And we were cold,—O bitter times were those,—
And we were rained on, and we walked through mire,
Or found a haystack, there to lie and doze;
Until at evening, with a let of rain,
We shivered awake, and limped, with crying pain,
To farms, and begged a meal.... if they were kind
We warmed ourselves, and maybe were allowed
The barn to sleep in.... I was nearly blind,
Sometimes, with need to sleep—sometimes so cowed
By pain and hunger that for weeks on end
I’d work in the fields,—and maybe lose my friend:
Live steady for a while and flesh my bones,
And reap or plough, or drive the cattle home,
And weed the kitchen patch, and pile up stones;
But always it must end, and I must roam;
One night, as still as stars, I rose, was gone,
They had no trace of me at come of dawn,
And I was out once more in wind and weather,
Brother of larks and leaves and dewy ferns,
Friends of the road I had, we begged together,
And slept together, and tended fire by turns:
O, they were rare times, bitter times were they,
Winding the open road day after day!
And then I came to London.... Sick, half dead,
Crossing a street I shocked with dizzy pain,
With fury of sound, and darkness ... then in bed
I woke; there was a long white counterpane;
I heard, impassively, the doctors talk.
From that day, without crutch, I could not walk.
O, the sick-hearted times that took me then!
The days, like vultures, sat to watch me dying.
It seemed as if they lived to feed on men.
I found no work, it seemed so useless trying.
And I got sick of hearing doorbells ring:
Begging in London was a hopeless thing.
Once I had driven: I tried to get a job
At driving ’busses, but there wasn’t any;
Sometimes, by washing wheels, I earned a bob;
Sometimes held horses for a stingy penny;
And it was hard to choose between the bed
That penny paid for, and a bite of bread.
Often I hid in parks, and slept on benches,
After the criers had wailed and passed me by;
And it was cold, but better than the stenches
Of ten men packed in one room like a sty.
Twice, I was caught and jailed. It wasn’t bad,
Come to think of the cot and bread I had.
But O the weariness, day in, day out,
Watching the people walking on so cold,
So full of purpose, deaf to even a shout,—
It was their utter heedlessness that told;
It made me white at heart and sick with hate.
Some guiltily looked away; some walked so straight
They never knew I lived, but trod my shadow,
Brushed at the laces that I tried to sell....
O God, could I but then have seen a meadow,
Or walked erect in woods, it had been well,
These wretched things I might have then forgiven,
Nor spread my shadow betwixt them and heaven....
I failed at hawking.... somehow, I never sold....
I wasn’t shaped for it by Him that makes.
I tried with matches, toys, sham studs of gold,—
I failed; it needs a fakir to sell fakes.
The bitter pennies that I saved for buying
Were going to hell, and my whole soul was dying.
I tried to steal a sleep, without my penny,
One night at John’s. I hadn’t fed all day.
It was a shrewish winter night, and rainy.
John found me out and swore. I said I’d pay
Next afternoon, or die—he said I’d die....
O, I was longing for a place to lie!...
He pushed me to the door and opened it,
His stinking arm was smothered round my face,
And then I raged and swung my crutch and hit,
He only laughed and knocked me into space.
When I came to, Joe Cluer bathed my head,
And he had paid my penny, so he said.
Joe Cluer was a man—God help him now,
Pneumonia got him down last year and took him.
But he had colored chalks, and taught me how
To draw on stones; sometimes the d.t.’s shook him
So hard he couldn’t draw, himself, but show
The way it’s done.... That’s how I made a go.
And we’d steal out together, he and I,
And draw before the crowds began to come.
At first he helped me. But as time went by
Drink made him worse, and I would help him some:
I drew him six on paper, in the end,
And he would take them out, and just pretend
To draw a little on the dewy stones....
But it was useless, for the stones were wet,
And he just wasted chalk, and chilled his bones,
His hand shook ... O, I can see him yet ...
Cramping his fingers down with hellish pain
To write out “My Own Talent,” large and plain.
Sometimes, to go out early, it was fun,
When it was not too cold, on autumn days
When leaves were rustling downward, and the sun
Came rising red and paley through the haze....
The streets were fairly quiet, the people few,
There was a smell of dead leaves damp with dew....
