No More Learning

—The Greeks (or at least the
Athenians) liked to hear good talking: indeed
they had an eager inclination for it, which dis-
tinguished them more than anything else from
non-Greeks. And so they required good talking
even from passion on the stage, and submitted to
the unnaturalness of dramatic verse with delight:
—in nature, forsooth, passion is so sparing of words!
so dumb and confused! Or if it finds words, so
embarrassed and irrational and a shame to itself!
We have now, all of us, thanks to the Greeks,
accustomed ourselves to this unnaturalness on the
stage, as we endure that other unnaturalness, the
singing passion, and willingly endure it, thanks to
the Italians. —It has become a necessity to us, which
we cannot satisfy out of the resources of actuality,
to hear men talk well and in full detail in the most


## p. 111 (#142) ############################################

IIO THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II
see with some pleasure what everyone is in him-
self, what he experiences and aims at: it is only
they who have taught us how to estimate the hero
that is concealed in each of these common-place
men, and the art of looking at ourselves from a
distance as heroes, and as it were simplified and
transfigured,—the art of " putting ourselves on the
stage" before ourselves. It is thus only that we
get beyond some of the paltry details in ourselves!
Without that art we should be nothing but fore-
ground, and would live absolutely under the spell
of the perspective which makes the closest and the
commonest seem immensely large and like reality
in itself. —Perhaps there is merit of a similar kind
in the religion which commanded us to look at the
sinfulness of every individual man with a magnify-
ing-glass, and to make a great, immortal criminal
out of the sinner; in that it put eternal per-
spectives around man, it taught him to see himself
from a distance, and as something past, something
entire.
79-
The Charm of Imperfection. —I see here a poet,
who, like so many men, exercises a higher charm
by his imperfections than by all that is rounded off
and takes perfect shape under his hands,—indeed,
he derives his advantage and reputation far more
from his actual limitations than from his abun-
dant powers. His work never expresses altogether
what he would really like to express, what he
would like to have seen: he appears to have had
the foretaste of a vision and never the vision


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THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II III
itself:—but an extraordinary longing for this vision
has remained in his soul; and from this he
derives his equally extraordinary eloquence of
longing and craving. With this he raises those
who listen to him above his work and above all
"works," and gives them wings to rise higher than
hearers have ever risen before, thus making them
poets and seers themselves; they then show an ad-
miration for the originator of their happiness, as if
he had led them immediately to the vision of his
holiest and ultimate verities, as if he had reached
his goal, and had actually seen and communicated
his vision. It is to the advantage of his reputa-
tion that he has not really arrived at his goal.
80.
Art and Nature. —The Greeks (or at least the
Athenians) liked to hear good talking: indeed
they had an eager inclination for it, which dis-
tinguished them more than anything else from
non-Greeks. And so they required good talking
even from passion on the stage, and submitted to
the unnaturalness of dramatic verse with delight:
—in nature, forsooth, passion is so sparing of words!
so dumb and confused! Or if it finds words, so
embarrassed and irrational and a shame to itself!
We have now, all of us, thanks to the Greeks,
accustomed ourselves to this unnaturalness on the
stage, as we endure that other unnaturalness, the
singing passion, and willingly endure it, thanks to
the Italians. —It has become a necessity to us, which
we cannot satisfy out of the resources of actuality,
to hear men talk well and in full detail in the most


## p. 111 (#144) ############################################

I IO THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II
see with some pleasure what everyone is in him-
self, what he experiences and aims at: it is only
they who have taught us how to estimate the hero
that is concealed in each of these common-place
men, and the art of looking at ourselves from a
distance as heroes, and as it were simplified and
transfigured,—the art of " putting ourselves on the
stage" before ourselves. It is thus only that we
get beyond some of the paltry details in ourselves!
Without that art we should be nothing but fore-
ground, and would live absolutely under the spell
of the perspective which makes the closest and the
commonest seem immensely large and like reality
in itself. —Perhaps there is merit of a similar kind
in the religion which commanded us to look at the
sinfulness of every individual man with a magnify-
ing-glass, and to make a great, immortal criminal
out of the sinner; in that it put eternal per-
spectives around man, it taught him to see himself
from a distance, and as something past, something
entire.
79-
The Charm of Imperfection. —I see here a poet,
who, like so many men, exercises a higher charm
by his imperfections than by all that is rounded off
and takes perfect shape under his hands,—indeed,
he derives his advantage and reputation far more
from his actual limitations than from his abun-
dant powers. His work never expresses altogether
what he would really like to express, what he
would like to have seen: he appears to have had
the foretaste of a vision and never the vision


## p. 111 (#145) ############################################

THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II III
itself:—but an extraordinary longing for this vision
has remained in his soul; and from this he
derives his equally extraordinary eloquence of
longing and craving. With this he raises those
who listen to him above his work and above all
"works," and gives them wings to rise higher than
hearers have ever risen before, thus making them
poets and seers themselves; they then show an ad-
miration for the originator of their happiness, as if
he had led them immediately to the vision of his
holiest and ultimate verities, as if he had reached
his goal, and had actually seen and communicated
his vision. It is to the advantage of his reputa-
tion that he has not really arrived at his goal.
80.
Art and Nature. —The Greeks (or at least the
Athenians) liked to hear good talking: indeed
they had an eager inclination for it, which dis-
tinguished them more than anything else from
non-Greeks. And so they required good talking
even from passion on the stage, and submitted to
the unnaturalness of dramatic verse with delight:
—in nature, forsooth, passion is so sparing of words!
so dumb and confused! Or if it finds words, so
embarrassed and irrational and a shame to itself!
We have now, all of us, thanks to the Greeks,
accustomed ourselves to this unnaturalness on the
stage, as we endure that other unnaturalness, the
singing passion, and willingly endure it, thanks to
the Italians. —It has become a necessity to us, which
we cannot satisfy out of the resources of actuality,
to hear men talk well and in full detail in the most


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112 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II
trying situations: it enraptures us at present when
the tragic hero still finds words, reasons, eloquent
gestures, and on the whole a bright spirituality,
where life approaches the abysses, and where the
actual man mostly loses his head, and certainly
his fine language. This kind of deviation from
nature is perhaps the most agreeable repast for
man's pride: he loves art generally on account of
it, as the expression of high, heroic unnatural-
ness and convention. One rightly objects to the
dramatic poet when he does not transform every-
thing into reason and speech, but always retains a
remnant of silence:—just as one is dissatisfied with
an operatic musician who cannot find a melody
for the highest emotion, but only an emotional,
"natural" stammering and crying. Here nature
has to be contradicted! Here the common
charm of illusion has to give place to a higher
charm! The Greeks go far, far in this direction
—frightfully far! As they constructed the stage
as narrow as possible and dispensed with all the
effect of deep backgrounds, as they made panto-
mime and easy motion impossible to the actor, and
transformed him into a solemn, stiff, masked bogey,
so they have also deprived passion itself of its deep
background, and have dictated to it a law of fine
talk; indeed, they have really done everything to
counteract the elementary effect of representa-
tions that inspire pity and terror: they did not
want pity and terror,—with due deference, with
the highest deference to Aristotle! but he
certainly did not hit the nail, to say nothing
of the head of the nail, when he spoke about the


