"Yes," writes Heine, "one must forgive one's enemies, but not until they have been hanged."
Heine's quarrel with Börne originally arose out of the abomination with which Börne, who was Radical to the point of fanaticism, regarded the somewhat poetic and elastic Liberalism of his fellow-Jew, and it is instructive to enter into an examination of the depth and strength of those views which supplied the real motive power which drove him from Germany to France. There can be no doubt that Heine himself took his Liberalism with perfect seriousness. "In truth I know not," he writes, "if I merit that my coffin should be decorated with a laurel wreath. However much I loved Poesy, she was ever to me only a holy toy or a consecrated means for heavenly ends. It is rather a sword that they should lay on my coffin, for I was a brave soldier in the Liberation War of Humanity." It should be observed, however, that this Liberal had the most aristocratic contempt for the unculturedδημος, as is shown by passages such as the following: "The horny hands of the Socialists who will unpityingly break all the marble statues which are so dear to my heart"; and, "If Democracy really triumphs, it is all up with poetry."
Yet there can be no gainsaying that Heine's political orthodoxy was perfectly unimpeachable on that anti-clericalism which has always been one of the most cardinal points of Continental Liberalism.
He is rarely tired of tilting at Catholicism, and while he regarded ascetic mediæval Catholicism as the vampire which sucked the blood and light out of the hearts of men, he dubbed the modern Catholic reactionaries in Germany "the Party of lies, theruffians of Despotism, the restorers of all the folly and abomination of the Past."
Yet, if his beliefs were too wide to admit of the narrowness of a consistent partisanship, his enthusiasm was deep and sincere for the joy, light, and liberty of a new era that was to sweep away all the unhealthy and plaguy humours of that blind, delirious, and anæmic mediævaldom, which, to use his own phrase, has spread over the countries like an infectious disease, till Europe was but one huge hospital. Politically, in fine, Heine is a brilliant freelance, who, too proud to wear the uniform of party, none the less fought valiantly for the army of Progress and Humanity, a forlorn outpost in the War of Freedom.[1]
Heine's polemical modernity manifested itself most efficiently in theDeutschland, which, together with its sequel,The Romantic School, was issued as a counter-blast to Madame de Staël's work of the same name. This history of the religion, literature, and philosophy of Germany is the masterpiece of Heine's extant prose. An academic philosophic treatise, of course, it neither is nor professes to be. As a description half-serious, half-flippant, however, of the main currents of modern and mediæval Germany by a writer who sees life from the bird's-eye view of the combined poet, journalist, thinker, and man of the world, it is unrivalled. It contains some of Heine's loftiest and most sublime flights, some of his most brilliant and trenchant epigrams.
Particularly happy is the comparison drawn between the furious onslaughts made by the French Revolutionists under Robespierre and the German philosophers under Kant on respectively the divine rights of kings and the divine rights of God.
How delicious is the conclusion of the parallel between the two men: "Each eminently represents the ideal middle-class type—Nature had decreed that they should weigh out coffee and sugar, but Fate willed that they should weigh out other things, and in the scales of the one did she lay a King and in the scales of the other a God....
"And they both gave exact weight."
As, however, has been previously pointed out, Heine's chief characteristic as a prose writer is that marvellous elasticity which can rebound from the frivolous to the sublime with the most consummate ease and celerity. Interspersed with the bright flash-light of the epigrammatic pyrotechnics lie really great passages, and pieces in particular like those on Luther and Goethe possess the clear golden ring of the grand style.
Heine's political ideals were subjected to the inevitable disillusionment. The Revolution of July, which he had fondly hoped would complete the work of the great movement of 1793, merely resulted in the anti-climax of the establishment of a bourgeois constitution under a bourgeois monarch. He tended to become generally embittered. Money matters, too, began to irritate him, and his health to give him trouble, and though he found a devoted sick-nurse in Matilde Crescenzia Mirat, a grisette whom he married in 1841, the lady with whom "he quarrelled daily for six years in that life-long duel at the termination of which only one of the combatants would be left alive," yet none the less his condition began to deteriorate. "The damp cold days and black long nights of his exile" oppressed him, and he began to yearn for the old German soil. He gratified hisHeimwehby a flying and surreptitious visit to Germany that inspired the well-knownGermanyor aWinter Tale, which, together with the somewhat similarAtta Troll, constitutes his most sustained poetic achievement. These two poems are about as characteristic as anything which he wrote. They represent admirably his wild classic Dionysiac fantasy, his sudden dips from the most extravagant Romanticism to the harsh, crude facts of reality, the marvellous swing and sweep of his Aristophanic humour.
Very typical is the following satire on the intimate relation between anthropo- and arctomorphism.
"Up above in star-pavilion,On his golden throne of lordship,Ruling worlds with sway majestic,Sits a Polar bear colossal.""Stainless, snow-white shines the glamourOf his skin, his head is wreathedWith a diadem of diamonds,Flashing light through all the heavens.""Harmony rests in his visage,And the silent deeds of thought,Just a whit he bends his sceptre,And the spheres they ring and sing."
The above quotation shows excellently the essentially poetic quality by which Heine's wit is illumined. A satirist as keen and vivid as Voltaire, he possesses all the logical aptness of the Frenchman without his dryness. His chief characteristic, in fact, is the method by which in his imaginative flights he combines the maximum of this logical aptness with the maximum of humorous incongruity. No humorist dives for his metaphors into stranger water or brings up from the deep more bizarre and fantastic gems. A charming example of Heinean humour is the following passage from one of his prefaces: "A pious Quaker once sacrificed his whole fortune in buying up the most beautiful of the mythological picturesof Giulio Romano in order to consign them to the flames—verily he merits thereby to go to heaven and be whipped with birches regularly every day."
One of the most cardinal traits of Heine's wit and humour is a phenomenal freedom of tone and language, a freedom that is occasionally not always in the most unimpeachable taste. Heine, in fact, is a writer who admits the public gratis to his psychological toilette, where he exposes with studied recklessness his most private thoughts. This question cuts too deep into Heine's life-outlook to be lightly passed over, and necessitates some examination. In the first place even Heine's most enthusiastic admirer will admit that a great deal of this licence is sheer gaminerie; Heine is the mischievous schoolboy of literature who thoroughly revels in being naughty, grimacing by an almost mechanical instinct, so soon as he catches a glimpse of the sacred figures of religion and sex. Like Baudelaire, he loves, almost indeed as a matter of conscientious principle, to make the hairs of the philistines stand on end. His one excuse, however, is that even when he causes the hairs of the philistines almost to spring from their roots, as indeed he does not infrequently, he conducts the operation with so light a touch, so exquisite a grace, that the offence is almost redeemed. Let him speak in his own defence, in the lines from the great Jewish poem, "Jehudah Halevy":
"As in Life so too in poetryGrace is aye Man's highest Good;Who has grace, he never sinnethNot in verse nor e'en in prose.""And by God's grace such a poetGenius we do entitle,King supreme and uncontrolledIn the great desmesne of thought."
Not unnaturally his coarseness grew apace with the virulence of his disease, and he himself explains his cause to his friend "La Mouche": "Vois-tu c'est la faute de la mort qui arrive à grands pas, et quand je la sens ainsi tout près de moi comme à present j'ai besoin de me cramponner la vie ne fût ce par une poutre pourrie." This final phase in fact was simply a reaction against his fate, and is not altogether without analogy to that same psychological principle which dictated much of the crude buffoonery of Swift and Carlyle by way of an heroic protest against their own helplessness.
