That may seem but a simple and homely way of stating the matter, though a few years later, in 1727, a yet greater spirit than Shaftesbury, Swift, combining the conception of life as æsthetic contemplation with that of life as art, wrote in a letter, “Life is a tragedy, wherein we sit as spectators awhile, and then act our own part in it.” If we desire a more systematically philosophical statement we may turn to the distinguished thinker of to-day who in many volumes has most powerfully presented the same essential conception, with all its implications, of life as a spectacle. “Tirez le rideau; la farce est jouée.” That Shakespearian utterance, which used to be attributed to Rabelais on his death-bed, and Swift’s comment on life, and Shaftesbury’s intimate meditation, would seem to be—on the philosophic and apart from the moral side of life—entirely in the spirit that Jules de Gaultier has so elaborately developed. The world is a spectacle, and all the men and women the actors on its stage. Enjoy the spectacle while you will, whether comedy or tragedy, enter into the spirit of its manifold richness and beauty, yet take it not too seriously, even when you leave it and the curtains are drawn that conceal it for ever from your eyes, grown weary at last.
Such a conception, indeed, was already to be seen in a deliberately philosophical form in Schopenhauer (who, no doubt, influenced Gaultier) and, later, Nietzsche, especially the early Nietzsche, although he never entirely abandoned it; his break with Wagner, however, whom he had regarded as the typical artist, led him to become suddenly rather critical of art and artists, as we see in “Human-all-too-Human,” which immediately followed “Wagner in Bayreuth,” and he became inclined to look on the artist, in the narrow sense, as only “a splendid relic of the past,” not, indeed, altogether losing his earlier conception, but disposed to believe that “the scientific man is the finest development of the artistic man.” In his essay on Wagner he had presented art as the essentially metaphysical activity of Man, here following Schopenhauer. “Every genius,” well said Schopenhauer, “is a great child; he gazes out at the world as something strange, a spectacle, and therefore with purely objective interest.” That is to say that the highest attitude attainable by man towards life is that of æsthetic contemplation. But it took on a different character in Nietzsche. In 1878 Nietzsche wrote of his early essay on Wagner: “At that time I believed that the world was created from the æsthetic standpoint, as a play, and that as a moral phenomenon it was a deception: on that account I came to the conclusion that the world was only to be justified as an æsthetic phenomenon.”[141] At the end of his active career Nietzsche was once more reproducing this proposition in many ways. Jules de Gaultier has much interested himself in Nietzsche, but he had already reached, no doubt through Schopenhauer, a rather similar conception before he came in contact with Nietzsche’s work, and in the present day he is certainly the thinker who has most systematically and philosophically elaborated the conception.[142]