Longing
George Burman Foster
Itwas indeed a world-historical movement, that old reformation of the Sixteenth century, snapping as it did the fetters of a Church that arrogated to itself all power in heaven and on earth, and defiantly asserting supremacy over the papacy. But the reformation of our day is much more radical and universal. Ours ends what that began, destroys what that established. The critical spirit of our time, this nothing can withstand unless it is in a position to justify and verify itself to the moral and rational judgment of mankind. In our time of day, what is church, what is state, what are society and law and sanctified custom—things that the old reformation partly inherited, partly organized, and wholly bequeathed to us? At best, tones for the musician’s use, clay in the hands of the potter, or stuff for the sculptor’s shaping, materials all, ductile or refractory, to be kneaded into forms for the habitation of man’s free spirit, man’s soul, man’s life. This critical spirit of an all-inclusive reform of life, to which everything belonging to life is subject, for which science works and art as well, living and active in the heart of modern humanity in countless problems, like the woman problem, the labor problem, like national and international social problems, with all their subdivisions,—this critical spirit gives our time a prophetic character. It summons all progressive spirits to the great struggle against a common foe, against all those forces which have banded together for a standstill of life and have made a lucrative and social-climbing business out of retrogression.
Can there be any doubt as to the stand we ought to take with reference to these great movements? May we not greet them as a new spring-time of humanity whose light and warmth shall vanquish winter, and bring life, joy and peace into the land? “When the Day of Passover was fully Come”—may we not see this day in these movements, when a spirit of truth and soul and freedom shall brood over men, and lead them to higher goals and greater tasks of human being?
To be sure, our era is not arbitrarily made, not excogitated and invented by man. To be sure, great elementary forces of life will come, must come, to their unfolding in these movements. To be sure, the matter of real concern is a new structure of humanity, new cultural and social forms, new world-views, new life-views. No doubt these forces of life will carry the individual along with them, will come upon him and coerce him when he does not so will, will not at all even ask him what he wills, what he has to say to them, or how he regards them. But on this very account, in surveying the great whole of our life development we easily lose sense for what is individual and special. Where classes and masses of men encountereach other, where world-moving thought jolt and undermine thousand-year-old traditions and customs, removing their very foundations, there the individual human soul suffers abridgement, there we forget that even the largest number consists of units, and that the greatest numerical worth is judged according to the worth of these units.
Therefore a great social thinker must reflect ever anew thatmanis the significant thing in every new social culture—is beginning and goal. To understand how to trumpet a word respectingman and his personalityinto this social movement and seething, this is to do an essential service to the modern way of viewing life, this is to warn us that we are not entirely impersonal in the presence of pure objectivity.
No one has done such service to our age in so signal a manner, asFriedrich Nietzsche. He is not the preacher ofsocial, but ofpersonal, man. However, fundamental hater of socialism that he was, he yet became a mighty moving and impelling force for socialism. He, too, wills a new culture,but he wills it through a new man. Therefore, he shows us the way to this new culture in that which is mostpersonalto man, in man’sLonging, or yearning, or craving,—in man’sSehnsucht,—a word of profound import to which none of these English words does justice.
To many ears that program does not sound provocative, promising, alluring.Sehnsuchtis not a feeling that makes one happy and blissful—not a feeling to which one would like to accord a constant and abiding possession of one’s heart. “Only he who knowsSehnsuchtknows what Isuffer”—so sighed Goethe’s Mignon, one of the most impressive and marvelous characters the poet-genius ever created, an Incarnate Yearning, self-consumed in unquieted longing of soul, inHeimwehfor a dreamily visioned distance, to walk in whose sunny beauty her feet were never destined. To preachSehnsuchtis to preach hunger. To hunger is to ache. The gnawing of a hungry stomach—but what is that compared with the gnawing of a hungry heart, when everything that seems good and great and worth striving after becomes elusive, unattainable, unintelligible, to passionate longing?Sehnsuchtis not anxiety, it is worse than anxiety. Anxiety is petty;Sehnsuchtis great and deep. In anxiety, life is dark, and darkness terrifies and distresses man. InSehnsucht, life is luminous, but the light blinds the soul.Sehnsuchtsees all light in a magical radiance, yet cannot clasp it; feels its overpowering attraction, yet cannot satisfy the eye with it. Prometheus chained to a rock, after he had filched the celestial spark from the gods! Tantalus, the luscious fruit just over his head, but wafted away as soon as he longs to grasp it with greedy hands! Yes, all the human heart’s deepest pain, this isSehnsucht. Whoever names a pain that is notSehnsuchthas not peered to the bottom of pain’s chalice.
