MAY, Keith. Nietzsche and Modern Literature - Themes in Yeats, Rilke, Mann and Lawrence

NIETZSCHE AND MODERN LITERATURE
By the same author

ALDOUS HUXLEY
OUT OF THE MAELSTROM: Psychology and the Novel in the
Twentieth Century
CHARACTERS OF WOMEN IN NARRATIVE LITERATURE
IBSEN AND SHAW
Nietzsche and
Modern Literature
Themes in Yeats, Rilke, Mann and
Lawrence
Keith M. May
M
MACMILLAN
PRESS
©Keith May 1988
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1988
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First published 1988
Published by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
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and London
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

May, Keith M.
Nietzsche and modern literature: themes
in Yeats, Rilke, Mann and Lawrence.
I. Nietzsche, Friedrich - Influence
2. European literature - 20th century-
History and criticism 3. Philosophy in
literature
I. Title
809'.04 PN771
ISBN 978-1-349-19118-5 ISBN 978-1-349-19116-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-19116-1
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
1 Perspectives of Nietzsche 1
2 Yeats and Aristocracy 16
3 Rilke's Angels and the Ubermensch 45
4 Mann: Beyond Good and Evil 79
5 Lawrence: How One Becomes What One Is 111
6 God and Nietzsche's Madman 144
Notes and References 159
Bibliography 168
Index 173
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgement is gratefully made to the following: Random
House Inc. and Marianne Fallon, Permissions Editor, for per-
mission to quote from The Will to Power by Friedrich Nietzsche,
translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, copyright
©1967 by Walter Kaufmann; Laurence Pollinger Limited and the
estate of Mrs Frieda Lawrence Ravagli for permission to quote from
D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and Movements in European
History; Cambridge University Press for permission to quote from
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, General Editor James T. Boulton;
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. for permission to quote from D. H. Law-
rence's The Plumed Serpent and from the following works of Thomas
Mann: Death in Venice, Doctor Faustus, Joseph and His Brothers, The
Beloved Returns, The Magic Mountain and Tonia Kroger, all translated
by H. T. Lowe-Porter, and Confessions of Felix Krull Confidence Man,
translated by Denver Lindley; Secker & Warburg Limited for
permission to quote from the translations by H. T. Lowe-Porter of
Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers, Tonia Kroger, Death in
Venice, The Magic Mountain, Lotte in Weimar and Doctor Faustus,
and from the translation by Denver Lindley of Thomas Mann's
Confessions of Felix Krull Confidence Man; Chatto & Windus: The
Hogarth Press for permission to quote extracts from Duino Elegies
by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated with introduction and commen-
tary by J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender. The lines from Duino
Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by J. B. Leishman and
Stephen Spender, are reprinted with the permission of W. W.
Norton & Company Inc., copyright 1939 by W. W. Norton &
Company Inc., copyright renewed 1967 by Stephen Spender and
J. B. Leishman.
Grateful acknowledgement is also made to: Viking Penguin Inc.
for permission to quote from Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence,
copyright 1913 by Thomas Seltzer Inc. All rights reserved. Re-
printed by permission of Viking Penguin Inc. From The Rainbow by
D. H. Lawrence, copyright 1915 by D. H. Lawrence. Copyright
renewed 1943 by Frieda Lawrence. Reprinted by permission of
Viking Penguin Inc. From Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence,
copyright 1920, 1922 by D. H. Lawrence, renewed 1948, 1950 by
Frieda Lawrence. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin Inc.
vi
Acknowledgements vii
From Aaron's Rod by D. H. Lawrence, copyright 1922 by Thomas

Seltzer Inc. Copyright renewed 1950 by Frieda Lawrence. Re-
printed by permission of Viking Penguin Inc. From Kangaroo by
D. H. Lawrence, copyright 1923 by Thomas Seltzer Inc. Copyright
renewed 1951 by Frieda Lawrence. Reprinted by permission of
Viking Penguin Inc. To A. P. Watt on behalf of Michael B. Yeats
and Macmillan, London, Limited for permission to quote from
three works of W. B. Yeats: The Rose Tree', 'Two Songs from a
Play' and 'Mohini Chatterjee'.
A selection from The Rose Tree' is reprinted with the permission
of Macmillan Publishing Company from Collected Poems by W. B.
Yeats, copyright 1924 by Macmillan Publishing Company, re-
newed 1952 by Bertha Georgie Yeats. A selection from 'Two Songs
from a Play' is reprinted with the permission of Macmillan
Publishing Company from Collected Poems by W. B. Yeats, copy-
right 1928 by Macmillan Publishing Company, renewed 1956 by
Bertha Georgie Yeats. A selection from 'Mohini Chatterjee' is
reprinted with the permission of Macmillan Publishing Company
from Collected Poems by W. B. Yeats, copyright 1933 by Macmillan
Publishing Company, renewed 1961 by Bertha Georgie Yeats.
Gratitude is also expressed for the use of the following works:
Nancy Cardozo, Maud Gonne: Lucky Eyes and a High Heart (Golla nez,
1979); Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, translated by Hugh
Tomlinson (Athlone, 1983); Richard Ellman, The Identity of Yeats
(Faber & Faber, 1964, and Macmillan, 1954); Richard Ellman, Yeats:
The Man and the Masks (Oxford University Press, 1979, Macmillan,
1948, and Faber & Faber, 1961); Romano Guardini, Rilke's Duino
Elegies, translated by K. G. Knight (Darwin Finlayson, 1961);
Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche VOl.I The Will to Power as Art and
Vol.1I The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, both volumes translated
by David Farrell Krell (Harper & Row); T. R. Henn, The Lonely
Tower (Methuen, 1965); Joseph Hone, W. B. Yeats 1865-1939
(Penguin, 1971 and Macmillan, 1943); A. Norman Jeffares, A New
Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats (Macmillan, 1984); Walter
Kaufmann, From Shakespeare to Existentialism: An Original Study
(Princeton University Press, 1980); Lawrence in Love: Letters to Louie
Burrows, edited and introduced by James T. Boulton (University of
Nottingham, 1968); Thomas Mann's Essays of Three Decades and Past
Masters and Other Papers, each translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter;
Thomas Mann Diaries 1918-1939, selection and foreword by Herman
Kesten, translated by Richard and Clara Winston (Andre Deutsch,
viii Acknowledgements
1983); Last Essays, translated by Richard and Clara Winston and

Tania and James Stem (Seeker & Warburg, 1959); The Letters of
Thomas Mann 1889-1955, selected and translated by Richard and
Clara Winston (Penguin, 1975); Thomas Mann: A Collection of Critical
Essays (Prentice-Hall, 1964); Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good
(Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970); George Orwell, Collected Essays
(Seeker & Warburg, 1961); Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebook of Malte
Laurids Brigge, introduction by Stephen Spender (Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1984); Selected Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke 1902-
1926, translated by R. F. C. Hull (Macmillan, 1946); Arthur
Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, translation by
E. F. J. Payne (Dover Publications, 1966, and The Falcon's Wing
Press, 1958); Works of Spinoza, translated by R. H. M. Elwes (New
York, Dover Publications, 1951); Joan Stambaugh, Nietzsche's
Thought of Eternal Return Oohns Hopkins University Press, 1972);
the following works of W. B. Yeats: Autobiographies (Macmillan,
1955), Collected Poems (Macmillan, 1969), Essays and Introductions
Macmillan, New York, 1961), Explorations (Macmillan, New York,
1962), Letters of w. B. Yeats (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954), Memoirs
(Macmillan, 1972), Pages from a Diary Written in Nineteen Hundred
and Thirty (Dublin, 1944), The Variorum Edition of the Complete Plays
of w. B. Yeats (Macmillan, 1966), A Vision (Macmillan, 1962).
The author wishes to express special appreciation for the
opportunity to make use of the following editions of Nietzsche's
works: Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future,
translated with commentary by Walter Kaufmann (Vintage Books,
Random House, 1966); The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner,
Random House, 1967); Daybreak: Thoughts On the Prejudices of
Morality, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, introduction by Michael
Tanner (Cambridge University Press, 1982); The Gay Science,
Random House, 1974); On The Genealogy of Morals, translated by
Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, and Ecce Homo, translated
with commentary by Walter Kaufmann (Vintage Books, Random
House, 1967); A Nietzsche Reader, selected and translated by R. J.
Hollingdale (Penguin, 1979); Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the
Greeks, translated with introduction by Marianne Cowan (A
Gateway Edition, Regnery Gateway, 1962); Selected Letters of
Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by A. N. Ludovici, edited and intro-
duced by O. Levy (Soho Book Company, 1985); Thus Spoke
Acknowledgements ix
Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One, translated with

introduction by R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin, 1980); Twilight of the
Idols and The Anti-Christ, translated with introduction and com-
mentary by R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin, 1978); Unpublished Letters,
translated and edited by Karl F. Leidecker (Peter Owen, 1960,
Philosophical Library USA, 1959); Untimely Meditations, translated
by R. J. Hollingdale, introduction by J. P. Stern (Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1983).
1
Perspectives of Nietzsche
Nietzsche is the philosopher friendliest to art even though he
pierces artists' masks. He goes behind appearances to motives, yet
shows that appearances reflect motives. For example, Nietzsche
points out that Euripides has the appearance of one fascinated by
actual behaviour and is the wonderful observer among the earliest
dramatists. But why was Euripides so fascinated? As a youth he sat
among the spectators of Aeschylus and Sophocles uneasily aware
that he, and perhaps he alone, could not understand the older
authors. The performances bore little resemblance to Athenian
reality and failed to represent the people who attended them. Why
couldn't everyone else see this blatant falsification? So Euripides
proceeded to write his tragedies in which the behaviour of the
characters was familiar and, above all, intelligible. He introduced
the everyday social man into the drama and, since he evidently
despised the mass of spectators, wrote for two appreciative
observers: himself as thinker rather than as poet, and the 'theor-
etical man', Socrates. In this fashion he paved the way for the New
Comedy and strangled tragedy shortly after its birth. But that was
his intention. We know Euripides as an eminent writer of
tragedies, though in fact the spirit of tragedy was his prey. All
Europe has been influenced by him to the present day, for we still
believe that the phenomenal world is basic, whereas, so Nietzsche
says, the ground of being is Dionysian, unindividualised and
impenetrable.
Thus Nietzsche anatomises Euripides (in The Birth of Tragedy,
sections 11-13) but he does not do so out of distaste. He probes the
dramatist as he probes everything else; he goes behind the mask of
psychological realism because he is himself the sharpest of all
psychologists. But for Nietzsche to do this he has to know the
mask in the way of an absorbed reader. It is necessary to empathise
with Euripides. So Nietzsche successfully uses art as material for
philosophy, because he greets it first as art.
The friendliness towards art, therefore, has nothing to do with
veneration, but is connected with a belief that artists' productions
1
2 Nietzsche and Modern Literature
are no less trustworthy as guides for the conduct of our lives (and
sometimes healthier) than the arguments of philosophy, the
demonstrations of science and the certainties of revelation. Each of
these fields has its characteristic weaknesses, and one weakness of
the artist is that he is easily tempted to sacrifice an insight for the
sake of an effect or out of laziness. ('On Gethsemane - The most
painful thing a thinker can say to artists is: "Could ye not watch
with me one hour?'''!) Just the same, artists at their most reliable
deal with the actual world and do not prefer invisible spheres.
This is the virtue that Plato held to be a vice. It was harmful that
poets were purely concerned with phenomena, the shadows cast
by the fire on the wall of the cave. Plato's philosopher-rulers,
fundamentally a sort of anti-poets, would be distinguished by their
ability to see and delight in the essences of things. But to Nietzsche
there are no essences, no Forms, no unseen intelligible principles.
Therefore the artist's proper role is to assist in the shaping of this
world, and though we might often remember that he is a liar, we
should also remember that he does not normally pretend to tell the
truth. Shakespeare, for example, has often enough been regarded
as a truth-teller, though he, in the guise of Prospero, seems to have
thought of himself as an enchanter. However, poets desert their
phenomenalistic function from time to time, indeed in their
'highest flights' become 'glorifiers of humanity'S religious and
philosophical errors', as happened for instance when Dante wrote
the Divina Commedia. 2
But if artists are careless of the truth, how can we allow them,
indeed encourage them, to affect our views of the world - as a rule
by means of their elaborations upon established doctrines? Part of
the answer is that we cannot 'correct' them without becoming
artists ourselves or stop them without becoming tyrants. Every
artist is an egoist almost by definition and in any event would not
be able to do his work if he tried to see things' objectively'. I mean
that the artist, especially the greatly talented artist, promotes his
own personal view of the world, his' colouring', at all costs. If he is
not original as a thinker, he is not a mish-mash of general opinions
either. His vision must be a perspective. To this kind of argument
Nietzsche's supportive response is to say that what we call the
mind is and must ever be composed of perspectives, so that
'objectivity' refers just to a type of perspective whose distortions
are at present hidden. Some perspectives should be seen as
preferable to others, but not because they are nearer to transcen-
Perspectives of Nietzsche 3
dent truth. For example, the laws of physics offer a better

perspective for modern people than primitive myth, though not on
the grounds that they are literally objective.
To put the matter another way, a human subject cannot but see
and think as a subject. He may not climb out of the prison of
himself, or 'cleanse', as Blake puts it, 'the doors of perception'. 3 It
follows that a painting, a product of human perception, never
objectively represents the simplest thing. Neither does a photo-
graph, the product of a mechanical process, since the thing-in-itself
which the photograph apparently shows does not exist. 'Or is it to
be supposed,' Nietzsche asks, 'that at that moment the things as it
were engrave, counterfeit, photograph themselves by their own
action on a purely passive medium?,4
Nietzsche means that even an unemotional and seemingly
unslanted view of anything is still only a view. This is much clearer
in the case of a sentient being, for it is plain that an objective view
of a creature must somehow proceed from the subject~vity of an
observer yet, impossibly, be made up of the subjectivity of the
creature. In regard to things, it is tempting to say with Kant that
they exist in themselves but are unknowable: however, what
Nietzsche actually says is that the thing-in-itself is nonsense. There
are only appearances and relationships.
That things possess a constitution in themselves, quite apart

from interpretation and subjectivity, is a quite idle hypothesis: it
presupposes that interpretations and subjectivity are not essen-
tial, that a thing freed from all relationships would still be a
thing. 5
It is on account of this attitude, among others, that Nietzsche

might be regarded as the poet's philosopher. He is not the
philosopher's philosopher, though he could reasonably be seen as
the philosopher of post-Einstein science. In effect he says to artists:
'Make your interpretations gladly and without obeisance to any
pattern of meaning or morality that contradicts them.' In fact
poets, or more broadly creative writers, have never much cared if
they lived in a somewhat regulated society, provided they could
reinterpret the rules. Perhaps even now writers prefer supposedly
strict legislative or cultural rules that may in practice be broken. But
for writers to be told by Nietzsche that there can be no creditable
authority over them is perhaps unnerving. And it is certainly
helpful for the writer to have some body of custom or belief to tilt
against.
The poets and novelists discussed in this book seem to me the
most considerable of those who have faced their world somewhat
'Nietzscheanly'. It goes without saying that they did not do so
obsequiously: rather, three of them, Yeats, Rilke and Mann, saw
what Nietzsche was driving at and accommodated his attitudes to
their own. As for Lawrence, he was scarcely influenced by
Nietzsche, but independently arrived at his own similar views on,
especially, will to power.
The usual practice of critics is, understandably, to expound one
or other of these four modernist writers with little or no reference
to Nietzsche. But substantial aspects of their work grow much
clearer when one does refer to the philosopher. Moreover, to
mention some theme of Nietzsche in passing or in a footnote is
likely to be misleading, since in that way neither the original
thought nor its metamorphosis into a literary mode will be fully
understood.
For these ideas are harder to grasp than they appear, and even
more radical. When a Nietzschean insight dons the mantle of an
image in Yeats or a setting in Mann it is thought to be more
manageable, since it is now merely a piece of literature and need
not be taken to heart. When a new idea masquerades as 'pure art' it
may be officially ignored, even though it subterraneously eats
away at old certainties. Generally speaking, Western literary works
invite no positive commitment from anyone and simply contrib-
ute to a hopeless jumble of opinions; all the same, some few ideas
(and Nietzsche's are notable in this respect) gather force decade by
decade. Nietzsche himself remarks that new ideas gain currency by
being assimilated to familiar attitudes: thus the Socratic plays of
Euripides were not distinguished accurately enough from the plays
of his predecessors. They were distinguished of course (and there
was even a rumour that Socrates was their author) but no one
seems to have grasped their essentially anti-Aeschylean and anti-
Sophoclean import. 6
This is the reason why the plan in this book is to cross academic
boundaries and consider literature and philosophy side by side; for
instance, to contemplate beyond-good-and-evil in Nietzsche and
Mann. It is important, first of all, to appreciate the sheer novelty of
certain attitudes. Second, these attitudes ought not to be confined
to the sphere of learning, let alone to one branch of learning rather
than another. At the outset, however, it is necessary to discuss a

few pervasive features of Nietzsche, one of which we have already
broached, namely his opinion of the status of 'truth'.
So far, then, we have noticed that Nietzsche is a sort of 'non-
cognitivist' thinker who does not believe that truth transcends our
thought-processes or that it can be objectively known. This
amounts to saying, if we wish to put it so, that there is 'no truth'.
Indeed, Nietzsche declares: 'There exists neither "spirit", nor
reason, nor thinking, nor consciousness, nor soul, nor will, nor
truth: all are fictions that are of no use.'7
But such an unqualified rejection of metaphysical assumptions
does not mean a rejection of values. Oddly enough it does not
mean a rejection of 'truth' in some sense, for Nietzsche often
speaks of truth as if it were preferable to falsehood. Indeed, it is
plain that the assertion 'There is no truth' is itself intended to be a
truth. What Nietzsche has in mind is that human beings interpret
everything as a matter of course: to perceive or to think about
something is to interpret it. Nevertheless some interpretations are
better than others because they exclude what we ought honestly to
recognise as falsifications. Thus no one who frankly contemplates
his own activities will be able to detect his spirit, reason, thinking,
consciousness, soul or will. To say one 'thinks' is to simplify and
therefore to falsify.
Fortunately (for this is a book-length topic of much complexity)
John T. Wilcox's Truth and Value in Nietzsche deals exhaustively
with the question of how Nietzsche both seeks truth and denies it. 8
Wilcox reaches the following conclusions: first, according to
Nietzsche there are truths about truth itself (e.g. that it is fallible
and provisional); second, there are certain large-scale truths (e.g.
that man is purely a species of animal); and third, there are
psychological truths (e.g. about the development of Christianity or
the workings of pity).9 As we have seen, these truths are still
interpretations, but they are better interpretations than the obvious
lies which they replace: for instance, that man is made in God's
image or that the natural feeling of pity is also a virtue. If we now
proceed to ask why some interpretations are better than others,
Nietzsche's answer is that they affirm life rather than deny it. Here
it must be understood that Nietzsche is not urging man to behave
after the manner of a natural force or a lower animal. Man has a
unique capacity for 'sublimating' his lower into higher impulses:
that is the natural way for our species. We are not the talking
animals so much as the sublimating animals, for speech is but a

mode of sublimation. 10 If we look at cultural developments in this
light we have the basis for a criterion of all human interpretations:
false interpretations disown and denigrate their own natural
sources. Note that it is never a matter of asking which of two
interpretations promotes vigour the more, since there is a vigour of
decadence too. No, we must look for signs that the artist or
philosopher is a life-affirmer rather than a judge.
Nietzsche prefers to speak of 'strength' rather than 'vigour'.
Here are some clear and consistent formulations of this quality.
The vigour of a mind, its freedom through strength and superior

strength, is proved by scepticism. 11
Freedom from any kind of conviction is part of the strength of his

[the great man's] will ... The need for faith, for anything
unconditional in YES and NO is a proof of weakness. 12
Everywhere else that the spirit is strong, mighty, and at work

without counterfeit today, it does without ideals of any kind -
the popular expression for this abstinence is 'atheism' - except for
its will to truth. But this will, this remnant of an ideal, is, if you will
believe me, this ideal itself in its strictest, most spiritual
formulation, esoteric through and through, with all external
additions abolished, and thus not so much its remnant as its
kernel. Unconditional honest atheism ... is the awe-inspiring
catastrophe of two thousand years of training in truthfulness that
finally forbids itself the lie involved in belief in God. 13
These remarks concern strength at present, not necessarily in

earlier periods, and for modern people strength is indicated by
atheism. The atheism must be complete and not of the partial or
parodic variety that still believes in the moral law or entertains
ideals of any kind. For an ideal is a token of God, while strength is
the denial of everything that can be denied - except the will to
truth. Now this remnant or kernel of an ideal (a remnant when we
look to the past, a kernel when we look to the future) is the
minimum from which new and sustainable values might grow.
The matchless irony is that the will to truth is a result of the
philosophy and faith (Socratism and Christianity) that have
praised truth for over two thousand years. And now the strong in
spirit see and reject the lies involved in these self-same teachings,
and hence the teachings themselves.
Can we speak of our four authors as 'atheists' in accordance with
this use of the word? Yeats was scarcely a sceptic, since in some
curious fashion he believed in legendary Gaelic beings, or else he
accepted them because they helped to express his system of
values. He was certainly determined to preserve or reintroduce a
sense of immaterial dimensions. But that is not what Nietzsche
means by 'conviction' and 'faith'; indeed it is not what anyone
normally means by those terms. So we must concede that Yeats at
least was not what Nietzsche means by a 'great man'. For all that,
Yeats's magical and pagan beliefs were precisely a denial of the one
ideal God of Plato and Christianity.
Then, the search undertaken by some of Lawrence's characters is
for non-idealistic meaning. Lawrence's 'new way to God' demands a
new God who must be, as Lawrence repeatedly insists, a God of
flesh and spirit, or of the spirit as flesh. Rilke is perhaps readily
seen as an anti-idealist, since the Duino Elegies explicitly bring man
down to earth and indeed trace idealism to its source in fear of
death. Thomas Mann was sceptical about idealists, finding them
comic or mischievous, and wanted to enhance our race by scientific
rather than artlessly benevolent means. For instance, he attached
great importance to experimental psychology. The chief point is
that each of these 'Nietzschean' writers rejects God as truth and as
the author of timeless morality. Therefore all four require what
Nietzsche famously calls a 'revaluation of all values'.
Nietzsche says that atheism is the popular term for doing
without ideals, meaning ideals of behaviour or character. Yeats
scarcely concerns himself with moral questions in the familiar
sense and indeed regards human beings in either a supra-moral or
a fabulous light. He is tragic rather than moralistic. Rilke is
avowedly anti-moral, believing that man should, on the contrary,
strive for a feeling of kinship between himself and the rest of
nature. He sees moralism as one form of consolation for pain, and
thinks that suffering is the close relation of joy rather than its
opposite. It is generally understood that Mann was preoccupied
with merging so-called opposites: health and disease, art and
philistinism and, perhaps above all, what we think of as goodness
and wickedness. The God of the Joseph novels combines good and
bad. Lawrence, for his part, recommended from first to last a God
of infinite variety who should beckon each individual to a peculiar
destiny. One of Lawrence's tasks was to distinguish such self-

realisations from the coarse self-indulgence with which they were,
and are, confused.
As we shall see, it is relevant to our four authors that Nietzsche
denies the existence of opposites in the sphere of psychology. At
the beginning of Human All-Too-Human he remarks that our race
has made exactly the wrong assumption about this matter. We
have implicitly argued as follows:
... how can anything spring from its opposite? for instance, rea-
son out of unreason, the sentient out of the dead, logic out of
unlogic, disinterested contemplation out of covetous willing, life
for others out of egoism, truth out of error. 14
However, qualities have emerged and still emerge in just that

fashion: for example, life for others and egoism are linked as a
flower is linked to its roots. In the story of evolution the sentient
has come out of the dead, and indeed life and death are related not
as opposites but as alternating stages. (That is one of Rilke's
themes.) Nietzsche contends that 'there are no opposites except in
the usual exaggeration of the popular or metaphysical point of
view' . 15 Elsewhere he says that 'between good and evil actions
there is no difference of species, but at most of degree. Good
actions are sublimated evil ones; evil actions are vulgarised and
stupefied good ones.,16 Two actual deeds are never opposites,
though it is sometimes hard for us not to see them as such.
Nietzsche's overwhelming concern was always with values, or
spiritual distinctions. He did not usually speak of opposites and we
should be on guard against seeing radical opposition where there
is only change and development. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche
discusses what Apollo and Dionysus meant to the Greeks. Those
gods were regularly in conflict, yet at their most fruitful their strife
was experienced by the spectators of tragedies as divine harmony.
Apollo refers to man's power to make images, as in dreams and
visual art, while Dionysus refers to non-imagistic self-expression,
as in music. The two gods, or sets of psychological capacities, came
to grips with each other in tragedy, Apollo barely mastering the
formless Dionysian energies. Now our post-Freudian perceptions
inform us that Apollo was never strictly the opposite of Dionysus
but a 'higher' development of Dionysus, 'turning back', as it were,
and mastering his own more rudimentary forces. Nietzsche
himself refers to the Apollonian and Dionysian as antithetical

concepts, suggesting, I suppose, that they are antithetical only as
concepts, never in complex experience.
A strict antithesis is a purely linguistic and logical opposition.
'Big' is the opposite of 'little', though really there are only degrees
of size. In theological history and in casual modern thought good is
not only the opposite of evil but has no need of evil to complete
and define itself. Nietzsche's argument amounts to saying, to the
contrary, that Jekyll would not be Jekyll without the concealed
Hyde qualities. All the qualities of this character shade into one
another so that neither he nor anyone else is truly a 'dual
personality'. Likewise Cordelia and Goneril are sisters in kind as
well as by birth. This does not mean that Nietzsche would have us
esteem the sisters equally (which would be nonsense and an
ingenuous travesty of what Nietzsche intends) but that we should
observe each of them moment by moment as neither angel nor
devil but as a muddled, dynamic cluster of deeds. The two women
should not be understood schematically in terms of absolute moral
antagonism.
Similarly, the celebrated categories of master morality and slave
morality are seldom in practice mutually exclusive. When
Nietzsche begins to expound these moralities in Beyond Good and
Evil he briefly digresses in the following words:
I add immediately that in all the higher and more mixed cultures
there also appear attempts at mediation between these two
moralities, and yet more often the interpenetration and mutual
misunderstanding of both, and at times they occur directly
alongside each other - even in the same human being, within a
single soul. 17
Nietzsche's own categories of master and slave morality are

theoretical and therefore form an antithesis rarely found in life.
Indeed, as Nietzsche shows in On the Genealogy of Morals, slave
morality arose from ressentiment against the masters. It was con-
ceived as an antithesis, but the slave, or rather the priest who set
himself up as the slave's spokesman and guide, so created an
artificial antithesis as a focus for his aspirations. The slave now felt
himself to be good simply because he was not one of the 'bad'
masters. In this way he became the reverse of a master. Nietzsche's
discussion of this decisive historical process shows that he believed
the antithesis to be contrived, a priestly fabrication disguising

psychological realities.
Perhaps even the veriest 'slave-type' who venerates 'pity, the
complaisant and obliging hand, the warm heart, patience, indus-
try, humility and friendliness,18 will once in a while behave with
the joyous and reckless independence of a master (as distinct from
the distrustful tyranny of a slave-become-master). Likewise the
most complete master will have his moments when he apprehends
only the 'morality of utility'. 19 How can an act be good, he will
sometimes ask, unless it benefits someone? In such a fashion the
mere notion of 'good' is a falsification of everyday psychology.
Either language is at fault here or we are at fault for not trying hard
enough to make our language subtler and more flexible - perhaps
for failing even to notice its coarseness. At all events, Nietzsche
remarks that 'language . .. will not get over its awkwardness, and
will continue to talk of opposites where there are only degrees and
many subtleties of gradation'. 20
It will later be shown, by implication when not explicitly, that
Yeats, Rilke, Mann and Lawrence all thought in the same way as
Nietzsche about this basic matter. The antithetical and paradoxical
pattern in Yeats's thinking is not in the least a contradiction of
Nietzsche but corresponds with the philosopher's view, much as
Nietzsche's own references to Apollo and Dionysus are not self-
contradictions. 'Blest souls are not composite', Yeats has his
scholar-hero say in 'Michael Robartes and the Dancer', suggesting
that 'ideally' there would be no ideals, because thought and
argument, out of which ideals are made, would be subsumed in
the flesh. All would be body and appearance, since materiality
should express rather than affront spirituality. But note: the spirit
should be taken into the body, not the other way round. Thus the
spirit as a separate (Platonic or Christian) realm would die and only
the flesh remain. But the flesh would then be more erotically
beautiful than ever, because more radiant with spirit. For man is
already erotic, while other animals merely copulate. Further, each
advanced stage in an individual's life is seen by Yeats as a
sublimation of elementary stages: 'I must lie down where all the
ladders start/In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.' Yeats
appreciated that his own 'masterful images' had begun in 'A
mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street'. 21
In a yet more stark and startling fashion Rilke so thoroughly
abandons antithesis that he regards death as transformation of life
rather than its negation. Obviously there is nothing Christian

about this, nothing to suggest life after death or even that 'our little
life is rounded with a sleep'. On the contrary, Rilke thinks of death
as the extinction of the individual which nevertheless gives him all
his possible richness and meaning. Life 'goes into' death, or the
visible side of life goes into the invisible (in Rilke's terminology),
and this is purely a metamorphosis. Life flows into death, death
flows into life, for all eternity. For Rilke meaning resides in the
whole (the cosmos, infinity) and when we die we reach out to the
infinite. (This seemingly mystical view is, as I hope to show,
materially unassailable.)
Mann chiefly reconciles what we call 'good' and 'evil'. The best-
known illustration of this is probably Hans Castorp's dream in
Chapter 6 of The Magic Mountain. In a Mediterranean setting a
number of handsome and tranquil people - perfect creatures in the
Arcadian sense - seem aware that nearby two hags are dismember-
ing and eating a baby. When the dream is over Hans feels that the
beauty and the horror were part and parcel of each other, for 'Man
is the lord of counter-positions'. 22 In other words, man rises above
the counter-positions which his culture has taught him to detect.
That is in fact an optimistic version of Nietzsche, for Nietzsche
would say that the Ubermensch will be capable of annihilating the
counter-positions - for himself, not for mankind at large. Just the
same, Mann renders something of Nietzsche's desideratum into a
memorable fictional image.
Lawrence, admittedly, seems to make irreconcilable distinctions
between his approved characters (an Ursula Brangwen, an Aaron
Sisson, a Kate Leslie) and his unsatisfactory or 'wicked' people (for
example, Gerald Crich, Loerke, Sir Clifford Chatterley). Neverthe-
less, the people in the wrong, through weakness or malice, are
precisely people who are not whole and in fact fail to appreciate
wholeness. Thus Lawrence's heroes and heroines are far from
immaculate, for they contain and transcend the base impulses of
the base people. Ursula, for example, has moments of pure hatred
and destructiveness. Nor do these superior figures strive for
immaculacy, which they see as an inorganic objective.
To make this topic clearer still, it might be sensible to draw two
contrasts. First, let us recall that in such morally dualistic writers as
Fielding and Dickens the paragons and villains are utterly distinct,
never for a moment merging. They are locked in spiritual combat,
each unable to imagine how his opponent feels. The second
contrast is more pertinent today. Now there are many authors who
superfically seem 'beyond good and evil' or incapable of value-
distinctions of any sensible sort. That is not in the least what
Nietzsche meant, though he predicted such 'weak nihilism'. Nor is
it what our four authors advocated. Our contemporary nihilists
have lost the God-given certainty of moral values and therefore
assume that the mere notion of value is itself lost. They do not
grasp that value is what one creates, without divine sanction or
social approval.
To Nietzsche, then, 'good' and 'evil' are names which, in the way
of all names, give unified existence to processes and self-contradic-
tory bundles of activity. These bundles are essentially, not
supererogatorily, linked to others. It is not a case of one self-
subsistent entity being linked to another, but of so-called entities
whirling from one partner to the next in a vast constitutive dance.
The dance is not, so to speak, 'optional' for each of its elements:
they do whatever they do because they are in the dance. What they
do is what we like to call 'what they are', but in truth there is no
such state of being. Nothing simply is and everything behaves.
(This, by the way, is presumably what T. S.Eliot means in his
Heraclitean phrase in 'Burnt Norton', 'And there is only the
dance'.) Consequently the terms 'good' and 'bad' will serve here to
illustrate what Nietzsche regards as the entire misguided assump-
tion of men for millenia, the assumption that by naming something
we acknowledge its independent or 'dance-free' existence.
The clearest exposition of Nietzsche's own views about ontology
is his account of Heraclitus in sections 5 to 8 of Philosophy in the
Tragic Age of the Greeks. Here Nietzsche expounds another man's
philosophy and sees his subject as surpassing other pre-Socratic
philosophers. Of the early philosophers, including Socrates him-
self, Nietzsche declares that 'All posterity has not made an
essential contribution to them since.'23 It is too early to say that
Nietzsche succeeded in making an essential contribution in his
doctrine of eternal return, but whether he did or not, eternal return
is very like Heraclitus and may in fact be Heraclitus rephrased.
Nietzsche remarks in Ecce Homo (written in 1888, twelve years after
Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks) that eternal return 'might in
the end have been taught already by Heraclitus'. 24
Heraclitus, says Nietzsche, took two bold steps: first, he grasped
that there is no other world lying behind our visible universe; and
second, he saw that nothing, no object or quality, merely is, but
continually grows, changes, withers and flows away on the ever-

rolling stream. Never does it actually exist in the usual sense of the
word.
Louder than Anaximander, Heraclitus proclaimed: 'I see nothing

other than becoming. Be not deceived. It is the fault of your
myopia, not the nature of things, if you believe you see land
somewhere in the ocean of coming-to-be and passing away. You
use names for things as though they rigidly, persistently
endured; yet even the stream into which you step a second time
is not the one you stepped into before.,25
So Nietzsche paraphrases Heraclitus. The example of a stream is

instantly convincing, though a more startling illustration would be
provided by something we regard as solid and enduring, say a
mighty mountain. Suppose one said 'That peak of Everest on
which you gaze today is not the peak you saw before'. And this is
what Heraclitus meant: the mountain is an activity rather than a
mass, and we, the observers, are activities too. It is the fault of our
myopia if we believe we see a static mountain and, similarly, there
is no observer who remains as he was or, to put the matter another
way, who exceeds the sum of his activities. We wrongly concep-
tualise ourselves as distinct from our doings. We and our doings
coincide entirely, and indeed the subject, 'we', is just a linguistic
imposition.
So far we have considered relations in space; what of relations in
time? Just as space is the universal invisible arena in which things
happen, so time is the measurable sequence of perceived happen-
ings. Space and time are knowable because of their contents.
Nietzsche points out that we know these dimensions intuitively.
Every moment consumes its predecessor and is nothing more than
that destructive act, since it has no duration. Thus everything in
space and time has only a relative existence. But Heraclitus further
believed that surmounting this incessant wavebeat and cosmic
dance there is a One, namely the entirety of the dance. The One is
the many, or to repeat Heraclitus' resounding utterance, 'The
world is the game Zeus plays'.
These are philosophically primitive teachings upon which have
rested several comparatively polished layers of doctrine: Platon-
ism, the Hellenic anti-Platonic teachings, the successive stages of
Christianity, science and scientific meliorism, and Marxism.
Nietzsche does not 'go back' to Heraclitus but in one way or

another shows how these post-Heraclitean ideas - or, to shift the
emphasis slightly, these anti-tragic attitudes - came into being.
They have all been perspectives disguised as truth and certainly
the Heraclitean view must also be a perspective. Nevertheless it is
a tragic perspective and accordingly keeps the material nature of all
things firmly in mind. Moreover, being tragic, Heraclitus' philos-
ophy has even now the effect of dividing the strong from the weak.
The strong cheerfully acknowledge it and the weak recoil in horror
or argumentative denial.
Our four modem authors strive, alongside Nietzsche, to find
modem ways of looking that develop rather than contradict this
ancient awareness. When Lawrence speaks of God as flesh rather
than spirit, this is roughly what he means. All that is is fundamen-
tally flesh, from which has come the spirit, as a late and erring
growth. Mann, too, sees the spirit as liable to error whenever it
seeks to deny its material base. His solution is scientific in a broad
and cultured sense. We must rely on knowledge rather than either
faith or benevolence. He is a progressionist in a manner that
Nietzsche never countenanced, but Mann, nevertheless, feels that
reliable progress comes only from awareness of our earthly ties.
Nietzsche likewise placed great store by scientific investigation.
Rilke is unmistakably Heraclitean and, especially, Nietzschean.
The theme of the Duino Elegies is the reunification of man and
nature, through man's taking into himself what he has hitherto
perceived as 'out there', often indeed as alien. In other words we
should not follow Plato by postulating essences and ideals but, on
the contrary, take external nature into ourselves. And in Rilke
there is no sense of being: 'For staying is nowhere' (nothing is,
nothing remains), he declares in the First Elegy. Rilke's aim is a
modest version of the aim of Nietzsche's Zarathustra: to experience
a joy which wants the 'eternity of all things', wants life as it
ineluctably is as opposed to an amended life of comfort and justice.
Finally Yeats, whom we shall shortly consider in detail, sought
not improvement but acceptance of the world. What we may be
tempted to think of as his 'romanticism' or, alternatively, his
'other-worldliness' still obscures his classical bent. Yeats is plainly
and persistently hostile to bourgeois materialism, but the hostility
is aristocratic. So far as he was concerned nothing was worse than
a barbaric society and barbarism means absence or debasement of
culture and lack of social discrimination. Yeats thought there must
be what Nietzsche calls 'order of rank'. The poet could respect both
aristocrats and peasants, but as aristocrats and peasants, not as
potentially equal members of society. He saw order of rank as the
bulwark of culture and the highest values, or even as their
fertilising ground. For himself, once 'out of nature' he would take
the form of a mechanical golden bird and sing to lords and ladies of
Byzantium. He would not sing to the crowd and would not sing of
essential change but only of the playthings of time. So Yeats
rejected the invisible realm of Christianity, the kingdom of heaven,
and the unfolding world of the dialectic. Several thinkers stiffened
his purpose, but Nietzsche clarified and justified it by means of his
uniquely shrewd understanding of human behaviour.
2
Yeats and Aristocracy
He cannot let anyone, except a friend, determine his life. For that
would be slavish; and this is why all flatterers are servile and
inferior people are flatterers.
Aristotle
Among Yeats's sources it is worthwhile to distinguish the few

authors who enchanted him from the many whose ideas or tales he
merely accepted. In Autobiographies he recalls:
I began [in the mid-eighties] occasionally telling people that one

should believe whatever has been believed in all countries and
periods, and only reject any part of it after much evidence,
instead of starting all over afresh and only believing what one
could prove. 1
This continued to be Yeats's attitude. He would yield to positive

evidence but did not consider, for example, that the propositions
of theosophy needed to be proved. He was not constantly hostile
to science but wanted it confined to its proper sphere. Culture
ought not to be threatened by that extension of the scientific
method which asks for proof even in an area, such as theosophy,
where proof is out of the question.
Perhaps it was for a similar reason that he tended to disregard
the core and justification of Christianity, namely its moral teach-
ing. For culture demands the evil that Christianity would have us
abjure. On the other hand the legendary features of Christianity,
the 'Bible stories', are themselves rich and fruitful. Yeats seems
always to have realised that 'perfection of the life'2 is hostile to
perfection of the work; that purity in the full sense of imitatio Christi
means depreciation of culture. In choosing perfection of the work
he was hostile to social improvement as well. Or, to be precise, he
was one of those who regard the mere idea of progress in its
modern sense as barbaric. Despite his short-lived interest in
16
Yeats and Aristocracy 17
General Eoin O'Duffy's Blue shirt movement in the early thirties,

he had not the outlook ascribed to him by Orwell 'of those who
reach Fascism by the aristocratic route',3 but he certainly assumed
that there could be only a crumbling make-believe accommodation
between culture and social equality.
In truth the test of a belief for Yeats was not, fundamentally, that
a people somewhere has harboured it, but that a doctrine, a fable
or a code of conduct has fostered a rounded, good-and-evillife. A
Yeatsian belief therefore required colour, physicality and moral
diversity. Perhaps, as in Yeats's reading of Plotinus (in 1926), our
physical world might be regarded as territory to be crossed
towards a spiritual sphere, but nevertheless the journey is all.
Plotinus himself, according to Yeats, preferred the ugly Socrates to
Socrates' beautiful thought. 4 This paradox pervades the unscien-
tific, unprovable, absurd doctrines that Yeats entertained. Rosicru-
cianism, theosophy, spiritualism: each is 'other-worldly' in some
fashion, but what must constantly have attracted the poet was the
sense that an initiate is wholly in touch with nature. Conversely,
science proper reduces all nature to quantifiable factors. Every
respectable academic field is by definition exclusive. Christianity
too is exclusive in its own equivocal way: that is to say, it humbles
the sinner by loving and forgiving him. And what is left of the
sinner when he has thus been humbled, when his sin has either
been eliminated or become a source of guilt? He is now diminished
- or so Yeats (like Nietzsche) believed. But the technical other-
worldliness of theosophy excludes and denigrates nothing: one
supposedly controls natural forces instead of trying to ignore
them. Likewise the Rosicrucian, far from belittling nature, thinks
he is privy to nature's commanding secrets. All along, then, Yeats
was struggling to embrace the natural world, not to evade it.
Certainly he wished to change some social developments of our
century, because he thought them to be misguided. Although he
generally welcomed artifice, he was against the artifice of equality.
Yeats wanted to arrange a marriage of heaven and hell or, better,
to reintegrate them. He assumed with Blake and Shelley that what
has been called evil at any period was then the fount of creativity.
That is why Blake and Shelley were two of Yeats's teachers. Yeats
tells us in Essays and Introductions that he found in middle age that it
was Shelley and not Blake who had most shaped his life. 5 There is
no mention of Nietzsche at this point, but it is certain that the
German had a profound, if not exactly a shaping, influence upon
him. Nietzsche came like a demon suddenly in September 1902.

