A noble
poverty but a masterly freedom within the limits of
that modest wealth distinguishes the Greek artists
in oratory.
poverty but a masterly freedom within the limits of
that modest wealth distinguishes the Greek artists
in oratory.
Nietzsche - v07 - Human All-Too-Human - b
—How an author is
vexed by those stolid, awkward readers who always
## p. 249 (#289) ############################################
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW. 249
fall at every place where they stumble, and always
hurt themselves when they fall!
105.
Poets' Thoughts. —Real thoughts of real poets
always go about with a veil on, like Egyptian women;
only the deep eye of thought looks out freely through
the veil. —Poets' thoughts are as a rule not of such
value as is supposed. We have to pay for the veil
and for our own curiosity into the bargain.
106.
Write Simply and Usefully. —Transitions,
details, colour in depicting the passions—we make
a present of all these to the author because we bring
them with us and set them down to the credit of his
book, provided he makes us some compensation.
107.
WlELAND. —Wieland wrote German better than
any one else, and had the genuine adequacies and
inadequacies of the master. His translations of
the letters of Cicero and Lucian are the best in
the language. His ideas, however, add nothing to
our store of thought. We can endure his cheerful
moralities as little as his cheerful immoralities, for
both are very closely connected. The men who en-
joyed them were at bottom better men than we are,
but also a good deal heavier. They needed'an author
of this sort. The Germans did not need Goethe, and
therefore cannot make proper use of him. We have
## p. 250 (#290) ############################################
250 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAX.
only to consider the best of our statesmen and
artists in this light . None of them had or could
have had Goethe as their teacher.
108.
Rare Festivals. —Pithyconciseness, repose, and
maturity—where you find these qualities in an
author, cry halt and celebrate a great festival in the
desert . It will be long before you have such a treat
again.
109.
The Treasure of German Prose. —Apart
from Goethe's writings and especially Goethe's con-
versations with Eckermann (the best German book
in existence), what German prose literature remains
that is worth reading over and over again? Lichten-
berg's Aphorisms, the first book of Jung-Stilling's
Story of My Life, Adalbert Stifter's St. Martin's
Summer and Gottfried Keller's People of Seldwyla
—and there, for the time being, it comes to an end.
no.
Literary and Colloquial Style. —The art
of writing demands, first and foremost, substitutions
for the means of expression which speech alone
possesses—in other words, for gestures, accent, in-
tonation, and look. Hence literary style is quite
different from colloquial style, and far more difficult,
because it has to make itself as intelligible as the
latter with fewer accessaries. Demosthenes delivered
his speeches differently from what we read; he
## p. 251 (#291) ############################################
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW. 251
worked them up for reading purposes. —Cicero's
speeches ought to be "demosthenised" with the
same object, for at present they contain more of the
Roman Forum than we can endure.
in.
Caution in Quotation. —Young authors do
not know that a good expression or idea only looks
well among its peers; that an excellent quotation
may spoil whole pages, nay the whole book; for it
seems to cry warningly to the reader, " Mark you, I
am the precious stone, and round about me is lead
—pale, worthless lead! " Every word, every idea
only desires to live in its own company—that is the
moral of a choice style.
112.
How should Errors be Enunciated? —We
may dispute whether it be more injurious for errors
to be enunciated badly or as well as the best truths.
It is certain that in the former case they are doubly
harmful to the brain and are less easily removed
from it. But, on the other hand, they are not so
certain of effect as in the latter case. They are, in
fact, less contagious.
"3-
Limiting and Widening. —Homer limited and
diminished the horizon of his subject, but allowed
individual scenes to expand and blossom out.
Later, the tragedians are constantly renewing this
process. Each takes his material in ever smaller
and smaller fragments than his predecessor did, but
## p. 252 (#292) ############################################
252 HUMAN', ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
each attains a greater wealth of blooms within the
narrow hedges of these sequestered garden en-
closures.
114.
Literature and Morality Mutually Ex-
planatory. —We can show from Greek literature
by what forces the Greek spirit developed, how it
entered upon different channels, and where it be-
came enfeebled. All this also depicts to us how
Greek morality proceeded, and how all morality will
proceed: how it was at first a constraint and dis-
played cruelty, then became gradually milder; how
a pleasure in certain actions, in certain forms and
conventions arose, and from this again a propensity
for solitary exercise, for solitary possession; how the
track becomes crowded and overcrowded with com-
petitors ; how satiety enters in, newobjects of struggle
and ambition are sought, and forgotten aims are
awakened to life; how the drama is repeated, and the
spectators become altogether weary of looking on,
because the whole gamut seems to have been run
through—and then comes a stoppage, an expira-
tion, and the rivulets are lost in the sand. The end,
or at any rate an end, has come.
115.
What Landscapes give Permanent De-
light. —Such and such a landscape has features
eminently suited for painting, but I cannot find the
formula for it; it remains beyond my grasp as a
whole. I notice that all landscapes which please
me permanently have a simple geometrical scheme
## p. 253 (#293) ############################################
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW. 253
of lines underneath all their complexity. Without
such a mathematical substratum no scenery be-
comes artistically pleasing. Perhaps this rule may
be applied symbolically to human beings.
116.
Reading Aloud. — The ability to read aloud
involves of necessity the ability to declaim. Every-
where we must apply pale tints, but we must deter-
mine the degree of pallor in close relation to the
richly and deeply coloured background, that always
hovers before our eyes and acts as our guide—in
other words, in accordance with the way in which
we should declaim, the same passages. That is why
we must be able to declaim.
117.
The Dramatic Sense. —He who has not the
four subtler senses of art tries to understand every-
thing with the fifth sense, which is the coarsest of all
—the dramatic sense.
118.
Herder. —Herder fails to be all that he made
people think he was and himself wished to think he
was. He was no great thinker or discoverer, no
newly fertile soil with the unexhausted strength of a
virgin forest. But he possessed in the highest degree
the power of scenting the future, he saw and picked
the first-fruits of the seasons earlier than all others,
and they then believed that he had made them
grow. Between darkness and light, youth and age,
## p. 254 (#294) ############################################
254 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
his mind was like a hunter on the watch, looking
everywhere for transitions, depressions, convulsions,
the outward and visible signs of internal growth.
The unrest of spring drove him to and fro, but he
was himself not the spring. —At times, indeed, he
had some inkling of this, and yet would fain not
have believed it — he, the ambitious priest, who
would have so gladly been the intellectual pope of
his epoch! This is his despair. He seems to have
lived long as a pretender to several kingdoms or
even to a universal monarchy. He had his follow-
ing which believed in him, among others the young
Goethe. But whenever crowns were really distri-
buted, he was passed over. Kant, Goethe, and then
the first true German historians and scholars robbed
him of what he thought he had reserved for himself
(although in silence and secret he often thought the
reverse). Just when he doubted in himself, he
gladly clothed himself in dignity and enthusiasm:
these were often in him mere garments, which had
to hide a great deal and also to deceive and comfort
him. He really had fire and enthusiasm, but his
ambition was far greater! It blew impatiently at
the fire, which flickered, crackled, and smoked—his
style flickers, crackles, and smokes—but he yearned
for the great flame which never broke out. He did
not sit at the table of the genuine creators, and his
ambition did not admit of his sitting modestly
among those who simply enjoy. Thus he was a
restless spirit, the taster of all intellectual dishes,
which were collected by the Germans from every
quarter and every age in the course of half a century.
