Chapter VI: Part 6

The plague of the Antonines seems to have varied in different parts of the Empire and at different times of its devastating career.[18] Occasionally it seems to have taken the appearance of smallpox, sometimes of typhus, and perhaps at times an infusion of bubonic plague may have thrust in its frightful form. It would be much easier for after generations to guess at the truth if only poor Galen had not taken wing and fled; for he was an acute clinician. At its first onset he fled to Campania and, finding no safety there, took ship to Pergamos. Thence, after two years’ absence, he returned at the urgent summons of the emperor, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, and after a brief stay in Rome rejoined him again at Aquileia. But there was no rest for his weary soul; again pestilence pursued him. The thing would be comic if we could forget the frightful misery of mankind when the foundations of civilisation were crumbling before the assaults of micro-organisms. Man was engaged in one of his greatest battles to the death against the wild; and the rat, the body-louse, and the direct infection of smallpox were apparently leagued in an assault upon his works. It is a dramatic thing to stand before the great statue of Marcus Aurelius at the head of the Capitoline steps in Rome, near the smell of the caged wolves, and to ponder that the real enemy of that somewhat tedious emperor was, not the Quadi or the Marcomanni, but, unknown to himself, if Dr. Crawfurd is right, the ignoble body-louse and the squeaking, fighting, greedy Mus Decumanus.[19] And yet he sits there so proudly upon his wonderful horse, looking every inch an emperor yet unable to cast even a moral maxim at his ignoble foes.

After the plague of the Antonines we come to the great plague of Justinian and here at last we have the evidence of an exact historian who did not run and could state what he saw in language that we can understand. Gibbon says hesitantly that Procopius was a doctor, though probably in truth he was a lawyer. Possibly he was too much afraid of the naughty little Empress Theodora, whom he was afterwards to slander, to forsake the path of duty and run away when the world seemed dying; but at any rate he has left us a remarkable account of the plague of 542, one of the most terrible recorded visitations of epidemic disease; and after reading Gibbon’s somewhat excitable account of it I think that few doctors will deny that it was real old bubonic plague that has so often made history. Justinian suffered from it and recovered; we do not know enough about the exact circumstances to estimate its exact effects upon the world; but we can be pretty certain that the bacillus pestis did not lay waste the Byzantine Empire for nothing. Gibbon estimates the total loss of life at a hundred millions; but one doubts if the population of the Roman Empire, even in its palmiest days, was ever much larger, and surely the plague could not have swept off everybody in the known world, though we do know that, if it really breaks loose in flea-bitten surroundings, plague can do an infinity of mischief, probably more than any other known disease.

We leave the dead old world that shook at Cæsar’s nod, and leap in one moment to the very beginnings of the modern world, to the Black Death of 1348; for, though the Middle Ages were still to drag their slow length along for at least a century, there can be little doubt that after the Black Death had terrified mankind all our modern problems were beginning, if only in embryo. The original source of it seems to have been China, and the epidemic proceeded with most leisurely footsteps until it took ship for Europe. Dr. Hecker[20] in 1833 wrote an exhaustive account of it from mediæval records; but since 1833 the cell-theory of Schleiden and Schwann has revolutionised medicine, and even Dr. Hecker has to be translated into modern terminology; so rapidly has medicine changed that a book written ten years ago is already obsolete. Indeed, it is not too much to say that more has been discovered in medicine within the last thirty years than in the whole previous half-million years during which man has been upon the earth; one sometimes becomes terrified at the amazing growth of knowledge. Whither is it all leading us? Are we becoming as gods? Vespasian joked about himself when he was dying; let us not really grow “pumpkinified,” to use Seneca’s words about Claudius, when we think ourselves becoming deified.

The Black Death seems to have come to Europe from Africa by ship in 1348. The harbingers of the epidemic began in 1347 with earthquakes and floods in China and Egypt; in far-away China the earth opened and swallowed men. Frightful portents appeared in the sky (of course I am simply quoting this nonsense from Hecker and his mediævalists) and the seasons changed, summer becoming winter. At that time, according to Hecker, the sheet of ice was formed which has since prevented men from looking upon the coast of Greenland; there were unequalled rains and the floodgates of heaven were opened in a more than Noachian deluge. Vast swarms of locusts appeared and died; and the want of the crops which they had devoured thrust man, whose hold upon the earth is always so feeble, to the edge of that slight precipice which generally protects him from the Valley of Starvation. The earth opened, and into the crevasses men fell, never to be seen again; from the crevasses arose a horrid stench. Into this world, even more starved and terrified by the adventure of living than was common in the Middle Ages, the rat and the bacillus pestis made their death-dealing plunge. The epidemic which they brought seems to have been carried from the sultry delta of the Nile by ship to Greece and Italy; four fugitives—and unknown numbers of rats and fleas—fled to find safety in Marseilles, carrying their own destruction with them. Thence the plague went to Avignon, at that time the residence of the pope; and ultimately to England where it landed in the southwest counties, taking half a year to crawl to London. As acutely noted by Procopius, plague always spreads inland from the shores of the sea, and we now know that it spreads just so fast as the rat can run and no faster. In 1348 they knew nothing about rats and bacteria, but attributed everything to bad air or evil spirits; and they noted that there was a continuance of southerly winds, which of course in Greece and Italy are hot winds and may possibly have spread the plague by bringing the ships and their contained rats. In Germany they had some story about a dense pestiferous fog which smelt abominably and so was obviously the cause of the Black Death. It is difficult to say how much truth there was in these stories of fog, though they are too numerous and too well attested to be utterly ignored; they have naturally been seized upon by historical novelists in search of the dramatic and anxious to show that in 1348 everything was different from things as they are to-day. Possibly they accounted for the preponderance of pneumonic plague.

