philosophy no doubt is admissible. It is idle to say that he
contradicted himself at twenty turns, and that especially he hated
the professors and raked them with the shrapnel of his irony. It is
the way of supermen to hate other supermen. It is the badge of the
tribe. Of all his writings Germany took and absorbed just as much as
fitted in with her mood of domination and Empire. Hauptmann--another
of the flattered renegades--told us the other day that if you open
the knapsack of a German soldier you will probably find in it a copy
of _Thus Spake Zarathustra_. Nietzsche was angry with the professors
only because they preferred obscure, and he preferred lucid brutality.
Not since Lucifer was so much light used to dark ends. Not since Diana
was great in Ephesus were such beautiful images cast or carven in the
service of a false worship. He made German dance, as before him, only
Heine had done.
“I have the idea,” he wrote, “that with _Zarathustra_ I have brought
the German language to its point of perfection.”
The boast is probably true. The devil was always a good stylist, and it
is not inappropriate that when his gospel is at its worst, his prose
should be at its best. We may charitably assume that those whom he led
off the plain paths of life into his foul and blood-bathed jungles,
were taken captive, not by his message, but by his music.
What then was his creed, or rather his vision? For he was the
mystagogue of Prussianism, who chanted but never explained. As
in the case of Bismarck, I propose to exclude as far as possible
anything written _ad hoc_, or since the war. My first witness is
Alfred Fouillée, the doyen of French philosophy, Whose _Nietzsche et
l’Immoralisme_ appeared in 1902 (the unfamiliarity of Fouillée’s name
is a biting satire on our leaders of thought)--
“If the Vandals had read a course in Hegelian metaphysics, they would
have held the same language as Nietzsche.”
The popular instinct which named the Prussians the Huns was thus long
anticipated by the greatest Platonist in Europe.
* * * * *
To Nietzsche the whole motive behind life is a sort of metaphysical
symbol which he calls the Will-to-Power. The whole task of life is
to impose your power on others _an andern Macht auslassen_. With what
aim? To evolve the Superman. But in this struggle of all against all
we must, in a world divided into nations and classes, struggle for the
victory of some nation and some fashion of government. For Prussia, and
for an aristocracy more scientifically cruel than the world has ever
known. And what is the first step towards this Elysium? War, and again
war. War, with the formula of the Assassins for its formula--
“Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”
* * * * *
It is idle to remind us that Nietzsche touched life at other points,
and that in his flaming incoherence you will find contradictions of
this vision. For it was this vision of Attila, and no other, that
conquered the imagination of Prussia. She desired all Europe for an
Empire, and after that the seas, and at last the world. It needed but
one further step in this mysticism of the madhouse to decree divine
honours to the Kaiser.
Now let Nietzsche speak for himself. Thus spake Zarathustra on the
morality of war--
“You shall love peace as a means to new wars, and a short peace better
than a long....
“I do not counsel you labour, I do not counsel you peace, but victory.
Let your labour be a conflict, and your peace a victory....
“It was said of old that a good cause sanctifies war; but I say to you
that a good war sanctifies any cause.”
As to what he meant by a “good” war he leaves us in no doubt. He meant
simply a war in which a victorious Prussia would slay and burn without
measure and without pity.
“My brothers, I place above you this new Table of the Law: Be hard!”
* * * * *
Zarathustra washes, with shame, his hands, because they have aided
someone who was suffering. “Nay, I labour to cleanse my very soul” of
the sin of pity, he adds.
“I dream,” he cries, “of an association of men who would be whole and
complete, who would know no compromise, and who would give themselves
the name of destroyers....”
In memorial verses on the death of a friend, killed in France in 1870,
he writes--
“Even in the hour of death he ordered men, and he ordered them to
destroy.”
The three cardinal virtues of the warrior are “pleasure, pride and the
instinct of domination.”
