No More Learning

SHUTTING ONE'S MOUTH. - When his book.
opens its mouth, the author must shut his.
141.
BADGES OF RANK. --All poets and men of letters
who are in love with the superlative want to do more
than they can.
142.
COLD BOOKS. —The deep thinker reckons on
readers who feel with him the happiness that lies
in deep thinking. Hence a book that looks cold
and sober, if seen in the right light, may seem bathed
in the sunshine of spiritual cheerfulness and become
a genuine soul-comforter.
143.
A KNACK OF THE SLOW-WITTED. —The slow-
witted thinker generally allies himself with loqua-
city and ceremoniousness. By the former he thinks
he is gaining mobility and fluency, by the latter he
gives his peculiarity the appearance of being a result
of free will and artistic purpose, with a view to
dignity, which needs slow movement.


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74 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
144-
Le Style Baroque*—He who as thinker and
writeris not born or trained to dialectic and the conse-
cutive arrangement of ideas, will unconsciously turn
to the rhetoric and dramatic forms. For, after all, his
object is to make himself understood and to carry the
day by force, and he is indifferent whether, as shep-
herd, he honestly guides to himself the hearts of his
fellow-men, or, as robber, he captures them by sur-
prise. This is true of the plastic arts as of music:
where the feeling of insufficient dialectic or a de-
ficiency in expression or narration, together with an
urgent, over-powerful impulse to form, gives birth
to that species of style known as " baroque. " Only
the ill-educated and the arrogant will at once find a
depreciatory force in this word. The baroque style
always arises at the time of decay of a great art,
when the demands of art in classical expression
have become too great. It is a natural phenomenon
which will be observed with melancholy—for it is a
forerunner of the night—but at the same time with
admiration for its peculiar compensatory arts of ex-
pression and narration. To this style belongs already
a choice of material and subjects of the highest
dramatic tension, at which the heart trembles even
when there is no art, because heaven and hell are
all too near the emotions: then, the oratory of strong
passion and gestures, of ugly sublimity, of great
* In German Barockstil, i. e. the degenerate post-Renais-
sance style in art and literature, which spread from Italy
in the seventeenth century. —Tr.


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MISCELLANEOUS MAXIMS AND OPINIONS. 75
masses, in fact of absolute quantity per se (as is
shown in Michael Angelo, the father or grandfather
of the Italian baroque stylists): the lights of dusk,
illumination and conflagration playing upon those
strongly moulded forms: ever-new ventures in means
and aims, strongly underscored by artists for artists,
while the layman must fancy he sees an unconscious
overflowing of all the horns of plenty of an original
nature-art: all these characteristics that constitute
the greatness of that style are neither possible nor
permitted in the earlier ante-classical and classical
periods of a branch of art. Such luxuries hang long
on the tree like forbidden fruit. Just now, when
music is passing into this last phase, we may learn to
know the phenomenon of the baroque style in peculiar
splendour, and, by comparison, find much that is
instructive for earlier ages. For from Greek times
onward there has often been a baroque style, in
poetry, oratory, prose writing, sculpture, and, as is
well known, in architecture. This style, though
wanting in the highest nobility,—the nobility of an
innocent, unconscious, triumphant perfection,—has
nevertheless given pleasure to many of the best and
most serious minds of their time. Hence, as afore-
said, it is presumptuous to depreciate it without re-
serve, however happy we may feel because our taste
for it has not made us insensible to the purer and
greater style.
145.
The Value of Honest Books. —Honest books
make the reader honest, at least by exciting his
hatred and aversion, which otherwise cunning clever-


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j6 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
ness knows so well how to conceal. Against a book,
however, we let ourselves go, however restrained we
may be in our relations with men.
146.
How Art makes Partisans. —Individual fine
passages, an exciting general tenor, a moving and
absorbing finale—so much of a work of art is ac-
cessible even to most laymen. In an art period
when it is desired to win over the great majority of
the laymen to the side of the artists and to make a
party perhaps for the very preservation of art, the
creative artist will do well to offer nothing more than
the above. Then he will not be a squanderer of his
strength, in spheres where no one is grateful to him.
For to perform the remaining functions, the imi-
tation of Nature in her organic development and
growth, would in that case be like sowing seeds in
water.
147.
Becoming Great to the Detriment of
HISTORy. —Every later master who leads the taste
of art-lovers into his channel unconsciously gives rise
to a selection and revaluation of the older masters
and their works. Whatever in them is conformable
and akin to him, and anticipates and foreshadows
him, appears henceforth as the only important ele-
ment in them and their works—a fruit in which a
great error usually lies hidden like a worm.
148.
How an Epoch becomes Lured to Art. —If
we teach people by all the enchantments of artists


