Chapter 39

Rank.Well, and what’s that?Nora.There’s something that I should so like to say—but for Torvald to hear it.Rank.Then, why don’t you say it to him?Nora.Because I daren’t, for it sounds so ugly....Rank.In that case I would advise you not to say it. But you might say it to us, at any rate.... What is it that you would like to say in Helmer’s presence?Nora.I should like to shout with all my heart—Oh, dash it all!—A Doll’s House,op. cit., pp. 26, 27.[326]Auguste Ehrhard,op. cit., p. 270.[327]Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing,Psychopathia sexualis mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der conträren Sexualempfindung.Eine klinisch-forensische Studie.Dritte vermehrte und verbesserte Auflage. Stuttgart, 1888. See (p. 120) the observation relative to the young nobleman who was erotically excited by his ‘boot-thoughts.’ I cite this single case only, but it would be possible to instance dozens of cases where nightcaps, shoe-nails, white aprons, the wrinkled head of an old woman, etc., have excited sensuality in the highest degree.[328]A Doll’s House, p. 112:Helmer.To forsake your home, your husband, and your children! And only think what people will say about it.Nora.I cannot take that into consideration. I only know that to go is necessary for me....Helmer.... Your duties to ... your children?Nora.I have other duties equally sacred ... duties towards myself, etc.[329]Ghosts, p. 170:Oswald.At last he said, ‘You have been worm-eaten from your birth.’ ... I didn’t understand either, and begged of him to give me a clearer explanation. And then the old cynic said, ‘The father’s sins are visited upon the children.’ And p. 194:Oswald.The disease I have as my birthright (he points to his forehead, and adds very softly) is seated here.[330]The Wild Duck, Act III.:Gregers.Besides, if I’m to go on living, I must try and find some cure for my sick conscience.Werle.It will never be well. Your conscience has been sickly from childhood. That’s an inheritance from your mother, Gregers—it is the only inheritance she left you....Relling.But, deuce take it, don’t you see the fellow’s mad, cracked, demented!Gina.There, you hear! His mother before him had mad fits like that sometimes.[331]The Wild Duck, Act II.:Hjalmar.She is in danger of losing her eyesight.Gregers.Becoming blind?Hjalmar.... But the doctor has warned us. It’s coming, inexorably.Gregers.What an awful misfortune! How do you account for it?Hjalmar(sighs). Hereditary, no doubt.Again, Act IV.:Mrs. Sörby.... He (Werle) is going blind.Hjalmar(with a start). Going blind? That’s strange—Werle, too, becoming blind![332]Dr Prosper Lucas,Traité philosophique et physiologique de l’Hérédité naturelle dans les États de Santé et de Maladie du Système nerveux, etc. (The title occupies seven lines more!) Paris, 1847, 2 volumes, t. i., p. 250. (It appears that Montaigne had this inherited horror of doctors.)[333]Lucas,op. cit., t. i., pp. 391-420:De l’hérédité des modes sensitifs de la vue. On page 400 he tells of a family in which the mother became blind at the age of twenty-one years, and the children at sixteen and seventeen respectively, etc.[334]August Weismann,Ueber die Vererbung. Jena, 1883.[335]F. Galton,Natural Inheritance. London, 1888.[336]Page 136:Mrs. Alving.I know one who has kept both his inner and his outer self unharmed. Only look at him, Mr. Manders.[337]Krafft-Ebing,Psychopathia sexualis, p. 139. The author here cites all the features in question as characteristic of the first stage of general paralysis: ‘Libidinous talk, unconstraint in intercourse with the opposite sex, plans of marriage.’[338]Rosmersholm, p. 23:Rebecca(to Brendel). You should apply to Peter Mortensgaard.Brendel.Pardon, Madame—what sort of an idiot is he?See the flat travesty inAn Enemy of the People(Act IV.) of the forum scene in Shakespeare’sJulius Cæsar, and the characterization of the ‘crowd,’ inBrand(Act V.).[339]Herbert Spencer,The Manversusthe State, 1884, p. 78.[340]In the German text, ‘only of themselves and their families.’—Translator.[341]Edward Westermarck,The History of Human Marriage. London: Macmillan, 1892. See especially the two chapters on ‘The Forms of Human Marriage,’ and ‘The Duration of Marriage.’[342]‘At leve—er Kamp med TroldeJ Hjertet og Hjernens Hvaelv;At digte—det er at holdeDommedag over sig selv.’[343]Dr. Wilhelm Griesinger,Pathologie und Therapie der psychischen Krankheiten für Aerzte und Studirende. 5te Auflage. Gänzlich umgearbeitet und erweitert. Von Dr. Willibald Levinstein-Schleger; Berlin, 1892. (See p. 143, on ‘Diseased Impulses’; and p. 147, on ‘Excessive Energy of Will.’)[344]Griesinger,op. cit., p. 77: ‘Retardation of thought may be produced ... by the state of constriction following a mental depression, by complete inertia extending to the arrest of thought.’[345]Rationalized in the English version cited, as follows (p. 25): ‘Yes, perhaps I am a little delicate.’—Translator.[346]Rationalized in the English version by ‘now soon,’ being rendered as ‘nearly.’—Translator.[347]‘True’ is omitted in the English version quoted.—Translator.[348]Bracketed clause not in English version.—Translator.[349]Griesinger,op. cit., p. 176. He names the coining of words ‘phraseomania.’ Kussmaul gives the nameParaphrasia vesanato the coining of incomprehensible words, or the using of known words in a sense wholly foreign to them.[350]Dr. A. Marie,Études sur quelques Symptômes des Délires systématisés et sur leur Valeur; Paris, 1892, chap. ii.: ‘Eccentricities of language. Neologisms and conjuring incantations.’ Tanzi cites, among others, the following examples: A patient used continuously to repeat, ‘That is true, and not false’; another began every phrase with, ‘God’s Word’; a third said, ‘Out with the vile beast!’ making at the same time a sign of benediction with the right hand; a fourth said unceasingly, ‘Turn over the page’; a fifth cried, in a tone of command, ‘Lips acs livi cux lips sux!’ etc. One of Krafft-Ebing’s patients (op. cit., p. 130) constructed, among others, the following words: ‘Magnetismusambosarbeitswellen, Augengedanken, Austrahlung, Glückseligkeitsbetten, Ohrenschussmaschine,’ etc. Krafft-Ebing,op. cit., pp. 130, 131.[351]Vicomte E. M. de Vogué, ‘Les Cigognes,’Revue des deux Mondes, February 15, 1892, p. 922: ‘Ibsen would have won our trust, were it only by certain axioms [?] which appeal to our actual distrusts, such as this ... inRosmersholm: “The Rosmer view of life ennobles, but it kills happiness.”’ I am convinced that, unless previously told that they emanated from confined lunatics, these ‘comprehensives’ would, without difficulty, understand and interpret the expression ‘little-cupboards-of-appetite-of-representation’ (Vorstellungs-Appetitschränkchen), freely used by one of Meynert’s lunatic patients, or the words of a patient under Griesinger’s care (op. cit., p. 176) that ‘the lady superior was establishing herself in the military side-tone and in the retardation of her teeth.’[352]Tanzi,I Neologismi in rapporta col Delirio cronico. Turin, 1890.[353]‘Vi vil gjöre det om igjen raditalere,Men dertil sordres baade Maend og Talere.J sörger sor Vandflom til Verdensparken,Jeg laegger med Lyst Torpedo under Arken.’Observe the purely mystic vapours of this thought. The poet wishes to destroy everything, even the ark which shelters the saved remnants of terrestrial life, but sees himself placed beyond the reach of the destruction, and hence will survive the annihilation of everything else on earth.[354]Georges Brandes,op. cit., pp. 431, 435, 438, etc.[355]J. Cotard,Études sur les Maladies cérébrales et mentales; Paris, 1891. In this book thedélire des négationsis for the first time recognised and described as a form of melancholia. The Third Congress of French Alienists, which sat at Blois from the 1st to the 6th of August, 1892, devoted almost the whole of its conferences to the insanity of doubt. In a work by F. Raymond and F. L. Arnaud, ‘Sur certains cas d’aboulie avec obsession interrogative et trouble des mouvements’ (Annales médico-psychologiques, 7eséries, t. xvi.), we read, p. 202: ‘The invalids occupy themselves with questions intrinsically insoluble, such as the creation, nature, life, etc. Why the trees are green? Why the rainbow has seven colours? Why men are not as tall as houses?’ etc.[356]Lombroso and B. Laschi,Le Crime politique et les Révolutions par rapport au Droit, à l’Anthropologie criminelle et à la Science du Gouvernement. Traduit de l’Italien par H. Bouchard. Paris, 1892, t. i., p. 195.[357]Auguste Ehrhard,op. cit., p. 412: ‘He [Ibsen] assigns himself arôleto acquaint us in a direct manner with his own disillusionings.... He presents himself in the fantastic and tormented character of Ulric Brendel. Let us not be deceived by the disguise in which he veils himself. Ulric Brendel, the fool, is no other than Henrik Ibsen, the idealist’(?).[358]Auguste Ehrhard,op. cit., p. 120: ‘With admirable frankness Ibsen, in his latest works, points out the abuse which may be made of his ideas [!]. He counsels reformers to extreme prudence, if not to silence. As for himself, he ceases to excite the multitude to the pursuit of moral and social progress [!]; he entrenches himself in his disdainful pessimism, and in aristocratic solitude enjoys the serene vision of future ages.’[359]Henrik Jaeger,Henrik Ibsen og haus Vaerker. En Fremstilling i Grundrids. Christiania, 1892,passim.[360]G. R. S. Mead,Simon Magus. London, 1892.[361]Ehrhard,op. cit., p. 94.[362]W. Roux,Ueber den Kampf der Theile des Organismus. Leipzig, 1881. Since the appearance of Roux’s work, the theory of phagocytose, or the digestion of weaker cells by the stronger, has been considerably extended. This, however, is not the place to cite the numerous communications bearing on this subject which have appeared in theZeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Zoologie, in Virchow’sArchiv, in theBiologische Centralblatt, in theZoologische Jahrbücher, etc.[363]Jacoby,La Folie de Césars. Paris, 1880.[364]Alfred Binet,Les Altérations de la Personnalité, Paris, 1892, p. 23, communicates the case (observed by Bourru and Burot, and often cited) of Louis B., who united in himself six different personalities—six ‘I’s’ having not the slightest knowledge of each other, each possessing another character, another memory, other peculiarities of feeling and movement, etc.[365]‘Suicidal’ is here not a mere rhetorical expression. If the tyrannical power of instinct always ends by leading the individual in the long-run to his destruction, it sometimes does this directly. Instinct, namely, may have for its direct object suicide or self-mutilation; and the ‘free’ man obeying his instinct has then the ‘liberty’ of mutilating or killing himself, although that so little tallies with his real wish that he seeks in others a protection from himself. See Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing,Lehrbuch der gerichtlichen Psychopathologie. Dritte umgearbeitete Auflage. Stuttgart, 1892, p. 311.[366]Herbert Spencer,The Individual versus the State. London, 1884.[367]Dr. Ph. Boileau de Castelnau, ‘Misopédie ou Lésion de l’Amour de la Progeniture’ (Annales médico-psychologiques, 3esérie, 7evolume, p. 553). In this work the author communicates twelve observations, in which the natural feeling of the mother for her children was transformed by disease into hatred.[368]G. Ferrero, ‘L’Atavisme de la Prostitution,’Revue scientifique, 50evolume, p. 136.[369]R. von Krafft-Ebing,Psychopathia sexualis, etc., 7teAuflage, p. 89 (the third edition of this book, from which I have made my previous citations, contains nothing on masochism), andNeue Forschungen auf dem Gebiete der Psychopathia sexualis eine medicinisch-psychologische Studie, Zweite umgearbeitete und vermehrte Auflage, Stuttgart, 1891, p. 1ff.Krafft-Ebing gives this explanation of his word (p. 1et seq.): ‘By masochism I understand a peculiar perversion of the psychicvita sexualis, consisting in this, that the individual seized with it is dominated in his sexual feeling and thought by the idea that he is wholly and unconditionally subjected to the will of a person of the opposite sex, who treats him imperiously, humiliates and maltreats him.’ The word is formed from the name Sacher-Masoch, because ‘his writings delineate exactly typical pictures of the perverted psychic life of men of this kind’ (Neue Forschungen, etc., p. 37). I do not look upon this designation as a happy one. Krafft-Ebing himself shows that Zola and, long before him, Rousseau (he might have added Balzac in Baron Hulot inParents pauvres, part i.:La cousine Bette) have embodied this condition quite as clearly as Sacher-Masoch. Hence I prefer the designation ‘passivism,’ proposed by Dimitry Stefanowsky. SeeArchives de l’Anthropologie criminelle, 1892, p. 294.[370]Ehrhard,op. cit., p. 88.[371]Persian for Zoroaster.[372]Dr. Hugo Kaatz,Die Weltanschauung Friedrich Nietzsche: Erster Theil, ‘Cultur und Moral’; Zweiter Theil, ‘Kunst und Leben.’ Dresden und Leipzig, 1892, 1 Th., p. vi.: ‘We are accustomed, especially in matters concerning the deepest problems of thought, to a finished, systematic exposition.... There is none of all this in Nietzsche. No single work of his forms a finished whole, or is wholly intelligible without the others. Each book, moreover, is totally wanting in organic structure. Nietzsche writes almost exclusively in aphorisms, which, filling sometimes two lines, sometimes several pages, are complete in themselves, and seldom manifest any direct connection with each other.... With proud indifference to the reader, the author has avoided cutting evenonegap in the hedge with which he has closely surrounded his intellectual creations. Access to him must be gained by fighting,’ etc. In spite of its seeming obscurity, Nietzsche has himself given such pointed information concerning his method of work as amounts to an avowal. ‘All writing makes me angry or ashamed; for me, writing is a necessity.’ ‘But why, then, do you write?’ ‘Yes, my dear friend, let me say it in confidence: I have hitherto found no other means ofriddingmyself of my thoughts.’ (The italics are Nietzsche’s.) ‘And why do you wish to rid yourself of them?’ ‘Why I wish? Do I so wish? I must.’Die fröhliche Wissenschaft.Neue Ausgabe, p. 114.[373]Dr. Max Zerbst,Nein und Ja!Leipzig, 1892.[374]Robert Schellwien,Max Stirner und Friedrich Nietzsche,Erscheinungen des modernen Geister und das Wesen des Menschen. Leipzig, 1892.[375]I refuted this silly sophism before Nietzsche propounded it in the passages above quoted fromZur Genealogie der Moral, p. 66, andJenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 228. SeeDie conventionellen Lügen der Kulturmenschheit, 14 Aufl., pp. 211, 212: ‘This expression [of Proudhon’s, that property is theft] can be regarded as true only from the sophistical standpoint that everything existing exists for itself, and from the fact of its existence derives its right to belong to itself. According to this view, forsooth, a man steals the blade of grass he plucks, the air he breathes, the fish he catches; but, then, the martin, too, is stealing when it swallows a fly, and the grub when it eats its way into the root of a tree; then Nature is altogether peopled by arch-thieves, and, in general, everything steals that lives,i.e., absorbs from without materials not belonging to it, and organically elaborates them, and a block of platinum, which does not even pilfer from the air a little oxygen with which to oxidize itself, would be the sole example of honesty on our globe. No; property resulting from earning, that is, from the exchange of a determined amount of labour for a corresponding amount of goods, is not theft.’ If, throughout this passage, ‘theft’ be substituted for the word ‘exploitation,’ used by Nietzsche, his sophism is answered.[376]The Sacred Books of the East.Translated by various Oriental scholars, and edited by F. Max Müller. The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1st series, vol. x.:Dhammapada, by F. Max Müller; andSutta-Nipâta, by V. Fausböll.[377]The Sacred Books of the East, etc., vol. xix.:Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king, by Rev. S. Beal.[378]Charles Darwin,The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex; London, J. Murray, 1885, p. 101: ‘All the baboons had reascended the heights, excepting a young one, about six months old, who, loudly calling for aid, climbed on a block of rock, and was surrounded. Now one of the largest males, a true hero, came down again from the mountain, slowly went to the young one, coaxed him, and triumphantly led him away, the dogs being too much astonished to make an attack.’[379]Friedrich Nietsche,Zur Genealogie der Moral.Eine Streitschrift.Zweite Auflage. Leipzig, 1892, § 80.[380]Gustav Freytag,Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit. Erster Band, aus dem Mittelalter. Leipzig, 1872, p. 42ff.: ‘The Roman Consul, Papirius Carbo ... denies the strangers [the Cimbrians and Teutons!] the right of sojourn because the inhabitants are enjoying the rights of hospitality of the Romans. The strangers excuse themselves by saying they did not know that the natives were under Roman protection, and they are ready to leave the country.... The Cimbrians do not seek a quarrel; they send to Consul Silanus, and urgently entreat him to assign them lands; they are willing in return for it to serve the Romans in time of war.... Once more the strangers do not invade Roman territory, but send an embassy to the Senate and repeat the request for an assignment of land.... The victorious Germans now sent a fresh embassy to the leader of the other army, for the third time, to sue for peace and ask for land and seed-corn.’[381]Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 79.[382]Ibid., p. 73.[383]Charles Darwin,op. cit., p. 98: ‘As soon as the mental faculties had become highly developed, images of all past actions and motives would be incessantly passing through the brain of each individual; and that feeling of dissatisfaction, or even misery, which invariably results ... from any unsatisfied instinct, would arise as often as it was perceived that the enduring and always present social instinct had yielded to some other instinct, at the time stronger, but neither enduring in its nature nor leaving behind it a very vivid impression. It is clear that many instinctive desires, such as that of hunger, are, in their nature, of short duration, and, after being satisfied, are not readily or vividly recalled,’ etc.[384]Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 9.[385]Ibid., p. 48.[386]Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 91: ‘The criminal is, often enough, not grown to the level of his deed: he dwarfs and traduces it. The legal defenders of the criminal are rarely artists enough to turn the beautiful terribleness of the deed to the profit of the doer.’[387]‘A people is the detour of nature, in order to arrive at six or seven great men.’ See also: ‘The essential thing in a good and healthy aristocracy is, that it should feel itself to benotthe function, but theendand justification, be it of royalty or of the commonwealth—that it should, therefore, with a good conscience, suffer the sacrifice of a countless number of men who,for its sake, must be humbled and reduced to imperfect beings, to slaves, to instruments.’—Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 226.[388]The following are a few examples, which could easily be centupled (literally, not hyperbolically)—Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 63: ‘It is the Orient, the deep Orient.’ p. 239: ‘Such books of depth and of the first importance.’ p. 248: ‘Deep suffering ennobles.’ ‘A bravery of taste, resisting all that is sorrowful and deep.’ p. 249: ‘Any fervour and thirstiness which constantly drives the soul ... into the bright, the brilliant, the deep, the delicate.’ p. 256: ‘An odour quite as much of depth [!] as of decay.’ p. 260: ‘To lie tranquilly like a mirror, so that the deep heaven might reflect itself in them.’ p. 262: ‘I often think how I may make him [man] stronger, wickeder, and deeper.’Also sprach Zarathustra, pt. i., p. 71: ‘But thou Deep One, thou sufferest too deeply even from little wounds.’ Pt. ii., p. 52: ‘Immovable is my depth; but it sparkles with floating enigmas and laughters’ (!!). p. 64: ‘And this for me is knowledge: all depth should rise—to my height.’ p. 70: ‘They did not think enough into the depth.’ Pt. iii., p. 22: ‘The world is deep, and deeper than the day has ever thought it.’ Pt. iv., p. 129: ‘What says the deep midnight?... From a deep dream am I awakened. The world is deep, and deeper than the day thought. Deep in its woe. Joy—deeper still than sorrow of heart. All joy ... wishes for deep, deep eternity,’ etc.[389]Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 167.[390]Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 159: ‘Our virtues? It is probable that we, too, still have our virtues, albeit they are no longer the true-hearted and robust virtues for which we hold our grandfathers in honour—though at a little distance.’ p. 154: ‘The man beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues ... he ought to be the greatest.’ So then, ‘beyond good and evil,’ and yet having ‘virtues’![391]Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 79: ‘As a premise to this hypothesis concerning the origin of the evil conscience [through the ‘transvaluation of values’ and the ‘revolt of slaves in morality’] belongs the fact ... that this transformation was in no way gradual, or voluntary, and did not manifest itself as an organic growing into new conditions, but as a rapture, a leap, a compulsion.’ Hence, not only was that good which had previously been evil, but this ‘transvaluation’ even occurred suddenly, ordered one fine day by authority![392]Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 232: ‘Slave-morality is essentially a utilitarian morality.[393]Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 32: ‘In reality, however, evil instincts are just as purposive, as conservative of the species, and as indispensable as the good, only they have a different function.’Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 21: ‘At the root of all ... noble races lies the beast of prey ... this foundation needs from time to time to disburden itself; the animal must out, must hie him back to the desert.’ This means that it is essential to his health, and, consequently, of utility to him.[394]Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 6: ‘To what disorders, however, this [democratic] prejudice can give rise, is shown by the infamous [!] case of Buckle. The plebeianism of the modern spirit, which is of English origin, once more breaks forth ... there.’Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 212: ‘There are truths that are best recognised by mediocre heads.... We are driven to this proposition since the intellect of mediocre Englishmen—I may mention Darwin, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer—acquired preponderance in the mean region of European taste.’[395]Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 43.[396]See, in my novel,Die Krankheit des Jahrhunderts, Leipzig, 1889, Band I., p. 140, Schrötter’s remarks: ‘Egoism is a word. All depends upon the interpretation. Every living being strives for happiness,i.e., for contentment.... He [the healthy man] cannot be happy when he sees others suffer. The higher the man’s development, the livelier is this feeling.... The egoism of these men consists in their seeking out the pain of others and striving to alleviate it, in which, while combating the sufferings of others, they are simply struggling to attain to their own happiness. A Catholic would say of St. Vincent de Paul or of Carlo Borromeo, He was a great saint; I should say of him, He was a great egoist.’[397]Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 48.[398]Dr. Hugo Kaatz,op. cit., Thiel I., Vorrede, p. viii.[399]Robert Schellwien,Max Stierner und Friedrich Nietzsche. Leipzig, 1892, p. 23.[400]Also sprach Zarathustra, pt. i., p. 84: ‘The “thou” is proclaimed holy, but not yet the “I.”’[401]Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 43.[402]Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 222.[403]Jenseits von Gut und Böse, pp. 78, 106.[404]C. Lombroso and R. Laschi,Le Crime politique et les Révolutions. Paris, 1892, t. i., p. 142.[405]R. Schellwien,op. cit., p. 7: ‘The literary activity of the two thinkers [!] is separated by more than fifty years; but great as may be the difference between them, the agreement is not less, and thus the essential characters of systematic individualism are presented with all the more distinctness.’[406]See, in myParadoxe, the chapter ‘Wo ist die Wahrheit?’[407]‘With what magic she lays hold of me! What? Has all the world’s repose embarked here?’ ‘What use has the inspired one for wine? What? Give the mole wings and proud imaginings?’ ‘In so far as he says Yes to this other world, what? must he not then say No to its counterpart, this world?’ ‘Round about God all becomes—what? perhaps world?’ ‘A pessimist ... who says Yes to morality ... tolæde-neminem-morality; what? is that really—a pessimist?’ ‘Fear and pity: with these feelings has man hitherto stood in the presence of woman. What? Is there now to be an end of this?’ I will content myself with these examples, but let it be remarked once for all, that all the specimens I adduce here for the purpose of examining Nietzsche’s mental state could easily be multiplied a hundredfold, as the characteristic peculiarities recur in him hundreds of times. On one occasion he plainly becomes conscious of this living note of interrogation, always present in his mind as an obsession. InAlso sprach Zarathustra, pt. iii., p. 55, he calls the passion for rule, ‘the flashing note of interrogation by the side of premature answers.’ In this connection, this expression has absolutely no sense; but it at once becomes intelligible when it is remembered that the insane are in the habit of suddenly giving utterance to the ideas springing up in their consciousness. Nietzsche plainlysawin his mind ‘the flashing note of interrogation,’ and suddenly, and without transition, spoke of it.[408]‘A Greek life, to which he said, No.’ ‘A pessimist who not merely says, No, wishes No [!] but who ... does No’ [!!]. ‘An inward saying No to this or that thing.’ ‘Free for death, and free in death, a holy No-sayer.’ Then as a complementary counterpart: ‘Pregnant with lightnings, who say, Yes! laugh Yes!’ ‘While all noble morality grows to itself out of a triumphant saying Yea.’ (He feels himself to be something) ‘at least saying Yea to life.’ ‘To be able to say Yea to yourself, that is ... a ripe fruit.’ (Disinterested wickedness is felt by primitive humanity to be something) ‘to which conscience valiantly says Yea.’ We see what use Nietzsche makes of his saying ‘Nay’ and ‘Yea.’ It stands in the place of nearly all verbs joining subject with predicate. The thought ‘I am thirsty’ would, by Nietzsche, be thus expressed, ‘I say Yes to water.’ Instead of ‘I am sleepy,’ he would say, ‘I say Nay to wakefulness,’ or, ‘I say Yes to bed,’ etc. This is the way in which invalids in incomplete aphasia are in the habit of paraphrasing their thoughts.[409]Dr. Hermann Türck,Fr. Nietzsche und seine philosophischen Irrwege, Zweite Auflage. Dresden, 1891, p. 7.[410]B. Ball,La Folie érotique, Paris, 1888, p. 50: ‘I have sketched for you the picture of chaste love (amorous lunacy, or the erotomania of Esquirol), where the greatest excesses remain enclosed within the limits of feeling, and are never polluted by the intervention of the senses. I have shown you some examples of this delirium pushed to the extreme bounds of insanity, without the intermixture of a single idea foreign to the domain of platonic affection.’[411]In one passage ofZur Genealogie der Moral, p. 132, Nietzsche speaks of the ‘species of moral onanists and self-indulgers.’ He does not apply the expression to himself; but it was unquestionably suggested by an obscure suspicion of his own state of mind.[412]Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing,Neue Forschungen, u. s. w., p. 45ff.: ‘The complete contrary of masochism is Sadism. While in the former the subject desires to suffer sorrows, and to feel himself in subjection to violence, in the latter his aim is to cause sorrows, and to exercise violence.... All the acts and situations carried out in the active part played by Sadism constitute, for masochism, the object of longing, to be attained passively. In both perversions these acts form a progression from purely symbolic events to grievous misdeeds.... Both are to be considered as original psychopathies of mentally abnormal individuals, afflicted in particular with psychicHyperæsthesia sexualis, but also, as a rule, with other anomalies.... The pleasure of causing sorrow and the pleasure of experiencing sorrow appear only as two different sides of the same psychic event, the primary and essential principle in which is the consciousness of active and passive subjection respectively.’ See Nietzsche,Also sprach Zarathustra, pt. i., p. 95: ‘Thou art going to women? Forget not the whip!’Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 186: ‘Woman unlearns the fear of man,’ and thus ‘exposes her most womanly instincts.’[413]Krafft-Ebing,Neue Forschungen, u. s. w., p. 108. (A sexual-psychopath thus writes): ‘I take great interest in art and literature. Among poets and authors, those attract me most who describe refined feelings, peculiar passions, choice impressions: an artificial (or ultra-artificial) style pleases me. In music, again, the nervous, stimulating music of a Chopin, a Schumann, a Schubert[!], a Wagner, etc., appeal to me most. In art, all that is not only original, but bizarre, attracts me.’ P. 128 (another patient): ‘I am passionately fond of music, and am an enthusiastic partisan of Richard Wagner, for whom I have remarked a predilection in most of us [sufferers from contrary-sexual-feeling]; I find that this music accords so very much with our nature,’ etc.[414]See, inParadoxe, the chapter on ‘Evolutionistische Æsthetik.’[415]Dr. Max Zerbst,Nein und Ja!Leipzig, 1892, p. vii.: ‘It is not impossible that this little book may fall into the hands of some who are nearly connected with the invalid ... whom every indelicate treatment of his affliction must wound most deeply.’ The very last person having the right to complain of indelicate treatment, and to demand consideration, is surely a partisan of Nietzsche’s, who claims for himself the ‘joy in wishing to cause woe,’ and ‘grand unscrupulousness’ as the ‘privilege of the over-man’! Zerbst calls his book a reply to that by Dr. Hermann Türck; but it is nothing but a childishly obstinate and insolent repetition of all Nietzsche’s assertions, the insanity of which has been proved by Dr. Türck. It is exceedingly droll that Zerbst, appealing to a feeble compilation by Ziehen, wishes to demonstrate to Türck that there are no such things as psychoses of the will. Now, Türck has not said a single word about a psychosis of the will in Nietzsche; but Nietzsche, indeed, inFröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 270, does speak of ‘monstrous disease of the will,’ and of a ‘will-disease.’ Zerbst’s objection, therefore, applies, not to Türck, but to his own master—Nietzsche.[416]Dr. Hugo Kaatz,op. cit., pt. i., p. 6.[417]Ola Hansson,Das junge Skandinavien. Vier Essays.Dresden und Leipzig, 1891, p. 12.[418]Albert Kniepf,Theorie der Geisteswerthe. Leipzig, 1892.[419]Dr. Max Zerbst,op. cit., p. 1: ‘O, this modern natural science! these modern psychologists! Nothing is sacred to them!’ ‘When a man, grown up in the school of sickly “idealism,” confronts a cruel savant of this kind ... this godless man takes a small piece of chalk in his hand,’ etc. He ‘turns to the nonplussed idealist,’ and the latter somewhat timidly answers, and ‘adds something sorrowfully,’ whereupon ‘the young psychologist replies, with a gentle shrug of his shoulders.’ Quite so! the ‘cruel,’ the ‘godless,’ the ‘shoulder-shrugging’ young psychologist is himself, Zerbst; the whimpering idealist, the ‘timid’ and ‘sorrowful’ speaker and questioner is his opponent, Dr. Türck![420]Kurt Eisner,Psychopathia spiritualis. Friedrich Nietzsche und die Apostel der Zukunft.Leipzig, 1892.[421]Ola Hansson,Materialisimen i Skönlitteraturen, Populär-vetenskapliga[scientific!]Afhandlingar. Stockholm, undated, pp. 28, 50. In this brochure Hansson also designates the author ofRembrandt als Erzieheras a ‘genius’!![422]Revue politique et littéraire, année 1891.[423]‘During his sojourn of several years in the solitary mountainous district of Sils Maria ... he was in the habit ... of lying on a verdant neck of land stretching into the lake. One spring he returned, to find, on the consecrated [!] spot, a seat, on which trivial folk might rest, in the place hitherto peopled only by his most secret thoughts and visions. And the sight of this all too human [!] structure was enough to render the beloved place of sojourn insupportable to him. He never set foot there again.’—Ola Hansson, quoted from Dr. Hermann Türck,op. cit., p. 10.[424]Dr. Wilhelm Griesinger,op. cit., p. 77.[425]Dr. von Krafft-Ebing,Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie auf klinischer Grundlage für praktische Aertze und Studirende. Vierte theilweise umgearbeitete Auflage. Stuttgart, 1890, p. 363ff.[426]Translator.[427]Dr. Hermann Türck,op. cit., s. 59.[428]Jenseits von Gut und Böse, pp. 198, 201.[429]Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 130.[430]Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 147.[431]Also Sprach Zarathustra, pt. iii., p. 74.[432]Paris unter der dritten Republik, Vierte Auflage. Leipzig, 1890.Zola und Naturalismus Ausgewählte Pariser Briefe, Zweite Auflage. Leipzig, 1887. ‘Pot Bouille, von Zola.’[433]Jules Huret,Enquête sur l’Évolution littéraire, p. 135.[434]J. H. Rosny,Vamireh: Roman des Temps primitifs. Paris, 1892.[435]Ferdinand Brunetière,Le Roman naturaliste, nouvelle édition. Paris, 1892, p. 285.[436]Thirty years before realism began to create a disturbance in Germany, with its mania for description, the Swiss novelist, Gottfried Keller, with a curious premonition, ridiculed it. SeeDie Leute von Seldwyla, Auflage 12, Berlin, 1892, Band II., p. 108. (The hero of the story entitledDie missbrauchten Liebesbriefe[the misused love-letters] suddenly conceives the notion of becoming an author.) ‘He laid aside the book of commercial notes, and drew forth a smaller one provided with a little steel lock. Then he placed himself before the first tree he came to, examined it attentively, and wrote: “A beech-trunk. Pale gray, with still paler flecks and transverse stripes. Two kinds of moss cover it, one almost blackish, and one of a sheeny, velvety green. In addition, yellowish, reddish and white lichen, which often run one into another.... Might perhaps be serviceable in scenes with brigands.” Next he paused before a stake driven into the earth, on which some child had hung a dead slow-worm. He wrote: “Interesting detail. A small staff driven into the ground. Body of a silver-gray snake wound round it.... Is Mercury dead, and has he left his stick with dead snakes sticking here? This last allusion serviceable, above all, for commercial tales. N.B.—The staff or stake is old and weather-beaten; of the same colour as the snake; in places where the sun shines upon it it is covered with little silver-gray hairs. (This last observation might be new, etc.),”’ etc.[437]Edmond et Jules de Goncourt,Manette Solomon. Paris, 1876, pp. 3, 145, 191.[438]F. Brunetière,op. cit., p. 153.[439]F. Brunetière,op. cit., p. 156.[440]‘Everything is a mystery. Everything is a semblance. Nothing really exists.’ The saying of one of Arnaud’s patients afflicted with the mania of negation. See F. L. Arnaud, ‘Sur le Délire des Négations,’Annales médico-psychologiques, 7esérie, t. xvi., p. 387et seq.[441]I would lay humanity on a white page, all things, all beings, a work which would be a vast ark.’—E. Zola, preface toLa Faute de l’Abbé Mouret, edition of 1875. ‘Throw yourself into the commonplace current of existence.’ ‘Choose for your hero a person in the simplicity of daily life.’ ‘No hollow apotheoses, no grand false sentiments, no ready-made formulæ.’—E. Zola,Le Roman expérimental,passim.[442]The family of Kérangal has been the subject of many works, and is well known in technical literature. The last published work on them is due to Dr. Paul Aubry: ‘Une Famille de Criminels,’Annales médico-psychologiques, 7eséries, t. xvi., p. 429 (reproduced inLa Contagion du Meurtre, by the same author; Paris, 1894). See especially, pp. 432, 433, the curious genealogical tree of the family, in which Zola’s celebrated genealogical tree of the Rougon-Macquart and the Quenu-Gradelle can be immediately recognised.[443]Brunetière,op. cit., p. iii.[444]James Sully,Pessimism: A History and a Criticism. London, 1877, p. 411.[445]Dr. Paul Sollier,Psychologie de l’Idiot et de l’Imbécile. Paris, 1891, p. 95.[446]Catrou,Étude sur la Maladie des Tics convulsifs(Jumping, Latab, Myriachit). Paris, 1890.[447]Lombroso,L’Uomo delinquente, etc., pp. 450-480.[448]His descriptions of impulsive criminals are not really exact. The laity have greatly admired his description of the assassin Lantier inLa Bête humaine. The most competent judge in such matters, however, Lombroso, says of this character, which has been inspired in M. Zola, according to his own declaration, byL’Uomo delinquente: ‘M. Zola, in my opinion, has never observed criminals in real life.... His criminal characters give me the impression of the wanness and inaccuracy of certain photographs which reproduce portraits, not from Nature, but from pictures.’—Le piu recenti scoperte ed applicazioni della psichiatria ed antropologia criminale. Con 3 tavole e 52 figure nel testo.Torino, 1893, p. 356.[449]Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing,Psychopathia Sexualis, etc., 3eAuflage; Stuttgart, 1888. Beobachtung 23, Zippes Fall, s. 55; Beobachtung 24, Passow’s Fall, s. 56; Aum. zu s. 57, Lombroso’s Fall.Cæsare Lombroso,Le piu recenti scoperte, etc., p. 227: ‘He always had voluptuous sensations on seeing animals killed, or in perceiving in shops feminine under-garments and linen.’ The case of which Lombroso here speaks is that of a degenerate of fifteen years old, who had been observed by Dr. MacDonald, of Clark University.[450]Léon Tolstoi,[Œuvres complètes, p. 385: ‘He smelt the warmth of her body, inhaled the odour of her perfumes ... and at this moment Pierre understood that not onlymightHélène become his wife, but that shemustbecome so—that nothing else was possible.’] It is related that the King of France, Henri III., married Marie of Cleves because, at the wedding of the King of Navarre and his sister, Marguerite of Valois, wishing to dry his face in the chemise wet with the perspiration of the young princess, he was so intoxicated by the scent which emanated from it, that he had no rest till he had won her who had borne it. See Krafft-Ebing,Psychopathia Sexualis, p. 17.[451]Léon Tolstoi,[Œuvres complètes, t. ii., p. 385: ‘With him there had come into the room a strong, but not disagreeable, smell,’ etc.][452]Maurice Barrès,L’Ennemi des Lois, p. 47.[453]Edmond de Goncourt,La Faustin. Paris, 1882, p. 267.[454]Alfred Binet,Le Fétichisme dans l’Amour, etc., p. 26. This passage will make the German reader think of the sniffer of souls, G. Jaeger; I have no occasion to mention him here.[455]Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing,Psychopathie Sexualis, p. 15, foot-note, p. 17.[456]E. Séguin,Traitement morale, Hygiène et Education des Idiots. Paris, 1846.[457]L. Bernard,Le Odeurs dans le Romans de Zola. Montpellier, 1889.[458]Le Temps, Nodu 13 Février, 1892: ‘Current literature ... is, at present, at an inconceivably low ebb in Germany. From one end of the year to the other it is becoming an impossibility to discover a novel, a drama, or a page of criticism worthy of notice. TheDeutsche Rundschauitself recently admitted this in despair. It is not only the talent and the style which are deficient—all is poor, weak and flat; one might imagine one’s self in France, in the time of Bouilly.... Even the desire to rise above a certain level of ordinary writing seems wanting. One ends by being thankful to any contemporary German author who is seen to be making ... the simplest effort not to write like a crossing-sweeper.’ Every German who observes all the literary productions of his contemporaries will see that this is the opinion of a spiteful enemy. This opinion, nevertheless, is explained and justified by the fact that at the present day it is only the ‘realists’ who make enough stir to be heard in certain places abroad, and that there the natives are delighted to be able to consider them as representing all the German literature of the day.[459]Arno Holz—Johannes Schlaf,Die Familie Selicke, 3eAuflage; Berlin, 1892, p. vi.: ‘In fact, nothing so provokes us to smile ... as when they, in their anxiety to find models, label us as plagiarists of the great foreign authors. Let them say it, then.... It will be acknowledged some day that there has never yet been in our literature a movement less influenced from without, more strongly originated from within—in one word, morenational—than this movement, even at the further development of which we look to-day, and which has had for its visible point of departure ourPapa Hamlet.Die Familie Selickeis the most thoroughly German piece of writing our literature possesses,’ etc. This passage may serve the reader as a model both of the style in which these lads write, and of the tone in which they speak of themselves and their productions.[460]The complaint of want of money is a constant refrain among the ‘Young Germans.’ Listen to Baron Detlev von Liliencron: ‘You had nothing to eat again to-day; as a set-off, every blackguard has had his fill.’ ‘The terror of infernal damnation is—A garden of roses under the kisses of spring,—When I think of how heart and soul fret,—To be hourly bitten by the need of money.’ And Karl Bleibtreu: ‘Brass reigns, gold reigns,—Genius goes its way a-begging.’ ‘To call a ton of gold one’s own,—Sublime end, unattainable to man!’ etc.

