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Part II
Deductions from Part I.
Nietzsche's Art Principles

"For he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes." — Matthew vii. 29.

1. The Spirit of the Age Incompatible with Ruler-Art.

        With Nietzsche's concept of Art before me I feel as if I had left the arts of the present day many thousand leagues behind, and it is almost a hardship to be obliged to return to them. For unless most of that which is peculiar to this age be left many thousand leagues to the rear, all hope of making any headway must be abandoned.
        We live in a democratic age. It is only natural, therefore, that all that belongs to the ruler should have been whittled down, diluted, and despoiled of its dignity; and we must feel no surprise at finding that no pains have been spared which might reduce Art also to a function that would be compatible with the spirit of the times. All that savours of authority has become the work of committees, assemblies, herds, crowds, and mobs. How could the word of one man be considered authoritative, now that the ruling principle, to use

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a phrase of Mr. Chesterton's, is that "twelve men are better than one"? 1
        The conception of Art as a manifestation of the artist's will to power and his determination to prevail, is a much too dangerous one for the present day. It involves all kinds of things which are antagonistic to democratic theory, such as: Command, Reverence, Despotism, Obedience, Greatness and Inequality. Therefore, if artists are to be tolerated at all, they must have a much more modest, humble, and pusillanimous comprehension of what their existence means, and of the purpose and aim of their work; and their claims, if they make any, must be meek, unprivileged, harmless and unassuming.
        While, therefore, the artist, as Nietzsche understood him, scarcely exists at all to-day, another breed of man has come to the fore in the graphic arts, whose very weakness is his passport, who makes no claims at establishing new values of beauty, and who contents himself modestly with exhibiting certain baffling dexterities, virtuosities and tricks, which at once amaze and delight ordinary spectators or Art-students, simply because they themselves have not yet overcome even the difficulties of a technique.
        Monet's pointillisme, Sargent's visible and nervous brush strokes, Rodin's wealth of anatomical detail, the Impressionist's scientific rendering of atmosphere, Peter Graham's gauzy mists, Lavery's post-Whistlerian portraits of pale people, and the

        1 See his evidence before the Joint Committee on the Stage Censorship. — Daily Press, September 24th, 1909.

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touching devotion of all modern artists to Truth, in the Christian and scientific sense, are all indications of the general "funk" — the universal paralysis of will that has overtaken the Art-world.
        But I am travelling too fast. I said that no pains have been spared which might reduce Art also to a function that would be compatible with the democratic spirit of the times. Now in what form have these pains been taken?
        Their form has invariably been to turn the tables upon Art, and to make its beauty dependent upon Nature, instead of Nature's beauty dependent upon it. 1
        Tradition, of course, very largely laid the foundation of this mode of thinking, and, from the Greeks to Ruskin, few seem to have realized how much beauty Art had already laid in Nature, before even the imitative artist could consider Nature as beautiful.
        As Croce rightly observes: "Antiquity seems generally to have been entrammelled in the meshes of the belief in mimetic, or the duplication of natural objects by the artist;" 2 but when we remember that, as Schelling points out, in Greece speculation about Art began with Art's decline, 3

        1 T. I., Part 10, Aph. 19: "Man believes the world itself to be overcharged with beauty, — he forgets that he is the cause of it. He alone has endowed it with beauty. . . . In reality man mirrors himself in things; he counts everything beautiful which reflects his likeness. . . . Is the world really beautiful, just because man thinks it is? Man has humanized it, that is all."
        2 Æsthetic (Douglas Ainslie's translation), p. 259. See also B. Bosanquet, A History of Æsthetic, pp. 15–18.
        3 Sämmtliche Werke, Vol. V, "Vorlesungen über die Methode des akademischen Studiums," pp. 346, 347.


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we ought to feel no surprise at this remote underestimation of the artistic fact. 1
        In reviewing the work of æstheticians from Plato to Croce, however, what strikes me as so significant is the fact that, from the time of Plotinus — who practically marks the end of the declension which started in Plato's time — to the end of the seventeenth century, scarcely a voice of any magnitude was raised in Europe on the subject of Art. 2
        That there was no real "talk" about Art, at the time when it was revived in the Middle Ages, and at the time when it flourished in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and that all the old Hellenic discussions on the subject should have been taken up again at a period when the last emaciated blooms of the Renaissance and of the counter-Renaissance were bowing their heads, only shows how very sorry the plight of all great human functions must be when man begins to hope that he may set them right by talking about them.
        When it is remembered, however, that, from the end of the seventeenth century onward, Art was regarded either as imitation pure and simple or as idealized imitation by no less than fifteen thinkers

        1 Dr. Max Schasler (Kritische Geschichte der Æsthetik, p. 73) agrees that the understanding of Art in classical antiquity seems to be quite barbaric in its stupidity ("von einer geradezu barbarischen Bornirtheit"); but he adds that this may be an argument in favour of the antique; for it may prove the unconsciousness of the artists and the absolute unity of the artistic life and of artistic appreciation in antiquity.
        2 Aristotle was, of course, studied and commentated to a very great extent during these fifteen centuries; but in all the branches of science save Æsthetic. Where his Poetic was examined, the philological or literary-historical interest was paramount. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas do not differ materially from Plotinus and Plato.


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of note — that is to say, roughly speaking, by the Earl of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Home, Burke and Hume in England, by Batteux and Diderot in France, by Pagano and Spaletti in Italy, by Hemsterhuis in Holland, and by Leibnitz, Baumgarten, Kant, Schiller and Fichte in Germany; and that if Winckelmann and Lessing opposed these ideas, it was rather with the recommendation of another kind of imitation — that of the antique — than with a new valuation of Art; we can feel scarcely any. surprise at all at the sudden and total collapse of the dignity of Art in the nineteenth century, under the deadly influence of the works of men like Semper and his followers.
        It is all very well to point to men like Goethe, Heydenreich, Schelling, Hegel, Hogarth and Reynolds — all of whom certainly did a good deal to brace the self-respect of artists; but it is impossible to argue that any one of them took up either such a definite or such a determined attitude against the fifteen others whom I have mentioned, as could materially stem the tide of democratic Art which was rising in Europe. And if in the latter half of the nineteenth century we have Ruskin telling us that "the art which makes us believe what we would not otherwise have believed, is misapplied, and in most instances very dangerously so"; 1 and if we find that his first principle is, "that our graphic art, whether painting or sculpture, is to produce something which shall look as like Nature as possible," 2 and that, in extolling the Gothic, he says

        1 Lectures on Art (1870), p. 50.
        2 Aratra Pentelici (1870), p. 118. It is true that this is


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it was "the love of natural objects for their own sake, and the effort to represent them frankly, unconstrained by artistic laws"; 1 we realize how very slight the effect of those exceptional spirits, headed by Goethe, must have been.

2. A Thrust parried. Police or Detective Art defined.

        But to return to the movement initiated by Semper 2 — here we certainly have the scientific and Christian coup de grâce levelled at the expiring spirit of nineteenth-century Art. For the actors in this movement not only maintained that Art is imitation, but that it actually took its origin in imitation — and of the basest sort — that is to say, of accidental combinations of lines and colours produced in basket-work, weaving and plaiting.
        This conclusion, which was arrived at, once more, by means of a formidable array of facts, and which called itself "Evolution in Art," was, like its first cousin, "Evolution in the Organic World," absolutely democratic, ignoble, and vulgar; seeking the source of the highest human achievements either in automatic mimicry, slavish and even faulty copying, or involuntary adoption of natural or purely utilitarian forms.
        Taking the beauty of Nature for granted — an

followed by a restriction; but what does this restriction amount to? Ruskin says: "We must produce what shall look like Nature to people who know what Nature is.
        1 On the Nature of the Gothic (Smith, Elder, 1854), p. 19.
        2 "Der Stil in der technischen und tektonischen Künsten, oder praktische Æsthetik."


