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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Prophets of Dissent, by Otto Heller
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Prophets of Dissent
+       Essays on Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Nietzsche and Tolstoy
+
+Author: Otto Heller
+
+Release Date: May 15, 2011 [EBook #36111]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROPHETS OF DISSENT ***
+
+
+
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+
+  [ Transcriber's Notes:
+
+    Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully
+    as possible, including inconsistencies in spelling and hyphenation.
+    Some corrections of spelling have been made. They are listed at the
+    end of the text.
+
+    Italic text has been marked with _underscores_.
+  ]
+
+
+
+
+  PROPHETS OF DISSENT
+
+
+
+
+  BOOKS BY OTTO HELLER
+
+  HENRIK IBSEN: PLAYS AND PROBLEMS
+
+  STUDIES IN MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE
+
+  LESSING'S "MINNA VON BARNHELM"
+  in English
+
+
+
+
+  Prophets of Dissent: Essays
+  on Maeterlinck, Strindberg,
+  Nietzsche and Tolstoy
+
+  by
+  Otto Heller
+
+  Professor of Modern European Literature
+  in Washington University (St. Louis)
+
+
+  Is there a thing in this world that can be separated from
+  the inconceivable?
+
+  Maeterlinck, "Our Eternity"
+
+
+  New York
+  Mcmxviii
+  Alfred A Knopf
+
+
+
+
+  COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY
+  ALFRED A. KNOPF
+
+  PRINTED IN UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
+
+
+
+
+  To
+  HELLEN SEARS
+  staunchest of friends
+
+
+
+
+Preface
+
+
+The collocation of authors so widely at variance in their moral and
+artistic aims as are those assembled in this little book may be defended
+by the safe and simple argument that all of these authors have exerted,
+each in his own way, an influence of singular range and potency. By
+fairly general consent they are the foremost literary expositors of
+important modern tendencies. It is, therefore, of no consequence whether
+or not their ways of thinking fit into our particular frame of mind;
+what really matters is that in this small group of writers more clearly
+perhaps than in any other similarly restricted group the basic issues of
+the modern struggle for social transformation appear to be clearly and
+sharply joined. That in viewing them as indicators of contrarious ideal
+currents due allowance must be made for peculiarities of temperament,
+both individual and racial, and, correspondingly, for the purely
+"personal equation" in their spiritual attitudes, does not detract to
+any material degree from their generic significance.
+
+In any case, there are those of us who in the vortical change of the
+social order through which we are whirling, feel a desire to orient
+ourselves through an objective interest in letters among the embattled
+purposes and policies which are now gripped in a final test of strength.
+In a crisis that makes the very foundations of civilization quake, and
+at a moment when the salvation of human liberty seems to depend upon the
+success of a united stand of all the modern forces of life against the
+destructive impact of the most primitive and savage of all the
+instincts, would it not be absurdly pedantic for a critical student of
+literature to resort to any artificial selection and co-ordination of
+his material in order to please the prudes and the pedagogues? And is it
+not natural to seek that material among the largest literary apparitions
+of the age?
+
+It is my opinion, then, that the four great authors discussed in the
+following pages stand, respectively, for the determining strains in a
+great upsetting movement, and that in the aggregate they bring to view
+the composite mental and moral impulsion of the times. Through such
+forceful articulations of current movements the more percipient class of
+readers have for a long time been enabled to foresense, in a manner, the
+colossal reconstruction of society which needs must follow this
+monstrous, but presumably final, clash between the irreconcilable
+elements in the contrasted principles of right and might, the masses and
+the monarchs.
+
+However, the gathering together of Maeterlinck, Nietzsche, Strindberg,
+and Tolstoy under the hospitality of a common book-cover permits of a
+supplementary explanation on the ground of a certain fundamental
+likeness far stronger than their only too obvious diversities. They are,
+one and all, radicals in thought, and, with differing strength of
+intention, reformers of society, inasmuch as their speculations and
+aspirations are relevant to practical problems of living. And yet what
+gives them such a durable hold on our attention is not their particular
+apostolate, but the fact that their artistic impulses ascend from the
+subliminal regions of the inner life, and that their work somehow brings
+one into touch with the hidden springs of human action and human fate.
+This means, in effect, that all of them are mystics by original cast of
+mind and that notwithstanding any difference, however apparently
+violent, of views and theories, they follow the same introspective path
+towards the recognition and interpretation of the law of life. From
+widely separated ethical premises they thus arrive at an essentially
+uniform appraisal of personal happiness as a function of living.
+
+To those readers who are not disposed to grant the validity of the
+explanations I have offered, perhaps equality of rank in artistic
+importance may seem a sufficient criterion for the association of
+authors, and, apart from all sociologic and philosophic considerations,
+they may be willing to accept my somewhat arbitrary selection on this
+single count.
+
+    O. H.
+
+April, 1918.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                     PAGE
+
+    I Maurice Maeterlinck: a study in Mysticism         3
+
+   II August Strindberg: a study in Eccentricity       71
+
+  III Friedrich Nietzsche: a study in Exaltation      109
+
+   IV Leo Tolstoy: a study in Revivalism              161
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE MYSTICISM OF MAURICE MAETERLINCK
+
+
+Under the terrific atmospheric pressure that has been torturing the
+civilization of the entire world since the outbreak of the greatest of
+wars, contemporary literature of the major cast appears to have gone
+into decline. Even the comparatively few writers recognized as
+possessing talents of the first magnitude have given way to that
+pressure and have shrunk to minor size, so that it may be seriously
+questioned, to say the least, whether during the past forty months or so
+a single literary work of outstanding and sustained grandeur has been
+achieved anywhere. That the effect of the universal embattlement upon
+the art of letters should be, in the main, extremely depressing, is
+quite natural; but the conspicuous loss of breadth and poise in writers
+of the first order seems less in accordance with necessity,--at least
+one might expect a very superior author to rise above that necessity. In
+any case it is very surprising that it should be a Belgian whose
+literary personality is almost unique in having remained exempt from the
+general abridgment of spiritual stature.
+
+It is true that Maurice Maeterlinck, the most eminent literary figure in
+his sadly stricken country and of unsurpassed standing among the
+contemporary masters of French letters, has, since the great
+catastrophe, won no new laurels as a dramatist; and that in the other
+field cultivated by him, that of the essay, his productiveness has been
+anything but prolific. But in his case one is inclined to interpret
+reticence as an eloquent proof of a singularly heroic firmness of
+character at a time when on both sides of the great divide which now
+separates the peoples, the cosmopolitan trend of human advance has come
+to a temporary halt, and the nations have relapsed from their
+laboriously attained degree of world-citizenship into the homelier, but
+more immediately virtuous, state of traditional patriotism.
+
+It is a military necessity as well as a birthright of human nature that
+at a time like the present the patriot is excused from any pharisaical
+profession of loving his enemy. Before the war, Maeterlinck's writings
+were animated by humanitarian sympathies of the broadest catholicity. He
+even had a peculiar affection for the Germans, because doubtless he
+perceived the existence of a strong kinship between certain essential
+traits in his spiritual composition and the fundamental tendencies of
+German philosophy and art. But when Belgium was lawlessly invaded, her
+ancient towns heinously destroyed, her soil laid waste and drenched with
+the blood of her people, Maeterlinck, as a son of Belgium, learned to
+hate the Germans to the utmost of a wise and temperate man's capacity
+for hatred, and in his war papers collected in _Les Débris de la
+Guerre_, (1916),(1) which ring with the passionate impulse of the
+patriot, his outraged sense of justice prevails over the disciplined
+self-command of the stoic.
+
+  (1) "The Wrack of the Storm," 1916.
+
+He refuses to acquiesce in the lenient discrimination between the guilty
+Government of Germany and her innocent population: "It is not true that
+in this gigantic crime there are innocent and guilty, or degrees of
+guilt. They stand on one level, all those who have taken part in it....
+It is, very simply, the German, from one end of his country to the
+other, who stands revealed as a beast of prey which the firm will of our
+planet finally repudiates. We have here no wretched slaves dragged along
+by a tyrant king who alone is responsible. Nations have the government
+which they deserve, or rather, the government which they have is truly
+no more than the magnified and public projection of the private morality
+and mentality of the nation.... No nation can be deceived that does not
+wish to be deceived; and it is not intelligence that Germany lacks....
+No nation permits herself to be coerced to the one crime that man cannot
+pardon. It is of her own accord that she hastens towards it; her chief
+has no need to persuade, it is she who urges him on."(2)
+
+  (2) "The Wrack of the Storm," pp. 16-18.
+
+Such a condemnatory tirade against the despoilers of his fair homeland
+was normally to be expected from a man of Maeterlinck's depth of
+feeling. The unexpected thing that happened not long after was that the
+impulsive promptings of justice and patriotism put themselves into
+harmony with the guiding principles of his entire moral evolution. The
+integrity of his philosophy of life, the sterling honesty of his
+teachings, were thus loyally sealed with the very blood of his
+heart.--"Before closing this book," he says in the Epilogue,(3) "I wish
+to weigh for the last time in my conscience the words of hatred and
+malediction which it has made me speak in spite of myself." And then,
+true prophet that he is, he speaks forth as a voice from the future,
+admonishing men to prepare for the time when the war is over. What saner
+advice could at this critical time be given the stay-at-homes than that
+they should follow the example of the men who return from the trenches?
+"They detest the enemy," says he, "but they do not hate the man. They
+recognize in him a brother in misfortune who, like themselves, is
+submitting to duties and laws which, like themselves, he too believes
+lofty and necessary." On the other hand, too, not many have sensed as
+deeply as has Maeterlinck the grandeur to which humanity has risen
+through the immeasurable pathos of the war. "Setting aside the
+unpardonable aggression and the inexpiable violation of the treaties,
+this war, despite its insanity, has come near to being a bloody but
+magnificent proof of greatness, heroism, and the spirit of sacrifice."
+And from his profound anguish over the fate of his beloved Belgium this
+consolation is wrung: "If it be true, as I believe, that humanity is
+worth just as much as the sum total of latent heroism which it contains,
+then we may declare that humanity was never stronger nor more exemplary
+than now and that it is at this moment reaching one of its highest
+points and capable of braving everything and hoping everything. And it
+is for this reason that, despite our present sadness, we are entitled to
+congratulate ourselves and to rejoice." Altogether, Maeterlinck's
+thoughts and actions throughout this yet unfinished mighty fate-drama of
+history challenge the highest respect for the clarity of his intellect
+and the profoundness of his humanity.
+
+  (3) In the English translation this is the chapter preceding the last
+  one and is headed "When the War Is Over," p. 293 ff.; it is separately
+  published in _The Forum_ for July, 1916.
+
+The appalling disaster that has befallen the Belgian people is sure to
+stamp their national character with indelible marks; so that it is safe
+to predict that never again will the type of civilization which before
+the war reigned in the basins of the Meuse and the Scheldt reëstablish
+itself in its full peculiarity and distinctiveness which was the result
+of a unique coagency of Germanic and Romanic ingredients of culture. Yet
+in the amalgam of the two heterogeneous elements a certain competitive
+antithesis had survived, and manifested itself, in the individual as in
+the national life at large, in a number of unreconciled temperamental
+contrasts, and in the fundamental unlikeness exhibited in the material
+and the spiritual activities. Witness the contrast between the bustling
+aggressiveness in the province of practical affairs and the metaphysical
+drift of modern Flemish art. To any one familiar with the visible
+materialism of the population in its external mode of living it may have
+seemed strange to notice how sedulously a numerous set among the younger
+artists of the land were facing away from their concrete environment, as
+though to their over-sensitive nervous system it were irremediably
+offensive. The vigorous solidity of Constantin Meunier, the great
+plastic interpreter of the "Black Country" of Belgium, found but few
+wholehearted imitators among the sculptors, while among the painters
+that robust terrestrialism of which the work of a Rubens or Teniers and
+their countless disciples was the artistic upshot, was almost totally
+relinquished, and linear firmness and colorful vitality yielded the day
+to pallid, discarnately decorative artistry even, in a measure, in the
+"applied art" products of a Henri van de Velde.
+
+It is in the field of literature, naturally enough, that the contrast is
+resolved and integrated into a characteristic unity. Very recently
+Professor A. J. Carnoy has definitely pointed out(4) the striking
+commixture of the realistic and imaginative elements in the work of the
+Flemish symbolists. "The vision of the Flemings"--quoting from his own
+_précis_ of his paper--"is very concrete, very exact in all details and
+gives a durable, real, and almost corporeal presence to the creations of
+the imagination. All these traits are exhibited in the reveries of the
+Flemish mystics, ancient and modern. One finds them also no less plainly
+in the poetic work of Belgian writers of the last generation:
+Maeterlinck, Verhaeren, Rodenbach, Van Lerberghe, Le Roy, Elskamp, etc."
+
+  (4) In a paper read by title before the Modern Language Association of
+  America at Yale University, December 29, 1917.
+
+If we take into account this composite attitude of the Flemish mind we
+shall be less surprised at the remarkable evolution of a
+poet-philosopher whose creations seem at first blush to bear no
+resemblance to the outward complexion of his own age; who seems as far
+removed temperamentally from his locality and time as were his lineal
+spiritual ancestors: the Dutchman Ruysbroeck, the Scandinavian
+Swedenborg, the German Novalis, and the American Emerson--and who in the
+zenith of his career stands forth as an ardent advocate of practical
+action while at the same time a firm believer in the transcendental.
+
+Maeterlinck's romantic antipathy towards the main drift of the age was a
+phenomenon which at the dawn of our century could be observed in a great
+number of superior intelligences. Those fugitives from the dun and
+sordid materialism of the day were likely to choose between two avenues
+of escape, according to their greater or lesser inner ruggedness. The
+more aggressive type would engage in multiform warfare for the
+reconstruction of life on sounder principles; whereas the more
+meditative professed a real or affected indifference to practical things
+and eschewed any participation in the world's struggle for progress. And
+of the quiescent rather than the insurgent variety of the romantic
+temper Maurice Maeterlinck was the foremost exponent.
+
+The "romantic longing" seems to have come into the world in the company
+of the Christian religion with which it shares its partly outspoken,
+partly implied repugnance for the battle of life. Romantic periods occur
+in the history of civilization whenever a sufficiently influential set
+of artistically minded persons have persuaded themselves that, in quite
+a literal sense of the colloquial phrase, they "have no use" for the
+world; a discovery which would still be true were it stated obversely.
+The romantic world-view, thus fundamentally oriented by world-contempt,
+entails, at least in theory, the repudiation of all earthly
+joys--notably the joy of working--and the renouncement of all worldly
+ambition; it scorns the cooperative, social disposition, invites the
+soul to a progressive withdrawal into the inner ego, and ends in
+complete surrender to one sole aspiration: the search of the higher
+vision, the vision, that is, of things beyond their tangible reality. To
+such mystical constructions of the inner eye a certain group of German
+writers who flourished in the beginning of the nineteenth century and
+were known as the Romantics, darkly groped their way out of the
+confining realities of their own time. The most modern spell of
+romanticism, the one through which our own generation was but yesterday
+passing, measures its difference from any previous romantic era by the
+difference between earlier states of culture and our own. Life with us
+is conspicuously more assertive and aggressive in its social than in its
+individual expressions, which was by no means always so, and unless the
+romantic predisposition adapted itself to this important change it could
+not relate itself at all intimately to our interests. Our study of
+Maeterlinck should help us, therefore, to discover possibly in the new
+romantic tendency some practical and vital bearings.
+
+We find that in the new romanticism esthetic and philosophical impulses
+are inextricably mixed. Hence the new movement is also playing an
+indispensable rôle in the modern re-foundation of art. For while acting
+as a wholesome offset to the so-called naturalism, in its firm refusal
+to limit inner life to the superficial realities, it at the same time
+combines with naturalism into a complete recoiling, both of the
+intellect and the emotions, from any commonplace, or pusillanimous, or
+mechanical practices of artistry. This latter-day romanticism, moreover,
+notwithstanding its sky-aspiring outstretch, is akin to naturalism in
+that, after all, it keeps its roots firmly grounded in the earth; that
+is to say, it seeks for its ulterior sanctions not in realms high beyond
+the self; rather it looks within for the "blue flower" of contentedness.
+Already to the romantics of old the mystic road to happiness was not
+unknown. It is, for instance, pointed by Novalis: "Inward leads the
+mysterious way. Within us or nowhere lies eternity with its worlds;
+within us or nowhere are the past and the future." Viewed separately
+from other elements of romanticism, this passion for retreating within
+the central ego is commonly referred to as mysticism; it has a strong
+hold on many among the moderns, and Maurice Maeterlinck to be properly
+understood has to be understood as the poet _par excellence_ of modern
+mysticism. By virtue of this special office he deals mainly in concepts
+of the transcendental, which puzzles the ordinary person accustomed to
+perceive only material and ephemeral realities. Maeterlinck holds that
+nothing matters that is not eternal and that what keeps us from enjoying
+the treasures of the universe is the hereditary resignation with which
+we tarry in the gloomy prison of our senses. "In reality, we live only
+from soul to soul, and we are gods who do not know each other."(5) It
+follows from this metaphysical foundation of his art that instead of the
+grosser terminology suitable to plain realities, Maeterlinck must depend
+upon a code of subtle messages in order to establish between himself and
+his audience a line of spiritual communication. This makes it somewhat
+difficult for people of cruder endowment to appreciate his meaning, a
+grievance from which in the beginning many of them sought redress in
+facile scoffing. Obtuse minds are prone to claim a right to fathom the
+profound meanings of genius with the same ease with which they expect to
+catch the meaning of a bill of fare or the daily stock market report.
+
+  (5) Maeterlinck, "On Emerson."
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+It must be confessed, however, that even those to whom Maeterlinck's
+sphere of thought is not so utterly sealed, enter it with a sense of
+mixed perplexity and apprehension. They feel themselves helplessly
+conducted through a world situated beyond the confines of their normal
+consciousness, and in this strange world everything that comes to pass
+appears at first extremely impracticable and unreal. The action seems
+"wholly dissevered from common sense and ordinary uses;" the figures
+behave otherwise than humans; the dialogue is "poised on the edge of a
+precipice of bathos." It is clear that works so far out of the common
+have to be approached from the poet's own point of view. "Let the reader
+move his standpoint one inch nearer the popular standpoint," thus we are
+warned by Mr. G. K. Chesterton, "and his attitude towards the poet will
+be harsh, hostile, unconquerable mirth." There are some works that can
+be appreciated for their good story, even if we fail to realize the
+author's moral attitude, let alone to grasp the deeper content of his
+work. "But if we take a play by Maeterlinck we shall find that unless we
+grasp the particular fairy thread of thought the poet rather lazily
+flings to us, we cannot grasp anything whatever. Except from one extreme
+poetic point of view, the thing is not a play; it is not a bad play, it
+is a mass of clotted nonsense. One whole act describes the lovers going
+to look for a ring in a distant cave when they both know they have
+dropped it down the well. Seen from some secret window on some special
+side of the soul's turret, this might convey a sense of faerie futility
+in our human life. But it is quite obvious that unless it called forth
+that one kind of sympathy, it would call forth nothing but laughter. In
+the same play, the husband chases his wife with a drawn sword, the wife
+remarking at intervals, 'I am not gay.' Now there may really be an idea
+in this; the idea of human misfortune coming most cruelly upon the
+opportunism of innocence; that the lonely human heart says, like a child
+at a party, 'I am not enjoying myself as I thought I should.' But it is
+plain that unless one thinks of this idea, and of this idea only, the
+expression is not in the least unsuccessful pathos,--it is very broad
+and highly successful farce!"
+
+And so the atmosphere of Maeterlinck's plays is impregnated throughout
+with oppressive mysteries, and until the key of these mysteries is found
+there is very little meaning to the plays. Moreover, these mysteries, be
+they never so stern and awe-inspiring, are irresistibly alluring. The
+reason is, they are our own mysteries that have somehow escaped our
+grasp, and that we fain would recapture, because there dwells in every
+human breast a vague assent to the immortal truth of Goethe's assertion:
+"The thrill of awe is man's best heritage."(6)
+
+  (6) "_Das Schaudern ist der Menschheit bestes Teil._"
+
+The imaginative equipment of Maeterlinck's dramaturgy is rather limited
+and, on its face value, trite. In particular are his dramatis personae
+creatures by no means calculated to overawe by some extraordinary
+weirdness or power. And yet we feel ourselves touched by an elemental
+dread and by an overwhelming sense of our human impotence in the
+presence of these figures who, without seeming supernatural, are
+certainly not of common flesh and blood; they impress us as surpassingly
+strange mainly because somehow they are instinct with a life
+fundamentally more real than the superficial reality we know. For they
+are the mediums and oracles of the fateful powers that stir human beings
+into action.
+
+The poet of mysticism, then, delves into the mystic sources of our
+deeds, and makes us stand reverent with him before the unknowable forces
+by which we are controlled. Naturally he is obliged to shape his visions
+in dim outline. His aim is to shadow forth that which no naked eye can
+see, and it may be said in passing that he attains this aim with a
+mastery and completeness incomparably beyond the dubious skill displayed
+more recently by the grotesque gropings of the so-called futurist
+school. Perhaps one true secret of the perturbing strangeness of
+Maeterlinck's figures lies in the fact that the basic principle of their
+life, the one thoroughly vital element in them, if it does not sound too
+paradoxical to say so, is the idea of death. Maeterlinck's mood and
+temper are fully in keeping with the religious dogma that life is but a
+short dream--with Goethe he believes that "all things transitory but as
+symbols are sent," and apparently concurs in the creed voiced by one of
+Arthur Schnitzler's characters,--that death is the only subject in life
+worthy of being pondered by the serious mind. "From our death onwards,"
+so he puts it somewhere, "the adventure of the universe becomes our own
+adventure."
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+It will be useful to have a bit of personal information concerning our
+author. He started his active career as a barrister; not by any means
+auspiciously, it seems, for already in his twenty-seventh year he laid
+the toga aside. Experience had convinced him that in the forum there
+were no laurels for him to pluck. The specific qualities that make for
+success at the bar were conspicuously lacking in his make-up. Far from
+being eloquent, he has at all times been noted for an unparalleled
+proficiency in the art of self-defensive silence. He shuns banal
+conversation and the sterile distractions of promiscuous social
+intercourse, dreads the hubbub of the city, and has an intense dislike
+for travel, to which he resorts only as a last means of escape from
+interviewers, reporters, and admirers. Maeterlinck, it is seen, is
+anything but _multorum vir hominum_. In order to preserve intact his
+love of humanity, he finds it expedient to live for the most part by
+himself, away from the throng "whose very plaudits give the heart a
+pang;" his fame has always been a source of annoyance to him. The only
+company he covets is that of the contemplative thinkers of bygone
+days,--the mystics, gnostics, cabalists, neo-Platonists. Swedenborg and
+Plotinus are perhaps his greatest favorites. That the war has produced a
+mighty agitation in the habitual calm of the great Belgian
+poet-philosopher goes without saying. His love of justice no less than
+his love of his country aroused every red corpuscle in his virile
+personality to violent resentment against the invader. Since the war
+broke out, however, he has published nothing besides a number of
+ringingly eloquent and singularly pathetic articles and appeals,--so
+that the character portrait derived from the body of his work has not at
+this time lost its application to his personality.
+
+In cast of mind, Maeterlinck is sombrously meditative, and he has been
+wise in framing his outer existence so that it would accord with his
+habitual detachment. The greater part of his time used to be divided
+between his charming retreat at _Quatre Chemins_, near Grasse, and the
+grand old abbey of St. Wandrille in Normandy, which he managed to snatch
+in the very nick of time from the tightening clutch of a manufacturing
+concern. With the temperament of a hermit, he has been, nevertheless, a
+keen observer of life, though one preferring to watch the motley
+spectacle from the aristocratic privacy of his box, sheltered, as it
+were, from prying curiosity. Well on in middle age, he is still an
+enthusiastic out-of-doors man,--gardener, naturalist, pedestrian,
+wheelman, and motorist, and commands an extraordinary amount of special
+knowledge in a variety of sports and sciences. In "The Double Garden" he
+discusses the automobile with the authority of an expert watt-man and
+mechanician. In one of his other books he evinces an extraordinary
+erudition in all matters pertaining to the higher education of dogs; and
+his work on "The Life of the Bee" passes him beyond question with high
+rank among "thirty-third degree" apiculturists.
+
+One of the characteristics that seem to separate his books, especially
+those of the earlier period, from the literary tendencies of his age, is
+their surprising inattention to present social struggles. His
+metaphysical bias makes him dwell almost exclusively, and with great
+moral and logical consistency, on aspects of life that are slightly
+considered by the majority of men yet which he regards as ulteriorly of
+sole importance.
+
+When men like Maeterlinck are encountered in the world of practical
+affairs, they are bound to impress us as odd, because of this inversion
+of the ordinary policies of behavior. But before classing them as
+"cranks," we might well ask ourselves whether their appraisal of the
+component values of life does not, after all, correspond better to their
+true relativity than does our own habitual evaluation. With the average
+social being, the transcendental bearing of a proposition is synonymous
+with its practical unimportance. But in his essay on "The Invisible
+Goodness" Maeterlinck quite properly raises the question: "Is visible
+life alone of consequence, and are we made up only of things that can be
+grasped and handled like pebbles in the road?"
+
+Throughout his career Maeterlinck reveals himself in the double aspect
+of poet and philosopher. In the first period his philosophy, as has
+already been amply hinted, is characterized chiefly by aversion from the
+externalities of life, and by that tense introversion of the mind which
+forms the mystic's main avenue to the goal of knowledge. But if, in
+order to find the key to his tragedies and puppet plays, we go to the
+thirteen essays representing the earlier trend of his philosophy and
+issued in 1896 under the collective title, "The Treasure of the Humble,"
+we discover easily that his cast of mysticism is very different from
+that of his philosophic predecessors and teachers in the fourteenth and
+nineteenth centuries, in particular from the devotional mysticism of the
+"Admirable" John Ruysbroeck, and Friedrich von Hardenberg-Novalis.
+Maeterlinck does not strive after the so-called "spiritual espousals,"
+expounded by the "doctor ecstaticus," Ruysbroeck, in his celebrated
+treatise where Christ is symbolized as the divine groom and Human Nature
+as the bride glowing with desire for union with God. Maeterlinck feels
+too modernly to make use of that ancient sensuous imagery. The main
+thesis of his mystical belief is that there are divine forces dormant in
+human nature; how to arouse and release them, constitutes the paramount
+problem of human life. His doctrine is that a life not thus energized by
+its own latent divineness is, and must remain, humdrum and worthless. It
+will at once be noticed that such a doctrine harmonizes thoroughly with
+the romantic aspiration. Both mystic and romantic teach that, in the
+last resort, the battlefield of our fate lies not out in the wide world
+but that it is enclosed in the inner self, within the unknown quantity
+which we designate as our soul. The visible life, according to this
+modern prophet of mysticism, obeys the invisible; happiness and
+unhappiness flow exclusively from the inner sources.
+
+Maeterlinck's speculations, despite their medieval provenience, have a
+practical orientation. He firmly believes that it is within the ability
+of mankind to raise some of the veils that cover life's central secret.
