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But the same contrast exists between the dream state and the state of intoxication; both of these states let loose all manner of artistic powers within us, but each unfetters powers of a different kind. Dreamland gives us the power of vision, of association, of poetry: intoxication gives us the power of grand attitudes, of passion, of song, and of dance.

799.

Sexuality and voluptuousness belong to the Dionysiac intoxication: but neither of them is lacking in the Apollonian state. There is also a difference of tempo between the states.... The extreme peace of certain feelings of intoxication (or, more strictly, the slackening of the feeling of time, and the reduction of the feeling of space) is wont to reflect itself in the vision of the most restful attitudes and states of the soul. The classical style essentially represents repose, simplification, foreshortening, and concentration—the highest feeling of power is concentrated in the classical type. To react with difficulty: great consciousness: no feeling of strife.

800.

The feeling of intoxication is, as a matter of fact, equivalent to a sensation of surplus power: it is strongest in seasons of rut: new organs, new accomplishments, new colours, new forms. Embellishment is an outcome of increased power. Embellishment is merely an expression of a triumphant will, of an increased state of co-ordination, of a harmony of all the strong desires, of an infallible and perpendicular equilibrium. Logical and geometrical simplification is the result of an increase of power: conversely, the mere aspect of such a simplification increases the sense of power in the beholder.... The zenith of development: the grand style.

Ugliness signifies the decadence of a type:[Pg 242] contradiction and faulty co-ordination among the inmost desires—this means a decline in the organising power, or, psychologically speaking, in the will. The condition of pleasure which is called intoxication is really an exalted feeling of power. ... Sensations of space and time are altered; inordinate distances are traversed by the eye, and only then become visible; the extension of the vision over greater masses and expanses; the refinement of the organ which apprehends the smallest and most elusive things; divination, the power of understanding at the slightest hint, at the smallest suggestion; intelligent sensitiveness; strength as a feeling of dominion in the muscles, as agility and love of movement, as dance, as levity and quick time; strength as the love of proving strength, as bravado, adventurousness, fearlessness, indifference in regard to life and death.... All these elated moments of life stimulate each other; the world of images and of imagination of the one suffices as a suggestion for the other: in this way states finally merge into each other, which might do better to keep apart, e.g. the feeling of religious intoxication and sexual irritability (two very profound feelings, always wonderfully co-ordinated. What is it that pleases almost all pious women, old or young? Answer: a saint with beautiful legs, still young, still innocent). Cruelty in tragedy and pity (likewise normally correlated). Spring-time, dancing, music, —all these things are but the display of one sex before the other,—as also that "infinite yearning of the heart" peculiar to Faust.

[Pg 243]

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 sthetic state. The[Pg 244] 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;[Pg 245] 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.

804.

The biological value of beauty and ugliness. That which we feel instinctively opposed to us sthetically is, according to the longest experience of mankind, felt to be harmful, dangerous, and worthy of suspicion: the sudden utterance of the sthetic instinct, e.g. in the case of loathing, implies an act of judgment. To this extent beauty lies within the general category of the biological values, useful, beneficent, and life-promoting: thus, a host of stimuli which for ages have been associated with, and remind us of, useful things and conditions, give us the feeling of beauty, i.e. the increase of the feeling of power (not only things, therefore, but the sensations which are associated with such things or their symbols).[Pg 246] In this way beauty and ugliness are recognised as determined by our most fundamental self-preservative values. Apart from this, it is nonsense to postulate anything as beautiful or ugly. Absolute beauty exists just as little as absolute goodness and truth. In a particular case it is a matter of the self-preservative conditions of a certain type of man: thus the gregarious man will have quite a different feeling for beauty from the exceptional or super-man.