How much of what follows I said to de Tessin at the time I do not clearly remember, but this is what I had in mind.
The idea of the superman is an idea that has been developed by various people ignorant of biology and unaccustomed to biological ways of thinking.It is an obvious idea that follows in the course of half an hour or so upon one's realisation of the significance of Darwinism.If man has evolved from something different, he must now be evolving onward into something sur-human.The species in the future will be different from the species of the past.So far at least our Nietzsches and Shaws and so on went right.
But being ignorant of the elementary biological proposition that modification of a species means really a secular change in its average, they jumped to a conclusion--to which the late Lord Salisbury also jumped years ago at a very memorable British Association meeting--that a species is modified by the sudden appearance of eccentric individuals here and there in the general mass who interbreed--preferentially.Helped by a streak of antic egotism in themselves, they conceived of the superman as a posturing personage, misunderstood by the vulgar, fantastic, wonderful.But the antic Personage, the thing I have called the Effigy, is not new but old, the oldest thing in history, the departing thing.It depends not upon the advance of the species but upon the uncritical hero-worship of the crowd.You may see the monster drawn twenty times the size of common men upon the oldest monuments of Egypt and Assyria.The true superman comes not as the tremendous personal entry of a star, but in the less dramatic form of a general increase of goodwill and skill and common sense.A species rises not by thrusting up peaks but by the brimming up as a flood does.The coming of the superman means not an epidemic of personages but the disappearance of the Personage in the universal ascent.That is the point overlooked by the megalomaniac school of Nietzsche and Shaw.
And it is the peculiarity of this war, it is the most reassuring evidence that a great increase in general ability and critical ability has been going on throughout the last century, that no isolated great personages have emerged.Never has there been so much ability, invention, inspiration, leadership; but the very abundance of good qualities has prevented our focusing upon those of any one individual.We all play our part in the realisation of God's sanity in the world, but, as the strange, dramatic end of Lord Kitchener has served to remind us, there is no single individual of all the allied nations whose death can materially affect the great destinies of this war.
In the last few years I have developed a religious belief that has become now to me as real as any commonplace fact.I think that mankind is still as it were collectively dreaming and hardly more awakened to reality than a very young child.It has these dreams that we express by the flags of nationalities and by strange loyalties and by irrational creeds and ceremonies, and its dreams at times become such nightmares as this war.But the time draws near when mankind will awake and the dreams will fade away, and then there will be no nationality in all the world but humanity, and no kind, no emperor, nor leader but the one God of mankind.This is my faith.I am as certain of this as I was in 1900 that men would presently fly.To me it is as if it must be so.
So that to me this extraordinary refusal of the allied nations under conditions that have always hitherto produced a Great Man to produce anything of the sort, anything that can be used as an effigy and carried about for the crowd to follow, is a fact of extreme significance and encouragement.It seems to me that the twilight of the half gods must have come, that we have reached the end of the age when men needed a Personal Figure about which they could rally.The Kaiser is perhaps the last of that long series of crowned and cloaked and semi-divine personages which has included Caesar and Alexander and Napoleon the First--and Third.In the light of the new time we see the emperor-god for the guy he is.In the August of 1914 he set himself up to be the paramount Lord of the World, and it will seem to the historian to come, who will know our dates so well and our feelings, our fatigues and efforts so little, it will seem a short period from that day to this, when the great figure already sways and staggers towards the bonfire.
5
I had the experience of meeting a contemporary king upon this journey.He was the first king I had ever met.The Potsdam figure--with perhaps some local exceptions behind the Gold Coast--is, with its collection of uniforms and its pomps and splendours, the purest survival of the old tradition of divine monarchy now that the Emperor at Pekin has followed the Shogun into the shadows.The modern type of king shows a disposition to intimate at the outset that he cannot help it, and to justify or at any rate utilise his exceptional position by sound hard work.It is an age of working kings, with the manners of private gentlemen.
The King of Italy for example is far more accessible than was the late Pierpont Morgan or the late Cecil Rhodes, and he seems to keep a smaller court.
I went to see him from Udine.He occupied a moderate-sized country villa about half an hour by automobile from headquarters.
I went over with General Radcliffe; we drove through the gates of the villa past a single sentinel in an ordinary infantry uniform, up to the door of the house, and the number of guards, servants, attendants, officials, secretaries, ministers and the like that Isaw in that house were--I counted very carefully--four.
