Friedrich Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil
[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 January 2009]
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 is still vital. It is to the Germans’ credit that such a pride did not
make an error! What juices and forces, what seasons and heavenly strokes are
intermingled here! It impresses us sometimes as old fashioned, sometimes as
strange, dry, 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 which makes us dream, almost a
nightmare—but already the old stream of contentment is spreading and widening
once more, the stream of contentment, of manifold contentment, of old and new
happiness, which very much includes the happiness of the artist with
himself, something he will not 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 fine 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 reverend treasures and fine points; 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 landmark 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 bump and relapse into old loves and narrow places—I just gave 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 require 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 who, even in our shrinking 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.” And while I indulge myself excessively 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 thinks about and understands philosophy as much as a farmer 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 everything 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 riches and
power, they call him ‘great.’ What does it matter that in the meantime those of
us who are more cautious and more 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
love of their old and certain virtues to a new and doubtful mediocrity—suppose
that a statesman sentenced his people to a general ‘politicking,’ although up
to that point those same people had better things to do and think about and
that in the depth of their souls they could not rid themselves of a cautious
disgust with the anxiety, emptiness, blaring, 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 stains, their interaction with strangers
and their secret boundlessness into a liability, devalued their most heartfelt
inclinations, turned their conscience around, made their spirit narrow, their
taste ‘national,’—well, would a statesman who did all those things which his
people would have to atone for 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 would soon become
master over the strong, and also how there is a compensation for the spiritual
flattening of one people, namely, the spiritual 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, the growing detachment from the conditions under which arise races
linked to a climate and class, their increasing independence from every distinct
milieu which for centuries wanted to inscribe itself on body and soul with the
same demands—thus, the slow emergence of an essentially supra-national and nomadic
type of man, 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 men 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 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 new 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 designate the Germans with the label
“profound.” Now, when the most successful type of the new Germanism craves
completely different honours and perhaps finds “briskness” lacking in
everything profound, it is almost timely and patriotic to doubt whether we were
not deceiving ourselves previously with that praise: in short, 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 make the
attempt 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. The
German soul is, above all, multifaceted, with different origins, more cobbled
together and layered than truly constructed. That comes from how it emerged. A
German who wished the audacity to claim “Alas, two souls live inside 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 pre-Aryan elements, as “a people in the middle” in every
sense, the Germans are more incomprehensible, more extensive, more
contradictory, more unknown, more unpredictable, more surprising, and more
terrifying to themselves than other people are to themselves—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 knew what
he was doing when he expressed his anger over Fichte’s false but patriotic
flatteries and exaggerations— but is it likely that Goethe’s thinking about the
Germans was any different from Jean Paul’s, even if he thought he was right in
his opinion about Fichte?* 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.* 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 denies with an
impatient heart what the Germans reckon as something they can be proud of: the
famous German disposition he once defined as “leniency with the weaknesses of
strangers and with their own.” Was he wrong in that? It’s a 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 high points, hiding
places, dungeons. Its lack of order has a great deal of the charm of something
full of secrets. On the secret routes to chaos, the German knows what he is
doing. And just as everything loves its own metaphorical likeness, so the
German loves the clouds and everything associated with a lack of clarity, with
becoming, with twilight, with dampness: any kind of uncertainty, shapelessness,
shifting around, or developing he senses as something “profound.” In himself,
the German man is nothing—he is becoming something, he “is
developing himself.” Hence, “developing” is the essential German discovery and
invention 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 present to them (something
Hegel organized into a system and Richard Wagner finally even set to music).
“Good natured and treacherous”—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 of “the German soul,”
let them only 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 experiences badly—he’s never “finished” with them. German
profundity is often only a difficult and hesitant “digestion.” And just as all
the habitual invalids, all the 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 which 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 nightgown! 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 “boldness” and Berlin wit and sand. It’s
clever for a people to make itself and 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, 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!—He was, in fact, only the final chords
of a stylistic transition, a break in style, and not, like Mozart, the
final notes of a great centuries-long European taste.*
Beethoven is something that happens between an old crumbling soul which is
constantly breaking up and a very young soul of the future which is constantly coming.
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 freedom 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 sounds the talk of Rousseau, Schiller, Shelley,
and Byron, in whom collectively the same European fate found a way in
words which it knew how to sing in Beethoven!*
What has come in German music since then belongs to the Romantic period, that
is, historically considered, to an even shorter, even more fleeting, even more
superficial movement than was that great interlude, that transition in Europe
from Rousseau to Napoleon and to the arrival of democracy. There’s Weber: but
what are Freischutz and Oberon these days for us! Or
Marschner’s Hans Heiling and Vampyr! Or even Wagner’s Tannhauser!