Rank.Well, and what’s that?Nora.There’s something that I should so like to say—but for Torvald to hear it.Rank.Then, why don’t you say it to him?Nora.Because I daren’t, for it sounds so ugly....Rank.In that case I would advise you not to say it. But you might say it to us, at any rate.... What is it that you would like to say in Helmer’s presence?Nora.I should like to shout with all my heart—Oh, dash it all!—A Doll’s House,op. cit., pp. 26, 27.[326]Auguste Ehrhard,op. cit., p. 270.[327]Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing,Psychopathia sexualis mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der conträren Sexualempfindung.Eine klinisch-forensische Studie.Dritte vermehrte und verbesserte Auflage. Stuttgart, 1888. See (p. 120) the observation relative to the young nobleman who was erotically excited by his ‘boot-thoughts.’ I cite this single case only, but it would be possible to instance dozens of cases where nightcaps, shoe-nails, white aprons, the wrinkled head of an old woman, etc., have excited sensuality in the highest degree.[328]A Doll’s House, p. 112:Helmer.To forsake your home, your husband, and your children! And only think what people will say about it.Nora.I cannot take that into consideration. I only know that to go is necessary for me....Helmer.... Your duties to ... your children?Nora.I have other duties equally sacred ... duties towards myself, etc.[329]Ghosts, p. 170:Oswald.At last he said, ‘You have been worm-eaten from your birth.’ ... I didn’t understand either, and begged of him to give me a clearer explanation. And then the old cynic said, ‘The father’s sins are visited upon the children.’ And p. 194:Oswald.The disease I have as my birthright (he points to his forehead, and adds very softly) is seated here.[330]The Wild Duck, Act III.:Gregers.Besides, if I’m to go on living, I must try and find some cure for my sick conscience.Werle.It will never be well. Your conscience has been sickly from childhood. That’s an inheritance from your mother, Gregers—it is the only inheritance she left you....Relling.But, deuce take it, don’t you see the fellow’s mad, cracked, demented!Gina.There, you hear! His mother before him had mad fits like that sometimes.[331]The Wild Duck, Act II.:Hjalmar.She is in danger of losing her eyesight.Gregers.Becoming blind?Hjalmar.... But the doctor has warned us. It’s coming, inexorably.Gregers.What an awful misfortune! How do you account for it?Hjalmar(sighs). Hereditary, no doubt.Again, Act IV.:Mrs. Sörby.... He (Werle) is going blind.Hjalmar(with a start). Going blind? That’s strange—Werle, too, becoming blind![332]Dr Prosper Lucas,Traité philosophique et physiologique de l’Hérédité naturelle dans les États de Santé et de Maladie du Système nerveux, etc. (The title occupies seven lines more!) Paris, 1847, 2 volumes, t. i., p. 250. (It appears that Montaigne had this inherited horror of doctors.)[333]Lucas,op. cit., t. i., pp. 391-420:De l’hérédité des modes sensitifs de la vue. On page 400 he tells of a family in which the mother became blind at the age of twenty-one years, and the children at sixteen and seventeen respectively, etc.[334]August Weismann,Ueber die Vererbung. Jena, 1883.[335]F. Galton,Natural Inheritance. London, 1888.[336]Page 136:Mrs. Alving.I know one who has kept both his inner and his outer self unharmed. Only look at him, Mr. Manders.[337]Krafft-Ebing,Psychopathia sexualis, p. 139. The author here cites all the features in question as characteristic of the first stage of general paralysis: ‘Libidinous talk, unconstraint in intercourse with the opposite sex, plans of marriage.’[338]Rosmersholm, p. 23:Rebecca(to Brendel). You should apply to Peter Mortensgaard.Brendel.Pardon, Madame—what sort of an idiot is he?See the flat travesty inAn Enemy of the People(Act IV.) of the forum scene in Shakespeare’sJulius Cæsar, and the characterization of the ‘crowd,’ inBrand(Act V.).[339]Herbert Spencer,The Manversusthe State, 1884, p. 78.[340]In the German text, ‘only of themselves and their families.’—Translator.[341]Edward Westermarck,The History of Human Marriage. London: Macmillan, 1892. See especially the two chapters on ‘The Forms of Human Marriage,’ and ‘The Duration of Marriage.’[342]‘At leve—er Kamp med TroldeJ Hjertet og Hjernens Hvaelv;At digte—det er at holdeDommedag over sig selv.’[343]Dr. Wilhelm Griesinger,Pathologie und Therapie der psychischen Krankheiten für Aerzte und Studirende. 5te Auflage. Gänzlich umgearbeitet und erweitert. Von Dr. Willibald Levinstein-Schleger; Berlin, 1892. (See p. 143, on ‘Diseased Impulses’; and p. 147, on ‘Excessive Energy of Will.’)[344]Griesinger,op. cit., p. 77: ‘Retardation of thought may be produced ... by the state of constriction following a mental depression, by complete inertia extending to the arrest of thought.’[345]Rationalized in the English version cited, as follows (p. 25): ‘Yes, perhaps I am a little delicate.’—Translator.[346]Rationalized in the English version by ‘now soon,’ being rendered as ‘nearly.’—Translator.[347]‘True’ is omitted in the English version quoted.—Translator.[348]Bracketed clause not in English version.—Translator.[349]Griesinger,op. cit., p. 176. He names the coining of words ‘phraseomania.’ Kussmaul gives the nameParaphrasia vesanato the coining of incomprehensible words, or the using of known words in a sense wholly foreign to them.[350]Dr. A. Marie,Études sur quelques Symptômes des Délires systématisés et sur leur Valeur; Paris, 1892, chap. ii.: ‘Eccentricities of language. Neologisms and conjuring incantations.’ Tanzi cites, among others, the following examples: A patient used continuously to repeat, ‘That is true, and not false’; another began every phrase with, ‘God’s Word’; a third said, ‘Out with the vile beast!’ making at the same time a sign of benediction with the right hand; a fourth said unceasingly, ‘Turn over the page’; a fifth cried, in a tone of command, ‘Lips acs livi cux lips sux!’ etc. One of Krafft-Ebing’s patients (op. cit., p. 130) constructed, among others, the following words: ‘Magnetismusambosarbeitswellen, Augengedanken, Austrahlung, Glückseligkeitsbetten, Ohrenschussmaschine,’ etc. Krafft-Ebing,op. cit., pp. 130, 131.[351]Vicomte E. M. de Vogué, ‘Les Cigognes,’Revue des deux Mondes, February 15, 1892, p. 922: ‘Ibsen would have won our trust, were it only by certain axioms [?] which appeal to our actual distrusts, such as this ... inRosmersholm: “The Rosmer view of life ennobles, but it kills happiness.”’ I am convinced that, unless previously told that they emanated from confined lunatics, these ‘comprehensives’ would, without difficulty, understand and interpret the expression ‘little-cupboards-of-appetite-of-representation’ (Vorstellungs-Appetitschränkchen), freely used by one of Meynert’s lunatic patients, or the words of a patient under Griesinger’s care (op. cit., p. 176) that ‘the lady superior was establishing herself in the military side-tone and in the retardation of her teeth.’[352]Tanzi,I Neologismi in rapporta col Delirio cronico. Turin, 1890.[353]‘Vi vil gjöre det om igjen raditalere,Men dertil sordres baade Maend og Talere.J sörger sor Vandflom til Verdensparken,Jeg laegger med Lyst Torpedo under Arken.’Observe the purely mystic vapours of this thought. The poet wishes to destroy everything, even the ark which shelters the saved remnants of terrestrial life, but sees himself placed beyond the reach of the destruction, and hence will survive the annihilation of everything else on earth.[354]Georges Brandes,op. cit., pp. 431, 435, 438, etc.[355]J. Cotard,Études sur les Maladies cérébrales et mentales; Paris, 1891. In this book thedélire des négationsis for the first time recognised and described as a form of melancholia. The Third Congress of French Alienists, which sat at Blois from the 1st to the 6th of August, 1892, devoted almost the whole of its conferences to the insanity of doubt. In a work by F. Raymond and F. L. Arnaud, ‘Sur certains cas d’aboulie avec obsession interrogative et trouble des mouvements’ (Annales médico-psychologiques, 7eséries, t. xvi.), we read, p. 202: ‘The invalids occupy themselves with questions intrinsically insoluble, such as the creation, nature, life, etc. Why the trees are green? Why the rainbow has seven colours? Why men are not as tall as houses?’ etc.[356]Lombroso and B. Laschi,Le Crime politique et les Révolutions par rapport au Droit, à l’Anthropologie criminelle et à la Science du Gouvernement. Traduit de l’Italien par H. Bouchard. Paris, 1892, t. i., p. 195.[357]Auguste Ehrhard,op. cit., p. 412: ‘He [Ibsen] assigns himself arôleto acquaint us in a direct manner with his own disillusionings.... He presents himself in the fantastic and tormented character of Ulric Brendel. Let us not be deceived by the disguise in which he veils himself. Ulric Brendel, the fool, is no other than Henrik Ibsen, the idealist’(?).[358]Auguste Ehrhard,op. cit., p. 120: ‘With admirable frankness Ibsen, in his latest works, points out the abuse which may be made of his ideas [!]. He counsels reformers to extreme prudence, if not to silence. As for himself, he ceases to excite the multitude to the pursuit of moral and social progress [!]; he entrenches himself in his disdainful pessimism, and in aristocratic solitude enjoys the serene vision of future ages.’[359]Henrik Jaeger,Henrik Ibsen og haus Vaerker. En Fremstilling i Grundrids. Christiania, 1892,passim.[360]G. R. S. Mead,Simon Magus. London, 1892.[361]Ehrhard,op. cit., p. 94.[362]W. Roux,Ueber den Kampf der Theile des Organismus. Leipzig, 1881. Since the appearance of Roux’s work, the theory of phagocytose, or the digestion of weaker cells by the stronger, has been considerably extended. This, however, is not the place to cite the numerous communications bearing on this subject which have appeared in theZeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Zoologie, in Virchow’sArchiv, in theBiologische Centralblatt, in theZoologische Jahrbücher, etc.[363]Jacoby,La Folie de Césars. Paris, 1880.[364]Alfred Binet,Les Altérations de la Personnalité, Paris, 1892, p. 23, communicates the case (observed by Bourru and Burot, and often cited) of Louis B., who united in himself six different personalities—six ‘I’s’ having not the slightest knowledge of each other, each possessing another character, another memory, other peculiarities of feeling and movement, etc.[365]‘Suicidal’ is here not a mere rhetorical expression. If the tyrannical power of instinct always ends by leading the individual in the long-run to his destruction, it sometimes does this directly. Instinct, namely, may have for its direct object suicide or self-mutilation; and the ‘free’ man obeying his instinct has then the ‘liberty’ of mutilating or killing himself, although that so little tallies with his real wish that he seeks in others a protection from himself. See Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing,Lehrbuch der gerichtlichen Psychopathologie. Dritte umgearbeitete Auflage. Stuttgart, 1892, p. 311.[366]Herbert Spencer,The Individual versus the State. London, 1884.[367]Dr. Ph. Boileau de Castelnau, ‘Misopédie ou Lésion de l’Amour de la Progeniture’ (Annales médico-psychologiques, 3esérie, 7evolume, p. 553). In this work the author communicates twelve observations, in which the natural feeling of the mother for her children was transformed by disease into hatred.[368]G. Ferrero, ‘L’Atavisme de la Prostitution,’Revue scientifique, 50evolume, p. 136.[369]R. von Krafft-Ebing,Psychopathia sexualis, etc., 7teAuflage, p. 89 (the third edition of this book, from which I have made my previous citations, contains nothing on masochism), andNeue Forschungen auf dem Gebiete der Psychopathia sexualis eine medicinisch-psychologische Studie, Zweite umgearbeitete und vermehrte Auflage, Stuttgart, 1891, p. 1ff.Krafft-Ebing gives this explanation of his word (p. 1et seq.): ‘By masochism I understand a peculiar perversion of the psychicvita sexualis, consisting in this, that the individual seized with it is dominated in his sexual feeling and thought by the idea that he is wholly and unconditionally subjected to the will of a person of the opposite sex, who treats him imperiously, humiliates and maltreats him.’ The word is formed from the name Sacher-Masoch, because ‘his writings delineate exactly typical pictures of the perverted psychic life of men of this kind’ (Neue Forschungen, etc., p. 37). I do not look upon this designation as a happy one. Krafft-Ebing himself shows that Zola and, long before him, Rousseau (he might have added Balzac in Baron Hulot inParents pauvres, part i.:La cousine Bette) have embodied this condition quite as clearly as Sacher-Masoch. Hence I prefer the designation ‘passivism,’ proposed by Dimitry Stefanowsky. SeeArchives de l’Anthropologie criminelle, 1892, p. 294.[370]Ehrhard,op. cit., p. 88.[371]Persian for Zoroaster.[372]Dr. Hugo Kaatz,Die Weltanschauung Friedrich Nietzsche: Erster Theil, ‘Cultur und Moral’; Zweiter Theil, ‘Kunst und Leben.’ Dresden und Leipzig, 1892, 1 Th., p. vi.: ‘We are accustomed, especially in matters concerning the deepest problems of thought, to a finished, systematic exposition.... There is none of all this in Nietzsche. No single work of his forms a finished whole, or is wholly intelligible without the others. Each book, moreover, is totally wanting in organic structure. Nietzsche writes almost exclusively in aphorisms, which, filling sometimes two lines, sometimes several pages, are complete in themselves, and seldom manifest any direct connection with each other.... With proud indifference to the reader, the author has avoided cutting evenonegap in the hedge with which he has closely surrounded his intellectual creations. Access to him must be gained by fighting,’ etc. In spite of its seeming obscurity, Nietzsche has himself given such pointed information concerning his method of work as amounts to an avowal. ‘All writing makes me angry or ashamed; for me, writing is a necessity.’ ‘But why, then, do you write?’ ‘Yes, my dear friend, let me say it in confidence: I have hitherto found no other means ofriddingmyself of my thoughts.’ (The italics are Nietzsche’s.) ‘And why do you wish to rid yourself of them?’ ‘Why I wish? Do I so wish? I must.’Die fröhliche Wissenschaft.Neue Ausgabe, p. 114.[373]Dr. Max Zerbst,Nein und Ja!Leipzig, 1892.[374]Robert Schellwien,Max Stirner und Friedrich Nietzsche,Erscheinungen des modernen Geister und das Wesen des Menschen. Leipzig, 1892.[375]I refuted this silly sophism before Nietzsche propounded it in the passages above quoted fromZur Genealogie der Moral, p. 66, andJenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 228. SeeDie conventionellen Lügen der Kulturmenschheit, 14 Aufl., pp. 211, 212: ‘This expression [of Proudhon’s, that property is theft] can be regarded as true only from the sophistical standpoint that everything existing exists for itself, and from the fact of its existence derives its right to belong to itself. According to this view, forsooth, a man steals the blade of grass he plucks, the air he breathes, the fish he catches; but, then, the martin, too, is stealing when it swallows a fly, and the grub when it eats its way into the root of a tree; then Nature is altogether peopled by arch-thieves, and, in general, everything steals that lives,i.e., absorbs from without materials not belonging to it, and organically elaborates them, and a block of platinum, which does not even pilfer from the air a little oxygen with which to oxidize itself, would be the sole example of honesty on our globe. No; property resulting from earning, that is, from the exchange of a determined amount of labour for a corresponding amount of goods, is not theft.’ If, throughout this passage, ‘theft’ be substituted for the word ‘exploitation,’ used by Nietzsche, his sophism is answered.[376]The Sacred Books of the East.Translated by various Oriental scholars, and edited by F. Max Müller. The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1st series, vol. x.:Dhammapada, by F. Max Müller; andSutta-Nipâta, by V. Fausböll.[377]The Sacred Books of the East, etc., vol. xix.:Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king, by Rev. S. Beal.[378]Charles Darwin,The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex; London, J. Murray, 1885, p. 101: ‘All the baboons had reascended the heights, excepting a young one, about six months old, who, loudly calling for aid, climbed on a block of rock, and was surrounded. Now one of the largest males, a true hero, came down again from the mountain, slowly went to the young one, coaxed him, and triumphantly led him away, the dogs being too much astonished to make an attack.’[379]Friedrich Nietsche,Zur Genealogie der Moral.Eine Streitschrift.Zweite Auflage. Leipzig, 1892, § 80.[380]Gustav Freytag,Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit. Erster Band, aus dem Mittelalter. Leipzig, 1872, p. 42ff.: ‘The Roman Consul, Papirius Carbo ... denies the strangers [the Cimbrians and Teutons!] the right of sojourn because the inhabitants are enjoying the rights of hospitality of the Romans. The strangers excuse themselves by saying they did not know that the natives were under Roman protection, and they are ready to leave the country.... The Cimbrians do not seek a quarrel; they send to Consul Silanus, and urgently entreat him to assign them lands; they are willing in return for it to serve the Romans in time of war.... Once more the strangers do not invade Roman territory, but send an embassy to the Senate and repeat the request for an assignment of land.... The victorious Germans now sent a fresh embassy to the leader of the other army, for the third time, to sue for peace and ask for land and seed-corn.’[381]Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 79.[382]Ibid., p. 73.[383]Charles Darwin,op. cit., p. 98: ‘As soon as the mental faculties had become highly developed, images of all past actions and motives would be incessantly passing through the brain of each individual; and that feeling of dissatisfaction, or even misery, which invariably results ... from any unsatisfied instinct, would arise as often as it was perceived that the enduring and always present social instinct had yielded to some other instinct, at the time stronger, but neither enduring in its nature nor leaving behind it a very vivid impression. It is clear that many instinctive desires, such as that of hunger, are, in their nature, of short duration, and, after being satisfied, are not readily or vividly recalled,’ etc.[384]Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 9.[385]Ibid., p. 48.[386]Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 91: ‘The criminal is, often enough, not grown to the level of his deed: he dwarfs and traduces it. The legal defenders of the criminal are rarely artists enough to turn the beautiful terribleness of the deed to the profit of the doer.’[387]‘A people is the detour of nature, in order to arrive at six or seven great men.’ See also: ‘The essential thing in a good and healthy aristocracy is, that it should feel itself to benotthe function, but theendand justification, be it of royalty or of the commonwealth—that it should, therefore, with a good conscience, suffer the sacrifice of a countless number of men who,for its sake, must be humbled and reduced to imperfect beings, to slaves, to instruments.’—Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 226.[388]The following are a few examples, which could easily be centupled (literally, not hyperbolically)—Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 63: ‘It is the Orient, the deep Orient.’ p. 239: ‘Such books of depth and of the first importance.’ p. 248: ‘Deep suffering ennobles.’ ‘A bravery of taste, resisting all that is sorrowful and deep.’ p. 249: ‘Any fervour and thirstiness which constantly drives the soul ... into the bright, the brilliant, the deep, the delicate.’ p. 256: ‘An odour quite as much of depth [!] as of decay.’ p. 260: ‘To lie tranquilly like a mirror, so that the deep heaven might reflect itself in them.’ p. 262: ‘I often think how I may make him [man] stronger, wickeder, and deeper.’Also sprach Zarathustra, pt. i., p. 71: ‘But thou Deep One, thou sufferest too deeply even from little wounds.’ Pt. ii., p. 52: ‘Immovable is my depth; but it sparkles with floating enigmas and laughters’ (!!). p. 64: ‘And this for me is knowledge: all depth should rise—to my height.’ p. 70: ‘They did not think enough into the depth.’ Pt. iii., p. 22: ‘The world is deep, and deeper than the day has ever thought it.’ Pt. iv., p. 129: ‘What says the deep midnight?... From a deep dream am I awakened. The world is deep, and deeper than the day thought. Deep in its woe. Joy—deeper still than sorrow of heart. All joy ... wishes for deep, deep eternity,’ etc.[389]Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 167.[390]Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 159: ‘Our virtues? It is probable that we, too, still have our virtues, albeit they are no longer the true-hearted and robust virtues for which we hold our grandfathers in honour—though at a little distance.’ p. 154: ‘The man beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues ... he ought to be the greatest.’ So then, ‘beyond good and evil,’ and yet having ‘virtues’![391]Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 79: ‘As a premise to this hypothesis concerning the origin of the evil conscience [through the ‘transvaluation of values’ and the ‘revolt of slaves in morality’] belongs the fact ... that this transformation was in no way gradual, or voluntary, and did not manifest itself as an organic growing into new conditions, but as a rapture, a leap, a compulsion.’ Hence, not only was that good which had previously been evil, but this ‘transvaluation’ even occurred suddenly, ordered one fine day by authority![392]Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 232: ‘Slave-morality is essentially a utilitarian morality.[393]Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 32: ‘In reality, however, evil instincts are just as purposive, as conservative of the species, and as indispensable as the good, only they have a different function.’Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 21: ‘At the root of all ... noble races lies the beast of prey ... this foundation needs from time to time to disburden itself; the animal must out, must hie him back to the desert.’ This means that it is essential to his health, and, consequently, of utility to him.[394]Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 6: ‘To what disorders, however, this [democratic] prejudice can give rise, is shown by the infamous [!] case of Buckle. The plebeianism of the modern spirit, which is of English origin, once more breaks forth ... there.’Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 212: ‘There are truths that are best recognised by mediocre heads.... We are driven to this proposition since the intellect of mediocre Englishmen—I may mention Darwin, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer—acquired preponderance in the mean region of European taste.’[395]Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 43.[396]See, in my novel,Die Krankheit des Jahrhunderts, Leipzig, 1889, Band I., p. 140, Schrötter’s remarks: ‘Egoism is a word. All depends upon the interpretation. Every living being strives for happiness,i.e., for contentment.... He [the healthy man] cannot be happy when he sees others suffer. The higher the man’s development, the livelier is this feeling.... The egoism of these men consists in their seeking out the pain of others and striving to alleviate it, in which, while combating the sufferings of others, they are simply struggling to attain to their own happiness. A Catholic would say of St. Vincent de Paul or of Carlo Borromeo, He was a great saint; I should say of him, He was a great egoist.’[397]Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 48.[398]Dr. Hugo Kaatz,op. cit., Thiel I., Vorrede, p. viii.[399]Robert Schellwien,Max Stierner und Friedrich Nietzsche. Leipzig, 1892, p. 23.[400]Also sprach Zarathustra, pt. i., p. 84: ‘The “thou” is proclaimed holy, but not yet the “I.”’[401]Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 43.[402]Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 222.[403]Jenseits von Gut und Böse, pp. 78, 106.[404]C. Lombroso and R. Laschi,Le Crime politique et les Révolutions. Paris, 1892, t. i., p. 142.[405]R. Schellwien,op. cit., p. 7: ‘The literary activity of the two thinkers [!] is separated by more than fifty years; but great as may be the difference between them, the agreement is not less, and thus the essential characters of systematic individualism are presented with all the more distinctness.’[406]See, in myParadoxe, the chapter ‘Wo ist die Wahrheit?’[407]‘With what magic she lays hold of me! What? Has all the world’s repose embarked here?’ ‘What use has the inspired one for wine? What? Give the mole wings and proud imaginings?’ ‘In so far as he says Yes to this other world, what? must he not then say No to its counterpart, this world?’ ‘Round about God all becomes—what? perhaps world?’ ‘A pessimist ... who says Yes to morality ... tolæde-neminem-morality; what? is that really—a pessimist?’ ‘Fear and pity: with these feelings has man hitherto stood in the presence of woman. What? Is there now to be an end of this?’ I will content myself with these examples, but let it be remarked once for all, that all the specimens I adduce here for the purpose of examining Nietzsche’s mental state could easily be multiplied a hundredfold, as the characteristic peculiarities recur in him hundreds of times. On one occasion he plainly becomes conscious of this living note of interrogation, always present in his mind as an obsession. InAlso sprach Zarathustra, pt. iii., p. 55, he calls the passion for rule, ‘the flashing note of interrogation by the side of premature answers.’ In this connection, this expression has absolutely no sense; but it at once becomes intelligible when it is remembered that the insane are in the habit of suddenly giving utterance to the ideas springing up in their consciousness. Nietzsche plainlysawin his mind ‘the flashing note of interrogation,’ and suddenly, and without transition, spoke of it.[408]‘A Greek life, to which he said, No.’ ‘A pessimist who not merely says, No, wishes No [!] but who ... does No’ [!!]. ‘An inward saying No to this or that thing.’ ‘Free for death, and free in death, a holy No-sayer.’ Then as a complementary counterpart: ‘Pregnant with lightnings, who say, Yes! laugh Yes!’ ‘While all noble morality grows to itself out of a triumphant saying Yea.’ (He feels himself to be something) ‘at least saying Yea to life.’ ‘To be able to say Yea to yourself, that is ... a ripe fruit.’ (Disinterested wickedness is felt by primitive humanity to be something) ‘to which conscience valiantly says Yea.’ We see what use Nietzsche makes of his saying ‘Nay’ and ‘Yea.’ It stands in the place of nearly all verbs joining subject with predicate. The thought ‘I am thirsty’ would, by Nietzsche, be thus expressed, ‘I say Yes to water.’ Instead of ‘I am sleepy,’ he would say, ‘I say Nay to wakefulness,’ or, ‘I say Yes to bed,’ etc. This is the way in which invalids in incomplete aphasia are in the habit of paraphrasing their thoughts.[409]Dr. Hermann Türck,Fr. Nietzsche und seine philosophischen Irrwege, Zweite Auflage. Dresden, 1891, p. 7.[410]B. Ball,La Folie érotique, Paris, 1888, p. 50: ‘I have sketched for you the picture of chaste love (amorous lunacy, or the erotomania of Esquirol), where the greatest excesses remain enclosed within the limits of feeling, and are never polluted by the intervention of the senses. I have shown you some examples of this delirium pushed to the extreme bounds of insanity, without the intermixture of a single idea foreign to the domain of platonic affection.’[411]In one passage ofZur Genealogie der Moral, p. 132, Nietzsche speaks of the ‘species of moral onanists and self-indulgers.’ He does not apply the expression to himself; but it was unquestionably suggested by an obscure suspicion of his own state of mind.[412]Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing,Neue Forschungen, u. s. w., p. 45ff.: ‘The complete contrary of masochism is Sadism. While in the former the subject desires to suffer sorrows, and to feel himself in subjection to violence, in the latter his aim is to cause sorrows, and to exercise violence.... All the acts and situations carried out in the active part played by Sadism constitute, for masochism, the object of longing, to be attained passively. In both perversions these acts form a progression from purely symbolic events to grievous misdeeds.... Both are to be considered as original psychopathies of mentally abnormal individuals, afflicted in particular with psychicHyperæsthesia sexualis, but also, as a rule, with other anomalies.... The pleasure of causing sorrow and the pleasure of experiencing sorrow appear only as two different sides of the same psychic event, the primary and essential principle in which is the consciousness of active and passive subjection respectively.’ See Nietzsche,Also sprach Zarathustra, pt. i., p. 95: ‘Thou art going to women? Forget not the whip!’Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 186: ‘Woman unlearns the fear of man,’ and thus ‘exposes her most womanly instincts.’[413]Krafft-Ebing,Neue Forschungen, u. s. w., p. 108. (A sexual-psychopath thus writes): ‘I take great interest in art and literature. Among poets and authors, those attract me most who describe refined feelings, peculiar passions, choice impressions: an artificial (or ultra-artificial) style pleases me. In music, again, the nervous, stimulating music of a Chopin, a Schumann, a Schubert[!], a Wagner, etc., appeal to me most. In art, all that is not only original, but bizarre, attracts me.’ P. 128 (another patient): ‘I am passionately fond of music, and am an enthusiastic partisan of Richard Wagner, for whom I have remarked a predilection in most of us [sufferers from contrary-sexual-feeling]; I find that this music accords so very much with our nature,’ etc.[414]See, inParadoxe, the chapter on ‘Evolutionistische Æsthetik.’[415]Dr. Max Zerbst,Nein und Ja!Leipzig, 1892, p. vii.: ‘It is not impossible that this little book may fall into the hands of some who are nearly connected with the invalid ... whom every indelicate treatment of his affliction must wound most deeply.’ The very last person having the right to complain of indelicate treatment, and to demand consideration, is surely a partisan of Nietzsche’s, who claims for himself the ‘joy in wishing to cause woe,’ and ‘grand unscrupulousness’ as the ‘privilege of the over-man’! Zerbst calls his book a reply to that by Dr. Hermann Türck; but it is nothing but a childishly obstinate and insolent repetition of all Nietzsche’s assertions, the insanity of which has been proved by Dr. Türck. It is exceedingly droll that Zerbst, appealing to a feeble compilation by Ziehen, wishes to demonstrate to Türck that there are no such things as psychoses of the will. Now, Türck has not said a single word about a psychosis of the will in Nietzsche; but Nietzsche, indeed, inFröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 270, does speak of ‘monstrous disease of the will,’ and of a ‘will-disease.’ Zerbst’s objection, therefore, applies, not to Türck, but to his own master—Nietzsche.[416]Dr. Hugo Kaatz,op. cit., pt. i., p. 6.[417]Ola Hansson,Das junge Skandinavien. Vier Essays.Dresden und Leipzig, 1891, p. 12.[418]Albert Kniepf,Theorie der Geisteswerthe. Leipzig, 1892.[419]Dr. Max Zerbst,op. cit., p. 1: ‘O, this modern natural science! these modern psychologists! Nothing is sacred to them!’ ‘When a man, grown up in the school of sickly “idealism,” confronts a cruel savant of this kind ... this godless man takes a small piece of chalk in his hand,’ etc. He ‘turns to the nonplussed idealist,’ and the latter somewhat timidly answers, and ‘adds something sorrowfully,’ whereupon ‘the young psychologist replies, with a gentle shrug of his shoulders.’ Quite so! the ‘cruel,’ the ‘godless,’ the ‘shoulder-shrugging’ young psychologist is himself, Zerbst; the whimpering idealist, the ‘timid’ and ‘sorrowful’ speaker and questioner is his opponent, Dr. Türck![420]Kurt Eisner,Psychopathia spiritualis. Friedrich Nietzsche und die Apostel der Zukunft.Leipzig, 1892.[421]Ola Hansson,Materialisimen i Skönlitteraturen, Populär-vetenskapliga[scientific!]Afhandlingar. Stockholm, undated, pp. 28, 50. In this brochure Hansson also designates the author ofRembrandt als Erzieheras a ‘genius’!![422]Revue politique et littéraire, année 1891.[423]‘During his sojourn of several years in the solitary mountainous district of Sils Maria ... he was in the habit ... of lying on a verdant neck of land stretching into the lake. One spring he returned, to find, on the consecrated [!] spot, a seat, on which trivial folk might rest, in the place hitherto peopled only by his most secret thoughts and visions. And the sight of this all too human [!] structure was enough to render the beloved place of sojourn insupportable to him. He never set foot there again.’—Ola Hansson, quoted from Dr. Hermann Türck,op. cit., p. 10.[424]Dr. Wilhelm Griesinger,op. cit., p. 77.[425]Dr. von Krafft-Ebing,Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie auf klinischer Grundlage für praktische Aertze und Studirende. Vierte theilweise umgearbeitete Auflage. Stuttgart, 1890, p. 363ff.[426]Translator.[427]Dr. Hermann Türck,op. cit., s. 59.[428]Jenseits von Gut und Böse, pp. 198, 201.[429]Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 130.[430]Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 147.[431]Also Sprach Zarathustra, pt. iii., p. 74.[432]Paris unter der dritten Republik, Vierte Auflage. Leipzig, 1890.Zola und Naturalismus Ausgewählte Pariser Briefe, Zweite Auflage. Leipzig, 1887. ‘Pot Bouille, von Zola.’[433]Jules Huret,Enquête sur l’Évolution littéraire, p. 135.[434]J. H. Rosny,Vamireh: Roman des Temps primitifs. Paris, 1892.[435]Ferdinand Brunetière,Le Roman naturaliste, nouvelle édition. Paris, 1892, p. 285.[436]Thirty years before realism began to create a disturbance in Germany, with its mania for description, the Swiss novelist, Gottfried Keller, with a curious premonition, ridiculed it. SeeDie Leute von Seldwyla, Auflage 12, Berlin, 1892, Band II., p. 108. (The hero of the story entitledDie missbrauchten Liebesbriefe[the misused love-letters] suddenly conceives the notion of becoming an author.) ‘He laid aside the book of commercial notes, and drew forth a smaller one provided with a little steel lock. Then he placed himself before the first tree he came to, examined it attentively, and wrote: “A beech-trunk. Pale gray, with still paler flecks and transverse stripes. Two kinds of moss cover it, one almost blackish, and one of a sheeny, velvety green. In addition, yellowish, reddish and white lichen, which often run one into another.... Might perhaps be serviceable in scenes with brigands.” Next he paused before a stake driven into the earth, on which some child had hung a dead slow-worm. He wrote: “Interesting detail. A small staff driven into the ground. Body of a silver-gray snake wound round it.... Is Mercury dead, and has he left his stick with dead snakes sticking here? This last allusion serviceable, above all, for commercial tales. N.B.—The staff or stake is old and weather-beaten; of the same colour as the snake; in places where the sun shines upon it it is covered with little silver-gray hairs. (This last observation might be new, etc.),”’ etc.[437]Edmond et Jules de Goncourt,Manette Solomon. Paris, 1876, pp. 3, 145, 191.[438]F. Brunetière,op. cit., p. 153.[439]F. Brunetière,op. cit., p. 156.[440]‘Everything is a mystery. Everything is a semblance. Nothing really exists.’ The saying of one of Arnaud’s patients afflicted with the mania of negation. See F. L. Arnaud, ‘Sur le Délire des Négations,’Annales médico-psychologiques, 7esérie, t. xvi., p. 387et seq.[441]I would lay humanity on a white page, all things, all beings, a work which would be a vast ark.’—E. Zola, preface toLa Faute de l’Abbé Mouret, edition of 1875. ‘Throw yourself into the commonplace current of existence.’ ‘Choose for your hero a person in the simplicity of daily life.’ ‘No hollow apotheoses, no grand false sentiments, no ready-made formulæ.’—E. Zola,Le Roman expérimental,passim.[442]The family of Kérangal has been the subject of many works, and is well known in technical literature. The last published work on them is due to Dr. Paul Aubry: ‘Une Famille de Criminels,’Annales médico-psychologiques, 7eséries, t. xvi., p. 429 (reproduced inLa Contagion du Meurtre, by the same author; Paris, 1894). See especially, pp. 432, 433, the curious genealogical tree of the family, in which Zola’s celebrated genealogical tree of the Rougon-Macquart and the Quenu-Gradelle can be immediately recognised.[443]Brunetière,op. cit., p. iii.[444]James Sully,Pessimism: A History and a Criticism. London, 1877, p. 411.[445]Dr. Paul Sollier,Psychologie de l’Idiot et de l’Imbécile. Paris, 1891, p. 95.[446]Catrou,Étude sur la Maladie des Tics convulsifs(Jumping, Latab, Myriachit). Paris, 1890.[447]Lombroso,L’Uomo delinquente, etc., pp. 450-480.[448]His descriptions of impulsive criminals are not really exact. The laity have greatly admired his description of the assassin Lantier inLa Bête humaine. The most competent judge in such matters, however, Lombroso, says of this character, which has been inspired in M. Zola, according to his own declaration, byL’Uomo delinquente: ‘M. Zola, in my opinion, has never observed criminals in real life.... His criminal characters give me the impression of the wanness and inaccuracy of certain photographs which reproduce portraits, not from Nature, but from pictures.’—Le piu recenti scoperte ed applicazioni della psichiatria ed antropologia criminale. Con 3 tavole e 52 figure nel testo.Torino, 1893, p. 356.[449]Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing,Psychopathia Sexualis, etc., 3eAuflage; Stuttgart, 1888. Beobachtung 23, Zippes Fall, s. 55; Beobachtung 24, Passow’s Fall, s. 56; Aum. zu s. 57, Lombroso’s Fall.Cæsare Lombroso,Le piu recenti scoperte, etc., p. 227: ‘He always had voluptuous sensations on seeing animals killed, or in perceiving in shops feminine under-garments and linen.’ The case of which Lombroso here speaks is that of a degenerate of fifteen years old, who had been observed by Dr. MacDonald, of Clark University.[450]Léon Tolstoi,[Œuvres complètes, p. 385: ‘He smelt the warmth of her body, inhaled the odour of her perfumes ... and at this moment Pierre understood that not onlymightHélène become his wife, but that shemustbecome so—that nothing else was possible.’] It is related that the King of France, Henri III., married Marie of Cleves because, at the wedding of the King of Navarre and his sister, Marguerite of Valois, wishing to dry his face in the chemise wet with the perspiration of the young princess, he was so intoxicated by the scent which emanated from it, that he had no rest till he had won her who had borne it. See Krafft-Ebing,Psychopathia Sexualis, p. 17.[451]Léon Tolstoi,[Œuvres complètes, t. ii., p. 385: ‘With him there had come into the room a strong, but not disagreeable, smell,’ etc.][452]Maurice Barrès,L’Ennemi des Lois, p. 47.[453]Edmond de Goncourt,La Faustin. Paris, 1882, p. 267.[454]Alfred Binet,Le Fétichisme dans l’Amour, etc., p. 26. This passage will make the German reader think of the sniffer of souls, G. Jaeger; I have no occasion to mention him here.[455]Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing,Psychopathie Sexualis, p. 15, foot-note, p. 17.[456]E. Séguin,Traitement morale, Hygiène et Education des Idiots. Paris, 1846.[457]L. Bernard,Le Odeurs dans le Romans de Zola. Montpellier, 1889.[458]Le Temps, Nodu 13 Février, 1892: ‘Current literature ... is, at present, at an inconceivably low ebb in Germany. From one end of the year to the other it is becoming an impossibility to discover a novel, a drama, or a page of criticism worthy of notice. TheDeutsche Rundschauitself recently admitted this in despair. It is not only the talent and the style which are deficient—all is poor, weak and flat; one might imagine one’s self in France, in the time of Bouilly.... Even the desire to rise above a certain level of ordinary writing seems wanting. One ends by being thankful to any contemporary German author who is seen to be making ... the simplest effort not to write like a crossing-sweeper.’ Every German who observes all the literary productions of his contemporaries will see that this is the opinion of a spiteful enemy. This opinion, nevertheless, is explained and justified by the fact that at the present day it is only the ‘realists’ who make enough stir to be heard in certain places abroad, and that there the natives are delighted to be able to consider them as representing all the German literature of the day.[459]Arno Holz—Johannes Schlaf,Die Familie Selicke, 3eAuflage; Berlin, 1892, p. vi.: ‘In fact, nothing so provokes us to smile ... as when they, in their anxiety to find models, label us as plagiarists of the great foreign authors. Let them say it, then.... It will be acknowledged some day that there has never yet been in our literature a movement less influenced from without, more strongly originated from within—in one word, morenational—than this movement, even at the further development of which we look to-day, and which has had for its visible point of departure ourPapa Hamlet.Die Familie Selickeis the most thoroughly German piece of writing our literature possesses,’ etc. This passage may serve the reader as a model both of the style in which these lads write, and of the tone in which they speak of themselves and their productions.[460]The complaint of want of money is a constant refrain among the ‘Young Germans.’ Listen to Baron Detlev von Liliencron: ‘You had nothing to eat again to-day; as a set-off, every blackguard has had his fill.’ ‘The terror of infernal damnation is—A garden of roses under the kisses of spring,—When I think of how heart and soul fret,—To be hourly bitten by the need of money.’ And Karl Bleibtreu: ‘Brass reigns, gold reigns,—Genius goes its way a-begging.’ ‘To call a ton of gold one’s own,—Sublime end, unattainable to man!’ etc.

