Artists when they are worth anything at all are men of strong propensities (even physically), with surplus energy, powerful animals, sensual; without a certain overheating of the sexual system a man like Raphael is unthinkable.... To produce music is also in a sense to produce children; chastity is merely the economy of the artist, and in all creative artists productiveness certainly ceases with sexual potency.... Artists should not see things as they are; they should see them fuller, simpler, stronger: to this end, however, a kind of youthfulness, of vernality, a sort of perpetual elation, must be peculiar to their lives.
801.
The states in which we transfigure things and make them fuller, and rhapsodise about them, until they reflect our own fulness and love of life back upon us: sexuality, intoxication, post-prandial states, spring, triumph over our enemies, scorn, bravado, cruelty, the ecstasy of religious feeling. But three elements above all are active: sexuality, intoxication, cruelty; all these belong to the oldest festal joys of mankind, they also preponderate in budding artists.
Conversely: there are things with which we meet which already show us this transfiguration and fulness, and the animal world's response thereto is a state of excitement in the spheres where these states of happiness originate. A blending of these very delicate shades of animal well-being and desires is the æsthetic state. The latter only manifests itself in those natures which are capable of that spendthrift and overflowing fulness of bodily vigour; the latter is always the primum mobile. The sober-minded man, the tired man, the exhausted and dried-up man (e.g. the scholar), can have no feeling for art, because he does not possess the primitive force of art, which is the tyranny of inner riches: he who cannot give anything away cannot feel anything either.
"Perfection"—In these states (more particularly in the case of sexual love) there is an ingenuous betrayal of what the profoundest instinct regards as the highest, the most desirable, the most valuable, the ascending movement of its type; also of the condition towards which it is actually striving. Perfection: the extraordinary expansion of this instinct's feeling of power, its riches, its necessary overflowing of all banks.
802.
Art reminds us of states of physical vigour: it may be the overflow and bursting forth of blooming life in the world of pictures and desires; on the other hand, it may be an excitation of the physical functions by means of pictures and desires of exalted life—an enhancement of the feeling of life, the latter's stimulant.
To what extent can ugliness exercise this power? In so far as it may communicate something of the triumphant energy of the artist who has become master of the ugly and the repulsive; or in so far as it gently excites our lust of cruelty (in some circumstances even the lust of doing harm to ourselves, self-violence, and therewith the feeling of power over ourselves).
803.
"Beauty" therefore is, to the artist, something which is above all order of rank, because in beauty contrasts are overcome, the highest sign of power thus manifesting itself in the conquest of opposites; and achieved without a feeling of tension: violence being no longer necessary, everything submitting and obeying so easily, and doing so with good grace; this is what delights the powerful will of the artist.