A Hard Bed
George Burman Foster
Warfareagainst suffering, this is man’s most natural fight. Suffering is an attack upon man, upon his will to live. On this account, he has a right to protect himself from suffering, to hold suffering far from him.
But the struggle seems futile. The host of sufferings seems illimitable. For each old suffering which we thought we had vanquished, ten new ones come of which we had never dreamt. Indeed, the capacity to suffer grows with the growth of man. The feeling of pain grows as the senses become sharper and finer. The higher a man’s development, the stronger becomes his ability to feel life’s pains. Even if we could exchange all the sufferings of life for pure joy and bliss, this latter life would be suffering still, a surfeit and a search, and I doubt not we would long for an hour of some old anguish again that would redeem us from a pleasure now grown oppressive and intolerable.
Shall we, then, hate life? Shall we say that it were better not to be than to be? We might, did we not find strength and comfort in and with every suffering,—did we not allow every item or event of experience the democratic right to a trial by a jury of its peers and to our trust that it is worth while until it shall prove that it is not,—did we not experience that up from the abyss of every suffering, painful as it seems, a path leads to a summit where all sufferings are only shadows of a blinding flood and fullness of light; that all articulate and fit into the eternal process of an upward-striving life.
There is no question but that this is the workable view of life to present to the heart of man, draining, as one must, pain’s bitter cup for one’s self. But the sufferings one feels for others, sufferings in which one’s love, expressed in sympathy and pity, is complicated—this is another matter, here one may fall into mischievous aberration. There can be no doubt that the pain of our pity for others may be more painful than the pain of our own lives. In the throes of such pity, the woes of our own lives may seem small indeed, and finally fade away. To behold a human being that is deeply dear to us suffer is worse than it would be to suffer in his place. And if the man of moral elevation of soul feels equal in the end to all that brings pain to his own life, all the more defenseless does he feel with regard to the great all-prevailing misery which, in pity, celebrates its triumphal entry into his heart. Love is our noblest human power, and it is love that lets us feel such misery, it is love whose wealth of recognition and experience renders it possible for us to descry sorrow’s abysses, to anticipate them even in advance of the poor sufferer himself.
Now, may love be good, and pity bad? What a problem is here! May we war a two-fold warfare, one against suffering and one against pity? Ought we? War upon pity—would not that be in contradiction to all that our own generation especially calls good and great? Our generation has done its best to develop in the human heart an ever-enlarging capacity for pity—what would it say to a warrior who pitilessly took up arms against pity?
Friedrich Nietzschewas such a warrior, single-handed and alone! And the venomous verbal onslaught upon Nietzsche by those who did not understand him was equalled only by those who did. At first Nietzsche’s own success consisted in supplying his opponents with new weapons against himself. Of all the words which have been used as bludgeons to break the head of this most resolute rebel against our previous moral view of life, Nietzsche’s piercing words concerning pity and the pitiful have most occupied the attention of his enemies. This may not deter us from looking unabashed the great question squarely in the face. In the end, is pity something to be overcome, a disease of the old culture? Does the path of the new culture lead men out and beyond and above pity? This is no longer a Nietzsche question merely. This is a question of the moral lifeof our time. Perhaps this is the last weightiest question which our time can put to men of dignity and depth of thought.
However, it is only fair to say at the outset that no one has any right to fly into a rage at Nietzsche in particular for summoning men to arms against pity, since, if rage is in order at all, the conventional practices of our previous life furnished therefor occasion enough. Aye, there is an old wide-spread fashion of averting the strain of pity which is so mean and cool that almost anybody could fly into a frenzy over it—the fashion, not of triumphing over pity, but of cowardly flight from pity. Consider the whole conception of life of the so-called favorites of fortune. To what lengths do they go that they may be spared the sight of misfortune, that they may not be agitated by a touch of pity! How they avoid, if at all possible, every place that would remind them that there are want and misery, hunger and sorrow, in the world—as the Parisians did, until Zola, the most calumniated author of the nineteenth century, dragged these things, with their ensuing vices, out into the light of day and made the French people look at them! How furious they are, as the French were at great Zola, at anybody who dares to open their eyes to the sad and harrowing realities of life! Nay, they have invented a special art and religion that shall succeed in sparing them pity; the former to conjure up a make-believe world in which life shall be all sunshine and gladness; the latter to advocate the doctrine that all pain is punishment from God, and that, since God must be just, He will properly parcel out and administer pain and suffering. We do not need to bestir ourselves in behalf of sufferers; that would be a wrong against God; a doubt of the Everlasting Justice; hence all may not feel pity for the wicked man upon whom God visits His wrath and punishment! Thus the “good people” and the just harden their hearts. They have stones which they heave at the poor sinner—especially at a “sinful woman”—but no mercy, no pity, for those who are not as they are, and do not think and feel and act as they do. They grow chesty: “Yes, if others were as good as we are, then it would be as well with them as it is with us!” With such pride they choke all feeling of kinship and connection with others. Where pride grows, no pity can thrive. And at last pity itself becomes a kind of pride, a sorry self-reflection as in a mirror. The most subtle and dangerous way for men to free themselves from the pain of pity, when they cannot stave it off completely, is to make it a thing of pride and praise: “I thank Thee, God, that I am not like the hard-hearted!” Then they revel and riot in their pity, then they rejoice that they are so good-hearted, so tender-hearted, because they can see no suffering without being touched and melted to tears. And the pitiful call this their morality and their virtue. They make a “delicacy” of their pity to set before themselves at the table of life when all of life’s other gratifications and indulgences begin to grow stale and tasteless. The tears of emotion that gush generously forth at the spectacle of suffering humanity—even of frail andfaulty humanity—taste so good! Many is the time they have felt the weary weight of this unintelligible world on listening to a sad story or seeing a play, and screwed up melancholy and doleful countenances—maybe pity can be put among the things that can make life, always requiring to be braced up a bit, a trifle more interesting. And so pity is at last honored with a place among the articles of luxury with which they enrich and adorn their lives—their lives, always surprising them with some fresh sign of poverty and patches!