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THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II I13
final aim of Greek tragedy! Let us but look at
the Grecian tragic poets with respect to what most
excited their diligence, their inventiveness, and their
emulation,—certainly it was not the intention of
subjugating the spectators by emotion! The
Athenian went to the theatre to hear fine talking!
And fine talking was arrived at by Sophocles! —
pardon me this heresy! —It is very different with
serious opera: all its masters make it their business
to prevent their personages being understood.
"An occasional word picked up may come to the
assistance of the inattentive listener; but on the
whole the situation must be self-explanatory,—
the talking is of no account! "—so they all think,
and so they have all made fun of the words.
Perhaps they have only lacked courage to express
fully their extreme contempt for words: a little
additional insolence in Rossini, and he would have
allowed la-la-la-la to be sung throughout—and it
might have been the rational course! The person-
ages of the opera are not meant to be believed
"in their words," but in their tones! That is the
difference, that is the fine unnaturalness on account
of which people go to the opera! Even the recita-
tivo secco is not really intended to be heard as
words and text: this kind of half-music is meant
rather in the first place to give the musical ear a
little repose (the repose from melody, as from the
sublimest, and on that account the most straining
enjoyment of this art),—but very soon something
different results, namely, an increasing impatience,
an increasing resistance, a new longing for entire
music, for melody. —How is it with the art of
8


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114 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II
Richard Wagner as seen from this standpoint? Is
it perhaps the same? Perhaps otherwise? It would
often seem to me as if one needed to have learned
by heart both the words and the music of his
creations before the performances; for without
that—so it seemed to me—one may hear neither
the words, nor even the music.
81.
Grecian Taste. —" What is beautiful in it ? "—
asked a certain geometrician, after a performance
of the Iphigenia—" there is nothing proved in it! "
Could the Greeks have been so far from this taste?
In Sophocles at least "everything is proved. "
82.
Esprit Un-Grecian. —The Greeks were exceed-
ingly logical and plain in all their thinking; they
did not get tired of it, at least during their long
flourishing period, as is so often the case with the
French; who too willingly made a little excursion
into the opposite, and in fact endure the spirit of
logic only when it betrays its sociable courtesy,
its sociable self-renunciation, by a multitude of
such little excursions into its opposite. Logic
appears to them as necessary as bread and water,
but also like these as a kind of prison-fare, as soon
as it is to be taken pure and by itself. In good
society one must never want to be in the right
absolutely and solely, as all pure logic requires;
hence, the little dose of irrationality in all French
esprit. —The social sense of the Greeks was far
less developed than that of the French in the


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THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II IIS
present and the past; hence, so little esprit in their
cleverest men, hence, so little wit, even in their wags,
hence—alas! But people will not readily believe
these tenets of mine, and how much of the kind
I have still on my soul! —Est res magna tacere
—says Martial, like all garrulous people.
S3-
Translations. —One can estimate the amount of
the historical sense which an age possesses by the
way in which it makes translations and seeks to
embody in itself past periods and literatures.
The French of Corneille, and even the French of
the Revolution, appropriated Roman antiquity in a
manner for which we would no longer have the
courage—owing to our superior historical sense.
And Roman antiquity itself: how violently, and
at the same time how naively, did it lay its hand
on everything excellent and elevated belonging to
the older Grecian antiquity! How they trans-
lated these writings into the Roman present!
How they wiped away intentionally and uncon-
cernedly the wing-dust of the butterfly moment!
It is thus that Horace now and then translated
Alcaeus or Archilochus, it is thus that Propertius
translated Callimachus and Philetas (poets of
equal rank with Theocritus, if we be allowed to
judge): of what consequence was it to them that
the actual creator experienced this and that, and
had inscribed the indication thereof in his poem ! —
as poets they were averse to the antiquarian,
inquisitive spirit which precedes the historical
sense; as poets they did not respect those essenti-


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Il6 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II
ally personal traits and names, nor anything
peculiar to city, coast, or century, such as its
costume and mask, but at once put the present
and the Roman in its place. They seem to us to
ask: "Should we not make the old new for our-
selves, and adjust ourselves to it? Should we not
be allowed to inspire this dead body with our soul?
for it is dead indeed: how loathsome is everything
dead ! "—They did not know the pleasure of the
historical sense; the past and the alien was painful
to them, and as Romans it was an incitement to
a Roman conquest. In fact, they conquered
when they translated,—not only in that they
omitted the historical: no, they added also allu-
sions to the present; above all, they struck out the
name of the poet and put their own in its place
—not with the feeling of theft, but with the very
best conscience of the imperium Romanum.
84.
The Origin of Poetry. —The lovers of the fantastic
in man, who at the same time represent the doctrine
of instinctive morality, draw this conclusion:
"Granted that utility has been honoured at all times
as the highest divinity, where then in all the world
has poetry come from ? —this rhythmising of speech
which thwarts rather than furthers plainness of
communication, and which, nevertheless, has sprung
up everywhere on the earth, and still springs up,
as a mockery of all useful purpose! The wildly
beautiful irrationality of poetry refutes you, ye
utilitarians! The wish to get rid of utility in
some way—that is precisely what has elevated


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THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II 117
man, that is what has inspired him to morality and
art! " Well, I must here speak for once to please
the utilitarians,—they are so seldom in the right
that it is pitiful! In the old times which called
poetry into being, people had still utility in view
with respect to it, and a very important utility—
at the time when rhythm was introduced into
speech, the force which arranges all the particles
of the sentence anew, commands the choosing of
the words, recolours the thought, and makes it more
obscure, more foreign, and more distant: to be sure
a superstitious utility! It was intended that a
human entreaty should be more profoundly im-
pressed upon the Gods by virtue of rhythm, after
it had been observed that men could remember
a verse better than an unmetrical speech. It was
likewise thought that people could make them-
selves audible at greater distances by the rhythmi-
cal beat; the rhythmical prayer seemed to come
nearer to the ear of the Gods. Above all, however,
people wanted to have the advantage of the
elementary conquest which man experiences in
himself when he hears music: rhythm is a con-
straint; it produces an unconquerable desire to
yield, to join in; not only the step of the foot,
but also the soul itself follows the measure,—
probably the spul of the Gods also, as people
thought! They attempted, therefore, to constrain
the Gods by rhythm and to exercise a power over
them; they threw poetry around the Gods like a
magic noose. There was a still more wonderful
idea, and it has perhaps operated most powerfully
of all in the originating of poetry. Among the


