NIETZSCHE

It is not the hour in which to say much about Nietzsche. The

dissentient voices are silent. The crowd has stopped howling. But a

worse thing is happening to him, the thing of all others he dreaded

most;--he is becoming "accepted"--The preachers are quoting him

and the theologians are explaining him.

What he would himself pray for now are Enemies--fierce

irreconcilable Enemies--but our age cannot produce such. It can

only produce sneering disparagement; or frightened conventional

approbation.

What one would like to say, at this particular juncture, is that

_here,_ or again _there,_ this deadly antagonist of God missed his

aim. But who can say that? He aimed too surely. No, he did not miss

his aim. He smote whom he went out to smite. But one thing he

could not smite; he could neither smite it, or unmask it, or

"transvalue" it. I mean the Earth itself--the great, shrewd, wise,

all-enduring Mother of us all--who knows so much, and remains so

silent!

And sometimes one feels, walking some country road, with the

smell of upturned sods and heavy leaf-mould in one's nostrils, that

even Lucifer himself is not as deep or strong or wise as is patient

furrowed earth and her blundering children. A rough earth-hint, a

Rabelaisian ditty, a gross amazing jest, a chuckle of deep Satyric

humour;--and the monstrous "thickness" of Life, its friendly aplomb

and nonchalance, its grotesque irreverence, its shy shrewd common-sense,

its tough fibres, and portentous indifference to "distinction";

tumbles us over in the mud--for all our "aloofness"--and roars over

us, like a romping bull-calf!

The antidote to Nietzsche is not to be found in the company of the

Saints. He was too much of a Saint himself for that. It is to be found

in the company of Shakespearean clodhoppers, and Rabelaisian

topers, and Cervantian serving-wenches. In fact, it is to be found, as

with the antidotes for other noble excesses, in burying your face in

rough moist earth; and grubbing for pig-nuts under the beech-trees.

A summer's day in the woods with Audrey will put "Fatality" into its

place and remove "the Recurrence of all things" to a very modest

remoteness. And this is not a relinquishing of the secret of life. This

is not a giving up of the supreme quest. It is an opening of another

door; a letting in of a different air; a reversion to a more primitive

level of the mystery.

The way to reduce the tyranny of this proud spirit to its proper

proportion is not to talk about "Love" or "Morality" or "Orthodoxy,"

or "the strength of the vulgar herd"--it is simply to call up in one's

mind the motley procession of gross, simple, quaint, _bulbous,_

irrepressible objects--human and otherwise--whose mere existence

makes it as impossible for Nietzsche to deal with the _massiveness_

of Life, as it is impossible for anyone else to deal with it.

No, we shall not free ourselves from his intellectual predominance

by taking refuge with the Saints. We shall not do this because he

himself was essentially a Saint. A Saint and a Martyr! Is it for me

now to prove that?

It is realized, I suppose, what the history of his spiritual contest

actually was? It was a deliberate self-inflicted Crucifixion of the

Christ in him, as an offering to the Apollo in him. Nietzsche

was--that cannot be denied--an Intellectual Sadist; and his Intellectual

Sadism took the form--as it can (he has himself taught us so) take

many curious forms--of deliberately outraging his own most

sensitive nerves. This is really what broke his reason, in the end. By

a process of spiritual vivisection--the suffering of which one dare

not conceive--he took his natural "sanctity," and carved it, as a dish

fit for the gods, until it assumed an Apollonian shape. We must

visualize Nietzsche not only as the Philosopher with the Hammer;

but as the Philosopher with the Chisel.

We must visualize him, with such a sculptor's tool, standing in the

presence of the crucified figure of himself; and altering one by one,

its natural lineaments! Nietzsche's own lacerated "intellectual

nerves" were the vantage-ground of his spiritual vision. He could

write "the Antichrist" because he had "killed." in his own nature,

"the thing he loved" It was for this reason that he had such a

supernatural insight into the Christian temperament. It was for this

reason that he could pour vitriol upon its "little secrets"; and hunt it

to its last retreats.

