89.
Now and Formerly.—Of what consequence is all our art in artistic products, if that higher art, the art of the festival, be lost by us? Formerly all artistic products were exhibited on the great festive-path of humanity, as tokens of remembrance, and monuments of high and happy moments. One now seeks to allure the exhausted and sickly from the great suffering-path of humanity for a wanton moment by means of works of art; one furnishes them with a little ecstasy and insanity.
90.
Lights and Shades.—Books and writings are different with different thinkers. One writer has collected together in his book all the rays of light which he could quickly plunder and carry home from an illuminating experience; while another gives only the shadows, and the grey and black replicas of that which on the previous day had towered up in his soul.
91.
Precaution.—Alfieri, as is well known, told a great many falsehoods when he narrated the history of his life to his astonished contemporaries. He told falsehoods owing to the despotism toward himself which he exhibited, for example, in the way in which he created his own language, and tyrannised himself into a poet:—he finally found a rigid form of sublimity into which he forced his life and his memory; he must have suffered much in the process.—I would also give no credit to a history of Plato's life written by himself, as little as to Rousseau's, or to the Vita nuova of Dante.
92.
Prose and Poetry.—Let it be observed that the great masters of prose have almost always been poets as well, whether openly, or only in secret and for the "closet"; and in truth one only writes good prose in view of poetry! For prose is an uninterrupted, polite warfare with poetry; all its charm consists in the fact that poetry is constantly avoided and contradicted; every abstraction wants to have a gibe at poetry, and wishes to be uttered with a mocking voice; all dryness and coolness is meant to bring the amiable goddess into an amiable despair; there are often approximations and reconciliations for the moment, and then a sudden recoil and a burst of laughter; the curtain is often drawn up and dazzling light let in just while the goddess is enjoying her twilights and dull colours; the word is often taken out of her mouth and chanted to a melody while she holds her fine hands before her delicate little ears:—and so there are a thousand enjoyments of the warfare, the defeats included, of which the unpoetic, the so-called prose—men know nothing at all:—they consequently write and speak only bad prose! Warfare is the father of all good things, it is also the father of good prose!—There have been four very singular and truly poetical men in this century who have arrived at mastership in prose, for which otherwise this century is not suited, owing to lack of poetry, as we have indicated. Not to take Goethe into account, for he is reasonably claimed by the century that produced him, I look only on Giacomo Leopardi, Prosper Mérimée, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walter Savage Landor the author of Imaginary Conversations, as worthy to be called masters of prose.
93.