Otto Bohlmann points out in his Yeats and Nietzsche that the poet
would have been aware of the philosopher by 1896, 6 but the
chances are that he would have been aware of him only as a name
and a misleading reputation. Nietzsche is still the thinker one
'knows about' for years, then by chance actually reads, and as early
as the 1880s false and sinister ideas about what he stood for
preceded him.
The evidence suggests that Yeats read Nietzsche from Sep-
tember 1902, when he received from John Quinn, a New York
lawyer, copies of The Case of Wagner, On the Genealogy of Morals and
Thus Spoke Zarathustra. At about the same time Yeats also obtained
Nietzsche as Critic, Philosopher, Poet and Prophet, an anthology of
Nietzsche's writings selected by Thomas Common and published
in 1901. In a letter to Lady Gregory, undated but probably of late
September 1902, Yeats explained that he had recently written to
her in a rather scrappy way because he had been taken up with
Nietzsche, 'that strong enchanter'. 7 The phrase was not hyper-
bolic, for Yeats was indeed spellbound by Nietzsche, and even
thirty odd years later, towards the end of his life, he was still
fascinated by the philosopher.
Along with Blake and Shelley, Nietzsche was never a mere
serviceable source. His observations were scarcely accretions. to
Yeats's thought, for they strengthened and subtilised its foun-
dations. As we shall see, Nietzsche gave form, justification and
analytic meaning to certain vague shapes in the poet's mind. It is
important to note the element of justification. From childhood a
few people stir uneasily when they hear moralistic accounts of life,
history and the nature of man. So overwhelming are these
accounts - or more commonly the unspoken assumptions based
upon them - that the doubter naturally feels he is misguided. But
his eccentricity is simply that he sees moral criteria as interpret-
ations and feelings while others see them as objective facts.
Nietzsche supports the doubter and argues that it is about time the
history of morality was investigated thoroughly, according to the
strictest scholarly principles.
Nietzsche gives his support without drifting towards what he
calls 'weak nihilism'. As we have seen, in preferring truth he
knows he prefers the non-existent or the provisional. At the same
time he draws the healthiest of distinctions between 'weak
nihilism', which declares 'There are no general values, so I shall
take the line of least resistance', and 'strong nihilism', which

declares 'There are no general values, so I shall forgo exacting
standards for myself alone'. (Zarathustra says that each of the
'wisest men' must become 'judge and avenger and victim of his
own law'. B)
There is far more to be said about this, in particular about the
contrast between the affirmations of strong nihilism and the
mesmerised reactions of the weak variety, but enough has been
mentioned to clarify our approach to Yeats. Nietzsche, then,
provided explanations for social and cultural phenomena that
Yeats had simply, though unconventionally, observed. In this way
Nietzsche showed, or seemed to show, the rightness of Yeats's
observations. I mean of course the rightness in cognitive rather
than moral terms. Yeats favoured social hierarchy. Did he then
favour a sort of wickedness or the unjust pattern that gives rise to
alienation and conflict? Yeats felt that social hierarchy was some-
how bound up with culture, not just with a few types of culture but
with all valuable types. Nietzsche did not postulate this same
connection, as might any snob or apologist reactionary, but
incidentally explained why to get rid of hierarchy is to make a
desert.
Every enhancement of the type 'man' has so far been the work of
an aristocratic society - and it will be so again and again - a
society that believes in the long ladder of an order of rank and
differences in values between man and man, and that needs
slavery in some sense or other. Without that pathos of distance
which grows out of the ingrained difference between strata -
when the ruling caste constantly looks afar and looks down
upon subjects and instruments and just as constantly produces
obedience and command, keeping down and keeping at a
distance - that other, more mysterious pathos could not have
grown up either - the craving for an ever new widening of
distances within the soul itself, the development of ever higher,
rarer, more remote, further-stretching, more comprehensive
states - in brief, simply the enhancement of the type 'man', the
continual 'self-overcoming of man', to use a moral formula in a
supra-moral sense. 9
These remarks are already clear, yet we are so unaccustomed to

such thinking that is is helpful to rephrase and enlarge upon them.
An obvious illustration of what Nietzsche means by enhancement

of man is the widening and deepening of European capacities in
the Renaissance, Yeats's favourite period. These developments
were a reflection within artistic and adventurous souls of the
'pathos of distance' experienced by everyone in daily life. A prince
saw the ranks of lesser people stretched out below him: the minor
nobility, the burgesses and gentry, the yeomen, the urban crafts-
men and labourers, the peasants, and at the bottom the canaille of
vagabonds and criminals. The church stood aside with its own
order of rank from supreme pontiff to novice. Each group, even the
lowest, valued rank for its own sake, and classlessness was
unconsidered or thought of, occasionally, as hideous. (,Take but
degree away, untie that string ... '.) This social variety was arti-
ficial, though it was widely understood to be a reflection of the
physical universe itself. Now since separation or widening was the
condition of society, it was in turn a spiritual condition and artists
strove to produce images that should nearly break free from one
another yet miraculously cohere. The artist encouraged tension in
his works, a sense of images, characters and ideas straining away
from one another, repelling one another, for his aim was to
harmonise discordant elements. The greater the discord he could
embrace the greater his achievement. He positively wanted a chaos
to subdue. As Nietzsche says elsewhere, an artist of the grand style
wills to become master of the chaos that he is. 10 The artist's own
chaotic spirit was the immediate source of the artistic richness, but
the ultimate origin was the hierarchical society, its distinctions and
degrees, and the chasm between prince and beggar.
Two points should be made here. The first is that, if Nietzsche
and Yeats are right, a choice presents itself: we may either have
order of rank and the possibility of high culture, or something
resembling social equality with the certainty of third-rate culture.
The second point is that to both Yeats and Nietzsche order of rank
was an order of qualitative distinctions, not an empty sequence as
in modern business or bureaucracy. Each of them saw rank as the
source of culture, and culture in turn as either the source or at least
the mainstay of values. Neither man was in the usual sense an
aesthete, taken up with every kind of beauty including the
decadent; but for both beauty was the arena, so to speak, of
estimable deeds. The negative object of poet and philosopher was
to combat weak nihilism or to find a path through the nihilistic
wastes; the positive object was to promote a value-laden form of
life. The key difference is that Yeats wished to recover certain old
values, while Nietzsche wished to discover new ones and so bring
about a further 'enhancement of the type "man"'. Both however
regarded the notion of social justice as a slow poison prepared by a
sort of illusionists who thought of themselves as social realists.
To Yeats a levelled and 'perfected' society was more or less
without meaning in itself, so that one could find meaning only by
opposing the movement towards such a society. Just those who
assimilate beauty to morality want to destroy a beautiful society.
As the sixth of Yeats's seven sages says,
Whether they knew or not,

Goldsmith and Burke, Swift and the Bishop of Cloyne
All hated Whiggery; but what is Whiggery?
A levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind
That never looked out of the eye of a saint
Or out of a drunkard's eye. 11
These lines imply rather more than they state. Both saint and
drunkard accept the non-rational because neither wishes to control
the world. Whigs, on the contrary, bring everything to the bar of
reason, since reason is the means of human dominance. The
Whiggish assumption is that people are fundamentally alike and
rational, that our differences are accidental and superfluous.
Was it not the rational bar, the bar of the dialectic in other words,
that Yeats tilted against all his life? Nietzsche certainly did, and
both men believed the dialectical method to be nothing more than
a weapon in the service of the levelling sort of mind. Nietzsche
says that 'the mob achieved victory with dialectics', a practice
which before Socrates was considered ill-bred and indecent. 12 Yet
here again that important difference between Yeats and Nietzsche
emerges, since for Yeats there must be a replacement of our
modern counting-house mores by values as old as Homer, while
Nietzsche promised something utterly new, specificially Zarathus-
tra's sign and 'great noontide'.
Yeats himself, never mind the critics, supposed his work of the
eighties and nineties to represent an evasion of reality. On 14
March 1888 he wrote to Katharine Tynan that his poetry was
'almost all a flight into fairyland from the real world'. 13 Can we
accept this, however? In The Song of the Happy Shepherd' the
central distinction between 'the woods of Arcady' and 'Grey Truth'
has been wrongly seen as a contrast between alluring dreams and

the drab facts of life. The poem is rather an assertion that 'there is
no truth/Saving in thine own heart' and further, in the words of
the concluding line, that we should 'Dream, dream, for this is also
sooth'. The prose argument of this anti-prosaic piece is that all so-
called 'truth' is human (it is 'in thine own heart') and that dreams
or fantasies are merely different truths from the truths of daily
observation. Yeats is elevating one category of psychological
behaviour, fantasy, above other categories such as everyday
perceptions and obedience to convention. What he means is
simply that 'the woods of Arcady' are of superior value to the 'Grey
Truth' of late Victorianism. Both, however, are equally 'true' - or
equally human inventions.
This is the constant, mildly Nietzschean theme of the poems in
Yeats's first volume, Crossways, though Yeats had not yet encoun-
tered the German's work. Yeats is realistic and modern enough to
assume that man's own soul organises and gives meaning to
nature; that we must presume the universe as such (an impossible
conception) to be a fecund, ravening chaos. Far from Wordsworth-
ianly detecting a soul in nature corresponding to the human sout
Yeats explicitly denies such a connection. Thus in the 1880s Yeats
anticipates something of the philosophical point of Sartre's La
Nausee, published in 1938. In The Sad Shepherd' a sorrowful man
speaks into a shell on the seashore, but his burden of sorrow does
not fall away and the shelt says Yeats, 'Changed all he sang to
inarticulate moan'. Man's thoughts and his seemingly magical
words are his alone in the universe, very much as Sartre argues in
La Nausee. For all that, as we may surmise, it is our task to make
universal meanings, and everything depends upon the value in
human terms of whatever meanings we make. In this fashion Yeats
questions the value of the scientific-melioristic world picture.
I do not maintain that the young Yeats was fully aware of what
he was doing, since he was obliged in his more pedestrian
moments to accept the philosophic distinctions of his time: for
example, the sharp distinction between objective knowledge and
subjective experience. In the poetry, it seems, he already knows a
strikingly modern thing: that gods do not make men, but men
made gods to express their highest hopes at any period of history.
Every creature and plant makes a god in its own image. The
Indian Upon God' celebrates this insight, since Yeats presents the
moorfowt the lotus, the roebuck and the peacock as each having
an appropriate god and seeing the environment accordingly. The

peacock's domain has been created by a 'monstrous peacock' and
man together with his colourless, spiritual God is, I suppose, an
interloper there.
The Crossways poems often lament the narrow and sterile
conceptions held by Europeans generally. Yeats's fairyland is a
criticism of the dull streets of Dublin and London. He wishes to
convince us that there is no stark divorce between so-called reality
and so-called fantasy, but a flowing-together and countless
nuances. Yeats's objection to 'reality' in the usual sense is that it is
exclusive and low in value. He was alert to the difference between
the scientifically proven and what he called 'monsters and mar-
vels'.14 In Autobiographies he recalls that a certain geologist, and
therefore supposedly a man of science, rejected the young Yeats's
Haeckel- and Huxley-based arguments, saying 'If I believed what
you do, I could not live a morallife. IlS Yeats always recognised that
reality in the scientific-prosaic meaning must be informed with
fantasy, or else surrounded by fantasy, for it to have any life at all.
Science without 'the romance of science' is negligible, if not
impossible, and the social sciences likewise owe their existence and
nature to crusading zeal.
His own aim was inclusive: he wanted to combine as many
diverse elements as he could. This was what Shakespeare had
done, and not Shakespeare alone but many men of the Renaiss-
ance. Shakespeare perhaps almost achieved sanctity as a result of
an imagination of terror and crime. Yeats once noted: 'I feel in
Hamlet, as so often in Shakespeare, that I am in the presence of a
soul lingering on the storm-beaten threshold of sanctity. Has not
that threshold always been terrible and crime-haunted?tl6 That is
part of the story, the vital 'evil' out of which sanctity may
conceivably grow. Notice Yeats's characteristic assumption that
we cannot have sanctity without crime, that a crimeless world
would also be a world without the loftier virtues.
A related part of the same story is the unification of warring
elements in Renaissance art: the fusing, for example, of harsh
matter and verbal music. To couch foul deeds in fair language, as
Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists did, is exemplary, and such
an achievement is not moral in the accepted sense but aesthetic.
Accordingly Yeats asked Althea Gyles to design a cover for The
Secret Rose (1897) which should express a unity of supposed
opposites. Richard Ellman reproduces this design in black and
white and describes it as follows: 'At its centre is a four-petalled

rose joined to a cross, occupying a place just below the middle of a
tree. The boughs of the tree resemble a serpent's folds; among
them, just above the rose, are the kissing faces of a man and a
woman: l7
In plain terms what does this design mean? It seems that the
kissing people are the fruit of a serpentine or diabolic develop-
ment. Further, the people and the serpent's folds together form a
rose at the centre of which is a cross. Indeed the rose itself is also
faintly cruciform. It is important not just to describe this concept of
unity but also to grasp it in our own 1980s terms. I mean that the
serpent must be taken to include whatever we now reject as
'socially unacceptable' or iniquitous. What is evil varies from
civilisation to civilisation and period to period. Adultery was once
evil, and so was blasphemy. Now such behaviour may be
regrettable, but as a rule it is no longer evil. Today terrorism and
frightful sadism are sometimes (by no means always) described as
evil. Yeats, then, is saying that eroticism, romantic love and,
finally, purity and beauty in all its forms, including the most
spiritual, are knit together with the ghastliest crimes. The 'higher'
love depends upon the 'lower' and the cross of Jesus grew out of
sin. To put it another way, the rationalist's perfect world from
which the bad is excluded and in which everyone co-operates
joyfully is the fruit of error. For the rational is only a tiny growth in
a huge jumble and utterly depends upon the jumble. Therefore the
more rationally we live, the more languidly we live. 'Terrible
beauty', as in 'Easter 1916', is only one form of beauty but it is a
peculiarly intense and valuable form, unobtainable without the
terror.
In fact the cross formed by the serpent is scarcely the cross of
Christ, understood to represent the willed suffering of the Saviour
and Man's redemption. The reason is this: Rosicrucianism seeks to
incorporate even Jesus Himself into an all-embracing natural
universe of spirit and flesh. When reading Rosicrucian texts and
commentaries one seldom comes across anything expressed in a
manner amenable to philosophy or even to common sense.
Therefore what I am doing here is making a little sense out of a
body of doctrine which claims to rise above orthodox discussion.
The point is that, to the Rosicrucian, Jesus is no longer the Lord
God but a subordinate character in a vast design which may be
apprehended by us only as 'Eternal Beauty'. Nor is Eternal Beauty
to be likened to Plato's Form of Beauty, since the latter is only one

of several Forms, while the former is all-encompassing. Yeats's
position was not in this respect Platonic, for he regarded 'beauty'
as just our general term for particular things we find beautiful. Like
other Rosicrucians and, more important, like Nietzsche, he took
beauty to include and transcend charity, justice and the rest of the
virtues. It might exclude every virtue and still be of the highest
value. Beauty was precisely our harmonisation of elements which
in our unaesthetic moments we perceive as discordant or simply
insignificant.
It almost goes without saying that the story of Jesus was
beautiful to Yeats. And Jesus was God rather than a moral teacher.
I mean that Yeats was chiefly impressed by the God-man's death
and resurrection, which defeated the mere health and sanity of
Greece and Rome. Jesus showed the overmastering value of
mystery, the fact that all our explanations and constructions are
but human fairy tales disguised as extra-human facts. I suggest
that to Yeats the story of Jesus transcended good and evil, so that
Jesus was not the good who fights the evil but the God who
annihilates that distinction. Yeats himself contrived to think of
'goodness', in either the Christian or the humanist sense, as a
category of behaviour, no more valuable in itself than 'badness'.
And both sorts of behaviour played their parts in a purely aesthetic
universe: that is, a universe which may not be comprehended
except aesthetically. How anti-Pascalian or anti-Kierkegaardian
this is!
Yeats implicitly agreed with one of Nietzsche's most celebrated
utterances: 'For it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence
and the world are eternally justified'. 18 Nietzsche's italicisation of
'justified' is interesting, for he intends to emphasise a sense of
blamelessness. The world can be vindicated only when we see it in
an aesthetic light - or, better, at such a time we no longer see any
error or crime requiring vindication. No one reading the Iliad
blames anybody. This does not mean that the arts are a means of
glossing over guilt: it means that the arts at their best show up the
folly and self-indulgence of guilt. Suffering now makes perfect sense
- tragic sense, needless to say. Wickedness is now conformable.
Take wickedness away - as is possible in dreams - and the
aesthetic phenomenon which is the world is botched. Such a
Yeatsian or Nietzschean vision is not dilettante but quite the
reverse, the fruit of wholehearted engagement.
Yeats's attitudes were essentially unmoral. To take the best

known example, when Yeats wrote about the fates of various
republicans (in 'Easter 1916' and other poems in the volume
Michael Robartes and the Dancer) he translated a fairly widespread
public feeling into the terms of his own aesthetic vision. At the
time most Irish people were out of sympathy with the rebels,
whom they regarded less as heroes than as troublemakers. 19 Yeats
was in Gloucestershire that Easter and a little later, in London, he
wrote to Lady Gregory of the 'heroic, tragic lunacy of Sinn Fein'. 20
His feelings seem to have been similar to those of many Irish
people, for they followed a course of surprise deepening to wonder
and finally twisting into horror as the executions proceeded. He
was neither more nor less outraged than many members of the
public. So Yeats's own feelings traced a general pattern and his
originality was imposed upon it.
'Easter 1916' makes three points: first, that the rebels had earlier
seemed mediocre; second, that persistent single-mindedness is
unnatural; and third, that the deaths have generated a terrible
beauty. There is an elementary honesty in the poem, because while
everyone knows that a tedious fool may turn into a martyr, few
will admit as much, except in theoretical discussion. That is what I
mean by Yeats's lack of morality: his perceptions are rarely blunted
or perverted by considerations of justice. Beauty still predomi-
nates. Does not Yeats almost remark that the rebels were anyway
moving towards spiritual death (since Too long a sacrifice/Can
make a stone of the heart') and their physical deaths were therefore
more valuable, because more beautiful, than their stony lives?
Yet it is exactly the beauty of such actions that changes the
political and social climate. Thus the aesthetic need not be the
merely aesthetic, and in fact it rarely is. Consider Yeats's represen-
tation of Patrick Pearse, the zealous schoolmaster, in the poem
The Rose Tree'. In reality Pearse often talked of the need for the
Irish to make a 'blood sacrifice'; in the poem these are his words:
'But where can we draw water,'

Said Pearse to Connolly,
'When all the wells are parched away?
o plain as plain can be
There's nothing but our own red blood
Can make a right Rose Tree.'
Yeats's Pearse does not speak of the wickedness of the English and
his emphasis is upon refertilising Ireland. Yeats himself felt that
Ireland needed fresh visions of beauty and it was only later that he
came to believe that Pearse had rightly grasped the connection
between 'blood sacrifice' and beauty. Or if this was partly a
Yeatsian vision, then at least he was happy to attribute it entirely to
the sacrificed Pearse.
Yeats cast an aesthetic light over the Rising and its aftermath, not
to lie about them or soften them but to justify them in the sense
Nietzsche had in mind. Such justification must transcend the
partisan, so that the opposition is not wrong or evil and one's own
champions are naturally flawed. Justification must of necessity be
'truthful': that is to say, no one in generations to come, when the
dust has settled, must think it a piece of wish-fulfilment.
Let us for a moment compare this tiny piece of Irish history with
a great war which we know only as a story, the Trojan War. The
latter in Homer is frightful, thrilling, logically ridiculous, formally
effective and sublime. To adapt a phrase of Nietzsche, the war with
Troy was a festival play for the gods, 21 and it is a festival play for us
as well, since we view it in a god-like manner, not without fervent
sympathy, yet never for a moment wishing it away. We relish it
even while we are moved by, say, Andromache's lament over
Hector. Now if 'Easter 1916' describes Yeats's purified feelings
about the Rising, his feelings with the dross of agitation removed,
then he saw it like a sombre festival play. He sorrowed and
rejoiced at the same time, in something of the spirit of an ancient
tragic poet. Yeats's standard bears no relation, or an inverse
relation, to notions of justice and human power over events. What
matters is the fertilisation of the soul rather than any specific
attainment. Therefore Yeats opposes the normal modern assump-
tion that the soul reflects circumstances, the entire Marxian belief
that the immaterial is simply a response to the concrete world. On
the contrary, Yeats believes, the immaterial should shape and
compose materiality, especially by means of art.
Another way of putting the matter is to say that Yeats always
held to an aristocratic standard, though we should keep in mind
that the phrase does not neatly refer to any actual aristocrat. The
virtues of a sect or class must normally be above or beyond it. The
aristocratic standard in Yeats has nothing to do with power over
events and everything to do with power over oneself. It is still an
aspiration, imperfectly realised as a rule. In Yeats's view the
aristocrat is ideally able to form himself as a personality. He does

not master events by making them turn out as he wishes (a
bourgeois or proletarian ambition) but by playing his own chosen
role in relation to them. Here is the explanation of Yeats's notion of
personality and values. One's values are one's own as distinct from
a social code; or, to be exact, the readiness to form values of one's
own is the sign of nobility. The social code is not disregarded but is
no more than the foundation on which the self-defining values
rest. Further, one's peculiar personality should be an expression of
one's peculiar values.
Yeats is triumphantly non-utilitarian in outlook. He appreciates
aristocrats not so much on account of their day-to-day behaviour
but because of their acceptance of what T. R. Henn calls the
'wasteful heroic virtues'. 22 An imagination of heroism is what
matters: a desire to find persons, styles and deeds to look up to - in
a fantasy world if not in the streets. Conversely, the sure sign of
the mob is lack of respect for anyone, including oneself. But he
who would be a hero has only to imagine heroism, as Richard
Ellman points out: 'Yeats defiantly asserts his imagined self against
futility, and to imagine heroism is to become a hero'. 23 If you
picture Cuchulain to yourself strongly and consistently you
become, not remotely Cuchulain of course, but one whose soul is
elevated by Cuchulain-pictures, images of 'That amorous, violent
man, renowned Cuchulain', as he is described in The Only Jealousy
of Erner.
However, imagining heroism is not something anyone may
readily do. To be able to apprehend a moral condition in subtle
detail is already a gift, so that it is one thing to want to imagine
heroism and another to do so. Such imagining is not itself the
result of struggle, for it comes about either comfortably or not at
all. An imagination of heroism is a consequence perhaps of
childhood training, perhaps of undiscoverable childhood circum-
stances but in any case it is a mark of undeserved distinction.
Nevertheless, in an aristocratic society the distinction is favoured,
since such a society honours especially gifts that are not deserved -
gifts of courage, beauty and artistic or athletic talent.
Yeats wanted remarkable people to celebrate and was therefore a
poet for an aristocratic society (a born 'praise-singer'). He writes in
'Estrangement' that 'Those whom it is our business [artists'
business] to cherish and celebrate are complete arcs'. 24 Thus
Achilles is a complete arc and Horner is his celebrant. Today we
tend to see Homer as the great one who depicted simple warriors,
but Yeats's singularity was that he had something of Homer's
celebratory attitude. He looked up to nature rather than down
upon it and wanted, in a classical spirit, to eliminate the roughness
of reality.
But of course aristocratic societies in general wish to surmount
roughnesses or inadequacies, and are therefore characterised by
courtesy, veneration, rivalry for honours and little regard for
utility. For these reasons Yeats wanted such a society in which one
is what one is. I refer to talents, not to social station. The great
thing is to stop people desiring authority just because some others
have authority. If one is cut out to be a boss, that is a different
matter. Even an outlaw-shepherd such as Tamburlaine can end up
as an emperor if (and only if) he has imperial qualities.
Yeats himself was the son of an unprosperous, if fashionable,
portrait painter and his nature was that of a poet who sang partly
in celebration and partly, as he puts it in 'To Ireland in the Coming
Times', 'to sweeten Ireland's wrong'. He wrote not to remedy
Ireland's wrong but to sweeten it. Ireland is a wronged country:
that is to say, the Irish have for centuries regarded themselves in
such a light. Yeats's characteristic aim in the 1890s was purely
bardic: he was the poet of a wronged people and his object was to
encourage them to relish the wrongness. In 'The Dedication to A
Book of Stories Selected From the Irish Novelists' he defines his
land as 'tragic Eire' and plainly has no wish to change its character.
The standpoint may be expressed as a question: What would be the
good of a politically victorious Ireland which had lost its specifical-
ly Irish culture, tinged - and often more than tinged - with
melancholy? The only power that mattered to Yeats was cultural
power. (Likewise Nietzsche argued that the military and political
ascendancy of Bismarck's Germany over France could not rna tch the
cultural ascendancy of the French. 25)
Ireland is Cathleen Ni Houlihan, who in Yeats's play of 1902
demands a melancholy sacrifice from her champions and suppor-
ters, saying 'It is a hard service they take that help me'. 26 Ireland's
pride is in the hardness of the sacrifice asked of her children or
lovers. A merry Ireland seems nonsensical, and so does a cock-of-
the-walk Ireland, a stranger to tears. Consequently Yeats did not
wish to foster a people who should either resent their fate or undo
themselves by becoming prosperous and vacuously cheerful in the
modern style. His way was to take the wrongs of Ireland as they
traditionally were and sweeten them. This is a tricky notion. Did

Yeats misrepresent the aftermath of the Easter Rising? I think there
is general agreement that he did not, while some others, ranters,
fanatics and thoughtless people, did. Yeats sweetened, or
beautified, the aftermath without misrepresenting it, and to do
such things was his fate.
Consequently his regular disagreements with Maud Gonne were
philosophical as well as personal, for while Yeats loved his fate and
held that we should all do so, she strove to avoid her fate as a
figure of unrivalled, self-sufficient beauty. She should have been
not a fighter but an inspirer of fighters. A 'Ledaean body' is wasted
when one spends one's time at public meetings or tightens one's
flesh in anguish over political problems. In Nietzschean terms
Maud Gonne had no arnor tati. What does arnor tati mean and how
did Maud Gonne exemplify the lack of it? Here are Nietzsche's
words:
My formula for greatness in a human being is arnor tati: that one

wants nothing to be different, not forward, nor backward, not in
all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal
it - all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is
necessary - but love it. 27
Fate is necessarily personal and necessarily bound up with one's

social world. It is what one is in relation to whatever is taking
place. Nietzsche therefore means that the 'great' human being
positively loves his role and his time even if, for example, his role
in political terms is to be a rebel. Then he loves rebellion, even as
Nietzsche himself loved his grandly subversive, anti-Christian,
Dionysian role, including the illnesses and the professional neglect
that were the concomitants of that role. In short, the last thing a
great human being is is bitter or resentful.
But Maud Gonne was almost desperately rancorous. Her natural
fate, the fate she should have loved, was to reincarnate Cathleen
Ni Houlihan (as she briefly and triumphantly did in the play) or
else to focus republican aspirations, somewhat as Helen focused
the aspirations of the Greeks. Maud Gonne' s 'error', therefore, was
to aid the cause in a strictly political way, organising meetings and
making speeches. In Yeats's opinion she was wrong to loathe the
enemy, England, and to regard the condition of Ireland as a sort of
sickness that must be cured as the preliminary to a tolerable life.
Cathleen Ni Houlihan is inescapably a suffering figure, and proud

to be so, not one who longs to be victorious. She is rejuvenated
simply by the support of her champions. And Helen of Troy is
never one to count her beauty subordinate to a political cause.
It is true that by 1908, in 'No Second Troy', Yeats ascribed Maud
Gonne's lack of arnor fati to a mismatch between her nature and her
times:
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?
From a Nietzschean point of view, however, and really from a

commonsense point of view, these famous lines are brilliantly
disingenuous, because Maud Gonne's anger was not self-realis-
ation but in part a product of self-evasion. Yeats usually despised
the slavish self that automatically responds to circumstances, and
such was Maud Gonne's personality, working against her pride
and her sovereign beauty.
In old age she called Yeats 'lucky' for being able to 'escape into
the freer life of the spirit beyond the limitations of time and
space'. 28 That is one way of putting the matter and perhaps Yeats
was lucky, but Maud Gonne too might, in theory, have lived the
'freer life of the spirit'; or, to say the least, Yeats's lifelong
argument was that admirable people are people who can do so.
They are aristocrats of the spirit if not by birth.
Yeats's ideal society consisted of a few aristocrats surrounded by
many lesser folk, each of whom should be confidently developed
in his own line. We recognise that Yeats revered the protestant
landowning families of Ireland, especially as he understood them
to have been in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Likewise he loved the Renaissance, destroyed in Britain, he said,
by Cromwell (The Curse of Cromwell'). His regard for Lady
Gregory's Coole Park and the Gore-Booths' Lissadell; his en-
thusiasm for Swift, Berkeley, Goldsmith and Burke, each of whom
despised notions of progress and equality; his hostility to the
encroaching spheres of business and industry: these matters have
been amply discussed by Yeats critics. It is important also to
remember that Yeats's non-aristocratic figures are Shakespeareanly
distinctive. The implication is that society should be a collection of
robust eccentrics who do not seek to melt into the environment but
stand square against it. There is no common good for which any of
these individuals would sacrifice his nature and his vocation, since
that would be to exchange the self for an abstraction.
On the other hand the new Ireland, a compound of shopkeeper
mentality and bloody terror, is, as we say, 'conformist'. But
consider a small sample of the characters Yeats either invents or
recreates: Father Q'Hart in 'The Ballad of Father O'Hart'; the
hunter in 'The Ballad of the Foxhunter'; the jester in 'The Cap and
Bells'; the fiddler in 'The Fiddler of Dooney'; Tom Q'Roughley,
that enemy of logic who thinks dying 'but a second wind'; Yeats's
uncle when he returns to Sligo, in the poem 'In Memory of Alfred
Pollexfen'; Red Hanrahan himself in all his wildness; Raftery, the
blind poet; the 'affable irregular' of 'The Road at My Door'; the slut
Crazy Jane who is wiser than the bishop; the quaintly and
victoriously honourable Colonel Martin; the 'old bawd' Mary
Moore in 'John Kinsella's Lament for Mrs Mary Moore' - but
perhaps this brief list of singular characters is nevertheless long
enough.
Mohini Chatterjee, the Brahmin whose teaching Yeats never
ceased to respect, is given these words to say:
I have been a king,

I have been a slave,
Nor is there anything
Fool, rascal, knave
That I have not been,
And yet upon my breast
A myriad heads have lain 29
Mohini Chatterjee did say roughly the same in Dublin in the 1880s,
so that Yeats absorbed from him an understanding of life as an
endless, senseless pageant including no 'real' or imperative moral
distinctions: one is simply fated to be oneself, good or bad. The
way, said the Brahmin, was to refuse to reflect the outside world in
one's thoughts or personality. That is an extreme variant of what
Yeats always implicitly believed. (It is interesting, though not
immediately relevant, that Nietzsche and Yeats both tended to
view Christ as 'Asiatic', as the prophet of the indwelling kingdom
of heaven.)
In the widest sense, therefore, Yeats's aristocratic beliefs entail
seeing the personality as largely independent of events: his
doctrine is pretty well the reverse of social determinism. Alex
Zwerdling, in his book Yeats and the Heroic Ideal, thoroughly

examines this part of the Yeatsian web, taking care to distinguish
the hero in Yeats (a solitary or wandering figure) from the
aristocrat (essentially a member of a select group). From our point
of view, the nearer Yeats moved towards simple admiration for
aristocracy, the more he followed Ezra Pound into detestation of
the urban masses, the less impressive he is as a thinker and even as
a poet. This is not because his attitudes grow 'nasty', but because
they are purely nostalgic - pleasant or even delectable but of no
further consequence. Zwerdling assumes that the later Yeats, if not
the earlier, believed that aristocracy would eventually come back in
its old form, yet this is just the point that is not clear, for all the
exegesis of recent years. Yeats wrote as follows in 1930:
As for the rest, we wait till the world changes and its reflection
changes in our mirror and an hieratical society returns, power
descending from the few to the many, from the subtle to the
gross, not because some man's policy has decreed it but because
what is so overwhelming cannot be restrained. A new begin-
ning, a new turn of the wheel. 30
Did the mature Yeats imagine, for example, that at some time in
the future elegant houses roughly comparable with the Gore-
Booths' Lissadell would again be built, and beautiful girls much
like the young Eva and Constance Gore-Booth would grace such
houses with their presence (as those sisters timelessly appear in
the poem 'In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Can Markiewicz')?
But forms are never repeated, except as sterile copies. There have
been so many hierarchical societies, none like the others except for
the mere fact of social gradation. Bronze Age warriors, the
patricians of Rome, the courtiers of Versailles: each group is
distinctive. And if we say again that order of rank fosters culture,
we should also emphasise that each order fosters its own charac-
teristic culture.
It is likely that Yeats so regretted the decline of the Anglo-Irish
landowners, each of whom had lived, so it seemed, 'rooted in one
dear perpetual place',31 that he cultivated a faith that their like
would come again after the vilenesses of democracy. He might
have tried to support such a faith by a certain understanding of
Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal return (an understanding now
increasingly discounted by Nietzsche scholars) but he probably did

not think the matter out at all thoroughly. As a poet he was liable
to stop thinking whenever he came up against a fact unsuited to
his vision. Even if we take it that Yeats had in mind only
the contentions of A Vision, and especially the lunar phases and the
movements of the gyres, we should remember that any cyclical
understanding of history can only be an expedient, and that
'history' itself, as a branch of knowledge, is a construct. Yet so
openly didactic are some of Yeats's poems that they demand the
suspension of our disbelief and owe inextricable facets of their
beauty to dubious historical ideas. I mean not legends but the
question-begging history that Yeats was capable of.
Perhaps one small illustration will be enough, and certainly
there is no space for more. Phases 16 to 18 corresponding to the
eighth gyre, the period 1550 to 1650, are characterised by the
'awakening of sexual desire', as in Titian; the bursting forth of the
human personality, as in Shakespeare; an attempted return to the
synthesis of the Sistine ceiling, as in Paradise Lost; and a loss of
absolute Christian faith so that 'Christendom keeps a kind of
spectral unity'. 32 This reading of the period may be acceptable, and
plainly we should not quibble (saying, for instance, that sexual
desire had earlier 'awakened' in Ariosto). Further, we ought to
acknowledge that Yeats's swift analysis of Milton is impressive, for
he speaks not only of the Miltonic music and magnificence but also
of the unreality and 'cold rhetoric'. 33 Indeed A Vision as a whole
shows what a good critic of the arts Yeats was. The weakness of all
this lies partly in the emphases and partly in the attribution of
human affairs to phases of the moon. If one historical development
grows out of another, that process is better seen as dialectical, for
such changes may be observed in daily life and are thoroughly
understandable.
My purpose here is not the absurd one of faulting Yeats's
schemata but to comment on his tendency to draw parallels rather
than make distinctions. He wanted to contain his observations in
one great design, possibly because he could not measure them by a
moral yardstick. Things make sense if you divide them into right
and wrong, and if you do not, you may need another form of
organisation. Then, the usual way of making sense of history is by
seeing it as 'progress'; indeed, modern man is still supposed to be
the goal of the entire evolutionary process. But Yeats's patterns are
part of his overriding campaign against progress. He did not want
the old things to go; he feared above all a descent into barbarism, a
smashing of native cultures on the Marxian grounds that all their
varieties have depended upon vicious distinctions of class. (It is
perhaps unnecessary to remark that putting culture into museums
is a way of recording it, not preserving it.) Seen in this light,
alienation, which Marx thinks of as a malady to be cured, Yeats
thinks of as the only fertile ground of culture.
Yeats wanted old ways to return and believed they always had
returned: Alexander's empire rose and fell, and about twelve
hundred years later so did Charlemagne's. Most historians would
be interested in the differences between these two chains of
events, while Yeats is concerned simply with the fact of imperial
rise and fall. Nietzsche himself is in some sense a rephrasing of the
old heroic motif. He is a 'return' of Achilles .
. . . Eleven pass, and then

Athene takes Achilles by the hair,
Hector is in the dust, Nietzsche is born,
Because the hero's crescent is the twelfth. 34
In A Vision Nietzsche is Yeats's specific example of a Phase 12 man,

and according to The Phases of the Moon' Achilles belongs to this
phase as well. When Athene seizes Achilles' hair she prevents him
from attacking his commander, Agamemnon, and by so doing
initiates his long withdrawal from the fighting which ends only
when he returns to kill Hector in revenge for Hector's killing of
Patroclus. Athene's action is thus decisive and brings about the
entire story. Now Phase 12 belongs to 'The Forerunner', a
'fragmentary and violent man'. The main point is that such a man
'overcomes himself' and has 'the greatest possible belief in the
values created by personality'. He has 'immense energy' and is
'wrought to a frenzy of desire for truth of self'. At his best he is
divorced from his circumstances and he is 'marble pure' rather
than warm-hearted. 35
It seems, then, that many or most heroes do not belong here.
Achilles is discriminatingly chosen because though he is often
passionate, he is scarcely ever sympathetic towards others. He is
solitary, fated, conscious of a lonely destiny. Above all, his values
are his own, related to the values of other Achaeans but by no
means identical with them. Nietzsche could reasonably be said to
have these traits in common with Achilles. Both men desire 'truth
of self' at all costs and are therefore, in the most extreme and
perhaps admirable sense, 'anti-social'. Even so, consider the
obvious differences between a simple, if magnificent warrior,
capable of only elementary thought-processes, and an exquisitely
subtle thinker who called himself 'the opposite of a heroic
nature'. 36 At first sight Achilles and Nietzsche would seem to have
no point of similarity - until Yeats comes along and places the
similarity before our eyes.
Yeats's analogising bent is at its most audacious when in the play
The Resurrection he compares Christ with Dionysus. Dionysus is
usually thought of as the god furthest removed from Jesus, and in
modern times that is how Nietzsche pre-eminently thought of him.
Dionysus is orgiastic, uniting man with nature, while Christ is
precisely the God who transforms all nature from its cruel and
wanton reality into an indwelling kingdom of heaven. Thus
Dionysus retains man within nature and Jesus, conversely, takes
nature into man's own loving spirit. Nevertheless Dionysus, like
Christ Himself, dies and is resurrected.
I saw a staring virgin stand

Where holy Dionysus died,
And tear the heart out of his side,
And lay the heart upon her hand
And bear that beating heart away;
And then did all the Muses sing
Of Magnus Annus at the spring,
As though God's death were but a play. 37
The still-beating heart of Dionysus was torn from his side by the
staring virgin (entranced Athene) and so he lives on in some
fashion. In course of time the Greeks and Romans created man-
centred worlds of reason, military prowess and artistic order. Then
God was born a man and died a real death, so that the smell of His
blood swept reason aside. Dionysus and Christ are thus alike as
divine intermediaries between man and the meaningless universe.
Perhaps indeed - so the impudent suggestion goes - they are
successive faces of one God. Man's own doings constantly pass
away after at best a momentary flame of glory.
Everything that man esteems

Endures a moment or a day.
Love's pleasure drives his love away,
The painter's brush consumes his dreams;
The herald's cry, the soldier's tread
Exhaust his glory and his might:
Whatever flames upon the night
Man's own resinous heart has fed.
Here is a yet more daring leap. Jesus and Dionysus are akin, since
both are purely reminders that man and all his works are pointless.
That is how the anti-humanist Yeats aspired to treat life: as a
rapturous tragic festival, having no higher reality, no final justifica-
tion, no purpose and no loving God. His poems would at best
flame upon the night and they, like every conceivable perspective
on the world, would be short-lived without 'truth'. This implies
that Yeats's entire scheme is itself a semi-deliberate fiction or, as he
put it in a letter of about 1910 to his father, 'The world being
illusive one must be deluded in some way if one is to triumph in
it.,38 Strictly speaking, he meant by this that if one is to triumph
one must produce and reach out towards a self-image. Neverthe-
less Yeats's patterns of thought, and especially the cyclical pattern
of A Vision, were in a similar sense illusive: in other words, he
made them up as means to his own special triumph.
Nietzsche would alternatively say: The world is independent of
us and we know it only as our invention. We cannot actually
change it any more than a few microbes can change a forest.
Therefore we had better cling to Dionysus, who is the yea-sayer
and brings tragic joy, rather than to Christ, who is the nay-sayer
and replaces our terrestial reality with his sorrowful spirit.'
To whatever extent Christ and Dionysus are differentiated by

Yeats, the poet's sense of divinity is in one interesting respect
Nietzschean. His gods are not moralistic; nor are they examplars at
all in the usual Western sense, but sacrificial figures whose death
and rebirth keeps man in touch with his natural home from which
he ever tries to stray. In Nietzsche's eyes that is true of Dionysus
and quite untrue of Christ, but that is not my present point.
Nothing gives the appearance of keeping nature at bay so much as
man's faith, religious in its origins, that he is essentially apart from

nature. That is why in modern, scientific times we tend to assume
that all distressing personal destinies may in principle be trans-
formed, and that pain is in principle curable. Christ Himself
preached a purely psychological change for individuals, not a
change in the environment or for society at large. But the modern
notion is that the more we cling together, the less any creature can
be singled out for suffering. Moreover, the popular idea of shared
suffering is based on the fact that suffering may thus turn into a
species of pleasure, albeit a melancholy species. In theory the
suffering is apportioned and no one has more than 'his share'.
Conversely an ancient tragic hero, such as Oedipus, would
scarcely have imagined or even desired his suffering to be
shareable: it was his lot and he was, if anything, jealous of it.
For these reasons a belief in God, or in many gods, preserves
individuality and a certain sense of apartness, while the loss of
God reinforces 'herd' feelings. Yeats knew this almost as well as
Nietzsche, though he never expressed it so neatly. Nietzsche says
that God used to be our 'unconditional sanction,39 and in this
particular sense Yeats's Christ is a different deity. Yeats was
nevertheless aware of what had long been rising up in place of the
sanctioning God. It is likely that he would have agreed with these
comments of Nietzsche:
Now suppose that belief in God has vanished: the question

presents itself anew: 'who speaks?' - My answer, taken not from
metaphysics but from animal physiology: the herd instinct speaks.
It wants to be master: hence its 'though shalt!' - it will allow
value to the individual only from the point of view of the whole,
for the sake of the whole, it hates those who detach themselves-
it turns the hatred of all individuals against them. 40
God is or was in this fashion a protector against group authority, a

guarantor that at least one will not be sucked into crowd move-
ments waving meretricious moral banners. Yeats was constantly
aware that the people's march would take such a form and
expressed his awareness most fiercely in 'On the Boiler' (1939).
The poet always loathed mediocrity of mind, by which I mean
not 'average intelligence' but the tendency at all intellectual levels
to want to overcome that which cannot be overcome: the nature of
things. We are clever enough to make use of nature, but that is
altogether different. We may conceivably arrange matters so that

no one needs to struggle overmuch, yet a feature of such a
condition must surely be the rarity of joy. Nietzsche refers to the
'typical man' as fighting against evils 'as if one could dispense with
them'.41 Yeats had the same contempt for mediocrity and the same
understanding that the total number of evils is never reduced. It is
rather as if we destroy weeds and others grow in their place.
In accordance with this understanding Yeats detested, as did
Nietzsche, the concept of a God who guarantees lowly and
subordinate groups victory over their superiors. The victory might
indeed be ultimate, that is to say, marking the end of time, the end
of the experiment of creation, but what matters is the impudent
assumption of its rightness. To be low is itself thought to be a sign
of merit or at least a moral palliative. Coupled with this is the belief
in modern times that a fair proportion of evils reside not so much
in the superior group but in political power as such, and that
political power can actually, if miraculously, be abolished.
To Yeats, God is not in the least an avenger or an equaliser
(though vengeance of the ordinary human kind is not necessarily a
bad thing). For his part, Nietzsche maintains that at the time of
Christ Rome had ruled the West for two hundred years and subject
peoples could not imagine how it would ever be possible to
overthrow the empire. The culture and the very history of
conquered races were treated by the conquerors as of no account.
Accordingly, members of the subordinate groups came to worship
the crucified God, the God whose death mocked the Roman
imperium. In this way a grotesque genius born of despair taught
people to exult in their own degradation - in filth and rags, in
crucifixion and lingering suicide in catacombs. The Roman empire,
or in other words the world as a whole, was now deemed ripe for
destruction. Such a God who will one day destroy his own creation
cannot be compared with the Greek Dionysus: therefore it is not
this face of God that Yeats acknowledges. Yeats does not see mercy
or forgiveness or, for that matter, judgement-day severity, but
Godhood itself, assuring man that everything passes and every-
thing returns.
Ideally, in Yeats's opinion, the poor and socially humble should
not also be psychologically humble, but proud - as proud as Crazy
Jane. They certainly should not resent their lords and masters,
because the feeling of resentment is the sure mark of inferiority.
Likewise, straining every nerve to climb a social or professional
ladder confirms one's inferiority; or, as Nietzsche says in regard to

promoted workers, to become 'a stopgap to fill a hole in human
inventiveness' does not 'lift them from the essence of their miserable
condition'. 42 So the promoted worker who is now a manager is still
caught in the essence of his miserable condition, and the same
applies even to a proletarian dictator (such as Stalin).
Money is only minimally important to the noble man. Yeats
appreciated this and had no wish to become rich by selling his
talent. I do not mean by prostituting it but by legitimately selling it.
For, as Nietzsche says, one should not wish to make of one's
genius a 'shopkeeper's affair'Y And wisdom should not be
subordinated to cleverness or employed for material gain. In fact
wisdom scarcely plans for material advancement at all. Yeats
revered high social rank but did not regard it as a level to which a
wise person deliberately climbs. Somewhat similarly, he thought
money to be for sensible use and not in the least for prestige.
Yeats thought of power roughly as Nietzsche did, though not
remotely to the same fruitful and all-explanatory purpose. (Will to
power is discussed in some detail in Chapter 6.) Both men
regarded power as creative ability, not at all the same thing as force
or status. Thus Shakespeare had great power, while Elizabeth I
had little or none. In fact the so-called power of a boss is commonly
his compensation for lack of real power. Sometimes a politician or a
soldier Oulius Caesar or Napoleon) may have the more adventur-
ous kind of power, but that is rare. The feeling of power is a
stretching of limbs and gusts of euphoria. Lady Gregory had
power when she planted trees in Coole Park; Michelangelo had it
as he worked at his 'David'; a gang of boys have it when they build
a den on their holidays. The quality of the product is not the point,
and indeed the product is valuable to the producer chiefly as the
focus of his energies. Power is thus the entirely personal freedom
to shape things, including words, ideas and one's own personality.
Nietzsche argues that 'Power which is attacked and defamed is
worth more than impotence which is treated only with kindness.,44
He means that the feeling of power outweighs all other considera-
tions. Yeats's peasant or low-life figures are not treated with
kindness and would normally resist such treatment as liable to
restrict their self-created characters. And the impotent feel impo-
tent even when they are technically secure: that is part of
Nietzsche's point and I think Yeats would have agreed.
Both our subjects had a keen awareness of the difference
between personal and political strength. Nietzsche implies that

