Chapter III: Part 3

_Epicurus._--Yes, I am proud of perceiving the character of Epicurus differently from anyone else perhaps, and of enjoying the happiness of the afternoon of antiquity in all that I hear and read of him:--I see his eye gazing out on a broad whitish sea, over the shore-rocks on which the sunshine rests, while great and small creatures play in its light, secure and calm like this light and that eye itself. Such happiness could only have been devised by a chronic sufferer, the happiness of an eye before which the sea of existence has become calm, and which can no longer tire of gazing at the surface and at the variegated, tender, tremulous skin of this sea. Never previously was there such a moderation of voluptuousness.

46.

_Our Astonishment--_There is a profound and fundamental satisfaction in the fact that science ascertains things that _hold their ground,_ and again furnish the basis for new researches:--it could certainly be otherwise. Indeed, we are so much convinced of all the uncertainty and caprice of our judgments, and of the everlasting change of all human laws and conceptions, that we are really astonished _how persistently_ the results of science hold their ground! In earlier times people knew nothing of this changeability of all human things; the custom of morality maintained the belief that the whole inner life of man was bound to iron necessity by eternal fetters:--perhaps people then felt a similar voluptuousness of astonishment when they listened to tales and fairy stories. The wonderful did so much good to those men, who might well get tired sometimes of the regular and the eternal. To leave the ground for once! To soar! To stray! To be mad!--that belonged to the paradise and the revelry of earlier times; while our felicity is like that of the shipwrecked man who has gone ashore, and places himself with both feet on the old, firm ground--in astonishment that it does not rock.

47.

_The Suppression of the Passions._--When one continually prohibits the expression of the passions as something to be left to the "vulgar," to coarser, bourgeois, and peasant natures--that is, when one does not want to suppress the passions themselves, but only their language and demeanour, one nevertheless realises _therewith_ just what one does not want: the suppression of the passions themselves, or at least their weakening and alteration,--as the court of Louis XIV. (to cite the most instructive instance), and all that was dependent on it, experienced. The generation _that followed,_ trained in suppressing their expression, no longer possessed the passions themselves, but had a pleasant, superficial, playful disposition in their place,--a generation which was so permeated with the incapacity to be ill-mannered, that even an injury was not taken and retaliated, except with courteous words. Perhaps our own time furnishes the most remarkable counterpart to this period: I see everywhere (in life, in the theatre, and not least in all that is written) satisfaction at all the _coarser_ outbursts and gestures of passion; a certain convention of passionateness is now desired,--only not the passion itself! Nevertheless _it_ will thereby be at last reached, and our posterity will have a _genuine savagery,_ and not merely a formal savagery and unmannerliness.

48.

_Knowledge of Distress.--_Perhaps there is nothing by which men and periods are so much separated from one another, as by the different degrees of knowledge of distress which they possess; distress of the soul as well as of the body. With respect to the latter, owing to lack of sufficient self-experience, we men of the present day (in spite of our deficiencies and infirmities), are perhaps all of us blunderers and visionaries in comparison with the men of the age of fear--the longest of all ages,--when the individual had to protect himself against violence, and for that purpose had to be a man of violence himself. At that time a man went through a long schooling of corporeal tortures and privations, and found even in a certain kind of cruelty toward himself, in a voluntary use of pain, a necessary means for his preservation; at that time a person trained his environment to the endurance of pain; at that time a person willingly inflicted pain, and saw the most frightful things of this kind happen to others without having any other feeling than for his own security. As regards the distress of the soul however, I now look at every man with respect to whether he knows it by experience or by description; whether he still regards it as necessary to simulate this knowledge, perhaps as an indication of more refined culture; or whether, at the bottom of his heart, he does not at all believe in great sorrows of soul, and at the naming of them calls to mind a similar experience as at the naming of great corporeal sufferings, such as tooth-aches, and stomach-aches. It is thus, however, that it seems to be with most people at present. Owing to the universal inexperience of both kinds of pain, and the comparative rarity of the spectacle of a sufferer, an important consequence results: people now hate pain far more than earlier man did, and calumniate it worse than ever; indeed people nowadays can hardly endure the _thought_ of pain, and make out of it an affair of conscience and a reproach to collective existence. The appearance of pessimistic philosophies is not at all the sign of great and dreadful miseries; for these interrogative marks regarding the worth of life appear in periods when the refinement and alleviation of existence already deem the unavoidable gnat-stings of the soul and body as altogether too bloody and wicked; and in the poverty of actual experiences of pain, would now like to make _painful general ideas_ appear as suffering of the worst kind.--There might indeed be a remedy for pessimistic philosophies and the excessive sensibility which seems to me the real "distress of the present":--but perhaps this remedy already sounds too cruel, and would itself be reckoned among the symptoms owing to which people at present conclude that "existence is something evil." Well! the remedy for "the distress" is _distress._

49.

