r stating the fact that even Goethe's prose, in its mixture of
stiffness and elegance, is no exception, as a reflection of the "good
old time" to which it belongs, and as an expression of German taste at a
time when there was still a "German taste," which was a rococo-taste
in moribus et artibus. Lessing is an exception, owing to his histrionic
nature, which understood much, and was versed in many things; he who was
not the translator of Bayle to no purpose, who took refuge willingly in
the shadow of Diderot and Voltaire, and still more willingly among the
Roman comedy-writers--Lessing loved also free-spiritism in the TEMPO,
and flight out of Germany. But how could the German language, even
in the prose of Lessing, imitate the TEMPO of Machiavelli, who in his
"Principe" makes us breathe the dry, fine air of Florence, and cannot
help presenting the most serious events in a boisterous allegrissimo,
perhaps not without a malicious artistic sense of the contrast he
ventures to present--long, heavy, difficult, dangerous thoughts, and
a TEMPO of the gallop, and of the best, wantonest humour? Finally, who
would venture on a German translation of Petronius, who, more than any
great musician hitherto, was a master of PRESTO in invention, ideas, and
words? What matter in the end about the swamps of the sick, evil world,
or of the "ancient world," when like him, one has the feet of a wind,
the rush, the breath, the emancipating scorn of a wind, which makes
everything healthy, by making everything RUN! And with regard to
Aristophanes--that transfiguring, complementary genius, for whose
sake one PARDONS all Hellenism for having existed, provided one has
understood in its full profundity ALL that there requires pardon and
transfiguration; there is nothing that has caused me to meditate more on
PLATO'S secrecy and sphinx-like nature, than the happily preserved petit
fait that under the pillow of his death-bed there was found no
"Bible," nor anything Egyptian, Pythagorean, or Platonic--but a book of
Aristophanes. How could even Plato have endured life--a Greek life which
he repudiated--without an Aristophanes!

29. It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is a
privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it, even with the best
right, but without being OBLIGED to do so, proves that he is probably
not only strong, but also daring beyond measure. He enters into a
labyrinth, he multiplies a thousandfold the dangers which li