they keep it.  As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time.  A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself.  A man denounces marriage as a lie, and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie.  He calls a flag a bauble, and then blames the oppressors of Poland or Ireland because they take away that bauble.  The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts.  In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite sceptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines.  In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men.  Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt.  By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything.

It may be added that the same blank and bankruptcy can be observed in all fierce and terrible types of literature, especially in satire.  Satire may be mad and anarchic, but it presupposes an admitted superiority in certain things over others; it presupposes a standard.  When little boys in the street laugh at the fatness of some distinguished journalist, they are unconsciously assuming a standard of Greek sculpture.  They are appealing to the marble Apollo.  And the curious disappearance of satire from our literature is an instance of the fierce things fading for want of any principle to be fierce about.  Nietzsche had some natural talent for sarcasm:  he could sneer, though he could not laugh; but there is always something bodiless and without weight in his satire, simply because it has not any mass of common morality behind it.  He is himself more preposterous than anything he denounces.  But, indeed, Nietzsche will stand very well as the type of the whole of this failure of abstract violence.  The softening of the brain which ultimately overtook him was not a physical accident.  If Nietzsche had not ended in imbecility, Nietzscheism would end in imbecility.  Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot.  Every man who will not have softening of the heart must at last have softening of the brain.

This last attempt to evade intellectualism ends in intellectualism, and therefore in death.  The sortie has failed.  The wild worship of lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void.  Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in Tibet.  He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and Nirvana.  They are both helpless—­one because he must not grasp anything, and the other because he must