Part 10 (1/2)
But what matter? Let us pay the penalty. Let us pay the price. _Is it not worth it?_ Beauty! O divine, O cruel Mistress! Thee, thee we must wors.h.i.+p still, and with thee the acolytes who bear thy censers!
For the secret of life is to take every risk without fear; even the risk of finding one's self an exile, with ”no shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat of pale-mouthed prophet dreaming” in the land without memories, without altars, without Thee!
NIETZSCHE
It is not the hour in which to say much about Nietzsche. The dissentient voices are silent. The crowd has stopped howling. But a worse thing is happening to him, the thing of all others he dreaded most;--he is becoming ”accepted”--The preachers are quoting him and the theologians are explaining him.
What he would himself pray for now are Enemies--fierce irreconcilable Enemies--but our age cannot produce such. It can only produce sneering disparagement; or frightened conventional approbation.
What one would like to say, at this particular juncture, is that _here,_ or again _there,_ this deadly antagonist of G.o.d missed his aim. But who can say that? He aimed too surely. No, he did not miss his aim. He smote whom he went out to smite. But one thing he could not smite; he could neither smite it, or unmask it, or ”transvalue” it. I mean the Earth itself--the great, shrewd, wise, all-enduring Mother of us all--who knows so much, and remains so silent!
And sometimes one feels, walking some country road, with the smell of upturned sods and heavy leaf-mould in one's nostrils, that even Lucifer himself is not as deep or strong or wise as is patient furrowed earth and her blundering children. A rough earth-hint, a Rabelaisian ditty, a gross amazing jest, a chuckle of deep Satyric humour;--and the monstrous ”thickness” of Life, its friendly aplomb and nonchalance, its grotesque irreverence, its shy shrewd common-sense, its tough fibres, and portentous indifference to ”distinction”; tumbles us over in the mud--for all our ”aloofness”--and roars over us, like a romping bull-calf!
The antidote to Nietzsche is not to be found in the company of the Saints. He was too much of a Saint himself for that. It is to be found in the company of Shakespearean clodhoppers, and Rabelaisian topers, and Cervantian serving-wenches. In fact, it is to be found, as with the antidotes for other n.o.ble excesses, in burying your face in rough moist earth; and grubbing for pig-nuts under the beech-trees.
A summer's day in the woods with Audrey will put ”Fatality” into its place and remove ”the Recurrence of all things” to a very modest remoteness. And this is not a relinquis.h.i.+ng of the secret of life. This is not a giving up of the supreme quest. It is an opening of another door; a letting in of a different air; a reversion to a more primitive level of the mystery.
The way to reduce the tyranny of this proud spirit to its proper proportion is not to talk about ”Love” or ”Morality” or ”Orthodoxy,”
or ”the strength of the vulgar herd”--it is simply to call up in one's mind the motley procession of gross, simple, quaint, _bulbous,_ irrepressible objects--human and otherwise--whose mere existence makes it as impossible for Nietzsche to deal with the _ma.s.siveness_ of Life, as it is impossible for anyone else to deal with it.
No, we shall not free ourselves from his intellectual predominance by taking refuge with the Saints. We shall not do this because he himself was essentially a Saint. A Saint and a Martyr! Is it for me now to prove that?
It is realized, I suppose, what the history of his spiritual contest actually was? It was a deliberate self-inflicted Crucifixion of the Christ in him, as an offering to the Apollo in him. Nietzsche was--that cannot be denied--an Intellectual s.a.d.i.s.t; and his Intellectual Sadism took the form--as it can (he has himself taught us so) take many curious forms--of deliberately outraging his own most sensitive nerves. This is really what broke his reason, in the end. By a process of spiritual vivisection--the suffering of which one dare not conceive--he took his natural ”sanct.i.ty,” and carved it, as a dish fit for the G.o.ds, until it a.s.sumed an Apollonian shape. We must visualize Nietzsche not only as the Philosopher with the Hammer; but as the Philosopher with the Chisel.
We must visualize him, with such a sculptor's tool, standing in the presence of the crucified figure of himself; and altering one by one, its natural lineaments! Nietzsche's own lacerated ”intellectual nerves” were the vantage-ground of his spiritual vision. He could write ”the Antichrist” because he had ”killed.” in his own nature, ”the thing he loved” It was for this reason that he had such a supernatural insight into the Christian temperament. It was for this reason that he could pour vitriol upon its ”little secrets”; and hunt it to its last retreats.
