The Constructive Reasoner
(A Non-Mythical Allegory)
George Soule
He was born in the glacial age. They originally called him something else, but as soon as he was old enough to talk he lisped the tertiary dialect for “constructive reasoner”—when they paid any attention to him. Later he was recognized by his characteristic expression, “Yes, but—”. When he was ten years old he watched his father, with much skill and heroism, slaying a musk ox. “Why did you kill him?” he asked. “To eat,” was the reply. “Yes,” replied the prodigy, “but what will you put in his place?” The misguided parent glared at his son without replying, and passed him a second joint, which was consumed with relish.
The tragedy of his early life was to watch the glaciers slowly leveling mountains and laying up vast wastes of terminal moraine without conscious purpose. All this destruction weighed on his soul.
He was ever an observer. As time went on, his intellect grew more ponderous. He saw mankind slay the dinosaurs, rob the earth of its minerals, hew down vast trees, and agitate the earth with rude plows. Agitators were particularly distasteful to him. He stood aloof from these movements, because he did not believe in destruction. And when men finally set sail on the seas, he was moved to poetic rancor. “You are destroying the mystery of the ocean” he cried. But he built himself a fine house from the products of their commerce.
He was in Rome when the Goths swept down over Italy and sacked it. “What will you give us instead?” he asked their leader. The Northerner frankly did not know. “You have no right to sweep away something that has been established so long unless you can put in its place something better,” he complained. The great Goth laughed and grabbed another handful of jewels.
Religions seemed to him peculiarly sacred. With great satisfaction he watched the burning of the early Christian agitators, who were attempting to tear in pieces the comfortable old hierarchy of Jove. “What is this utopian theory of theirs?” he asked, derisively. “It won’t work. You can’t change human nature in a day. When they give us a program I can’t pick flaws in, I will listen to them.” Later he was particularly incensed at Martin Luther and remonstrated with him for undermining so many persons’ simple faith without giving them something that would exactly fill its place.
In the modern world he found a very comfortable niche. A city of tradesmen offered him the post of chief prophet. Not that they bothered much about his great principle, but he always did his best to stave off the destructive elements of society, who interfered with business. He advised people to be comfortable and quiet. He deplored violence of any kind. Sane progress was all very well, but he always demanded progress of visionaries and theorists, and he always pointed out tremendous flaws in their programs. He opposed bitterly anything in the nature of tariff reform or anti-trust laws. Such things destroyed business confidence, and were not the business men the great constructive element in society? To women who wanted the vote, he said “Woman’s place is in the home. If you had your way, you would destroy the family.” He supported practical men for office.
One day he came upon a workman wrecking an old building. The sight filled him with pain. He went up to the man and asked him if he were sure that the new building would be better than the old, if in fact it would stand at all? To his great surprise the workman paid no attention to him. Again the constructive reasoner put the question; he even touched the workman on the shoulder. But it was as if the questioner did not exist. He was angry and chagrined. Then it dawned on him that he was dead. Unconsciously he had become a ghost.
Jehovah appointed a private judgment day for him. The dead hero came before the throne. “Who are you?” asked the ruler of the universe. “I am the constructive reasoner,” he replied proudly. “What have you constructed?” was the next question. For the first time since his birth, the mortal was at a loss.
“Never mind,” said Jehovah, “you have earned Heaven, for there all is peace and perfection; there no one tears down or builds up.” And so Jehovah put him into a place which was labeled “Heaven,” and locked the gate on the outside.
For a while the saved soul sat on a golden throne and was contented. But soon he began to be a little bored. He went to an older inhabitant and asked him what one does in Heaven. “Nothing,” was the answer. “The place is populated with souls who have done nothing but try to get here, and now they must rest from their labors. What can there be to do, in a place that is perfect?”
For a moment the new arrival suspected for the first time that all these years he had been mistaken. Would it not be better to be building something, even if one had to destroy something else as a preliminary? But he layed the suspicion aside as unworthy of him. “Before I can logically object to Heaven,” he thought, “I must propose something better. And of course, that is impossible.” So he sat down again, to await Eternity.
G. S.
Patriotism, sir, is the last resort of scoundrels.—Dr. Johnson.
The Crucified Dionysus
Alexander S. Kaun
Achad Ha’am, in his admirable essay, Priest and Prophet, differentiates between the two ways of serving an Idea. The Prophet is essentially one-sided; a certain idea fills his whole being, masters his every feeling and sensation, engrosses his whole attention. His gaze is fixed always on what ought to be in accordance with his own convictions; never on what can be consistently with the general condition of things outside himself. He is a primal force. The Priest also fosters the Idea, and desires to perpetuate it; but he is not of the race of giants. Instead of clinging to the narrowness of the Prophet, and demanding of reality what it cannot give, he broadens his outlook, and takes a wider view of the relation between his Idea and the facts of life. Not what ought to be, but what can be, is what he seeks. The Idea of the Priest is not a primal force; it is an accidental complex of various forces, among which there is no essential connection. Their temporary union is due simply to the fact that they have happened to come into conflict in actual life, and have been compelled to compromise and join hands. The Priest sooner or later becomes a dominant force, an interpreter, a teacher; the Prophet remains all his life “a man of strife and a man of contention to the whole earth,” and is cried after, “The Prophet is a fool, the spiritual man is mad.” Throughout the ages we have seen the repetition of this phenomenon: from Jeremiah to Nietzsche, from Paul to Brandes. The narrow-minded, hapless giants have been sowing seed for future generations; the broad-minded interpreters have been cultivating the soil for their contemporaries.