And I’d draw, singing, places I had seen,
The places that I walked when I was free,
And of my colors best I loved the green,—
O, it would break my heart to draw a tree
Growing in fields, and shaking off the sun,
With cattle standing under, one and one....
And roads I loved to draw,—the white roads winding
Away up, beautifully, through blue hills;
Queer, when I drew them I was always minding
The happy things, forgetting all the ills,
And I’d think I was young again, and strong,
Rising at smell of dawn to walk along....
To walk along in the cool breath of dawn,
Through dusk mysterious with faint song of birds....
Out of the valleys, mist was not yet gone,—
Like sleeping rivers; it were hard for words
To say that quiet wonder, and that sleep,
And I alone, walking along the steep,
To see and love it, like the God who made!...
And I would draw the sea—when I was young
I lived by sea. Its long slow cannonade
Sullen against the cliffs, as the waves swung,
I heard now, and the hollow guttural roar
Of desolate shingle muttering down the shore....
And the long swift waves unfurled in smother of white,
Snow, streaked with green, and sea-gulls shining high,—
And their keen wings,—I minded how, in flight,
They made a whimpering sound; and the clean sky,
Swept blue by winds—O what would I have given
To change this London pall for that sweet heaven!
And I kept thinking of a Devon village
That snuggled in a sea-side deep ravine,
With the tall trees above, and the red tillage,
And little houses smothered soft in green,
And the fishers talking, biding for the tides,
And mackerel boats all beached upon their sides.
And it was pleasure edged with lightning pain
To draw these things again in colored chalk,
And I would sometimes think they lived again,
And I would think “O God, if I could walk,
It’s little while I’d linger in this street
Giving my heart to bitterly wounding feet....”
And shame would gnaw me that I had to do it.
O there were moments when I could have cried
To draw the thing I loved—and yet, I drew it;
But how I longed to say I hadn’t lied,
That I had been and seen it, that I wanted
To go again, that through my dreams it haunted,
That it was lovely here, but lovelier far
Under its own sky, sweet as God had made.
It hurt me keenly that I had to mar
With gritty chalk, and smutchy light and shade,
On grimy pavings, in a public square,
What shone so purely yonder in soft air!
And yet I drew—year after year I drew;
Until the pictures, that I once so loved,
Though better drawn, seemed not of things I knew,
But dreamed perhaps; my heart no longer moved;
And it no longer mattered if the rain
Wiped out what I had drawn with so much pain.
I only care to find the best-paid places,
To get there first and get my pictures done,
And then sit back and hate the pallid faces,
And shut my eyes to warm them, if there’s sun,
And get the pennies saved for harder times,—
Winter in London is no joke, by crimes.
It’s hellish cold. Your hands turn blue at drawing.
You’re cramped; and frost goes cutting to your bones.
O you would pray to God for sun and thawing
If you had sat and dithered on these stones,
And wanted shoes and not known how to get them,
With these few clothes and winter rains to wet them.
You come and try it, you just come and try!
O for one day if you would take my place!
If we could only change once, you and I,
You, with your soft white wrists and delicate face!
One day of it, my man, and like Joe Cluer,
Pneumonia’d get you and you’d die, that’s sure.
O God, if on dark days you yet remember
So small and base a thing as I, who pray,
Though of myself I am but now the ember—
For my great sorrows grant me this, that they
Who look upon me may be shaken deep
By sufferings; O let me curse their sleep,
A devil’s dance, a demon’s wicked laughter,—
To haunt them for a space; so they may know
How sleek and fat their spirits are; and after,
When they have prospered of me, I will go;
Grant me but this, and I am well content.
Then strike me quickly, God, for I am spent.
Yet,—lift me from these streets before I die.
For the old hunger takes me, and I yearn
To go where swelling hills are, and blue sky,
And slowly walk in woods, and sleep in fern;
To wake in fern, and see the larks go winging,
Vanish in sunlight, and still hear them singing!
So die; and leave behind me no more trace
Than stays of chalkings after night of rain;
Even myself, I hardly know their place
When I go back next day to draw again;
Only the withered leaves, which the rain beat,
And the grey gentle stones, with rain still sweet.
