TOLSTOY AND NIETZSCHE.

COMPARISONS AND CONTRASTS.

 THE SUPERMAN ON TRIAL

By ARCHIBALD T. STRONG.

  In an age of mainly materialistic humanitarianism, of which the thought has for the most part been devoted to political speculation and experiment, two men of mighty genius stand out, each poles apart from the other, yet each embodying the most strenuous reaction against the prevailing tendencies of his time. One of these is the author of "Zarathustra;" the other the great seer last moments have just been watched with interval and sympathy by the whole civilised world.
   Nietzsche took what he believed to be the Greek spirit, which he identified with the Joy of Life, and deduced from this the of the Superman, a being, stronger, blither, and more magnificently selfish than the men of our own day, ruling over a population of serfs by sheer right of strength, mighty of will, a law until himself, and utterly contemptuous of the claims of the weakling majority, of the sickly morality of the herd, of all standards set by which he must needs hate and despise as the faith of cripples and slaves.
 To him the main evil of modern society appeared to consist in its utterly mistaken theory of values, and its reconstruction must, he thought, be preceded by a revaluation. And Tolstoy, up to this point, is quite at one with Nietzsche. Life to be worth the living, must in his eyes become an utterly new thing; and it could only succeed in being this when existing society had been shattered and recast in a new mould.

 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.

 Nietzsche declared that the Superman must live in a world beyond Good and Evil; hence he scorned and flouted existing themes of morality, and as a token of his hatred of them, styled himself an amoralist. Tolstoy, if he did not do this at all events held himself severely aloof from all schemes of political activity and reform, holding, here again with Nietzsche, that the new order must arise within the individual, and not without. In spite of his so-called Socialism, he has always refused to take part in any project of practical revolution, or reconstruction of the State; and this has been at once his strength, obtaining for him the toleration of the Russian Government, and his weakness, inasmuch as it has put him completely out of touch with the great men of action with whom he might have been otherwise expected to sympathise warmly.
 Nietzsche and Tolstoy are at one, moreover, in wishing, each according to his lights, to evolve from the old man a new one, who should differ from him in kind rather than in degree, and should possess an infinitely higher and finer nature; though each is in exact opposition to the other as to what that nature should be.
 Both agree, too, that such a change as this is impossible under a scheme of society dominated by the standard of women, whom both, here differing again from the general opinion of their day, held to be morally, as well as mentally, inferior to men. Tolstoy, following Proudhon, declared property in any shape or form to be a crime; and if Nietzsche did not do this, he, at any rate, believed it to be criminal that property, as a form of power, should be allowed to remain in hands that were totally unworthy to wield it effectively.
 Both men stood, or endeavored to stand, outside the State which was their natural sphere of action, and both either disregarded or rejected utterly the successive steps by which their predecessors had slowly been endeavoring to build up what they considered to be a sound new order, evolved from the old by a gradual sequence of effort and evolution. Finally each, by rejecting the existing social conditions as a basis of higher construction, and scorning bitterly the "slow degrees" by which "the world soul quickens through the centuries," cut the main nerve of human effect in the centre, and rendered meaningless almost every one of the battles fought and won in the cause of progress by the mighty dead.

THE GOSPELS OF MIGHT AND MEEKNESS.

  Here, however, the resemblance ends: and it is indeed a truism to remark that in essentials the end held up by Tolstoy to man is the exact contrary of that so fiercely preached by Nietzsche. Nietzsche's message was for the strong, and for these alone; and he declared that society was only valuable for the sake of the few Supermen which, if it were properly reconstituted, it might some day hope to produce. To Tolstoy, man may attained his true personality by annihilating the Superman in himself and strenuously denying the Will to power which with Nietzsche had been the cardinal virtue. With Tolstoy, as with Christ, man must be born again and become as a little child: with Nietzsche he must spring from his new birth a giant supremely hard and strong, a Dionysiac being, exulting in his might and eager alike for the fight and the dance. With Nietzsche, warfare of the nobler kind was the natural and normal state of the higher man: but Tolstoy held — to quote the seemingly paradoxical words of Mr Aylmer Maude —that "we must assert that physical force should never be used, even in cases in which a man feels that he ought to use it, for if we once admit any exception to the rule, it breaks to pieces, and all sorts of violence will go on being practised in the world."
 Tolstoy, here following Schopenhauer, that great genius who has deepened and spiritualised the outlook of so many other geniuses, considered humility to be the main virtue, and took for his life's motto. "Blessed are the meek." To Nietzsche this text, which is the very keystone of Christianity, appeared immoral and nauseous, the outcome of a desperate attempt made by the weak to impose their distorted sense of values upon the strong, and to obtain a dispensation of Power which they were neither physically nor spiritually fitted to wield.