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MISCELLANEOUS MAXIMS AND OPINIONS. JJ
and thinkers to feel reverence for their defects, their
intellectual poverty, their absurd infatuations and
passions (as it is quite possible to do); if we show
them only the lofty side of crime and folly, only
the touching and appealing element in weakness and
flabbiness and blind devotion (that too has often
enough been done):—we have employed the means
for inspiring even an unphilosophical and inartistic
age with an ecstatic love of philosophy and art
(especially of thinkers and artists as personalities)
and, in the worst case, perhaps with the only means
of defending the existence of such tender and fragile
beings.
149.
Criticism and Joy. —Criticism, one-sided and
unjust as well as intelligent criticism, gives so much
pleasure to him who exercises it that the world is
indebted to every work and every action that in-
spires much criticism and many critics. For criti-.
cism draws after it a glittering train of joyousness,
wit, self-admiration, pride, instruction, designs of im-
provement. —The God of joy created the bad and
the mediocre for the same reason that he created the
good.
150.
Beyond his Limits. —When an artist wants to
be more than an artist—for example, the moral
awakener of his people—he at last falls in love, as a
punishment, with a monster of moral substance.
The Muse laughs, for, though a kind-hearted God-
dess, she can also be malignant from jealousy.
Milton and Klopstock are cases in point.


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78 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
151.
A GLASS Eye. —The tendency of a talent towards
moral subjects, characters, motives, towards the
"beautiful soul" of the work of art, is often only a
glass eye put on by the artist who lacks a beautiful
soul. It may result, though rarely, that his eye
finally becomes living Nature, if indeed it be Nature
with a somewhat troubled look. But the ordinary
result is that the whole world thinks it sees Nature
where there is only cold glass.
152.
Writing and Desire for Victory. —Writing
should always indicate a victory, indeed a conquest
of oneself which must be communicated to others
for their behoof. There are, however, dyspeptic
authors who only write when they cannot digest
something, or when something has remained stuck
in their teeth. Through their anger they try un-
consciously to disgust the reader too, and to exercise
violence upon him—that is, they desire victory, but
victory over others.
153-
A Good Book Needs Time. —Every good book
tastes bitter when it first comes out, for it has the
defect of newness. Moreover, it suffers damage
from its living author, if he is well known and much
talked about. For all the world is accustomed to
confuse the author with his work. Whatever of
profundity, sweetness, and brilliance the work may
contain must be developed as the years go by,


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MISCELLANEOUS MAXIMS AND OPINIONS. 79
under the care of growing, then old, and lastly
traditional reverence. Many hours must pass, many
a spider must have woven its web about the book.
A book is made better by good readers and clearer
by good opponents.
154.
Extravagance as an Artistic Means. —
Artists well understand the idea of using extrava-
gance as an artistic means in order to convey an
impression of wealth. This is one of those innocent
wiles of soul-seduction that the artist must know,
for in his world, which has only appearance in view,
the means to appearance need not necessarily be
genuine.
155-
The Hidden Barrel-Organ. —Genius, by
virtue of its more ample drapery, knows better than
talent how to hide its barrel-organ. Yet after all
it too can only play its seven old pieces over and
over again.
156.
The Name on the Title-Page. —It is now a
matter of custom and almost of duty for the
author's name to appear on the book, and this is a
main cause of the fact that books have so little
influence. If they are good, they are worth more
than the personalities of their authors, of which
they are the quintessences. But as soon as the
author makes himself known on the title-page, the
quintessence, from the reader's point of view, be-


## p. 80 (#100) #############################################

80 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
comes diluted with the personal, the most personal
element, and the aim of the book is frustrated. It
is the ambition of the intellect no longer to appear
individual.
157-
The Most Cutting Criticism. —We make the
most cutting criticism of a man or a book when we
indicate his or its ideal.
158.
Little or no Love. —Every good book is written
for a particular reader and men of his stamp, and
for that very reason is looked upon unfavourably
by all other readers, by the vast majority. Its re-
putation accordingly rests on a narrow basis and
must be built up by degrees. —The mediocre and
bad book is mediocre and bad because it seeks to
please, and does please, a great number.
159-
Music and Disease. —The danger of the new
music lies in the fact that it puts the cup of rapture
and exaltation to the lips so invitingly, and with
such a show of moral ecstasy, that even the noble
and temperate man always drinks a drop too much.
This minimum of intemperance, constantlyrepeated,
can in the end bring about a deeper convulsion and
destruction of mental health than any coarse excess
could do. Hence nothing remains but some day
to fly from the grotto of the nymph, and through
perils and billowy seas to forge one's way to the


