“Such people as have been bred up to liberty, and subject to no other dominion but the authority of their own will, look upon all other forms of government as monstrous and contrary to nature. Those who are inured to monarchy do the same; and what opportunity soever fortune presents them with to change, even then, when with the greatest difficulties they have disengaged themselves from one master, that was troublesome and grievous to them, they presently run, with the same difficulties, to create another; being unable to take into hatred subjection itself.”
There is no law in religion. There is no justification in patriotism. The choice of religion is not a matter of conscience or of reason, but of custom and climate. We are Christians by the same title as we are Perigordins or Germans.
V.
If to destroy all human principles and illusions is to be a sceptic, Montaigne is the greatest sceptic that ever existed. But Montaigne’s scepticism is only a means to an end. On the ruin of all philosophies and religions Montaigne, like Nietzsche, has built up a dogmatism of his own. The foundation of that dogmatism in both is an unbounded faith in life and in nature. Like Nietzsche, Montaigne is an optimist. At the very outset of the “Essays” he proclaims the joy of life. He preaches the gaya scienza, the fröhliche Wissenschaft. All our sufferings are due to our departing from the teachings of Nature. The chapter on cannibalism, from which Shakespeare has borrowed a famous passage in “The Tempest,” and which has probably suggested the character of Caliban, must be taken in literal sense. The savage who lives in primitive simplicity comes nearer to Montaigne’s ideal of perfection than the philosopher and the saint.
VI.
And this brings us to the fundamental analogy between Nietzsche and Montaigne. Like the German, the Frenchman is a pure pagan. Here, again, we must not be misled by the innumerable professions of faith, generally added in later editions and not included in the edition of 1580. Montaigne is uncompromisingly hostile to Christianity. His Catholicism must be understood as the Catholicism of Auguste Comte, defined by Huxley—namely, Catholicism minus Christianity. He glorifies suicide. He abhors the self-suppression of asceticism; he derides chastity, humility, mortification—every virtue which we are accustomed to associate with the Christian faith. He glorifies self-assertion and the pride of life. Not once does he express even the most remote sympathy for the heroes of the Christian Church, for the saints and martyrs. On the other hand, again and again he indulges in lyrical raptures for the achievements of the great men of Greece and Rome. He is an intellectual aristocrat. His ideal policy is the policy of the Spartans—“almost miraculous in its perfection.” His ideal man is the pagan hero—the superman of antiquity—Alcibiades, Epaminondas, Alexander, Julius Cæsar.
III.—TREITSCHKE[14] AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF PRUSSIANISM.
There is a most baneful delusion which has misled the Allies from the beginning of the war, and which is still being acted on after three years of a desperate struggle—namely, that we are mainly fighting a sinister political dynasty and a formidable political machine constructed with all the diabolical ingenuity and armed with all the resources of the destructive genius of man. If, indeed, we had only been confronted by the Kaiser and his paladins, or only threatened by his military machine, the war would long ago have been ended—if not by the Allies, then by the German people themselves. Millions of people, however loyal, do not allow themselves to be slaughtered for a dynast, even though that dynast claims to be a Superman, even though he be called Prince of Schwarzburg-Sondershausen or Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, even though he be called Prince Henry XXI. of Reuss of the younger branch or Prince Henry LXXXVIII. of Reuss of the older branch. Whole nations do not indefinitely submit to being the slaves of a machine, however diabolical and however perfect. The truth is that behind the German princes and princelings and Junkers there is the resolve of a united people. Behind the Prussian machine there is the driving power of tremendous spiritual and moral forces, of an inflexible purpose, of a compelling idealism, of a mystical creed accepted with more than Mohammedan fanaticism. It is that national purpose, it is those spiritual forces, which explain the unconquerable pride of the German people, as evil and as lofty as the pride of Satan in “Paradise Lost.” It is these which explain their devotion and self-sacrifice, it is these which explain the Teutonic legions marching to their doom singing their hymns of love as well as their hymns of hatred. It is these which explain the two million volunteers which in August, 1914, went to swell the huge German conscript armies. It is the obsession of that mystical German creed which explains the epic achievements of the German offensive and the even more astounding achievements of the German defensive. We may continue to denounce the crimes of Germany and the atrocities of the German soldiery—and I have personally denounced them until my readers must have got sick of my denunciations. But there is nothing particularly mysterious in crimes and atrocities, and crimes and atrocities alone do not help to explain the German soul. Crimes and atrocities do not make us understand how even to-day the German hosts are still able to challenge a whole world in arms.
Let us, then, take in the vital fact that after three years those German spiritual forces, those perverted German ideals, remain the most formidable obstacle in our path. We may continue to destroy the German armies by the slow process of attrition, and we may continue to sacrifice the flower of our youth until the process is completed. We may trust to our superiority in money-power and in man-power, but unless we also break the moral power of German ideals, unless we exorcise the spell which possesses the German mind, unless we triumph in the spiritual contest as well as in the battle of tanks and howitzers, unless we overthrow the idols which successive generations of great teachers and preachers have imposed on a susceptible, receptive, and docile people, there will be no early settlement, nor, however long belated, can there ever be a lasting peace.
The foregoing remarks may justify the following attempt to interpret and to make intelligible, even to the most inattentive reader, the creed of one of the most powerful of those teachers and preachers who have taken such mysterious and uncanny possession of the soul of the German nation. Before 1914 none except a few initiated had ever heard of Treitschke. Since 1914 he has become a household name and a name of evil import. But to the immense majority of readers that name, however familiar and ominous, remains an empty name. Nomen flatus vocis. And even those to whom the name conveys something more definite do not trouble about its meaning. With that strange disbelief in the power of ideas which is one of our lamentable weaknesses, and which even the war has not been able to cure, even yet we have not brought ourselves to take seriously those terrible theories which have burnt themselves into the Teutonic imagination. And so indifferent have we remained to doctrines so far-reaching and so deadly that the recent publication of an excellent English translation of Treitschke’s “German History,” one of the masterpieces of historical literature, has had to be suspended for the incredible reason that there was no British public to read it.