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 AFFIRMATIONS.
 
 AFFIRMATIONS 
 
 BY 
 
 HAVELOCK ELLIS 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 WALTER SCOTT, LIMITED 
 
 PATERNOSTER SQUARE 
 1898
 
 I.ltJiiAllI 
 
 LhiVE: J'TY OF CALIFORiM 
 SAM A BARBARA 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 There are at least two ways of looking at 
 books and at the personalities books express. 
 In its chief but rarer aspect Hterature is the 
 medium of art, and as such can raise no ethical 
 problems. Whatever morality or immorality art 
 may hold is quiescent, or lifted into an atmo- 
 sphere of radiant immortality where questioning 
 is irrelevant. Of the literature that is all art we 
 need not even speak, unless by chance we too 
 approach it as artists, trying to grasp it by im- 
 aginative insight. In literature, as elsewhere, 
 art should only be approached as we would 
 approach Paradise, for the sake of its joy. It 
 would be well, indeed, if we could destroy or 
 forget all that has ever been written about the 
 world's great books, even if it were once worth 
 while to write those books about books. How 
 happy, for instance, the world might be if there 
 were no literature about the Bible, if Augustine 
 and Aquinas and Calvin and thousands of
 
 iv Preface. 
 
 smaller men had not danced on it so loncj, 
 stamping every page of it into mire, that now 
 the vision of a single line, in its simple sense, is 
 almost an effort of inspiration. All my life long 
 I have been casting away the knowledge I have 
 gained from books about literature, and from 
 opinions about life, and coming to literature 
 itself or to life itself, a slow and painful 
 progress towards that Heaven of knowledge 
 where a child is king. 
 
 But there is another kind of literature, a 
 literature which is not all art — the literature of 
 life. Literature differs from design or music by 
 being closer to life, by being fundamentally not 
 an art at all, but merely the development of 
 ordinary speech, only rising at intervals into the 
 region of art. It is so close to life that largely 
 it comes before us much as the actual facts of 
 life come before us. So that while we were best 
 silent about the literature of art, sanctified by 
 time and the reverence of many men, we cannot 
 question too keenly the literature of life. In 
 this book I deal with questions of life as they 
 are expressed in literature, or as they are 
 suggested by literature. Throughout I am dis- 
 cussing morality as revealed or disguised by 
 literature. I may not care, indeed, to pervert 
 my subjects in order to emphasise my opinions, 
 but I frankly take my subjects chiefly on those 
 sides which suit my own pleasure, and I select
 
 Preface. v 
 
 them solely because they do that so well, I use 
 them as the ancient device of the stalking-horse 
 was used, to creep up more closely to the game 
 that my soul loves best. 
 
 So far as possible I dwell most on those 
 aspects of my subjects which are most question- 
 able. It was once brought against me that I 
 had a predilection for such aspects. Assuredly 
 it is so. If a subject is not questionable it 
 seems to me a waste of time to discuss it. The 
 great facts of the world are not questionable; 
 they are there for us to enjoy, or to suffer, in 
 silence, not to talk about. Our best energies 
 should be spent in attacking and settling 
 questionable things that so we may enlarge 
 the sphere of the unquestionable — the sphere 
 of real life — and be ready to meet new questions 
 as they arise. It is only by dealing with the 
 questionable aspects of the world that criticism 
 of life can ever have any saving virtue for us. 
 It is waste of life to use literature for pawing 
 over the unquestionable. Even a healthy dog, 
 having once ascertained the essential virtue of a 
 bone, contentedly eats it, or buries it. 
 
 And yet, it may well be, there is a time for 
 affirming the simple eternal facts of life, a time, 
 even, when those simple eternal facts have drifted 
 so far from us that we count them also question- 
 able. The present moment has seemed to me a 
 fitting one to set a few such affirmations in
 
 vi Preface. 
 
 order. The century now nearly over has per- 
 formed many dirty and laborious tasks ; it has 
 had to organise its own unwieldiness, to cleanse 
 its Augean stables of the filth it has itself 
 deposited, to pull down the buildings it has 
 itself erected. When we witness such work 
 carried out — blunderingly, it may be, but yet, 
 we thought, humbly — we mc-»y well point out 
 what splendid fellows these modest, begrimed 
 toilers really were, what useful and noble work 
 they were engaged in, how large a promise they 
 bear for the future. That was my own point of 
 view. But the case is altered when these yet 
 unwashed toilers rise up around us in half- 
 intoxicated jubilation over the triumphs of 
 their own little epoch, well assured that there 
 never was such an age or such a race since the 
 world began. Then we may well pause. It is 
 time to recall the simple eternal facts of life. It 
 is time to affirm the existence of those verities 
 which are wrought into our very structure 
 everywhere and always, and in the face of 
 which the paltry triumphs of an "era" fall back 
 into insignificance. 
 
 Yet every man must make his own affirma- 
 tions. The great questions of life are immortal, 
 only because no one can answer them for his 
 fellows. I claim no general validity for my 
 affirmations. It has been well said that certain 
 books possess a value that is in the ratio of the
 
 Preface. vii 
 
 spiritual vigour of those who use them, acting as 
 a tonic to the strong, still further dissolving and 
 enfeebling the weakness of the weak. It would 
 be presumptious to claim any potent and pecu- 
 liar energy for this book; but the observation is 
 one which a reader may do well always to bear 
 in mind. The final value of any book is not in 
 the beliefs which it may give us or take away 
 from us, but in its power to reveal to us our 
 own real selves. If I can stimulate any one in 
 the search for his own proper affirmations, he 
 and I may well rest content. He is welcome 
 to cast aside mine as the idle conclusions of a 
 dreamer lying in the sunshine. Our own affirma- 
 tions are always the best. Let us but be sure 
 that they are our own, that they have grown up 
 slowly and quietly, fed with the strength of our 
 own blood and brain. Only with the help of 
 such affirmations can we find a staff to comfort 
 us through the valley of life. It is only when 
 they utter affirmations, one has said, that the 
 wands of the angels blossom. 
 
 H. E. 
 August 1897.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 NIETZSCHE ... 
 CASANOVA ... 
 
 ZOLA 
 
 HUYSMANS ... 
 
 ST. FRANCIS AND OTHERS 
 
 PAGE 
 I 
 
 86 
 
 131 
 
 158 
 
 212
 
 AFFIRMATIONS. 
 
 NIETZSCHE. 
 
 For some years the name of Friedrich Nietzsche 
 has been the war-cry of opposing factions in 
 Germany. It is not easy to take up a German 
 periodical without finding some trace of the 
 passionate admiration or denunciation which 
 this man has called forth. If we turn to 
 Scandinavia or to France, whither his fame 
 and his work are also penetrating, we find 
 that the same results have followed. And we 
 may expect a similar outburst in England now 
 that the translation of his works has at last 
 begun. At present, however, I know of no 
 attempt to deal with Nietzsche from the British 
 point of view, and that is my excuse for trying 
 to define his personality and influence.^ I do 
 not come forward as the champion of Nietz- 
 schianism or of Anti-Nietzschianism. It appears 
 to me that any human individuality that has 
 
 _ 1 This statement (made at the end of 1895) ''^s ceased to 
 be true, but it explains the genesis of this study, and I leave it 
 standing. 
 
 I
 
 2 Affu'inations. 
 
 strongly aroused the love and hatred of men 
 must be far too complex for absolute con- 
 demnation or absolute approval. Apart from 
 praise or blame, which seem here alike imper- 
 tinent, Nietzsche is without doubt an extra- 
 ordinarily interesting figure. He is the modern 
 incarnation of that image of intellectual pride 
 which Marlowe created in Faustus. A man 
 who has certainly stood at the finest summit of 
 modern culture, who has thence made the most 
 determined effort ever made to destroy modern 
 morals, and who now leads a life as near to 
 death as any life outside the grave can be, must 
 needs be a tragic figure. It is a figure full 
 of significance, for it represents one of the 
 greatest spiritual forces which have appeared 
 since Goethe, full of interest also to the psycho- 
 logist, and surely not without its pathos, perhaps 
 its horror, for the man in the street 
 
 I. 
 
 It has only lately become possible to study 
 Nietzsche's life-history. For a considerable 
 period the Nietzsche-Archiv at Naumburg and 
 Weimar has been accumulating copious materials 
 which have now been utilised by Nietzsche's 
 sister, Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche, in the pro- 
 duction of an authoritative biography. This 
 sister is herself a remarkable person ; for many
 
 NietzscJie. 3 
 
 years she lived in close association with her 
 brother, so that she was supposed, though 
 without reason, to have exerted an influence 
 over his thought; then she married Dr. Fdrster, 
 the founder of the New Germany colony in 
 Paraguay ; on his death she returned home to 
 write the history of the colony, and has since 
 devoted herself to the care of her brother and 
 his fame. Only the first two volumes of the 
 Leben Nietzsche^s have yet appeared, but they 
 enable us to trace his development to his 
 departure from Basel, and throw light on his 
 whole career. 
 
 Nietzsche belonged, according to the ancestral 
 tradition (though the name, I am told, is a com- 
 mon one in Wendish Silesia), to a noble Polish 
 family called Nietzky, who on account of strong 
 Protestant convictions abandoned their country 
 and their title during the eighteenth century and 
 settled in Germany. Notwithstanding the large 
 amount of German blood in his veins, he always 
 regarded himself as essentially a Pole. The 
 Poles seemed to him the best endowed and 
 most knightly of Sclavonic peoples, and he 
 once remarked that it was only by virtue of a 
 strong mixture of Sclavonic blood that the 
 Germans entered the ranks of gifted nations. 
 Pie termed the Polish Chopin the deliverer of 
 music from German heaviness and stupidity, 
 and when he speaks of another Pole, Copernicus,
 
 4 Affirmation:^. 
 
 who reversed the judgment of the whole world, 
 one may divine a reference to what in later 
 years Nietzsche regarded as his own mission. In 
 adult life Nietzsche's keen and strongly marked 
 features were distinctly Polish, and when abroad 
 he was frequently greeted by Poles as a fellow- 
 countryman ; at Sorrento, where he once spent a 
 winter, the country people called him II Polacco. 
 Like Emerson (to whose writings he was 
 strongly attracted throughout life) and many 
 another strenuous philosophic revolutionary, 
 Nietzsche came of a long race of Christian 
 ministers. On both sides his ancestors were 
 preachers, and from first to last the preacher's 
 fervour was in his own blood. The eldest of 
 three children (of whom one died in infancy), 
 Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844 at Rocken, 
 near Liitzen, in Saxony. His father — who 
 shortly after his son's birth fell down the par- 
 sonage steps, injuring his head so severely that 
 he died within twelve months — is described as 
 a man of noble and poetic, nature, with a special 
 talent for music, inherited by his son ; though 
 once described by his son as " a tender, lovable, 
 morbid man," he belonged to a large and 
 very healthy family, who mostly lived to an 
 extreme old age, preserving their mental and 
 physical vigour to the last. The Nietzsches 
 were a proud, sincere folk, very clannish, look- 
 incr askance at all who were not Nietzsches.
 
 Nietzsche. 5 
 
 Nietzsche's mother, said to be a charming 
 woman and possessed of much physical vigour, 
 was again a clergyman's daughter. The Oehler 
 family, to which she belonged, was also very 
 large, very health}^, and very long-lived ; she 
 was only eighteen at her son's birth, and is still 
 alive to care for him in his complete mental 
 decay. I note these facts, which are given with 
 much precision and detail in the biography, 
 because they certainly help us to understand 
 Nietzsche. It is evident that he is no frail 
 hectic flame of a degenerating race. There 
 seems to be no trace of insanity or nervous dis- 
 order at any point in the family history, as far 
 back as it is possible to go. On the contrary, 
 he belonged to extremely vigorous stocks, pos- 
 sessing unusual moral and physical force, people 
 of" character." A similar condition of things is 
 not seldom found in the history of genius. In 
 such a case the machine is, as it were, too highly 
 charged with inherited energy, and works at a 
 pressure which ultimately brings it to perdition. 
 All genius must work without rest, it cannot do 
 otherwise ; only the most happily constituted 
 genius works without haste. 
 
 The sister's account of the children's early 
 life is a very charming part of this record, and 
 one which in the nature of things rarely finds 
 place in a biography. She describes her first 
 memories of the boy's pretty face, his long fair
 
 6 Affirvialions. 
 
 hair, and large, dark, serious eyes. He could not 
 speak until he was nearly three years old, but at 
 four he began to read and write. He was a 
 quiet, rather obstinate child, with fits of passion 
 which he learnt to control at a very early age ; 
 his self-control became so great that, as a boy, 
 on more than one occasion he deliberately burnt 
 his hand, to show that Mucius Scaevola's act was 
 but a trifling matter. 
 
 The widowed mother went with her children 
 to settle at Naumburg on the Saale with her 
 husband's mother, a woman of fine character 
 with views of her own, one of which was that 
 children of all classes should first be brought up 
 together. Little Fritz was therefore sent to the 
 town school, but the experiment was not alto- 
 gether successful. He was a serious child, fond 
 of solitude, and was called " the little parson " by 
 his comrades. " The fundamental note of his 
 disposition," writes a schoolfellow in after-life, 
 " was a certain melancholy which expressed 
 itself in his whole being." He avoided his 
 fellows and sought beautiful scenery, as he con- 
 tinued to do throughout life. At the same time 
 he was a well-developed, vigorous boy, who 
 loved games of various kinds, especially those 
 of his own invention. But although the child- 
 ren lived to the full the fantastic life of childhood, 
 the sister regretfully confesses that they re- 
 mained models of propriety, Fritz was " a very
 
 NielzscJie. 7 
 
 pious child ; he thought much about rch'gious 
 matters, and was always concerned to put his 
 thoughts into practice." It is curious that, not- 
 withstanding his instinctive sympathy with the 
 Greek spirit and his philological aptitudes, he 
 found Greek specially difficult to learn. At the 
 age of ten appeared his taste for verse-making, 
 and also for music, and he soon began to show 
 that inherited gift for improvisation by which 
 he was always able to hold his audience spell- 
 bound. Even as a boy the future moralist made 
 a deep impression on those who knew him, 
 and he reminded one person of the youthful 
 Jesus in the Temple. " We Nietzsches hate 
 lies," an aunt was accustomed to say ; in Fried- 
 rich sincerity was a very deep-rooted trait, and he 
 exercised an involuntary educational influence 
 on those who came near him. 
 
 In 1858 a place was found for him at Pforta, 
 a remarkable school of almost military discipline. 
 Here many of the lines of his future activity 
 were definitely laid down. At an even earlier date, 
 excited by the influence of Humboldt, he had 
 been fascinated by the ideal of universal culture, 
 and at Pforta his intellectual energies began to 
 expand. Here also, in 1859, when a piano- 
 forte edition of Iristaji was first published, 
 Nietzsche became an enthusiastic Wagnerian, 
 and even to the last Tristan remained for him 
 " music par excellence^ Here, too, he began
 
 '8 Affinnations. 
 
 those philological studies which led some years 
 later to a professorship. He turned to philology, 
 however, as he himself recognised, because of 
 the need he felt to anchor himself to some cool 
 logical study which would not grip his heart 
 like the restless and exciting artistic instincts 
 which had hitherto chiefly moved him. During 
 the latter part of his stay at this very strenu- 
 ous educational establishment young Nietzsche 
 was a less brilliant pupil than during the 
 earlier part His own individuality was silently 
 growing beneath the disciplinary pressure which 
 would have dwarfed a less vigorous individuality. 
 His philosophic aptitudes began to develop and 
 take form ; he wished also to devote himself to 
 music ; and he pined at the confinement, long- 
 ing for the forest and the woodman's axe. It was 
 the beginning of a long struggle between the 
 impulses of his own self-centred nature and the 
 duties imposed from without, by the school, 
 the university, and, later, his professorship ; he 
 always strove to broaden and deepen these 
 duties to the scope of his own nature, but the 
 struggle remained. It was the immediate result 
 of this double strain that, during 1862, strong 
 and healthy as the youth appeared, he began to 
 suffer from headaches and eye-troubles, cured 
 by temporary removal from the school. He 
 remained extremely short-sighted, and it was 
 only by an absurd error in the routine examina-
 
 Nietasclie. 9 
 
 tion that, some years later, he was passed for 
 mihtary service in the artillery. 
 
 In the following year, 1863, Nietzsche met a 
 schoolfellow's sister, an ethereal little Berlin girl, 
 who for a while appealed to " the large, broad- 
 shouldered, shy, rather solemn and stiff youth." 
 To this early experience, which never went 
 beyond poetic Schwdrmerei, his sister is inclined 
 to trace the origin of Nietzsche's view of women 
 as very fragile, tender little buds. The experience 
 is also interesting because it appears to stand 
 alone in his life. We strike here on an or- 
 ganic abnormality in this congenital philosopher. 
 Nietzsche's attitude was not the crude misogyny 
 of Schopenhauer, who knew women chiefly as 
 women of the streets. Nietzsche knew many of 
 the finest women of his time, and he sometimes 
 speaks with insight and sympathy of the world 
 as it appears to women ; but there was clearly 
 nothing in him to answer to any appeal to passion, 
 and his attitude is well summed up in an 
 aphorism of his own Zarathustra : "It is better 
 to fall into the hands of a murderer than into 
 the dreams of an ardent woman." " All bis life 
 long," his sister writes, "my brother remained 
 completely apart from cither great passion or 
 vulgar pleasure. His whole passion lay in the 
 world of knowledge ; only very temperate emo- 
 tions remained over for anything else. In later 
 life he was grieved that he had never attained
 
 lO Affirmations. 
 
 to amour passion, and that every inclination to 
 a feminine personality quickly changed to a 
 tender friendship, however fascinatingly pretty 
 the fair one might be." He would expend much 
 sympathy on unhappy lovers, yet he would 
 shake his head, saying to himself or others : 
 "And all that over a little girl!" 
 
 Young Nietzsche left Pforta, in 1863, with the 
 most various and incompatible scientific tastes 
 and interests (always excepting in mathematics, 
 for which he never possessed any aptitude), but, 
 as he himself remarked, none that would fit him 
 for any career. One point in regard to the 
 termination of his school-life is noteworthy: he 
 chose Thcognis as the subject of his valedictory 
 dissertation. His meditations on this moralist 
 and aristocrat, so contemptuous of popular rule, 
 may have served as the starting-point of some 
 of his own later views on Greek culture. In 
 1864 he became a student at Bonn, and the year 
 that followed was of special import in his inner 
 development; he finally threw off the beliefs 
 of his early youth; he discovered his keen 
 critical faculty; and self-contained independence 
 became a visible mark of his character, though 
 always disguised by amiable and courteous 
 manners. At Bonn his life seems to have been 
 fairly happy, though he was by no means a 
 typical German student. He spent much money, 
 but it was chiefly on his artistic tastes — music
 
 Nietzsche, i r 
 
 and the theatre — or on Httlc tours. No one 
 could spend less on eating and drinking; like 
 Goethe and like Heine, he had no love for 
 tobacco or for beer, and he was repelled by 
 the thick, beery good-humour of the German 
 student. People who drink beer and smoke 
 pipes every evening, he always held, were in- 
 capable of understanding his philosophy; for 
 they could not possibly possess the clarity of 
 mind needed to grasp any delicate or complex 
 intellectual problem. He returned home from 
 Bonn " a picture of health and strength, broad- 
 shouldered, brown, with rather fair thick hair, 
 and exactly the same height as Goethe;" and 
 then went to continue his studies at Leipzig. 
 
 Notwithstanding the youth's efforts to subdue 
 his emotional and aesthetic restlessness by cool 
 and hard work, he was clearly tortured by the 
 effort to find a philosophic home for himself in 
 the world. This effort absorbed him all day 
 long, frequently nearly all the night. At this 
 time he chanced to take up on a bookstall a 
 totally unknown work, entitled Der Weii als 
 Wille und Vorstelbing ; in obedience to an 
 unusual impulse he bought the book without 
 consideration, and from that moment began an 
 acquaintance with Schopenhauer which for many 
 years exerted a deep influence on his life. At 
 that time, probably, he could have had no better 
 guide into paths of peace; but even as a student
 
 1 2 AJfiruiations. 
 
 he was a keen critic of Schopenhauer's system, 
 valuing him chiefly as, in opposition to Kant, 
 " the philosopher of a re-a\vakencd classical 
 period, a Germanised Hellenism." Schumann's 
 music and long solitary walks aided in the work 
 of recuperation. A year or two later Nietzsche 
 met the other great god who shared with Scho- 
 penhauer his early worship. " I cannot bring my 
 heart to any degree of critical coolness before 
 this music," he wrote, in 1868, after listening to 
 the overture to the Meistersinger; "every fibre 
 and nerve in me thrills; it is a long time since 
 I have been so carried away." I quote these 
 words, for we shall, I think, find later that they 
 have their significance. A few weeks afterwards 
 he was invited to meet the master, and thus 
 began a relationship that for Nietzsche was 
 fateful. 
 
 Meanwhile his philological studies were bring- 
 ing him distinction. A lecture on Theognis was 
 pronounced by Ritschl to be the best work by a 
 student of Nietzsche's standing that he had ever 
 met with. Then followed investigations into 
 the sources of Suidas, a lengthy examination 
 De fontibus Diogenis Laertii, and palaeographic 
 studies in connection with Terence, Statins, and 
 Orosius. He was now also consciously perfect- 
 ing his German style, treating language, he 
 remarks, as a musical instrument on which one 
 must be able to improvise, as well as play what
 
 Nietzsche. 1 3 
 
 is merely learnt by heart. In 1S69, when only 
 in his twenty-sixth year, and before he had 
 taken his doctor's degree, he accepted the chair 
 of classical philology at Basel. He was certainl)', 
 as he himself said, not a born philologist. He 
 had devoted himself to philology — I wish to 
 insist on this significant point — as a sedative 
 and tonic to his restless energy; in this he was 
 doubtless wise, though his sister seems to 
 suggest that he thereby increased his mental 
 strain. But he had no real vocation for 
 philolo;:zy, and it is curious that when the 
 Basel chair was offered to him he was proposing 
 to himself to throw aside philology for chemistry. 
 Philologists, he declares again and again, arc 
 but factory hands in the service of science. At 
 the best philology is a waste of acuteness, since 
 it merely enables us to state facts which the 
 study of the present ' would teach us much 
 more swiftly and surely. Thus it was that he 
 instinctively broadened and deepened every 
 philological question he took up, making it a 
 channel for philosophy and morals. With his 
 specifically philological work we are not further 
 concerned. 
 
 I have been careful to present the main facts 
 in Nietzsche's early development because they 
 seem to me to throw light on the whole of his 
 later development. So far he had published 
 nothing except in philological journals. In
 
 14 Affiyniatioiis. 
 
 1 3/ 1, after he had settled at Basel, appeared 
 his first work, an essay entitled Die Geburt der 
 Trag'ddie aiis devi Geiste der Mnsik, dedicated to 
 Wagner. The conception of this essay was 
 academic, but in Nietzsche's hands the origin 
 of tragedy became merely the text for an 
 exposition of his own philosophy of art at this 
 period. He traces two art impulses in ancient 
 Greece : one, starting in the phenomena of 
 dreaming, which he associates with Apollo; 
 the other, starting in the phenomena of 
 intoxication, associated with Dionysus, and 
 through singing, music and dithyramb leading 
 up to the lyric. The union of these, which both 
 imply a pessimistic view of life, produced folk- 
 song and finally tragedy, which is thus the 
 outcome of Dionysiac music fertilised by Apol- 
 lonian imagery. Socrates the optimist, with his 
 views concerning virtue as knowledge, vice as 
 ignorance, and his identification of virtue with 
 happiness, led to the decay of tragedy and the 
 triumph of Alexandrian culture, in the net of 
 which the whole modern world is still held. 
 Now, however, German music is producing a 
 new birth of tragedy through Wagner, who has 
 again united music and myth, inaugurated an 
 era of art culture, and built the bridge to a new 
 German heathenism. This remarkable essay 
 produced considerable controversy and much 
 consternation among Nietzsche's philological
 
 NietzscJie. 1 5 
 
 friends and teachers, who resented — reasonably 
 enough, we may well admit — the subordination 
 of philology to modern philosophy and art, and 
 could not understand the marvellous swan they 
 had hatched. A philologist Nietzsche could 
 never have continued, but this book publicly 
 put an end to any hope of academic advance- 
 ment It remains characteristic of Nietzsche's 
 first period, as we may call whatever he wrote 
 before 1876, in its insistence on the primary im- 
 portance of aesthetic as opposed to intellectual 
 culture; and it is characteristic of his whole work 
 in its grip of the connection between the prob- 
 lems and solutions of Hellenic times and the 
 problems and solutions of the modern world. 
 For Nietzsche the Greek world was not the 
 model of beautiful mediocrity imagined by 
 Winckelmann and Goethe, nor did it date from 
 the era of rhetorical idealism inaugurated by 
 Plato. The real Hellenic world came earlier, and 
 the true Hellenes were sturdy realists enamoured 
 of life, reverencing all its manifestations and 
 signs, and holding in highest honour that 
 sexual symbol of life which Christianity, with 
 its denial of life, despises. Plato Nietzsche 
 hated ; he had wandered from all the funda- 
 mental instincts of the Hellene. His childish 
 dialectic can only appeal, Nietzsche said, to 
 those who are ignorant of French masters like 
 Fontenelle. The best cure for Plato, he held,
 
 1 6 Affirmations. 
 
 is Thucydides, the last of the old Hellenes who 
 were brave in the face of reality; Plato fled 
 from reality into the ideal and was a Christian 
 before his time. Heraclitus was Nietzsche's 
 favourite Greek thinker, and he liked to point 
 out that the moralists of the Stoa may be 
 traced back to the great philosopher of 
 Ephesus. 
 
 Die Geburt der Trag'ddie is the prelude to 
 all Nietzsche's work. He outgrew it, but in 
 one point at least it sounds a note which recurs 
 throughout all his v/ork. He ever regarded the 
 Greek conception of Dionysus as the key to the 
 mystery of life. In Gdtseiiddmmening, the last 
 of his works, this is still affirmed, more distinctly 
 than ever. " The fundamental Hellenic in- 
 stinct," he there wrote, " was first revealed in 
 the Dionysiac mysteries. What was it the 
 Greek assured to himself in these mysteries? 
 Eternal life, the eternal return of life, the future 
 promised and consecrated in the present, the 
 triumphal affirmation of life over death and 
 change, true life or immortality through pro- 
 creation, through the mysteries of sexuality. 
 Thus the sexual symbol was to the Greeks 
 the profoundest and most venerable symbol in 
 the whole range of ancient piety. Every in- 
 dividual act of reproduction, of conception, of 
 birth was a festival awaking the loftiest emotions. 
 The doctrine of the mysteries proclaimed the
 
 Nietzsche. 1 7 
 
 holiness of pain ; the pangs of childbirth sancti- 
 fied all pain. All growth and development, 
 every promise for the future, is conditioned 
 by pain. To ensure the eternal pleasure of 
 creation, the eternal affirmation of the will to 
 live, the eternity of birth-pangs is absolutely 
 required. All this is signified by the word 
 Dionysus : I know no higher symbolism than 
 this Greek Dion^siac symbolism. In it the 
 deepest instinct of life, of the future of life, 
 the eternity of life, is experienced religiously; 
 generation, the way to life, is regarded as a 
 sacred way. Christianity alone, with its funda- 
 mental horror of life, has made sexuality an 
 impure thing, casting filth on the beginning, 
 the very condition, of our life." 
 
 Between 1873 and 1876 Nietzsche wrote four 
 essays — on David Strauss, the Use and Abuse 
 of History in relation to Life, Schopenhauer as 
 an Educator, and Richard Wagner — which were 
 published as a series of Unseitgemdsse Betracht- 
 imge?i. The essay on Strauss was written soon 
 after the great war, amid the resulting outburst of 
 flamboyant patriotism and the widely-expressed 
 conviction that the war was a victory of " Ger- 
 man culture." Fresh from the world of Greece, 
 Nietzsche pours contempt on that assumption. 
 Culture, he says, is, above all, unity of artistic 
 style in every expression of a people's life. The 
 exuberance of knowledge in which a German 
 
 2
 
 1 8 Affirmations. 
 
 glories is neither a necessary means of culture 
 nor a sign of it, being, indeed, more allied to the 
 opposite of culture — to barbarism. It is in this 
 barbarism that the modern German lives, that is 
 to say, in a chaotic mixture of all styles. Look 
 at his clothing, Nietzsche continues, his houses, 
 his streets, all his manners and customs. They 
 are a turmoil of all styles in which he peacefully 
 lives and moves. Such culture is really a phleg- 
 matic absence of all sense of culture. Largely, 
 also, it is merely a bad imitation of the real and 
 productive culture of France which it is sup- 
 posed to have conquered in 1870. Let there be 
 no chatter, he concludes, about the triumph of 
 German culture, for at present no real German 
 culture exists. The heroic figures of the 
 German past were not " classics," as some 
 imagine; they were seekers after a genuine 
 German culture, and so regarded themselves. 
 The would-be children of culture in Germany 
 to-day are Philistines without knowing it, and the 
 only unity they have achieved is a methodical 
 barbarism. Nietzsche attacks Strauss by no 
 means as a theologian, but as a typical "culture- 
 Philistine." He was moved to this by the recent 
 publication of Der Alte nnd der Naie Glniibc. 
 I can well understand the emotions with which 
 that book filled him, for I, too, read it soon after 
 its publication, and can vividly recall the painful 
 impression made on me by its homely pedes-
 
 I^ictzscJic. 19 
 
 trianism, the dull unimaginativeness of the man 
 who could only compare the world to a piece 
 of machinery, an engine that creaks in the work- 
 ing, a sort of vast Lancashire mill in which we 
 must spend every moment in feverish labour, 
 and for our trouble perhaps be caught between 
 the wheels and cogs. But I was young, and my 
 youthful idealism, eager for some vital and 
 passionate picture of the world, inevitably 
 revolted against so tawdry and mechanical a 
 conception. Nietzsche, then and ever, failed to 
 perceive that there is room, after all, for the 
 modest sturdy bourgeois labourer who, at the 
 end of a hard life in the service of truth, sits 
 down to enjoy his brown beer and Haydn's 
 quartettes, and to repeat his homely confession 
 of faith in the world as he sees it. Nietzsche 
 failed to realise that Strauss's limitations were 
 essential to the work he had to do, and that he 
 remained a not unworthy follower of those 
 German heroes who were not "classics," but 
 honest seekers after the highest they knew. In 
 this hypertrophied repulsion for the everyday 
 work of the intellectual world we touch on a 
 defect in Nietzsche's temperament which we 
 must regard as fundamental, and which wrought 
 in him at last to wildest issues. 
 
 In another of these essays, Schopenhauer als 
 Ercicher, Nietzsche sets forth his opinions con- 
 cerning his early master in philosophy. It is
 
 20 Affirmations. 
 
 a significant indication of the qualities that 
 attracted him to Schopenhauer that he com- 
 pares him to Montaigne, thus at once revealing 
 his own essential optimism, and the admiration- 
 which he then and always felt for the great 
 French masters of wisdom. He regards Scho- 
 penhauer as the leader from Kant's caves of 
 critical scepticism to the open sky with 
 its consoling stars. Schopenhauer saw the 
 world as a whole, and was not befooled by 
 the analysis of the colours and canvas where- 
 with the picture is painted. Kant, in spite of 
 the impulse of his genius, never became a 
 philosopher. " If any one thinks I am thus 
 doing Kant an injustice, he cannot know what 
 a philosopher is, i.e., not merely a great thinker 
 but also a real man; " and he goes on to explain 
 that the mere scholar who is accustomed to let 
 opinions, ideas, and things in books always 
 intervene between him and facts, will never 
 see facts, and will never be a fact to himself; 
 whereas the philosopher must regard himself 
 as the symbol and abbreviation of all the facts 
 of the world. It remained an axiom with 
 Nietzsche that the philosopher must first of all 
 be a " real man." 
 
 In this essay, which Nietzsche always pre- 
 ferred to his other early works, he thus for the 
 first time clearly sets forth his conception of the 
 philosopher as a teacher, a liberator, a guide
 
 Nietzsche. 2 1 
 
 to fine living; Schopenhauer's metaphysical 
 doctrine he casts aside with indifference. Un- 
 consciously, as in late years he seems to have 
 admitted, he was speaking of himself and setting 
 forth his own aims. Thus it is characteristic 
 that he here also first expressed his conception 
 of the value of individuality. Shakespeare had 
 asked : 
 
 " Which can say more 
 Than this rich praise, that you alone are you ?" 
 
 But Shakespeare was only addressing a single 
 beloved friend. Nietzsche addresses the same 
 thought to the common "you." "At bottom 
 every man well knows that he can only live one 
 single life in the world, and that never again 
 will so strange a chance shake together into 
 unity such singularly varied elements as he 
 holds: he knows that, but he hides it like a bad 
 conscience." This was a sane and democratic 
 individualism; in later years, as we shall see, it 
 assumed stranger shapes. 
 
 At Basel Nietzsche lived in close communion 
 with Wagner and Frau Cosima, who at this 
 time regarded him as the prophet of the music- 
 drama. The essay on Wagner, which starts 
 from the standpoint reached in the previous 
 essays, seems to justify this confidence. There 
 is a deep analogy for those to whom distance is 
 no obscuring cloud, Nietzsche remarks, between
 
 22 Affinnatiofis. 
 
 Kant and the Eleatics, Schopenhauer and 
 Empedocles, Wagner and i^schylus. " The 
 world has been orientalised long enough, and 
 men now seek to be hellcniscd." The Gordian 
 knot has been cut and its strands are fluttering 
 to the ends of the world; we need a series of 
 Anti-Alexanders mighty enough to bring to- 
 gether the scattered threads of life. Wagner 
 is such an Anti-Alexander, a great astringent 
 force in the world. For " it is not possible to 
 present the highest and purest operations of 
 dramatic art, and not therewith to renew morals 
 and the state, education and affairs." Bayreuth 
 is the sacred consecration on the morning of 
 battle. " The battles which art brings before 
 us are a simplification of the actual battles of 
 life; its problems are an abbreviation of the 
 endlessly involved reckoning of human action 
 and aspiration. But herein lies the greatness 
 and value of art, that it calls forth the appear- 
 ance of a simpler world, a shorter solution of the 
 problems of life. No one who suffers in life can 
 dispense with that appearance, just as no one can 
 dispense with sleep." Wagner has simplified the 
 world, Nietzsche continues; he has related m.usic 
 to life, the drama to music; he has intensified the 
 visible things of the world, and made the audible 
 visible. Just as Goethe found in poetry an 
 expression for the painter's vocation he had 
 missed, so Wagner utilised in music his dramatic
 
 NietzscJie. 23 
 
 instinct. And Nietzsche further notes the 
 democratic nature of Wagner's art, so strenu- 
 ously warm and bright as to reach even the 
 lowliest in spirit. Wagner takes off the stigma 
 that clings to the word " common," and brings 
 to all the means of attaining spiritual freedom. 
 " For," says Nietzsche, "whosoever will be free, 
 must make himself free; freedom is no fairy's 
 gift to fall into any man's lap." Such are the 
 leading thoughts in an essay which remains an 
 interesting philosophic appreciation of the place 
 of Wagner's art in the modern world; yet one 
 may well admit that it is often over-strained, 
 with a strain that expresses the obscure struggle 
 of nascent antagonism. 
 
 It is, indeed, Wagner in BayretitJi which 
 brings to an end Nietzsche's first period, and 
 leads up to the crash which inaugurated his later 
 period. Hitherto Nietzsche's work was unques- 
 tionably sane both in substance and form. No 
 doubt it had called forth much criticism; work 
 so vigorous, sincere, and independent could not 
 fail to arouse hostility. But as we look back 
 to-day, these fine essays represent, with much 
 youthful enthusiasm, the best that was known 
 and thought in Germany a quarter of a century 
 ago. Nietzsche's opinions on Wagner and 
 Schopenhauer, on individualism and democracy, 
 the significance of early Hellenism for moderns, 
 the danger of an excessive historical sense, the
 
 24 Affirmations. 
 
 conception of culture less as a striving after 
 intellectual knowledge than as that which 
 arouses within us the philosopher, the artist, 
 and the saint — all these ideas, wild as some of 
 them seemed to Nietzsche's German contempor- 
 aries, are the ideas v/hich have now largely 
 permeated European culture. The same cannot 
 be said of his later ideas. 
 
 It was at the first Bayreuth festival in 1876 
 that this chapter in Nietzsche's life was finally 
 closed. His profound admiration for Wagner, 
 his intimate intercourse with the greatest fig-ure 
 in the German world of art, had hitherto been 
 the chief fact in his life. All his ideals of life 
 and his hopes for the future had grown up 
 around the figure of Wagner, who seemed the 
 leader into a new Promised Land. During the 
 previous two years, however, Nietzsche had seen 
 little of Wagner, who had left Switzerland, and 
 he had been unable to realise either his own 
 development or Wagner's. Whatever enthusi- 
 asm Nietzsche may have felt in early life for 
 a return to German heathenism, he was yet 
 by race and training and taste by no means 
 allied to primitive Germanism ; it was towards 
 Greece and towards France that his conception 
 of national culture really drew him. Wagner 
 was far more profoundly Teutonic, and in the 
 Nibelung cycle, which Nietzsche was about to 
 witness for the first time on the stage, Wagner
 
 Nietzsche. 2 5 
 
 had incarnated the spirit of Teutonic heathenism 
 with an overwhelming barbaric energy which, 
 as Nietzsche could now realise, was utterly alien 
 to his own most native instincts. Thus it was 
 that Bayreuth marked the crisis of a subtle but 
 profound realisation, the most intense self- 
 realisation he had yet attained. 
 
 The whole history of this Wagner episode in 
 Nietzsche's life is full of interest. The circum- 
 stantial narrative in the second volume of the 
 Leben Nietzsche s renders it clear at every point, 
 and reveals a tragedy which has its significance 
 for the study of genius generally. Nietzsche, 
 it must be remembered, was more than thirty 
 years younger than Wagner. He was younger, 
 and also he was less corrupted by the world 
 than Wagner. Tiie great artist of the music- 
 drama possessed, or had acquired, a practical 
 good sense in all that concerned the realisation 
 of his own mighty projects such as always 
 marks the greatest and most successful of the 
 world's supreme artists. Like Shakespeare, he 
 knew that the dyer's hand must ever be a little 
 subdued to what it works in, if the radiant 
 beauty of his stuffs is ever to be perfectly 
 achieved. But Nietzsche could never endure 
 any fleck on his hand; he shrank with horror 
 from every soiling contact ; he was an artist 
 who regarded life itself as the highest art. He 
 could never have carried through the rou^h
 
 26 Affirmations. 
 
 task of dying the gorgeous garments of a 
 narrower but more perfectly attainable art. 
 Nietzsche's idealised admiration for Wagner 
 was complicated, after his appointment to the 
 Basel chair, by a deep personal friendship for 
 the Master, the chief friendship of his life. And 
 his friendships were deeper than those of most; 
 although they show no traces of sexual tincture 
 they were hypertrophied by the defective sex- 
 uality of the man who always regarded friend- 
 ship as a more massive and poignant emotion 
 than love. That there were on either side any 
 petty faults to cause a rift in friendship there 
 is no reason whatever to believe. Nietzsche 
 was above such, and Wagner's friendship was 
 always hearty until he realised that Nietzsche 
 was no longer his disciple, and then he dropped 
 him, silently, as a workman drops a useless tool. 
 In addition it must be noted that Nietzsche was 
 probably at this time often over-strained, almost 
 hysterical, — at least so, we may gather, he im- 
 pressed Wagner, who urged him to marry a 
 rich wife and to travel, — and he was still 
 afflicted by a disorder which not even genius 
 can escape in youth, he was still something of 
 what we vulgarly call a "prig"; he had not 
 yet quite outgrown " the youthful Jesus in 
 the Temple." " Your brother with his air of 
 delicate distinction is a most uncomfortable 
 fellow," said Wagner to Frau Forster-Nietzsche;
 
 Nietzsche. 27 
 
 " one can always see what he is thinking; sonne- 
 times he is quite embarrassed at my jokes — and 
 then I crack them more madly than ever." 
 Wagner's jokes, it appears, were of a homely 
 and plebeian sort, not appealing to one who 
 lived naturally and habitually in an atmosphere 
 of keen intellectual activity. Bearing all this 
 in mind, one can imagine the impression made 
 upon Nietzsche by the inaugural festival at 
 Bayreuth for which he had just written an 
 impassioned and yet philosophic prologue. 
 Wagner was absorbed in using all his consider- 
 able powers of managing men in finally van- 
 quishing the difficulties in his way. To any one 
 who could see the festival from the inside, as 
 Nietzsche was able to see it, there were all the 
 inevitable squabbles and scandals and comic 
 contretemps which must always mark the in- 
 ception of a great undertaking, but which to- 
 day are hidden from us, pilgrims from many 
 lands, as we ascend to that hillside structure 
 which is the chief living shrine of art in Europe. 
 And the people who were crowding in to this 
 "sacred consecration on the morning of battle" 
 were aristocrats and plutocrats — bejewelled, 
 corpulent, commonplace — headed by the old 
 Emperor, anxious to do his duty, decorously 
 joining in the applause as he whispered "Horrible! 
 horrible ! " to his aide-de-camp, and hurrying 
 away as quickly as possible to the military
 
 28 Affinnations. 
 
 manoeuvres. There was more than enough here 
 to make his own just issued battle-cry seem 
 farcical to Nietzsche. All was conspiring to 
 one end. The conception of the sanctity of 
 Bayreuth, his personal reverence for Wagner 
 were slipping away together, and at the same time 
 he was forced to realise that the barbaric Ger- 
 manism of this overpowering Nibelung music 
 was not the music for him. His development 
 would inevitably have carried him away from 
 Wagner, but the festival brought on the crisis 
 with a sudden clash. Nietzsche had finally 
 conquered the mightiest of his false ideals, and 
 stood for ever after free and independent of all his 
 early gods; but the wounds of that victory were 
 never quite closed to the last: a completely 
 serene and harmonious conception of things, so 
 far as Wagner was concerned, Nietzsche never 
 attained. 
 
