08. CHAPTER VIII
PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES
240. I HEARD, once again for the first time, Richard Wagner's
overture to the Mastersinger: it is a piece of magnificent,
gorgeous, heavy, latter-day art, which has the pride to
presuppose two centuries of music as still living, in order that
it may be understood:--it is an honour to Germans that such a
pride did not miscalculate! What flavours and forces, what
seasons and climes do we not find mingled in it! It impresses us
at one time as ancient, at another time as foreign, bitter, and
too modern, it is as arbitrary as it is pompously traditional, it
is not infrequently roguish, still oftener rough and coarse--it
has fire and courage, and at the same time the loose, dun-
coloured skin of fruits which ripen too late. It flows broad and
full: and suddenly there is a moment of inexplicable hesitation,
like a gap that opens between cause and effect, an oppression
that makes us dream, almost a nightmare; but already it broadens
and widens anew, the old stream of delight-the most manifold
delight,--of old and new happiness; including ESPECIALLY the joy
of the artist in himself, which he refuses to
conceal, his
astonished, happy cognizance of his mastery of the expedients
here employed, the new, newly acquired, imperfectly tested
expedients of art which he apparently betrays to us. All in all,
however, no beauty, no South, nothing of the delicate southern
clearness of the sky, nothing of grace, no dance, hardly a will
to logic; a certain clumsiness even, which is also emphasized, as
though the artist wished to say to us: "It is part of my
intention"; a cumbersome drapery, something arbitrarily barbaric
and ceremonious, a flirring of learned and venerable conceits and
witticisms; something German in the best and worst sense of the
word, something in the German style, manifold, formless, and
inexhaustible; a certain German potency and super-plenitude of
soul, which is not afraid to hide itself under the RAFFINEMENTS
of decadence--which, perhaps, feels itself most at ease there; a
real, genuine token of the German soul, which is at the same time
young and aged, too ripe and yet still too rich in futurity. This
kind of music expresses best what I think of the Germans: they
belong to the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow--
THEY HAVE AS YET NO TODAY.
241. We "good Europeans," we also have hours when we allow
ourselves a warm-hearted patriotism, a plunge and relapse into
old loves and narrow views--I have just given an example of it--
hours of national excitement, of patriotic anguish, and all other
sorts of old-fashioned floods of sentiment. Duller spirits may
perhaps only get done with what
confines its operations in us to
hours and plays itself out in hours--in a considerable time: some
in half a year, others in half a lifetime, according to the speed
and strength with which they digest and "change their material."
Indeed, I could think of sluggish, hesitating races, which even
in our rapidly moving Europe, would require half a century ere
they could surmount such atavistic attacks of patriotism and
soil-attachment, and return once more to reason, that is to say,
to "good Europeanism." And while digressing on this possibility,
I happen to become an ear-witness of a conversation between two
old patriots--they were evidently both hard of hearing and
consequently spoke all the louder. "HE has as much, and knows as
much, philosophy as a peasant or a corps-student," said the one--
"he is still innocent. But what does that matter nowadays! It is
the age of the masses: they lie on their belly before everything
that is massive. And so also in politicis. A statesman who rears
up for them a new Tower of Babel, some monstrosity of empire and
power, they call 'great'--what does it matter that we more
prudent and conservative ones do not meanwhile give up the old
belief that it is only the great thought that gives greatness to
an action or affair. Supposing a statesman were to bring his
people into the position of being obliged henceforth to practise
'high politics,' for which they were by nature badly endowed and
prepared, so that they would have to sacrifice their old and
reliable virtues, out of love to a new and doubtful mediocrity;--
supposing a statesman were to condemn his people generally to
'practise politics,'
when they have hitherto had something better
to do and think about, and when in the depths of their souls they
have been unable to free themselves from a prudent loathing of
the restlessness, emptiness, and noisy wranglings of the
essentially politics-practising nations;--supposing such a
statesman were to stimulate the slumbering passions and avidities
of his people, were to make a stigma out of their former
diffidence and delight in aloofness, an offence out of their
exoticism and hidden permanency, were to depreciate their most
radical proclivities, subvert their consciences, make their minds
narrow, and their tastes 'national'--what! a statesman who should
do all this, which his people would have to do penance for
throughout their whole future, if they had a future, such a
statesman would be GREAT, would he?"--"Undoubtedly!" replied the
other old patriot vehemently, "otherwise he COULD NOT have done
it! It was mad perhaps to wish such a thing! But perhaps
everything great has been just as mad at its commencement!"--
"Misuse of words!" cried his interlocutor, contradictorily--
"strong! strong! Strong and mad! NOT great!"--The old men had
obviously become heated as they thus shouted their "truths" in
each other's faces, but I, in my happiness and apartness,
considered how soon a stronger one may become master of the
strong, and also that there is a compensation for the
intellectual superficialising of a nation--namely, in the
deepening of another.
