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The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable. It is to this that every explanation, through few or many intermediate stages, leads; as the plummet touches the bottom of the sea now at a greater depth, now at a less, but is bound to reach it somewhere sooner or later. The study of this inexplicable devolves upon metaphysics.
For intellect in the service of will, that is to say in practical use, there exist only individual things; for intellect engaged in art and science, that is to say active for its own sake, there exist only universals, entire kinds, species, classes, ideas of things. Even the sculptor, in depicting the individual, seeks to depict the idea, the species. The reason for this is that will aims directly only at individual things, which are its true objective, for only they possess empirical reality. Concepts, classes, kinds, on the other hand, can become its objective only very indirectly. That is why the ordinary man has no sense for general truths, and why the genius, on the contrary, overlooks and neglects what is individual: to the genius the enforced occupation with the individual as such which constitutes the stuff of practical life is a burdensome drudgery.
The two main requirements for philosophizing are: firstly, to have the courage not to keep any question back; and secondly, to attain a clear consciousness of anything that goes without saying so as to comprehend it as a problem. Finally, the mind must, if it is really to philosophize, also be truly disengaged: it must prosecute no particular goal or aim, and thus be free from the enticement of will, but devote itself undividedly to the instruction which the perceptible world and its own consciousness imparts to it.
The poet presents the imagination with images from life and human characters and situations, sets them all in motion and leaves it to the beholder to let these images take his thoughts as far as his mental powers will permit. That is why he is able to engage men of the most differing capabilities, indeed fools and sages together. The philosopher, on the other hand, presents not life itself but the finished thoughts which he has abstracted from it and then demands that the reader should think precisely as, and precisely as far as, he himself thinks. That is why his public is so small. The poet can thus be compared with one who presents flowers, the philosopher with one who presents their essence.
An odd and unworthy definition of philosophy, which however even Kant gives, is that it is a science composed only of concepts. For the entire property of a concept consists of nothing more than what has been begged and borrowed from perceptual knowledge, which is the true and inexhaustible source of all insight. So that a true philosophy cannot be spun out of mere abstract concepts, but has to be founded on observation and experience, inner and outer. Nor will anything worthwhile be achieved in philosophy by synthesizing experiments with concepts such as have been performed so often in the past but especially by the sophists of our own day — I mean by Fichte and Schelling and even more offensively by Hegel, and in the field of ethics by Schleiermacher.
Philosophy, just as much as art and poetry, must have its source in perceptual comprehension of the world: nor, however much the head needs to remain on top, ought it to be so cold-blooded a business that the whole man, heart and head, is not finally involved and affected through and through. Philosophy is not algebra: on the contrary, Vauvenargues
was right when he said: Les grandes pensées viennent du cœur.
Mere subtlety may qualify you as a sceptic but not as a philosopher. On the other hand, scepticism is in philosophy what the Opposition is in Parliament; it is just as beneficial, and indeed necessary. It rests everywhere on the fact that philosophy is not capable of producing the kind of evidence mathematics produces.
A dictate of reason is the name we give to certain propositions which we hold true without investigation and of which we think ourselves so firmly convinced we should be incapable of seriously testing them even if we wanted to, since we should then have to call them provisionally in doubt. We credit these propositions so completely because when we first began to speak and think we continually had them recited to us and they were thus implanted in us; so that the habit of thinking them is as old as the habit of thinking as such and we can no longer separate the two.
People never weary of reproaching metaphysics with the very small progress it has made compared with the very great progress of the physical sciences. But what other science has been hampered at all times by having an antagonist ex officio, a public prosecutor, a king's champion in full armour against it? Metaphysics will never put forth its full powers so long as it is expected to accommodate itself to dogma. The various religions have taken possession of the metaphysical tendency of mankind, partly by paralysing it through imprinting their dogmas upon it in the earliest years, partly by forbidding and proscribing all free and uninhibited expression of it; so that free investigation of man's most important and interesting concern, of his existence itself, has been in part indirectly hampered, in part made subjectively impossible by the paralysis referred to; and in this way his most sublime tendency has been put in chains.
The discovery of truth is prevented most effectively, not by the false appearance things present and which mislead into error, nor directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice, which as a pseudo a priori stands in the path of truth and is then like a contrary wind driving a ship away from land, so that sail and rudder labour in vain.
Every general truth is related to specific truths as gold is to silver, inasmuch as it can be converted into a considerable number of specific truths which follow from it in the same way as a gold coin can be converted into small change.
From one proposition nothing more can follow than what is already contained in it, i. e. than what it itself implies when its meaning is exhausted; but from two propositions, if they are joined together as premises of a syllogism, more can follow than is contained in either of them taken individually — just as a body formed by chemical combination exhibits qualities possessed by none of its constituents. That logical conclusions possess value derives from this fact.
What light is to the outer physical world intellect is to the inner world of consciousness. For intellect is related to will, and thus also to the organism, which is nothing other than will regarded objectively, in approximately the same way as light is to a combustible body and the oxygen in combination with which it ignites. And as light is the purer the less it is involved with the smoke of the burning body, so also is intellect the purer the more completely it is separated from the will which engendered it. In a bolder metaphor one could even say: Life is known to be a process of combustion; intellect is the light produced by this process.
The simplest unprejudiced self-observation, combined with the facts of anatomy, leads to the conclusion that intellect, like its objectivization the brain, is, together with its dependent sense-apparatus, nothing other than a very intense receptivity to influences from without and does not constitute our original and intrinsic being; thus that intellect is not that in us which in a plant is motive power or in a stone weight and chemical forces: it is will alone which appears in these forms. Intellect is that in us which in a plant is merely receptivity to external influences, to physical and chemical action and whatever else may help or hinder it to grow and thrive; but in us this receptivity has risen to such a pitch of intensity that by virtue of it the entire objective world, the world as idea, appears; and this, consequently, is how its objectivization originates. It will help to make all this more vivid if you imagine the world without any animal life on it. There will then be nothing on it capable of perceiving it, and therefore it will actually have no objective existence at all. Now imagine a number of plants shooting up out of the ground close beside one another. All kinds of things will begin to operate on them, such as air, wind, the pressure of one plant against another, moisture, cold, light, warmth, electricity, etc. Now imagine the receptivity of these plants to influences of this kind intensified more and more: it will finally become sensation, accompanied by the capacity to refer sensation to its cause, and at last perception: whereupon the world will be there, appearing in space, time and causal connexion — yet it will still be merely the result of external influences on the receptivity of the plants. This pictorial representation brings home very well the merely phenomenal existence of the external world and makes it comprehensible: for no one, surely, would care to assert that a state of affairs which consists of perceptions originating in nothing but relations between external influences and active receptivity represents the truly objective, inner and original constitution of all those natural forces assumed to be acting on the plants; that it represents, that is to say, the world of things in themselves. This picture can thus make it comprehensible to us why the realm of the human intellect should have such narrow boundaries, as Kant demonstrates it has in the Critique of Pure Reason.