John Cantacuzenos, Byzantine emperor, whose own son died of it, left a description that entirely fits in with our modern knowledge of plague, buboes, black spots and all, though there is a certain resemblance to Thucydides which makes one rather believe that he was adding to his narrative for dramatic effect. Strangely modern is his description of the dull stupor that affects so many plague patients to-day. We all noticed it in the slight epidemic that affected Sydney some years ago. Then again John specially stated that some patients were attacked by a violent pain in the chest, with difficulty of breathing and a putrid expectoration. This looks uncommonly like the pneumonic type of plague which proved so destructive in Manchuria in 1910.

But the most interesting feature of the Black Death was its attack upon Avignon, where Guy de Chauliac was physician to the pope. It lasted eight months, with the usual concomitants of numbers of dead so huge that the living could not bury them. As trench after trench became filled, no matter how hard the living worked, the pope blessed the Rhone and had the bodies hurled into that rushing stream, doubtless to the joy of the rats. Guy himself showed the courage that one expects in a modern doctor, and has left us a perfectly recognisable description, which is commented upon by both Dr. Hecker and Dr. Crawfurd. It is in Guy himself that our interest dwells; for at last Medicine had found its soul. His colleagues, being trained in Arabian medicine, all told him that the plague was inevitably fatal, that medicine could do nothing, and that he was only courting destruction by staying to comfort those whom he knew that he could not save. Guy himself had a theory that strong purgation would cure the disease, though he knew that the only real safety was in flight. He stayed; though whether he was prevented from running by the medicines that he prescribed or by sheer courage no one can say. His own words were “As for me I did not dare absent myself, though I was in constant fear.” To be feared of a thing and yet to do it—that is what makes the prettiest kind of a man; and to be afraid only of his own conscience makes a man a hero. Guy was afraid of his own conscience, not of the plague, and therefore he has become one of the heroes of medicine. No doubt he donned his quaint mediæval anti-infection costume with its beaky vizor, and went from door to door trying to bring a little hope to the gloomy death-beds of the frightened people; no doubt he had himself to clean up the mess caused by his treatment, which must have been calamitous. But he lives in the memory of his colleagues, for we are all proud to belong to the profession of that simple-minded doctor of Provence, and try to act like him though with less messy treatment. He was a brave man.

The epidemic endured at Avignon for eight months, and Guy tells us that for the first three it took the form, in our terminology, of pneumonic plague and was intensely infectious, but for the other five it seems to have been the ordinary bubonic that was so fatal in London in 1665. Guy remained in Avignon for the Black Death, and faced its return twelve years later. In the first visitation the poor suffered, but in the second the rich; but, rich or poor, Guy remained at his post with his ample store of aloes to win the love of the dying whom he could not save. We know now some results of crude aloes which are not very pleasant, and I wonder whether Master Guy de Chauliac ever noticed them, or whether his patients ever came running to him to cure them of the effects of his aloes.

To sum up, it is probable that the series of epidemics that we call the Black Death were all different varieties of the plague; bubonic, pneumonic, septicæmic, hæmorrhagic, etc. The sentimental and journalistic Nordic nations, such as the English and Germans, muttered the horrified name “Black Death,” afraid to give the thing a name, just as to-day they talk about the “Red Plague” or “a certain loathsome disease” when they mean to say syphilis; but the more clear-sighted and logical Mediterranean peoples knew that the thing certainly killed them, though they did not know what it was, so they simply called it La Grande Mortelaga—the Great Mortality, which it assuredly was. We prosaic moderns simply call it the plague, whose dread name even to-day makes us shudder. We do not fear it, because we know exactly how it is spread, and that, to use Osler’s epigrammatic words, all that one needs to defeat an epidemic of plague is a stout heart and a long purse. During the fourteenth century men’s hearts, being very ignorant, were not very stout, and their purses were atrociously short. It would hardly be too much to say that during the Middle Ages, and up till about 1700, the greatest cause of death in cities was the plague. After 1700 people slowly began to become rich, and to build better houses which would keep the rat at a distance, so that man conquered the plague without knowing how he had done it. But the conditions in the Middle Ages must have been frightful. Listen to the words of Dr. Abram in _English Life and Manners in the Later Middle Ages_ about the overcrowding, which would put even Glasgow to shame. He is referring to the Miller of Trumpington in Chaucer’s _Reve’s Tale_; and the miller cannot have been a very poor man; he was prosperous and on edge for his dignity. But in his house there was only one bedroom, where slept he himself, his wife, his baby, his grown-up daughter, and two undergraduates from Cambridge all at once.