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MISCELLANEOUS MAXIMS AND OPINIONS. 8l
smoke of Ithaca and the embraces of a simpler and
more human spouse.
160.
Advantage for Opponents. —A book full of
intellect communicates something thereof even to
its opponents.
161.
Youth and Criticism. —To criticise a book
means, for the young, not to let oneself be touched
by a single productive thought therefrom, and to
protect one's skin with hands and feet. The
youngster lives in opposition to all novelty that
he cannot love in the lump, in a position of self-
defence, and in this connection he commits, as often
as he can, a superfluous sin.
162.
Effect of Quantity. —The greatest paradox
in the history of poetic art lies in this: that in all
that constitutes the greatness of the old poets a
man may be a barbarian, faulty and deformed from
top to toe, and still remain the greatest of poets.
This is the case with Shakespeare, who, as com-
pared with Sophocles, is like a mine of immeasur-
able wealth in gold, lead, and rubble, whereas
Sophocles is not merely gold, but gold in its noblest
form, one that almost makes us forget the money-
value of the metal. But quantity in its highest in-
tensity has the same effect as quality. That is a
good thing for Shakespeare.
VOl. II. F


## p. 82 (#102) #############################################

82 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
I63.
All Beginning is Dangerous. —The Poet can
choose whether to raise emotion from one grade to
another, and so finally to exalt it to a great height
—or to try a surprise attack, and from the start
to pull the bell-rope with might and main. Both
processes have their danger—in the first case his
hearer may run away from him through boredom,
in the second through terror.
164.
In Favour OF Critics. —Insects sting, not from
malice, but because they too want to live. It is the
same with our critics—they desire our blood, not our
pain.
165.
Success of Aphorisms. —The inexperienced,
when an aphorism at once illuminates their minds
with its naked truth, always think that it is old and
well known. They look askance at the author, as if
he had wanted to steal the common property of all,
whereas they enjoy highly spiced half-truths, and
give the author to understand as much. He knows
how to appreciate the hint, and easily guesses there-
by where he has succeeded and failed.
166.
The Desire for Victory. — An artist who
exceeds the limit of his strength in all that he
undertakes will end by carrying the multitude
along with him through the spectacle of violent


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MISCELLANEOUS MAXIMS AND OPINIONS. 83
wrestling that he affords. Success is not always
the accompaniment only of victory, but also of the
desire for victory.
167.
Sibi Scribere. —The sensible author writes for
no other posterity than his own—that is, for his
age—so as to be able even then to take pleasure
in himself.
168.
Praise of the Aphorism. —A good aphorism
is too hard for the tooth of time, and is not worn
away by all the centuries, although it serves as food
for every epoch. Hence it is the greatest paradox
in literature, the imperishable in the midst of
change, the nourishment which always remains
highly valued, as salt does, and never becomes
stupid like salt.
169.
The Art-Need of the Second Order. —The
people may have something of what can be called
art-need, but it is small, and can be cheaply satis-
fied. On the whole, the remnant of art (it must
be honestly confessed) suffices for this need. Let
us consider, for example, the kind of melodies and
songs in which the most vigorous, unspoiled, and
true-hearted classes of the population find genuine
delight; let us live among shepherds, cowherds,
peasants, huntsmen, soldiers, and sailors, and give
ourselves the answer. And in the country town, just
in the houses that are the homes of inherited civic
virtue, is it not the worst music at present produced


## p. 84 (#104) #############################################

84 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
that is loved and,one might say,cherished? He who
speaks of deeper needs and unsatisfied yearnings
for art among the people, as it is, is a crank or an im-
postor. Be honest! Only in exceptional men is there
now an art-need in the highest sense—because art
is once more on the down-grade, and human powers
and hopes are for the time being directed to other
matters. —Apart from this, outside the populace,
there exists indeed, in the higher and highest strata
of society, a broader and more comprehensive art-
need, but of the second order. Here there is a sort
of artistic commune, which possibly means to be
sincere. But let us look at the elements! They
are in general the more refined malcontents, who
attain no genuine pleasure in themselves; the cul-
tured, who have not become free enough to dispense
with the consolations of religion, and yet do not
find its incense sufficiently fragrant; the half-aristo-
cratic, who are too weak to combat by a heroic
conversion or renunciation the one fundamental
error of their lives or the pernicious bent of their
characters; the highly gifted, who think themselves
too dignified to be of service by modest activity,
and are too lazy for real, self-sacrificing work; girls
who cannot create for themselves a satisfactory
sphere of duties; women who have tied themselves
by a light-hearted or nefarious marriage, and know
that they are not tied securely enough; scholars,
physicians, merchants, officials who specialised too
early and never gave their lives a free enough scope
—who do their work efficiently, it is true, but with a
worm gnawing at their hearts; finally, all imperfect
artists—these are nowadays the true needers of art!


