She Had Saturated Herself With Rome, For
Whose Name She Professed A Tremulous Affection Untainted By Worldly
Considerations Such As Mine; She Loved Its "Persistent Spiritual Life";
It Was Her Haven Of Rest.
So, while her arm rested lightly on mine, we
wandered about those gardens, the saintly lady and myself; her
Mind
dwelling, maybe, on memories of that one classic love-adventure and the
part she came nigh to playing in the history of Europe, while mine was
lost in a maze of vulgar love-adventures, several of which came nigh to
making me play a part in the police-courts of Rome.
What may have helped to cement our strange friendship was my
acquaintance, at that time, with the German metaphysicians. She must
have thought me a queer kind of Englishman to discuss with such
familiarity the tenets of these cloudy dreamers. Malwida loved them in a
bland and childlike fashion. She would take one of their dicta as a
starting-point - establish herself, so to speak, within this or that
nebular hypothesis - and argue thence in academic fashion for the sake of
intellectual exercise and the joy of seeing where, after a thousand
twists and turnings, you were finally deposited. A friend of ours - some
American - had lately published a Socratic dialogue entitled "The
Prison"; it formed a fruitful theme of conversation. [9] Nietzsche was
also then to the fore, and it pleases me to recollect that even in those
days I detected his blind spot; his horror of those English materialists
and biologists. I did not pause to consider why he hated them so
ardently; I merely noted, more in sorrow than in anger, this fact which
seemed to vitiate his whole outlook - as indeed it does. Now I know the
reason. Like all preacher-poets, he is anthropocentric. To his way of
thinking the human mind is so highly organized, so different from that
of beasts, that not all the proofs of ethnology and physiology would
ever induce him to accept the ape-ancestry of man. This monkey-business
is too irksome and humiliating to be true; he waives it aside, with a
sneer at the disgusting arguments of those Englishmen.
That is what happens to men who think that "the spirit alone lives; the
life of the spirit alone is true life." A philosopher weighs the value
of evidence; he makes it his business, before discoursing of the origin
of human intellect, to learn a little something of its focus, the brain;
a little comparative anatomy. These men are not philosophers.
Metaphysicians are poets gone wrong. Schopenhauer invents a "genius of
the race" - there you have his cloven hoof, the pathetic fallacy, the
poet's heritage. There are things in Schopenhauer which make one blush
for philosophy. The day may dawn when this man will be read not for what
he says, but for how he says it; he being one of the few of his race who
can write in their own language. Impossible, of course, not to hit upon
a good thing now and then, if you brood as much as he did.
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