WHERE WAGNER BELONGS
Even now France is still the seat of the most spiritual and refined culture in Europe and the foremost school of taste: but one must know where to find this “France of taste.” The Norddeutsche Zeitung, for example, or whoever uses this newspaper as a mouthpiece, considers the French “barbarians”; I, for my own part, look for the Dark Continent, where the “slaves” ought to be freed, in the vicinity of the North Germans.
Whoever belongs to that France keeps himself well concealed: it may be a small number in whom it lives and continues, and at that, perhaps human beings who are not among the sturdiest: partly fatalists, somber and sick, partly pampered and artificial, such as have the ambition to be artificial—but they possess everything high and delicate that is still left in this world. In this France of the spirit, which is also the France of pessimism, Schopenhauer is even now more at home than he has ever been in Germany; his main work has already been translated twice, the second time excellently, so that I now prefer to read Schopenhauer in French (he was an accident among Germans, as I am such an accident; the Germans have no fingers for us, they have no fingers altogether, they have only paws). Not to speak of Heinrich Heine—l’adorable Heine, they say in Paris —who has long become part of the very flesh and blood of the more profound and soulful lyrical poets in France. How could German oxen be anything but dumfounded by the délicatesses of such a nature!
As regards Richard Wagner, finally, it is so plain that one could grasp it with the hands, though perhaps not with fists, that Paris is the real soil for Wagner: the more French music develops according to the needs of the âme moderne, the more it will Wagnerize—in fact, that is what it is doing even now. We must not let ourselves be led astray about this by Wagner himself: it was real badness in Wagner to mock Paris in its agony in 1871. In Germany, Wagner is nevertheless merely a misunderstanding: who could be more incapable of understanding Wagner than, for example, the young Kaiser? It remains a certain fact for anyone familiar with European cultural movements that French romanticism and Richard Wagner belong together most closely. All dominated by literature right into their eyes and ears—the first artists in Europe to have an education in world literature —in most cases, themselves writers, poets, mediators, and mixers of the senses and the arts; all fanatics of expression, great discoverers in the realm of the sublime, also of the ugly and the horrible, still greater discoverers in the sphere of effects and spectacular displays, in the art of display windows; all talents far beyond their genius—virtuosos through and through, with uncanny access to everything that seduces, lures, forces, overthrows, born enemies of logic and of the straight line, covetous of the strange, the exotic, the tremendous, and all opiates of the senses and the understanding. On the whole, an audaciously daring, magnificently violent, high-soaring, and high-sweeping type of artist, they alone have taught their century—it is the century of the mass—the concept of the “artist.” But sick.
WAGNER AS THE APOSTLE OF CHASTITY
1
Is this still German?
Out of a German heart, this torrid screeching?
a German body, this self-laceration?
German, this priestly affectation,
this incense-smelling lurid preaching?
German, this plunging, halting, reeling,
this sugar-sweetish bim-bam pealing?
this nunnish ogling, Ave leavening,
this whole falsely ecstatic heaven over-heavening?
Is this still German?
Consider! Stay! You are perplexed?
That which you hear is Rome—Rome’s faith without the
text.
2
There is no necessary opposition between sensuality and chastity; every good marriage, every love affair, that comes from the heart is beyond this opposition. But in a case in which this opposition really exists, fortunately it need by no means be a tragic opposition. This would seem to hold at least for all the better turned out, more cheerful mortals, who are far from counting their labile balance between angel and petite bête as necessarily among the objections to existence: the finest, the brightest, like Hafiz, like Goethe, have even considered this one attraction more. Such contradictions actually seduce to existence. On the other hand, it is only too easy to understand that, should those whom misfortune has changed into the animals of Circe ever be brought to the point of adoring chastity, they will see only their own opposite in it and will adore it—oh, with what tragic grunting and fervor one can imagine. And at the end of his life Richard Wagner undeniably wanted to set this embarrassing and perfectly superfluous opposition to music and produce it on the stage. Why? we are entitled to ask.
3
At this point, of course, we cannot escape another question: What could that male (yet so unmasculine) “innocence from the country” really be to him, that poor devil and child of nature, Parsifal, whom Wagner finally makes a Catholic by such captious means? How now? Was this Parsifal meant at all seriously? For, that he has been laughed at, I would certainly be in no position to dispute—nor would Gottfried Keller.61
I should really wish that the Wagnerian Parsifal were intended as a prank—as the epilogue and satyr play, as it were, with which the tragedian Wagner wanted to say farewell in a fitting manner worthy of himself—to us, to himself, and above all to tragedy, with an excessive, sublimely wanton parody on the tragic itself, on all the former horrid earthly seriousness and earthly misery, on the most stupid form, overcome at long last, of the anti-nature of the ascetic ideal. After all, Parsifal is operetta material par excellence. Is Wagner’s Parsifal his secretly superior laughter at himself, the triumph of his ultimate artistic freedom, his artistic non plus ultra—Wagner able to laugh at himself?