No wonder the rats and fleas were rampant and the plague swept over the land. And as for the personal cleanliness of these crowded peoples, there was none.[21] If I wished to use another jargon than medical I would say it was a minus quantity, but personally I prefer the medical, because that means something and is exact.

The Black Death revived that strange and mournful sect of the flagellants, the Brotherhood of the Cross. The spirit of man, which is capable of such wonders, must needs bow before that shadow of itself which it has projected into the infinite, and ask pardon of its anthropomorphic fourteenth-century God for the fancied sins which had brought these horrors upon the world. The quaint figures of the flagellants wandered, cross on breast, in doleful procession all over Europe, chanting dolorous hymns of misery that bore the seeds of rebellion against that very God whom they affected to supplicate. They would reach a church, lie down in circles, strip off their clothing and flog each other with scourges of nails. People crowded to watch the blood flow, while doubtless the rats and fleas rejoiced if rejoicing be possible to beings so lowly. In these flagellants probably lay the real seeds of the Reformation which was to come. They sometimes seized upon a church and rebelliously conducted Mass without an authorised priest, although the pope, Clement VI, who was a brave man and faced the plague like a hero, had given absolution in advance to every patient who should be taken sick. Man wanted his own priest, and sometimes when he sent in his last extremity his priest would not come, or was dead of the plague, so that when the epidemic had abated, and the world was struggling to recover itself and reap the neglected harvests, men were only too ready to believe the stories about the priests and their women which were even then paving the way for the Reformation. The Statute of Labourers, in England, was the herald of many of our modern political ideas. Those unhappy men who died, stupefied by plague, were really dying for humanity.

We cannot make an accurate guess even at the actual number of people lost during the Great Mortality. Hecker, after taking the utmost trouble, thought that at least a fourth of the people of Europe perished, but in some places far more; thus in Avignon, of which we have the most exact information, about nine-tenths. This vast mortality in Avignon was not caused by de Chauliac and his aloes, any more than it was due to Pope Clement and his blessing. Probably de Chauliac’s treatment had no influence one way or the other; neither did the question of pope and anti-pope nor the great schism. But we know more about what happened at Avignon than anywhere else, because de Chauliac was a brave doctor who told the truth.

We do not forget the plague, because it takes very good care of that, and is still, though we have long purses, the nightmare of health officials who keep their silent watch over the health of mankind.

But, in dealing with epidemic diseases that have affected civilisation we must not forget malaria. Like syphilis itself, its social effects have been prodigious. Malaria was undoubtedly, with typhus and possibly smallpox, one of the real causes of the fall of the Roman Empire. The work of Sir Ronald Ross in discovering that it is spread by the anopheles mosquito, is one of the great epoch-making discoveries of history. There are few countries in the world which are free from malaria to-day. Unquestionably it is the cause of the anæmia and poor physique of the inhabitants of most tropical countries; and Australia is fortunate in having so few anopheles mosquitoes, though we have so many other varieties of the abominable little pests. That the numerous returned soldiers who were infected with malaria in Palestine have comparatively rarely spread their disease is due to the rarity of the anopheles in Australia; but doctors are always on the lookout for this particular pest and let us hope will keep it to its natural habitat in moister countries. Probably the real reason of the good physique of Australians is that the British race, for the first time in history, has had the chance of developing in a warm climate with no malaria. We are making a mistake in concentrating on the search for the discovery of the will-o’-the-wisp cause of cancer, which, though a very terrible and horrible disease, possibly associated into the very mystery of life itself, has probably less important social effects than either syphilis or malaria. I do not merely refer to the actual death-rate from these diseases, though it is probable that syphilis indirectly causes more deaths than cancer, tuberculosis or overeating. The trouble is that syphilis works in so mysterious a way; it is sly and subtle in its effects; it lies long latent and springs up again to the slaughter after the man who is its victim has long forgotten that he ever had it; and it conceals itself under innumerable guises. The great problem before the civilised world to-day is not the cure of cancer; it is the prevention of syphilis.

We know exactly how to prevent syphilis in the male. Metchnikoff and Calmette have shown us by experimental proof that is irrefragable. That their method is impossible to apply satisfactorily in the female owing to anatomical reasons is no reason whatever for so solemnly concealing its existence from young men, because, if it were generally known to the male, the females would not be affected and the contagiousness of the disease would die out in one generation. It is painful to think of the vast mortality and misery that is caused by this one disease when every decent doctor knows exactly how to prevent it. With moral education in self-restraint together with application of Metchnikoff’s discoveries, which are known to every doctor, there is no reason whatever why syphilis should not be entirely abolished from the educated world. The other venereal diseases though serious are of comparatively minor importance; even gonorrhœa, which sterilises so many women and blinds so many babies, is less important because it does not affect the brain.

My own opinion is, that while moral education should certainly be attended to, every boy should have a quiet talk with his doctor before he goes to boarding-school and still better perhaps before he goes to the university. It is common experience that more lads become infected while they are young and ignorant, during the time of their university life, than at any other time.

