And this is the paradox in Keating’s relations to men: basically, he is completely dependent upon them; thus he is forced to demand a great deal from them; selfless in spirit, he makes other men his victims, he sacrifices them to his own emptiness, to fill his own void. His success does not depend upon the intrinsic value of his own work; his success is to be obtained
through and from other men;
thus he has to fight men, to cheat them, to force one man after another from a position he desires; he has nothing to fight with, save his ability to outwit and outmaneuver other men; each man is his natural enemy. The spiritual independence of another man is the greatest threat to him; being only a mirror that reflects others, he expects others to be only a mirror for him. A man unconcerned with the person of Peter Keating is an enemy; for within that man, Peter Keating is dead; and Peter Keating has no life save within other people’s minds. To exist he must force the consciousness of his existence upon them. He spends his life cultivating friendships—and he is no friend to anyone. Spiritually enslaved, he carries the principle of slavery to all those around him. He is a man without a soul, who has never felt the need of a soul. When he begins to understand the truth about himself—it is too late.
Gail Wynand,
the third man of the novel, is a man who sold his soul. Independent in spirit, with a potentiality for greatness such as Roark‘s, he chooses deliberately to betray his own self. Fundamentally, he does not need other men in that deep, primary, personal sense in which Keating needs them. But instead of keeping himself apart spiritually, Wynand chooses to seek power over men. His conception of greatness is not in following other men, not in being admired by them, like Keating, but in ruling them.
A man of brilliant intellect, of great daring and imagination, starting life from the abject poverty of a slum childhood, he rises to become a great publisher, head of a journalistic empire. He achieves his success by giving people what they want; nothing is too low or too sensational for his newspapers to exploit; he plays upon men’s worst instincts; he develops an unerring sense of public opinion, and the policy of his newspapers is to follow it faithfully. He does not allow himself the luxury ever to express an editorial judgment of his own; his editorials say what he knows his readers want him to say. The difference between him and Keating on this point is that Keating would have accepted, in his own mind, this judgment of his readers as final and valid; Wynand does not accept it; Wynand despises his readers and all humanity; but Wynand thinks that power over men is his best defense against them. His only relief from men is his love for great art, which he understands and appreciates.
In his innermost consciousness, Wynand is free; but he does not possess Roark’s single-minded consistency; he does not carry his spiritual reality into action; Roark is too selfish to feel the need of imposing himself upon others in any way; Wynand is selfless enough to need power. In acquiring power over others, he loses his own freedom; he has no outlet for his own convictions, no way to translate them into reality. Potentially a prime-mover like Roark, i.e., a man who thinks and feels through his own mind, he denies himself the possibility of an idea to follow. But the need of such an ideal is deep within him. And this need, frustrated, turns into an active hatred of all ideals. Keating does not understand the conception of idealism; Wynand understands it too well. The more successful he becomes in his career, the greater his impulse to destroy in others that which he himself has missed, that which he has sacrificed to them. The only personal pleasure he finds in life is a sadistic delight in breaking the integrity of other men. He will pay any price to force a writer of radical sympathies into becoming a champion of conservatism, or vice versa. The commercial careerist holds no interest for him. It is only men in whom he senses a sincere, profound devotion to their convictions that he chooses for his victims. He wrecks lives on his way, he drives some to suicide. He believes that he is merely proving to himself the triviality of all human idealism. He believes that he is prompted by contempt for human integrity. He cannot allow himself to realize that he is prompted by a great love of integrity, that he tries to destroy it in order to prove to himself that it does not exist, that he has not missed much—knowing only too well that it does exist and that he has missed more than he dares admit to himself.
