. . .Those men whose productive impulse has been checked or killed by historical studies were already so impotent and ineffective that the world would not have been enriched by their productions. And moreover, what paralyses is not so much the heterogeneous mass of dead historical learning (about the actions of governments, political chess-moves, military achievements, artistic styles, etc.), as the knowledge of certain great minds of the past, by the side of whose production anything that can be shown by a man now living appears so insignificant as to make it a matter of indifference whether his work sees the light or not. Goethe alone is enough to reduce a young German poet to despair. But a hero-worshipper like Nietzsche cannot consistently desire to curtail our knowledge of the greatest.

The want of artistic courage and intellectual boldness has certainly deeper-lying causes; above all, the disintegration of the individuality which the modern order of society invo. . . Read More