 It may well be that the change was also 
 physical. The excitement of the festival pre- 
 cipitated an organic catastrophe towards which 
 he had long been tending. His sister finds the 
 original source of this catastrophe in the war of 
 1870. He desired to serve his country as a com- 
 batant, but the University would only allow him 
 leave to attend to the wounded. The physical 
 and emotional over-tension involved by his con- 
 stant care of six young wounded men culminated 
 in a severe illness, which led on to a never-end-
 
 Nietzsche. 29 
 
 ing train of symptoms — eye-troublcs, dyspepsia, 
 headache, insomnia — which were perhaps aggra- 
 vated by the reckless use of drugs. I have 
 already noted passages which indicate that he 
 was himself aware of a consuming flame within, 
 and that from time to time he made efforts to 
 check its ravages. That it was this internal 
 flame which largely produced the breakdown 
 is shown by the narrative of Nietzsche's friend. 
 Dr. Kretzer, who was with him at Bayreuth. 
 It was evident he was seriously ill, Kretzer tells 
 us, utterly changed and broken down. His 
 eye-troubles were associated, if not with actual 
 brain disease, at all events with a high degree 
 of neurasthenia.^ At Bayreuth, Nietzsche was 
 
 1 The most convincing word-portrait of Nietzsche I have met 
 with (by M. Schure) dates from the visit to Bayreuth : — "I was 
 struck both by the superiority of his intellect and the strangeness 
 of his face. A broad forehead, short hair brushed back, the 
 prominent cheek-bones of the Slav. The heavy moustache and 
 the bold outline of the face would have given him the aspect of 
 a cavalry officer if it had not been for his timid and haughty air. 
 The musical voice and slow speech indicated the artist's organi- 
 sation, while the circumspect meditative carriage was that of a 
 philosopher. Nothing more deceptive than the apparent calm 
 of his expression. The fixed eye revealed the painful travail of 
 thought. It was at once the eye of an acute observer and a 
 fanatical visionary. The double character of this gaze produced 
 a disquieted and disquieting impression, all the more so since it 
 seemed to be always fixed on a single point. In moments of 
 effusion this gaze was softened to a dream-like sweetness, but 
 soon became hostile again." This picture is confirmed by 
 Nietzsche's sister, who also refers to his "unusually large, 
 beautiful, and brilliant eyes."
 
 30 Affirmations. 
 
 forced to realise the peril of his position as 
 he had never realised it before. He could no 
 longer disguise from himself that he must break 
 with all the passionate interests of his past. 
 It was an' essential measure of hygiene, almost 
 a surgical operation. This is indeed how he 
 has himself put the matter. In the preface to 
 Der Fall Wagner, he said that it had been to 
 him a necessary self-discipline to take part 
 against all that was morbid within himself, 
 against Wagner, against Schopenhauer, against 
 all the impassioning interests of modern life, 
 and to view the world, so far as possible, with 
 the philosopher's eyes, from an immense height. 
 And again he speaks of Wagner's art as a 
 beaker of ecstasy so subtle and profound that 
 it acts like poison and leaves no remedy at last 
 but flight from the siren's cave. Nietzsche was 
 henceforth in the position of a gouty subject 
 who is forced to abandon port wine and straight- 
 way becomes an apostle of total abstinence. 
 The remedy seems to have been fairly success- 
 ful. But the disease was in his bones. Im- 
 passioning interests that were far more subtly 
 poisonous slowly developed within him, and 
 twelve years later flight had become impossible, 
 even if he was still able to realise the need for 
 flight. 
 
 Nietzsche brol'ce very thoroughly with his past, 
 yet the break has been exaggerated, and he
 
 Nietzsche. 3 1 
 
 himself often helped to exagf^erate it. He was 
 in the position of a beleaguered city which has 
 been forced to abandon its outer walls and 
 concentrate itself in the citadel ; and however 
 it may have been in ancient warfare, in spiritual 
 affairs such a state of things involves an offensive 
 attitude towards the former line of defence. 
 The positions we have abandoned constitute a 
 danger to the positions we have taken up. 
 Many of the world's fiercest persecutors have 
 but persecuted their old selves, and there seems 
 to be psychological necessity for such an atti- 
 tude. Yet a careful study of Nietzsche's earlier 
 activity reveals many germs of later develop- 
 ments. The critical attitude towards conven- 
 tional morality, the individualism, the optimism, 
 the ideal of heroism, which dominate his later 
 thought, exist as germs in his earlier work. 
 Even the flagrant contrast between Richard 
 Wagner ifi BayreutJi and Der Fall Wagner was 
 the outcome of a gradual development. In the 
 earlier essay Nietzsche had justly pointed out 
 that Wagner's instincts were fundamentally 
 dramatic. As years went on he brooded over 
 this idea ; the nimble and lambent wit of his 
 later days played around it until Wagner be- 
 came a mere actor in his work and in his life, a 
 rhetorician, an incarnate falsehood, the personi- 
 fication of latter-day decadence, the Victor Hugo 
 of music, the Bernini of music, the modern
 
 32 Affirmations. 
 
 Cagliostro. At the same time he admits that 
 Wagner represents the modern spirit, and that 
 it is reasonable for a musician to say that 
 though he hates Wagner he can tolerate no 
 other music. The fact is, one may well repeat, 
 that Nietzsche was not Teuton enough to abide 
 for ever with Wagner. He compares him con- 
 temptuously with Hegel, cloud-compellers both, 
 masters of German mists and German mysticism, 
 worshippers of Wotan, the god of bad weather, 
 the god of the Germans. " How could they 
 miss what we, we Halcyonians, miss in Wagner 
 — la gaya scienza^ the light feet, wit, fire, grace, 
 strong logic, the dance of the stars, arrogant 
 intellectuality, the quivering light of the south, 
 the smooth sea — perfection ? " It was scarcely, 
 however, the Halcyonian in Nietzsche that stood 
 between him and Wagner. That is well shown 
 by his attitude towards Parsifal. Whatever we 
 may think of the ideas embodied in Parsifal, it 
 may yet seem to us the most solemn, the most 
 graciously calm and beautiful spectacle that has 
 ■ ever been fitly set to music. In Nietzsche the 
 thinker and the moralist were so much stronger 
 than the artist that he could see nothing here 
 but bad psychology, bad thinking, and bad 
 religion. 
 
 The rebellion against Wagner was inevitable. 
 It is evident that Nietzsche had not gained com- 
 plete mastery of his own personality in his earlier
 
 Nietasc/ic. 33 
 
 work. It is brilliant, full of fine perceptions and 
 critical insight, but as a personal utterance in- 
 complete. It renders the best ideas of the time, 
 not the best ideas that Nietzsche could contribute 
 to the time. The shock of i ^y6 may have been a 
 step towards the disintegration of his intellect, but 
 it was also a rally, a step towards a higher self- 
 realisation. Nietzsche had no genuine affinity 
 with Schopenhauer or with Wagner, though 
 they were helpful to his development ; he was 
 no pessimist, he was no democrat. As he himself 
 said, "I understood the philosophic pessimism 
 of the nineteenth century as the symptom of a 
 finer strength of thought, a more victorious 
 fulness of life. In the same way Wagner's 
 music signified to me the expression of a 
 Dionysiac mightiness of soul in which I seemed 
 to hear, as in an earthquake, the upheaval of 
 the primitive powers of life, after age-long re- 
 pression." Now he only needed relief, "golden, 
 tender, oily melodies," to soothe the leaden 
 weight of life, and these he found in Carmen. 
 Any discussion of the merits of the question 
 as between Wagner and Bizet, the earlier and 
 the later Nietzsche, seems to me out of place, 
 though much has been made of it by those who 
 delight to see a giant turn and rend himself. 
 Nietzsche himself said he was writing for psy- 
 chologists, and it is not unfair to add that it is 
 less " Wagner's case " that he presents to us than 
 
 3
 
 34 Affirmations. 
 
 " Nietzsche's case." As to the merits of the 
 case, we may alike admit that Nietzsche's en- 
 thusiasm for Wagner was not excessive, and 
 that the pleasant things he said of Carmen are 
 fully justified; we may address both the early 
 and the late Nietzsche in the words habitually 
 used by the landlord of the " Rainbow" : " You're 
 both wrong and you're both right, as I alius 
 says." Most of the mighty quarrels that have 
 sent men to battle and the stake might have 
 been appeased had each side recognised that 
 both were right in their affirmations, both wrong 
 in their denials. 
 
 Nietzsche occupied his chair at Basel for some 
 years longer; in i88o his health forced him to 
 resign and he was liberally pensioned. As a 
 professor he treated the most difficult questions 
 of Greek study, and devoted his chief attention 
 to his best pupils, who in their turn adored him. 
 Basel is an admirable residence for a cosmo- 
 politan thinker ; it was easy for Nietzsche to 
 keep in touch with all that went on from Paris 
 to St Petersburg. He was also on terms of 
 more or less intimate friendship with the finest 
 spirits in Switzerland, with Keller the novelist, 
 Bocklin the painter, Burckhardt the historian. 
 We are told that he was a man of great per- 
 sonal charm in social intercourse. But his 
 associates at Basel never suspected that in this 
 courteous and amiable professor was stored up
 
 Nietzsche. 3 5 
 
 an explosive energy which would one day be 
 felt in every civilised land. With pen in hand 
 his criticism of life was unflinching, his sincerity 
 arrogant ; when the pen was dropped he became 
 modest, reserved, almost timorous. 
 
 The work he produced between 1877 ^"d 
 1882 seems to me to represent the maturity of 
 his genius. It includes MenscJiliches, AUsumen- 
 scJiliches, Morgenrothe, and Die Frdhliclie Wis- 
 senschaft. In form all these volumes belong to 
 pensee literature. They deal with art, with re- 
 ligion, with morals and philosophy, with the 
 relation of all these to life. Nietzsche shows 
 himself in these pensees above all a freethinker, 
 emancipated from every law save that of sin- 
 cerity, wide-ranging, serious, penetrative, often 
 impassioned, as yet always able to follow his 
 own ideal of self-restraint. 
 
 After leaving Basel he spent the following 
 nine years chiefly at health resorts and in tra- 
 velling. We find him at Sorrento, Venice, 
 Genoa, Turin, Sils Maria, as well as at Leipzig. 
 Doubtless his fresh and poignant pensees are 
 largely the outcome of strenuous solitary walks 
 in the Engadine or among the Italian lakes. 
 We may assume that during most of these 
 years he was fighting, on the whole successfully 
 fighting, for mental health. Yet passages that 
 occur throughout his books seem to suggest 
 that his thoughts may have sometimes turned
 
 36 Affirmations. 
 
 to the jToal towards which he was tending^. It 
 is a mistake, he points out, to suppose that 
 insanity is always the symptom of a degenerat- 
 ing culture, although to nod towards the asylum 
 is a convenient modern way of slaying spiritual 
 tyrants ; it is in primitive and developing stages 
 of culture that insanity has played its chief 
 part ; only by virtue of what seemed to be the 
 "Divine" turbulence of insanity and epilepsy 
 could any new moral law make progress among 
 early cultures. Just as for us there seems a 
 little madness in all genius, so for them there 
 seemed a little genius in all madness; sorcerers 
 and saints agonised in solitude and abstinence 
 for some gleam of madness which would bring 
 them faith in themselves and openly justify their 
 mission. 
 
 What may perhaps be called Nietzsche's third 
 period began in 1883 with Also sprach Zara- 
 thustra, the most extraordinary of all his works, 
 mystical and oracular in form, but not mystical 
 in substance. Zarathustra has only a distant 
 relationship to his prototype Zoroaster, though " 
 Nietzsche had a natural sympathy with the 
 symbolism of fire and water, with the reverence 
 for light and purity, which mark the rites asso- 
 ciated with the name of the Bactrian prophet; 
 he has here allowed himself to set forth his 
 own ideas and ideals in the free and oracular 
 manner of all ancient scriptures, and is thus
 
 Nietzsche, 37 
 
 enabled to present his visions in a concrete 
 form. Zarathustra, for the first and last time, 
 gave scope to the artist within Nietzsche, and 
 with all its extravagance and imperfection it 
 must remain for good or evil his most per- 
 sonal utterance. It was followed by Jenseits 
 von Gut imd Bose, Zur Genealogie der Moral, 
 Der Fall Wagner, and Gdtzenddtnmerung. It is 
 during this period that we trace the growth of 
 the magnification of his own personal mission 
 which finally became a sort of megalomania. 
 (" I have given to men the deepest book they 
 possess, my Zarathustra" he wrote towards the 
 end.) In form the books of this period are 
 sometimes less fragmentary than those of the 
 second period ; in substance they are marked 
 by their emphatic, often extravagant, almost 
 reckless insistence on certain views of morality. 
 If in the first period he was an apostle of culture, 
 in the second a freethinker, pronouncing judg- 
 ment on all things in heaven and earth, he was 
 now exclusively a moralist, or, as he would 
 prefer to say, an immoralist. It was during this 
 period that he worked out his " master morality" 
 — the duty to be strong — in opposition to the 
 "slave morality" of Christianity, with its glorifi- 
 cation of weakness and pity, and that he con- 
 sistently sought to analyse and destroy the 
 traditional conceptions of good and evil on which 
 our current morality rests. The last work which
 
 38 Affirmations. 
 
 he planned, but never completed, was a re-valua- 
 tion of all values, UmwertJuing aller Werthe, 
 which would have been his final indictment of 
 the modern world, and the full statement of his 
 own immoralism and Dionysiac philosophy. 
 
 It is sometimes said that Nietzsche's mastery 
 of his thoug:ht and style was increasing up to 
 the last. This I can scarcely admit, even as 
 regards style. No doubt there is at the best a 
 light and swift vigour of movement in these last 
 writings which before he had never attained. 
 He can pour out now a shimmering stream of 
 golden phrases with which he has intoxicated 
 himself, and tries to intoxicate us. We may 
 lend ourselves to the charm, but it has no 
 enduring hold. This master of gay or bitter 
 invective no longer possesses the keenly reasoned 
 and piercing insight of the earlier Nietzsche. 
 We feel that he has become the victim of 
 obsessions which drive him like a leaf before 
 the wind, and all his exuberant wit is unsub- 
 stantial and pathetic as that of Falstafif. The 
 devouring flame has at length eaten the core 
 out of the man and his style, leaving only this 
 coruscating shell. And at a touch even this 
 thin shell collapsed into smouldering embers. 
 
 From a child Nietzsche was subject to strangely 
 prophetic dreams. In a dream which, when a 
 boy, he put into literary form, he tells how he 
 seemed to be travelling forward amid a glorious
 
 Nietzsche. 39 
 
 landscape, while carolling larks ascended to the 
 clouds, and his whole life seemed to stretch 
 before him in a vista of happy years ; " and 
 suddenly a shrill cry reached our ears ; it came 
 from the neighbouring lunatic asylum." Even 
 in 1876 his friends began to see that Nietzsche 
 attached extraordinary importance to his own 
 work. After he wrote Zarathustra^ this self- 
 exaltation increased, and began to find expres- 
 sion in his work. Latterly, it is said, he came 
 to regard himself as the incarnation of the genius 
 of humanity. It has always been found a 
 terrible matter to war with the moral system 
 of one's age ; it will have its revenge, one way 
 or another, from within or from without, what- 
 ever happens after. Nietzsche strove for nothing 
 less than to remodel the moral world after his 
 own heart's desire, and his brain was perishing 
 of exhaustion in the immense effort. In 18S9 — 
 at the moment when his work at last began to 
 attract attention — he became hopelessly insane. 
 A period of severe hallucinatory delirium led on 
 to complete dementia, and he passes beyond our 
 sight. 
 
 II. 
 
 Nietzsche was by temperament a philosopher 
 after the manner of the Greeks. In other words, 
 philosophy was not to him, as to the average 
 modern philosopher, a matter of books and the
 
 40 Affirmations. 
 
 study, but a life to be lived. It seemed to him 
 to have much less concern with "truth" than 
 with the essentials of fine living. He loved 
 travel and movement, he loved scenery, he loved 
 cities and the spectacle of men ; above all, he 
 loved solitude. The solitude of cities drew him 
 strongly; he envied Heraclitus his desert study 
 amid the porticoes and peristyles of the immense 
 temple of Diana. He had, however, his own 
 favourite place of work, to which he often 
 alludes, the Piazza di San IMarco at Venice, 
 amid the doves, in front of the strange and 
 beautiful structure which he " loved, feared, and 
 envied ;" and here in the spring, between ten 
 o'clock and midday, he found his best philo- 
 sophic laboratory. 
 
 It was in Italy that Nietzsche seems to have 
 found himself most at home, although there are 
 no signs that he felt any special sympathy with 
 the Italians, that is to say in later than Renais- 
 sance days. For the most part he possessed 
 very decided sympathies and antipathies. His 
 antipathy to his own Germans lay in the nature 
 of things. Every prophet's message is primarily 
 directed to his own people. And Nietzsche was 
 unsparing in his keen criticism of the Germans. 
 He tells somewhere with a certain humour how 
 people abroad would ask him if Germany had 
 produced of late no great thinker or artist, no 
 really good book, and how with the courage of
 
 Niet::scJic. 4 1 
 
 despair he would at last reply, "Yes, Bismarck!" 
 Nietzsche was willing enough to recognise the 
 kind of virtue personified in Bismarck. But 
 with that recognition nearly all was said in 
 favour of Germany that Nietzsche had to say. 
 There is little in the German spirit that answered 
 to his demands. He admired clearness, analytic 
 precision, and highly organised intelligence, light 
 and alert. He saw no sufficient reason why 
 profundity should lack a fine superficies, nor 
 why strength should be ungainly. His in- 
 stinctive comparison for a good thinker was 
 always a good dancer. As a child he had been 
 struck by seeing a rope-dancer, and throughout 
 life dancing seemed to him the image of the 
 finest culture, supple to bend, strong to retain 
 its own equilibrium, an exercise demanding the 
 highest training and energy of all the muscles 
 of a well-knit organism. But the indubitable 
 intellectual virtues of the bulky and plodding 
 German are scarcely those which can well be 
 symbolised by an Otero or a Caicedo. " There 
 is too much beer in the German intellect," 
 Nietzsche said. For the last ten centuries 
 Germany has wilfully stultified herself; "no- 
 where else has there been so vicious a misuse 
 of the two great European narcotics, alcohol 
 and Christianity," to which he was inclined to 
 add music. ("The theatre and music," he re- 
 marked in Die FrbJdicJic Wisscnschaft, " are
 
 42 Affinnadons. 
 
 the haschisch and betel of Europeans, and the 
 history of the so-called higher culture is largely 
 the history of narcotics.") " Germans regard 
 bad writing," he said, " as a national privilege ; 
 they do not write prose as one works at a 
 statue, they only improvise." Even " German 
 virtue" — and this was the unkindest cut of all — • 
 had its origin in eighteenth century France, as 
 its early preachers, such as Kant and Schiller, 
 fully recognised. Thus it happens that the 
 German has no perceptions — coupling his 
 Goethe with a Schiller, and his Schopenhauer 
 with a Hartmann — and no tact, "no finger for 
 nuances" his fingers are all claws. The few 
 persons of high culture whom he had met in 
 Germany, he noted towards the end of his life, 
 and especially Frau Cosima Wagner, were all of 
 French origin. Nietzsche regarded it as merely 
 an accident that he was himself born in Ger- 
 many, just as it was merely an accident that 
 Heine the Jew, and Schopenhauer the Dutch- 
 man, were born there. Yet, as I have already 
 hinted, we may take these utterances too 
 seriously. There are passages in his works — 
 though we meet them rarely — which show that 
 Nietzsche recognised and admired the elemental 
 energy, the depth and the contradictions in the 
 German character ; he attributed them largely 
 to mixture of races. 
 
 Nietzsche was not much attracted to the
 
 NictzscJte. 43 
 
 English, It is true that he names Landor 
 as one of the four masters of prose this century- 
 has produced, while another of these is Emerson, 
 with whom he had genuine affinity, although his 
 own intellect was keener and more passionate, 
 with less sunny serenity. For Shakespeare, also, 
 his admiration was deep. And when he had 
 outgrown his early enthusiasm for Schopenhauer, 
 the fine qualities which he still recognised in that 
 thinker — his concreteness, lucidity, reasonable- 
 ness — seemed to him English. He was usually 
 less flattering towards English thought Dar- 
 winism, for instance, he thought, savoured too 
 much of the population question, and was 
 invented by English men of science who were 
 oppressed by the problems of poverty. The 
 struggle for existence, he said, is only an excep- 
 tion in nature; it is exuberance, an even reckless 
 superfluity, which rules. For English philosophic 
 thought generally he had little but contempt. 
 J. S. Mill was one of his "impossibilities"; the 
 English and French sociologists of to-day, he 
 said, have only known degenerating types of 
 society, devoid of organising force, and they 
 take their own debased instincts as the standard 
 of social codes in general. Modern democracy, 
 modern utilitarianism, are largely of English 
 manufacture, and he came at last to hate them 
 both. During the past century, he asserted, 
 they have reduced the whole spiritual currcnc}'-
 
 44 Affirmations. 
 
 of Europe to a dull plebeian level, and they are 
 the chief causes of European vulgarity. It is 
 the English, he also asserted — George Eliot, for 
 instance — who, while abolishing Christian belief, 
 have sought to bolster up the moral system 
 which was created by Christianity, and which 
 must necessarily fall with it. It is, moreover, 
 the English, who with this democratic and 
 utilitarian plebeianism have seduced and per- 
 verted the fine genius of France. 
 
 Just as we owe to England the vulgarity 
 v/hich threatens to overspread Europe, so to 
 France we owe the conception of a habit of 
 nobility, in every best sense of the word. On 
 that point Nietzsche's opinion never wavered. 
 The present subjection of the French spirit to 
 this damnable Anglo-mania, he declared, must 
 never lead us to forget the ardent and pas- 
 sionate energy, the intellectual distinction, which 
 belonged to the France of the sixteenth and 
 seventeenth centuries.^ The French, as Nietzsche 
 
 ^ One may be allowed to regret that Nietzsche was not equally 
 discriminating in his judgment of our country. Had he not 
 been blinded by the spiritual plebeianism of the nineteenth 
 century in England, he might also have discerned in certain 
 periods some of the same ardent and heroic qualities which he 
 recognised in sixteenth century France, the more easily since 
 at that time the same Renaissance wave had effected a consider- 
 able degree of spiritual union between France and England. 
 In George Chapman, for instance, at his finest and lucidest 
 moments the typical ethical representative of our greatest literary 
 age, Nietzsche would have found a man after his own heart,
 
 NietzscJie. 45 
 
 always held, are the one modern European 
 nation which may be compared with the Greeks. 
 In MenscJilicJies, AUzumenschliches he names six 
 French writers — Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, 
 La Bruyere, Fontenelle (in the Dialogues des 
 Moris), Vauvenai'Ljcs, Chamfort — who bring us 
 nearer to Greek antiquity than any other group 
 of modern authors, and contain more real 
 thought than all the books of the German 
 philosophers put together. The only French 
 writer of the present century for whom he 
 cared much (putting aside Merimee) was 
 Stendhal, who possesses some of the characters 
 of the earlier group. The French, he points 
 out, are the most Christian of all nations, and 
 have produced the greatest saints. He enumer- 
 ates Pascal (" the first among Christians, who 
 was able to unite fervour, intellect, and candour; 
 — think of what that means !"), Fenelon, Mme. de 
 Guyon, De Ranee, the founder of the Trappists 
 who have flourished nowhere but in France, the 
 Huguenots, Port-Royal — truly, he exclaims, the 
 great French freethinkers encountered foemen 
 worthy of their steel! The land which produced 
 the most perfect types of Anti-Christianity pro- 
 
 not only one who scarcely yielded to himself in generous admir- 
 ation of the great qualities of the French spirit but a man of 
 " absolute and full soul " who was almost a precursor of his 
 own " immoralism," a lover of freeilom, of stoic self-reliance, 
 one who was ever seeking to enlarije the discipline of a fine 
 culture in the direction of moral freedom and dignity.
 
 46 Affirmations. 
 
 duced also the most perfect types of Christianity. 
 He defends, also, that seeming superficiality 
 which in a great Frenchman, he says, is but 
 the natural epidermis of a rich and deep nature, 
 while a great German's profundity is too often 
 strangely bottled up from the light in a dark 
 and contorted phial. 
 
 I have briefly stated Nietzsche's feeling as 
 regards each of the three chief European 
 peoples, because we are thus led up to the 
 central points of his philosophy — his attitude 
 towards modern religion and his attitude to- 
 wards modern morals. We are often apt to 
 regard these matters as of little practical im- 
 portance; we think it the reasonable duty of 
 practical social politics to attend to the im- 
 mediate questions in hand, and leave these 
 wider questions to settle themselves. Rightly 
 or wrongly, that was not how Nietzsche looked 
 at the matter. He was too much of a philo- 
 sopher, he had too keen a sense of the vital 
 relation of things, to be content with the policy 
 of tinkering society, wherever it seems to need 
 mending most badly, avoiding any reference to 
 the whole. That is our English method, and 
 no doubt it is a very sane and safe method, but, 
 as we have seen, Nietzsche was not in sympathy 
 with English methods. His whole significance 
 lies in the thorough and passionate analysis with 
 which he sought to dissect and to dissolve, first,
 
 NietzscJie. 47 
 
 "German culture," then Christianity, and lastly, 
 modern morals, with all that these involve. 
 
 It is scarcely necessary to point out, that 
 though Nietzsche rejoiced in the title of free- 
 thinker, he can by no means be confounded 
 with the ordinary secularist. He is not bent 
 on destroying religion from any anaesthesia of 
 the religious sense, or even in order to set up 
 some religion of science which is practically no 
 religion at all. He is thus on different ground 
 from the great freethinkers of France, and to 
 some extent of England. Nietzsche was himself 
 of the stuff of which great religious teachers are 
 made, of the race of apostles. So when he 
 writes of the founder of Christianity and the 
 great Christian types, it is often with a poignant 
 sympathy which the secularist can never know; 
 and if his knife seems keen and cruel, it is not 
 the easy indifferent cruelty of the pachyder- 
 matous scoffer. When he analyses the souls of 
 these men and the impulses which have moved 
 them, he knows with what he is dealing : he is 
 analysing his own soul. 
 
 A mystic Nietzsche certainly was not ; he had 
 no moods of joyous resignation. It is chiefly 
 the religious ecstasy of active moral energy that 
 he was at one with. The sword of the spirit is 
 his weapon rather than the merely defensive 
 breastplate of faith. St. Paul is the consum- 
 mate type of such religious forces, and whatever
 
 48 Affirmations. 
 
 Nietzsche wrote of that apostle — the inventor of 
 Christianity, as he truly calls him — is peculiarly 
 interesting. He hates him, indeed, but even 
 his hatred thrills with a tone of intimate sym- 
 pathy. It is thus in a remarkable passage in 
 Morgenrolhe, v/here he tells briefly the history 
 and struggles of that importunate soul, so super- 
 stitious and yet so shrewd, without whom there 
 would have been no Christianity. He describes 
 the self-torture of the neurotic, sensual, refined 
 "Jewish Pascal," who flagellated himself with 
 the law that he came to hate with the hatred of 
 one who had a genius for hatred ; who in one 
 dazzling flash of illumination realised that Jesus 
 by accomplishing the law had annihilated it, and 
 so furnished him with the instrument he desired 
 to wreak his passionate hatred on the law, and 
 to revel in the freedom of his joy, Nietzsche 
 possesses a natural insight in probing the 
 wounds of self-torturing souls. He excels also 
 in describing the efi*ects of extreme pain in 
 chasing away the mists from life, in showing 
 to a man his own naked personality, in bringing 
 us face to face with the cold and terrible fact. 
 It is thus that, coupling the greatest figure in 
 history with the greatest figure in fiction, he 
 compares the pathetic utterance of Jesus on the 
 cross — " My God, my God, why hast thou for- 
 saken me?" — with the disillusionment of the 
 dying Don Quixote. Of Jesus himself he
 
 Nietzsche. 49 
 
 speaks no harsh word, but ho regarded the 
 atmosphere of Roman decay and languor — 
 though very favourable for the production of 
 fine personalities — as ill-adapted to the develop- 
 ment of a great religion. The Gospels lead us 
 into the atmosphere of a Russian novel, he 
 remarks in one of his last writings, Der A?iii- 
 christ, an atmosphere in which the figure of 
 Jesus had to be coarsened to be understood; it 
 became moulded in men's minds by memories of 
 more familiar types — prophet, Messiah, wonder- 
 worker, judge; the real man they could not 
 even see. "It must ever be a matter for regret 
 that no Dostoievsky lived in the neighbourhood 
 of this most interesting decadent, I mean some 
 one who could understand the enthralling charm 
 of just this mixture of the sublime, the morbid, 
 and the child-like." Jesus, he continues, never 
 denied the world, the state, culture, work; he 
 simply never knew or realised their existence ; 
 his own inner experience — "life," "light," 
 "truth" — was all in all to him. The only 
 realities to him were inner realities, so living 
 that they make one feel " in Heaven " and 
 " eternal " ; this it was to be " saved." And 
 Nietzsche notes, as so many have noted before 
 him, that the fact that men should bow the 
 knee in Christ's name to the very opposite of all 
 these things, and consecrate in the " Church " 
 all that he threw behind him, is an insoluble 
 
 4
 
 50 Affinnations. 
 
 example of historical irony. " Strictly speaking, 
 there has only been one Christian, and he died 
 on the cross. The Gospel died on the cross." 
 
 There may seem a savour of contempt in the 
 allusion to Jesus as an "interesting decadent^' 
 and undoubtedly there is in Der Antichrist a 
 passionate bitterness which is not found in 
 Nietzsche's earlier books. But he habitually 
 used the word decadent in a somewhat extended 
 and peculiar sense. The decadent, as Nietzsche 
 understood him, was the product of an age in 
 which virility was dead and weakness was 
 sanctified ; it was so with the Buddhist as well 
 as with the Christian, they both owe their origin 
 and their progress to " some monstrous disease 
 of will." They sprang up among creatures who 
 craved for some " Thou shalt," and who were apt 
 only for that one form of energy which the weak 
 possess, fanaticism. By an instinct which may 
 be regarded as sound by those who do not 
 accept his disparagement of either, Nietzsche 
 ahvays coupled the Christian and the anarchist; 
 to him they were both products of decadence. 
 Both wish to revenge their own discomfort on 
 this present world, he asserted, the anarchist 
 immediately, the Christian at the last day. 
 Instead of feeling, "/ am worth nothing," the 
 decadent says, ''Life is worth nothing," — a 
 terribly contagious state of mind which has 
 covered the world with the vitality of a tropical
 
 Nietzsche. 5 1 
 
 jungle. It cannot be too often repeated, 
 Nietzsche continues, that Christianity was born 
 of the decay of antiquity, and on the degenerate 
 people of that time it worked like a soothing 
 balm ; their eyes and ears were sealed by age 
 and they could no longer understand Epicurus 
 and Epictetus. At such a time purity and 
 beneficence, large promises of future life, worked 
 sweetly and wholesomely. But for fresh young 
 barbarians Christianity is poison. It produces 
 a fundamental enfeeblement of such heroic, 
 childlike, and animal natures as the ancient 
 Germans, and to that enfeeblement, indeed, we 
 owe the revival of classic culture ; so that the 
 conclusion of the whole matter is here, as ever, 
 Nietzsche remarks, that " it is impossible to say 
 whether, in the language of Christianity, God 
 owes more thanks to the Devil, or the Devil to 
 God, for the way in which things have come 
 about." But in the interaction of the classic 
 spirit and the Christian spirit, Nietzsche's own 
 instincts were not on the side of Christianity, 
 and as the years went on he expresses himself 
 in ever more unmeasured language. He could 
 not take up the Initiation of Christ — the very 
 word " imitation " being, as indeed Michelet had 
 said before, the whole of Christianity — without 
 physical repugnance. And in the Gdtsenddni- 
 iiiening" he compares the Bible with the Laws 
 of Manu (though at the same time asserting that
 
 5 2 Affirmations. 
 
 it is a sin to name the two books in the same- 
 breath) : " The sun Hes on the whole book. All 
 those things on which Christianity vents its 
 bottomless vulgarity — procreation, for example, 
 woman, marriage — are here handled earnestly 
 and reverently, with love and trust. I know no 
 book in which so many tender and gracious 
 things are said about women as in the Laws of 
 Manu." Again in Der Aittichrist — which repre- 
 sents, I repeat, the unbalanced judgments of 
 his last period — he tells how he turns from Paul 
 with delight to Petronius, a book of which it 
 can be said e tutto festo, " immortally sound, 
 immortally serene." In the whole New Testa- 
 ment, he adds, there is only one figure we can 
 genuinely honour — that of Pilate. 
 
 On the whole, Nietzsche's attitude towards 
 Christianity was one of repulsion and antagon- 
 ism. At first he appears indifferent, then he 
 becomes calmly judicial, finally he is bitterly 
 hostile. He admits that Christianity possesses, 
 the virtues of a cunningly concocted narcotic to 
 soothe the leaden griefs and depressions of men- 
 whose souls are physiologically weak. But from 
 first to last there is no sign of any genuine 
 personal sympathy with the religion of the 
 poor in spirit. Epicureanism, the pagan doc- 
 trine of salvation, had in it an element of Greek 
 energy, but the Christian doctrine of salvation, 
 he declares, raises its sublime development of
 
 NietsscJie. 5 3 
 
 hedonism on a thoroughly morbid foundation. 
 Christianity hates the body ; the first act of 
 Christian triumph over the Moors, he recalls, 
 was to close the public baths which they had 
 everywhere erected. "With its contempt for 
 the body Christianity was the greatest mis- 
 fortune that ever befell humanity." And at the 
 end of Der Antichrist he sums up his concen- 
 trated hatred : " I condenm Christianity ; I raise 
 against the Christian Church the most terrible 
 accusation that any accuser has ever uttered. 
 It is to me the most profound of all thinkable 
 corruptions." 
 
 It is scarcely necessary to add that Nietzsche's 
 condemnation of Christianity extended to the 
 Christian God. He even went so far as to 
 assert that it was the development of Christian 
 morality itself — " the father-confessor sensitive- 
 ness of the Christian conscience translated and 
 sublimed into a scientific conscience" — which 
 had finally conquered the Christian God. He 
 held that polytheism had played an important 
 part in the evolution of culture. Gods, heroes, 
 supernatural beings generally, were inestimable 
 schoolmasters to bring us to the sovereignty of 
 the individual. Polytheism opened up divine 
 horizons of freedom to humanity, "Ye shall 
 be as gods." But it has not been so with 
 monotheism. The doctrine of a single God, in 
 whose presence all others were false gods,
 
 54 Affirviations. 
 
 favours stagnation and unity of type; mono- 
 theism has thus perhaps constituted " the 
 greatest danger which humanity has had to 
 meet in past ages." Nor are we yet freed from 
 its influence, " For centuries after Buddha 
 died men showed his shadow in a cave — a vast 
 terrible shadow. God is dead : but thousands 
 of years hence there will probably be caves in 
 which his shadow may yet be seen. And we — 
 we must go on fighting that shadow ! " How 
 deeply rooted Nietzsche believed faith in a god 
 to be is shown by the fantastic conclusion to 
 ZaratJmstra. A strange collection of Ueber- 
 vtenschen — the men of the future — are gathered 
 together in Zarathustra's cave : two kings, the 
 last of the popes — thrown out of work by 
 the death of God — and many miscellaneous 
 creatures, including a donkey. As Zarathustra 
 returns to his cave he hears the sound of prayer 
 and smells the odour of incense ; on entering 
 he finds the Uebennenschen on their knees in- 
 toning an extraordinary litany to the donkey, 
 who has "created us all in his own image." 
 
 In his opposition to the Christian faith and 
 the Christian God, Nietzsche by no means stands 
 alone, however independent he may have been 
 in the method and standpoint of his attack. 
 But in his opposition to Christian morality he 
 was more radically original. There is a very 
 general tendency among those who reject
 
 NietzscJie. 5 5 
 
 Christian theology to shore up the superstruc- 
 ture of Christian morahty which rests on that 
 theology, George Eliot, in her writings at all 
 events, has been an eloquent and distinguished 
 advocate of this process ; Mr. Myers, in an oft- 
 quoted passage, has described with considerable 
 melodramatic vigour the "sibyl in the gloom" 
 of the Trinity Fellows' Garden at Cambridge, 
 who withdrew God and Immortality from his 
 grasp, but, to his consternation, told him to go 
 on obeying Duty. What George Eliot pro- 
 posed was one of those compromises so dear 
 to our British minds. Nietzsche would none 
 of it. Hence his contemptuous treatment of 
 George Eliot, of J. S. Mill, of Herbert Spencer, 
 and so many more of our favourite intellectual 
 heroes who have striven to preserve Christian 
 morality while denying Christian theology. 
 Nietzsche regarded our current moral ideals, 
 whether formulated by bishops or by anarchists, 
 as alike founded on a Christian basis, and when 
 that foundation is sapped they cannot stand. 
 
 The motive of modern morality is pity, its 
 principle is altruistic, its motto is " Love your 
 neighbour as yourself," its ideal self-abnegation, 
 its end the greatest good of the greatest number. 
 All these things were abhorrent to Nietzsche, 
 or so far as he accepted them, it was in forms 
 which gave them new values. Modern morality, 
 he said, is founded on an extravagant dread of
 
 56 Affirmations. 
 
 pain, in ourselves primarily, secondarily in 
 others. Sympathy is fellow-suffering; to love 
 one's neighbour as oneself is to dread his pain 
 as we dread our own pain. The religion of love 
 is built upon the fear of pain. " On n'est bon 
 que par la pitie ; " the acceptance of that doc- 
 trine Nietzsche considers the chief outcome of 
 Christianity, although, he thinks, not essential 
 to Christianity, which rested on the egoistic 
 basis of personal salvation : " One thing is 
 needful." But it remains the most important 
 by-product of Christianity, and has ever been 
 gaining strength. Spinoza and Kant stood 
 firmly outside the stream, but the French free- 
 thinkers, from Voltaire onwards, were not to be 
 outdone in this direction by Christians, while 
 Comte with his " Vivre pour autrui" even out- 
 Christianised Christianity, and Schopenhauer in 
 Germany, J. S. Mill in England, carried on the 
 same doctrine. " The great question of life," 
 said Benjamin Constant in Adolphe — and it is 
 a saying that our finest emotions are quick to 
 echo — " is the pain that we cause." 
 
 Both the sympathetic man and the unsym- 
 pathetic man, Nietzsche argues, are egoists. But 
 the unsympathetic man he held to be a more 
 admirable kind of egoist. It is best to win the 
 strength that comes of experience and suffering, 
 and to allow others also to play their own cards 
 and win the same strength, shedding our tears
 
 Niet::;scJie. 5 7 
 
 in private, and abhorring soft-hearted ncss as the 
 foe of all manhood and courage. To call the 
 unsympathetic man " wicked," and the sympa- 
 thetic man "good," seemed to Nietzsche a 
 fashion in morals, a fashion which will have its 
 day. He believed he was the first to point out 
 the danger of the prevailing fashion as a sort 
 of moral impressionism, the outcome of the 
 hyperaesthesia peculiar to periods of decadence. 
 Not indeed that Christianity is, or could be, 
 carried out among us to its fullest extent : 
 " That would be a serious matter. If we were 
 ever to become the object to others of the same 
 stupidities and importunities which they expend 
 on themselves, we should flee wildly as soon as 
 we saw our 'neighbour' approach, and curse 
 sympathy as heartily as we now curse egoism." 
 Our deepest and most personal griefs, Nietzsche 
 remarks elsewhere, remain unrevealed and in- 
 comprehensible to nearly all other persons, 
 even to the " neighbour" who eats out of 
 the same dish with us. And even though 
 my grief should become visible, the dear sym- 
 pathetic neighbour can know nothing of its 
 complexity and results, of the organic economy 
 of my soul. That my grief may be bound up 
 with my happiness troubles him little. The 
 devotee of the "religion of pity" will heal my 
 sorrows without a moment's delay; he knows 
 not that the path to my Heaven must lie
 
 58 Affirmatio7ts. 
 
 through my own Hell, that happiness and 
 unhappiness are twin sisters who grow up to- 
 gether, or remain stunted together. 
 
 " Morality is the mob-instinct working in the 
 individual." It rests, Nietzsche asserts, on two 
 thoughts : " the community is worth more than 
 the individual," and " a permanent advantage is 
 better than a temporary advantage ; " whence 
 it follows that all the advantages of the com- 
 munity are preferable to those of the individual. 
 Morality thus becomes a string of negative 
 injunctions, a series of " Thou shalt nots," with 
 scarcely a positive command amongst them ; 
 witness the well-known table of Jewish com- 
 mandments. Now Nietzsche could not endure 
 mere negative virtues. He resented the subtle 
 change which has taken place in the very 
 meaning of the word " virtue," and which has 
 perverted it from an expression of positive 
 masculine qualities into one of merely negative 
 feminine qualities. In his earliest essay he 
 referred to " active sin " as the Promethean 
 virtue which distinguishes the Aryans. The 
 only moral codes that commended themselves 
 to him were those that contained positive com- 
 mands alone : " Do this ! Do it with all your 
 heart, and all your strength, and all your 
 dreams ! — and all other things shall be taken 
 away from you ! " For if we are truly devoted 
 to the things that are good to do we need
 
 Nietzsche. 59 
 
 trouble ourselves little about the things that are 
 good to leave undone. 
 
