reli-
gion and morality were to be set up, and pain-
fully complied with, until they became a second
nature as ours have become, should we not then
gradually lose our bad conscience, bom as it is
out of the antagonism between instinct and
morality? Nay, if we were to persevere still
further until instinct and religion and morality
became intermingled and indistinguishable,
might we not enter the Garden of Eden again,
might not innocence itself become ours? But
to attain that end, an unremitting discipline,
extending over hundreds of years, might be nec-
essary; and who, in the absence of gods, is to
impose that discipline?

63

The Other Side

The life-defaming creeds are not to be con-
demned unconditionally: even they are not evil.
" Guilt," asceticism, contempt for the world —
these are the physiologically bad things which
have sharpened, deepened and made subtle the
soul of man. The Greeks were simple com-
pared with modern man; a thousand times more
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healthy, it is true — perhaps because they were
incapable of contracting our maladies. Well,
let us judge Christianity, which in Europe was
mainly responsible for this deepening of Man,
by an artistic criterion: let us judge it by the
effects it achieved, not by what it said.

64

Effects of Christianity

If there are gods who take an interest in Man,
and experiment upon him, what better means
could they have devised for getting out of him
certain " effects," not Christian at all, than
Christianity? Far more significant for man-
kind than the virtues of Christianity, are its
contradictions, excesses and " states of mind."
The " way of life," Christian morality, is of
little account compared with the permanent
physiological and psychological transformations
effected upon Man by the discipline of centuries
of religion. Not that Man has been forced into
the mould of Christian morality, but that in the
process he has undergone the most unique con-
vulsions, adaptations and permutations, that an
entire new world of conflict, pain, fear, horror,
exaltation, faith and scepticism has been bom
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ORIGINAL SIN

within him, that Life, driven within itself, has
deepened, enriched and invested him — that is
from the standpoint of human culture the most
important thing, beside which what is usually
understood by the Christianizing of Europe is
relatively insignificant. Not Christian moral-
ity, but the effects of Christian morality it is
that now concern us. And these effects are
not themselves Christian; rather the contrary.
Christianity has made Man more complex, con-
tradictory, sceptical, tragic and sublime; it has
given him more capacity for good and for evil,
and has added to these two qualities subtlety
and spirituality.

99 —

WHAT IS MODERN?

Ill

What Is Modern?

65

Whither?

The fever of modern thought which bums in
our veins, and from which we refuse to escape
by reactionary backdoors — Christianity and the
like — is not without its distinction: it is an
" honourable sickness," to use the phrase of
Nietzsche. I speak of those who sincerely strive
to seek an issue from this fever; to pass through
it into a new health. Of the others to whom
fever is the condition of existence, who make a
profession of their maladies, the valetudinarians
of the spirit, the dabblers in quack soul-remedies
for their own sake, it is impossible to speak
without disdain. Our duty is to exterminate
them, by ridicule or any other means found
effectual. But we are ourselves already too
grievously harassed; we are caught in the
whirlwind of modem thought, which contains
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WE MODERNS

as much dust as wind. We see outside our field
of conflict a region of Christian calm, but never,
never, never can we return there, for our in-
stincts as well as our intellect are averse to it.
The problem must have a different solution.
And what, indeed, is the problem? To some of
us it is still that of emancipation — that which
confronted Goethe, Ibsen, Nietzsche, and the
other great spirits of last century. It is an error
to think that these men have yet been refuted or
even understood; they have simply been buried
beneath the corpses of later writers. Arid it is
the worst intellectual weakness, and, therefore,
crime, of our age that ideas are no longer dis-
proved, but simply superseded by newer ideas.
The latest is the true, and Time refutes every-
thing! That is our modern superstition. We
have still, then, to go back — or, rather, forward

— to Goethe, Ibsen and Nietzsche. Our prob-
lem is still that of clearing a domain of freedom
around us, of enlarging our field of choice, and
so making destiny itself more spacious; and,
then, having delivered ourselves from prejudice
and superstition — and how many other things!

— of setting an aim before us for the unflinch-
ing pursuit of which we make ourselves responsi-

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WHAT IS MODERN?

ble. Greater freedom, and therefore greater
responsibility, above all greater aims, an en-
largement of life, not a whittling of it down to
Christian standards — that is our problem still!

66

The " Restoration " of Christianity

Will Christianity ever be established again?
It is doubtful. At the most, it may be " re-
stored " — in the manner of the architectural
" restorations," against which Ruskin declaimed.
The difficulty of re-establishing it must needs be
greater than that of establishing it. For it
has now been battered by science (people no
longer believe in miracles) and by history (peo-
ple have read what the Church has done — or
has not done). Christianity has become a
Church, and the Church, an object of criticism.
As the body which housed the spirit of Christian-
ity, men have studied it with secular eyes, and
have found little to reverence, much to censure;
and in the disrepute into which the body has
fallen, the spirit, also, has shared. And now
the atmosphere cannot be created in which
Christianity may grow young again and re-
capture its faith. The necessary credulity, or,
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at any rate, the proper kind of credulity, is no
longer ours. For Christianity grew, like the
mushrooms, in the night. Had there been news-
papers in Judea, there had been no Christianity.
And this age of ours, in which the clank of the
printing press drowns all other sounds, is fatal
to any noble mystery, to any noble birth or re-
birth. That night, at all events, we can never
pass through again, and, therefore, Christianity
will probably never renew itself.

67 ,

A Drug for Diseased Souls

The utmost that can be expected is a " restora-
tion," and in that direction we have gone already
a long way. For Christianity is not now, as it
was at the beginning, a spring of inspiration, a
thing spiritual, spontaneous, Dionysian. It is
mainly a remedy, or, more often, a drug for
diseased souls; and, therefore, to be husbanded
strictly by the modern medicine men, to be dis-
pensed carefully, and, yes, to be advertised as
well! Its birth was out of an exuberance of
spiritual life; its " restoration " will be out of a
hopeless debility and fatigue. And, there-
fore

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WHAT IS MODERN ?

68

The Dogmatists

All religions may be regarded from two sides;
from that of their creators, and from that of
their followers. Among the creators are to be
numbered not only the founders of religion, but
the saints, the inspired prophets and every one
who has in some degree the genius for religion.
They are not distinguished by much reverence
for dogma, but by the " religious feeling " ; and
when this emotion d&rries them away in its flood
they often treat dogma in a way to make the or-
thodox gape with horror. But, in truth, they do
not themselves take much account of dogma;
every dogma is a crutch, and they do not feel the
need of one. But the people who are not sus-
tained by this inward spring of emotion, who can
never know what religion really is, these need
a crutch; it is for them that dogma was designed.
And, of course, the real religious men see their
advantage also in the adherence of the dog-
matists, the many ; for the more widely a religion
is spread, the more secure it becomes, and the
greater chance it has of enduring. Dogma,
then, is religion for the irreligious. To the saint
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religion is a thing inward and creative; to the
dogmatist it is a thing outward, accomplished
and fixed, to which he may cling. The former
is the missionary of religion, the latter, its con-
server. The one is religious because he has re-
ligion, the other, because he needs it.

69

The Religious Impulse

The time comes in the history of a faith when
the " religious feeling " dies, and nothing is left
but dogma. The dogmatists then become the
missionaries of religion. The fount is dried up;
there is no longer an inward force seeking for
expression; there is only the fear of the dog-
matist lest his staff, his guide, his horizon should
be taken from him. Religion is then supported
most frenziedly by the irreligious; weakness
then speaks with a more poignant eloquence than
strength itself. And that is what is happening
with Christianity. Its " religious feeling " is
dead: there has been no great religious figure in
Europe in our time. And the Church is now
being defended on grounds neither religious nor
theological, but secular and even utilitarian.
The real religious impulse is now to be found in
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WHAT IS MODERN ?

the movement outside, and, therefore, against
Christianity. But, alas, as Nietzsche feared,
there may not after all be " sufficient religion in
the world to destroy religion."

70

The Decay of Prophecy

The past should be studied only in order to
divine the future. The new soothsayers should
seek for omens, not, as their ancient brethren
did, in the stars and the entrails of animals, but
in the book of history, past and becoming.
" The new soothsayers," for soothsaying has not
died; it has become popular — and degenerate.
Every one may now foretell the future, but no
one may believe what is foretold. And that is
because the soothsayers do not themselves believe
their auguries; when they happen to speak the
truth, no one is more surprised than they. But
in the antique world the augurs had, at any rate,
responsibility; to foretell the future was not to
them an amusement but a vocation.

To what is due the decay of the art of sooth-
saying? Partly, no doubt, to the dissemination
of popular knowledge, by which people have be-
come less credulous; partly to the " scientific
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WE MODERNS

temper " of those who, had they lived in the old
world, would have been the soothsayers; partly
to other causes known to every one. But, allow-
ing for these, may there not be something due to
the fact that people are no longer interested, as
they used to be, in the future? They know the
past, ah, perhaps too well: they have looked into
it so long that at length they feel that the future
holds nothing which it has not held, that Fate
has now no fresh metamorphosis or apotheosis,
and that Time must henceforth be content to
plagiarize itself. And so the future has lost the
seduction which it once held for the noblest
spirits. It is true, men still amuse themselves
by guessing which of Time's well-thumbed and
greasy cards will turn up at the next deal, or by
playing at patience with the immemorial pos-
sibilities. But that is not soothsaying, nor is it
even playing with the future: it is playing with
the past. And the great modern discovery is
not the discovery of the future, but the discovery
of the past.

And as with soothsaying, so with prophecy.

If we could but look for a moment into the soul

of an old prophet and see his deepest thoughts

and visions, what a conception of the future

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WHAT IS MODERN ?

would be ours! But that is impossible. We
cannot now understand the faith of the men who,
unmoved, prophesied the advent of supernat-
ural beings, the Christ or another; to whom the
future was a new world more strange than Amer-
ica was to Columbus. That attitude of mind has
been killed; and now comes one who says the
belief in the future is a weakness. Would he,
perchance, have said that to John the Baptist,
the great modern of his time? Had he lived in
that pre-Christian world, would he have believed
in the God in whom he now believes? The or-
thodox Christian here finds himself in a laugh-
able dilemma. Admitting nothing wonderful in
the future, he is yet constrained to believe in a
past wonderful beyond the dreams of poets or of
madmen — a past in which supernatural beings,
miracles and portents were almost the rule. And
so the future is to him not even so wonderful as
the past. It is an expurgated edition of the
past — an edition with the incidents and marvels
left out, a novel without a hero or a plot.

So, for good or for evil, we no longer believe

in the future as we did: it is steadily becoming

less marvellous, and, therefore, less seductive

for us. But, without the bait of the strange and

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the new to lure it on, must not humanity halt on
its way? Can man act at all without believing
in the future in some fashion? Must not things
be foreseen before they can be accomplished?
Is not soothsaying implicit in every deliberate
act? Are not all sincere ideals involuntary
auguries? Is it not the future rather than the
prophecy which " comes true "? Did not the
old prophecies " come true " because they were
prophesied? Did not Christ arise because He
was foretold? And are not the believers in the
future, then, the creators of the future, and the
true priests of progress? When we can envisage
a future noble enough, it will not then be weak-
ness to believe in it.

71

The Great Immoralists

The morality of Nietzsche is more strict and
exacting than that of Christianity. When the
Christians argue against it, therefore, they are
arguing in favour of a morality more comfort-
able, pleasing and indulgent to the natural man;
consequently, even on religious grounds, of a
morality more immoral. What! is Nietzsche,
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HAT IS MODERN?

then, the great moralist, and are the Christians
the great immoralists?

This notion may appear to us absurd, or
merely ingenious, but will it appear so to future
generations? Will timidity, conformity, medi-
ocrity, judicious blindness, unwillingness to of-
fend, be synonymous, to them also, with moral-
ity? Or will they look back upon Christianity
as a creed too indulgent and not noble enough?
As a sort of Epicureanism, for instance?

72

The First and the Last

We all know what the weak have suffered
from the strong; but who shall compute what the
strong have suffered from the weak? " The last
shall be first " ; but when they become first they
become also the worst tyrants — impalpable, an-
onymous and petty.

73

Humility in Pride

The pride of some gifted men is not pride in
their person, but in something within them, of
which they regard themselves the guardians and
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servants. If there is dignity in their demeanour
it is a reflected, impersonal dignity. Just so a
peasant might feel ennobled who guarded a king
in danger and exile.

74

The Modern Devil

The devil is not wicked but corrupt, in modem
phraseology, decadent. The qualities of the
mediaeval devil, rage, cruelty, hatred, pride,
avarice, are in their measure necessary to Life,
necessary to virtue itself. But corruption is
wholly bad ; it contaminates even those who fight
it. Hell relaxes: Mr. Shaw's conception is
profoundly true.

But if the devil is corruption, cannot the devil
be abolished? It is true, Man cannot extirpate
cruelty, hatred and pride without destroying
Life; but Life is made more powerful by the
destruction of the corrupt. God created Man;
but it was Man that created the devil.

75

Master and Servant

To summon out of the void a task, and then
incontinently to make of himself its slave: that
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WHAT IS MODERN ?

is the happiness of many a man. A great means
of happiness!

76

Criterions

It is not expedient to choose on every occasion
the higher rather than the lower, for one may not
be able to endure too much living on the heights.
If will and capacity were always equal! Then,
it is true, there would not be any difficulty; but
Life is Life, after all — that is, our will is
greater than our capacity. On the other hand,
it is not well to develop equally all our faculties
— the formula of the Humanist — for among
them there is a hierarchy, and some are more
worthy of development than others. What
course is left? To act always in the interest of
what is highest in us, and when we partake of a
lower pleasure to regard it as a form of sleep, of
necessary forgetting? For even the mind must
slumber occasionally if it is to remain healthy.

77

Intellectual Prudence

Among athletes there is a thing known as over-
training: if it is persisted in it wrecks the body.
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A similar phenomenon is to be found among
thinkers: thought too severe and protracted may
ruin the mind. Was this the explanation of Niet-
zsche's downfall? Certainly, his intellectual
health was that of the athlete who remains vig-
orous by virtue of a never-sleeping discipline,
who maintains his balance by a continuous ef-
fort. This is perhaps the highest, the most ex-
quisite form of health, but it is at the same time
the most dangerous — a little more, a little less,
and the engine of thought is destroyed. It is
important that the thinker should discover ex-
actly how far he may discipline himself, and how
far permit indulgence. What in the ordinary
man — conscious of no secondary raison d'etre
— is performed without fuss by the instincts,
must by him be thought out — a task of great
peril.

78

A Dilemmia

To be a man is easy: to be a purpose is more
difficult; but, on the whole — easy. In the first
instance, one has but to exist; in the second, to
act. But to unite man and purpose in the same
person — to be a type — is both difficult and
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WHAT IS MODERN?

precarious. For that a balance is imperative:
" being " and " doing " must be prevented from
injuring each other: action must become rhythm,
and rest, a form of energy. To be in doing, to
do in being — that is the task of the future man.
The danger of our being mere man is that man-
kind may remain forever stationary, without a
goal. The danger of our being mere purpose is
that our humanity may altogether drop out and
nothing but the purpose be left. And would not
that defeat the purpose?

