______________________________________________________
Friedrich
Nietzsche
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL
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[This document, which has been prepared by Ian Johnston of
Vancouver Island University, Nanaimo, BC, has certain copyright restrictions. For
information, please consult Copyright. Editorial comments and translations in
square brackets and italics are by Ian Johnston; comments in normal brackets
are from Nietzsche’s text. Last revised in December 2013]
[Table of Contents for Beyond Good and Evil]
PART EIGHT
PEOPLES AND FATHERLANDS
240
I heard once again for the first time Richard Wagner’s overture to
the Meistersinger: it is a
splendid, overloaded, difficult, and late art, which prides itself on the fact
that, in order to understand it, one has to assume that two centuries of music
are still vital. It is to the Germans’ credit that such a pride was not
misplaced! What juices and forces, what seasons and climates are intermingled
here! It impresses us sometimes as old fashioned, sometimes as strange, bitter,
and too young; it is as arbitrary as it is conventionally grandiose, if not
infrequently mischievous, still more frequently tough and coarse—it has fire
and courage and, at the same time, the loose dun-coloured skin of fruits which
become ripe too late. It streams out wide and full, and suddenly a moment of
inexplicable hesitation, a gap, as it were, springs up between cause and
effect, a pressure that makes us dream, almost a nightmare—but already the old
stream of contentment is spreading and widening once more, of manifold
contentment, of old and new happiness, which very much includes the happiness of the artist with himself, something
he has no desire to conceal, his amazed and happily shared knowledge of the
mastery of the means he has used here, new and newly acquired artistic means,
so far untried, as he seems to inform us. All in all, no beauty, nothing of the
south, nothing of the delicate southern brightness of heaven, nothing of grace,
no dance, scarcely any will for logic, indeed a certain awkwardness that is
even emphasized, as if the artist wanted to tell us, “That is part of my
purpose,” a ponderous drapery, something arbitrarily barbaric and ceremonial, a
shimmy of scholarly and venerable precious objects and lace; something German,
in the best and worst senses of the word, something manifold, formless, and inexhaustible
in the German way, a certain German power and spiritual excess, which has no
fear of hiding under the refinements of decay—and which perhaps feels at its
best only there, a truly authentic emblem of the German soul, young and obsolete
both at the same time, over-rotten and still over-rich for the future. This
kind of music expresses best what I think of the Germans: they belong to the
day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow—but they still have no today.
241
We “good Europeans,” we too have hours when we allow ourselves a
hearty feeling for our fatherland, a tumble and relapse into old loves and
narrow places—I have just given a sample of that—hours of national tumults,
patriotic apprehensions, and all sorts of other floods of old-fashioned
emotion. Slower moving spirits than we are might take a longer period of time
to be done with things which with us last and have run their course in a matter
of hours—some need half a year, others half a human lifetime, each according to
the speed and power with which they digest and “transform their stuff.” In
fact, I could think of some dull, hesitant races which, even in our rapidly
moving Europe, would require half a century in order to overcome such atavistic
attacks of patriotism and attachment to their soil and to return to reason,
that is to say, to “good Europeanness [guten Europäerthum]” And
while I indulge myself with this possibility, it so happens that I listen in on
a conversation between two old “patriots.” They both were obviously hard of
hearing and so spoke all the louder. One said, “That man possesses and understands philosophy as much as a peasant or a student
in a fraternity. He is still innocent. But what does that matter these days!
This is age of the masses, who prostrate
themselves before anything built on a massive scale. That’s how it is in
politics, as well. If a statesman piles up a new Tower of Babel for them,
anything at all that’s immense in power and empire,
they call him ‘great.’ What does it matter that in the meantime those of us who
are more cautious and reserved still do not give up the old belief that only a
great idea confers greatness on an act or a cause? What if a statesman brought
his people into a situation where from that point on they had to practise ‘grand politics,’ something for which they were by
nature poorly adapted and prepared, so that it would be necessary for them to
sacrifice their old and certain virtues for the sake of a new and doubtful mediocrity—suppose
a statesman sentenced his people to a general ‘politicking,’ although up to
that point those same people had had better things to do and to think about and
in the depth of their souls could not rid themselves of a cautious disgust with
the anxiety, emptiness, noise, and devilish squabbling of those peoples who
were truly politicking—suppose such a statesman goaded the sleeping passions
and desires of his people and turned their earlier shyness and their pleasure
in standing to one side into defects, their fondness for foreign things [Ausländerei] and their secret boundlessness into a liability, devalued for them
their most heartfelt inclinations, turned their conscience around, made their
spirit narrow, and their taste ‘national,’—well, would a statesman who did all
those things, someone for whom his people would have to atone through all
future time, in the event they had a future, would such a statesman be great?” “Undoubtedly,” the other old patriot answered him vehemently,
“otherwise he would have been incapable of doing it! Perhaps it was idiotic to want something like that?
But perhaps every great thing was merely idiotic at the beginning!” “That’s an
abuse of words!” cried his conversational partner in response, “Strong! Strong!
