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. [Back
to Text]
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