o its feebleness (as is pretended), but to its
energy. The misanthropes pretend that they despise humanity for its
weakness. As a matter of fact, they hate it for its strength.

Of course, this shrinking from the brutal vivacity and brutal variety
of common men is a perfectly reasonable and excusable thing as long as
it does not pretend to any point of superiority. It is when it calls
itself aristocracy or aestheticism or a superiority to the bourgeoisie
that its inherent weakness has in justice to be pointed out.
Fastidiousness is the most pardonable of vices; but it is the most
unpardonable of virtues. Nietzsche, who represents most prominently
this pretentious claim of the fastidious, has a description
somewhere--a very powerful description in the purely literary sense--of
the disgust and disdain which consume him at the sight of the common
people with their common faces, their common voices, and their common
minds. As I have said, this attitude is almost beautiful if we may
regard it as pathetic. Nietzsche's aristocracy has about it all the
sacredness that belongs to the weak. When he makes us feel that he
cannot endure the innumerable faces, the incessant voices, the
overpowering omnipresence which belongs to the mob, he will have the
sympathy of anybody who has ever been sick on a steamer or tired in a
crowded omnibus. Every man has hated mankind when he was less than a
man. Every man has had humanity in his eyes like a blinding fog,
humanity in his nostrils like a suffocating smell. But when Nietzsche
has the incredible lack of humour and lack of imagination to ask us to
believe that his aristocracy is an aristocracy of strong muscles or an
aristocracy of strong wills, it is necessary to point out the truth. It
is an aristocracy of weak nerves.

We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next-door
neighbour. Hence he comes to us clad in all the careless terrors of
nature; he is as strange as the stars, as reckless and indifferent as
the rain. He is Man, the most terrible of the beasts. That is why the
old religions and the old scriptural language showed so sharp a wisdom
when they spoke, not of one's duty towards humanity, but one's duty
towards one's neighbour. The duty towards humanity may often take the
form of some choice which is personal or even pleasurable. That duty
may be a hobby; it may even be a dissipation. We may work in the East
End because we are peculiarly fitted to work i