_Magnanimity and allied Qualities.--_Those paradoxical phenomena, such as the sudden coldness in the demeanour of good-natured men, the humour of the melancholy, and above all _magnanimity,_ as a sudden renunciation of revenge or of the gratification of envy--appear in men in whom there is a powerful inner impulsiveness, in men of sudden satiety and sudden disgust. Their satisfactions are so rapid and violent that satiety, aversion and flight into the antithetical taste, immediately follow upon them: in this contrast the convulsion of feeling liberates itself, in one person by sudden coldness, in another by laughter, and in a third by tear and self-sacrifice. The magnanimous person appears to me--at least that kind of magnanimous person who has always made most impression--as a man with the strongest thirst for vengeance, to whom a gratification presents itself close at hand, and who _already_ drinks it off _in imagination_ so copiously, thoroughly, and to the last drop, that an excessive, rapid disgust follows this rapid licentiousness;--he now elevates himself "above himself," as one says, and forgives his enemy, yea, blesses and honours him. With this violence done to himself, however, with this mockery of his impulse to revenge, even still so powerful he merely yields to the new impulse, the disgust which has become powerful, and does this just as impatiently and licentiously, as a short time previously he _forestalled,_ and as it were exhausted, the joy of revenge with his fantasy. In magnanimity there is the same amount of egoism as in revenge, but a different quality of egoism.

50.

_The Argument of Isolation._--The reproach of conscience, even in the most conscientious, is weak against the feeling: "This and that are contrary to the good morals of _your_ society." A cold glance or a wry mouth on the part of those among whom and for whom one has been educated, is still _feared_ even by the strongest. What is really feared there? Isolation! as the argument which demolishes even the best arguments for a person or cause!--It is thus that the gregarious instinct speaks in us.

51.

_Sense for Truth.--_Commend me to all scepticism where I am permitted to answer: "Let us put it to the test!" But I don't wish to hear anything more of things and questions which do not admit of being tested. That is the limit of my "sense for truth": for bravery has there lost its right.

52.

_What others Know of us.--_That which we know of ourselves and have in our memory is not so decisive for the happiness of our life as is generally believed. One day it flashes upon our mind what _others_ know of us (or think they know)--and then we acknowledge that it is the more powerful. We get on with our bad conscience more easily than with our bad reputation.

53.

_Where Goodness Begins.--_Where bad eyesight can no longer see the evil impulse as such, on account of its refinement,--there man sets up the kingdom of goodness; and the feeling of having now gone over into the kingdom of goodness brings all those impulses (such as the feelings of security, of comfortableness, of benevolence) into simultaneous activity, which were threatened and confined by the evil impulses. Consequently, the duller the eye so much the further does goodness extend! Hence the eternal cheerfulness of the populace and of children! Hence the gloominess and grief (allied to the bad conscience) of great thinkers.

54.

_The Consciousness of Appearance.--_How wonderfully and novelly, and at the same time how awfully and ironically, do I feel myself situated with respect to collective existence, with my knowledge! I have _discovered_ for myself that the old humanity and animality, yea, the collective primeval age, and the past of all sentient being, continues to meditate, love, hate, and reason in me,--I have suddenly awoke in the midst of this dream, but merely to the consciousness that I just dream, and that I _must_ dream on in order not to perish; just as the sleep-walker must dream on in order not to tumble down. What is it that is now "appearance" to me! Verily, not the antithesis of any kind of essence,--what knowledge can I assert of any kind of essence whatsoever, except merely the predicates of its appearance! Verily not a dead mask which one could put upon an unknown X, and which to be sure one could also remove! Appearance is for me the operating and living thing itself; which goes so far in its self-mockery as to make me feel that here there is appearance, and Will o' the Wisp, and spirit-dance, and nothing more,--that among all these dreamers, I also, the "thinker," dance my dance, that the thinker is a means of prolonging further the terrestrial dance, and in so far is one of the masters of ceremony of existence, and that the sublime consistency and connectedness of all branches of knowledge is perhaps, and will perhaps, be the best means for _maintaining_ the universality of the dreaming, the complete, mutual understandability of all those dreamers, and thereby _the duration of the dream_.

55.

_The Ultimate Nobility of Character._--What then makes a person "noble"? Certainly not that he makes sacrifices; even the frantic libertine makes sacrifices. Certainly not that he generally follows his passions; there are contemptible passions. Certainly not that he does something for others, and without selfishness; perhaps the effect of selfishness is precisely at its greatest in the noblest persons.--But that the passion which seizes the noble man is a peculiarity, without his knowing that it is so: the use of a rare and singular measuring-rod, almost a frenzy: the feeling of heat in things which feel cold to all other persons: a divining of values for which scales have not yet been invented: a sacrificing on altars which are consecrated to an unknown God: a bravery without the desire for honour: a self-sufficiency which has superabundance, and imparts to men and things. Hitherto, therefore, it has been the rare in man, and the unconsciousness of this rareness, that has made men noble. Here, however, let us consider that everything ordinary, immediate, and indispensable, in short, what has been most preservative of the species, and generally the _rule_ in mankind hitherto, has been judged unreasonable and calumniated in its entirety by this standard, in favour of the exceptions. To become the advocate of the rule--that may perhaps be: the ultimate form and refinement in which nobility of character will reveal itself on earth.

56.

