In his views on matters of fact Nietzsche, as becomes the naïve
egotist, was quite irresponsible. If he said the course of history
repeated itself in cycles, it was because the idea pleased him; it
seemed a symbol of self-approval on the world's part. If he hailed the
advent of a race of men superior to ourselves and of stronger fibre, it
was because human life as it is, and especially his own life, repelled
him. He was sensitive and, therefore, censorious. He gazed about him,
he gazed at himself, he remembered the disappointing frailties and
pomposity of the great man, Wagner, whom he had once idolised. His
optimism for the moment yielded to his sincerity. He would sooner
abolish than condone such a world, and he fled to some solitary
hillside by the sea, saying to himself that man was a creature to be
superseded.
Dissatisfaction with the actual is what usually leads people to frame
ideals at all, or at least to hold them fast; but such a negative
motive leaves the ideal vague and without consistency. If we could
suddenly have our will, we should very likely find the result trivial
or horrible. So the superman of [Pg 137] Nietzsche might prove, if
by magic he could be realised. To frame solid ideals, which would,
in fact, be better than actual things, is not granted to the merely
irritable poet; it is granted only to the master-workman, to the
modeller of some given substance to some given use--things which
define his aspiration, and separate what is relevant and glorious in
his dreams from that large part of them which is merely ignorant and
peevish. It was not for Nietzsche to be an artist in morals and to
institute anything coherent, even in idea.
The superman of Nietzsche is rendered the more chimerical by the
fact that he must contradict not only the common man of the present
but also the superior men, the half-superhuman men, of the past. To
transcend humanity is no new ambition; that has always been the effort
of Indian and Christian religious discipline and of Stoic philosophy.
But this spiritual superiority, like that of artists and poets, has
come of abstraction; a superiority to life, in that these minds were
engrossed in the picture or lesson of life rather than in living; and
if they powerfully affected the world, as they sometimes did, it was
by bringing down into it something supermundane, the arresting touch
of an ulterior wisdom. Nietzsche, on the contrary, even more than most
modern philosophers, loved mere life with the pathetic intensity
of [Pg 138] the wounded beast; his superman must not rise above our
common condition by his purely spiritual resources, or by laying up
his treasure in any sort of heaven. He must be not a superior man but
a kind of physiological superman, a griffin in soul, if not in body,
who instead of labouring hands and religious faith should have eagle's
wings and the claws of a lion. His powers should be superior to ours
by resembling those of fiercer and wilder animals. The things that
make a man tame--Nietzsche was a retired professor living in a
boarding-house--must be changed into their opposites. But man
has been tamed by agriculture, material arts, children, experience;
therefore these things are to be far from the superman. If he must
resemble somebody, it will be rather the _condottieri_ of the
renaissance or the princes and courtiers of the seventeenth century;
Cæsar Borgia is the supreme instance. He must have a splendid presence
and address, gallantry, contempt for convention, loyalty to no country,
no woman, and no idea, but always a buoyant and lordly assertion of
instinct and of self. In the helter-skelter of his irritable genius,
Nietzsche jumbled together the ferocity of solitary beasts, the
indifference and _hauteur_ of patricians, and the antics of revellers,
and out of that mixture he hoped to evoke the rulers of the coming age.
[Pg 139] How could so fantastic an ideal impose on a keen satirist
like Nietzsche and a sincere lover of excellence? Because true human
excellence seemed to him hostile to life, and he felt--this was
his strong and sane side, his lien on the future--that life must
be accepted as it is or may become, and false beliefs, hollow demands,
and hypocritical, forced virtues must be abandoned. This new wisdom
was that which Goethe, too, had felt and practised; and of all masters
of life Goethe was the one whom Nietzsche could best understand. But a
master of life, without being in the least hostile to life, since he
fulfils it, nevertheless uses life for ends which transcend it. Even
Goethe, omnivorous and bland as he was, transcended life in depicting
and judging and blessing it. The saints and the true philosophers have
naturally emphasised more this renunciation of egotism: they have seen
all things in the light of eternity--that is, as they are in
truth--and have consequently felt a reasonable contempt for mere
living and mere dying; and in that precisely lies moral greatness.
Here Nietzsche could not follow; rationality chilled him; he craved
vehemence.
