there honoured—he would fain persuade himself
that the very happiness there is not genuine.
On the other hand,
those qualities which serve
to alleviate the existence of sufferers are brought
into prominence and flooded with light; it is here
that sympathy, the kind, helping hand, the warm heart,
patience, diligence, humility, and friendliness attain
to honour; for here these are the most useful qualities,
and almost the only means of supporting the burden
of existence. Slave-morality is essentially the
morality of utility. Here is the seat of the origin
of the famous antithesis “good” and “evil":—power
and dangerousness are assumed to reside in the evil,
a certain dreadfulness, subtlety, and strength, which
do not admit of being despised. According to
slave-morality, therefore, the “evil” man
arouses fear; according to master-morality, it is
precisely the “good” man who arouses fear
and seeks to arouse it, while the bad man is regarded
as the despicable being. The contrast attains
its maximum when, in accordance with the logical consequences
of slave-morality, a shade of depreciation—it
may be slight and well-intentioned—at last
attaches itself to the “good” man of this
morality; because, according to the servile mode of
thought, the good man must in any case be the
safe
man: he is good-natured, easily deceived, perhaps
a little stupid, un bonhomme. Everywhere that
slave-morality gains the ascendancy, language shows
a tendency to approximate the significations of the
words “good” and “stupid."- -A last
fundamental difference: the desire for
freedom,
the instinct for happiness and the refinements of
the feeling of liberty belong as necessarily to slave-morals
and morality, as artifice and enthusiasm in reverence
and devotion are the regular symptoms of an aristocratic
mode of thinking and estimating.— Hence
we can understand without further detail why love
as
A
passion—it is our European specialty—must
absolutely be of noble origin; as is well known, its
invention is due to the Provencal poet-cavaliers,
those brilliant, ingenious men of the “gai saber,”
to whom Europe owes so much, and almost owes itself.
261. Vanity is one of the things which are perhaps
most difficult for a noble man to understand:
he will be tempted to deny it, where another kind
of man thinks he sees it self-evidently. The
problem for him is to represent to his mind beings
who seek to arouse a good opinion of themselves which
they themselves do not possess—and consequently
also do not “deserve,”—and who
yet believe in this good opinion afterwards.
This seems to him on the one hand such bad taste and
so self-disrespectful, and on the other hand so grotesquely
unreasonable, that he would like to consider vanity
an exception, and is doubtful about it in most cases
when it is spoken of. He will say, for instance:
“I may be mistaken about my value, and on the
other hand may nevertheless demand that my value should