fare[1]—extended preparatory notes for the book are to be found in his published remains.[2] He did not, of course, completely identify the general with the particular—he still feels the greatness of the real genius,[3] sees the place of the poet, and gives a beautiful picture of the poetry of the future (as contrasted with the unripeness and excess mistaken for force and nature now),[4] is not even without appreciation for music of the right sort;[5] c but in general, art recedes into the background of his thought, and the realities of the world are faced in their unrelieved somberness and bareness.
We might expect that in such circumstances Nietzsche would become pessimist absolutely. But this was not the case. He still has the Dionysiac will to live against whatever odds (though saying little of Dionysus); he has even a certain pleasure in probing life, partly to prove what he can endure and come out victorious over, and partly for the mere sake of knowing, the joy of energizing his intellectual self. In a most interesting preface to second editions of Mixed Opinions and Sayings and The Wanderer and his Shadow written some years later, he explains his peculiar type of pessimism. It was a pessimism which does not fear the terrible and problematical in existence, but rather seeks it; it is the antithesis of the pessimism of life-weariness, as truly as of all romantic illusion; it is a brave pessimism, a pessimism that has a good will to pessimism,[6] i.e., as I should say, it is practically not pessimism at all. We have seen Nietzsche ready at the start to justify any kind of a world—no matter how irrational and unmoral—which could be æsthetically treated and turned into a picture; and we now find him ready to justify any kind of a world that can be turned into an object of knowledge. He thinks there is easement in this attitude too. We can transcend whatever is painful in experience by an objective contemplation in which pain has no part and the pleasure of knowing alone is felt, as
- ↑ See note b to chap, vi of this volume.
- ↑ Werke, XI, 81-102; more fully in the pocket ed., IV, 436-70.
- ↑ Mixed Opinions etc., §§ 378, 407.
- ↑ Ibid., §§ 99, 111. He is severe against "naturalistic" poetry, saying that the poets of great cities live too near "the sewers."
- ↑ Cf. Dawn of Day, § 461, on the possibilities of a new music, "unschuldige Musik," i.e., genuinely lyric.
- ↑ See §§ 3-7 of the preface alluded to.