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MISCELLANEOUS MAXIMS AND OPINIONS. 85
What do they really desire from art? Art is to drive
away hours and moments of discomfort, boredom,
half-bad conscience, and, if possible, transform the
faults of their lives and characters into faults of
world-destiny. Very different were the Greeks, who
realised in their art the outflow and overflow of their
own sense of well-being and health, and loved to
see their perfection once more from a standpoint
outside themselves. They were led to art by delight
in themselves; our contemporaries—by disgust of
themselves.
170.
The Germans in the Theatre. —The real
theatrical talent of the Germans was Kotzebue. He
and his Germans, those of higher as well as those
of middle-class society, were necessarily associated,
and his contemporaries should have said of him in all
seriousness, "in him we live and move and have our
being. " Here was nothing—no constraint, pretence,
or half-enjoyment: what he could and would do was
understood. Yes, until now the honest theatrical
success on the German stage has been in the hands
of the shamefaced or unashamed heirs of Kotzebue's
methods and influence—that is, as far as comedy
still flourishes at all. The result is that much of the
Germanism of that age, sometimes far off from the
great towns, still survives. Good-natured; incon-
tinent in small pleasures; always ready for tears;
with the desire, in the theatre at any rate, to be
able to get rid of their innate sobriety and strict
attention to duty and exercise; a smiling, nay, a
laughing indulgence; confusing goodness and sym-


## p. 86 (#106) #############################################

86 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
pathy and welding them into one, as is the essential
characteristic of German sentimentality; exceed-
ingly happy at a noble, magnanimous action; for
the rest, submissive towards superiors, envious of
each other, and yet in their heart of hearts thor-
oughly self-satisfied—such were they and such was
he. —The second dramatic talent was Schiller. He
discovered a class of hearers which had hitherto
never been taken into consideration: among the
callow German youth of both sexes. His poetry
responded to their higher, nobler, more violent if
more confused emotions, their delight in the jingle
of moral words (a delight that begins to disappear
when we reach the thirties). Thus he won for him-
self, by virtue of the passionateness and partisanship
of the young, a success which gradually reacted with
advantage upon those of riper years. Generally
speaking, Schiller rejuvenated the Germans. Goethe
stood and still stands above the Germans in every
respect. To them he will never belong. How could
a nation in well-being and well-wishing come up to
the intellectuality of Goethe? Beethoven composed
and Schopenhauer philosophised above the heads
of the Germans, and it was above their heads, in
the same way, that Goethe wrote his Tasso, his
Iphigenie. He was followed by a small company
of highly cultured persons, who were educated by
antiquity, life, and travel, and had grown out of
German ways of thought. He himself did not
wish it to be otherwise.
—When the Romantics set
up their well-conceived Goethe cult; when their
amazing skill in appreciation was passed on to the
disciples of Hegel, the real educators of the Germans


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MISCELLANEOUS MAXIMS AND OPINIONS. 87
of this century; when the awakening national am-
bition turned out advantageous to the fame of the
German poets; when the real standard of the nation,
as to whether it could honestly find enjoyment in
anything, became inexorably subordinated to the
judgment of individuals and to that national am-
bition,—that is, when people began to enjoy by
compulsion,—then arose that false, spurious German
culture which was ashamed of Kotzebue; which
brought Sophocles, Calderon, and even the Second
Part of Goethe's Faust on the stage; and which,
on account of its foul tongue and congested stomach,
no longer knows now what it likes and what it finds
tedious. —Happy are those who have taste, even if
it be a bad taste! Only by this characteristic can
one be wise as well as happy. Hence the Greeks,
who were very refined in such matters, designated
the sage by a word that means "man of taste," and
called wisdom, artistic as well as scientific, " taste"
{sophia).
171.
Music as a Late-Comer in every Culture.
—Among all the arts that are accustomed to grow
on a definite culture-soil and under definite social
and political conditions, music is the last plant to
come up, arising in the autumn and fading-season
of the culture to which it belongs. At the same
time, the first signs and harbingers of a new spring
are usually already noticeable, and sometimes music,
like the language of a forgotten age, rings out into
a new, astonished world, and comes too late. In the
art of the Dutch and Flemish musicians the soul


## p. 88 (#108) #############################################

88 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
r
of the Christian middle ages at last found its fullest
tone: their sound-architecture is the posthumous
but legitimate and equal sister of Gothic. Not until
Handel's music was heard the note of the best in
the soul of Luther and his kin, the great Judaeo-
heroical impulse that created the whole Reforma-
tion movement. Mozart first expressed in golden
melody the age of Louis XIV. and the art of Racine
and Claude Lorrain. The eighteenth century—that
century of rhapsody, of broken ideals and transitory
happiness—only sang itself out in the music of Bee-
thoven and Rossini. A lover of sentimental similes
might say that all really important music was a
swan-song. —Music is, in fact, not a universal language
for all time, as is so often said in its praise, but re-
sponds exactly to a particular period and warmth
of emotion which involves a quite definite, individual
culture, determined by time and place, as its inner
law. The music of Palestrina would be quite un-
intelligible to a Greek; and again, what would the
music of Rossini convey to Palestrina ? —It may be
that our most modern German music, with all its pre-
eminence and desire of pre-eminence, will soon be
no longer understood. For this music sprang from
a culture that is undergoing a rapid decay, from the
soil of that epoch of reaction and restoration in
which a certain Catholicism of feeling, as well as a
delight in all indigenous, national, primitive man-
ners, burst into bloom and scattered a blended per-
fume over Europe. These two emotional tendencies,
adopted in their greatest strength and carried to
their farthest limits, found final expression in the
music of Wagner. Wagner's predilection for the old