Never really happy and satisfied, Herder was also
## p. 255 (#295) ############################################
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW. 255
too often ill, and then at times envy sat by his bed,
and hypocrisy paid her visit as well. He always
had an air of being scarred and crippled, and he
lacked simple, stalwart manliness more completely
than any of the so-called "classical writers. "
119.
SCENT OF WORDS. —Every word has its scent;
there is a harmony and discord of scents, and so
too of words.
120.
The Far-Fetched Style. —The natural style
is an offence to the lover of the far-fetched style.
121.
A Vow. —I will never again read an author of
whom one can suspect that he wanted to make a
book, but only those writers whose thoughts un-
expectedly became a book.
122.
The Artistic Convention'. —Three-fourths of
Homer is convention, and the same is the case with
all the Greek artists, who had no reason for falling
into the modern craze for originality. They had no
fear of convention, for after all convention was a
link between them and their public. Conventions
are the artistic means acquired for the understand-
ing of the hearer; the common speech, learnt with
much toil, whereby the artist can really communi-
cate his ideas. All the more when he wishes, like
## p. 256 (#296) ############################################
256 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
the Greek poets and musicians, to conquer at once
with each of his works (since he is accustomed to
compete publicly with one or two rivals), the first
condition is that he must be understood at once,
and this is only possible by means of convention.
What the artist devises beyond convention he offers
of his own free will and takes a risk, his success at
best resulting in the setting-up of a new conven-
tion. As a rule originality is marvelled at, some-
times even worshipped, but seldom understood. A
stubborn avoidance of convention means a desire
not to be understood. What, then, is the object of
the modern craze for originality?
123.
Artists' Affectation of Scientific Me-
thod. —Schiller, like other German artists, fancied
that if a man had intellect he was entitled to impro-
vise even with the pen on all difficult subjects. So
there we see his prose essays—in every way a model
of how not to attack scientific questions of aesthetics
and ethics, and a danger for young readers who, in
their admiration for Schiller the poet, have not the
courage to think meanly of Schiller the thinker and
author. —The temptation to traverse for once the
forbidden paths, and to have his say in science as
well, is easy and pardonable in the artist. For
even the ablest artist from time to time finds his
handicraft and his workshop unendurable. This
temptation is so strong that it makes the artist show
all the world what no one wishes to see, that his little
chamber of thought is cramped and untidy. Why
## p. 257 (#297) ############################################
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW. 257
not, indeed? He does not live there. He proceeds
to show that the storeroom of his knowledge is
partly empty, partly filled with lumber. Why not,
indeed? This condition does not really become
the artist-child badly. In particular, the artist
shows that for the very easiest exercises of scientific
method, which are accessible even to beginners, his
joints are too stiff and untrained. Even of that he
need not really be ashamed! On the other hand,
he often develops no mean art in imitating all the
mistakes, vices, and base pedantries that are prac-
tised in the scientific community, in the belief that
these belong to the appearance of the thing, if not to
the thing itself. This is the very point that is so
amusing in artists' writing, that the artist involun-
tarily acts as his vocation demands: he parodies
the scientific and inartistic natures. Towards science
he should show no attitude but that of parody, in
so far as he is an artist and only an artist.
124.
The Faust-Idea. — A little sempstress is se-
duced and plunged into despair: a great scholar of
all the four Faculties is the evil-doer. That cannot
have happened in the ordinary course, surely? No,
certainly not! Without the aid of the devil incar-
nate, the great scholar would never have achieved
the deed. —Is this really destined to be the greatest
German "tragic idea," as one hears it said among
Germans ? —But for Goethe even this idea was too
terrible. His kind heart could not avoid placing
the little sempstress, "the good soul that forgot
vol. n. R
## p. 258 (#298) ############################################
258 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
itself but once," near to the saints, after her involun-
tary death. Even the great scholar, "the good
man" with "the dark impulse," is brought into
heaven in the nick of time, by a trick which is
played upon the devil at the decisive moment. - In
heaven the lovers find themselves again. Goethe
once said that his nature was too conciliatory for
really tragic subjects.
125.
Are there "German Classics"? —Sainte-
Beuve observes somewhere that the word "classic"
does not suit the genius of certain literatures. For
instance, nobody could talk seriously of " German
classics. "—What do our German publishers, who
are about to add fifty more to the fifty German
classics we are told to accept, say to that? Does
it not almost seem as if one need only have been
dead for the last thirty years, and lie a lawful prey
to the public * in order to hear suddenly and unex-
pectedly the trumpet of resurrection as a " Classic "?
And this in an age and a nation where at least five
out of the six great fathers of its literature are un-
doubtedly antiquated orbecomingantiquated—with-
out there being any need for the age or the nation to
be ashamed of this. For those writers have given
way before the strength of our time—let that be con-
sidered in all fairness! —Goethe, as I have indicated,
I do not include. He belongs to a higher species
than "national literatures": hence life, revival,
* The German copyright expires thirty years after publica-
tion. — Tr.
## p. 259 (#299) ############################################
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW. 259
and decay do not enter into the reckoning in his
relations with his countrymen. He lived and now
lives but for the few; for the majority he is nothing
but a flourish of vanity which is trumpeted from
time to time across the border into foreign ears.
Goethe, not merely a great and good man, but a
culture, is in German history an interlude without a
sequel. Who, for instance, would be able to point
to any trace of Goethe's influence in German politics
of the last seventy years (whereas the influence,
certainly of Schiller, and perhaps of Lessing, can be
traced in the political world)? But what of those
five others? Klopstock, in a most honourable way,
became out of date even in his own lifetime, and so
completely that the meditative book of his later
years, The Republic of Learning, has never been
taken seriously from that day to this. Herder's
misfortune was that his writings were always either
new or antiquated. Thus for stronger and more
subtle minds (like Lichtenberg) even Herder's
masterpiece, his Ideas for the History of Mankind,
was in a way antiquated at the very moment of its
appearance. Wieland, who lived to the full and
made others live likewise, was clever enough to
anticipate by death the waning of his influence.
Lessing, perhaps, still lives to-day—but among a
young and ever younger band of scholars. Schiller
has fallen from the hands of young men into those
of boys, of all German boys. It is a well-known
sign of obsolescence when a book descends to
people of less and less mature age. —Well, what is
it that has thrust these five into the background,
so that well-educated men of affairs no longer read
## p. 260 (#300) ############################################
200 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
them? A better taste, a riper knowledge, a higher
reverence for the real and the true: in other words,
the very virtues which these five (and ten or twenty
others of lesser repute) first re-planted in Germany,
and which now, like a mighty forest, cast over their
graves not only the shadow of awe, but something
of the shadow of oblivion. — But classical writers
are not planters of intellectual and literary virtues.
