Kitabı oku: «The Dawn of Day», sayfa 18

264

Deceiving One's Self. – Envious men with a discriminating intuition endeavour not to become too closely acquainted with their rivals in order that they may feel themselves superior to them.

265

There is a Time for the Theatre. – When the imagination of a people begins to diminish, there arises the desire to have its legends represented on the stage: it then tolerates the coarse substitutes for imagination. In the age of the epic rhapsodist, however, the theatre itself, and the actor dressed up as a hero, form an obstacle in the path of the imagination instead of acting as wings for it – too near, too definite, too heavy, and with too little of dreamland and the flights of birds about them.

266

Without Charm. – He lacks charm and knows it. Ah, how skilful he is in masking this defect! He does it by a strict virtue, gloomy looks, and acquired distrust of all men, and of existence itself; by coarse jests, by contempt for a more refined manner of living, by pathos and pretensions, and by a cynical philosophy – yea, he has even developed into a character through the continual knowledge of his deficiency.

267

Why so Proud? – A noble character is distinguished from a vulgar one by the fact that the latter has not at ready command a certain number of habits and points of view like the former: fate willed that they should not be his either by inheritance or by education.

268

The Orator's Scylla and Charybdis. – How difficult it was in Athens to speak in such a way as to win over the hearers to one's cause without repelling them at the same time by the form in which one's speech was cast, or withdrawing their attention from the cause itself by this form! How difficult it still is to write thus in France!

269

Sick People and Art. – For all kinds of sadness and misery of soul we should first of all try a change of diet and severe manual labour; but in such cases men are in the habit of having recourse to mental intoxicants, to art for example – which is both to their own detriment and that of art! Can you not see that when you call for art as sick people you make the artists themselves sick?

270

Apparent Toleration. – Those are good, benevolent, and rational words on and in favour of science, but, alas! I see behind these words your toleration of science. In a corner of your inmost mind you think, in spite of all you say, that it is not necessary for you, that it shows magnanimity on your part to admit and even to advocate it, more especially as science on its part does not exhibit this magnanimity in regard to your opinion! Do you know that you have no right whatever to exercise this toleration? that this condescension of yours is an even coarser disparagement of science than any of that open scorn which a presumptuous priest or artist might allow himself to indulge in towards science? What is lacking in you is a strong sense for everything that is true and actual, you do not feel grieved and worried to find that science is in contradiction to your own sentiments, you are unacquainted with that intense desire for knowledge ruling over you like a law, you do not feel a duty in the need of being present with your own eyes wherever knowledge exists, and to let nothing that is “known” escape you. You do not know that which you are treating with such toleration! and it is only because you do not know it that you can succeed in adopting such a gracious attitude towards it. You, forsooth, would look upon science with hatred and fanaticism if it for once cast its shining and illuminating glance upon you! What does it matter to us, then, if you do exhibit toleration – and towards a phantom! and not even towards us! – and what do we matter!

271

Festive Moods. – It is exactly those men who aspire most ardently towards power who feel it indescribably agreeable to be overpowered! to sink suddenly and deeply into a feeling as into a whirlpool! To suffer the reins to be snatched out of their hand, and to watch a movement which takes them they know not where! Whatever or whoever may be the person or thing that renders us this service, it is nevertheless a great service: we are so happy and breathless, and feel around us an exceptional silence, as if we were in the most central bowels of the earth. To be for once entirely powerless! the plaything of the elementary forces of nature! There is a restfulness in this happiness, a casting away of the great burden, a descent without fatigue, as if one had been given up to the blind force of gravity.

This is the dream of the mountain climber, who, although he sees his goal far above him, nevertheless falls asleep on the way from utter exhaustion, and dreams of the happiness of the contrast – this effortless rolling down hill. I describe happiness as I imagine it to be in our present-day society, the badgered, ambitious society of Europe and America. Now and then they wish to fall back into impotence – this enjoyment is offered them by wars, arts, religions, and geniuses. When a man has temporarily abandoned himself to a momentary impression which devours and crushes everything – and this is the modern festive mood – he afterwards becomes freer, colder, more refreshed, and more strict, and again strives tirelessly after the contrary of all this: power.

