2. To do what artists have done hitherto, _i.e._ to reach a small
degree of perfection in a certain medium.)
796.
Art as it appears without the artist, _i.e._ as a body, an organisation
(the Prussian Officers' Corps, the Order of the Jesuits). To what
extent is the artist merely a preliminary stage? The world regarded as
a self-generating work of art.
797.
The phenomenon, "artist," is the easiest to see through: from it one
can look down upon the fundamental instincts of power, of nature, etc.,
even of religion and morality.
"Play," uselessness--as the ideal of him who is overflowing with power,
as the ideal of the child. The childishness of God, παῑς παίζων.
798.
_Apollonian, Dionysian._ There are two conditions in which art
manifests itself in man even as a force of nature, and disposes of
him whether he consent or not: it may be as a constraint to visionary
states, or it may be an orgiastic impulse. Both conditions are to be
seen in normal life, but they are then somewhat weaker: in dreams and
in moments of elation or intoxication.[9]
But the same contrast exists between the dream state and the state of
intoxication; both of these states let loose all manner of artistic
powers within us, but each unfetters powers of a different kind.
Dreamland gives us the power of vision, of association, of poetry:
intoxication gives us the power of grand attitudes, of passion, of
song, and of dance.
[Footnote 9: German: "Rausch."--There is no word in English for the
German expression "Rausch." When Nietzsche uses it, he means a sort of
blend of our two words: intoxication and elation.--Tr.]
799.
Sexuality and voluptuousness belong to the Dionysiac intoxication:
but neither of them is lacking in the Apollonian state. There is also
a difference of tempo between the states.... _The extreme peace of
certain feelings of intoxication_ (or, more strictly, the slackening
of the feeling of time, and the reduction of the feeling of space) is
wont to reflect itself in the vision of the most restful attitudes
and states of the soul. The classical style essentially represents
repose, simplification, foreshortening, and concentration--the _highest
feeling of power_ is concentrated in the classical type. To react with
difficulty: great consciousness: no feeling of strife.
800.
The feeling of intoxication is, as a matter of fact, equivalent to a
sensation of _surplus power_: it is strongest in seasons of rut: new
organs, new accomplishments, new colours, new forms. Embellishment is
an outcome of _increased power._ Embellishment is merely an expression
of a triumphant will, of an increased state of co-ordination, of a
harmony of all the strong desires, of an infallible and perpendicular
equilibrium. Logical and geometrical simplification is the result of an
increase of power: conversely, the mere aspect of such a simplification
increases the sense of power in the beholder.... The zenith of
development: the grand style.
Ugliness signifies _the decadence of a type_: contradiction and
faulty co-ordination among the inmost desires--this means a decline
in the _organising_ power, or, psychologically speaking, in the will.
The condition of pleasure which is called intoxication is really
an exalted feeling of power. ... Sensations of space and time are
altered; inordinate distances are traversed by the eye, and only then
become visible; the extension of the vision over greater masses and
expanses; the refinement of the organ which apprehends the smallest
and most elusive things; divination, the power of understanding at the
slightest hint, at the smallest suggestion; intelligent sensitiveness;
_strength_ as a feeling of dominion in the muscles, as agility and
love of movement, as dance, as levity and quick time; strength as the
love of proving strength, as bravado, adventurousness, fearlessness,
indifference in regard to life and death.... All these elated moments
of life stimulate each other; the world of images and of imagination
of the one suffices as a suggestion for the other: in this way states
finally merge into each other, which might do better to keep apart,
_e.g._ the feeling of religious intoxication and sexual irritability
(two very profound feelings, always wonderfully co-ordinated. What is
it that pleases almost all pious women, old or young? Answer: a saint
with beautiful legs, still young, still innocent). Cruelty in tragedy
and pity (likewise normally correlated). Spring-time, dancing, music,
--all these things are but the display of one sex before the other,--as
also that "infinite yearning of the heart" peculiar to Faust.
Artists when they are worth anything at all are men of strong
propensities (even physically), with surplus energy, powerful animals,
sensual; without a certain overheating of the sexual system a man like
Raphael is unthinkable.... To produce music is also in a sense to
produce children; chastity is merely the economy of the artist, and
in all creative artists productiveness certainly ceases with sexual
potency.... Artists should not see things as they are; they should
see them fuller, simpler, stronger: to this end, however, a kind of
youthfulness, of vernality, a sort of perpetual elation, must be
peculiar to their lives.
801.
The states in which we transfigure things and make them fuller, and
rhapsodise about them, until they reflect our own fulness and love
of life back upon us: sexuality, intoxication, post-prandial states,
spring, triumph over our enemies, scorn, bravado, cruelty, the ecstasy
of religious feeling. But three elements above all are active:
_sexuality, intoxication, cruelty_; all these belong to the oldest
_festal joys_ of mankind, they also preponderate in budding artists.
Conversely: there are things with which we meet which already show
us this transfiguration and fulness, and the animal world's response
thereto is a state of excitement in the spheres where these states
of happiness originate. A blending of these very delicate shades of
animal well-being and desires is the _æsthetic state._ The latter only
manifests itself in those natures which are capable of that spendthrift
and overflowing fulness of bodily vigour; the latter is always the
_primum mobile._ The sober-minded man, the tired man, the exhausted and
dried-up man (_e.g._ the scholar), can have no feeling for art, because
he does not possess the primitive force of art, which is the tyranny
of inner riches: he who cannot give anything away cannot feel anything
either.
_"Perfection"_--In these states (more particularly in the case of
sexual love) there is an ingenuous betrayal of what the profoundest
instinct regards as the highest, the most desirable, the most valuable,
the ascending movement of its type; also of the condition towards which
it is actually striving. Perfection: the extraordinary expansion of
this instinct's feeling of power, its riches, its necessary overflowing
of all banks.
802.