“If I am convinced”--he means, plainly, “Since I am convinced”--he
writes, “that harshness, cruelty, trickery, audacity, and the mood of
battle tend to augment the vitality of man, I shall say Yes! to evil,
and sin....”
And lest any of his defenders should seek to explain away this very
coherent doctrine as “poetry,” let it be remembered that this was a man
who had seen war, much of the war of 1870. During its actual progress
he wrote deliberately a Satanic pæan from which he never receded--
“On the one hand they (the Democrats) conjure up systems of European
equilibrium; on the other hand, they do their best to deprive absolute
sovereigns of the right to declare war.... They feel it incumbent on
them to weaken the monarchical instinct of the masses, and do weaken it
by propagating amongst them the liberal and optimistic conception of
the world which has its roots in the doctrines of French rationalism
and the Revolution; that is, in a philosophy altogether foreign to the
German spirit, a Latin platitude, devoid of any metaphysical meaning.”
We “must have war, and war again.”
“It will not, therefore, be thought that I do ill when I raise here
the pæan of war. The resonance of its silver bow is terrible. It comes
to us sombre as night; nevertheless, Apollo accompanies, Apollo the
rightful leader of states, the god who purifies them.... Let us say it
then; war is necessary to the state, as the slave is to society.”
* * * * *
This transition leads us without a break on to some amiable views
regarding the internal organization of states. To Nietzsche the mass of
humanity is a sweating negligibility--
“The misery of those who live by labour must be made yet more rigorous,
in order that a very few Olympian men may create a world of art.”
(Unnecessary to say that the son of the Pastor of Naumburg was to have
a life membership of Olympus.) “At their expense, by the artifice of
unpaid labour, the privileged classes should be relieved from the
struggle for life, and given such new conditions that they can create,
and satisfy a new order of needs.... And if it is true to say that
the Greeks were destroyed by slavery, this other affirmation is most
certainly even truer; for lack of slavery, we are perishing.”
The reader can but be astonished at the modesty of the slightly
impecunious professor from Basel. Why did he not call himself a god?
Why a mere superman?
On the subject of God and gods, however, he had views of his own. Just
as Fichte used to say to his philosophical students at a certain point
in the course: “To-morrow, gentlemen, I will proceed to create God!”
so Nietzsche was never tired of repeating: “I have killed God!” His
argument is very simple--
“If there did exist gods, how could I bear not to be a god?
Consequently, there are no gods.”
As to that special mode of worship called Christianity, upon which all
justice, love, pity, and help of our neighbours, is in the tradition of
Europe, immovably based, he is unable to speak with even a colour of
sanity.
“The Christian concept of God--God as the deity of the sick, God as
spider, God as spirit--is one of the most corrupt concepts of God that
have ever been attained on earth.” Christianity and alcohol are “the
two great instruments of corruption.”
That he said, “You are going among women. Do not forget your whip!”
I do not regard as essential to his philosophy. Most men have said
angry things about women at one time or other. But it does happen that
the position of women is more abject in Germany than anywhere else in
Europe. And it does happen that Nietzsche also said--
“For man, happiness lies in the formula, I desire. For woman, in the
formula, he desires.”
And also “man is to be reared for war, woman for the recreation of the
warrior. All the rest is folly.”
Did Hauptmann’s Germans, one wonders, whip out their new knapsack
Bibles and run over this text before they entered Aerschot and Louvain?
In his practical ethics he works out the theory of the Ems telegram and
the Berlin Press Bureau--
“In point of fact it matters greatly to what end one lies, whether one
preserves or destroys by means of falsehood.”
It would be a simple weariness to multiply passages in greater
abundance. They are all of the same texture, for, despite incoherence
and contradictions, they all come from the same centre of corruption,
the Will-to-Power. It is a long-drawn-out Metaphysics of Bullying,
nothing less and nothing more.
One has only to think of the soil into which seed like this was dropped
in order to understand the harvest of desolation that the swords are
now reaping. Think of Prussia, flattered by all the world--even by
Matthew Arnold--into regarding herself as the chosen of the Lord.
