THIRD BOOK
149
Small inconventionalities are needed.—Acting sometimes against our better insight in matters of custom, yielding in practice whilst reserving our intellectual freedom, doing like everybody else, and thereby showing consideration and kindness to all, as a compensation, so to speak, for what may be unconventional in our opinions, —all this is looked upon by many tolerably free-minded people not only as safe, but even as honourable," humane, tolerant, unpecantic," and whatever else may be the beautiful words by which the intellectual conscience is lulled to sleep. So one person, though an atheist, brings his child to Christian baptism; anothir serves in the army, though he severely condemns the hatred of nations: a third accompanies his little wife, because she is of pions parentage, to church, an unblushingly makes rows to the priest. ("What does it matter if we do what everybody always has done and will do?" asserts blind prejudice.) What a great mistake! For nothing matters more than that a strong, old-established and irrationally recognised custom be once more confirmed through the action of one recognised as reasonable. To all who hear of it, it is tantamount to being sanctioned by reason itself. All clue humour to your opinions! But small unconventionalities are of greater value.
150
The accidentality of matrimony—Were I a god, and a well-meaning one, the marriages of people would annoy me more than anything else. Very far indeed may an individual progress in the seventy, nay, thirty years of his life,—so far as to appear marvellous even to the gods. But when we see him hang up the inheritance and fruit of his struggles and victory, the laurel-wreath of his humanity on the very first pillar where a wife may pick it to pieces; when we see how much better he understands acquisition than preservation, nay, how little he is aware that by procreationhie might bring forth an even more victorious life: we, indeed, grow impatient, saying to ourselves, "Nothing in the long run will come of humanity, the individuals are wasted, the accidentality of marriage makes every reasonable and great course of humanity impossible:—let us cease being cager spectators and fools of this play without a purpose ! In this mood once, long ago, the gods of Epicurus withdrew to their heavenly seclusion and bliss: they were weary of men and men's love affairs."
151
New ideals to be invented.—While in love we ought not to be permitted to decide about our own lives, or to settle once for all the character of our companionship: we ought publicly to disavow the vows of lovers, and retuse matrimony to them, for the very reason that we ought to treat matrimony in a far more serious light; so that in the very cases in which it has hitherto been contracted, it would usually forsooth not be contracted. Are not most marriages such that a third person, as witness, seems an undesirable interloper? And just this third is hardly ever wanting, it is the child, the witness, nay more, the scapegoat of matrimony.
152
Formula of oath.—"If I am telling a lie, I will no longer claim the title of an honourable man, and everybody may tell me so to my face." This formula I should recommend in place of the judicial oath and usual invocation of God: it is stronger. There is no reason for the pions even to oppose it: for as soon as the customary oath will begin to lack in adequate usefulness, the pious will have to consult their entechism, which prescribes—“Thou shall not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain."
153
154
Comfort in a life of peril.—The Greeks, in a life which was surrounded by great dangers and upheavals, sought: feeling of safety and last refuge in meditation and knowledge. We, in a state of paralleled safety, have introduced insecurity into meditation and knowledge, and seek case in the struggles of life.
155
Extinct scepticism.—Bold enterprises are rarer in modern times than they were in antiquity and the middle ages,—probably because modens no longer believe in omens, oracles, stars and soothsayers. That is, we have become unable to believe in a predestined future, in which the ancients believed, who—in contradistinction to us— were much less sceptic with regard to that which will be, than to that which is.
156
Evil through wantonness.—"Let us beware of feeling too happy,"—was the secret anxiety of the Greeks in their best time. Hence they preached moderation to themselves. And we?
157
Worship of the natural sounds.—Whither does it point that our culture not only bears with indulgence the expressions of pains, the tears, complaints, reproaches, the gestures of rage or of humiliation, but even sanctions them and reckons them among the nobler necessities— whereas the spirit of ancient philosophy scornfully looked down upon them, without admitting this necessity at all. Let us recall to our minds how Plato—not one of the most inhuman philosophers—speaks of the Philoctetus of the tragical stage. Is our modern culture perhaps waiting in philosophy"? Are we, all of us, perhaps only what those ancient philosophers would call a "mob"?
158
Where flattery grows.—In the present time fawning flatterers must not be sought at the courts of princes, these have all imbibed a military taste, which is opposed to flattery. But it is around bankers and artists that this plant may be found to grow even now.
159
160
Vain, courteous and hardly wise.—Your desires surpass your reason, and your vanity even surpasses your desires,— to such people as you are a good deal of Chiristian practice and a little of Schopenhauer's theory would be an excellent prescription.
161
Beauty correspondent to the century.—If our sculptors, painters and musicians would hit off the spirit of the age, they ought to represent beauty as bloated, gigantic and nervous, just as the Greeks, under the spell of their law of moderation, saw and formed beauty in the shape of Apollo of Belvedere. We really ought to call him ugly! But the absurd classicists have deprived us of all honesty.
162
The irony of the present age.—In our days Europeans have contracted the habit of treating all matters of great interest with irony, because, through our activity in their service, we have no time for dealing seriously with them.
163
Rousseau rebutted.—It is time that there is something wretched about our civilisation; we are at liberty to infer with Rousseau “this wretched civilisation is to blame for our bad morality," or to infer in a sense opposed to Rousseau's "our good morality is to blame for this wretched civilisation." Our work, unmanly social conceptions of good and evil, and their enormous ascendancy over body and mind, live at last weakened all bodies and minds and crushed all self-reliant, independent, unprejudiced people, the pillars of a strong civilisation. Wherever we still meet with bad morality, we see the last crumbling debris of these pillars. Thus let paradox fight against paradox! It is impossible that truth should be on both sides: is it really on either side? Examine for yourselves.
164
Perhaps premature.—Amid all sorts of false, misleading names, and, in most cases, amid great uncertainty, those who do not stand committed by the existing customs and laws are non apparently making their first attempts towards organising themselves and thereby securing a right for themselves, whereas hitherto they had lived as ill-famed criminals, freethinkers, immoral folk, evil-doers, under the ban of outlawry and bad conscience, being both corrupted and corrupting. This we ought to consider, on the whole, fair and right, though it may bring danger to the coming century and make everybody shoulder arms; if only it will create a counterforce, constantly reminding us that there is no monopoly of morals, and that every morality which exclusively asserts itself destroys too much good strength and is too dearly bought by mankind. The straying ones, who so often are the inventive and productive ones, shall no longer be sacrificed; it shall not even be deemed a disgrace to stray from morals either in deods or thoughts; numerous experiments shall be made in matters of life and society; an enormous incubus of bad conscience shall be removed from the world—these are the general aims which ought to be recognised and furthered by all honest and truthseeking people.
165
The morality which does not weary.—The chief moral commandments which a nation allows its teachers and preachers again and again to insist upon, are proportionate to its principal errors, and, therefore, not wearying. The Greeks who, but too frequently, set aside their moderation, cool courage, fair mindedness, and rationality, generally speaking, willingly welcomed the four Socratic virtues—for they were sorely in need of them, and, indeed, had very little talent for them.
