The Nietzschean Love of Eternity
George Burman Foster
After all, there have been great wars before this pan-European cataclysm; and, naturally enough, according to the psychological law of the expansion of the emotions, men have transferred their experiences of time to the content of eternity. Thus, amid the abomination of desolation which the Thirty Years’ War brought upon the German Fatherland, one Johannes Rist, a clergyman residing in the neighborhood of Hamburg, sang his symptomatic song:
“O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort!
Du Schwert, das durch die Seele bohrt!
O Anfang sonder Ende!
Ich weiss vor lauter Traurigkeit,
Nicht, wo ich mich hinwende!”
The thunder and blood of war are in it. The horrors of the war long have passed, but not those of the song. Today you may hear the old hymn sung from new hymn-books in German churches. Today still, school children commit it to memory in their schools—with what profound and terrible impression, who can say? All the pains which little children feel so quiveringly with their defenseless and susceptible natures, all these will continue unbrokenly in eternity. On this bank and shoal of time, children easily and happily forget the tribulations of a bygone hour—in eternity, never, never again! But might there not be also an eternity of childish play and joy? Even so, that could not tip the scale in view of the possibility of a comfortless and cruel eternity; especially since the possibility becomes a probability, and the probability a certainty, owing to the fact that the children are taught to consider themselves as lost and damned sinners—in Adam’s fall they sinned all! Consequently the remote hope of bliss in “Jerusalem the golden with milk and honey blest” could not assuage the grief nor silence the terror and torture that filled the child mind. “Would that there were no eternity!”—often this must have been the secret thought of German children, and not of these alone.
This is the eternity of fear.
From the nursery and school to the world of thought! From gruesome pictures and poetry of the enigma of eternity to the solution in systems of the philosophers and theologians. From Rist of the Thirty Years’ War to Spinoza with imperturbable philosophic calm—such was the great change through which many a German child passed—Spinoza who won his deepest insight into life by viewing all things sub specie aeternitatis. Or from Rist to Schleiermacher, who unveiled the august mystery of humanness as eternity in the heart—as eternity internal, dynamic, living, present, not external, mechanical, fixed, and future. It was the great transition from orthodoxy to romanticism.
Or else from all these men to Friedrich Nietzsche, him that was the godless one, who, in the end of the ages, also sang a song, a new song, of eternity. He both celebrated eternity in song and made no problem of it. He lived it and loved it as his first and truest love—plighted his soul’s troth in unwavering loyalty: “Denn ich liebe dich, o Ewigkeit!” From dull and gloomy dreams and anxious fears did this eternity awaken him, from mortal ills did it redeem his life. Nietzsche had wistfully peered into the world’s enigmatic darkness, his seeking and skeptical soul had chafed over the riddles and contradictions of life—no meaning, he cried, in this senseless play of life and death, truth and error; and only illusion and folly in all that men called joy and sorrow. There came to him, then, revelation of a new, of an eternal life. The present, with all the kaleidoscopic changes of life’s little day, makes ready its own recurrence, each part of time being but a ring linked with the next, the whole becoming the ring of eternity, the true marriage ring of humanity—the seal and stay of an eternal bond between man and Ever-creative, Ever-reincarnating Life!
Ich liebe dich, o Ewigkeit. Perfect love casts out fear. This is the eternity of love. The godless one would lead the German heart, and all hearts, from “Donnerworte” and “Schwerte,” from the fear of eternity to the love of eternity.
That is what Nietzsche would do. But is such an undertaking worth while in a day like ours? What does man care about eternity—his life so swift and short that he does not know on one day what he did or thought or wanted the day before? His treasures in time, will not his heart be there also, seeking its right and content there? Money ruling the world, time ruling money, why talk of eternity at all? A jolly hour, a sprig of mirth plucked by the way, is not that what the man of modern culture longs for, is it not enough to satisfy such longing as his? The earth overpopulated as it is with Augenblicksmenschen, as Nietzsche would say, and not with Ewigkeitsmenschen, why recall the love and hope of a long lost past?
