Book II

5 of 9 books in The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche

Original German

57 An die Realisten. — Ihr nüchternen Menschen, die ihr euch gegen Leidenschaft und Phantasterei gewappnet fühlt und gerne einen Stolz und einen Zierath aus eurer Leere machen möchtet, ihr nennt euch Realisten und deutet an, so wie euch die Welt erscheine, so sei sie wirklich beschaffen: vor euch allein stehe die Wirklichkeit entschleiert, und ihr selber wäret vielleicht der beste Theil davon, — oh ihr geliebten Bilder von Sais! Aber seid nicht auch ihr in eurem entschleiertsten Zustande noch höchst leidenschaftliche und dunkle Wesen, verglichen mit den Fischen, und immer noch einem verliebten Künstler allzu ähnlich? — und was ist für einen verliebten Künstler „Wirklichkeit“! Immer noch tragt ihr die Schätzungen der Dinge mit euch herum, welche in den Leidenschaften und Verliebtheiten früherer Jahrhunderte ihren Ursprung haben! Immer noch ist eurer Nüchternheit eine geheime und unvertilgbare Trunkenheit einverleibt! Eure Liebe zur „Wirklichkeit“ zum Beispiel — oh das ist eine alte uralte „Liebe“! In jeder Empfindung, in jedem Sinneseindruck ist ein Stück dieser alten Liebe: und ebenso hat irgend eine Phantasterei, ein Vorurtheil, eine Unvernunft, eine Unwissenheit, eine Furcht und was sonst noch Alles! daran gearbeitet und gewebt. Da jener Berg! Da jene Wolke! Was ist denn daran „wirklich“? Zieht einmal das Phantasma und die ganze menschliche Zuthat davon ab, ihr Nüchternen! Ja, wenn ihr das könntet! Wenn ihr eure Herkunft, Vergangenheit, Vorschule vergessen könntet, — eure gesammte Menschheit und Thierheit! Es giebt für uns keine „Wirklichkeit“ — und auch für euch nicht, ihr Nüchternen —, wir sind einander lange nicht so fremd, als ihr meint, und vielleicht ist unser guter Wille, über die Trunkenheit hinauszukommen, ebenso achtbar als euer Glaube, der Trunkenheit überhaupt unfähig zu sein.

58 Nur als Schaffende! — Diess hat mir die grösste Mühe gemacht und macht mir noch immerfort die grösste Mühe: einzusehen, dass unsäglich mehr daran liegt, wie die Dinge heissen, als was sie sind. Der Ruf, Name und Anschein, die Geltung, das übliche Maass und Gewicht eines Dinges — im Ursprunge zuallermeist ein Irrthum und eine Willkürlichkeit, den Dingen übergeworfen wie ein Kleid und seinem Wesen und selbst seiner Haut ganz fremd — ist durch den Glauben daran und sein Fortwachsen von Geschlecht zu Geschlecht dem Dinge allmählich gleichsam an- und eingewachsen und zu seinem Leibe selber geworden: der Schein von Anbeginn wird zuletzt fast immer zum Wesen und wirkt als Wesen! Was wäre das für ein Narr, der da meinte, es genüge, auf diesen Ursprung und diese Nebelhülle des Wahnes hinzuweisen, um die als wesenhaft geltende Welt, die sogenannte „Wirklichkeit“, zu vernichten! Nur als Schaffende können wir vernichten! — Aber vergessen wir auch diess nicht: es genügt, neue Namen und Schätzungen und Wahrscheinlichkeiten zu schaffen, um auf die Länge hin neue „Dinge“ zu schaffen.

59 Wir Künstler! — Wenn wir ein Weib lieben, so haben wir leicht einen Hass auf die Natur, aller der widerlichen Natürlichkeiten gedenkend, denen jedes Weib ausgesetzt ist; gerne denken wir überhaupt daran vorbei, aber wenn einmal unsere Seele diese Dinge streift, so zuckt sie ungeduldig und blickt, wie gesagt, verächtlich nach der Natur hin: — wir sind beleidigt, die Natur scheint in unsern Besitz einzugreifen und mit den ungeweihtesten Händen. Da macht man die Ohren zu gegen alle Physiologie und decretirt für sich insgeheim „ich will davon, dass der Mensch noch etwas Anderes ist, ausser Seele und Form, Nichts hören!“ „Der Mensch unter der Haut“ ist allen Liebenden ein Greuel und Ungedanke, eine Gottes- und Liebeslästerung. — Nun, so wie jetzt noch der Liebende empfindet, in Hinsicht der Natur und Natürlichkeit, so empfand ehedem jeder Verehrer Gottes und seiner „heiligen Allmacht“: bei Allem, was von der Natur gesagt wurde, durch Astronomen, Geologen, Physiologen, Aerzte, sah er einen Eingriff in seinen köstlichsten Besitz und folglich einen Angriff, — und noch dazu eine Schamlosigkeit des Angreifenden! Das „Naturgesetz“ klang ihm schon wie eine Verleumdung Gottes; im Grunde hätte er gar zu gerne alle Mechanik auf moralische Willens- und Willküracte zurückgeführt gesehn: — aber weil ihm Niemand diesen Dienst erweisen konnte, so verhehlte er sich die Natur und Mechanik, so gut er konnte und lebte im Traum. Oh diese Menschen von ehedem haben verstanden zu träumen und hatten nicht erst nöthig, einzuschlafen! — und auch wir Menschen von heute verstehen es noch viel zu gut, mit allem unseren guten Willen zum Wachsein und zum Tage! Es genügt, zu lieben, zu hassen, zu begehren, überhaupt zu empfinden, — sofort kommt der Geist und die Kraft des Traumes über uns, und wir steigen offenen Auges und kalt gegen alle Gefahr auf den gefährlichsten Wegen empor, hinauf auf die Dächer und Thürme der Phantasterei, und ohne allen Schwindel, wie geboren zum Klettern — wir Nachtwandler des Tages! Wir Künstler! Wir Verhehler der Natürlichkeit! Wir Mond- und Gottsüchtigen! Wir todtenstillen unermüdlichen Wanderer, auf Höhen, die wir nicht als Höhen sehen, sondern als unsere Ebenen, als unsere Sicherheiten!

60 Die Frauen und ihre Wirkung in die Ferne. Habe ich noch Ohren? Bin ich nur noch Ohr und Nichts weiter mehr? Hier stehe ich inmitten des Brandes der Brandung, deren weisse Flammen bis zu meinem Fusse heraufzüngeln: — von allen Seiten heult, droht, schreit, schrillt es auf mich zu, während in der tiefsten Tiefe der alte Erderschütterer seine Arie singt, dumpf wie ein brüllender Stier: er stampft sich dazu einen solchen Erderschütterer-Tact, dass selbst diesen verwetterten Felsunholden hier das Herz darüber im Leibe zittert. Da, plötzlich, wie aus dem Nichts geboren, erscheint vor dem Thore dieses höllischen Labyrinthes, nur wenige Klafter weit entfernt, — ein grosses Segelschiff, schweigsam wie ein Gespenst dahergleitend. Oh diese gespenstische Schönheit! Mit welchem Zauber fasst sie mich an! Wie? Hat alle Ruhe und Schweigsamkeit der Welt sich hier eingeschifft? Sitzt mein Glück selber an diesem stillen Platze, mein glücklicheres Ich, mein zweites verewigtes Selbst? Nicht todt sein und doch auch nicht mehr lebend? Als ein geisterhaftes, stilles, schauendes, gleitendes, schwebendes Mittelwesen? Dem Schiffe gleichend, welches mit seinen weissen Segeln wie ein ungeheurer Schmetterling über das dunkle Meer hinläuft! Ja! Ueber das Dasein hinlaufen! Das ist es! Das wäre es! — — Es scheint, der Lärm hier hat mich zum Phantasten gemacht? Aller grosser Lärm macht, dass wir das Glück in die Stille und Ferne setzen. Wenn ein Mann inmitten seines Lärmes steht, inmitten seiner Brandung von Würfen und Entwürfen: da sieht er auch wohl stille zauberhafte Wesen an sich vorübergleiten, nach deren Glück und Zurückgezogenheit er sich sehnt, — es sind die Frauen. Fast meint er, dort bei den Frauen wohne sein besseres Selbst: an diesen stillen Plätzen werde auch die lauteste Brandung zur Todtenstille und das Leben selber zum Traume über das Leben. Jedoch! Jedoch! Mein edler Schwärmer, es giebt auch auf dem schönsten Segelschiffe so viel Geräusch und Lärm und leider so viel kleinen erbärmlichen Lärm! Der Zauber und die mächtigste Wirkung der Frauen ist, um die Sprache der Philosophen zu reden, eine Wirkung in die Ferne, eine actio in distans: dazu gehört aber, zuerst und vor Allem — Distanz!

61 Zu Ehren der Freundschaft. — Dass das Gefühl der Freundschaft dem Alterthum als das höchste Gefühl galt, höher selbst als der gerühmteste Stolz des Selbstgenügsamen und Weisen, ja gleichsam als dessen einzige und noch heiligere Geschwisterschaft: diess drückt sehr gut die Geschichte von jenem macedonischen Könige aus, der einem weltverachtenden Philosophen Athen’s ein Talent zum Geschenk machte und es von ihm zurückerhielt. „Wie? sagte der König, hat er denn keinen Freund?“ Damit wollte er sagen: „ich ehre diesen Stolz des Weisen und Unabhängigen, aber ich würde seine Menschlichkeit noch höher ehren, wenn der Freund in ihm den Sieg über seinen Stolz davongetragen hätte. Vor mir hat sich der Philosoph herabgesetzt, indem er zeigte, dass er eines der beiden höchsten Gefühle nicht kennt, — und zwar das höhere nicht!“

62 Liebe. — Die Liebe vergiebt dem Geliebten sogar die Begierde.

63 Das Weib in der Musik. — Wie kommt es, dass warme und regnerische Winde auch die musikalische Stimmung und die erfinderische Lust der Melodie mit sich führen? Sind es nicht die selben Winde, welche die Kirchen füllen und den Frauen verliebte Gedanken geben?

64 Skeptiker. — Ich fürchte, dass altgewordene Frauen im geheimsten Verstecke ihres Herzens skeptischer sind, als alle Männer: sie glauben an die Oberflächlichkeit des Daseins als an sein Wesen, und alle Tugend und Tiefe ist ihnen nur Verhüllung dieser „Wahrheit“, die sehr wünschenswerthe Verhüllung eines pudendum —, also eine Sache des Anstandes und der Scham, und nicht mehr!

65 Hingebung. — Es giebt edle Frauen mit einer gewissen Armuth des Geistes, welche, um ihre tiefste Hingebung auszudrücken, sich nicht anders zu helfen wissen, als so, dass sie ihre Tugend und Scham anbieten: es ist ihnen ihr Höchstes. Und oft wird diess Geschenk angenommen, ohne so tief zu verpflichten, als die Geberinnen voraussetzen, — eine sehr schwermüthige Geschichte!

66 Die Stärke der Schwachen. — Alle Frauen sind fein darin, ihre Schwäche zu übertreiben, ja sie sind erfinderisch in Schwächen, um ganz und gar als zerbrechliche Zierathen zu erscheinen, denen selbst ein Stäubchen wehe thut: ihr Dasein soll dem Manne seine Plumpheit zu Gemüthe führen und in’s Gewissen schieben. So wehren sie sich gegen die Starken und alles „Faustrecht“.

67 Sich selber heucheln. — Sie liebt ihn nun und blickt seitdem mit so ruhigem Vertrauen vor sich hin wie eine Kuh: aber wehe! Gerade diess war seine Bezauberung, dass sie durchaus veränderlich und unfassbar schien! Er hatte eben schon zu viel beständiges Wetter an sich selber! Sollte sie nicht gut thun, ihren alten Charakter zu heucheln? Lieblosigkeit zu heucheln? Räth ihr also nicht — die Liebe? Vivat comoedia!

68 Wille und Willigkeit. — Man brachte einen Jüngling zu einem weisen Manne und sagte: „Siehe, das ist Einer, der durch die Weiber verdorben wird!“

Der weise Mann schüttelte den Kopf und lächelte. „Die Männer sind es, rief er, welche die Weiber verderben: und Alles, was die Weiber fehlen, soll an den Männern gebüsst und gebessert werden, — denn der Mann macht sich das Bild des Weibes, und das Weib bildet sich nach diesem Bilde.“ — „Du bist zu mildherzig gegen die Weiber, sagte einer der Umstehenden, du kennst sie nicht!“ Der weise Mann antwortete: „Des Mannes Art ist Wille, des Weibes Art Willigkeit; — so ist es das Gesetz der Geschlechter, wahrlich! ein hartes Gesetz für das Weib! Alle Menschen sind unschuldig für ihr Dasein, die Weiber aber sind unschuldig im zweiten Grade: wer könnte für sie des Oels und der Milde genug haben.“ — Was Oel! Was Milde! rief ein Anderer aus der Menge; man muss die Weiber besser erziehen! — „Man muss die Männer besser erziehen,“ sagte der weise Mann und winkte dem Jünglinge, dass er ihm folge. — Der Jüngling aber folgte ihm nicht.

69 Fähigkeit zur Rache. — Dass Einer sich nicht vertheidigen kann und folglich auch nicht will, gereicht ihm in unsern Augen noch nicht zur Schande: aber wir schätzen Den gering, der zur Rache weder das Vermögen noch den guten Willen hat, — gleichgültig ob Mann oder Weib. Würde uns ein Weib festhalten (oder wie man sagt „fesseln“) können, dem wir nicht zutrauten, dass es unter Umständen den Dolch (irgend eine Art von Dolch) gegen uns gut zu handhaben wüsste? Oder gegen sich: was in einem bestimmten Falle die empfindlichere Rache wäre (die chinesische Rache).

70 Die Herrinnen der Herren. — Eine tiefe mächtige Altstimme, wie man sie bisweilen im Theater hört, zieht uns plötzlich den Vorhang vor Möglichkeiten auf, an die wir für gewöhnlich nicht glauben: wir glauben mit Einem Male daran, dass es irgendwo in der Welt Frauen mit hohen, heldenhaften, königlichen Seelen geben könne, fähig und bereit zu grandiosen Entgegnungen, Entschliessungen und Aufopferungen, fähig und bereit zur Herrschaft über Männer, weil in ihnen das Beste vom Manne, über das Geschlecht hinaus, zum leibhaften Ideale geworden ist. Zwar sollen solche Stimmen nach der Absicht des Theaters gerade nicht diesen Begriff vom Weibe geben: gewöhnlich sollen sie den idealen männlichen Liebhaber, zum Beispiel einen Romeo, darstellen; aber nach meiner Erfahrung zu urtheilen, verrechnet sich dabei das Theater und der Musiker, der von einer solchen Stimme solche Wirkungen erwartet, ganz regelmässig. Man glaubt nicht an diese Liebhaber: diese Stimmen enthalten immer noch eine Farbe des Mütterlichen und Hausfrauenhaften, und gerade dann am meisten, wenn Liebe in ihrem Klange ist.

71 Von der weiblichen Keuschheit. — Es ist etwas ganz Erstaunliches und Ungeheures in der Erziehung der vornehmen Frauen, ja vielleicht giebt es nichts Paradoxeres. Alle Welt ist darüber einverstanstanden, sie in eroticis so unwissend wie möglich zu erziehen und ihnen eine tiefe Scham vor dergleichen und die äusserste Ungeduld und Flucht beim Andeuten dieser Dinge in die Seele zu geben. Alle „Ehre“ des Weibes steht im Grunde nur hier auf dem Spiele: was verziehe man ihnen sonst nicht! Aber hierin sollen sie unwissend bis in’s Herz hinein bleiben: — sie sollen weder Augen, noch Ohren, noch Worte, noch Gedanken für diess ihr „Böses“ haben: ja das Wissen ist hier schon das Böse. Und nun! Wie mit einem grausigen Blitzschlage in die Wirklichkeit und das Wissen geschleudert werden, mit der Ehe — und zwar durch Den, welchen sie am meisten lieben und hochhalten: Liebe und Scham im Widerspruch ertappen, ja Entzücken, Preisgebung, Pflicht, Mitleid und Schrecken über die unerwartete Nachbarschaft von Gott und Thier und was Alles sonst noch! in Einem empfinden müssen! — Da hat man in der That sich einen Seelen-Knoten geknüpft, der seines Gleichen sucht! Selbst die mitleidige Neugier des weisesten Menschenkenners reicht nicht aus, zu errathen, wie sich dieses und jenes Weib in diese Lösung des Räthsels und in diess Räthsel von Lösung zu finden weiss, und was für schauerliche, weithin greifende Verdachte sich dabei in der armen aus den Fugen gerathenen Seele regen müssen, ja wie die letzte Philosophie und Skepsis des Weibes an diesem Puncte ihre Anker wirft! — Hinterher das selbe tiefe Schweigen wie vorher: und oft ein Schweigen vor sich selber, ein Augen-Zuschliessen vor sich selber. — Die jungen Frauen bemühen sich sehr darum, oberflächlich und gedankenlos zu erscheinen; die feinsten unter ihnen erheucheln eine Art Frechheit. — Die Frauen empfinden leicht ihre Männer als ein Fragezeichen ihrer Ehre und ihre Kinder als eine Apologie oder Busse, — sie bedürfen der Kinder und wünschen sie sich, in einem ganz anderen Sinne als ein Mann sich Kinder wünscht.

— Kurz, man kann nicht mild genug gegen die Frauen sein!

72 Die Mütter. — Die Thiere denken anders über die Weiber, als die Menschen; ihnen gilt das Weibchen als das productive Wesen. Vaterliebe giebt es bei ihnen nicht, aber so Etwas wie Liebe zu den Kindern einer Geliebten und Gewöhnung an sie. Die Weibchen haben an den Kindern Befriedigung ihrer Herrschsucht, ein Eigenthum, eine Beschäftigung, etwas ihnen ganz Verständliches, mit dem man schwätzen kann: diess Alles zusammen ist Mutterliebe, — sie ist mit der Liebe des Künstlers zu seinem Werke zu vergleichen. Die Schwangerschaft hat die Weiber milder, abwartender, furchtsamer, unterwerfungslustiger gemacht; und ebenso erzeugt die geistige Schwangerschaft den Charakter der Contemplativen, welcher dem weiblichen Charakter verwandt ist: — es sind die männlichen Mütter. — Bei den Thieren gilt das männliche Geschlecht als das schöne.

73 Heilige Grausamkeit. — Zu einem Heiligen trat ein Mann, der ein eben geborenes Kind in den Händen hielt. „Was soll ich mit dem Kinde machen? fragte er, es ist elend, missgestaltet und hat nicht genug Leben, um zu sterben.“ „Tödte es, rief der Heilige mit schrecklicher Stimme, tödte es und halte es dann drei Tage und drei Nächte lang in deinen Armen, auf dass du dir ein Gedächtniss machest: — so wirst du nie wieder ein Kind zeugen, wenn es nicht an der Zeit für dich ist, zu zeugen.“ — Als der Mann diess gehört hatte, gieng er enttäuscht davon; und Viele tadelten den Heiligen, weil er zu einer Grausamkeit gerathen hatte, denn er hatte gerathen, das Kind zu tödten. „Aber ist es nicht grausamer, es leben zu lassen?“ sagte der Heilige.

74 Die Erfolglosen. — Jenen armen Frauen fehlt es immer an Erfolg, welche in Gegenwart Dessen, den sie lieben, unruhig und unsicher werden und zu viel reden: denn die Männer werden am sichersten durch eine gewisse heimliche und phlegmatische Zärtlichkeit verführt.

75 Das dritte Geschlecht. — „Ein kleiner Mann ist eine Paradoxie, aber doch ein Mann, — aber die kleinen Weibchen scheinen mir, im Vergleich mit hochwüchsigen Frauen, von einem anderen Geschlechte zu sein“ — sagte ein alter Tanzmeister. Ein kleines Weib ist niemals schön — sagte der alte Aristoteles.

76 Die grösste Gefahr. — Hätte es nicht allezeit eine Ueberzahl von Menschen gegeben, welche die Zucht ihres Kopfes — ihre „Vernünftigkeit“ — als ihren Stolz, ihre Verpflichtung, ihre Tugend fühlten, welche durch alles Phantasiren und Ausschweifen des Denkens beleidigt oder beschämt wurden, als die Freunde „des gesunden Menschenverstandes“: so wäre die Menschheit längst zu Grunde gegangen! Ueber ihr schwebte und schwebt fortwährend als ihre grösste Gefahr der ausbrechende Irrsinn — das heisst eben das Ausbrechen des Beliebens im Empfinden, Sehen und Hören, der Genuss in der Zuchtlosigkeit des Kopfes, die Freude am Menschen-Unverstande. Nicht die Wahrheit und Gewissheit ist der Gegensatz der Welt des Irrsinnigen, sondern die Allgemeinheit und Allverbindlichkeit eines Glaubens, kurz das Nicht-Beliebige im Urtheilen. Und die grösste Arbeit der Menschen bisher war die, über sehr viele Dinge mit einander übereinzustimmen und sich ein Gesetz der Uebereinstimmung aufzulegen — gleichgültig, ob diese Dinge wahr oder falsch sind. Diess ist die Zucht des Kopfes, welche die Menschheit erhalten hat; — aber die Gegentriebe sind immer noch so mächtig, dass man im Grunde von der Zukunft der Menschheit mit wenig Vertrauen reden darf. Fortwährend schiebt und verschiebt sich noch das Bild der Dinge, und vielleicht von jetzt ab mehr und schneller als je; fortwährend sträuben sich gerade die ausgesuchtesten Geister gegen jene Allverbindlichkeit — die Erforscher der Wahrheit voran! Fortwährend erzeugt jener Glaube als Allerweltsglaube einen Ekel und eine neue Lüsternheit bei feineren Köpfen: und schon das langsame Tempo, welches er für alle geistigen Processe verlangt, jene Nachahmung der Schildkröte, welche hier als die Norm anerkannt wird, macht Künstler und Dichter zu Ueberläufern: — diese ungeduldigen Geister sind es, in denen eine förmliche Lust am Irrsinn ausbricht, weil der Irrsinn ein so fröhliches Tempo hat! Es bedarf also der tugendhaften Intellecte, — ach! ich will das unzweideutigste Wort gebrauchen — es bedarf der tugendhaften Dummheit, es bedarf unerschütterlicher Tactschläger des langsamen Geistes, damit die Gläubigen des grossen Gesammtglaubens bei einander bleiben und ihren Tanz weitertanzen: es ist eine Nothdurft ersten Ranges, welche hier gebietet und fordert.

Wir Andern sind die Ausnahme und die Gefahr, — wir bedürfen ewig der Vertheidigung! — Nun, es lässt sich wirklich etwas zu Gunsten der Ausnahme sagen, vorausgesetzt, dass sie nie Regel werden will.

77 Das Thier mit gutem Gewissen. — Das Gemeine in Alledem, was im Süden Europa’s gefällt — sei diess nun die italiänische Oper (zum Beispiel Rossini’s und Bellini’s) oder der spanische Abenteuer-Roman (uns in der französischen Verkleidung des Gil Blas am besten zugänglich) — bleibt mir nicht verborgen, aber es beleidigt mich nicht, ebensowenig als die Gemeinheit, der man bei einer Wanderung durch Pompeji und im Grunde selbst beim Lesen jedes antiken Buches begegnet: woher kommt diess? Ist es, dass hier die Scham fehlt und dass alles Gemeine so sicher und seiner gewiss auftritt, wie irgend etwas Edles, Liebliches und Leidenschaftliches in der selben Art Musik oder Roman? „Das Thier hat sein Recht wie der Mensch: so mag es frei herumlaufen, und du, mein lieber Mitmensch, bist auch diess Thier noch, trotz Alledem!“ — das scheint mir die Moral der Sache und die Eigenheit der südländischen Humanität zu sein. Der schlechte Geschmack hat sein Recht wie der gute, und sogar ein Vorrecht vor ihm, falls er das grosse Bedürfniss, die sichere Befriedigung und gleichsam eine allgemeine Sprache, eine unbedingt verständliche Larve und Gebärde ist: der gute, gewählte Geschmack hat dagegen immer etwas Suchendes, Versuchtes, seines Verständnisses nicht völlig Gewisses, — er ist und war niemals volksthümlich! Volksthümlich ist und bleibt die Maske! So mag denn alles diess Maskenhafte in den Melodien und Cadenzen, in den Sprüngen und Lustigkeiten des Rhythmus dieser Opern dahinlaufen! Gar das antike Leben! Was versteht man von dem, wenn man die Lust an der Maske, das gute Gewissen alles Maskenhaften nicht versteht! Hier ist das Bad und die Erholung des antiken Geistes: — und vielleicht war diess Bad den seltenen und erhabenen Naturen der alten Welt noch nöthiger, als den gemeinen. — Dagegen beleidigt mich eine gemeine Wendung in nordischen Werken, zum Beispiel in deutscher Musik, unsäglich. Hier ist Scham dabei, der Künstler ist vor sich selber hinabgestiegen und konnte es nicht einmal verhüten, dabei zu erröthen: wir schämen uns mit ihm und sind so beleidigt, weil wir ahnen, dass er unseretwegen glaubte hinabsteigen zu müssen.

