But perhaps I have
pointed out enough inconsistencies, and the reader, growing weary, may
say: "Are you so young, then, that you don't know that the world is a
mass of contradictions? that life is no more than a tale told by an
idiot full of sound and fury, and signifying nothing?" Shakespeare did
no more than to put into eloquent language every man's belief, that we
are all mad on one subject or another. If this be so, every race is
mad on some point, for have we not often heard that what is true of
the individual is true of the race? Anglo-Saxon madness is book
morality. Madness has been defined as a lack of consequence in ideas,
and can anything be less consequent than--we need look no further back
than Ibsen? The great genius who died in May last was decried by the
English people as one of the most immoral of writers; for twenty years
at least this opinion obtained in the press, and even among men of
letters; suddenly the opinion disappeared, it went out like the flame
of a candle; the text is the same, not a comma has been changed, yet
now everybody reads it differently. But I must not allow myself to be
drawn into speaking of the moral crusades directed against other
writers; the task is tempting, and I hope it will be undertaken one of
these days.
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