Nietzsche was by temperament a philosopher after the manner of the
Greeks. In other words, philosophy was not to him, as to the average
modern philosopher, a matter of books and the study, but a life to be
lived. It seemed to him to have much less concern with “truth” than
with the essentials of fine living. He loved travel and movement, he
loved scenery, he loved cities and the spectacle of men; above all, he
loved solitude. The solitude of cities drew him strongly; he envied
Heraclitus his desert study amid the porticoes and peristyles of the
immense temple of Diana. He had, however, his own favourite place of
work, to which he often alludes, the Piazza di San Marco at Venice,
amid the doves, in front of the strange and beautiful structure which
he “loved, feared, and envied;” and here in the spring, between ten
o’clock and midday, he found his best philosophic laboratory.
It was in Italy that Nietzsche seems to have found himself most at
home, although there are no signs that he felt any special sympathy
with the Italians, that is to say in later than Renaissance days. For
the most part he possessed very decided sympathies and antipathies.
His antipathy to his own Germans lay in the nature of things. Every
prophet’s message is primarily directed to his own people. And
Nietzsche was unsparing in his keen criticism of the Germans. He tells
somewhere with a certain humour how people abroad would ask him if
Germany had produced of late no great thinker or artist, no really good
book, and how with the courage of despair he would at last reply,
“Yes, Bismarck!” Nietzsche was willing enough to recognise the kind
of virtue personified in Bismarck. But with that recognition nearly
all was said in favour of Germany that Nietzsche had to say. There is
little in the German spirit that answered to his demands. He admired
clearness, analytic precision, and highly organised intelligence,
light and alert. He saw no sufficient reason why profundity should
lack a fine superficies, nor why strength should be ungainly. His
instinctive comparison for a good thinker was always a good dancer.
As a child he had been struck by seeing a rope-dancer, and throughout
life dancing seemed to him the image of the finest culture, supple to
bend, strong to retain its own equilibrium, an exercise demanding the
highest training and energy of all the muscles of a well-knit organism.
But the indubitable intellectual virtues of the bulky and plodding
German are scarcely those which can well be symbolised by an Otero or
a Caicedo. “There is too much beer in the German intellect,” Nietzsche
said. For the last ten centuries Germany has wilfully stultified
herself; “nowhere else has there been so vicious a misuse of the two
great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity,” to which he
was inclined to add music. (“The theatre and music,” he remarked in
_Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft_, “are the haschisch and betel of
Europeans, and the history of the so-called higher culture is largely
the history of narcotics.”) “Germans regard bad writing,” he said,
“as a national privilege; they do not write prose as one works at a
statue, they only improvise.” Even “German virtue”--and this was the
unkindest cut of all--had its origin in eighteenth century France, as
its early preachers, such as Kant and Schiller, fully recognised. Thus
it happens that the German has no perceptions--coupling his Goethe
with a Schiller, and his Schopenhauer with a Hartmann--and no tact,
“no finger for _nuances_,” his fingers are all claws. The few
persons of high culture whom he had met in Germany, he noted towards
the end of his life, and especially Frau Cosima Wagner, were all of
French origin. Nietzsche regarded it as merely an accident that he was
himself born in Germany, just as it was merely an accident that Heine
the Jew, and Schopenhauer the Dutchman, were born there. Yet, as I
have already hinted, we may take these utterances too seriously. There
are passages in his works--though we meet them rarely--which show that
Nietzsche recognised and admired the elemental energy, the depth and
the contradictions in the German character; he attributed them largely
to mixture of races.
