Chesterton gets Nietzsche right. He does this, not necessarily as a portrait painter, but as a brilliant caricaturist. Have you ever wondered how the great caricaturists do it — drawing a nose that is three feet long, and yet you recognize the person?
“And then I thought of all that was brave and proud and pathetic in poor Nietzsche, and his mutiny against the emptiness and timidity of our time. I thought of his cry for the ecstatic equilibrium of danger, his hunger for the rush of great horses, his cry to arms . . . [but] Nietzsche, for all we know, was afraid of a cow” (Orthodoxy, p. 49).
Also in
Orthodoxy, Chesterton says this:
“This, incidentally, is almost the whole weakness of Nietzsche, whom some are representing as a bold and strong thinker. No one will deny that he was a poetical and suggestive thinker; but he was quite the reverse of strong. He was not at all bold . . . Nietzsche is truly a very timid thinker. He does not really know in the least what sort of man he wants evolution to produce.”
What Chesterton gets is captured in that adjective,
poor Nietzsche. He gets it with words like “weakness, timid, reverse of strong.” Chesterton sees what very few see — weakness, self-loathing, and timidity. But it is surprising that more don’t see it — it is right on the surface of what he writes. Nietzsche was a conflicted sentimentalist, raging against his
own pathetic fears, loves, and inadequacies, and convincing pretty much everybody that he was the uber-bad boy. He was a brilliant and captivating writer, and so he could effectively draw attention away from himself. But the shrewd sanity of Chesterton saw through the verbal tricks completely. Nietzsche could see down the road of nobility and courage a long way. But seeing down a road and walking down it are very different things — and because this was the case, the better Nietzsche could see, the more of a waster he knew himself to be.
I have elsewhere drawn the distinction between the moral man, who doesn’t want to do certain sinful things because he doesn’t want to do them, and the moralistic man, who fiercely denounces what he is afraid he will fall into. Nietzsche is a moralist of unbelief. He preached strength and aristocracy because he knew himself to be craven. The moment he snapped into madness was highly suggestive — when he saw a horse being beaten. Why is it suggestive? He identified with the horse, and not with the driver who held a “strong whip hand.”
I have listed this under postmodernism because the lineage holds firm. Sentimentalism, resentment, rage, weakness, and hatred of the apostle Paul.