166
At the crossing of the roads.—For shame! you want to adopt a system in which you must either be a wheel in the fullest sense of the word, or be crushed by the wheels; in which it is a matter of course that everybody is that to which he was predestined; that the running after “connections" is one of the natural duties; that nobody feels offended if his attention is drawn to somebody and it is hinted, "Some day he may be of use to you"; that we do not feel ashamed of paying a visit to ask for a person's intercession; that we do not even suspect that, by a spontaneous conformity lo such customs, we once for all stamp ourselves as nature's common pottery, which others may use and break without feeling compunctions about it; just as if we said, “There will never be a lack of such people as I am: take me, there, without ado!"
167
Unconditional homage.—When I think of the beststudied German philosopher, the most popular German musician, the most distinguished German statesman, I admit that the Germans—this nation of unconditional feeling—are much imposed upon, and that, too, by their own great men. We see spread out before us a threefold splendid sight: in each case a stream, coursing along its own self-wrought bed, so mightily agitated that often it would seem to flow uphill. And yet, however highly we may cultivate this worship, who would not, in the main, like to differ from Schopenhauer? And who could now side in all greater and lesser matters with Richard Wagner, however true it may be that, as somebody has said, wherever he takes or gives offence, some problem lies buried—which he, however, does not unearth for us? And, last not least, how many would most willingly be of one mind with Bismarck if only he would always be of one mind with himself, or, at least, endevour to be so for the future! True, without principles, but with deep-seatel impulses, a moralle mine in the service of strong, deep-seated impulses, and, for this very reason, without principles—should be my— thing but startling in a statesman, and should, on the contrary, be considered as the proper and natural thing: but, unfortunately, up to now, it was decidedly un-German as public excitement about music, and discord and discontent about the musician, or as the new and extraordinary attitude adopted by Schopenhauer, who is neither above the things nor on his knees before the things—either of these might yet have been called German—but against the things. How incredible and disagreeable ! To range oneself along with the things and yet oppose them, and, last of all, oneself! What can the unconditional admirer do with such a model? And again, what is he to do with three such models who do not mean to be at peace with one another? Schopenhauer, the antagonist of Wagner's music; Wagner, the antagonist of Bismarck's policy; and Bismarck, the antagonist of all Wagnerism and Schopenhauerism. What are we to do! Where shall we quench our thirst for hero-worship? Might we not, from the music of a composer, select a hundred bars or so of good music, which strike home to the heart, and to which we would cling with affection, because they have a heart within them—might we not step aside with this small spoil—and forget all the rest? And might we not discover a similar arrangement with regard to the philosopher and statesman, selecting, laying to heart, and, above all, forgetting the rest? If only it were not so difficult to forget! There was once a very proud man, who absolutely refused to accept anything, whether good or evil, from others but himself; when he was in need of forgetting, however, he could not bestow it on himself, and was thrice obliged to conjure up the spirits; they came, they heard his request, and at last they said, “This is the only thing which it is not in our power to give." Ought not the Germans to profit by Manfred's experience? Why even conjure up the spirits? It is of no avail; never forget what we long to forget. And how great would be the balance of oblivion which would remain, were we to continue wholesale admirers of these three heroes! Hence it seems more advisable to avail oneself of the good opportunity which offers, and attempt something new, namely, to grow more honest towards our own selves, and to change our credulous authority—worship and fierce, blind animosity into conlditional consent and gentle opposition. But first of all let us be taught that an unconditional hero-worship is ridiculous, that a change of conception on this head would not be discreditable even to Germans, and that there is a profound and memorable saying, “Ce qui importe, ce ne sont point les personnes, mais les choses." This saying is like him who uttered it—great, honest, simple, and tacit, just like Carnot the soldier and republican. But may I at the present moment speak thus of a Frenchman, nay, a republican, to Germans? Perhaps not; perhaps I may not evell recall to mind what Neighbour in his day felt at liberty to say to Germans: that nobody ever made such an impression of true greatness on him as Carnot did.
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1 model.—What do I admire in Thucydides, why do I honour him more highly than Plato? He has the most extensive and most impartial delight in every typical side of men and events, and finds that each type is possessed of a certain amount of good sense, which he tries to discover. He shows greater practical fairness than Plato, he is no reviler or letracter of men whom he dislikes or who have wronged him in life. On the contrary, in seeing but types he, by an effort of imagination, adds something noble to all things and all persons; how could posterity, to whom he dedicates his work, trouble about things not typical. Thus in him, the sketcher of men, that culture of the most unprejudiced knowledge of the world gives forth its last elicious bloom, which found its poet in Sophocles, its statesman in Pericles, its physician in Hippocrates, its natural philosopher in Democritus—that culture which deserves to be named after its teachers, the Sophists, and which, unfortunately, from that hour of its baptism, at once begins to grow pale and incomprehensible to us, for now we suspect that it must have been a most immoral culture which was opposed by Plato and all the Socratic schools. The truth in this is so twisted and entangled that we feel reluctant to rake it up Let therefore the old error (error veritate simplicior) run its old course.
169
Hellenism foreign to us.—Compared with Greek art, all art, Oriental or modern, Asiatic or European, is remarkable for its imposing effects and the revelling in monumental grandeur as the expression of the sublime; whereas Paestum, Pompeii, Athens, and the whole of Grecian architecture astonish us by the modest structures whereby the Greeks were able and love to express the sublime. Again, low simple did the people in Greece appear to their own conceptions! How far superior to them are we ve in the knowledge of man! But how labyrinthian appear our souls and conceptions of the soul in comparison to theirs ! If we wished for and ventured upon any architecture corresponding to the constitution of our own souls (we are too cowardly for that), the maze would have to be only pattern. That music alone, which is so peculiar to us, and really expresses ns, discloses the truth. (For in music men throw off their guard in imagining that nobody could see them through the veil of their music.)
170
IAnother perspective of feeling.–now we jabber about the Greeks! What do we understand of their art, the soul of which is the passion for naked male beauty! Only from that point of view they appre- ciated female beauty. Thus they had a perspective thoroughly different from ours. The case was similar with regard to their love for womankind. Their worship was of a different taste, and so was their contempt.
171
Fool for the modern man.–He has learnt to digest many things, nay, almost everything–it is his ambition to do so: but he would really be of a higher order if he were less proficient in this art; homopamphagus is not the finest of human species. We live between a past which had a mudder and more stubborn taste than we have, and a future which perlaps may have a more select taste—we halt too much midway.
172
Tragerly and music.–Men of a fundamentally warlike disposition, such as were the Greeks in the time of Æschylus, are not easily tonehod, and when once pity overcomes their hard natures it seizes them like a whirlwind and a “demonic power," they feel carried away and thrilled by a religious horror, Afterwards they are sceptical) about this state, but as long as they are in it they enjoy the delight of being outside themselves and of the marvellous, mixed with the bitterest wormwool of suffering; it is the right kind of food for warriors, something rare, dangerous, and bitter-sweet, which does not easily fall to our share. It is to souls capable of feeling pity in such wise that tragedy appeals to hard and warlike souls, which are difficult to conquer, whether through fear or through pity, but which are greatly benefited by an occasional melting: but of what use is tragedy to those who are as open to the sympathetic affections as the sails are to the winds? When, in Plato's time, the Athenians had become more soft-hearted and sensitive, oh, how far removed were they still from the gushing emotions of our city-people and townsfolk ! Even then philosophers complained of the injuriousness of tragedies. of peril such as the one which we are inaugurating, in which valour and manliness are rising in value, may perhaps gradually harden the souls to such a degree that they will again be in need of tragic poets; but, meanwhile, these were to use the mildest expressionsomewhat superfluous. In the same sense, perhaps, also music will see better days (they will certainly be more evil ones!) when artists will have to appeal with their music to strictly personal beings, hearts of oak, ruled over by the gloomy asperity of their own passion; but of what advantage is music to the present little souls of the vanishing age, souls too versatile, too little developed, half personal, inquisitive, which hanker after everything?
