H. L. Mencken's The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche:

Nietzsche the Prophet

Nietzsche As A Teacher

Shaw himself points out, in a dozen places, that there is more in him of the interpreter than of the pioneer. His labor, as he sees it and defines it, is not so much to think new thoughts as to seize upon and develop the thoughts of other men and translate them into symbols comprehensible to folks who dine well and feel a bit foundered afterward, and so demand that the maximum of divertisement be injected into the world problems set before them. This frank prologue to the Shaw plays has been regarded with suspicion, as if it were some sort of unusually subtle and subterranean joke, but as a matter of fact it should be accepted as a true saying. Personally, Shaw is merely "ag'in the government," which means that the existing order pains him and that he yearns to attack and overthrow it with whatever weapon or weapons seem nearest at hand. He has scarcely any preference; all he wants to do is to hit a head. And so it happens that he achieves the astounding feat of seeming to stand as sponsor, in one play and sometimes on one page, for such irreconcilable enemies as the philosopher of renunciation and the prophet of eternal defiance. It remained for Ireland, in the days of her bondage, to produce a human being who could at once subscribe to the most unpromising altruism and the most bitter and unpitying egotism. In the whole history of civilization no other man has so successfully served both the angels and the devil.

Shaw first swam into our ken as a spouter of socialistic nonsense from cart-tails, and he still poses, in a half-hearted and apologetic sort of fashion, as a Christian socialist, - whatever that may be, - but his true importance and significance lie, not in his weak variations upon stale themes by Marx, but in his thunderous bellowings of Nietzsche. Socialism was an old story before he was born and Schopenhauer's supine asceticism had long ago gone the way of all unworkable, unlivable creeds. Even Tolstoy had lost his tang and novelty and was beginning his spectacular descent from the seminaries of serious philosophers to the "home" pages of the yellow journals. But when Shaw began to absorb his emanations - unconsciously, perhaps, at the start - Nietzsche was new. Germany was beginning to grow aware of him and there is reason to believe that Ibsen and Strindberg, the Scandinavians, took home some notion of him, but in general the great world beyond Metz and Kiel knew him not. It was by Shaw's hand that the ideas for which he stands were done into the English vulgate. It was Shaw that changed his x into 1, 2 and 3. And in this benevolent enterprise the Irish dramatist borrowed many of the Prussian iconoclast's meditations bodily, and put them, with scarcely any change, into the mouths of his Jack Tanners, his Capt. Bluntschlis and his Andrew Undershafts, and into his prologues, epilogues, intermezzos and appendices. By their aid - in part, at least - he was lifted up to his present eminence as the premier scoffer and dominant heretic of the day.

Consider, for instance, the leaven of Nietzsche in that most notorious and excellent of all the Shaw plays, "Mrs. Warren's Profession," a drama in which Shaw is more the serious philosopher and less the comique than in any other. This profession, as we know, is the oldest in the world and Mrs. Warren enters it knowingly and deliberately, because she sees in it her only chance to obtain decent food and lodging and her modicum of happiness. "Do you think I was such a fool," she says in after years, "as to let other people trade in my good looks, by employing me as a shop-girl, a barmaid or a waitress, when I could trade in them myself and get all the profits, instead of starvation wages?" She prospers and grows rich and there comes to her the ease and comfort for which every normal human being yearns. Also, there comes to her a daughter, who goes to Cambridge, well taught and well fed, and takes high honors. At first Mrs. Warren is proud that her outlawed trade has enabled her to do so much for her offspring - proud that, in defiance of her outlawry, she is the mother of such an uncommon child. But by and by there comes over her a fear that when the daughter discovers her means of livelihood, she will recoil in horror. The fear grows and hypocrisy comes out of it. Mrs. Warren equivocates and dissimulates. The daughter must never know.

But in the end the daughter does know, and the manner of her revolt is passing strange. She sees her mother's motive and temptation and approves her sin. "My dear mother," she says, "you are a wonderful woman - you are stronger than all England." So far mother and daughter are as one. But, in the last analysis, Mrs. Warren has failed. She has hurled her defiance at the moral code - and then sought its shelter. She has grown ashamed! And her daughter, seeing this, holds her in loathing. "If I had been you, mother," she says, "I might have done as you did; but I should not have lived one life and believed in another. You are a conventional woman at heart. That is why I am leaving you now."

