Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

David Strauss, the confessor and the writerwomen and children engaged with their newspapers and commonplacechatter about politics, we listen for a time as they discussmarriage and universal suffrage, capital punishment and workers'strikes, and it seems to us impossible that the rosary of publicopinion could be told more quickly. Finally we are also to be convincedof the classical taste of those who dwell here: a brief visit to thelibrary and the music-room discloses, as expected, that the bestbooks lie on the shelves and the most celebrated pieces of music onthe music-stands; they even play us something, and if it was supposedto be Haydn's music at least Haydn was not to blame if itsounded like Riehl's music fo r the home. In the meantime, the masterof the house has had occasion to state that he is in entire agreementwith Lessing, also with Goethe, though excluding the second part ofFaust. Finally the summer-house owner commends himself, andexpresses the view that those he disagrees with are beyond help andnot yet ripe fo r his point of view; whereupon he offers us his carriage,with the polite reservation that he cannot guarantee it will answer toall our requirements; the stones on his carriageways are, moreover,newly scattered and we might be much buffeted about. OurEpicurean garden god then takes his leave of us with the incomparabledexterity he had recognized and commended in Voltaire.Who could now doubt this incomparable dexterity? We recognizethe master of his material, the lightly clad horticulturalist is unmasked;and still we hear the voice of the classic author: 'As a writer Irefu se to be a philistine, I refuse! I refuse! I want to be Voltaire, theGerman Voltaire! and best of all the French Lessing too!'We have betrayed a secret: our Master does not always know whohe would prefer to be, Voltaire or Lessing, but wants at no price to bea philistine; if possible, he would like to be both, Lessing and Voltaire- that it might be fulfilled which was written: 'he had no characterwhatever: whenever he wanted a character he always had toassume one'.10If we have understood Strauss the confessor correctly, he himself is atrue philistine with a narrow, dried-up soul and with sober andscholarly requirements : and yet no one would be angrier at beingcalled a philistine than David Strauss the writer. Hewould approve ifone called him headstrong, rash, malicious, foolhardy; but he wouldbe most pleased of all to be compared with Lessing or Voltaire, since45