The modern artist who, in his physiology, is next of kin to the hysteric, may also be classified as a character belonging to this state of morbidness. The hysteric is false,--he lies from the love of lying, he is admirable in all the arts of dissimulation,--unless his morbid vanity hood-wink him. This vanity is like a perpetual fever which is in need of stupefying drugs, and which recoils from no self-deception and no farce that promises it the most fleeting satisfaction. (The incapacity for pride and the need of continual revenge for his deep-rooted self-contempt, this is almost the definition of this man's vanity.) The absurd irritability of his system, which makes a crisis out of every one of his experiences, and sees dramatic elements in the most insignificant occurrences of life, deprives him of all calm reflection; he ceases from being a personality, at most he is a rendezvous of personalities of which first one and then the other asserts itself with barefaced assurance. Precisely on this account he is great as an actor _i_ all these poor will-less people, whom doctors study so profoundly, astound one through their virtuosity in mimicking, in transfiguration, in their assumption of almost any character required. 814. Artists are not men of great passion, despite all their assertions to the contrary both to themselves and to others. And for the following two reasons: they lack all shyness towards themselves (they watch themselves live, they spy upon themselves, they are much too inquisitive), and they also lack shyness in the presence of passion (as artists they exploit it). Secondly, however, that vampire, their talent, generally forbids them such an expenditure of energy as passion demands.--A man, who has a talent is sacrificed to that talent; he lives under the vampirism of his talent. A man does not get rid of his passion by reproducing it, but rather he is rid of it if he is able to reproduce it. (Goethe teaches the reverse, but it seems as though he deliberately misunderstood himself here--from a sense of delicacy.) 815.