Visions and Revisions Part 10

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.

The curious "optimism" of Nietzsche, by means of which he sought to force himself into a mood of such Dionysian ecstasy as to be able not only to endure Fate, but to "love" it, is yet another example of the subterranean "conscience" of Christianity working in him. In the presence of such a mood, and, indeed, in the presence of nearly all his great dramatic Pa.s.sions, it is Nietzsche, and not his humorous critic, who is "with Our Lord" in Gethsemane. One does not drink of the cup of Fate "lovingly"--without b.l.o.o.d.y sweat!

The interesting thing to observe about Nietzsche's ideas is that the wider they depart from what was essentially Christian in him, the less convincing they grow. One cannot help feeling he recognised this himself--and, infuriated by it, strode further and further into the Jungle.

For instance, one cannot suppose that the cult of "the Blonde Beast,"

and the cult of Caesar Borgia, were anything but mad reprisals, directed towards himself, in savage revenge; blind blows struck at random against the lofty and penetrating spirituality in which he had indulged when writing Zarathustra.

But there is a point here of some curious psychological interest, to which we are attracted by a certain treacherous red glow upon his words when he speaks of this sultry, crouching, spotted, tail-las.h.i.+ng mood. Why is it precisely this Borgian type, this Renaissance type, among the world's various l.u.s.t-Darlings that he chooses to select?

Why does he not oppose, to the Christian Ideal, _its true opposite_--the naive, artless, faun-like, pagan "child of Nature," who has never known "remorse"?

The answer is clear. He chooses the Borgian type--the type which is _not_ free from "superst.i.tion," which is always wrestling with "superst.i.tion"--the type that sprinkles holy water upon its dagger--because such a type is the inevitable _product_ of the presence among us of the Christian Ideal. The Christian Ideal has made a certain complication of "wickedness" possible, which were impossible without it.

If Nietzsche had not been obsessed by Christianity he would have selected as his "Ideal Blond Beast" that perfectly naive, "unfallen"

man, of imperturbable nerves, of cla.s.sic nerves, such as Life abounded in _before Christ came._ He makes, indeed, a pathetic struggle to idealize this type, rather than the "conscience-stricken"

Renaissance one. He lets his fingers stray more than once over the red-stained limbs of real sun-burnt "Pompeian" heathenism. He turns feverishly the wanton pages of Petronius to reach this unsullied, "imperial" Animal. But he cannot reach him. He never could reach him. The "consecrated" dagger of the Borgia gleams and scintillates between. Even, therefore, in the sort of "wickedness" he evokes, Nietzsche remains Christ-ridden and Christ-mastered. The matter is made still more certain when one steals up silently, so to speak, behind the pa.s.sages where he speaks of Napoleon.

If a reader has the remotest psychological clairvoyance, he will be aware of a certain strain and tug, a certain mental jerk and contortion, whenever Napoleon is introduced.

Yes, he could engrave that fatal "N" over his mantlepiece at Weimar--to do so was the last solace of his wounded brain. But he was never really at ease with the great Emperor. Never did he--in pure, direct, cla.s.sic recognition--greet him as "the Demonic Master of Destiny," with the Goethean salutation! Had Goethe and Napoleon, in their notorious encounter, wherein they recognized one another as "Men," been interrupted by the entrance of Nietzsche, do you suppose they would not have both stiffened and recoiled, recognizing their natural Enemy, the Cross-bearer, the Christ-obsessed one, _"Il Santo"?_

The difference between the two types can best be felt by recalling the way in which Napoleon and Goethe treated the Christ-Legend, compared with Nietzsche's desperate wrestling.

Napoleon uses "Religion" calmly and deliberately for his High Policy and Worldly Statecraft.

Goethe uses "Religion" calmly and deliberately for his aesthetic culture and his mystic symbolism. Neither of them are, for one moment, touched by it themselves.

They are born Pagans; and when this n.o.ble, tortured soul flings himself at their feet in feverish wors.h.i.+p, one feels that, out of their Homeric Hades, they look wonderingly, _unintelligently,_ at him.

One of the most laughable things in the world is the attempt some simple critics make to turn Nietzsche into an ordinary "Honest Infidel," a kind of poetic Bradlaugh-Ingersoll, offering to humanity the profound discovery that there is no G.o.d, and that when we die, we die! The absurdity is made complete when this naive, revivified "Pagan" is made to a.s.sure us--us, "the average sensual men"--that the path of wisdom lies, not in resisting, but in yielding to _temptation;_ not in spiritual wrestling to "transform" ourselves, but in the brute courage "to be ourselves," and "live out our type"!

The good folk who play with such a childish illusion would do well to scan over again their "pagan" hero's branding and flaying of the philosopher Strauss. Strauss was precisely what they try to turn Nietzsche into--a rancorous, insensitive, bullying, materialistic Heathen, making sport of "the Cross" and drinking Laager Beer.

Nietzsche loathed Laager Beer, and "the Cross" _burnt_ day and night in his tormented, Dionysian soul.

It occurs to me sometimes that if there had been no "German Reformation" and no overrunning of the world by vulgar evangelical Protestantism, it would be still possible to bring into the circle of the Church's development the lofty and desperate Pa.s.sion of this "saintly" Antichrist. After all, why should we concede that those agitated, voluptuous, secret devices to get "saved," those super-subtle, subliminal tricks of the weak and the perverted to be _revenged_ on the beautiful and the brave, which Nietzsche laments were ever "bound up" in the same cover as the "Old Testament."

must remain forever the dominant "note" in the Faith of Christendom? While the Successor of Caesar, while the Pontifex Maximus of our "Spiritual Rome," still represents the Infallible Element in the world's n.o.bler religious Taste, there is yet, perhaps, a remote chance that this vulgarizing of "the mountain summits" this degrading of our Planet's Pa.s.sion-Play, may be cauterized and eliminated.

And yet it is not likely! Much more likely is it that the real "secret"

of Jesus, together with the real "secret" of Nietzsche--and they do not differ in essence, for all his Borgias!--will remain the sweet and deadly "fatalities" they have always been--for the few, the few, the few who understand them!

For the final impression one carries away, after reading Nietzsche, is the impression of "distinction," of remoteness from "vulgar brutality," from "sensual baseness," from the clumsy compromises of the world. It may not last, this Zarathustrian mood. It lasts with some of us an hour; with some of us a day--with a few of us a handful of years! But while it lasts, it is a rare and high experience.

As from an ice-bound promontory stretching out over the abysmal gulfs, we dare to look Creation and Annihilation, for once, full in the face.

Liberated from our own l.u.s.ts, or using them, contemptuously and indifferently, as engines of vision, we see the life and death of worlds, the slow, long-drawn, moon-lit wave of Universe-drowning Nothingness.

We see the races of men, falling, rising, stumbling, advancing and receding--and we see the _new race_--in the hours of the "Great Noon-tide"--fulfilling its Prophet's hope--and we see _the end of that also!_ And seeing all this, because the air of our watch-tower is so ice-cold and keen, we neither tremble or blench. The world is deep, and deep is pain, and deeper than pain is joy. We have seen Creation, and have exulted in it. We have seen Destruction, and have exulted in it. We have watched the long, quivering Shadow of Life shudder across our glacial promontory, and we have watched that drowning tide receive it. It is enough. It is well. We have had our Vision. We know now what gives to the G.o.ds "that look" their faces wear.