102.

THE INTERPRETATIVE SENSE.—The sense of taste, as the true interpretative

sense, often talks the other senses over to its point of view and imposes

upon them its laws and customs. At table one can receive disclosures about

the most subtle secrets of the arts; it suffices to observe what tastes

good and when and after what and how long it tastes good.

103.

LESSING.—Lessing had a genuine French talent, and, as writer, went most

assiduously to the French school. He knows well how to arrange and display

his wares in his shop-window. Without this true art his thoughts, like the

objects of them, would have remained rather in the dark, nor would the

general loss be great. His art, however, has taught many (especially the

last generation of German scholars) and has given enjoyment to a countless

number. It is true his disciples had no need to learn from him, as they

often did, his unpleasant tone with its mingling of petulance and

candour.—Opinion is now unanimous on Lessing as “lyric poet,” and will

some day be unanimous on Lessing as “dramatic poet.”

104.

UNDESIRABLE READERS.—How an author is vexed by those stolid, awkward

readers who always fall at every place where they stumble, and always hurt

themselves when they fall!

105.

POETS’ THOUGHTS.—Real thoughts of real poets always go about with a veil

on, like Egyptian women; only the deep _eye_ of thought looks out freely

through the veil.—Poets’ thoughts are as a rule not of such value as is

supposed. We have to pay for the veil and for our own curiosity into the

bargain.

106.

WRITE SIMPLY AND USEFULLY.—Transitions, details, colour in depicting the

passions—we make a present of all these to the author because we bring

them with us and set them down to the credit of his book, provided he

makes us some compensation.

107.

WIELAND.—Wieland wrote German better than any one else, and had the

genuine adequacies and inadequacies of the master. His translations of the

letters of Cicero and Lucian are the best in the language. His ideas,

however, add nothing to our store of thought. We can endure his cheerful

moralities as little as his cheerful immoralities, for both are very

closely connected. The men who enjoyed them were at bottom better men than

we are, but also a good deal heavier. They _needed_ an author of this

sort. The Germans did not need Goethe, and therefore cannot make proper

use of him. We have only to consider the best of our statesmen and artists

in this light. None of them had or _could_ have had Goethe as their

teacher.

108.

RARE FESTIVALS.—Pithy conciseness, repose, and maturity—where you find

these qualities in an author, cry halt and celebrate a great festival in

the desert. It will be long before you have such a treat again.

109.

THE TREASURE OF GERMAN PROSE.—Apart from Goethe’s writings and especially

Goethe’s conversations with Eckermann (the best German book in existence),

what German prose literature remains that is worth reading over and over

again? Lichtenberg’s _Aphorisms_, the first book of Jung-Stilling’s _Story

of My Life_, Adalbert Stifter’s _St. Martin’s Summer_ and Gottfried

Keller’s _People of Seldwyla_—and there, for the time being, it comes to

an end.

110.

LITERARY AND COLLOQUIAL STYLE.—The art of writing demands, first and

foremost, substitutions for the means of expression which speech alone

possesses—in other words, for gestures, accent, intonation, and look.

Hence literary style is quite different from colloquial style, and far

more difficult, because it has to make itself as intelligible as the

latter with fewer accessaries. Demosthenes delivered his speeches

differently from what we read; he worked them up for reading

purposes.—Cicero’s speeches ought to be “demosthenised” with the same

object, for at present they contain more of the Roman Forum than we can

endure.

111.

CAUTION IN QUOTATION.—Young authors do not know that a good expression or

idea only looks well among its peers; that an excellent quotation may

spoil whole pages, nay the whole book; for it seems to cry warningly to

the reader, “Mark you, I am the precious stone, and round about me is

lead—pale, worthless lead!” Every word, every idea only desires to live in

its own company—that is the moral of a choice style.

112.

HOW SHOULD ERRORS BE ENUNCIATED?—We may dispute whether it be more

injurious for errors to be enunciated badly or as well as the best truths.

It is certain that in the former case they are doubly harmful to the brain

and are less easily removed from it. But, on the other hand, they are not

so certain of effect as in the latter case. They are, in fact, less

contagious.

113.

LIMITING AND WIDENING.—Homer limited and diminished the horizon of his

subject, but allowed individual scenes to expand and blossom out. Later,

the tragedians are constantly renewing this process. Each takes his

material in ever smaller and smaller fragments than his predecessor did,

but each attains a greater wealth of blooms within the narrow hedges of

these sequestered garden enclosures.

114.

LITERATURE AND MORALITY MUTUALLY EXPLANATORY.—We can show from Greek

literature by what forces the Greek spirit developed, how it entered upon

different channels, and where it became enfeebled. All this also depicts

to us how Greek morality proceeded, and how all morality will proceed: how

it was at first a constraint and displayed cruelty, then became gradually

milder; how a pleasure in certain actions, in certain forms and

conventions arose, and from this again a propensity for solitary exercise,

for solitary possession; how the track becomes crowded and overcrowded

with competitors; how satiety enters in, new objects of struggle and

ambition are sought, and forgotten aims are awakened to life; how the

drama is repeated, and the spectators become altogether weary of looking

on, because the whole gamut seems to have been run through—and then comes

a stoppage, an expiration, and the rivulets are lost in the sand. The end,

or at any rate _an_ end, has come.

115.

WHAT LANDSCAPES GIVE PERMANENT DELIGHT.—Such and such a landscape has

features eminently suited for painting, but I cannot find the formula for

it; it remains beyond my grasp as a whole. I notice that all landscapes

which please me permanently have a simple geometrical scheme of lines

underneath all their complexity. Without such a mathematical substratum no

scenery becomes artistically pleasing. Perhaps this rule may be applied

symbolically to human beings.

116.

READING ALOUD.—The ability to read aloud involves of necessity the ability

to declaim. Everywhere we must apply pale tints, but we must determine the

degree of pallor in close relation to the richly and deeply coloured

background, that always hovers before our eyes and acts as our guide—in

other words, in accordance with the way in which we should _declaim_ the

same passages. That is why we must be able to declaim.

117.

THE DRAMATIC SENSE.—He who has not the four subtler senses of art tries to

understand everything with the fifth sense, which is the coarsest of

all—the dramatic sense.

118.

HERDER.—Herder fails to be all that he made people think he was and

himself wished to think he was. He was no great thinker or discoverer, no

newly fertile soil with the unexhausted strength of a virgin forest. But

he possessed in the highest degree the power of scenting the future, he

saw and picked the first-fruits of the seasons earlier than all others,

and they then believed that he had made them grow. Between darkness and

light, youth and age, his mind was like a hunter on the watch, looking

everywhere for transitions, depressions, convulsions, the outward and

visible signs of internal growth. The unrest of spring drove him to and

fro, but he was himself not the spring.—At times, indeed, he had some

inkling of this, and yet would fain not have believed it—he, the ambitious

priest, who would have so gladly been the intellectual pope of his epoch!

This is his despair. He seems to have lived long as a pretender to several

kingdoms or even to a universal monarchy. He had his following which

believed in him, among others the young Goethe. But whenever crowns were

really distributed, he was passed over. Kant, Goethe, and then the first

true German historians and scholars robbed him of what he thought he had

reserved for himself (although in silence and secret he often thought the

reverse). Just when he doubted in himself, he gladly clothed himself in

dignity and enthusiasm: these were often in him mere garments, which had

to hide a great deal and also to deceive and comfort him. He really had

fire and enthusiasm, but his ambition was far greater! It blew impatiently

at the fire, which flickered, crackled, and smoked—his _style_ flickers,

crackles, and smokes—but he yearned for the great flame which never broke

out. He did not sit at the table of the genuine creators, and his ambition

did not admit of his sitting modestly among those who simply enjoy. Thus

he was a restless spirit, the taster of all intellectual dishes, which

were collected by the Germans from every quarter and every age in the

course of half a century. Never really happy and satisfied, Herder was

also too often ill, and then at times envy sat by his bed, and hypocrisy

paid her visit as well. He always had an air of being scarred and

crippled, and he lacked simple, stalwart manliness more completely than

any of the so-called “classical writers.”

119.

SCENT OF WORDS.—Every word has its scent; there is a harmony and discord

of scents, and so too of words.

120.

THE FAR-FETCHED STYLE.—The natural style is an offence to the lover of the

far-fetched style.

121.

A VOW.—I will never again read an author of whom one can suspect that he

_wanted_ to make a book, but only those writers whose thoughts

unexpectedly became a book.

122.

THE ARTISTIC CONVENTION.—Three-fourths of Homer is convention, and the

same is the case with all the Greek artists, who had no reason for falling

into the modern craze for originality. They had no fear of convention, for

after all convention was a link between them and their public. Conventions

are the artistic means _acquired_ for the understanding of the hearer; the

common speech, learnt with much toil, whereby the artist can really

communicate his ideas. All the more when he wishes, like the Greek poets

and musicians, to conquer at once with each of his works (since he is

accustomed to compete publicly with one or two rivals), the first

condition is that he must be understood at once, and this is only possible

by means of convention. What the artist devises beyond convention he

offers of his own free will and takes a risk, his success at best

resulting in the setting-up of a new convention. As a rule originality is

marvelled at, sometimes even worshipped, but seldom understood. A stubborn

avoidance of convention means a desire not to be understood. What, then,

is the object of the modern craze for originality?