Far more important, however, is the fact that this particular trait of Heine is profoundly symbolic of his outlook on life, especially where an obscene jest marks the climax of a genuinely poetical flight. Circumstance turned him into a cynic, who saw frequently in Liberty but the uprising of a squalid proletariate, who heard in the "sweet lies of the nightingale, the flatterer of spring," merely the "harbingers of the decay of its queenliness," and who beheld in love but a mere illusion of the senses that vanishes so soon as the beloved one utters a syllable. Held fast in the grip of the great World-paradox, Heine is forced to look at life as a glaring phantasmagoria of blacks and whites, in which the sublime and the ridiculous, the pathetic and the grotesque, the refined and the crude, dance along hand in hand till they become so confused that it is impossible for the observer to distinguish the individual partners, and he is reduced to describing, in pairs, the giddy, whirling couples that make up the fantastic medley.
This incessant antithesis makes Heine one of the most complete of modern writers.
The poet's world is composed of two hemispheres:one is the abode of the beautiful, the grand, the tragic; the other of the ugly, the petty, the comic. Most poets confine their efforts to only a small portion of one of these hemispheres. Heine, however, is the Atlas of poetry, who supports both of the half-spheres of the world, and who, by way of proving how easily his burden sits upon him, suddenly turns juggler, and after showing his audience one side of the magic globe, will,hey presto! whisk the whole world round, and before they know where they are smilingly confront them with the other.
In 1848 the spinal affection from which he suffered became so acute that Heine was compelled to take to that mattress-grave where, paralytic and half-blind and racked intermittently by the most agonising spasms, he dragged out the eight most ghastly years of his life. At first the death-chamber was one of the favourite rendezvous of fashionable Paris, but as the novelty wore off, his circle of friends grew narrower and narrower, until eventually a visit from Berlioz seemed only the crowning proof of the musician's inveterate eccentricity.
Heine, however, rose manfully to the occasion, and did all that he could under the circumstances. Always a passionate lover of the paradoxical, he now began to appreciate with an intense and unprecedented relish the infinite humour of the great Life-farce, one of the most effective scenes of which was even now being enacted in the person of the poet ofjoie de vivre, who, enduring all the agonies of the damned, lay dying in La Rue d'Amsterdam to the quick music of the piano on the story underneath, while only a few feet away shone all the glow and glitter of Parisian life.
The chief occupation and solace of the dying man was the writing of his Memoirs, the greatApologiapro vitâ suâwhich was to square his accounts with the world, and win for him the future as his own.
Yet at times the greatness of his sufferings would soften his heart. He would find in the Bible the magic book which had power to dispel his earthly torments; the "Heimwehfor heaven" would fall upon him, and again would he know his God. It would seem, however, that Heine's death-bed reconversion is simply to be regarded as one of the numerous instances of the Prince of Darkness exhibiting monastic proclivities under the stress of severe physicalmalaise. For eight years Heine lay a-dying, and with the skeleton of Death assiduously serving the few bitter crumbs that yet remained of his feast of life, he was, as a simple matter of pathology, almost bound to believe once more, even if he had been the most hardened infidel in existence. Heine, however, was no cynical atheist. The current religions, it is true, he considered pretty poetry, but bad logic, yet none the less he was genuinely imbued with the ethical idea.
"I am too proud," he writes, "to be influenced by greed for the heavenly wages of virtue or by fear of hellish torments. I strive after the good because it is beautiful and attracts me irresistibly, and I abominate the bad because it is hateful and repugnant to me."
What, in fact, served Heine in the stead of a theology was his fervid enthusiasm for Progress and Humanity. His real religion was the religion of Freedom, the religion of the poor people, the new creed of which Jean Rousseau was the John the Baptist and Voltaire the chief apostle; Heine's Madonna was the red goddess of Revolution, who exacted from her worshippers innumerable hecatombs of human victims; the Man-god whom he reveredas the Saviour of Society was Napoleon, the Son of the Revolution, the drastic reorganiser of the world, who, unappreciated by the pharisees and reactionaries of his time, and finding his Golgotha on the "martyr-cliffs of St. Helena," endured for more than five years all the agonies of a moral crucifixion; while to complete our version of the Heinesque theology, hisHeilige Geistwas the Holy Spirit of the Human Intellect which he says "is seen in its greatest glory in Light and Laughter," and the Revelation which inspired him most deeply was, to use once more his own phrase, "the sacred mystic Revelation that we name poesy."
It is interesting to trace the influence of these last ghastly years on Heine's writings. His almost complete physical prostration brought with it its own compensation in the shape of a marvellous psychic exaltation, and theRomanzeroand thePoetische Nachlesecontain some of his greatest and most moving poems. Nowhere do we see more clearly his most characteristic excellences, his delicacy, his power of antithesis, his concision.
It is Heine's compression, in fact, which is one of the most pronounced features of his poetic style. The whole quintessence of joy and pain, of love and sorrow, is frequently distilled into one short poem. This Heinesque condensation is a variant of the same theory that can be traced in the old Impressionist school of painters which is concerned with the outline and the proper light and shading of the outline to the exclusion of minor details, and in the journalistic cult of the "story" in which the ideal aimed at is "the point, the whole point, and nothing but the point." Heine, in fact, is unique among the poets for narrating a tale with the minimum of space and the maximum of effect, for narrating it in sucha way that each line serves to heighten the level of intensity, till at length the edifice is crowned by the climax. This feature of his style is well illustrated by the end of the frequently quoted poem, "The Asra," in theRomanzero:
"And the slave spake, I am calledMohammed, I am from Yemen,And my stock is from those Asras,They who die whene'er they love."
Though, moreover, he protested to the last against his fate, his tone in theRomanzeroand the earlierPoetische Nachleseis more mellow than in his earlier writings. His cry from the heart is not the cry of defiance but rather of the pathetic wistfulness of impotence. Yet before the candle of his life became extinguished it leapt up in one final flicker, the most marvellous of all. A characteristic caprice of fate made him acquainted during the last months of his life with his one true soul-affinity, the charming woman who is known under the pseudonym of Camille Selden or La Mouche.
Is it then to be wondered at that when the rich feast of a perfect love, for which he had craved Tantalus-like all his life, was offered to him almost at the very minute that his lips were being sealed by the cold kiss of death, the whole soul of the man should leap up in indignant protest, and that such poems as "Lass die heiligen Parabolen," and the even more wonderful series of stanzas with the refrain, "O schöne Welt du bist abscheulich," should exhibit the cold insolent shrug of the man convinced of the righteousness of his plea that of all the places in the universe this human earth "where the just man drags himself along beneath the blood-stained burden of his cross, while the wicked man rides in triumph on his high steed," is the most iniquitous?
Heine died at four o'clock in the morning of February 17, 1856. He was buried by his own directions in Montmartre, "in order to avoid being disturbed by the crowd and bustle of Père Lachaise."
His writings form an incessant stream of paradoxes, but his life is the greatest paradox of all. The prophet of the new religion of liberty, he was repudiated by his country, and his happiest days were spent in the land of exile; throughout his life he sought for love, to live years of the most healthy prosaic domesticity with his mistress, and to find his one true romance on his death-bed; he imagined that he was a great political force, but it is rather as a poet that he survives; as a poet his chief theme was the Joy and Light of Life, and he drew his truest inspiration from the darkest depths of his agony; even as a great writer he has been chiefly known by the comparatively inferiorBook of SongsandReisebilder,while his masterpiece, theMemoirs, the great highly barbed Parthian arrow shot from the grave to transfix his enemies for all eternity, lay mouldering for many years amid the dusty archives of the Vienna Library.