Strong and idiotic! Not great!” The old men had evidently worked themselves up, as they
shouted their “truths” into each other’s faces like this. But I, in my
happiness and remoteness, thought about how a stronger man will soon become
master over the strong, and also how there is a compensation for the spiritual
flattening of one people, namely, the deepening of another people.—
242
Now, let’s call what we’re looking for as the distinguishing mark
of Europeans “civilization,” or “humanizing,” or “progress”; let’s use a
political formula and call it simply, without praise or blame, Europe’s democratic movement:
behind all the moral and political foregrounds indicated with such labels, an immense physiological process
is completing itself, something whose momentum is constantly growing—the
process by which the Europeans are becoming more similar to each other, their
growing detachment from the conditions under which arise races linked to a
climate and class, their increasing independence from any distinct environment that for centuries wanted to
inscribe itself on body and soul with the same demands—hence, the slow
emergence of an essentially supra-national and nomadic type of human being,
who, physiologically speaking, possesses as his characteristic mark a maximum
of the art and power of adaptation. This process of the developing European, which can be held back by
great relapses in tempo, but which for that very reason perhaps acquires and augments
its vehemence and depth—the furious storm and stress of “national feeling”
still raging today belongs here, along with that anarchism which is just emerging—this
process will probably rush ahead to conclusions which its naive proponents and
advocates, the apostles of “modern ideas,” are least likely to expect. The same
new conditions which will, on average, create a situation in which human beings
are homogenous and mediocre—useful, hard-working, practical in many tasks,
clever men from an animal herd—are to the highest degree suitable for giving
rise to exceptional men with the most dangerous and most attractive qualities.
For while that power to adapt, which keeps testing constantly changing
conditions and begins a new task with every generation, almost with every
decade, by no means makes possible the full power of the
type, while the collective impression of such future Europeans probably will be
one of many kinds of extremely useful chattering workers with little will
power, men who will need a master, someone to give orders, as much as they need their daily
bread, and while the democratizing of Europe thus moves towards the creation of
a type prepared for slavery in the most subtle sense, the strong man, in single and exceptional cases, will have to turn out
stronger and richer than he has perhaps ever been before now—thanks to the
absence of prejudice in his education, thanks to the immense multiplicity of practice,
art, and mask. What I wanted to say is this: the democraticizing of Europe is at the same
time an involuntary way of organizing for the breeding of tyrants—understanding that word in every sense, including the most
spiritual.
243
I am pleased to hear that our sun is caught up in a rapid movement
towards the constellation Hercules, and I hope that men on this earth
act like the sun in this respect. And we first, we good Europeans!
244
There was a time when people were accustomed to confer on the
Germans, as a mark of distinction, the label “profound.” Now, when the most
successful type of the new Germanism
craves completely different honours and
perhaps finds that everything profound lacks “flair,” it is almost timely and
patriotic to doubt whether we were not deceiving ourselves previously with that
praise: in short, to wonder whether German profundity is not basically something
else, something worse—and something which, thank God, we are about to succeed
in removing. So let’s try to learn to think differently about German
profundity. For that we don’t have to do anything except a little vivisection
on the German soul. More than anything else, the German soul is multifaceted,
with various origins, more cobbled together and superimposed than truly constructed.
That comes from how it emerged. A German who had the audacity to claim “Alas,
two souls dwell within my breast” would be seriously violating the truth, or,
putting the matter more correctly, would lag behind the truth by several souls.
As a people of the most monstrous mixing and stirring together of races, perhaps
even with an excess of the pre-Aryan element, as “a people of the middle” in
every sense, the Germans are more incomprehensible, more extensive, more
contradictory, more unknown, more unpredictable, more surprising, and even more
terrifying to themselves than other people are—they elude definition and for that reason alone are the despair of the French. It’s
typical of the Germans that with them the question “What is German?” never dies
away. Kotzebue certainly knew his Germans well enough: “We have been
acknowledged,” they cheered to him—but Sand also thought he knew them. John Paul understood what he was doing
when he expressed his anger over Fichte’s false but patriotic flatteries and
exaggerations—but it is likely that Goethe’s thinking about the Germans was different from Jean Paul’s, even if he thought he was right in
his opinion about Fichte.1 What did
Goethe really think about the Germans?—But he never spoke clearly about many
things around him, and all his life he knew how to keep a delicate silence—he
probably had good reasons for that. What’s certain is that “the Wars of Liberation” did not make him look up in a happier mood, any more
than the French Revolution.2 The event
which made him rethink
his Faust and, indeed, the entire problem of “man” was the appearance of
Napoleon. There are words of Goethe in which, as if from a foreign country, he
repudiates with an impatient severity what the Germans reckon as something they
can be proud of: he once defined the famous German disposition [Gemüth] as “indulgence towards the weaknesses of strangers and towards
one’s own.” Was he wrong in that? It’s characteristic of the Germans that one
is rarely completely wrong about them. The German soul has within it lanes and
connecting paths; in it there are caves, hiding places, and dungeons. Its lack
of order has a great deal of the charm of something full of secrets. The German
is well acquainted with the secret routes to chaos. And just as everything
loves its own metaphorical likeness, so the German loves clouds and everything
unclear, developing, dim, damp, and shrouded: any kind of uncertainty,
shapelessness, shifting around, or evolving he senses as something “profound.”
In himself, the German man does not exist—he is becoming something—he “is
developing himself.” Hence, “developing” is the essential German discovery and
successful stroke in the great realm of philosophical formulas—a governing idea
which, along with German beer and German music, is working to Germanize all
Europe. Foreigners stand there amazed at and attracted to the riddles which the
contradictory nature underlying the German soul presents to them (something
Hegel organized into a system and Richard Wagner finally even set to music).
