Prophets of Dissent Part 3

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 a.s.sault.

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 prost.i.tution cannot provide a living for all, the oversupply now clamor for admission to the work-mart; but they are incompetent and lazy, and inveterate s.h.i.+rkers 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 subst.i.tutes: 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 s.e.x, by which fact the impeachment is in large part invalidated.

The play bearing the satirical t.i.tle "Comrades" makes a special application of the theory about the pre-established antagonism of the s.e.xes. In a situation similar to that in "The Father," husband and wife are shown in a yet sharper ant.i.thesis 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 a.s.sumes 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, rea.s.serts his manhood, and, in the ensuing fight for supremacy, routs the usurper and comes into his own. The steps by which he pa.s.ses 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 a.n.a.lytic 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 astonis.h.i.+ng 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 s.e.x appears as a monstrous slander, princ.i.p.ally 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 wors.h.i.+p 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 wors.h.i.+pped,--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 pa.s.sed 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 debas.e.m.e.nt with a stigma in the name of a pure and n.o.ble 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 pa.s.sed 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 n.o.body 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 pa.s.sed in his agonizing search for cert.i.tude 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 a.s.sumed 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 gla.s.s, 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 chastis.e.m.e.nt. 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 G.o.d 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 grat.i.tude for him; the great Scandinavian seer had brought him back to G.o.d, 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, ent.i.tled "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 G.o.d 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 a.s.severations 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 spa.r.s.ely 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 doc.u.ments 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 suns.h.i.+ne, and I feel that happiness has no place in my lot."

Destiny had a.s.sembled 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 a.s.sortment of defects both of character and of intellect, Strindberg could not be cla.s.sed 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 fas.h.i.+on, 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, princ.i.p.ally 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 a.s.sumption 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 "Unzeitgema.s.se 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, superst.i.tiousness, 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 pa.s.sing; of a congenital inability to understand and absorb the culture of other peoples, and particularly the culture of the French; of a boorish b.u.mptiousness, 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 ma.s.s 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 dest.i.tute 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 pa.s.s 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 p.r.o.nounces it one of mankind's greatest misfortunes. His argumentation is not sustained and progressive, but desultory, impressionistic, and freely repet.i.tional; slas.h.i.+ng 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 _metier_. 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 s.h.i.+ft from the biological to the poetic sphere of thought and from the averagely socialized to an uncompromisingly self-centred att.i.tude 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 impa.s.sioned. 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 cla.s.sic 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 kins.h.i.+p 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 G.o.ds delight in G.o.ds, 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-cla.s.sification, 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 subt.i.tle, "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 compet.i.tive 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 a.s.sume the existence of an absolutistic teleological tendency to perfection, we are logically bound to connect upward development with favorable external conditions. By subst.i.tuting 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 appet.i.tes are not appeased by a normal sufficiency; on the contrary, "_l'appet.i.t 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 acc.u.mulation 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.