Nietzsche was not much attracted to the English. It is true that he
names Landor as one of the four masters of prose this century has
produced, while another of these is Emerson, with whom he had genuine
affinity, although his own intellect was keener and more passionate,
with less sunny serenity. For Shakespeare, also, his admiration was
deep. And when he had outgrown his early enthusiasm for Schopenhauer,
the fine qualities which he still recognised in that thinker--his
concreteness, lucidity, reasonableness--seemed to him English. He
was usually less flattering towards English thought. Darwinism, for
instance, he thought, savoured too much of the population question,
and was invented by English men of science who were oppressed by the
problems of poverty. The struggle for existence, he said, is only an
exception in nature; it is exuberance, an even reckless superfluity,
which rules. For English philosophic thought generally he had little
but contempt. J. S. Mill was one of his “impossibilities”; the
English and French sociologists of to-day, he said, have only known
degenerating types of society, devoid of organising force, and they
take their own debased instincts as the standard of social codes
in general. Modern democracy, modern utilitarianism, are largely
of English manufacture, and he came at last to hate them both.
During the past century, he asserted, they have reduced the whole
spiritual currency of Europe to a dull plebeian level, and they are
the chief causes of European vulgarity. It is the English, he also
asserted--George Eliot, for instance--who, while abolishing Christian
belief, have sought to bolster up the moral system which was created by
Christianity, and which must necessarily fall with it. It is, moreover,
the English, who with this democratic and utilitarian plebeianism have
seduced and perverted the fine genius of France.
Just as we owe to England the vulgarity which threatens to overspread
Europe, so to France we owe the conception of a habit of nobility, in
every best sense of the word. On that point Nietzsche’s opinion never
wavered. The present subjection of the French spirit to this damnable
Anglo-mania, he declared, must never lead us to forget the ardent and
passionate energy, the intellectual distinction, which belonged to the
France of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.[3] The French, as
Nietzsche always held, are the one modern European nation which may
be compared with the Greeks. In _Menschliches, Allzumenschliches_
he names six French writers--Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère,
Fontenelle (in the _Dialogues des Morts_), Vauvenarges,
Chamfort--who bring us nearer to Greek antiquity than any other group
of modern authors, and contain more real thought than all the books of
the German philosophers put together. The only French writer of the
present century for whom he cared much (putting aside Mérimée) was
Stendhal, who possesses some of the characters of the earlier group.
The French, he points out, are the most Christian of all nations,
and have produced the greatest saints. He enumerates Pascal (“the
first among Christians, who was able to unite fervour, intellect, and
candour;--think of what that means!”), Fénelon, Mme. de Guyon, De
Rancé, the founder of the Trappists who have flourished nowhere but
in France, the Huguenots, Port-Royal--truly, he exclaims, the great
French freethinkers encountered foemen worthy of their steel! The land
which produced the most perfect types of Anti-Christianity produced
also the most perfect types of Christianity. He defends, also, that
seeming superficiality which in a great Frenchman, he says, is but the
natural epidermis of a rich and deep nature, while a great German’s
profundity is too often strangely bottled up from the light in a dark
and contorted phial.
I have briefly stated Nietzsche’s feeling as regards each of the three
chief European peoples, because we are thus led up to the central
points of his philosophy--his attitude towards modern religion and
his attitude towards modern morals. We are often apt to regard these
matters as of little practical importance; we think it the reasonable
duty of practical social politics to attend to the immediate questions
in hand, and leave these wider questions to settle themselves. Rightly
or wrongly, that was not how Nietzsche looked at the matter. He was too
much of a philosopher, he had too keen a sense of the vital relation of
things, to be content with the policy of tinkering society, wherever
it seems to need mending most badly, avoiding any reference to the
whole. That is our English method, and no doubt it is a very sane
and safe method, but, as we have seen, Nietzsche was not in sympathy
with English methods. His whole significance lies in the thorough and
passionate analysis with which he sought to dissect and to dissolve,
first, “German culture,” then Christianity, and lastly, modern morals,
with all that these involve.
It is scarcely necessary to point out, that though Nietzsche rejoiced
in the title of freethinker, he can by no means be confounded with the
ordinary secularist. He is not bent on destroying religion from any
anæsthesia of the religious sense, or even in order to set up some
religion of science which is practically no religion at all. He is thus
on different ground from the great freethinkers of France, and to some
extent of England. Nietzsche was himself of the stuff of which great
religious teachers are made, of the race of apostles. So when he writes
of the founder of Christianity and the great Christian types, it is
often with a poignant sympathy which the secularist can never know;
and if his knife seems keen and cruel, it is not the easy indifferent
cruelty of the pachydermatous scoffer. When he analyses the souls of
these men and the impulses which have moved them, he knows with what he
is dealing: he is analysing his own soul.