_The Desire for Suffering._--When I think of the desire to do something, how it continually tickles and stimulates millions of young Europeans, who cannot endure themselves and all their ennui,--I conceive that there must be a desire in them to suffer something, in order to derive from their suffering a worthy motive for acting, for doing something. Distress is necessary! Hence the cry of the politicians, hence the many false trumped-up, exaggerated "states of distress" of all possible kinds, and the blind readiness to believe in them. This young world desires that there should arrive or appear _from the outside--not_ happiness--but misfortune; and their imagination is already busy beforehand to form a monster out of it, so that they may afterwards be able to fight with a monster. If these distress-seekers felt the power to benefit themselves, to do something for themselves from internal sources, they would also understand how to create a distress of their own, specially their own, from internal sources. Their inventions might then be more refined, and their gratifications might sound like good music: while at present they fill the world with their cries of distress, and consequently too often with the _feeling of distress_ in the first place! They do not know what to make of themselves--and so they paint the misfortune of others on the wall; they always need others! And always again other others!--Pardon me, my friends, I have ventured to paint my _happiness_ on the wall.

BOOK SECOND

57.

_To the Realists._--Ye sober beings, who feel yourselves armed against passion and fantasy, and would gladly make a pride and an ornament out of your emptiness, ye call yourselves realists, and give to understand that the world is actually constituted as it appears to you; before you alone reality stands unveiled, and ye yourselves would perhaps be the best part of it,--oh, ye dear images of Sais! But are not ye also in your unveiled condition still extremely passionate and dusky beings compared with the fish, and still all too like an enamoured artist?[1]--and what is "reality" to an enamoured artist! Ye still carry about with you the valuations of things which had their origin in the passions and infatuations of earlier centuries! There is still a secret and ineffaceable drunkenness embodied in your sobriety! Your love of "reality," for example--oh, that is an old, primitive "love"! In every feeling, in every sense-impression, there is a portion of this old love: and similarly also some kind of fantasy, prejudice, irrationality, ignorance, fear, and whatever else has become mingled and woven into it. There is that mountain! There is that cloud! What is "real" in them? Remove the phantasm and the whole human _element_ therefrom, ye sober ones! Yes, if ye could do _that!_ If ye could forget your origin, your past, your preparatory schooling,--your whole history as man and beast! There is no "reality" for us--nor for you either, ye sober ones,--we are far from being so alien to one another as ye suppose; and perhaps our good-will to get beyond drunkenness is just as respectable as your belief that ye are altogether _incapable_ of drunkenness.

[1] Schiller's poem, "The Veiled Image of Sais," is again referred to here.--TR.

58.

_Only as Creators!_--It has caused me the greatest trouble, and for ever causes me the greatest trouble, to perceive that unspeakably more depends upon _what things are called,_ than on what they are. The reputation, the name and appearance, the importance, the usual measure and weight of things--each being in origin most frequently an error and arbitrariness thrown over the things like a garment, and quite alien to their essence and even to their exterior--have gradually, by the belief therein and its continuous growth from generation to generation, grown as it were on-and-into things and become their very body; the appearance at the very beginning becomes almost always the essence in the end, and _operates_ as the essence! What a fool he would be who would think it enough to refer here to this origin and this nebulous veil of illusion, in order to _annihilate_ that which virtually passes for the world--namely, so-called "reality"! It is only as creators that we can annihilate!--But let us not forget this: it suffices to create new names and valuations and probabilities, in order in the long run to create new "things."

59.

_We Artists!_--When we love a woman we have readily a hatred against nature, on recollecting all the disagreeable natural functions to which every woman is subject; we prefer not to think of them at all, but if once our soul touches on these things it twitches impatiently, and glances, as we have said, contemptuously at nature:--we are hurt; nature seems to encroach upon our possessions, and with the profanest hands. We then shut our ears against all physiology, and we decree in secret that "we will hear nothing of the fact that man is something else than _soul and form!"_ "The man under the skin" is an abomination and monstrosity, a blasphemy of God and of love to all lovers.--Well, just as the lover still feels with respect to nature and natural functions, so did every worshipper of God and his "holy omnipotence" feel formerly: in all that was said of nature by astronomers, geologists, physiologists, and physicians, he saw an encroachment on his most precious possession, and consequently an attack,--and moreover also an impertinence of the assailant! The "law of nature" sounded to him as blasphemy against God; in truth he would too willingly have seen the whole of mechanics traced back to moral acts of volition and arbitrariness:--but because nobody could render him this service, he _concealed_ nature and mechanism from himself as best he could, and lived in a dream. Oh, those men of former times understood how to _dream,_ and did not need first to go to sleep!--and we men of the present day also still understand it too well, with all our good-will for wakefulness and daylight! It suffices to love, to hate, to desire, and in general to feel _immediately_ the spirit and the power of the dream come over us, and we ascend, with open eyes and indifferent to all danger, the most dangerous paths, to the roofs and towers of fantasy, and without any giddiness, as persons born for climbing--we the night-walkers by day! We artists! We concealers of naturalness! We moon-struck and God-struck ones! We death-silent, untiring wanderers on heights which we do not see as heights, but as our plains, as our places of safety!

60.

