Part 31 (1/2)
And that was the end of my long adventure.
December 30th.
”I am pleased to be able to tell you that your poem is a great deal better than I expected to find it. I am forced to write briefly by reason of pressure of business; but you have very considerable literary gifts. The work is clearly made whole of sincerity; it shows a considerable command of expression, and a considerable understanding of style. It has qualities of imagination and of emotional insight, and is obviously the fruit of a wide reading. But besides these things, it is exactly as I expected, and as I told you--the work is very narrow in the range of its appeal; you can not in the least blame the publishers for declining it, because it is true that very few people would care for it. My own judgment is hardly capable in the matter, because I myself am not an idealist. Recording my own opinion, I found the poem monotonous, and not especially interesting; but then, I say that of much that some other people consider great poetry.
”My advice to you is just what it was before--that you go out into the world and become acquainted with life. Not knowing you personally, I could not counsel you definitely, but I should think that what would benefit you most would be a good stiff course in plain, every-day newspaper reporting.
Newspaper reporters have many deficiencies, but at least they learn to keep in touch with their audiences, and to write in a way that takes hold of the people. You may not welcome this advice--but we seldom welcome what is good for us.”
I am not dead yet, and I have not lost the power of getting angry. Such things as that do me good, they make me fight, they get all my soul in arms. Great G.o.d, the blindness, the asininity of it!
It is enough if you can cla.s.sify a man; give him a name--and then it's all out of the way. If he have faith and fire and aspiration and wors.h.i.+p--and you have not--why, say that he is an idealist, and that you are something else, and let it go at that.
December 31st.
The poem came back to-day, and I trudged off to another publisher's--the sixth. I have no hope now, however; I send it as a matter of form.
I shudder at the prospect of to-morrow's coming; for it will be just a month more to the time I said I should have to go to work!
And New Year's day--my soul, if I had foreseen this last New Year's! I thank Heaven for that blessing, at least.
Who are these men that I should submit to their judgments? These men and their commonplace lives--are they not that very world out of which I have fought my way, by the toil of nights and days?--And now I must come back and listen to their foolish judgments about my song!
--You felt what was in it, you poor, stupid man! But it did not take you with it, for you are not a poet; you have not kept the holy fire burning, you are not still ”strenuous for the bright reward.” And so you found it monotonous! Some men find nature monotonous. And some men find music monotonous.
January 5th.
Two days ago I was reading Menschen und Werke, by Georg Brandes. I was glancing over an essay on Friedrich Nietzsche, and I came upon some things that made my heart throb:--
”This man [Nietzsche's ideal] takes willingly upon himself the sorrow of speaking the truth. His chief thought is this: A happy life is an impossibility; the highest that man can attain is a heroic life, a life in which, amid the greatest difficulties, something is striven for which, in one way or other, proves for the good of all. To what is truly human only the true men can lift us, those who seem to have come into being through a leap of nature, the thinkers and discoverers, the artists and producers, and those who achieve more through their being than their doing; the n.o.ble, the good in a great sense, those in whom the genius of the good works.
These men are the goal of history. Nietzsche formulates the sentence 'Humanity shall labor continually at this, to beget solitary great men--and this and nothing else is its task.'--
”Here Nietzsche has reached the final answer to his question 'What is Culture?' For upon this rest the fundamental principles of Culture, and the duties which it imposes. It lays upon me the duty to place myself actively in relation to the great human ideals. Its chief thought is this: To every one who will look for it and partake of it, it sets the task; to labor in himself and outside of himself at the begetting of the thinker and the artist, the truth-loving and the beauty-loving man, the pure and good personality--and therewith at the fulfilment of nature....
”In our day a so-called Culture inst.i.tution signifies only too often an arrangement by which the cultured, moving in closed ranks, force to one side all those solitary and contrary ones whose striving is directed to higher things. Also among the learned there is so far lacking, as a rule, all sense for the genius that is coming into being, and every feeling for the work of the contemporary and struggling soul. Therefore, in spite of the irresistible and restless advance in all technical and specialized fields, the conditions for the originating of the great are so little improved that the opposition to the highly gifted has rather increased than diminished.
”From the government the superior individuals can not expect much. It helps them rarely when it takes them into its service, very certainly it will help them only when it gives them full independence. Only true Culture can prevent their early becoming weary or exhausted, and protect them from the exasperating battle with Culture-philistinism.”