2.
The rarest of all things is this: to have after all another taste—a second taste. Out of such abysses, out of the abyss of great suspicion as well, a man returns as though born again, he has a new skin, he is more susceptible, more full of wickedness; he has a finer taste for joyfulness; he has a more sensitive tongue for all good things; his senses are more cheerful; he has acquired a second, more dangerous, innocence in gladness; he is more childish too, and a hundred times more cunning than ever he had been before.
Oh, how much more repulsive pleasure now is to him, that coarse, heavy, buff-coloured pleasure, [pg 081] which is understood by our pleasure-seekers, our “cultured people,” our wealthy folk and our rulers! With how much more irony we now listen to the hubbub as of a country fair, with which the “cultured” man and the man about town allow themselves to be forced through art, literature, music, and with the help of intoxicating liquor, to “intellectual enjoyments.” How the stage-cry of passion now stings our ears; how strange to our taste the whole romantic riot and sensuous bustle, which the cultured mob are so fond of, together with its aspirations to the sublime, to the exalted and the distorted, have become. No: if we convalescents require an art at all, it is another art—-a mocking, nimble, volatile, divinely undisturbed, divinely artificial art, which blazes up like pure flame into a cloudless sky! But above all, an art for artists, only for artists! We are, after all, more conversant with that which is in the highest degree necessary—cheerfulness, every kind of cheerfulness, my friends!… We men of knowledge, now know something only too well: oh how well we have learnt by this time, to forget, not to know, as artists!… As to our future: we shall scarcely be found on the track of those Egyptian youths who break into temples at night, who embrace statues, and would fain unveil, strip, and set in broad daylight, everything which there are excellent reasons to keep concealed.[15] No, we are disgusted with this bad taste, this will to truth, this search [pg 082] after truth “at all costs;” this madness of adolescence, “the love of truth;” we are now too experienced, too serious, too joyful, too scorched, too profound for that.… We no longer believe that truth remains truth when it is unveiled,—we have lived enough to understand this.… To-day it seems to us good form not to strip everything naked, not to be present at all things, not to desire to “know” all. “Tout comprendre c'est tout mépriser.”… “Is it true,” a little girl once asked her mother, “that the beloved Father is everywhere?—I think it quite improper,”—a hint to philosophers.… The shame with which Nature has concealed herself behind riddles and enigmas should be held in higher esteem. Perhaps truth is a woman who has reasons for not revealing her reasons?… Perhaps her name, to use a Greek word is Baubo?—Oh these Greeks, they understood the art of living! For this it is needful to halt bravely at the surface, at the fold, at the skin, to worship appearance, and to believe in forms, tones, words, and the whole Olympus of appearance! These Greeks were superficial—from profundity.… And are we not returning to precisely the same thing, we dare-devils of intellect who have scaled the highest and most dangerous pinnacles of present thought, in order to look around us from that height, in order to look down from that height? Are we not precisely in this respect—Greeks? Worshippers of form, of tones, of words? Precisely on that account—artists?