 Nietzsche compared himself to a mole boring 
 down into the ground and undermining what 
 philosophers have for a couple of thousand years 
 considered the very surest ground to build on 
 — the trust in morals. One of his favourite 
 methods of attack is by the analysis of the 
 " conscience." He points out that whatever we 
 were regularly required to do in youth by those 
 we honoured and feared created our "good 
 conscience." The dictates of conscience, how- 
 ever urgent, thus have no true validity as 
 regards the person who experiences them. 
 " But," some one protests, " must we not trust 
 our feelings ? " " Yes," replies Nietzsche, " trust 
 your feelings, but still remember that the in- 
 spiration which springs from feelings is the 
 grandchild of an opinion, often a false one, and 
 in any case not your own. To trust one's 
 feelings — that means to yield more obedience 
 to one's grandfather and grandmother and their 
 grandparents than to the gods within our ozvn 
 breasts: our own reason and our own experi- 
 ence." Faith in authority is thus the source of 
 conscience; it is not the voice of God in the 
 human heart but the voice of man. The sphere 
 of the moral is the sphere of tradition, and a 
 man is moral because he is dependent on a 
 tradition and not on himself. Originally every-
 
 6o Affirmations. 
 
 thing was within the sjDhere of morals, and it 
 was only possible to escape from that sphere by 
 becoming a law-giver, medicine-man, demigod 
 — that is to say by making morals. To be 
 customary is to be moral, — I still closely follow 
 Nietzsche's thought and expression, — to be 
 individual is to be wicked. Every kind of 
 originality involves a bad conscience. Nietzsche 
 insists with fine eloquence, again and again, 
 that every good gift that has been given to man 
 put a bad conscience into the heart of the giver. 
 Every good thing was once new, unaccustomed, 
 immoral, and gnawed at the vitals of the finder 
 like a worm. Primitive men lived in hordes, 
 and must obey the horde-voice within them. 
 Every new doctrine is vv-ickcd. Science has 
 always come into the world with a bad con- 
 science, with the emotions of a criminal, at least 
 of a smuggler. No man can be disobedient to 
 custom and not be immoral, and feel that he is 
 immoral. The artist, the actor, the merchant, 
 the freethinker, the discoverer, were once 
 all criminals, and were persecuted, crushed, 
 rendered morbid, as all persons must be when 
 their virtues are not the virtues idealised by the 
 community. The whole phenomena of morals 
 are animal-like, and have their origin in the 
 search for prey and the avoidance of pursuit. 
 
 Progress is thus a gradual emancipation from 
 morals. We have to recognise the services of
 
 Nietzsche. 6 1 
 
 the men who fight in this stnrj^glc against 
 morals, and who arc crushed into the ranks of 
 criminals. Not that we need pity them. " It 
 is a new justice that is called for, a new 
 mot (Tordye. We need new philosophers. The 
 moral world also is round. The moral world 
 also has its antipodes, and the antipodes also 
 have their right to exist. A new world remains 
 to be discovered — and more than one ! Hoist 
 sail, O philosophers ! " 
 
 "Men must become both better mid wickeder^ 
 So spake Zarathustra; or, as he elsewhere has 
 it, " It is with man as with a tree, the higher he 
 would climb into the brightness above, the more 
 vigorously his roots must strive earthwards, 
 downwards, into the darkness and the depths — 
 into the wicked." Wickedness is just as in- 
 dispensable as goodness. It is the ploughshare 
 of wickedness which turns up and fertilises the 
 exhausted fields of goodness. We must no 
 longer be afraid to be wicked; we must no 
 longer be afraid to be hard. " Only the noblest 
 things are very hard. This new command, O 
 my brothers, I lay upon you — become hard." 
 
 In renewing our moral ideas we need also to 
 renew our whole conception of the function and 
 value of morals. Nietzsche advises moralists 
 to change their tactics: " Deny moral values, 
 deprive them of the applause of the crowd, 
 create obstacles to their free circulation; let
 
 62 Affiymations. 
 
 them be the shame-faced secrets of a few 
 solitary souls; forbid morality! In so doin^ 
 you may perhaps accredit these things among 
 the only men whom one need have on one's 
 side, I mean heroic men. Let it be said of 
 morality to-day as Meister Eckard said: *I 
 pray God that he may rid me of God ! ' " We 
 have altogether over-estimated the importance 
 of morality. Christianity knew better when 
 it placed " grace " above morals, and so also 
 did Buddhism. And if we turn to literature, 
 Nietzsche maintains, it is a vast mistake to 
 suppose that, for instance, great tragedies have, 
 or were intended to have, any moral effect. 
 Look at Macbeth, at Tristan unci Isolde, at 
 CEdipiLs. In all these cases it would have been 
 easy to make guilt the pivot of the drama. But 
 the great poet is in love with passion. " He 
 calls to us: It is the charm of charms, this 
 exciting, changing, dangerous, gloomy, yet often 
 sun-filled existence ! It is an adventure to live 
 — take this side or that, it will always be the 
 same ! ' So he speaks to us out of a restless 
 and vigorous time, half drunken and dazed with 
 excess of blood and energy, out of a wickeder 
 time than ours is; and we are obliged to set to 
 rights the aim of a Shakespeare and make it 
 righteous, that is to say, to misunderstand it." 
 
 We have to recognise a diversity of moral 
 ideals. Nothing is more profoundly dangerous
 
 Nietzsche. 63 
 
 than, with Kant, to create impersonal categorical 
 imperatives after the Chinese fashion, to general- 
 ise "virtue," "duty," and "goodness," and sacri- 
 fice them to the Moloch of abstraction. " Every- 
 man must find his own virtue, his own categori- 
 cal imperative ; " it must be founded on inner 
 necessity, on deep personal choice. Only the 
 simpleton says : " Men ought to be like this or 
 like that." The real world presents to us a 
 dazzling wealth of types, a prodigious play of 
 forms and metamorphoses. Yet up comes a 
 poor devil of a moralist, and says to us : " No ! 
 men ought to be something quite different!" 
 and straightway he paints a picture of himself 
 on the wall, and exclaims : " Ecce homo ! " But 
 one thing is needful, that a man should attain 
 the fullest satisfaction. Every man must be his 
 own moralist. 
 
 These views might be regarded as " lax," as 
 predisposing to easy self-indulgence. Nietzsche 
 would have smiled at such a notion. Not yield- 
 ing, but mastering, was the key to his personal 
 morality. " Every day is badly spent," he said, 
 "in which a man has not once denied himself; 
 this gymnastic is inevitable if a man will retain 
 the joy of being his own master." The four 
 cardinal virtues, as Nietzsche understood morals, 
 are sincerity, courage, generosity, and courtesy. 
 " Do what you will," said Zarathustra, " but first 
 be one of those who are able to will. Love your
 
 64 Affirmations. 
 
 neighbour as yourself — but first be one of those 
 who are able to love themselves." And again 
 Zarathustra spoke : " He who belongs to me 
 must be strong of bone and light of foot, eager 
 for fight and for feast, no sulker, no John o' 
 Dreams, as ready for the hardest task as for a 
 feast, sound and hale. The best things belong 
 to me and mine, and if men give us nothing, 
 then we take them : the best food, the purest 
 sky, the strongest thoughts, the fairest women ! " 
 There was no desire here to suppress effort and 
 pain. That Nietzsche regarded as a mark of 
 modern Christian morals. It is pain, more pain 
 and deeper, that we need. The discipline of 
 suffering alone creates man's pre-eminence. 
 " Man unites in himself the creature and the 
 creator: there is in him the stuff of things, 
 the fragmentary and the superfluous, clay, mud, 
 madness, chaos ; but there is also in him the 
 creator, the sculptor, the hardness of the 
 hammer, the divine blessedness of the spectator 
 on the seventh day." Do you pity, he asks, 
 what must be fashioned, broken, forged, refined 
 as by fire? But our pity is spent on one thing 
 alone, the most effeminate of all weaknesses — 
 pity. This was the source of Nietzsche's 
 admiration for war, and indifference to its 
 horror ; he regarded it as the symbol of that 
 spiritual warfare and bloodshed in which to him 
 all human progress consisted. He might, had
 
 Nietzsche. 65 
 
 he pleased, have said with the Jew and the 
 Christian, that without shedding of blood there 
 shall be no remission of sins. But with a 
 difference, for as he looked at the matter, every 
 man must be his own saviour, and it is his own 
 blood that must be shed ; there is no salvation 
 by proxy. That was expressed in his favourite 
 motto : Virescit volnere virtus. 
 
 Nietzsche's ideal man is the man of Epictetus, 
 as he describes him in Morgenr'dthe, the laconic, 
 brave, self-contained man, not lusting after ex- 
 pression like the modern idealist The man 
 whom Epictetus loved hated fanaticism, he 
 hated notoriety, he knew how to smile. And 
 the best was, added Nietzsche, that he had no 
 fear of God before his eyes ; he believed firmly 
 in reason, and relied, not on divine grace, but 
 on himself. Of all Shakespeare's plays Julius 
 CcBsar seemed to Nietzsche the greatest, because 
 it glorifies Brutus ; the finest thing that can be 
 said in Shakespeare's honour, Nietzsche thought, 
 was that — aided perhaps by some secret and 
 intimate experience — he believed in Brutus and 
 the virtues that Brutus personified. In course 
 of time, however, while not losing his sympathy 
 with Stoicism, it was Epicureanism, the heroic 
 aspects of Epicureanism, which chiefly appealed 
 to Nietzsche. He regarded Epicurus as one of 
 the world's greatest men, the discoverer of the 
 heroically idyllic method of living a philosophy; 
 
 5
 
 66 Affirinaiions. 
 
 for one to whom happiness could never be more 
 than an unending self-discipline, and whose ideal 
 of life had ever been that of a spiritual nomad, 
 the methods of Epicurus seemed to yield the 
 finest secrets of good living. Socrates, with his 
 joy in life and in himself, was also an object of 
 Nietzsche's admiration. Among later thinkers, 
 Helvetius appealed to him strongly. Goethe and 
 Napoleon were naturally among his favourite 
 heroes, as were Alcibiades and Caesar. The 
 latest great age of heroes was to him the Italian 
 Renaissance. Then came Luther, opposing the 
 rights of the peasants, yet himself initiating a 
 peasants' revolt of the intellect, and preparing 
 the way for that shallow plebeianism of the 
 spirit which has marked the last two centuries. 
 
 Latterly, in tracing the genealogy of modern 
 morals, Nietzsche's opinions hardened into a 
 formula. He recognised three stages of moral 
 evolution : first, the /r^-w^/vz/ period of primitive 
 times, when the beast of prey was the model of 
 conduct, and the worth of an action was judged 
 by its results. Then came the moral period, 
 when the worth of an action was judged not by 
 its results, but by its origin ; this period has 
 been the triumph of what Nietzsche calls slave- 
 morality, the morality of the mob; the goodness 
 and badness of actions is determined by atavism, 
 at best by survivals ; every man is occupied in 
 laying down laws for his neighbour instead of
 
 Nietzsche. 67 
 
 for himself, and all arc tamed and chastised into 
 weakness in order that they may be able to 
 obey these prescriptions. Nietzsche ingeniously 
 connected his slave-morality with the accepted 
 fact that for many centuries the large, fair- 
 haired aristocratic race has been dying out in 
 Europe, and the older down-trodden race- 
 short, dark, and broad-headed— has been slowly 
 gaining predominance. But now we stand at 
 the threshold of the extra-moral period. Slave- 
 morality, Nietzsche asserted, is about to give way 
 to master-morality; the lion will take the place 
 of the camel. The instincts of life, refusing to 
 allow that anything is forbidden, will again 
 assert themselves, sweeping away the feeble 
 negative democratic morality of our time. The 
 day has now come for the man who is able to 
 rule himself, and who will be tolerant to others 
 not out of his weakness, but out of his strength; 
 to him nothing is forbidden, for he has passed 
 beyond goodness and beyond wickedness. 
 
 III. 
 
 So far I have attempted to follow with little 
 or no comment what seems to me the main 
 current of Nietzsche's thought. It may be 
 admitted that there is some question as to 
 which is the main current. For my own part 
 I have no hesitation in asserting that it is the
 
 68 Affirmations. 
 
 current which expands to its fullest extent 
 between 1876 and 1883 in what I term 
 Nietzsche's second or middle period ; up to 
 then he had not gained complete individuality; 
 afterwards began the period of uncontrolled 
 aberrations. Thus I am inclined to pass 
 lightly over the third period, during which the 
 conception of "master-morality" attained its 
 chief and most rigid emphasis, although I 
 gather that to Nietzsche's disciples as to his 
 foes this conception seems of primary import- 
 ance. This idea of "master-morality" is in 
 fact a solid fossilised chunk, easy to handle for 
 friendly or unfriendly hands. The earlier and 
 more living work — the work of the man who 
 truly said that it is with thinkers as with 
 snakes : those that cannot shed their skins die 
 — is less obviously tangible. So the " master- 
 morality" it is that your true Nietzschian is 
 most likely to close his fist over. It would be 
 unkind to say more, for Nietzsche himself has 
 been careful to scatter through his works, on 
 the subject of disciples and followers generally, 
 very scathing remarks which must be sufficiently 
 painful to any faithful Nietzschian. 
 
 We are helped in understanding Nietzsche's 
 philosophic significance if we understand his 
 precise ideal. The psychological analysis of 
 every great thinker's work seems to reveal some 
 underlying fundamental image or thought —
 
 Nietzsche. 6g 
 
 often enough simple and homely in character — 
 which he has carried with him into the most 
 abstract regions. Thus Fraser has found good 
 reason to suppose that Hegel's main ideas were 
 suggested by the then recent discovery of 
 galvanism. In Nietzsche's case this key is 
 to be found in the persistent image of an 
 attitude. As a child, his sister tells us, he had 
 been greatly impressed by a rope-dancer who 
 had performed his feats over the market-place at 
 Naumburg, and throughout his work, as soon as 
 he had attained to real self-expression, we may 
 trace the image of the dancer. " I do not know," 
 he somewhere says, " what the mind of a philo- 
 sopher need desire more than to be a good dancer. 
 For dancing is his ideal, his art also, indeed 
 his only piety, his 'divine worship.'" In all 
 Nietzsche's best work we are conscious of 
 this ideal of the dancer, strong, supple, vigorous, 
 yet harmonious and well-balanced. It is the 
 dance of the athlete and the acrobat rather than 
 the make-believe of the ball-room, and behind 
 the easy equipoise of such dancing lie patient 
 training and effort. The chief character of 
 good dancing is its union of the maximum 
 of energetic movement with the maximum of 
 well-balanced grace. The whole muscular 
 system is alive to restrain any excess, so that 
 however wild and free the movement may 
 seem it is always measured ; excess would
 
 /O Affirmations. 
 
 mean ignominious collapse. When in his later 
 years Nietzsche began, as he said, to " philoso- 
 phise with the hammer," and to lay about him 
 savagely at every hollow " idol " within reach, 
 he departed from his better ideal of dancing, 
 and his thinking became intemperate, reckless, 
 desperate. 
 
 Nietzsche had no system, probably because 
 the idea that dominated his thought was an 
 image, and not a formula, the usual obsession 
 of philosophers, such as may be clapped on the 
 universe at any desired point. He remarks in 
 one place that a philosopher believes the worth 
 of his philosophy to lie in the structure, but 
 that what we ultimately value are the finely 
 carven and separate stones with which he 
 builded, and he was clearly anxious to supply 
 the elaborated stones direct. In time he 
 came to call himself a realist, using the term, 
 in no philosophic sense, to indicate his reverence 
 for the real and essential facts of life, the things 
 that conduce to fine living. He desired to 
 detach the " bad conscience " from the things 
 that are merely wicked traditionally, and to 
 attach it to the things that are anti-natural, 
 anti-instinctive, anti-sensuous. He sought to 
 inculcate veneration for the deep-lying sources 
 of life, to take us down to the bed-rock of life, 
 the rock whence we are hewn. He held that 
 man, as a reality, with all his courage and
 
 Nietzsche. 7^ 
 
 cunning, is himself worthy of honour, but that 
 man's ideals are absurd and morbid, the mere 
 dregs in the drained cup of life; or, as he 
 eventually said— and it is a saying which will 
 doubtless seal his fate in the minds of many 
 estimable persons— man's ideals are his only 
 partie honteuse, of which we may avoid any 
 close examination. Nietzsche's " realism " was 
 thus simply a vigorous hatred of all dreaming 
 that tends to depreciate the value of life, 
 and a vivid sense that man himself is the ens 
 realisshniim. 
 
 A noteworthy point in Nietzsche's concep- 
 tion of philosophy is his increasingly clear 
 conception of its fundamentally psychological 
 character. I mean to say that Nietzsche knows 
 that a man's philosophy, to be real, must be the 
 inevitable outcome of his own psychic con- 
 stitution. It is a point that philosophers have 
 never seen. Perhaps Nietzsche was the first, 
 however hesitatingly, to realise it. It is only 
 in the recognition of this fact that the eirenicon 
 of philosophies— and one might add, of religions 
 —can ever be found. The philosopher of old 
 said: "This is my conception of the universe;" 
 it was well. But he was apt to add: " It is t/ie 
 conception of the universe," and so put himself 
 hopelessly in the wrong. It is as undignified 
 to think another man's philosophy as to wear 
 another man's cast-off clothes. Only the poor
 
 72 Affirmations, 
 
 in spirit or in purse can find any satisfaction in 
 doing either. A philosophy or reh'gion can 
 only fit the man for whom it was made. 
 "There has only been one Christian," as 
 Nietzsche put it, " and he died on the cross." 
 But why waste energy in trying to manufacture 
 a second Christian ? We may be very sure 
 that we can never find another Christian whom 
 Christianity would fit so admirably as it once 
 fitted Christ. Why not rest content with 
 Christ? Let Brown be a Brownite and Robin- 
 son a Robinsonian. It is not good that they 
 should exchange their philosophies, or that 
 either should insist on thrusting his threadbare 
 misfits on Jones, who prefers to be metaphysi- 
 cally naked. When men have generally begun 
 to realise this the world will be a richer and 
 an honester world, and a pleasanter one as well. 
 That Nietzsche had vaguely begun to realise it 
 seems to me his chief claim to distinction in the 
 purely philosophic field. 
 
 To recognise the free and direct but dis- 
 connected nature of Nietzsche's many-sided 
 vision of the world is to lessen the force of his 
 own antagonisms as well as of the antagonisms 
 he has excited. Much of Nietzsche's work, 
 especially in the third period, is the utterance of 
 profound half-truths, keenly and personally felt, 
 but still half-truths of which he has himself 
 elsewhere supplied the complements. The
 
 Nietzsche. 73 
 
 reason is that during that period he was not 
 so much expressing himself as appealing pas- 
 sionately against himself to those failing forces 
 whose tonic influence he thirsted after. The 
 hardness, the keen sword, the reckless energy 
 he idealised were the things that had slipped 
 utterly away and left him defenceless to the 
 world. He grew to worship cruel strength as 
 the consumptive Keats, the sickly Thoreau, loved 
 beauty and health, with " the desire of the moth 
 for the star." Such an attitude has its rightness 
 and power, so long as we understand it, though 
 it comes short of the serenity of the greatest 
 spirits who seek, like Goethe, to live at each 
 moment in the whole. The master-morality of 
 Nietzsche's later days, on which friends and foes 
 have alike insisted, is a case in point. This 
 appears to have been hailed, or resented, as a 
 death-blow struck at the modern democratic 
 regime. To take a broad view of Nietzsche's 
 philosophic attitude is to realise that both views 
 are alike out of place. On this matter, as on 
 many others, Nietzsche moved in a line which 
 led him to face an opposite direction in his 
 decay from that which he faced in his imma- 
 turity. He began by regarding democracy as 
 the standard of righteousness, and ended by 
 asserting that the world only exists for the pro- 
 duction of a few great men. It would be foolish 
 to regard either of the termini as the last out-
 
 74 Affinnations. 
 
 post of wisdom. But in the passage between 
 these two points many excellent things are said 
 by the way. Nietzsche was never enamoured 
 of socialism or democracy for its own sake; 
 reasonably enough, he will not even admit that 
 we have yet attained democracy; though the 
 horses, indeed, are new, as yet "the roads are 
 the same old roads, the wheels the same old 
 wheels." But he points out that the value of 
 democracy lies in its guarantee of individual 
 freedom: Cyclopean walls are being built, with 
 much toil and dust, but the walls will be a 
 rampart against any invasion of barbarians or 
 any new slavery, against the despotism of capital 
 and the despotism of party. The workers may 
 regard the walls as an end in themselves; we 
 are free to value them for the fine flowers of 
 culture which will grow in the gardens they 
 inclose. To me, at least, this attitude of 
 Nietzsche's maturity seems the ample justifi- 
 cation of democracy. 
 
 Nietzsche was not, however, greatly interested 
 in questions of government ; he was far more 
 deeply interested in questions of morals. In 
 his treatment of morals — no doubt chiefly in 
 the last period — there is a certain element of 
 paradox. It must again be pointed out that 
 this is to be explained by the organic demands 
 of Nietzsche's own nature. In attacking the 
 excessive tendency to sympathy which he
 
 Nietzsche. 75 
 
 seemed to see around him he was hygienically 
 defending himself from his own excessive sym- 
 pathy. His sister quotes with a smile the 
 declaration that his Paradise lay beneath the 
 shadow of his sword ; we scarcely need her 
 assurance of his tender-hearted sensitiveness. 
 He could attack relentlessly, but he never 
 attacked a person save as the symbol of what 
 he regarded as a false principle held in un- 
 deserved honour. When he realised that the 
 subject of such attack was really a living person 
 he was full of remorse. He attacked Strauss 
 because Strauss was the successful representa- 
 tive of a narrow ideal of culture ; a few months 
 later Strauss died, having, it now appears, 
 borne the onset philosophically enough, and 
 Nietzsche was full of grief lest he had em- 
 bittered the dying man's last hours. It was 
 because he had himself suffered from the 
 excesses of his own sympathy that he was 
 able so keenly to analyse the secrets of sym- 
 pathy. He spoke as the Spanish poet says 
 that every poet — and indeed every seer — must 
 always speak, /^ir la hoca de sic hen'da, through 
 the mouth of his wound. That is why his voice 
 is often so poignantly intimate ; it is also why 
 we sometimes find this falsetto note of paradox. 
 In his last period, Nietzsche grows altogether 
 impatient of morals, calls himself an immoralist, 
 fervently exhorts us to become wickeder. But
 
 y6 Affirmations. 
 
 if any young disciple came to the teacher 
 asking, "What must I do to become wickeder?" 
 it docs not appear that Nietzsche bade him to 
 steal, bear false witness, commit adultery, or 
 do any other of the familiar and commonly- 
 accepted wickednesses. Nietzsche preached 
 wickedness with the same solemn exaltation 
 that Carducci lauded Satan. What he desired 
 was far indeed from any rehabilitation of easy 
 vice ; it was the justification of neglected and 
 unsanctified virtues. 
 
 At the same time, and while Nietzsche's 
 immoralist is just as austere a person as the 
 mere moralists who have haunted the world 
 for many thousand years, it is clear that 
 Nietzsche wished strictly to limit the sphere 
 of morals. He never fails to point out how 
 large a region of life and art lies legitimately out- 
 side the moral jurisdiction. In an age in which 
 many moralists desire to force morals into every 
 part of life and art — and even assume a certain 
 air of virtue in so doing — the " immoralist " who 
 lawfully vindicates any region for free cultivation 
 is engaged in a proper and wholesome task. 
 
 No doubt, however, there will be some to 
 question the value of such a task. Nietzsche 
 the immoralist can scarcely be welcome in every 
 camp, although he remains always a force to 
 be reckoned with. The same may be said of 
 Nietzsche the freethinker. He was, perhaps,
 
 Nietzsche. yj 
 
 the typical freethinker of the age that comes 
 after Renan. Nietzsche had nothing of Renan's 
 genial scepticism and smiling disillusionment; 
 he was less tender to human weakness, for all 
 his long Christian ancestry less Christian, than 
 the Breton seminarist remained to the last. He 
 seems to have shaken himself altogether free of 
 Christianity — so free, that except in his last 
 period he even speaks of it without bitterness 
 — though by no means wholly untouched 
 by that nostalgia of the cloister which now 
 and then pursues even those of us who are 
 farthest from any faith in Christian dogma. 
 He never sought, as among ourselves Pater 
 sought, the germ of Christianity in things 
 pagan, the undying essence of paganism in 
 things Christian. Heathen as he was, I do 
 not think even Heine's visions of the gods in 
 exile could have touched him ; he never felt 
 the charm of fading and faded things. It is 
 remarkable. It is scarcely less remarkable that, 
 far as he was from Christianity, he was equall\' 
 far from what we usually call "paganism," 
 the pasteboard paganism of easy self-indulg- 
 ence and cheerful irresponsibility. It was not 
 so that he understood Hellenism. Matthew 
 Arnold once remarked that the Greeks were 
 never sick or sad. Nietzsche knew better. 
 The greater part of Greek literature bears 
 witness that the Hellenes were for ever
 
 78 Affirmations. 
 
 wrestling with the problems of pain. And 
 none who came after have more poignantly- 
 uttered the pangs of human affairs, or more 
 sweetly the consolations of those pangs, than 
 the great disciples of the Greeks who created 
 the Roman world. The classic world of nymphs 
 and fauns is an invention of the moderns. The 
 real classic world, like the modern world, was 
 a world of suffering. The difference lay in the 
 method of facing that suffering. Nietzsche 
 chose the classic method from no desire to 
 sport with Amaryllis in the shade, but because 
 he had known forms of torture for which the 
 mild complacencies of modern faith seemed to 
 offer no relief. If we must regard Nietzsche 
 as a pagan, it is as the Pascal of paganism. 
 The freethinker, it is true, was more cheerful 
 and hopeful than the believer, but there is the 
 same tragic sincerity, the same restless self- 
 torment, the same sense of the abyss.^ 
 
 ^ Pater's description of the transition we may trace from the 
 easy prose of Pascal's first book to the " perpetual agonia " of 
 his later work, applies with scarcely a change to the similar 
 transition in Nietzsche : — " Everywhere in the Letters he had 
 seemed so great a master — a master of himself — never at a loss, 
 taking the conflict so lightly, with so light a heart : in the great 
 Atlantean travail of the Thoughts his feet sometimes ' are almost 
 gone.' In his soul's agony theological abstractions seem to 
 become personal powers. ... In truth, into his typical 
 diagnosis, as it may seem, of the tragedy of the human soul, 
 there have passed not merely the personal feelings, the tempera- 
 ment of an individual, but his malady also, a physical malady."
 
 Nietzsche. 79 
 
 There still remains Nietzsche, the apostle of 
 culture, the philosopher engaged in the criticism 
 of life. From first to last, wherever you open 
 his books, you light on sayings that cut to the 
 core of the questions that every modern thinking 
 man must face. I take, almost at random, a 
 few passages from a single book : of convictions 
 he writes that "a man possesses opinions as he 
 possesses fish, in so far as he owns a fishing-net; 
 a man must go fishing and be lucky, then he 
 has his own fish, his own opinions ; I speak of 
 living opinions, living fish. Some men are 
 content to possess fossils in their cabinets — 
 and convictions in their heads." Of the 
 problem of the relation of science to culture 
 he says well : " The best and wholesomest 
 thing in science, as in mountains, is the air that 
 blows there. It is because of that air that we 
 spiritual weaklings avoid and defame science;" 
 and he points out that the work of science — 
 with its need for sincerity, infinite patience, 
 complete self-abnegation — calls for men of 
 nobler make than poetry needs. When we 
 have learnt to trust science and to learn from 
 it, then it will be possible so to tell natural 
 history that " every one who hears it is inspired 
 to health and gladness as the heir and continuer 
 of humanity." This is how he rebukes those 
 foolish persons who grow impatient with critics : 
 " Remember that critics are insects who only
 
 8o Affirmations. 
 
 sting to live and not to hurt : they want our 
 blood and not our pain." And he utters this 
 wise saying, himself forgetting it in later years: 
 " Growth in wisdom may be exactly measured 
 by decrease in bitterness." Nietzsche desires 
 to prove nothing, and is reckless of consistency. 
 He looks at every question that comes before 
 him with the same simple, intent, penetrative 
 gaze, and whether the aspects that he reveals 
 are new or old, he seldom fails to bring us a 
 fresh stimulus. Culture, as he understood it, 
 consists for the modern man in the task of 
 choosing the simple and indispensable things 
 from the chaos of crude material which to-day 
 overwhelms us. The man who will live at the 
 level of the culture of his time is like the juggler 
 who must keep a number of plates spinning in 
 the air ; his life must be a constant training in 
 suppleness and skill so that he may be a good 
 athlete. But he is also called on to exert his 
 skill in the selection and limitation of his task. 
 Nietzsche is greatly occupied with the simpli- 
 fication of culture. Our suppleness and skill 
 must be exercised alone on the things that are 
 vital, essential, primitive ; the rest may be 
 thrown aside. He is for ever challenging the 
 multifarious materials for culture, testing them 
 with eye and hand ; we cannot prove them too 
 severely, he seems to say, nor cast aside too 
 contemptuously the things that a real man has
 
 Nietzsche. 8 1 
 
 no need of for fine living. What must I do to 
 be saved? What do I need for the best and 
 fullest life? — that is the everlasting question 
 that the teacher of life is called upon to answer. 
 And we cannot be too grateful to Nietzsche for 
 the stern penetration — the more acute for his 
 ever-present sense of the limits of energy — with 
 which he points from amid the mass to the 
 things which most surely belong to our eternal 
 peace. 
 
 Nietzsche's style has often been praised. The 
 style was certainly the man. There can be 
 little doubt, moreover, that there is scarcely any 
 other German style to compare with it, though 
 such eminence means far less in a country 
 where style has rarely been cultivated than it 
 would mean in France or even England. 
 Sallust awoke his sense for style, and may 
 account for some characteristics of his style. 
 He also enthusiastically admired Horace as the 
 writer who had produced the maximum of energy 
 with the minimum of material. A concentrated 
 Roman style, significant and weighty at every 
 point, cere perennius, was always his ideal. Cer- 
 tainly the philologist's aptitudes helped here to 
 teach him the value and force of words, as jewels 
 for the goldsmith to work with, and not as mere 
 worn-out counters to slip through the fingers. 
 One may call it a muscular style, a style 
 wrought with the skilful strength of hand and 
 
 6
 
 82 Affirmations. 
 
 arm. It scarcely appeals to the ear. It lacks 
 the restful simplicity of the greatest masters, 
 the plangent melody, the seemingly unconscious 
 magic quivering along our finest-fibred nerves. 
 Such effects we seem to hear now and again in 
 Schopenhauer, but rarely or never from any 
 other German. This style is titanic rather than 
 divine, but the titanic virtues it certainly pos- 
 sesses in fullest measure : robust and well-tem- 
 pered vigour, concentration, wonderful plastic 
 force in moulding expression. It becomes 
 over-emphatic at last. When Nietzsche threw 
 aside the dancer's ideal in order to " philosophise 
 with the hammer," the result on his style was 
 as disastrous as on his thought ; both alike took 
 on the violent and graceless character of the 
 same implement. He speaks indeed of the 
 virtue of hitting a nail on the head, but it 
 is a less skilled form of virtue than good 
 dancing. 
 
 Whether he was dancing or hammering, how- 
 ever, Nietzsche certainly converted the whole of 
 himself into his work, as in his view every philo- 
 sopher is bound to do, " for just that art of 
 transformation is philosophy." That he was 
 entirely successful in being a " real man " one 
 may doubt. His excessive sensitiveness to the 
 commonplace in life, and his deficiency in the 
 sexual instinct — however highly he may have 
 rated the importance of sex in life — largely cut
 
 Nietzsche, 83 
 
 him off from true fellowship with the men who 
 are most " real " to us. He was less tolerant 
 and less humane than his master Goethe ; his 
 incisive insight, and, in many respects, better 
 intellectual equipment, are more than compen- 
 sated by this lack of breadth. But, as his friend 
 the historian Burckhardt has said, he worked 
 mightily for the increase of independence in 
 the world. Every man, indeed, works with 
 the limitations of his qualities, just as we all 
 struggle beneath the weight of the superin- 
 cumbent atmosphere ; our defects are even a 
 part of our qualities, and it would be foolish to 
 quarrel with them. Nietzsche succeeded in 
 being himself, and it was a finely rare success. 
 Whether he was a "real man" matters less. With 
 passionate sincerity he expressed his real self and 
 his best self, abhorring, on the one hand, what 
 with Voltaire and Verlaine he called "litera- 
 ture," and, on the other, all that mere indigested 
 material, the result of mental dyspepsia, of 
 which he regarded Carlyle as the supreme 
 warning. A man's real self, as he repeated so 
 often, consists of the things which he has truly 
 digested and assimilated ; he must always " con- 
 quer" his opinions; it is only such conquests 
 which he has the right to report to men as his 
 own. His thoughts are born of his pain ; he 
 has imparted to them of his own blood, his own 
 pleasure and torment. Nietzsche himself held
 
 84 Ajjirmations. 
 
 that sufifcring' and even disease are almost in- 
 dispensable to the philosopher ; great pain is 
 the final emancipator of the spirit," those great 
 slow pains that take their time, and burn us up 
 like green wood. " I doubt whether such pain 
 betters us," he remarks, " but I know that it 
 deepens us." That is the stuff of Nietzsche's 
 Hellenism, as expressed in the most light- 
 hearted of his books. Virescit volmre virtus. 
 It is that which makes him, when all is said, a 
 great critic of life. 
 
 It is a consolation to many — I have seen it so 
 stated in a respectable review — that Nietzsche 
 went mad. No doubt also it was once a con- 
 solation to many- that Socrates was poisoned, 
 that Jesus was crucified, that Bruno was burnt. 
 But hemlock and the cross and the stake 
 proved sorry weapons against the might of 
 ideas even in those days, and there is no reason 
 to suppose that a doctor's certificate will be 
 more effectual in our own. Of old time we 
 killed our great men as soon as i^heir visionary 
 claims became inconvenient ; now, in our mercy, 
 we leave the tragedy of genius to unroll itself to 
 the bitter close. The devils to whom the modern 
 Faustus is committed have waxed cunning with 
 the ages. Nietzsche has met, in its most re- 
 lentless form, the fate of Pascal and Swift and 
 Rousseau. That fact may carry what weight it 
 will in any final estimate of his place as a moral
 
 Nietzsche. 85 
 
 teacher : it cannot touch his position as an 
 aboriginal force. He remains in the first rank 
 of the distinguished and significant personalities 
 our century has produced.
 
 86 
 
 CASANOVA. 
 
 There are few more delightful books in the 
 world than Casanova's Manoires. — That is a 
 statement I have long vainly sought to see in 
 print. It is true, one learns casually that various 
 eminent literary personages have cherished a 
 high regard for this autobiography, have even 
 considered it the ideal autobiography, that 
 Wendell Holmes was once heard defending 
 Casanova, that Thackeray found him good 
 enough to steal from. But these eminent 
 personages — and how many more we shall 
 never know — locked up the secret of their 
 admiration for this book in some remote casket 
 of their breasts ; they never confided it to the 
 cynical world. Every properly constituted 
 "man of letters" has always recognised that 
 any public allusion to Casanova should begin 
 and end with lofty moral reprobation of his 
 unspeakable turpitude. 
 
 No doubt whatever — and this apart from the 
 question as to whether his autobiography should 
 be counted as moral or immoral literature — 
 Casanova delivered himself bound into the
 
 Casanova. 87 
 
 hands of the moralists. He recognised this ; 
 his autobiography, as he himself truly said, 
 was " a confession, if ever there was one," But 
 he wrote at the end of a long and full life, in the 
 friendly seclusion of a lonely Bohemian castle, 
 when all things had become indifferent to him 
 save the vivid memories of the past. It 
 mattered little to him that the whirlwind of 
 1789 had just swept away the eighteenth 
 century together with the moral maxims that 
 passed current in that century. We have to 
 accept these facts at the outset when we 
 approach Casanova. And if a dweller in the 
 highly respectable nineteenth century may be 
 forgiven a first exclamation of horror at Casa- 
 nova's wickedness, he has wofully failed in 
 critical insight if he allows that exclamation 
 to be his last word concerning these Mhnoires. 
 There are at least three points of view from 
 which Casanova's Memoires are of deep and 
 permanent interest. In the first place they 
 constitute an important psychological docu- 
 ment as the full and veracious presentation of 
 a certain human type in its most complete 
 development. In the second place, as a mere 
 story of adventure and without reference to 
 their veracity, the Memories have never been 
 surpassed, and only equalled by books written 
 on a much smaller scale. In the third place, 
 we here possess an unrivalled picture of the
 
 88 Affirmations. 
 
 eighteenth century in its most characteristic 
 aspects throughout Europe. 
 
 I. 
 
 Casanovi lived in an age which seems to 
 have been favourable to the spontaneous revela- 
 tion of human nature in literature. It was not 
 only the age in which the novel reached full 
 development ; it was the age of diaries and 
 autobiographies. Pepys, indeed, though he died 
 in the eighteenth century, had written his diary 
 long before ; but during Casanova's lifetime 
 Boswell was writing that biography which is 
 so wonderful largely because it is so nearly 
 an autobiography. Casanova's communicative 
 countryman, Gozzi, was also his contemporary. 
 Rousseau's Confessions only preceded Casanova's 
 Memoires by a few years, and a little later Restif 
 de la Bretonne wrote Monsieur Nicolas, and 
 Madame Roland her Memoires Particulieres. 
 All these autobiographies are very unlike Casa- 
 nova's. They mostly seem to present the 
 shady sides of otherwise eminent and respectable 
 lives. The highly-placed government official 
 of versatile intellectual tastes exhibits himself 
 as a monster of petty weaknesses ; the eloquent 
 apostle of the return to Nature uncovers the 
 corroding morbidities we should else never 
 suspect ; the philanthropic pioneer in social
 
 Casanova. 89 
 
 reform exposes himself in a state of almost 
 maniacal eroticism ; the austere heroine who 
 was nourished on Plutarch confesses that she 
 is the victim of unhappy passion. We are 
 conscious of no such discords in Casanova's 
 autobiography. Partly it may be because we 
 have no other picture of Casanova before our 
 eyes. Moreover, he had no conventional ideals 
 to fall short of; he was an adventurer from the 
 first. " I am proud because I am nothing," he 
 used to say. He could not boast of his birth; 
 he never held high position ; for the greatest 
 part of his active career he was an exile ; at 
 every moment of his life he was forced to rely 
 on his own real and personal qualities. But 
 the chief reason why we feel no disturbing 
 discord in Casanova's Mchnoires lies in the 
 admirable skill with which he has therein 
 exploited his unquestionable sincerity. He is 
 a consummate master in the dignified narration 
 of undignified experiences. Fortified, it is true, 
 by a confessed and excessive amour propre, he 
 never loses his fine sense of equilibrium, his 
 power of presenting his own personality broadly 
 and harmoniously. He has done a few dubious 
 things in his time, he seems to say, and now and 
 again found himself in positions that were 
 ridiculous enough ; but as he looks back he 
 feels that the like may have happened to any 
 of us. He views these things with complete
 
 90 Affirmations. 
 
 human tolerance as a necessary part of the 
 whole picture, which it would be idle to slur 
 over or apologise for. He records them simply, 
 not without a sense of humour, but with no 
 undue sense of shame. In his heart, perhaps, 
 he is confident that he has given the world one 
 of its greatest books, and that posterity will 
 require of him no such rhetorical justification 
 as Rousseau placed at the head of his Con- 
 fessions. 
 
 In the preface to the Me'vioires, Casanova is 
 sufficiently frank. He has not scrupled, he tells 
 us, to defraud fools and rascals, " when neces- 
 sary," and he has never regretted it. But such 
 incidents have been but episodes in his life. 
 He is not a sensualist, he says, for he has never 
 neglected his duty — " when I had any " — for the 
 allurements of sense ; yet the main business of 
 his life has ever been in the world of sense ; 
 "there is none of greater importance." " I have 
 always loved women and have done my best 
 to make them love me. I have also delighted 
 in good cheer, and I have passionately followed 
 whatever has excited my curiosity." Now in 
 old age he reviews the joys of his life. He has 
 learnt to be content with one meal a day, in 
 spite of a sound digestion, but he recalls the 
 dishes that delighted him: Neapolitan macaroni, 
 Spanish olla podrida, Newfoundland cod, high- 
 flavoured game, old cheese (has he not collected
 
 Casanoz'a. 91 
 
 material for a Dicttonnaire des Froinogcs ?), and 
 without any consciousness of abrupt transition 
 he passes on to speak of the fragrant sweetness 
 of the women he had loved. Then with a smile 
 of pity he turns on those who call such tastes 
 depraved, the poor insensate fools who think 
 the Almighty is only able to enjoy our sorrow 
 and abstinence, and bestows upon us for nought 
 the gift of self-respect, the love of praise, the 
 desire to excel, energy, strength, courage, and 
 the power to kill ourselves when we will. And 
 with the strain of Stoicism which is ever present 
 to give fibre to his Epicureanism, he quotes the 
 maxim which might well belong to both philo- 
 sophies : " Nemo lasditur nisi a seipso." 
 
