Part 16

The men I have regarded with the most loathing, heretofore, are the parasites of intellect: they are to be found everywhere, already, in our modern Europe, and as a matter of fact their conscience is as light as it possibly can be. They may be a little turbid, and savour somewhat of Pessimism, but in the main they are voracious, dirty, dirtying, stealthy, insinuating, light-fingered gentry, scabby--and as innocent as all small sinners and microbes are. They live at the expense of those who have intellect and who distribute it liberally: they know that it is peculiar to the rich mind to live in a disinterested fashion, without taking too much petty thought for the morrow, and to distribute its wealth prodigally. For intellect is a bad domestic economist, and pays no heed whatever to the fact that everything lives on it and devours it.

78.

MODERN MUMMERY

The motleyness of modern men and its charm Essentially a mask and a sign of boredom.

The journalist.

The political man (in the "national swindle").

Mummery in the arts:--

The lack of honesty in preparing and schooling oneself for them (Fromentin);

The Romanticists (their lack of philosophy and science and their excess in literature);

The novelists (Walter Scott, but also the monsters of the Nibelung, with their inordinately nervous music);

The lyricists.

"Scientifically."

Virtuosos (Jews).

The popular ideals are overcome, but not yet in the presence of the people:

The saint, the sage, the prophet.

79.

The want of discipline in the modern spirit concealed beneath all kinds of moral finery.--The show-words are: Toleration (for the "incapacity of saying yes or no"); la largeur de sympathie (= a third of indifference, a third of curiosity, and a third of morbid susceptibility); "objectivity" (the lack of personality and of will, and the inability to "love"); "freedom" in regard to the rule (Romanticism); "truth" as opposed to falsehood and lying (Naturalism); the "scientific spirit" (the "human document": or, in plain English, the serial story which means "addition"--instead of "composition"); "passion" in the place of disorder and intemperance; "depth" in the place of confusion and the pell-mell of symbols.

80.

Concerning the criticism of big words.--I am full of mistrust and malice towards what is called "ideal": this is my Pessimism, that I have recognised to what extent "sublime sentiments" are a source of evil--that is to say, a belittling and depreciating of man.

Every time "progress" is expected to result from an ideal, disappointment invariably follows; the triumph of an ideal has always been a retrograde movement.

Christianity, revolution, the abolition of slavery, equal rights, philanthropy, love of peace, justice, truth: all these big words are only valuable in a struggle, as banners: not as realities, but as show-words, for something quite different (yea, even quite opposed to what they mean!).

81.

The kind of man is known who has fallen in love with the sentence "tout comprendre à est tout pardonner" It is the weak and, above all, the disillusioned: if there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to contemn! It is the philosophy of disappointment, which here swathes itself so humanly in pity, and gazes out so sweetly.

They are Romanticists, whose faith has gone to pot: now they at least wish to look on and see how everything vanishes and fades. They call it l'art pour l'art, "objectivity," etc.

82.

The main symptoms of Pessimism:--Dinners at Magny's; Russian Pessimism (Tolstoy, Dostoiewsky); æsthetic Pessimism, l'art pour l'art, "description" (the romantic and the anti-romantic Pessimism); Pessimism in the theory of knowledge (Schopenhauer: phenomenalism); anarchical Pessimism; the "religion of pity," Buddhistic preparation; the Pessimism of culture (exoticness, cosmopolitanism); moral Pessimism, myself.

83.

"Without the Christian Faith" said Pascal, "you would yourselves be like nature and history, un monstre et un chaos." We fulfilled this prophecy: once the weak and optimistic eighteenth century had embellished and rationalised man.