_Women and their Effect in the Distance._--Have I still ears? Am I only ear, and nothing else besides? Here I stand in the midst of the surging of the breakers, whose white flames fork up to my feet;--from all sides there is howling, threatening, crying, and screaming at me, while in the lowest depths the old earth-shaker sings his aria hollow like a roaring bull; he beats such an earth-shaker's measure thereto, that even the hearts of these weathered rock-monsters tremble at the sound. Then, suddenly, as if born out of nothingness, there appears before the portal of this hellish labyrinth, only a few fathoms distant,--a great sailing-ship gliding silently along like a ghost. Oh, this ghostly beauty! With what enchantment it seizes me! What? Has all the repose and silence in the world embarked here? Does my happiness itself sit in this quiet place, my happier ego, my second immortalised self? Still not dead, but also no longer living? As a ghost-like, calm, gazing, gliding, sweeping, neutral being? Similar to the ship, which, with its white sails, like an immense butterfly, passes over the dark sea! Yes! Passing _over_ existence! That is it! That would be it!--It seems that the noise here has made me a visionary? All great noise causes one to place happiness in the calm and the distance. When a man is in the midst of _his_ hubbub, in the midst of the breakers of his plots and plans, he there sees perhaps calm, enchanting beings glide past him, for whose happiness and retirement he longs--_they are women._ He almost thinks that there with the women dwells his better self; that in these calm places even the loudest breakers become still as death, and life itself a dream of life. But still! but still! my noble enthusiast, there is also in the most beautiful sailing-ship so much noise and bustling, and alas, so much petty, pitiable bustling! The enchantment and the most powerful effect of women is, to use the language of philosophers, an effect at a distance, an _actio in distans;_ there belongs thereto, however, primarily and above all,--_distance!_

6l.

_In Honour of Friendship._--That the sentiment of friendship was regarded by antiquity as the highest sentiment, higher even than the most vaunted pride of the self-sufficient and wise, yea, as it were its sole and still holier brotherhood, is very well expressed by the story of the Macedonian king who made the present of a talent to a cynical Athenian philosopher from whom he received it back again. "What?" said the king, "has he then no friend?" He therewith meant to say, "I honour this pride of the wise and independent man, but I should have honoured his humanity still higher, if the friend in him had gained the victory over his pride. The philosopher has lowered himself in my estimation, for he showed that he did not know one of the two highest sentiments--and in fact the higher of them!"

62.

_Love.--_Love pardons even the passion of the beloved.

63.

_Woman in Music--How_ does it happen that warm and rainy winds bring the musical mood and the inventive delight in melody with them? Are they not the same winds that fill the churches and give women amorous thoughts?

64.

_Sceptics._--I fear that women who have grown old are more sceptical in the secret recesses of their hearts than any of the men; they believe in the superficiality of existence as in its essence, and all virtue and profundity is to them only the disguising of this "truth," the very desirable disguising of a _pudendum,_--an affair, therefore, of decency and modesty, and nothing more!

65.

_Devotedness._--There are noble women with a certain poverty of spirit, who, in order to _express_ their profoundest devotedness, have no other alternative but to offer their virtue and modesty: it is the highest thing they have. And this present is often accepted without putting the recipient under such deep obligation as the giver supposed,--a very melancholy story!

66.

_The Strength of the Weak.--_Women are all skilful in exaggerating their weaknesses, indeed they are inventive in weaknesses, so as to seem quite fragile ornaments to which even a grain of dust does harm; their existence is meant to bring home to man's mind his coarseness, and to appeal to his conscience. They thus defend themselves against the strong and all "rights of might."

67.

_Self-dissembling._--She loves him now and has since been looking forth with as quiet confidence as a cow; but alas! It was precisely his delight that she seemed so fitful and absolutely incomprehensible! He had rather too much steady weather in himself already! Would she not do well to feign her old character? to feign indifference? Does not--love itself advise her _to do so? Vivat comœdia!_

68.

_Will and Willingness._--Some one brought a youth to a wise man, and said, "See, this is one who is being corrupted by women!" The wise man shook his head and smiled. "It is men," he called out, "who corrupt women; and everything that women lack should be atoned for and improved in men--for man creates for himself the ideal of woman, and woman moulds herself according to this ideal."--"You are too tender-hearted towards women," said one of the bystanders, "you do not know them!" The wise man answered: "Man's attribute is will, woman's attribute is willingness--such is the law of the sexes, verily! a hard law for woman! All human beings are innocent of their existence, women, however, are doubly innocent; who could have enough of salve and gentleness for them!"--"What about salve! What about gentleness!" called out another person in the crowd, "we must educate women better!"--"We must educate men better," said the wise man, and made a sign to the youth to follow him.--The youth, however, did not follow him.

69.

_Capacity for Revenge--_That a person cannot and consequently will not defend himself, does not yet cast disgrace upon him in our eyes; but we despise the person who has neither the ability nor the good-will for revenge--whether it be a man or a woman. Would a woman be able to captivate us (or, as people say, to "fetter" us) whom we did not credit with knowing how to employ the dagger (any kind of dagger) skilfully _against us_ under certain circumstances? Or against herself; which in a certain case might be the severest revenge (the Chinese revenge).

70.

