Were it not multiplying illustrations, the same point might be urged as to politics. Does not party loyalty often mean personal servility? As a matter of fact what is loyalty in one situation, or one age, may be simple cowardice or abjectness in another.
The upshot is that the modern man has to endure the reproach of not thinking and feeling and judging and acting as men formerly did—the reproach of perfidy toward the past, its solutions and its sanctities. In consequence, it would not be a bad idea for him to cultivate respect for the past, gratitude for its achievements, appreciation for its unfinished tasks. Still, he should learn to accept the reproach as praise,—recognition that, though problems remain the same, solutions change; though sanctity abide, the objects which are sacred change. Evolutionism no longer recognizes any fact as sacred. Man is inwardly working on ever farther, ever overcoming the old and conquering ever the new—this must also be recognized.
It is said that we ought to love the old, the finished. But is love blind? Does it consist in advocating the point of view of one’s friend, not because it seems true, but just because love requires it? Is loyalty of love the faculty of adaptation with which we remodel ourselves after the image of another? Is one disloyal in love if one affirm one’s self against another, or if another affirm himself against one? Surely fidelity of friendship, even of marriage, ought not to be the grave of one’s own being. Surely loyalty should be the life and not the death of one’s self! Surely we must all see with our own eyes, hear with our own ears, judge with our own judgments, love with our own hearts, for the quite plain reason that we have no others with which we can do these things.
And so, if we take up this great subject in a large way, as Nietzsche has done, we see that we have all broken with the old loyalty, and that the consummation of this breach has been life and blessing to us. We moderns all somehow live in a disloyalty which we have committed—imputed to us as transgression, viewed by us as our strength and pride. We have all become unfaithful,—as children to our parents, as pupils to our teachers, as disciples to our masters. We felt ourselves bound to them; we loosed ourselves from them. The paths they walked we have forsaken. In the strange untrodden land whither our vagrant feet have wandered, we “came to ourselves” in declaring disobedience to the laws of tradition, in breaking loyalty to the rules of the schools. It is precisely on this account that once again we have won spiritual life, a living art and science, a living religion and morality. We have snapped the fetters fastened upon us in the name of the old loyalty, and all that is great and fruitful and constructive in the life of the modern spirit is a monument of the disloyalty which its creators have built thereto. Nothing is gained any longer by our screening ourselves behind this word loyalty, and making believe that we shall not be found out! We owe it to ourselves and we owe it to the world to confess frankly that we have done with the old loyalty to the unchangeable and the finished, for that is to be loyal to an unreality, since there is no such thing. Even God, if he be the living God, cannot be the same yesterday, today, and forever. But we owe it even more to ourselves and to the world to strive for a clear position in reference to this question which is so profoundly agitating our entire moral world today. We may not abandon the field to those who would demolish the temple of the old goddess simply that they may celebrate upon its ruins the orgies of their caprice and inconstancy and characterlessness. If ever there was a doctrine whose right is easily turned into a wrong, whose truth into an error, whose blessing into a curse, it is this Nietzschean doctrine of the right and the duty of ceaseless change, of self-dependence, by which we are redeemed from slavery to the past. If the old loyalty—loyalty to the past—no longer holds men, wherewith shall they be held? Shall they be like the weathervane blown hither and thither by every wind of doctrine, or like the rudderless ship driven aimless and planless over the high seas by the midnight hurricane? Better a thousand times be tethered to the old loyalty than to be doomed to such a life of levity and poiselessness and flightiness.
But the new loyalty which we seek, without which we go forward into no future, should it not be more stable and enduring and loyal than the old? If a moment releases itself from what to it is past, and validates its right as a self-dependent life to its predecessor, a birth has transpired in man, and birth means pain. Without such pain, man has changed his situation, but not himself. A new color has come upon the motly manifoldness of his life—he has remained the same. Trees do not have their roots in the air. Weaklings cannot make the real change—it needs a strength that they do not have. The strength to change really—only he has this who bears the new loyalty in his own bosom; loyalty not to his opinion, not to his learning and heritage, but loyalty to his growth, to the great eternal goal of life, to the great sacred task which he has yet to fulfil in life.
Loyal to ourself? Would that it might be so! But the self that we would at first be loyal to is not our self at all. It is foreign wares, loaded upon us,—first even in the nursery, slyly slipped subsequently upon our shoulders,—foreign words, foreign worths! Loyalty to what satiates, not the better loyalty to our hunger! We begin to live only when we live in our hunger; our hunger is we ourselves. It is a good satiety only if a new hunger comes from it. Loyalty to our self—this is to keep our life alive in us—a young glad life, that never grows old, because the old is ever transmuted into a new. This loyalty to ourself,—it is to expel from every truth its error, from every boundary its limit which blocks the vision into the wide world, the blue sky, and the distant sea.
Loyalty to men? Would that it might be so! But such loyalty costs so much trouble and toil. For the faithfulness that is genuine and living, there is no law, no binding I must, only a glorious I will. One day we shall have done with the loyalty which means master and servant, leader and led—the loyalty of the dog that is loyalest to him who feeds him best or beats him hardest. One day we shall understand what the loyalty of man means—this new loyalty toward man, in which souls meet and chime and work together, and live in each other, yet each remains itself and true to itself.
So, then, the law of change and of growth is the law of the new loyalty, as the law of fixedness and finishedness and finality was of the old. It is the duty of such new loyalty to protect itself against the deadening force of habit and of petrifaction, to guard itself against any obedience by which it would become disloyal to itself. Such loyalty is too honorable to humor inertia and laziness under its banner, too courageous to conceal cowardice behind a slave’s patience.
But thought on our theme is usually lifted up to where the sky keeps company with the granite and the grass, to a religious elevation. Nor do we need stop short here. Ultimately the new loyalty is loyalty to God, the new God, of whom something must be said later. The God in whom all fulness dwells summons us to ever new truths, and reveals underground wells of living water throwing its spray aloft on life’s ferns and flowers. To be loyal to him is never to sunder ourselves from his fulness and freshness, but to co-work with him who is forever making all things new.
And now I think we are at the end. The result? It is needless to state it, but I would not shrink from the thankless task. In a word, then, the new loyalty—in harmony with the whole great changed view of the world and of life—is loyalty to change and becoming rather than to finishedness and finality; to the future rather than to the past; to ideals rather than to conventions; to freedom rather than to authority; to personality rather than to institution; to character rather than to respectability; to our hunger rather than to our satiety; to the God that is to be rather than to the God that is. Thus the loyalty abides, but the objects of loyalty change and pass.