II.—Nietzsche
It is in no way surprising to find defenders of the calamitous prophet of Hohenzollernism active to prove that he meant this fine thing, and that, and did not mean blood and domination. The truth is that only too many English writers allowed themselves to be tarred with the Nietzschean brush. They made him a cult, a boom, a pinnacle of superior vision. Now that the Moloch, whose high priests were beyond all others Nietzsche and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, is exacting his awful tribute, the worshippers, once so self-confident, begin to fear a little for their own reputations. For the issue of this war is to kill Prussianism, not only in Germany, but in the whole life and philosophy of Europe. The universal watchword is: “Never again!”
The vogue of the Supermaniacs is, perhaps, best explained by the curious lack of seriousness in dealing with ideas which is characteristic of the English mind in its worst periods. Great journals flatter the Harnacks and the Euckens and the rest in their attempt to deny all authenticity to the “scraps of paper” on which Christian belief is founded, and wonder, in the next column, why people are not going to church. Professor Cramb—who, by the way, is painfully German in his “anti-German” book—touches upon this inexplicable unreality of English thought. He suggests that it has counted for much in producing in Germany that professorial contempt which one finds, especially, in a writer like Treitschke. When your Prussian says: “Fill me a bath of blood!” he means blood. When your English critic reads it, he says, too often: “What a vivid image!”
Of the “deep damnation” which lies at the heart of the Nietzschean philosophy no doubt is admissible. It is idle to say that he contradicted himself at twenty turns, and that especially he hated the professors and raked them with the shrapnel of his irony. It is the way of supermen to hate other supermen. It is the badge of the tribe. Of all his writings Germany took and absorbed just as much as fitted in with her mood of domination and Empire. Hauptmann—another of the flattered renegades—told us the other day that if you open the knapsack of a German soldier you will probably find in it a copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra. Nietzsche was angry with the professors only because they preferred obscure, and he preferred lucid brutality. Not since Lucifer was so much light used to dark ends. Not since Diana was great in Ephesus were such beautiful images cast or carven in the service of a false worship. He made German dance, as before him, only Heine had done.
“I have the idea,” he wrote, “that with Zarathustra I have brought the German language to its point of perfection.”
The boast is probably true. The devil was always a good stylist, and it is not inappropriate that when his gospel is at its worst, his prose should be at its best. We may charitably assume that those whom he led off the plain paths of life into his foul and blood-bathed jungles, were taken captive, not by his message, but by his music.
What then was his creed, or rather his vision? For he was the mystagogue of Prussianism, who chanted but never explained. As in the case of Bismarck, I propose to exclude as far as possible anything written ad hoc, or since the war. My first witness is Alfred Fouillée, the doyen of French philosophy, Whose Nietzsche et l’Immoralisme appeared in 1902 (the unfamiliarity of Fouillée’s name is a biting satire on our leaders of thought)—
“If the Vandals had read a course in Hegelian metaphysics, they would have held the same language as Nietzsche.”
The popular instinct which named the Prussians the Huns was thus long anticipated by the greatest Platonist in Europe.
* * * * *
To Nietzsche the whole motive behind life is a sort of metaphysical symbol which he calls the Will-to-Power. The whole task of life is to impose your power on others an andern Macht auslassen. With what aim? To evolve the Superman. But in this struggle of all against all we must, in a world divided into nations and classes, struggle for the victory of some nation and some fashion of government. For Prussia, and for an aristocracy more scientifically cruel than the world has ever known. And what is the first step towards this Elysium? War, and again war. War, with the formula of the Assassins for its formula—
“Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”
* * * * *
It is idle to remind us that Nietzsche touched life at other points, and that in his flaming incoherence you will find contradictions of this vision. For it was this vision of Attila, and no other, that conquered the imagination of Prussia. She desired all Europe for an Empire, and after that the seas, and at last the world. It needed but one further step in this mysticism of the madhouse to decree divine honours to the Kaiser.
Now let Nietzsche speak for himself. Thus spake Zarathustra on the morality of war—
“You shall love peace as a means to new wars, and a short peace better than a long....
“I do not counsel you labour, I do not counsel you peace, but victory. Let your labour be a conflict, and your peace a victory....
“It was said of old that a good cause sanctifies war; but I say to you that a good war sanctifies any cause.”
As to what he meant by a “good” war he leaves us in no doubt. He meant simply a war in which a victorious Prussia would slay and burn without measure and without pity.
“My brothers, I place above you this new Table of the Law: Be hard!”
* * * * *
Zarathustra washes, with shame, his hands, because they have aided someone who was suffering. “Nay, I labour to cleanse my very soul” of the sin of pity, he adds.
“I dream,” he cries, “of an association of men who would be whole and complete, who would know no compromise, and who would give themselves the name of destroyers....”
In memorial verses on the death of a friend, killed in France in 1870, he writes—
“Even in the hour of death he ordered men, and he ordered them to destroy.”
The three cardinal virtues of the warrior are “pleasure, pride and the instinct of domination.”