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assumption which, as the first part of this lecture shows, is quite unwarrantable — these Art-Evolutionists sought to prove that all artistic beauty was the outcome of man's Simian virtues working either in the realm of Nature or in the realm of his own utilitarian handiwork. And from the purely imitative productions found in the Madeleine Cavern in La Dordogne, to the repetitive patterns worked on wooden bowls by the natives in British New Guinea, the origin of all art lay in schoolboy "cribbing."
        This was a new scientific valuation of Art — foreshadowed, as I have shown, by philosophical æsthetic, but arriving independently, as it were, at the conclusion that Art was no longer a giver, but a robber.
        Volumes were written to show the origin in technical industry of individual patterns and ornaments on antique vases. And as Alois Riegl rightly observes, the authors of these works spoke with such assurance, that one might almost have believed that they had been present when the vases were made. 1
        Even Semper, however, as Riegl points out, did not go so far as his disciples, and though he believed that art-forms had been evolved — a fact any one would be ready to admit — he did not press the point that technical industry had always been their root.
        When we find such delicate and beautifully rhythmic patterns as those which Dr. A. C. Haddon gives us in his interesting work on Evolution in Art, and are told that they originated in

        1 See the excellent work, Stilfragen, p. 11.

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the frigate birds, or in woodlarks, which infest the neighbourhood from which these patterns hail; 1 when we are shown a Chinese ornament which resembles nothing so much as the Egyptian honeysuckle and lotus ornament, 2 and we are told that it is derived from the Chinese bat, and when we are persuaded that an ordinary fish-hook can lead to a delightful bell-like 3 design; then our knowledge of what Art is protests against this desecration of its sanctity — more particularly after we have been informed that any beauty that the original "Skeuomorph" 4 may ultimately possess is mostly due to rapid and faulty copying by inexpert draughtsmen, or to a simplifying process which repeated drawings of the same thing must at length involve.
        This is nonsense, and of a most pernicious sort. No mechanical copying or involuntary simplification will necessarily lead to designs of great beauty. One has only to set a class of children to make dozens of copies of an object — each more removed than the last from the original — in order to discover that if any beauty arises at all, it is actually given or imparted to the original by one particular child, who happens to be an artist, and that the rest of the class will be quite innocent of anything in the way of embellishments, or beauty of any kind.

        1 Evolution in Art, by A. C. Haddon. See especially figures 26, 27, 30, 31, 32, pp. 49–52. See also figure 106, p. 181.
        2 The Evolution of Decorative Art, by Henry J. Balfour, p. 50.
        3 Evolution in Art, by A. C. Haddon, p. 76.
        4 A word Dr. Colley March introduced to express the idea of an ornament due to structure.


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        It would be absurd to argue that the beak of a frigate bird had not been noticed by particular natives in those parts of the world where the creature abounds; but the creative act of making an ornamental design based upon a pot-hook unit, such as the frigate bird's beak is, bears no causal relation whatsoever to the original fact in the artist's environment, and to write books in order to show that it does, is as futile as to try and show that pneumonia or bronchitis or pleurisy was the actual cause of Poe's charming poem, "Annabel Lee."
        Riegl, Lipps, and Dr. Worringer very rightly oppose this view of Semper and others. In his book, Stilfragen, Riegl successfully disposes of the theory that repetitive patterns have invariably been the outcome of technical processes such as weaving and plaiting, and points out that, very often, a vegetable or animal form is given to an original ornamental figure, only after it has been developed to such an extent that it actually suggests that vegetable or animal form. 1
        Dr. Worringer goes to great pains in order to show that there is an Art-will which is quite distinct from mimicry of any kind, and that this Art-will, beginning in the graphic arts with rhythmic and repetitive geometrical designs, such as zigzags, cross-hatchings and spirals, has nothing whatsoever to do with natural objects or objects of utility, such as baskets and woven work, which these designs happen to resemble. 2

        1 Stilfragen, p. 208 et seq. See also Dr. W. Worringer's really valuable contribution to this subject: Abstraktion und Einfühlung, p. 58.
        2 Abstraktion und Einfühlung, pp. 4, 8, 9, 11.


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        He points out that there is not only a difference of degree, but actually a marked difference of kind, between the intensely realistic drawing of the Madeleine finds and of some Australian cave painting and rock sculptures, 1 which are the work of the rudest savages, and the rhythmic decoration of other races; and that whereas the former are simply the result of a truly imitative instinct which the savage does well to cultivate for his own self-preservation — since the ability to imitate also implies sharpened detective senses 2 — the latter is the result of a genuine desire for order and simple and organized arrangement, and an attempt in a small way to overcome confusion. "It is man's only possible way of emancipating himself from the accidental and chaotic character of reality." 3
        The author also shows very ably that, even where plant forms are selected by the original geometric artist, it is only owing to some peculiarly orderly or systematic arrangement of their parts, and that the first impulse in the selective artist is not to imitate Nature, but to obtain a symmetrical and systematic arrangement of lines, 4 to gratify his will to be master of natural disorder.
        These objections of Riegl and Worringer are both necessary and important; for, as the former declares: "It is now high time that we should retreat from the position in which it is maintained

        1 Abstraktion und Einfühlung, p. 51. See also Grosse, The Beginnings of Art, pp. 166–169 et seq.
        2 For confirmation of this point see Felix Clay, The Origin of the Sense of Beauty, p. 97.
        3 Abstraktion und Einfühlung, p. 44.
        4 Abstraktion und Einfühlung, p. 58.


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that the roots of Art lie in purely technical prototypes." 1
        Even in the camp of the out-and-out evolutionists, however, there seems always to have been some uncertainty as to whether they were actually on the right scent. One has only to read Grosse, where he throws doubt on the technical origin of ornament, and acknowledges that he clings to it simply because he can see no other, 2 and the concluding word of Dr. Haddon's book, Evolution in Art, 3 in order to understand how very much a proper concept of the Art-instinct would have helped these writers to explain a larger field of facts than they were able to explain, and to do so with greater accuracy.
        Nobody, of course, denies that the patterns on alligators' backs, the beaks of birds, and even the regular disposition of features in the human face, have been incorporated into designs; but what must be established, once and for all, is the fact that there is a whole ocean of difference between the

        1 Stilfragen, p. 12.
        2 The Beginnings of Art, pp. 145–147.
        3 p. 309: "There are certain styles of ornamentation which, at all events in particular cases, may very well be original, taking that word in its ordinary sense, such, for example, as zigzags, cross-hatching, and so forth. The mere toying with any implement which could make a mark on any surface might suggest the simplest ornamentation [N.B. — It is characteristic of this school that even original design, according to them, must be the result of "toying" with an instrument, and of a suggestion from chance markings it may make] to the most savage mind. This may or may not have been the case, and it is entirely beyond proof either way, and therefore we must not press our analogy too far. It is, however, surprising and is certainly very significant that the origin of so many designs can be determined although they are of unknown age."


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theory which would ascribe such coincidences to the imitative faculty, and that which would show them to be merely the outcome of an original desire for rhythmic order, simplification, and organization, which may or may not avail itself of natural or technical forms suggestive of symmetrical arrangement that happen to be at hand.
        It is an important controversy, and one to which I should have been glad to devote more attention. In summing up, however, I don't think I could do better than quote the opening lines of the Rev. J. F. Rowbotham's excellent History of Music, in which the same questions, although applied to a different branch of Art, are admirably stated and answered.
        In this book the author says —
        "The twittering of birds, the rustling of leaves, the gurgling of brooks, have provoked the encomiums of poets. Yet none of these has ever so powerfully affected man's mind that he has surmised the existence of something deeper in them than one hearing would suffice to disclose, and has endeavoured by imitating them to familiarize himself with their nature, so that he may repeat the effect at his own will and pleasure in all its various shades. These sounds, with that delicate instinct which has guided him so nicely through this universe of tempting possibilities, he chose deliberately to pass over. He heard them with pleasure maybe. But pleasure must possess some æsthetic value. There must be a secret there to fathom, a mystery to unravel, before we would undertake its serious pursuit.