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MISCELLANEOUS MAXIMS AND OPINIONS. 89
native sagas, his free idealisation of their unfamiliar
gods and heroes,—who are really sovereign beasts
of prey with occasional fits of thoughtfulness, mag-
nanimity, and boredom,—his re-animation of those
figures, to which he gave in addition the mediaeval
Christian thirst for ecstatic sensuality and spiritual-
isation—all this Wagnerian give-and-take with re-
gard to materials, souls, figures, and words—would
clearly express the spirit of his music, if it could not,
like all music, speak quite unambiguously of itself.
This spirit wages the last campaign of reaction
against the spirit of illumination which passed into
this century from the last, and also against the super-
national ideas of French revolutionary romanticism
and of English and American insipidity in the
reconstruction of state and society. —But is it not
evident that the spheres of thought and emotion
apparently suppressed by Wagner and his school
have long since acquired fresh strength, and that
his late musical protest against them generally rings
into ears that prefer to hear different and opposite
notes; so that one day that high and wonderful
art will suddenly become unintelligible and will be
covered by the spider's web of oblivion ? —In con-
sidering this state of affairs we must not let our-
selves be led astray by those transitory fluctuations
which arise like a reaction within a reaction, as a
temporary sinking of the mountainous wave in the
midst of the general upheaval. Thus, this decade of
national war, ultramontane martyrdom, and social-
istic unrest may, in its remoter after-effect, even aid
the Wagnerian art to acquire a sudden halo, with-
out guaranteeing that it " has a future" or that it


## p. 90 (#110) #############################################

go HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
has the future. It is in the very nature of music
that the fruits of its great culture-vintage should
lose their taste and wither earlier than the fruits of
the plastic arts or those that grow on the tree of
knowledge. Among all the products of the human
artistic sense ideas are the most solid and lasting.
172.
The Poet no longer a Teacher. —Strange
as it may sound to our time, there were once poets
and artists whose soul was above the passions with
their delights and convulsions, and who therefore
took their pleasure in purer materials, worthier men,
more delicate complications and denouements. If
the artists of our day for the most part unfetter the
will, and so are under certain circumstances for that
very reason emancipators of life, those were tamers of
the will, enchanters of animals, creators of men. In
fact, they moulded, re-moulded, and new-moulded
life, whereas the fame of poets of our day lies in
unharnessing, unchaining, and shattering. —The an-
cient Greeks demanded of the poet that he should
be the teacher of grown men. How ashamed the
poet would be now if this demand were made of
him! He is not even a good student of himself,
and so never himself becomes a good poem or a fine
picture. Under the most favourable circumstances
he remains the shy, attractive ruin of a temple, but
at the same time a cavern of cravings, overgrown
like a ruin with flowers, nettles, and poisonous weeds,
inhabited and haunted by snakes, worms, spiders,
and birds; an object for sad reflection as to why the
noblest and most precious must grow up at once


## p. 91 (#111) #############################################

MISCELLANEOUS MAXIMS AND OPINIONS. 91
like a ruin, without the past and future of perfec-
tion.
173-
Looking Forward and Backward. —An art
like that which streams out of Homer, Sophocles,
Theocritus, Calderon, Racine, Goethe, as the super-
abundance of a wise and harmonious conduct of life
—that is the true art, at which we grasp when we
have ourselves become wiser and more harmonious.
It is not that barbaric, if ever so delightful, outpour-
ing of hot and highly coloured things from an un-
disciplined, chaotic soul, which is what we under-
stood by "art" in our youth. It is obvious from
the nature of the case that for certain periods of
life an art of overstrain, excitement, antipathy to
the orderly, monotonous, simple, logical, is an in-
evitable need, to which artists must respond, lest
the soul of such periods should unburden itself in
other ways, through all kinds of disorder and im-
propriety. Hence youths as they generally are, full,
fermenting, tortured above all things by boredom,
and women who lack work that fully occupies their
soul, require that art of delightful disorder. All
the more violently on that account are they in-
flamed with a desire for satisfaction without change,
happiness without stupor and intoxication.
174.
Against the Art of Works of Art. —Art is
above all and first of all meant to embellish life, to
make us ourselves endurable and if possible agree-
able in the eyes of others. With this task in view,