He has never allowed himself a complete, profound, personal desire of his own. But, at the climax of his life, an overwhelming personal issue forces him to put his power over men to an actual test. He attempts, for once, to sway the public opinion which he thought he controlled. He attempts to use his newspapers to champion an unpopular cause crucially important to him. He finds himself helpless. Public opinion will not follow him. Men are deaf to his commands and to his pleas—men who have never been given cause to respect him. He sees, for the first time, that he has no power over men, but has surrendered himself into their power instead, that he does not rule, but is ruled, that he has been a figure-head sitting on a throne which they had created and which he could occupy only so long as he pleased them, that he is the creation of his own slaves, that he is the puppet and they hold the strings, that his life and his power have been second-hand. And the monster he helped to feed is now unleashed against him: the voice of other men, the pressure of public opinion force him to betray his own cause, to reverse the policy of his papers in obedience to the general desire and against his first and only ideal.
Ellsworth M.
Toohey,
the fourth man, is a creature of perfection in his own kind, just as Roark is a creature of perfection in his—and the complete antithesis of Roark. Toohey is successful at the evil of which Keating and Wynand are victims. Toohey is the paragon of spiritual “second-handedness.”
Basically, Toohey is non-creative. He has nothing of his own to offer—to himself or to others. His evil lies in [the fact] that he knows it, accepts it and glories in it. He begins where Keating and Wynand ended. Keating sought superiority after his own fashion; he wished for good, even though his conception of good was false; when he discovered the basic lie of his life, when he saw that he had been neither superior nor good—the discovery brought him spiritual ruin. Wynand sought power as a means of independence; when he discovered the true nature of his power—he was ended spiritually. Toohey began by seeing and accepting what these two could not accept; he knew himself to be incapable of intrinsic superiority or independence; he made of this his virtue; he dedicated himself to the destruction of all superiority and all independence. He accepted consciously the negation of all values, of all ideals, of all that is high and noble in man—with a full realization of the meaning of such values. Not in frustrated longing for an ideal, but in cold and deliberate hatred of all integrity. He chose to be consciously evil. He is the great Nihilist of the spirit.
Toohey understands human greatness and the motive-power of human greatness better than any other man in the story. Roark is great, but too unself conscious to analyze or understand it—for a long time. Keating and Wynand seek greatness blindly. Toohey knows its roots. He understands fully the basic antithesis, the two principles fighting within human consciousness—the individual and the collective, the one and the many, the “I” and the “They.” He knows that the source of all greatness, of all that is free, creative, forward-moving, and—ultimately—benevolent to all men is a man’s basic independence of spirit, his integrity of thought untouched, fundamentally, by any concern for others. He knows that the source of all evil and all sorrow, of all frustration and all lies is the collective sense, the intrusion of others into the basic motives of a man. And since he is dedicated to the destruction of greatness, he becomes the enemy of the individual and the great champion of collectivism.
Toohey knows that each man must be judged by what he has achieved through the creative labor of his own mind, not by what he has or has not done for others; that his creation is the greatest gift he can bring to others, such as the creations of all great thinkers, artists, and scientists, creations made possible not because of their brothers, but in spite of the opposition of their brothers, made possible only by the profoundly selfish integrity of the spirit of the great creators. Toohey knows that a man’s achievement is the only measure of his value and of his superiority. And Toohey knows that in such a competition he has no chance at superiority; he is basically sterile; he has no great passion for anything and no great interest in anything save other men. Thus he decides not to attempt to seek superiority, but to do better: to destroy its very conception. He cannot rise. He can pull others down. He cannot reach the heights. He can raze them. Equality becomes his greatest passion.
His life program is simple: to destroy men by tying them to one another; to preach self-sacrifice, self-denial, self-abasement; to preach the spiritual slavery of each man to all other men; to fight the great creator and liberator—Man’s Ego. Toohey is famous as “The Humanitarian.”
