The Portable Nietzsche

  It seems to me that even the bluntest word, the bluntest letter is still more good-natured, still more honest, than silence. Those who remain silent are almost always lacking in delicacy and politeness of the heart. Silence is an objection, and swallowing things down necessarily makes for a bad character—it even upsets the digestion. All who remain silent are dyspeptic. Clearly, I would not have bluntness underestimated: it is by far the most humane form of contradiction and, amid modern pampering, one of our foremost virtues. When one is rich enough for this, it is even good fortune to be wrong. Were a god to come down upon earth, he should do nothing but wrong: to take upon oneself guilt and not punishment, that alone would be godlike.

  My practice of war may be summarized in four propositions. First: I attack only causes which are victorious—and at times I wait until they are victorious. Second: I attack only causes against which I cannot expect to find allies, against which I shall stand alone —against which I shall compromise myself alone. I have never taken a step in public which was not compromising: that is my criterion of doing what is right. Third: I never attack persons; I only avail myself of the person as of a strong magnifying glass with which one can render visible a general but creeping calamity which it is otherwise hard to get hold of. Thus I attacked David Strauss—or more precisely, the success of a decrepit book among German “educated people”—here I caught these educated people in the act. Thus I attacked Wagner—or, more precisely, the falsity, the half-wittedness of instinct in our “culture,” which mistakes the subtle for the abundant, and the latecomers for the great. Fourth: I attack only causes in which any personal difference is out of the question, and in which any background of unwholesome experiences is lacking. On the contrary, to attack is with me a proof of good will, and sometimes of gratitude.

  Heinrich Heine gave me the highest conception of the lyric poet. I seek in vain in all the realms of thousands of years for an equally sweet and passionate music. He possessed that divine sarcasm without which I cannot conceive the perfect. I estimate the value of human beings, of races, according to the necessity with which they cannot understand the god apart from the satyr. And how Heine handles the German language! It will be said one day that he and I have been by far the first artists of the German language—at an incalculable distance from everything that mere Germans have done with it.

  One must pay dearly for immortality: one has to die several times while still alive.

  The whole of history is the refutation by experiment of the principle of the so-called “moral world order.”

  NIETZSCHE CONTRA WAGNER

  OUT OF THE FILES OF A PSYCHOLOGIST

  PREFACE

  All of the following chapters have been selected, not without caution, from my older writings—some go back all the way to 1877—perhaps clarified here and there, above all, shortened. Read one after another, they will leave no doubt either about Richard Wagner or about myself: we are antipodes. Other things too will become clear; for example, that this is an essay for psychologists, but not for Germans. I have my readers everywhere, in Vienna, in St. Petersburg, in Copenhagen and Stockholm, in Paris, in New York—I do not have them in Europe’s shallows, Germany.

  And perhaps I could whisper something to my good Italians whom I love as much as I—.57 Quousque tandem, Crispi? 58 Triple alliance: with the Reich an intelligent people can enter only a mésalliance.

  FRIEDRICH NIETZCHE

  Turin, Christmas 1888

  WHERE I ADMIRE

  I believe that artists often do not know what they can do best: they are too vain. They are intent on something prouder than these small plants seem to be which grow on their soil, new, strange and beautiful, in real perfection. What is ultimately good in their own garden and vineyard they esteem lightly, and their love and insight are not equal. There is a musician who, more than any other musician, is a master at finding the tones in the realm of suffering, depressed, and tortured souls, at giving language even to mute misery. None can equal him in the colors of late fall, is the indescribably moving happiness of the last, truly last, truly shortest joy; he knows a sound for those quiet, disquieting midnights of the soul, where cause and effect seem to be out of joint and where at any moment something might originate “out of nothing.” He draws most happily of all out of the profoundest depth of human happiness, and, as it were, out of its drained goblet, where the bitterest and most repulsive drops have finally and evilly run together with the sweetest. He knows that weariness of the soul which drags itself, unable to leap or fly any more, even to walk; he masters the shy glance of concealed pain, of understanding without comfort, of the farewell without confession—indeed, as the Orpheus of all secret misery he is greater than any; and some things have been added to the realm of art by him alone, things that had hitherto seemed inexpressible and even unworthy of art —the cynical rebellion, for example, of which only those are capable who suffer most bitterly; also some very minute and microscopic aspects of the soul, as it were the scales of its amphibian nature: indeed, he is the master of the very minute. But he does not want to be that! His character prefers large walls and audacious frescoes.