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Il8 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II
/
Pythagoreans it made its appearance as a philoso-
phical doctrine and as an artifice of teaching: but
long before there were philosophers music was
acknowledged to possess the power of unburdening
the emotions, of purifying the soul, of soothing
the ferocia animi—and this was owing to the
rhythmical element in music. When the proper
tension and harmony of the soul were lost a person
had to dance to the measure of the singer,—that
was the recipe of this medical art. By means of it
Terpander quieted a tumult, Empedocles calmed a
maniac, Damon purged a love-sick youth; by
means of it even the maddened, revengeful Gods
were treated for the purpose of a cure. First of
all, it was by driving the frenzy and wantonness
of their emotions to the highest pitch, by making
the furious mad, and the revengeful intoxicated
with vengeance:—all the orgiastic cults seek to
discharge the ferocia of a deity all at once and
thus make an orgy, so that the deity may feel freer
and quieter afterwards, and leave man in peace.
Melos, according to its root, signifies a soothing
means, not because the song is gentle itself, but
because its after-effect makes gentle. —And not
only in the religious^song, but also in the secular
song of the most ancient times the prerequisite is
that the rhythm should exercise a magical influence;
for example, in drawing water, or in rowing: the
song is for the enchanting of the spirits supposed to
be active thereby; it makes them obliging, involun-
tary, and the instruments of man. And as often
as a person acts he has occasion to sing, every
action is dependent on the assistance of spirits;


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THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II 119
magic song and incantation appear to be the
original form of poetry. When verse also came to
be used in oracles—the Greeks said that the
hexameter was invented at Delphi,—the rhythm
was here also intended to exercise a compulsory
influence. To make a prophecy—that means
originally (according to what seems to me the
probable derivation of the Greek word) to deter-
mine something; people thought they could deter-
mine the future by winning Apollo over to their
side: he who, according to the most ancient idea, is
far more than a foreseeing deity. According as the
formula is pronounced with literal and rhythmical
correctness, it determines the future: the formula,
however, is the invention of Apollo, who as the
God of rhythm, can also determine the goddesses
of fate. —Looked at and investigated as a whole,
was there ever anything more serviceable to the
ancient superstitious species of human being than
rhythm? People could do everything with it:
they could make labour go on magically; they
could compel a God to appear, to be near at hand,
and listen to them; they could arrange the future
for themselves according to their will; they could
unburden their own souls of any kind of excess (of
anxiety, of mania, of sympathy, of revenge), and
not only their own soul, but the souls of the most
evil spirits,—without verse a person was nothing,
by means of verse a person became almost a God.
Such a fundamental feeling no longer allows itself
to be fully eradicated,—and even now, after mil-
lenniums of long labour in combating such supersti-
tion, the very wisest of us occasionally becomes the


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120 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II
fool of rhythm, be it only that one perceives a
thought to be truer when it has a metrical form
and approaches with a divine hopping. Is it not
a very funny thing that the most serious philo-
sophers, however anxious they are in other respects
for strict certainty, still appeal to poetical sayings in
order to give their thoughts force and credibility?
—and yet it is more dangerous to a truth when the
poet assents to it than when he contradicts it!
For, as Homer says, "The singers speak much
falsehood! "—
85.
The Good and the Beautiful. —Artists glorify
continually—they do nothing else,—and indeed
they glorify all those conditions and things that
have a reputation, so that man may feel himself
good or great, or intoxicated, or merry, or pleased
and wise by it. Those select things and conditions
whose value for human happiness is regarded
as secure and determined, are the objects of
artists: they are ever lying in wait to discover
such things, to transfer them into the domain of
art. I mean to say that they are not themselves
the valuers of happiness and of the happy ones,
but they always press close to these valuers with
the greatest curiosity and longing, in order
immediately to use their valuations advantageously.
As besides their impatience, they have also the
big lungs of heralds and the feet of runners, they
are likewise always among the first to glorify the
new excellency, and often seem to be those who
first of all called it good and valued it as good.


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THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II 121
This, however, as we have said, is an error; they are
only faster and louder than the actual valuers:—
And who then are these? —They are the rich and
the leisurely.
86.
The Theatre. —This day has given me once more
strong and elevated sentiments, and if I could
have music and art in the evening, I know well
what music and art I should not like to have;
namely, none of that which would fain intoxicate
its hearers and excite them to a crisis of strong and
high feeling,—those men with commonplace souls,
who in the evening are not like victors on triumphal
cars, but like tired mules to whom life has rather
too often applied the whip. What would those
men at all know of " higher moods," unless there
were expedients for causing ecstasy and idealistic
strokes of the whip! —and thus they have their
inspirers as they have their wines. But what is
their drink and their drunkenness to me! Does
the inspired one need wine? He rather looks with
a kind of disgust at the agency and the agent which
are here intended to produce an effect without
sufficient reason,—an imitation of the high tide of
the soul! What? One gives the mole wings and
proud fancies—before going to sleep, before he
creeps into his hole? One sends him into the
theatre and puts great magnifying-glasses to his
blind and tired eyes? Men, whose life is not
"action" but business, sit in front of the stage
and look at strange beings to whom life is more
than business? "This is proper," you say, "this


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122 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II
is entertaining, this is what culture wants! "—Well
then! culture is too often lacking in me, for this
sight is too often disgusting to me. He who
has enough of tragedy and comedy in himself
surely prefers to remain away from the theatre;
or, as the exception, the whole procedure—theatre
and public and poet included—becomes for him a
truly tragic and comic play, so that the performed
piece counts for little in comparison. He who is
something like Faust and Manfred, what does it
matter to him about the Fausts and Manfreds of
the theatre! —while it certainly gives him some-
thing to think about that such figures are brought
into the theatre at all. The strongest thoughts and
passions before those who are not capable of thought
and passion—but of intoxication only! And those
as a means to this end! And theatre and music the
hashish-smoking and betel-chewing of Europeans!
Oh, who will narrate to us the whole history of
narcotics! —It is almost the history of "culture,"
the so-called higher culture!
87.
The Conceit of Artists. —I think artists often do
not know what they can do best, because they are
too conceited, and have set their minds on some-
thing loftier than those little plants appear to be,
which can grow up to perfection on their soil,
fresh, rare, and beautiful. The final value of their
own garden and vineyard is superciliously under-
estimated by them, and their love and their insight
are not of the same quality. Here is a musician,
who, more than any one else, has the genius for


