If his moral evolution, so insistently claimed by his disciples, has been of a zigzag nature, if lacunæ abound in his system and paradoxical vues d'ensemble often distract, yet logical evolution there has been—from the maddest, romantic individualism to a well-defined solidarity—and without attenuation of the dignity and utility of the Individual in the scheme of collectivism. The Individual is the Salt of the State. The Individual leavens the mass politic. Numbers will never supplant the value, psychic or economic, of the Individual. Emerson and Matthew Arnold said all this before Barrès. Incomparable artist as is Maurice Barrès, we still must demand of him: "In Vishnu-land what Avatar!"
[VII]
PHASES OF NIETZSCHE
I
THE WILL TO SUFFER
Coleridge quotes Sir Joshua Reynolds as declaring that "the greatest man is he who forms the taste of a nation; the next greatest is he who corrupts it." It is an elastic epigram and not unlike the rule which is poor because it won't work both ways. All master reformers, heretics, and rebels were at first great corrupters. It is a prime necessity in their propaganda. Aristophanes and Arius, Mohammed and Napoleon, Montaigne and Rabelais, Paul and Augustine, Luther and Calvin, Voltaire and Rousseau, Darwin and Newman, Liszt and Wagner, Kant and Schopenhauer—here are a few names of men who undermined the current beliefs and practices of their times, whether for good or evil. Rousseau has been accused of being the greatest corrupter in history; yet to him we may owe the Constitution of the United States. Pascal, in prose of unequalled limpidity, denounced the Jesuits as corrupting youth. Nevertheless, Dr. Georg Brandes, an "intellectual" and a philosophic anarch, once wrote to Nietzsche: "I, too, love Pascal. But even as a young man I was on the side of the Jesuits against Pascal. Wise men, it was they who were right; he did not understand them; but they understood him and ... they published his Provincial Letters with notes themselves. The best edition is that of the Jesuits," Were not Titian, Rubens, and Rembrandt the three unspeakable devils of painting for Blake? Loosely speaking, then, it doesn't much matter whether one considers a great man as a regenerator or a corrupter. Napoleon was called the latter by Taine after he had been saluted as demigod by his idolatrous contemporaries. Nor does the case of Nietzsche differ much from his philosophic forerunners. He scolded Schopenhauer, though borrowing his dialectic tools, as he later mocked at the one sincere friendship of his lonely life, Richard Wagner's. We know the most objective philosophies are tinged by the individual temperaments of their makers, and perhaps the chief characteristic of all philosophers is their unphilosophic contempt for their fellow-thinkers. Nietzsche displayed this trait; so did Richard Wagner—who was in a lesser fashion an amateur philosopher, his system adorned by plumes borrowed from Feuerbach, Schelling, and Schopenhauer. Arthur Schopenhauer was endowed with a more powerful intellect than either Wagner or Nietzsche. He "corrupted" them both. He was materialist enough to echo the epigram attributed to Fontenelle: To be happy a man must have a good stomach and a wicked heart.
Friedrich Nietzsche was more poet than original thinker. Merely to say Nay! to all existing institutions is not to give birth to a mighty idea, though the gesture is brave. He substituted for Schopenhauer's "Will to Live"—(an ingenious variation of Kant's "Thing in Itself") the "Will to Power"; which phrase is mere verbal juggling. The late Eduard von Hartmann built his house of philosophy in the fog of the Unconscious; Nietzsche, despising Darwin as a dull grubber, returned unknowingly to the very land of metaphysics he thought he had fled forever. He was always the theologian—toujours séminariste, as they said of Renan. Theology was in his blood. It stiffened his bones. Abusing Christianity, particularly Protestant Christianity, he was himself an exponent of a theological odium of the virulent sort, as may be seen in his thundering polemics. He held a brief for the other side of good and evil; but a man can't so easily empty his veins of the theologic blood of his forebears. It was his Nessus shirt and ended by consuming him. He had the romantic cult of great men, yet sneered at Carlyle for his Titanism. He believed in human perfectibility. He borrowed his Superman partly from the classic pantheon, partly from the hierarchy of Christian saints—or perhaps from the very Cross he vituperated. The only Christian, he was fond of saying, died on the Cross. The only Nietzschian, one might reply, passed away when crumbled the brilliant brain of Nietzsche. Saturated with the culture of Goethe, his Superman was sent ballooning aloft by the poetic afflatus of Nietzsche.
He was an apparition possible only in modern and rationalistic Protestant Germany. Like a voice from the Middle Ages he has stirred the profound phlegm and spiritual indifference of his fellow countrymen. But he has in him more of Savonarola than Luther—Luther, who was for him the apotheosis of all that is hateful in the German character: the self-satisfied philistinism, sensuality, beer and tobacco, unresponsiveness to all the finer issues of existence, pious tactlessness and harsh dogmatism.