Let none think he did not understand the grandeur, and the terrible

intoxicating appeal, of the thing he fought. He understood these only

too well. What vibrating sympathy--as for a kindred spirit--may be

read between the lines of his attack on Pascal--Pascal, the supreme

type of the Christian Philosopher!

It must be further realized--for after all what are words and

phrases?--that it was really nothing but the "Christian conscience" in

him that forced him on so desperately to kick against the pricks. It

was the "Christian conscience" in him--has he not himself analysed

the voluptuous cruelty of that?--which drove him to seek something--if

possible--nobler, austerer, gayer, more innocently wicked, than

Christianity!

It was not in the interests of Truth that he fought it. True Christian,

as he was, at heart, he never cared greatly for Truth as Truth. It was

in the interest of a Higher Ideal, a more exacting, less human Ideal,

that he crushed it down. The Christian spirit, in him set him upon

strangling the Christian spirit--and all in the interest of a madness of

nobility, itself perforated with Christian conscience!

Was Nietzsche really Greek, compared with--Goethe, let us say?

Not for a moment. It was in the desperation of his attempt to be so,

that he seized upon Greek tragedy and made it dance to Christian

cymbals! This is, let it be clearly understood, the hidden secret of his

mania for Dionysus--Dionysus gave him his opportunity. In the

worship of this god--also a wounded god, be it remarked;--he was

able to satisfy his perverted craving for "ecstasy of laceration" under

the shadow of another Name.

But after all--as Goethe says--"feeling is all in all; the name is sound

and smoke." What he felt were Christian feelings, the feelings of a

Mystic, a Visionary, a Flagellant. What matter by what name you

call them? Christ? Dionysus? It is the secret creative passion of the

human heart that sends them Both forth upon their warfaring.

Is any one simple enough to think that whatever Secret Cosmic

Power melts into human ecstasy, it waits to be summoned by certain

particular syllables? That this arbitrary strangling of the Christ in

him never altogether ended, is proved by the words of those tragic

messages he sent to Cosima Wagner from "the aristocratic city of

Turin" when his tormented brain broke like a taut bow-string. Those

messages resembled arrows of fire, shot into space; and on one was

written the words "The Crucified" and on the other the word

"Dionysus."

The grand and heart-breaking appeal of this lonely Victim of his

own merciless scourge, does not depend, for its effect upon us, upon

any of the particular "ideas" he announced. The idea of the "Eternal

Recurrence of all things"--to take the most terrible--is clearly but

another instance of his intellectual Sadism.

The worst thing that could happen to those innumerable Victims of

Life, for whom he sought to kill his Pity, was that they should have

to go through the same punishment again--not once or twice, but for

an infinity of times--and it was just that that he, whose immense Pity

for them took so long a killing, suddenly felt must be what _had_ to

happen--had to happen for no other reason than that it was

_intolerable_ that it should happen. Again, we may note, it was not

"Truth" he sought, but ecstasy, and, in this case, the ecstasy of

"accepting" the very worst kind of issue he could possibly imagine.

The idea of the Superman, too, is an idea that could only have

entered the brain of one, pushed on to think, at the spear-head of his

own cruelty. It is a great and terrible idea, sublime and devastating,

this idea of the human race yielding place to _another race,_

stronger, wiser, fairer, sterner, gayer, and more godlike! Especially

noble and compelling is Nietzsche's constant insistence that the

moment has come for men to take their Destiny out of the blind

power of Evolution, and to guide it themselves, with a strong hand

and a clear will, towards a _definite goal._

The fact that this driving force, of cruelty to himself and, through

himself, to humanity, scourged him on to so formidable an

illumination of our path, is a proof how unwise it is to suppress any

grand perversion. Such motive-forces should be used, as Nietzsche

used his, for purposes of intellectual insight--not simply trampled

upon as "evil."

Whether our poor human race ever will surpass itself, as he demands,

and rise to something psychologically different, "may admit a wide

solution." It is not an unscientific idea. It is not an irreligious idea.

