. . . . . . .
XIII
Sternly and ruthlessly does Fate lead each one of us—and only in the early days do we, occupied with all sorts of accidents, nonsense, ourselves, fail to feel her harsh hand.—So long as we are able to deceive ourselves and are not ashamed to lie, it is possible to live and to hope without shame. The truth—not the full truth (there can be no question of that), but even that tiny fraction which is accessible to us—immediately closes our mouths, binds our hands, and reduces “to negation.”—The only thing that is then left for a man, in order to keep erect on his feet and not crumble to dust, not to become bemired in the ooze of self-forgetfulness, is self-scorn; is to turn calmly away from everything and say: “It is enough!”—and folding his useless arms on his empty breast to preserve the last, the sole merit which is accessible to him, the merit of recognising his own insignificance; the merit to which Pascal alludes, when, calling man a thinking reed, he says that if the entire universe were to crush him, he, that reed, would still be higher than the universe because he would know that it is crushing him—while it would not know that. A feeble merit! Sad consolation! Try as thou mayest to permeate thyself with it, to believe in it,—oh, thou my poor brother, whosoever thou mayest be!—thou canst not refute those ominous words of the poet:
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing....[32]
I have cited the verses from “Macbeth,” and those witches, phantoms, visions have recurred to my mind.... Alas! it is not visions, not fantastic, subterranean powers that are terrible; the creations of Hoffmann are not dreadful, under whatsoever form they may present themselves.... The terrible thing is that there is nothing terrible, that the very substance of life itself is petty, uninteresting—and insipid to beggary. Having once become permeated with this consciousness, having once tasted of this wormwood, no honey will ever seem sweet—and even that loftiest, sweetest happiness, the happiness of love, of complete friendship, of irrevocable devotion—even it loses all its charm; all its worth is annihilated by its own pettiness, its brevity. Well, yes: a man has loved, he has burned, he has faltered words about eternal bliss, about immortal enjoyments—and behold: it is long, long since the last trace vanished of that worm which has eaten out the last remnants of his withered tongue. Thus late in autumn, on a frosty day, when everything is lifeless and dumb in the last blades of grass, on the verge of the denuded forest, the sun has but to emerge for an instant from the fog, to gaze intently at the chilled earth, and immediately, from all sides, gnats rise up; they frolic in the warmth of his rays, they bustle and jostle upward, downward, they circle round one another.... The sun hides himself, and the gnats fall to the earth in a soft rain—and there is an end to their momentary life.
XIV
“But are there no great conceptions, no great words of consolation? Nationality, right, liberty, humanity, art?” Yes; those words do exist, and many people live by them and for them. But nevertheless, I have an idea that if Shakspeare were to be born again he would find no occasion to disclaim his “Hamlet,” his “Lear.” His penetrating glance would not descry anything new in human existence: the same motley and, in reality, incoherent picture would still unfold itself before him in its disquieting monotony. The same frivolity, the same cruelty, the same pressing demand for blood, gold, filth, the same stale pleasures, the same senseless sufferings in the name of ... well, in the name of the same nonsense which was ridiculed by Aristophanes three thousand years ago, the same coarse lures to which the many-headed beast still yields as readily as ever—in a word, the same anxious skipping of the squirrel in the same old wheel, which has not even been renewed.... Shakspeare would again make Lear repeat his harsh: “There are no guilty ones”—which, in other words, signifies: “There are no just”—and he also would say: “It is enough!” and he also would turn away.—One thing only: perhaps, in contrast to the gloomy, tragic tyrant Richard, the ironical genius of the great poet would like to draw another, more up-to-date tyrant, who is almost ready to believe in his own virtue and rests calmly at night or complains of the over-dainty dinner at the same time that his half-stifled victims are endeavouring to comfort themselves by at least imagining him as Richard III. surrounded by the ghosts of the people he has murdered....
But to what purpose?
Why demonstrate—and that by picking and weighing one’s words, by rounding and polishing one’s speech—why demonstrate to gnats that they really are gnats?