## p. 92 (#112) #############################################

92 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
art moderates us and holds us in restraint, creates
forms of intercourse, binds over the uneducated to
laws of decency, cleanliness, politeness, well-timed
speech and silence. Hence art must conceal or
transfigure everything that is ugly—the painful,
terrible, and disgusting elements which in spite of
every effort will always break out afresh in accord-
ance with the very origin of human nature. Art
has to perform this duty especially in regard to the
passions and spiritual agonies and anxieties, and to
cause the significant factor to shine through unavoid-
able or unconquerable ugliness. To this great, super-
great task the so-called art proper, that of works of
art, is a mere accessary. A man who feels within
himself a surplus of such powers of embellishment,
concealment, and transfiguration will finally seek
to unburden iumself of this surplus in works of art.
The same holds good, under special circumstances,
of a whole nation. —But as a rule we nowadays begin
art at the end, hang on to its tail, and think that
works of art constitute art proper, and that life
should be improved and transformed by this means
—fools that we are! If we begin a dinner with
dessert, and try sweet after sweet, small wonder that
we ruin our digestions and even our appetites for
the good, hearty, nourishing meal to which art in-
vites us!
175-
Continued Existence of Art. —Why, really,
does a creative art nowadays continue to exist? Be-
cause the majority who have hours of leisure (and
such an art is for them only) think that they cannot


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MISCELLANEOUS MAXIMS AND OPINIONS. 93
fill up their time without music, theatres and picture-
galleries, novels and poetry. Granted that one
could keep them from this indulgence, either they
would strive less eagerly for leisure, and the in-
vidious sight of the rich would be less common (a
great gain for the stability of society), or they would
have leisure, but would learn to reflect on what can
be learnt and unlearnt: on their work, for instance,
their associations, the pleasure they could bestow.
All the world, with the exception of the artist, would
in both cases reap the advantage. —Certainly, there
are many vigorous, sensible readers who could take
objection to this. Still, it must be said on behalf of
the coarse and malignant that the author himself is
concerned with this protest, and that there is in his
book much to be read that is not actually written
down therein.
176.
The Mouthpiece of the Gods. —The poet
expresses the universal higher opinions of the
nation, he is its mouthpiece and flute; but by
virtue of metre and all other artistic means he so
expresses them that the nation regards them as
something quite new and wonderful, and believes
in all seriousness that he is the mouthpiece of the
Gods. Yes, under the clouds of creation the poet
himself forgets whence he derives all his intellectual
wisdom—from father and mother, from teachers and
books of all kinds, from the street and particularly
from the priest. He is deceived by his own art,
and really believes, in a naive period, that a God
is speaking through him, that he is creating in a


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94 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
state of religious inspiration. As a matter of fact,
he is only saying what he has learnt, a medley of
popular wisdom and popular foolishness. Hence,
so far as a poet is really vox populi he is held to be
vox del.
177.
What all Art wants to Do and Cannot. —
The last and hardest task of the artist is the pre-
sentment of what remains the same, reposes in
itself, is lofty and simple and free from the bizarre.
Hence the noblest forms of moral perfection are
rejected as inartistic by weaker artists, because the
sight of these fruits is too painful for their ambition.
The fruit gleams at them from the topmost branches
of art, but they lack the ladder, the courage, the
grip to venture so high. In himself a Phidias is
quite possible as a poet, but, if modern strength be
taken into consideration, almost solely in the sense
that to God nothing is impossible. The desire for
a poetical Claude Lorrain is already an immodesty
at present, however earnestly one man's heart may
yearn for such a consummation. —The presentment
of the highest man, the most simple and at the same
time the most complete, has hitherto been beyond
the scope of all artists. Perhaps, however, the
Greeks, in the ideal of Athene, saw farther than
any men did before or after their time.
178.
Art and Restoration. —The retrograde move-
ments in history, the so-called periods of restora-
tion, which try to revive intellectual and social


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MISCELLANEOUS MAXIMS AND OPINIONS. 95
conditions that existed before those immediately
preceding,—and seem really to succeed in giving
them a brief resurrection, — have the charm of
sentimental recollection, ardent longing for what is
almost lost, hasty embracing of a transitory happi-
ness. It is on account of this strange trend towards
seriousness that in such transient and almost dreamy
periods art and poetry find a natural soil, just as the
tenderest and rarest plants grow on mountain-slopes
of steep declivity. —Thus many a good artist is un-
wittingly impelled to a "restoration" way of thinking
in politics and society, for which, on his own account,
he prepares a quiet little corner and garden. Here
he collects about himself the human remains of the
historical epoch that appeals to him, and plays his lyre
to many who are dead, half-dead, and weary to death,
perhaps with the above-mentioned result of a brief
resurrection.
179-
Happiness of the Age. —In two respects our
age is to be accounted happy. With respect to the
past, we enjoy all cultures and their productions, and
nurture ourselves on the noblest blood of all periods.
We stand sufficiently near to the magic of the
forces from whose womb these periods are born to
be able in passing to submit to their spell with
pleasure and terror; whereas earlier cultures could
only enjoy themselves, and never looked beyond
themselves, but were rather overarched by a bell of
broader or narrower dome, through which indeed
light streamed down to them, but which their gaze
could not pierce. With respect to the future,