It has all the dreams of the Prophets behind it. But--who can tell? It is

quite as possible that the spirit of destruction in us will wantonly

ruin this great Chance as that we shall seize upon it. Man has many

other impulses besides the impulse of creation. Perhaps he will

never be seduced into even _desiring_ such a goal, far less "willing"

it over long spaces of time.

The curious "optimism" of Nietzsche, by means of which he sought

to force himself into a mood of such Dionysian ecstasy as to be able

not only to endure Fate, but to "love" it, is yet another example of

the subterranean "conscience" of Christianity working in him. In the

presence of such a mood, and, indeed, in the presence of nearly all

his great dramatic Passions, it is Nietzsche, and not his humorous

critic, who is "with Our Lord" in Gethsemane. One does not drink of

the cup of Fate "lovingly"--without bloody sweat!

The interesting thing to observe about Nietzsche's ideas is that the

wider they depart from what was essentially Christian in him, the

less convincing they grow. One cannot help feeling he recognised

this himself--and, infuriated by it, strode further and further into the

Jungle.

For instance, one cannot suppose that the cult of "the Blonde Beast,"

and the cult of Caesar Borgia, were anything but mad reprisals,

directed towards himself, in savage revenge; blind blows struck at

random against the lofty and penetrating spirituality in which he had

indulged when writing Zarathustra.

But there is a point here of some curious psychological interest, to

which we are attracted by a certain treacherous red glow upon his

words when he speaks of this sultry, crouching, spotted, tail-lashing

mood. Why is it precisely this Borgian type, this Renaissance type,

among the world's various Lust-Darlings that he chooses to select?

Why does he not oppose, to the Christian Ideal, _its true opposite_--the

naive, artless, faun-like, pagan "child of Nature," who has never

known "remorse"?

The answer is clear. He chooses the Borgian type--the type which is

_not_ free from "superstition," which is always wrestling with

"superstition"--the type that sprinkles holy water upon its

dagger--because such a type is the inevitable _product_ of the presence

among us of the Christian Ideal. The Christian Ideal has made a

certain complication of "wickedness" possible, which were

impossible without it.

If Nietzsche had not been obsessed by Christianity he would have

selected as his "Ideal Blond Beast" that perfectly naive, "unfallen"

man, of imperturbable nerves, of classic nerves, such as Life

abounded in _before Christ came._ He makes, indeed, a pathetic

struggle to idealize this type, rather than the "conscience-stricken"

Renaissance one. He lets his fingers stray more than once over the

red-stained limbs of real sun-burnt "Pompeian" heathenism. He

turns feverishly the wanton pages of Petronius to reach this

unsullied, "imperial" Animal. But he cannot reach him. He never

could reach him. The "consecrated" dagger of the Borgia gleams and

scintillates between. Even, therefore, in the sort of "wickedness" he

evokes, Nietzsche remains Christ-ridden and Christ-mastered. The

matter is made still more certain when one steals up silently, so to

speak, behind the passages where he speaks of Napoleon.

If a reader has the remotest psychological clairvoyance, he will be

aware of a certain strain and tug, a certain mental jerk and contortion,

whenever Napoleon is introduced.

Yes, he could engrave that fatal "N" over his mantlepiece at

Weimar--to do so was the last solace of his wounded brain. But he

was never really at ease with the great Emperor. Never did he--in

pure, direct, classic recognition--greet him as "the Demonic Master

of Destiny," with the Goethean salutation! Had Goethe and

Napoleon, in their notorious encounter, wherein they recognized one

another as "Men," been interrupted by the entrance of Nietzsche, do

you suppose they would not have both stiffened and recoiled,

recognizing their natural Enemy, the Cross-bearer, the Christ-obsessed

one, _"Il Santo"?_

The difference between the two types can best be felt by recalling

the way in which Napoleon and Goethe treated the Christ-Legend,

compared with Nietzsche's desperate wrestling.

Napoleon uses "Religion" calmly and deliberately for his High

Policy and Worldly Statecraft.

Goethe uses "Religion" calmly and deliberately for his aesthetic

culture and his mystic symbolism. Neither of them are, for one

moment, touched by it themselves.