But if all guilt be revenged upon earth, punishment of this misuse of pity may not be stayed. It is doubly punished and revenged—upon him who practices it and upon him upon whom it is practiced. Or do we not know that the pharisees of pity become ever more feeble and sentimental men, losing all power and energy of will through pure emotionality? Or do we not know that most crafty business speculation, speculation in pity, in which sufferers magnify their least pains, expert in making an impression with their “cases” in order to arouse the interest of the pitiful, an interest which need not always be relieved by the clink of coin, but which makes ready its punishment much more frequently with idle hours spent in dreaming and weeping, with the unprofitable breathing-out of pathos and reproach? Often enough the enthusiasts of the kind and tender heart do not know what they do, but they rob men of the marrow of life, they emasculate and coddle the soul; and the emotional debauchery in which they live, requires ever stronger stimulus which ever operates more enervatingly still.
Contemplating these devastations wrought everywhere in life by love’s softness, one begins to cherish some respect for a Nietzsche who preached to men “a hard bed,” love’s hardness. To be sure, if one is to understand this preaching, one must keep in mind what the preacher says: “My brethren, give heed unto each hour, in which your spirit wisheth to speak in parables: there is the origin of your virtue.” Nietzsche speaks in parables. For instance, his words on war and warriors—a good war hallowing every cause—these, too, are parables. And hardness, bravery, praised by him as the strength and consecration of life, truly this is not the barbarity of prize-fighting or the brutality of lynching; this is the high mind fearlessly going its own way, stampeded by no danger into thinking and acting and being other than what it holds to be right. Danger is but the acid test which such a mind applies to the ingredients of its life. To such a mind, hardness is the characteristic of the gem, of the diamond, which thus guarantees its genuineness, its sparkling worth. Zarathustra-Nietzsche loves everything which steels the will and augments life’s force. Therefore he loves his foe, for, thanks to his foe, he never comes to a standstill and stagnates. Therefore his true friend is the one who has become his best foe, who makes him sweat, who summons him to risk hot war with him, to break a lance with him in an intellectual passage at arms in which the soul struggles for its own yea and nay.So, similarly, this Zarathustra-Nietzsche hates pity. Why? Not because he is a brute. “Kind unto the sick is Zarathustra.... Would that they were convalescent and conquering and creating a higher body for themselves!” Not because, as we have seen, so much of pity is for self’s sake and not for the sake of service, though this is an essential part of the answer. Then why? Because it works an embarrassment for man, because it knows no shame, no reverence, in the presence of the giant forces which, for every brave soul, is concealed in great and deep pain. Therefore he combats pity because it is a passion and not an action, and yet life is not for passionists but for pragmatists. “All great love is lifted above all its pity, for it seeketh to create what it loveth.... But all creators are hard.” “If thou hast a suffering friend, be a couch for his suffering, but a hard bed, as it were, a field-bed; thus thou wilt be of most use for him.”
Hearken ye, O Reader, to another Transvaluer of values Whose Person Nietzsche “the Crucified,” excoriated at ill-starred moments, but did so on the basis of that very “high mind” for which He, rejecting pity, went to His Crucifixion! “And Jesus, Pilate handed over to their will. As they led him off he was followed by a large multitude of the people and also of women who beat their breasts and lamented him; but Jesus turned to them and said, ‘Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me!’”