They bring those virtues to perfection and are their
highest luminous peaks, and being brighter, freer,
and purer than all that surrounds them, they remain
shining above the nations when the nations them-
selves perish. There may come an elevated stage
of humanity, in which the Europe of the peoples
is a dark, forgotten thing, but Europe lives on in
thirty books, very old but never antiquated—in the
classics.
126.
Interesting, but not Beautiful. — This
countryside conceals its meaning, but it has one
that we should like to guess. Everywhere that I
look, I read words and hints of words, but I do not
know where begins the sentence that solves the
riddle of all these hints. So I get a stiff neck in
trying to discover whether I should start reading
from this or that point.
127.
Against Innovators in Language. —The use
of neologisms or archaisms, the preference for the
rare and the bizarre, the attempt to enrich rather
than to limit the vocabulary, are always signs either
## p. 261 (#301) ############################################
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW. 261
of an immature or of a corrupted taste.
A noble
poverty but a masterly freedom within the limits of
that modest wealth distinguishes the Greek artists
in oratory. They wish to have less than the people
has—for the people is richest in old and new—but
they wish to have that little better. The reckoning
up of their archaic and exotic forms is soon done,
but we never cease marvelling if we have an eye
for their light and delicate manner in handling the
commonplace and apparently longoutworn elements
in word and phrase.
128.
Gloomy and Serious Authors. — He who
commits his sufferings to paper becomes a gloomy
author, but he becomes a serious one if he tells us
what he has suffered and why he is now enjoying a
pleasurable repose.
129.
Healthiness of Taste. —How is it that health
is less contagious than disease—generally, and par-
ticularly in matters of taste? Or are there epidemics
of health?
130.
A RESOLUTION. —Never again to read a book
that is born and christened (with ink) at the same
moment.
131.
Improving OUR Ideas. —Improving our style
means improving our ideas, and nothing else. He
## p. 262 (#302) ############################################
262 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
who does not at once concede this can never be
convinced of the point.
132.
Classical Books. —The weakest point in every
classical book is that it is written too much in the
mother tongue of its author.
133-
Bad Books. —The book should demand pen, ink,
and desk, but usually it is pen, ink, and desk that
demand the book. That is why books are of so little
account at present.
134-
Presence of Sense. —When the public reflects
on paintings, it becomes a poet; when on poems,
an investigator. At the moment when the artist
summons it it is always lacking in the right sense,
and accordingly in presence of sense, not in pre-
sence of mind.
135-
Choice Ideas. —The choice style of a momentous
period does not only select its words but its ideas—
and both from the customary and prevailing usage.
Venturesome ideas, that smell too fresh, are to the
maturer taste no less repugnant than new and reck-
less images and phrases. Later on both choice
ideas and choice words soon smack of mediocrity,
because the scent of the choice vanishes quickly, and
then nothing but the customary and commonplace
element is tasted.
## p. 263 (#303) ############################################
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW. 263
136.
Main Reason for Corruption of Style. —
The desire to display more sentiment than one
really feels for a thing corrupts style, in language
and in all art. All great art shows rather the
opposite tendency. Like every man of moral
significance, it loves to check emotion on its way
and not let it run its course to the very end. This
modesty of letting emotion but half appear is most
clearly to be observed, for example, in Sophocles.
The features of sentiment seem to become beautified
when sentiment feigns to be more shy than it
really is.
137.
An Excuse for the Heavy Style. — The
lightly uttered phrase seldom falls on the ear with
the full weight of the subject. This is, however, due
to the bad training of the ear, which by education
must pass from what has hitherto been called music
to the school of the higher harmony—in other words,
to conversation.
138.
BIRD'S-EyE VIEWS. — Here torrents rush from
every side into a ravine: their movement is so swift
and stormy, and carries the eye along so quickly,
that the bare or wooded mountain slopes around
seem not to sink down but to fly down. We are in
an agonised tension at the sight, as if behind all
this were hidden some hostile element, before which
all must fly, and against which the abyss alone gave
protection. This landscape cannot be painted, un-
## p. 264 (#304) ############################################
264 HUMAX, AIX-TOO-HUMAX.
less we hover above it like a bird in the open air.
Here for once the so-called bird's-eye view is not an
artistic caprice, but the sole possibility.
139-
Rash Comparisons. —If rash comparisons are
not proofs of the wantonness of the writer, they are
proofs of the exhaustion of his imagination. In any
case they bear witness to his bad taste.
14a
DANCING IN Chains. — In the case of every
Greek artist, poet, or writer we must ask: What is
the new constraint which he imposes upon himself
and makes attractive to his contemporaries, so as to
find imitators? For the thing called "invention"
(in metre, for example) is always a self-imposed
fetter of this kind. "Dancing in chains "—to make
that hard for themselves and then to spread a false
notion that it is easy—that is the trick that they
wish to show us. Even in Homer we may perceive
a wealth of inherited formulae and laws of epic
narration, within the circle of which he had to dance,
and he himself created new conventions for them
that came after. This was the discipline of the
Greek poets: first to impose upon themselves a
manifold constraint by means of the earlier poets;
then to invent in addition a new constraint, to im-
pose it upon themselves and cheerfully to overcome
it, so that constraint and victory are perceived and
admired.
## p. 265 (#305) ############################################
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW. 265
141.
Authors' Copiousness. —The last quality that
a good author acquires is copiousness: whoever has
it to begin with will never become a good author.
The noblest racehorses are lean until they are per-
mitted to rest from their victories.
142.
Wheezing Heroes. —Poets and artists who suffer
from a narrow chest of the emotions generally make
their heroes wheeze. They do not know what easy
breathing means.
143-
The Short-Sighted*—The short-sighted are
the deadly foes of all authors who let themselves go.
These authors should know the wrath with which
these people shut the book in which they observe
that its creator needs fifty pages to express five
ideas. And the cause of their wrath is that they
have endangered what remains of their vision almost
without compensation. A short-sighted person
said, "All authors let themselves go. " "Even the
HolyGhost? " "Even the Holy Ghost. " But he had
a right to, for he wrote for those who had lost their
sight altogether.
144.
The Style of Immortality. —Thucydides and
Tacitus both imagined immortal, life for their works
when they executed them. That might be guessed
* Nietzsche himself was extremely short-sighted—Tr.
## p. 266 (#306) ############################################
266
HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
(if not known otherwise) from their style. The one
thought to give permanence to his ideas by salting
them, the other by boiling them down; and neither,
it seems, made a miscalculation.
145.
AGAINST IMAGES AND SIMILES. —By images and
similes we convince, but we do not prove. That is
why science has such a horror of images and similes.
Science does not want to convince or make plausible,
and rather seeks to provoke cold distrust by its mode
of expression, by the bareness of its walls. For
distrust is the touchstone for the gold of certainty.
146.
CAUTION. -In Germany, he who lacks thorough
knowledge should beware of writing. The good
German does not say in that case “he is ignorant,”
but “he is of doubtful character. ”—This hasty con-
clusion, by the way, does great credit to the Ger-
mans.