A mystic Nietzsche certainly was not; he had no moods of joyous
resignation. It is chiefly the religious ecstasy of active moral
energy that he was at one with. The sword of the spirit is his weapon
rather than the merely defensive breastplate of faith. St. Paul is
the consummate type of such religious forces, and whatever Nietzsche
wrote of that apostle--the inventor of Christianity, as he truly
calls him--is peculiarly interesting. He hates him, indeed, but even
his hatred thrills with a tone of intimate sympathy. It is thus in a
remarkable passage in _Morgenröthe_, where he tells briefly the
history and struggles of that importunate soul, so superstitious and
yet so shrewd, without whom there would have been no Christianity.
He describes the self-torture of the neurotic, sensual, refined
“Jewish Pascal,” who flagellated himself with the law that he came to
hate with the hatred of one who had a genius for hatred; who in one
dazzling flash of illumination realised that Jesus by accomplishing the
law had annihilated it, and so furnished him with the instrument he
desired to wreak his passionate hatred on the law, and to revel in the
freedom of his joy. Nietzsche possesses a natural insight in probing
the wounds of self-torturing souls. He excels also in describing
the effects of extreme pain in chasing away the mists from life, in
showing to a man his own naked personality, in bringing us face to
face with the cold and terrible fact. It is thus that, coupling the
greatest figure in history with the greatest figure in fiction, he
compares the pathetic utterance of Jesus on the cross--“My God, my
God, why hast thou forsaken me?”--with the disillusionment of the
dying Don Quixote. Of Jesus himself he speaks no harsh word, but
he regarded the atmosphere of Roman decay and languor--though very
favourable for the production of fine personalities--as ill-adapted
to the development of a great religion. The Gospels lead us into the
atmosphere of a Russian novel, he remarks in one of his last writings,
_Der Antichrist_, an atmosphere in which the figure of Jesus had
to be coarsened to be understood; it became moulded in men’s minds
by memories of more familiar types--prophet, Messiah, wonder-worker,
judge; the real man they could not even see. “It must ever be a matter
for regret that no Dostoievsky lived in the neighbourhood of this most
interesting _décadent_, I mean some one who could understand the
enthralling charm of just this mixture of the sublime, the morbid, and
the childlike.” Jesus, he continues, never denied the world, the state,
culture, work; he simply never knew or realised their existence; his
own inner experience--“life,” “light,” “truth”--was all in all to him.
The only realities to him were inner realities, so living that they
make one feel “in Heaven” and “eternal”; this it was to be “saved.” And
Nietzsche notes, as so many have noted before him, that the fact that
men should bow the knee in Christ’s name to the very opposite of all
these things, and consecrate in the “Church” all that he threw behind
him, is an insoluble example of historical irony. “Strictly speaking,
there has only been one Christian, and he died on the cross. The Gospel
_died_ on the cross.”
There may seem a savour of contempt in the allusion to Jesus as
an “interesting _décadent_,” and undoubtedly there is in
_Der Antichrist_ a passionate bitterness which is not found
in Nietzsche’s earlier books. But he habitually used the word
_décadent_ in a somewhat extended and peculiar sense. The
_décadent_, as Nietzsche understood him, was the product of an
age in which virility was dead and weakness was sanctified; it was
so with the Buddhist as well as with the Christian, they both owe
their origin and their progress to “some monstrous disease of will.”