 The fact that Casanova was on one side a 
 Venetian must count for something in any 
 attempt to explain him. Not indeed that 
 Venice ever produced more than one Casanova; 
 I would imply no such disrespect to Venice — or 
 to Casanova — but the racial soil was favourable 
 to such a personality. The Venetians are a 
 branch of a more northern people who long 
 since settled by the southern sea to grow 
 mellow in the sunshine. It suited them well, 
 for they expanded into one of the finest races 
 in Christendom, and certainly one of the least 
 Christian races there, a solid, well-tempered 
 race, self-controlled and self-respecting. The 
 Venetian genius is the genius of sensuous en-
 
 92 Affirmations. 
 
 joymcnt, of tolerant humanity, of unashamed 
 earthHness. Whatever was sane and stable in 
 Casanova, and his instinctive distaste for the 
 morbid and perverse, he owes to his Venetian 
 maternal ancestry. If it is true that he was not 
 a mere sensualist, it was by no means because 
 of his devotion to duty — "when I had any," — 
 but because the genuine sensualist is only 
 alive on the passive side of his nature, and in 
 Casanova's nervous system the development of 
 the sensory fibres is compensated and held in 
 balance by the equal vigour of the motor fibres; 
 what he is quick to enjoy he is strong and alert 
 to achieve. Thus he lived the full and varied 
 life that he created for himself at his own good 
 pleasure out of nothing, by the sole power of 
 his own magnificent wits. And now the self- 
 sufficing Venetian sits down to survey his vvork 
 and finds that it is good. It has not always 
 been found so since. A " self-made " man, if 
 ever there was one, Casanova is not revered by 
 those who worship self-help. The record of his 
 life will easily outlive the largest fortune ever 
 made in any counting-house, but the life itself 
 remains what we call a " wasted " life. Thrift, 
 prudence, modesty, scrupulous integrity, strict 
 attention to business — it is useless to come to 
 Casanova for any of these virtues. They were 
 not even in his blood ; he was only half 
 Venetian.
 
 Casajiova. 93 
 
 The Casanova family was originally Spanish. 
 The first Casanova on record was a certain Don 
 Jacobo, of illegitimate birth, who in the middle 
 of the fifteenth century became secretary to 
 King Alfonso. He fell in love with a lady 
 destined to the religious life, and the day 
 after she had pronounced her vows he carried 
 her off from her convent to Rome, where 
 he finally obtained the forgiveness and bene- 
 diction of the Pope. The son of this union, 
 Don Juan, killed an officer of the King of 
 Naples, fled from Rome, and sought fortune 
 with Columbus, dying on the voyage. Don 
 Juan's son, Marcantonio, secretary to a cardinal, 
 was noted in his day as an epigrammatic poet; 
 but his satire was too keen, and he also had to 
 flee from Rome. His son became a colonel, 
 and, unlike his forefathers, died peacefully, in 
 extreme old age, in France. In this soldier's 
 grandson, Casanova's father, the adventurous 
 impulsiveness of the family again came out ; 
 he ran away from home at nineteen with a 
 young actress, and himself became an actor; 
 subsequently he left the actress and then fell 
 in love with a young Venetian beauty of 
 sixteen, Zanetta P^arusi, a shoemaker's daughter. 
 But a mere actor could find no favour in a 
 respectable family, so the young couple ran 
 away and were married ; the hero of these 
 Me moires^ born on the 2nd April, 1725, was
 
 94 Affirmations. 
 
 their first-born. There is probably no reason 
 to doubt the substantial accuracy of this family 
 history, but if one desired to invent an ancestry 
 for Casanova he could scarcely better it. 
 
 His race helps to account for Casanova, but 
 the real explanation of the man can only lie in 
 his own congenital organisation. That he was 
 a radically abnormal person is fairly clear. Not 
 that he was morbid either in body or mind. 
 On the contrary, he was a man of fine presence, 
 of abounding health — always looking ten years 
 younger than his age — of the most robust 
 appetites, a great eater, who delighted to see 
 others, especially women, eat heartily also, a 
 man of indubitable sexual vigour ; however 
 great the demands he made upon his physical 
 energy it seldom failed to respond, and his 
 capacity for rest was equally great ; he could 
 sleep nineteen hours at a stretch. His mental 
 health was not less sound. The most punctilious 
 alienist, with this frank and copious history 
 before him, could not commit Casanova to an 
 asylum. Whatever offences against social codes 
 he may have committed, Casanova can scarcely 
 be said to have sinned against natural laws. 
 He was only abnormal because so natural a 
 person within the gates of civilisation is neces- 
 sarily abnormal and at war with his environ- 
 ment. Far from being the victim of morbidities 
 and perversities, Casanova presents to us the
 
 Casanova. 95 
 
 natural man in excelsis. He was a man for 
 whom the external world existed, and who 
 reacted to all the stimuli it presents to the 
 healthy normal organism. His intelligence was 
 immensely keen and alert, his resourcefulness, 
 his sagacious audacity, his presence of mind, 
 were all of the first order. He was equally 
 swift to feel, to conceive, and to act. His 
 mental organisation was thus singularly har- 
 monious, and hence his success in gratifying 
 his eager and immense appetite for the world, 
 an appetite unsatiated and insatiable even to 
 the last, or he would have found no pleasure 
 in writing these M^moires. Casanova has been 
 described as a psychological type of instability. 
 That is to view him superficially. A man who 
 adapts himself so readily and so effectively to 
 any change in his environment or in his desires 
 only exhibits the instability which marks the 
 most intensely vital organisms. The energy 
 and ability which Casanova displayed in gratify- 
 ing his instincts would have sufficed to make a 
 reputation of the first importance in any depart- 
 ment, as a popular statesman, a great judge, a 
 merchant prince, and enabled him to die worn 
 out by the monotonous and feverish toil of the 
 senate, the court, or the counting-house. Casa- 
 nova chose to live. A crude and barbarous 
 choice it seems to us, with our hereditary 
 instinct to spend our lives in wasting the
 
 9^ Affirmations. 
 
 reasons for living. But it is certain that Casa- 
 nova never repented his choice. Assuredly we 
 need not, for few judges, statesmen, or merchants 
 have ever left for the joy of humanity any legacy 
 of their toil equal to these Meinoires. 
 
 But such swift energy of vital action and 
 reaction, such ardour of deed in keeping pace 
 with desire, are in themselves scarcely normal. 
 Casanova's abnormality is suggested by the 
 tendency to abnormality which we find in 
 his family. We have seen what men his 
 ancestors were ; in reading the Meinoires we 
 gather incidentally that one of his brothers 
 had married, though impotent, and another 
 brother is described as a somewhat feeble- 
 minded ne'er-do-well. All the physical and 
 mental potency of the family was intensely 
 concentrated in Casanova. Yet he himself in 
 early childhood seems to have been little better 
 than an idiot either in body or mind. He could 
 recall nothing that happened before he was eight 
 years of age. He was not expected to live; he 
 suffered from prolonged haemorrhages from the 
 nose, and the vision of blood was his earliest 
 memory. As a child he habitually kept his mouth 
 open, and his face was stupid. " Thickness of 
 the blood," said the physicians of those days; 
 it seems probable that he suffered from growths 
 in the nose which, as we now know, produce 
 such physical and mental inferiority as Casa-
 
 Casanova. 97 
 
 nova describes. The cure was spontaneous. 
 He was taken to Padua, and shortly afterwards 
 began to develop wonderfully both in stature 
 and intelligence. In after years he had little 
 cause to complain either of health or intellect. 
 It is notable, however, that when, still a boy, he 
 commenced his ecclesiastical training (against 
 his wishes, for he had chosen to be a doctor), he 
 failed miserably as a preacher, and broke down 
 in the pulpit ; thus the Church lost a strange 
 ornament. Moreover, with all his swift sensa- 
 tion and alert response, there was in Casanova 
 an anomalous dulness of moral sensibility. The 
 insults to Holy Religion which seem to have 
 brought him to that prison from which he 
 effected his marvellous escape, were scarcely 
 the serious protests of a convinced heretic ; 
 his deliberate trickery of Mme. d'Urfe was not 
 only criminal but cruel. His sense of the bonds 
 of society was always somewhat veiled, and 
 although the veil never became thick, and 
 might be called the natural result of an adven- 
 turer's life, one might also, perhaps, maintain 
 that it was a certain degree of what is sometimes 
 called moral imbecility that made Casanova 
 an adventurer. But while we thus have to 
 recognise that he was a man of dulled moral 
 sensibility, we must also recognise that he 
 possessed a vigorous moral consciousness of 
 his own, or we misunderstand him altogether. 
 
 7
 
 98 AffirjuaiioHS. 
 
 The point to be remembered is that the thres- 
 hold of his moral sensibility was not easily 
 reached. There are some people whose tactile 
 sensibility is so obtuse that it requires a very 
 wide separation of the aesthesiometer to get the 
 right response. It was so with Casanova's 
 moral sensitiveness. But, once aroused, his 
 conscience responded energetically enough. It 
 seems doubtful whether, from his own point of 
 view, he ever fell into grave sin, and therefore 
 he is happily free from remorse. No great 
 credit is thus due to him ; the same psycho- 
 logical characteristic is familiar in all criminals. 
 It is not difficult to avoid plucking the apples of 
 shame when so singularly few grow on your 
 tree. 
 
 Casanova's moral sensibility and its limits 
 come out, where a man's moral sensibility will 
 come out, in his relations with women. Women 
 played a large part in Casanova's life; he was 
 nearly always in love. We may use the word 
 " love " here in no euphemistic sense, for al- 
 though Casanova's passions grew and ripened 
 with the rapidity born of long experience in 
 these matters, so fresh is the vitality of the 
 man that there is ever a virginal bloom on every 
 new ardour. He was as far removed from the 
 cold-blooded libertine typified in Laclos's Val- 
 mont, unscrupulously using women as the in- 
 struments of his own lust, as from Laura's
 
 Casanova. 99 
 
 sonneteering lover. He had fully grasped what 
 the latest writer on the scientific psychology of 
 sex calls the secondary law of courting, namely, 
 the development. in the male of an imaginative 
 attentiveness to the psychical and bodily states 
 of the female, in place of an exclusive attentive- 
 ness to his own gratification. It is not impossible 
 that in these matters Casanova could have given 
 a lesson to many virtuous husbands of our own 
 highly moral century. He never sank to the 
 level of the vulgar maxim that " all's fair in 
 love and war." He sought his pleasure in the 
 pleasure, and not in the complaisance, of the 
 women he loved, and they seem to have grate- 
 fully and tenderly recognised his skill in the art 
 of love-making. Casanova loved many women, 
 but broke few hearts. The same women appear 
 again and again through his pages, and for the 
 most part no lapse of years seems to deaden the 
 gladness with which he goes forth to meet them 
 anew. That he knew himself well enough never 
 to take either wife or mistress must be counted 
 as a virtue, such as it was, in this incomparable 
 lover of so many women. A man of finer moral 
 fibre could scarcely have loved so many women ; 
 a man of coarser fibre could never have left so 
 many women happy. 
 
 This very lack of moral delicacy which shuts 
 Casanova off from the finest human development 
 is an advantage to the autobiographer. It in-
 
 100 Affirmations. 
 
 sures his sincerity because he is unconscious of 
 offence ; it saves us from any wearisome self- 
 justification, because, for all his amused self- 
 criticism, he sees no real need for justification. 
 In Rousseau's Confessions we hear the passionate 
 pleader against men at the tribunal of God; 
 here we are conscious neither of opponent nor 
 tribunal. Casanova is neither a pillar of society 
 nor yet one of the moral Samsons who delight 
 to pull down the pillars of society; he has taken 
 the world as it is, and he has taken himself as 
 he is, and he has enjoyed them both hugely. 
 So he is free to set forth the whole of himself, 
 his achievements, his audacities, his failures, his 
 little weaknesses and superstitions, his amours, 
 his quarrels, his good fortune and his bad fortune 
 in the world that on the whole he has found so 
 interesting and happy a place to dwell in. And 
 his book remains an unending source of delight- 
 ful study of the man of impulse and action in all 
 his moods. The self-reliant man, immensely 
 apt for enjoyment, who plants himself solidly 
 with his single keen wit before the mighty oyster 
 of the world, has never revealed himself so 
 clearly before. 
 
 What manner of man Casanova seemed to 
 his contemporaries has only been discovered of 
 recent years ; and while the picture which we 
 obtain of him has been furnished by his enemies, 
 and was not meant to flatter, it admirably
 
 Casanova. loi 
 
 supports the Memoir es. In 1755 a spy of the 
 Venetian Inquisition reported that Casanova 
 united impiety, imposture, and wantonness to 
 a degree that inspired horror. It was in 
 that same year that he was arrested, chiefly 
 on the charge of contempt for reh'gion, and 
 sentenced to five years' imprisonment. Fif- 
 teen months later he had effected his famous 
 escape, and was able to pursue his career as an 
 assured and accompHshed adventurer who had 
 brilhantly completed his apprenticeship. It is 
 not until many years later, in 1772, when his 
 long efforts to obtain pardon from his country 
 still remained unsuccessful, that we obtain an 
 admirable picture of him from the Venetian 
 agent at Ancona. " He comes and goes where 
 he will," the agent reports, " with open face and 
 haughty mien, always well equipped. He is a 
 man of some forty years at most [really about 
 forty-eight, thus confirming Casanova's state- 
 ment that he was always taken for some ten 
 years younger than his years], of lofty stature, 
 of fine and vigorous aspect, with bright eyes 
 and very brown skin. He wears a short, 
 chestnut-coloured peruke. I am told that his 
 character is bold and disdainful, but especially 
 that he is full of speech, and of witty and well- 
 instructed speech." Two years later Casanova 
 was at last permitted to return to Venice. He 
 there accepted the post of secret agent of the
 
 I02 Affirmations. 
 
 State Inquisition for service within the city. 
 Like Defoe and Toland, who were also secret 
 political agents, he attempted to justify himself 
 on grounds of public duty. In a few years, 
 however, he was dismissed, perhaps, as Baschet 
 suggests, on account of the fact that his reports 
 contained too much philosophy and not enough 
 espionage; probably it was realised that a man 
 of such powerful individuality and independence 
 was not fitted for servile uses. Finally, in 1782, 
 he was banished from Venice for an offence to 
 which the blood of the Casanovas had always 
 been easily inclined — he published an audacious 
 satire against a patrician. From Venice he went 
 to Trieste, and thence to Vienna. There he 
 met Count Waldstein, a fervent adept of Kabba- 
 listic science, a subject in which Casanova him- 
 self claimed to be proficient; he had found it 
 useful in certain dealings with credulous people. 
 In 1784 the count offered him the post of 
 librarian, with a salary of one thousand florins, 
 at his castle of Dux, in Bohemia. It is said to 
 be a fine castle, and is still noted for its charm- 
 ing park. Here this prince of Bohemians spent 
 the remainder of his life, devoting seven years 
 to the Memoires, on which he was still engaged 
 at his death. A terra-cotta bust discovered at 
 the castle (and etched some years ago for Le 
 Livre) shows him in mature age, a handsome, 
 energetic, and imposing head, with somewhat
 
 Co sail ova. 103 
 
 deep-set eyes; it is by no means the head of 
 a scamp, but rather that of a philosopher, a 
 philosopher with unusual experience of affairs, 
 a successful statesman, one might say. A 
 medallion portrait, of later date, which has also 
 been reproduced, shows him at the age of sixty- 
 three with lean, eager face, and lofty, though 
 receding forehead, the type of the man of quick 
 perception and swift action, the eagle type of 
 man. The Prince de Ligne has also left a 
 description of him as he appeared in old age, 
 now grown very irritable, ready to flare up at 
 any imagined insult, engaged in perpetual war- 
 fare with domestics, but receiving the highest 
 consideration from those who knew how to 
 appreciate the great qualities of the man and 
 his unequalled experiences, and who knew also 
 how to indulge his susceptibilities and smile at 
 his antique fashions. Once he went off in a 
 huff to Weimar, and was graciously received by 
 the Duke, but he soon came back again ; all the 
 favours there were showered on a certain court 
 favourite, one Goethe. It is clear, as we read 
 the Prince de Ligne's detailed description, that 
 the restless old adventurer had need, even in 
 the peaceful seclusion of Dux, of all the con- 
 solation yielded by Socrates, Horace, Seneca, 
 and Boethius, his favourite philosophers. Here, 
 at Dux, on the 4th of June 1798, Casanova died. 
 " Bear witness that I have lived as a philosopher
 
 1 04 Affirmations. 
 
 and die as a Christian ; " that, we are told, was 
 his last utterance after he had received the sacra- 
 ments. 
 
 From that moment Casanova with everything 
 that concerned him was covered by a pall of 
 oblivion. He seems to have been carelessly cast 
 aside, together with the century of which he was 
 so characteristic, and, as it now appears, so 
 memorable a child. The world in which he 
 had lived so joyously and completely had been 
 transformed by the Revolution. The new age 
 of strenuous commercialism and complacent 
 philanthropy was in its vigorous youth, a sword 
 in its right hand and a Bible in its left. The 
 only adventurer who found favour now was he 
 who took the glad news of salvation to the 
 heathen, or mowed them down to make new 
 openings for trade. Had he been born later, 
 we may be well assured, Casanova would have 
 known how to play his part; he would not have 
 fallen short of Borrow, who became an agent of 
 the Bible Society. But as it was, what had the 
 new age to do with Casanova ? No one cared, 
 no one even yet has cared, so much as to 
 examine the drawers and cupboards full of 
 papers which he left behind at Dux. Only on 
 the 13th of February, 1820, was the oblivion a 
 little stirred. On that date a certain Carlo 
 Angiolieri appeared at Leipzig in the office 
 of the famous publisher, Brockhaus, carrying a
 
 Casanova. 105 
 
 voluminous manuscript in the handwriting (as 
 we now know) of Casanova and bearing the 
 title, Histoire de ma Viejusqu'a Van 1797. 
 
 But even the appearance of Carlo Angiolieri 
 failed to dissipate the gloom. Fifty years more 
 were to pass before the figure of Casanova again 
 became clear. This man, so ardently alive in 
 every fibre, had now become a myth. The 
 sagacious world — which imparts the largest dole 
 of contempt to the pilgrim who brings back to 
 it the largest gifts — refused to take Casanova 
 seriously. The shrewd critic wondered who 
 wrote Casanova, just as he has since wondered 
 who wrote Shakespeare. Paul Lacroix paid 
 Stendhal the huge compliment of suggesting 
 that he had written the M^moireSy a sufificiently 
 ingenious suggestion, for in Stendhal's Dauphiny 
 spirit there is something of that love of adven- 
 ture which is supremely illustrated in Casanova. 
 But we now know that, as Armand Baschet first 
 proved, Casanova himself really wrote his own 
 Menioires. Moreover, so far as investigation 
 has yet been able to go, he wrote with strict 
 regard to truth. Wherever it is possible to test 
 Casanova, his essential veracity has always been 
 vindicated. In the nature of things it is im- 
 possible to verify much that he narrates. When, 
 however, we remember that he was telling the 
 story of his life primarily for his own pleasure, 
 it is clear that he had no motive for deception ;
 
 io6 Affirvialions. 
 
 and when we consider the surpassingly discredit- 
 able episodes which he has recorded, we may- 
 recall that he has given not indeed positive 
 proof of sincerity, but certainly the best that 
 can be given in the absence of direct proof. It 
 remains a question how far a man is able to 
 recollect the details of the far past — the con- 
 versations he held, the garments he wore, the 
 meals he ate — so precisely as Casanova professes 
 to recollect them. This is a psychological 
 problem which has not yet been experimentally 
 examined. There are, however, great individual 
 differences in memory, and there is reason to 
 believe that an organisation, such as Casanova's, 
 for which the external world is so vivid, is 
 associated with memory-power of high quality. 
 That this history is narrated with absolute 
 precision of detail Casanova himself would 
 probably not have asserted. But there is no 
 reason to doubt his good faith, and there is ex- 
 cellent reason to accept the substantial accuracy 
 of his narrative. It remains a personal docu- 
 ment of a value which will increase rather than 
 diminish as time goes by. It is one of the great 
 autobiographical revelations which the ages 
 have left us, with Augustine's, Cellini's, Rous- 
 seau's, of its own kind supreme.
 
 Casanova. 107 
 
 II. 
 
 The Menioires are authentic ; they give us 
 what they profess to give us— the true story of 
 a man who unites (as it has been well said) the 
 characters of Gil Bias and of Figaro. Thus 
 Casanova was the incarnation in real life of the 
 two most typical imaginative figures of his 
 century. Yet even if the Mhnoires had been 
 the invention of some novelist of surpassing 
 genius they would still possess extraordinary 
 interest. We may forget that the book is an 
 autobiography, and still find it, as a story of 
 adventure, the apotheosis of the picaresque 
 novel. 
 
 The picaresque novel — although a French- 
 man brought it to perfection in Gil Bias — arose 
 and flourished in Spain, Casanova's ancestral 
 country, and its piquancy, variety, and audacity 
 seem to have been very congenial to the Spanish 
 spirit and the Spanish soil. Casanova's Menioires 
 carry this form of story on to a broader and in 
 some respects higher plane. The old picai-o 
 never dared affront the world ; he cringed before 
 it and slunk behind its back to make grimaces. 
 Casanova, too, was an adventurer living by his 
 wits, but he approached the world with the same 
 self-confidence as he approached a beautiful 
 woman, and having won its favours treats it 
 with the same consideration. Unlike the picaro
 
 1 08 Affirmations. 
 
 whose delight it is to reveal the pettinesses of 
 the men he has duped, Casanova shows his 
 magnificence in adventure by regarding the 
 world as a foeman worthy of all his courtesy; 
 and with incomparable impartiality, as well as 
 skill, he presents to us the narrative of all the 
 perils he encountered or sought. Few old men 
 sitting down in the evening of their days to 
 chatter of old times have been so free as 
 Casanova from the vices of senile literature. 
 He never maunders of the things that are so 
 dear to the aged merely because they are past; 
 he introduces no superfluous reflections or com- 
 ments. We recognise that the hand which keeps 
 this pen so surely to the point is the hand of a 
 man of action. Casanova's skill in narrative is 
 conspicuously shown in the love - adventures 
 which form so large and important a part of 
 his book, as of his life. (Men usually regard 
 love as a bagatelle, he says somewhere, but, for 
 his own part, he adds, he has found no more 
 important business in life.) There would seem 
 to be nothing so difficult as to tell a long series 
 of amours, unshrinkingly, from first to last, with- 
 out drawing a curtain at any stage. Nearly 
 every writer in fiction or in autobiography who 
 has attempted this has only produced an effect 
 of weary monotony or else of oppressive close- 
 ness. But Casanova succeeds. Partly this is 
 due to the variety and individuality he is able
 
 Casanova. 109 
 
 to give, not only to every incident, but to every 
 woman he meets ; so that his book is a gallery 
 of delightful women, drawn with an art that 
 almost recalls his great contemporary, Goethe. 
 Partly it seems he was aided by his vivid and 
 sympathetic Venetian temperament ; his swift, 
 unliterary style finds time for no voluptuous 
 languors. He was aided even by his im- 
 modesty, for in literature as in the plastic arts 
 and in life itself, the nude is nearer to virtue 
 than the decollete. The firm and absolute pre- 
 cision of every episode in these ]\Itinoires leaves 
 no room for any undue dallying with the fringes 
 of love's garments. Casanova tells his story 
 swiftly and boldly, with no more delay than is 
 needed to record every essential detail ; he is the 
 absolute anti-type to Sterne as a narrator; the 
 most libertine of authors, he is yet free from 
 prurience. Thus the man of action covers the 
 romancer with confusion; this supreme book of 
 adventures is a real man's record of his own real 
 life. 
 
 But let us forget that it is an autobiography 
 and take it merely as a story. Its immense 
 range of human interest, its audacious realism, 
 its freedom from perversity, entitle us to regard 
 it as a typical story of adventure. And I ask 
 myself: What is the relation of such a book 
 to life ? what is the moral worth of Casanova's 
 Mhnoires ?
 
 I lO Affirmations. 
 
 . A foolish, superfluous question, I know, it 
 seems to many. And I am willing to admit 
 that there may possibly be things in life which 
 it is desirable to do, and yet undesirable to 
 moralise over ; I would even assert that the 
 moral worth of many of our actions lies precisely 
 in their unconsciousness of any moral worth. 
 Yet beneath the freest moral movements there 
 must be a solid basis of social law, just as 
 beneath the most gracious movements of the 
 human body there lies the regulated play of 
 mechanical law. When we find it assumed that 
 there are things which are good to do and not 
 good to justify we may strongly suspect that 
 we have come across a mental muddle. 
 
 To see the matter rightly we must take it 
 at the beginning. No one can rightly see the 
 moral place of immoral literature — the literature 
 of adventure — in the case of adults unless he 
 sees it in the case of children. Of late years 
 the people who write in newspapers and 
 magazines have loudly abused all stories of 
 the crudely heroic order, the stories of im- 
 possible virtue and unheard-of villainy in far- 
 away lands, of marvellously brave bands under 
 extravagantly reckless leaders, who march on 
 through careless bloodshed to incredible 
 victory or incalculable treasure. The hero 
 of the average boy — magnificent sombrero 
 on head, pi-stols in belt, galloping off on his
 
 Casanova. in 
 
 mighty charger, a villain grasped by the scruff 
 of the neck in each outstretched hand — has 
 been severely mauled. The suggestions offered 
 for the displacement of this literature furnish 
 documents for the psychologist. Let us have 
 cheap lives of Jesus and the Apostle Paul! let 
 us flood the world with the sober romances 
 licensed by religious societies ! — say those good 
 people in the newspapers and the magazines. If 
 they have ever themselves been children, and if 
 so, how they came into the world shrouded in an 
 impenetrable caul which will for ever shut them 
 out from insight into the hearts of the young, is 
 not known, and perhaps is no matter. Putting 
 aside these estimable persons, there is in every 
 heart a chamber dedicated to the impossible, 
 and the younger the heart the larger is this 
 golden ventricle. For the child who can just 
 read, Jack the Giant-killer, and the story of 
 those human-souled swans which make the 
 swan a mystic bird for all our lives, are better 
 worth knowing than any fact of the visible 
 world. Some day the Life of Jesus, and even 
 perhaps the Life of Paul, will seem to be among 
 the sweetest and strangest of the world's fairy- 
 tales; but that day will hardly come until every 
 church and chapel has been spiritually razed 
 to the ground. It cannot come to the genera- 
 tion which has had the name of Jesus thrust 
 down its throat in Sunday-schools and board-
 
 112 Affinnations. 
 
 schools. We English are a practical, common- 
 sense people, and we cure our children of any 
 hearty taste for religion as confectioners are 
 said to cure their assistants of any excessive 
 taste for sweets, by a preliminary surfeit. No 
 doubt we are very wise, but we postpone in- 
 definitely the day when children will come to 
 our religious tales in the pure gladness of their 
 joy in the marvellous. 
 
 In the meantime there ought not to be any 
 doubt that children should be fed on fairy-tales 
 as their souls' most natural food. Nothing can 
 make up for the lack of them at the outset, just 
 as no later supply of milk can compensate for 
 the starvation involved in feeding infants on 
 starch. The power of assimilating fairy-tales 
 is soon lost, and unless the child has a rarely 
 powerful creative imagination its spiritual growth 
 on this side at least remains for ever stunted. 
 
 If then childhood needs its pure fairy-land, and 
 youth its fairy-land of impossible adventure, what 
 fairy-land is left for adult age? Scarcely the 
 novel. The modern novel in its finest manifesta- 
 tions, however engrossingly interesting, takes us 
 but a little step from the passionate interests of 
 our own lives. If I turn to the two recent 
 novels which have most powerfully interested 
 me — Huysmans' En Route and Hardy's yi«^<2 the 
 Obscure — I find that their interest lies largely in 
 the skill with which they present and concentrate
 
 Casanova. 1 1 3 
 
 two mighty problems of actual life, the greatest 
 of all problems, religion and sex. In adult life 
 we seek a fairy-land occupied by beings at once 
 as real as ourselves, and yet far removed from 
 the sphere of our own actual interests and the 
 heavy burden of the atmosphere under which 
 we live; only so can it fascinate the imaginations 
 of those who have outgrown the simple imagin- 
 ative joys of early life. Casanova's Memoires is 
 the perfected type of the books which answer 
 these requirements. It is unflinchingly real, 
 immensely varied, the audaciously truthful 
 narrative of undeniably human impulses. And 
 yet it carries us out of relation with the prob- 
 lems of our actual life; it leads us into the 
 realm of fairy-land. 
 
 But — analysing the matter a little more closely 
 — it may still fairly be asked whether a book 
 which, in spite of its remoteness, represents a 
 form of human life, must not have a certain 
 bearing on morals. Is not a part of its attrac- 
 tion, and indeed that of all fairy-lands, the 
 existence of a different code of morals? It 
 seems to me that this is so. But precisely in 
 that lies the moral value of such literature. 
 Indeed the whole question of the moral value 
 of art — that is to say, of aisthetic enjoyment 
 — is really involved here. The matter is worth 
 looking into. 
 
 It is one of Schopenhauer's unforgettable
 
 1 14 Affirmations. 
 
 sayings, that whatever course of action we take 
 in life there is always some element in our 
 nature which could only find satisfaction in an 
 exactly contrary course; so that, take what 
 road we will, we yet always remain restless and 
 unsatisfied in part To Schopenhauer that re- 
 flection made for pessimism; it need not The 
 more finely and adequately we adjust ourselves 
 to the actual conditions of our life the larger, no 
 doubt, the unused and unsatisfied region within 
 us. But it is just here that art comes in. Art 
 largely counts for its effects on playing on these 
 unused fibres of our organism, and by so doing 
 it serves to bring them into a state of harmoni- 
 ous satisfaction — moralises them, if you will. 
 Alienists have described a distressing form of 
 insanity peculiar to old maids who have led 
 honourable lives of abstinence and abnegation. 
 After years of seeming content with the con- 
 ditions of their lot they begin to manifest 
 uncontrollable obsessions and erotic impulses; 
 the unused elements of life, which they had shut 
 down in the cellars of their souls and almost 
 forgotten, have at last arisen in rebellion, 
 clamouring tumultuously for satisfaction. The 
 old orgies — the Saturn alian festival at Christmas 
 and the Midsummer Festival on St John's Day 
 — bear witness that the ancients in their wisdom 
 recognised that the bonds of the actual daily 
 moral life must sometimes be relaxed lest they
 
 Casanova. 1 1 5 
 
 break from over-tension. We have lost the 
 orgy, but in its place we have art. Our respect- 
 able matrons no longer send out their daughters 
 with torches at midnight into the woods 
 and among the hills, where dancing and 
 wine and blood may lash into their flesh the 
 knowledge of the mysteries of life, but they 
 take them to Tristan, and are fortunately 
 unable to see into those carefully brought-up 
 young souls on such occasions. The moral- 
 ising force of art lies, not in its capacity to 
 present a timid imitation of our experiences, 
 but in its power to go beyond our experience, 
 satisfying and harmonising the unfulfilled activi- 
 ties of our nature. That art should have such 
 an effect on those who contemplate it is not 
 surprising when we remember that, to some 
 extent, art has a similar influence on its creators. 
 " Libertin d'esprit mais sage de moeurs," it was 
 said of Watteau. Mohammed when he wrote 
 50 voluptuously of the black-eyed houris of 
 Paradise was still young and the blameless 
 husband of an aged woman. 
 
 " Singing is sweet ; but be sure of this, 
 Lips only sing when they cannot kiss." 
 
 It has been said of Wagner that he had in him 
 the instincts of an ascetic and of a satyr, and 
 the first is just as necessary as the second to the 
 making of a great artist. It is a very ancient
 
 ir6 Affirmations. 
 
 observation that the most unchaste verse has 
 often been written by the chastest poets, and 
 that the writers who have written most purely 
 have found their compensation in living im- 
 purely.i In the same manner it has always 
 been found in Christendom, both among Catho- 
 lics and Protestants, that much of the most 
 licentious literature has been written by the 
 clergy, by no means because the clergy arc 
 a depraved class, but precisely because the 
 austerity of their lives renders necessary for 
 them these emotional athletics. Of course, from 
 the standpoint of simple nature, such literature 
 is bad, it is merely a form of that obscenity 
 which, as Huysmans has acutely remarked, can 
 only be produced by those who are chaste; in 
 Nature desire passes swiftly into action, leaving 
 little or no trace on the mind. A certain 
 degree of continence — I do not mean merely 
 in the region of sex but in the other fields of 
 human action also — is needed as a breeding- 
 ground for the dreams and images of desire to 
 
 ' I take the first example which comes to hand, for whatever 
 it may be worth: — " Luttrell was talking of Moore and Rogers 
 — the pqetry of the former so licentious, that of the latter so- 
 pure; much of its popularity owing to its being so carefully 
 weeded of everything approaching to indelicacy; and the con- 
 trast between the lives and the works of the two men — the 
 former a pattern of conjugal and domestic regularity, the latter 
 of all the men he had ever known the greatest sensualist " 
 (Greville's lilemoirs, vol. iii. p. 324).
 
 Casanova. 1 1 7 
 
 develop into the perfected visions of art. But 
 the point of view of society is scarcely that of 
 unadulterated nature. In society we have not 
 always room for the swift and free passage of 
 impulse into action; to avoid the evils of re- 
 pressed impulse this play of the emotions on 
 a higher and serener plane becomes essential. 
 Just as we need athletics to expand and har- 
 monise the coarser unused energies of the 
 organism, so we need art and literature to ex- 
 pand and harmonise its finer energies, emotion 
 being, as it may not be superfluous to point 
 out, itself largely a muscular process, motion 
 in a more or less arrested form, so that there 
 is here more than a mere analogy. Art from 
 this point of view is the athletics of the emotions. 
 
 The adventures of fairy-land — of which for our 
 age I take Casanova's Memoires as the type — 
 constitute an important part of this athletics. 
 It may be abused, just as we have the grosser 
 excesses of the runner and the cyclist; but it is 
 the abuse and not the use which is pernicious, 
 and under the artificial conditions of civilisation 
 the contemplation of the life and adventures of 
 the heroically natural man is an exercise with 
 fine spiritual uses. Such literature thus has 
 a moral value : it helps us to live peacefully 
 within the highly specialised routine of civilisa- 
 tion. 
 
 That is the underlying justification for Casa-
 
 1 1 8 Affirmations. 
 
 nova's Metnoires as moral literature. But there 
 is no reason why it should emerge into con- 
 sciousness when we take up these Meuioires, any 
 more than a man need take up a branch of 
 physical athletics with any definite hygienic 
 aim. It is sufficient to be moved by the pure 
 enjoyment of it. And there must be something 
 unwholesome and abnormal — something corrupt 
 at the core — in any civilised man or woman who 
 cannot win some enjoyment from this book. 
 
 III. 
 
 The more I contemplate the eighteenth cen- 
 tury the more interesting I find it. In my youth 
 it seemed to me unworthy of a glance. The 
 books and the men, Shelley above all, who stirred 
 my young blood belonged to the early nine- 
 teenth century. I was led to regard the last 
 century as a dull period of stagnation and 
 decay, a tomb into which the spirit of man 
 sank after the slow death which folloAved the 
 Renaissance. The dawn of the nineteenth 
 century was an Easter Day of the human soul, 
 rising from the sepulchre and flinging aside the 
 old eighteenth century winding-sheet. 
 
 I have nothing yet to say against the early 
 nineteenth century, which was indeed only the 
 outcome of the years that went before, but I 
 have gained a new delight in the men of the
 
 Casanova. 1 1 9 
 
 eighteenth century. It was in that age that the 
 Enghsh spirit found its most complete intel- 
 lectual expression, unaffected by foreign in- 
 fluence. When that spirit, reviving after the 
 wars that lamentably cut short the develop- 
 ment of Chaucer's magnificent song, again 
 began its free literary development — no doubt 
 with some stimulus from Humanism — it was 
 suddenly smothered at birth by the Renaissance 
 wave from Italy and France. We may divine 
 how it would have developed independently if 
 we think of John Hey wood's dramatic sketches — 
 pale as those are after the Miller's talc in which 
 for the first and last time Chaucer perfectly 
 mated English realism to the lyric grace of 
 English idealism — and to some extent, also, 
 when we turn to the later Heywood's plays, 
 or Dekker's, and especially to the robust and 
 tolerant humanity, the sober artistic breadth 
 of the one play of Porter's which has come 
 down to us. But the intoxicating melodies of 
 Ronsard and his fellows were heard from over 
 sea, and the men of the English Renaissance 
 arose — Lyly and Lodge and Campion with 
 their refinements, Greene and Nash with their gay 
 and brilliant music, Marlowe with his arrogant, 
 irresistible energy — and brought to birth an 
 absolutely new spirit, which may have been 
 English enough in its rich and virginal 
 elements, but received the seminal principle
 
 1 20 Affirmations. 
 
 from abroad. It needed a century and more 
 for that magnificent tumult to subside, and 
 for the old English spirit to reappear and 
 reach at last full maturity, by happy chance 
 again in association with France, though this 
 time it is England that chiefly plays the mas- 
 culine part and impregnates France. Thus the 
 eighteenth century was an age in which the 
 English spirit found complete self-expression, 
 and also an age in which England and France 
 joined hands intellectually, and stood together 
 at the summit of civilisation, with no rivals, 
 unless Goethe and Kant may suffice to stand 
 for a whole people. In the great Englishmen 
 of these days we find the qualities which are 
 truly native to Britain, and which have too 
 often been torn and distracted by insane aber- 
 rations. There is a fine sobriety and sagacity 
 in the English spirit, a mellow human solidity, 
 such as the Romans possessed always, but 
 which we in our misty and storm-swept island 
 have often exchanged, perhaps for better, but 
 certainly for other qualities. It was not so in 
 the eighteenth century, and by no accident 
 the historian who has most finely expressed 
 the genius of Rome was an eighteenth century 
 Englishman. All the most typical men of 
 that age possessed in varying degree the 
 same qualities: Locke, Swift, Fielding, Hume, 
 Richardson, Goldsmith, Hogarth, Johnson, God-
 
 Casanova. 1 2 1 
 
 win. Thus the eighteenth century should un- 
 doubtedly be a source of pride to the British 
 heart. England's reputation in the world rests 
 largely on our poetic aptitudes and our political 
 capacity. Eighteenth century England is not 
 obviously pre-eminent in either respect, although 
 it was the great age of our political development 
 and the seed-time of our second great poetic 
 age; it produced scarcely more than a single 
 first-class poet exclusively within its limits, and 
 it lost America. Yet our greatest philo- 
 sopher, our greatest historian, our greatest 
 biographer, nearly all our greatest novelists, 
 our great initiators in painting, who were in- 
 directly the initiators of the greater art of 
 France, belong wholly to this century, and an 
 unequalled cluster of our greatest poets belongs 
 to its close. And these men were marked by 
 sanity and catholicity, a superb solidity of 
 spirit; they became genuinely cosmopolitan 
 without losing any of their indigenous virtues. 
 Without the eighteenth century we should never 
 have known many of the greatest qualities which 
 are latent, and too often only latent, in our race. 
 Landor and Wordsworth alone were left to carry 
 something of the spirit of the English eighteenth 
 century far on into the literature of our own 
 wholly alien century. 
 
 And their brothers of France were their most 
 worthy peers. This spirit, indeed, which we see
 
 122 Affirmations. 
 
 so conspicuously in the finest men of their age 
 in England and France, was singularly wide- 
 spread throughout Europe, a cheerful sobriety, 
 a solid humanit}', little troubled by any of those 
 " movements " which were to become so prolific 
 and so noisy in the next century. Christianity, 
 it seemed, was decaying. Diderot, well informed 
 on English affairs, wrote to a friend that in a few 
 years it would be extinct, and looking at the 
 state of the English Church at that time, 
 no one could reasonably have surmised that 
 Zinzendorf in Germany, and after him Wesley 
 in England on a lower plane and Law on a 
 higher plane, had already initiated that revival 
 of Christianity which in our own century was des- 
 tined to work itself out so obstreperously. But 
 the world seemed none the worse for the apparent 
 subsidence of Christianity ; in the opinion of 
 many it seemed to be very much the better. 
 The tolerant paganism of classic days appeared 
 to be reasserting itself, robustly in England, 
 with a delicate refinement in France, — setting 
 the paganism of Watteau against the paganism 
 of Fielding — while Goethe and the Germans 
 generally were striving to rescue and harmonise 
 the best of Christianity with the best of antiquity. 
 European civilisation was fully expanded; for a 
 long time no great disturbing force had arisen, 
 and though on every side the tender buds of 
 coming growths might have been detected, they
 
 Casanova. 123 
 
 could not yet reveal their strength. Such 
 a period certainly has its terrible defects; 
 mellowness is not far from rottenness. But then 
 youth also has its defects, and its crude acidity 
 is still further from perfection. The nineteenth 
 century has a higher moral standard than the 
 eighteenth, so at least we in our self-righteous- 
 ness have been accustomed to think. But even 
 if so, the abstract existence of a high moral 
 standard is another thing from the prevalence 
 of high moral living. Whatever the standard 
 may be, it is a question whether the lives are 
 much different. In the one case the standard 
 is much above the practice, in the other only a 
 little above it — that is the chief difference. And 
 the advantages of winding the standard up to 
 the higher pitch are not so unmixed as is 
 sometimes assumed. One need not question 
 these advantages, well recognised in the present 
 century. But the advantages of a lower standard 
 are less often recognised. There is especially 
 the great advantage that we attain a higher 
 degree of sincerity, and sincerity, if not itself 
 the prime virtue, is surely, whatever the virtue 
 may be, its chief accompaniment A life that is 
 swathed and deformed in much drapery is not 
 so wholesome or so effective as one that can 
 live nearer to the sun. And the unrecognisable 
 villain is most pernicious; the brigand who holds 
 a revolver at your head is better than the sleek
 
 124 Affirmations. 
 
 and well-dressed thief who opens the proceed- 
 ings with prayer. The eighteenth has been 
 called a gross and unintelligent century. In 
 the department of criticism, indeed, this century 
 in England (for it was far otherwise in Germany) 
 comes very short of our own century, and it is 
 largely this failure to measure the precise value 
 of things in aesthetic perception which now 
 makes that age seem so shocking. From this 
 point of view every great age — and not least 
 our own greatest Elizabethan age — is equally 
 defective. A period of energetic life cannot 
 afford to spend much time on the solitary 
 contemplation of its own bowels of aesthetic 
 emotion. To produce a Pater is the one 
 exquisite function of a spiritually barren and 
 exhausted age. And still the eighteenth century 
 redeems its critical grossness by making even 
 this later development possible ; it lifted the 
 man of letters from the place of a dependent 
 to the place of a free man boldly prophesying 
 in his own right ; and, moreover, it was the 
 first century which dared to claim the complete 
 equality of men and women with all which that 
 involves. 
 
