VI
It must be admitted that the imagination has not yet sufficiently glorified this enterprise of civilization. It is hard to forget old shibboleths and loyalties. And yet precisely that must be done with every advance in liberality. Admiration and passion lag behind reason; are forever backsliding and debauching themselves among the companions of their youth. But man's salvation lies not in degrading his reason to the level of his loyalties, nor in allowing the two to drift apart, but in acquiring a finer loyalty. And while one cannot extemporize the symbols and imagery of devotion, these will surely grow about any sustained purpose.
We hear much in our day of the passing of nobility and enthusiasm with the era of war. "Whatever makes men feel young," says Chesterton, {29} "is great—a great war or a love story." [9] Love stories will doubtless continue to the end; but must man cease to feel young in the days when cruelty and exploitation are obsolete? Nietsche[10] speaks with passionate regret of a certain "lordliness," or assertion of superiority, that has latterly given place to the slave morality, which aims at "the universal green-meadow happiness of the herd." There are no more heroes, of "lofty spirituality," but only levellers, timid, stupid, mediocre folk, "sans genie et sans esprit."
Now there is a paradox that does not seem to have occurred to Nietsche, in the slave insurrection by which he accounts for this dreary spectacle. It can scarcely be a code of slavishness that has enabled slaves to overthrow their masters. The morality of the modern European democracy is the morality of the strong; of the many, it is true, but of the many united and impassioned, moving toward the general end with good heart. And it is this which gave mastery to the once ruling class. Mastery appears wherever action is bold, united, and with the pressure of interest behind it; mastery has nothing to do with the airs of mastery, with Nietsche's "pathos of distance," separating class from class. The "instinct for rank," and "delight in the nuances of reverence," are not signs of nobility, as Nietsche would have it. There is no nose for them so {30} sensitive and discriminating as that of the chambermaid or butler. The mere pride of an easy mastery over slaves is the taint of every society in which class differences are recognized as fixed. It attaches to all classes; whether it be called snobbery or obsequiousness, it is all one. The virtue of mastery, on the other hand, lies in the power and in the attainment which it represents.
And this Nietsche himself fully admits in his less inspired but more thoughtful utterances. It is "the constant struggle with uniform unfavorable conditions" that fixes the type he admires. When there are no more enemies, "the bond and constraint of the old discipline severs," and a rapid decay sets in; which leads inevitably, after a chaos of individualism, to a period of mediocrity such as the present. In other words, so soon as its political and social activities are confined to "lording it," the aristocracy loses its vigor, and falls an easy prey to democratic or other propagandists who want something and are united to attain it.
Now it seems that if man is not to become spiritually bankrupt, he must be confronted with unfavorable conditions that keep him vigilant and alert. Nietsche has no imagination for resistance, struggle, and victory, except as these arise in the war of man against man. His heroes are Alcibiades, Caesar, and Frederick II, "men {31} predestined for conquering and circumventing others." But it is not easy for us of this day to forget the others; it is the cost to them that galls our conscience. We cannot sincerely applaud a heroism in which life is condemned to feed on itself. Shall the only enemy that never fails, the condition that is always indifferent if not unfavorable, namely, the perpetual wear and drag of nature, be forgotten in order that men may fall on one another? Has man no more lordly task than that of destroying what he holds to be good? Is there no more of "creative plenipotence" in man than killing and robbing?
I am convinced that it needs only enlightenment to reduce Nietsche's circumventer of others to the proportions of a burglar; and to enlarge to truly heroic proportions him who circumvents the blindness of nature, brings up the weak or faint-hearted who lag behind, and throws himself bravely into the enterprise of steady constructive civilization. Nietsche is beguiled by a love of melodrama. He forgets the real war for the pageantry of an era that will pass. As a misleader of youth he conspires with the writers of dime-novels to fix the imagination on false symbols. The small boy who would run away from home for the glory of fighting Indians is deceived; both because there are no longer any Indians to fight, and because there are more glorious {32} battles to be fought at home. War between man and man is an obsolescent form of heroism. There is every reason, therefore, why it should not be glorified as the only occasion capable of evoking the great emotions. The general battle of life, the first and last battle, is still on; and it has that in it of danger and resistance, of comradeship and of triumph, that can stir the blood.
But I have not undertaken to make morality picturesque. I shall leave that to other hands. In an age when it has been somewhat out of literary fashion, Chesterton[11] has found it possible even to proclaim morality as the latest and most enlivening paradox. But I propose to leave it clad in its own sobriety. Its appeal in the last analysis must be to a sense for reality, and to an enlightened practical wisdom. Morality is that which makes man, "naked, shoeless, and defenceless" in body, the master of the kingdom of nature. Morality in this sense has never been more simply and eloquently justified than in the words which Plato puts into the mouth of Protagoras. He first describes the arts with which men contrived barely to sustain themselves, in a condition no better than the beasts which preyed on them in their helplessness. It is then that through the gift of Zeus they are rescued from their degradation and invested with the forms of civilization.
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After a while the desire of self-preservation gathered them into cities; but when they were gathered together, having no art of government, they evil-intreated one another, and were again in process of dispersion and destruction. Zeus feared that the entire race would be exterminated, and so he sent Hermes to them, bearing reverence and justice to be the ordering principles of cities and the bonds of friendship and conciliation.[12]
But reverence and justice are more even than the ordering principles of cities. They are the conditions of the maximum of attainment, whether this be conceived as that supreme excellence which Plato divined, or as that all-saving good which is the object of a Christian devotion to humanity. Morality is the law of life, from its bare preservation to its supreme fruition. There is a high pretension in morality which is the necessary consequence of its motive. But man is not, on that account, in need of those reminders of failure which are so easy to offer, and which are so impotently true; he needs rather new symbols of faith, through which his heart may be renewed, and his courage fortified to proceed with an undertaking of which he cannot see the end. Faith and courage have brought him thus far:
"Till he well-nigh can tame
Brute mischiefs and control
Invisible things and turn
All warring ills to purposes of good."
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