Various

“ 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 the Christusbild was 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. ”

“ For the pathetic element soon creeps into Anatol’s frivolousness. The presentiment of the transitory dwells in his creation—the end of love, the end of enjoyment and of passion, the end of life itself. But this permanent thought of death, not searching beyond the limits of this earth, gives a new intensity to the enjoyment of this life while it lasts. This feeling for life, for the simple joy of breathing, of seeing the spring once more, is one of Schnitzler’s most elementary conceptions. You may look at any of his plays and find this true—the call of Life, expressed with the utmost intensity. ”

“ Why did God implant Sehnsucht in 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Every love, therefore, is itself a yearning: love for truth is the power to grow beyond a truth; 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. ”

“ One of Nature’s henchmen, fresh, bold, Viking in the marrow, with a spirit of steel, a man for whom the sea would smile, poet, painter, stainer of glass, weaver of carpets, spinning a world with the strains of his song, socialist and revolutionist, Morris comes as a teasing wind through the dank atmosphere of nineteenth-century commercialism, daring conventions and going his way a body all soul, a majesty supreme to the last. ”

“ But yearning is therefore not simply suffering, not simply love—of these we 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. ”

“ And we love her. She has given us not only our blood, but our civilization. Since this war broke out she has harbored us and kept her ships running for us. In Paris, one must get a permit from the police to stay or leave. In England, one is free and unmolested. England has always been the refuge of oppressed peoples. Does she need to ask our sympathy now that she is, herself, oppressed? Neutral we must be, and neutral we shall be, but we are not a military nation, and despotism can never attract us.
Every American would rather a bungling democracy than the wisest despot who ever breathed. ”

“ We must be more demanding! The saddest aspect of the whole thing is that choice is such a tiny element in the process of becoming. It is after one has chosen highly that his real struggle—and his real joy—begins. And only on such a basis is built up that intensity of inner life which is the sole compensation one can wrest from a world of mysterious terrors ... and of ecstasies too dazzling to be shared.
Souls are weighed in silence, as gold and silver are weighed in pure water, and the words which we pronounce have no meaning except through the silence in which they are bathed.—Maeterlinck. ”

“ Over the corpse of the other woman the girl rushes into the arms of the man, who can belong to her for the few hours left to him. And after all these breathless events, she remains alone, bewildered, as if after a heavy dream. She lives on and cannot understand that there is still room for her in the world, with all her crime and grief and joy. ”

“ A great, popular, full-blooded thing like war must have a great, popular, full-blooded thing to counteract it. Also, we must remember that the life of the masses of people is not such a beautiful and colored thing that death on the battle-field is such a very dreadful alternative. Painting the horrors of war,—its sordid and unheroic side,—is not enough. Nothing could be more sordid and unheroic than the gray existence of the factory hand. A new, full gospel of affirmation, revolt, and militancy must be set against the war-passion. The spirit of conflict is good ”

“ 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. ”

“ The great iconoclasts of our time who have spoken through the drama—Ibsen, Strindberg, Sudermann, Hauptmann, Wedekind, Brieux, Shaw, Galsworthy, Tolstoi, Tchekhof, Gorki—she has gathered together within one pair of covers to show us that their message is her message:—Change not Compromise.
As she puts it in her foreword:
They know that society has gone beyond the stage of patching up, and that man must throw off the dead weight of the past, with all its ghosts and spooks, if he is to go foot free to meet the future. ”

“ For if literature is supposed to be the mirror of life; if in literature we find the true reflection of a people’s feelings, cravings, ideals, struggles,—then Russia presents the most vivid demonstration of this truth. In no other country has literature reflected real life with such a consequential and accurate preciseness as has that of the land of the Czar in all its epochs and stages. If, therefore, the modern Russian literature has a morbid aspect; if its heroes preach adultery, crime, free love, and praise the lowest mob instincts ”

“ 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. ”