Such queries may give us pause, but they may not stampede us. We may not forget that Professor Münsterberg, of Harvard, has written a great book bearing the impressive title, The Eternal Values. Nor may we be blind to the evidence that the thought so clearly and singularly espoused by the bearers of the better ideals of our new time is that of the imminent and constant eternity in the human heart, as unfolded by Spinoza and Schleiermacher and Nietzsche. Indeed, the question as to what values are eternal values, this eternity question, is central in our modern culture. Very superficial indeed would be our evaluation of modern life, most un-understood indeed would be the riddle of the soul of this life, did we ignore the ever clearer, ever mightier longing for eternity in this soul’s abyss, and the unification of all deeper spirits upon the high task of giving an eternal content to our culture.
By taking some illustrations, one can see the need to supply the latter profound view to the former superficial judgment, if one is to do justice to the new movements of life in the modern world.
There is your modern poet. At first sight he seems to lack the illumination of that eternal light which never was on land or sea. You see the scorching sun beating upon the lone pilgrim as he plods through the burning sand to a goalless goal. You see faded, pale shadows. You do not meet with an idea that makes you feel that the poet yearns to interpret some eternal thought to this life of ours. Instead, life speaks only of itself and from itself. This is an abomination in the eyes of those who call themselves Ewigkeitsmenschen. They call it naturalistic, materialistic art. They upbraid an era in which a poet may dare to dissociate his poetry from the eternal ideal. Then you look again, you read more carefully, and you see the whole matter differently. The eternity that men claimed for their thought is indeed gone. But eternity itself, the eternity of life, that is not gone, that abides. This realistic man of modern poetry, the more really he is apprehended, stands before us as the embodiment of a necessity, a necessity that transcends the individual, yet lives and weaves in him, a necessity that enunciates the law of life in the destiny of the individual—power of darkness or dawn of a new day! But necessity, law of life, this is but another name for eternity.
And there again is your modern painter. He, too, presents us with a bit, often a tiny bit, of reality, of nature. A rotten trunk of some old tree; a dilapidated hut on a ledge; some God-forsaken nook of earth, lost and forgotten of man; a bent and broken man with his hoe; some poor wretch with pistol against his skull; some traveller bleeding unbandaged by the roadside—there they all are in the galleries of our modern realism. But look again, and you will see that the keen observant eye of your artist serves an artist’s heart, seeks and finds eternity, and directs our slower vision to the eternal mystery he has found, the most inspiring of all mysteries—viz., greatness in the least and lowest, glory and beauty in the offensive and repellant, invaluable human worth and nobility in the depraved and downtrodden!
There also is your man of science as he moves out along new paths. Storming the sky, unlocking all the eternities so long sought for behind the world, what does the scientist’s supreme power and consecration consist in but his steadfast and strenuous search for eternity? He not only seeks, he finds. He finds eternal life and eternal love in the daintiest fern, in the tiniest lichen. In the very dust beneath our feet he descries what was there before men were at all. He points us to men as they emerge from the unplumbed æonian abyss, bearing in their bodies still visible and tangible traces of an eternal life. He reveals an eternal content of being in all that lives and weaves and moves.
Truly, if there is no sign of an eternity in which we live, there is no sign of an eternity at all. But if you were to bring to its simplest and truest expression all that is great and overmastering in the life of the human spirit today, you would then have once again the exultant Zarathustra song: “Ich liebe dich, o Ewigkeit!” All that lends true worth to the life that now is and is to be, is contained in this song. A present eternity we seek as the one thing needful. What we love must be near us, we must feel it and grasp it. Be it never so remote, it is the magic of love to bring the remote nigh our hearts, or, better still, to conquer space and time, so that there is no near and no far, only a life and love that is eternal!
