childhood have a value _per se,_ and are not to be looked upon merely
as passages and bridges, so also unfinished thoughts have their value.
For this reason we must not torment a poet with subtle explanations,
but must take pleasure in the uncertainty of his horizon, as if the way
to further thoughts were still open. We stand on the threshold; we wait
as for the digging up of a treasure, it is as if a well of profundity
were about to be discovered. The poet anticipates something of the
thinker's pleasure in the discovery of a leading thought, an makes us
covetous, so that we give chase to it; but it flutters past our head
and exhibits the loveliest butterfly-wings,--and yet it escapes us.
208.
THE BOOK GROWN ALMOST INTO A HUMAN BEING.--Every author is surprised
anew at the way in which his book, as soon as he has sent it out,
continues to live a life of its own; it seems to him as if one part
of an insect had been cut off and now went on its own way. Perhaps he
forgets it almost entirely, perhaps he rises above the view expressed
therein, perhaps even he understands it no longer, and has lost that
impulse upon which he soared at the time he conceived the book;
meanwhile it seeks its readers, inflames life, pleases, horrifies,
inspires new works, becomes the soul of designs and actions,--in
short, it lives like a creature endowed with mind and soul, and yet
is no human being. The happiest fate is that of the author who, as an
old man, is able to say that all there was in him of life-inspiring,
strengthening, exalting, enlightening thoughts and feelings still
lives on in his writings, and that he himself now only represents the
gray ashes, whilst the fire has been kept alive and spread out. And
if we consider that every human action, not only a book, is in some
way or other the cause of other actions, decisions, and thoughts; that
everything that happens is inseparably connected with everything
that is going to happen, we recognise the real _immortality,_ that of
movement,--that which has once moved is enclosed and immortalised in
the general union of all existence, like an insect within a piece of
amber.
209.
JOY IN OLD AGE.--The thinker, as likewise the artist, who has put his
best self into his works, feels an almost malicious joy when he sees
how mind and body are being slowly damaged and destroyed by time, as if
from a dark corner he were spying a thief at his money-chest, knowing
all the time that it was empty and his treasures in safety.
210.
QUIET FRUITFULNESS.--The born aristocrats of the mind are not in too
much of a hurry; their creations appear and fall from the tree on some
quiet autumn evening, without being rashly desired, instigated, or
pushed aside by new matter. The unceasing desire to create is vulgar,
and betrays envy, jealousy, and ambition. If a man _is_ something, it
is not really necessary for him to do anything--and yet he does a great
deal. There is a human species higher even than wie "productive" man.
211.
ACHILLES AND HOMER.--It is always like the case of Achilles and
Homer,--the one _has_ the experiences and sensations, the other
_describes_ them. A genuine author only puts into words the feelings
and adventures of others, he is an artist, and divines much from the
little he has experienced. Artists are by no means creatures of great
passion; but they frequently _represent_ themselves as such with the
unconscious feeling that their depicted passion will be better believed
in if their own life gives credence to their experience in these
affairs. They need only let themselves go, not control themselves, and
give free play to their anger and their desires, and every one will
immediately cry out, "How passionate he is!" But the deeply stirring
passion that consumes and often destroys the individual is another
matter: those who have really experienced it do not describe it in
dramas, harmonies or romances. Artists are frequently _unbridled_
individuals, in so far as they are not artists, but that is a different
thing.
212.
OLD DOUBTS ABOUT THE EFFECT OF ART.--Should pity and fear really be
unburdened through tragedy, as Aristotle would have it, so that the
hearers return home colder and quieter? Should ghost-stories really
make us less fearful and superstitious? In the case of certain physical
processes, in the satisfaction of love, for instance, it is true
that with the fulfilment of a need there follows an alleviation and
temporary decrease in the impulse. But fear and pity are not in this
sense the needs of particular organs which require to be relieved.
And in time every instinct is even _strengthened_ by practice in
its satisfaction, in spite of that periodical mitigation. It might
be possible that in each single case pity and fear would be soothed
and relieved by tragedy; nevertheless, they might, on the whole, be
increased by tragic influences, and Plato would be right in saying that
tragedy makes us altogether more timid and susceptible. The tragic poet
himself would then of necessity acquire a gloomy and fearful view of
the world, and a yielding, irritable, tearful soul; it would also agree
with Plato's view if the tragic poets, and likewise the entire part of
the community that derived particular pleasure from them, degenerated
into ever greater licentiousness and intemperance. But what right,
indeed, has our age to give an answer to that great question of Plato's
as to the moral influence of art? If we even had art,--where have we an
influence, _any kind_ of an art-influence?
213.
