While the German doctrine was the plaything merely of hysterical and
supersensitive persons, like Carlyle and Nietzsche, it mattered little
to the world of politics. An excitable man, of vivid imagination and
invalid constitution, like Carlyle, feels a natural predilection for the
cult of the healthy brute. Carlyle's English style is itself a kind of
epilepsy. Nietzsche was so nervously sensitive that everyday life was an
anguish to him, and broke his strength. Both were poets, as Marlowe was
a poet, and both sang the song of Power. The brutes of the swamp and the
field, who gathered round them and listened, found nothing new or
unfamiliar in the message of the poets. 'This', they said, 'is what we
have always known, but we did not know that it is poetry. Now that great
poets teach it, we need no longer be ashamed of it.' So they went away
resolved to be twice the brutes that they were before, and they named
themselves Culture-brutes.
It is difficult to see how the world, or any considerable part of it,
can belong to Germany, till she changes her mind.
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