To create such Ewigkeitsmenschen is the great goal of the new life, the prophecy of a new culture. For this new culture we need men who feel something in their own being that uplifts them above all the experience of the present, much as they may seem imprisoned therein, men who dominate life in a royal fashion, men who in confident freedom do not mind the storms which would hurl them from their path. We need men who survey the great connections of the world from peak to peak and overbridge them with their own souls, men who release destiny from its isolation and articulate it in the eternal cycle of human life, men whose own being contains all life according to its eternal substance, uttering their “yea and amen” to all that is called life as they blissfully surrender to the beauty of existence. This is the great apocalypse, life’s cryptic mystery-manual, whose seven seals the poet-prophet of this new culture, Friedrich Nietzsche, has broken.
What is yet to be? What will a day, a year, bring forth? If the eye is far-seeing and far-seeking, what will the next century bring forth? The darkness tenting like thick clouds upon the mountains of the future mystifies, and the days, the times, the years, the centuries, coerce man under the burden of all their darknesses until he is a-weary even before he has taken up his pilgrimage into the untrodden. Then there flashes from the love of eternity a clear light which kindles the light of the future: we ourselves are this light! Our existence is the cloud hanging heavily over the hills, cloud with prophetic and positive light, from which redeeming beams shall break.
Behind us lies the whole long grim past, a huge grave, with countless gravestones—the silent city of the dead which holds all that has been ever dear to the heart, all youth with their glad faces and forms, all glances of love, all divine moments. And all the dead compel all the living to conflict that the living may be controlled by life and not by death. From their graves the dead direct their deadliest shafts at the heart, at the living, to drag them down into the embrace of death. But something stirs in man that cannot be wounded, cannot be buried—man’s will. The will bursts all tombs hewn from rocks, demolishes all graves, creates resurrections out of them, smashes churches and abbeys that heaven’s pure eye may gaze through their rent roofs—the will building and bearing eternities! And who, through love of eternity, controls future and past, finds the earth quivering with new creative words, is himself such a word, even binds good and evil together, making the evilest worthy of being the sauce of life.
Ewigkeitsmensch!—the wind from the unexplored swells his sail, seafarer’s gale roaring in from the boundless. When time and space vanish from sight, vanish coasts also, the last fetters drop away: the body feels its weight and burden is past! How shall we go about rescuing ourselves from this torture and casting off this oppression?
In a strange fanatical vision, Nietzsche shows how he became an eternity-preacher, an eternity-sculptor. The vision is more novel than that of the Ascension which biblical legends narrate. The disciples of Jesus gaze upon their Master mounting heavenward into the clouds, and they hear strange words of the Christ coming down from heaven again to abide with them all the days till the end of the world. Nietzsche does not speak of the second advent of the Christ, of a recurrence of a single item of being, but of an eternal recurrence of all things, of all men, all moments and happenings of all life! Eternal return—to live life so that we would live each and all of it over again—to live it all so that it would be worth being not once but once again forever and forever—to be joint creator of a cosmos in which what is shall be fit—to be once yet again everlastingly—that is our, and Being’s, final flawless test, passing which, no Great White Throne may fill us with dismay! There is the heart’s harrowing cry: Could I but begin and live it—all over again, how different I would do! Would we like to do all that we have done over again? do them again eternally? Would we like to say and hear all the senseless prattle over again forever? Horrible thought! It were well to live and speak so that our existence can stand the fiery test of a Nietzschean eternity—live now in a way that it would be worth while to live again. It were indeed well to fill each fleeting moment of time with what is worthy to be the content of eternity. Eternity the criterion of time—that is really a great thought. To be sure, there is no eternal recurrence, and it is not clear that Nietzsche meant to say that there was. Faith in the eternal recurrence of all things, Nietzsche means this,—so at all events it seems to me,—to be a mirror in which we may recognize the true full worth of our life, a life in which there is nothing to be forgotten, nothing to be regretted, nothing done to be undone, because all is freed from the limitations of space and time and from external contingencies, and stands there in its great eternal necessity, because eternal, good, and godly even, in this necessity itself. Then we would not only live our life over again precisely as we lived it, we would live it in the light of the eternity again, ever again. No error, and folly would we then wish out of our life, because in this love of eternity it is precisely from error and folly that the truth grows which lights our faith. No weakness, no stumbling and falling, would we wish out of our life, because in the eternal illumination, power grows from all these experiences which enables us to mount above them, and gives us the victory in every bitter battle of life. No, our life is not lived from the right point of view, until we can sing it out in the song whose name is—Recurrence! We do not know the worth of the honor until we can dedicate to it that song whose meaning is: “In alle Ewigkeit!”