123.

ARTISTS’ AFFECTATION OF SCIENTIFIC METHOD.—Schiller, like other German

artists, fancied that if a man had intellect he was entitled to improvise

even with the pen on all difficult subjects. So there we see his prose

essays—in every way a model of how _not_ to attack scientific questions of

æsthetics and ethics, and a danger for young readers who, in their

admiration for Schiller the poet, have not the courage to think meanly of

Schiller the thinker and author.—The temptation to traverse for once the

forbidden paths, and to have his say in science as well, is easy and

pardonable in the artist. For even the ablest artist from time to time

finds his handicraft and his workshop unendurable. This temptation is so

strong that it makes the artist show all the world what no one wishes to

see, that his little chamber of thought is cramped and untidy. Why not,

indeed? He does not live there. He proceeds to show that the storeroom of

his knowledge is partly empty, partly filled with lumber. Why not, indeed?

This condition does not really become the artist-child badly. In

particular, the artist shows that for the very easiest exercises of

scientific method, which are accessible even to beginners, his joints are

too stiff and untrained. Even of that he need not really be ashamed! On

the other hand, he often develops no mean art in imitating all the

mistakes, vices, and base pedantries that are practised in the scientific

community, in the belief that these belong to the appearance of the thing,

if not to the thing itself. This is the very point that is so amusing in

artists’ writing, that the artist involuntarily acts as his vocation

demands: he parodies the scientific and inartistic natures. Towards

science he should show no attitude but that of parody, in so far as he is

an artist and only an artist.

124.

THE FAUST-IDEA.—A little sempstress is seduced and plunged into despair: a

great scholar of all the four Faculties is the evil-doer. That cannot have

happened in the ordinary course, surely? No, certainly not! Without the

aid of the devil incarnate, the great scholar would never have achieved

the deed.—Is this really destined to be the greatest German “tragic idea,”

as one hears it said among Germans?—But for Goethe even this idea was too

terrible. His kind heart could not avoid placing the little sempstress,

“the good soul that forgot itself but once,” near to the saints, after her

involuntary death. Even the great scholar, “the good man” with “the dark

impulse,” is brought into heaven in the nick of time, by a trick which is

played upon the devil at the decisive moment. In heaven the lovers find

themselves again. Goethe once said that his nature was too conciliatory

for really tragic subjects.

125.

ARE THERE “GERMAN CLASSICS”?—Sainte-Beuve observes somewhere that the word

“classic” does not suit the genius of certain literatures. For instance,

nobody could talk seriously of “German classics.”—What do our German

publishers, who are about to add fifty more to the fifty German classics

we are told to accept, say to that? Does it not almost seem as if one need

only have been dead for the last thirty years, and lie a lawful prey to

the public,(21) in order to hear suddenly and unexpectedly the trumpet of

resurrection as a “Classic”? And this in an age and a nation where at

least five out of the six great fathers of its literature are undoubtedly

antiquated or becoming antiquated—without there being any need for the age

or the nation to be ashamed of this. For those writers have given way

before the strength of our time—let that be considered in all

fairness!—Goethe, as I have indicated, I do not include. He belongs to a

higher species than “national literatures”: hence life, revival, and decay

do not enter into the reckoning in his relations with his countrymen. He

lived and now lives but for the few; for the majority he is nothing but a

flourish of vanity which is trumpeted from time to time across the border

into foreign ears. Goethe, not merely a great and good man, but a

_culture_, is in German history an interlude without a sequel. Who, for

instance, would be able to point to any trace of Goethe’s influence in

German politics of the last seventy years (whereas the influence,

certainly of Schiller, and perhaps of Lessing, can be traced in the

political world)? But what of those five others? Klopstock, in a most

honourable way, became out of date even in his own lifetime, and so

completely that the meditative book of his later years, _The Republic of

Learning_, has never been taken seriously from that day to this. Herder’s

misfortune was that his writings were always either new or antiquated.

Thus for stronger and more subtle minds (like Lichtenberg) even Herder’s

masterpiece, his _Ideas for the History of Mankind_, was in a way

antiquated at the very moment of its appearance. Wieland, who lived to the

full and made others live likewise, was clever enough to anticipate by

death the waning of his influence. Lessing, perhaps, still lives

to-day—but among a young and ever younger band of scholars. Schiller has

fallen from the hands of young men into those of boys, of all German boys.

It is a well-known sign of obsolescence when a book descends to people of

less and less mature age.—Well, what is it that has thrust these five into

the background, so that well-educated men of affairs no longer read them?

A better taste, a riper knowledge, a higher reverence for the real and the

true: in other words, the very virtues which these five (and ten or twenty

others of lesser repute) first re-planted in Germany, and which now, like

a mighty forest, cast over their graves not only the shadow of awe, but

something of the shadow of oblivion.—But classical writers are not

planters of intellectual and literary virtues. They bring those virtues to

perfection and are their highest luminous peaks, and being brighter,

freer, and purer than all that surrounds them, they remain shining above

the nations when the nations themselves perish. There may come an elevated

stage of humanity, in which the Europe of the peoples is a dark, forgotten

thing, but Europe lives on in thirty books, very old but never

antiquated—in the classics.

126.

INTERESTING, BUT NOT BEAUTIFUL.—This countryside conceals its meaning, but

it has one that we should like to guess. Everywhere that I look, I read

words and hints of words, but I do not know where begins the sentence that

solves the riddle of all these hints. So I get a stiff neck in trying to

discover whether I should start reading from this or that point.

127.

AGAINST INNOVATORS IN LANGUAGE.—The use of neologisms or archaisms, the

preference for the rare and the bizarre, the attempt to enrich rather than

to limit the vocabulary, are always signs either of an immature or of a

corrupted taste. A noble poverty but a masterly freedom within the limits

of that modest wealth distinguishes the Greek artists in oratory. They

wish to have less than the people has—for the people is richest in old and

new—but they wish to have that little _better_. The reckoning up of their

archaic and exotic forms is soon done, but we never cease marvelling if we

have an eye for their light and delicate manner in handling the

commonplace and apparently long outworn elements in word and phrase.

128.

GLOOMY AND SERIOUS AUTHORS.—He who commits his sufferings to paper becomes

a gloomy author, but he becomes a serious one if he tells us what he _has_

suffered and why he is now enjoying a pleasurable repose.

129.

HEALTHINESS OF TASTE.—How is it that health is less contagious than

disease—generally, and particularly in matters of taste? Or are there

epidemics of health?

130.

A RESOLUTION.—Never again to read a book that is born and christened (with

ink) at the same moment.

131.

IMPROVING OUR IDEAS.—Improving our style means improving our ideas, and

nothing else. He who does not at once concede this can never be convinced

of the point.

132.

CLASSICAL BOOKS.—The weakest point in every classical book is that it is

written too much in the mother tongue of its author.

133.

BAD BOOKS.—The book should demand pen, ink, and desk, but usually it is

pen, ink, and desk that demand the book. That is why books are of so

little account at present.

134.

PRESENCE OF SENSE.—When the public reflects on paintings, it becomes a

poet; when on poems, an investigator. At the moment when the artist

summons it it is always lacking in the right sense, and accordingly in

presence of sense, not in presence of mind.

135.

CHOICE IDEAS.—The choice style of a momentous period does not only select

its words but its ideas—and both from the customary and prevailing usage.

Venturesome ideas, that smell too fresh, are to the maturer taste no less

repugnant than new and reckless images and phrases. Later on both choice

ideas and choice words soon smack of mediocrity, because the scent of the

choice vanishes quickly, and then nothing but the customary and

commonplace element is tasted.

136.

MAIN REASON FOR CORRUPTION OF STYLE.—The desire to display more sentiment

than one really feels for a thing corrupts style, in language and in all

art. All great art shows rather the opposite tendency. Like every man of

moral significance, it loves to check emotion on its way and not let it

run its course to the very end. This modesty of letting emotion but half

appear is most clearly to be observed, for example, in Sophocles. The

features of sentiment seem to become beautified when sentiment feigns to

be more shy than it really is.

137.

AN EXCUSE FOR THE HEAVY STYLE.—The lightly uttered phrase seldom falls on

the ear with the full weight of the subject. This is, however, due to the

bad training of the ear, which by education must pass from what has

hitherto been called music to the school of the higher harmony—in other

words, to conversation.

138.

BIRD’S-EYE VIEWS.—Here torrents rush from every side into a ravine: their

movement is so swift and stormy, and carries the eye along so quickly,

that the bare or wooded mountain slopes around seem not to sink down but

to fly down. We are in an agonised tension at the sight, as if behind all

this were hidden some hostile element, before which all must fly, and

against which the abyss alone gave protection. This landscape cannot be

painted, unless we hover above it like a bird in the open air. Here for

once the so-called bird’s-eye view is not an artistic caprice, but the

sole possibility.