They sprang up among creatures who craved for some “Thou shalt,”
and who were apt only for that one form of energy which the weak
possess, fanaticism. By an instinct which may be regarded as sound
by those who do not accept his disparagement of either, Nietzsche
always coupled the Christian and the anarchist; to him they were both
products of decadence. Both wish to revenge their own discomfort
on this present world, he asserted, the anarchist immediately, the
Christian at the last day. Instead of feeling, “_I_ am worth
nothing,” the _décadent_ says, “_Life_ is worth nothing,”--a
terribly contagious state of mind which has covered the world with
the vitality of a tropical jungle. It cannot be too often repeated,
Nietzsche continues, that Christianity was born of the decay of
antiquity, and on the degenerate people of that time it worked like a
soothing balm; their eyes and ears were sealed by age and they could
no longer understand Epicurus and Epictetus. At such a time purity
and beneficence, large promises of future life, worked sweetly and
wholesomely. But for fresh young barbarians Christianity is poison.
It produces a fundamental enfeeblement of such heroic, childlike,
and animal natures as the ancient Germans, and to that enfeeblement,
indeed, we owe the revival of classic culture; so that the conclusion
of the whole matter is here, as ever, Nietzsche remarks, that “it is
impossible to say whether, in the language of Christianity, God owes
more thanks to the Devil, or the Devil to God, for the way in which
things have come about.” But in the interaction of the classic spirit
and the Christian spirit, Nietzsche’s own instincts were not on the
side of Christianity, and as the years went on he expresses himself in
ever more unmeasured language. He could not take up the _Imitation
of Christ_--the very word “imitation” being, as indeed Michelet had
said before, the whole of Christianity--without physical repugnance.
And in the _Götzendämmerung_ he compares the Bible with the Laws
of Manu (though at the same time asserting that it is a sin to name
the two books in the same breath): “The _sun_ lies on the whole
book. All those things on which Christianity vents its bottomless
vulgarity--procreation, for example, woman, marriage--are here handled
earnestly and reverently, with love and trust. I know no book in which
so many tender and gracious things are said about women as in the Laws
of Manu.” Again in _Der Antichrist_--which represents, I repeat,
the unbalanced judgments of his last period--he tells how he turns
from Paul with delight to Petronius, a book of which it can be said
_è tutto festo_, “immortally sound, immortally serene.” In the
whole New Testament, he adds, there is only one figure we can genuinely
honour--that of Pilate.
On the whole, Nietzsche’s attitude towards Christianity was one of
repulsion and antagonism. At first he appears indifferent, then he
becomes calmly judicial, finally he is bitterly hostile. He admits that
Christianity possesses the virtues of a cunningly concocted narcotic
to soothe the leaden griefs and depressions of men whose souls are
physiologically weak. But from first to last there is no sign of any
genuine personal sympathy with the religion of the poor in spirit.
Epicureanism, the pagan doctrine of salvation, had in it an element of
Greek energy, but the Christian doctrine of salvation, he declares,
raises its sublime development of hedonism on a thoroughly morbid
foundation. Christianity hates the body; the first act of Christian
triumph over the Moors, he recalls, was to close the public baths
which they had everywhere erected. “With its contempt for the body
Christianity was the greatest misfortune that ever befell humanity.”
And at the end of _Der Antichrist_ he sums up his concentrated
hatred: “I _condemn_ Christianity; I raise against the Christian
Church the most terrible accusation that any accuser has ever uttered.
It is to me the most profound of all thinkable corruptions.”
It is scarcely necessary to add that Nietzsche’s condemnation of
Christianity extended to the Christian God. He even went so far as to
assert that it was the development of Christian morality itself--“the
father-confessor sensitiveness of the Christian conscience translated
and sublimed into a scientific conscience”--which had finally
conquered the Christian God. He held that polytheism had played an
important part in the evolution of culture. Gods, heroes, supernatural
beings generally, were inestimable schoolmasters to bring us to the
sovereignty of the individual. Polytheism opened up divine horizons
of freedom to humanity. “Ye shall be as gods.” But it has not been
so with monotheism. The doctrine of a single God, in whose presence
all others were false gods, favours stagnation and unity of type;
monotheism has thus perhaps constituted “the greatest danger which
humanity has had to meet in past ages.” Nor are we yet freed from its
influence. “For centuries after Buddha died men showed his shadow in a
cave--a vast terrible shadow. God is dead: but thousands of years hence
there will probably be caves in which his shadow may yet be seen. And
we--we must go on fighting that shadow!” How deeply rooted Nietzsche
believed faith in a god to be is shown by the fantastic conclusion to
_Zarathustra_. A strange collection of _Uebermenschen_--the
men of the future--are gathered together in Zarathustra’s cave:
two kings, the last of the popes--thrown out of work by the death
of God--and many miscellaneous creatures, including a donkey. As
Zarathustra returns to his cave he hears the sound of prayer and smells
the odour of incense; on entering he finds the _Uebermenschen_ on
their knees intoning an extraordinary litany to the donkey, who has
“created us all in his own image.”
