Can there be any doubt as to the stand we ought to take with reference to these great movements? May we not greet them as a new spring-time of humanity whose light and warmth shall vanquish winter, and bring life, joy and peace into the land? “When the Day of Passover was fully Come”—may we not see this day in these movements, when a spirit of truth and soul and freedom shall brood over men, and lead them to higher goals and greater tasks of human being?
To be sure, our era is not arbitrarily made, not excogitated and invented by man. To be sure, great elementary forces of life will come, must come, to their unfolding in these movements. To be sure, the matter of real concern is a new structure of humanity, new cultural and social forms, new world-views, new life-views. No doubt these forces of life will carry the individual along with them, will come upon him and coerce him when he does not so will, will not at all even ask him what he wills, what he has to say to them, or how he regards them. But on this very account, in surveying the great whole of our life development we easily lose sense for what is individual and special. Where classes and masses of men encounter each other, where world-moving thought jolt and undermine thousand-year-old traditions and customs, removing their very foundations, there the individual human soul suffers abridgement, there we forget that even the largest number consists of units, and that the greatest numerical worth is judged according to the worth of these units.
Therefore a great social thinker must reflect ever anew that man is the significant thing in every new social culture—is beginning and goal. To understand how to trumpet a word respecting man and his personality into this social movement and seething, this is to do an essential service to the modern way of viewing life, this is to warn us that we are not entirely impersonal in the presence of pure objectivity.
No one has done such service to our age in so signal a manner, as Friedrich Nietzsche. He is not the preacher of social, but of personal, man. However, fundamental hater of socialism that he was, he yet became a mighty moving and impelling force for socialism. He, too, wills a new culture, but he wills it through a new man. Therefore, he shows us the way to this new culture in that which is most personal to man, in man’s Longing, or yearning, or craving,—in man’s Sehnsucht,—a word of profound import to which none of these English words does justice.
To many ears that program does not sound provocative, promising, alluring. Sehnsucht is not a feeling that makes one happy and blissful—not a feeling to which one would like to accord a constant and abiding possession of one’s heart. “Only he who knows Sehnsucht knows what I suffer”—so sighed Goethe’s Mignon, one of the most impressive and marvelous characters the poet-genius ever created, an Incarnate Yearning, self-consumed in unquieted longing of soul, in Heimweh for a dreamily visioned distance, to walk in whose sunny beauty her feet were never destined. To preach Sehnsucht is to preach hunger. To hunger is to ache. The gnawing of a hungry stomach—but what is that compared with the gnawing of a hungry heart, when everything that seems good and great and worth striving after becomes elusive, unattainable, unintelligible, to passionate longing? Sehnsucht is not anxiety, it is worse than anxiety. Anxiety is petty; Sehnsucht is great and deep. In anxiety, life is dark, and darkness terrifies and distresses man. In Sehnsucht, life is luminous, but the light blinds the soul. Sehnsucht sees all light in a magical radiance, yet cannot clasp it; feels its overpowering attraction, yet cannot satisfy the eye with it. Prometheus chained to a rock, after he had filched the celestial spark from the gods! Tantalus, the luscious fruit just over his head, but wafted away as soon as he longs to grasp it with greedy hands! Yes, all the human heart’s deepest pain, this is Sehnsucht. Whoever names a pain that is not Sehnsucht has not peered to the bottom of pain’s chalice.
“Woe to that man through whom Sehnsucht comes!” we might almost cry. If you love me, do not stir up this yearning for the impossible that is in me, this hot, fervent craving, which can never find satisfaction, which can never enjoy the pleasures of life, or its own self. If you love men, save them from their very youth up in the presence of that tempestuous storm and stress into the Afar, where all solid shores vanish, all safe harbors are closed—save men, trembling, untranquil, from the everlasting question: Knowest thou the land? Knowest it well? Leave men their peace of mind, add no fuel to the flame of their discontent. Do not wrong them by letting them eat of the tree of knowledge. Do not show them the infinite expanse unrolling behind and beyond the narrow confines of their petty lives, thus spoiling the pleasure of their contentment, the joy they have in their limited and longingless life. Paradise is better than Wilderness. The familiar murmur of the brook in the meadow by the old home is more restful than the roar of the cataract or than the eternal haunting mystery and melody of the great sea. Such is the common cry of the lackadaisical, the longingless, the laissez-faire people to all of us who “turn the world upside down.”
Yes, we make all men sufferers—we who pilot their minds to what is not yet there, and to what they not yet are—we who show them a land lying undiscovered in mist or azure ahead of them. We make man seekers, we become disturbers of the peace—this is what they call our crime and blasphemy. Therefore, men give us a wide berth, warn others against our society, afraid of the yearning and hot hunger of soul which would come over them, were they once to hanker after a different fare from what they light upon in their troughs every morning, gorging themselves to an easy satiety—a different fare that would make them hunger ever anew, and arouse them to new longings. No, comfort men; free them from their painful Sehnsucht; teach them the foolishness of hitching their wagons to stars; tell them that all is well with them and make them content with any lot in life that may by chance be theirs! Then you will be their true benefactors; then you will heal the wounds from which the heart would otherwise so easily bleed!
Really? That is a good thing to do for men? The wise thing to say to the heart is: Break your wings in two, so you will not be tempted to brave the blue, to keep company with “the distant sea,” to explore the Afar? The comforting thing to do for the slave is to gild his chains, so that he may have joy in their glittering splendor and show them off as worth their weight in gold? How easy it would be then for the Czar of all the Russias “to go to Berlin if it costs me my last peasant!” How easy for the Vatican to silence the modernist! Throne and altar, an entente cordiale indeed, could then enjoy by “divine right” an unmolested and unworried repose upon a world of dumb, blind, brute peasants. But—
If I’m designed yon lordling’s slave—
By nature’s law design’d—