Rank.Well, and what’s that?Nora.There’s something that I should so like to say—but for Torvald to hear it.Rank.Then, why don’t you say it to him?Nora.Because I daren’t, for it sounds so ugly....Rank.In that case I would advise you not to say it. But you might say it to us, at any rate.... What is it that you would like to say in Helmer’s presence?Nora.I should like to shout with all my heart—Oh, dash it all!—A Doll’s House,op. cit., pp. 26, 27.[326]Auguste Ehrhard,op. cit., p. 270.[327]Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing,Psychopathia sexualis mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der conträren Sexualempfindung.Eine klinisch-forensische Studie.Dritte vermehrte und verbesserte Auflage. Stuttgart, 1888. See (p. 120) the observation relative to the young nobleman who was erotically excited by his ‘boot-thoughts.’ I cite this single case only, but it would be possible to instance dozens of cases where nightcaps, shoe-nails, white aprons, the wrinkled head of an old woman, etc., have excited sensuality in the highest degree.[328]A Doll’s House, p. 112:Helmer.To forsake your home, your husband, and your children! And only think what people will say about it.Nora.I cannot take that into consideration. I only know that to go is necessary for me....Helmer.... Your duties to ... your children?Nora.I have other duties equally sacred ... duties towards myself, etc.[329]Ghosts, p. 170:Oswald.At last he said, ‘You have been worm-eaten from your birth.’ ... I didn’t understand either, and begged of him to give me a clearer explanation. And then the old cynic said, ‘The father’s sins are visited upon the children.’ And p. 194:Oswald.The disease I have as my birthright (he points to his forehead, and adds very softly) is seated here.[330]The Wild Duck, Act III.:Gregers.Besides, if I’m to go on living, I must try and find some cure for my sick conscience.Werle.It will never be well. Your conscience has been sickly from childhood. That’s an inheritance from your mother, Gregers—it is the only inheritance she left you....Relling.But, deuce take it, don’t you see the fellow’s mad, cracked, demented!Gina.There, you hear! His mother before him had mad fits like that sometimes.[331]The Wild Duck, Act II.:Hjalmar.She is in danger of losing her eyesight.Gregers.Becoming blind?Hjalmar.... But the doctor has warned us. It’s coming, inexorably.Gregers.What an awful misfortune! How do you account for it?Hjalmar(sighs). Hereditary, no doubt.Again, Act IV.:Mrs. Sörby.... He (Werle) is going blind.Hjalmar(with a start). Going blind? That’s strange—Werle, too, becoming blind![332]Dr Prosper Lucas,Traité philosophique et physiologique de l’Hérédité naturelle dans les États de Santé et de Maladie du Système nerveux, etc. (The title occupies seven lines more!) Paris, 1847, 2 volumes, t. i., p. 250. (It appears that Montaigne had this inherited horror of doctors.)[333]Lucas,op. cit., t. i., pp. 391-420:De l’hérédité des modes sensitifs de la vue. On page 400 he tells of a family in which the mother became blind at the age of twenty-one years, and the children at sixteen and seventeen respectively, etc.[334]August Weismann,Ueber die Vererbung. Jena, 1883.[335]F. Galton,Natural Inheritance. London, 1888.[336]Page 136:Mrs. Alving.I know one who has kept both his inner and his outer self unharmed. Only look at him, Mr. Manders.[337]Krafft-Ebing,Psychopathia sexualis, p. 139. The author here cites all the features in question as characteristic of the first stage of general paralysis: ‘Libidinous talk, unconstraint in intercourse with the opposite sex, plans of marriage.’[338]Rosmersholm, p. 23:Rebecca(to Brendel). You should apply to Peter Mortensgaard.Brendel.Pardon, Madame—what sort of an idiot is he?See the flat travesty inAn Enemy of the People(Act IV.) of the forum scene in Shakespeare’sJulius Cæsar, and the characterization of the ‘crowd,’ inBrand(Act V.).[339]Herbert Spencer,The Manversusthe State, 1884, p. 78.[340]In the German text, ‘only of themselves and their families.’—Translator.[341]Edward Westermarck,The History of Human Marriage. London: Macmillan, 1892. See especially the two chapters on ‘The Forms of Human Marriage,’ and ‘The Duration of Marriage.’[342]‘At leve—er Kamp med TroldeJ Hjertet og Hjernens Hvaelv;At digte—det er at holdeDommedag over sig selv.’[343]Dr. Wilhelm Griesinger,Pathologie und Therapie der psychischen Krankheiten für Aerzte und Studirende. 5te Auflage. Gänzlich umgearbeitet und erweitert. Von Dr. Willibald Levinstein-Schleger; Berlin, 1892. (See p. 143, on ‘Diseased Impulses’; and p. 147, on ‘Excessive Energy of Will.’)[344]Griesinger,op. cit., p. 77: ‘Retardation of thought may be produced ... by the state of constriction following a mental depression, by complete inertia extending to the arrest of thought.’[345]Rationalized in the English version cited, as follows (p. 25): ‘Yes, perhaps I am a little delicate.’—Translator.[346]Rationalized in the English version by ‘now soon,’ being rendered as ‘nearly.’—Translator.[347]‘True’ is omitted in the English version quoted.—Translator.[348]Bracketed clause not in English version.—Translator.[349]Griesinger,op. cit., p. 176. He names the coining of words ‘phraseomania.’ Kussmaul gives the nameParaphrasia vesanato the coining of incomprehensible words, or the using of known words in a sense wholly foreign to them.[350]Dr. A. Marie,Études sur quelques Symptômes des Délires systématisés et sur leur Valeur; Paris, 1892, chap. ii.: ‘Eccentricities of language. Neologisms and conjuring incantations.’ Tanzi cites, among others, the following examples: A patient used continuously to repeat, ‘That is true, and not false’; another began every phrase with, ‘God’s Word’; a third said, ‘Out with the vile beast!’ making at the same time a sign of benediction with the right hand; a fourth said unceasingly, ‘Turn over the page’; a fifth cried, in a tone of command, ‘Lips acs livi cux lips sux!’ etc. One of Krafft-Ebing’s patients (op. cit., p. 130) constructed, among others, the following words: ‘Magnetismusambosarbeitswellen, Augengedanken, Austrahlung, Glückseligkeitsbetten, Ohrenschussmaschine,’ etc. Krafft-Ebing,op. cit., pp. 130, 131.[351]Vicomte E. M. de Vogué, ‘Les Cigognes,’Revue des deux Mondes, February 15, 1892, p. 922: ‘Ibsen would have won our trust, were it only by certain axioms [?] which appeal to our actual distrusts, such as this ... inRosmersholm: “The Rosmer view of life ennobles, but it kills happiness.”’ I am convinced that, unless previously told that they emanated from confined lunatics, these ‘comprehensives’ would, without difficulty, understand and interpret the expression ‘little-cupboards-of-appetite-of-representation’ (Vorstellungs-Appetitschränkchen), freely used by one of Meynert’s lunatic patients, or the words of a patient under Griesinger’s care (op. cit., p. 176) that ‘the lady superior was establishing herself in the military side-tone and in the retardation of her teeth.’[352]Tanzi,I Neologismi in rapporta col Delirio cronico. Turin, 1890.[353]‘Vi vil gjöre det om igjen raditalere,Men dertil sordres baade Maend og Talere.J sörger sor Vandflom til Verdensparken,Jeg laegger med Lyst Torpedo under Arken.’Observe the purely mystic vapours of this thought. The poet wishes to destroy everything, even the ark which shelters the saved remnants of terrestrial life, but sees himself placed beyond the reach of the destruction, and hence will survive the annihilation of everything else on earth.[354]Georges Brandes,op. cit., pp. 431, 435, 438, etc.[355]J. Cotard,Études sur les Maladies cérébrales et mentales; Paris, 1891. In this book thedélire des négationsis for the first time recognised and described as a form of melancholia. The Third Congress of French Alienists, which sat at Blois from the 1st to the 6th of August, 1892, devoted almost the whole of its conferences to the insanity of doubt. In a work by F. Raymond and F. L. Arnaud, ‘Sur certains cas d’aboulie avec obsession interrogative et trouble des mouvements’ (Annales médico-psychologiques, 7eséries, t. xvi.), we read, p. 202: ‘The invalids occupy themselves with questions intrinsically insoluble, such as the creation, nature, life, etc. Why the trees are green? Why the rainbow has seven colours? Why men are not as tall as houses?’ etc.[356]Lombroso and B. Laschi,Le Crime politique et les Révolutions par rapport au Droit, à l’Anthropologie criminelle et à la Science du Gouvernement. Traduit de l’Italien par H. Bouchard. Paris, 1892, t. i., p. 195.[357]Auguste Ehrhard,op. cit., p. 412: ‘He [Ibsen] assigns himself arôleto acquaint us in a direct manner with his own disillusionings.... He presents himself in the fantastic and tormented character of Ulric Brendel. Let us not be deceived by the disguise in which he veils himself. Ulric Brendel, the fool, is no other than Henrik Ibsen, the idealist’(?).[358]Auguste Ehrhard,op. cit., p. 120: ‘With admirable frankness Ibsen, in his latest works, points out the abuse which may be made of his ideas [!]. He counsels reformers to extreme prudence, if not to silence. As for himself, he ceases to excite the multitude to the pursuit of moral and social progress [!]; he entrenches himself in his disdainful pessimism, and in aristocratic solitude enjoys the serene vision of future ages.’[359]Henrik Jaeger,Henrik Ibsen og haus Vaerker. En Fremstilling i Grundrids. Christiania, 1892,passim.[360]G. R. S. Mead,Simon Magus. London, 1892.[361]Ehrhard,op. cit., p. 94.[362]W. Roux,Ueber den Kampf der Theile des Organismus. Leipzig, 1881. Since the appearance of Roux’s work, the theory of phagocytose, or the digestion of weaker cells by the stronger, has been considerably extended. This, however, is not the place to cite the numerous communications bearing on this subject which have appeared in theZeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Zoologie, in Virchow’sArchiv, in theBiologische Centralblatt, in theZoologische Jahrbücher, etc.[363]Jacoby,La Folie de Césars. Paris, 1880.[364]Alfred Binet,Les Altérations de la Personnalité, Paris, 1892, p. 23, communicates the case (observed by Bourru and Burot, and often cited) of Louis B., who united in himself six different personalities—six ‘I’s’ having not the slightest knowledge of each other, each possessing another character, another memory, other peculiarities of feeling and movement, etc.[365]‘Suicidal’ is here not a mere rhetorical expression. If the tyrannical power of instinct always ends by leading the individual in the long-run to his destruction, it sometimes does this directly. Instinct, namely, may have for its direct object suicide or self-mutilation; and the ‘free’ man obeying his instinct has then the ‘liberty’ of mutilating or killing himself, although that so little tallies with his real wish that he seeks in others a protection from himself. See Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing,Lehrbuch der gerichtlichen Psychopathologie. Dritte umgearbeitete Auflage. Stuttgart, 1892, p. 311.[366]Herbert Spencer,The Individual versus the State. London, 1884.[367]Dr. Ph. Boileau de Castelnau, ‘Misopédie ou Lésion de l’Amour de la Progeniture’ (Annales médico-psychologiques, 3esérie, 7evolume, p. 553). In this work the author communicates twelve observations, in which the natural feeling of the mother for her children was transformed by disease into hatred.[368]G. Ferrero, ‘L’Atavisme de la Prostitution,’Revue scientifique, 50evolume, p. 136.[369]R. von Krafft-Ebing,Psychopathia sexualis, etc., 7teAuflage, p. 89 (the third edition of this book, from which I have made my previous citations, contains nothing on masochism), andNeue Forschungen auf dem Gebiete der Psychopathia sexualis eine medicinisch-psychologische Studie, Zweite umgearbeitete und vermehrte Auflage, Stuttgart, 1891, p. 1ff.Krafft-Ebing gives this explanation of his word (p. 1et seq.): ‘By masochism I understand a peculiar perversion of the psychicvita sexualis, consisting in this, that the individual seized with it is dominated in his sexual feeling and thought by the idea that he is wholly and unconditionally subjected to the will of a person of the opposite sex, who treats him imperiously, humiliates and maltreats him.’ The word is formed from the name Sacher-Masoch, because ‘his writings delineate exactly typical pictures of the perverted psychic life of men of this kind’ (Neue Forschungen, etc., p. 37). I do not look upon this designation as a happy one. Krafft-Ebing himself shows that Zola and, long before him, Rousseau (he might have added Balzac in Baron Hulot inParents pauvres, part i.:La cousine Bette) have embodied this condition quite as clearly as Sacher-Masoch. Hence I prefer the designation ‘passivism,’ proposed by Dimitry Stefanowsky. SeeArchives de l’Anthropologie criminelle, 1892, p. 294.[370]Ehrhard,op. cit., p. 88.[371]Persian for Zoroaster.[372]Dr. Hugo Kaatz,Die Weltanschauung Friedrich Nietzsche: Erster Theil, ‘Cultur und Moral’; Zweiter Theil, ‘Kunst und Leben.’ Dresden und Leipzig, 1892, 1 Th., p. vi.: ‘We are accustomed, especially in matters concerning the deepest problems of thought, to a finished, systematic exposition.... There is none of all this in Nietzsche. No single work of his forms a finished whole, or is wholly intelligible without the others. Each book, moreover, is totally wanting in organic structure. Nietzsche writes almost exclusively in aphorisms, which, filling sometimes two lines, sometimes several pages, are complete in themselves, and seldom manifest any direct connection with each other.... With proud indifference to the reader, the author has avoided cutting evenonegap in the hedge with which he has closely surrounded his intellectual creations. Access to him must be gained by fighting,’ etc. In spite of its seeming obscurity, Nietzsche has himself given such pointed information concerning his method of work as amounts to an avowal. ‘All writing makes me angry or ashamed; for me, writing is a necessity.’ ‘But why, then, do you write?’ ‘Yes, my dear friend, let me say it in confidence: I have hitherto found no other means ofriddingmyself of my thoughts.’ (The italics are Nietzsche’s.) ‘And why do you wish to rid yourself of them?’ ‘Why I wish? Do I so wish? I must.’Die fröhliche Wissenschaft.Neue Ausgabe, p. 114.[373]Dr. Max Zerbst,Nein und Ja!Leipzig, 1892.[374]Robert Schellwien,Max Stirner und Friedrich Nietzsche,Erscheinungen des modernen Geister und das Wesen des Menschen. Leipzig, 1892.[375]I refuted this silly sophism before Nietzsche propounded it in the passages above quoted fromZur Genealogie der Moral, p. 66, andJenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 228. SeeDie conventionellen Lügen der Kulturmenschheit, 14 Aufl., pp. 211, 212: ‘This expression [of Proudhon’s, that property is theft] can be regarded as true only from the sophistical standpoint that everything existing exists for itself, and from the fact of its existence derives its right to belong to itself. According to this view, forsooth, a man steals the blade of grass he plucks, the air he breathes, the fish he catches; but, then, the martin, too, is stealing when it swallows a fly, and the grub when it eats its way into the root of a tree; then Nature is altogether peopled by arch-thieves, and, in general, everything steals that lives,i.e., absorbs from without materials not belonging to it, and organically elaborates them, and a block of platinum, which does not even pilfer from the air a little oxygen with which to oxidize itself, would be the sole example of honesty on our globe. No; property resulting from earning, that is, from the exchange of a determined amount of labour for a corresponding amount of goods, is not theft.’ If, throughout this passage, ‘theft’ be substituted for the word ‘exploitation,’ used by Nietzsche, his sophism is answered.[376]The Sacred Books of the East.Translated by various Oriental scholars, and edited by F. Max Müller. The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1st series, vol. x.:Dhammapada, by F. Max Müller; andSutta-Nipâta, by V. Fausböll.[377]The Sacred Books of the East, etc., vol. xix.:Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king, by Rev. S. Beal.[378]Charles Darwin,The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex; London, J. Murray, 1885, p. 101: ‘All the baboons had reascended the heights, excepting a young one, about six months old, who, loudly calling for aid, climbed on a block of rock, and was surrounded. Now one of the largest males, a true hero, came down again from the mountain, slowly went to the young one, coaxed him, and triumphantly led him away, the dogs being too much astonished to make an attack.’[379]Friedrich Nietsche,Zur Genealogie der Moral.Eine Streitschrift.Zweite Auflage. Leipzig, 1892, § 80.[380]Gustav Freytag,Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit. Erster Band, aus dem Mittelalter. Leipzig, 1872, p. 42ff.: ‘The Roman Consul, Papirius Carbo ... denies the strangers [the Cimbrians and Teutons!] the right of sojourn because the inhabitants are enjoying the rights of hospitality of the Romans. The strangers excuse themselves by saying they did not know that the natives were under Roman protection, and they are ready to leave the country.... The Cimbrians do not seek a quarrel; they send to Consul Silanus, and urgently entreat him to assign them lands; they are willing in return for it to serve the Romans in time of war.... Once more the strangers do not invade Roman territory, but send an embassy to the Senate and repeat the request for an assignment of land.... The victorious Germans now sent a fresh embassy to the leader of the other army, for the third time, to sue for peace and ask for land and seed-corn.’[381]Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 79.[382]Ibid., p. 73.[383]Charles Darwin,op. cit., p. 98: ‘As soon as the mental faculties had become highly developed, images of all past actions and motives would be incessantly passing through the brain of each individual; and that feeling of dissatisfaction, or even misery, which invariably results ... from any unsatisfied instinct, would arise as often as it was perceived that the enduring and always present social instinct had yielded to some other instinct, at the time stronger, but neither enduring in its nature nor leaving behind it a very vivid impression. It is clear that many instinctive desires, such as that of hunger, are, in their nature, of short duration, and, after being satisfied, are not readily or vividly recalled,’ etc.[384]Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 9.[385]Ibid., p. 48.[386]Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 91: ‘The criminal is, often enough, not grown to the level of his deed: he dwarfs and traduces it. The legal defenders of the criminal are rarely artists enough to turn the beautiful terribleness of the deed to the profit of the doer.’[387]‘A people is the detour of nature, in order to arrive at six or seven great men.’ See also: ‘The essential thing in a good and healthy aristocracy is, that it should feel itself to benotthe function, but theendand justification, be it of royalty or of the commonwealth—that it should, therefore, with a good conscience, suffer the sacrifice of a countless number of men who,for its sake, must be humbled and reduced to imperfect beings, to slaves, to instruments.’—Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 226.[388]The following are a few examples, which could easily be centupled (literally, not hyperbolically)—Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 63: ‘It is the Orient, the deep Orient.’ p. 239: ‘Such books of depth and of the first importance.’ p. 248: ‘Deep suffering ennobles.’ ‘A bravery of taste, resisting all that is sorrowful and deep.’ p. 249: ‘Any fervour and thirstiness which constantly drives the soul ... into the bright, the brilliant, the deep, the delicate.’ p. 256: ‘An odour quite as much of depth [!] as of decay.’ p. 260: ‘To lie tranquilly like a mirror, so that the deep heaven might reflect itself in them.’ p. 262: ‘I often think how I may make him [man] stronger, wickeder, and deeper.’Also sprach Zarathustra, pt. i., p. 71: ‘But thou Deep One, thou sufferest too deeply even from little wounds.’ Pt. ii., p. 52: ‘Immovable is my depth; but it sparkles with floating enigmas and laughters’ (!!). p. 64: ‘And this for me is knowledge: all depth should rise—to my height.’ p. 70: ‘They did not think enough into the depth.’ Pt. iii., p. 22: ‘The world is deep, and deeper than the day has ever thought it.’ Pt. iv., p. 129: ‘What says the deep midnight?... From a deep dream am I awakened. The world is deep, and deeper than the day thought. Deep in its woe. Joy—deeper still than sorrow of heart. All joy ... wishes for deep, deep eternity,’ etc.[389]Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 167.[390]Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 159: ‘Our virtues? It is probable that we, too, still have our virtues, albeit they are no longer the true-hearted and robust virtues for which we hold our grandfathers in honour—though at a little distance.’ p. 154: ‘The man beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues ... he ought to be the greatest.’ So then, ‘beyond good and evil,’ and yet having ‘virtues’![391]Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 79: ‘As a premise to this hypothesis concerning the origin of the evil conscience [through the ‘transvaluation of values’ and the ‘revolt of slaves in morality’] belongs the fact ... that this transformation was in no way gradual, or voluntary, and did not manifest itself as an organic growing into new conditions, but as a rapture, a leap, a compulsion.’ Hence, not only was that good which had previously been evil, but this ‘transvaluation’ even occurred suddenly, ordered one fine day by authority![392]Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 232: ‘Slave-morality is essentially a utilitarian morality.[393]Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 32: ‘In reality, however, evil instincts are just as purposive, as conservative of the species, and as indispensable as the good, only they have a different function.’Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 21: ‘At the root of all ... noble races lies the beast of prey ... this foundation needs from time to time to disburden itself; the animal must out, must hie him back to the desert.’ This means that it is essential to his health, and, consequently, of utility to him.[394]Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 6: ‘To what disorders, however, this [democratic] prejudice can give rise, is shown by the infamous [!] case of Buckle. The plebeianism of the modern spirit, which is of English origin, once more breaks forth ... there.’Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 212: ‘There are truths that are best recognised by mediocre heads.... We are driven to this proposition since the intellect of mediocre Englishmen—I may mention Darwin, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer—acquired preponderance in the mean region of European taste.’[395]Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 43.[396]See, in my novel,Die Krankheit des Jahrhunderts, Leipzig, 1889, Band I., p. 140, Schrötter’s remarks: ‘Egoism is a word. All depends upon the interpretation. Every living being strives for happiness,i.e., for contentment.... He [the healthy man] cannot be happy when he sees others suffer. The higher the man’s development, the livelier is this feeling.... The egoism of these men consists in their seeking out the pain of others and striving to alleviate it, in which, while combating the sufferings of others, they are simply struggling to attain to their own happiness. A Catholic would say of St. Vincent de Paul or of Carlo Borromeo, He was a great saint; I should say of him, He was a great egoist.’[397]Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 48.[398]Dr. Hugo Kaatz,op. cit., Thiel I., Vorrede, p. viii.[399]Robert Schellwien,Max Stierner und Friedrich Nietzsche. Leipzig, 1892, p. 23.[400]Also sprach Zarathustra, pt. i., p. 84: ‘The “thou” is proclaimed holy, but not yet the “I.”’[401]Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 43.[402]Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 222.[403]Jenseits von Gut und Böse, pp. 78, 106.[404]C. Lombroso and R. Laschi,Le Crime politique et les Révolutions. Paris, 1892, t. i., p. 142.[405]R. Schellwien,op. cit., p. 7: ‘The literary activity of the two thinkers [!] is separated by more than fifty years; but great as may be the difference between them, the agreement is not less, and thus the essential characters of systematic individualism are presented with all the more distinctness.’[406]See, in myParadoxe, the chapter ‘Wo ist die Wahrheit?’[407]‘With what magic she lays hold of me! What? Has all the world’s repose embarked here?’ ‘What use has the inspired one for wine? What? Give the mole wings and proud imaginings?’ ‘In so far as he says Yes to this other world, what? must he not then say No to its counterpart, this world?’ ‘Round about God all becomes—what? perhaps world?’ ‘A pessimist ... who says Yes to morality ... tolæde-neminem-morality; what? is that really—a pessimist?’ ‘Fear and pity: with these feelings has man hitherto stood in the presence of woman. What? Is there now to be an end of this?’ I will content myself with these examples, but let it be remarked once for all, that all the specimens I adduce here for the purpose of examining Nietzsche’s mental state could easily be multiplied a hundredfold, as the characteristic peculiarities recur in him hundreds of times. On one occasion he plainly becomes conscious of this living note of interrogation, always present in his mind as an obsession. InAlso sprach Zarathustra, pt. iii., p. 55, he calls the passion for rule, ‘the flashing note of interrogation by the side of premature answers.’ In this connection, this expression has absolutely no sense; but it at once becomes intelligible when it is remembered that the insane are in the habit of suddenly giving utterance to the ideas springing up in their consciousness. Nietzsche plainlysawin his mind ‘the flashing note of interrogation,’ and suddenly, and without transition, spoke of it.[408]‘A Greek life, to which he said, No.’ ‘A pessimist who not merely says, No, wishes No [!] but who ... does No’ [!!]. ‘An inward saying No to this or that thing.’ ‘Free for death, and free in death, a holy No-sayer.’ Then as a complementary counterpart: ‘Pregnant with lightnings, who say, Yes! laugh Yes!’ ‘While all noble morality grows to itself out of a triumphant saying Yea.’ (He feels himself to be something) ‘at least saying Yea to life.’ ‘To be able to say Yea to yourself, that is ... a ripe fruit.’ (Disinterested wickedness is felt by primitive humanity to be something) ‘to which conscience valiantly says Yea.’ We see what use Nietzsche makes of his saying ‘Nay’ and ‘Yea.’ It stands in the place of nearly all verbs joining subject with predicate. The thought ‘I am thirsty’ would, by Nietzsche, be thus expressed, ‘I say Yes to water.’ Instead of ‘I am sleepy,’ he would say, ‘I say Nay to wakefulness,’ or, ‘I say Yes to bed,’ etc. This is the way in which invalids in incomplete aphasia are in the habit of paraphrasing their thoughts.[409]Dr. Hermann Türck,Fr. Nietzsche und seine philosophischen Irrwege, Zweite Auflage. Dresden, 1891, p. 7.[410]B. Ball,La Folie érotique, Paris, 1888, p. 50: ‘I have sketched for you the picture of chaste love (amorous lunacy, or the erotomania of Esquirol), where the greatest excesses remain enclosed within the limits of feeling, and are never polluted by the intervention of the senses. I have shown you some examples of this delirium pushed to the extreme bounds of insanity, without the intermixture of a single idea foreign to the domain of platonic affection.’[411]In one passage ofZur Genealogie der Moral, p. 132, Nietzsche speaks of the ‘species of moral onanists and self-indulgers.’ He does not apply the expression to himself; but it was unquestionably suggested by an obscure suspicion of his own state of mind.[412]Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing,Neue Forschungen, u. s. w., p. 45ff.: ‘The complete contrary of masochism is Sadism. While in the former the subject desires to suffer sorrows, and to feel himself in subjection to violence, in the latter his aim is to cause sorrows, and to exercise violence.... All the acts and situations carried out in the active part played by Sadism constitute, for masochism, the object of longing, to be attained passively. In both perversions these acts form a progression from purely symbolic events to grievous misdeeds.... Both are to be considered as original psychopathies of mentally abnormal individuals, afflicted in particular with psychicHyperæsthesia sexualis, but also, as a rule, with other anomalies.... The pleasure of causing sorrow and the pleasure of experiencing sorrow appear only as two different sides of the same psychic event, the primary and essential principle in which is the consciousness of active and passive subjection respectively.’ See Nietzsche,Also sprach Zarathustra, pt. i., p. 95: ‘Thou art going to women? Forget not the whip!’Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 186: ‘Woman unlearns the fear of man,’ and thus ‘exposes her most womanly instincts.’[413]Krafft-Ebing,Neue Forschungen, u. s. w., p. 108. (A sexual-psychopath thus writes): ‘I take great interest in art and literature. Among poets and authors, those attract me most who describe refined feelings, peculiar passions, choice impressions: an artificial (or ultra-artificial) style pleases me. In music, again, the nervous, stimulating music of a Chopin, a Schumann, a Schubert[!], a Wagner, etc., appeal to me most. In art, all that is not only original, but bizarre, attracts me.’ P. 128 (another patient): ‘I am passionately fond of music, and am an enthusiastic partisan of Richard Wagner, for whom I have remarked a predilection in most of us [sufferers from contrary-sexual-feeling]; I find that this music accords so very much with our nature,’ etc.[414]See, inParadoxe, the chapter on ‘Evolutionistische Æsthetik.’[415]Dr. Max Zerbst,Nein und Ja!Leipzig, 1892, p. vii.: ‘It is not impossible that this little book may fall into the hands of some who are nearly connected with the invalid ... whom every indelicate treatment of his affliction must wound most deeply.’ The very last person having the right to complain of indelicate treatment, and to demand consideration, is surely a partisan of Nietzsche’s, who claims for himself the ‘joy in wishing to cause woe,’ and ‘grand unscrupulousness’ as the ‘privilege of the over-man’! Zerbst calls his book a reply to that by Dr. Hermann Türck; but it is nothing but a childishly obstinate and insolent repetition of all Nietzsche’s assertions, the insanity of which has been proved by Dr. Türck. It is exceedingly droll that Zerbst, appealing to a feeble compilation by Ziehen, wishes to demonstrate to Türck that there are no such things as psychoses of the will. Now, Türck has not said a single word about a psychosis of the will in Nietzsche; but Nietzsche, indeed, inFröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 270, does speak of ‘monstrous disease of the will,’ and of a ‘will-disease.’ Zerbst’s objection, therefore, applies, not to Türck, but to his own master—Nietzsche.[416]Dr. Hugo Kaatz,op. cit., pt. i., p. 6.[417]Ola Hansson,Das junge Skandinavien. Vier Essays.Dresden und Leipzig, 1891, p. 12.[418]Albert Kniepf,Theorie der Geisteswerthe. Leipzig, 1892.[419]Dr. Max Zerbst,op. cit., p. 1: ‘O, this modern natural science! these modern psychologists! Nothing is sacred to them!’ ‘When a man, grown up in the school of sickly “idealism,” confronts a cruel savant of this kind ... this godless man takes a small piece of chalk in his hand,’ etc. He ‘turns to the nonplussed idealist,’ and the latter somewhat timidly answers, and ‘adds something sorrowfully,’ whereupon ‘the young psychologist replies, with a gentle shrug of his shoulders.’ Quite so! the ‘cruel,’ the ‘godless,’ the ‘shoulder-shrugging’ young psychologist is himself, Zerbst; the whimpering idealist, the ‘timid’ and ‘sorrowful’ speaker and questioner is his opponent, Dr. Türck![420]Kurt Eisner,Psychopathia spiritualis. Friedrich Nietzsche und die Apostel der Zukunft.Leipzig, 1892.[421]Ola Hansson,Materialisimen i Skönlitteraturen, Populär-vetenskapliga[scientific!]Afhandlingar. Stockholm, undated, pp. 28, 50. In this brochure Hansson also designates the author ofRembrandt als Erzieheras a ‘genius’!![422]Revue politique et littéraire, année 1891.[423]‘During his sojourn of several years in the solitary mountainous district of Sils Maria ... he was in the habit ... of lying on a verdant neck of land stretching into the lake. One spring he returned, to find, on the consecrated [!] spot, a seat, on which trivial folk might rest, in the place hitherto peopled only by his most secret thoughts and visions. And the sight of this all too human [!] structure was enough to render the beloved place of sojourn insupportable to him. He never set foot there again.’—Ola Hansson, quoted from Dr. Hermann Türck,op. cit., p. 10.[424]Dr. Wilhelm Griesinger,op. cit., p. 77.[425]Dr. von Krafft-Ebing,Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie auf klinischer Grundlage für praktische Aertze und Studirende. Vierte theilweise umgearbeitete Auflage. Stuttgart, 1890, p. 363ff.[426]Translator.[427]Dr. Hermann Türck,op. cit., s. 59.[428]Jenseits von Gut und Böse, pp. 198, 201.[429]Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 130.[430]Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 147.[431]Also Sprach Zarathustra, pt. iii., p. 74.[432]Paris unter der dritten Republik, Vierte Auflage. Leipzig, 1890.Zola und Naturalismus Ausgewählte Pariser Briefe, Zweite Auflage. Leipzig, 1887. ‘Pot Bouille, von Zola.’[433]Jules Huret,Enquête sur l’Évolution littéraire, p. 135.[434]J. H. Rosny,Vamireh: Roman des Temps primitifs. Paris, 1892.[435]Ferdinand Brunetière,Le Roman naturaliste, nouvelle édition. Paris, 1892, p. 285.[436]Thirty years before realism began to create a disturbance in Germany, with its mania for description, the Swiss novelist, Gottfried Keller, with a curious premonition, ridiculed it. SeeDie Leute von Seldwyla, Auflage 12, Berlin, 1892, Band II., p. 108. (The hero of the story entitledDie missbrauchten Liebesbriefe[the misused love-letters] suddenly conceives the notion of becoming an author.) ‘He laid aside the book of commercial notes, and drew forth a smaller one provided with a little steel lock. Then he placed himself before the first tree he came to, examined it attentively, and wrote: “A beech-trunk. Pale gray, with still paler flecks and transverse stripes. Two kinds of moss cover it, one almost blackish, and one of a sheeny, velvety green. In addition, yellowish, reddish and white lichen, which often run one into another.... Might perhaps be serviceable in scenes with brigands.” Next he paused before a stake driven into the earth, on which some child had hung a dead slow-worm. He wrote: “Interesting detail. A small staff driven into the ground. Body of a silver-gray snake wound round it.... Is Mercury dead, and has he left his stick with dead snakes sticking here? This last allusion serviceable, above all, for commercial tales. N.B.—The staff or stake is old and weather-beaten; of the same colour as the snake; in places where the sun shines upon it it is covered with little silver-gray hairs. (This last observation might be new, etc.),”’ etc.[437]Edmond et Jules de Goncourt,Manette Solomon. Paris, 1876, pp. 3, 145, 191.[438]F. Brunetière,op. cit., p. 153.[439]F. Brunetière,op. cit., p. 156.[440]‘Everything is a mystery. Everything is a semblance. Nothing really exists.’ The saying of one of Arnaud’s patients afflicted with the mania of negation. See F. L. Arnaud, ‘Sur le Délire des Négations,’Annales médico-psychologiques, 7esérie, t. xvi., p. 387et seq.[441]I would lay humanity on a white page, all things, all beings, a work which would be a vast ark.’—E. Zola, preface toLa Faute de l’Abbé Mouret, edition of 1875. ‘Throw yourself into the commonplace current of existence.’ ‘Choose for your hero a person in the simplicity of daily life.’ ‘No hollow apotheoses, no grand false sentiments, no ready-made formulæ.’—E. Zola,Le Roman expérimental,passim.[442]The family of Kérangal has been the subject of many works, and is well known in technical literature. The last published work on them is due to Dr. Paul Aubry: ‘Une Famille de Criminels,’Annales médico-psychologiques, 7eséries, t. xvi., p. 429 (reproduced inLa Contagion du Meurtre, by the same author; Paris, 1894). See especially, pp. 432, 433, the curious genealogical tree of the family, in which Zola’s celebrated genealogical tree of the Rougon-Macquart and the Quenu-Gradelle can be immediately recognised.[443]Brunetière,op. cit., p. iii.[444]James Sully,Pessimism: A History and a Criticism. London, 1877, p. 411.[445]Dr. Paul Sollier,Psychologie de l’Idiot et de l’Imbécile. Paris, 1891, p. 95.[446]Catrou,Étude sur la Maladie des Tics convulsifs(Jumping, Latab, Myriachit). Paris, 1890.[447]Lombroso,L’Uomo delinquente, etc., pp. 450-480.[448]His descriptions of impulsive criminals are not really exact. The laity have greatly admired his description of the assassin Lantier inLa Bête humaine. The most competent judge in such matters, however, Lombroso, says of this character, which has been inspired in M. Zola, according to his own declaration, byL’Uomo delinquente: ‘M. Zola, in my opinion, has never observed criminals in real life.... His criminal characters give me the impression of the wanness and inaccuracy of certain photographs which reproduce portraits, not from Nature, but from pictures.’—Le piu recenti scoperte ed applicazioni della psichiatria ed antropologia criminale. Con 3 tavole e 52 figure nel testo.Torino, 1893, p. 356.[449]Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing,Psychopathia Sexualis, etc., 3eAuflage; Stuttgart, 1888. Beobachtung 23, Zippes Fall, s. 55; Beobachtung 24, Passow’s Fall, s. 56; Aum. zu s. 57, Lombroso’s Fall.Cæsare Lombroso,Le piu recenti scoperte, etc., p. 227: ‘He always had voluptuous sensations on seeing animals killed, or in perceiving in shops feminine under-garments and linen.’ The case of which Lombroso here speaks is that of a degenerate of fifteen years old, who had been observed by Dr. MacDonald, of Clark University.[450]Léon Tolstoi,[Œuvres complètes, p. 385: ‘He smelt the warmth of her body, inhaled the odour of her perfumes ... and at this moment Pierre understood that not onlymightHélène become his wife, but that shemustbecome so—that nothing else was possible.’] It is related that the King of France, Henri III., married Marie of Cleves because, at the wedding of the King of Navarre and his sister, Marguerite of Valois, wishing to dry his face in the chemise wet with the perspiration of the young princess, he was so intoxicated by the scent which emanated from it, that he had no rest till he had won her who had borne it. See Krafft-Ebing,Psychopathia Sexualis, p. 17.[451]Léon Tolstoi,[Œuvres complètes, t. ii., p. 385: ‘With him there had come into the room a strong, but not disagreeable, smell,’ etc.][452]Maurice Barrès,L’Ennemi des Lois, p. 47.[453]Edmond de Goncourt,La Faustin. Paris, 1882, p. 267.[454]Alfred Binet,Le Fétichisme dans l’Amour, etc., p. 26. This passage will make the German reader think of the sniffer of souls, G. Jaeger; I have no occasion to mention him here.[455]Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing,Psychopathie Sexualis, p. 15, foot-note, p. 17.[456]E. Séguin,Traitement morale, Hygiène et Education des Idiots. Paris, 1846.[457]L. Bernard,Le Odeurs dans le Romans de Zola. Montpellier, 1889.[458]Le Temps, Nodu 13 Février, 1892: ‘Current literature ... is, at present, at an inconceivably low ebb in Germany. From one end of the year to the other it is becoming an impossibility to discover a novel, a drama, or a page of criticism worthy of notice. TheDeutsche Rundschauitself recently admitted this in despair. It is not only the talent and the style which are deficient—all is poor, weak and flat; one might imagine one’s self in France, in the time of Bouilly.... Even the desire to rise above a certain level of ordinary writing seems wanting. One ends by being thankful to any contemporary German author who is seen to be making ... the simplest effort not to write like a crossing-sweeper.’ Every German who observes all the literary productions of his contemporaries will see that this is the opinion of a spiteful enemy. This opinion, nevertheless, is explained and justified by the fact that at the present day it is only the ‘realists’ who make enough stir to be heard in certain places abroad, and that there the natives are delighted to be able to consider them as representing all the German literature of the day.[459]Arno Holz—Johannes Schlaf,Die Familie Selicke, 3eAuflage; Berlin, 1892, p. vi.: ‘In fact, nothing so provokes us to smile ... as when they, in their anxiety to find models, label us as plagiarists of the great foreign authors. Let them say it, then.... It will be acknowledged some day that there has never yet been in our literature a movement less influenced from without, more strongly originated from within—in one word, morenational—than this movement, even at the further development of which we look to-day, and which has had for its visible point of departure ourPapa Hamlet.Die Familie Selickeis the most thoroughly German piece of writing our literature possesses,’ etc. This passage may serve the reader as a model both of the style in which these lads write, and of the tone in which they speak of themselves and their productions.[460]The complaint of want of money is a constant refrain among the ‘Young Germans.’ Listen to Baron Detlev von Liliencron: ‘You had nothing to eat again to-day; as a set-off, every blackguard has had his fill.’ ‘The terror of infernal damnation is—A garden of roses under the kisses of spring,—When I think of how heart and soul fret,—To be hourly bitten by the need of money.’ And Karl Bleibtreu: ‘Brass reigns, gold reigns,—Genius goes its way a-begging.’ ‘To call a ton of gold one’s own,—Sublime end, unattainable to man!’ etc.

