_"And once more Grow Clear."_--We, the generous and rich in spirit, who stand at the sides of the streets like open fountains and would hinder no one from drinking from us: we do not know, alas! how to defend ourselves when we should like to do so; we have no means of preventing ourselves being made _turbid_ and dark,--we have no means of preventing the age in which we live casting its "up-to-date rubbish" into us, or of hindering filthy birds throwing their excrement, the boys their trash, and fatigued resting travellers their misery, great and small, into us. But we do as we have always done: we take whatever is cast into us down into our depths--for we are deep, we do not forget--_and once more grow clear_...
_The Fool's Interruption._--It is not a misanthrope who has written this book: the hatred of men costs too dear to-day. To hate as they formerly hated _man,_ in the fashion of Timon, completely, without qualification, with all the heart, from the pure _love_ of hatred--for that purpose one would have to renounce contempt:--and how much refined pleasure, how much patience, how much benevolence even, do we owe to contempt! Moreover we are thereby the "elect of God": refined contempt is our taste and privilege, our art, our virtue perhaps, we, the most modern amongst the moderns!... Hatred, on the contrary, makes equal, it puts men face to face, in hatred there is honour; finally, in hatred there is _fear,_ quite a large amount of fear. We fearless ones, however, we, the most intellectual men of the period, know our advantage well enough to live without fear as the most intellectual persons of this age. People will not easily behead us, shut us up, or banish us; they will not even ban or burn our books. The age loves intellect, it loves us, and needs us, even when we have to give it to understand that we are artists in despising; that all intercourse with men is something of a horror to us; that with all our gentleness, patience, humanity and courteousness, we cannot persuade our nose to abandon its prejudice against the proximity of man; that we love nature the more, the less humanly things are done by her, and that we love art _when_ it is the flight of the artist from man, or the raillery of the artist at man, or the raillery of the artist at himself....