PLEASURE IN NONSENSE.--How can we take pleasure in nonsense? But
wherever there is laughter in the world this is the case: it may even
be said that almost everywhere where there is happiness, there is
found pleasure in nonsense. The transformation of experience into its
opposite, of the suitable into the unsuitable, the obligatory into the
optional (but in such a manner that this process produces no injury
and is only imagined in jest), is a pleasure; for it temporarily
liberates us from the yoke of the obligatory, suitable and experienced,
in which we usually find our pitiless masters; we play and laugh when
the expected (which generally causes fear and expectancy) happens
without bringing any injury. It is the pleasure felt by slaves in the
Saturnalian feasts.
214.
THE ENNOBLING OF REALITY.--Through the fact that in the aphrodisiac
impulse men discerned a godhead and with adoring gratitude felt it
working within themselves, this emotion has in the course of time
become imbued with higher conceptions, and has thereby been materially
ennobled. Thus certain nations, by virtue of this art of idealisation,
have created great aids to culture out of diseases,--the Greeks,
for instance, who in earlier centuries suffered from great nervous
epidemics (like epilepsy and St. Vitus' Dance), and developed out of
them the splendid type of the Bacchante. The Greeks, however, enjoyed
an astonishingly high degree of health--their secret was, to revere
even disease as a god, if it only possessed _power_.
215.
Music.--Music by and for itself is not so portentous for our inward
nature, so deeply moving, that it ought to be looked upon as the
_direct_ language of the feelings; but its ancient union with poetry
has infused so much symbolism into rhythmical movement, into loudness
and softness of tone, that we now _imagine_ it speaks directly _to_ and
comes _from_ the inward nature. Dramatic music is only possible when
the art of harmony has acquired an immense range of symbolical means,
through song, opera, and a hundred attempts at description by sound.
"Absolute music" is either form _per se,_ in 'the rude condition of
music, when playing in time and with various degrees of strength gives
pleasure, or the symbolism of form which speaks to the understanding
even without poetry, after the two arts were joined finally together
after long development and the musical form had been woven about with
threads of meaning and feeling. People who are backward in musical
development can appreciate a piece of harmony merely as execution,
whilst those who are advanced will comprehend it symbolically. No music
is deep and full of meaning in itself, it does not speak of "will," of
the "thing-in-itself"; that could be imagined by the intellect only in
an age which had conquered for musical symbolism the entire range of
inner life. It was the intellect itself that first _gave_ this meaning
to sound, just as it also gave meaning to the relation between lines
and masses in architecture, but which in itself is quite foreign to
mechanical laws.
216.
GESTURE AND SPEECH.--Older than speech is the imitation of gestures,
which is carried on unconsciously and which, in the general repression
of the language of gesture and trained control of the muscles, is
still so great that we cannot look at a face moved by emotion without
feeling an agitation of our own face (it may be remarked that feigned
yawning excites real yawning in any one who sees it). The imitated
gesture leads the one who imitates back to the sensation it expressed
in the face or body of the one imitated. Thus men learned to understand
one another, thus the child still learns to understand the mother.
Generally speaking, painful sensations may also have been expressed
by gestures, and the pain which caused them (for instance, tearing
the hair, beating the breast, forcible distortion and straining of
the muscles of the face). On the other hand, gestures of joy were
themselves joyful and lent themselves easily to the communication of
the understanding; (laughter, as the expression of the feeling when
being tickled, serves also for the expression of other pleasurable
sensations). As soon as men understood each other by gestures,
there could be established a _symbolism_ of gestures; I mean, an
understanding could be arrived at respecting the language of accents,
so that first _accent_ and gesture (to which it was symbolically added)
were produced, and later on the accent alone. In former times there
happened very frequently that which now happens in the development of
music, especially of dramatic music,--while music, without explanatory
dance and pantomime (language of gesture), is at first only empty
sound, but by long familiarity with that combination of music and
movement the ear becomes schooled into instant interpretation of the
figures of sound, and finally attains a height of quick understanding,
where it has no longer any need of visible movement and _understands_
the sound-poet without it. It is then called absolute music, that
is music in which, without further help, everything is symbolically
understood.
217.