139.

RASH COMPARISONS.—If rash comparisons are not proofs of the wantonness of

the writer, they are proofs of the exhaustion of his imagination. In any

case they bear witness to his bad taste.

140.

DANCING IN CHAINS.—In the case of every Greek artist, poet, or writer we

must ask: What is the new constraint which he imposes upon himself and

makes attractive to his contemporaries, so as to find imitators? For the

thing called “invention” (in metre, for example) is always a self-imposed

fetter of this kind. “Dancing in chains”—to make that hard for themselves

and then to spread a false notion that it is easy—that is the trick that

they wish to show us. Even in Homer we may perceive a wealth of inherited

formulæ and laws of epic narration, within the circle of which he had to

dance, and he himself created new conventions for them that came after.

This was the discipline of the Greek poets: first to impose upon

themselves a manifold constraint by means of the earlier poets; then to

invent in addition a new constraint, to impose it upon themselves and

cheerfully to overcome it, so that constraint and victory are perceived

and admired.

141.

AUTHORS’ COPIOUSNESS.—The last quality that a good author acquires is

copiousness: whoever has it to begin with will never become a good author.

The noblest racehorses are lean until they are permitted to rest from

their victories.

142.

WHEEZING HEROES.—Poets and artists who suffer from a narrow chest of the

emotions generally make their heroes wheeze. They do not know what easy

breathing means.

143.

THE SHORT-SIGHTED.(22)—The short-sighted are the deadly foes of all

authors who let themselves go. These authors should know the wrath with

which these people shut the book in which they observe that its creator

needs fifty pages to express five ideas. And the cause of their wrath is

that they have endangered what remains of their vision almost without

compensation. A short-sighted person said, “All authors let themselves

go.” “Even the Holy Ghost?” “Even the Holy Ghost.” But he had a right to,

for he wrote for those who had lost their sight altogether.

144.

THE STYLE OF IMMORTALITY.—Thucydides and Tacitus both imagined immortal

life for their works when they executed them. That might be guessed (if

not known otherwise) from their style. The one thought to give permanence

to his ideas by salting them, the other by boiling them down; and neither,

it seems, made a miscalculation.

145.

AGAINST IMAGES AND SIMILES.—By images and similes we convince, but we do

not prove. That is why science has such a horror of images and similes.

Science does not want to convince or make plausible, and rather seeks to

provoke cold distrust by its mode of expression, by the bareness of its

walls. For distrust is the touchstone for the gold of certainty.

146.

CAUTION.—In Germany, he who lacks thorough knowledge should beware of

writing. The good German does not say in that case “he is ignorant,” but

“he is of doubtful character.”—This hasty conclusion, by the way, does

great credit to the Germans.

147.

PAINTED SKELETONS.—Painted skeletons are those authors who try to make up

for their want of flesh by artistic colourings.

148.

THE GRAND STYLE AND SOMETHING BETTER.—It is easier to learn how to write

the grand style than how to write easily and simply. The reasons for this

are inextricably bound up with morality.

149.

SEBASTIAN BACH.—In so far as we do not hear Bach’s music as perfect and

experienced connoisseurs of counterpoint and all the varieties of the

fugal style (and accordingly must dispense with real artistic enjoyment),

we shall feel in listening to his music—in Goethe’s magnificent phrase—as

if “we were present at God’s creation of the world.” In other words, we

feel here that something great is in the making but not yet made—our

mighty modern music, which by conquering nationalities, the Church, and

counterpoint has conquered the world. In Bach there is still too much

crude Christianity, crude Germanism, crude scholasticism. He stands on the

threshold of modern European music, but turns from thence to look at the

Middle Ages.

150.

HÄNDEL.—Händel, who in the invention of his music was bold, original,

truthful, powerful, inclined to and akin to all the heroism of which a

_nation_ is capable, often proved stiff, cold, nay even weary of himself

in composition. He applied a few well-tried methods of execution, wrote

copiously and quickly, and was glad when he had finished—but that joy was

not the joy of God and other creators in the eventide of their working

day.

151.

HAYDN.—So far as genius can exist in a man who is merely _good_, Haydn had

genius. He went just as far as the limit which morality sets to intellect,

and only wrote music that has “no past.”

152.

BEETHOVEN AND MOZART.—Beethoven’s music often appears like a deeply

emotional meditation on unexpectedly hearing once more a piece long

thought to be forgotten, “Tonal Innocence”: it is music about music. In

the song of the beggar and child in the street, in the monotonous airs of

vagrant Italians, in the dance of the village inn or in carnival nights he

discovers his melodies. He stores them together like a bee, snatching here

and there some notes or a short phrase. To him these are hallowed memories

of “the better world,” like the ideas of Plato.—Mozart stands in quite a

different relation to his melodies. He finds his inspiration not in

hearing music but in gazing at life, at the most stirring life of southern

lands. He was always dreaming of Italy, when he was not there.

153.

RECITATIVE.—Formerly recitative was dry, but now we live in the age of

moist recitative. It has fallen into the water, and the waves carry it

whithersoever they list.

154.

“CHEERFUL” MUSIC.—If for a long time we have heard no music, it then goes

like a heavy southern wine all too quickly into the blood and leaves

behind it a soul dazed with narcotics, half-awake, longing for sleep. This

is particularly the case with cheerful music, which inspires in us

bitterness and pain, satiety and home-sickness together, and forces us to

sip again and again as at a sweetened draught of poison. The hall of gay,

noisy merriment then seems to grow narrow, the light to lose its

brightness and become browner. At last we feel as if this music were

penetrating to a prison where a poor wretch cannot sleep for

home-sickness.

155.

FRANZ SCHUBERT.—Franz Schubert, inferior as an artist to the other great

musicians, had nevertheless the largest share of inherited musical wealth.

He spent it with a free hand and a kind heart, so that for a few centuries

musicians will continue to _nibble_ at his ideas and inspirations. In his

works we find a store of _unused_ inventions; the greatness of others will

lie in making use of those inventions. If Beethoven may be called the

ideal listener for a troubadour, Schubert has a right to be called the

ideal troubadour.

156.

MODERN MUSICAL EXECUTION.—Great tragic or dramatic execution of music

acquires its character by imitating the gesture of the great sinner, such

as Christianity conceives and desires him: the slow-stepping, passionately

brooding man, distracted by the agonies of conscience, now flying in

terror, now clutching with delight, now standing still in despair—and all

the other marks of great sinfulness. Only on the Christian assumption that

all men are great sinners and do nothing but sin could we justify the

application of this style of execution to _all_ music. So far, music would

be the reflection of all the actions and impulses of man, and would

continually have to express by gestures the language of the great sinner.

At such a performance, a listener who was not enough of a Christian to

understand this logic might indeed cry out in horror, “For the love of

Heaven, how did sin find its way into music?”

157.

FELIX MENDELSSOHN.—Felix Mendelssohn’s music is the music of the good

taste that enjoys all the good things that have ever existed. It always

points behind. How could it have much “in front,” much of a future?—But

did he want it to have a future? He possessed a virtue rare among artists,

that of gratitude without _arrière-pensée_. This virtue, too, always

points behind.

158.

A MOTHER OF ARTS.—In our sceptical age, real devotion requires almost a

brutal heroism of ambition. Fanatical shutting of the eyes and bending of

the knee no longer suffice. Would it not be possible for ambition—in its

eagerness to be the last devotee of all the ages—to become the begetter of

a final church music, as it has been the begetter of the final church

architecture? (They call it the Jesuit style.)

159.

FREEDOM IN FETTERS—A PRINCELY FREEDOM.—Chopin, the last of the modern

musicians, who gazed at and worshipped beauty, like Leopardi; Chopin, the

Pole, the inimitable (none that came before or after him has a right to

this name)—Chopin had the same princely punctilio in convention that

Raphael shows in the use of the simplest traditional colours. The only

difference is that Chopin applies them not to colour but to melodic and

rhythmic traditions. He admitted the validity of these traditions because

he was born under the sway of etiquette. But in these fetters he plays and

dances as the freest and daintiest of spirits, and, be it observed, he

does not spurn the chain.

160.

CHOPIN’S BARCAROLLE.—Almost all states and modes of life have a moment of

rapture, and good artists know how to discover that moment. Such a moment

there is even in life by the seashore—that dreary, sordid, unhealthy

existence, dragged out in the neighbourhood of a noisy and covetous

rabble. This moment of rapture Chopin in his Barcarolle expressed in sound

so supremely that Gods themselves, when they heard it, might yearn to lie

long summer evenings in a boat.

161.

ROBERT SCHUMANN.—“The Stripling,” as the romantic songsters of Germany and

France of the first three decades of this century imagined him—this

stripling was completely translated into song and melody by Robert

Schumann, the eternal youth, so long as he felt himself in full possession

of his powers. There are indeed moments when his music reminds one of the

eternal “old maid.”

162.

DRAMATIC SINGERS.—“Why does this beggar sing?” “Probably he does not know

how to wail.” “Then he does right.” But our dramatic singers, who wail

because they do not know how to sing—are they also in the right?