147.
PAINTED SKELETONS. — Painted skeletons are
those authors who try to make up for their want of
flesh by artistic colourings.
148.
THE GRAND STYLE AND SOMETHING BETTER.
- It is easier to learn how to write the grand style
than how to write easily and simply. The reasons
for this are inextricably bound up with morality.
## p. 267 (#307) ############################################
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW. 267
149.
Sebastian Bach. —In so far as we do not hear
Bach's music as perfect and experienced connois-
seurs of counterpoint and all the varieties of thefugal
style (and accordingly must dispense with real artistic
enjoyment), we shall feel in listening to his music
—in Goethe's magnificent phrase—as if "we were
present at God's creation of the world. " In other
words, we feel here that something great is in the
makingbut notyet made—our mighty modem music,
which by conquering nationalities, the Church, and
counterpoint has conquered the world. In Bach
there is still too much crude Christianity, crude
Germanism, crude scholasticism. He stands on
the threshold of modern European music, but turns
from thence to look at the Middle Ages.
150.
HANDEL. —Handel, who in the invention of his
music was bold, original, truthful, powerful, inclined
to and akin to all the heroism of which a nation is
capable, often proved stiff, cold, nay even weary of
himself in composition. He applied a few well-tried
methods of execution, wrote copiously and quickly,
and was glad when he had finished—but that joy
was not the joy of God and other creators in the
eventide of their working day.
151.
Haydn. —So far as genius can exist in a man
who is merely good, Haydn had genius. He went
## p. 268 (#308) ############################################
268 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
just as far as the limit which morality sets to in-
tellect, and only wrote music that has "no past. "
152.
Beethoven and Mozart. —Beethoven's music
often appears like a deeply emotional meditation
on unexpectedly hearing once more a piece long
thought to be forgotten, "Tonal Innocence": it is
music about music. In the song of the beggar and
child in the street, in the monotonous airs of vagrant
Italians, in the dance of the village inn or in carnival
nights he discovers his melodies. He stores them
together like a bee, snatching here and there some
notes or a short phrase. To him these are hallowed
memories of "the better world," like the ideas of
Plato. —Mozart stands in quite a different relation
to his melodies. He finds his inspiration not in
hearing music but in gazing at life, at the most
stirring life of southern lands. He was always
dreaming of Italy, when he was not there.
153-
RECITATIVE. —Formerly recitative was dry, but
now we live in the age of moist recitative. It has
fallen into the water, and the waves carry it whither-
soever they list.
154.
"Cheerful" Music. — If for a long time we
have heard no music, it then goes like a heavy
southern wine all too quickly into the blood and
leaves behind it a soul dazed with narcotics, half-
'v
## p. 269 (#309) ############################################
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW. 269
awake, longing for sleep. This is particularly the
case with cheerful music, which inspires in us bit-
terness and pain, satiety and home-sickness to-
gether, and forces us to sip again and again as at
a sweetened draught of poison. The hall of gay,
noisy merriment then seems to grow narrow, the
light to lose its brightness and become browner.
At last we feel as if this music were penetrating
to a prison where a poor wretch cannot sleep for
home-sickness.
155.
Franz Schubert. —Franz Schubert, inferior as
an artist to the other great; musicians, had never-
theless the largest share of inherited musical wealth.
He spent it with a free hand and a kind heart, so
that for a few centuries musicians will continue to
nibble at his ideas and inspirations. In his works
we find a store of unused inventions; the greatness
of others will lie in making use of those inventions.
If Beethoven may be called the ideal listener for
a troubadour, Schubert has a right to be called the
ideal troubadour.
156.
Modern Musical Execution. —Great tragic
or dramatic execution of music acquires its character
by imitating the gesture of the great sinner, such
as Christianity conceives and desires him : the slow-
stepping, passionately brooding man, distracted by
the agonies of conscience, now flying in terror,
now clutching with delight, now standing still in
despair—and all the other marks of great sinful-
## p. 270 (#310) ############################################
270 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
J
ness. Only on the Christian assumption that all
men are great sinners and do nothing but sin could
we justify the application of this style of execution
to all music. So far, music would be the reflection
of all the actions and impulses of man, and would
continually have to express by gestures the lan-
guage of the great sinner. At such a performance,
a listener who was not enough of a Christian to
understand this logic might indeed cry out in hor-
ror, " For the love of Heaven, how did sin find its
way into music? "
157-
Felix Mendelssohn. —Felix Mendelssohn's
music is the music of the good taste that enjoys
all the good things that have ever existed. It
always points behind. How could it have much
"in front," much of a future ? —But did he want
it to have a future? He possessed a virtue rare
among artists, that of gratitude without arriere-
pensee. This virtue, too, always points behind.
158.
A Mother of Arts. —In our sceptical age, real
devotion requires almost a brutal heroism of am-
bition. Fanatical shutting of the eyes and bending
of the knee no longer suffice. Would it not be pos-
sible for ambition—in its eagerness to be the last
devotee of all the ages—to become the begetter of a
final church music, as it has been the begetter of the
final church architecture? (They call it the Jesuit
style. )
## p. 271 (#311) ############################################
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW. 271
159.
Freedom in Fetters—a Princely Freedom.
—Chopin, the last of the modern musicians, who
gazed at and worshipped beauty, like Leopardi;
Chopin, the Pole, the inimitable (none that came
before or after him has a right to this name)—
Chopin had the same princely punctilio in conven-
tion that Raphael shows in the use of the simplest
traditional colours. The only difference is that
Chopin applies them not to colour but to melodic
and rhythmic traditions. He admitted the validity
of these traditions because he was born under the
sway of etiquette. But in these fetters he plays and
dances as the freest and daintiest of spirits, and, be
it observed, he does not spurn the chain.
160.
Chopin's Barcarolle. —Almost all states and
modes of life have a moment of rapture, and good
artists know how to discover that moment. Such
a moment there is even in life by the seashore—that
dreary, sordid, unhealthy existence, dragged out in
the neighbourhood of a noisy and covetous rabble.
This moment of rapture Chopin in his Barcarolle
expressed in sound so supremely that Gods them-
selves, when they heard it, might yearn to lie long
summer evenings in a boat.
161.
Robert Schumann. —"The Stripling," as the
romantic songsters of Germany and France of the
## p. 272 (#312) ############################################
272 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
first three decades of this century imagined him—
this stripling was completely translated into song
and melody by Robert Schumann, the eternal
youth, so long as he felt himself in full possession
of his powers. There are indeed moments when
his music reminds one of the eternal " old maid. "
162.
Dramatic Singers. —"Why does this beggar
sing? " "Probably he does not know how to wail. "
"Then he does right. " But our dramatic singers,
who wail because they do not know how to sing
—are they also in the right?
163.
Dramatic Music. —For him who does not see
what is happening on the stage, dramatic music is
a monstrosity, just as the running commentary to
a lost text is a monstrosity. Such music requires
us to have ears where our eyes are. This, however,
is doing violence to Euterpe, who, poor Muse, wants
to have her eyes and ears where the other Muses
have theirs.