272

The Purification of Races. – It is probable that there are no pure races, but only races which have become purified, and even these are extremely rare.⁸ We more often meet with crossed races, among whom, together with the defects in the harmony of the bodily forms (for example when the eyes do not accord with the mouth) we necessarily always find defects of harmony in habits and appreciations. (Livingstone heard some one say, “God created white and black men, but the devil created the half-castes.”)

Crossed races are always at the same time crossed cultures and crossed moralities: they are, as a rule, more evil, cruel, and restless. Purity is the final result of innumerable adjustments, absorptions, and eliminations; and progress towards purity in a race is shown by the fact that the latent strength in the race is more and more restricted to a few special functions, whilst it formerly had to carry out too many and often contradictory things. Such a restriction will always have the appearance of an impoverishment, and must be judged with prudence and moderation. In the long run, however, when the process of purification has come to a successful termination, all those forces which were formerly wasted in the struggle between the disharmonious qualities are at the disposal of the organism as a whole, and this is why purified races have always become stronger and more beautiful. – The Greeks may serve us as a model of a purified race and culture! – and it is to be hoped that some day a pure European race and culture may arise.

273

Praise. – Here is some one who, you perceive, wishes to praise you: you bite your lips and brace up your heart: Oh, that that cup might go hence! But it does not, it comes! let us therefore drink the sweet impudence of the panegyrist, let us overcome the disgust and profound contempt that we feel for the innermost substance of his praise, let us assume a look of thankful joy – for he wished to make himself agreeable to us! And now that it is all over we know that he feels greatly exalted; he has been victorious over us. Yes, and also over himself, the villain! – for it was no easy matter for him to wring this praise from himself.

274

The Rights and Privileges of Man. – We human beings are the only creatures who, when things do not go well with us, can blot ourselves out like a clumsy sentence, – whether we do so out of honour for humanity or pity for it, or on account of the aversion we feel towards ourselves.

275

The Transformed Being. – Now he becomes virtuous; but only for the sake of hurting others by being so. Don't pay so much attention to him.

276

How Often! How Unexpected! – How may married men have some morning awakened to the fact that their young wife is dull, although she thinks quite the contrary! not to speak of those wives whose flesh is willing but whose intellect is weak!

277

Warm and Cold Virtues. – Courage is sometimes the consequence of cold and unshaken resolution, and at other times of a fiery and reckless élan. For these two kinds of courage there is only the one name! – but how different, nevertheless, are cold virtues and warm virtues! and the man would be a fool who could suppose that “goodness” could only be brought about by warmth, and no less a fool he who would only attribute it to cold. The truth is that mankind has found both warm and cold courage very useful, yet not often enough to prevent it from setting them both in the category of precious stones.

278

The gracious Memory. – A man of high rank will do well to develop a gracious memory, that is, to note all the good qualities of people and remember them particularly; for in this way he holds them in an agreeable dependence. A man may also act in this way towards himself: whether or not he has a gracious memory determines in the end the superiority, gentleness, or distrust with which he observes his own inclinations and intentions, and finally even the nature of these inclinations and intentions.

279

Wherein we become Artists. – He who makes an idol of some one endeavours to justify himself in his own eyes by idealising this person: in other words, he becomes an artist that he may have a clear conscience. When he suffers he does not suffer from his ignorance, but from the lie he has told himself to make himself ignorant. The inmost misery and desire of such a man – and all passionate lovers are included in this category – cannot be exhausted by normal means.

280

Childlike. – Those who live like children – those who have not to struggle for their daily bread, and do not think that their actions have any ultimate signification – remain childlike.