173
The panegyrists of scork.—In the glorification of work, in the incessant chatter about the “blessings of work," I discover the same secret thought as in the praise of the benevolent, impersonal actious, namely, the dread of the individual. At the sight of work—which always implies that severe toil from morning till night—we really feel that such work is the best police, that it keeps everybody in bounds, and effectually checks the development of reason, of covetousness, of a desire after independence. For it consumes an enormous amount of nervous force, withdrawing it from reflection, brooding, dreaming, care, love, hatred; it always dangles a small object before the eye, affording easy and regular gratifications. Thus a society in which hard work is constantly being performed will enjoy greater security, and security is now worshipped as the supreme deity. And now! Oh horror! the very “workman" has grown dangerous! the work is swarming with “dangerous individuals"! And in their train follows the danger of all dangers—the individual.
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Fundamental notion of a culture of traders.—We many watch the multifarious growth in our days of a social culture the very soul of which is trading, just as personal rivalry was that of the Greeks, and war, victory and law that of the Romans. The trader knows how to estimate anything without making it, and, indeed, to estimate it not according to his own personal requirements, but to those of the consumers. "Who and how many will consume this?" is his question of questions. This type of estimation he now instinctively and constantly applies to every thing, including the productions of art and science, of thinkers, scholars, artists, statesmen, nations and parties, in fact of the entire age; in connection with everything produced he inquires into supply and demand in order to fix the value of a thing. This, when once it has become the character of a whole culture, being worked out in the minutest and nicest details, and stamped on every volition and faculty, will be the thing that ye people of the century to come will be proud of, provided the prophets of the commercial class are right in making the century over to yon. But I have little faith in these prophets. {{italic|Credat Judaus Apella—to speak with Horace.
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The criticism on the ancestors.—Why do we now forbear the truth about even the most recent past? Because there is always a new generation which feels in opposition to this post, and enjoys in this criticism the firstfruit of the sense of power. Formerly the new generation, on the contrary, wished to build upon the older one, and begin to feel its power in not only adopting paternal views, but as far as possible tightening the bonds of observance. Criticism on the ancestors was at that time considered wicked: in our days the younger idealists make it their starting point.
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To learn solitude.—Oh ye poor fellows in the large cities of the world's politics, ye young and gifted men, who, tormented by ambition, deem it your duty to give your opinion on every occurrence of the day—something always occurs; who, by thus raising up lust and noise, mistake yourselves for the rolling chariot of history; who, because you always listen, are always on the lookout for the moment when you may put in a word or two, and thereby lose all true productiveness. However desirous you may be of doing great deeds, the deep silence of pregnancy never comes to you! The event of the day sweeps you along like chaff, while you fancy that you are chasing the events—poor fellows! If you wish to pose as heroes on the stage, you must not think of forming the chorus, nay, not even know how the chorus is formed.
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The daily wear-end-tear.—These young men are lacking neither character, nor talent, nor industry, but they have never been allowed sufficient leisure to choose their own course; on the contrary, they have been accustomed from childhood to some one's guidance. At the time when they were ripe to “be sent into the desert," something else was done with them—they were employed, they were estranged from themselves, they were trained to being worn out with the daily toil; this was imposed as a duty upon them—and now they are neither able nor willing to do without it. The only thing that cannot be denied these poor beasts of burden is their "vacation," as they call it, this ideal of leisure amid an overstrained century, where we may for once be idle, idiotic, and childish to our heart's content.
179
As little of the State as possible.—All the political and economic affairs do not deserve being and having to be dealt with by the most gifted; such a waste of intellect is really worse than a deficiency of it. They are and will ever be departments of work for lesser heads, and others than the lesser ones should not be at the service of this workshop, it would be better to let the machinery go to pieces again. But as matters now stand, when not only all believe that every day they have to know all about it, but everybody at all times wishes to be engaged in its service, and, in so doing, neglects his own work, it is a great and ridiculous mania. The price which we thus have to pay for the "general safety" is far too high, and, what is the maddest thing of all, we effect the very reverse of the general safety, a fact which our own country has undertaken to prove, as though it had never been proved before! Making society safe against thieves and fire, and thoroughly fit for all trade and traffic, and transforming the State in a good and evil sense into a kind of Providencethese are low, moderate, and by no means indispensable aims, which we ought not to strive after with the highest meals and instruments in existence—these we ought to reserve for our highest and rarest aims. Our age, however much it may talk about economy, is a lavisher: it lavishes the most precious thing of all—the intellect.
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Wars.—The great wars of the present times are the results of the study of history.
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Governing.—Some people govern from a mere passion for governing; others in order not to be governed. To the latter it is only the lesser of two evils.
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Rough consistency.—People say with great reverence, “He is a character !"-that is, if he shows a rough consistency, through this consistency be obvious even to the dullest eye. But whenever a subtler and deeper intellect shows consistency in its higher methods, the spectators deny the existence of character. This is why cunning stateman usually act their comedy under a cloak of rough consistency.
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The old and the young.—"There is something immoral in Parliaments," so many seem to reason even now, there one may have views quite opposed to the govern"We ought unconditionally to adopt that view which the gracious sovereign commands Eleventh commandment in many an honest, aged brain, especially in the north of Germany. We deride it as an obsolete fashion; but formerly it was the moral law. Perhaps some day the mockers will attack that which is now considered moral among the younger parliamentary generation, namely, the policy of placing party before one's own wisdom, and of answering every question on the public weal in such wise as may fill the sails of party with a favourable gust of wind. "We must take that view of the subject which the position of the party demands," such would be the canon. In the service of morals like these we new meet with overy kind of sacrifice, self-effacement, and martyrdom.
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The State as a production of anarchists.—In countries inhabited by gentle-minded people there may be found even now plenty of backsliders and unreclaimed ones. For the present they are gathered in larger numbers in the socialist camps than elsewhere. Should it happen that they will have to give Iaws, we may depend upon it that they will lay themselves in iron chains and practise a savage discipline—they know one another!—and they will submit to these laws in the consciousness of having themselves established them. The sense of power, of this power, is too fresh and too delightful for them not to make them suffer anything for its sake.
185
Beggars.—We ought to do away with beggars, for we are sorry both when we relieve them and when we do not relieve them.
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Business-men.—Your business is your greatest prejudice, it ties you to your loyalty, your society, your inclinations. Diligent in business, but lazy in intellect, content with your inadequacy and with the cloak of duty covering this contentment; so you live, so you like to see your children.
187
Of a possible future.—Can we not imagine an evil-doer denouncing himself, and publicly dictating his own punishment, in the proud consciousness of thus respecting the law which he himself has established, of exercising his power, the power of the legislator, in punishing himself? may for once offend, but, by his voluntary punishment, he raises himself above his offence; he not only wipes out his offense by candour, greatness and calmness, but he adds to it a public benefit. Such would be the criminal of a possible future, if, indeed, we presuppose at the same time a future legislation founded on the idea, "I will yield in great things as in small only to that law which I myself have given." How many experiments will yet have to be made! How many a future will yet have to dawn upon mankind!
