Free eBooks at Planet eBook.com PERCEIVED—or he even conceals his silence by expressly
assenting to some plausible opinion. Perhaps the paradox of
his situation becomes so dreadful that, precisely where he
has learnt GREAT SYMPATHY, together with great CON-
TEMPT, the multitude, the educated, and the visionaries,
have on their part learnt great reverence—reverence for
‘great men’ and marvelous animals, for the sake of whom
one blesses and honours the fatherland, the earth, the dig-
nity of mankind, and one’s own self, to whom one points
the young, and in view of whom one educates them. And
who knows but in all great instances hitherto just the same
happened: that the multitude worshipped a God, and that
the ‘God’ was only a poor sacrificial animal! SUCCESS has
always been the greatest liar—and the ‘work’ itself is a suc-
cess; the great statesman, the conqueror, the discoverer, are
disguised in their creations until they are unrecognizable;
the ‘work’ of the artist, of the philosopher, only invents him
who has created it, is REPUTED to have created it; the ‘great
men,’ as they are reverenced, are poor little fictions com-
posed afterwards; in the world of historical values spurious
coinage PREVAILS. Those great poets, for example, such as
Byron, Musset, Poe, Leopardi, Kleist, Gogol (I do not ven-
ture to mention much greater names, but I have them in
my mind), as they now appear, and were perhaps obliged to
be: men of the moment, enthusiastic, sensuous, and child-
ish, light- minded and impulsive in their trust and distrust;
with souls in which usually some flaw has to be concealed;
often taking revenge with their works for an internal defile-
ment, often seeking forgetfulness in their soaring from a