How life can be fulfilled and made beautiful by reason was never better
shown than by the Greeks, both by precept and example. Nietzsche in his
youth was a professor of Greek literature: one would have [Pg 140]
expected his superman to be a sort of Greek hero. Something of the
Dorian harshness in beauty, something of the Pindaric high-born and
silent victor may have been fused into Nietzsche's ideal; certainly
Bacchic freedom and ardour were to enter in. But on the whole it
is remarkable how little he learned from the Greeks, no modesty or
reverence, no joy in order and in loveliness, no sense for friendship,
none for the sanctity of places and institutions. He repeated the
paradoxes of some of their sophists, without remembering how their
wise men had refuted them. For example, he gave a new name and a new
prominence to the distinction between what he called the Dionysiac
and the Apollonian elements in Greek genius. He saw how false was
that whitewashed notion of the Greek mind which young ladies derived
from sketching a plaster cast of the Apollo Belvidere.[1] He saw that
a demonic force, as the generation of Goethe called it, underlay
everything; what he did not see was that this demonic force was under
control, which is the secret of the [Pg 141] whole matter. The point
had been thoroughly elucidated by Plato, in the contrast he drew
between inspiration and art. But Plato was rather ironical about
inspiration, and had a high opinion of art; and Nietzsche, with, his
contrary instinct, rushes away without understanding the mind of the
master or the truth of the situation. He thinks he alone has discovered
the divinity of Dionysus and of the Muses, which Plato took as a matter
of course but would not venerate superstitiously. Inspiration, like
will, is a force without which reason can do nothing. Inspiration must
be presupposed; but in itself it can do nothing good unless it is in
harmony with reason, or is brought into harmony with it. This two-edged
wisdom that makes impulse the stuff of life and reason its criterion,
is, of course, lost on Nietzsche, and with it the whole marvel of Greek
genius. There is nothing exceptional in being alive and impulsive; any
savage can run wild and be frenzied and enact histrionic passions: the
virtue of the Greeks lay in the exquisite firmness with which they
banked their fires without extinguishing them, so that their life
remained human (indeed, remained infra-human, like that of Nietzsche's
superman) and yet became beautiful: they were severe and fond of
maxims, on a basis of universal tolerance; they governed themselves
rationally, with a careful freedom, while well aware [Pg 142] that
nature and their own bosoms were full of gods, all of whom must be
reverenced.
After all, this defect in appreciation is inseparable from the
transcendental pose. The ancients, like everything else, never seem to
the egotist a reality co-ordinate with himself, from which he might
still have something to learn. They are only so much "content" for his
self-consciousness, so much matter for his thought to transcend. They
can contain nothing for him but the part of his outgrown self which he
deigns to identify with them. His mind must always envelop them and be
the larger thing. No wonder that in this school learning is wasted for
the purposes of moral education. Whoever has seen the learned egotist
flies at his approach. History in his hands is a demonstration of his
philosophy. Science is a quarry of proofs for his hobbies. If we do
not agree with him we are not merely mistaken (every philosopher tells
us that), but we are false to ourselves and ignorant of our ideal
significance. His ego gives us our place in the world. He informs us
of what we mean, whatever we may say; and he raises our opinions, as
he might his food, to a higher unity in his own person. He is priest
in every temple. He approaches a picture-gallery or a foreign religion
in a dictatorial spirit, with his _a priori_ categories ready on his
lips; pedantry and vanity speak in his [Pg 143] every gesture, and the
lesson of nothing can reach his heart.
No, neither the philosophy inherited by Nietzsche nor his wayward
imagination was fit to suggest to him a nobler race of men. On the
contrary, they shut him off from comprehension of the best men that
have existed. Like the utopias or ideals of many other satirists and
minor philosophers, the superman is not a possibility, it is only a
protest. Our society is outworn, but hard to renew; the emancipated
individual needs to master himself. In what spirit or to what end
he will do so, we do not know, and Nietzsche cannot tell us. He
is the jester, to whom all incoherences are forgiven, because all
indiscretions are allowed. His mind is undisciplined, and his tongue
outrageous, but he is at bottom the friend of our conscience, and full
of shrewd wit and tender wisps of intuition. Behind his "gay wisdom"
and trivial rhymes lies a great anguish. His intellect is lost in a
chaos. His heart denies itself the relief of tears and can vent itself
only in forced laughter and mock hopes that gladden nobody, least of
all himself.
[1] I was about to say: How false was the notion of Winkelmann about
the grandeur and repose of the Greek spirit. But Winkelmann, if his
sense for the chained monsters in the Greek soul was inadequate, was
at least in real sympathy with what had inspired Greek sculpture, love
and knowledge of the human body in the life, made gentle by discipline
and kept strong by training. For that reason Winkelmann seems hardly a
German: his learning was deficient and his heart was humble. He did
not patronise the ancients, he believed in them.
[Pg 144] CHAPTER XIV