188
Stimulants and food.—The nations are so often deceived because they are constantly on the look out for a deceiver, that is, in the form of a stimulating wine for their senses. If they can but have that, they are quite content with inferior brend. They value stimulants more highly than sustenance, this is the bait they will always bite at. What are men, chosen from their midst—though they may be the most practical experts—to them, as compared with the brilliant conquerors or the old and magnificent princely houses. The demagogue at least is obliged to hold out conquests and luxury to them, then perlaps he may encounter faith. They will always obey and more than obey, provided they may at the same time get intoxicated. We may not even offer repose and pleasure to them without the laurel wreath and its maddening influence. This vulgar taste, which lays more stress upou inebriation than upon sustenance, by no means originated in the lowest social strata; on the contrary, it was carried and transplanted thither in the past, and is now only wore prominent there in its late and luxurious growth; but its origin is derived from the highest intellects, for it flourished in them for thousands of years. The people are the last virgin soil on which this brilliant weed could thrive. Well, then, should we really entrust politics to them, so that they may have their daily cup of the intoxicating draught?
189
Hante politique.—However largely the private advantage and vanity—of both individuals and nations—may have influenced the great politics, the most powerful tide which urges them forward is the desire for the sensation of power, bursting forth from inexhaustible wells not only in the souls of princes and rulers, but periodically in an equal measure from among the lowest ranks of the people. The time will come when the masses will be ready to sacrifice their lives, their goods and chattels, their consciences and their virtue, for the purpose of securing that highest of enjoyments and of ruling either in reality or in imagination as a victorious, tyrannical, arbitrary nation over other nations. On these occasions the prodigal, devotel, hopeful, confident, overweening, fantastical feelings will spring forth in such abundance as to allow the ambitious or wisely provident prince to rush into a war and to make the good consciences of his people an excuse for his injustice. The great conquerors have always had the pathetic language of virtue on their lips: they always and crowds of people around them, who felt as though in a state of exaltation, and who would not listen to any but the most exalted language. Such is the curious madness of moral judgments! When man feels the sense of power, he feels and calls himself good: and at the very same time others, who have to endure the weight of his power, feel and call him evil! Hesiodus, in the fable of the world's ages, has twice in succession pictured the same age, namely that of the Homeric heroes, and has made two out of one: to those who either were under the terrible iron heel of these advrenturous despots or had heard about them from their ancestors, it appeared evil: but the descendants of the knightly races worshipped it in a good old blissful, semi-blissful age. Hence the poet had no alternative but to do as he did—his audience was probably composed of descendants of either race.
190
German culture in the past.—When the Germans began to grow interesting to the other European nations, which is not so very long ago, it was owing to a state of culture which they now no longer possess, nay, which they have sluken off with a blind zeal, like some diserse: and yet they were not able to obtain in exchange anything better than a political and national mania. Thereby they have succeeded in becoming to other nations even more interesting than they formerly were through their culture: may they now feel satislied! Yet there is no denying that this German culture has fooled Europeans, and that it did not deserve such an interest; much less the imitation and cumulation on their part in appropriating it. Let us, just for a moment, turn back to Schiller, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Schelling; let us peruse their correspondence and mix in the large circle of their followers: what have they in common, which fills us, such as we now are, alternately with nausea and with touching and pitiful emotions ? First, the passion for appearing, at any price, morally excited; then the desire for brilliant, feeble, commonplace remarks, and the set purpose of seeing everything (characters, passions, periods, customs) in a more rosy light—alas! “rosy,” according to a bad, Vague taste, which nevertheless boasted of Greek origin. It was a soft, goodnatured, silver-glittering idealism which, above all, wished to affect noble gestures and noble voices, being both presumptuous and harmless, and sincerely disgusted will the "cold" or "dry" reality, with anatomy, with complete passions, with every kind of philosophical abstention and scepticism; but especially with the knowledge of nature in so far as it could not be employed for a religious symbolism. Goethe watched these movements of German culture in his own charecteristic fashion, standing by, gently remonstrating, silent, more and more determined in his own better course. Subsequently Schopenhauer watched then—much of the real world and devilry of the world had been revealed to him, and he spoke of it both rudely all enthusiastically: for this devilry has a beauty of its own! And what was it really that prevented foreigners from cither viewing all this in the same light as Goethe or Schopenhauer saw it, or simply slutting their eyes to it? It was that faint lustre, that mysterious starlight, which formed a halo round this culture. The foreigner said to himself, "This is very remote to us; our sight, lecturing, understanding, enjoyment and valuing are lost here; yet, despite all this, they might be stars! Can the German have secretly discovered some corner of heaven and settled there? We must try and come nearer to the Germans." And they came nearer to them; whereas, not many years later, these selfsame Germans began to divest themselves of this starlight lustre; they knew but too well that they had not been in heaven—but in a cloud.
191
Better people.—They tell me that our art appeals to the greedy, insatiable, uncurbed, loathsome, harassed spirits of the present age, exhibiting to them a picture of bliss, loftiness and unworldliness alongside with that of their own crudeness that for once they may forget and breathe again, nay, perhaps even derive from that oblivion encouragement towards flight and conversion. Poor artists, with such a public as this, with bythoughts half of a priestly, half of the mad doctor's type! How much happier was Corneille—"our great Corneille," as Madame de Sevigné exclaims with the accent of a woman in the presence of the man—how much nobler was his audience, whom he could please with the pictures of chivalrous virtues, strict duty, magnanimous devotion, heroic self-denial! How differently did both he and they love their existence, not issuing from a blind, indomitable will," which we curse, because we cannot destroy it, but is a state where greatness conjointly with humanity is possible, and where even the severest rigour of form, the submission under a princely or clerical tyranny can neither suppress the pride, chivalry, grace, nor the intellect of all individuals, but, on the contrary, are looked upon as stimuli and incentives for that which contrasts with the inborn self-glorification and distinction, with the inherited power of volition and passion.
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Wishing for perfect opponents.—We cannot deny that the French have been the most Christian nation in the world: not because of the faith of their people being greater than elsewhere, but because of the most exalted Christian ideals having been transformed among them into men, instead of merely remaining fanciers, beginnings or faltering measures. Take Pascal, the foremost of Christians in his combination of ardour, intellect and honesty, and consider what combination was needed in his case. Take Fénelon, the perfect and charming embodiment of eccclesiastical culture in all its power: a golden middle-road which a historic writer might feel inclined to prove impossible, whereas, in reality, it was merely something extremely difficult and improbable. Take Madame de Guyon among her fellow-thinkers, the French Quietists and everything which the zealous eloquence of the apostle Paul has endeavoured to unfathom respecting the state of the most public, most boring, most quiet and enraptured semi-divinity of the Christian, has become truth in her and, owing to a true old French naïveté in words and gestures, at once feminine, fine and noble, stripped of that Jewish aggressiveness which Paul showed towards God. Take the founder of the Trappist monasteries, the last person that was genuinely in earnest about the ascetic ideal, not as an exception among Frenchman, but as a typical Frenchman: for up to this day his gloomy creation has been able to remain indigenous and effective only among the French; it followed them into Alsace and Algeria. Let us not forget the Huguenots: the combination of a warlike and industrious mind, of refined mamers and Christian severity never appeared in a more beautiful light. At Port Royal the great Christian erudition saw its last era of prosperity and in France great men know the knack of prospering better than elsewhere. Far from being superficial, a great Frenchman preserves his surface, a natural skin to his real worth and depth—whereas the depth of a great German is usually kept inclosed in an irregularly shaped box, an elixir as it were which tries to protect itself by means of its hard and enormous casing, against the light and the intrusion of frivolous hands. And now let us find out why a people prolific in perfect Christian types was bound to produce also the perfect counter types, those of un-Christian free-thought. The French free-thinker individually had always to fight against great men, and not, as the free-thinkers of other nations, against mere dogmas and sublime abortions.