79

Dangers of Genius

Why is it that so many men of genius have
been destroyed by falling into chasms of desire
which are safely trodden by common men? Is
it because there is within the exceptional man
greater compass, and, therefore, greater danger?
The genius has left the animal further behind
than the ordinary man; indeed, in the genius of
the nobler sort there is an almost passionate
avoidance and disavowal of the animal. In this
disavowal lie at once his safety and his danger:
by means of it he climbs to perilous heights, and
is also secure upon them. But let him abrogate
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JFE MODERNS

even once this denial of kinship, and he is in the
utmost danger. He now finds himself stationed
on the edge of a precipice up to which he seems
to have climbed in a dream, a dreadful dizziness
assails him, along with a mad desire to fling him-
self into the depths. It was perhaps a leap of
this kind that Marlowe made, and Shelley.
Meantime, the ordinary man lives in safety at
the foot of the precipice: he is never so far above
the animal as to be injured by a fall into animal-
ism. Only to the noble does spiritual danger
come.

80

A Strange Failure

He failed; for the task was too small for him
— a common tale among men of genius. You
have been unsuccessful in trivial things? There
is always a remedy left : to essay the great. How
often has Man become impotent simply because
there was no task heroic enough to demand
greatness of him!

81

Dangers of the Spiritual

If you are swept off your feet by a strongly
sensuous book, it is probably a sign that you
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WHAT IS MODERN ?

have become too highly spiritualized. For a
sensualist would simply have enjoyed it, while
feeling, perhaps, a little bored and dissatisfied.
It was only a religious anchorite who could have
lost his soul to Anatole France's Thais. For
the salvation of Man it is more than ever im-
perative that a reconciliation should be effected
between the spirit and the senses. Until it is,
the highest men — the most spiritual — will be
in the very greatest peril, and will almost in-
evitably be wrecked or frustrated. It is for the
good of the soul that this reconciliation must now
be sought.

82

Again

From the diabolization of the senses innumera-
ble evils have flowed; physical and mental dis-
ease, disgust with the world, cruelty towards
everything natural. But, worst of all, it has
made sensuality a greater danger than it was
ever before. In the anchorite, seeking to live
entirely in the spirit, and ignoring or chastising
the body, sensuality was driven into the very
soul, and there was magnified a hundredfold.
To the thinker avoiding the senses as much as
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WE MODERNS

possible — for he had been taught to distrust
them — sensuality, in the moments when he was
brought face to face with it, had acquired a
unique seductiveness, and had become a problem
and a danger. If he yielded, it was perilous in
a degree unknown to the average sensual man;
if he resisted, a good half of his spiritual energy
was wasted in keeping the senses at bay. In
either case, the thinker suffered. So that now
it is the spirit that has become the champion of
the senses, but for the good of the spirit.

83

God and Animal

Until the marriage of the soul and the senses
has been accomplished, Man cannot manifest
himself in any new type. What has been the
history of humanity during the last two thousand
years? The history of humanity, that is, as dis-
tinct from the history of communities? A rec-
ord of antithetic tyrannies, the spiritual alter-
nating with the sensual; an uncertain tussle be-
tween God and animal, now one uppermost, now
the other; not a tragedy — for in Tragedy there
is significance — but a gloomy farce. And this
farce must continue so long as the spirit con-
— 120 —

WHAT IS MODERN ?

temns sense as evil in itself — for neither of
them can be abolished! Whether we like it or
not, the senses, so long as they are oppressed and
defamed, will continue to break out in terrible
insurrections of sensuality and excess, until, tired
and satiated, they return again under the tyranny
of the spirit — at the appointed time, however,
to revolt once more. From this double cul de
sac Man can be freed only by a reconciliation
between the two. When this happens, however,
it will be the beginning of a higher era in the
history of humanity; Man will then become
spiritual in a new sense. Spirit will then affirm
Life, instead of, as now, slandering it; existence
will become joyful and tragic; for to live in
accordance with Life itself — voluntarily to ap-
prove struggle, suffering and change — is the
most difficult and heroic of lives. The softening
of the rigour of existence, its reduction and
weakening by asceticism, humility, " sin," is the
easier path; narrow is the way that leads to
Nihilism! The error of Heine was that he prop-
hesied a happier future from the reconciliation
of the body and the soul: his belief in the efficacy
of happiness was excessive. But this reconcilia-
tion is, nevertheless, of importance for nothing
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else than its spiritual significance: by means of
it Man is freed from his labyrinth, and can at
last move forward — he becomes more tragic.

84

Ultimate Pessimism

To the most modem man must have come at
some time the thought, What if this thing spirit
be essentially the enemy of the senses? What
if, like the vampire, it can live only by drinking
blood? What if the conflict between spirit and
" life " is and must forever be an implacable
and destructive one? He is then for a moment
a Christian, but with an added bitterness which
few Christians have known. For if his thought
be true, then the weakening and final nullifica-
tion of Life must be our object.

To prove that the spirit and the senses are not
eternally irreconcilable enemies is still a task.
Those who believe they are, do so as an act of
faith: their opponents are in the same case. We
should never cease to read spirit into Life-affirm-
ing things, such as pride, heroism and love, and
to magnify and exalt these aspects of the spirit.

— 122 —

WHAT IS MODERN?

85

Leisure and Productiveness

Granted that the society whidh produces the
highest goods in the greatest profusion is the best
— let us not argue from this that society should
be organized with the direct aim of producing
goods. For what if goods be to society what
happiness is said to be to men — things to be
attained only by striving for something else?
In all good things — whether it be in art, litera-
ture or philosophy — there is much of the
free, the perverse, the unique, the incalculable.
In short, good things can only be produced by
great men — and these are exceptions. The best
we can do, then, is to inaugurate a society in
which great men will find it possible to live, will
be even encouraged to live. Can a society in
which rights are affixed to functions serve for
that? A function, in practice, in a democratic
state — that will mean something which can be
seen to be useful for today, but not for tomor-
row, far less for any distant future. The more
subtle, spiritual, posthumous the activity of a
man the less it will be seen to be a function. Art
and philosophy arise when leisure and not work
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is the ruling convention. It is true that artists
and philosophers work, and at a higher tension
than other men; but it is in leisure that they must
conceive their works: what obvious function do
they then fulfil? Even the most harassed of
geniuses, even Burns would never have become
immortal had he not had the leisure to ponder,
dream and love. Idleness is as necessary for
the production of a work of art as labour. And
with some men perhaps whole years of idleness
are needed. Artists must always be privileged
creatures. It is privileges, and not rights, that
they want.

86

What is Freedom?

The athlete, by the disciplining of his body,
creates for himself a new world of actions; he
can now do things which before were prohibited
to him; in consequence, he has enlarged the
sphere of his freedom. The thinker and the
artist by discipline of a different kind are re-
warded in the same way. They are now more
free, because they have now more capacity.

There are people, however, who think one can
be free whether one has the capacity for freedom
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WHAT IS MODERN ?

or not — a characteristically modem fallacy.
But a man the muscles of whose body and mind
are weak cannot do anphing; how can he be
free? The concept of Freedom cannot be sepa-
rated from that of Power.

87

Freedom in the Dance

Even the most unbridled dance is a form of
constraint. The completest freedom of move-
ment is the reward of the severest discipline.

88

A Moral for Moderns

A spring gushed forth here on the airy height;
but the soil was not hard enough to retain it ; and
the water sapped away among the soft moss.
One day a man came and laid down a hard chan-
nel for the spring. Imprisoned on both sides, it
now imperiously sought an outlet and — a mira-
cle!— leapt glittering into the sunshine. The
history of Freedom.

89

The Renaissance: A Thesis

How unsatisfactory are those explanations of
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the Renaissance which give as its cause the break-
ing up of the restrictive intellectual canons of
the Middle Ages — as if a mere negation could
explain such a unique creative era! What has
here to be discovered is how freedom and the
capacity for freedom should have appeared at
the same moment. Perhaps the Middle Ages
have now been sufficiently reviled by the admir-
ers of the Renaissance; perhaps that event owed
more than we are willing to acknowledge to the
centuries of mediaeval repression and discipline.
During these centuries the human spirit had been
confined in the granite channel cut for it by
mediaeval Christianity, a channel of which even
the mouth was stopped. In the fifteenth century
the stream swept away every obstacle and leapt
forth, a brilliant cascade, scattering almost pagan
warmth and light. The fall of Constantinople
and the other circumstances usually given as the
explanation of this outburst were only its oc-
casion; the cause lay much deeper, in the long
storing up, conserving and strengthening of hu-
man powers. The freedom of which the Renais-
sance was an expression was more, then, than the
simple removal of restriction. It was a freedom
not political or moral, but vital; a positive en-
— 126 —

WHAT IS MODERN?

hancement if the natural power of man, who
could now do things which hitherto he could not
do — an event in the history, not merely of so-
ciety, but of Man. Accordingly, the " freedom
of the individual," so dear to some modems,
does not teach us much here. It was not because
freedom was given to them that men now created :
the freedom was claimed because they now pos-
sessed more power, could do more, and had,
therefore, the right to a larger sphere of freedom.
The more naturally free — that is, individually
powerful — a people become, the more they will
demand and obtain of " individual freedom " ;
but it is perhaps inexpedient to offer to a people
individually weak any more freedom than they
can use. They are still at the disciplinary
stage; they are preparing for their renaissance;
and to the student of human culture the periods
of preparation, of unproductiveness, are more
worthy of consideration than the productive
periods. For in the future we must prepare
for our eras of fruition, and not leave them, as in
the past, to pure chance.

At the Renaissance, however, it was not even
individual freedom in the modern democratic
sense that was claimed and allowed; it was at
— 127 —

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the most the freedom of certain individuals, the
naturally free, the powerful. Not until a later
time was this claim to be universalized by the un-
conditional theorists, the generalizers sans dis-
tinction, the egalitarians. The French Revolu-
tion was the Renaissance rationalized and popu-
larized.

90

The Unproductive Periods

Without the Middle Ages the Renaissance
would have been impossible; the one, therefore,
was as necessary as the other; and our reproba-
tion of the former for its comparative sterility
is entirely without justification. If we happen
to be living in an unproductive age, it is our
misfortune, then; but we are not entitled, in con-
templating this age, to the luxury of condemna-
tion, reproof or scorn. What we may demand
of any period now is that it should be a period
either of preparation or of fruition. So the
present era is, after all, deserving of condemna-
tion, but only because it is not an era of prepara-
tion — not for any other reason.

— 128

WHAT IS MODERN?

91

Duties of the Unproductive

The history of culture is the history of long
ages of unproductiveness broken by short eras
of production; but unproductiveness is the rule.
The men bom in barren periods have not, then,
the right to bewail their lot: we have not that
right. But what is of the first importance, for
the sake of culture, is to find out what are the
duties proper to men in a sterile age. Certainly
their duty it is not to produce whether they are
productive or not; that can only result in abor-
tions and painful caricatures: does not con-
temporary literature demonstrate it? The work
that is bom out of the poverty of the artist is, as
Nietzsche pointed out, decadent work, and de-
bases the spectator, lowers his vitality.

What, then, are the tasks of a writer in an
unproductive age? To live sparely and con-
serve strength? To make discipline more rigid?
To preserve and fortify the tradition of culture?
To render more accessible the sources from
which creative literature draws its life, so that
the next generation may be better placed? To
observe vigilantly the signs of today — and not
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only of today? It may be so; but, also, when
necessary, to throw these prudent and preserva-
tive tasks to the winds and spend his last ounce
of strength in battling with the demons who make
a productive era forever impossible. Yes, this
last duty is for us today — the most important.
And, we may depend, it is the creators — those
who produce what they should not — who will
fight most bitterly on the opposite side.

92

" Emancipation "

The rallying cry of the great writers of the last
century was " emancipation." Goethe, Heine
and Ibsen alike professed as their task the eman-
cipation of man; Nietzsche, their successor,
elevated the freed man, the Superman, into an
ideal, in the pursuit of which it was necessary
meantime that men should discipline themselves.
The later moderns, our own contemporaries,
have belittled this freedom, seeing in it nothing
but a negation, the freedom from some one thing
or another. But Ibsen and Heine, these men of
true genius, who believed most sincerely that
they were " brave soldiers in the war of the libe-
ration of humanity " did not perhaps waste their
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WHAT IS MODERN?

powers in battling for a thing so trivial! It is
barely possible that they meant by emancipation
something much more profound; something
spiritual and positive; indeed, nothing less
than an enhancement of the powers of man!
Certainly both poets looked forward to new
" developments " of man: Heine with his
" happier and more perfect generations, begot in
free and voluntary embraces, blossoming forth
in a religion of joy "; Ibsen with his perplexed
figures painfully " working their way out to
Freedom." It was the task of us in this genera-
tion, who should have been the heirs of this
tradition, but are not, to supply the commentary
to this noble vision, to carry forward this religion
of hope further and further. But the cult of
modernity has itself prevented this; the latest
theory has always seized us and exacted our be-
lief for its hour; the present has invariably
triumphed ; and we have discarded the great work
of last century before we have understood it.
Heine has been seized mainly by the decadents;
his healthy and noble sensuousness, his desire to
restore the harmony between the senses and the
soul, 05 a means towards the emancipation of
man, and as nothing else, has been perverted by
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them into worship of the senses for their own
sake — a thing which to Heine would have
seemed despicable. Ibsen has fallen among the
realists and propagandists; all the spiritual value
of his work has for this age been lost — and
what a loss ! — his battle to deliver man from
his weakness and inward slavery has been re-
duced — it is no exaggeration — to a battle to
deliver the women of the middle classes from
their husbands. The old story of emanation has
been again repeated, with the distinction that
here there is no trace left of the original source
except negative ones! Well, we have to turn
back again, our task, second to none in grandeur,
before which we may well feel abashed, is still
the same as that of Goethe, Ibsen and Nietzsche,
the task of emancipation. To restore dignity to
literature, indeed, it would be necessary to create
such a task if it did not already exist.

93

Genealogy of the Moderns

This is what has happened. The conventional

modems of our time are the descendants not of

Heine and Ibsen, but of the race against which

the poets fought. They live unthinkingly in the

— 132 —

WHAT IS MODERN ?

present, just as their spiritual ancestors lived un-
thinkingly in the past. But slavery to the past
has long ago fallen into the second place among
dangers to humanity: it is slavery to the present
that is now by far the greatest peril. Not be-
cause they broke the tyranny of the past, but
because they had an ideal in the future are the
great fighters of last century significant. To
think of them as iconoclasts is to mistake for
their aim the form of their activity: the past lay
between them and their object: on that account
alone did they destroy it. But the great obstacle
now is the domination of the present; and were
the demigods of last century alive today, they
would be fighting precisely against you, my dear
moderns, who live so complacently in your pro-
vincial present, making of it almost a cult. To
be a modem in the true sense, however, is to be a
forerunner; there is in this age, an age of prepa-
ration, no other test of the modem. To believe
that there are still potentialities in man; to have
faith that the " elevation of the type Man " is
possible, yes, that the time is ripe to prepare
for it; and to write and live in and by that
thought: this is to be modern.

