modern feminism would provoke romantic protests from Schopenhauer
himself, or even Strindberg. As a matter of fact I hardly noticed
Schopenhauer's disparagements of women when they came under my
notice later on, so thoroughly had Mr Bax familiarized me with
the homoist attitude, and forced me to recognize the extent to
which public opinion, and consequently legislation and
jurisprudence, is corrupted by feminist sentiment.

But Mr Bax's essays were not confined to the Feminist question.
He was a ruthless critic of current morality. Other writers have
gained sympathy for dramatic criminals by eliciting the alleged
"soul of goodness in things evil"; but Mr Bax would propound some
quite undramatic and apparently shabby violation of our
commercial law and morality, and not merely defend it with the
most disconcerting ingenuity, but actually prove it to be a
positive duty that nothing but the certainty of police
persecution should prevent every right-minded man from at once
doing on principle. The Socialists were naturally shocked, being
for the most part morbidly moral people; but at all events they
were saved later on from the delusion that nobody but Nietzsche
had ever challenged our mercanto-Christian morality. I first
heard the name of Nietzsche from a German mathematician, Miss
Borchardt, who had read my Quintessence of Ibsenism, and told me
that she saw what I had been reading: namely, Nietzsche's
Jenseits von Gut and Bose. Which I protest I had never seen, and
could not have read with any comfort, for want of the necessary
German, if I had seen it.

Nietzsche, like Schopenhauer, is the victim in England of a
single much quoted sentence containing the phrase "big blonde