Ye say that a good cause will even sanctify war! I tell you, it is the good war that sanctifies every cause!—Nietzsche.
The Restaurant Violin
George Soule
(Another picture of our violinist)
A brook
Which murmured me to high afternoon fields,
Where came a shower,
And after that, the long, straight call of the low sun
To the green-gold and winking purple of every leaf
And the long shadows between the hills.
And every leaf was glad
And the earth was comforted,
Breathing up freshly,
And the hills were full of joy,
And the clouds remained in the west
In ecstasy of color because of the sun.
Out of hidden trees
A wood-thrush sang.
And then I heard the restaurant—
Crashing of spoons on trays,
The dip, dip, dip, of the big rotary fans,
The chink of the cash-register, the clatter of money into the tray,
And people talking loudly, with mirthless laughter,
And munching, munching, munching.
Over it mocked the violin—
The rain fell and the sun called,
And there returned unto the violin,
And entered with glory into the violin
Final loneliness.
Then the pianist selected something from a musical comedy.
Editorials
Our Third New Poet
Maxwell Bodenheim was born in Natchez, Mississippi, twenty-two years ago, was educated in the Memphis, Tennessee, schools, served three years in the U. S. regular army, and is at present studying law and art in Chicago. He has written poetry for six years without having had a single poem accepted—in fact, he has had exactly three hundred and seventeen rejection slips from the astute editors of American magazines. He addresses to them the following poem:
The Poet Speaks To Those Who Scorn Him
I have taken tons of carbon in my hand,
Shriveled them, with a thought, to a small diamond:
And tried to sell it to men who call it glass.
It was glass in a sense—
Glass which with terrible exactness,
Showed them big, hideous souls
Dwarfed by the splendor of its immense clarity,
Like forests pressed to specks by the height of a mountain.
His first acceptance came from Miss Harriet Monroe, who prints five of his poems in the August issue of Poetry. “My creed,” says Mr. Bodenheim “(if I can be said to have one), is this: Most of the things which men call beautiful are ugly to me, and some of the things they call ugly are beautiful. Men and deeds are subjects for prose, not poetry. I am not concerned with life, but with that which lies behind life. I am an intense admirer of Ezra Pound’s,” he always adds; “I worship him.”
Sade Iverson, Unknown
We wish the mysterious poet who sent us The Milliner—which we liked profoundly and printed in our last issue—would come in to see us. The poem arrived one day in April with a modest little note: “Something about your magazine—perhaps the essential actuality of it—has moved me to make ‘the simple confession’ which I enclose. Print it if it is good enough; throw it in the waste basket if it is not.” But though we have tried various investigations we have not been able to find out who this remarkable Sade Iverson is. She was the first person to send us a congratulatory letter about The Little Review. In it she warned us that restraint is better than expression; but The Milliner will stand as a stronger refutation of that advice than anything we can say. We want very much to know Sade Iverson. After reading her poem Mr. Bodenheim wrote the following:
To Sade Iverson
I wonder if you scooped out your entire melted soul
With shaking hands, and spilled it into this
Slim-necked but bulging-bodied flagon—
So slim-necked that my sticking lips
Must fight for wonderful drops.
“Blast”
The typical gamin, the street-urchin with his tongue in his cheek, crying in an infinitely wise childish treble that the world is an exciting place after all, and that even if you are so burned out that you can’t taste your gin straight any more you can still put pepper in it,—this street-urchin has at last invaded the quarterlies. We have known him already in the dailies, the weeklies, the monthlies, the bound volume; but up to now the quarterlies have seemed dignified and safe. But the last bulwark of conservatism has fallen; the march of progress is unchecked!
