[922W-{3-7/78} Public and Popularity: PW Vol. VI, p. 66-67]
[P. 66] [FEUER} “ … how is a man to proceed, who feels bound to appeal to this naïve receptivity [of the German public], when experience tells him that it is the very thing the majority of playwrights also count on and exploit in favour of the Bad? With them prevails the maxim ‘mundus vult decipi,’ which my great friend Franz Liszt once playfully turned into ‘mundus vult schundus.’ [* Translator’s Footnote: ‘Schund’ – ‘garbage’] Who abjures that maxim, having neither an interest nor a pleasure in duping the public, would therefore probably do better – for so long as he is granted the leisure to belong entirely to himself – to leave the public altogether out of view; the less he thinks of this, and devotes himself entirely to his work, as from the depths of his own soul will there arise for him an Ideal Public … .
{FEUER} Thus is born … what alone we can [P. 67] term the Good in art. ‘Tis exactly like the Morally good, for this, as well, can spring from no intention, no concern. On the contrary, we might define the Bad as the sheer aim-to-please both summoning up the picture and governing its execution. As we have had to accord our public no developed sense of artistic form, and hardly anything beyond a highly varying receptivity, aroused by the very desire of entertainment, so we must recognise the work that merely aims at exploiting this desire as certainly bare of any value in itself, and closely approaching the category of the morally-bad in so far as it makes for profit from the most questionable attributes of the crowd.” [922W-{3-7/78} Public and Popularity: PW Vol. VI, p. 66-67]
[923W-{3-7/78} Public and Popularity: PW Vol. VI, p. 73-74]
[P. 73] {anti-FEUER/NIET} “So much for the utilitarian round of our Academic officialdom. Close by, however, there runs another, with claims to quite an ideal use, from whose correct accomplishment the academician promises the healing of all the world: here reign pure Science and its eternal Progress. Both are committed to the ‘Philosophic faculty,’ in which Philology and Natural Science are included. Indeed that ‘progress’ on which our governments expend so much, is furnished almost solely by the various sections of Natural Science; and here, if we mistake not, stands Chemistry at top. (…) On Philosophy proper, however, the accumulating discoveries of Physics, above all of the same Chemistry, react as veritable charms, from which every poor Philology may draw her ample share of profit. (…) From Physical Science, however, especially when they foregather on the field of Aesthetics, both philologists and philosophists obtain peculiar encouragement, nay obligation, to an as yet illimitable progress in the art of criticising all things human and inhuman. [* Translator’s Footnote: ‘Alluding to F. Nietzsche’s ‘Menschliches, Allzumenschliches’ – ‘Human, All-too-human’ – first published in May 1878; the two immediately succeeding sentences, and the last of this paragraph, are peculiarly applicable to the ‘case of’ Nietzsche.’] It seems, to wit, that from that science’s [P. 74] experiments they derive profound authority for an altogether special skepsis … which ensures them their appointed share in the general everlasting Progress. (…) In lesser cases such a thing may become amusing, for instance when one Aesthete forbids the creation of types, and the next re-grants that privilege to poets. ‘Tis graver where all Greatness in general, and the so highly objectionable ‘genius’ in particular, is dubbed pernicious, nay, the entire idea of Genius cast overboard as a radical error.
{anti-FEUER/NIET} This is the outcome of the newest scientific method, which dubs itself in general the ‘historical school.’ “ [923W-{3-7/78} Public and Popularity: PW Vol. VI, p. 73-74]
