The rallying cry of the great writers of the last century was "emancipation." Goethe, Heine and Ibsen alike professed as their task the emancipation of man; Nietzsche, their successor, elevated the freed man, the Superman, into an ideal, in the pursuit of which it was necessary meantime that men should discipline themselves. The later moderns, our own contemporaries, have belittled this freedom, seeing in it nothing but a negation, the freedom _from_ some one thing or another. But Ibsen and Heine, these men of true genius, who believed most sincerely that they were "brave soldiers in the war of the liberation of humanity" did not perhaps waste their powers in battling for a thing so trivial! It is barely possible that they meant by emancipation something much more profound; something spiritual and positive; indeed, nothing less than an enhancement of the powers of man! Certainly both poets looked forward to new "developments" of man: Heine with his "happier and more perfect generations, begot in free and voluntary embraces, blossoming forth in a religion of joy"; Ibsen with his perplexed figures painfully "working their way out to Freedom." It was the task of us in this generation, who should have been the heirs of this tradition, but are not, to supply the commentary to this noble vision, to carry forward this religion of hope further and further. But the _cult_ of modernity has itself prevented this; the latest theory has always seized us and exacted our belief for its hour; the present has invariably triumphed; and we have discarded the great work of last century before we have understood it. Heine has been seized mainly by the decadents; his healthy and noble sensuousness, his desire to restore the harmony between the senses and the soul, _as a means_ towards the emancipation of man, and as nothing else, has been perverted by them into worship of the senses for their own sake--a thing which to Heine would have seemed despicable. Ibsen has fallen among the realists and propagandists; all the spiritual value of his work has for this age been lost--and what a loss!--his battle to deliver man from his weakness and inward slavery has been reduced --it is no exaggeration--to a battle to deliver the women of the middle classes from their husbands. The old story of emanation has been again repeated, with the distinction that here there is no trace left of the original source except negative ones! Well, we have to turn back again, our task, second to none in grandeur, before which we may well feel abashed, is still the same as that of Goethe, Ibsen and Nietzsche, the task of emancipation. To restore dignity to literature, indeed, it would be necessary to create such a task if it did not already exist. 93 _Genealogy of the Moderns_