— 133 —

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94

Domination of the Present

To be modem in the accepted, intellectually
fashionable sense: what is that? To propagate
always the newest theory, whatever it be; to be
the least possible distance behind the times, be-
hind the latest second of the times, whether they
be good or bad; and, of course, to assume one
is *' in the circle " and to adopt the tone of the
circle: in short, to make ideas a matter of fash-
ion, to choose views as a well-to-do woman
chooses dresses — to be intellectually without
foundation, principles or taste. How did this
convention arise? Perhaps out of lack of leis-
ure: superficiality is bound to engulf a genera-
tion who abandon leisure. But to be enslaved
to the present in this way is the most dangerous
form of superficiality: it is to be ignorant of the
very thing that makes Man significant, and with
idiotic cheerfulness and unconcern to render his
existence meaningless and trivial. In two ways
can Man become sublime; by regarding himself
as the heir of a great tradition: by making of
himself a fore-runner. Both ways are open to
the true modern, and both must be followed by
— 134 —

WHAT IS MODERN ?

him. For the past and the future are greater
than the present: the sense of continuity is nec-
essary for human dignity.

The men of this age, however, are isolated —
to use an electrical metaphor — from the current
of Humanity: they have become almost entirely
individuals, temporal units, "men"; what has
been the outcome? Inevitably the loss of the
concept Man, for Man is a concept which can be
understood only through the contemplation on a
grand scale of the history of mankind. Man
ceases to be dramatic when there are no longer
spectators for the drama of Humanity. The
present generation have, therefore, no sentiment
of the human sublime; they see that part of the
grand tragedy which happens to pass before
them, but without caring about what went before
or what will come after, without a clue, however
poor, to the mystery of existence. They know
men only, the men of their time. They are
provincial — that is, lacking the sentiment of
Man.

How much decadence may not be traced to

this! In Art, the conventions of Realism and

of -^stheticism have arisen. The first is just the

portrayal of present-day men as present-day

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men; nothing more, therefore, than " contempor-
ary art " ; an appendage of the present, a trivial-
ity. The second has as its creed enjoyment of
the moment; and if it contemplates the past at
all, it is with the eyes of the voluptuous antiquary
— but a collector is not an heir. Art has in our
time, both in theory and in practice, become de-
liberately more fleeting. In morality, there is
Humanitarianism, or, in other words, the convic-
tion that the suffering of today is the most im-
portant thing, coupled with the belief that there
is nothing at present existing which can justify
and redeem this suffering: therefore, uncondi-
tional pity, alleviation, " the greatest happiness
of the greatest number." Modern pessimism,
which springs from the same source, is the ob-
verse of this belief. It, also, regards only the
present, and says, perhaps with truth, that it, at
any rate, is not noble enough to deserve and de-
mand the suffering necessary for its existence —
consequently, all life is an error! All these
theories, however, are breaks with the spiritual
tradition of emancipation; they are founded on
the magnification of the temporary — of that
which only in a present continually carried for-
ward seems to be important. This judgment of
— 136 —

WHAT IS MODERN ?

Life with the eyes of the present, this narrowest
and most false of interpretations: how has it con-
fused and finally stultified the finest talents of
our time! The modern man is joyless; his joy-
lessness has arisen out of his modernity; and
now to find forgetfulness of it he plunges more
madly than before — into modernity! For his
own sake, as much as for that of Humanity, it is
our duty to free him from his wheel. One can
live with dignity only if one have a sense of the
tragedy of Man. It is the first task of the true
modem to destroy the domination of the present.

95

Encyclopcedists

Strange that the great dramatic poets of mod-
ern times have had a weakness for turning
their tragedies into encyclopaedias! Consider
" Faust " and " Brand," for instance. Is it that
the sentiment of the eternal was already begin-
ning to weaken in Goethe and Ibsen? Were
they overburdened by their oAvn age? Their
world was too much with them; and so they did
not reach the highest peaks of tragedy : they were
not universal.

—137 —

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96

What is Modern

It is time we erected a standard whereby to
test what is modem. To be an adherent of all
the latest movements — that is at most to be an-
archistic, eclectic, inconsistent — call it what you
will. Futurism, Realism, Feminism, Tradition-
alism may be all of them opposed or irrelevant to
modernity. It is not sufficient that movements
should be new — if they are ever new ; the ques-
tion is, To what end are they? If they are
movements in the direction of emancipation,
" the elevation of the type Man," then they are
modern; if they are not, then they are move-
ments to be opposed or ignored by modems. If
modernism be a vital thing it must needs have
roots in the past and be an essential expression
of humanity, to be traced, therefore, in the his-
tory of humanity : in short, it can only be a tradi-
tion. The true modem is a continuator of tradi-
tion as much as the Christian or the conservative:
the ti-ue fight between progress and stagnation is
always a fight between antagonistic traditions.
To battle against tradition as such is, therefore,
not the task of the modern; but rather to enter
— 138 —

WHAT IS MODERN ?

the conflict — an eternal one — for his tradition
against its opposite: Nietzsche found for this
antithesis the symbolism of Dionysus and Apollo.
Does such a tradition of modernity exist? Is
there a " modem spirit " not dependent upon
time and place, and in all ages modern? If
there is — and there is — the possession of it in
some measure will alone entitle us to the name
of modems, give us dignity and make the history
of Man once more dramatic and tragical. It is
a pity that some historian has not yet traced, in
its expression in events, the history of this con-
flict — a task requiring the deepest subtlety and
insight. Meantime, for this tradition may be
claimed with confidence such events as Greek
Tragedy, most of the Renaissance, and the
emancipators of last century. These are tri-
umphant expressions of " the modem spirit,"
but that spirit is chiefly to be recognized as a
principle not always triumphant or easy of per-
ception, constantly struggling, assuming many
disguises and tirelessly creative. It is not, in-
deed, only a tradition of persons, of dogmas, or
of sentiments: it is a principle of Life itself.
This conception, it is true, is grand, and even
terrifying — a disadvantage in this age. But
— 139 —

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is there any other which grants modernity more
than the status of an accident of time and fash-
ion?

97

How We Shall Be Known

In an age it is not always what is most charac-
teristic that survives: posterity will probably
know us not by our true qualities, but by the
exceptions to them. The present-day writers in
English who will endure after their age has
passed are probably Joseph Conrad, W. H. Hud-
son, and Hillaire Belloc for a few of his essays
and lyrics — none of them representative, none
of them modern. They might have been born
in any era: they are in the oldest tradition.
The most striking characteristic of our time,
however, is its lack of a tradition. The senti-
ment of transiency is our most deeply rooted
sentiment: it is the very spirit of the age. But
by its essential nature it cannot hope to endure,
to be known by future generations; for we shall
not produce immortal works until we become
interested in some idea long enough to be in-
spired by it, and to write monumentally and
surely of it. We hold our ideas by the day;
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WHAT IS MODERN?

but for a masterpiece to be born, an idea must
have taken root and defied time. Permanence
of form, moreover, would seriously embarrass a
modem writer, who wishes to change with the
hour, and does not want his crotchets of yester-
day to live to be refutations of his fads of today.
Thus we are too fleeting to make even our
transitoriness eternal. The very sentiment of
immortality has perished amongst us, and we
actually prefer that our work should die — wit-
ness the Futurists! The most self-conscious
heirs of modernity, these propounded the theory
that it is better that works of art should not en-
dure: well, in that case, their own creations have
been true works of art! Nevertheless, all they
did in this theory was to erect into a system
the shallowness, provinciality and frivolousness
of the present — and thereby to proclaim them-
selves the enemies of the future.

141 —

ART AND LITERATURE

IV

Art and Literature

98

Psychology of Style

There are writers with a style — it may be
either good or bad — and writers with no style
at all, who just write badly. What quality or
combination of qualities is it which makes a
writer a stylist?

Style probably arises out of a duality; the
association in a writer of the scribe and the spec-
tator. The first having set down his thought, the
second goes aside, contemplates it, as things
should be contemplated, from a distance, and
and asks, " How does this strike me? How does
it look, sound, move? " And he suggests here
a toning down of colour, there an acceleration
of speed, somewhere else, it may be, an added
lucidity, for clearness is an aesthetic as well as
an intellectual virtue.

The writer without style, however, just writes
— 145 —

WE MODERNS

on without second thought; the spectator is
altogether lacking in him; he cannot contem-
plate his work from a distance, nor, indeed, at
all. This explains the unconsciousness and in-
nocence in bad writing — not in bad style,
which is neither unconscious nor innocent!
The stylist, on the other hand, is always the
actor to his own spectator; he must get his
effect; even Truth he uses as a means to his
effect. If a truth is too repulsive, he throws
this or that cloak over it; if it is uninteresting,
he envelops it in mysticism (mysticism is
simply an artist's trick) ; in a word, he aestheti-
cizes, that is, falsifies everything, to please the
second person in his duality, the spectator.
Even if he gets his effects by moderation of
statements, he is to be distrusted, for it is the
moderation and not Truth that is aimed at.
And, then, his temptation to employ metaphors,
to work up an interesting madness, to rhapsodize
— these most potent means to great effects, these
falsifications! Well, are we to assent, then, to
the old philosophic prejudice against style and
refuse to believe any philosopher who does not
write badly?

146

ART AND LITERATURE

99

Modern Writing

The greatest fault of modem style is that it
is a smirking style. It fawns upon the reader,
it insinuates, it has the manner of an amiable
dog. If it does something smart, it stops im-
mediately, wags its tail, and waits confidently
for your approval. You will guess now why
those little regiments of dots are scattered so
liberally over the pages of the best-known Eng-
lish novelist. It is H.G. Wells's style wagging
its tail.

100

The Precise

There have been writers — there are writers
— whose only title to fame is an interesting de-
fect. They are unable to write soundly, and
this inability, being abnormal, is more in-
teresting than sound writing, which is only nor-
mal. For to limp or to hop on one leg is
never pedestrian — what do I say? — is not
even pedestrian.

147 —

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101

Paradox

What is paradox? The " bull " raised to a

form of literary art?

102

The Platitude

There should be no platitudes in the works
of a sincere author. A platitude is an idea not
understood by its writer — in one word, a shib-
boleth.

103

Praise?

It is usual to extol the industry of those
realists who put everything into their books, but
they should rather be censured for their want of
taste. The truth is that they lack the selective
faculty — lack, that is, art. Afraid to omit
anything from their reproductions of existence
— lest they omit what is most significant —
they include all: the easiest course. The
easiest course, that is — for the writers.

148

ART AND LITERATURE

104

Hostility of Thinkers

When a thinker has a world of thought of his
own, he generally becomes cold towards other
thinkers, and to none more than to him whose
star is nearest his own. It is necessary, there-
fore, that he should read, above all, the philo-
sopher whose thought most closely resembles his,
for to him he is most likely to be unjust. We
are the most hostile to those who say what we
say, but say it in a way we do not like.

105

The Twice Subtle

The thinker who has been twice subtle arrives
at simplicity. And in doing so he has, at the
same time, discovered a new truth. But this
other thinker has possessed simplicity from the
beginning. Has he also possessed this truth?
At any rate, he does not know it.

106

Mastery of One^s Thoughts

One should know how to keep one's thoughts
at a distance. The French can do this, and,
therefore, write at once wittily and profoundly
— 149 —

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of serious things. But the Germans live, per-
haps, too near their thoughts, and are possessed
by them: hence, their obscurity and heaviness.
Wit — lightness of hand — shows that one is
master of one's thought, and is not mastered by
it. Nevertheless, the thoughts of the Germans
may be the mightier. In this matter the com-
plete thinker should be able to become French or
German as occasion demands.

107

Psychologists

The keenest psychologists are those who are
burdened with no social mission and get along
with a minimum of theory. Joseph Conrad, for
instance, is infinitely more subtle in his analysis
of the human mind and heart than is H. G. Wells
or John Galsworthy. He has the happy un-
concern and detachment of a connoisseur in
humanity, of one who experiences the same fine
interest in an unusual human situation as the
dilettante finds in some recondite trifle. Henry
James carried this attitude to a high degree of re-
finement. He walked among men and women
as a botanist might walk among a collection of
" specimens," dismissing the ordinary with the
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ART AND LITERATURE

assured glance of an expert, and lingering only
before the distinctive and the significant.
Should we who nurse a mission deplore the
spirit in which these disinterested observers
enter into their task? By no means. But for
them, certain domains of human nature would
never have been discovered, and we should have
been correspondingly the losers. For we re-
volutionists must know the human kind before
we can alter them. The non-missionary is as
necessary as the missionary, and to none more
than to the missionary.

108

Realism

Novels which take for their subject-matter
mere ordinary, pedestrian existence — and of
this kind are three-fourths of present-day novels
— are invariably dull in one of two ways. In
the first instance, they are written by pettifog-
ging talents to whom only the ordinary is of in-
terest, by people, that is to say, who are inca-
pable of writing a book that is not dull. In the
other, they are written by men generally of
considerable, sometimes of brilliant, ability,
who, misled by a theory, concern themselves
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laboriously with a domain of life which they
dislike and which even bores them. But if the
writer is bored, how much more so must be the
reader! In short, the realist theory produces
bad books because it forces the writer to select
subjects the only emotion towards which it is
possible to feel is boredom. And great art
may arise out of hate, grief, even despair, but
never out of boredom.

109

Fate and Mr. Wells

Fate has dealt ironically with H. G. Wells. It
has turned his volumes of fiction into prophecies,
and his volumes of prophecies into fiction.

110

Mr. G. K. Chesterton

A man's philosophy may be uninteresting,
although he writes about it in an interesting
manner. Just as the many write dully about in-
teresting things, so a few write interestingly
about dull things. And Mr. Chesterton is one
of these. Equality is a dull creed, Christianity
is a dry bone, tradition is wisdom for ants and
the Chinese. But Mr. Chesterton is a very in-
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ART AND LITERATURE

teresting man. How is it possible for an in-
teresting man to have an uninteresting philos-
ophy? Is this simply the last paradox of a
master of paradox?

Mr. Chesterton's most charming quality is a
capacity for being surprised. He writes para-
doxically, because to him everything is a para-
dox — the most simple thing, the most unin-
teresting thing. And that is his weakness, as
well as his strength. He has found the common
things so wonderful that he has not searched for
the uncommon things. The average man is to
him such a miracle, that he will not admit the
genius is a far greater miracle. The theories
he finds established, Christianity, equality,
democracy, traditionalism, interest him so much
that he has not gone beyond them to inquire into
other theories perhaps more interesting. And
this, because he lacks intellectual curiosity, along
with that which frequently accompanies it,
subtlety of mind. For the intellectually curious
man is precisely the man who is not interested in
things, or, at any rate, is interested in them
only for a little, and then passes on or burrows
deeper to find something further. One dogma
after another he studies and deserts, this faith-
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less searcher, this philanderer, this philosopher;
and that which leads him on is the hope that at
last he will find something to interest him for
an eternity. Perhaps it is this dissatisfaction of
the mind which has always driven men to seek
knowledge; perhaps, if all mankind had been
like Mr. Chesterton, we should not have had
even Christianity, equality, democracy and the
other theories which he holds and adorns.

For Mr. Chesterton's impressions are all first
impressions. Like his own deity, he sees
everything for the first time always. And he
lacks, therefore, the power, called vision, of
seeing into things: the outside of things is
already sufficiently interesting to him. He pos-
sesses imagination, however, and kindly and
grotesque fancies which he hangs on the ear of
the most common clodhopper of a reality. In
fantasy he reaches greatness. But his phi-
losophy is not interesting. It is himself that
is interesting.

Ill

Nietzsche

Nietzsche loved Man, but not men: in that
love were comprehended his nobility and his
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ART AND LITERATURE

cruelty. He demanded that men should become
Man before they asked to be loved.

