How hard, after this, sounds the singular leaf of his Lordship, which
seems to be no letter, but a cold apology for his future conduct. "Life
is a petty; empty game. If my many years have not refuted me, then a
refutation by my few remaining ones is neither necessary nor possible.
A single unhappy man outweighs all drunken ones. For us insignificant
things, insignificant things are good enough; for sleepers, dreams.
Therefore, neither in us nor out of us is there anything worthy of
wonder. The sun near to is a ball of earth; an earthly globe is merely
the more frequent repetition of an earthly clod.--What is not sublime
in itself and for itself can no more be made so by repetition than the
flea by the microscope; at most, smaller. Why should the tempest be
sublimer than an electric experiment, a rainbow greater than a
soap-bubble? If I resolve a great Swiss landscape into its constituent
parts, I get fir-needles, icicles, grasses, drops, and gravel.--Time
resolves itself into moments, peoples into individuals, genius into
thoughts, immensity into points; there is nothing great.--A
trigonometrical proposition, often thought over, becomes a tautological
one; an oft-read conceit, stale; an old truth, indifferent.--Again I
assert, what becomes great by steps remains little. If the poetic
power, which paints either _images_ or _passions_, is not already
admirable in the invention of the most commonplace image, then it is
nowhere so. Every one can, like the poet, put himself into the place of
another, at least in some degree.--I hate inspiration, because it is
raised as well by liquors as by fancies, and because, during and after
it, one is most inclined to _intolerance_ and _sensual pleasure_.--The
greatness of a sublime deed consists not in the execution, which
amounts to mere corporeal pitiablenesses, going and staying; not in the
simple resolve, because the opposite one, e. g., that of murdering,
requires just as much energy as that of dying; not in its rarity,
because we all are conscious in ourselves of the same capacity for the
act, but have not the motive;--not in any of these, but in our
boasting.--We hold our very last error for truth, and only the last but
one as none at all; our today as holy, and every future moment as the
crown and heaven of its predecessors. In old age, after so many labors,
after so many appeasings, the spirit has the same thirst, the same
torment. As in a higher eye everything is diminished, a spirit or a
world, in order to be great, should be so even before a so-called
Divine eye; but then the one or the other would have to be greater than
God, for one never admires his own image.--In my youth, I composed a
tragedy, and put all the above principles into the mouth of my hero,
and made him, shortly before he plunged the dagger into his own heart,
add these further words: But perhaps death is sublime; for I do not
comprehend it. And so, then, will I lead aside the columns of blood
which leap up out of the heart and so sportively keep up the human head
and the human individuality at such an elevation, as a fountain bears
the hollow ball balanced on its flickering stream,--this fountain will
I draw off with the dagger, so that the _I_ may be precipitated.--I
shuddered at this character at the time; but afterward, I reflected
upon it, and it became my own!"
* * * * *
Frightful man! Thy blood-stream and the _I_ on the top of it
have perhaps already collapsed, or will soon fall through.--And
precisely this dark presentiment is also in the hearts of Victor and
Clotilda----O that thou, thou other bowed man, whom I dare not name
here before the public, mightest guess that I mean thee, that thou,
just as well as the unhappy Lord, art eating away thy own self like
blood-sucking corpses, and that, in the _starry night_ of life, thou
still bearest a deadly _mist_ of thine own around thee! O the spectacle
of a magnanimous heart, which merely through ideas makes itself
helpless, and which lies inaccessible and benumbed in its arbor of
philosophical poison-trees, often dyes our days black!--Believe, not
that his Lordship is anywhere right! How can he find anything to be
small, without holding it over against something great? Without
reverence there could be no contempt; without the feeling of
disinterestedness, no perception of selfishness; without greatness, no
littleness. When thou canst explain the tears of the adagio by the
vibration of the strings, or by the blood-globules and threefold
skins of a beautiful face thy regard for the same; then and as well
canst thou think to justify thy rapture for the _spiritual_ in
Nature by means of its corporeal filaments, which are nothing but the
_flute-pieces_ and flat and sharp valves of the unplayed harmony. The
sublime resides only in thoughts, whether those of the Eternal One, who
expresses them by letters made of worlds, or those of man, who reads
them and spells them out!--
I postpone the refutation of his Lordship to another book, although
this, too, is a refutation.--