In his opposition to the Christian faith and the Christian God,
Nietzsche by no means stands alone, however independent he may have
been in the method and standpoint of his attack. But in his opposition
to Christian morality he was more radically original. There is a very
general tendency among those who reject Christian theology to shore up
the superstructure of Christian morality which rests on that theology.
George Eliot, in her writings at all events, has been an eloquent and
distinguished advocate of this process; Mr. Myers, in an oft-quoted
passage, has described with considerable melodramatic vigour the “sibyl
in the gloom” of the Trinity Fellows’ Garden at Cambridge, who withdrew
God and Immortality from his grasp, but, to his consternation, told
him to go on obeying Duty. What George Eliot proposed was one of those
compromises so dear to our British minds. Nietzsche would none of it.
Hence his contemptuous treatment of George Eliot, of J. S. Mill, of
Herbert Spencer, and so many more of our favourite intellectual heroes
who have striven to preserve Christian morality while denying Christian
theology. Nietzsche regarded our current moral ideals, whether
formulated by bishops or by anarchists, as alike founded on a Christian
basis, and when that foundation is sapped they cannot stand.
The motive of modern morality is pity, its principle is altruistic, its
motto is “Love your neighbour as yourself,” its ideal self-abnegation,
its end the greatest good of the greatest number. All these things
were abhorrent to Nietzsche, or so far as he accepted them, it was in
forms which gave them new values. Modern morality, he said, is founded
on an extravagant dread of pain, in ourselves primarily, secondarily
in others. Sympathy is fellow-suffering; to love one’s neighbour as
oneself is to dread his pain as we dread our own pain. The religion of
love is built upon the fear of pain. “On n’est bon que par la pitié;”
the acceptance of that doctrine Nietzsche considers the chief outcome
of Christianity, although, he thinks, not essential to Christianity,
which rested on the egoistic basis of personal salvation: “One thing is
needful.” But it remains the most important by-product of Christianity,
and has ever been gaining strength. Spinoza and Kant stood firmly
outside the stream, but the French freethinkers, from Voltaire onwards,
were not to be outdone in this direction by Christians, while Comte
with his “Vivre pour autrui” even out-Christianised Christianity, and
Schopenhauer in Germany, J. S. Mill in England, carried on the same
doctrine. “The great question of life,” said Benjamin Constant in
_Adolphe_--and it is a saying that our finest emotions are quick
to echo--“is the pain that we cause.”
Both the sympathetic man and the unsympathetic man, Nietzsche argues,
are egoists. But the unsympathetic man he held to be a more admirable
kind of egoist. It is best to win the strength that comes of experience
and suffering, and to allow others also to play their own cards and
win the same strength, shedding our tears in private, and abhorring
soft-heartedness as the foe of all manhood and courage. To call the
unsympathetic man “wicked,” and the sympathetic man “good,” seemed
to Nietzsche a fashion in morals, a fashion which will have its
day. He believed he was the first to point out the danger of the
prevailing fashion as a sort of moral impressionism, the outcome of
the hyperæsthesia peculiar to periods of decadence. Not indeed that
Christianity is, or could be, carried out among us to its fullest
extent: “That would be a serious matter. If we were ever to become
the object to others of the same stupidities and importunities which
they expend on themselves, we should flee wildly as soon as we saw
our ‘neighbour’ approach, and curse sympathy as heartily as we now
curse egoism.” Our deepest and most personal griefs, Nietzsche remarks
elsewhere, remain unrevealed and incomprehensible to nearly all other
persons, even to the “neighbour” who eats out of the same dish with us.