242. Whether we call it "civilization," or "humanising," or
"progress," which now distinguishes the European, whether we call
it simply, without praise or blame, by the political formula the
DEMOCRATIC movement in Europe--behind all the moral and political
foregrounds pointed to by such formulas, an immense PHYSIOLOGICAL
PROCESS goes on, which is ever extending the process of the
assimilation of Europeans, their increasing detachment from the
conditions under which, climatically and hereditarily, united
races originate, their increasing independence of every definite
milieu, that for centuries would fain inscribe itself with equal
demands on soul and body,--that is to say, the slow emergence of
an essentially SUPER-NATIONAL and nomadic species of man, who
possesses, physiologically speaking, a maximum of the art and
power of adaptation as his typical distinction. This process of
the EVOLVING EUROPEAN, which can be retarded in its TEMPO by
great relapses, but will perhaps just gain and grow thereby in
vehemence and depth--the still-raging storm and stress of
"national sentiment" pertains to it, and also the anarchism which
is appearing at present--this process will probably arrive at
results on which its naive propagators and panegyrists, the
apostles of "modern ideas," would least care to reckon. The same
new conditions under which on an average a levelling and
mediocrising of man will take place--a useful, industrious,
variously serviceable, and clever gregarious man--are in the
highest degree suitable to give rise to exceptional
men of the
most dangerous and attractive qualities. For, while the capacity
for adaptation, which is every day trying changing conditions,
and begins a new work with every generation, almost with every
decade, makes the POWERFULNESS of the type impossible; while the
collective impression of such future Europeans will probably be
that of numerous, talkative, weak-willed, and very handy workmen
who REQUIRE a master, a commander, as they require their daily
bread; while, therefore, the democratising of Europe will tend to
the production of a type prepared for SLAVERY in the most subtle
sense of the term: the STRONG man will necessarily in individual
and exceptional cases, become stronger and richer than he has
perhaps ever been before--owing to the unprejudicedness of his
schooling, owing to the immense variety of practice, art, and
disguise. I meant to say that the democratising of Europe is at
the same time an involuntary arrangement for the rearing of
TYRANTS--taking the word in all its meanings, even in its most
spiritual sense.
243. I hear with pleasure that our sun is moving rapidly towards
the constellation Hercules: and I hope that the men on this earth
will do like the sun. And we foremost, we good Europeans!
244. There was a time when it was customary to call Germans
"deep" by way of distinction; but now that the most successful
type of new Germanism is covetous of quite other honours, and
perhaps misses
"smartness" in all that has depth, it is almost
opportune and patriotic to doubt whether we did not formerly
deceive ourselves with that commendation: in short, whether
German depth is not at bottom something different and worse--and
something from which, thank God, we are on the point of
successfully ridding ourselves. Let us try, then, to relearn with
regard to German depth; the only thing necessary for the purpose
is a little vivisection of the German soul.--The German soul is
above all manifold, varied in its source, aggregated and super-
imposed, rather than actually built: this is owing to its origin.
A German who would embolden himself to assert: "Two souls, alas,
dwell in my breast," would make a bad guess at the truth, or,
more correctly, he would come far short of the truth about the
number of souls. As a people made up of the most extraordinary
mixing and mingling of races, perhaps even with a preponderance
of the pre-Aryan element as the "people of the centre" in every
sense of the term, the Germans are more intangible, more ample,
more contradictory, more unknown, more incalculable, more
surprising, and even more terrifying than other peoples are to
themselves:--they escape DEFINITION, and are thereby alone the
despair of the French. It IS characteristic of the Germans that
the question: "What is German?" never dies out among them.
Kotzebue certainly knew his Germans well enough: "We are known,"
they cried jubilantly to him--but Sand also thought he knew them.
