May 30. Rome — A God Indeed
How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of—Apollo!... I have to-day, for the first time, seen a god.
He stands in the Vatican, and follows, with upthrown head and far-seeing eye, the flight of the golden arrow that slays the serpent of the miasmatic marsh. One feels a sad tenderness for the poor bleeding deity, who hangs dead and helpless from a thousand crucifixes here in Rome, but to-day, for the first time in my life, I felt the impulse to fall on my knees and worship. Here is at last, and indeed a god, whose fine feet disdain the earth, whose proud youth never knew suffering or defeat. Here is the embodiment of the ideal of the European—beauty, health, power. How he must smile to stand here, merely a statue, in the place where the Christian reigns, amid luxury and pomp, in the name of the sorrowful Hebrew democrat who had not a place to lay his head. Apollo’s ideal, his worship, still remains dominant, though they call his religion by another name. The European remains, and always will remain, a pagan; none more pagan than the popes with their lust for temporal power.
Only here in Rome is it possible to realize the long struggle for supremacy between the European and Semitic ideas; for here is gathered the bulk of the relics of Greece—mother and nurse of our race—who early broke the bonds of Asiatic thought and sought her own development, material rather than spiritual (if one accepts the theory that spirit and matter are divisible), sensuous rather than mystical, concerned more with the well-being of the body and the freedom and vigour of the mind than with the condition of the soul. She who threw herself with passion into the arms of Nature, and worshipped only the sublimated human characteristics and visible natural forces deified into exquisite personifications. She who exalted the beauty and health of the body into a cult, strove after the demonstrable truths of science, and loved man as he was—humorously loved him with all his faults and limitations, rather than an impossible ideal of him.
Here in Rome one finds all the records of the next great development of the European Erd-geist—the growth of its genius in military, social, and political organization. Still, as in Greece, clinging to the aristocratic ideal; to the rule of the strong and gifted. The fruit did not exist for the benefit of the vine; the vine existed to produce, to nourish, to minister to the perfect culmination of its species in the fruit, which drank its sap as of right. Here again the European followed Nature, that Arch-Aristocrat who destroys multitudes to produce a few perfect specimens—whose right is always might.
The Asian conquests brought again inroads of Asian thought; more particularly the thought of that small tribe, the quintessential of Semitism, which was ever engaged in revolt against nature, and maintaining democratic convictions in the teeth of all experience. Impatient of rulers, but submissive to those who scourged the impulses of their appetites. Scornful of kings, and turning from beauty and genius to exalt the insane and insect-ridden fakir with knotted unshorn locks who muttered vague prophecies. Struggling always to escape from the grip of the inevitable cruelties of natural forces by opposing to them bloody sacrifices and cruel self-restraints—flowering at last into that supreme incarnation of the Semitic mind called Jesus Christ, who wrested from asceticism a dream of a panacea for the brutalities of the laws of life. The misshapen and undeveloped fruit of the tree of existence, the windfalls—always a vast majority—received with ecstasy this new gospel, absurd but fascinating, which denied actualities and promised impossibilities. The feeble majority clutched at a power denied them by nature, and only by outwardly accepting the new tenets were the strong few able to maintain their old dominance.
Nietsche’s “blond savage” pouring in from the north found Rome disintegrated by this Asian influence, and unable to discern that the new faith was not an integral part of the civilization whose splendour dazzled him, accepted this theory of life as part of the lesson he set himself humbly to learn at the feet of Italy.
Hence followed that blind welter of mediævalism; the material genius of the European race struggling in the bonds of a creed entirely foreign and unsympathetic. The strong still ruled, as always, but ruled by new formulæ, and moistened with blood and kneaded by swords the hard paste of the European Aryan was leavened by Semitism. Not willingly; never entirely. A thousand years after Rome’s acceptance of the new cult the re-discovery of the old art and philosophy of Greece intoxicated Europe with joy. Here was something of her own—natural to her—sympathetic. The Renaissance became an ecstasy of negation of the heavy yoke under which her neck had so long been bowed. Learning again was glorious. The philosopher dared assert his superiority to dirty, ignorant scions of the gutter, who had claimed equality with sovereigns by reason of not eating three meals a day, and because of the virtue which lay in the frequent recitation of gibberish. Art abandoned its endless repetitions of a single theme, and essayed in faltering delight to rival the glorious fragments of those who had made nature their model and had joyed to picture life in all its rich grace and charm. The Western world stood once more upon its feet and burst into a rapture of creation. It laughed to scorn the narrow commands of Semitic asceticism against the graven image. Once more it allowed the beauty of visible nature to pour through its veins in a rich, fecundating flood.
But after all, the leaven had reached every part, and had tinctured it past any possible casting out. Never could the European be free of Asian influence. The pendulum has swung back and forth ever since—ever moving a little higher toward the side of the natural, material development of the race, but ever checked and brought back to the old Jewish revolt against nature. To-day the influence of Asia shows itself in the absurdities of democracy, the phantasies of socialism.
... One of the most curious phases of the whole question is that the Jew—dispersed throughout the Western world—has entirely succumbed to the very ideas which he overthrew. He is the artist, the materialist of our times!