And even though my grief should become visible, the dear sympathetic
neighbour can know nothing of its complexity and results, of the
organic economy of my soul. That my grief may be bound up with my
happiness troubles him little. The devotee of the “religion of pity”
will heal my sorrows without a moment’s delay; he knows not that the
path to my Heaven must lie through my own Hell, that happiness and
unhappiness are twin sisters who grow up together, or remain stunted
together.
“Morality is the mob-instinct working in the individual.” It rests,
Nietzsche asserts, on two thoughts: “the community is worth more than
the individual,” and “a permanent advantage is better than a temporary
advantage;” whence it follows that all the advantages of the community
are preferable to those of the individual. Morality thus becomes a
string of negative injunctions, a series of “Thou shalt nots,” with
scarcely a positive command amongst them; witness the well-known table
of Jewish commandments. Now Nietzsche could not endure mere negative
virtues. He resented the subtle change which has taken place in the
very meaning of the word “virtue,” and which has perverted it from an
expression of positive masculine qualities into one of merely negative
feminine qualities. In his earliest essay he referred to “active sin”
as the Promethean virtue which distinguishes the Aryans. The only
moral codes that commended themselves to him were those that contained
positive commands alone: “Do this! Do it with all your heart, and all
your strength, and all your dreams!--and all other things shall be
taken away from you!” For if we are truly devoted to the things that
are good to do we need trouble ourselves little about the things that
are good to leave undone.
Nietzsche compared himself to a mole boring down into the ground
and undermining what philosophers have for a couple of thousand
years considered the very surest ground to build on--the trust in
morals. One of his favourite methods of attack is by the analysis
of the “conscience.” He points out that whatever we were regularly
required to do in youth by those we honoured and feared created our
“good conscience.” The dictates of conscience, however urgent, thus
have no true validity as regards the person who experiences them.
“But,” some one protests, “must we not trust our feelings?” “Yes,”
replies Nietzsche, “trust your feelings, but still remember that
the inspiration which springs from feelings is the grandchild of an
opinion, often a false one, and in any case not your own. To trust
one’s feelings--that means to yield more obedience to one’s grandfather
and grandmother and their grandparents than to the gods within _our
own_ breasts: our own reason and our own experience.” Faith in
authority is thus the source of conscience; it is not the voice of God
in the human heart but the voice of man. The sphere of the moral is
the sphere of tradition, and a man is moral because he is dependent on
a tradition and not on himself. Originally everything was within the
sphere of morals, and it was only possible to escape from that sphere
by becoming a law-giver, medicine-man, demigod--that is to say by
making morals. To be customary is to be moral,--I still closely follow
Nietzsche’s thought and expression,--to be individual is to be wicked.
Every kind of originality involves a bad conscience. Nietzsche insists
with fine eloquence, again and again, that every good gift that has
been given to man put a bad conscience into the heart of the giver.
Every good thing was once new, unaccustomed, _immoral_, and gnawed
at the vitals of the finder like a worm. Primitive men lived in hordes,
and must obey the horde-voice within them. Every new doctrine is
wicked. Science has always come into the world with a bad conscience,
with the emotions of a criminal, at least of a smuggler. No man can be
disobedient to custom and not be immoral, and feel that he is immoral.
The artist, the actor, the merchant, the freethinker, the discoverer,
were once all criminals, and were persecuted, crushed, rendered morbid,
as all persons must be when their virtues are not the virtues idealised
by the community. The whole phenomena of morals are animal-like, and
have their origin in the search for prey and the avoidance of pursuit.
Progress is thus a gradual emancipation from morals. We have to
recognise the services of the men who fight in this struggle against
morals, and who are crushed into the ranks of criminals. Not that we
need pity them. “It is a new _justice_ that is called for, a new
_mot d’ordre_. We need new philosophers. The moral world also is
round. The moral world also has its antipodes, and the antipodes also
have their right to exist. A new world remains to be discovered--and
more than one! Hoist sail, O philosophers!”