+In unison with some other charitable students of society, he holds to
+the faith that a more highly spiritualized era is dawning, and from the
+observed indications he prognosticates a wider awakening of the
+sleepbound soul of man. And certainly some of the social manifestations
+that appeared with cumulative force during the constructive period
+before the war were calculated to justify that faith. The revival of
+interest in the metaphysical powers of man which expressed itself almost
+epidemically through such widely divergent cults as Theosophy and
+Christian Science, was indubitable proof of spiritual yearnings in the
+broader masses of the people. And it had a practical counterpart in
+civic tendencies and reforms that evidenced a great agitation of the
+social conscience. And even to-day, when the great majority feel that
+the universal embroilment has caused civilized man to fall from his
+laboriously achieved level, this sage in his lofty solitude feels the
+redeeming spiritual connotation of our great calamity. "Humanity was
+ready to rise above itself, to surpass all that it had hitherto
+accomplished. It has surpassed it.... Never before had nations been seen
+that were able as a whole to understand that the happiness of each of
+those who live in this time of trial is of no consequence compared with
+the honor of those who live no more or the happiness of those who are
+not yet alive. We stand on heights that had not been attained before."
+
+But even for those many who find themselves unable to build very large
+hopes on the spiritual uplift of mankind through disaster, Maeterlinck's
+philosophy is a wholesome tonic. In the essay on "The Life Profound" in
+"The Treasure of the Humble," we are told: "Every man must find for
+himself in the low and unavoidable reality of common life his special
+possibility of a higher existence." The injunction, trite though it
+sound, articulates a moral very far from philistine. For it urges the
+pursuit of the transcendental self through those feelings which another
+very great idealist, Friedrich Schiller, describes in magnificent
+metaphor as
+
+    ... "der dunklen Gefühle Gewalt,
+    die im Herzen wunderbar schliefen."
+
+In the labyrinth of the subliminal consciousness there lurks, however, a
+great danger for the seeker after the hidden treasures: the paralyzing
+effect of fatalism upon the normal energies. Maeterlinck was seriously
+threatened by this danger during his earlier period. How he eventually
+contrived his liberation from the clutch of fatalism is not made
+entirely clear by the progress of his thought. At all events, an era of
+greater intellectual freedom, which ultimately was to create him the
+undisputed captain of his soul and master of his fate, was soon to
+arrive for him. It is heralded by another book of essays: "Wisdom and
+Destiny." But, as has been stated, we may in his case hardly hope to
+trace the precise route traveled by the mind between the points of
+departure and arrival.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+So closely are the vital convictions in this truthful writer linked with
+the artistic traits of his work that without some grasp of his
+metaphysics even the technical peculiarities of his plays cannot be
+fully appreciated. To the mystic temper of mind, all life is secretly
+pregnant with great meaning, so that none of its phenomena can be deemed
+inconsequential. Thus, while Maeterlinck is a poet greatly preoccupied
+with spiritual matters yet nothing to him is more wonderful and worthy
+of attention than the bare facts and processes of living. Real life,
+just like the theatre which purports to represent it, manipulates a
+multiform assortment of stage effects, now coarse and obvious and
+claptrap, now refined and esoteric, to suit the diversified taste and
+capacity of the patrons. To the cultured esthetic sense the tragical
+tendency carries more meaning than the catastrophic finale; our author
+accordingly scorns, and perhaps inordinately, whatsoever may appear as
+merely adventitious in the action of plays. "What can be told," he
+exclaims, "by beings who are possessed of a fixed idea and have no time
+to live because they have to kill off a rival or a mistress?" The
+internalized action in his plays is all of one piece with the profound
+philosophical conviction that the inner life alone matters; that
+consequently the small and unnoticed events are more worthy of attention
+than the sensational, cataclysmic moments. "Why wait ye," he asks in
+that wonderful rhapsody on "Silence"(7) "for Heaven to open at the
+strike of the thunderbolt? Ye should attend upon the blessed hours when
+it silently opens--and it is incessantly opening."
+
+  (7) "The Treasure of the Humble."
+
+His purpose, then, is to reveal the working of hidden forces in their
+intricate and inseparable connection with external events; and in order
+that the _vie intérieure_ might have the right of way, drama in his
+practice emancipates itself very far from the traditional realistic
+methods. "Poetry," he maintains, "has no other purpose than to keep open
+the great roads that lead from the visible to the invisible." To be
+sure, this definition postulates, rather audaciously, a widespread
+spiritual susceptibility. But in Maeterlinck's optimistic anthropology
+no human being is spiritually so deadened as to be forever out of all
+communication with the things that are divine and infinite. He fully
+realizes, withal, that for the great mass of men there exists no
+intellectual approach to the truly significant problems of life. It is
+rather through our emotional capacity that our spiritual experience
+brings us into touch with the final verities. Anyway, the poet of
+mysticism appeals from the _impasse_ of pure reasoning to the voice of
+the inner oracles. But how to detect in the deepest recesses of the soul
+the echoes of universal life and give outward resonance to their faint
+reverberations? That is the artistic, and largely technical, side of the
+problem.
+
+Obvious it is that if the beholder's collaboration in the difficult
+enterprise is to be secured, his imagination has to be stirred to a
+super-normal degree. Once a dramatist has succeeded in stimulating the
+imaginative activity, he can dispense with a mass of descriptive detail.
+But he must comply with two irremissible technical demands. In the first
+place, the "_vie intérieure_" calls forth a _dialogue intérieur_; an
+esoteric language, I would say, contrived predominantly for the
+"expressional" functions of speech, as differenced from its
+"impressional" purposes. Under Swedenborg's fanciful theory of
+"correspondences" the literal meaning of a word is merely a sort of
+protective husk for its secret spiritual kernel. It is this inner,
+essential meaning that Maeterlinck's dialogue attempts to set free. By a
+fairly simple and consistent code of intimations the underlying meaning
+of the colloquy is laid bare and a basis created for a more fundamental
+understanding of the dramatic transactions. Maeterlinck going, at first,
+to undue lengths in this endeavor, exposed the diction of his dramas to
+much cheap ridicule. The extravagant use of repetition, in particular,
+made him a mark for facile burlesque. The words of the Queen in
+_Princesse Maleine_: "_Mais ne répetez pas toujours ce que l'on dit_,"
+were sarcastically turned against the poet himself.
+
+As a result of the extreme simplicity of his dialogue, Maeterlinck was
+reproached with having invented the "monosyllabic theatre," the "theatre
+without words," and with having perpetrated a surrogate sort of drama, a
+hybrid between libretto and pantomime.
+
+The fact, however, is, his characters speak a language which, far from
+being absurd, as it was at first thought to be by many of his readers,
+is instinct with life and quite true to life--to life, that is, as made
+articulate in the intense privacy of dreams, or hallucinations, or
+moments of excessive emotional perturbation.
+
+The other principal requisite for the attainment of the inner dramatic
+vitalness in drama is a pervasive atmospheric mood, a sustained
+_Stimmung_. This, in the case of Maeterlinck, is brought about by the
+combined employment of familiar and original artistic devices.
+
+The grave and melancholy mood that so deeply impregnates the work of
+Maeterlinck is tinged in the earlier stage, as has been pointed out,
+with the sombre coloring of fatalism. In the first few books, in
+particular, there hovers a brooding sense of terror and an undefinable
+feeling of desolation. Through _Serres Chaudes_ ("Hot Houses"), his
+first published book, (1889), there runs a tenor of weariness, of ideal
+yearnings overshadowed by the hopelessness of circumstances. Even in
+this collection of poems, where so much less necessity exists for a
+unity of mood than in the plays, Maeterlinck's predilection for scenic
+effects suggestive of weirdness and superstitious fear became apparent
+in the recurrent choice of sombre scenic motifs: oppressive nocturnal
+silence,--a stagnant sheet of water,--moonlight filtered through green
+windows, etc. The diction, too, through the incessant use of terms like
+_morne_, _las_, _pâle_, _désire_, _ennui_, _tiède_, _indolent_,
+_malade_, exhales as it were a lazy resignation. Temporarily, then, the
+fatalistic strain is uppermost both in the philosophy and the poetry of
+the rising young author; and to make matters worse, his is the fatalism
+of pessimistic despair: Fate is forsworn against man. The objective
+point of life is death. We constantly receive warnings from within, but
+the voices are not unequivocal and emphatic enough to save us from
+ourselves.
+
+Probing the abysses of his subliminal self, the mystic may sense, along
+with the diviner promptings of the heart, the lurking demons that
+undermine happiness,--"the malignant powers,"--again quoting
+Schiller--"whom no man's craft can make familiar"--that element in human
+nature which in truth makes man "his own worst enemy." It is a search
+which at this stage of his development Maeterlinck, as a mystic, cannot
+bring himself to relinquish, even though, pessimistically, he
+anticipates that which he most dreads to find; in this way, fatalism and
+pessimism act as insuperable barriers against his artistic
+self-assertion. His fixed frame of mind confines him to the
+representation of but one elemental instinct, namely, that of fear. The
+rustic in the German fairy tale who sallied forth to learn how to
+shudder,--_gruseln_,--would have mastered the art to his complete
+satisfaction if favored with a performance or two of such plays as
+"Princess Maleine," "The Intruder," or "The Sightless." Perhaps no other
+dramatist has ever commanded a similarly well-equipped arsenal of
+thrills and terrible foreshadowings. The commonest objects are fraught
+with ominous forebodings: a white gown lying on a _prie-dieu_, a curtain
+suddenly set swaying by a puff of air, the melancholy soughing of a
+clump of trees,--the simplest articles of daily use are converted into
+awful symbols that make us shiver by their whisperings of impending
+doom.
+
+Nor in the earlier products of Maeterlinck are the cruder practices of
+melodrama scorned or spared,--the crash and flash of thunder and
+lightning, the clang of bells and clatter of chains, the livid light and
+ghastly shadows, the howling hurricane, the ominous croaking of ravens
+amid nocturnal solitude, trees illumined by the fiery eyes of owls, bats
+whirring portentously through the gloom,--so many harbingers of dread
+and death. And the prophetic import of these tokens and their sort is
+reinforced by repeated assertions from the persons in the action that
+never before has anything like this been known to occur. To such a
+fearsome state are we wrought up by all this uncanny apparatus that at
+the critical moment a well calculated knock at the door is sufficient to
+make our flesh creep and our hair stand on end.
+
+Thus, the _vie intérieure_ would seem to prerequire for its
+externalization a completely furnished chamber of horrors. And when it
+is added that the scene of the action is by preference a lonely
+churchyard or a haunted old mansion, a crypt, a cavern, a silent forest
+or a solitary tower, it is easy to understand why plays like "Princess
+Maleine" could be classed by superficial and unfriendly critics with the
+gruesome ebullitions of that fantastic quasi-literary occupation to
+which we owe a well known variety of "water-front" drama and, in
+fiction, the "shilling shocker." Their immeasurably greater
+psychological refinement could not save them later on from condemnation
+at the hands of their own maker. And yet they are not without very great
+artistic merits. Octave Mirbeau, in his habitual enthusiasm for the
+out-of-the-ordinary, hailed Maeterlinck, on the strength of "Princess
+Maleine," as the Belgian Shakespeare, evidently because Maeterlinck
+derived some of his motifs from "Hamlet": mainly the churchyard scene,
+and Prince Hjalmar's defiance of the queen, as well as his general want
+of decision. As a matter of fact, Maeterlinck has profoundly studied,
+not Shakespeare alone, but the minor Elizabethans as well. He has made
+an admirable translation of "Macbeth." Early in his career he even
+translated one of John Ford's Plays, "'Tis Pity She's a Whore," one of
+the coarsest works ever written for the stage, but to which he was
+attracted by the intrinsic human interest that far outweighs its
+offensiveness. As for any real kinship of Maeterlinck with Shakespeare,
+the resemblance between the two is slight. They differ philosophically
+in the fundamental frame of mind, ethically in the outlook upon life,
+dramaturgically in the value attached to external action, and
+humanly,--much to the disadvantage of the Belgian,--in their sense of
+humor. For unfortunately it has to be confessed that this supreme gift
+of the gods has been very sparingly dispensed to Maeterlinck.
+Altogether, whether or no he is to be counted among the disciples of
+Shakespeare, his works show no great dependence on the master. With far
+better reason might he be called a debtor to Germanic folklore,
+especially in its fantastic elements.
+
+A German fairy world it is to which we are transported by Maeterlinck's
+first dramatic attempt, "Princess Maleine," (1889), a play refashioned
+after Grimm's tale of the Maid Maleen; only that in the play all the
+principals come to a harrowing end and that in it an esoteric meaning
+lies concealed underneath the primitive plot. The action, symbolically
+interpreted, illustrates the fatalist's doctrine that man is nothing but
+a toy in the hands of dark and dangerous powers. Practical wisdom does
+not help us to discern the working of these powers until it is too late.
+Neither can we divine their presence, for the prophetic apprehension of
+the future resides not in the expert and proficient, but rather in the
+helpless or decrepit,--the blind, the feeble-minded, and the stricken in
+years, or again in young children and in dumb animals. Take the scene in
+"Princess Maleine" where the murderers, having invaded the chamber, lie
+there in wait, with bated breath. In the corridor outside, people are
+unconcernedly passing to and fro, while the only creatures who,
+intuitively, sense the danger, are the little Prince and a dog that
+keeps anxiously scraping at the door.
+
+In _L'Intruse_ ("The Intruder"), (1890), a one-act play on a theme which
+is collaterally developed later on in _Les Aveugles_ ("The Sightless"),
+and in _L'Intérieur_ ("Home"), the arriving disaster that cannot be shut
+out by bolts or bars announces itself only to the clairvoyant sense of a
+blind old man. The household gathered around the table is placidly
+waiting for the doctor. Only the blind grandfather is anxious and
+heavy-laden because he alone knows that Death is entering the house, he
+alone can feel his daughter's life withering away under the breath of
+the King of Terror: the sightless have a keener sensitiveness than the
+seeing for what is screened from the physical eye.
+
+It would hardly be possible to name within the whole range of dramatic
+literature another work so thoroughly pervaded with the chilling horror
+of approaching calamity. The talk at the table is of the most
+commonplace,--that the door will not shut properly, and they must send
+for the carpenter to-morrow. But from the mechanism of the environment
+there comes cumulative and incremental warning that something
+extraordinary and fatal is about to happen. The wind rises, the trees
+shiver, the nightingales break off their singing, the fishes in the pond
+grow restive, the dogs cower in fear,--an unseen Presence walks through
+the garden. Then the clanging of a scythe is heard. A cold current of
+air rushes into the room. Nearer and nearer come the steps. The
+grandfather insists that a stranger has seated himself in the midst of
+the family. The lamp goes out. The bell strikes midnight. The old man is
+sure that somebody is rising from the table. Then suddenly the baby
+whose voice has never been heard starts crying. Through an inner door
+steps a deaconess silently crossing herself: the mother of the house is
+dead.
+
+These incidents in themselves are not necessarily miraculous. There are
+none of them but might be accounted for on perfectly natural grounds. In
+fact, very plausible explanations do offer themselves for the weirdest
+things that come to pass. So, especially, it was a real, ordinary mower
+that chanced to whet his scythe; yet the apparition of the Old Reaper in
+person could not cause the chilling consternation produced by this
+trivial circumstance coming as it does as the climax of a succession of
+commonplace happenings exaggerated and distorted by a fear-haunted
+imagination. To produce an effect like that upon an audience whose
+credulity refuses to be put to any undue strain is a victorious proof of
+prime artistic ability.
+
+_Les Aveugles_ ("The Sightless"), (1891), is pitched in the same
+psychological key. The atmosphere is surcharged with unearthly
+apprehension. A dreary twilight--in the midst of a thick forest--on a
+lonely island; twelve blind people fretting about the absence of their
+guardian. He is gone to find a way out of the woods--what can have
+become of him? From moment to moment the deserted, helpless band grows
+more fearstricken. The slightest sound becomes the carrier of evil
+forebodings: the rustling of the foliage, the flapping of a bird's
+wings, the swelling roar of the nearby sea in its dash against the
+shore. The bell strikes twelve--they wonder is it noon or night? Then
+questions, eager and calamitous, pass in whispers among them: Has the
+leader lost his way? Will he never come back? Has the dam burst apart
+and will they all be swallowed by the ocean? The pathos is greatly
+heightened by an extremely delicate yet sure individuation of the
+figures, as when at the mention of Heaven those not sightless from birth
+raise their countenance to the sky. And where in the meanwhile is the
+lost leader? He is seated right in their midst, but smitten by death.
+They learn it at last through the actions of the dog; besides whom--in
+striking parallel to "Princess Maleine"--the only other creature able to
+see is a little child. The horror-stricken unfortunates realize that
+they can never get home, and that they must perish in the woods.
+
+In _Les Sept Princesses_ ("The Seven Princesses"), (1891), although it
+is one of Maeterlinck's minor achievements, some of the qualities that
+are common to all his work become peculiarly manifest. This is
+particularly true of the skill shown in conveying the feeling of the
+story by means of suitable scenic devices. Most of his plays depend to a
+considerable degree for their dark and heavy nimbus of unreality upon a
+studied combination of paraphernalia in themselves neither numerous nor
+far-sought. In fact, the resulting scenic repertory, too, is markedly
+limited: a weird forest, a deserted castle with marble staircase and
+dreamy moonlit terrace, a tower with vaulted dungeons, a dismal corridor
+flanked by impenetrable chambers, a lighted interior viewed from the
+garden, a landscape bodefully crêped with twilight--the list nearly
+exhausts his store of "sets."
+
+The works mentioned so far are hardly more than able exercises
+preparatory for the ampler and more finished products which were to
+succeed them. Yet they represent signal steps in the evolution of a new
+dramatic style, designed, as has already been intimated, to give
+palpable form to emotional data descried in moments anterior not only to
+articulation but even to consciousness itself; and for this reason, the
+plane of the dramatic action lies deep below the surface of life, down
+in the inner tabernacle where the mystic looks for the hidden destinies.
+In his style, Maeterlinck had gradually developed an unprecedented
+capacity for bringing to light the secret agencies of fate. A portion of
+the instructed public had already learned to listen in his writings for
+the finer reverberations that swing in the wake of the uttered phrase,
+to heed the slightest hints and allusions in the text, to overlook no
+glance or gesture that might betray the mind of the acting characters.
+It is true that art to be great must be plain, but that does not mean
+that the sole test of great art is the response of the simple and
+apathetic.
+
+In Maeterlinck's first masterpiece, _Pélléas et Mélisande_, (1892), the
+motives again are drawn up from the lower regions of consciousness; once
+more the plot is born of a gloomy fancy, and the darkling mood hovering
+over scene and action attests the persistence of fatalism in the poet.
+The theory of old King Arkel, the spokesman of the author's personal
+philosophy, is that one should not seek to be active; one should ever
+wait on the threshold of Fate. Even the younger people in the play are
+infected by the morbid doctrine of an inevitable necessity for all
+things that happen to them: "We do not go where we would go. We do not
+do that which we would do." Perhaps, however, these beliefs are here
+enounced for the last time with the author's assent or acquiescence.
+
+In artistic merit "Pélléas and Mélisande" marks a nearer approach to
+mastery, once the integral peculiarities of the form and method have
+been granted. Despite a noticeable lack of force, directness, and
+plasticity in the characterization, the _vie intérieure_ is most
+convincingly expressed. In one of the finest scenes of the play we see
+the principals at night gazing out upon a measureless expanse of water
+dotted with scattered lights. The atmosphere is permeated with a
+reticent yearning of love. The two young creatures, gentle, shy, their
+souls tinged with melancholy, are drawn towards one another by an
+ineluctable mutual attraction. Yet, though their hearts are filled to
+overflowing, not a word of affection is uttered. Their love reveals
+itself to us even as to themselves, without a loud and jarring
+declaration, through its very speechlessness, as it were. The situation
+well bears out the _roi sage_ in _Alladine et Palomides_: "There is a
+moment when souls touch one another and know everything without a need
+of our opening the lips." There are still other scenes in this play so
+tense with emotion that words would be intrusive and dissonant. There is
+that lovely picture of Mélisande at the window; Pélléas cannot reach up
+to her hand, but is satisfied to feel her loosened hair about his face.
+It is a question whether even that immortal love duet in "Romeo and
+Juliet" casts a poetic spell more enchanting than this. At another
+moment in the drama, we behold the lovers in Maeterlinck's beloved
+half-light, softly weeping as they stare with speechless rapture into
+the flames. And not until the final parting does any word of love pass
+their lips. In another part of the play Goland, Mélisande's aging
+husband, who suspects his young stepbrother, Pélléas, of loving
+Mélisande, conducts him to an underground chamber. We are not told why
+he has brought him there, and why he has led him to the brink of the
+pitfall from which there mounts a smell of death. If it be a heinous
+deed he is brooding, why does he pause in its execution? His terrible
+struggle does not reveal itself through speech, yet it is eloquently
+expressed in the wildness of his looks, the trembling of his voice, and
+the sudden anguished outcry: "Pélléas! Pélléas!"
+
+Evidently Maeterlinck completely achieves the very purpose to which the
+so-called Futurists think they must sacrifice all traditional
+conceptions of Art; and achieves it without any brutal stripping and
+skinning of the poetic subject, without the hideous exhibition of its
+_disjecta membra_, and above all, without that implied disqualification
+for the higher artistic mission which alone could induce a man to limit
+his service to the dishing-up of chunks and collops, "cubic" or
+amorphous.
+
+In recognition of a certain tendency towards mannerism that lay in his
+technique, Maeterlinck, in a spirit of self-persiflage, labeled the book
+of one-act plays which he next published, (1894), _Trois Petits Drames
+pour Marionettes_ ("Three Little Puppet Plays"). They are entitled,
+severally: _Alladine et Palomides_, _Intérieur_, and _La Mort de
+Tintagiles_. While in motifs and materials as well as in the principal
+points of style these playlets present a sort of epitome of his artistic
+progression up to date, they also display some new and significant
+qualities. Of the three the first named is most replete with suggestive
+symbolism and at the same time most remindful of the older plays,
+especially of "Pélléas and Mélisande." King Ablamore is in character and
+demeanor clearly a counterpart of King Arkel. To be sure he makes a
+temporary stand against the might of Fate, but his resistance is meek
+and futile, and his wisdom culminates in the same old fatalistic
+formula: "_Je sais qu'on ne fait pas ce que l'on voudrait faire._"
+
+_L'Intérieur_ ("Home") handles a theme almost identical with that of
+_L'Intruse_: Life and Death separated only by a thin pane of glass,--the
+sudden advent of affliction from a cloudless sky. In this little tragedy
+a family scene, enacted in "dumb show," is watched from the outside. The
+play is without suspense in the customary use of the term, since after
+the first whispered conversation between the bringers of the fateful
+tidings the audience is fully aware of the whole story:--the daughter of
+the house, for whose return the little group is waiting, has been found
+dead in the river. The quiescent mood is sustained to the end; no great
+outburst of lamentation; the curtain drops the instant the news has been
+conveyed. But the poignancy of the tragic strain is only enhanced by the
+repression of an exciting climax.
+
+"The Death of Tintagiles" repeats in a still more harrowing form the
+fearful predicament of a helpless child treated with so much dramatic
+tension in Maeterlinck's first tragedy. Again, as in "Princess Maleine,"
+the action of this dramolet attains its high point in a scene where
+murderous treachery is about to spring the trap set for an innocent
+young prince. Intuitively he senses the approach of death, and in vain
+beats his little fists against the door that imprisons him. The
+situation is rendered more piteous even than in the earlier treatment of
+the motif, because the door which bars his escape also prevents his
+faithful sister Ygraine from coming to the rescue.
+
+We have observed in all the plays so far a marked simplicity of
+construction. _Aglavaine et Selysette_, (1896), denotes a still further
+simplification. Here the scenic apparatus is reduced to the very
+minimum, and the psychological premises are correspondingly plain. The
+story presents a "triangular" love entanglement strangely free from the
+sensual ingredient; two women dream of sharing, in all purity, one
+lover--and the dream ends for one of them in heroic self-sacrifice
+brought to secure the happiness of the rival. However, more noteworthy
+than the structure of the plot is the fact that the philosophic current
+flowing through it has perceptibly altered its habitual direction. The
+spiritual tendency is felt to be turning in its course, and even though
+fatalism still holds the rule, with slowly relaxing grip, yet a changed
+ethical outlook is manifest. Also, this play for the first time
+proclaims, though in no vociferous manner, the duty of the individual
+toward himself, the duty so emphatically proclaimed by two of
+Maeterlinck's greatest teachers, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henrik Ibsen.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+The inner philosophic conflict was but of short duration. In 1898 _La
+Sagesse et La Destinée_ ("Wisdom and Destiny") saw the light. The
+metaphor might be taken in a meaning higher and more precise than the
+customary, for, coming to this book from those that preceded is indeed
+like emerging from some dark and dismal cave into the warm and cheering
+light of the sun. "Wisdom and Destiny" is a collection of essays and
+aphorisms which stands to this second phase of Maeterlinck's dramaturgy
+in a relation closely analogous to that existing between "The Treasure
+of the Humble" and the works heretofore surveyed. Without amounting to a
+wholesale recantation of the idea that is central in the earlier set of
+essays, the message of the newer set is of a very different kind. The
+author of "Wisdom and Destiny" has not changed his view touching the
+superiority of the intuitional function over the intellectual. The
+significant difference between the old belief and the new consists
+simply in this: the latent force of life is no longer imagined as an
+antagonistic agency; rather it is conceived as a benign energy that
+makes for a serene acceptance of the world that is. Of this turn in the
+outlook, the philosophic affirmation of life and the consent of the will
+to subserve the business of living are the salutary concomitants.
+Wisdom, in expanding, has burst the prison of fatalism and given freedom
+to vision. The world, beheld in the light of this emancipation, is not
+to be shunned by the wise man. Let Fortune bring what she will, he can
+strip his afflictions of their terrors by transmuting them into higher
+knowledge. Therefore, pain and suffering need not be feared and shirked;
+they may even be hailed with satisfaction, for, as is paradoxically
+suggested in _Aglavaine et Selysette_, they help man "_être heureux en
+devenant plus triste_,"--to be happy in becoming sadder. The poet, who
+till now had clung to the conviction that there can be no happy fate,
+that all our destinies are guided by unlucky stars, now on the contrary
+persuades us to consider how even calamity may be refined in the medium
+of wisdom in such fashion as to become an asset of life, and warns us
+against recoiling in spirit from any reverse of our fortunes. He holds
+that blows and sorrows cannot undo the sage. Fate has no weapons save
+those we supply, and "wise is he for whom even the evil must feed the
+pyre of love." In fine, Fate obeys him who dares to command it. After
+all, then, man has a right to appoint himself the captain of his soul,
+the master of his fate.
+
+Yet, for all that, the author of "Wisdom and Destiny" should not be
+regarded as the partizan and apologist of sadness for the sake of
+wisdom. If sorrow be a rich mine of satisfaction, joy is by far the
+richer mine. This new outlook becomes more and more optimistic because
+of the increasing faculty of such a philosophy to extract from the mixed
+offerings of life a more near-at-hand happiness than sufferings can
+possibly afford; not perchance that perpetual grinning merriment over
+the comicality of the passing spectacle which with so many passes for a
+"sense of humor," but rather a calm and serious realization of what is
+lastingly beautiful, good, and true. A person's attainment of this
+beatitude imposes on him the clear duty of helping others to rise to a
+similar exalted level of existence. And this duty Maeterlinck seeks to
+discharge by proclaiming in jubilant accents the concrete reality of
+happiness. _L'Oiseau Bleu_ ("The Blue Bird"), above all other works,
+illustrates the fact that human lives suffer not so much for the lack of
+happiness as for the want of being clearly conscious of the happiness
+they possess. It is seen that the seed of optimism in "The Treasure of
+the Humble" has sprouted and spread out, and at last triumphantly shot
+forth through the overlaying fatalism. The newly converted, hence all
+the more thoroughgoing, optimist, believing that counsel and consolation
+can come only from those who trust in the regenerative power of hope,
+throws himself into a mental attitude akin to that of the Christian
+Scientist, and confidently proceeds to cure the ills of human kind by a
+categorical denial of their existence. Or perhaps it would be more just
+to say of Maeterlinck's latter-day outlook, the serenity of which even
+the frightful experience of the present time has failed to destroy, that
+instead of peremptorily negating evil, he merely denies its supremacy.
