human
Hamlet, we are disposed to reject Nietzsche's general conclusion no less emphatically than Voltaire's description of Shakspere as a drunken savage. The truth is that decadence or decline in one principle of vitality often means awakening energy in another. Nietzsche had latterly worked himself to a point of view from which the mystery of northern poetry and the vividly imaginative detail of Gothic art are intolerable. His remarks about Wagner's want of taste in the disposition of broad masses and his over-liveliness in minute detail are like a criticism of Strasburg Cathedral by an ancient architect; his view of the Wagnerian drama as concerned with problems of hysteria and as exhibiting a gallery of morbid personages is like an indictment by a Roman patrician of the entire
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Corpus Poeticum Boreale. Nietzsche was all his life a stranger to tolerance and compromise, and towards the end this peculiarity became greatly accentuated. His failing health attracted him to southern climates, and he presently decreed that the north was no longer to exist. Having found a sort of salvation among the
human
Halcyonians, he is constrained to wage spiritual warfare against all Hyperboreans, and especially against Wagner, regarded as the typical Hyperborean.
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Ah, the old Minotaur! says Nietzsche,
human
What has he not cost us already! Every year trains of the finest youths and maidens are led into his labyrinth to be devoured. Every year all Europe strikes up the cry: 'Off to Crete! Off to Crete!' It is highly interesting to observe where Nietzsche finds an antidote for the painful impression of the Wagnerian art. The one modern work that thoroughly satisfied his later taste was Bizet's
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Carmen.
human
This music seems to me perfect, he says;
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says Nietzsche,
human
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Carmen is only the music of devil-may-care, of gaiety and sunburnt mirth, with a strong spice of southern passion; but it has really vivid originality, it has true unity of style, and the unerring perfection with which the composer has caught and reflected a certain mood of wayward grace and mastered the musical symbolism of the bright and fierce and fickle south, the lightness and fire, the logical development and rhythmical charm of the music stamp the work as an unmistakable masterpiece of its kind. In his delight at finding something congenial to his later taste Nietzsche forgot the question of scope, and forgot that Bizet was only a trifler. It was enough for him that he had found a
human
Halcyonian to contrast with Wagner, the
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Hyperborean. Another objection to the line taken in the introduction is that the isolated insistence on Nietzsche's
human
standard gives the impression of a type of thinker inconceivably remote from what he really was. Many a dull and stodgy materialist, such as the author of
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Kraft und Stoff, has maintained the universality of the physiological standard; while the special characteristic of Nietzsche's ethical ideas is surely something very different. Is it not the audacious denial that any one ethical system is valid for all classes of mankind?--the theory of
human
Herrenmoral and
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Sklavenmoral, master-morality and slave-morality--and the attribution of all social mischief to the ever-increasing prevalence of slave-morality over master-morality. Is it not the acceptance of the caste-system as the simple recognition of a universal and unchanging fact of life which really differentiates Nietzsche both from the English moralists and from all other European writers whatsoever? Perhaps Dr. Tille was unwilling to alarm his readers, and conscious of addressing a public which regards the question of human equality as having been finally settled a hundred years ago, deliberately avoided bringing forward opinions that savour of Oriental despotism. But seeing that every line of Nietzsche's writings is animated by such opinions, it is impossible to deal with the subject at all without shocking the ideas of a democratic age. Nietzsche, it should be remembered, was a belated scion of the proudest, most turbulent, and most ruthlessly tyrannical aristocracy that ever existed. He witnessed, with despairing rage, both the success of vulgarity in that modern Europe which had ruined his ancient and noble race, and what he regarded as the progressive depreciation of the high-bred qualities in human nature under the influence of socialistic ideas. Though nowhere expressly stated, the thought of his people, disinherited for their inability to adapt themselves to the modern spirit, is never absent from his consciousness, and he uses his matchless literary power to tell the men of an industrial and co-operative civilisation what the last of genuine aristocrats thinks of them. With advancing years Nietzsche became less and less German and more and more Polish, till after the break with Wagner and Schopenhauer we find him openly satirising everything German. He has, in fact,