“Good natured and malicious”—such a juxtaposition, a contradiction if applied
to any other people, unfortunately justifies itself too often in Germany. Just
live for a while among the Swabians! The ponderousness
of the German scholar, his social tastelessness, gets on alarmingly well with
an inner agility in dancing on a tightrope and with a light impudence, faced
with which all the gods have by now learned about fear. If people want an ad oculos
[visual] demonstration
“the German soul,” let them just look into German taste, into
German arts and customs: what a boorish indifference to “taste”! See how there
the noblest and the meanest stand next to each other! How disorderly and rich
this entire spiritual household is! The German drags his soul along; he drags along everything he experiences. He digests
his events badly—he’s never “finished” with them. German profundity is often
only a difficult and hesitant “digestion.” And just as all chronic invalids, all
dyspeptics, have an inclination for comfort, so the German loves “openness” and
“conventional probity”: how comfortable it is to be open and conventional!—Today that is perhaps the most
dangerous and most successful disguise the German knows—this trusting,
cooperative, cards-on-the-table nature of German honesty. It is his true
Mephistophelean art; with it he can “still go far!” The German lets himself go,
as he gazes with true, blue, empty German eyes—and foreigners immediately
confuse him with his dressing gown! What I wanted to say is this—let “German
profundity” be what it will—when we are entirely among ourselves perhaps we’ll
allow ourselves to laugh about it?—we’ll do well to hold its appearance and its
good name in honour in future and not to dispose of our old reputation as
people of profundity too cheaply for Prussian “dash” and Berlin wit and sand.
It’s clever for a people to make itself pass for—and to let others
think it—profound, clumsy, good natured, honest, unwise. That could even
be—profound! Finally one should be a credit to one’s name—not for nothing are
we called the “tiusche” people,
the deceiving people . . .
245
The “good old” days are gone. In Mozart they sang themselves
out:—how lucky we are that his rococo still speaks to us, that his “good society,”
his loving raptures, his childish delight in Chinese effects and curlicues, the
civility in his heart, his desire for delicacy, lovers, dancers, those with
blissful tears, and his faith in the south can still appeal to some remnant in us!
Alas, at some point it will be gone!—But who can doubt that the understanding
of and taste for Beethoven will be gone even earlier!—Beethoven was, in fact,
only the final chords of a stylistic transition, a break in style, and not, like Mozart, the last notes of a great centuries-long European
taste. Beethoven is something that happens between an old worn out soul which
is constantly breaking up and a very young soul of the future which is constantly coming on. In his music there lies that half light of eternal
loss and of eternally indulgent hoping—that same light in which Europe was
bathed when it dreamed with Rousseau, when it danced around the Liberty Tree of
revolution and finally almost worshipped before Napoleon. But how quickly now this very
feeling fades. Nowadays how difficult it has already become to know this
feeling—how foreign to our ears the language of Rousseau, Schiller, Shelley,
and Byron sounds, in whom collectively
the same European fate found a way in words which it knew how to
sing in Beethoven!3 What has come in German music since then belongs to Romanticism, that is, historically considered, to an even shorter, even more fleeting,
even more superficial movement than that great interlude, that transition in
Europe from Rousseau to Napoleon and to the arrival of democracy. There is
Weber: but what are Freischutz and Oberson these
days for us? Or Marschner’s Hans Heiling and
Vampyr!4 Or even Wagner’s Tannhauser! That music
has faded away, even if it has not yet been forgotten. In addition, all this Romantic
music was not sufficiently noble, not sufficiently musical, to justify itself
anywhere other than in the theatre and in front of crowds. Right from the start
it was second-rate music, of little interest among true musicians. The situation
was different with Felix Mendelssohn, that halcyon master, who won rapid
admiration for his lighter, purer, and happier soul and then was
forgotten just as quickly, as a lovely event in German music.5 But as
for the case of Robert Schumann, who took his work seriously and from the beginning
was also taken seriously—he was the last one who founded a school—nowadays
don’t we count it as good luck, as a relief, and as a liberation that this
very Schumann-style Romanticism has been overthrown? Schumann ran off into the
“Saxon Switzerland” of his soul, half like Werther, half like Jean-Paul, but certainly nothing
like Beethoven, certainly nothing like Byron!—the music of his Manfred is an
error in judgment and a misunderstanding to the point of injustice.6—Schumann
with his taste, which was basically a petty taste (that is, a dangerous tendency, doubly dangerous among the
Germans, toward quiet lyricism and a drunken intoxication of feeling), always
going off to the side, shyly withdrawing himself and pulling back, a nobly
tender soul, who wallowed in nothing but anonymous happiness and sorrow, from
the start a sort of young maiden and noli me tangere [do not touch me]: this Schumann was already
merely a German event in music, no longer something European, as Beethoven was,
and, to an even greater extent, Mozart. With him German music was threatened by
its greatest danger, the loss of the voice
for the soul of Europe and its descent to something dealing merely with
the fatherland.
246
What a torture are books written in German for the person who has
a third ear! How unwillingly he stands beside the slowly revolving swamp
of sounds without melody, of rhythms without dance, what among the Germans is
called a “book!” And as for the German who reads books!