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Wit and morals.—The German who knows the secret how to be tedious in spite of intellect, knowledge and heart, and who has accustomed himself to consider tediousness as something moral—is in dread lest French wit might put out the eyes of morality, a sensation akin to the dread and delight of the little bird in presence of the rattlesnake. Of all the famous Germans, none perhaps possessed more wit than Hegel—but also he had that remarkable German dread of it, which produced his curious, bad style. For its nature is a kernel wrapped up so many times that it barely peeps out, bashfully and inquisitively—like "young women peeping through their veils," to use the words of Æschylas, the ancient mysogenist: but that kernel is a witty, oftimes indiscret sally on the most intellectual subjects, a smart, bold compound of worlds, as befits the society of thinkers as a sweetmeat to science—but wrapped up as it is it presents itself as a very abstruse science and altogether as a highly moral tediousness. There the Germans had found a permissible form of wit, which they enjoyed with such exuberant delight as to baffle Schopenhauer's excellent understanding—all his lifetime he has thundered against the spectacle which the Germans presented to him, and yet he never was able to account for it.
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Vanity of the teachers of morals.—The comparatively slight success of the teachers of morals may be accounted for by the fact that they wanted too much at one time, that is, they were too ambitious, and too fond of giving precepts to all. Which means, they roam through boundless regions, delivering speeches to the animals, for the purpose of turning them into huruan beings: No wonder that the animals should deem this tedious! We ought to select limited circles, seeking and promoting morals on their behalf; we ought to deliver speeches to the wolves, for instance, in order to turn them into dogs. But the greatest success will befall him who wants to educate neither all nor limited circles, but one individual, and who glances either to the right nor to the left. The last century excelled ours in that it possessed so many individually educated persons, and as many educators, wlio had made this their life-task— and who, with it, had found dignity both in their own eyes and in those of the remaining "good society."
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The so-called classical education.—We have discovered that our life is consecrated to knowledge, that we should throw it away, nay, that we should have thrown it away, if this consecration did not protect us against our own selves; while we frequently, and not without deep emotion, recite the verse:
"Oh fate, I follow thee! For would I not,
'Spite many a sigh, I must comply."
And then, in looking backwards on the course of life, we also discover that one thing cannot be restored: the wasted years of our youth, when our educators did not employ those ardent, eager years, full of a glowing thirst for knowledge, to lend us to the knowledge of things, but to the so-called classical education! Think of the waste of our youth, when a scanty knowledge of the Greeks and Romans and their languages was clumsily and painfully drummed into us, contrary to the principle of education—give food only to him who hungers after it; when we had mathematics and physics forced upon us, instead of being first led forth to the despair of ignorance and having one limited everyday life, our transactions and everything happening in the house, the workshop, in the sky and the landscape, from morning till night, dissected into thousands of problems, of harassing, mortifying, irritating problems—in order afterwards to be shown that our desires first of all require a mathematical and mechanical knowledge, and then to be taught the first scientific delight in the absolute logic of this knowledge. If only we had been inspired with reverence for these branches of science, if but once our souls had been made to tremble at the struggles and defeats and the ever-renewal contests of the great, at the martyrdom which is the history of pure science! On the contrary, the breath of a certain irreverence for the true branches of science breathed upon us in favour of history, “formal education" and “classicism." And we allowed ourselves to be so easily deceived! Formal education! Might we not have pointed to the best teachers of our high-schools, jocosely asking: "Are these then the receptacles of former education? And if they lack it, how are they to teach it?" Classicism, indeed! Did we learn any portion of that in which the ancients used to educate their youth? Did we learn to speak or to write as they did? Did we unceasingly practise dialects in rhetorical contests? Did we learn to move as beautifully and proudly as they, to wrestle, to throw, to box as they? Did we learn some of the practical asceticism of all Greek philosophers? Were we trained in a single antique virtue, in the way in which the ancients practised it? Was not all reflection on morals utterly neglected in our education?—how much more its only possible criticism, those carnest and courageous attempts at living according to this or that morality! Did they even stir up in us any feeling more highly valued by the ancients than by moderns? Dil they in an antique spirit disclose to in the divisions of clay and life and the goals higher than life? Did we learn the classical languages in the same way in which we learn those of living nations—for the purpose of speaking them fluently and well? Nowhere a real proficiency, genuine ability as the result of toilsome years! Only a knowledge of that which men men were proficient in an able to do in times of yore! And what knowledge! As years roll by one thing seems to become more and more evident to me that all Greek and antique nature, however simple and manifest it appears to our eyes, is very difficult to understand, nay, hardly accessible, and that the conditional ease with which we gabble of the ancients, is either a piece of levity or of the old hereditary conceit of our thoughtlessness. The resemblance of words and notions deceives us: but at the root of them lies concealed some sensation which must necessarily be strange, unintelligible and painful to modern sensation. Are these intellectual hunting-grounds for boys? To be brief, we hunted in them in our boyhood and there became imbued with an almost inextinguishable dislike for antiquity, the dislike born of an apparently too great intimacy. For the conceit of our classical educators, who fancy that they have gained full possession of the ancients, goes so far as to transfer this conceit on their former pupils, together with a suspicion that suchi a possession is not fit to make people happy, but is good enough for honest, poor, foolish old bookworms: “May these brood over their treasure; it will be worthy of them!” with this mental reservation we complete our classical education. This cannot be redressed—in us! But let us think of others as well as of ourselves.
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The most personal questions of truth.—What really is that which I am doing? And what do I want to do with it? This is the question of truth which is excluded from our present syllabus of education and is consequently not asked; we have no time for it. But we have always leisure for playing with children instead of discussing the truth; for complimenting women, who one day will have to be mothers, instead of discussing the truth; for speaking with youths about their future and pleasure, instead of discussing the truth. But what are seventy years!—they wear on and soon draw to a close; it matters so little whether the wave knows how and whither it is flowing. Nay, it might be wisdom not to know it. "Granted; but it is not proud not even to inquire into it; our culture does not make people proud." So much the better. —"Really?