Any form of personal happiness is a form of freedom. To destroy men he must destroy their joy in living; to destroy their joy in living he must destroy all that is personally dear and important to them. Such is his first instinct in relation to any human being he meets. He wrecks the life of his niece, Catherine, by destroying the only important thing of her existence—her love for Peter Keating. He destroys Keating by killing such self-respect as Keating did possess. He attempts to destroy Dominique Francon, the heroine of the story (more about her later), by encouraging her perverse desire to resist all desires. He has no personal concern for Keating, Catherine, or Dominique; it is only their inner selves which he wishes to annihilate. Men who are happy live for themselves; Toohey cannot allow men to live for themselves; unhappy men turn to others for consolation, attempt to fill the emptiness of their failure by existing for the sake of others; and this is the state to which Toohey wishes them reduced. “Let all live for all. Let all sacrifice and none profit. Let all suffer and none enjoy. Let progress stop. Let all stagnate. There is equality in stagnation.” Such is Toohey’s secret motto. And it is the more frightening since he truly seeks nothing for himself. He does not wish to subjugate men to his own will. He wishes to subjugate all to the will of all. Which means—to the will of none. Universal slavery—without even the dignity of a master. Slavery to slavery. A great circle and an utter equality. Such is Ellsworth M. Toohey.
His chief weapon is mockery. A great, all-embracing nihilistic ridicule. Allow nothing to remain sacred in a man’s soul. Earnestness towards any conception whatever, the mere conception of earnestness itself, is the base of reverence. Allow nothing to be important to a man’s spirit. Laugh it out of existence. Laughter, not as joy, but as destruction. Fight ideals, not by denial, but by internal corruption. Toohey is wiser than Wynand; Wynand tried to destroy integrity by crude force from without, which merely tore that integrity, intact, out of a man’s soul. Toohey is subtler and deadlier: he makes integrity rot slowly within that soul. He uses a man’s integrity against itself; he makes it become loyalty to principles basically destructive of all integrity. He destroys idealism in men, not by denying it, not by preaching the vanity of all ideals, but in precisely the opposite manner: by professing the great value and glory of idealism in men and then directing their idealism toward objects basically destructive of all ideals. Thus, he holds out unselfishness as the supreme goal of the spirit; thus he holds out brother-love as the sublime virtue. He does not deny the conception of superiority among men, but destroys it by glorifying the worthless as superior. Thus, fully recognizing the genius of Roark, he holds him up to ridicule; fully recognizing the mediocrity of Keating, he hails him as a great architect. An art critic by profession, Toohey manages to reach into every field of creative endeavor; and in every field he enshrines mediocrity—in order to destroy all shrines. Keating in architecture; Lois Cook in literature—a phony “modernist” who writes “words on words,” “words above meaning” and thus destroys both words and meaning; in painting—a creator of the pork-chop-fur-lined-tea-cup school; and so on. Do not fight human achievement in the open. Destroy it from within. Destroy by internal corruption. Destroy the rare, the difficult, the exceptional, the original by substituting standards of achievement open to the abilities of any and all. That, also, is Ellsworth M. Toohey. That he is a Communist in his political convictions is only incidental; he proclaims that he fights Rockefeller and Morgan; he really fights Shakespeare and Beethoven.
Thus the four men of the story are: Howard Roark, who is great and knows it; Peter Keating, who could not be great and does not know it; Gail Wynand, who could have been; and Ellsworth M. Toohey, who could never be and knows it.
A few words about Dominique Francon and about the general course of the story.
Dominique’s basic passion is a fierce love of independence. But it is an independence that turns upon itself—in protest against the world she sees around her. Capable of great desire, she makes it her aim to desire nothing. Actually a saint, in that her subconscious demand is perfection—from herself and from all others—she finds a vicious delight in lowering herself to whatever action she considers most contemptible; since she cannot find perfection, she prefers its opposite extreme to compromise. But such conscious self-degradation is only her manner of a quest for the sublime. Her redemption is in that she never accepts spiritually the vile depths to which she descends; she defies the depths by descending.
It is quite obviously inevitable that she should love Roark and that her love for him should be final, complete and immediate. It is a love too great to be endured in acceptance; she can bear it only by denying, by resisting it, by degrading it, by trying to destroy it. Like most women, and to a greater degree than most, she is a masochist and she wishes for the happiness of suffering at Roark’s hands. Sexually, Roark has a great deal of the sadist, and he finds pleasure in breaking her will and her defiance. Yet he loves her, and this love is the only passion for another human being in his whole life. And her love for him is essentially worship, it becomes her religion, it becomes her reconciliation with life, with humanity and with herself—but not until many years later.