His message, too, the core and kernel of his philosophy, is again a paradox. To the sphinx-like riddle with which every thinker is confronted, "Is Life poetry or prose, tragedy or farce?" Heine made answer that the pathos and poetry of life were contained in the fact that life was so essentially grim and unpoetical, and that the real tragedy of the world lay in the ghastly farce of it all.
[1]Cf.the poem "Enfant perdu," beginning "Verlorner Posten in dem Freiheits Kriege."
[1]Cf.the poem "Enfant perdu," beginning "Verlorner Posten in dem Freiheits Kriege."
The recent centenary of the birth of Benjamin Disraeli renewed our interest in the most striking figure in the English history of the last century. Throughout his life Disraeli made it an important part of hismétierto be interesting, and it is certainly a convincing proof both of his great natural fascination and of the adroitness with which he worked his pose, that even beyond the grave his character should still exercise our curiosity and blind us with the various facets of its brilliancy. He fairly bristles with paradoxes, this cynic, who was also a sentimentalist, this Oriental mystic, who was one of the most finished dandies in London, this shameless adventurer, with his pathetic and chivalrous devotion to his sovereign, this political Don Juan, who provided a classic example of conjugal affection. Many have essayed to solve the riddle of the "Primrose Sphinx"; but the best testimony to their almost universal failure is that nearly every biographer has produced a completely different version of his character. Mr. Hitchman, "one of the helpless, somnambulised cattle whom he led by the nose," to use Carlyle's phrase, portrays him (inThe Public Life of the late Lord Beaconsfield) with charmingnaïvetéas the "disinterested and patriotic statesman." Mr. T. P. O'Connor, on the other hand, who, when still sowing his literary wild oats, painted Disraeli even blacker than the Prince of Darkness himself, in a book unworthy of any serious biographer, simply overshoots the mark.Froude, in hisLife, comes nearer to the truth, but is hampered by being forced to compress the history of a crowded life and the psychology of a complex character into a narrow and inadequate compass. Both Froude, however, and Mr. Sichel, who has given us an interesting volume on Disraeli's personality, lay too much stress on his imaginative and idealistic features.
The reason for this inability to comprehend a character, in many respects singularly typical of his age, lies not so much in the alleged inadequacy of the materials as in the incapacity of most English writers for handling general ideas. The English mind is too concrete for social psychology; it delights in the almost mechanical work of classifying animals, but fails to produce any classification of characters worth the name. The Disraeli problem is admittedly difficult; the secrecy which until recently kept us from all knowledge of the greater portion of his papers and correspondence is undoubtedly a handicap, but the difficulty is by no means insuperable, nor the material so scanty as is usually supposed. Let us take Disraeli in relation to his age, his environment, his ancestry, then what would otherwise have struck us as strange, not to say impossible, stands out clear and inevitable. Another valuable source of information is to be found in his novels, though it is always difficult to discriminate between what is and what is not autobiographical in these works.
A vigorous and imaginative mind, when writing about its own history, will naturally not stint itself in its licences; it will abandon itself to all kinds of hypotheses; it will take a certain phase of itself, frame circumstances to suit its development, and proceed on the fictitious assumption; it will indulgefreely both in caricature and idealisation. InVivian Grey, for instance, Disraeli has slightly exaggerated the more cynical side of his nature;Sidonia, on the other hand, is an idealised version of Disraeli; it is Disraeli raised to a higher power; it is what he would have liked to have been, but was not, any more than the actual Byron was as brave, as romantic, and as fascinating as the ideal Byron who is portrayed inConrad, Childe Harold, andDon Juan.
Yet, none the less,Sidonia, Fakredeen, Vivian Grey,andContarini Flemingpossess a strong family likeness, and strike a genuine autobiographical note. With regard to the two latter, Mr. Sichel, in his study of Disraeli, is unwarranted in his attempted depreciation of their evidence, on the theory that they represent merely a distorted and transient phase of Disraeli's development, to be ascribed to ill-health and immaturity. On the contrary, the contortions of great men in adolescence are peculiarly instructive. It is then that the very elements of the future man are fermenting in the crucible; and is not growth more significant than maturity? It is not a paradox, but a fundamental truth, to say that a man is never more himself than when he is not himself; it is in periods of violent upheaval that the conventional superstructure is destroyed and the innermost foundations of character are laid bare. It is far easier to tone down than to touch up, and the unrestrained sincerity of these early novels, written under the impetus of intense emotion, throws far more light on Disraeli's real character than a book likeEndymion, the official pronouncement of his maturer years. A prudent use, then, of the novels, and an examination of his relations to his age, environment, and ancestry should enable us to construct a psychologyof Disraeli that should be at once convincing and consistent, and adequate to shed light on many of the obscure points of his character.
TheSturm und Drangage of the Revolution in which Disraeli was born marked the passing of Europe from childhood to manhood, from mediævalism to modernity. Like all transition periods, it was peculiarly complex; the tendencies being so varied, and were so frequently accompanied by the reactions against themselves, that it requires considerable care to disentangle the principal threads.
It was an age of progress where reaction was frequently to be seen at work; it was an age significant for a violent outburst of scientific materialism, and the consequently inevitable mysticism of a religious revival. It was an age at once scientific and romantic, individual and cosmopolitan. It was an age where circumstances produced strange mixtures, so that in England we are brought face to face with the paradox that Gladstone, the founder of democratic idealism, obtained his seat under the old system of close boroughs, while Disraeli, the most brilliant example of the new democratic theory ofla carrière ouverte aux talentes, found his way to power as the head of the aristocratic and conservative party. The predominant note, however, was one of democratic individualism. With the French Revolution the yoke of responsibility, political and religious, was violently thrown off; new and wide fields had been opened out to commerce by the extended communications and the new mechanical inventions. A quickened life broke in upon the lethargy of the previous century. The struggle for existence entered on a sharper and intenser phase. Ambitious men vehemently dashed themselves against the social barrier, which day by day became more easy toclimb. In every department it was the age of the clever and ambitious parvenu. In war and in politics Napoleon, in poetry Burns, in fiction Balzac, give convincing testimony to the power of the new regime. It was the age of the French Revolution and of the Holy Alliance, of Condillac and of Chateaubriand, of Laplace and of Shelley, of Godwin and of Tom Paine.