Jean Paul knew what he was doing when he declared himself
incensed at Fichte's lying but patriotic flatteries and
exaggerations,--but it is
probable that Goethe thought
differently about Germans from Jean Paul, even though he
acknowledged him to be right with regard to Fichte. It is a
question what Goethe really thought about the Germans?--But about
many things around him he never spoke explicitly, and all his
life he knew how to keep an astute silence--probably he had good
reason for it. It is certain that it was not the "Wars of
Independence" that made him look up more joyfully, any more than
it was the French Revolution,--the event on account of which he
RECONSTRUCTED his "Faust," and indeed the whole problem of "man,"
was the appearance of Napoleon. There are words of Goethe in
which he condemns with impatient severity, as from a foreign
land, that which Germans take a pride in, he once defined the
famous German turn of mind as "Indulgence towards its own and
others' weaknesses." Was he wrong? it is characteristic of
Germans that one is seldom entirely wrong about them. The German
soul has passages and galleries in it, there are caves, hiding-
places, and dungeons therein, its disorder has much of the charm
of the mysterious, the German is well acquainted with the bypaths
to chaos. And as everything loves its symbol, so the German loves
the clouds and all that is obscure, evolving, crepuscular, damp,
and shrouded, it seems to him that everything uncertain,
undeveloped, self-displacing, and growing is "deep". The German
himself does not EXIST, he is BECOMING, he is "developing
himself". "Development" is therefore the essentially German
discovery and hit in the great domain of philosophical formulas,--
a ruling
idea, which, together with German beer and German music,
is labouring to Germanise all Europe. Foreigners are astonished
and attracted by the riddles which the conflicting nature at the
basis of the German soul propounds to them (riddles which Hegel
systematised and Richard Wagner has in the end set to music).
"Good-natured and spiteful"--such a juxtaposition, preposterous in
the case of every other people, is unfortunately only too often
justified in Germany one has only to live for a while among
Swabians to know this! The clumsiness of the German scholar and
his social distastefulness agree alarmingly well with his physical
rope-dancing and nimble boldness, of which all the Gods have
learnt to be afraid. If any one wishes to see the "German soul"
demonstrated ad oculos, let him only look at German taste, at
German arts and manners what boorish indifference to "taste"! How
the noblest and the commonest stand there in juxtaposition! How
disorderly and how rich is the whole constitution of this soul!
The German DRAGS at his soul, he drags at everything he
experiences. He digests his events badly; he never gets "done"
with them; and German depth is often only a difficult, hesitating
"digestion." And just as all chronic invalids, all dyspeptics like
what is convenient, so the German loves "frankness" and "honesty";
it is so CONVENIENT to be frank and honest!--This confidingness,
this complaisance, this showing-the-cards of German HONESTY, is
probably the most dangerous and most successful disguise which the
German is up to nowadays: it is his proper Mephistophelean art;
with this he can
"still achieve much"! The German lets himself go,
and thereby gazes with faithful, blue, empty German eyes--and
other countries immediately confound him with his
dressing-gown!--I meant to say that, let "German depth" be what it
will--among ourselves alone we perhaps take the liberty to laugh
at it--we shall do well to continue henceforth to honour its
appearance and good name, and not barter away too cheaply our old
reputation as a people of depth for Prussian "smartness," and
Berlin wit and sand. It is wise for a people to pose, and LET
itself be regarded, as profound, clumsy, good-natured, honest, and
foolish: it might even be--profound to do so! Finally, we should
do honour to our name--we are not called the "TIUSCHE VOLK"
(deceptive people) for nothing. . . .