political strength, when it is divorced from the private, inner will
(as it often is), means that one is an actor, or worse: 'the imitation
of an actor'. 45 The only role worth playing is a role chosen and
invented for oneself alone, since the rest, the public or generally
accessible roles, never suit anybody who has supervised his own
development.
Political strength is a concomitant of weakness in the individual
and cultural weakness in the state. Nietzsche thought German
culture to be declining in the late nineteenth century just because
the state was growing more powerful: 'After all, no one can spend
more than he has - that is true of individuals, it is also true of
nations. If one spends oneself on power, grand politics, economic
affairs, world commerce, parliamentary institutions, military inter-
ests ... then there will be a shortage in the other direction.,46 As in
other places, Nietzsche here offers an explanation for what Yeats
intuitively grasped. I mean that Yeats believed Irish culture to be
fertile so long as Irishmen did not worry overmuch about their
country's political subordination. Further, like Nietzsche, he ob-
served the humiliation inherent in giving priority to political power
(and that was part of the reason for his continuing disagreement
with Maud Gonne).
Yeats's play of 1904, The King's Threshold, is specifically con-
cerned with the conflict between politics and poetry, and the
question posed by the play is: Which of these activities yields the
more honour? The poet, Seanchan, dies yet gains more honour
than the King. Honour, it seems, is not reputation (though a
person might rightly or wrongly have a reputation for honour) but
a sort of private honesty of soul. Seanchan's (so-called) Oldest
Pupil finally declares:
Not what it leaves behind it in the light
But what it carries with it to the dark
Exalts the soul ...
That is honour. The quality was always of the greatest importance
to Yeats and we should note that it is anything but a general
quality. We give a general name to something which by its nature
takes the form of the singular individual: each person who 'has
honour' has it in his own way.
Nietzsche makes no explicit comments along the same lines, but
several of his aphorisms follow the same broad direction. Often
such remarks reveal both the peculiar force and the fallacy of
assaults upon the criterion of honour. Socrates himself could not
understand this aristocratic concept. Nietzsche shows us repeat-
edly that dialectic - in the Socratic rather than the Hegelian sense -
has always been destructive of honour, since honour cannot
provide a reasoned justification for itself: it was bound to fall before
the sword-thrusts of Socrates' questions. 47 But then, according to
Nietzsche, even this prodigious thinker failed to understand that
honour is admired because it is 'indefensible', in the sense of rising
above argument and reason. Alternatively it is possible that
Socrates did understand all this perfectly well and was driven to
put honour on the defensive because - so Nietzsche speculates -
human instincts were then at odds with one another and threat-
ening to overwhelm Greek civilisation. 48 In such a fashion Socrates
was possibly a saviour, though he cast a shadow over all
succeeding generations.
Yeats detested what he, following Blake, called 'mathematical
form', meaning the application to living beings of mathematical
concepts, including the concept of equality. 49 Outside the realm of
mathematics equality is plainly a metaphor. When we say that two
people are of equal height or weight we are (properly) confining
them to quantities, altogether ignoring their distinctive qualities. It
might be better to say that we treat the quantities of height and
weight as if they were not also, in living reality, qualities. Yeats
therefore (not out of crude snobbery) hated the widespread modem
belief that individual differences are either superficial or technical.
The supposition is that visible differences (stature, colour, gender
and so forth) are of the surface and other differences have to do
with how well the individual has acquired a technical skill, such as
using language or playing a game. In theory no differences are
vital.
But to Yeats differences are pervasive and for the most part quite
un technical. More important, a difference is never a simple
difference but a distinction of value. The latter-day ideal of 'equal
but different' is absurd, since it camouflages the fact that equality
means sameness. Naturally we may regard living beings as equal,
but that is only to impose equality upon our original observations
of inequality. The Yeatsian point is that each person has his own
value and should reach after it. But that means that he cannot, in
Nietzsche's phraseology, belong to the herd. Nietzsche is the pre-
eminent preacher of this same attitude towards society, since he
regularly opposes the belief that society should take precedence

over each of its members. Similarly even the lowliest of Yeats's
invented or borrowed figures, when he or she commands our
approbation, feels above society. For each of them a virtue is not
social but is one's own self-discovered quality. Nietzsche asserts
such an attitude as a doctrine. 'A virtue', he writes, arguing against
Kant, 'has to be our invention, our most personal defence and
necessity: in any other sense it is merely a danger.'so
The thrust of this is clear but, once again, the doctrine is so
unfamiliar today that some enlargement is called for. Nietzsche
means that a public virtue with a public label (faith, hope, charity
and the rest) is actually harmful. Or at least, Kantian virtues and
the categorical imperative are harmful whenever they do not
spring from one's private necessity. A public virtue is a contradic-
tion in terms because a virtue belongs to one person only. Yeats
desiderated a group, a society, a nation of such 'virtuous' individ-
ualists, none of whom would seek to impose his own virtue upon
others but would be pleased (and perhaps also proud) to keep it to
himself. In Yeats there are no attractive evangelists and no one
wants others to imitate him. In 'Calvary' (1920) Yeats's Judas
betrays Christ just because he will not be possessed by the Lord;
likewise Lazarus is bitter because Christ has robbed him of his own
death, his 'right to die', as we might nowadays call it. Insofar as
God is the giver of specific laws (the commandments and the 'way'
of the Sermon on the Mount) Yeats wanted to be free of God. And
he wanted to be free of society as well, to the extent that
aristocrats, artists and individualistic persons used to be free. He
thought, with Nietzsche, that in modern times society has taken
over from the legislative God as the grand despot.
'Herd animals', as Nietzsche zoologically calls them, the imi-
tative ones, discover a lustreless kind of happiness in cultivating
general qualities. No doubt, to be fair, there are also moments of
euphoria in giving oneself over to the undifferentiated crowd.
However, the most noble sort of person, for whom Nietzsche
seeks, has the following characteristics:
... the feeling of heat in things that feel cold to everybody else;
the discovery of values for which no scales have been invented
yet; offering sacrifices on altars that are dedicated to an un-
known god; a courage without any desire for honours; a self-
sufficiency that overflows and gives to men and things. 51
The ultimate noble man is therefore a singular being in this exact

way. Approximating to him are such figures as Shakespeare's
Brutus and the historical Mirabeau. According to Nietzsche Brutus
is made of finer clay than Hamlet, since of all the characters in
Shakespeare he has the highest regard for 'independence of the
soul'. 52 'The height at which he [Shakespeare 1places Caesar is the
finest honour that he could bestow on BrutuS.'53 This Brutus kills
even such an outstanding man as Caesar for the sake of his soul's
independence. Such seems to be the most sought-after quality in
both Nietzsche and Yeats. And in Nietzsche at least, though in all
probability this is true of Yeats also, independence of the soul is
not simply given but is achieved, more or less strenuously.
Nietzsche remarks (and we shall need to make further references
to this interesting idea): 'What does your conscience say - "You shall
become the person you are".'54
Note that Nietzsche's conception of the conscience is completely
personal and is thus quite different from the theological con-
science, the Kantian conscience and the latter day 'social conscience'.
Everyone should heed his own conscience and become what he
alone is. There is no standard, no norm, except for members of the
multitude who desire above all to lose themselves. Spirit in the
Christian sense has normally assumed an impersonal, extrinsic
form: it has approached purity because it has approached abstrac-
tion. 'Once spirit was God,' says Nietzsche, 'then it became man,
and now it is even becoming mob.,55
Yeats's understanding was much the same. Both wanted to
know what might become of spirit in the future. For Yeats, who
was a complete conservative, spirit must sooner or later become
man again, as it was in the Renaissance and the eighteenth
century. To Nietzsche, the most thoroughgoing radical, it grew
plain that man's value is confined to his function as bridge to the
Ubermensch, who is not a new species, still less a repetition of the
variety 'great man', but homo sapiens with an entirely fresh
psychology .
3
Rilke' ~. Angels and the
Ubermensch
Whatever has died has not fallen out of the universe. If it lives
here, it changes here and is dissolved into its proper parts. These
are elements of the universe and of you. And when these change
they do not complain, so why should you?
Marcus Aurelius
A useful preliminary is to ask ourselves whether we are to will the

advent of the Ubermensch as a radiant newcomer to the earth or to
regard him as one who, in Nietzsche's own words, 'has existed
often enough already'. 1 But the context of that remark in The Anti-
Christ is an argument that the 'higher type' of man, the 'more
valuable type', has been ousted by Christianity. Nietzsche is
probably not talking specificially about the overman, who has
earlier been adumbrated in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and of whom
Zarathustra is the forerunner.
Walter Kaufmann assumes in the eleventh chapter of his
Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist that some historical
persons fall into the category of overman. Nevertheless, Zarathus-
tra tells his disciples, 'There has never yet been a Superman. I have
seen them both naked, the greatest and the smallest man. They are
still all-too-similar to one another. Truly, I found even the greatest
man - all-too-human!,2
Here is no ambiguity, yet in The Gay Science, published in 1882,
the year before the appearance of Parts One and Two of Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, Nietzsche refers to 'the invention of gods, heroes and
overmen of all kinds' ,3 meaning overmen imagined by our
forefathers. Why then does Zarathustra struggle so hard, and so
uniquely, to work out what manner of being the overman will be?
From the rapturous tones of Zarathustra and indeed from the
straightforward meaning of the text one would assume that no one
before Nietzsche had imagined the overman. 'Man is something
45
that should be overcome', says Zarathustra in his first public

speech, 4 and adds that man shall be a laughing stock to the
overman as the ape is to man.
Kaufmann nevertheless believes that we should not take too
seriously the assertion that the iibermensch has not lived as yet and
argues that he is the man who overcomes himself, as Goethe
overcame himself. Just the same, Nietzsche stresses in Ecce Homo
the sheer novelty and rarefied height of Thus spoke Zarathustra,
remarking 'that a Goethe, a Shakespeare, would be unable to
breathe even for a moment in this tremendous passion and
height.'s Nietzsche supposed that in Zarathustra he had thought on
a new plane, perceiving man's life and history from an utterly fresh
perspective. And that, of course, is the impression given by the
work itself.
The imagined overman rises above Caesar, Shakespeare and
Goethe not just in degree but absolutely. He rises above mythical
creatures as well, for they were the inventions of people who
sought consolation, explanation or aggrandisement. They - the
Titans, the Olympian deities and the monster-slaying heroes -
were, from one point of view, products of human weakness. From
another point of view they were agents of human survival and
development: it was necessary for our ancestors to think of
Prometheus so that they might now and then behave somewhat
Prometheanly.
It will be as well to mention here that Nietzsche never regards
the overman as necessarily more intelligent than present-day
human beings, since there is no question of a larger brain or a more
complex nervous system. On the contrary, as we shall later see, the
iibermensch has little need of specifically intellectual faculties and
indeed the learned man or, as such a figure appears in Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, the 'conscientious man of the spirit' is a sort of 'higher
man' whom Zarathustra leaves behind.
The height of the iibermensch above man must be assessed in
spiritual terms. The trouble is that our idea of spirituality is so
informed by Platonism and Christianity that it may seem hard to
think of a non-moral (or, as Nietzsche would say, 'moraline-free')
spiritual condition. Yet clearly the spirituality before Plato - in
Homer and Sappho, to take two obvious examples - had little to do
with altruism, justice or asceticism. By 'spiritual' I simply mean
connected with values transcending, though not excluding, the
brutish and material. The overman will be anything but a simple
Rilke's Angels and the Uberrnensch 47
brute and, though wonderfully higher than historical man, any-

thing but an angel too.
The overman is neither an inevitable next stage nor a creature to
be willed into being by an unconscious process, as Shaw's long-
living people are fostered in Back to Methuselah. 'Man is a rope',
says Zarathustra, 'fastened between animal and Superman - a rope
over an abyss.,6 So far the most remarkable people have been no
more than that rope but they have typically longed for the other
side of the abyss. These best people are 'higher men'. They are
'great despisers', giving of themselves in some fashion and
wishing to be surpassed. They appreciate that they and the rest of
mankind are inadequate. It is not that we are sinful in the eyes of
God the Father, frail in the eyes of Jesus or piteous in the eyes of
Mary, since the divine forms were themselves created out of our
inadequacy. Man, being the deficient creature that he is, found it
necessary to make a God in order both to judge and to justify
himself. Therefore the 'great despisers' despise from their own
perceptible vantage points and not through their dreams of a
heavenly perspective. The best literary illustration of a higher man
might well be Hamlet, as he, more than anyone else in his time or
earlier, disdained mankind from a largely secular position.
Being a great despiser does not mean being an inveterate sneerer
and mocker, for such a stance is petty and negative. The people
Zarathustra loves despise because 'they are the great venerators
and arrows of longing for the other bank'. 7 That is, they know that
man as rope over the abyss has no justification but to get to the
other side. The other side is no purer than the original animal side,
because the notion of purity was always just a mode of longing not
to be an animal at all. But the overman who will stand on that
farther bank will assuredly be an animal, for what else could he be?
At this point, when we have at least begun to discard some false
ideas about the overman, it would seem sensible to offer a positive
definition or description. However, such an offering must depend
upon our knowing what, in Nietzsche's view, is so wrong with
man that he needs to be overcome - not just improved but
overcome. After all, a widespread assumption at present is that
humanity should be pitied and treated with irony, though not
quite dismissed as hopeless. But Nietzsche foresaw this stage of
nihilism and knew that it could not last. Nothing lasts, and man's
inheritor, when he comes, must lack the weaknesses that have led
to the present impasse.
These weaknesses - again, in Nietzsche's view - are other than

the traditionally recognised ones: sins, social failings, absurdities
and irrationalities. Indeed the weaknesses may not be judged by
past criteria, because those criteria are part and parcel of the
problem. Our race took a certain direction and has naturally always
judged itself according to that direction. The overman will face the
other way, so to speak, not in the childish sense of 'evil be thou my
good' but rather in the sense, in Zarathustra's words, of wanting
'everything anew, everything eternal, everything chained, en-
twined together, everything in love'. 8 As we shall see, this
doctrine, or vision, is opposed to all idealism, all traditionalism and
all 'progress'. It is entirely original.
The way I propose to tackle this question is by first considering
not Nietzsche himself, but Rilke's Duino Elegies, because these
poems diagnose the malady in a distinctly Nietzschean fashion.
We shall proceed towards the iibermensch proper by grasping
something of Rilke's vision of humanity, to which his Angel and
Nietzsche's conception are twin alternatives. The former seems
meant to be unrealisable, while the latter is proposed (through
Zarathustra) as a future possibility, or indeed as a being who must
come because the dice are now so loaded in his favour.
It is true that over and above the natural differences of
personality and attitude between the two men, Rilke's elegiac
tones are foreign to Nietzsche's enterprise. It is also true that while
Nietzsche is constantly a 'genealogist', one who explains by
reference to growth and development, Rilke is not an explainer at
all and thinks only of lasting conditions. Nevertheless, Rilke is the
most philosophic of poets in the sense that no one else (not even
the Epicurean Lucretius and certainly not Pope) has focused his
attention so immediately and candidly upon the human situation
itself. What is man? What is he doing here? These are Rilke's
questions, or rather it is to these questions that he gives answers.
The answers are similar to Nietzsche's, as if to suggest that anyone
who refuses to set up ideals (man as heroic warrior, man as fallen
angel, man as rational being, man as humanitarian neighbour, or
even man as 'glory, jest and riddle of the world') must come to
certain conclusions. It is the ideals that vary far more than the
observable facts, even though the facts are scarcely 'objective' and
can be approached in countless different ways.
According to Walter Kaufmann Rilke had in common with
Nietzsche, first and foremost, 'his experience of his own historical
Rilke's Angels and the Ubermensch 49
situation'. 9 Both men felt cut off, unable to sustain themselves by

the values of the past or by those common dreams of the future
which are founded upon old values. In contrast, Marx fled into an
imaginary future, and Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky were men of
faith. Rilke and Nietzsche were alike, and perhaps alone, in seeing
little in human culture but fallacy. Second, arising from this
awareness of a historical dead end, Rilke like Nietzsche required a
'new honesty'.lD We are in an unprecedented position which
demands an unprecedented rejection of every discernible false-
hood. Consequently Rilke's work is, Nietzscheanly, a 'complete
repudiation of otherworldliness'. 11 There is no other world, even
as the future of this world. That future must be yet another
fantasy. Professor Kaufmann declares that 'Rilke accepts Zarathus-
tra's challenge to remain faithful to the earth', 12 meaning neither a
romanticised nor a scientific earth but merely the experienced
world around us - albeit experienced ecstatically. Next and, for us,
most important, the Angel of Rilke's Duino Elegies is 'the image or
incarnation of the accomplishment of our striving, and his features
thus merge with those of Nietzsche's Ubermensch'. 13 The goal of the
present chapter is to discover in what ways that is true. We must
work carefully towards the goal, discerning en route not simply the
features of Rilke's and Nietzsche's envisioned beings, but in
addition the historical circumstances to which those beings are, as
it were, 'solutions'. It is important to appreciate that unless one
sees man's failings as Nietzsche and Rilke saw them one cannot
apprehend the beings either. The beings are precisely what man
has never been. They are not, nevertheless, reactions to man but,
quite on the contrary, man as he would be if he himself were not
entirely formed of defensive reactions to his environment.
Two further items should be added to this brief summary of a
few of Kaufmann's observations. One is that he believes Rilke to
resemble Nietzsche in exhorting us to 'live dangerously'. 14 The
other is that he regards Rilke as weaker than Nietzsche, because
the poet lacked 'ultimate honesty with himself'. 15 I too find that
whenever there is a discrepancy between comparable attitudes of
Rilke and Nietzsche, it is the poet who goes under.
Rilke was scarcely a disciple of Nietzsche and the question of
influence is too obscure for sensible discussion. We know that
Rilke enthusiastically read Nietzsche. Further, from the age of
twenty-two onwards he was the intimate friend of Lou Andreas-
Salome, to whom Nietzsche had contemplated proposing in the
early eighties, when Rilke was a boy. Rilke met Lou in 1897, at
which time Nietzsche was insane and within three years of his
death. In Rilke's letters there are very few references to Nietzsche,
but one remark is worth noting: 'Nietzsche', he wrote to his wife,
'with whom we have all become slightly intoxicated, he [Hans
Larson, a poet] has taken as a medicine and grown healthier from
it.,J6 That is the most revealing of the few things we know by way
of documentary fact. Rilke was one of those who, by 1904, had
become 'slightly intoxicated' with Nietzsche.
The Duino Elegies were not written in consequence of that
intoxication, but heady draughts of Nietzsche had long been
Rilke's habit when he wrote the First Elegy in 1912. Rilke was
entirely himself, standing aside from Nietzsche and from everyone
else, yet he presumably felt that he and the philosopher were
looking to the same stark future, which would be either a void or
a new beginning. Rilke suddenly wrote the First Elegy in January
1912, when he was staying at the castle of Duino near Trieste, the
property of the Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe.
The first poem, opening as it does with a declaration of an
unbridgeable gulf between us and the Angels (they 'excel us in
action to exactly the same degree that God is more active above
them', Rilke commented in a letter 17), is the start of a magnificent
theme of man's lot, his attempts to overcome it and the impossibi-
lityof his ever doing so except, paradoxically, by welcoming it (amor
tati in the largest sense, or tragic joy). Man is between the Angels
and the animals; that is the whole explanation of his generic
destiny.
Familiar though this may sound so far, Rilke's Angels are not
insubstantial attendants of God but combine immensely heigh-
tened consciousness with the naturalness of animals. They are at
home in the world, as a wild animal is at home, but are also
comprehensively aware. They are perfected people, not in the
sense of purity but as a rose is a perfected rosebud. Unlike a rose,
however, they never wither and die. The being of each Angel is a
constant state of becoming: that is, Angels are always moving,
doing deeds, comprehending their surroundings, changing their
natures (which are indeed so protean as to be describable only in
general terms), but they never finally flourish or decay.
In one way it is seriously and even absurdly misleading to call
Rilke an idealist, since he regularly implies that all ideals are false.
Just the same, the Angels of the Elegies are themselves ideal,
inaccessible 'birds of the soul' (Second Elegy, line 2) whose health

defines our sickness. 18 Eventually the more we bear them in mind
the better we shall see ourselves, but we should proceed by
grasping Rilke's analysis of our limitations, punctuated by ever-
clearer glimpses of the Angels. For the moment let us just note that
the Angels are terrible to us because of what the poet calls their
'stronger existence' (First Elegy, line 4).
Below us, of course, are the animals. Yet the animals at least
belong unquestioningly to nature. We, on the other hand, inter-
pret the world: we have 'made' it or recreated it in our own image
through every branch of culture, and now, says Rilke, 'we don't
feel very securely at home/in this interpreted world' (lines 12-13).
The animals are aware of our uneasiness. We sense from the
watching eyes of a beast that it notices our unavoidable clumsiness
and instinctual failure. We blunder as a matter of course, unlike
lesser creatures, presumably because we regularly evade or try to
outstrip our instincts. No one is completely unselfconscious, but is
an animal ever remotely conscious of itself? Nietzsche makes some
apposite remarks in The Gay Science: 'Animals as critics - I fear that
the animals consider man as a being like themselves that has lost in
a most dangerous way its sound common sense; they consider him
the insane animal, the laughing animal, the weeping animal, the
miserable animal. d9
In addition, although objects are crudely apprehended by an
animal, at least they appear in a straightforward fashion: they are
good to eat; they cast a shadow; they are dangerous, and so on. But
there are very few immediate (unmediated) realities for us and
these are things encountered at random: for example, 'some tree on
a slope' (line 14) and, it seems, always that 'mild disenchantress',
the night (line 21). For although we do obviously interpret the
night, it contrives to defeat our interpretations.
People in love 'only conceal their lot' (line 21), and in fact love in
either a religious or a profane sense is no answer. We should
endlessly strive for a sense of merging ourselves with whatever
we perceive. But even this is a falsification of Rilke, for it is not a
matter of 'merging ourselves': who are we that we have anything
to contribute to the process? It is rather a matter of filling ourselves
with externalities. To Rilke one is, or ought to be, nothing except
an ability to receive the outside world, unimpaired and unrefined.
This is a creative, not a passive activity, and it is most creative
precisely when one's impression of the thing is freshly received. In
the same vein, our feelings should be of a piece with our

impressions and neither should be informed - which is to say
warped - by doctrine. For what we term the 'mind' is a ragbag that
confuses our original perceptions, with the result that we are
normally divorced from what we observe.
In Rilke's extraordinary opinion worldly happenings and objects
have need of us. Birds flying overhead, springtime each year, a
star, a wave, the noise of a violin through a window: each of these
is intrinsically incomplete. Our 'commission' is to make something
of all such items, but without prejudgement. Thus we are to make
of them what we already find them to be. An external thing is
completed when it is transformed from its visible state (or, in
general, its presence to the senses) into the invisibility of one's
mental assimilation of it. We consummate the thing, so to speak,
and that is our only proper function.
Rilke is possibly speaking of a process performed by wordless
infants. If so, his belief is similar to that of the Wordsworth of the
'Immortality Ode'. Unlike Wordsworth, however, he is signally
refusing to accept that 'soothing thoughts' must compensate us for
the loss of the capacity as we grow up. On the contrary, it remains
our Orphic role (unavoidable, though we have been avoiding it
these thousands of years) to make the world invisible. Even the
most remarkable people have failed to do this. The Hero lives his
life to a purpose, which coincides with his death. That is the
flowering of his deeds. So the Hero 'continues' after death, for
'even his setting/was a pretext for further existence, an ultimate
birth' (lines 40-1). That is admirably said, since a hero lives as
though impelled towards a particular death. The death gives him
a 'further existence', not just a story for posterity, since Rilke has
no use for stories as such, as 'mere' fictions; or for posterity.
Everything past and future, fact and fiction, is all one, or at least
these forms and dimensions endlessly flow together.
Another type of greatness is that of the great lover. Rilke's
example is Gaspara Stampa, a sixteenth-century Italian girl loved
and deserted by the Count Collatino di Colla to. (In Part Two of The
Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge she is mentioned as one of those
renowned female lovers whose 'laments have corne down to us'. 20)
Such love encompasses and outstrips its object, as an arrow
leaving a bowstring becomes 'something more than itself' (line 52).
Rilke's point is that 'staying is nowhere' (line 52), and the great
lover knows that the beloved is an occasion, not a terminus.
Rilke's Angels and the Obermensch 53
Nothing is a terminus, not even death. We should 'gently

remove' (line 65) the impression of injustice that comes to us when
we contemplate the youthfully dead. They have merely preceded
us on their way through the universe. We draw 'too sharp
distinctions' (line 80) between the living and the dead, for both are
simply part of the 'eternal torrent' (line 84). Here it will be seen that
Rilke is thinking of 'becoming' in Nietzsche's and Heraclitus'
sense: he is assuming, without argument or explanation, that there
is only unceasing motion and that no item in the stream may be
circumscribed as 'being'. Indeed, I am again misrepresenting Rilke
in speaking of distinct items.
The Second Elegy begins with a more elaborate account of the
Angels. From one point of view they are substantial beings,
because they constantly empty themselves into physical matter
and are just as constantly replenished thereby. I do not see how it
is possible to think of the Angels as divorced from matter, since
Rilke does not conceive of spirit apart from flesh. Nor does an
Angel have a character, as character is perforce limitation. Rather
an Angel has a multitude of natures and therefore no 'nature' in
the usual sense. The process of an Angel, or the process which
constitutes an Angel, is a never-ending expiration and inspiration,
outflow and inflow. We human beings are so much less because
we 'evaporate' (line 18). We diminish in the material sense that our
body cells are irreparably destroyed and we grow towards death.
The handsomest people deteriorate. Our selves (mind-bodies)
keep melting into our surroundings, hence into matter. Dust we
are and unto dust we shall return, but not with the qualification
that we shall be resurrected to eternal life through Christ. Rilke is
talking about eternal transformation rather than eternal life.
(Nietzsche's manner of saying something similar is impressive:
'The living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare
type.'21)
Lovers fancy that they confer eternity upon each other, that their
bodies are rendered Jasting through caresses. ('Eternity was in our
lips and eyes', as Cleopatra says.) Nevertheless lovers inexorably
change, or in other words slide away.
Lovers, are you the same? When you lift yourselves
up to each other's lips - drink unto drink:
oh, how strangely the drinker eludes his part!
(lines 63-5)
No one and nothing simply survives, not even the Platonic

Forms, which are, presumably, a set of words and a phase in
civilisation. (How strangely and comprehensively is Rilke an
elegist!)
There is something of Nietzsche's duality of Apollo and Diony-
sus in the Third Elegy. In a sense familiar to us through Freud and
Jung it is, says Rilke, 'One thing to sing the beloved, another alas!/
that hidden guilty river-god of the blood' (lines 1-2). The senti-
ments and social transactions of romance are conspicuous, while
beneath them seethes the gloomy god, Neptune, from whom the
love-songs ultimately derive. A youth is aroused by a girl, a
fledged and intricate individual, but she is just a focus for his
ferocious energies. Above the youth, watching over him, are the
women, his mother and his girl, while inwardly he harbours a
'night-space' (line 33). These women divert the 'floods of origin'
within him (line 46). The upper agents are female, the lower male.
The lower are more powerful by far and would be ghastly to
behold, if they were not softened and prettified by the female
agents. Paradoxically the youth is more attracted by the 'horror'
than by the emollient women: it smiles at him more 'tenderly' (line
62) and he loves his 'interior jungle' (line 53). The object of a
cherished girl should be to guide her youth 'close to the garden'
(line 84). Note: not 'into the garden'. He is an accumulation of
Caliban forebears and can at best be soothed, not spiritualised.
The failure of human instincts is crass and all but disastrous. We
fly against the wind or across it and alight grotesquely on ponds.
So Rilke says in effect at the opening of the Fourth Elegy. We are
never free from the knowledge of weakness, while a lion is either
splendidly alive or at death's door and there is no leonine middle
way. We do not even know the 'shape' of one of our own feelings,
'but only that which forms it from outside' (line 18). According to
Romano Guardini (whose study of the Elegies is rewarding, if
pervaded, and even vexed, by his Christian objections to so much
that the poet says) Rilke means in this reference to human feelings
that 'Our experience only reaches our consciousness from without,
namely through our proximity to whatever is alien or hostile to
US.'22 I stress this point because it will later be necessary to show
that Nietzsche's Ubermensch is characterised precisely by his lack of
such human reactive feelings. That is, his creative joy embraces
whatever would otherwise be experienced as alien or hostile. Rilke
is surely right to see that at least a high proportion of our feelings
are shaped by the hostile world. (He thinks this inevitable, while
Nietzsche thinks it surmountable.)
We are both audience and actors at our own theatre. As a
spectator each of us is dismayed by our own performance. One
appears on stage not as an adroit dancer but as a 'bourgeois' (line
24), a lumpish, dutiful fellow. Our deeds and thoughts amount to
inept role-playing. Even a doll or a puppet would seem preferable,
since it has no disjointed inner life.
Rilke addresses his dead father who used to find the boy's
nature bitterly displeasing. So far as Rilke was concerned, through-
out his life, people were half dolls and half living creatures, or
creatures with dolls' faces. Therefore a 'counterpoising angel' (line
55) was necessary to put them through their paces. Without the
Angels, Rilke thought, there would be no play, nothing to watch.
Only children and dying people lacked histrionic ways, and of
these two exemplary categories, the first was in a hurry to grow
up, or in other words to start posturing.
o hours of childhood,
hours when behind the figures there was more
than the mere past, and when what lay before us
was not the future!
(lines 65-8)
These interesting lines seem to mean that in childhood the 'figures'

(of people in general, but especially of adults) embodied entirely
personal pasts influencing present behaviour. The past in each
instance was not the 'mere past' but the dynamic presence of the
past in the present. Further, the immediately foreseeable future of
a child, or at any rate the future as the 'coming holiday' or the
'examinations next week', is a far cry from the insurable, pen-
sionable, drearily unspontaneous future of an adult. Thus the child
lives more or less in the present and is relatively free-wheeling,
relatively not a puppet.
The category of the dying is possibly easier to understand. What
Rilke means is a good part of the point of Tolstoy'S story 'The
Death of Ivan Ilyich', which is a study of a man's freeing himself
from theatricality and make-believe as he painfully dies. Life and
death are still much the same for a child: his moments, whatever
their qualities, are eternal. This means that each moment is neither
isolable nor a link in a chain. Moments flow together and are

eternal in the sense of 'timeless'. (Certainly we subject a moment to
the 'time of chronometers', as T. S. Eliot calls it in 'The Dry
Salvages', but time is not an intrinsic property of the moment.)
In the Fifth Elegy some street acrobats are described as a means
of qualifying social life in general. Leishman and Spender remark
that 'In many ways the acrobats, both in the exercise of their
profession and in their relationships with one another, seem to
Rilke symbolic of human activity as a whole.,23 Perhaps, however,
it is not so much a matter of symbolising as of focusing, because the
acrobats reveal what is usually hidden. Rilke's own metaphor is
precise: a performance by the acrobats at the centre of a period-
ically changing group of onlookers is the 'pistil' around which a
rose 'blooms and unblossoms' (line 21). Onlookers and performers
thus share in the same fake-organic process.
For four months in 1915 Rilke lived mthe Munich apartment of
an absent woman friend, Hertha Koenig, who owned Picasso's
picture Les Saltimbanques, which the poet called 'the loveliest of all
Picassos'.24 The painting is of six immobile figures against a vague
landscape and a light, cloudy sky. Years earlier Rilke had seen the
actual saltimbanques, and at the time of completing the Fifth Elegy
(in 1922, about a week after writing what is now the Tenth Elegy)
he told Lou Andreas-Salome that these particular acrobats 'affected
me so when I was first in Paris and have lain on me like a task ever
since'. 25
There is no very obvious relation between Rilke's account of a
performance by the saltimbanques and Picasso's artifically frozen
figures. The people in the poem are 'travellers' (line I), as we all
are, but slightly 'more fleeting than we ourselves' (line 2). In a
certain sense they 'caricature' us, though they have no intention of
caricaturing anyone. The effect is similar to that of glimpsing
oneself strutting or slouching past a shop window, for Rilke's
acrobats are seen, not coldly, but without the usual sort of cultural
veneer.
The performers themselves and the shifting spectators are
bored, but nobody realises as much. The cycle of a performance is a
'sham-fruit of boredom' (line 24). One pathetic fellow, big but
'shrivelled up in his massive hide' (line 29), beats a drum, since he
is now too old to do anything else. In contrast a young athletic man
does all the skilful tricks, and these (like much gymnasium work)
are both clever and, frankly, dull. In further contrast a boy
repeatedly climbs to the top of the group and repeatedly fails to

keep his balance, falling like an unripe fruit. Every time he falls he
is hurt, so that his feet tingle in anticipation well before they hit the
ground. Tears come into the boy's eyes but he is not aware of
them. He looks to his mother for consolation, yet she rarely
responds.
Then there is a girl of about twelve who is 'mutely elided/by all
the exquisite joys' (lines 65-6). Such joys pass her by, but she is so
busy remaining composed, practising less the appearance of
serenity than serenity itself, that she does not know what she is
missing. She wills herself to be a placid show-piece: what is there
to be unhappy about? The reality of these acrobats and the non-
acrobatic people they dismally entertain (by extension, all of us) is
camouflaged by the 'modiste Madam Lamort' (line 90), the death-
concealing trappings of social life. Rilke probably means every-
thing from fashion to the consolations of philosophy.
The alternative to this sheer inauthenticity (as we have com-
placently learned to call it) is at most a supposition, a 'place we
know nothing about' (line 96) where lovers act with consummate
skill and complete sincerity. They and their actions might, conceiv-
ably, coincide. And they might also be watched by a lively crowd
who finally throw down 'coins of happiness' (line 105). In this
situation there is no discrepancy between feeling and deed,
between the individual and the environment. This dream is one
illustration of Rilke's weakness in comparison with Nietzsche: the
dream is enticing, so Rilke entertains it for at least the space of a
closing stanza.
The Fifth Elegy expounds more graphically than the others how
Rilke habitually saw his fellow men. He observed ugliness,
pretence and self-maltreatment. This becomes plainer if one turns
for a moment to The Notebook of Malle Laurids Brigge and reads, for
example, the description of the waiting-room in the Saltpetriere.
Malte, representing the author, notices in detail the Zolaesque
frightfulness of the hospital, but does so without Zola's habitual
implication that such pain and fear should be rooted out. Nor is
Rilke like Kafka in finding comedy and horror in absurdity. On the
contrary, things are as they are, and there is not even a disguised
complaint from the author. Stephen Spender suggests that The
Notebook of Malle Laurids Brigge might well be called 'Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Neurotic (or, perhaps to update it further, as a
Young Existentialist)" 26 but the fact is that Rilke, however neurotic,
sees what is there, while the commoner sort of neurotic specifically

and morbidly fantasises.
The exceptionally short Sixth Elegy is interesting in relation to
Nietzsche, though its implications must be pursued, not here and
now, but later in this chapter and in Chapters 5 and 6. Fig trees,
says Rilke, scarcely flower at all, going almost straight to the
fruiting stage. Conversely, we human beings linger in the flower-
ing stage and then wake up one morning to find ourselves overripe
and ready to fall. Heroes are different. 'These go plunging ahead'
(line 18). Repeatedly the Hero 'takes himself off and enters the
changed constellation' (line 23). For long enough Samson's mother
was infertile, then she gave birth to him, the great one. He was a
Hero even in the womb, for it was there that he chose himself out
of the thousands of embryonic possibilities 'trying to be him' (line
35). He 'shattered columns' when he burst from his mother's body,
even more than when he brought down the house at Gaza. Such a
Hero smiles back at those who, loving him, would detain him.
No doubt we loiter through the phase of flowering, as Rilke says,
but so do many plants, if not animals. We postpone ripeness until
it is too late. Here Rilke must be referring to opportunities for self-
fulfilment, the historical accidents that make a meaning of one's
life, so that they do not seem accidents at all. On the other hand
Samson knew exactly when to destroy the Philistines and, further,
recognised at the same moment that such destruction was his
destiny. Thus the Hero plunges ahead towards his death (as Rilke
has already pointed out in the First Elegy).
Does the Hero choose himself in the womb and, if he does,
doesn't everyone? Rilke means that individuality begins in the
womb. Already one is oneself. Even if the individual later has a
road-to-Damascus conversion and consequently a distinctive des-
tiny, the seeds of that destiny were sown before birth. Not literally,
perhaps; this is not necessarily a genetic process, but a sort of
utterly unconscious self-selection takes place in the womb and the
baby is born as a particularised person. This will seem nonsense to
those who assume that character is the result of post-natal
conditioning, but Rilke believes, to the contrary, that such con-
ditioning generally obliterates original character.
Is it not likely that 'social pressures' instantly begin to deform the
new-born piece of originality, and that the Hero resists those
pressures? But why only the Hero, for Rilke himself was no Hero,
and neither were most creative spirits. Shakespeare does not seem
to have been heroic, yet he had a sense of his own fate that resisted
the influences and obligations of Stratford and sent him to London.
We must remember that 'fate' cannot be taken to mean a task
imposed on the individual, in the way of ancient myth, but is an
early act of self-will never renounced. From these brief remarks I
hope it may be felt that Rilke's belief is important, if not
unprecedented, but the message still needs a good deal of
cognitive (as opposed to poetic) refinement.
As for Nietzsche, we shall later see that he thought of the self as
a personality that lies ahead of the social character, a personality to
be achieved. At first sight, therefore, it seems that Nietzsche did not
regard the all-important self as pre-natal, but for all that he can
only have meant that the self must be distinguished from various
competing models. Certainly it is what is left when false, imitative
selves have been stripped away. And perhaps the seeds are
present in the womb. But how does one know the genuine from
the spurious? Nietzsche's answer is that one simply does know, at
any age, if a sprig of genuineness is still alive, for 'What does your
conscience say? - "You shall become the person you are".' 27 So one
reaches out for whatever the sprig will grow into. But the paradox
cannot be evaded: you have to strive to become what you initially
elected to be. In Rilke only the Hero can do this (and he has no
difficulty in so doing, whatever the incidental hardships of his
journey), while in Nietzsche the one who follows his own path is
merely an exception - a true' original'.
The first twenty-nine lines of the Seventh Elegy have a fresh and
rapturous tone. Up to now, throughout the Elegies, we might
have been tempted to conclude that Rilke was counselling us to
despise this life and 'be absolute for death'. But that is true only in
a most unusual way, namely that for Rilke death was neither a
meaningless negation, a cancelling-out, nor the gateway to another
world. He did not imagine the dead to be somehow 'not dead', as
in a child's picture of heaven or hell. On the contrary, Rilke
assumed that at death everyone is decomposed into chemical
substances and consciousness is naturally extinguished. Neverthe-
less to him death meant entry to another mode of existence. Not to
non-existence, but to a fuller existence from which consciousness
has excluded us. He regarded consciousness as a temporary gift,
and not much of a gift, since we use it largely to estrange ourselves
from nature, which is God.
Rilke was remarkable in this respect. He did not accept Jesus as
God but saw Him as a prophet who has actually taken us further
away from God. Rilke was a theistic anti-Christian, as he makes
plain in the famous 'Letter from a Young Worker' (written in
February 1922, but never addressed or sent to anyone, and
published posthumously). The letter asserts that Jesus was the
grand repudiator of the earth, of the sense, of life itself. (This, of
course, is Nietzsche's Christ as well.) Thus Jesus refutes Rilke's
God, who is nothing more or less or other than what we must
paradoxically call the 'spirit' of the material world. God is not
behind or above the universe but is the universe, in all its beauty
and destructiveness. It follows that man is included in the all-
embracing spirit of God and that the spirit is part and parcel of
materiality. Spirit and matter are not opposites; nor do they co-
exist but, contrary to our traditions, coincide.
If anyone asks how this can be, since spirit is defined as other
than matter, Rilke's implied response is that spirit is the human
significance of matter. The universe without man would presum-
ably be without spirit, but nevertheless man's spirit may only be
exercised in conjunction with matter. It is what we make of things,
and we make something of everything, however infertile it might
be. 'The whole of creation, I feel,' Rilke writes in the letter, 'says
this word [God] without thinking, if often out of profound
meditation.,28
What does this mean? What can it possibly mean? One who
wishes in a fit of literalness to deny that a tree or a cloud or a lump
of igneous rock 'says' anything at all must assume that Rilke
simply sees man as a creature of nature to whom, because he is
conscious, nature in a manner 'speaks'. Thus a tree expresses itself
to me, since I cannot, however hard I try, contemplate a meaning-
less tree - in other words, a 'voiceless' tree, a tree that utterly fails
to communicate with me. It is no good saying that my experience
of the tree excludes anything communicated by 'the tree itself':
there can be no such thing in my experience as the tree itself.
To Rilke man's consciousness separates him from what he is
conscious of. In looking at a tree I am too busy making up an
imaginary or conceptualised tree to see the tree. Conversely, Jesus
was one of those who have taught us to keep the world at a
distance, reminding us always of 'toil and distress' and insisting on
'redeeming' us from the mere necessities of life. 29 But God has no
use for a redeemer: God is the world from which Christ would
redeem us. Unfortunately it is only now and again that Rilke can
rapturously receive and venerate the actual. He does this at the

beginning of the Seventh Elegy. He continues by insisting that
when he 'calls' the lover, as he has just done, other girls also 'come
and gather' from their graves (line 32), since a love-call cannot in
practice be limited to one person, or even to living persons.
Destiny is no more than 'what's packed into childhood' (line 36).
This means that destiny is not a circumstance to which one travels
but an intensification of life at any time, though it is especially a
property of childhood. Samson's death at Gaza was, in general
terms, the sort of deed he had been doing all his life. It was
historically significant for the Israelites and for us, but Samson did
not think of his career as a mere preparation for that moment. So
the Hero hurtles towards his death, not as a distant prospect but as
an ever-present possibility. For most of us, however, the sense of
personal, continuous destiny is lost as we grow up, because we are
overwhelmed by social requirements and temptations.
Rilke now compares the early twentieth century with the past, to
the disadvantage of modern times. Once men built 'permanent'
houses, but now they build only 'invented' structures (line 53). It
seems that invention is just a mode or a product of the fancy and it
is unrelated to the natural sphere, with which we should fill
ourselves. The cathedral of Chartres, anything but an invention in
Rilke's sense, does not suffer much even in comparison with an
Angel.
But, for goodness' sake, Rilke hastens to add, 'Don't think that
I'm wooing!/AngeC even if I were, you'd never come .. .' (lines
86-7). The poet acknowledges that the intention of his poetry is,
humanly, to fend off the Angel. He is so busy keeping Angels at
bay that they cannot come nearer. An Angel, therefore, is not
omnipotent, or perhaps one should say that an Angel cannot
approach a man just as the omnipotent Christian God has no
access to the heart of a hardened sinner.
So far in the Elegies Rilke has assumed without much elaboration
that animals are at home in the world because they lack conscious
awareness of it. We, on the contrary, name things and so separate
ourselves from them. When a chimpanzee does human tricks or a
mynah bird speaks, neither has any idea of what it is doing. Only
an Angel both knows the world and is at one with it. Now, in the
Eighth Elegy, Rilke explores animal nature. An animal's eyes are
properly open, while ours entrap whatever they behold. A young
child, too, has some of an animal's openness but is quickly 'turned
round', as Rilke calls it, to the sphere of human codes. The animal
has no concepts and no symbols: therefore its eyes gaze blankly
and unimpededly at whatever is there. The eyes are blank because
they are not 'compromised', as one might say, by prior knowledge,
memory, understanding. And for the same reason they do
emphatically see.
. .. the free animal

has its decease perpetually behind it
and God in front, and when it moves, it moves
within eternity ...
(lines 10-13)
'God in front' means the uninterpreted quality of things, which the

animal faces. The reality of death is visible to an animal only now
and then. The rest of the time, when the animal is not confronted
by another's death, it is unaware of death and so 'has its decease
perpetually behind it'. Death is hidden from the animal's sight.
This is a favourable piece of ignorance since, when its time comes,
the animal simply and willingly dies. Death is thus properly part of
life and not a negation to be postponed or, as in the oldest of
human dreams, to be replaced by some sort of conscious post-
mortem existence.
Rilke is clearly implying that an animal's condition is, so far, part
of what we should try for. The animal observes the open world of
creation - endless, 'pointless' creation - and, as a corollary, has no
notion of time or the succession of moments. Each moment is
therefore 'eternal'. It is not apprehended by the animal as that
which follows something or leads up to something. It is not a link
in a chain and therefore lacks duration. The moment is eternal
because it is timeless. Equally important is the fact that to an
animal every moment is as important or valuable as every other
moment. There is no sense of superiority and subordination.
Consequently the animal lives in and for the moment, without
prudence or perception of pattern. To an animal there is no
pattern, while to human beings everything is patterned. Presum-
ably we make patterns, for they are not objectively present.
There is only chaos, not 'for all eternity' as if chaos stretched out
to the crack of doom (for there will never be a crack of doom
either), but because every instant is chance, despite its necessarily
following the preceding instant. Really there are two factors: every
instant is a pure piece of chance and also unavoidably necessary. It
was a piece of chance before it happened and a necessity
afterwards. From the animal's point of view there is no before and
after, anyway: there is only now. Therefore the now of every
moment is necessary and necessarily part of infinity. No part of
infinity is removable or replaceable, but each part falls into place
contributing to the all-embracing chaos. Rilke's attitude here seems
to me to resemble Nietzsche's. Both men saw the world as made
up of a huge number of colliding and interacting forces. There is no
design whatever, but even the tiniest event has its place. This is the
greatest paradox: all is chaos and yet every motion of the chaos is
linked in its exact form to the rest.
As it happens, Rilke implies, the animal is right about all this:
that is how matters are, despite the history of human thought. The
animal is right and doesn't know it; human beings are wrong and
do not know it, and only Angels are right and know they are right.
There is probably a close relation between Rilke's attitude here and
Nietzsche's thought of Eternal Return. The latter, though, is still
scarcely comprehended, for all the studies of the subject. That is as
it must be because Nietzsche himself did not expound the doctrine
clearly. To begin with, in August 1881, he received it as a sudden
insight, and thereafter he returned to it again and again, but never
cleared up the difficulties. In one of the best English studies of the
insight Joan Stambaugh remarks, Thus, the thought of eternal
return is schwer in the double sense of being extremely difficult and
hard to think out, as well as weighty and momentous.,30
Later in this chapter, as we contemplate the Ubermensch in
comparison with Rilke's Angels, we must consider Eternal Return
from one limited point of view, since the supreme creatures of both
the philosopher and the poet differ from man precisely in their
never-failing and (to us) miraculous grasp of eternity. Meanwhile
let us note that the animals, for all their lack of human follies,
convey a sense of sadness. This sense is, for once, not a product of
our falsifying imaginations. The sad-looking horse is sad, not of
course in the human way, but because it is never positively
happy. Frisking in the meadow it is not cheerful; dying it is not
sorrowful. It follows that, while animals do not make human errors
of judgement and their earth is the actual earth, their lives are
empty. They properly fill themselves with the environment but
cannot properly exult in doing so. They are dull, frigid creatures
who require to be charmed into significance by Orpheus. And who

is Orpheus? He is not a specific, mythological poet but rather a
general human capacity. For human beings must inescapably and
Orphically confer significance upon all creation.
That indeed is the theme of the Ninth Elegy, completed at Muzot
on 9 February 1922. RiIke asks and answers what one would
carelessly suppose to be an unanswerable question:
oh, why
have to be human, and, shunning Destiny,
long for Destiny
(lines 4-6)
Alternatively, why have to be non-human? Why live? The point is

that human beings, alone of all beings, absolutely must justify their
existence. The most incurable degenerate explains and justifies
himself somehow. No doubt his self-justification is preposterous,
but so is the self-justification of the hero, the artist and the saint.
We do not exist, says Rilke, for the sake of happiness, 'that
precipitate profit of imminent loss' (line 8). It does not seem that
Rilke means to deny the occurrence of joy, but to announce that
happiness in any form is conditional upon loss. It is what we
sometimes derive from transience; it is our way of profiting from
things that pass or, commercially speaking, it is the profit we take
before the business goes bankrupt. It is therefore a sort of illusion,
but the melancholic who cannot be thus deluded is no more of a
realist than the joyful person who can.
At any rate, happiness is not our raison d'etre and should not be
our goal. The destiny of everyone is to take in some fleeting
portion of the world. We are here and that fact can never be erased.
Our being here means, and means only, that certain events occur:
if I were not here the events that befall me would not befall
anyone. Even so elementary an experience as perceiving a tree is
unique to me, for no one else sees the tree as I do.
Nevertheless my private experience is publicly named, for we all
say 'tree'. We name things and so consummate them. That is all
being human amounts to. A house, for instance, exists in an
unrepeatable way because I perceive it and name it in an
unrepeatable moment. No matter that we all say 'house', for the
word is merely the public sign by means of which I suffer my
peculiar experience of the thing. The fact to hold on to, however, is

that my experience of the thing (my naming it) is what the thing
exists for. Without me the thing would be unexperienced, unex-
pressed and inconsequential. Rilke means that the earth is mean-
ingful and valuable only through each one of us alone. One life
cannot replace another, because things are rendered meaningful
only in singular, fleeting moments. Another moment, another
person, another meaning: there is no general meaning.
A more elementary account of human existence can scarcely be
imagined. What Rilke says is 'true', if anything is, and nothing
more than Rilke's assertions could ever be proved to be true.
Human beings are to be defined in terms neither of physiology nor
of superior consciousness, but as the value-conferring animals.
Alternatively, they give or perceive meaning. Of course the
constant temptation is to give false meanings, to idolatrise. Rilke
assumes that God is universal creation (not 'as a whole' but in
specific forms) and that God requires man to recognise and praise
Him.
From the complexities of the final elegy, the Tenth Elegy, there is
only one essential point for us to consider: that pain and death are
forever inescapable and, properly understood, are the entwined
roots of rich and satisfying life. Just as to Rilke death is a
metamorphosis rather than a negation, so pain and joy come from
neighbouring sources and are bound together. We, however, live
in the City of Pain, a place where pain is masked and unappreci-
ated. Leishman characterises our habitation as follows:
... that half-life from which death, and all that is mysterious and
inexplicable, is simply excluded; that life whose consolations are
provided by conventional religion, and whose activities are the
pursuit of happiness and the making of money; from which fear
and misery are banished by distractions, and where suffering is
regarded merely as an unfortunate accident. 31
The City of Pain is much the same as Bunyan's Vanity Fair,

except that now, in the twentieth century, there is more emphasis
on money. Having presented us with this fairground city (com-
plete with its fairground church) Rilke introduces us to a youth
who is drawn further and further away from the booths and
hoardings by a girl, a 'Lament'. She wears 'Pearls of Pain' (line 52)
and is, presumably for that very reason, alluring to the youth. She
takes him to a valley where he questions one of the older Laments.

