And that was the end of my long adventure.
December 30th.
"I am pleased to be able to tell you that your poem is a great deal better than I expected to find it. I am forced to write briefly by reason of pressure of business; but you have very considerable literary gifts. The work is clearly made whole of sincerity; it shows a considerable command of expression, and a considerable understanding of style. It has qualities of imagination and of emotional insight, and is obviously the fruit of a wide reading. But besides these things, it is exactly as I expected, and as I told you--the work is very narrow in the range of its appeal; you can not in the least blame the publishers for declining it, because it is true that very few people would care for it. My own judgment is hardly capable in the matter, because I myself am not an idealist. Recording my own opinion, I found the poem monotonous, and not especially interesting; but then, I say that of much that some other people consider great poetry.
"My advice to you is just what it was before--that you go out into the world and become acquainted with life. Not knowing you personally, I could not counsel you definitely, but I should think that what would benefit you most would be a good stiff course in plain, every-day newspaper reporting.
Newspaper reporters have many deficiencies, but at least they learn to keep in touch with their audiences, and to write in a way that takes hold of the people. You may not welcome this advice--but we seldom welcome what is good for us."
I am not dead yet, and I have not lost the power of getting angry. Such things as that do me good, they make me fight, they get all my soul in arms. Great G.o.d, the blindness, the asininity of it!
It is enough if you can cla.s.sify a man; give him a name--and then it"s all out of the way. If he have faith and fire and aspiration and worship--and you have not--why, say that he is an idealist, and that you are something else, and let it go at that.
December 31st.
The poem came back to-day, and I trudged off to another publisher"s--the sixth. I have no hope now, however; I send it as a matter of form.
I shudder at the prospect of to-morrow"s coming; for it will be just a month more to the time I said I should have to go to work!
And New Year"s day--my soul, if I had foreseen this last New Year"s! I thank Heaven for that blessing, at least.
Who are these men that I should submit to their judgments? These men and their commonplace lives--are they not that very world out of which I have fought my way, by the toil of nights and days?--And now I must come back and listen to their foolish judgments about my song!
--You felt what was in it, you poor, stupid man! But it did not take you with it, for you are not a poet; you have not kept the holy fire burning, you are not still "strenuous for the bright reward." And so you found it monotonous! Some men find nature monotonous. And some men find music monotonous.
January 5th.
Two days ago I was reading Menschen und Werke, by Georg Brandes. I was glancing over an essay on Friedrich Nietzsche, and I came upon some things that made my heart throb:--
"This man [Nietzsche"s ideal] takes willingly upon himself the sorrow of speaking the truth. His chief thought is this: A happy life is an impossibility; the highest that man can attain is a heroic life, a life in which, amid the greatest difficulties, something is striven for which, in one way or other, proves for the good of all. To what is truly human only the true men can lift us, those who seem to have come into being through a leap of nature, the thinkers and discoverers, the artists and producers, and those who achieve more through their being than their doing; the n.o.ble, the good in a great sense, those in whom the genius of the good works.
These men are the goal of history. Nietzsche formulates the sentence "Humanity shall labor continually at this, to beget solitary great men--and this and nothing else is its task."--
"Here Nietzsche has reached the final answer to his question "What is Culture?" For upon this rest the fundamental principles of Culture, and the duties which it imposes. It lays upon me the duty to place myself actively in relation to the great human ideals. Its chief thought is this: To every one who will look for it and partake of it, it sets the task; to labor in himself and outside of himself at the begetting of the thinker and the artist, the truth-loving and the beauty-loving man, the pure and good personality--and therewith at the fulfilment of nature....
"In our day a so-called Culture inst.i.tution signifies only too often an arrangement by which the cultured, moving in closed ranks, force to one side all those solitary and contrary ones whose striving is directed to higher things. Also among the learned there is so far lacking, as a rule, all sense for the genius that is coming into being, and every feeling for the work of the contemporary and struggling soul. Therefore, in spite of the irresistible and restless advance in all technical and specialized fields, the conditions for the originating of the great are so little improved that the opposition to the highly gifted has rather increased than diminished.
"From the government the superior individuals can not expect much. It helps them rarely when it takes them into its service, very certainly it will help them only when it gives them full independence. Only true Culture can prevent their early becoming weary or exhausted, and protect them from the exasperating battle with Culture-philistinism."