Let none think he did not understand the grandeur, and the terrible intoxicating appeal, of the thing he fought. He understood these only too well. What vibrating sympathy--as for a kindred spirit--may be read between the lines of his attack on Pascal--Pascal, the supreme type of the Christian Philosopher!
It must be further realized--for after all what are words and phrases?--that it was really nothing but the ”Christian conscience” in him that forced him on so desperately to kick against the p.r.i.c.ks. It was the ”Christian conscience” in him--has he not himself a.n.a.lysed the voluptuous cruelty of that?--which drove him to seek something--if possible--n.o.bler, austerer, gayer, more innocently wicked, than Christianity!
It was not in the interests of Truth that he fought it. True Christian, as he was, at heart, he never cared greatly for Truth as Truth. It was in the interest of a Higher Ideal, a more exacting, less human Ideal, that he crushed it down. The Christian spirit, in him set him upon strangling the Christian spirit--and all in the interest of a madness of n.o.bility, itself perforated with Christian conscience!
Was Nietzsche really Greek, compared with--Goethe, let us say?
Not for a moment. It was in the desperation of his attempt to be so, that he seized upon Greek tragedy and made it dance to Christian cymbals! This is, let it be clearly understood, the hidden secret of his mania for Dionysus--Dionysus gave him his opportunity. In the wors.h.i.+p of this G.o.d--also a wounded G.o.d, be it remarked;--he was able to satisfy his perverted craving for ”ecstasy of laceration” under the shadow of another Name.
But after all--as Goethe says--”feeling is all in all; the name is sound and smoke.” What he felt were Christian feelings, the feelings of a Mystic, a Visionary, a Flagellant. What matter by what name you call them? Christ? Dionysus? It is the secret creative pa.s.sion of the human heart that sends them Both forth upon their warfaring.
Is any one simple enough to think that whatever Secret Cosmic Power melts into human ecstasy, it waits to be summoned by certain particular syllables? That this arbitrary strangling of the Christ in him never altogether ended, is proved by the words of those tragic messages he sent to Cosima Wagner from ”the aristocratic city of Turin” when his tormented brain broke like a taut bow-string. Those messages resembled arrows of fire, shot into s.p.a.ce; and on one was written the words ”The Crucified” and on the other the word ”Dionysus.”
The grand and heart-breaking appeal of this lonely Victim of his own merciless scourge, does not depend, for its effect upon us, upon any of the particular ”ideas” he announced. The idea of the ”Eternal Recurrence of all things”--to take the most terrible--is clearly but another instance of his intellectual Sadism.
The worst thing that could happen to those innumerable Victims of Life, for whom he sought to kill his Pity, was that they should have to go through the same punishment again--not once or twice, but for an infinity of times--and it was just that that he, whose immense Pity for them took so long a killing, suddenly felt must be what _had_ to happen--had to happen for no other reason than that it was _intolerable_ that it should happen. Again, we may note, it was not ”Truth” he sought, but ecstasy, and, in this case, the ecstasy of ”accepting” the very worst kind of issue he could possibly imagine.
The idea of the Superman, too, is an idea that could only have entered the brain of one, pushed on to think, at the spear-head of his own cruelty. It is a great and terrible idea, sublime and devastating, this idea of the human race yielding place to _another race,_ stronger, wiser, fairer, sterner, gayer, and more G.o.dlike! Especially n.o.ble and compelling is Nietzsche's constant insistence that the moment has come for men to take their Destiny out of the blind power of Evolution, and to guide it themselves, with a strong hand and a clear will, towards a _definite goal._
The fact that this driving force, of cruelty to himself and, through himself, to humanity, scourged him on to so formidable an illumination of our path, is a proof how unwise it is to suppress any grand perversion. Such motive-forces should be used, as Nietzsche used his, for purposes of intellectual insight--not simply trampled upon as ”evil.”
Whether our poor human race ever will surpa.s.s itself, as he demands, and rise to something psychologically different, ”may admit a wide solution.” It is not an unscientific idea. It is not an irreligious idea.
It has all the dreams of the Prophets behind it. But--who can tell? It is quite as possible that the spirit of destruction in us will wantonly ruin this great Chance as that we shall seize upon it. Man has many other impulses besides the impulse of creation. Perhaps he will never be seduced into even _desiring_ such a goal, far less ”willing”
it over long s.p.a.ces of time.