Art reminds us of states of physical vigour: it may be the overflow and
bursting forth of blooming life in the world of pictures and desires;
on the other hand, it may be an excitation of the physical functions by
means of pictures and desires of exalted life--an enhancement of the
feeling of life, the latter's stimulant.
To what extent can ugliness exercise this power? In so far as it may
communicate something of the triumphant energy of the artist who has
become master of the ugly and the repulsive; or in so far as it gently
excites our lust of cruelty (in some circumstances even the lust of
doing harm to ourselves, self-violence, and therewith the feeling of
power over ourselves).
803.
"Beauty" therefore is, to the artist, something which is above all
order of rank, because in beauty contrasts are overcome, the highest
sign of power thus manifesting itself in the conquest of opposites;
and achieved without a feeling of tension: violence being no longer
necessary, everything submitting and obeying so easily, and doing so
with good grace; this is what delights the powerful will of the artist.
804.
The biological value of _beauty_ and _ugliness._ That which we feel
instinctively opposed to us æsthetically is, according to the longest
experience of mankind, felt to be harmful, dangerous, and worthy of
suspicion: the sudden utterance of the æsthetic instinct, _e.g._ in the
case of loathing, implies an act of judgment. To this extent beauty
lies within the general category of the biological values, useful,
beneficent, and life-promoting: thus, a host of stimuli which for
ages have been associated with, and remind us of, useful things and
conditions, give us the feeling of beauty, _i.e._ the increase of the
feeling of power (not only things, therefore, but the sensations which
are associated with such things or their symbols). In this way beauty
and ugliness are recognised as determined by our most fundamental
self-preservative values. Apart from this, it is nonsense to postulate
anything as beautiful or ugly. Absolute beauty exists just as little
as absolute goodness and truth. In a particular case it is a matter of
the self-preservative conditions of a certain type of man: thus the
gregarious man will have quite a different feeling for beauty from the
exceptional or super-man.
It is the optics of things in the foreground which only consider
immediate consequences, from which the value beauty (also goodness and
truth) arises.
All instinctive judgments are short-sighted in regard to the
concatenation of consequences: they merely advise what must be done
forthwith. Reason is essentially an obstructing apparatus preventing
the immediate response to instinctive judgments: it halts, it
calculates, it traces the chain of consequences further.
Judgments concerning beauty and ugliness are short-sighted (reason is
always opposed to them): but they are convincing in the highest degree;
they appeal to our instincts in that quarter where the latter decide
most quickly and say yes or no with least hesitation, even before
reason can interpose.
The most common affirmations of beauty stimulate each other
reciprocally; where the æsthetic impulse once begins to work, a
whole host of other and foreign perfections crystallise around the
"particular form of beauty." It is impossible to remain objective, it
is certainly impossible to dispense with the interpreting, bestowing,
transfiguring, and poetising power (the latter is a stringing together
of affirmations concerning beauty itself). The sight of a beautiful
woman....
Thus (1) judgment concerning beauty is short-sighted; it sees only the
immediate consequences.
(2) It smothers the object which gives rise to it with a charm that is
determined by the association of various judgments concerning beauty,
which, however, are quite alien to the _essence of the particular
object._ To regard a thing as beautiful is necessarily to regard it
falsely (that is why incidentally love marriages are from the social
point of view the most unreasonable form of matrimony).
805.
_Concerning the genesis of Art._ That making perfect and seeing
perfect, which is peculiar to the cerebral system overladen with sexual
energy (a lover alone with his sweetheart at eventide transfigures the
smallest details: life is a chain of sublime things, "the misfortune
of an unhappy love affair is more valuable than anything else"); on
the other hand, everything perfect and beautiful operates like an
unconscious recollection of that amorous condition and of the point of
view peculiar to it--all perfection, and the whole of the beauty of
things, through contiguity, revives aphrodisiac bliss. (Physiologically
it is the creative instinct of the artist and the distribution of
his semen in his blood.) The desire for art and beauty is an indirect
longing for the ecstasy; of sexual desire, which gets communicated to
the brain. The world become perfect through "love."
806.
_Sensuality in its various disguises._--(1) As idealism (Plato), common
to youth, constructing a kind of concave-mirror in which the image of
the beloved is an incrustation, an exaggeration, a transfiguration, an
attribution of infinity to everything. (2) In the religion of love, "a
fine young man," "a beautiful woman," in some way divine; a bridegroom,
a bride of the soul. (3) In art, as a decorating force, _e.g._ just as
the man sees the woman and makes her a present of everything that can
enhance her personal charm, so the sensuality of the artist adorns an
object with everything else that he honours and esteems, and by this
means perfects it (or idealises it). Woman, knowing what man feels
in regard to her, tries to meet his idealising endeavours half-way
by decorating herself, by walking and dancing well, by expressing
delicate thoughts: in addition, she may practise modesty, shyness,
reserve--prompted by her instinctive feeling that the idealising
power of man increases with all this, (In the extraordinary finesse
of woman's instincts, modesty must not by any means be considered as
conscious hypocrisy: she guesses that it is precisely artlessness and
real shame which seduces man most and urges him to an exaggerated
esteem of her. On this account, woman is ingenuous, owing to the
subtlety of her instincts which reveal to her the utility of a state of
innocence. A wilful closing of one's eyes to one's self.... Wherever
dissembling has a stronger influence by being unconscious it actually
becomes unconscious.)
807.
What a host of things can be accomplished by the state of intoxication
which is called by the name of love, and which is something else
besides love!--And yet everybody has his own experience of this matter.
