LANDSCAPE AND PORTRAIT PAINTING
"He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the service of man: that he may bring forth fruit out of the earth."—Psalms civ. 14.
[1. The Value "Ugly" in the Mouth of the Creator.]
In the last section of this lecture, I told you of three kinds of ugliness. I said there was the ugliness of chaos and disorder, which provokes the hate of the layman, and which the artist overcomes. I spoke of the ugliness of form in Art, which appeared when the artist had failed in his endeavour to master disorder, or when he had selected a subject already ordered, in which he has left himself no scope for manifesting his power; and I also pointed to that ugliness of subject in Art, in which the ordinary beholder, as well as the artist, recognizes the degeneration of his type or a low example of it.
There is, however, a fourth aspect of ugliness, and that is the esoteric postulation of the value "ugly" by the creator. I have shown how creating also involves giving, and therefore loss—just as procreation does; but what is the precise meaning of the word "ugly" in the mouth of the Dionysian artist?
We must remember that his eyes are not our eyes, and that his mind is not our mind. He cannot look at Life without enriching her. But what is his attitude to the transfigurations of former artists?
Before these the Dionysian artist can feel only loathing, and, in a paroxysm of hatred, he raises his axe and shatters the past into fragments. All around him, a moment before, people said: "The world is beautiful!" But he, thoroughly alone, groans at its unspeakable ugliness.
He rejoices as he sees the fragments fly beneath his mighty weapon, and the greater the beauty of the thing he destroys, the higher is his exultation. For, to him, "the joy in the destruction of the most noble thing and at the sight of its gradual undoing," is "the joy over what is coming and what lies in the future," and this "triumphs over actual things, however good they may be."[1]
What he calls "ugly," then, has nothing whatsoever in common with any other concept of ugliness; it is simply the outcome of his creative spirit "which compels him to regard what has existed hitherto as no longer acceptable, but as botched, worthy of being suppressed—ugly!"[2] And thus it is peculiar to him alone.
I have shown you that Nietzsche explains pleasure, æsthetically, as the appropriation of the world by man's Will to Power. Pain, or evil, now obtains its æsthetic justification. It is the outcome of the destruction that the creator spreads in a world of Becoming; it is the periodical smashing of Being by the Dionysian creator who can endure Becoming. No creator can tolerate the past save as a thing which once served as his schooling. But a people are usually one with their past. To them it is at once a grandfather, a father, and an elder brother. In a trice the creator deprives them of these relatives. Through him they are made orphans, brotherless and alone. Hence the pain that is inevitably associated with the joy of destruction and of creation.