MAY, Keith. Nietzsche and Modern Literature - Themes in Yeats, Rilke, Mann and Lawrence
MAY, Keith. Nietzsche and Modern Literature - Themes in Yeats, Rilke, Mann and Lawrence
MAY, Keith. Nietzsche and Modern Literature - Themes in Yeats, Rilke, Mann and Lawrence
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1 Perspectives of Nietzsche 1
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
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
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
Perspectives of Nietzsche 5
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
8 Nietzsche and Modern Literature
... 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
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
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
Perspectives of Nietzsche 13
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
16
Yeats and Aristocracy 17
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
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,
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'
22 Nietzsche and Modern Literature
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
28 Nietzsche and Modern Literature
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
30 Nietzsche and Modern Literature
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?
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:
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
Yeats and Aristocracy 33
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
34 Nietzsche and Modern Literature
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 .
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.
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.
Yeats and Aristocracy 37
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.'
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
Yeats and Aristocracy 43
... 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
44 Nietzsche and Modern Literature
45
46 Nietzsche and Modern Literature
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,
Rilke's Angels and the Ubermensch 51
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)
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
60 Nietzsche and Modern Literature
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
Rilke's Angels and the Ubermensch 61
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.
(lines 10-13)
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
64 Nietzsche and Modern Literature
oh, why
have to be human, and, shunning Destiny,
long for Destiny
(lines 4-6)
... 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
(lines 110-13)
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.
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
Rilke's Angels and the Ubermensch 75
79
80 Nietzsche and Modern Literature
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.
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
82 Nietzsche and Modern Literature
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
Mann: Beyond Good and Evil 83
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
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
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
Mann: Beyond Good and Evil 99
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:
The Magic Mountain, Joseph and His Brothers and Lotte in Weimar, the
first set should simply and robustly annihilate the second.
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
Mann: Beyond Good and Evil 109
111
112 Nietzsche and Modern Literature
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
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
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.
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
Lawrence: Becoming What One Is 131
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.
134 Nietzsche and Modern Literature
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
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
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
144
God and Nietzsche's Madman 145
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
God and Nietzsche's Madman 149
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.
152 Nietzsche and Modern Literature
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.
154 Nietzsche and Modern Literature
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
156 Nietzsche and Modern Literature
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
159
160 Notes and References
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid., Book Three, Section 270, p.219.
55. 2, Part One, 'Of Reading and Writing', p.67.
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.
Notes and References 167
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174 Index