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Nietzsche started a nonsensical idea that men had once sought as good what we now call evil; if it were so, we could not talk of surpassing or even falling short of them. How can you overtake Jones if you walk in the other direction? You cannot discuss whether one people has succeeded more in being miserable than another succeeded in being happy.
They appear in the biography by his sister, and although their wisdom is unquestionable, the nature of the reforms he suggests render it impossible for them to become popular just now. Pars. 26, 27. Par. 28. Nietzsche was not an iconoclast from predilection. No bitterness or empty hate dictated his vituperations against existing values and against the dogmas of his parents and forefathers.
A friend of ours some American had lately published a Socratic dialogue entitled "The Prison"; it formed a fruitful theme of conversation. Nietzsche was also then to the fore, and it pleases me to recollect that even in those days I detected his blind spot; his horror of those English materialists and biologists.
"I only quoted it to show you that I have read Nietzsche, and recollect his many truths." "You certainly do seem to have a gay house-party at Glencardine," he remarked, changing the subject. "I noticed Jimmy Flockart there as usual." "Yes. He's one of mother's greatest friends. She makes good use of him in every way. Up in town they are inseparable, it seems.
Tolstoi, Turgeniev, Sienkiewicz, Ibsen, Maeterlinck, Fogazzaro, Jokai, Haeckel, Nietzsche I give the names at random as they come of any one of these there is immeasurably more of a "cult" in the United States than in England a far larger proportion of the population makes some effort to master what is worth mastering in each.
Nietzsche is right; in certain matters the Germans are the Chinese of Europe; they refuse to see the light of modern discoveries in art. Here is a violent instance: On the top floor of the National Gallery, Berlin, there is a room with fourteen masterpieces on its walls.
Nietzsche is one of the supreme masters of language, in a literature which counts very few masters of language, and the beauty of his style is transparent even in the disguise of a foreign translation.
Was it Nietzsche, or Haeckel, or Maeterlinck, or all of them together, who declared that Nature's constant aim is to perpetuate and surpass herself? The sponge slipping from vegetable to animal kingdom; the animal grading up to man; man stretching his neck to become what? is it spirit, the being of a future world?
It must certainly be disagreeable to be treated like this, especially when one has a fairly good opinion of one's self; but why do you take it so very, very seriously? Did Nietzsche, perchance, spare the Germans? And aren't you accustomed to criticism on the part of German philosophers?
These also are labels. The 'individualist' is a member of a mob as fully as any other man: and the mob of individualists is the most unpleasing, because it has the least character. Nietzsche was a mob-man, just as Bergson is an intellectualist. We cannot escape the label, but let it be one which carries no distinction, and arouses no self-consciousness.
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