We have apparently got over our post-war epidemic of influenza, which sensationally minded people called the Black Death without knowing what they said. But has fate altogether done with us? Has the war really left no other sequel than the influenza? Only this morning I was reading an article by Mr. Stephen Graham in the _Nineteenth Century and After_, in which he refers to the frightful post-war corruption of women in London, as shown by the mad competition among prostitutes for the favours of men. I can corroborate that article fully, for last year I went travelling over many parts of Europe, and I was impressed and horrified by exactly the same thing. A man cannot leave his hotel unaccompanied without being set upon by these women, who are evidently starving and desperate. London, Paris, and Rome are all the same; there is nothing to choose between them.

Nothing seems to be done about this frightful menace. Let us take care lest a rival to the Black Death may ruin the people of Europe. Immorality must be paid for somehow; and it does no good for politicians to wrangle over trifles such as the German restitutions when there is a very much more dreadful menace knocking at the world’s doors.

During Tudor times, when the world seems to have been almost at its lowest stage of filth, there were great epidemics of typhus fever in Europe, especially in Italy; thus reviving memories of Athens and the Roman Empire, which to the eyes of modern men seem to have been an age of beauty. Typhus is beyond all other diseases the disease of filth, war, and misery; and that it spread so vigorously in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries seems to show that things at that time were less romantic than people try to depict. Probably, if we could get at the real truth, throughout recorded history, typhus has slain more people than any other epidemic disease, possibly even more than the plague itself.

There can be little doubt as to the identity of the “Sweating Sickness” of Tudor times. It seems to have begun with the bloodshed of the Wars of the Roses, as the army of Henry VII marched in misery, slush, and triumph after the battle of Bosworth. Very soon after the king’s entry into London the sweating sickness began to spread among the overcrowded houses of the capital. It ravaged high and low; at first it spread largely among young and vigorous men; in one week it took two lord mayors and six aldermen. The coronation of Henry VII was postponed by reason of the general distress, and the disease spread without interruption over the whole country. Nobody seemed to be immune; and when it attacked Oxford the professors and students fled alike in a common terror, so that the ancient university was as deserted as it was, for a more worthy reason, during our late war.

After its first appearance, sudden and savage, the English Sweat for a time abandoned its victims, and the mediæval world resigned itself to its normal accompaniments of epidemic typhus, smallpox, and plague. Soon after the return of Columbus we begin to hear of a new and terrible disease, syphilis,[22] though there has been great argument as to whether it may not have been yaws, which is a comparatively mild tropical long-continued ailment. To my mind the fact is convincing that we find no real traces of syphilis in the bones from ancient burial-places. If it had existed in the ancient world we should certainly have found such evidences.

But the English Sweat was only biding its opportunity; for it returned mildly in 1506; and again severely in 1517; and again, in its worst epidemic, in 1528. By this time the world was beginning to think that we were eternally damned; and when in 1529, it spread to Hamburg, the good North Germans tried to signify their belief in the usual manner by confining their patients in the best replica of hell that they could imagine. Every patient, whatever his sickness, was hidden under a heap of featherbeds; the stove was driven to its full force; the windows shut and sealed with rags; and the patient’s relatives heaped themselves upon him until it sometimes happened that he was actually smothered by their well-meant efforts.

Besides the sweat, influenza recurred again and again; and slew its thousands and tens of thousands. It probably so weakened Mary Tudor’s heart that she died suddenly while hearing Mass.

Now what was this dreadful Sweating Sickness which so paralysed over and over again the strong arm of the Tudors? Osler describes it confidently as what we call miliary fever; a disease which now and then breaks out in little valleys of Italy and Eastern Europe; kills a few harmless people; and suddenly departs as quickly as it came.

Of course there must always be doubt as to all these mediæval epidemics. One symptom may impress one doctor as due to one special disease, another symptom may impress another as the most important. Thus, thinking of the plague of Athens, what impressed me most was the fact that Thucydides expressly mentioned the fact that the patient’s fingers and genitals used sometimes to drop off when he seemed on the high road to recovery. We see just the same symptom in epidemic typhus to-day.

It is difficult exactly to understand ancient pathological terms; when an ancient observer says “peticula” or “bubo” or “macula” or uses other learned terms, we cannot be quite sure that he means to convey exactly the same idea as the words imply to ourselves. There is always room for honest difference of opinion. But after carefully reviewing the diseases of old I fancy most people will agree with Sydney Smith when he wrote:

“The good of olden times let others state.
I think it lucky I was born so late.”

With all the glamour that enthusiasts and romanticists have cast upon the Middle Ages we are probably very much happier to-day.

F. W. Nietzsche

I had long shared the general belief that this remarkable man died of general paralysis; but a brief study of the facts as they are set forth in Frau Foster-Nietzsche’s book, _The Lonely Nietzsche_, will convince any fair-minded person, as they did me, that such an hypothesis is untenable. As Nietzsche was undoubtedly one of the makers of the modern mind it will be worth while to study his health a little, for the more we study it the more remarkable he becomes.

