For the mediocre, simply because they cannot transfigure Life in that way, benefit extremely from looking on the world through the Dionysian artist's personality. It is his genius which, by putting ugly reality into an art-form, makes life desirable. Beneath all his dithyrambs, however, there is still the will to power and the will to prevail—just as these instincts are to be found behind the magnificats of the everyday lover; but, in the case of the former, it is the power in the spirit.
There is, however, another kind of man who walks towards Life to value and to order her. The kind of man who, as we saw in my last lecture, declares that "man is born in sin,"—"that depravity is universal," —"that nothing exists in the intellect but what has before existed in the senses; "and that "every man is his own priest"; the man who defines Life as "the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations"; and who says: "it is only the cultivation of individuality which produces, or can produce, well-developed human beings"; the man who declares that we are all equal, that there is one truth for all, if only it can be found; and who thus not only kills all higher men, but also deprives his fellow creatures of all the beauty that these higher men have brought, and might still bring, into the world; finally, the man who values humanity with figures and in the terms of matter, who values progress in the terms of the engineer's workshop, and who denies that Art can have any relation to Life.
This man is a sort of inverted Midas at whose touch all gold turns to tinsel, all pearls turn to beads, and all beauty withers and fades, His breath is that of the late autumn, and his words are hoarfrost. Having nothing to give,[66] he merely robs things of the beauty that was once laid in them, by insisting upon the truth of their reality; and he sees Life smaller, thinner, weaker, and greyer than it is even to the people themselves. He is the antithesis of the Dionysian artist. He comes from the people, and very often from a substratum lower than they. How, therefore, can he give the people anything they do not already possess? He is a housewives have not already seen or felt? People have no use for him, therefore, and whenever they are drawn to his side by his seditious songs about equality, they find, when it is too late, that he has made the world drabbier, uglier, colder, and stranger for them than it was before.
This is the man who insists upon truth. Forgetting that truth is ugly[67] and that humanity has done little else, since it first became conscious, than to master and overcome truth, he wishes to make this world what it was in the beginning, "without form" and "void," and to empty things of the meaning that has been put into them, simply because he is unable to create a world for himself.[68]
Aiming at a general truth for all, he is reduced to naked reality, to Nature as it was before God's Spirit moved upon the face of the waters, and this is his world of facts, stripped of all that higher men have put into them. This man of science without Art, is gradually reducing us to a state of absolute ignorance; for while he takes from us what we know about things, he gives us nothing in return. How often do we not hear people who are influenced by his science, exclaim that the more they learn the less they feel they know. This exclamation contains a very profound truth; for science is robbing us inch by inch of all the groundfield-labourer among field-labourers, a housewife among housewives—how could he point to any beauty or desire which field-labourers and that was once conquered for us by bygone artists.[69]
Such a man, if he can be really useful in garnering and accumulating facts, and in devising and developing novel mechanical contrivances, ought in any case to be closeted apart, so that none of his breath can reach the Art-made world. And when he begins valuing, all windows and doors ought speedily to be barred and bolted against him. He is the realist. It is he who sees spots on the sun's face; it is he who denies that mist is the passionate sigh of mother Earth, yearning for her spouse the sky; it is he who will not believe that the god of the forest with his tallest trees separated the earth and the heavens by force, and the explanations he gives of things, though they are doubtless useful to him in his laboratory, are empty and colourless. Granting, as I say, that he does anything useful in the department of facts, let his profession at least be a strictly esoteric one. For his interpretations are so often ignoble, in addition to being colourless, that his business, like that of a certain Paris functionary, ought to be pursued in the most severe and most zealous secrecy.
If the world grows ugly, and Life loses her bloom; if all winds are ill winds, and the sunshine seems sickly and pale; if we turn our eyes dubiously about us, and begin to question the justification of our existence, we may be quite certain that this man, this realist, and his type, are in the ascendancy, and that he it is who is stamping his ugly fist upon our millennium.
For the function of Art is the function of the ruler. It relieves the highest of their burden, so that mediocrity may be twice blessed, and it makes us a people by luring us to a certain kind of Life. Its essence is riches, its activity is giving and perfecting, and while it is a delight to the highest, it is also a boon to those beneath them.
The attempt of the Dionysian artist to prevail, therefore, is sacred and holy. In his efforts to make his eyes our eyes, his ears our ears, and his touch our touch, though he does not pursue any altruistic purpose, he confers considerable benefits upon mankind. Whereas the attempt of that other man to prevail—the realist and devotee of so-called truth—is barbarous and depraved. By his egoism he depresses, depreciates and dismantles Life in great things as in small. Woe to the age whose values allow his voice to be heard with respect! There are necessary grey studies to be made, necessary uglinesses to be described, perhaps. But let these studies and descriptions be kept within the four walls of a laboratory until the time comes when, by their collective means, man can be raised and not depressed by them. Science is not with us to promulgate values. It is with us to be the modest handmaiden of Art, working in secrecy until all its ugliness can be collected, transfigured, and used for the purpose of man's exaltation by the artist. It may be useful for our science-slaves, working behind the scenes of Life, to know that the sky is merely our limited peep into an infinite expanse of ether—whatever that is. But when we ask to hear about it, let us be told as follows—
"O heaven above me! Thou pure! Thou deep! Thou abyss of light! Gazing on Thee, I quiver with godlike desires.