with which to work in creative tension, so we have to find our own.

Clearly in such circumstances the very notion of style is severely

strained. The fact that he says that 'Whether this taste was good or
bad is less important than one might suppose, if only it was a single
taste!' implies that the criteria he is employing here are not only
aesthetic but also formal. The nature of the elements takes second
place to their configuration. That may make us wonder, again, about
whether it matters what the elements are at all, and surely Nietzsche
thought that it did. At the end of the section he writes: 'For one thing
is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself,
whether it be by means of this or that poetry or art; only then is a
human being at all tolerable to behold'. But attaining satisfaction with
oneself can at best be a necessary condition. There are plenty of
people who have attained satisfaction with themselves who are
intolerable to behold, and for that very reason.
�
o
Such passages as this do raise the question of how far one should press ;
;.
Nietzsche. For all his own tendencies to extremes and exaggeration s of
l
expression, he somehow manages to exercise tact, by not pressing i n z
ID

inappropriate places. B u t the opposite danger is that w e call him �

'stimulating', which means that we do not take seriously what he says.
In this particular case, some tactlessness may be worth risking,
because it does contain in embryo thoughts that will be central to his
work, but they will be so much more portentous than he is here that it
may be better to see him in his huma n rather than his superhuman
dimensions.

So, while leaving open the matter of whether he is giving the man of
style carte blanche on the issue of the elements of his character, we can
agree that one of the things about a person which leads u s to say that
he has style is his capacity to carry things off, to incorporate disparate
and what for most people would be embarrassing or humiliating
experiences and make them part of a larger scheme. There is a moving,
funny, and memorable moment at the end of Jean Renoir's film La

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