Of notes from the slim song.
A Hard Bed
George Burman Foster
Warfare against suffering, this is man’s most natural fight. Suffering is an attack upon man, upon his will to live. On this account, he has a right to protect himself from suffering, to hold suffering far from him.
But the struggle seems futile. The host of sufferings seems illimitable. For each old suffering which we thought we had vanquished, ten new ones come of which we had never dreamt. Indeed, the capacity to suffer grows with the growth of man. The feeling of pain grows as the senses become sharper and finer. The higher a man’s development, the stronger becomes his ability to feel life’s pains. Even if we could exchange all the sufferings of life for pure joy and bliss, this latter life would be suffering still, a surfeit and a search, and I doubt not we would long for an hour of some old anguish again that would redeem us from a pleasure now grown oppressive and intolerable.
Shall we, then, hate life? Shall we say that it were better not to be than to be? We might, did we not find strength and comfort in and with every suffering,—did we not allow every item or event of experience the democratic right to a trial by a jury of its peers and to our trust that it is worth while until it shall prove that it is not,—did we not experience that up from the abyss of every suffering, painful as it seems, a path leads to a summit where all sufferings are only shadows of a blinding flood and fullness of light; that all articulate and fit into the eternal process of an upward-striving life.
There is no question but that this is the workable view of life to present to the heart of man, draining, as one must, pain’s bitter cup for one’s self. But the sufferings one feels for others, sufferings in which one’s love, expressed in sympathy and pity, is complicated—this is another matter, here one may fall into mischievous aberration. There can be no doubt that the pain of our pity for others may be more painful than the pain of our own lives. In the throes of such pity, the woes of our own lives may seem small indeed, and finally fade away. To behold a human being that is deeply dear to us suffer is worse than it would be to suffer in his place. And if the man of moral elevation of soul feels equal in the end to all that brings pain to his own life, all the more defenseless does he feel with regard to the great all-prevailing misery which, in pity, celebrates its triumphal entry into his heart. Love is our noblest human power, and it is love that lets us feel such misery, it is love whose wealth of recognition and experience renders it possible for us to descry sorrow’s abysses, to anticipate them even in advance of the poor sufferer himself.
Now, may love be good, and pity bad? What a problem is here! May we war a two-fold warfare, one against suffering and one against pity? Ought we? War upon pity—would not that be in contradiction to all that our own generation especially calls good and great? Our generation has done its best to develop in the human heart an ever-enlarging capacity for pity—what would it say to a warrior who pitilessly took up arms against pity?
Friedrich Nietzsche was such a warrior, single-handed and alone! And the venomous verbal onslaught upon Nietzsche by those who did not understand him was equalled only by those who did. At first Nietzsche’s own success consisted in supplying his opponents with new weapons against himself. Of all the words which have been used as bludgeons to break the head of this most resolute rebel against our previous moral view of life, Nietzsche’s piercing words concerning pity and the pitiful have most occupied the attention of his enemies. This may not deter us from looking unabashed the great question squarely in the face. In the end, is pity something to be overcome, a disease of the old culture? Does the path of the new culture lead men out and beyond and above pity? This is no longer a Nietzsche question merely. This is a question of the moral life of our time. Perhaps this is the last weightiest question which our time can put to men of dignity and depth of thought.
However, it is only fair to say at the outset that no one has any right to fly into a rage at Nietzsche in particular for summoning men to arms against pity, since, if rage is in order at all, the conventional practices of our previous life furnished therefor occasion enough. Aye, there is an old wide-spread fashion of averting the strain of pity which is so mean and cool that almost anybody could fly into a frenzy over it—the fashion, not of triumphing over pity, but of cowardly flight from pity. Consider the whole conception of life of the so-called favorites of fortune. To what lengths do they go that they may be spared the sight of misfortune, that they may not be agitated by a touch of pity! How they avoid, if at all possible, every place that would remind them that there are want and misery, hunger and sorrow, in the world—as the Parisians did, until Zola, the most calumniated author of the nineteenth century, dragged these things, with their ensuing vices, out into the light of day and made the French people look at them! How furious they are, as the French were at great Zola, at anybody who dares to open their eyes to the sad and harrowing realities of life! Nay, they have invented a special art and religion that shall succeed in sparing them pity; the former to conjure up a make-believe world in which life shall be all sunshine and gladness; the latter to advocate the doctrine that all pain is punishment from God, and that, since God must be just, He will properly parcel out and administer pain and suffering. We do not need to bestir ourselves in behalf of sufferers; that would be a wrong against God; a doubt of the Everlasting Justice; hence all may not feel pity for the wicked man upon whom God visits His wrath and punishment! Thus the “good people” and the just harden their hearts. They have stones which they heave at the poor sinner—especially at a “sinful woman”—but no mercy, no pity, for those who are not as they are, and do not think and feel and act as they do. They grow chesty: “Yes, if others were as good as we are, then it would be as well with them as it is with us!” With such pride they choke all feeling of kinship and connection with others. Where pride grows, no pity can thrive. And at last pity itself becomes a kind of pride, a sorry self-reflection as in a mirror. The most subtle and dangerous way for men to free themselves from the pain of pity, when they cannot stave it off completely, is to make it a thing of pride and praise: “I thank Thee, God, that I am not like the hard-hearted!” Then they revel and riot in their pity, then they rejoice that they are so good-hearted, so tender-hearted, because they can see no suffering without being touched and melted to tears. And the pitiful call this their morality and their virtue. They make a “delicacy” of their pity to set before themselves at the table of life when all of life’s other gratifications and indulgences begin to grow stale and tasteless. The tears of emotion that gush generously forth at the spectacle of suffering humanity—even of frail and faulty humanity—taste so good! Many is the time they have felt the weary weight of this unintelligible world on listening to a sad story or seeing a play, and screwed up melancholy and doleful countenances—maybe pity can be put among the things that can make life, always requiring to be braced up a bit, a trifle more interesting. And so pity is at last honored with a place among the articles of luxury with which they enrich and adorn their lives—their lives, always surprising them with some fresh sign of poverty and patches!