+All about him he perceives in the midst of the worst wrongs and evils
+many fertile germs of righteousness; vice itself seems to distil its own
+antitoxin.
+
+Together with Maeterlinck's optimistic strain, his individualism gains
+an unexpected emphasis. "Before one exists for others, one must exist
+for one's self. The egoism of a strong and clear-sighted soul is of a
+more beneficent effect than all the devotion of a blind and feeble
+soul." Here we have a promulgation identical in gist with Emerson's
+unqualified declaration of moral independence when he says: "Whoso would
+be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms
+must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be
+goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
+No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature."(8)
+
+  (8) "Self-Reliance."
+
+His attitude of countenancing the positive joys of living causes
+Maeterlinck in his later career to reverse his former judgment, and to
+inveigh, much in the manner of Nietzsche, against the "parasitical
+virtues." "Certain notions about resignation and self-sacrifice sap the
+finest moral forces of mankind more thoroughly than do great vices and
+even crimes. The alleged triumphs over the flesh are in most cases only
+complete defeats of life." When to such rebellious sentiments is joined
+an explicit warning against the seductions and intimidations held out by
+the official religions--their sugar plums and dog whips, as Maeterlinck
+puts it--one can only wonder how his writings escaped as long as they
+did the attention of the authorities that swing the power of imprimatur
+and anathema.
+
+Maeterlinck may not be classed unreservedly as a radical individualist.
+For whereas a philosophy like that of Nietzsche takes no account of the
+"much-too-many," who according to that great fantasist do not interest
+anybody except the statistician and the devil, Maeterlinck realizes the
+supreme importance of the great mass as the ordained transmitters of
+civilization. The gulf between aristocratic subjectivism, devoted
+single-mindedly to the ruthless enforcement of self-interest, and, on
+the other hand, a self-forgetful social enthusiasm, is bridged in
+Maeterlinck by an extremely strong instinct for justice and, moreover,
+by his firm belief--at least for the time being--that the same strong
+instinct exists universally as a specific trait of human nature. By such
+a philosophy Justice, then, is discerned not as a supra-natural
+function, but as a function of human nature as distinguished from nature
+at large. The restriction is made necessary by our knowledge of the
+observable operations of nature. In particular would the principle of
+heredity seem to argue against the reign of justice in the
+administration of human destinies, inasmuch as we find ourselves quite
+unable to recognize in the apportionment of pleasure and pain anything
+like a due ratio of merit. And yet Maeterlinck realizes that perhaps
+nature measures life with a larger standard than the individual's short
+span of existence, and warns us in his essay on "Justice" not to indulge
+our self-conceit in a specious emulation of ways that are utterly beyond
+our comprehension. After all, then, our poet-philosopher succeeds _foro
+conscientiæ_ in reconciling his cult of self with devotion to the common
+interest. Morality, in that essay, is defined as the co-ordination of
+personal desire to the task assigned by nature to the race. And is it
+not true that a contrary, that is, ascetic concept of morality reduces
+itself to absurdity through its antagonism to that primal human instinct
+that makes for the continuity of life?
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+From the compromise effected between two fairly opposite ethical
+principles, there emerges in the works of this period something akin to
+a socialistic tendency. It is organically related to the mystical
+prepossession of the author's manner of thinking. Maeterlinck gratefully
+acknowledges that by the search-light of science the uppermost layers of
+darkness have been dispelled; but realizes also that the deep-seated
+central enigma still remains in darkness: as much as ever are the
+primordial causes sealed against a glimpse of finite knowledge. We have
+changed the names, not the problems. Instead of God, Providence, or
+Fate, we say Nature, Selection, and Heredity. But in reality do we know
+more concerning Life than did our ancestors?
+
+What, then, questions the persevering pursuer of the final verities,
+shall we do in order that we may press nearer to Truth? May we not
+perchance steep our souls in light that flows from another source than
+science? And what purer light is there to illumine us than the halo
+surrounding a contented worker performing his task, not under coercion,
+but from a voluntary, or it may be instinctive, submission to the law of
+life? If such subordination of self constitutes the basis of rational
+living, we shall do well to study its workings on a lowlier and less
+complicated plane than the human; for instance, in the behavior of the
+creature that is proverbial for its unflagging industry. For this
+industry is not motivated by immediate or selfish wants; it springs from
+instinctive self-dedication to the common cause. Some people expected
+from _La Vie des Abeilles_ ("The Life of the Bee"), (1901), much
+brand-new information about matters of apiculture. But in spite of his
+twenty-five years' experience, Maeterlinck had no startling discoveries
+to convey to his fellow-hivers. His book on bees is not primarily the
+result of a specialist's investigations but a poetical record of the
+observations made by a mind at once romantic and philosophical and
+strongly attracted to the study of this particular form of community
+life, because by its organization on a miniature scale it spreads before
+the student of society a synoptic view of human affairs.
+
+Of the great change that had by now taken place in his conception of
+life, Maeterlinck was fully cognizant, and made no concealment of it. In
+the essay on "Justice" he says, with reference to his earlier dramas:
+"The motive of these little plays was the fear of the Unknown by which
+we are constantly surrounded," and passes on to describe his religious
+temper as a sort of compound of the Christian idea of God with the
+antique idea of Fate, immersed in the profound gloom of hopeless
+mystery. "The Unknown took chiefly the aspect of a power, itself but
+blindly groping in the dark, yet disposing with inexorable unfeelingness
+of the fates of men."
+
+Evidently those same plays are passed once more in self-critical review
+in _Ardiane et Barbe-Bleue_ ("Ardiane and Blue-Beard"), (1899),
+notwithstanding the fact that the author disclaims any philosophic
+purpose and presents his work as a mere libretto. We cannot regard it as
+purely accidental that of Blue-Beard's terror-stricken wives,
+four,--Selysette, Mélisande, Ygraine, Alladine,--bear the names of
+earlier heroines, and, besides, that each of these retains with the name
+also the character of her namesake. The symbolism is too transparent.
+The child-wives of the cruel knight, forever in a state of trembling
+fear, are too passive to extricate themselves from their fate, whereas
+Ardiane succeeds instantly in breaking her captivity, because she has
+the spirit and strength to shatter the window and let in the light and
+air. The contrast between her resolute personality and those five inert
+bundles of misery undoubtedly connotes the difference between the
+author's paralyzing fatalism in the past and his present dynamic
+optimism.
+
+A like contrast between dejection and resilience would be brought to
+light by a comparison of the twelve lyric poems, _Douze Chansons_,
+(1897), with the _Serres Chaudes_. The mood is still greatly subdued;
+the new poetry is by no means free from sadness and a strain of
+resignation. But the half-stifled despair that cries out from the older
+book returns no dissonant echo in the new.
+
+Even his dramatic technique comes under the sway of Maeterlinck's
+altered view of the world. The far freer use of exciting and eventful
+action testifies to increased elasticity and force. This is a marked
+feature of _Soeur Beatrice_ ("Sister Beatrice"), (1900), a miracle play
+founded on the old story about the recreant nun who, broken from sin and
+misery, returns to the cloister and finds that during the many years of
+her absence her part and person have been carried out by the Holy Virgin
+herself.
+
+Equally, the three other dramas of this epoch--_Aglavaine et Selysette_,
+_Monna Vanna_, and _Joyzelle_--are highly available for scenic
+enactment. Of the three, _Monna Vanna_, (1902), in particular is
+conspicuous for a wholly unexpected aptitude of characterization, and
+for the unsurpassed intensity of its situations, which in this isolated
+case are not cast in a single mood as in the other plays, but are
+individually distinct and full of dramatic progress, whereas everywhere
+else the action moves rather sluggishly.
+
+"Monna Vanna" is one of the most brilliantly actable plays of modern
+times, despite its improbability. A certain incongruity between the
+realistic and the romantic aspects in the behavior of the principals is
+saved from offensiveness by a disposition on the part of the spectator
+to refer it, unhistorically, to the provenience of the story. But as a
+matter of fact the actors are not fifteenth century Renaissance men and
+women at all, but mystics, modern mystics at that, both in their
+reasoning and their morality. It is under a cryptical soul-compulsion
+that Giovanna goes forth to the unknown condottiere prepared to lay down
+her honor for the salvation of her people, and that her husband at last
+conquers his repugnance to her going. Prinzivalle, Guido, Marco, are
+mystics even to a higher degree than Vanna.
+
+The poignant actualism of "Monna Vanna" lies, however, in the author's
+frank sympathy with a distinctively modern zest for freedom. The
+situation between husband and wife is reminiscent of "A Doll's House" in
+the greedily possessive quality of Guido's affection, with which quality
+his tyrannous unbelief in Prinzivalle's magnanimity fully accords. But
+Maeterlinck here goes a step beyond Ibsen. In her married life with
+Guido, Vanna was meekly contented, "at least as happy as one can be when
+one has renounced the vague and extravagant dreams which seem beyond
+human life." When the crisis arrives she realizes that "it is never too
+late for one who has found a love that can fill a life." Her final
+rebellion is sanctioned by the author, who unmistakably endorses the
+venerable Marco's profession of faith that life is always in the right.
+
+"Joyzelle," (1903), inferior to "Monna Vanna" dramaturgically, and in
+form the most distinctly fantastic of all Maeterlinck's productions, is
+still farther removed from the fatalistic atmosphere. This play sounds,
+as the author himself has stated, "the triumph of will and love over
+destiny or fatality," as against the converse lesson of _Monna Vanna_.
+The idea is symbolically expressed in the temptations of Lanceor and in
+the liberation of Joyzelle and her lover from the power of Merlin and
+his familiar, Arielle, who impersonates the secret forces of the heart.
+
+_Aglavaine et Selysette_, _Monna Vanna_, and _Joyzelle_ mark by still
+another sign the advent of a new phase in Maeterlinck's evolution;
+namely, by the characterization of the heroines. Previously, the women
+in his plays were hardly individualized and none of them can be said to
+possess a physiognomy strictly her own. Maeterlinck had returned with
+great partiality again and again to the same type of woman: languid and
+listless, without stamina and strength, yet at the same time full of
+deep feeling, and capable of unending devotion--pathetic incorporeal
+figures feeling their way along without the light of self-consciousness,
+like some pre-raphaelite species of somnambulists. In the new plays, on
+the contrary, women of a courageous and venturesome spirit and with a
+self-possessive assurance are portrayed by preference and with
+unmistakable approval.
+
+As the technique in the more recent creations of Maeterlinck, so the
+diction, too, accommodates itself to altered tendencies. Whereas
+formerly the colloquy was abrupt and fragmentary, it is now couched in
+cadenced, flowing language, which, nevertheless, preserves the old-time
+simplicity. The poet himself has criticized his former dialogue. He said
+it made those figures seem like deaf people walking in their sleep, whom
+somebody is endeavoring to arouse from a heavy dream.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+For the limited purpose of this sketch it is not needful to enter into a
+detailed discussion of Maeterlinck's latest productions, since such
+lines as they add to his philosophical and artistic physiognomy have
+been traced beforehand. His literary output for the last dozen years or
+so is embodied in six or seven volumes: about two years to a book seems
+to be his normal ratio of achievement, the same as was so regularly
+observed by Henrik Ibsen, and one that seems rather suitable for an
+author whose reserve, dictated by a profound artistic and moral
+conscience, like his actual performance, calls for admiration and
+gratitude. During the war he has written, or at least published, very
+little. It is fairly safe to assume that the emotional experience of
+this harrowing period will control his future philosophy as its most
+potent factor; equally safe is it to predict, on the strength of his
+published utterances, that his comprehensive humanity, that has been put
+to such a severe test, will pass unscathed through the ordeal.
+
+Of the last group of Maeterlinck's works only two are dramas, namely,
+"The Blue Bird," (1909), and "Mary Magdalene," (1910). The baffling
+symbolism of "The Blue Bird" has not stood in the way of a tremendous
+international stage success; the fact is due much less to the simple
+line of thought that runs through the puzzle than to the exuberant fancy
+that gave rise to it and its splendid scenical elaboration. Probably Mr.
+Henry Rose is right, in his helpful analysis of "The Blue Bird," in
+venturing the assertion that "by those who are familiar with
+Swedenborg's teaching 'The Blue Bird' must be recognized as to a very
+large extent written on lines which are in accordance with what is known
+as the Science of Correspondences--a very important part of Swedenborg's
+teachings." But the understanding of this symbolism in its fullness
+offers very great difficulties. That a definite and consistent meaning
+underlies all its features will be rather felt than comprehended by the
+great majority who surely cannot be expected to go to the trouble first
+of familiarizing themselves with Maeterlinck's alleged code of symbols
+and then of applying it meticulously to the interpretation of his plays.
+
+"Mary Magdalene," judged from the dramatic point of view, is a quite
+impressive tragedy, yet a full and sufficient treatment of the very
+suggestive scriptural legend it is not. The converted courtezan is
+characterized too abstractly. Instead of presenting herself as a woman
+consumed with blazing sensuality but in whom the erotic fire is
+transmuted into religious passion, she affects us like an enacted
+commentary upon such a most extraordinary experience.
+
+Finally, there are several volumes of essays, to some of which reference
+has already been made.(9) _Le Temple Enseveli_ ("The Buried Temple"),
+(1902), consists of six disquisitions, all dealing with metaphysical
+subjects: Justice, The Evolution of Mystery, The Reign of Matter, The
+Past, Chance, The Future. _Le Double Jardin_ ("The Double Garden"),
+(1904), is much more miscellaneous in its makeup. These are its
+heterogeneous subjects: The Death of a Little Dog, Monte Carlo, A Ride
+in a Motor Car, Dueling, The Angry Temper of the Bees, Universal
+Suffrage, The Modern Drama, The Sources of Spring, Death and the Crown
+(a discussion upon the fatal illness of Edward VII), a View of Rome,
+Field Flowers, Chrysanthemums, Old-fashioned Flowers, Sincerity, The
+Portrait of Woman, and Olive Branches (a survey of certain now, alas,
+obsolete ethical movements of that day). _L'Intelligence des Fleurs_ (in
+the translation it is named "Life and Flowers," in an enlarged issue
+"The Measure of the Hours," both 1907), takes up, besides the theme of
+the general caption, the manufacture of perfumes, the various
+instruments for measuring time, the psychology of accident, social duty,
+war, prize-fighting, and "King Lear." In 1912, three essays on Emerson,
+Novalis, and Ruysbroeck appeared collectively, in English, under the
+title "On Emerson and Other Essays." These originally prefaced certain
+works of those writers translated by Maeterlinck in his earlier years.
+
+  (9) Considerable liberty has been taken by Maeterlinck in the grouping
+  and naming of his essay upon their republication in the several
+  collections. The confusion caused thereby is greatly increased by the
+  deviation of some of the translated editions from the original volumes
+  as to the sequence of articles, the individual and collective titles,
+  and even the contents themselves.
+
+Maeterlinck's most recent publications are _La Mort_ (published in
+English in a considerably extended collection under the title "Our
+Eternity"), (1913), "The Unknown Guest," (1914), and _Les Débris de la
+Guerre_ ("The Wrack of the Storm"), (1916).(10) The two first named,
+having for their central subject Death and the great concomitant problem
+of the life beyond, show that the author has become greatly interested
+in psychical research; he even goes so far as to affirm his belief in
+precognition. In these essays, Theosophy and Spiritism and kindred
+occult theories are carefully analyzed, yet ingenious as are the
+author's speculations, they leave anything like a solution of the
+perplexing riddles far afield. On the whole he inclines to a telepathic
+explanation of the psychical phenomena, yet thinks they may be due to
+the strivings of the cosmic intelligence after fresh outlets, and
+believes that a careful and persistent investigation of these phenomena
+may open up hitherto undreamt of realms of reality. In general, we find
+him on many points less assertive than he was in the beginning and
+inclined to a general retrenchment of the dogmatic element in his
+philosophic attitude. A significant passage in "The Buried Treasure"
+teaches us not to deplore the loss of fixed beliefs. "One should never
+look back with regret to those hours when a great belief abandons us. A
+faith that becomes extinct, a means that fails, a dominant idea that no
+longer dominates us because we think it is our turn to dominate
+it--these things prove that we are living, that we are progressing, that
+we are using up a great many things because we are not standing still."
+Of the gloomy fatalism of his literary beginnings hardly a trace is to
+be found in the Maeterlinck of to-day. His war-book, "The Wrack of the
+Storm," breathes a calm optimism in the face of untold disaster. The
+will of man is put above the power of fate. "Is it possible that
+fatality--by which I mean what perhaps for a moment was the
+unacknowledged desire of the planet--shall not regain the upper hand? At
+the stage which man has reached, I hope and believe so.... Everything
+seems to tell us that man is approaching the day whereon, seizing the
+most glorious opportunity that has ever presented itself since he
+acquired a consciousness, he will at last learn that he is able, when he
+pleases, to control his whole fate in this world."(11) His faith in
+humanity is built on the heroic virtues displayed in this war. "To-day,
+not only do we know that these virtues exist: we have taught the world
+that they are always triumphant, that nothing is lost while faith is
+left, while honor is intact, while love continues, while the soul does
+not surrender." ... Death itself is now threatened with extinction by
+our heroic race: "The more it exercises its ravages, the more it
+increases the intensity of that which it cannot touch; the more it
+pursues its phantom victories, the better does it prove to us that man
+will end by conquering death."
+
+  (10) "The Light Beyond" (1917) is not a new work at all, but merely a
+  combination of parts from "Our Eternity" and "The Wrack of the Storm."
+
+  (11) "The Wrack of the Storm," p. 144 f.
+
+In the concluding chapter of "Our Eternity," the romantic modification
+of Maeterlinck's mysticism is made patent in his confession regarding
+the problem of Knowledge: "I have added nothing to what was already
+known. I have simply tried to separate what may be true from that which
+is assuredly not true.... Perhaps through our quest for that
+undiscoverable Truth we shall have accustomed our eyes to pierce the
+terror of the last hour by looking it full in the face.... We need have
+no hope that any one will utter on this earth the word that shall put an
+end to our uncertainties. It is very probable, on the contrary, that no
+one in this world, nor perhaps in the next, will discover the great
+secret of the universe. And ... it is most fortunate that it should be
+so. We have not only to resign ourselves to living in the
+incomprehensible, but to rejoice that we cannot get out of it. If there
+were no more insoluble questions ... infinity would not be infinite; and
+then we should have forever to curse the fate that placed us in a
+universe proportionate to our intelligence. The unknown and the
+unknowable are necessary and will perhaps always be necessary to our
+happiness. In any case, I would not wish my worst enemy, were his
+understanding a thousandfold loftier and a thousandfold mightier than
+mine, to be condemned eternally to inhabit a world of which he had
+surprised an essential secret...."(12)
+
+  (12) Quoted from the excellent translation by A. T. de Mattos.
+
+So the final word of Maeterlinck's philosophy, after a lifetime of
+ardent search, clears up none of the tantalizing secrets of our
+existence. And yet somehow it bears a message that is full of
+consolation. The value of human life lies in the perpetual movement
+towards a receding goal. Whoever can identify himself with such a
+philosophy and accept its great practical lesson, that we shall never
+reach Knowledge but acquire wisdom in the pursuit, should be able to
+envisage the veiled countenance of Truth without despair, and even to
+face with some courage the eternal problem of our being, its reason and
+its destination.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE ECCENTRICITY OF AUGUST STRINDBERG
+
+
+One cannot speak of August Strindberg with much _gusto_. The most
+broadminded critic will find himself under necessity to disapprove of
+him as a man and to condemn so many features of his production that
+almost one might question his fitness as a subject of literary
+discussion. Nevertheless, his importance is beyond dispute and quite
+above the consideration of personal like or dislike, whether we view him
+in his creative capacity,--as an intellectual and ethical spokesman of
+his time,--or in his human character,--as a typical case of certain
+mental and moral maladies which somehow during his time were more or
+less epidemic throughout the lettered world. We have it on excellent
+authority that at his début in the literary theatre he made the stage
+quake with the elemental power of his personality. Gigantic rebels like
+Ibsen, Bjoernson, Nietzsche, and Tolstoy, we are told, dwindled to
+normal proportions beside his titanic stature. He aimed to conquer and
+convert the whole world by his fanatical protest against the rotten
+civilization of his time. The attempt proved an utter failure. He never
+could grow into a world-figure, because he lacked the courage as well as
+the cosmopolitan adaptability needed for intellectual expatriation.
+Hence, in great contrast to Ibsen, he remained to Europe at large the
+uncouth Scandinavian, while in the eyes of Scandinavia he was
+specifically the Swede; and his country-men, even though they
+acknowledged him their premier poet, treated him, because of his
+eccentricity, as a national gazing-stock rather than as a genuine
+national asset. Yet for all that, he ranks as the foremost writer of his
+country and one of the representative men of the age. His poetic genius
+is admitted by practically all the critics, while the greatest among
+them, George Brandes, pronounces him in addition an unsurpassed master
+in the command of his mother tongue. But his position as a writer is by
+no means limited to his own little country. For his works have been
+translated into all civilized languages, and if the circulation of
+literary products is a safe indication of their influence, then several
+of Strindberg's books at least must be credited with having done
+something toward shaping the thought of our time upon some of its
+leading issues. In any case, the large and durable interest shown his
+productions marks Strindberg as a literary phenomenon of sufficient
+consequence to deserve some study.
+
+Readers of Strindberg who seek to discover the reason why criticism
+should have devoted so much attention to an author regarded almost
+universally with strong disapproval and aversion, will find that reason
+most probably in the extreme subjectiveness that dominates everything he
+has written; personal confession, novels, stories, and plays alike share
+this equality, and even in his historical dramas the figures, despite
+the minute accuracy of their delineation, are moved by the author's
+passion, not their own. Rarely, if ever, has a writer of eminence
+demonstrated a similar incapacity to reproduce the thoughts and feelings
+of other people. It has been rightly declared that all his leading
+characters are merely the outward projections of his own sentiments and
+ideas,--that at bottom he, August Strindberg, is the sole protagonist in
+all his dramaturgy and fiction.
+
+Strindberg was a man with an omnivorous intellectual curiosity, and he
+commanded a vast store of knowledge in the fields of history, science,
+and languages. His "History of the Swedish People" is recognized by
+competent judges as a very brilliant and scholarly performance. Before
+he was launched in his literary career, and while still obscurely
+employed as minor assistant at a library, he earned distinction as a
+student of the Chinese language, and one product of his research work in
+that field was even deemed worthy of being read before the _Académie des
+Inscriptions et Belles Lettres_. In Geology, Chemistry, Botany, he was
+equally productive. But the taint of eccentricity in his mental fibre
+prevented his imposing scientific accomplishments from maintaining him
+in a state of intellectual equilibrium. He laid as much store by things
+of which he had a mere smattering as by those on which he was an
+authority, and his resultant unsteadiness caused him to oscillate
+between opposite scientific enthusiasms even as his self-contradictory
+personal character involved him in abrupt changes of position, and made
+him jump from one extreme of behavior to the other.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Strindberg first attracted public notice by the appearance in 1879 of a
+novel named "The Red Room." Its effect upon a country characterized by
+so keen an observer as George Brandes as perhaps the most conservative
+in Europe resembled the excitement caused by Schiller's "The Robbers"
+almost precisely one hundred years before. It stirred up enough dust to
+change, though not to cleanse, the musty atmosphere of Philistia. For
+here was instantly recognized the challenge of a radical spirit uprisen
+in full and ruthless rebellion against each and every time-hallowed
+usage and tradition. The recollection of that hot-spur agitator bent
+with every particle of his strength to rouse the world up from its
+lethargy by his stentorian "J'accuse" and to pass sentence upon it by
+sheer tremendous vociferation, is almost entirely obliterated to-day by
+the remembrance of quite another Strindberg:--the erstwhile stormy
+idealist changed into a leering cynic; a repulsive embodiment of
+negation, a grimacing Mephistopheles who denies life and light or
+anything that he cannot comprehend, and to whom the face of the earth
+appears forever covered with darkness and filth and death and
+corruption. Indeed this final depictment of August Strindberg, whether
+or no it be accurately true to life, is a terrible example of what life
+can make of a man, or a man of his life, if he is neither light enough
+to be borne by the current of his time, nor strong enough to set his
+face against the tide and breast it.
+
+The question is, naturally, was Strindberg sincere in the fanatical
+insurgency of his earlier period, or was his attitude merely a
+theatrical pose and his social enthusiasm a ranting declamation? In
+either case, there opens up this other question: Have we reason to doubt
+the sincerity of the mental changes that were yet to follow,--the
+genuineness of his pessimism, occultism, and, in the final stage, of his
+religious conversion? His unexampled hardihood in reversing his opinions
+and going dead against his convictions could be illustrated in nearly
+every sphere of thought. At one time a glowing admirer of Rousseau and
+loudly professing his gospel of nature, he forsook this allegiance, and
+chose as his new idol Rousseau's very antipode, Voltaire. For many years
+he was a democrat of the purest water, identified himself with the
+proletarian cause, and acted as the fiery champion of the poor
+labor-driven masses against their oppressors; but one fine day, no
+matter whether it came about directly through his contact with Nietzsche
+or otherwise, he repudiated socialism, scornfully denouncing it as a
+tattered remnant of his cast-off Christianity, and arrayed himself on
+the side of the elect, or self-elect, against the "common herd," the
+"much-too-many." License for the best to govern the rest, became
+temporarily his battle-cry; and his political ideal suggested nothing
+less completely absurd than a republic presided over by an oligarchy of
+autocrats. His unsurpassed reputation as an anti-feminist would hardly
+prepare us to find his earlier works fairly aglow with sympathy for the
+woman cause. He held at one time, as did Tolstoy, that art and poetry
+have a detrimental effect upon the natural character; for which reason
+the peasant is a more normal being than the lettered man. Especially was
+he set against the drama, on the ground that it throws the public mind
+into confusion by its failure to differentiate sharply between the
+author's own opinions and those of the characters. Literature, he held,
+should pattern itself after a serious newspaper: it should seek to
+influence, not entertain. Not only did he drop this pedantic restriction
+of literature in the end, but in his own practice he had always defied
+it, because, despite his fierce campaign against art, he could not
+overcome the force of his artistic impulses. And so in other provinces
+of thought, too, he reversed his judgment with a temerity and swiftness
+that greatly offended the feelings and perplexed the intelligence of his
+followers for the time being and justified the question whether
+Strindberg had any principles at all. In politics he was by quick turns
+Anarchist and Socialist, Radical and Conservative, Republican and
+Aristocrat, Communist and Egoist; in religion, Pietist, Protestant,
+Deist, Atheist, Occultist, and Roman Catholic. And yet unquestionably he
+was honest. To blame him merely because he changed his views, and be it
+never so radically, would be blaming a man for exercising his right to
+develop. In any man of influence, an unalterable permanency of opinion
+would be even more objectionable than a frequent shift of his point of
+view. In recent times the presumable length of a person's intellectual
+usefulness has been a live subject of discussion which has resulted in
+some legislation of very questionable wisdom, for instance the setting
+of an arbitrary age limit for the active service of high-grade teachers.
+In actual experience men are too old to teach, or through any other
+function to move the minds of younger people in a forward direction,
+whenever they have lost the ability to change their own mind. Yet at all
+events, an eminent author's right of self-reversal must not be exercised
+at random; he should refrain from the propagation of new opinions that
+have not ripened within himself. Which is the same as saying that he
+should stick to his old opinions until he finds himself inwardly
+compelled to abandon them. But as a matter of fact, a man like
+Strindberg, propelled by an unbridled imagination, alert with romantic
+tendencies, nervously overstrung, kept constantly under a strain by his
+morbidly sensitive temperament,--and whose brain is consequently a
+seething chaos of conflicting ideas, is never put to the necessity of
+changing his mind; his mind keeps changing itself.