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THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II 123
discovering the tones peculiar to suffering. oppressed,
tortured souls, and who can endow even dumb
animals with speech. No one equals him in the
colours of the late autumn, in the indescribably
touching happiness of a last, a final, and all too
short enjoyment; he knows a chord for those secret
and weird midnights of the soul when cause and
effect seem out of joint, and when every instant
something may originate "out of nothing. " He
draws his resources best of all out of the lower
depths of human happiness, and so to speak, out of
its drained goblet, where the bitterest and most
nauseous drops have ultimately, for good or for
ill, commingled with the sweetest. He knows the
weary shuffling along of the soul which can no
longer leap or fly, yea, not even walk; he has the
shy glance of concealed pain, of understanding
without comfort, of leave-taking without avowal;
yea, as the Orpheus of all secret misery, he is greater
than anyone; and in fact much has been added
to art by him which was hitherto inexpressible
and not even thought worthy of art, and which was
only to be scared away, by words, and not grasped
—many small and quite microscopic features of
the soul: yes, he is the master of miniature. But
he does not wish to be so! His character is more
in love with large walls and daring frescoes! He
fails to see that his spirit has a different taste and
inclination, and prefers to sit quietly in the corners
of ruined houses:—concealed in this way, concealed
even from himself, he there paints his proper master-
pieces, all of which are very short, often only one
bar in length,—there only does he become quite


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124 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II
good, great, and perfect, perhaps there only. —But
he does not know it! He is too conceited to
know it.
88.
Earnestness for the Truth. —Earnest for the truth!
What different things men understand by these
words! Just the same opinions, and modes of
demonstration and testing which a thinker regards
as a frivolity in himself, to which he has succumbed
with shame at one time or other,—just the same
opinions may give to an artist, who comes in
contact with them and accepts them temporarily,
the consciousness that the profoundest earnestness
for the truth has now taken hold of him, and that
it is worthy of admiration that, although an artist,
he at the same time exhibits the most ardent
desire for the antithesis of the apparent. It is thus
possible that a person may, just by his pathos of
earnestness, betray how superficially and sparingly
his intellect has hitherto operated in the domain of
knowledge. —And is not everything that we con-
sider important our betrayer? It shows where our
motives lie, and where our motives are altogether
lacking.
89.
Now and Formerly. —Of what consequence is all
our art in artistic products, if that higher art, the
art of the festival, be lost by us? Formerly all
. artistic products were exhibited on the great
festive path of humanity, as tokens of remembrance,
and monuments of high and happy moments.
One now seeks to allure the exhausted and sickly


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THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II 125
from the great suffering path of humanity for a
wanton moment by means of works of art; one
furnishes them with a little ecstasy and insanity.
90.
Lights and Shades. —Books and writings are
different with different thinkers. One writer has
collected together in his book all the rays of light
which he could quickly plunder and carry home
from an illuminating experience; while another
gives only the shadows, and the grey and black
replicas of that which on the previous day had
towered up in his soul.
91.
Precaution. — Alfieri, as is well known, told a
great many falsehoods when he narrated the
history of his life to his astonished contemporaries.
He told falsehoods owing to the despotism toward
himself which he exhibited, for example, in the
way in which he created his own language, and
tyrannised himself into a poet:—he finally found
a rigid form of sublimity into which he forced his
life and his memory; he must have suffered much
in the process. —I would also give no credit to a
history of Plato's life written by himself, as little as
to Rousseau's, or to the Vita nuova of Dante.
92.
Prose and Poetry. —Let it be observed that the
great masters of prose have almost always been
poets as well, whether openly, or only in secret and


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126 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II
for the " closet"; and in truth one only writes good
prose in view of poetry! For prose is an uninter-
rupted, polite warfare with poetry; all its charm
consists in the fact that poetry is constantly avoided,
and contradicted; every abstraction wants to have
a gibe at poetry, and wishes to be uttered with a
mocking voice; all dryness and coolness is meant
to bring the amiable goddess into an amiable
despair; there are often approximations and recon-
ciliations for the moment, and then a sudden recoil
and a burst of laughter; the curtain is often drawn
up and dazzling light let in just while the goddess
is enjoying her twilights and dull colours; the
word is often taken out of her mouth and chanted'
to a melody while she holds her fine hands before
her delicate little ears — and so there are a
thousand enjoyments of the warfare, the defeats
included, of which the unpoetic, the so-called
prose - men know nothing at all: — they conse-
quently write and speak only bad prose! Warfare
is the father of all good things, it is also the father
of good prose! —There have been four very singular
and truly poetical men in this century who have
arrived at mastership in prose, for which other-
wise this century is not suited, owing to lack of
poetry, as we have indicated. Not to take Goethe
into account, for he is reasonably claimed by the
century that produced him, I look only on Giacomo
Leopardi, Prosper Merimce, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
and Walter Savage Landor, the author of Imaginary
Conversations, as worthy to be called masters of
prose.


## p. 127 (#161) ############################################

THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II 127
93-
But why, then, do you Write ? —A: I do not
belong to those who think with the wet pen in
hand; and still less to those who yield themselves
entirely to their passions before the open ink-bottle,
sitting on their chair and staring at the paper. I
am always vexed and abashed by writing; writing
is a necessity for me,—even to speak of it in a
simile is disagreeable. B: But why, then, do you
write? A: Well, my dear Sir, to tell you in con-
fidence, I have hitherto found no other means of
getting rid of my thoughts. B: And why do you
wish to get rid of them? A: Why I wish? Do
I really wish! I must. —B: Enough! Enough!
94.
Growth after Death. —Those few daring words
about moral matters which Fontenelle threw
into his immortal Dialogues of the Dead, were
regarded by his age as paradoxes and amusements
of a not unscrupulous wit; even the highest judges
of taste and intellect saw nothing more in them,—
indeed, Fontenelle himself perhaps saw nothing
more. Then something incredible takes place:
these thoughts become truths! Science proves
them! The game becomes serious! And we read
those dialogues with a feeling different from that
with which Voltaire and Helvetius read them, and
we involuntarily raise their originator into another
and much higher class of intellects than they did. —
Rightly? Wrongly?