That you should write down valuable ideas that occur to you as soon as possible goes without saying: we sometimes forget even what we have done, so how much more what we have thought. Thoughts, however, come not when we but when they want. On the other hand, it is better not to copy down what we have received finished and complete from without, what we have merely learned and what can in any case be discovered again in books: for to copy something down is to consign it to forgetfulness. You should deal sternly and despotically with your memory, so that it does not unlearn obedience; if, for example, you cannot call something to mind, a line of poetry or a word perhaps, you should not go and look it up in a book, but periodically plague your memory with it for weeks on end until your memory has done its duty. For the longer you have had to rack your brains for something the more firmly will it stay once you have got it.
The quality of our thoughts (their formal value) comes from within, their direction, and thus their matter, from without; so that what we are thinking at any given moment is the product of two fundamentally different factors. Consequently, the object of thought is to the mind only what the plectrum is to the lyre: which is why the same sight inspires such very different thoughts in differing heads.
How very paltry and limited the normal human intellect is, and how little lucidity there is in the human consciousness, may be judged from the fact that, despite the ephemeral brevity of human life, the uncertainty of our existence and the countless enigmas which press upon us from all sides, everyone does not continually and ceaselessly philosophize, but that only the rarest of exceptions do so. The rest live their lives away in this dream not very differently from the animals, from which they are in the end distinguished only by their ability to provide for a few years ahead. If they should ever feel any metaphysical need, it is taken care of from above and in advance by the various religions; and these, whatever they may be like, suffice.
One might almost believe that half our thinking takes place unconsciously. Usually we arrive at a conclusion without having clearly thought about the premises which lead to it. This is already evident from the fact that sometimes an occurrence whose consequences we can in no way foresee, still less clearly estimate its possible influence on our own affairs, will nonetheless exercise an unmistakable influence on our whole mood and will change it from cheerful to sad or from sad to cheerful: this can only be the result of unconscious rumination. It is even more obvious in the following: I have familiarized myself with the factual data of a theoretical or practical problem; I do not think about it again, yet often a few days later the answer to the problem will come into my mind entirely of its own accord; the operation which has produced it, however, remains as much a mystery to me as that of an adding-machine: what has occurred is, again, unconscious rumination. — One might almost venture the physiological hypothesis that conscious thinking takes place on the surface of the brain, unconscious thinking inside it.
Considering the monotony and consequent insipidity of life one would find it unendurably tedious after any considerable length of time, were it not for the continual advance of knowledge and insight and the acquisition of even better and clearer understanding of all things, which is partly the fruit of experience, partly the result of the changes we ourselves undergo through the different stages of life by which our point of view is to a certain extent being continually altered, whereby things reveal to us sides we did not yet know. In this way, despite the decline in our mental powers, dies diem docet
still holds indefatigably true and gives life an ever-renewed fascination, in that what is identical continually appears as something new and different.
It is quite natural that we should adopt a defensive and negative attitude towards every new opinion concerning something on which we have already an opinion of our own. For it forces its way as an enemy into the previously closed system of our own convictions, shatters the calm of mind we have attained through this system, demands renewed efforts of us and declares our former efforts to have been in vain. A truth which retrieves us from error is consequently to be compared with a physic, as much for its bitter and repellent taste as for the fact that it takes effect not at the moment it is imbibed but only some time afterwards.
Thus, if we see the individual obstinately clinging to his errors, with the mass of men it is even worse: once they have acquired an opinion, experience and instruction can labour for centuries against it and labour in vain. So that there exist certain universally popular and firmly accredited errors which countless numbers contentedly repeat every day: I have started a list of them which others might like to continue.
1. Suicide is a cowardly act.
2. He who mistrusts others is himself dishonest.
3. Worth and genius are unfeignedly modest.
4. The insane are exceedingly unhappy.
5. Philosophizing can be learned, but not philosophy. (The opposite is true.)
6. It is easier to write a good tragedy than a good comedy.
7. A little philosophy leads away from God, a lot of it leads back to him — repeated after Francis Bacon.
8. Knowledge is power. The devil it is! One man can have a great deal of knowledge without its giving him the least power, while another possesses supreme authority but next to no knowledge.
Most of these are repeated parrot fashion without much thought being given to them and merely because when people first heard them said they found them very wise-sounding.
Intellect is a magnitude of intensity, not a magnitude of extension: which is why in this respect one man can confidently take on ten thousand and a thousand fools do not make one wise man.
What the pathetic commonplace heads with which the world is crammed really lack are two closely related faculties: that of forming judgements and that of producing ideas of their own. But these are lacking to a degree which he who is not one of them cannot easily conceive, so that he cannot easily conceive the dolefulness of their existence. It is this deficiency, however, which explains on one hand the poverty of the scribbling which in all nations passes itself off to its contemporaries as their literature, and on the other the fate that overtakes true and genuine men who appear among such people. All genuine thought and art is to a certain extent an attempt to put big heads on small people: so it is no wonder the attempt does not always come off. For a writer to afford enjoyment always demands a certain harmony between his way of thinking and that of the reader; and the enjoyment will be the greater the more perfect this harmony is: so that a great mind will fully and completely enjoy only another great mind. It is for this same reason that bad or mediocre writers excite disgust and revulsion in thinking heads: and even conversation with most people has the same effect — one is conscious of the inadequacy and disharmony every step of the way.
The life of the plants consists in simple existence: so that their enjoyment of life is a purely and absolutely subjective, torpid contentment. With the animals there enters knowledge: but it is still entirely restricted to what serves their own motivation, and indeed their most immediate motivation. That is why they too find complete contentment in simple existence and why it suffices to fill their entire lives; so that they can pass many hours completely inactive without feeling discontented or impatient, although they are not thinking but merely looking. Only in the very cleverest animals such as dogs and apes does the need for activity, and with that boredom, make itself felt; which is why they enjoy playing, and why they amuse themselves by gazing at passers-by; in which respect they are in a class with those human window-gazers who stare at us everywhere but only when one notices they are students really arouse our indignation.
Only in man has knowledge — i. e. the consciousness of other things, in antithesis to mere self-consciousness — reached a high degree and, with the appearance of the reasoning faculty, risen to thought. As a consequence of this his life can, besides simple existence, be filled by knowledge as such, which is to a certain extent a second existence outside oneself in other beings and things. With man too, however, knowledge is mostly restricted to what serves his own motivation, although this now includes motivations less immediate which, when taken together, are called 'practical knowledge'. On the other hand, he usually has no more free, i. e. purposeless, knowledge than is engendered by curiosity and the need for diversion; yet this kind of knowledge does exist in every man, even if only to this extent. In the meantime, when motivation is quiescent, the life of man is to a large extent filled by simple existence, to which fact the tremendous amount of lounging about that goes on and the commonness of that kind of sociability which consists chiefly in mere togetherness, without any conversation, or at the most very scanty conversation, bear witness. Indeed, most people have — in their hearts even if not consciously — as the supreme guide and maxim of their conduct the resolve to get by with the least possible expenditure of thought, because to them thinking is hard and burdensome. Consequently, they think only as much as their trade or business makes absolutely necessary, and then again as much as is demanded by their various pastimes — which is what their conversation is just as much as their play; but both must be so ordered that they can be tackled with a minimum of thought.
