THE GERMAN SUPERMAN.

Taihape Daily Times, Volume 8, Issue 18, 22 January 1916, Page 3

THE GERMAN SUPERMAN.

ANOTHER HUN THEFT,

WITH A HIDEOUS RESULT. (By SIDNEY LOW). It is somewhat singular that we have i only now (in the publication of Adrian ,Collins’s translation of “The Inequality of Human Races”) obtained for Jthe-first time 'a version of Count Go--1 bineau’s most striking work in an English dress. Among ourselves indeed l this author hag remained almost unknown until the last few years, but ,in Germany he has long had a great ivogue. Numerous books have been .'written on him, a Gobineau society (was founded a good many years ago, ,and there l s a Avell marked cult of Gcbinism.

There is no doubt that the speculations and ideas which this amiable ' French nobleman put forward in the ’fifties of the last century exercised a remarkable effect on German thought and opinion. (Wagner became acquainted with Gobineau in his later years, and found, or thought he found, in his writings some solution of the i problems with which he had been struggling all his life. Nietzsche, although he indignantly repudiated the accusation of being a Gobinist, did in fact ewe his most characteristic doc- ’ trine, that of the Superman and the Super-race, to the Count. And more than all, the Gobinist idea has inspired that renegade B’riton, Houston Stuart Chamberlain, whose two massive volumes, “The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century,” are the gospel of the Neo-Ger-manic faith in all its arrogance and brutal pride. It was Gobineau who propagated, in its most exaggerated modern form, that theory of racial su.periority on which Chamberlain enlarges in his two volumes of confused argument and perverted erudition. Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau was the descendant of a distinguished family that had remained loyal to the Bourbon s through the Revolution, and his father had followed Louis XVUI into exile during the “Hundred Days.” The count had wea'th as well as social position, and at an early age entered the French Diplomatic Service, in which he remained until his death. CONGENITAL ARISTOCRACY. It is in these works that he puts forward with uncompromising emphasis his theory of congenital aristocracy. The crowd appeared to him in any case hopeless. It never had been, and never would be, anything but slavish, ignorant, and feeble, and neither education, nor environment would alter its character. So he fell back on the ide'a of race, in which he found the secret of national greatness and human achievement. All that had ever been w'orth doing in history had been ’">ne by the superior stocks which had impressed’ their own force and vitality upon the unregenerate herds. Nature was inexorable. Neither climate nor religion, nor political institutions | could run counter to the inevitable-'

law s of physiology and heredity. A man was well born or he was not, and it was the qualities he derived from his ancestors that alone mattered. THE WHITE ARYANS.

This theory of eugenics was based cn a foundation deduced from ethnology and history. Humanity was white, • yellow, or black; that is to say, it . was Aryan, Mongolian, or Negroid, or a mixture of these three. The blacks and the yellows were inferior in every w T ay and were bound for ever to re\main inferior. All virtue, strength, physical and mental, beauty, capacity, art, refinement, and courage of the highest kind resided in the white ,Ai-yans, and wherever there had been a notable civilisation it had been \created by a dominating Aryan caste. 'Thus ancient Egypt owed it s culture to an Aryan colony from Asia Minor, Aso did Assyria, so did China, which was thereby enabled to make some progress, until the white conquerors were submerged by the yellow ocean. Ancient Rome and Greece were examples ot a mixed "subject population, \with an Aryan ruling caste, and the same could be said of ancient India ■‘and Persia.

In most of these countries the superior stock was too small to retain its permanence. It was lest by crossing with the aboriginals of brown hr yellow descent, and so a race of mongre’s was produced with resulting national degeneration. But it is the Teuton and the Scandinavian, with his fair hair and fair skin, who really represents the Aryan race in its. purity; find as long as he remains pure he is capable of doing anything and has a natural right, and indeed a sacred duty, to impose upon the inferior service stocks.

Here i s the germ, and something more, of the favourite Nietzchean hypothesis. Gobineau’s Aryan is the “blonde beast,” the superman of the author of Zarathustra. He is also the origin of the exaggerated Germanism cf the Chamberlain sect. For since it is only in pure Germanism that salvation lies, the necessary inference was that nations are to be ranked according to the amount of Teutonic b'.cod in their composition.

A CREEP OP PESSIMISM

To Gobineau himself all these speculations only brought despair, for everywhere he found that the blond© beast had most unfortunately neglected to preserve its blondeness and its Purity; with the result that every country i s mainly inhabited by halfbreeds ,so that in the end the whole world will be permeated, by the incurable vices of democracy, and all 'the aristocratic virtues, such as courage, taste, refinement, originality, will gradually disappear. The Count, in fact, was a cultured, polite, and rather cheerful pessimist. The nineteenth century ideal of progress made no appeal to him. The salvation of mankind lay in what would now be called eugenics, and, as he saw no prospect of eugenic methods being ever adopted, he came to

the conclusion that no salvation was

to be expected, and that our civilisation, like those which have preceded it, wa s doomed eventually to failure and impotence. His Teutonic disciples, however, Svhile admitting his postulates, have not accepted his deductions. They decline to 'admit that the aristocratic ideal, whether racial or individual, is incapable of realisation; so that while one set fix their hopes upon the eventual emergence of the cosmopolitan super-man, others are content to pro-

claim the more rapid success of the

\supex--race; and the super-race, for ■Gobineau’s Teutonic disciples, is evidently the German. It is on this foundation of ethnology and history that the monstrous superstructure of modern German ambition has been built up. A FRAGILE DOCTRINE. It is, of course, eascy to show that \ the foundation itself is hopelessly fraI gile. The careful resarches cf mo--1 dern students of anthropology and an- ]' thropometry have blown to pieces the j vague and shadowy assumptions on j- which the whole doctrine reposes. It i us true that there are no pure races 'at | present; but it i s highly probable that ' there never were. If man was not a mongrel from the beginning of things i he certainly seems to have been so as long as history has been able to take account of him.

The suggestion which Chamberlain and Gobineau have worked to death, that the dominating caste everywhere was purely Aryan, has no substantial evidence in its favour, and it is, indeed, highly uncertain whether there ever were any Aryans in the true sense at all. The whole subject is extremely obscure and confused, and nothing can be more ridiculous than the fact that out of thi s confusion there h'as been evolved a theory which ministers so conveniently to (the national vanity of a single community. If there is any pure race in the world it is certainly not that which now inhabits the dominions of the German Emperor; and hi s own Prussian subjects are 'about the most mixed of all, and have rather less infusion of the pure “Germanic” blood than some of those against which they are at; present waging war.