_The Mistresses of the Masters--_A powerful contralto voice, as we occasionally hear it in the theatre, raises suddenly for us the curtain on possibilities in which we usually do not believe; all at once we are convinced that somewhere in the world there may be women with high, heroic, royal souls, capable and prepared for magnificent remonstrances, resolutions, and self-sacrifices, capable and prepared for domination over men, because in them the best in man, superior to sex, has become a corporeal ideal. To be sure, it is not the intention of the theatre that such voices should give such a conception of women; they are usually intended to represent the ideal male lover, for example, a Romeo; but, to judge by my experience, the theatre regularly miscalculates here, and the musician also, who expects such effects from such a voice. People do not believe in _these_ lovers; these voices still contain a tinge of the motherly and housewifely character, and most of all when love is in their tone.

71.

_On Female Chastity.--_There is something quite astonishing and extraordinary in the education of women of the higher class; indeed, there is perhaps nothing more paradoxical. All the world is agreed to educate them with as much ignorance as possible _in eroticis,_ and to inspire their soul with a profound shame of such things, and the extremest impatience and horror at the suggestion of them. It is really here only that all the "honour" of woman is at stake; what would one not forgive them in other respects! But here they are intended to remain ignorant to the very backbone:--they are intended to have neither eyes, ears, words, nor thoughts for this, their "wickedness"; indeed knowledge here is already evil. And then! To be hurled as with an awful thunderbolt into reality and knowledge with marriage--and indeed by him whom they most love and esteem: to have to encounter love and shame in contradiction, yea, to have to feel rapture, abandonment, duty, sympathy, and fright at the unexpected proximity of God and animal, and whatever else besides! all at once!--There, in fact, a psychic entanglement has been effected which is quite unequalled! Even the sympathetic curiosity of the wisest discerner of men does not suffice to divine how this or that woman gets along with the solution of this enigma and the enigma of this solution; what dreadful, far-reaching suspicions must awaken thereby in the poor unhinged soul; and forsooth, how the ultimate philosophy and scepticism of the woman casts anchor at this point!--Afterwards the same profound silence as before and often even a silence to herself, a shutting of her eyes to herself.--Young wives on that account make great efforts to appear superficial and thoughtless the most ingenious of them simulate a kind of impudence.--Wives easily feel their husbands as a question-mark to their honour, and their children as an apology or atonement,--they require children, and wish for them in quite another spirit than a husband wishes for them.--In short, one cannot be gentle enough towards women!

72.

_Mothers._--Animals think differently from men with respect to females; with them the female is regarded as the productive being. There is no paternal love among them, but there is such a thing as love of the children of a beloved, and habituation to them. In the young, the females find gratification for their lust of dominion; the young are a property, an occupation, something quite comprehensible to them, with which they can chatter: all this conjointly is maternal love,--it is to be compared to the love of the artist for his work. Pregnancy has made the females gentler, more expectant, more timid, more submissively inclined; and similarly intellectual pregnancy engenders the character of the contemplative, who are allied to women in character:--they are the masculine mothers.--Among animals the masculine sex is regarded as the beautiful sex.

73.

_Saintly Cruelty.--_A man holding a newly born child in his hands came to a saint. "What should I do with this child," he asked, "it is wretched, deformed, and has not even enough of life to die" "Kill it," cried the saint with a dreadful voice, "kill it, and then hold it in thy arms for three days and three nights to brand it on thy memory:--thus wilt thou never again beget a child when it is not the time for thee to beget."--When the man had heard this he went away disappointed; and many found fault with the saint because he had advised cruelty; for he had advised to kill the child. "But is it not more cruel to let it live?" asked the saint.

74.

_The Unsuccessful--_Those poor women always fail of success who become agitated and uncertain, and talk too much in presence of him whom they love; for men are most successfully seduced by a certain subtle and phlegmatic tenderness.

75.

_The Third Sex._--"A small man is a paradox, but still a man,--but a small woman seems to me to be of another sex in comparison with well-grown ones"--said an old dancing-master. A small woman is never beautiful--said old Aristotle.

76.

_The greatest Danger._--Had there not at all times been a larger number of men who regarded the cultivation of their mind--their "rationality"--as their pride, their obligation, their virtue, and were injured or shamed by all play of fancy and extravagance of thinking--as lovers of "sound common sense":--mankind would long ago have perished! Incipient _insanity_ has hovered, and hovers continually over mankind as its greatest danger: it is precisely the breaking out of inclination in feeling, seeing, and hearing; the enjoyment of the unruliness of the mind; the delight in human unreason. It is not truth and certainty that is the antithesis of the world of the insane, but the universality and all-obligatoriness of a belief, in short, non-voluntariness in forming opinions. And the greatest labour of human beings hitherto has been to agree with one another regarding a number of things, and to impose upon themselves a _law of agreement_--indifferent whether these things are true or false. This is the discipline of the mind which has preserved mankind;--but the counter-impulses are still so powerful that one can really speak of the future of mankind with little confidence. The ideas of things still continually shift and move, and will perhaps alter more than ever in the future; it is continually the most select spirits themselves who strive against universal obligatoriness--the investigators of _truth_ above all! The accepted belief, as the belief of all the world, continually engenders a disgust and a new longing in the more ingenious minds; and already the slow _tempo_ which it demands for all intellectual processes (the imitation of the tortoise, which is here recognised as the rule) makes the artists and poets runaways:--it is in these impatient spirits that a downright delight in delirium breaks out, because delirium has such a joyful _tempo!_ Virtuous intellects, therefore, are needed--ah! I want to use the least ambiguous word,--_virtuous stupidity_ is needed, imperturbable conductors of the _slow_ spirits are needed, in order that the faithful of the great collective belief may remain with one another and dance their dance further: it is a necessity of the first importance that here enjoins and demands. _We others are the exceptions and the danger,_--we eternally need protection--Well, there can actually be something said in favour of the exceptions _provided that they never want to become the rule._

77.