245. The "good old" time is past, it sang itself out in Mozart--
how happy are WE that his ROCOCO still speaks to us, that his
"good company," his tender enthusiasm, his childish delight in
the Chinese and its flourishes, his courtesy of heart, his
longing for the elegant, the amorous, the tripping, the tearful,
and his belief in the South, can still appeal to SOMETHING LEFT
in us! Ah, some time or other it will be over with it!--but who
can doubt that it will be over still sooner with the intelligence
and taste for Beethoven! For he was only the last echo of a break
and transition in style, and NOT, like Mozart, the last echo of a
great European taste which had existed for centuries. Beethoven
is the intermediate event between an old mellow soul that is
constantly breaking down, and a future over-young soul that is
always COMING; there is spread over his music the twilight of
eternal loss and eternal extravagant hope,--the same light in
which Europe was bathed when it dreamed with Rousseau, when it
danced round the Tree of Liberty of the Revolution, and finally
almost fell down in adoration before Napoleon. But how rapidly
does THIS very sentiment now pale, how difficult nowadays is even
the APPREHENSION of this sentiment, how strangely does the
language of Rousseau, Schiller, Shelley, and Byron sound to our
ear, in whom COLLECTIVELY the same fate of Europe was able to
SPEAK, which knew how to SING in Beethoven!--Whatever German
music came afterwards, belongs to Romanticism, that is to say, to
a movement which, historically considered, was still shorter,
more fleeting, and more superficial than that great interlude,
the transition of Europe from Rousseau to Napoleon, and to the
rise of democracy. Weber--but what do WE care nowadays for
"Freischutz" and "Oberon"! Or Marschner's "Hans Heiling" and
"Vampyre"! Or even Wagner's "Tannhauser"! That is extinct,
although not yet forgotten music. This whole music of
Romanticism, besides, was not noble enough, was not musical
enough, to maintain its position anywhere but in the theatre and
before the masses; from the beginning it was second-rate music,
which was little thought of by genuine musicians. It was
different with Felix Mendelssohn, that halcyon master, who, on
account of his lighter, purer, happier soul, quickly acquired
admiration, and was equally quickly forgotten: as the
beautiful
EPISODE of German music. But with regard to Robert Schumann, who
took things seriously, and has been taken seriously from the
first--he was the last that founded a school,--do we not now
regard it as a satisfaction, a relief, a deliverance, that this
very Romanticism of Schumann's has been surmounted? Schumann,
fleeing into the "Saxon Switzerland" of his soul, with a half
Werther-like, half Jean-Paul-like nature (assuredly not like
Beethoven! assuredly not like Byron!)--his MANFRED music is a
mistake and a misunderstanding to the extent of injustice;
Schumann, with his taste, which was fundamentally a PETTY taste
(that is to say, a dangerous propensity--doubly dangerous among
Germans--for quiet lyricism and intoxication of the feelings),
going constantly apart, timidly withdrawing and retiring, a noble
weakling who revelled in nothing but anonymous joy and sorrow,
from the beginning a sort of girl and NOLI ME TANGERE--this
Schumann was already merely a GERMAN event in music, and no
longer a European event, as Beethoven had been, as in a still
greater degree Mozart had been; with Schumann German music was
threatened with its greatest danger, that of LOSING THE VOICE FOR
THE SOUL OF EUROPE and sinking into a merely national affair.
246. What a torture are books written in German to a reader who
has a THIRD ear! How indignantly he stands beside the slowly
turning swamp of sounds without tune and rhythms without dance,
which
Germans call a "book"! And even the German who READS books!
How lazily, how reluctantly, how badly he reads! How many Germans
know, and consider it obligatory to know, that there is ART in
every good sentence--art which must be divined, if the sentence
is to be understood! If there is a misunderstanding about its
TEMPO, for instance, the sentence itself is misunderstood! That
one must not be doubtful about the rhythm-determining syllables,
that one should feel the breaking of the too-rigid symmetry as
intentional and as a charm, that one should lend a fine and
patient ear to every STACCATO and every RUBATO, that one should
divine the sense in the sequence of the vowels and diphthongs,
and how delicately and richly they can be tinted and retinted in
the order of their arrangement--who among book-reading Germans is
complaisant enough to recognize such duties and requirements, and
to listen to so much art and intention in language? After all,
one just "has no ear for it"; and so the most marked contrasts of
style are not heard, and the most delicate artistry is as it were
SQUANDERED on the deaf.--These were my thoughts when I noticed
how clumsily and unintuitively two masters in the art of prose-
writing have been confounded: one, whose words drop down
hesitatingly and coldly, as from the roof of a damp cave--he
counts on their dull sound and echo; and another who manipulates
his language like a flexible sword, and from his arm down into
his toes feels the dangerous bliss of the quivering, over-sharp
blade, which wishes to bite, hiss, and cut.
247. How little the German style has to do with harmony and with
the ear, is shown by the fact that precisely our good musicians
themselves write badly. The German does not read aloud, he does
not read for the ear, but only with his eyes; he has put his ears
away in the drawer for the time. In antiquity when a man read--
which was seldom enough--he read something to himself, and in a
loud voice; they were surprised when any one read silently, and
sought secretly the reason of it. In a loud voice: that is to
say, with all the swellings, inflections, and variations of key
and changes of TEMPO, in which the ancient PUBLIC world took
delight. The laws of the written style were then the same as
those of the spoken style; and these laws depended partly on the
surprising development and refined requirements of the ear and
larynx; partly on the strength, endurance, and power of the
ancient lungs. In the ancient sense, a period is above all a
physiological whole, inasmuch as it is comprised in one breath.