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        "And there is a kind of sound which exactly possesses these qualities — a sound fraught with seductive mystery — a sound which is Nature's magic, for by it can dumb things speak.
        "The savage who, for the first time in our world's history, knocked two pieces of wood together, and took pleasure in the sound, had other aims than his own delight. He was patiently examining a mystery; he was peering with his simple eyes into one of Nature's greatest secrets. The something he was examining was rhythmic sound, on which rests the whole art of music." 1
        Thus, as you see, there is a goodly array of perfectly sensible people on the other side. Still, the belief that graphic art took its origin in imitation must undoubtedly have done a good deal of damage; for the numbers that hold it and act upon it at the present day are, I am sorry to say, exceedingly great.
        By identifying the will to imitate with the instinct of self-preservation pure and simple, however, we immediately obtain its order of rank; for having already established that the will to Art is the will to exist in a certain way — that is to say, with power, all that which ministers to existence alone must of necessity fall below the will to Art. In helping us to make this point, Dr. Worringer and Mr. Felix Clay have done good service, while Riegl's contribution to the side opposed to the Art-Evolutionists cannot be estimated too highly.
        We are now able to regard the realistic rock-

        1 The History of Music, by J. F. Rowbotham, 1893, pp. 7, 8. See also Dr. Wallaschek's Anfänge der Tonkunst (Leipzig, 1903).

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drawings and cave-paintings of rude Bushmen, as also the finds in the Madeleine Cavern, with an understanding which has not been vouchsafed us before, and in comparing these examples of amazing truth to Nature — which, for want of a better name, we shall call Detective or Police Art 1 — with the double twisted braid, the palmette, and the simple fret in Assyrian ornament, we shall be able to assign to each its proper order of rank.
        It seems a pity, before laying down the principles of an art, that it should be necessary to clear away so many false doctrines and prejudices heaped upon it in perfect good faith by scientific men. It is only one proof the more, if such were needed, of the vulgarizing influence science has exercised over everything it has touched, since it began to become almost divinely ascendant in the nineteenth century.

3. The Purpose of Art Still the Same as Ever.

        But in spite of all the attempts that have been made to democratize Art, and to fit it to the Procrustes bed of modernity, two human factors have remained precisely the same as they ever were, and show no signs of changing. I refer to the general desire to obey and to follow, in the mass of mankind, and to the general desire to prevail in concepts, if not in offspring, among higher men.
        Wherever one may turn, wherever one inquires, one will discover that, at the present day, however

        1 The Bertillon system of identification and Madame Tussaud's, together with a large number of modern portraits and landscapes, are the highest development of this art.

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few and weak the commanders may be, there is among the vast majority of people an insatiable thirst to obey, to find opinions ready-made, and to believe in some one or in some law. The way the name of science is invoked when a high authority is needed — just as the Church or the Bible used to be invoked in years gone by — the love of statistics and the meekness with which a company grows silent when they are quoted; the fact that the most preposterous fashions are set in clothing, in tastes, and in manners; the sheep-like way in which people will follow a leader, whether in politics, literature, or in sport, not to dilate upon the love of great names and the faith in the daily Press which nowadays, so I hear, even prescribes schemes for dinner-table conversation — all these things show what a vast amount of instinctive obedience still remains the birthright of the Greatest Number. For even advertisement hoardings and the excessive use of advertisements in this age, in addition to the fact that they point unmistakably to the almost omnipotent power of the commercial classes (a power which vouchsafes them even the privilege of self-praise, which scarcely any other class of society could claim without incurring the charge of bad-taste), also show how docilely the greatest number must ultimately respond to repeated stimuli, and finally obey if they be told often enough to buy, or to go to see, any particular thing. And, in this respect, the Nietzschean attitude towards the greatest number is one of kindness and consideration.
        This instinct to obey, says Nietzsche, is the most natural thing in the world, and it must be gratified.

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By all means it must be gratified. What is fatal is not that it should be fed with commands, but that it should be starved by the lack of commanders, and so be compelled to go in search of food on its own account.
        "Inasmuch as in all ages," says Nietzsche, "as long as mankind has existed, there have always been human herds (family alliances, communities, tribes, peoples, states, churches), and always a great number who obey in proportion to the small number who command — in view, therefore, of the fact that obedience has been most practised and fostered among mankind hitherto, one may reasonably suppose that, generally speaking, the need thereof is now innate in every one, as a kind of formal conscience which gives the command: 'Thou shalt unconditionally do something, unconditionally refrain from something.' In short, 'Thou shalt.' This need tries to satisfy itself and to fill its form with a content; according to its strength, impatience and eagerness, it thereby seizes, as an omnivorous appetite, with little selection, and accepts whatever is shouted into its ear by all sorts of commanders — parents, teachers, laws, class prejudices, or public opinion." 1
        Everywhere, then, "he who would command finds those who must obey" 2 — this is obvious to the most superficial observer; because it is easier to obey than to command.
        "Wherever I found living things," says Zarathustra, "there heard I also the language of

        1 G. E., p. 120.
        2 W. P., Vol. I, p. 105.


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obedience. All living things are things that obey.
        "And this I heard secondly: whatever cannot obey itself, is commanded. Such is the nature of living things.
        "This, however, is the third thing I heard: to command is more difficult than to obey. And not only because the commander beareth the burden of all who obey, and because this burden easily crusheth him: —
        "An effort and a risk seemed all commanding unto me; and whenever it commandeth, the living thing risketh itself.
        "Yea, even when it commandeth himself, then also must it atone for its commanding. Of its own law must it become the judge and avenger and victim." 1
        For opinions are a matter of will; they are always, or ought to be always, travelling tickets implying a certain definite aim and destination, and the opinions we hold concerning Life must point to a certain object we see in Life; — hence there is just as great a market for opinions, and just as great a demand for fixed values to-day as there ever was, and the jealous love with which men will quote well-established views, or begin to believe when they hear that a view is well established — a fact which is at the root of all the fruits of modern popularity — shows what a need and what a craving there is for authority, for authoritative information, and for unimpeachable coiners of opinions.
        Now all the arts either determine values or lay

        1 Z., II, XXXIV.

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stress upon certain values already established. 1 What, then, are the particular values that the graphic arts determine or accentuate? It must be clear that they determine what is beautiful, desirable, in fact, imperative, in form and colour.
        The purpose of the graphic arts, then, has remained the same as it ever was. It is to determine the values "ugly" and "beautiful" for those who wish to know what is ugly and what is beautiful. The fact that painters and sculptors have grown so tremulous and so little self-reliant as to claim only the right to imitate, to please and to amuse, does not affect this statement in the least; it is simply a reflection upon modern artists and sculptors.
        Since, however, these values beautiful and ugly are themselves but the outcome of other more fundamental values which have ruled and moulded a race for centuries, it follows that the artist who would accentuate or determine the qualities beautiful or ugly, must bear some intimate relation to the past and possible future of the people.
        Place the Hermes of Praxiteles and especially the canon of Polycletus in any part of a cathedral of the late Gothic, and you will see to what extent the values which gave rise to Gothic Art were incom-

        1 T. I., Part 10, Aph. 24: "A psychologist asks what does all art do? does it not praise? does it not glorify? does it not select? does it not bring into prominence? In each of these cases it strengthens or weakens certain valuations. . . . Is this only a contingent matter? — an accident, something with which the instinct of the artist would not at all be concerned? Or rather, is it not the pre-requisite which enables the artist to do something? Is his fundamental instinct directed towards art? — or is it not rather directed towards the sense of art, namely, life? towards a desirableness of life?"