_The Animal with good Conscience._--It is not unknown to me that there is vulgarity in everything that pleases Southern Europe--whether it be Italian opera (for example, Rossini's and Bellini's), or the Spanish adventure-romance (most readily accessible to us in the French garb of Gil Blas)--but it does not offend me, any more than the vulgarity which one encounters in a walk through Pompeii, or even in the reading of every ancient book: what is the reason of this? Is it because shame is lacking here, and because the vulgar always comes forward just as sure and certain of itself as anything noble, lovely, and passionate in the same kind of music or romance? "The animal has its rights like man, so let it run about freely; and you, my dear fellow-man, are still this animal, in spite of all!"--that seems to me the moral of the case, and the peculiarity of southern humanity. Bad taste has its rights like good taste, and even a prerogative over the latter when it is the great requisite, the sure satisfaction, and as it were a universal language, an immediately intelligible mask and attitude; the excellent, select taste on the other hand has always something of a seeking, tentative character, not fully certain that it understands,--it is never, and has never been popular! The _masque_ is and remains popular! So let all this masquerade run along in the melodies and cadences, in the leaps and merriment of the rhythm of these operas! Quite the ancient life! What does one understand of it, if one does not understand the delight in the masque, the good conscience of all masquerade! Here is the bath and the refreshment of the ancient spirit:--and perhaps this bath was still more necessary for the rare and sublime natures of the ancient world than for the vulgar.--On the other hand, a vulgar turn in northern works, for example in German music, offends me unutterably. There is _shame_ in it, the artist has lowered himself in his own sight, and could not even avoid blushing: we are ashamed with him, and are so hurt because we surmise that he believed he had to lower himself on our account.

78.

_What we should be Grateful for.--_It is only the artists, and especially the theatrical artists, who have furnished men with eyes and ears to hear and see with some pleasure what everyone is in himself, what he experiences and aims at: it is only _they_ who have taught us how to estimate the hero that is concealed in each of these common-place men, and the art of looking at ourselves from a distance as heroes, and as it were simplified and transfigured--the art of "putting ourselves on the stage" before ourselves. It is thus only that we get beyond some of the paltry details in ourselves! Without that art we should be nothing but foreground, and would live absolutely under the spell of the perspective which makes the closest and the commonest seem immensely large and like reality in itself.--Perhaps there is merit of a similar kind in the religion which commanded us to look at the sinfulness of every individual man with a magnifying-glass, and made a great, immortal criminal of the sinner; in that it put eternal perspectives around man, it taught him to see himself from a distance, and as something past, something entire.

79.

_The Charm of Imperfection.--_I see here a poet, who, like so many men, exercises a higher charm by his imperfections than by all that is rounded off and takes perfect shape under his hands,--indeed, he derives his advantage and reputation far more from his actual limitations than from his abundant powers. His work never expresses altogether what he would really like to express, what he _would like to have seen:_ he appears to have had the foretaste of a vision and never the vision itself:--but an extraordinary longing for this vision has remained in his soul; and from this he derives his equally extraordinary eloquence of longing and craving. With this he raises those who listen to him above his work and above all "works," and gives them wings to rise higher than hearers have ever risen before, thus making them poets and seers themselves; they then show an admiration for the originator of their happiness, as if he had led them immediately to the vision of his holiest and ultimate verities, as if he had reached his goal, and had actually _seen_ and communicated his vision. It is to the advantage of his reputation that he has not really arrived at his goal.

80.

