Part 3

As for the clothing they wear, they would do better if left suddenly naked as a people and without preconceptions were commanded to find some covering for themselves. As herds, they have fallen into a descending arc of usage, under the inevitable down-pull of trade. Where the vibrations of matter are low, its responsive movement is gregarian, rather than individual. The year around, these people wear clothing, woolen pants and skirts, which if touched with an iron, touched with sunlight, rain or any medium that arouses the slumbering quantities, the adjacent nostril is offended.

They are heavy eaters of meat the year round. They slay their pets with as little concern as they gather strawberries. Their ideas of virtue and legitimacy have to do with an ecclesiastical form, as ancient as Nineveh and as effaced in meaning. They accept their children, as one pays a price for pleasure; and those children which come from their stolen pleasures are either murdered or marked with shame. Their idea of love is indefinite with desire, and their love of children has to do with the sense of possession.

They are not significant men in their own fields; rarely a good mason, a good carpenter, a good farmer; the many have not even found the secret of order and unfolding from the simplest task. The primary meaning of the day’s task in its relation to life and blessedness is not to be conceived by them. They are taught from childhood that first of all work is for bread; that bread perishes; therefore one must pile up as he may the wherewith to purchase the passing bread; that bread is bread and the rest a gamble.... They answer to the slow loop waves which enfold the many in amusement and opinion, in suspicion and cruelty and half-truth. To all above, they are as if they were not; mediocre men, static in spiritual affairs, a little pilot-burner of vision flickering from childhood, but never igniting their true being, nor opening to them the one true way which each man must go alone, before he begins to be erect in other than bone and sinew.

They cover their bodies—but they do not cover their faces nor their minds nor their souls; and this is the marvel, _they are not ashamed_! They reveal the emptiness of their faces and the darkness of their minds without complaining to each other or the police.

From any standpoint of reality, the points of view of the many need only to be expressed to reveal their abandonment.... You see, I have left the Countryside and am lost in the crowd now, any crowd, the world-crowd, whose gods today are trade, patriotism and a certain limp-legged tumbler.

... Yet we are told by every authoritative voice out of the past, and we know it from the urge of our own souls, that we must love the many before we can serve them. It is fatuous to love blindly, therefore we must understand what we are about. I have touched here some small things of the crowd, which are well enough to know; otherwise we are apt to stand apart from the many crying: “How noble are the simple-minded! How sweet the people of the Countryside! How inevitable and unerring is the voice of the people!” As a matter of truth, unless directed by some strong man’s vision, the voice of the people has never yet given utterance to constructive truth; and the same may be said of those who cater to the public taste in politics or the so-called arts. The man who undertakes to give the people what the people want is not an artist or a true leader of any dimension. He is a tradesman and finds his place in his generation.

The brave workman who dares be himself and go hungry for the honor finds sooner or later a brilliant little fact rising in his consciousness—one that comes to stay, and which future thinking must be built around: that while the people are all that is low and bad in their change and rush of personality, they are also the soil of the future, a splendid potential mass that contains every heroism and masterpiece to be; that all great things must come from the people, because great leaders of the people turn their passionate impregnation of idealism upon them; that first the dreamer dreams—and then the people make it action....

That which we see that hurts us so as workmen, is but the unfinished picture, the back of the tapestry.

To be worth his spiritual salt, the artist, any artist, must turn every force of his conceiving into that great restless Abstraction, the many; he must plunge whole-heartedly in the doing, but cut himself loose from the thing done; at least, he must realize that what he is willing to give could not be bought.... When he is quite ready, there shall rise for him, out of the Abstraction, something finished; something as absolutely his own as the other half of his circle.

“Rooming”

HELEN HOYT

I

O, I can tell when I get to my corner, Where to turn in going to my house. On the other corners along the avenue, Northward and southward where the cars grind, Are saloons and drug stores, Glaring with signals and bright glass. On both sides of the street the same, One block like the next.

But on my corner is a florist’s shop With ferns in the window And sweet-peas and roses, Glowing with red and pink and yellow.

And sometimes pansies And moss.

Each night as I step down from the car There the flowers are waiting To say I have got home. And I linger Seeing gardens.

II

The room I have now is narrow, Narrow Like a coffin. As plain and as straight And as tight as a coffin. Two corners at the end of it, Are rounded off where the head lies. Ugh!

In the bed, you stiffen And look down at your feet As if buried.