* * * * *
So for nine days I suffered this man’s curse,
And lived with him, and lived his life, and ached;
And this vicarious suffering was far worse
Than my own pain had been.... But when I waked,
His pain, my sorrow, were together flown;
My grief had lived and died; and the sun shone.
There was a woman lived by Bloomsbury Square—
She is no more to me; I could not sorrow
To think, I loved this woman, she was fair;
All grief I had was grief that I could borrow—
A beggar’s grief. With him, all these long years,
I lived his life of wretchedness and tears.
Personality
GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER
A powerful appeal to peoples, especially to the German peoples, it was
with this that the nineteenth century began. Still in the eighteenth
century there were no peoples, only dynasties, courts. All life revolved
around these courts. On the crumbs that fell from royal tables, peoples
lived. For the sake of these crumbs, peoples crawled and crouched and
cringed. Then came the Corsican! He trod under foot all these gracious
sovereigns. The greater selfishness of the giant swallowed up the
selfishness of the pygmies. Germany was still but an historical memory.
Europe seemed to have but one will: the will of Napoleon. In the
collapse of dynasties, peoples began to consider themselves. Preachers
of repentance arose who interpreted the sufferings of the people in a
way that could be understood. The Napoleonic thunder awoke them from the
sleep of centuries. There came the prophet Fichte with his
ever-memorable _Reden an die deutsche Nation_. A living divine breath
blew over the dead bones of the Fatherland until they became alive
again. And as the people considered and reflected upon themselves, and
showed the astonished world that they were still there, the judgment
that was executed against the royal courts was turned against their
executor. The German phoenix arose from its ashes, the people revealed
their unwithering power, their eternal life. A rebirth of the people’s
life, this was the program of the major prophet Fichte. Folk culture,
folk education, this was to create a new self within the folk, a free
self, dependent upon a life of its own, instead of a self that was
unfree, dismembered, unsettled. And all the best, freest, noblest
spirits went about the work with a will to renew the folk life in head
and heart and hand.
Did this work succeed? Was even an auspicious beginning made? Or, was a
false path taken from the very start? Confessedly opinions deviate most
widely as to all this. But among those who consider this work as
abortive and bungling, no one has aired his displeasure—if not, indeed,
his disgust and distemper—so energetically as _Friedrich Nietzsche_. The
Germans grew proud of their folk schools, where every one could learn to
read and write, if nothing more. But Nietzsche raged: “Everybody can
learn to read and write today, which in the long run ruins not only the
writing, but the thinking as well!” The Germans founded libraries, built
reading halls, and art institutes, that the spiritual treasures of
humanity might be as widely available as possible. But Nietzsche
scoffed: “Once there was the Spirit of God, now—through its introduction
into the masses it has become _Pöbel_, the vulgar plebeian mob!” He even
called the whole German culture _pöbelhaft_, vulgar, coarse, plebeian;
German manners, unlike French, inelegant and unrefined; ochlocracy or
mobocracy, the democratic instinct of modern civilization—to Nietzsche,
the grave of all genuine human life.
In the tendency of the times there is undoubtedly the danger of leveling
men, of uniformizing their culture, consequently of externalizing their
culture. Nietzsche’s aversion to this tendency is understandable, and is
well worth laying to heart. For example, religion ecclesiasticized is
disspiritualized; morals conventionalized are degraded; so is art; so is
even science, as is seen in the “science made easy” cults and courses.
Nietzsche made it the special business of his life to dam back this
current in the affairs of our modern world. To him, the preaching of the
equality of all men was the most dangerous lie of the last century.
Therefore, he preached the inequality of all men; required of men that
they should not be ironed out to the same smoothness, that they should
not all be hand and glove with each other, but on the contrary, that
they should be aware of their manifold inequalities, keep their
distances, and that thus great and small might be clear as to their real
differences. _Not_ liberty, equality, fraternity, but the _Eigenheit_,
the peculiarity, the uniqueness, the _own-ness_ of the human
personality, the right of man to his _Eigenheit_, the pleasure in its
unfolding and formation—this was to be the watchword of the new culture.
This was what Nietzsche required. He based his requirement upon the fact
that every man is an unrepeatable miracle. He never was before, he never
will be again, except in his own self. This fact is almost self-evident.