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patible with, and antagonistic to, those which reared Praxiteles and Polycletus. Now, if you want a still greater contrast, place an Egyptian granite sculpture inside a building like le Petit Trianon, and this intimate association between the Art and the values of a people will begin to seem clear to you.
        You may ask, then, why or how such an art as Ruler-art can please? Since it introduces something definitely associated with a particular set of values, and commands an assent to these values, how is it that one likes it?
        The reply is that one does not necessarily like it. One often hates it. One likes it only when one feels that it reveals values which are in sympathy with one's own aspirations. The Ruler-art of Egypt, for instance, can stir no one who, consciously or unconsciously, is not in some deep secret sympathy with the society which produced it; and as an example of this sympathy — if you wish to know why the realism which comes from poverty 1 tends to increase and flourish in democratic times, it is only because there is that absence of particular human power in it which is compatible with a society in which a particular human power is completely lacking.
        For it is absolute nonsense to speak of l'art pour l'art and of the pleasure of art for art's sake as acceptable principles. 2 I will show later on how this notion arose. Suffice it to say, for the present, that this is the death of Art. It is separating Art

        1 See p. 119.
        2 W. P., Vol. I, p. 246. See also T. I., Part 10, Aph. 24, and G. E., p. 145.


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from Life, and it is relegating it to a sphere — a Beyond — where other things, stronger than Art, have already been known to die. The notion of art for art's sake can only arise in an age when the purpose of Art is no longer known, when its relation to Life has ceased from being recognized, and when artists have grown too weak to find the realization of their will in their works.

4. The Artist's and the Layman's View of Life.

        If the artist's view of Life can no longer affect Life, if his ordering, simplifying and adjusting mind can no longer make Life simpler, more orderly and better adjusted, then all his power has vanished, and he has ceased from counting in our midst, save, perhaps, as a decorator of our homes — that is to say, as an artisan; or as an entertainer — that is to say, as a mere illustrator of our literary men's work.
        What is so important in the artist is, that disorder and confusion are the loadstones that attract him. 1 Though, in stating this, I should ask you to remember that he sees disorder and confusion where, very often, the ordinary person imagines everything to be admirably arranged. Still, the fact remains that he finds his greatest proof of power only where his ordering and simplifying mind meets with something whereon it may stamp its two strongest features: Order and Simplicity; and where he is strong, relative disorder is his element, and the arrangement of this disorder is

        1 W. P., Vol. II, p. 368.

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his product. 1 Stimulated by disorder, which he despises, he is driven to his work; spurred by the sight of anarchy, his inspiration is government; fertilized by rudeness and ruggedness, his will to power gives birth to culture and refinement. He gives of himself — his business is to make things reflect him.
        Thus, even his will to eternalize, and to stamp the nature of stability on Becoming, must not be confounded with that other desire for Being which is a desire for rest and repose and opiates, 2 and which has found its strongest expression in the idea of the Christian Heaven. It is, rather, a feeling of gratitude towards Life, a desire to show thankfulness to Life, which makes him desire to rescue one beautiful body from the river of Becoming, and fix its image for ever in this world, 3 whereas the other is based upon a loathing of Life and a weariness of it.
        Defining ugliness provisionally as disorder, it may have a great attraction for the artist, it may even be the artist's sole attraction, and in converting it — the thing he despises most — into beauty, which we shall define provisionally as order, he reaches the zenith of his power. 4
        "Where is beauty?" Zarathustra asks. "Where I must will with my whole will; where I will love and perish, that an image may not remain merely an image. 5
        "For to create desireth the loving one, because he despiseth." 6

        1 W. P., Vol. II, p. 241.
        2 W. P., Vol. II, p. 280.
        3 W. P., Vol. II, p. 281.
        4 W. P., Vol. II, p. 244.
        5 Z., II, XXXVII.
        6. Z., I, XVIII.


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        It follows from this, therefore, that the realistic artist — the purveyor of Police Art — who goes direct to beauty or ugliness and, after having worked upon either, leaves it just as it was before, 1 shows no proof of power at all, and ranks with the bushmen of Australia and the troglodytes of La Dordogne, as very much below the hierophantic artist who transforms and transfigures. All realists, therefore, from Apelles 2 in the fourth century B.C. to the modern impressionists, portrait painters and landscapists, must step down. Like the scientists, they merely ascertain facts, and, in so doing, leave things precisely as they are. 3 Photography is rapidly outstripping them, and will outstrip them altogether once it has mastered the problem of colour. Photography could never have vied with the artist of Egypt, or even of China and Japan; because in the arts of each of these nations there is an element of human power over Nature or reality, which no mechanical process can emulate.
        Now, what is important in the ideal and purely hypothetical layman is, that he has a horror of disorder, of confusion, and of chaos, and flees from it whenever possible. He finds no solace anywhere, except where the artist has been and left

        1 T. I., Part 10, Aph. 7: "Nature, estimated artistically, is no model. It exaggerates, it distorts, it leaves gaps. Nature is accident. Studying 'according to nature' seems to me a bad sign; it betrays subjection, weakness, fatalism; this lying-in-the-dust before petit faits is unworthy of a complete artist. Seeing what is — that belongs to another species of intellects, to the anti-artistic, to the practical."
        2 See Woltmann and Woermann, History of Painting, Vol. I, p. 62.
        3 B. T., p. 59. See also Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena, Vol. II, p. 447.


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things transformed and richer for him. Bewildered by reality, he extends his hands for that which the artist has made of reality. He is a receiver. He reaches his zenith in apprehending. 1 His attitude is that of a woman, as compared with the attitude of the artist which is that of the man.
        "Logical and geometrical simplification is the result of an increase of power: conversely, the mere aspect of such simplification increases the sense of power in the beholder." 2 To see what is ugliness to him, represented as what is beauty to him, also impresses the spectator with the feeling of power; of an obstacle overcome, and thereby stimulates his activities. Moreover, the spectator may feel a certain gratitude to Life and Mankind. It often happens, even in our days, that another world is pictured as by no means a better world, 3 and the healthy and optimistic layman may feel a certain thankfulness to Life and to Humanity. It is then once more that he turns to the artist who has felt the same in a greater degree, who can give him this thing — be it a corner of Life or of Humanity — who can snatch it from the eternal flux and torrent of all things into decay or into death, and who can carve or paint it in a form unchanging for him, in spite of a world of Becoming, of Evolution, and of ebb and flow. Just as the musician cries Time! Time! Time! to the cacophonous medley of natural sounds that pour into his ears from all

        1 W. P., Vol. II, p. 255.
        2 W. P., Vol. II, p. 241.
        3 W. P., Vol. II, p. 95: "A people that are proud of themselves, and who are on the ascending path of Life always picture another existence as lower and less valuable than theirs."


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sides, and assembles them rhythmically for our ears hostile to disorder; so the graphic artist cries Time! Time! Time! to the incessant and kaleidoscopic procession of things from birth to death, and places in the layman's arms the eternalized image of that portion of Life for which he happens to feel great gratitude.

