Thoughts out of Season, part 1 | Page 5

of men, which they once kindly offered to all Europe to quaff;
but have, on the contrary, remained the most sober, the most exclusive,
the most feudal, the most conservative people of our continent.
But because the ravages of Democracy have been less felt here than
abroad, because there is a good deal of the mediaeval building left
standing over here, because things have never been carried to that
excess which invariably brings a reaction with it--this reaction has not

set in in this country, and no strong desire for the necessity of it, no
craving for the counterbalancing influence of a Nietzsche, has arisen
yet in the British mind. I cannot help pointing out the grave
consequences of this backwardness of England, which has arisen from
the fact that you have never taken any ideas or theories, not even your
own, seriously. Democracy, dear Englishmen, is like a stream, which
all the peoples of Europe will have to cross: they will come out of it
cleaner, healthier, and stronger, but while the others are already in the
water, plunging, puffing, paddling, losing their ground, trying to swim,
and even half-drowned, you are still standing on the other side of it,
roaring unmercifully about the poor swimmers, screamers, and fighters
below,--but one day you will have to cross this same river too, and
when you enter it the others will just be out of it, and will laugh at the
poor English straggler in their turn!
The third and last reason for the icy silence which has greeted
Nietzsche in this country is due to the fact that he has--as far as I
know--no literary ancestor over here whose teachings could have
prepared you for him. Germany has had her Goethe to do this; France
her Stendhal; in Russia we find that fearless curiosity for all problems,
which is the sign of a youthful, perhaps too youthful nation; while in
Spain, on the other hand, we have an old and experienced people, with
a long training away from Christianity under the dominion of the
Semitic Arabs, who undoubtedly left some of their blood behind,--but I
find great difficulty in pointing out any man over here who could serve
as a useful guide to the heights of the Nietzschean thought, except one,
who was not a Britisher. I am alluding to a man whose politics you
used to consider and whose writings you even now consider as fantastic,
but who, like another fantast of his race, may possess the wonderful gift
of resurrection, and come again to life amongst you--to Benjamin
Disraeli.
The Disraelian Novels are in my opinion the best and only preparation
for those amongst you who wish gradually to become acquainted with
the Nietzschean spirit. There, and nowhere else, will you find the true
heroes of coming times, men of moral courage, men whose failures and
successes are alike admirable, men whose noble passions have
altogether superseded the ordinary vulgarities and moralities of lower
beings, men endowed with an extraordinary imagination, which,

however, is balanced by an equal power of reason, men already
anointed with a drop of that sacred and noble oil, without which the
High Priest-Philosopher of Modern Germany would not have crowned
his Royal Race of the Future.
Both Disraeli and Nietzsche you perceive starting from the same
pessimistic diagnosis of the wild anarchy, the growing melancholy, the
threatening Nihilism of Modern Europe, for both recognised the danger
of the age behind its loud and forced "shipwreck gaiety," behind its
big-mouthed talk about progress and evolution, behind that veil of
business-bustle, which hides its fear and utter despair--but for all that
black outlook they are not weaklings enough to mourn and let things go,
nor do they belong to that cheap class of society doctors who mistake
the present wretchedness of Humanity for sinfulness, and wish to make
their patient less sinful and still more wretched. Both Nietzsche and
Disraeli have clearly recognised that this patient of theirs is suffering
from weakness and not from sinfulness, for which latter some kind of
strength may still be required; both are therefore entirely opposed to a
further dieting him down to complete moral emaciation, but are, on the
contrary, prescribing a tonic, a roborating, a natural regime for him
--advice for which both doctors have been reproached with Immorality
by their contemporaries as well as by posterity. But the younger doctor
has turned the tables upon their accusers, and has openly reproached his
Nazarene colleagues with the Immorality of endangering life itself, he
has clearly demonstrated to the world that their trustful and believing
patient was shrinking beneath their very fingers, he has candidly
foretold these Christian quacks that one day they would be in the
position of the quack skin-specialist at the fair, who, as a proof of