Now, what are the ideas at the bottom of this play? What are the propositions its protagonist lays down? First, that every woman (like every man) has an unalienable right to seek comfort and happiness in life in the manner best calculated to procure them, and regardless of the customs and opinions of other persons. Secondly, that her methods are right and without sin so long as she accepts their consequences uncomplainingly. Third, that when she fails in this defiance and, repentant, makes complaint - when she pretends falsely to subscribe to a moral code she has cast aside and cries out when she is discovered and denounced - then she loses, at one stroke, all she has sought to gain. Such is the more obvious meaning of the drama, and thus we find the Nietzschean superman in skirts - the ya-sager in a brothel. But, as Shaw himself points out in the preface, there is beneath the action a thesis more widely applicable to the facts of existence and it is this: that any system of ethics or condition of human society which makes it necessary for a woman, in order to procure that share of happiness which instinct demands, to put to herself in dire peril of losing happiness altogether, is outrageously unfair, illogical and pernicious. "It can't be right!" wails Mrs. Warren. "I stick to that: it's wrong." Thus Shaw penned his play and pointed its moral in 1893. Nietzsche, as we have seen, put the same argument into vitriolic German a full decade before.

In greater or less measure the Nietzschean flavor will be found in all of Shaw's other dramas, mixed with and sometimes obscured or neutralized by the effluvia of other and more orthodox sages. In Major Barbara we have a hero who calls himself a dionysian and offers Nietzscheism as a substitute for Christianity. In Man and Superman we have a hero who calls himself a nascent superman and preaches the Nietzschean doctrine of womankind. In each case there is borrowing, not only of the spirit, but also of the letter. "Dionysus," "super-man," "other-worldliness," and Undershaft's motto: "Unashamed" - in the very phrases we hear the voice of Zarathustra. "Never resist temptation," says Jack Tanner. "Prove all things: hold fast to that which is good." "What does not kill me," says Nietzsche, more epigrammatically, "strengthens me." "Vice," says Tanner, "is waste of life. Poverty, obedience and celibacy are the canonical vices." "Self-control," says Nietzsche, "destroys the nervous system as certainly and thoroughly as debauchery." "Those who minister to poverty and disease," says Tanner, "are accomplices in the two worst of all crimes." In Nietzsche appears the idea more broadly: "Sympathy is both the multiplier of misery and the conservator of misery." There is no need to pile up examples. Shaw may regard himself as a socialist, but his socialism is so overcast by the philosophy of Dionysus that its outlines are lost.

It is probable that a thousand other men, in a dozen countries, had asked themselves the questions which grew into Nietzsche's philosophy. Some of them had been debated years and years before he was born. But the world, as a world, thinks dimly and muddily, and emotion always goes before reason. It remains for some clear brain to transmute the groping half-conscious feeling of the race into a visible, understandable idea. The mind of Nietzsche had this retort-like quality. It was fed by the thought of his time, but it changed this thought from rough, gray ore into clear-running metal. Nietzsche, in brief, put into words and syllogisms the things that his contemporaries felt stirring gropingly within them, and when he spoke, there were not a few who understood.

That Ibsen remained long unacquainted with Nietzsche's writings is as unthinkable as that a Huxley could remain unaware of a Darwin. The Norwegian had brought forth his answer to the problem for himself, from the depths of his own loathing for morality as he found it, but as, one by one, the German's books came from the press, they must have heartened and influenced him profoundly. Ibsen's letters show us that he was ever more the poet than the philosopher, and that even after the world gave him ear, he still manifested a queer distrust of his own philosophy - a distrust compounded in part of modesty, and in part of that uncertainty which always marks the true agnostic. The rise of Nietzsche must have made him feel more sure of himself, for here there was a professional metaphysician whose dictata augmented and reinforced his own. His later plays demonstrated it. The onslaught upon "A Doll's House" drove him behind trenches in "Ghosts," but later on, when he came to write "Hedda Gabbler," "The Master Builder" and "When We Dead Awaken," he was sure of himself and so pounded out his ideas unheedingly and defiantly. The difference between his first audience and his last was the difference between a race not yet cured of Thomas ŕ Kempis and a race inoculated with Nietzsche.