On the right side is the high bureau, On the left side is the high desk— How high and stiff and black they are! How high and stiff and black they are And what is “I” dwells in the cañon between,— Where at any moment the narrowness may tumble and fall in upon me! How far off the ceiling appears over my eyes! At the coffin’s head one window; At the coffin’s foot, one chair.

III

My room is narrow, But wide enough. My desk and pencils are wide as the world And my books are like palaces and far journeys.

What have I need of space? There is always room enough for thinking, Or for dreaming or desiring. There is always room enough to smile And sing And cry out. If the feet are happy they can always dance Even in narrowness.

(And a small room can be cold for a large one When the mornings are gray.)

IV

Closing the door I close out the world. I am alone, Free. At home. Castled.

After the mastery of the day Now I am the master. I expand and aspire: I exult and strut and feel aware of myself.

The walls await me. The mirror, The chair. Everything that is here is mine, Familiar only to me; Dependent upon my hands for use; Dependent upon my heart for beauty.

The books on the shelf call to me, They send out glances to me. We have an understanding together. They know I will come and touch them with my fingers.

But first I must get loosened from the day; From people— People crowding upon my shoulders. I must loosen them from me.

How good to us doors are! They make the whole universe not be except this room.

The curtain folds are full of quietness And I have a great contentment with undressing. My bed reaches out kind arms to me And folds me in, Awake with many thoughts.

V

How pleasant are sheets! Smooth and fine with cool creases, Laying comfort to your cheek, Laying soft cleanness of touch to your throat; Delicious with sun And blown air And lavender.

And then the kind wool of the blanket Spreading out wide; Dropping away plentifully, Luxuriously over the edge of the bed; Woven and spun out of living warmth, Lightly; Rich to possess against the proud cold.

VI

How generously into its soft yielding lap The bed receives us now, And its strong arms Fold us about as a mother folds her children,— Comforting, and long-accustomed, and secure.

Unquestioning our deserts; Unfailing; never denying; Never refusing our weariness; Taking our weariness from us like a burden.

To petulance, to discomfort, Answering with soft answers; Smoothing away with silence our sorrows, Till in those faithful friendly arms We are enwrapped with quietness and content; With old well-being of sleep.

The Ugliest Man

GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER

Good and evil, these are time-old opposites. So are beautiful and ugly. But these two opposites are seldom entirely coincident. No doubt there are good and high-class men who are commonly judged to be fundamentally ugly. And there are blinding beauties who are on a war-footing against all that we call good. The good satisfies our moral judgment; the beautiful, our judgment of taste. The one has to do with the content of human life; the other, with the form. But, at bottom, the moral judgment and the judgment of taste cannot remain entirely and materially dissociated. It was a more nearly correct feeling on the part of the Greeks when they let the beautiful and the good inter-grow. According to the Greek, the good and the beautiful, intimately united, constitute the ideal of virtue, however. We are reconciled after a fashion to the ugliness of a man if we find a great and noble soul in the repellant shell.

But if permanent beauty is to be preserved to human nature, efficient and high endeavor, free self-concentrated formation of character is the only means to this end. When the “outer man” mirrors goodness and beauty of heart, firmness and bravery of will, seriousness and depth of thought, his countenance glows under all circumstances with a radiance of happy beauty, and it would be a barbarian and pitiable eye indeed that could not apprehend such radiance or feel itself smitten with its glory. For the man of fine feeling, therefore, all that is ugly affects him morally at the same time. Indeed, the reproach of having behaved in an ugly manner he feels as keenly, frequently more keenly in fact, than the reproach of having behaved immorally.

In the case of _Friedrich Nietzsche_, the moral criterion of human worth was totally transformed into an aesthetic criterion! This man who had subdued all “morality” and left it behind him, who took his stand “beyond good and evil,” submitted to a new evaluation, was measured according to his greatness. Greatness was nobility, supremacy, beauty. Smallness was vulgarity, baseness, ugliness. Not the wickedest, and not the wretchedest, but the ugliest man—_der hässlichste Mensch_—represents the power which the new culture has to struggle with—to overcome, indeed—if man is to mount to a higher plane of being.