164.
vexed by those stolid, awkward readers who always
## p. 249 (#289) ############################################
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW. 249
fall at every place where they stumble, and always
hurt themselves when they fall!
105.
Poets' Thoughts. —Real thoughts of real poets
always go about with a veil on, like Egyptian women;
only the deep eye of thought looks out freely through
the veil. —Poets' thoughts are as a rule not of such
value as is supposed. We have to pay for the veil
and for our own curiosity into the bargain.
106.
Write Simply and Usefully. —Transitions,
details, colour in depicting the passions—we make
a present of all these to the author because we bring
them with us and set them down to the credit of his
book, provided he makes us some compensation.
107.
WlELAND. —Wieland wrote German better than
any one else, and had the genuine adequacies and
inadequacies of the master. His translations of
the letters of Cicero and Lucian are the best in
the language. His ideas, however, add nothing to
our store of thought. We can endure his cheerful
moralities as little as his cheerful immoralities, for
both are very closely connected. The men who en-
joyed them were at bottom better men than we are,
but also a good deal heavier. They needed'an author
of this sort. The Germans did not need Goethe, and
therefore cannot make proper use of him. We have
## p. 250 (#290) ############################################
250 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAX.
only to consider the best of our statesmen and
artists in this light . None of them had or could
have had Goethe as their teacher.
108.
Rare Festivals. —Pithyconciseness, repose, and
maturity—where you find these qualities in an
author, cry halt and celebrate a great festival in the
desert . It will be long before you have such a treat
again.
109.
The Treasure of German Prose. —Apart
from Goethe's writings and especially Goethe's con-
versations with Eckermann (the best German book
in existence), what German prose literature remains
that is worth reading over and over again? Lichten-
berg's Aphorisms, the first book of Jung-Stilling's
Story of My Life, Adalbert Stifter's St. Martin's
Summer and Gottfried Keller's People of Seldwyla
—and there, for the time being, it comes to an end.
no.
Literary and Colloquial Style. —The art
of writing demands, first and foremost, substitutions
for the means of expression which speech alone
possesses—in other words, for gestures, accent, in-
tonation, and look. Hence literary style is quite
different from colloquial style, and far more difficult,
because it has to make itself as intelligible as the
latter with fewer accessaries. Demosthenes delivered
his speeches differently from what we read; he
## p. 251 (#291) ############################################
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW. 251
worked them up for reading purposes. —Cicero's
speeches ought to be "demosthenised" with the
same object, for at present they contain more of the
Roman Forum than we can endure.
in.
Caution in Quotation. —Young authors do
not know that a good expression or idea only looks
well among its peers; that an excellent quotation
may spoil whole pages, nay the whole book; for it
seems to cry warningly to the reader, " Mark you, I
am the precious stone, and round about me is lead
—pale, worthless lead! " Every word, every idea
only desires to live in its own company—that is the
moral of a choice style.
112.
How should Errors be Enunciated? —We
may dispute whether it be more injurious for errors
to be enunciated badly or as well as the best truths.
It is certain that in the former case they are doubly
harmful to the brain and are less easily removed
from it. But, on the other hand, they are not so
certain of effect as in the latter case. They are, in
fact, less contagious.
"3-
Limiting and Widening. —Homer limited and
diminished the horizon of his subject, but allowed
individual scenes to expand and blossom out.
Later, the tragedians are constantly renewing this
process. Each takes his material in ever smaller
and smaller fragments than his predecessor did, but
## p. 252 (#292) ############################################
252 HUMAN', ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
each attains a greater wealth of blooms within the
narrow hedges of these sequestered garden en-
closures.
114.
Literature and Morality Mutually Ex-
planatory. —We can show from Greek literature
by what forces the Greek spirit developed, how it
entered upon different channels, and where it be-
came enfeebled. All this also depicts to us how
Greek morality proceeded, and how all morality will
proceed: how it was at first a constraint and dis-
played cruelty, then became gradually milder; how
a pleasure in certain actions, in certain forms and
conventions arose, and from this again a propensity
for solitary exercise, for solitary possession; how the
track becomes crowded and overcrowded with com-
petitors ; how satiety enters in, newobjects of struggle
and ambition are sought, and forgotten aims are
awakened to life; how the drama is repeated, and the
spectators become altogether weary of looking on,
because the whole gamut seems to have been run
through—and then comes a stoppage, an expira-
tion, and the rivulets are lost in the sand. The end,
or at any rate an end, has come.
115.
What Landscapes give Permanent De-
light. —Such and such a landscape has features
eminently suited for painting, but I cannot find the
formula for it; it remains beyond my grasp as a
whole. I notice that all landscapes which please
me permanently have a simple geometrical scheme
## p. 253 (#293) ############################################
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW. 253
of lines underneath all their complexity. Without
such a mathematical substratum no scenery be-
comes artistically pleasing. Perhaps this rule may
be applied symbolically to human beings.
116.
Reading Aloud. — The ability to read aloud
involves of necessity the ability to declaim. Every-
where we must apply pale tints, but we must deter-
mine the degree of pallor in close relation to the
richly and deeply coloured background, that always
hovers before our eyes and acts as our guide—in
other words, in accordance with the way in which
we should declaim, the same passages. That is why
we must be able to declaim.
117.
The Dramatic Sense. —He who has not the
four subtler senses of art tries to understand every-
thing with the fifth sense, which is the coarsest of all
—the dramatic sense.
118.
Herder. —Herder fails to be all that he made
people think he was and himself wished to think he
was. He was no great thinker or discoverer, no
newly fertile soil with the unexhausted strength of a
virgin forest. But he possessed in the highest degree
the power of scenting the future, he saw and picked
the first-fruits of the seasons earlier than all others,
and they then believed that he had made them
grow. Between darkness and light, youth and age,
## p. 254 (#294) ############################################
254 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
his mind was like a hunter on the watch, looking
everywhere for transitions, depressions, convulsions,
the outward and visible signs of internal growth.
The unrest of spring drove him to and fro, but he
was himself not the spring. —At times, indeed, he
had some inkling of this, and yet would fain not
have believed it — he, the ambitious priest, who
would have so gladly been the intellectual pope of
his epoch! This is his despair. He seems to have
lived long as a pretender to several kingdoms or
even to a universal monarchy. He had his follow-
ing which believed in him, among others the young
Goethe. But whenever crowns were really distri-
buted, he was passed over. Kant, Goethe, and then
the first true German historians and scholars robbed
him of what he thought he had reserved for himself
(although in silence and secret he often thought the
reverse). Just when he doubted in himself, he
gladly clothed himself in dignity and enthusiasm:
these were often in him mere garments, which had
to hide a great deal and also to deceive and comfort
him. He really had fire and enthusiasm, but his
ambition was far greater! It blew impatiently at
the fire, which flickered, crackled, and smoked—his
style flickers, crackles, and smokes—but he yearned
for the great flame which never broke out. He did
not sit at the table of the genuine creators, and his
ambition did not admit of his sitting modestly
among those who simply enjoy. Thus he was a
restless spirit, the taster of all intellectual dishes,
which were collected by the Germans from every
quarter and every age in the course of half a century.
