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If we cancel the suggestion of this intestinal fever from the lyric of tones and words, what is left to poetry and music? ... L'art pour l'art perhaps; the professional cant of frogs shivering outside in the cold, and dying of despair in their swamp.... Everything else was created by love.
809.
All art works like a suggestion on the muscles and the senses which were originally active in the ingenuous artistic man; its voice is only heard by artists—it speaks to this kind of man, whose constitution is attuned to such subtlety in sensitiveness. The concept "layman" is a misnomer. The deaf man is not a subdivision of the class, whose ears are sound. All art works as a tonic; it increases strength, it kindles desire (i.e. the feeling of strength), it excites all the more subtle recollections of intoxication; there is actually a special kind of memory which underlies such states—a distant flitful world of sensations here returns to being.
Ugliness is the contradiction of art. It is that which art excludes, the negation of art: wherever decline, impoverishment of life, impotence, decomposition, dissolution, are felt, however remotely, the sthetic man reacts with his No. Ugliness depresses: it is the sign of depression. It robs strength, it impoverishes, it weighs down, ... Ugliness suggests repulsive things. From one's[Pg 253] states of health one can test how an indisposition may increase one's power of fancying ugly things. One's selection of things, interests, and questions becomes different. Logic provides a state which is next of kin to ugliness: heaviness, bluntness. In the presence of ugliness equilibrium is lacking in a mechanical sense: ugliness limps and stumbles—the direct opposite of the godly agility of the dancer.
The sthetic state represents an overflow of means of communication as well as a condition of extreme sensibility to stimuli and signs. It is the zenith of communion and transmission between living creatures; it is the source of languages. In it, languages, whether of signs, sounds, or glances, have their birthplace. The richer phenomenon is always the beginning: our abilities are subtilised forms of richer abilities. But even to-day we still listen with our muscles, we even read with our muscles.
Every mature art possesses a host of conventions as a basis: in so far as it is a language. Convention is a condition of great art, not an obstacle to it.... Every elevation of life likewise elevates the power of communication, as also the understanding of man. The power of living in other people's souls originally had nothing to do with morality, but with a physiological irritability of suggestion: "sympathy," or what is called "altruism," is merely a product of that psycho-motor relationship which is reckoned as spirituality (psycho-motor induction, says Charles Fr). People never communicate a thought to one[Pg 254] another: they communicate a movement, an imitative sign which is then interpreted as a thought.
810.
Compared with music, communication by means of words is a shameless mode of procedure; words reduce and stultify; words make impersonal; words make common that which is uncommon.
811.
It is exceptional states that determine the artist—such states as are all intimately related and entwined with morbid symptoms, so that it would seem almost impossible to be an artist without being ill.
The physiological conditions which in the artist become moulded into a "personality," and which, to a certain degree, may attach themselves to any man:—
(1) Intoxication, the feeling of enhanced power; the inner compulsion to make things a mirror of one's own fulness and perfection.
(2) The extreme sharpness of certain senses, so that they are capable of understanding a totally different language of signs—and to create such a language (this is a condition which manifests itself in some nervous diseases); extreme susceptibility out of which great powers of communion are developed; the desire to speak on the part of everything that is capable of making-signs; a need of being rid of one's self by means of gestures[Pg 255] and attitudes; the ability of speaking about one's self in a hundred different languages—in fact, a state of explosion.
One must first imagine this condition as one in which there is a pressing and compulsory desire of ridding one's self of the ecstasy of a state of tension, by all kinds of muscular work and movement; also as an involuntary co-ordination of these movements with inner processes (images, thoughts, desires)—as a kind of automatism of the whole muscular system under the compulsion of strong stimuli acting from within; the inability to resist reaction; the apparatus of resistance is also suspended. Every inner movement (feeling, thought, emotion) is accompanied by vascular changes, and consequently by changes in colour, temperature, and secretion. The suggestive power of music, its "suggestion mentale."
(3) The compulsion to imitate: extreme irritability, by means of which a certain example becomes contagious—a condition is guessed and represented merely by means of a few signs.... A complete picture is visualised by one's inner consciousness, and its effect soon shows itself in the movement of the limbs,—in a certain suspension of the will (Schopenhauer!!!!). A sort of blindness and deafness towards the external world,—the realm of admitted stimuli is sharply defined.
This differentiates the artist from the layman (from the spectator of art): the latter reaches the height of his excitement in the mere act of apprehending: the former in giving—and in such a way that the antagonism between these two gifts is not[Pg 256] only natural but even desirable. Each of these states has an opposite standpoint—to demand of the artist that he should have the point of view of the spectator (of the critic) is equivalent to asking him to impoverish his creative power.... In this respect the same difference holds good as that which exists between the sexes: one should not ask the artist who gives to become a woman—to "receive."
Our sthetics have hitherto been women's sthetics, inasmuch as they have only formulated the experiences of what is beautiful, from the point of view of the receivers in art. In the whole of philosophy hitherto the artist has been lacking ... i.e. as we have already suggested, a necessary fault: for the artist who would begin to understand himself would therewith begin to mistake himself—he must not look backwards, he must not look at all; he must give.—It is an honour for an artist to have no critical faculty; if he can criticise he is mediocre, he is modern.
812.
Here I lay down a series of psychological states as signs of flourishing and complete life, which to-day we are in the habit of regarding as morbid. But, by this time, we have broken ourselves of the habit of speaking of healthy and morbid as opposites: the question is one of degree, what I maintain on this point is that what people call healthy nowadays represents a lower level of that which under favourable circumstances actually would be healthy—that we are relatively sick....
The artist belongs to a much stronger race. That which in us would be harmful and sickly, is natural in him. But people object to this that it is precisely the impoverishment of the machine which renders this extraordinary power of comprehending every kind of suggestion possible: e.g. our hysterical females.