281

Our Ego desires Everything. – It would seem as if men in general were only inspired by the desire to possess: languages at least would permit of this supposition, for they view past actions from the standpoint that we have been put in possession of something – “I have spoken, struggled, conquered” – as if to say, I am now in possession of my word, my struggle, my victory. How greedy man appears in this light! he cannot even let the past escape him: he even wishes to have it still!

282

Danger in Beauty. – This woman is beautiful and intelligent: alas, how much more intelligent she would have become if she had not been beautiful!

283

Domestic and Mental Peace. – Our habitual mood depends upon the mood in which we maintain our habitual entourage.

284

New Things as Old Ones. – Many people seem irritated when something new is told them: they feel the ascendancy which the news has given to the person who has learnt it first.

285

What are the Limits of the Ego. – The majority of people take under their protection, as it were, something that they know, as if the fact of knowing it was sufficient in itself to make it their property. The acquisitiveness of the egoistic feeling has no limits: Great men speak as if they had behind them the whole of time, and had placed themselves at the head of this enormous host; and good women boast of the beauty of their children, their clothes, their dog, their physician, or their native town, but the only thing they dare not say is, “I am all that.” Chi non ha non è– as they say in Italy.

286

Domestic Animals, Pets and the Like. – Could there be anything more repugnant than the sentimentality which is shown to plants and animals – and this on the part of a creature who from the very beginning has made such ravages among them as their most ferocious enemy, – and who ends by even claiming affectionate feelings from his weakened and mutilated victims! Before this kind of “nature” man must above all be serious, if he is any sort of a thinking being.

287

Two Friends. – They were friends once, but now they have ceased to be so, and both of them broke off the friendship at the same time, the one because he believed himself to be too greatly misunderstood, and the other because he thought he was known too intimately – and both were wrong! For neither of them knew himself well enough.

288

The Comedy of the Noble Souls. – Those who cannot succeed in exhibiting a noble and cordial familiarity endeavour to let the nobleness of their nature be seen by their exercise of reserve and strictness, and a certain contempt for familiarity, as if their strong sense of confidence were ashamed to show itself.

289

Where we may say Nothing against Virtue. – Among cowards it is thought bad form to say anything against bravery, for any expression of this kind would give rise to some contempt; and unfeeling people are irritated when anything is said against pity.⁹

290

A Waste. – We find that with irritable and abrupt people their first words and actions generally afford no indication of their actual character – they are prompted by circumstances, and are to some extent simply reproductions of the spirit of these circumstances. Because, however, as the words have been uttered and the deeds done, the subsequent words and deeds, indicating the real nature of such people, have often to be used to reconcile, amend, or extinguish the former.

291

Arrogance. – Arrogance is an artificial and simulated pride; but it is precisely the essential nature of pride to be incapable of artifice, simulation, or hypocrisy – and thus arrogance is the hypocrisy of the incapacity for hypocrisy, a very difficult thing, and one which is a failure in most cases. But if we suppose that, as most frequently happens, the presumptuous person betrays himself, then a treble annoyance falls to his lot: people are angry with him because he has endeavoured to deceive them, and because he wished to show himself superior to them, and finally they laugh at him because he failed in both these endeavours. How earnestly, therefore, should we dissuade our fellow-men from arrogance!

292

A Species of Misconception. – When we hear somebody speak it is often sufficient for his pronunciation of a single consonant (the letter r, for example) to fill us with doubts as to the honesty of his feelings: we are not accustomed to this particular pronunciation, and should have to make it ourselves as it were arbitrarily – it sounds “forced” to us. This is the domain of the greatest possible misconception: and it is the same with the style of a writer who has certain habits which are not the habits of everybody. His “artlessness” is felt as such only by himself, and precisely in regard to that which he himself feels to be “forced” (because he has yielded in this matter to the prevailing fashion and to so called “good taste”), he may perhaps give pleasure and inspire confidence.

293

Thankful. – One superfluous grain of gratitude and piety makes one suffer as from a vice – in spite of all one's independence and honesty one begins to have a bad conscience.

294

Saints. – It is the most sensual men who find it necessary to avoid women and to torture their bodies.

