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to-day, ye who stand apart, ye shall one day be a people; from you who have chosen yourselves, a chosen people shall arise; and from it the superman."

VII. DECADENCE

Consequently, the road to the superman must lie through aristocracy. Democracy-"this mania for counting noses" -must be eradicated before it is too late. The first step here is the destruction of Christianity so far as all higher men are concerned. The triumph of Christ was the beginning of democracy; "the first Christian was in his deepest instincts a rebel against everything privileged; he lived and struggled unremittingly for 'equal rights" "; in modern times he would have been sent to Siberia. "He that is greatest among you, let him be your servant"—this is the inversion of all political wisdom, of all sanity; indeed, as one reads the Gospel one feels the atmosphere of a Russian novel; they are a sort of plagiarism from Dostoievski. Only among the lowly could such notions take root; and only in an age whose rulers had degenerated and ceased to rule. "When Nero and Caracalla sat on the throne, the paradox arose that the lowest man was worth more than the man on top." 2

As the conquest of Europe by Christianity was the end of ancient aristocracy, so the overrunning of Europe by Teutonic warrior barons brought a renewal of the old masculine virtues, and planted the roots of the modern aristocracies. These men were not burdened with "morals": they "were free from every social restraint; in the innocence of their wild-beast conscience they returned as exultant monsters from a horrible train of murder, incendiarism, rapine, torture, with an arrogance and compromise as if nothing but a student's freak had been perpetrated." It was such men who supplied the ruling classes for Germany, Scandinavia, France, England, Italy, and Russia.

1 Z., 107.

2 Antichrist, 195; Ellis, 49-50; W. P., ii, 313.

A herd of blond beasts of prey, a race of conquerors and masters, with military organization, with the power to organize, unscrupulously placing their fearful paws upon a population perhaps vastly superior in numbers, this

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This splendid ruling stock was corrupted, first by the Catholic laudation of feminine virtues, secondly by the Puritan and plebeian ideals of the Reformation, and thirdly by inter-marriage with inferior stock. Just as Catholicism was mellowing into the aristocratic and unmoral culture of the Renaissance, the Reformation crushed it with a revival of Judaic rigor and solemnity. "Does anybody at last understand, will anybody understand what the Renaissance was? The transvaluation of Christian values, the attempt undertaken with all means, all instincts and all genius to make the opposite values, the noble values triumph I see before

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Protestantism and beer have dulled German wit; add, now, Wagnerian opera. As a result, "the present-day Prussian is one of the most dangerous enemies of culture." "The presence of a German retards my digestion." "If, as Gibbon says, nothing but time—though a long time—is required for a world to perish; so nothing but time—though still more time -is required for a false idea to be destroyed in Germany." When Germany defeated Napoleon it was as disastrous to culture as when Luther defeated the Church; thenceforward Germany put away her Goethes, her Schopenhauers and her Beethovens, and began to worship "patriots"; "Deutschland über

1 G. M., 40.

2 Antichrist, 228.

Yet

Alles-I fear that was the end of German philosophy." 1 there is a natural seriousness and depth in the Germans that gives ground for the hope that they may yet redeem Europe; they have more of the masculine virtues than the French or the English; they have perseverance, patience, industry—hence their scholarship, their science, and their military discipline; it is delightful to see how all Europe is worried about the German army. If the German power of organization could cooperate with the potential resources of Russia, in materials and in men, then would come the age of great politics. "We require an intergrowth of the German and Slav races; and we require, too, the cleverest financiers, the Jews, that we may become the masters of the world. . . . We require an unconditional union with Russia." The alternative was encirclement and strangulation.