Who is this ugliest man? Of all the Zarathustrian enigmas, this is perhaps the most enigmatic. It must have been a frightful ugliness which haunted and harried the poet-philosopher when he narrates that, amid his wanderings over men’s disappointing earth, he had met the ugliest man. Many and many were the types of human beings that Zarathustra had met in his lonely pilgrimages. Most of them he disposed of with high scorn or honest contempt,—thus did he dispatch the good and reputable, the custodians of the old tables of morals and order; then, the preachers of the doctrine of equality, who swarmed around like flies in market places, shunning all solitudes, able to exist only in masses; next the poisonous tarantulas who, with envious revenge, devised punishments, in cold blood dragged their victims to justice; finally, the wise and upright, the schoolmasters, whose duress converted all depths into shallows, managed to obliterate all men’s peculiarities, till nothing distinctive was left.

But the ugliest man was uglier than any of these! These types did not so infuriate Zarathustra as did the ugliest man. At all these Nietzsche shook his head, but they did not floor him. He had been able to look upon them, to scold them, to laugh at them. “And again did Zarathustra’s feet run through mountains and forests.... When the path curved round a rock, all at once the landscape changed, and Zarathustra entered into a realm of death. Here bristled aloft black and red cliffs, without any grass, tree, or bird’s voice. For it was a valley which all animals avoided, even the beasts of prey, except that a species of ugly, thick, green serpent came here to die when they became old. Therefore the shepherds called this valley ‘Serpent-death.’” Here Zarathustra found the ugliest man something sitting by the wayside shaped like a man, and yet hardly like a man, something nondescript. And all at once there came over Zarathustra a great shame, he blushed up to the roots of his white hair, he would flee this ill-starred place—the worst that there was in the whole world! But the Great Despiser, the Hater of all pity was himself so unstrung and overpowered by pity that he sank down all at once, like a giant oak that had weathered many a storm, or withstood many a stroke of the woodman’s axe.

Who was this ugliest man? What was this ugliest thing which Nietzsche—the great man-spy and life-appraiser—had ever discovered in a human being? Before Nietzsche wrote, _thus spake Zarathustra_, he expresses himself in another work as follows: “Nothing is ugly save the degenerate man.... From the physical standpoint everything ugly weakens and depresses man. It reminds of decay, danger, impotence; he literally loses strength in its presence. The effect of ugliness may be gauged by the dynamometer. Whenever man’s spirits are downcast, it is a sign that he scents the proximity of something ‘ugly.’ His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage and his pride—these things collapse at the sight of what is ugly, and rise at the sight of what is beautiful.... Ugliness is understood to signify a hint or a symptom of degeneration; that which reminds us, however, remotely of degeneracy, impels us to the judgment ‘ugly.’ Every sign of exhaustion, of gravity, of age, of fatigue; every kind of constraint, such as cramp, or paralysis; and above all the smells, colors and forms associated with decomposition and putrefaction, however much they may have been attenuated into symbols,—all these things provoke the same reaction, which is the judgment ‘ugly.’ A certain hatred expresses itself here: who is it that man hates? Without a doubt it is _the decline of his type_. In this regard his hatred springs from the deepest instinct of the race. There is horror, caution, profundity, and far-reaching vision in this hatred,—it is the most profound hatred that exists.”

Nowhere has Nietzsche told us of the zenith, who his superman is. But he here tells us of the nadir, who the ugliest man is—and the superman is the exact and august opposite. Thus we could ourselves construct his superman.

But the ugliest man—we recognize this strange figure of the Zarathustra poesy in the sharp cry of distress which all representatives of degenerate (_de-genera_) humanity groan out where the yearning toward a higher humanity overpowers them. The ugliest man then appears accoutered with a crown with which he has crowned his own head, and with two purple girdles which encircle him. In a later profound observation, Nietzsche informs us that the ugliest man is called _der historische Sinn_, the historical mind, or sense, which needs decoration, accoutrement, like all ugly things that would make themselves tolerable, at least for surface people. The degenerate man,—this is the ugly man, and the saddest degeneration is _the surrender of life to the past_—for the past is the big grave which swallows up all that lives. Whoever makes the past the goal of his longing walks among corpses which make him shiver. He becomes himself a corpse, whose society is freezing for living men. And because this man, assimilated to the past, living in the past, is nothing himself, he needs all kinds of fiddle-faddle to give himself the semblance of being something. He needs pomp which makes a world-stirring phenomenon out of a coronation; he scrambles and scratches after titles and orders—which long ago Frederick the Great, the philosopher-king on the Prussian throne, called the insignia of fools; he has himself accredited by father and grandfather, so that their merit may adorn the shield of son and grandson; in a word, he reverses the counsel of an apostle: “Forgetting the things that are behind,” for he forgets the things that are before and reaches back for the things that are behind. And because there is for this backward-bent man an inconvenient monitor and witness of all life—because there is God, the omnipresent God, who ever sees all, even sees man through and through, this ugliest man became the murderer of God, he took revenge on the living God for being witness of the hiddenest life of man! “I know thee well,” said Zarathustra, with a brazen voice, “_thou art the murderer of God_!... Thou couldst not _endure_ him who beheld thee through and through, thou ugliest man. Thou tookest revenge on this witness!”