Now, as it seems to me, this Nietzsche preaching is not so far removed from that other preaching which we are otherwise wont to call a gospel, a good, a glad message! For this glad message was not a lamentation, but a hymn of heroism and of victory, a call to creation! And I take the liberty to repeat that the Preacher of this glad message forbade pity for himself even in his dark and desolate hour—do you think what that hour was?—when he appealed to weak and wailing and weeping womanly souls, Weep not for me, weep for yourselves! And He Who Himself wills no pity, Who bears in Himself a greatness which is elevated above all pity, would he have willed to have men so weak and pitiful as we often enough today imagine the Ideal of a Christ-man to be?
What, now, if the true pitiful love, the true mercy to men, were tohardenthem, to make them free from what meant only suffering to them? It is, to be sure, very much more difficult to make men themselves “hard,” so that the burden lying on their backs can not crush them than it is to indulge their weakness and sensitiveness and to leave them as they are. Indulgent parental hearts would a thousand times rather remove all life’s burdens from their children than to place burdens upon their children which they might learn to bear. So often our pity plays us a sorry trick—we would rather do something for men than to repress our pity, silence it, and then teach men how they themselves can do what is good and necessary for them. We speak of a ministrant love, meaning a love which knows nothing higher than to provide comforts, avert trials, spare vexations, and everything which could shake a man to his foundations. How much greatera service of love it would be to lead man to himself, make him strong that he might be equal to what we had thought we must take away from him! Pray, not for easier tasks, lighter burdens, but for more power! This Nietzschean love is not only a greater love, it also requires a greater, more tiresome work, it requires a constant conquest of our pitying weakness, it requires a courageous faith in man and a firm earnest appraisal of his power. And how entirely different a service of friendship do we render a friend if we show a hard love to him, if he break a tooth on us, as Nietzsche says, because we do not flatter and fit him, but compel him, out of love compel him, to assert himself against us, and to withstand our defense of our rights against him! Foolish men seek their friends among theJasagern, most preferably, among those who are of their own opinion in everything. They then call this an ideal friendship: two souls and one thought, two hearts and one beat! But in such a friendship, their best, their own soul, their sense of truth, and their courage for the truth, soon rusts. To spare a friend the disillusion which he would suffer if he felt an antagonism, an opposition, in the friendship, they have pity on him, they learn to keep silent, and silence soon becomes a lie. Since they dare not cause the friend the grief of discovering to him these lies, they lie more, lie life-long,—all out of pity, out of their weak tender love. How much nobler and greater that friendship whose ideal Nietzsche sketches for us, in which we are gripped from the outset in a friend’s contradiction and hostility! We seek and love in him precisely what is not attuned to us, but is his own, and must forever remain his very own. Such hard love which gives the friend a “camp-bed” and not one as “soft as downy pillows are” and requires the like in return is the proudest manliest friendship, is alone what brings our sluggish and pampered natures forward, and makes us stronger, freer, richer in understanding and experience. Every genuine love should be a spur, freedom, to us, not an easy berth and a trammel in life.
We cannot, we ought not, refrain from pity in life. We cannot, we ought not, stave it artificially from us. Pity belongs to man as man. It comes stealing upon him, and ought so to come. But when it has come, he ought not to be enmeshed in it. Still less ought he to let it grow rank. He should ennoble it, overcome it, with strong will and energetic deed. For pity is yetsufferingand all suffering summons men to conflict, to defense. The sign that such overcoming has succeeded is thatrejoicing-togetherhas been born ofsuffering-together—is that the conflict has issued in a victory in which hard militant love triumphs over every weakness, and is grateful to the hardness which has given it such a victory!
In his brilliant book on Nietzsche, “Who Is to Be Master of the World,” Ludovici writes powerfully as follows: “What the units of a herd most earnestly seek and find, is smug ease, not necessarily mastership. For mastership entails responsibility, insight, nerve, courage andhardnesstowardsone’s self, that control of one’s self which all good commanders must have, and which is the very antithesis of the gregarious man’s attitude towards himself.... Hardness?—He knows nothing of the hardness that can command his heart, his mouth, before it attends to the command of others; he knows nothing of the hardness that can dispel the doubts of a whole continent, that can lead the rabble and the ruck to deeds of anomalous nobility, or that can impose silence upon the overweening importunities of an assembled nation. He knowsthishardness, that he could coldly watch the enemy of his private and insignificant little interests, burnt at the stake; he knowsthishardness, that he would let a great national plan miscarry for the sake of a mess of pottage;—the gregarious man and future socialist has this so-called hardness; but so have all those who burn with resentment,—so have all parasites and silent worm-gnawers at the frame-work of great architecture.”
But not Nietzsche’s interpreter, but Nietzsche himself, shall have the last word: “Praises are what maketh hard!—I do not praise the land where butter and honey—flow! To learn to look away from one’s self is necessary in order to see many things: this hardener is needed by every mountain climber.”
Also Sprach Aristoteles—Zarathustra!