Friedrich Nietzsche, by George Brandes, recently published by the Macmillan company, adds little new to the vast interpretative literature on the creator of Zarathustra. The book contains a moderate essay on Aristocratic Radicalism, written in 1889, a necrolog, a brief note on Ecce Homo, and a few letters interchanged between the philosopher and the critic. In the last twenty-five years life and literature (perhaps I ought to say art in general) have been so profoundly influenced by Nietzschean views that the source of those views has ceased to be discernable. From Gorky’s Bosyaki and the types of D’Annunzio down to the Manifestoes of the Futurists, the aphorisms and paradoxes of Nietzsche have been sounded and resounded on various scales, and the slogan of Transvaluation of Values has been echoed and re-echoed from the college platform, from the pulpit, from the soap-box, from the stage, even from the cabaret and music-halls (the Ueberbrettl’ movement in central Europe). Perhaps the American public has been too “busy” to be touched by that hurricane, so that it was left to Dr. Foster to appear in our day and proclaim with prophetic fervor and pathos the “new” Decalogue; but then our neophytes will hardly find adequate Dr. Brandes’ Essay written in 1889, when Nietzsche was practically unknown.
Yet this belated book in its somewhat belated English translation contains an invaluable feature—the correspondence between Nietzsche and Brandes. “The letters he sent me in that last year of his conscious life” says the famous critic, “appear to me to be of no little psychological and biographical interest.” Indeed so, and what is more, they reveal a bit of the reserved personality of Brandes and provoke the reader to venture a comparison between the correspondents.
From the very first we mark the distinct characteristics of the Priest and the Prophet. The careful, correct, and clear interpreter, and the bewildering, cascading revaluator of life, or, to use Ben-Zakkay’s metaphor, the plastered well that does not lose a drop, and the powerful spring ever shooting forth new streams; the earnest professor offering practical suggestions, telling of the book-binder, of the copyright business, and of the big audiences at his lectures, and the seething, “three parts blind” sufferer who swings his imagination on revolutionizing Europe, bringing “the whole world into convulsions.” The difference in the style of writing is also characteristic. As against Brandes’ “free and graceful French way in which he handles the language,” Nietzsche thus explains his “difficult position.”
On the scale of my experiences and circumstances, the predominance is given to the rarer, remoter, more attenuated tones as against the normal, medial ones. Besides (as an old musician, which is what I really am), I have an ear for quarter-tones. Finally—and this probably does more to make my books obscure—there is in me a distrust of dialectics, even of reasons. What a person already holds “true,” or has not yet acknowledged as true, seems to me to depend mainly on his courage, on the relative strength of his courage (I seldom have the courage for what I really know).
To which Brandes comments with his usual clarity.
... You write more for yourself, think more of yourself in writing, than for the general public; whereas most non-German writers have been obliged to force themselves into a certain discipline of style, which no doubt makes the latter clearer and more plastic, but necessarily deprives it of all profundity and compels the writer to keep to himself his most intimate and best individuality, the anonymous in him. I have thus been horrified at times to see how little of my inmost self is more than hinted at in my writings.
The earnest tone of Brandes’ letters is at times counteracted by a humorous frolic on the part of his correspondent. I even suspect an ironical smile curving around the Polish mustache, when, for instance, Nietzsche confesses his “admiration for the tolerance of your judgment, as much as for the moderation of your sentences.” Or as when Brandes confesses:
At the risk of exciting your wrath ... Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde made an indelible impression on me. I once heard this opera in Berlin, in a despondent, altogether shattered state of mind, and I felt every note. I do not know whether the impression was so deep because I was so ill.
Nietzsche mischievously retorts:
As to the effect of Tristan, I, too, could tell strange tales. A regular dose of mental anguish seems to me a splendid tonic before a Wagnerian repast. The Reichsgerichtsrath, Dr. Wiener, of Leipzig, gave me to understand that a Carlsbad cure was also a good thing....
Only once irony passes into impatient sarcasm. Nietzsche expresses his regret at not knowing either Swedish or Danish. Yet Brandes continuously tantalizes him with such exclamations as, “What a pity that so learned a philologist as you should not understand Danish.” Back comes a flash: “Ah, how industrious you are! And idiot that I am, not to understand Danish!”
I am tempted to bring another illustration of the profound earnestness of the Priest as against the plausible light-mindedness of the Prophet.
