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 themselves loose from it. "No more _Sehnsucht_ now," 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 their _human_ Jesus. 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 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. 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 I _live_!"--so might Mignon's dear words be changed yet again. To save the Sehnsucht is to save the soul. _Also sprach Goethe--Nietzsche!_ The Wicked to the Wise ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE "A brilliant mind, gone wrong!" ... O tell me, ye who throng The beehives of the world, grow ye not ever weary of this song? "The way our fathers went." ... Yes, if our days were spent Sod-deep, beside our fathers' bones, wise, needless were your argument. "The wisdom of the mass." ... Thank God, it too shall pass Like the breathed film hiding the face grayly within the silvered glass. "All's surely for the best!" ... Aye, so shall be confessed By your sons' sons, marking where down we smote you as we onward pressed. The Viennese Dramatists ERNA MCARTHUR