Noise

George Burman Foster

Thereis a discovery, by no means pleasing or edifying, that the student makes as he broadly surveys the history of humanity. All the great turning-points of that history seem to be inwardly associated with violent upheavals and fearful revolutions. And of all these revolutions, it may be doubted whether history records any one on so large a scale as that which confronts us under the name of Christianity, in the transition from ancient to mediæval ecclesiastical culture. It was not a single Crucified One that gave Christianity the sacred symbol of its religion; unnumbered thousands—mostly slaves—breathed out their poor lives on martyrs’ crosses. The old culture went down in rivers of blood—not too figuratively meant—and a new arose, or, better, was created. Now, what is true of this most important revolution of our antecedent cultural life is true also, in corresponding measure, of every new “becoming” in the history of peoples. No state, no church, no social form, has ever arisen but that the path of the new life has passed over ruins and graves.

Must this be so? Must it be eternally so? Is it a thing of historical inevitability, is it even a law of the very order of the world itself? The answer—first answer, at all events—is, Yes! To affirm itself, to persist as life,—this belongs as nothing else does to life’s very nature. What newly arises negates what has already arisen. All that is living pronounces a sentence of death upon all that has been alive and that now sets itself against the new life. Accordingly, we are wont to call life a struggle for existence. Old Greeks coined a phrase,Polemos pater panton: war is the father of all things. The right to life is the right of the strong.

In view of these things, may we fairly raise the question as to whether there are exceptions to so universal a rule? Were we to set up a different right, would it not be the right of the weak? Would it not be to make the sick and the infirm masters over the well and the strong? Would it not be to preach a decadent morality as do all the pusillanimous and the hirelings who beg for the protection of their weakness because they do not have the strength to drive and force their way through life?

The man who, for a generation, has been called the prophet of a new culture, thisFriedrich Nietzsche, is he not, then, precisely the apostle of this man of might and mastery, of ill-famedHerrnmoral, master’s morality, especially? Napoleon, his Messiah—do you think? Did he not gloat and glory over the time when the wild rovingblonde Bestiewas still alive in the old Germans? Did he not worship the beast of prey, memorialize the murderer, stigmatize the morality of Christianity as a crime against life, because of its saying, Blessed are the poor and the sick, the peaceable and the meek?If, now, the word of this new prophet should make disciples, should even revolutionize the times, should we close our churches and stop our preaching, as the first thing to be done? For the churches preach goodness and love, not might and dominion; see in man child of God, not beast of prey.

If all this were a partisan matter—for or against Nietzsche—I would have nothing to do with it. To join in the damnatory fulminations against this man, or to advertise mitigating circumstances for his thought, and to re-interpret the whole from such a standpoint, until the whole should seem less brutal and less dangerous—to do either the one or the other is not for me, but for those polemicists and irenicists who are adding to the gayety of nations in these otherwise heartbreaking times, by the high debate as to whether Nietzsche be both the efficient and the final cause of our present world war. Not to defend Nietzsche, not to condemn him, but to wrestle for a firm, clear, moral view of life in our seething times, this alone is most worth while, and this too is my task.

But for all that, I do believe we must penetrate much, much deeper into this new prophet’s spirit than either friend or foe has yet done, if we are to win from Nietzsche a deepening of our own and our time’s moral view of life.

Would that we might forget, for a moment at least, all that partisan praise and blame have scraped together respecting this most modern of all philosophers; would that we might accompany him into the most hidden workshop of his own thoughts and hearken to the personal confessions of his wonderful soul! And what would we hear there? This preacher of crash and catastrophe and cataclysm, temporal and eternal, speaking of “thoughts which come with dove’s feet and steer and pilot the world”; of “the stillest hours which bring the storm.” Zarathustra-Nietzsche hears theHöllenlärm, the hellish alarum, that men make in life, that life itself makes; he observes how men lend their ears to this noise, how they are frightened by it, or exult over it, how they think that the truth is the truer where the noise is the louder, how the howling of the storm signifies to men that something good and great must be taking place, some great event of history must be under way. Then Nietzsche sets himself like a flint against this evaluation of things: “The greatest experiences, these are not our noisiest, but our stillest hours. It is not around the inventor of new noise, it is around the inventor of new values that the world revolves, inaudibly revolves.” I speak for myself alone, but these are words, Nietzsche words, for which I would gladly sacrifice whole volumes of moral and theological works. These words sharpen the eye and the ear for life-values which the majority of men today pass by—pass by more heedlessly perhaps than ever. These great words supply us with a criterion for the evaluation of questions of the moral life, a criterion that no one will cast aside who once comes to see what it means. It is a criterion without which we do not yet comprehendlife in its depths, because we so constantly contemplate things from a false angle of vision. Something of the men who are carried away by “hellish alarum” lives in all of us. Let there be stillness without, and we think that there is nothing going on. Let nature peal and groan outside there, so that all gigantic forces seem to be released; then we have respect for her, we discern in such over-power even a divine creative force or a divine destructive will. Let people collide, the earth quake from thunder of cannon, and we signalize such a day in our history, pass it down from child to child, and we call such and such a battle a world-historical event.