 If it has required a certain insight for the 
 child of our own century to discover the great 
 qualities of the last century, there cannot be 
 much doubt about the final judgment of the 
 most competent judges. The eighteenth was,
 
 Casanova. 1 2 3 
 
 as Renouvicr has called it, the first century of 
 humanity since Christ, while at the same time, 
 as Lange has said, it was penetrated through by 
 the search for the ideal, or, as a more recent 
 thinker concludes, it was a century dominated 
 by the maxim Sahis popidi supreina est lex, 
 holding in its noble aspirations after general 
 happiness the germs of all modern socialism. 
 In art and literature it saw the fresh spring 
 of those blossoms which opened so splendidly 
 and faded so swiftly in our century; it was 
 the century not only of Hogarth and Fielding 
 and Voltaire, but of Blake and Rousseau, of 
 Diderot, of Swedenborg and Mesmer, of 
 the development of modern music with 
 Mozart and Beethoven, of the unparalleled 
 enthusiasm awakened by the discovery of the 
 Keltic world. And as its crowning glory the 
 eighteenth century claims Goethe. Men will 
 scarcely look back to our own century as so 
 good to live in. One may well say that he 
 would have gladly lived in the thirteenth 
 century, perhaps the most interesting of all 
 since Christ, or in the sixteenth, probably the 
 most alive of all, or the eighteenth, surely the 
 most human. But why have lived in the nine- 
 teenth, the golden age of machinery, and of 
 men used as machines ? 
 
 Eighteenth century Europe, being what it 
 was, formed a perfect stage for Casanova to play
 
 1 26 AffirviafwJis. 
 
 his part on. With his Spanish and Itah'an 
 blood, he was of the race of those who had 
 come so actively to the front in the last days 
 of old classic Rome, and his immediate ancestors 
 had lived in the centre of the pagan Rome of 
 the Renaissance. Thus he carried with him 
 traditions which consorted well with much in 
 the eighteenth century. And he had that in 
 him, moreover, which no tradition can give, 
 the incommunicable vitality in the presence of 
 which all tradition shrivels into nothingness, 
 
 Casanova knew not only Italy, France, Eng- 
 land, Germany, and Holland; he had visited 
 Spain, Russia, Poland, Greece, Turkey, and 
 Asia Minor. He was received by Benedict XH., 
 by Frederick H. of Prussia, by the Empress 
 Catherine, by Joseph H. He was at home in 
 Paris, in London, in Berlin, in Vienna; he knew 
 Munich, Dresden, Moscow, St. Petersburg, War- 
 saw, Barcelona. His picture of London is of 
 great interest. He spent much of the year 
 1763 there, and some of his most interest- 
 ing experiences, romantic and psychological, 
 occurred during that period. He even dated 
 the close of what he calls the second act in 
 the comedy of his life from that visit to London, 
 the next and concluding act being one of slow 
 declination. So profound was his depression 
 at this time that one day he went towards 
 the Thames at the Tower with the deliberate
 
 Casanova. 127 
 
 intention of drowning himself, having first filled 
 his pockets with bullets to ensure sinking. 
 Fortunately an English friend (to whom the 
 world owes thanks) met him on the way, read 
 his resolve in his face, and insisted on carrying 
 him off to a very convivial party, whose in- 
 decorous proceedings, although Casanova only 
 remained a passive witness, served to dissipate 
 all thoughts of suicide. He is not, however, 
 prejudiced against England; on the contrary, 
 he finds that no nation offers so many interesting 
 peculiarities to the attentive observer. As usual, 
 in London Casanova mixed indiscriminately 
 with the best and the worst society; his wit, 
 his knowledge, his imperturbable effrontery, his 
 charming conversation, served to open any door 
 that he desired to open. He gives us curious 
 glimpses into the lives of English noblemen of 
 the day, and not less intimate pictures of the 
 chevaliers d'industri'e who preyed upon them. 
 In the course of one adventure with people 
 of the latter sort he was haled before the 
 eminent blind magistrate Sir John Fielding, 
 whom he seems to have mistaken, though this 
 is not quite clear, for his yet more eminent 
 brother Henry. He also met Kitty Fischer, 
 the most fashionable cocotte of her day, whom 
 we may yet see as Reynolds caught her in 
 a well-inspired moment, dilating her sensitive 
 nostrils, radiantly inhaling the joy of life, and
 
 128 Affirmations. 
 
 he tells us anecdotes of her extravagance, of the 
 jewels she wore, of the thousand guinea bank- 
 note which she ate in a sandwich.^ 
 
 Throughout Europe Casanova knew many of 
 the most celebrated people of his time, though 
 it is clear — as one would expect from a man of 
 his impartial humanity — he seldom went out of 
 his way to meet them. His visit to Voltaire is 
 a distinct contribution to our knowledge of that 
 sage; he admired Helvetius, and wondered how 
 a man of so many virtues could have denied 
 virtue; D'Alembert he thought the most truly 
 modest man he had ever met, an interesting 
 
 ^ For another side of life we may read his description of the 
 English Sunday: — "On Sunday one dares neither to play at cards 
 nor to perform music. The numerous spies who infest the streets 
 of this capital listen to the sounds which come from the parlours 
 of the houses, and if they suspect any gaming or singing they 
 conceal themselves and slip in at the first opportunity to seize 
 those bad Christians who dare to profane the Lord's Day by 
 amusements which everywhere else are counted innocent. In 
 revenge the English may go with impunity to sanctify the 
 holy day in the taverns and brothels which are so plentiful in 
 this city." One may compare with this Mme. de Stael's almost 
 Dantesque description — so at least it remains in the memory — 
 of the gloom of the Scotch Sabbath in the days of Burns. This 
 statement of the matter remained substantially accurate until 
 almost yesterday. So long it remained for the English spirit to 
 re-conquer Sunday ! It must be remembered that Puritanism, 
 while always a part of the English spirit, was not originally 
 its predominant note ; it only became so as an inevitable re- 
 action against the exotic Renaissance movement. Mary Stuart 
 made Knox, Charles I. made Cromwell, and both monarchs were 
 intimately associated with the last wave of the Renaissance.
 
 Casanova. \ 29 
 
 tribute from the most truly immodest man of 
 that period. The value of Casanova's record 
 of the eighteenth century h'es, however, by no 
 means in the glimpses he has given us of great 
 personalities: that has been much better done 
 by much more insignificant writers. It is as a 
 picture of the manners and customs of the 
 eighteenth century throughout Europe that the 
 Manoires are invaluable. Casanova saw Europe 
 from the courts of kings to the lowest bas fonds. 
 He lived in the castles of French and Italian 
 nobles, in the comfortable homes of Dutch 
 merchants, in his own house in Pall Mall, in 
 taverns and inns and peasants' cottages any- 
 where. He had no intellectual prejudices, he 
 had an immense versatility in tastes and 
 practical aptitudes, he was genuinely interested 
 in all human things. Thus he approached life 
 with no stereotyped set of opinions, but with 
 all the aloofness of an unclassed adventurer, 
 who was at the same time a scholar and a 
 man of letters. It can scarcely be that there 
 is any record to compare with this as a vivid 
 and impartial picture of the eighteenth century, 
 in its robust solidity, its cheerful and tolerant 
 scepticism, its serene and easy gaiety, its 
 mellow decay. That is our final debt to this 
 unique and immortal book. 
 
 What should be our last word about Casa- 
 
 9
 
 1 30 Affiruiatio7ts. 
 
 nova? It is true that although — if indeed one 
 should not say because — he was so heroically 
 natural Casanova was not an average normal 
 man. It is scarcely given to the average man 
 to expend such versatile and reckless skill in 
 the field of the world, or to find so large a part 
 wherein to play off that skill. But neither are 
 the saints and philosophers normal ; St. Bernard 
 was not normal, nor yet Spmoza. And surely 
 it is a poor picture of the world which would 
 show us St. Bernard and Spinoza and shut 
 out Casanova. "Vous avez I'outil universel," 
 Fabrice said to Gil Bias. Casanova's brain 
 was just such a tool of universal use, and he 
 never failed to use it. For if you would find 
 the supreme type of the human animal in the 
 completest development of his rankness and 
 cunning, in the very plenitude of his most 
 excellent wits, I know not where you may 
 more safely go than to the Memoires of the 
 self-ennobled Jacques Casanova Chevalier de 
 Seingalt.
 
 I^I 
 
 ZOLA. 
 
 Zola's name — a barbarous, explosive name, like 
 an anarchist's bomb — has been tossed about 
 amid hoots and yells for a quarter of a century. 
 In every civilised country we have heard of the 
 man who has dragged literature into the gutter, 
 who has gone down to pick up the filth of the 
 streets, and has put it into books for the filthy 
 to read. And in every civilised country his 
 books have been read, by the hundred thousand. 
 
 To-day, his great life-work is completed. At 
 the same time, the uproar that it aroused has, 
 to a large extent, fallen silent. Not that there 
 is any general agreement as to the rank of the 
 author of the Rougon-Macquart series; but the 
 storms that greeted it have worn themselves 
 out, and it is recognised that there are at least 
 two sides to this as to any other question. Such 
 a time is favourable to the calm discussion of 
 Zola's precise position. 
 
 The fundamental assertion of those who, in 
 their irreconcilable opposition to Zola, have 
 rightly felt that abuse is not argument, has 
 always been that Zola is no artist. The matter
 
 132 Affirmations. 
 
 has usually presented itself to them as a ques- 
 tion of Idealism versus Realism. Idealism, as 
 used by the literary critic, seems to mean a 
 careful selection of the facts of life for artistic 
 treatment, certain facts being suited for treat- 
 ment in the novel, certain other facts being not 
 so suited ; while the realist, from the literary 
 critic's point of view, is one who flings all facts 
 indiscriminately into his pages. I think that 
 is a fair statement of the matter, for the literary 
 critic does not define very clearly; still less does 
 he ask himself how far the idealism he advocates 
 is merely traditional, nor, usually, to what extent 
 the manner of presentation should influence us. 
 He does not ask himself these questions, nor 
 need we ask him, for in the case of Zola (or, 
 indeed, of any other so-called " realist ") there 
 is no such distinction. There is no absolute 
 realism, merely a variety of idealisms; the 
 only absolute realism would be a phonographic 
 record, illustrated photographically, after the 
 manner of the cinematograph. Zola is just as 
 much an idealist as George Sand. It is true 
 that he selects very largely from material things, 
 and that he selects very profusely. But the 
 selection remains, and where there is deliberate 
 selection there is art. We need not trouble 
 ourselves here — and I doubt whether we are 
 ever called upon to trouble ourselves — about 
 " Realism " and " Idealism." The questions are:
 
 Zola. 133 
 
 Has the artist selected the right materials? 
 Has he selected them with due restraint? 
 
 The first question is a large one, and, in 
 Zola's case at all events, it cannot, I think, be 
 answered on purely aesthetic grounds; the second 
 may be answered without difficulty. Zola has 
 himself answered it; he admits that he has been 
 carried away by his enthusiasm, and perhaps, 
 also, by his extraordinary memory for recently- 
 acquired facts (a memory like a sponge, as he 
 has put it, quickly swollen and quickly emptied); 
 he has sown details across his page with too 
 profuse a hand. It is the same kind of error 
 as Whitman made, impelled by the same kind 
 of enthusiasm. Zola expends immense trouble 
 to get his facts ; he has told how he ransacked 
 the theologians to obtain body and colour for 
 La Faute de I' Abbe Moiiret, perhaps the best of 
 his earlier books. But he certainly spent no 
 more preliminary labour on it than Flaubert 
 spent on Madame Bovary, very far less than 
 Flaubert spent on the study of Carthage for 
 Salammbd. But the results are different ; the 
 one artist gets his effects by profusion and 
 multiplicity of touches, the other by the de- 
 liberate self-restraint with which he selects and 
 emphasises solely the salient and significant 
 touches. The latter method seems to strike 
 more swiftly and deeply the ends of art Three 
 strokes with the brush of Frans Hals are worth
 
 1 34 Affirmations. 
 
 a thousand of Denner's. Rich and minute detail 
 may impress us, but it irritates and wearies in 
 the end. If a man takes his two children on to 
 his knees, it matters Httle whether he places 
 Lenore on his right knee and Henri on his 
 left, or the other way about ; the man himself 
 may fail to know or to realise, and the more 
 intense his feelings the less likely is he to know. 
 When we are living deeply, the facts of our 
 external life do not present themselves to us in 
 elaborate detail ; a very few points are — as it 
 has been termed — focal in consciousness, while 
 the rest are marginal in subconsciousness. A 
 few things stand out vividly at each moment 
 of life ; the rest are dim. The supreme artist 
 is shown by the insight and boldness with which 
 he seizes and illuminates these bright points at 
 each stage, leaving the marginal elements in due 
 subordination. Dramatists so unlike as Ford 
 and Ibsen, novelists so unlike as Flaubert and 
 Tolstoi, yet alike impress us by the simple 
 vividness of their artistic effects. The methods 
 adopted by Zola render such effects extremely 
 difficult of attainment Perhaps the best proof 
 of Zola's I'emarkable art is the skill with which 
 he has neutralised the evil results of his ponderous 
 method. In his most characteristic novels, as 
 UAssommoir, Nana, Germinal, his efforts to 
 attain salient perspective in the mass of trivial 
 or technical things — to build a single elaborate
 
 Zola. 135 
 
 effect out of manifold details— are often admir- 
 ably conducted. Take, for instance, the Voreux, 
 the coal-pit which may almost be said to be the 
 hero of Germinal rather than any of the persons 
 in the book. The details are not interesting, but 
 they are carefully elaborated, and the Voreux is 
 finally symbolised as a stupendous idol, sated 
 with human blood, crouching in its mysterious 
 sanctuary. Whenever Zola wishes to bring the 
 Voreux before us, this formula is repeated. And 
 it is the same, in a slighter degree, with the 
 other material personalities of the book. Some- 
 times, in the case of a crowd, this formula is 
 simply a cry. It is so with the Parisian mob 
 who yell "A Berlin!" in the highly-wrought 
 conclusion to Nana; it is so with the crowd of 
 strikers in Germinal who shout for bread. It is 
 more than the tricky repetition of a word or a 
 gesture, overdone by Dickens and others ; it is 
 the artful manipulation of a carefully-elaborated, 
 significant phrase. Zola seems to have been the 
 first who has, deliberately and systematically, 
 introduced this sort of leit-motiv into literature, 
 as a method of summarising a complex mass of 
 details, and bringing the total impression of them 
 before the reader. In this way he contrives to 
 minimise the defects of his method, and to render 
 his complex detail focal. He sometimes attains 
 poignantly simple effects by the mere repetition 
 of a leit-motiv at the right moment. And he is
 
 1 36 Affirmations. 
 
 able at times, also, to throw aside his detailed 
 method altogether, and to reach effects of tragic 
 intensity. The mutilation of Maigrat's corpse is 
 a scene which can scarcely have been described 
 in a novel before. Given the subject, Zola's 
 treatment of it has the strength, brevity, and 
 certainty of touch which only belong to great 
 masters of art. That Zola is a great master of 
 his art, L Assommoir and Ger^ninal — which, so 
 far as I have read Zola, seem his two finest 
 works — are enough to prove. Such works are 
 related to the ordinary novel much as Wagner's 
 music-dramas are related to the ordinary Italian 
 opera. Wagner reaches a loftier height of art 
 than Zola ; he had a more complete grasp of all 
 the elements he took in hand to unite. Zola 
 has not seen with sufficient clearness the point 
 of view of science, and the limits of its capacity 
 for harmonising with fiction ; nor has he with 
 perfect sureness of vision always realised the 
 ends of art. He has left far too much of the 
 scaffolding standing amid his huge literary 
 structures ; there is too much mere brute fact 
 which has not been wrought into art. But, if 
 Zola is not among the world's greatest artists, I 
 do not think we can finally deny that he is a 
 great artist. 
 
 To look at Zola from the purely artistic stand- 
 point, however, is scarcely to see him at all. 
 His significance for the world generally, and
 
 Zola, 137 
 
 even for literature, lies less in a certain method 
 of using his material — as it maybe said to lie, 
 for example, in the case of the Goncourts — than 
 in the material itself, and the impulses and ideas 
 that prompted his selection of that material. 
 These growing piles of large books are the 
 volcanic ejecta of an original and exuberant 
 temperament. To understand them we must 
 investigate this temperament. 
 
 A considerable and confused amount of racial 
 energy was stored up in Zola. At once French, 
 Italian, and Greek — with a mother from the 
 central Beauce country of France, more fruitful 
 in corn than in intellect, and a father of mixed 
 Italian and Greek race, a mechanical genius in 
 his way, with enthusiastic energies and large 
 schemes — he presents a curious combination of 
 potential forces, perhaps not altogether a very 
 promising combination. One notes that the 
 mechanical engineer in the father seems to have 
 persisted in the son, not necessarily by heredity, 
 but perhaps by early familiarity and association. 
 Young Zola was a delicate child and by no 
 means a brilliant schoolboy, though he once 
 won a prize for memory; such ability as he 
 showed was in the direction of science; he 
 had no literary aptitudes. He seems to have 
 adopted literature chiefly because pen and ink 
 come handiest to the eager energies of a poor 
 clerk. It is scarcely fanciful to detect the
 
 138 Affirnia tio )is. 
 
 mechanical aptitudes still. Just as all Huxley's 
 natural instincts were towards mechanics, and 
 in physiology he always sought for the "go" 
 of the organism, so Zola, however imperfect his 
 scientific equipment may be, has always sought 
 for the "go" of the social organism. The 
 history of the Rougon-Macquart family is a 
 study in social mathematics: given certain 
 family strains, what is the dynamic hereditary 
 outcome of their contact ? 
 
 To the making of Zola there went, therefore, 
 this curious racial blend, as a soil ready to be 
 fertilised by any new seed, and a certain almost 
 instinctive tendency to look at things from the 
 mechanical and material point of view. To 
 these, in very early life, a third factor was added 
 of the first importance. During long years after 
 his father's death, Zola, as a child and youth, 
 suffered from poverty, poverty almost amounting 
 to actual starvation, the terrible poverty of 
 respectability. The whole temper of his work 
 and his outlook on the world are clearly con- 
 ditioned by this prolonged starvation of adoles- 
 cence. The timid and reserved youth — for such, 
 it is said, has been Zola's character both in 
 youth and manhood — was shut up with his 
 fresh energies in a garret while the panorama 
 of the Paris world was unfolded below him. 
 Forced both by circumstances and by tempera- 
 ment to practise the strictest chastity and
 
 Zoln. 139 
 
 sobriety, there was but one indulgence left open 
 to him, an orgy of vision. Of this, as we read 
 his books, we cannot doubt that he fully availed 
 himself, for each volume of the Rougon-Mac- 
 quart series is an orgy of material vision.^ 
 
 Zola remained chaste, and, it is said, he is still 
 sober— though we are told that his melancholy 
 morose face lights up like a gourmet's at the hour 
 of his abstemious dinner— but this early eagerness 
 to absorb the sights as well as the sounds, and 
 
 ' " Mes souvenirs," he told a psychological interviewer, " ont 
 une puissance, un relief extraordinaire ; ma memoire est cn<jrme, 
 prodigieuse, elle me gene; quand j'evoque les objets que j'ai vus, jc 
 les revois tels qu'ils sont reellement avec leurs lignes, leurs formes, 
 leurs couleurs, leurs odeurs, leurs sons ; c'est une tnaU'rialisation ci 
 outrance ; le soleil qui les eclaire m'eblouit presque ; I'odeur mc 
 suffoque, les details s'accrochent a moi et m'empechent dc voir 
 rensemble. Aussi pour le ressaisir me faut-il attendre un certain 
 temps. Cette possibilite d'evocation ne dure pas tres longtemps ; 
 le relief de I'image est d'une exactitude, d'une intensite inouies, 
 puis I'image s'efface, disparait, cela s'en va." This description 
 suggests myopia, and it is a fact that Zola has been short-sighted 
 from youth; he first realised it at sixteen. His other senses, 
 especially smell, are very keen— largely, however, as an outcome 
 of attention or practice. Thus while his tactile sensibility and 
 sensibility to pain are acute, his olfactory keenness is rather 
 qualitative than quantitative; that is to say that it mainly con- 
 sists in a marked memory for odours, a tendency to be emotion- 
 ally impressed by them, and an ability to distinguish them in 
 which he resembles professional perfumers. All these and 
 many other facts have been very precisely ascertained by means 
 of the full psychological and anthropological study of M. Zola 
 which has been carried out by experts under the superintendence 
 of Dr. Toulouse.
 
 1 40 Afinnations. 
 
 one may add the smells, of the external world, 
 has at length become moulded into a routine 
 method. To take some corner of life, and to 
 catalogue every detail of it, to place a living 
 person there, and to describe every sight and 
 smell and sound around him, although he him- 
 self may be quite unconscious of them — that, in 
 the simplest form, is the recipe for making a 
 roman experimental. The method, I wish to 
 insist, was rooted in the author's experience of 
 the world. Life only came to him as the sights, 
 sounds, smells, that reached his garret window. 
 His soul seems to have been starved at the 
 centre, and to have encamped at the sensory 
 periphery. He never tasted deep of life, he 
 stored up none of those wells of purely personal 
 emotion from which great artists have hoisted 
 up the precious fluid which makes the bright 
 living blood of their creations. How different 
 he is in this respect from the other great novelist 
 of our day, who has also been a volcanic force 
 of world-wide significance ! Tolstoi comes be- 
 fore us as a man who has himself lived deeply, 
 a man who has had an intense thirst for life, 
 and who has satisfied that thirst. He has 
 craved to know life, to know women, the joy 
 of wine, the fury of battle, the taste of the 
 ploughman's sweat in the field. He has known 
 all these things, not as material to make books, 
 but as the slaking of instinctive personal
 
 Zola. 1 4 1 
 
 passions. And in knowing them he has stored 
 up a wealth of experiences from which he drew 
 as he came to make books, and which bear 
 about them that peculiar haunting fragrance 
 only yielded by the things which have been 
 lived through, personally, in the far past. Zola's 
 method has been quite otherwise: when he 
 wished to describe a great house he sat outside 
 the palatial residence of M. Menier, the choco- 
 late manufacturer, and imagined for himself the 
 luxurious fittings inside, discovering in after 
 years that his description had come far short of 
 the reality; before writing Nana, he obtained 
 an introduction to a courtesan, with whom he 
 was privileged to lunch; his laborious prepara- 
 tion for the wonderful account of the war of 
 1870, in La Debacle, was purely one of books, 
 documents, and second-hand experiences; when 
 he wished to write of labour he went to the 
 mines and to the fields, but never appears to 
 have done a day's manual work. Zola's literary 
 methods are those of the parvemi who has tried 
 to thrust himself in from outside, who has 
 never been seated at the table of life, who has 
 never really lived. That is their weakness. It 
 is also their virtue. There is no sense of satiety 
 in Zola's work as there is in Tolstoi's. One 
 can understand how it is that, although their 
 methods arc so unlike, Tolstoi himself regards 
 Zola as the one French novelist of the day who
 
 142 Affirmations. 
 
 is really alive. The starved lad, whose eyes 
 vi^ere concentrated with longing on the visible 
 world, has reaped a certain reward from his 
 intellectual chastity; he has preserved his clear- 
 ness of vision for material things, an eager, 
 insatiable, impartial vision. He is a zealot in 
 his devotion to life, to the smallest details of 
 life. He has fought like the doughtiest knight 
 of old-world romance for his iady's honour, and 
 has suffered more contumely than they all. " On 
 barde de fcr nos urinoirs ! " he shouts in a fury 
 of indignation in one of his essays; it is a 
 curious instance of the fanatic's austere deter- 
 mination that no barrier shall be set up to shut 
 out the sights and smells of the external world. 
 The virgin freshness of his thirst for life gives 
 its swelling, youthful vigour to his work, its 
 irrepressible energy. 
 
 It has, indeed, happened with this unsatisfied 
 energy as it will happen with such energies; it 
 has retained its robustness at the sacrifice of 
 the sweetness it might otherwise have gained. 
 There is a certain bitterness in Zola's fury of 
 vision, as there is also in his gospel of " Work ! 
 work ! work ! " One is conscious of a savage 
 assault on a citadel which, the assailant now 
 well knows, can never be scaled. Life cannot 
 be reached by the senses alone; there is always 
 something that cannot be caught by the utmost 
 tension of eyes and ears and nose; a well-
 
 Zola. 143 
 
 balanced soul is built up, not alone on sensory 
 memories, but also on the harmonious satis- 
 faction of the motor and emotional energies. 
 That cardinal fact must be faced even when 
 we are attempting to define the fruitful and 
 positive element in Zola's activity. 
 
 The chief service w^hich Zola has rendered to 
 his fellow-artists and successors, the reason of 
 the immense stimulus he supplies, seems to lie 
 in the proofs he has brought of the latent artistic 
 uses of the rough, neglected details of life. The 
 Rougon-Macquart series has been to his weaker 
 brethren like that great sheet knit at the four 
 corners, let down from Heaven full of four- 
 footed beasts and creeping things and fowls 
 of the air, and bearing in it the demonstration 
 that to the artist as to the moralist nothing can 
 be called common or unclean. It has hence- 
 forth become possible for other novelists to find 
 inspiration where before they could never have 
 turned, to touch life with a vigour and audacity 
 of phrase which, without Zola's example, they 
 would have trembled to use, while they still 
 remain free to bring to their work the simplicity, 
 precision, and inner experience which he has 
 never possessed. Zola has enlarged the field of 
 the novel. He has brought the modern material 
 world into fiction in a more definite and thorough 
 manner than it has ever been brought before, 
 just as Richardson brought the modern emo-
 
 144 Affirmations. 
 
 tional world into fiction ; such an achievement 
 necessarily marks an epoch. In spite of all his 
 blunders, Zola has given the novel new power 
 and directness, a vigour of fibre which was hard 
 indeed to attain, but which, once attained, we 
 may chasten as we will. And in doing this he 
 has put out of court, perhaps for ever, those 
 unwholesome devotees of the novelist's art who 
 work out of their vacuity, having neither inner 
 nor outer world to tell of. 
 
 Zola's delight in exuberant detail, it is true, is 
 open to severe criticism. When, however, we 
 look at his work, not as great art but as an 
 important moment in the evolution of the novel, 
 this exuberance is amply justified. Such furious 
 energy in hammering home this demonstration 
 of the artistic utility of the whole visible modern 
 world may detract from the demonstrator's 
 reputation for skill ; it has certainly added to 
 the force of the demonstration. Zola's luxuri- 
 ance of detail — the heritage of that romantic 
 movement of which he was the child — has ex- 
 tended impartially to every aspect of life he 
 has investigated, to the working of a mine, to 
 the vegetation of the Paradou, to the ritual of 
 the Catholic Church. But it is not on the 
 details of inanimate life, or the elaborate 
 description of the industrial and religious 
 functions of men, that the rage of Zola's ad- 
 versaries has chiefly been spent It is rather
 
 Zola. 145 
 
 on his use of the language of the common 
 people and on his descriptions of the sexual 
 and digestiv^e functions of humanity. Zola 
 has used slang — the argot of the populace — 
 copiously, chiefly indeed in L'Assommoir, which 
 is professedly a study of low life, but to a less 
 extent in his other books. A considerable 
 part of the power of UAssonimoir, in many 
 respects Zola's most perfect work, lies in the 
 skill with which he uses the language of the 
 people he is dealing with; the reader is bathed 
 throughout in an atmosphere of picturesque, 
 vigorous, often coarse argot. There is, no 
 doubt, a lack of critical sobriety in the pro- 
 fusion and reiteration of vulgarisms, of coarse 
 oaths, of the varied common synonyms for 
 common things. But they achieve the end 
 that Zola sought, and so justify themselves. 
 
 They are of even greater interest as a protest 
 against the exaggerated purism which has ruled 
 the French language for nearly three centuries, 
 and while rendering it a more delicate and 
 precise instrument for scientific purposes, has 
 caused it to become rather bloodless and colour- 
 less for the artist's purposes, as compared with 
 the speech used by Rabelais, Montaigne, and 
 even Moliere, the great classics who have chiefly 
 influenced Zola. The romantic movement of 
 the present century, it is true, added colour to 
 the language, but scarcely blood ; it was an 
 
 10
 
 146 Affinnations. 
 
 exotic, feverish colour which has not per- 
 manently enriched French speech. A language 
 rendered anaemic by over-clarification cannot be 
 fed by exotic luxuries but by an increase in the 
 vigorous staples of speech, and Zola was on the 
 right track when he went to the people's com- 
 mon speech, which is often classic in the true 
 sense and always robust. Doubtless he has 
 been indiscriminate and even inaccurate in his 
 use of argot, sometimes giving undue place to 
 what is of merely temporary growth. But the 
 main thing was to give literary place and 
 prestige to words and phrases which had fallen 
 so low in general esteem, in spite of their 
 admirable expressiveness, that only a writer of 
 the first rank and of unequalled audacity could 
 venture to lift them from the mire. This Zola 
 has done; and those who follow him may easily 
 exercise the judgment and discretion in which 
 he has been lacking. 
 
 Zola's treatment of the sexual and the 
 digestive functions, as I pointed out, has chiefly 
 aroused his critics. If you think of it, these 
 two functions are precisely the central functions 
 of life, the two poles of hunger and love around 
 which the world revolves. It is natural that it 
 should be precisely these fundamental aspects 
 of life which in the superficial contact of 
 ordinary social intercourse we are for ever 
 trying more and more to refine away and
 
 Zola. 147 
 
 ignore. They are subjected to an ever-encroach- 
 ing process of attenuation and circumlocution, 
 and as a social tendency this influence is 
 possibly harmless or even beneficial. But it 
 is constantly extending to literature also, and 
 here it is disastrous. It is true that a few great 
 authors — classics of the first rank — have gone to 
 extremes in their resistance to this tendency. 
 These extremes are of two kinds : the first 
 issuing in a sort of coprolalia, or inch'nation 
 to dwell on excrement, which we find to a 
 slight extent in Rabelais and to a marked 
 extent in the half-mad Swift ; in its fully- 
 developed shape this coprolalia is an uncon- 
 trollable instinct found in some forms of 
 insanity. The other extreme is that of 
 pruriency, or the perpetual itch to circle round 
 sexual matters, accompanied by a timidity 
 which makes it impossible to come right up 
 to them ; this sort of impotent fumbling in 
 women's placket-holes finds its supreme literary 
 exponent in Sterne. Like coprolalia, when 
 uncontrolled, prurience is a well-recognised 
 characteristic of the insane, leading them to 
 find a vague eroticism everywhere. But both 
 these extreme tendencies have not been found 
 incompatible with the highest literary art. 
 Moreover, their most pronounced exponents 
 have been clerics, the conventional represen- 
 tatives of the Almighty. However far Zola
 
 148 Affirmations. 
 
 might go in these directions, he would still be 
 in what is universally recognised as very good 
 company. He has in these respects by no 
 means come up with Father Rabelais and Dean 
 Swift and the Rev. Laurence Sterne ; but there 
 can be little doubt that, along both lines, he 
 has missed the restraint of well-balanced art. 
 On the one hand he over-emphasises what is 
 repulsive in the nutritive side of life, and on the 
 other hand, with the timid obsession of chastity, 
 he over-emphasises the nakedness of flesh. In- 
 so doing, he has revealed a certain flabbiness 
 in his art, although he has by no means dim- 
 inished his service in widening the horizon of 
 literary speech and subject. Bearing in mind 
 that many crowned kings of literature have 
 approached these subjects quite as closely as 
 Zola, and far less seriously, it does not seem 
 necessary to enter any severer judgment here. 
 
 To enlarge the sphere of language is an un- 
 thankful task, but in the long run literature owes 
 an immense debt to the writers who courageously 
 add to the stock of strong and simple words. 
 Our own literature for two centuries has been 
 hampered by the social tendency of life to 
 slur expression, and to paraphrase or suppress 
 all forceful and poignant words. If we go 
 back to Chaucer, or even to Shakespeare, 
 we realise what power of expression we have 
 lost It is enough, indeed, to turn to our
 
 Zola. 149 
 
 English Bible. The literary power of the 
 English Bible is largely due to the uncon- 
 scious instinct for style which happened to be 
 in the air when it was chiefly moulded, to the 
 simple, direct, unashamed vigour of its speech. 
 Certainly, if the discovery of the Bible had been 
 left for us to make, any English translation 
 would have to be issued at a high price by some 
 esoteric society, for fear lest it should fall into 
 the hands of the British matron. It is our 
 British love of compromise, we say, that makes 
 it possible for a spade to be called a spade 
 on one day of the week, but on no other ; our 
 neighbours, whose minds are more logically 
 constituted, call it le cant Britannique. But our 
 mental compartments remain very water-tight, 
 and on the whole we are even worse off than 
 the French who have no Bible. For instance, 
 we have almost lost the indispensable words 
 " belly " and " bowels," both used so often and 
 with such admirable effect in the Psalms; we 
 talk of the " stomach," a word which is not only 
 an incorrect equivalent, but at best totally inapt 
 for serious or poetic uses. Any one who is 
 acquainted with our old literature, or with the 
 familiar speech of the common folk, will 
 recall similar instances of simple, powerful ex- 
 pressions which are lost or vanishing from 
 literary language, leaving no available substitute 
 behind. In modern literary language, indeed,
 
 1 50 Affirmations. 
 
 man scarcely exists save in his extremities. 
 For we take the pubes as a centre, and we 
 thence describe a circle with a radius of some 
 eighteen inches — in America the radius is rather 
 longer — and we forbid any reference to any 
 organ within the circle, save that maid-of-all- 
 work the "stomach"; in other words, we make 
 it impossible to say anything to the point 
 concerning the central functions of life. 
 
 It is a question how far real literature can be 
 produced under such conditions, not merely 
 because literature is thus shut out from close 
 contact with the vital facts of life, but because 
 the writer who is willing to be so shut out, who 
 finds himself most at home within the social 
 limits of speech, will probably not be made of 
 the heroic stuff that goes to the moulding of a 
 great writer. The social limits of speech are 
 useful enough, for we are all members of society, 
 and it is well that we should have some protec- 
 tion against the assaults of unbridled vulgarity. 
 But in literature we may choose to read what 
 we will, or to read nothing, and the man who 
 enters the world of literature timidly equipped 
 with the topics and language of the drawing- 
 room is not likely to go far, I once saw it 
 stated depreciatingly in a grave literary review 
 that a certain novel by a woman writer dealt 
 with topics that are not even discussed by 
 men at their clubs. I had never read it, but it
 
 Zola. 1 5 1 
 
 seemed to me then that there might be hope for 
 that novel. No doubt it is even possible in 
 literature to fall below the club standard, but 
 unless you can rise above the club standard, 
 better stay at the club, tell stories there, or 
 sweep the crossing outside. 
 
 All our great poets and novelists from Chaucer 
 to Fielding wrote sincerely and heroically con- 
 cerning the great facts of life. That is why they 
 are great, robustly sane, radiantly immortal. It 
 is a mistake to suppose that no heroism was 
 involved in their case; for though no doubt 
 they had a freer general speech on their side 
 they went beyond their time in daring to mould 
 that speech to the ends of art, in bringing litera- 
 ture closer to life. It was so even with Chaucer; 
 compare him with his contemporaries and suc- 
 cessors ; observe how he seeks to soothe the 
 susceptibilities of his readers and to deprecate 
 the protests of the "precious folk." There is 
 no great art at any epoch without heroism, 
 though one epoch may be more favourable than 
 another to the exercise of such heroism in litera- 
 ture. In our own age and country daring has 
 passed out of the channels of art into those of 
 commerce, to find exercise, foolish enough some- 
 times, in the remotest corners of the earth. It 
 is because our literature is not heroic, but has 
 been confined within the stifling atmosphere 
 of the drawing-room, that English poets and
 
 152 Affirmations. 
 
 novelists have ceased to be a power in the 
 world and are almost unknown outside the 
 parlours and nurseries of our own country. It 
 is because in France there have never ceased to 
 be writers here and there who have dared to 
 face life heroically and weld it into art that the 
 literature of France is a power in the world 
 wherever there are men intelligent enough to 
 recognise its achievements. When literature 
 that is not only fine but also great appears in 
 England we shall know it as such by its heroism, 
 if by no other mark. 
 
 Language has its immense significance be- 
 cause it is the final incarnation of a man's most 
 intimate ideals. Zola's style and method are 
 monotonous — with a monotony which makes 
 his books unreadable when we have once 
 mastered his secret — and the burden they ex- 
 press is ever the same : the energy of natural 
 life. Whatever is robust, whatever is whole- 
 somely exuberant, whatever, wholesomely or 
 not, is possessed by the devouring fury of 
 life — of such things Zola can never have 
 enough. The admirable opening of La Terre, 
 in which a young girl drives the cow, wild 
 for the male, to the farm where the stock- 
 bull is kept, then leading the appeased 
 animal home again, symbolises Zola's whole 
 view of the world. All the forces of Nature, it 
 seems to him, are raging in the fury of gener-
 
 Zola. 153 
 
 ative desire or reposing in the fulness of 
 swelling maturity. The very earth itself, in the 
 impressive pages with which Gerviinal closes, 
 is impregnated with men, germinating beneath 
 the soil, one day to burst through the furrows 
 and renew the old world's failing life, In this 
 conception of the natural energies of the world 
 — as manifested in men and animals, in machines, 
 in every form of matter — perpetually conceiving 
 and generating, Zola reaches his most impres- 
 sive effects, though these effects are woven 
 together of elements that are separately of 
 no very exquisite beauty, or subtle insight, or 
 radical novelty. 
 
 In considering Zola, we arc indeed constantly 
 brought back to the fact that most of the things 
 that he has tried to do have been better done by 
 more accomplished artists. The Goncourts have 
 extended the sphere of language, even in the 
 direction of slang, and have faced many of the 
 matters that Zola has faced, and with far more 
 delicate, though usually more shadowy, art ; 
 Balzac has created as large and vivid a world of 
 people, though drawing more of it from his own 
 imagination ; Huysmans has greater skill in 
 stamping the vision of strange or sordid things 
 on the brain ; Tolstoi gives a deeper realisation 
 of life ; Flaubert is as audaciously naturalistic, 
 and has, as well, that perfect self-control which 
 should always accompany audacity. And in
 
 154 Affirmations. 
 
 Flaubert, too, we find something of the same 
 irony as in Zola. 
 
 This irony, however, is a personal and char- 
 acteristic feature of Zola's work. It is irony 
 alone which gives it distinction and poignant 
 inclsiveness. Irony may be called the soul of 
 Zola's work, the embodiment of his moral 
 attitude towards life. It has its source, doubt- 
 less, like so much else that is characteristic, in 
 his early days of poverty and aloofness from the 
 experiences of life. There is a fierce impartiality 
 — the impartiality of one who is outside and 
 shut off — in this manner of presenting the 
 brutalities and egoisms and pettinesses of men. 
 The fury of his irony is here equalled by his 
 self-restraint. He concentrates it into a word, a 
 smile, a gesture. Zola believes, undoubtedly, in 
 a reformed, even perhaps a revolutionised, future 
 of society, but he has no illusions. He sets down 
 things as he sees them. He has no tendernesses 
 for the working-classes, no pictures of rough 
 diamonds. We may see this very clearly in 
 Genninal. Here every side of the problem of 
 modern capitalism is presented : the gentle- 
 natured shareholding class unable to realise a 
 state of society in which people should not live 
 on dividends and give charity; the official class 
 with their correct authoritative views, very sure 
 that they will always be needed to control labour 
 and maintain social order ; and the workers,
 
 Zola. 155 
 
 some brutalised, some suffering like dumb beasts, 
 some cringing to the bosses, some rebelling 
 madly, a few striving blindly for justice. 
 
 There is no loophole in Zola's impartiality ; 
 the gradual development of the seeming hero of 
 Germinal, Etienne Lantier, the agitator, honest 
 in his revolt against oppression, but with an 
 unconscious bourgeois ideal at his heart, seems 
 unerringly right. All are the victims of an evil 
 social system, as Zola sees the world, the en- 
 slaved workers as much as the overfed masters; 
 the only logical outcome is a clean sweep — the 
 burning up of the chaff and straw, the fresh 
 furrowing of the earth, the new spring of a sweet 
 and vigorous race. That is the logical outcome 
 of Zola's attitude, the attitude of one who regards 
 our present society as a thoroughly vicious circle. 
 His pity for men and women is boundless ; his 
 disdain is equally boundless. It is only towards 
 animals that his tenderness is untouched by con- 
 tempt; some of his most memorable passages 
 are concerned with the sufferings of animals. 
 The New Jerusalem may be fitted up, but the 
 Montsou miners will never reach it ; they will 
 fight for the first small, stuffy, middle-class villa 
 they meet on the way. And Zola pours out the 
 stream of his pitiful, pitiless irony on the weak, 
 helpless, erring children of men. It is this moral 
 energy, combined with his volcanic exuberance, 
 which lifts him to a position of influence above
 
 1 56 Affirmations. 
 
 the greater artists with whom wc may compare 
 him. 
 