Think of the unearned prosperity brought by the French tribute, of the
raw egotism, the coarse insolence bred by it. Think of how the old
Germanic racial chauvinism was nourished by the theories of Gobineau as
freshened by the appalling Chamberlain. Think of how French intellect
has been boycotted in England and America for thirty years, while
troops of translators, critics and publishers ran round canvassing
first-class reputations for fourth-rate German scholars. Think of the
tawdry pretensions of Berlin, of the infinite vulgarity of the Alley
and Column of Victory.
* * * * *
Is it to be wondered at that a creed like Nietzsche’s, let loose
in such a world, has succeeded? Reading it, Krupp feels himself a
veritable knight of the Holy Ghost. Kaiser Wilhelm’s brow grows heavy
with the growing cares of the superman. Buccaneer Bernhardi cries out:
“My lust for blood is philosophised.” The diplomats join in in chorus:
“Remember Bismarck! Since France and England both want peace, let us
either lie or bully them into war!”
Nietzsche said of himself: “I am a fatality!” He was. Three years
before this war was thought of, in attempting to define Nietzscheanism
in an introduction to Halévy’s _Life_, I wrote as opening words: “The
duel between Nietzsche and Civilisation is over....”
I was wrong; it is not over. But between Prussianism and Civilisation
it is that this epical war is joined; there is not room on earth for
the two.
III.--TREITSCHKE AND THE PROFESSORS
I confess that I am weary of these German Professors. Having deposed
God--by stern decree of their theological Press Bureau--they felt
that a gap had been created, and volunteered to fill it. But as a
substitute divinity the Herr Professor falls a little short of perfect
accomplishment. I have sat under or come in contact with a few truly
great men among them, like Windleband of Heidelberg, and Pastor of
Innsbruck. But the Haeckels, the Harnacks, the Euckens, and the
rest mistook their trade when they went in for omniscience. These
drill-sergeants of metaphysics understand everything except reality.
The “fog of war,” of which one had heard so much, was as nothing to the
fog of peace into which they had plunged Germany and Europe.
You must remember the nature of the system of which they are the
mature, show products. In a German university it is unusual for a
student to take a degree. Our own institutions are appalling enough,
in all conscience; but there is, at least, a sort of scheduled,
educational mediocrity to which even athletic demigods must attain.
And there is not the least doubt that, in the intervals of neglecting
their work, our college men do, in the mass, enter by subtle ways into
the mysterious and honourable art of being gentlemen. In a German
university you do not find any uniform, general life on which everybody
can draw. The caste system--on which all Prussia is founded--manifests
itself very soon. Either you clip off your friends’ ears in duels, keep
dogs, abjure learning, and absorb beer for two or three years, or else
you set out to be a Herr Doktor. By steadily accumulating notes, and
grimly avoiding fresh air, you arrive at the moment when you can order
a visiting card with this wizard-title on it. Then, wearing a nimbus
of adulation, you pass on to be a _Privat Dozent_, and ultimately a
Herr Professor. Everybody’s hat is off to you; you meet with no real
criticism or free thrust of thought.
Add to this the fact that German is a singularly difficult language
in which to tell the truth plainly, even if you should desire to do
so. Two or three writers, like Schiller, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche,
have contrived the miracle; but the general impression inflicted on
the Latin mind by German literature is that of inadequately cooked
plum-duff. One understands a great Socialist like Otto Effertz
turning in his third book from German to French with the observation:
“Formerly I wrote in a provincial dialect. I now experiment in a
European language.” A brilliant lady of my acquaintance, who suffered
fools more or less gladly at Marburg and Bonn, is of opinion that
the Prussian reaches his most exquisite moment of lyricism when, at
Christmas or Easter, he ties a bow of blue ribbon on a sausage, and
presents it to his beloved. This is a disputable view; but it does
indicate certain inadequacies in the German apparatus of expression
which really exist.