112

Strindberg

This writer, despite his genius, earnestness
and courage, arouses in us a feeling of profound
disappointment. Nor is the cause very far to
seek. For along with earnestness and courage
in a writer we instinctively look for nobility and
joy: if the latter qualities are absent we feel
that the raison d'etre of the former is gone, and
that earnestness and courage divorced from
nobility and joy are aimless, wasted, almost in-
conceivable. And in Strindberg they are so
divorced. A disappointed courage; an ignoble
earnestness! These are his pre-eminent quali-
ties. And with them he essayed tragedy — the
form of art in which nobility and joy are most
required! As a consequence, the problems
which he treats are not only treated inade-
quately; the inadequacy, when we stop to re-
flect upon it, absolutely amazes us. His crises
are simply rows. His women, when they are
angry, are intellectual fishwives ; and — more
disgusting still — so are his men. All his
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characters, indeed, intellectual and talented as
they are, move on an amazingly low spiritual
plane. The worst in their nature comes to light
at the touch of tragedy, and an air of sordidness
surrounds all. Posterity will not tolerate this
" low " tragedy, this tragedy without a raison
d'etre, this drama of the dregs.

113

Dostoieffsky

Dostoieffsky depicted the subconscious as
conscious; that was how he achieved his com-
plex and great effects. For the subconscious is
the sphere of all that is most primeval, mys-
terious and sublime in man ; the very bed out of
which springs the flower of tragedy. But did
Dostoieffsky do well to lay bare that world pre-
viously so reverently hidden, and to bring the
reader behind the scenes of tragedy? The
artist will deny it — the artist who always de-
mands as an ingredient in his highest effects
mystery. For how can mystery be retained
when the very realm of mystery, the subcon-
scious, is surveyed and mapped? In Dos-
toieffsky's imperishable works the spirit of full
tragedy is perhaps never evoked. What he pro-
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ART AND LITERATURE

vides in them, however, is such a criticism of
tragedy as is nowhere else to be found. His
genius was for criticism; the artist in him
created these great figures in order that after-
wards the psychologist might dissect them.
And so well are they dissected, even down to
the subconsciousness, that, to use a phrase of the
critics, we know them better than the people we
meet. Well, that is precisely what we object to
— as lovers of art!

114

Again

Not only is Dostoieffsky himself a great
psychologist; all his chief characters are great
psychologists as well. Raskolnikoff, for
instance. Porphyrins Petrovitch, Svidragailoff,
Prince Muishkin, walk through his pages as
highly self-conscious figures, and as people who
have one and all looked deeply into the shadowy
world of human motives, and have generalized.
The crises in Dostoieffsky's books are, therefore,
of a peculiarly complex kind. It is not only
the human passions and desires that meet one
another in a conflict more or less spontaneous;
the whole wealth of psychological observation
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and generalization of the conflicting character is
thrown into their armoury, and with that, too,
they do battle. The resulting effect is more
large, rich and subtle than anything else in
modern fiction, but also, if the truth must be
told, more impure, in the artistic sense, more
sophisticated. Sometimes, so inextricably are
passion and " psychology " mingled, that the
crises are more like the duels of psychologists
than the conflicts of human souls. In the end,
one turns with relief to the pure tragedy of the
classical writers, the tragedy which is not
brought about by people who act like amateur
psychologists.

115

Tolerance of Artists

No matter what their conscious theories may
be, all artists are unconsciously aristocratic, and
even intolerant in tlieir attitude to other men.
They are more blind than most people to the
raison d'etre of the politician, the business man
and the philosopher — these unaccountable
beings who will not acknowledge the primacy
of Creation and Beauty. But at last they mag-
nanimously conclude that these exist to form
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ART AND LITERATURE

their audience, not the subject-matter of their art
— that is the modem fallacy!

116

Climate

There are natures exquisitely sensitive to
their human environment. This man depresses
them, they feel the vitality ebbing out of them
in his presence; that other brings exhilaration,
at the touch of his mind their powers increase
and become creative. It is a question of
atmosphere. The first has a wintry, grey soul;
the latter carries a sun — their sun — in his
bosom. And these artists require sunlight and
soft air, before the flowers and fruit can hang
from their boughs. Every artist of this type
should go to Italy or France and live there; or,
failing that, create for himself an Italy or
France of friends. Others require the tempest
with its lowering skies. But that is easier to
seek; they can generally find it within them-
selves.

117

Sensibility

It may be wisdom for the man of action to
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smother his griefs, and follow resolutely his
course. But with the artist it is different. He
should not close his heart against sorrow, for
sorrow is of use to him; his task is to transfigure
it; thus he makes himself richer. Every con-
quest of suffering which is attained hy isolating
the pang makes the artist poorer; the part of
him so isolated dies: he loses bit by bit his
sensitiveness, and how much does his sensitive-
ness mean to him! The artist is more defence-
less than other men, and he must be so. For
his sensitiveness should be such that the faintest
rose-leaf of emotion or thought cannot touch his
heart without evoking in him infinite delight or
pain; and, at the same time, he should be able
to respond to the great tempests and terrible
moods of life. Great strength, great love, great
productiveness, these are required if he is to
endure his sensitiveness; alas, for him, if he
have them not! Then he must suffer and suffer,
until he has cut off one by one the sources of
his suffering, until he has mutilated and lamed
what is most godlike in him, and has made him-
self ordinary at last — or a Schopenhauerian.

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ART AND LITERATURE

118

The Artistes Enemy

I waited once beside a lake, created surely
to mirror Innocence, so pure it was. The pas-
sage of a butterfly over it or the breath of a rose-
leaf's fall was enough to stir its surface, in-
finitely delicate and sensitive. Yet tempests did
not affright it, for it laughed and danced be-
neath the whip of the fiercest storm. And it
could bury, as in a bottomless tomb, the stones
thrown at it by the most spiteful hands; to these,
indeed, it responded with a Puck-like radiating
smile that spread until it broke in soft laughter
upon its marge. So strong and delicate it lay,
and yet, it seemed, so defenceless. Yet what
could harm it? Storm, shower, sunshine, and
darkness alike but ministered to it, and even the
missiles of its enemies were lost in its boundless
security. It seemed invulnerable. I returned
years later, and looked once, looked and fled.
For the lake had grown old, blind and torpid,
so that even the light lay dead in it. Then I
noticed that on every side, almost invisible,
there were innumerable black streams oozing —
infection! The tragedy of the artist.
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119

Uniformity

In the mien of children there is sometimes
to be noted a natural nobility and pride; they
walk with the imconscious grace of conquerors.
But this grace and freedom soon disappear, and
when the child has become man there is noth-
ing left of them: his bearing is as undis-
tinguished as his neighbour's. Nowhere, now,
is nobility of presence and movement to be
found, except among children, the chieftains of
half-barbarous peoples, and some animals.
The farther man departs from the animal the
less dignified he becomes, and the more his ap-
pearance conforms to a common level: indeed,
civilization seems, on one side, to be a labourious
attempt to arrive at the undistinguished and in-
distinguishable. Is Man, then, the mediocre
animal par excellence? Only, perhaps, under
an egalitarian regime. Wherever a hierarchy
exists in Europe there is more of nobility of
demeanour than elsewhere. Equality and hu-
mility are the great fosterers of the mediocre:
and not only, alas! of the mediocre in de-
meanour. Who can tell how many proud,
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ART AND LITERA TURE

graceful and gallant thoughts and emotions
have been killed by shame — the shame which
the egalitarians and the humble have heaped
upon them? And how much Art, therefore, has
lost? Certainly, in the minds of children there
are many brave, generous and noble thoughts
which are never permitted to come to maturity.
Ye must become as little children .

120

Immortality of the Artist

An artist one day forgot Death, so entirely
had he become Life's, rapt in a world of liv-
ing contemplation; and, established there, he
created a form. That hour was immortal, and,
therefore, the form was immortal. This is the
" timelessness " of true art-work; they are
fashioned " in eternity," as Blake said, and so
speak to the eternal in Man.

121

The Descent of the Artist

At the beginning of his journey he climbed

daringly, leaping from rock to rock, exuberant,

tireless, until he reached what he thought was his

highest peak. Then began his descent, and, lo,

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immediately great weariness fell upon him. A
friend of his wondered, Is he going downhill
because he is tired? Or is he tired because he
is going downhill?

122

Apropos the Cynic

He wrote with an assumption of extreme
heartlessness, and the public said, " How tender
his heart must be when he hides it under such
a disguise! " But what he was hiding all the
time was his lack of heart.

123

Artist and Philosopher

In all ages the philosophers have pardoned
the artists their lack of depth, on account of
their divine love of the beautiful. In our
time, however, this only reason for pardoning
them has disappeared, and they are now entirely
deserving of condemnation. For the realists
abjure equally thought — interpretation, and
beauty — selection. To be an eye, with a foun-
tain pen attached to it; that is their aim, suc-
cessfully attained, alas! A single eye and not
a single thought: the definition of the realist.
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ART AND LITERATURE

124

An Evil

Art is at the present day far too easy for com-
prehension, far too obvious. Our immediate
task should be to make it difficult, and the con-
cern of a dedicated few. Thus only shall we
win back reverence for it. When it is rever-
enced, however, it will then be time to extend
its sway; but not until then. Art must be ap-
proached with reverence, or not at all. A
democratic familiarity with it — such as exists
among the middle classes, not among the work-
ing classes, in whom reverence is not yet dead
— is an abomination.

125

Modern Art Themes

How sordid are the themes which modern art
has chosen for itself! The loss of money or of
position, poverty, social entanglements — the
little accidents which a thinker laughs at! Are
modern artists as bourgeois as this? A coterie
of shop-keepers? Tragic art has no concern with
the accidental: that is the sphere of comedy.
Tragedy should move inevitably once it has be-
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gun to revolve; it is beyond fashion, universal,
essential; Fate, not Circumstance, is its theme.
The presence of the accidental in a tragedy is
sufficient to condemn it. For it is the inevitable,
the " Fate " in Tragedy, that makes of it a heroic
and joyful thing. It cannot be improvised like
Comedy. It demands in its creator a sense of
the eternal, just as Comedy, on the other hand,
demands an exquisite appreciation of temporal
fashion. Tragedy is the greater art; Comedy,
perhaps, the more difficult. Our modern trage-
dies, however, are mainly about accidents, and
very mean accidents; they are improvised mis-
fortunes and their effect is depressing.

126

The Illusionists

How shallow are most artists! How child-
ish! How subject to illusion! This novelist at
the end of his novels leaves his characters in a
Utopia, from which all sorrow and trial have
been banished, a condition absolutely unreal,
contemptible and absurd. And all his readers
admire without thinking, and call the author pro-
found! He is not profound, but shallow and
commonplace. Except for his gift of mimicry,
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ART AND LITERATURE

which he calls Art, he is just an average man.
And, moreover, he is tired : the " happy end-
ing " is his exhaustion speaking through his
art, his will to stagnation and surrender. Works
of art should only end tragically, or enigmati-
cally, as in " A Doll's House," or at the gate-
way of a new ideal, as in " An Enemy of the
People."

127

Majorities and Art

When it is said that in modern society poetic
tragedy is out of season and cannot succeed, an
assumption is made which on literary grounds
can never be admitted. It is that majorities
count in literature as in politics; that " Brand "
was a failure and " A Doll's House " a suc-
cess. But from another point of view,
" Brand " was the success, " A Doll's House "
the failure. And the whole " problem " drama
a failure with it, and all the realistic schools,
as well — a failure! This is certainly how the
future historian of literature will regard it.
Our era with its depressing " masterpieces " will
be called the barren era, because the grand ex-
ception, great art, has not bloomed in it, be-
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cause even our critics have judged contemporary
art by a criterion of success instead of the
eternal spiritual criterion: their championship
of " problem " art proves it! In the meantime,
then, realism is considered " the thing," and peo-
ple speak pityingly of poetic tragedy. Only
those forms of art which can " survive " in the
struggle for existence are counted good — so
deeply, so unwisely have we drunk at the Dar-
winian spring!

128

The Decay of Man

The aim of Art was once to enrich existence
by the creation of gods and demi-gods; it is
now to duplicate existence by the portrayal of
men. Art has become imitation, Realism has
triumphed. And how much has materialism
had to do with this! In an age lacking a vivid
ideal of Man, men become interesting. The
eyes of the artist, no longer having an ideal to
feed upon, are turned towards the actual, and
imitation succeeds creation. Every one busies
himself in the study of men, and Art becomes
half a science, the artists actually collecting their
data, as if they were professors of psychology!
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ART AND LITERA TURE

Theories glorifying men are born, and the cult
of the average man arises, which is nothing but
the exaltation of men at the expense of Man.
In due time all ideals perish, only an inspira-
tion towards averageness remains, and equality
is everywhere enthroned. Art has no longer
a heaven to fly to, there to create loftier heavens.
In despair, she descends to earth and the ordi-
nary, and for her salvation must find the ordi-
nary interesting, must make the ordinary in-
teresting. Realism arises when ideals of Man
decay: it is the egalitarianism of Art.

129

A New Valuation

But why do ideals of Man decay — why did
the ideal of Man decay? Because there were
no longer examples to inspire the artists in the
creation of their grand, superhuman figures.
Suspicion, envy, equality — call it what you
will — had become strong : the great man could
no longer fight it and remain great. By the
radicals the genius was regarded as an insult
to the remainder of mankind. And how ordi-
nary he was, this genius, compared with the
grand figures of the time of the Renaissance;
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that time when men were weighed and valued,
when elevation and inequality were acknowl-
edged and acted upon, and Man became greater
in stature, with Art his Will to Greatness!
Well, we must weigh men again; we must deny
equality ; we must affirm aristocracy — in
everything but commerce and production, where
democracy is really a return to the aristocratic
tradition. And, you artists, you must turn from
men to Man, from Realism to Myth. And if
you can find in your age no example to inspire
you to the creation of a great ideal of Man, then
become your own examples! Man must be born
again, if you would enter into your heaven.

130

The Man and the Hour

A. Let people say about aristocracy what
they will, it remains true that Man generally is
equal to the event. Events are the true stepping-
stones on which Man rises to higher things. B.
Ah! you are not speaking of Man, but of men,
of the many. The great man, however, does not
require an event to call his greatness forth. He
is his own event — and also that of others !

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ART AND LITERATURE

131

The Lover to the Artists

Love idealizes the object. If you would
create an ideal Art, must you not, then, learn
to love? And that you are Realists — does it
not prove that you have not Love?

132

Origin of the Tragic

Here is yet another guess at the origin of the
tragic:

A man is told of some calamity, altogether
unexpected, the engulfing of a vessel by the sea,
an avalanche which wipes out a town, or a fire
in which a family of little ones perish, leaving
the father and mother unharmed and disconso-
late; and at once the very grandest feelings
awaken within him, he finds himself enlarged
spiritually, and life itself is enriched for him —
the people in the vessel and in the town, the
children and the parents of the children, are
raised to a little more than human elevation by
the favouritism of calamity. Next day he hears
that the news was false, and immediately, along
with the feeling of relief, he experiences an un-
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mistakable disappointment and loss; for all
those grand emotions and the contemplation of
life in that greater aspect are snatched from
him! Perhaps in primitive times, when the
means of disseminating news were more un-
trustworthy than they are today, disappoint-
ments of this kind would occur very often; and
one day some rude poet, having noted the
elevation which calamity brings, would in
luxurious imagination invent a calamity, in
order to experience at will this enlargement of
the soul. But a tale of calamity, being invented,
would inevitably please the poet's hearers, both
for the feelings it aroused and the grand image
of Man it represented. So much for the origin
and persistence — not the meaning — of the
tragic.