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g6 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
there opens out to us for the first time a mighty,
comprehensive vista of human and economic pur-
poses engirdling the whole inhabited globe. At
the same time, we feel conscious of a power our-
selves to take this new task in hand without presump-
tion, without requiring supernatural aids. Yes,
whatever the result of our enterprise, however much
we may have overestimated our strength, at any
rate we need render account to no one but our-
selves, and mankind can henceforth begin to do
with itself what it will. —There are, it is true,
peculiar human bees, who only know how to suck
H the bitterest and worst elements from the chalice
of every flower. It is true that all flowers contain
something that is not honey, but these bees may
be allowed to feel in their own way about the
happiness of our time, and continue to build up
their hive of discomfort.
180.
A VISION. —Hours of instruction and meditation
for adults, even the most mature, and such institu-
tions visited without compulsion but in accordance
with the moral injunction of the whole community;
the churches as the meeting-places most worthy and
rich in memories for the purpose; at the same time
daily festivals in honour of the reason that is at-
tained and attainable by man; a newer and fuller
budding and blooming of the ideal of the teacher,
in which the clergyman, the artist and the physician,
the man of science and the sage are blended, and
their individual virtues should come to the fore as


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MISCELLANEOUS MAXIMS AND OPINIONS. 97
a collective virtue in their teaching itself, in their
discourses, in their method—this is my ever-re-
curring vision, of which I firmly believe that it has
raised a corner of the veil of the future.
181.
Education a Distortion. —The extraordinary
haphazardness of the whole system of education,
which leads every adult to saynowadays that his sole
educator was chance, and the weathercock-nature
of educational methods and aims, may be explained
as follows. The oldest and the newest culture-
powers, as in a turbulent mass-meeting, would rather
be heard than understood, and wish to prove at all
costs by their outcries and clamourings that they
still exist or already exist. The poor teachers and
educators are first dazed by this senseless noise,
then become silent and finally apathetic, allowing
anything to be done to them just as they in their
turn allow anything to be done to their pupils.
They are not trained themselves, so how are they
to train others? They are themselves no straight-
growing, vigorous, succulent trees, and he who
wishes to attach himself to them must wind and
bend himself and finally become distorted and de-
formed as they.
182.
PHILOSOPHERS AND ARTISTS OF THE AgE. —
Rhapsody and frigidity, burning desires and wan-
ing of the heart's glow—this wretched medley is to
be found in the picture of the highest European
society of the present day. There the artist thinks
vol. 11. g


## p. 98 (#118) #############################################

98 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
that he is achieving a great deal when through his
art he lights the torch of the heart as well as the
torch of desire. The philosopher has the same
notion, when in the chilliness of his heart, which he
has in common with his age, he cools hot desires in
himself and his following by his world-denying judg-
ments.
183.
Not to be a Soldier of Culture without
Necessity. —At last people are learning what it
costs us so dear not to know in our youth—that
we must first do superior actions and secondly
seek the superior wherever and under whatever
names it is to be found ; that we must at once go out
of the way of all badness and mediocrity without
fighting it; and that even doubt as to the excellence
of a thing (such as quickly arises in one of practised
taste) should rank as an argument against it and a
reason for completely avoiding it. We must not
shrink from the danger of occasionally making a
mistake and confounding the less accessible good
with the bad and imperfect. Only he who can do
nothing better should attack the world's evils as
the soldier of culture. But those who should support
culture and spread its teachings ruin themselves
if they go about armed, and by precautions, night-
watches, and bad dreams turn the peace of their
domestic and artistic life into sinister unrest.
184.
How Natural History should be Ex-
pounded. —Natural history, like the history of the