78 Wofür wir dankbar sein sollen. — Erst die Künstler, und namentlich die des Theaters, haben den Menschen Augen und Ohren eingesetzt, um Das mit einigem Vergnügen zu hören und zu sehen, was Jeder selber ist, selber erlebt, selber will; erst sie haben uns die Schätzung des Helden, der in jedem von allen diesen Alltagsmenschen verborgen ist, und die Kunst gelehrt, wie man sich selber als Held, aus der Ferne und gleichsam vereinfacht und verklärt ansehen könne, — die Kunst, sich vor sich selber „in Scene zu setzen“. So allein kommen wir über einige niedrige Details an uns hinweg! Ohne jene Kunst würden wir Nichts als Vordergrund sein und ganz und gar im Banne jener Optik leben, welche das Nächste und Gemeinste als ungeheuer gross und als die Wirklichkeit an sich erscheinen lässt. —

Vielleicht giebt es ein Verdienst ähnlicher Art an jener Religion, welche die Sündhaftigkeit jedes einzelnen Menschen mit dem Vergrösserungsglase ansehen hiess und aus dem Sünder einen grossen, unsterblichen Verbrecher machte: indem sie ewige Perspectiven um ihn beschrieb, lehrte sie den Menschen, sich aus der Ferne und als etwas Vergangenes, Ganzes sehen.

79 Reiz der Unvollkommenheit. — Ich sehe hier einen Dichter, der, wie so mancher Mensch, durch seine Unvollkommenheiten einen höheren Reiz ausübt, als durch alles Das, was sich unter seiner Hand rundet und vollkommen gestaltet, — ja er hat den Vortheil und den Ruhm vielmehr von seinem letzten Unvermögen, als von seiner reichen Kraft. Sein Werk spricht es niemals ganz aus, was er eigentlich aussprechen möchte, was er gesehen haben möchte: es scheint, dass er den Vorgeschmack einer Vision gehabt hat, und niemals sie selber: — aber eine ungeheure Lüsternheit nach dieser Vision ist in seiner Seele zurückgeblieben, und aus ihr nimmt er seine ebenso ungeheure Beredtsamkeit des Verlangens und Heisshungers. Mit ihr hebt er Den, welcher ihm zuhört, über sein Werk und alle „Werke“ hinaus und giebt ihm Flügel, um so hoch zu steigen, wie Zuhörer nie sonst steigen: und so, selber zu Dichtern und Sehern geworden, zollen sie dem Urheber ihres Glückes eine Bewunderung, wie als ob er sie unmittelbar zum Schauen seines Heiligsten und Letzten geführt hätte, wie als ob er sein Ziel erreicht und seine Vision wirklich gesehen und mitgetheilt hätte. Es kommt seinem Ruhme zu Gute, nicht eigentlich an’s Ziel gekommen zu sein.

80 Kunst und Natur. — Die Griechen (oder wenigstens die Athener) hörten gerne gut reden: ja sie hatten einen gierigen Hang darnach, der sie mehr als alles Andere von den Nicht-Griechen unterscheidet. Und so verlangten sie selbst von der Leidenschaft auf der Bühne, dass sie gut rede, und liessen die Unnatürlichkeit des dramatischen Verses mit Wonne über sich ergehen: — in der Natur ist ja die Leidenschaft so wortkarg! so stumm und verlegen! Oder wenn sie Worte findet, so verwirrt und unvernünftig und sich selber zur Scham! Nun haben wir uns Alle, Dank den Griechen, an diese Unnatur auf der Bühne gewöhnt, wie wir jene andere Unnatur, die singende Leidenschaft ertragen und gerne ertragen, Dank den Italiänern. — Es ist uns ein Bedürfniss geworden, welches wir aus der Wirklichkeit nicht befriedigen können: Menschen in den schwersten Lagen gut und ausführlich reden zu hören: es entzückt uns jetzt, wenn der tragische Held da noch Worte, Gründe, beredte Gebärden und im Ganzen eine helle Geistigkeit findet, wo das Leben sich den Abgründen nähert, und der wirkliche Mensch meistens den Kopf und gewiss die schöne Sprache verliert. Diese Art Abweichung von der Natur ist vielleicht die angenehmste Mahlzeit für den Stolz des Menschen; ihretwegen überhaupt liebt er die Kunst, als den Ausdruck einer hohen, heldenhaften Unnatürlichkeit und Convention. Man macht mit Recht dem dramatischen Dichter einen Vorwurf daraus, wenn er nicht Alles in Vernunft und Wort verwandelt, sondern immer einen Rest Schweigen in der Hand zurückbehält: — so wie man mit dem Musiker der Oper unzufrieden ist, der für den höchsten Affect nicht eine Melodie, sondern nur ein affectvolles „natürliches“ Stammeln und Schreien zu finden weiss. Hier soll eben der Natur widersprochen werden! Hier soll eben der gemeine Reiz der Illusion einem höheren Reize weichen! Die Griechen gehen auf diesem Wege weit, weit — zum Erschrecken weit! Wie sie die Bühne so schmal wie möglich bilden und alle Wirkung durch tiefe Hintergründe sich verbieten, wie sie dem Schauspieler das Mienenspiel und die leichte Bewegung unmöglich machen und ihn in einen feierlichen, steifen, maskenhaften Popanz verwandeln, so haben sie auch der Leidenschaft selber den tiefen Hintergrund genommen und ihr ein Gesetz der schönen Rede dictirt, ja sie haben überhaupt Alles gethan, um der elementaren Wirkung furcht- und mitleiderweckender Bilder entgegenzuwirken: sie wollten eben nicht Furcht und Mitleid, — Aristoteles in Ehren und höchsten Ehren! aber er traf sicherlich nicht den Nagel, geschweige den Kopf des Nagels, als er vom letzten Zweck der griechischen Tragödie sprach! Man sehe sich doch die griechischen Dichter der Tragödie darauf hin an, was am Meisten ihren Fleiss, ihre Erfindsamkeit, ihren Wetteifer erregt hat, — gewiss nicht die Absicht auf Ueberwältigung der Zuschauer durch Affecte! Der Athener gieng in’s Theater, um schöne Reden zu hören! Und um schöne Reden war es dem Sophokles zu thun! — man vergebe mir diese Ketzerei! — Sehr verschieden steht es mit der ernsten Oper: alle ihre Meister lassen es sich angelegen sein, zu verhüten, dass man ihre Personen verstehe. Ein gelegentlich aufgerafftes Wort mag dem unaufmerksamen Zuhörer zu Hülfe kommen: im Ganzen muss die Situation sich selber erklären, — es liegt Nichts an den Reden! — so denken sie Alle und so haben sie Alle mit den Worten ihre Possen getrieben. Vielleicht hat es ihnen nur an Muth gefehlt, um ihre letzte Geringschätzung des Wortes ganz auszudrücken: ein wenig Frechheit mehr bei Rossini und er hätte durchweg la-la-la-la singen lassen — und es wäre Vernunft dabei gewesen! Es soll den Personen der Oper eben nicht „auf’s Wort“ geglaubt werden, sondern auf den Ton! Das ist der Unterschied, das ist die schöne Unnatürlichkeit, derentwegen man in die Oper geht! Selbst das recitativo secco will nicht eigentlich als Wort und Text angehört sein: diese Art von Halbmusik soll vielmehr dem musicalischen Ohre zunächst eine kleine Ruhe geben (die Ruhe von der Melodie, als dem sublimsten und desshalb auch anstrengendsten Genusse dieser Kunst) —, aber sehr bald etwas Anderes: nämlich eine wachsende Ungeduld, ein wachsendes Widerstreben, eine neue Begierde nach ganzer Musik, nach Melodie. — Wie verhält es sich, von diesem Gesichtspuncte aus gesehen, mit der Kunst Richard Wagner’s? Vielleicht anders? Oft wollte es mir scheinen, als ob man Wort und Musik seiner Schöpfungen vor der Aufführung auswendig gelernt haben müsste: denn ohne diess — so schien es mir — höre man weder die Worte noch selber die Musik.

81 Griechischer Geschmack. — „Was ist Schönes daran? — sagte jener Feldmesser nach einer Aufführung der Iphigenie — es wird Nichts darin bewiesen!“ Sollten die Griechen so fern von diesem Geschmacke gewesen sein? Bei Sophokles wenigstens wird „Alles bewiesen“.

82 Der esprit ungriechisch. — Die Griechen sind in allem ihrem Denken unbeschreiblich logisch und schlicht; sie sind dessen, wenigstens für ihre lange gute Zeit, nicht überdrüssig geworden, wie die Franzosen es so häufig werden: welche gar zu gerne einen kleinen Sprung in’s Gegentheil machen und den Geist der Logik eigentlich nur vertragen, wenn er durch eine Menge solcher kleiner Sprünge in’s Gegentheil seine gesellige Artigkeit, seine gesellige Selbstverleugnung verräth. Logik erscheint ihnen als nothwendig, wie Brod und Wasser, aber auch gleich diesen als eine Art Gefangenenkost, sobald sie rein und allein genossen werden sollen. In der guten Gesellschaft muss man niemals vollständig und allein Recht haben wollen, wie es alle reine Logik will: daher die kleine Dosis Unvernunft in allem französischen esprit. — Der gesellige Sinn der Griechen war bei Weitem weniger entwickelt, als der der Franzosen es ist und war: daher so wenig esprit bei ihren geistreichsten Männern, daher so wenig Witz selbst bei ihren Witzbolden, daher — ach! Man wird mir schon diese meine Sätze nicht glauben, und wie viele der Art habe ich noch auf der Seele! — Est res magna tacere — sagt Martial mit allen Geschwätzigen.

83 Uebersetzungen. — Man kann den Grad des historischen Sinnes, welchen eine Zeit besitzt, daran abschätzen, wie diese Zeit Uebersetzungen macht und vergangene Zeiten und Bücher sich einzuverleiben sucht. Die Franzosen Corneille’s, und auch noch die der Revolution, bemächtigten sich des römischen Alterthums in einer Weise, zu der wir nicht den Muth mehr hätten — Dank unserem höheren historischen Sinne. Und das römische Alterthum selbst: wie gewaltsam und naiv zugleich legte es seine Hand auf alles Gute und Hohe des griechischen älteren Alterthums! Wie übersetzten sie in die römische Gegenwart hinein! Wie verwischten sie absichtlich und unbekümmert den Flügelstaub des Schmetterlings Augenblick! So übersetzte Horaz hier und da den Alcäus oder den Archilochus, so Properz den Callimachus und Philetas (Dichter gleichen Ranges mit Theokrit, wenn wir urtheilen dürfen): was lag ihnen daran, dass der eigentliche Schöpfer Diess und Jenes erlebt und die Zeichen davon in sein Gedicht hineingeschrieben hatte! — als Dichter waren sie dem antiquarischen Spürgeiste, der dem historischen Sinne voranläuft, abhold, als Dichter liessen sie diese ganz persönlichen Dinge und Namen und Alles, was einer Stadt, einer Küste, einem Jahrhundert als seine Tracht und Maske zu eigen war, nicht gelten, sondern stellten flugs das Gegenwärtige und das Römische an seine Stelle. Sie scheinen uns zu fragen: „Sollen wir das Alte nicht für uns neu machen und uns in ihm zurechtlegen? Sollen wir nicht unsere Seele diesem todten Leibe einblasen dürfen? denn todt ist er nun einmal: wie hässlich ist alles Todte!“ — Sie kannten den Genuss des historischen Sinnes nicht; das Vergangene und Fremde war ihnen peinlich, und als Römern ein Anreiz zu einer römischen Eroberung. In der That, man eroberte damals, wenn man übersetzte, — nicht nur so, dass man das Historische wegliess: nein, man fügte die Anspielung auf das Gegenwärtige hinzu, man strich vor Allem den Namen des Dichters hinweg und setzte den eigenen an seine Stelle — nicht im Gefühl des Diebstahls, sondern mit dem allerbesten Gewissen des imperium Romanum.

84 Vom Ursprunge der Poesie. — Die Liebhaber des Phantastischen am Menschen, welche zugleich die Lehre von der instinctiven Moralität vertreten, schliessen so: „gesetzt, man habe zu allen Zeiten den Nutzen als die höchste Gottheit verehrt, woher dann in aller Welt ist die Poesie gekommen? — diese Rhythmisirung der Rede, welche der Deutlichkeit der Mittheilung eher entgegenwirkt, als förderlich ist, und die trotzdem wie ein Hohn auf alle nützliche Zweckmässigkeit überall auf Erden aufgeschossen ist und noch aufschiesst! Die wildschöne Unvernünftigkeit der Poesie widerlegt euch, ihr Utilitarier! Gerade vom Nutzen einmal loskommen wollen — das hat den Menschen erhoben, das hat ihn zur Moralität und Kunst inspirirt!“ Nun ich muss hierin einmal den Utilitariern zu Gefallen reden, — sie haben ja so selten Recht, dass es zum Erbarmen ist! Man hatte in jenen alten Zeiten, welche die Poesie in’s Dasein riefen, doch die Nützlichkeit dabei im Auge und eine sehr grosse Nützlichkeit — damals als man den Rhythmus in die Rede dringen liess, jene Gewalt die alle Atome des Satzes neu ordnet, die Worte wählen heisst und den Gedanken neu färbt und dunkler, fremder, ferner macht: freilich eine abergläubische Nützlichkeit! Es sollte vermöge des Rhythmus den Göttern ein menschliches Anliegen tiefer eingeprägt werden, nachdem man bemerkt hatte, dass der Mensch einen Vers besser im Gedächtniss behält, als eine ungebundene Rede; ebenfalls meinte man durch das rhythmische Tiktak über grössere Fernen hin sich hörbar zu machen; das rhythmisirte Gebet schien den Göttern näher an’s Ohr zu kommen. Vor Allem aber wollte man den Nutzen von jener elementaren Ueberwältigung haben, welche der Mensch an sich beim Hören der Musik erfährt: der Rhythmus ist ein Zwang; er erzeugt eine unüberwindliche Lust, nachzugeben, mit einzustimmen; nicht nur der Schritt der Füsse, auch die Seele selber geht dem Tacte nach, — wahrscheinlich, so schloss man, auch die Seele der Götter! Man versuchte sie also durch den Rhythmus zu zwingen und eine Gewalt über sie auszuüben: man warf ihnen die Poesie wie eine magische Schlinge um. Es gab noch eine wunderlichere Vorstellung: und diese gerade hat vielleicht am mächtigsten zur Entstehung der Poesie gewirkt. Bei den Pythagoreern erscheint sie als philosophische Lehre und als Kunstgriff der Erziehung: aber längst bevor es Philosophen gab, gestand man der Musik die Kraft zu, die Affecte zu entladen, die Seele zu reinigen, die ferocia animi zu mildern — und zwar gerade durch das Rhythmische in der Musik. Wenn die richtige Spannung und Harmonie der Seele verloren gegangen war, musste man tanzen, in dem Tacte des Sängers, — das war das Recept dieser Heilkunst. Mit ihr stillte Terpander einen Aufruhr, besänftigte Empedokles einen Rasenden, reinigte Damon einen liebessiechen Jüngling; mit ihr nahm man auch die wildgewordenen rachsüchtigen Götter in Cur. Zuerst dadurch, dass man den Taumel und die Ausgelassenheit ihrer Affecte auf’s Höchste trieb, also den Rasenden toll, den Rachsüchtigen rachetrunken machte: — alle orgiastischen Culte wollen die ferocia einer Gottheit auf Ein Mal entladen und zur Orgie machen, damit sie hinterher sich freier und ruhiger fühle und den Menschen in Ruhe lasse. Melos bedeutet seiner Wurzel nach ein Besänftigungsmittel, nicht weil es selber sanft ist, sondern weil seine Nachwirkung sanft macht. — Und nicht nur im Cultusliede, auch bei dem weltlichen Liede der ältesten Zeiten ist die Voraussetzung, dass das Rhythmische eine magische Kraft übe, zum Beispiel beim Wasserschöpfen oder Rudern, das Lied ist eine Bezauberung der hierbei thätig gedachten Dämonen, es macht sie willfährig, unfrei und zum Werkzeug des Menschen. Und so oft man handelt, hat man einen Anlass zu singen, — jede Handlung ist an die Beihülfe von Geistern geknüpft: Zauberlied und Besprechung scheinen die Urgestalt der Poesie zu sein. Wenn der Vers auch beim Orakel verwendet wurde — die Griechen sagten, der Hexameter sei in Delphi erfunden —, so sollte der Rhythmus auch hier einen Zwang ausüben. Sich prophezeien lassen — das bedeutet ursprünglich (nach der mir wahrscheinlichen Ableitung des griechischen Wortes): sich Etwas bestimmen lassen; man glaubt die Zukunft erzwingen zu können dadurch, dass man Apollo für sich gewinnt: er, der nach der ältesten Vorstellung viel mehr, als ein vorhersehender Gott ist. So wie die Formel ausgesprochen wird, buchstäblich und rhythmisch genau, so bindet sie die Zukunft: die Formel aber ist die Erfindung Apollo’s, welcher als Gott der Rhythmen auch die Göttinnen des Schicksals binden kann. — Im Ganzen gesehen und gefragt: gab es für die alte abergläubische Art des Menschen überhaupt etwas Nützlicheres, als den Rhythmus? Mit ihm konnte man Alles: eine Arbeit magisch fördern; einen Gott nöthigen, zu erscheinen, nahe zu sein, zuzuhören; die Zukunft sich nach seinem Willen zurecht machen; die eigene Seele von irgend einem Uebermaasse (der Angst, der Manie, des Mitleids, der Rachsucht) entladen, und nicht nur die eigene Seele, sondern die des bösesten Dämons, — ohne den Vers war man Nichts, durch den Vers wurde man beinahe ein Gott. Ein solches Grundgefühl lässt sich nicht mehr völlig ausrotten, — und noch jetzt, nach Jahrtausende langer Arbeit in der Bekämpfung solchen Aberglaubens, wird auch der Weiseste von uns gelegentlich zum Narren des Rhythmus, sei es auch nur darin, dass er einen Gedanken als wahrer empfindet, wenn er eine metrische Form hat und mit einem göttlichen Hopsasa daher kommt. Ist es nicht eine sehr lustige Sache, dass immer noch die ernstesten Philosophen, so streng sie es sonst mit aller Gewissheit nehmen, sich auf Dichtersprüche berufen, um ihren Gedanken Kraft und Glaubwürdigkeit zu geben? — und doch ist es für eine Wahrheit gefährlicher, wenn der Dichter ihr zustimmt, als wenn er ihr widerspricht! Denn wie Homer sagt: „Viel ja lügen die Sänger!“ —

85 Das Gute und das Schöne. — Die Künstler verherrlichen fortwährend — sie thun nichts Anderes —: und zwar alle jene Zustände und Dinge, welche in dem Rufe stehen, dass bei ihnen und in ihnen der Mensch sich einmal gut oder gross, oder trunken, oder lustig, oder wohl und weise fühlen kann. Diese ausgelesenen Dinge und Zustände, deren Werth für das menschliche Glück als sicher und abgeschätzt gilt, sind die Objecte der Künstler: sie liegen immer auf der Lauer, dergleichen zu entdecken und in’s Gebiet der Kunst hinüberzuziehen. Ich will sagen: sie sind nicht selber die Taxatoren des Glückes und des Glücklichen, aber sie drängen sich immer in die Nähe dieser Taxatoren, mit der grössten Neugierde und Lust, sich ihre Schätzungen sofort zu Nutze zu machen. So werden sie, weil sie ausser ihrer Ungeduld auch die grossen Lungen der Herolde und die Füsse der Läufer haben, immer auch unter den Ersten sein, die das neue Gute verherrlichen, und oft als Die erscheinen, welche es zuerst gut nennen und als gut taxiren. Diess aber ist, wie gesagt, ein Irrthum: sie sind nur geschwinder und lauter, als die wirklichen Taxatoren. — Und wer sind denn diese? — Es sind die Reichen und die Müssigen.

86 Vom Theater. — Dieser Tag gab mir wieder starke und hohe Gefühle, und wenn ich an seinem Abende Musik und Kunst haben könnte, so weiss ich wohl, welche Musik und Kunst ich nicht haben möchte, nämlich alle jene nicht, welche ihre Zuhörer berauschen und zu einem Augenblicke starken und hohen Gefühls emportreiben möchte, — jene Menschen des Alltags der Seele, die am Abende nicht Siegern auf Triumphwägen gleichen, sondern müden Maulthieren, an denen das Leben die Peitsche etwas zu oft geübt hat. Was würden jene Menschen überhaupt von „höheren Stimmungen“ wissen, wenn es nicht rauscherzeugende Mittel und idealische Peitschenschläge gäbe! — und so haben sie ihre Begeisterer, wie sie ihre Weine haben. Aber was ist mir ihr Getränk und ihre Trunkenheit! Was braucht der Begeisterte den Wein! Vielmehr blickt er mit einer Art von Ekel auf die Mittel und Mittler hin, welche hier eine Wirkung ohne zureichenden Grund erzeugen sollen, — eine Nachäffung der hohen Seelenfluth! — Wie? Man schenkt dem Maulwurf Flügel und stolze Einbildungen, — vor Schlafengehen, bevor er in seine Höhle kriecht? Man schickt ihn in’s Theater und setzt ihm grosse Gläser vor seine blinden und müden Augen? Menschen, deren Leben keine „Handlung“, sondern ein Geschäft ist, sitzen vor der Bühne und schauen fremdartigen Wesen zu, denen das Leben mehr ist, als ein Geschäft? „So ist es anständig“, sagt ihr, „so ist es unterhaltend, so will es die Bildung!“ — Nun denn! So fehlt mir allzuoft die Bildung: denn dieser Anblick ist mir allzuoft ekelhaft. Wer an sich der Tragödie und Komödie genug hat, bleibt wohl am Liebsten fern vom Theater; oder, zur Ausnahme, der ganze Vorgang — Theater und Publicum und Dichter eingerechnet — wird ihm zum eigentlichen tragischen und komischen Schauspiel, sodass das aufgeführte Stück dagegen ihm nur wenig bedeutet. Wer Etwas wie Faust und Manfred ist, was liegt dem an den Fausten und Manfreden des Theaters! — während es ihm gewiss noch zu denken giebt, dass man überhaupt dergleichen Figuren auf’s Theater bringt. Die stärksten Gedanken und Leidenschaften vor Denen, welche des Denkens und der Leidenschaft nicht fähig sind — aber des Rausches! Und jene als ein Mittel zu diesem! Und Theater und Musik das Haschisch-Rauchen und Betel-Kauen der Europäer! Oh wer erzählt uns die ganze Geschichte der Narcotica! — Es ist beinahe die Geschichte der „Bildung“, der sogenannten höheren Bildung!

87 Von der Eitelkeit der Künstler. — Ich glaube, dass die Künstler oft nicht wissen, was sie am besten können, weil sie zu eitel sind und ihren Sinn auf etwas Stolzeres gerichtet haben, als diese kleinen Pflanzen zu sein scheinen, welche neu, seltsam und schön, in wirklicher Vollkommenheit auf ihrem Boden zu wachsen vermögen. Das letzthin Gute ihres eigenen Gartens und Weinbergs wird von ihnen obenhin abgeschätzt, und ihre Liebe und ihre Einsicht sind nicht gleichen Ranges. Da ist ein Musiker, der mehr als irgend ein Musiker darin seine Meisterschaft hat, die Töne aus dem Reiche leidender, gedrückter, gemarterter Seelen zu finden und auch noch den stummen Thieren Sprache zu geben. Niemand kommt ihm gleich in den Farben des späten Herbstes, dem unbeschreiblich rührenden Glücke eines letzten, allerletzten, allerkürzesten Geniessens, er kennt einen Klang für jene heimlich-unheimlichen Mitternächte der Seele, wo Ursache und Wirkung aus den Fugen gekommen zu sein scheinen und jeden Augenblick Etwas „aus dem Nichts“ entstehen kann; er schöpft am glücklichsten vor Allen aus dem unteren Grunde des menschlichen Glückes und gleichsam aus dessen ausgetrunkenem Becher, wo die herbsten und widrigsten Tropfen zu guter- und böserletzt mit den süssesten zusammengelaufen sind; er kennt jenes müde Sich-schieben der Seele, die nicht mehr springen und fliegen, ja nicht mehr gehen kann; er hat den scheuen Blick des verhehlten Schmerzes, des Verstehens ohne Trost, des Abschiednehmens ohne Geständniss; ja, als der Orpheus alles heimlichen Elendes ist er grösser, als irgend Einer, und Manches ist durch ihn überhaupt der Kunst hinzugefügt worden, was bisher unausdrückbar und selbst der Kunst unwürdig erschien, und mit Worten namentlich nur zu verscheuchen, nicht zu fassen war, — manches ganz Kleine und Mikroskopische der Seele: ja, es ist der Meister des ganz Kleinen. Aber er will es nicht sein! Sein Charakter liebt vielmehr die grossen Wände und die verwegene Wandmalerei! Es entgeht ihm, dass sein Geist einen anderen Geschmack und Hang hat und am liebsten still in den Winkeln zusammengestürzter Häuser sitzt: — da, verborgen, sich selber verborgen, malt er seine eigentlichen Meisterstücke, welche alle sehr kurz sind, oft nur Einen Tact lang, — da erst wird er ganz gut, gross und vollkommen, da vielleicht allein. — Aber er weiss es nicht! Er ist zu eitel dazu, es zu wissen.

