IBSEN, EMERSON AND NIETZSCHE 149 



Let a stoic arise who shall reveal the resources of man and tell men they 

 are not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves — that a man is 

 the word made flesh — and that the moment he acts from himself, tossing the 

 laws, the books, idolatries and customs out of the window — we . . . thank and 

 revere him. 



Further on in the same essay he says again : 



The secret of fortune is joy in our own hands. Welcome evermore to gods 

 and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide. Him all 

 tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. 



This is all open and unmistakable individualism, and that it is 

 individualism on the religious basis is clear when, in the same con- 

 nection, he speaks of a greater self-reliance as " a new respect for the 

 divinity in man." 



This, indeed, is in an essay that suggests the note of personal 

 aggressiveness, but we shall not find it otherwise in the essays on 

 " Love " and " Friendship." In the one he says : 



Thus we are put in training for a love which knows not sex, nor person, 

 nor partiality, but which seeketh virtue and wisdom everywhere. . . . We are 

 often made to feel that our affections are but tents of a night. Though slowly 

 and with pain, the objects of the affections change, as the objects of thought do. 



In the other he says as the conclusion of the whole matter: 



I do then with my friends as I do with my books: I would have them 

 where I can find them, but I seldom use them. We must have society on our 

 own terms, and admit or exclude it on the slightest cause. I can not afford to 

 speak much with my friend. If he is great he makes me so great that I can 

 not descend to converse. 



Here even the offices of what are normally the most unselfish of 

 the personal relations of life are conceived of as having their aim 

 and end in the development of self. Life finds its fulfilment in an 

 approximation to the divine possibilities that are the natural heritage 

 of every human being, and in attaining to that one must not permit 

 himself to be materially hindered by consideration for others. Part 

 of the divine perfection is doubtless expressed for Emerson in the 

 Sermon on the Mount, but it seems clear that he contributes his share 

 toward that questioning of the ethical system of Christianity which 

 now centers upon that portion of the gospel. He does not put him- 

 self explicitly in opposition to the beatitudes, but he exalts a spirit 

 and a philosophy in which their teaching is more or less negligible. 

 This, perhaps, is little more than saying that with Emerson protestant 

 theology had passed out of the stage of bondage to the letter, but the 

 forces at work in the change were those of a deeper regard for the 

 powers and capabilities of the inner man, a deeper wish that there 

 should be no check upon their expansion to their fullest possibilities. 

 How large these were in his conception of them may be seen in the 

 essay on " History." 



I can find Greece, Palestine, Italy, Spain and the Islands — the genius and 

 creative principle of each and of all eras, in my own mind. 