Only where intellect exceeds the measure needed for living does knowledge become more or less an end in itself. It is consequently a quite abnormal event if in some man intellect deserts its natural vocation — that of serving the will by perceiving mere relations between things — in order to occupy itself purely objectively. But it is precisely this which is the origin of art, poetry and philosophy, which are therefore produced by an organ not originally intended for that purpose. For intellect is fundamentally a hard-working factory-hand whom his demanding master, the will, keeps busy from morn to night. But if this hard-driven serf should once happen to do some of his work voluntarily during his free time, on his own initiative and without any object but the work itself, simply for his own satisfaction and enjoyment — then this is a genuine work of art, indeed, if pushed to an extreme, a work of genius.
Such a purely objective employment of the intellect, as well as lying behind all artistic, poetical and philosophical achievement of the higher kind, also lies behind all purely scientific achievement in general, is already present in purely scientific study and learning, likewise in any free reflection (i. e. reflection not involved with personal interest) upon any subject whatever. It is the same thing, indeed, which inspires even mere conversation if its theme is a purely objective one, i. e. is not related in any way to the interest, and consequently the will of those taking part in it. Every such purely objective employment of the intellect compares with its subjective employment — i. e. employment in regard to personal interest, however indirectly — as dancing does with walking: for, like dancing, it is the purposeless expenditure of excess energy. On the other hand, the subjective employment of intellect is, of course, the natural one, since intellect arose merely in order to serve will. It is involved not merely in work and the personal drives, but also in all conversation concerning personal affairs and material matters in general; in eating, drinking and other pleasures; in everything pertaining to earning a livelihood; and in utilitarian concerns of every sort. Most men, to be sure, are incapable of any other employment of their intellect, because with them it is merely a tool in service of their will and is entirely consumed by this service, without any remainder. It is this that makes them so arid, so brutishly earnest and incapable of objective conversation; just as the shortness of the bonds joining intellect to will is visible in their face. The impression of narrow-mindedness which often emerges from it in such a depressing fashion is, in fact, only the outward sign of the narrow limitation of their total stock of knowledge to the affairs of their own will. One can see that here there is just as much intellect as a given will requires for its ends and no more: hence the vulgarity of their aspect; and hence also the fact that their intellect subsides into inactivity the moment their will ceases to drive it. They take an objective interest in nothing whatever. Their attention, not to speak of their mind, is engaged by nothing that does not bear some relation, or at least some possible relation, to their own person: otherwise their interest is not aroused. They are not noticeably stimulated even by wit or humour; they hate rather everything that demands the slightest thought. Coarse buffooneries at most excite them to laughter: apart from that they are earnest brutes — and all because they are capable of only subjective interest. It is precisely this which makes card-playing the most appropriate amusement for them — card-playing for money: because this does not remain in the sphere of mere knowledge, as stage plays, music, conversation, etc., do, but sets in motion the will itself, the primary element which exists everywhere. For the rest they are, from their first breath to their last, tradesmen, life's born drudges. All their pleasures are sensuous: they have no feeling for any other kind of pleasure. Talk to them about business, but not about anything else. To be sociable with them is to be degraded. On the other hand, conversation between two people who are capable of some sort of purely objective employment of their intellect is a free play of intellectual energy, though the matter be never so insubstantial and amount to no more than jesting. Such a conversation is in fact like two or more dancing together: while the other sort is like marching side-by-side or one behind the other merely in order to arrive somewhere.
Now this tendency towards a free and thus abnormal employment of the intellect, together with the capacity for it, attains in the genius the point at which knowledge becomes the main thing, the aim of the whole of life; his own existence, on the other hand, declines to a subsidiary thing, a mere means; so that the normal relationship is completely reversed. Consequently, the genius lives on the whole more in the rest of the world, by virtue of his knowledge and comprehension of it, than in his own person. The entirely abnormal enhancement of his cognitive powers robs him of the possibility of filling up his time with mere existence and its aims: his mind needs to be constantly and vigorously occupied. He thus lacks that composure in traversing the broad scenes of everyday life and that easy absorption in them which is granted to ordinary men. So that genius is for the ordinary practical living appropriate to normal mental powers an ill endowment and, like every abnormality, an impediment: for with this intensifying of the intellectual powers, intuitive comprehension of the outside world achieves so great a degree of objective clarity and furnishes so much more than is requisite for serving the will that such an abundance becomes a downright hindrance to this service, inasmuch as to contemplate given phenomena in themselves and for their own sake constantly detracts from the contemplation of their connexions with the individual will and with one another and consequently disturbs and obstructs any clear comprehension of these connexions. For the service of the will an entirely superficial contemplation of things suffices, a contemplation which furnishes no more than their bearing on whatever aims we may have and whatever may be associated with these aims, and consequently consists of nothing but relationships, with the greatest possible degree of blindness towards everything else: an objective and complete comprehension of the nature of things enfeebles knowledge of this sort and throws it into disorder.
The difference between the genius and the normal intelligence is, to be sure, only a quantitative one, in so far as it is only a difference of degree: one is nonetheless tempted to regard it as a qualitative one when one considers how normal men, despite their individual diversity, all think along certain common lines, so that they are frequently in unanimous agreement over judgements which are, in fact, false. This goes so far that they have certain basic views which are held in all ages and continually reiterated, while the great minds of every age have, openly or secretly, opposed these views.
A genius is a man in whose head the world as idea has attained a greater degree of clarity and is present more distinctly; and since the weightiest and profoundest insight is furnished not by painstaking observation of what is separate and individual but by the intensity with which the whole is comprehended, mankind can expect from him the profoundest sort of instruction. Genius can thus also be defined as an exceptionally clear consciousness of things and therefore also of their antithesis, one's own self. Mankind looks up to one who is thus gifted for disclosures about things and about its own nature.
If you want to earn the gratitude of your own age you must keep in step with it. But if you do that you will produce nothing great. If you have something great in view you must address yourself to posterity: only then, to be sure, you will probably remain unknown to your contemporaries; you will be like a man compelled to spend his life on a desert island and there toiling to erect a memorial so that future seafarers shall know he once existed.
Talent works for money and fame: the motive which moves genius to productivity is, on the other hand, less easy to determine. It isn't money, for genius seldom gets any. It isn't fame: fame is too uncertain and, more closely considered, of too little worth. Nor is it strictly for its own pleasure, for the great exertion involved almost outweighs the pleasure. It is rather an instinct of a unique sort by virtue of which the individual possessed of genius is impelled to express what he has seen and felt in enduring works without being conscious of any further motivation. It takes place, by and large, with the same sort of necessity as a tree brings forth fruit, and demands of the world no more than a soil on which the individual can flourish. More closely considered, it is as if in such an individual the will to live, as the spirit of the human species, had become conscious of having, by a rare accident, attained for a brief span of time to a greater clarity of intellect, and now endeavours to acquire at any rate the results, the products of this clear thought and vision for the whole species, which is indeed also the intrinsic being of this individual, so that their light may continue to illumine the darkness and stupor of the ordinary human consciousness. It is from this that there arises that instinct which impels genius to labour in solitude to complete its work without regard for reward, applause or sympathy, but neglectful rather even of its own well-being and thinking more of posterity than of the age it lives in, which could only lead it astray. To make its work, as a sacred trust and the true fruit of its existence, the property of mankind, laying it down for a posterity better able to appreciate it: this becomes for genius a goal more important than any other, a goal for which it wears the crown of thorns that shall one day blossom into a laurel-wreath. Its striving to complete and safeguard its work is just as resolute as that of the insect to safeguard its eggs and provide for the brood it will never live to see: it deposits its eggs where it knows they will one day find life and nourishment, and dies contented.