88 Der Ernst um die Wahrheit. — Ernst um die Wahrheit! Wie Verschiedenes verstehen die Menschen bei diesen Worten! Eben die selben Ansichten und Arten von Beweis und Prüfung, welche ein Denker an sich wie eine Leichtfertigkeit empfindet, der er zu seiner Scham in dieser oder jener Stunde unterlegen ist, — eben die selben Ansichten können einem Künstler, der auf sie stösst und mit ihnen zeitweilig lebt, das Bewusstsein geben, jetzt habe ihn der tiefste Ernst um die Wahrheit erfasst, und es sei bewunderungswürdig, dass er, obschon Künstler, doch zugleich die ernsthafteste Begierde nach dem Gegensatze des Scheinenden zeige. So ist es möglich, dass Einer gerade mit seinem Pathos von Ernsthaftigkeit verräth, wie oberflächlich und genügsam sein Geist bisher im Reiche der Erkenntniss gespielt hat. — Und ist nicht Alles, was wir wichtig nehmen, unser Verräther? Es zeigt, wo unsere Gewichte liegen und wofür wir keine Gewichte besitzen.

89 Jetzt und ehedem. — Was liegt an aller unsrer Kunst der Kunstwerke, wenn jene höhere Kunst, die Kunst der Feste, uns abhanden kommt! Ehemals waren alle Kunstwerke an der grossen Feststrasse der Menschheit aufgestellt, als Erinnerungszeichen und Denkmäler hoher und seliger Momente. Jetzt will man mit den Kunstwerken die armen Erschöpften und Kranken von der grossen Leidensstrasse der Menschheit bei Seite locken, für ein lüsternes Augenblickchen; man bietet ihnen einen kleinen Rausch und Wahnsinn an.

90 Lichter und Schatten. — Die Bücher und Niederschriften sind bei verschiedenen Denkern Verschiedenes: der Eine hat im Buche die Lichter zusammengebracht, die er geschwind aus den Strahlen einer ihm aufleuchtenden Erkenntniss wegzustehlen und heimzutragen wusste; ein Anderer giebt nur die Schatten, die Nachbilder in Grau und Schwarz von dem wieder, was Tags zuvor in seiner Seele sich aufbaute.

91 Vorsicht. — Alfieri hat, wie bekannt, sehr viel gelogen, als er den erstaunten Zeitgenossen seine Lebensgeschichte erzählte. Er log aus jenem Despotismus gegen sich selber, den er zum Beispiel in der Art bewies, wie er sich seine eigene Sprache schuf und sich zum Dichter tyrannisirte: — er hatte endlich eine strenge Form von Erhabenheit gefunden, in welche er sein Leben und sein Gedächtniss hineinpresste: es wird viel Qual dabei gewesen sein. — Ich würde auch einer Lebensgeschichte Platon’s, von ihm selber geschrieben, keinen Glauben schenken: so wenig, als der Rousseau’s, oder der vita nuova Dante’s.

92 Prosa und Poesie. — Man beachte doch, dass die grossen Meister der Prosa fast immer auch Dichter gewesen sind, sei es öffentlich, oder auch nur im Geheimen und für das „Kämmerlein“; und fürwahr, man schreibt nur im Angesichte der Poesie gute Prosa! Denn diese ist ein ununterbrochener artiger Krieg mit der Poesie: alle ihre Reize bestehen darin, dass beständig der Poesie ausgewichen und widersprochen wird; jedes Abstractum will als Schalkheit gegen diese und wie mit spöttischer Stimme vorgetragen sein; jede Trockenheit und Kühle soll die liebliche Göttin in eine liebliche Verzweifelung bringen; oft giebt es Annäherungen, Versöhnungen des Augenblickes und dann ein plötzliches Zurückspringen und Auslachen; oft wird der Vorhang aufgezogen und grelles Licht hereingelassen, während gerade die Göttin ihre Dämmerungen und dumpfen Farben geniesst; oft wird ihr das Wort aus dem Munde genommen und nach einer Melodie abgesungen, bei der sie die feinen Hände vor die feinen Oehrchen hält — und so giebt es tausend Vergnügungen des Krieges, die Niederlagen mitgezählt, von denen die Unpoetischen, die sogenannten Prosa-Menschen, gar Nichts wissen: — diese schreiben und sprechen denn auch nur schlechte Prosa! Der Krieg ist der Vater aller guten Dinge, der Krieg ist auch der Vater der guten Prosa! — Vier sehr seltsame und wahrhaft dichterische Menschen waren es in diesem Jahrhundert, welche an die Meisterschaft der Prosa gereicht haben, für die sonst diess Jahrhundert nicht gemacht ist — aus Mangel an Poesie, wie angedeutet. Um von Goethe abzusehen, welchen billigerweise das Jahrhundert in Anspruch nimmt, das ihn hervorbrachte: so sehe ich nur Giacomo Leopardi, Prosper Mérimée, Ralph Waldo Emerson und Walter Savage Landor, den Verfasser der Imaginary Conversations, als würdig an, Meister der Prosa zu heissen.

93 Aber warum schreibst denn du? — A.: Ich gehöre nicht zu Denen, welche mit der nassen Feder in der Hand denken; und noch weniger zu Jenen, die sich gar vor dem offenen Tintenfasse ihren Leidenschaften überlassen, auf ihrem Stuhle sitzend und auf’s Papier starrend. Ich ärgere oder schäme mich alles Schreibens; Schreiben ist für mich eine Nothdurft, — selbst im Gleichniss davon zu reden, ist mir widerlich. B.: Aber warum schreibst du dann? A.: Ja, mein Lieber, im Vertrauen gesagt: ich habe bisher noch kein anderes Mittel gefunden, meine Gedanken los zu werden. B.: Und warum willst du sie los werden? A.: Warum ich will? Will ich denn? Ich muss. — B.: Genug! Genug!

94 Wachsthum nach dem Tode. — Jene kleinen verwegenen Worte über moralische Dinge, welche Fontenelle in seinen unsterblichen Todtengesprächen hinwarf, galten seiner Zeit als Paradoxien und Spiele eines nicht unbedenklichen Witzes; selbst die höchsten Richter des Geschmackes und des Geistes sahen nicht mehr darin, — ja, vielleicht Fontenelle selber nicht. Nun ereignet sich etwas Unglaubliches: diese Gedanken werden Wahrheiten! Die Wissenschaft beweist sie! Das Spiel wird zum Ernst! Und wir lesen jene Dialoge mit einer anderen Empfindung, als Voltaire und Helvetius sie lasen, und heben unwillkürlich ihren Urheber in eine andere und viel höhere Rangclasse der Geister, als Jene thaten, — mit Recht? Mit Unrecht?

95 Chamfort. — Dass ein solcher Kenner der Menschen und der Menge, wie Chamfort, eben der Menge beisprang und nicht in philosophischer Entsagung und Abwehr seitwärts stehen blieb, das weiss ich mir nicht anders zu erklären, als so: Ein Instinct war in ihm stärker, als seine Weisheit, und war nie befriedigt worden, der Hass gegen alle Noblesse des Geblüts: vielleicht der alte nur zu erklärliche Hass seiner Mutter, welcher durch die Liebe zur Mutter in ihm heilig gesprochen war, — ein Instinct der Rache von seinen Knabenjahren her, der die Stunde erwartete, die Mutter zu rächen. Und nun hatte ihn das Leben und sein Genie, und ach! am meisten wohl das väterliche Blut in seinen Adern dazu verführt, eben dieser Noblesse sich einzureihen und gleichzustellen — viele viele Jahre lang! Endlich ertrug er aber seinen eigenen Anblick, den Anblick des „alten Menschen“ unter dem alten Regime nicht mehr; er gerieth in eine heftige Leidenschaft der Busse, und in dieser zog er das Gewand des Pöbels an, als seine Art von härener Kutte! Sein böses Gewissen war die Versäumniss der Rache. — Gesetzt, Chamfort wäre damals um einen Grad mehr Philosoph geblieben, so hätte die Revolution ihren tragischen Witz und ihren schärfsten Stachel nicht bekommen: sie würde als ein viel dümmeres Ereigniss gelten und keine solche Verführung der Geister sein. Aber der Hass und die Rache Chamfort’s erzogen ein ganzes Geschlecht: und die erlauchtesten Menschen machten diese Schule durch. Man erwäge doch, dass Mirabeau zu Chamfort wie zu seinem höheren und älteren Selbst aufsah, von dem er Antriebe, Warnungen und Richtersprüche erwartete und ertrug, — Mirabeau, der als Mensch zu einem ganz anderen Range der Grösse gehört, als selbst die Ersten unter den staatsmännischen Grössen von gestern und heute. — Seltsam, dass trotz einem solchen Freunde und Fürsprecher — man hat ja die Briefe Mirabeau’s an Chamfort — dieser witzigste aller Moralisten den Franzosen fremd geblieben ist, nicht anders, als Stendhal, der vielleicht unter allen Franzosen dieses Jahrhunderts die gedankenreichsten Augen und Ohren gehabt hat. Ist es, dass Letzterer im Grunde zu viel von einem Deutschen und Engländer an sich hatte, um den Parisern noch erträglich zu sein? — während Chamfort, ein Mensch, reich an Tiefen und Hintergründen der Seele, düster, leidend, glühend, — ein Denker, der das Lachen als das Heilmittel gegen das Leben nöthig fand, und der sich beinahe verloren gab, an jedem Tage, wo er nicht gelacht hatte, — vielmehr wie ein Italiäner und Blutsverwandter Dante’s und Leopardi’s erscheint, als wie ein Franzose! Man kennt die letzten Worte Chamfort’s: „Ah! mon ami, sagte er zu Sieyes, je m’en vais enfin de ce monde, où il faut que le coeur se brise ou se bronze —“. Das sind sicherlich nicht Worte eines sterbenden Franzosen.

96 Zwei Redner. — Von diesen beiden Rednern erreicht der eine die ganze Vernunft seiner Sache nur dann, wenn er sich der Leidenschaft überlässt: erst diese pumpt genug Blut und Hitze ihm in’s Gehirn, um seine hohe Geistigkeit zur Offenbarung zu zwingen. Der Andere versucht wohl hier und da das Selbe: mit Hülfe der Leidenschaft seine Sache volltönend, heftig und hinreissend vorzubringen, — aber gewöhnlich mit einem schlechten Erfolge. Er redet dann sehr bald dunkel und verwirrt, er übertreibt, macht Auslassungen und erregt gegen die Vernunft seiner Sache Misstrauen: ja, er selber empfindet dabei diess Misstrauen, und daraus erklären sich plötzliche Sprünge in die kältesten und abstossendsten Töne, welche in dem Zuhörer einen Zweifel erregen, ob seine ganze Leidenschaftlichkeit ächt gewesen sei. Bei ihm überfluthet jedes Mal die Leidenschaft den Geist; vielleicht, weil sie stärker ist, als bei dem Ersten. Aber er ist auf der Höhe seiner Kraft, wenn er dem andringenden Sturme seiner Empfindung widersteht und ihn gleichsam verhöhnt: da erst tritt sein Geist ganz aus seinem Versteck heraus, ein logischer, spöttischer, spielender, und doch furchtbarer Geist.

97 Von der Geschwätzigkeit der Schriftsteller.

Es giebt eine Geschwätzigkeit des Zornes, — häufig bei Luther, auch bei Schopenhauer. Eine Geschwätzigkeit aus einem zu grossen Vorrathe von Begriffsformeln wie bei Kant. Eine Geschwätzigkeit aus Lust an immer neuen Wendungen der selben Sache: man findet sie bei Montaigne. Eine Geschwätzigkeit hämischer Naturen: wer Schriften dieser Zeit liest, wird sich hierbei zweier Schriftsteller erinnern. Eine Geschwätzigkeit aus Lust an guten Worten und Sprachformen: nicht selten in der Prosa Goethe’s. Eine Geschwätzigkeit aus innerem Wohlgefallen an Lärm und Wirrwarr der Empfindungen: zum Beispiel bei Carlyle.

98 Zum Ruhme Shakespeare’s. — Das Schönste, was ich zum Ruhme Shakespeare’s, des Menschen, zu sagen wüsste, ist diess: er hat an Brutus geglaubt und kein Stäubchen Misstrauens auf diese Art Tugend geworfen! Ihm hat er seine beste Tragödie geweiht — sie wird jetzt immer noch mit einem falschen Namen genannt —, ihm und dem furchtbarsten Inbegriff hoher Moral. Unabhängigkeit der Seele! — das gilt es hier! Kein Opfer kann da zu gross sein: seinen liebsten Freund selbst muss man ihr opfern können, und sei er noch dazu der herrlichste Mensch, die Zierde der Welt, das Genie ohne Gleichen, — wenn man nämlich die Freiheit als die Freiheit grosser Seelen liebt, und durch ihn dieser Freiheit Gefahr droht: — derart muss Shakespeare gefühlt haben! Die Höhe, in welche er Cäsar stellt, ist die feinste Ehre, die er Brutus erweisen konnte: so erst erhebt er dessen inneres Problem in’s Ungeheure und ebenso die seelische Kraft, welche diesen Knoten zu zerhauen vermochte! — Und war es wirklich die politische Freiheit, welche diesen Dichter zum Mitgefühl mit Brutus trieb, — zum Mitschuldigen des Brutus machte?

Oder war die politische Freiheit nur eine Symbolik für irgend etwas Unaussprechbares? Stehen wir vielleicht vor irgend einem unbekannt gebliebenen dunklen Ereignisse und Abenteuer aus des Dichters eigener Seele, von dem er nur durch Zeichen reden mochte? Was ist alle Hamlet-Melancholie gegen die Melancholie des Brutus! — und vielleicht kennt Shakespeare auch diese, wie er jene kannte, aus Erfahrung! Vielleicht hatte auch er seine finstere Stunde und seinen bösen Engel, gleich Brutus! — Was es aber auch derart von Aehnlichkeiten und geheimen Bezügen gegeben haben mag: vor der ganzen Gestalt und Tugend des Brutus warf Shakespeare sich auf den Boden und fühlte sich unwürdig und ferne: — das Zeugniss dafür hat er in seine Tragödie hineingeschrieben. Zweimal hat er in ihr einen Poeten vorgeführt und zweimal eine solche ungeduldige und allerletzte Verachtung über ihn geschüttet, dass es wie ein Schrei klingt, — wie der Schrei der Selbstverachtung. Brutus, selbst Brutus verliert die Geduld, als der Poet auftritt, eingebildet, pathetisch, zudringlich, wie Poeten zu sein pflegen, als ein Wesen, welches von Möglichkeiten der Grösse, auch der sittlichen Grösse, zu strotzen scheint und es doch in der Philosophie der That und des Lebens selten selbst bis zur gemeinen Rechtschaffenheit bringt. „Kennt er die Zeit, so kenn’ ich seine Launen, — fort mit dem Schellen-Hanswurst!“ — ruft Brutus. Man übersetze sich diess zurück in die Seele des Poeten, der es dichtete.

99 Die Anhänger Schopenhauer’s. — Was man bei der Berührung von Cultur-Völkern und Barbaren zu sehen bekommt: dass regelmässig die niedrigere Cultur von der höheren zuerst deren Laster, Schwächen und Ausschweifungen annimmt, von da aus einen Reiz auf sich ausgeübt fühlt und endlich vermittelst der angeeigneten Laster und Schwächen Etwas von der werthhaltigen Kraft der höheren Cultur mit auf sich überströmen lässt: — das kann man auch in der Nähe und ohne Reisen zu Barbaren-Völkern mit ansehen, freilich etwas verfeinert und vergeistigt und nicht so leicht mit Händen zu greifen. Was pflegen doch die Anhänger Schopenhauer’s in Deutschland von ihrem Meister zuerst anzunehmen? — als welche, im Vergleich zu dessen überlegener Cultur, sich barbarenhaft genug vorkommen müssen, um auch durch ihn zuerst barbarenhaft fascinirt und verführt zu werden. Ist es sein harter Thatsachen-Sinn, sein guter Wille zu Helligkeit und Vernunft, der ihn oft so englisch und so wenig deutsch erscheinen lässt? Oder die Stärke seines intellectuellen Gewissens, das einen lebenslangen Widerspruch zwischen Sein und Wollen aushielt und ihn dazu zwang, sich auch in seinen Schriften beständig und fast in jedem Puncte zu widersprechen? Oder seine Reinlichkeit in Dingen der Kirche und des christlichen Gottes? — denn hierin war er reinlich wie kein deutscher Philosoph bisher, so dass er „als Voltairianer“ lebte und starb. Oder seine unsterblichen Lehren von der Intellectualität der Anschauung, von der Apriorität des Causalitätsgesetzes, von der Werkzeug-Natur des Intellects und der Unfreiheit des Willens? Nein, diess Alles bezaubert nicht und wird nicht als bezaubernd gefühlt: aber die mystischen Verlegenheiten und Ausflüchte Schopenhauer’s, an jenen Stellen, wo der Thatsachen-Denker sich vom eitlen Triebe, der Enträthseler der Welt zu sein, verführen und verderben liess, die unbeweisbare Lehre von Einem Willen („alle Ursachen sind nur Gelegenheitsursachen der Erscheinung des Willens zu dieser Zeit, an diesem Orte“, „der Wille zum Leben ist in jedem Wesen, auch dem geringsten, ganz und ungetheilt vorhanden, so vollständig, wie in Allen, die je waren, sind und sein werden, zusammengenommen“), die Leugnung des Individuums („alle Löwen sind im Grunde nur Ein Löwe“, „die Vielheit der Individuen ist ein Schein“; sowie auch die Entwicklung nur ein Schein ist: — er nennt den Gedanken de Lamarck’s „einen genialen, absurden Irrthum“), die Schwärmerei vom Genie („in der ästhetischen Anschauung ist das Individuum nicht mehr Individuum, sondern reines, willenloses, schmerzloses, zeitloses Subject der Erkenntniss“; „das Subject, indem es in dem angeschauten Gegenstande ganz aufgeht, ist dieser Gegenstand selbst geworden“), der Unsinn vom Mitleide und der in ihm ermöglichten Durchbrechung des principii individuationis als der Quelle aller Moralität, hinzugerechnet solche Behauptungen „das Sterben ist eigentlich der Zweck des Daseins“, „es lässt sich a priori nicht geradezu die Möglichkeit ableugnen, dass eine magische Wirkung nicht auch sollte von einem bereits Gestorbenen ausgehen können“: diese und ähnliche Ausschweifungen und Laster des Philosophen werden immer am ersten angenommen und zur Sache des Glaubens gemacht: — Laster und Ausschweifungen sind nämlich immer am leichtesten nachzuahmen und wollen keine lange Vorübung. Doch reden wir von dem berühmtesten der lebenden Schopenhauerianer, von Richard Wagner. — Ihm ist es ergangen, wie es schon manchem Künstler ergangen ist: er vergriff sich in der Deutung der Gestalten, die er schuf, und verkannte die unausgesprochene Philosophie seiner eigensten Kunst. Richard Wagner, hat sich bis in die Mitte seines Lebens durch Hegel irreführen lassen; er that das Selbe noch einmal, als er später Schopenhauer’s Lehre aus seinen Gestalten herauslas und mit „Wille“, „Genie“ und „Mitleid“ sich selber zu formuliren begann. Trotzdem wird es wahr bleiben: Nichts geht gerade so sehr wider den Geist Schopenhauer’s, als das eigentlich Wagnerische an den Helden Wagner’s: ich meine die Unschuld der höchsten Selbstsucht, der Glaube an die grosse Leidenschaft als an das Gute an sich, mit Einem Worte, das Siegfriedhafte im Antlitze seiner Helden. „Das Alles riecht eher noch nach Spinoza als nach mir“ — würde vielleicht Schopenhauer sagen. So gute Gründe also Wagner hätte, sich gerade nach anderen Philosophen umzusehen als nach Schopenhauer: die Bezauberung, der er in Betreff dieses Denkers unterlegen ist, hat ihn nicht nur gegen alle anderen Philosophen, sondern sogar gegen die Wissenschaft selber blind gemacht; immer mehr will seine ganze Kunst sich als Seitenstück und Ergänzung der Schopenhauerschen Philosophie geben und immer ausdrücklicher verzichtet sie auf den höheren Ehrgeiz, Seitenstück und Ergänzung der menschlichen Erkenntniss und Wissenschaft zu werden. Und nicht nur reizt ihn dazu der ganze geheimnissvolle Prunk dieser Philosophie, welche auch einen Cagliostro gereizt haben würde: auch die einzelnen Gebärden und die Affecte der Philosophen waren stets Verführer! Schopenhauerisch ist zum Beispiel Wagner’s Ereiferung über die Verderbniss der deutschen Sprache; und wenn man hierin die Nachahmung gut heissen sollte, so darf doch auch nicht verschwiegen werden, dass Wagner’s Stil selber nicht wenig an all den Geschwüren und Geschwülsten krankt, deren Anblick Schopenhauern so wüthend machte, und dass, in Hinsicht auf die deutsch schreibenden Wagnerianer, die Wagnerei sich so gefährlich zu erweisen beginnt, als nur irgend eine Hegelei sich erwiesen hat. Schopenhauerisch ist Wagner’s Hass gegen die Juden, denen er selbst in ihrer grössten That nicht gerecht zu werden vermag: die Juden sind ja die Erfinder des Christenthums! Schopenhauerisch ist der Versuch Wagner’s, das Christenthum als ein verwehtes Korn des Buddhismus aufzufassen und für Europa, unter zeitweiliger Annäherung an katholisch-christliche Formeln und Empfindungen, ein buddhistisches Zeitalter vorzubereiten. Schopenhauerisch ist Wagner’s Predigt zu Gunsten der Barmherzigkeit im Verkehre mit Thieren; Schopenhauer’s Vorgänger hierin war bekanntlich Voltaire, der vielleicht auch schon, gleich seinen Nachfolgern, seinen Hass gegen gewisse Dinge und Menschen als Barmherzigkeit gegen Thiere zu verkleiden wusste. Wenigstens ist Wagner’s Hass gegen die Wissenschaft, der aus seiner Predigt spricht, gewiss nicht vom Geiste der Mildherzigkeit und Güte eingegeben — noch auch, wie es sich von selber versteht, vom Geiste überhaupt. — Zuletzt ist wenig an der Philosophie eines Künstlers gelegen, falls sie eben nur eine nachträgliche Philosophie ist und seiner Kunst selber keinen Schaden thut. Man kann sich nicht genug davor hüten, einem Künstler um einer gelegentlichen, vielleicht sehr unglücklichen und anmaasslichen Maskerade willen gram zu werden; vergessen wir doch nicht, dass die lieben Künstler sammt und sonders ein wenig Schauspieler sind und sein müssen und ohne Schauspielerei es schwerlich auf die Länge aushielten. Bleiben wir Wagnern in dem treu, was an ihm wahr und ursprünglich ist, — und namentlich dadurch, dass wir, seine Jünger, uns selber in dem treu bleiben, was an uns wahr und ursprünglich ist. Lassen wir ihm seine intellectuellen Launen und Krämpfe, erwägen wir vielmehr in Billigkeit, welche seltsamen Nahrungen und Nothdürfte eine Kunst, wie die seine, haben darf, um leben und wachsen zu können! Es liegt Nichts daran, dass er als Denker so oft Unrecht hat; Gerechtigkeit und Geduld sind nicht seine Sache. Genug, dass sein Leben vor sich selber Recht hat und Recht behält: — dieses Leben, welches Jedem von uns zuruft: „Sei ein Mann und folge mir nicht nach, — sondern dir! Sondern dir!“ Auch unser Leben soll vor uns selber Recht behalten! Auch wir sollen frei und furchtlos, in unschuldiger Selbstigkeit aus uns selber wachsen und blühen! Und so klingen mir, bei der Betrachtung eines solchen Menschen, auch heute noch, wie ehedem, diese Sätze an’s Ohr: „dass Leidenschaft besser ist, als Stoicismus und Heuchelei, dass Ehrlich-sein, selbst im Bösen, besser ist, als sich selber an die Sittlichkeit des Herkommens verlieren, dass der freie Mensch sowohl gut als böse sein kann, dass aber der unfreie Mensch eine Schande der Natur ist, und an keinem himmlischen noch irdischen Troste Antheil hat; endlich dass Jeder, der frei werden will, es durch sich selber werden muss, und dass Niemandem die Freiheit als ein Wundergeschenk in den Schooss fällt“. (Richard Wagner in Bayreuth S. 94.)

100 Huldigen lernen. — Auch das Huldigen müssen die Menschen lernen wie das Verachten. Jeder, der auf neuen Bahnen geht und Viele auf neue Bahnen geführt hat, entdeckt mit Staunen, wie ungeschickt und arm diese Vielen im Ausdruck ihrer Dankbarkeit sind, ja wie selten sich überhaupt auch nur die Dankbarkeit äussern kann. Es ist als ob ihr immer, wenn sie einmal reden will, Etwas in die Kehle komme, sodass sie sich nur räuspert und im Räuspern wieder verstummt. Die Art, wie ein Denker die Wirkung seiner Gedanken und ihre umbildende und erschütternde Gewalt zu spüren bekommt, ist beinahe eine Komödie; mitunter hat es das Ansehen, als ob Die, auf welche gewirkt worden ist, sich im Grunde dadurch beleidigt fühlten und ihre, wie sie fürchten, bedrohte Selbständigkeit nur in allerlei Unarten zu äussern wüssten. Es bedarf ganzer Geschlechter, um auch nur eine höfliche Convention des Dankes zu erfinden: und erst sehr spät kommt jener Zeitpunct, wo selbst in die Dankbarkeit eine Art Geist und Genialität gefahren ist: dann ist gewöhnlich auch Einer da, welcher der grosse Dank-Empfänger ist, nicht nur für Das, was er selber Gutes gethan hat, sondern zumeist für Das, was von seinen Vorgängern als ein Schatz des Höchsten und Besten allmählich aufgehäuft worden ist.

