On the problem of the actor. – The problem of the actor has troubled me for a very long time; I was unsure (and still sometimes am) whether it is only from this angle that one can approach the dangerous concept of the ‘artist’ – a concept that has heretofore been treated with unpardonable generosity. Falseness with a good conscience; the delight in pretence erupting as a power that pushes aside, floods, and at times extinguishes one’s so-called ‘character’; the inner longing for a role and mask, for an appearance (Schein); an excess of capacities for all kinds of adaptation that can no longer be satisfied in the service of the nearest, most narrowly construed utility – perhaps all of this is distinctive not only of the actor? Such an instinct will have developed most easily in lower-class families who had to survive under fluctuating pressures and coercions, in deep dependency; who had nimbly to cut their coats according to their cloth, always readapting to new circumstances, always having to act and pose differently until they slowly learned to turn their coats with every wind and thus almost turned into coats themselves – and masters of an art which they have fully assimilated so that it is an integral part of themselves, that art of perpetually playing at self-concealment which in animals we call mimicry – until finally this capacity, accumulated from generation to generation, becomes domineering, unreasonable, intractable, an instinct that learns to command other instincts and produces the actor, the ‘artist’ (the buffoon, the teller of lies, the fool, the jester, the clown primarily, but also the classical servant, Gil Blas;34 for it is in such types that we find the prehistory of the artist and often enough even of ‘genius’). In more elevated social conditions, too, a similar human type develops under similar pressures; only here, the histrionic instinct is usually just barely kept in check by another instinct, as in the case of ‘diplomats’. Incidentally, I would think that a good diplomat would be free at any time to become a good actor – provided, of course, that he were ‘free’ to do this. But as for the Jews, that people possessing the art of adaptability par excellence, one might, according to this train of thought, immediately see in them a world-historical organization for the cultivation of actors, a veritable breeding ground for actors; and indeed it is really high time to ask: what good actor today is not – a Jew? Also the Jew as a born literary man, as the true master of the European press, exercises this power by virtue of his histrionic ability, for the literary man is essentially an actor: he plays the ‘expert’, the ‘specialist’. Finally, women: consider the whole history of women – mustn’t they be actresses first and foremost? Listen to doctors who have hypnotized womenfolk; finally, love them – let yourself be ‘hypnotized’ by them! What is always the result? That they try to be ‘taken for something’ even when they are being taken… Woman is so artistic…