But equality is a medal with two faces: on the one side is written, "I am as good as, if not better than, everyone else"; on the other, "Everyone else is as good as, if not better than, myself." The first was the motto of the rampant individualism and vigorous national policy of Disraeli, the latter of the hesitating Christian spirit and sentimental cosmopolitanism of Gladstone. Gladstone, indeed, is such an excellent foil to Disraeli that we may well be permitted the following quotations, where the rift in Gladstone's lute, between the churchman and the politician, stands in pointed contrast to the unity of purpose that from his earliest years actuated his rival. Gladstone, torn between his missionary impulse and yearning for apostolic destination on the one hand, and healthy ambition on the other, writes to his father: "I am willing to persuade myself that in spite of other longings, which I often feel, my heart is prepared to yield other hopes and other desires for this: of being permitted to be the humblest of those who may be commissioned to set before the eyes of man the magnanimity and glory of Christian truth. Politics are fascinating to me, perhaps too fascinating. My temper is so excitable that I should fear giving up my mind to other subjects, which have ever proved sufficiently alluring to me, and which I fear would make my life a series of unsatisfied longings and expectations." Disraeli is less undecided,as is clear from the following quotation fromContarini Fleming: "I should have killed myself if I had not been supported by my ambition, which now each day became more quickening, so that the desire of distinction and of astounding action raged in my soul, and when I realised that so many years must elapse before I could realise my ideal, I gnashed my teeth in silent rage and cursed my existence," Disraeli will give up anything rather than his chance of being a great man. At a time when most clever young men of his age were thinking of a scholarship he had finally decided to go in for a premiership. He has planned his campaign, he will fool the world to the top of its bent. When yet a boy Disraeli says, as Vivian Grey: "We must mix with the herd, we must sympathise with the sorrow that we do not feel and share the merriment of fools. To rule men we must be men, to prove that we are strong we must be weak. Our wisdom must be concealed under folly, our constancy under caprice."
None the less, Disraeli had too vivid an imagination, too keen a sense of the picturesque, not to be affected to a certain extent by the current Romanticism. We see this in the Eastern novels ofTancredandAlroy, also inContarini Fleming, the English Wilhelm Meister, which exhibits the weaker and more morbid side of the author's character, and is a useful supplement to Vivian Grey. But it is the latter, however, who represents most accurately the ideals and aspirations of the young Disraeli, and, taken generally, is a broad adumbration of his subsequent career. But the Disraeli of Vivian Grey was not so unique as is usually considered, and an analogy between him and the celebrated Frenchman, who wrote a novel about the same period, and one, moreover, singularly typical of his age, provesinstructive. Benjamin Disraeli and Henri Beyle were in all superficial details so absolutely different that one might well hesitate before making the comparison, yet they were radically similar in many of their larger outlines, and in particular their characters, as revealed in the heroes of two novels,Vivian GreyandLe Rouge et le Noir, show an extraordinary resemblance. Both Julien Sorel and Vivian Grey are impelled by a violent and overwhelming ambition; both, originally excluded by their status from participation in the great prizes of the world, set out undaunted to conquer, the one as a priest, the other as a politician. Cynical, with that extreme and savage species of cynicism which is the reaction from intense sensitiveness, they both wage war on society in their passion for success, while the nobler and more generous instincts with which nature had endowed them perish in the struggle.
But this Time-Spirit of individualism was no mere cold-blooded philosophy of egoism. It was, after all, an age of genuine poetry, of fresh ideals. The halo of romance played around the most abandoned sinners. Individualism found, in addition, an æsthetic sanction, as was seen in the prodigious vogue of Byron, where the picturesque pose of the one man pitted against society appealed strongly to the popular imagination. How deeply Disraeli was imbued with Byronism is evidenced not only by the whole tone and manner of his early life, but by his resuscitation of the Byronic legend inVenetia.
This spirit of combined idealism and intense practical energy is met with again in Disraeli's race and ancestry. The Jewish race is a compound of materialism and idealism. The Jew is the dreamer in action, combining fluid imagination with adamantine purpose. These two phases of the Jewishcharacter are seen excellently in Disraeli's father and paternal grandfather. The latter, an Italian Jew, came over to England about the middle of the eighteenth century, and quickly made a fortune by dint of his shrewd business talent and fixity. His son Isaac was gifted with an unfortunate superfluity of the poetic temperament. His youth was erratic and unhappy, but when close on thirty he found a secure refuge in the quiet waters of literature. To his Semitic blood is also to be traced Disraeli's prodigious tenacity of purpose. He came of a stiff-necked people, so that opposition stimulated him, and his early failures served but to render sweeter his eventual success. He had, too, the calculating foresight of the Jew, and could pierce the future, if not with prophetic vision, at any rate, with marvellous intuition. His Oriental strain of mysticism served him in good stead. He never forgot that he was a scion of the Chosen People, and came of a race which had never sullied its purity of lineage by changing its blood. Was he not the chosen man of the chosen race? Could he not read his future, if not in the stars, "which are the brain of heaven," yet in his own brilliant and meteoric brain? He had a full measure of the pride of race, and plumed himself to the last on what he may well have called "the Oriental ichor in his veins." If his enemies dubbed him a parvenu he would fling the wretched taunt back in their faces, bidding them realise that they came from a parvenu and hybrid race, while he himself was sprung from the purest blood in Europe. How keen was this genealogical Judaism we can see from the classic letter to O'Connell, where he wrote that "the hereditary bondsman had forgotten the clank of his fetters," and from his masterpiece of character-drawing, Sidonia, who, withwealth, intellect, and power at his command, yet found his chief "source of interest in his descent and in the fortunes of his race." Disraeli's Judaism, however, did not extend to the religious tenets of the creed. Few, no doubt, are the instances of a converted Jew proving a genuine Christian, but Disraeli had too much of the mystic in him to be an atheist, and if we take into account the elasticity of his imagination, there is little reason to doubt that he was at any rate reasonably sincere in his belief that Christianity was merely completed Judaism, Calvary but the logical corollary of Sinai; he would also, no doubt, find a malicious joy in reminding those who taunted him with his origin, that "one half of Christendom worships a Jew and the other half a Jewess." Anyway, the Christian religion played nothing approaching an integral part in his life; while an amiable acquiescence in its dogmas was, at the best, as it has been with so many, but an intellectual habit. His Jewish origin helped him, moreover, in that he approached the problems of politics with a mind free from conventional British prejudices. He was never a thorough Englishman, and was proud of the fact, instead of thanking God "that he was born an Englishman," as do many of his race, who betray in their every word and action their Jewish nationality. His admirable expert knowledge of the English character was throughout professional, not sympathetic.
When we turn to Disraeli's early environment, we find that it was one calculated to foster both ambition and a literary imagination. He breathed from his earliest days the atmosphere of books, and almost from the cradle imbibed avidly the many volumes of Voltaire. Nothing is so stimulating to the youthful mind as the unchecked run of a library, with its delightful excursions into the unexplored country ofliterature. His natural sensitiveness was hardened by his experiences at school, where his nationality and cleverness rendered him unpopular. The reaction intensified his already precocious ambition, and gave him that consciousness of semi-isolation which formed one of the chief parts of his strength. His ambition was further heightened by the smart literary set which he met constantly at his father's house, and his early glimpses of the great world. Disraeli is palpably exaggerating when he says,aproposof Vivian Grey, that "he was a tender plant in a moral hot-house," but the following passage is significant:
"He became habituated to the idea that everything could be achieved by dexterity, that there was no test of conduct except success; to be ready to advance any opinion, to possess none; to look upon every man as a tool, and never to do anything which had not a definite though circuitous purpose."
"He became habituated to the idea that everything could be achieved by dexterity, that there was no test of conduct except success; to be ready to advance any opinion, to possess none; to look upon every man as a tool, and never to do anything which had not a definite though circuitous purpose."