The intrinsic problem of the metaphysics of the beautiful can be stated very simply: how is it possible for us to take pleasure in an object when this object has no kind of connexion with our desires?
For we all feel that pleasure in a thing can really arise only from its relation to our will or, as we like to put it, our aims; so that pleasure divorced from a stimulation of the will seems to be a contradiction. Yet it is quite obvious that the beautiful as such excites pleasure in us without having any kind of connexion with our personal aims, that is to say with our will.
My solution to this problem has been that in the beautiful we always perceive the intrinsic and primary forms of animate and inanimate nature, that is to say Plato's Ideas thereof, and that this perception stipulates the existence of its essential correlative, the will-less subject of knowledge, i. e. a pure intelligence without aims or intentions. Through this, when an aesthetic perception occurs the will completely vanishes from consciousness. But will is the sole source of all our troubles and sufferings. This is the origin of the feeling of pleasure which accompanies the perception of the beautiful. It therefore rests on the abolition of all possibility of suffering. — If it should be objected that the possibility of pleasure would then also be abolished, one should remember that, as I have often demonstrated, happiness, gratification, is of a negative nature, namely the mere cessation of suffering, pain on the other hand positive. Thus, when all desire disappears from consciousness there still remains the condition of pleasure, i. e. the absence of all pain, and in this case the absence even of the possibility of pain, in that the individual is transformed from a willing subject into a purely knowing subject, yet continues to be conscious of himself and of his actions as a knowing subject. As we know, the world as will is the primary (ordine prior) and the world as idea the secondary world (ordine posterior). The former is the world of desire and consequently that of pain and thousandfold misery. The latter, however, is in itself intrinsically painless: in addition it contains a remarkable spectacle, altogether significant or at the very least entertaining. Enjoyment of this spectacle constitutes aesthetic pleasure.
If, however, the individual will sets its associated power of imagination free for a while, and for once releases it entirely from the service for which it was made and exists, so that it abandons the tending of the will or of the individual person which alone is its natural theme and thus its regular occupation, and yet does not cease to be energetically active or to extend to their fullest extent its powers of perceptivity, then it will forthwith become completely objective, i. e. it will become a faithful mirror of objects, or more precisely the medium of the objectivization of the will appearing in this or that object, the inmost nature of which will now come forth through it the more completely the longer perception lasts, until it has been entirely exhausted. It is only thus, with the pure subject, that there arises the pure object, i. e. the complete manifestation of the will appearing in the object perceived, which is precisely the (Platonic) Idea of it. The perception of this, however, demands that, when contemplating an object, I really abstract its position in space and time, and thus abstract its individuality. For it is this position, always determined by the law of causality, which places this object in any kind of relationship to me as an individual; so that only when this position is done away with will the object become an Idea and I therewith a pure subject of knowledge. This is why a painting, by fixing for ever the fleeting moment and thus extricating it from time, presents not the individual but the Idea, the enduring element in all change. But this postulated change in subject and object requires not only that the faculty of knowledge be released from its original servitude and given over entirely to itself, but also that it should remain active to the full extent of its capacity, notwithstanding that the natural spur to its activity, the instigation of the will, is now lacking. Here is where the difficulty and thus the rarity of the thing lies; because all our thought and endeavour, all our hearing and seeing, stand by nature directly or indirectly in the service of our countless personal aims, big and small, and consequently it is the will which spurs on the faculty of knowledge to the fulfilment of its functions, without which instigation it immediately weakens. Moreover, knowledge activated by this instigation completely suffices for practical life, even for the various branches of science, since they direct themselves to the relations between things and not to their intrinsic and inner being. Wherever it is a question of knowledge of cause and effect or of grounds and consequences of any kind, that is to say in all branches of natural science and mathematics, as also in history, or with inventions, etc., the knowledge sought must be an aim of the will, and the more vehemently it strives for it, the sooner it will be attained. Likewise in affairs of state, in war, in finance and business, in intrigues of every sort, and so on, the will must first of all, through the vehemence of its desire, compel the intellect to exert all its energies so as to track down all the reasons and consequences of the affair in question. Indeed, it is astonishing how far beyond the normal measure of its energies the spur of the will can drive a given intellect in such a case.
The situation is quite different with the perception of the objective, intrinsic being of things which constitutes their (Platonic) Idea and which must lie behind every achievement in the fine arts. For the will, which in the former case promoted the endeavour and was indeed indispensable to it, must here take no part whatever: for here only that serves which the intellect achieves quite alone and by its own means and presents as a voluntary gift. For only in the condition of pure knowledge, where will and its aims have been completely removed from man, but with them his individuality also, can that purely objective perception arise in which the (Platonic) Ideas of things will be comprehended. But such a perception must always precede the conception, i. e. the first, intuitive knowledge which afterwards constitutes the intrinsic material and kernel, as it were the soul of an authentic work of art or poem, or indeed of a genuine philosophy. The unpremeditated, unintentional, indeed in part unconscious and instinctive element which has always been remarked in works of genius owes its origin to precisely the fact that primal artistic knowledge is entirely separated from and independent of will, is will-less.
As for the objective aspect of this aesthetic perception, that is to say the (Platonic) Idea, it may be described as that which we would have before us if time, the formal and subjective condition of our knowledge, were drawn away, like the glass lens from a kaleidoscope. We see, e. g., the development of bud, flower and fruit and marvel at the driving force which never wearies of producing this series again and again. Our amazement would cease if we could know that with all this changing development we have before us only the one, unchangeable Idea of the plant, which however we are incapable of perceiving as a unity of bud, flower and fruit, but are compelled to apprehend under the form of time through which the Idea is displayed to our intellect in these successive states.
If you consider how poetry and the plastic arts always take an individual for their theme and present it with the most careful exactitude in all its uniqueness, down to the most insignificant characteristics; and if you then look at the sciences, which operate by means of concepts each of which represents countless individuals by once and for all defining and designating what is peculiar to them as a species; — if you consider this, the practice of art is likely to seem to you paltry, petty and indeed almost childish. The nature of art, however, is such that in art one single case stands for thousands, in that what art has in view with that careful and particular delineation of the individual is the revelation of the Idea of the genus to which it belongs; so that, e. g., an occurrence, a scene from human life depicted correctly and completely, that is to say with an exact delineation of the individuals involved in it, leads to a clear and profound knowledge of the Idea of humanity itself perceived from this or that aspect. For as the botanist plucks one single flower from the endless abundance of the plant world and then analyses it so as to demonstrate to us the nature of the plant in general, so the poet selects a single scene, indeed sometimes no more than a single mood or sensation, from the endless confusion of ceaselessly active human life, in order to show us what the life and nature of man is. This is why we see the greatest spirits — Shakespeare and Goethe, Raphael and Rembrandt — not disdaining to delineate single individuals, and not even notable ones, and to make them visible before us, and doing so with the greatest exactitude and the most earnest application, in their whole particularity down to the very smallest details. For the particular and individual can be grasped only when it is made visible — which is why I have defined poetry as the art of setting the imagination into action by means of words.