133

Tragedy and Comedy

Tragedy is the aristocratic form of art. In
it the stature of Man is made larger. The great
tragic figures are superhuman, unapproachable:
we do not sorrow with them, but for them, with
an impersonal pity and admiration. And that
is because Man, and not men, is represented by
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ART AND LITERATURE

them: idealization and myth are, therefore, pro-
per to their delineation.

But Comedy is democratic. Its subject is
men, the human-all-too-human, the unrepresen-
tative: it belittles men in a jolly egalitarianism.
This static fraternity, this acceptance of men as
they are, is resented by the aristocratic natures,
who would make Man nobler; but to the average
men it is flattering, for it proclaims that the great
are absurd even as they, it unites men in a
brotherhood of absurdity. Thus, all comedy is
an involuntary satire, all tragedy an involuntary
idealization of men.

Tragedy is the supreme affirmation of Life, for
it affirms Life even in its most painful aspects,
struggle, suffering, death; so that we say, " Yes,
this, too, is beautiful! " That was the raison
d'etre of classical tragedy — and not Nihilism!
Well, in which of these forms. Tragedy or
Comedy, may our hopes and visions of the
Future best be expressed? Surely in that which
idealizes Man and says Yea to suffering.
Tragedy, the dynamic form of Art.

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134

Super -Art

In the works of some artists everything is on
a slightly superhuman scale. The figures they
create fill us with astonishment; we cannot un-
derstand how such unparalleled creatures came
into being. When we contemplate them, in the
works of Michelangelo or of Nietzsche, there
arise unvoluntarily in our souls sublime dreams
of what Man may yet attain. Our thoughts
travel into the immeasurable, the undiscovered,
and the future becomes almost an intoxication
to us.

In Neitzsche, especially, this attempt to make
Art perform the impossible — this successful
attempt to make Art perform the impossible —
is to be noted in every book, almost in every
word. For he strains language to the utmost
it can endure; his words seem to be striving to
escape from the bonds of language, seeking to
transcend language. " It is my ambition," he
says in " The Twilight of the Idols," " to say
in ten sentences what every one else says in a
whole book — what every one else does not say
in a whole book." In the same way, when in
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ART AND LITERATURE

his first book he wrote about Tragedy, he raised
it to an elevation greater than it had ever known
before, except, perhaps, in the works of
-^schylus; when, in his essay upon " Schopen-
hauer as Educator," he adumbrated his concep-
tion of the philosopher, philosophy seemed to
become a task for the understandings of gods;
and when, having criticized the prevailing moral-
ity, he set up another, it seemed to his generation
an impossible code for human beings, a code
cruel, over-noble. Finally, when he wrote of
Man, it was to create the Superman. He
touched nothing which he did not ennoble. And,
consequently, in Art his chosen form was Myth;
he held it beneath the nobility of great art to
create anything less than demi-gods; religion
and art were in him a unity.

In super-art, in these works of Leonardo and
Michelangelo, of ^^schylus and Nietzsche, Man
is incited again and again to surpass himself,

to become more than " human."

>

135

Love Poetry-
hove poetry, so long as it glorifies Love, is
supremely worthy of our reverence. Every-
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r,.,^,.jy^ thing that idealizes and transfigures Love, mak-
ing it more desirable and full even of transcen-
dental meaning, is of unquestionable advantage
to mankind; on the other hand, a crudely
physiological statement, even though this may be
formally true, serves neither Love nor Life. It
is assuredly not the function of art to treat Love
in this way. On the contrary, amatory poetry
by its idealization allures to Love; this is true
even of such of it as is tragic: we are prepared
by it to experience gladly even the suffering of
Love. The only poetry that is noxious is that
which bewails the " vanity " of Love, and that
in which a deliberate sterility is adumbrated.
These are decadent.

136

Literature and Literature

Literature that is judged by literary standards
merely is not of the highest rank. For the
greatest works are themselves the standards by
which literature is judged. How, then, are they
to be valued? By a standard outside of liter-
ature, by their consonance with that which is the
raison d'etre of literature? In them a far
greater problem than any literary problem faces
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ART AND LITERA TURE

us, the problem, Why does literature exist?
What is the meaning of literature?

Through whole generations men forget this
problem, and literature becomes to them a
specialized form of activity to be pursued for
its own sake, a part of Man's soul, thrown off and
become static and separate, with a sterile life
of its own. The more shallow theory and prac-
tice of literature then come into being; Realism
and Art for Art's sake flourish. But the eternal
question always returns again. Why does liter-
ature exist? What is its meaning? And, then,
the possibility of another blossoming of litera-
ture is not far away.

137

The Old Poet

An old poet who had lived in the good days
when poets were makers — of moralities and
gods, among other things — lately re-visited the
earth, and after a study of the very excellent
exercises in literature to be found in our
libraries, delivered himself thus: —

" How has our power decayed! Into littera-
teurs have we declined who were creators.
Perish all literature that is only literature!
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Poets live to create gods; to glorify gods should
all their arts of adornment and idealization be
used. But I see here adornment without the ob-
ject worthy of adornment; beautification for the
sake of beautification; Art for Art's sake.
These artists are only half artists. They have
surely made Art into a game."

The critics did not understand him, and, there-
fore, disagreed. The artists thought he was
mad, besides knowing nothing of aesthetics.
The moral fanatics acclaimed him vociferously,
mistaking him for a popular preacher. Only a
philosophico-artistic dilettante listened atten-
tively, and said, a little patronizingly, " He is
wrong, but he is more right than wrong."

138

The Old Gods

Perhaps there is too much made of anthro-
pomorphism. Man's first gods were not " hu-
man " gods; they were stars, animals, plants and
the like. It was not until he became an artist
that he made gods after his own form: anthro-
pomorphism is just an artistic convention! For
gods are in their content superhuman. There
has never been a man like Jehovah or Zeus or
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ART AND LITERATURE

Odin. The essential thing in them is that they
embody an ideal, a fiction, adumbrating some-
thing more than Man. Religion is poetry in
the grand style, and, as poetry, must have its
conventions.

139

The Old Poets

In primitive times the poet was far more both
of an inventor and a liar than he is at present.
For many centuries the lies of the poets have
been innocent lies, a convention merely, and to
be recognized as such before " aesthetic " enjoy-
ment can begin. But the lies the old poets told
were believed literally — as they were meant
to be! Yes, the poet at the beginning was just
a liar, a great liar. How else, if he had not
deceived Man, could he have peopled the
heavens with Man's deities? And as the father
of whole familes of gods, he has done more to
decide the fate of Humanity than all the
philosophers, heroes and martyrs. These are
only his servants, who explain war or die for
his fictions. And not merely error, as Nietzsche
held, but lying has from the earliest times been
the most potent factor of progress. But not all
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lying; only the lies told out of great love have
been creative and life-giving. Art, imagination,
prophecy, hallucination, ecstasy, vision — all
these were united in the first poets, the true
creators.

140

The Creator Redivivus

The only modern who has dared to be a poet
through and through, that is, a liar in the noble
and tragic sense, is the author of the Superman.
In Nietzsche, again, after centuries of divine
toying, the poet has appeared in his great role
of a creator of gods, a figure beside whom the
" poet " seems like nothing more than the page
boy of the Muse.

141

Literature as Praise

A. Would you erase from the book of liter-
ature all that is not idealization and myth, you
neo-moderns? Would you deprive us of all the
charming, serious, whimsical, and divinely
frivolous works which are human-all-too-hu-
man? B. If we could — a thousand times no!
We would only destroy what defames Life. All
that praises Life, all that enchants to Life, we
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ART AND LITERATURE

would cherish as things holy. Idealization, it is
true, is the highest form of praise, because it
arises out of Love; but there are other forms.
Modern Realism, however, is a calumny against
Life. Ecrasez I'm fame!

142

The Poet Speaks

How unhappy must all those poor mortals be
who are not poets! They feel and cannot
express. They are dumb when their soul would
utter its divinest thoughts. Cloddish and frag-
mentary, they are scarcely human, these poor
mortals! For one must be a poet to be alto-
gether human. Yes! in the ideal society of the
future every one will be a poet, even the average
man!

143
Myth

The worst evil of our time is this, that there
is nothing greater than the current average exist-
ence to which man can look; Religion has dried
up. Art has decayed from an idealization of life
into a reflection of it. In short. Art has become
a passive thing, where once it was the " great
stimulus to Life." The idealization and en-
— 181 —

r£ MODERNS

chantment which the modems have so carefully
eliminated from it was precisely its raison d'etre.
And modem Art, which sets out to copy life, has
forgotten Art altogether, its origin, its meaning
and its end.

Against this aimless Realism, we must oppose
idealization, and especially that which is its
highest expression. Myth. And let no one say
that it is impossible at this stage in Man's his-
toiy to resuscitate Myth. The past has certainly
lost its mystery for us, and it was in the past,
at the source of Humanity, that the old poets set
their sublime fictions. But the future is still
ours, and there, at Man's goal, our myths must
be planted. And thither, indeed, has set the
great literature of the last hundred years.
Faust, Mephistopheles, Brand, Peer Gynt, Zara-
thustra — there were no greater figures in the
literature of the last century — were all myths,
and all forecasts of the future. The soil out of
which literature grows, then, has not yet been
exhausted! If we but break away from
Realism, if we make Art symbolic, if we bring
about a marriage between Art and Religion, Art
will rise again. That this is possible, we who
have faith in the Future must believe.
— 182 —

CREATIVE LOVE

V

Creative Love

144

Creative Love

To us who nourish hopes for the future of
Man, the important distinction to be drawn in
Love is not that between the sacred and the pro-
fane. We ask, rather. Is our Love creative or
barren? That Love should bring happiness, or
union, or fulfilment, seems to us not such a
very great matter! The will to create some-
thing, out of oneself, not oneself, whether it be
in bodies, or in Art or Philosophy — that is the
thing for ever worthy of our reverence.

There is another Love; that whose end is en-
joyment. It is the enemy of creative Love. It is
the Love which, in various forms, is known as
Liberalism, or Humanitarianism, or the greatest
happiness of the greatest number. Sympathy is
its central dogma; and it is never tired of exalt-
ing itself at the expense of the other Love, which
it calls cruel, senseless and unholy. But the
— 185 —

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same blasphemy is here repeated that Socrates
once was guilty of and afterwards so divinely
atoned. For it is not creative Love, but sympa-
thetic Love, that is unholy. This would spare
the beloved the pangs of love, even if, in doing
so, it had to sacrifice the fruits of love. It
springs from disbelief in existence. Life is suf-
fering, it cries, suffering must be alleviated, and,
therefore, Life must be abated, weakened and
lamed! And this love is barren. But creative
Love does not bring enjoyment, but rapture and
pain. It is the will to suffer gladly; it finds
relief from the pains of existence, not in allevia-
tion, but in creation. This Love is, indeed, a
Siren — we would not mitigate the awfulness
of that symbol — luring Man to peril, perhaps
to shipwreck. Yet, by the holiest law of his
being, he listens, he follows. And, if his ears
have been sealed by reason he unseals them
again, he listens with his very soul, yielding to
that which is for him certainly danger, perhaps
Death, knowing that, even in Death, he will be
affirming Life in the highest. This Love, the
earnest of future greatness, this terrible, un-
conditional and innocent thing, we cannot but
reverence.

— 186 —

CREATIVE LOVE

145

Where Man is Innocent

There is one region in Man where innocence
and a good conscience still reign — in the un-
conscious. Love and the joy in Love are of the
unconscious. The rapture which Love brings is
neither, as Schopenhauer said, merely a device
to ensure the propagation of mankind, nor the
race rejoicing in and through the individual to
its own perpetuation; but the joy of uncon-
scious Man, still innocent as before the Fall,
with a good conscience enjoying the anticipa-
tory rapture of new life. The instincts believe
in Life entirely without questioning; doubt and
guilt are simply not present in their world: it
is reflection that makes sinners of us all.

The thoughts that come to us in the season
of Love — we do not need to search in meta-
physical heavens for their source. They arise
from the very well spring, the very central ego
of Man, out of the unconscious, the innocent, the
real. Poetry, in that which is incomprehen-
sible and mystical in it, arises from this also.
So there is hope still for Man, all ye who believe
not in primal depravity! The real man is even
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now innocent: Original Sin is only mind deep,
conscience deep. The instincts still behave as
if Life-defaming doctrines were not: they have
not yet begun to mourn at the Spring and exult
at the Autumn. And in the ecstasies of creative
Love, whether it be of persons or of things, they
continue to celebrate, without misgiving, their
jubilee.

146

A Criterion

To find out whether a thing is decadent or no,
let us henceforth put this question, Does it spring
from creative Love? Is the Will to suffering in-
carnate in it, or the will to alleviate suffering?
How much must by this standard be condemned!
Humanitarianism and its child, Reform, or the
desire to alleviate others' pain; i^stheticism and
its step-brother. Realism, or the wish to alleviate
one's own: these spring from the same source
— a dearth of Love. For creative Love would
enjoin, not sympathy with suffering, but the will
to transcend suffering; not reform, whose aim
is happiness, but revolution, whose aim is
growth; not Art for Art's sake, an escape from
Life into a stationary aesthetic world, but the
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CREATIVE LOVE

creation, out of Life, of ever new Art; not
Realism or the need to find men interesting;
but idealization, or the desire to make men in-
teresting. John Galsworthy and Oscar Wilde
alike are decadent for this reason, that they lack
Love. The real difference between them is that
the one is a Collectivist, and sympathizes with
the people, and the other is an Individualist, and
sympathizes with himself. But both degrade
Love to the level of Hedonism; both rebel
against the cruelty of Love, desiring a Love
which will not hurt, and, therefore, must be
barren.

But wherever peoples, faiths or arts decay, the
decay of Love — this strong, energetic Love —
has come first. The current frivolousness about
intellectual matters, the philandering of the
literary coquettes, springs simply from a lack of
Love. For the great problems demand passion
for their comprehension, and our intellectuals
dislike passion. In politics and in religion it
is the same: creative Love has everywhere dis-
appeared to be replaced by barren Sympathy.
But is it possible by preaching to increase Love?
Can it be willed into power? Well, praise may
call it forth.

— 189 —

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147

Love at the Renaissance

How may a great creative age like the Re-
naissance be interpreted on the hypothesis of
Love? Shall it yet be found that the mainspring
of the Renaissance was a newly discovered love
of Life and, therefore, of Man?

In the Middle Ages that part of Life, then
called God, had become isolated and abstract,
and was worshipped to the detriment of all
other Life; while Man was neglected where he
was not belittled. Thus, a strong current of
Man's love was diverted away from Man alto-
gether, and the earth became dark and sterile.
How was the earth to recapture its love again,
and drink back into itself its rapture and cre-
ativeness? By a marriage in which God and
the Universe were made one flesh; by the incor-
poration of God into Life, and, therefore, into
Man. Hence arose the Pantheism of the Re-
naissance. To love Life with a good conscience,
to love Life unconditionally, it was necessary to
call Life God. Out of this Love sprang not only
the art but the science of the Renaissance. For
Man once more became interested in himself,
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CREATIVE LOVE

and, from himself, in Life; ultimately dis-
coveries were made and more than one New
World was brought to light.