“Men must become both better _and wickeder_.” So spake
Zarathustra; or, as he elsewhere has it, “It is with man as with a
tree, the higher he would climb into the brightness above, the more
vigorously his roots must strive earthwards, downwards, into the
darkness and the depths--into the wicked.” Wickedness is just as
indispensable as goodness. It is the ploughshare of wickedness which
turns up and fertilises the exhausted fields of goodness. We must
no longer be afraid to be wicked; we must no longer be afraid to be
hard. “Only the noblest things are very hard. This new command, O my
brothers, I lay upon you--become hard.”
In renewing our moral ideas we need also to renew our whole conception
of the function and value of morals. Nietzsche advises moralists to
change their tactics: “Deny moral values, deprive them of the applause
of the crowd, create obstacles to their free circulation; let
them be the shame-faced secrets of a few solitary souls; _forbid
morality_! In so doing you may perhaps accredit these things among
the only men whom one need have on one’s side, I mean heroic men.
Let it be said of morality to-day as Meister Eckard said: ‘I pray
God that he may rid me of God!’” We have altogether over-estimated
the importance of morality. Christianity knew better when it placed
“grace” above morals, and so also did Buddhism. And if we turn to
literature, Nietzsche maintains, it is a vast mistake to suppose that,
for instance, great tragedies have, or were intended to have, any
moral effect. Look at _Macbeth_, at _Tristan und Isolde_,
at _Œdipus_. In all these cases it would have been easy to make
guilt the pivot of the drama. But the great poet is in love with
passion. “He calls to us: It is the charm of charms; this exciting,
changing, dangerous, gloomy, yet often sun-filled existence! It is an
_adventure_ to live--take this side or that, it will always be the
same!’ So he speaks to us out of a restless and vigorous time, half
drunken and dazed with excess of blood and energy, out of a wickeder
time than ours is; and we are obliged to set to rights the aim of a
Shakespeare and make it righteous, that is to say, to misunderstand it.”
We have to recognise a diversity of moral ideals. Nothing is more
profoundly dangerous than, with Kant, to create impersonal categorical
imperatives after the Chinese fashion, to generalise “virtue,” “duty,”
and “goodness,” and sacrifice them to the Moloch of abstraction.
“Every man must find his own virtue, his own categorical imperative;”
it must be founded on inner necessity, on deep personal choice. Only
the simpleton says: “Men ought to be like this or like that.” The real
world presents to us a dazzling wealth of types, a prodigious play
of forms and metamorphoses. Yet up comes a poor devil of a moralist,
and says to us: “No! men ought to be something quite different!” and
straightway he paints a picture of himself on the wall, and exclaims:
“Ecce homo!” But one thing is needful, that a man should attain the
fullest satisfaction. Every man must be his own moralist.
These views might be regarded as “lax,” as predisposing to easy
self-indulgence. Nietzsche would have smiled at such a notion. Not
yielding, but mastering, was the key to his personal morality. “Every
day is badly spent,” he said, “in which a man has not once denied
himself; this gymnastic is inevitable if a man will retain the joy
of being his own master.” The four cardinal virtues, as Nietzsche
understood morals, are sincerity, courage, generosity, and courtesy.
“Do what you will,” said Zarathustra, “but first be one of those who
_are able to will_. Love your neighbour as yourself--but first
be one of those who _are able to love themselves_.” And again
Zarathustra spoke: “He who belongs to me must be strong of bone and
light of foot, eager for fight and for feast, no sulker, no John o’
Dreams, as ready for the hardest task as for a feast, sound and hale.
The best things belong to me and mine, and if men give us nothing, then
we take them: the best food, the purest sky, the strongest thoughts,
the fairest women!” There was no desire here to suppress effort and
pain. That Nietzsche regarded as a mark of modern Christian morals.