Brandes writes:
I am delighted with the aphorism on the hazard of marriage. But why do you not dig deeper here? You speak somewhere with a certain reverence of marriage, which by implying an emotional ideal has idealized emotion—here, however, you are more blunt and forcible. Why not for once say the full truth about it? I am of opinion that the institution of marriage, which may have been very useful in taming brutes, causes more misery to mankind than even the church has done. Church, monarchy, marriage, property, these are to my mind four old venerable institutions which mankind will have to reform from the foundations in order to be able to breathe freely. And of these marriage alone kills the individuality, paralyzes liberty and is the embodiment of a paradox. But the shocking thing about it is that humanity is still too coarse to be able to shake it off. The most emancipated writers, so called, still speak of marriage with a devout and virtuous air which maddens me. And they gain their point, since it is impossible to say what one could put in its place for the mob. There is nothing else to be done but slowly to transform opinion. What do you think about it?
And this is what Nietzsche thinks about it:
I feel for you in the North, now so wintry and gloomy; how does one manage to keep one’s soul erect there? I admire almost every man who does not lose faith in himself under a cloudy sky, to say nothing of his faith in “humanity,” in “marriage,” in “property,” in the “State”.... In Petersburg I should be a nihilist: here I believe, as a plant believes, in the sun. The sun of Nice—you cannot call that a prejudice. We have had it at the expense of all the rest of Europe. God, with the cynicism peculiar to Him, lets it shine upon us idlers, “philosophers,” and sharpers more brightly than upon the far worthier military heroes of the “Fatherland.”
Think of the Lebensfreude that sparkles from these lines written by a man who a few months later had to be shut out from the world, who had suffered extremely painful and persistent headaches,—“hundred days of torment in the year”! It was his keen sense that “a sick man had no right to pessimism,” it was his extravagant love of life that led him to set for chorus and orchestra the Hymn to Life written by Lou von Salomé, from which we read an extract in the book of Brandes:
So truly loves a friend his friend
As I love thee, O Life in mystery hidden!
If joy or grief to me thou send;
If loud I laugh or else to weep am bidden,
Yet love I thee with all thy changeful faces;
And shouldst thou doom me to depart,
So would I tear myself from thy embraces,
As comrade from a comrade’s heart.
And in conclusion:
And if thou hast now left no bliss to crown me,
Lead on! thou hast thy sorrow still!
George Brandes “discovered” Nietzsche in the last year of his conscious life, after he had written his greatest works, unrecognized, repulsed by his few former friends, suffering in solitude, yet with superhuman enthusiasm casting new worlds, slaughtering old gods, fighting mediocrity. His letters of that year reveal the final act of the greatest of world-tragedies—the Nietzsche-Tragedy; they grant us a glimpse into the torn soul of the joyous martyr.
I lived for years in extreme proximity of death. This was my great good fortune. I fought myself, I outlived myself....
... After all, my illness has been of the greatest use to me: it has released me, it has restored to me the courage to be myself.... And, indeed, in virtue of my instincts, I am a brave animal, a military one even.... Am I a philosopher, do you ask?—But what does that matter!...
How he created his greatest work, Zarathustra:
Each part in about ten days. Perfect state of “inspiration.” All conceived in the course of rapid walks: absolute certainty, as though each sentence were shouted to one. While writing the book, the greatest physical elasticity and sense of power.
In his first letter to Brandes, Nietzsche wrote:
How far this mode of thought has carried me already, how far it will carry me yet—I am almost afraid to imagine. But there are certain paths which do not allow one to go backward and so I go forward, because I must.
And the path led him to the inevitable end. His mind reached the summit of the heights and burst into bleeding fragments over the yet not comprehending world. In the last letter but one we see “signs of powerful exaltation,” as Brandes chooses to name the obvious symptoms of megalomania. January 4, 1889, is the date of an unstamped, unaddressed letter written on a piece of paper ruled in pencil:
To the friend Georg—When once you had discovered me, it was easy enough to find me: the difficulty now is to get rid of me....
—The Crucified.
In reading the letters of Nietzsche we follow the doomed one with profound pain and awe unto his Golgotha; we witness the dire trials of his spirit and body, we see the last flashes of Zarathustra’s sun, then—darkness. Götter-dämmerung. Self-crucified Dionysus.
Nietzsche was by no means a child of his age. As a prophet, he hurled his seeds far into the future, over the heads of many generations. Mankind is still vegetating on the bottom of the Valley unable to reach the Heights where Zarathustra is alone with himself, bathing in an abyss of light. They who have exchanged the Prophet’s pearls on up-to-date glittering coins, are counterfeiters; they who presumptuously wrap themselves in the crimson mantle of the Crucified Dionysus, as his faithful followers, are impostors: the time for the Superman has not come yet. Let us bear in mind these burning words from the farewell message, Ecce Homo:
Nun heiße ich euch, mich verlieren und euch finden; und erst, wenn ihr mich Alle verleugnet habt, will ich euch wiederkehren.
Soon, I believe, we shall once more receive a lively impression that art cannot rest content with ideas and ideals for the average mediocrity, any more than with remnants of the old catechisms; but that great art demands intellects that stand on a level with the most individual personalities of contemporary thought, in exceptionality, in independence, in defiance, and in artistic self-supremacy.—George Brandes.
Poems
Amy Lowell