Where the Arcadian dreaming
begins is when Rousseau assumes that an Emile who has learned the
lesson of force from Nature herself, will not pass along this lesson
to others, whether citizens of his own or some other country, but will
rather display in his dealings with them an ideal fraternity. In the
early stages of the naturalistic movement, in Hobbes and Shaftesbury,
for example, egoism and altruism, the idea of power and the idea of
sympathy, are more sharply contrasted than they are in Rousseau and the
later romanticists. Shaftesbury assumes in human nature an altruistic
impulse or will to brotherhood that will be able to cope successfully
with the will to power that Hobbes declares to be fundamental. Many of
the romanticists, as we have seen, combine the cult of power with the
cult of brotherhood. Hercules, as in Shelley’s poem, is to bow down
before Prometheus, the lover of mankind. The extreme example, however,
is probably William Blake. He proclaims himself of the devil’s party,
he glorifies a free expansion of energy, he looks upon everything that
restricts this expansion as synonymous with evil. At the same time he
pushes his exaltation of sympathy to the verge of the grotesque.[126]
Such indeed is the jumble of incompatibles in Blake that he would
rest an illimitable compassion on the psychology of the superman. For
nothing is more certain than that the “Marriage of Heaven and Hell”
is among other things a fairly complete anticipation of Nietzsche.
The reasons are worth considering why the idea of power and the idea
of sympathy which Blake and so many other romanticists hoped to unite
have once more come to seem antipodal, why in the late stages of the
movement one finds a Nietzsche and a Tolstoy, just as in its early
stages one finds a Hobbes and a Shaftesbury. It is plain, first of
all, that what brought the two cults together for a time was their
common hatred of the past. With the triumph over the past fairly
complete, the incompatibility of power and sympathy became increasingly
manifest. Nietzsche’s attitude is that of a Prometheus whose sympathy
for mankind has changed to disgust on seeing the use that they are
actually making of their emancipation. Humanitarian sympathy seemed
to him to be tending not merely to a subversion, but to an inversion
of values, to a positive preference for the trivial and the ignoble.
He looked with special loathing on that side of the movement that is
symbolized in its homage to the ass. The inevitable flying apart of
power and sympathy was further hastened in Nietzsche and others by
the progress of evolution. Darwinism was dissipating the Arcadian
mist through which nature had been viewed by Rousseau and his early
followers. The gap is wide between Tennyson’s nature “red in tooth and
claw” and the tender and pitiful nature of Wordsworth.[127] Nietzsche’s
preaching of ruthlessness is therefore a protest against the sheer
unreality of those who wish to be natural and at the same time
sympathetic.