The muscular strength of a girl suddenly increases as soon as a man
comes into her presence: there are instruments with which this can be
measured. In the case of a still closer relationship of the sexes,
as, for instance, in dancing and in other amusements which society
gatherings entail, this power increases to such an extent as to make
real feats of strength possible: at last one no longer trusts either
one's eyes, or one's watch! Here at all events we must reckon with the
fact that dancing itself, like every form of rapid movement, involves
a kind of intoxication of the whole nervous, muscular, and visceral
system. We must therefore reckon in this case with the collective
effects of a double intoxication.--And how clever it is to be a little
off your head at times! There are some realities which we cannot admit
even to ourselves: especially when; we are women and have all sorts
of feminine, _"pudeurs."..._Those young creatures dancing over there
are obviously beyond all reality: they are dancing only with a host
of tangible ideals: what is more, they even see ideals sitting around
them, their mothers!... An opportunity for quoting _Faust._ They look
incomparably fairer, do these pretty creatures, when they have lost
their head a little; and how well they know it too, they are even more
delightful _because_ they know it! Lastly, it is their finery which
inspires them; their finery is their third little intoxication. They
believe in their dressmaker as in their God: and who would destroy this
faith in them? Blessed is this faith! And self-admiration is healthy!
Self-admiration can protect one even from cold! Has a beautiful woman,
who knew she was well-dressed, ever caught cold? Never yet on this
earth! I even suppose a case in which she has scarcely a rag on her.
808.
If one should require the most astonishing proof of how far the power
of transfiguring, which comes of intoxication, goes, this proof is
at hand in the phenomenon of love; or what is called love in all
the languages and silences of the world. Intoxication works to such
a degree upon reality in this passion that in the consciousness of
the lover the cause of his love is quite suppressed, and something
else seems to take its place,--a vibration and a glitter of all the
charm-mirrors of Circe.... In this respect to be man or an animal
makes no difference: and still less does spirit, goodness, or honesty.
If one is astute, one is befooled astutely; if one is thick-headed,
one is befooled in a thick-headed way. But love, even the love of
God, saintly love, "the love that saves the soul," are at bottom all
one; they are nothing but a fever which has reasons to transfigure
itself--a state of intoxication which does well to lie about itself....
And, at any rate, when a man loves, he is a good liar about himself
and to himself: he seems to himself transfigured, stronger, richer,
more perfect; he _is_ more perfect.... _Art_ here acts as an organic
function: we find it present in the most angelic instinct "love";
we find it as the greatest stimulus of life--thus art is sublimely
utilitarian, even in the fact that it lies.... But we should be wrong
to halt at its power to lie: it does more than merely imagine; it
actually transposes values. And it not only transposes the _feeling_
for values: the lover actually _has_ a greater value; he is stronger.
In animals this condition gives rise to new weapons, colours, pigments,
and forms, and above all to new movements, new rhythms, new love-calls
and seductions. In man it is just the same. His whole economy is
richer, mightier, and _more complete_ when he is in love than when he
is not. The lover becomes a spendthrift; he is rich enough for it. He
now dares; he becomes an adventurer, and even a donkey in magnanimity
and innocence; his belief in God and in virtue revives, because he
believes in love. Moreover, such idiots of happiness acquire wings and
new capacities, and even the door to art is opened to them.
If we cancel the suggestion of this intestinal fever from the lyric
of tones and words, what is left to poetry and music? ... _L'art pour
l'art_ perhaps; the professional cant of frogs shivering outside in
the cold, and dying of despair in their swamp.... Everything else was
created by love.
809.
All art works like a suggestion on the muscles and the senses which
were originally active in the ingenuous artistic man; its voice is only
heard by artists--it speaks to this kind of man, whose constitution
is attuned to such subtlety in sensitiveness. The concept "layman"
is a misnomer. The deaf man is not a subdivision of the class, whose
ears are sound. All art works as a _tonic;_ it increases strength, it
kindles desire _(i.e._ the feeling of strength), it excites all the
more subtle recollections of intoxication; there is actually a special
kind of memory which underlies such states--a distant flitful world of
sensations here returns to being.
Ugliness is the contradiction of art. It is that which art _excludes,_
the _negation_ of art: wherever decline, impoverishment of life,
impotence, decomposition, dissolution, are felt, however remotely, the
æsthetic man reacts with his _No._ Ugliness _depresses_: it is the sign
of depression. It _robs_ strength, it impoverishes, it weighs down, ...
Ugliness _suggests_ repulsive things. From one's states of health one
can test how an indisposition may increase one's power of fancying ugly
things. One's selection of things, interests, and questions becomes
different. Logic provides a state which is next of kin to ugliness:
heaviness, bluntness. In the presence of ugliness equilibrium is
lacking in a mechanical sense: ugliness limps and stumbles--the direct
opposite of the godly agility of the dancer.
The æsthetic state represents an overflow _of means of communication_
as well as a condition of extreme sensibility to stimuli and signs. It
is the zenith of communion and transmission between living creatures;
it is the source of languages. In it, languages, whether of signs,
sounds, or glances, have their birthplace. The richer phenomenon is
always the beginning: our abilities are subtilised forms of richer
abilities. But even to-day we still listen with our muscles, we even
read with our muscles.
Every mature art possesses a host of conventions as a basis: in so
far as it is a language. Convention is a condition of great art,
_not_ an obstacle to it.... Every elevation of life likewise elevates
the power of communication, as also the understanding of man. _The
power of living in other people's souls_ originally had nothing to do
with morality, but with a physiological irritability of suggestion:
"sympathy," or what is called "altruism," is merely a product of
that psycho-motor relationship which is reckoned as spirituality
(psycho-motor induction, says Charles Féré). People never communicate a
thought to one another: they communicate a movement, an imitative sign
which is then interpreted as a thought.
810.
_Compared with music,_ communication by means of words is a shameless
mode of procedure; words reduce and stultify; words make impersonal;
words make common that which is uncommon.
811.
It is exceptional states that determine the artist--such states as are
all intimately related and entwined with morbid symptoms, so that it
would seem almost impossible to be an artist without being ill.
