George Burman Foster
In his voluptuous vagabondage Rousseau at length halted at Paris, where he managed to worry through some inconstant years. The thing that saved the day for him was the fragment of a pamphlet that blew across his path in one of his rambles, announcing a prize to be awarded by the Academy of Dijon for the best answer to an extraordinary question. Had the renascence of the arts and sciences ennobled morals? That was a flash of lightning which lit up a murky night and helped this bewildered and lonely wanderer to get his bearings. Thoughts came to him demoniacally which shaped his entire future and won him no small place in the history of humanity.
Answer is “No!” said Rousseau. And his answer was awarded the academic prize.
It seems strange that the history of his times sided with Rousseau’s “No.” Certainly it was the first fiery meteor of the French revolution. It pronounced the first damnatory sentence upon a culture that had already reached the point of collapse. In his own body and soul Rousseau had bitterly experienced the curse of this culture. It was largely responsible for his heart’s abnormal yearning whose glow was consuming him. Instead of ennobling morals this culture had inwardly barbarized man. Then it galvanized and painted the outside of life. And then life became a glittering lie.
Thus Rousseau became prophet in this desert of culture, and called men to repentance. “Back from culture to nature,” was his radical cry; back from what man has made out of himself to what nature meant him to be. Nature gave man free use of his limbs; culture has bound them with all sorts of bindings, until he is stiff, and short-winded, and crippled. According to nature man lives his own life; man is what he seems and seems what he is; according to culture he is cunning, and crafty, and mendacious.
The eighteenth-century man of culture hearkened with attentive soul to the dirge in which one of its noblest sons vented his tortured heart. The melancholy music bruised from this prophet’s heart silenced the wit and ridicule of even a Voltaire, who wanted to know, however, whether “the idea was that man was to go on all fours again.” In a few decades the feet of revolutionary Frenchmen were at the door ready, with few and short prayers, to bear to its last abode that culture whose moral worth even a French Academy had called in question, and for whose moral condemnation had awarded the first prize.
Now it is our turn! What is the good of our culture? Such is the query of a host of people who know nothing thereof save the wounds it has inflicted upon them—a host of people who face our culture with the bitter feeling that they have created it with the sweat of their brows, but have not been permitted to taste its joys. Such, too, is the query of others who, satiated with its beneficence, have been its pioneers,—a John Stuart Mill, political economist, who doubts whether all our cultural progress has mitigated the sufferings of a single human being; a Huxley, naturalist, who finds the present condition of the larger part of humanity so intolerable today that, were no way of improvement to be found, he would welcome the collision of a kindly comet that would smash our petty planet into smithereens.
Also, there is your proletariat. And there is your culture on summits far out of his reach. The more inaccessible it is, shining there with a radiance that never falls upon him, the less does he reflect that all is not gold that glitters. Then there is your philanthropist, foremost in culture of mind and heart, surveying the masses far beneath him, in the slime and grime of life, and doubting at last whether any labor of love can lift men up to where he thinks men ought to be; whether, after all, it can bring joy to men who are sick and sore with the load of life.
Not to be partial, one may magnanimously cite your philistine also—the man of “the golden mean,” the “man of sanity,” as mediocrity has ever brand-marked itself, who “hates ultra.” For the life of him your philistine cannot understand how a “reasonable” man can have any doubt about our culture. Does he not read in his favorite newspaper how gloriously we have progressed? Does he not encore the prodigious achievements of our technique? Has he not heard his crack spellbinder orate on the cultural felicity that follows our flag? Down with the disloyalty of highbrow doubters!
Now it was from an entirely different side, indeed it was from an entirely different standpoint, that Friedrich Nietzsche contemplated modern culture, particularly the national culture of the German Fatherland. What horrified him was not simply the content, but the criterion, of our culture. He sharply scrutinized the ideals which we set ourselves in our culture. He found not simply our achievements but our ideals, ourselves even, so inferior, so vulgar, so contemptible, that he began to doubt whether even the Germans could be recognized as a culture people or not. Hence Nietzsche became the most ruthless iconoclast of our culture. Unlike the majority, unlike the scholars, the philanthropists, the philistines, Nietzsche was not moved by the misery of the masses, by the great social need of our time. He did not regret that the boon of our culture was shared by so few, inasmuch as, in his opinion, this boon was of very doubtful value. He found our life so barbarous, so culture-hostile, that he still missed the first elements of a true culture among us.