5. The Confusion of the Two Points of View.

        It is obvious that if both pleasures are to remain pure and undefiled — if the artist is to attain to his zenith in happiness, and the layman to his also — their particular points of view must not be merged, dulled, or blunted by excessive spiritual intercourse. 1 For a very large amount of the disorder in the arts of the present can easily be traced to a confusion of the two points of view.
        In an ideal society, the artist's standpoint would be esoteric, and the layman's exoteric.
        Nowadays, of course, owing to the process of universal levelling which has been carried so far that it is invading even the department of sex, it is hard to find such distinctions as the artist's and the layman's standpoint in art sharply and definitely juxtaposed. And this fact accounts for a good deal of the decrease in æsthetic pleasure, which is so characteristic of the age. In fact, it accounts for the decrease of pleasure in general, for only where there are sharp differences can there be any great pleasure. Pessimism and melancholia can arise only in inartistic ages, when a process of

        1 W. P., Vol. II, pp. 255, 256.

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levelling has merged all the joys of particular standpoints into one.
        Let me give you a simple example, drawn from modern life and the pictorial arts, in order to show you to what extent the standpoint of the people or of the layman has become corrupted by the standpoint of the artist, and vice-versâ.
        Strictly speaking, artists in search of scope for their powers should prefer Hampstead Heath or the Forest of Fontainebleau 1 to the carefully laid-out gardens of our parks and of Versailles. Conversely, if their taste were still uncorrupted, the public ought to prefer the carefully arranged gardens of our parks and of Versailles to Hampstead Heath or the Forest of Fontainebleau.
        Some of the public, of course, still do hold the proper views on these points, but their number is rapidly diminishing, and most of them assume the airs of artists now, and speak with sentimental enthusiasm about the beautiful ruggedness of craggy rocks, the glorious beauty of uncultivated Nature, and the splendour of wild scenery. 2

        1 In regard to this point it is interesting to note that Kant, in his Kritik der Urteilskraft, actually called landscape-painting a process of gardening.
        2 I do not mean to imply here that all the sentimental gushing that is given vent to nowadays over rugged and wild scenery is the outcome only of a confusion of the artist's and layman's standpoints. The influence of the Christian and Protestant worship of pointless freedom, together with that of their contempt of the work of man, is largely active here; and the sight of unhandseled and wild shrubs, and of tangled and matted grasses, cheers the heart of the fanatical believer in the purposeless freedom and anarchy which Christianity and Protestantism have done so much to honour and extol. That the same man who honours government and an aristocratic ideal may



- facing p. 123 -



The Marriage of Mary
By Raphael
(Brera, Milan.)


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        Artists, on the other hand, having become infected by the public's original standpoint — the desire for order — either paint pictures like Raphael's "Marriage of Mary," 1 his "Virgin and Child attended by St. John the Baptist and St. Nicholas of Bari," 2 and Perugino's "Vision of St. Bernard," 3 in which the perfectly symmetrical aspect and position of the architecture is both annoying and inartistic, owing to the fact that it was looked at by the artist from a point at which it was orderly and arranged before he actually painted it, and could not therefore testify to his power of simplifying or ordering — but simply to his ability to avail himself of another artist's power, namely, the architect's; or else, having become infected by the public's corrupt standpoint — the desire for disorder and chaos as an end in itself — they paint as Ruysdael, Hobbema and Constable painted — that is to say, without imparting anything of themselves, or of their power to order and simplify, to the content of the picture, lest the desire for disorder or chaos should be thwarted. 4
        This is an exceedingly important point, and its

often be found to-day dilating upon the charms of chaotic scenery, only shows how muddle-headed and confused mankind has become.
        1 The Brera at Milan.
        2 The National Gallery, London. Raphael was very much infected with the people's point of view, hence the annoying stiltedness of many of his pictures.
        3 Pinakothek, Munich.
        4 See particularly, Ruysdael's "Rocky Landscape," "Landscape with a Farm" (Wallace collection); Hobbema's "Outskirts of a Wood" and many others in the Wallace collection; and Constable's "Flatford Mill" and "The Haywain" (National Gallery).


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value for art criticism cannot be overrated. If one can trust one's taste, and it is still a purely public taste, it is possible to tell at a glance why one cannot get oneself to like certain pictures in which either initial regularity has been too great, thus leaving no scope for the artist's power, or in which final irregularity is too great, thus betraying no evidence of the artist's power.
        Looking at Rubens' "Ceres," 1 in which the architecture is viewed also in a frontal position, you may be tempted to ask why such a picture is not displeasing, despite the original symmetry of the architecture in the position in which the painter chose to paint it. The reply is simple. Here Rubens certainly placed the architecture full-face; but besides dissimulating the greater part of it in shadow — which in itself produces unsymmetrical shapes that have subsequently to be arranged by tone composition — lie carefully disordered it by means of garlands and festoons, and only then did he exercise his artistic mind in making a harmonious and orderly pictorial arrangement of it, which also included some cupids skilfully placed.
        All realism, or Police Art, therefore, in addition to being the outcome of the will to truth which Christianity and its offshoot Modern Science have infused into the arts, may also be the result of the artist's becoming infected either with the public's pure taste, or with the public's corrupted or artist-infected taste, and we are thus in possession of one more clue as to what constitutes a superior work of graphic art.

        1 Hermitage Gallery, St. Petersburg.

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6. The Meaning of Beauty of Form and of Beauty of Content in Art.

        So far, then, I have arrived at this notion of beauty in Ruler-Art, namely: that it may be regarded almost universally as that order, simplicity and transfiguration which the artist mind imparts to the content of his production. This notion seems to allow of almost universal application, because, as I showed in the first part of this lecture, it involves one of the primary instincts of man — the overcoming of chaos and anarchy by adjustment, simplification and transfiguration. It is only in democratic ages, or ages of decline, when instincts become disintegrated, that beauty in Art is synonymous with a lack of simplicity, of order and of transfiguration. I have shown, however, that the second kind of beauty, or democratic beauty, is of an inferior kind to that of the first beauty, or Ruler beauty, because, while the former takes its root in the will to live, the latter arises surely and truly out of the will to power. 1 Either beauty, however, constitutes ugliness in its opponent's opinion.
        But there is another aspect of Beauty in Art which has to be considered, and that is the intrinsic beauty of the content of an artistic production. You may say that, ex hypothesi, I have denied that there could be any such beauty. Not at all!

        1 If this book be read in conjunction with my monograph on Nietzsche: his Life and Works (Constable), or my Who is to be Master of the World? (Foulis), there ought to be no difficulty in understanding this point.

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        Since the ruler-artist transfigures by enhancement, by embellishment and by ennoblement, his mind can be stimulated perfectly well by an object or a human being which to the layman is vertiginously beautiful, and which to himself is exceedingly pleasing. In fact, if his mind is a mind which, like that of most master-artists, adores that which is difficult, it will go in search of the greatest natural beauty it can find, in order, by a stupendous effort in transfiguration, to outstrip even that; for the embellishment of the downright ugly and the downright revolting presents a task too easy to the powerful artist — a fact which explains a good deal of the ugly contents of many a modern picture.
        What, then, constitutes the beauty of the content in an artistic production, as distinct from the beauty of the treatment? In other words, what is beauty in a subject?
        For the notion that the subject does not matter in a picture is one which should be utterly and severely condemned. It arose at a time when art was diseased, when artists themselves had ceased from having anything of importance to say, when the subjects chosen had no meaning, and when technique was bad. And it must be regarded more in the light of a war-cry coming from a counter-movement, aiming at an improved technique and rebelling against an abuse of literature in the graphic arts, than in the light of sound doctrine, taking its foundation in normal and healthy conditions.
        The intrinsic beauty of the content or substance

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of a picture or sculpture may therefore be the subject of legitimate inquiry, and in determining what it consists of, we raise the whole question of content beauty.
        Volumes, stacks of volumes, have been written on this question. The most complicated and incomprehensible answers have been given to it, and not one can be called satisfactory; for all of them would be absolute.
        When, however, we find a modern writer defining the beautiful as "that which has characteristic or individual expressiveness for sense perception or imagination, subject to the conditions of general or abstract expressiveness in the same medium," 1 we feel, or at least I feel, that something must be wrong. It is definitions such as these which compel one to seek for something more definite and more lucid in the matter of explanation, and if, in finding the latter, one may seem a little too prosaic and terre-à-terre, it is only because the transcendental and metaphysical nature of the kind of definition we have just quoted makes anything which is in the slightest degree clearer, appear earthly and material beside it.
        It is obvious that, if we could only arrive at a subject-beauty which was absolute, practically all the difficulties of our task would vanish. For having established the fact that the purpose of the graphic arts is to determine the values beautiful and ugly, it would only remain for us to urge all artists to advocate that absolute subject-beauty with all the eloquence of line and colour that our concept of

