Then if all duties which are based on right and law, shall cease to be considered as something special, something great, if their fulfilment shall be no longer marveled at as a feat of virtue, because these duties shall have become self-evident and natural, then shall man be illumined by new and greater duties which shall make him a debtor to life, then shall he call his wealth and the fulness of his being his debt which he can pay only in constant creation for man, in ceaseless giving to man! “Therefore, nobler souls will it: they will to have nothing gratis, least of all life! Whoever is of the Pöbel wills to live gratis, but we others to whom life gave itself—we ever meditate as to what we can best give in return and, verily, that is a noble saying which says: what life promises us, that will we keep for life!” In simpler language: Not to merit a reward, heavenly or earthly, will we give, will we assemble in ourselves the highest gifts, to lay them down as offerings upon the altars of men, but we will give to return thanks for all that we have undeservedly received. Bickering and calculating as to whether we have had our just dues, haggling over hopes which have not done what they promised, we will have none of this, but thanks, thanks, that as men we have gained some material from the saddest life, created joys out of its pains, wealth and worth out of its weakness and loss. This, this, in Nietzsche’s immortal words, is eine Umwertung der Werte, a transvaluation of values in the moral life, from which a new moral culture can issue. In our labors we are ever shadowed by the still, lurking thought of returns and rewards, we calculate, and calculate ever in our own favor, that somewhere life has left us in the lurch. Could we but once reverse this matter: It is not life that is obligated and indebted to us—we are obligated and indebted to life! In the former way of counting we always come out with a deficit, with a poverty: in the later, with a balance, with a wealth: we still have something for which we gave nothing, did nothing, with which we have done no good!
How would it do to put such thankfulness to the test? When the heart is shaken with sorrow’s power—it is life’s gift to feel such shaking, in such shaking love can feel the storm raging. Even such gift you would not have gratis. You would make some return—the bravery with which you settle for it. You come to know despondency, a new deed, and your thanks therefor is that you have been permitted to overcome a paralysis of your energy. If, with freer vision and with broader heart, your eye has become alert and keen for human folly and lamentation, and these attack you as cowardice and disgust of life, then you take this as a gift that you will not have gratis, you will give something as counter-gift and thanks: a more energetic will, that will go to the bottom of folly and grief, with the fineness of feeling which has been bestowed upon you—you will dig deeper, search out more earnestly the genuine values of life, so that your cowardice and your ennui at life may become a new strength and a new joy for life. If you feel your hands tied, if the world seems a prison at whose bars you lunge, but whose rods you cannot break, if then a horrible feebleness befalls you, and your best will confesses that you are too weak,—then take this, too, as a gift for which you learn to give thanks, for even the restriction of your power creates a new freedom, the pressure of the impossible ceases with your learning, thus, the possible, the necessary, of your life. Poor? You may be rich, immeasurably rich, not for yourself indeed, but for others, that you may communicate to them, give to them and yet never give out! Be debtor of life, that in your poverty you may make many rich. Be debtor of love, that you may never be able to pay your great eternal debt. Confessing and obligating yourself to such debt, your life gains that eternal worth which increases the more you spend of it, which receives, the more you give of it. Poor, yet having all things; poor, yet making many rich—also sprach Paulus-Nietzsche.
After this Zarathustra went back into the mountains and the solitude of his cave and withdrew from men, waiting like a sower who hath thrown out his seed. But his soul was filled with impatience and longing for those he loved; for he had still many gifts for them. For this is the hardest: to shut one’s open hand because of love.
It is the business of the very few to be independent: it is the privilege of the strong, and whoever attempts it, even with the best regret but without being obliged to do so, proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring beyond measure. He enters into a labyrinth, he multiplies a thousand-fold the dangers which life itself already brings with it; not the least of which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way, becomes isolated, and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of conscience. Supposing such a one comes to grief, it is so far from the comprehension of men that they can neither feel it nor sympathize with it, and he cannot any longer go back! He cannot ever go back again to the sympathies of men.—Nietzsche.
Editorials and Announcements
Mrs. Havelock Ellis
Mrs. Ellis’s visit to Chicago has been a series of revelations. At first she was a little disappointing: in her lecture on James Hinton and his sex ethics—particularly in the discussion which followed it—Mrs. Ellis did not loom as large as some of her more “destructive” contemporaries. The thing was beautifully done, of course—a gorgeous bit of interpretative art; for Mrs. Ellis chooses words with a poet’s care and presents ideas with an economy that is invigorating and restful at the same time. But in so far as the lecture reflected her own ideas it had some of the limitations to which the eugenist point of view is always open: the failure to go quite the whole distance. Compared with the directness and honest thoroughness of the few pioneers who are advocating birth control—like Margaret Sanger, whose little pamphlet on the subject will cost her ten years imprisonment if the authorities can get hold of her—the ideas of Mrs. Ellis came with a certain inadequacy. But later she cleared herself of the charge of cultism by her laughing remark to some one who discussed eugenics with her: “Eugenics? A mere spoke in the wheel, and a very dogmatic spoke at that. Heaven knows we don’t want a race of averages.” One of her most delightful afternoons was given over to her Cornish stories. She read one called The Idealist, which ought to be studied by all those who draw their rigid distinctions between “normal” and “abnormal”. As Mrs. Ellis said, “This story is an attempt to show that those people we so piously consider the worst of us are sometimes the best of us.” And so this charming woman with her simplicity, her humor, her frankness, her idealism, and her fine boyishness is a personality one must not fail to know. She returns to Chicago on February 4, to lecture on sex and eugenics in Orchestra Hall. That lecture will be given exclusively to women and will include a discussion of sex abnormalities, as well as a paper on the subject written especially for the occasion by her husband, which Mrs. Ellis will read.
A Journal of Ideas
The New Republic is the first weekly in America which has dared to assert that ideas are interesting, even if they are new. We have had one kind of weekly whose main purpose is to pay dividends to its owners. Dividends demand advertising, advertising demands large circulation, circulation demands pleasing as many people as possible, pleasing many people has seemed to demand piffle and dishonesty. We have had another kind of weekly which confines itself to academic criticism and frankly gives up any attempt to speak to the nation. The New Republic is run neither for dividends nor for ancient prestige. It proceeds on the assumption that we can find writers who are both honest enough and intelligent enough to speak things of a value not determined either by capital or by the mob. It hopes that their product may be so interesting that the people who want to read it will be sufficiently numerous to support the paper. It hopes vastly more that the ideas and opinions so enunciated will introduce a powerful and much-needed element of disinterested intelligence into American public life. The way in which these hopes are put into print will have much to do with the success of the attempt. But it is hopeful that somebody with adequate resources and equipment is actually engaged in the attempt to relate honesty and intelligence with the democracy.