The breeding of the Superman follows from the notion of “selection.” Nietzsche was an unconscious pupil of Darwin from the time that he wrote aphorisms, but Darwin himself had remoulded the evolution-ideas of the 18th Century according to the Malthusian tendencies of political economy, which he projected on the higher animal-world. Malthus had studied the cotton industry in Lancashire, and already in 1857 we have the whole system, only applied to men instead of to beasts, in Buckle’s History of English Civilization.
In other words, the “master-morale” of this last of the Romantics is derived—strangely perhaps but very significantly—from that source of all intellectual modernity, the atmosphere of the English factory. The Machiavellism that commended itself to Nietzsche as a Renaissance phenomenon is something closely (one would have supposed, obviously) akin to Darwin’s notion of “mimicry.” It is in fact that of which Marx (that other famous disciple of Malthus) treats in his Das Kapital, the bible of political (not ethical) Socialism.[[462]] That is the genealogy of “Herrenmoral.” The Will-to-Power, transferred to the realistic, political and economic domain, finds its expression in Shaw’s “Major Barbara.” No doubt Nietzsche, as a personality, stands at the culmination of this series of ethical philosophers, but here Shaw the party politician reaches up to his level as a thinker. The will-to-power is to-day represented by the two poles of public life—the worker-class and the big money-and-brain men—far more effectually than it ever was by a Borgia. The millionaire Undershaft of Shaw’s best comedy is a Superman, though Nietzsche the Romanticist would not have recognized his ideal in such a figure. Nietzsche is for ever speaking of transvaluations of all values, of a philosophy of the “Future” (which, incidentally, is merely the Western, and not the Chinese or the African future), but when the mists of his thought do come in from the Dionysiac distance and condense into any tangible form, the will-to-power appears to him in the guise of dagger-and-poison and never in that of strike and “deal.” And yet he says that the idea first came to him when he saw the Prussian regiments marching to battle in 1870.
The drama, in this epoch, is no longer poetry in the old sense of the Culture days, but a form of agitation, debate and demonstration. The stage has become a moralizing institution. Nietzsche himself often thought of putting his ideas in the dramatic form. Wagner’s Nibelung poetry, more especially the first draft of it (1850), expresses his social-revolutionary ideas, and even when, after a circuitous course under influences artistic and non-artistic, he has completed the “Ring,” his Siegfried is still a symbol of the Fourth Estate, his Brünhilde still the “free woman.” The sexual selection of which the “Origin of Species” enunciated the theory in 1859, was finding its musical expression at the very same time in the third act of “Siegfried” and in “Tristan.” It is no accident that Wagner, Hebbel and Ibsen, all practically simultaneously, set to work to dramatize the Nibelung material. Hebbel, making the acquaintance in Paris of Engels’s writings, expresses (in a letter of April 2, 1844) his surprise at finding that his own conceptions of the social principle of his age, which he was then intending to exemplify in a drama Zu irgend einer Zeit, coincided precisely with those of the future “Communist Manifesto.” And, upon first making the acquaintance of Schopenhauer (letter of March 19, 1857), he is equally surprised by the affinity that he finds between the Welt als Wille und Vorstellung and tendencies upon which he had based his Holofernes and his Herodes und Mariamne. Hebbel’s diaries, of which the most important portion belongs to the years 1835-1845, were (though he did not know it) one of the deepest philosophical efforts of the century. It would be no surprise to find whole sentences of it in Nietzsche, who never knew him and did not always come up to his level.
The actual and effective philosophy of the 19th Century, then, has as its one genuine theme the Will-to-Power. It considers this Will-to-Power in civilized-intellectual, ethical, or social forms and presents it as will-to-life, as life-force, as practical-dynamical principle, as idea, and as dramatic figure. (The period that is closed by Shaw corresponds to the period 350-250 in the Classical.) The rest of the 19th-Century philosophy is, to use Schopenhauer’s phrase, “professors’ philosophy by philosophy-professors.” The real landmarks are these:
1819. Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. The will to life is for the first time put as the only reality (original force, Urkraft); but, older idealist influences still being potent, it is put there to be negatived (zur Verneinung empfohlen).
1836. Schopenhauer, Ueber den Willen in der Natur. Anticipation of Darwinism, but in metaphysical disguise.
1840. Proud’hon, Qu’est-ce que la Propriété, basis of Anarchism. Comte, Cours de philosophic positive; the formula “order and progress.”
1841. Hebbel, “Judith,” first dramatic conception of the “New Woman” and the “Superman.” Feuerbach, Das Wesen des Christenthums.
1844. Engels, Umriss einer Kritik des Nationalökonomie, foundation of the materialistic conception of history. Hebbel, Maria Magdalena, the first social drama.
1847. Marx, Misère de la Philosophie (synthesis of Hegel and Malthus). These are the epochal years in which economics begins to dominate social ethic and biology.