Art no longer gives: it takes. It no longer reflects beauty on reality: it seeks its beauty in reality. And that is why it falls to pieces judged by the standard of Ruler-Art. It cannot bear the fierce light of an art that is intimate with Life and inseparable from Life. In its death-throes it has decked itself with all kinds of metaphysical plumes, in order that it may thus, perhaps, live after death. But these plumes have been used before by dying gods and have proved of no avail. "Virtue for virtue's sake," was the cry of a dying religion. "Art for art's sake," is now the cry of an expiring godlike human function.
But unless this cry be altered very quickly into a cry of art for the sake of Life, there will be no chance of saving it. Before this art for Life's sake can be discovered, however; before the purpose after which it will strive can be determined and established, the first thing to which we shall have to lend our attention is not art, but mankind.
The purpose of man is a thousand times more important than the purpose of art. The one determines the other. And as a proof of how intimately the two are connected, see how much doubt there is as to the purpose of art, precisely at a moment when men also, owing to the terrible civil war which is raging among their values, are beginning to doubt the real purpose of human existence.
It would be useless to indulge in a detailed criticism of individual artists. To all those who have followed my arguments closely, no such clumsy holding up of particular modern artists to ridicule will seem necessary. In some of your minds these men are idols still, and it pleases only the envious and the unsuccessful to see niche-statues stoned.
The great artist, as I have shown you, is the synthetic and superhuman spirit that apotheosizes the type of a people and thereby stimulates them to a higher mode of life. But where should we go to-day, if we wished to look for a type or for a desirable code of values which that type would exemplify?
We know that we can go nowhere; for such things do not exist. They are utterly and hopelessly extinct.
Our first duty, then, is not to mend the arts—you cannot mend a cripple. But it is rather to mend the parents who bring forth this cripple—to mend Life itself, and above all Man.
"Away from God and Gods did my will allure me," says Zarathustra; "what would there be to create if there were Gods!
"But to man doth it ever drive me anew, my burning will; thus doth it drive the hammer unto the stone.
"Alas, ye fellow-men, within the stone slumbereth an image for me, the image of all my visions! Alas that it should perforce slumber in ugliest stone!