"Unto many life is a failure," says Zarathustra, "a poisonous worm eating through into their heart. These ought to see to it that they succeed better in dying.
"Many-too-many live.... Would that preachers of swift death might arise! They would be the proper storms to shake the trees of life."[71]
In the presence of beauty, alone, can one know one's true rank, and this explains why the Japanese declare that "until a man has made himself beautiful he has no right to approach beauty,"[72] for "great art is that before which we long to die."[73]
But, to those who see but the smallest chance of approaching it, beauty is an exhortation, a stimulus, a bugle-call. It may drive them to means for pruning themselves of ugliness; it may urge them to inner harmony, to a suppression of intestinal discord.
"Beauty alone should preach penitence,"[74] says Zarathustra. And in this sentence you have the only utilitarian view of beauty that has any aristocratic value, besides that which maintains that beauty lures to Life, and to the body.
Hence, beauty need not impel all men to the river. There are some who, after contemplating it, will feel just near enough to it not to despair altogether of attaining to its level, and this thought will lend them both hope and courage.
The ruler-artist, therefore, in order that his subject-beauty may have some meaning, must be the synthesis of the past and the future of a people. Up to his waist in their spirit, he must mould or paint them the apotheosis of their type. Only thus can he hope to prevail with his subject—Man.
The German philosopher, Karl Heinrich Heydenreich, was one of the first to recognize this power of the ruler-artist, and the necessity of his being intimately associated with a particular people, although above them; and in his little book, System der Æsthetik, he makes some very illuminating remarks on this matter.[75]
Thus Benedetto Croce rightly argues that in order to appreciate the artistic works of bygone and extinct nations, it is necessary to have a knowledge and understanding of their life and history—in other words, of their values.[76] What he does not point out, however, and what seems very important, is, that such historical research would be quite unnecessary to one who by nature was a priori in sympathy with the values of an extinct nation; and also, that all the historical knowledge available could not make any one whose character was not a little Periclean or Egyptian from the start, admire, or even appreciate, either the Parthenon, or the brilliant diorite statue of King Khephrën in the Cairo Museum.
All great ruler-art, then, is, as it were, a song of praise, a magnificat, appealing only to those, and pleasing only those, who feel in sympathy with the values which it advocates. And that is why all art of any importance, and of any worth, must be based upon a certain group of values—in other words, must have a philosophy or a particular view of the world as its foundation. Otherwise it is pointless, meaningless, and divorced from life. Otherwise it is acting, sentimental nonsense, or l'art pour l'art.