It is this trait of doing things with an object which supplied the true clue to Disraeli as a man of letters. We admit, of course, theverveand brilliancy of the novels, their claim to rank as classic, but it is impossible to arrive at a correct appreciation of them unless they be taken in the closest conjunction with their author's political career.Vivian Grey, for instance, no doubt afforded an excellent outlet for the fermenting passion of Disraeli's youth; it was itself one of the best society novels ever written, but it was something more. Before that time the future Premier had been hiding his light. How could he obtain a free field for the exercise of his gifts? His father's Bohemian clique scarcely answered his purpose. How could he burst open the doors of society? The bombshell was supplied byVivian Grey. It was a case of self-advertisement raised to the level of a fine art, and Disraeli introduced himself to the public with a bow of most elaborate flourishes.Contarini Flemingstrikes a slightly different note, exhibiting the more poetic side of its author's character; but we must not forget that at the time when it was published Disraeli's long absence in the East had temporarily obscured his fame in London, and that it was the success ofContarini Flemingwhich secured for him once more theentréeinto society. Similarly,Coningsby, Sybil, andTancredwere, in the main, but the gospels in which, in the rôle of a political saviour, he propagated the new creed of Young England.LothairandEndymionwere partly written to replenish his empty exchequer. The protagonists, moreover, in all his chief novels were fashioned in the image of himself, and even Lord Cadurcis inVenetia, who is theoretically Byron, is portrayed with the physical features of the author, so as to ensure a vivid impression on the public mind of his own personality. Not that Disraeli did not experience a genuine joy in the wielding of the pen. He could soar high in his flights of mysticism and romance; could describe the picturesque and the beautiful in passages of inspired rhetoric, though it was in the dash and brilliancy of his satire which at its best equalled that of Heine, or Voltaire, or Byron, that he was most himself. His style is redolent of his race. It possesses the genuine Oriental glamour, the Oriental love of gorgeous and grandiose magnificence, the Oriental lack of symmetry and proportion. His prodigious genius for sarcasm was also Semitic, if we are to believe Mr. Bryce, who considers that gift a peculiar property of the race, instancing, as examples, Lucian and Heine, the greatest satirists of ancient and modern times.
This same combination of temperament and policy which explains Disraeli, the man of letters, explains Disraeli, the dandy. Living as he did in an age which revolted, under the leadership of Count D'Orsay,against the chaste and classic traditions of Brummel, and which offered in the elaborate picturesqueness of its dress an excellent medium for the expression of personality, is it to be wondered at that so ambitious a nature as Disraeli's should, apart from other reasons, enter gaily into the sartorial arena? These early years remind us of Alcibiades, who, in his youth, his genius, his precocious political ambitions, his aristocratic lineage and superb insolence, his extravagance and irresponsibility, offers a fairly close analogy. Disraeli, however, was an Alcibiades with ballast, and his most erratic phases were governed by a consistent purpose. He had, it is true, the regular Hebrew love for the picturesque, the racial craving for flamboyant display; but the unique characteristic of the man was the ingenious method by which he exploited even his weaknesses to advance his purpose. Realising that nothing was more fatal to his career than the indifference of the public, that to be hated was better than to be ignored, and that notoriety was a passable substitute for fame, he was determined to bulk largely in the public eye. Living, fortunately, in an age when dandyism, if not an art, was at any rate a career, and when "wild, melancholy men" were still the rage among the ladies, he manipulated the dandy and Byronic pose with phenomenal success. But his social career was not all pose. Though political ambition was to him always the main point of existence, he was far too healthy to lose sight of the small change of life. He had, moreover, a genuine love of society. His remarkaproposof Gladstone, "What can we do with a leader who is not even in society?" was sincere in spite of being an epigram, and the hosts of great ladies who crowd his novels attest conclusively to his social fastidiousness. But the most convincing proof of this lighter side of hisnature is to be found in his correspondence with his sister. Those letters, dashed off hurriedly to his "dearest Sa," written with that complete lack of ceremony which is the sign of a perfect intimacy, show with what zest he frequented balls and water-parties, dinners andsoirées. Yet his ambition is never far in the background. He goes to the House of Commons, hears the big man speak, and then writes to his sister, "But between ourselves I could floor them all." His genius for conversation is historic, and we are not surprised that he considered that the one unforgivable sin was to be a bore. He had not, it is true, Gladstone's habit of unburdening himself freely to the most casual of acquaintances. How many, indeed, were there of his intimates who had penetrated into the secret places of his heart? But over-much sincerity is a hindrance to the art of conversation; and many of his most brilliant paradoxes were thrown off as an evasive retort to an impertinent question. When, however, we come to Disraeli's social and private life, the most interesting question that presents itself is that of his relation to his wife. Even though he had discoursed inContarini Flemingof the grand passion with all the high-flown sentimentalism of the age, it was obviously impossible for him, considering the disparity of their ages, to be seriously in love with Mrs. Disraeli; and it must have seemed that he had been forced to exchange the poetry of the mistress for the prose of the wife. Had he not, about ten years before his marriage, written to his sister, "How would you like Lady B—— for a sister-in-law? Clever, £25,000, and domestic. As for love, all my friends who have married for love either beat their wives or live apart from them. This is literally true. I may commit many follies, but never that of marrying for love,which, I am convinced, cannot but be a guarantee of infelicity." Yet this union, based originally on mere policy and camaraderie, was eventually crowned with the most faithful of loves. It was his wife's absorbing interest in his career that supplied the link. He has himself written that the most exquisite moment in a man's life was when he surprised his lady-love reading the manuscript of his first speech, and the sympathy of Mrs. Disraeli in his successes may well have given them a yet further charm. The situation is well expressed in the remark of Mrs. Disraeli's: "You know you married me for money, and I know that if you had to do it again you would do it for love."
In fact the warm and constant affection Disraeli lavished on his wife during her lifetime, and the poignant grief that he evinced at her death, furnish a more than sufficient refutation to those who persist in regarding him as a mere cynical fortune-hunter. Disraeli, like Browning, had
"Two soul sides, one to face the world with,One to show a woman when he loves her."
In the other departments of private life he was likewise exemplary. His hardness was limited to politics; he was the most dutiful of sons, the most affectionate of brothers, the most faithful of friends. His debts, for the most part, were incurred by backing the bills of other men. His touching and romantic friendship for Mrs. Brydges Williams, the eccentric old Cornish lady who gave him pecuniary assistance at a critical period of his career, is well known. The story, again, of the Premier and his wife dancing a Highland jig in their night apparel on hearing of the success of an old friend, shows how little the bitter struggles of politics had hardened his heart. Particularly touching, also, is the mutualaffection between him and the Queen, that sweetened his last years. She was, as we read in a letter of Disraeli's to the Marchioness of Ely, "the best friend he had in the world."
