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"It is time for man to fix his goal. It is time for man to plant the germ of his highest hope.
"His soil is still rich enough for that purpose. But that soil will one day be too poor and exhausted, and no lofty tree will any longer be able to grow thereon."[10]
[1] G. E., p. 227
[2] John xii. 25; 1 John ii. 15, 16; James iv. 4.
[3] Z., p. 249.
[4] G. M., 1st Essay, Aph. 7.
[5] Matthew v.
[6] Matthew xxiii. 39; Mark xiii. 31; Luke x. 27; Matthew v. 44.
[7] 2 Luke xviii. 7, 8; Romans xii. l9; Revelation vi. 10.
[8] I Corinthians i. 20, 21, 26, 27, 28.
[9] G. M., 1st Essay, Aph. 14. See also Epistle to the Hebrews xii. 6, and Revelation iii. 19.
[10] Z., p. 12
"Transvalue your values or perish!" This was the message of the hermit Nietzsche to the people inhabiting the valley into which he had descended. "Transvalue your values!"—that is to say, make them what they once were, noble, life-approving, virile! For two thousand years the roll of the world-wheel had been reversed—Stendhal had said that many years before Nietzsche lived—but it was left to Nietzsche, Stendhal's admirer and pupil, to teach and prove this fact. Stendhal, too, had cried out against the tameness, the lukewarmness, the effeminacy of society; but Nietzsche took up this cry with a voice more brazen than Stendhal's at a time when mankind was in much greater need of it. Stendhal had pointed enthusiastically to the sun and to the passion of the south, and had donned a moral respirator whenever he turned to face the grey and depressing atmosphere of northern ideas and northern tepidness. Nietzsche follows his master's hint with alacrity, but in doing so converts Stendhal's clarion notes into thunder, and the glint of Stendhal's rapier into strokes of lightning.[1]
When Nietzsche began to write Europe was suffering from the worst kind of spiritual illness—weakness of will. Everywhere comfort and freedom from danger were becoming the highest ideals; everywhere, too, virtue was being confounded with those qualities which led to the highest possible amount of security and tame, back-parlour pleasures; and man was gradually developing into a harmless domesticated type of animal, capable of performing a host of charming little drawing-room tricks which rejoiced the hearts of his womenfolk.
Sleep seemed to be the greatest accomplishment. It had become all important to have a good night's rest, and everything was done to achieve this end. A man no longer asked his heart what it dictated, when he stood irresolute before a daring deed, he simply consulted Morpheus, who warned him that he could not promise him a soft pillow if he did anything that was ever so slightly naughty. In the end, Morpheus would prevail, and thus all Europe was beginning to snore peacefully the whole night through, with marvellous regularity, while manliness rotted and danger dwindled.[2]
Nietzsche protested against this state of affairs:—"What is good? ye ask. To be brave is good. Let the little schoolgirls say: To be good is sweet and touching at the same time. Ye say, a good cause will hallow even war? I say unto you: a good war halloweth every cause. War and courage have done greater things than love!"[3]
"I pass through this people and keep mine eyes open: they have become smaller, and ever become smaller: the reason thereof is their doctrine of happiness and virtue.
"For they are moderate also in virtue—because they want comfort. With comfort, however, moderate virtue only is compatible.
"Of man there is little here: therefore do their women make themselves manly. For only he who is man enough, will save the woman in woman.
"In their hearts, they want simply one thing most of all: that no one hurt them.
"That, however, is cowardice, though it be called virtue."[4]
Some there were, of course, who were conscious of the dreadful condition of things, and who deplored it, without, however, being able to put their finger on the root of the evil. Such people were most of them pessimists, and, at the time that Nietzsche lived, Schopenhauer was their leader.
Sensitive, noble-minded, artistic people, deprived by rationalistic and atheistic teachers of the belief in God, felt the ignobleness of European hopes and aspirations, and knowing of no better creed and possessing the intelligence to see the hopelessness of things under the rule of the values which then prevailed, they succumbed to a mood of utter despair, subscribed to Schopenhauer's horror and loathing of the world, and regarded the very optimism of childhood with suspicion and scorn.
For a while Nietzsche, too, was an ardent and devoted follower of Schopenhauer. Godlessness was bad enough to endure: but Godlessness in a world of un-pagan and effeminate manhood, was too much for the loving student of classical antiquity, and he turned to Schopenhauer as to one who, he thought, would understand how to steel his heart against life's misery.
But this opiate did not maintain its sway over Nietzsche long. Our poet was of a type too courageous and too vigorous to be able to surrender himself so completely to sorrow and to Buddhistic consolations. Gradually he began to regard the humble and resigned attitude of the pessimist before life's hardships and modernity's greyness as unworthy of a spirited and active man. Slowly it dawned upon him that the root of the evil lay, not in the constitution of the earth, but in man himself, and in man's actual values. If man could be roused to pursue higher ideals; if he could be moved to kill the poisonous snake of ignoble values that had crawled into his throat and choked him while he was in slumber;[5] in fact, if man could surpass himself and regard the reversal of the world's engines, for the last two thousand years, as Stendhal had done—that is to say, as the grossest error and most ridiculous faux pas that had ever been made—then, Nietzsche thought, pessimism and Schopenhauer might go to the deuce, and conscious, sensitive, intellectual, and artistic Europe would once more be able to smile instead of shuddering at the thought of mankind's former qualities.
