The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
826.
False "accentuation": (1) In romanticism, this unremitting "_expressivo_" is not a sign of strength, but of a feeling of deficiency; (2) Picturesque music, the so-called dramatic kind, is above all easier (as is also the brutal scandalmongering and the juxtaposition of facts and traits in realistic novels); (3) "Passion" as a matter of nerves and exhausted souls; likewise the delight in high mountains, deserts, storms, orgies, and disgusting details,--in bulkiness and massiveness (historians, for instance); as a matter of fact, there is actually a cult of exaggerated feelings (how is it that in stronger ages art desired just the opposite--a restraint of passion?); (4) The preference for exciting materials (_Erotica_ or _Socialistica_ or _Pathologica_): all these things are the signs of the style of public that is being catered for to-day--that is to say, for overworked, absentminded, or enfeebled people. Such people must be tyrannised over in order to be affected. Modern art is the art of tyrannising. A coarse and salient definiteness in delineation; the motive simplified into a formula; formulæ tyrannise. Wild arabesques within the lines; overwhelming masses, before which the senses are confused; brutality in coloration, in subject-matter, in the desires. Examples: Zola, Wagner, and, in a more spiritualised degree, Taine. Hence logic, massiveness, and brutality.
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