101 Voltaire. — Ueberall, wo es einen Hof gab, hat er das Gesetz des Gut-Sprechens und damit auch das Gesetz des Stils für alle Schreibenden gegeben. Die höfische Sprache ist aber die Sprache des Höflings, der kein Fach hat und der sich selbst in Gesprächen über wissenschaftliche Dinge alle bequemen technischen Ausdrücke verbietet, weil sie nach dem Fache schmecken, desshalb ist der technische Ausdruck und Alles, was den Specialisten verräth, in den Ländern einer höfischen Cultur ein Flecken des Stils. Man ist jetzt, wo alle Höfe Caricaturen von sonst und jetzt geworden sind, erstaunt, selbst Voltaire in diesem Puncte unsäglich spröde und peinlich zu finden (zum Beispiel in seinem Urtheil über solche Stilisten, wie Fontenelle und Montesquieu), — wir sind eben alle vom höfischen Geschmack emancipirt, während Voltaire dessen Vollender war!

102 Ein Wort für die Philologen. — Dass es Bücher giebt, so werthvolle und königliche, dass ganze Gelehrten-Geschlechter gut verwendet sind, wenn durch ihre Mühe diese Bücher rein erhalten und verständlich erhalten werden, — diesen Glauben immer wieder zu befestigen ist die Philologie da. Sie setzt voraus, dass es an jenen seltenen Menschen nicht fehlt (wenn man sie gleich nicht sieht), die so werthvolle Bücher wirklich zu benutzen wissen: — es werden wohl die sein, welche selber solche Bücher machen oder machen könnten. Ich wollte sagen, die Philologie setzt einen vornehmen Glauben voraus, — dass zu Gunsten einiger Weniger, die immer „kommen werden“ und nicht da sind, eine sehr grosse Menge von peinlicher, selbst unsauberer Arbeit voraus abzuthun sei: es ist Alles Arbeit in usum Delphinorum.

103 Von der deutschen Musik. — Die deutsche Musik ist jetzt schon desshalb, mehr als jede andere, die europäische Musik, weil in ihr allein die Veränderung, welche Europa durch die Revolution erfuhr, einen Ausdruck bekommen hat: nur die deutschen Musiker verstehen sich auf den Ausdruck bewegter Volksmassen, auf jenen ungeheuren künstlichen Lärm, der nicht einmal sehr laut zu sein braucht, — während zum Beispiel die italiänische Oper nur Chöre von Bedienten oder Soldaten kennt, aber kein „Volk“. Es kommt hinzu, dass aus aller deutschen Musik eine tiefe bürgerliche Eifersucht auf die noblesse herauszuhören ist, namentlich auf esprit und élégance, als den Ausdruck einer höfischen, ritterlichen, alten, ihrer selber sicheren Gesellschaft. Das ist keine Musik, wie die des Goethischen Sängers vor dem Thore, die auch „im Saale“, und zwar dem Könige wohlgefällt; da heisst es nicht: „die Ritter schauten muthig drein und in den Schooss die Schönen“. Schon die Grazie tritt nicht ohne Anwandelung von Gewissensbissen in der deutschen Musik auf; erst bei der Anmuth, der ländlichen Schwester der Grazie, fängt der Deutsche an, sich ganz moralisch zu fühlen — und von da an immer mehr bis hinauf zu seiner schwärmerischen, gelehrten, oft bärbeissigen „Erhabenheit“, der Beethoven’schen Erhabenheit. Will man sich den Menschen zu dieser Musik denken, nun, so denke man sich eben Beethoven, wie er neben Goethe, etwa bei jener Begegnung in Teplitz, erscheint: als die Halbbarbarei neben der Cultur, als Volk neben Adel, als der gutartige Mensch neben dem guten und mehr noch als „guten“ Menschen, als der Phantast neben dem Künstler, als der Trostbedürftige neben dem Getrösteten, als der Uebertreiber und Verdächtiger neben dem Billigen, als der Grillenfänger und Selbstquäler, als der Närrisch-Verzückte, der Selig-Unglückliche, der Treuherzig-Maasslose, als der Anmaassliche und Plumpe — und Alles in Allem als der „ungebändigte Mensch“: so empfand und bezeichnete ihn Goethe selber, Goethe der Ausnahme-Deutsche, zu dem eine ebenbürtige Musik noch nicht gefunden ist! — Zuletzt erwäge man noch, ob nicht jene jetzt immer mehr um sich greifende Verachtung der Melodie und Verkümmerung des melodischen Sinnes bei Deutschen als eine demokratische Unart und Nachwirkung der Revolution zu verstehen ist. Die Melodie hat nämlich eine solche offene Lust an der Gesetzlichkeit und einen solchen Widerwillen bei allem Werdenden, Ungeformten, Willkürlichen, dass sie wie ein Klang aus der alten Ordnung der europäischen Dinge und wie eine Verführung und Rückführung zu dieser klingt.

104 Vom Klange der deutschen Sprache. — Man weiss, woher das Deutsch stammt, welches seit ein paar Jahrhunderten das allgemeine Schriftdeutsch ist. Die Deutschen, mit ihrer Ehrfurcht vor Allem, was vom Hofe kam, haben sich geflissentlich die Kanzleien zum Muster genommen, in Allem, was sie zu schreiben hatten, also namentlich in ihren Briefen, Urkunden, Testamenten und so weiter. Kanzleimässig schreiben, das war hof- und regierungsmässig schreiben, — das war etwas Vornehmes, gegen das Deutsch der Stadt gehalten, in der man gerade lebte. Allmählich zog man den Schluss und sprach auch so, wie man schrieb, — so wurde man noch vornehmer, in den Wortformen, in der Wahl der Worte und Wendungen und zuletzt auch im Klange: man affectirte einen höfischen Klang, wenn man sprach, und die Affectation wurde zuletzt Natur. Vielleicht hat sich etwas ganz Gleiches nirgendwo ereignet: die Uebergewalt des Schreibestils über die Rede und die Ziererei und Vornehmthuerei eines ganzen Volkes als Grundlage einer gemeinsamen nicht mehr dialektischen Sprache. Ich glaube, der Klang der deutschen Sprache war im Mittelalter, und namentlich nach dem Mittelalter, tief bäuerisch und gemein: er hat sich in den letzten Jahrhunderten etwas veredelt, hauptsächlich dadurch, dass man sich genöthigt fand, so viel französische, italiänische und spanische Klänge nachzuahmen und zwar gerade von Seiten des deutschen (und österreichischen) Adels, der mit der Muttersprache sich durchaus nicht begnügen konnte. Aber für Montaigne oder gar Racine muss trotz dieser Uebung Deutsch unerträglich gemein geklungen haben: und selbst jetzt klingt es, im Munde der Reisenden, mitten unter italiänischem Pöbel, noch immer sehr roh, wälderhaft, heiser, wie aus räucherigen Stuben und unhöflichen Gegenden stammend. — Nun bemerke ich, dass jetzt wieder unter den ehemaligen Bewunderern der Kanzleien ein ähnlicher Drang nach Vornehmheit des Klanges um sich greift, und dass die Deutschen einem ganz absonderlichen „Klangzauber“ sich zu fügen anfangen, der auf die Dauer eine wirkliche Gefahr für die deutsche Sprache werden könnte, — denn abscheulichere Klänge sucht man in Europa vergebens. Etwas Höhnisches, Kaltes, Gleichgültiges, Nachlässiges in der Stimme: das klingt jetzt den Deutschen „vornehm“ — und ich höre den guten Willen zu dieser Vornehmheit in den Stimmen der jungen Beamten, Lehrer, Frauen, Kaufleute: ja die kleinen Mädchen machen schon dieses Officierdeutsch nach. Denn der Offizier, und zwar der preussische, ist der Erfinder dieser Klänge: dieser selbe Officier, der als Militär und Mann des Fachs jenen bewunderungswürdigen Tact der Bescheidenheit besitzt, an dem die Deutschen allesammt zu lernen hätten (die deutschen Professoren und Musicanten eingerechnet!). Aber sobald er spricht und sich bewegt, ist er die unbescheidenste und geschmackwidrigste Figur im alten Europa — sich selber unbewusst, ohne allen Zweifel! Und auch den guten Deutschen unbewusst, die in ihm den Mann der ersten und vornehmsten Gesellschaft anstaunen und sich gerne „den Ton von ihm angeben“ lassen. Das thut er denn auch! — und zunächst sind es die Feldwebel und Unteroffiziere, welche seinen Ton nachahmen und vergröbern. Man gebe Acht auf die Commandorufe, von denen die deutschen Städte förmlich umbrüllt werden, jetzt wo man vor allen Thoren exerciert: welche Anmassung, welches wüthende Autoritätsgefühl, welche höhnische Kälte klingt aus diesem Gebrüll heraus! Sollten die Deutschen wirklich ein musicalisches Volk sein? — Sicher ist, dass die Deutschen sich jetzt im Klange ihrer Sprache militarisiren: wahrscheinlich ist, dass sie, eingeübt militärisch zu sprechen, endlich auch militärisch schreiben werden. Denn die Gewohnheit an bestimmte Klänge greift tief in den Charakter: — man hat bald die Worte und Wendungen und schliesslich auch die Gedanken, welche eben zu diesem Klange passen! Vielleicht schreibt man jetzt schon offiziermässig; vielleicht lese ich nur zu wenig von dem, was man jetzt in Deutschland schreibt. Aber Eines weiss ich um so sicherer: die öffentlichen deutschen Kundgebungen, die auch in’s Ausland dringen, sind nicht von der deutschen Musik inspirirt, sondern von eben jenem neuen Klange einer geschmackwidrigen Anmaassung. Fast in jeder Rede des ersten deutschen Staatsmannes und selbst dann, wenn er sich durch sein kaiserliches Sprachrohr vernehmen lässt, ist ein Accent, den das Ohr eines Ausländers mit Widerwillen zurückweist: aber die Deutschen ertragen ihn, — sie ertragen sich selber.

105 Die Deutschen als Künstler. — Wenn der Deutsche einmal wirklich in Leidenschaft geräth (und nicht nur, wie gewöhnlich, in den guten Willen zur Leidenschaft!), so benimmt er sich dann in derselben, wie er eben muss, und denkt nicht weiter an sein Benehmen. Die Wahrheit aber ist, dass er sich dann sehr ungeschickt und hässlich und wie ohne Tact und Melodie benimmt, sodass die Zuschauer ihre Pein oder ihre Rührung dabei haben und nicht mehr: — es sei denn, dass er sich in das Erhabene und Entzückte hinaufhebt, dessen manche Passionen fähig sind. Dann wird sogar der Deutsche schön! Die Ahnung davon, auf welcher Höhe erst die Schönheit ihren Zauber selbst über Deutsche ausgiesst, treibt die deutschen Künstler in die Höhe und Ueberhöhe und in die Ausschweifungen der Leidenschaft: ein wirkliches tiefes Verlangen also, über die Hässlichkeit und Ungeschicktheit hinauszukommen, mindestens hinauszublicken — hin nach einer besseren, leichteren, südlicheren, sonnenhaften Welt. Und so sind ihre Krämpfe oftmals nur Anzeichen dafür, dass sie tanzen möchten: diese armen Bären, in denen versteckte Nymphen und Waldgötter ihr Wesen treiben — und mitunter noch höhere Gottheiten!

106 Musik als Fürsprecherin. — „Ich habe Durst nach einem Meister der Tonkunst, sagte ein Neuerer zu seinem Jünger, dass er mir meine Gedanken ablerne und sie fürderhin in seiner Sprache rede: so werde ich den Menschen besser zu Ohr und Herzen dringen. Mit Tönen kann man die Menschen zu jedem Irrthume und jeder Wahrheit verführen: wer vermöchte einen Ton zu widerlegen?“ — „Also möchtest du für unwiderlegbar gelten?“ sagte sein Jünger. Der Neuerer erwiderte: „Ich möchte, dass der Keim zum Baume werde. Damit eine Lehre zum Baume werde, muss sie eine gute Zeit geglaubt werden: damit sie geglaubt werde, muss sie für unwiderlegbar gelten. Dem Baume thun Stürme, Zweifel, Gewürm, Bosheit noth, damit er die Art und Kraft seines Keimes offenbar mache; mag er brechen, wenn er nicht stark genug ist! Aber ein Keim wird immer nur vernichtet, — nicht widerlegt!“ — Als er das gesagt hatte, rief sein Jünger mit Ungestüm: „Aber ich glaube an deine Sache und halte sie für so stark, dass ich Alles, Alles sagen werde, was ich noch gegen sie auf dem Herzen habe“. — Der Neuerer lachte bei sich und drohte ihm mit dem Finger. „Diese Art Jüngerschaft, sagte er dann, ist die beste, aber sie ist gefährlich und nicht jede Art Lehre verträgt sie“.

107 Unsere letzte Dankbarkeit gegen die Kunst. Hätten wir nicht die Künste gut geheissen und diese Art von Cultus des Unwahren erfunden: so wäre die Einsicht in die allgemeine Unwahrheit und Verlogenheit, die uns jetzt durch die Wissenschaft gegeben wird — die Einsicht in den Wahn und Irrthum als in eine Bedingung des erkennenden und empfindenden Daseins —, gar nicht auszuhalten. Die Redlichkeit würde den Ekel und den Selbstmord im Gefolge haben. Nun aber hat unsere Redlichkeit eine Gegenmacht, die uns solchen Consequenzen ausweichen hilft: die Kunst, als den guten Willen zum Scheine. Wir verwehren es unserm Auge nicht immer, auszurunden, zu Ende zu dichten: und dann ist es nicht mehr die ewige Unvollkommenheit, die wir über den Fluss des Werdens tragen — dann meinen wir, eine Göttin zu tragen und sind stolz und kindlich in dieser Dienstleistung. Als ästhetisches Phänomen ist uns das Dasein immer noch erträglich, und durch die Kunst ist uns Auge und Hand und vor Allem das gute Gewissen dazu gegeben, aus uns selber ein solches Phänomen machen zu können. Wir müssen zeitweilig von uns ausruhen, dadurch, dass wir auf uns hin und hinab sehen und, aus einer künstlerischen Ferne her, über uns lachen oder über uns weinen; wir müssen den Helden und ebenso den Narren entdecken, der in unsrer Leidenschaft der Erkenntniss steckt, wir müssen unsrer Thorheit ab und zu froh werden, um unsrer Weisheit froh bleiben zu können! Und gerade weil wir im letzten Grunde schwere und ernsthafte Menschen und mehr Gewichte als Menschen sind, so thut uns Nichts so gut als die Schelmenkappe: wir brauchen sie vor uns selber — wir brauchen alle übermüthige, schwebende, tanzende, spottende, kindische und selige Kunst, um jener Freiheit über den Dingen nicht verlustig zu gehen, welche unser Ideal von uns fordert. Es wäre ein Rückfall für uns, gerade mit unsrer reizbaren Redlichkeit ganz in die Moral zu gerathen und um der überstrengen Anforderungen willen, die wir hierin an uns stellen, gar noch selber zu tugendhaften Ungeheuern und Vogelscheuchen zu werden. Wir sollen auch über der Moral stehen können: und nicht nur stehen, mit der ängstlichen Steifigkeit eines Solchen, der jeden Augenblick auszugleiten und zu fallen fürchtet, sondern auch über ihr schweben und spielen! Wie könnten wir dazu der Kunst, wie des Narren entbehren? — Und so lange ihr euch noch irgendwie vor euch selber schämt, gehört ihr noch nicht zu uns!

Musean translation

Mouseia’s complete machine-assisted Musean translation of the expanded second edition (E. W. Fritzsch, Leipzig, 1887): the preface, the verse prologue “Jest, Cunning and Revenge”, all five books (aphorisms 1–383), and the appendix “Songs of Prince Free-as-a-Bird”. Made directly from the German, read from the printed pages; verse stays verse, and Nietzsche’s own emphases, dashes and numbered divisions are kept.

57 To the Realists. — You sober people, who feel armored against passion and fantasy, and who would gladly make a pride and an ornament out of your emptiness: you call yourselves realists and suggest that the world is just as it appears to you, that reality stands before you alone, unveiled, and that you yourselves may be its best part. Oh, you beloved images of Sais! But are you not, even in your most unveiled state, still highly passionate and dark beings compared with the fishes, and still all too much like a lovesick artist? And what is "reality" for a lovesick artist! You still carry around with you the estimations of things, which have their origin in the passions and infatuations of earlier centuries! Your sobriety still has a secret and indestructible intoxication built into it! Your love of "reality," for example, oh, that is an old, very old "love"! In every sensation, in every sense impression, there is a piece of this old love, and likewise some fantasy, some prejudice, some unreason, some ignorance, some fear, and whatever else! has worked and woven at it. There is that mountain! There is that cloud! What then is "real" about them? Just try subtracting the phantasm and all the human addition from them, you sober ones! Yes, if you could do that! If you could forget your descent, your past, your preschool, your whole humanity and animality! There is no "reality" for us, and for you too, you sober ones. We are not nearly as alien to one another as you think, and perhaps our good will to get beyond intoxication is as worthy of respect as your belief that you are incapable of intoxication at all.

58 Only as Creators! — This has cost me the greatest effort, and still costs me the greatest effort: to see that it matters infinitely more what things are called than what they are. The reputation, name and appearance of a thing, its standing, its customary measure and weight, were at the beginning mostly an error and an arbitrary act, thrown over the thing like a garment and quite alien to its essence and even to its skin. Through belief in them, and through their growth from generation to generation, they have gradually grown onto and into the thing, as it were, and have become its body itself. The appearance at the beginning almost always becomes in the end the essence, and acts as the essence! What a fool he would be who thought it enough to point to this origin and this fog-veil of illusion in order to destroy the world that passes for essential, the so-called "reality"! Only as creators can we destroy! — But let us not forget this either: it is enough to create new names, estimations and probabilities in order, in the long run, to create new "things."

59 We Artists! — When we love a woman, we easily feel a hatred for nature, thinking of all the repellent natural facts to which every woman is subject. We generally like to think past them. But when our soul touches on these things, it flinches impatiently and looks down on nature, as I said. We feel insulted; nature seems to reach into our possession with the most unconsecrated hands. So we shut our ears to all physiology and secretly decree: "I do not want to hear anything about the fact that a human being is also something other than soul and form!" "The human being under the skin" is an abomination and an unthought thought to all lovers, a blasphemy against God and love. Now, the way the lover feels today about nature and what is natural, that is how every worshiper of God and his "holy omnipotence" once felt. Whatever was said about nature by astronomers, geologists, physiologists and doctors, he saw as an intrusion into his most precious possession, and therefore as an attack, and moreover as an indecency on the part of the attacker. The "law of nature" already sounded to him like a slander against God. At bottom he would most gladly have seen all mechanics traced back to moral acts of will and caprice. But since no one could render him that service, he concealed nature and mechanics from himself as well as he could, and lived in a dream. Oh, those people of earlier times knew how to dream, and did not first need to fall asleep! And we people of today still understand it far too well, with all our good will for wakefulness and daylight! It is enough to love, to hate, to desire, in short to feel, and at once the spirit and power of the dream come over us. With open eyes and cold against all danger, we climb the most dangerous paths, up onto the roofs and towers of fantasy, and without any dizziness, as if born for climbing: we sleepwalkers of the day! We artists! We concealers of naturalness! We moon-hungry and God-hungry! We tireless wanderers, dead-silent, on heights which we do not see as heights, but as our plains, as our securities!

60 Women and Their Effect at a Distance. — Do I still have ears? Am I still only ear and nothing more? Here I stand in the blaze of the surf, whose white flames lick up to my feet. From all sides it howls, threatens, shouts and shrieks at me, while in the deepest depth the old earth-shaker sings his aria, dull as a bellowing bull. For this he stamps out such an earth-shaking beat that even these weathered rock-giants here feel their hearts tremble in their bodies. Then suddenly, as if born from nothing, there appears before the gate of this infernal labyrinth, only a few fathoms away, a great sailing ship, gliding by as silently as a ghost. Oh, this ghostly beauty! With what magic it takes hold of me! How? Has all the rest and silence of the world embarked here? Does my happiness itself sit in this quiet place, my happier self, my second, eternalized self? Not dead, and yet no longer living? As a ghostly, quiet, contemplating, gliding, floating intermediate being? Like the ship that runs over the dark sea with its white sails like an enormous butterfly! Yes! To run over existence! That is it! That would be it! — — It seems the noise here has made me a fantast? All great noise makes us place happiness in silence and distance. When a man stands in the midst of his noise, in the midst of his surf of throws and designs, then he may see still magical beings gliding past him, for whose happiness and seclusion he longs. They are the women. He almost believes that his better self lives there with the women; in those quiet places even the loudest surf becomes dead silence, and life itself becomes a dream about life. But! But! My noble enthusiast, even on the finest sailing ship there is so much noise and clatter, and unfortunately so much small and wretched clatter! The charm and the most powerful effect of women is, to speak the language of the philosophers, an effect at a distance, an actio in distans. But for that, first of all and above all, one needs distance!

61 In Honor of Friendship. — That the feeling of friendship was regarded in antiquity as the highest feeling, higher even than the most celebrated pride of the self-sufficient and the wise, indeed as its only and still more sacred kinship, is well expressed by the story of the Macedonian king who gave a talent to a world-despising philosopher of Athens and received it back from him. "What? said the king, does he then have no friend?" By this he meant: "I honor this pride of the wise and independent man. But I would honor his humanity still more if the friend in him had won the victory over his pride. Before me the philosopher has lowered himself, by showing that he does not know one of the two highest feelings, and not the higher one!"

62 Love. — Love even forgives the beloved for desire.

63 Woman in Music. — Why is it that warm and rainy winds also bring with them the musical mood and the inventive pleasure of melody? Are they not the same winds that fill the churches and give women amorous thoughts?

64 Skeptics. — I fear that aging women, in the most secret hiding place of their hearts, are more skeptical than all men. They believe in the superficiality of existence as its essence. For them all virtue and depth is only a veil over this "truth," a very desirable veil over a pudendum. So it is a matter of decency and modesty, and nothing more!

65 Devotion. — There are noble women with a certain poverty of spirit who, in order to express their deepest devotion, know no other way than to offer their virtue and modesty. It is their highest possession. And often this gift is accepted without binding the recipient as deeply as the giver supposes. A very melancholy story!

66 The Strength of the Weak. — All women are skilled at exaggerating their weakness. Indeed they are inventive in weaknesses, so as to appear entirely like fragile ornaments, which even a speck of dust can hurt. Their existence is meant to bring the clumsiness of the man home to his conscience and to make him feel guilty. In this way they defend themselves against the strong and against all "rights of the fist."

67 Pretending to Oneself. — Now she loves him, and since then she has looked straight ahead with such calm trust, like a cow! But woe! It was precisely his enchantment that she seemed thoroughly changeable and impossible to grasp! He already had too much steady weather in himself! Should she not do well to pretend her old character? To pretend lovelessness? Does love not advise her to do exactly that? Vivat comoedia!

68 Will and Willingness. — A youth was brought to a wise man, and it was said: "Look, this is one who is being corrupted by women!"

The wise man shook his head and smiled. "It is men who corrupt women," he cried, "and everything that women lack must be paid for and mended in men, for the man makes for himself the image of woman, and woman shapes herself according to this image." "You are too gentle with women," said one of the bystanders, "you do not know them!" The wise man answered: "The nature of man is will, the nature of woman is willingness. That is the law of the sexes, truly! A hard law for women! All people are innocent of their existence, but women are innocent in the second degree. Who could have enough oil and mildness for them?" "What oil! What mildness!" cried another from the crowd. "One must raise women better!" "One must raise men better," said the wise man, and beckoned to the youth to follow him. But the youth did not follow him.

69 The Capacity for Revenge. — That someone cannot defend himself, and therefore does not want to, is not yet a disgrace in our eyes. But we think little of the one who has neither the power nor the will for revenge, whether man or woman. Could a woman hold us (or, as one says, "bind" us) whom we did not trust to handle the dagger (any kind of dagger) well against us? Or against herself: which in a given case would be the more painful revenge (the Chinese revenge).

70 The Mistresses of Masters. — A deep, powerful contralto, such as one sometimes hears in the theater, suddenly draws back for us the curtain on possibilities in which we ordinarily do not believe. At once we believe that somewhere in the world there could be women with high, heroic, royal souls, capable and ready for grand replies, resolutions and sacrifices, capable and ready to rule over men, because in them the best of the man, beyond his sex, has become a living ideal. True, according to the theater's intention such voices are precisely not meant to give this idea of woman. Usually they are supposed to portray the ideal male lover, for example a Romeo. But judging by my experience, the theater and the musician who expects such effects from such a voice always miscalculate. One does not believe in these lovers. These voices still always contain a tinge of the motherly and the housewifely, and most of all when love sounds in them.