THE SPIRITUALISING OF HIGHER ART.--By virtue of extraordinary
intellectual exercise through the art-development of the new music, our
ears have been growing more intellectual. For this reason we can now
endure a much greater volume of sound, much more "noise," because we
are far better practised in listening for the _sense_ in it than were
our ancestors. As a matter of fact, all our senses have been somewhat
blunted, because they immediately look for the sense; that is, they
ask what "it means" and not what "it is,"--such a blunting betrays
itself, for instance, in the absolute dominion of the temperature of
sounds; for ears which still make the finer distinctions, between
_eis_ and _des,_ for instance, are now amongst the exceptions. In
this respect our ear has grown coarser. And then the ugly side of the
world, the one originally hostile to the senses, has been conquered
for music; its power has been immensely widened, especially in the
expression of the noble, the terrible, and the mysterious: our music
now gives utterance to things which had formerly no tongue. In the
same way certain painters have rendered the eye more intellectual, and
have gone far beyond that which was formerly called pleasure in colour
and form. Here, too, that side of the world originally considered as
ugly has been conquered by the artistic intellect. What results from
all this? The more capable of thought that eye and ear become, the
more they approach the limit where they become senseless, the seat of
pleasure is moved into the brain, the organs of the senses themselves
become dulled and weak, the symbolical takes more and more the place
of the actual,--and thus we arrive at barbarism in this way as surely
as in any other. In the meantime we may say: the world is uglier than
ever, but it _represents_ a more beautiful world than has ever existed.
But the more the amber-scent of meaning is dispersed and evaporated,
the rarer become those who perceive it, and the remainder halt at
what is ugly and endeavour to enjoy it direct, an aim, however, which
they never succeed in attaining. Thus, in Germany there is a twofold
direction of musical development, here a throng of ten thousand with
ever higher, finer demands, ever listening more and more for the "it
means," and there the immense countless mass which yearly grows more
incapable of understanding what is important even in the form of
sensual ugliness, and which therefore turns ever more willingly to what
in music is ugly and foul in itself, that is, to the basely sensual.
218.
A STONE IS MORE OF A STONE THAN FORMERLY.--As a general rule we no
longer understand architecture, at least by no means in the same way
as we understand music. We have outgrown the symbolism of lines and
figures, just as we are no longer accustomed to the sound-effects of
rhetoric, and have not absorbed this kind of mother's milk of culture
since our first moment of life. Everything in a Greek or Christian
building originally had a meaning, and referred to a higher order of
things; this feeling of inexhaustible meaning enveloped the edifice
like a mystic veil. Beauty was only a secondary consideration in
the system, without in any way materially injuring the fundamental
sentiment of the mysteriously-exalted, the divinely and magically
consecrated; at the most, beauty _tempered horror_--but this horror was
everywhere presupposed. What is the beauty of a building now? The same
thing as the beautiful face of a stupid woman, a kind of mask.
219.
THE RELIGIOUS SOURCE OF THE NEWER MUSIC.--Soulful music arose out of
the Catholicism re-established after the Council of Trent, through
Palestrina, who endowed the newly-awakened, earnest, and deeply
moved spirit with sound; later on, in Bach, it appeared also in
Protestantism, as far as this had been deepened by the Pietists and
released from its originally dogmatic character. The supposition
and necessary preparation for both origins is the familiarity with
music, which existed during and before the Renaissance, namely that
learned occupation with music, which was really scientific pleasure
in the masterpieces of harmony and voice-training. On the other hand,
the opera must have preceded it, wherein the layman made his protest
against a music that had grown too learned and cold, and endeavoured
to re-endow Polyhymnia with a soul. Without the change to that deeply
religious sentiment, without the dying away of the inwardly moved
temperament, music would have remained learned or operatic; the
spirit of the counter-reformation is the spirit of modern music (for
that pietism in Bach's music is also a kind of counter-reformation).
So deeply are we indebted to the religious life. Music was the
counter-reformation in the field of art; to this belongs also the
later painting of the Caracci and Caravaggi, perhaps also the baroque
style, in _any_ case more than the architecture of the Renaissance
or of antiquity. And we might still ask: if our newer music could
move stones, would it build them up into antique architecture? I very
much doubt it. For that which predominates in this music, affections,
pleasure in exalted, highly-strained sentiments, the desire to be alive
at any cost, the quick change of feeling, the strong relief-effects of
light and shade, the combination of the ecstatic and the naïve,--all
this has already reigned in the plastic arts and created new laws
of style:--but it was neither in the time of antiquity nor of the
Renaissance.
220.
THE BEYOND IN ART.--It is not without deep pain that we acknowledge
the fact that in their loftiest soarings, artists of all ages have
exalted and divinely transfigured precisely those ideas which we now
recognise as false; they are the glorifiers of humanity's religious
and philosophical errors, and they could not have been this without
belief in the absolute truth of these errors. But if the belief in such
truth diminishes at all, if the rainbow colours at the farthest ends of
human knowledge and imagination fade, then this kind of art can never
re-flourish, for, like the _Divina Commedia,_ Raphael's paintings,
Michelangelo's frescoes, and Gothic cathedrals, they indicate not only
a cosmic but also a metaphysical meaning in the work of art. Out of all
this will grow a touching legend that such an art and such an artistic
faith once existed.
221.