How lazily, how reluctantly, how badly he reads! How many Germans know and demand
from themselves the knowledge that there is art in every good sentence, art which must be correctly grasped if the
sentence is to be understood! With a misunderstanding about its tempo, for
example, the sentence itself is misunderstood! That one must not be in doubt
about the rhythmically decisive syllables, that one must feel the break in the
extremely strict symmetry as intentional and charming, that one must lend a
refined and patient ear to every staccato and every rubato, that
one sorts out the sense in the series of vowels and diphthongs, how softly and
richly they can colour and re-colour
each other as they follow in their sequence—who among our book-reading Germans
has enough goodwill to recognize these sorts of duties and demands and to
listen for so much art and intentionality in the language? In the end we just
“don’t have the ear for that.” And thus the most pronounced contrasts in style
are not heard and the most refined artistry is wasted, as if
on deaf people. These were my thoughts as I observed how crudely and naively
people confused two masters of the art of prose with each other—one whose words
drip down, hesitant and cold, as if from the roof of a damp cavern—he’s relying
on their dull sound and echo—and the other who handles his language like a
flexible sword and feels from his arm down to his toes the dangerous joy in the
excessively sharp, shimmering blade that wants to bite, hiss, and cut.—
247
Just how little German style concerns itself with sound and with
the ear is demonstrated in the fact that even our good musicians write badly.
The German does not read aloud, not for the ear, but merely with his eyes. In
the process he puts his ears away in a drawer. In antiquity a man read, when he
read—and that happened rarely enough—to himself aloud and, in fact, in a
loud voice. People were amazed if someone read quietly, and they secretly asked
themselves why. With a loud voice—that is to say, with all the swellings, inflections,
changes in tone, and shifts in tempo which the ancient public world enjoyed.
At that time the principles of writing style were the same as those for the
speaking style, and these principles depended in part on the astonishing
development and the sophisticated needs of the ear and larynx and in part on
the strength, endurance, and power of the ancient lungs. A syntactic period is,
as the ancients understood it, above all a physiological totality, insofar as
it is held together by a single breath. Such periods, as they manifest
themselves in Demosthenes and Cicero, swelling up twice and sinking
down twice, all within the single breath—that’s what ancient men enjoyed.7 From their own schooling they knew how to value the virtue in such
periods—how rare and difficult it was to deliver them. We really
have no right to the great syntactical period, we moderns, we short-winded people in every
sense! These ancient people were, in fact, themselves collectively dilettantes
in public speaking—and as a result connoisseurs and thus critics. Hence, they
drove their speakers to the utmost limits. In a similar way in the last
century, once all Italian men and women understood how to sing, among them
virtuoso singing (and with that the art of melody as well) reached its high
point. But in Germany (right up until very recent times, when a sort of platform
eloquence started flapping its young wings timidly and crudely enough) there
was really only one form of public speaking which came
close to being
artistic: what came from the pulpit. In Germany only the preacher understood
what a syllable or what a word weighs, how a sentence strikes, leaps, falls,
runs, and comes to an end; only he had a conscience in his ears, often enough a
bad conscience. For
there is no shortage of reasons why it’s precisely the German who rarely, and
almost always too late, achieves a proficiency in speaking. It is
appropriate therefore that the masterwork of German prose is the masterwork of
its greatest preacher: up to this point, the Bible has been the best German
book. In comparison with Luther’s Bible, almost everything else is mere
“literature”—something that did not grow in Germany and hence also did not grow
and does not grow in German hearts, as the Bible has.
248
There are two kinds of genius: one which above all breeds and desires
to breed, and another which is happy to let itself be fertilized and give
birth. In just the same way, there are among peoples of genius those to whom
the female problem of pregnancy and the secret task of shaping, maturing, and
perfecting have been assigned—the Greeks, for example, were a people of this
kind, like the French—and there are others who have to fertilize and become the
origin of new orders of life—like the Jews, the Romans, and, one could ask in
all modesty, the Germans?—People tormented and enchanted by unknown fevers and irresistibly
driven outside themselves, in love with and lusting after foreign races (after
those who “let themselves be fertilized”—) and thus obsessed with mastery, like
everything which has a knowledge of itself as full of procreative power and
thus “by the grace of God.” These two types of genius seek each other out, like
man and woman, but they also misunderstand each other—like man and woman.
249
Every people has its
characteristic Tartufferie [hypocrisy] and calls it its virtues.—The best that man is he does not know—he
cannot know.
250
What does Europe owe the Jews?—All sorts of things, good and bad,
and above all one that is at the same time among the best and the worst: the
grand style in morality, the terror and majesty of infinite demands, infinite
meanings, the whole romanticism and grandeur of morally questionable things [moralischen Fragwürdigkeiten]—and as a result precisely the most attractive,
most insidious, and most exquisite parts of those plays of colours
and enticements to life, whose afterglow these days makes the sky of our European
culture glow in its evening light—perhaps as it burns itself out. Among the
spectators and philosophers, we artists are grateful to the Jews for that.
