Egoists, A Book of Supermen: Stendhal, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Anatole France, Huysmans, Barrès, Nietzsche, Blake, Ibsen, Stirner, and Ernest Hello
Nietzsche · en
nest in the trees of the future.
What a master of invective! He often descends to the street in his
tongue-lashing, as, for instance, when he groups "shopkeepers,
Christians, cows, women, Englishmen, and other democrats." Woman is
always the enemy. The only way to tame her is to make her a mother.
As for female suffrage, he sets it down to psychological disorders.
He is a _nuance_, and is the first German to understand women! Alas!
And not the last man who will repeat this speech surely hailing from
the Stone Age. He seems rather proud of his double personality, and
hints at a third. Oddly enough, Nietzsche asked that his Ecce Homo
(the title proves his constant preoccupation with Christianity) be
translated into French by Strindberg, the Swedish poet and the first
dramatist to incorporate into his plays the Nietzschian philosophy,
or what he conceived to be such. (Daniel Lesueur has written of the
various adaptations for gorillas of a teaching that really demands from
man the utmost that is in him.) Nietzsche was a hater of Christianity;
above all of Christian morals, but he was a brave and honest fighter.
He raged at George Eliot, Herbert Spencer, and Carlyle for their
half-heartedness. To give up the belief in Christ and His mission
meant for Nietzsche to drop the moral system, to transvalue old moral
values. This, he truthfully asserted, George Eliot and Spencer had not
the courage to do. He did not skulk behind such masks as the Higher
Criticism, Modernism, or quacksalver Christian socialism. Compromise
was abhorrent to him. His Superman, with its echoes of Wagner's
Siegfried, Ibsen's Brand, Stendhal's wicked heroes, the Renaissance
Borgias, the second Faust of Goethe, and not a little of Hamlet, is
a monster of perfection that may some day become a demigod for a new
religion--and no worse than contemporary mud-gods manufactured daily.
Nietzsche's particular virtue, even for the orthodox, is that though
he assails their faith he also puts to rout with the fiery blasts of
his rhetoric all the belly-gods, the false-culture gods, the gods who
"heal," and other "ghosts"--as Max Stirner calls them. But to every
generation its truths (or lies).
A recently published anecdote of Ibsen quotes a statement of his _a
propos_ of Brand. "The whole drama is only meant as irony. For the man
who wants all or nothing is certainly crazy." Well, Friedrich Nietzsche
was such a man. No half-way parleyings. Fight the Bogey. Don't go
around. He went more serenely than did Brand to his ice cathedral on
the heights. His prayer uttered years before came true: "Give me, ye
gods, give me madness! Madness to make me believe at last in myself."