But Disraeli, though he fulfilled himself in many ways, was first of all a politician, and it is Disraeli the politician rather than Disraeli the man of letters, the dandy, or the human being, that principally provokes our interest. What were his real views on politics? How far can we distinguish between the official edition of himself which he displayed for public inspection and the original that he alone could read? Given his policy, how far was it justifiable, how far rational? The view of his most devoted, but yet in reality, quite unappreciative, admirers, that throughout a political career of over half a century he remained consistently and absolutely faithful to his original ideals, and that he introduced into politics an integrity and disinterestedness that Parliament had rarely witnessed, is even more absurd than the opinion of his blind and malignant enemies that he was a mere charlatan who juggled with parties and the people without possessing a single genuine political faith of his own. Disraeli, as was inevitable in a man of so detached and unprejudiced a nature, simply took the then party system at its true worth, and, of course, realised from the outset that before he could do anything worth doing he must first obtain that power which alone could give him the opportunity of doing it. His attack on Peel was,primâ facie, an occasion that it would have been the depth of folly to have missed, and Mr. Birrell's statement that Disraeli "ate his peck of dirt," and his comparison of him to Casanova, is mere petulance. For these preliminary stages of the higher politics Disraeli was admirably fitted, and the following autobiographicpassages fromTancredshow how congenial were his Herculean labours: "To be the centre of a maze of manœuvres was his empyrean, and while he recognised in them the best means of success he found in their exercise a means of constant delight"; and again, "'Intrigue,' cried the young prince, using, as was his custom, a superfluity of expression both of voice and hand and eyes, 'intrigue, it is life, it is the only thing. If you wish to produce a result you must make a combination, and you call combination intrigue.'" Disraeli viewed party politics from the dispassionate standpoint of a chess-player, "playing off the proud peers like pawns," skilfully manœuvring his knights and bishops beneath the shadow of the old mediæval castles, though it was "in his masterly manipulation of his queen" that he really surpassed himself. What a contrast to Gladstone's youthful frame of mind, who entered politics because he felt a strong moral duty to defend that Church which he was afterwards partly to disestablish against the insidious attacks of philosophic Radicalism. But Disraeli's point of view was, after all, merely that which was obvious and rational. It is well known that in Disraeli's day the whole efficiency of the party system as a means of carrying on the government was based on that sagacious inconsistency, so characteristic of this country, which, cheerfully accommodating the most untractable of facts to the most docile of theories, drew between the two parties no clear dividing line either of principle or of class. Those genuine lines of cleavage both of policy and interest that now tend to become more and more clearly marked did not then exist. The only vital political distinction then existing in England was that between the Ins and the Outs. Whigs and Tories were, in their origin, merely the names for the tworival organisations for the pursuit of political power into which the oligarchy of the time had divided itself, and the party catch-words then indicated as much essential difference as the badges by which the two sides of a "scratch" game symbolise a fictitious distinction.
Particularly interesting is the following quotation from a letter of Gladstone, written comparatively early in his career, which shows convincingly that the subsequent democratic idealist fully realised the intrinsic farce of the then party system: "Each of them, the Whig and the Tory Party, comprises within itself far greater divergencies than can be noticed as dividing the more moderate portion of the one from the more moderate portion of the other. The great English parties differ no more in their general outlines than by a somewhat different distribution of the same elements in each." It is impossible for the opportunist position to be more cogently stated. It is, indeed, a strange paradox that political integrity should be traditionally associated with the name of Gladstone, who accomplished more than any other of our statesmen in changing statesmanship into demagogy. His pronouncedly religious temperament, however, led to extraordinary results, and his psychological condition was best expressed in the well-known epigram that "he followed his conscience in the same manner that the driver of a gig follows the horse." It was not that he was deliberately insincere. He could deceive himself as well as others with his ingenious sophisms. His sincerity was merely so elastic, his enthusiasm so adaptable, that he found it easy to be sincere and enthusiastic,inter alia, about those things which coincided with his interests.
Carlyle hits the mark in dubbing Gladstone adeeper and unconscious juggler as contrasted with Disraeli, the clever, conscious juggler. The latter, at any rate, played the game straight with himself. He did not, like his rival, have recourse to super-natural inspiration for every argument that dropped from his specious lips, or degrade his deity into a veritabledeus ex machinâ, whose function it was to sanction the most elementary dictates of Parliamentary tactics.
Yet, though he exhibited a prudent elasticity in his handling of the minor details of party politics, in the main outlines of his policy he remained consistent and true to himself throughout his career. The romantic strain in his temperament rendered him congenitally opposed to the cut and dried utilitarianism of the Whigs. The renovated Toryism of New England, for which he was largely responsible, though to a great extent merely a move in the game, is deeply stamped with the impress of his own nature. That his bias was naturally aristocratic no one can doubt who has read the passage inThe Revolutionary Epickeon Equality, or has appreciated the tone of personal superiority and contempt for the mediocre that pervades all his writings. His Conservatism, however, was not the orthodox Conservatism of the Eldon school, "the barren mule of politics which engenders nothing," to use his own phrase, but a more picturesque and practical policy. He poured successfully the new wine of Democracy into the old bottles of Toryism, and thus, while no doubt indulging the more romantic side of his nature, placed, his party on a more modern and workable basis. Disraeli's policy, in fact, was always one of sane and rational opportunism. In the same way that Gambetta, the exponent of French Opportunism, opposed "a policy of results to the policy ofchimeras" of the reactionaries, Disraeli opposed to Gladstone's dangerous and visionary ideals a policy that was at once feasible and salutary. Disraeli invariably treated England as a definite country with a definite personality of its own, requiring individual attention and delicate handling, while Gladstone regarded her as a meretabula rasaon which the latest new-fangled doctrines could be easily imprinted. Precisely the same spirit induced Gladstone to treat the Queen as a department of State and Disraeli to treat her as a woman. In home politics he has grasped well that transition from feudal to federal principles which was the keynote of the last century politics. His detractors object that no great measures stand identified with his name; but here the fates were against him. It was a cruel paradox that when at last he obtained an untrammelled power he was too old and jaded to initiate any new creative measure in domestic affairs. I quote Mrs. Disraeli: "You don't know my Dizzy; what great plans he has long matured for the good and greatness of England. But they have made him wait and drudge so long, and now time is against him." In his foreign policy, however, he displayed his characteristic combination of practical and imaginative strength. In the same spirit in which he himself had obtained the foremost place in England, he desired that England should acquire the foremost rank among the nations; while, as is shown by his Imperial policy, he infused something of his own picturesqueness into the policy of the most prosaic Power in Europe. His Indian policy, in particular, proves with what practical imagination he had divined how much lay in a name, and that to the feudatory princes it meant all the difference whether they paid their allegiance to the Queen of England or to the Empress of India.
Disraeli's master-passion was ambition. But he was no monomaniac like Napoleon. In the same way that Sidonia, the complete and perfect man, according to Disraeli, played with a master-hand on the whole gamut of life, so did Disraeli, though in a lesser scale, live largely and fully. He lived in the solitudes of the Arabian deserts and in the crowded drawing-rooms of St. James's; in the halls of Westminster and the shady quietude of Bradenham; in the privacy of his own study, and in the historic chambers of Downing Street. To few men has it been given to express themselves in so many different ways. What matter if his feats of statesmanship were restricted by the limitations of the Parliamentary system and the handicap of his own failing health? To such a nature the joy of life lay rather in the winning than in the using of the prize. It is the romance and character of the man that perpetuate his memory rather than his political achievements. He lives as a great career. When yet a boy he had mapped out his future, and he realised his ambition in every detail. By sheer force of intellect and determination he lifted himself from the Ghetto to the highest position in England. As he himself said, in one of Mrs. Craigie's novels: "Many men have talent; few have genius; fewer still have character."
The Genealogy of Morals: a Polemic! Nietzsche was well advised to append the word "polemic" to his title, for it supplies the key to his whole position. To some extent, no doubt, the "Genealogy" may be the expression in more philosophic language of those ideas, which find in Zarathustra their poetic and almost biblical formulation. Yet philosopher though he may be, Nietzsche is no abstract thinker sitting down stolidly on some icy height to solve the riddle of the universe, whatever it may be, by the rigid rules of abstract logic, so that he may placidly present the solution to such members of the public as happen to be interested in metaphysics. On the contrary his mind, and even more truly his temperament, are made up from the outset. Certain ideas grip him so tensely, and for him, at any rate, constitute so fiery and omnipresent a reality, as to be from his standpoint things transcending the mere cavillings of logicians and scientists.