Such periods as occur in Demosthenes and Cicero, swelling twice
and sinking twice, and all in one breath, were pleasures to the
men of ANTIQUITY, who knew by their own schooling how to
appreciate the virtue therein, the rareness and the difficulty in
the deliverance of such a period;--WE have really no right to the
BIG period, we modern men, who are short of breath in every
sense! Those ancients, indeed, were all of them dilettanti in
speaking, consequently connoisseurs, consequently critics--they
thus brought their orators to the highest pitch; in
the same
manner as in the last century, when all Italian ladies and
gentlemen knew how to sing, the virtuosoship of song (and with it
also the art of melody) reached its elevation. In Germany,
however (until quite recently when a kind of platform eloquence
began shyly and awkwardly enough to flutter its young wings),
there was properly speaking only one kind of public and
APPROXIMATELY artistical discourse--that delivered from the
pulpit. The preacher was the only one in Germany who knew the
weight of a syllable or a word, in what manner a sentence
strikes, springs, rushes, flows, and comes to a close; he alone
had a conscience in his ears, often enough a bad conscience: for
reasons are not lacking why proficiency in oratory should be
especially seldom attained by a German, or almost always too
late. The masterpiece of German prose is therefore with good
reason the masterpiece of its greatest preacher: the BIBLE has
hitherto been the best German book. Compared with Luther's Bible,
almost everything else is merely "literature"--something which
has not grown in Germany, and therefore has not taken and does
not take root in German hearts, as the Bible has done.
248. There are two kinds of geniuses: one which above all
engenders and seeks to engender, and another which willingly lets
itself be fructified and brings forth. And similarly, among the
gifted nations, there are those on whom the woman's problem of
pregnancy has devolved, and the secret task of forming, maturing,
and perfecting--the
Greeks, for instance, were a nation of this
kind, and so are the French; and others which have to fructify
and become the cause of new modes of life--like the Jews, the
Romans, and, in all modesty be it asked: like the Germans?--
nations tortured and enraptured by unknown fevers and
irresistibly forced out of themselves, amorous and longing for
foreign races (for such as "let themselves be fructified"), and
withal imperious, like everything conscious of being full of
generative force, and consequently empowered "by the grace of
God." These two kinds of geniuses seek each other like man and
woman; but they also misunderstand each other--like man and
woman.
249. Every nation has its own "Tartuffery," and calls that its
virtue.--One does not know--cannot know, the best that is in one.
250. What Europe owes to the Jews?--Many things, good and bad,
and above all one thing of the nature both of the best and the
worst: the grand style in morality, the fearfulness and majesty
of infinite demands, of infinite significations, the whole
Romanticism and sublimity of moral questionableness--and
consequently just the most attractive, ensnaring, and exquisite
element in those iridescences and allurements to life, in the
aftersheen of which the sky of our European culture, its evening
sky, now glows--perhaps glows out. For this, we
artists among the
spectators and philosophers, are--grateful to the Jews.
251. It must be taken into the bargain, if various clouds and
disturbances--in short, slight attacks of stupidity--pass over
the spirit of a people that suffers and WANTS to suffer from
national nervous fever and political ambition: for instance,
among present-day Germans there is alternately the anti-French
folly, the anti-Semitic folly, the anti-Polish folly, the
Christian-romantic folly, the Wagnerian folly, the Teutonic
folly, the Prussian folly (just look at those poor historians,
the Sybels and Treitschkes, and their closely bandaged heads),
and whatever else these little obscurations of the German spirit
and conscience may be called. May it be forgiven me that I, too,
when on a short daring sojourn on very infected ground, did not
remain wholly exempt from the disease, but like every one else,
began to entertain thoughts about matters which did not concern
me--the first symptom of political infection. About the Jews, for
instance, listen to the following:--I have never yet met a German
who was favourably inclined to the Jews; and however decided the
repudiation of actual anti-Semitism may be on the part of all
prudent and political men, this prudence and policy is not
perhaps directed against the nature of the sentiment itself, but
only against its dangerous excess, and especially against the
distasteful and infamous expression of this excess of sentiment;
--on this point we must not deceive ourselves. That Germany
has
amply SUFFICIENT Jews, that the German stomach, the German blood,
has difficulty (and will long have difficulty) in disposing only
of this quantity of "Jew"--as the Italian, the Frenchman, and the
Englishman have done by means of a stronger digestion:--that is
the unmistakable declaration and language of a general instinct,
to which one must listen and according to which one must act.