But we forget the best. A blustering and brewing pervades nature when Spring comes over the land to conquer Winter. When we hear the conflict we cry: “Spring has come!” Not so. The true, genuine Spring-life, nascent underneath the fury, makes no noise at all, weaves away inaudibly, invisibly, in tiny seeds, and conceals in itself the noiseless new germs of life.

Thomas Carlyle, though a trifle noisy himself at times, could finely write: “Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are thenceforth to rule.” Wordsworth, not unmindful of

“The silence that is in the starry sky”

yet, gazing on the earth about him, sang

“No sound is uttered,—but a deepAnd solemn harmony pervadesThe hollow vale from steep to steepAnd penetrates the glades.”

“No sound is uttered,—but a deep

And solemn harmony pervades

The hollow vale from steep to steep

And penetrates the glades.”

And for Longfellow there is

“Hoeder, the blind old godWhose feet are shod with silence.”

“Hoeder, the blind old god

Whose feet are shod with silence.”

But the chief study of mankind is still man, not nature and the gods. Man’s silences! Yes, amid the smoke of powder and clink of swords, peoples slash each other; and the men who make such uproar the people call great. But the might and work of a people are to be found in that quiet heroism, of which no one can discern anything outwardly—that quiet heroism to which no one can unveil monuments in our cities. It is the inaudible battles of the heart that this heroism fights; and the quieter it is, the more gloriously it shines. Men with big voices and mighty lungs we hear. Their words excite, move to tears, arouse boisterous and voluble antagonisms. These who assemble about them such billowy mobs, we are tempted to think that they are the leading spirits, that a vast power must live in them, since they are so able to move inert men. But another prophet,modern also, has said to these bawlers in market places: “Do you think that he who stirs up scandal moves the world?” Nothing easier than to start a scandal! Also, nothing jollier for numerous men, to say nothing of women. But scandal is a roaring in the ears. It does not reach the heart. It irritates, over-irritates the nerves. It creates no blessings, no life. A tiny word that sinks down into the deep of the soul, and quietly does its work there of germinating and sprouting—this means infinitely more for the world than the “alarum” of all the professional and unprofessional bawlers. Deep rivers make least din. Light cares speak; mighty griefs are dumb. A heart must be profane indeed, in which there is nothing sacred to silence and the solemn sea. Once more, to quote Carlyle: “Under all speech that is good for anything lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as eternity; speech is shallow as time.”

It were well to begin at home, and learn to evaluate experience aright in our own being. There are moments in our lives when everything that we encounter disconcerts us; nay, when our whole being seems to be off the hinges, out of joint. Pain plows up our innermost selves. We could shriek from heartbreak and woe. We stand there undone. And men who see us and hear us moaning so piteously, groaning so painfully, have the feeling: “No pain like this!” But how mistaken they are! For there is a cry of the soul, heard of no one, more painful than all that can be pitied or lamented. There are labors and battles of the soul wherein nothing is hammered and driven, and yetsomething newis formed. It is never so still in a man as when he makes up his mind to have done inwardly with some experience. As long as there is foaming and blustering within, we accomplish nothing. True work tolerates no tempest. We must be still. And when old values are broken, when we must lead life to new goals, the quiet hour must come in which a divine child of the spirit is conceived by the holy spirit; and the brightest light which we can kindle within will burn so quietly and clearly that no cloud of smoke shall ascend therefrom, and there shall be no flickering to bear witness of contact with the restless world. “There the true Silence is, self-conscious and alone.”