 It is by no means probable that the world will 
 continue to read Zola much longer. His work 
 is already done; but when the nineteenth century 
 is well past it may be that he will still have his 
 interest. There will be plenty of material, 
 especially in the newspapers, for the future 
 historian to reconstruct the social life of the 
 latter half of the nineteenth century. But the 
 material is so vast that these historians will 
 possibly be even more biassed and one-sided 
 than our own. For a vivid, impartial picture — 
 on the whole a faithful picture — of certain of 
 the most characteristic aspects of this period, 
 seen indeed from the outside, but drawn by a 
 contemporary in all its intimate and even repul- 
 sive details, the reader of a future age can best 
 go to Zola. What would we not give for a 
 thirteenth century Zola ! We should read with 
 painful, absorbed interest a narrative of the 
 Black Death as exact as that of nineteenth 
 century alcoholism in U Assomvioir. The story 
 of how the serf lived, as fully told as in La 
 Terre, would be of incomparable value. The 
 early merchant and usurer would be a less dim 
 figure if UAi-gcnt had been written about him. 
 The abbeys and churches of those days have in 
 part come down to us, but no Gertninal remains 
 to tell of the lives and thoughts of the men who
 
 Zola. 157 
 
 hewed those stones, and piled them, and carved 
 them. How precious such record would have 
 been we may realise when we recall the incom- 
 parable charm of Chaucer's prologue to Tlic 
 Canterbury Tales. But our children's children, 
 with the same passions alive at their hearts 
 under incalculably different circumstances, will 
 in the pages of the Rougon-Macquart scries find 
 themselves back again among all the strange 
 remote details of a vanished world. What a 
 fantastic and terrible page of old-world romance!
 
 iss 
 
 HUYSMANS. 
 
 In trying to represent the man who wrote the 
 extraordinary books grouped around A Rebours 
 and En Route, I find myself carried back to the 
 decline of the Latin world. I recall those rest- 
 less Africans who were drawn into the vortex of 
 decadent Rome, who absorbed its corruptions 
 with all the barbaric fervour of their race, and 
 then with a more natural impetus of that youth- 
 ful fervour threw themselves into the young 
 current of Christianity, yet retaining in their 
 flesh the brand of an exotic culture. Tertullian, 
 Augustine, and the rest gained much of their 
 power, as well as their charm, because they in- 
 carnated a fantastic mingling of youth and age, 
 of decayed Latinity, of tumultuously youthful 
 Christianity. Huysmans, too, incarnates the old 
 and the new, but with a curious, a very vital 
 difference. To-day the 7'6les are reversed ; it is 
 another culture that is now young, with its 
 aspirations after human perfection and social 
 solidarity, while Christianity has exchanged the 
 robust beauty of youth for the subtler beauty 
 of age. " The most perfect analogy to our time
 
 Huysiiians. 159 
 
 which I can find," wrote Renan to his sister amid 
 the tumults of Paris in 1848, a few weeks after 
 Huysmans had been born in the same city, " is 
 the moment when Christianity and paganism 
 stood face to face." Huysmans had wandered 
 from ancestral haunts of mediaeval peace into 
 the forefront of the struggles of our day, bring- 
 ing the clear, refined perceptions of old culture 
 to the intensest vision of the modern world yet 
 attained, but never at rest, never once grasping 
 except on the purely aesthetic side the signifi- 
 cance of the new age, always haunted by the 
 memory of the past and perpetually feeling his 
 way back to what seems to him the home of his 
 soul. — The fervent seeker of those early days, 
 indeed, but a rebours ! 
 
 This is scarcely a mere impression; one might 
 be tempted to say that it is strictly the formula 
 of this complex and interesting personality. 
 Coming on the maternal side from an ordinary 
 Parisian bourgeois stock, though there chanced to 
 be a sculptor even along this line, on the paternal 
 side he belongs to an alien aristocracy of art. 
 From father to son his ancestors were painters, 
 of whom at least one, Cornelius Huysmans, 
 still figures honourably in our public galleries, 
 while the last of them left Breda to take up his 
 domicile in Paris. Here his son, Joris Karl, has 
 been the first of the race to use the pen instead 
 of the brush, yet retaining precisely those char-
 
 i6o Affirmations. 
 
 actcrs of " veracity of imitation, jewel-like rich- 
 ness of colour, perfection of finish, emphasis of 
 character," which their historian finds in the 
 painters of his land from the fourteenth century 
 onwards. Where the Mouse approaches the 
 Rhine valley we find the home of the men 
 who, almost alone in the north, created paint- 
 ing and the arts that are grouped around paint- 
 ing, and evolved religious music. On the side 
 of art the Church had found its chief builders 
 in the men of these valleys, and even on 
 the spiritual side also, for here is the northern 
 home of mysticism. Their latest child has 
 fixed his attention on the feverish activities of 
 Paris with the concentrated gaze of a stranger 
 in a strange land, held by a fascination which is 
 more than half repulsion, always missing some- 
 thing, he scarcely knows what. He has ever 
 been seeking the satisfaction he had missed, 
 sometimes in the aesthetic vision of common 
 things, sometimes in the refined Thebaid of his 
 own visions, at length more joyfully in the sur- 
 vivals of mediaeval mysticism. Yet as those early 
 Africans still retained their acquired Roman in- 
 stincts, and that fantastic style which could not 
 be shaken off, so Huysmans will surely retain 
 to the last the tincture of Parisian modernity. 
 
 Yet we can by no means altogether account 
 for Huysmans by race and environment. Every 
 man of genius is a stranger and a pilgrim on the
 
 Huysinans. 1 6 1 
 
 earth, unlike other men, seeing everything as it 
 were at a different angle, mirroring the world in 
 his mind as in those concave or convex mirrors 
 which elongate or abbreviate absurdly all who 
 approach them. No one ever had a keener 
 sense of the distressing absurdity of human 
 affairs than M. Huysmans. The Trocadero is 
 not a beautiful building, but to no one else 
 probably has it appeared as an old hag lying 
 on her back and elevating her spindle shanks 
 towards the sky. Such images of men's works 
 and ways abound in Huysmans' books, and 
 they express his unaffected vision of life, his 
 disgust for men and things, a shuddering dis- 
 gust, yet patient, half-amused. I can well recall 
 an evening spent some years ago in M. Huys- 
 mans' company. His face, with the sensitive, 
 luminous eyes, reminded one of Baudelaire's 
 portraits, the face of a resigned and benevolent 
 Mephistopheles who has discovered the absurdity 
 of the Divine order but has no wish to make 
 any improper use of his discovery. He talked 
 in low and even tones, never eagerly, without 
 any emphasis or gesture, not addressing any 
 special person ; human imbecility was the burden 
 of nearly all that he said, while a faint twinkle 
 of amused wonderment lit up his eyes. And 
 throughout all his books until almost the last 
 "rdternelle betise de I'humanite" is the ever- 
 recurring refrain. 
 
 II
 
 1 62 Affirmations. 
 
 Always leading a retired life, and specially- 
 abhorring the society and conversation of the 
 average literary man, M. Huysmans has for 
 many years been a government servant — a 
 model official, it is said — at the Ministry of 
 Foreign Affairs. Here, like our own officials at 
 Whitehall, he serves his country in dignified 
 leisure — on the only occasion on which I have 
 seen him in his large and pleasant bureau, he 
 was gazing affectionately at Cheret's latest affiche, 
 which a lady of his acquaintance had just 
 brought to show him — and such duties of 
 routine, with the close contact with practical 
 affairs they involve, must always be beneficial 
 in preserving the sane equipoise of an imagin- 
 ative temperament. In this matter Huysmans 
 has been more fortunate than his intimate friend 
 Villiers de I'lsle-Adam, who had wandered so 
 far into the world of dreams that he lost touch 
 with the external world and ceased to distinguish 
 them clearly. One is at first a little surprised 
 to hear of the patient tact and diplomacy which 
 the author of A Rebours spent round the death- 
 bed of the author of Contcs Criiels to obtain 
 the dying dreamer's consent to a ceremony of 
 marriage which would legitimate his child. But 
 Huysmans' sensitive nervous system and ex- 
 travagant imagination have ever been under 
 the control of a sane and forceful intellect ; 
 his very idealism has been nourished by the
 
 Hjtysvians. 1 63 
 
 contemplation of a world which he has seen 
 too vividly ever to ignore. We may read 
 that in the reflective deliberation of his grave 
 and courteous bearing, somewhat recalling, as 
 more than one observer has noted, his own 
 favourite animal, the cat, whose outward repose 
 of Buddhistic contemplation envelops a highly- 
 strung nervous system, while its capacity to 
 enjoy the refinements of human civilisation 
 comports a large measure of spiritual freedom 
 and ferocity. Like many another man of letters, 
 Huysmans suffers from neuralgia and dyspepsia; 
 but no novelist has described so persistently and 
 so poignantly the pangs of toothache or the 
 miseries of maux d'esiomac, a curious proof of 
 the peculiarly personal character of Huysmans' 
 work throughout. His sole pre-occupation has 
 been with his own impressions. He possessed 
 no native genius for the novel. But with a very 
 sound instinct he set himself, almost at the 
 outset of his career, to describe intimately and 
 faithfully the crudest things of life, the things 
 most remote from his own esoteric tastes but 
 at that time counted peculiarly "real." There 
 could be no better discipline for an idealist. 
 Step by step he has left the region of vulgar 
 actualities to attain his proper sphere, but the 
 marvellous and slowly won power of expressing 
 the spiritually impalpable in concrete imagery 
 is the fruit of that laborious apprenticeship.
 
 164 Affirmations. 
 
 He was influenced in his novels at first by 
 Goncourt, afterwards a little by Zola, as he 
 sought to reproduce his own vivid and personal 
 vision of the world. This vision is like that 
 of a man with an intense exaltation of the 
 senses, especially the senses of sight and smell. 
 Essentially Huysmans is less a novelist than a 
 poet, with an instinct to use not verse but prose 
 as his medium. Thus he early fell under the 
 influence of Baudelaire's prose-poems. His 
 small and slight first volume, Le Drageoir d. 
 Epices, bears witness to this influence, while yet 
 revealing a personality clearly distinct from 
 Baudelaire's. This personality is already wholly 
 revealed in the quaint audacity of the little 
 prose-poem entitled " L'Extase." Here, at the 
 very outset of Huysmans' career, we catch an 
 unconscious echo of mediaeval asceticism, the 
 voice, it might be, of Odo of Cluny, who 
 nearly a thousand years before had shrunk 
 with horror from embracing a " sack of dung ; " 
 "quomodo ipsum stercoris saccum amplecti desi- 
 deramus ! " " L'Extase" describes how the lover 
 lies in the wood clasping the hand of the beloved 
 and bathed in a rapture of blissful emotion ; 
 "suddenly she rose, disengaged her hand, dis- 
 appeared in the bushes, and I heard as it were 
 the rustling of rain on the leaves ; " at once the 
 delicious dream fled and the lover awakes to 
 the reality of commonplace human things. That
 
 Hiiysmans, 165 
 
 is a parable of the high-strung ideah'sm, having 
 only contempt for whatever breaks in on its 
 ideal, which has ever been the mark of Huys- 
 mans. His sensitive ear is alive to the 
 gentlest ripple of nature, and it jars on him ; it 
 becomes the deafening Niagara of " the in- 
 cessant deluge of human foolishness;" all his art 
 is the research for a Heaven where the voice 
 of Nature shall no more be heard. Baudelaire 
 was also such a hypera^sthetic idealist, but the 
 human tenderness which vibrates beneath the 
 surface of Baudelaire's work has been the last 
 quality to make itself more than casually felt 
 in Huysmans. It is the defect which vitiated 
 his early work in the novel, when he was still 
 oscillating between the prose-poem and the 
 novel, clearly conscious that while the first 
 suited him best only in the second could 
 mastery be won. His early novels are some- 
 times portentously dull, with a lack of interest, 
 or even attempt to interest, which itself almost 
 makes them interesting, as frank ugliness is. 
 They are realistic with a veracious and courage- 
 o'jsly abject realism, never, like Zola's, care- 
 fully calculated for its pictorial effectiveness, 
 but dealing simply with the trivialest and 
 sordidest human miseries. His first novel 
 Marthe — which inaugurated the long series 
 of novels devoted to state-regulated prosti- 
 tution in those slaughter-houses of love, as
 
 1 66 Affirmations. 
 
 Huysmans later described them, where Desire 
 is slain at a single stroke, — sufficiently repul- 
 sive on the whole, is not without flashes of 
 insight which reveal the future artist, and to 
 some readers indeed make it more interesting 
 than La Filk Elisa, which the Goncourts 
 published shortly afterwards. Unlike the crude 
 and awkward MartJie — though that book reveals 
 the influence of the Goncourts — La Fille Elisa 
 shows the hand of an accomplished artist, but 
 it is also the work of a philanthropist writing 
 with an avowed object, and of a fine gentleman 
 ostentatiously anxious not to touch pitch with 
 more than a finger-tip. The Preface to Marthe 
 contains a declaration which remains true for 
 the whole of Huysmans' work : " I set down 
 what I see, what I feel, what I have lived, 
 writing it as well as I am able, et voilct tout ! " 
 But it has ever been a dangerous task to set 
 down what one sees and feels and has lived ; 
 for no obvious reason, except the subject, 
 MartJie was immediately suppressed by the 
 police. This first novel remains the least 
 personal of Huysmans' books ; in his next novel, 
 Les Sceurs Vatard — a study of Parisian work- 
 girls and their lovers — a more characteristic 
 vision of the world begins to be revealed, and 
 from that time forward there is a continuous 
 though irregular development both in intellec- 
 tual grip and artistic mastery. "Sac au Dos,"
 
 Huysmans. 1 67 
 
 which appeared in the Soirees de Medan, re- 
 presents a notable stage in this development, 
 for here, as he has since acknowledged, Huys- 
 mans' hero is himself. It is the story of a 
 young student who serves during the great 
 war in the Garde Mobile of the Seine, and is 
 invalided with dysentery before reaching the 
 front. There is no story, no striking impres- 
 sion to record— nothing to compare with Guy 
 de Maupassant's incomparably more brilliant 
 " Boule-de-Suif," also dealing with the fringe 
 of war, which appears in the same volume — 
 no opportunity for literary display, nothing 
 but a record of individual feelings with 
 which the writer seems satisfied because they 
 are interesting to himself. It is, in fact, the 
 germ of that method which Huysmans has 
 since carried to so brilliant a climax in En 
 Route. All the glamour of war and the 
 enthusiasm of patriotism are here— long before 
 Zola wrote his Debdcle— reduced to their simplest 
 terms in the miseries of the individual soldier 
 whose chief aspiration it becomes at last to 
 return to a home where the necessities of 
 nature may be satisfied in comfort and peace. 
 At that time Huysmans' lack of patriotic 
 enthusiasm seemed almost scandalous; but 
 when we bear in mind his racial affinities it 
 is natural that he should, as he once remarked 
 to an interviewer, "prefer a Leipzig man to
 
 1 68 Affirmations. 
 
 a Marseilles man," " the big, phlegmatic, taciturn 
 Germans " to the gesticulating and rhetorical 
 people of the French south. In Ld-Bas, at a 
 later date, through the mouth of one of his 
 characters, Huysmans goes so far as to regret 
 the intervention of Joan of Arc in French 
 history, for had it not been for Joan France 
 and England would have been restored to their 
 racial and prehistoric unity, consolidated into 
 one great kingdom under Norman Plantagenets, 
 instead of being given up to the southerners of 
 Latin race who surrounded Charles VII. 
 
 The best of Huysmans' early novels is 
 undoubtedly En Menage. It is the intimate 
 history of a young literary man who, having 
 married a wife whom he shortly afterwards finds 
 unfaithful, leaves her, returns to his bachelor 
 life, and in the end becomes reconciled to her. 
 This picture of a studious man who goes away 
 with his books to fight over again the petty 
 battles of bachelorhood with the bonne and 
 the concierge and his own cravings for womanly 
 love and companionship, reveals clearly for the 
 first time Huysmans' power of analysing states 
 of mind that are at once simple and subtle. 
 Perhaps no writer surprises us more by his 
 revealing insight into the commonplace experi- 
 ences which all a novelist's traditions lead him 
 to idealise or ignore. As a whole, however. En 
 Menage is scarcely yet a master's work, a little
 
 Huysvians. 169 
 
 laboured, with labour which cannot yet achieve 
 splendour of effect. Nor can a much slighter 
 story, A Vau rEau, which appeared a little later, 
 be said to mark a further stage in develop- 
 ment, though it is a characteristic study, this 
 sordid history of Folantin, the poor, lame, 
 discontented, middle-aged clerk. Cheated and 
 bullied on every side, falling a prey to the 
 vulgar woman of the street who boisterously 
 takes possession of him in the climax of the 
 story, all the time feeling poignantly the whole 
 absurdity of the situation, there is yet one spot 
 where hope seems possible. He has no religious 
 faith; "and yet," he reflects, "yet mysticism 
 alone could heal the wound that tortures me." 
 Thus Folantin, though like Andr6 in En 
 Menage he resigns themselves to the inevitable 
 stupidity of life, yet stretches out his hands 
 towards the Durtal of Huysmans' latest work. 
 
 In all these novels we feel that Huysmans has 
 not attained to full self-expression. Intellectual 
 mastery, indeed, he is attaining, but scarcely yet 
 the expression of his own personal ideals. The 
 poet in Huysmans, the painter enamoured of 
 beauty and seeking it in unfamiliar places, has 
 little scope in these detailed pictures of sordid 
 or commonplace life. At this early period it 
 is still in prose-poems, especially in Croquis 
 Parisiens, that this craving finds satisfaction. 
 Des Esseintes, the hero of A Reboui's, who on
 
 1 70 Affirmations. 
 
 so many matters is Huysmans' mouthpiece, 
 of all forms of literature preferred the prose- 
 poem when, in the hands of an alchemist 
 of genius, it reveals a novel concentrated into 
 a few pages or a few lines, the concrete juice, 
 the essential oil of art. It was "a communion 
 of thought between a magical writer and an 
 ideal reader, a spiritual collaboration among a 
 dozen superior persons scattered throughout 
 the world, a delectation offered to the finest 
 wits, and to them alone accessible." Huysmans 
 took up this form where Baudelaire and Mallarme 
 had left it, and sought to carry it yet further. 
 In that he was scarcely successful. The excess 
 of tension in the tortured language with which 
 he elaborates his effects too often holds him 
 back from the goal of perfection. We must yet 
 value in Croquis Parisiens its highly wrought 
 and individual effects of rhythm and colour and 
 form. In France, at all events, Huysmans is 
 held to inaugurate the poetic treatment of 
 modern things — a characteristic already trace- 
 able in Les Sceurs Vatard — and this book deals 
 with the esthetic aspects of latter-day Paris, with 
 the things that are " ugly and superb, outrageous 
 and yet exquisite," as a type of which he selects 
 the Folies-Bergere, at that time the most charac- 
 teristic of Parisian music-halls, and he was thus 
 the first to discuss the aesthetic value of the variety 
 stage which has been made cheaper since. For
 
 Hiiysmaiis. 1 7 1 
 
 the most part, however, these Croquis arc of 
 the simplest and most commonplace things — 
 the forlorn Bievre district, the poor man's cafe, 
 the roast-chestnut seller — extracting the beauty 
 or pathos or strangeness of all these things. 
 "Thy garment is the palette of setting suns, 
 the rust of old copper, the brown gilt of Cordo- 
 van leather, the sandal and saffron tints of the 
 autumn foliage. . . When I contemplate thy 
 coat of mail I think of Rembrandt's pictures, 
 I see again his superb heads, his sunny 
 flesh, his gleaming jewels on black velvet I 
 see again his rays of light in the night, his 
 trailing gold in the shade, the dawning of suns 
 through dark arches." The humble bloater has 
 surely never before been sung in language which 
 recalls the Beloved of the " Song of Songs." 
 Huysmans has carried to an even extravagant 
 degree that re-valuation of the world's good in 
 which genius has ever found its chief function. 
 To abase the mighty and exalt the humble 
 seems to man the divinest of prerogatives, for 
 it is that which he himself exercises in his 
 moments of finest inspiration. To find a new 
 vision of the world, a new path to truth, is the 
 instinct of the artist or the thinker. He changes 
 the whole system of our organised perceptions. 
 That is why he seems to us at first an incarnate 
 paradox, a scoffer at our most sacred verities, 
 making mountains of our mole-hills and count-
 
 172 Affirmations. 
 
 ing as mere mole-hills our everlasting mountains, 
 always keeping time to a music that clashes 
 with ours, at our hilarity tristis, in tristitia 
 hilaris. 
 
 In 1889 A Reboiirs appeared. Not perhaps 
 his greatest achievement, it must ever remain 
 the central work in which he has most power- 
 fully concentrated his whole vision of life. It 
 sums up the progress he had already made, 
 foretells the progress he was afterwards to 
 make, in a style that is always individual, 
 always masterly in its individuality. Tech- 
 nically, it may be said that the power of A 
 Rebours lies in the fact that here for the first 
 time Huysmans has succeeded in uniting the 
 two lines of his literary development : the austere 
 analysis in the novels of commonplace things 
 mostly alien to the writer, and the freer elabora- 
 tion in the prose-poems of his own more in- 
 timate personal impressions. In their union 
 the two streams attain a new power and a 
 more intimately personal note. Des Esseintes, 
 the hero of this book, may possibly have been 
 at a few points suggested by a much less in- 
 teresting real personage in contemporary Paris, 
 the Comte de Montesquiou-Fezensac, but in the 
 main he was certainly created by Huysmans' 
 own brain, as the representative of his author's 
 hyperaesthetic experience of the world and the 
 mouthpiece of his most personal judgments.
 
 IluysJiians. 173 
 
 The victim of over-wrought nerves, of neuralgia 
 and dyspepsia, Des Esseintcs retires for a season 
 from Paris to the solitude of his country house 
 at Fontenay, which he has fitted up, on almost 
 cloistral methods, to soothe his fantasy and 
 to gratify his complex aesthetic sensations, his 
 love of reading and contemplation. The finest 
 pictures of Gustave Moreau hang on the walls, 
 with the fantastic engravings of Luyken, and 
 the strange visions of Odilon Redon. He has 
 a tortoise curiously inlaid with precious stones ; 
 he delights in all those exotic plants which 
 reveal Nature's most unnatural freaks; he is 
 a sensitive amateur of perfumes, and considers 
 that the pleasures of smell are equal to those of 
 sight or sound; he possesses a row of little 
 barrels of liqueurs so arranged that he can blend 
 in infinite variety the contents of this instru- 
 ment, his "mouth-organ" he calls it, and pro- 
 duce harmonies which seem to him comparable 
 to those yielded by a musical orchestra. But 
 the solitary pleasures of this palace of art only 
 increase the nervous strain he is suffering from ; 
 and at the urgent bidding of his doctor Des 
 Esseintes returns to the society of his abhorred 
 fellow-beings in Paris, himself opening the dyke 
 that admitted the "waves of human mediocrity" 
 to engulf his refuge. And this wonderful 
 confession of JEsthetic faith — with its long 
 series of deliberately searching and decisive
 
 1 74 Affirjuations. 
 
 affirmations on life, religion, literature, art — 
 ends with a sudden solemn invocation that is 
 surprisingly tremulous : " Take pity, O Lord, 
 on the Christian who doubts, on the sceptic who 
 desires to believe, on the convict of life who 
 embarks alone, in the night, beneath a sky no 
 longer lit by the consoling beacons of ancient 
 faith." 
 
 " He who carries his own most intimate 
 emotions to their highest point becomes the 
 first in file of a long series of men ; " that saying 
 is peculiarly true of Huysmans. But to be a 
 leader of men one must turn one's back on men. 
 Huysmans' attitude towards his readers was 
 somewhat like that of Thoreau, who spoke 
 with lofty disdain of such writers as "would 
 fain have one reader before they die." As he 
 has since remarked, Huysmans wrote A Rebours 
 for a dozen persons, and was himself more sur- 
 prised than any one at the wide interest it 
 evoked. Yet that interest was no accident. 
 Certain aesthetic ideals of the latter half of the 
 nineteenth century are more quintessentially 
 expressed in A Rebotcrs than in any other book. 
 Intensely personal, audaciously independent, it 
 yet sums up a movement which has scarcely 
 now worked itself out. We may read it and 
 re-read, not only for the light which it casts on 
 that movement, but upon every similar period 
 of acute aesthetic perception in the past.
 
 Hiiysmans. 175 
 
 II. 
 
 The aesthetic attitude towards art which A 
 Rebours illuminates is that commonly called 
 decadent. Decadence in art, though a fairly 
 simple phenomenon, and world-wide as art 
 itself, is still so ill understood that it may be 
 worth while to discuss briefly its precise nature, 
 more especially as manifested in literature. 
 
 Technically, a decadent style is only such 
 in relation to a classic style. It is simply a 
 further development of a classic style, a further 
 specialisation, the homogeneous, in Spencerian 
 phraseology, having become heterogeneous. 
 The first is beautiful because the parts are 
 subordinated to the whole ; the second is 
 beautiful because the whole is subordinated to 
 the parts. Among our own early prose-writers 
 Sir Thomas Browne represents the type of 
 decadence in style. Swift's prose is classic, 
 Pater's decadent. Hume and Gibbon are 
 classic, Emerson and Carlyle decadent. In 
 architecture, which is the key to all the arts, we 
 see the distinction between the classic and the 
 decadent visibly demonstrated ; Roman archi- 
 tecture is classic, to become in its Byzantine 
 developments completely decadent, and St. 
 Mark's is the perfected type of decadence in 
 art ; pure early Gothic, again, is strictly classic 
 in the highest degree because it shov/s an
 
 1 76 Affinnations. 
 
 absolute subordination of detail to the bold 
 harmonies of structure, while later Gothic, 
 grown weary of the commonplaces of structure 
 and predominantly interested in beauty of 
 detail, is again decadent. In each case the 
 earlier and classic manner — for the classic 
 manner, being more closely related to the 
 ends of utility, must always be earlier — sub- 
 ordinates the parts to the whole, and strives 
 after those virtues which the whole may best 
 express ; the later manner depreciates the im- 
 portance of the whole for the benefit of its 
 parts, and strives after the virtues of individual- 
 ism. All art is the rising and falling of the 
 slopes of a rhythmic curve between these two 
 classic and decadent extremes. 
 
 Decadence suggests to us going down, falling, 
 decay. If we walk down a real hill we do not 
 feel that we commit a more wicked act than 
 when we walked up it. But if it is a figurative 
 hill then we view Hell at the bottom. The 
 word " corruption " — used in a precise and 
 technical sense to indicate the breaking up of 
 the whole for the benefit of its parts — serves also 
 to indicate a period or manner of decadence in 
 art. This makes confusion worse, for here the 
 moralist feels that surely he is on safe ground. 
 But as Nietzsche, with his usual acuteness in 
 cutting at the root of vulgar prejudice, has well 
 remarked (in Die Frdhliche Wissenschaff), even
 
 Huysmans. 177 
 
 as regards what is called the period of " corrup- 
 tion " in the evolution of societies, we are apt 
 to overlook the fact that the energy which in 
 more primitive times marked the operations of 
 the community as a whole has now simply been 
 transferred to the individuals themselves, and 
 this aggrandisement of the individual really 
 produces an even greater amount of energy. 
 The individual has gained more than the com- 
 munity has lost. An age of social decadence 
 is not only the age of sinners and degenerates, 
 but of saints and martyrs, and decadent Rome 
 produced an Antoninus as well as a Heliogabalus. 
 No doubt social " corruption " and literary " cor- 
 ruption " tend to go together ; an age of indi- 
 vidualism is usually an age of artistic decadence, 
 and we may note that the chief literary artists 
 of America — Poe, Hawthorne, Whitman — are 
 for the most part in the technical sense deca- 
 dents. 
 
 Rome supplies the first clear types of classic 
 and decadent literature, and the small group of 
 recent French writers to whom the term has 
 been more specifically applied were for the most 
 part peculiarly attracted by later Latin literature. 
 So far as I can make out, it is to the profound 
 and penetrating genius of Baudelaire that we 
 owe the first clear apprehension of the legitimate 
 part which decadence plays in literature. Wc 
 may trace it, indeed, in his own style, clear, pure, 
 
 12
 
 178 Affirmations. 
 
 and correct as that style always remains, as well 
 as in his literary preferences. He was a good 
 Latinist, and his favourite Latin authors were 
 Apuleius, Juvenal, Petronius, Saint Augustine, 
 Tertullian, and other writers in prose and verse 
 of the early Christian Church. He himself wrote 
 a love-poem in rhymed Latin verse, adding to it 
 a note concerning the late Latin decadence re- 
 garded as "the supreme sigh of a vigorous 
 person already transformed and prepared for 
 the spiritual life," and specially apt to express 
 passion as the modern world feels it, one pole 
 of the magnet at the opposite end of which 
 are Catullus and his band. " In this marvellous 
 tongue," he added, "solecism and barbarism 
 seem to me to render the forced negligences of 
 a passion which forgets itself and mocks at 
 rules. Words taken in a new meaning reveal 
 the charming awkwardness of the northern 
 barbarian kneeling before the Roman beauty." 
 But the best early statement of the meaning of 
 decadence in style — though doubtless inspired 
 by Baudelaire — was furnished by Gautier in 
 1868 in the course of the essay on Baudelaire 
 which is probably the most interesting piece of 
 criticism he ever achieved. The passage is long, 
 but so precise and accurate that it must here in 
 part be quoted : " The poet of the Fleurs du 
 Mai loved what is improperly called the style 
 of decadence, and which is nothing else but art
 
 Huysmans. 1 79 
 
 arrived at that point of extreme maturity yielded 
 by the slanting suns of aged civilisations : an 
 ingenious compHcated style, full of shades and 
 of research, constantly pushing back the bound- 
 aries of speech, borrowing from all the technical 
 vocabularies, taking colour from all palettes and 
 notes from all key-boards, struggling to render 
 what is most inexpressible in thought, what is 
 vague and most elusive in the outlines of form, 
 listening to translate the subtle confidences of 
 neurosis, the dying confessions of passion grown 
 depraved, and the strange hallucinations of the 
 obsession which is turning to madness. The 
 style of decadence is the ultimate utterance of 
 the Word, summoned to final expression and 
 driven to its last hiding-place. One may recall 
 in this connection the language of the later 
 Roman Empire, already marbled with the green- 
 ness of decomposition, and, so to speak, gamy, 
 and the complicated refinements of the Byzantine 
 school, the last forms of Greek art falling into 
 deliquescence. Such indeed is the necessary and 
 inevitable idiom of peoples and civilisations in 
 which factitious life has replaced natural life, 
 and developed unknown wants in men. It is, 
 besides, no easy thing, this style disdained of 
 pedants, for it expresses new ideas in new forms, 
 and in words which have not yoX been heard. 
 Unlike the classic style it admits shadow. . . . 
 One may well imagine that the fourteen hundred
 
 1 80 Affirmations. 
 
 words of the Racinian vocabulary scarcely suffice 
 the author who has undertaken the laborious 
 task of rendering modern ideas and things in 
 their infinite complexity and multiple coloura- 
 tion." 
 
 Some fifteen years later, Bourget, again in an 
 essay on Baudelaire {Essais de Psychologic Con- 
 temporaine), continued the exposition of the 
 theory of decadence, elaborating the analogy to 
 the social organism which enters the state of 
 decadence as soon as the individual life of the 
 parts is no longer subordinated to the whole. 
 " A similar law governs the development and 
 decadence of that other organism which we call 
 language. A style of decadence is one in which 
 the unity of the book is decom.posed to give 
 place to the independence of the page, in which 
 the page is decomposed to give place to the 
 independence of the phrase, and the phrase to 
 give place to the independence of the word." 
 It was at this time (about 1884) that the term 
 "decadent" seems first to have been applied 
 by Barres and others to the group of which 
 Verlaine, Huysmans, Mallarme were the most 
 distinguished members, and in so far as it 
 signified an ardent and elaborate search for 
 perfection of detail beyond that attained by 
 Parnassian classicality it was tolerated or ac- 
 cepted. Verlaine, indeed, was for the most 
 part indifferent to labels, neither accepting nor
 
 Huysmans. 1 8 1 
 
 rejecting them, and his work was not bound 
 up with any theory. But Huysmans, with the 
 intellectual passion of the pioneer in art, 
 deliberate and relentless, has carried both the 
 theory and the practice of decadence in style 
 to the farthest point. In practice he goes 
 beyond Baudelaire, who, however enamoured 
 he may have been of what he called the 
 phosphorescence of putrescence, always retained 
 in his own style much of what is best in the 
 classic manner. Huysmans' vocabulary is vast, 
 his images, whether remote or familiar, always 
 daring, — "dragged," in the words of one critic, 
 " by the hair or by the feet, down the worm- 
 eaten staircase of terrified Syntax," — but a 
 heart-felt pulse of emotion is restrained beneath 
 the sombre and extravagant magnificence of this 
 style, and imparts at the best that modulated 
 surge of life which only the great masters can 
 control. 
 
 Des Esseintes's predilections in literature are 
 elaborated through several chapters, and with- 
 out question he faithfully reflects his creator's 
 impressions. He was indifferent or contempt- 
 uous towards the writers of the Latin Augustan 
 age; Virgil seemed to him thin and mechanical, 
 Horace a detestable clown; the fat redundancy 
 of Cicero, we are told, and the dry constipation 
 of Caesar alike disgusted him ; Sallust, Livy, 
 Juvenal, even Tacitus and Plautus, though for
 
 1 82 Affii'inations. 
 
 these he had words of praise, seemed to him for 
 the most part merely the delights of pseudo- 
 literary readers. Latin only began to be in- 
 teresting to Des Esscintes in Lucan, for here 
 at least, in spite of the underlying hollowness, 
 it became expressive and studded with bril- 
 liant jewels. The author whom above all he 
 delighted in was Petronius — who reminded 
 Des Esseintes of the modern French novelists 
 he most admired — and several eloquent pages 
 are devoted to that profound observer, delicate 
 analyst, and marvellous painter who modelled 
 his own vivid and precise style out of all the 
 idioms and slang of his day. After Petronius 
 there was a gap in his collection of Latin 
 authors until the second century of our own era 
 is reached with Apuleius and the sterner Christian 
 contemporaries of that jovial pagan, Tertullian 
 and the rest, in whose hands the tongue that in 
 Petronius had reached supreme maturity now 
 began to dissolve. For Tertullian he had little 
 admiration, and none for Augustine, though 
 sympathising with his City of God and his 
 general disgust for the world. But the special 
 odour which the Christians had by the fourth 
 century imparted to decomposing pagan Latin 
 was delightful to him in such authors as Com- 
 modian of Gaza, whose tawny, sombre, and 
 tortuous style he even preferred to Claudian's 
 sonorous blasts, in which the trumpet of
 
 Huysmans. 183 
 
 paganism was last heard in the world. He 
 was also able to maintain interest in Pru- 
 dentius, Sedulius, and a host of unknown 
 Christians who combined Catholic fervour with 
 a Latinity which had become, as it were, com- 
 pletely putrid, leaving but a few shreds of torn 
 flesh for the Christians to " marinate in the brine 
 of their new tongue." His shelves continued 
 to show Latin books of the sixth, seventh, 
 and eighth centuries, among which he found 
 special pleasure in the Anglo-Saxon writers, 
 and only finally ceased at the beginning of 
 the tenth century, when " the curiosity, the 
 complicated naivete'' of the earlier tongue 
 were finally lost in scholastic philosophy and 
 mere cartalaries and chronicles.^ Then, with 
 a formidable leap of ten centuries, his Latin 
 books gave place to nineteenth century French 
 books. 
 
 Des Esseintes is no admirer of Rabelais or 
 Moliere, of Voltaire or Rousseau. Among the 
 older French writers he read only Villon, 
 D'Aubigne, Bossuet, Bourdaloue, Nicole, and 
 especially Pascal. Putting these aside, his 
 French library began with Baudelaire, whose 
 works he had printed in an edition of one copy, 
 
 ' It may be gathered from the Preface he wrote at a later 
 date for M. Remy de Gourmont's delightful volume, Le Latin 
 Mystique, that Huysmans would no longer draw a line at this 
 point ; for he here speaks with enthusiasm of the styles of St. 
 Bernard, St. Bonaventure, and St. Thomas d'Aquinas.
 
 184 Affirmations. 
 
 in episcopal letters, in large missal format, 
 bound in flesh-coloured pig-skin; he found an 
 unspeakable delight in reading this poet who, 
 " in an age when verse only served to express 
 the external aspects of things, had succeeded in 
 expressing the inexpressible, by virtue of a mus- 
 cular and sinewy speech which more than any 
 other possessed the marvellous power of fixing 
 with strange sanity of expression the most 
 morbid, fleeting, tremulous states of weary brains 
 and sorrowful souls." After Baudelaire the few 
 French books on Des Esseintes's shelves fall into 
 two groups, one religious, one secular. Most of 
 the French clerical writers he disregarded, for 
 they yield a pale flux of words which seemed to 
 him to come from a school-girl in a convent. 
 Lacordaire he regarded as an exception, for his 
 language had been fused and moulded by ardent 
 eloquence, but for the most part the Catholic 
 writers he preferred were outside the Church. 
 For Hello's Homme, especially, he cherished pro- 
 found admiration, and an inevitable sympathy 
 for its author, who seemed to him " a cunning 
 engineer of the soul, a skilful watchmaker of the 
 brain, delighting to examine the mechanism of 
 a passion and to explain the play of the wheel- 
 work," and yet united to this power of analysis 
 all the fanaticism of a Biblical prophet, and the 
 tortured ingenuity of a master of style — an ill- 
 balanced, incoherent, yet subtle personality.
 
 Huysnians. 185 
 
 But above all he delighted in Barbcy d'Aurc- 
 villy, shut out from the Church as an unclean 
 and pestiferous heretic, yet glorying to sing 
 her praises, insinuating into that praise a note 
 of almost sadistic sacrilege, a writer at once 
 devout and impious, altogether after Des 
 Esseintes's own heart, so that a special copy 
 of the Diaboliques, in episcopal violet and 
 cardinal purple, printed on sanctified vellum 
 with initials adorned by satanic tails, formed one 
 of his most cherished possessions. In D'Aure- 
 villy's style alone he truly recognised the same 
 gaminess, the speckled morbidity, the flavour as 
 of a sleepy pear which he loved in decadent 
 Latin and the monastic writers of old time. 
 Of contemporary secular books he possessed not 
 many; by force of passing them through the 
 screw-press of his brain few were finally found 
 solid enough to emerge intact and bear re- 
 reading, and in this process he had accelerated 
 "the incurable conflict which existed between 
 his ideas and those of the world into which by 
 chance he had been born." Certain selected 
 works of the three great French novelists of his 
 time — Flaubert, Goncourt, and Zola^ — still re- 
 mained, for in all three he found in various 
 forms that " nostalgic des au-dela " by which he 
 was himself haunted ; and with Baudelaire, these 
 three were, in modern profane literature, the 
 authors by whom he had chiefly been moulded.
 
 1 86 Affirmations. 
 
 The scanty collection also included Verlaine, 
 Mallarme, Poe, and Villiers de I'lsle-Adam, 
 whose firm fantastic style and poignantly ironic 
 attitude towards the utilitarian modern world 
 he found entirely to his taste. Finally, there 
 only remained the little anthology of prose- 
 poems. Des Esseintes thought it improbable 
 that he would ever make any additions to his 
 library; it seemed impossible to him that a 
 decadent language — " struggling on its death- 
 bed to repair all the omissions of joy and bequeath 
 the subtlest memories of pain " — would ever go 
 beyond Mallarme. This brief summary of the 
 three chapters, all full of keen if wayward 
 critical insight, which describe Des Esseintes's 
 library, may serve at once both to indicate the 
 chief moulding influences on Huysmans' own 
 style and to illustrate the precise nature of 
 decadence in art and the fundamental part it 
 plays. 
 
 We have to recognise that decadence is an 
 aesthetic and not a moral conception. The 
 power of words is great, but they need not 
 befool us. The classic herring should suggest 
 no moral superiority over the decadent bloater. 
 We are not called upon to air our moral indigna- 
 tion over the bass end of the musical clef All 
 confusion of intellectual substances is foolish, 
 and one may well sympathise with that fervid 
 unknown metaphysician to whom we owe the
 
 Huysjnans. 187 
 
 Athanasian creed when he went so far as to 
 assert that it is damnable. It is not least so 
 in the weak-headed decadent who falls into 
 the moralist's snare and complacently admits 
 his own exceeding wickedness. We may well 
 reserve our finest admiration for the classic 
 in art, for therein arc included the largest and 
 most imposing works of human skill; but our 
 admiration is of little worth if it is founded 
 on incapacity to appreciate the decadent. 
 Each has its virtues, each is equally right 
 and necessary. One ignorant of plants might 
 well say, on gazing at a seed-capsule with its 
 seeds disposed in harmonious rows, that there 
 was the eternally natural and wholesome order 
 of things, and on seeing the same capsule wither 
 and cast abroad its seeds to germinate at random 
 in the earth, that here was an unwholesome and 
 deplorable period of decay. But he would know 
 little of the transmutations of life. And we have 
 to recognise that those persons who bring the 
 same crude notions into the field of art know as 
 little of the life of the spirit. 
 
 III. 
 