From youth onwards he was subject to dreadful headaches, often accompanied by vomiting and intense pain in the eyes. He had temporary strokes of paralysis, and sometimes lost the power of speech. Probably the disease from which he suffered was what we now call migraine or “sick headache.” This is a trouble that is almost confined to persons of active and intelligent mind, and the cause of it is quite unknown. Nietzsche, imagining that his headaches had something to do with his digestion, used to starve himself and lead the most ascetic life; but all to no purpose. Starvation rather tends to make the patient worse. As a rule this sickness tends to improve as the patient grows older; but in Nietzsche’s case advancing age brought no relief. Work was impossible, and he had to get leave of absence from his position as Professor of Classical Philology in the University of Basel in 1876. Later on he tried to resume work, but spent many years in wandering from one health resort to another in almost constant pain; indeed, he said that for him two hundred days out of every year were days of pain.

This migraine is a very terrible complaint which affects mostly the elect of the earth: those whose brains are far above the average. Women are more often affected by it than men; and in them it appears to become worse periodically and at the climacteric. Afterwards it generally leaves them. Clods do not suffer from migraine; the trouble appears to be one of the prices that very clever men have to pay for their brains. Sufferers from it are generally very prone to seasickness and to trainsickness, and once an attack is in full blast no treatment whatever but natural sleep seems to relieve it. The pain appears to be so terrible that the stomach is paralysed by the sheer violence of it, and such drugs as aspirin, phenacetin, and even opium pills are useless because they are at once vomited. Sometimes symptoms indistinguishable from those of migraine persist for many years in cases of chronic Bright’s disease; and there is reason to suspect that it may be accompanied by some sudden constriction of an artery in the brain. In the worst cases the pain also affects the eye; and occasionally there is confusion of speech or even positive aphasia. Possibly even a stroke of paralysis may occur, and there is the usual fear of insanity that seems to accompany all nervous troubles in highly neurotic men.

Late in the year 1888 the blow fell; and Nietzsche became definitely insane. Nietzsche’s sister has left us quite a good account of it which enables us to guess with a certain amount of probability the actual nature of his insanity; though we must always remember that he had been suffering from this terrible agony for years and had already had strokes that were probably due to a temporary constriction of a cerebral artery.

During the latter end of 1888 Nietzsche was even more than usually worried; sensitive old women, Wagnerians and all the little people were writing him abusive letters. Something had to go. Either angry people must leave him alone or the delicate filament of Nietzsche’s mind must snap. It had already been strained past endurance by his headaches and pains in the eye and incessant self-denial. The first symptom seems to have been that his Italian landlady noticed that Professor Nietzsche had suddenly taken to imbibing gigantic draughts of water. Suddenly, while he was walking near his home, he fell down in the street and could not get up again; that is to say, probably one of his cerebral arteries had gone into a state of spasm. His landlord found him and helped him home, where he lay for two days on a sofa in a lethargic, probably semi-conscious, state; he would not say a word nor answer questions. When he awoke to the world again he was deranged. He talked loudly to himself and would not allow people into his room, for he said he was composing an oratorio. He had always been interested in music. He began to write wild letters to his friends and relatives, accusing them of all sorts of silly things, but, be it observed, of nothing indecent. Then he began to accuse himself of fancied extravagance. When he met Professor Oberbeck he ran towards him and embraced him, saying, “My dear fellow, I hope you’ve brought me money; I’ve been living so extravagantly!” Nietzsche extravagant; a man who was a byword for asceticism and who did not even then realise the fame and fortune that was beginning to come to him! When they examined his papers they found 900 francs among them. They took him to Jena, where he was admitted to an asylum. Unhappily his friends had no specimen of his handwriting to assist the asylum doctors, and as it was before the days of the cerebro-spinal Wassermann test, it is not surprising that the poor doctors, driven to give the thing a name, hinted at general paralysis, though they seem to have eaten their words later.

The ordinary typical case of general paralysis is much as follows: An apparently perfectly sane and normal man suddenly goes out and orders a dozen motor-cars, or twenty-three cameras, or fifty arm-chairs, or a dozen sets of gymnastic apparatus or something equally silly; then he goes home to his wife very well pleased with himself and boasts how he has suddenly become the best cyclist in Europe or the most famous cricketer. No doubts for him, gladsome fellow! Probably he will also tell her that he is God. Or perhaps he will indecently assault some little girl before the very eye of some hitherto friendly policeman. Sometimes the disease will begin with purely neurasthenic and gloomy symptoms, so that even a clever doctor may be put off the scent for months or years. But when he is examined carefully it will generally be found that his hand is tremulous so that he cannot write intelligibly; his tongue trembles and perhaps wobbles in and out like a trombone; his speech is indistinct; the pupils of his eyes may be unequal or not circular. Later come the fits and increasing dementia that haunt him till his death.

The fact that Nietzsche suffered from doubts about money and showed no sign of obscenity seems to point to a totally different form of insanity. Faithful to the principle that no doctor ought to offer a diagnosis without having seen the patient, I hesitate to say definitely what was the matter with Nietzsche, especially as Dr. Oscar Levy of Hamburg is still alive and knows the Nietzsche case intimately; but I should not wonder if the poor overwrought man was suddenly seized by something akin to melancholia,[23] that last infirmity of sensitive minds. As clods do not suffer from migraine they comparatively rarely attain to the heights—or depths—of melancholia. Under the influence of nursing, rest and protection from the attacks of the world, he partly recovered, but, as generally happens with melancholia in middle age, he seems to have become more emotional and partly demented before the chronic trouble that may have caused his headaches ultimately killed him. Throughout his insanity the difficulty in speaking pursued him. “I don’t speak prettily,” he would pathetically say; and after a tremor that may have been uræmic he passed away.