A work of plastic art does not show us, as actuality does, that which exists once and never again, namely the union of this particular material with this particular form which constitutes the concrete and individual; it shows us the form alone which, if it were presented completely and in all its aspects, would be the Idea itself. The picture therefore immediately leads us away from the individual to the pure form. The separation of form from material is already a big step towards the Idea: but every picture, whether a painting or a statue, constitutes such a separation. Now it is precisely because the aim of the aesthetic work of art is to bring us to a knowledge of the (Platonic) Idea that it is characterized by this separation, this dividing of the form from the material. It is intrinsic to the work of art to present the form alone, without the material, and to do so manifestly and obviously. This is really the reason waxwork figures make no aesthetic impression and are consequently not works of art (in the aesthetic sense), although when they are well made they produce a far greater illusion of reality than the best picture or statue can and if imitation of the actual were the aim of art would have to be accorded the first rank. For they seem to present not the pure form but with it the material as well, so that they bring about the illusion that the thing itself is standing there. The true work of art leads us from that which exists only once and never again, i. e. the individual, to that which exists perpetually and time and time again in innumerable manifestations, the pure form or Idea; but the waxwork figure appears to present the individual itself, that is to say that which exists only once and never again, but without that which lends value to such a fleeting existence, without life. That is why the waxwork evokes a feeling of horror: it produces the effect of a rigid corpse.
The reason the impressions we receive in youth are so significant, the reason why in the dawn of life everything appears to us in so ideal and transfigured a light, is that we then first become acquainted with the genus, which is still new to us, through the individual, so that every individual thing stands as a representative of its genus: we grasp therein the (Platonic) Idea of this genus, which is essentially what constitutes beauty.
The beauty and grace of the human figure united together are the will in its most clearly visible form at the highest stage of its objectivization, and this is why they are the supreme achievement of the plastic arts. On the other hand, every material thing is beautiful, consequently every animal is beautiful. If this is not evident to us in the case of certain animals it is because we are not in a position to regard them purely objectively and thus comprehend the Idea of them, but are prevented from doing so by some inescapable thought-association, usually the result of an obtrusive similarity, e. g. that of the ape to man, as a consequence of which instead of grasping the Idea of this animal we see only the caricature of a man. The similarity between the toad and mud and dirt seems to produce the same effect, although this is inadequate to explain the boundless repugnance, indeed terror and horror, which overcomes many people at the sight of this animal, as it does others in the case of the spider: this seems rather to originate in a much deeper, metaphysical and mysterious connexion.
Inorganic nature, provided it does not consist of water, produces a very melancholy, indeed oppressive impression upon us when it appears without anything organic. An instance is provided by the regions of bare rock without any vegetation in the long valley near Toulon through which runs the road to Marseille; but the deserts of Africa offer a much more grandiose and impressive example. The sadness of this impression produced upon us by the inorganic derives first and foremost from the fact that the inorganic mass is subject exclusively to the law of gravity, the direction of which consequently dictates everything. — On the other hand, we derive a high degree of immediate pleasure from the sight of vegetation, but this is naturally the greater the more abundant, manifold and extensive — that is to say left to itself — the vegetation is. The immediate reason for this lies in the fact that in vegetation the law of gravity seems to have been overcome, in that the plant world raises itself in precisely the opposite direction from the one dictated by this law and thus directly proclaims the phenomenon of life as a new and higher order of things. We ourselves are part of this order: it is that in nature which is related to us, the element of our existence. Our heart is uplifted in presence of it. What pleases us first and foremost at the sight of the plant world, therefore, is this vertical upward direction, and a group of trees gains vastly from having a couple of straight-rising pointed fir-trees in its midst. On the other hand, a felled tree no longer affects us; indeed, one that has grown up slanting already produces far less effect than an upright one; and it is the down-hanging branches of the weeping willow which have surrendered to gravity that have given this tree its name. — The melancholy effect of the inorganic nature of water is in large part abolished by its great mobility, which produces an impression of life, and by its constant play with light: it is, moreover, the primal condition of our life.
A man who tries to live on the generosity of the Muses, I mean on his poetic gifts, seems to me somewhat to resemble a girl who lives on her charms. Both profane for base profit what ought to be the free gift of their inmost being. Both are liable to become exhausted and both usually come to a shameful end. So do not degrade your Muse to a whore.
Music is the true universal language which is understood everywhere, so that it is ceaselessly spoken in all countries and throughout all the centuries with great zeal and earnestness, and a significant melody which says a great deal soon makes its way round the entire earth, while one poor in meaning which says nothing straightaway fades and dies: which proves that the content of a melody is very well understandable. Yet music speaks not of things but of pure weal and woe, which are the only realities for the will: that is why it speaks so much to the heart, while it has nothing to say directly to the head and it is a misuse of it to demand that it should do so, as happens in all pictorial music, which is consequently once and for all objectionable, even though Haydn and Beethoven strayed into composing it: Mozart and Rossini, so far as I know, never did. For expression of the passions is one thing, depiction of things another.
Grand opera is not really a product of the pure artistic sense, it is rather the somewhat barbaric conception of enhancing aesthetic enjoyment by piling up the means to it, by the simultaneous production of quite disparate impressions and by strengthening the effect through augmenting the masses and forces producing it; while music, as the mightiest of the arts, is capable by itself of completely engrossing the mind receptive to it; indeed, its highest products, if they are to be properly comprehended and enjoyed, demand the undivided and undistracted attention of the entire mind, so that it may surrender to them and immerse itself in them in order to understand their incredibly intimate language. Instead of which, the mind is invaded through the eye, while listening to a highly complex piece of operatic music, by the most colourful pageantry, the most fanciful pictures and the liveliest impressions of light and colour; and at the same time it is occupied with the plot of the action. Through all this it is distracted and confused and its attention is diverted, so that it is very little receptive to the sacred, mysterious, intimate language of music. All these accompaniments are thus diametrically opposed to the attainment of the musical aim.
Strictly speaking one could call opera an unmusical invention for the benefit of unmusical minds, in as much as music first has to be smuggled in through a medium foreign to it, for instance as the accompaniment to a long drawn out, insipid love story and its poetic pap: for a spirited compact poem full of matter is of no use as an opera text, because the composition cannot be equal to such a poem.
The mass and the symphony alone provide undisturbed, fully musical enjoyment, while in opera the music is miserably involved with the vapid drama and its mock poetry and must try to bear the foreign burden laid on it as best it can. The mocking contempt with which the great Rossini sometimes handles the text is, while not exactly praiseworthy, at any rate genuinely musical.