“If I am convinced”—he means, plainly, “Since I am convinced”—he writes, “that harshness, cruelty, trickery, audacity, and the mood of battle tend to augment the vitality of man, I shall say Yes! to evil, and sin....”
And lest any of his defenders should seek to explain away this very coherent doctrine as “poetry,” let it be remembered that this was a man who had seen war, much of the war of 1870. During its actual progress he wrote deliberately a Satanic pæan from which he never receded—
“On the one hand they (the Democrats) conjure up systems of European equilibrium; on the other hand, they do their best to deprive absolute sovereigns of the right to declare war.... They feel it incumbent on them to weaken the monarchical instinct of the masses, and do weaken it by propagating amongst them the liberal and optimistic conception of the world which has its roots in the doctrines of French rationalism and the Revolution; that is, in a philosophy altogether foreign to the German spirit, a Latin platitude, devoid of any metaphysical meaning.”
We “must have war, and war again.”
“It will not, therefore, be thought that I do ill when I raise here the pæan of war. The resonance of its silver bow is terrible. It comes to us sombre as night; nevertheless, Apollo accompanies, Apollo the rightful leader of states, the god who purifies them.... Let us say it then; war is necessary to the state, as the slave is to society.”
* * * * *
This transition leads us without a break on to some amiable views regarding the internal organization of states. To Nietzsche the mass of humanity is a sweating negligibility—
“The misery of those who live by labour must be made yet more rigorous, in order that a very few Olympian men may create a world of art.” (Unnecessary to say that the son of the Pastor of Naumburg was to have a life membership of Olympus.) “At their expense, by the artifice of unpaid labour, the privileged classes should be relieved from the struggle for life, and given such new conditions that they can create, and satisfy a new order of needs.... And if it is true to say that the Greeks were destroyed by slavery, this other affirmation is most certainly even truer; for lack of slavery, we are perishing.”
The reader can but be astonished at the modesty of the slightly impecunious professor from Basel. Why did he not call himself a god? Why a mere superman?
On the subject of God and gods, however, he had views of his own. Just as Fichte used to say to his philosophical students at a certain point in the course: “To-morrow, gentlemen, I will proceed to create God!” so Nietzsche was never tired of repeating: “I have killed God!” His argument is very simple—
“If there did exist gods, how could I bear not to be a god? Consequently, there are no gods.”
As to that special mode of worship called Christianity, upon which all justice, love, pity, and help of our neighbours, is in the tradition of Europe, immovably based, he is unable to speak with even a colour of sanity.
“The Christian concept of God—God as the deity of the sick, God as spider, God as spirit—is one of the most corrupt concepts of God that have ever been attained on earth.” Christianity and alcohol are “the two great instruments of corruption.”
That he said, “You are going among women. Do not forget your whip!” I do not regard as essential to his philosophy. Most men have said angry things about women at one time or other. But it does happen that the position of women is more abject in Germany than anywhere else in Europe. And it does happen that Nietzsche also said—
“For man, happiness lies in the formula, I desire. For woman, in the formula, he desires.”
And also “man is to be reared for war, woman for the recreation of the warrior. All the rest is folly.”
Did Hauptmann’s Germans, one wonders, whip out their new knapsack Bibles and run over this text before they entered Aerschot and Louvain?
In his practical ethics he works out the theory of the Ems telegram and the Berlin Press Bureau—
“In point of fact it matters greatly to what end one lies, whether one preserves or destroys by means of falsehood.”
It would be a simple weariness to multiply passages in greater abundance. They are all of the same texture, for, despite incoherence and contradictions, they all come from the same centre of corruption, the Will-to-Power. It is a long-drawn-out Metaphysics of Bullying, nothing less and nothing more.
One has only to think of the soil into which seed like this was dropped in order to understand the harvest of desolation that the swords are now reaping. Think of Prussia, flattered by all the world—even by Matthew Arnold—into regarding herself as the chosen of the Lord. Think of the unearned prosperity brought by the French tribute, of the raw egotism, the coarse insolence bred by it. Think of how the old Germanic racial chauvinism was nourished by the theories of Gobineau as freshened by the appalling Chamberlain. Think of how French intellect has been boycotted in England and America for thirty years, while troops of translators, critics and publishers ran round canvassing first-class reputations for fourth-rate German scholars. Think of the tawdry pretensions of Berlin, of the infinite vulgarity of the Alley and Column of Victory.
* * * * *
Is it to be wondered at that a creed like Nietzsche’s, let loose in such a world, has succeeded? Reading it, Krupp feels himself a veritable knight of the Holy Ghost. Kaiser Wilhelm’s brow grows heavy with the growing cares of the superman. Buccaneer Bernhardi cries out: “My lust for blood is philosophised.” The diplomats join in in chorus: “Remember Bismarck! Since France and England both want peace, let us either lie or bully them into war!”
Nietzsche said of himself: “I am a fatality!” He was. Three years before this war was thought of, in attempting to define Nietzscheanism in an introduction to Halévy’s Life, I wrote as opening words: “The duel between Nietzsche and Civilisation is over....”
I was wrong; it is not over. But between Prussianism and Civilisation it is that this epical war is joined; there is not room on earth for the two.