was bound to secure the applause of those women who in the viragoes of Ibsen's drama-hysterical, nymphomaniacal, perverted in maternal instinct *-recognise either their own portrait or the ideal of development of their degenerate imagination. Women of this species find, as a matter of fact, all discipline intolerable. They are by birth les femmes de ruisseau of Dumas fils. They are not fit for marriagefor European marriage with one man only. Promiscuous sexual intercourse and prostitution are their most deeplyseated instincts, according to Ferrero† the atavistic form of degeneration in women, and they are grateful to Ibsen for having catalogued, under the fine designations of The struggle of woman for moral independence' and 'The right of woman to assert her own personality,' those propensities to which opprobrious names are usually given.

In his fiercely travestied exaggerations of Ibsen's doctrines, entitled Der Vater, Gräfin Julie, Gläubiger, etc., poor Grindberg, whose brain is equally deranged, but who possesses great creative power, goes to the greatest pains to show the absurdity of Ibsen's notions on the nature of woman, her rights, her relations to man. His method, however, is a false one. He will never convince Ibsen by rational arguments that his doctrines are foolish, for they do not spring from his reason, but from his unconscious instincts. His figures of women and their destinies are the poetical expression of that sexual perversion of degenerates called by Krafft-Ebing 'masochism.'‡

* Dr. Ph. Boileau de Castelnau, Misopédie ou Lésion de l'Amour de la Progeniture' (Annales médico-psychologiques, 3o série, 7o volume, 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.

† G. Ferrero, 'L'Atavisme de la Prostitution,' Revue scientifique, 50° volume, p. 136.

R. von Krafft Ebing. Psychopathia sexualis, etc., 7te Auflage, p. 89 (the third edition of this book, from which I have made my previous citations, contains nothing on masochism), and Neue Forschungen auf dem Gebiete der Psychopathia sexualis eine medicinisch-psychologische Studie, Zweite umgearbeitete und vermehrte Auflage, Stuttgart, 1891, p. 1 f. Krafft-Ebing gives this explanation of his word (p. 1 et seq.): By masochism I understand a peculiar perversion of the psychic vita 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 in Parents 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. See Archives de l'Anthropologie criminelle, 1892, p. 294.

Masochism is a sub-species of contrary sexual sensation.' The man affected by this perversion feels himself, as regards woman, to be the weaker party; as the one standing in need of protection; as the slave who rolls on the ground, compelled to obey the behests of his mistress, and finding his happiness in obedience. It is the inversion of the healthy and natural relation between the sexes. In Sacher-Masoch imperious and triumphant woman wields the knout; in Ibsen she exacts confessions, inflicts inflammatory reprimands, and leaves in a flare of Bengal lights. In essence, Ibsen's heroines are the same as Sacher-Masoch's, though the expression of feminine superiority is a little less brutal. It is remarkable that the women who exult over Ibsen's Nora-types are not shocked by the Hedwigs, Miss Tesmans, and other womanly embodiments of sacrifice, in whom the highly contradictory thoughts and feelings of the confused mystic come to light. But it has been psychologically established that human beings overlook what is in dissonance with their own propinquities, and dwell on that only which is in harmony with them.

Ibsen's teminine clientèle is, moreover, not composed merely of hysterical and degenerate characters, but includes also those women who are leading an unhappy married life, or believe themselves misunderstood, or suffer from the discontent and inner void resulting from insufficient occupation. Clear thinking is not the most prominent quality of this species of woman. Otherwise they would not have found their advocate in Ibsen. Ibsen is not their friend. No one is who, as long as the present order of society exists, attacks the institution of marriage.

A serious and healthy reformer will contend for the principle that marriage should acquire a moral and emotional import, and not remain a lying form. He will condemn the marriage for interest, a dowry or business marriage; he will brand as a crime the action of married couples who feel for some other human being a strong, true love, tested by time and struggle, and yet remain together in a cowardly pseudo-union, deceiving and contaminating each other, instead of honourably separating and contracting genuine connections elsewhere; he will demand that marriage be based on reciprocal inclination, maintained by confidence, respect, and gratitude, consolidated by consideration for the offspring; but he will guard himself from saying anything against marriage itself, this bulwark of the relations between the sexes afforded by definite, permanent duty. Marriage is a high advance from the free copulation of savages. To abandon it and return to primitive promiscuity would be the most profound atavism of degeneracy. Marriage, moreover, was not instituted for the man, but for

the woman and the child. It is a protective social institution for the benefit of the weaker part. Man has not yet conquered and humanized his polygamous animal instincts to the same extent as woman. It would for the most part be quite agreeable to him to exchange the woman he possesses for a new one. Departures à la Nora are as a rule not of a nature to frighten him. He could open the door very wide for Nora, and bestow on her his parting benediction with much pleasure. Were it once the law and custom in a society where each was forced to care for himself alone (and needed only to trouble himself about the offspring of others, when it was a question of orphan, abandoned, or begging children) that man and wife should separate as soon as they ceased to be agreeable to each other, it would be the men and not the women who would first make use of the new liberty. Departures à la Nora are perhaps without danger for rich wives, or those eminently capable of acquiring means of support, and hence pecuniarily independent. Such, however, in present society constitute a minute minority. Under Ibsen's code of morals the vast majority of wives would have everything to lose. The severe discipline of matrimony is their bulwark. obliges the man to take care of the children and of the wife as she declines in years. Hence it should be the true duty of rational wives to declare Ibsen infamous, and to revolt against Ibsenism, which criminally threatens them and their rights. Only through error can women of spirit and indisputable morality join the ranks of Ibsen's followers. It is necessary to enlighten them concerning the range of his doctrines, and in particular concerning their effect on the position of woman, so that they may abandon a company which can never be their own. May he remain surrounded by those only who are spirit of his spirit, that is to say, by hysterical women and masculine masochists, who, with Ehrhard,* believe that 'sound common-sense and optimism are the two destructive principles of all poetry'!