295

The Subtlety of Serving. – One of the most subtle tasks in the great art of serving is that of serving a more than usually ambitious man, who, indeed, is excessively egoistic in all things, but is entirely adverse to being thought so (this is part of his ambition). He requires that everything shall be according to his own will and humour, yet in such a way as to give him the appearance of always having sacrificed himself, and of rarely desiring anything for himself alone.

296

Duelling. – I think it a great advantage, said some one, to be able to fight a duel – if, of course, it is absolutely necessary; for I have at all times brave companions about me. The duel is the last means of thoroughly honourable suicide left to us; but it is unfortunately a circuitous means, and not even a certain one.

297

Pernicious. – A young man can be most surely corrupted when he is taught to value the like-minded more highly than the differently minded.

298

Hero-Worship and its Fanatics. – The fanatic of an ideal that possesses flesh and blood is right as a rule so long as he assumes a negative attitude, and he is terrible in his negation: he knows what he denies as well as he knows himself, for the simple reason that he comes thence, that he feels at home there, and that he has always the secret fear of being forced to return there some day. He therefore wishes to make his return impossible by the manner of his negation. As soon as he begins to affirm, however, he partly shuts his eyes and begins to idealise (frequently merely for the sake of annoying those who have stayed at home). We might say that there was something artistic about this – agreed, but there is also something dishonest about it.

The idealist of a person imagines this person to be so far from him that he can no longer see him distinctly, and then he travesties that which he can just perceive into something “beautiful” – that is to say, symmetrical, vaguely outlined, uncertain. Since he wishes to worship from afar that ideal which floats on high in the distance, he finds it essential to build a temple for the object of his worship as a protection from the profanum vulgus. He brings into this temple for the object of his worship all the venerable and sanctified objects which he still possesses, so that his ideal may benefit by their charm, and that, nourished in this way, it may grow more and more divine. In the end he really succeeds in forming his God, but, alas for him! there is some one who knows how all this has been done, viz. his intellectual conscience; and there is also some one who, quite unconsciously, begins to protest against these things, viz. the deified one himself, who, in consequence of all this worship, praise, and incense, now becomes completely unbearable and shows himself in the most obvious and dreadful manner to be non-divine, and only too human.

In a case like this there is only one means of escape left for such a fanatic; he patiently suffers himself and his fellows to be maltreated, and interprets all this misery in maiorem dei gloriam by a new kind of self-deceit and noble falsehood. He takes up a stand against himself, and in doing so experiences, as an interpreter and ill-treated person, something like martyrdom – and in this way he climbs to the height of his conceit. Men of this kind to be found, for example, in the entourage of Napoleon: indeed, perhaps it may have been he who inspired the soul of his century with that romantic prostration in the presence of the “genius” and the “hero,” which was so foreign to the spirit of rationalism of the nineteenth century – a man about whom even Byron was not ashamed to say that he was a “worm compared with such a being.” (The formulæ of this prostration have been discovered by Thomas Carlyle, that arrogant old muddle-head and grumbler, who spent his long life in trying to romanticise the common sense of his Englishmen: but in vain!)

299

The Appearance of Heroism. – Throwing ourselves in the midst of our enemies may be a sign of cowardice.

300

Condescending towards the Flatterer. – It is the ultimate prudence of insatiably ambitious men not only to conceal their contempt for man which the sight of flatterers causes them: but also to appear even condescending to them, like a God who can be nothing if not condescending.

301

“Strength of Character.” – “What I have said once I will do” – This manner of thinking is believed to indicate great strength of character. How many actions are accomplished, not because they have been selected as being the most rational, but because at the moment when we thought of them they influenced our ambition and vanity by some means or another, so that we do not stop until we have blindly carried them out. Thus they strengthen in us our belief in our character and our good conscience, in short our strength; whilst the choice of the most rational acts possible brings about a certain amount of scepticism towards ourselves, and thus encourages a sense of weakness in us.