ry one conscious of CREATIVE powers and an artist's
conscience will look down upon with scorn, though not without sympathy.
Sympathy for you!--to be sure, that is not sympathy as you understand
it: it is not sympathy for social "distress," for "society" with its
sick and misfortuned, for the hereditarily vicious and defective who lie
on the ground around us; still less is it sympathy for the grumbling,
vexed, revolutionary slave-classes who strive after power--they call it
"freedom." OUR sympathy is a loftier and further-sighted sympathy:--we
see how MAN dwarfs himself, how YOU dwarf him! and there are moments
when we view YOUR sympathy with an indescribable anguish, when we resist
it,--when we regard your seriousness as more dangerous than any kind
of levity. You want, if possible--and there is not a more foolish "if
possible"--TO DO AWAY WITH SUFFERING; and we?--it really seems that WE
would rather have it increased and made worse than it has ever been!
Well-being, as you understand it--is certainly not a goal; it seems
to us an END; a condition which at once renders man ludicrous and
contemptible--and makes his destruction DESIRABLE! The discipline
of suffering, of GREAT suffering--know ye not that it is only THIS
discipline that has produced all the elevations of humanity hitherto?
The tension of soul in misfortune which communicates to it its energy,
its shuddering in view of rack and ruin, its inventiveness and bravery
in undergoing, enduring, interpreting, and exploiting misfortune, and
whatever depth, mystery, disguise, spirit, artifice, or greatness has
been bestowed upon the soul--has it not been bestowed through suffering,
through the discipline of great suffering? In man CREATURE and CREATOR
are united: in man there is not only matter, shred, excess, clay, mire,
folly, chaos; but there is also the creator, the sculptor, the hardness
of the hammer, the divinity of the spectator, and the seventh day--do
ye understand this contrast? And that YOUR sympathy for the "creature
in man" applies to that which has to be fashioned, bruised, forged,
stretched, roasted, annealed, refined--to that which must necessarily
SUFFER, and IS MEANT to suffer? And our sympathy--do ye not understand
what our REVERSE sympathy applies to, when it resists your sympathy as
the worst of all pampering and enervation?--So it is sympathy AGAINST
sympathy!--But to repeat it once more, there are higher problems than
the problems of pleasure and