_Art and Nature._--The Greeks (or at least the Athenians) liked to hear good talking: indeed they had an eager inclination for it, which distinguished them more than anything else from non-Greeks. And so they required good talking even from passion on the stage, and submitted to the unnaturalness of dramatic verse with delight:--in nature, forsooth, passion is so sparing of words! so dumb and confused! Or if it finds words, so embarrassed and irrational and a shame to itself! We have now, all of us, thanks to the Greeks, accustomed ourselves to this unnaturalness on the stage, as we endure that other unnaturalness, the _singing_ passion, and willingly endure it, thanks to the Italians.--It has become a necessity to us, which we cannot satisfy out of the resources of actuality, to hear men talk well and in full detail in the most trying situations: it enraptures us at present when the tragic hero still finds words, reasons, eloquent gestures, and on the whole a bright spirituality, where life approaches the abysses, and where the actual man mostly loses his head, and certainly his fine language. This kind of _deviation from nature_ is perhaps the most agreeable repast for man's pride: he loves art generally on account of it, as the expression of high, heroic unnaturalness and convention. One rightly objects to the dramatic poet when he does not transform everything into reason and speech, but always retains a remnant of _silence:_--just as one is dissatisfied with an operatic musician who cannot find a melody for the highest emotion, but only an emotional, "natural" stammering and crying. Here nature _has to_ be contradicted! Here the common charm of illusion _has to_ give place to a higher charm! The Greeks go far, far in this direction--frightfully far! As they constructed the stage as narrow as possible and dispensed with all the effect of deep backgrounds, as they made pantomime and easy motion impossible to the actor, and transformed him into a solemn, stiff, masked bogey, so they have also deprived passion itself of its deep background, and have dictated to it a law of fine talk; indeed, they have really done everything to counteract the elementary effect of representations that inspire pity and terror: _they did not want pity and terror,_--with due deference, with the highest deference to Aristotle! but he certainly did not hit the nail, to say nothing of the head of the nail, when he spoke about the final aim of Greek tragedy! Let us but look at the Grecian tragic poets with respect to _what_ most excited their diligence, their inventiveness, and their emulation,--certainly it was not the intention of subjugating the spectators by emotion! The Athenian went to the theatre _to hear fine talking!_ And fine talking was arrived at by Sophocles!--pardon me this heresy!--It is very different with _serious opera:_ all its masters make it their business to prevent their personages being understood. "An occasional word picked up may come to the assistance of the inattentive listener; but on the whole the situation must be self-explanatory,--the _talking_ is of no account!"--so they all think, and so they have all made fun of the words. Perhaps they have only lacked courage to express fully their extreme contempt for words: a little additional insolence in Rossini, and he would have allowed la-la-la-la to be sung throughout--and it might have been the rational course! The personages of the opera are _not_ meant to be believed "in their words," but in their tones! That is the difference, that is the fine _unnaturalness_ on account of which people go to the opera! Even the _recitativo secco_ is not really intended to be heard as words and text: this kind of half-music is meant rather in the first place to give the musical ear a little repose (the repose from _melody,_ as from the sublimest, and on that account the most straining enjoyment of this art),--but very soon something different results, namely, an increasing impatience, an increasing resistance, a new longing for _entire_ music, for melody.--How is it with the art of Richard Wagner as seen from this standpoint? Is it perhaps the same? Perhaps otherwise? It would often seem to me as if one needed to have learned by heart both the words _and_ the music of his creations before the performances; for without that--so it seemed to me--me _may hear_ neither the words, nor even the music.

81.

_Grecian Taste_--"What is beautiful in it?"--asked a certain geometrician, after a performance of the _Iphigenia--_"there is nothing proved in it!" Could the Greeks have been so far from this taste? In Sophocles at least "everything is proved."

82.

_Esprit Un-Grecian._--The Greeks were exceedingly logical and plain in all their thinking; they did not get tired of it, at least during their long flourishing period, as is so often the case with the French; who too willingly made a little excursion into the opposite, and in fact endure the spirit of logic only when it betrays its _sociable_ courtesy, its sociable self-renunciation, by a multitude of such little excursions into its opposite. Logic appears to them as necessary as bread and water, but also like these as a kind of prison-fare, as soon as it is to be taken pure and by itself. In good society one must never want to be in the right absolutely and solely, as all pure logic requires; hence the little dose of irrationality in all French _esprit_.--The social sense of the Greeks was far less developed than that of the French in the present and the past; hence, so little _esprit_ in their cleverest men, hence, so little wit, even in their wags, hence--alas! But people will not readily believe these tenets of mine, and how much of the kind I have still on my soul!--_Est res magna tacere_--says Martial, like all garrulous people.

83.

_Translations._--One can estimate the amount of the historical sense which an age possesses by the way in which it makes _translations_ and seeks to embody in itself past periods and literatures. The French of Corneille, and even the French of the Revolution, appropriated Roman antiquity in a manner for which we would no longer have the courage--owing to our superior historical sense. And Roman antiquity itself: how violently, and at the same time how naïvely, did it lay its hand on everything excellent and elevated belonging to the older Grecian antiquity! How they translated these writings into the Roman present! How they wiped away intentionally and unconcernedly the wing-dust of the butterfly moment! It is thus that Horace now and then translated Alcæus or Archilochus, it is thus that Propertius translated Callimachus and Philetas (poets of equal rank with Theocritus, if we _be allowed_ to judge): of what consequence was it to them that the actual creator experienced this and that, and had inscribed the indication thereof in his poem!--as poets they were averse to the antiquarian, inquisitive spirit which precedes the historical sense; as poets they did not respect those essentially personal traits and names, nor anything peculiar to city, coast, or century, such as its costume and mask, but at once put the present and the Roman in its place. They seem to us to ask: "Should we not make the old new for ourselves, and adjust _ourselves_ to it? Should we not be allowed to inspire this dead body with our soul? for it is dead indeed: how loathsome is everything dead!"--They did not know the pleasure of the historical sense; the past and the alien was painful to them, and as Romans it was an incitement to a Roman conquest. In fact, they conquered when they translated,--not only in that they omitted the historical: they added also allusions to the present; above all, they struck out the name of the poet and put their own in its place--not with the feeling of theft, but with the very best conscience of the _Imperium Romanum_.

84.

