Mummery in the arts:—
The lack of honesty in preparing and schooling oneself for them (Fromentin);
The Romanticists (their lack of philosophy and science and their excess in literature);
The novelists (Walter Scott, but also the monsters of the Nibelung, with their inordinately nervous music);
The lyricists.
"Scientifically."
Virtuosos (Jews).
The popular ideals are overcome, but not yet in the presence of the people:
The saint, the sage, the prophet.
79.
The want of discipline in the modern spirit concealed beneath all kinds of moral finery.—The show-words are: Toleration (for the "incapacity of saying yes or no"); la largeur de sympathie (= a third of indifference, a third of curiosity, and a third of morbid susceptibility); "objectivity" (the lack of personality and of will, and the inability to "love"); "freedom" in regard to the rule (Romanticism); "truth" as opposed to falsehood and lying (Naturalism); the "scientific spirit" (the "human document": or, in plain English, the serial story which means "addition"—instead of "composition"); "passion" in the place of disorder and intemperance; "depth" in the place of confusion and the pell-mell of symbols.
80.
Concerning the criticism of big words.—I am full of mistrust and malice towards what is called "ideal": this is my Pessimism, that I have recognised to what extent "sublime sentiments" are a source of evil—that is to say, a belittling and depreciating of man.