 For some years after the appearance of A 
 Rebours Huysmans produced nothing of any 
 magnitude. En Rade, his next novel, the 
 experience of a Parisian married couple who,
 
 1 88 Affirmations. 
 
 under the stress of temporary pecuniary diffi- 
 culties, go into the country to stay at an 
 uncle's farm, dwells in the memory chiefly by 
 virtue of two vividly naturalistic episodes, the 
 birth of a calf and the death of a cat. More 
 interesting, more intimately personal, are the 
 two volumes of art criticism, L'Art Moderne 
 and Certains, which Huysmans published at 
 about this period. Degas, Rops, Rafifaelli, 
 Odilon Redon are among the artists of very 
 various temperament whom Huysmans either 
 discovered, or at all events first appreciated in 
 their full significance, and when he writes of 
 them it is not alone critical insight which he 
 reveals, but his own personal vision of the 
 world. 
 
 To Huysmans the world has ever been above 
 all a vision ; it was no accident that the art that 
 appeals most purely to the eyes is that of which 
 he has been the finest critic. One is tempted, 
 indeed, to suggest that this aptitude is the out- 
 come of heredity, of long generations devoted 
 to laborious watchfulness of the desire of the 
 eye in the external world, not indeed by actual 
 accumulation of acquired qualities, but by the 
 passing on of a nervous organism long found so 
 apt for this task. He has ever been intensely 
 preoccupied with the effort to express those 
 visible aspects of things which the arts of design 
 were made to express, which the art of speech
 
 Iluysmans. 1 89 
 
 can perhaps never express. The tortured elabora- 
 tion of his style is chiefly due to this perpetual 
 effort to squeeze tones and colours out of this 
 foreign medium. The painter's brain holds 
 only a pen and cannot rest until it has wrung 
 from it a brush's work. But not only is the 
 sense of vision marked in Huysmans. We arc 
 conscious of a general hyperesthesia, an in- 
 tense alertness to the inrush of sensations, 
 which we might well term morbid if it were not 
 so completely intellectualised and controlled. 
 Hearing, indeed, appears to be less acutely 
 sensitive than sight, the poet is subordinated 
 to the painter, though that sense still makes 
 itself felt, and the heavy multicoloured para- 
 graphs often fall at the close into a melancholy 
 and poignant rhythm laden with sighs. It is 
 the sense of smell which Huysmans' work would 
 lead us to regard as most highly developed after 
 that of sight. The serious way in which Des 
 Esseintes treats perfumes is characteristic, and 
 one of the most curious and elaborate of the 
 Croquis Parisiens is " Le Gousset," in which the 
 capacities of language are strained to define and 
 differentiate the odours of feminine arm-pits. 
 Again, earlier, in a preface written for Hannon's 
 Rimes de Joie, Huysmans points out that that 
 writer — who failed to fulfil his early promise 
 — alone of contemporary poets possessed "la 
 curiositc des parfums," and that his chief poem
 
 1 90 Affirmations, 
 
 was written in honour of what Huysmans called 
 "the Hbertine virtues of that glorious perfume," 
 opoponax. This sensitiveness to odour is 
 less marked in Huysmans' later work, but the 
 dominance of vision remains. 
 
 The two volumes of essays on art incidentally 
 serve to throw considerable light on Huysmans' 
 conception of life. For special illustration we 
 may take his attitude towards women, whom in 
 his novels he usually treats, from a rather conven- 
 tionally sexual point of view, as a fact in man's 
 life rather than as a subject for independent 
 analysis. In these essays we may trace the 
 development of his own personal point of view, 
 and in comparing the earlier with the later 
 volume we find a change which is significant of 
 the general evolution of Huysmans' attitude 
 towards life. He is at once the ultra-modern 
 child of a refined civilisation and the victim of 
 nostalgia for an ascetic media^valism ; his origin- 
 ality lies in the fact that in him these two 
 tendencies are not opposed but harmonious, 
 although the second has only of late reached 
 full development. In a notable passage in En 
 Rade, Jacques, the hero, confesses that he can 
 see nothing really great or beautiful in a harvest 
 field, with its anodyne toil, as compared with a 
 workshop or a steamboat, " the horrible magnifi- 
 cence of machines, that one beauty which the 
 modern world has been able to create." It is so
 
 Huys)nans. 1 9 1 
 
 that Huysmans views women also ; he is as 
 indifferent to the feminine ideals of classic art 
 as to its literary ideals. In UArt Modernc, 
 speaking with admiration of a study of the nude 
 by Gauguin, he proceeds to lament that no one 
 has painted the unclothed modern woman with- 
 out falsification or premeditated arrangement, 
 real, alive in her own intimate personality, with 
 her own joys and pains incarnated in the curves 
 of her flesh, and the lash of child-birth traceable 
 on her flanks. We go to the Louvre to learn 
 how to paint, he remarks, forgetting that "beauty 
 is not uniform and invariable, but changes with 
 the age and the climate, that the Venus of Milo, 
 for instance, is now not more beautiful and in- 
 teresting than those ancient statues of the New 
 World, streaked and tattooed and adorned with 
 feathers ; that both are but diverse manifesta- 
 tions of the same ideal of beauty pursued by 
 different races ; that at the present date there 
 can be no question of reaching the beautiful by 
 Venetian, Greek, Dutch, or Flemish rites ; but 
 only by striving to disengage it from contem- 
 porary life, from the world that surrounds us." 
 " Un nu fatigue, delicat, afiine, vibrant" can 
 alone conform to our own time ; and he adds 
 that no one has truly painted the nude since 
 Rembrandt. It is instructive to turn from this 
 essay to that on Degas, written some six years 
 later. It may fairly be said that to Degas
 
 192 Affirmations. 
 
 belongs the honour of taking up the study of 
 the nude at the point where Rembrandt left it; 
 and hke Rembrandt, he has reaHsed that the 
 nude can only be rightly represented in those 
 movements, postures, and avocations by which 
 it is naturally and habitually exposed. It is 
 scarcely surprising, therefore, that Huysmans at 
 once grasped the full significance of the painter's 
 achievement. But he has nothing now to say 
 of the beauty that lies beneath the confinement 
 of modern garments, " the delicious charm of 
 youth, grown languid, rendered as it were divine 
 by the debilitating air of cities." On the con- 
 trary, he emphasises the vision which Degas 
 presents of women at the bath-tub revealing in 
 every "frog-like and simian attitude" their 
 pitiful homeliness, "the humid horror of a body 
 which no washing can purify." Such a glorified 
 contempt of the flesh, he adds, has never been 
 achieved since the Middle Ages. There we catch 
 what had now become the dominant tone in 
 Huysmans' vision; the most modern things in 
 art now suggest to him, they seem to merge 
 into, the most mediaeval and ascetic. And if 
 we turn to the essay on Felicien Rops in the 
 same volume — the most masterly of his essays 
 — we find the same point developed to the 
 utmost. Rops in his own way is as modern 
 and as daring an artist of the nude as Degas. 
 But, as Huysmans perceives, in delineating the
 
 Huysjnans. 193 
 
 essentially modern he is scarcely a supreme 
 artist, is even inferior to Forain, who in his own 
 circumscribed region is insurpassable. Rops, as 
 Huysmans points out, is the great artist of the 
 symbolical rather than the naturalistic modern, a 
 great artist who furnishes the counterpart to Mem- 
 linc and Fra Angelico. All art, Huysmans pro- 
 ceeds, " must gravitate, like humanity which has 
 given birth to it and the earth which carries it, 
 between the two poles of Purity and Wanton- 
 ness, the Heaven and the Hell of art." Rops 
 has taken the latter pole, in no vulgar nympho- 
 maniacal shapes, but "to divulge its causes, to 
 summarise it Catholically, if one may say so, in 
 ardent and sorrowful images"; he has drawn 
 women who are "diabolical Theresas, satanised 
 saints." Following in the path initiated by 
 Baudelaire and Barbey D'Aurevilly, Huysmans 
 concludes, Rops has restored Wantonness to her 
 ancient and Catholic dignity. Thus is Huysmans 
 almost imperceptibly led back to the old stand- 
 point from which woman and the Devil are one. 
 Certains was immediately followed by Ld- 
 bas. This novel is mainly a study of Satan- 
 ism, in which Huysmans interested himself long 
 before it attracted the general attention it has 
 since received in France. There arc, however, 
 three lines of interest in the book, the story of 
 Gilles de Rais and his Sadism, the discussion 
 of Satanism culminating in an extraordinary 
 
 13
 
 1 94 Affinnatt'ons. 
 
 description of a modern celebration of the 
 Black Mass, and the narration of Durtal's 
 liaison with Madame Chantelouve, wherein 
 Huysmans reaches, by firm precision and trium- 
 phant audacity, the highest point he has attained 
 in the analysis of the secrets of passion. But 
 though full of excellent matter, the book loses 
 in impressiveness from the multiplicity of these 
 insufficiently compacted elements of interest. 
 
 While not among his finest achievements, 
 however, it serves to mark the definite attain- 
 ment of a new stage in both the spirit and the 
 method of his work. Hitherto he had been a 
 realist, in method if not in spirit, and had 
 conquered the finest secrets of naturalistic art ; 
 by the help of En Menage alone, as Hennequin, 
 one of his earliest and best critics has said, 
 " it will always be possible to restore the exact 
 physiognomy of Paris to-day." At the outset 
 of La-bas there is a discussion concerning the 
 naturalistic novel and its functions which makes 
 plain the standpoint to which Huysmans had 
 now attained. Pondering the matter, Durtal, 
 the hero of the book, considers that we need, on 
 the one hand, the veracity of document, the 
 precision of detail, the nervous strength of 
 language, which realism has supplied ; but 
 also, on the other hand, we must draw water 
 from the wells of the soul. We cannot explain 
 everything by sexuality and insanity ; we need
 
 Huysmans. 195 
 
 the soul and the body in their natural reactions, 
 their conflict and their union. " We must, in 
 short, follow the great high-way so deeply dug 
 out by Zola, but it is also necessary to trace a 
 parallel path in the air, another road by which 
 we may reach the Beyond and the Afterward, 
 to achieve thus, in one word, a spiritualistic 
 naturalism." Dostoievsky comes nearest to this 
 achievement, he remarks, and the real psycho- 
 logist of the century is not Stendhal but Hello. 
 In another form of art the early painters — 
 Italian, German, especially Flemish — realised 
 this ideal. Durtal sees a consummate revela- 
 tion of such spiritual naturalism in Matth?eus 
 Griinewald's crucifixion at Cassel — the Christ 
 who was at once a putrid and unaureoled 
 corpse and yet a manifest god bathed in 
 invisible light, the union of outrageous realism 
 and outrageous idealism. "Thus from trium- 
 phal ordure Griinewald extracted the finest 
 mints of dilection, the sharpest essences of 
 tears." One may say that the tendency Huys- 
 mans here so clearly asserts had ever been 
 present in his work. But in his previous novels 
 liis own native impulse was always a little 
 unduly oppressed by the naturalistic formulas 
 of Goncourt and Zola. The methods of these 
 great masters had laid a burden on his work, 
 and although the work developed beneath, and 
 because of, that burden, a sense of laborious
 
 196 Affirmations. 
 
 pain and obscurity too often resulted. Hence- 
 forth this disappears. Huysmans retains his 
 own complexity of style, but he has won a 
 certain measure of simplicity and lucidity. It 
 was a natural development, no doubt furthered 
 also by the position which Huysmans had now 
 won in the world of letters. A Rebours, which 
 he had written for his own pleasure, had found 
 an echo in thousands of readers, and the con- 
 sciousness of an audience inspired a certain 
 clarity of speech. From this time we miss the 
 insults directed at the belise of humanity. These 
 characteristics clearly mark Huysmans' next and 
 perhaps greatest book, in which the writer who 
 had conquered all the secrets of decadent art 
 now sets his face towards the ideals of classic 
 art. 
 
 In En Route, indeed, these new qualities 
 of simplicity, lucidity, humanity, and intensity 
 of interest attain so high a degree that the book 
 has reached a vast number of readers who could 
 not realise the marvellous liberation from slavery 
 to its material which the slow elaboration of art 
 has here reached. In ^ Rebours Huysmans 
 succeeded in taking up the prose-poem into his 
 novel form, while at the same time certainly 
 sacrificing something of the fine analysis of 
 familiar things which he had developed in En 
 Menage. In En Rotite he takes the novel from 
 the point he had reached in A Rebours, incor-
 
 Huysmans. 1 97 
 
 porates into it that power of analysis which 
 has now reached incomparable simplicity and 
 acuity, and thus wields the whole of the artistic 
 means which he has acquired during a quarter 
 of a century to one end, the presentation of a 
 spiritual state which has become of absorbing 
 personal interest to himself. 
 
 I well remember hearing M. Huysmans, many 
 years ago, tell how a muddle-headed person had 
 wished to commission him to paint a head of 
 Christ. It seemed then a deliciously absurd 
 request to make of the author of A Rebotirs, 
 and his face wore the patient smile which the 
 spectacle of human stupidity was wont to evoke, 
 but I have since thought that that muddle- 
 headed person was wiser than he knew. As 
 we look back on Huysmans' earlier work it is 
 now easy to sec how he has steadily progressed 
 towards his present standpoint. En Route does 
 not represent, as some might imagine, the 
 reaction of an exhausted debauchee or even 
 the self-deception of a disappointed man of the 
 world. The temperament of Durtal is that of 
 Andre and Folantin and Des Esseintes ; from 
 the first, in the Drageoir a Epices, Huysmans 
 has been an idealist and a seeker, by no means 
 an ascetic, rather a man whose inquisitive senses 
 and restless imagination had led him to taste of 
 every forbidden fruit, but never one to whom 
 the vulgar pleasures of life could offer any
 
 198 Affirmations. 
 
 abiding satisfaction. Tlie more precise record 
 of Des Esseintes's early sexual life may help 
 us here ; while for the penultimate stage Durtal's 
 relations with Madame Chantelouve in Ld-bas, 
 and the mingled attraction and repulsion which 
 he felt for her, are certainly significant. In En 
 Route Durtal magnifies his own wickedness, as 
 Bunyan did in his Grace Abounding ; the saints 
 have always striven to magnify their wickedness, 
 leaving to the sinners the congenial function of 
 playing at righteousness. To trace the real 
 permanence of Huysmans' attitude towards re- 
 ligion it is enough to turn back to A Rebours. 
 Des Esseintes had been educated by the Jesuits, 
 and it sometimes seemed to him that that 
 education had put into him some extra-terres- 
 trial ferment which never after ceased to work, 
 driving him in search of a new world and impos- 
 sible ideals. He could find no earthly place of 
 rest ; he sought to build for himself a " refined 
 Thebaid " as a warm and comfortable ark 
 wherein to find shelter from the flood of human 
 imbecility. He was already drawn towards the 
 Church by many bonds, by his predilection for 
 early Christian Latinity, by the exquisite beauty 
 of the ecclesiastical art of the Middle Ages, by 
 his love for monastic mediaeval music, " that 
 emaciated music which acted instinctively on his 
 nerves" and seemed to him precious beyond all 
 other. Just as Nietzsche was always haunted by
 
 Hiiysinaiis. igc) 
 
 the desire for a monastery for freethinkers, so 
 Des Esseintes dreamed of a hermitage, of the 
 advantages of the cloistered life of convents, 
 wherein men are persecuted by the world for 
 meting out to it the just contempt of silence. 
 
 Des Esseintes, and even the Durtal of Ld- 
 bas, always put aside these thoughts with the 
 reflection that, after all, the Church is only an 
 out-worn legend, a magnificent imposture. In 
 En Route Durtal has taken a decisive step. He 
 has undergone that psychological experience 
 commonly called " conversion." It is only of 
 recent years that the phenomena of conversion 
 have been seriously studied, but we know at all 
 events that it is not intellectual, not even neces- 
 sarily moral transformation, though it may react 
 in either direction, but primarily an emotional 
 phenomenon ; and that it occurs especially in 
 those who have undergone long and torturing 
 disquietude, coming at last as the spontaneous 
 resolution of all their doubts, the eruption of a 
 soothing flood of peace, the silent explosion of 
 inner light. The insight with which this state 
 is described in En Route seems to testify to a 
 real knowledge of it. No obvious moral or 
 intellectual change is effected in Durtal, but 
 he receives a new experience of reposeful faith, 
 a conviction deeper than all argument. It is 
 really the sudden emergence into consciousness 
 of a very gradual process, and the concrete
 
 200 Affirmations. 
 
 artistic temperament which had been subjected 
 to the process reacts in its own way. A more 
 abstract intelh'gence would have asked: "But, 
 after all, is my faith true?" Durtal, in the 
 presence of the growing structure of sensory 
 and imaginative forms within him, which has 
 become as it were a home, feels that the question 
 of its truth has fallen into the background. Its 
 perfect fitness has become the affirmation of its 
 truth. Henceforth it is the task of his life to 
 learn how best to adapt himself to what he 
 recognises as his eternal home. En Route 
 represents a stage in this adaptation. 
 
 By a rare chance — a happier chance than 
 befell Tolstoi under somewhat similar circum- 
 stances — a new development in artistic achieve- 
 ment has here run parallel, and in exquisite 
 harmony, with the new spiritual development. 
 The growing simplicity of Huysmans' work has 
 reached a point beyond which it could not 
 perhaps be carried without injury to his vivid 
 and concrete style. And the new simplicity 
 of spirit, of which it is the reflection, marks 
 the final retreat into the background of that 
 unreasonable contempt for humanity which ran 
 through nearly all the previous books, and now 
 at last passes even into an ecstasy of adoration 
 in the passages concerning old Simon, the 
 monastery swine-herd. Huysmans has chiefly 
 shown his art, however, by relying almost solely
 
 Huysinans. 20 1 
 
 for the interest of his book on his now con- 
 summate power of analysis. This power, 
 which we may perhaps first clearly trace in 
 "Sac au Dos," had developed in En Mhiagc 
 into a wonderful skill to light up the unexplored 
 corners of the soul and to lay bare those terrible 
 thoughts which are, as he has somewhere said, 
 the lamentable incarnation of "the unconscious 
 ignominy of pure souls." In his earlier master- 
 piece, A Rebours, however, it is little seen, 
 having mostly passed into aesthetic criticism. 
 The finest episode of emotional analysis here is 
 the admirable chapter in which Des Esseintes's 
 attempt to visit London is narrated. All his 
 life he had wished to see two countries, Holland 
 and England. (And here we may recall that 
 the former is Huysmans' own ancestral land, 
 and that his French critics find in his work a 
 distinct flavour of English humour.) He had 
 actually been to Holland, and with visions won 
 from the pictures of Rembrandt, Steen, and 
 Teniers he had returned disillusioned. Now he 
 went to Galignani's, bought an English Baedeker, 
 entered the bodega in the Rue de Rivoli to 
 drink of that port which the English love, and 
 then proceeded to a tavern opposite the Gare 
 St. Lazare to eat what he imagined to be a 
 characteristic English meal, surrounded by 
 English people, and haunted by memories of 
 Dickens. And as time went by he continued
 
 202 Affirmations. 
 
 to sit still, while all the sensations of England 
 seemed to pass along his nerves, still sat until 
 at last the London mail had started. "Why- 
 stir," he asked himself, "when one can travel 
 so magnificently in a chair ? . . . Besides, what 
 can one expect save fresh disillusionment, as in 
 Holland? . . . And then I have experienced 
 and seen what I wanted to experience and see. 
 I have saturated myself with English life ; it 
 would be madness to lose by an awkward 
 change of place these imperishable sensations. 
 . . . He called a cab and returned with his 
 portmanteaus, parcels, valises, rugs, umbrellas, 
 and sticks to Fontenay, feeling the physical and 
 mental fatigue of a man who returns home after 
 a long and perilous journey." There could be 
 no happier picture of the imaginative life of the 
 artistic temperament. But in En Route analysis 
 is the prime element of interest ; from first to 
 last there is nothing to hold us but this 
 searching and poignant analysis of the fluctua- 
 tions of Durtal's soul through the small section 
 which he here travels in the road towards 
 spiritual peace. And on the way, lightly, as by 
 chance, the author drops the finest appreciations 
 of liturgical aesthetics, of plain-chant, of the way 
 of the Church with the soul, of the everlasting 
 struggle with the Evil One. There could, for 
 instance, be no better statement than this of 
 one of the mystic's secrets : " There are two ways
 
 Huysvians. 203 
 
 of ridding ourselves of a thing which burdens 
 us, casting it away or letting it fall. To cast 
 away requires an effort of which we may not 
 be capable, to let fall imposes no labour, is 
 simpler, without peril, within reach of all. To 
 cast away, again, implies a certain interest, a 
 certain animation, even a certain fear ; to let 
 fall is absolute indifference, absolute contempt ; 
 believe me, use this method, and Satan will 
 flee." How many forms of Satan there are in 
 the world before which we may profitably 
 meditate on these Vv^ords ! To strive or cry in 
 the face of human stupidity is not the way to 
 set it to flight ; that is the lesson which Des 
 Esseintes would never listen to, which Durtal 
 has at last learnt.^ 
 
 En Route is the first of a trilogy, and the names 
 of the succeeding volumes. La CatJiedrale and 
 nOblat, sufficiently indicate the end of the path 
 on which Durtal, if not indeed his creator, has 
 started. But however that may prove, whatever 
 Huysmans' own final stage may be, there can be 
 little doubt that he is the greatest master of 
 
 ^ In the seventeenth century a great English man of science, 
 Stephen Hales, had discovered the same truth, for we are 
 told that " He could look even upon wicked men, and those 
 who did him unkind offices, without any emotion of particular 
 indignation, not from want of discernment or sensibility; but he 
 used to consider them only like those experiments which, upon 
 trial, he found could never be applied to any useful purpose, 
 and which he therefore calmly and dispassionately laid aside."
 
 204 Affinnations. 
 
 style, and within his own h'mits the subtlest 
 thinker and the acutest psychologist who in 
 France to-day uses the medium of the novel. 
 Only Zola can be compared with him, and be- 
 tween them there can be no kind of rivalry. Zola, 
 with his immense and exuberant temperament, 
 his sanity and width of view, his robust and 
 plebeian art, has his own place on the high-road 
 of modern literature. Huysmans, an intellectual 
 and aesthetic aristocrat, has followed with un- 
 flinching sincerity the by-path along which his 
 own more high-strung and exceptional tempera- 
 ment has led him, and his place, if seemingly a 
 smaller one, is at least as sure; wherever men 
 occupy themselves with the literature of the late 
 nineteenth century they will certainly sometimes 
 talk about Zola, sometimes read Huysmans. 
 Zola's Cyclopean architecture can only be seen 
 as a whole when we have completed the weary 
 task of investigating it in detail ; in Huysmans 
 we seek the expressiveness of the page, the 
 sentence, the word. Strange as it may seem to 
 some, it is the so-called realist who has given us 
 the more idealised rendering of life; the con- 
 centrated vision of the idealist in his own 
 smaller sphere has revealed not alone mysteries 
 of the soul, but even the exterior secrets of 
 life. True it is that Huysmans has passed by 
 with serene indifference, or else with contempt, 
 the things which through the ages we have
 
 Hnysma iis. 205 
 
 slowly learnt to count beautiful. But on the 
 other hand, he has helped to enlarge the sphere 
 of our delight by a new vision of beauty where 
 before to our eyes there was no beauty, exer- 
 cising the proper function of the artist who ever 
 chooses the base and despised things of the 
 world, even the things that are not, to put to 
 nought the things that are. Therein the 
 decadent has his justification. And while we 
 may accept the pioneer's new vision of beauty, 
 we are not called upon to reject those old 
 familiar visions for which he has no eyes, only 
 because his gaze must be fixed upon that 
 unfamiliar height towards which he is leading 
 the men who come after. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Huysmans very exquisitely represents one 
 aspect of the complex modern soul, that aspect 
 which shrinks from the grosser forces of Nature, 
 from the bare simplicity of the naked sky or 
 the naked body, the "incessant deluge of human 
 foolishness," the eternal oppression of the com- 
 monplace, to find a sedative for its exasperated 
 nerves in the contemplation of esoteric beauty 
 and the difficult search for the mystic peace 
 which passes all understanding. " Needs must 
 I rejoice beyond the age," runs the motto from 
 the old Flemish mystic Ruysbroeck set on the
 
 2o6 Affirmatiotis. 
 
 front of A Rebours, "though the world has 
 horror of my joy and its grossness cannot under- 
 stand what I would say." Such is decadence ; 
 such, indeed, is religion, in the wide and true 
 sense of the word. Christianity itself, as we 
 know it in the western church, sprang from the 
 baptism of young barbarism into Latin deca- 
 dence. Pagan art and its clear serenity, science, 
 rationalism, the bright, rough vigour of the sun 
 and the sea, the adorable mystery of common 
 life and commonplace human love, are left to 
 make up the spirit that in any age we call 
 " classic." 
 
 Thus what we call classic corresponds on the 
 spiritual side to the love of natural things, and 
 what we call decadent to the research for the 
 things which seem to lie beyond Nature. "Cor- 
 porea pulchritudo in pelle solummodo constat. 
 Nam si viderent homines hoc quod subtus pellem 
 est, sicutlynces in Beotia cernere interiore dicun- 
 tur, mulieres videre nausearent. Iste decor in 
 flegmate et sanguine et humore ac felle constitit." 
 That is St. Odo of Cluny's acute analysis of 
 woman, who for man is ever the symbol of 
 Nature : beauty is skin-deep, drowned in excre- 
 tions which we should scarcely care to touch 
 with the finger's tip. And for the classic vision 
 of Nature, listen to that fantastic and gigantic 
 Englishman, Sir Kenelm Digby, whose Memoirs, 
 whose whole personality, embodied the final
 
 Huysmans. 207 
 
 efflorescence of the pagan English Renaissance. 
 He has been admitted by her maids to the bed- 
 chamber of Venetia Stanley, the famous beauty 
 who afterwards became his wife; she is still sleep- 
 ing, and he cannot resist the temptation to undress 
 and lie gently and reverently beside her, as half 
 disturbed in her slumber she rolled on to her 
 side from beneath the clothes; "and her smock 
 was so twisted about her fair body that all her 
 legs and the best part of her thighs were naked, 
 which lay so one over the other that they made 
 a deep shadow where the never-satisfied eyes 
 wished for the greatest light. A natural ruddi- 
 ness did shine through the skin, as the sun- 
 beams do through crystal or water, and ascer- 
 tained him that it was flesh that he gazed upon, 
 which yet he durst not touch for fear of melting 
 it, so like snow it looked. Her belly was 
 covered with her smock, which it raised up with 
 a gentle swelling, and expressed the perfect 
 figure of it through the folds of that discourteous 
 veil. Her paps were like two globes — wherein 
 the glories of the heaven and the earth were 
 designed, and the azure veins seemed to divide 
 constellations and kingdoms — between both 
 which began the milky way which leadeth 
 lovers to their Paradise, somewhat shadowed by 
 the yielding downwards of the uppermost of 
 them as she lay upon her side, and out of that 
 darkness did glisten a fev/ drops of sweat like
 
 2o8 Affirmations. 
 
 diamond sparks, and a more fragrant odour 
 than the violets or primroses, whose season was 
 nearly passed, to give way to the warmer sun 
 and the longest days." They play with the same 
 counters, you observe, these two, Odo and Digby, 
 with skin, sweat, and so forth, each placing upon 
 them his own values. Idealists both of them, 
 the one idealises along the line of death, the 
 other along the line of life which the whole race 
 has followed, and both on their own grounds 
 are irrefutable, the logic of life and the logic of 
 death, alike solidly founded in the very structure 
 of the world, of which man is the measuring-rod. 
 The classic party of Nature seems, indeed, 
 the stronger — in seeming only, and one recalls 
 that, of the two witnesses just cited, the abbot of 
 Cluny was the most venerated man of his age, 
 while no one troubled even to publish Digby's 
 Memoirs until our own century — but it carries 
 weakness in its very strength, the weakness of 
 a great political party formed by coalition. It 
 has not alone idealists on its side, but for the 
 most part also the blind forces of robust vul- 
 garity. So that the more fine-strung spirits are 
 sometimes driven to a reaction against Nature 
 and rationalism, like that of which Huysmans, 
 from "L'Extase" onwards, has been the con- 
 sistent representative. At the present moment 
 such a reaction has attained a certain ascend- 
 ency.
 
 Huysinans. 209 
 
 Christianity once fitted nearly every person 
 born into the European world; there must needs 
 be some to whom, in no modern devitalised form 
 but in its purest essence, it is still the one refuge 
 possible. No doubt conditions have changed; 
 the very world itself is not what it was to the 
 mediaeval man. One has to recognise that the 
 modern European differs in this from his medi- 
 aeval ancestor that now we know how largely 
 the world is of our own making. The sense of 
 interiority, as the psychologists say, is of much 
 later development than the sense of exteriority. 
 For the mediaeval man, — as still to-day for the 
 child in the darkness, — his dreams and his 
 fancies, every organic thrill in eye or ear, seemed 
 to be flashed on him from a world of angels and 
 demons without. In a sense which is scarcely 
 true to-day the average man of those days — not 
 the finer or the coarser natures, it may well be 
 — might be said to be the victim of a species 
 of madness, a paranoia, a systematised persccu- 
 tional delusion. He could not look serenely in 
 the face of the stars or lie at rest among the 
 fir-cones in the wood, for who knew what ambush 
 of the Enemy might not lurk behind these 
 things? Even in flowers, as St. Cyprian said, 
 the Enemy lay hidden. 
 
 " Nil jocundum, nil amoenum, 
 Nil salubrc, nil serenum, 
 Nihil dulce, nihil plenum." 
 
 14
 
 2 1 Affirmations. 
 
 There was only one spot where men might 
 huddle together in safety — the church. There 
 the blessed sound of the bells, the contact of 
 holy water, the smell of incense, the sight of 
 the Divine Flesh, wove a spiritual coat of mail 
 over every sensory avenue to the soul. The 
 winds of hell might rave, the birds of night dash 
 themselves against the leaden spires of that 
 fortress whence alone the sky seemed blue with 
 hope. 
 
 Huysmans, notwithstanding a very high 
 degree of intellectual subtlety, is by virtue of 
 his special aesthetic and imaginative tempera- 
 ment carried back to the more childlike attitude 
 of this earlier age. The whole universe appears 
 to him as a process of living images; he cannot 
 reason in abstractions, cannot rationalise ; that 
 indeed is why he is inevitably an artist. Thus 
 he is a born leader in a certain modern emo- 
 tional movement. 
 
 That movement, as we know, is one of a 
 group of movements now peculiarly active. We 
 see them on every hand, occultism, theosophy, 
 spiritualism, all those vague forms on the border- 
 land of the unknown which call to tired men 
 weary of too much living, or never strong enough 
 to live at all, to hide their faces from the sun of 
 nature and grope into cool, delicious darkness, 
 soothing the fever of life. It is foolish to 
 resent this tendency ; it has its tightness ; it
 
 Huysrnans. 2 1 1 
 
 suits some, who may well cling to their private 
 dream if life itself is but a dream. At the worst 
 we may remember that, however repugnant such 
 movements may be, to let fall remains a better 
 way of putting Satan to flight than to cast away. 
 And at the best one should know that this is 
 part of the vital process by which the spiritual 
 world moves on its axis, alternating between 
 darkness and light. 
 
 Therefore soak yourself in mysticism, follow 
 every intoxicating path to every impossible Be- 
 yond, be drunken with mediaevalism, occultism, 
 spiritualism, theosophy, and even, if you will, 
 protestantism- — the cup that cheers, possibly, but 
 surely not inebriates — for the satisfaction that 
 comes of all these is good while it lasts. Yet 
 be sure that Nature is your home, and that from 
 the farthest excursions you will return the more 
 certainly to those fundamental instincts which 
 are rooted in the zoological series at the summit 
 of which we stand. For the whole spiritual 
 cosmogony finally rests, not indeed on a tortoise, 
 but on the emotional impulses of the mammal 
 vertebrate which constitute us men. 
 
 Meanwhile we will not grieve because in the 
 course of our pilgrimage on earth the sun sets. 
 It has always risen again. We may lighten the 
 darkness of the journey by admiring the beauty 
 of night, plucking back the cowl if needs must 
 we wear it. — Eta, /ratines, pergavms.
 
 212 
 
 ST. FRANCIS AND OTHERS. 
 
 The religion of Jesus was the invention of a race 
 which itself never accepted that religion. In the 
 East religions spring up, for the most part, as 
 naturally as flowers, and, like flowers, are scarcely 
 a matter for furious propaganda. These deep 
 sagfacious Eastern men threw us of old this 
 rejected flower, as they have since sent us the 
 vases and fans they found too tawdry; and 
 when we send our missionaries out to barter 
 back the gift at a profit, they say no word, but 
 their faces wear the mysterious Eastern smile. 
 Yet for us, at all events, the figure of Jesus 
 symbolises, and will always symbolise, a special 
 attitude towards life, made up of tender human 
 sympathy and mystical reliance on the unseen 
 forces of the world. In certain stories of the 
 Gospels, certain sayings, in many of the parables, 
 this attitude finds the completest expression of 
 its sweetest abandonment. But to us, men of 
 another race living in far distant corners of the 
 world, it seems altogether oriental and ascetic, 
 a morbid exceptional phenomenon. And as 
 a matter of fact Jesus found no successor.
 
 S/. Francis and Others. 213 
 
 Over the stage of those gracious and radiant 
 scenes swiftly fell a fire-proof curtain, wrought 
 of systematic theology and formal metaphysics, 
 which even the divine flames of that wonderful 
 personality were unable to melt. 
 
 Something even stronger than theology or 
 metaphysics has served to cut us off from the 
 spirit of Jesus, and that is the spirit of Paul, 
 certainly the real founder of " Christianity," as 
 we know it, for Jerome, Augustine, Luther, were 
 all the children of Paul, and in no respect the 
 children of Jesus. That marvellous little Jew 
 painted in its main outlines the picture of 
 Christianity which in the theatre of this world 
 has for so many centuries shut us off from Jesus. 
 Impelled by the intense and concentrated energy 
 of his twisted suffering nature, Paul brought 
 "moral force" into our western world, and after 
 it that infinite procession of hypocrisies and 
 cruelties and artificialities which still trains loath- 
 somely across the scene of civilised life. Jesus 
 may have been a visionary, but his visions were in 
 divine harmony with the course of nature, with 
 the wine and the bread of life, with children and 
 with flowers. We may be very sure that Paul 
 never considered the lilies, or found benediction 
 with children. He trampled on nature when it 
 came in his way, and for the rest never saw it. 
 He was not, as Festus thought, a madman, but 
 whether or not, as his experiences seem to indi-
 
 214 Affirmations. 
 
 cate, he was a victim to the " sacred disease " of 
 epilepsy, concerning his profoundly neurotic 
 temperament there can be no manner of ques- 
 tion. 
 
 He flung himself on to men, this terrible 
 apostle of the " Gentiles," thrusting faith down 
 their throats at the point of a spiritual sword 
 so fiery and keen that, by no miracle, it soon 
 became a sword of steel with red blood dripping 
 from its point Well-nigh everything that has 
 ever been evil in Christianity, its temporal power, 
 its accursed intolerance, its contempt for reason, 
 for beautiful living, for every sweet and sunny 
 and simple aspect of the world — all that is in- 
 volved in the awful conception of " moral force " 
 — flows directly from Paul. What eternal tor- 
 ture could be adequate for so monstrous an 
 offender? And yet, when you think of the 
 potent personality concentrated in this morbid 
 man, of his courage, of the intolerance that he 
 wreaked on himself, the flashes of divine insight 
 in his restless and turbulent spirit, of the 
 humility of the neuropath who desired to be 
 "altogether mad," the pathos of it all, indigna- 
 tion falls silent. What can be said ? 
 
 Thus Paul and not Peter was the rock on 
 which the Church was built, and whatever 
 virtues the Church may have possessed have 
 not been the virtues of Jesus but the quite other 
 virtues of Paul. Yet Jesus has not wholly been
 
 St. Frauds and Others. 215 
 
 left without witness even in Europe, and it is 
 the special charm and significance of Francis of 
 Assisi that he, if not alone certainly chief 
 among European men, has incarnated some 
 measure of the graciousness that was in Jesus, 
 and made it visible and real to the European 
 world. And he has done that by no means 
 through the influence of the Church, or by 
 imitation, but by wholly natural and spontaneous 
 impulse. To understand Francis we must first 
 of all realise that he was in no sense and at no 
 time the creature of the Church, being indeed 
 from first to last in a very real sense antagonistic 
 to the Church. The whole world as Francis 
 knew it was Christian, and he was by no means 
 a man of inquisitive analytic intellectual type, a 
 Bruno or a Campanella; he accepted Christianity 
 because it was there, and while remaining in it 
 was never of it, resenting fiercely any attempt of 
 the Church to encroach on the free activity of his 
 personality, dispensing himself of any intimate 
 adherence not by intellectual sophistries, but 
 by lightly brushing away science and theology 
 altogether as useless superfluities. 
 
 An acute psychologist has well remarked that 
 those famous historical persons who have passed 
 through two antithetical phases of character, 
 survive for us usually only in one of those 
 phases, that we can remember only the post- 
 conversion Augustine and the pre-abdication
 
 2i6 Affirmations. 
 
 Diocletian. Such one-sided views of great and 
 complex characters suit our rough and lazy 
 methods of ordinary thought, content to regard 
 a man only on that side which has been most 
 prominently displayed to the world. But such 
 methods are fatal to any clear psychological 
 conception of character or to any sound ethical 
 conception of life. Francis lived one of these 
 double-sided lives, and the Francis we remem- 
 ber is the emaciated saint already developing 
 the stigmata of divine grace. In his earlier bio- 
 graphies we catch glimpses of a younger and quite 
 other Francis, iti vanitatibiis Jiiitritus insolenter, 
 the spendthrift companion of nobles, proud to 
 surpass them in youthful extravagance and dissi- 
 pation, the head of a band which dazzled the 
 citizens of Assisi with the luxury of their rich 
 garments and the sound of their festive songs by 
 night, a passionate lover of chivalry and the 
 troubadours, whose music then filled the air, so 
 full of gaiety that he sometimes seemed almost 
 mad to the grave citizens of his town, one whose 
 nature it was from the first to go to excess, 
 always to a fine and generous excess, that 
 spiritual excess which Blake called the road to 
 the palace of wisdom. 
 
 The later Francis survived ; the early Francis 
 is forgotten. But we may be assured that there 
 would have been no Francis the saint if there 
 had not been Francis the sinner. That grace
 
 S^. Fi'ancis and Others. 217 
 
 and elation, the tender humanity and infinite 
 delight in natural things, even the profound 
 contempt for luxury and superfluity, were not 
 learnt in any of the saint's beloved Umbrian 
 cells; they were the final outcome of a beauti- 
 fully free and excessive life acting on an ex- 
 quisitely fine-strung organism. Rarely has any 
 follower of Francis attained in any measure to 
 his level of exalted freedom, joy, and simplicity 
 in saintliness. It was not alone that they could 
 not possess his organism, but they had not lived 
 his life. Their piety even blinded their eyes, 
 and just as the biographers of Jesus omitted 
 all reference to the formative years of his life, 
 so also the biographers of Francis gradually 
 eliminated the early records, terrified at the 
 thought that their founder may not have been 
 a virgin. We do not win any clear psycho- 
 logical insight into the man until we realise 
 this. 
 
 It is not alone the psychological aspect 
 which becomes clear in the light of Francis's 
 early life. These stages of development have 
 their ethical significance also. It seems to be 
 too often forgotten that repression and licence 
 are two sides of the same fact. We can only 
 attain a fine temperance through a fine freedom, 
 even a fine excess. The women who think that 
 they must at all costs repress themselves, and 
 the men who — usually with the help of certain
 
 2 1 8 Affirmations. 
 
 private " accommodements " — consider repres- 
 sion as the proper ideal, have missed the true 
 safeguards against licence, and flounder for ever 
 in a turbid sea, at war with themselves, at war 
 with nature. The saints knew better. By a 
 process of spiritual Pasteurism, a natural and 
 spontaneous process, they guaranteed their eter- 
 nal peace. All the real saints, so far as we 
 know them, had many phases, such of them as 
 were saints from their mothers' wombs possess- 
 ing a significance which for human beings 
 generally is minimal. The real saints in all 
 'ages have forgotten so many beautiful things, 
 storing so many wonderful experiences in their 
 past. We should not dye our clothes, says St. 
 Clement of Alexandria, our life should now be 
 anything but a pageant. Flower-like garments 
 should be abandoned, and Bacchic revelries, 
 "useful for tragedies, not for life." The dyes 
 of Sardis — olive, green, rose-coloured, scarlet, 
 and ten thousand other hues — invented for 
 voluptuousness, the garments of embroidered 
 gold and purple, dipped in perfume, stained in 
 saffron, the bright diaphonous tissues of the 
 dancing girl — to all these we must bid farewell. 
 But we cannot bid them farewell unless we have 
 known them. If you would be a saint you must 
 begin by being something other than a saint. 
 This it was that St. Clement forgot, or never 
 knew.
 
 St. Francis and Others. 219 
 
 In youth we are so full of energy, and life 
 seems so long. In our ethical fervour we accept 
 Clement's theory of conduct at his own valua- 
 tion. One is so scrupulous of others, so anxious 
 lest he hurt them ; and another is so contempt- 
 uous of others, so eager to hold himself back 
 from all but the highest good, and never to let 
 himself fully go. And there is a fine thrill of 
 pleasure in the self-restraint, an athletic tension 
 of the soul. It is as if the infant at the breast 
 should say, I will hold myself back from 
 sucking ; I will take only just ever so little, and 
 not let myself go and draw in the delicious 
 stream with no after-thought ; there will be time 
 for that when I am grown up. But it is not 
 so. There is only one time in life for milk, 
 only one time for youth; we cannot postpone 
 life or retrace its milestones, and what is once 
 lost is lost for ever. The cold waters of self- 
 restraint and self-denial, as we first put our 
 young feet in them, send a tonic shiver along 
 the nerves, and we go on and on. But suddenly 
 we find that the water has risen to our breasts, 
 to our chins, that it is too late, too late, that we 
 shall never again move and breathe freely in the 
 open air and sunshine. That is the fate that 
 overtakes the young ascetic ideal. Unhappier 
 yet are those who snatch the cup of life so 
 hastily in youth and fill it with such muddy 
 waters that the dregs cling to their lips for ever,
 
 220 Affirmations. 
 
 spoiling the taste of the most exquisite things. 
 To live remains an art, an art which every one 
 must learn, and which no one can teach. 
 