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Animosity of the Germans against Enlightenment.— Let us consider what the Germans of the earlier portion of our century contributed to the general culture by means of their intellectual work, and take first the German philosophers: they reverted to the first and oldest stage of speculation, for they were satisfied with conceptions instead of explanations, like unto the thinkers of dreamy ages,—thus, & pre-scientific mode of philosophy was resuscitated by them. Secondly, the German historians and romantic poets: their efforts tended towards bringing into vogue old, primitive ideas, and more especially Christianity, folk-thought, folk-lore, folk-speech, mediavality, Oriental asceticism, Indianism. Thirdly, the naturalists: they combated the genius of Newton andl Voltaire, and like Goethe and Schopenhuner attempted to re-establish the idea of a deified or diabolised nature and of its average ethical and symbolical meaning. The chief tendency of the Germans was exclusively directed against enlightenment and social revolutions which were blindly mistaken for the consequences of the former: the piety towards everything in existence tried to dissolve itself into piety towards everything that had existed, for the sole purpose that heart and mind might again be filled and leave no space for future and later aims. The worship of feeling took the place of the worship of reason, and the German musicians, the consummate artists in all that is invisible, fanciful, legendary, malcontent, were more successful in building up the new temple than all the artists in words and thoughts. If we take it into consideration that innumerable good things have been separately uttered and explored, and many things have since been more fairly judged than ever before: there yet remains this to be said of the sun total, that it was a general risk by no means small under the semblance of a full and final knowledge of the past, to place knowledge altogether below feeling, and by way of using the words of Kant, who thus defined his special task—"again to pave the way for belief by fixing the limits of knowledge." We may again breathe freely: the hour of this danger has passed! And, strange to say, those very spirits which the Germans had so eloquently conjured up, proved in the long run most harmful to the intentions of their conjurors; history, the comprehension of origin and development, the sympathy with the past, the newly stirred up passion of feeling and knowledge, after having been for some time helpmates of the obscuring, vague, retrograde spirit, one day assumed a new nature and are now soaring on outstretched wings past their conjurors, up on high, as new and stronger geniii of that very enlightenment against which they had been raised. This enlightenment we now have to carry onward,— minding that there has been, nay, that there is still, a great revolution and again a great "reaction” against it: these are but playful waves compared to the truly great surge on which we drift and want to drift.
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How to lend prestige to one's country.—A wealth of great inward experiences and reposeful calm watching over them with an intellectual eye, constitute the men of culture, who lend prestige to their country. In France and Italy this was the task of the nobility; in Germany, where until lately the nobility was generally composed of men who were poor in intellect (which we hope they may soon cease to be), it was the task of the priests, the teachers, and their descendants.
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We are of nobler minds.—Faithfulness, generosity, great care of one's fair fame—these three qualities, when combined in one mind, we call noble, distinguished, highminded, and in this we excel the Greeks. We do not want to create the semblance, as though the ancient objects of these virtues (and rightly so) were lowered in estimation, but cautiously to substitute new objects for this precious hereditary craving. In order to understand why the views of the most distinguished Grecks must necessarily he set down as low and hardly respectable in our age of ever chivalrous and feudal dignity, we must recall to mind the words of comfort wherewith Ulysses soothed his heart in all his ignominious positions: “Forbear, dear heart, forbear! thou hast forborne worse things than these." And let us all, as an application of this mythical example, the story of that Athenian officer who, being threatened with a stick by another officer, in presence of the whole staff, shook off this disgrace with the words: “Strike, but hear me." (This was Themistocles, that ingenious Ulysses of the classical age, who was the very man at that moment of disgrace to send down to his "dear heart" these words of comfort and extremity.) The Greeks were far from making as light of life and death on account of an insult as we, under the influence of inherited chivalrous adventurousness and self-devotion, are wont to do; or from seeking opportunities, as we do in our duels, for risking both in the cause of honour; or from valuing the preservation of a good name (honour) more highly than the acquisition of an evil one if the latter be compatible with fame and the sense of power; or from remaining faithful to the prejudices and the creed of rank, if they could prevent us from becoming tyrants. For this is the ignoble secret of the Greek aristocrat: from sheer jealousy, he considers each one of his peers to be on an equal footing with himself, but is ready, like a tiger, to pounce upon his prey of absolute rule. What are lies, murder, treason, the selling of his native city to him! To people of this turn of mind the meaning of justice was extremely difficult to understand, nay, it was looked upon as something incredible; "the just" tantamount among the Grecks to “the saint" among Christians. But when Socrates was so bold as to say, "The most virtuous man is the happiest," they did not trust their ears; they fancied that they heard a madman speak. For to complete the picture of the happiest, every nobleman had in his mind the consummate arbitrariness and mischievousness of the tyrant, who sacrifices everything and everybody to his own presumptuousness and lust. Among people who secretly and gently raved about such happiness, the veneration of the State could, indeed, not be rooted too deeply,—but I think that people whose passion for power does not rage as blindly as did that of the nobleborn Greeks, are no longer in need of that idolatry of “State," whereby, in times of yore, that passion was kept in check.
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Endurance of poverty.—There is one great advantage in noble extraction in that it makes poverty more endurable.
201
Future of the nobility.—The demeanour of high-born people indicates that in their bodies the consciousness of power is constantly playing its fascinating gue. Thus people of aristocratic habits, male as well as female, avoid sinking utterly exhausted into a chair; when everybody else makes himself comfortable, in the train, for instance, they avoid reclining; they do not seem to get tired after standing for hours at Court; they do not furnish their houses in a comfortable, but in a spacious and dignified style, as though they were the abodes of greater and taller beings; to a provoking speech they reply with deportment and intellectual clearness, not as if horrified, crushed, abashed, out of breath, after the manner of plebeians. In the same measure as the aristocrat knows how to preserve the appearance of an ever-present great physical strenghı, he, by keeping up an unchanging serenity and civility of mamers, even under trying circumstances, wishes to convey the impression that his soul and intellect are a match to all dangers and surprises. A distinguished nature may, as regards the objects of the passions, be either like a rider, who delights in making a fiery proud animal step the Spanish pace, we need only think of the age of Louis XIV.,—or like the one who feels his horse dart away under him like an elementary force, on the borders of where horse and rider lose their heads, but who, in the enjoyment of delight, at that very time, keeps a clear head: in both instances the aristocratic culture breathes power, and, though very frequently requiring in its customs only the semblance of a of power, the real sense of ascendancy, owing to the impression which this display makes on the plebeian, and owing to the very sight of this impression, is nevertheless constantly increasing. This indisputable advantage of aristocratic culture, which is based on the consciousness of ascendancy, is now beginning to rise to an ever higher level, it being permissible and no longer disgraceful for people of noble extraction and education to enter the order of knowledge and there to obtain intellectual ordinations, to learn chivalrous services higher than those of previous times and to look up to that ideal of victorious wisdom which never as yet any age has been able to set up with a safe conscience except that age which is just now dawning upon us. Last, not least, what shall henceforth be the occupation of nobility, if it daily grows more evident that it is becoming less and less respectable to dabble in politics?