Blast is the name of the new magazine, published in London by John Lane. Let us take it as it comes. The cover—after you have seen the cover you know all—is of a peculiar brilliancy, something between magenta and lavender, about the color of an acute sick-headache. Running slantingly across both the front and the back is the single word BLAST in solid black-faced type three inches high. That is all, but it is enough.
Inside there is much food for thought. At least one feels sure there must be much food for thought, if only one could come near enough to understanding it to think about it.
First there are twelve pages of what seem to be the rare-bit dream of a type-setter, but which on closer inspection prove to be a table of curses, much like the old table which has now been cut from the Anglican prayer-book. “BLAST” they say “CURSE! DAMN”—“England, France, Humor, Sport, years 1837 to 1900, Rotten Menagerie, castor-oil.” “CURSE” also “those who will hang over this manifesto with SILLY CANINES exposed.” After these twelve pages come half the number of blessings, again from the prayer-book. “BLESS” they say “England, all ports, the Hairdresser, Humor, France, and castor-oil.”
Then comes the Manifesto. No woman of the olden times found without a shift could be more shamed than a new cult today found without a Manifesto. This one begins: “Beyond action and reaction we would establish ourselves.” It proceeds with jaunty violence to settle the artistic problems of the world. Nonetheless there is much wisdom in the Manifesto. But you must read it for yourselves to understand it. This announcement is signed with eleven names, of which the best-known in this country are probably Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis (the editor), Richard Aldington, and Gaudier Brzeska.
A group of poems by Ezra Pound follows. After the mental indigestion of the first few pages we cannot be too grateful to Mr. Pound for putting English words together in such a manner that they at least make sentences. More than that, they make in places excellent satire. Then follows a long prose play (at least we should guess it to be prose) by Wyndham Lewis, called The Enemy of the Stars. Seven-tenths of it consists of stage directions. Here is a sample:
Fungi of sullen violet thoughts, investing primitive vegetation. Groping hands strummed Byzantine organ of his mind, producing monotonous black fugue.
The plot unfortunately escaped our perusal, hiding itself in verbiage. But undoubtedly there is one.
The number also contains the beginning of a serial story by Richard Aldington, a remarkably vivid short story by Rebecca West called The Indissolubility of Matrimony, and Vortices by the editor. The whole is copiously sown with Cubist drawings which must be seen to be appreciated.
So the quarterly street-urchin makes his bow on the literary stage. How much of his singular make-up will prove to be juvenile spleen and how much genuine integrity only time can tell. In the meanwhile his tongue is in his cheek.—E. T.
The Stigma of Knowing It All
One of the most exasperating things that can happen to a thinking person is to be told this: “You would be much more forceful if you weren’t so sure you knew it all.” How much time we all waste in vague, unthoughtful generalizations of this sort! The only person who really thinks he “knows it all” is that misguided soul who is always asking for advice, always giving advice, and eternally ignoring both that which he gives and which he receives. He is as muddled as a clear pool that has been stirred up with a stick; but the ripples convince him that the stirring-up has touched many shores. The person to whom the stigma of “knowing it all” is most often attached is he who believes that he knows something about himself and very little about anybody else. He is that person who takes care of his own problems with a certain ardor, with a sense of keen clearness, like the shining of a star through his deep, unmuddled pool. He has realized Arnold’s Self-Dependence. But the muddled ones can never forgive him for that joy with which the stars perform their shining; nor can they ever understand the stupor of helplessness which descends upon him when he is asked to direct some one else’s shining. Therefore, they argue, he is self-sufficient; and the adjective is a curse. Some one has said, quite untruly, that people never know the important things about themselves. But the only thing in the world a man can really know is himself; and it is his chief business to push self-knowledge beyond its obvious boundaries to those reaches where even change becomes a comprehended element. The gist of the whole matter is this: People who know themselves are the only ones with whom we are wholly protected from that stupid and offensive practice of dictatorship; also, they are the only ones capable of receiving counsel with intelligence.