The physiological conditions which in the artist become moulded into a
"personality," and which, to a certain degree, may attach themselves to
any man:--
(1) Intoxication, the feeling of enhanced power; the inner compulsion
to make things a mirror of one's own fulness and perfection.
(2) The extreme sharpness of certain senses, so that they are capable
of understanding a totally different language of signs--and to create
such a language (this is a condition which manifests itself in some
nervous diseases); extreme susceptibility out of which great powers of
communion are developed; the desire to speak on the part of everything
that is capable of making-signs; a need of being rid of one's self by
means of gestures and attitudes; the ability of speaking about one's
self in a hundred different languages--in fact, a state of _explosion._
One must first imagine this condition as one in which there is a
pressing and compulsory desire of ridding one's self of the ecstasy of
a state of tension, by all kinds of muscular work and movement; also as
an involuntary _co-ordination_ of these movements with inner processes
(images, thoughts, desires)--as a kind of automatism of the whole
muscular system under the compulsion of strong stimuli acting from
within; the inability to resist reaction; the apparatus of resistance
is also suspended. Every inner movement (feeling, thought, emotion)
is accompanied by _vascular changes,_ and consequently by changes in
colour, temperature, and secretion. The suggestive power of music, its
"_suggestion mentale._"
(3) _The compulsion to imitate:_ extreme irritability, by means of
which a certain example becomes contagious--a condition is guessed
and represented merely by means of a few signs.... A complete picture
is visualised by one's inner consciousness, and its effect soon shows
itself in the movement of the limbs,--in a certain suspension of the
_will_ (Schopenhauer!!!!). A sort of blindness and deafness towards the
external world,--the realm of admitted stimuli is sharply defined.
This differentiates the artist from the layman (from the spectator
of art): the latter reaches the height of his excitement in the mere
act of apprehending: the former in giving--and in such a way that
the antagonism between these two gifts is not only natural but even
desirable. Each of these states has an opposite standpoint--to demand
of the artist that he should have the point of view of the spectator
(of the critic) is equivalent to asking him to impoverish his creative
power.... In this respect the same difference holds good as that which
exists between the sexes: one should not ask the artist who gives to
become a woman--to _"receive."_
Our æsthetics have hitherto been women's æsthetics, inasmuch as they
have only formulated the experiences of what is beautiful, from the
point of view of the receivers in art. In the whole of philosophy
hitherto the artist has been lacking ... _i.e._ as we have already
suggested, a necessary fault: for the artist who would begin to
understand himself would therewith begin to mistake himself--he must
not look backwards, he must not look at all; he must give.--It is an
honour for an artist to have no critical faculty; if he can criticise
he is mediocre, he is modern.
812.
Here I lay down a series of psychological states as signs of
flourishing and complete life, which to-day we are in the habit of
regarding as morbid. But, by this time, we have broken ourselves of
the habit of speaking of healthy and morbid as opposites: the question
is one of degree, what I maintain on this point is that what people
call healthy nowadays represents a lower level of that which under
favourable circumstances actually would be healthy--that we are
relatively sick....
The artist belongs to a much stronger race. That which in us would be
harmful and sickly, is natural in him. But people object to this that
it is precisely the impoverishment of the machine which renders this
extraordinary power of comprehending every kind of suggestion possible:
_e.g._ our hysterical females.
An overflow of spunk and energy may quite as well lead to symptoms of
partial constraint, sense hallucinations, peripheral sensitiveness,
as a poor vitality does--the stimuli are differently determined, the
effect is the same.... What is not the same is above all the ultimate
result; the extreme torpidity of all morbid natures, after their
nervous eccentricities, has nothing in common with the states of the
artist, who need in no wise repent his best moments.... He is rich
enough for it all: he can squander without becoming poor.
Just as we now feel justified in judging genius as a form of neurosis,
we may perhaps think the same of artistic suggestive power,--and
our artists are, as a matter of fact, only too closely related to
hysterical females!!! This, however, is only an argument against the
present day, and not against artists in general.
The inartistic states are: objectivity, reflection suspension of the
will ... (Schopenhauer's scandalous misunderstanding consisted in
regarding art as a mere bridge to the denial of life)... The inartistic
states are: those which impoverish, which subtract, which bleach, under
which life suffers--the Christian.
813.
The modern artist who, in his physiology, is next of kin to the
hysteric, may also be classified as a character belonging to this state
of morbidness. The hysteric is false,--he lies from the love of lying,
he is admirable in all the arts of dissimulation,--unless his morbid
vanity hood-wink him. This vanity is like a perpetual fever which is
in need of stupefying drugs, and which recoils from no self-deception
and no farce that promises it the most fleeting satisfaction. (The
incapacity for pride and the need of continual revenge for his
deep-rooted self-contempt, this is almost the definition of this man's
vanity.)
The absurd irritability of his system, which makes a crisis out of
every one of his experiences, and sees dramatic elements in the most
insignificant occurrences of life, deprives him of all calm reflection;
he ceases from being a personality, at most he is a rendezvous of
personalities of which first one and then the other asserts itself with
barefaced assurance. Precisely on this account he is great as an actor
_i_ all these poor will-less people, whom doctors study so profoundly,
astound one through their virtuosity in mimicking, in transfiguration,
in their assumption of almost any character required.
814.
Artists are not men of great passion, despite all their assertions
to the contrary both to themselves and to others. And for the
following two reasons: they lack all shyness towards themselves (they
watch themselves live, they spy upon themselves, they are much too
inquisitive), and they also lack shyness in the presence of passion
(as artists they exploit it). Secondly, however, that vampire, their
talent, generally forbids them such an expenditure of energy as passion
demands.--A man, who has a talent is sacrificed to that talent; he
lives under the vampirism of his talent.