_The Origin of Poetry.--_The lovers of the fantastic in man, who at the same time represent the doctrine of instinctive morality, draw this conclusion: "Granted that utility has been honoured at all times as the highest divinity, where then in all the world has poetry come from?--this rhythmising of speech which thwarts rather than furthers plainness of communication, and which, nevertheless, has sprung up everywhere on the earth, and still springs up, as a mockery of all useful purpose! The wildly beautiful irrationality of poetry refutes you, ye utilitarians! The wish _to get rid of_ utility in some way--that is precisely what has elevated man, that is what has inspired him to morality and art!" Well, I must here speak for once to please the utilitarians,--they are so seldom in the right that it is pitiful! In the old times which called poetry into being, people had still utility in view with respect to it, and a very important utility--at the time when rhythm was introduced into speech, that force which arranges all the particles of the sentence anew, commands the choosing of the words, recolours the thought, and makes it more obscure, more foreign, and more distant: to be sure a _superstitious utility!_ It was intended that a human entreaty should be more profoundly impressed upon the Gods by virtue of rhythm, after it had been observed that men could remember a verse better than an unmetrical speech. It was likewise thought that people could make themselves audible at greater distances by the rhythmical beat; the rhythmical prayer seemed to come nearer to the ear of the Gods. Above all, however, people wanted to have the advantage of the elementary conquest which man experiences in himself when he hears music: rhythm is a constraint; it produces an unconquerable desire to yield, to join in; not only the step of the foot, but also the soul itself follows the measure,--probably the soul of the Gods also, as people thought! They attempted, therefore, to _constrain_ the Gods by rhythm, and to exercise a power over them; they threw poetry around the Gods like a magic noose. There was a still more wonderful idea, and it has perhaps operated most powerfully of all in the originating of poetry. Among the Pythagoreans it made its appearance as a philosophical doctrine and as an artifice of teaching: but long before there were philosophers music was acknowledged to possess the power of unburdening the emotions, of purifying the soul, of soothing the _ferocia animi_--and this was owing to the rhythmical element in music. When the proper tension and harmony of the soul were lost a person had to _dance_ to the measure of the singer,--that was the recipe of this medical art. By means of it Terpander quieted a tumult, Empedocles calmed a maniac, Damon purged a love-sick youth; by means of it even the maddened, revengeful Gods were treated for the purpose of a cure. This was effected by driving the frenzy and wantonness of their emotions to the highest pitch, by making the furious mad, and the revengeful intoxicated with vengeance all the orgiastic cults seek to discharge the _ferocia_ of a deity all at once, and thus make an orgy, so that the deity may feel freer and quieter afterwards, and leave man in peace. _Melos,_ according to its root, signifies a soothing agency, not because the song is gentle itself, but because its after-effect is gentle.--And not only in the religious song, but also in the secular song of the most ancient times, the prerequisite is that the rhythm should exercise a magical influence; for example, in drawing water, or in rowing: the song is for the enchanting of the spirits supposed to be active thereby; it makes them obliging, involuntary and the instruments of man. And as often as a person acts he has occasion to sing, _every_ action is dependent on the assistance of spirits: magic song and incantation appear to be the original form of poetry. When verse also came to be used in oracles--the Greeks said that the hexameter was invented at Delphi,--the rhythm was here also intended to exercise a compulsory influence. To make a prophecy--that means originally (according to what seems to me the probable derivation of the Greek word) to determine something; people thought they could determine the future by winning Apollo over to their side: he who, according to the most ancient idea, is far more than a foreseeing deity. According as the formula is pronounced with literal and rhythmical correctness, it determines the future: the formula, however, is the invention of Apollo, who as the God of rhythm, can also determine the goddesses of fate--Looked at and investigated as a whole, was there ever anything _more serviceable_ to the ancient superstitious species of human being than rhythm? People could do everything with it: they could make labour go on magically; they could compel a God to appear, to be near at hand, and listen to them; they could arrange the future for themselves according to their will; they could unburden their own souls of any kind of excess (of anxiety, of mania, of sympathy, of revenge), and not only their own souls, but the souls of the most evil spirits,--without verse a person was nothing, by means of verse a person became almost a God. Such a fundamental feeling no longer allows itself to be fully eradicated,--and even now, after millenniums of long labour in combating such superstition, the very wisest of us occasionally becomes the fool of rhythm, be it only that one _perceives_ a thought to be _truer_ when it has a metrical form and approaches with a divine hopping. Is it not a very funny thing that the most serious philosophers, however anxious they are in other respects for strict certainty, still appeal to _poetical sayings_ in order to give their thoughts force and credibility? and yet it is more dangerous to a truth when the poet assents to it than when he contradicts it! For, as Homer says, "Minstrels speak much falsehood!"--

85.

_The Good and the Beautiful._--Artists, glorify continually--they do nothing else,--and indeed they glorify all those conditions and things that have a reputation, so that man may feel himself good or great, or intoxicated, or merry, or pleased and wise by it. Those _select_ things and conditions whose value for human _happiness_ is regarded as secure and determined, are the objects of artists: they are ever lying in wait to discover such things, to transfer them into the domain of art. I mean to say that they are not themselves the valuers of happiness and of the happy ones, but they always press close to these valuers with the greatest curiosity and longing, in order immediately to use their valuations advantageously. As besides their impatience, they have also the big lungs of heralds and the feet of runners, they are generally always among the first to glorify the _new_ excellency, and often _seem_ to be the first who have called it good and valued it as good. This, however, as we have said, is an error; they are only faster and louder than the actual valuers:--And who then are these?--They are the rich and the leisurely.

86.