This second woman explains that she is a member of a vast family
of suffering people whose line stretches back beyond the ancient
civilisations. The family of Laments used to be rich and continues
to be noble. Their forefathers worked mines in the mountains,
from which one may still recover a lump of 'polished original pain'
(line 59).
The older Lament now brings the youth to a distant gorge which
is the 'source of Joy' (line 99). She leaves him and he ascends alone
to the 'mountains of Primal Pain' (line 104). Primal Pain is
strikingly different from our modern mode of more-or-Iess trouble-
some living, and even indeed from extreme modern suffering,
because it is stark and undisguised. It is neither caused by events,
nor is it itself for the sake of some cause or other. It will not be
eliminated by future generations. It inexorably and permanently
and pointlessly is. Apart from this, the gorge whence issues the
stream of joy is in the foothills of the mountains of Primal Pain.
Rilke can only mean something to the effect that pain is fundamen-
tal, woven into the writhings and blossomings of every life-form.
We can minimise it only at a certain cost. That cost, it seems, is a
like moderation of joy, a turning of joy into mild pleasure and
spiritual infertility. For if great joy is what we sometimes feel in the
absence of pain, it remains consequent upon pain. Rilke does not
suggest that joy is simply relief, but rather that it is an intensifica-
tion of emotion that can occur only in a general condition of
heightened feelings, which condition naturally and perhaps
primarily includes pain.
Rilke's concluding remark is typically pointed and paradoxical, a
deliberate reversal of our normal assumptions.
And we, who think of ascending

happiness, then would feel
the emotion that almost startles
when happiness falls
(lines 110-13)
Happiness is a condition one receives rather than strives for. It is a

gift, here contemplated in the image of fertilising rain or hanging
catkins. Happiness is fertilisation and a passive, yet ecstatic,
welcoming of what the earth offers.
Rilke is truly elegiac. We all realise that life without death is

nonsense, but Rilke stresses that fact as no other modern poet
does, because unlike others he offers no Christian or progressionist
interpretation and does not fall back on either irony or helpless
pity. To him death is not regrettable, and certainly not what it is to
his commentator, Romano Guardini: a 'disgrace'. 'To be a person
at all implies personality - that is, self-possession and responsibili-
ty for one's actions in a unity of mind and body. The destruction of
this unity in death means ontological disgrace.'32 This position of
Guardini is the modern reversal or refutation of tragedy in a
nutshell. Here we have the core of modern Christianity and the
reason why even a sympathetic, learned exegetist cannot properly
appreciate that rare quality of Rilke: the rejection of any belief that
human beings have, or ought to have, powers that extricate them
from the toils of nature.
Now we can discuss the qualities of Rilke's Angels. An Angel lacks

the human weaknesses that are a large part of the matter of the
Duino Elegies. He is an imaginary and presumably unrealisable
being, whose being is, anyway, entirely composed of becoming.
However we should not think of Angels as protean, for that
suggests a changing of shape at will, capriciously. An Angel, on
the other hand, inevitably (and joyously) changes to accommodate
whatever portion of the world he is currently absorbing. He
masters the earth not by caprice or wizardry but by taking it as he
finds it.
He never-endingly 'takes in' the earth around him, then expels it
to take in some other fragment. So if he is an ideal to Rilke, he is, in
an unprecedented fashion, a 'realistic ideal'. For he never has
ideas about what he incorporates: that is to say, he never
subordinates a piece of materiality to an image of it. We, on the
contrary, give a thing a name and thereby seek to master it. It is no
longer an independent object (possibly housing a spirit, possibly
dangerous), since we have appropriated it. And we appropriate it
only by altering its nature, by falsifying it in some degree. But
Angels welcome their original, fearless impressions of things and
do not employ appropriative language.
Angels are supremely conscious, but this does not mean that
they use reasoning intelligence, which, to Rilke, is no more than a
means of humanising and falsifying things. An Angel is vastly

more aware than even the cleverest person and for that very
reason is not clever at all in the human way. The Angel does not
think, but acts, continually acts. Nor is the Angel spirit as distinct
from substance. He is the reverse, a shifting compound of material
things made 'invisible'. He may possibly be described as a 'spirit'
in a special sense, that is as one who readily makes material objects
invisible, willingly receives them and so completes them. Thus the
Angel is nothing if not natural. Or, if we decide to call him
'supernatural', we must remember that this means he comple-
ments rather than controls the natural sphere.
At first sight it might seem that an Angel has no personality
because he is so changeable and accommodating, but if we imagine
him as possessing unlimited negative capability, then no doubt he
has personality. We do not think of Shakespeare as having less
personality than Wordsworth because he had more negative
capability. Angels are different in kind, but Rilke evidently thought
of every Angel as distinguished from his fellows. We are forced to
assume that the Angelic capacity to ingest the external world
unimpaired does not mean that Angels receive things 'objectively'.
In fact each Angel forms, or is composed of, his own characteristic
impressions, but these impressions are not coloured by wishes or
fears. The Angel knows no wishes or fears. He is afraid of nothing
and accepts everything. Thus an Angel is malleable, not in the
least rigid, but is nevertheless singular. He is himself, which
automatically means that he is not an accommodating social entity.
Above all, and finally, the Angels are continually in touch with
eternity. There is no line, no ascent or descent, no forwards or
backwards, no circle or cycle, no 'progress' in the modem sense,
no history, no beginning or end. Each instant is rich and, so one
could guess, without sensible duration. Certainly its duration is
not reckoned by the Angel. It seems also that the meaning of a
moment is not influenced by reference to traditional patterns or to
fashions. For the Angel, who consummates the meaning of the
moment, is constantly creative. He does not try to match each
moment to an historical pattern, although he knows, as no
ordinary human being knows, that the nature of a passing event
depends upon its exact place in a cosmic complex of events. All this
means that the Angel is free to 'play with' the moment creatively.
He shapes it even as he respects its given nature. He does not
make it a reflection of his ego, since he has no ego. In fact he is
Rilke's Angels and the Uberrnensch 69
empty and so shapes the moment disinterestedly, purely for the

sake of creation.
Perhaps it will be helpful for us to think about Shakespeare.
Shakespeare respected his source but did not feel bound by it to
the extent of rubbing the shine off his creation, the play. Plutarch
related that Antony and Cleopatra did such and such: very well, so
they do in Shakespeare's play, but only on condition that the
poetry and drama are not thereby marred. Nevertheless, Shake-
speare does not make an Antony and Cleopatra to suit his private
preferences, to advance a cause or even to fit a general moral
scheme. They are in Shakespeare pretty much what they are in
Plutarch. An Angel does this sort of thing and far, far more.
Likewise Michelangelo fashions a David who - except for his size,
itself 'heroic' - is conceivably, or even recognisably, the David of
the Bible, but is a new creation just the same. Can the Angel, then,
be imagined as a miraculously enhanced classical artist? I think he
can in part and am sure that, at all events, he is not a crusading or
resentful artist.
These are the ways in which a Rilkean Angel resembles
Nietzsche's Ubermensch. Both gladly play with the given world.
Neither wishes to hurt anyone, although the Angel, at least, is not
concerned if he does. Possibly the Ubermensch will feel concern at
times, for the last part of Zarathustra is not clear on this point.
Neither is a 'legislator of the world', in Shelley's phrase, because
their actions do not embody laws, even for themselves. There are
no laws; or, rather, there is one all-embracing fact which we
normal human beings might take to be a law, namely that the
world is as it is. So, far from being ones who try to alter the nature
of things, Rilke's and Nietzsche's alternatives to existing and
historical humanity recreate the world according to its unalterable
qualities. To offer the most striking illustration, every living thing
goes through a metamorphosis which we call 'death': therefore
neither Angel nor Ubermensch imagines a deathless world, a
paradise. The vital distinction between the two is that the Angel is
a fantasy and the Ubermensch a prophecy.
To some extent I am attributing characteristics to the Angels
which Rilke does not mention. But these are characteristics an
Angel must have in order to be a counterweight to man, as Rilke
portrays man. Throughout the Elegies Rilke's diagnosis (or com-
plaint) has been that people fail to empty themselves of egotism
and cultural prejudices; that they reject or falsify nature; that they
wear dolls' faces instead of their own; that they are time-ridden;
and, above all, that they fear death. Angels, then, are or do the
reverse of these things. Even the Rilkean Hero is no more than the
best kind of human being, yet he falls far short of an Angel. We are
all exhorted to 'fling the emptiness' out of our arms (First Elegy,
line 22) so that some external thing might flow in. We should carry
out our commission whenever we perceive, for instance, a star; we
should let ourselves meet the world unshielded and, when
necessary, slip away from life.
Early successes, favourites of fond Creation,

ranges, summits, dawn-red ridges
of all forthbringing, - pollen of blossoming godhead,
junctures of light, corridors, stairways, thrones,
chambers of essence, shields of felicity, tumults
of stormily-rapturous feeling, and suddenly, separate,
mirrors, drawing up again their own
outstreamed beauty into their own faces.
(Second Elegy, lines 10-18)
That is a description of the Angels and their exalted way which we

cannot hope to follow, but bearing Angels in mind presumably
gives us the best perspective on our lives.
Nietzsche's overman is the answer to man whom Zarathustra

hopes to herald. John the Baptist heralded the Saviour before he
knew what (not simply who but what) the Saviour would be.
Nietzsche, through Zarathustra, needs to work out what the
iibermensch will be. Doing this will help the man-above-men to
materialise. Thus Spoke Zarathustra portrays Zarathustra's dawning
appreciation of iibermensch-qualities. Nietzsche himself is crystal-
lising his awareness of these qualities as he goes along, though the
process is not laborious but ecstatic. (Nietzsche told Georg Brandes
that when writing the book he had been in a 'perfect condition of
one who is "inspired" .,33)
Towards the end of the work Zarathustra is confronted, one by
one, with the weaknesses in the best men, the 'higher men'. In
Part Four of Thus Spoke Zarathustra this mightiest of prophets
encounters a lesser prophet who is himself a higher man. The latter

speaks of the 'great weariness' and teaches that 'It is all one,
nothing is worth while, the world is without meaning, knowledge
chokes.,34 This prophet aims to seduce Zarathustra to pity for the
higher men and soon Zarathustra manages to hear a cry of distress
from the abysses near his mountain cave. This means that higher
men (as opposed to the crowd or, as Nietzsche prefers to say, the
'mob') are now, in the modern period, desolate and might well
excite pity.
What the prophet says is 'true'. Everything is illusion. The
prophet, who probably resembles Schopenhauer, wants
Zarathustra to accept nihilism in its most complete form and
merely sympathise with certain exceptional beings who have
actively sought a life of value. The prophet thus preys upon the last
infirmity of Zarathustra's noble mind, a temptation to pity higher
men. But such a course of action - or, rather, of torpor - will not
do: it is the world ending with a whimper. Zarathustra must
continue to accept that all is illusion but may be given value by acts
of zestful creation. We cannot wait for value to descend again from
heaven, for there is no heaven, no 'back world' as Nietzsche calls
it.
The overman will not react against what he observes, will not
make things in his own image, 'purify' them or confer spirituality
upon them in the Platonic or neo-Platonic fashion. These are the
all-too-human ways that our race has followed and they are
obsolescent now. As a matter of fact Zarathustra started in Part
One fully aware of the death of God and consequently of nihilism,
but he has still been surprised now and then by the ignorance and
cowardice of others. Throughout Zarathustra he learns as he
teaches.
At this point it is possible that someone will believe, as the
Nietzsche critic F. A. Lea has believed, that Nietzsche's doctrine
may be reconciled up to a point with the gospels. 35 Nietzsche was
convinced, on the contrary, that Jesus, in filling the world with His
love, ignored realities. Jesus simply, if uniquely, replaced reality by
His love. Thus he did not distinguish the qualities of people and
things: all were weak and lovable. Nietzsche believed that Jesus
initially found the world so intolerably vile that he was constrained
to replace it by 'a merely "inner" world, a "real" world, an
IIeternal" world ... liThe kingdom of God is within you . . ." , . 36 The
overman will be the supreme Antichrist because he will gladly give
everything its due. Hostility, for instance, will remain hostility in

his eyes. The aggressor will remain an aggressor and not be robbed
of his aggression by the spirit of love.
Shortly after leaving the prophet, Zarathustra meets two kings
driving before them a laden ass. The kings are the principle of
social hierarchy and the belief in customary morality. They
represent nobility in the sense of high rank and honourable ways
as opposed to social climbing, money-making and other such
pursuits of the rabble. Zarathustra finds the kings amusing and
artless in their futile contempt for democratic assumptions. How-
ever, they are undoubtedly higher men, since they desiderate a
noble society and quite accurately perceive some of the faults of
our time. (Here, it will be appreciated, is a marked difference
between Nietzsche and Yeats, for the latter, as we have seen, was a
venerator of the highborn. Lady Gregory was 'regal' in this
outmoded fashion.) Earlier the prophet rather cheekily announced
that he would make his way to Zarathustra's cave and await
Zarathustra's return at the end of the day. Now Zarathustra invites
the kings, together with their ass (whose significance we shall later
discuss), to wait for him in the same place, and this they are eager
to do.
As the wanderer goes on his way he accidentally treads on a man
lying camouflaged on the swampy ground. This is the 'man with
the leeches' or, preferably, the 'conscientious man of the spirit'.
'Better to know nothing than half-know many things', he de-
clares. 37 He is an impartial, scientific truth-seeker. The trouble with
him is that he sacrifices his life for the sake of objective truth, never
realising that such truth is only a perspective. Hence the leeches,
which suck away his life-blood. Nevertheless this conscientious
fellow is another higher man, for he despises propaganda,
partiality, slipshod work and other barriers to science. He too
stands above the mob, for all his grovelling in the mud, and is
accordingly invited to Zarathustra's cave.
The sorcerer whom Zarathustra next encounters is, qua higher
man, something of a puzzle at first. He wails at length about the
torments that afflict him and calls God the 'cruellest huntsman'
and the 'Hangman-god'. 38 Zarathustra is understandably dis-
gusted with this man, but shortly comes to realise that the man
seeks greatness by feigning pains he does not feel (which
Nietzsche, after his earlier hero-worship of Wagner, came to
believe to be Wagner's procedure). The sorcerer equates a certain
brand of suffering with greatness and does not appreciate that

while suffering is unavoidable it is, so to speak, 'nothing to boast
of'. To be miserable even in a good cause, as a martyr may be, is
not in itself a mark of greatness. And indeed 'greatness', according
to Zarathustra, is passe as a concept.
Just the same, the sorcerer most earnestly wishes to be regarded
as 'great': he fakes greatness because he is enough of a higher man
to wish to be great. Gilles Deleuze, in his exceptionally illuminat-
ing Nietzsche and Philosophy, says that the sorcerer is the 'falsely
tragic one', 39 which he evidently is, but for him to want to be tragic
or to want to be thought tragic is a promising sign. At least it
removes him from the mob, and one quality these higher men have
in common is contempt for mediocrity and a longing for man to be
surpassed. The sorcerer eventually confesses his spuriousness and
says he also seeks Zarathustra. Consequently the sorcerer, too, is
invited to the cave.
A man with a haggard face whom Zarathustra now finds sitting
beside the path is the old pope who knows that God is dead but
cannot let Him depart. It has always puzzled the old pope that God
both loved man and judged him, for that is an impossible
confluence of attitudes. It is no good our saying that by definition
God can do it, since that means we must believe in an unbelievable
God. The old pope has witnessed the whole process of Christianity
from its beginning to the present day, and cannot shake it off. This
man genuinely loved God, while the multitude merely pretended
to do so or followed one another like cattle. Nevertheless the pope
knows that a perfect God of love would perforce love 'beyond
reward and punishment'. 40
Towards the end of the great cycle of the Church the old pope
grew disillusioned with Christianity, but did so as a loyal old
retainer grows disillusioned with his master. It is his virtue as a
higher man that he still needs a master and he accepts Zarathustra
in this role, since Zarathustra is the most pious and godly of men.
This is the point: Zarathustra wants the overman because he is too
godly to be satisfied with man.
Zarathustra next enters the barren valley called 'Serpent's Death'
where dwells an abominable man so ugly that Zarathustra is
ashamed to look at him. This, the ugliest man, is the murderer of
God, who now suffers unendurably not from the hatred of men
but from their pity. However, he knows that pity is a vice, not a
virtue: it is 'contrary to modesty'. 41 This monster of ugliness killed
God because God saw into his best-concealed corners, observed all
his disgusting ways. So the man put himself in God's place and
now hates himself as much as ever, because he knows that he is
not remotely worthy of the place of God. Naturally he too seeks
Zarathustra and consequently the overman who will relieve his
guilt.
Shortly afterwards Zarathustra beholds a herd of cows in the
midst of which, addressing the beasts, is the voluntary beggar. 'If
we do not alter and become as cows,' declares this man, 'we shall
not enter into the kingdom of heaven. ,42 Even this amiable idiot is a
higher man, and not such an idiot either, for the antecedent of his
belief was that he sought the kingdom of heaven on earth among
the poor, only to find the poor no better than the rich. He is a
Tolstoyan figure who has turned away from mankind altogether
and now finds some solace among the innocent cows because they
are at least incapable of greed, malice and pride.
Zarathustra seems to have met a fair variety of higher men,
perhaps all the main types that manifest themselves in our time,
but there is one remaining: his own shadow. The shadow may be
thought of as a caricature of Zarathustra, or as his weakness. The
shadow says, like Ivan Karamazov, 'Nothing is true, everything is
permitted.,43 He is roughly what some even quite thoughtful
people still think Nietzsche meant by the overman: that is, a non-
moral exploiter and mocker of his fellows. Yet this shadow is far
from cheerful and the truth is that he is so composed of doubt that
he has lost his function and goal. He doubts that he will ever find a
function again. He is free to the point of emptiness. Zarathustra
has the most imeortant purpose of envisaging and preparing the
ground for the Ubermensch. Consequently the shadow, likewise,
ought never to doubt that mankind will be superseded.
Finally in this catalogue of higher men we should return to the
ass which the two kings drive before them, since this animal too is
a caricature, not of Zarathustra but of the overman himself. The ass
is this because it says 'Yes', or rather 'Ye-a', to everything. To
understand the matter we must grasp what is essentially wrong
with all the higher men and therefore (it goes without saying) with
everyone else, everyone lower and undistinguished. What is
wrong, in a word, is that they all see life as a sphere to be solved and
mastered. They, like all the rest, want to be 'spared', says Zarathus-
tra,44 meaning that their attitudes are nostrums. They want to
'correct' life in order to match it to their own misshapen souls. That
is why Zarathustra tells them (in a kindly enough fashion) 'And

there is hidden mob in you too'. 45
Even these higher men, striving with all their might to be heroes
of culture, science or religion, are convinced that they or their
progeny might, as it were, come out on top, having disciplined the
world or distanced themselves from it. They are desperate now, it
is true, and hence their delight when Zarathustra arrives. He will
surely have the answer. But Zarathustra's answer is different from
what any of them expected. From section eleven, 'The Greeting', to
the penultimate section Zarathustra utters his final message to the
higher men. Finally, in section twenty, 'The Sign', Zarathustra
declares (to himself) that his day, his phase of the world, is
beginning. A few elements of Zarathustra's discourse should be
mentioned here, for they show how the projected iibermensch
resembles Rilke's Angels.
Following Zarathustra a new breed of men, 'laughing lions', will
come at some stage. Presumably these will be precursors of the
overman and indicate what manner of individual he will be. A
laughing lion is a man as natural and instinctual as a lion, who also
treats everything, death included, joyfully. His laughter will be
euphoric, not sneering, or when there is mockery, it will be
entirely good-natured.
So Rilke's assumptions about animals, that they have 'God in
front' and 'decease perpetually behind', apply to the overman as
well. A lion is never afraid, one assumes, and is never joyful either,
but the overman will combine fearlessness and joy. He will have
the utter 'belongingness' of a lion in its habitat and Olympian
playfulness into the bargain. The overman will in this way surpass
not just our evasive modern ways, but even the sphere of tragedy
as we encounter it in the ancients. He will be Dionysian: that is,
one possessed of tragic joy. He will delight in tragic reality, delight
in the given world, whereas even the grimmest of dramatic
tragedies is a mode of 'making the best of things', a mode of solace.
To proceed from our present plight towards the advent of the
overman, the higher men must acknowledge the abyss of nihilism
and 'master it with pride', says Zarathustra. They must be
prepared for great suffering and be honest at all costs. More
important still, the higher men must shake off the 'spirit of
gravity' which has beset their kind down the centuries and learn
to 'dance': that is, to move physically and mentally in a sprightly
manner. They must similarly learn to play with reality as though it
were a game of dice; to be happy, uncaring gamblers.

There are possible misunderstandings, of course, one of which is
typically the ass's error. The ass says 'Ye-a' to everything, which
sounds admirably affirmative. But it is vital to say 'No' to some
things, for example the things the higher men have always stood
for: solemn striving, self-betterment, the ennobling effects of
suffering, idolatries of all kinds. So the overman will be supremely
but not universally affirmative. He will affirm everything natural
but turn aside from consolatory attitudes, including tragedy when
its ulterior motive is consolation. Another mistake is to assume that
the higher men must abjure science. On the contrary, science at its
best, its most purely empirical, is precisely not a form of consola-
tion but a way in which man's courage conquers his fears. Science
proper, devoted to nothing but knowledge, is vital, not because it
is 'objective' but because it is courageous.
At the conclusion of these 'lectures' by Zarathustra the ugliest
man declares: 'I am content for the first time to have lived my
whole life.,46 He continues by saying that now he is willing not
only to die but to live his entire wretched life over again. At least
for the moment he wills eternal return, or comes near to doing so.
As I have mentioned earlier, we cannot here begin to do justice to
the thought of eternal return, but for the purpose of comparing
Rilke with Nietzsche we must bring into focus a view of human life
which is at once a rough approximation to Nietzsche's insight and
the way of the Angels. (The overman should be defined simply as
the one who will live in the sure knowledge of eternal return.)
We ourselves stand in the moment, in every moment. The right
manner of life is not to try to stand aside from the moment
spectatorially but to take possession of the moment enthusiastical-
ly. The moment means the exact instant, not the general historical
phase, though an infinity of past time, including what we classify
and interpret as 'history', bears down upon each of us in the
present. This has always been man's case, but never has he
managed to face the instant without taking revenge for past griefs
and humiliations. However, says Nietzsche, we cannot actually
'will backwards', or compensate in the present for old pains.
Attempts at such compensation constitute all history and culture,
for we have constantly tried to alter the past by our present
(supposedly forward-looking) activities.
In Part Three of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in the section called 'Of
the Vision and the Riddle', Zarathustra fancies he sees a young
shepherd writhing on the ground with a black snake hanging out

of his mouth. The snake is the past which is choking the shepherd.
Zarathustra cries out that the shepherd must bite off the snake's
head, and this the shepherd does, to rise up no longer a mere man
but a transformed, ecstatic being. We should aim to do likewise, or
rather we should do it, at once. The past is not to be disowned,
forgotten or palliated, for these are the procedures that choke us.
On the contrary, the past must be wholly accepted, not just as that
which happened but as that which we willed to happen. For unless
we welcome the past (however hideous and however far removed
from our personal liabilities it might be) we cannot welcome the
present. The present, whatever it is, is a consequence of the past,
all the past, including the repulsive parts. (Of course this is another
kind of 'willing backwards', but a healthy kind.)
The black snake causing our convulsions is the guilt-ridden and
vengeful presence of the past in the present. If we wholly accepted
the past we could concentrate on creating the present afresh. Note:
the past would not then have been cast aside; it would still be
within us, as the headless body of the snake is within the
shepherd. This is not a doctrine of wiping the slate. It is a doctrine
of ceasing to feel either guilty or injured - even if we are 'guilty' or
injured (as we obviously may be in a technical sense). Neverthe-
less, feeling guilty is also a way of clinging to the past, it is
unadventurous and asphyxiating too. The new way that Nietzsche
is recommending would not be 'happy', in the sense of painless,
and indeed to dream of a painless future is just consolatory. The
new way would be joyful and painful and, above all, tragic in the
fullest sense, the sense in which man is rooted to the earth.
Insofar as this is eternal return Nietzsche means that man in
such a guiltless, tragic, joyful spirit would be so in love with all
vicissitudes (not fighting off the disagreeable ones) that he would
make each moment afresh. Thus what would eternally return
would be an unprecedented sort of positive creativity. (Up to now
our procedures have been at best reactively creative or at worst
mere slavish habit.) Therefore in such an admirable condition man
would make a truly fresh future rather than a future which seeks to
make up for the past and so drearily repeats the past. The point is
that the future is bound to be a consequence of the past in any case,
for, as Heidegger puts it:
If you allow your existence to drift in timorousness and

ignorance, with all the consequences these things have, then

they will come again, and they will be that which already was.
And if on the contrary you shape something supreme out of the
next moment, as out of every moment, and if you note well and
retain the consequences, then this moment will come again and
will have been what already was. 47
These words suggest to us the modus vivendi of both Rilke's

Angels and the overman. Nevertheless there is an important
difference between the two. If we accept the sequence prehistory,
history and post-history, the overman will belong to the last.
Angels, however, stand apart from history altogether and so differ
from the overman even as they resemble him.
4
Mann: Beyond Good and
Evil
The greatest souls are capable of the greatest vices, as well as the
greatest virtues.
Descartes
In Mann's The Tales of Jacob, the first volume of Joseph and His
Brothers, God is expressly regarded as beyond good and evil. The
Prelude, 'Descent into Hell', is an account of biblical cosmology
according to which, Mann states, there were in the beginning God
Himself, soul and matter. Soul was the 'primevally human', and so
for the purpose of reading the Joseph novels rightly we should
imagine that some indescribable sort of human potential, some
'human stuff', existed before any species of plant or creature. Soul
came to wish to impart form to matter, which was originally
formless: 'the earth was without form and void', as we are told in
Genesis. But the efforts of soul were futile until God sent spirit to
act as soul's artificer and champion.
Now the sending of spirit was hotly opposed by God's entour-
age, the angels. They were hostile to God's creative plans, which is
as much as to say that the angels, being immaculate, were hostile
to creativity itself. That is the point: the purely good do not create
and the act of creation is a worldly, as distinct from a heavenly,
process. Creating means 'doing evil', as we say, for it is no more
than a mode of living, in other words sinning. But the finished
condition of angelic goodness is inevitably non-creative. For
perfect goodness does not become or grow: it simply is, and is
therefore altogether apart from existence and alien to worldly man.
Even so, God rises above goodness, even as he rises above sin.
God made our world for a purpose:
He created the world; that is to say, by way of assisting the
primitive human being He brought forth solid and permanent
forms, in order that the soul might gratify physical desires upon
these and engender man. 1
79
Truly our place is not this world, for we belong with God, yet since
we are here we ought at best to create. To create is not to escape
from evil, but to do evil, and in the final analysis there is no better
human alternative. God knows that we create as part of our
worldly inheritance, though creation is distinct from goodness and
opposed to it. Only God creates without sin, because God towers
above sin. He is not simply good but soars over moral distinctions.
When we fight against sin God Himself is not involved in the
combat, for, after all, sin is merely our condition. In the eyes of
God our world is a lively drama of good and bad and death, but it
is not the be-all and end-all.
Mann emphasises that God Himself is the All.
He was not the Good, but the All. And He was holy! Holy not
because of goodness, but of life and excess of life; holy in majesty
and terror, sinister, dangerous, and deadly, so that an omission,
an error, the smallest negligence in one's bearing to Him, might
have frightful consequences. 2
This is, certainly, the God of Abraham, but if we remark that God's
countenance changes in the course of the Bible and is far kindlier
after the birth of Jesus, we might also appreciate that God remains
the All and wears a different face according to the creative will of
each inventive (and pious) generation.
According to Mann the Fall was not a decline into sin but a
sudden access of consciousness. Most important, the Fall was not
contrary to the will of God.
We can, objectively considered, speak of a 'Fall' of the soul of the

primeval light-man, only by over-emphasising the moral factor.
The soul, certainly, has sinned against itself, frivolously sacri-
ficing its original blissful and peaceful state - but not against God
in the sense of offending any prohibition of His in its passional
enterprise, for such a prohibition, at least according to the
doctrine we have received, was not issued. 3
Sin is therefore harmful to the soul but not 'against God'. Our
human sense of sin is a means (and hitherto the principal means)
of giving meaning to our lives. To give meaning is an enterprise
peculiar to man and constitutive of man (compare Rilke) in which
God has assisted us down the ages. It follows that God transcends
Mann: Beyond Good and Evil 81
good and evil, for they are no more than elements in the drama He
has set in motion.
But what is good and what is evil depends upon the creative
spirit of the age. This is not 'moral relativism', to use the
fashionable phrase, and by definition it is not nihilistic. In Mann's
presentation the heroes of the Old Testament are heroes because
they give new shapes to goodness and wickedness. Jacob and
Joseph both work, or live, in a quasi-artistic manner to effect
changes in notions of morality. Each is creative. To 'create' does
not mean to devise in order to gratify one's whims but to reach out,
in defiance of distractions, towards a vague and private goal. That
is exactly the way of Jacob and Joseph.
For example, Joseph resists the conspicuous charms of
Potiphar's wife. He regards her as taboo, not because she is
married (to a eunuch, after all) but for a number of other reasons,
and he would think himself lost if he yielded to her. Potiphar's
wife, Mut-em-enet, is a painted, perfumed aristocrat, fawned upon
since childhood by slaves and lesser concubines. Endlessly she
attends to her smooth brown skin, her shining nails and her
artificially bright eyes. She also lusts after Joseph, her husband's
steward, with all the morbid passion of her ultra-sensual, prison-
house world.
The story of Joseph's time in Potiphar's house takes up Chapters
4 to 6 of Joseph in Egypt (the third volume) and Mut's pursuit of him
takes up chapter 6, entitled 'the Smitten One'. She is one of Mann's
best realised characters, who seems to us scarcely wicked but,
rather, ill-starred and degenerative, as Mann implies in the
Foreword of 1948 when he speaks of his 'humanisation' of
Potiphar's wife. Frenziedly she has Joseph thrown into prison after
he has torn himself away from her clutches, but even this is
understandable.
In fact Joseph rejects Mut for seven reasons which Mann
recounts in the chapter 'Of Joseph's Chastity'. To summarise:
Joseph's celebrated chastity is compounded of his sense of betro-
thal to God, his loyalty to Jacob and a spiritual reaction against that
association of dissoluteness and death which seems to him
peculiarly Egyptian. Joseph's God is of the spirit and will be
betrayed if Joseph makes love to Potiphar's wife. Joseph thinks of
himself as a chosen being, a man with a distinct destiny which
somehow involves a reunion with Jacob. Joseph constantly waits,
or even expects, to return home and thus incidentally helps to
mould the history of all the Israelites. The fate of Israel crystallises
around his personal desires. He never tells himself in so many
words that his fate and that of his people are bound together, but
his yearning for Jacob is in its effects a racial yearning. Joseph
fulfils himself by working his way home to his people, and in so
doing he consolidates the identity and history of his race.
Joseph thus says 'No' to Egyptian death and 'Yes' to Jewish life.
That is why he rejects Mut: she would detain and compromise him
utterly. So we gather that sin is not behaviour specifically prohi-
bited by God but is what a creative person, an artist such as Joseph,
assumes to be hateful to God. Sin is what Joseph's God deplores
but not what God Himself deplores. God has no preferential view
of morality. Joseph is a man of destiny because he seeks his own
destiny and eschews everything that would decisively block his
path. In this way the story of Joseph and Mut-em-enet illustrates
what I believe to be beyond good and evil in Mann, for Mann is
plainly on high, seeing the tale from beyond the moral as well as
the physical confines of the characters. Nor is this simply because
they are ancient Jewish characters, since it is a peculiarity of Mann,
as we shall see, that he does the same with modem figures in other
novels and stories. To him a composition is complete only when it
synthesises good and evil.
No one in Joseph and His Brothers is or aspires to be good in the
New Testament sense. The immaculacy of Jesus is undreamt of
and the injunctions of Paul lie far in the future. It is worth noting
here that in Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche praises the grandeur of
the Old Testament and remarks that to have 'glued' the 'small-souled'
New Testament to the Old is 'perhaps the greatest audacity and
"sin against the spirit" that literary Europe has on its conscience'. 4
In Mann's version of these tales altruism is not even a theory.
The admired people are those who make a law first for themselves
and consequently for everyone else. The chapter called 'The Great
Hoaxing' in Book Four of The Tales of Jacob is a plausible account of
the ousting of Esau by Rebecca and Jacob. Jacob trembles with
terror at the prospect of being caught out and cursed by Isaac
instead of blessed, but he cares nothing about the badness of his
behaviour. As readers we take self-interested tricks for granted and
scarcely feel disposed to make ethical judgments. For instance,
when Jacob at Laban's house finds that he has been tricked into
sleeping with Leah instead of Rachel he regards Laban as a 'wolf-
man', but we are given little sense of the uncle's wickedness. The
story, like all the stories in this quartet of novels, is scarcely

moralistic but contributes to what is, after all, a majestic comedy.
Jacob's 'virtue' in the ancient pre-moral sense, his special
meritorious gift, is his capacity for musing: he associates images
and ideas from widely varied (and indeed what we think of as
'opposite') spheres. But Jacob's musing leads in turn to the plainer
virtue of resolution. He is thus a hero and steadfastly maintains the
patriarchal line. Rachel is his chosen bride in whom his seed,
which is to be as the 'dust of the earth' (Genesis), must germinate.
As for Joseph, he is profoundly self-centred. We understand
why his brothers beat him and throw him into the pit, for who
would not be maddened by this spoilt darling with his coat of
many colours? Mann interestingly says of Joseph that he made an
'assumption that everybody loved him more than themselves'. 5
'Piety', Mann elsewhere writes, 'is the subjectivation of the outer
world, its concentration upon the self and its salvation'. 6 In this
'pious' fashion Joseph sees others as contributors to his story and
perhaps sees even God as his personal God.
The father, Jacob, is a meditative man while Joseph, at least
when young, is a charming self-loving exploiter of his handsome-
ness and cleverness. And both are ultimately determined by that
natural sensuality of the Old Testament which bursts forth in 'The
Song of Solomon'. For even the chaste Joseph quite knowingly
directs his sexual impulses into spiritual channels. He deliberately
'lives a story' by which means, in the years after his marriage to
Asenath as well as in the long years before, he devotes a good
measure of his sexual energy to a spiritual end. Of the two men,
Jacob is more obviously an artist-visionary and Joseph an artist-
administrator, but both are notably creative.
The emphasis in Joseph and His Brothers is upon making fertile use
of circumstances. The two heroes create new meanings out of their
vicissitudes. Mann is never 'moral' in the usual restricted sense,
the sense in which the reader is abreast of the author in knowing
right from wrong. Thus the 'song of Joseph', as Mann happily calls
the four united novels, may serve as our first clue to Mann's work
as a whole. All along, from Hanno's love of music in Buddenbrooks
to Leverkiihn's pact with the devil in Doctor Faustus, Mann is of the
devil's party and knows it. But he is of that persuasion not in order
to defy goodness but to reach out for a greater harmony. Privately
he referred to himself as 'a man of balance'. He wrote in a letter to
Karl Kerenyi, 'I am a man of balance. I instinctively lean to the left
when the boat threatens to capsize on the right.,7 This seems a

merely reasonable attitude, but in Mann's literary practice it meant
that he instinctively leaned towards bad when the boat threatened
to capsize on the side of good. Clearly, though, he could not
simply override goodness as a scoundrel does. Mann's moral
ambivalence is one of the most conspicuous features of his works
and it has been discussed a thousand times, but I do not think it
has been satisfactorily defined.
In the first stage of his career, at the turn of the century, Mann
inched his way towards his proper leading theme, the theme he
would come to make his own. That is why the youthful master-
piece Buddenbrooks cannot be thoroughly understood as a tale of the
decline of a prosperous bourgeois family, ending with the death of
the last male heir, the sickly, music-loving Hanno. Nor should we
rest content with seeing this novel as a familiar sort of contest
between the overbearing world of commerce and the beautiful
sphere of art. If it were such a novel the author's stance, if not his
conspicuous tones, would be satirical- as Madame Bovary is a satire
and, more crudely, The Man of Property.
Buddenbrooks is rightly never called a satire because it is a more
honest, by which I mean a more comprehensive, study of
bourgeois ways than perhaps any in that long sequence of writings
by disaffected bourgeois sons and daughters. In comparison Balzac
and Flaubert are plainly unfair: that is to say, morally selective.
Nevertheless there can be little of importance that anyone wishes
to say against the bourgeoisie that Mann has not inadvertently
contrived to say. However, he says such things less from hostility
than from a liking for facts. Later on, especially in Doctor Faustus
but also, to a degree, in Lotte in Weimar, Mann sometimes
overloads his works with information, while here the proportion
seems right. The result is that Buddenbrooks impresses us as an
accurate picture of north-German mercantile society in the nine-
teenth century.
Old Johann Buddenbrooks, for example, is a man whom Balzac,
Flaubert or Zola would present as either unpleasant or misguided.
And we can plainly see the traits of Johann that would have been
painted blacker by another hand. Nor does Mann conceal Johann's
philistinism, sharp practice, self-will and Schadenfreude. Yet Johann
is not at all vile in the author's eyes but merely interesting, a
subject to pin down. No one hostile to old Johann could see him so
roundedly, and in truth the young Thomas Mann wished to come
to terms with the bourgeoisie; not to yield to them but to

acknowledge them completely, warts and all, and then (but only
then) master them through art.
The problem for Mann was that he regarded this venture as
dangerous and conceivably fatal. Earlier authors had seen nothing
especially risky in assailing the bourgeoisie, and indeed such had
been the sport of artists since the 1830s. On the other hand, Mann
is the one major author to distance himself from the bourgeoisie
out of artistic and philosophic need rather than enmity. Mann's
childhood was happy and in that sense he may be said to have
'loved' his family and acquaintances whom he depicted in this first
novel. 8 Therefore, while he nicely observed their so-called faults,
he did not condemn these as faults. He was not, so to speak,
against sin and he portrayed his family accurately because his
specific non-moral vocation demanded that he should.
For this reason alone the artist's distancing himself from bour-
geois society was apprehended by Mann as morbid and deathly.
Society, whatever its failings, amounts to health and 'goodness' in
the eyes of one who has been happy and socially integrated as a
child. Society is a coherence and the artist, along with outlaws and
other misfits, threatens that coherence. Therefore the figures in
Buddenbrooks who fall away from society, notably Thomas and his
son Hanno, are doomed. Thomas has a fatal stroke after a painful
visit to the dentist. Somehow this is scarcely an accident, since his
life has been deteriorating for some time: the family grain business
is falling behind competitors; Thomas's mother, the Frau Consul,
has died; his wife, Gerda, is involved in a suspect friendship with
an infantry lieutenant; and he has come to long for easeful death in
consequence of reading part of Schopenhauer's The World as Will
and Idea. Young Hanno, after a night of enchantment at a
performance of Lohengrin followed by a normally wretched day at
school, sickens and dies of typhoid fever.
Thomas and Hanno die because in moving away from society
they disintegrate. Society is not only a coherence of individuals but
cohesive for each individual. He is mentally and morally intact to
the extent that he is a member of the group. But to pursue truth
one must separate oneself from the group, since social morality
and truthfulness are not the same, are hardly even neighbours.
Mann's picture of Lubeck society in the nineteenth century, I
repeat, appears to us accurate and reasonably comprehensive, in
other words a product of yea-saying; but in order to produce that
picture he needed to hold himself aloof.