202
Hygienics.—No sooner had we begun to give proper attention to the physiology of criminals than we already arrived at the unavoidable conclusion that there is no essential difference between criminals and lunatics, provided we believe the usual moral mode of thinking to be that of a healthy intellect. No belief is now so confidently entertained as this one; let us therefore not shrink from drawing our conclusions and treating the criminal like a lunatic: above all, not with arrogant mercy, but with medical skill and goodwill. He may be in need of a change of air, of new companionship, temporary disappearance, perhaps isolation and a new occupation very well! Perhaps he himself may find it to his advantage to live for a time in custody, in order thus to find protection against himself and a troublesome, tyrannical craving—very well! We ought quite explicitly to point out to him the possibility of his being cured and the remedies required (the extermination, transformation, sublimation of the aforesaid craving), and also, in the worst case, the improbability of the cure; we ought to offer an opportunity for suicide to the incurable criminal who has become an abomination to himself. While reserving this as an extreme means of relief, we ought not to leave anything unattempted which might restore to the criminal his good courage and equanimity; we ought to wipe remorse of his soul like something unclean, and to throw out suggestions to him as to how to redress and more than balance the harm, which he may have inflicted on one, by benefits bestowed on some one else, may, perhaps on the community. Do all this with the greatest forbearance! Let him alore all remain anonymous or assign an adopted name, and frequently change locality, so that his reputation and future may suffer as little as possible. At present, it is true, the one who has been injured, quite irrespective of any method of redress, wants to have his revenge as well and applies to the courts of justice—which still administer onr abominable penal laws—and cling to their commercial scales and their futile endeavours of counterpoising guilt by punishment: but might we not be able to get a step further? What a relief it would be to the general sensation of life, if, while freeing ourselves from the belief in guilt, we could also shake off the old craving for revenge, and even consider it a noble prudence of the happy ones in conformity with Christian teaching to bless our enemies and to do good to those who have offended us! Let us rid the world of the notion of sin-and banish with it the idea of punishment. May these banished monsters henceforth live far from the abodes of mankind, if, indeed, they want to live and do not perish from disgust with themselves and do not forget that the loss suffered by society and the individual through criminals is as severe as that which they suffer through the sick: for these spread grief, ill-humour, being productive and consuming the carnings of others, at the same time requiring attendants, physicians, amusements, and feeding on the time and strength of the healthy ones. Despite all this we should rightly describe him who, for this reason, would wreak vengeance on the sick, as inhuman. In olden times indeed people were less humane: in crude states of society, and even now among certain savage tribes, the sick are treated as criminals, as a danger to the community, and living abodles of demonic beings embodied in them through some offence committed by them. Here, truly, applies the saying, The sick are the guilty! And we—are we not ripe yet for an opposite view? Shall we not yet be allowed to say, The guilty are the sick? No, the hour has not yet come. As yet we lack first and foremost those physicians in whose opinion the morals, heretofore called practical, have become an integral portion of their medical art and science; as yot we lack that intense interest in these things which, some day, may perhaps come upon us like the storm and stress of those ancient religious ecstasies; as yet the churches are not in possession of the guardians of health: as yet the precepts, respecting our bodies and our diet, are not among the tenets of all higher and lower schools; as yet we have no private societies of people pledging each other to do without tribunals and the punishment and revenge now meted out to offenders: as yet no thinker has lead the courage to adjust the healthfulness of society an individuals to the number of parasites that could be maintained; and as yet there has been no founder of a State who would use the ploughshare in the spirit of that generous and charitable saying, “If thou wilt till the land, till it with the plough: so that the bird and the wolf, walking behind thy plough, may rejoice in thee— may every creature rejoice in thee."
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The people of Israel.—One of the spectacles which the coming century holds in store for us, is the decision regarding the fate of the European Jews. There is not the slightest doubt that they have cast their die and traversed their Rubicon: the only thing which remains for them is either to become the master's of Europe or to lose Europe, as they once, ages ago, lost Egypt, where they had to face a similar dilemma. But in Europe they have gone throngh a school of eighteen centuries, such as no other nation can boast of, and the experiences of this terrible time of probation have benefited the community much less than the individual. In conse- quence whereof the resourcefulness in soul and intellect of on modern Jews is extraordinary. In times of extremity they', least of all the inhabitants of Europe, try to escape any great dilemma by a recourse to drink or to suicide —which less gifted people are so apt to fly to. Each Jew finds in the history of his fathers and grandfathers a voluminous record of instances of the greatest coolness and perseverance in terrible positions, of most art cunning and clever fencing with misfortune and chance; their bravery under the cloak of wretched submissiveness, their heroism in the spernere se sperni surpass the virtues of all the saint. People willed to make them contemptible by treating them scornfully for twenty centuries, by refusing to them the approach to all dignities and honourable positions, and by pushing them all the deeper down into the mean trades—and, indeed, they have not become cleaner under this process. But contemptible? They have never ceased believing themselves qualified for the highest functions; neither have the virtues of all suffering people ever failed to adorn them. Their manner of honouring parents and children, the reasonableness of their marriages and marriage customs make them conspicuous among Europeans. Besides, they know how to derive a sense of power and lasting revenge from the very trades which were left to them (or to which they were abandoned); we cannot help saying, in palliation even of their usury, that, without this occasional pleasant and useful torture inflicted on their scorners, they would hardly have persevered so long in their selfrespect. For our self-respect depends on our being able to make reprisals in good and evil things. Moreover, their vengeance never carries them too far, for they all have that liberality even of the soul in which the frequent change of place, climate, customs, neighbours, and oppressors schools man; they live by far the greatest experience in any human intercourse, and even in their passions they still exercise the caution of this experience. They are so sure of their intellectual suppleness and shrewdness, that they never, not even in the bitterest straits, have to earn their bread by manual labour, as common workinen, porters, rural serfs. Their manners teach us that their souls have never been inspired with chivalrous, noble feelings, nor their bodies girt with beautiful arms: a certain obtrusiveness alternates in them with a frequently tender, nearly always painful submissiveness. But now that their intermarriage withi the gentlest blood of Europe inevitably grows more common from year to year, they will soon have a goodly heritage of manners both intellectual and physical: and, in another hundred years, they will look genteel enough, so as not to make themselves as masters ridiculous before those they have subdued. And this is a matter of some importance. Therefore a settlement of their affairs is as yet premature. They themselves know best that a conquest of Enrope or any act of violence are quite out of the question: but they know that, some time or other, Europe may fall as a ripe fruit into their hands if they would only just extend then. Meanwhile it is necessary that they should distinguish themselves in all departments of European distinction and stand among the foremost: till they shall have advanced so far as to determine that which shall give distinction. Then they will be called the inventors and guides of the people of Europe, and cease to offend their sense of proportion. Where shall this accumulated wealth of great impressions, which forms the Jewish history in every Jewish family, this wealth of passions, virtues, resolutions, resignations, struggles, victories of all sorts—where shall it find an outlet, if not in great intellectual people and work? On that day when the Jews will be able to show as their handiwork such jewels and golden vessels as the European nations of shorter and less thorough experience either can nor could produce, when Israel will have turned its eternal vengeance into an eternal blessing of Europe: then once more that seventh day will appear, when the old God of the Jews may rejoice in Himself, His creation, and His chosen people and all, all of us will rejoice with Him !