In general, however, grand opera, by more and more deadening our musical receptivity through its three-hours duration and at the same time putting our patience to the test through the snail's pace of what is usually a very trite action, is in itself intrinsically and essentially boring; which failing can be overcome only by the excessive excellence of an individual achievement: that is why in this genre only the masterpieces are enjoyable and everything mediocre is unendurable.
Drama in general, as the most perfect reflection of human existence, has three modes of comprehending it. At the first and most frequently encountered stage it remains at what is merely interesting: we are involved with the characters because they pursue their own designs, which are similar to our own; the action goes forward by means of intrigue, the nature of the characters, and chance; wit and humour season the whole. — At the second stage drama becomes sentimental: pity is aroused for the hero, and through him for ourselves; the action is characterized by pathos, yet at the end it comes back to peace and contentment. — At the highest and hardest stage the tragic is aimed at: grievous suffering, the misery of existence is brought before us, and the final outcome is here the vanity of all human striving. We are deeply affected and the sensation of the will's turning away from life is aroused in us, either directly or as a simultaneously sounding harmony.
The first step is the hardest — says the popular adage. But in dramaturgy the reverse is true: the last step is the hardest. Evidence of this is the countless dramas the first half of which promises well but which then become confused, halt, waver, especially in the notorious fourth act, and finally come to a forced or unsatisfying end, or to one everybody has long since foreseen; sometimes, as with Emilia Galotti,
the end is even revolting and sends the audience home in a thoroughly bad mood. This difficulty of the dénouement is the result partly of the fact that it is easier to confuse things than to straighten them out again, but partly too of the fact that at the beginning of the play we allow the dramatist carte blanche, while at the end we make certain definite demands of him. We demand that the outcome shall be a completely happy or a completely tragic one — but it is not easy to make human affairs take so definite a direction. We then demand that this outcome shall be achieved naturally, fairly and in an unforced way — and yet at the same time not have been foreseen by the audience.
A novel will be the higher and nobler the more inner and less outer life it depicts; and this relation will accompany every grade of novel as its characteristic sign, from Tristram Shandy down to the crudest and most action-packed romance. Tristram Shandy, to be sure, has as good as no action whatever; but how very little action there is in La Nouvelle Héloïse and Wilhelm Meister!
Even Don Quixote has relatively little, and what there is is very trivial, amounting to no more than a series of jokes. And these four novels are the crown of the genre. Consider, further, the marvellous novels of Jean Paul and see how much inner life is set in motion on the narrowest of external foundations. Even the novels of Walter Scott have a significant preponderance of inner over outer life, and the latter appears only with a view to setting the former in motion; while in bad novels the outer action is there for its own sake. The art lies in setting the inner life into the most violent motion with the smallest possible expenditure of outer life: for it is the inner life which is the real object of our interest. — The task of the novelist is not to narrate great events but to make small ones interesting.
Writers can be divided into meteors, planets and fixed stars. The first produce a momentary effect: you gaze up, cry: 'Look!' — and then they vanish for ever. The second, the moving stars, endure for much longer. By virtue of their proximity they often shine more brightly than the fixed stars, which the ignorant mistake them for. But they too must soon vacate their place, they shine moreover only with a borrowed light, and their sphere of influence is limited to their own fellow travellers (their contemporaries). The third alone are unchanging, stand firm in the firmament, shine by their own light and influence all ages equally, in that their aspect does not alter when our point of view alters since they have no parallax. Unlike the others, they do not belong to one system (nation) alone: they belong to the Universe. But it is precisely because they are so high that their light usually takes so many years to reach the eyes of dwellers on earth.
There are above all two kinds of writer: those who write for the sake of what they have to say and those who write for the sake of writing. The former have had ideas or experiences which seem to them worth communicating; the latter need money and that is why they write — for money. They think for the purpose of writing. You can recognize them by the fact that they spin out their ideas to the greatest possible extent, that their ideas are half-true, obscure, forced and vacillating, and that they usually prefer the twilight so as to appear what they are not, which is why their writings lack definiteness and clarity. You can soon see they are writing simply in order to cover paper: and as soon as you do see it you should throw the book down, for time is precious. — Payment and reserved copyright are at bottom the ruin of literature. Only he who writes entirely for the sake of what he has to say writes anything worth writing. It is as if there were a curse on money: every writer writes badly as soon as he starts writing for gain. The greatest works of the greatest men all belong to a time when they had to write them for nothing or for very small payment: so that here too the Spanish proverb holds good: Honra y provecho no caben en un saco.
A multitude of bad writers lives exclusively on the stupid desire of the public to read nothing but what has just been printed: the journalists. Well named! In English the word means 'day-labourers'.
And then again, there can be said to be three kinds of author. Firstly, there are those who write without thinking. They write from memory, from reminiscence, or even directly from other people's books. This class is the most numerous. — Secondly, there are those who think while writing. They think in order to write. Very common. — Thirdly, there are those who have thought before they started writing. They write simply because they have thought. Rare.
Even among the small number of writers who actually think seriously before they start writing, there are extremely few who think about the subject itself: the rest merely think about books, about what others have said about the subject. They require, that is to say, the close and powerful stimulation of ideas produced by other people in order to think at all. These ideas are then their immediate theme, so that they remain constantly under their influence and consequently never attain to true originality. The above-mentioned minority, on the other hand, are stimulated to think by the subject itself, so that their thinking is directed immediately to this. Among them alone are to be discovered those writers who endure and become immortal.
Only he who takes what he writes directly out of his own head is worth reading.
A book can never be more than a reproduction of the thoughts of its author. The value of these thoughts lies either in the material, that is in what he has thought upon, or in the form, i. e. the way in which the material is treated, that is in what he has thought upon it.
The upon what is manifold, as are the advantages it bestows on books. All empirical material, that is everything historically or physically factual in itself and in the widest sense, belongs here. The characteristic quality lies in the object, so that the book can be an important one whoever its author may be.
In the case of the what, on the other hand, the characteristic quality lies in the subject. The topics treated can be such as are accessible and familiar to all men, but it is the form in which they are comprehended, the what of the thought, which here bestows value, and this lies in the subject. If, consequently, a book of this sort is admirable and unique, its author is so too; from which it follows that the merit of a writer who is worth reading is the greater the less it owes to his material, and even the more familiar and much-employed this material is. Thus, e. g., the three great Greek tragedians all employed the same material.
Thus when a book becomes famous you should firmly distinguish whether it is on account of its material or on account of its form.
The public is much more interested in the material than in the form. It displays this tendency in its most ridiculous shape in regard to poetic works, in that it painstakingly tracks down the real events or personal circumstances which occasioned the work, and these, indeed, become more interesting to it than the works themselves, so that it reads more about than by Goethe and studies the Faust legend more assiduously than Faust, And if Bürger once said: 'They will undertake learned research into who Lenore really was',
we have seen this literally come to pass in the case of Goethe. — This preference for the material as against the form is as if one should ignore the form and painting of a beautiful Etruscan vase in order to carry out a chemical analysis of the pigment and clay.
