The Ugliest Man
George Burman Foster
Goodand 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 ofFriedrich 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 isthe 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 calledder 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 isthe 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, “thouart the murderer of God!... Thou couldst notendurehim 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 tohistorical culture and to man’s knowledge of the pastonly in so faras 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 acultusof 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 thisde-genera-tion, we are by no means free. Instead of ascent to a highergenusthan present man, to superman, there is descent to a lowergenus. This antiquarian, hoary spirit pervades our whole social life, thisre-spectfor 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 deadthat no longer lives, how much bitter strife and war overreliques, 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 thispiety, 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 themselvesagainst 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, theLivingGod 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 todie: he looked with eyes which beheldeverything,—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 cannotendureit 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!
To fight and conquer this hindrance to a new culture, this is to fight and conquer death; and since death is death only through man, through his yearning or fear, the triumph of a new culture begins with the triumphal song of life, which knows how to make a festival out of even death. To be sure, Nietzsche did not set his most beautiful man over against his most ugly, but we can yet read between the lines what he conceived the most beautiful man to be. He is the man who has pushed far from him the last vestige and survival of fear and slave-service. He is the man who has learned dying as the great Consummator, victorious, surrounded by men who hope and vow that there shall ever be festival where a man who so dies dedicates himself to the living. Here Zarathustra-Nietzsche intimates a kinship with that other Dying Man Who proclaimed his life’s victorious career in His: “It is finished!” and created on Christianity’s Good Friday a festival of death. Nietzsche speaks of the Hebrew, too early dead, who would have confessed Zarathustra’s doctrine, if he had attained to Zarathustra’s years. It did not occur to Nietzsche that such a confession was not at all needed, because the world had perceived the glad message already which would make a festival out of death and teach men how the most beautiful festival was consecrated. Christian art had opposed to the ugliest man the most beautiful human picture: the head full of woundsand blood, the King in the thorn-crown, who understood dying because he understood living. With this victorious song of death began a new culture, a new heroism of humanity, to which death ceased to be a pale ghost, but which confessed even in death: “as dying, and behold, we live!” Then men ceased to learn dying, and because they made no preaching of life out of dying and no vow to life, death became to them a torturing anxiety and care again; they did not dare name his name; they did not dare frankly look him in the eye. And this cowardice and lie disfigure all their action and passion; they would give to death at least the semblance of life; they would believe in ghostly existence still allotted to all the dead, rather than say to death: “Thou are a messenger of God, a revelation, a witness of life; since thou art good, I will greet thee and bless thee!”
So Zarathustra demanded of his disciples: “Let your dying be no blasphemy of men and earth; my friends, your spirit and your virtue shall still glow in your dying, like the evening red over the earth, or else death has miserably betrayed you.”
Death our will even, our freedom—this is life’s highest meaning! Who but Nietzsche could have thought that? Of course, this is not to throw life away, when it has become hard and heavy to bear. Such a death would be of all the most unfree. It would be a flight, not a deed; it would be a lamentation and a feebleness, not a festival of the soul! But it means that we take up death from the start into the order of our life, as the night which, no less than the day, belongs to man’s full day. It means that we give to life a worth which no death can destroy, which first in death reveals its eternal power. I must die—so laments the slave, who has lived only non-entities even in his life, and has never learned that life is work, creation, consummation. Iwilldie—so speaks the hero, to whom every fight brings the prize of a victory well worth death!—the hero who hazards his life every moment for the highest human good, who knows that he and his life have become a sacrifice from which a better, higher, freer humanity shall gain its life and its strength.
Who is ugly? Who is beautiful? Who is ashamed of his death and falsifies his deadness that it may look like life—who does this, bears death within himself as a power that drags him down, disfigures him in the fullness of that which he would be able to live. But who, in his power to die, proves that he has learned to live, has overcome the ugliest thing in man, cast it out; namely, the fear of death which creates all the lies of life, and all the servility and unfreedom of men—which creates men over whomdas Gewesen! the dead past, possesses power, so that they can never breathe a joyous breath, can never commit themselves to the living and the growing. But abeautifulculture will also become agoodculture because one that is living is at once good and beautiful; the eternal life of God, of whom it is said: There is none good but God alone.