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The impossible state.—Poverty, cheerfulness and independence—these are a possible combination; poverty, cheerfulness and slavery are likewise possible,—and I have nothing better to say to the men who serve as factory-slaves; provided that, in the way in which it is done, they do not altogether feel it as a disgrace that they are used up as screws of a machine and makeshifts, so to speak, of human art of invention. Fic on the thought that, by means of higher wages, the essential part of their misery, that is to say, their impersonal enslavement, might be removed! Fie, that we should suffer ourselves to be persuaded that, through an increase of this impersonality within the mechanical working of a new society, the disgrace of slavery could be made a virtue! Fie, that there should be a standard of wages at which we may be turned from individuals into screws! Are you the accomplices in the present folly of nations, who, above all, want to produce as much as possible, and be as rich as possible? It would be your duty to present to them your counter-chains: what large sums of intrinsic value have been thrown away for such an external aim. But where is your intrinsic value, if yon no longer know what it is to breathe freely: if you have not even the slightest command over your own selves; if but too often you get tired of yourselves as of a stale beverage; if you watch the newspapers and look askance at your rich neighbour, being male covetous by the quick rise and fall of power, money and opinions; if you no longer believe in a philosophy clad in rags, or the genuineness of one who has few wants; if a voluntary, idyllic poverty, without profession or matrimony, such a state as should suit the more intellectual ones amongst you, has become a subject of derision to you? Whilst your car's are ringing with the flute-sounds of the socialistic rat-charmers who wish to fill you with wild hopes; who bid you be ready and nothing else, ready from this day to the morrow, so that you may be waiting and waiting for something from outside, living in all other respects as you lived before—until this waiting shall be turned into hunger and thirst, fever and madness, and the day of the triumphant beast at last will dawn in all its glory? Yet every one should say to himself: I will rather denigrate and try to subdue fresh countries and “pastures New” and, above all, myself: changing my abode, as often as any danger of slavery may be threatening me; slumming neither adventure nor war, and in the worst case, preparing for death: anything rather than this unbecoming slavery, this sourness, malice and rebelliousThis would be the right spirit: the workmen in Europe ought henceforth to declare theirs an impossible class among mankind, and not merely, as is the present view, some harsh and injudicious arrangement of society: they ought to bring about in the European bee-hive an age of the rent swarming out, such as has never yet been seen, protesting by suchi voluntary and wholesale emigration against machines, capital and the threatening alternative of becoming either slaves of the State or slaves of the revolutionists. May Europe disburden herself of one-fourth of her inhabitants. Both she and they will feel relieved! Only in the far distance, in the swarming emigrations of colonists, we shall find out the true amount of reasonableness, fairness and wholesome distrust wherewith mother Europe has imbued her sons, — these sons who could no longer endure a life with the dull old woman, running the risk of growing its sullen, irritable and eager for pleasure as she herself has been. Far away from Europe, the virtues of Europe will be travelling along with these workmen; and those same qualities which in their native homes began to degenerate into dangerous ill-humour and criminal tendencies, will, when abroad, assume a will, beautiful naturalness and be called heroism. Thus, at last, a purer air would waft upon old Europe, in its present over-populated and brooding state. What matter if there should be want of “hands"? Perhaps we may their recall to mind that we have accustomed ourselves to many wants because they were so easily gratified only,—we may unlearn some of these wants. Perlaps the Chinaman will be called in, and he would bring along with him the mode of thinking and living suitable for the bees of industry. Indeed, they might altogether help in giving to restless, fretful Europe a little of his Asiatic calmness and contemplativeness, and,— what is perhaps most needful,— of his Asiatic Perseverance.
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Attitude of the Germans towards morality.—A German is capable of great things, but it is improbable that he will ever accomplish them, for he obeys wherever he can, as befits a torpid intellect. When reduced to the necessity of standing alone and slinking off his torpor, when it is no longer possible for him to vanish as a cipher in a number {in this respect he is greatly inferior to a Frenchman or Englisimman),—he discovers his true abilities: then he grows dangerous, evil, deep, bold and discloses the hidden store of dormant energy, in which previously no one(not even he) placed any trust. When in such a case a German obeys himself,—this is the great exception, —he does so with the same clusiness, inexorableness and constancy with which, in other cases, he obeys his prince—his official duties. Thus, as previously mentioned, he is able to do great things, which are in no wise consistent with the “weak character" which he attributes to himself. But usually he is afraid of depending solely on himself, of taking the initiative: this is why Germany wastes the energies of so many of her officials and spills so much ink. The German is a stranger to light-heartedness, he is too timid for it; but in entirely new positions, which rouse him from his drowsiness, he is almost frivolous; he then enjoys the novelty and rarity of the position like some intoxicating liquor, and he thoroughly understands this kind of thing, Hence the German of our days is almost frivolous in politics: though even in this department, he has the advantage of the prejudice of thoroughness and earnestness, and though he may fully avail himself thereof in the intercourse with other political powers, yet he secretly rejoices in being able for once to be enthusiastic and capricious and fond of innovations, and to change persons, parties, hopes, as if they were masks. The German men of letters who up to lately were considered the most German of Germans, have been and are perhaps still as good as the German soldiers, owing to their profound and almost chilllike tendency towards obedience in all external things and their being compelled frequently to hold their own in science and to answer for many things; should they know how to preserve their proud, simile and patient nature and their freedom from political folly at times when the wind shifts its quarters, we may yet expect great things from them: such as they are (or have been), they are the embryo state of something higher. The advantage and disadvantage of the Germans and even of their men of letters, have been thus far their being more prone to superstition and more eager to believe than other nations ; their vices are, as they have been and always will be, their drunkenness and suicidal tendency (which are a proof for the clumsiness of their intellect, which is easily tempted to throw down the reins): their danger lies in everything which ties down the reasoning faculties and unfetters the passions (as, for instance, the excessive use of music and of spirits), for the German passion is opposed to its own advantage, and is as self-destructive is that of the drunkard. Enthusiasm itself is valued in Germany less highly than anywhere else, for it is barren. Whenever a German accomplished anything great, he did so in times of extremity, in a state of valour, of dogged ness, of most exalted prudence and often of generosity. The intercourse with them would indeed be advisable,— for almost every German has something to give, if one only understands how to make him find, or rather recover this something (for he is personally untidy). Well, if a people so constituted be bent on morals, of what kind will be the morals that may satisfy them? They certainly will first of all wish to see their genuine craving for obedience idealised in them. “Man must have something which he may implicitly obey,"—this is a German sentiment, German consistency: it is the basis of all German moral precepts. How different is the impression when we survey the whole field of morality! All those Greek thinkers, however varied their images may appear to us, seem as moralists to resemble the teacher in gymnastics, who persuades a youth by the following words: “Come, follow me! Submit to my discipline ! Then you may perhaps succeed in carrying off the prize as the foremost of the Greeks." Personal distinction is ancient virtue. Submission, conformity, whether public or private, are German virtues. Long before Kant and his categorical imperative, Luther, obeying the same impulse, had said that there must be a being whom man may implicitly trust,—it was his proof for God's existence; he wished, in a coarser and more popular way than Kant, to make us implicitly obey not an idea, but a person; am in the end, even Kant took a round-about way through morals for the sole purpose of arriving at the obedience to the person. This, indeed, is the worship of the German; the more so, the less he has left of religious worship. The Greeks and Romans looked differently at these things and would have laughed at such a "there must be a beng, "—it is part and parcel of their Southern boldness of feeling to resist "implicit faith” and to reserve, in the inmost processes of their hearts, a slightly sceptical view on all and everything, be it God, man, or idea. Then take the ancient philosopher: Nil admirari are the words in which he sums up his philosophy. A German, Schopenhauer, goes so far in the contrary direction as to assert: Admirari id est philosophari. But how, if the German, as occasion-ally happens, should be thrown into a state which would fit him for the performance of great things? When the hour of exception, the hour of disobedience, comes? I do not believe that Schopenhauer is right in asserting that the only preference of the Germans above other nations consists in having a greater number of atheists than are met anywhere else :—but this I know: whenever the German is in a proper condition for the performance of great actions, he always raises himself above morals! And why not? He has now something new to do, namely, to command, either himself or others ! But his German morality has not taught him how to command! The word command is not to be found in its code.