It goes without saying that the red hand of Nietzsche is in all
this. The Naumburg Antichrist, damned for five years running by
the indignation of all right-thinking men, has made steady and
enormous progress under cover. There has never been a time, indeed,
when his notions enjoyed a wider dispersion or were poll-parrotted
unwittingly by greater numbers of the righteous. Excessive draughts
of the democratic cure-all, swallowed label, cork, testimonials and
all, have brought Christendom to bed with _Katzenjammer--_and there
stands the seductive antidote in its leering blue bottles. Where would
philosophical opponents of Bolshevism be without Nietzsche? Who would
devise arguments for them, eloquence for them, phrases for them? On all
sides one hears echoes of him--often transformed from his harsh bass
to a piping falsetto, but nevertheless recognizable enough. Any port
in a storm! If God is asleep, then turn to the Devil! The show offers
the best laughing that heathen have enjoyed, perhaps, since the Hundred
Years' War. And there is an extra snicker in the fact that Scotland,
once again, seems to resume the old trade of intellectual smuggling.
If one Scot is to the front with so forthright a piece as "We Moderns,"
then surely there must be a thousand other Scots hard at it in a
_pianissimo_ manner. Thus, I suppose, the crime of Carlyle is repeated
on a wholesale scale, and once again the poor Sassenach is inoculated
with pathogenic Prussian organisms. On this side of the ocean the
business is less efficiently organized; we have no race of illicit
metaphysicians on our border. But the goods come in all the same. I
have heard more prattling of stale Nietzscheism of late, from men
bearing the flag in one hand and the cross in the other, than I ever
heard in the old days from parlour anarchists and unfrocked priests.
Nietzsche, belatedly discovered by a world beset by terrors too great
for it and mysteries too profound, becomes almost respectable, nay,
almost Episcopalian!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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