A man does not get rid of his passion by reproducing it, but rather
he is rid of it if he is able to reproduce it. (Goethe teaches the
reverse, but it seems as though he deliberately misunderstood himself
here--from a sense of delicacy.)
815.
_Concerning a reasonable mode of life._--.Relative, chastity, a
fundamental and shrewd caution in regard to _erotica,_ even in thought,
may be a reasonable mode of life even in richly equipped and perfect
natures. But this principle applies more particularly to artists; it
belongs to the best wisdom of their lives. Wholly trustworthy voices
have already been raised in favour of this view, _e.g._ Stendhal, Th.
Gautier, and Flaubert. The artist is perhaps in his way necessarily
a sensual man, generally susceptible, accessible to everything, and
capable of responding to the remotest stimulus or suggestion of a
stimulus. Nevertheless, as a rule he is in the power of his work, of
his will to mastership, really a sober and often even a chaste man. His
dominating instinct will have him so: it does not allow him to spend
himself haphazardly. It is one and the same form of strength which is
spent in artistic conception and in the sexual act: there is only one
form of strength. The artist who yields in this respect, and who spends
himself, is betrayed: by so doing he reveals his lack of instinct, his
lack of will in general. It may be a sign of decadence,--in any case it
reduces the value of his art to an incalculable degree.
816.
Compared with the artist, the scientific man, regarded as a phenomenon,
is indeed a sign of a certain storing-up and levelling-down of
life (but also of an increase of strength, severity, hardness, and
will-power). To what extent can falsity and indifference towards truth
and utility be a sign of youth, of childishness, in the artist? ...
Their habitual manner, their unreasonableness, their ignorance of
themselves, their indifference to "eternal values," their seriousness
in play, their lack of dignity; clowns and gods in one; the saint and
the rabble.... Imitation as an imperious instinct.--Do not artists of
ascending life and artists of degeneration belong to all phases? ...
Yes!
817.
Would any link be missing in the whole chain of science and art, if
woman, if woman's work, were excluded from it? Let us acknowledge the
exception--it proves the rule--that woman is capable of perfection in
everything which does not constitute a work: in letters, in memoirs,
in the most intricate handiwork--in short, in everything which is not
a craft; and just precisely because in the things mentioned woman
perfects herself, because in them she obeys the only artistic impulse
in her nature,--which is to captivate.... But what has woman to do
with the passionate indifference of the genuine artist who sees more
importance in a breath, in a sound, in the merest trifle, than in
himself?--who with all his five fingers gropes for his most secret
and hidden treasures?--who attributes no value to anything unless
it knows how to take shape (unless it surrenders itself, unless it
visualises itself in some way). Art as it is practised by artists--do
you not understand what it is? is it not an outrage on all _our
pudeurs? ..._ Only in this century has woman dared to try her hand at
literature ("_Vers la canaille plumière écrivassière,"_ to speak with
old Mirabeau): woman now writes, she now paints, she is losing her
instincts. And to what purpose, if one may put such a question?
818.
A man is an artist to the extent to which he regards everything
that inartistic people call "form" as the actual substance, as the
"principal" thing. With such ideas a man certainly belongs to a world
upside down: for henceforward substance seems to him something merely
formal,--his own life included.
819.
A sense for, and a delight in, nuances (which is characteristic of
modernity), in that which is not general, runs counter to the instinct
which finds its joy and its strength in grasping what is typical: like
Greek taste in its best period. In this there is an overcoming of the
plenitude of life; restraint dominates, the peace of the strong soul
which is slow to move and which feels a certain repugnance towards
excessive activity is defeated. The general rule, the law, is honoured
and made prominent, conversely, the exception is laid aside, and shades
are suppressed. All that which is firm, mighty, solid, life resting
on a broad and powerful basis, concealing its strength this pleases:
_i.e._ it corresponds with what we think of ourselves.
820.
In the main I am much more in favour of artists than any philosopher
that has appeared hitherto: artists, at least, did not lose sight of
the great course which life pursues; they loved the things "of this
world,"--they loved their senses. To strive after "spirituality,"
in cases where this is not pure hypocrisy or self-deception, seems
to me to be either a misunderstanding, a disease, or a cure, I wish
myself, and all those who live without the troubles of a puritanical
conscience, and who are able to live in this way, an ever greater
spiritualisation and multiplication of the senses. Indeed, we would
fain be grateful to the senses for their subtlety, power, and
plenitude, and on that account offer them the best we have in the way
of spirit. What do we care about priestly and metaphysical anathemas
upon the senses? We no longer require to treat them in this way: it
is a sign of well-constitutedness when a man like Goethe clings with
ever greater joy and heartiness to the "things of this world"--in this
way he holds firmly to the grand concept of mankind, which is that man
becomes the glorifying power of existence when he learns to glorify
himself.
821.
_Pessimism in art?_--The artist gradually learns to like for their own
sake, those means which bring about the condition of æsthetic elation;
extreme delicacy and glory of colour, definite delineation, quality of
tone; distinctness where in normal conditions distinctness is absent.
All distinct things, all nuances, in so far as they recall extreme
degrees of power which give rise to intoxication, kindle this feeling
of intoxication by association;--the effect of works of art is the
excitation of the state which creates art, of æsthetic intoxication.
The essential feature in art is its power of perfecting
existence, its production of perfection and plenitude; art is
essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of
existence.... What does a pessimistic art signify? Is it not a
_contradictio_?--Yes.--Schopenhauer is in error when he makes certain
works of art serve the purpose of pessimism. Tragedy does not teach
"resignation." ... To represent terrible and questionable things
is, in itself, the sign of an instinct of power and magnificence
in the artist; he doesn't fear them.... There is no such thing as
a pessimistic, art.... Art affirms. Job affirms. But Zola? and the
Goncourts?--the things they show us are ugly, their reason, however,
for showing them to us is their love of ugliness ... I don't care what
you say! You simply deceive yourselves if you think otherwise.--What a
relief Dostoievsky is!