It must be kept in mind especially when we place a man into relation
with his surroundings. A man cannot possibly be explained merely as a
result of his environment. No man can be so explained, least of all a
superior individual who has awakened to a self-conscious life, of
distinctive personality, and who is inwardly aware of the mystery of his
own person. Here scientific inquiry, with its descriptions and
explanations, halts. At this point science ceases and we must resort to
intuition and interpretation of life’s deepest mysteries.
Nietzsche was right in his requirement. Man is an unrepeatable miracle.
But may we not go even further than Nietzsche did? All life is peculiar
and singular and unique. Behold the billowy field of grain! Countless
stalks bend to the breeze. The whole seems to be but a great homogeneous
mass. But take any two of these stalks and consider them more minutely,
compare them with each other. Each is something special, something with
an individual life of its own. Pluck an ear from the stalk. One grain is
side by side with another, one looks for all the world just like
another. But, in fact, no one is just like another. And from each grain
a special stalk grows, so special that the like of it was never in the
world before. Or, you wander along the beach. Innumerable are the grains
of sand on the shore of the sea. The multitude of grains form indeed a
uniform mass, so uniform that its very uniformity wearies and pains the
eye, if it is looked at for long. But look sharply, consider any two of
these grains of sand. Each is something for itself. In the whole
illimitable mass, you find no second grain just like the first. What is
true of the little grains of sand is true of every drop in the wide and
deep sea; true of every mote in the air, of every least particle in vast
shoreless cosmic spaces. Then, too, there are the stars—one star differs
from another star in glory, as Paul saw and said long ago.
All this I call the wealth of nature, the wealth, if you will, of God.
In this eternal life, nothing is ever repeated or duplicated. This I
call infinite creative power. Never and nowhere does the weaving and
waxing world deal with copies. Everywhere and everywhen the world
creates an original fontal life of its very own.
Then should not man be awakened to such a life—man in whose eyes and
soul all this singular and peculiar life is mirrored? Should it be man’s
lot alone to be excluded from all this superabounding fulness of
original life? Should he be offended at what is a blessing to all other
creatures, fear their fulness, find the true task of his life in the
renunciation of this fulness? To be sure, the centripetal, solidaric
forces of life do indeed awaken in man. With the breadth of his spirit
man spans the greatest and the least, compares the likest and the
unlikest, combines the nearest and the farthest. But, for all that, he
would sin against life, he would commit spiritual suicide, were he to
use this systematic power of thought to overpaint gray in gray the
variegated world with its colorful magnificence, to make everything in
his own world so similar, so uniform and so unicolored, everything that
was divinely destined and created for an existence of its own. From
everything that was repeated or duplicated in the world would ascend an
accusation to God in whose life all human life was rooted. We who would
thus be only a repetition of another would have the feeling that we were
so much too much, that we were superfluous in the world! For the proof
that we are not superfluous in life is to be found in the fact that no
one else can be put into our place, can be confounded with us, that
there is a gap in life, in the heart, into which no one else can fit,
and that if ever another does occupy our place in life, the gap abides,
surviving as the only trace of our existence in the human heart,
corresponding to our image and our nature. To be superfluous in the
world, to fill therein no place of one’s own, to drift and drag about
with this feeling—the feeling of all this is alone the real damnation of
life, the worst hell that there is in this or in any other world. But
the feeling, even with the minimum capital of life, which yet we may
call our own—the feeling that one makes a necessary, organic,
irreplaceable contribution to the possessions of humanity, this is life
indeed; who has this life, and keeps it alive, knows more joy and bliss
than any other heaven can guarantee.
A life of one’s own that shall yet serve the life of all—there is the
consummation devoutly to be wished! In these days we hear much about
decadence and the decadent. What does that mean? At bottom, the decadent
seeks to escape the diremption of the modern man between the individual
and the social, by affirming the former and negating the latter. The
individual, the social cell, detaches itself from the whole
organization, from the social body, without considering that he thereby
dooms himself to death. The cell can just as little exist without the
organism, as the organism without the cell. Decadence is the last word
which anti-social individualism has to say to our time. The history of
this individualism is the judgment of this individualism. The man who
fundamentally detaches himself from society cuts the arteries of life.
