Volume Ii Part 13 (1/2)
HOW ART MAKES PARTISANS.-Individual fine pa.s.sages, an exciting general tenor, a moving and absorbing finale-so much of a work of art is accessible even to most laymen. In an art period when it is desired to win over the great majority of the laymen to the side of the artists and to make a party perhaps for the very preservation of art, the creative artist will do well to offer nothing more than the above. Then he will not be a squanderer of his strength, in spheres where no one is grateful to him.
For to perform the remaining functions, the imitation of Nature in her organic development and growth, would in that case be like sowing seeds in water.
147.
BECOMING GREAT TO THE DETRIMENT OF HISTORY.-Every later master who leads the taste of art-lovers into his channel unconsciously gives rise to a selection and revaluation of the older masters and their works. Whatever in them is conformable and akin to him, and antic.i.p.ates and foreshadows him, appears henceforth as the only important element in them and their works-a fruit in which a great error usually lies hidden like a worm.
148.
HOW AN EPOCH BECOMES LURED TO ART.-If we teach people by all the enchantments of artists and thinkers to feel reverence for their defects, their intellectual poverty, their absurd infatuations and pa.s.sions (as it is quite possible to do); if we show them only the lofty side of crime and folly, only the touching and appealing element in weakness and flabbiness and blind devotion (that too has often enough been done):-we have employed the means for inspiring even an unphilosophical and inartistic age with an ecstatic love of philosophy and art (especially of thinkers and artists as personalities) and, in the worst case, perhaps with the only means of defending the existence of such tender and fragile beings.
149.
CRITICISM AND JOY.-Criticism, one-sided and unjust as well as intelligent criticism, gives so much pleasure to him who exercises it that the world is indebted to every work and every action that inspires much criticism and many critics. For criticism draws after it a glittering train of joyousness, wit, self-admiration, pride, instruction, designs of improvement.-The G.o.d of joy created the bad and the mediocre for the same reason that he created the good.
150.
BEYOND HIS LIMITS.-When an artist wants to be more than an artist-for example, the moral awakener of his people-he at last falls in love, as a punishment, with a monster of moral substance. The Muse laughs, for, though a kind-hearted G.o.ddess, she can also be malignant from jealousy.
Milton and Klopstock are cases in point.
151.
A GLa.s.s EYE.-The tendency of a talent towards moral subjects, characters, motives, towards the ”beautiful soul” of the work of art, is often only a gla.s.s eye put on by the artist who lacks a beautiful soul. It may result, though rarely, that his eye finally becomes living Nature, if indeed it be Nature with a somewhat troubled look. But the ordinary result is that the whole world thinks it sees Nature where there is only cold gla.s.s.
152.