To Mann the Buddenbrook faults were venial while damnable
vices boiled down to one vice: coldly exploiting the social group or,
alternatively, the very same 'noble objectivity' which Rilke found
in Buddenbrooks. 9 That, however, is a narrow view of the matter.
Comprehensively speaking, whatever threatens the social citadel is
immoral. The threat varies in relation to the historical nature of the
citadel, but he who stands outside its walls is the immoral one. He
may be calmly exploitative or wild and reckless; all that counts is
the wilful self-exclusion. But at this stage of his career Mann was
concerned in a limited fashion with the goodness of the bour-
geoisie and the badness of straying from them.
Such is the significance of Tonio Kroger's celebrated declaration
of regard for his social class in the novella that bears his name.
Tonio Kroger was published in Tristan, two years after Buddenbrooks,
and here Mann frankly confronted his own problem for the first
time. Tonio confides to Lisabeta Ivanovna, his Russian painter
friend, his belief that the artist must stand apart from the rest of
humanity.
The artist must be unhuman, extra-human; he must stand in a
queer aloof relationship to our humanity; only so is he in a
position, I ought to say only so would he be tempted, to
represent it, to present it, to portray it to good effect. 10
When Tonio has finished his lengthy self-analysis Lisabeta rather
depressingly tells him that he is a 'bourgeois manque'. At the close
of the story Tonio confirms her observation. He is 'an artist with a
bad conscience'. He writes to her as follows:
I stand between two worlds. I am at home in neither, and I suffer

in consequence. You artists call me a bourgeois, and the bourgeois
try to arrest me ... I don't know which makes me feel worse. The
bourgeois are stupid; but you adorers of the beautiful, who call me
phlegmatic and without aspirations, you ought to realize that
there is a way of being an artist that goes so deep and is so much
a matter of origins and destinies that no longing seems to it
sweeter and more worth knowing than longing after the bliss of
the commonplace. 11
Ordinarily a good artist is not bourgeois, whatever the socia

class of his upbringing, and for that very reason he misrepresents
bourgeois people. He does so ignorantly and with a clear consci-

ence. He identifies with his feelings about the bourgeois, not with
their feelings about themselves. Thus the normally experienced
reality of small-town Normandy in the mid-nineteenth century
must have been qualitatively different from Flaubert's portrait in
Madame Bovary, which is of course the height of 'realism'. Such a
manner of life felt otherwise to the actual doctors and chemists and
dreaming housewives. But Mann wanted to feel as a bourgeois
feels. Flaubert empathised with Emma Bovary, but only because
she was a figure devised out of his own passive and dreaming
personality. Conversely Mann wished to 'go out of himself' in
order to see the world through the eyes of a Thomas Buddenbrook,
for instance. In Tonia Kroger he apprehends this aspiration, this
longing indeed, as the root of his capacity as an artist. It is an
irremovable trait, essential to his artistry. For all that, his vocation
as an artist estranges him from the non-artistic community.
However, Mann evidently senses the 'damnable' possibilities of
his vocation, for it cuts him off from the legions of the good, the
unquestioning bourgeoisie. 'Damnation', let us keep in mind, has
to do with being rejected, exiled.
Here it is probably necessary to emphasise two points. First, the
usual estimate of the bourgeoisie as narrow, unimaginative,
complacent and so on should be resisted in this context. I mean
simply that bourgeois people naturally provide a positive criterion
for anyone happily brought up in their midst. Second, it will today
be easy for many readers to view Mann's creative dilemma as
obsolescent. But the point is that there is always an orthodoxy of
attitudes and behaviour, even when it takes the form of wide-
spread tolerance, for then control and discipline edge towards the
wicked side. So far Mann has recognised the orthodoxy of
bourgeois customs, while later he concentrates on the orthodoxy of
faith in beneficent progress. He is dialectical as a matter of course;
his nature demands that he takes the antithesis into account, not
sparingly but with enthusiasm. Nevertheless, let us note here a
point that must be developed later: utter crassness, Nazi crassness,
the assumption that louts should sweep aside creative intelligence
(albeit wicked creative intelligence) never enters Mann's public
writing and enters the diaries and letters only for the purpose of
being dismissed as self-evident nonsense.
Death in Venice, which Mann referred to as 'next of kin' to Tonia
Kroger in terms of 'youthful lyric bloom', 12 strikes a different note,
however, from the earlier writings in that civilised values of a

subtle sort are themselves now set in place as mere attitudes by
means of which we manage our lives. They have no higher
sanction and no surer foundation. They are not remotely 'true' and
match our experience only to the extent that we fearfully or cannily
fail to experience whatever would contradict them. Here is an
important development in Mann's career. To begin with he saw
the principal opposition as between social and family order on the
one hand and art, specifically music, on the other: the socio-moral,
that is to say, versus the beauty which the socio-moral tends to
exclude. But now, at the stage of Death in Venice, art occupies the
positive pole while ranged against it are nothing less than bestiality
and putrefaction. Aschenbach's nightmare is composed of foul
animal forms.
His senses reeled in the steam of panting bodies, the acrid stench
from the goats, the odour as of stagnant waters - and another,
too familiar smell- of wounds, uncleanness and disease .... But
now the dreamer was in them and of them, the stranger god was
his own. Yes, it was he who was flinging himself upon the
animals, who bit and tore and swallowed smoking gobbets of
flesh - while on the trampled moss there now began the rites in
honour of the god, an orgy of promiscuous embraces - and in his
very soul he tasted the bestial degradation of his fall. 13
Mann thus implies that Aschenbach's writing, especially in its

later phase, has held at bay the slobbering, slavering, rank and
fleshly chaos of the natural. In this way Aschenbach has merely
behaved humanly, since human beings must sublimate their
instincts and art is an elaborate mode of sublimation. Nevertheless,
art at its best concedes the precariousness of its accomplishment.
Shakespeare does this in the figure of Cali ban and in Titus
Andronicus, Measure for Measure and King Lear, to mention the
plainest instances. The Greek dramatists were obviously aware of
chaos, as were Homer, Dante and Goethe. Indeed such awareness
at its keenest might well be the touchstone of the best literature.
Throughout his career Aschenbach has seemed to face this great
challenge. Up to middle age he treated of 'the heroism born of
weakness',14 the emblem of which is Sebastian with the arrows
piercing his flesh. In that phase Aschenbach venerated a heroism
of knowledge that defies, or even destroys, the simpler, stupider
heroism of faith. But in middle age he 'made a right-about-face',15

having concluded that knowledge blunts the 'noble and active
mind'.16 It is not clear whether Mann himself, Mann the ironic
narrator, regards this conclusion as necessarily an error. He
comments upon it as follows:
And yet: this moral fibre surviving the hampering and disinte-
grating effect of knowledge, does it not result in a dangerous
simplification, in a tendency to equate the world and the human
soul, and thus to strengthen the hold of the evil, the forbidden
and the ethically impossible?17
On the face of it, then, Aschenbach first pursued knowledge but

abandoned that pursuit on the grounds that it blunts the noble and
active mind. Were those grounds false? Three of Mann's teachers,
Goethe, Nietzsche and Freud, would all have declared them to be
so. Nietzsche writes in The Gay Science of 'the great passion of the
seeker after knowledge who lives and must live continually in the
thundercloud of the highest problems and the heaviest respon-
sibilities'. 18 Such a passion might confound the mind, even to the
point of madness, but would scarcely blunt it.
What it seems we should read into Death in Venice is as follows:
Aschenbach was first on the right track, or he would have been if
he had valued knowledge more than the heroism involved in
obtaining it. But in fact at all stages of his much-honoured career he
valued effort for its own sake. Not effort for the sake of knowledge
or, later, effort to keep knowledge at bay, but effort as sufficient
unto itself, as the way. It is this way that leads to the disintegration:
to the mortuary chapel in Munich, the vexations en route to the
hotel in Venice and, supremely, Tadzio, the beautiful boy, and the
epidemic of Asian cholera. (These and other incidents of the story
all took place, exactly as Mann describes them, in 1911 when he,
his wife and Heinrich Mann spent some time in Venice. 19)
It is clear that Aschenbach's ethic of struggle has been not
excessive, but finally and for all the intelligence involved in it,
blind. Aschenbach youthfully turned himself into a hero in defiance
of his frail constitution. To be exact, he fashioned a sort of heroism
out of his own unheroic nervous system. Therefore, since his
doctrine has been one of effort, his fate, his form of corruption,
turns out to be a yielding, even to death. This seems to be
psychologically valid, but for our purposes it chiefly demonstrates
that the infamy of an individual, or a society, or an entire

civilisation, is whatever the chosen virtue rejects. Thus the infamy
of a martial epoch is shame or dishonour; the infamy of a
compassionate age is, of course, callousness. To Aschenbach the
virtue is self-control and the vice self-abandonment. Mann was by
now reaching our for completeness, a Goethean objective, a
manner of writing that should encompass pro and contra, high and
low - as good and as evil as he could artistically embrace.
The novel in which he does this most explicitly is not in fact
Doctor Faustus but The Magic Mountain. The latter is a novel of ideas
and is perhaps supreme in that admittedly sparse category. What
makes it supreme - if I am not overpraising it - is that the ideas are
exceptionally well formulated, and at the same time permeate the
narrative and sensuous particulars of the work. The ideas and the
concrete details do not merely overlap but interfuse. And of course
the novel is full-blooded: ideas are made flesh. The 'talkers', as
Mann called them, Settembrini and Naphta, are memorably men of
ideas, while the personalities of others, especially Clavdia
Chauchat and Pieter Peeperkorn, imply that ideas are always
inferior and derivative. Mme Chauchat is one of the most palpable
people in modern fiction, a Slavonic refutation of all theory, all
idealism.
As must be well known, the title of this novel and its fundamen-
tal argument are Nietzsche's. The philosopher writes as follows in
The Birth of Tragedy:
If heroes like Goethe and Schiller could not succeed in breaking

open the enchanted gate which leads into the Hellenic magic
mountain; if with their most daunting striving they could not go
beyond the longing gaze which Goethe's Iphigenia casts from
barbaric Tauris to her home across the ocean, what could the
epigones of such heroes hope for - unless, amid the mystic tones
of reawakened tragic music, the gate should open for them
suddenly of its own accord, from an entirely different side, quite
overlooked in all previous cultural endeavours. 20
Briefly, in writing the novel Mann referred to the Hellenic magic

mountain which he believed, following Nietzsche, to have been
formed by the Apollonian containment of Dionysian forces. I
should say 'the bare containment' or even 'the apparent contain-
ment', for Nietzsche remarks that 'In the total effect of tragedy the
Dionysian predominates once again.'21 Then, The Birth of Tragedy

closes with the mention of a dream of Ionic colonnades and
harmonious people whom the dreamer recognises and declares to
be venerators of Dionysus - pretty much Hans Castorp's dream in
Chapter 6, 'Snow'.
The fundamental argument of The Magic Mountain is that the
world has for long enough exhibited two forces ranged against
each other. This antagonism may be labelled as enlightenment and
progress versus blood and terror. Most of the reasoning one hears
is naturally for the first force, since the second is by definition
irrational. Nevertheless the second seems to be the only means of
reinforcing a dualism of body and spirit for which many people
yearn. Let us look at this opposition in a little more detail.
Settembrini is a monist who argues with unrivalled lucidity that
man is the apogee of nature, that he is what millions of cosmic
years have worked up to. To be precise, man's rational spirit holds
that place in the scheme of things, and when we shake off the
detritus of the past, nature will be as it were fulfilled. Thus man
and nature, spirit and flesh, will properly come together in man at
his harmonious best.
Settembrini's conversation is, according to him (and we must
agree), 'plastic': that is, he moulds his raw material elegantly. The
world is his material and so he sees the world itself as manipulable.
Nevertheless, death is 'the inviolable condition of life' 22 and man's
spirit must (after the manner of Socrates) accept that fact. But
disease and pain are errors to be eradicated. Certainly, says
Settembrini, he prefers 'an intelligent ailing person to a consump-
tive idiot', 23 and Hans Castorp (who is at this stage becoming
something of a pupil) should have no truck with the view that
disease has dignity, a view which 'comes down to us from a past
seething with superstition'. 24 It is now our noble task to steer
mankind away from the superstitious ages. Much later the
humanist tells Hans that 'Disease and despair are often only forms
of depravity.,25 Health of mind and body is morally right, while
sickness is, to a degree, moral as well as physical degeneration.
Analysis of all kinds, physiological and psychological, can be on
the one hand an 'instrument of enlightenment' and on the other
hand a practice 'allied to the grave and its un savoury anatomy'. 26
This superb talker is a member of the International League for
the Organisation of Progress, whose members are compiling a
massive work entitled The Sociology of Suffering. In his diary Mann
called Settembrini's exposition at this point a 'comic bit of

rationalism',27 as indeed it is, but the comedy lies in the assured
exposition of what many people hesitantly think. Settembrini
believes that 'almost all individual suffering js due to disease of the
social organism'. 28 In general the League exists to aid individuals
towards self-realisation, and that is also Settembrini's vocation.
One bad feature of the Berghof, he remarks, is that there is 'too
much Asia' there, too many 'Muscovite and Mongolian types,29
caught in the toils of nature, unlike Europeans to whom the natural
scale is subordinate.
Such faith in progress seems facile to us (the period of the novel
is 1907 to 1914) but, nevertheless, Settembrini voices no more than
the unspoken and unexamined assumptions of modern man. His
creed is the post-Renaissance thesis, the good of the post-
Renaissance world. It was Mann's intention that readers would
find it all mildly absurd, and so they do, but only a tiny number of
people have any alternative understanding of their lives. Mann
himself outside the realm of fiction made similar assumptions. Nor
is Settembrini shallow: he merely has greater faith (and far greater
articulacy) than one normally encounters. Take away the residual
belief in progress and for many despair must follow. Indeed, that is
fitfully happening even now, the world over.
However, The Magic Mountain is celebrated for its clash and
variety of philosophies, so that Settembrini's is only the good
which Mann seeks to qualify. It is qualified, first, by the boisterous
scientism of Hofrat Behrens, to whom life is 'une destruction
organique'. 'Living', he says, 'consists in dying' (a somewhat
Rilkean conception arrived at via biochemistry).30 Alternatively,
according to Mynheer Peeperkorn, the retired Dutch tea-planter
for whom the author's own partiality was, he supposed, plain for
all to see, 31 life is a 'sprawling female with swelling breasts close to
each other, great soft belly between her haunches, slender arms,
bulging thighs, half-closed eyes'. 32 To Peeperkorn life is to be
taken, and taken emotionally. There is, certainly, something
anciently noble and as it were 'extra-moral' about this figure.
No doubt it is incorrect to speak of Clavdia Chauchat as having a
'philosophy', for she is too lazy, indifferent and (shrewdly)
unintellectual for that. Nevertheless, her 'anti-philosophy' is a sub-
variant of Peeperkorn's stance. She moves between amused
contempt for European mores (in fact for social reality as a whole)
and esteem for a hero when she meets one. For long enough she
appears nihilistic, then her dignified comportment with Peeper-

kom, her 'protector', and with Hans Castorp, her young admirer,
discloses certain undefined values of her own.
But the starkest challenge to Settembrini's faith is the faith of
Naphta. In the sixteenth century Naphta's way would have
seemed to many terrifyingly right, one 'extreme' of Christianity, of
course, but scarcely an error or a brutality. At that time Settem-
brini's ideas would have seemed blasphemously wrong. In our
time the positions have been reversed and Naphta is the bad one.
He enters the novel only in Chapter 6, about halfway through, and
from then until his suicide after the abortive pistol duel with
Settembrini he is the antagonist. Naphta's beliefs are calculatedly a
demolition of optimism, even though he is a Marxist as well as a
Jesuit. Mann has found the perfect antithesis: this exquisitely
clever, malign man who keeps an ugly fourteenth-century pieta in
his room; who wishes to hurt people as a means of saving them;
and who regards the historical function of the proletariat as the
shedding of bourgeois blood, the striking of terror into bourgeois
hearts for the purpose of reminding them of the human separation
from God. Naphta is literally a terrorist and is thoroughly modem
in that sense. For some of our contemporary terrorists, especially
the more intelligent specimens in Germany, see their activities not
simply as means to a better society but as spurs to the soul of
listless modem man. Naphta is also a confirmed dualist who
regards God, the ultimate reality, as forever removed from our
discernible realities. He believes, therefore, that 'Whatever profits
man, that is the truth', 33 meaning that scientific truths of nature
are of no account, since they take us no further towards salvation.
Settembrini is intellectually inferior to Naphta, and also more
likeable. Naphta is distasteful but fascinating. Settembrini exemp-
lifies and mildly travesties the good of modem ethics. I do not
mean ethics as propounded by philosophers but rather the ethics
of the market place (though the two categories overlap). Naphta
exemplifies what even modem liberals with their dislike of the
concept of evil nevertheless regard as evil. Mann's implication is
that antitheses are artificial and mutually dependent. Settembrini
and Naphta are 'extremists', Mann remarks, presumably because
neither accepts the primacy of muddled, healthy living.
Both creeds are classifiably historical and therefore wrong in
Mann's eyes. His synthesis seems meant to be 'a-historical', a kind
of honourable attitude esteemed in classical periods and still
esteemed by us today. No doubt such an attitude is in fact

historical in a very wide sense, but not in the limited fashion of
other characters' attitudes in The Magic Mountain. But above all the
attitude is earthly and impressive in its utter lack of idealism.
Conversely, Settembrini aims to 'improve' the earth and Naphta to
intensify earth's pains. Mann has now come upon his own rightful
doctrine, namely that we should, in Zarathustra's words, 'remain
true to the earth'. 34
This does not mean to be 'bad' necessarily, to be animalistic,
except in the sense that one must be a human animal without any
lingering Christian regret that one cannot be more purely spiritual.
However, it does mean that one needs to resist narrowness -
narrow perspectives and prescriptions - simply because such self-
limitation is the result of contrivance. We train ourselves to be
narrow, or are so trained. Thus an artless child is ignorant rather
than narrow and might well be willing to widen his vision. On the
other hand a Settembrini who refuses, in the modern humanist
style, to acknowledge the Naphta-components of human nature
(or, more precisely, regards them as atavisms to be expelled by
reason) is wilfully narrow.
At the start of his career Mann resisted the narrowness of the
bourgeoisie and of the usual artist's estimate of the bourgeoisie: in
the nineteenth century especially it was a deliberately limited
vantage-point. Next, Mann wished to know both Aschenbach's
iron self-control and the chaos that Aschenbach had devoted his
life to controlling. At least Mann included images of chaos.
Therefore Mann was both Aschenbach and the greater-than-
Aschenbach who wrote the story. By 'greater' I mean more
comprehensive, more supple and accommodating. By the early
twenties, at the time of writing The Magic Mountain, Mann
succeeded in jointly appreciating the ideal of progress and the
idealisation of endless suffering. The Magic Mountain suggests to us
that both are contrived ideals, the first arising from hatred of pain
and the second from love of pain. It is not clear that either
alternative is better than the other, for Mann himself, through
Peeperkorn and through his own good-naturedly ironic style,
seems to express a 'reasonable' distaste for pain, so to speak, and a
Rilke-like awareness that some sort of natural suffering is a vital
ingredient of our sense of significance.
In addition, at this period Mann was sharply conscious of the
nature and shortcomings of theorising. But true to dialectical form
Mann also saw what it means to disdain theorising, either in the

rare manner of Peeperkorn or in the commoner manner of Clavdia
Chauchat. For even Peeperkorn is faintly comic and Clavdia has
her obvious faults. Mann apparently aspires to see all and therefore
no sooner thinks of a principle than he thinks of an opposing
principle. The most interesting illustration of this is Lotte in Weimar,
in which even the all-embracing Goethe barely retains our sym-
pathy in contrast to the lovable heroine, Charlotte Kestner. Up to
now, however, and despite Naphta's analyses, Mann has not
confronted plain destructiveness: he has not done what Shakes-
peare did in creating lago.
Is Cipolla in Mario and the Magician 'evil' according to Mann's
own criterion? I think he is, simply because the magician appears
to be the complete nihilist. That is, he aspires to station himself
apart from the creature manifold of the world and bring about
general desiccation. His desire is to make the organic inorganic. Is
he therefore God's antagonist, even as God is contemplated in the
Joseph novels? If he is, then, miraculously, he is a fragment of God
antagonistic to the whole. He is a worm of loveless opposition, and
yet even this annihilating worm is a piece of the all-embracing
God. Here is Nietzsche's comment on what I take to be the type of
Cipolla.
The perfect nihilist - The nihilist's eye idealizes in the direction of
ugliness and is unfaithful to his memories: it allows them to
drop, lose their leaves; it does not guard them against the
corpselike pallor that weakness pours out over what is distant
and gone. And what he does not do for himself, he also does not
do for the whole past of mankind: he lets it drop. 35
What Nietzsche means is this: the nihilist forgets the good bits of
his life; he lets his joyful memories go as a tree loses its leaves.
Then a blight spreads over his past and it is all a desert. Likewise
he drains history of richness, making it a parched and pallid tract.
So far as we can judge, Cipolla is in this way composed of
rejection. He sees little in the world except that which he can bend
to his will. But his will also is empty: it is a purposeless instrument.
Cipolla does not even attempt to be attractive, as if he wants his
audience to 'see through' the snares of charm and beauty. He is
hunchbacked and his manner is cross-grained, sneeringly proud
and self-satisfied. He has broken, saw-edged teeth and a metallic
voice.
Just as some ugly persons seem determined to deny beauty,

Cipolla wishes to make everything base by in no way modifying or
concealing his own baseness. In effect he declares to the audience:
'I shall bring every one of you down to my level, but there
demonstrate the superiority of my will.' Thus if a member of the
audience has a touch of style or seems to depend upon a sentiment
(say of patriotism) or, as in the case of Mario, is actually and
fervently in love, Cipolla reveals the superficiality of the enhancing
feature. What he seems to demonstrate is that all are fundamental-
ly equal and therefore of no value. Mario's beloved Silvestra is
merely flesh and blood, as is the foul Cipolla himself. Cipolla
brings out the nihilism inherent in the ideal of equality.
At this point it is necessary to ask how far in both Mann and
Nietzsche evil and nihilism are equated. In Nietzsche evil is
historical and the term has a clear etymology. The notion of evil
was invented by priests speaking on behalf of their slave-peoples
to combat aristocratic oppressors. Thus evil is the quality of a
master seen from the point of view of a slave. The slave himself is
good simply and solely because he is the reverse of an evil master.
On the other hand, part of what Nietzsche meant by nihilism is the
denial of differentiating values. No one is more valuable than
anyone else; that is one aspect of the nihilistic attitude. It is clearly
connected with the slave's apprehension of himself as good. All
slaves are equally good (equally beloved of God) and even the evil
masters might congregate on the slave-plateau, if only they would
shed their pretensions to superiority.
To Nietzsche what is undesirable (to put is mildly) is precisely
nihilism. Nevertheless nihilism is the modern norm and had better
be positively welcomed by higher men as the soil in which a
revaluation of values might germinate. The old values are dead or
dying and may not be reinvigorated: therefore, sooner or later,
new prophets will light upon new (and more fully) human
standards. As for evil, that old priestly valuation had better be
discarded as we come increasingly to recognise that it was and is
merely a way of rejecting whatever cannot be creatively absorbed.
In the past the hiving-off, the rejection, was itself a creative act,
but now the act is repetitious and sterile.
Conversely, in Thomas Mann there seems to be what we might
call a 'creative confusion' between evil and nihilism. Perhaps
indeed the two terms are thoroughly equated. If in Mann evil is
assimilated to nihilism then perhaps he should be seen as
undertaking the revaluation of values that Nietzsche heralded. To

Mann evil consists in denial, exclusion, cutting out. This is
plainest, perhaps, in the essay 'Goethe's Faust' (1938). According
to Mann Goethe stands up for life through his character, Faust.
Life is 'the healing creative force' (Goethe's words) to which
Mephistopheles opposes the' cold devil's fist'. Mephistopheles is
specifically nihilistic, in the grandest possible sense that he wishes
to end life itself, to make a barren universe. But Mephistopheles is
also a projection of Goethe, expressing Goethe's own 'rebellion,
denial and critical bitterness'. 36 This means, I suggest, that in
Mann evil 'in itself' is purely destructive, though it may be used
creatively. A creator must turn his own evil tendencies into
elements of a comprehensive good. Thus Goethe's own spirit of
denial would have been mere evil left to itself. To begin with it was
evil, but when Goethe transferred this spirit into Mephistopheles it
became an indispensable part of the good, or life-enhancing, Faust.
Mann might be imagined giving us the following advice: 'Neither
deny evil nor succumb to it, but acknowledge it and make it
succumb to you.'
Goethe as Mann depicts him in Lotte in Weimar turns all his
experiences to creative account and that is why he is capable of
distressing Lotte. She is momentarily hurt and bewildered when
she appreciates the complete difference between Goethe and
herself: he, in a word, passes on, taking his experiences up into an
ever-growing pattern, while she remembers and values the past for
its own sake. Their youthful love affair went into The Sorrows of
Young Werther and then Goethe proceeded to his next phase.
Goethe takes every happening, every feeling, every person, and
his own personality into the bargain, to be essentially mobile.
There is 'nothing other than becoming', as Nietzsche says,
paraphrasing Heraclitus. 37 'Life is but change of form,' Goethe tells
Lotte as they take their last ride together in his landau, 'oneness in
many, permanence in change.,38
Goethe informs Lotte that she thinks of herself as the moth that
flew into his flame, but she should understand that he himself is
flame, candle and moth. Once he sacrificed her, but he continually
sacrifices himself. If Lotte were to object that she never offered
herself for sacrifice, he might well reply that sacrifice is all, that
living is sacrificing - of self and others. Mann's Goethe exploits
people, but exploits himself most of all. In Chapter 7 of Lotte in
Weimar, which is substantially an interior monologue, Goethe
reflects in his sententious way that art is not moral but ruthless;
that mind is a 'product of life' in which life 'truly lives';39 and that
he has 'never heard of a crime I could not have committed'. 40
Generally the scores of aphorisms and sentiments in this chapter
betoken a supremely creative, non-moral, non-reformist, catholic
Goethe, but the most notable observation from our immediate
point of view is that the poet has never heard of a crime he could
not have committed. This is a questionable assertion. Do we not
usually suppose, for example, that Shakespeare fully understood
the murders of Duncan and Desdemona but could not himself
have committed them? That is, we feel that Shakespeare was too
imaginative (not simply too moral) to perpetrate a gross killing. An
actual killer is a lesser - a narrower, simpler-minded - sort of
person. Yet Mann's Goethe means that no deed is too atrocious for
him.
The truth surely is that Mann's Goethe includes the mentality of
a criminal but could not be reduced to that pitch. What Mann does
not reckon with here is that brutal deeds are done by people who
fail adequately to imagine them. And Goethe's imagination would
never falter for the duration of a planned or relished murder. Here
is a measure not so much of Goethe as of our subject, Thomas
Mann. His Goethian aspiration was to contain everything, but to
do so only in a world of images. In such a world he could
comprehend (subsume and understand) the sanguine amorality of
a Felix Krull and the satanic coldness of an Adrian Leverkiihn.
These two characters reflect their creator in some fashion, the first
light-heartedly and the second with a deadly seriousness leavened
only by the narrator's scrupulous style. But the reflection in each
case is of Mann's personal preoccupations and, therefore, of
Mann's nature at its core.
However, Mann's private attitude towards Confessions of Felix
Krull Confidence Man while he was continuing the forty-year-old
fragment after the second world war was one of constant misgiv-
ing. He was writing a comic yam: what a way to end a
distinguished career! As early as 1948 he wrote to Erika Mann that
Felix Krull' consists of nothing but pranks', 41 and in 1954 he asked
Erika, 'Is it right for a man to celebrate his eightieth birthday with
such compromising jokes?' 'What's wanted', he continued, 'less
than weary wantonness?,42
Yet in the thirties, in the Preface to Stories of Three Decades, he
mentioned the existing fragment, Felix Krull, in much more
favourable terms. It was there that he declared: 'Felix Krull, like

Royal Highness, is in essence the story of an artist; in it the element
of the unreal and illusional passes frankly over into the criminal. ,43
A certain entry in the Diaries may be regarded as an amplification
of the same idea.
'Art is a microscope that the artist focuses on the secrets of his
own soul, and that then reveals to men the secrets common to them
all.' [These are Tolstoy'S words; Mann continues.] Very good. -
The Confidence Man, for example, means exactly this. 44
It appears that for two or three decades Mann was quite equable
about Felix Krull and then, presumably because of the Nazis and
the insistent question of the artist's social responsibilities, saw the
work in a different light.
Thus he was often torn between his artistic aspirations and his
social conscience. In Felix Krull he seems to assert from first to last,
from Felix's opening evocation of an irresponsible golden child-
hood to his adventures with Zouzou and Dona Maria Pia in
Lisbon, that life might be an enchanting game. That is what Mann
meant in the letter to Erika by 'weary wantonness'. But this
stunted novel is not weary to us, the readers, and is it even
wanton? Everyone appreciates that the comedy makes a serious
point.
The serious lesson, according to T. E. Apter, is that the 'essence
of the human spirit is frivolity'. 45 That does seem to get the
measure of the work and yet the author apparently never realised
as much. From his letters and Diary remarks we grasp that he did
not appreciate the significance of displaying human nature as
incurably feckless, histrionic and, above all, pointless. Mann's
consistent suggestion in Felix Krull is not that people cover inner
reality by outer show, but that every human activity above the
zoological level partakes of show. It is probable that the words of
Professor Kuckuck to Felix as they travel together to Lisbon convey
Mann's own premiss. It is this: humankind is nothing but a form of
being, and being, in turn, is purely an inconsequential develop-
ment in an eternity of nothingness. Being, says Kuckuck, is an
interlude between Nothingness and Nothingness.
The organic world is ephemeral and progress futility in the end.
There was progress, Kuckuck said ... without doubt there was pro-
gress from Pithecanthropus erectus to Newton and Shakespeare
had been a long and definitely upward path. But as with

the rest of Nature, so too in the world of men everything was
always present at the same time, every condition of culture and
morality, everything from the earliest to the latest, from the
silliest to the wisest, from the most primitive, sodden, barbaric to
the highest and most delicately evolved - all this continued to
exist side by side in the world, yes, often indeed the finest
became tired of itself and infatuated with the primitive and sank
drunkenly into barbarism. 46
However, such progress as this, from Pithecanthropus erectus to

Newton and Shakespeare, will come to naught, since Nothingness
in the sense of the inorganic is the one recurring cosmic condition.
So it appears that man's concerns are pieces of fantasy, self-
preserving or species-preserving devices. They might turn out to
be species-destroying devices, but at all events they are no more
universal than man himself. Therefore, if we fault Felix Krull for
his none-too-scrupulous joi de vivre, we do so from a social
standpoint only.
Felix samples life, knowing nothing of either despair or rapture.
Quite otherwise, Adrian Leverkiihn of Doctor Faustus reaches the
depths if not the heights. So we understand not solely from his
final, hideous condition but also because the devil candidly
foretells Adrian's future when the pair of them have their one and
only conversation. Here we must pay attention to the theme of evil
in Doctor Faustus: that is, we must separate the evil colouring of the
novel from the numerous prosaic details. Doctor Faustus clarifies
Mann's lifelong preoccupation with the (elation of good to evil and
of both to the realm of art. Not surprisingly, perhaps, it is Satan
who explains these relations with common sense and candour.
Leverkiihn is reminded that in the early twentieth century music
has fallen into a morass of technicality. It has grown aridly self-
conscious, as the devil explains. 'It comes down to this, that his
[the artist's] compositions are nothing more than solutions of that
kind; nothing but the solving of technical puzzles. Art becomes
critique.,47 Satan offers what is needed now: 'shining, sparkling,
vainglorious unreflectiveness'. 48 Art in general needs this quality,
and not art alone but the whole of human life. The devil liberates,
restores the ancient, pitiless euphoria. Adrian is told that the bane
of the modern world is a finicking, morbid self-consciousness and
a burden of duties. This condition is quite different from aesthetic
regulation, which must be observed before there can be aesthetic

beauty. On the other hand, moral rules inhibit life and may inhibit
art.
Now what is the price to pay for the satanic life? It is easy to
reply that one must be damned, but what on earth, in modern
times, can be meant by that Middle English term? Leverkiihn asks
this pressing question and is told the simple truth. The penalty for
Adrian will be emotional coldness, inability to love another.
Anyone he does care for will be ruined. Adrian thinks such
damnation is no great matter, since he is unloving by nature. The
point seems to be that selection by the devil is either foreordained
or takes place in youth, so that the apparent temptation we are
now considering is just a ratification. As for eternity in hell, that
ghastliest product of the priestly imagination, Adrian hopes that
he will be able to free himself by a final moment of contrition. He is
sceptical or inattentive when the devil tells him that he is too subtle
to be contrite.
Mann is connecting creativity with the absence of love. The more
one loves, the less impressive one's creations must be, though of
course there are many unloving individuals who have no aspira-
tions to creativity. Hell is the loveless sphere. To trace the subject
in ordinary ethical terms, Mann means that to create in art (or
science or philosophy) one must to a degree disregard the needs of
others. People must be viewed as material for one's compositions
or else ignorable creatures. There are echoes of Kierkegaard in
Mann's attitude here and of course reflections of the entire modern
world-picture, in which art, along with everything else, is in theory
subordinated to ethics. But Adrian is more than a selfish genius,
for he is also a sacrificial figure. Though he does not care for
people, he wishes to revitalise music for the sake of the world at
large. At the very end his appearance is Christlike and, as we shall
see, Mann reconciles good and evil by not resisting evil. Just the
same, it would be false to liken Leverkiihn's non-resistance to
Christ's.
It is part of Leverkiihn's sacrifice that he infects himself with
syphilis, in the belief or the hope, according to Zeitblom, the
narrator, that such 'daemonic' intercourse will provide a 'deathly
unchaining of chemical change in his nature'. 49 Zeitblom means
that Adrian evidently decided to alter the chemistry of his body so
as to elevate his musical talent. Nietzsche, who was Mann's main
teacher in this matter, constantly associated his own achieve-
ments with sickness. In Ecce Homo, for instance, speaking of his

production of The Dawn (or Daybreak), Nietzsche refers to 'that
sweetening and spiritualization which is almost inseparably con-
nected with an extreme poverty of blood and muscle'. 50
As is well known, Mann supposed that he had taken the episode
of Leverkiihn's visit to the prostitute Esmeralda from Nietzsche's
life. In February 1865 Nietzsche, then a student, went to Cologne
sightseeing and, having asked a street porter to take him to a
restaurant, was taken to a brothel instead. He fled in embarrass-
ment and fear. Nietzsche recounted this incident to his fellow-
student Paul Deussen and, so far as we know, said no more about
it. Mann, however, concludes in the essay 'Nietzsche's Philosophy
in the Light of Recent History' that Nietzsche must have returned
to Cologne a year later and this time 'contracted the disease (some
say deliberately, as self-punishment) which was to destroy his life
but also to intensify it enormously'. 51 Now this is speculation and
may well be untrue, as Nietzsche's latest biographer, Ronald
Hayman, makes plain. 52 At this point Mann almost comically
displays the literary man's propensity to convert supposition into
solid fact.
Certainly much in Nietzsche's life and thought was important
for Mann's work generally and for Mann's theme of Faustus. The
novelist's admiration for Nietzsche here finds its fullest expression.
But Mann's attitude is also thoroughly ambivalent, so that Lever-
kuhn is both hero and dreadful warning. I do not imply that
Leverkiihn is meant to resemble Nietzsche in personality or
accomplishments, which he plainly does not. Rather it is that
Leverkiihn puts music before ethics and Nietzsche regarded such a
precedence as healthy in principle. Leverkiihn is not a villain-hero
in the ordinary way but one who courts evil on our behalf as well
as his own. Without doubt Adrian is of heroic stature, and in truth
the last chapter of Doctor Faustus takes us beyond good and evil in a
certain sense. For there Mann's Faustus is confirmed as awe-
inspiring because he has devilishly (inhumanly, mercilessly) en-
larged human capacities.
Mann's argument in the essay 'Nietzsche's Philosophy in the
Light of Recent History' is far cruder. He sees Nietzsche as a
'Hamlet-figure' who became 'the mouthpiece and advocate of
blatant force, of the callous conscience, of Evil itself'. 53 Mann does
not recognise that Nietzsche (truly like Hamlet) 'gave mankind
up', as it were, because he found insufficient difference between
the highest and the lowest. Mann's implication in this late essay is
that we should simply accept the primacy of goodness and pursue
truth, if we wish, behind that virtuous stockade. But Mann
assumes that the pursuit of truth must always be a means of
fortifying goodness, whereas the entire point of such a pursuit is
that no one can know where it will lead. Nietzsche had long before
appreciated that this tendency in modern thought is just a
disguised form of theism. God and the universal good are one and
the same, so that if one dies the other dies too. It is not so easy to
get out of the modern trap as Mann sometimes fancied, though he
more than others faced the difficulties in his imaginative writings.
In Doctor Faustus Leverkiihn's behaviour is scarcely repellent but
in some sense sublime. At least we are meant to be appalled, not
contemptuous. Zeitblom observes his friend with pity, horror and
veneration. Nor is there any doubt that the supposedly wicked
Leverkiihn is of greater stature than the good and reasonable
Zeitblom. Adrian's giving himself to the devil consists of a
consolidation or an intensification of his native coldness. So he is
enabled to reach beyond mere technicality in music. His final
work, the symphonic cantata called The Lamentation of Dr
Faustus', is described by Zeitblom in the following words:
No, this dark tone-poem permits up to the very end no

consolation, appeasement, transfiguration. But take our artist
paradox: grant that expressiveness - expression as lament - is
the issue of the whole construction: then may we not parallel
with it another, a religious one, and say too (though only in the
lowest whisper) that out of the sheerly irremediable hope might
germinate? It would be but a hope beyond hopelessness, the
transcendence of despair - not betrayal to her, but the miracle
that passes belief. 54
Zeitblom's speculation here is the measure of his friend's fiendish

achievement. Leverkiihn has soared beyond technique to a dark
night of the soul and in that extreme condition disclosed the
possibility of a miracle of acceptance. Leverkiihn has reached this
height - or abysmal depth - by ignoring the needs of others and
treating the social question as a fashionable irrelevance.
Around him, as his work proceeds, human life is generally
debased or diseased. Clarissa Rodde, a failure as an actress, is
seduced by a lawyer who then tries to blackmail her into becoming

his regular mistress when she is about to marry an upright
businessman. She poisons herself in a hotel room. Her sister, Inez
Institoris, a morphine addict who thinks of life as an 'ignoble
fetter',55 shoots Rudi Schwerdtfeger on a Munich tram and is
seized, insane, by fellow-passengers. Adrian's little nephew
Nepomuk, nicknamed Echo, a 'fairy princeling' as a baby, dies in
screaming agony of meningitis. Since Leverkiihn has grown
attached to Echo he now sees himself as the boy's torturer and
murderer. This is the occasion of Leverkiihn's hysterical revolt
against Satan, whom he calls 'scum, filth, excrement'. 56 Conse-
quently Adrian sets out to 'take back' the goodness of Beethoven's
Ninth Symphony and so composes 'The Lamentation of Dr
Faustus'. This cantata is the breakthrough in which Leverkiihn, on
behalf of his period in history, uses the devil to beat the devil. The
only way to conquer Satan, so the composer finally explains to
friends, is to welcome him, knowing him to be scum, filth and
excrement. Evil may be turned around when one knowingly takes it
to one's heart. Leverkiihn makes the following remark: 'But an one
invite the divil as guest, to pass beyond all this and get to the
break-through, he chargeth his soul and taketh the guilt of the time
upon his own shoulders, so that he is damned.,57
This has little to do with Christ's unique message, 'Resist not
evil', since Leverkiihn is advocating co-operation with the devil in
order to enter the kingdom of art, not the kingdom of heaven.
Nevertheless, here is Mann's final way both of bringing art and life
into a mutually enriching relation and of uniting evil with good.
For surely to take guilt upon one's own shoulders is both evil and
commendable. And only a hell-bound hero, a martyr who will
never be claimed by God, may do this on our behalf.
At the end, though, Mann does not see what he readily saw as
late as Lotte in Weimar: that life itself is innocent. We cannot know
'life itself'; indeed the phrase is strictly meaningless because such a
vast and forever unknown reality dwarfs our human grasp. The
reality, a set of forces, stands apart from culture, while morality
(any conceivable morality) is a piece of culture. Mann seems to
have discerned the following relation: on the one side ascending
life, the devil, meaningful art, suffering; and on the other side
descending life, empty art, morality, consolation for suffering.
According to Doctor Faustus these two sets of relations may be
caused to converge. According to some earlier writings, especially
The Magic Mountain, Joseph and His Brothers and Lotte in Weimar, the
first set should simply and robustly annihilate the second.
Nietzsche's influence upon Thomas Mann, though considerable,

cannot be traced or described with any precision. It can be roughly
traced, of course. In the Diaries there are nineteen references to
Nietzsche, the first made in 1918 and the last in 1938. All references
are either neutral or favourable. A most interesting observation
occurs under 16 January 1936. A writer had claimed that there were
only superficial differences between Nietzsche and National Social-
ism. Mann angrily commented as follows:
But Nietzsche, who stood for utmost 'intellectual rectitude', for

the Dionysian will to know, who smiled at Faust for being a
'tragedy of knowledge' because he knew better, who was ready
to endure every suffering caused by the truth and for the sake of
truth - this man they want to claim in connection with myths of
action of a mass appeal roughly of the level of the most
degenerate popular dirty songs. 58
And yet only eleven years later, at the time of 'Nietzsche''S

Philosophy in the Light of Recent History', Mann's attitude
towards the philosopher had grown nearer to the attitude he
despised in 1936. Here is what presumably happened.
Throughout much of his adult life Mann was fascinated by
Nietzsche, seeing him as possibly a philosopher of the first rank
and for sure an unparalleled observer of his fellow men. Then the
devastation produced by the Nazis changed Mann's estimate in
part. Like many others he became convinced that evil must be
placed beyond the pale, not contemplated. He now assumed that
the liberal contemplation of evil - for example, its analysis in
intellectual terms - is potentially dangerous for the human race.
The enquiry Mann had himself conducted in Doctor Faustus (and let
us not forget that Doctor Faustus is an enquiry, a spiritual
adventure) he now saw as essentially removed from the reality of
corpses and torture chambers. Zeitblom's horrified references to
the war do not alter this essence, which has to do with the paradox
of Leverkiihn as wicked martyr.
Nietzsche had seemingly bridged the gap between reflection and
physical action, between philosophy and social reality. But it was

