Human, All Too Human Volume Ii Part 44

Hence literary style is quite different from colloquial style, and far more difficult, because it has to make itself as intelligible as the latter with fewer accessaries. Demosthenes delivered his speeches differently from what we read; he worked them up for reading purposes.-Cicero's speeches ought to be "demosthenised" with the same object, for at present they contain more of the Roman Forum than we can endure.

111.

CAUTION IN QUOTATION.-Young authors do not know that a good expression or idea only looks well among its peers; that an excellent quotation may spoil whole pages, nay the whole book; for it seems to cry warningly to the reader, "Mark you, I am the precious stone, and round about me is lead-pale, worthless lead!" Every word, every idea only desires to live in its own company-that is the moral of a choice style.

112.

HOW SHOULD ERRORS BE ENUNCIATED?-We may dispute whether it be more injurious for errors to be enunciated badly or as well as the best truths.

It is certain that in the former case they are doubly harmful to the brain and are less easily removed from it. But, on the other hand, they are not so certain of effect as in the latter case. They are, in fact, less contagious.

113.

LIMITING AND WIDENING.-Homer limited and diminished the horizon of his subject, but allowed individual scenes to expand and blossom out. Later, the tragedians are constantly renewing this process. Each takes his material in ever smaller and smaller fragments than his predecessor did, but each attains a greater wealth of blooms within the narrow hedges of these sequestered garden enclosures.

114.

LITERATURE AND MORALITY MUTUALLY EXPLANATORY.-We can show from Greek literature by what forces the Greek spirit developed, how it entered upon different channels, and where it became enfeebled. All this also depicts to us how Greek morality proceeded, and how all morality will proceed: how it was at first a constraint and displayed cruelty, then became gradually milder; how a pleasure in certain actions, in certain forms and conventions arose, and from this again a propensity for solitary exercise, for solitary possession; how the track becomes crowded and overcrowded with compet.i.tors; how satiety enters in, new objects of struggle and ambition are sought, and forgotten aims are awakened to life; how the drama is repeated, and the spectators become altogether weary of looking on, because the whole gamut seems to have been run through-and then comes a stoppage, an expiration, and the rivulets are lost in the sand. The end, or at any rate _an_ end, has come.

115.

WHAT LANDSCAPES GIVE PERMANENT DELIGHT.-Such and such a landscape has features eminently suited for painting, but I cannot find the formula for it; it remains beyond my grasp as a whole. I notice that all landscapes which please me permanently have a simple geometrical scheme of lines underneath all their complexity. Without such a mathematical substratum no scenery becomes artistically pleasing. Perhaps this rule may be applied symbolically to human beings.

116.

READING ALOUD.-The ability to read aloud involves of necessity the ability to declaim. Everywhere we must apply pale tints, but we must determine the degree of pallor in close relation to the richly and deeply coloured background, that always hovers before our eyes and acts as our guide-in other words, in accordance with the way in which we should _declaim_ the same pa.s.sages. That is why we must be able to declaim.

117.

THE DRAMATIC SENSE.-He who has not the four subtler senses of art tries to understand everything with the fifth sense, which is the coa.r.s.est of all-the dramatic sense.

118.

HERDER.-Herder fails to be all that he made people think he was and himself wished to think he was. He was no great thinker or discoverer, no newly fertile soil with the unexhausted strength of a virgin forest. But he possessed in the highest degree the power of scenting the future, he saw and picked the first-fruits of the seasons earlier than all others, and they then believed that he had made them grow. Between darkness and light, youth and age, his mind was like a hunter on the watch, looking everywhere for transitions, depressions, convulsions, the outward and visible signs of internal growth. The unrest of spring drove him to and fro, but he was himself not the spring.-At times, indeed, he had some inkling of this, and yet would fain not have believed it-he, the ambitious priest, who would have so gladly been the intellectual pope of his epoch!

This is his despair. He seems to have lived long as a pretender to several kingdoms or even to a universal monarchy. He had his following which believed in him, among others the young Goethe. But whenever crowns were really distributed, he was pa.s.sed over. Kant, Goethe, and then the first true German historians and scholars robbed him of what he thought he had reserved for himself (although in silence and secret he often thought the reverse). Just when he doubted in himself, he gladly clothed himself in dignity and enthusiasm: these were often in him mere garments, which had to hide a great deal and also to deceive and comfort him. He really had fire and enthusiasm, but his ambition was far greater! It blew impatiently at the fire, which flickered, crackled, and smoked-his _style_ flickers, crackles, and smokes-but he yearned for the great flame which never broke out. He did not sit at the table of the genuine creators, and his ambition did not admit of his sitting modestly among those who simply enjoy. Thus he was a restless spirit, the taster of all intellectual dishes, which were collected by the Germans from every quarter and every age in the course of half a century. Never really happy and satisfied, Herder was also too often ill, and then at times envy sat by his bed, and hypocrisy paid her visit as well. He always had an air of being scarred and crippled, and he lacked simple, stalwart manliness more completely than any of the so-called "cla.s.sical writers."

119.

SCENT OF WORDS.-Every word has its scent; there is a harmony and discord of scents, and so too of words.

120.

THE FAR-FETCHED STYLE.-The natural style is an offence to the lover of the far-fetched style.

121.

A VOW.-I will never again read an author of whom one can suspect that he _wanted_ to make a book, but only those writers whose thoughts unexpectedly became a book.

122.

THE ARTISTIC CONVENTION.-Three-fourths of Homer is convention, and the same is the case with all the Greek artists, who had no reason for falling into the modern craze for originality. They had no fear of convention, for after all convention was a link between them and their public. Conventions are the artistic means _acquired_ for the understanding of the hearer; the common speech, learnt with much toil, whereby the artist can really communicate his ideas. All the more when he wishes, like the Greek poets and musicians, to conquer at once with each of his works (since he is accustomed to compete publicly with one or two rivals), the first condition is that he must be understood at once, and this is only possible by means of convention. What the artist devises beyond convention he offers of his own free will and takes a risk, his success at best resulting in the setting-up of a new convention. As a rule originality is marvelled at, sometimes even wors.h.i.+pped, but seldom understood. A stubborn avoidance of convention means a desire not to be understood. What, then, is the object of the modern craze for originality?