Perhaps it is the defect of all theistic, objec-
tive theologies that they become, sooner or later,
barren. Only by being translated into the sub-
jective do they regain their creative power:
Pantheism is the remedy for Theism. Yet to
Theism we owe this, that it lent intensity and
elevation to Love. The Love of the Pantheists of
the Renaissance was not ordinary human Love;
it united in a unique emotion the love that had
formerly been given to Man along with that
which had formerly been given to God. It loved
Man as God should be loved — a dangerous
thing. But out of this love of God in Man it
created, nevertheless, something great, some-
what less than the one, somewhat more than the
other — the demi-god. Tlie Renaissance was
the age of the demi-gods.

148

Sympathy

Sympathy is Love bereft of his bow and ar-
rows — but still blind.

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149

A Self-Evident Proposition

This is certain, that God is Love. How, else,
could He have created the Universe?

150

" God is Love "

When Jesus said, " God is Love," He defined
a religion of Becoming. Was it not necessarily
so? For Love is not something which may
choose to create; it must create, it is fundamen-
tally the will and the power to create. And
Eternal Love, or God, is, therefore, eternal cre-
ation, eternal change, eternal Becoming. Con-
sequently, there is no ultimate goal, no Perfec-
tion, except that which is realized at every mo-
ment in the self-expression of Love. A vision?
A nightmare? Well, it depends whether one is
in favour of Life, or of Death; whether one
lives, or is lived. And, therefore, whether re-
ligion is subjective, or objective? Whether God
is within us, or outside us? For so long as God
is within us, we must create. That should be
our Becoming!

192

CREATIVE LOVE

151

Love and Mr. Galsworthy

The art of Mr. Galsworthy is such an am-
biguous thing — half impersonal portrayal, half
, personal plea, the Art pour VArt of a social re-
former — and the subjects he chooses are so
controversial — the abuses of society — that it
is hard to place him as an artist. When " The
Dark Flower " appeared, however, we thought
we had him. Here was a great subject to his
hand, an artist's question at last. Love. Alas!
even in writing about it, he could not altogether
exclude the reformer. Well, that itself, per-
haps, told us something! However that may be,
we do get here Mr. Galsworthy's conception of
Love. It is an inadequate conception, a realist's
conception: Love, with the meaning left out.
The ardours, the longing, the disappointment and
anguish — all the symptoms — of Love are
given; but not a hint that Love has any signifi-
cance beyond the emotions it brings: that which
redeems Love, creation, is ignored altogether!
Mr. Galsworthy has seen that Love is cruel, but
he has not seen beyond the cruelty: it is the ulti-
mate thing to him. Well, that is perhaps the
— 193 —

WE MODERNS

most that could be expected of a humanitarian
trying to comprehend Love! In this book are
all the symptoms of Humanitarianism — pity
for every one, reform of institutions, suffering
always considered the sufficient reason for abol-
ishing or palliating things: a creed thrice inade-
quate, thrice shallow, thrice blind. Love would
find relief from suffering in creation. But one
feels that Mr. Galsworthy would abolish Life if
he could. Humanitarianism unconsciously
seeks the annihilation of Life, for in Life suffer-
ing is integral.

152

Mr, Thomas Hardy

In Mr. Hardy's conception of Love, unlike
Mr. Galsworthy's, the contingency of creation is
never absent; but to him creation is not a justi-
fication of the pangs of Love. It is an intensi-
fication of them; it is Love's last and worst in-
dignity. But even when Love does not bestow
this ultimate insult of creation, it cannot resist
the satisfaction of torturing its victims; it is
wanton and irrelevant in its distribution of pain.
Mr. Hardy's books are filled with the torments
of Love. Was it not fitting that he should aim
— 194 —

CREATIVE LOVE

his main indictment of Life against it, seeing
that it is the trick whereby the blunder of Life
is perpetuated? And so Mr. Hardy is certainly
a decadent; but he is a great decadent — one of
those who by the power of their denial of Life
seem to make Life more profound and tragic,
and inspire the healthy artists to an even greater
love and reverence for it.

He is great, however, not by his theories, but
by his art. The contrast between the sordidness
of his thought and the splendidness of his art
fills us sometimes with amazement. He sets out
in his books to prove that Life is a mean blunder;
and, in spite of himself, the tragedy of this
blunder becomes in his hands splendid and im-
pressive, so that Life is enriched even while it is
defamed. Art, which is necessarily idealization
and glorification, triumphs in him over even his
most deeply founded conscious ideas. In all his
greater books, it refutes his pessimism and turns
his curses into involuntary blessings. So divine
is Art!

153

Mr. George Moore
In writing about Love, Mr. Moore falls into the
— 195-^

WE MODERNS

same realistic error as Mr. Galsworthy: he
writes about its manifestations without knowl-
edge of that which gives them meaning and con-
nection. Love to him is just certain sensations
— and not only Love, but everything else. Art
is a sensation; religion, a sensation; the soul, a
sensation. Take out of his books sensation, and
there will be little of account left. He knows
the religious feeling, but not religion : he always
confounds spirituality with refined sensualism.
So he knows the sensation of Love, but not Love.
But Mr. Moore is learned in the senses: he
knows them in everything but their purity. Yes,
even sensuality is in his books corrupted. How
true this is we realize when in " Evelyn Innes "
he compares one of his characters to a faun.
We are almost distressed at this, for we feel that
the word is not only coarsened, but used with a
wrong meaning altogether: we feel that Mr.
Moore is incapable of understanding what a faun
is! These sophisticated, scented and somewhat
damaged voluptuaries of his, in whose conversa-
tion there is always an atmosphere of expensive
feminine lingerie, and who " know " women so
intimately; how perverted must be the taste
which can compare them with the hardy, nimble,
— 196 —

CREATIVE LOVE

unconscious creatures of ancient Greece! But
Mr. Moore is much nearer in temper to Oscar
Wilde than to the realists. He is an aesthete es-
sentially, and a realist only in the second place,
and only because he is an aesthete. The province
of selected exquisite beauty had been exhausted
by Wilde and his school; so Mr. Moore turned
to the squalid, the commonplace and the diseased
in Life, there to find his " aesthetic emotion."
This explains the curious effect at once of colour
and of drabness in his books. He is a perverted
Wilde; doubly a decadent.

154

Mr. Bernard Shaw

Both the strength and the weakness of Mr.
Shaw spring from a defect — his lack of Love.
Freedom from illusion is his strength. He pos-
sesses common sense minus common sentiment;
that, and probably nothing more; and that gives
to his thought an appearance of subtlety, though
it is not really subtle. Thus, his common sense
tells him that Love is essentially creation. He
sees through the illusions which Love spins round
its purpose, because he does not see these illu-
sions at all. Love, indeed, is known to him in
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WE MODERNS

all but its illusions; but who knows Love that
knows not Love's illusions? Still, it is to his
honour that he has conceived Love as creation.
His weakness consists in that his attitude to Love
is purely intellectual. He lacks Love more than
any other man of his time. In grappling with
the great problems of existence, it is not Love
but the very absence of Love that has been his
most useful weapon; and so he has seen much,
but grasped nothing, created nothing. And be-
cause he has never loved, he can never be called
an artist. For how can one who has not loved
idealize? And how can one who has not ideal-
ized be an artist? In Mr. Shaw, Nature has
gone out of her way to create the very antithesis
of the artist.

What Nietzsche said about Socrates is true
of Mr. Shaw even in a higher degree; that his
reason is stronger than his instincts, and has
usurped the place of his instincts. Without
Love, he yet affirms creation. What can be his
reason for doing so? Why should he wish Life
to persist if he does not love Life? Is it in order
that people might still converse wittily, and the
epigram might not die? Or so that exceptional
men might experience forever the joy of intel-
— 198 —

CREATIVE LOVE

lectual conflict, the satisfaction found in the ruth-
less exposure of fallacy and weakness, and the
proud feeling of mental power? We know that
Mr. Shaw regards the brain as an end — the pur-
pose of Life being to perfect a finer and finer
brain — and we know, too, that to Mr. Shaw the
highest joy the brain can experience is not that
of knowing, but of fighting. Knowledge to him
is a weapon with which to wage war. Does he
desire Life to continue so that controversy might
continue? Well, let us look, then, for some
other reason for his praise of Love. He him-
self lacks Love: — Can it be that he praises it
for the same reason for which the Christian
praises what he is not but would fain be? And
his love of Love is then something pathetic,
founded on " unselfishness "? And himself, a
Romantic?

155

Mr. H. G. Wells

How much has Mr. Wells's scientific training
had to do with his conception of Love? As a
student of biology, it was natural he should see
Love as sex. In all his theories, indeed, there is
more of the scientist than of the artist. Scien-
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WE MODERNS

tific certainly, is his simple acceptance of sex
as a fact, and his unhesitating association of it
with generation, and of both with Love. The in-
nocence of the scientist and not of the artist is
his, an innocence Darwinian, not Goethean.
And so, although his purpose is fine — to restore
in his books an innocent conception of sexual
Love — in doing so, his biology always runs
away with his art. For he would render sex
significant by reading it into all creation, as the
meaning of creation; thus making the instru-
ment more than the agent, the very meaning of
the agent! But this robs both creation and sex
of their significance. The way to restore an in-
nocent conception of sexual Love is by reading
creation into it, by seeing it as part of the univer-
sal Becoming, by carrying it away on the great
purifying stream of Becoming. In spite of his
genius, and still more of his cleverness, Mr.
Wells here began at the wrong end. But it is
doubtful whether any one in this generation has
sufficient artistic power and elevation to express
in art this conception of Love. Within the
limts of Realism, especially of " physiological
Realism," it certainly cannot be expressed.
Nothing less than the symbolic may serve for it.
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CREATIVE LOVE

156

The Idealism of Love

The writer who discovered that love idealizes
the object might have pushed his discovery a
little further; for it is no less true that love
idealizes the subject. None knows better than
the poets how to take advantage of this self-
idealization: one has only to read their love
poems to find out how much more is said about
the poet's beautiful feelings than about the object
which presumably evoked them. Heine, par-
ticularly, was a shameless offender in this way.
A woman was to him simply an excuse for seeing
himself in imagination in a romantic attitude.
But even with the others who appear less obtru-
sive and more disinterested the implication is the
same. How elevated and even divine we must
be, they seem to say, when we can feel in this
manner; and how happy, when we are privi-
leged to love an object of such loveliness! Yes!
love has such power that it idealizes everything
— even the subject!

157

Love and Becoming

The great Heraclitus propounded the doctrine
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of Becoming. Everything changes, is built up
and dissolved; " stability " is only a little slug-
gishness in the flux of things. Zeus, the great
child, the divine artist, constructs and destroys
at his pleasure and for his amusement: all the
worlds are his playthings. This conception of
the Universe is innocent and beautiful, an artist's
conception; but it is at the same time terrifying.
And that because all meaning is left out of it;
for all things without meaning, no matter how
beautiful they may be, are in the end terrifying.
Nietzsche, the modem counterpart of Heracli-
tus, re-affirmed this doctrine; but he coupled
with it the idea of creative Love: that is his
chief distinction. Certainly, those who do not
comprehend Nietzsche's Love do not comprehend
Nietzsche. It is the key to his religion of Be-
coming. Becoming without Love is meaning-
less; Love without Becoming is meaningless.
But, united, each gives its meaning to the other,
each redeems the other. But have things a
meaning in themselves? Is it not Man that
forever interprets and interprets? Very well.
But is not a thing incomplete without its interpre-
tation? Is not its interpretation a part of it?
— 202 —

CREATIVE LOVE

158

Static Values

Stagnant waters become noisome after a while.
And stagnant values? Certainly within these
eternal pools not a few repulsive things have
been bom: in Perfection, Sin; in Justice, Guilt.
It was when human judgments were apotheosized
and became Eternal Justice that guilt was insinu-
ated into the core of Life. A falsehood, a pre-
sumption! What man found necessary at one
moment in his history for his preservation, that,
forsooth, was a law governing the spheres, the
everlasting edict of God Himself. And when
Life did not operate in conformity with this law,
it was Life that must needs be guilty — a very
ingenious method of world-vilification! It was
human vanity that created the eternal verities.
And how much have we suffered from them!
For the deification of Things meant the diaboli-
zation of Man, nay, of Life itself. The meta-
physician who created Heaven created Hell at
the self -same moment; but, ever since, it has
been Hell that has given birth to the metaphysi-
cians. Being condemns Becoming, and pollutes
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all Life with sin. So in the pools of Being we
can no longer cleanse ourselves, and our pref-
erence for a doctrine of Becoming may be at
bottom a hygienic preference.

159

The God of Becoming

Love is the God of Becoming. All the other
gods are static gods, changeless for yesterday,
today and tomorrow. But Love belongs alto-
gether to the future. It is the deity of those who
would create a future.

160

Utopias

It is sympathy that has built the Utopias. On
every one of them is written, " Conflict and suf-
fering are bad." Utopia is nothing but a place
where men are happy, like how many heavens,
an ideal of exhaustion. The thing that is
omitted from it is always Love, for Love would
shatter all Utopias and leave them behind. In
Nowhere Man no longer creates, but enjoys.
But creation and pain go hand in hand; for
what is creation? The dissolution of the out-
worn, the birth of the new; a continuous fury
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CREATIVE LOVE

in which the throes of death and of life are
mingled. And Love calls Man to that fate.

What we need is an ideal of energy. But that
must needs be an ideal of Man, not of Society;
for Man is the dynamic. Society the static.
Utopia is a goal, but the Superman is a goal be-
yond a goal; for, once attained, he is naught but
the arrow to shoot into his future. To attain the
Superman is to surpass the Superman. Only
ideals of this kind are unassailable by Love.

161

" Primacy of Things "

If we aim at a state of society in which static
values, as far as we can know them, are con-
formed with, we aim at a state in which the
creative impulse will not only be needless, but
harmful. For does not belief in absolute values
necessarily imply belief in a Utopia? And
therefore in something antagonistic to Love?
The metaphor of static Perfection, lovely as it is,
has perhaps ruled us too long, and it is time we
superseded it by another. Or is it still, as it
has always been, a crime to substitute one meta-
phor for another? Even if it is Love that drives
us on?

— 205 —

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Progress conceived as a discovery of the un-
known instead of as a pursuit of Perfection —
might not that take us a long way? Did
Nietzsche, perhaps, create his Superman, and
give him his hardness and lightness for no other
purpose than to carry out that task? Perfec-
tion is something that we have yet to discover!
In this conception of progress all Utopias are
transcended, all goals renounced, yet a set of
values, a morality, is retained. The morality
might be judged by the criterion. Does it aid us
in our quest? A future of discovery, of cre-
ation and change, not of enjoyment: what a task
for energetic Love does that open out! The
Superman is a goal, but what is the Superman's
goal? The Superman is something that must
be surpassed!