Behold, then, this Nietzsche, who flees all “alarum” and execrates all din as a falsification of the moral values of life; who lives preferably thousands of feet above the world there below, who lingers on the loftiest lands of life whither no whirring rattle of the day could rise! Could this Nietzsche find joy in men mauling and making a mess of each other? Could this Nietzsche preach a culture in which battalions in uniform should line up against those in blouse to see who knew best how to deal the deadly blow? Could he gloat over the field where the thunder of battle thundered the loudest? “Inventor” Krupp’s “new noise”—would that appeal to Nietzsche who wanted all silent save the dripping rain, and who worshipped sunshine alone? One might answer these questions in the light of one’s own experience.Let us suppose that we comprehend the meaning of thestillsten Stunden, the quietest hours, and the worth of those great happenings of which nothing reaches the newspapers, and which noavant-coureurtrumpets. Tell me, could we then detect even the slightest inclination to be our own heralds, and to sacrifice our quietest hours to the gaping and squabbling of men? Men—so the old gospels say—ought not to cast their pearls before swine, or give that which is holy to the dogs. But what is pearl, what is holy, if not what the Nietzschean still hour contains and produces? There is something so tender and beautiful in that hour that we shrink from expressing it, from translating it into thought, lest word and thought tincture its best perfume. Silence is sweeter than speech, more musical than song. Whoever has a deep in himself into which he alone descends and penetrates, aplusof his life that remains after we have known and weighed all his words and deeds, protects this deep and thisplusfrom everything that could make a noise, from all mere words, from all intrusive and obtrusive tittle-tattle.Sich eine Oberfläche anheucheln, to feign a surface, to wear a mask, this is the original and fine insight into such psychology. Man envelops himself in unneighborliness, not to hold haughtily other men away from him, but to save himself from them, so that they may not clumsily finger some pearl which could not stand so rude a touch. Why speak in parables? Because it is not given unto them to know the mystery of the kingdom, said the Nazarene. Parables were a protecting shell encasing the most intimate kernel, which ignorance or awkwardness might otherwise corrupt or destroy. Nietzsche and the Nazarene held a deep and aplusso uniquely their own that they intentionally sought, not to be understood, but to be misunderstood, with reference thereto.

Yes, there is a “surface” which only the man knows and uses who bears about a deep in his own being. There, hypocrisy becomes a protection of truthfulness; surface a protection of depth. Whoever “feigns such surface,” wears such mask, is infinitely more honest and veracious than he who has no silence in his deep which cannot be speech on his tongue—a speech which is often only motions and noises of the tongue of him who pries curiously into what he is inwardly incompetent to understand, or offers a superficial and voluble sympathy for griefs of which he is as innocent as a babe unborn, or a jaunty appreciation of values and verities and virtues for which he has never sweat even a drop of blood. To wear a mask, to lie, lie, lie,—that is thetruthof the soul as it hides its treasures and its sanctities from vulgarity and volubility!

‘The suitor oftruth? Thou?’ Thus they mocked.‘Nay! Merely a poet!An animal, a cunning, preying, stealing one,Which must lie,Which must lie, consciously, voluntarily,Longing for prey,Disguised in many colours,A mask unto itself,A prey unto itself.That—the suitor of truth?Only a fool! a poet!Only a speaker in many coloursSpeaking in many colours out of fools’ masks,Stalking about on deceitful word bridges,On deceitful rain-bows,Between false heavensWandering, stealing about—Onlya fool! a poet!(Italicsmine.)

‘The suitor oftruth? Thou?’ Thus they mocked.

‘Nay! Merely a poet!

An animal, a cunning, preying, stealing one,

Which must lie,

Which must lie, consciously, voluntarily,

Longing for prey,

Disguised in many colours,

A mask unto itself,

A prey unto itself.

That—the suitor of truth?

Only a fool! a poet!

Only a speaker in many colours

Speaking in many colours out of fools’ masks,

Stalking about on deceitful word bridges,

On deceitful rain-bows,

Between false heavens

Wandering, stealing about—

Onlya fool! a poet!

(Italicsmine.)

Thus, it is the Deep, the Unique, the Abyss within, that is the great Isolator. Nietzsche was indeed “the eagle that long, long gazeth benumbed into abysses, intoits ownabysses!”

