III
Every Classical ethic that we know or can conceive of constitutes man an individual static entity, a body among bodies, and all Western valuations relate to him as a centre of effect in an infinite generality. Ethical Socialism is neither more nor less than the sentiment of action-at-a-distance, the moral pathos of the third dimension; and the root-feeling of Care—care for those who are with us, and for those who are to follow—is its emblem in the sky. Consequently there is for us something socialistic in the aspect of the Egyptian Culture, while the opposite tendency to immobile attitude, to non-desire, to static self-containedness of the individual, recalls the Indian ethic and the man formed by it. The seated Buddha-statue (“looking at its navel”) and Zeno’s Ataraxia are not altogether alien to one another. The ethical ideal of Classical man was that which is led up to in his tragedy, and revealed in its Katharsis. This in its last depths means the purgation of the Apollinian soul from its burden of what is not Apollinian, not free from the elements of distance and direction, and to understand it we have to recognize that Stoicism is simply the mature form of it. That which the drama effected in a solemn hour, the Stoa wished to spread over the whole field of life; viz., statuesque steadiness and will-less ethos. Now, is not this conception of κάθαρσις closely akin to the Buddhist ideal of Nirvana, which as a formula is no doubt very “late” but as an essence is thoroughly Indian and traceable even from Vedic times? And does not this kinship bring ideal Classical man and ideal Indian man very close to one another and separate them both from that man whose ethic is manifested in the Shakespearian tragedy of dynamic evolution and catastrophe? When one thinks of it, there is nothing preposterous in the idea of Socrates, Epicurus, and especially Diogenes, sitting by the Ganges, whereas Diogenes in a Western megalopolis would be an unimportant fool. Nor, on the other hand, is Frederick William I of Prussia, the prototype of the Socialist in the grand sense, unthinkable in the polity of the Nile, whereas in Periclean Athens he is impossible.
Had Nietzsche regarded his own times with fewer prejudices and less disposition to romantic championship of certain ethical creations, he would have perceived that a specifically Christian morale of compassion in his sense does not exist on West-European soil. We must not let the words of humane formulæ mislead us as to their real significance. Between the morale that one has and the morale that one thinks one has, there is a relation which is very obscure and very unsteady, and it is just here that an incorruptible psychology would be invaluable. Compassion is a dangerous word, and neither Nietzsche himself—for all his maestria—nor anyone else has yet investigated the meaning—conceptual and effective—of the word at different times. The Christian morale of Origen’s time was quite different from the Christian morale of St. Francis’s. This is not the place to enquire what Faustian compassion—sacrifice or ebullience or again race-instinct in a chivalrous society[[432]]—means as against the fatalistic Magian-Christian kind, how far it is to be conceived as action-at-a-distance and practical dynamic, or (from another angle) as a proud soul’s demand upon itself, or again as the utterance of an imperious distance-feeling. A fixed stock of ethical phrases, such as we have possessed since the Renaissance, has to cover a multitude of different ideas and a still greater multitude of different meanings. When a mankind so historically and retrospectively disposed as we are accepts the superficial as the real sense, and regards ideals as subject-matter for mere knowing, it is really evidencing its veneration for the past—in this particular instance, for religious tradition. The text of a conviction is never a test of its reality, for man is rarely conscious of his own beliefs. Catchwords and doctrines are always more or less popular and external as compared with deep spiritual actualities. Our theoretical reverence for the propositions of the New Testament is in fact of the same order as the theoretical reverence of the Renaissance and of Classicism for antique art; the one has no more transformed the spirit of men than the other has transformed the spirit of works. The oft-quoted cases of the Mendicant Orders, the Moravians and the Salvation Army prove by their very rarity, and even more by the slightness of the effects that they have been able to produce, that they are exceptions in a quite different generality—namely, the Faustian-Christian morale. That morale will not indeed be found formulated, either by Luther or by the Council of Trent, but all Christians of the great style—Innocent III and Calvin, Loyola and Savonarola, Pascal and St. Theresa—have had it in them, even in unconscious contradiction to their own formal teachings.
