Gloria Mundi
Eunice Tietjens
In what dim, half imagined place
Does the Titanic lie to-day,
Too deep for tide, too deep for spray,
In night and saltiness and space?
Oh, quiet must the sea-floor be!
And very still must be the gloom
Where in each well-appointed room
The splendor rots unto the sea.
Through crannies in the shattered decks
The sea-weed thrusts pale finger-tips,
And in the bottom’s jagged rips
With ghostly hands it waves and becks.
The mirrors in the great saloons
Sleep darkly in their gilt and brass
Save when the silent fishes pass
With eyes like phosphorescent moons.
On painted walls are slimy things,
And strange sea creatures, lithe and cool,
Spawn in the marble swimming pool
And shall, a thousand springs.
For as it is, so it shall be,
Untouched of time till Doom appears,
Too deep for days, too deep for years
In the salt quiet of the sea.
The Will to Live
George Burman Foster
Like the sense for the true, the good, the holy, the esthetic sense is elementary. Man comes to himself as man in all alike. Without the effectuation of his peculiar artistic impulse, man, the born artist, could not find the real consecration and dignity of the human. Indeed, the worth of all human culture depends upon the sense for the beautiful. As religion is not restricted to some fragment of our experience but informs the whole, so culture requires that life shall be beautiful down to the commonplace and homely things of the daily round. The new program, to which this modern insight points, means a rebirth of our entire moral and social life.
Why is it, then, that those who vocationally and constantly worship in the sanctuary of art—the priests in this sanctuary—often so easily and singularly fail in the consecration which the worship of beauty is supposed to supply to the human personality? The lives of those whose calling it is to exhibit and exemplify the beautiful, why are they often so very ugly, so bereft of lovable emotions? The shortcomings of the artist, why do we count among these the pettiest and the basest known to man? To be specific, why do we speak almost proverbially of an artistic vanity, an artistic sensitiveness, an artistic envy or jealousy? If we answered, “Because the shadows of the ‘human all too human’ seem so dark in the golden light of the artistic calling,” that would be true, but it would not be the whole truth. Does not the professional occupation of oneself with art involve a danger to character? To live constantly in the world of the emotions, to fable and fantasy and dream, in all this there is so easily something weak, not to say “effeminate” and sickly, and hence enervating. Of great spirits this is true often enough—how much more of the lesser who sophistically find warrant in the weakness of the great for the greatness of their weakness! For instance, they have heard of “inspiration”—something not under the control of the artist, something that must “come upon him,” but only when the divine hour strikes, as it struck at the pentecostal “outpouring” of the “spirit” upon the early Christians. Hence no care for a thousand things—in both cases—for which other men must care! Hence a standard of life different from that by which other men live! To be outwardly different from others, to set oneself above others, that is to be artistic. Because some great artists are different from other people in moods and manners and morals, it is naïvely concluded that to emulate the latter is to be the former, and right merrily does the emulation go on. It must be a grief to a real artist, this culture of the eccentric head and the more eccentric heart. Therefore we need a man to free us from these eccentricities, a man to lift us above these caricatures because he has himself put them beneath his feet. This man is Friedrich Nietzsche.
The sickness and the soundness of life, both these were in Nietzsche. In his demand for an artistic culture he put his finger upon the wound of present humanity. This demand was accepted, the meaning of the demand was lost sight of. This was the fatality—as if Nietzsche required a new artistic culture only, and not at the same time a new life culture! Beauty the form of life indeed, but strength, will, deed, the content—that was the brave burden of the prophet’s message.
Nietzsche was born into a time that marked the climax of a more than millennial cultus of Death. The old songs of death as bridge of sunset into the eternal day of Bliss, songs of earthly lamentation and heavenly yearning and anticipation, these no longer came from the heart, to be sure; though still sung, the voices of “the faithful” grew ever thinner and thinner; and the songs were a monument of past piety rather than a witness to a present. Like vice, this earth which was once “a monster of so frightful mien” was first endured, then pitied, then embraced—and even wedded by man; its sufferings were healed and its delights enjoyed. The pain, the pleasure of earth, what does it mean? man’s heart again asked as it asked in happy Greece long ago. But as time went by, the human mind was bruised and broken over this question, until it concluded that all we call life is a great illusion. And back and behind this life, with its tumult and fitful fever, there is the “vasty deep” of the infinite nothing. Life is a cheat. And now there is Weltschmerz, Lebenschmerz—simply a naturalistic form of the old ecclesiastical longing for death. It said the same “No!” to life that the old church song said—it, too, valued the day of death higher than the day of birth; it, too, urged that, since life is intrinsically evil, the cure of the evil is to live as little as possible.