822.
If I have sufficiently initiated my readers into the doctrine that
even "goodness," in the whole comedy of existence, represents a form
of exhaustion, they will now credit Christianity with consistency for
having conceived the good to be the ugly. In this respect Christianity
was right.
It is absolutely unworthy of a philosopher to say that "the good and
the beautiful are one"; if he should add "and also the true," he
deserves to be thrashed. Truth is ugly.
Art is with us in order that we may not perish through truth.
823.
Moralising tendencies may be combated with art. Art is freedom from
moral bigotry and philosophy _à la_ Little Jack Horner: or it may be
the mockery of these things. The flight to Nature, where beauty and
terribleness are coupled. The concept of the great man.
--Fragile, useless souls-de-luxe, which are disconcerted by a mere
breath of wind, "beautiful souls."
--Ancient ideals, in their inexorable hardness and brutality, ought to
be awakened, as the mightiest of monsters that they are.
--We should feel a boisterous delight in the psychological perception
of how all moralised artists become worms and actors without knowing it.
--The falsity of art, its immorality, must be brought into the light of
day.
--The "fundamental idealising powers" (sensuality, intoxication,
excessive animality) should be brought to light.
824.
Modern counterfeit practices in the arts: regarded as necessary--that
is to say, as fully in keeping with the needs most proper to the modern
soul.
The gaps in the gifts, and still more in the education, antecedents,
and schooling of modern artists, are now filled up in this way:--
_First:_ A less artistic public is sought which is capable of unlimited
love (and is capable of falling on its knees before a personality).
The superstition of our century, the belief in "genius," assists this
process.
_Secondly;_ Artists harangue the dark instincts of the dissatisfied,
the ambitious, and the self-deceivers of a democratic age: the
importance of poses.
_Thirdly:_ The procedures of one art are transferred to the realm
of another; the object of art is confounded with that of science,
with that of the Church, or with that of the interests of the race
(nationalism), or with that of philosophy--a man rings all bells at
once, and awakens the vague suspicion that he is a god.
_Fourthly:_ Artists flatter women, sufferers, and indignant folk.
Narcotics and opiates are made to preponderate in art. The fancy of
cultured people, and of the readers of poetry and ancient history, is
tickled.
825.
We must distinguish between the "public" and the "select"; to satisfy
the public a man must be a charlatan to-day, to satisfy the select he
_will_ be a virtuoso and nothing else. The geniuses peculiar to our
century overcame this distinction, they were great for both; the great
charlatanry of Victor Hugo and Richard Wagner was coupled with such
genuine virtuosity that it even satisfied the most refined artistic
connoisseurs. This is why greatness is lacking: these geniuses had a
double outlook; first, they catered for the coarsest needs, and then
for the most refined.
826.
False "accentuation": (1) In romanticism, this unremitting
"_expressivo_" is not a sign of strength, but of a feeling of
deficiency;
(2) Picturesque music, the so-called dramatic kind, is above all
easier (as is also the brutal scandalmongering and the juxtaposition of
facts and traits in realistic novels);
(3) "Passion" as a matter of nerves and exhausted souls; likewise the
delight in high mountains, deserts, storms, orgies, and disgusting
details,--in bulkiness and massiveness (historians, for instance); as a
matter of fact, there is actually a cult of exaggerated feelings (how
is it that in stronger ages art desired just the opposite--a restraint
of passion?);
(4) The preference for exciting materials (_Erotica_ or _Socialistica_
or _Pathologica_): all these things are the signs of the style
of public that is being catered for to-day--that is to say, for
overworked, absentminded, or enfeebled people.
Such people must be tyrannised over in order to be affected.
827.
Modern art is the art of tyrannising. A coarse and salient definiteness
in delineation; the motive simplified into a formula; formulæ
tyrannise. Wild arabesques within the lines; overwhelming masses,
before which the senses are confused; brutality in coloration, in
subject-matter, in the desires. Examples: Zola, Wagner, and, in a more
spiritualised degree, Taine. Hence logic, massiveness, and brutality.
828.
In regard to the painter: _Tous ces modernes sont des poètes qui ont
voulu être peintres, L'un a cherché des drames dans l'histoire,
l'autre des scènes de mœurs, celui ci traduit des religions, celui
là une philosophie._ One imitates Raphael, another the early Italian
masters. The landscapists employ trees and clouds in order to make odes
and elegies. Not one is simply a painter; they are all archæologists,
psychologists, and impresarios of one or another kind of event or
theory. They enjoy our erudition and our philosophy. Like us, they are
full, and too full, of general ideas. They like a form, not because it
is what it is, but because of what it expresses. They are the scions of
a learned, tormented, and reflecting generation, a thousand miles away
from the Old Masters who never read, and only concerned themselves with
feasting their eyes.
829.
At bottom, even Wagner's music, in so far as it stands for the whole
of French romanticism, is literature: the charm of exoticism (strange
times, customs, passions), exercised upon sensitive cosy-corner people.
The delight of entering into extremely distant and prehistoric lands to
which books lead one, and by which means the whole horizon is painted
with new colours and new possibilities.... Dreams of still more distant
and unexploited worlds; disdain of the boulevards. ... For Nationalism,
let us not deceive ourselves, is also only a form of exoticism....
Romantic musicians merely relate what exotic books have made of them:
people would fain experience exotic sensations and passions according
to Florentine and Venetian taste; finally they are satisfied to look
for them in an image.... The essential factor is the kind of novel
desire, the desire to imitate, the desire to live as people have
lived once before in the past, and the disguise and dissimulation of
the soul.... Romantic art is only an emergency exit from defective
"reality."
The attempt to perform new things: revolution, Napoleon. Napoleon
represents the passion of new spiritual possibilities, of an extension
of the soul's domain.