163.

DRAMATIC MUSIC.—For him who does not see what is happening on the stage,

dramatic music is a monstrosity, just as the running commentary to a lost

text is a monstrosity. Such music requires us to have ears where our eyes

are. This, however, is doing violence to Euterpe, who, poor Muse, wants to

have her eyes and ears where the other Muses have theirs.

164.

VICTORY AND REASONABLENESS.—Unfortunately in the æsthetic wars, which

artists provoke by their works and apologias for their works, just as is

the case in real war, it is might and not reason that decides. All the

world now assumes as a historical fact that, in his dispute with Piccini,

Gluck was in the right. At any rate, he was victorious, and had might on

his side.

165.

OF THE PRINCIPLE OF MUSICAL EXECUTION.—Do the modern musical performers

really believe that the supreme law of their art is to give every piece as

much high-relief as is possible, and to make it speak at all costs a

dramatic language? Is not this principle, when applied for example to

Mozart, a veritable sin against the spirit—the gay, sunny, airy, delicate

spirit—of Mozart, whose seriousness was of a kindly and not awe-inspiring

order, whose pictures do not try to leap from the wall and drive away the

beholder in panic? Or do you think that all Mozart’s music is identical

with the statue-music in _Don Juan_? And not only Mozart’s, but all

music?—You reply that the advantage of your principle lies in its greater

_effect_. You would be right if there did not remain the counter-question,

“_On whom_ has the effect operated, and _on whom_ should an artist of the

first rank desire to produce his effect?” Never on the populace! Never on

the immature! Never on the morbidly sensitive! Never on the diseased! And

above all—never on the _blasé_!

166.

THE MUSIC OF TO-DAY.—This ultra-modern music, with its strong lungs and

weak nerves, is frightened above all things of itself.

167.

WHERE MUSIC IS AT HOME.—Music reaches its high-water mark only among men

who have not the ability or the right to argue. Accordingly, its chief

promoters are princes, whose aim is that there should be not much

criticism nor even much thought in their neighbourhood. Next come

societies which, under some pressure or other (political or religious),

are forced to become habituated to silence, and so feel all the greater

need of spells to charm away emotional ennui—these spells being generally

eternal love-making and eternal music. Thirdly, we must reckon whole

nations in which there is no “society,” but all the greater number of

individuals with a bent towards solitude, mystical thinking, and a

reverence for all that is inexpressible; these are the genuine “musical

souls.” The Greeks, as a nation delighting in talking and argument,

accordingly put up with music only as an _hors d’œuvre_ to those arts

which really admit of discussion and dispute. About music one can hardly

even _think_ clearly. The Pythagoreans, who in so many respects were

exceptional Greeks, are said to have been great musicians. This was the

school that invented a five-years’ silence,(23) but did not invent a

dialectic.

168.

SENTIMENTALITY IN MUSIC.—We may be ever so much in sympathy with serious

and profound music, yet nevertheless, or perhaps all the more for that

reason, we shall at occasional moments be overpowered, entranced, and

almost melted away by its opposite—I mean, by those simple Italian

operatic airs which, in spite of all their monotony of rhythm and

childishness of harmony, seem at times to sing to us like the very soul of

music. Admit this or not as you please, you Pharisees of good taste, it is

so, and it is my present task to propound the riddle that it is so, and to

nibble a little myself at the solution.—In childhood’s days we tasted the

honey of many things for the first time. Never was honey so good as then;

it seduced us to life, into abundant life, in the guise of the first

spring, the first flower, the first butterfly, the first friendship.

Then—perhaps in our ninth year or so—we heard our first music, and this

was the first that we understood; thus the simplest and most childish

tunes, that were not much more than a sequel to the nurse’s lullaby and

the strolling fiddler’s tune, were our first experience. (For even the

most trifling “revelations” of art need preparation and study; there is no

“immediate” effect of art, whatever charming fables the philosophers may

tell.) Our sensation on hearing these Italian airs is associated with

those first musical raptures, the strongest of our lives. The bliss of

childhood and its flight, the feeling that our most precious possession

can never be brought back, all this moves the chords of the soul more

strongly than the most serious and profound music can move them.—This

mingling of æsthetic pleasure with moral pain, which nowadays it is

customary to call (rather too haughtily, I think) “sentimentality”—it is

the mood of Faust at the end of the first scene—this “sentimentality” of

the listener is all to the advantage of Italian music. It is a feeling

which the experienced connoisseurs in art, the pure “æsthetes,” like to

ignore.—Moreover, almost all music has a magical effect only when we hear

it speak the language of our own _past_. Accordingly, it seems to the

layman that all the old music is continually growing better, and that all

the latest is of little value. For the latter arouses no “sentimentality,”

that most essential element of happiness, as aforesaid, for every man who

cannot approach this art with pure æsthetic enjoyment.

169.

AS FRIENDS OF MUSIC.—Ultimately we are and remain good friends with music,

as we are with the light of the moon. Neither, after all, tries to

supplant the sun: they only want to illumine our nights to the best of

their powers. Yet we may jest and laugh at them, may we not? Just a

little, at least, and from time to time? At the man in the moon, at the

woman in the music?

170.

ART IN AN AGE OF WORK.—We have the conscience of an industrious epoch.

This debars us from devoting our best hours and the best part of our days

to art, even though that art be the greatest and worthiest. Art is for us

a matter of leisure, of recreation, and we consecrate to it the _residue_

of our time and strength. This is the cardinal fact that has altered the

relation of art to life. When art makes its great demands of time and

strength upon its recipients, it has to battle against the conscience of

the industrious and efficient, it is relegated to the idle and

conscienceless, who, by their very nature, are not exactly suited to great

art, and consider its claims arrogant. It might, therefore, be all over

with art, since it lacks air and the power to breathe. But perhaps the

great art attempts, by a sort of coarsening and disguising, to make itself

at home in that other atmosphere, or at least to put up with it—an

atmosphere which is really a natural element only for petty art, the art

of recreation, of pleasant distraction. This happens nowadays almost

everywhere. Even the exponents of great art promise recreation and

distraction; even they address themselves to the exhausted; even they

demand from him the evening hours of his working-day—just like the artists

of the entertaining school, who are content to smooth the furrowed brow

and brighten the lack-lustre eye. What, then, are the devices of their

mightier brethren? These have in their medicine-chests the most powerful

excitants, which might give a shock even to a man half-dead: they can

deafen you, intoxicate you, make you shudder, or bring tears to your eyes.

By this means they overpower the exhausted man and stimulate him for one

night to an over-lively condition, to an ecstasy of terror and delight.

This great art, as it now lives in opera, tragedy, and music—have we a

right to be angry with it, because of its perilous fascination, as we

should be angry with a cunning courtesan? Certainly not. It would far

rather live in the pure element of morning calm, and would far rather make

its appeal to the fresh, expectant, vigorous morning-soul of the beholder

or listener. Let us be thankful that it prefers living thus to vanishing

altogether. But let us also confess that an era that once more introduces

free and complete high-days and holidays into life will have no use for

_our_ great art.

171.

THE EMPLOYEES OF SCIENCE AND THE OTHERS.—Really efficient and successful

men of science might be collectively called “The Employees.” If in youth

their acumen is sufficiently practised, their memory is full, and hand and

eye have acquired sureness, they are appointed by an older

fellow-craftsman to a scientific position where their qualities may prove

useful. Later on, when they have themselves gained an eye for the gaps and

defects in their science, they place themselves in whatever position they

are needed. These persons all exist for the sake of science. But there are

rarer spirits, spirits that seldom succeed or fully mature—“for whose sake

science exists”—at least, in their view. They are often unpleasant,

conceited, or cross-grained men, but almost always prodigies to a certain

extent. They are neither employees nor employers; they make use of what

those others have worked out and established, with a certain princely

carelessness and with little and rare praise—just as if the others

belonged to a lower order of beings. Yet they possess the same qualities

as their fellow-workers, and that sometimes in a less developed form.

Moreover, they have a peculiar limitation, from which the others are free;

this makes it impossible to put them into a place and to see in them

useful tools. They can only live in their own air and on their own soil.

This limitation suggests to them what elements of a science “are

theirs”—in other words, what they can carry home into their house and

atmosphere: they think that they are always collecting their scattered

“property.” If they are prevented from building at their own nest, they

perish like shelterless birds. The loss of freedom causes them to wilt

away. If they show, like their colleagues, a fondness for certain regions

of science, it is always only regions where the fruits and seeds necessary

to them can thrive. What do they care whether science, taken as a whole,

has untilled or badly tilled regions? They lack all impersonal interest in

a scientific problem. As they are themselves personal through and through,

all their knowledge and ideas are remoulded into a person, into a living

complexity, with its parts interdependent, overlapping, jointly nurtured,

and with a peculiar atmosphere and scent as a whole.—Such natures, with

their system of personal knowledge, produce the illusion that a science

(or even the whole of philosophy) is finished and has reached its goal.

