Excepting, perhaps, one or two recent cases, such as Dr. Parry and Mr. Hadow, our men of light and leading have had nothing important to say about music, whereas for Nietzsche, a scholar and critic of commanding reputation, music was the one art possessing genuine vitality in the modern world, and the questions of musical æsthetics were anything but an affair of dilettantes; they were the questions connected with a tremendous power for good or evil.
Of all Nietzsche's fantastic conceptions that which has produced the most curious results is the famous "blonde beast," a sort of bogey invented for the purpose of annoying and frightening Socialists. The satirist begins by expressing contempt of herding creatures and admiration of "beautiful solitary beasts of prey." Sheep and cattle, he reminds the Socialists, are naturally gregarious, but lions have never been known to acquire the gregarious instinct. Next he develops the theory of analogy between great men of the conquering type and common criminals—the same theory as is set forth, ostensibly as a joke but really with much seriousness, in Fielding's "Jonathan Wild." This theory stands in high repute among Socialists, who find it useful for attacking great men of the conquering and warfaring type, so that when Nietzsche turns it against Socialism he strikes with a two-edged sword. Lastly, he conjures up a fearsome image of predatory and unscrupulous vigour, a combination of Napoleon and feudal aristocrat. This is the "blonde beast" which, according to the programme of the Nietzschian apocalypse, is to devour the enfeebled man of the modern world. It is one of Nietzsche's happiest inspirations, and has already provoked a literature. Quite recently, for example, a book appeared in Germany accepting with perfect gravity and recommending for immediate practical adoption the principles of the "blonde beast." One might almost imagine that Nietzsche foresaw some such result with secret satisfaction at the idea of his posthumous revenge on the "flat-land." There are signs, too, in the English press that the popular imagination is about to fix on Nietzsche as a writer who recommends promiscuous ruffianism. Was not Darwin known for many years as the preposterous eccentric who said men were descended from monkeys? It is, however, advisable to warn those who are not greatly concerned with mental problems, who value tradition and take a hopeful view of life, that they had better leave Nietzsche alone. His influence is on the whole gloomy, disquieting, and profoundly unsettling, though in relation to the critical literature of the Continent he is unquestionably one of the great originals, one of the few "voices" that find many echoes.
Nietzsche in English.
August 4, 1899.
The publication of a complete English translation of the works of Nietzsche is an enterprise which deserves the cordial thankfulness of all lovers of profound thought and fine literary style. It is not too much to say that no German writer since Goethe's death, with the possible exception of Schopenhauer, has united in the same degree as Nietzsche the two characteristics of originality of matter and charm and pungency of expression. And of no modern writer whatever, except of George Meredith, can it be said that he possesses anything like Nietzsche's power of compelling his reader, whether he is an admiring reader or a protesting one, to think for himself about the fundamental problems of life and conduct. Nietzsche's philosophy, with its intense hatred of Christianity and modern humanitarianism, is scarcely likely to make any large number of converts among us, but if it can compel us to ask ourselves honestly and plainly what the unacknowledged ideals of our civilisation are, and whether they are, after all, capable of being rationally justified, he will have done an infinitely greater service to thought than any founder of sect or school.
If one measures the worth of a book by its suggestiveness rather than by the degree in which its propositions can be accepted as a whole, Nietzsche's own description of his "Thus spake Zarathustra" as the profoundest of German works will hardly appear exaggerated. In the absence of the great work on the "Transvaluation of all Values," which was so lamentably cut short by the philosopher's incurable illness, "Zarathustra" must probably be accepted as the prime document of the new moral code, of which Nietzsche was the best known and most eloquent preacher.
Nietzsche's hero has, of course, very little in common with the semi-historical fighting prophet of Iran. Under the disguise of a story with no particular scene or date, he gives you a treatise on the moral life as it might be if men would regard the extirpation of the unfit and the propagation of a race of physically and mentally superior beings as the first and last of human duties. Of course, in any such picture there must always be many subjective features, and much that is characteristic of Zarathustra, his extreme individualism, his love of loneliness and solitary places, his hatred of a complex and expensive life, is simply a reflection of the peculiar personal taste of his Creator. Had Nietzsche himself not been free from ordinary social and domestic ties, it is likely that the individualistic and anti-social strain in his teachings would have been far less prominent than it is. But when all allowance has been made for such personal idiosyncrasies, it remains the fact that Nietzsche has more boldly than any other writer of our time raised the most important of social questions; the question whether the ethical and political ideals of Christianity, of democracy, of universal benevolence, are those of a healthy or those of a radically diseased humanity. No future vindication of our current idea can be regarded as of any value unless it sets itself to grapple, more seriously than professional moral philosophy has as yet done, with the attack of Zarathustra. In the minor writings which fill the other two volumes of the translation already published, Nietzsche is less constructive and more purely iconoclastic. The "Antichrist" subjects the established religion of Europe and the moral code based upon it to a criticism which is always suggestive, often profound, sometimes merely angry and wrong-headed. The attack upon Wagner, in whom Nietzsche had once looked for a master, is closely connected with the furious onslaught upon Christian ideals. Of Wagner the musician Nietzsche has many things both hard and shrewd to say, but the Wagner against whom the main brunt of his polemic is directed is Wagner the psychologist, the pessimist, the preacher of chastity and resignation—in a word, as Nietzsche understands him, the decadent. Christianity, according to Nietzsche, has made decadence into a religion, Schopenhauer has turned it into a philosophy, Wagner into an æsthetic theory. Hence the constant polemic against all three which recurs in all Nietzsche's writings. The "Genealogy of Morals" is devoted to the exposition of a favourite theory of Nietzsche's, that there have always been two antithetical codes of moral values, that of "masters" and that of "slaves." "Masters" prize above everything else qualities which bespeak a superabundance of personal force, strength, beauty, wealth, long life; "slaves" set the highest store by qualities which make servitude more endurable, and in the end render revenge upon the "master" possible. Starting from this primary assumption, Nietzsche shows wonderful insight in his examination of the growth of concepts like "guilt," "sin," "bad conscience."
[1] This suggestion was adopted in the performances at Covent Garden in 1905.—Ed.