71 On Feminine Chastity. — There is something quite astonishing and monstrous in the upbringing of women of good family, indeed perhaps nothing more paradoxical exists. The whole world agrees to raise them as ignorant as possible in matters of eros, and to put into their souls a deep shame about such things, and the utmost impatience and flight at the mere hint of these matters. All the "honor" of a woman basically stands at stake here alone. In everything else people would forgive them! But in this they are to remain ignorant down to the heart. They are to have neither eyes, nor ears, nor words, nor thoughts for this, their "evil." Indeed, knowledge here is already the evil. And now! Thrown with a dreadful lightning-stroke into reality and knowledge, by marriage, and indeed by the one whom they love and esteem most. They catch love and shame in contradiction, indeed they must feel rapture, surrender, duty, pity and terror at once, at the unexpected neighborhood of God and beast and all the rest! In this they have truly tied a knot of the soul that has no equal! Even the compassionate curiosity of the wisest student of human nature is not enough to guess how this or that woman learns to find her way into this solution of the riddle and into this riddle of a solution, and what dreadful, far-reaching suspicions must stir in the poor, out-of-joint soul, and how at this point the last philosophy and skepticism of woman casts its anchors! Afterward, the same deep silence as before, often a silence before herself, a closing of the eyes before herself. Young women take great pains to appear superficial and thoughtless; the most refined among them feign a kind of impudence. Women easily feel their husbands as a question mark over their honor, and their children as an apology or a penance. They need children and wish for them, in a quite different sense from that in which a man wishes for children.

In short, one cannot be gentle enough with women!

72 The Mothers. — Animals think differently about women than people do. To them the female is the productive being. Among them there is no paternal love, but something like love for the children of a beloved, and habit toward them. For the females, the children are a satisfaction of their desire to rule, a possession, an occupation, something entirely comprehensible to them, with which one can chatter. All this together is maternal love, which can be compared with the artist's love for his work. Pregnancy has made women gentler, more patient, more fearful, more eager to submit. Likewise, spiritual pregnancy produces the character of the contemplatives, which is related to the female character: they are the male mothers. Among the animals, the male sex is regarded as the beautiful one.

73 Holy Cruelty. — A man came to a saint, holding a child that had just been born. "What shall I do with the child?" he asked. "It is wretched, misshapen, and does not have enough life to die." "Kill it," cried the saint in a terrible voice, "kill it, and then hold it in your arms for three days and three nights, so that you make yourself a memory. Then you will never beget a child again, unless the time is right for you to beget." When the man had heard this, he went away disappointed. And many blamed the saint for having advised a cruelty, since he had advised killing the child. "But is it not crueler to let it live?" said the saint.

74 The Unsuccessful. — Those poor women always lack success who become restless and insecure in the presence of the man they love and talk too much. For men are most surely seduced by a certain secret and phlegmatic tenderness.

75 The Third Sex. — "A small man is a paradox, but still a man. The little women, however, seem to me, compared with tall women, to belong to another sex." So said an old dancing master. A small woman is never beautiful, said old Aristotle.

76 The Greatest Danger. — If there had not always been a majority of people who felt the discipline of their minds, their "reasonableness," as their pride, their obligation, their virtue, and who were offended or ashamed by all the fantasizing and wild wandering of thought, the friends of "healthy common sense," humanity would long since have perished! Hovering above it, and hovering constantly as its greatest danger, is the breakout of madness. That means precisely the breaking loose of arbitrariness in feeling, seeing and hearing, the enjoyment of a lawlessness of the mind, the joy in human unreason. It is not truth and certainty that are the opposite of the world of the mad, but the generality and binding force of a belief, in short, the non-arbitrary in judgment. And the greatest work of humanity so far has been to agree with one another about very many things, and to lay upon itself a law of agreement, whether these things are true or false. This is the discipline of the mind that humanity has preserved. But the counter-drives are still so powerful that at bottom one may speak of humanity's future only with little confidence. The image of things still keeps shifting and being shifted, perhaps from now on more and faster than ever. The most refined spirits keep resisting that binding generality, the researchers of truth first of all! That belief, as a belief for everybody, keeps producing disgust and a new lust in finer minds. Even the slow pace it demands for all mental processes, that imitation of the tortoise recognized here as the norm, turns artists and poets into deserters. It is these impatient spirits in whom an actual delight in madness breaks out, because madness has such a cheerful tempo! So there is need of virtuous intellects, and, ah, I want to use the plainest word: there is need of virtuous stupidity, there is need of unshakable time-keepers of the slow mind, so that the believers in the great common belief stay together and keep dancing their dance. It is a necessity of the first rank that commands and demands here.

We others are the exception and the danger. We are always in need of defense! Now, something truly can be said in favor of the exception, provided it never wants to become the rule.

77 The Animal with a Good Conscience. — The vulgarity in all that pleases in southern Europe, whether it be Italian opera (for example Rossini's and Bellini's) or the Spanish adventure novel, which is most accessible to us in the French disguise of Gil Blas, does not escape me. But it does not offend me, any more than the vulgarity one meets on a walk through Pompeii, and at bottom even when reading any ancient book. Where does this come from? Is it that shame is missing here, and that everything vulgar appears as sure and self-assured as anything noble, lovely and passionate in the same kind of music or novel? "The animal has its right as a human being does: so let it run around freely, and you, my dear fellow human, are still this animal too, in spite of everything!" That seems to me to be the moral of the matter and the peculiarity of southern humanity. Bad taste has its right as good taste does, and even a privilege over it, if it is the great need, the sure satisfaction, and so to speak a common language, an absolutely understandable mask and gesture. Good, select taste, on the other hand, always has something searching, tested, not wholly sure of its own comprehension. It is and was never popular! The mask is and remains popular! So let all this masklike quality run along in the melodies and cadences, in the leaps and merriments of the rhythm of these operas! And as for ancient life! What does one understand of it if one does not understand the delight in the mask, the good conscience of everything masklike? Here is the bath and recreation of the ancient spirit, and perhaps this bath was even more necessary to the rare and sublime natures of the old world than to the common ones. By contrast, a vulgar turn in northern works, for example in German music, offends me beyond measure. Here shame is present. The artist has descended before himself and could not even prevent himself from blushing at it. We are ashamed along with him, and are so offended because we sense that he believed he had to descend on our account.

78 What We Should Be Thankful For. — It was artists, and above all the artists of the theater, who first gave people eyes and ears, so that they could take some pleasure in seeing and hearing what each of us is, what each of us lives, what each of us wills. They first taught us to value the hero hidden in each of these everyday people, and taught the art of looking at oneself as a hero, from a distance, simplified and transfigured, the art of "staging" oneself before oneself. Only in this way do we get past some low details in ourselves! Without that art we would be nothing but surface, and would live entirely under the spell of the optics that makes the nearest and commonest things appear enormously large and as reality itself.

Perhaps a merit of a similar kind belongs to that religion which made people look at the sinfulness of each individual through a magnifying glass, and turned the sinner into a great, immortal criminal. By describing eternal perspectives around him, it taught people to see themselves from a distance, as something past and whole.

79 The Charm of Imperfection. — Here I see a poet who, like many people, exerts a higher charm through his imperfections than through everything that becomes round and perfectly shaped under his hand. Indeed, he gains his advantage and his fame more from his last inability than from his rich strength. His work never fully says what he really wanted to say, what he wanted to have seen. It seems that he had a foretaste of a vision, but never the vision itself. Yet an enormous longing for this vision has remained in his soul, and from it he draws his equally enormous eloquence of desire and hunger. With it he lifts the one who listens to him above his work and above all "works," and gives him wings to rise as high as listeners never rise otherwise. And so, having become poets and seers themselves, they pay the author of their happiness an admiration as if he had led them directly to the sight of his holiest and last thing, as if he had reached his goal and had truly seen and shared his vision. His fame benefits from not having actually reached the goal.

80 Art and Nature. — The Greeks (or at least the Athenians) liked to hear good speech. Indeed they had a greedy inclination toward it, which sets them apart from the non-Greeks more than anything else. So they demanded of passion on the stage too that it speak well, and they endured with delight the unnaturalness of dramatic verse. In nature, passion is so tight-lipped! So mute and embarrassed! Or when it does find words, they are confused and unreasonable and a shame to itself! Now, thanks to the Greeks, we have all grown accustomed to this unnaturalness on the stage, just as, thanks to the Italians, we bear that other unnaturalness, the singing passion, and bear it gladly. It has become a need of ours that we cannot satisfy from reality: to hear people in the hardest situations speak well and at length. It delights us now when the tragic hero still finds words, reasons, eloquent gestures and on the whole a bright intellectuality, where life approaches the abysses and the real person usually loses his head and certainly his beautiful speech. This kind of departure from nature is perhaps the most pleasant meal for human pride. For this reason in particular people love art, as the expression of a high, heroic unnaturalness and convention. People rightly reproach the dramatic poet if he does not turn everything into reason and words, but always keeps back some remainder of silence in his hand. Likewise one is dissatisfied with the opera composer who, for the highest emotion, can find not a melody but only an emotional "natural" stammering and shouting. Here nature is supposed to be contradicted! Here the vulgar charm of illusion is supposed to give way to a higher charm! The Greeks went far, far along this road, to the point of alarm! As they made the stage as narrow as possible and forbade all effect through deep backgrounds, as they made it impossible for the actor to play with his features and move lightly, and turned him into a solemn, stiff, masklike idol, so they also took away from passion itself its deep background and dictated a law of beautiful speech for it. Indeed they did everything to counteract the elemental effect of images that awaken fear and pity. They simply did not want fear and pity. Honor to Aristotle, and the highest honor! But he certainly did not hit the nail, let alone the head of the nail, when he spoke of the final purpose of Greek tragedy! Just look at the Greek tragic poets with an eye to what most stirred their diligence, their inventiveness and their rivalry. It was certainly not the aim of overpowering the spectators through passions! The Athenian went to the theater to hear beautiful speeches! And it was beautiful speeches that Sophocles was after! Let me be forgiven this heresy! It is quite different with serious opera. All its masters take pains to prevent people from understanding their characters. A word snatched up now and then may come to the aid of the inattentive listener. On the whole the situation must explain itself. The speeches do not matter! So they all think, and so they have all played their tricks with words. Perhaps they only lacked the courage to express their final contempt for the word completely. A little more impudence in Rossini and he would have had everything sung as la-la-la-la, and there would still have been reason in it! The characters of an opera are precisely not to be believed "by their word," but by their tone! That is the difference, that is the beautiful unnaturalness for the sake of which one goes to the opera! Even the recitativo secco does not really want to be heard as word and text. This kind of half-music is meant rather to give the musical ear a little rest, a rest from melody, the most sublime and therefore also the most exhausting pleasure of this art. But very soon it becomes something else: a growing impatience, a growing reluctance, a new longing for whole music, for melody. From this point of view, how does Richard Wagner's art stand? Perhaps differently? It often seemed to me that one must have learned the words and music of his creations by heart before the performance, for without that, so it seemed to me, one hears neither the words nor the music itself.

81 Greek Taste. — "What is beautiful about it?" said that land surveyor after a performance of Iphigenia. "Nothing is proved in it!" Could the Greeks have been so far from this taste? In Sophocles, at least, "everything is proved."

82 The Un-Greek Esprit. — The Greeks are indescribably logical and simple in all their thinking. They did not grow tired of it, at least for their long good period, as the French so often do. The French are all too eager to make a little leap into the opposite, and they can only tolerate the spirit of logic when, through a series of such little leaps into the opposite, it reveals its social courtesy and its social self-denial. Logic appears to them necessary, like bread and water, but also, like these, as a kind of prisoner's fare, as soon as it is to be enjoyed pure and alone. In good company one must never want to be completely and solely right, as all pure logic wants. Hence the small dose of unreason in all French esprit. The social sense of the Greeks was far less developed than that of the French is and was. Hence so little esprit among their most witty men, hence so little wit even among their jokers, hence, ah! No one will believe these sentences of mine, and how many more of this kind I have on my conscience! Est res magna tacere, says Martial, with all the talkative people.

83 Translations. — One can estimate the degree of historical sense a period possesses by how that period makes translations and tries to take into itself past periods and books. The French of Corneille's time, and even the French of the Revolution, took hold of Roman antiquity in a way that we would no longer have the courage for, thanks to our higher historical sense. And Roman antiquity itself: how violently and naively at once it laid its hand on everything good and high in the older Greek antiquity! How they translated into the Roman present! How they deliberately and carelessly blurred the wing dust of the butterfly of the moment! So Horace here and there translated Alcaeus or Archilochus, and Propertius translated Callimachus and Philetas (poets of the same rank as Theocritus, if we are allowed to judge). What did it matter to them that the original creator had experienced this and that and written the traces of it into his poem! As poets they had no fondness for the antiquarian nose that runs ahead of the historical sense. As poets they did not respect these purely personal things, these names and everything that belonged to a city, a coast or a century as its costume and mask. Instead they promptly put the present and the Roman in its place. They seem to ask us: "Should we not make the old new for ourselves, and fit ourselves into it? Should we not be allowed to breathe our soul into this dead body? For dead it is, after all: how ugly everything dead is!" They did not know the enjoyment of the historical sense. The past and the foreign were embarrassing to them, and to them as Romans an incitement to a Roman conquest. In fact, when they translated, they were conquering, not merely in the sense that they left out the historical elements. No, they added an allusion to the present. Above all they struck out the name of the poet and put their own in its place, not out of any feeling of theft, but with the very best conscience of the imperium Romanum.

84 On the Origin of Poetry. — Those who love the fantastic in human beings, and who at the same time defend the doctrine of instinctive morality, reason like this: "Suppose people had always worshiped usefulness as the highest deity. Where then did poetry come from all over the world? This rhythmizing of speech, which works against clarity of communication rather than for it, and which nevertheless has sprung up everywhere on earth as a mockery of all useful purposefulness, and keeps springing up! The wild and beautiful unreason of poetry refutes you, you utilitarians! Wanting to break loose from usefulness at all: that is what has raised human beings, that is what has inspired them to morality and art!" Well, I must for once speak in favor of the utilitarians. They are so seldom right that it is pitiful! In those ancient times when poetry was brought into existence, people did keep usefulness in view, and a very great usefulness, when they let rhythm press into speech: that force which arranges all the atoms of a sentence anew, which means choosing words, which dyes the thought anew and makes it darker, stranger and more distant. Of course it was a superstitious usefulness! By means of rhythm, a human concern was supposed to be impressed more deeply on the gods, once people had noticed that a person remembers a verse better than loose speech. They also believed that by the rhythmic ticking they could make themselves heard over greater distances. A prayer set to rhythm seemed to reach the gods' ears more closely. Above all, however, people wanted to make use of that elemental overpowering which a person experiences in himself when he hears music. Rhythm is a compulsion; it produces an irresistible pleasure in yielding and joining in. Not only the feet keep step, but the soul itself follows the beat. Probably, so people concluded, the souls of the gods do too! So they tried to force the gods through rhythm and to exercise power over them. They threw poetry over them like a magical noose. There was an even stranger notion, and perhaps this is the one that worked most powerfully toward the birth of poetry. Among the Pythagoreans it appears as a philosophical doctrine and a technique of education. But long before there were philosophers, people granted music the power to discharge the passions, to purify the soul, and to soften the ferocia animi, and they granted it precisely through the rhythmic element in music. When the right tension and harmony of the soul had been lost, one had to dance to the singer's beat. That was the prescription of this healing art. With it Terpander quieted an uprising, Empedocles calmed a madman, Damon cleansed a youth sick with love. With it people also brought the savage, vengeful gods to reason. First they drove the frenzy and wildness of the gods' passions to the highest pitch, so that they made the raging god mad and the vengeful god drunk with revenge. All the orgiastic cults want to discharge a deity's ferocity all at once and turn it into an orgy, so that afterward it feels freer and calmer and leaves people in peace. In its root, melos means a means of appeasement, not because it is gentle itself, but because its after-effect makes gentle. And not only in the cult song, but also in the secular songs of the oldest times, the assumption is that rhythm exerts a magical power. For example, when drawing water or rowing, the song is an enchantment of the spirits thought to be at work there. It makes them compliant, unfree, and a tool of humankind. And whenever people act, they have a reason to sing. Every action is bound up with the help of spirits. The charm-song and the incantation seem to be the original form of poetry. Even though verse was used in oracles too (the Greeks said the hexameter was invented at Delphi), rhythm was meant to exert a compulsion here also. "To have one's fortune told" originally means (according to the derivation of the Greek word that seems most likely to me) "to have something determined for oneself." People believed they could force the future by winning Apollo over to their side, he who in the oldest conception is far more than a god who foresees. As soon as the formula is spoken, literally and rhythmically exact, it binds the future. The formula, however, is Apollo's invention, and as god of rhythms he can also bind the goddesses of fate. Seen as a whole, one must ask: was there anything more useful for the old superstitious human being than rhythm? With it one could do everything: magically speed up a job; compel a god to appear, to be near, to listen; make the future conform to one's will; discharge one's own soul from some excess (of fear, of mania, of pity, of revenge), and not only one's own soul but that of the most evil demon. Without verse one was nothing; through verse one became almost a god. Such a basic feeling cannot be completely uprooted. Even now, after thousands of years of work against such superstition, even the wisest of us occasionally becomes a fool of rhythm, if only in the sense that he feels a thought to be truer when it has a metrical form and comes along with a divine hopsasa. Is it not a very funny thing that even the most serious philosophers, however strictly they otherwise take their certainties, still appeal to sayings of poets to give their thoughts strength and credibility? And yet it is more dangerous for a truth when the poet agrees with it than when he contradicts it! For, as Homer says: "The singers tell many lies!"

85 The Good and the Beautiful. — Artists are constantly glorifying. They do nothing else. They glorify all those states and things which have the reputation of being places where a person can feel good, great, drunk, cheerful, or well and wise. These selected things and states, whose value for human happiness is considered certain and assessed, are the objects of artists. They always lie in wait to discover such things and drag them into the realm of art. I mean to say: they are not themselves the appraisers of happiness and of the happy, but they always push close to these appraisers, with the greatest curiosity and delight, to make immediate use of their estimates. Thus, because besides their impatience they have the big lungs of heralds and the feet of runners, they are always among the first to glorify the new good, and often appear as the ones who first call something good and rate it as good. But this, as I said, is a mistake. They are only quicker and louder than the real appraisers. And who are those? They are the rich and the idle.

86 On the Theater. — This day again gave me strong and lofty feelings. If I could have music and art on its evening, I know well which music and art I would not want: all those that wish to intoxicate their listeners and drive them up to a moment of strong and lofty feeling. Those are people of the soul's everyday, who on the evening are not like victors on triumphal chariots, but like tired mules on which life has used the whip a little too often. What would those people know of "higher moods" at all, if there were no intoxicating means and ideal whip-strokes! So they have their inspirers, just as they have their wines. But what are their drink and their drunkenness to me! What does an inspired person need wine for? Rather, he looks with a kind of disgust at the means and the go-betweens that are supposed to produce an effect here without sufficient reason, an imitation of the high tide of the soul! What? One gives the mole wings and proud fancies before bedtime, before he crawls into his burrow? One sends him to the theater and sets huge glasses before his blind and tired eyes? People whose life is not an "action" but a business sit before the stage and watch strange beings for whom life is more than a business? "That is proper," you say, "that is entertaining, that is what culture demands!" Well then! I often lack culture, because this sight often disgusts me. Anyone who has enough of tragedy and comedy in himself will probably prefer to stay away from the theater. Or, by way of exception, the whole event, counting the theater, the audience and the poet, becomes for him the real tragic and comic play, so that the performed piece means little to him by comparison. For someone who is a Faust or a Manfred himself, what do the Fausts and Manfreds of the theater matter! And yet it certainly gives him something to think about that such figures are put on the stage at all. The strongest thoughts and passions before people who are incapable of thought and passion, but of intoxication! And those as a means to it! And theater and music are the Europeans' hashish-smoking and betel-chewing! Oh, who will tell us the whole history of narcotics! It is almost the history of "culture," so-called higher culture!

87 On the Vanity of Artists. — I believe that artists often do not know what they can do best, because they are too vain and have directed their minds toward something prouder than these small plants seem to be, which can grow new, strange and beautiful, in true perfection, on their own soil. The best of their own garden and vineyard is valued by them only superficially, and their love and their insight are not of the same rank. Here is a musician who, more than any other musician, has his mastery in finding the tones of the realm of suffering, oppressed and tormented souls, and in giving speech even to the mute animals. No one equals him in the colors of late autumn, in the indescribably touching happiness of a last, very last, very brief enjoyment. He knows a sound for those secret and uncanny midnights of the soul, where cause and effect seem to have come out of joint and something can arise "out of nothing" at any moment. He draws most happily of all from the lower depths of human happiness, and so to speak from its drained cup, where the bitterest and most unpleasant drops have run together, at last, for good and for ill, with the sweetest. He knows that weary shuffling of the soul that can no longer leap or fly, or even walk. He has the shy look of hidden pain, of understanding without comfort, of parting without confession. Indeed, as the Orpheus of all secret misery, he is greater than anyone else. Much has been added to art through him that until then seemed inexpressible, and even unworthy of art. It could only be chased away with words, not grasped by them: many small and microscopic things of the soul. Yes, he is the master of the very small. But he does not want to be! His character loves rather the big walls and the daring mural painting! It escapes him that his spirit has another taste and inclination, and most likely sits quietly in the corners of collapsed houses. There, hidden, hidden even from himself, he paints his real masterpieces, which are all very short, often only one beat long. There, and perhaps only there, he becomes truly good, great and perfect. But he does not know it! He is too vain to know it.

88 Earnestness About Truth. — Earnestness about truth! How differently people understand these words! The very same views, and the same kinds of proof and examination, which a thinker feels in himself as a frivolity, one to which he has succumbed to his shame in this or that hour, can give an artist who encounters them and lives with them for a time the sense that the deepest earnestness about truth has now seized him, and that it is admirable that he, although an artist, shows at the same time the most serious desire for the opposite of what appears. So it is possible that someone, precisely with his pose of seriousness, betrays how superficially and contentedly his mind has so far played in the realm of knowledge. And is not everything we take seriously our betrayer? It shows where our weights lie, and for what we have no weights.

89 Now and Formerly. — What is the point of all our art of artworks if that higher art, the art of festivals, is lost to us! Formerly all artworks were set up along the great festival road of humanity, as memorial signs and monuments of high and blessed moments. Now people want to use artworks to lure the poor exhausted and sick away from the great road of human suffering, for a lustful little moment. They offer them a little intoxication and madness.

90 Lights and Shadows. — Books and written notes mean different things to different thinkers. One has gathered into the book the lights that he knew how to steal quickly from the rays of a knowledge shining on him, and to carry home. Another gives only the shadows, the afterimages in gray and black, of what built itself up in his soul the day before.

91 Caution. — As is well known, Alfieri lied a great deal when he told his astonished contemporaries the story of his life. He lied out of that despotism against himself which he showed, for example, in the way he created his own language and tyrannized himself into a poet. At last he had found a strict form of sublimity, into which he pressed his life and his memory. There must have been much torment in it. I would not believe a biography of Plato either, written by himself, any more than Rousseau's, or Dante's Vita nuova.

92 Prose and Poetry. — Note that the great masters of prose have almost always also been poets, either openly or only in secret, for the "little room." Indeed, one writes good prose only in the presence of poetry! For prose is an uninterrupted, graceful war with poetry. All its charms consist in constantly evading poetry and contradicting it. Every abstraction must be presented as a mischief against poetry and in a mocking voice. Every dryness and coolness should bring the lovely goddess into a lovely despair. There are often approaches and reconciliations for a moment, and then a sudden jump back and a laugh. Often the curtain is pulled up and harsh light let in, just when the goddess is enjoying her twilights and muted colors. Often the word is taken out of her mouth and sung to a melody, while she holds her delicate hands over her delicate little ears. So there are a thousand pleasures of the war, with the defeats counted in, of which the unpoetic, the so-called prose people, know nothing at all. They therefore write and speak only bad prose! War is the father of all good things, and war is the father of good prose too! In this century there were four very strange and truly poetic people who reached the mastery of prose, which the century is otherwise not made for, for lack of poetry, as I have hinted. Setting aside Goethe, whom the century that produced him is fairly entitled to claim, I regard only Giacomo Leopardi, Prosper Mérimée, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walter Savage Landor, the author of the Imaginary Conversations, as worthy of being called masters of prose.

93 But Why Do You Write? — A.: I do not belong to those who think with a wet pen in hand, and still less to those who even give themselves over to their passions in front of an open inkwell, sitting in their chair and staring at the paper. I am annoyed by all writing, or ashamed of it. Writing is a necessity for me. Even to speak of it figuratively disgusts me. B.: But then why do you write? A.: Yes, my friend, between us: so far I have found no other means of getting rid of my thoughts. B.: And why do you want to get rid of them? A.: Why I want to? Do I want to? I have to. — B.: Enough! Enough!

94 Growth After Death. — Those little daring remarks about moral matters that Fontenelle threw out in his immortal Dialogues of the Dead were taken in his time as paradoxes and games of a somewhat risky wit. Even the highest judges of taste and mind did not see more in them, and perhaps Fontenelle himself did not either. Now something unbelievable happens: these thoughts become truths! Science proves them! The game becomes earnest! And we read those dialogues with a different feeling from the one Voltaire and Helvétius had when they read them, and we involuntarily lift their author into a different and much higher class of minds than they did. Rightly? Wrongly?