That music has faded, 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 the lovely intermission
in German music.* But in 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.*—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 man who has a third ear! How
reluctantly he stands beside the slowly revolving swamp of sounds without
melody, of rhythms without dance, what among 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 good will 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 has put his ears
away in a drawer. In antiquity a man read, when he read—and that happened
rarely enough—to himself aloud and 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.*
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 ends; 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 into 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
awkward, 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 dullness—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.* May
I be forgiven for the fact that I, too, during a short and risky stay in a very
infected region did not remain wholly 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 assert
themselves 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 which 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 adjusted,
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, allowed, 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 anti-Semitic ranters out of the
country. We should comply with all caution, and selectively, more or less the
way the English aristocracy does it. It’s clear that the stronger and already
firmly established type of the new Germanism could involve itself with them
with the least objection, for example, the aristocratic officers from the Mark [of
Brandenburg].* It would be interesting in all sorts of ways to see
whether the genius of gold and patience (and above all of 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 in general; 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]. 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 can.* What’s
lacking in England, and what has always been missing, that’s something that
semi-actor and rhetorician Carlyle understood well enough, the 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.* 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, more pious than the German. He
is even more in need of Christianity. For more refined nostrils this
same English Christianity has still a lingering and truly English smell of
spleen and alcoholic dissipation, against which it is used for good reasons 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—has
succeeded in gaining pre-eminence in the middle regions of European taste.* In fact, who could doubt how useful it is
that such spirits rule for a while? 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.” And finally, they
have more to do than merely to have knowledge—for they have to be
something new, to mean something new, to present new values! The
gap between know and can is perhaps greater as well as more mysterious
than people think. It’s possible the man who can act in the grand style, the
creating man, will have to be a man who does not know; whereas, on the other
hand, for scientific discoveries of the sort Darwin made a certain narrowness,
aridity, and diligent carefulness, in short, something English, may not make a
bad disposition. 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—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 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.* Something
else is also common to them: a good will to stand against spiritual Germanization—and
an even better 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.* 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 becomes “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 unforgotten 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 of Paris, 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 [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 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
them, 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).*
Even today there is still in France an advance understanding of and an
accommodation with those rarer and rarely satisfied men 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.*
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
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 are on top nowadays with the help of this
idiocy 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 some 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 that 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, 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, Schopenhauer. Don’t get angry 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 which 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 customs, 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!*
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 decisive period the depth of his
instincts called him there, and how his whole way of appearing and his self-apostleship
could first perfect itself 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 had driven himself in all things
more strongly, more daringly, harder, and higher than a Frenchman of the
nineteenth century could—thanks to the fact that we Germans stand even closer
to barbarism than the French. Perhaps the most peculiar thing that Richard
Wagner created is even inaccessible and unsympathetic 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 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 don’t misunderstand these last words of mine, I’ll summon a few
powerful rhymes to my assistance, which will reveal to less refined ears what I
want—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
A
quotation from Goethe’s Faust. [Back to Text]
. .
. Kotzebue:
August 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. Fichte: Johann
Gottlieb Fichte (1797-1879), an influential German philosopher. [Back to Text]
. .
. wars of liberation: the wars against Napoleon which followed the French
Revolution. [Back to Text]
. .
. Swabians:
inhabitants of a region in eastern Germany. [Back to Text]
Mozart: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
(1756-1791); Beethoven: Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827). [Back to Text]
Freedom
tree of revolution: a reference to the French Revolution (1789-1799); Napoleon:
Napoleon 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]
Weber: Carl Maria Friedrich
Ernst von Weber (1786-1826), German musician during the Romantic period;
Marschner: Heinrich Marschner (1795-1861), German composer of operas. [Back to Text]
. .
. Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) German composer in the early Romantic period. [Back to Text]
. .
. Robert Schumann (1810-1856) German composer and music critic. Werther: Hero of
a famous Romantic novel by Goethe. He commits suicide. [Back to Text]
. .
. Cicero
(106-43 BC), the greatest of the Roman orators and prose stylists. Demosthenes
(384-322 BC), a very famous Greek orator. [Back to Text]
. .
. Sybel and Treitzsche: Heinrich von Sybel (1817-1895) and Heinrich von
Treitschke (1834-1896), important mid-nineteenth century German historians. [Back to Text]
. .
. Mark of Brandenburg: a region near Berlin. [Back to Text]
. .
. Hobbes:
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), English philosopher. David Hume (1711-1776),
Scottish historian and philosopher. John Locke (1632-1704), English
philosopher. Schelling: Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854),
German philosopher. [Back to Text]
. .
. Carlyle:
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), Scottish essayist, historian, and biographer. [Back to Text]
. .
. Charles 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]
. .
. Victor Hugo
(1802-1885), French poet, playwright, and novelist. [Back to Text]
. .
. Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), German lyric poet; Taine: Hippolye Adolphe Taine
(1828-1893), French critic and historian. [Back to Text]
. .
. blood 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]
. .
. Bizet:
Georges Bizet (1838-1875), French composer and pianist. [Back to Text]
. .
. Delacroix:
Ferdinand Victor Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863), important French Romantic
painter; Balzac: Honore de Balzac (1799-1850), prolific French novelist.
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