  It escapes him that his spirit has a different taste and inclination—the opposite perspective—and prefers to sit quietly in the nooks of collapsed houses: there, hidden, hidden from himself, he paints his real masterpieces, all of which are very short, often only one beat long—only then does he become wholly good, great, and perfect, perhaps there alone. Wagner is one who has suffered deeply—that is his distinction above other musicians. I admire Wagner wherever he puts himself into music.

  WHERE I OFFER OBJECTIONS

  This does not mean that I consider this music healthy —least of all precisely where it speaks of Wagner. My objections to the music of Wagner are physiological objections: why should I trouble to dress them up in aesthetic formulas? After all, aesthetics is nothing but a kind of applied physiology.

  My “fact,” my petit fait vrai, is that I no longer breathe easily when this music begins to affect me; that my foot soon resents it and rebels: my foot feels the need for rhythm, dance, march—to Wagner’s “Kaisermarsch” not even the young German Kaiser could march —it demands of music first of all those delights which are found in good walking, striding, dancing. But does not my stomach protest too? my heart? my circulation? Are not my entrails saddened? Do I not suddenly become hoarse? To listen to Wagner I need pastilles Gérandel.

  And so I ask myself: What is it that my whole body really expects of music? For there is no soul. I believe, its own ease: as if all animal functions should be quickened by easy, bold, exuberant, self-assured rhythms; as if iron, leaden life should lose its gravity through golden, tender, oil-smooth melodies. My melancholy wants to rest in the hiding-places and abysses of perfection: that is why I need music. But Wagner makes sick.

  What is the theater to me? What, the convulsions of his “moral” ecstasies which give the people—and who is not "people”?—satisfaction? What, the whole gesture hocus-pocus of the actor? It is plain that I am essentially anti-theatrical: confronted with the theater, this mass art par excellence, I feel that profound scorn at the bottom of my soul which every artist today feels. Success in the theater—with that one drops in my respect forever; failure—I prick up my cars and begin to respect.

  But Wagner was the other way around; besides the Wagner who made the loneliest music in existence, he was essentially also a man of the theater and an actor, the most enthusiastic mimomaniac, perhaps, who ever existed, even as a musician. And, incidentally, if it was Wagner’s theory that “the drama is the end, the music is always a mere means,” his practice was always, from beginning to end, “the pose is the end; the drama, also the music, is always merely its means.” Music as a means to clarify, strengthen, and lend inward dimension to the dramatic gesture and the actor’s appeal to the senses—and the Wagnerian drama, a mere occasion for many interesting poses! Besides all other instincts, he had the commanding instincts of a great a
ctor in absolutely everything—and, as already mentioned, also as a musician.

  Once there was a Wagnerian pur sang to whom I made this clear, not without trouble—clarity and Wagnerian! Not another word is needed. There were reasons then for adding: “Do be a little more honest with yourself! After all, we are not in Bayreuth. In Bayreuth one is honest only in the mass; as an individual one lies, one lies to oneself. One leaves oneself at home when one goes to Bayreuth; one renounces the right to one’s own tongue and choice, to one’s taste, even to one’s courage as one has it and exercises it between one’s own four walls against both God and world. No one brings along the finest senses of his art to the theater, least of all the artist who works for the theater—solitude is lacking; whatever is perfect suffers no witnesses. In the theater one becomes people, herd female, pharisee, voting cattle, patron, idiot—Wagnerian: even the most personal conscience is vanquished by the leveling magic of the great number; the neighbor reigns, one becomes a mere neighbor.”