251
When a people is suffering from nationalistic nervous fever and political
ambition and wants to suffer, we have to accept the fact that various kinds of clouds
and disturbances—in short, small attacks of stupidity—will pass over its
spirit: for example, among contemporary Germans sometimes the anti-French stupidity,
sometimes the anti-Jewish, sometimes the anti-Polish, sometimes the
Christian-Romantic, sometimes the Wagnerian, sometimes the Teutonic, sometimes the
Prussian (take a look at these poor historians Sybel
and Treitzschke and their thickly bandaged heads—),
and whatever else all these small obfuscations of the German
spirit and conscience may call themselves.8 May I be forgiven for the fact that I, too, during a short and
risky stay in a very infected region did not remain entirely free of this illness
and, like all the world, began to have ideas about
things which were no concern of mine, the first sign of the political
infection. For
example, about the Jews. Hear me out.—I have not yet
met a single German who was well disposed towards the Jews. And no matter how
absolute the rejection of real anti-Semitism on the part of all cautious and
political types may be, nonetheless this caution and politics directs itself
not against this type of feeling itself, but only against its dangerous excess,
in particular against the tasteless and disgraceful expression of this excessive
feeling—on that point people should not deceive themselves. That Germany has a
richly sufficient number of
Jews, that the German stomach and German blood have difficulty (and will still
have difficulty for a long time to come) absorbing even this quantum of
“Jew”—in the way the Italians, the French, and the English have absorbed them,
as a result of a stronger digestive system—that is the clear message and
language of a general instinct which we must listen to and according to which
we must act. “Let no more Jews in! And especially bar the doors to the east (also
to Austria)!” So orders the instinct of a people whose type is still weak and uncertain,
so that it could be easily erased, easily dissolved away by a stronger race.
But the Jews are without any doubt the strongest, most tenacious, and purest
race now living in Europe. They understand how to prevail even under the worst
conditions (better even than under favourable conditions),
as a result of certain virtues which today people might like to stamp as
vices—thanks, above all, to a resolute faith which has no need to feel shame
when confronted by “modern ideas.” They always change, if they
change, only in the way the Russian empire carries out its conquests—as an
empire that has time and was not born yesterday—that is, according to the basic
principle “as slowly as possible!” A thinker who has the future of Europe on
his conscience will, in all the designs he draws up for himself of this future,
take the Jews as well as the Russians into account as, for the time being, the
surest and most probable factors in the great interplay and struggle of forces.
What we nowadays call a “nation” in Europe is essentially more a res facta [something
made] than a res nata [something
born](indeed
sometimes it looks confusingly like a res ficta et picta [something
made up and unreal]—), in any case something developing, young, easily displaced, not
yet a race, to say nothing of aere perennius [more
enduring than bronze], as is the Jewish type. But these “nations” should be very wary
of every hot-headed competition and enmity! That the Jews, if they wanted to—or
if people were to force them, as the anti-Semites seem to want to do—could even now become predominant, in fact, quite literally gain mastery
over Europe, is certain; that they are not working and planning for
that is equally certain. Meanwhile, by contrast, they desire and wish—even with
a certain insistence—to be absorbed into and assimilated by Europe. They thirst
to be finally established somewhere or other, to be accepted and respected, and
to bring to an end their nomadic life, to the “Wandering Jew.” And people
should pay full attention to this tendency and impulse (which in itself perhaps
even expresses a moderating of Jewish instincts) and accommodate it. And for
this, it might perhaps be useful and reasonable to expel the noisy anti-Semitic
troublemakers from the country. We should welcome them with all caution, and selectively,
more or less the way the English aristocracy does. It’s clear that the stronger
and already more firmly established type of the new Germanism could
involve itself with them with the least objection, for example,
the aristocratic officers from the Mark Brandenburg.9 It would be interesting in all sorts of ways to see whether the
genius for money and patience (and above all for some spirit and spirituality,
which are seriously deficient in the people just referred to) could be added to
and bred into the inherited art of commanding and obeying—in both of which the
land mentioned above is nowadays a classic example. But at this point it’s fitting
that I break off my cheerful Germanomania [Deutschthümelei]
and speech of celebration. For
I’m already touching on something serious to me, on the “European
problem,” as I understand it, on the breeding of a new ruling caste for Europe.—
252
These Englishmen are no race of philosophers. Bacon signifies an attack on the
spirit of philosophy generally; Hobbes, Hume, and Locke have been a debasement
and a devaluing of the idea of a “philosopher” for more than a century. Kant
raised himself and rose up in reaction against Hume. It was Locke of whom Schelling was entitled to say, “Je méprise Locke” [I
despise Locke].10 In the struggle with the English mechanistic dumbing down of
the world, Hegel and Schopenhauer (along with Goethe) were unanimous—both of
these hostile fraternal geniuses in philosophy, who moved away from each other
towards opposite poles of the German spirit and, in the process, wronged each
other, as only brothers do. What’s lacking in England, and what has always been
missing, that’s something the semi-actor and rhetorician Carlyle understood
well enough, that tasteless muddle-headed Carlyle, who tried to conceal under
his passionate grimaces what he understood about himself, that is, what was lacking in Carlyle—a real power of spirituality, a real profundity of spiritual insight, in short, philosophy.11 It is characteristic of such an unphilosophical race that it clings
strongly to Christianity. They need its
discipline to develop their “moralizing” and humanizing. The Englishman is more gloomy, more
sensual, stronger willed, and more brutal than the German—he is also for that
very reason, as the more vulgar of the two, also more pious than the German. He
is even more in
need of Christianity.