The actual life of a thought lasts only until it reaches the point of speech: there it petrifies and is henceforth dead but indestructible, like the petrified plants and animals of prehistory. As soon as our thinking has found words it ceases to be sincere or at bottom serious. When it begins to exist for others it ceases to live in us, just as the child severs itself from its mother when it enters into its own existence.
Literary periodicals ought to be the dam against the ever-rising flood of bad and unprofitable books produced by the unprincipled scribbling of our age. With the incorruptibility, judiciousness and severity of their judgements, they should scourge without mercy all patchwork put together by incompetents, all the page-filling through which empty heads seek to fill their empty pockets, which is to say nine-tenths of all books, and thus work against triviality and imposture as their duty dictates; instead of which, they promote these things: and their abject tolerance allies itself with author and publisher to rob the public of its time and its money. Their writers are as a rule professors or literati who, because of low salaries or poor payment, write from need of money: so, since they all have a common aim, their interests are in common, they keep together, mutually sustain one another and speak in favour of one another: this is the origin of all the laudatory reviews of bad books which constitute the content of literary periodicals. Their motto ought to be: Live and let live!
Anonymity, that shield for every kind of literary scoundrelism, must disappear. The pretext for its introduction into literary periodicals was that it protected honest critics from the wrath of authors and their patrons. But for every case of this kind there are a hundred cases where it serves merely to allow complete irresponsibility to reviewers who would be unable to defend what they write, or even to conceal the shame of those so venal and abject as to recommend books to the public in exchange for a tip from their publisher. It often merely serves to cloak the obscurity, incompetence and insignificance of the reviewer. It is unbelievable what impudence these fellows are capable of, and from what degree of literary knavery they will not shrink, once they know themselves secure in the shadow of anonymity.
Rousseau already said in the preface to La Nouvelle Héloïse: 'Tout honnête homme doit avouer les livres qu'il publie' — which means in English: 'Every honest man puts his name to what he writes', and universally affirmative propositions can be reversed per contrapositionem.
How much more this applies to polemical writings, which reviews usually are!
Style is the physiognomy of the mind. It is less deceptive than that of the body. To imitate the style of another is to wear a mask, and however beautiful this may be its lifelessness soon makes it seem insipid and unendurable, so that the ugliest living face is preferable.
Stylistic affectation can be compared to pulling faces.
To arrive at a provisional assessment of a writer's worth it is not necessary to know what or upon what he has thought, because that would mean having to read everything he has written; it is sufficient in the first instance to know how he has thought. Now an exact impression of this how of his thinking, of its essential nature and prevailing quality, is provided by his style. For this reveals the formal nature of all a man's thoughts, which must always remain the same no matter what or upon what he thinks. It is, as it were, the paste from which he moulds all his figures, however various they may be. Just as Eulenspiegel, when asked how long it would take to reach the next town, gave his questioner the apparently senseless answer: 'Walk!' with a view to judging from his pace how far he would get in a certain time, so I read a couple of pages of an author and already know more or less how far I can profit from him.
The first rule, indeed by itself virtually a sufficient condition for good style, is to have something to say.
The dullness and tediousness of the writings of commonplace people might be a consequence of the fact that they are speaking only half-consciously, that is to say not really understanding the meaning of the words they use, since these are something they have learned and received finished and complete, so that what they put together is rather whole phrases (phrases banales) than individual words. This is the origin of the palpable lack of distinct ideas which characterize their writings, since they are without that which imposes distinctness on ideas, individual clear thinking: instead of this, we meet with an obscure indistinct welter of words, with current phrases, hackneyed expressions and fashionable locutions. Their nebulous productions consequently resemble printing with worn-out type.
With regard to the tediousness in writing touched on above, one should add the general observation that there are two kinds of tediousness: an objective and a subjective kind. The objective kind always derives from the deficiency in question, that is from the fact that the author has no clear ideas or information whatever to communicate. For he who has them goes about communicating them in a direct manner and consequently everywhere presents clear, distinct concepts, so that he is neither verbose, nor obscure, nor confused, and consequently he is not tedious. Even if his leading idea is false, it is in this event still clearly thought and well considered, that is to say at least formally correct, so that what he writes always retains some value. On the other hand, an objectively tedious work is, for the same reason, always worthless in every respect. — Subjective tediousness, on the contrary, is only relative: it originates in a lack of interest in the subject on the part of the reader; this, however, originates in the reader's limitations. The most admirable work, consequently, can be subjectively tedious, namely to this or that reader; as, conversely, the worst can be subjectively entertaining to this or that reader because the subject or the writer interests him.
An affected writer is like a man who dresses up so as not to be confused and confounded with the mob, a danger which a gentleman, however ill-clad, never runs. As a certain overdressing and tiré à quatre épingles
thus betrays the plebeian, so an affected style betrays the commonplace mind.
Nevertheless, it is a misguided endeavour to try to write exactly as you speak. Every style of writing should rather retain a certain vestige of affinity with the lapidary style, which is indeed the ancestor of them all. This endeavour is consequently as objectionable as its converse, that is to try to speak as you write, which is at once pedantic and hard to understand.
Obscurity and vagueness of expression is always and everywhere a very bad sign: for in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it derives from vagueness of thought, which in turn comes from an original incongruity and inconsistency in the thought itself, and thus from its falsity. If a true thought arises in a head it will immediately strive after clarity and will soon achieve it: what is clearly thought, however, easily finds the expression appropriate to it. The thoughts a man is capable of always express themselves in clear, comprehensible and unambiguous words. Those who put together difficult, obscure, involved, ambiguous discourses do not really know what they want to say: they have no more than a vague consciousness of it which is only struggling towards a thought: often, however, they also want to conceal from themselves and others that they actually have nothing to say.
Truth is fairest naked, and the simpler its expression the profounder its influence. What declamation over the vanity of human existence, for example, can well make a greater impression than Job's: Homo, natus de muliere, brevi vivit tempore, repletus multis miseriis, qui, tanquam flos, egreditur et conteritur, et fugit velut umbra.
— It is for just this reason that the naive poetry of Goethe stands so incomparably higher than the rhetorical poetry of Schiller. And it is this that accounts for the powerful effect of many folk songs. Everything superfluous is prejudicial.
More than nine-tenths of all literate men and women certainly read nothing but newspapers, and consequently model their orthography, grammar and style almost exclusively on them and even, in their simplicity, regard the murdering of language which goes on in them as brevity of expression, elegant facility and ingenious innovation; indeed, young people of the unlearned professions in general regard the newspaper as an authority simply because it is something printed. For this reason, the state should, in all seriousness, take measures to ensure that the newspapers are altogether free of linguistic errors. A censor should be instituted who, instead of receiving a salary, should receive one louis d'or for every mangled or stylistically objectionable word, error of grammar or syntax, or misemployed preposition he discovers in them, and three louis d'or for every instance of sheer impudent mockery of all style and grammar, with double the sum for any repetition, the amounts to be defrayed by the perpetrators. Or is the German language perhaps anyone's game, a trifle not worthy of that protection of the law which even a dunghill enjoys? — Miserable philistines! — What in the world is to become of the German language if every scribbler and newspaper writer is granted discretionary power to do with it whatever his caprice and folly suggest?