+
+It must be as difficult for the literary historian to do Strindberg full
+justice as it was for the great eccentric himself; when in taking stock,
+as it were, of his mental equipment, during one of his protracted
+periods of despondency, he summed himself up in the following
+picturesque simile: "A monstrous conglomeration, changing its forms
+according to the observer's point of view and possessing no more reality
+than the rainbow that is visible to the eyes and yet does not exist."
+His evolution may be tracked, however, in the detailed autobiography in
+which he undertook, by a rigorous application of Hippolyte Taine's
+well-known theory and method, to account for his temperamental
+peculiarities on the basis of heredity and the milieu and to describe
+the gradual transformation of his character through education and the
+external pressure of contemporary intellectual movements. This
+remarkable work is like a picture book of ideals undermined, hollowed,
+and shattered; a perverse compound of cynicism and passion, it is
+unspeakably loathsome to the sense of beauty and yet, in the last
+artistic reckoning, not without great beauty of its own. It divides the
+story of Strindberg's life into these consecutive parts: The Son of the
+Servant; The Author; The Evolution of a Soul; The Confession of a Fool;
+Inferno; Legends; The Rupture; Alone. The very titles signalize the
+brutal frankness, or, shall we say, terrible sincerity of a tale that
+rummages without piety among the most sacred privacies, and drags forth
+from intimate nooks and corners sorrow and squalor and shame enough to
+have wrecked a dozen average existences. There is no mistaking or
+evading the challenge hurled by this story: See me as I am, stripped of
+conventional lies and pretensions! Look upon my naked soul, covered with
+scars and open sores. Behold me in my spasms of love and hate, now in
+demoniacal transports, now prostrate with anguish! And if you want to
+know how I came to be what I am, consider my ancestry, my bringing up,
+my social environment, and be sure also to pocket your own due share of
+the blame for my destruction!--Certainly Strindberg's autobiography is
+not to be recommended as a graduation gift for convent-bred young
+ladies, or as a soothing diversion for convalescents, but if accepted in
+a proper sense, it will be found absorbing, informative, and even
+helpful.
+
+Strindberg never forgave his father for having married below his
+station. He felt that the good blood of the Strindbergs,--respectable
+merchants and ministers and country gentlemen,--was worsened by the
+proletarian strain imported into it through a working girl named
+Eleonore Ulrike Norling, the mother of August Strindberg and his eleven
+brothers and sisters. During August's childhood the family lived in
+extremely straitened circumstances. When a dozen people live cooped up
+in three rooms, some of them are more than likely to have the joy of
+youth crushed out of them and crowded from the premises. Here was the
+first evil that darkened Strindberg's life: he simply was cheated out of
+his childhood.
+
+School was no happier place for him than home. His inordinate pride,
+only sharpened by the consciousness of his parents' poverty which
+bordered on pauperism, threw him into a state of perpetual rebellion
+against comrades and teachers. And all this time his inner life was
+tossed hither and thither by a general intellectual and emotional
+restlessness due to an insatiable craving for knowledge. At fifteen
+years of age he had reached a full conviction on the irredeemable
+evilness of life; and concluded, in a moment of religious exaltation, to
+dedicate his own earthly existence to the vicarious expiation of
+universal sin through the mortification of the flesh. Then, of a sudden,
+he became a voracious reader of rationalistic literature, and turned
+atheist with almost inconceivable dispatch, but soon was forced back by
+remorse into the pietistic frame of mind,--only to pass through another
+reaction immediately after. At this time he claims that earthly life is
+a punishment or a probation; but that it lies in man's power to make it
+endurable by freeing himself from the social restraints. He has become a
+convert to the fantastic doctrine of Jean Jacques Rousseau, that man is
+good by nature but has been depraved by civilization. Now in his
+earliest twenties, he embraces communism with all its implications,--free
+love, state parenthood, public ownership of utilities, equal
+division of the fruits of labor, and so forth,--as the sole
+and sure means of salvation for humanity.
+
+In the "Swiss Stories," subtitled "Utopias in Reality,"(13) Strindberg
+demonstrated to his own satisfaction the smooth and practical workings
+of that doctrine. It was difficult for him to understand why the major
+part of the world seemed so hesitant about adopting so tempting and
+equitable a scheme of living. Yet, for his own person, too, he soon
+disavowed socialism, because under a socialistic régime the individual
+would be liable to have his ideas put into uniform, and the remotest
+threat of interference with his freedom of thought was something this
+fanatical apostle of liberty could not brook.
+
+  (13) The stories deal among other things with the harmonious communal
+  life in Godin's _Phalanstère_. Strindberg wrote two descriptions of
+  it, one before, the other after visiting the colony.
+
+In the preface to the "Utopias," he had referred to himself as "a
+convinced socialist, like all sensible people"; whereas now he writes:
+"Idealism and Socialism are two maladies born of laziness." Having thus
+scientifically diagnosed the disease and prescribed the one true
+specific for it, namely--how simple!--the total abolition of the
+industries, he resumes the preaching of Rousseauism in its simon-pure
+form, orders every man to be his maid-of-all-work and jack-of-all-trades,
+puts the world on a vegetarian diet, and then wonders why
+the socialists denounce and revile him as a turncoat and an
+apostate.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+The biography throws an especially vivid light on Strindberg's relation
+to one of the most important factors of socialism, to wit, the question
+of woman's rights. His position on this issue is merely a phase of that
+extreme and practically isolated position in regard to woman in general
+that has more than any other single element determined the feeling of
+the public towards him and by consequence fixed his place in
+contemporary literature. That this should be so is hardly unfair,
+because no other element has entered so deeply into the structure and
+fibre of his thought and feeling.
+
+Strindberg, as has been stated, was not from the outset, or perchance
+constitutionally, an anti-feminist. In "The Red Room" he preaches
+equality of the sexes even in marriage. The thesis of the book is that
+man and woman are not antagonistic phenomena of life, rather they are
+modifications of the same phenomenon, made for mutual completion; hence,
+they can only fulfill their natural destiny through close coöperative
+comradeship. But there were two facts that prevented Strindberg from
+proceeding farther along this line of thought. One was his incorrigible
+propensity to contradiction, the other his excessive subjectiveness
+which kept him busy building up theories on the basis of personal
+experience. The prodigious feminist movement launched in Scandinavia by
+Ibsen and Bjoernson was very repugnant to him, because he felt, not
+without some just reason, that the movement was for a great many people
+little more than a fad. So long as art and literature are influenced by
+fashion, so long there will be and should be revolts against the vogue.
+Moreover, Strindberg felt that the movement was being carried too far.
+He was prepared to accompany Ibsen some distance on the way of reform,
+but refused to subscribe to his verdict that the whole blame for our
+crying social maladjustments rests with the unwillingness of men to
+allot any rights whatsoever to women.
+
+Strindberg's play, "Sir Bengt's Wife," printed in 1882, but of much
+earlier origin, is interpreted by Brandes as a symbolical portrayal of
+feminine life in Scandinavia during the author's early manhood. The
+leading feminine figure, a creature wholly incapable of understanding or
+appreciating the nobler traits in man, is nevertheless treated with
+sympathy, on the whole. She is represented,--like Selma Bratsberg in
+Ibsen's "The League of Youth," and Nora Helmer, in "A Doll's House,"--as
+the typical and normal victim of a partial and unfair training. Her
+faults of judgment and errors of temper are due to the fact so
+forcefully descanted upon by Selma, that women are not permitted to
+share the interests and anxieties of their husbands. We are expressly
+informed by Strindberg that this drama was intended, in the first place,
+as an attack upon the romantic proclivities of feminine education; in
+the second, as an illustration of the power of love to subdue the will;
+in the third, as a defense of the thesis that woman's love is of a
+higher quality than man's; and lastly, as a vindication of the right of
+woman to be her own master. Again, in "Married" he answers the query,
+Shall women vote? distinctly in the affirmative, although here the fixed
+idea about the congenital discordance between the sexes, and the
+identification of love with a struggle for supremacy, has already seized
+hold of him.
+
+To repeat, there was at first nothing absolutely preposterous about
+Strindberg's position in regard to the woman movement. On the contrary,
+his view might have been endorsed as a not altogether unwholesome
+corrective for the ruling fashion of dealing with the issue by the
+advocacy of extremes. But by force of his supervening personal grievance
+against the sex, Strindberg's anti-feminism became in the long run the
+fixed pole about which gravitated his entire system of social and
+ethical thought. His campaign against feminism, which otherwise could
+have served a good purpose by curbing wild militancy, was defeated by
+its own exaggerations. Granting that feminists had gone too far in the
+denunciation of male brutality and despotism, Strindberg went still
+farther in the opposite direction, when he deliberately set out to lay
+bare the character of woman by dissecting some of her most diabolical
+incarnations. As has already been said, he was utterly incapable of
+objective thinking, and under the sting of his miseries in love and
+marriage, dislike of woman turned into hatred and hatred into frenzy.
+Henceforth, the entire spectacle of life presented itself to his
+distorted vision as a perpetual state of war between the sexes: on the
+one side he saw the male, strong of mind and heart, but in the
+generosity of strength guileless and over-trustful; on the other side,
+the female, weak of body and intellect, but shrewd enough to exploit her
+frailness by linking iniquity to impotence and contriving by her
+treacherous cunning to enslave her natural superior:--it is the story of
+Samson and Delilah made universal in its application. Love is shown up
+as the trap in which man is caught to be shorn of his power. The case
+against woman is classically drawn up in "The Father," one of the
+strangest and at the same time most powerful tragedies of Strindberg.
+The principals of the plot stand for the typical character difference
+between the sexes as Strindberg sees it; the man being kind-hearted,
+good-natured, and aspiring, whereas the woman, setting an example for
+all his succeeding portraits of women, is cunning, though unintelligent
+and coarse-grained, soulless, yet insanely ambitious and covetous of
+power. In glaring contrast to the situation made so familiar by Ibsen,
+we here see the man struggling away from the clutches of a woman who
+declares frankly that she has never looked at a man without feeling
+conscious of her superiority over him. In this play the man, a person of
+ideals and real ability, who is none other than Strindberg himself in
+one of his matrimonial predicaments, fails to extricate himself from the
+snare, and ends--both literally and figuratively--by being put into the
+straitjacket.
+
+Without classing Strindberg as one of the great world dramatists, it
+would be narrow-minded, after experiencing the gripping effect of some
+of his plays, to deny them due recognition, for indeed they would be
+remarkable for their perspicacity and penetration, even if they were
+devoid of any value besides. They contain the keenest analyses ever made
+of the vicious side of feminine character, obtained by specializing, as
+it were, on the more particularly feminine traits of human depravity.
+Assuredly the procedure is onesided, but the delineation of a single
+side of life is beyond peradventure a legitimate artistic enterprise as
+long as it is not palmed upon us as an accurate and complete picture.
+Unfortunately, Strindberg's abnormal vision falsifies the things he
+looks at, and, being steeped in his insuperable prejudice, his pictures
+of life, in spite of the partial veracity they possess, never rise above
+the level of caricatures.
+
+He was incompetent to pass judgment upon an individual woman separately;
+to him all women were alike, and that means, all unmitigatedly bad! To
+the objection raised by one of the characters in "The Father": "Oh,
+there are so many kinds of women," the author's mouthpiece makes this
+clinching answer: "Modern investigation has pronounced that there is
+only one kind."
+
+The autobiography of Strindberg is largely inspired by his unreasoning
+hatred of women; the result, in the main, of his three unfortunate
+ventures into the uncongenial field of matrimony. In its first part, the
+account of his life is not without some traces of healthy humor, but as
+the story progresses, his entire philosophy of life becomes more and
+more aberrant under the increasing pressure of that obsession. He gets
+beside himself at the mere mention of anything feminine, and blindly
+hits away, let his bludgeon land where it will; logic, common sense, and
+common decency go to the floor before his vehement and brutal assault.
+Every woman is a born liar and traitor. Her sole aim in life is to
+thrive parasitically upon the revenue of her favors. Since marriage and
+prostitution cannot provide a living for all, the oversupply now clamor
+for admission to the work-mart; but they are incompetent and lazy, and
+inveterate shirkers of responsibility. With triumphant malice he points
+to the perfidious readiness of woman to perform her tasks by proxy, that
+is, to delegate them to hired substitutes: her children are tended and
+taught by governesses and teachers; her garments are made by dressmakers
+and seamstresses; the duties of her household she unloads on
+servants,--and from selfish considerations of vanity, comfort, and love
+of pleasure, she withdraws even from the primary maternal obligation and
+lets her young be nourished at the breast of a stranger. Strindberg in
+his rage never stops to think that the deputies in these cases,--cooks
+and housemaids and nurses and so forth,--themselves belong to the female
+sex, by which fact the impeachment is in large part invalidated.
+
+The play bearing the satirical title "Comrades" makes a special
+application of the theory about the pre-established antagonism of the
+sexes. In a situation similar to that in "The Father," husband and wife
+are shown in a yet sharper antithesis of character: a man of sterling
+character and ability foiled by a woman in all respects his inferior,
+yet imperiously determined to dominate him. At first she seems to
+succeed in her ambition, and in the same measure as she assumes a more
+and more mannish demeanor, the husband's behavior grows more and more
+effeminate. But the contest leads to results opposite to those in "The
+Father." Here, the man, once he is brought to a full realization of his
+plight, arouses himself from his apathy, reasserts his manhood, and, in
+the ensuing fight for supremacy, routs the usurper and comes into his
+own. The steps by which he passes through revolt from subjection to
+self-liberation, are cleverly signaled by his outward transformation, as
+he abandons the womanish style of dressing imposed on him by his wife's
+whim and indignantly flings into a corner the feminine costume which she
+would make him wear at the ball.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Leaving aside, then, all question as to their artistic value,
+Strindberg's dramas are deserving of attention as experiments in a
+fairly unexplored field of analytic psychology. They are the first
+literary creations of any great importance begotten by such bitter
+hatred of woman. The anti-feminism of Strindberg's predecessors, not
+excepting that arch-misogynist, Arthur Schopenhauer himself, sprang from
+contempt, not from abhorrence and abject fear. In Strindberg, misogyny
+turns into downright gynophobia. To him, woman is not an object of
+disdain, but the cruel and merciless persecutor of man. In order to
+disclose the most dangerous traits of the feminine soul, Strindberg
+dissects it by a method that corresponds closely to Ibsen's astonishing
+demonstration of masculine viciousness. The wide-spread dislike for
+Strindberg's dramas is due, in equal parts, to the detestableness of his
+male characters, and to the optimistic disbelief of the general public
+in the reality of womanhood as he represents it. Strindberg's
+portraiture of the sex appears as a monstrous slander, principally
+because no other painter has ever placed the model into the same
+disadvantageous light, and the authenticity of his pictures is rendered
+suspicious by their abnormal family resemblance. He was obsessed with
+the petrifying vision of a uniform cruel selfishness staring out of
+every woman's face: countess, courtezan, or kitchen maid, all are cast
+in the same gorgon mold.
+
+Strindberg's aversion towards women was probably kindled into action, as
+has already been intimated, by his disgust at the sudden irruption of
+woman worship into literature; but, as has also been made clear, only
+the disillusionments and grievances of his private experience hardened
+that aversion into implacable hatred. At first he simply declined to
+ally himself with the feminist cult, because the women he knew seemed
+unworthy of being worshipped,--little vain dolls, frivolous coquettes,
+and pedants given to domestic tyranny, of such the bulk was made up.
+Under the maddening spur of his personal misfortunes, his feeling passed
+from weariness to detestation, from detestation to a bitter mixture of
+fear and furious hate. He conceived it as his supreme mission and
+central purpose in life to unmask the demon with the angel's face, to
+tear the drapings from the idol and expose to view the hideous ogress
+that feeds on the souls of men. Woman, in Strindberg's works, is a bogy,
+constructed out of the vilest ingredients that enter into the
+composition of human nature, with a kind of convulsive life infused by a
+remnant of great artistic power. And this grewsome fabric of a diseased
+imagination, like Frankenstein's monster, wreaks vengeance on its maker.
+His own mordant desire for her is the lash that drives him irresistibly
+to his destruction.
+
+It requires no profound psychologic insight to divine in this odious
+chimera the deplorable abortion of a fine ideal. The distortion of truth
+emanates in Strindberg's work, as it does in any significant satire or
+caricature, from indignation over the contrast between a lofty
+conception and a disappointing reality. What, after all, can be the
+mission of this hard-featured gallery of females,--peevish, sullen,
+impudent, grasping, violent, lecherous, malignant, and vindictive,--if
+it is not to mark pravity and debasement with a stigma in the name of a
+pure and noble womanhood?
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+It should not be left unmentioned that we owe to August Strindberg some
+works of great perfection fairly free from the black obsession and with
+a constructive and consistently idealistic tendency: splendid
+descriptions of a quaint people and their habitat, tinged with a fine
+sense of humor, as in "The Hemsoe-Dwellers"; charming studies of
+landscape and of floral and animal life, in the "Portraits of Flowers
+and Animals"; the colossal work on the Swedish People, once before
+referred to, a history conceived and executed in a thoroughly modern
+scientific spirit; two volumes of "Swedish Fortunes and Adventures";
+most of his historic dramas also are of superior order. But these works
+lie outside the scope of the more specific discussion of Strindberg as a
+mystic and an eccentric to which this sketch is devoted. We may conclude
+by briefly considering the final phases of Strindberg's checkered
+intellectual career, and by summing up his general significance for the
+age.
+
+It will be recalled that during the middle period of his life, (in
+1888), Strindberg came into personal touch with Nietzsche. The effect of
+the latter's sensational philosophy is clearly perceptible in the works
+of that period, notably in "Tschandala" and "By the Open Sea."
+Evidently, Nietzsche, at first, was very congenial to him. For both men
+were extremely aristocratic in their instincts. For a while, Strindberg
+endorsed unqualifiedly the heterodox ethics of the towering paranoiac.
+For one thing, that philosophy supplied fresh food and fuel to his
+burning rage against womankind, and that was enough to bribe him into
+swallowing, for the time being, the entire substance of Nietzsche's
+fantastic doctrine. He took the same ground as Nietzsche, that the race
+had deteriorated in consequence of its sentimentality, namely through
+the systematic protection of physical and mental inferiority and
+unchecked procreation of weaklings. He seconded Nietzsche's motion that
+society should exterminate its parasites, instead of pampering them.
+Mankind can only be reinvigorated if the strong and healthy are helped
+to come into their own. The dreams of the pacifists are fatal to the
+pragmatic virtues and to the virility of the race. The greatest need is
+an aggressive campaign for the moral and intellectual sanitation of the
+world. So let the brain rule over the heart,--and so forth in the same
+strain.
+
+Very soon, however, Strindberg passed out of the sphere of Nietzsche's
+influence. The alienation was due as much to his general instability as
+to the disparity between his pessimistic temper and the joyous
+exaltation of Zarathustra-ism. His striking reversion to orthodoxy was
+by no means illogical. Between pessimism and faith there exists a
+relation that is not very far to seek. When a person has forfeited his
+peace of soul and cannot find grace before his own conscience, he might
+clutch as a last hope the promise of vicarious redemption. Extending the
+significance of his own personal experience to everything within his
+horizon, and erecting a dogmatic system upon this tenuous
+generalisation, Strindberg reached the conviction that the purpose of
+living is to suffer, a conviction that threw his philosophy well into
+line with the religious and ethical ideas of the middle age. Yet even at
+this juncture his cynicism did not desert him, as witness this comment
+of his: "Religion must be a punishment, because nobody gets religion who
+does not have a bad conscience." This avowal preceded his saltatory
+approach to Roman Catholicism.
+
+In the later volumes of his autobiography he minutely describes the
+successive crises through which he passed in his agonizing search for
+certitude and salvation before his spirit found rest in the idea of
+Destiny which formerly to him was synonymous with Fate and now became
+synonymous with Providence. "Inferno" pictures his existence as a
+protracted and unbroken nightmare. He turned determinist, then fatalist,
+then mystic. The most trifling incidents of his daily life were spelt
+out according to Swedenborg's "Science of Correspondences" and thereby
+assumed a deep and terrifying significance. In the most trivial events,
+such as the opening or shutting of a door, or the curve etched by a
+raindrop on a dusty pane of glass, he perceived intimations from the
+occult power that directed his life. Into the most ordinary occurrence
+of the day he read a divine order, or threat, or chastisement. He was
+tormented by terrible dreams and visions; in the guise of ferocious
+beasts, his own sins agonized his flesh. And in the midst of all these
+tortures he studied and practised the occult arts: magic, astrology,
+necromancy, alchemy; he concocted gold by hermetical science! To all
+appearances utterly deranged, he was still lucid enough at intervals to
+carry on chemical, botanical, and physiological experiments of
+legitimate worth. Then his reason cleared up once again and put a sudden
+end to an episode which he has described in these words: "To go in quest
+of God and to find the devil,--that is what happened to me."
+
+He took leave of Swedenborg as he had taken leave of Nietzsche, yet
+retained much gratitude for him; the great Scandinavian seer had brought
+him back to God, so he averred, even though the conversion was effected
+by picturings of horror.
+
+"Legends," the further continuation of his self-history, shows him
+vividly at his closest contact with the Catholic Church. But the most
+satisfactory portion of the autobiography from a human point of view,
+and from a literary point perhaps altogether the best thing Strindberg
+has done, is the closing book of the series, entitled "Alone." He wrote
+it at the age of fifty, during a period of comparative tranquillity of
+mind, and that fact is manifested by the composure and moderation of its
+style. Now at last his storm-tossed soul seems to have found a haven. He
+accepts his destiny, and resigns himself to believing, since knowledge
+is barred.
+
+But even this state of serenity harbored no permanent peace; it
+signified merely a temporary suspension of those terrific internal
+combats.
+
+In Strindberg's case, religious conversion is not an edifying, but on
+the contrary a morbid and saddening spectacle; it is equal to a
+declaration of complete spiritual bankruptcy. He turns to the church
+after finding all other pathways to God blocked. His type of
+Christianity does not hang together with the labors and struggles of his
+secular life. A break with his past can be denied to no man; least of
+all to a leader of men. Only, if he has deserted the old road, he should
+be able to lead in the new; he must have a new message if he sees fit to
+cancel the old. Strindberg, however, has nothing to offer at the end. He
+stands before us timorous and shrinking, the accuser of his fellows
+turned self-accuser, a beggar stretching forth empty, trembling hands
+imploring forgiveness of his sins and the salvation of his soul through
+gracious mediation. His moral asseverations are either blank truisms, or
+intellectual aberrations. Strindberg has added nothing to the stock of
+human understanding. A preacher, of course, is not in duty bound to
+generate original thought. Indeed if such were to be exacted, our
+pulpits would soon be as sparsely peopled as already are the pews.
+Ministers who are wondering hard why so many people stay away from
+church might well stop to consider whether the reason is not that a
+large portion of mankind has already secured, theoretically, a religious
+or ethical basis of life more or less identical with the one which
+churches content themselves with offering. The greatest religious
+teacher of modern times, Leo Tolstoy, was not by any means a bringer of
+new truths. The true secret of the tremendous power which nevertheless
+he wielded over the souls of men was that he extended the practical
+application of what he believed. If, therefore, we look for a lesson in
+Strindberg's life as recited by himself, we shall not find it in his
+religious conversion.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Taken in its entirety, his voluminous yet fragmentary life history is
+one of the most painful human documents on record. One can hardly peruse
+it without asking: Was Strindberg insane? It is a question which he
+often put to himself when remorse and self-reproach gnawed at his
+conscience and when he fancied himself scorned and persecuted by all his
+former friends. "Why are you so hated?" he asks himself in one of his
+dialogues, and this is his answer: "I could not endure to see mankind
+suffer, and so I said and wrote: 'Free yourselves, I shall help.' And so
+I said to the poor: 'Do not let the rich suck your blood.' And to woman:
+'Do not let man oppress you.' And to the children: 'Do not obey your
+parents if they are unjust.' The consequences,--well, they are quite
+incomprehensible; for of a sudden I had both sides against me, rich and
+poor, men and women, parents and children; add to that sickness and
+poverty, disgraceful pauperism, my divorce, lawsuits, exile, loneliness,
+and now, to top the climax,--do you believe that I am insane?" From his
+ultra-subjective point of view, the explanation here given of the total
+collapse of his fortunes is fairly accurate, at least in the essential
+aspects. Still, many great men have been pursued by a similar conflux of
+calamities. Overwhelming misfortunes are the surest test of manhood. How
+high a person bears up his head under the blows of fate is the best gage
+of his stature. But Strindberg, in spite of his colossal physique, was
+not cast in the heroic mold. The breakdown of his fortunes caused him to
+turn traitor to himself, to recant and destroy his intellectual past.
+
+Whether he was actually insane is a question for psychiaters to settle;
+normal he certainly was not. In medical opinion his modes of reacting to
+the obstructions and difficulties of the daily life were conclusively
+symptomatic of neurasthenia. Certain obsessive ideas and idiosyncracies
+of his, closely bordering upon phobia, would seem to indicate grave
+psychic disorder. His temper and his world-view were indicative of
+hypochondria: he perceived only the hostile, never the friendly, aspects
+of events, people, and phenomena. Dejectedly he declares: "There is
+falseness even in the calm air and the sunshine, and I feel that
+happiness has no place in my lot."
+
+Destiny had assembled within him all the doubts and pangs of the modern
+soul, but had neglected to counterpoise them with positive and
+constructive convictions; so that when his small store of hopes and
+prospects was exhausted, he broke down from sheer hollowness of heart.
+He died a recluse, a penitent, and a renegade to all his past ideas and
+persuasions.
+
+Evidently, with his large assortment of defects both of character and of
+intellect, Strindberg could not be classed as one of the great
+constructive minds of our period. Viewed in his social importance, he
+will interest future students of morals chiefly as an agitator, a
+polemist, and in a fashion, too, as a prophet; by his uniquely
+aggressive veracity, he rendered a measure of valuable service to his
+time.
+
+But viewed as a creative writer, both of drama and fiction, he has an
+incontestable claim to our lasting attention. His work shows artistic
+ability, even though it rarely attains to greatness and is frequently
+marred by the bizarre qualities of his style. Presumably his will be a
+permanent place in the history of literature, principally because of the
+extraordinary subjective animation of his work. And perhaps in times
+less depressed than ours its gloominess may act as a valuable antidote
+upon the popular prejudice against being serious. His artistic
+profession of faith certainly should save him from wholesale
+condemnation. He says in one of his prefaces: "Some people have accused
+my tragedy of being too sad, as though one desired a merry tragedy.
+People clamor for Enjoyment as though Enjoyment consisted in being
+foolish. I find enjoyment in the powerful and terrible struggles of
+life; and the capability of experiencing something, of learning
+something, gives me pleasure."
+
+The keynote to his literary productions is the cry of the agony of
+being. Every line of his works is written in the shadow of the sorrow of
+living. In them, all that is most dismal and terrifying and therefore
+most tragical, becomes articulate. They are propelled by an abysmal
+pessimism, and because of this fact, since pessimism is one of the
+mightiest inspiring forces in literature, August Strindberg, its
+foremost spokesman, deserves to be read and understood.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE EXALTATION OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
+
+
+In these embattled times it is perfectly natural to expect from any
+discourse on Nietzsche's philosophy first of all a statement concerning
+the relation of that troublesome genius to the origins of the war; and
+this demand prompts a few candid words on that aspect of the subject at
+the start.