For more refined nostrils even this English Christianity has still a lingering
and truly English smell of spleen and alcoholic dissipation, against which it
is used with good reason as a medicinal remedy—that is, the more delicate
poison against the coarser one. Among crude people, a subtler poisoning is, in
fact, already progress, a step towards spiritualization. The crudity and
peasant seriousness of the English are still most tolerably disguised or, stated
more precisely, interpreted and given new meaning, by the language of Christian
gestures and by prayers and singing psalms. And for those drunken and dissolute
cattle who in earlier times learned to make moral grunts under the influence of
Methodism and, more recently, once again as the “Salvation Army,” a twitch of
repentance may really be, relatively speaking, the highest achievement of
“humanity” to which they can be raised: that much we can, in all fairness,
concede. But what is still offensive even in the most humane Englishman is his
lack of music, speaking metaphorically (and not metaphorically—). He has in the
movements of his soul and his body no rhythm and dance—in fact, not even the desire
for rhythm and dance, for “music.” Listen to him speak, or watch the most
beautiful English woman walk—in no
country of the earth are there lovelier doves and swans—and finally, listen to
them sing! But I’m demanding too much . . .
253
There are truths which are best recognized by mediocre heads, because
they are most appropriate for them; there are truths which have charm and seductive
power only for mediocre minds:—at this very point we are pushed back onto this
perhaps unpleasant proposition, since the time the spirit of respectable but
mediocre Englishmen—I cite Darwin, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer—is
successfully gaining pre-eminence in the middle regions of European taste.12 In fact, who could doubt how useful it is that such spirits
rule from time to time? It would be a mistake to think that highly cultivated
spirits who fly off to great distances would be particularly skilful at
establishing many small, common facts, collecting them, and pushing to a conclusion:—they
are, by contrast, as exceptional men, from the very start in no advantageous
position vis-à-vis the “rules.” In the final analysis, they have more to do than merely
have knowledge—for they have to be something new, to mean something new, to present new
values! The gap between knowing something and being able to do something is
perhaps greater as well as more mysterious than people think. It’s possible
that the man who can
act in the grand style, the creating man, will have to be a person who does not
know; whereas, on the other hand, for scientific discoveries of the sort Darwin
made a certain narrowness, aridity, and conscientious diligence, in short,
something English, may not be an unsuitable arrangement. Finally we should not
forget that the English with their profoundly average quality have already once
brought about a collective depression of the European spirit. What people call
“modern ideas” or “the ideas of the eighteenth century” or even “French
ideas”—in other words, what the German spirit has risen against with a deep disgust—were English in origin. There’s
no doubt of that. The French have been only apes and actors of these ideas,
their best soldiers, as well, and at the same time unfortunately their first
and most complete victims. For
with the damnable Anglomania of “modern ideas” the âme française [French soul] has finally become so thin and emaciated that nowadays we remember
almost with disbelief its sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, its profoundly
passionate power, its resourceful nobility. But with our teeth we must hang on
to the following principle of historical fairness and defend it against the
appearance of the moment: European noblesse [nobility]—in feeling, in taste, in customs, in short, the
word taken in every higher sense—is the work and invention of France; European nastiness, the plebeian quality of modern ideas, the
work of England.
254
Even now
France is still the place with the most spiritual and most refined European culture
and the leading school of taste. But we have to know how to find this “France
of taste.” Whoever belongs to it keeps himself well concealed—the number of
those in whom it is embodied and lives may be small, and in addition they may
perhaps be people who are not standing on the strongest legs, partly fatalistic,
dark, sick, and partly mollycoddled and artificial, such people as have the ambition to
conceal themselves. All of them have something in common: confronted with the
raging stupidity and the noisy chattering of the democratic bourgeois, they
keep their ears plugged. In fact, rolling around these days in the foreground
is a stupid and coarsened France—recently, at the funeral of Victor
Hugo, it celebrated a true orgy of tastelessness and at the same time of
self-admiration.13 Something else is also common to them: a great will to stand
against spiritual Germanization—and an
even greater inability to do so! Perhaps these days Schopenhauer is already
more at home and has become more indigenous in this France of the spirit, which
is also a France of pessimism, than he ever was in Germany, not to mention
Heinrich Heine, who has long since been transformed into the flesh and blood of
the more sophisticated and discriminating Parisian lyric poets, or Hegel, who
today exercises an almost tyrannical influence in the form of
Taine, the pre-eminent living historian.14 And so
far as Richard Wagner is concerned—the more French music learns to shape itself
according to the real needs of the âme moderne [modern
soul], the more it will become “Wagnerian.” That’s something we can
predict—it’s already doing enough of that now. Nonetheless, in spite of all the
voluntary or involuntary Germanizing and vulgarizing of taste, there are three
things which nowadays the French can still point to with pride as their inheritance
and property and as the indelible mark of an old cultural superiority over
Europe. The first is the capacity for artistic passions, for devotion to
“form,” for which the expression l’art pour l’art [art for
art’s sake] has been
invented, along with a thousand others—something like that has been present in
France for three centuries and, thanks to the reverence for the “small number,”
has made possible again and again a kind of chamber music in literature, which
is not to be found in the rest of Europe.—The second thing on which the French
can base a superiority over Europe is their ancient, multifaceted, moralistic culture,
because of which we find, on average, even in the small romanciers [novelists] of the newspapers and random boulevardiers
de Paris [Parisian men about town], a psychological sensitivity
and curiosity of which people in Germany, for example, have no idea (to say
nothing of the thing itself!). For that the Germans are lacking a couple of
centuries of moralistic behaviour which, as
mentioned, France did not spare itself. Anyone who calls the Germans “naive”
because of this is praising them for a defect. (In contrast to the German
inexperience and innocence in voluptate psychologica [in
psychological delight], which is not too distantly related to the
boredom of associating with Germans—and as the most successful expression of a
genuine French curiosity and talent for invention in this empire of tender
thrills, Henry Beyle may well
qualify, that remarkably prescient and pioneering man, who ran at a Napoleonic
tempo through his Europe, through several centuries of the European soul, as a
tracker and discoverer of this soul. It took two generations to catch up with him
somehow, to grasp some of the riddles which tormented and delighted him, this
strange Epicurean and question mark of a man, who was France’s last great psychologist).