No philosopher has been more shockingly misrepresented to the British public; and now that the bitterness of the war is over it is quite time that we should make some effort to understand what he intended. The famous “superman” was not a big bullying German _picklehaube_; it seems to have represented what a man might become if freed from conventional repression: if his instincts were perfect in every way. The “will to power” was not the arrogance that caused the war; as a matter of fact, no man ever attacked German militarism so fiercely as did Nietzsche. It really represented what the modern evolutionist means by survival value in all organisms. Possibly Nietzsche made a mistake in attributing prudery to the effects of Pauline Christianity; the very essence of prudery is now thought to lie in unconscious regrets of the old for their lost sexual power. It seems to be a frustrated wish-fulfilment and is found among people who worship mumbo-jumbo, as well as among those who pretend to follow Jesus.

Nietzsche did well to point out, as Huxley pointed out years ago, that “all men are _not_ born free and equal,” as optimists have averred. A little healthy pessimism would be very good for the world; it would teach it to be more careful about paying its debts and would prevent it from blundering into an ignorant war such as the last one.

But nobody who has ever seen the disgusting spectacle of a man dying of general paralysis, demented, helpless, lying bestial, an obscene body that has long survived its soul, deserted by every one but his mother and his old aunts, could ever look at the portrait of the dying Nietzsche, gazing so wistfully into the setting sun, and say that Nietzsche died of general paralysis. The Italians called him Il Santo, the Saint; so far did he seem to them above all moral frailty.

It was probably owing to his incessant pain that he could never settle down to systematise his philosophy, but had to write in epigrams.

Arthur Schopenhauer

It is difficult not to smile at this peculiar philosopher, even though he has obtained nearly as many admirers as Nietzsche himself, and it is a dangerous thing to offend a Nietzschian. But let us treat him with the seriousness that he would have insisted upon as his right.

He was born in Dantzig in 1788; he died in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1860, a philosopher to whom both Germany and England have laid claim, because his father wished him to be born in England, and took his mother there just before the expected birthday, but the good lady suddenly took fright at the English—is it possible that there can have been anybody on earth who has not liked the English?—and insisted on going back to Germany for the confinement. I have actually heard that to this very natural whim of a pregnant woman is to be attributed Arthur’s detestation of women! In that idea perhaps we may see the natural thought of all Englishmen that England is the only fit country for a man to be born in. But his father had his revenge; for he called the little son “Arthur” and the lady, being a dutiful German wife, had to submit, consoling herself by the thought that it was a German as well as an English name. But Arthur’s detestation of women is probably to be attributed to a more physical cause, as we shall see.

In 1793 Dantzig was annexed by Prussia, so the Schopenhauers moved to Hamburg. Later on, when the question of Arthur’s education came to be settled, they decided to send him to both France and England; and in London the future pessimist was placed at a boarding-school kept by a clergyman at Wimbledon—poor little boy. For some reason he found the life, and more particularly the religious training of the good schoolmaster, intensely irksome; and long afterwards he referred with disgust to the atmosphere of cant and hypocrisy which permeated England at that time. _Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis._

In 1807 his father was found dead in the canal at Hamburg, being suspected to have thrown himself from an upper story; and Arthur, out of respect for his father’s wishes, definitely took up his duties in an office, though personally he longed to be an author. His mother, being now free from the encumbrance of a husband—at least presumably she found him an encumbrance—took to literature as a minor novelist at Weimar. When Arthur went to join her, he found that she seemed to have forgotten the memory of his father; and before very long they quarrelled. At the age of twenty-one Arthur determined to enter the university of Göttingen as a medical student; and later on took to philosophy, and gained his Ph.D. It was probably while he was at the university that he caught syphilis; and for long underwent the heroic doses of mercury at intervals that the nineteenth century thought essential for the cure of that disease. It was not till the time of Fournier and Sir Jonathan Hutchinson that it was recognised that, while mercury was essential, it was not so much the amount of mercury as the faithful years of its intermittent duration that were really necessary; and Schopenhauer duly went through the proper course of huge doses accompanied by all the wretchedness of salivation, depression, and internal pain, that used to be thought necessary for every syphilitic if he would escape the legendary tortures of that wonderful disease. He frequently complained to his friends of his treatment; but, in spite of the sufferings that it caused him, he had in reality little to complain about, for he lived to seventy years of age and escaped the graver nervous troubles that often accompany untreated syphilis. Nowadays, of course, we should put him on injections of one of the arseno-benzol compounds, accompanied probably with rubbings, pills or injections of mercury, and insist on his taking moderate exercise in the fresh air and living a sober, righteous and godly life without excitement or dissipation. While we should be chary of giving a definite prognosis we should tell him that probably he would see no more of his disease either in himself or his children if he took care of himself and faithfully continued his treatment. But Schopenhauer, while escaping the more serious nervous, bone and skin manifestation of syphilis, evidently did not escape the psychasthenic troubles, the obsessions and imperative ideas—the phobias; and syphilophobia had him in its grip till the end of his life. In this strange condition the patient becomes possessed by an undue terror of syphilis and its results; and often the fear of syphilis becomes transferred to the fear of every other infectious disease until his life becomes a burden to him as he walks perpetually in the presence of evil spirits which ache to devour him. Probably it was to these phobias that he owed his unnatural hatred of women, and his hatred of the lower side of man’s nature. He knew that these “under-sized, short-legged, long-haired creatures who were not really beautiful,” went about the world simply for the purpose of spreading syphilis—made a trade of it, in short; and that he, being a man of strongly sexual impulses, could not resist their embrace, though he knew it to be death. He had no wax wherewith he might shut his ears to their siren songs, while his sturdy rowers propelled his boat beside their lair; he could not leave his house without knowing that some of them would lure him with their dreadful charms; how different the miserable creatures were from the proper form of a human being, which should be, like Arthur Schopenhauer himself, a rather short, square, blue-eyed, sturdy North German. And so his miserable life went on, carrying its own torture with it, and daily his thoughts turned more and more to the utter wretchedness of life, and the stupidity of those followers of Fichte and Hegel who simply _would_ not see the truth. Probably his pessimism was a direct result of his syphilophobia.