They are born Pagans; and when this noble, tortured soul flings

himself at their feet in feverish worship, one feels that, out of their

Homeric Hades, they look wonderingly, _unintelligently,_ at him.

One of the most laughable things in the world is the attempt some

simple critics make to turn Nietzsche into an ordinary "Honest

Infidel," a kind of poetic Bradlaugh-Ingersoll, offering to humanity

the profound discovery that there is no God, and that when we die,

we die! The absurdity is made complete when this naive, revivified

"Pagan" is made to assure us--us, "the average sensual men"--that

the path of wisdom lies, not in resisting, but in yielding to

_temptation;_ not in spiritual wrestling to "transform" ourselves, but

in the brute courage "to be ourselves," and "live out our type"!

The good folk who play with such a childish illusion would do well

to scan over again their "pagan" hero's branding and flaying of the

philosopher Strauss. Strauss was precisely what they try to turn

Nietzsche into--a rancorous, insensitive, bullying, materialistic

Heathen, making sport of "the Cross" and drinking Laager Beer.

Nietzsche loathed Laager Beer, and "the Cross" _burnt_ day and

night in his tormented, Dionysian soul.

It occurs to me sometimes that if there had been no "German

Reformation" and no overrunning of the world by vulgar evangelical

Protestantism, it would be still possible to bring into the circle of the

Church's development the lofty and desperate Passion of this

"saintly" Antichrist. After all, why should we concede that those

agitated, voluptuous, secret devices to get "saved," those super-subtle,

subliminal tricks of the weak and the perverted to be _revenged_

on the beautiful and the brave, which Nietzsche laments

were ever "bound up" in the same cover as the "Old Testament."

must remain forever the dominant "note" in the Faith of

Christendom? While the Successor of Caesar, while the Pontifex

Maximus of our "Spiritual Rome," still represents the Infallible

Element in the world's nobler religious Taste, there is yet, perhaps, a

remote chance that this vulgarizing of "the mountain summits" this

degrading of our Planet's Passion-Play, may be cauterized and

eliminated.

And yet it is not likely! Much more likely is it that the real "secret"

of Jesus, together with the real "secret" of Nietzsche--and they do

not differ in essence, for all his Borgias!--will remain the sweet and

deadly "fatalities" they have always been--for the few, the few, the

few who understand them!

For the final impression one carries away, after reading Nietzsche, is

the impression of "distinction," of remoteness from "vulgar

brutality," from "sensual baseness," from the clumsy compromises

of the world. It may not last, this Zarathustrian mood. It lasts with

some of us an hour; with some of us a day--with a few of us a

handful of years! But while it lasts, it is a rare and high experience.

As from an ice-bound promontory stretching out over the abysmal

gulfs, we dare to look Creation and Annihilation, for once, full in the

face.

Liberated from our own lusts, or using them, contemptuously and

indifferently, as engines of vision, we see the life and death of

worlds, the slow, long-drawn, moon-lit wave of Universe-drowning

Nothingness.

We see the races of men, falling, rising, stumbling, advancing and

receding--and we see the _new race_--in the hours of the "Great

Noon-tide"--fulfilling its Prophet's hope--and we see _the end of that

also!_ And seeing all this, because the air of our watch-tower is so

ice-cold and keen, we neither tremble or blench. The world is deep,

and deep is pain, and deeper than pain is joy. We have seen Creation,

and have exulted in it. We have seen Destruction, and have exulted

in it. We have watched the long, quivering Shadow of Life shudder

across our glacial promontory, and we have watched that drowning

tide receive it. It is enough. It is well. We have had our Vision. We

know now what gives to the gods "that look" their faces wear.

It now only remains for us to return to the familiar human Stage; to

the "Gala-Night, within the lonesome latter years," and be gay, and

"hard," and "superficial"!

That ice-bound Promontory into the Truth of Things has only known

one Explorer whose "Eloi, Eloi Lama Sabachthani" was not the

death-cry of his Pity. And that Explorer--did we only dream of his

Return?