Never really happy and satisfied, Herder was also
## p. 255 (#295) ############################################
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW. 255
too often ill, and then at times envy sat by his bed,
and hypocrisy paid her visit as well. He always
had an air of being scarred and crippled, and he
lacked simple, stalwart manliness more completely
than any of the so-called "classical writers. "
119.
SCENT OF WORDS. —Every word has its scent;
there is a harmony and discord of scents, and so
too of words.
120.
The Far-Fetched Style. —The natural style
is an offence to the lover of the far-fetched style.
121.
A Vow. —I will never again read an author of
whom one can suspect that he wanted to make a
book, but only those writers whose thoughts un-
expectedly became a book.
122.
The Artistic Convention'. —Three-fourths of
Homer is convention, and the same is the case with
all the Greek artists, who had no reason for falling
into the modern craze for originality. They had no
fear of convention, for after all convention was a
link between them and their public. Conventions
are the artistic means acquired for the understand-
ing of the hearer; the common speech, learnt with
much toil, whereby the artist can really communi-
cate his ideas. All the more when he wishes, like
## p. 256 (#296) ############################################
256 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
the Greek poets and musicians, to conquer at once
with each of his works (since he is accustomed to
compete publicly with one or two rivals), the first
condition is that he must be understood at once,
and this is only possible by means of convention.
What the artist devises beyond convention he offers
of his own free will and takes a risk, his success at
best resulting in the setting-up of a new conven-
tion. As a rule originality is marvelled at, some-
times even worshipped, but seldom understood. A
stubborn avoidance of convention means a desire
not to be understood. What, then, is the object of
the modern craze for originality?
123.
Artists' Affectation of Scientific Me-
thod. —Schiller, like other German artists, fancied
that if a man had intellect he was entitled to impro-
vise even with the pen on all difficult subjects. So
there we see his prose essays—in every way a model
of how not to attack scientific questions of aesthetics
and ethics, and a danger for young readers who, in
their admiration for Schiller the poet, have not the
courage to think meanly of Schiller the thinker and
author. —The temptation to traverse for once the
forbidden paths, and to have his say in science as
well, is easy and pardonable in the artist. For
even the ablest artist from time to time finds his
handicraft and his workshop unendurable. This
temptation is so strong that it makes the artist show
all the world what no one wishes to see, that his little
chamber of thought is cramped and untidy. Why
## p. 257 (#297) ############################################
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW. 257
not, indeed? He does not live there. He proceeds
to show that the storeroom of his knowledge is
partly empty, partly filled with lumber. Why not,
indeed? This condition does not really become
the artist-child badly. In particular, the artist
shows that for the very easiest exercises of scientific
method, which are accessible even to beginners, his
joints are too stiff and untrained. Even of that he
need not really be ashamed! On the other hand,
he often develops no mean art in imitating all the
mistakes, vices, and base pedantries that are prac-
tised in the scientific community, in the belief that
these belong to the appearance of the thing, if not to
the thing itself. This is the very point that is so
amusing in artists' writing, that the artist involun-
tarily acts as his vocation demands: he parodies
the scientific and inartistic natures. Towards science
he should show no attitude but that of parody, in
so far as he is an artist and only an artist.
124.
The Faust-Idea. — A little sempstress is se-
duced and plunged into despair: a great scholar of
all the four Faculties is the evil-doer. That cannot
have happened in the ordinary course, surely? No,
certainly not! Without the aid of the devil incar-
nate, the great scholar would never have achieved
the deed. —Is this really destined to be the greatest
German "tragic idea," as one hears it said among
Germans ? —But for Goethe even this idea was too
terrible. His kind heart could not avoid placing
the little sempstress, "the good soul that forgot
vol. n. R
## p. 258 (#298) ############################################
258 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
itself but once," near to the saints, after her involun-
tary death. Even the great scholar, "the good
man" with "the dark impulse," is brought into
heaven in the nick of time, by a trick which is
played upon the devil at the decisive moment. - In
heaven the lovers find themselves again. Goethe
once said that his nature was too conciliatory for
really tragic subjects.
125.
Are there "German Classics"? —Sainte-
Beuve observes somewhere that the word "classic"
does not suit the genius of certain literatures. For
instance, nobody could talk seriously of " German
classics. "—What do our German publishers, who
are about to add fifty more to the fifty German
classics we are told to accept, say to that? Does
it not almost seem as if one need only have been
dead for the last thirty years, and lie a lawful prey
to the public * in order to hear suddenly and unex-
pectedly the trumpet of resurrection as a " Classic "?
And this in an age and a nation where at least five
out of the six great fathers of its literature are un-
doubtedly antiquated orbecomingantiquated—with-
out there being any need for the age or the nation to
be ashamed of this. For those writers have given
way before the strength of our time—let that be con-
sidered in all fairness! —Goethe, as I have indicated,
I do not include. He belongs to a higher species
than "national literatures": hence life, revival,
* The German copyright expires thirty years after publica-
tion. — Tr.
## p. 259 (#299) ############################################
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW. 259
and decay do not enter into the reckoning in his
relations with his countrymen. He lived and now
lives but for the few; for the majority he is nothing
but a flourish of vanity which is trumpeted from
time to time across the border into foreign ears.
Goethe, not merely a great and good man, but a
culture, is in German history an interlude without a
sequel. Who, for instance, would be able to point
to any trace of Goethe's influence in German politics
of the last seventy years (whereas the influence,
certainly of Schiller, and perhaps of Lessing, can be
traced in the political world)? But what of those
five others? Klopstock, in a most honourable way,
became out of date even in his own lifetime, and so
completely that the meditative book of his later
years, The Republic of Learning, has never been
taken seriously from that day to this. Herder's
misfortune was that his writings were always either
new or antiquated. Thus for stronger and more
subtle minds (like Lichtenberg) even Herder's
masterpiece, his Ideas for the History of Mankind,
was in a way antiquated at the very moment of its
appearance. Wieland, who lived to the full and
made others live likewise, was clever enough to
anticipate by death the waning of his influence.
Lessing, perhaps, still lives to-day—but among a
young and ever younger band of scholars. Schiller
has fallen from the hands of young men into those
of boys, of all German boys. It is a well-known
sign of obsolescence when a book descends to
people of less and less mature age. —Well, what is
it that has thrust these five into the background,
so that well-educated men of affairs no longer read
## p. 260 (#300) ############################################
200 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
them? A better taste, a riper knowledge, a higher
reverence for the real and the true: in other words,
the very virtues which these five (and ten or twenty
others of lesser repute) first re-planted in Germany,
and which now, like a mighty forest, cast over their
graves not only the shadow of awe, but something
of the shadow of oblivion. — But classical writers
are not planters of intellectual and literary virtues.