We have only to compare the purely Western conception of the manly virtue that is designated by Nietzsche’s “moralinfrei” virtù, the grandezza of Spanish and the grandeur of French Baroque, with that very feminine ἀρετή of the Hellenic ideal, of which the practical application is presented to us as capacity for enjoyment (ἡδονή), placidity of disposition (γαλήνη, ἀπάθεια), absence of wants and demands, and, above all, the so typical ἀταραξία. What Nietzsche called the Blond Beast and conceived to be embodied in the type of Renaissance Man that he so overvalued (for it is really only a jackal counterfeit of the great Hohenstaufen Germans) is the utter antithesis to the type that is presented in every Classical ethic without exception and embodied in every Classical man of worth. The Faustian Culture has produced a long series of granite-men, the Classical never a one. For Pericles and Themistocles were soft natures in tune with Attic καλοκἀγαθία, and Alexander was a Romantic who never woke up, Cæsar a shrewd reckoner. Hannibal, the alien, was the only “Mann” amongst them all. The men of the early time, as Homer presents them to our judgment—the Odysseuses and Ajaxes—would have cut a queer figure among the chevaliers of the Crusades. Very feminine natures, too, are capable of brutality—a rebound-brutality of their own—and Greek cruelty was of this kind. But in the North the great Saxon, Franconian and Hohenstaufen emperors appear on the very threshold of the Culture, surrounded by giant-men like Henry the Lion and Gregory VII. Then come the men of the Renaissance, of the struggle of the two Roses, of the Huguenot Wars, the Spanish Conquistadores, the Prussian electors and kings, Napoleon, Bismarck, Rhodes. What other Culture has exhibited the like of these? Where in all Hellenic history is so powerful a scene as that of 1176—the Battle of Legnano as foreground, the suddenly-disclosed strife of the great Hohenstaufen and the great Welf as background? The heroes of the Great Migrations, the Spanish chivalry, Prussian discipline, Napoleonic energy—how much of the Classical is there in these men and things? And where, on the heights of Faustian morale, from the Crusades to the World War, do we find anything of the “slave-morale,” the meek resignation, the deaconess’s Caritas?[[433]] Only in pious and honoured words, nowhere else. The type of the very priesthood is Faustian; think of those magnificent bishops of the old German empire who on horseback led their flocks into the wild battle,[[434]] or those Popes who could force submission on a Henry IV and a Frederick II, of the Teutonic Knights in the Ostmark, of Luther’s challenge in which the old Northern heathendom rose up against old Roman, of the great Cardinals (Richelieu, Mazarin, Fleury) who shaped France. That is Faustian morale, and one must be blind indeed if one does not see it efficient in the whole field of West-European history. And it is only through such grand instances of worldly passion which express the consciousness of a mission that we are able to understand those of grand spiritual passion, of the upright and forthright Caritas which nothing can resist, the dynamic charity that is so utterly unlike Classical moderation and Early-Christian mildness. There is a hardness in the sort of com-passion that was practised by the German mystics, the German and Spanish military Orders, the French and English Calvinists. In the Russian, the Raskolnikov, type of charity a soul melts into the fraternity of souls, in the Faustian it arises out of it. Here too “ego habeo factum” is the formula. Personal charity is the justification before God of the Person, the individual.
This is the reason why "compassion"-morale, in the everyday sense, always respected by us so far as words go, and sometimes hoped for by the thinker, is never actualized. Kant rejected it with decision, and in fact it is in profound contradiction with the Categorical Imperative, which sees the meaning of Life to lie in actions and not in surrender to soft opinions. Nietzsche’s “slave-morale” is a phantom, his master-morale is a reality. It does not require formulation to be effective—it is there, and has been from of old. Take away his romantic Borgia-mask and his nebulous vision of supermen, and what is left of his man is Faustian man himself, as he is to-day and as he was even in saga-days, the type of an energetic, imperative and dynamic Culture. However it may have been in the Classical world, our great well-doers are the great doers whose forethought and care affects millions, the great statesmen and organizers. "A higher sort of men, who thanks to their preponderance of will, knowledge, wealth and influence make use of democratic Europe as their aptest and most mobile tool, in order to bring into their own hands the destinies of the Earth and as artists to shape ‘man’ himself. Enough—the time is coming when men will unlearn and relearn the art of politics." So Nietzsche delivered himself in one of the unpublished drafts that are so much more concrete than the finished works. “We must either breed political capacities, or else be ruined by the democracy that has been forced upon us by the failure of the older alternatives,”[[435]] says Shaw in Man and Superman. Limited though his philosophic horizon is in general, Shaw has the advantage over Nietzsche of more practical schooling and less ideology, and the figure of the multimillionaire Undershaft in Major Barbara translates the Superman-ideal into the unromantic language of the modern age (which in truth is its real source for Nietzsche also, though it reached him indirectly through Malthus and Darwin). It is these fact-men of the grand style who are the representatives to-day of the Will-to-Power over other men’s destinies and therefore of the Faustian ethic generally. Men of this sort do not broadcast their millions to dreamers, “artists,” weaklings and “down-and-outs” to satisfy a boundless benevolence; they employ them for those who like themselves count as material for the Future. They pursue a purpose with them. They make a centre of force for the existence of generations which outlives the single lives. The mere money, too, can develop ideas and make history, and Rhodes—precursor of a type that will be significant indeed in the 21st Century—provided, in disposing of his possessions by will, that it should do so. It is a shallow judgment, and one incapable of inwardly understanding history, that cannot distinguish the literary chatter of popular social-moralists and humanity-apostles from the deep ethical instincts of the West-European Civilization.
Socialism—in its highest and not its street-corner sense—is, like every other Faustian ideal, exclusive. It owes its popularity only to the fact that it is completely misunderstood even by its exponents, who present it as a sum of rights instead of as one of duties, an abolition instead of an intensification of the Kantian imperative, a slackening instead of a tautening of directional energy. The trivial and superficial tendency towards ideals of “welfare,” “freedom,” “humanity,” the doctrine of the “greatest happiness of the greatest number,” are mere negations of the Faustian ethic—a very different matter from the tendency of Epicureanism towards the ideal of “happiness,” for the condition of happiness was the actual sum and substance of the Classical ethic. Here precisely is an instance of sentiments, to all outward appearance much the same, but meaning in the one case everything and in the other nothing. From this point of view, we might describe the content of the Classical ethic as philanthropy, a boon conferred by the individual upon himself, his soma. The view has Aristotle on its side, for it is exactly in this sense that he uses the word φιλάνθρωπος, which the best heads of the Classicist period, above all Lessing, found so puzzling. Aristotle describes the effect of the Attic tragedy on the Attic spectator as philanthropic. Its Peripeteia relieves him from compassion with himself. A sort of theory of master-morale and slave-morale existed also in the early Hellenism, in Callicles for example—naturally, under strictly corporeal-Euclidean postulates. The ideal of the first class is Alcibiades. He did exactly what at the moment seemed to him best for his own person, and he is felt to be, and admired as, the type of Classical Kalokagathia. But Protagoras is still more distinct, with his famous proposition—essentially ethical in intention—that man (each man for himself) is the measure of things. That is master-morale in a statuesque soul.