+
+For more than three years the public has been persistently taught by the
+press to think of Friedrich Nietzsche mainly as the powerful promoter of
+a systematic national movement of the German people for the conquest of
+the world. But there is strong and definite internal evidence in the
+writings of Nietzsche against the assumption that he intentionally
+aroused a spirit of war or aimed in any way at the world-wide
+preponderance of Germany's type of civilization. Nietzsche had a
+temperamental loathing for everything that is brutal, a loathing which
+was greatly intensified by his personal contact with the horrors of war
+while serving as a military nurse in the campaign of 1870. If there were
+still any one senseless enough to plead the erstwhile popular cause of
+Pan-Germanism, he would be likely to find more support for his argument
+in the writings of the de-gallicized Frenchman, Count Joseph Arthur
+Gobineau, or of the germanized Englishman, Houston Stewart Chamberlain,
+than in those of the "hermit of Maria-Sils," who does not even suggest,
+let alone advocate, German world-predominance in a single line of all
+his writings. To couple Friedrich Nietzsche with Heinrich von Treitschke
+as the latter's fellow herald of German ascendancy is truly
+preposterous. Treitschke himself was bitterly and irreconcilably set
+against the creator of Zarathustra,(14) in whom ever since
+"Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen" he had divined "the good European,"--which
+to the author of the _Deutsche Geschichte_ meant the bad Prussian, and
+by consequence the bad German.
+
+  (14) As is convincingly pointed out in a footnote of J. A. Cramb's
+  "Germany and England."
+
+As a consummate individualist and by the same token a cosmopolite to the
+full, Nietzsche was the last remove from national, or strictly speaking
+even from racial, jingoism. Even the imputation of ordinary patriotic
+sentiments would have been resented by him as an insult, for such
+sentiments were to him a sure symptom of that gregarious disposition
+which was so utterly abhorrent to his feelings. In his German
+citizenhood he took no pride whatsoever. On every occasion that offered
+he vented in mordant terms his contempt for the country of his birth,
+boastfully proclaiming his own derivation from alien stock. He bemoaned
+his fate of having to write for Germans; averring that people who drank
+beer and smoked pipes were hopelessly incapable of understanding him. Of
+this extravagance in denouncing his countrymen the following account by
+one of his keenest American interpreters gives a fair idea. "No epithet
+was too outrageous, no charge was too farfetched, no manipulation or
+interpretation of evidence was too daring to enter into his ferocious
+indictment. He accused the Germans of stupidity, superstitiousness, and
+silliness; of a chronic weakness of dodging issues, a fatuous
+'barn-yard' and 'green-pasture' contentment, of yielding supinely to the
+commands and exactions of a clumsy and unintelligent government; of
+degrading education to the low level of mere cramming and examination
+passing; of a congenital inability to understand and absorb the culture
+of other peoples, and particularly the culture of the French; of a
+boorish bumptiousness, and an ignorant, ostrichlike complacency; of a
+systematic hostility to men of genius, whether in art, science, or
+philosophy; of a slavish devotion to the two great European narcotics,
+alcohol and Christianity; of a profound beeriness, a spiritual
+dyspepsia, a puerile mysticism, an old-womanish pettiness, and an
+ineradicable liking for the obscure, evolving, crepuscular, damp, and
+shrouded."(15) It certainly requires a violent twist of logic to hold
+this catalogue of invectives responsible for the transformation of a
+sluggish and indolent bourgeoisie into a "Volk in Waffen" unified by an
+indomitable and truculent rapacity.
+
+  (15) H. L. Mencken, "The Mailed Fist and Its Prophet." _Atlantic
+  Monthly_, November, 1914.
+
+Neither should Nietzsche's general condemnation of mild and tender
+forbearance--on the ground that it blocks the purpose of nature--be
+interpreted as a call to universal militancy. By his ruling it is only
+supermen that are privileged to carry their will through. But undeniably
+he does teach that the world belongs to the strong. They may grab it at
+any temporary loss to the common run of humanity and, if need be, with
+sanguinary force, since their will is, ulteriorly, identical with the
+cosmic purpose.
+
+Of course this is preaching war of some sort, but Nietzsche was not in
+favor of war on ethnic or ethical grounds, like that fanatical
+militarist, General von Bernhardi, whom the great mass of his countrymen
+in the time before the war would have bluntly rejected as their
+spokesman. Anyway, Nietzsche did not mean to encourage Germany to
+subjugate the rest of the world. He even deprecated her victory in the
+bloody contest of 1870, because he thought that it had brought on a form
+of material prosperity of which internal decay and the collapse of
+intellectual and spiritual ideals were the unfortunate concomitants. At
+the same time, the universal decrepitude prevented the despiser of his
+own people from conceiving a decided preference for some other country.
+He held that all European nations were progressing in the wrong
+direction,--the deadweight of exaggerated and misshapen materialism
+dragged them back and down. English life he deemed almost irredeemably
+clogged by utilitarianism. Even France, the only modern commonwealth
+credited by Nietzsche with an indigenous culture, was governed by what
+he stigmatizes as the life philosophy of the shopkeeper. Nietzsche is
+destitute of national ideals. In fact he never thinks in terms of
+politics. He aims to be "a good European, not a good German." In his
+aversion to the extant order of society he never for a moment advocates,
+like Rousseau or Tolstoy, a breach with civilization. Cataclysmic
+changes through anarchy, revolution, and war were repugnant to his
+ideals of culture. For two thousand years the races of Europe had toiled
+to humanize themselves, school their character, equip their minds,
+refine their tastes. Could any sane reformer have calmly contemplated
+the possible engulfment in another Saturnian age of the gains purchased
+by that enormous expenditure of human labor? According to Nietzsche's
+conviction, the new dispensation could not be entered in a book of blank
+pages. A higher civilization could only be reared upon a lower. So it
+seems that he is quite wrongly accused of having been an "accessory
+before the deed," in any literal or legal sense, to the stupendous
+international struggle witnessed to-day. And we may pass on to consider
+in what other way he was a vital factor of modern social development.
+For whatever we may think of the political value of his teachings, it is
+impossible to deny their arousing and inspiriting effect upon the
+intellectual, moral, and artistic faculties of his epoch and ours.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+It should be clearly understood that the significance of Nietzsche for
+our age is not to be explained by any weighty discovery in the realm of
+knowledge. Nietzsche's merit consists not in any unriddling of the
+universe by a metaphysical key to its secrets, but rather in the
+diffusion of a new intellectual light elucidating human consciousness in
+regard to the purpose and the end of existence. Nietzsche has no
+objective truths to teach, indeed he acknowledges no truth other than
+subjective. Nor does he put any faith in bare logic, but on the contrary
+pronounces it one of mankind's greatest misfortunes. His argumentation
+is not sustained and progressive, but desultory, impressionistic, and
+freely repetitional; slashing aphorism is its most effective tool. And
+so, in the sense of the schools, he is not a philosopher at all; quite
+the contrary, an implacable enemy of the _métier_. And yet the formative
+and directive influence of his vaticinations, enunciated with tremendous
+spiritual heat and lofty gesture, has been very great. His conception of
+life has acted upon the generation as a moral intoxicant of truly
+incalculable strength.
+
+Withal his published work, amounting to eighteen volumes, though
+flagrantly irrational, yet does contain a perfectly coherent doctrine.
+Only, it is a doctrine to whose core mere peripheric groping will never
+negotiate the approach. Its essence must be caught by flashlike seizure
+and cannot be conveyed except to minds of more than the average
+imaginative sensibility. For its central ideas relate to the remotest
+ultimates, and its dominant prepossession, the _Overman_, is, in the
+final reckoning, the creature of a Utopian fancy. To be more precise,
+Nietzsche extorts from the Darwinian theory of selection a set of
+amazing connotations by means of the simultaneous shift from the
+biological to the poetic sphere of thought and from the averagely
+socialized to an uncompromisingly self-centred attitude of mind. This
+doubly eccentric position is rendered feasible for him by a whole-souled
+indifference to exact science and an intense contempt for the practical
+adjustments of life. He is, first and last, an imaginative schemer,
+whose visions are engendered by inner exuberance; the propelling power
+of his philosophy being an intense temperamental enthusiasm at one and
+the same time lyrically sensitive and dramatically impassioned. It is
+these qualities of soul that made his utterance ring with the force of a
+high moral challenge. All the same, he was not any more original in his
+ethics than in his theory of knowledge. In this field also his receptive
+mind threw itself wide open to the flow of older influences which it
+encountered. The religion of personal advantage had had many a prophet
+before Nietzsche. Among the older writers, Machiavelli was its
+weightiest champion. In Germany, Nietzsche's immediate predecessor was
+"Max Stirner,"(16) and as regards foreign thinkers, Nietzsche declared
+as late as 1888 that to no other writer of his own century did he feel
+himself so closely allied by the ties of congeniality as to Ralph Waldo
+Emerson.
+
+  (16) His real name was Kaspar Schmidt; he lived from 1806-1856.
+
+The most superficial acquaintance with these writers shows that
+Nietzsche is held responsible for certain revolutionary notions of which
+he by no means was the originator. Of the connection of his doctrine
+with the maxims of "The Prince" and of "The Ego and His Own" (_Der
+Einzige und sein Eigentum_)(17) nothing further need be said than that
+to them Nietzsche owes, directly or indirectly, the principle of
+"non-morality." However, he does not employ the same strictly
+intellectual methods. They were logicians rather than moralists, and
+their ruler-man is in the main a construction of cold reasoning, while
+the ruler-man of Nietzsche is the vision of a genius whose eye looks
+down a much longer perspective than is accorded to ordinary mortals.
+That a far greater affinity of temper should have existed between
+Nietzsche and Emerson than between him and the two classic
+non-moralists, must bring surprise to the many who have never recognized
+the Concord Sage as an exponent of unfettered individualism. Yet in fact
+Emerson goes to such an extreme of individualism that the only thing
+that has saved his memory from anathema is that he has not many readers
+in his after-times, and these few do not always venture to understand
+him. And Emerson, though in a different way from Nietzsche's, was also a
+rhapsodist. In his poetry, where he articulates his meaning with far
+greater unrestraint than in his prose, we find without any difficulty
+full corroboration of his spiritual kinship with Nietzsche. For
+instance, where may we turn in the works of the latter for a stronger
+statement of the case of Power versus Pity than is contained in "The
+World Soul"?
+
+    "He serveth the servant,
+     The brave he loves amain,
+     He kills the cripple and the sick,
+     And straight begins again;
+     For gods delight in gods,
+     And thrust the weak aside,--
+     To him who scorns their charities
+     Their arms fly open wide."
+
+From such a world-view what moral could proceed more logically than that
+of Zarathustra: "And him whom ye do not teach to fly, teach--how to fall
+quicker"?
+
+  (17) By Machiavelli and Stirner, respectively.
+
+But after all, the intellectual origin of Nietzsche's ideas matters but
+little. Wheresoever they were derived from, he made them strikingly his
+own by raising them to the splendid elevation of his thought. And if
+nevertheless he has failed to take high rank and standing among the
+sages of the schools, this shortage in his professional prestige is more
+than counterbalanced by the wide reach of his influence among the laity.
+What might the re-classification, or perchance even the
+re-interpretation, of known facts about life have signified beside
+Nietzsche's lofty apprehension of the sacredness of life itself? For
+whatever may be the social menace of his reasoning, his commanding
+proclamation to an expectant age of the doctrine that Progress means
+infinite growth towards ideals of perfection has resulted in a singular
+reanimation of the individual sense of dignity, served as a potent
+remedy of social dry-rot, and furthered our gradual emergence from the
+impenetrable darkness of ancestral traditions.
+
+In seeking an adequate explanation of his power over modern minds we
+readily surmise that his philosophy draws much of its vitality from the
+system of science that underlies it. And yet while it is true enough
+that Nietzsche's fundamental thesis is an offshoot of the Darwinian
+theory, the violent individualism which is the driving principle of his
+entire philosophy is rather opposed to the general orientation of
+Darwinism, since that is social. Not to the author of the "Descent of
+Man" directly is the modern ethical glorification of egoism indebted for
+its measure of scientific sanction, but to one of his heterodox
+disciples, namely to the bio-philosopher W. H. Rolph, who in a volume
+named "Biologic Problems," with the subtitle, "An Essay in Rational
+Ethics,"(18) deals definitely with the problem of evolution in its
+dynamical bearings. The question is raised, Why do the extant types of
+life ascend toward higher goals, and, on reaching them, progress toward
+still higher goals, to the end of time? Under the reason as explained by
+Darwin, should not evolution stop at a definite stage, namely, when the
+object of the competitive struggle for existence has been fully
+attained? Self-preservation naturally ceases to act as an incentive to
+further progress, so soon as the weaker contestants are beaten off the
+field and the survival of the fittest is abundantly secured. From there
+on we have to look farther for an adequate causation of the ascent of
+species. Unless we assume the existence of an absolutistic teleological
+tendency to perfection, we are logically bound to connect upward
+development with favorable external conditions. By substituting for the
+Darwinian "struggle for existence" a new formula: "struggle for
+surplus," Rolph advances a new fruitful hypothesis. In all creatures the
+acquisitive cravings exceed the limit of actual necessity. Under
+Darwin's interpretation of nature, the struggle between individuals of
+the same species would give way to pacific equilibrium as soon as the
+bare subsistence were no longer in question. Yet we know that the
+struggle is unending. The creature appetites are not appeased by a
+normal sufficiency; on the contrary, "_l'appetit vient en mangeant_";
+the possessive instinct, if not quite insatiable, is at least
+coextensive with its opportunities for gratification. Whether or not it
+be true--as Carlyle claims--that, after all, the fundamental question
+between any two human beings is, "Can I kill thee, or canst thou kill
+me?"--at any rate in civilized human society the contest is not waged
+merely for the naked existence, but mainly for life's increments in the
+form of comforts, pleasures, luxuries, and the accumulation of power and
+influence; and the excess of acquisition over immediate need goes as a
+residuum into the structure of civilization. In plain words, then,
+social progress is pushed on by individual greed and ambition. At this
+point Rolph rests the case, without entering into the moral implicates
+of the subject, which would seem to obtrude themselves upon the
+attention.
+
+  (18) _Biologische Probleme, zugleich als Versuch einer rationellen
+  Ethik._ Leipzig, 1882.
+
+Now to a believer in progressive evolution with a strong ethical bent
+such a theory brings home man's ulterior responsibility for the
+betterment of life, and therefore acts as a call to his supreme duty of
+preparing the ground for the arrival of a higher order of beings. The
+argument seems simple and clinching. Living nature through a long file
+of species and genera has at last worked up to the _homo sapiens_ who as
+yet does not even approach the perfection of his own type. Is it a
+legitimate ambition of the race to mark time on the stand which it has
+reached and to entrench itself impregnably in its present mediocrity?
+Nietzsche did not shrink from any of the inferential conclusions
+logically to be drawn from the biologic argument. If growth is in the
+purpose of nature, then once we have accepted our chief office in life,
+it becomes our task to pave the way for a higher genus of man. And the
+only force that makes with directness for that object is the Will to
+Power. To foreshadow the resultant human type, Nietzsche resurrected
+from Goethe's vocabulary the convenient word _Übermensch_--"Overman."
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Any one regarding existence in the light of a stern and perpetual combat
+is of necessity driven at last to the alternative between making the
+best of life and making an end of it; he must either seek lasting
+deliverance from the evil of living or endeavor to wrest from the world
+by any means at his command the greatest sum of its gratifications. It
+is serviceable to describe the two frames of mind respectively as the
+optimistic and the pessimistic. But it would perhaps be hasty to
+conclude that the first of these attitudes necessarily betokens the
+greater strength of character.
+
+Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy sprang from pessimism, yet issued in an
+optimism of unheard-of exaltation; carrying, however, to the end its
+plainly visible birthmarks. He started out as an enthusiastic disciple
+of Arthur Schopenhauer; unquestionably the adherence was fixed by his
+own deep-seated contempt for the complacency of the plebs. But he was
+bound soon to part company with the grandmaster of pessimism, because he
+discovered the root of the philosophy of renunciation in that same
+detestable debility of the will which he deemed responsible for the
+bovine lassitude of the masses; both pessimism and philistinism came
+from a lack of vitality, and were symptoms of racial degeneracy. But
+before Nietzsche finally rejected Schopenhauer and gave his shocking
+counterblast to the undermining action of pessimism, he succumbed
+temporarily to the spell of another gigantic personality. We are not
+concerned with Richard Wagner's musical influence upon Nietzsche, who
+was himself a musician of no mean ability; what is to the point here is
+the prime principle of Wagner's art theory. The key to the Wagnerian
+theory is found, also, in Schopenhauer's philosophy. Wagner starts from
+the pessimistic thesis that at the bottom of the well of life lies
+nothing but suffering,--hence living is utterly undesirable. In one of
+his letters to Franz Liszt he names as the duplex root of his creative
+genius the longing for love and the yearning for death. On another
+occasion, he confesses his own emotional nihilism in the following
+summary of _Tristan und Isolde_: "_Sehnsucht, Sehnsucht, unstillbares,
+ewig neu sich gebärendes Verlangen--Schmachten und Dursten; einzige
+Erlösung: Tod, Sterben, Untergehen,--Nichtmehrerwachen._"(19) But from
+the boundless ocean of sorrow there is a refuge. It was Wagner's
+fundamental dogma that through the illusions of art the individual is
+enabled to rise above the hopelessness of the realities into a new
+cosmos replete with supreme satisfactions. Man's mundane salvation
+therefore depends upon the ministrations of art and his own artistic
+sensitiveness. The glorification of genius is a natural corollary of
+such a belief.
+
+  (19) "Longing, longing, unquenchable desire, reproducing itself
+  forever anew--thirst and drought; sole deliverance: death,
+  dissolution, extinction,--and no awaking."
+
+Nietzsche in one of his earliest works examines Wagner's theory and
+amplifies it by a rather casuistic interpretation of the evolution of
+art. After raising the question, How did the Greeks contrive to dignify
+and ennoble their national existence? he points, by way of an
+illustrative answer, not perchance to the Periclean era, but to a far
+more primitive epoch of Hellenic culture, when a total oblivion of the
+actual world and a transport into the realm of imagination was
+universally possible. He explains the trance as the effect of
+intoxication,--primarily in the current literal sense of the word. Such
+was the significance of the cult of Dionysos. "Through singing and
+dancing," claims Nietzsche, "man manifests himself as member of a higher
+community. Walking and talking he has unlearned, and is in a fair way to
+dance up into the air." That this supposititious Dionysiac phase of
+Hellenic culture was in turn succeeded by more rational stages, in which
+the impulsive flow of life was curbed and dammed in by operations of the
+intellect, is not permitted by Nietzsche to invalidate the argument. By
+his arbitrary reading of ancient history he was, at first, disposed to
+look to the forthcoming _Universal-Kunstwerk_(20) as the complete
+expression of a new religious spirit and as the adequate lever of a
+general uplift of mankind to a state of bliss. But the typical disparity
+between Wagner and Nietzsche was bound to alienate them. Wagner, despite
+all appearance to the contrary, is inherently democratic in his
+convictions,--his earlier political vicissitudes amply confirm this
+view,--and fastens his hope for the elevation of humanity through art
+upon the sort of genius in whom latent popular forces might combine to a
+new summit. Nietzsche on the other hand represents the extreme
+aristocratic type, both in respect of thought and of sentiment. "I do
+not wish to be confounded with and mistaken for these preachers of
+equality," says he. "For within _me_ justice saith: men are not equal."
+His ideal is a hero of coercive personality, dwelling aloft in solitude,
+despotically bending the gregarious instincts of the common crowd to his
+own higher purposes by the dominating force of his Will to Might.
+
+  (20) Work of all arts.
+
+The concept of the Overman rests, as has been shown, upon a fairly solid
+substructure of plausibility, since at the bottom of the author's
+reasoning lies the notion that mankind is destined to outgrow its
+current status; the thought of a humanity risen to new and wondrous
+heights of power over nature is not necessarily unscientific for being
+supremely imaginative. The Overman, however, cannot be produced ready
+made, by any instantaneous process; he must be slowly and persistently
+willed into being, through love of the new ideal which he is to embody:
+"All great Love," speaketh Zarathustra, "seeketh to create what it
+loveth. _Myself_ I sacrifice into my love, and _my neighbor_ as myself,
+thus runneth the speech of all creators." Only the fixed conjoint
+purpose of many generations of aspiring men will be able to create the
+Overman. "Could you create a God?--Then be silent concerning all gods!
+But ye could very well create Beyond-man. Not yourselves perhaps, my
+brethren! But ye could create yourselves into fathers and fore-fathers
+of Beyond-man; and let this be your best creating. But all creators are
+hard."
+
+Nietzsche's startlingly heterodox code of ethics coheres organically
+with the Overman hypothesis, and so understood is certain to lose some
+of its aspect of absurdity. The racial will, as we have seen, must be
+taught to aim at the Overman. But the volitional faculty of the
+generation, according to Nietzsche, is so debilitated as to be utterly
+inadequate to its office. Hence, advisedly to stimulate and strengthen
+the enfeebled will power of his fellow men is the most imperative and
+immediate task of the radical reformer. Once the power of willing, as
+such, shall have been,--regardless of the worthiness of its
+object,--brought back to active life, it will be feasible to give the
+Will to Might a direction towards objects of the highest moral grandeur.
+
+Unfortunately for the race as a whole, the throng is ineligible for
+partnership in the auspicious scheme of co-operative procreation: which
+fact necessitates a segregative method of breeding. The Overman can only
+be evolved by an ancestry of master-men, who must be secured to the race
+by a rigid application of eugenic standards, particularly in the matter
+of mating. Of marriage, Nietzsche has this definition: "Marriage, so
+call I the will of two to create one who is more than they who created
+him." For the bracing of the weakened will-force of the human breed it
+is absolutely essential that master-men, the potential progenitors of
+the superman, be left unhampered to the impulse of "living themselves
+out" (_sich auszuleben_),--an opportunity of which under the regnant
+code of morals they are inconsiderately deprived. Since, then, existing
+dictates and conventions are a serious hindrance to the requisite
+autonomy of the master-man, their abolishment might be well. Yet on the
+other hand, it is convenient that the _Vielzuviele_, the
+"much-too-many," i. e. the despised generality of people, should
+continue to be governed and controlled by strict rules and regulations,
+so that the will of the master-folk might the more expeditiously be
+wrought. Would it not, then, be an efficacious compromise to keep the
+canon of morality in force for the general run, but suspend it for the
+special benefit of master-men, prospective or full-fledged? From the
+history of the race Nietzsche draws a warrant for the distinction. His
+contention is that masters and slaves have never lived up to a single
+code of conduct. Have not civilizations risen and fallen according as
+they were shaped by this or that class of nations? History also teaches
+what disastrous consequences follow the loss of caste. In the case of
+the Jewish people, the domineering type or morals gave way to the
+servile as a result of the Babylonian captivity. So long as the Jews
+were strong, they extolled all manifestations of strength and energy.
+The collapse of their own strength turned them into apologists of the
+so-called "virtues" of humility, long-suffering, forgiveness,--until,
+according to the Judæo-Christian code of ethics, being good came to mean
+being weak. So races may justly be classified into masters and slaves,
+and history proves that to the strong goes the empire. The ambitions of
+a nation are a sure criterion of its worth.
+
+    "I walk through these folk and keep mine eyes open. They have become
+    _smaller_ and are becoming ever smaller. _And the reason of that is
+    their doctrine of happiness and virtue._
+
+    For they are modest even in their virtue; for they are desirous of
+    ease. But with ease only modest virtue is compatible.
+
+    True, in their fashion they learn how to stride and to stride
+    forward. That I call their _hobbling_. Thereby they become an
+    offense unto every one who is in a hurry.
+
+    And many a one strideth on and in doing so looketh backward, with a
+    stiffened neck. I rejoice to run against the stomachs of such.
+
+    Foot and eyes shall not lie, nor reproach each other for lying. But
+    there is much lying among small folk.
+
+    Some of them _will_, but most of them _are willed_ merely. Some of
+    them are genuine, but most of them are bad actors.
+
+    There are unconscious actors among them, and involuntary actors. The
+    genuine are always rare, especially genuine actors.
+
+    Here is little of man; therefore women try to make themselves manly.
+    For only he who is enough of a man will save the woman in woman.
+
+    And this hypocrisy I found to be worst among them, that even those
+    who command feign the virtues of those who serve.
+
+    'I serve, thou servest, we serve.' Thus the hypocrisy of the rulers
+    prayeth. And, alas, if the highest lord be merely the highest
+    servant!
+
+    Alas! the curiosity of mine eye strayed even unto their hypocrisies,
+    and well I divined all their fly-happiness and their humming round
+    window panes in the sunshine.
+
+    So much kindness, so much weakness see I. So much justice and
+    sympathy, so much weakness.
+
+    Round, honest, and kind are they towards each other, as grains of
+    sand are round, honest, and kind unto grains of sand.
+
+    Modestly to embrace a small happiness--they call 'submission'! And
+    therewith they modestly look sideways after a new small happiness.
+
+    At bottom they desire plainly one thing most of all: to be hurt by
+    nobody. Thus they oblige all and do well unto them.
+
+    But this is _cowardice_; although it be called 'virtue.'
+
+    And if once they speak harshly, these small folk,--I hear therein
+    merely their hoarseness. For every draught of air maketh them
+    hoarse.
+
+    Prudent are they; their virtues have prudent fingers. But they are
+    lacking in clenched fists; their fingers know not how to hide
+    themselves behind fists.
+
+    For them virtue is what maketh modest and tame. Thereby they have
+    made the wolf a dog and man himself man's best domestic animal.
+
+    'We put our chair in the midst'--thus saith their simpering unto
+    me--'exactly as far from dying gladiators as from happy swine.'
+
+    This is mediocrity; although it be called moderation."(21)
+
+  (21) "Thus Spake Zarathustra," pp. 243-245.
+
+The only law acknowledged by him who would be a master is the bidding of
+his own will. He makes short work of every other law. Whatever clogs the
+flight of his indomitable ambition must be ruthlessly swept aside.
+Obviously, the enactment of this law that would render the individual
+supreme and absolute would strike the death-knell for all established
+forms and institutions of the social body. But such is quite within
+Nietzsche's intention. They are noxious agencies, ingeniously devised
+for the enslavement of the will, and the most pernicious among them is
+the Christian religion, because of the alleged divine sanction conferred
+by it upon subserviency. Christianity would thwart the supreme will of
+nature by curbing that lust for domination which the laws of nature as
+revealed by science sanction, nay prescribe. Nietzsche's ideas on this
+subject are loudly and over-loudly voiced in _Der Antichrist_ ("The
+Anti-Christ"), written in September 1888 as the first part of a planned
+treatise in four instalments, entitled _Der Wille zur Macht. Versuch
+einer Umwertung aller Werte_. ("The Will to Power. An Attempted
+Transvaluation of All Values".)
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+The master-man's will, then, is his only law. That is the essence of
+_Herrenmoral_. And so the question arises, Whence shall the conscience
+of the ruler-man derive its distinctions between the Right and the
+Wrong? The arch-iconoclast brusquely stifles this naïve query beforehand
+by assuring us that such distinctions in their accepted sense do not
+exist for personages of that grander stamp. Heedless of the
+time-hallowed concepts that all men share in common, he enjoins
+mastermen to take their position uncompromisingly outside the confining
+area of conventions, in the moral independence that dwells "beyond good
+and evil." Good and Evil are mere denotations, devoid of any real
+significance. Right and Wrong are not ideals immutable through the ages,
+nor even the same at any time in all states of society. They are vague
+and general notions, varying more or less with the practical exigencies
+under which they were conceived. What was right for my great-grandfather
+is not _ipso facto_ right for myself. Hence, the older and better
+established a law, the more inapposite is it apt to be to the living
+demands. Why should the ruler-man bow down to outworn statutes or
+stultify his self-dependent moral sense before the artificial and
+stupidly uniform moral relics of the dead past? Good is whatever
+conduces to the increase of my power,--evil is whatever tends to
+diminish it! Only the weakling and the hypocrite will disagree.