"You ask me why," says Zarathustra, "but I say unto you I am not one of those whom one may ask their why."
The same idea is more technically expressed in the preface to the Genealogy—"that new immoral, or at least, 'amoral'a priori, and that 'categorical imperative,' which was its voice (but, oh I how hostile to the Kantian article, and how pregnant with problems), to which since then I have givenmore and more obedience (and, indeed, what is more than obedience)." For, startling though it may seem to the orthodox, albeit acceptable enough to the acolytes of the new faith, the fact stands out irresistibly, that all the later writings of Nietzsche are saturated through and through with the religious spirit.
For Nietzsche was inspired with as supreme a consciousness of the infallibility and paramount necessity of his message, as rigid a belief in exclusive salvation through his own teachings, as has overwhelmed the brain of any prophet or Messiah known to human history. "I have given mankind the deepest book it possesses," writes Nietzsche to Brandes, and means it quite deliberately and quite literally. The content, indeed, of the religion of this converse Christ may be diametrically opposed to that of the original, but the machinery is the same. With the same exalted spirit in which Jesus preached the kingdom of heaven, so did Nietzsche preach the kingdom of this earth, while it may be noted incidentally that both kingdoms were the perquisites of a select few; and as the spurned god of Israel taught self-abasement to the weak with an intensity that, rightly or wrongly, seems a little extravagant to our modern taste, so does Nietzsche, and with every whit as honest a fanaticism, thunder forth to the strong the sublime dogma of self-expression and self-glorification. Turn, in fact, the doctrines of Christianity upside down, but leave constant the missionary enthusiasm of its founder, his chronic fits of extreme depression and extreme exaltation, and you have the quintessence of Nietzsche.
As, however, it is the boast of all religions that they are beyond the realms of exact logic and empirical science, it would be as unfair to look in ourprophet's polemic for the mathematical accuracy of a Euclidian proposition, as it would be to search for such accuracy amid the many grandiose and tragic thoughts that loom over the invectives of Isaiah, Jesus, and Jeremiah.
Not, indeed, but what there are many new, swift, and illuminating truths in our philosopher's gospel, just as there were in the pronouncements of his afore-said Hebrew brethren. But the essence, theraison d'êtreof the whole book is purely polemical. Nietzsche is out to kill, and so long as his weapons effectually subserve that object, he is, and quite logically, indifferent to aught else.
Before, however, we analyse in detail the philosophy of this book, it is advisable to adjust our sights to those particular targets on which Nietzsche trained his gigantic and murderous artillery. We shall also have a better prospect of getting really into touch with "the very inner pulse of the machine," the real core of this philosophy, if we take a necessarily short, but it is to be hoped none the less vivid, glance at those reasons which induced Nietzsche to envisage the objects of his attack with so tense and implacable a hatred.
Now Nietzsche found his intellectual jumping-off ground in that hybrid of Christianity and Buddhism stuck on a pedestal of sex, which constituted the philosophy of Schopenhauer and the essence of the fashionable pessimism of mid-century Germany. To endeavour to condense one of the most brilliant and elaborate systems of the last century into a few words is at best a delicate and hazardous task, yet perhaps we may adumbrate tentatively the radical elements which spurred Nietzsche to so sanguinary a revolt.
Life according to Schopenhauer was a sorry failure, a thing not worth living on its merits, butkept going by the driving impetus of a blind life-force and knit with a mutual pity. Life then being intrinsically evil, the remedy for the evil was to live as little as possible—" Draw your desire back from the world so that there may be an end of that phenomenal life which is nothing but grief." Apart from general asceticism, there were two specific anodynes prescribed by Schopenhauer for the disease called life—art which transcended life, and lifted the spectator or listener on to another plane, and philosophy which, as it were, blunted the sting of life by the contemplation of the essentially unreal nature of the phenomenal universe. But the greatest good was Nirvana, a kind of Pantheistic Absolute of negativity, into which one eventually merged, to enjoy the supreme paradox of a peaceful self-consciousness of one's own nothingness.
It is easy for us to sneer, nowadays, at this bilious and suicidal system, and to explain the whole theory of the Will to Live by the keen and chronic tyranny which the sexual instinct exercised over the philosopher himself; the fact remained, Schopenhauer was the dominant influence of the day—how dominant, can be seen from the fact that the whole of later Wagnerian music is merely a translation of his philosophy into the language of sound. It is easy to see the extent to which Schopenhauer and Wagner were saturated with the whole spirit of primitive and mediæval Christianity. Human life, forsooth, is essentially bad and essentially unreal; salvation only lies in the mortification and annihilation of the self. Apart, however, from philosophical and theological technicalities, the profound psychological import of this nihilistic pessimism and neo-Christian romanticism is patent. Man looks at man's life on earth, and gives it up as a bad job, or at best makes somefantastic effort to create a new world to redress the balance of the old. "They wanted to run away from their misery, and the stars were too far away. Then they sighed, Oh, that there were heavenly ways, forsooth, to slink into another Being and Happiness."
It has, in fact, been well put that, as the motto of Goethe was "Memento vivere," so was the motto of Schopenhauer, "Memento mori."
Now, Nietzsche voiced the revolt of those temperaments whose ears were attuned rather to "Memento vivere" than "Memento mori." We must remember, moreover, that that Christian romanticism which finds its best metaphysical formulation in Schopenhauer was in itself but a reaction from the real spirit of the century, that ebullience and exuberance of the human ego of which Stendhal is perhaps the most typical manifestation. It might well indeed be instructive to trace the intellectual descent of Nietzsche from Stendhal, and, applying again the sociological method, to speculate as to how far he derived some of the impetus for his philosophy of egoism from the aggressive wars of Prussia, as exemplified in the Sadowa campaign and the Franco-German war. It is time, however, that we came to the temperament of the philosopher himself. It is indeed a platitude, that as man makes his gods in his own image, so does the philosopher create his systems. What is Aristotle's ideal of theβίος θεωρήτικος, and his conception of the self-contemplative god but the erection into a universal norm of the thinker's natural philosophic idiosyncrasy? What is the elaborate "I and Me" of the cosmology of Fichte but the attribution to the universe of the personal idiosyncrasies of Fichte, the self-conscious Doppelgänger? And how Schopenhauer promoted sex into the devil, whose heatanimates this earthly hell, we have already seen. What, then, was the impetus which impelled Nietzsche to batter down the walls of the contemporary moral and philosophic universe? The theory of an innatejoie de vivre, a system highly if not over-charged with vitality, supplies but half the answer. The real explanation lies in the stiffening of this natural exuberance beneath the tension of a grim incessant struggle with a nervous malady.
It is not actually necessary to go as far as the Swedish writer, M. Bjerre, who finds in Nietzsche's deliberate and revolutionary transvaluation of values that break up of the cerebral system from its previous condition which signalises the earlier stages of general paralysis. Yet Nietzsche's own writings, particularly his letters, reveal how potent was the stimulus exercised on his ego by those nervous headaches which hounded him over the Continent. To prevent defeat his will had to be perpetually strained to the maximum pitch of tension. The sweets of comfort being denied him, the only alternative left was to find a kind of super-happiness in the ecstasies and exultations of that Titanic contest which was perpetually fought on the battlefield of his own person. Let him speak for himself: "I made of my wish to get well, to live, my philosophy—it should, in fact, be noted—the years when my vitality descended to its minimum were those when I ceased to be a pessimist."