        1 B. Bosanquet, A History of Æsthetic, p. 4.

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Art-form would allow, and all the problems of Art would be solved.
        But we can postulate no such absolute in subject-beauty. "Absolute beauty exists just as little as absolute goodness and truth." 1 The term "beautiful," like the term "good," is only a means to an end. It is simply the arbitrary self-affirmation of a certain type of man in his struggle to prevail. 2 He says "Yea" to his type, and calls it beautiful. He cannot extend his power and overcome other types unless with complete confidence and assurance he says "Yea" to his own type.
        You and I, therefore, can speak of the beautiful with an understanding of what that term means, only on condition that our values, our traditions, our desires, and our outlook are exactly the same. If you agree with me on the question of what is good, our agreement simply means this, that in that corner of the world from which you and I hail, the same creator of values prevails over both of us. Likewise, if you and I agree on the question of what is beautiful, this fact merely denotes that as individuals coming from the same people, we have our values, our tradition and our outlook in common.
        "Beautiful," then, is a purely relative term which may be applied to a host of dissimilar types and which every people must apply to its own type

        1 W. P., Vol. II, p. 246. See also T. I., Part 10, Aph. 19: "The 'beautiful in itself' is merely an expression, not even a concept."
        2 T. I., Part 10, Aph. 19: "In the beautiful, man posits himself as the standard of perfection; in select cases he worships himself in that standard. A species cannot possibly do otherwise than thus say yea to itself."


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alone, if it wishes to preserve its power. Biologically, absolute beauty exists only within the confines of a particular race. That race which would begin to consider another type than their own as beautiful, would thereby cease from being a race. We may be kind, amiable, and even hospitable to the Chinaman or the Negro; but the moment we begin to share the Chinaman's or the Negro's view of beauty, we run the risk of cutting ourselves adrift from our own people.
        But assuming, as we must, that all people, the Chinese, the Negroes, the Hindus, the Red Indians, and the Arabs between themselves apply the word beautiful only to particular individuals among their own people, in order to distinguish them from less beautiful or mediocre individuals — what meaning has the term in that case?
        Obviously, since the spirit of the people, its habits, prejudices and prepossessions are determined by their values, and values may fix a type, that creature will be most beautiful among them who is the highest embodiment and outcome of all their values, and who therefore corresponds most to the ideal their æsthetic legislator had in mind when he created their values. 1 Thus even morality can be justified æsthetically. 2 And in legislating for primeval peoples, higher men and artist-legis-

        1 W. P., Vol. II, p. 361: "Legislative moralities are the principal means by which one can form mankind, according to the fancy of a creative and profound will: provided of course, that such an artistic will of the first order gets the power into its own hands, and can make its creative will prevail over long periods in the form of legislation, religions and morals." See p. 79 in the first part of this lecture.
        2 W. P., Vol. II, p. 185.


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lators certainly worked like sculptors on a yielding medium which was their own kind.
        The most beautiful negro or Chinaman thus becomes that individual negro or Chinaman who is rich in those features which the life-spirit of the Ethiopian or Chinese people is calculated to produce, and who, owing to a long and regular observance of the laws and traditions of his people, by his ancestors for generations, has inherited that regularity of form in his type, which all long observance of law and order is bound to cultivate and to produce. 1 And in reviewing the peoples of Europe alone, we can ascribe the many and different views which they have held and still hold of beauty, only to a difference in the values they have observed for generations in their outlook, their desires and their beliefs.
        It is quite certain, therefore, that, in the graphic arts, which either determine or accentuate the values "ugly" and "beautiful," every artist who sets up his notion of what is subject-beauty, like every lover about to marry, either assails or confirms and consolidates the values of his people. 2
        Examples of this, if they were needed, are to be found everywhere. See how the Gothic school of painting, together with men like Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, El Greco, and subse-

        1 G. E., p. 107: "The essential thing 'in heaven and earth' is, apparently, that there should be long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living; for instance, virtue, art, music, dancing, reason, spirituality — anything whatever that is transfiguring, refined, foolish, or divine."
        2 T. I., Part 10, Aph. 24.


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quently Burne-Jones, set up the soulful person, the person of tenuous, nervous and heaven-aspiring slenderness, as the type of beauty, thus advocating and establishing Christian values in a very seductive and often artistic manner; while the Pagans, with Michelangelo, Titian, and even Rubens, represented another code of values — perhaps even several other codes — and sought to fix their type also.
        Note, too, how hopeless are the attempts of artists who stand for the Pagan ideal, when they paint Christian saints and martyrs, and how singularly un-Pagan those figures are which appear in the pictures of the advocates of the Christian ideal when they attempt Pagan types. Christ by Rubens is not the emaciated, tenuous Person suffering from a wasting disease that Segna represents him to be; while the Mars and Venus of Botticelli in the National Gallery would have been repudiated with indignation by any Greek of antiquity.
        When values are beginning to get mixed, then, owing to an influx of foreigners from all parts of the world, we shall find the strong biological idea of absolute beauty tending to disappear, and in its place we shall find the weak and wholly philosophical belief arising that beauty is relative. Thus, in Attica of the fifth century B.C., when 300,000 slaves, chiefly foreigners, were to be counted among the inhabitants, the idea that beauty was a relative term first occurred to the "talker" Socrates.
        Still, in all concepts of beauty, however widely separated and however diametrically opposed, there is this common factor: that the beautiful person

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is the outcome of a long observance through generations of the values peculiar to a people. A certain regularity of form and feature, whether this form and feature be Arab, Ethiopian or Jewish, is indicative of a certain regular mode of life which has lasted for generations; and in calling this indication beautiful, a people once more affirms itself and its values. If the creature manifesting this regularity be a Chinaman, he will be the most essential Chinaman that the Chinese values can produce; his face will reveal no fighting and discordant values; there will be no violent contrasts of type in his features, and, relative to Chinese values, his face will be the most regular and harmonious that can be seen, and therefore the most beautiful. 1 The Chinese ruler-artist, in representing a mediocre Chinaman, would therefore exercise his transfiguring powers to overcome any discordant features in the face before him, and would thus produce a beautiful type. 2 Or, if

        1 T. I., Part 10, Aph. 47: "Even the beauty of a race or family, the pleasantness and kindness of their whole demeanour, is acquired by effort; like genius, it is the final result of the accumulated labour of generations. There must have been great sacrifices made to good taste; for the sake of it, much must have been done, and much refrained from — the seventeenth century in France is worthy of admiration in both ways; good taste must then have been a principle of selection, for society, place, dress, and sexual gratification, beauty must have been preferred to advantage, habit, opinion, indolence. Supreme rule: — we must not 'let ourselves go,' even when only in our own presence. — Good things are costly beyond measure, and the rule always holds, that he who possesses them is other than he who acquires them. All excellence is inheritance; what has not been inherited is imperfect, it is a beginning."
        2 W. P., Vol. II, p. 245: "'Beauty,' therefore, is, to the artist, something which is above order of rank, because in beauty contrasts are overcome, the highest sign of power


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his model happened to be the highest product of Chinese values, his object would be to transcend even that, and to point to something higher.
        Once again, therefore, though it is impossible to posit a universal concept of subject-beauty, various concepts may be given an order of rank, subject to the values with which they happen to be associated.

