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

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 - Nietzsche himself was extremely short-sighted. – Tr.]– 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.

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 sinfulness. 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 language 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 horror, “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 arrière-pensée. This virtue, too, always points behind.

158

A Mother of Arts. – In our sceptical age, real devotion requires almost a brutal heroism of ambition. Fanatical shutting of the eyes and bending of the knee no longer suffice. Would it not be possible 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.)

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 convention 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.