The life in their system works this magic, which at times has been fatal

to science and deceptive to the really efficient workers above described,

and at other times, when drought and exhaustion prevailed, has acted as a

kind of restorative, as if it were the air of a cool, refreshing

resting-place.—These men are usually called _philosophers_.

172.

RECOGNITION OF TALENT.—As I went through the village of S., a boy began to

crack his whip with all his might—he had made great progress in this art,

and he knew it. I threw him a look of recognition—in reality it hurt me

cruelly. We do the same in our recognition of many of the talents. We do

good to them when they hurt us.

173.

LAUGHING AND SMILING.—The more joyful and assured the mind becomes, the

more man loses the habit of loud laughter. In compensation, there is an

intellectual smile continually bubbling up in him, a sign of his

astonishment at the innumerable concealed delights of a good existence.

174.

THE TALK OF INVALIDS.—Just as in spiritual grief we tear our hair, strike

our foreheads, lacerate our cheeks or even (like Œdipus) gouge our eyes

out, so against violent physical pain we call to our aid a bitter, violent

emotion, through the recollection of slanderous and malignant people,

through the denigration of our future, through the sword-pricks and acts

of malice which we mentally direct against the absent. And at times it is

true that one devil drives out another—but then we have the other.—Hence a

different sort of talk, tending to alleviate pain, should be recommended

invalids: reflections upon the kindnesses and courtesies that can be

performed towards friend and foe.

175.

MEDIOCRITY AS A MASK.—Mediocrity is the happiest mask which the superior

mind can wear, because it does not lead the great majority—that is, the

mediocre—to think that there is any disguise. Yet the superior mind

assumes the mask just for their sake—so as not to irritate them, nay,

often from a feeling of pity and kindness.

176.

THE PATIENT.—The pine tree seems to listen, the fir tree to wait, and both

without impatience. They do not give a thought to the petty human being

below who is consumed by his impatience and his curiosity.

177.

THE BEST JOKER.—My favourite joke is the one that takes the place of a

heavy and rather hesitating idea, and that at once beckons with its finger

and winks its eye.

178.

THE ACCESSARIES OF ALL REVERENCE.—Wherever the past is revered, the

over-cleanly and over-tidy people should not be admitted. Piety does not

feel content without a little dust, dirt, and dross.

179.

THE GREAT DANGER OF SAVANTS.—It is just the most thorough and profound

savants who are in peril of seeing their life’s goal set ever lower and

lower, and, with a feeling of this in their minds, to become ever more

discouraged and more unendurable in the latter half of their lives. At

first they plunge into their science with spacious hopes and set

themselves daring tasks, the ends of which are already anticipated by

their imaginations. Then there are moments as in the lives of the great

maritime discoverers—knowledge, presentiment, and power raise each other

higher and higher, until a new shore first dawns upon the eye in the far

distance. But now the stern man recognises more and more how important it

is that the individual task of the inquirer should be limited as far as

possible, so that it may be entirely accomplished and the intolerable

waste of force from which earlier periods of science suffered may be

avoided. In those days everything was done ten times over, and then the

eleventh always had the last and best word. Yet the more the savant learns

and practises this art of solving riddles in their entirety, the more

pleasure he finds in so doing. But at the same time his demands upon what

is here called “entirety” grow more exacting. He sets aside everything

that must remain in this sense incomplete, he acquires a disgust and an

acute scent for the half-soluble—for all that can only give a kind of

certainty in a general and indefinite form. His youthful plans crumble

away before his eyes. There remains scarcely anything but a few little

knots, in untying which the master now takes his pleasure and shows his

strength. Then, in the midst of all this useful, restless activity, he,

now grown old, is suddenly then often overcome by a deep misgiving, a sort

of torment of conscience. He looks upon himself as one changed, as if he

were diminished, humbled, transformed into a dexterous _dwarf_; he grows

anxious as to whether mastery in small matters be not a convenience, an

escape from the summons to greatness in life and form. But he cannot pass

_beyond_ any longer—the time for that has gone by.

180.

TEACHERS IN THE AGE OF BOOKS.—Now that self-education and mutual education

are becoming more widespread, the teacher in his usual form must become

almost unnecessary. Friends eager to learn, who wish to master some branch

of knowledge together, find in our age of books a shorter and more natural

way than “school” and “teachers.”

181.

VANITY AS THE GREATEST UTILITY.—Originally the strong individual uses not

only Nature but even societies and weaker individuals as objects of

rapine. He exploits them, so far as he can, and then passes on. As he

lives from hand to mouth, alternating between hunger and superfluity, he

kills more animals than he can eat, and robs and maltreats men more than

is necessary. His manifestation of power is at the same time one of

revenge against his cramped and worried existence. Furthermore, he wishes

to be held more powerful than he is, and thus misuses opportunities; the

accretion of fear that he begets being an accretion of power. He soon

observes that he stands or falls not by what he _is_ but by what he is

_thought_ to be. Herein lies the origin of vanity. The man of power seeks

by every means to increase others’ faith in his power.—The thralls who

tremble before him and serve him know, for their part, that they are worth

just so much as they appear to him to be worth, and so they work with an

eye to this valuation rather than to their own self-satisfaction. We know

vanity only in its most weakened forms, in its idealisations and its small

doses, because we live in a late and very emasculated state of society.

Originally vanity is the great utility, the strongest means of

preservation. And indeed vanity will be greater, the cleverer the

individual, because an increase in the belief in power is easier than an

increase in the power itself, but only for him who has intellect or (as

must be the case under primitive conditions) who is cunning and crafty.

182.

WEATHER-SIGNS OF CULTURE.—There are so few decisive weather-signs of

culture that we must be glad to have at least one unfailing sign at hand

for use in house and garden. To test whether a man belongs to us (I mean

to the free spirits) or not, we must test his sentiments regarding

Christianity. If he looks upon Christianity with other than a critical

eye, we turn our backs to him, for he brings us impure air and bad

weather.—It is no longer our task to teach such men what a sirocco wind

is. They have Moses and the prophets of weather and of enlightenment.(24)

If they will not listen to these, then——

183.

THERE IS A PROPER TIME FOR WRATH AND PUNISHMENT.—Wrath and punishment are

our inheritance from the animals. Man does not become of age until he has

restored to the animals this gift of the cradle.—Herein lies buried one of

the mightiest ideas that men can have, the idea of a progress of all

progresses.—Let us go forward together a few millenniums, my friends!

There is still reserved for mankind a great deal of joy, the very scent of

which has not yet been wafted to the men of our day! Indeed, we may

promise ourselves this joy, nay summon and conjure it up as a necessary

thing, so long as the development of human reason does not stand still.

Some day we shall no longer be reconciled to the logical sin that lurks in

all wrath and punishment, whether exercised by the individual or by

society—some day, when head and heart have learnt to live as near together

as they now are far apart. That they no longer stand so far apart as they

did originally is fairly palpable from a glance at the whole course of

humanity. The individual who can review a life of introspective work will

become conscious of the _rapprochement_ arrived at, with a proud delight

at the distance he has bridged, in order that he may thereupon venture

upon more ample hopes.

184.

ORIGIN OF PESSIMISTS.—A snack of good food often decides whether we are to

look to the future with hollow eye or in hopeful mood. The same influence

extends to the very highest and most intellectual states. Discontent and

reviling of the world are for the present generation an inheritance from

starveling ancestors. Even in our artists and poets we often notice that,

however exuberant their life, they are not of good birth, and have often,

from oppressed and ill-nourished ancestors, inherited in their blood and

brain much that comes out as the subject and even the conscious colouring

of their work. The culture of the Greeks is a culture of men of wealth, in

fact, inherited wealth. For a few centuries they lived better than we do

(better in every sense, in particular far more simply in food and drink).

Then the brain finally became so well-stored and subtle, and the blood

flowed so quickly, like a joyous, clear wine, that the best in them came

to light no longer as gloomy, distorted, and violent, but full of beauty

and sunshine.

185.

OF REASONABLE DEATH.—Which is more reasonable, to stop the machine when

the works have done the task demanded of them, or to let it run on until

it stands still of its own accord—in other words, is destroyed? Is not the

latter a waste of the cost of upkeep, a misuse of the strength and care of

those who serve? Are men not here throwing away that which would be sorely

needed elsewhere? Is not a kind of contempt of the machines propagated, in

that many of them are so uselessly tended and kept up?—I am speaking of

involuntary (natural) and voluntary (reasonable) death. Natural death is

independent of all reason and is really an irrational death, in which the

pitiable substance of the shell determines how long the kernel is to exist

or not; in which, accordingly, the stunted, diseased and dull-witted

jailer is lord, and indicates the moment at which his distinguished

prisoner shall die. Natural death is the suicide of nature—in other words,

the annihilation of the most rational being through the most irrational

element that is attached thereto. Only through religious illumination can

the reverse appear; for then, as is equitable, the higher reason (God)

issues its orders, which the lower reason has to obey. Outside religious

thought natural death is not worth glorifying. The wise dispensation and

disposal of death belongs to that now quite incomprehensible and

immoral-sounding morality of the future, the dawn of which it will be an

ineffable delight to behold.

