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John Davidson tells us to have nothing to do with Thou shalt not ; but it is surely
obvious that Thou shalt not is only one of the necessary corollaries of I will. I will
go to the Lord Mayor s Show, and thou shalt not stop me. Anarchism adjures us to be
bold creative artists, and care for no laws or limits. But it is impossible to be an artist
and not care for laws and limits. Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the
frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold
creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really
find that you are not free to draw a giraffe. The moment you step into the world of facts,
you step into a world of limits. You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but
not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars;
but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you
may be freeing him from being a camel. Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging
triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its
three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end. Somebody wrote a work called The
Loves of the Triangles ; I never read it, but I am sure that if triangles ever were loved,
they were loved for being triangular. This is certainly the case with all artistic creation,
which is in some ways the most decisive example of pure will. The artist loves his
limitations: they constitute the thing he is doing. The painter is glad that the canvas is
flat. The sculptor is glad that the clay is colourless.
In case the point is not clear, an historic example may illustrate it. The French
Revolution was really an heroic and decisive thing, because the Jacobins willed
something definite and limited. They desired the freedoms of democracy, but also all
the vetoes of democracy. They wished to have votes and not to have titles.
Republicanism had an ascetic side in Franklin or Robespierre as well as an expansive
side in Danton or Wilkes. Therefore they have created something with a solid substance
and shape, the square social equality and peasant wealth of France. But since then the
revolutionary or speculative mind of Europe has been weakened by shrinking from any
proposal because of the limits of that proposal. Liberalism has been degraded into
liberality. Men have tried to turn revolutionise from a transitive to an intransitive
verb. The Jacobin could tell you not only the system he would rebel against, but (what
was more important) the system he would not rebel against, the system he would trust.
But the new rebel is a Sceptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty;
therefore he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything
really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation
implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only
the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it. Thus he writes
one book complaining that imperial oppression insults the purity of women, and then
he writes another book (about the sex problem) in which he insults it himself. He curses
the Sultan because Christian girls lose their virginity, and then curses Mrs. Grundy
because they keep it. As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then,
as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a
policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles
that the peasant ought to have killed himself. A man denounces marriage as a lie, and
then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie. He calls a flag a bauble,
and then blames the oppressors of Poland or Ireland because they take away that
bauble. The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that
savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes
on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts. In short, the
modern revolutionist, being an infinite sceptic, is always engaged in undermining his
own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book
on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt
has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything
he has lost his right to rebel against anything.
It may be added that the same blank and bankruptcy can be observed in all fierce
and terrible types of literature, especially in satire. Satire may be mad and anarchic, but
it presupposes an admitted superiority in certain things over others; it presupposes a
standard. When little boys in the street laugh at the fatness of some distinguished
journalist, they are unconsciously assuming a standard of Greek sculpture. They are
appealing to the marble Apollo. And the curious disappearance of satire from our
literature is an instance of the fierce things fading for want of any principle to be fierce
about. Nietzsche had some natural talent for sarcasm: he could sneer, though he could
not laugh; but there is always something bodiless and without weight in his satire,
simply because it has not any mass of common morality behind it. He is himself more
preposterous than anything he denounces. But, indeed, Nietzsche will stand very well
as the type of the whole of this failure of abstract violence. The softening of the brain
which ultimately overtook him was not a physical accident. If Nietzsche had not ended
in imbecility, Nietzscheism would end in imbecility. Thinking in isolation and with
pride ends in being an idiot. Every man who will not have softening of the heart must at
last have softening of the brain.
This last attempt to evade intellectualism ends in intellectualism, and therefore in
death. The sortie has failed. The wild worship of lawlessness and the materialist
worship of law end in the same void. Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he
turns up ultimately in Tibet. He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and
Nirvana. They are both helpless -- one because he must not grasp anything, and the
other because he must not let go of anything. The Tolstoyan s will is frozen by a
Buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil. But the Nietzscheite s will is quite
equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good; for if all special actions are
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