To call an attitude snobbish, when the great and good recommend it as
the only right attitude, would be to condemn it without trial; yet I
do not know how else to name the sentiment that happiness of one sort
is better than happiness of another sort, and that perfection in one
animal is more admirable than perfection in another. I wish there was
a word for this arrangement of excellences in higher and lower classes
which did not imply approval or disapproval of such an arrangement. But
language is terribly moralistic, and I do not blame the logicians for
wishing to invent another which shall convey nothing to the mind with
which it has any previous acquaintance. The Psyche, who is the mother
of language as well as of intellect, feels things to be good or evil
before she notices what other qualities they may have: and she never
gets much beyond the first dichotomy of her feminine logic: wretch and
darling, nasty and nice. This is perhaps the true reason why Plato, who
in some respects had a feminine mind and whose metaphysics follows the
lines of language, tells us in one place that the good is the highest
of the Ideas, and the source of both essence and existence. Good and
bad are certainly the first qualities fixed by words: so that to call a
man a snob, for instance, is a very vague description but a very clear
insult. Suppose we found on examination that the person in question
had a retiring and discriminating disposition, that he shunned the
unwashed, that he resembled persons of distinction, and recognized the
superiority of those who were really his superiors; we should conclude
without hesitation that he was no snob at all, but a respectable,
right-minded person. If he had been really a snob, he would have looked
up stupidly to what has no true sublimity, like birth without money,
would have imitated what was not becoming to his station, and would
have shunned company, such as our own, which though perhaps not the
most fashionable is undoubtedly the best. As I can see no scientific
difference between this snob and that no-snob, I am constrained in my
own thoughts to class them together; but in order to remind myself that
the same principle may be approved in one case and condemned in the
other, I call snobbery, when people approve of it, the higher snobbery.
An interesting advocate of the higher snobbery is Nietzsche. Although
his admiring eye is fixed on the superman, who is to supersede our
common or garden humanity, the unique excellence of that future being
does not seem to lie merely in that he is future, or is destined to be
dominant in his day: after all, everything was once future, everything
was once the coming thing, and destined to prevail in its day. It
is only human to admire and copy the fashion of to-day, whether in
clothes, or politics, or literature, or speculation; but I have not yet
heard of any snob so far ahead of his times as to love the fashions
of doomsday. The worship of evolution, which counts for so much with
many higher snobs, does not seem essential in Nietzsche. The superman
no doubt is coming, but he is not coming to stay, since the world
repeats its evolution in perpetual cycles; and whilst he will give
its highest expression to the love of power, it does not appear that
he will care very much about controlling external things, or will be
able to control them. His superiority is to be intrinsic, and chiefly
composed of freedom. It was freedom, I think, that Nietzsche sighed
for in his heart, whilst in his cavalierly speculations he talked of
power. At least, unless by power he meant power to be oneself, the
notion that all nature was animated by the lust of power would lose
its plausibility; the ambition which we may poetically attribute
to all animals is rather to appropriate such things as serve their
use, perfection, or fancy, and to leave all else alone. There are
indications that the superman was to be a mystic and a wanderer, like
a god visiting the earth, and that what spell he exercised was to flow
from him almost unawares, whilst he mused about himself and about
higher things. So little was his power to involve subjection to what he
worked upon (which is the counterpart of all material power) that he
was to disregard the interests of others in a Spartan mood; he was to
ride ruthlessly through this nether world, half a poet, half a scourge,
with his breast uncovered to every treacherous shaft, and his head high
in the air.
Now I will not say whether such a romantic and Byronic life is worth
living in itself; there may be creatures whose only happiness is to
be like that, although I suspect that Byron and Nietzsche, Lohengrin
and Zarathustra, had not mastered the art of Socrates, and did not
know what they wanted. In any case, such a Dionysiac career would be
good only as the humblest human existence may be so; its excellence
would lie in its harmony with the nature of him who follows it,
not in its bombast, inflation, or superhumanity. Nietzsche was far
from ungenerous or unsympathetic towards the people. He wished them
(somewhat contemptuously) to be happy, whilst he and his superman
remained poetically wretched; he even said sometimes that in their own
sphere they might be perfect, and added--with that sincerity which,
in him, redeems so many follies--that nothing could be better than
such perfection. But if this admission is to be taken seriously, the
superman would be no better than the good slave. The whole principle of
the higher snobbery would be abandoned, and Nietzsche in the end would
only lead us back to Epictetus.
No, the higher snob will reply, the perfect superman may be no better
than the perfect slave, but he is _higher_. What does this word mean?
For the zealous evolutionist it seems to mean later, more complicated,
requiring a longer incubation and a more special environment. Therefore
what is higher is more expensive, and has a more precarious existence
than what is lower; so the lady is higher than the woman, fine art is
higher than useful art, and the height of the fashion in fine art is
the highest point in it. The higher is the more inclusive, requiring
everything else to produce it, and itself producing nothing, or
something higher still. Of course the higher is not merely the better;
because the standard of excellence itself changes as we proceed, and
according to the standard of the lower morality the higher state which
abolishes it will be worse. An orchid may not be more beautiful than
a lily, but it is higher; philosophy may not be truer than science,
nor true at all, but it is higher, because so much more comprehensive;
faith may not be more trustworthy than reason, but it is higher;
insatiable will may not be more beneficent than contentment in oneself
and respect for others, but it is higher; war is higher, though more
painful, than peace; perpetual motion is not more reasonable than
movement towards an end, and stilts are not more convenient than shoes,
but they are higher. In everything the higher, when not the better,
means what folly or vanity cannot bear to abandon. Higher is a word by
which we defend the indefensible; it is a declaration of impenitence on
the part of unreason, a cry to create prejudice in favour of all that
tyrannizes over mankind. It is the watchword of the higher snob. The
first to use it was Satan, when he declared that he was not satisfied
to be anything but the highest; whereas the highest thinks it no
derogation to take the form of the lowest since the lowest, too, has
its proper perfection, and there is nothing _better_ than that.
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