Clearly, one should wish that; for what would Parsifal amount to if intended as a serious piece? Must we really see in it (as somebody has expressed it against me) “the abortion gone mad of a hatred of knowledge, spirit, and sensuality”? A curse on the senses and the spirit in a single hatred and breath? An apostasy and reversion to sickly Christian and obscurantist ideals? And in the end even a self-abnegation, a self-crossing-out on the part of an artist who had previously aimed at the very opposite of this, striving with all the power of his will to achieve the highest spiritualization and sensualization in his art? And not only in his art, but also in his life.
We should remember how enthusiastically Wagner once followed in the footsteps of the philosopher Feuerbach. In the thirties and forties, Feuerbach’s slogan of “healthy sensuality” sounded to Wagner, as to many other Germans—they called themselves the young Germans—like the words of redemption. Had he learned differently in the end? For it seems, at least, that he finally had the will to teach differently. Did the hatred against life become dominant in him, as in Flaubert? For Parsifal is a work of perfidy, of vindictiveness, of a secret attempt to poison the presuppositions of life—a bad work. The preaching of chastity remains an incitement to anti-nature: I despise everyone who does not experience Parsifal as an attempted assassination of basic ethics.
HOW I BROKE AWAY FROM WAGNER
1
By the summer of 1876, during the time of the first Festspiele, I said farewell to Wagner in my heart. I suffer no ambiguity; and since Wagner had moved to Germany, he had condescended step by step to everything I despise—even to anti-Semitism.
It was indeed high time to say farewell: soon after, I received the proof. Richard Wagner, apparently most triumphant, but in truth a decaying and despairing decadent, suddenly sank down, helpless and broken, before the Christian cross. Did no German have eyes in his head or pity in his conscience for this horrid spectacle? Was I the only one whom it pained? Enough; this unexpected event struck me like lightning and gave me clarity about the place I had left—and also that shudder which everybody feels after he has unconsciously passed through a tremendous danger. As I proceeded alone I trembled; not long after, I was sick, more than sick, namely, weary—weary from the inevitable dis
appointment about everything that is left to us modern men for enthusiasm, about the universally wasted energy, work, hope, youth, love—weary from nausea at the whole idealistic lie and pampering of the conscience, which had here triumphed once again over one of the bravest —weary, finally and not least of all, from the grief aroused by an inexorable suspicion that I was henceforth sentenced to mistrust more profoundly, to despise more profoundly, to be more profoundly alone than ever before. For I had had nobody except Richard Wagner. I have always been sentenced to Germans.
2
Lonely henceforth and badly mistrustful of myself, I then took sides, not without indignation, against myself and for everything that hurt and was hard just for me: thus I found the way again to that courageous pessimism which is the opposite of all idealistic mendaciousness, and also, it seems to me, the way to myself, to my task. That hidden and masterful something for which we long do not have a name, until finally it proves itself to be our task—this tyrant in us wreaks horrible revenge for every attempt we make to dodge or escape it, for every premature resignation, for every acceptance of equality with those among whom we do not belong, for every activity, however respectable, which distracts us from our main cause—indeed, for every virtue which would protect us from the hardness of our inmost responsibility. Every time, sickness is the response when we want to doubt our right to our task, when we begin to make things easier for ourselves in any way. Strange and at the same time terrible! It is the easing of our burden which we must atone most harshly. And if we want to return to health afterward, we have no choice: we must assume a heavier burden than we ever carried before.
THE PSYCHOLOGIST SPEAKS UP
1
The more a psychologist—a born and inevitable psychologist and unriddler of souls—applies himself to the more exquisite cases and human beings, the greater becomes the danger that he might suffocate of pity. He needs hardness and cheerfulness more than anyone else. For the corruption, the destruction, of the higher men is the rule: it is terrible constantly to have such a rule before one’s eyes. The manifold torture of the psychologist who has discovered this corruption, who discovers this whole inner haplessness of the higher man, this eternal “too late” in every sense, first in one case and then almost always again through the whole of history—one day this may perhaps bring about his own corruption.
In almost every psychologist one will perceive a telltale preference for association with everyday, well-ordered people: this reveals that he always requires a cure, that he needs a kind of escape and forgetting, away from all that with which his insights, his incisions, his craft, burden his conscience. He is characterized by fear of his memory. He is easily silenced by the judgments of others; he listens with an immobile face as they venerate, admire, love, and transfigure where he has seen—or he even conceals his silence by explicitly agreeing with some foreground opinion. Perhaps the paradox of his situation is so horrible that the “educated,” on their part, learn the greatest veneration precisely where he has learned the greatest pity coupled with the greatest contempt.
And who knows whether what happened in all great cases was not simply this—that one adored a god, and that the god was merely a poor sacrificial animal. Success has always been the greatest liar—and the work, the deed too, is a success. The great statesman, the conqueror, the discoverer is disguised by his creations, concealed beyond recognition; it is the work, of the artist as of the philosophers, that invents the man who has created it, who is supposed to have created it. “Great men,” as they are venerated, are subsequent pieces of wretched minor fiction: in the world of historical values, counterfeit rules.