95 Chamfort. — That such a connoisseur of human beings and of the crowd as Chamfort should have sided with the crowd, and not stood apart in philosophical renunciation and defense, I can explain only as follows. In him an instinct was stronger than his wisdom, and it had never been satisfied: hatred of all the nobility of birth. Perhaps it was the old and all too understandable hatred of his mother, which in him was made holy through love for his mother. It was an instinct of revenge from his boyhood, waiting for the hour to avenge his mother. And then life and his genius had led him, and, ah! perhaps most of all the paternal blood in his veins, to rank himself with this nobility and stand on an equal footing with it, for many, many years. In the end, however, he could no longer endure his own sight, the sight of the "old man" under the old regime. He fell into a violent passion for penance, and in this passion he put on the garb of the rabble as his kind of hair shirt. His bad conscience was the neglect of revenge. Suppose Chamfort had remained one degree more a philosopher at that time. Then the Revolution would not have acquired its tragic wit and its sharpest sting. It would count as a much stupider event, and it would not have been such a seduction of minds. But Chamfort's hatred and revenge educated a whole generation, and the most illustrious people went through this school. Consider that Mirabeau looked up to Chamfort as to his higher and older self, from whom he expected and endured impulses, warnings and verdicts. Mirabeau, as a human being, belongs to a quite different rank of greatness than even the foremost statesmen of yesterday and today. It is strange that, in spite of such a friend and advocate (we have Mirabeau's letters to Chamfort), this wittiest of all moralists remained foreign to the French, just as Stendhal did, who perhaps had the most thoughtful eyes and ears of all the French of this century. Was it that the latter had at bottom too much of the German and the Englishman in him to be bearable to the Parisians? While Chamfort, a man rich in the depths and background of the soul, gloomy, suffering, glowing, a thinker who found laughter necessary as a remedy against life, and who almost gave himself up for lost on every day he had not laughed, appears more like an Italian, a blood relative of Dante and Leopardi, than like a Frenchman. The last words of Chamfort are known: "Ah! My friend," he said to Sieyès, "I am at last leaving this world, where the heart must either break or harden —" Those are certainly not the words of a dying Frenchman.

96 Two Speakers. — Of these two speakers, the one reaches the full reason of his cause only when he gives himself over to passion. Only passion pumps enough blood and heat into his brain to force his high intellect into revelation. The other tries perhaps the same thing here and there: with the help of passion he presents his cause in full sound, vehemently and sweepingly. But usually with poor results. Soon he speaks in the dark and in confusion, he exaggerates, leaves things out, and arouses distrust of the reason of his cause. He himself feels this distrust, and from it come sudden jumps into the coldest and most repellent tones, which make the listener doubt whether his whole passion was genuine. In him passion always floods the mind, perhaps because it is stronger than in the first. But he is at the height of his power when he resists the storm of feeling rushing at him and, as it were, mocks it. Only then does his mind step fully out of its hiding place: a logical, mocking, playful, and yet terrible mind.

97 On the Garrulousness of Writers.

There is a garrulousness of anger, frequent in Luther, and also in Schopenhauer. There is a garrulousness born of too great a store of conceptual formulas, as in Kant. There is a garrulousness from delight in ever new turns of the same matter, which one finds in Montaigne. There is a garrulousness of spiteful natures: anyone who reads the writings of this time will recall two writers in this connection. There is a garrulousness from delight in good words and linguistic forms, not rare in Goethe's prose. And there is a garrulousness from inner pleasure in the noise and confusion of feelings, for example in Carlyle.

98 In Praise of Shakespeare. — The finest thing I can say in praise of Shakespeare the man is this: he believed in Brutus, and cast not a speck of distrust on that kind of virtue! To Brutus he dedicated his best tragedy, which even now is still called by a false name. He dedicated it to Brutus and to the most terrible sum of high morality. Independence of soul: that is what matters here! No sacrifice can be too great for it. One must be able to sacrifice even one's dearest friend to it, even if he is the most splendid of human beings, the ornament of the world, a genius without equal, when one loves freedom as the freedom of great souls, and this freedom is threatened by him. This is how Shakespeare must have felt. The height to which he raises Caesar is the finest honor he could show Brutus. Only thus does he lift Brutus's inner problem to monstrous size, and likewise the strength of soul that was able to cut through this knot! And was it truly political freedom that drove this poet to sympathize with Brutus, and made him an accomplice of Brutus?

Or was political freedom only a symbol for something unspeakable? Are we perhaps standing before some dark event and adventure from the poet's own soul, which remained unknown and of which he would speak only by signs? What is all the Hamlet melancholy beside the melancholy of Brutus! And perhaps Shakespeare knew this too, as he knew the other, from experience! Perhaps he too had his dark hour and his evil angel, like Brutus! But whatever resemblances and secret connections there may have been of this kind, before the whole figure and virtue of Brutus Shakespeare threw himself to the ground and felt unworthy and far away. He has written the testimony to it into his tragedy. Twice in it he brings on a poet, and twice he pours on him such an impatient and final contempt that it sounds like a cry, the cry of self-contempt. Brutus himself loses patience when the poet appears, conceited, pompous, pushy, as poets tend to be: a being who seems to bristle with possibilities of greatness, including moral greatness, and yet in the philosophy of deed and life rarely manages even to reach common uprightness. "If he knows the time, I know his whims. Away with the bell-ringing buffoon!" cries Brutus. Translate this back into the soul of the poet who wrote it.

99 The Followers of Schopenhauer. — What one sees when cultured peoples come into contact with barbarians is this: regularly the lower culture first takes over the vices, weaknesses and excesses of the higher culture. From them it feels an attraction, and finally, through the vices and weaknesses it has acquired, lets something of the valuable strength of the higher culture flow over into itself. This can also be seen close at hand, without traveling to barbarian peoples, though somewhat refined and spiritualized and not so easy to grasp with the hands. What, then, do Schopenhauer's followers in Germany first take over from their master? Compared with his superior culture, they must feel barbarous enough to be first fascinated and seduced by him in a barbarous way. Is it his hard sense of fact, his good will toward clarity and reason, which so often makes him appear so English and so little German? Or the strength of his intellectual conscience, which endured a lifelong contradiction between being and willing, and forced him to contradict himself constantly, and almost at every point, in his writings? Or his cleanliness in matters of the church and the Christian God? For in this he was cleaner than any German philosopher before him, so that he lived and died "as a Voltairean." Or his immortal teachings about the intellectuality of perception, the apriority of the law of causality, the instrument-nature of the intellect and the unfreedom of the will? No, all this does not enchant, and is not felt as enchanting. But Schopenhauer's mystical embarrassments and evasions, in those places where the fact-thinker let himself be led astray and ruined by the vain drive to be the unraveler of the world. The unprovable doctrine of one will ("all causes are only occasional causes of the appearance of the will at this time, in this place," "the will to live is present in every being, even the smallest, wholly and undivided, as completely as in all who ever were, are, and will be, taken together"). The denial of the individual ("all lions are at bottom only one lion," "the plurality of individuals is an appearance," and development too is only an appearance; he calls Lamarck's idea "a brilliant, absurd error"). The rapture about genius ("in aesthetic contemplation the individual is no longer an individual, but a pure, willless, painless, timeless subject of knowledge," "the subject, by wholly dissolving into the object contemplated, has become that object itself"). The nonsense about compassion, and the breaking-through of the principium individuationis made possible by it, as the source of all morality. Add to these such assertions as "dying is really the purpose of existence," and "one cannot flatly deny a priori that a magical effect might also proceed from someone already dead." These and similar excesses and vices of the philosopher are always the first to be adopted and made into matters of faith. For vices and excesses are always the easiest to imitate, and they do not require long preparation. But let us speak of the most famous of the living Schopenhauerians, Richard Wagner. He has fared as many artists have: he misjudged the meaning of the figures he created, and failed to recognize the unspoken philosophy of his own most personal art. Richard Wagner let himself be misled by Hegel until the middle of his life. He did the same thing again when he later read Schopenhauer's doctrine out of his figures, and began to formulate himself with "will," "genius," and "compassion." Even so, it will remain true that nothing goes so directly against the spirit of Schopenhauer as what is truly Wagnerian in the heroes of Wagner: I mean the innocence of the highest self-interest, the faith in great passion as good in itself, in a word, the Siegfried-like quality in the faces of his heroes. "All this smells more of Spinoza than of me," Schopenhauer might perhaps say. So good were Wagner's reasons to look around for other philosophers than Schopenhauer! But the enchantment to which he succumbed with regard to this thinker has made him blind not only to all other philosophers, but even to science itself. More and more his whole art wants to present itself as a companion piece and supplement to Schopenhauer's philosophy, and more and more explicitly it gives up the higher ambition of becoming a companion piece and supplement to human knowledge and science. And it is not only the whole mysterious pomp of this philosophy that tempts him, a philosophy that would have tempted a Cagliostro too. The individual gestures and affects of the philosophers were always seducers as well! Schopenhauerian, for example, is Wagner's zeal against the corruption of the German language. And if one were to approve of his imitation in this, it must still not be kept quiet that Wagner's own style suffers not a little from all the sores and swellings whose sight made Schopenhauer so furious. And that, as regards the German-writing Wagnerians, Wagnerism is beginning to prove as dangerous as any Hegelism ever proved. Schopenhauerian is Wagner's hatred of the Jews, whom he cannot even do justice to in their greatest deed: for the Jews are, after all, the inventors of Christianity! Schopenhauerian is Wagner's attempt to understand Christianity as a windblown grain of Buddhism, and, for Europe, to prepare a Buddhist age, with temporary approaches to Catholic-Christian formulas and feelings. Schopenhauerian is Wagner's sermon in favor of mercy in dealings with animals. Schopenhauer's predecessor in this was, as is well known, Voltaire, who perhaps already, like his successors, knew how to dress up his hatred of certain things and people as mercy toward animals. At any rate, Wagner's hatred of science, which speaks from his sermon, is certainly not inspired by a spirit of gentleness and goodness, nor, as goes without saying, by the spirit in general. — In the end, little depends on the philosophy of an artist, provided it is only a subsequent philosophy and does no harm to his art itself. One cannot be careful enough not to become angry at an artist for some occasional masquerade, perhaps very unhappy and presumptuous. Let us not forget that our dear artists, all of them, are and must be a little like actors, and without acting they would hardly hold out for long. Let us remain faithful to Wagner in what is true and original in him, and especially by being faithful, we his disciples, to what is true and original in ourselves. Let us grant him his intellectual whims and cramps. Rather, let us consider fairly what strange nourishment and needs an art like his must have in order to live and grow! It does not matter that he is so often wrong as a thinker. Justice and patience are not his business. It is enough that his life is right in its own eyes and stays right: this life, which calls out to each of us: "Be a man, and do not follow me, but yourself! Yourself!" Our life too should be right in our own eyes! We too should grow and bloom out of ourselves, free and fearless, in innocent selfhood! And so, when I contemplate such a man, these sentences still ring in my ears today as they did before: "that passion is better than stoicism and hypocrisy; that honesty, even in evil, is better than losing oneself to the morality of custom; that a free person can be both good and evil, but that an unfree person is a disgrace to nature and has no share in any heavenly or earthly consolation; and finally that everyone who wants to become free must become free through himself, and that freedom does not fall into anyone's lap as a miraculous gift." (Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, p. 94.)

100 Learning to Pay Homage. — People must learn to pay homage just as they learn to despise. Anyone who walks new paths and has led many onto new paths discovers with astonishment how clumsy and poor these many are in expressing their gratitude, and how rarely even gratitude can express itself at all. It is as if something always rises into their throat when they want to speak, so that they only clear their throat, and in the clearing fall silent again. The way a thinker comes to feel the effect of his thoughts, and their power to reshape and shake, is almost a comedy. Sometimes it looks as though those who have been affected feel insulted by it at bottom, and know only how to show their threatened independence, as they fear it is, through all sorts of bad manners. Whole generations are needed even to invent a polite convention of thanks. And only very late does that moment come when a kind of spirit and genius has entered into gratitude itself. Then there is usually also someone who is the great recipient of thanks, not only for what he himself has done that is good, but mostly for what has been gradually piled up by his predecessors as a treasure of the highest and best.

101 Voltaire. — Wherever there was a court, he laid down the law of speaking well, and with it the law of style for all who wrote. But court language is the language of the courtier, who has no profession, and who, even in conversation about scientific matters, forbids himself every convenient technical term, because it smells of the trade. Therefore, in countries with a court culture, technical language, and everything that betrays the specialist, is a blemish of style. Now that all courts have become caricatures of what they once were, people are astonished to find even Voltaire unbearably prim and fussy on this point, for example in his judgments of stylists such as Fontenelle and Montesquieu. We are all emancipated from courtly taste, while Voltaire was its perfecter!

102 A Word for the Philologists. — That there are books so valuable and royal that whole generations of scholars are well employed if their labor keeps these books pure and keeps them understandable, that is the faith philology must keep renewing. It assumes that there is no shortage of those rare people (though one does not see them) who really know how to use such valuable books. They will probably be the ones who make such books themselves, or could make them. I mean to say that philology assumes a noble faith: that for the sake of a few, who will always "come" and are not here, a very large amount of tedious, even unclean labor must first be done. It is all labor in usum Delphinorum.

103 On German Music. — German music is already, more than any other European music, the music in which alone the change that Europe underwent through the Revolution has found expression. Only German musicians understand how to express moving masses of people, that enormous artificial noise which need not even be very loud. Italian opera, for example, knows only choruses of servants or soldiers, but no "people." Add to this that through all German music one can hear a deep bourgeois jealousy of the nobility, especially of esprit and élégance, as the expression of a courtly, chivalric, old society, sure of itself. This is not music like that of Goethe's singer at the gate, which pleases also "in the hall," and indeed pleases the king. There one does not hear: "The knights looked bravely on, and the fair ladies in their laps." Even Grace appears in German music not without a twinge of bad conscience. Only with Grace, the rustic sister of Grace, does the German begin to feel wholly moral, and from there he rises more and more, up to his enthusiastic, learned, often grumpy "sublimity," the sublimity of Beethoven. If one wants to picture the person who belongs to this music, then picture Beethoven standing beside Goethe, as perhaps at that meeting in Teplitz: as half-barbarism beside culture, as the people beside the nobility, as the good-natured man beside the good and even more than "good" man, as the fantast beside the artist, as the one who needs comfort beside the one who has been comforted, as the exaggerator and suspicious man beside the reasonable one, as the hobgoblin-hunter and self-tormentor, as the wildly rapturous, the blessedly unhappy, the candidly immoderate, as the presumptuous and clumsy. And all in all, as the "untamed man." So Goethe himself felt and named him, Goethe the exceptional German, for whom a music worthy of him has not yet been found! Finally, consider whether the contempt for melody and the stunting of the melodic sense, which keeps spreading among Germans, should not be understood as a democratic bad manner and an aftereffect of the Revolution. Melody has such an open delight in lawfulness, and such a revulsion toward everything becoming, unformed and arbitrary, that it sounds like a voice from the old order of European things, and like a temptation to, and a return to, that order.

104 On the Sound of the German Language. — We know where the German that has been the general written German for a few centuries comes from. The Germans, with their reverence for everything that came from the court, made the chancelleries their model in everything they had to write, especially in their letters, documents, wills and so on. To write in chancery style was to write in the manner of court and government, and that was something refined, set against the German of the town in which one happened to live. Gradually people drew the conclusion and spoke as they wrote, and so they became still more refined: in word forms, in the choice of words and turns of phrase, and finally in sound. One affected a courtly sound when speaking, and the affectation at last became nature. Perhaps something quite similar has happened nowhere else: the predominance of the written style over speech, and the affectedness and self-importance of a whole people, as the foundation of a common language that was no longer dialectal. I believe the sound of the German language in the Middle Ages, and especially after the Middle Ages, was deeply rustic and common. In the last centuries it has become somewhat more refined, mainly because people found it necessary to imitate so many French, Italian and Spanish sounds, and this came especially from the German (and Austrian) nobility, who could not at all be content with their mother tongue. But for Montaigne, or even for Racine, German must have sounded unbearably vulgar despite this practice. And even now, in the mouths of travelers, in the middle of Italian rabble, it still sounds very raw, backwoodsy, hoarse, as if it came from smoky parlors and rude districts. Now I notice that among the former admirers of the chanceries a similar urge for a noble sound is spreading again, and that the Germans are beginning to submit to a quite peculiar "magic of sound," which in the long run could become a real danger to the German language. For more hideous sounds one searches Europe in vain. Something scornful, cold, indifferent and careless in the voice: this now sounds "refined" to the Germans. I hear the good will toward this refinement in the voices of young officials, teachers, women and merchants. Even the little girls are already imitating this officer's German. For the officer, and indeed the Prussian officer, is the inventor of these sounds: the same officer who, as a soldier and a man of his profession, has that admirable tact of modesty from which all Germans should learn (the German professors and musicians included!). But as soon as he speaks and moves, he is the most immodest and tasteless figure in old Europe, unaware of it, without any doubt! And the good Germans are unaware of it too. They marvel at him as a man of the first and most distinguished society, and gladly "take the tone" from him. And so he does indeed set it! And first it is the sergeants and corporals who imitate his tone and make it coarser. Pay attention to the words of command that now bellow through the German towns, as they drill outside all the gates. What arrogance, what raging sense of authority, what scornful coldness sounds out of this roaring! Are the Germans really a musical people? One thing is certain: the Germans are now becoming militarized in the sound of their language. It is likely that, once they are trained to speak militarily, they will in the end write militarily too. For the habit of certain sounds reaches deep into character. Soon one has the words and turns of phrase, and finally the thoughts, that fit exactly this sound! Perhaps people already write in the officer's manner now. Perhaps I read too little of what is being written in Germany. But one thing I know all the more surely: the public German declarations that reach even foreign countries are not inspired by German music, but by that new sound of a tasteless presumption. Almost every speech of the first German statesman, and even when he speaks through his imperial mouthpiece, has an accent that the ear of a foreigner rejects with revulsion. But the Germans endure it. They endure themselves.

105 The Germans as Artists. — When the German really gets into a passion (and not merely, as usual, into the good will toward passion!), he behaves in it as he must, and does not think further about his behavior. The truth, however, is that in passion he behaves very clumsily and ugly, as if without tact or melody, so that the spectators have their torment or their emotion from it and nothing more. Unless he lifts himself up into the sublime and the rapturous, of which some passions are capable. Then even the German becomes beautiful! The sense of the height at which beauty first pours its spell even over Germans drives German artists upward, into overreach and excess of passion. So there is a real, deep longing to get beyond ugliness and clumsiness, or at least to look beyond them, toward a better, lighter, more southern, sunlike world. And so their spasms are often only signs that they would like to dance: these poor bears, in whom hidden nymphs and forest gods carry on their existence, and at times even higher deities!

106 Music as Advocate. — "I thirst for a master of the art of tones," an innovator said to his disciple, "so that he might learn my thoughts from me and speak them in his language. Then I would reach people's ears and hearts better. With tones one can lead people into any error and any truth. Who could refute a tone?" "So you would like to be considered irrefutable?" said his disciple. The innovator replied: "I want the seed to become a tree. For a teaching to become a tree, it must be believed for a good while. For it to be believed, it must be considered irrefutable. The tree needs storms, doubts, worms and malice so that it shows the nature and strength of its seed. Let it break if it is not strong enough! But a seed is always only destroyed, never refuted!" When he had said this, his disciple cried out impetuously: "But I believe in your cause, and I consider it so strong that I will say everything, absolutely everything, that I still have on my heart against it." The innovator laughed to himself and wagged his finger at him. "This kind of discipleship, he said then, is the best, but it is dangerous, and not every kind of teaching can bear it."

107 Our Final Gratitude to Art. — If we had not approved of the arts and invented this kind of cult of the untrue, then the insight into general untruth and mendacity that science now gives us, the insight into delusion and error as a condition of the knowing and feeling life, would be simply unbearable. Honesty would bring disgust and suicide in its train. As it is, however, our honesty has a counterforce that helps us evade such consequences: art, as the good will toward appearance. We do not always prevent our eye from rounding things off, from finishing the poem. Then it is no longer the eternal imperfection that we carry over the river of becoming. Then we think we are carrying a goddess, and we are proud and childlike in this service. As an aesthetic phenomenon, existence is still bearable to us, and through art we have been given eye and hand, and above all the good conscience, to be able to make such a phenomenon out of ourselves. At times we must rest from ourselves, by looking at ourselves from above and below and, from an artistic distance, laughing at ourselves or weeping over ourselves. We must discover the hero and likewise the fool hidden in our passion for knowledge. We must sometimes be glad of our folly, so that we can remain glad of our wisdom! And precisely because at bottom we are heavy and serious people, more weights than people, nothing does us as much good as the jester's cap. We need it in front of ourselves. We need all high-spirited, floating, dancing, mocking, childlike and blessed art, so as not to lose that freedom above things which our ideal demands of us. It would be a relapse for us to fall entirely into morality with our sensitive honesty, and, because of the overly strict demands we make on ourselves in this, to become moral monsters and scarecrows. We should be able to stand above morality too: not only stand there, with the anxious stiffness of someone who fears at every moment that he will slip and fall, but also float above it and play! How could we do without art, and without the fool, to do that? And as long as you are still somehow ashamed in front of yourselves, you do not yet belong to us!

Plain English translation

Mouseia’s complete Plain English edition, made directly from the same 1887 German text, division by division and aphorism by aphorism. Same divisions and numbering; it explains what Nietzsche’s compressed German leaves implicit instead of imitating its cadence.

57 To the Realists. — You sober people, who feel protected against passion and fantasy and would like to make a pride and an ornament out of your emptiness, you call yourselves realists. You suggest that the world is exactly as it appears to you, that reality stands before you alone, uncovered, and that you yourselves may be its best part. Oh, you beloved pictures of Sais! But even in your most uncovered state, are you not still highly emotional and murky beings, compared with fish, and still far too much like a man in love? And what is "reality" for a man in love! You still carry around the valuations of things that come from the passions and infatuations of earlier centuries. Your sobriety still has a hidden and unbreakable drunkenness built into it. Your love of "reality," for example, oh, that is an old, very old "love"! In every feeling and every sense impression there is a piece of this old love. Some fantasy, some prejudice, some unreason, some ignorance, some fear, and whatever else, has worked on it and woven it. There is that mountain! There is that cloud! What is actually "real" about them? Try taking away the illusion and all the human additions, you sober people! Yes, if you could do that! If you could forget where you came from, your past, your early training, your whole humanity and animality! There is no "reality" for us, and none for you either, you sober people. We are not nearly as strange to each other as you think. Perhaps our good will to get past intoxication deserves just as much respect as your belief that you are incapable of intoxication at all.

58 Only as Creators! — This has been the hardest thing for me, and it is still the hardest thing: seeing that what things are called matters infinitely more than what they are. The reputation, name and appearance of a thing, its standing, its usual measure and weight, were at the beginning almost always a mistake and an arbitrary act. They were thrown over the thing like a coat, completely foreign to its nature and even to its skin. But through belief in them, and through their passing down from generation to generation, they have gradually grown onto and into the thing, so to speak, and become its body itself. The appearance at the start almost always becomes the essence in the end, and it works as the essence! What a fool would he be who thought it was enough to point out this origin and this fog of illusion in order to destroy the world that counts as real, the so-called "reality"! Only as creators can we destroy! — But let us not forget this either: it is enough to create new names, new valuations and new probabilities to create new "things" in the long run.

59 We Artists! — When we love a woman, it is easy to hate nature, remembering all the disgusting natural facts that every woman is subject to. We usually think around them. But when our soul touches on these things, it jerks away impatiently and looks at nature with contempt, as I said. We feel insulted. Nature seems to reach into what belongs to us, with the most unholy hands. So we close our ears to all physiology and quietly decide: "I do not want to hear that a human being is also something other than soul and form!" "The human being under the skin" is a horror and an unthinkable idea to all lovers, a blasphemy against God and love. Now, the way a lover feels about nature and the natural today, that is how every worshiper of God and his "holy almighty power" once felt. Whatever astronomers, geologists, physiologists and doctors said about nature, he saw as an intrusion into his most precious possession, and therefore as an attack, and even as shameless behavior on the part of the attacker. The "law of nature" already sounded like a slander against God to him. At bottom he would have been very glad to see all mechanics traced back to moral acts of will and whim. But since nobody could do him that favor, he hid nature and mechanics from himself as well as he could, and lived in a dream. Oh, the people of earlier times knew how to dream, and did not need to fall asleep first! And we people of today still understand it far too well, in spite of all our good will for being awake and for daylight! It is enough to love, hate, desire, in short to feel, and immediately the spirit and power of the dream come over us. With open eyes and a cold nerve against all danger, we climb the most dangerous paths, up onto the roofs and towers of fantasy, with no dizziness at all, as if born for climbing. We are sleepwalkers of the day! We artists! We hiders of the natural! We who hunger for the moon and for God! We tireless wanderers, dead silent, on heights that we do not see as heights, but as our plains, as our safe ground!