+
+Unmistakably this is a straightout application of the "pragmatic"
+criterion of truth. Nietzsche's unconfessed and cautious imitators, who
+call themselves pragmatists, are not bold enough to follow their own
+logic from the cognitive sphere to the moral. They stop short of the
+natural conclusion to which their own premises lead. Morality is
+necessarily predicated upon specific notions of truth. So if Truth is an
+alterable and shifting concept, must not morality likewise be variable?
+The pragmatist might just as well come out at once into the broad light
+and frankly say: "Laws do not interest me in the abstract, or for the
+sake of their general beneficence; they interest me only in so far as
+they affect me. Therefore I will make, interpret, and abolish them to
+suit myself."
+
+To Nietzsche the "quest of truth" is a palpable evasion. Truth is merely
+a means for the enhancement of my subjective satisfaction. It makes not
+a whit of difference whether an opinion or a judgment satisfies this or
+that scholastic definition. I call true and good that which furthers my
+welfare and intensifies my joy in living; and,--to vindicate my
+self-gratification as a form, indeed the highest, of "social
+service,"--the desirable thing is that which matters for the improvement
+of the human stock and thereby speeds the advent of the Superman. "Oh,"
+exclaims Zarathustra, "that ye would understand my word: Be sure to do
+whatever ye like,--but first of all be such as _can will_! Be sure to
+love your neighbor as yourself,--but first of all be such as _love
+themselves_,--as love themselves with great love, with contempt. Thus
+speaketh Zarathustra, the ungodly."
+
+By way of throwing some light upon this phase of Nietzsche's moral
+philosophy, it may be added that ever since 1876 he was an assiduous
+student of Herbert Spencer, with whose theory of social evolution he was
+first made acquainted by his friend, Paul Rée, who in two works of his
+own, "Psychologic Observations," (1875), and "On the Origin of Moral
+Sentiments," (1877), had elaborated upon the Spencerian theory about the
+genealogy of morals.
+
+The best known among all of Nietzsche's works, _Also Sprach Zarathustra_
+("Thus Spake Zarathustra"), is the Magna Charta of the new moral
+emancipation. It was composed during a sojourn in southern climes
+between 1883 and 1885, during the convalescence from a nervous collapse,
+when after a long and critical depression his spirit was recovering its
+accustomed resilience. Nietzsche wrote his _magnum opus_ in solitude, in
+the mountains and by the sea. His mind always was at its best in
+settings of vast proportions, and in this particular work there breathes
+an exaltation that has scarcely its equal in the world's literature.
+Style and diction in their supreme elation suit the lofty fervor of the
+sentiment. From the feelings, as a fact, this great rhapsody flows, and
+to the feelings it makes its appeal; its extreme fascination must be
+lost upon those who only know how to "listen to reason." The wondrous
+plastic beauty of the language, along with the high emotional pitch of
+its message, render "Zarathustra" a priceless poetic monument; indeed
+its practical effect in chastening and rejuvenating German literary
+diction can hardly be overestimated. Its value as a philosophic document
+is much slighter. It is not even organized on severely logical lines. On
+the contrary, the four component parts are but brilliant variations upon
+a single generic theme, each in a different clef, but harmoniously
+united by the incremental ecstasy of the movement. The composition is
+free from monotony, for down to each separate aphorism every part of it
+has its special lyric nuance. The whole purports to convey in the form
+of discourse the prophetic message of Zarathustra, the hermit sage, an
+idealized self-portrayal of the author.
+
+In the first book the tone is calm and temperate. Zarathustra exhorts
+and instructs his disciples, rails at his adversaries, and discloses his
+superiority over them. In the soliloquies and dialogues of the second
+book he reveals himself more fully and freely as the Superman. The third
+book contains the meditations and rhapsodies of Zarathustra now dwelling
+wholly apart from men, his mind solely occupied with thought about the
+Eternal Return of the Present. In the fourth book he is found in the
+company of a few chosen spirits whom he seeks to imbue with his
+perfected doctrine. In this final section of the work the deep lyric
+current is already on the ebb; it is largely supplanted by irony,
+satire, sarcasm, even buffoonery, all of which are resorted to for the
+pitiless excoriation of our type of humanity, deemed decrepit by the
+Sage. The author's intention to present in a concluding fifth division
+the dying Zarathustra pronouncing his benedictions upon life in the act
+of quitting it was not to bear fruit.
+
+"Zarathustra"--Nietzsche's terrific assault upon the fortifications of
+our social structure--is too easily mistaken by facile cavilers for the
+ravings of an unsound and desperate mind. To a narrow and superficial
+reading, it exhibits itself as a wholesale repudiation of all moral
+responsibility and a maniacal attempt to subvert human civilization for
+the exclusive benefit of the "glorious blonde brute, rampant with greed
+for victory and spoil." Yet those who care to look more deeply will
+detect beneath this chimerical contempt of conventional regulations no
+want of a highminded philanthropic purpose, provided they have the
+vision necessary to comprehend a love of man oriented by such extremely
+distant perspectives. At all events they will discover that in this
+rebellious propaganda an advancing line of life is firmly traced out.
+The indolent and thoughtless may indeed be horrified by the appalling
+dangers of the gospel according to Zarathustra. But in reality there is
+no great cause for alarm. Society may amply rely upon its agencies, even
+in these stupendous times of universal war, for protection from any
+disastrous organic dislocations incited by the teachings of Zarathustra,
+at least so far as the immediate future is concerned--in which alone
+society appears to be interested. Moreover, our apprehensions are
+appeased by the sober reflection that by its plain unfeasibleness the
+whole supersocial scheme of Nietzsche is reduced to colossal absurdity.
+Its limitless audacity defeats any formulation of its "war aims." For
+what compels an ambitious imagination to arrest itself at the goal of
+the superman? Why should it not run on beyond that first terminal? In
+one of Mr. G. K. Chesterton's labored extravaganzas a grotesque sort of
+super-overman _in spe_ succeeds in going beyond unreason when he
+contrives this lucid self-definition: "I have gone where God has never
+dared to go. I am above the silly supermen as they are above mere men.
+Where I walk in the Heavens, no man has walked before me, and I am alone
+in a garden." It is enough to make one gasp and then perhaps luckily
+recall Goethe's consoling thought that under the care of Providence the
+trees will not grow into the heavens. ("_Es ist dafür gesorgt, dass die
+Bäume nicht in den Himmel wachsen._") As matter of fact, the ideas
+promulgated in _Also Sprach Zarathustra_ need inspire no fear of their
+winning the human race from its venerable idols, despite the fact that
+the pull of natural laws and of elemental appetites seems to be on their
+side. The only effect to be expected of such a philosophy is that it
+will act as an antidote for moral inertia which inevitably goes with the
+flock-instinct and the lazy reliance on the accustomed order of things.
+
+Nietzsche's ethics are not easy to valuate, since none of their
+standards are derived from the orthodox canon. His being a truly
+personalized form of morality, his principles are strictly cognate to
+his temperament. To his professed ideals there attaches a definite
+theory of society. And since his philosophy is consistent in its
+sincerity, its message is withheld from the man-in-the-street, deemed
+unworthy of notice, and delivered only to the _élite_ that shall beget
+the superman. To Nietzsche the good of the greatest number is no valid
+consideration. The great stupid mass exists only for the sake of an
+oligarchy by whom it is duly exploited under nature's decree that the
+strong shall prey upon the weak. Let, then, this favored set further the
+design of nature by systematically encouraging the elevation of their
+own type.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+We have sought to dispel the fiction about the shaping influence of
+Nietzsche upon the thought and conduct of his nation, and have accounted
+for the miscarriage of his ethics by their fantastic impracticability.
+Yet it has been shown also that he fostered in an unmistakable fashion
+the class-consciousness of the aristocrat, born or self-appointed. To
+that extent his influence was certainly malign. Yet doubtless he did
+perform a service to our age. The specific nature of this service,
+stated in the fewest words, is that to his great divinatory gift are we
+indebted for an unprecedented strengthening of our hold upon reality. In
+order to make this point clear we have to revert once more to
+Nietzsche's transient intellectual relation to pessimism.
+
+We have seen that the illusionism of Schopenhauer and more particularly
+of Wagner exerted a strong attraction on his high-strung artistic
+temperament.
+
+Nevertheless a certain realistic counter-drift to the ultra-romantic
+tendency of Wagner's theory caused him in the long run to reject the
+faith in the power of Art to save man from evil. Almost abruptly, his
+personal affection for the "Master," to whom in his eventual mental
+eclipse he still referred tenderly at lucid moments, changed to bitter
+hostility. Henceforth he classes the glorification of Art as one of the
+three most despicable attitudes of life: Philistinism, Pietism, and
+Estheticism, all of which have their origin in _cowardice_, represent
+three branches of the ignominious road of escape from the terrors of
+living. In three extended diatribes Nietzsche denounces Wagner as the
+archetype of modern decadence; the most violent attack of all is
+delivered against the point of juncture in which Wagner's art gospel and
+the Christian religion culminate: the promise of redemption through
+pity. To Nietzsche's way of thinking pity is merely the coward's
+acknowledgment of his weakness. For only insomuch as a man is devoid of
+fortitude in bearing his own sufferings is he unable to contemplate with
+equanimity the sufferings of his fellow creatures. Since religion
+enjoins compassion with all forms of human misery, we should make war
+upon religion. And for the reason that Wagner's crowning achievement,
+his _Parsifal_, is a veritable sublimation of Mercy, there can be no
+truce between its creator and the giver of the counsel: "Be hard!"
+Perhaps this notorious advice is after all not as ominous as it sounds.
+It merely expresses rather abruptly Nietzsche's confidence in the value
+of self-control as a means of discipline. If you have learned calmly to
+see others suffer, you are yourself able to endure distress with manful
+composure. "Therefore I wash the hand which helped the sufferer;
+therefore I even wipe my soul." But, unfortunately, such is the frailty
+of human nature that it is only one step from indifference about the
+sufferings of others to an inclination to exploit them or even to
+inflict pain upon one's neighbors for the sake of personal gain of one
+sort or another.
+
+    Why so hard? said once the charcoal unto the diamond, are we not
+    near relations?
+
+    Why so soft? O my brethren, thus I ask you. Are ye not my brethren?
+
+    Why so soft, so unresisting, and yielding? Why is there so much
+    disavowal and abnegation in your hearts? Why is there so little fate
+    in your looks?
+
+    And if ye are not willing to be fates, and inexorable, how could ye
+    conquer with me someday?
+
+    And if your hardness would not glance, and cut, and chip into
+    pieces--how could ye create with me some day?
+
+    For all creators are hard. And it must seem blessedness unto you to
+    press your hand upon millenniums as upon wax,--
+
+    Blessedness to write upon the will of millenniums as upon
+    brass,--harder than brass, nobler than brass. The noblest only is
+    perfectly hard.
+
+    This new table, O my brethren, I put over you: Become hard!(22)
+
+  (22) "Thus Spake Zarathustra," p. 399, sec. 29.
+
+The repudiation of Wagner leaves a tremendous void in Nietzsche's soul
+by depriving his enthusiasm of its foremost concrete object. He loses
+his faith in idealism. When illusions can bring a man like Wagner to
+such an odious outlook upon life, they must be obnoxious in themselves;
+and so, after being subjected to pitiless analysis, they are disowned
+and turned into ridicule. And now, the pendulum of his zeal having swung
+from one emotional extreme to the other, the great rhapsodist finds
+himself temporarily destitute of an adequate theme. However, his fervor
+does not long remain in abeyance, and soon it is absorbed in a new
+object. Great as is the move it is logical enough. Since illusions are
+only a hindrance to the fuller grasp of life which behooves all free
+spirits, Nietzsche energetically turns from self-deception to its
+opposite, self-realization. In this new spiritual endeavor he relies far
+more on intuition than on scientific and metaphysical speculation. From
+his own stand he is certainly justified in doing this. Experimentation
+and ratiocination at the best are apt to disassociate individual
+realities from their complex setting and then proceed to palm them off
+as illustrations of life, when in truth they are lifeless, artificially
+preserved specimens.
+
+    "Encheiresin naturae nennt's die Chemie,
+     Spottet ihrer selbst und weiss nicht wie."(23)
+
+Nietzsche's realism, by contrast, goes to the very quick of nature,
+grasps all the gifts of life, and from the continuous flood of phenomena
+extracts a rich, full-flavored essence. It is from a sense of gratitude
+for this boon that he becomes an idolatrous worshiper of experience,
+"_der grosse Jasager_,"--the great sayer of Yes,--and the most
+stimulating optimist of all ages. To Nietzsche reality is alive as
+perhaps never to man before. He plunges down to the very heart of
+things, absorbs their vital qualities and meanings, and having himself
+learned to draw supreme satisfaction from the most ordinary facts and
+events, he makes the common marvelous to others, which, as was said by
+James Russell Lowell, is a true test of genius. No wonder that
+deification of reality becomes the dominant _motif_ in his philosophy.
+But again that onesided aristocratic strain perverts his ethics. To
+drain the intoxicating cup at the feast of life, such is the divine
+privilege not of the common run of mortals but only of the elect. They
+must not let this or that petty and artificial convention, nor yet this
+or that moral command or prohibition, restrain them from the exercise of
+that higher sense of living, but must fully abandon themselves to its
+joys. "Since man came into existence he hath had too little joy. That
+alone, my brethren, is our original sin."(24) The "much-too-many" are
+doomed to inanity by their lack of appetite at the banquet of life:
+
+    Such folk sit down unto dinner and bring nothing with them, not even
+    a good hunger. And now they backbite: "All is vanity!"
+
+    But to eat well and drink well, O my brethren, is, verily, no vain
+    art! Break, break the tables of those who are never joyful!(25)
+
+  (23) Goethe's _Faust_, II, ll. 1940-1. Bayard Taylor translates:
+  _Encheiresin naturae_, this Chemistry names, nor knows how herself she
+  banters and blames!
+
+  (24) "Thus Spake Zarathustra," p. 120.
+
+  (25) _Ibid._, p. 296, sec. 13.
+
+The Will to Live holds man's one chance of this-worldly bliss, and
+supersedes any care for the remote felicities of any problematic future
+state. Yet the Nietzschean cult of life is not to be understood by any
+means as a banal devotion to the pleasurable side of life alone. The
+true disciple finds in every event, be it happy or adverse, exalting or
+crushing, the factors of supreme spiritual satisfaction: joy and pain
+are equally implied in experience, the Will to Live encompasses jointly
+the capacity to enjoy and to suffer. It may even be paradoxically said
+that since man owes some of his greatest and most beautiful achievements
+to sorrow, it must be a joy and a blessing to suffer. The unmistakable
+sign of heroism is _amor fati_, a fierce delight in one's destiny, hold
+what it may.
+
+Consequently, the precursor of the superman will be possessed, along
+with his great sensibility to pleasure, of a capacious aptitude for
+suffering. "Ye would perchance abolish suffering," exclaims Nietzsche,
+"and we,--it seems that we would rather have it even greater and worse
+than it has ever been. The discipline of suffering,--tragical
+suffering,--know ye not that only this discipline has heretofore brought
+about every elevation of man?" "Spirit is that life which cutteth into
+life. By one's own pain one's own knowledge increaseth;--knew ye that
+before? And the happiness of the spirit is this: to be anointed and
+consecrated by tears as a sacrificial animal;--knew ye that before?" And
+if, then, the tragical pain inherent in life be no argument against
+Joyfulness, the zest of living can be obscured by nothing save the fear
+of total extinction. To the disciple of Nietzsche, by whom every moment
+of his existence is realized as a priceless gift, the thought of his
+irrevocable separation from all things is unbearable. "'Was this life?'
+I shall say to Death. 'Well, then, once more!'" And--to paraphrase
+Nietzsche's own simile--the insatiable witness of the great
+tragi-comedy, spectator and participant at once, being loath to leave
+the theatre, and eager for a repetition of the performance, shouts his
+endless _encore_, praying fervently that in the constant repetition of
+the performance not a single detail of the action be omitted. The
+yearning for the endlessness not of life at large, not of life on any
+terms, but of _this my life_ with its ineffable wealth of rapturous
+moments, works up the extreme optimism of Nietzsche to its stupendous _a
+priori_ notion of infinity, expressed in the name _die ewige Wiederkehr_
+("Eternal Recurrence"). It is a staggeringly imaginative concept, formed
+apart from any evidential grounds, and yet fortified with a fair amount
+of logical armament. The universe is imagined as endless in time,
+although its material contents are not equally conceived as limitless.
+Since, consequently, there must be a limit to the possible variety in
+the arrangement and sequence of the sum total of data, even as in the
+case of a kaleidoscope, the possibility of variegations is not infinite.
+The particular co-ordination of things in the universe, say at this
+particular moment, is bound to recur again and again in the passing of
+the eons. But under the nexus of cause and effect the resurgence of the
+past from the ocean of time is not accidental nor is the configuration
+of things haphazard, as is true in the case of the kaleidoscope; rather,
+history, in the most inclusive acceptation of the term, is predestined
+to repeat itself; this happens through the perpetual progressive
+resurrection of its particles. It is then to be assumed that any aspect
+which the world has ever presented must have existed innumerable
+millions of times before, and must recur with eternal periodicity. That
+the deterministic strain in this tremendous _Vorstellung_ of a cyclic
+rhythm throbbing in the universe entangles its author's fanatical belief
+in evolution in a rather serious self-contradiction, does not detract
+from its spiritual lure, nor from its wide suggestiveness, however
+incapable it may be of scientific demonstration.
+
+From unfathomed depths of feeling wells up the pæan of the prophet of
+the life intense.
+
+    O Mensch! Gib Acht!
+    Was spricht die tiefe Mitternacht?
+    Ich schlief, ich schlief--,
+    Aus tiefem Traum bin ich erwacht:--
+    Die Welt ist tief,
+    Und tiefer als der Tag gedacht.
+    Tief ist ihr Weh--,
+    Lust--tiefer noch als Herzeleid:
+    Weh spricht: Vergeh!
+    Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit--
+    Will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit!(26)
+
+  (26)
+
+      O man! Lose not sight!
+      What saith the deep midnight?
+      "I lay in sleep, in sleep;
+      From deep dream I woke to light.
+      The world is deep,
+      And deeper than ever day though! it might.
+      Deep is its woe,--
+      And deeper still than woe--delight."
+      Saith woe: "Pass, go!
+      Eternity's sought by all delight,--
+      Eternity deep--by all delight.
+
+  "Thus Spake Zarathustra," The Drunken Song, p. 174.--The translation
+  but faintly suggests the poetic appeal of the original.
+
+A timid heart may indeed recoil from the iron necessity of reliving _ad
+infinitum_ its woeful terrestrial fate. But the prospect can hold no
+terror for the heroic soul by whose fiat all items of experience have
+assumed important meanings and values. He who has cast in his lot with
+Destiny in spontaneous submission to all its designs, cannot but revere
+and cherish his own fate as an integral part of the grand unalterable
+fatality of things.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+If this crude presentment of Friedrich Nietzsche's doctrine has not
+entirely failed of its purpose, the _leitmotifs_ of that doctrine will
+have been readily referred by the reader to their origin; they can be
+subsumed under that temperamental category which is more or less
+accurately defined as the _romantic_. Glorification of violent
+passion,--quest of innermost mysteries,--boundless expansion of
+self-consciousness,--visions of a future of transcendent magnificence,
+and notwithstanding an ardent worship of reality a quixotically
+impracticable detachment from the concrete basis of civic life,--these
+outstanding characteristics of the Nietzschean philosophy give
+unmistakable proof of a central, driving, romantic inspiration:
+Nietzsche shifts the essence and principle of being to a new center of
+gravity, by substituting the Future for the Present and relying on the
+untrammeled expansion of spontaneous forces which upon closer
+examination are found to be without definite aim or practical goal.
+
+For this reason, critically to animadvert upon Nietzsche as a social
+reformer would be utterly out of place; he is simply too much of a poet
+to be taken seriously as a statesman or politician. The weakness of his
+philosophy before the forum of Logic has been referred to before.
+Nothing can be easier than to prove the incompatibility of some of his
+theorems. How, for instance, can the absolute determinism of the belief
+in Cyclic Recurrence be reconciled with the power vested in superman to
+deflect by his autonomous will the straight course of history? Or, to
+touch upon a more practical social aspect of his teaching,--if in the
+order of nature all men are unequal, how can we ever bring about the
+right selection of leaders, how indeed can we expect to secure the due
+ascendancy of character and intellect over the gregarious grossness of
+the demos?
+
+Again, it is easy enough to controvert Nietzsche almost at any pass by
+demonstrating his unphilosophic onesidedness. Were Nietzsche not
+stubbornly onesided, he would surely have conceded--as any sane-minded
+person must concede in these times of suffering and sacrifice--that
+charity, self-abnegation, and self-immolation might be viewed, not as
+conclusive proofs of degeneracy, but on the contrary as signs of growth
+towards perfection. Besides, philosophers of the _métier_ are sure to
+object to the haziness of Nietzsche's idea of Vitality which in truth is
+oriented, as is his philosophy in general, less by thought than by
+sentiment.
+
+Notwithstanding his obvious connection with significant contemporaneous
+currents, the author of "Zarathustra" is altogether too much _sui
+generis_ to be amenable to any crude and rigid classification. He may
+plausibly be labelled an anarchist, yet no definition of anarchism will
+wholly take him in. Anarchism stands for the demolition of the extant
+social apparatus of restraint. Its battle is for the free determination
+of personal happiness. Nietzsche's prime concern, contrarily, is with
+internal self-liberation from the obsessive desire for personal
+happiness in any accepted connotation of the term; such happiness to him
+does not constitute the chief object of life.
+
+The cardinal point of Nietzsche's doctrine is missed by those who,
+arguing retrospectively, expound the gist of his philosophy as an
+incitation to barbarism. Nothing can be more remote from his intentions
+than the transformation of society into a horde of ferocious brutes. His
+impeachment of mercy, notwithstanding an appearance of reckless impiety,
+is in the last analysis no more and no less than an expedient in the
+truly romantic pursuit of a new ideal of Love. Compassion, in his
+opinion, hampers the progress towards forms of living that shall be
+pregnant with a new and superior type of perfection. And in justice to
+Nietzsche it should be borne in mind that among the various
+manifestations of that human failing there is none he scorns so deeply
+as cowardly and petty commiseration of self. It also deserves to be
+emphasized that he nowhere endorses selfishness when exercised for small
+or sordid objects. "I love the brave. But it is not enough to be a
+swordsman, one must also know against whom to use the sword. And often
+there is more bravery in one's keeping quiet and going past, in order to
+spare one's self for a worthier enemy: Ye shall have only enemies who
+are to be hated, but not enemies who are to be despised."(27) Despotism
+must justify itself by great and worthy ends. And no man must be
+permitted to be hard towards others who lacks the strength of being even
+harder towards himself.
+
+  (27) "Thus Spake Zarathustra," p. 304.
+
+At all events it must serve a better purpose to appraise the practical
+importance of Nietzsche's speculations than blankly to denounce their
+immoralism. Nietzsche, it has to be repeated, was not on the whole a
+creator of new ideas. His extraordinary influence in the recent past is
+not due to any supreme originality or fertility of mind; it is
+predominantly due to his eagle-winged imagination. In him the emotional
+urge of utterance was, accordingly, incomparably more potent than the
+purely intellectual force of opinion: in fact the texture of his
+philosophy is woven of sensations rather than of ideas, hence its
+decidedly ethical trend.
+
+The latent value of Nietzsche's ethics in their application to specific
+social problems it would be extremely difficult to determine. Their
+successful application to general world problems, if it were possible,
+would mean the ruin of the only form of civilization that signifies to
+us. His philosophy, if swallowed in the whole, poisons; in large
+potations, intoxicates; but in reasonable doses, strengthens and
+stimulates. Such danger as it harbors has no relation to grossness. His
+call to the Joy of Living and Doing is no encouragement of vulgar
+hedonism, but a challenge to persevering effort. He urges the supreme
+importance of vigor of body and mind and force of will. "O my brethren,
+I consecrate you to be, and show unto you the way unto a new nobility.
+Ye shall become procreators and breeders and sowers of the future.--Not
+whence ye come be your honor in future, but whither ye go! Your will,
+and your foot that longeth to get beyond yourselves, be that your new
+honor!"(28)
+
+  (28) "Thus Spake Zarathustra," p. 294.
+
+It would be a withering mistake to advocate the translation of
+Nietzsche's poetic dreams into the prose of reality. Unquestionably his
+Utopia if it were to be carried into practice would doom to utter
+extinction the world it is devised to regenerate. But it is generally
+acknowledged that "prophets have a right to be unreasonable," and so, if
+we would square ourselves with Friedrich Nietzsche in a spirit of
+fairness, we ought not to forget that the daring champion of reckless
+unrestraint is likewise the inspired apostle of action, power,
+enthusiasm, and aspiration, in fine, a prophet of Vitality and a
+messenger of Hope.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE REVIVALISM OF LEO TOLSTOY
+
+
+In the intellectual record of our times it is one of the oddest events
+that the most impressive preacher who has taken the ear of civilized
+mankind in this generation raised up his voice in a region which in
+respect of its political, religious, and economic status was until
+recently, by fairly common consent, ruled off the map of Europe. The
+greatest humanitarian of his century sprang up in a land chiefly
+characterized in the general judgment of the outside world by the
+reactionism of its government and the stolid ignorance of its populace.
+A country still teeming with analphabeticians and proverbial for its
+dense medievalism gave to the world a writer who by the great quality of
+his art and the lofty spiritualism of his teaching was able not only to
+obtain a wide hearing throughout all civilized countries, but to become
+a distinct factor in the moral evolution of the age. The stupefying
+events that have recently revolutionized the Russian state have given
+the world an inkling of the secrets of the Slavic type of temperament,
+so mystifying in its commixture of simplicity and strength on the one
+hand with grossness and stupidity, and on the other hand with the
+highest spirituality and idealism. For such people as in these
+infuriated times still keep up some objective and judicious interest in
+products of the literary art, the volcanic upheaval in the social life
+of Russia has probably thrown some of Tolstoy's less palpable figures
+into a greater plastic relief. Tolstoy's own character, too, has become
+more tangible in its curious composition. The close analogy between his
+personal theories and the dominant impulses of his race has now been
+made patent. We are better able to understand the people of whom he
+wrote because we have come to know better the people for whom he wrote.