Imagine, then, your Herr Professor, thus fed on gross flattery,
inducted into the most rigid caste system in Europe, mentally
imprisoned in a language in which it is easier to say Yes! and No!
together to any question than to say either separately: turn him
loose on German history, give him a Kaiser and a Court audience who
demand adulation, give him, further, a set of prosperous bandits like
Frederick the Great and fruitful liars like Bismarck to work on, and
you get Treitschke. I have looked more or less carefully through eight
large volumes of his history and essays. In one sentence you find
jingoism, in the next egotism. For my part, I have been unable to
find much else. I gather from Dr. Max Lenz and other biographers that
this renegade Saxon was at one time or other blind, deaf, and honest.
Whether he was all three simultaneously, or in what permutations
he worked, I do not know, and one is very far from gibing at human
suffering. But when an invalid sets up as a Prophet of Bullydom, when
a feeble creature, saved from collapse only by human affection, goes
about to blaspheme all the intimate sanctities of civilisation, one
feels justified in summoning him to the bar of his own Darwinism. Among
modern nations Prussia has had the strange experience of having a
Gospel of Relentless Force preached to her by invalids and degenerates.
Her metaphysic has been dictated from a hospital ward.
The one thing you find in Treitschke, reverberating through page
after page, is the doctrine of a Chosen People. He used his learning,
which was not inconsiderable, his prestige, and his influence to keep
hammering into Prussia the belief that she was the chosen race, the
seed of the superman, the predestined ruler of Western civilisation.
He preached the ruthless supremacy of the State, and the sacrifice to
military power of all humane activities. He regarded Holland, Belgium,
Denmark, Luxemburg as fragments of Germany that had been temporarily
broken off, and must be recovered. He taught those whom he influenced
to dream of a Vandal Empire, straddled across all Europe from Dunkirk
to Belgrade. Domination, domination, and again domination: that is the
message of Treitschke. Were he alive he would have rejoiced blatantly
at the tearing up of the “scrap of paper” which stood for nothing
except the conscience of Europe and the integrity of Belgium.
I understand that we are to have solemn and careful studies of his
works issued in English. A great deal of his detailed historical
research is probably of high value. But it would be just as well if
critics realised that, for the future, when a German corrupter like
Treitschke is translated, he comes not to judge, but to be judged. He
preached the Gospel of the Devil, the gospel of domination, cruelty,
and planned barbarism. Whatever intellectual prestige he came to
acquire will no more save him than brilliancy will save Lucifer.
TRADE OR HONOUR?
A democracy, which, for its own defence, has deprived itself of free
speech is a dangerous paradox. The position is not merely abnormal;
it is so abnormal that the path of return to normality is to the
average citizen unimaginable. Since war is the supplanting of reason
by violence it is natural that it should swallow up Liberalism which
is precisely the opposite. All values are turned inside out. Killing
becomes a solemn duty. Lying is holy on condition that it deceives
the enemy to his death. Men must approve their manhood by handing
themselves over soul and body to others, their military superiors.
Criticism, and the individual mind, accept engulfment in a world of
patterned conduct, salutes, absolutism. All that corruption of the
essence of life comes with war as its inseparable shadow, and the
rankness of the Prussian offence is not merely to have foregone honour,
and broken treaties and sown untimely death throughout the world,
but also to have compelled civilisation to debase itself in order to
preserve itself. So, at least, must it strike a Liberal.
We have bowed to the whole process of retrogression imposed on us.
With bitterness of spirit we have seen unnecessary arbitrariness added
to what was necessary, added by methods as contemptible as were
ever used in furtherance of the old political and economic tyrannies
before the war. Now we have the right to call a halt. The rich,
reckless clamourers who in these days are almost the monopolists of
free speech have already achieved some deterioration of the ideal for
which the people of the Allied countries took up the challenge of war.