7. The Meaning of Ugliness of Form and of Ugliness of Content in Art.

        Ugliness in Art, therefore, is Art's contradiction. 1 It is the absence of Art. It is a sign that the simplifying, ordering and transfiguring power of the artist has not been successful, and that chaos, disorder and complexity have not been overcome.
        Ugliness of form in Art, therefore, will tend to become prevalent in democratic times; because it is precisely at such times that a general truth for all is believed in, and, since reality is the only truth which can be made common to all, democratic art is invariably realistic, and therefore, according to my definition of the beautiful in form, ugly.
        In this matter, I do not ask you to take my views on trust. A person who will seem to you very much more authoritative than myself — a man who once had the honour of influencing Whistler, and who, by the bye, is also famous for having flung

thus manifesting itself in the conquest of opposites; and achieved without a feeling of tension." See also Hegel, Vorlesungen über Æsthetik, Vol. I, pp. 130, 144.
        1 W. P., Vol. II, p. 252.


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down the Colonne Vendôme in Paris — once expressed himself quite categorically on this matter.
        At the Congress of Antwerp in 1861, after he had criticized other artists and other concepts of art, this man concluded his speech as follows: "By denying the ideal and all that it involves, I attain to the complete emancipation of the individual, and finally to democracy. Realism is essentially democratic." 1
        As you all must know, this man was Gustave Courbet, of whom Muther said that he had a predilection for the ugly. 2
        Artists infected with the pure or the corrupt layman's view of Art, as described in the previous section, and artists obsessed by the Christian or scientific notion of truth, will consequently produce ugly work. They will be realists, or Police-artists, and consequently ugly.
        But how can content- or subject-ugliness be understood? Content- or subject-ugliness is the decadence of a type. 3 It is the sign that certain features, belonging to other peoples (hitherto

        1 A. Estignard, Gustave Courbet (Paris, 1896), p. 118.
        2 Geschichte der Malerei, Vol. III, p. 204.
        3 W. P., Vol. II, pp. 241, 242, 245. See also T. I., Part 10, Aph. 20: "The ugly is understood as a sign and symptom of degeneration; that which reminds us in the remotest manner of degeneracy prompts us to pronounce the verdict 'ugly.' Every indication of exhaustion, gravity, age or lassitude; every kind of constraint, such as cramp or paralysis; and above all the odour, the colour, and the likeness of decomposition or putrefaction, be it utterly attenuated even to a symbol: — all these things call forth a similar reaction, the evaluation 'ugly.' A hatred is there excited: whom does man hate there? There can be no doubt: the decline of his type."


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called ugly according to the absolute biological standard of beauty of a race), are beginning to be introduced into their type. Or it may mean that the subject to be represented does not reveal that harmony and lack of contrasts which the values of a people are capable of producing. In each case it provokes hatred, and this "hatred is inspired by the most profound instinct of the species; there is horror, foresight, profundity, and far-reaching vision in it — it is the profoundest of all hatreds. On account of it art is profound." 1
        The hatred amounts to a condemnation of usurping values, or of discordant values; in fact, to a condemnation of dissolution and anarchy, and the judgment "ugly" is of the most serious import.
        Thus, although few of us can agree to-day as to what constitutes a beautiful man or woman, there is still a general idea common to us all, that a certain regularity of features constitutes beauty, and that, with this beauty, a certain reliable, harmonious, and calculable nature will be present. Spencer said the wisest thing in all his philosophy when he declared that "the saying that beauty is but skin deep, is but a skin-deep saying." 2
        For beauty in any human creature, being the result of a long and severe observance by his ancestors of a particular set of values, always denotes some definite attitude towards Life; it always lures to some particular kind of life and joy — as Stendhal said, "Beauty is a promise of

        1 T. I., Part 10, Aph. 20.
        2 Essays, Vol. II (1901 Edition), p. 394.


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happiness" — and as such it seduces to Life and to this earth.
        This explains why beauty is regarded with suspicion by negative religions, and why it tends to decline in places where the sway of a negative religion is powerful. Because a negative religion cannot tolerate that which lures to life, to the body, to joy and to voluptuous ecstasy.
        It is upon their notion of spiritual beauty, upon passive virtues, that the negative religions lay such stress, and thus they allow the ugly to find pedestals in their sanctuaries more easily than the beautiful.

8. The Ruler-Artist's Style and Subject.

        Up to the present, you have doubtless observed that I have spoken only of man as the proper subject-matter of the graphic Arts. In maintaining this, Nietzsche not only has Goethe and many lesser men on his side, but he has also the history of Art in general. I cannot, however, show you yet how, or in what manner, animal-painting, landscape-painting, and. in some respects, portrait-painting are to be placed lower than the art which concerns itself with man. Let it therefore suffice, for the present, simply to recognize the fact that Nietzsche did take up this attitude, and leave the more exhaustive discussion of it to the next part of this lecture.
        Now, eliminating for a moment all those pseudo-artists who have been reared by the two strongest public demands on the Art of the present age — I speak of portrait-painting and dining-room pictures

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— there remains a class of artists which still shows signs of raising its head here and there, though every year with less frequency, and this is the class which, for want of a better term, we call Ruler-artists.
        As I say, they are becoming extremely rare; their rarity, which may be easily accounted for, 1 is one of the evil omens of the time.
        The ruler-artist is he who, elated by his own health and love of Life, says "Yea" to his own type and proclaims his faith or confidence in it, against all other types; and who, in so doing, determines or accentuates the values of that type. If he prevails in concepts in so doing, he also ennobles and embellishes the type he is advocating.
        He is either the maker or the highest product of an aspiring and an ascending people. In him their highest values find their most splendid bloom. In him their highest values find their strongest spokesman. And in his work they find the symbol of their loftiest hopes.
        By the beauty which his soul reflects upon the selected men he represents in his works, he establishes an order of rank among his people, and puts each in his place.
        The spectator who is very much beneath the beauty of the ruler-artist's masterpieces feels his ignominious position at a glance. He realizes the impassable gulf that is for ever fixed between himself and that 1 And this sudden revelation tells him his level. Such a man, after he has contemplated the ruler-artist's work, may rush headlong

        1 G. E., p. 120.

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to the nearest river and drown himself. His despair may be so great when he realizes the impossibility of ever reaching the heights he has been contemplating, that he may immolate himself on the spot. Only thus can the world be purged of the many-too-many.
        "Unto many life is a failure," says Zarathustra, "a poisonous worm eating through into their heart. These ought to see to it that they succeed better in dying.
        "Many-too-many live. . . . Would that preachers of swift death might arise! They would be the proper storms to shake the trees of life." 1
        In the presence of beauty, alone, can one know one's true rank, and this explains why the Japanese declare that "until a man has made himself beautiful he has no right to approach beauty," 2 for "great art is that before which we long to die." 3
        But, to those who see but the smallest chance of approaching it, beauty is an exhortation, a stimulus, a bugle-call. It may drive them to means for pruning themselves of ugliness; it may urge them to inner harmony, to a suppression of intestinal discord.
        "Beauty alone should preach penitence," 4 says Zarathustra. And in this sentence you have the only utilitarian view of beauty that has any aristocratic value, besides that which maintains that beauty lures to Life, and to the body.
        Hence, beauty need not impel all men to the river. There are some who, after contemplating

        1 Z., I, XXI.
        2 The Book of Tea, p. 152.
        3 Ibid., p. 199.
        4 Z., I, XXVI.


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it, will feel just near enough to it not to despair altogether of attaining to its level, and this thought will lend them both hope and courage.
        The ruler-artist, therefore, in order that his subject-beauty may have some meaning, must be the synthesis of the past and the future of a people. Up to his waist in their spirit, he must mould or paint them the apotheosis of their type. Only thus can he hope to prevail with his subject — Man.
        The German philosopher, Karl Heinrich Heydenreich, was one of the first to recognize this power of the ruler-artist, and the necessity of his being intimately associated with a particular people, although above them; and in his little book, System der Æsthetik, he makes some very illuminating remarks on this matter. 1
        Thus Benedetto Croce rightly argues that in order to appreciate the artistic works of bygone and extinct nations, it is necessary to have a knowledge and understanding of their life and history — in other words, of their values. 2 What he does not

        1 System der Æsthetik (1790), pp. 9, 10, 11, where, in replying to the question why the arts were not only pursued with more perfection by the ancients, but also judged with more competence by them, he says: "Their material was drawn from the heart of their nation, and from the life of their citizens, and the manner of representing it and of framing it was in keeping with the character and needs of the people. . . . If the Greek lent his ear to the poet, or his eye to the painter and sculptor, of his age, he was shown subjects which were familiar to his soul, intimately related to his imagination, and, as it were, bound by blood-relationship to his heart." On pp. 12, 13, he also shows that if Art is less thrilling nowadays, it is because peoples are too mixed, and a single purpose no longer characterizes their striving.
        2 Æsthetic (translated by Douglas Ainslie), p. 210 et seq.