162

Perfection

When men write largely of Perfection, as if
it were a concept every one could understand,
we are entitled to ask what exactly they mean.
Do they mean a sort of synthesis or hotchpotch
of the virtues in which they believe? Does X
believe in a Christian and Y in a Nietzschean per-
— 206 —

CREATIVE LOVE

fection? As a rule, conceptions of Perfection
are offshoots of the morality prevalent at any
given time. And, for action, people's concep-
tion of Perfection is much more important than
Perfection itself. Therefore, let us ceaselessly
repeat. Perfection is something still to be dis-
covered! As for the current conception, is con-
flict an ingredient in it, or rest? Is it an ideal
of Life, or a thing impossible, self -contradictory,
static, an eternal stick with which to chastise
existence? The first question to be asked.

163

Goals

When people speak of the unthinkableness of
eternal Becoming which has no goal in Being,
what they express is their longing for rest. It
is unendurable, they feel, that Life, creation,
change, should travel on their way forever: at
the very thought their minds become tired, and
Being is conjured up. Hitherto, our goals have
not been resting stages, but eternal termini.
But a true goal should not be a cul-de-sac, but
the peak from which to descry our next goal.
And so on eternally? Well, why not? Finality
was bom when the mind became weary at the
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thought of eternal ascent and found refuge in that
of eternal rest. We have not fully learned yet
how to live: struggle is still with us an argu-
ment against Life. What we need is perhaps a
few re-incarnations! When we have learned to
live, however, we shall welcome struggle as a
necessary part of Life, and Becoming will be as
desirable to us as Being now. And not till then
shall we be fit for immortality.

164

Love and Sympathy

Lov 5 and Hatred are not the true opposites,
but Love and Sympathy. Love is creation, that
is to say, strife: a battle between the inanimate
not yet dead, and the living still unborn. And
it is also, therefore, the hatred of the one for the
other? True, this hatred may not be of individ-
uals but of things; but does that make it any
more harmless? It is na'ive democratic preju-
dice to think that hatred of things is less wicked
than hatred of individuals; the very opposite is
the case! The former is a thousand times more
dangerous and destructive than the latter, which,
indeed, is little more than an idiosyncrasy.
Hatred is contained in and is an aspect of Love;
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CREATIVE LOVE

it is Love seen as destruction. Well, only Love
has a right to Hatred, for only Love can create.
Sympathy, however, would maintain in exist-
ence what should be dead, and would bid what
should be living remain forever unborn. For
in death and in birth alike there is pain. Sym-
pathy — that is. Sympathy with the necessary
suffering of existence — is a far greater danger
than Hatred.

165

The Humanitarians

Hatred only to things, not to men; Love only
to men, not to things: the formula of the half-
and-half.

166

Love and the Virtues

Love is the mother of all the harder virtues,
and that because she requires them. For how
without them could she suffer to create, and
endure the pain of Becoming? Everything
dynamic must become virtuous. The soft,
hedonistic, and degenerate in morality, however,
arise from Sympathy. Sympathy needs the
comfortable virtues; it seeks the static, for
— 209 —

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movement is pain, and pain, of the devil — if
Sympathy will admit a devil! Its virtues are all
in bad training.

167
The Other Side

He ceaselessly groaned that he was weary of
life and wished to be rid of it; but all the time
it was life that wished to be rid of him.

168

Love and Danger

The fear that danger might perish — the im-
mortal fear of Nietzsche — need cause us no
anxiety, could we but believe that creative Love
will continue to exist. For Love is the great
source of danger, and of the heroic in action and
thought. If military wars were to disappear
from the earth, danger need not be diminished;
it might become emancipated and voluntary: it
might be raised from a common necessity to an in-
dividual task. Perhaps in the distant future na-
tions will become more pacific, men more war-
like ; peace will be maintained among nations in
order that individuals may have a free arena in
which to carry on their great contests — " with-
out powder," as Nietzsche said. The battles,
— 210 —

CREATIVE LOVE

born of Love, of the Brands and Zarathustras,
not those of the Napoleons : that is what creative
Love would envisage! But this prophecy has
not sufficient foundation as yet, alas, to be called
even a conjecture!

169

Fellowship and Love

Fellowship is of two kinds: that which is in-
spired by Sympathy, and that which is an expres-
sion of Love. Men unite for the mere satis-
faction which union brings, or for that which is
found in the struggle for more remote things —
an aspiration or a vision. This latter thing, im-
practical and paradoxical, which lends Man
what nobility he has — it was Love that gave it
to him. Fellowship is the sublime attempt to
complete the figure of Man. My friend is he
who possesses the qualities which I lack and
most need: in that sense, he creates me. Fel-
lowship should enrich all who partake of it, make
their highest qualities productive, and throw
bridges over the chasms of their defects. But
the association of men for mere enjoyment is
not worthy the name of Friendship. Sympathy
is its parent.

— 211 —

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170

The Paradox

It is possible to live nobly without Happiness,
but not without Love. Love, however, confers
the highest happiness. Is it because Love is in-
different to Happiness that Happiness flutters
around it, and caresses it with its wings?

171

Moral Indignation

We should altogether eschew moral censorious-
ness in our contemplation of Life, for it is
merely destructive. To destroy that which we
cannot re-create in a better form is a crime.
Only Love should condemn, for only Love can
create. To bring the good into existence, or
prepare the way of those who can create the good
— that should be our only form of condemna-
tion. In what consists the passion of the moral
fanatic? In respect for the law, that it should
not be violated. So he would extirpate what-
ever does not conform, even though thus he
should destroy all life, and have no power to
create it anew. No wonder he is gloomy; the
vulture is not a bird of cheerful mien.
— 212 —

CREATIVE LOVE

172

Morality and Love

Into what a dilemma falls the poor lover of life
who goes to make the choice of morality! He
sees that both great types of morality, the hu-
manitarian and the military, the Hedonistic and
the Spartan, lead in the end to Nihilism, the one
by liquefying, the other by hardening. The
former becomes too sensitive to endure Life ; the
latter, too insensible to feel it. Yet they were
to serve Life; but they soon forgot the purpose
for which they were formed ; they exalted them-
selves as something higher than Life; they be-
come " absolute," and a stumbling-block to exist-
ence. And this was because they were not
founded in the beginning upon the very principle
of Life, which is Love, but upon accidentals.
The conflict between Morality and Love has ac-
cordingly been a conflict between the forces of
Death and of Life: for " works " without Love
are dead. Morality should be but the discipline
which Love imposes upon itself in order to cre-
ate. It should crown all the virtues which op-
pose a gallant and affirmative coimtenance to suf-
fering and change, such as heroism, fortitude,
— 213 —

WE MODERNS

joy, temperance. This morality is the antithesis
of the humanitarian morality sprung from Sym-
pathy.

173

Paradise Regained

If Life is but an expression of creative Love,
then a morality founded upon Love must be the
only true morality. And, moreover, in it ethics
and the instincts are reconciled; innocence is
grasped.

174

Love and Knowledge

If in all Life there is change, creation. Becom-
ing, and if in our lives we know these things
only in the interpretation of them which we call
Love, must not Love be a necessary part of our
knowledge of Life? Observation, investigation
and the weighing of results may tell us much
about Life, and show it to us in many aspects,
but it does not give us immediate knowledge. Is
it possible to know Life? If Life be the expres-
sion of Love ! Upon that " if " depends

everything. For if it is justified, then we have

within us the clue to the riddle of existence.

— 214 —

CREATIVE LOVE

Perhaps here we discern the faint struggling for
birth of that undiscovered faculty of the mind
of which men speak. The comprehension of
Life through Love! The profoundest of intui-
tions? The maddest of dreams?

175

Proverb and Commentary

Love is blind, but it is with excess of light.

176

Bad Thoughts

She was as perfect as a drop of dew or a beam
of light; a pure thought of God, delicate, spon-
taneous and finished. There was nothing mis-
shapen in body or soul; Love did well to create
such a being. But the others, the crooked,
blind and defiled ! Are these the bad thoughts of
God? From whence do they come? Whither
do they go? Conceived in darkness, born for
destruction?

177

Love and Sympathy

We must not think of Love as a mere concept.
For it is something more real than Life itself:
— 215 —

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the very Life of Life, the very soul of Becoming.
It is a force both spiritual and physical, but tran-
scending the distinction of spiritual and physical.
We must not conceive Love as a thing akin to
Sympathy. It is not humanitarian or even hu-
man; it is a force as unsullied by humanity as
the mountain winds or the tides of the ocean.
Nevertheless, it is within Man, just as it is within
the stars and seas; a great creative, destructive,
transforming and purifying force; beyond Good
and Evil as the dew and the lightning are. This
is the power that is known by Man in his mo-
ments of love. He is then free to create and
enjoy, as if he were re-born, with a will new,
joyful and innocent. But seldom does he attain
this knowledge: his moments of exultation are
brief. Yet Love has not on that account lost any
of its potence. Man may decay and become
corrupt; but Love remains unalterable, forever
pure, incapable of corruption.

178

Multum in Parvo

You are but a drop in the ocean of Life.
True: but it is in the ocean of Life!

216 —

CREA TIVE LOVE

179

Love and the Senses

When one loves, the distinction between soul
and body is passed. In Love alone is the dream
of Goethe, Heine, and the moderns realized:
here the reconciliation of the spirit and the senses
is celebrated in perfect innocence. For Love ir-
radiates and makes fragrant the body in which it
dwells, and raises it aloft to sit by its brother the
soul.

180

Love and Innocence

Life takes us back to its bosom when we love.
The heavens, the earth and the race of men no
longer appear things external and hostile, against
which we must arm ourselves. We return from
exile in personality; our thought sweeps to the
farthest horizons, and plunges into the deepest
gulfs of existence, at home in all places. The
" external " is no longer external: we contem-
plate it from the inside, we gaze through its
eyes. For the very principle of Life, of which
all living things are the expression, has been ap-
prehended by us. Our personality has been
— 217 —

WE MODERNS

emancipated. This feeling of universal compre-
hension is called Innocence.

181

Love and the Fall

Has the fable of the Fall still another inter-
pretation for us? Was the Fall of Man the fall
from Love? When the feeling of universal com-
prehension was lost, personality in the individu-
alistic sense arose. And Sin was the child of
this Individualism. To the first man bereft of
Love, the earth assumed a terrible mien; nature
glared at him with a million baleful eyes : he be-
came an outcast in his home. No longer know-
ing the earth or other men, he experienced terror,
hatred and despair. To protect himself against
existence, he created Love's substitute, morality.
And with morality arose sin, and perished in-
nocence.

182

Love and its Object

Nietzsche's psychology was wrong when he
spoke of Love as a narrowly egoistic thing isolat-
ing two people and making them indifferent to
every one else. There is too much of the philos-
— 218 —

CREATIVE LOVE

opher and too little of the psychologist in this
observation. For mankind cannot be loved, Life
cannot be loved, until One has been loved. Only-
lovers can generate such wealth of life that it
overflows, enriching their friends, their enemies,
all the world. To love one is to love all.

183

Freedom in Love

In true love there is a feeling of entire free-
dom. Is it because the lovers have by a divine
chance found their true path, have become a pulse
in the very heart of Life? If Love is the prin-
ciple of Life, then in Love alone is perfect free-
dom. Ethics and instinct become one. This is
the road that leads beyond good and evil: Man
must learn to love.

184

Love and the Sensualists

On those who affirm Life as innocent and holy,
there is an obligation laid. Their lives must be
innocent: Life must be to them a sustained act
of worship. How many of them have been lack-
ing just here! Heine failed, in spite of his real
nobility. Goethe, however, attained unity and
— 219 —

E MODERNS

sincerity; and Neitzsche was a figure of beauti-
ful integrity and innocence. They were neither
of them mere " writers." Nor must we be:
there is upon us the compulsion to prove that a
life of innocence is possible. And as a first step,
we must separate ourselves from those who, be-
fore they have sought innocence, praise the
senses. For they confuse and defile everything.

185

Free Will

Only those who have knowledge of Becoming
can know what the freedom of the will is. Free-
dom — that is to will Becoming with all its suf-
fering, voluntarily to go on the way which Fate
and the highest Life direct us. Slavery — that
is to deny Becoming, to cling to the static, and
to be dragged along the stream of change. To
be dragged, not to remain stationary; for men
by taking thought cannot gain immunity from
change. Their will and their desires avail them
nothing. For the stream of Becoming is un-
changeable in its power. It is Man that changes.
When he affirms Becoming, he is enlarged; when
he denies it, he is straitened.

— 220 —

CREATIVE LOVE

186

Tragedy, Life and Love

In the highest Life two qualities are always to
be found together, exuberance and suffering.
Life is founded on this paradox, which is funda-
mental; for in the emotion of Love we are most
conscious of it. Love is the most joyful and
most suffering thing: its plenitude of joy is so
great that it can endure gladly the worst griefs.
And tragedy is the truest expression in art of
Life and of Love; for its characteristic, too, is
a Joy triumphing over Fate.

221 —

THE TRAGIC VIEW

VI

The Tragic View

187

Life as Expression

Schopenhauer interpreted life as the expres-
sion of a Will to Live. Nietzsche showed with
profound truth that beneath this will there was
something more fundamental, the Will to Power.
Have we here got to the foundation, or shall we
find that underlying the Will to Power there is
something more fundamental still? Why do all
living things strive for power? Is it, indeed,
power that they desire in their striving, power
for the sake of power? That which everything
by a law of its being searches for is expression:
the Will to Power is merely an outcome of that
search. For seeing that the sun of created Life
is split up into individuals, related and yet
diverse, the expression of one unit is bound to
collide with that of another, and the outcome is a
— 225 —

WE MODERNS

conflict. Life, therefore, is essentially some-
thing that injures itself, and injures itself the
more the more powerful it is; in a word, Life
is essentially tragic. Most people, however, live
in illusion, knowing nothing of this. The philos-
ophers, and, before them, the priests, were those
who perceived that Life was of this nature; but,
alas, from the truth they drew the immediate and
not the more profound conclusion. They sought,
unconscious Hedonists, a palliative for Life, and
contemned expression, which they saw was the
cause of suffering. These were the creators of
that morality which has prevailed to our own day;
a morality antagonistic to Life, anti-tragic, nega-
tive. All the systems which have been created
in this way are colossal panaceas and remedies:
they are not fundamental.

There were others, however, who saw as the
priests did that Life was tragic, but who at the
same time affirmed it. These were the tragic
poets. They were more deeply versed in Life
than the priests : tragic art is more profound than
morality. For morality is based on the belief
that man desires above everything else Happi-
ness. But Tragedy has perceived that this is not
so. Man will express himself, it proclaims,
226

THE TRAGIC VIEW

whatever the outcome, whether it be joy or suf-
fering.

Since then morality has sunk deep into Life,
and there is now ahnost a second instinct in man
striving against expression. Consequently there
are many existences passed without expression;
sometimes even in a resolute struggle against it,
as in the case of innumerable religious men and
ascetics. To some men it seems that their spirit
has been lying frozen and dead within them,
until one day an influence touches them, and they
feel an imperious desire to express themselves,
to create. This influence is nothing else than
Love, which is the desire for expression itself.
When its rule is recognized and obeyed Life
reaches its highest degree of joy and of pain,
and becomes creative. This is the state which is
glorified by the tragic poets. To those who
affirm, it is the highest condition of Life.