"Let no more Jews come in! And shut the doors, especially towards
the East (also towards Austria)!"--thus commands the instinct of
a people whose nature is still feeble and uncertain, so that it
could be easily wiped out, easily extinguished, by a stronger
race. The Jews, however, are beyond all doubt the strongest,
toughest, and purest race at present living in Europe, they know
how to succeed even under the worst conditions (in fact better
than under favourable ones), by means of virtues of some sort,
which one would like nowadays to label as vices--owing above all
to a resolute faith which does not need to be ashamed before
"modern ideas", they alter only, WHEN they do alter, in the same
way that the Russian Empire makes its conquest--as an empire that
has plenty of time and is not of yesterday--namely, according to
the principle, "as slowly as possible"! A thinker who has the
future of Europe at heart, will, in all his perspectives
concerning the future, calculate upon the Jews, as he will
calculate upon the Russians, as above all the surest and
likeliest factors in the great play and battle of forces. That
which is at present called a "nation" in Europe, and is really
rather a RES FACTA than NATA (indeed,
sometimes confusingly
similar to a RES FICTA ET PICTA), is in every case something
evolving, young, easily displaced, and not yet a race, much less
such a race AERE PERENNUS, as the Jews are such "nations" should
most carefully avoid all hotheaded rivalry and hostility! It is
certain that the Jews, if they desired--or if they were driven to
it, as the anti-Semites seem to wish--COULD now have the
ascendancy, nay, literally the supremacy, over Europe, that they
are NOT working and planning for that end is equally certain.
Meanwhile, they rather wish and desire, even somewhat
importunely, to be insorbed and absorbed by Europe, they long to
be finally settled, authorized, and respected somewhere, and wish
to put an end to the nomadic life, to the "wandering Jew",--and
one should certainly take account of this impulse and tendency,
and MAKE ADVANCES to it (it possibly betokens a mitigation of the
Jewish instincts) for which purpose it would perhaps be useful
and fair to banish the anti-Semitic bawlers out of the country.
One should make advances with all prudence, and with selection,
pretty much as the English nobility do It stands to reason that
the more powerful and strongly marked types of new Germanism
could enter into relation with the Jews with the least
hesitation, for instance, the nobleman officer from the Prussian
border it would be interesting in many ways to see whether the
genius for money and patience (and especially some intellect and
intellectuality--sadly lacking in the place referred to) could
not in addition be annexed and trained to the hereditary art of
commanding and obeying--
for both of which the country in question
has now a classic reputation But here it is expedient to break
off my festal discourse and my sprightly Teutonomania for I have
already reached my SERIOUS TOPIC, the "European problem," as I
understand it, the rearing of a new ruling caste for Europe.
252. They are not a philosophical race--the English: Bacon
represents an ATTACK on the philosophical spirit generally,
Hobbes, Hume, and Locke, an abasement, and a depreciation of the
idea of a "philosopher" for more than a century. It was AGAINST
Hume that Kant uprose and raised himself; it was Locke of whom
Schelling RIGHTLY said, "JE MEPRISE LOCKE"; in the struggle
against the English mechanical stultification of the world, Hegel
and Schopenhauer (along with Goethe) were of one accord; the two
hostile brother-geniuses in philosophy, who pushed in different
directions towards the opposite poles of German thought, and
thereby wronged each other as only brothers will do.--What is
lacking in England, and has always been lacking, that half-actor
and rhetorician knew well enough, the absurd muddle-head,
Carlyle, who sought to conceal under passionate grimaces what he
knew about himself: namely, what was LACKING in Carlyle--real
POWER of intellect, real DEPTH of intellectual perception, in
short, philosophy. It is characteristic of such an
unphilosophical race to hold on firmly to Christianity--they NEED
its discipline for "moralizing"
and humanizing. The Englishman,
more gloomy, sensual, headstrong, and brutal than the German--is
for that very reason, as the baser of the two, also the most
pious: he has all the MORE NEED of Christianity. To finer
nostrils, this English Christianity itself has still a
characteristic English taint of spleen and alcoholic excess, for
which, owing to good reasons, it is used as an antidote--the
finer poison to neutralize the coarser: a finer form of poisoning
is in fact a step in advance with coarse-mannered people, a step
towards spiritualization. The English coarseness and rustic
demureness is still most satisfactorily disguised by Christian
pantomime, and by praying and psalm-singing (or, more correctly,
it is thereby explained and differently expressed); and for the
herd of drunkards and rakes who formerly learned moral grunting
under the influence of Methodism (and more recently as the
"Salvation Army"), a penitential fit may really be the relatively
highest manifestation of "humanity" to which they can be
elevated: so much may reasonably be admitted. That, however,
which offends even in the humanest Englishman is his lack of
music, to speak figuratively (and also literally): he has neither
rhythm nor dance in the movements of his soul and body; indeed,
not even the desire for rhythm and dance, for "music." Listen to
him speaking; look at the most beautiful Englishwoman WALKING--in
no country on earth are there more beautiful doves and swans;
finally, listen to them singing! But I ask too much . . .