The trouble with Germany is a certain stolidity of mind which pays for this solidity of character; Germany misses the long traditions of culture which have made the French the most refined and subtle of all the peoples of Europe. "I believe only in French culture, and I regard everything else in Europe which calls itself culture as a misunderstanding." "When one reads Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, . . . Vauvenargues, and Chamfort, one is nearer to antiquity than with any group of authors in any other nation." Voltaire is "a grand seigneur of the mind"; and Taine is "the first of living historians." Even the later French writers Flaubert, Bourget, Anatole France, etc.—are infinitely beyond other Europeans in clarity of thought and language "what clearness and delicate precision in these Frenchmen!" European nobility of taste, feeling and manners is the work of France. But of the old France, of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the Revolution, by destroying the aristocracy, destroyed the vehicle and nursery of culture, and now the French soul is thin and pale in comparison with what it used to be. Nevertheless it has still some fine qualities; "in France almost 1 Figgis, 47, note; T. I., 51.

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all psychological and artistic questions are considered with incomparably more subtlety and thoroughness than they are in Germany. . . . At the very moment when Germany arose as a great power in the world of politics, France won new importance in the world of culture."

Russia is the blond beast of Europe. Its people have a "stubborn and resigned fatalism which gives them even nowadays the advantage over us Westerners." Russia has a strong government, without "parliamentary imbecility." Force of will has long been accumulating there, and now threatens to find release; it would not be surprising to find Russia becoming master of Europe. "A thinker who has at heart the future of Europe will in all his perspectives concerning the future calculate upon the Jews and the Russians as above all the surest and the likeliest factors in the great play and battle of forces." But all in all it is the Italians who are the finest and most vigorous of existing peoples; the man-plant grows strongest in Italy, as Alfieri boasted. There is a manly bearing, an aristocratic pride in even the lowliest Italian; "a poor Venetian gondolier is always a better figure than a Berlin Geheimrath, and in the end, indeed, a better man.” 2

Worst of all are the English; it is they who corrupted the French mind with the democratic delusion; "shop-keepers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen, and other democrats belong together." English utilitarianism and philistinism are the nadir of European culture. Only in a land of cutthroat competition could anyone conceive of life as a struggle for mere existence. Only in a land where shop-keepers and ship-keepers had multiplied to such a number as to overcome the aristocracy could democracy be fabricated; this is the gift, the Greek gift, which England has given the modern world. Who will rescue Europe from England, and England from democracy?

1 Salter, 464-7; E. H., 37, 83; B. G. E., 213-6; T. I., 54; Faguet, 10-11.
2 G. M., 98; B. G. E., 146, 208; Salter, 469.

VIII. ARISTOCRACY

Democracy means drift; it means permission given to each part of an organism to do just what it pleases; it means the lapse of coherence and interdependence, the enthronement of liberty and chaos. It means the worship of mediocrity, and the hatred of excellence. It means the impossibility of great men-how could great men submit to the indignities and indecencies of an election? What chance would they have? "What is hated by the people, as a wolf by the dogs, is the free spirit, the enemy of all fetters, the not-adorer," the man who is not a "regular party-member." How can the superman arise in such a soil? And how can a nation become great when its greatest men lie unused, discouraged, perhaps unknown? Such a society loses character; imitation is horizontal instead of vertical-not the superior man but the majority man becomes the ideal and the model; everybody comes to resemble everybody else; even the sexes approximate the men become women and the women become men.1 1

Feminism, then, is the natural corollary of democracy and Christianity. "Here is little of man; therefore women try to make themselves manly. For only he who is enough of a man will save the woman in woman." Ibsen, "that typical old maid," created the "emancipated woman." "Woman was created out of man's rib?-'wonderful is the poverty of my ribs!' says man." Woman has lost power and prestige by her "emancipation"; where have women now the position they enjoyed under the Bourbons? Equality between man and woman is impossible, because war between them is eternal; there is here no peace without victory-peace comes only when one or the other is acknowledged master. It is dangerous to try equality with a woman; she will not be content with that; she will be rather content with subordination if the man is a Above all, her perfection and happiness lie in mother

man.

1 W. P., i, 382-4; ii, 206; Z., 141.

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