We have not, however, at this juncture space to elaborate further the theory of the superman. Let it be enough to say that it is the raising to thenth power of the spirit of struggling and aggressive efficiency, and the venting of an over-full vitality by the creation of new values out of the wealth of the individual ego. As, however, the glorification of strength involves, and logically so, the degradation of weakness,and "to build up a sanctuary it is necessary for a sanctuary to be destroyed," it is not surprising that Nietzsche should clear the ground for his new creations by a ferocious bombardment of the crumbling ruins that still encumbered the site. Schopenhauer, who had been the fount from which Nietzsche's philosophic youth had drawn its inspiration before, as it were, he had found him out, is always treated with a certain amount of respect. But the arch-enemy was the, to him, poisonous system of altruism, self-annihilation, and world-renouncement which was called Christianity.
The cynical may smile at the inordinate and concentrated frenzy of this attack. "Is not your wildly militant prophet simply wasting his powder and shot? Who in his senses ever heard of Christianity being takenau pied de la lettre, even by the most orthodox of modern bishops? What is it, to use another metaphor, but flogging a dead horse?" To which Nietzsche's answer would be that it is by removing the foundations that you remove also the superstructure, or to translate our metaphor, "Let me kill Christianity, and I kill at the same time all that system of altruism for altruism's sake, of abstract truth for the sake of abstract truth, which is built on that hateful foundation." It may also be observed that, even apart from the poetic and prophetic licence to which a man writing under such circumstances would be legitimately entitled, there are even now not wanting people who do in point of fact take Christianity with all the implicit seriousness of the mediæval monks or the early Fathers. It is, indeed, a phenomenon not without a certain intrinsic humour, that almost at the very moment when Tolstoi was making his pathetic efforts to resuscitate literal Christianity with the abortive tears of pity, Nietzsche shouldswing along to flagellate the semi-inanimate ghost of the bleeding God, in no monkish spirit, forsooth, but with all the grim and scientific energy of the most enthusiastic of executioners, compared to whom Voltaire was but the most urbane of wits, and Heine the most innocuous of schoolboys. Having thus taken a brief view of the targets, and of the implacable and very serious spirit that animates the assailant, let us glance briefly at the chief lines of attack.
The first essay of the Genealogy consists of an essay on "Good and Evil, Good and Bad." The line of attack is double, being first etymological, and secondly historical.
Without going into philological exactitudes, it is, we think, fairly safe to follow Nietzsche in his theory that the word "good" and its analogues were originally applied to designate those qualities which were peculiar to the governing aristocratic classes, albeit qualities by no means susceptible of the title of "ethical" goodness. Physical valour being in primitive times the most valuable asset of the community, it is not unnatural that that quality should be held in universal esteem. We would remark, however, in passing, that though Nietzsche professes to make a flying expedition into the domain of early Greek ethics, which would appear, according to his teachings, to be represented as an ideal system worthy of modern imitation, he is apparently oblivious to the fact that the spirit of cunning prudence, of which he so emphatically disapproves, was one of the most admired qualities of primitive Greece.
On the general question, however, we may perhaps supplement Nietzsche's by Spencer's argumenton the meaning of the English word "good," which, as is notorious, has the double meaning of "ethical" and "efficient." Instructive, however, though this argument is, it cannot be said to clinch the question, since, even in the times of ancient Greece, there were not wanting words such asκάλος, αἴχρος, ὅσιοςto denote, albeit mostly in æsthetic terminology, that ethical meaning, of which the wordἄγαθοςfell so signally short. In other words, to use Nietzschean terminology, the ethical taint even then existed, though in a less virulent form.
The other line of attack, however, is more serious, and penetrates to the very core of the modern moral system with its savage onslaught on Christianity. What is Christianity, says Nietzsche, but the revolt of the slaves in the sphere of morals? Our philosopher's suggestion, of course, that Christianity was a deliberate stratagem on the part of a revengeful Israel to square accounts with the conqueror, has, on the face of it, no claim to serious consideration as anything but a poetic thought. The fact, however, that Christianity from its beginning catered avowedly for the poor, the weak, the oppressed, the inefficient, is admittedly true, whatever disputes may range as to the inferences to be drawn from this fact. And that the accusation of being a slave-morality is something more than empty abuse, is substantiated by the numerous slaves who did, in fact, subscribe to the infant creed. It is, moreover, not without its interest to watch nowadays a recurrence of the same phenomenon. Just, indeed, as at present the proletariate areipso factoready to believe, quite apart from any question of any economic justification of the doctrine, in the genuine iniquity of the rich capitalist, so in the early Christian era the proletariate were not reluctant to put their faith in the saying, that, "it was aseasy for a camel to go through the eye of a needle as for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven." The difference, however, between modern and ancient Christianity stands out clearly from the fact that though this identical creed is invoked with something approaching equal facility on the sides both of the angels and the devils, it is, on the whole, now identified with the richer and more prosperous classes.
It must, however, be frankly admitted that Nietzsche somewhat overshoots the mark, both in dubbing the history of the world a conflict between the two ideals, of Rome and Judæa, the egoistic and altruistic ideals, and in asseverating that the primitive "beast of prey prowling avidly after booty and victory" was the only type of the human species worthy of admiration, and that the tamed modern species is but a diseased distortion. We will deal later with the lacuna caused in Nietzsche's philosophy by his refusal to recognise the true significance of the Aristotelian doctrine that man is aζῶον πολιτικονwhen we show that even from his own standpoint the modern state of man is preferable to the primal. Suffice it for the present to say that, however large a part of the truth Nietzsche captured with this potent theory, there remains a not inconsiderable part which still eluded him.
Having endeavoured thus to dispose of the "ethically good" and "ethically bad" by the theory that such ideas are merely distortions of the ideas of "practically good and practically bad," Nietzsche in the second essay of the Genealogy makes a similar effort to take the sting out of the ideas of "Schuld" (guilt, debt), and "schlechtes Gewissen" (bad conscience). But here, again, difficulties beset our revolutionary.He approves of responsibility and the sacredness of the promise, but disapproves of the bad conscience by which the individual would enforce these things on himself. He blesses justice, but damns the social system. We shall find it hard to follow him in his attempted reconciliation of these divergent standpoints. When, for instance, he alludes with almost paternal approbation to the savage mnemonics by which the "conscience" (per se) was produced, and then proceeds to an envenomed, if none the less brilliant polemic against the "bad conscience," we see that in reality it is not so much the existence of a consciencequâconscience, to which he objects, but the existence of a conscience functioning on what he conceives to be a vicious basis. Indeed, even the most faithful of our prophet's disciples would admit that the Nietzschean teaching lays down as thorny and toilsome a path for the "bold, bad man," orübermensch, as Christianity ever decreed for the good man or weakling. The only difference, in fact, between Nietzschean and Christian ethics is that between excessive self-affirmation and excessive self-negation. But one has only to readZarathustrato realise immediately that this self-affirmation is no heedless hedonism, but a tense and chronic struggle of the ego against the world, subject to as rigid rules and braving as intense martyrdoms as does the Christian struggle of the spirit against the flesh. We may say, in fact, that on an officially Nietzschean basis the "bad" man who fails in being thoroughly and perfectly bad is, and apparently properly so, subject to as poignant pangs as is the "good" man who fails in being thoroughly and perfectly good.