They bring those virtues to perfection and are their
highest luminous peaks, and being brighter, freer,
and purer than all that surrounds them, they remain
shining above the nations when the nations them-
selves perish. There may come an elevated stage
of humanity, in which the Europe of the peoples
is a dark, forgotten thing, but Europe lives on in
thirty books, very old but never antiquated—in the
classics.
126.
Interesting, but not Beautiful. — This
countryside conceals its meaning, but it has one
that we should like to guess. Everywhere that I
look, I read words and hints of words, but I do not
know where begins the sentence that solves the
riddle of all these hints. So I get a stiff neck in
trying to discover whether I should start reading
from this or that point.
127.
Against Innovators in Language. —The use
of neologisms or archaisms, the preference for the
rare and the bizarre, the attempt to enrich rather
than to limit the vocabulary, are always signs either
## p. 261 (#301) ############################################
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW. 261
of an immature or of a corrupted taste.
A noble
poverty but a masterly freedom within the limits of
that modest wealth distinguishes the Greek artists
in oratory. They wish to have less than the people
has—for the people is richest in old and new—but
they wish to have that little better. The reckoning
up of their archaic and exotic forms is soon done,
but we never cease marvelling if we have an eye
for their light and delicate manner in handling the
commonplace and apparently longoutworn elements
in word and phrase.
128.
Gloomy and Serious Authors. — He who
commits his sufferings to paper becomes a gloomy
author, but he becomes a serious one if he tells us
what he has suffered and why he is now enjoying a
pleasurable repose.
129.
Healthiness of Taste. —How is it that health
is less contagious than disease—generally, and par-
ticularly in matters of taste? Or are there epidemics
of health?
130.
A RESOLUTION. —Never again to read a book
that is born and christened (with ink) at the same
moment.
131.
Improving OUR Ideas. —Improving our style
means improving our ideas, and nothing else. He
## p. 262 (#302) ############################################
262 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
who does not at once concede this can never be
convinced of the point.
132.
Classical Books. —The weakest point in every
classical book is that it is written too much in the
mother tongue of its author.
133-
Bad Books. —The book should demand pen, ink,
and desk, but usually it is pen, ink, and desk that
demand the book. That is why books are of so little
account at present.
134-
Presence of Sense. —When the public reflects
on paintings, it becomes a poet; when on poems,
an investigator. At the moment when the artist
summons it it is always lacking in the right sense,
and accordingly in presence of sense, not in pre-
sence of mind.
135-
Choice Ideas. —The choice style of a momentous
period does not only select its words but its ideas—
and both from the customary and prevailing usage.
Venturesome ideas, that smell too fresh, are to the
maturer taste no less repugnant than new and reck-
less images and phrases. Later on both choice
ideas and choice words soon smack of mediocrity,
because the scent of the choice vanishes quickly, and
then nothing but the customary and commonplace
element is tasted.
## p. 263 (#303) ############################################
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW. 263
136.
Main Reason for Corruption of Style. —
The desire to display more sentiment than one
really feels for a thing corrupts style, in language
and in all art. All great art shows rather the
opposite tendency. Like every man of moral
significance, it loves to check emotion on its way
and not let it run its course to the very end. This
modesty of letting emotion but half appear is most
clearly to be observed, for example, in Sophocles.
The features of sentiment seem to become beautified
when sentiment feigns to be more shy than it
really is.
137.
An Excuse for the Heavy Style. — The
lightly uttered phrase seldom falls on the ear with
the full weight of the subject. This is, however, due
to the bad training of the ear, which by education
must pass from what has hitherto been called music
to the school of the higher harmony—in other words,
to conversation.
138.
BIRD'S-EyE VIEWS. — Here torrents rush from
every side into a ravine: their movement is so swift
and stormy, and carries the eye along so quickly,
that the bare or wooded mountain slopes around
seem not to sink down but to fly down. We are in
an agonised tension at the sight, as if behind all
this were hidden some hostile element, before which
all must fly, and against which the abyss alone gave
protection. This landscape cannot be painted, un-
## p. 264 (#304) ############################################
264 HUMAX, AIX-TOO-HUMAX.
less we hover above it like a bird in the open air.
Here for once the so-called bird's-eye view is not an
artistic caprice, but the sole possibility.
139-
Rash Comparisons. —If rash comparisons are
not proofs of the wantonness of the writer, they are
proofs of the exhaustion of his imagination. In any
case they bear witness to his bad taste.
14a
DANCING IN Chains. — In the case of every
Greek artist, poet, or writer we must ask: What is
the new constraint which he imposes upon himself
and makes attractive to his contemporaries, so as to
find imitators? For the thing called "invention"
(in metre, for example) is always a self-imposed
fetter of this kind. "Dancing in chains "—to make
that hard for themselves and then to spread a false
notion that it is easy—that is the trick that they
wish to show us. Even in Homer we may perceive
a wealth of inherited formulae and laws of epic
narration, within the circle of which he had to dance,
and he himself created new conventions for them
that came after. This was the discipline of the
Greek poets: first to impose upon themselves a
manifold constraint by means of the earlier poets;
then to invent in addition a new constraint, to im-
pose it upon themselves and cheerfully to overcome
it, so that constraint and victory are perceived and
admired.
## p. 265 (#305) ############################################
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW. 265
141.
Authors' Copiousness. —The last quality that
a good author acquires is copiousness: whoever has
it to begin with will never become a good author.
The noblest racehorses are lean until they are per-
mitted to rest from their victories.
142.
Wheezing Heroes. —Poets and artists who suffer
from a narrow chest of the emotions generally make
their heroes wheeze. They do not know what easy
breathing means.
143-
The Short-Sighted*—The short-sighted are
the deadly foes of all authors who let themselves go.
These authors should know the wrath with which
these people shut the book in which they observe
that its creator needs fifty pages to express five
ideas. And the cause of their wrath is that they
have endangered what remains of their vision almost
without compensation. A short-sighted person
said, "All authors let themselves go. " "Even the
HolyGhost? " "Even the Holy Ghost. " But he had
a right to, for he wrote for those who had lost their
sight altogether.
144.
The Style of Immortality. —Thucydides and
Tacitus both imagined immortal, life for their works
when they executed them. That might be guessed
* Nietzsche himself was extremely short-sighted—Tr.
## p. 266 (#306) ############################################
266
HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
(if not known otherwise) from their style. The one
thought to give permanence to his ideas by salting
them, the other by boiling them down; and neither,
it seems, made a miscalculation.
145.
AGAINST IMAGES AND SIMILES. —By images and
similes we convince, but we do not prove. That is
why science has such a horror of images and similes.
Science does not want to convince or make plausible,
and rather seeks to provoke cold distrust by its mode
of expression, by the bareness of its walls. For
distrust is the touchstone for the gold of certainty.
146.
CAUTION. -In Germany, he who lacks thorough
knowledge should beware of writing. The good
German does not say in that case “he is ignorant,”
but “he is of doubtful character. ”—This hasty con-
clusion, by the way, does great credit to the Ger-
mans.
147.
PAINTED SKELETONS. — Painted skeletons are
those authors who try to make up for their want of
flesh by artistic colourings.
