'Likeable anarchist, modest Übermensch, atheist preacher'

From Antichrist by Jonathan Ré [New Humanist]:

The calamity of madness did no harm to Nietzsche's burgeoning reputation: he came to fame as the philosopher who denounced the demands of reason so effectively that at last he lost his own. Twilight could now be seen as foreshadowing the eclipse of an intellect of such power that no one could stand it, even himself, and Zarathustra became a record of insights too deep to be expressed in the ordinary discourse of reason: indeed it inspired two of the most adventurous young composers of the 1890s – Richard Strauss and Frederick Delius – to transpose the gospel of the death of God into swathes of futuristic sound.

The first self-proclaimed Nietzscheans in the English-speaking world were avant-garde writers like WB Yeats, Jack London, JM Synge, James Joyce, DH Lawrence and Edwin Muir: rebellious radicals, unmistakably "modern" and self-consciously "young". Nietzscheanism, to them, meant the call of the wild. They adored Twilight – which appeared in translation in 1895 – not only for its general air of braggadocio (the subtitle is How to Philosophise with a Hammer), but also for its ferocity about an earlier generation of English radicals. "England", for Nietzsche, was the land where "for every little emancipation from divinity, people have to re-acquire respectability by becoming moral fanatics," or where the typical atheist "aspires to honour for not being one". He poured scorn on Darwin as a complacent peace-loving optimist, and condemned Carlyle for combining a "longing for a strong belief" with "the feeling of incapacity for it".

Uninhibited by direct knowledge (he never visited Britain, let alone Ireland or America, and could not read English), Nietzsche was able to mock John Stuart Mill for his "offensive transparency", while dismissing George Eliot as one of those "ethical girls" who, having "got rid of the Christian God … think themselves obliged to cling firmer than ever to Christian morality."

The young Nietzscheans knew that their master would have despised their socialism and anarchism, not to mention their feminism, and many of them were aware that, back in Germany, a very different cult of the Übermensch was being promoted by Nietzsche's ultra-conservative sister Elizabeth. But they were exhilarated by Nietzsche's highly quotable motto Nichts ist wahr: Alles ist erlaubt ("nothing is true: everything is permitted"). They were inspired by his ethic of magnificent autonomy – the "master-morality" of the proud blond beast as opposed to the slave-morality of trembling Christian killjoys. They found glamour in Nietzsche's extremism, and were more interested in excitement and inspiration than guidance or exact interpretation. "Nietzsche is worse than shocking," as the unshockable George Bernard Shaw put it, enviously: "he is simply awful – his epigrams are written with phosphorus on brimstone". And the glorious Isadora Duncan – self-styled "dancer of the future" – was of much the same opinion: "How do we know," she asked, "that what seems to us insanity was not a vision of transcendental truth?"

The young Nietzcheans did not hesitate to identify Nietzsche himself with the Übermensch – or the "beyond-man", as the first translator of Zarathustra put it – and they dreamed of a day when they too might be acclaimed as pioneers of post-humanity. The main vehicle for their project was a little magazine called The Eagle and the Serpent: A Journal of Egoistic Philosophy, started in 1898 by a young Londoner by the name of John Erwin McCall. Its policy was summed up in two defiant slogans: "a race of altruists is necessarily a race of slaves" and "a race of freemen is necessarily a race of egoists", and the first issue called for the creation of a network of "Egoist Coteries" to serve as centres of resistance to all kinds of religion – or rather to all except for McCall's fresh new creed, known as "the Religion of Hate".

McCall and his fellow haters were passionate about social change, but they wanted nothing to do with the progressive politics of the past. Their aim was not social justice but self-emancipation, and "the realisation of a higher type of human being … a being as much superior to man as man is superior to the ape." But where Nietzsche might have expected the dictatorship of the Übermensch to be the work of a cultural aristocracy, his followers at The Eagle and the Serpent looked to a revolutionary workers' movement based in what they called "class-consciousness" or "class-selfism". They also amended Nietzsche's attitude to Darwin, claiming that the "master morality" of the future was "synonymous with … the modern doctrine of evolution". But in spite of their appeals to mass movements and natural science, they still conducted themselves like an exclusive sect. The principles of the Übermensch (or the "overman" – a term they preferred to "beyond-man") were "not for boys, nor for old women, nor for dreamers either," they declared: "they are the ethics for full-grown men, for noble, strong, wide-awake men, who shape the world's destiny."

Radical Nietzscheanism was probably the first philosophical movement to pride itself on the raw extravagance of youth rather than the mature wisdom of experience. Bernard Shaw, now in his forties, found it made him feel old; but he offered the egoist teenagers his support, hoping they might re-invigorate the socialist movement by "bringing Individualism round again on a higher plane". He also broke the translation logjam over the Übermensch with his all-conquering neologism "superman", and gave the journal an endorsement that its editor could brandish with pride: "it promises," he said, "to be foolish enough to make people think."

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