+
+The emphasis of Tolstoy's popular appeal was unquestionably enhanced by
+certain eccentricities of his doctrine, and still more by his
+picturesque efforts to conform his mode of life, by way of necessary
+example, to his professed theory of social elevation. The personality of
+Tolstoy, like the character of the Russian people, is many-sided, and
+since its aspects are not marked off by convenient lines of division,
+but are, rather, commingled in the great and varied mass of his literary
+achievements, it is not easy to make a definitive forecast of his
+historic position. Tentatively, however, the current critical estimate
+may be summed up in this: as a creative writer, in particular of novels
+and short stories, he stood matchless among the realists, and the
+verdict pronounced at one time by William Dean Howells when he referred
+to Tolstoy as "the only living writer of perfect fiction" is not likely
+to be overruled by posterity. Nor will competent judges gainsay his
+supreme importance as a critic and moral revivalist of society, even
+though they may be seriously disposed to question whether his principles
+of conduct constitute in their aggregate a canon of much practical worth
+for the needs of the western world. As a philosopher or an original
+thinker, however, he will hardly maintain the place accorded him by the
+less discerning among his multitudinous followers, for in his persistent
+attempt to find a new way of understanding life he must be said to have
+signally failed. Wisdom in him was hampered by Utopian fancies; his
+dogmas derive from idiosyncrasies and lead into absurdities. Then, too,
+most of his tenets are easily traced to their sources: in his vagaries
+as well as in his noblest and soundest aspirations he was merely
+continuing work which others had prepared.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+An objective survey of Tolstoy's work in realistic fiction, in which he
+ranked supreme, should start with the admission that he was by no means
+the first arrival among the Russians in that field. Nicholas Gogol,
+Fedor Dostoievsky, and Ivan Turgenieff had the priority by a small
+margin. Of these three powerful novelists, Dostoievsky (1821-1881) has
+probably had an even stronger influence upon modern letters than has
+Tolstoy himself. He was one of the earliest writers of romance to show
+the younger generation how to found fiction upon deeper psychologic
+knowledge. His greatest proficiency lay, as is apt to be the case with
+writers of a realistic bent, in dealing with the darkest side of life.
+The wretched and outcast portion of humanity yielded to his skill its
+most congenial material. His novels--"Poor Folk," (1846), "Memoirs from
+a Dead House," (1862), "Raskolnikoff," (1866), "The Idiot," (1868), "The
+Karamasoffs," (1879)--take the reader into company such as had
+heretofore not gained open entrance to polite literature: criminals,
+defectives, paupers, and prostitutes. Yet he did not dwell upon the
+wretchedness of that submerged section of humanity from any perverse
+delight in what is hideous or for the satisfaction of readers afflicted
+with morbid curiosity, but from a compelling sense of pity and brotherly
+love. His works are an appeal to charity. In them, the imperdible grace
+of the soul shines through the ugliest outward disguise to win a glance
+from the habitual indifference of fortune's _enfants gâtés_. Dostoievsky
+preceded Tolstoy in frankly enlisting his talents in the service of his
+outcast brethren. With the same ideal of the writer's mission held in
+steady view, Tolstoy turned his attention from the start, and then more
+and more as his work advanced, to the pitiable condition of the lower
+orders of society. It must not be forgotten in this connection that his
+career was synchronous with the growth of a social revolution which,
+having reached its full force in these days, is making Russia over for
+better or for worse, and whose wellsprings Tolstoy helps us to fathom.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+For the general grouping of his writings it is convenient to follow
+Tolstoy's own division of his life. His dreamy poetical childhood was
+succeeded by three clearly distinct stages: first, a score of years
+filled up with self-indulgent worldliness; next, a nearly equal length
+of time devoted to artistic ambition, earnest meditation, and helpful
+social work; last, by a more gradual transition, the ascetic period,
+covering a long stretch of years given up to religious illumination and
+to the strenuous advocacy of the Simple Life.
+
+The remarkable spiritual evolution of this great man was apparently
+governed far more by inborn tendencies than by the workings of
+experience. Of Tolstoy in his childhood, youth, middle age, and
+senescence we gain trustworthy impressions from numerous
+autobiographical documents, but here we shall have to forego anything
+more than a passing reference to the essential facts of his career. He
+was descended from an aristocratic family of German stock but domiciled
+in Russia since the fourteenth century. The year of his birth was 1828,
+the same as Ibsen's. In youth he was bashful, eccentric, and amazingly
+ill-favored. The last-named of these handicaps he outgrew but late in
+life, still later did he get over his bashfulness, and his eccentricity
+never left him. His penchant for the infraction of custom nearly put a
+premature stop to his career when in his urchin days he once threw
+himself from a window in an improvised experiment in aerial navigation.
+At the age of fourteen he was much taken up with subtile speculations
+about the most ancient and vexing of human problems: the future life,
+and the immortality of the soul. Entering the university at fifteen, he
+devoted himself in the beginning to the study of oriental languages, but
+later on his interest shifted to the law. At sixteen he was already
+imbued with the doctrines of Jean Jacques Rousseau that were to play
+such an important rôle in guiding his conduct. In 1846 he passed out of
+the university without a degree, carrying away nothing but a lasting
+regret over his wasted time. He went directly to his ancestral estates,
+with the idealistic intention to make the most of the opportunity
+afforded him by the patriarchal relationship that existed in Russia
+between the landholder and the _adscripti glebae_ and to improve the
+condition of his seven hundred dependents. His efforts, however, were
+foredoomed to failure, partly through his lack of experience, partly
+also through a certain want of sincerity or tenacity of purpose. The
+experiment in social education having abruptly come to its end, the
+disillusionized reformer threw himself headlong into the diversions and
+dissipations of the capital city. In his "Confession" he refers to that
+chapter of his existence as made up wholly of sensuality and
+worldliness. He was inordinately proud of his noble birth,--at college
+his inchoate apostleship of the universal brotherhood of man did not
+shield him from a general dislike on account of his arrogance,--and he
+cultivated the most exclusive social circles of Moscow. He freely
+indulged the love of sports that was to cling through life and keep him
+strong and supple even in very old age. (Up to a short time before his
+death he still rode horseback and perhaps none of the renunciations
+exacted by his principles came so hard as that of giving up his favorite
+pastime of hunting.) But he also fell into the evil ways of gilded
+youth, soon achieving notoriety as a toper, gambler, and _courreur des
+femmes_. After a while his brother, who was a person of steadier habits
+and who had great influence over him, persuaded him to quit his
+profligate mode of living and to join him at his military post. Under
+the bracing effect of the change, the young man's moral energies quickly
+revived. In the wilds of the Caucasus he at once grew freer and cleaner;
+his deep affection for the half-civilized land endeared him both to the
+Cossack natives and the Russian soldiers. He entered the army at
+twenty-three, and from November, 1853, up to the fall of Sebastopol in
+the summer of 1855, served in the Crimean campaign. He entered the
+famous fortress in November, 1854, and was among the last of its
+defenders. The indelible impressions made upon his mind by the heroism
+of his comrades, the awful scenes and the appalling suffering he had to
+witness, were responsible then and later for descriptions as harrowing
+and as stirring as any that the war literature of our own day has
+produced.
+
+In the Crimea he made his début as a writer. Among the tales of his
+martial period the most popular and perhaps the most excellent is the
+one called "The Cossacks." Turgenieff pronounced it the best short story
+ever written in Russian, and it is surely no undue exaggeration to say
+of Tolstoy's novelettes in general that in point of technical mastery
+they are unsurpassed.
+
+Sick at heart over the unending bloodshed in the Caucasus the young
+officer made his way back to Petrograd, and here, lionized in the salons
+doubly, fur his feats at arms and in letters, he seems to have returned,
+within more temperate limits, to his former style of living. At any
+rate, in his own judgment the ensuing three years were utterly wasted.
+The mental inanity and moral corruption all about him swelled his sense
+of superiority and self-righteousness. The glaring humbug and hypocrisy
+that permeated his social environment was, however, more than he could
+long endure.
+
+Having resigned his officer's commission he went abroad in 1857, to
+Switzerland, Germany, and France. The studies and observations made in
+these travels sealed his resolution to settle down for good on his
+domain and to consecrate his life to the welfare of his peasants. But a
+survey of the situation found upon his return made him realize that
+nothing could be done for the "muzhik" without systematic education:
+therefore, in order to prepare himself for efficacious work as a
+teacher, he spent some further time abroad for special study, in 1859.
+After that, the educational labor was taken up in full earnest. The lord
+of the land became the schoolmaster of his subjects, reenforcing the
+effect of _viva voce_ teaching by means of a periodical published
+expressly for their moral uplift. This work he continued for about three
+years, his hopes of success now rising, now falling, when in a fit of
+despondency he again abandoned his philanthropic efforts. About this
+time, 1862, he married Sophia Andreyevna Behrs, the daughter of a Moscow
+physician. With characteristic honesty he forced his private diary on
+his fiancée, who was only eighteen, so that she might know the full
+truth about his pre-conjugal course of living.
+
+About the Countess Tolstoy much has been said in praise and blame. Let
+her record speak for itself. Of her union with the great novelist
+thirteen children were born, of whom nine reached an adult age. The
+mother nursed and tended them all, with her own hands made their
+clothes, and until they grew to the age of ten supplied to them the
+place of a schoolmistress. It must not be inferred from this that her
+horizon did not extend beyond nursery and kitchen, for during the
+earlier years she acted also as her husband's invaluable amanuensis.
+Before the days of the typewriter his voluminous manuscripts were all
+copied by her hand, and recopied and revised--in the case of "War and
+Peace" this happened no less than seven times, and the novel runs to
+sixteen hundred close-printed pages!--and under her supervision his
+numerous works were not only printed but also published and circulated.
+Moreover, she managed his properties, landed, personal, and literary, to
+the incalculable advantage of the family fortune. This end, to be sure,
+she accomplished by conservative and reliable methods of business; for
+while of his literary genius she was the greatest admirer, she never was
+in full accord with his communistic notions. And the highest proof of
+all her extraordinary _Tüchtigkeit_ and devotion is that by her common
+sense and tact she was enabled to function for a lifetime as a sort of
+buffer between her husband's world-removed dreamland existence and the
+rigid and frigid reality of facts.
+
+Thus Tolstoy's energies were left to go undivided into literary
+production; its amount, as a result, was enormous. If all his writings
+were to be collected, including the unpublished manuscripts now reposing
+in the Rumyantzoff Museum, which are said to be about equal in quantity
+to the published works, and if to this collection were added his
+innumerable letters, most of which are of very great interest, the
+complete set of Tolstoy's works would run to considerably more than one
+hundred volumes. To discuss all of Tolstoy's writings, or even to
+mention all, is here quite out of the question. All those, however, that
+seem vital for the purpose of a just estimate and characterization will
+be touched upon.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+The literary fame of Tolstoy was abundantly secured already in the
+earlier part of his life by his numerous short stories and sketches. The
+three remarkable pen pictures of the siege of Sebastopol, and tales such
+as "The Cossacks," "Two Hussars," "Polikushka," "The Snow-Storm," "The
+Encounter," "The Invasion," "The Captive in the Caucasus," "Lucerne,"
+"Albert," and many others, revealed together with an exceptional depth
+of insight an extraordinary plastic ability and skill of motivation; in
+fact they deserve to be set as permanent examples before the eyes of
+every aspiring author. In their characters and their setting they
+present true and racy pictures of a portentous epoch, intimate studies
+of the human soul that are full of charm and fascination,
+notwithstanding their tragic sadness of outlook. Manifestly this author
+was a prose poet of such marvelous power that he could abstain
+consistently from the use of sweeping color, overwrought sentiment, and
+high rhetorical invective.
+
+At this season Tolstoy, while he refrained from following any of the
+approved literary models, was paying much attention to the artistic
+refinement of his style. There was to be a time when he would abjure all
+considerations of artistry on the ground that by them the ethical issue
+in a narration is beclouded. But it would be truer to say conversely
+that in his own later works, since "Anna Karenina," the clarity of the
+artistic design was dimmed by the obtrusive didactic purpose.
+Fortunately the artistic interest was not yet wholly subordinated to the
+religious urge while the three great novels were in course of
+composition: "War and Peace," (1864-69), "Anna Karenina," (first part,
+1873; published complete in 1877), and "Resurrection," (1899). To the
+first of these is usually accorded the highest place among all of
+Tolstoy's works; it is by this work that he takes his position as the
+chief epic poet of modern times. "War and Peace" is indeed an epic
+rather than a novel in the ordinary meaning. Playing against the
+background of tremendous historical transactions, the narrative sustains
+the epic character not only in the hugeness of its dimensions, but
+equally in the qualities of its technique. There is very little comment
+by the author upon the events, and merely a touch of subjective irony
+here and there. The story is straightforwardly told as it was lived out
+by its characters. Tolstoy has not the self-complacency to thrust in the
+odds and ends of his personal philosophy, as is done so annoyingly even
+by a writer of George Meredith's consequence, nor does he ever treat his
+readers with the almost simian impertinence so successfully affected by
+a Bernard Shaw. If "War and Peace" has any faults, they are the faults
+of its virtues, and spring mainly from an unmeasured prodigality of the
+creative gift. As a result of Tolstoy's excessive range of vision, the
+orderly progress of events in that great novel is broken up somewhat by
+the profusion of shapes that monopolize the attention one at a time much
+as individual spots in a landscape do under the sweeping glare of the
+search-light. Yet although in the externalization of this crowding
+multitude of figures no necessary detail is lacking, the grand movement
+as a whole is not swamped by the details. The entire story is governed
+by the conception of events as an emanation of the cosmic will, not
+merely as the consequence of impulses proceeding from a few puissant
+geniuses of the Napoleonic order.
+
+It is quite in accord with such a view of history that the machinery of
+this voluminous epopee is not set in motion by a single conspicuous
+protagonist. As a matter of fact, it is somewhat baffling to try to name
+the principals in the story, since in artistic importance all the
+figures are on an equal footing before their maker; possibly the fact
+that Tolstoy's ethical theory embodied the most persistent protest ever
+raised against the inequality of social estates proved not insignificant
+for his manner of characterization. Ethical justice, however, is carried
+to an artistic fault, for the feelings and reactions of human nature in
+so many diverse individuals lead to an intricacy and subtlety of
+motivation which obscures the organic causes through overzeal in making
+them patent. Anyway, Tolstoy authenticates himself in this novel as a
+past master of realism, particularly in his utterly convincing
+depictment of Russian soldier life. And as a painter of the battlefield
+he ranks, allowing for the difference of the medium, with Vasili
+Verestschagin at his best. It may be said in passing that these two
+Russian pacifists, by their gruesome exposition of the horrors of war,
+aroused more sentiment against warfare than did all the spectacular and
+expensive peace conferences inaugurated by the crowned but hollow head
+of their nation, and the splendid declamations of the possessors of, or
+aspirants for, the late Mr. Nobel's forty-thousand dollar prize.
+
+Like all true realists, Tolstoy took great pains to inform himself even
+about the minutiæ of his subjects, but he never failed, as did in large
+measure Zola in _La Débâcle_, to infuse emotional meaning into the
+static monotony of facts and figures. In his strong attachment for his
+own human creatures he is more nearly akin to the idealizing or
+sentimentalizing type of realists, like Daudet, Kipling, Hauptmann, than
+to the downright matter-of-fact naturalists such as Zola or Gorki. But
+to classify him at all would be wrong and futile, since he was never
+leagued with literary creeds and cliques and always stood aloof from the
+heated theoretical controversies of his time even after he had hurled
+his great inclusive challenge to art.
+
+"War and Peace" was written in Tolstoy's happiest epoch, at a time,
+comparatively speaking, of spiritual calm. He had now reached some
+satisfying convictions in his religious speculations, and felt that his
+personal life was moving up in the right direction. His moral change is
+made plain in the contrast between two figures of the story, Prince
+Andrey and Peter Bezukhoff: the ambitious worldling and the honest
+seeker after the right way.
+
+In his second great novel, "Anna Karenina," the undercurrent of the
+author's own moral experience has a distinctly greater carrying power.
+It is through the earnest idealist, Levine, that Tolstoy has recorded
+his own aspirations. Characteristically, he does not make Levine the
+central figure.
+
+"Anna Karenina" is undoubtedly far from "pleasant" reading, since it is
+the tragical recital of an adulterous love. But the situation, with its
+appalling consequence of sorrow, is seized in its fullest psychological
+depth and by this means saved from being in any way offensive. The
+relation between the principals is viewed as by no means an ordinary
+liaison. Anna and Vronsky are serious-minded, honorable persons, who
+have struggled conscientiously against their mutual enchantment, but are
+swept out of their own moral orbits by the resistless force of Fate.
+This fatalistic element in the tragedy is variously emphasized; so at
+the beginning of the story, where Anna, in her emotional confusion still
+half-ignorant of her infatuation, suddenly realizes her love for
+Vronsky; or in the scene at the horse races where he meets with an
+accident. Throughout the narrative the psychological argumentation is
+beyond criticism. Witness the description of Anna's husband, a sort of
+cousin-in-kind of Ibsen's Thorvald Helmer, reflecting on his future
+course after his wife's confession of her unfaithfulness. Or that other
+episode, perhaps the greatest of them all, when Anna, at the point of
+death, joins together the hands of her husband and her lover. Or,
+finally, the picture of Anna as she deserts her home leaving her son
+behind in voluntary expiation of her wrong-doing, an act, by the way,
+that betrays a nicety of conscience far too subtle for the Rhadamantine
+inquisitors who demand to know why, if Anna would atone to Karenin, does
+she go with Vronsky? How perfectly true to life, subsequently, is the
+rapid _dégringolade_ of this passion under the gnawing curse of the
+homeless, workless, purposeless existence which little by little
+disunites the lovers! Only the end may be somewhat open to doubt, with
+its metastasis of the heroine's character,--unless indeed we consider
+the sweeping change accounted for by the theory of duplex personality.
+She herself believes that there are two quite different women alive in
+her, the one steadfastly loyal to her obligations, the other blindly
+driven into sin by the demon of her uncontrollable temperament.
+
+In the power of analysis, "Anna Karenina" is beyond doubt Tolstoy's
+masterpiece, and yet in its many discursive passages it already
+foreshadows the disintegration of his art, or more precisely, its
+ultimate capitulation to moral propagandism. For it was while at work
+upon this great novel that the old perplexities returned to bewilder his
+soul. In the tumultuous agitation of his conscience, the crucial and
+fundamental questions, Why Do We Live? and How Should We Live? could
+nevermore be silenced. Now a definitive attitude toward life is forming;
+to it all the later works bear a vital relation. And so, in regard to
+their moral outlook, Tolstoy's books may fitly be divided into those
+written before and those written since his "conversion." "Anna Karenina"
+happens to be on the dividing line.
+
+He was a man well past fifty, of enviable social position, in prosperous
+circumstances, widely celebrated for his art, highly respected for his
+character, and in his domestic life blessed with every reason for
+contentment. Yet all the gifts of fortune sank into insignificance
+before that vexing, unanswered Why? In the face of a paralyzing
+universal aimlessness, there could be to him no abiding sense of life in
+his personal enjoyments and desires. The burden of life became still
+less endurable face to face with the existence of evil and with the
+wretchedness of our social arrangements. With so much toil and trouble,
+squalor, ignorance, crime, and every conceivable kind of bodily and
+mental suffering all about me, why should I be privileged to live in
+luxury and idleness? This ever recurring question would not permit him
+to enjoy his possessions without self-reproach. To think of thousands of
+fellowmen lacking the very necessaries, made affluence and its
+concomitant ways of living odious to him. We know that in 1884, or
+thereabouts, he radically changed his views and modes of life so as to
+bring them into conformity with the laws of the Gospel. But before this
+conversion, in the despairing anguish that attacked him after the
+completion of "Anna Karenina," he was frequently tempted to suicide.
+Although the thought of death was very terrible to him then and at all
+times, still he would rather perish than live on in a world made heinous
+and hateful by the iniquity of men. Then it was that he searched for a
+reason why the vast proportion of humanity endure life, nay enjoy it,
+and why self-destruction is condemned by the general opinion, and this
+in spite of the fact that for most mortals existence is even harder than
+it could have been for him, since he at least was shielded from material
+want and lived amid loving souls. The answer he found in the end seemed
+to lead by a straight road out of the wilderness of doubt and despair.
+The great majority, so he ascertained, are able to bear the burden of
+life because they heed the ancient injunction: "_ora et labora_"; they
+_work_ and they _believe_. Might he not sweeten his lot after the same
+prescription? Being of a delicate spiritual sensibility, he had long
+realized that people of the idle class were for the most part inwardly
+indifferent to religion and in their actions defiant of its spirit. In
+the upper strata of society religious thought, where it exists, is
+largely adulterated or weakened; sophisticated by education, doctored by
+science, thinned out with worldly ambitions and with practical needs and
+considerations. The faith that supports life is found only among simple
+folk. For faith, to deserve the name, must be absolute, uncritical,
+unreasoning. Starting from these convictions as a basis, Tolstoy
+resolutely undertook _to learn to believe_; a determination which led
+him, as it has led other ardent religionists, so far astray from
+ecclesiastical paths that in due course of time he was unavoidably
+excommunicated from his church. His convictions made him a vehement
+antagonist of churchdom because of its stiffness of creed and laxness of
+practice. For his own part he soon arrived at a full and absolute
+acceptance of the Christian faith in what he considered to be its
+primitive and essential form. In "Walk Ye in the Light," (1893), the
+reversion of a confirmed worldling to this original conception of
+Christianity gives the story of the writer's own change of heart.
+
+To the period under discussion belongs Tolstoy's drama, "The Power of
+Darkness," (1886).(29) It is a piece of matchless realism, probably the
+first unmixedly naturalistic play ever wrought out. It is brutally,
+terribly true to life, and that to life at its worst, both in respect of
+the plot and the actors, who are individualized down to the minutest
+characteristics of utterance and gesture. Withal it is a species of
+modern morality, replete with a reformatory purpose that reflects deeply
+the author's tensely didactic state of mind. His instructional zeal is
+heightened by intimate knowledge of the Russian peasant, on his good
+side as well as on his bad. Some of his short stories are crass pictures
+of the muzhik's bestial degradation, veritable pattern cards of human
+and inhuman vices. In other stories, again, the deep-seated piety of the
+muzhik, and his patriarchal simplicity of heart are portrayed. As
+instance, the story of "Two Old Men," (1885), who are pledged to attain
+the Holy Land: the one performs his vow to the letter, the other, much
+the godlier of the two, is kept from his goal by a work of practical
+charity. In another story a muzhik is falsely accused of murder and
+accepts his undeserved punishment in a devout spirit of non-resistance.
+In a third, a poor cobbler who intuitively walks in the light is deemed
+worthy of a visit from Christ.
+
+  (29) The only tragedy brought out during his life time.
+
+In "The Power of Darkness," the darkest traits of peasant life prevail,
+yet the frightful picture is somehow Christianized, as it were, so that
+even the miscreant Nikita, in spite of his monstrous crimes, is sure of
+our profound compassion. We are gripped at the very heartstrings by that
+great confession scene where he stutters out his budget of malefactions,
+forced by his awakened conscience and urged on by his old father: "Speak
+out, my child, speak it off your soul, then you will feel easier."
+
+"The Power of Darkness" was given its counterpart in the satirical
+comedy, "Fruits of Culture," (1889). The wickedness of refined society
+is more mercilessly excoriated than low-lived infamy. But artistically
+considered the peasant tragedy is far superior to the "society play."
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Tolstoy was a pessimist both by temperament and philosophical
+persuasion. This is made manifest among other things by the prominent
+place which the idea of Death occupies in his writings. His feelings are
+expressed with striking simplicity by one of the principal characters in
+"War and Peace": "One must often think of death, so that it may lose its
+terrors for us, cease to be an enemy, and become on the contrary a
+friend that delivers us from this life of miseries." Still, in Tolstoy's
+stories, death, as a rule, is a haunting spectre. This conception comes
+to the fore even long after his conversion in a story like "Master and
+Man." Throughout his literary activity it has an obsessive hold on his
+mind. Even the shadowing of the animal mind by the ubiquitous spectre
+gives rise to a story: "Cholstomjer, The Story of a Horse," (1861), and
+in one of the earlier tales even the death of a tree is pictured. Death
+is most terrifying when, denuded of its heroic embellishments in battle
+pieces such as "The Death of a Soldier" ("Sebastopol") or the
+description of Prince Andrey's death in "War and Peace," it is exposed
+in all its bare and grim loathsomeness. Such happens in the short novel
+published in 1886 under the name of "The Death of Ivan Ilyitch,"--in
+point of literary merit one of Tolstoy's greatest performances. It is a
+plain tale about a middle-aged man of the official class, happy in an
+unreflecting sort of way in the jog-trot of his work and domestic
+arrangements. Suddenly his fate is turned,--by a trite mishap resulting
+in a long, hopeless sickness. His people at first give him the most
+anxious care, but as the illness drags on their devotion gradually
+abates, the patient is neglected, and soon almost no thought is given to
+him. In the monotonous agony of his prostration, the sufferer slowly
+comes to realize that he is dying, while his household has gone back to
+its habitual ways mindless of him, as though he were already dead, or
+had never lived. All through this lengthened crucifixion he still clings
+to life, and it is only when the family, gathering about him shortly
+before the release, can but ill conceal their impatience for the end,
+that Ivan at last accepts his fate: "I will no longer let them suffer--I
+will die; I will deliver them and myself." So he dies, and the world
+pursues its course unaltered,--in which consists the after-sting of this
+poignant tragedy.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Between the years 1879 and 1886 Tolstoy published the main portion of
+what may be regarded as his spiritual autobiography, namely, "The
+Confession," (1879, with a supplement in 1882), "The Union and
+Translation of the Four Gospels," (1881-2), "What Do I Believe?" (also
+translated under the title "My Religion," 1884) and "What Then Must We
+Do?" (1886). He was now well on the way to the logical ultimates of his
+ethical ideas, and in the revulsion from artistic ambitions so plainly
+foreshown in a treatise in 1887: "What is True Art?" he repudiated
+unequivocally all his earlier work so far as it sprang from any motives
+other than those of moral teaching. Without a clear appreciation of
+these facts a just estimate of "The Kreutzer Sonata" (1889) is
+impossible.
+
+The central character of the book is a commonplace, rather well-meaning
+fellow who has been tried for the murder of his wife, slain by him in a
+fit of insensate jealousy, and has been acquitted because of the
+extenuating circumstances in the case. The object of the story is to lay
+bare the causes of his crime. Tolstoy's ascetic proclivity had long
+since set him thinking about sex problems in general and in particular
+upon the ethics of marriage. And by this time he had arrived at the
+conclusion that the demoralized state of our society is chiefly due to
+polygamy and polyandrism; corroboration of his uncompromising views on
+the need of social purity he finds in the evangelist Matthew, v:27-28,
+where the difference between the old command and its new, far more
+rigorous, interpretation is bluntly stated: "Ye have heard that it was
+said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto
+you that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed
+adultery with her already in his heart."
+
+Now Tolstoy thinks that society, far from concurring in the scriptural
+condemnation of lewdness, caters systematically to the appetites of the
+voluptuary. If Tolstoy is right in his diagnosis, then the euphemistic
+term "social evil" has far wider reaches of meaning than those to which
+it is customarily applied. With the head person in "The Kreutzer
+Sonata," Tolstoy regards society as no better than a _maison de
+tolérance_ conducted on a very comprehensive scale. Women are reared
+with the main object of alluring men through charms and accomplishments;
+the arts of the hairdresser, the dressmaker, and milliner, as well as
+the exertions of governesses, music masters, and linguists all converge
+toward the same aim: to impart the power of attracting men. Between the
+woman of the world and the professional courtezan the main difference in
+the light of this view lies in the length of the service. Pozdnicheff
+accordingly divides femininity into long term and short term
+prostitutes, which rather fantastic classification Tolstoy follows up
+intrepidly to its last logical consequence.
+
+The main idea of "The Kreutzer Sonata," as stated in the postscript, is
+that sexless life is best. A recommendation of celibacy as mankind's
+highest ideal to be logical should involve a wish for the disappearance
+of human life from the globe. A world-view of such pessimistic sort
+prevents itself from the forfeiture of all bonds with humanity only by
+its concomitant reasoning that a race for whom it were better not to be
+is the very one that will struggle desperately against its _summum
+bonum_. Since race suicide, then, is a hopeless desideratum, the
+reformer must turn to more practicable methods if he would at least
+alleviate the worst of our social maladjustments. Idleness is the mother
+of all mischief, because it superinduces sensual self-indulgence.
+Therefore we must suppress anything that makes for leisure and pleasure.