In the drama of today, Ibsen and Nietzsche are the dominant voices. In Germany and England, in France and America, the playmakers have gone to Ibsen for their artistry and technique and to Nietzsche for their philosophy. Ibsen taught them naturalness and truth - he showed them the absurdity of the soliloquy and the hero and the essential impossibility of Marguerite Gautier - and Nietzsche made them critics, not of kings and intrigues, but of human institutions and divine mandates. The difference between the Henry Arthur Jones of "The Silver King" and the Jones of "The Hypocrites" marks the measure of this revolution. Its leaders today are Hermann Sudermann, the German, and August Strindberg, the Swede. We who speak English know Sudermann for his Heimat, which has been rendered into our tongue as "Magda," Magda Schwartze is a Mrs. Warren with strength to face it out to the bitter end. As Nietzsche would say, she is a ya-sager - a yes-sayer - who asks nothing of the world but a chance to seek happiness in her own way. Convention - authority - respectability - stretch out their arms and would make her their own. But she has chosen for herself. "If you give us the right to hunger," she cries, - "and I have hungered!" why do you deny us the right...to happiness, as we can understand it?... I must live out my own life! That I owe to myself - to myself and mine!"

In all of these earnest and significant dramas you will find some trace of the Nietzschean thesis. The problem they illuminate is never, Will the brave Rudolph win the fair Angeline? but, Is this virtue really good? or, Is that sin really bad? Such things were discussed years and years ago, but until the human mind was finally freed from the bonds of theology and authority, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, these discussions were always half-hearted and vain. Let him weigh and speculate as much as he would, the philosopher and poet always came, at last, to a dead wall. He might beat upon it as much as he pleased, but he could not hope to be ranked much higher, in the human scale, than a successful hurler of muck at temple gates. Even today - such is the force of collective opinion - we think of Voltaire and Machiavelli and others of their ilk as criminals rather than as truth-tellers. The dead wall towered high. Such-and-such a rule was laid down by the laws of some king, or the commandments of some god or the dogmas of some holy man - and it was immaculate, incontrovertible and final. One might go so far - and no further. Beyond the wall lay blasphemy, lunacy and all sorts of unutterable horrors.

But it is vain, perhaps, to attempt to measure a philosopher's true influence by counting the noses of the disciples who copy his writings upon fresh scrolls. Such disciples bear the same relation to him that Paderewski does to Chopin or Mantell to Shakespeare or Hearst to Karl Marx. Executants are necessary because the world is large, and when the fates are propitious, they sometimes reach the estate and dignity of interpreters, but at bottom they are mere echoes. To change the figure, they are lumber sawed from a tree and not new shoots springing from its roots. But even at that, as has been said, they cut a respectable figure in the world. The best actor conceivable is of much less importance than the worst dramatist, and the most dexterous pianist seems paltry beside even the composer of the "Florodora" sextette, but we must have parrots as well as nightingales and printing presses as well as divine fire. Thus it is not well to hold in contempt those humble ones who stand below and are ready, when the great officers of the barque of life shout down an order, to repeat it respectfully, with the addition of "Aye, aye: sir!"

The ideas of Nietzsche are dominant in the German universities, and have colored the whole stream of German thought. From Leipsic and Heidelberg they journey to London and New York and bob up in the weeklies and reviews. And out of the Spectator and the Saturday, the Independent and the North American, they are translated into the vulgar tongue - with reservations and amendations - and so become leading articles in the more anarchistic and discontented section of the daily press. Thus after a long voyage and many hardships, they impinge upon the intellects of those meditative Anglo-Saxons who brave the elemental furies and the laws of political economy from their benches in City Hall Park or their inns along the Mile End Road. And that is one way in which Nietzsche reaches the great plain people of America and England. The porridge runs distressingly thin by the time it gets to them, but the flavor, though faint, is still there.