The greater the debility of the will, the greater the extravagances in
the desire to feel, to represent, and to dream new things.--The result
of the excesses which have been indulged in: an insatiable thirst for
unrestrained feelings.... Foreign literatures afford the strongest
spices.
830.
Winckelmann's and Goethe's Greeks, Victor Hugo's Orientals, Wagner's
Edda characters, Walter Scott's Englishmen of the thirteenth
century--some day the whole comedy will be exposed! All of it was
disproportionately historical and false, _but_--modern.
831.
Concerning the characteristics of national genius in regard to the
strange and to the borrowed--
English genius vulgarises and makes realistic everything it sees;
The French whittles down, simplifies, rationalises, embellishes;
The German muddles, compromises, involves, and infects everything with
morality;
The Italian has made by far the freest and most subtle use of borrowed
material, and has enriched it with a hundred times more beauty than
it ever drew out of it: it is the richest genius, it had the most to
bestow.
832.
The Jews, with Heinrich Heine and Offenbach, approached genius in
the sphere of art. The latter was the most intellectual and most
high-spirited satyr, who as a musician abided by great tradition,
and who, for him who has something more than ears, is a real relief
after the sentimental and, at bottom, degenerate musicians of German
romanticism.
833.
_Offenbach;_ trench music imbued with Voltaire's intellect, free,
wanton, with a slight sardonic grin, but clear and intellectual almost
to the point of banality (Offenbach never titivates), and free from the
_mignardise_ of morbid or blond-Viennese sensuality.
834.
If by artistic genius we understand the most consummate freedom
within the law, divine ease, and facility in overcoming the greatest
difficulties, then Offenbach has even more right to the title genius
than Wagner has. Wagner is heavy and clumsy: nothing is more foreign to
him than the moments of wanton perfection which this clown Offenbach
achieves as many as five times, six times, in nearly every one of his
buffooneries. But by genius we ought perhaps to understand something
else.
835.
_Concerning "music."_--French, German, and Italian music. (Our most
debased periods in a political sense are our most productive. The
Slavs?)--The ballet, which is the outcome of excessive study of the
history of strange civilisations, has become master of opera.--Stage
music and musicians music.--It is an error to suppose that what Wagner
composed was _a. form_: it was rather formlessness. The possibilities
of dramatic construction have yet to be discovered.--Rhythm.
"Expression" at all costs. Harlotry in instrumentation.--All honour to
Heinrich Schütz; all honour to Mendelssohn: in them we find an element
of Goethe, but nowhere else! (We also find another element of Goethe
coming to blossom in Rahel; a third element in Heinrich Heine.)
836.
Descriptive music leaves reality to work its effects alone.... All
these kinds of art are easier, and more easy to imitate; poorly gifted
people have recourse to them. The appeal to the instincts; suggestive
art.
837.
_Concerning our modern music._--The decay of melody, like the decay
of "ideas," and of the freedom of intellectual activity, is a piece
of clumsiness and obtuseness, which is developing itself into new
feats of daring and even into principles;--in the end man has only the
principles of his gifts, or of his lack of gifts.
"Dramatic music"--nonsense! It is simply bad music.... "Feeling" and
"passion" are merely substitutes when lofty intellectuality and the
joy of it (_e.g._ Voltaire's) can no longer be attained. Expressed
technically, feeling and "passion" are easier; they presuppose a much
poorer kind of artist. The recourse to drama betrays that an artist is
much more a master in tricky means than in genuine ones. To-day we have
both dramatic painting and dramatic poetry, etc.
838.
What we lack in music is an æsthetic which would impose laws upon
musicians and give them a conscience; and as a result of this we lack
a real contest concerning "principles."--For as musicians we laugh
at Herbart's velleities in this department just as heartily as we
laugh at Schopenhauer's. As a matter of fact, tremendous difficulties
present themselves here. We no longer know on what basis to found our
concepts of what is exemplary, masterly, perfect. With the instincts
of old loves and old admiration we grope about in a realm of values,
and we almost believe, "that is good which pleases us".... I am always
suspicious when I hear people everywhere speak innocently of Beethoven
as a "classic"; what I would maintain, and with some seventy, is that,
in other arts, a classic is the very reverse of Beethoven. But when
the complete and glaring dissolution of style, Wagner's so-called
dramatic style, is taught and honoured as exemplary, as masterly, as
progressive, then my impatience exceeds all bounds. Dramatic style in
music, as Wagner understood it, is simply renunciation of all style
whatever; it is the assumption that something else, namely, drama, is a
hundred times more important than music. Wagner can paint; he does not
use music for the sake of music, with it he accentuates attitudes; he
is a poet. Finally he made an appeal to beautiful feelings and heaving
breasts, just as all other theatrical artists have done, and with it
all he converted women and even those whose souls thirst for culture
to him. But what do women and the uncultured care about music? All
these people have no conscience for art: none of them suffer when the
first and fundamental virtues of an art are scorned and trodden upon in
favour of that which is merely secondary (as _ancilla dramaturgica_).
What good can come of all extension in the means of expression, when
that which is expressed, art itself, has lost all its law and order?
The picturesque pomp and power of tones, the symbolism of sound,
rhythm, the colour effects of harmony and discord, the suggestive
significance of music, the whole sensuality of this art which Wagner
made prevail--it is all this that Wagner derived, developed, and drew
out of music. Victor Hugo did something very similar for language: but
already people in France are asking themselves, in regard to the case
of Victor Hugo, whether language was not corrupted by him, whether
reason, intellectuality, and thorough conformity to law in language
are not suppressed when the sensuality of expression is elevated to a
high place? Is it not a sign of decadence that the poets in France have
become plastic artists, and that the musicians of Germany have become
actors and culturemongers?
839.
