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"You know," continued Argensola, "that in quarrelling with Wagner about the excess of Germanism in his art, Nietzsche proclaimed the necessity of mediterraneanizing music. His ideal was a culture for all Europe, but with a Latin base." Julius von Hartrott replied most disdainfully to this, repeating the Spaniard's very words. Men who thought much said many things.
Above the caryatidae were marble busts of men whom that age esteemed great moral emancipators and pioneers; for the most part their names were strange to Graham, though he recognised Grant Allen, Le Gallienne, Nietzsche, Shelley and Goodwin.
In fact, the most successful of these conquerors, if success is measured by the amount of territory overrun and subdued, were not the 'great blond beasts' of Nietzsche, but yellow monsters with black hair, the Huns and Tartars. The causes of Tartar ascendancy had not the remotest connection with any moral or intellectual qualities which we can be expected to admire.
Whenever my view strikes them as being at all outside the range of, say, an ordinary suburban churchwarden, they conclude that I am echoing Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Strindberg, Tolstoy, or some other heresiarch in northern or eastern Europe. I confess there is something flattering in this simple faith in my accomplishment as a linguist and my erudition as a philosopher.
As the philosopher of the New Germany, as the chief expositor of the doctrine of force, the inventor of the super-man and of the idea of the beyond-good, Nietzsche seems to stand convicted of furnishing precisely the concepts that have become the German's gospel of war; and since the German is prone to be guided by abstractions, the evidence, even though circumstantial, seems to many to be convincing.
Nietzsche is a formidable foe of Christianity, but he is a magnanimous foe, who certainly brings us nearer to a comprehension of the inmost meaning of the very doctrines he attacks. And it is quite possible that the Christian champion of the future may incorporate Nietzsche in his apologetics, even as St. Thomas Aquinas incorporated Aristotle, even as Pascal incorporated Montaigne.
Those shelves are ranked with the most furious combustibles in the world the brains of men. I can spend a rainy afternoon reading, and my mind works itself up to such a passion and anxiety over mortal problems as almost unmans me. It is terribly nerve-racking. Surround a man with Carlyle, Emerson, Thoreau, Chesterton, Shaw, Nietzsche, and George Ade would you wonder at his getting excited?
He wrote it to inflame Germany; its effect was to inflame England.... The list might be lengthened almost ad infinitum. When a man writes a book he fires a machine gun into a wood. The game he brings down often astonishes him, and sometimes horrifies him. Consider the case of Ibsen.... After my book on Nietzsche I was actually invited to lecture at Princeton.
How much cleverer are the apes who won't talk, because, if they did, they would be forced to abandon their lovely free life, put on ugly garments, and work for a living. These animals, for which we have such contempt, are freer than men; they are the Supermen of Nietzsche Nietzsche whose brain mirrored both a Prometheus and a Napoleon." Quell listened to this speech with indifference.
These passions are manly and natural, and what is natural cannot be wrong. There is in Sanin's doctrine something of Nietzsche and more of Rousseau. Sanin himself is not at all a contemptible character. He is not argumentative except when dragged into an argument; he does not attempt to convert others to his views. He has the inner light which we more often associate with Christian faith.
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