Those words made my blood tingle, they made me tremble. Alone, miserable, helpless--here was a voice at last, a friend! I dropped the book and I went to the library, and I was back with "Also sprach Zarathustra" in an hour.
I have been reading it for two days--reading it in a state of excitement, forgetting everything. Here is a man!--Here is a man! The first night that I read it I kicked my heels together and laughed aloud in glee, like a child. _Oh_, it was so fine! And to find things like this already written, and in the world! Great heavens, it was like finding a gold mine underneath my feet; and I have forgotten all my troubles again, forgotten everything! I have found a man who understands me, a man to be my friend!
I do not know what the name Friedrich Nietzsche conveys to the average cultured American. I can only judge by my own case--I have kept pace with our literary movements and I have read the standard journals and reviews; but I have never come upon even a reference to Friedrich Nietzsche, except as a byword and a jest.
I had rather live my own life than any other man"s life. My own vision is my home. But every great man"s inspiration is a challenge, and until you have mastered it you can not go on.
I speak not of poets, nor of philosophers, but of religious teachers, of prophets; and I speak but my opinion--let every man form his own. I say that I have read all those that men honor, and that a greater prophet than this man has not come upon the earth in centuries. I think of Emerson and Carlyle as the religious teachers, the prophets, of this time; and beside this mighty spirit Emerson is a child and Carlyle a man without a faith or an idea. I call him the John Baptist of the new Dispensation, the first high priest of the Religion of Evolution; and I bid the truth-seeker read well his Bible, for in it lies the future of mankind for ages upon ages to come.
Half that I love in my soul"s life I owe to the prophet of Nazareth. The other half I owe,--not to Nietzsche, but to the new Dispensation of which he is a priest. Nietzsche will stand alone; but he is nevertheless the child of his age--he sings what thousands feel.
It is a disadvantage to be the first man. If you are the first man you see but half-truths and you hate your enemies. When you seek truth, truly, all systems and all faiths of men--they are beautiful to you--born of sorrow, and hallowed with love; but they will not satisfy you, and you put them by.
You do not let them influence you one way or the other; you can no more find truth while you are bound to them by hatred than while you are bound to them by love. There are dreary places in "Also sprach Zarathustra,"
narrownesses and weaknesses too; they come whenever the writer is thinking of the evils of the hour, whenever he is gazing, not on the vision of his soul, but on the half-truths of the men about him.
When I speak of Christ let no man think of Christianity. I speak of a prince of the soul, the boldest, the freest, the n.o.blest of men that I know. With the thousand systems that mankind has made in his memory, I have simply nothing in any way to do.
To me all morality is one. Morality is hunger and thirst after righteousness. Morality is a quality of will. The differences that there are between Christ and Nietzsche are differences of the intellect--where no man is final.
The doctrine of each is a doctrine of sacrifice; with one it is a sacrifice of love, with the other it is a sacrifice of labor. For myself, I care not for the half-truths of any man. I said to my soul, "Shall I cast out love for labor?" And my soul replied, "For what wilt thou labor but love?"
Moral sublimity lies in the escape from self. The doctrine of Christ is a negation of life, that of Nietzsche an affirmation; it seems to me much easier to attain to sublimity with the former.
It is easier to die for righteousness than to live for it. If you are to die, you have but to fix your eyes upon your vision, and see that you do not take them away. But the man who will _live_ for righteousness--he must plant and reap, must gather fire-wood and establish a police-force; and to do these things n.o.bly is not easy; to do them sublimely seems hardly possible at all.
Twenty centuries ago the Jewish world was a little plain, and G.o.d a loving Father. He held you in his arms, he spoke to you in every dream, in every fantasy, in every accident. Life was very short--but a little trial--you had only to be patient, and nothing mattered. Society did not exist--only your neighbor existed. Knowledge did not exist, nor was it needed--the world was to end--perhaps to-night--and what difference made all the rest?
You took no heed for the morrow--for would not your Father send you bread?
You resisted not evil--for if you died, was not that all that you could ask?
It was with such a sweet and simple faith as this that the victory of Jesus Christ was won. These were his ideas, and as the soul was all-consuming with him, he lived by them and died by them, and stands as the symbol of faith.