186.

RETROGRADE INFLUENCES.—All criminals force society back to earlier stages

of culture than that in which they are placed for the time being. Their

influence is retrograde. Let us consider the tools that society must forge

and maintain for its defence: the cunning detectives, the jailers, the

hangmen. Nor should we forget the public counsel for prosecution and

defence. Finally we may ask ourselves whether the judge himself and

punishment and the whole legal procedure are not oppressive rather than

elevating in their reaction upon all who are not law-breakers. For we

shall never succeed in arraying self-defence and revenge in the garb of

innocence, and so long as men are used and sacrificed as a means to the

end of society, all loftier humanity will deplore this necessity.

187.

WAR AS A REMEDY.—For nations that are growing weak and contemptible war

may be prescribed as a remedy, if indeed they really want to go on living.

National consumption as well as individual admits of a brutal cure. The

eternal will to live and inability to die is, however, in itself already a

sign of senility of emotion. The more fully and thoroughly we live, the

more ready we are to sacrifice life for a single pleasurable emotion. A

people that lives and feels in this wise has no need of war.

188.

INTELLECTUAL AND PHYSICAL TRANSPLANTATION AS REMEDIES.—The different

cultures are so many intellectual climates, every one of which is

peculiarly harmful or beneficial to this or that organism. History as a

whole, as the knowledge of different cultures, is the science of remedies,

but not the science of the healing art itself. We still need a physician

who can make use of these remedies, in order to send every one—temporarily

or permanently—to the climate that just suits him. To live in the present,

within the limits of a single culture, is insufficient as a universal

remedy: too many highly useful kinds of men, who cannot breathe freely in

this atmosphere, would perish. With the aid of history we must give them

air and try to preserve them: even men of lower cultures have their

value.—Add to this cure of intellects that humanity, on considerations of

bodily health, must strive to discover by means of a medical geography

what kinds of degeneration and disease are caused by each region of the

earth, and conversely, what ingredients of health the earth affords: and

then, gradually, nations, families, and individuals must be transplanted

long and permanently enough for them to become masters of their inherited

physical infirmities. The whole world will finally be a series of

sanatoria.

189.

REASON AND THE TREE OF MANKIND.—What you all fear in your senile

short-sightedness, regarding the over-population of the world, gives the

more hopeful a mighty task. Man is some day to become a tree overshadowing

the whole earth, with millions upon millions of buds that shall all grow

to fruits side by side, and the earth itself shall be prepared for the

nourishment of this tree. That the shoot, tiny as yet, may increase in sap

and strength; that the sap may flow in countless channels for the

nutrition of the whole and the parts—from these and similar tasks we must

derive our standard for measuring whether a man of to-day is useful or

worthless. The task is unspeakably great and adventurous: let us all

contribute our share to prevent the tree from rotting before its time! The

historically trained mind will no doubt succeed in calling up the human

activities of all the ages before its eyes, as the community of ants with

its cunningly wrought mounds stands before our eyes. Superficially judged,

mankind as a whole, like ant-kind, might admit of our speaking of

“instinct.” On a closer examination we observe how whole nations, nay

whole centuries, take pains to discover and test new means of benefiting

the great mass of humanity, and thus finally the great common fruit-tree

of the world. Whatever injury the individual nations or periods may suffer

in this testing process, they have each become wise through this injury,

and from them the tide of wisdom slowly pours over the principles of whole

races and whole epochs. Ants too go astray and make blunders. Through the

folly of its remedies, mankind may well go to rack and ruin before the

proper time. There is no sure guiding instinct for the former or the

latter. Rather must we boldly face the great task of preparing the earth

for a plant of the most ample and joyous fruitfulness—a task set by reason

to reason!

190.

THE PRAISE OF DISINTERESTEDNESS AND ITS ORIGIN.—Between two neighbouring

chieftains there was a long-standing quarrel: they laid waste each other’s

territories, stole cattle, and burnt down houses, with an indecisive

result on the whole, because their power was fairly equal. A third, who

from the distant situation of his property was able to keep aloof from

these feuds, yet had reason to dread the day when one of the two

neighbours should gain a decisive preponderance, at last intervened

between the combatants with ceremonial goodwill. Secretly he lent a heavy

weight to his peace proposal by giving either to understand that he would

henceforth join forces with the other against the one who strove to break

the peace. They met in his presence, they hesitatingly placed into his

hand the hands that had hitherto been the tools and only too often the

causes of hatred—and then they really and seriously tried to keep the

peace. Either saw with astonishment how suddenly his prosperity and his

comfort increased; how he now had as neighbour a dealer ready to buy and

sell instead of a treacherous or openly scornful evil-doer; how even, in

unforeseen troubles, they could reciprocally save each other from

distress, instead of, as before, making capital out of this distress of

his neighbour and enhancing it to the highest degree. It even seemed as if

the human type had improved in both countries, for the eyes had become

brighter, the forehead had lost its wrinkles; all now felt confidence in

the future—and nothing is more advantageous for the souls and bodies of

men than this confidence. They saw each other every year on the

anniversary of the alliance, the chieftains as well as their retinue, and

indeed before the eyes of the mediator, whose mode of action they admired

and revered more and more, the greater the profit that they owed to him

became. Then his mode of action was called _disinterested_. They had

looked far too fixedly at the profit they had reaped themselves hitherto

to see anything more of their neighbour’s method of dealing than that his

condition in consequence of this had not altered so much as their own; he

had rather remained the same: and thus it appeared that the former had not

had his profit in view. For the first time people said to themselves that

disinterestedness was a virtue. It is true that in minor private matters

similar circumstances had arisen, but men only had eyes for this virtue

when it was depicted on the walls in a large script that was legible to

the whole community. Moral qualities are not recognised as virtues,

endowed with names, held in esteem, and recommended as worthy of

acquisition until the moment when they have _visibly_ decided the

happiness and destiny of whole societies. For then the loftiness of

sentiment and the excitation of the inner creative forces is in many so

great, that offerings are brought to this quality, offerings from the best

of what each possesses. At its feet the serious man lays his seriousness,

the dignified man his dignity, women their gentleness, the young all the

wealth of hope and futurity that in them lies; the poet lends it words and

names, sets it marching in the procession of similar beings, gives it a

pedigree, and finally, as is the way of artists, adores the picture of his

fancy as a new godhead—he even teaches others to adore. Thus in the end,

with the co-operation of universal love and gratitude, a virtue becomes,

like a statue, a repository of all that is good and honourable, a sort of

temple and divine personage combined. It appears thenceforward as an

individual virtue, as an absolute entity, which it was not before, and

exercises the power and privileges of a sanctified super-humanity.—In the

later days of Greece the cities were full of such deified human

abstractions (if one may so call them). The nation, in its own fashion,

had set up a Platonic “Heaven of Ideas” on earth, and I do not think that

its inhabitants were felt to be less alive than any of the old Homeric

divinities.

191.

DAYS OF DARKNESS.—“Days of Darkness” is the name given in Norway to the

period when the sun remains below the horizon the whole day long. The

temperature then falls slowly but continually.—A fine simile for all

thinkers for whom the sun of the human future is temporarily eclipsed.

192.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF LUXURY.—A garden, figs, a little cheese, and three or

four good friends—that was the luxury of Epicurus.

193.

THE EPOCHS OF LIFE.—The real epochs of life are those brief periods of

cessation midway between the rise and decline of a dominating idea or

emotion. Here once again there is satisfaction: all the rest is hunger and

thirst—or satiety.

194.

DREAMS.—Our dreams, if for once in a way they succeed and are

complete—generally a dream is a bungled piece of work—are symbolic

concatenations of scenes and images in place of a narrative poetical

language. They paraphrase our experiences or expectations or relations

with poetic boldness and definiteness, so that in the morning we are

always astonished at ourselves when we remember the nature of our dream.

In dreams we use up too much artistry—and hence are often too poor in

artistry in the daytime.

195.

NATURE AND SCIENCE.—As in nature, so in science the worse and less fertile

soils are first cultivated—because the means that science in its early

stages has at command are fairly sufficient for this purpose. The working

of the most fertile soils requires an enormous, carefully developed,

persevering method, tangible individual results, and an organised body of

well-trained workers. All these are found together only at a late

stage.—Impatience and ambition often grasp too early at these most fertile

soils, but the results are then from the first null and void. In nature

such losses would usually be avenged by the starvation of the settlers.

196.

THE SIMPLE LIFE.—A simple mode of life is nowadays difficult, requiring as

it does far more reflection and gift for invention than even very clever

people possess. The most honourable will perhaps still say, “I have not

the time for such lengthy reflection. The simple life is for me too lofty

a goal: I will wait till those wiser than I have discovered it.”

197.

PEAKS AND NEEDLE-POINTS.—The poor fertility, the frequent celibacy, and in

general the sexual coldness of the highest and most cultivated spirits, as

that of the classes to which they belong, is essential in human economy.

Intelligence recognises and makes use of the fact that at an acme of

intellectual development the danger of a neurotic offspring is very great.