Rank.Well, and what’s that?

Nora.There’s something that I should so like to say—but for Torvald to hear it.

Rank.Then, why don’t you say it to him?

Nora.Because I daren’t, for it sounds so ugly....

Rank.In that case I would advise you not to say it. But you might say it to us, at any rate.... What is it that you would like to say in Helmer’s presence?

Nora.I should like to shout with all my heart—Oh, dash it all!—A Doll’s House,op. cit., pp. 26, 27.

[326]Auguste Ehrhard,op. cit., p. 270.

[327]Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing,Psychopathia sexualis mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der conträren Sexualempfindung.Eine klinisch-forensische Studie.Dritte vermehrte und verbesserte Auflage. Stuttgart, 1888. See (p. 120) the observation relative to the young nobleman who was erotically excited by his ‘boot-thoughts.’ I cite this single case only, but it would be possible to instance dozens of cases where nightcaps, shoe-nails, white aprons, the wrinkled head of an old woman, etc., have excited sensuality in the highest degree.

[328]A Doll’s House, p. 112:

Helmer.To forsake your home, your husband, and your children! And only think what people will say about it.

Nora.I cannot take that into consideration. I only know that to go is necessary for me....

Helmer.... Your duties to ... your children?

Nora.I have other duties equally sacred ... duties towards myself, etc.

[329]Ghosts, p. 170:Oswald.At last he said, ‘You have been worm-eaten from your birth.’ ... I didn’t understand either, and begged of him to give me a clearer explanation. And then the old cynic said, ‘The father’s sins are visited upon the children.’ And p. 194:Oswald.The disease I have as my birthright (he points to his forehead, and adds very softly) is seated here.

[330]The Wild Duck, Act III.:

Gregers.Besides, if I’m to go on living, I must try and find some cure for my sick conscience.

Werle.It will never be well. Your conscience has been sickly from childhood. That’s an inheritance from your mother, Gregers—it is the only inheritance she left you....

Relling.But, deuce take it, don’t you see the fellow’s mad, cracked, demented!

Gina.There, you hear! His mother before him had mad fits like that sometimes.

[331]The Wild Duck, Act II.:

Hjalmar.She is in danger of losing her eyesight.

Gregers.Becoming blind?

Hjalmar.... But the doctor has warned us. It’s coming, inexorably.

Gregers.What an awful misfortune! How do you account for it?

Hjalmar(sighs). Hereditary, no doubt.

Again, Act IV.:

Mrs. Sörby.... He (Werle) is going blind.

Hjalmar(with a start). Going blind? That’s strange—Werle, too, becoming blind!

[332]Dr Prosper Lucas,Traité philosophique et physiologique de l’Hérédité naturelle dans les États de Santé et de Maladie du Système nerveux, etc. (The title occupies seven lines more!) Paris, 1847, 2 volumes, t. i., p. 250. (It appears that Montaigne had this inherited horror of doctors.)

[333]Lucas,op. cit., t. i., pp. 391-420:De l’hérédité des modes sensitifs de la vue. On page 400 he tells of a family in which the mother became blind at the age of twenty-one years, and the children at sixteen and seventeen respectively, etc.

[334]August Weismann,Ueber die Vererbung. Jena, 1883.

[335]F. Galton,Natural Inheritance. London, 1888.

[336]Page 136:

Mrs. Alving.I know one who has kept both his inner and his outer self unharmed. Only look at him, Mr. Manders.

[337]Krafft-Ebing,Psychopathia sexualis, p. 139. The author here cites all the features in question as characteristic of the first stage of general paralysis: ‘Libidinous talk, unconstraint in intercourse with the opposite sex, plans of marriage.’

[338]Rosmersholm, p. 23:

Rebecca(to Brendel). You should apply to Peter Mortensgaard.

Brendel.Pardon, Madame—what sort of an idiot is he?

See the flat travesty inAn Enemy of the People(Act IV.) of the forum scene in Shakespeare’sJulius Cæsar, and the characterization of the ‘crowd,’ inBrand(Act V.).

[339]Herbert Spencer,The Manversusthe State, 1884, p. 78.

[340]In the German text, ‘only of themselves and their families.’—Translator.

[341]Edward Westermarck,The History of Human Marriage. London: Macmillan, 1892. See especially the two chapters on ‘The Forms of Human Marriage,’ and ‘The Duration of Marriage.’

[342]

‘At leve—er Kamp med Trolde

J Hjertet og Hjernens Hvaelv;

At digte—det er at holde

Dommedag over sig selv.’

[343]Dr. Wilhelm Griesinger,Pathologie und Therapie der psychischen Krankheiten für Aerzte und Studirende. 5te Auflage. Gänzlich umgearbeitet und erweitert. Von Dr. Willibald Levinstein-Schleger; Berlin, 1892. (See p. 143, on ‘Diseased Impulses’; and p. 147, on ‘Excessive Energy of Will.’)

[344]Griesinger,op. cit., p. 77: ‘Retardation of thought may be produced ... by the state of constriction following a mental depression, by complete inertia extending to the arrest of thought.’

[345]Rationalized in the English version cited, as follows (p. 25): ‘Yes, perhaps I am a little delicate.’—Translator.

[346]Rationalized in the English version by ‘now soon,’ being rendered as ‘nearly.’—Translator.

[347]‘True’ is omitted in the English version quoted.—Translator.

[348]Bracketed clause not in English version.—Translator.

[349]Griesinger,op. cit., p. 176. He names the coining of words ‘phraseomania.’ Kussmaul gives the nameParaphrasia vesanato the coining of incomprehensible words, or the using of known words in a sense wholly foreign to them.

[350]Dr. A. Marie,Études sur quelques Symptômes des Délires systématisés et sur leur Valeur; Paris, 1892, chap. ii.: ‘Eccentricities of language. Neologisms and conjuring incantations.’ Tanzi cites, among others, the following examples: A patient used continuously to repeat, ‘That is true, and not false’; another began every phrase with, ‘God’s Word’; a third said, ‘Out with the vile beast!’ making at the same time a sign of benediction with the right hand; a fourth said unceasingly, ‘Turn over the page’; a fifth cried, in a tone of command, ‘Lips acs livi cux lips sux!’ etc. One of Krafft-Ebing’s patients (op. cit., p. 130) constructed, among others, the following words: ‘Magnetismusambosarbeitswellen, Augengedanken, Austrahlung, Glückseligkeitsbetten, Ohrenschussmaschine,’ etc. Krafft-Ebing,op. cit., pp. 130, 131.

[351]Vicomte E. M. de Vogué, ‘Les Cigognes,’Revue des deux Mondes, February 15, 1892, p. 922: ‘Ibsen would have won our trust, were it only by certain axioms [?] which appeal to our actual distrusts, such as this ... inRosmersholm: “The Rosmer view of life ennobles, but it kills happiness.”’ I am convinced that, unless previously told that they emanated from confined lunatics, these ‘comprehensives’ would, without difficulty, understand and interpret the expression ‘little-cupboards-of-appetite-of-representation’ (Vorstellungs-Appetitschränkchen), freely used by one of Meynert’s lunatic patients, or the words of a patient under Griesinger’s care (op. cit., p. 176) that ‘the lady superior was establishing herself in the military side-tone and in the retardation of her teeth.’

[352]Tanzi,I Neologismi in rapporta col Delirio cronico. Turin, 1890.

[353]

‘Vi vil gjöre det om igjen raditalere,Men dertil sordres baade Maend og Talere.J sörger sor Vandflom til Verdensparken,Jeg laegger med Lyst Torpedo under Arken.’

Observe the purely mystic vapours of this thought. The poet wishes to destroy everything, even the ark which shelters the saved remnants of terrestrial life, but sees himself placed beyond the reach of the destruction, and hence will survive the annihilation of everything else on earth.

[354]Georges Brandes,op. cit., pp. 431, 435, 438, etc.

[355]J. Cotard,Études sur les Maladies cérébrales et mentales; Paris, 1891. In this book thedélire des négationsis for the first time recognised and described as a form of melancholia. The Third Congress of French Alienists, which sat at Blois from the 1st to the 6th of August, 1892, devoted almost the whole of its conferences to the insanity of doubt. In a work by F. Raymond and F. L. Arnaud, ‘Sur certains cas d’aboulie avec obsession interrogative et trouble des mouvements’ (Annales médico-psychologiques, 7eséries, t. xvi.), we read, p. 202: ‘The invalids occupy themselves with questions intrinsically insoluble, such as the creation, nature, life, etc. Why the trees are green? Why the rainbow has seven colours? Why men are not as tall as houses?’ etc.

[356]Lombroso and B. Laschi,Le Crime politique et les Révolutions par rapport au Droit, à l’Anthropologie criminelle et à la Science du Gouvernement. Traduit de l’Italien par H. Bouchard. Paris, 1892, t. i., p. 195.

[357]Auguste Ehrhard,op. cit., p. 412: ‘He [Ibsen] assigns himself arôleto acquaint us in a direct manner with his own disillusionings.... He presents himself in the fantastic and tormented character of Ulric Brendel. Let us not be deceived by the disguise in which he veils himself. Ulric Brendel, the fool, is no other than Henrik Ibsen, the idealist’(?).

[358]Auguste Ehrhard,op. cit., p. 120: ‘With admirable frankness Ibsen, in his latest works, points out the abuse which may be made of his ideas [!]. He counsels reformers to extreme prudence, if not to silence. As for himself, he ceases to excite the multitude to the pursuit of moral and social progress [!]; he entrenches himself in his disdainful pessimism, and in aristocratic solitude enjoys the serene vision of future ages.’

[359]Henrik Jaeger,Henrik Ibsen og haus Vaerker. En Fremstilling i Grundrids. Christiania, 1892,passim.

[360]G. R. S. Mead,Simon Magus. London, 1892.

[361]Ehrhard,op. cit., p. 94.

[362]W. Roux,Ueber den Kampf der Theile des Organismus. Leipzig, 1881. Since the appearance of Roux’s work, the theory of phagocytose, or the digestion of weaker cells by the stronger, has been considerably extended. This, however, is not the place to cite the numerous communications bearing on this subject which have appeared in theZeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Zoologie, in Virchow’sArchiv, in theBiologische Centralblatt, in theZoologische Jahrbücher, etc.

[363]Jacoby,La Folie de Césars. Paris, 1880.

[364]Alfred Binet,Les Altérations de la Personnalité, Paris, 1892, p. 23, communicates the case (observed by Bourru and Burot, and often cited) of Louis B., who united in himself six different personalities—six ‘I’s’ having not the slightest knowledge of each other, each possessing another character, another memory, other peculiarities of feeling and movement, etc.

[365]‘Suicidal’ is here not a mere rhetorical expression. If the tyrannical power of instinct always ends by leading the individual in the long-run to his destruction, it sometimes does this directly. Instinct, namely, may have for its direct object suicide or self-mutilation; and the ‘free’ man obeying his instinct has then the ‘liberty’ of mutilating or killing himself, although that so little tallies with his real wish that he seeks in others a protection from himself. See Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing,Lehrbuch der gerichtlichen Psychopathologie. Dritte umgearbeitete Auflage. Stuttgart, 1892, p. 311.

[366]Herbert Spencer,The Individual versus the State. London, 1884.

[367]Dr. Ph. Boileau de Castelnau, ‘Misopédie ou Lésion de l’Amour de la Progeniture’ (Annales médico-psychologiques, 3esérie, 7evolume, p. 553). In this work the author communicates twelve observations, in which the natural feeling of the mother for her children was transformed by disease into hatred.

[368]G. Ferrero, ‘L’Atavisme de la Prostitution,’Revue scientifique, 50evolume, p. 136.

[369]R. von Krafft-Ebing,Psychopathia sexualis, etc., 7teAuflage, p. 89 (the third edition of this book, from which I have made my previous citations, contains nothing on masochism), andNeue Forschungen auf dem Gebiete der Psychopathia sexualis eine medicinisch-psychologische Studie, Zweite umgearbeitete und vermehrte Auflage, Stuttgart, 1891, p. 1ff.Krafft-Ebing gives this explanation of his word (p. 1et seq.): ‘By masochism I understand a peculiar perversion of the psychicvita sexualis, consisting in this, that the individual seized with it is dominated in his sexual feeling and thought by the idea that he is wholly and unconditionally subjected to the will of a person of the opposite sex, who treats him imperiously, humiliates and maltreats him.’ The word is formed from the name Sacher-Masoch, because ‘his writings delineate exactly typical pictures of the perverted psychic life of men of this kind’ (Neue Forschungen, etc., p. 37). I do not look upon this designation as a happy one. Krafft-Ebing himself shows that Zola and, long before him, Rousseau (he might have added Balzac in Baron Hulot inParents pauvres, part i.:La cousine Bette) have embodied this condition quite as clearly as Sacher-Masoch. Hence I prefer the designation ‘passivism,’ proposed by Dimitry Stefanowsky. SeeArchives de l’Anthropologie criminelle, 1892, p. 294.

[370]Ehrhard,op. cit., p. 88.

[371]Persian for Zoroaster.

[372]Dr. Hugo Kaatz,Die Weltanschauung Friedrich Nietzsche: Erster Theil, ‘Cultur und Moral’; Zweiter Theil, ‘Kunst und Leben.’ Dresden und Leipzig, 1892, 1 Th., p. vi.: ‘We are accustomed, especially in matters concerning the deepest problems of thought, to a finished, systematic exposition.... There is none of all this in Nietzsche. No single work of his forms a finished whole, or is wholly intelligible without the others. Each book, moreover, is totally wanting in organic structure. Nietzsche writes almost exclusively in aphorisms, which, filling sometimes two lines, sometimes several pages, are complete in themselves, and seldom manifest any direct connection with each other.... With proud indifference to the reader, the author has avoided cutting evenonegap in the hedge with which he has closely surrounded his intellectual creations. Access to him must be gained by fighting,’ etc. In spite of its seeming obscurity, Nietzsche has himself given such pointed information concerning his method of work as amounts to an avowal. ‘All writing makes me angry or ashamed; for me, writing is a necessity.’ ‘But why, then, do you write?’ ‘Yes, my dear friend, let me say it in confidence: I have hitherto found no other means ofriddingmyself of my thoughts.’ (The italics are Nietzsche’s.) ‘And why do you wish to rid yourself of them?’ ‘Why I wish? Do I so wish? I must.’Die fröhliche Wissenschaft.Neue Ausgabe, p. 114.

[373]Dr. Max Zerbst,Nein und Ja!Leipzig, 1892.

[374]Robert Schellwien,Max Stirner und Friedrich Nietzsche,Erscheinungen des modernen Geister und das Wesen des Menschen. Leipzig, 1892.

[375]I refuted this silly sophism before Nietzsche propounded it in the passages above quoted fromZur Genealogie der Moral, p. 66, andJenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 228. SeeDie conventionellen Lügen der Kulturmenschheit, 14 Aufl., pp. 211, 212: ‘This expression [of Proudhon’s, that property is theft] can be regarded as true only from the sophistical standpoint that everything existing exists for itself, and from the fact of its existence derives its right to belong to itself. According to this view, forsooth, a man steals the blade of grass he plucks, the air he breathes, the fish he catches; but, then, the martin, too, is stealing when it swallows a fly, and the grub when it eats its way into the root of a tree; then Nature is altogether peopled by arch-thieves, and, in general, everything steals that lives,i.e., absorbs from without materials not belonging to it, and organically elaborates them, and a block of platinum, which does not even pilfer from the air a little oxygen with which to oxidize itself, would be the sole example of honesty on our globe. No; property resulting from earning, that is, from the exchange of a determined amount of labour for a corresponding amount of goods, is not theft.’ If, throughout this passage, ‘theft’ be substituted for the word ‘exploitation,’ used by Nietzsche, his sophism is answered.

[376]The Sacred Books of the East.Translated by various Oriental scholars, and edited by F. Max Müller. The Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1st series, vol. x.:Dhammapada, by F. Max Müller; andSutta-Nipâta, by V. Fausböll.

[377]The Sacred Books of the East, etc., vol. xix.:Fo-sho-hing-tsan-king, by Rev. S. Beal.

[378]Charles Darwin,The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex; London, J. Murray, 1885, p. 101: ‘All the baboons had reascended the heights, excepting a young one, about six months old, who, loudly calling for aid, climbed on a block of rock, and was surrounded. Now one of the largest males, a true hero, came down again from the mountain, slowly went to the young one, coaxed him, and triumphantly led him away, the dogs being too much astonished to make an attack.’

[379]Friedrich Nietsche,Zur Genealogie der Moral.Eine Streitschrift.Zweite Auflage. Leipzig, 1892, § 80.

[380]Gustav Freytag,Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit. Erster Band, aus dem Mittelalter. Leipzig, 1872, p. 42ff.: ‘The Roman Consul, Papirius Carbo ... denies the strangers [the Cimbrians and Teutons!] the right of sojourn because the inhabitants are enjoying the rights of hospitality of the Romans. The strangers excuse themselves by saying they did not know that the natives were under Roman protection, and they are ready to leave the country.... The Cimbrians do not seek a quarrel; they send to Consul Silanus, and urgently entreat him to assign them lands; they are willing in return for it to serve the Romans in time of war.... Once more the strangers do not invade Roman territory, but send an embassy to the Senate and repeat the request for an assignment of land.... The victorious Germans now sent a fresh embassy to the leader of the other army, for the third time, to sue for peace and ask for land and seed-corn.’

[381]Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 79.

[382]Ibid., p. 73.

[383]Charles Darwin,op. cit., p. 98: ‘As soon as the mental faculties had become highly developed, images of all past actions and motives would be incessantly passing through the brain of each individual; and that feeling of dissatisfaction, or even misery, which invariably results ... from any unsatisfied instinct, would arise as often as it was perceived that the enduring and always present social instinct had yielded to some other instinct, at the time stronger, but neither enduring in its nature nor leaving behind it a very vivid impression. It is clear that many instinctive desires, such as that of hunger, are, in their nature, of short duration, and, after being satisfied, are not readily or vividly recalled,’ etc.

[384]Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 9.

[385]Ibid., p. 48.

[386]Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 91: ‘The criminal is, often enough, not grown to the level of his deed: he dwarfs and traduces it. The legal defenders of the criminal are rarely artists enough to turn the beautiful terribleness of the deed to the profit of the doer.’

[387]‘A people is the detour of nature, in order to arrive at six or seven great men.’ See also: ‘The essential thing in a good and healthy aristocracy is, that it should feel itself to benotthe function, but theendand justification, be it of royalty or of the commonwealth—that it should, therefore, with a good conscience, suffer the sacrifice of a countless number of men who,for its sake, must be humbled and reduced to imperfect beings, to slaves, to instruments.’—Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 226.

[388]The following are a few examples, which could easily be centupled (literally, not hyperbolically)—Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 63: ‘It is the Orient, the deep Orient.’ p. 239: ‘Such books of depth and of the first importance.’ p. 248: ‘Deep suffering ennobles.’ ‘A bravery of taste, resisting all that is sorrowful and deep.’ p. 249: ‘Any fervour and thirstiness which constantly drives the soul ... into the bright, the brilliant, the deep, the delicate.’ p. 256: ‘An odour quite as much of depth [!] as of decay.’ p. 260: ‘To lie tranquilly like a mirror, so that the deep heaven might reflect itself in them.’ p. 262: ‘I often think how I may make him [man] stronger, wickeder, and deeper.’Also sprach Zarathustra, pt. i., p. 71: ‘But thou Deep One, thou sufferest too deeply even from little wounds.’ Pt. ii., p. 52: ‘Immovable is my depth; but it sparkles with floating enigmas and laughters’ (!!). p. 64: ‘And this for me is knowledge: all depth should rise—to my height.’ p. 70: ‘They did not think enough into the depth.’ Pt. iii., p. 22: ‘The world is deep, and deeper than the day has ever thought it.’ Pt. iv., p. 129: ‘What says the deep midnight?... From a deep dream am I awakened. The world is deep, and deeper than the day thought. Deep in its woe. Joy—deeper still than sorrow of heart. All joy ... wishes for deep, deep eternity,’ etc.

[389]Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 167.

[390]Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 159: ‘Our virtues? It is probable that we, too, still have our virtues, albeit they are no longer the true-hearted and robust virtues for which we hold our grandfathers in honour—though at a little distance.’ p. 154: ‘The man beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues ... he ought to be the greatest.’ So then, ‘beyond good and evil,’ and yet having ‘virtues’!