188

" Self -Expression "

Self-expression is something infinitely more

subtle than the modems conceive. This man

studied to express himself: he investigated his

ego, and thereby cut himself off^ from Life more

227

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completely than any anchorite, for the anchorite
had at least heaven in addition to himself. This
neo-anchorite, however, turned his eyes deliber-
ately inward and strove to find expression for
what he discovered there, but for nothing more.
Thus he became his own prison. Eventually he
turned out an aesthete.

This other man found that his thoughts and
desires flew away from him as irrevocably as a
flock of wild birds and became lost or strangers.
He seemed constrained to express everything not
himself, everything foreign, remote and as ex-
alted; but in the end he discovered that it was
himself he had expressed. " Thy true being,"
said Nietzsche, " lies not deeply hidden in thee,
but an infinite height above thee, or at least above
that which thou dost commonly take to be thy-
self."

189

Life as a Value

Those who say that the belief in Life as a
value is not a belief which will arouse the heroic
passions and make men die for it, use a form of
reasoning, at any rate, which is erroneous. They
first confuse the ideal of more complete exist-
228

THE TRAGIC VIEW

ence with the more complete existence of an in-
dividual, and then demonstrate that this individ-
ual will not lay down his life for the sake of his
more complete existence! But Life as an ideal
is just as impersonal as any other ideal, whether
it be Justice or Perfection or Renunciation.
True, it has not yet become static, but on that
account its attraction is only the stronger; it
arouses our very love. And men will die for
what they love : they will die for Life.

190

HebbeVs Theory of Tragedy

Hebbel's theory of Tragedy is noble and pro-
found. Not in the misdirection of wills does
he find the source of the tragic, but in the core of
the will itself, in the inexorable expression and
collision of wills. This conception raises
Tragedy from a mere consequence and punish-
ment of sin to an expression of Life itself, to
the most profound and essential expression of
Life. And this is just and worthy of Tragedy.
For the character of Tragedy is not negative and
condemnatory, but deeply affirmative and joyous.
How shallow then must be the theories which
would deny Tragedy to the good, to those whose
229

WE MODERNS

wills are highly directed! Tragedy is not a
punishment. The more noble man becomes the
more tragic he will also become.

191

Tragic Philosophy

The belief, against which Nietzsche declaimed,
that Reason brings Happiness has become to the
modern man second nature, so that now the no-
tions of Reason and Happiness are indissolubly
connected in his mind. Any argument for a
tragic view of Life must therefore appear, first
of all, unreasonable; for Happiness as an end is
the only reason that will be acknowledged. It
remains for us to show that Happiness is itself
unreasonable, an impossibility, a chimera.
There is no Happiness as an end. Reason does
not bring Happiness, nor does virtue, nor does
asceticism, nor does comfort. Happiness is an
accident. And not even a modem can make ac-
cidents happen !

To this modern world, with its belief in Hap-
piness, Nietzsche was bound to appear unreason-
able, for he brought with him not only a tragic
conception of Life, but a tragic philosophy. A
tragic philosophy — the marriage of Knowledge
230

THE TRAGIC VIEW

and Tragedy: nothing could have seemed more
irrational to modern Europe than that!

192

Tragedy and Arguments

Those who desire to restore a tragic concep-
tion of Life should not use these arguments: that
Happiness is a condition which, if it were possible
of realization, would become intolerable, pro-
ducing its opposite, unhappiness; or that only
when the individual renounces Happiness does
Happiness become his. These are the statements
of a Hedonism once removed. The argument
for the tragic view should be founded on consid-
erations altogether irrelevant to Happiness. It
should not care enough about Happiness even to
disdain it.

193

Morality and Happiness

Philosophers have from the beginning acknowl-
edged that Happiness is not won by seeking for
it, but by striving for other things. This, how-
ever, has not prevented them from proclaiming
Happiness as the goal of Man and as the deliber-
ate object of ethics. Contradiction upon contra-
231

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diction! If the individual cannot by taking
thought capture Happiness, is it conceivable that
a community can, or the human race, in toto?
To throw a net round this mirage compounded of
desire and fancy — surely Reason was itself the
most unreasonable thing to attempt that. And,
after all, does Man desire Happiness? Tragedy
denies it.

194

End or Effect

One may possess all the virtues save Love, and
remain unhappy. Love, however, brings Hap-
piness with it as the sun brings light. Is Happi-
ness, then, the end of morality? Or an effect of
Love?

195

Superiority

In order to despise enjoyment, one need only
be supremely happy or supremely wretched.

196

Beauty and Tragedy

In every beautiful face there is nobility,
strength and a touch of sadness — the seal of
232

THE TRAGIC VIEW

tragedy is upon it. To make Life beautiful,
then, would be to make it tragic? Nay, rather
let us say that to make Life tragic is to make it
beautiful. Supreme beauty is but the expression
in which are comprised in a miracle of unity the
sorrow and the joy of Tragedy. For in the most
radiant manifestation of Beauty there is a brood-
ing solemnity; in the most sorrowful there is
triumph.

197

Experimenting in Life

The aim of the aesthetes was without enduring
Tragedy to enjoy Beauty. To that end they de-
vised their creed of experimentation in Life: they
wished to know all the joys of the soul and of the
senses without inconvenience to themselves.
Perceiving that Love and Beauty bring suffering
in their train, they decided to take the initiative
against them, in other words, to " experience "
them. All they experienced, however, was —
their experiences. That, indeed, was all they de-
sired : their " experimenting in Life " was escap-
ing from Life. Without the courage to accept
Life with the Dionysians or to renounce it with
the ascetics, they hit upon the plan of stealing
233

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a march upon it. Well, it was certainly not upon
Life that they stole a march!

198

Christian and Dionysian

The Christian and the Dionysian are both of
them step-children and solutions of Pessimism.
A gloomy and realistic view of the world was
necessary before either of them could be born.
In Christianity Pessimism was translated into
symbols. " Original Sin " and " transgression
against God " — these were the theological
counterparts of the pessimist's " suffering," " the
tyranny of the Will." How did Christinaity find
relief from this fundamental pessimism? By a
pathetic illusion in which mankind were trans-
formed into erring children, who, however, were
forgiven by an indulgent Father. Here suffer-
ing was still an argument against Life, and a pal-
liative was sought and found. The Dionysian,
however, affirmed Life in the very tragicality of
its aspect, and, by so doing, achieved a victory
over it. In short, to the Dionysian Life is a
tragedy; to the Christian it is a pathetic tale with
a happy ending.

234

THE TRAGIC VIE

199

History of the Dionysian

In the beginning he possessed innocence: the
world appeared to him as beautiful, Man as good,
and the future as immeasurable. The great il-
lusion of Rousseau was his — a " natural man "
himself, believing in the " natural man," a ro-
manticist, a credulous, not too sincere, " beau-
tiful " soul — a youth with the qualities of youth.
But a day came when unwillingly and painfully
his soul forced his eyes open and compelled them
to look, and he saw without illusion; the cruelty
beneath smiling Appearance, the red claw, and
conscienceless, inappeasable appetite. Looking
at Man he found him a powerless little creature,
condemned to a few years in this world, cut off
by Death, and even during his life circumscribed
by invincible limitation. Nevertheless, this man
disdained to hide his head in the sands of il-
lusion; and immediately he became altogether
more worthy of respect, more real, almost sub-
lime. A noble resignation to Life now charac-
terized him; the classical writers, especially the
Greeks with their naturalistic pessimism, seemed
to him the highest thing; and he accepted the
235

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theory of Original Sin. All honour to him when
he reached, after a painful journey, this spare
but real conclusion! All honour to this pes-
simist who would not deceive himself!

One day, however, the thought came to him,
" Even if pain and necessity be the truths of
Life! There is something within me which can
turn these, also, to account! I can transfigure
them. Pain, Struggle, Change — these will no
longer enslave me; for these shall be my slaves! "
At that moment he became a Dionysian: he had
turned the corner of pessimism, and had gained
freedom. Original Sin was no longer true for
him; for a new truth had dawned in whose light
the old was quenched.

From an illusive freedom in the beginning,
through bondage to necessity, to a new freedom
— the history of the Dionysian. The pessimist
is more profound than the " natural man," but
the Dionysian is the most profound of all. He
burrows deeper than pessimism itself; he grows,
the most happy of men, out of the very soil of
pessimism.

236

THE TRAGIC VIEW

200

Tragic Affirmation

To feel happy at this moment — is not that to
approve of your whole life, of its suffering, con-
flict, ennui and scepticism no less than its vic-
tories and festivals? This moment is what it is
by virtue of these experiences; justify it and you
justify them. The physical agony which left
its mark upon you; the anguish of bereavement
and of disillusionment; the cynicism with which
you consoled yourself; the years when you lived
altogether bereft of hope; your most profound
and most petty thoughts and actions; your mean-
est, bitterest and noblest experiences: all these
are unconsciously affirmed in your affirmation
of this moment. Let them be affirmed con-
sciously! Or is your soul afraid to go as far
as your will? Looking back now with new eyes
over your life, you find that precisely what you
cannot do is to repent — least of all of your
sins and griefs! For to repent is to will Life
to be other than Life, and essentially not to af-
firm.

He who contemplates his life thus, perhaps
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WE MODERNS

understands for the first time what is the mean-
ing of Tragedy.

201

Mastery and Tragedy

The desire of Man to subjugate Nature and
Fate and obtain mastery over his resources —
perhaps it is as well that tliis is meantime unat-
tainable! For Man's spirit is not yet noble
enough for him to use his power aright : he would
use it, if he could grasp it now, as a means to
Happiness! Our first duty is to fight the idea
of Happiness, to make Man tragic. Once Man
wills Tragedy, however, the more mastery he
acquires the better.

202

The Hidden Faculty

When we speak hopefully of the discovery of
still undiscovered faculties in Man, to what do
we look forward? In plain terms, how do we
expect this faculty to be of use to us? In bring-
ing about Happiness? It is almost a tragedy —
it is a tragedy without the nobility — that in
our time the most beautiful, heroic and powerful
things have to bow their heads and become slaves
238

THE TRAGIC VIEW

to this weak and pathetic tyrant, Happiness.
Should we then oppose the addition of one more
divine power to the imprisoned? Well, a hope
consoles us. For the discovery of a new faculty
in Man will not make him more happy, but
simply more powerful; his self-expression in ac-
tion will be the more complete ; the essential con-
flict of Life will be magnified; Life will become
more tragic. So think well, you votaries of
Happiness, before you bring to life another
power of the tragic creature, Man. Far better
for your ends if you could but succeed in killing
some of those he already possesses. But have
you not sometimes tried to do that?

203

The Other Side

And yet Man cannot create without Happi-
ness. The soul that lives in shadow becomes
unhealthy and sterile: sunshine is after all the
great health-bringing and fructifying thing.
Happiness does make a man nobler; more ready
to generosity and heroism; more careless of en-
joyment. Happiness! But what is Happiness?
The Happiness that is essential to the best life is
a state of the soul: this is doubtless that which
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WE MODERNS

Goethe and Heine praised. But the other, the
Happiness of the utilitarian, is an effect of cal-
culated action, the reward of a sort of ethical
thrift. The first, however, is independent of
calculation, and even a little scornful of it; for
in its confidence and plenitude it dares to put
out on the gloomiest seas. It is not unrelated
to Love, this effect of an affirmative attitude to
Life. When people praise Happiness, how one
desires to believe it is this that they praise.

204

The Two Species

The few have a conception of Life different
from that of the many. To the latter still per-
tain such notions as " do as you would be done
by," and so forth. They understand a morality
but not the end of morality. The few, however,
who understand both the morality and the reason
for it, who have a conception of Life more diffi-
cult and unyielding, seem to the many cold and
a little inhuman. The lives of the latter, on the
other hand, appear to the few as a naively happy,
narrow and absurd form of existence.

240

THE TRAGIC VIEW

205

Nietzsche

What was Nietzsche, that subtlest of modern
riddles? First, a great tragic poet: it was by a
divine accident that he was at the same time a
profound thinker and the deepest psychologist.
But his tragic affirmative was the core of his
work, of which thought and analysis were but
outgrowths. Without it, his subtlety might have
made him another Pascal. The Will to Power,
which makes suffering integral in Life; the Order
of Rank whereby the bulk of mankind are
doomed to slavery; the Superman himself, that
most sublime child of Tragedy; and the last af-
firmation, the Eternal Recurrence: these are the
conceptions of a tragic poet. It is, indeed, by
virtue of his tragic view of Life that Nietzsche is
for us a force of such value. For only by means
of it could modern existence, sunk in scepticism,
pessimism and the greatest happiness of the
greatest number, be re-created.

For the last two centuries Europe has been
under the domination of the concept of Happi-
ness as progress. Altruism, the ideology of the
greatest happiness of the greatest number, al-
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WE MODERNS

truism as a means of universalizing Happiness,
was preached in the eighteenth century; until
after a while it was seen by such clear-sighted
observers as Voltaire that men did not obey this
imperative of altruism; therefore they were con-
demned: the moral indignation of the eighteenth
century, the century of censoriousness par ex-
cellence, was the result. First, an impossible
morality was demanded, and for the attainment
of an unattainable ideal; then Man was con-
demned because he failed to comply with it, be-
cause he was Man. Thus in the end the ideal of
the greatest happiness worked out in pessimism:
Life became hideous and, worst of all, immoral,
to the utilitarian, when it was seen that altruism
and happiness are alike impossible. Schopen-
hauer is here the heir of Voltaire: the moral
condemnation of the one has become in the other
a condemnation of Life itself, more profound,
more poetical, more logical. Altruism has in
Schopenhauer deepened into Pity; for Pity is
altruism bereft of the illusion of Happiness.

How was Man to avoid now the almost inevi-
table bourne of Nihilism? By renouncing alto-
gether Happiness as a value; by restoring a con-
ception of Life in which Happiness was neither
242

THE TRAGIC VIEW

a positive nor a negative standard, but something
irrelevant, an accident: in short, by setting up a
tragic conception of Life. This was the task
of Nietzsche: in how far he succeeded how can
we yet say?

206

Again

Nietzsche loved not goodness but greatness:
the True, the Great and the Beautiful. Was not
this the necessary corollary of his aesthetic evalu-
ation of Life?

207

Sacrifices

" The first of the first fruits of thy land thou
shalt bring into the house of the Lord thy God."

Thus spoke the oldest reverence. We should
not scoff at this feeling but rather try to under-
stand it; for it is only too rare in our time.
What was its meaning to the rulers of Israel?
Gratitude, a beautiful, affirmative thing. To en-
rich Life with our highest gifts, which we freely
offer in thanksgiving for what Life has given
us, — that should be our form of sacrifice. And
we should perform it gladly, with festive, over-
243

IfE MODERNS

flowing heart, not with sullen and conscientious
face, as if Life were a usurer.

208

Our Poverty

The spiritual poverty of modem life is ap-
palling; and all the more because men are un-
conscious of it. Prayer was in former times the
channel whereby a profound current of spiritual
life flowed into the lives of men and enriched
them. This source of wealth has now almost
ceased, and Man has become less spiritual, more
impoverished. We must seek a new form of
prayer. Better not live at all than live without
reverence and gratitude! Let our sacramental
attitude to Life be our form of prayer. Let us
no longer desire to live when that has perished.

209

Finis

" To abjure half measures and to live reso-
lutely in the Whole, the Full, the Beautiful." —
Goethe.

" To try to see in all things necessity as
beauty." — Nietzsche.

THE END

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