253. There are truths which are best recognized by mediocre
minds, because they are best adapted for them, there are truths
which only possess charms and seductive power for mediocre
spirits:--one is pushed to this probably unpleasant conclusion,
now that the influence of respectable but mediocre Englishmen--I
may mention Darwin, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer--begins
to gain the ascendancy in the middle-class region of European
taste. Indeed, who could doubt that it is a useful thing for SUCH
minds to have the ascendancy for a time? It would be an error to
consider the highly developed and independently soaring minds as
specially qualified for determining and collecting many little
common facts, and deducing conclusions from them; as exceptions,
they are rather from the first in no very favourable position
towards those who are "the rules." After all, they have more to
do than merely to perceive:--in effect, they have to BE something
new, they have to SIGNIFY something new, they have to REPRESENT
new values! The gulf between knowledge and capacity is perhaps
greater, and also more mysterious, than one thinks: the capable
man in the grand style, the creator, will possibly have to be an
ignorant person;--while on the other hand, for scientific
discoveries like those of Darwin, a certain narrowness, aridity,
and industrious carefulness (in short, something English) may not
be unfavourable for arriving at them.--Finally, let it not be
forgotten that the English, with their profound mediocrity,
brought about once before a general depression of European
intelligence. What is called "modern ideas," or "the ideas of the eighteenth
century," or "French ideas"--that, consequently, against which
the GERMAN mind rose up with profound disgust--is of English
origin, there is no doubt about it. The French were only the apes
and actors of these ideas, their best soldiers, and likewise,
alas! their first and profoundest VICTIMS; for owing to the
diabolical Anglomania of "modern ideas," the AME FRANCAIS has in
the end become so thin and emaciated, that at present one recalls
its sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, its profound, passionate
strength, its inventive excellency, almost with disbelief. One
must, however, maintain this verdict of historical justice in a
determined manner, and defend it against present prejudices and
appearances: the European NOBLESSE--of sentiment, taste, and
manners, taking the word in every high sense--is the work and
invention of FRANCE; the European ignobleness, the plebeianism of
modern ideas--is ENGLAND'S work and invention.
254. Even at present France is still the seat of the most
intellectual and refined culture of Europe, it is still the high
school of taste; but one must know how to find this "France of
taste." He who belongs to it keeps himself well concealed:--they
may be a small number in whom it lives and is embodied, besides
perhaps being men who do not stand upon the strongest legs, in
part fatalists, hypochondriacs, invalids, in part persons over-
indulged, over-refined,
such as have the AMBITION to conceal
themselves.
They have all something in common: they keep their ears closed in
presence of the delirious folly and noisy spouting of the
democratic BOURGEOIS. In fact, a besotted and brutalized France
at present sprawls in the foreground--it recently celebrated a
veritable orgy of bad taste, and at the same time of self-
admiration, at the funeral of Victor Hugo. There is also
something else common to them: a predilection to resist
intellectual Germanizing--and a still greater inability to do so!
