But that which digs the deepest ditch between the futuristic and anarchistic conception, is the great problem of love, with its great tyranny of sentiment and lust, from which we want to extricate humanity.
Genius-worship is the infallible sign of an uncreative age.—Clive Bell.
The least that the state can do is to protect people who have something to say that may cause a riot. What will not cause a riot is probably not worth saying.—Clive Bell.
Noise
George Burman Foster
There is a discovery, by no means pleasing or edifying, that the student makes as he broadly surveys the history of humanity. All the great turning-points of that history seem to be inwardly associated with violent upheavals and fearful revolutions. And of all these revolutions, it may be doubted whether history records any one on so large a scale as that which confronts us under the name of Christianity, in the transition from ancient to mediæval ecclesiastical culture. It was not a single Crucified One that gave Christianity the sacred symbol of its religion; unnumbered thousands—mostly slaves—breathed out their poor lives on martyrs’ crosses. The old culture went down in rivers of blood—not too figuratively meant—and a new arose, or, better, was created. Now, what is true of this most important revolution of our antecedent cultural life is true also, in corresponding measure, of every new “becoming” in the history of peoples. No state, no church, no social form, has ever arisen but that the path of the new life has passed over ruins and graves.
Must this be so? Must it be eternally so? Is it a thing of historical inevitability, is it even a law of the very order of the world itself? The answer—first answer, at all events—is, Yes! To affirm itself, to persist as life,—this belongs as nothing else does to life’s very nature. What newly arises negates what has already arisen. All that is living pronounces a sentence of death upon all that has been alive and that now sets itself against the new life. Accordingly, we are wont to call life a struggle for existence. Old Greeks coined a phrase, Polemos pater panton: war is the father of all things. The right to life is the right of the strong.
In view of these things, may we fairly raise the question as to whether there are exceptions to so universal a rule? Were we to set up a different right, would it not be the right of the weak? Would it not be to make the sick and the infirm masters over the well and the strong? Would it not be to preach a decadent morality as do all the pusillanimous and the hirelings who beg for the protection of their weakness because they do not have the strength to drive and force their way through life?
The man who, for a generation, has been called the prophet of a new culture, this Friedrich Nietzsche, is he not, then, precisely the apostle of this man of might and mastery, of ill-famed Herrnmoral, master’s morality, especially? Napoleon, his Messiah—do you think? Did he not gloat and glory over the time when the wild roving blonde Bestie was still alive in the old Germans? Did he not worship the beast of prey, memorialize the murderer, stigmatize the morality of Christianity as a crime against life, because of its saying, Blessed are the poor and the sick, the peaceable and the meek? If, now, the word of this new prophet should make disciples, should even revolutionize the times, should we close our churches and stop our preaching, as the first thing to be done? For the churches preach goodness and love, not might and dominion; see in man child of God, not beast of prey.
If all this were a partisan matter—for or against Nietzsche—I would have nothing to do with it. To join in the damnatory fulminations against this man, or to advertise mitigating circumstances for his thought, and to re-interpret the whole from such a standpoint, until the whole should seem less brutal and less dangerous—to do either the one or the other is not for me, but for those polemicists and irenicists who are adding to the gayety of nations in these otherwise heartbreaking times, by the high debate as to whether Nietzsche be both the efficient and the final cause of our present world war. Not to defend Nietzsche, not to condemn him, but to wrestle for a firm, clear, moral view of life in our seething times, this alone is most worth while, and this too is my task.