## p. 128 (#162) ############################################

128 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II
95-
Chamfort. — That such a judge of men and
of the multitude as Chamfort should side with
the multitude, instead of standing apart in philo-
sophical resignation and defence—I am at a loss
to explain, except as follows:—There was an
instinct in him stronger than his wisdom, and
it had never been gratified: the hatred against all
noblesse of blood; perhaps his mother's old and
only too explicable hatred, which was consecrated
in him by love of her,—an instinct of revenge from
his boyhood, which waited for the hour to avenge
his mother. But then the course of his life, his
genius, and alas! most of all, perhaps, the paternal
blood in his veins, had seduced him to rank
and consider himself equal to the noblesse —
for many, many years! In the end, however, he
could not endure the sight of himself, the "old
man" under the old regime, any longer; he got
into a violent, penitential passion, and in this state
he put on the raiment of the populace as his special
kind of hair-shirt! His bad conscience was the
neglect of revenge. —If Chamfort had then been
a little more of the philosopher, the Revolution
would not have had its tragic wit and its sharpest
sting; it would have been regarded as a much
more stupid affair, and would have had no such
seductive influence on men's minds. But Chamfort's
hatred and revenge educated an entire generation;
and the most illustrious men passed through his
school. Let us but consider that Mirabeau looked
up to Chamfort as to his higher and older self,


## p. 129 (#163) ############################################

THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II 129
from whom he expected (and endured) impulses,
warnings, and condemnations,—Mirabeau, who as
a man belongs to an entirely different order of
greatness, as the very foremost among the states-
man-geniuses of yesterday and to-day. —Strange,
that in spite of such a friend and advocate—we
possess Mirabeau's letters to Chamfort — this
wittiest of all moralists has remained unfamiliar
to the French, quite the same as Stendhal, who
has perhaps had the most penetrating eyes and
ears of any Frenchman of this century. Is it
because the latter had really too much of the
German and the Englishman in his nature for
the Parisians to endure him? —while Chamfort,
a man with ample knowledge of the profundities
and secret motives of the soul, gloomy, suffering,
ardent—a thinker who found laughter necessary
as the remedy of life, and who almost gave himself
up as lost every day that he had not laughed,—
seems much more like an Italian, and related by
blood to Dante and Leopardi, than like a French-
man. One knows Chamfort's last words: "Ah/
mon ami" he said to Sieyes, "Je trien vais enfin
de ce monde, oil il faut que le coeur se brise ou se
bronze—. " These were certainly not the words of
a dying Frenchman.
96.
Two Orators. —Of these two orators the one
arrives at a full understanding of his case only
when he yields himself to emotion; it is only this
that pumps sufficient blood and heat into his brain
to compel his high intellectuality to reveal itself,
9


## p. 130 (#164) ############################################

130 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II
The other attempts, indeed, now and then to do
the same: to state his case sonorously, vehe-
mently, and spiritedly with the aid of emotion,
—but usually with bad success. He then very
soon speaks obscurely and confusedly; he exagger-
ates, makes omissions, and excites suspicion of the
justice of his case: indeed, he himself feels this
suspicion, and the sudden changes into the coldest
and most repulsive tones (which raise a doubt in
the hearer as to his passionateness being genuine)
are thereby explicable. With him emotion always
drowns the spirit; perhaps because it is stronger
than in the former. But he is at the height of his
power when he resists the impetuous storm of his
feeling, and as it were scorns it; it is then only
that his spirit emerges fully from its concealment,
a spirit logical, mocking, and playful, but never-
theless awe-inspiring.
97-
The Loquacity of Authors. —There is a loquacity
of anger—frequent in Luther, also in Schopenhauer.
A loquacity which comes from too great a store
of conceptual formulae, as in Kant. A loquacity
which comes from delight in ever new modifications
of the same idea: one finds it in Montaigne. A
loquacity of malicious natures: whoever reads
writings of our period will recollect two authors in
this connection. A loquacity which comes from
delight in fine words and forms of speech: by no
means rare in Goethe's prose. A loquacity which
comes from pure satisfaction in noise and confusion
of feelings: for example in Carlyle.


## p. 131 (#165) ############################################

THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II 131
98.
In Honour of Shakespeare. — The best thing I
could say in honour of Shakespeare, the man, is
that he believed in Brutus and cast not a shadow
of suspicion on the kind of virtue which Brutus
represents! It is to him that Shakespeare conse-
crated his best tragedy—it is at present still called
by a wrong name,—to him and to the most terrible
essence of lofty morality. Independence of soul!
—that is the question at issue! No sacrifice can
be too great there: one must be able to sacrifice
to it even one's dearest friend, though he be also
the grandest of men, the ornament of the world, the
genius without peer,—if one really loves freedom
as the freedom of great souls, and if this freedom
be threatened by him :—it is thus that Shakespeare
must have felt! The elevation in which he places
Caesar is the most exquisite honour he could confer
upon Brutus; it is thus only that he lifts into
vastness the inner problem of his hero, and similarly
the strength of soul which could cut this knot! —
And was it actually political freedom that impelled
the poet to sympathy with Brutus,—and made him
the accomplice of Brutus? Or was political freedom
merely a symbol for something inexpressible? Do
we perhaps stand before some sombre event or
adventure of the poet's own soul, which has remained
unknown, and of which he only cared to speak
symbolically? What is all Hamlet-melancholy
in comparison with the melancholy of Brutus! —
and perhaps Shakespeare also knew this, as he
knew the other, by experience! Perhaps he also had


## p. 132 (#166) ############################################

132 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II
his dark hour and his bad angel, just as Brutus had
them! —But whatever similarities and secret re-
lationships of that kind there may have been,
Shakespeare cast himself on the ground and felt
unworthy and alien in presence of the aspect and
virtue of Brutus:—he has inscribed the testimony
thereof in the tragedy itself. He has twice brought
in a poet in it, and twice heaped upon him such
an impatient and extreme contempt, that it sounds
like a cry,—like the cry of self-contempt. Brutus,
even Brutus loses patience when the poet appears,
self-important, pathetic, and obtrusive, as poets
usually are,—persons who seem to abound in the
possibilities of greatness, even moral greatness,
and nevertheless rarely attain even to ordinary
uprightness in the philosophy of practice and of
life. "He may know the times, but I know his
temper,—away with the jigging fool I"—shouts
Brutus. We may translate this back into the soul
of the poet that composed it.
99-
The Followers of Schopenhauer. —What one sees
at the contact of civilized peoples with barbarians,
—namely, that the lower civilization regularly
accepts in the first place the vices, weaknesses,
and excesses of the higher; then, from that point
onward, feels the influence of a charm; and finally,
by means of the appropriated vices and weaknesses,
also allows something of the valuable influence of
the higher culture to leaven it:—one can also see
this close at hand and without journeys to bar-
barian peoples, to be sure, somewhat refined and