Nietzsche's cardinal error, according to Mann, that he heaped
abuse upon the 'theoretical man' while himself being 'this theor-
etical man, par excellence'. 59 My contention is, to the contrary, that
despite some polemical tricks Nietzsche meant what he said and
knew in flesh and blood terms what his ideas portended - not
encouraged, but simply portended. For some of Nietzsche's most
resonant remarks are prophecies rather than recommendations.
That is why he scorned the dualism of good and evil. Rather, he
scorned the weakness that once produced the dualism; saw what
purpose (or whose purpose) it served, and sensed that it was
petering out. Nietzsche knew of course that people do frightful
things, but regarded moral classification as interpretative, not
factual. Then, the interpretations, good and evil, are psychological
dodges: that is to say, ways of averting our gaze from psycho-
logical realities. The clearest statement of Nietzsche's thought on
this subject is not in Beyond Good and Evil but in The Will to Power.
For once we shall need a long quotation.
The demand is that man should castrate himself of those

instincts with which he can be an enemy, can cause harm, can be
angry, can demand revenge -
This unnaturalness corresponds, then, to that dualistic con-
ception of a merely good and a merely evil creature (God, spirit,
man); in the former are summarized all the positive, in the latter
all the negative forces, intentions, states. -
Such a manner of valuing believes itself to be 'idealistic'; it
does not doubt that, in the conception of 'the good', it has
posited a supreme desideratum. At its peak, it imagines a state in
which all that is evil is annulled and in which only good
creatures actually remain. It does not even consider it settled that
this antithesis of good and evil is conditional on the existence of
both; on the contrary, the latter should vanish and the former
remain, the one has a right to exist, the other ought not to be
there at all -
What is it really that desires this? -
Much labor has been expended in all ages, and especially in
the Christian ages, to reduce mankind to this half-sided efficien-
cy, to the 'good': even today there is no lack of those deformed
and weakened by the church for whom this object coincides with
'humanization' in general, or with the 'will of God', or with
'salvation of the soul'. The essential demand here is that

mankind should do nothing evil, that it should under no
circumstances do harm or desire to do harm. The way to achieve
this is: the castration of all possibility of enmity, the unhinging of
all the instincts of ressentiment, 'peace of soul' as a chronic
disease.
This mode of thought, with which a definite type of man is
bred, starts from an absurd presupposition: it takes good and
evil for realities that contradict one another (not as complemen-
tary value concepts, which would be the truth), it advises taking
the side of the good, it desires that the good should renounce
and oppose the evil down to its ultimate roots - it therewith
actually denies life, which has in all its instincts both Yes and
No. Not that it grasps this: it dreams, on the contrary, that it is
getting back to wholeness, to unity, to strength of life: it thinks it
will be a state of redemption when the inner anarchy, the unrest
between those opposing value drives, is at last put an end to. -
Perhaps there has never before been a more dangerous ideology,
a greater mischief in psychologicis, than this will to good: one has
reared the most repellent type, the unfree man, the bigot; one
has taught that only as a bigot is one on the right path to
godhood, only the bigot's way is God's way. 60
These words are most important not only for an understanding

of Nietzsche's phrase 'beyond good and evil', but for a general
grasp of his peculiar way of philosophising. They are notes, since
The Will to Power consists of notes. The remarks help to illustrate
how Nietzsche did his thinking: he made psychological obser-
vations as a matter of course and aimed to change common views
which ran counter to such primary observations. For example,
everyone spoke of the 'will' as a mental agent or faculty. But
Nietzsche could not discern this celebrated will in either his own or
anyone else's make-up.61 Therefore he concluded that the will is a
fiction (as Gilbert Ryle concludes in The Concept of Mind).
Now in the above words from The Will to Power we can see how
Nietzsche pondered the question of good and evil. It was not a
question arising in a discipline called 'Ethics', still less a matter of
spontaneous feelings, but rather a social injunction to pour one
complex set of actions into the category 'good' and another,
equally complex set into the category 'evil'. It was further decreed
that the two sets should be opposites. Thus the good-and-evil
schema was artificial, and not even a sound device for reducing our
harmful, or evil, tendencies. Ancient scriptures and modern moralists
alike urge that we should overcome our harmful impulses. But this
would be to castrate ourselves, because such urges are constituents
of health. We could create nothing without our harmfulness. The
idea that one might be harmlessly vigorous or vigorously harmless
is misguided, since the activities of a species or an individual
cannot but encroach upon the ways of others. So doing harm is
inescapable for all creatures.
If doing harm is roughly what we mean by evil, then the belief
that evil might be eliminated is wrong. So is the contemporary
assumption that evil is 'caused' - by injustice or oppression. For
the implicit belief here is that the very roots of evil may be plucked
out, one by one, until there are none left. The modern moralist
declares as fervently as his ancient forebears that accepting evil is a
disgrace. As moral beings we must at least deplore wickedness.
Fighting evil, the moralist argues, may not often be profitable, but
there is no decent alternative. This last, common assumption rests
(I believe) upon a merely theoretical recognition of the durability of
evil. The shadowy thesis is that humanity might gradually shake
off harmful impulses.
Nietzsche agrees that we need some sort of value discrimination,
but not that we must entertain mutually exclusive categories of
good and evil. He is certain that 'many actions called immoral
ought to be avoided and resisted and that many called moral ought
to be done and encouraged'. 62 Nietzsche's point here is that
morality and immorality are blanket terms which misrepresent our
actual and often singular motivations. The reasons for our be-
haviour might profitably be seen as other than the moral ones we
commonly ascribe to them. We might say, for instance, that to hate
another is bad, not on the grounds that hatred is contrary to a
commandment but because it is psychically crippling. Likewise
systematic persecution is either a sickening debauch or else a
quasi-mechanical, barely human practice. Then a latter-day terror-
ist, whatever his avowed motives, must inevitably be or become a
spiritual cretin. In offering these illustrations I too am simplifying,
but at least I am looking for improvements on the murky or
thoughtless epithet 'evil'.
In this regard, as in all others, Nietzsche recommended acuity
and intellectual courage. He believed that those qualities should
take precedence over all others. Morality should therefore be seen
as subordinate, not primary: the first requirement was to see and

think as honestly as possible. For example, it is commonly
assumed that we should aim for 'peace of soul', but why should we
do so? Indeed that aim is dangerous, for such peace brings 'chronic
disease'. No matter how we wriggle round the point, peace soon
becomes infirmity. Peace is necessary and desirable at intervals,
but as a lasting condition it would be disastrous.
Life 'has in all its instincts both Yes and No'. These words mean
that any force embraces some things and rejects others. An
individual is a force or a collection of forces and must therefore
welcome bits of the environment and deny other bits. The bits he
denies have to be fought in some fashion; man himself must say
Yes and No. But what he repels is not so much 'wrong' as
unassimilable. It is neither 'wrong in itself' nor the antithesis of the
right. Accepting and rejecting is, properly, a matter of nuances,
not of absolute distinctions. An individual is obliged as a condition
of life both to love and to combat other individuals. If this
fundamental requirement is the 'war of every man against every
man', then that war is not a mere Hobbesian doctrine but a supra-
doctrinal state. In fact, however, the war, like all wars, entails
alliances, loyalties, motions of love and momentary reconciliations.
The bigot is one type of unfree man. He is en route to godhood
because he knows sans peur et sans doute what is right and what is
wrong. He has devised rules not just for himself but for all. But
good is never universal good and evil never universal evil. Or
rather no two deeds are actually the same, and to speak of moral
degrees is still misleading. The belief that deeds may be categori-
cally evil is no longer a priestly but a democratic prejudice. To say
this is not to open the door to atrocity: it is to try to see everything,
atrocity included, in the clearest light.
Today, after twentieth-century vilenesses or in the midst of
them, speaking as Nietzsche spoke seems to some people sinister,
foolish or anachronistic. So Thomas Mann came to believe: the
century had put Nietzsche out of court. But Mann contrived to
hold that opinion only by means of an ingenious final novel which
tended to refute his earlier writings. Indeed it might be said to
refute itself, since it concerns the career of a wicked saviour. Then
there was the late Nietzsche essay in which the philosopher was
seen as unacceptably aesthetical. History, thought Mann, had
crushed such pretensions.
However, let us consider another possibility for a moment. It is
this: Nietzsche's view of good and evil is now surreptitiously and

irreversibly creeping over mankind, although few acknowledge as
much. Perhaps it is here that we find the essential history of our
post-war period, the history that cannot be wished or engineered
away. Nietzsche's view might thus be less an argument and more a
flight of understanding.
5
Lawrence: How One
Becomes What One Is
Everything, in so far as it is in itself, endeavours to persist in its
own being.
Spinoza
Lawrence's writings seek to demonstrate that becoming what one

is is supremely valuable and arduous. It is the value, the one factor
that separates Lawrence's heroes and heroines from the rest of his
characters. These best people have a hard time, for they are not like
Rilke's Heroes, whose destiny is assured and unquestioned from
the beginning. None the less, Lawrence's admired ones are
incapable of wandering all their lives along a populous highway,
but must sooner or later make off down a side track. Indeed it
would be better to say that they force their way into the trackless
forest.
As for Nietzsche, he too maintains that self-becoming is an
exploration, a series of goals, each indescribable until one has
reached it and is pressing on to the next, 'for your true nature lies,
not concealed deep within you, but immeasurably high above you,
or at least above that which you usually take yourself to be'. 1 Both
Nietzsche and Lawrence see the majority as incapable of this vital
progress. And both regard plans for a co-operative society, in
which people respect each other's ways, as disguised plans for a
standardised society in which distinctions are ornamental. Here it
will be convenient for a change to deal with the philosopher's
theory first and to put the artist aside for a few pages. The reason is
that Nietzsche's view of self-becoming is closely allied to his theory
of will to power, and the latter in turn is the foundation of both the
Nietzschean and the Lawrentian vision. Lawrence intuitively saw
power as Nietzsche saw it.
'Will to power', then, is Nietzsche's cardinal term, used by him
to refer to the principle of all being. 'This world is the will to power -
and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power -
111
and nothing besides!'2 The world, the totality of all things, is

nothing but will to power, so that whenever people seek to
differentiate themselves from the physical universe (as, for ex-
ample, by regarding their natures as essentially spiritual) they are
only doing in a human fashion what non-human beings do in their
varied fashions - exercising will to power. A person's spiritual
aspirations and a plant's growth through the soil are alike modes of
self-fulfilment. And the self is a powerful will.
At this point I should make it plain that the argument I am
briefly expounding is Nietzsche's adaptation of the central idea of
Schopenhauer. It was Schopenhauer who first argued for the
universality of will. 'Therefore: he wrote in The World as Will and
Representation, 'in this sense I teach that the inner nature of
everything is will, and I call the will the thing-in-itself.'3 The
argument is thus over a hundred and fifty years old, but it is
unfamiliar at present and many people might well feel uncomfort-
able thinking in Schopenhaurian terms - which seem, neverthe-
less, to be supported rather than refuted by Einsteinian physics.
But let us continue to consider what these terms of Schopenhauer
and Nietzsche are.
Will to power is what being is. There is not first being which is
then sometimes informed by will to power. Will to power is being
and being is will to power. As Heidegger puts it, 'Will to power is
never the willing of a particular actual entity. It involves the Being
and the essence of beings: it is this itself.'4 As we remarked earlier,
being is actually becoming, since nothing exists unchangingly. 5 It
appears that Nietzsche saw inorganic substances as once-organic
or potentially organic substances at present stabilised. To say that
something is 'stabilised' amounts to saying that no force within the
substance may at this moment dominate the others. Nothing is
currently happening because the indwelling forces are exactly
balanced against one another. Equilibrium is stasis and is no
healthier in the body politic than in the physical body. However,
stasis is evidence not of the enduring absence of will to power, or
of its enduring negation, but of its temporary quiescence. Einstein
once made this point when discussing the theory of relativity: he
remarked that 'inert mass is nothing else than latent energy'. 6
Will to power emphatically does not mean appetite for power or
pursuit of power. In fact each term - 'will', 'to' and 'power' - needs
comment here. First, it may be helpful if we briefly think of will as
drive or energy, for then the universal application that Nietzsche
Ulwrence: Becoming What One Is 113
intends will be easier to assimilate. It is not that Nietzsche takes the

non-mechanical quality out of will but rather that he restores that
quality to all forms of energy. The philosopher lies behind Freud in
believing that conscious will is at best the rationalised upper
residue of unconscious will. Further than that, Nietzsche attributes
will to every force in nature, since he believes that everything non-
mechanistic is informed by will. For instance, a breeze whipping
along a shoreline, bending trees, rocking boats, causing people to
totter: such a breeze undoubtedly has drive or energy. But since
will is never properly conscious, why do we not say that the breeze
has or is will?
The breeze is not a mere force, or if it is a mere force, how may
we define force?
The notorious concept 'force', by means of which our physicists

have created God and the World, still needs to be completed: an
inner will must be ascribed to it, which I designate as 'will to
power', i.e., as an insatiable desire to manifest power; or as the
employment and exercise of power, as a creative drive, etc. 7
Nietzsche implies that, for example, when we call a breeze a 'force'

we must bear in mind that force is not necessarily or normally
mechanical. We tend wrongly to regard a breeze as quasi-
mechanical, but of course a breeze is not a mechanism, not a
machine at all, for it does 'what it likes' and not what it has been
engineered to do. The breeze is neither more nor less than what it
does of its own accord.
For anything to act of its own accord is to be or display what we
normally understand as 'will'. We should not deny will to the
breeze on the grounds that the breeze doesn't know what it is
doing, or doesn't plan its doings, or is forced into them by
atmospheric conditions. Such grounds apply to creatures also,
including human beings. Even the elevated consciousness of a
person is nothing but the application of words to original libido.
And libido, in turn, is no more than a form of that molecular
activity which we share with everything else. The differences are
stages, not gaps or jumps.
An individual is therefore a cluster of drives forming a distinctive
core. The core is will to power. Like the breeze, however, the
individual is not will to obtain power, for power is what he already
is. As we have seen, the 'power' of the phrase 'will to power' is a
property of every element in creation. We ourselves exercise power

and are power in all our actions. As Gilles Deleuze neatly puts it,
'The will to power is thus ascribed to force, but in a very special
way: it is both a complement of force and something internal to it.'8
Deleuze means and makes clear in four illuminating pages that
each force both has and contains its own self-defining, irreplace-
able power. Power in a general sense is plainly an abstraction.
Political power or the power attached to any recognised social role
is a slave-substitute for genuine power. The latter is entirely
personal and may neither be conferred nor removed by others.
So far, then, we can say that 'will to power' means drive to show
or exercise one's own peculiar power. Each of us is to be defined as
a specific 'insatiable desire to manifest power; or as the employment
and exercise of power, as a creative drive, etc'. Finally, therefore,
the preposition in the term 'will to power' bears no connotation of
seeking or aspiring, but abbreviates the phrase 'to the exercise of'.
We will to exercise the power that we already happen to be.
Now it is clear that exercising one's personal power entails
conflict with others. How could it not do so? Without the conflict
there would be no power and, in practical terms, the less conflict
the less power. Yet the majority look for frictionless conflict and do
this by disowning themselves. The procedure is to cover one's face
with a mask chosen from a large but standardised batch and to
strive (successfully as a rule) to mould one's native features to the
mask. The millrace of one's unique will to power thus flows into a
broad and sluggish stream. It loses much of its character and
special force, but it still exists in a diffused and weakened form.
The individual now feels that he has some political power,
recognised power, though his personal power is dissipated.
Among the masked people there is a formularistic sort of conflict.
These people do not fight for themselves personally but in some
public cause. One hears many arguments and each is empty,
inapplicable to any single individual. The debators are, above all,
reasonable, ready to yield to a majority view, which can be no
more than an agreed formula. Naturally the formula is sterile. All
this procedure is gone through in order to avoid actual wounds
and intensity of life.
By this means the weak defeat the strong and have progressively
done so down the ages. The weak nullify themselves and imagine
that the strong may do the same. A weak man, Nietzsche says in
effect, is like a lamb regarding an eagle and thinking to itself, 'That
Lawrence: Becoming What One Is 115
frightful bird would be acceptable if only it behaved like a lamb.'

The lamb fails to appreciate that predatoriness is not accidental but
essential to the eagle-nature.
Nietzsche does not suggest that homo sapiens is necessarily a
predator. He means that a strong person retains his ability,
whatever it is, while the numerous weak allow themselves to be
separated from what they can do. 9 Thus the strong individual is
characterised by his unique capacity, while the mass of people
cultivate shared, impersonal ways. The important fact to grasp is
that the strong are not free to be weak.
We have just been speaking of mankind generally: all are
composed of more or less efficient will to power. In addition,
Nietzsche has in common with Lawrence a faith in a certain
'metaphysical' distinction of gender. Since the will to power is
primary in Nietzsche, if not in Lawrence, gender is a secondary
consideration to the philosopher. Nor does Nietzsche think of his
distinction of men's and women's personalities as un surpassable
but, on the contrary, cultural and open to change. Nevertheless,
Nietzsche believes that we had better maintain some age-old
differences. His comments about relations between the sexes are
candidly recommendations and are not presented as biological
'laws'. Another way of putting the matter would be to say that they
are candidly prejudices. They do not seem to me to be indispens-
able to his thought, for I cannot understand how his doctrines
would be seriously affected, let alone destroyed, if men and
women were held to have potentially the same qualities, including
of course the same creative scope.
However, Zarathustra declares that 'For the woman, the man is
a means: the end is always the child. But what is the woman for the
man?' 10 The answer is that the man is a warrior and a child, one
who fights and plays, so that the woman is his recreation. She is a
bitter recreation preferably, says Zarathustra, but a recreation just
the same. The woman's point of view is that the man gives her
children. The man's point of view is that the woman respects his
creative activity. 'The man's happiness is: I will. The woman's
happiness is: He Will.'ll This does not mean that she should
automatically obey, far from it, but that she is happy when the
man's creative drive is such that she can willingly obey. Law-
rence's novels repeatedly deal with this very topic.
Both Nietzsche and Lawrence believed that civilisation cannot be
at its best whenever women's enterprises tend away from repro-
duction and nurturing. A specialised woman might do a 'man's

work' instead, by which I do not mean run-of-the-mill jobs but
some pioneering activity. Factory work is not 'man's work' in this
sense, and neither is accountancy. On the other hand, Marie Curie
eminently did man's work.
A man properly desires to create 'beyond himself', as Zarathus-
tra puts it: to create something higher than himself. This might well
be a child whose superior value to the father betokens the father's
value. A good marriage is in being when a woman supports a man
in his self-transcending ambition. 'Marriage,' says Zarathustra,
'that I call the will of two to create the one who is more than those
who created it.'12 Both parents in a good marriage desire such
offspring-above-themselves. In order to desire this offspring both
the father and the mother must be self-created people. It may
happen, of course, that a bad or mediocre marriage, in which
neither the man nor the woman is self-created, produces a superior
child. For all that, in the best sort of alliance the mother's will flows
towards pregnancy and her husband's creativity. Zarathustra's
teaching is that a man should make his own path and a woman
should choose a man who does so.
Generally that is Lawrence's teaching also, though he regularly
confronts obstacles to such a way of life and empathises with his
heroines. According to him men have lost their way, becoming
ciphers, while women either blindly lead or clamour to become
equal ciphers with the men. This is a principal theme in Lawrence
from the beginning almost to the end, from The White Peacock to
Lady Chatterley's Lover.
The title of Lawrence's first novel is not so inapt .as has sometimes
been supposed. Annable, the gamekeeper, remarks to the young
narrator, Cyril, that the soul of a woman is like the peacock which
the pair of them observe one evening in the Hall churchyard. This
bird perches on the neck of an angel, spreads its glimmering tail
and defiles its holy pedestal. A little later Annable tells Cyril the
story of his marriage. As a young man he was a tolerably contented
curate, but a Lady Crystabel lusted after him, married him and
abandoned him when she was physically sated. Cyril comments
that, at any rate, Lady Crystabel must have been a white peacock,
since she could not help her behaviour.
Cyril's remark is not superfluous but to some extent an explana-
tion of the novel. For us much falls into place because of the title.
Perhaps the meaning of the design grew clearer to Lawrence
himself when (in 1910, at his publisher's insistence) he changed the

name from 'Nethermere'. Certainly Lawrence must have appreci-
ated only after the passage of years that his beautiful rustic
composition revolved around the theme of man's loss of direction
and woman's consequent waywardness.
The young farmer, George Saxton, is handsome, indolent,
inwardly soft and purposeless. Cyril's graceful sister, Lettie, rejects
George, though he pleads with her to marry him and tell him what
to do with his life. He needs a woman to give him a goal. But Lettie
rightly maintains that she is not strong enough to guide them both.
Instead she marries the rich Leslie Tempest, who has ordinary
social ambitions. Leslie's career - as a mine-owner and later a
politician - proves to be meaningless to Lettie because it is
'inorganic', unconnected with the actual man. Lettie ends desper-
ately bored: her life is drifting away while her husband goes about
his conventional business.
George Saxton marries Meg of the Ram Inn and, despite Meg's
sensual loveliness, either accelerates or fails to check his own
decline. His status is now that of Meg's husband, father of her
children. He ends as a sot, serving a contemptuous woman and
heading for an early death. The burden is clear: in this fertile
district of 'Nethermere' the young besport themselves with rare
intensity so long as the sap is simply rising, but when the time
comes for life-defining choices these people turn out to be empty or
misguided. Neither George nor Leslie is a pathfinder, and the
women, Lettie, Meg and, less significantly, Emily Saxton, are lost
because they are bereft of pioneering masculine guidance. The
White Peacock is a lament for the loss of religious meaning.
'Religious meaning' may seem an odd, arbitrary phrase to use in
this connection. Yet the words are fitting, because Lawrence
recognised even then, at the outset of his career, that a sense of
personal meaning is bound up with a sense of universal meaning.
If the world is seen as a collection of mechanical bits and pieces, or
if society (Marxianly) blots out the natural world, then the
individual is merely a unit. Thus there is a complete difference
between a personal meaning and a public, or social, or mechanical
explanation. The latter is a pale substitute for meaning.
The people of The White Peacock, men and women, lack assured
individuality. Cyril perhaps has this quality, but the story he tells is
not his story. The same theme is amplified and much clarified in
Sons and Lovers. For the first six months of their marriage Walter
and Gertrude Morel each seem lit from within, as it were, by a

beacon. Gertrude comes from a 'good old burgher family,13 and
has the haughty pride of her father. This pride in her integrity is
Gertrude's beacon. Her personality largely consists in a sturdy,
unyielding response to the environment. Everything around her is
resisted, or else appropriated. She is the resistant one and is
therefore strong. Gertrude is here and the world is there. Note that
this is not simply because her bourgeois soul shrinks from the
mining community, but fundamentally because her puritan nature
must needs dominate the 'world as such'. The antagonism
between Gertrude's nature and the 'wilderness of this world', as
Bunyan calls it, is tragic and creative. She herself is somewhat
intellectual, psychologically astute and receptive. The last-
mentioned quality is not a defence mechanism or a form of shyness,
but just her strong, inquisitive way of encountering externality.
Gertrude is fascinated by Walter Morel when she first meets him
at a Christmas party because he is handsome, excessively physical,
unmoral and heedless. 'Mindless', one might pardonably say. He
does not resist the world but flows along with it, like an animal.
Religion to Gertrude amounts to tragic, unrelenting personal
integrity: one resists for the sake of resisting, to the death. Morel's
way amounts to a set of sure instincts, like a dog's: he venerates
nothing so much as his own impulses. Everything and everyone is
to him merely the object of an impulse. He reacts as a dog reacts,
basking in affection, or snarling with rage, or going to sleep.
In the early period of their marriage Gertrude remains true to her
puritan nature, which is not an ascetic nature but a proud,
assertive, oath-keeping sort of personality. At the same time
Walter begins to assume the posture of a whipped and defeated
dog. His 'fighting back' consists of surliness and fits of violence, for
he cannot learn some effective technique with which to combat his
wife. Lawrence remarks in the chapter 'The Young Life of Paul'
that Morel 'had denied the God in him', 14 implying, I believe, that
one's God, or one's version of the universal God, is one's will to
power. Thus Morel's will to power naturally still lurks within him,
but as a broken, baffled agent.
Here we can align Lawrence's terminology with Nietzsche's. In
this vision of the artist one partakes of God. God is 'in' the
individual. But the form God takes is evidently peculiar to the
individual. Similarly, as we have seen, one's will to power is 'in'
one, or constitutes oneself. This personal version of God, or this
personal will to power, is what, according to both Nietzsche and

Lawrence, one should become. ('How One Becomes What One Is'
is the subtitle of Nietzsche's Ecce Homo.)
The individual who succeeds in this endeavour has progressive-
ly shaken off any ill-fitting, imitative garments he has acquired. He
becomes what he is by ridding himself of everything he is not.
Likewise the God in Lawrentian man is that man's share of
godhood - since God to Lawrence is never absolute or transcen-
dental. Both Nietzsche and Lawrence refute mechanistic interpre-
tations of life by denying not only the machinery of nature but also
the First Cause. Absolute being is absolute and harmful fantasy in
the eyes of both men. There are only struggling little beings, each
one of potential value in his own right. There are no command-
ments now and, it seems, to Lawrence (as to Nietzsche) the way of
Christ is simply a way one might choose. (Of course it has been
argued often enough that Jesus wanted such followers, not a
Christian Church, not Christian nations, not an empire of
Christendom. )
Even the old concept of a moral God is finished in Lawrence's
view, since morality may no longer be regarded as a fixed standard
for all persons and places. But if God is alternatively apprehended
as 'morality', undefined and unformulated, then each moral
individual makes his own way to God. God Himself is possibly a
meeting point of a myriad private moralities. There is all the
difference in the world between a private morality and no morality.
Many people have no morality in Lawrence's sense, since to him
morality consists in creative transactions between the individual
and the environment, and most of us are uncreative.
In Sons and Lovers there are snares for the individual who has a
creative spark. William, the eldest son, is ensnared when he courts
the Streatham girl 'Gypsy', who understands 'nothing but love-
making and chatter' IS and has been confirmed three times through
love of the ceremony. Gypsy is certainly a 'white peacock' who
means no harm but contrives to kill her fiance by her soullessness.
William is so torn between his own soul, his will to power in other
words, and his promise to this girl that he dies of pneumonia. The
point is not that William's soul belongs to his mother, 16 but that
Mrs Morel has fostered in him a delicate and still-growing structure
of selfhood which Gypsy cannot perceive, let alone nurture.
The pattern is developed far more elaborately in the relation of
Paul Morel and Miriam Leivers. Paul is an artist who acknowledges
the 'God in him' and never frustrates his own lively, observant
spirit. On the other hand, Miriam crushes her instincts, since she is
driven by fear. Out of fear all must be defined and formalised.
Nothing is allowed to reveal itself but is instead subordinated to an
ideal. The self or soul of everything - a person, a flower, an animal,
a task, a pastime - must be aligned with a prescribed form. An
original self is by definition bad.
Miriam is a victim of what Nietzsche calls 'ascetic ideals'.
Nietzsche writes that 'in the case of the physiologically deformed
and deranged (the majority of mortals) ... these ideals are an
attempt to see themselves as "too good" for this world'.17 For
example, says Nietzsche, 'there is no necessary antithesis between
chastity and sensuality; every good marriage, every genuine love
affair, transcends this antithesis'. 18 But the ascetic idealist may
wish to confront any actual marriage with chastity, to compare the
confused details of the marriage with a spotless standard.
Miriam is proud of her humility; even her 'joy is like a flame
coming off sadness', Paul tells her; 19 she leaves 'no emotion on a
normal plane' ;20 her body is 'not flexible and living'. 21 When Paul
declares that he does not love her, Miriam assumes that he is
mistaken. 22 Miriam is Gothic, Paul points out, meaning that she
wishes to rise heavenwards like a Gothic arch and preferably never
return to earth. Earth is axiomatically bad. The flesh is rendered
acceptable only when it is given a firm, conscious meaning and
thus commandeered. Fear is the root of this; fear of the body, of
course, but mainly just fear. By making something conscious
Miriam limits it and seems to control it. An artist such as Paul is not
seen as an inconsistent, ever-growing, ever-changing individual
but as a category of person who must perforce follow certain artist-
rules and correspond minutely to the ideal or image of 'the artist'.
He may not enjoy vulgar amusements, for instance.
On the other hand, Clara Dawes has next to nothing to do with
ascetic ideals. It is true that she feels guilty after her first act of
adultery with Paul, but that is no more than a slight bow towards
convention and a far cry from Miriam's reverence for rules. Clara's
ten years of self-education and membership of the women's
movement are not aspects of an attempt to .see herself as too good
for this world. She is a rather bitter, rebellious person but not a
renegade from life itself. The distinction here is important, since
many who are renegades from life see themselves as merely social
rebels: sufferings are overwhelmingly ascribed to conditions of
lAwrence: Becoming What One Is 121
society. Clara is not of that numerous persuasion. She and Miriam

differ chiefly in that the latter seeks an impossible sphere of static,
perfected being, while Clara, despite her bitterness, accepts the
actual sphere of becoming.
Mrs Morel is like Clara in this vital respect. The mother's
puritanism is a studied attitude towards life, not a yearning for
heaven. One must fight as a matter of pride and principle. Hence,
of course, the rejection of Morel, who will not grasp that the
natural way for a man differs from the natural ways of other
animals. Each species has its power or genius and homo sapiens
should continually make, or reinterpret, the environment (compare
Rilke) - not in order to blot out the changes, the ups and downs,
the pains of living, but merely out of creative zeal.
Most of Lawrence's exemplary characters do not fly straight to a
creative destiny like an arrow to its target. The chief exceptions are
Birkin, the author's self-projection in Women in Love, and Don
Ram6n in The Plumed Serpent. Apart from those two, no one in
Lawrence says, with Nietzsche, 'Formula of my happiness: a Yes, a
No, a straight line, a goal . .. '.23 Generally Lawrence's characters
are distracted, or they start late, or they eventually give up. But the
principle remains constant: nothing matters so much as creativity.
'Progress' in the benevolent political and scientific senses is
regarded as utter nonsense.
The Rainbow is a portrait of creative ebb and flow amid predomin-
antly hostile conditions in the late nineteenth century. We may not
readily accept Lawrence's interpretation of those conditions, yet,
on the other hand, his picture might now seem more discerning
than the old tales of triumphant progress. His reigning attitude
towards the early twentieth century was a strange mixture of anger
and chirpiness. Man in his lunatic pride was rushing into the
desert of mechanisation, but somehow he would come through.
There is something here of Nietzsche's philosophical assumption
that great movements of history must work themselves out.
Lawrence sometimes thinks in that fashion but, conversely, he
often conveys a sense of urgency, even of desperation.
The Rainbow illustrates more clearly than preceding novels the
blindness of the will to power. Those Brangwen men at the
beginning of the book, farmers before 1840, have 'a kind of surety,
an expectancy, the look of an inheritor'. 24 This look is not
searching, since the inheritance is assured. They are blindly at one
with the soil and the seasons. Their will flows with the will of the
land. The Brangwen womenfolk of that period yearn for knowl-

edge and spiritual fulfilment. Their will also is blind, for they peer
into darkness. Who is creative, the male or the female?
The men are midwives to nature and are therefore comparatively
unconscious and personally unfruitful. They have no problems of
meaning and prefer darkness to light. For that very reason the
women yearn for light, for 'poetry' in the widest, Shelleyan sense
of all the grand works of interpretation: Homer, the Dialogues of
Plato, the Bible. Such works once made everything fall into place,
illuminating even the dullest and nastiest events. That is the kind
of light sought by the Brangwen women of the early nineteenth
century. Two generations later Anna Brangwen still requires
similar enlightenment, because she finds the explanations offered
by church and school to be inappropriate to her. She is proud while
the other girls at school are, she declares, 'bagatelle'. The school-
mistress has a 'coarsely working nature,25 and commands Anna,
the little aristocrat, to learn thirty lines of As You Like It.
In other words, Anna Brangwen forms a self-image which is
independent of immediate social influences, for it seems to be part
of Lawrence's purpose to demonstrate the self-generating charac-
ter of such images. We might trace a line of descent for Anna's
notion of herself, but the essential feature of such a line must be
precisely that it is not mechanical and therefore not a 'cause' in the
usual sense.
To consider this matter from Lawrence's own point of view, we
should remark that, having resolved to grow into an aristocrat of
some sort, the child Anna indeed moulds herself aristocratically -
that is, without reference to social expectations. 'Free, proud lady'
is her self-definition and therefore her accomplishment, for what
could check her advance? She would not bow to an impediment
even if she were physically impeded, since stone walls do not a
prison make. She might conceivably be an 'imprisoned aristocrat'
some day, yet no one could rob her of her nature. It is Lawrence's
view (and Nietzsche's) that free people thus create themselves.
Social and physical conditions are flimsy entanglements. To those
who regard such an attitude as self-deception, Lawrence would
certainly have replied - The Rainbow makes this clear - that one
must cope with social circumstances from the standpoint of one's
own freely conceived self. That self is primary, not formed by
circumstances but potentially formative of them.
Nothing of note in contemporary culture supports Anna's
definition of herself, since she interprets Christianity so liberally as

to be almost a pagan and has no time for science, reform, the
march of the British Empire or Victorian respectability. Anna
represents an ascending form of life, a way of pride, indifference
and individual conquest, while around her people abase them-
selves either to nostalgia (in the fashion of the Pre-Raphaelites and
Ruskin) or to dreams of the future. The present is widely supposed
to be a vantage point for looking forward or back, while Anna lives
entirely in the present. But she does so by making her own little
world in the village of Cossethay.
At eighteen she marries her cousin Will, who appears to her as
an outsider, a strange mixture of refinement and uncouthness,
distinguished from the local Ilkeston youths. Soon after their
wedding Will proves himself to be an escapist, not a cultured man
in the adventurous Renaissance sense but one who clings in fear to
outworn symbols. He prefers symbols to concrete reality.26 The
lamb of God is God to him, while to Anna it is a living lamb.
Lincoln Cathedral is a vast symbol which reassuringly excludes the
wild and fecund world. Nevertheless this preference of the
husband constitutes his being. It is all there is of him, his entirety,
his crippled will to power, and accordingly his way of battling with
his wife. Her way of fighting him is often mockery but at her most
triumphant it is pregnancy. When she is pregnant she excludes the
father. So she builds her domain while Will tends the church,
Cossethay Church, beside their house.
Students of Lawrence will have found the foregoing excessively
familiar, but it has been necessary to rehearse these matters in
order to emphasise that Lawrence is presenting not 'character' in
the traditional sense but will to power. That is approximately what
he meant in declaring to Edward Garnett that The ordinary novel
would trace the histo~ of the diamond - but I say, "diamond,
what! This is carbon".' 7 The 'this' that is carbon is the portraiture
in The Rainbow, which can be regarded as a static element only in
relation to the ordinary motions of consciousness. The 'carbon-
aceous' core of character that Lawrence depicts in The Rainbow is not
actually static. In the letter to Garnett he meant to stress that he
viewed the ego not as a coherence of thoughts, feelings and so on,
but as something deeper and more stable. More stable, pervasive,
consistent, but surely not motionless, since it must move in
response to circumstances. In fact the carbon in question can only
be will to power. Thus the core of Anna Brangwen is an ever-active
will with which she fends off the injunctions and blandishments of
the community.
The exercise of will to power is much more evident in the career
of Ursula Brangwen, eldest daughter of Will and Anna and
properly the 'heroine' of The Rainbow. For Ursula's will is far more
varied, inclusive and contradictory than that of either her father or
her mother. Ursula's personality is unusually rich and productive,
because it is composed of conflicting drives which she does not try
to harmonise by mendacious means. She has the minimum of bad
faith. Such is the quality of a highly creative personality. Anna
Brangwen's creativity more or less stops at reproduction, Will
Brangwen's at handicrafts and handicraft-teaching. But Ursula
tries to reconcile in herself the great spiritual tensions of turn-of-
the century Europe.
There are apparent causes of Ursula's nature which are, once
again, no causes at all. These are merely predisposing circum-
stances, notably the child's love-hate relation with her father and a
certain isolation from a mother forever preoccupied with the next
baby. Like Anna before her, Ursula sees herself as superior to the
local children and it never occurs to her that others might have a
poor opinion of her. Here once more is the master-morality
element of the Brangwens, the tendency (missing in Will Brang-
wen) to confer value, or discover it, rather than receive it ready-
made.
Ursula loves learning partly because she has an aspiring nature.
She aspires not to any social standard, for she is above such
considerations, but to a scarcely definable criterion which at its
zenith assumes the mask of a personal God. Jesus is not Ursula's
God, or rather the human, crucified Jesus of the common people is
not hers. She regards herself as one of the daughters of men who
will one day be taken by a son of God. So she is exceptional, linked
with God rather than part of the social nexus. And hers is a godlike
God, a fierce, noble divinity, composed of lion and eagle.
Ursula's progress consists more radically than her mother's in
rejecting the influences of society. It would be yet more accurate to
say that while Anna turns her disdainful back on society, Ursula
needs to do battle with society. Finding her own route must
include pinpointing the wrongness of the general route. One
aspect of the general route is illustrated in the person of Anton
Skrebensky, Ursula's lover. He has an aristocratic demeanour but
turns out to be glad to be a brick in the social fabric. How accurately
Ulwrence: Becoming What One Is 125
in the portrait of Skrebensky Lawrence predicts the tendency of

people of all classes to fall into the democratic trap, where only
token responsibilities remain!
Likewise Ursula grows out of her love for the teacher Winifred
Inger, because Winifred is an uncaring observer. Then University
College, Nottingham, seems intellectually exciting at first but
quickly proves to be a commercial sham. One studies to enter the
world of commerce, not the kingdom of heaven. Or rather, the
kingdom of heaven, which university work ought actually to
constitute (in the sense not of unrelieved joy but of hallowed
meaning), has been supplanted by considerations of trade. Ursula
also finds her profession of schoolteaching to be just a mechanical
discipline, without zest or human purpose.
Most interesting for our purposes, I suggest, is a jarring
conversation Ursula has at the university with a certain Dr
Frankstone. This lady, a physics lecturer, opines as follows:
I don't see why we should attribute some special mystery to life-

do you? We don't understand it as we understand electricity,
even, but that doesn't warrant our saying it is something
different in kind and distinct from everything else in the
universe - do you think it does? May it not be that life consists in
a complexity of physical and chemical activities, of the same
order as the activities we already know in science? I don't see,
really, why we should imagine there is a special order of life, and
life alone ... 28
Ursula frets over these remarks and then, a few days later, gazes at
a unicellular creature under her microscope. It moves and Ursula
joyously recognises that the creature is moving of its own volition.
It intended to be itself. But what self?.. She could not

understand what it all was. She only knew that it was not limited
mechanical energy, not mere purpose of self-preservation and
self-assertion. It was a consummation, a being infinite. Self was a
oneness with the infinite. To be oneself was a supreme,
gleaming triumph of infinity. 29
Now here it seems to me that Lawrence, in his zeal to prove his

Dr Frankstone wrong, might actually have misrepresented mat-
ters. The lecturer is right: life is probably not 'something different

in kind and distinct from everything else in the universe'. It is not
life alone that is mysterious. Only the strictly mechanical is
mechanical. Modem biologists no longer make a hard and fast
distinction between the organic and the inorganic, but bring the
two together by extending the sphere of the first.
Nevertheless, although Dr Frankstone is technically right, she is
appallingly and symptomatically wrong in her desire to abolish
mystery or, in other words, to reduce all to measurable factors. The
lesson Ursula draws is Lawrence's and Nietzsche's lesson also. It is
Nietzsche's as well as Lawrence's because in concluding that 'self
was a oneness with the infinite' Ursula rids herself of mechanical
interpretation. In one of its senses the infinite is the all, everything
that ever has been and ever will be. The infinite is thus vaguely
understood to be a grand aggregate of finite things. This is a
mechanistic conception of infinity which actually amounts to a
monstrous finitude, a whole which is yet remotely circumscribed.
Ursula's radically different insight was expressed in the seven-
teenth century by Spinoza. 'Every substance', he wrote, 'is
necessarily infinite.,30 His proof of this proposition was that a
substance can be limited only by another substance having exactly
the same attributes. I may be limited only by another me, not by
some other person or process. Similarly, Ursula concludes that any
being in its unique self is creatively unlimited. It limitlessly creates
itself, out of itself. There can be no check on this process except for
the self-imposed check of mechanisation; that is, the false belief
that people are essentially social or biological components. People
cannot be components, but it has often seemed useful for us to
think of them as such. It is clear, also, that according to this
Lawrentian or 'Ursuline' doctrine physical death is not contem-
plated as the absolute end of a being but as transformation. We
have encountered this vision in Rilke and here it is necessary only
to stress that at all stages of one's being some sort of creation is
possible. That is the mode of identity of the self and the infinite.
We now approach another aspect of that doctrine of self-
becoming which Lawrence shares with Nietzsche. Ursula's story is
so far incomplete because throughout her youth she has merely, if
bravely, rejected a number of false solutions. She may not retreat,
as her mother did, into the sort of marriage which tends to exclude
the larger social world. For Ursula, as for her author, everything
should cohere: religion, society, culture, one's vocation and one's
most intimate personal relations. Consequently the rainbow which

Ursula sees at the conclusion of the novel is nothing more than a
hopeful sign: it does not tell her how to proceed. This provincial girl
may not solve vast problems of life and spirit, yet, at the same
time, she may not rest content if no one else is tackling them.
Thus, in writing Women in Love, Lawrence, being now ready to
tackle such problems himself, gives Ursula the role of argumenta-
tive disciple. She becomes the character upon whom he 'tries out'
his anguished ruminations. Amusingly enough, she is not even a
sympathetic pupil but one who is apt to find her teacher over-
solemn and perverse. Through the relation of Birkin and Ursula,
Lawrence imagines how a lively, enquiring young woman would
greet his own philosophical thoughts. A good deal of the time she
is in robust disagreement with them, but of course Lawrence, as
Birkin, has no intention of letting Ursula win. Why should he,
since her own thoughts are usually at best reservations and at
worst uncomprehending insults? Even at the very end she is still
convinced that Birkin's desire for 'two kinds of love' (,eternal
union' with a man as well as a woman) is 'an obstinacy, a theory, a
perversity'. 31
This means that Lawrence could not accept that his own desire
for two kinds of love might be a perversity. Just the same, he
realised that it was impossible to explain to his wife, Frieda, why
he was not satisfied with her alone. And he would likewise have
found it impossible to explain to his former fiancee, Louisa (Louie)
Burrows, upon whom Ursula is largely based. 32 Lawrence com-
monly experienced this kind of difficulty because he ventured to
the limits of thought and could not find reasons for his ideas. The
point is, however, that Ursula is a yea-sayer, an affirmer of life in
all its natural forms. She is probably wrong - so we understand - to
detect some sort of decadence in Birkin's desires, but she is right to
stand on guard against decadence.
She is right also to sense decadence all around her, to be aware
of the 'decline of the west'. If this sounds too grand, we should
remember that all her life Ursula has recognised and rejected that
decline in the forms of her father's nostalgia, her mother's cavalier
withdrawal, the education system, the ethics of nationalism
(Skrebensky), joyless cynicism (Winifred Inger), the progress of
scientific materialism and the inadequacy of the church.
Ursula's younger sister, Gudrun, is yet another focus for
Lawrence's investigations, since she greets the decline of the west
in an entirely different fashion. To Gudrun that decline is attractive

precisely because it smells of dissolution and decay. These two
ways of life, Ursula's and Gudrun's, Lawrence, through Birkin,
calls 'synthetic creation' and 'destructive creation'. The first term
corresponds to what Nietzsche calls 'health', the second to what he
calls 'decadence'.
Now here we enter an obscure terrain which Lawrence, at any
rate, never bothers to illuminate. On the other hand Nietzsche
does unravel these matters and he means, I believe, more or less
what Lawrence means. First, it is necessary to recognise that health
and decadence (I will use Nietzsche's language for the sake of
simplicity) are not mutually exclusive. To the contrary, Nietzsche
regarded himself as both healthy and decadent. He makes it plain
in the first section of Ecce Homo that his own decadence consisted in
long experience of morbidity, of actual physical sickness, from
which vantage point he examined the attitudes and values of
abundant health. That is, he came to know how typical decadents
feel, or he knew the groundwork of their feelings. To this
physically sick Nietzsche there thus came an intimate knowledge
of how certain values inimical to life (nihilistic values) had arisen.
Specifically these were and are the Christian moral values which
once openly held life in contempt and even now seek to 'amend'
life so far as the human race is concerned. This desire for
amendment, Nietzsche argues, is ultimately a rejection of one's
own personal degeneracy. One establishes two equations: good-
ness = health, harmony and co-operation; badness = pain, discord
and antagonism. The object is to eliminate the second equation
from all human affairs.
But this seemingly wholesome way is the way of the decadent,
for only a decadent dreams of a 'perfected', which is to sayan
inorganic life. For every living thing is of necessity made up of
conflict. So it is just an obvious form of decadence, the form to
which we normally give the name, that openly relishes les fleurs du
mal. We should remember that the fascinating Baudelairean savour
has to do with a connection between sex and holiness, sex and
heaven, sex and 'purity': in short, sex and death. Early Christians
and numbers of medieval people actually preferred the sick to the
healthy, since the healthy were too much in love with life to be
ready candidates for heaven. The infirm were demonstrably
heading for the 'perfection' of the afterlife. Then there is our
modern mode of decadence which reaches out for the inorganic,
sees people as more or less interchangeable and concentrates

upon their purely social worth.
The point is that the typical decadent depersonalises himself and
others. An individual is then regarded as one of God's scarcely
differentiated children, or as a member (a 'unit') of the Church, or
else, in modern parlance, as one who 'belongs to society'. His or
her body is an assemblage of parts, although it is we who have
fragmented the body for medical purposes. One's very 'soul' is a
reflection of society. The overriding aim in all this is the
seemingly commendable one of keeping sickness and pain at bay.
For millenia, in one fashion or another, we have aimed for
unmodified joy - as if joy were incompatible with sorrow.
On the other hand, good health should correctly be seen to
consist not in the absence of sickness but in power to surmount it.
A healthy person, says Nietzsche, makes use of his illnesses and
overcomes them, while an unhealthy person yields to them.
Similarly a healthy society, such as the Renaissance, is certainly not
one in which few are sick (injured, humiliated, and so on), but one
which produces flowers from its natural discord. These are not
[leurs du mal (though it would be a typical decadent's error to think
they were) but, for example, the splendid language of a Tambur-
laine. Thus health and decadence do not necessarily exclude each
other. Sometimes indeed, perhaps as a rule, the first needs the
second as antagonist. 'From the military school of life. - What does
not kill me makes me stronger.,33
Now Lawrence's Birkin coins the phrases 'synthetic creation'
and 'destructive creation'. Two rivers flow concurrently through-
out the world. One is the 'silver river of life, rolling on and
quickening all the world to a brightness'. The other is 'that dark
river of dissolution', a 'black river of corruption'. 34 In plain terms
Birkin means that human beings at least (for it is not clear if he
intends a non-human application as well) create either by merging
things (synthetic creation) or by splitting things (destructive
creation), by fusion or by fission. The second sort of creative
process has been the commoner in our history, but bursts of
synthetic creation occur now and then and, in any event, Birkin
cannot tolerate the thought of centuries of 'ice-destructive knowl-
edge, snow-abstract annihilation'. 35 These and similar phrases in
Women in Love have sometimes seemed to critics of Lawrence to be
obscure and eccentric, yet their meaning is vital. Birkin is proph-
esying the end of Apollonian harmony between the senses and the
intellect. Such a fate must also mean the end of individuals. The
world's future will be either purely sensual in the 'African' way or
abstract in the 'northern' way. In both cases individuality and self-
determination will vanish. The individualist's route is anyway
painful, so it is especially easy to convince a hedonistic people that
it is also wrong - 'selfish', 'anti-social' and so forth. We increasing-
ly aim for a life of either unindividualised sensations or impersonal
thoughts. Our lives must then become a sequence of tropical
ecstasies, or alternatively, for the northern races, painless immer-
sion in streams of theories, scientific symbols, social doctrines - all
thoroughly abstract and comfortingly 'unreal'. So it seems impera-
tive (if conceivably futile) that some people, such as Birkin and
Ursula, should struggle against the drift of the world, though that
drift is in their blood also. These two are themselves nihilists, but
seekers after new values as well.
The nihilism of this pair consists of rejecting not value as such,
but old and accordingly valueless values. To Lawrence the term
'old value' is a contradiction in terms, since values are necessarily
fresh creations. Alternatively, the nihilism of Gudrun and Gerald
Crich is hatred of life itself. It is one thing to tum one's back on the
Christian-Platonic tradition and quite another to find no sense and
no delight in living. But the moral tradition of Socrates and Christ
has been with us for so long that we imagine its absence to be a
wasteland. Lawrence's point is that we have to go through the
wasteland anyhow. And many, perhaps most, will positively
welcome the desert.
When he was a boy Gerald Crich killed his brother by means of a
so-called accident, and now Gerald is bent on negating every
fertile, growing thing. He wishes to replace becoming with being,
the freely mobile with the controlled movements of a machine.
Unlike his father, Gerald manages the coal mines efficiently, since
he has reduced the once muddled activity of mining to smooth-
running mechanism. Gerald loves the mechanical because it lacks
internal conflict. The parts of a machine work together, since the
original will to power of each part as raw material has been
rendered dormant. Gerald aspires to be the god of the machine,
which means of course that he himself longs for oblivion. He has
long done his best to substitute a mechanical (a socially recognised
and utilitarian) will for his own original will to power - which must
perforce be awkward and unruly. Therefore Gerald also wishes to
be the god of such as Minette, the masochistic artist's model, and
of Gudrun Brangwen, in whom he senses a kindred spirit.