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point out, however, and what seems very important, is, that such historical research would be quite unnecessary to one who by nature was a priori in sympathy with the values of an extinct nation; and also, that all the historical knowledge available could not make any one whose character was not a little Periclean or Egyptian from the start, admire, or even appreciate, either the Parthenon, or the brilliant diorite statue of King Khephrën in the Cairo Museum.
        All great ruler-art, then, is, as it were, a song of praise, a magnificat, appealing only to those, and pleasing only those, who feel in sympathy with the values which it advocates. And that is why all art of any importance, and of any worth, must be based upon a certain group of values — in other words, must have a philosophy or a particular view of the world as its foundation. Otherwise it is pointless, meaningless, and divorced from life. Otherwise it is acting, sentimental nonsense, or l'art pour l'art.
        All great ruler-art also takes Man as its content; because human values are the only values that concern it. All great ruler-art also takes beauty within a certain people as its aim; because the will-to-power is its driving instinct, and beauty, being the most difficulty thing to achieve, is the strongest test of power. Finally, all great ruler-art is optimistic; because it implies the will of the artist to prevail.
        But what constitutes the form of the ruler-artist's work? In what way must he give us his content?

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        The ruler-artist's form is the form of the commander. It must scorn to please. 1 It must brook no disobedience and no insubordination, save among those of its beholders about whom it does not care, from whom it would fain separate itself, and among whom it is not with its peers. It must be authoritative, extremely simple, irrefutable, full of restraint, and as repetitive as a Mohammedan prayer. It must point to essentials, it must select essentials, and it must transfigure essentials. The presence of non-essentials in a work of art is sufficient to put it at once upon a very low plane. For what matters above all is that the ruler-artist should prevail in concepts, and in order to do this his work must contain the definite statement of the value he sets upon all that he most cherishes.
        Hence the belief all through the history of æsthetic that high art is a certain unity in variety, a certain single idea exhaled from a more or less complex whole, or, as the Japanese say, "repetition with a modicum of variation." 2

        1 W. P., Vol. II, p. 277: "The greatness of an artist is not to be measured by the beautiful feelings which he evokes: let this belief be left to the girls. It should be measured according to the extent to which he approaches the grand style, according to the extent to which he is capable of the grand style. This style and great passion have this in common — that they scorn to please; that they forget to persuade; that they command; that they will. . . ." See also p. 241.
        2 This was first brought to my notice by my friend, Dr. Wrench. See The Grammar of Life, by G. T. Wrench (Heinemann, 1908), p. 218. Although the development of this idea really belongs to a special treatise on the laws of Style in painting, it is interesting to note here that this excellent principle is quickly grasped if the powerfully alliterative phrases: "Where there's a will there's a way,"


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        Symmetry, as denoting balance, and as a help to obtaining a complete grasp of an idea; Sobriety, as revealing that restraint which a position of command presupposes; Simplicity, as proving the power of the great mind that has overcome the chaos in itself, 1 to reflect its order and harmony upon other things, 2 and to select the most essential features from among a host of more or less essential features; Transfiguration, as betraying that Dionysian elation and elevation from which the artist gives of himself to reality and makes it reflect his own glory back upon him; Repetition, as a means of obtaining obedience; and Variety, as the indispensable condition of all living Art — all Art which is hortatory and which does not aim at repose alone, at sleep, and at soothing and lulling jaded and exasperated nerves, — these are the principal qualities of ruler-art, and any work which would be deficient in one of these qualities would thereby be utterly and deservedly condemned to take its place on a lower plane.
        Perhaps the greatest test of all, however, in

or "Goodness gracious!" or "To-morrow, to-morrow, and not to-day" be spoken before certain pictures, or written beneath them The first phrase, for instance, written beneath the "Aldobrindini Marriage," or Botticelli's "Birth of Venus," is seen immediately to be next of kin to these pictures as an art-form; and the same holds good of the second written beneath Reynolds's "John Dunning (First Lord Ashburton) and his Sister," or Manet's "Olympia."
        1 W. P., Vol. II, p. 277.
        2 W. P., Vol. II, p. 288. "The most convincing artists are those who make harmony ring out of every discord, and who benefit all things by the gift of their power and their inner harmony: in every work of art they merely reveal the symbol of their inmost experiences — their creation is gratitude for their life." See also p 307.


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regard to the worth of an artistic production is to inquire whence it came, what was its source. Has hunger or superabundance created it? 1
        If the first, the work will make nobody richer. It will rather rob them of what they have. It is likely to be either (A) true to Nature, (B) uglier than Nature, or (C) absurdly unnatural. A is the product of the ordinary man, B is the product of the man below mediocrity, save in a certain manual dexterity, and C is the outcome of the tyrannical will of the sufferer, 2 who wishes to wreak his revenge on all that thrives, and is beautiful and happy, and which bids him weave fantastic worlds of his own, away from this one, where people of his calibre can forget their wretched ailments and evil humours, and wallow in their own feverish nightmares of overstrained, palpitating and neuropathic yearnings. A is poverty-realism or Police Art. B is pessimism and incompetent Art. C is Romanticism.
        Where superabundance is active, the work is the gift and the blessing of the will to power of some higher man. It will seem as much above Nature to mediocre people as its creator is above them. But, since it will brook no contradiction, it will actually value Nature afresh, and stimulate them to share in this new valuation.
        Where poverty is active, the work is an act of robbery. It is what psychologists call a reflex

        1 W. P., Vol. II, p. 280: "In regard to all æsthetic values I now avail myself of this fundamental distinction: in every individual case I ask myself has hunger or has superabundance been creative here?"
        2 W. P., Vol. II, p. 281.


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action resulting from a stimulus — the only kind of action that we understand nowadays: hence our belief in Determinism, Darwinism, and such explanations of Art as we find in books by Taine and other writers who share his views.
        The Art which must have experience and which is not the outcome of inner riches brought to the surface by meditation — this is the art of poverty. The general modern belief in experience and in the necessity of furnishing the mind by going direct to Nature and to reality shows to what extent the Art of to-day has become reactive instead of active.
        The greater part of modern realism is the outcome of this poverty. It is reactive art, resulting from reflex actions; and, as such, is an exceedingly unhealthy sign. Not only does it show that the power of resisting stimuli is waning or altogether absent; but it also denotes that that inner power which requires no stimulus to discharge itself is either lacking or exceedingly weak.
        With these words upon the subject of realism, I shall now conclude this part of Lecture II.
        I shall return to realism in my next lecture; but you will see that it will be of a different kind from that of which I have just spoken. It will be superior, and will be the outcome of riches rather than of poverty. Although beneath genuine Ruler-art, which transfigures reality, it will nevertheless be superior to the poverty-realism which I have just discussed; for it will be of a kind which is forced upon the powerful artist who, in the midst of a world upholding other values than his own,

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is obliged to bring forward his ideal with such a preponderance of characteristic features as would seem almost to represent a transcript of reality. This realism I call militant realism, to distinguish it from the former kind.
        In discussing mediæval. Renaissance and Greek Art, in my next lecture, this distinction will, I hope, be made quite plain to you.

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