An error of style which, with literature in decline and the ancient languages neglected, is becoming more and more common, but is really at home only in Germany, is its subjectivity. It consists in this, that the writer is satisfied so long as he himself understands what he means: the reader may be left to make of it what he can. Unconcerned with this difficulty, the writer proceeds as if he were engaged in a monologue: while what should really be taking place is a dialogue, and indeed one in which the speaker has to express himself the more clearly in that he cannot hear the listener's questions. It is for just this reason that a style should be not subjective, but objective. An objective style is one in which the words are so arranged that the reader is downright compelled to think exactly the same thing as the author has thought. But this will come about only if the author continually remembers that thoughts obey the law of gravity to this extent, that they travel much more easily from head down to paper than they do from paper up to head, so that for the latter journey they require all the assistance we can give them. If it is achieved, the words operate in a purely objective way, like a completed oil-painting; while the subjective style is hardly more effective than a series of blots on a wall: only he whose imagination has chanced to be aroused by them can see in them shapes and pictures — to others they are merely blots. The distinction in question applies to the whole mode of communication, but it can often be demonstrated in individual passages too: for example, I have just read in a new book: 'I have not written so as to increase the number of existing books.' This says the opposite of what the writer intended, and is moreover nonsense.
He who writes carelessly makes first and foremost the confession that he himself does not place any great value on his thoughts. For the enthusiasm which inspires the unflagging endurance necessary for discovering the clearest, most forceful and most attractive form of expressing our thoughts is begotten only by the conviction of their weightiness and truth — just as we employ silver or golden caskets only for sacred things or priceless works of art.
Few write as an architect builds, drawing up a plan beforehand and thinking it out down to the smallest details. Most write as they play dominoes: their sentences are linked together as dominoes are, one by one, in part deliberately, in part by chance.
The guiding principle in the art of composition should be that the human being can think clearly only one thought at a time, so that he should not be asked to think two, not to speak of more than two thoughts at the same time. — But this is what he is being asked to do when parentheses are inserted into sentences which have been broken up to accommodate them, a practice which causes unnecessary and wanton confusion. German writers are the worst offenders in this respect. That their language lends itself to it more readily than other living languages may account for the fact but does not make it commendable. The prose of no language reads so pleasantly and easily as does that of the French, and this is because it is as a rule free of this error. The French writer sets his thoughts down one after the other in the most logical and natural order possible and thus places them before his reader in succession, so that the reader can give his undivided attention to each of them. The German, on the other hand, weaves them together into an involved and twice involved and thrice involved period, because he insists on saying six things at once instead of presenting them one after the other.
The true national characteristic of the Germans is ponderousness: [1] it is evident in their gait, their activities, their language, their speech, their mode of narrating, their way of understanding and thinking, but especially in their style of writing, in the pleasure they take in long, ponderous, involved periods, where the memory has to bear the burden for a good five minutes, patient and unaided, until, at the end of the period, reason comes into action and the conundrum is solved. This is the kind of thing they enjoy, and if affectation and bombast can be introduced as well, the author revels in it: but Heaven help the reader.
It is obviously counter to all sound reason to clap one thought down straight over another, as if making a cross: but this is what happens when a writer interrupts what he has started to say in order to say something quite different in the middle of it, thus leaving a meaningless half-period in the custody of the reader until the other half comes along. It is like handing a guest an empty plate and leaving him to hope something will appear on it.
This form of construction reaches the height of tastelessness when the parentheses are not even dovetailed organically into the period but, by making a straight breach in it, simply wedged in. If it is an impertinence to interrupt others, it is no less of an impertinence to interrupt oneself, as happens in a form of construction which for some years now every inferior, careless, hasty scribbler with visions of payment before his eyes has employed six times on every page and enjoyed doing so. It consists — precept and example should, where possible, go together — in breaking off one phrase in order to stick another into it. They do it, however, not only from laziness, but also from stupidity, in that they take it for a pleasant légèreté
which enlivens the discourse. — In rare individual cases it may be excusable.
No literary quality — persuasiveness, for instance, or richness of imagery, a talent for metaphors, boldness, astringency, conciseness, gracefulness, facility of expression, wit, striking contrast, laconism, simplicity — can be acquired by reading writers who display it. But if we already possess any such quality as a natural tendency, that is potentia,
we can by reading summon it up in ourselves, become conscious of it, see what can be made of it, be fortified in our inclination, indeed in the courage to employ it, judge of its effectiveness, and thus learn how to use it correctly: and only then shall we also possess it actu.
This, then, is the only way in which reading can teach writing: it instructs us in the use we can make of our own natural gifts; thus it can instruct us only when we possess such gifts. If we do not possess them we can learn from reading nothing but cold dead mannerism, and become superficial imitators.
As the strata of the earth preserve in succession the living creatures of past epochs, so the shelves of libraries preserve in succession the errors of the past and their expositions, which like the former were very lively and made a great commotion in their own age but now stand petrified and stiff in a place where only the literary palaeontologist regards them.
According to Herodotus, Xerxes wept at the sight of his enormous army to think that, of all these men, not one would be alive in a hundred years' time; so who cannot but weep at the sight of the thick fair catalogue to think that, of all these books, not one will be alive in ten years' time.
The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. — A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.
Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.
In the history of the world half a century is a considerable period, because its material is always changing, inasmuch as something is always happening. In the history of literature, on the other hand, half a century is often no time at all, because nothing has happened: things are as they were fifty years before.
It is consistent with this state of things that we should see the scientific, literary and artistic Zeitgeist declared bankrupt about every thirty years: for during this period the errors contained in it have grown to such proportions as to crush it by the weight of their absurdity, while the opposing view has at the same time been strengthened by them. So now there is a sudden change: but what often succeeds is an error in the opposite direction. To exhibit the periodical recurrence of this state of things would be the true pragmatic material of literary history.
I wish someone would one day attempt a tragic history of literature, showing how the various nations which now take their highest pride in the great writers and artists they can show treated them while they were alive. In such a history, the author would bring visibly before us that endless struggle which the good and genuine of all ages and all lands has to endure against the always dominant bad and wrong-headed; depict the martyrdom of almost every genuine enlightener of mankind, almost every great master of every art; show us how, with a few exceptions, they lived tormented lives in poverty and wretchedness, without recognition, without sympathy, without disciples, while fame, honour and riches went to the unworthy; how, that is, their lot was that of Esau, who while out hunting and catching game for his father was robbed by Jacob of his father's blessing; but how, in spite of all, love of their cause sustained them, until the hard struggle of such an educator of the human race was at last consummated, the never-fading laurel-wreath beckoned and the hour struck in which for him too:
Der schwere Panzer wird zum Flügelkleide,
Kurz ist der Schmerz, unendlich ist die Freude.
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Schwerf
lligkeit: heaviness, clumsiness, slowness, awkwardness, ponderousness.