To-day there exists a sort of musical pessimism even among people
who are not musicians. Who has not met and cursed the confounded
youthlet who torments his piano until it shrieks with despair,
and who single-handed heaves the slime of the most lugubrious and
drabby harmonies before him? By so doing a man betrays himself as a
pessimist.... It is open to question, though, whether he also proves
himself a musician by this means. I for my part could never be made
to believe it. Wagnerite _pur sang_ is unmusical, he submits to the
elementary forces of music very much as a woman submits to the will
of the man who hypnotises her--and in order to be able to do this he
must not be made suspicious _in rebus musicis et musicantibus_ by a
too severe or too delicate conscience. I said "very much as"--but in
this respect I spoke perhaps more than a parable. Let any one consider
the means which Wagner uses by preference, when he wishes to make an
effect (means which for the greater part he first had to invent), they
are appallingly similar to the means by which a hypnotist exercises
his power (the choice of his movements, the general colour of his
orchestration; the excruciating evasion of consistency, and fairness
and squareness, in rhythm; the creepiness, the soothing touch, the
mystery, the hysteria of his "unending melody"). And is the condition
to which the overture to _Lohengrin,_ for instance, reduces the men,
and still more the women, in the audience, so essentially different
from the somnambulistic trance? On one occasion after the overture in
question had been played, I heard an Italian lady say, with her eyes
half closed, in a way in which female Wagnerites are adepts: "_Come si
dorme con questa musica!_"[10]
[Footnote 10: "How the music makes one sleep!"--Tr.]
840.
_Religion in music._--What a large amount of satisfaction all religious
needs get out of Wagnerian music, though this is never acknowledged
or even understood! How much prayer, virtue, unction, virginity,
salvation, speaks through this music!... Oh what capital this cunning
saint, who leads and seduces us back to everything that was once
believed in, makes out of the fact that he may dispense with words
and concepts! ... Our intellectual conscience has no need to feel
ashamed--it stands apart--if any old instinct puts its trembling lips
to the rim of forbidden philtres.... This is shrewd and healthy, and,
in so far as it betrays a certain shame in regard to the satisfaction
of the religious instinct, it is even a good sign.... Cunning
Christianity: the type of the music which came from the "last Wagner."
841.
I distinguish between courage before persons, courage before things,
and courage on paper. The latter was the courage of David Strauss, for
instance. I distinguish again between the courage before witnesses
and the courage without witnesses: the courage of a Christian, or
of believers in God in general, can never be the courage without
witnesses--but on this score alone Christian courage stands condemned.
Finally, I distinguish between the courage which is temperamental and
the courage which is the fear of fear; a single instance of the latter
kind is moral courage. To this list the courage of despair should be
added.
This is the courage which Wagner possessed. His attitude in regard to
music was at bottom a desperate one. He lacked two things which go
to make up a good musician: nature and nurture, the predisposition
for music and the discipline and schooling which music requires. He
had courage: out of this deficiency he established a principle; he
invented a kind of music for himself. The dramatic music which he
invented was the music which he was able to compose,--its limitations
are Wagner's limitations.
And he was misunderstood!--Was he really misunderstood?... Such is
the case with five-sixths of the artists of to-day. Wagner is their
Saviour: five-sixths, moreover, is the "lowest proportion." In any case
where Nature has shown herself without reserve, and wherever culture is
an accident, a mere attempt, a piece of dilettantism, the artist turns
instinctively--what do I say?--I mean enthusiastically, to Wagner; as
the poet says: "Half drew he him, and half sank he."[11]
[Footnote 11: This is an adapted quotation from Goethe's poem, "The
Fisherman." The translation is E. A. Bowring's.--Tr.]
842.
"Music" and the grand style. The greatness of an artist is not to be
measured by the beautiful feelings which he evokes: let this belief
be left to the girls. It should be measured according to the extent
to which he approaches the grand style, according to the extent to
which he is capable of the grand style. This style and great passion
have this in common--that they scorn to please; that they forget to
persuade; that they command: that they will.... To become master of
the chaos which is in one; to compel one's inner chaos to assume form;
to become consistent, simple, unequivocal, mathematical, law this is
the great ambition here. By means of it one repels; nothing so much
endears people to such powerful men as this,--a desert seems to lie
around them, they impose silence upon all, and awe every one with the
greatness Of their sacrilege.... All arts know this kind of aspirant to
the grand style: why are they absent in music? Never yet has a musician
built as that architect did who erected the Palazzo Pitti.... This is a
problem. Does music perhaps belong to that culture in which the reign
of powerful men of various types is already at an end? Is the concept
"grand style" in fact a contradiction of the soul of music,--of "the
Woman" in our music? ...
With this I touch upon the cardinal question: how should all our music
be classified? The age of classical taste knows nothing that can be
compared with it: it bloomed when the world of the Renaissance reached
its evening, when "freedom" had already bidden farewell to both men and
their customs--is it characteristic of music to be Counter-Renaissance?
Is music, perchance, the sister of the baroque style, seeing that in
any case they were contemporaries? Is not music, modern music, already
decadence? ...
I have put my finger before on this question: whether music is not an
example of Counter-Renaissance art? whether it is not the next of kin
to the baroque style? whether it has not grown in Opposition to all
classic taste, so that any aspiration to classicism is forbidden by the
very nature of music?
The answer to this most important of all questions of values would
not be a very doubtful one, if people thoroughly understood the
fact that music attains to its highest maturity and plenitude as
romanticism--likewise as a reactionary movement against classicism.
Mozart, a delicate and lovable soul, but quite eighteenth century,
even in his serious lapses ... Beethoven, the first great romanticist
according to the French conception of romanticism, just as Wagner is
the last great romanticist ... both of them are instinctive opponents
of classical taste, of severe style--not to speak of "grand" in this
regard.
843.
Romanticism: an ambiguous question, like all modern questions.