Such men are the peaks of mankind—they ought no longer to run out into

needle-points.

198.

_NATURA NON FACIT SALTUM._—However strongly man may develop upwards and

seem to leap from one contradiction to another, a close observation will

reveal the dovetails where the new building grows out of the old. This is

the biographer’s task: he must reflect upon his subject on the principle

that nature takes no jumps.

199.

CLEAN, BUT—He who clothes himself with rags washed clean dresses cleanly,

to be sure, but is still ragged.

200.

THE SOLITARY SPEAKS.—In compensation for much disgust, disheartenment,

boredom—such as a lonely life without friends, books, duties, and passions

must involve—we enjoy those short spans of deep communion with ourselves

and with Nature. He who fortifies himself completely against boredom

fortifies himself against himself too. He will never drink the most

powerful elixir from his own innermost spring.

201.

FALSE RENOWN.—I hate those so-called natural beauties which really have

significance only through science, especially geographical science, but

are insignificant in an æsthetic sense: for example, the view of Mont

Blanc from Geneva. This is an insignificant thing without the auxiliary

mental joy of science: the nearer mountains are all more beautiful and

fuller of expression, but “not nearly so high,” adds that absurd

depreciatory science. The eye here contradicts science: how can it truly

rejoice in the contradiction?

202.

THOSE THAT TRAVEL FOR PLEASURE.—Like animals, stupid and perspiring, they

climb mountains: people forgot to tell them that there were fine views on

the way.

203.

TOO MUCH AND TOO LITTLE.—Men nowadays live too much and think too little.

They have hunger and dyspepsia together, and become thinner and thinner,

however much they eat. He who now says “Nothing has happened to me” is a

blockhead.

204.

END AND GOAL.—Not every end is the goal. The end of a melody is not its

goal, and yet if a melody has not reached its end, it has also not reached

its goal. A parable.

205.

NEUTRALITY OF NATURE ON A GRAND SCALE.—The neutrality of Nature on a grand

scale (in mountain, sea, forest, and desert) is pleasing, but only for a

brief space. Afterwards we become impatient. “Have they all nothing to say

to _us_? Do _we_ not exist so far as they are concerned?” There arises a

feeling that a _lèse-majesté_ is committed against humanity.

206.

FORGETTING OUR PURPOSE.—In a journey we commonly forget its goal. Almost

every vocation is chosen and entered upon as means to an end, but is

continued as the ultimate end. Forgetting our purpose is the most frequent

form of folly.

207.

SOLAR ORBIT OF AN IDEA.—When an idea is just rising on the horizon, the

soul’s temperature is usually very low. Gradually the idea develops in

warmth, and is hottest (that is to say, exerts its greatest influence)

when belief in the idea is already on the wane.

208.

HOW TO HAVE EVERY MAN AGAINST YOU.—If some one now dared to say, “He that

is not for me is against me,” he would at once have all against him.—This

sentiment does credit to our era.

209.

BEING ASHAMED OF WEALTH.—Our age endures only a single species of rich

men—those who are ashamed of their wealth. If we hear it said of any one

that he is very rich, we at once feel a similar sentiment to that

experienced at the sight of a repulsively swollen invalid, one suffering

from diabetes or dropsy. We must with an effort remember our humanity, in

order to go about with this rich man in such a way that he does not notice

our feeling of disgust. But as soon as he prides himself at all on his

wealth, our feelings are mingled with an almost compassionate surprise at

such a high degree of human unreason. We would fain raise our hands to

heaven and cry, “Poor deformed and overburdened creature, fettered a

hundredfold, to whom every hour brings or may bring something unpleasant,

in whose frame twitches every event that occurs in scores of countries,

how can you make us believe that you feel at ease in your position? If you

appear anywhere in public, we know that it is a sort of running the

gauntlet amid countless glances that have for you only cold hate or

importunity or silent scorn. You may earn more easily than others, but it

is only a superfluous earning, which brings little joy, and the guarding

of what you have earned is now, at any rate, a more troublesome business

than any toilsome process of earning. You are continually suffering,

because you are continually losing. What avails it you that they are

always injecting you with fresh artificial blood? That does not relieve

the pain of those cupping-glasses that are fixed, for ever fixed, on your

neck!—But, to be quite fair to you, it is difficult or perhaps impossible

for you _not_ to be rich. You _must_ guard, you _must_ earn more; the

inherited bent of your character is the yoke fastened upon you. But do not

on that account deceive us—be honestly and visibly ashamed of the yoke you

wear, as in your soul you are weary and unwilling to wear it. This shame

is no disgrace.”

210.

EXTRAVAGANT PRESUMPTIONS.—There are men so presumptuous that they can only

praise a greatness which they publicly admire by representing it as steps

and bridges that lead to themselves.

211.

ON THE SOIL OF INSULT.—He who wishes to deprive men of a conception is

generally not satisfied with refuting it and drawing out of it the

illogical worm that resides within. Rather, when the worm has been killed,

does he throw the whole fruit as well into the mire, in order to make it

ignoble in men’s sight and to inspire disgust. Thus he thinks that he has

found a means of making the usual “third-day resurrection” of conceptions

an impossibility.—He is wrong, for on the very soil of insult, in the

midst of the filth, the kernel of the conception soon produces new

seeds.—The right thing then, is not to scorn and bespatter what one wishes

finally to remove, but to lay it tenderly on ice again and again, having

regard to the fact that conceptions are very tenacious of life. Here we

must act according to the maxim: “One refutation is no refutation.”

212.

THE LOT OF MORALITY.—Since spiritual bondage is being relaxed, morality

(the inherited, traditional, instinctive mode of action in accordance with

moral sentiments) is surely also on the decline. This, however, is not the

case with the individual virtues, moderation, justice, repose; for the

greatest freedom of the conscious intellect leads at some time, even

unconsciously, back to these virtues, and then enjoins their practice as

expedient.

213.

THE FANATIC OF DISTRUST AND HIS SURETY.—_The Elder_: You wish to make the

tremendous venture and instruct mankind in the great things? What is your

surety?

_Pyrrho_: It is this: I intend to warn men against myself; I intend to

confess all the defects of my character quite openly, and reveal to the

world my hasty conclusions, my contradictions, and my foolish blunders.

“Do not listen to me,” I will say to them, “until I have become equal to

the meanest among you, nay am even less than he. Struggle against truth as

long as you can, from your disgust with her advocate. I shall be your

seducer and betrayer if you find in me the slightest glimmering of

respectability and dignity.”

_The Elder_: You promise too much; you cannot bear this burden.

_Pyrrho_: Then I will tell men even that, and say that I am too weak, and

cannot keep my promise. The greater my unworthiness, the more will they

mistrust the truth, when it passes through my lips.

_The Elder_: You propose to teach distrust of truth?

_Pyrrho_: Yes; distrust as it never was yet on earth, distrust of anything

and everything. This is the only road to truth. The right eye must not

trust the left eye, and for some time light must be called darkness: this

is the path that you must tread. Do not imagine that it will lead you to

fruit trees and fair pastures. You will find on this road little hard

grains—these are truths. For years and years you will have to swallow

handfuls of lies, so as not to die of hunger, although you know that they

are lies. But those grains will be sown and planted, and perhaps, perhaps

some day will come the harvest. No one may _promise_ that day, unless he

be a fanatic.

_The Elder_: Friend, friend! Your words too are those of a fanatic!

_Pyrrho_: You are right! I will be distrustful of all words.

_The Elder_: Then you will have to be silent.

_Pyrrho_: I shall tell men that I have to be silent, and that they are to

mistrust my silence.

_The Elder_: So you draw back from your undertaking?

_Pyrrho_: On the contrary—you have shown me the door through which I must

pass.

_The Elder_: I don’t know whether we yet completely understand each other?

_Pyrrho_: Probably not.

_The Elder_: If only you understand yourself!

(Pyrrho turns round and laughs.)

_The Elder_: Ah, friend! Silence and laughter—is that now your whole

philosophy?

_Pyrrho_: There might be a worse.

214.

EUROPEAN BOOKS.—In reading Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère,

Fontenelle (especially the _Dialogues des Morts_), Vauvenargues, and

Chamfort we are nearer to antiquity than in any group of six authors of

other nations. Through these six the spirit of the last centuries before

Christ has once more come into being, and they collectively form an

important link in the great and still continuous chain of the Renaissance.

Their books are raised above all changes of national taste and

philosophical nuances from which as a rule every book takes and must take

its hue in order to become famous. They contain more real ideas than all

the books of German philosophers put together: ideas of the sort that

breed ideas——I am at a loss how to define to the end: enough to say that

they appear to me writers who wrote neither for children nor for

visionaries, neither for virgins nor for Christians, neither for Germans

nor for—I am again at a loss how to finish my list. To praise them in

plain terms, I may say that had they been written in Greek, they would

have been understood by Greeks. How much, on the other hand, would even a

Plato have understood of the writings of our best German thinkers—Goethe

and Schopenhauer, for instance—to say nothing of the repugnance that he

would have felt to their style, particularly to its obscure, exaggerated,

and occasionally dry-as-dust elements? And these are defects from which

these two among German thinkers suffer least and yet far too much (Goethe

as thinker was fonder than he should have been of embracing the cloud, and

Schopenhauer almost constantly wanders, not with impunity, among symbols

of objects rather than among the objects themselves).—On the other hand,

what clearness and graceful precision there is in these Frenchmen! The

Greeks, whose ears were most refined, could not but have approved of this

art, and one quality they would even have admired and reverenced—the

French verbal wit: they were extremely fond of this quality, without being

particularly strong in it themselves.

