I. HUMANISM AND THE NEW ORDER
FOR centuries a civilisation will follow the same path, worshipping the same gods, cherish-ing the same ideals, acknowledging the same moral and intellectual standards. And then all at once a change will come, the springs of the old life run dry, and men suddenly awake to a new world, in which the ruling principles of the former age seem to lose their validity and to become inapplicable or meaningless.
This is what occurred in the time of the Roman Empire, when the ancient world, which had lived for centuries on the inherited capital of the Hellenistic culture, seemed suddenly to come to the end of its resources and to realise its need of something entirely new. For four hun-dred years the civilised world had been reading the same books, admiring the same works of art, and cultivating the same types of social and personal expression. Then came the change of the third and fourth centuries, A.D., when the 9
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forms of the Hellenistic culture suddenly lost their vitality and men turned to a new art, a new thought and a new way of life—from philosophy to theology, from the Greek statue to the Byzantine mosaic, from the gymnasium to the monastery.
This species of cultural discontinuity is not unknown in other civilisations—for example in China in the third and fourth centuries A.D.— but it seems specially characteristic of the West.
It took place once more in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries at the close of the Middle Ages, and we seem to be experiencing something of the kind in Europe to-day. During the last period of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth century a further phase of Western civilisation came to an end.
The old capital was exhausted and there was nothing to take its place. Liberalism and Nationalism had won their long fight with the old order, but they had lost their own ideals.
In Italy the Risorgimento had given place to the age of Crispi and the Triple Alliance, and in France the centenary of the Republic was being celebrated by the Panama scandals. It was a dark age—dark not as in the early Middle Ages with the honest night of barbarism, but with the close uneasy gloom that comes before a storm. In the past, the periods of climax, as 10
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a rule, have been ages of material distress and economic decline, but the terrifying thing about that age was its prosperity, its confidence, its material success. ” There has never,” wrote Peguy, ” been an age in which money was to such a degree the only master and god. And never have the rich been so protected against the poor and the poor so unprotected against the rich… .
“And never has the temporal been so protected against the spiritual; and never has the spiritual been so unprotected against the temporal.” *
The goal of the Liberal Enlightenment and Revolution had been reached, and Europe at last possessed a completely secularised culture.
The old religion had not been destroyed ; in fact throughout Protestant Europe the churches still possessed a position of established privilege.
But they held this position only on the condition that they did not interfere with the reign of Mammon. In reality they had been pushed aside into a backwater where they were free to stagnate in peace and to brood over the memory of dead controversies which had moved the mind of Europe three centuries before.
On the other hand the intellectuals who had contributed so much to the victory of the new order of things were in a somewhat similar * C. P é g u y , L’ argent Suite, p p . 170-171.
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plight. They found themselves powerless to influence the movement of civilisation, which had cut itself free, not only from tradition, but also from art and thought. The spiritual leadership that was possessed by Voltaire and Rousseau, by Goethe and Fichte, was now a thing of the past. The men of letters were expected to follow society, not to lead it. And this is what many of them did, whether with the professional servility of the journalist or with the disinterested fanaticism of the realist, who affirmed his artistic integrity by the creation of an imaginary world no less devoid of spiritual significance than was the social world in which he lived. But a large number, probably the majority, found neither of these alternatives satisfactory. They turned to literature and art as a means of escape from reality. That was the meaning to-many of the catchword, ” Art for Art’s sake.”* Symbolism and aestheticism, the Ivory Tower and the Celtic Twilight, Satanism and the cult of ” Evil,” hashish and absinthe ; all of them were ways by which the last survivors of Romanticism made their escape, leaving the enemy in possession of the field.
There was, however, one exception, one man who refused to surrender.
* Its true meaning, however, is to be found rather in the dilettantism of Oscar Wilde.
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Whatever his weaknesses Friedrich Nietzsche was neither a time-server nor a coward. He at least stood for the supremacy of spirit, when so many of those whose office it was to defend it had fallen asleep or had gone over to the enemy.
He remained faithful to the old ideals of the Renaissance culture, the ideals of creative genius and of the self-affirmation of the free personality, and he revolted against the blasphemies of an age which degraded the personality and denied the power of the spirit in the name of humanity and liberty.
Nevertheless, Nietzsche himself was far from being a humanist. Humanism is essentially a via media, and in the nineteenth century the via media had become identical with mediocrity. In Nietzsche’s eyes humanity had become something either ridiculous or shameful, and the attempt to pass beyond humanity led him to the negation of humanism and the destruction of his own personality ; as he said, the way of the creator is to burn himself in his own fire.
Yet the tragedy of Nietzsche is the tragedy of the end of humanism, since it only reveals with exceptional clearness the ultimate consequences of the antinomy that was inherent in the humanist tradition from the beginning.
The essentially transitory character of the humanist culture has been obscured by the