Of the “deep damnation” which lies at the heart of the Nietzschean philosophy no doubt is admissible. It is idle to say that he contradicted himself at twenty turns, and that especially he hated the professors and raked them with the shrapnel of his irony. It is the way of supermen to hate other supermen. It is the badge of the tribe. Of all his writings Germany took and absorbed just as much as fitted in with her mood of domination and Empire. Hauptmann—another of the flattered renegades—told us the other day that if you open the knapsack of a German soldier you will probably find in it a copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra. Nietzsche was angry with the professors only because they preferred obscure, and he preferred lucid brutality. Not since Lucifer was so much light used to dark ends. Not since Diana was great in Ephesus were such beautiful images cast or carven in the service of a false worship. He made German dance, as before him, only Heine had done.
“I have the idea,” he wrote, “that with Zarathustra I have brought the German language to its point of perfection.”
The boast is probably true. The devil was always a good stylist, and it is not inappropriate that when his gospel is at its worst, his prose should be at its best. We may charitably assume that those whom he led off the plain paths of life into his foul and blood-bathed jungles, were taken captive, not by his message, but by his music.
What then was his creed, or rather his vision? For he was the mystagogue of Prussianism, who chanted but never explained. As in the case of Bismarck, I propose to exclude as far as possible anything written ad hoc, or since the war. My first witness is Alfred Fouillée, the doyen of French philosophy, Whose Nietzsche et l’Immoralisme appeared in 1902 (the unfamiliarity of Fouillée’s name is a biting satire on our leaders of thought)—
“If the Vandals had read a course in Hegelian metaphysics, they would have held the same language as Nietzsche.”
The popular instinct which named the Prussians the Huns was thus long anticipated by the greatest Platonist in Europe.
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To Nietzsche the whole motive behind life is a sort of metaphysical symbol which he calls the Will-to-Power. The whole task of life is to impose your power on others an andern Macht auslassen. With what aim? To evolve the Superman. But in this struggle of all against all we must, in a world divided into nations and classes, struggle for the victory of some nation and some fashion of government. For Prussia, and for an aristocracy more scientifically cruel than the world has ever known. And what is the first step towards this Elysium? War, and again war. War, with the formula of the Assassins for its formula—
“Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”
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