The philosophically fertile element in the original project of
Siegfried's Death was the conception of Siegfried himself as a type of
the healthy man raised to perfect confidence in his own impulses by
an intense and joyous vitality which is above fear, sickliness of
conscience, malice, and the makeshifts and moral crutches of law and
order which accompany them. Such a character appears extraordinarily
fascinating and exhilarating to our guilty and conscience-ridden
generations, however little they may understand him. The world has
always delighted in the man who is delivered from conscience. From Punch
and Don Juan down to Robert Macaire, Jeremy Diddler and the pantomime
clown, he has always drawn large audiences; but hitherto he has been
decorously given to the devil at the end. Indeed eternal punishment is
sometimes deemed too high a compliment to his nature. When the late Lord
Lytton, in his Strange Story, introduced a character personifying the
joyousness of intense vitality, he felt bound to deny him the immortal
soul which was at that time conceded even to the humblest characters in
fiction, and to accept mischievousness, cruelty, and utter incapacity
for sympathy as the inevitable consequence of his magnificent bodily and
mental health.
In short, though men felt all the charm of abounding life and
abandonment to its impulses, they dared not, in their deep
self-mistrust, conceive it otherwise than as a force making for
evil--one which must lead to universal ruin unless checked and literally
mortified by self-renunciation in obedience to superhuman guidance, or
at least to some reasoned system of morals. When it became apparent to
the cleverest of them that no such superhuman guidance existed, and
that their secularist systems had all the fictitiousness of "revelation"
without its poetry, there was no escaping the conclusion that all the
good that man had done must be put down to his arbitrary will as well as
all the evil he had done; and it was also obvious that if progress were
a reality, his beneficent impulses must be gaining on his destructive
ones. It was under the influence of these ideas that we began to hear
about the joy of life where we had formerly heard about the grace of God
or the Age of Reason, and that the boldest spirits began to raise the
question whether churches and laws and the like were not doing a great
deal more harm than good by their action in limiting the freedom of the
human will. Four hundred years ago, when belief in God and in revelation
was general throughout Europe, a similar wave of thought led the
strongest-hearted peoples to affirm that every man's private judgment
was a more trustworthy interpreter of God and revelation than the
Church. This was called Protestantism; and though the Protestants were
not strong enough for their creed, and soon set up a Church of their
own, yet the movement, on the whole, has justified the direction it
took. Nowadays the supernatural element in Protestantism has perished;
and if every man's private judgment is still to be justified as the most
trustworthy interpreter of the will of Humanity (which is not a
more extreme proposition than the old one about the will of God)
Protestantism must take a fresh step in advance, and become Anarchism.
Which it has accordingly done, Anarchism being one of the notable new
creeds of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The weak place which experience finds out in the Anarchist theory is
its reliance on the progress already achieved by "Man." There is no such
thing as Man in the world: what we have to deal with is a multitude of
men, some of them great rascals, some of them great statesmen, others
both, with a vast majority capable of managing their personal affairs,
but not of comprehending social organization, or grappling with the
problems created by their association in enormous numbers. If "Man"
means this majority, then "Man" has made no progress: he has, on
the contrary, resisted it. He will not even pay the cost of existing
institutions: the requisite money has to be filched from him by
"indirect taxation." Such people, like Wagner's giants, must be
governed by laws; and their assent to such government must be secured
by deliberately filling them with prejudices and practicing on their
imaginations by pageantry and artificial eminences and dignities.
The government is of course established by the few who are capable of
government, though its mechanism once complete, it may be, and generally
is, carried on unintelligently by people who are incapable of it the
capable people repairing it from time to time when it gets too far
behind the continuous advance or decay of civilization. All these
capable people are thus in the position of Wotan, forced to maintain as
sacred, and themselves submit to, laws which they privately know to be
obsolescent makeshifts, and to affect the deepest veneration for creeds
and ideals which they ridicule among themselves with cynical scepticism.
No individual Siegfried can rescue them from this bondage and hypocrisy;
in fact, the individual Siegfried has come often enough, only to find
himself confronted with the alternative of governing those who are not
Siegfrieds or risking destruction at their hands. And this dilemma will
persist until Wotan's inspiration comes to our governors, and they see
that their business is not the devising of laws and institutions to prop
up the weaknesses of mobs and secure the survival of the unfittest, but
the breeding of men whose wills and intelligences may be depended on to
produce spontaneously the social well-being our clumsy laws now aim at
and miss. The majority of men at present in Europe have no business
to be alive; and no serious progress will be made until we address
ourselves earnestly and scientifically to the task of producing
trustworthy human material for society. In short, it is necessary to
breed a race of men in whom the life-giving impulses predominate, before
the New Protestantism becomes politically practicable. [*]
* The necessity for breeding the governing class from a
selected stock has always been recognized by Aristocrats,
however erroneous their methods of selection. We have
changed our system from Aristocracy to Democracy without
considering that we were at the same time changing, as
regards our governing class, from Selection to Promiscuity.
Those who have taken a practical part in modern politics
best know how farcical the result is.
The most inevitable dramatic conception, then, of the nineteenth
century, is that of a perfectly naive hero upsetting religion, law and
order in all directions, and establishing in their place the unfettered
action of Humanity doing exactly what it likes, and producing order
instead of confusion thereby because it likes to do what is necessary
for the good of the race. This conception, already incipient in Adam
Smith's Wealth of Nations, was certain at last to reach some great
artist, and be embodied by him in a masterpiece. It was also certain
that if that master happened to be a German, he should take delight
in describing his hero as the Freewiller of Necessity, thereby beyond
measure exasperating Englishmen with a congenital incapacity for
metaphysics.