CHAPTER V.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE.

As in Ibsen ego-mania has found its poet, so in Nietzsche it has found its philosopher. The deification of filth by the Parnassians with ink, paint, and clay; the censing among the Diabolists and Decadents of licentiousness, disease, and corruption; the glorification, by Ibsen, of the person who Ehrhard, op. cit., p. 88

'wills,' is 'free' and 'wholly himself'-of all this Neitzsche supplies the theory, or something which proclaims itself as such. We may remark, in passing, that this has ever been the task of philosophy. It plays in the race the same rôle as consciousness in the individual. Consciousness has the thankless task of discovering rational and elucidatory grounds for the explanation of the impulses and acts springing up in subconsciousness. In the same way philosophy endeavours to find formulæ of apparent profundity for the peculiarities of feeling, thought and deed, having their roots in the history of politics and civilization-in climatic and economic conditionsand to fit them with a sort of uniform of logic. The race lives on, conformably with the historical necessity of its evolution, not troubling itself about a theory of its peculiarities; and philosophy hobbles busily after it, gathers with more or less regularity into its album the scattered features of racial character, and the manifestations of its health and disease; methodically provides this album with a title, paging, and full stop, then places it with a contented air in the library, among the systems of the same regulation size. Genuine truths, real, apposite explanations-these are not contained in philosophical systems. But they furnish instructive evidence of the efforts of the racial consciousness to supply reason, skilfully or clumsily, with the excuses it demands for the unconscious impulses of the race during a given period of time.

From the first to the last page of Nietzsche's writings the careful reader seems to hear a madman, with flashing eyes, wild gestures, and foaming mouth, spouting forth deafening bombast; and through it all, now breaking out into frenzied laughter, now sputtering expressions of filthy abuse and invective, now skipping about in a giddily agile dance, and now bursting upon the auditors with threatening mien and clenched fists. So far as any meaning at all can be extracted from the endless stream of phrases, it shows, as its fundamental elements, a series of constantly reiterated delirious ideas, having their source in illusions of sense and diseased organic processes, which will be pointed out in the course of this chapter. Here and there emerges a distinct idea, which, as is always the case with the insane, assumes the form of an imperious assertion, a sort of despotic command. Nietzsche never tries to argue. If the thought of the possibility of an objection arises in his mind, he treats it lightly, or sneers at it, or curtly and rudely decrees, That is false! (How much more rational is that . . . theory, for example, represented by Herbert Spencer! . . . According to this theory, good is that which has hitherto always proved itself to be useful, so that it may be estimated as valuable in the highest degree, as valuable

in itself. Although this mode of explanation is also false, the explanation itself is at least rational and psychologically tenable.'-Zur Genealogie der Moral, 2 Aufl., p. 5. This mode of explanation is also false.' Full-stop! Why is it false? Wherein is it false? Because Nietzsche so orders it. The reader has no right to inquire further.) For that matter, he himself contradicts almost every one of his violently dictatorial dogmas. He first asserts something and then its opposite, and both with equal vehemence, most frequently in the same book, often on the same page. Now and then he becomes conscious of the self-contradiction, and then he pretends to have been amusing himself and making sport of the reader. (It is difficult to be understood, especially when one thinks and lives gangasrotogati, among plain men who think and live otherwise-in other words, kromagati, or under the most favourable circumstances, among mandeigati, who "have the frog's mode of progression "I just do all I can to make myself hard to understand. But with regard to the "good friends". . . it is well to accord them in advance room for the play and exercise of misconception; in this way one has still something to laugh. at or wholly to abolish these good friends-and still laugh!'Jenseits von Gut und Böse, 2 Aufl., p. 38. Similarly on p. 51: All that is profound loves the mask; the most profound things even hate imagery and parable. Should not contrast rather be the right disguise in which the shamefacedness of a god might walk abroad?')

The nature of the individual dogmatic assertions is very characteristic. First of all it is essential to become habituated to Nietzsche's style. This is, I admit, unnecessary for the alienist. To him this sort of style is well known and familiar. He frequently reads writings (it is true, as a rule, unprinted) of a similar order of thought and diction, and he reads them, not for his pleasure, but that he may prescribe the confinement of the author in an asylum. The unprofessional reader, on the contrary, is easily confused by the tumult of phrases. Once, however, he has found his way, once he has acquired some practice in discerning the actual theme among the drums-andfifes of this ear-splitting, merry-go-round music, and, in the hailstorm of rattling words, that render clear vision almost impossible, has learned to perceive the fundamental thought, he at once observes that Nietzsche's assertions are either commonplaces, tricked out like Indian caciques with feathercrown, nose-ring, and tattooing (and of so mean a kind that a high-school girl would be ashamed to make use of them in a composition-exercise); or bellowing insanity, rambling far beyond the range of rational examination and refutation. I