In the course of this exposition, it will be seen that I have to lay realism also at the door of Ruler Art; but I am careful to point out that, although such realism (I call it _militant realism_ in respect to the art both of the Middle Ages and of the later Renaissance, as well as of Greece) is a fault, of Ruler Art which very much reduces the latter's rank among the arts; it is nevertheless above that other realism of mediocrity which, for the want of a better term, I call _poverty realism_. (See Lecture II, Part II, end.)
In order firmly to establish the difference between the Ruler and Democratic styles I ought, perhaps, to have entered with more thoroughness than I have done into the meditative nature of the one, and the empirical nature of the other. This, apart from a few very unmistakable hints, I have unfortunately been unable to do. I found it quite impossible to include all the detail bearing upon the main thesis, in this first treatise; and, though I have resolved to discuss these important matters very soon, in the form of supplementary essays, I can but acknowledge here that I recognize their omission as a blemish.
The wide field covered by this book, and the small form in which I was compelled to cast it, have thus led to many questions remaining inadequately answered and to many statements being left insufficiently substantiated. In the end I found it quite impossible to avail myself even of a third of the material I had collected for its production, and I should therefore be grateful if it could be regarded more in the light of a preliminary survey of the ground to be built upon, rather than as a finished building taking its foundation in Nietzsche's philosophy of Art.
With regard to all my utterances on Egypt, I should like the reader kindly to bear only this in mind: that my choice of Egyptian art, as the best example of Ruler Art we possess, is neither arbitrary nor capricious; but, because it is neither arbitrary nor capricious, it does not follow that I regard a return to the types of Egypt as the only possible salvation of the graphic arts. This would be sheer Romanticism and sentimentality. "A thousand paths are there which have never yet been trodden; a thousand salubrities and hidden islands of life. Unexhausted and undiscovered is still man and man's world" (_Z._, I, XXII.).