 It may seem that I speak of out-worn things, 
 and that the problem of saintliness has little 
 relation to the moral problems of our time. It 
 is far otherwise. You have never seen the world 
 if you have not realised that an element of 
 asceticism lies at the foundation of life. You 
 may expel it with the fork of reason or of self- 
 enjoyment, but being part of Nature herself it 
 must ever return. All the art of living lies in a 
 fine mingling of letting go and holding in. The 
 man who makes the one or the other his ex- 
 clusive aim in life will die before he has ever 
 begun to live. The man who has carried one 
 part of the process to excess before turning to 
 the other will indeed learn what life is, and may 
 leave behind him the memory of a pattern saint. 
 But he alone is the wise master of living who 
 from first to last has held the double ideal in 
 true honour. In these, as in other matters, we 
 cannot know the spiritual facts unless we realise 
 the physical facts of life. All life is a building 
 up and a breaking down, a taking in and a 
 giving out, a perpetually anabolic and katabolic 
 rhythm. To live rightly we must imitate both 
 the luxury of Nature and her austerity. 
 
 What should be the place of asceticism in 
 modern life? Evidently there is in human
 
 St. Fi'ancis and Others. 221 
 
 nature an instinct which craves for the sharpen- 
 ing of enjoyment which conies from simpHcity 
 and a finely-tempered abstinence, a measured 
 drawing back when also it were possible reck- 
 lessly to let go. It is easy to wave aside 
 religious asceticism. That, it seems, may well 
 be left to those who decide to invest their enjoy- 
 ments in a heavenly bank which will pay large 
 dividends in another world. There still remains 
 the rational asceticism that is sweet either for 
 its own sake, or for its immediate and visible 
 results in human joy. 
 
 When we contemplate the modern world 
 from a broadly biological standpoint, there can 
 be but little difficulty in finding free and whole- 
 some scope for the ascetic instinct. For the 
 Christian or Buddhist ascetic of old (as in 
 some measure for his feeble modern imitator, 
 the theosophist) asceticism was a rapturous 
 indifference to life for the sake of something 
 that seemed more than life, something that was 
 itself a " higher life," and only to be achieved in 
 the treading under foot of all that men counted 
 life. Such conceptions belong to the past, and 
 can only be revivified in the failing imaginations 
 of the weary and the aged who belong to the 
 past. The more subtle and complex conception 
 of life which has grown up in the modern world 
 traces life to its roots and finds it most precious 
 where it is most intense. When we wish to
 
 222 Affirmations. 
 
 carve out a world for ourselves it is the periphery 
 which we cut away and not the core. The 
 immense accretions of that periphery in the 
 modern world make clearer to us than it was 
 to our predecessors that it is in the simple and 
 elementary things that our life consists. It is 
 to the honour of Francis that in a vague, im- 
 perfect way he foresaw this. Aided by his 
 early experiences, he cast aside the superfluities 
 of knowledge and labour and skill — all that vain 
 plethora of mere formal things and prescribed 
 acts which men foolishly count life — and sym- 
 bolising them in wealth, joyfully espoused 
 Poverty as a bride. For poverty to Francis 
 meant contact with Nature and with men. The 
 free play of the individual soul in contact with 
 Nature and men, Francis instinctively felt, is 
 joy and liberation ; and if the simple-minded 
 saint went farther than this, and allowed a 
 certain set of dogmatic opinions and conven- 
 tional abstentions, we may be sure that herein 
 he had no warrant of personal inspiration, but 
 was content to follow the well-nigh unques- 
 tioned traditions of his day. Francis fought, 
 not for Christianity and still less for the Church, 
 but for the great secret of fine living which he 
 had personally divined. It was by a true 
 instinct that his modern biographer finds the 
 motto of his life in the exquisite saying of the 
 saint's great precursor, Joachim of Flora, that
 
 St. Francis and Others. 223 
 
 the true ascetic counts nothing his own, save 
 only his harp : " Qui vere inonachus est nihil 
 reputat esse suum nisi citharam." 
 
 In former days we used to regard the civi- 
 lised man as in some way incorporating in his 
 organism and bringing into the world with him 
 the inheritance of the ages of human culture. 
 Now the tendency is to regard civilisation as a 
 growth totally outside man, and to consider the 
 man himself as a savage who merely adapts 
 himself to civilisation as he grows up, bringing, 
 it may be, his own little contribution to its 
 development, but himself remaining practically 
 a savage. Thus Weismann has argued that 
 the development of music is purely a develop- 
 ment of traditions, and that given the traditions 
 any savage has a chance of becoming a Bach 
 or a Beethoven. I think this is a more extreme 
 view than the facts warrant us in taking. But 
 it is fairly obvious that there has been no growth 
 of the human intellect during at least the last 
 two or three thousand years. We cannot beat 
 the Romans at government ; we cannot express 
 passion better than Sappho, or form better than 
 Phidias. We have produced no more truly 
 scientific physicians than Hippocrates or Galen; 
 we cannot map out the world more philo- 
 sophically than Aristotle, nor play at ball with 
 it with a greater dialectical facility than Plato. 
 What we have done is to burden ourselves with
 
 224 Affirmations. 
 
 a vaster mass of tradition. Civilisation is the 
 garment which man makes to clothe himself 
 with. It is for each of us to help to put 
 in a patch here, to sew on a button there, or 
 to work in more embroidery. But the indi- 
 vidual himself, with his own personal organic 
 passions, never becomes part of the garment, he 
 only wears it. Not, indeed, that we are called 
 upon to refuse to wear it. The person who can 
 so refuse to follow the whole tradition of the 
 race whence he springs is organically abnormal, 
 not to say morbid. His fellows have a fair 
 right to call him a lunatic or a criminal. The 
 real question is whether we shall allow ourselves 
 to be crushed to the earth, lame, impotent, and 
 anaemic, by the mere garment of civilisation, or 
 whether we shall so strive to live that we wear 
 it loosely and easily and athletically, recognis- 
 ing that it is infinitely less precious than the 
 humanity it clothes, still not without its beauty 
 and its use. 
 
 If we wish to realise how many things are 
 not required for fine living we may contemplate 
 the "triumphs of the Victotian era." Contem- 
 plating these we are enabled also to see that 
 they mostly belong to the mechanical side of 
 existence, among the things that are remote 
 from the core of life. The new energy that all 
 these inventions may give you on one side they 
 take from you on the other. They run on the
 
 SL Francis and OtJicrs. 225 
 
 energy that you yourself supply. They arc but 
 devices for burdening your progress and drain- 
 ing away your energy. For what does it avail 
 though tons of food are piled before you at the 
 banquet of life if the capacity of your stomach 
 remains strictly limited? Only the more ex- 
 quisite quality of the banquet, with a finer 
 equity in its distribution, could have brought 
 you new joy and strength. Tlie exquisite 
 things of life are to-day as rare and as precious 
 as ever they were. If the Victorian era had 
 given a keener sauce to hunger, a more ravishing 
 delight to love, if it had added a new joy to the 
 sunlight, or a more delicious thrill to the spring- 
 time, if it had made any of these things a larger 
 part of the common life, there indeed were a 
 triumph to boast of I But so far as one can see, 
 the Victorian era has mostly helped to cover 
 over and push away from men the essential 
 joys of living. Even those who prate so glee- 
 fully of its triumphs find chief of these its nar- 
 cotics. Let us use these "triumphs" as much 
 as we will, they belong to the unessential back- 
 ground against which the real drama of our life 
 must still be played. 
 
 We waste so much of our time on the things 
 that are not truly essential, worrying ourselves 
 and others. Only one thing is really needful, 
 whether with this man we say " Seek first the 
 kingdom of Heaven," or with that, " Make to 
 
 15
 
 226 Ajjirmations. 
 
 yourself a perfect body." It matters little, 
 because he who pointed to the kingdom of 
 Heaven came eating and drinking, the friend of 
 publicans and sinners, and he who pointed to 
 the body sought solitude and the keenest 
 spiritual austerity. The body includes the soul, 
 and the kingdom of Heaven includes the body. 
 The one thing needful is to seek wisely the 
 fullest organic satisfaction. The more closely 
 we cling to that which satisfies the deepest 
 cravings of the organism, the more gladly we 
 shall let fall the intolerable burden of restraints 
 and licences which are not required for fine 
 living. " The true ascetic counts nothing his own 
 save only his harp." It is best to feel light and 
 elate, free in every limb. Every man may have 
 his burden to bear; let him only beware that he 
 bears no burden which is not a joy to carry. If 
 a man cannot sing as he carries his cross he had 
 better drop it. 
 
 One has to admit that among English-speak- 
 ing races at all events the conditions have not 
 been favourable for fine living. The racial 
 elements that have chiefly gone to making the 
 English-speaking peoples have been mainly 
 characterised by energy, and while energy is 
 the prime constituent of living, it is scarcely 
 sufficient for fine living. It is quality rather 
 than quantity of life which finally counts: that 
 is the terrible fact it has taken so long for our
 
 St. Francis and Others. 227 
 
 race to Icarn. To plough deep in the furrows 
 of life, to scatter human seed broadcast, to bring 
 to birth your random millions to wilt and fade 
 in the black fog of London alleys or the hot 
 steam of Lancashire mills, casting abroad the 
 residue to wreak the vengeance in their blood 
 on every fair and unspoilt land the world may 
 hold — that is scarcely yet civilisation ; fishes 
 that spawn in the deep have carried the art of 
 living as far as that. Not energy, even when it 
 shows itself in the blind fury of righteousness, 
 suffices to make civilisation, but sincerity, intel- 
 ligence, sympathy, grace, and all those subtle 
 amenities which go to what we call, perhaps 
 imperfectly enough, humanity — therein more 
 truly lie the virtues of fine living. 
 
 It seems not unnecessary to point out that 
 civilisation was immortal long before the first 
 Englishman was born. The races that have 
 given the world the chief examples of fine living 
 have never, save sometimes in their decay, 
 sought quantity rather than quality of life. 
 Some of the world's most eternal cities are its 
 smallest cities. If indeed the reckless excess 
 of human life tended to produce happiness, we 
 might well recognise compensation, and rest 
 content. But, as we know, that is not so. The 
 country that men call the wealthiest is the 
 poorest in humanity when the lives and safeties 
 of its workers are concerned, the law of our
 
 228 Affirmations. 
 
 righteousness demanding that the weakest shall 
 go to the wall. 
 
 One asks oneself if such a condition of things 
 is fatally necessary. If that were so, then indeed 
 the outlook of the world is dark. If the ideal 
 of quantity before quality, of brute energy, of 
 complacent self-righteousness, is for ever to 
 dominate a large part of the world through the 
 English-speaking peoples, then indeed we may 
 die happy that the memory and the vision of 
 better things were yet extant in our time. 
 
 Yet surely it is not necessary. If civilisation 
 is a tradition then we may mould that tradition 
 We are no longer fatally damned into the world. 
 If our fathers ate sour grapes our teeth are not 
 on edge. And even so far as the influence of 
 race counts, there is yet to be set against it the 
 influence of climate. In sunnier English-speak- 
 ing lands we may already trace a new foreign 
 element of grace and suavity, a deeper insight 
 into the art of living, clearly due in large 
 measure to sky alone. When races change their 
 .-ky, unlike individuals, they change their dis- 
 positions also. 
 
 But if we put aside this factor — though 
 it is one of much significance when we recall 
 the accumulating evidence that under proper 
 conditions the white races can live and flourish 
 in hot climes — are there no reasons for think- 
 ing that even the English in England may
 
 S^. Frauds and Olhers. 229 
 
 acquire those aptitudes whicii make not only for 
 the grosser virtues of civiHsation, but also for 
 those finer qualities which alone make life truly 
 worth living ? I think there are. 
 
 It is common for pessimists of the baser sort 
 to lament the relative decay of English supre- 
 macy in manufacturing and commercial energy, 
 and to look enviously at the development in 
 these directions of other and younger lands. 
 Such an attitude is in any case inhuman, since 
 these younger countries, especially Germany, are 
 Imdertaking the cruder tasks of civilisation in 
 at once a more scientific and a more humane 
 spirit than we have ever been able to achieve. 
 But it is also uncalled for. As a civilisation 
 declines in brutal material energy it gains in 
 spiritual refinement, thus winning more subtle 
 and permanent influence. Egypt in her old age 
 helped to mould young Greece, which in turn as 
 she fell civilised her barbarian Roman con- 
 querors. Of early vigorous Rome nothing 
 remains save the empty echo of heroic virtue; 
 but on the magnificent compost of Roman, Alex- 
 andrian, and Byzantine decay we northerners 
 are flourishing even to-day. France has not 
 taken a leading part in the grosser work of 
 modern civilisation, but her laboratories of ideas, 
 her workshops of beauty, above all her skill in 
 the fine art of living, have given her an influence 
 over men's minds which swarming millions of
 
 230 Affirmations. 
 
 pale factory hands and an inconceivable tonnage 
 of mercantile shipping have not so far given to 
 us. But in the very dying down of these grosser 
 energies there is hope, for \vc may be sure that 
 the forces of life are not yet extinct, and that 
 worthier and subtler ends will float before our 
 eyes as the sculleries and outhouse offices of life 
 are gradually removed elsewhere. England, 
 there can be little doubt, is peculiarly fitted to 
 exercise the finer functions of civilisation, if not 
 indeed for the world generally, at all events for 
 those peoples of the globe which are allied to 
 her wholly by language and largely by race. 
 In new countries, in the hurry of cities, in the 
 barren solitude of plains and hills, men have 
 no time or no chance to elaborate the ideals and 
 visions for which they yet thirst; they are not 
 in touch with those great traditions on which 
 alone all worthy and abiding effort must finally 
 rest. The little group of islands hidden in this 
 far corner of the Atlantic, bathed in their ever- 
 lasting halo of iridescent mist, will be a sacred 
 shrine for fully half the world. It was the 
 womb in which the world's most energetic race 
 was elaborated ; we may be sure that the mother 
 feeling will never die out. Every great name 
 and episode in the slow incubation of the race 
 has its place and association there. Nothing 
 there which is not visibly bathed in that glory 
 which for ever touches us in the far past. In
 
 Sf. Francis and OtJiers. 231 
 
 the light of a newer civilisation every aspect of 
 it will claim the picturesque beauty of the past. 
 And if, as Ribot has lately asserted, the factories 
 of this century will haunt the minds of future 
 men with the same picturesque suggestion as 
 the ruins of thirteenth century abbeys to-da)-- 
 haunt us, how rich a treasure England will 
 possess here ! Men will come from afar to 
 wander among the ruined factories and furnaces 
 of Lancashire and the Midlands, to gaze at 
 the crumbling charm of those structures once 
 mortared by tears and blood. They will seek 
 the massive whirr of vanished mills at dawn, 
 the prolonged clatter of clogs along the pave- 
 ment, the flutter of shawls down dark alleys, 
 the echo of brutal forgotten oaths. Their eyes 
 will vainly try to recall the men and women of 
 the Victorian era, huddled together in pathetic 
 self-satisfaction beneath a black pall of smoke 
 and disease and death, playing out the tragedy 
 they called life. A tender melancholy mightier 
 than beauty will cling to the decay of that 
 vanished past. 
 
 So far we have been developing the modern 
 applications of that spirit oi simplicity — of sincere 
 and natural asceticism — which was a chief part 
 of the secret of the Umbrian saint's charm. 
 Francis — as in an earlier age the great Cynics of 
 Greece, and in a later age the New England 
 transcendentalists — enables us to see that asceti-
 
 232 Ajfinnations. 
 
 cism is a natural instinct ; he knew that so far 
 from being an effort to crush the body it was an 
 effort to give elation and freedom to the body — 
 Gaudcfrater corpus ! — and that so far from being 
 an appeal to sorrow it was a perpetual appeal to 
 joy. Let us throw aside the useless burdens of 
 life, he seems to say, the things that oppress 
 body and mind, — care and wealth and learning 
 and books, — that thus we may become free to 
 concentrate ourselves on the natural things of 
 the world, attaining therein the joy of living. 
 That was the simplicity of Francis. There is 
 another vaguer and subtler aspect of his person- 
 ality which may be expressed by the allied word 
 purity. I mean that clearness and perfect 
 crystalline transparency symbolised by water, 
 in which it has its source. That Francis, with 
 all his fine natural instincts, fully realised all the 
 implications of purity, either on its physical or 
 its spiritual sides, one may well doubt. Purity 
 has never been a great Christian virtue, though 
 ever greatly talked about in Christendom ; and 
 while the reliance of Francis on instinct carried 
 him far beyond the age and the faith in which 
 he lived, his indifference to the intellectual grip 
 of things which was part of that natural instinct 
 caused him to be often swayed by the con- 
 ventions and traditions around him. 
 
 It has been well said that purity — which in the 
 last analysis is physical cleanness — is the final
 
 St. Francis and Others. 233 
 
 result of evolution after which Nature is ever 
 striving. When she had attained to the pro- 
 duction of naked savage man, a creature no 
 longer encumbered with the care of his fur but 
 freely and constantly bathed by the elements, 
 the perfection of purity was attained. With the 
 wearing of clothes dirt was again brought into 
 the world ; and so-called civilised man — except 
 when he possesses leisure for prolonged attention 
 to his person and his clothes — is once more 
 brought to the level of the lower animals, indeed 
 below them, for few animals spend so little time 
 and trouble in attaining cleanliness as garmented 
 man. Pagan classic times, no doubt, cherished 
 a cult of the body which involved a high regard 
 for physical purity. That is the very reason 
 why such purity has never been a Christian or 
 modern virtue. The early Church, feeling pro- 
 found antagonism to the vices which in classic 
 times were associated with the bath, from the 
 outset frequently denied that there was any 
 need for cleanliness at all. Even so cultured a 
 Christian as Clement of Alexandria would only 
 admit that women should be clean ; it was not 
 necessary for men ; " the bath is to be taken 
 by women for cleanliness and health, by men for 
 health alone ; " in later days the hatred of clean- 
 liness often became quite whole-hearted. Thus it 
 happens that throughout Europe and wherever 
 the influence of Christianity has spread there
 
 234 Affirmations. 
 
 has been on the whole an indifference to dirt, 
 which is indeed not uncommonly found among 
 degraded peoples untouched by Christianity, but 
 is certainly nowhere else found in association 
 with a grade of culture in most other matters so 
 high. To the Roman the rites of the bath 
 formed one of the wcvy chief occupations of life, 
 and to this race it has happened, as probably to 
 no other ancient race, that their baths have often 
 survived their temples ; Rome holds no more 
 memorable relic than the Baths of Caracalla. 
 For the Mohammedan the love of water is part 
 of religion, and the energy and skill with which 
 in its prime Islamic civilisation exploited the 
 free and beautiful use of water, are still to be 
 traced throughout southern Spain. In the fine 
 civilisation of Japan, again, the pursuit of 
 physical purity has ever been a simple and 
 unashamed public duty, and "a Japanese crowd," 
 says Professor Chamberlain, " is the sweetest in 
 the world." How different things are in Christ- 
 endom one need not insist. 
 
 It is, however, impossible to overrate the 
 magnitude of the issues which are directly and 
 indirectly enfolded in this question of physical 
 purity. Christianity, with its studied indiffer- 
 ence to cleanliness, is, after all, a force from 
 the outside so far as we are concerned ; every 
 spontaneous reflective movement of progress 
 involves a reaction against it On the physical
 
 St. Francis and Others. 235 
 
 side it is the mark of the better social classes 
 that they are clean, and any striving for better- 
 ment among the masses is on the physical side 
 a striving for greater cleanliness. Personal 
 dirtiness is the real and permanent dividing 
 line of classes. The instinctive physical shrink- 
 ing of the clean person from the dirty person — 
 except at the rare moments when some stronger 
 emotion comes into play — is profound and in- 
 evitable. Nearly every form of honest natural 
 vulgarity it is possible to find tolerable 
 and sometimes even charming, but personal 
 physical unwholesomeness remains an impos- 
 sible barrier. There is no social equality be- 
 tween the clean and the dirty. The question 
 of physical purity lies at the root of the real 
 democratic problem. 
 
 Our attitude towards physical purity inevitably 
 determines our attitude towards the body gener- 
 ally. Without the ideal of cleanliness the body 
 becomes impure. It cannot be shown. Complete 
 concealment becomes the ideal of the impure. 
 And however pure and excellent the body may 
 actually be among ourselves, the traditions of the 
 past remain. The Greeks considered the dislike 
 to nakedness as a mark of Persian and other 
 barbarians; the Japanese — the Greeks of another 
 age and clime — had not conceived the reasons 
 for avoiding nakedness until taught by the lustful 
 and shame-faced eyes of western barbarians.
 
 236 Affirviations. 
 
 Among ourselves it is "disgusting" even to-day 
 to show so much as the foot.^ We certainly 
 could not imitate St. Francis, who broke with 
 his old life by abandoning his father's house and 
 all that he owned, absolutely naked. 
 
 There is no real line of demarcation between 
 physical purity and spiritual purity, and the 
 spiritual impurity which marks our civilisation 
 is certainly related to the physical impurity 
 which has so long been a tradition of Christen- 
 dom. Both alike are a consciousness of unclean- 
 ness involving a cloak of hypocrisy. We may 
 well recall that sincerity, if we carry its history 
 sufficiently far back, is one with physical purity. 
 In some districts of Italy a girl shows that she 
 is chaste by joining in a certain procession and 
 bearing the symbols of purity in her hand. At 
 all events so it was once. All women now walk 
 in the procession of the chaste. In civilised 
 modern life everywhere, indeed, we all walk in 
 that procession, and bright lustful eyes mingled 
 with faint starved eyes both look out incon- 
 gruously from behind the same monotonously 
 chaste maslcs. We have forgotten, if we ever 
 
 1 Thus one learns from the newspapers that the offence of 
 wearing sandals has involved ejection even from so great a 
 centre of enlightenment as the Reading Room of the British 
 Museum, while the mere assertion that an actress appeared on 
 the stage with bare legs was so damaging that it involved an 
 action for slander, a public apology, and the payment of "a 
 substantial sum ''" in compensation.
 
 St. Francis and OtJias. 237 
 
 knew, tliat the filthy raqs of our righteousness 
 have aHke robbed desire of its purity and 
 restraint of its beauty. 
 
 How far Francis had instinctively divined the 
 meaning and significance of purity, either on 
 the physical or the moral side, it would be idle 
 to attempt to inquire too precisely. But this 
 delicate and admirable saint brings us into an 
 atmosphere in which the true grace of purity 
 may at least be discerned. His indifference to 
 nakedness, his affection for animals and interest 
 in their loves, his audacious banding together of 
 men and women in one order, his gospel of joy 
 and his everlasting delight in all natural and 
 elementary things, make up a whole inconceiv- 
 ably different from that vision of the world 
 which the great mediaeval monks, from St. 
 Bernard downwards, spent their lives in main- 
 taining. He brings us to a point at which 
 we are enabled to go beyond his own insight, 
 a point at which we may not only see that 
 asceticism is a simple and natural instinct, not 
 alone recognise the beauty of sex in flowers and 
 birds, but in human creatures also, and learn at 
 last that the finest secrets of purity are known 
 only to the man and woman who have mingled 
 the scent of their sweat with the wild thyme. 
 
 At the present moment it may indeed be said 
 that the purity which is one with sincerity 
 presents itself to us more broadly and more
 
 238 Affirmations. 
 
 clearly in the road of our evolution than it ever 
 has before. Even on the physical side secrecy 
 is becoming impossible, and as the progress of 
 physical science makes matter more and more 
 transparent to our eyes, sincerity must ever 
 become a more stringent and inevitable virtue. 
 And on the psychic side, also, purity — if you 
 will, sincerity — is even more surely imposing 
 itself. Within our own time we have been 
 privileged to see psychology taken from the 
 study into the laboratory and into the market- 
 place. There is no recess of the soul — however 
 intimate, however, as we have been taught to 
 think, disgusting — that is not now opened to 
 the child-like, all-scrutinising curiosity of science. 
 We may perhaps rebel, but so it is. There are 
 no mysteries left, no noisome abysses of ignor- 
 ance veiled by the pretty mists of innocence. 
 In the face of this tendency private vice must 
 ever become more difficult ; we are learning to 
 detect the whole man in the slightest quiver of 
 his muscles. Thus, again, purity becomes yet 
 more stringent and inevitable. We gaze at all 
 facts now, and find none too mean or too sacred 
 for study. But it is fatal to gaze at certain facts 
 if you cannot gaze purely. In that lies the 
 final triumph of purity. We may rebel, I repeat, 
 but so it is, so it must remain, 
 
 I do not wish to insist here on the moral 
 aspects of purity — grave and profound as these
 
 Si. Frauds and OtJicrs. 239 
 
 are — for I am dealing less with the social aspects 
 of simplicity and purity than with what I would 
 call their religious aspects, their power to win 
 our personal peace and joy. How far we arc 
 to-day, at all events in England, from tlie sim- 
 plicity and purity of Francis in the search for 
 peace and joy is brought home very clearly to 
 those who have ever made it their business to 
 observe the masses of our population in their 
 finest moments of would-be peace and jo}'. 
 Many years ago a curious fascination drew me 
 every Bank Holiday to haunt the structure and 
 grounds of the Crystal Palace, near which I then 
 lived. The vision of humanity in the mass, 
 when it has lost the interest which individuals 
 possess, and taken on the more abstract interest 
 belonging to the species, has for me at least 
 always had a certain attraction. But these 
 Bank Holiday crowds had a more special 
 interest. They summed up and wrote large 
 the characteristics of a nation. These thirty 
 thousand persons belonging to the class which 
 by virtue of greater fertility furnishes the ulti- 
 mate substance of all classes, seemed to reveal 
 to me the heart of my own people. The per- 
 petual, violent movement, the meaningless shouts 
 and yells, the haggard bands of young women 
 standing in the corridors to tramp wearily a 
 treadmill variation of the Irish jig until they fell 
 into an almost hypnotic state, the wistful, weary
 
 240 Affinnations. 
 
 looks in the dull eyes of these seekers, rushing on 
 among the plaster images of old serene gods, 
 seeing nothing but always moving, moving they 
 knew not whither, faint, yet pursuing they knew 
 not what, — the whole of the northern soul, the 
 English soul above all, was there. On ! on ! 
 never mind how or where : that seemed the 
 perpetual cry of these pale, lean, awkward 
 youths and women. And I would think of the 
 bands of boys and girls in the mediaeval crusad- 
 ing epidemics, starting from the north with the 
 same eyes, asking for Jerusalem at every town, 
 soon to be slain or drowned in unknown obscure 
 ways. Or sometimes I recalled the bas-reliefs 
 in the museum at Naples — that most fascinat- 
 ing of museums — which show how the failing 
 Greek genius concentrated its now spiritualised 
 energy in the forms of Dionysus and his maenads. 
 With eager face grown languid he leans on the 
 great thyrsus, which bends beneath his weight, 
 and in front his maenads, upheld by the ardour 
 of the search, with heads thrown back and 
 flying hair, still beat their cymbals desper- 
 ately, seeking, until they have grown almost 
 unconscious of search, a far-away joy, an ever- 
 fleeting ideal, of which they have at last for- 
 gotten the name. And so for hours my gaze 
 would be fixed on the pathetic vulgarity of those 
 terrible crowds. 
 
 Of late I have been able to see how the other
 
 Sf. Francis and OtJicrs. 241 
 
 vigorous and reproductive race — the race that 
 chiefly shares with England the partition of the 
 unciviHscd world — comports itself at its great 
 festivals. The Russians are a profoundly and 
 consciously religious race, and I recall above all 
 the unforgettable scene at the ancient monastery 
 of Troitsa, near Moscow, as it appeared on 
 the festival of the Assumption, when pilgrims, 
 women mostly, in every variety of gay cos- 
 tume, crowded thither on foot from all parts of 
 Russia. There, at length within the walls of 
 that monastery-fortress on the hill at Sergievo, 
 they fervently kiss the sacred relics, and having 
 been served by the dark- robed, long-haired 
 monks with soup and black bread, they lie 
 down and fall asleep, placid and motionless, on 
 all sides. Young women, grasping the pilgrim's 
 staff, a little droop sometimes in the lips, yet 
 with large brawny thighs beneath the short 
 skirts, stolid great-breasted women of middle 
 age, wrinkled old women decked in their ancient 
 traditional adornments — all this gay-coloured 
 multitude fling themselves down to sleep on 
 the church steps, around its walls, over the silent 
 graves, heaped up anywhere that the march 
 of on-coming pilgrims leaves a little space, 
 tired maenads filled for once with the wine 
 their souls craved, colossal images of immense 
 appeasement. It is the orgy of a strong, silent, 
 much-suffering race, with all the charm of child- 
 
 16
 
 242 Affirnialioiis. 
 
 hood yet upon it, too humane to be ferocious 
 in its energy. 
 
 We English subordinate the sensory to the 
 motor side of Hfe, and even find our virtue in so 
 doing. To live in the present, to suffer and 
 to enjoy our actual evil and good, facing it 
 squarely and making our account with it — that 
 we cannot do: that was the way of the Greeks 
 and Romans ; it is not our way. We are ever 
 poets and idealists, down to the dregs of life's 
 cup. We must strive and push, using our 
 muscles to narcotise our senses, ever con- 
 temptuous of the people who more fully 
 exercise their senses to grasp the world 
 around them. For the sake of this muscular 
 auto-intoxication we miss the finest moments 
 life has to give. The Japanese masses, who fix 
 their popular festival for the day when the 
 cherry-tree is in finest bloom, and take their 
 families into the woods to sip tea and pass the 
 day deliciously with the flowers, are born to 
 a knowledge of that mystery which Francis 
 painfully conquered. The people to whom 
 such an art of enjoyment is the common 
 practice of the common people may possibly 
 not succeed in sending ugly and shoddy goods 
 to clothe and kill the beautiful skins of every 
 savage tribe under heaven, but we need not fear 
 to affirm that they have learnt secrets of civilisa- 
 tion which are yet hidden from us in England.
 
 St. Fra7icis and OtJicrs. 243 
 
 The worth of a civilisation, wc may be very 
 sure, is more surely measured by its power to 
 multiply among the common people the possi- 
 bility of having and enjoying such moments 
 than by the mileage of cotton goods its factories 
 can yield, or even by the output of Bibles its 
 weary factory hands can stitch. We can know 
 no moments of finer or purer exhilaration, 
 whether we breathe the bright air of Australian 
 solitudes and watch the virgin hills lie fold 
 within fold beneath the stainless sunlight, or 
 in the dimmer and damper air of this old 
 country recline on Surrey heights by the great 
 beeches of the old deserted Pilgrim's Way and 
 meditate of the past. There are few things 
 sweeter or more profitable than to lie on the 
 velvety floor of a little pine wood on a forgotten 
 southern height in May, where tall clumps of 
 full-flowered rhododendra blend with the 
 fragrant gorse which spreads down to the 
 sparkling sea, and to throw aside everything 
 and dream. In such moments at such spots we 
 reach the summits of life, learning those secrets 
 of asceticism which Francis knew so well. 
 
 Thus by his words and by his deeds Francis 
 still has his significance for us. He brought 
 asceticism from the cell into the fields, and 
 became the monk of Nature. One may doubt 
 whether, as Renan thought, the Song to the 
 Sun is the supreme modern expression of the
 
 244 Affirmations. 
 
 religious spirit, but without doubt it gathers up 
 vaguely and broadly the things that most surely 
 belong to our eternal peace in this world. That 
 it is the simplest and naturalest things to which 
 eternal joy belongs is the divine secret which 
 makes Francis a prince among saints, and it 
 was by a true inspiration that he dedicated the 
 chief utterance of his worship of joy in life to 
 the sun. 
 
 If it should ever chance that a sane instinct of 
 worship is born again on earth among civilised 
 men, let us be sure that nothing will seem more 
 worthy of worship than the sun, the source of 
 that energy out of which we and all our ideals 
 ultimately spring. Some day, again, perhaps, 
 men will greet the rising of the sun at the 
 summer solstice on the hills with music and 
 song and dance, framing their most exquisite 
 liturgical art to the honour of that supreme 
 source of all earthly life. It was natural, doubt- 
 less, that at some stage of human progress 
 new-found moral conceptions should intrude 
 themselves as worthier of human worship. But 
 even the cross itself — if not its great rival the 
 lunar Mohammedan crescent — was first the 
 symbol of sun-worship, of the source of life. 
 We may yet rescue that sacred symbol, now 
 fallen to such sorrowful uses, bearing it onwards 
 to sunnier heights of wholeness and joy. 
 
 Religions are many, and in the mass they
 
 vS"/. Francis and Olhcts. 245 
 
 seem to us — blinded to the social functions that 
 religions originally subserved — endlessly harsh 
 and cruel. But in their summits, in their finest 
 personalities, they are simple and natural enough, 
 and alike lovely. Look at the Jesus of the 
 Gospels, the friend of publicans and sinners, 
 the marriage guest at Cana, so tender-hearted 
 in the house of Simon, the author of those 
 sayings of quintessential natural wisdom pre- 
 served to us in that string of adorable pearls men 
 call the Sermon on the Mount. Look at the 
 prophet of Islam, when gazing back at the earth 
 as it seemed to recede into the distance at the 
 end of his long career, he counted as first among 
 its claims the simple natural joys: " I love your 
 world because of its women and its perfumes." 
 And we remember the depths to which Chris- 
 tianity and Mohammedanism have alike fallen. 
 Look, again, at Francis, who in no prim 
 academical sense may be called the first modern 
 apostle of sweetness and light, a man who found 
 joy unspeakable in inhaling the fragrance of 
 flowers, in watching the limpid waters of 
 mountain streams, and whose most character- 
 istic symbol is the soaring lark he loved so 
 well. And we remember that a century later 
 even Chaucer, that sweetest and most sym- 
 pathetic of poets, can only speak of his friar 
 in words that seem to be of inevitable and 
 unconscious irony. For every religion be^rins
 
 246 AJ/innatioiis. 
 
 as the glorious living flame of a lovely human 
 personality, — or so it seems, — and continues as 
 a barren cinder-heap. As such, as a Church, 
 whether pagan or Christian, it can scarcely 
 afford us either light or heat. 
 
 Why, one asks oneself, is it necessary for me 
 to choose between Paul and Pctronius? Why 
 pester me on the one hand with the breastplate 
 of faith and the helmet of salvation, on the other 
 with the feast of Trimalchio and the kisses of 
 Giton ? "A plague of both your houses ! " We 
 are not barbarians, tortured by a moral law, 
 neither are we all pagans with unmixed instincts 
 of luxury. We are the outcome of a civilisation 
 in which not only has what we are pleased to 
 regard as the sensual fury of the ape and tiger 
 become somewhat chastened, but the ascetic 
 fury of the monk and priest also. Let the child 
 of the south feast still in the house of Trimalchio 
 with unwounded conscience, if he can ; we will 
 not forbid him. And let the barbarian still 
 flagellate his tense rebellious nerves with knotted 
 spiritual scourges, if only so can he draw out the 
 best music they yield; we will be the first 
 to applaud. But most of us have little to do 
 with the one or the other. The palmiest days 
 of both ended a thousand years ere we were 
 born. Before the threshold of our modern world 
 was reached Francis sang in the sun and smiled 
 away the spectres that squatted on the beautiful
 
 5/. Francis and Others. 247 
 
 things of the earth. On the threshold of our 
 world Rabelais built his Abbey of Thel^me, 
 in whose rule was but one clause, Fay ce que 
 vouldras, a rule which no pagan or Christian 
 had ever set up before, because never before 
 except as involved in the abstract conceptions 
 of philosophers, had the thought of voluntary 
 co-operation, of the unsolicited freedom to do 
 well, appeared before European men. 
 
 What have we to do also, it may be added, 
 with modernity, with the fashions of an hour? 
 It is well, indeed, to live in the present, what- 
 ever that present may be, but sooner or later 
 we are pushed back, weary or disillusioned, on 
 the inspiration of our own personality. All the 
 activity of Francis only wrought a plague of 
 grey friars, scattered like dust on the highways of 
 Europe. But Francis still remains, and all things 
 wither into nothingness in the presence of one 
 natural man who dared to be himself The 
 best of us can scarcely hope to be more 
 successful tlian Francis. But at least we 
 may be ourselves. " Whatever happens I must 
 be emerald:" that, Antoninus said, is the 
 emerald's morality; that must remain our finest 
 affirmation. 
 
 Our feet cling to the earth, and it is well that 
 we should learn to grip it closely and nakedly. 
 But the earth beneath us is not all of Nature ; 
 there arc instincts within us that lead elsewhere,
 
 248 Affirmations. 
 
 and it is part of the art of living to use naturally- 
 all those instincts. In so doing the spiritual 
 burdens which the ages have laid upon us glide 
 away into thin air. 
 
 And for us, as for him who wrote De Imita- 
 tione Christi — however far differently — there are 
 still two wings by which we may raise ourselves 
 above the earth, simplicity, that is to say, and 
 purity. 
 
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 work with much care, judgment, and discrimination." — The Laucet. 
 
 XXX. EVOLUTION IN ART: As Illustrated by the 
 Life-Histories of Designs. By Professor Alfred C. 
 H ADDON. With 130 Illustrations. 
 
 "It is impossible to speak too highly of this most unassuming and 
 invaluable hodW."— Journal Anth-opelogical Institute. 
 
 XXXI. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE EMOTIONS. 15y 
 
 Th. Ribot, Professor at the College of France, Editor of the 
 Revue Philosophique. 
 "Professor Ribot's treatment is careTul, modern, and adequate." — 
 Academy. 
 
 XXXII. HALLUCINATIONS AND ILLUSIONS : A Study 
 OF THE Fallacies of Perception. 13y Edmund 
 Parish. 
 
 " This remarkable little volume." — Daily Nexus. 
 
 XXXIII. THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY. By E. W. Scrip- 
 ture, Ph.D. (Leipzig). With 124 Illustrations. 
 
 XXXIV. SLEEP : Its Physiology, Pathology, Hygiene, ant 
 Psychology. By Marie de Manaceine (St. Petersburg). 
 Illustrated.
 
 THE SCOTT LIBRARY. 
 
 Crown Svo, Cloth Elegant^ Price is. 6d. per Volume. 
 ISSUE OF NEW VOLUMES. 
 
 Vasari's Lives of Italian Painters. Selected and 
 Prefaced by Havelock Ellis. 
 
 " Vasari's Lives " may be approached for such knowleflge as they afforrl con- 
 cerning the history of art and the catalot;uing of the art-product3 of the Italian 
 Renaissance ; or they may be approached for the light Vasari tlirows on the 
 psychology of genius in artists, from which point of view ho is incomparable. 
 As the personal friend or acquaintance of some of the world's greatest artists, 
 Vasari moved in an atmos))here of artistic tradition, which he has fully re- 
 corded. In this volume tlie editor has sought to gather from the voluminous 
 Lives everytliing that is really of value regardin;: the intimate nature and 
 habits of the great Florentine artists of the Italian Renaissance. 
 
 Laocoon ; and other Prose Writings of Lessing. 
 A New Translation, with an Introduction, by W. B. 
 
 RONNFELDT. 
 
 This volume, representative of the prose of Lessing, contains, besides the 
 Laocoon essay, those portions of Lessing's Dramatic Notes (Ilainbwri/iKche 
 Dramatur:/ie)'vfhich deal with various priuciples of dramatic art, and which 
 are of permanent interest, together witli the Education of the Unman Bace, 
 Lessing's last contribution to theological discussion. A biograpliical note is 
 prefixed to the introduction. An entirely new translation is here given. 
 
 Pelleas and Melisanda and The Sightless. Two 
 Plays by Maurice INIaeterlinck. Translated from the 
 French by Laurence Alma Tadema. 
 
 The preface to this volume, while providing for the reader who is unacquainted 
 ■with the peculiarly imaginative dramas of Maeterlinck an e.xcellent intro. 
 duction to them, furnishes also a bibliography of .Maeterlinck's works. For the 
 song in Act III. of Pelleas and JSlelisanda (" Mes lonij cheneux desceiident"), the 
 attempt at an adequate English rendition of which has batiied various trans- 
 lators, another song has, at the request of M. Maelerlinck, been substituted. 
 
 The Complete Angler of Walton and Cotton. 
 Edited, with an Introduction, by Charles Hill Dick. 
 
 This is a carefully edited reprint of this famous book, prefixed by a bio- 
 graphical introduction. Pains has been taken in the selection of the type for 
 this edition, whicli will be found one of the neatest and handiest of the many 
 editions of The Angler which have api^eared. 
 
 Lessing's " Nathan the Wise." Translated, with 
 an Introduction, by Major-General Patrick Maxwell. 
 
 As the translator of Schiller's "Maid of Orleans," "William Tell," and of 
 vavinus plays and essays. General Maxwell's work has been received with 
 considerable critical appreciation. An analysis of the play precedes the text 
 in this volume, and copious elucidatory notes are appended, l his translation 
 of one of the most notable dramatic productions of the last century will be 
 found as faithful and eti'ective as any that has yet been given to the English 
 reader. Jj ^ 
 
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