"That, however, is cowardice, though it be called virtue."[4]
Some there were, of course, who were conscious of the dreadful condition of things, and who deplored it, without, however, being able to put their finger on the root of the evil. Such people were most of them pessimists, and, at the time that Nietzsche lived, Schopenhauer was their leader.
Sensitive, noble-minded, artistic people, deprived by rationalistic and atheistic teachers of the belief in God, felt the ignobleness of European hopes and aspirations, and knowing of no better creed and possessing the intelligence to see the hopelessness of things under the rule of the values which then prevailed, they succumbed to a mood of utter despair, subscribed to Schopenhauer's horror and loathing of the world, and regarded the very optimism of childhood with suspicion and scorn.
For a while Nietzsche, too, was an ardent and devoted follower of Schopenhauer. Godlessness was bad enough to endure: but Godlessness in a world of un-pagan and effeminate manhood, was too much for the loving student of classical antiquity, and he turned to Schopenhauer as to one who, he thought, would understand how to steel his heart against life's misery.
But this opiate did not maintain its sway over Nietzsche long. Our poet was of a type too courageous and too vigorous to be able to surrender himself so completely to sorrow and to Buddhistic consolations. Gradually he began to regard the humble and resigned attitude of the pessimist before life's hardships and modernity's greyness as unworthy of a spirited and active man. Slowly it dawned upon him that the root of the evil lay, not in the constitution of the earth, but in man himself, and in man's actual values. If man could be roused to pursue higher ideals; if he could be moved to kill the poisonous snake of ignoble values that had crawled into his throat and choked him while he was in slumber;[5] in fact, if man could surpass himself and regard the reversal of the world's engines, for the last two thousand years, as Stendhal had done—that is to say, as the grossest error and most ridiculous faux pas that had ever been made—then, Nietzsche thought, pessimism and Schopenhauer might go to the deuce, and conscious, sensitive, intellectual, and artistic Europe would once more be able to smile instead of shuddering at the thought of mankind's former qualities.
Thus it was the condemnation of modern values, together with the thought of man's being able to surpass himself, which gave Nietzsche the grounds and the necessary strength for abandoning pessimism and embracing that wise optimism which characterises the whole of his works after The Joyful Wisdom.
True, God was dead; but that ought only to make man feel more self-reliant, more creative, prouder. Undoubtedly God was dead: but man could now hold himself responsible for himself. He could now seek a goal in manhood, on earth, and one that was at least within the compass of his powers. Long enough had he squinted heavenwards, with the result, that he had neglected his task on earth.[6]
"Dead are all Gods!" Nietzsche cries, "now we will that Superman live!"[7]
We are now before Nietzsche the evolutionist, and we must define him, relatively to those other evolutionists with whom we, as English people, are already familiar.
To begin with, then, let us dispose of the fundamental question: Nietzsche's concept of life. We have had life variously defined for us by our own writers, and perhaps one among Nietzsche's greatest contemporaries in England—Herbert Spencer—defined it in the most characteristically English fashion. Spencer said: "Life is activity," or "the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations." Now there is absolutely nothing in either of these definitions, no suggestion or hint, which would lead the most suspicious to conjecture what life really is. (Activity) reveals nothing of life's passions, its hate, its envy, its covetousness, its hard, inexorable principles; the process of the continual adjustments of internal relations to external relations might mean the serpent's digestion of its prey, or the training of an opera singer's voice, and it might also be a scientific formula for a "moral order of things." Both definitions are delightfully unheroic and vague; though they do not compromise the writer they compromise with everything else, and to start out with them is to shelve the question in a way which allows of our subsequently weaving all the romance and sweetness possible into life, and of making it as pretty as a little nursery story.