“Woe to that man through whomSehnsuchtcomes!” we might almost cry. If you love me, do not stir up this yearning for the impossible that isin me, this hot, fervent craving, which can never find satisfaction, which can never enjoy the pleasures of life, or its own self. If you love men, save them from their very youth up in the presence of that tempestuous storm and stress into the Afar, where all solid shores vanish, all safe harbors are closed—save men, trembling, untranquil, from the everlasting question: Knowest thou the land? Knowest it well? Leave men their peace of mind, add no fuel to the flame of their discontent. Do not wrong them by letting them eat of the tree of knowledge. Do not show them the infinite expanse unrolling behind and beyond the narrow confines of their petty lives, thus spoiling the pleasure of their contentment, the joy they have in their limited and longingless life. Paradise is better than Wilderness. The familiar murmur of the brook in the meadow by the old home is more restful than the roar of the cataract or than the eternal haunting mystery and melody of the great sea. Such is the common cry of the lackadaisical, the longingless, thelaissez-fairepeople to all of us who “turn the world upside down.”
Yes, we make all men sufferers—we who pilot their minds to what is not yet there, and to what they not yet are—we who show them a land lying undiscovered in mist or azure ahead of them. We make man seekers, we become disturbers of the peace—this is what they call our crime and blasphemy. Therefore, men give us a wide berth, warn others against our society, afraid of the yearning and hot hunger of soul which would come over them, were they once to hanker after a different fare from what they light upon in their troughs every morning, gorging themselves to an easy satiety—a different fare that would make them hunger ever anew, and arouse them to new longings. No, comfort men; free them from their painful Sehnsucht; teach them the foolishness of hitching their wagons to stars; tell them that all is well with them and make them content with any lot in life that may by chance be theirs! Then you will be their true benefactors; then you will heal the wounds from which the heart would otherwise so easily bleed!
Really? That is a good thing to do for men? The wise thing to say to the heart is: Break your wings in two, so you will not be tempted to brave the blue, to keep company with “the distant sea,” to explore the Afar? The comforting thing to do for the slave is to gild his chains, so that he may have joy in their glittering splendor and show them off as worth their weight in gold? How easy it would be then for the Czar of all the Russias “to go to Berlin if it costs me my last peasant!” How easy for the Vatican to silence the modernist! Throne and altar, anentente cordialeindeed, could then enjoy by “divine right” an unmolested and unworried repose upon a world of dumb, blind, brute peasants. But—
If I’m designed yon lordling’s slave—By nature’s law design’d—Why was an independent wishE’er planted in my mind?
If I’m designed yon lordling’s slave—By nature’s law design’d—Why was an independent wishE’er planted in my mind?
If I’m designed yon lordling’s slave—By nature’s law design’d—Why was an independent wishE’er planted in my mind?
If I’m designed yon lordling’s slave—By nature’s law design’d—Why was an independent wishE’er planted in my mind?
If I’m designed yon lordling’s slave—
By nature’s law design’d—
Why was an independent wish
E’er planted in my mind?
Why did God implantSehnsuchtin the heart of man? “Thou hast made us for Thyself and the heart is restless until it rests in Thee,” said Augustine long ago. Indeed, God is but another human name for Eternal Yearning.
All yearning is love—love that silently and secretly celebrates its triumphal entry into the soul. If you stood at the grave of a joy and felt pain over that which was lost, would not the pain of yearning be the measure, the consciousness, of your newly-awakened, ever-waking love? Would you like to calculate this yearning and exchange therefor coldness and indifference of heart? And if you felt a love so full and deep that moments had eternities concealed in them, even so, on the basis of this love yearning would live more than ever, it would open up to the soul new vistas, new goals, it would give love her life; and a love without yearning, which did not see beyond itself, did not love above itself, finished in that which it was, or it called its own—would quickly cease to be love. Yes, yearning redoubles all genuine love to man; it involves something becoming, something greater, purer, for which love lays the foundation and gives the impulse. Only he who knows yearning, knows what Ilove, so Mignon might have also said. There is something unslaked, unslakable, in every love, an insatiable hunger for more love, for better and purer love.