215.

FASHION AND MODERNITY.—Wherever ignorance, uncleanness, and superstition

are still rife, where communication is backward, agriculture poor, and the

priesthood powerful, national costumes are still worn. Fashion, on the

other hand, rules where the opposite conditions prevail. Fashion is

accordingly to be found next to the virtues in modern Europe. Are we to

call it their seamy side?—Masculine dress that is fashionable and no

longer national proclaims of its wearer: firstly, that he does not wish to

appear as an individual or as member of a class or race; that he has made

an intentional suppression of these kinds of vanity a law unto himself:

secondly, that he is a worker, and has little time for dressing and

self-adornment, and moreover regards anything expensive or luxurious in

material and cut as out of harmony with his work: lastly, that by his

clothes he indicates the more learned and intellectual callings as those

to which he stands or would like to stand nearest as a European—whereas

such national costumes as still exist would exhibit the occupations of

brigand, shepherd, and soldier as the most desirable and distinguished.

Within this general character of masculine fashion exist the slight

fluctuations demanded by the vanity of young men, the dandies and dawdlers

of our great cities—in other words, Europeans who have not yet reached

maturity.—European women are as yet far less mature, and for this reason

the fluctuations with them are much greater. They also will not have the

national costume, and hate to be recognised by their dress as German,

French, or Russian. They are, however, very desirous of creating an

impression as individuals. Then, too, their dress must leave no one in

doubt that they belong to one of the more reputable classes of society (to

“good” or “high” or “great” society), and on this score their pretensions

are all the greater if they belong scarcely or not at all to that class.

Above all, the young woman does not want to wear what an older woman

wears, because she thinks she loses her market value if she is suspected

of being somewhat advanced in years. The older woman, on the other hand,

would like to deceive the world as long as possible by a youthful garb.

From this competition must continually arise temporary fashions, in which

the youthful element is unmistakably and inimitably apparent. But after

the inventive genius of the young female artists has run riot for some

time in such indiscreet revelations of youth (or rather, after the

inventive genius of older, courtly civilisations and of still existing

peoples—in fact, of the whole world of dress—has been pressed into the

service, and, say, the Spaniards, Turks, and ancient Greeks have been

yoked together for the glorification of fair flesh), then they at last

discover, time and again, that they have not been good judges of their own

interest; that if they wish to have power over men, the game of

hide-and-seek with the beautiful body is more likely to win than naked or

half-naked honesty. And then the wheel of taste and vanity turns once more

in an opposite direction. The rather older young women find that their

kingdom has come, and the competition of the dear, absurd creatures rages

again from the beginning.—But the more women advance mentally, and no

longer among themselves concede the pre-eminence to an unripe age, the

smaller their fluctuations of costume grow and the less elaborate their

adornment. A just verdict in this respect must not be based on ancient

models—in other words, not on the standard of the dress of women who dwell

on the shores of the Mediterranean—but must have an eye to the climatic

conditions of the central and northern regions, where the intellectual and

creative spirit of Europe now finds its most natural home.—Generally

speaking, therefore, it is not change that will be the characteristic mark

of fashion and modernity, for change is retrograde, and betokens the still

unripened men and women of Europe; but rather the repudiation of national,

social, and individual vanity. Accordingly, it is commendable, because

involving a saving of time and strength, if certain cities and districts

of Europe think and invent for all the rest in the matter of dress, in

view of the fact that a sense of form does not seem to have been bestowed

upon all. Nor is it really an excessive ambition, so long as these

fluctuations still exist, for Paris, for example, to claim to be the sole

inventor and innovator in this sphere. If a German, from hatred of these

claims on the part of a French city, wishes to dress differently,—as, for

example, in the Dürer style,—let him reflect that he then has a costume

which the Germans of olden times wore, but which the Germans have not in

the slightest degree invented. For there has never been a style of dress

that characterised the German as a German. Moreover, let him observe how

he looks in his costume, and whether his altogether modern face, with all

its hues and wrinkles, does not raise a protest against a Dürer fashion of

dress.—Here, where the concepts “modern” and “European” are almost

identical, we understand by “Europe” a far wider region than is embraced

by the Europe of geography, the little peninsula of Asia. In particular,

we must include America, in so far as America is the daughter of our

civilisation. On the other hand, not all Europe falls under the heading of

cultured “Europe,” but only those nations and divisions of nations which

have their common past in Greece, Rome, Judaism, and Christianity.

216.

“GERMAN VIRTUE.”—There is no denying that from the end of the eighteenth

century a current of moral awakening flowed through Europe. Then only

Virtue found again the power of speech. She learnt to discover the

unrestrained gestures of exaltation and emotion, she was no longer ashamed

of herself, and she created philosophies and poems for her own

glorification. If we look for the sources of this current, we come upon

Rousseau, but the mythical Rousseau, the phantom formed from the

impression left by his writings (one might almost say again, his

mythically interpreted writings) and by the indications that he provided

himself. He and his public constantly worked at the fashioning of this

ideal figure. The other origin lies in the resurrection of the Stoical

side of Rome’s greatness, whereby the French so nobly carried on the task

of the Renaissance. With striking success they proceeded from the

reproduction of antique forms to the reproduction of antique characters.

Thus they may always claim a title to the highest honours, as the nation

which has hitherto given the modern world its best books and its best men.

How this twofold archetype, the mythical Rousseau and the resurrected

spirit of Rome, affected France’s weaker neighbours, is particularly

noticeable in Germany, which, in consequence of her novel and quite

unwonted impulse to seriousness and loftiness in will and self-control,

finally came to feel astonishment at her own newfound virtue, and launched

into the world the concept “German virtue,” as if this were the most

original and hereditary of her possessions. The first great men who

transfused into their own blood that French impulse towards greatness and

consciousness of the moral will were more honest, and more grateful.

Whence comes the moralism of Kant? He is continually reminding us: from

Rousseau and the revival of Stoic Rome. The moralism of Schiller has the

same source and the same glorification of the source. The moralism of

Beethoven in notes is a continual song in praise of Rousseau, the antique

French, and Schiller. “Young Germany” was the first to forget its

gratitude, because in the meantime people had listened to the preachers of

hatred of the French. The “young German” came to the fore with more

consciousness than is generally allowed to youths. When he investigated

his paternity, he might well think of the proximity of Schiller,

Schleiermacher, and Fichte. But he should have looked for his grandfathers

in Paris and Geneva, and it was very short-sighted of him to believe what

he believed: that virtue was not more than thirty years old. People became

used to demanding that the word “German” should connote “virtue,” and this

process has not been wholly forgotten to this day.—Be it observed further

that this moral awakening, as may almost be guessed, has resulted only in

drawbacks and obstacles to the _recognition_ of moral phenomena. What is

the entire German philosophy, starting from Kant, with all its French,

English, and Italian offshoots and by-products? A semi-theological attack

upon Helvetius, a rejection of the slowly and laboriously acquired views

and signposts of the right road, which in the end he collected and

expressed so well. To this day Helvetius is the best-abused of all good

moralists and good men in Germany.

217.

CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC.—Both classically and romantically minded spirits—two

species that always exist—cherish a vision of the future; but the former

derive their vision from the strength of their time, the latter from its

weakness.

218.

THE MACHINE AS TEACHER.—Machinery teaches in itself the dovetailed working

of masses of men, in activities where each has but one thing to do. It is

the model of party organisations and of warfare. On the other hand, it

does not teach individual self-glorification, for it makes of the many a

machine, and of each individual a tool for one purpose. Its most general

effect is to teach the advantage of centralisation.

219.

UNABLE TO SETTLE.—One likes to live in a small town. But from time to time

just this small town drives us out into bare and lonely Nature, especially

when we think we know it too well. Finally, in order to refresh ourselves

from Nature, we go to the big town. A few draughts from this cup and we

see its dregs, and the circle begins afresh, with the small town as

starting-point.—So the moderns live; they are in all things rather too

thorough to be able to settle like the men of other days.

220.

REACTION AGAINST THE CIVILISATION OF MACHINERY.—The machine, itself a

product of the highest mental powers, sets in motion hardly any but the

lower, unthinking forces of the men who serve it. True, it unfetters a

vast quantity of force which would otherwise lie dormant. But it does not

communicate the impulse to climb higher, to improve, to become artistic.

It creates activity and monotony, but this in the long-run produces a

counter-effect, a despairing ennui of the soul, which through machinery

has learnt to hanker after the variety of leisure.