We have here, I think, with all that is enigmatic and obscure, a sharply-outlined picture of the ugliest man. Earlier Nietzsche wrote a book on the blessing and the bane of history for life. In that book he accorded right to historical culture and to man’s knowledge of the past _only in so far_ as the life of the man of the present and of the future would be advanced thereby. But the historians in the schools, in chair and pulpit, did not so think. They acknowledged life only when it was dead! A zealous teacher of history was a meandering mummy from out the past, who had no blood more in his veins, no flesh more on his bones. Therefore was he so ugly. Therefore did he create such a frosty temperature round about him. Under the pressure of these historical forces, all life became a _cultus_ of the past. The older a thing was, the better it was. It was the long past, the outlived, that was noble. The more remote that past, the prouder men were of it, and the brighter shone its glory-beaming star to the eyes of men.

From this malady of the ugliest man, from this _de-genera-tion_, we are by no means free. Instead of ascent to a higher _genus_ than present man, to superman, there is descent to a lower _genus_. This antiquarian, hoary spirit pervades our whole social life, this _re-spect_ for what has become old and rotten, for what can show no other merit than that it once—was! It is a sign of our own decay, this living on the dead, this ability only to resuscitate and copy past centuries—past poetry, past art, past philosophy, past morality, past religion!—this knowing in consequence no life of our very own. We build “whitewashed sepulchers” in our lives, because we have no courage of heart to create anything that belongs to life. At all events, that the putridity and the dead bones may be concealed, we use whitewash, much whitewash! We use decorations, brilliant, finely-painted decorations so that men may not observe that life has become a theatrical play, making an impression indeed under clever management, but inspiring no living human heart. All the splendor of this pomp, which we of today employ on the stage of life, cannot conceal the chilly vacuity of this whole business; and the man who peers behind the curtains and sees how people look shorn of their decorations, without powder and paint, without the artificial cunning luminosity of the day’s puffery, has Zarathustra’s feeling in the valley forsaken to the old green thick snake on its way to die,—Zarathustra’s feeling when he met the ugliest man, where much heaviness settled on his mind, because he did not think that anything so ugly and horrible could exist among men.

Yes, there are traces and traits of this ugliest man among us. If we but imagine all that is decoration, flummery, stripped off from us, think how much degenerate life would be disclosed! How much love for the dead _that no longer lives_, how much bitter strife and war over _reliques_, over some sacred cloak, or sacred bone, of which history narrates, telling us that they once belonged to life. How much slavish obedience to thoughts that once were; to institutions that once served the living. To be sure, men call this _piety_, and have thus designed a beautiful robe behind which they hide their moribund lives. For the sake of this piety, they exact consideration for all ancient dust which burden the homes and hearts of men, they arm themselves against him who, with mighty hand, would undertake a huge house-cleaning of life and for life. Piety,—it is this that they call admiration and veneration of every idol which for long has been played out, but still counts us of today among its devotees. Men must even deal God a mortal blow, the _Living_ God of the living, and, with the ferocious hatred of their folly, pursue the God who sees their innermost heart as a living witness of what they would like to hide from themselves and all the world. “But he—_had to_ die: he looked with eyes which beheld _everything_,—he beheld men’s depths and dregs, all his hidden ignominy and ugliness ... he crept into my dirtiest corners. This most prying, over-intrusive, over-pitiful one had to die. He even beheld me: on such a witness I would have revenge—or not live myself. The God who beheld everything, _and also man_: that God had to die! Man cannot _endure_ it that such a witness should live.”

Thus spake the ugliest man. Zarathustra started off, feeling frozen to the very bowels.

The God who told men that altogether they served death, not life, that they worked deterioration, not rejuvenation—had to die! Life is a dying—and yet there shoots through the heart of man such a nameless anxiety in the presence of this dying that he paints up and pencils all death till it looks like life. And indeed many are deceived, many see only men’s rouge and mark not the great lie which it hides. This is the ugliest thing in the world, and it made the prophet of a new culture shudder and freeze—_this_, that we live and walk among corpses which yet look as if they were alive!