168

Artist and his followers must keep step. The progress from one level of style to the next must be so slow that not only the artists, but also the listeners and spectators participate in it and know exactly what is taking place. Otherwise, a great gap suddenly forms between the artist, who creates his works on remote heights, and the public, which can no longer climb up to those heights, and finally climbs farther downhill again, disgruntled. For when the artist no longer lifts his public, it sinks quickly downward and falls, in fact, the deeper and more dangerously the higher a genius had carried it; like the eagle, from whose talons the turtle, carried up into the clouds, drops to disaster 13

13. A reference to Aesop's fable of the tortoise and the eagle.

Friedrich Nietzsche - Human, All Too Human
Section Four: From the Soul of Artists and Writers - Aphorism # 168

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