60 Women and Their Effect at a Distance. — Do I still have ears? Am I still nothing but ears? Here I stand in the blaze of the surf, whose white flames lick up to my feet. From every side it howls, threatens, shouts and shrieks at me, while in the deepest depth the old earth-shaker sings his aria, dull as a bellowing bull. For this he stamps out such an earth-shaking beat that even these weathered giants of rock feel their hearts tremble in their bodies. Then suddenly, as if born from nothing, there appears in front of the gate of this hellish labyrinth, only a few fathoms away, a great sailing ship, gliding past as silently as a ghost. Oh, this ghostly beauty! With what magic it takes hold of me! How? Has all the calm and silence of the world boarded here? Does my happiness itself sit in this still place, my happier self, my second, eternal self? Not dead, and yet not alive anymore? As a ghostly, quiet, watching, gliding, floating in-between being? Like the ship that runs over the dark sea with its white sails, like an enormous butterfly! Yes! To run over existence! That is it! That would be it! — — It seems the noise here has made me a dreamer? All great noise makes us put happiness in silence and distance. When a man stands in the middle of his noise, in the middle of his surf of throws and plans, then he may also see quiet, magical beings gliding past him, whose happiness and seclusion he longs for. They are the women. He almost believes that his better self lives there with the women. In those quiet places even the loudest surf turns into dead silence, and life itself turns into a dream about life. But! But! My noble dreamer, even on the finest sailing ship there is so much noise and racket, and unfortunately so much small and miserable racket! The charm and the strongest effect of women is, to use the language of the philosophers, an effect at a distance, an actio in distans. But that requires, first of all and above all, distance!

61 In Honor of Friendship. — That the feeling of friendship was regarded as the highest feeling in ancient times, higher even than the most famous pride of the self-sufficient and wise, and almost as its only and still more sacred kinship, is shown well by the story of the Macedonian king who gave a talent to a philosopher of Athens who despised the world, and got it back from him. "What? said the king. Does he have no friend?" By this he meant: "I respect this pride of the wise and independent man. But I would respect his humanity even more if the friend in him had won the victory over his pride. Before me the philosopher has made himself smaller, by showing that he does not know one of the two highest feelings, and not even the higher one!"

62 Love. — Love even forgives the beloved for desiring.

63 Women in Music. — Why do warm, rainy winds also bring with them the musical mood and the creative pleasure of melody? Are they not the same winds that fill the churches and give women loving thoughts?

64 Skeptics. — I fear that women who have grown old are, in the most secret corner of their hearts, more skeptical than any man. They believe that the shallowness of existence is its true nature. For them all virtue and depth is only a cover for this "truth," a very welcome cover for a pudendum. So it is a matter of good manners and shame, and nothing more!

65 Devotion. — There are noble women with a certain poverty of spirit who, to express their deepest devotion, do not know any other way than to offer their virtue and modesty. It is their highest possession. And often this gift is accepted without binding the receiver as deeply as the giver assumes. A very sad story!

66 The Strength of the Weak. — All women are clever at exaggerating their weakness. They are inventive in weaknesses, so that they appear completely like fragile ornaments that even a speck of dust can hurt. Their existence is meant to make a man feel his clumsiness and to put it on his conscience. This is how they protect themselves against the strong, and against all "right of the fist."

67 Pretending to Oneself. — Now she loves him, and since then she has looked ahead with such calm trust, like a cow! But woe! It was exactly his fascination that she seemed completely changeable and impossible to pin down! He already had too much steady weather in himself! Should she not do well to pretend her old character? To pretend to be indifferent? Does love not advise her to do exactly that? Long live the play!

68 Will and Willingness. — A young man was brought to a wise man, and they said: "Look, this is one who is being ruined by women!"

The wise man shook his head and smiled. "It is men who ruin women," he said. "Whatever women lack has to be paid for and repaired in men, because the man makes an image of woman for himself, and the woman shapes herself according to that image." "You are too gentle with women," said one of the bystanders. "You do not know them!" The wise man answered: "A man's nature is will; a woman's nature is willingness. That is the law of the sexes, truly! A hard law for women! All people are innocent for their existence, but women are innocent in the second degree. Who could have enough oil and mildness for them?" "What oil! What mildness!" cried someone else from the crowd. "Women must be raised better!" "Men must be raised better," said the wise man, and signaled to the young man to follow him. But the young man did not follow him.

69 The Capacity for Revenge. — That someone cannot defend himself, and therefore does not want to, does not yet bring him shame in our eyes. But we think little of the one who has neither the power nor the will for revenge, whether man or woman. Could a woman hold us (or, as people say, "bind" us) if we did not trust her to use a dagger (any kind of dagger) well against us? Or against herself, which in a particular case would be the more painful revenge (the Chinese revenge).

70 The Mistresses of Masters. — A deep, powerful contralto, of the kind one sometimes hears in the theater, suddenly pulls back the curtain on possibilities we normally do not believe in. At once we believe that somewhere in the world there could be women with high, heroic, royal souls, able and ready for grand answers, decisions and sacrifices, able and ready to rule over men, because in them the best part of a man, beyond the difference of sex, has become a living ideal. True, the theater does not intend such voices to give this idea of woman. Usually they are meant to portray the ideal male lover, a Romeo for example. But from my experience, the theater, and the musician who expects these effects from such a voice, always miscalculate. People do not believe in these lovers. These voices still always carry a tone of the motherly and the housewifely, and most of all when love is in their sound.

71 On Feminine Chastity. — Something quite astonishing and monstrous exists in how refined women are raised. Perhaps nothing is more paradoxical. Everyone agrees to raise them as ignorant as possible about sex, and to give them a deep shame about such things, and the greatest impatience and the urge to flee when these matters are even hinted at. All of a woman's "honor" basically depends on this alone. Otherwise people would forgive them almost anything! But in this one matter they are supposed to stay ignorant down to the heart. They are to have no eyes, ears, words or thoughts for this, their "evil." In fact, knowledge is already the evil here. And then! They are thrown with a terrible lightning strike into reality and knowledge, through marriage, and indeed by the very man they love and respect most. They find love and shame in conflict. They even have to feel delight, surrender, duty, pity and fear all at once, at the unexpected closeness of God and animal and everything else! They have truly tied a knot in the soul that has no equal! Even the sympathetic curiosity of the wisest judge of people is not enough to guess how this or that woman manages to find her way into this solution of the riddle, and into this riddle of a solution. What terrible, far-reaching suspicions must stir in the poor, shaken soul, and how the last philosophy and skepticism of woman drops its anchor at this point! Afterward there is the same deep silence as before, often a silence even toward herself, a closing of her eyes to herself. Young women work hard to look shallow and thoughtless, and the most refined among them pretend to be a little bold. Women easily see their husbands as a question mark over their honor, and their children as an apology or a penance. They need children and want them, but in a very different sense from the way a man wants children.

In short, you cannot be gentle enough with women!

72 The Mothers. — Animals think about women differently from people. To them the female is the productive being. Among animals there is no fatherly love, but something like love for the children of a mate, and a habit of living with them. For females, their children are a satisfaction of their urge to rule, a possession, an occupation, something they fully understand, something they can chatter about. All of this together is motherly love, which can be compared to an artist's love for his work. Pregnancy has made women gentler, more patient, more timid, and more willing to submit. In the same way, spiritual pregnancy produces the character of the contemplatives, which is related to the female character. They are the male mothers. Among animals, the male sex is considered the beautiful one.

73 Holy Cruelty. — A man came to a holy man carrying a child that had just been born. "What should I do with the child?" he asked. "It is weak, misshapen, and does not have enough life to die." "Kill it," cried the holy man in a terrible voice, "kill it, and then hold it in your arms for three days and three nights, so that you have something to remember. Then you will never father another child, unless the time is right for you to do so." When the man heard this, he went away disappointed. Many people blamed the holy man for giving such cruel advice, since he had advised killing the child. "But isn't it crueler to let it live?" said the holy man.

74 The Unsuccessful. — Those poor women always fail who become restless and uncertain in the presence of the man they love, and talk too much. Men are most surely won over by a certain secret, calm tenderness.

75 The Third Sex. — "A small man is a paradox, but still a man. But small women seem to me, compared with tall women, to belong to a different sex," said an old dance teacher. "A small woman is never beautiful," said the old Aristotle.

76 The Greatest Danger. — If there had not always been a majority of people who felt the discipline of their minds, their "reasonableness," as their pride, their duty and their virtue, and who were offended or embarrassed by all the fantasizing and wild wandering of thought, the friends of "common sense," humanity would have died out long ago! Hanging over humanity, as its greatest danger, is the outbreak of madness. This means the breaking loose of whim in feeling, seeing and hearing, the enjoyment of a mind without discipline, the delight in human unreason. What is the opposite of the world of the insane is not truth and certainty, but the general acceptance and binding force of a belief. In short, it is the lack of arbitrariness in judgment. The greatest work people have done so far has been to agree with one another about a great many things, and to put on themselves a rule of agreement, whether those things are true or false. This is the discipline of the mind that humanity has kept. But the opposing drives are still so strong that one can speak about humanity's future only with little confidence. The picture of things keeps shifting, and perhaps from now on it will shift more and faster than ever. The most refined minds keep resisting that binding agreement, the researchers of truth first of all. That belief, as a belief for everyone, keeps producing disgust and a new appetite in sharper heads. Even the slow pace it demands for all mental activity, the tortoise-like crawl that is accepted here as the standard, turns artists and poets into deserters. It is these impatient minds that burst out with a real craving for madness, because madness has such a lively pace! So there is a need for virtuous intellects, and, to say it plainly: there is a need for virtuous stupidity, for unshakable timekeepers of the slow mind, so that the believers in the great common belief stay together and keep on dancing their dance. This is a need of the first rank, and it commands and demands here.

We others are the exception and the danger. We always need defending! Still, something can really be said in favor of the exception, as long as it never wants to become the rule.

77 The Animal with a Clear Conscience. — I am not blind to the crudeness in everything that is popular in southern Europe, whether Italian opera (Rossini and Bellini, for example) or the Spanish adventure novel, which reaches us most easily in the French disguise of Gil Blas. But it does not offend me, any more than the crudeness you meet on a walk through Pompeii, or even while reading any ancient book. Where does this come from? Is it that shame is missing here, and that everything crude appears as sure of itself as anything noble, lovely or passionate does in the same kind of music or novel? "The animal has its rights like a human being. So let it run around freely. And you, my dear fellow human, are still this animal too, in spite of everything!" That seems to me to be the moral of the matter, and the peculiar feature of southern humanity. Bad taste has its rights just as good taste does, and even a privilege over it, if it provides a great need, a certain satisfaction, and, so to speak, a common language, a completely understandable mask and gesture. Good, selective taste, on the other hand, always has something searching and tentative about it, something not entirely certain that it will be understood. It is not and never has been popular! The mask is and remains popular! So let all this masklike quality run along in the melodies and cadences, in the jumps and jolliness of the rhythm of these operas! And as for ancient life: what does anyone understand about it if they do not understand the pleasure in the mask, the clear conscience of everything masklike? Here is the bath and recreation of the ancient mind. Perhaps this bath was even more necessary to the rare and noble natures of the old world than to the ordinary ones. On the other hand, a crude turn in northern works, for example in German music, offends me terribly. Here shame is involved. The artist has come down to a lower level in front of himself and could not even keep himself from blushing. We feel ashamed along with him, and we are offended, because we sense that he thought he had to come down on our account.

78 What We Should Be Grateful For. — It was artists, and above all the artists of the theater, who first gave people eyes and ears to enjoy watching and hearing what each of us is, what each of us lives through, what each of us wants. They first taught us to value the hero hidden in every one of these ordinary people. They taught us the art of seeing ourselves as heroes, from a distance and in a simplified, glorified way, the art of "staging" ourselves before ourselves. Only in this way do we get past some of the petty details of our own lives! Without that art we would be nothing but surface, living entirely under the spell of the kind of vision that makes the nearest and most common things look enormous and like reality itself.

Perhaps religion deserves a similar credit. It taught people to look at the sinfulness of each individual through a magnifying glass, and turned the sinner into a great, immortal criminal. By describing eternal perspectives around him, it taught people to see themselves from a distance, as something past and whole.

79 The Appeal of Imperfection. — Here I see a poet who, like many people, has a greater appeal because of his imperfections than because of everything that comes out round and perfect under his hand. In fact, he gets more of his advantage and fame from his final inability than from his rich strength. His work never fully says what he really meant to say, what he wanted to see. It seems he had a taste of a vision but never the vision itself. Still, a huge longing for that vision has stayed in his soul, and from it he draws his equally huge eloquence of desire and hunger. With it he lifts the listener above his work and above all "works," and gives him wings to climb as high as listeners ever climb. And so, having become poets and seers themselves, they admire the creator of their happiness as if he had led them straight to the sight of his holiest and final thing, as if he had reached his goal and really seen his vision and passed it on. His reputation benefits from not having actually reached the goal.

80 Art and Nature. — The Greeks, or at least the Athenians, liked to hear good speech. They had an eager appetite for it, which sets them apart from non-Greeks more than anything else. So they demanded that passion on the stage speak well too, and they put up with the unnaturalness of dramatic verse with pleasure. In nature, passion says so little! It is so silent and awkward! And when it does find words, they are confused and unreasonable and embarrassing even to itself! Now, thanks to the Greeks, we have all grown used to this unnaturalness on the stage, just as, thanks to the Italians, we put up with the other unnaturalness, the singing passion, and gladly so. We have come to need something that we cannot get from real life: to hear people in the hardest situations speak well and at length. It delights us now when the tragic hero still finds words, reasons, eloquent gestures, and on the whole a clear intelligence, at the very point where life comes close to the abyss and the real person usually loses his head and certainly his fine speech. This kind of departure from nature is perhaps the most pleasant meal for human pride. For this reason people love art, as the expression of a high, heroic unnaturalness and convention. It is fair to criticize a dramatic poet if he does not turn everything into reason and words, but keeps some portion of silence in his hand. In the same way people are unhappy with an opera composer who, for the strongest emotion, can find not a melody but only an emotional, "natural" stammering and shouting. Here nature is supposed to be contradicted! Here the common charm of illusion is supposed to give way to a higher charm! The Greeks went a very long way down this road, a frighteningly long way! They made the stage as narrow as possible and forbade any effect from deep backgrounds. They made it impossible for the actor to use his facial expressions and move freely, and turned him into a solemn, stiff, masklike figure. They also took away from passion its deep background and dictated a law of beautiful speech for it. In fact, they did everything they could to work against the raw effect of images that stir fear and pity. They simply did not want fear and pity. Honor to Aristotle, and the highest honor! But he certainly did not hit the nail, let alone the head of the nail, when he spoke about the final purpose of Greek tragedy! Just look at the Greek tragic poets and see what most stirred their effort, their inventiveness and their competition. It was certainly not the goal of overwhelming the audience with emotions! The Athenian went to the theater to hear beautiful speeches! And it was beautiful speeches that Sophocles cared about! Forgive me this heresy! It is quite different with serious opera. All its masters take care to keep people from understanding their characters. A word picked up now and then may help the distracted listener. On the whole, the situation has to explain itself. The speeches do not matter! That is how they all think, and so they have all played their tricks with words. Perhaps they only lacked the nerve to say completely how little they think of the word. A little more boldness in Rossini and he would have had everything sung as la-la-la-la, and there would still have been sense in it! The characters in an opera are precisely not to be believed "on their word," but on their tone! That is the difference, that is the beautiful unnaturalness for which people go to the opera! Even the recitativo secco does not really want to be heard as words and text. This kind of half-music is meant to give the musical ear a little rest, a rest from melody, which is the most sublime and therefore also the most tiring pleasure of this art. But very soon it does something else: it makes impatience grow, reluctance grow, and a new desire for whole music, for melody. Seen from this point of view, how does the art of Richard Wagner stand? Perhaps differently? It often seemed to me that you would have to memorize the words and music of his works before the performance, because without that, so it seemed to me, you hear neither the words nor the music itself.

81 Greek Taste. — "What is beautiful about it?" said that land surveyor after a performance of Iphigenia. "Nothing is proved in it!" Could the Greeks have been so far from that taste? In Sophocles, at least, "everything is proved."

82 The Un-Greek Esprit. — In all their thinking the Greeks are indescribably logical and plain. For their long good period, at least, they did not get tired of it, as the French so often do. The French are very eager to make a little jump into the opposite, and they tolerate the spirit of logic only when, through a series of such little jumps into the opposite, it shows its social politeness and its social self-denial. Logic seems necessary to them, like bread and water, but also like these, a kind of prisoner's food, as soon as it is to be enjoyed pure and by itself. In good company you must never want to be completely and entirely right, as pure logic always wants. That is why there is a small dose of unreason in all French esprit. The social sense of the Greeks was far less developed than that of the French, and was. That is why their most witty men had so little esprit, and why even their jokers had so little wit. Ah! People will not believe these sentences of mine, and how many more of this kind I have on my conscience! Est res magna tacere, says Martial, speaking to all the talkative people.

83 Translations. — You can judge how much historical sense a period has by the way it makes translations and tries to take in past periods and books. The French of Corneille's time, and even the French of the Revolution, took hold of Roman antiquity in a way that we would no longer have the courage for, thanks to our higher historical sense. And Roman antiquity itself: how forcefully and naively at once it laid its hand on everything good and high in the older Greek antiquity! How they translated it into the Roman present! How they deliberately and carelessly rubbed the wing dust off the butterfly of the moment! Horace translated Alcaeus or Archilochus here and there, and Propertius translated Callimachus and Philetas, poets of the same rank as Theocritus, if we are allowed to judge. What did it matter to them that the original creator had lived through this or that and written the traces of it into his poem? As poets, they had no liking for the antiquarian nose that runs ahead of historical sense. As poets, they did not respect these purely personal things, the names and everything that belonged to a city, a coast or a century as its costume and mask. They quickly put the present and the Roman in their place. They seem to ask us: "Should we not make the old new for ourselves, and lay ourselves out in it? Should we not be allowed to breathe our soul into this dead body? It is dead, after all, and how ugly everything dead is!" They did not know the pleasure of historical sense. The past and the foreign embarrassed them, and as Romans they saw it as a reason for a Roman conquest. In fact, when they translated, they were conquering. It was not only that they left out the historical parts. They added a hint at the present, and above all they struck out the poet's name and put their own in its place. They did not feel they were stealing. They had the very best conscience of the imperium Romanum.

84 Where Poetry Came From. — People who love the imaginative side of human beings, and who also defend the view that morality is instinctive, argue like this: "Suppose people had always worshiped usefulness as the highest god. Then where did poetry come from, all over the world? This rhythm in speech works against clear communication rather than helping it, and yet it has grown up everywhere on earth as a mockery of all practical purpose, and it keeps growing! The wild, beautiful unreason of poetry proves you wrong, you utilitarians! Wanting to break free of usefulness is what raised human beings up, what inspired them to morality and art!" Well, for once I will speak in the utilitarians' favor. They are so rarely right that it is pitiful! In those ancient times when poetry first came into being, people did keep usefulness in view, and a very great usefulness at that, when they let rhythm into speech. This force rearranges all the parts of a sentence, it means choosing words, it colors a thought anew and makes it darker, stranger and more distant. Of course it was a superstitious usefulness! Through rhythm, a human request was supposed to be engraved more deeply on the gods. People had noticed that someone remembers a verse better than plain speech. They also thought that the rhythmic beat made them heard over greater distances. A prayer set to rhythm seemed to reach the gods' ears more closely. But above all, people wanted to use the overwhelming effect that a person feels inside when he hears music. Rhythm is a kind of compulsion. It produces an irresistible pleasure in giving in and joining along. Not only the feet keep step, but the soul itself follows the beat. Probably, people concluded, the souls of the gods do too! So they tried to force the gods through rhythm and to gain power over them. They threw poetry over them like a magic noose. There was an even odder belief, and perhaps it was the one that most powerfully helped poetry come into being. Among the Pythagoreans it shows up as a philosophical idea and a method of education. But long before there were philosophers, people believed that music could release the passions, purify the soul and soften the ferocia animi, and they believed this precisely because of the rhythm in music. When a person had lost the right tension and balance in his soul, he had to dance to the singer's beat. That was the remedy of this healing art. With it Terpander put down a riot, Empedocles calmed a madman, and Damon cured a young man sick with love. With it people also brought angry, vengeful gods back to their senses. First they drove the frenzy and wildness of the god's passions to the highest pitch, so that a raging god became even madder and a vengeful one drunk with revenge. All the orgiastic cults want to let out a deity's fury all at once and turn it into an orgy, so that afterward it feels freer and calmer and leaves people alone. The root of the Greek word melos means something that soothes, not because the thing itself is gentle, but because its after-effect makes people gentle. And not only in cult songs, but also in the everyday songs of the oldest times, people assumed that rhythm had magic power. When drawing water or rowing, for example, the song was an enchantment of the spirits believed to be working there. It made them obedient, unfree, and a tool for human use. Whenever people act, they have a reason to sing, and every action depends on the help of spirits. The charm-song and the incantation seem to be the original form of poetry. Even though verse was also used in oracles (the Greeks said the hexameter was invented at Delphi), rhythm was supposed to compel here too. To be told your fortune originally meant, as far as I can tell from the likely origin of the Greek word, to have something decided for you. People believed they could force the future by winning Apollo over to their side. In the oldest view he is far more than a god who simply foresees. Once the formula is spoken, word for word and exactly in rhythm, it binds the future. The formula is Apollo's invention, and as god of rhythms he can also bind the goddesses of fate. Looking at the whole picture: was there anything more useful for the old superstitious human being than rhythm? With it you could do almost anything. You could speed up a job by magic. You could force a god to appear, to come near, to listen. You could shape the future to your will. You could discharge your own soul from some excess (fear, mania, pity, revenge), and not only your own soul but the soul of the most evil demon. Without verse you were nothing; through verse you became almost a god. A feeling like this cannot be completely rooted out. Even now, after thousands of years of fighting this superstition, even the wisest of us sometimes becomes a fool for rhythm, if only in the sense that he feels a thought to be truer when it has a metrical form and comes along with a divine hopsasa. Isn't it very funny that even the most serious philosophers, however strictly they otherwise insist on certainty, still quote lines from poets to give their thoughts strength and believability? And yet a truth is more dangerous when the poet agrees with it than when he contradicts it! As Homer says: "Singers tell many lies!"

85 The Good and the Beautiful. — Artists are always praising. They do nothing else. They praise all the states and things that have the reputation of letting a person feel good, great, drunk, cheerful, or wise and well. These chosen things and states, whose value for human happiness is considered certain and measured, are the subjects of artists. They are always on the lookout for such things and for dragging them into the territory of art. I mean that they are not themselves the judges of happiness and the happy. But they always crowd close to these judges, with the greatest curiosity and pleasure, so they can make immediate use of their judgments. So, since they have impatience and also the big lungs of heralds and the feet of runners, they are always among the first to praise a new good, and they often look like the ones who first call something good and rate it so. But as I said, this is a mistake. They are just quicker and louder than the real judges. And who are the real judges? The rich and the idle.

86 On the Theater. — This day again gave me strong and high feelings. If I could have music and art on its evening, I know well which kind I would not want: all those that try to intoxicate their audience and push them up to a moment of strong and high feeling. Those are people of the soul's everyday life, who in the evening look less like victors on triumphal chariots than like tired mules that life has whipped a little too often. What would such people know about "higher moods" at all, if there were no intoxicants and idealized whip-strokes! So they have their stimulants, just as they have their wines. But what do I care for their drink and their drunkenness! What does an inspired person need wine for? He looks instead with a kind of disgust at the means and go-betweens that are meant to produce an effect here without good reason, an imitation of the high tide of the soul. What? You give the mole wings and proud fancies before bedtime, before he crawls into his hole? You send him to the theater and set huge glasses in front of his blind, tired eyes? People whose life is not an "action" but a business sit in front of the stage and watch strange beings for whom life is more than business? "That is proper," you say. "That is entertaining. That is what culture demands!" Well then, I often lack culture, because this sight often makes me sick. Someone who already has enough tragedy and comedy in himself usually prefers to stay away from the theater. Or, by way of exception, the whole event, including the theater, the audience and the poet, becomes for him the real tragic and comic play, so that the piece being performed means little to him. For someone who is a Faust or a Manfred himself, what do the Fausts and Manfreds of the theater matter? And yet it certainly gives him something to think about that such figures are put on stage at all. The strongest thoughts and passions are shown to people who are not capable of thinking or feeling them, but only of intoxication! And those thoughts and passions are used as a means to it! Theater and music are the Europeans' hashish-smoking and betel-chewing! Oh, who will tell us the whole history of narcotics? It is almost the history of "culture," so-called higher culture!

87 On the Vanity of Artists. — I think artists often do not know what they do best, because they are too vain and have set their sights on something prouder than the small plants that can grow new, strange and beautiful in true perfection on their own ground. They undervalue the best that is in their own garden and vineyard, and their love and insight are not of equal rank. Here is a musician who has more mastery than any other musician in finding the sounds of the realm of suffering, oppressed and tortured souls, and in giving speech even to dumb animals. No one matches him in the colors of late autumn, in the indescribably moving happiness of a last, very last, very brief enjoyment. He knows a sound for the secret, eerie midnights of the soul, when cause and effect seem to have fallen out of step, and something can arise "out of nothing" at any moment. He draws most happily from the lower depths of human happiness, and from its emptied cup, so to speak, where the bitterest and most disagreeable drops have finally run together with the sweetest, for better and for worse. He knows that tired shuffling of the soul that can no longer leap or fly or even walk. He has the shy look of hidden pain, of understanding without comfort, of saying goodbye without confession. Indeed, as the Orpheus of all secret misery, he is greater than anyone. Through him much has been added to art that until then seemed unspeakable, even unworthy of art, and that could only be chased away with words, never caught by them: many small and microscopic things of the soul. Yes, he is the master of the very small. But he does not want to be! His character loves rather the big walls and the bold mural painting! He does not notice that his spirit has a different taste and leaning, and most likely prefers to sit quietly in the corners of collapsed houses. There, hidden, even hidden from himself, he paints his true masterpieces, which are all very short, often only one beat long. Only there, and perhaps only there, does he become truly good, great and perfect. But he does not know it! He is too vain to know it.