He kept a diary in accordance with his plan of absolute self-confession; and there are many thoughts on love and marriage, written during the years 1819-22 and 1825-31, which his modest English biographer describes as being quite too frank for publication. These thoughts were written down in English; probably Schopenhauer doubted whether the Deity understood that language, just as we nowadays are quite certain that He does not understand French or Latin. But we can leave them unread, in the certain surety that they were completely coarse.

He now fell into a quarrel with Hegel, for, as he thought, purposely setting the world against the mighty Arthur Schopenhauer, of whom probably Hegel at that time had never heard in his life. He now began to indulge in that most expensive and unsatisfactory of all amusements, lawsuits.

In 1821 he found three women gossiping on the landing outside his door; so naturally he complained to his landlady, who assured him that such a thing would not happen again. Alas! a few days later there they were again, still cackling. Schopenhauer warned them to be off, and not to disturb his lordly self. Two of them, being meek and as he thought women really should be, departed, but the third was of sterner stuff and refused. She was a maiden sempstress of fifty who lived in the room higher up. Schopenhauer incontinently took her by the waist and threw her downstairs[24] with a coarse description of her character to boot; and after her flung her sewing and the tools of her trade. Heard a body ever the like? She took him to court, as no proper woman should do, and the philosopher defended his own case. An ungallant judge decided in his favour, and naturally the aggrieved lady appealed. This short-legged, long-haired female actually appealed against the decision given in favour of the Right, in favour of the great pessimist philosopher, of the Neo-Buddhist who just then wanted to get away to Italy for a holiday! And will it be believed that an unjust, nay, an inhuman, judge would not postpone the hearing of the appeal, so that once more Schopenhauer should be able to air his eloquence. In Schopenhauer’s absence in the sunny south the case was decided against him, and he was sentenced to pay the long-haired, etc., creature damages. Three years later the spinster renewed her assaults upon him, having discovered that he had injured her so severely that she was unable to earn her living; and this time the court ordered Schopenhauer to pay her a pension of £9 a year for the rest of her life. This was really getting beyond a joke, and Schopenhauer appealed; but unsuccessfully. Therefore he was faced with the prospect of paying the damsel this pension until the Greek calends; for it is well known that women are very hard to kill, and when they are in receipt of a pension they will live for ever out of sheer spite. But unfortunately for her she died of cholera some time afterwards; and Schopenhauer, receiving notice that he was relieved of pensioning her, showed his joy by scrawling upon the paper the appropriate—and obscene—words: “Obit anus—abit onus.” Thus it was proved that from woman came all man’s woes; but few men have the chance to revenge themselves on the sex by an epigram. As a rule, woman gets her epigram in first, owing to her agile tongue.

The last few years of his life were spent at Frankfurt-am-Main, where his was the most perfect instance of a quiet and philosophic life of which I have any knowledge, except Spinoza’s. The fires of his youth and middle age had died down, and the ashes took a long while to become stone-cold. At half-past seven every morning he rose and took a bath, taking particular care to wash his eyes very thoroughly.[25] Then, having ordered his housekeeper strictly to keep to her kitchen, he made himself coffee, and settled down to work for three or four hours; this being in his opinion the utmost that the human brain could stand at severe intellectual labour, in which he was probably right. At noon she came and timidly knocked at his door, whereupon he left his books and began to play upon his flute. At 1 p.m. he went to the Englischer Hof for dinner; and there he ate in silence with a gold coin displayed ostentatiously beside his plate. After this had gone on for some years he explained to a friend that he had kept the coin as a wager to himself that he should present it to the poor-box if anybody should start a discussion about any single subject under the sun but women, wine, and horses. After dinner, with the faithful coin still unused in his pocket, he went home, read light literature for a couple of hours, and at four o’clock went for a brisk walk into the suburbs. His only companion was a poodle-dog, and “Schopenhauer with his dog” has become a legend; the local children used to call it “young Schopenhauer.” After two hours of walking at his utmost speed, summer or winter, he went to the reading-room, and read _The Times_. This literature predisposing him for sleep, he went home, ate a very light supper, got out his long pipe, smoked for an hour, “and so to bed.”