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MISCELLANEOUS MAXIMS AND OPINIONS. 99
war and victory of moral and intellectual forces
in the campaign against anxiety, self-delusion, lazi-
ness, superstition, folly, should be so expounded
that every reader or listener may be continually
aroused to strive after mental and physical health
and soundness, after the feeling of joy, and be
awakened to the desire to be the heir and continu-
ator of mankind, to an ever nobler adventurous im-
pulse. Hitherto natural history has not found its
true language, because the inventive and eloquent
artists—who are needed for this purpose—never
rid themselves of a secret mistrust of it, and above
all never wish to learn from it a thorough lesson.
Nevertheless it must be conceded to the English
that their scientific manuals for the lower strata
of the people have made admirable strides towards
that ideal. But then such books are written by
their foremost men of learning, full, complete, and
inspiring natures, and not, as among us, by mediocre
investigators.
185.
Genius in Humanity. —If genius, according to J
Schopenhauer's observation, lies in the coherent
and vivid recollection of our own experience, a
striving towards genius in humanity collectively
might be deduced from the striving towards know-
ledge of the whole historic past—which is begin-
ning to mark off the modern age more and more
as compared with earlier ages and has for the first
time broken down the barriers between nature and
spirit, men and animals, morality and physics. A
perfectly conceived history would be cosmic self-
consciousness.


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IOO HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
186.
The Cult of Culture. —On great minds is
bestowed the terrifying all-too-human of their
natures, their blindnesses, deformities, and extra-
vagances, so that their more powerful, easily all-
too-powerful influence may be continually held
within bounds through the distrust aroused by such
qualities. For the sum-total of all that human-
ity needs for its continued existence is so com-
prehensive, and demands powers so diverse and so
numerous, that for every one-sided predilection,
whether in science or politics or art or commerce, to
which such natures would persuade us, mankind as
a whole has to pay a heavy price. It has always
been a great disaster to culture when human beings
are worshipped. In this sense we may understand
the precept of Mosaic law which forbids us to have
any other gods but God. —Side by side with the
cult of genius and violence we must always place,
as its complement and remedy, the cult of culture.
This cult can find an intelligent appreciation
even for the material, the inferior, the mean, the
misunderstood, the weak, the imperfect, the one-
sided, the incomplete, the untrue, the apparent, even
the wicked and horrible, and can grant them the
concession that all this is necessary. For the
continued harmony of all things human, attained
by amazing toil and strokes of luck, and just as
much the work of Cyclopes and ants as of geniuses,
shall never be lost. How, indeed, could we dis-
pense with that deep, universal, and often uncanny


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MISCELLANEOUS MAXIMS AND OPINIONS. IOI
bass, without which, after all, melody cannot be
melody?
187.
The Antique World and Pleasure. —The
man of the antique world understood better how to
rejoice, we understand better how to grieve less.
They continually found new motives for feeling
happy, for celebrating festivals, being inventive with
all their wealth of shrewdness and reflection. We,
on the other hand, concentrate our intellect rather
on the solving of problems which have in view
painlessness and the removal of sources of dis-
comfort. With regard to suffering existence, the
ancients sought to forget or in some way to convert
the sensation into a pleasant one, thus trying to
supply palliatives. We attack the causes of suffering,
and on the whole prefer to use prophylactics. —
Perhaps we are only building upon a foundation
whereon a later age will once more set up the temple
of joy.
188.
The Muses as Liars. —" We know how to tell
many lies," so sang the Muses once, when they
revealed themselves to Hesiod. —The conception of
the artist as deceiver, once grasped, leads to im-
portant discoveries.
189.
How Paradoxical Homer can be. —Is there
anything more desperate, more horrible, more in-
credible, shining over human destiny like a winter
sun, than that idea of Homer's:


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102 HUMAN, ALL-TOO-HUMAN.
,
"So the decree of the Gods willed it, and doomed
man to perish, that it might be a matter for song
even to distant generations "?
In other words, we suffer and perish so that poets
may not lack material, and this is the dispensation
of those very Gods of Homer who seem much con-
cerned about the joyousness of generations to come,
but very little about us men of the present. To
think that such ideas should ever have entered the
head of a Greek!
190.
Supplementary Justification of Exist-
ence. —Many ideas have come into the world as
errors and fancies but have turned out truths, be-
cause men have afterwards given them a genuine
basis to rest upon.
191.
Pro and Con Necessary. —He who has not
realised that every great man must not only be en-
couraged but also, for the sake of the common
welfare, opposed, is certainly still a great child—or
himself a great man.
192.
Injustice of Genius. —Genius is most unjust
towards geniuses, if they be contemporary. Either
it thinks it has no need of them and considers them
superfluous (for it can do without them), or their
influence crosses the path of its electric current, in
which case it even calls them pernicious.


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MISCELLANEOUS MAXIMS AND OPINIONS. 103
193-
The Saddest Destiny of a Prophet. —He
has worked twenty years to convince his con-
temporaries, and succeeds at last, but in the mean-
time his adversaries have also succeeded—he is no
longer convinced of himself.
194.
Three Thinkers like one Spider. —In every
philosophical school three thinkers follow one an-
other in this relation: the first produces from
himself sap and seed, the second draws it out in
threads and spins a cunning web, the third waits in
this web for the victims who are caught in it—and
tries to live upon this philosophy.
195.
From Association with Authors.