“ The elevating influence of that idealistic literature has been displayed most manifestly upon Russian youth, particularly upon university students. The susceptible young souls followed the call of their great teachers and guides, and plunged with zeal and ardor into the battle. Selfishness, life’s diversions and conventionalities had no place in their puritanic minds. To fight for freedom was their only “sport”; to enlighten the masses, their sole “amusement”; to die on the scaffold for the Ideal, the climax of happiness. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Rule and custom and people who are no more than these are for the scrap heap. Night comes and swallows the dead. History is nothing except for its exceptions. Nature’s royal men we discover despite their uniforms. We note not their habiliments; they have a natural tongue and true approach and are masters of the seconds. They breathe life lustily still. These are the verities. They are descriptive not of antiquity but of the mind which is now. They show us who we are. We love them because of this. ”

“ No one has done such service to our age in so signal a manner, as Friedrich Nietzsche. He is not the preacher of social, but of personal, 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 most personal to man, in man’s Longing, or yearning, or craving,—in man’s Sehnsucht,—a word of profound import to which none of these English words does justice. ”

“ There is no self-respect nor respect for others. The provoked instincts know of no hold-back. The sexual passion intermingles with the passion to torture and to tyrannize. The atmosphere is veiled in a bloody fog. The venom has penetrated all over, through all ranks of the population. Bloody and shameful deeds have become an every-day occurrence not only among the higher society—army officers, bureaucrats, noblemen, cultured and uncultured capitalists; you meet with the same crimes likewise among the poor urban populace, among the lower strata, the so-called “masses” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? Sehnsucht is not anxiety, it is worse than anxiety. Anxiety is petty; Sehnsucht is great and deep. In anxiety, life is dark, and darkness terrifies and distresses man. In Sehnsucht, life is luminous, but the light blinds the soul. Sehnsucht sees all light in a magical radiance, yet cannot clasp it ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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, the laissez-faire people to all of us who “turn the world upside down.” ”

“ The bureaucracy celebrates its victory over the people. The heretofore united forces are divided, the sacred ideal polluted, the bitterly-fought-for constitution brought down to a mocking buffonade, and the “Mighty Ham,” whose coming was predicted a few years ago by the illustrious Merezhkovski, has his day in the degradated country. The Russian giant who had temporarily awakened after a slumber of centuries, snores again hopelessly. Over the vast continent reigns a suffocating atmosphere of despair, decay, and demoralization. ”

“ 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; love Kinderland, the undiscovered land in distant oceans, that he may make amends to the children for their being the children of their fathers! ”

“ Youth is not always synonymous with love of life; the gutter does not always hold a reflection of the sky, and a conversation or even understanding with one’s parents but seldom solves the problem of soul imprisonment. ”

“ The literature, like the life itself, had been a continuous heroism. The harder the oppressions from above, the more resolute was the fighting spirit below; the wilder the reaction that raged over the throbbing country, the loftier were the ideals of the struggling people; the more acute the sufferings of the gloomy present, the brighter and the more attractive appeared the perspectives of the future. ”

“ We wish only that someone with an equal enthusiasm for artistically moral literature would try a similar advertising campaign for a genuine artist. Such advertisements might set forth the facts that the bookshops are being overrun with mediocre novels which make successes by pandering to untruth and public prejudice, that the work of genius is in danger of being choked out by the insincere product of commercial writers, and that the best way to promote the interests of good literature would be to buy in large quantities the novels of John Galsworthy or Romain Rolland! ”

“ Hence, too, they had a certain culture, good manners, and a predominant interest in æsthetic questions, as there had been no occasion for them to know the primitive cares of life. But they were tired of the narrowness and tastelessness of their milieu; they wanted to do things differently—to live and love differently; to put art into their surroundings, their dwellings, their dress; good taste—this had been a tradition of the old Vienna, lost in the transition-state when the middle-class element obtained its precedence over the old aristocracy—was now to take its place again. ”