Still the man must be his own man, and not another, even that he may
give a service of his own to society, as a cell must be its own cell and
not another if it is to construct and constitute the organism of which
it is so small a part. Besides, man is not entirely like a cell. He is
in an important sense a supersocial being, as the cell is not
super-organic. So we may as well go on with our discussion of the
Nietzschean uniqueness and _own-ness_ of personality. Personality is
both super-individual and supersocial. We have its truth in
value-judgment and not simply in existence-judgment.
Somewhere in the old forgotten gospels there is a grim stirring word:
Enter by the narrow gate, for the gate is broad and the road is wide
that leads to destruction, and many enter that way. But the road that
leads to life is both narrow and close, and there are few who find it.
Yes, indeed! It is a narrow, a very narrow gate through which men enter
into life; a small, a very small path that leads to this narrow gate.
There is room for only one man at a time—only one! There is one
precaution with which man must sharpen all his wits, if he is to have
regard for the way, so that he may at no moment lose sight of the way;
or if his feet are not to lose their hold and slip, if he is not to grow
dizzy and plunge into the abyss. This is not every man’s thing; it costs
stress and strain and tension; it needs sharp eyes, cool head, firm and
brave heart. It is much easier to stroll along the broad way, where one
keeps step with another, where many wander along together; and if there
but be one that is the guide of all, then of course all follow that one
step by step. On this broad way no one need take upon himself any
responsibility for the right way. Should the leader mislead his blind
followers, the latter would disbelieve their own eyes rather than their
leader, would “confess” that the false broad way was nevertheless the
right way, rather than condemn their own blindness and indolence. These
are the _Herdenmenschen_, the herd men who cannot understand that there
is a strength which only the man feels who stands alone. These are the
men who have no stay in themselves and seek their stay, therefore, in
dependence upon others; possess no supplies of their own, and ever
therefore only consume the capital which others amass.
Friedrich Nietzsche summoned men out and away from this herd. Friedrich
Nietzsche warned men of the broad way and guided their minds to the
solitary paths which are difficult and perilous indeed, but along which
the true life is to be lived. These small paths, these are the paths of
the creative: “Where man becomes a new force, and a new law, a wheel
rolling of itself, and a first mover!” There every force of his being
becomes a living creative force. No thought is repeated, no feeling, no
decision, is a copy of something which was before. This is a new faith
in man. He does not need to live by borrowing. There is a stratum in his
own soul, in whose hidden depths veins of gold are concealed, gold that
he needs but to mine in order to have a worth of his own, a wealth of
his own. This is a new love to the man who conceals undreamt of riches
underneath his poor shell, divine living seedcorn preserved with
germinating power underneath all the burden of the dead that overlay
him. Here Nietzsche, the godless one, chimes with the godly Gallet who
values the error which man of himself finds more highly than the truth
he learns by rote. To be sure, man possesses this that is his very own,
this power of the creator, in his soul, not in his coat, not in his
manners, not in life’s forms of social intercourse. The man is still far
from having everything his very own, if he be only different from
others, if he only says “no” to what others say “yes.” There are people
enough whom one might call reverse _Herdenmenschen_. They esteem
themselves original because they act, think, speak differently from what
they see everybody else doing, and yet they are only the counterpart of
others, they receive the impulse of their life, not from what is living
in their ownselves, but from opposition to what they themselves are not.
What they call beautiful is not beautiful to them because it grips their
souls, fills their hearts with the free joy of vision, but because
others cannot endure it, and call it ugly. The good for which they
strive is not good because they have themselves thereby become stronger,
greater, better, and will always become stronger, greater, better
thereby, but a caprice which they follow, making it a law to themselves,
because others may not do so. As if anyone could live on negation, or
create by digging mole tracks in the fields and meadows of men! Even the
small path is path, and every path has a goal, and the goal of every
path is a “yes” and not a “no!” Therefore, Friedrich Nietzsche,
Contemner of _Pöbel_, of the plebeian mass, would count all as _Pöbel_
who held themselves aloof from the broad way purely because they saw how
many there were that trod it. He would also call the most select and
sought-after exclusivists _Herdenmenschen_ were they to derive the
reason of their action and passion merely from the mania and disease to
be different from the herd.