148.
THE GRAND STYLE AND SOMETHING BETTER.
- It is easier to learn how to write the grand style
than how to write easily and simply. The reasons
for this are inextricably bound up with morality.
## p. 267 (#307) ############################################
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW. 267
149.
Sebastian Bach. —In so far as we do not hear
Bach's music as perfect and experienced connois-
seurs of counterpoint and all the varieties of thefugal
style (and accordingly must dispense with real artistic
enjoyment), we shall feel in listening to his music
—in Goethe's magnificent phrase—as if "we were
present at God's creation of the world. " In other
words, we feel here that something great is in the
makingbut notyet made—our mighty modem music,
which by conquering nationalities, the Church, and
counterpoint has conquered the world. In Bach
there is still too much crude Christianity, crude
Germanism, crude scholasticism. He stands on
the threshold of modern European music, but turns
from thence to look at the Middle Ages.
150.
HANDEL. —Handel, who in the invention of his
music was bold, original, truthful, powerful, inclined
to and akin to all the heroism of which a nation is
capable, often proved stiff, cold, nay even weary of
himself in composition. He applied a few well-tried
methods of execution, wrote copiously and quickly,
and was glad when he had finished—but that joy
was not the joy of God and other creators in the
eventide of their working day.
151.
Haydn. —So far as genius can exist in a man
who is merely good, Haydn had genius. He went
## p. 268 (#308) ############################################
268 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
just as far as the limit which morality sets to in-
tellect, and only wrote music that has "no past. "
152.
Beethoven and Mozart. —Beethoven's music
often appears like a deeply emotional meditation
on unexpectedly hearing once more a piece long
thought to be forgotten, "Tonal Innocence": it is
music about music. In the song of the beggar and
child in the street, in the monotonous airs of vagrant
Italians, in the dance of the village inn or in carnival
nights he discovers his melodies. He stores them
together like a bee, snatching here and there some
notes or a short phrase. To him these are hallowed
memories of "the better world," like the ideas of
Plato. —Mozart stands in quite a different relation
to his melodies. He finds his inspiration not in
hearing music but in gazing at life, at the most
stirring life of southern lands. He was always
dreaming of Italy, when he was not there.
153-
RECITATIVE. —Formerly recitative was dry, but
now we live in the age of moist recitative. It has
fallen into the water, and the waves carry it whither-
soever they list.
154.
"Cheerful" Music. — If for a long time we
have heard no music, it then goes like a heavy
southern wine all too quickly into the blood and
leaves behind it a soul dazed with narcotics, half-
'v
## p. 269 (#309) ############################################
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW. 269
awake, longing for sleep. This is particularly the
case with cheerful music, which inspires in us bit-
terness and pain, satiety and home-sickness to-
gether, and forces us to sip again and again as at
a sweetened draught of poison. The hall of gay,
noisy merriment then seems to grow narrow, the
light to lose its brightness and become browner.
At last we feel as if this music were penetrating
to a prison where a poor wretch cannot sleep for
home-sickness.
155.
Franz Schubert. —Franz Schubert, inferior as
an artist to the other great; musicians, had never-
theless the largest share of inherited musical wealth.
He spent it with a free hand and a kind heart, so
that for a few centuries musicians will continue to
nibble at his ideas and inspirations. In his works
we find a store of unused inventions; the greatness
of others will lie in making use of those inventions.
If Beethoven may be called the ideal listener for
a troubadour, Schubert has a right to be called the
ideal troubadour.
156.
Modern Musical Execution. —Great tragic
or dramatic execution of music acquires its character
by imitating the gesture of the great sinner, such
as Christianity conceives and desires him : the slow-
stepping, passionately brooding man, distracted by
the agonies of conscience, now flying in terror,
now clutching with delight, now standing still in
despair—and all the other marks of great sinful-
## p. 270 (#310) ############################################
270 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
J
ness. Only on the Christian assumption that all
men are great sinners and do nothing but sin could
we justify the application of this style of execution
to all music. So far, music would be the reflection
of all the actions and impulses of man, and would
continually have to express by gestures the lan-
guage of the great sinner. At such a performance,
a listener who was not enough of a Christian to
understand this logic might indeed cry out in hor-
ror, " For the love of Heaven, how did sin find its
way into music? "
157-
Felix Mendelssohn. —Felix Mendelssohn's
music is the music of the good taste that enjoys
all the good things that have ever existed. It
always points behind. How could it have much
"in front," much of a future ? —But did he want
it to have a future? He possessed a virtue rare
among artists, that of gratitude without arriere-
pensee. This virtue, too, always points behind.
158.
A Mother of Arts. —In our sceptical age, real
devotion requires almost a brutal heroism of am-
bition. Fanatical shutting of the eyes and bending
of the knee no longer suffice. Would it not be pos-
sible for ambition—in its eagerness to be the last
devotee of all the ages—to become the begetter of a
final church music, as it has been the begetter of the
final church architecture? (They call it the Jesuit
style. )
## p. 271 (#311) ############################################
THE WANDERER AND HIS SHADOW. 271
159.
Freedom in Fetters—a Princely Freedom.
—Chopin, the last of the modern musicians, who
gazed at and worshipped beauty, like Leopardi;
Chopin, the Pole, the inimitable (none that came
before or after him has a right to this name)—
Chopin had the same princely punctilio in conven-
tion that Raphael shows in the use of the simplest
traditional colours. The only difference is that
Chopin applies them not to colour but to melodic
and rhythmic traditions. He admitted the validity
of these traditions because he was born under the
sway of etiquette. But in these fetters he plays and
dances as the freest and daintiest of spirits, and, be
it observed, he does not spurn the chain.
160.
Chopin's Barcarolle. —Almost all states and
modes of life have a moment of rapture, and good
artists know how to discover that moment. Such
a moment there is even in life by the seashore—that
dreary, sordid, unhealthy existence, dragged out in
the neighbourhood of a noisy and covetous rabble.
This moment of rapture Chopin in his Barcarolle
expressed in sound so supremely that Gods them-
selves, when they heard it, might yearn to lie long
summer evenings in a boat.
161.
Robert Schumann. —"The Stripling," as the
romantic songsters of Germany and France of the
## p. 272 (#312) ############################################
272 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
first three decades of this century imagined him—
this stripling was completely translated into song
and melody by Robert Schumann, the eternal
youth, so long as he felt himself in full possession
of his powers. There are indeed moments when
his music reminds one of the eternal " old maid. "
162.
Dramatic Singers. —"Why does this beggar
sing? " "Probably he does not know how to wail. "
"Then he does right. " But our dramatic singers,
who wail because they do not know how to sing
—are they also in the right?
163.
Dramatic Music. —For him who does not see
what is happening on the stage, dramatic music is
a monstrosity, just as the running commentary to
a lost text is a monstrosity. Such music requires
us to have ears where our eyes are. This, however,
is doing violence to Euterpe, who, poor Muse, wants
to have her eyes and ears where the other Muses
have theirs.
164.