Beside this method of what may be called direct inoculation, it is evident that there is also in progress a more general and subtle infection. A philosophy, when it offers a practical solution of pressing problems or a comprehensible interpretation of contemporary phenomena, begins to saturate the air, and so influences everyone, including even those who have never heard of it directly. Human beings, in the mass, are ever the willing slaves of some prevalent suggestion. The great majority of Americans, for instance, always think much alike. One year they are unanimously outraged by Spain's crimes in Cuba; the next year they are unanimously enraged by the eccentricities of predatory wealth; another year they think deeply and indignantly about the tariff, expansion, executive usurpation, Mormonism, divorce or the negro question. As it is with concrete presentations, so it is with general ideas. At one time, in the middle ages, it was the firm opinion of practically every human being in all Europe that the most profitable way to employ time and energy was to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and kill as many Saracens as possible on the way. At another time, the thirst for money was uppermost and everything else was subordinated to considerations of trade. At still another time, there was an almost unanimous revolt against old ideas of government, and the French revolution was one of its symptoms. In our own time we have seen Christendom reduce Christianity to the lowly estate of a mere scheme of morality and have witnessed an unprecedented attempt to uncover the secrets of nature. Always there is some dominant trend of thought, some fashionable frame of mind, some universal idea.

Whatever the groove in which the intellect of the world happens to be working, it feels a need for some leader to give voice to its inarticulate and half-conscious longings and to serve, in some sense, as its guide. This leader is nearly always the product, rather than the cause of the movement for which he stands. Thus, at the time of the crusades, Richard Coeur de Lion neither invented the idea of slaying the Saracens nor was he particularly successful in his individual attempts at massacre, yet he visualized, in his own mind and deeds, the notion of rescuing the holy sepulchre, and so, when we think of the crusades today, we always think of Richard, too. In the same way half a dozen men are identified with the French revolution, and Roosevelt and his rough riders stand for the war with Cuba, and Bryan is accepted as the prophet of the war upon lawless millions. Again, we find ourselves unconsciously associating such purely symptomatic phenomena as Payne, Huxley and Ingersoll with the revolt against Christian supernaturalism, and Darwin with the search for knowledge and Tolstoy with the rebellion against modern systems of government.

In brief, the age is dionysian and the moral ideas that have come down to us in the decalogue and the beatitudes are under fire. In New York, not long ago, an old woman, incurably ill of cancer, died of poison, and it was charged that her daughter, who loved her and had nothing to gain personally by her death, had given it to her to put her out of her frightful and useless agony. It so happened that the daughter disproved this charge, but the essential thing is not this, but the fact that the great majority of New Yorkers apparently regarded it as sensible, not to say heroic, that she should do the thing she was accused of doing. A few days afterward a reputable paper in London printed a long defense of murder, as a necessary means of avenging injuries for which the law could offer no remedy, and at the same time there were in progress in the United States a dozen trials of persons accused of putting the same idea into practice, all of which resulted in practical acquittals. Since the Civil War the negro problem in the south has been hotly debated and a thousand schemes for carrying out the biblical injunction to love one another have been proposed. Recently, a clear-headed and vigorous, if slightly theatrical southerner, has courageously voiced the instinctive conviction that this injunction must be disregarded, and that the white race, to preserve itself, must pronounce upon the black race and set out to execute - as gently as possible, but still with unalterable firmness - a sentence of extermination. [Once again, this should tell you something about Nietzscheanism - DMR.]

Whether or not the result of this unrestrained search for ultimate truths will be a "transvaluation of all values" in the Nietzschean sense, remains to be seen. Nietzsche apparently believed that, in the course of time, the human race would substitute "thou shalt" for "thou shalt not" throughout the decalogue and that the beatitudes would eventually become a sort of roster anathema. That such a transvaluation will come during the time that human beings remain substantially as they are is beyond all possibility; that it will ever come is beyond all prophecy. But even setting this problem aside as insoluble, the fact remains that the grand assault-at-arms now in progress will result in incalculable benefit. If the race decides, in. the end, that the commandments, after all, are sound and so resolves to abide by them, it will have made an infinite advance, nevertheless, beyond the time when it accepted them unquestionably, because they were regarded as perfect by the ancient Jews. In a word, a race which looks its own problems squarely in the face and seeks solutions for them in the storehouse of its own experience, and with an eye solely to his own welfare, is a race vastly superior to one which puts an infantile trust in the wisdom of a people long lost in the struggle for existence, to whom its peculiar requirements were unknown and to whom the very world itself bore a different aspect.