Human, All-Too-Human: A Book For Free Spirits; Part II

96

The Grand Style. – The grand style comes into being when the beautiful wins a victory over the monstrous.

97

Dodging. – We do not realise, in the case of distinguished minds, wherein lies the excellence of their expression, their turn of phrase, until we can say what word every mediocre writer would inevitably have hit upon in expressing the same idea. All great artists, in steering their car, show themselves prone to dodge and leave the track, but never to fall over.

98

Something like Bread. – Bread neutralises and takes out the taste of other food, and is therefore necessary to every long meal. In all works of art there must be something like bread, in order that they may produce divers effects. If these effects followed one another without occasional pauses and intervals, they would soon make us weary and provoke disgust – in fact, a long meal of art would then be impossible.

99

Jean Paul. – Jean Paul knew a great deal, but had no science; understood all manner of tricks of art, but had no art; found almost everything enjoyable, but had no taste; possessed feeling and seriousness, but in dispensing them poured over them a nauseous sauce of tears; had even wit, but, unfortunately for his ardent desire for it, far too little – whence he drives the reader to despair by his very lack of wit. In short, he was the bright, rank-smelling weed that shot up overnight in the fair pleasaunces of Schiller and Goethe. He was a good, comfortable man, and yet a destiny, a destiny in a dressing-gown.²⁰

100

Palate for Opposites. – In order to enjoy a work of the past as its contemporaries enjoyed it, one must have a palate for the prevailing taste of the age which it attacked.

101

Spirits-of-Wine Authors. – Many writers are neither spirit nor wine, but spirits of wine. They can flare up, and then they give warmth.

102

The Interpretative Sense. – The sense of taste, as the true interpretative sense, often talks the other senses over to its point of view and imposes upon them its laws and customs. At table one can receive disclosures about the most subtle secrets of the arts; it suffices to observe what tastes good and when and after what and how long it tastes good.

103

Lessing. – Lessing had a genuine French talent, and, as writer, went most assiduously to the French school. He knows well how to arrange and display his wares in his shop-window. Without this true art his thoughts, like the objects of them, would have remained rather in the dark, nor would the general loss be great. His art, however, has taught many (especially the last generation of German scholars) and has given enjoyment to a countless number. It is true his disciples had no need to learn from him, as they often did, his unpleasant tone with its mingling of petulance and candour. – Opinion is now unanimous on Lessing as “lyric poet,” and will some day be unanimous on Lessing as “dramatic poet.”

104

Undesirable Readers. – How an author is vexed by those stolid, awkward readers who always 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

Wieland. – 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 enjoyed 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 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. – Pithy conciseness, 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 conversations with Eckermann (the best German book in existence), what German prose literature remains that is worth reading over and over again? Lichtenberg'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.

110

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, intonation, 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 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.

111

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.

113

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 each attains a greater wealth of blooms within the narrow hedges of these sequestered garden enclosures.

114

Literature and Morality Mutually Explanatory. – We can show from Greek literature by what forces the Greek spirit developed, how it entered upon different channels, and where it became 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 displayed 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 competitors; how satiety enters in, new objects 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 expiration, and the rivulets are lost in the sand. The end, or at any rate an end, has come.

115

What Landscapes give Permanent Delight. – 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 of lines underneath all their complexity. Without such a mathematical substratum no scenery becomes 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. Everywhere we must apply pale tints, but we must determine 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 everything 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, 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 following which believed in him, among others the young Goethe. But whenever crowns were really distributed, 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 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 unexpectedly 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 understanding of the hearer; the common speech, learnt with much toil, whereby the artist can really communicate his ideas. All the more when he wishes, like 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 convention. As a rule originality is marvelled at, sometimes 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 Method. – Schiller, like other German artists, fancied that if a man had intellect he was entitled to improvise 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 æsthetics 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 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 practised 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 involuntarily 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 seduced 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 incarnate, 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 itself but once,” near to the saints, after her involuntary 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,²¹ in order to hear suddenly and unexpectedly 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 undoubtedly antiquated or becoming antiquated – without 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 considered in all fairness! – Goethe, as I have indicated, I do not include. He belongs to a higher species than “national literatures”: hence life, revival, 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 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 themselves 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 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 long outworn 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 particularly 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 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 presence 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 reckless 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.

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, unless 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.

140

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 formulæ 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 impose it upon themselves and cheerfully to overcome it, so that constraint and victory are perceived and admired.

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 permitted 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.²²– 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 Holy Ghost?” “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 (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 conclusion, by the way, does great credit to the Germans.

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.

149

Sebastian Bach. – In so far as we do not hear Bach's music as perfect and experienced connoisseurs of counterpoint and all the varieties of the fugal 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 making but not yet made – our mighty modern 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

Händel. – Händel, 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 just as far as the limit which morality sets to intellect, 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 whithersoever 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-awake, longing for sleep. This is particularly the case with cheerful music, which inspires in us bitterness and pain, satiety and home-sickness together, 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 nevertheless 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.