We may assume that the Allied Governments are better custodians of
the democratic faith, but there is always danger, in times of stress,
from those whom one may call the terrorists of “patriotism.” Protest
has become an obligation. Nobody who has watched latest developments
can fail to be alarmed by their manifest tendency. That tendency may
be summarised in one ignoble sentence. An attempt is being made to
transform what began as a war for honour into a war for trade. Powerful
intriguers of unbounded assurance are sedulous behind the backs of
the fighting men, scheming to run up new flags in the place of the
old. The inscription “Justice” is to be hauled down, and “Markets”
is to be hoisted in its stead. In pursuance of that new object the
powerful innovators are ready to extend far beyond their natural term
the torture and agony which are now the sole realities of Europe. They
are willing, for the accomplishment of it, to ordain that the blood of
better men shall drip indefinitely into the cistern of Gehenna. And
since it is the bellowers and gamblers at home and not the silent
trench-fellows of death at the front that exercise most influence
on national policy, it is to be feared that the former may prevail.
Assuredly protest is a matter of obligation.
This is no argument, or faint-hearted appeal, for a premature or
inconclusive peace. Truly the scourge of war is more terrible, more
Apocalyptic in its horror, than even the most active imagination could
have pictured. When the time comes to write down in every country a
plain record of it, with its wounds and weariness, and flesh-stabbing,
and bone-pulverising, and lunacies, and rats and lice and maggots,
and all the crawling festerment of battle-fields, two landmarks in
human progress will be reached. The world will for the first time
understand the nobility, beyond all phrase, of soldiers, and it will
understand also the foulness, beyond all phrase, of those who compel
them into war. In these days God help the militarists! There will
be no need to organise a peace movement; it will organise itself in
all democratic countries, spontaneous and irresistible as a prime
force of nature. It will still be necessary to arm against those who
linger in the blood-mists of autocracy, just as civilised men provide
against tigers and murderers and syphilis. But God help those who go
preaching to mutilated veterans and stricken homes the gospel that
war is a normal incident of the intercourse between nations, and an
ennobling thing to be cultivated for its own sake! That by the way.
Such is modern war, and knowing it to be such, there is not a man or
woman of the Allied peoples, in uniform or out of it, but is ready to
go through with it day after day and, if need be, year after year until
the anti-human evangel of Berlin is down in the mud. That resolution,
so unmistakable, is the supreme answer of democracy to the whole race
of blood-and-ironmongers. They loved war, praised war, planned war;
we loathed it, believed so little that a modern state would loose it
on the world as even to neglect advisable precautions. And now the
peace-workers have the war-workers by the throat, and are humbling them
in their own picked arena. Despite Nietzsche and Bernhardi and the
rest, democracy does not so soften men that they will not die for their
ideals. They will do more than die, they will conquer.
So much is liminal; it lies across the threshold of any temple of
peace that can be imagined. Until the objects for which the Allies
went into the war are achieved it must go on, and we mean it to go on,
regardless of any waste of life or substance. But there is another
proposition just as basal against the ignoring of which the writer
of this article enters his protest. No statesman has the right to
change, behind the backs of the fighting men, the aim and purpose
of the war. No government has a mandate to substitute markets for
justice. The necessary blood must be spent, it will spend itself
freely and without question. But the diplomatist who lavishes one
life in excess, in order to achieve objects other than that for which
peaceful citizens transformed themselves into soldiers, is a criminal
against civilisation. There are many, very many, men in the New Army
who believe that no war merely for trade can be justifiable or other
than an abomination. If another Power launches war in the name of
trade, your resistance is a very different matter: it is the answer of
a higher to a lower morality. It must succeed in order precisely to
punish those who are willing to make war solely for trade.
Is the fear well founded that powerful men are in fact working behind
the stages to bring about such a transformation as has been indicated?
Is it merely fancy that discovers the assiduous and not over-clean
finger of predatory finance in certain pies that are now on the menu?
If so, Liberalism cannot too soon awaken. The New Army attested to
die, if need be, for the public law of Europe: there was no mention of
tariffs in the bond.