## p. 133 (#167) ############################################

THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II 133
spiritualised, and not so readily palpable. What
are the German followers of Schopenltauer still
accustomed to receive first of all from their master:
—those who, when placed beside his superior culture,
must deem themselves sufficiently barbarous to be
first of all barbarously fascinated and seduced
by him. Is it his hard matter-of-fact sense, his
inclination to clearness and rationality, which often
makes him appear so English, and so unlike
Germans? Or the strength of his intellectual
conscience, which endured a life-long contradiction
of "being" and "willing," and compelled him to
contradict himself constantly even in his writings
on almost every point? Or his purity in matters
relating to the Church and the Christian God ? —
for here he was pure as no German philosopher
had been hitherto, so that he lived and died "as
a Voltairian. " Or his immortal doctrines of the
intellectuality of intuition, the apriority of the law
of causality, the instrumental nature of the intellect,
and the non-freedom of the will? No, nothing of
this enchants, nor is felt as enchanting; but
Schopenhauer's mystical embarrassments and
shufflings in those passages where the matter-of-
fact thinker allowed himself to be seduced and
corrupted by the vain impulse to be the unraveller
of the world's riddle: his undemonstrable doctrine
of one will (" all causes are merely occasional causes
of the phenomenon of the will at such a time and
at such a place," "the will to live, whole and
undivided, is present in every being, even in the
smallest, as perfectly as in the sum of all that
was, is, and will be"); his denial of the


## p. 134 (#168) ############################################

134 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II
individual ("all lions are really only one lion,"
"plurality of individuals is an appearance," as
also development is only an appearance: he calls
the opinion of Lamarck "an ingenious, absurd
error"); his fantasy about genius (" in aesthetic
contemplation the individual is no longer an
individual, but a pure, will-less, painless, timeless
subject of knowledge," "the subject, in that it
entirely merges in the contemplated object, has
become this object itself"); his nonsense about
sympathy, and about the outburst of the principium
individuationis thus rendered possible, as the source
of all morality; including also such assertions as,
"dying is really the design of existence," "the
possibility should not be absolutely denied that
a magical effect could proceed from a person
already dead " :—these, and similar extravagances
and vices of the philosopher, are always first
accepted and made articles of faith; for vices
and extravagances are always easiest to imitate,
and do not require a long preliminary practice.
But let us speak of the most celebrated of the
living Schopenhauerians, Richard Wagner. — 1%
has happened to him as it has already happened
to many an artist: he made a mistake in the
interpretation of the characters he created, and
misunderstood the unexpressed philosophy of
the art peculiarly his own. Richard Wagner
allowed himself to be misled by Hegel's influence
till the middle of his life; and he did the same
again when later on he read Schopenhauer's
doctrine between the lines of his characters, and
began to express himself with such terms as


## p. 135 (#169) ############################################

THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II 135
"will," "genius," and "sympathy. " Nevertheless
it will remain true that nothing is more counter
to Schopenhauer's spirit than the essentially
Wagnerian element in Wagner's heroes: I mean
the innocence of the supremest selfishness, the
belief in strong passion as the good in itself, in a
word, the Siegfried trait in the countenances of
his heroes. "All that still smacks more of Spinoza
than of me,"—Schopenhauer would probably have
said. Whatever good reasons, therefore, Wagner
might have had to be on the outlook for other
philosophers than Schopenhauer, the enchantment
to which he succumbed in respect to this thinker,
not only made him blind towards all other philo-
sophers, but even towards science itself; his entire
art is more and more inclined to become the
counterpart and complement of the Schopen-
hauerian philosophy, and it always renounces more
emphatically the higher ambition to become the
counterpart and complement of human knowledge
and science. And not only is he allured thereto
by the whole mystic pomp of this philosophy
(which would also have allured a Cagliostro), the
peculiar airs and emotions of the philosopher have
all along been seducing him as well! For example,
Wagner's indignation about the corruption of the
German language is Schopenhauerian; and if one
should commend his imitation in this respect, it
is nevertheless not to be denied that Wagner's
style itself suffers in no small degree from all the
tumours and turgidities, the sight of which made
Schopenhauer so furious; and that, in respect to
the German-writing Wagnerians, Wagneromania
s


## p. 136 (#170) ############################################

136 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II
is beginning to be as dangerous as only some kinds
of Hegelomania have been. Schopenhauerian is
Wagner's hatred of the Jews, to whom he
is unable to do justice, even in their greatest
exploit: are not the Jews the inventors of
Christianity! The attempt of Wagner to construe
Christianity as a seed blown away from Buddhism,
and his endeavour to initiate a Buddhistic era in
Europe, under a temporary approximation to
Catholic-Christian formulas and sentiments, are
both Schopenhauerian. Wagner's preaching in
favour of pity in dealing with animals is Schopen-
hauerian; Schopenhauer's predecessor here, as is
well known, was Voltaire, who already perhaps, like
his successors, knew how to disguise his hatred of
certain men and things as pity towards animals.
At least Wagner's hatred of science, which mani-
fests itself in his preaching, has certainly not
been inspired by the spirit of charitableness and
kindness—nor bylthe spirit at all, as is sufficiently
obvious. —Finally, it is of little importance what
the philosophy of an artist is, provided it is only a
supplementary philosophy, and does not do any
injury to his art itself. We cannot be sufficiently on
our guard against taking a dislike to an artist on
account of an occasional, perhaps very unfortunate
and presumptuous masquerade; let us not forget
that the dear artists are all of them something of
actors—and must be so; it would be difficult for
them to hold out in the long run without stage-
playing. Let us be loyal to Wagner in that
which is true and original in him,—and especially
in this point, that we, his disciples, remain loyal


## p. 137 (#171) ############################################

THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II 137
to ourselves in that which is true and original in us.
Let us allow him his intellectual humours and
spasms, let us in fairness rather consider what
strange nutriments and necessaries an art like his
is entitled to, in order to be able to live and grow!
It is of no account that he is often wrong as a
thinker; justice and patience are not his affair. It
is sufficient that his life is right in his own eyes,
and maintains its right,—the life which calls to
each of us: "Be a man, and do not follow me—but
thyself! thyself! " Our life, also ought to main-
tain its right in our own eyes! We also are to
grow and blossom out of ourselves, free and fearless,
in innocent selfishness! And so, on the contem-
plation of such a man, these thoughts still ring in
my ears to-day, as formerly: "That passion is
better than stoicism or hypocrisy; that straight-
forwardness, even in evil, is better than losing
oneself in trying to observe traditional morality;
that the free man is just as able to be good as
evil, but that the unemancipated man is a disgrace
to nature, and has no share in heavenly or earthly
bliss; finally, that all who wish to be free-must
become so through themselves, and that freedom falls
to nobody's lot as a gift from Heaven. " {Richard
Wagner in Bayreuth, Vol. I. of this Translation,
pp. 199-200).
100.
Learning to do Homage. —One must learn the
art of homage, as well as the art of contempt.
Whoever goes in new paths and has led many
persons therein, discovers with astonishment how
f