Into such a world Friedrich Nietzsche was born, breathed its atmosphere, was himself once drunk upon its drugged drinks. The preacher of this modern yearning for Nirvana,—i.e., not metaphysical non-existence but psychological desirelessness,—was Schopenhauer as well as his disciple von Hartmann. This is the worst possible world, croaked Schopenhauer; No, moaned von Hartmann, it is not the worst possible world, it is the best possible world, but it is worse than none! And once Nietzsche called Schopenhauer his teacher—went forth as an enthusiastic apostle of the message of passive resignation to the inevitable sorry scheme of things, nay, of the message that the world is the work of an anguished god seeking redemption from the infinite misery of existence by the infinite negation of life.
And surely the anguish of Nietzsche fitted him, as no other, to be partner in distress of this anguished god. Surely he, if anyone, could say, To this end was I born and for this purpose came I into the world, to bear witness—to the body of this death. From his mother’s womb was he set apart to suffer. Endowed with a transcendent and super-abundant fulness of spirit, every fresh and forceful impulse of his personality he felt as an indictment of the inexorable pitiless limitations within which his best innermost life was imprisoned. He was a voice crying in the wilderness, not only to men, but to himself. Each new flash of light which illumined his inner eye let him see the graves upon which he was treading, and revealed those who claimed to be alive in the mask of the death to which they had succumbed. In the abounding wealth of youth he felt a mortal sickness getting its grip upon him. As life dragged on, he felt more and more the hell tortures of pain from which he had to wring his work every hour of his existence.
Who would have the effrontery to cast a stone at this man had he flung down his arms into one of those graves, and cried with an old philosopher: This may all be very well for the gods, but not for me! But he did not lay down his arms! Freed from all encumbrances of conscience and debilitating sense of sin which had paralyzed the Christian, and from the Schopenhauer Welt- und Lebenanschauung, he welcomed all that life had to offer and went unhesitatingly toward the universal goal of annihilation with a blithe and unregretting spirit. Entertaining no illusions about indeterminism or free-will or immortality, he rejoiced in his strength, seized with avidity the passing moment, and fell fighting to the last. He spoke his courageous “Yes!” to life, while Schopenhauer, with his money and his mistress, and all the world beside, were crying to him to say “No!” For this we must thank him. In this we find an antidote to present-day tendencies to sink the individual in the multitude, to subordinate men to institutions, and to apotheosize mediocrity. Nietzsche met pain with a power which transformed even death into life, and turned the day of his death even into a festival of the soul. He taught himself and he taught others to believe in that power, which alone is great,—to believe in the Power of the Will! Nietzsche, like Jesus, proclaimed the inestimable worth of the individual man, saw for him vast and glorious possibilities, sought the regeneration of society through the regeneration of the individual. Both committed the fortunes of the cause to which they devoted their lives to individuals and not to masses of men. Both believed that the best was yet to be. Both believed in the inwardness, the self-dependence, and the autonomy of personality. Neither ever side-stepped or flinched.