It is pain, more pain and deeper, that we need. The discipline of
suffering alone creates man’s pre-eminence. “Man unites in himself the
creature and the creator: there is in him the stuff of things, the
fragmentary and the superfluous, clay, mud, madness, chaos; but there
is also in him the creator, the sculptor, the hardness of the hammer,
the divine blessedness of the spectator on the seventh day.” Do you
pity, he asks, what must be fashioned, broken, forged, refined as by
fire? But our pity is spent on one thing alone, the most effeminate of
all weaknesses--pity. This was the source of Nietzsche’s admiration for
war, and indifference to its horror; he regarded it as the symbol of
that spiritual warfare and bloodshed in which to him all human progress
consisted. He might, had he pleased, have said with the Jew and the
Christian, that without shedding of blood there shall be no remission
of sins. But with a difference, for as he looked at the matter, every
man must be his own saviour, and it is his own blood that must be shed;
there is no salvation by proxy. That was expressed in his favourite
motto: _Virescit volnere virtus._
Nietzsche’s ideal man is the man of Epictetus, as he describes him in
_Morgenröthe_, the laconic, brave, self-contained man, not lusting
after expression like the modern idealist. The man whom Epictetus
loved hated fanaticism, he hated notoriety, he knew how to smile. And
the best was, added Nietzsche, that he had no fear of God before his
eyes; he believed firmly in reason, and relied, not on divine grace,
but on himself. Of all Shakespeare’s plays _Julius Cæsar_ seemed
to Nietzsche the greatest, because it glorifies Brutus; the finest
thing that can be said in Shakespeare’s honour, Nietzsche thought,
was that--aided perhaps by some secret and intimate experience--he
believed in Brutus and the virtues that Brutus personified. In course
of time, however, while not losing his sympathy with Stoicism, it
was Epicureanism, the heroic aspects of Epicureanism, which chiefly
appealed to Nietzsche. He regarded Epicurus as one of the world’s
greatest men, the discoverer of the heroically idyllic method of living
a philosophy; for one to whom happiness could never be more than an
unending self-discipline, and whose ideal of life had ever been that
of a spiritual nomad, the methods of Epicurus seemed to yield the
finest secrets of good living. Socrates, with his joy in life and in
himself, was also an object of Nietzsche’s admiration. Among later
thinkers, Helvetius appealed to him strongly. Goethe and Napoleon were
naturally among his favourite heroes, as were Alcibiades and Cæsar.
The latest great age of heroes was to him the Italian Renaissance.
Then came Luther, opposing the rights of the peasants, yet himself
initiating a peasants’ revolt of the intellect, and preparing the way
for that shallow plebeianism of the spirit which has marked the last
two centuries.
Latterly, in tracing the genealogy of modern morals, Nietzsche’s
opinions hardened into a formula. He recognised three stages of moral
evolution: first, the _pre-moral_ period of primitive times,
when the beast of prey was the model of conduct, and the worth of an
action was judged by its results. Then came the _moral_ period,
when the worth of an action was judged not by its results, but by
its origin; this period has been the triumph of what Nietzsche calls
slave-morality, the morality of the mob; the goodness and badness of
actions is determined by atavism, at best by survivals; every man is
occupied in laying down laws for his neighbour instead of for himself,
and all are tamed and chastised into weakness in order that they may
be able to obey these prescriptions. Nietzsche ingeniously connected
his slave-morality with the accepted fact that for many centuries the
large, fair-haired aristocratic race has been dying out in Europe,
and the older down-trodden race--short, dark, and broad-headed--has
been slowly gaining predominance. But now we stand at the threshold
of the _extra-moral_ period. Slave-morality, Nietzsche asserted,
is about to give way to master-morality; the lion will take the place
of the camel. The instincts of life, refusing to allow that anything
is forbidden, will again assert themselves, sweeping away the feeble
negative democratic morality of our time. The day has now come for the
man who is able to rule himself, and who will be tolerant to others
not out of his weakness, but out of his strength; to him nothing is
forbidden, for he has passed beyond goodness and beyond wickedness.