Gudrun shares Gerald's desire for annihilation, or rather she
comes to share it in part. At the beginning of the novel Gudrun and
Ursula appear to be at one in detesting the shapeless ugliness of
their home town of Beldover. But here is the vital difference
between the two of them: Ursula continues to reach out for the
'silver river of life' while Gudrun progressively immerses herself in
the 'black river of corruption'. Gudrun, the stylish Gudrun, even
grows fascinated by the griminess of pit-heads, railway arches and
brutish sex. She likes the squalor because it annihilates her: now
she has no more self-responsibility, no idiotic 'standards', no
aspirations. Thus Gudrun fights against nature, including her own
natural (individuated) self.
No doubt the great circuses and forums of ancient Rome were
also unnatural, but the Roman citizens built their temples to gods
of nature, not to a purely spiritual God and certainly not to
machinery. Lawrence implies that people have come to loathe
nature because it is unsafe, wasteful, illogical, fecund and, above
all, pluralistic. Nature takes a myriad forms, each with its own
specific value: it is not remotely a 'system'. In our industrialised
societies beauty remains, of course, but it is increasingly contrived,
hence degenerate. Lawrence never revered wildness in the Gothic
manner, since such reverence is just another fashion, but he
always recognised the unsystematiC diversity of natural things and
creatures. In that particular sense wildness must take precedence
over man's tamed and systematised little sphere.
Gudrun controls the highland cattle (in Chapter 14, 'Water-
Party') not solely because they are male, but because, being
bestially, stupidly, unreasoningly male, they are parts of uncon-
trollable nature. The cattle are humbled, but there remains an
eternity of space-time which Gudrun obviously cannot bring to
order. What maddens her is that she can control next to nothing
and the entire fugitive world is so 'stupid' and unconscious.
Gudrun cannot tolerate unconsciousness which always threatens
to overwhelm her. Towards the end (in Chapters 29 and 30,
'Continental' and 'Snowed Up') she forms a tacit alliance with the
sculptor Loerke because, for instance, he believes that 'art should
interpret industry'. 36
Loerke is a pioneer of the process of destructive creation. His
coldly conscious desire is to dominate all spontaneous life, which is
to say 'life itself'. The unreachable apex of his ambition is to
extinguish will to power in Nietzsche's sense of the phrase,

replacing it with the mechanical and controllable. Of course this
also can be no more than a perverse form of will to power. All
creatures (all forms of growth, presumably) should ideally be
geometrised or engineered or otherwise robbed of self-generated
movement. Here is complete life-hatred, and Gudrun has her
considerable share of it. She helps to kill Gerald erich, in effect,
because she knows that he wants to die - specifically amid a white
emptiness, a wilderness of snow, where everything is homogen-
ised. He is a murderer, she is a murderer, and the outcome
depends on which one is the more urgently bent on self-murder.
It must not be supposed that Ursula and Birkin are simply a joint
antitheses and wholly commendable beings. There is a struggle for
and Birkin, at any rate, is enticed now and then by images of
dissolution. Lawrence is against purity of definition, against neat
antitheses and wholly commendable beings. there is a struggle for
domination between Ursula and Birkin, though it is a struggle in
which each nobly preserves respect for the other's will to power,
and indeed for all varieties of will to power. In addition, we should
keep firmly in mind that the pairs Ursula-Gudrun and Birkin-
Gerald each have a sort of complementariness, a sharing of blood
or spiritual need. It was clearly part of Lawrence's purpose to
present these four characters as interlocked in a broadly tragic
fashion, not opposed in a moralistic fashion.
Ursula is the least contaminated, the most unmixed, and by the
end of the novel one is no longer sure that her rare quality is not
something of a defect. Even Birkin, the champion of the silver river
of life, is drawn towards death and sometimes yearns for an earth
emptied of people. To counteract that 'he guesses', as Nietzsche
says, referring to the type of Birkin, 'what remedies avail against
what is harmful'. 37 Thus he helps to cure himself of the blow on the
head from Hermione Roddice by rolling naked in the grass. He
cures himself, however, for a life with Ursula which he knows
cannot actually prevail over the world-drift. The fact that Ursula
does not realise as much, or does not care, suggests what, to
Lawrence, was inadequate about the man-woman union as a
solution.
It is a partial solution only, by which I do not mean that each
partner must also have other social or professional 'contacts', or
must 'take an interest in society', as we say. According to
Lawrence there should be another kind of intimacy as well. Birkin
has wanted 'eternal union with a man toO,.38 'Eternal', mark you,
meaning that at the moment of dying the link is reforged between
the one about to die and the survivor. Such a link then becomes
part of an endless chain. And Birkin has required union not with
any man or with one of a select few but, as it has turned out, with
Gerald Crich alone. What does this mean? Lawrence thought in the
following way. A fruitful relation must be a complete commitment,
and a man (if not a woman) needs two such commitments. This
cannot be pre-arranged and if it comes about it is a destiny. For a
man, intimacy with one woman greatly helps to keep his head
above the black river of corruption. A man's corresponding
relation with another man also helps, but in a different way. This is
made plain in the Introduction to Fantasia of the Unconscious
(published 1922). There Lawrence says that sex is most important
and it means two things: the division into genders and the
'consummating act of coition'. But sex is not by any means enough,
for there is also, and primarily, the 'essentially religious or creative
motive'. Contrary to what Freud says, this motive is not sexual in
its origins and merely (I presume) utilises the individual's peculiar,
differentiated sexuality. Thus Michelangelo painted and sculpted
in a certain fashion not as a means of sublimating his sexuality, nor
yet because he was homosexual in a generalised sense, but in
consequence of a primary asexual impulse which inevitably util-
ised his personal sexuality. This happened to be a special mode of
homosexuality.
At this stage of his career Lawrence thus asserted that the best
sort of creativity comes about - when it comes about - as a result of
a man's sexual union with one woman and spiritual union with
one man. Such he then believed to be the best way of life for all
purposes. The judgement was philosophic or religious and so to be
used as the criterion of works of art. By implication Lawrence
meant that a greatly talented artist will nevertheless be lopsided if
he does not follow such a path. And a lopsided artist or
philosopher may lead generations astray.
However, this was Lawrence's doctrine for a few years only,
specifically the immediate post-war period of Women in Love,
Aaron's Rod and Kangaroo. In The Lost Girl (begun in 1913 as 'The
Insurrection of Miss Houghton' and published in 1920) everything
hangs upon the man-woman relation: Alvina Houghton paradoxi-
cally, as it might seem, exercises her will to power by submission to
Ciccio, while the latter has no need of a special union with a man.
This was the old Lawrentian doctrine to which he would return by

the time of The Plumed Serpent (1929), but in writing Women in Love
(published in 1921) he began a brief, interesting period of depar-
ture from it.
In the early twenties Lawrence keenly desired intimacy of some
sort with a man. The chances are that this requirement had little or
nothing to do with sexuality, except in a highly sublimated form.
He wanted a partner on the plane of intellectual and spiritual
exploration, for which activity he presumed women to be forever
unfitted. I maintain that this still-common presumption is wrong,
since it is simply traditional and does not allow for natural
developments which lie within our powers. However, Lawrence's
hope was that he and the other man would spontaneously take it
in turns to be disciple and leader, according to which one's
qualities were best suited to a stretch of terrain. Thus in Aaron's Rod
it is clear that Lawrence has projected himself into both Rawdon
Lilly and the miner-hero, Aaron: that is, into both leader and led;
while in Kangaroo Lawrence is Somers, a reluctant disciple who
betrays his master.
Aaron Sisson leaves his wife and daughters at Christmas 1918.
There is nothing much wrong with his marriage in the usual sense,
or with his job as a checkweighman at the pit, and he departs for
unknown reasons - unknown to him and to us. Roughly speaking,
he finds ordinary life just after the war quite futile. Four years of
mechanised killing have killed off human meaning, or left it flapping
feebly in the mud. Aaron is obscurely aware of this historico-
psychological fact, though, realistically, he never says as much: it is
all too baffling for words.
As he works in the Covent Garden orchestra and later during his
spell in Florence, Aaron is looking for someone to tell him how to
live. He knows some things already and these are radical depar-
tures from widespread 1920s attitudes. Yet he knows them
inarticulately, for Aaron is not an especially articulate man. If he
could formulate the matter he would say, 'Give thyself, but give
thyself not away.,39 That is to say, do not finally yield yourself in
love or in any other cause. The message of romantic novels and
love-songs is false (argues Lawrence as narrator), since natural
things are connected individually with the elements. For example,
a lily is 'life-rooted, life-central'. 40 One lily has nothing essentially
to do with another lily, and each lily is concerned with its own
growth, not with some generalised notion of lily-growth. It is not
absolutely clear why human individuals should do likewise, but

Lawrence presumably means that the more people move away
from this utterly natural mode the more they deteriorate as
individuals.
Rawdon Lilly much expands on this basic teaching. He counsels
Aaron to stop trying to lose himself in love or political action, the
most prominent forms of modern self-evasion. 'There's no goal
outside you - and there's no God outside you', Lilly maintains.
Aaron should 'unfold' his own destiny, 'as a dandelion unfolds
itself into a dandelion, and not into a stick of celery'. 41 But, we
might object, dandelion and celery are generically different: are not
two human beings more like two dandelions? To this I imagine
Lawrence would have replied that, on the contrary, human beings
are Singular from their very roots - and so, for that matter, are
dandelions.
Lilly's 'harangue', as Lawrence calls it, continues in the fol-
lowing way:
We've exhausted our love-urge, for the moment. And yet we try
to force it to continue working. So we get inevitably anarchy and
murder. It's no good. We've got to accept the power motive,
accept it in deep responsibility, do you understand me? It is a
great life motive. It was the great dark power-urge which kept
Egypt so intensely living for so many centuries. It is a vast dark
source of life and strength in us now, waiting either to issue into
true action, or to burst into cataclysm. Power - the power urge.
The will-to-power - but not in Nietzsche's sense. Not intellectual
power. Not mental power. Not conscious will-power. Not even
wisdom. But dark, living, fructifying power. Do you know what
I mean?42
Two points need discussion here. First, as we know, Nietzsche's

sense of will to power is not distinct from Lilly's but is merely
larger. Lilly means very roughly what Nietzsche means in The Will
to Power, though Nietzsche's definition is universal. In 1922
Lawrence could not have known Nietzsche well enough. Second,
in genuine contrast to Lawrence, Nietzsche implicitly contends
that love is not finally a different urge from power, but a form or a
style of power. All urges are ultimately will to power.
Nevertheless, Lawrence had long flirted with the notion that
love is part of the power mode. I do not refer to possessive love but
to unselfish love, as, for example, when Mrs Morel nurses Paul
through his pneumonia. She unfolds herself into the sick youth in
her struggle to bring him back from the verge of death, but it is
herself, her power, that she thus unfolds. She remains distinct from
Paul; there is no childish self-identification and no possessiveness.
A like assimilation of love to power occurs when Birkin and Ursula
love each other and, more transparently, in Alvina's love for
Ciccio. Ursula consummates her self, that is, comes into her own
will to power, in loving acknowledgement of Birkin's individual
power.
In Lawrence's eyes love is naturally a giving of oneself to the
other's needs, but it is a voluntary giving of the wholly-formed
self, not a submission of a fledgling self whose entire, adolescent
mode is givingness. So this giving is also will to power, or
alternatively, selfhood. Moreover, the maxim 'Give not thyself
away' applies to a woman as well as to a man. At the same time
one realises what Lawrence-Lilly means: simply that a civilisation
can be built around the undisguised exercise of ordinary power - of
domination and submission - and consequently a culture. Like-
wise a civilisation may be built around the exercise of love, either
as eros or agape; as eros in Alexandria, as both eros and agape in
the late Middle Ages.
Love as agape is a good part of the theme of Kangaroo, since
Australia is the matey, masculine, anti-hierarchical country. Law-
rence tests out the possibility of agape as a means of taking
civilisation forward again after the Great War. Love as eros does
not come into the picture and Kangaroo is probably the least erotic
of Lawrence's novels. Kangaroo (Benjamin Cooley) is scarcely an
attractive figure, as the kangaroo is scarcely a handsome animal.
Cooley offers Somers what the latter has always missed: absolute,
David-and-Jonathan friendship.
All his life he [Somers] had secretly grieved over his friendless-
ness. And now at last, when it was really offered - and it had
been offered twice before, since he had left Europe - he didn't
want it, and he realised that in his innermost soul he had never
wanted it. 43
Of course Lawrence is here, as always, working out his own

problem. It might be formulated in the following manner. Law-
rence evidently felt a need to be connected positively with the rest
of humanity: that is, he felt (as most of us do not feel) potentially

cut off from the rest of humanity. I believe that this is the reason for
the odd, repeated insistence on spiritual intimacy with a man,
commitment to a man. Physical and spiritual intimacy with a
woman was not enough, because such a relation meant precisely a
final severing of the bond between himself and mankind. After all,
Lawrence had enjoyed a male-female connection since birth and it
was the vital connection with a father that he had lacked.
He could not be lonely; he was not at all the hermit type, as
Nietzsche was up to a point. But more important, Lawrence could
not do as people generally do and simply maintain loose, casual
links with others. Just as he was unable to take casual mistresses or
enjoy sex with strangers, so he was not content with nodding
acquaintances, colleagues, drinking pals and so forth. His connec-
tions must be fierce and thorough. Nor could he feel any
appreciable contact with people in the mass, with social classes,
nationalities, races, professional groups. All these were fairly
abstract to him. So his tendency was quite different from that of
Jesus. Jesus thought of individuals as 'man', while Lawrence
contemplated mankind largely through the medium of his per-
sonal acquaintances, chiefly indeed through a few loved beings.
Nevertheless, almost the last thing Lawrence wanted was to
sacrifice himself to another. Give thyself, but give thyself not
away. He had a peculiar sense of his own inviolate separateness.
Consequently, when the dying Kangaroo begs Somers 'Say you
love me', all the graceless, sincere Somers can affirm is that he has
an 'immense regard' for Kangaroo. 44 Somers believes that to tell
Kangaroo he loves him would be more than a white lie: it would
also be a self-betrayal. At the end he is obliged to betray either
Cooley or himself.
Lawrence recognises in this scene (as elsewhere, time and again)
that, for all the trust and affection between people, there is in
addition a fundamental collision of wills to power. I do not mean a
struggle to be boss, but that two selves are two forces, each to be
valued as more or as less than the other at any given moment.
Perhaps the words 'more' and 'less' are misleading, since they
suggest an underlying similarity and a scale of measurement,
while Lawrence implies that a force realises itself by distinguishing
itself from others. It does not matter whether the distinction
involves conquest or submission - provided the submission is self-
willed. A submission, no less than a conquest, may be (as in the
cases of Alvina Houghton and Ursula Brangwen) a realisation of

self. But then it must be a voluntary submission, of which that of
the heroine of 'The Woman who rode away' is the extreme
instance.
Nearly at the end of Kangaroo Somers insists to Jaz (William
James): 'Well, I'm the enemy of this machine civilisation. But I'm
not the enemy of the deep, self-responsible consciousness in man,
which is what I mean by civilisation.,45 Each individual is respon-
sible to himself primarily, and therefore, if he gives himself, should
do so by design. Thus he becomes what he is. In this way
Lawrence opposes both the machine civilisation, in which people
are functions of the whole, and the unwilling obedience of the
slave. Everything, for Lawrence, begins and ends in the processes
of the self, the will to power.
For all that, Lawrence sometimes repudiates what he thinks of as
a cult of the self, aligning that cult with shallow modernity. At such
times Lawrence sees no self other than this cult-self. The reduction
of self to a sort of superficial grasping and hectoring is plain in The
Plumed Serpent. Here Lawrence is confused about the very topic
upon which he is usually expert. For once he has muddled the self
with an ersatz self, the real being of a human being with the
attitudes and desires people form for social purposes. The fact that
many people are almost entirely social creatures is neither here nor
there.
Don Ramon, the hierophant of The Plumed Serpent, explains to
the admirable Kate Leslie that regularly having one's own way
means 'running about smelling all the things in the street, like a
dog that will pick up something'. 'Of myself', Ramon continues, 'I
have no way. No man has any way in himself.'46 Here it will be
seen that we are concerned with fancy and caprice, but what have
these necessarily to do with will? Ramon means that one's con-
scious, trivial and, in all probability, fashionable desires ought to
be subordinated to something nobler and momentous. Yes indeed,
but Lawrence is usually aware that such a nobler force is also a
force of the self; that 'self-sacrifice' is sacrifice by the self as well as
of the self. There is no will other than the will of an individual,
since the so-called 'collective will' is an abstraction.
Ramon seeks to bring back the ancient Mexican god Quetzal-
coatI, the plumed serpent god, so that the cruel and ponderous
spirit of the Mexicans might be leavened. Quetzakoatl is held to be
superior to Christ, because Christ exhorts us to forsake earth for
the kingdom of heaven, which is within (a spiritual condition),

while the Mexican god unites heaven and earth; spirit and flesh;
the bird, the Quetzal, and the snake, the coatI.
So far this corresponds with Lawrence's usual teaching (and
with Nietzsche's, since the philosopher held Christ to be the
ultimate repudiator of reality), but pervading the novel is an
uncharacteristic confusion of self and ego. Lawrence does not see
that Kate's submitting to Quetzalcoatl will be either a discovery of
her proper, healthy self or else a final betrayal of it. She may not
advisedly 'lose herself', as Lawrence suggests she might. Devoting
her life to Quetzalcoatl, Kate will discard her tired, European
assumptions and so come into her own, or conceivably flyaway
into madness. Everything depends upon what her indwelling will
to power actually wills. The Quetzalcoatl religion is nothing other
than Lawrence's image-cluster for the purpose of combating what
he sees as three forms of decadence: Christianity, dialectical reason
and commercialism. Evidently someone may transcend his cus-
toms, beliefs, attitudes and emotions, but not his will to power -
which may only be fostered or evaded.
We have observed throughout this chapter that, in Nietzsche's
words, one becomes what one is. The process is continuous and
should not end at any point. The 'what' of what one is is a route,
not a terminus. Kate Leslie wants to eliminate whatever she now
(at forty) feels to be false: ways of behaving and feeling once
adopted foolishly or faute de mieux and grown habitual. On the
other hand, Constance Chatterley has wandered into a tiresome
trap and Lady Chatterley's Lover is the story of her escape. Connie
illustrates better than most people in Lawrence the haphazard,
fateful and inconclusive character of self-becoming. Up to her
present age of twenty-seven she has followed the wrong directions
- not necessarily a disagreeable procedure. First there was her
'aesthetically unconventional' youth in Europe, including sex as
experiment and pointless little thrill; next her marriage to Clifford,
quickly and permanently emptied of substance; and then the short
affaire with Michaelis. The relation with Mellors is itself a journey of
many stages amid a barren social and cultural landscape. Law-
rence's chief emphasis is upon awakening and metamorphosis.
Even so, Mellors' vicissitudes lie mainly in the past and there are
now, I suggest, too few signs of development in him. Conversely,
Sir Clifford visibly, if peripherally, changes (for the worse, if
anything) as the story proceeds.
The novel is about Lady Chatterley, not her lover. She is the
mainspring, or rather, since a mechanical metaphor absolutely will
not do, she is the burgeoning plant. Unlike Lawrence's earlier
heroines, from Lettie to Kate Leslie, Connie scarcely plans a
development, hardly envisages her future. For her there is none of
Ursula's positive or Gudrun's negative determination. Connie lets
things happen, but comes to distinguish with increasing assurance
the good things from the bad.
'Good' and 'bad' refer to blossoming and unnatural withering,
not to morality. Michaelis amounts to a trivial escapade: he is a
cocksure fellow who manages to blame Connie for his early
ejaculations. Mellors is quite displeasing in personality at first. But
Connie accepts her experiences, even when they make her uneasy:
she is constantly watchful and responsive. To this extent she
exhibits amor fati. At the same time she is fairly passive, but above
all 'healthy' in Nietzsche's sense of the word. As for Sir Clifford,
his self-discovery is a recognition of his essential vulgarity. It is
Connie who turns out to be the aristocrat and Clifford who comes
into his own as the village gossip (along with Mrs Bolton, his
nurse). Part of Lady Chatterley's aristocratic nature and part of her
amor fatilconsist\in her'new-found'loVe of!the body, of the flesh, as
opposed to the theories and prejudices of society.
She insists to a scarce-comprehending Sir Clifford that the life of
the body is better than the 'life of professional corpses'.
The human body is only just coming to real life. With the Greeks
it gave a lovely flicker, then Plato and Aristotle killed it, and
Jesus finished it off. But now the body is really coming to life, it
is really rising from the tomb. And it will be lovely, lovely life in
the lovely universe, the life of the human bodyY
In writing these words Lawrence was perhaps heralding his next

and, as it proved, final story, 'The Man Who Died'. The words are
unsatisfactory and it is not clear that Lawrence himself recognises
the faults in Connie's enthusiasm. The universe is not simply
'lovely', and Connie fails to appreciate that her regard for nature
must include an acceptance of its terror as well as its beauty. Nor
was there any compelling reason in 1928 - or now, for that matter-
to claim that 'the body is really coming to life'. No one knew better
than Lawrence how easy it is to confuse all forms of eroticism with
the essentially respectful and insouciant loving that he advocated.
This fact is made plain in 'A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover'.

As late as 1928 Lawrence had not said in uncluttered fictional
form what he must always obscurely have felt to be true. At all
events, his doctrine still seemed to be perverse and, of course,
excessively taken up with 'sex'. Many times in essays (in 'Reflec-
tions on the Death of a Porcupine', 'Democracy', 'New Mexico',
'Indians and Englishmen', The Crown') and in substantial parts of
Studies in Classical American Literature, Fantasia of the Unconscious and
Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious he had argued his strange yet
utterly natural and obvious case. Strange because very few had
come near to uttering it throughout man's idealistic and nihilistic
history. That history with all its weird beliefs, codes and symbol-
isations also illustrates, by way of contrast, why and how Law-
rence's meaning is simply natural and akin toZarathustra's 'remain
true to the earth'.
The Man Who Died' is a final and audacious assertion in the
most heretical terms. Nietzsche's Ecce Homo concludes with the
words, 'Have I been understood? - Dionysus versus the Crucified -?'
Lawrence's story also depicts Christ as the adversary: that is to say,
the risen Christ is the antagonist of his former self. Jesus is himself
the Antichrist. And Lawrence sees the way of the old, crucified
Christ, the actual Christ, as a deadly error.
The crucifixion is presented as something quite other than the
preliminary to the saviour's glorification: now it is the gateway to a
proper earthly life. Jesus had always believed death to be the joyful
access to the Father in heaven, but now he appreciates the ultimate
absurdity at the heart of man's condition: that death alone removes
the ever-present fear of death which accounts for our ridiculous
history. We live absurdly because we are afraid of dying: hence the
nonsense of much of our culture. Jesus has 'miraculously' com-
pleted the stages of dying except the last, since he was cut down
barely alive. Therefore he has known the worst that life can offer
and no longer desires the Father or the kingdom of heaven.
The kingdom of heaven no longer matters to him, because every
assault upon his senses, painful or delightful, is sufficient unto
itself. Christ's emergence into life is more or less credible, or as
credible as such an event could be made. The life to which he
returns is the life of the birds and beasts. A young cock tied by its
leg maintains its will above all, namely to eat and crow and take
the hens. Christ does not 'take' a woman in this way, for his
mating with the priestess of Isis (who believes him to be Osiris) is
gentle, respectful and at her instigation. Jesus is now entirely

reborn into a world whose very cruelties, treacheries and con-
cupiscence he wholeheartedly accepts. So he has been transformed
from nay-sayer to yea-sayer par-excellence. Lawrence assumes that
Christ's ministry was a rejection of the actual world of becoming,
of the endlessly changing flesh. The resurrected Christ is not God
but a man who dies and whose amor fati now seems well-nigh
complete. He is at home in the material world, interpreting and
evaluating all he sees, rejecting nothing. Perhaps he is less
awesome than Rilke's Angels or Nietzsche's Ubermensch, but in his
completed humanity he is, like them, a measure of our short-
comings.
An important point remains to be made about Nietzsche's 'will to

power' and Lawrence's faith in self-realisation. By 'will' Nietzsche
expressly does not mean something fleeting, fashionable or con-
scious in its origins. Lawrence, however, often does use the word
'will' in that everyday sense and so may be misleading. Nietzsche
regards the 'self' as a fiction. He argues that each personality (to
think only in human terms) comprises a number of competing
forces. There is no single subject, no overlord of these forces, but,
he asks, does it not rather seem that there is 'a kind of aristocracy
of "cells" in which dominion resides? To be sure, an aristocracy of
equals, used to ruling jointly and understanding how to com-
mand?'48 So the subject is a multiplicity, not a single agent. It might
be helpful here to think of the multiple self as resembling Homer's
Greek heroes, each of whom has more or less equal status with the
others. Together they form a coherent body of men distinct from
their adversaries, the Trojans, from Helen, from the armourers,
slaves and so forth.
How could such a 'multicellular' creature be informed by will to
power? In fact this will is, as Deleuze puts it, 'the principle of the
synthesis of forces'. 49 The will is what synthesises the 'Homeric
heroes', so to speak, except that - and this is most important - the
synthesising will is not distinct from the 'heroes' themselves. No
one other than the heroes holds the heroes together. They are not
conscripted or bound by higher authority. However obscure this
might seem, it does describe the manner in which a human being
(body and 'mind') behaves. One grasps oneself as a coherence,
despite the fact that one is a number of distinct and often

conflicting activities. And the 'one' who does the grasping does not
exist apart from the activities themselves. There is evidently no
single, separable, overseeing subject, which means that such a
subject is a convenient (perhaps a necessary) abstraction. We must
not lose sight of the fact that separate forces are synthesised in the
composition of a human individual not for the sake of his mere
survival, but for the sake of power. The forces are disposed so as to
enhance the individual. He inescapably wishes to grow, expand,
assimilate his surroundings. That is why he is properly defined as
'will to power'.
Lawrence, for his part, was often seduced into aligning 'will'
with 'ego', no doubt because he was keenly impatient with the
ego, with the overweening demands of consciousness. For ex-
ample, Hermione Roddice in Women in Love boasts to Birkin,
Gerald and Ursula that as a child she conquered her nervousness
by willpower. Birkin angrily tells her that 'such a will is an
obscenity' .50 I presume Birkin means that Hermione should have
acknowledged her nervousness as part of herself, not eliminated it.
In fact she disowned it, trampled it underfoot. The 'she' who thus
disposed of the nervousness was a dissociated will. So Hermione
typically limited herself instead of expanding herself by com-
prehending the experiences that made her feel nervous. Such a will
is anything but a personal, creative will.
In this way Lawrence, like Nietzsche, in effect taught that all
one's conscious psychic activities should be avowed and none
arbitrarily suppressed. The activities would then compose them-
selves organically and grow through contact with the environ-
ment, as natural organisms grow.
6
God and Nietzsche's
Madman
The madman-Have you not heard of that madman who lit a
lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and
cried incessantly: 'I seek God! I seek God!'-As many of those
who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he
provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose
his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid
of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?-Thus they yelled
and laughed.
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with
his eyes. 'Whither is God?' he cried; 'I will tell lOu. We have killed
him-you and 1. All of us are his murderers:
Nietzsche's tale is about the murder of God, not His non-existence.

This is far from commonplace atheism, for commonplace, heedless
atheism is itself under attack. Unbelievers generally assume that
God was always an illusion, so that our modern repudiation of him
can only increase our freedom. Nietzsche knows, on the contrary,
that a world without God must be a wilderness as well as an
opportunity. Nietzsche assumes that when God 'lived in men's
hearts' He was alive in an exceedingly valuable sense. He was the
Lord of all power and might, but now every sort of authority lies in
the hands of ordinary people. They have nothing to look up to but
themselves, no one to question, and in particular they have no
model of conduct. Human life has lost its moral meaning, but we
still give it a moral interpretation.
The freethinkers who mock the madman have no idea that they
have done away with undisputed goodness. They have separated
God from the moral law, assuming that the latter has a life of its
own. Though Nietzsche's marketplace atheists are nineteenth-
century persons, they are presumably in the same condition as we;
that is, they oscillate between two attitudes, the first a denial of
binding moral rules and the second a horrified reaction to tales of
144
God and Nietzsche's Madman 145
depravity. On the one hand there is no God, while on the other

hand some deeds are unequivocally and objectively wicked.
Nietzsche maintains that these two attitudes contradict each other.
I do not know of a better 'post-Christian' argument for the
practice of good than that of Iris Murdoch in The Sovereignty of
Good. We should strive to discern the particular good required by
every circumstance: that is Iris Murdoch's existential recommen-
dation, presented as not 'hers' at all but as a more or less
mandatory feature of the human condition. The recommendation
(or 'injunction') means that we must realistically observe our
situations, eschew fantasy, and above all 'unseIf' ourselves. It
seems possible (though Iris Murdoch would certainly not agree)
that this view is an internalisation and humanisation of God. He
merely dwells in each of us and dictates our behaviour, or would
do so if our perceptions were not clouded by selfishness, fashion
and immaturity.
We are told that good is transcendent. It is also strictly a concept,
since it is confined to the human race and our conceptualising
minds. Nevertheless it is sovereign over other concepts, just as
whatever praxis we apprehend as good should push aside other
possibilities. That is to say, good is not in even the widest sense a
'matter of opinion'. On the other hand, good deeds are always
particular and never exactly repeatable. Each good action is of a
piece with a precise set of circumstances. Conversely, badness is
myopia or blindness: one squints, averts one's gaze, shuts one's
eyes, prefers a formula to an observable reality, fails to look 'under
the net' (to adapt Iris Murdoch's Wittgensteinian image from her
first novel).
Iris Murdoch remarks that 'The ordinary person does not, unless
corrupted by philosophy, believe that he creates values by his
choices.,2 We can imagine Nietzsche agreeing with this and then
adding that it is only extraordinary people who create values,
which are, nevertheless, created. He might further insist that
values are made by our interpretations, not our choices. In
Nietzsche's eyes evaluation of behaviour is somewhat like reading
a poem and pronouncing upon its meaning and quality. There is
no unarguably correct reading and no universally accepted cri-
terion of quality.
It is important to add, in this brief rehearsal of some points in The
Sovereignty of Good, that good behaviour is said to be pretty well
indefinable. However, one specific characteristic that comes near
to goodness, or points to it, is humility. Those who lack the

'anxious avaricious tentacles of the self,3 exercise the uncluttered
vision that is a large part of goodness. It is true that we usually
respect such people on the very rare occasions that we meet them.
This is not the result of Christian influence, since, for example, in
Classical times people spoke well of Germanicus and Brutus
because they betrayed notably little self-interest or pettiness. For
all that, goodness is neither the only sort of impressive behaviour
nor always, comparatively speaking, especially impressive at all.
Here is the place to start trying to define Nietzsche's anticipatory
objection to Iris Murdoch's type of argument, his 'leaping over'
twentieth-century moralists.
When Nietzsche speaks of the 'genealogy of morals' he refers to
the development of slave morality out of master morality. It is the
former, of course, that in modem western thinking equates the
good with the unegoistic. It is perhaps not widely disputed that
our notions of good and evil have had but a limited life in relation
to recorded history, let alone to the span of human time on earth.
In the ancient world, and especially before about 1000 Be, the good
man was always a lordly being who looked down upon 'bad' or
slavish folk. Further, aristocratic and warrior codes have persisted
down the ages, so that here and there, in Islamic countries, in
Japan, in parts of Latin America and among some African tribes,
the moral code as we understand it seems an ill-fitting garment.
For millenia there have been persons and entire races who prized
qualities which we regard as bad: pride, hardness and cruelty.
How can we declare, therefore, that good in our sense must be
sovereign? How can we determine that good is what human
situations invariably demand?
It would be an altogether different matter to argue that one's
values, whatever they are, must take precedence over argument
and reason. That is an honourable anti-dialectical position. But we
are concerned with the belief that efficient perception leads to good
or virtually amounts to good. According to this supposition,
Homer and Shakespeare saw matters so undistortedly that their
productions reveal the inherent wickedness of wicked behaviour
and the inherent desirability of goodness. Possibly there is
goodness in our modem sense in the Iliad, for instance when
Achilles gives the body of Hector to Priam in Book XXIV, but it
seems doubtful that this is so, and in any event this one 'good'
action of Achilles is not the point of the poem. In fact Homer's
unblinkered awareness of his Bronze Age society tends to disprove

Iris Murdoch's argument. To Homer good means noble-spirited,
and this aristocratic quality too co-exists with lucid perceptions.
When we survey some tapestry of events, real or fictional, it is
often not the good person who most impresses us but some variety
of the bad. Is this because we have been corrupted by art? Perhaps
it is the other way round, since it is the uncorrupted child who
most admires Achilles in a child's version of the Iliad, and the
humane adult who has come to regard Achilles as a murderous
brute, and may well have been taught to do so. Most of us have no
difficulty in agreeing with Aristotle that the main personages of
epic and tragedy are awe-inspiring. We are aroused to wonder by
Theseus, by Dido and Aeneas, by Orestes, even by such a vicious
woman as Clytemnestra and such a maddened killer as Medea. In
contexts of this sort humility would make little impact: it would be
absolutely unimpressive. Even Antigone is not good so much as
heroically self-willed.
Certainly we must conclude that badness is at least as welcome
as goodness on stage. Our hospitality to wickedness is more than a
respite from the rigours of respectability in everyday life, for it is,
among other things, a recognition (in conditions of personal safety,
of course) that we prefer the clash of personalities to the plainer
harmony of ubiquitous goodness. It is harmony we aim for, but
this should preferably be an ultimate harmony of contrasting
figures. Indeed to speak of 'harmony' in any other sense is to
misuse the word, for what we then mean is monotony. Hence, as
we all acknowledge in theoretical discussion, the need for Goneril
and Regan as well as Cordelia and Edgar, for Iago alongside
Desdemona, for Iachimo as foil to Imogen. We still like to believe
that Shakespeare presents moral lessons, whereas his supposed
moralising is a minor element subordinate to his shining images of
the world. It does not hold the images together and is a component
of each play rather than its governing agency. King Lear might be
said to be an exception to this general Shakespearean rule, yet even
Lear is a cry of disgust rather than a lesson for us to heed - and still
the sombre images predominate.
The question Shakespeare could be said to pose is this: What
value would Desdemona have without Iago? Cordelia without
Goneril? It is not just that Iago is necessary as an agent in the play
Othello, but that his viciousness feeds and sustains an economy in
which the honour of Othello and Desdemona thrives. The reverse
is also true. Desdemona needs Iago as he needs her, since both are
locked in a dramatic sphere. But in this regard Othello at least
adequately represents society: that is to say, the Desdemona
qualities always and everywhere require the Iago qualities, as
flowers require choking weeds. It is easy to imagine an essential or
'free-floating' Desdemona who seems not to need either the play of
which she is inescapably a part or even our daily sphere of mixed
vice and virtue. Yet to imagine such a Desdemona is a mental
dodge. It is hard to remember that everything is what it is purely in
its contexts. Desdemona absolutely could not exist either as an
invented character or as a real person in an Iago-Iess world.
First, she is part of Shakespeare's pseudo-Venetian sphere, but
then she is also a fragment of the predatory earth. Structuralist and
'post-structuralist' critics are, if anything, only too well aware that
Desdemona, for example, is a series of signs in a formal work.
Possibly Schopenhauer and Nietzsche have good claims to be the
ultimate founders of such twentieth-century movements as formal-
ism and structuralism. Neither philosopher measures works of art
in terms of their similarity to everyday life. In fact neither believes
that we have unimpeded access to reality. For both of them the
human mind is an architectonic instrument. It cannot but perform
two contradictory functions: it constructs whatever it contemplates
(Coleridge's 'primary imagination') while recognising the inde-
pendence of external things. Our knowledge is a series of
inventions, fables and codes joined with a recognition that the
world at large is unknowably there.
Our familiar and age-old error is to believe that moral attitudes
may have priority over life itself. If they fail to do so, that is
somehow 'life's fault'. Nietzsche's moral radicalism consists in
pointing out that the proclivities of an Iago are as valuable for our
species as those of a chaste wife such as Desdemona. Nietzsche
writes that 'the evil instincts are expedient, species-preserving,
and indispensable to as high a degree as the good ones; their
function is merely different'. 4
Nietzsche's words explain why we exult in the crimes of tragic
heroes and heroines. Of course we are appalled as well, but the last
reaction we make, if we are worthy critics, is one of ordinary moral
censure. If we condemn Medea, this is mainly because our very
language forces us to do so: inwardly and inarticulately we are
more than half in league with her. In effect this barbarian puts the
case for passionate attachment and private honour against civic
responsibilities. It is therefore Medea whom we indefensibly

admire and the great Jason, her husband, whom we somewhat
despise. These valuations are natural rather than moral, simply
because Medea places the life-urge of the individual before the
abstract good of the community. The latter is the dull, infertile
moral goal. So Medea's dreadful killings, according to the central
paradox of all tragedy, are affirmations of life as against the mere
rules of society and - what is far more bitter - against the decent
feelings of humanity as well.
We cannot term Medea 'degenerate', for she is nearly the
opposite. Our own yearning for purity is a sign of degeneration,
which means the reduction from a complex to a simple form. Man
is more complex than other organisms and must healthily embrace
a greater diversity of experiences, yet he usually tries to limit his
experience, to simplify himself. 'Diversity' cannot mean an Arca-
dian sort of variety in which creatures and their habitats are
constantly beautiful, pacific and undisturbing. It means instead
endless collision and appropriation. For this very reason goodness
may become a tyranny. Nietzsche expresses this point as follows:
The 'good man' as tyrant-Man has repeated the same mistake

over and over again: he has made a means to life into a standard
of life; instead of discovering the standard of life in the highest
enhancement of life itself, in the problem of growth and
exhaustion, he has employed the means to a quite distinct kind
of life to exclude all other forms of life, in short to criticize and
select life. 5
Although this is only an unpublished notebook utterance, it is a

mature utterance made in 1888. Nietzsche of course means that the
natural world is primary and inescapable and should therefore be
the source of our judgement of ourselves. To judge in opposition to
it is madness, though as a rule a collective sort of madness. Among
our means to life, morality is often important: that is, morality
commonly acts as an enhancement of life. Sometimes, however, it
acts as a brake or a poison: it retards processes that should plunge
ahead, or it kills processes that should live.
We presumably agree with Iris Murdoch that goodness is a
concept. Our aim should be not to weaken morality for the sake of
self-gratification, but to confine morality to its proper, subordinate
place; to recognise that good ought not to be our sovereign
concept. Strictly speaking no concept should inevitably prevail

over others, but all should be measured against life itself. No doubt
we sometimes conceptualise 'life itself', yet we ought to resist the
temptation to do so. If we retain images of growth and decay, of
energies expending themselves endlessly and pointlessly, then at
least we have a grasp of that profusion of forces against which all
mere concepts must be measured and found wanting.
That was the attitude to life in the tragic age of the Greeks. It is
also Nietzsche's attitude and, in their individual ways, that of
Yeats, Rilke, Mann and Lawrence. The philosopher and the four
artists are 'immoralists' in this sense: they do not advocate or
prefer immorality, but resist the tyranny of the good man. Nor do
they resemble Nietzsche's freethinkers who scoff at his madman,
for their work echoes the madman's opinion about the 'greatness'
of the deed of killing God.
Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we
ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There
has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us - for
the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all
history hitherto. 6
Is this a 'mad' comment in any sense? Nietzsche himself thinks
that posterity, namely ourselves, must belong to a 'higher history
than all history hitherto'. He plainly assumes that the bulk of
posterity will be unaware of their exalted history. A few, and our
four authors belong to this category, will rise to their historical
task. Let us now briefly concentrate upon the interpretation of that
task made by each author.
From beginning to end Yeats assumes that he must justify
mankind by aesthetic and legendary means. True, there is a mood
of recantation of this attitude in 'The Circus Animals' Desertion',
but the mood has vanished again by the end of Last Poems. 'Justify'
will seem a strange word to use because it implies guilt, but I refer
simply to the making of sense and value out of our lives. That, after
all, is justification. The value of humanity need not be (and in
Yeats's view had better not be) of an ethical character.
Yeats always knows that the history of Ireland began 'Before
God made the angelic clan', that Ireland is a 'Druid land'. 7 This
means that the Irish repudiate moralistic interpretations. The
dialectic is alien to them also, so that neither Socrates nor St Paul
lies behind their manner of thought.
Know that when all words are said