 MASTER MORALITY AND SLAVE MORALITY.

 Tolstoy held what are commonly considered to be the more aristocratic forms of activity to be pretentious and inferior, manual labor on the land being the noblest form of human effort: hence till his recent retreat to a monastery he lived and labored like a serf, and among serfs. To Nietzsche, such labor seemed the duty of the lowest, and the laudation of it merely another form of that contemptible and artificial slave morality which had overlain and deadened the true morality of the masters among men, their great artists, great legislators, and great warriors.
 In the realm of Art, both thinkers agreed in detesting the dilettantism which puts forth works of technical perfection from which all higher Form or feeling is absent: but to Nietzsche all art was worthless which did not tend to further the joy of life among the strong ones of this earth; and his objection to Wagner is that his music was effeminate and languorous, supplying a solace to the weak instead of the stirring strains to which the Superman might dance forward in might and mirth towards his goal. With Nietzsche the highest art, like the highest education, could only be for the chosen few: but Tolstoy, as the doctrines of his later years got stronger and stronger hold upon him, came to distrust and despise every form of artistic production In which the peasants could not have an equal share.
 Tolstoy's faith and life were based on the love of his neighbor; Nietzsche, believing such love to make for democracy and weakness, declared :—"Do I advise you to love your neighbor? Rather do I advise you to flee from your neighbor, and to love the most remote. Higher than love unto your neighbor is love unto the most remote future man."
 The whole secret of Tolstoy's life may fairly be said to have consisted in renouncing three things— Voluptuousness, the passion for Power, and what he conceived to be Selfishness; and it was just these three things of which Nietzsche could speak thus:—
"Voluptuousness: Only to the withered a sweet poison; to the lion-willed, however a great cordial, and the reverently saved wine of wines.
"Voluptuousness : The great symbolic happiness of a higher happiness and highest hope.
 "Passion for Power: The earthquake which breaketh and unbreaketh all that is rotten and hollow. The rolling, rumbling, punitive demolisher of whited sepulchres; the flashing interrogative sign beside premature answers.
 "And then it happened and, verily it happened for the first time! — that Zarathustra's word blessed Selfishness —the wholesome, healthy Selfishness that springeth from the powerful soul."
 Finally, to Nietzsche, Christ and Christianity were symbols of weakness and decay which had overlain the world for centuries and must be rooted out ever the new life could begin: to Tolstoy it was exactly in them that the new life must be sought, and the old life had been bad not from following their precepts but from neglecting them : and though he believed as firmly as did Nietzsche that Christ was man and not God, he felt Him to be not weaker than other men, but mightier than all of them through his fuller participation in a higher Power.

 STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS OF EITHER THINKER.

 So much for the differences between these great geniuses who in their opposite ways are surely the two mightiest spiritual forces of their age. Each in his different way supplies the antidote for certain crying evils of his day, and represents from his own standpoint a reaction against compromise and materialistic contentment. The teaching of Nietzsche, though it may be difficult to accept it as a whole, is intensely valuable as a spur to effort and efficiency, as a reminder that higher culture, mental, spiritual, and physical is a thing ever to be sought after and diligently ensued, and as a counterblast to the chief evils of democracy— its tendency to level down, to distrust and depress its best and wisest and strongest, and to elevate into cardinal virtues the weakness and Inefficiency of the herd. " A man is worth a mob," said Landor: and though Nietzsche may possibly have gone a little too far in drawing the corollary that the mob has no worth at all, he has done great good to his age by reminding it forcibly that it is above all things virile personality that counts In life and thought and art.
 Tolstoy, on the other hand, reminds us of the seemingly paradoxical but perfectly true conclusion that the mob must needs absorb and annihilate the man who lives wholly to himself, that the highest form of personality is only attainable by self-negation, and that spiritual welfare and progress are things ultimately independent of political reconstruction and reform.
 Either thinker is inadequate in himself, and for the same reason — namely, that he disregards the essential unity between the man and the State, cuts himself loose from the only possible sphere of self-expression and realisation, and inculcates, each in his own way, an impossible and unearthly individualism which leaves him out of touch with all but a very few of his kind. Each teacher, indeed, represents an opposite ideal pushed to its extreme: Nietzsche, the Western ideal of the strenuous assertion of personality through Force and Efficiency and Joy : Tolstoy, the Eastern one of its stern negation through passivity and asceticism. Each is in a sense the antidote for the weakness or exaggeration of the other : we may give thanks for each after his kind.

Herald (Melbourne, Vic. : 1861 - 1954), Tuesday 29 November 1910, page 6