  WAGNER AS A DANGER

  1

  The intention pursued by recent music with what is now vigorously, but not at all clearly, called “infinite melody,” can be clarified by an illustration. One walks into the sea, gradually loses one’s secure footing, and finally surrenders oneself to the elements without reservation: one must swim. In older music, what one had to do in the dainty, or solemn, or fiery back and forth, quicker and slower, was something quite different, namely, to dance. The measure required for this, the maintenance of certain equally balanced units of time and force, demanded continual wariness of the listener’s soul—and on the counterplay of this cooler breeze that came from wariness and the warm breath of enthusiasm rested the magic of all good music. Richard Wagner wanted a different kind of movement; he overthrew the physiological presupposition of previous music. Swimming, floating—no longer walking and dancing.

  Perhaps the decisive point has now been stated. The “infinite melody” seeks deliberately to break all evenness of time and force and even scorns it occasionally; the wealth of its invention lies precisely in that which to an older ear sounds like a rhythmic paradox and blasphemy. The imitation or domination of such a taste would result in a danger to music which cannot be exaggerated: the complete degeneration of rhythmic feeling, chaos in place of rhythm. This danger reaches its climax when such music leans more and more heavily on a wholly naturalistic style of acting and gestures, which is no longer dominated by any law of plasticity and wants effect, nothing more. Espressivo at any price, and music in the service, the slavery, of poses-that is the end.

  2

  What? Should it really be the supreme virtue of a performance, as the virtuosos of musical performance now seem to believe, that one must under all circumstances achieve an hautrelief which is simply unsurpassable? Is not this, when applied to Mozart, for example, the true sin against the spirit of Mozart—the cheerful, enthusiastic, tender, enamored spirit of Mozart, who was happily no German and whose seriousness is a gracious, a golden, seriousness and not the seriousness of a German Philistine? Not to speak of the seriousness of the “Stone Guest” 59 But apparently you think all music is like the music of the “Stone Guest”—all music must leap out of the wall and shake the listener to his very intestines. Only then you consider music “effective.” But on whom are such effects achieved? On those whom a noble artist should never impress: on the mass, on the immature, on the blasé, on the sick, on the idiots, on Wagnerians!

  A MUSIC WITHOUT A FUTURE

  Music makes its appearance as the last plant among all the arts which grow on the soil of a particular culture—perhaps because it is the most inward and hence arrives last, in the fall, when the culture which belongs to it is fading. Only in the art of the Dutch masters did the soul of the Christian Middle Ages attain its last vibrations: their tone architecture is the posthumous, but legitmate and equal sister of the Gothic. Only in Handel’s music did there resound what was best in the souls of Luther and those related to him, the Jewishheroic trait that gave the Reformation a trait of greatness-the Old Testament become music, not the New. Only Mozart transformed the age of Louis XIV and the art of Racine and Claude Lorrain into ringing gold; only in the music of Beethoven and Rossini did the eighteenth century sing itself out—the century of enthusiasm, of broken ideals, and of evanescent happiness. All true, all original music, is a swan song.

  Perhaps our latest music too, however dominant and domineering it is, has but a short span of time ahead of it: for it developed out of a culture whose soil is rapidly sinking—a culture which will soon have sunk out of sight. A certain catholicism of feeling and a delight in some old indigenous, so-called “national” sense and nonsense are its presuppositions. Wagner’s appropriation of old sagas and songs, which scholarly prejudice had held up as something Teutonic par excellence—today we laugh at that—his reanimation of those Scandinavian monsters with a thirst for ecstatic sensuality and desensualization—this whole give-and-take of Wagner concerning materials, figures, passions, and nerves clearly expresses the spirit of his music too, supposing that this, like any music, could not speak of itself except ambiguously: for music is a woman.

