Here, it is obvious, the process of intellectual development takes
colour from the Sklavenmoral, and is, in a sense, a product of it. The
Jews, as Nietzsche has demonstrated, got their unusual intelligence by
the same process; a contrary process is working in the case of the
English and the Americans, and has begun to show itself in the case of
the French and Germans. The sum of feminine wisdom that I have just
mentioned—the body of feminine devices and competences that is handed
down from generation to generation of women—is, in fact, made up very
largely of doctrines and expedients that infallibly appear to the
average sentimental man, helpless as he is before them, as cynical and
immoral. He commonly puts this aversion into the theory that women have
no sense of honour. The criticism, of course, is characteristically
banal. Honour is a concept too tangled to be analyzed here, but it may
be sufficient to point out that it is predicated upon a feeling of
absolute security, and that, in that capital conflict between man and
woman out of which rises most of man’s complaint of its absence—to wit,
the conflict culminating in marriage, already described—the security of
the woman is not something that is in actual being, but something that
she is striving with all arms to attain. In such a conflict it must be
manifest that honor can have no place. An animal fighting for its very
existence uses all possible means of offence and defence, however foul.
Even man, for all his boasting about honor, seldom displays it when he
has anything of the first value at hazard. He is honorable, perhaps, in
gambling, for gambling is a mere vice, but it is quite unusual for him
to be honorable in business, for business is bread and butter. He is
honorable (so long as the stake is trivial) in his sports, but he
seldom permits honor to interfere with his perjuries in a lawsuit, or
with hitting below the belt in any other sort of combat that is in
earnest. The history of all his wars is a history of mutual allegations
of dishonorable practices, and such allegations are nearly always well
grounded. The best imitation of honor that he ever actually achieves in
them is a highly self-conscious sentimentality which prompts him to be
humane to the opponent who has been wounded, or disarmed, or otherwise
made innocuous. Even here his so-called honor is little more than a
form of playacting, both maudlin and dishonest. In the actual
death-struggle he invariably bites.
Perhaps one of the chief charms of woman lies precisely in the fact
that they are dishonorable, i.e., that they are relatively uncivilized.
In the midst of all the puerile repressions and inhibitions that hedge
them round, they continue to show a gipsy spirit. No genuine woman ever
gives a hoot for law if law happens to stand in the way of her private
interest. She is essentially an outlaw, a rebel, what H. G. Wells calls
a nomad. The boons of civilization are so noisily cried up by
sentimentalists that we are all apt to overlook its disadvantages.
Intrinsically, it is a mere device for regimenting men. Its perfect
symbol is the goose-step. The most civilized man is simply that man who
has been most successful in caging and harnessing his honest and
natural instincts-that is, the man who has done most cruel violence to
his own ego in the interest of the commonweal. The value of this
commonweal is always overestimated. What is it at bottom? Simply the
greatest good to the greatest number—of petty rogues, ignoramuses and
poltroons.
The capacity for submitting to and prospering comfortably under this
cheese-monger’s civilization is far more marked in men than in women,
and far more in inferior men than in men of the higher categories. It
must be obvious to even so pathetic an ass as a university professor of
history that very few of the genuinely first-rate men of the race have
been, wholly civilized, in the sense that the term is employed in
newspapers and in the pulpit. Think of Caesar, Bonaparte, Luther,
Frederick the Great, Cromwell, Barbarossa, Innocent III, Bolivar,
Hannibal, Alexander, and to come down to our own time, Grant, Stonewall
Jackson, Bismarck, Wagner, Garibaldi and Cecil Rhodes.