There is still a third claim to superiority: in the nature of the French there
is a semi-successful synthesis of north and south, which enables them to
understand many things and tells them to do other things which an Englishman
will never understand. In the French, the temperament which periodically turns
towards and away from the south and in which, from time to time, the Provencal
and Ligurian blood
bubbles over, protects them from the dreadful northern gray on gray and the
sunless conceptual ghostliness and anaemia—our German sickness of taste, against the excesses of which at the moment we
have prescribed for ourselves, with great decisiveness, blood and iron—or I
should say “grand politics” (in accordance with a dangerous art of healing
which teaches me to wait and wait, but up to this point has not taught me to
hope).15 Even today there is still in France an advance understanding of
and an accommodation with those rarer and rarely satisfied people who are too
all-embracing to find their contentment in some patriotism or other and know
how to love the south in the north and the north in the south—the born mid-landers, the
“good Europeans.”—For them Bizet created his music, this last genius who saw a new
beauty and enticement and—who discovered a piece of the south in music.16
255
I think all sorts of precautions are necessary against German
music. Suppose that someone loves the south the way I love it, as a great
school for convalescing in the most spiritual and sensual sense, as an unrestrained
abundance of sun and transfiguration by the sun, which spreads itself over an existence
which rules itself and believes in itself. Now, such a man will learn to be
quite careful as far as German music is concerned, because in ruining his taste
again it ruins his health again as well. Such a man of the south, not by
descent but by faith, must,
if he dreams of the future of music, also dream of a redemption of music from
the north and have in his ears the prelude to a more profound, more powerful,
perhaps more evil and more mysterious music, a supra-German music which does
not fade away, turn yellow, and grow pale at the sight of the blue voluptuous
sea and the brightness of the Mediterranean sky, the way all German music does,
a supra-European music which justifies itself even when confronted with the
brown desert sunsets, whose soul is related to the palm trees and knows how to
be at home and to wander among huge, beautiful, solitary, predatory beasts. . .
. I could imagine to myself a music whose rarest magic consisted in the fact
that it no longer knew anything about good and evil, only that perhaps here and
there some mariner’s nostalgia or other, some golden shadow and tender
weaknesses would race across it, an art which from a great distance could see
speeding towards it the colours of a sinking moral world—one
which has become almost unintelligible—and which would be sufficiently
hospitable and deep to take in such late fugitives.—
256
Thanks to the pathological alienation which the nationalist idiocy
has established and still establishes among European peoples, thanks as well to
the short-sighted politicians with hasty hands, who with the help of this
idiocy are on top nowadays and have no sense of how much the politics of
disintegration which they carry on can necessarily be only politics for an
intermission—thanks to all this and to many things today which are quite
impossible to utter, now the most unambiguous signs indicating that Europe wants to become a unity are being
overlooked or wilfully and mendaciously reinterpreted.
With all the more profound and more comprehensive men of this century the real
overall direction in the mysterious work of their souls has been to prepare the
way to this new synthesis and to anticipate, as an experiment, the European of the future.
Only in their foregrounds or in their weaker hours, as in old age, for example,
did they belong to their “fatherlands”—they were only taking a rest from
themselves when they became “patriots.” I’m thinking of men like Napoleon,
Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, Heinrich Heine, and Schopenhauer. Don’t get upset
with me if I also count Richard Wagner among them. About him people should not
let themselves be seduced by his own misunderstandings—geniuses of his kind
rarely have the right to understand themselves. Even less, of course, by the
uncivilized noise with which people in France these days close themselves off from
and resist Richard Wagner. Nonetheless, the fact remains that the late French Romanticism of the
forties and Richard Wagner belong together in the closest and most inner relation.
