On theatre. – This day I had strong and elevated feelings again, and if on its eve I could have music and art, I know very well what music and art I would not like to have, namely, the kind that tries to intoxicate its audience and drive it to the height of a moment of strong and elevated feelings – an art for those everyday souls who in the evening look not like victors on triumphal chariots but rather like tired mules who have been whipped somewhat too often by life. What would those people know of ‘higher moods’ were there no intoxicating substances and whip-lashes of ideals! – and so they have their inspirers as they have their wines. But what is their drink and their drunkenness to me! What is wine to the inspired! He looks instead with a sort of disgust at the means and the mediators that are supposed to produce an effect without sufficient reason – aping the high tide of the soul! What? One gives the mole wings and proud conceits – before bedtime, before he crawls into his hole? One sends him to the theatre and puts big glasses before his blind and tired eyes? People whose lives are not a ‘dramatic action’ but a business sit before the stage and look at strange creatures for whom life is more than a business? ‘It’s proper that way’, you say; ‘it’s entertaining that way; it’s culture!’ Well then! In that case I all too often lack culture, for this sight is all too often disgusting to me. Whoever has enough tragedy and comedy in himself probably does best to stay away from the theatre; or, should there be an exception, the entire event – including theatre and audience and poet – becomes the actual tragic and comic spectacle to him, so that the piece that is performed means little to him by comparison. What do the Fausts and Manfreds30 of the theatre matter to someone who is himself somewhat like Faust and Manfred? – whereas the fact that such figures are brought on stage is certainly something for him to think about. The strongest thoughts and passions are there presented before those who are capable not of thought and passion – but of intoxication! And the former as a means to the latter! And theatre and music as the hashish-smoking and betel-chewing of the European! Oh, who will tell us the entire history of narcotics? – It is nearly the history of ‘culture’, our so-called higher culture!