[391]Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 79: ‘As a premise to this hypothesis concerning the origin of the evil conscience [through the ‘transvaluation of values’ and the ‘revolt of slaves in morality’] belongs the fact ... that this transformation was in no way gradual, or voluntary, and did not manifest itself as an organic growing into new conditions, but as a rapture, a leap, a compulsion.’ Hence, not only was that good which had previously been evil, but this ‘transvaluation’ even occurred suddenly, ordered one fine day by authority!

[392]Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 232: ‘Slave-morality is essentially a utilitarian morality.

[393]Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 32: ‘In reality, however, evil instincts are just as purposive, as conservative of the species, and as indispensable as the good, only they have a different function.’Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 21: ‘At the root of all ... noble races lies the beast of prey ... this foundation needs from time to time to disburden itself; the animal must out, must hie him back to the desert.’ This means that it is essential to his health, and, consequently, of utility to him.

[394]Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 6: ‘To what disorders, however, this [democratic] prejudice can give rise, is shown by the infamous [!] case of Buckle. The plebeianism of the modern spirit, which is of English origin, once more breaks forth ... there.’Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 212: ‘There are truths that are best recognised by mediocre heads.... We are driven to this proposition since the intellect of mediocre Englishmen—I may mention Darwin, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer—acquired preponderance in the mean region of European taste.’

[395]Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 43.

[396]See, in my novel,Die Krankheit des Jahrhunderts, Leipzig, 1889, Band I., p. 140, Schrötter’s remarks: ‘Egoism is a word. All depends upon the interpretation. Every living being strives for happiness,i.e., for contentment.... He [the healthy man] cannot be happy when he sees others suffer. The higher the man’s development, the livelier is this feeling.... The egoism of these men consists in their seeking out the pain of others and striving to alleviate it, in which, while combating the sufferings of others, they are simply struggling to attain to their own happiness. A Catholic would say of St. Vincent de Paul or of Carlo Borromeo, He was a great saint; I should say of him, He was a great egoist.’

[397]Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 48.

[398]Dr. Hugo Kaatz,op. cit., Thiel I., Vorrede, p. viii.

[399]Robert Schellwien,Max Stierner und Friedrich Nietzsche. Leipzig, 1892, p. 23.

[400]Also sprach Zarathustra, pt. i., p. 84: ‘The “thou” is proclaimed holy, but not yet the “I.”’

[401]Zur Genealogie der Moral, p. 43.

[402]Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 222.

[403]Jenseits von Gut und Böse, pp. 78, 106.

[404]C. Lombroso and R. Laschi,Le Crime politique et les Révolutions. Paris, 1892, t. i., p. 142.

[405]R. Schellwien,op. cit., p. 7: ‘The literary activity of the two thinkers [!] is separated by more than fifty years; but great as may be the difference between them, the agreement is not less, and thus the essential characters of systematic individualism are presented with all the more distinctness.’

[406]See, in myParadoxe, the chapter ‘Wo ist die Wahrheit?’

[407]‘With what magic she lays hold of me! What? Has all the world’s repose embarked here?’ ‘What use has the inspired one for wine? What? Give the mole wings and proud imaginings?’ ‘In so far as he says Yes to this other world, what? must he not then say No to its counterpart, this world?’ ‘Round about God all becomes—what? perhaps world?’ ‘A pessimist ... who says Yes to morality ... tolæde-neminem-morality; what? is that really—a pessimist?’ ‘Fear and pity: with these feelings has man hitherto stood in the presence of woman. What? Is there now to be an end of this?’ I will content myself with these examples, but let it be remarked once for all, that all the specimens I adduce here for the purpose of examining Nietzsche’s mental state could easily be multiplied a hundredfold, as the characteristic peculiarities recur in him hundreds of times. On one occasion he plainly becomes conscious of this living note of interrogation, always present in his mind as an obsession. InAlso sprach Zarathustra, pt. iii., p. 55, he calls the passion for rule, ‘the flashing note of interrogation by the side of premature answers.’ In this connection, this expression has absolutely no sense; but it at once becomes intelligible when it is remembered that the insane are in the habit of suddenly giving utterance to the ideas springing up in their consciousness. Nietzsche plainlysawin his mind ‘the flashing note of interrogation,’ and suddenly, and without transition, spoke of it.

[408]‘A Greek life, to which he said, No.’ ‘A pessimist who not merely says, No, wishes No [!] but who ... does No’ [!!]. ‘An inward saying No to this or that thing.’ ‘Free for death, and free in death, a holy No-sayer.’ Then as a complementary counterpart: ‘Pregnant with lightnings, who say, Yes! laugh Yes!’ ‘While all noble morality grows to itself out of a triumphant saying Yea.’ (He feels himself to be something) ‘at least saying Yea to life.’ ‘To be able to say Yea to yourself, that is ... a ripe fruit.’ (Disinterested wickedness is felt by primitive humanity to be something) ‘to which conscience valiantly says Yea.’ We see what use Nietzsche makes of his saying ‘Nay’ and ‘Yea.’ It stands in the place of nearly all verbs joining subject with predicate. The thought ‘I am thirsty’ would, by Nietzsche, be thus expressed, ‘I say Yes to water.’ Instead of ‘I am sleepy,’ he would say, ‘I say Nay to wakefulness,’ or, ‘I say Yes to bed,’ etc. This is the way in which invalids in incomplete aphasia are in the habit of paraphrasing their thoughts.

[409]Dr. Hermann Türck,Fr. Nietzsche und seine philosophischen Irrwege, Zweite Auflage. Dresden, 1891, p. 7.

[410]B. Ball,La Folie érotique, Paris, 1888, p. 50: ‘I have sketched for you the picture of chaste love (amorous lunacy, or the erotomania of Esquirol), where the greatest excesses remain enclosed within the limits of feeling, and are never polluted by the intervention of the senses. I have shown you some examples of this delirium pushed to the extreme bounds of insanity, without the intermixture of a single idea foreign to the domain of platonic affection.’

[411]In one passage ofZur Genealogie der Moral, p. 132, Nietzsche speaks of the ‘species of moral onanists and self-indulgers.’ He does not apply the expression to himself; but it was unquestionably suggested by an obscure suspicion of his own state of mind.

[412]Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing,Neue Forschungen, u. s. w., p. 45ff.: ‘The complete contrary of masochism is Sadism. While in the former the subject desires to suffer sorrows, and to feel himself in subjection to violence, in the latter his aim is to cause sorrows, and to exercise violence.... All the acts and situations carried out in the active part played by Sadism constitute, for masochism, the object of longing, to be attained passively. In both perversions these acts form a progression from purely symbolic events to grievous misdeeds.... Both are to be considered as original psychopathies of mentally abnormal individuals, afflicted in particular with psychicHyperæsthesia sexualis, but also, as a rule, with other anomalies.... The pleasure of causing sorrow and the pleasure of experiencing sorrow appear only as two different sides of the same psychic event, the primary and essential principle in which is the consciousness of active and passive subjection respectively.’ See Nietzsche,Also sprach Zarathustra, pt. i., p. 95: ‘Thou art going to women? Forget not the whip!’Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 186: ‘Woman unlearns the fear of man,’ and thus ‘exposes her most womanly instincts.’

[413]Krafft-Ebing,Neue Forschungen, u. s. w., p. 108. (A sexual-psychopath thus writes): ‘I take great interest in art and literature. Among poets and authors, those attract me most who describe refined feelings, peculiar passions, choice impressions: an artificial (or ultra-artificial) style pleases me. In music, again, the nervous, stimulating music of a Chopin, a Schumann, a Schubert[!], a Wagner, etc., appeal to me most. In art, all that is not only original, but bizarre, attracts me.’ P. 128 (another patient): ‘I am passionately fond of music, and am an enthusiastic partisan of Richard Wagner, for whom I have remarked a predilection in most of us [sufferers from contrary-sexual-feeling]; I find that this music accords so very much with our nature,’ etc.

[414]See, inParadoxe, the chapter on ‘Evolutionistische Æsthetik.’

[415]Dr. Max Zerbst,Nein und Ja!Leipzig, 1892, p. vii.: ‘It is not impossible that this little book may fall into the hands of some who are nearly connected with the invalid ... whom every indelicate treatment of his affliction must wound most deeply.’ The very last person having the right to complain of indelicate treatment, and to demand consideration, is surely a partisan of Nietzsche’s, who claims for himself the ‘joy in wishing to cause woe,’ and ‘grand unscrupulousness’ as the ‘privilege of the over-man’! Zerbst calls his book a reply to that by Dr. Hermann Türck; but it is nothing but a childishly obstinate and insolent repetition of all Nietzsche’s assertions, the insanity of which has been proved by Dr. Türck. It is exceedingly droll that Zerbst, appealing to a feeble compilation by Ziehen, wishes to demonstrate to Türck that there are no such things as psychoses of the will. Now, Türck has not said a single word about a psychosis of the will in Nietzsche; but Nietzsche, indeed, inFröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 270, does speak of ‘monstrous disease of the will,’ and of a ‘will-disease.’ Zerbst’s objection, therefore, applies, not to Türck, but to his own master—Nietzsche.

[416]Dr. Hugo Kaatz,op. cit., pt. i., p. 6.

[417]Ola Hansson,Das junge Skandinavien. Vier Essays.Dresden und Leipzig, 1891, p. 12.

[418]Albert Kniepf,Theorie der Geisteswerthe. Leipzig, 1892.

[419]Dr. Max Zerbst,op. cit., p. 1: ‘O, this modern natural science! these modern psychologists! Nothing is sacred to them!’ ‘When a man, grown up in the school of sickly “idealism,” confronts a cruel savant of this kind ... this godless man takes a small piece of chalk in his hand,’ etc. He ‘turns to the nonplussed idealist,’ and the latter somewhat timidly answers, and ‘adds something sorrowfully,’ whereupon ‘the young psychologist replies, with a gentle shrug of his shoulders.’ Quite so! the ‘cruel,’ the ‘godless,’ the ‘shoulder-shrugging’ young psychologist is himself, Zerbst; the whimpering idealist, the ‘timid’ and ‘sorrowful’ speaker and questioner is his opponent, Dr. Türck!

[420]Kurt Eisner,Psychopathia spiritualis. Friedrich Nietzsche und die Apostel der Zukunft.Leipzig, 1892.

[421]Ola Hansson,Materialisimen i Skönlitteraturen, Populär-vetenskapliga[scientific!]Afhandlingar. Stockholm, undated, pp. 28, 50. In this brochure Hansson also designates the author ofRembrandt als Erzieheras a ‘genius’!!

[422]Revue politique et littéraire, année 1891.

[423]‘During his sojourn of several years in the solitary mountainous district of Sils Maria ... he was in the habit ... of lying on a verdant neck of land stretching into the lake. One spring he returned, to find, on the consecrated [!] spot, a seat, on which trivial folk might rest, in the place hitherto peopled only by his most secret thoughts and visions. And the sight of this all too human [!] structure was enough to render the beloved place of sojourn insupportable to him. He never set foot there again.’—Ola Hansson, quoted from Dr. Hermann Türck,op. cit., p. 10.

[424]Dr. Wilhelm Griesinger,op. cit., p. 77.

[425]Dr. von Krafft-Ebing,Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie auf klinischer Grundlage für praktische Aertze und Studirende. Vierte theilweise umgearbeitete Auflage. Stuttgart, 1890, p. 363ff.

[426]Translator.

[427]Dr. Hermann Türck,op. cit., s. 59.

[428]Jenseits von Gut und Böse, pp. 198, 201.

[429]Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, p. 130.

[430]Jenseits von Gut und Böse, p. 147.

[431]Also Sprach Zarathustra, pt. iii., p. 74.

[432]Paris unter der dritten Republik, Vierte Auflage. Leipzig, 1890.Zola und Naturalismus Ausgewählte Pariser Briefe, Zweite Auflage. Leipzig, 1887. ‘Pot Bouille, von Zola.’

[433]Jules Huret,Enquête sur l’Évolution littéraire, p. 135.

[434]J. H. Rosny,Vamireh: Roman des Temps primitifs. Paris, 1892.

[435]Ferdinand Brunetière,Le Roman naturaliste, nouvelle édition. Paris, 1892, p. 285.

[436]Thirty years before realism began to create a disturbance in Germany, with its mania for description, the Swiss novelist, Gottfried Keller, with a curious premonition, ridiculed it. SeeDie Leute von Seldwyla, Auflage 12, Berlin, 1892, Band II., p. 108. (The hero of the story entitledDie missbrauchten Liebesbriefe[the misused love-letters] suddenly conceives the notion of becoming an author.) ‘He laid aside the book of commercial notes, and drew forth a smaller one provided with a little steel lock. Then he placed himself before the first tree he came to, examined it attentively, and wrote: “A beech-trunk. Pale gray, with still paler flecks and transverse stripes. Two kinds of moss cover it, one almost blackish, and one of a sheeny, velvety green. In addition, yellowish, reddish and white lichen, which often run one into another.... Might perhaps be serviceable in scenes with brigands.” Next he paused before a stake driven into the earth, on which some child had hung a dead slow-worm. He wrote: “Interesting detail. A small staff driven into the ground. Body of a silver-gray snake wound round it.... Is Mercury dead, and has he left his stick with dead snakes sticking here? This last allusion serviceable, above all, for commercial tales. N.B.—The staff or stake is old and weather-beaten; of the same colour as the snake; in places where the sun shines upon it it is covered with little silver-gray hairs. (This last observation might be new, etc.),”’ etc.

[437]Edmond et Jules de Goncourt,Manette Solomon. Paris, 1876, pp. 3, 145, 191.

[438]F. Brunetière,op. cit., p. 153.

[439]F. Brunetière,op. cit., p. 156.

[440]‘Everything is a mystery. Everything is a semblance. Nothing really exists.’ The saying of one of Arnaud’s patients afflicted with the mania of negation. See F. L. Arnaud, ‘Sur le Délire des Négations,’Annales médico-psychologiques, 7esérie, t. xvi., p. 387et seq.

[441]I would lay humanity on a white page, all things, all beings, a work which would be a vast ark.’—E. Zola, preface toLa Faute de l’Abbé Mouret, edition of 1875. ‘Throw yourself into the commonplace current of existence.’ ‘Choose for your hero a person in the simplicity of daily life.’ ‘No hollow apotheoses, no grand false sentiments, no ready-made formulæ.’—E. Zola,Le Roman expérimental,passim.

[442]The family of Kérangal has been the subject of many works, and is well known in technical literature. The last published work on them is due to Dr. Paul Aubry: ‘Une Famille de Criminels,’Annales médico-psychologiques, 7eséries, t. xvi., p. 429 (reproduced inLa Contagion du Meurtre, by the same author; Paris, 1894). See especially, pp. 432, 433, the curious genealogical tree of the family, in which Zola’s celebrated genealogical tree of the Rougon-Macquart and the Quenu-Gradelle can be immediately recognised.

[443]Brunetière,op. cit., p. iii.

[444]James Sully,Pessimism: A History and a Criticism. London, 1877, p. 411.

[445]Dr. Paul Sollier,Psychologie de l’Idiot et de l’Imbécile. Paris, 1891, p. 95.

[446]Catrou,Étude sur la Maladie des Tics convulsifs(Jumping, Latab, Myriachit). Paris, 1890.

[447]Lombroso,L’Uomo delinquente, etc., pp. 450-480.

[448]His descriptions of impulsive criminals are not really exact. The laity have greatly admired his description of the assassin Lantier inLa Bête humaine. The most competent judge in such matters, however, Lombroso, says of this character, which has been inspired in M. Zola, according to his own declaration, byL’Uomo delinquente: ‘M. Zola, in my opinion, has never observed criminals in real life.... His criminal characters give me the impression of the wanness and inaccuracy of certain photographs which reproduce portraits, not from Nature, but from pictures.’—Le piu recenti scoperte ed applicazioni della psichiatria ed antropologia criminale. Con 3 tavole e 52 figure nel testo.Torino, 1893, p. 356.

[449]Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing,Psychopathia Sexualis, etc., 3eAuflage; Stuttgart, 1888. Beobachtung 23, Zippes Fall, s. 55; Beobachtung 24, Passow’s Fall, s. 56; Aum. zu s. 57, Lombroso’s Fall.

Cæsare Lombroso,Le piu recenti scoperte, etc., p. 227: ‘He always had voluptuous sensations on seeing animals killed, or in perceiving in shops feminine under-garments and linen.’ The case of which Lombroso here speaks is that of a degenerate of fifteen years old, who had been observed by Dr. MacDonald, of Clark University.

[450]Léon Tolstoi,[Œuvres complètes, p. 385: ‘He smelt the warmth of her body, inhaled the odour of her perfumes ... and at this moment Pierre understood that not onlymightHélène become his wife, but that shemustbecome so—that nothing else was possible.’] It is related that the King of France, Henri III., married Marie of Cleves because, at the wedding of the King of Navarre and his sister, Marguerite of Valois, wishing to dry his face in the chemise wet with the perspiration of the young princess, he was so intoxicated by the scent which emanated from it, that he had no rest till he had won her who had borne it. See Krafft-Ebing,Psychopathia Sexualis, p. 17.

[451]Léon Tolstoi,[Œuvres complètes, t. ii., p. 385: ‘With him there had come into the room a strong, but not disagreeable, smell,’ etc.]

[452]Maurice Barrès,L’Ennemi des Lois, p. 47.

[453]Edmond de Goncourt,La Faustin. Paris, 1882, p. 267.

[454]Alfred Binet,Le Fétichisme dans l’Amour, etc., p. 26. This passage will make the German reader think of the sniffer of souls, G. Jaeger; I have no occasion to mention him here.

[455]Dr. R. von Krafft-Ebing,Psychopathie Sexualis, p. 15, foot-note, p. 17.

[456]E. Séguin,Traitement morale, Hygiène et Education des Idiots. Paris, 1846.

[457]L. Bernard,Le Odeurs dans le Romans de Zola. Montpellier, 1889.

[458]Le Temps, Nodu 13 Février, 1892: ‘Current literature ... is, at present, at an inconceivably low ebb in Germany. From one end of the year to the other it is becoming an impossibility to discover a novel, a drama, or a page of criticism worthy of notice. TheDeutsche Rundschauitself recently admitted this in despair. It is not only the talent and the style which are deficient—all is poor, weak and flat; one might imagine one’s self in France, in the time of Bouilly.... Even the desire to rise above a certain level of ordinary writing seems wanting. One ends by being thankful to any contemporary German author who is seen to be making ... the simplest effort not to write like a crossing-sweeper.’ Every German who observes all the literary productions of his contemporaries will see that this is the opinion of a spiteful enemy. This opinion, nevertheless, is explained and justified by the fact that at the present day it is only the ‘realists’ who make enough stir to be heard in certain places abroad, and that there the natives are delighted to be able to consider them as representing all the German literature of the day.

[459]Arno Holz—Johannes Schlaf,Die Familie Selicke, 3eAuflage; Berlin, 1892, p. vi.: ‘In fact, nothing so provokes us to smile ... as when they, in their anxiety to find models, label us as plagiarists of the great foreign authors. Let them say it, then.... It will be acknowledged some day that there has never yet been in our literature a movement less influenced from without, more strongly originated from within—in one word, morenational—than this movement, even at the further development of which we look to-day, and which has had for its visible point of departure ourPapa Hamlet.Die Familie Selickeis the most thoroughly German piece of writing our literature possesses,’ etc. This passage may serve the reader as a model both of the style in which these lads write, and of the tone in which they speak of themselves and their productions.

[460]The complaint of want of money is a constant refrain among the ‘Young Germans.’ Listen to Baron Detlev von Liliencron: ‘You had nothing to eat again to-day; as a set-off, every blackguard has had his fill.’ ‘The terror of infernal damnation is—A garden of roses under the kisses of spring,—When I think of how heart and soul fret,—To be hourly bitten by the need of money.’ And Karl Bleibtreu: ‘Brass reigns, gold reigns,—Genius goes its way a-begging.’ ‘To call a ton of gold one’s own,—Sublime end, unattainable to man!’ etc.

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