A romanticist is an artist whose great dissatisfaction with himself makes him productive--; who looks away from himself and his fellows, and sometimes, therefore, looks backwards. 845. Is art the result of dissatisfaction with reality? or is it the expression of gratitude for happiness experienced? In the first case, it is romanticism; in the second, it is glorification and dithyramb (in short, apotheosis art): even Raphael belongs to this, except for the fact that he was guilty of the duplicity of having defied the appearance of the Christian view of the world. He was thankful for life precisely where it was not exactly Christian. With a moral interpretation the world is insufferable; Christianity was the attempt to overcome the world with morality: _i.e._ to deny it. _In praxi_ such a mad experiment--an imbecile elevation of man above the world--could only end in the beglooming, the dwarfing, and the impoverishment of mankind: the only kind of man who gained anything by it, who was promoted by it, was the most mediocre, the most harmless and gregarious type. Homer as an apotheosis artist; Rubens also. Music has not yet had such an artist. The idealisation of the great criminal (the feeling for his greatness) is Greek; the depreciation, the slander, the contempt of the sinner, is Judæo-Christian. 846. Romanticism and its opposite. In regard to all æsthetic values I now avail myself of this fundamental distinction: in every individual case I ask myself has hunger or has superabundance been creative here? At first another distinction might perhaps seem preferable, it is far more obvious,--_e.g._ the distinction which decides whether a desire for stability, for eternity, for Being, or whether a desire for destruction, for change, for Becoming, has been the cause of creation. But both kinds of desire, when examined more closely, prove to be ambiguous, and really susceptible of interpretation only according to that scheme already mentioned and which I think is rightly preferred. The desire for destruction, for change, for Becoming, may be the expression of an overflowing power pregnant with promises for the future (my term for this, as is well known, is Dionysian); it may, however, also be the hate of the ill-constituted, of the needy and of the physiologically botched, that destroys, and must destroy, because such creatures are indignant at, and annoyed by everything lasting and stable.