88 Seriousness About Truth. — Seriousness about truth! People understand these words in very different ways! The very views, and the same kinds of proof and testing, which a thinker feels in himself as a frivolity, something he has given in to in shame during this or that hour, can give an artist who comes across them and lives with them for a while the feeling that he has now been seized by the deepest seriousness about truth. He may feel it admirable that, though an artist, he shows the most serious desire for the opposite of what seems true. So it is possible that someone, through exactly his display of seriousness, reveals how shallow and contented his mind has been in the realm of knowledge. And is not everything we take seriously our betrayer? It shows where our weights are, and what we have no weights for.

89 Then and Now. — What good is all our art of artworks if we lose that higher art, the art of festivals! In earlier times all artworks were placed along the great festival road of humanity, as reminders and monuments of high and blessed moments. Now people want to use artworks to lure the poor, exhausted and sick away from the great road of human suffering, for a single lustful moment. They offer them a little intoxication and madness.

90 Lights and Shadows. — Books and written notes mean different things to different thinkers. One has gathered into his book the lights that he knew how to steal quickly from the rays of a knowledge that shone on him, and carry home. Another gives only the shadows, the gray and black afterimages of what built itself up in his soul the day before.

91 A Warning. — As is well known, Alfieri lied a great deal when he told his life story to his astonished contemporaries. He lied out of the tyranny he practiced against himself. He showed it, for example, in the way he built his own language and forced himself into being a poet. In the end he had found a strict form of grandeur, into which he pressed his life and his memory. There must have been much torment in that. I would not believe a biography of Plato either, if he had written it himself, any more than Rousseau's, or Dante's Vita nuova.

92 Prose and Poetry. — Note that the great masters of prose have almost always been poets as well, either openly or only in secret, in the "little room." And indeed, you write good prose only in the presence of poetry! Prose is an uninterrupted, polite war with poetry. All its charm consists in constantly dodging poetry and contradicting it. Every abstract idea has to be presented as a prank against poetry, in a mocking voice. Every dryness and coolness should drive the lovely goddess into a lovely despair. There are often approaches and reconciliations for a moment, and then a sudden jump back and a laugh. Often the curtain is pulled up and harsh light let in, just when the goddess is enjoying her twilight and muted colors. Often the word is taken out of her mouth and sung to a tune, while she holds her delicate hands over her delicate little ears. So there are a thousand pleasures in this war, with the defeats counted in too, and the unpoetic people, the so-called prose people, know nothing about them. That is why they write and speak only bad prose! War is the father of all good things, and war is the father of good prose too! In this century there were four very strange and truly poetic people who reached the mastery of prose, which the century is otherwise not made for, for lack of poetry, as I have hinted. Leaving aside Goethe, whom the century that produced him fairly claims, I consider only Giacomo Leopardi, Prosper Mérimée, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walter Savage Landor, the author of the Imaginary Conversations, worthy of being called masters of prose.

93 But Why Do You Write? — A.: I do not belong to those who think with a wet pen in hand, and still less to those who give themselves over to their passions in front of an open inkwell, sitting in their chair and staring at the paper. I am annoyed by all writing, or ashamed of it. Writing is a necessity for me. Even to speak of it in a figure of speech disgusts me. B.: Then why do you write? A.: Yes, my friend, between us: so far I have found no other way to get rid of my thoughts. B.: And why do you want to get rid of them? A.: Why do I want to? Do I want to? I have to. — B.: Enough! Enough!

94 Growth After Death. — The small daring remarks about moral matters that Fontenelle tossed out in his immortal Dialogues of the Dead were taken in his day as paradoxes, and as the games of a rather risky wit. Even the highest judges of taste and intellect saw nothing more in them, and perhaps Fontenelle himself did not either. Now something unbelievable happens: these thoughts become truths! Science proves them! The game turns into seriousness! And we read those dialogues with a different feeling from the one Voltaire and Helvétius had, and we lift their author, without meaning to, into a different and much higher rank of minds than they did. Rightly? Wrongly?

95 Chamfort. — I can only explain it this way: that such an expert on people and on the crowd as Chamfort sided with the crowd, instead of standing aside in philosophical renunciation and resistance. In him an instinct was stronger than his wisdom, and it had never been satisfied. It was hatred of all noble birth. Perhaps it was the old and quite understandable hatred of his mother, which his love for his mother made sacred in him. It was an instinct for revenge from his boyhood, waiting for the hour to avenge his mother. Then life and his talent, and, ah! perhaps most of all the father's blood in his veins, led him to join this nobility and stand on equal footing with it, for many, many years. In the end, however, he could no longer bear the sight of himself, the sight of the "old man" under the old regime. He fell into a violent passion for penance, and in it he put on the clothes of the common people, as his kind of hair shirt. His bad conscience was his failure to take revenge. Suppose Chamfort had stayed one degree more a philosopher back then. The Revolution would not have gotten its tragic wit and its sharpest sting. It would be remembered as a much stupider event, and it would not have seduced so many minds. But Chamfort's hatred and revenge educated a whole generation, and the most distinguished people went through this school. Consider that Mirabeau looked up to Chamfort as to his higher and older self, from whom he expected and accepted impulses, warnings and verdicts. Mirabeau, as a person, belongs to a completely different rank of greatness than even the leading statesmen of yesterday and today. It is strange that, in spite of such a friend and advocate (we have Mirabeau's letters to Chamfort), this wittiest of all moralists stayed foreign to the French, just as Stendhal did, who perhaps had the most thoughtful eyes and ears of all the French of his century. Was it that Stendhal had too much of the German and the Englishman in him to be bearable to Parisians? Chamfort, on the other hand, was a man rich in the depths and background of the soul: gloomy, suffering, glowing. He was a thinker who found laughter necessary as a cure for life, and who nearly gave himself up for lost on every day he had not laughed. He looks more like an Italian, a blood relative of Dante and Leopardi, than like a Frenchman. We know Chamfort's last words: "Ah! My friend," he said to Sieyès, "I am finally leaving this world, where the heart must either break or harden —" Those are certainly not the words of a dying Frenchman.

96 Two Speakers. — Of these two speakers, one reaches the full reason of his cause only when he gives himself up to passion. Only passion pumps enough blood and heat into his brain to force his high intellect out into the open. The other may try the same thing here and there: with the help of passion he presents his cause in full, forceful, sweeping tones. But usually with poor results. Soon he is speaking in the dark and in confusion. He exaggerates, leaves things out, and makes the listener distrust the reason behind his cause. He feels this distrust himself, and from it come sudden jumps into the coldest and most off-putting tones, which make the listener doubt whether his passion was genuine at all. In him passion always floods the mind, perhaps because it is stronger than in the first. But he is at the height of his power when he resists the storm of feeling rushing at him, and, so to speak, mocks it. Only then does his mind fully step out of its hiding place: a logical, mocking, playful, and yet terrible mind.

97 On the Talkativeness of Writers.

There is a talkativeness of anger, frequent in Luther and also in Schopenhauer. There is talkativeness that comes from having too large a supply of conceptual formulas, as in Kant. There is talkativeness from enjoying endless new turns of the same matter, which you find in Montaigne. There is the talkativeness of spiteful natures: anyone who reads writings from this period will remember two writers here. There is talkativeness from delight in fine words and linguistic forms, not rare in Goethe's prose. And there is talkativeness from an inner pleasure in the noise and confusion of feelings, for example in Carlyle.

98 In Praise of Shakespeare. — The best thing I can say in praise of Shakespeare the man is this: he believed in Brutus, and he did not throw a speck of doubt on that kind of virtue! He dedicated his best tragedy to Brutus, though it still goes by a false name. He dedicated it to Brutus and to the most terrible sum of high morality. What matters here is the independence of the soul! No sacrifice can be too big for it. You must be able to sacrifice even your dearest friend to it, even if he is the most splendid person, the pride of the world, a genius without equal, provided that you love freedom as the freedom of great souls, and that freedom is put at risk by him. This is how Shakespeare must have felt. The height to which he raises Caesar is the highest honor he could give Brutus. Only that way does he make Brutus's inner problem enormous, and the strength of soul that could cut through this knot too! And was it really political freedom that made this poet sympathize with Brutus, and made him, in a way, Brutus's accomplice?

Or was political freedom only a symbol for something that cannot be put into words? Are we perhaps facing some dark event and adventure from the poet's own soul, which stayed unknown, and about which he would speak only in signs? What is all of Hamlet's melancholy next to the melancholy of Brutus! Perhaps Shakespeare knew this too, the way he knew the other one, from experience! Perhaps he too had his dark hour and his evil angel, like Brutus! But whatever resemblances and hidden connections there were of this kind, Shakespeare threw himself to the ground before the whole figure and virtue of Brutus, and felt unworthy and far away. He wrote the proof of this into his tragedy. Twice in it he brings on a poet, and twice he pours such impatient, final contempt on him that it sounds like a cry, the cry of self-contempt. Brutus himself loses patience when the poet appears: conceited, pompous, pushy, the way poets tend to be, a being who seems to be bursting with possibilities of greatness, including moral greatness, and yet who in the philosophy of deeds and life rarely gets as far as ordinary decency. "If he knows the time, I know his whims. Away with the bell-ringing clown!" cries Brutus. Translate this back into the soul of the poet who wrote it.

99 The Followers of Schopenhauer. — When cultured peoples meet barbarians, one can see the same pattern every time. The lower culture first takes on the vices, weaknesses and excesses of the higher culture. It feels drawn to them, and finally, through the vices and weaknesses it has picked up, lets some of the valuable strength of the higher culture flow into itself. You can see this close at hand too, without traveling to barbarian peoples, though it is a little more refined and spiritual, and harder to grasp. What, then, do Schopenhauer's followers in Germany first take from their master? Compared with his superior culture, they must feel barbaric enough to be first fascinated and seduced by him in a barbaric way. Is it his hard sense of facts and his good will toward clarity and reason, which so often makes him seem so English and so little German? Or the strength of his intellectual conscience, which bore a lifelong contradiction between being and willing, and forced him to contradict himself constantly, almost at every point, in his writings? Or his cleanliness in matters of the church and the Christian God? In this he was cleaner than any German philosopher before him, so that he lived and died "as a Voltairean." Or his immortal teachings about the intellectual nature of perception, the a priori character of the law of causality, the tool-like nature of the intellect and the unfreedom of the will? No, none of this enchants people, and it is not felt as enchanting. What people feel as enchanting are Schopenhauer's mystical embarrassments and evasions, in the places where the fact-based thinker let himself be led astray and ruined by the vain urge to be the solver of the world's riddle. There is the unprovable doctrine of one will ("all causes are only occasional causes of the appearance of the will at this time and in this place," "the will to live is present in every being, even the smallest, wholly and undivided, as completely as in all who have ever been, are, or will be, taken together"). There is the denial of the individual ("all lions are at bottom only one lion," "the multitude of individuals is an illusion," and development too is only an appearance; he calls Lamarck's idea "a brilliant, absurd error"). There is the raptures about genius ("in aesthetic contemplation the individual is no longer an individual, but a pure, willless, painless, timeless subject of knowledge," "the subject, by completely dissolving into the object it contemplates, has itself become that object"). There is the nonsense about pity, and the breaking-through of the principium individuationis that pity supposedly makes possible, as the source of all morality. Add assertions such as "dying is really the purpose of existence," and "one cannot flatly deny, a priori, that a magical effect might also come from someone who has already died." These and similar excesses and vices of the philosopher are always the first to be taken up and turned into matters of faith. Vices and excesses are always the easiest to copy, and they do not require long practice. But let us speak of the most famous of the living Schopenhauerians, Richard Wagner. He has had the same experience as many artists: he misread the meaning of the figures he created, and failed to recognize the unspoken philosophy of his own most personal art. Richard Wagner let himself be misled by Hegel until the middle of his life. He did the same thing again when he later read Schopenhauer's doctrine out of his figures, and began to describe himself with "will," "genius," and "pity." Still, it will remain true that nothing goes so directly against the spirit of Schopenhauer as what is truly Wagnerian in Wagner's heroes: I mean the innocence of the highest self-interest, the faith in great passion as good in itself, in a word, the Siegfried-like quality in the faces of his heroes. "All this smells more of Spinoza than of me," Schopenhauer might say. So Wagner had good reasons to look for other philosophers than Schopenhauer! But the enchantment he fell under with this thinker has made him blind not only to all other philosophers, but even to science itself. More and more his whole art wants to present itself as a companion piece and supplement to Schopenhauer's philosophy, and more and more openly it gives up the higher ambition of becoming a companion piece and supplement to human knowledge and science. And it is not only the mysterious display of this philosophy that tempts him. It would have tempted a Cagliostro too! The individual gestures and feelings of philosophers were always seducers as well! Schopenhauerian, for example, is Wagner's zeal against the corruption of the German language. And if one were to approve of him imitating this, it must still not be kept quiet that Wagner's own style suffers not a little from all the sores and swellings whose sight made Schopenhauer so furious. And that, as regards German-writing Wagnerians, Wagnerism is beginning to prove as dangerous as any Hegelianism ever did. Schopenhauerian is Wagner's hatred of the Jews, whom he cannot even do justice to in their greatest achievement: after all, the Jews invented Christianity! Schopenhauerian is Wagner's attempt to understand Christianity as a grain of Buddhism blown in on the wind, and, for Europe, to prepare a Buddhist age, with temporary moves toward Catholic-Christian formulas and feelings. Schopenhauerian is Wagner's sermon in favor of mercy toward animals. Schopenhauer's predecessor in this was, as is well known, Voltaire, who perhaps already knew, like his successors, how to dress up his hatred of certain things and people as mercy toward animals. At any rate, Wagner's hatred of science, which speaks from his sermon, is certainly not inspired by a spirit of gentleness and goodness, nor, as goes without saying, by the spirit in general. — In the end, little depends on an artist's philosophy, as long as it is only an afterthought and does no harm to his art itself. One cannot be careful enough not to become angry at an artist over some occasional masquerade, perhaps very unhappy and presumptuous. Let us not forget that our dear artists, all of them, are and must be a little like actors, and that without acting they would hardly last long. Let us stay faithful to Wagner in what is true and original in him, and above all by being faithful, we his followers, to what is true and original in ourselves. Let us allow him his intellectual whims and cramps. Rather, let us consider fairly what strange nourishment and needs an art like his must have in order to live and grow! It does not matter that he is so often wrong as a thinker. Justice and patience are not his business. It is enough that his life is right in its own eyes and stays right: this life that calls to each of us, "Be a man, and do not follow me, but yourself! Yourself!" Our life, too, should be right in our own eyes! We too should grow and bloom out of ourselves, free and fearless, in innocent selfhood! And so when I think about such a man, these sentences still ring in my ears today as they did before: that passion is better than stoicism and hypocrisy; that honesty, even in evil, is better than losing oneself to the morality of custom; that a free person can be both good and evil, but an unfree person is a disgrace to nature and has no share in any heavenly or earthly comfort; and finally that everyone who wants to become free must become free through himself, and that freedom does not fall into anyone's lap as a miraculous gift. (Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, p. 94.)

100 Learning to Pay Homage. — People have to learn to pay homage just as they learn to despise. Anyone who walks new paths and has led many others onto them discovers, with astonishment, how clumsy and poor these many are in showing their gratitude, and how rarely gratitude can express itself at all. It is as if something always gets stuck in their throat when they want to speak, so that they only clear their throat, and in clearing it fall silent again. The way a thinker learns about the effect of his thoughts, and their power to reshape and shake people, is almost comic. Sometimes it looks as if the people affected feel insulted at bottom, and know only how to show their independence, which they fear is threatened, through all kinds of bad manners. Whole generations are needed just to invent a polite convention of thanks. And only very late does the moment come when some spirit and genius has entered gratitude itself. Then there is usually someone who is the great recipient of thanks, not only for what he himself has done that is good, but mostly for what his predecessors gradually piled up as a treasure of the highest and best.

101 Voltaire. — Wherever there was a court, he set the rule for speaking well, and with it the rule of style for everyone who wrote. But court language is the language of the courtier, who has no profession, and who forbids himself, even in conversation about scientific matters, every convenient technical term, because it smells of a trade. So in countries with a court culture, technical language and everything that betrays the specialist counts as a flaw in style. Now that all courts have become caricatures of what they once were, people are surprised to find that even Voltaire was unbearably prim and fussy on this point, for example in his judgments of stylists such as Fontenelle and Montesquieu. We have all been freed from courtly taste, while Voltaire was its finisher!

102 A Word for the Philologists. — There are books so valuable and royal that whole generations of scholars are well spent if their work keeps these books pure and understandable. Philology exists to keep this belief alive. It assumes that there is no shortage of those rare people (though you do not see them) who really know how to use such valuable books. They will probably be the ones who write such books themselves, or could. I mean that philology assumes a noble faith: that for the sake of a few, who will always "come" and are never here, a very large amount of tedious, even unclean work must first be done. It is all work in usum Delphinorum.

103 On German Music. — German music is more European than any other kind of music, for a simple reason: only in German music has the change Europe went through in the Revolution found expression. Only German musicians know how to express moving masses of people, that huge, artificial noise that does not even have to be very loud. Italian opera, for example, knows choruses of servants or soldiers, but no "people." There is more to it. You can hear in all German music a deep middle-class jealousy of the nobility, especially of esprit and élégance, the marks of a courtly, chivalric, old society that is sure of itself. This is not music like that of Goethe's singer at the gate, which pleases "in the hall" too, and in fact pleases the king. There one does not hear, "The knights looked bravely on, and the lovely ladies sat in their laps." Even grace appears in German music only with a twinge of guilt. Only with charm, the country sister of grace, does the German begin to feel fully moral. From there he rises more and more, up to his enthusiastic, learned, often grumpy "sublimity," the sublimity of Beethoven. If you want to imagine the person who belongs to this music, picture Beethoven standing next to Goethe, as perhaps at that meeting in Teplitz. He looks like half-barbarism beside culture, the common people beside the nobility, the good-natured man beside the good and even more than "good" man, the fantast beside the artist, the one who needs comfort beside the one who has been comforted, the exaggerator and suspicious man beside the reasonable one, the hunter of whims and the self-tormentor, the wildly ecstatic, the blessedly unhappy, the candidly immoderate, the presumptuous and clumsy. All in all, he is the "untamed man." That is how Goethe himself felt and described him. Goethe was the exceptional German, and a music worthy of him has not yet been found! Finally, consider whether the growing contempt for melody among Germans, and the stunting of their sense for it, should not be understood as a democratic bad manner, an aftereffect of the Revolution. Melody takes such open pleasure in lawfulness and such dislike of anything still forming, unshaped or arbitrary that it sounds like a voice from the old order of European things, and like a lure that pulls people back toward it.

104 On the Sound of the German Language. — We know where the German that has been the standard written language for a few centuries comes from. The Germans, with their reverence for everything that came from the court, deliberately took the government offices as their model for everything they had to write: especially letters, documents, wills and so on. To write in office style was to write like the court and the government. That was something refined, set against the German of whatever town you happened to live in. Gradually people drew the conclusion that they should also speak the way they wrote. So they became even more refined, in word forms, in the choice of words and phrases, and finally in sound. When people spoke, they affected a courtly sound, and the affectation eventually became natural. Perhaps something very similar has happened nowhere else: the written style came to dominate speech, and the pretension and showing-off of a whole people became the basis of a common language that was no longer dialect. I believe the sound of German in the Middle Ages, and especially after them, was deeply rural and common. In the last few centuries it has become somewhat more polished, mainly because people found they had to copy so many French, Italian and Spanish sounds. This came especially from the German and Austrian nobility, who could not be satisfied with their mother tongue. But for Montaigne, or even Racine, German must have sounded unbearably vulgar despite all this practice. Even now, in the mouths of travelers in the middle of an Italian crowd, it still sounds very raw, backwoodsy and hoarse, as if it came from smoky rooms and rude regions. Now I notice that among the former admirers of the office style, a similar drive for a noble sound is spreading again. Germans are beginning to submit to a very odd "magic of sound," which could in the long run become a real danger to the German language. You will not find more hideous sounds anywhere in Europe. Something mocking, cold, indifferent and careless in the voice: this now sounds "refined" to Germans. I hear the good will toward this refinement in the voices of young civil servants, teachers, women and merchants. Even little girls are already copying this officer's German. The officer, and specifically the Prussian officer, is the inventor of these sounds. He is the same officer who, as a soldier and a professional, has that admirable tact of modesty from which all Germans should learn, the German professors and musicians included! But as soon as he speaks and moves, he is the most immodest and tasteless figure in old Europe, unaware of it, without any doubt! And the good Germans are unaware of it too. They marvel at him as a man of the first and most distinguished society, and gladly let him set the tone for them. And he does set it! The first to copy and coarsen his tone are the sergeants and corporals. Pay attention to the shouted commands that now fill the German towns, since they drill outside all the gates. What arrogance, what raging sense of authority, what scornful coldness rings out of that bellowing! Are Germans really a musical people? What is certain is that Germans are now becoming militarized in the sound of their language. It is likely that once they are trained to speak like soldiers, they will in the end write like soldiers too. The habit of certain sounds reaches deep into character. Soon you have the words and phrases, and finally the thoughts, that fit exactly this sound! Perhaps people already write in the officer's manner. Perhaps I read too little of what is being written in Germany now. But one thing I know all the more surely: the public German statements that reach even foreign countries are not inspired by German music. They are inspired by that new sound of a tasteless presumption. Almost every speech by the first German statesman, even when he speaks through his imperial mouthpiece, has an accent that a foreigner's ear rejects with disgust. But the Germans put up with it. They put up with themselves.

105 The Germans as Artists. — When a German really gets into a passion (and not just, as usual, into the good will to feel passion!), he behaves as he has to within it, and does not think any more about how he is behaving. The truth, however, is that in passion he behaves very awkwardly and ugly, as if he had no tact or melody. So the onlookers have their pain or their emotion from it, and nothing more. The exception is when he lifts himself into the sublime and the rapturous, which some passions are capable of. Then even the German becomes beautiful! The sense of the height at which beauty first pours its spell even over Germans drives German artists upward, into excess and overreach of passion. So there is a real, deep longing to get past ugliness and clumsiness, or at least to look beyond them toward a better, lighter, more southern, sunny world. Their spasms are often just signs that they would like to dance. These poor bears, in whom hidden nymphs and forest gods carry on, and sometimes even higher deities!

106 Music as Advocate. — "I thirst for a master of the art of sound," an innovator said to his disciple. "He should learn my thoughts from me and speak them in his language. Then I would reach people's ears and hearts better. With tones you can lead people into any error and any truth. Who could refute a tone?" "So you would like to be considered irrefutable?" said his disciple. The innovator answered: "I want the seed to become a tree. For a teaching to become a tree, it must be believed for a good while. For it to be believed, it must be considered irrefutable. The tree needs storms, doubts, worms and malice, so that it reveals the kind and strength of its seed. Let it break if it is not strong enough! But a seed is only ever destroyed, never refuted!" When he had said this, his disciple cried out eagerly: "But I believe in your cause, and I think it is so strong that I will say everything, absolutely everything, that I still have on my heart against it." The innovator laughed to himself and wagged a finger at him. "This kind of discipleship is the best," he said, "but it is dangerous, and not every kind of teaching can bear it."

107 Our Last Thanks to Art. — If we had not approved of the arts, and invented this kind of cult of the untrue, then the insight into universal untruth and deceit that science now gives us, the insight that delusion and error are a condition of life that knows and feels, would be unbearable. Honesty would bring disgust and suicide in its wake. As it is, our honesty has a counterforce that helps us avoid such consequences: art, as the good will toward appearance. We do not always keep our eyes from rounding things off, from finishing the poem. Then it is no longer the endless imperfection we carry across the river of becoming. Then we think we are carrying a goddess, and we are proud and childlike in this service. As an aesthetic phenomenon, existence is still bearable to us. Through art we have been given eyes, hands and above all a good conscience, to be able to make such a phenomenon out of ourselves. At times we have to rest from ourselves, by looking at ourselves from above and below and, from an artistic distance, laughing or weeping at ourselves. We must discover the hero and also the fool hidden in our passion for knowledge. We must now and then be glad of our folly, so that we can remain glad of our wisdom! And precisely because at bottom we are heavy, serious people, more weights than people, nothing does us as much good as the jester's cap. We need it in front of ourselves. We need all high-spirited, floating, dancing, mocking, childlike and blessed art, so as not to lose that freedom above things which our ideal demands of us. It would be a relapse for us to fall completely into morality with our touchy honesty, and, because of the overly strict demands we make on ourselves here, to turn into moral monsters and scarecrows. We should be able to stand above morality too: not just stand there, with the anxious stiffness of someone who is afraid of slipping and falling every moment, but float above it and play! How could we manage that without art, and without the fool? And as long as you are still ashamed of yourselves in any way, you do not yet belong to us!

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Book II is part of The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche. This page sets the German original beside 2 direct-source translations, so any line can be checked against the source. It is book 5 of 9 in the work, which is kept in the European tradition.

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