2
Those great poets, for example, men like Byron, Musset, Poe, Leopardi, Kleist, Gogol—I do not dare mention far greater names, but I mean them—are and must be men of the moment, sensual, absurd, fivefold, irresponsible, and sudden in mistrust and trust; with souls in which they must usually conceal some fracture; often taking revenge with their works for some inner contamination, often seeking with their high flights to escape into forgetfulness from an all-too-faithful memory; idealists from the vicinity of swamps—what torture are these great artists and all the so-called higher men for him who has guessed their true nature! We are all advocates of the mediocre. It is easy to understand that it is woman—clairvoyant in the world of suffering, and, unfortunately, also desirous far beyond her strength to help and to save—who so readily accords these men those outbreaks of infinite pity on which the mass, particularly the venerating mass, then lavish inquisitive and self-satisfied interpretations. This pity regularly deceives itself about its own strength: woman would like to believe that love can achieve everything—it is her characteristic superstition. Alas, whoever knows the heart will guess how poor, helpless, arrogant, and mistaken is even the best, the profoundest love—how it even destroys rather than saves.
3
The spiritual nausea and haughtiness of every human being who has suffered deeply—how deeply one can suffer almost determines the order of rank—his shuddering certainty, which permeates and colors him through and through, that by virtue of his suffering he knows more than the cleverest and wisest could possibly know, and that he knows his way and has once been at home in many distant, terrifying worlds of which “you know nothing”—this spiritual and silent haughtiness, this pride of the elect of cognition, of the “initiated,” of the almost sacrificed, finds all kinds of disguise necessary to protect itself against contact with officious and pitying hands, and against everything that is not a peer in suffering. Deep suffering makes noble; it separates.
One of the finest disguises is Epicureanism, and a certain ostentatious courage of taste which takes suffering glibly and wards off everything sad and deep. There are “cheerful people” who employ cheerfulness in order to be misunderstood—they want to be misunderstood. There are “scientific spirits” who employ science because it gives a cheerful appearance, and because scientism suggests that a man is superficial—they want to seduce others to such a false inference. There are free, impudent spirits who would like to conceal and deny that at bottom they are broken, incurable hearts—the case of Hamlet: and then even foolishness can be the mask for an unblessed all-too-certain certainty.
EPILOGUE
1
I have often asked myself whether I am not more heavily obligated to the hardest years of my life than to any others. As my inmost nature teaches me, whatever is necessary—as seen from the heights and in the sense of a great economy—is also the useful par excellence: one should not only bear it, one should love it. Amor fati: that is my inmost nature. And as for my long sickness, do I not owe it indescribably more than I owe to my health? I owe it a higher health—one which is made stronger by whatever does not kill it. I also owe my philosophy to it. Only great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit, as the teacher of great suspicion which turns every U into an X, a real, genuine X, that is, the letter before the penultimate one. Only great pain, that long, slow pain in which we are burned with green wood, as it were—pain which takes its time—only this forces us philosophers to descend into our ultimate depths and to put away all trust, all good-naturedness, all that would veil, all mildness, all that is medium— things in which formerly we may have found our humanity. I doubt that such a pain makes us “better,” but I know that it makes us more profound.
Whether we learn to pit our pride, our scorn, our will power against it, equaling the American Indian who, however tortured, evens the score with his torturer by the malice of his tongue; or whether we withdraw from pain into that Nothing, into mute, rigid, deaf resignation, self-forgetting, self-extinction: out of such long and dangerous exercises of self-mastery one emerges as a different person, with a few more question marks—above all, with the will to question more persistently, more deeply, severely, harshly, evilly, and quietly than has ever been questioned on this earth before. The trust in life is gone; life itself has become a problem. Yet one should not jump to the conclus
ion that with all this a man has necessarily become dusky, a barn owl. Even the love of life is still possible—only, one loves differently. It is the love for a woman who raises doubts in us.
2
What is strangest is this: afterward one has a different taste—a second taste. Out of such abysses, also out of the abyss of great suspicion, one returns newborn, having shed one’s skin, more ticklish and sarcastic, with a more delicate taste for joy, with a more tender tongue for all good things, with gayer senses, with a second dangerous innocence in joy, more childlike and yet a hundred times more subtle than one has ever been before.
How repulsive pleasure is now, that crude, musty, brown pleasure as it is understood by those who like pleasure, our “educated” people, our rich people, and our rulers! How sarcastically we listen now to the big county-fair boom-boom with which the “educated” person and city dweller today permits art, books, and music to rape him and provide “spiritual pleasures”—with the aid of spirituous liquors! How the theatrical scream of passion now hurts our ears, how strange to our taste the whole romantic uproar and tumult of the senses have become, which the educated rabble loves, and all its aspirations after the elevated, inflated, and exaggerated! No, if we who have recovered still need art, it is another kind of art—a mocking, light, fleeting, divinely untroubled, divinely artificial art, which, like a pure flame, licks into unclouded skies. Above all, an art for artists, for artists only! We know better afterward what above all is needed for this: cheerfulness, any cheerfulness, my friends. There are a few things we now know too well, we knowing ones: oh, how we learn now to forget well, and to be good at not knowing, as artists!