On the suppression of the passions. – If one constantly forbids oneself the expression of the passions, as if that were something to be left for the ‘common’, coarser, middle-class, peasant types – i.e. if one wants to suppress not the passions themselves but only their language and gesture – one still attains in addition what one did not desire: the suppression of the passions themselves, at least their weakening and alteration – the most instructive example being furnished by the court of Louis XIV and everything that depended on it. The age that followed, brought up in the suppression of expression, no longer had the passions themselves and had in their place a graceful, shallow, playful manner – an age marked by an incapacity for bad manners, so that even an insult was accepted and returned with obliging words. Perhaps the present age supplies the most notable counterpart: everywhere, in life and on the stage, and not the least in everything written, I see the delight in all the coarser outbursts and gestures of passion: what is demanded these days is a certain convention of the passionate – but not passion itself! Nevertheless, eventually passion itself will be reached this way, and our progeny will be genuinely savage and not just savage and unruly in demeanour.