Human, All Too Human Volume Ii Part 46

135.

CHOICE IDEAS.-The choice style of a momentous period does not only select its words but its ideas-and both from the customary and prevailing usage.

Venturesome ideas, that smell too fresh, are to the maturer taste no less repugnant than new and reckless images and phrases. Later on both choice ideas and choice words soon smack of mediocrity, because the scent of the choice vanishes quickly, and then nothing but the customary and commonplace element is tasted.

136.

MAIN REASON FOR CORRUPTION OF STYLE.-The desire to display more sentiment than one really feels for a thing corrupts style, in language and in all art. All great art shows rather the opposite tendency. Like every man of moral significance, it loves to check emotion on its way and not let it run its course to the very end. This modesty of letting emotion but half appear is most clearly to be observed, for example, in Sophocles. The features of sentiment seem to become beautified when sentiment feigns to be more shy than it really is.

137.

AN EXCUSE FOR THE HEAVY STYLE.-The lightly uttered phrase seldom falls on the ear with the full weight of the subject. This is, however, due to the bad training of the ear, which by education must pa.s.s from what has. .h.i.therto been called music to the school of the higher harmony-in other words, to conversation.

138.

BIRD'S-EYE VIEWS.-Here torrents rush from every side into a ravine: their movement is so swift and stormy, and carries the eye along so quickly, that the bare or wooded mountain slopes around seem not to sink down but to fly down. We are in an agonised tension at the sight, as if behind all this were hidden some hostile element, before which all must fly, and against which the abyss alone gave protection. This landscape cannot be painted, unless we hover above it like a bird in the open air. Here for once the so-called bird's-eye view is not an artistic caprice, but the sole possibility.

139.

RASH COMPARISONS.-If rash comparisons are not proofs of the wantonness of the writer, they are proofs of the exhaustion of his imagination. In any case they bear witness to his bad taste.

140.

DANCING IN CHAINS.-In the case of every Greek artist, poet, or writer we must ask: What is the new constraint which he imposes upon himself and makes attractive to his contemporaries, so as to find imitators? For the thing called "invention" (in metre, for example) is always a self-imposed fetter of this kind. "Dancing in chains"-to make that hard for themselves and then to spread a false notion that it is easy-that is the trick that they wish to show us. Even in Homer we may perceive a wealth of inherited formulae and laws of epic narration, within the circle of which he had to dance, and he himself created new conventions for them that came after.

This was the discipline of the Greek poets: first to impose upon themselves a manifold constraint by means of the earlier poets; then to invent in addition a new constraint, to impose it upon themselves and cheerfully to overcome it, so that constraint and victory are perceived and admired.

141.

AUTHORS' COPIOUSNESS.-The last quality that a good author acquires is copiousness: whoever has it to begin with will never become a good author.

The n.o.blest racehorses are lean until they are permitted to rest from their victories.

142.

WHEEZING HEROES.-Poets and artists who suffer from a narrow chest of the emotions generally make their heroes wheeze. They do not know what easy breathing means.

143.

THE SHORT-SIGHTED.(22)-The short-sighted are the deadly foes of all authors who let themselves go. These authors should know the wrath with which these people shut the book in which they observe that its creator needs fifty pages to express five ideas. And the cause of their wrath is that they have endangered what remains of their vision almost without compensation. A short-sighted person said, "All authors let themselves go." "Even the Holy Ghost?" "Even the Holy Ghost." But he had a right to, for he wrote for those who had lost their sight altogether.

144.

THE STYLE OF IMMORTALITY.-Thucydides and Tacitus both imagined immortal life for their works when they executed them. That might be guessed (if not known otherwise) from their style. The one thought to give permanence to his ideas by salting them, the other by boiling them down; and neither, it seems, made a miscalculation.

145.

AGAINST IMAGES AND SIMILES.-By images and similes we convince, but we do not prove. That is why science has such a horror of images and similes.

Science does not want to convince or make plausible, and rather seeks to provoke cold distrust by its mode of expression, by the bareness of its walls. For distrust is the touchstone for the gold of certainty.

146.

CAUTION.-In Germany, he who lacks thorough knowledge should beware of writing. The good German does not say in that case "he is ignorant," but "he is of doubtful character."-This hasty conclusion, by the way, does great credit to the Germans.