It is this yearning that saves love from being blind; it gives love the strength and courage of veraciousness; it plunges the heart into a struggle of desperation when a man of our love does not keep his promise, when he becomes pettier and baser than we had believed of him; and yet in this struggle it achieves the victory of faith which mounts above all the pettiness and baseness of the man, to the certainty of its strength, that love faileth never. In every love we love something higher than itself, something for which the heart is destined and endowed. This is the yearning in our love,a will, which stirs in all deep feeling of the heart, and guards against the death which every moment, sufficient only for itself, harbors. Every love, therefore, is itself a yearning: love for truth is the power to grow beyondatruth; love for righteousness is hunger and thirst after righteousness. In all the beauty that greets the eye and awakens exultation and joy in the heart, the soul ripens new sensitivity for new visions of the wonders of life, the heart widens so that it absorbs strength for new beauty and sees new beauty even in the darkness and dust of earth. A man without yearning is a man without love. And if one would guarantee man that satisfaction which one prizes as the most beautiful and most blissful lot on earth, then one must first stifle his heart or tear it from his breast; for as long as this heart still beats, and announces in every beat its insatiable hunger for love, so long will the man harbor and feel his yearning, which will not let the beating heart be satisfied.
But yearning is therefore not simply suffering, not simply love—of thesewe have been thinking—it is also life, the true life of man. The man who lives only for himself, and for the passing moment, does not live at all. And this is what Nietzsche says of man—man a transition and an end—yearning always interring an Old, always swinging a bridge across to a New—love loving the most distant and most future—vision sweeping up the ages to higher man. This, then, is man’s hour of great self-contempt. All his happiness, his wealth, his knowledge, his virtue, seems too little to fill his soul. There is insufficiency, nausea, as to all that he esteems, a cry of wrath from the deep of his being, a cry that sounds like madness to all who call themselves good and righteous, to all who call their execrable smugness a delight.
But this is the great tumultuous yearning, the thunder of whose soaring wings is forever in modern ears. It proffers man a new table of values; forward, not backward, shall he look; loveKinderland, the undiscovered land in distant oceans, that he may make amends to the children fortheir being the children of their fathers!
In this song of jubilee of yearning, who does not hear the old ring, which was once preached as glad tidings, as gospel of humanity! There, too, it was the seeking that were saved, the hungering and not the sated, the starving and not the full. And they, too, had their Higher Man—the Christ they called Him, their Yearning, their Love, their Life. They sang: For me to live is Christ; I live, yet not I; Christ lives in me. And as long as this Yearning lived in them, they were creative spirits. They put a new face upon the world. They transformed the world after the image of their Higher Man. A living, a socially organized Yearning, this is what the whole Middle Age was, with its Below and its Above, where each lower man had in each higher man a rung of the heavenly ladder on which he should climb to a higher existence. A yearning hewn in stone, that was their dome; yearning they sang in their most impressive hymns and masses; and yearning breathed all those celestial figures as they lifted their glorified eyes to the Higher Man of Heaven, the Man Thorn-crowned, Crucified and Risen.
Then the glow of this yearning was cooled by the cold north wind of reality. Yearning petrified. There was no inclination to keep it from dying. They were swift to deal it a deadly blow. They thought they had accomplished marvels to have torn themselvesloose from it. “No moreSehnsuchtnow,” they said, “for we have found happiness!” They smirked and they blinked. Their Higher Man died along with their yearning. The scholars indeed had discovered that this Higher Man was only “man,” a Jewish rabbi whom the people of his day mistakenly held to be a Higher Man, a Messiah, but who now to them themselves and to all moderns belongs to Lower Man, to Past Man. To be sure, it goes against the grain of all of them for their Higher Man to vanish from life, from the yearning of man.Therefore, they seek painfully and anxiously for a “Dignity” which they may still claim for theirhumanJesus. Above all, they thus forget that the Higher Man can never lie behind us, but only before us, not beside us, on a level with us, but only above us. Therefore, all their scholarship cannot rescue the Higher Man for us, and cannot give us back the Great Yearning. Only the living heart can do this, the heart that creates out of its own mystery a yearning. That heart with this yearning will overcome and retire the man of today—all who play the game as lords of today. The modern man of yearning looks beyond himself, works beyond himself, for a Man as high above present-day man as once theChristusbildwas above the men of the long-lost past—a Man who will bear all the deeps of the world and all the deeps of its woes in his heart, while at the same time thirsting in its deepest depths for the eternities. This great yearning, this suffering and loving yearning, this is more than all the wisdom of the scribes, all the subtleties and hairsplittings of the theologians, this is the sacred womb from which a Christ life is born ever and ever again. “Only he who knows yearning, knows what Ilive!”—so might Mignon’s dear words be changed yet again. To save the Sehnsucht is to save the soul.Also sprach Goethe—Nietzsche!