  We must not allow ourselves to be deceived about this state of affairs simply because at the moment we happen to live in a period of reaction within reaction. The age of national wars, of ultramontane martyrdom, this whole entr’acte character of the current situation in Europe may indeed help such an art as Wagner’s to a sudden glory, without thereby guaranteeing it a future. The Germans themselves have no future.

  WE ANTIPODES

  It may perhaps be recalled, at least among my friends, that at first I approached the modern world with. a few errors and overestimations, in any case, full of hopes. I understood—who knows on the basis of what personal experiences?—the philosophic pessimism of the nineteenth century as a symptom of a greater strength of thought, of a more triumphant fullness of life, than had found expression in the philosophy of Hume, Kant, and Hegel: I took tragic insight for the most beautiful luxury of our culture, for its most precious, noblest, most dangerous kind of squandering—but nevertheless, in view of its excessive wealth, as a permissible luxury. Similarly, I interpreted Wagner’s music as an expression of a Dionysian power of the soul; I believed I heard in it the earthquake with which a primordial force of life, dammed up from time immemorial, finally vents itself, indifferent to the possibility that everything that calls itself culture today might start tottering. It is plain what I misunderstood in, equally plain what I read into, Wagner and Schopenhauer—myself.

  Every art, every philosophy, may be considered a remedy and aid in the service of either growing or declining life: it always presupposes suffering and sufferers. But there are two kinds of sufferers: first, those who suffer from the overfullness of life and want a Dionysian art as well as a tragic insight and outlook on life—and then those who suffer from the impoverishment of life and demand of art and philosophy, calm, stillness, smooth seas, or, on the other hand, frenzy, convulsion, and anesthesia. Revenge against life itself—the most voluptuous kind of frenzy for those so impoverished!

  Wagner responds to this dual need of the latter no less than Schopenhauer: they negate life, they slander it, hence they are my antipodes. He that is richest in the fullness of life, the Dionysian god and man, can afford not only the sight of the terrible and the questionable, but even the terrible deed and any luxury of destruction, decomposition, and negation: in his case, what is evil, senseless, and ugly seems, as it were, permissible, as it seems permissible in nature, because of an excess of procreating, restoring powers which can yet turn every desert into luxurious farm land. Conversely, those who suffer most and are poorest in life would need mildness, peacefulness, and goodness most—what is today called humaneness—in thought as well as in deed, and, if possible, a god who would be truly a god for the sick, a healer and “savior”; also logic, the conceptual understandability of existence even for idiots—the typical “free spirits,” like
the “idealists” and “beautiful souls,” are all decadents—in short, a certain warm, fear-repulsing narrowness and enclosure within optimistic horizons which permit hebetation.

  Thus I gradually learned to understand Epicurus, the opposite of a Dionysian Greek; also the Christian, who is, in fact, only a kind of Epicurean, and, with his “faith makes blessed,” follows the principle of hedonism as far as possible—far beyond any intellectual integrity. If there is anything in which I am ahead of all psychologists, it is that my eye is sharper for that most difficult and captious kind of backward inference in which the most mistakes are made: the backward inference from the work to the maker, from the deed to the doer, from the ideal to him who needs it, from every way of thinking and valuing to the want behind it that prompts it.

  Regarding artists of all kinds, I now avail myself of this main distinction: is it the hatred against life or the excess of life which has here become creative? In Goethe, for example, the excess became creative; in Flaubert, hatred: Flaubert—a new edition of Pascal, but as an artist, with the instinctive judgment deep down: “Flaubert est toujours haïssable, l’homme n’est rien, l’oeuvre est tout.” 60 He tortured himself when he wrote, just as Pascal tortured himself when he thought; they were both unegoistic. “Selflessness”—the principle of decadence, the will to the end, in art as well as in morals.