## p. 138 (#172) ############################################

138 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II
awkward and incompetent all of them are in the
expression of their gratitude, and indeed how
rarely gratitude is able even to express itself. It
is always as if something comes into people's
throats when their gratitude wants to speak, so
that it only hems and haws, and becomes silent
again. The way in which a thinker succeeds in
tracing the effect of his thoughts, and their trans-
forming and convulsing power, is almost a comedy:
it sometimes seems as if those who have been
operated upon felt profoundly injured thereby, and
could only assert their independence, which they
suspect to be threatened, by all kinds of impro-
prieties. It needs whole generations in order merely
to devise a courteous convention of gratefulness;
it is only very late that the period arrives when
something of spirit and genius enters into gratitude.
Then there is usually some one who is the great
receiver of thanks, not only for the good he himself
has done, but mostly for that which has been
gradually accumulated by his predecessors, as a
treasure of what is highest and best.
101.
Voltaire. —Wherever there has been a court, it
has furnished the standard of good-speaking, and
with this also the standard of style for writers.
The court language, however, is the language of
the courtier who has no profession, and who even in
conversations on scientific subjects avoids all con-
venient, technical expressions, because they smack
of the profession; on that account the technical
expression, and everything that betrays the special-


## p. 139 (#173) ############################################

THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II 139
ist, is a blemish of style in countries which have a
court culture. At present, when all courts have
become caricatures of past and present times, one
is astonished to find even Voltaire unspeakably
reserved and scrupulous on this point (for example,
in his judgments concerning such stylists as Fon-
tenelle and Montesquieu),—we are now, all of us,
emancipated from court taste, while Voltaire was
its perfecter!
102.
A Word for Philologists. —It is thought that
there are books so valuable and royal that whole
generations of scholars are well employed when
through their efforts these books are kept genuine
and intelligible,—to confirm this belief again and
again is the purpose of philology. It presupposes
that the rare men are not lacking (though they may
not be visible), who actually know how to use such
valuable books :—those men perhaps who write such
books themselves, or could write them. I mean
to say that philology presupposes a noble belief,—
that for the benefit of some few who are always
"to come," and are not there, a very great amount
of painful, and even dirty labour has to be done
beforehand: it is all labour in usum Delphinomm.
103.
German Music. —German music, more than any
other, has now become European music; because
the changes which Europe experienced through
the Revolution have therein alone found expres-
sion: it is only German music that knows how to


## p. 140 (#174) ############################################

140 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II
express the agitation of popular masses, the tre-
mendous artificial uproar, which does not even
need to be very noisy,—while Italian opera, for
example, knows only the choruses of domestics
or soldiers, but not "the people. " There is
the additional fact that in all German music a
profound bourgeois jealousy of the noblesse can be
traced, especially a jealousy of esprit and tUgance,
as the expressions of a courtly, chivalrous, ancient,
and self-confident society. It is not music like
that of Goethe's musician at the gate, which was
pleasing also "in the hall," and to the king as
well; it is not here said: "The knights looked
on with martial air; with bashful eyes the
ladies. " Even the Graces are not allowed in
German music without a touch of remorse; it is
only with Pleasantness, the country sister of the
Graces that the German begins to feel morally
at ease—and from this point up to his enthusiastic,
learned, and often gruff " sublimity" (the Beethoven-
like sublimity), he feels more and more so. If we
want to imagine the man of this music,—well, let
us just imagine Beethoven as he appeared beside
Goethe, say, at their meeting at Teplitz: as semi-
barbarism beside culture, as the masses beside
the nobility, as the good-natured man beside the
good and more than "good" man, as the visionary
beside the artist, as the man needing comfort beside
the comforted, as the man given to exaggeration
and distrust beside the man of reason, as the
crank and self-tormenter, as the foolish, enraptured,
blessedly unfortunate, sincerely immoderate man,
as the pretentious and awkward man,—and alto-


## p. 141 (#175) ############################################

THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II 141
gether as the "untamed man": it was thus that
Goethe conceived and characterised him, Goethe,
the exceptional German, for whom a music of
equal rank has not yet been found! — Finally,
let us consider whether the present, continually
extending contempt of melody and the stunting of
the sense for melody among Germans should not
be understood as a democratic impropriety and an
after-effect of the Revolution? For melody has
such an obvious delight in conformity to law, and
such an aversion to everything evolving, unformed
and arbitrary, that it sounds like a note out of the
ancient European regime, and as a seduction and
re-duction back to it.
104.
The Tone of the German Language. —We know
whence the German originated which for several
centuries has been the universal, literary language
of Germany. The Germans, with their reverence for
everything that came from the court, intentionally
took the chancery style as their pattern in all that
they had to write, especially in their letters, records,
wills, &c. To write in the chancery style, that was
to write in court and government style,—that was
regarded as something select compared with the
language of the city in which a person lived.
People gradually drew this inference, and spoke
also as they wrote,—they thus became still more
select in the forms of their words, in the choice of
their terms and modes of expression, and finally
also in their tones: they affected a court tone when
they spoke, and the affectation at last became


## p. 141 (#176) ############################################

140 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II
express the agitation of popular masses, the tre-
mendous artificial uproar, which does not even
need to be very noisy,—while Italian opera, for
example, knows only the choruses of domestics
or soldiers, but not "the people. " There is
the additional fact that in all German music a
profound bourgeois jealousy of the noblesse can be
traced, especially a jealousy of esprit and e'Ugance,
as the expressions of a courtly, chivalrous, ancient,
and self-confident society. It is not music like
that of Goethe's musician at the gate, which was
pleasing also "in the hall," and to the king as
well; it is not here said: "The knights looked
on with martial air; with bashful eyes the
ladies. " Even the Graces are not allowed in
German music without a touch of remorse; it is
only with Pleasantness, the country sister of the
Graces that the German begins to feel morally
at ease—and from this point up to his enthusiastic,
learned, and often gruff " sublimity" (the Beethoven-
like sublimity), he feels more and more so. If we
want to imagine the man of this music,—well, let
us just imagine Beethoven as he appeared beside
Goethe, say, at their meeting at Teplitz: as semi-
barbarism beside culture, as the masses beside
the nobility, as the good-natured man beside the
good and more than "good" man, as the visionary
beside the artist, as the man needing comfort beside
the comforted, as the man given to exaggeration
and distrust beside the man of reason, as the
crank and self-tormenter, as the foolish, enraptured,
blessedly unfortunate, sincerely immoderate man,
as the pretentious and awkward man,—and alto-


