NIETZSCHE AND ART by ANTHONY M. LUDOVICI Author of 'Who is to be Master of the World?' "Rien n'est beau que le vrai, dit un vers respecté; et moi, je lui réponds, sans crainte d'un blasphème: Rien n'est vrai sans beauté." --Alfred de Musset. CONSTABLE & CO. LTD. LONDON 1911 [Illustration: Sekhet (Louvre)] Preface "We philosophers are never more delighted than when we are taken for artists."[1] In this book, which embodies a course of lectures delivered in a somewhat condensed and summarized form at University College, London, during November and December, 1910, I have done two things. I have propounded Nietzsche's general Art doctrine, and, with the view of illustrating it and of defining it further, I have also applied its leading principles to one of the main branches of Art. As this has not been done before, either in English or in any Continental language, my book is certainly not free from the crudeness and inadvertences which are inseparable from pioneer efforts of this nature. Nevertheless it is with complete confidence, and a deep conviction of its necessity, that I now see it go to print; for, even if here and there its adventurous spirit may ultimately require modification, I feel certain that, in the main, time itself, together with the help of other writers, will fully confirm its general thesis, if I should be unable to do so. Sooner or later it will be brought home to us in Europe that we cannot with impunity foster and cultivate vulgarity and mob qualities in our architecture, our sculpture, our painting, our music and literature, without paying very dearly for these luxuries in our respective national politics, in our family institutions, and even in our physique. To connect all these things together, and to show their inevitable interdependence, would be a perfectly possible though arduous undertaking. In any case, this is not quite the task I have set myself in this work. I have indeed shown that to bestow admiration on a work of extreme democratic painting and at the same time to be convinced of the value of an aristocratic order of society, is to be guilty of a confusion of ideas which ultimately can lead only to disastrous results in practical life; but further than this I have not gone, simply because the compass of these lectures did not permit of my so doing. Confining myself strictly to Nietzsche's æsthetic, I have been content merely to show that the highest Art, or Ruler Art, and therefore the highest beauty,--in which culture is opposed to natural rudeness, selection to natural chaos, and simplicity to natural complexity,--can be the flower and product only of an aristocratic society which, in its traditions and its active life, has observed, and continues to observe, the three aristocratic principles,--culture, selection and simplicity.