This irrelevant criticism is an intellectually lazy protest of a sensuous, self-styled “healthy” person blundering through an interpretative analysis of hard, serious thought, expecting to find a program or a plan, cut and dried, ready for the seekers of a new culture. Dr. Foster properly avoided making any definite proposals based upon his study of Nietzsche. With a contagious enthusiasm he wrote his own response to Nietzsche’s attitude toward the universe. To condemn his animation is barbaric stupidity. He probably was not conscious when he wrote the paper that anybody wanted him to outline in desiccated phrases a scheme to crystallize the Nietzschean philosophy into personal or social action. He was fired by his subject, and his function—I do not say his purpose—was to spread the flame. The depths of feeling must be reached before action can be more than an abortion of the mind. Dr. Foster’s serious, almost sad, enthusiasm, makes the spirit of Nietzsche arouse feeling, and feeling underlies every organic social action. It is not what he “actually says” but what Nietzsche says to him that explains and justifies Dr. Foster’s enthusiasm.
An incoherent generalization like “pure enthusiasm wasting itself in little geysers is intrinsically ridiculous” is a part of the typical literary method of veneering ignorance or prejudices. For a critic who asks “what is it that you want us to do?” which is the desperate voice of an imitationist, and then talks glibly of “pure enthusiasm,” which is gaseous rhetoric, I have neither respect nor compassion. What is “pure enthusiasm”?
M. H. P.’s objection to “sound and fury,” which he associates with “political speeches” “for a major prophet,” clearly is attributable to a temperamental inability to understand Nietzsche or emotionally to respond to his dynamic appeal to intelligence. A “healthy” critic—was there ever one?—is a myth, or a morbidly self-conscious person whose striving after “healthy” attitudes is an infallible sign of disease at the top. Such a person is pathologically interesting, but in the realm of philosophical criticism he is incompetent. I should expect him to demand that “enthusiasm should grow trees and put magic in violets”—which is a ridiculous horticulture. To limit enthusiasm to so definite a purpose as this is to affect a poetic attitude whose labored simplicity has nothing in common with the magic of violets.
Your critic, who has a mania for “the most simple way,” is aware of his own amorphous complexity, and demands that thinkers and writers be specific, calm, easy, leisurely, “healthy,” and lucid, thereby economizing his unhealthy distress. For him, Nietzsche has no message, and upon him Dr. Foster’s enthusiasm is wasted. To him “sound and fury” exist where to Nietzsche’s “preordained readers” there is the new music of truth. It is that deep harmony which ran in legitimate fury through the remarkable article contributed by Dr. Foster. “Nietzsche was a Knight of the Future.” This sentence from the article bears interestingly upon M. H. P.’s allegation of “undue quickness” in what the author expects from the adoption of the Nietzschean view of life. As for nobody caring about the sap, I should say that if he have an enthusiasm for growing trees and putting magic in violets he will, perforce, have that care for the sap which conditions the strength of the tree and the magic of the violet. Nietzsche’s superman is not to be achieved in a society that cares nothing about the sap.
Whoever reads Nietzsche and Whitman “slowly, profoundly, attentively, prudently, with inner thoughts, with mental doors ajar, with delicate fingers and eyes,” will be better qualified than M. H. P. to serve as a critic of articles like Dr. Foster’s. Why not call it “the critics’ gossip”?
DeWitt C. Wing.
H. G. Wells’s Man of the Future
In a little while he will reach out to the other planets, and take the greater fire, the sun, into his service. He will bring his solvent intelligence to bear upon the riddles of his individual interaction, transmute jealousy and every passion, control his own increase, select and breed for his embodiment a continually finer and stronger and wiser race. What none of us can think or will, save in a disconnected partiality, he will think and will collectively. Already some of us feel our merger with that greater life. There come moments when the thing shines out upon our thoughts. Sometimes in the dark, sleepless solitudes of night one ceases to be so-and-so, one ceases to bear a proper name, forgets one’s quarrels and vanities, forgives and understands one’s enemies and oneself, as one forgives and understands the quarrels of little children, knowing oneself indeed to be a being greater than one’s personal accidents, knowing oneself for Man on his planet, flying swiftly to unmeasured destinies through the starry stillnesses of space.—H. G. Wells in Social Forces in England and America.
Lawton Parker
Eunice Tietjens