Today we are suffering from impuissant personality, from cowardice, from weakness of the will. Taming the great wild strong instincts, making them small and weak, choking them, so that man can will nothing or do nothing great and original and special—this is what we call civilization. A comfortable existence, this is the final end of life, according to this civilization. No conflict, no danger, for these menace comfort! Not to know the comfort of a calm, safe existence from which you can look down upon the struggles in a neck-breaking life far below—that is barbarism indeed! And is not this comfort a virtue, buttressed by moral principles at that? So buttressed, one’s slumbers are not disturbed. And may not one add to this virtue of comfort that other cardinal virtue of hatred of all that keeps matters stirred up, all that causes unrest, that causes sleepless nights and stormy days? What the man of civilization hates he calls “bad,” what he loves he calls “good.” Accordingly, as Nietzsche saw and said, the weak are the “good” people, the brave and the strong are the “bad.” Accordingly, also, it is comfortable to be “moral.” All one needs is to attune one’s life to the “common run,” to quarantine against every profound disturbance, to steal by every dangerous abyss of life. And if powers stir in man which do not amiably submit to taming, why, “morality” may be used as a whip to lash these insubordinate stirrings into subjection. And if the living heart crouches into submission under the lash, why, such crouching is called “virtue,” and the daring to resist and escape the lash, this of course is “vice.” In a word, the most will-less is the most virtuous. Thus—such was Nietzsche’s uncanny insight—“moral laws” are devices for disciplining the will into weakness! “Morality” is a poison with which man is inoculated, so that his strength may be palsied. “Morality” is itself death to a man, a will to weakness, a destruction of the will, while life is a will to power, a will to self-affirmation.
Every virtue has its double, easily confounded with it, in reality the exact opposite of it. Take meekness, peaceableness. It is a virtue which the cowardly, the over-cautious, arrogate to themselves—those who duck and bow and bend so as to give no offense, and to conjure up no violent conflict. Yet to be peaceable and meek is in truth supreme strength, having one’s own stormy heart under control, and being absolutely sure of power over the militant spirits of men. Humility is a sign at once of smallness and of greatness. Patience is at once a lazy lassitude and an active steadfast strength. Chastity may be reduced vitality, fear of disease, fear of being found out, lack of opportunity, slavery to respectability, poverty, or it may be temperance and self-control in satisfying sex-needs. And so on. Every virtue may arise because a man is too weak for the opposite. And this virtue which walks the path of virtue because it lacks the courage and the strength not to do so, this complacent, harmless, untempted virtue, men make the universal criterion of all virtue, the codex of their morality. Today still the pharisee, not the publican, the son who stupidly ate his fill in his father’s house, not the “prodigal” who hungered in the far country, heads the scroll of the virtuous. To fear and flee vice, or to “pass a law,” this is the current solution of morality, dinged into us from youth up, not to confront vice, battle with it, conquer and coerce it!
So misunderstood Nietzsche thought. He thought that the morality of “virtuous people” was, in fact, a foe of life, that the virtue of the weak was a grave for the virtue of the strong, and that, consequently the consciences of men must be aroused so that they could see the whole abomination of this, their virtue, of which they were so proud. To bridle and tame men is not to ennoble them; to make men too weak and cowardly for vice is not to make them strong and brave for the good. This anxious and painful slipping and winding and twisting between virtue and vice, this cannot be the fate of the future, the eternal destiny of man; this is to make man the eternal slave of man; to damn him in his innermost and idiomatic life to the lot of the eternal slave. Virtue and vice are values which men mint, stamps which men imprint upon their ever-changing conduct, not eternal values, born of life itself, sanctioned by the law of life itself. As time goes on tables of old values become sins. To obey them, to have the law outside and not inside us, is “to fall from grace” indeed. A law of life cannot be on paper, for paper is not living. Life must be the law of life. Life must interpret and reveal life. And life must be the criterion of life. What makes us alive, and strong, and mighty of will, is on that account good; what brings death and weakness, foulness and feebleness of will is bad. The courage which in the most desperate situation of life, in the most labyrinthan aberration of thought, dares to wring a new strength to live, is good; all pusillanimity, all over-mastery by pain, all collapse under the burden of life, all disappointing desert of the censure, “O ye of little faith, why are ye fearful?”—all this is bad. It will be a new day for man when he feels it wrong and immoral to lament his lot, to whine, but right and moral to earn strength from pain, a will to labor from temptation to die. Not the fear of the moral man to sin, but the fear to be weak, so that one cannot do one’s work in the world—that is to be the fear in the future. The powerful will, nay, the will become power itself, the fixed heart, the keyed and concentrated personality; this means freedom from every slave yoke. And it means that life is no longer at the mercy of capricious and contingent gain and loss, but a King’s Crown conquered in conflict with itself, with man, and with God.
Also sprach Nietzsche-Zarathustra!