And he spoke in parables. Give heed—so Zarathustra counsels his disciples—to the times when your spirits speak in parables, for in these times is the origin of your virtue.

I said I would not vindicate Nietzsche. But what if his deification of force-humanity, of master-humanity, wereOberfläche, “surface,” mask, which he “feigned” or wore, in order to protect his pearls from sows, his holy of holies from hounds? What ifthis—scandalizing the scandalous!—were but picture and parable which Nietzsche flaunted to the people that they might wreak their vengeance thereupon? And the parable is so pertinently chosen that it says everything to men of sense and seriousness, hides everything from fools; that the pearls can be recognized if right eyes behold, but protectingly concealed from rude eyes and awkward hands.

Of course, Nietzsche was a homicide! So must we be! If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee; if thy right hand offend thee, hew it off, and cast it from thee. And there are things more offensive than an eye or a hand! These are the weaknesses which we pamper and grow in ourselves: thought-lessness which we wink at; old pet habits which have come to be just too dear for anything, especially for us to knife; above all, sickly sentiments, self-pity, from which even all our joys cannot rescue us—so that we do not have the courage to join those warriors who turn their weapons against their own selves, and to swear an “I will,” that is hard as steel, against all these softnesses and humors and self-commiserations. Surely, it were well to be force-men, master-men, so that we would not coddle our impotency or carry on a pleasure-pain play with our weakness.

Yes, in these “stillest hours” there is also a “still” homicide and interment, a plucking out and a hacking off, and the warrior-hero does not betray the least pathos as he does this—there is no plaintive note in his voice. The greatest thing about the dying Socrates, sipping away at his cup of hemlock,was the total absence of pathos and self-pity. Ah, if we but took half the pains to marshal forces of will in ourselves, that we now devote to conserving our weak wills, and to adducing all sorts of plausible reasons for their impuissance! If we but actually learnedHerrenmoral, master-morality, that were indeed masterful and understood mastership! We are called to be masters by our creator, not only masters of the earth, but also masters of the spirit. And mastership is a great sacred thing, which we ought to learn from world-masters. We ought to be hammers in life and not anvils. The great calamity among men is that they shrink from being hammers, and call the virtue of the anvil that lets itself be struck by the name of “patience.”

It is just not true that Christianity abhors master-morality and preaches aSclavenmoral, a slave-morality. Yes itistrue of the cowardly and inert thing that men call Christianity, this religion of the study-chair and the barracks which can make use of no master, because it summons just those powers to rule whose whole strength consists only in the weakness of others. But thereisa Christianity which has been outright mighty force, outright master-instinct, this kingly Christianity, in whose presence a Pilate, and a Herod, with the entire host of their war-slaves, were feeble folk indeed; a Christianity of love and gentleness and meekness,—aye, aye, sir! But one can have gentleness in the heart,—and yet lay on with a club! That was indeed master-morality when the Son of Man made himself master of the Sabbath; when he with a whip of cords scourged the money-changers and mammonists out of the Temple! That was a force-man and a master-man who hurled his, “Get thee behind me, Satan!” against the weak heart of Peter.

How would it do for our churches to have a new festival, a festival of “the stillest hour,” memorializing the “invention of new values, around which the world revolves, noiselessly revolves”? Noises enough, often enoughHöllenlärm, have there been in our churches, are yet, God knows! But it is not noise that rules the world. It is stillness which ultimately is the spiritual and moral might of the men who will possess the kingdom of earth. What if even the history of peoples “feigns a surface,” wears a mask, for those who having eyes see not, having ears hear not? What if men mistakeHöllenlärmfor messages of great occurrences in history, and on this account hold themselves aloof from those phenomena and experiences in whichsomething new, a life of the heart, presses on to its birth-hour? Yet the human race will not always need or require noise and masks as its history rolls on. The more men kill what is really worthy of death, the less will they set out to kill each other. The more powerfully the will becomes conscious of its calling to master, the more strenuously men strive after greatness, human greatness, the more ridiculous will it come to seem to them in the course of time that the force of man should be sought in the force of his muscles, the mastership of man in the hoarded prerogative of powderand lead. The day will yet come—as come it shall—when we will estimate our life, not according to its noisiest, but according to its stillest hours. And then a great and pure life will be created by what is done in the heart of man.

Back to Index Next