For as it is, so it shall be,
Untouched of time till Doom appears,
Too deep for days, too deep for years
In the salt quiet of the sea.
The Will to Live
George Burman Foster
Like the sense for the true, the good, the holy, the esthetic sense is elementary. Man comes to himself as man in all alike. Without the effectuation of his peculiar artistic impulse, man, the born artist, could not find the real consecration and dignity of the human. Indeed, the worth of all human culture depends upon the sense for the beautiful. As religion is not restricted to some fragment of our experience but informs the whole, so culture requires that life shall be beautiful down to the commonplace and homely things of the daily round. The new program, to which this modern insight points, means a rebirth of our entire moral and social life.
Why is it, then, that those who vocationally and constantly worship in the sanctuary of art—the priests in this sanctuary—often so easily and singularly fail in the consecration which the worship of beauty is supposed to supply to the human personality? The lives of those whose calling it is to exhibit and exemplify the beautiful, why are they often so very ugly, so bereft of lovable emotions? The shortcomings of the artist, why do we count among these the pettiest and the basest known to man? To be specific, why do we speak almost proverbially of an artistic vanity, an artistic sensitiveness, an artistic envy or jealousy? If we answered, “Because the shadows of the ‘human all too human’ seem so dark in the golden light of the artistic calling,” that would be true, but it would not be the whole truth. Does not the professional occupation of oneself with art involve a danger to character? To live constantly in the world of the emotions, to fable and fantasy and dream, in all this there is so easily something weak, not to say “effeminate” and sickly, and hence enervating. Of great spirits this is true often enough—how much more of the lesser who sophistically find warrant in the weakness of the great for the greatness of their weakness! For instance, they have heard of “inspiration”—something not under the control of the artist, something that must “come upon him,” but only when the divine hour strikes, as it struck at the pentecostal “outpouring” of the “spirit” upon the early Christians. Hence no care for a thousand things—in both cases—for which other men must care! Hence a standard of life different from that by which other men live! To be outwardly different from others, to set oneself above others, that is to be artistic. Because some great artists are different from other people in moods and manners and morals, it is naïvely concluded that to emulate the latter is to be the former, and right merrily does the emulation go on. It must be a grief to a real artist, this culture of the eccentric head and the more eccentric heart. Therefore we need a man to free us from these eccentricities, a man to lift us above these caricatures because he has himself put them beneath his feet. This man is Friedrich Nietzsche.
The sickness and the soundness of life, both these were in Nietzsche. In his demand for an artistic culture he put his finger upon the wound of present humanity. This demand was accepted, the meaning of the demand was lost sight of. This was the fatality—as if Nietzsche required a new artistic culture only, and not at the same time a new life culture! Beauty the form of life indeed, but strength, will, deed, the content—that was the brave burden of the prophet’s message.
Nietzsche was born into a time that marked the climax of a more than millennial cultus of Death. The old songs of death as bridge of sunset into the eternal day of Bliss, songs of earthly lamentation and heavenly yearning and anticipation, these no longer came from the heart, to be sure; though still sung, the voices of “the faithful” grew ever thinner and thinner; and the songs were a monument of past piety rather than a witness to a present. Like vice, this earth which was once “a monster of so frightful mien” was first endured, then pitied, then embraced—and even wedded by man; its sufferings were healed and its delights enjoyed. The pain, the pleasure of earth, what does it mean? man’s heart again asked as it asked in happy Greece long ago. But as time went by, the human mind was bruised and broken over this question, until it concluded that all we call life is a great illusion. And back and behind this life, with its tumult and fitful fever, there is the “vasty deep” of the infinite nothing. Life is a cheat. And now there is Weltschmerz, Lebenschmerz—simply a naturalistic form of the old ecclesiastical longing for death. It said the same “No!” to life that the old church song said—it, too, valued the day of death higher than the day of birth; it, too, urged that, since life is intrinsically evil, the cure of the evil is to live as little as possible.