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“Contemporary German philosophy is a ‘war philosophy.’ In France we may find isolated thinkers, like Joseph de Maistre, who are the apostles of war, who maintain that war is a Divine and providential institution, one of the eternal verities. In Germany the paradoxes of de Maistre are the commonplaces of historians and moralists. To an Englishman war is a dwindling force, an anachronism.
And no doubt the world of literary moralists will always be divided upon the question one mainly of national temperament whether mere animal spirits or serious satiric purpose is the best justification for offences against cleanliness.
It was not one .of those methodistical moralists who in every age think themselves called to declaim against the wickedness of the time, but it was Machiavelli, who, in one of his best-considered works, said openly: 'We Italians are irreligious and corrupt above others. Another man would perhaps have said, 'We are individually highly developed; we have outgrown the limits of morality and religion which were natural to us in our undeveloped state, and we despise outward law, because our rulers are illegitimate, and their judges and officers wicked men. Machiavelli adds, 'because the Church and her representatives set us the worst example.
Instead of tabooing our impulses, we must redirect them. Instead of trying to crush badness we must turn the power behind it to good account. The assumption is that every lust is capable of some civilized expression. We say, in effect, that evil is a way by which desire expresses itself. The older moralists, the taboo philosophers believed that the desires themselves were inherently evil.
God drove them out of Paradise punishment enough. They revenge themselves with a monotonous enthusiasm. Ah, these fellatian moralists! It is folly to take their hypocrisies to heart. The plot is too delicious for tears. These two-fisted citizens, these purity braggarts masturbating with one finger unemployed and pointing scornfully at their neighbors! "Charming street.
Perhaps the most penetrating of all his sentences is that in which he says: "If you possess any passion which you feel to be noble and generous, be sure you foster it." This was diametrically opposed to all the teaching of the seventeenth-century moralists who had preceded him, and also had taught us that we should mistrust our passions and disdain our enthusiasms.
I would like to establish the intimate connection which exists between Montaigne and Nietzsche, between the greatest of French moralists and the greatest of Germans. A vast literature has grown up in recent years round the personality and works of Nietzsche, which would already fill a moderately sized library.
He had a deep inward sense that everything was as it should be, human nature included. The little accidents of humanity, known collectively to moralists as sin, looked very venial to his growing sense of universal brotherhood and benevolence. "It will all come right," the Deacon said to himself, "I feel a joyful conviction that everything is for the best.
He has grouped together a number of precepts from the writings of some of the great heathen moralists, such as Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, and then has urged the question how far we who profess to be the disciples of a loftier faith are true even to these ancient heathen ideals. Perhaps, however, this is not a method of self-examination which is open to us all.
Were Green's book a lost work, only preserved to the memories of men by such citations as the above, the author would certainly be relegated to a class of moralists with which he had, in fact, little sympathy.
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