+At this point we grasp the meaning of Tolstoy's vehement recoil from
+art. It is, to a great extent, the strong-willed resistance of a highly
+impressionable puritan against the enticements of beauty,--their
+distracting and disquieting effect, and principally their power of
+sensuous suggestion.
+
+The last extensive work published by Tolstoy was "Resurrection," (1889).
+In artistic merit it is not on a level with "War and Peace" and "Anna
+Karenina," nor can this be wondered at, considering the opinion about
+the value of art that had meanwhile ripened in the author.
+
+"Resurrection" was written primarily for a constructive moral purpose,
+yet the subject matter was such as to secrete, unintendedly, a corrosive
+criticism of social and religious cant. The satirical connotation of the
+novel could not have been more grimly brought home than through this
+fact, that the hero by his unswerving allegiance to Christian principles
+of conduct greatly shocks, at first, our sense of the proprieties,
+instead of eliciting our enthusiastic admiration. In spite of our
+highest moral notions Prince Nekhludoff, like that humbler follower of
+the voice of conscience in Gerhart Hauptmann's novel, impresses us as a
+"Fool in Christ." The story, itself, leads by degrees from the
+under-world of crime and punishment to a great spiritual elevation.
+Maslowa, a drunken street-walker, having been tried on a charge of
+murder, is wrongfully sentenced to transportation for life, because--the
+jury is tired out and the judge in a hurry to visit his mistress. Prince
+Nekhludoff, sitting on that jury, recognizes in the victim of justice a
+girl whose downfall he himself had caused. He is seized by penitence and
+resolves to follow the convict to Siberia, share her sufferings,
+dedicate his life to her redemption. She has sunk so low that his hope
+of reforming her falters, yet true to his resolution he offers to marry
+her. Although the offer is rejected, yet the suggestion of a new life
+which it brings begins to work a change in the woman. In the progress of
+the story her better nature gradually gains sway until a thorough moral
+revolution is completed.
+
+"Resurrection" derives its special value from its clear demonstration of
+those rules of conduct to which the author was straining with every
+moral fiber to conform his own life. From his ethical speculations and
+social experiments are projected figures like that of Maria Paulovna, a
+rich and beautiful woman who prefers to live like a common workingwoman
+and is drawn by her social conscience into the revolutionary vortex. In
+this figure, and more definitely still in the political convict
+Simonson, banished because of his educational work among the common
+people, Tolstoy studies for the first time the so-called "intellectual"
+type of revolutionist. His view of the "intellectuals" is sympathetic,
+on the whole. They believe that evil springs from ignorance. Their
+agitation issues from the highest principles, and they are capable of
+any self-sacrifice for the general weal. Still Tolstoy, as a thoroughly
+anti-political reformer, deprecates their organized movement.
+
+Altogether, he repudiated the systems of social reconstruction that go
+by the name of socialism, because he relied for the regeneration of
+society wholly and solely upon individual self-elevation. In an
+essential respect he was nevertheless a socialist, inasmuch as he strove
+for the ideal of universal equality. His social philosophy, bound up
+inseparably with his personal religious evolution, is laid down in a
+vast number of essays, letters, sketches, tracts, didactic tales, and
+perhaps most comprehensively in those autobiographical documents already
+mentioned. Sociologically the most important of these is a book on the
+problem of property, entitled, "What Then Must We Do?" (1886), which
+expounds the passage in Luke iii:10, 11: "And the people asked him,
+saying, What shall we do then? He answered and saith unto them, He that
+hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none; and he that hath
+meat, let him do likewise." Not long before that, he had thought of
+devoting himself entirely to charitable work, but practical experiments
+at Moscow demonstrated to him the futility of almsgiving. Speaking on
+that point to his English biographer, Aylmer Maude,(30) he remarked:
+"All such activity, if people attribute importance to it, is worthless."
+When his interviewer insisted that the destitute have to be provided for
+somehow and that the Count himself was in the habit of giving money to
+beggars, the latter replied: "Yes, but I do not imagine that I am doing
+good! I only do it for myself, because I know that I have no right to be
+well off while they are in misery." It is worth mention in passing that
+during the famine of 1891-2 this determined opponent of organized
+charity, in noble inconsistency with his theories, led in the
+dispensation of relief to the starving population of Middle Russia.
+
+  (30) "The Life of Tolstoy," Later Years, p. 643 f.
+
+But in "What Then Must We Do?" he treats the usual organized dabbling in
+charity as utterly preposterous: "Give away all you have or else you can
+do no good." ... "If I give away a hundred thousand and still withhold
+five hundred thousand, I am far from acting in the spirit of charity,
+and remain a factor of social injustice and evil. At the sight of the
+freezing and hungering I must still feel responsible for their plight,
+and feel that since we should live in conditions where that evil can be
+abstained from, it is impossible for me in the position in which I
+deliberately place myself to be anything other than a source of general
+evil."
+
+It was chiefly due to the influence of two peasants, named Sutayeff and
+Bondareff, that Tolstoy decided by a path of religious reasoning to
+abandon "parasitical existence,"--that is, to sacrifice all prerogatives
+of his wealth and station and to share the life of the lowly. He
+reasoned as follows: "Since I am to blame for the existence of social
+wrong, I can lessen my blame only by making myself like unto those that
+labor and are heavy-laden." Economically, Tolstoy reasons from this
+fallacy: If all men do not participate equitably in the menial work that
+has to be performed in the world, it follows that a disproportionate
+burden of work falls upon the shoulders of the more defenseless portion
+of humanity. Whether this undue amount of labor be exacted in the form
+of chattel slavery, or, which is scarcely less objectionable, in the
+form of the virtual slavery imposed by modern industrial conditions,
+makes no material difference. The evil conditions are bound to continue
+so long as the instincts that make for idleness prevail over the
+co-operative impulses. The only remedy lies in the simplification of
+life in the upper strata of the social body, overwork in the laboring
+classes being the direct result of the excessive demands for the
+pleasures and luxuries of life in the upper classes.
+
+To Bondareff in particular Tolstoy confessedly owes the conviction that
+the best preventive for immorality is physical labor, for which reason
+the lower classes are less widely removed from grace than the upper.
+Bondareff maintained on scriptural grounds that everybody should employ
+at least a part of his time in working the land. This view Tolstoy
+shared definitely after 1884. Not only did he devote a regular part of
+his day to agricultural labor; he learned, in addition, shoemaking and
+carpentry, meaning to demonstrate by his example that it is feasible to
+return to those patriarchal conditions under which the necessities of
+life were produced by the consumer himself. From this time forth he
+modelled his habits more and more upon those of the common rustic. He
+adopted peasant apparel and became extremely frugal in his diet.
+Although by natural taste he was no scorner of the pleasures of the
+table, he now eliminated one luxury after another. About this time he
+also turned strict vegetarian, then gave up the use of wine and spirits,
+and ultimately even tobacco, of which he had been very fond, was made to
+go the way of flesh. He practiced this self-abnegation in obedience to
+the Law of Life which he interpreted as a stringent renunciation of
+physical satisfactions and personal happiness. Nor did he shirk the
+ultimate conclusion to which his premises led: if the Law of Life
+imposes the suppression of all natural desires and appetites and
+commands the voluntary sacrifice of every form of property and power, it
+must be clear that life itself is devoid of sense and utterly
+undesirable. And so it is expressly stated in his "Thoughts."(31)
+
+  (31) No. 434.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+To what extent Tolstoy was a true Christian believer may best be
+gathered from his own writings, "What Do I Believe?" (1884), "On Life,"
+(1887), and "The Kingdom of God is within You," (1893). Although at the
+age of seventeen he had ceased to be orthodox, there can be no question
+whatever that throughout his whole life religion remained the deepest
+source of his inspiration. By the early eighties he had emerged from
+that acute scepticism that well-nigh cost him life and reason, and had,
+outwardly at least, made his peace with the church, attending services
+regularly, and observing the feasts and the fasts; here again in
+imitating the muzhik in his religious practices he strove apparently to
+attain also to the muzhik's actual gift of credulity. But in this
+endeavor his superior culture proved an impediment to him, and his
+widening doctrinal divergence from the established church finally drew
+upon his head, in 1891, the official curse of the Holy Synod. And yet a
+leading religious journal was right, shortly after his death, in this
+comment upon the religious meaning of his life: "If Christians
+everywhere should put their religious beliefs into practice with the
+simplicity and sincerity of Tolstoy, the entire religious, moral, and
+social life of the world would be revolutionized in a month." The
+orthodox church expelled him from its communion because of his
+radicalism; but in his case radicalism meant indeed the going to the
+roots of Christian religion, to the original foundations of its
+doctrines. In the teachings of the _primitive_ church there presented
+itself to Tolstoy a dumfoundingly simple code for the attainment of
+moral perfection. Hence arose his opposition to the _established_ church
+which seemed to have strayed so widely from its own fundamentals.
+
+Since Tolstoy's life aimed at the progressive exercise of
+self-sacrifice, his religious belief could be no gospel of joy. In fact,
+his is a sad, gray, ascetic religion, wholly devoid of poetry and
+emotional uplift. He did not learn to believe in the divinity of Christ
+nor in the existence of a God in any definite sense personal, and it is
+not even clear whether he believed in an after-life. And yet he did not
+wrongfully call himself a Christian, for the mainspring of his faith and
+his labor was the message of Christ delivered to his disciples in the
+Sermon on the Mount. This, for Tolstoy, contained all the philosophy and
+the theology of which the modern world stands in need, since in the
+precept of non-resistance is joined forever the issue between the Law
+and the Gospel: "Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an
+eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not
+evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the
+other also."
+
+And farther on: "Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love
+thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you. Love your
+enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and
+pray for them that despitefully use you, and persecute you." ...
+
+In this commandment Tolstoy found warrant for unswerving forbearance
+toward every species of private and corporate aggression. Offenders
+against individuals or the commonwealth deserve nothing but pity.
+Prisons should be abolished and criminals never punished. Tolstoy went
+so far as to declare that even if he saw his own wife or daughters being
+assaulted, he would abstain from using force in their defense. The
+infliction of the death penalty was to him the most odious of crimes. No
+life, either human or animal, should be wilfully destroyed.
+
+The doctrine of non-resistance removes every conceivable excuse for war
+between the nations. A people is as much bound as is an individual by
+the injunction: "Whosoever shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn to
+him the other also." War is not to be justified on patriotic grounds,
+for patriotism, far from being a virtue, is an enlarged and unduly
+glorified form of selfishness. Consistently with his convictions,
+Tolstoy put forth his strength not for the glory of his nation but for
+the solidarity of mankind.
+
+The cornerstones of Tolstoy's religion, then, were these three articles
+of faith. First, True Faith gives Life. Second, Man must live by labor.
+Third, Evil must never be resisted by means of evil.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Outside of the sphere of religious thought it is inaccurate to speak of
+a specific Tolstoyan philosophy, and it is impossible for the student to
+subscribe unconditionally to the hackneyed formula of the books that
+Tolstoy "will be remembered as perhaps the most profound influence of
+his day on human thought." Yet the statement might be made measurably
+true if it were modified in accordance with the important reservation
+made earlier in this sketch. In the field of thought he was not an
+original explorer. He was great only as the promulgator, not as the
+inventor, of ideas. His work has not enriched the wisdom of man by a
+single new thought, nor was he a systematizer and expounder of thought
+or a philosopher. In fact he possessed slight familiarity with
+philosophical literature. Among the older metaphysicians his principal
+guide was Spinoza, and in more modern speculative science he did not
+advance beyond Schopenhauer. To the latter he was not altogether unlike
+in his mental temper. At least he showed himself indubitably a pessimist
+in his works by placing in fullest relief the bad side of the social
+state. We perceive the pessimistic disposition also through his personal
+behavior, seeing how he desponded under the discords of life, how easily
+he lost courage whenever he undertook to cope with practical problems,
+and how sedulously he avoided the contact with temptations. It was only
+by an almost total withdrawal from the world, and by that entire relief
+from its daily and ordinary affairs which he owed to the devotion of his
+wife that Tolstoy was enabled during his later years to look upon the
+world less despairingly.
+
+Like his theology, so, too, his civic and economic creed was marked by
+the utmost and altogether too primitive simplicity. Political questions
+were of slight interest to him, unless they touched upon his vital
+principles. If, therefore, we turn from his very definite position in
+matters of individual conduct to his political views, we shall find that
+he was wanting in a program of practical changes. His only positive
+contribution to economic discussion was a persistent advocacy of
+agrarian reform. Under the influence of Henry George he became an
+eloquent pleader for the single tax and the nationalization of the land.
+This question he discussed in numerous places, with especial force and
+clearness in a long article entitled "A Great Iniquity."(32) He takes
+the view that the mission of the State, if it have any at all, can only
+consist in guaranteeing the rights of every one of its denizens, but
+that in actual fact the State protects only the rights of the
+propertied. Intelligent and right-minded citizens must not conspire with
+the State to ride rough-shod over the helpless majority. Keenly alive to
+the unalterable tendency of organized power to abridge the rights of
+individuals and to dominate both their material and spiritual existence,
+Tolstoy fell into the opposite extreme and would have abolished with a
+clean sweep all factors of social control, including the right of
+property and the powers of government, and transformed society into a
+community of equals and brothers, relying for its peace and well-being
+upon a universal love of liberty and justice.
+
+  (32) Printed in the (London) _Times_ of September 10, 1905.
+
+By his disbelief in authority, the rejection of the socialists' schemes
+of reconstruction, his mistrust of fixed institutions and reliance on
+individual right-mindedness for the maintenance of the common good,
+Tolstoy in the sphere of civic thought separated himself from the
+political socialists by the whole diameter of initial principle: he
+might not unjustly be classified, therefore, as an anarchist, if this
+definition were neither too narrow nor too wide. The Christian
+Socialists might claim him, because he aspires ardently to ideals
+essentially Christian in their nature, and there is surely truth in the
+thesis that "every thinker who understands and earnestly accepts the
+teaching of the Master is at heart a socialist." At the same time,
+Christianity and Socialism do not travel the whole way together. For a
+religion that enjoins patience and submission can hardly be conducive to
+the full flowering of Socialism. And Tolstoy's attitude towards the
+church differs radically from that of the Christian Socialists. On the
+whole one had best abstain from classifying men of genius.
+
+The base of Tolstoy's social creed was the non-recognition of private
+property. The effect of the present system is to maintain the inequality
+of men and thereby to excite envy and stir up hatred among them. Eager
+to set a personal example and precedent, Tolstoy rendered himself
+nominally penniless by making all his property, real and personal, over
+to his wife and children. Likewise he abdicated his copyrights. Thus he
+reduced himself to legal pauperism with a completeness of success that
+cannot but stir with envy the bosom of any philanthropist who shares Mr.
+Andrew Carnegie's conviction that to die rich is to die disgraced.
+
+Tolstoy's detractors have cast a plausible suspicion upon his sincerity.
+They pointed out among other things that his relinquishment of pecuniary
+profit in his books was apparent, not real. Since Russia has no
+copyright conventions with other countries, it was merely making a
+virtue of necessity to authorize freely the translation of his works
+into foreign languages. As for the Russian editions of his writings, it
+is said that in so far as the heavy hand of the censor did not prevent,
+the Countess, as her husband's financial agent, managed quite skilfully
+to exploit them.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Altogether, did Tolstoy practice what he professed? Inconsistency
+between principles and conduct is a not uncommon frailty of genius, as
+is notoriously illustrated by Tolstoy's real spiritual progenitor, Jean
+Jacques Rousseau.
+
+Now there are many discreditable stories in circulation about the muzhik
+lord of Yasnaya Polyana. He urged upon others the gospel commands: "Lay
+not up for yourselves treasures upon earth" and: "Take what ye have and
+give to the poor," and for his own part lived, according to report, in
+sumptuous surroundings. He went ostentatiously on pilgrimages to holy
+places, barefooted but with an expert pedicure attending him. He dressed
+in a coarse peasant blouse, but underneath it wore fine silk and linen.
+He was a vegetarian of the strictest observance, yet so much of an
+epicure that his taste for unseasonable dainties strained the domestic
+resources. He preached simplicity, and according to rumor dined off
+priceless plate; taught the equality of men, and was served by lackies
+in livery. He abstained from alcohol and tobacco, but consumed six cups
+of strong coffee at a sitting. Finally, he extolled the sexless life and
+was the father of thirteen children. It was even murmured that
+notwithstanding his professed affection for the muzhik and his incessant
+proclamation of universal equality, the peasantry of Yasnaya Polyana was
+the most wretchedly-treated to be found in the whole province and that
+the extortionate landlordism of the Tolstoys was notorious throughout
+the empire.
+
+Much of this, to be sure, is idle gossip, unworthy of serious attention.
+Nevertheless, there is evidence enough to show that Tolstoy's insistence
+upon a literal acceptance of earlier Christian doctrines led him into
+unavoidable inconsistencies and shamed him into a tragical sense of
+dishonesty.
+
+Unquestionably Tolstoy lived very simply and laboriously for a man of
+great rank, means, and fame, but his life was neither hard nor cramped.
+Having had no personal experience of garret and hovel, he could have no
+first-hand practical knowledge of the sting of poverty, nor could he
+obtain hardship artificially by imposing upon himself a mild imitation
+of physical discomfort. For the true test of penury is not the suffering
+of to-day but the oppressive dread of to-morrow. His ostensible muzhik
+existence, wanting in none of the essentials of civilization, was a
+romance that bore to the real squalid pauperism of rural Russia about
+the same relation that the bucolic make-belief of Boucher's or Watteau's
+swains and shepherdesses bore to the unperfumed truth of a sheep-farm or
+a hog-sty. As time passed, and the sage turned his thoughts to a more
+rigid enforcement of his renunciations, it was no easy task for a
+devoted wife to provide comfort for him without shaking him too rudely
+out of his fond illusion that he was enduring privations.
+
+After all, then, his practice did not tally with his theory; and this
+consciousness of living contrary to his own teachings was a constant
+source of unhappiness which no moral quibbles of his friends could
+still.
+
+Yet no man could be farther from being a hypocrite. If at last he broke
+down under a burden of conscience, it was a burden imposed by the
+reality of human nature which makes it impossible for any man to live up
+to intentions of such rigor as Tolstoy's. From the start he realized
+that he did not conform his practice entirely to his teachings, and as
+he grew old he was resolved that having failed to harmonize his life
+with his beliefs he would at least corroborate his sincerity by his
+manner of dying. Even in this, however, he was to be thwarted. In his
+dramatic ending, still plainly remembered, we feel a grim consistency
+with the lifelong defeat of his will to suffer.
+
+Early in 1910 a student by the name of Manzos addressed a rebuke to
+Tolstoy for simulating the habits of the poor, denouncing his mode of
+life as a form of mummery. He challenged the sage to forsake his
+comforts and the affections of his family, and to go forth and beg his
+way from place to place. "Do this," entreated the young fanatic, "and
+you will be the first true man after Christ." With his typical
+large-heartedness, Tolstoy accepted the reproof and said in the course
+of his long reply:(33) ... "The fact that I am living with wife and
+daughter in terrible and shameful conditions of luxury when poverty
+surrounds me on all sides, torments me ever more and more, and there is
+not a day when I am not thinking of following your advice. I thank you
+very, very much for your letter." As a matter of fact, he had more than
+once before made ready to put his convictions to a fiery proof by a
+final sacrifice,--leaving his home and spending his remaining days in
+utter solitude. But when he finally proceeded to carry out this ascetic
+intention and actually set out on a journey to some vague and lonely
+destination, he was foiled in his purpose. If ever Tolstoy's behavior
+irresistibly provoked misrepresentation of his motives it was by this
+somewhat theatrical hegira. The fugitive left Yasnaya Polyana, not
+alone, but with his two favorite companions, his daughter Alexandra and
+a young Hungarian physician who for some time had occupied the post of
+private secretary to him. After paying a farewell visit to his sister, a
+nun cloistered in Shamardin, he made a start for the Trans-Caucasus. His
+idea was to go somewhere near the Tolstoy colony at the Black Sea. But
+in an early stage of the journey, a part of which was made in an
+ordinary third-class railway compartment, the old man was overcome by
+illness and fatigue. He was moved to a trackman's hut at the station of
+Astopovo, not farther than eighty miles from his home, and
+here,--surrounded by his hastily summoned family and tenderly nursed for
+five days,--he expired. Thus he was denied the summit of martyrdom to
+which he had aspired,--a lonely death, unminded of men.
+
+  (33) February 17, 1910.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Even a summary review like this of Tolstoy's life and labors cannot be
+concluded without some consideration of his final attitude toward the
+esthetic embodiment of civilization. The development of his philosophy
+of self-abnegation had led irresistibly, as we have seen, to the
+condemnation of all self-regarding instincts. Among these, Art appeared
+to him as one of the most insidious. He warned against the cultivation
+of the beautiful on the ground that it results in the suppression and
+destruction of the moral sense. Already in 1883 it was known that he had
+made up his mind to abandon his artistic aspirations out of loyalty to
+his moral theory, and would henceforth dedicate his talents exclusively
+to the propagation of humanitarian views. In vain did the dean of
+Russian letters, Turgenieff, appeal to him with a death-bed message: "My
+friend, great writer of the Russians, return to literary work! Heed my
+prayer." Tolstoy stood firm in his determination. Nevertheless, his
+genius refused to be throttled by his conscience; he could not paralyze
+his artistic powers; he could merely bend them to his moral aims.
+
+As a logical corollary to his opposition to art for art's sake, Tolstoy
+cast from him all his own writings antedating "Confession,"--and
+denounced all of them as empty manifestations of worldly conceit. His
+authorship of that immortal novel, "War and Peace," filled him with
+shame and remorse. His views on Art are plainly and forcibly expounded
+in the famous treatise on "What is Art?" and in the one on
+"Shakespeare." In both he maintains that Art, no matter of what sort,
+should serve the sole purpose of bringing men nearer to each other in
+the common purpose of right living. Hence, no art work is legitimate
+without a pervasive moral design. The only true touchstone of an art
+work is the uplifting strength that proceeds from it. Therefore, a
+painting like the "Angelus," or a poem like "The Man with the Hoe" would
+transcend in worth the creations of a Michael Angelo or a Heinrich Heine
+even as the merits of Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Goethe are outmatched
+in Tolstoy's judgment by those of Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, and
+George Eliot. By the force of this naïve reasoning and his theoretical
+antipathy toward true art, he was led to see in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" the
+veritable acme of literary perfection, for the reason that this book
+wielded such an enormous and noble influence upon the most vital
+question of its day. He strongly discountenanced the literary practice
+of revamping ancient themes, believing with Ibsen that modern writers
+should impart their ideas through the medium of modern life. Yet at the
+same time he was up in arms against the self-styled "moderns"! They took
+their incentives from science, and this Tolstoy decried, because science
+did not fulfill its mission of teaching people how rightly to live. In
+this whole matter he reasoned doggedly from fixed ideas, no matter to
+what ultimates the argument would carry him. For instance, he did not
+stick at branding Shakespeare as an utter barbarian, and to explain the
+reverence for such "disgusting" plays as "King Lear" as a crass
+demonstration of imitative hypocrisy.
+
+Art in general is a practice aiming at the production of the beautiful.
+But what is "beautiful"? asked Tolstoy. The current definitions he
+pronounced wrong because they were formulated from the standpoint of the
+pleasure-seeker. Such at least has been the case since the Renaissance.
+From that time forward, Art, like all cults of pleasure, has been evil.
+To the pleasure-seeker, the beautiful is that which is enjoyable; hence
+he appraises works of art according to their ability to procure
+enjoyment. In Tolstoy's opinion this is no less absurd than if we were
+to estimate the nutritive value of food-stuffs by the pleasure
+accompanying their consumption. So he baldly declares that we must
+abolish beauty as a criterion of art, or conversely, must establish
+truth as the single standard of beauty. "The heroine of my stories whom
+I strive to represent in all her beauty, who was ever beautiful, is so,
+and will remain so, is Truth."
+
+His views on art have a certain analogy with two modern schools,--much
+against his will, since he strenuously disavows and deprecates
+everything modern; they make us think on the one hand of the
+"naturalists," inasmuch as like them Tolstoy eschews all intentional
+graces of style and diction: and on the other hand of the
+"impressionists," with whom he seems united by his fundamental
+definition of art, namely that it is the expression of a dominant
+emotion calculated to reproduce itself in the reader or beholder.
+Lacking, however, a deep and catholic understanding for art, Tolstoy, in
+contrast with the modern impressionists, would restrict artists to the
+expression of a single type of sentiments, those that reside in the
+sphere of religious consciousness. To him art, as properly conceived and
+practiced, must be ancillary to religion, and its proper gauge is the
+measure of its agreement with accepted moral teachings. Remembering,
+then, the primitive form of belief to which Tolstoy contrived to attain,
+we find ourselves face to face with a theory of art which sets up as the
+final arbiter the man "unspoiled by culture," and he, in Tolstoy's
+judgment, is the Russian muzhik.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+This course of reasoning on art is in itself sufficient to show the
+impossibility for any modern mind of giving sweeping assent to Tolstoy's
+teachings. And a like difficulty would be experienced if we tried to
+follow him in his meditations on any other major interest of life.
+Seeking with a tremendous earnestness of conscience to reduce the
+bewildering tangle of human affairs to elementary simplicity, he
+enmeshed himself in a new network of contradictions. The effect was
+disastrous for the best part of his teaching; his own extremism stamped
+as a hopeless fantast a man incontestably gifted by nature, as few men
+have been in history, with the cardinal virtues of a sage, a reformer,
+and a missionary of social justice. Because of this extremism, his voice
+was doomed to remain that of one crying in the wilderness.
+
+The world could not do better than to accept Tolstoy's fundamental
+prescriptions: simplicity of living, application to work, and
+concentration upon moral culture. But to apply his radical scheme to
+existing conditions would amount to a self-stultification of the race,
+for it would entail the unpardonably sinful sacrifice of some of the
+finest and most hard-won achievements of human progress. For our
+quotidian difficulties his example promises no solution. The great mass
+of us are not privileged to test our individual schemes of redemption in
+the leisured security of an ideal experiment station; not for every man
+is there a Yasnaya Polyana, and the Sophia Andreyevnas are thinly sown
+in the matrimonial market.
+
+But even though Tolstoyism will not serve as a means of solving the
+great social problems, it supplies a helpful method of social criticism.
+And its value goes far beyond that: the force of his influence was too
+great not to have strengthened enormously the moral conscience of the
+world; he has played, and will continue to play, a leading part in the
+establishing and safeguarding of democracy. After all, we do not have to
+separate meticulously what is true in Tolstoy's teaching from what is
+false in order to acknowledge him as a Voice of his epoch. For as Lord
+Morley puts the matter in the case of Jean Jacques Rousseau: "There are
+some teachers whose distinction is neither correct thought, nor an eye
+for the exigencies of practical organization, but simply depth and
+fervor of the moral sentiment, bringing with it the indefinable gift of
+touching many hearts with love of virtue and the things of the spirit."
+
+
+
+
+  [ Transcriber's Note:
+
+    The following is a list of corrections made to the original.
+    The first line is the original line, the second the corrected one.
+
+  sublimal regions of the inner life, and that their work somehow brings
+  subliminal regions of the inner life, and that their work somehow brings
+
+  in the writings of the de-gallisized Frenchman, Count Joseph Arthur
+  in the writings of the de-gallicized Frenchman, Count Joseph Arthur
+
+  the same time, the universal decreptitude prevented the despiser of his
+  the same time, the universal decrepitude prevented the despiser of his
+
+  artistic design was dimmed by the obstrusive didactic purpose.
+  artistic design was dimmed by the obtrusive didactic purpose.
+
+  ]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Prophets of Dissent, by Otto Heller
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