In all the heights and depths of their needs they are related to each other,
fundamentally related. It is Europe, the one Europe, whose soul pushes out and
upward through their manifold and impetuous art, and it longs to go—where? Into a new light? Towards a new sun? But who could express
exactly what all these masters of new ways of speaking did not know how to
express clearly? What is certain is that the same storm and stress tormented
them, that they sought in the same way, these last great seekers! All of them were
dominated by literature up to their eyes and ears—the first artists educated in
world literature—most of them were even themselves writers, poets, conveyers of
and mixers in the arts and senses (Wagner belongs as a musician with the
painters, as a poet with the musicians, as an artist generally with the
actors); they were all fanatics of expression “at any price”—I’ll cite Delacroix, the one most closely related
to Wagner—they were all great discoverers in the realm of the sublime, as well
as of the ugly and the horrific, even greater discoverers in effects, in
display, in the art of the store window—all talents far beyond their genius,
virtuosos through and through, with mysterious access to everything that
seduces, entices, compels, knocks over, born enemies of logic and the straight
line, greedy for the strange, the exotic, the monstrous, the crooked, the
self-contradictory; as men they were Tantaluses of the will, up-and-coming
plebeians, who knew that they were incapable of a noble tempo, a lento [slow movement], in their lives and
works—think, for example, of Balzac—unrestrained workers, almost killing
themselves with work, antinomians and rebels against morals, ambitious and insatiable
without equilibrium and enjoyment; all of them finally collapsing and sinking
down before the Christian cross (and they were right and justified in that, for
who among them would have been sufficiently profound and original for a
philosophy of the Antichrist?—), on
the whole, a boldly daring, marvellously violent,
high-flying kind of higher men, who pulled others up into the heights, men who first taught the idea of “higher man” to their century—and it’s
the century of the masses!17 The German friends of Richard Wagner should think about whether
there is anything essentially German in Wagnerian art or whether it is not
precisely its distinction that it comes from supra-German sources and urges. In doing that, one should not underestimate
just how indispensable Paris was for the development of a type like him, how at
the most decisive period the depth of his instincts called him there, and how
his whole way of appearing and his self-apostleship could perfect itself only
at the sight of the model of French socialists. Perhaps with a more sophisticated
comparison people will discover, to the honour of Richard Wagner’s German
nature, that he carried everything out more strongly, more daringly, harder,
and higher than a Frenchman of the nineteenth century could have done—thanks to
the fact that we Germans are still closer to barbarism than the French are.
Perhaps the most peculiar thing that Richard Wagner created is even inaccessible
and unsympathetic to and beyond the emulation of the entire Latin race, which
is so mature, for all time and not merely for today: the character of
Siegfried, that very free man, who, in fact, may be far too free, too hard, too cheerful,
too healthy, too anti-Catholic for the taste of an old and worn cultured people. He may even have
been a sin against Romanticism, this anti-Romantic [antiromanische] Siegfried. Well, Wagner more than made up for this sin in his old
and gloomy days when—in anticipation of a taste which in the meantime has
become political—he began, with his characteristic religious vehemence, if not
to go to Rome, at
least to preach the way there. So that you do not misunderstand these last
words of mine, I’ll summon a few powerful rhymes to my assistance, which will
reveal what I mean to less refined ears as well—what I have against the “late Wagner” and his Parsifal music:
Is that
still German?
Did this oppressive screech come from a German heart?
Is this self-mutilation of the flesh a German part?
And is this German, such priestly affectation,
this incense-smelling, sensual stimulation?
And German this faltering, plunging, staggering,
this uncertain bim-bam
dangling?
This nun-like ogling and ringing Ave bells,
this whole false heavenly super-heaven of spells?
Is that still German?
Think! You’re still standing by the entrance way.
You’re hearing Rome, Rome’s faith without the words they say.
NOTES
1August
Kotzebue (1761-1819), a well-known German writer assassinated by Karl Sand
(1795-1820); John Paul (1763-1825), pen name of Johann Richter, an influential
German writer in the Romantic era; Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1797-1879), an
influential German philosopher. [Back to Text]
2Wars of
Liberation: the wars against Napoleon which followed the French Revolution. [Back to Text]
3Napoleon
Bonaparte (I1769-1821) French general, ruler of France, and conqueror of much
of Europe; Rousseau: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), critic, philosopher and
writer whose work influenced the French Revolution; Schiller: Johann Christoph Friedrich
von Schiller (1759-1805), German poet, playwright, and philosopher; Shelley: Percy Bysshe Shelley
(1792-1822), a major English poet in the Romantic era; Byron: George Gordon
Byron (Lord Byron) (1788-1824), English poet in the Romantic era, a leading international
presence in European Romanticism. [Back to Text]
4Carl Maria
Friedrich Ernst von Weber (1786-1826), German musician during the Romantic period;
Heinrich Marschner (1795-1861),
German composer of operas. [Back to Text]
5Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) German composer in the early Romantic
period. [Back to Text]
6Robert
Schumann (1810-1856) German composer and music critic; Werther: hero of
a famous Romantic novel by Goethe (he commits suicide). [Back to Text]
7Cicero
(106-43 BC), the greatest of the Roman orators and prose stylists; Demosthenes
(384-322 BC), a very famous Greek orator. [Back to Text]
8Heinrich von Sybel (1817-1895)
and Heinrich von Treitschke (1834-1896), important mid-nineteenth century
German historians. [Back to Text]
9Mark
Brandenburg: a region near Berlin. [Back to Text]
10Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), English philosopher; David Hume
(1711-1776), Scottish historian and philosopher; John Locke (1632-1704),
English philosopher; Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854), German
philosopher. [Back to Text]
11Thomas
Carlyle (1795-1881), Scottish essayist, historian, and biographer. [Back to Text]
12Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
English scientist, whose Origin of
Species was
published in 1859; John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), English utilitarian philosopher
and economist; Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), English philosopher. [Back to Text]
13Victor
Hugo (1802-1885), French poet, playwright, and novelist. [Back to Text]
14Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), German lyric poet; Hippolye Adolphe Taine
(1828-1893), French critic and historian. [Back to Text]
15blood and iron: a phrase
made famous by Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck (1815-1898), First Chancellor
of Germany: “Not by speeches and votes of the majority are the great questions
of the time decided . . . but by iron and blood.” [Back to Text]
16Georges
Bizet (1838-1875), French composer and pianist. [Back to Text]
17Ferdinand
Victor Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863), important French Romantic painter; Honore de Balzac (1799-1850), prolific French novelist. [Back to Text]
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