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The mystic, however far removed he may be from Nietzsche's ideal of the Superman, nevertheless represents superhumanity in the domain of consciousness. By means of quotations, taken almost at random from the rich literature of mysticism, the author will attempt to show that the consciousness of the mystic involves the awareness of dimensionally higher worlds.
He is shamefast and bashful with those who surround him and wishes not to be discovered by them, just as one instinctively avoids all lavish display of comfort or wealth in the presence of a poor friend. This seems to me to give an account of the great struggle which must have taken place in Nietzsche's soul before he finally resolved to make known the more esoteric portions of his teaching.
I think of Wagner's "Parsifal," of Nietzsche's "Zara-thrusta," of the Kaiser Wilhelm's amazing "Weltauf-fassung," and it seems to me that such things could not be in any nation where one single man knew how to laugh.
P. T. Barnum's stable-name was Taylor, his middle name; Charles Lamb's was Guy; Nietzsche's was Fritz; Whistler's was Jimmie; the late King Edward's was Bertie; Grover Cleveland's was Steve; J. Pierpont Morgan's was Jack; Dr. Wilson's is Tom. Some given names are surrounded by a whole flotilla of stable-names.
Dostojevsky's "Brothers Caramazov" was published nearly at the same time as Nietzsche's "Zarathustra" with its message of the Superman. Again two antipodes! You will in vain try to find such contrasts in the world as the Russian and Germano-Carlylean literature.
Nietzsche's wisdom becomes pregnant upon lonely mountains; he claims that whosoever seeks to enter into this wisdom "must be accustomed to live on mountain-tops and see beneath him the wretched ephemeral gossip of politics and national egoism." But the mountain-tops make sport of the certainties of philosophers as well as of those of fools.
He was compared by obsequious flatterers to the Black Prince, to Alcibiades, to the young Caesar. To many he seemed Nietzsche's Overman revealed. He was big and blond and virile, and splendidly non-moral. The first great feat that startled Europe, and almost brought about a new Trojan war, was his abduction of the Princess Helena of Norway and his blank refusal to marry her.
His philosophy of life was exalted an exalted socialism. He was, to employ Nietzsche's pithy phrase, a "Yes-Sayer"; he said "Yes" to the universe. A man of vigorous affirmations, he worshipped nature, not for its pictorial aspects, but for the god which is the leaf and rock and animal, for the god that beats in our pulses and shines in the clear sunlight.
Consider the names of the chief exponents of the aggressive German idea, and you will find that not one is German. The first begetter of Nietzsche's "blond beast," and of all that great flood of rubbish about a strange superior race with whitish hair and blue eyes, that has so fatally rotted the German imagination, was a Frenchman named Gobineau.
His very cocksureness is filched from Darwin's morality of strength based on the survival of the fittest. And what did Bergson do with it? Touched it up with a bit of James' pragmatism, rosied it over with the eternal hope in man's breast that he will live again, and made it all a-shine with Nietzsche's 'nothing succeeds like excess " "Wilde's, you mean," corrected Ernestine.
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