And this went on for about ten years, until, one day he noticed that he could not walk quite so fast as usual, and that he was beginning to get breathless when he was going uphill. By this time he had become more egotistical than ever; his chief pleasure was in reading laudatory comments in the newspapers upon Herr Doktor Arthur Schopenhauer _hochwohlgeboren_ and his wonderful philosophy. Gradually praise and public fame began to come to him. A steady stream of people came to see him, among them many women attracted by the thought of the great woman-hater.[26] As his heart began slowly to fail his doctor visited him every day; until one day the philosopher was laid up with a slight attack of pneumonia. Recovering from this, he tried to resume his invariable routine; but on September 20th he had another bad attack. On the morning of the 21st he rose as usual. A few minutes after his housekeeper had left him, his doctor called and found him lying dead on his sofa. The Goddess Luetina, assuming her least terrible appearance, had carried him to the Nirvana where no women could trouble him.

It is one thing to write a witty essay against women, just to annoy the feminists, who, poor ladies, have such quaint ideas about men and are, in physiological language so excessively ready to react to stimuli. But Schopenhauer’s case was far otherwise; with him it was a matter of coarseness in his mind and sheer lust in his body. No wonder he despised the animal in man. In hating woman he was really hating himself because he could not resist them.

And it was probably well for him that he had to complain of his gigantic doses of mercury, for, with his family history of a father who committed suicide and his own worrying and neurotic mind, he was just the sort of man to get cerebral syphilis or general paralysis. I have read many attempts to explain Schopenhauer’s misogyny, but I rather fancy we can detect the real reason for it in his own syphilophobia. Some critics have tried to explain it by slandering his mother and sister, on the assumption that every man can only judge woman by the women he knows; and that Joanna Schopenhauer and Adele Schopenhauer must therefore have been of bad character. Possibly! But he was full of phobias and obsessions. And the best thing we read about him was his genuine love for Beethoven. Often he would sit and listen to a symphony, dreaming with his eyes shut; and, the last divine chords sounded, he would leave his seat rudely, lest some lesser music should blur the impression.

I have often thought of writing a history of the effect of syphilis upon the history of the world; but the difficulties appal me. We now know that syphilis is less a disease of skin and bone, than a very grim disease of the nervous system; and so secretive is it, so it loves to conceal itself under other names, that even to-day, though every doctor is acutely on the lookout for it, it would be impossible from the mortality returns to pick out which man or woman died of syphilis and which of some apparently quite distinct affection. All that is safe to say is that the very flower of the human race, the greatest artists, poets, musicians and philosophers, have all rested under a strong suspicion of having fought against the spirochæte before it killed them. Too likely such a history as passes through my mind would degenerate into a mere _chronique scandaleuse_, and nobody would believe it.

So long as there is this horrible and disgusting prudery about syphilis, so long will it continue to lay waste the fairest part of the human race; and few doctors will disagree with Schopenhauer, the poor hopeless syphilophobe, when he said that war and syphilis are the two greatest foes to humanity.

The great effect of the philosophy of Schopenhauer has probably been indirect. When the young undergraduate of Oxford enunciated the belief that there is nothing new and nothing true, and no matter, he probably thought that he was quoting the beliefs of the great woman-hater; but it was reserved for a mind far nobler and more truly poetical to see the real inner meaning of Schopenhauer’s thoughts. The great discovery of Schopenhauer was that the evil in man has quite as much to do with his character as the good. Thomas Hardy, in writing the _Woodlanders_ and _Tess of the D’Urbervilles_, was really transfiguring Schopenhauer’s somewhat arid philosophy until it became a beautiful truth. Hardy, in a sense, was simply a reaction from the foolish optimism of the Victorians; from the cheerful caricaturing of human nature by Charles Dickens; from the mock cynicism of Thackeray. That some people still say that his novels are grey and unduly pessimistic simply means that they have not yet grasped the full truth about human nature. And surely Hardy’s “Immanent Will” was truly Schopenhaueresque.

Healthy minds have converted Schopenhauer’s pessimism into the gentle pessimism of the present day, which may be rather beautiful and poetical than hideous. That Schopenhauer could be so vulgarly insulting to women was simply the index of his own diseased mind.

His opinions about women were merely an instance of the utterly degrading effect of syphilis upon the human brain and soul.

Baruch Spinoza

This, the most wonderful of all philosophers, the most daring, the most scientific, was born, a little Jew of Portuguese descent, in Amsterdam on November 28th, 1632, at a time when the European world was riven by the fiercest sectarian contention; when the hounds of the Spanish Inquisition were baying hell-fire and destruction to any man who should dare to differ from the dogmas of the pope as to objective truth. He grew up to be a typical Oriental—like Jesus Himself—with all the Oriental powers of mysticism.