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 not let go of anything.  The Tolstoyan’s will is frozen by a Buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil.  But the Nietzscheite’s will is quite equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none of them are special.  They stand at the cross-roads, and one hates all the roads and the other likes all the roads.  The result is—­well, some things are not hard to calculate.  They stand at the cross-roads.

Here I end (thank God) the first and dullest business of this book—­the rough review of recent thought.  After this I begin to sketch a view of life which may not interest my reader, but which, at any rate, interests me.  In front of me, as I close this page, is a pile of modern books that I have been turning over for the purpose—­a pile of ingenuity, a pile of futility.  By the accident of my present detachment, I can see the inevitable smash of the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Tolstoy, Nietzsche and Shaw, as clearly as an inevitable railway smash could be seen from a balloon.  They are all on the road to the emptiness of the asylum.  For madness may be defined as using mental activity so as to reach mental helplessness; and they have