And a man is fighting mad,
Something drops from eyes long blind,
He completes his partial mind,
For an instant stands at ease,
Laughs aloud, his heart at peace.
The references in this late poem, 'Under Ben Bulben', are in the
main universal, but the viewpoint is naturally Irish. Yeats declares
that a man may be at peace just when he is fighting mad. It is
enmity that produces a heart at peace, provided the enmity is
zestful and fearless. One is reconciled with oneself just when one
is utterly at odds with another. Then the 'partial mind' is
completed. It seems, therefore, that the very cause of restlessness
and self-division is the attempt to love an enemy as if he were not
an enemy. To speak more comprehensively, self-division is the
result of setting some standard or ideal against one's appetences.
Note that in this respect there is a revealing difference between
Yeats and Nietzsche. The latter accepts inward struggles as
unavoidable and sometimes fruitful, while the former thinks of
mental conflict as surpassable in principle and sometimes, happily,
in practice. Nietzsche sees nothing automatically wrong with
placing an ego-ideal against the day-to-day workings of the ego,
provided that the ideal is one's own invention. Both men are agreed
upon one aspect of this question, namely that ideals imposed by
the social group are barren.
Yeats never departed from his early conviction that the modern
world of technology, democracy, equality and progress is calcu-
lated to induce a sort of narcotic moralism. Our efforts are directed
towards peace, the healing of wounds, by which means we foster
precisely a frenzy of dissatisfaction. The 'partial mind' or the
'composite' soul, as Yeats presents it, is a product of philosophies
and faiths that divide people from what they can do. One has a will
to power which must be primary and at any given moment might
or might not entail loving one's neighbour. Yeats never speaks of
will to power but he means, time and again, that the neighbour is
not necessarily to be loved, but to be faced, measured and,
whenever possible, respected for what he is. This facing is not a
merging of oneself and the neighbour, not a blurring of identities
and desires; on the contrary, it is a reckoning of his forces against
one's own and might involve combat of some sort.
Despite this acceptance of outer conflict, there is of course in

Yeats the determination to make a unity sooner or later. The 'gong-
tormented sea' of 'Byzantium' is to be fashioned into works of art
or some kind of handiwork (a 'moonlit dome', say, or whatever the
'golden smithies of the emperor' might produce) and that is man's
supreme function. This function is aesthetical, so that the true
aesthete is anything but an airy avoider of problems. In fact he is
one who confronts difficulties and at his best accepts the tragic
groundwork of our lives. He does this by looking outwards to the
gong-tormented sea and making patterns of what he observes. The
turbulence is neither denied nor palliated but organised, made
beautiful. The beauty and the torment belong together.
So Yeats does as Nietzsche's madman suggests and sets himself
up as a 'god', a god in the sense of a creator. This means an
absolute creator, one who assumes that he can 'play with' the
world as he wishes, but nevertheless cannot rob it of its earthly
character. In Yeats's view no god can do that, and that is why he
identifies Christ Himself with Dionysus. However, Yeats falls
short by Nietzsche's standards in refusing to see - as one 'born
after us' - that he may not expect a return of historical customs.
Yeats retains the spirit of revenge, not in the usual modern guise of
a desire for progress (that is, the desire to make up for yesterday's
injuries) but in the loftier guise of veneration for hierarchy. Thus
he resembles Zarathustra's two kings, higher men indeed but ones
who are foolishly confident that social hierarchy of an old
ceremonious sort will be restored.
And what of Rilke, for on the face of it the Duino Elegies are
markedly Nietzschean? Rilke joins Nietzsche's madman and might
almost be the madman himself in his apparent overweening
assumption that nature has need of us, of each one of us
individually. Yet Rilke plainly faces the facts he describes in an
altogether different spirit from Nietzsche's. The latter emphasises
joy: the last two parts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 'The Intoxicated
Song' and 'The Sign', constitute a veritable hymn to joy, and in
Ecce Homo Nietzsche repeatedly mentions his high regard for Zara-
thustra. Joy is Nietzsche's leitmotiv, since from beginning to end he
seems to regard the mood of sheer happiness as man's proper
condition from which we are estranged.
Conversely, as we noticed earlier, Rilke is entirely an elegist. His
tones are solemn; there is no laughter, either of happiness or of
mockery. At the close of the Tenth Elegy the elder Lament
embraces the youth and weeps. The youth ascends alone to the
mountains of Primal Pain. Pain is emphasised in Rilke, as in no
other poet who comes to mind. The result is that the last verse of
the Tenth Elegy celebrates a sort of happiness that 'falls', in other
words comes to us willy-nilly when we are not reaching out for it,
just because we have recognised the ever-present reality and the
fecundity of pain.
Some may argue that Rilke is exemplary in deriving happiness
from pain, or in regarding the two conditions as having the same
roots. They will maintain that Rilke's whole object is the transform-
ation of what we have experienced as sorrow into happiness, an
aspiration partly resembling Nietzsche's. It seems to me, however,
that the happiness at the end of the Duino Elegies is quite distinct
from the rapture at the end of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
I suggest that Rilke relishes the human condition as he portrays
it: he enjoys elegy. He is admittedly no petty individual pretending
to be sad or desperate, but at the same time he is content that
human beings should forever be divided from the Angels. Angels
remind us of all we lack, and Rilke is reconciled to that. We are, so
to speak, the 'not-Angels'. That is exactly our state. We are not so
much the 'not-animals', since our chief distinction from other
species consists of our aspirations. Whatever we are, we aim to be
higher, more complete, more fulfilled. No dog can be more than a
dog, but every person, according to both Rilke and Nietzsche,
wants to be more than a person. Rilke says that this metamor-
phosis cannot come about. Can we imagine Nietzsche resignedly
saying that man is the creature who can never give birth to the
Ubermensch?
The reason for this difference is that, unlike Rilke, Nietzsche
unfailingly recognises 'genealogy': that is to say, he knows that
attitudes grow, and must grow according to their own natures.
Nietzsche might helpfully be likened to one living in the reign of
the Emperor Julian (the Apostate) who knows that the weird
modem religion of Christianity absolutely cannot be stamped out.
It must take its course. Julian tried to abolish Christianity and
superficially must have seemed likely to succeed, but a Nietzsche-
figure living then would have known (not merely guessed) that the
Emperor's proscriptions and purges must fail. Or we could say
that Nietzsche resembles a man of the early Renaissance who ob-
scurely senses that his period is the 'Renaissance', that Classical liter-
atures are coming back and science will go forward from now on.
So Nietzsche's belief in the Ubermensch is not a faith or a mere

hope, but an awareness that nihilism, the 'uncanniest of all
guests', 8 is upon us and that the answer to an absence of values
cannot be a reinvigoration of old values. I suppose the reason for
this is that values are implicitly accepted only when they first well
up from the unconscious. Then they are triumphant, but as soon as
they grow fully conscious they begin to lose vitality, and once they
are subjected to reasoned examination they may not re-enter via
the unconscious. So they lose their original energy, though
communities might enforce them for generations or get up fresh
crusades in their favour. In this fashion our old values are burnt
out: anyone might live by them but in the future no one will
unquestioningly believe in them. Therefore, says Nietzsche in
effect, new values must come as surely as the development of
science after Copernicus. The one who can 'transvalue' the values
and so lead us out of nihilism is by definition the Ubermensch.
Therefore he will come. This is not wishful thinking, and it means
that someone not unlike a Rilkean Angel will come.
There are three attitudes to life which we should briefly notice
here. First there is the popular attitude which might be expressed
as follows: 'At present our race is not doing very well and we have
no solid grounds for hope. However, if we cling together and
behave agreeably to one another, we may have a pleasant enough
time and, who knows, human life might improve out of all
recognition.' Second there is Rilke's attitude which declares, 'Joy
is always fundamentally pain. If we accept this fact and try
constantly to fill ourselves with external realities, we shall live as
best we can and experience sporadic happiness.' The third voice is
Nietzsche's: 'History and genealogy are actual processes, and
while we weave fancies around them, they are not in themselves
fanciful. Man's life has hitherto been reactive, his culture a
consolatory reaction against living. Our reactive ways are now
coming to an end and, if we do not perish, we must tum reaction
round until it becomes spontaneous action for the very first
time. That final revolution may be undertaken only by the
overman.'
It might seem that of these three attitudes Rilke's is the most
'realistic', in the sense of the least deceived. In fact there is a good
deal of Zarathustra's shadow in Rilke's make-up. The poet's
doubts are excessive and addictive. Nietzsche himself believes in
doubting everything that can be doubted, but what if one thereby
no longer has a goal? The shadow in Thus Spoke Zarathustra has lost
his goal and would persuade Zarathustra to forsake his also.
Zarathustra knows that man is the animal who must have a goal.
As a species we are but a bridge to the iibermensch: we have no
other function. So this one goal of iibermensch must be retained,
and Zarathustra leaves his shadow behind. Nietzsche of course
does the same, while Rilke remains to relish his suffering - or, to be
fair, his amalgam of suffering and happiness. Nevertheless, Rilke
has shown us what an active as opposed to a reactive human
nature would be. He has given us a glimpse of a higher (though in
his view unattainable) humanity.
Thomas Mann's response to Nietzsche is significantly different
from Rilke's. The poet goes to the heart of the matter, the
ontological question, while the novelist stays most astutely and
probingly at the ethical level. Rilke asks, 'What is it for human
beings to be?' Mann asks, 'What is it for people to live decently?'
But Mann's moral question is real, not feigned, for unlike other
authors he really does not know the answer. Rather, he does not
know the answer as an artist, while as an essayist and letter-writer,
indeed as an everyday social man, he is almost the perfect type of
modern liberal. It is not that the essays explicitly say something
different from the works of fiction (though they sometimes do), but
that their thoughtful and well-weighed manner detains us in the
civilised context of the lecture theatre. So evil remains, for the
moment, a topic for discussion and is robbed of its terrifying
vigour.
The novels and stories, however, are nothing if not explorations
of the borderline between good and evil or, to be exact, blurrings of
that borderline. Since such a procedure is commonly judged to be
shabby (a sort of equivocation), it is necessary to emphasise once
again that Mann's fictional exercises in that kind constitute the
substance and value of his work. As an artist, if not elsewhere,
Mann is one who knows and most skilfully shows that we cannot
separate our vital energies from our unamiable, destructive im-
pulses.
Let us briefly recall the main examples. Tonio Kroger writes well
(or writes as well as he does) because he guiltily alienates himself
from his fellows; Aschenbach has in the past kept disintegration at
bay and thereby failed to acknowledge his own 'evil'; Mynheer
Peeperkorn overwhelms both the disputatious decency of Settem-
brini and the deadlier sword-thrusts of Naphta by his own
unmoral life-force; Joseph is a creator because he is self-centred

and thinks himself God's darling; Goethe exploits everyone
(including himself) and has never heard of a crime he could not
have committed; Felix Krull is sympathetic partly because he is
somewhat unscrupulous; and, supremely, Leverkiihn refuses to
love his fellows (either individually or collectively) and thus 'brings
back' great music. Perhaps above all we should remember that the
devil in Doctor Faustus is always right in his arguments. He is also a
plain speaker and it is we, the readers, who equivocate.
Now in all these instances Mann might be said to be contemplat-
ing evil without taking real atrocity into account. His wicked
people are not remotely the equivalent of concentration camp
guards. Does this mean, however, that, with the exception of
Cipolla in Mario and the Magician, they are simply more intelligent
and refined? Does that in turn mean that actual guards were just
foully stupid, if possibly intelligent in a narrow technical sense?
What sort of moral difference is there between the aesthete who
contemplates wickedness and the vicious person who does the
deeds - as Lord Henry Wotton differs from Dorian Gray in Wilde's
story?
Mann is not one of Zarathustra's 'higher men', but he is perhaps
'higher' in another sense, for he has accurate and courageous
knowledge of many things and lacks the common impulse towards
self-deception in the realm of ideas. He is a knower of a high order.
Even so, while dealing in the subtlest fashion with the relation
between music and social life in Doctor Faustus, Mann does not
seem finally able to appreciate that this novel as a whole actually
depends upon the monstrous Hitler. The narrator, Zeitblom,
regularly deplores Hitler's war, but a sort of inverse relation is
assumed between the devastation of Europe and Leverkiihn's
achievements, instead of the 'symbiotic' relation that should surely
be noticed. Similarly Mann describes the child-eating hags in The
Magic Mountain without quite appreciating that their emblematic
value is a measure of the value of the novel. The hags are a
comment on the world. They are part of a fictional dream but what
they represent is real. These creatures are literary devices which
collapse even as devices the moment we confine them to the level
of devices.
Mann appears to have insisted that evil was the fount of good, or
at least a part of good, in the sphere of art. Nevertheless we are
bound to assume that we, the 'decent ones', should use evil for art
alone. Yet Mann of all people, the creator of Adrian Leverkiihn,

knows that evil cannot simply be exploited. Therefore might he not
have further realised that Leverkiihn's triumphant music arises
from an underworld of monstrous growths and vapid souls?
Leverkiihn's last work, 'The Lamentation of Dr Faustus', tran-
scends despair (writes Zeitblom, the narrator), but the work would
not have come into being without despair.
For as Nietzsche says, through the medium of Zarathustra,
everything is 'chained, entwined together, everything [is] in love'. 9
Nietzsche assumed that homo sapiens, though a product of evol-
ution, cannot himself evolve. Our advances in speech and other
modes of symbolisation have not taken us towards our proper
destiny as human animals. We have merely developed a variety of
techniques for reacting to, or against, our environment. Both
science and religion are such techniques. Now that our reactive
cultures are wearing thin we should yearn for the major advance
that Zarathustra calls the 'great noontide'.
Certainly Nietzsche sometimes speaks as if great men and
splendid doings have occurred now and then throughout history.
Thus there have been such people as Brutus and Mirabeau, noble
souls, but the mass of mankind has remained stuck in the spiritual
marshlands. Lawrence too, however nicely he distinguishes both
fictional and historical personages, makes only one clear-cut
distinction of value, namely the gulf between the noble person and
the rest. Needless to say, the noble person in Lawrence is not
necessarily of high birth. This is how he expresses the matter in
Movements in European History:
Some men must be noble, or life is an ash-heap. There is natural

nobility, given by God or the Unknown, and far beyond
common sense. And towards this natural nobility we must
live ...
The hereditary aristocratic class has fallen into disuse. And
democracy means the electing of tools to serve the fears and the
material desires of the masses. Noblesse n'oblige plus . ..
There is nothing to be done, en masse. But every youth, every
girl can make the great historical change inside himself and
herself, to care supremely for nothing but the spark of noblesse
that is in him and in her, and to follow only the leader who is a
star of the new, natural Noblesse. 10
Now what does this noblesse mean, for to adduce such a quality is
liable to produce sneers or cries of disbelief from many people?
Lawrence says that it means fearlessness and generosity. Both are
necessary. To be fearless alone, one might as well be Attila. To be
really generous is not possible in a constant state of fear.
Lawrence's hope, therefore, is that a sufficient number of youths
and girls might resolve as individuals to be generous of spirit and
without fear. That is roughly the difference between Lawrence's
heroes and heroines and the rest of his personages. Those of
'heroic' stature try not to be frightened or mean. And they know
only too well that exactly these ignoble qualities are masked when
one joins the procession.
In Lawrence's fiction, however, the matter is subtler still, for
there is such a person as Gudrun Brangwen who senses - or even
shares - the quality of noblesse, yet rejects it, preferring the nihilism
of Dresden. But Gertrude and Paul Morel, Ursula, Birkin, Aaron,
Lilly, Somers, Kate Leslie, Don Ramon, Constance Chatterley and
a few lesser characters in the stories are in the noble category. Such
people are not more moral than others, but have more natural
nobility.
To Nietzsche, on the other hand, there is no assurance in that
direction. Lawrence's wishes will come to nothing, not because
human beings are getting worse but because our all-too-human
history is ending. It is ending now because we have broken the old
connection between us and the rest of the universe. The connec-
tion is no longer implicit, as with animals, or mythical, as with our
forebears. It is simply a fact which gives us no privileged status. So
we ourselves have no preordained value and, accordingly, neither
has the world at large.
Nietzsche is vastly more apocalyptic than Lawrence. Between
the noble person and others there is an uplifting difference, but it is
not difference enough. For that, Nietzsche supposes, we need the
'greatest elevation of the consciousness of strength in man, as he
creates the overman'. 11 And such elevation of consciousness will
be the final step forward, not the evolution of a higher species but
man's coming into his own.
Notes and References
The place of publication is London unless otherwise stated.
1 PERSPECTIVES OF NIETZSCHE
1. F. Nietzsche, Human All-Too-Human (HAH), 2 vols, Part I trans.

Helen Zimmem, Part II trans. Paul V. Kohn BA (Edinburgh and
London: T. N. Foulis, 1909 and 1911) 'Miscellaneous Maxims and
Opinions', Part II, No. 29 p. 26.
2. Ibid., Part I, No. 220, p.l99.
3. William Blake, Poetry and Prose of William Blake (The Nonesuch Press,
1939) The Marriage of Heaven and Hell', p.187.
4. F. Nietzsche, 'On the uses and disadvantages of history for life',
Untimely Meditations (UM), trans. R.J. Hollingdale, intro. J. P. Stem
(Cambridge University Press, 1983) p.81.
5. F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power (WP), trans. Walter Kaufmann & R. J.
Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, A
Division of Random House, 1967) Section 560, pp.302f.
6. F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner (BT and
CW), trans. with commentary by Walter Kaufmann (New York:
Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, 1967) BT, Sections 10
to 25.
7. WP, Section 480, p.266.
8. John T. Wilcox, Truth and Value in Nietzsche: A Study of His Metaethics
and Epistemology, foreword by Walter Kaufmann (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1974).
9. Ibid., pp. 156f.
10. For thorough discussion of Nietzsche on 'sublimation' see especially
Walter Kaufmann's Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist
(Princeton University Press, 1968) Part III.
11. F. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ (TJ and AC),
trans. with introduction and commentary by R. J. Hollingdale
(Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin 1968) AC, Section 54, p.l72.
12. WP, Section 963, pp.505f.
13. F. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo (GM and EH),
GM trans. Walter Kaufmann & R.J. Hollingdale, EH trans. Walter
Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, A Division of Random
House, 1969) GM, Third Essay, p. 160.
14. HAH, VoLI, pp. 13f.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., Part I, No. 107, p.108.
17. F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future
159
160 Notes and References
(BGE), trans. with commentary by Walter Kaufmann (New York:

Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, 1966) Section 260,
p.204.
18. Ibid., Section 260, p.207.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., Section 24, p.35.
21. W. B. Yeats, The Collected Poems of w. B. Yeats (Macmillan, 1982) 'The
Circus Animals' Desertion', p.391. (First published in hardback
1933.)
22. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter
(Seeker & Warburg, 1971) Chapter 6, 'Snow', p.496.
23. F. Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (PTG), trans.
with introduction by Marianne Cowan (Chicago: Regnery Gateway,
1962) p. 31.
24. EH, Section 3, p.274.
25. PTG, pp.51£.
2 YEATS AND ARISTOCRACY
1. W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (Macmillan, 1973) p. 78. (First published

in this edition 1955.)
2. The Collected Poems of w. B. Yeats (CP), (Macmillan, 1969) 'The
Choice', p.278.
3. George Orwell, 'Yeats', Collected Essays (Seeker & Warburg, 1961)
p.182. (Essay first published in 1943.)
4. W. B. Yeats, Explorations (New York: Macmillan, 1962) p. 368.
5. W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan, 1961)
p.424.
6. Otto Bohlmann, Yeats and Nietzsche: An Exploration of Major Nietz-
schean Echoes in the Writings of William Butler Yeats (Macmillan, 1982)
p.1.
7. Letters of w. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954)
p.379.
8. F. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Z), trans. and intro. by R.J.
Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1961) 'Of Self-
Overcoming', p. 137.
9. BGE, 'What is Noble', Section 257, p.201.
to. WP, Section 842, p.444.
11. CP, 'The Seven Sages', p.271.
12. WP, Section 431, p.235.
13. See A. Norman Jeffares, A New Commentary on the Poems of w. B.
Yeats (Macmillan, 1984) p. 12.
14. Autobiographies, p.52.
15. Ibid., p.60.
16. Ibid., p.522.
17. Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats (Faber & Faber, 1964) p.64.
(First published by Macmillan, 1954.)
18. BT, Section 5, p. 52.

19. See A. J. P. Taylor, English History 1914-1945 (Oxford University
Press, 1965) p. 56, and Robert Kee, Ireland: A History (Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1980) pp. 153ff.
20. See Joseph Hone, W. B. Yeats 1865-1939 (Harmondsworth, Mid-
dlesex: Penguin, 1971) p. 303. (First published by Macmillan, 1943.)
21. GM, Second Essay, Section 7, p.69: 'Tragic terrors ... were
intended as festival plays for the gods.'
22. T. R. Henn, The Lonely Tower (Methuen, 1965) p. xxii.
23. Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats, p. xviii.
24. Autobiographies, 'Estrangement', p.475.
25. This argument briefly recurs, but it is present in concentrated form
in 'David Strauss: The Confessor and Writer', in Untimely Medita-
tions.
26. 'Cathleen Ni Houlihan', in The Variorum Edition of the Plays of w. B.
Yeats, ed. Russell K. Alspach, assisted by Catherine C. Alspach
(Macmillan, 1966) p. 229.
EH, p. 258.
28. See Nancy Cardozo, Maud Gonne: Lucky Eyes and a High Heart (Victor
Gollancz, 1979) p. 407.
29. CP, 'Mohini Chatterjee', p.279.
30. Pages from a Diary Written in Nineteen Hundred and Thirty (Dublin,
1944) p. 55.
31. CP, 'A Prayer for My Daughter', p.211.
32. A Vision (Macmillan, 1962) p. 295.
33. Ibid.
34. CP, 'The Phases of the Moon', p. 185.
35. A Vision, pp. 126ff.
36. EH, 'Why I am So Clever', p.255.
37. CP, 'Two Songs From a Play', p.239.
38. Quoted by Richard Ellman in The Identity of Yeats, p. 109.
39. WP, Section 275, p. 157.
40. Ibid.
41. WP, Section 881, p.470.
42. F. Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality (0),
trans. R. J. Hollingdale, intro. by Michael Tanner (Cambridge
University Press, 1982) Section 206, p. 126.
43. Ibid., Section 308, p. 156.
44. Ibid., Section 360, p. 167.
45. TI, 'Maxims and Arrows', 38, p.27.
46. Ibid. 'What the Germans Lack', 4, p.62.
47. See ibid., 'The Problem of Socrates', 5, p.31.
48. Ibid., 10, p.33.
49. See Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan, 1961) pp. 292f.
50. AC, Section 11, p. 121.
51. F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science (GS), trans. with commentary by
Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, A Division of
Random House, 1974) Book One, Section 55, p. 117.
52. Ibid., Book Two, Section 98, p. 150.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid., Book Three, Section 270, p.219.
55. 2, Part One, 'Of Reading and Writing', p.67.
3 RILKE'S ANGELS AND THE iiBERMENSCH
1. AC, Section 3, p. 116.

2. 2, Part One, 'Of the Priests', p. 117.
3. GS, Book Three, No. 143, p. 191.
4. 2, Part One, 'Zarathustra's Prologue', 3, p.41.
5. EH, 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra', 6, p.304.
6. 2, Part One, 'Zarathustra's Prologue', 4, p.43.
7. Ibid., p.44.
8. Ibid., Part Four, 'The Intoxicated Song', p.332.
9. WaIter Kaufmann, From Shakespeare to Existentialism: An Original
Study (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980) p. 225. (First
published by the Beacon Press in 1959.)
10. Ibid., p.226.
11. Ibid., p.228.
12. Ibid., p.229.
13. Ibid., p.233.
14. Ibid., p.239.
15. Ibid., p.251.
16. Selected Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke 1902-1926, trans. R. F. C. Hull
(Macmillan, 1946) pp. 66f.: letter No. 70 of 9 July 1904.
17. Ibid., p.230: letter No. 105 of 15 March 1913.
18. All quotations from the Elegies are taken from Duino Elegies, German
text with English trans., intro. and commentary by J. B. Leishman &
Stephen Spender (Chatto & Windus, 1981). (First published by The
Hogarth Press, 1939.)
19. GS, Book Three, No. 224, p.211.
20. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge, intro. by
Stephen Spender (Oxford University Press, 1984) p.221.
21. GS, Book Three, Section 109, p. 168.
22. Romano Guardini, Rilke's Duino Elegies: An Interpretation, trans.
K. G. Knight (Darwin Finlayson, 1961) p. 103.
23. Duino Elegies, p. 124.
24. Letters, p.250: letter of 28 June 1915.
25. Ibid., p.355: letter of 20 February 1922.
26. The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge, Introduction, p. ix.
27. GS, Book Three, Section 270, p.219.
28. Letters, p.338.
29. Ibid.
30. Joan Stambaugh, Nietzsche's Thought of Eternal Return (Baltimore
and London: Johns Hopkins Press, 1972) p. xi.
31. Duino Elegies, p. 142.
32. Romano Guardini, op. cit., p.299.

33. Nietzsche: Unpublished Letters, trans. and ed. Karl F. Leidecker (Peter
Owen, 1960) p. 132: letter to Brandes of 10 April 1888.
34. Z, Part Four, 'The Cry of Distress', p.254.
35. F. A. Lea, The Tragic Philosopher: A Study of Friedrich Nietzsche (New
York: Philosophical Library, 1957). See the last chapter.
36. AC, Section 29, p.141.
37. Z, Part Four, 'The Leech', p.263.
38. Ibid., p.266.
39. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson
(Athlone Press, 1983) p.165. (First published by Presses Univer-
sitaires de France, 1962.)
40. Z, Part Four, 'Retired from Service', p.273.
41. Ibid., The Ugliest Man', p.277.
42. Ibid., The Voluntary Beggar', p.280.
43. Ibid., The Shadow', p.285.
44. Ibid., The Greeting', p. 293.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid., The Intoxicated Song', p.326.
47. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol.n, The Eternal Recurrence of the
Same, trans. with notes and analysis by David Farrell Krell (San
Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984) pp.135f. The four volumes of
Heidegger's Nietzsche were in the main originally lectures given at
Freiburg between 1936 and 1940.
4 MANN: BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL
Thomas Mann, Joseph and his Brothers, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter

(Seeker & Warburg, 1981) Prelude, p.24.
2. Ibid., p.287.
3. Ibid., p.27.
4. BGE, Section 52, p.66.
5. Joseph and His Brothers, Young Joseph, 'In the Pit', p.385.
6. Ibid., Joseph the Provider, 'I Will Go and See Him', p. 1139.
7. The Letters of Thomas Mann 1889-1955, selected and trans. Richard &
Clara Winston (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1975) p.184.
8. The happiness of Mann's childhood and youth is affirmed in
Richard Winston's Thomas Mann: The Making of An Artist, 1875-
1911 (Constable, 1982). For the originals of the characters of
Buddenbrooks see Chapter 7 of that work.
9. See Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks', trans.
Henry Hatfield, in Thomas Mann: A Collection of Critical Essays
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964).
10. Thomas Mann, Tonio Kroger', in Stories of Three Decades, trans. H. T.
Lowe-Porter (Seeker & Warburg, 1946) p. 103.
11. Ibid., p.132.
12. Ibid., Preface, p. vi.

13. Ibid., 'Death in Venice', p.431.
14. Ibid., p.385.
15. Ibid., p.386.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. CS, No. 351, p.293.
19. See Richard Winston, Thomas Mann: The Making of an Artist, Chapter
17.
20. BT, Section 20, p. 123.
21. Ibid., p.130.
22. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter
(Seeker & Warburg, 1971) Chapter 5, 'Soup Everlasting', p.200.
23. Ibid., Chapter 4, 'Necessary Purchases', p.98.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., Chapter 5, 'Freedom', p. 221.
26. Ibid., p.222.
27. Thomas Mann: Diaries 1918-1939, selection and foreword by Herman
Kesten, trans. Richard & Clara Winston (Andre Deutsch, 1983)
p.96: diary entry for 21 May 1920.
28. The Magic Mountain, 'Encyclopaedic', p.246.
29. Ibid., p.242.
30. Ibid., p.266.
31. See Letters, p.121: letter of 5 January 1925 to Herbert Eulenberg,
who had mentioned Mann's 'secret love' for Peeperkorn. Mann
replies, '1 did not think it was all that secret.'
32. The Magic Mountain, 'Vingt Et Un', p.566.
33. Ibid., 'Of the City of God', p.398.
34. Z, 'Zarathustra's Prologue', 3, p.42.
35. WP, 21, p. 17.
36. Thomas Mann, 'Goethe's Faust', in Essays of Three Decades, trans.
H. T. Lowe-Porter (Seeker & Warburg) p. 23.
37. PTC, p.51.
38. Thomas Mann, Lotte in Weimar, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (Seeker &
Warburg, 1940) Chapter 9, p.340.
39. Ibid., Chapter 7, p.234.
41. Letters, p.406: letter of 6 November 1948 to Erika Mann.
42. Ibid., p.465: letter of 7 June 1954 to Erika Mann.
43. Stories of Three Decades, Preface, p. vii.
44. Diaries, p. 17: entry for 29 December 1918.
45. T. E. Apter, Thomas Mann: The Devil's Advocate (Macmillan, 1978)
p.l34.
46. Thomas Mann, Confessions of Felix Krull Confidence Man, trans.
Denver Lindley (Seeker & Warburg, 1955) Part Three, Chapter 5,
p.294.
47. Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (Seeker &
Warburg, 1969) Chapter 25, p.239.
48. Ibid., p.237.
49. Ibid., Chapter 19, p. ISS.

SO. EH, 'Why I am So Wise', p.222.
51. Thomas Mann, 'Nietzsche's Philosophy in the Light of Recent
History', in lilst Essays, trans. Richard & Clara Winston and Tania &
James Stern (Secker & Warburg, 1959) pp. 145f.
52. Ronald Hayman, Nietzsche: A Critical Life (Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1980) p. 64.
53. lilst Essays, p. 142.
54. Doctor Faustus, Chapter 46, p.491.
58. Diaries, pp. 254f.: entry for 16 January 1936.
59. 'Nietzsche's Philosophy in the Light of Recent History', lilst Essays,
p.174.
60. WP, Book Two, pp. 192f.
61. See Chapter 1 above (note 7): WP, Section 480, p.266.
62. 0, Book II, Section 103, p. 103.
5 LAWRENCE: HOW ONE BECOMES WHAT ONE IS
1. UM, 'Schopenhauer as Educator', p. 129.

2. WP, Book Four, 'Discipline and Breeding', Section 1067, p.550.
3. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans.
G. F.J. Payne, 2 vols (New York: Dover Publications, 1966) Vol. II,
p.197.
4. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. ., The Will to Power as Art, trans.
with notes and analysis by David Farrell Krell (San Francisco:
Harper & Row, 1979) p. 61.
5. See Chapter 1 above.
6. Albert Einstein in The Times, 28 November 1919.
7. WP, Section 619, pp.332f.
8. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.49.
9. On this aspect see Gilles Deleuze, op. cit., especially' Active and
Reactive', Section 10.
10. 2, Part One, 'Of Old and Young Women', p. 91.
11. Ibid., p.92.
12. Ibid., 'Of Marriage and Children', p.95.
13. D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers (Phoenix Edition, William Heine-
mann, 1974) p. 7. (First published 1913.)
14. Ibid., p.63.
15. Ibid., p.131.
16. Lawrence himself gives this false impression in the famous letter to
Garnett of 14 November 1912: 'William gives his sex to a fribble, and
his mother holds his soul.' (The Letters of D. H. lilwrence, General
Editor James T. Boulton, Vol. I, 1901-13, ed. James T. Boulton
(Cambridge University Press, 1979) letter 516, p.477.) The novel
itself does not quite bear out Lawrence's remark, but rather suggests
that the real split is between William's sense of honour as a
betrothed man and his personal needs.
17. GM, Third Essay, Section 1, p.97.
18. Ibid., p.98.
19 Sons and Lovers, p. 152.
20. Ibid., p.153.
21. Ibid.
22. See Sons and Lovers, pp.22lf.
23. TI, 'Maxims and Arrows', No. 44, p.27.
24. D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, intro. by Richard Aldington (Phoenix
Edition, William Heinemann, 1961) p. 1. (First published 1915.)
25. Ibid., p.95.
26. Concerning the original of Will, namely Alfred Burrows, see
Lawrence in Love: Letters to Louie Burrows, ed. with intro. and notes by
James I. Boulton (University of Nottingham, 1968) especially the
Introduction, pp. ix ff.
27. Letters, VOI.II, letter 732, p.I83.
28. The Rainbow, 'The Bitterness of Ecstasy', p.44O.
29. Ibid., p.441.
30. Benedict de Spinoza, 'The Ethics', in Works of Spinoza, Vol. II, trans.
and intro. by R. H. M. Elwes (New York: Dover Publications, 1951)
Part I, p.48.
31. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (Phoenix Edition, William
Heinemann, 1961) p.473. (First published 1921.)
32. See James I. Boulton's Introduction to Lawrence in Love.
33. TI, 'Maxims and Arrows', 8, p.23.
34. Women in Love, p. 164.
35. Ibid., p.246.
36. Ibid., p.415.
37. EH, p.224.
38. Women in Love, p.473.
39. D. H. Lawrence, Aaron's Rod (Phoenix Edition, William Heinemann,
1979) p. 161. (First published 1922.)
40. Ibid., p. 162.
41. Ibid., p.286.
42. Ibid., p.288.
43. D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo (Phoenix Edition, William Heinemann,
1966) p. 104. (First published 1923.)
44. Ibid., pp.344f.
45. Ibid., p.256.
46. D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent (Phoenix Edition, William
Heinemann, 1955) p. 69. (First published 1926.)
47. D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, intro. by Richard Hoggart
(Harrnondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1961) p.245. (First pub-
lished 1928.)
48. WP, Book Three, 'Principles of a New Evaluation', No. 490, p.270.
49. Gilles Deleuze, op. cit., p.50.
SO. Women in Love, p. 131.
6 GOD AND NIETZSCHE'S MADMAN
1. GS, Book Three, No. 125, p. 18I.

2. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1970) p.97.
3. Ibid., p. 103.
4. GS, Book One, No.4, p.79.
5. WP, Book Two, No. 354, pp.194f.
6. GS, Book Three, No. 125, p. 181.
7. CP, 'To Ireland in the Coming Times', pp.56f.
8. WP, Book One, No.1, p.7.
9. Z, Part Four, 'The Intoxicated Song', p.332.
10. D. H. Lawrence, Movements in European History, intro. by James T.
Boulton (Oxford University Press, 1981) pp.320f. (First edition
published by Oxford University Press, 1921. This edition first
published in hardback, 1971.)
11. WP, Book Four, 'Discipline and Breeding', No. 1060, p.546.
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Index
Aeschylus, 1,4 Kant, Immanuel, 43, 44
Andreas-Salome, Lou, 49-50, 56 Kaufmann, Walter, 45-9
Apter, T. E., 99 KJerkegaard,Seren, 25,49, 101
Aristotle, 16, 147
Larson, Hans, 50
Baudelaire, Charles, 129 Lawrence, David Herbert, 4, 7, 8,
Blake, William, 3, 17, 18 10, 11, 14, Chapter 5 passim, 157-:
Bohlmann, Otto, 18 8: Aaron's Rod, 133, 134-8, 158; 'A
Bunyan, John, 65, 118 Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover',
Burrows, Louie, 127 Essays, 141; Fantasia of the
Brutus,~arcus,44, 146, 157 Unconscious, 133; Kangaroo, 133,
134,136-8; Lady Chatterley's
Caesar, Julius, 40, 44, 46 Lover, 139-41, 158; Letters, 123;
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 148 The Lost Girl, 133, 136; 'The ~an
Curie, ~arie, 116 Who Died', 141-2; Movements in
European History, 157-8; The
Dante Alighieri, 2, 88 Plumed Serpent, 121, 138-9; The
Deleuze, Gilles, 73, 114 Rainbow, 121-7, 158; Sons and
Deussen, Paul, 102 Lovers, 118-21, 136, 158; Studies
Dickens, Charles, 11 in Classical American Literature,
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 49,74 141; The White Peacock, 116-17;
'The Woman who rode away',
Einstein, Albert, 3, 112 138; Women in Love, 121, 127-33,
Eliot, T. 5., 12,56 143, 158
Elizabeth I, 40 Lea, F. A., 71
Ellman, Richard, 23 Leishmann, J. B., 56, 65
Euripides, 1,4, 148-9 Lohengrin, 85
Lucretius, Titus, 48
Fielding, Henry, 11
Freud, Sigmund, 8, 54, 89,133 Madame Bovary, 84, 87
Man of Property, The, 84
Guardini, Romano, 54, 67 ~ann, Thomas, 4,7, 10, 11, 14,
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 46, Chapter 4 passim, 155-7:
89,90 Buddenbrooks, 83, 84-6;
Confessions of Felix Krull Confidence
Hayman, Ronald, 102 Man, 98-100,156; Death in Venice,
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm, 42 87-90, 155; Diaries, 91, 99, 105;
Heidegger, ~artin, 77-8, 112 Doctor Faustus, 83, 84, 90, 98,
Henn, T. R., 28 100-5,156-7; 'Goethe's Faust',
Heraclitus, 12-13, 14, 53 97, 156; Joseph and His Brothers,
Homer, 21, 27, 28-9, 35-6, 46, 79-83, lOS, 156; Letters, 83-4, 98;
146-7 Lotte in Weimar, 84, 95, 97-8, 104;
The Magic Mountain, 11,90-5,
Jung, Carl Gustav, 54 ISS, 156; Mario and the Magician,
173
174 Index
Mann, Thomas - continued 61,67-70,78, 142; Duino Elegies,

95-6, ISS, 156; 'Nietzsche's I, SO-3; II, 51, 53-4; III, 54; IV,
Philosophy in the Light of Recent 54-7; V, 55-8; VI, 58-9; VII, 59-
History', 102-3, 105-6; Tonio 61; VIII, 61-4; IX, 64-5; X, 65-7,
Kroger, 86-7, 155; Tristan, 86 152-3; 'Letter from a Young
Marx, Karl, 27, 35,117 Worker', 60; The Notebook of Malte
Michelangelo Buonarroti, 40, 69 Laurids Brigge, 52, 57
Murdoch,Iris, 145-9 Ryle, Gilbert, 107
Nietzsche, Friedrich: amor fati, 30- Sappho,46

I, SO, 140; The Anti-Christ, 6, 43, Sartre, Jean-Paul, 22
45,71; Beyond Good and Evil, 9, 19, Schopenhauer, Arthur, 71, 112
82,106; The Birth of Tragedy, I, 8, Shakespeare, William, 2, 23, 31, 34,
25,90; The Case of Wagner, 18; N. 40,44,46,47,53,58-9,68,69,88,
and Christianity, 37-40, 60, 71-3, 98, 122, 147-8
139, 144-5;Daybreak,40, 102; N. Shaw, George Bernard, 47
and Dionysus, 1,8-9,36-7; Ecce SheUey, Percy Bysshe, 17, 18, 69,
Homo, 12,36,102, 119, 128, 141, 122
152; 'eternal return', 33, 63, 76-8; Socrates, 1,4, 12, 17, 21, 42, 130
The Gay Science, 43, 45, 51, 89, Sophocles, I, 4, 38
144, ISO; On the Genealogy of Sorrows of Young Werther, The, 97
Morals, 9, 18,27, 120, 146; Spender, Stephen, 56, 57
Human, All-Too-Human, 2,8; Spinoza, Benedict de, 111, 126
nihilism, 12, 18-19, 154; Structuralism, 148
Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the
Greeks, 12; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Tamburlaine the Great, 29, 129
14,18, 19,21,44,45-7,70-7, Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe,
lIS, 116, 141, 152, 153, 157; Princess Marie von, SO
'{wilight of the Idols, 41, 42, 121; Tolstoy, Count Leo, 55, 74
Ubermensch, 11,44,45-9,54,63,
69,70,75-8, 142, 153, 154, ISS, Wagner,Richard,72-3
158; Untimely Meditations, 3,111; Wilcox, John T., 5
'will to power', 3,111-16, 142; Wilde, Oscar, 156
The Will to Power,S, 20, 21, 40, 95, Winston, Richard, 84n, 85n
106-7, 111-12, 113, 135, 149, 158 Wordsworth, William, 22,51,52, 68
Oedipus, 38 Yeats, William Butler, 4, 7, 10, 14-

Orpheus, 52, 64 IS, Chapter 2 passim, 72, lSO-2:
Orwell, George, 17 Autobiographies, 16,23;
'Byzantium', 152; Calvary, 43;
Pascal, Blaise, 25 Cathleen Ni Houlihan, 29, 30-1;
Picasso, Pablo, 56 'The Choice', 16; Y. and
Plato, 2, 7, 10,46,54, 130 Christianity, 24-5, 32, 36-9, 43,
Plutarch, 69 152; 'The Circus Animals'
Pope, AJexander, 48 Desertion', 150; Crossways, 22, 23;
'The Curse of Cromwell', 31; 'The
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 4,7,8,10-11, Dedication to a Book of Stories
14, Chapter 3 passim, SO, 86, 111, Selected from the Irish
152-5: Angels, 48, 49, 50, 53, 55, Novelists', 29; 'Easter 1916', 24,
Index 175
Yeats, W. B. - continued Hundred and Thirty, 33; 'The

26-7,30; Essays and Introductions, Phases of the Moon', 35-6; 'A
17,42; 'Estrangement', 28; Y. and Prayer for My Daughter', 33; The
fascism, 17; 'The Indian upon Resurrection, 36; 'The Rose Tree',
God', 22; The King's Threshold, 41; 26; 'The Sad Shepherd', 22;
Y. and Lady Gregory, 18, 26, 31, 'Sailing to Byzantium', 15; The
72; Last Poems, 150; Y. and Maud Secret Rose, 23; 'The Seven Sages',
Gonne, 29-30, 41; 'In Memory of 21; 'The Song of the Happy
Eva Gore-Booth and Con Shepherd', 21-2; 'To Ireland in
Markiewicz', 33; Michael Robartes the Coming Times', 29,151; 'Two
and the Dancer, 10, 26; 'Mohini Songs from a Play', 36-7; 'Under
Chatterjee', 32; 'No Second Ben Bulben', 151;A Vision, 34, 35
Troy', 31; On the Boiler, 38; Pages
from a Diilry Written in Nineteen Zwerdling, Alex, 33

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What is the book about?

What is the book about?

What authors are discussed in relation to Nietzsche?

What authors are discussed in relation to Nietzsche?

NIETZSCHE AND MODERN LITERATURE

By the same author

First published 1988

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

2 Yeats and Aristocracy 16

3 Rilke's Angels and the Ubermensch 45

4 Mann: Beyond Good and Evil 79

5 Lawrence: How One Becomes What One Is 111

6 God and Nietzsche's Madman 144

Notes and References 159

From Aaron's Rod by D. H. Lawrence, copyright 1922 by Thomas

1983); Last Essays, translated by Richard and Clara Winston and

Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One, translated with

dent truth. For example, the laws of physics offer a better

That things possess a constitution in themselves, quite apart

It is on account of this attitude, among others, that Nietzsche

than another. At the outset, however, it is necessary to discuss a

animals so much as the sublimating animals, for speech is but a

The vigour of a mind, its freedom through strength and superior

Freedom from any kind of conviction is part of the strength of his

Everywhere else that the spirit is strong, mighty, and at work

These remarks concern strength at present, not necessarily in

destiny. One of Lawrence's tasks was to distinguish such self-

However, qualities have emerged and still emerge in just that

himself refers to the Apollonian and Dionysian as antithetical

Nietzsche's own categories of master and slave morality are

the antithesis to be contrived, a priestly fabrication disguising

rather than its negation. Obviously there is nothing Christian

continually grows, changes, withers and flows away on the ever-

Louder than Anaximander, Heraclitus proclaimed: 'I see nothing

So Nietzsche paraphrases Heraclitus. The example of a stream is

Nietzsche does not 'go back' to Heraclitus but in one way or

Among Yeats's sources it is worthwhile to distinguish the few

I began [in the mid-eighties] occasionally telling people that one

This continued to be Yeats's attitude. He would yield to positive

General Eoin O'Duffy's Blue shirt movement in the early thirties,

him. Nietzsche came like a demon suddenly in September 1902.

take the line of least resistance', and 'strong nihilism', which

These remarks are already clear, yet we are so unaccustomed to

An obvious illustration of what Nietzsche means by enhancement

Whether they knew or not,

has been wrongly seen as a contrast between alluring dreams and

an appropriate god and seeing the environment accordingly. The

white and describes it as follows: 'At its centre is a four-petalled

to be likened to Plato's Form of Beauty, since the latter is only one

Yeats's attitudes were essentially unmoral. To take the best

'But where can we draw water,'

aristocrat is ideally able to form himself as a personality. He does

traditionally were and sweeten them. This is a tricky notion. Did

My formula for greatness in a human being is arnor tati: that one

Fate is necessarily personal and necessarily bound up with one's

Cathleen Ni Houlihan is inescapably a suffering figure, and proud

From a Nietzschean point of view, however, and really from a

I have been a king,

Zwerdling, in his book Yeats and the Heroic Ideal, thoroughly