## p. 141 (#177) ############################################

THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II 141
gether as the "untamed man ": it was thus that
Goethe conceived and characterised him, Goethe,
the exceptional German, for whom a music of
equal rank has not yet been found! — Finally,
let us consider whether the present, continually
extending contempt of melody and the stunting of
the sense for melody among Germans should not
be understood as a democratic impropriety and an
after-effect of the Revolution? For melody has
such an obvious delight in conformity to law, and
such an aversion to everything evolving, unformed
and arbitrary, that it sounds like a note out of the
ancient European regime, and as a seduction and
re-duction back to it.
104.
The Tone of the German Language. —We know
whence the German originated which for several
centuries has been the universal, literary language
of Germany. The Germans, with their reverence for
everything that came from the court, intentionally
took the chancery style as their pattern in all that
they had to write, especially in their letters, records,
wills, &c. To write in the chancery style, that was
to write in court and government style,—that was
regarded as something select compared with the
language of the city in which a person lived.
People gradually drew this inference, and spoke
also as they wrote,—they thus became still more
select in the forms of their words, in the choice of
their terms and modes of expression, and finally
also in their tones: they affected a court tone when
they spoke, and the affectation at last became


## p. 141 (#178) ############################################

140 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II
express the agitation of popular masses, the tre-
mendous artificial uproar, which does not even
need to be very noisy,—while Italian opera, for
example, knows only the choruses of domestics
or soldiers, but not "the people. " There is
the additional fact that in all German music a
profound bourgeois jealousy of the noblesse can be
traced, especially a jealousy of esprit and e'Ugance,
as the expressions of a courtly, chivalrous, ancient,
and self-confident society. It is not music like
that of Goethe's musician at the gate, which was
pleasing also "in the hall," and to the king as
well; it is not here said: "The knights looked
on with martial air; with bashful eyes the
ladies. " Even the Graces are not allowed in
German music without a touch of remorse; it is
only with Pleasantness, the country sister of the
Graces that the German begins to feel morally
at ease—and from this point up to his enthusiastic,
learned, and often gruff " sublimity" (the Beethoven-
like sublimity), he feels more and more so. If we
want to imagine the man of this music,—well, let
us just imagine Beethoven as he appeared beside
Goethe, say, at their meeting at Teplitz: as semi-
barbarism beside culture, as the masses beside
the nobility, as the good-natured man beside the
good and more than "good" man, as the visionary
beside the artist, as the man needing comfort beside
the comforted, as the man given to exaggeration
and distrust beside the man of reason, as the
crank and self-tormenter, as the foolish, enraptured,
blessedly unfortunate, sincerely immoderate man,
as the pretentious and awkward man,—and alto-


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THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II 141
gether as the "untamed man ": it was thus that
Goethe conceived and characterised him, Goethe,
the exceptional German, for whom a music of
equal rank has not yet been found! — Finally,
let us consider whether the present, continually
extending contempt of melody and the stunting of
the sense for melody among Germans should not
be understood as a democratic impropriety and an
after-effect of the Revolution? For melody has
such an obvious delight in conformity to law, and
such an aversion to everything evolving, unformed
and arbitrary, that it sounds like a note out of the
ancient European regime, and as a seduction and
re-duction back to it.
104.
The Tone of the German Language. —We know
whence the German originated which for several
centuries has been the universal, literary language
of Germany. The Germans, with their reverence for
everything that came from the court, intentionally
took the chancery style as their pattern in all that
they had to write, especially in their letters, records,
wills, &c. To write in the chancery style, that was
to write in court and government style,—that was
regarded as something select compared with the
language of the city in which a person lived.
People gradually drew this inference, and spoke
also as they wrote,—they thus became still more
select in the forms of their words, in the choice of
their terms and modes of expression, and finally
also in their tones: they affected a court tone when
they spoke, and the affectation at last became


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142 THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II
natural. Perhaps nothing quite similar has ever
happened elsewhere:—the predominance of the
literary style over the talk, and the formality and
affectation of an entire people, becoming the basis
of a common and no longer dialectical language.
I believe that the sound of the German language
in the Middle Ages, and especially after the Middle
Ages, was extremely rustic and vulgar; it has
ennobled itself somewhat during the last centuries,
principally because it was found necessary to
imitate so many French, Italian, and Spanish
sounds, and particularly on the part of the German
(and Austrian) nobility, who could not at all
content themselves with their mother-tongue. But
notwithstanding this practice, German must have
sounded intolerably vulgar to Montaigne, and even
to Racine: even at present, in the mouths of
travellers among the Italian populace, it still sounds
very coarse, sylvan, and hoarse, as if it had origi-
nated in smoky rooms and outlandish districts. —
Now I notice that at present a similar striving
after selectness of tone is spreading among
the former admirers of the chancery style, and
that the Germans are beginning to accommodate
themselves to a peculiar " witchery of sound," which
might in the long run become an actual danger to
the German language,—for one may seek in vain
for more execrable sounds in Europe. Something
mocking, cold, indifferent, and careless in the
voice: that is what at present sounds "noble"
to the Germans — and I hear the approval of
this nobleness in the voices of young officials,
teachers, women, and trades-people; indeed, even


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THE JOYFUL WISDOM, II 143
the little girls already imitate this German of the
officers. For the officer, and in fact the Prussian
officer is the inventor of these tones: this same
officer, who, as soldier and professional man pos-
sesses that admirable tact for modesty which the
Germans as a whole might well imitate (German
professors and musicians included ! ). But as soon
as he speaks and moves he is the most immodest
and inelegant figure in old Europe — no doubt
unconsciously to himself! And unconsciously also
to the good Germans, who gaze at him as the man
of the foremost and most select society, and
willingly let him " give them his tone. " And indeed
he gives it to them! —in the first place it is the
sergeant-majors and non-commissioned officers that
imitate his tone and coarsen it. One should note
the roars of command, with which the German
cities are absolutely surrounded at present, when
there is drilling at all the gates: what presump-
tion, furious imperiousness, and mocking coldness
speaks in this uproar!