In this France of intellect, which is also a France of pessimism,
Schopenhauer has perhaps become more at home, and more indigenous
than he has ever been in Germany; not to speak of Heinrich Heine,
who has long ago been re-incarnated in the more refined and
fastidious lyrists of Paris; or of Hegel, who at present, in the
form of Taine--the FIRST of living historians--exercises an
almost tyrannical influence. As regards Richard Wagner, however,
the more French music learns to adapt itself to the actual needs
of the AME MODERNE, the more will it "Wagnerite"; one can safely
predict that beforehand,--it is already taking place
sufficiently! There are, however, three things which the French
can still boast of with pride as their heritage and possession,
and as indelible tokens of their ancient intellectual superiority
in Europe, in spite of all voluntary or involuntary Germanizing
and vulgarizing of taste. FIRSTLY, the capacity for artistic
emotion, for devotion to "form," for which the expression, L'ART
POUR L'ART, along with numerous others, has been invented:--such
capacity has
not been lacking in France for three centuries; and
owing to its reverence for the "small number," it has again and
again made a sort of chamber music of literature possible, which
is sought for in vain elsewhere in Europe.--The SECOND thing
whereby the French can lay claim to a superiority over Europe is
their ancient, many-sided, MORALISTIC culture, owing to which one
finds on an average, even in the petty ROMANCIERS of the
newspapers and chance BOULEVARDIERS DE PARIS, a psychological
sensitiveness and curiosity, of which, for example, one has no
conception (to say nothing of the thing itself!) in Germany. The
Germans lack a couple of centuries of the moralistic work
requisite thereto, which, as we have said, France has not
grudged: those who call the Germans "naive" on that account give
them commendation for a defect. (As the opposite of the German
inexperience and innocence IN VOLUPTATE PSYCHOLOGICA, which is
not too remotely associated with the tediousness of German
intercourse,--and as the most successful expression of genuine
French curiosity and inventive talent in this domain of delicate
thrills, Henri Beyle may be noted; that remarkable anticipatory
and forerunning man, who, with a Napoleonic TEMPO, traversed HIS
Europe, in fact, several centuries of the European soul, as a
surveyor and discoverer thereof:--it has required two generations
to OVERTAKE him one way or other, to divine long afterwards some
of the riddles that perplexed and enraptured him--this strange
Epicurean and man of interrogation, the last great psychologist
of France).--There is yet a THIRD claim to superiority: in the
French
character there is a successful half-way synthesis of the
North and South, which makes them comprehend many things, and
enjoins upon them other things, which an Englishman can never
comprehend. Their temperament, turned alternately to and from the
South, in which from time to time the Provencal and Ligurian
blood froths over, preserves them from the dreadful, northern
grey-in-grey, from sunless conceptual-spectrism and from poverty
of blood--our GERMAN infirmity of taste, for the excessive
prevalence of which at the present moment, blood and iron, that
is to say "high politics," has with great resolution been
prescribed (according to a dangerous healing art, which bids me
wait and wait, but not yet hope).--There is also still in France
a pre-understanding and ready welcome for those rarer and rarely
gratified men, who are too comprehensive to find satisfaction in
any kind of fatherlandism, and know how to love the South when in
the North and the North when in the South--the born Midlanders,
the "good Europeans." For them BIZET has made music, this latest
genius, who has seen a new beauty and seduction,--who has
discovered a piece of the SOUTH IN MUSIC.
255. I hold that many precautions should be taken against German
music. Suppose a person loves the South as I love it--as a great
school of recovery for the most spiritual and the most sensuous
ills, as a boundless solar profusion and effulgence which
o'erspreads a sovereign existence believing in itself
--well, such
a person will learn to be somewhat on his guard against German
music, because, in injuring his taste anew, it will also injure
his health anew. Such a Southerner, a Southerner not by origin
but by BELIEF, if he should dream of the future of music, must
also dream of it being freed from the influence of the North; and
must have in his ears the prelude to a deeper, mightier, and
perhaps more perverse and mysterious music, a super-German music,
which does not fade, pale, and die away, as all German music
does, at the sight of the blue, wanton sea and the Mediterranean
clearness of sky--a super-European music, which holds its own
even in presence of the brown sunsets of the desert, whose soul
is akin to the palm-tree, and can be at home and can roam with
big, beautiful, lonely beasts of prey . . . I could imagine a music
of which the rarest charm would be that it knew nothing more of
good and evil; only that here and there perhaps some sailor's
home-sickness, some golden shadows and tender weaknesses might
sweep lightly over it; an art which, from the far distance, would
see the colours of a sinking and almost incomprehensible MORAL
world fleeing towards it, and would be hospitable enough and
profound enough to receive such belated fugitives.
256. Owing to the morbid estrangement which the nationality-craze
has induced and still induces among the nations of Europe, owing
also to the short-sighted and hasty-handed politicians, who with
the help of this craze, are at present in power,
and do not
suspect to what extent the disintegrating policy they pursue must
necessarily be only an interlude policy--owing to all this and
much else that is altogether unmentionable at present, the most
unmistakable signs that EUROPE WISHES TO BE ONE, are now
overlooked, or arbitrarily and falsely misinterpreted. With all
the more profound and large-minded men of this century, the real
general tendency of the mysterious labour of their souls was to
prepare the way for that new SYNTHESIS, and tentatively to
anticipate the European of the future; only in their simulations,
or in their weaker moments, in old age perhaps, did they belong
to the "fatherlands"--they only rested from themselves when they
became "patriots." I think of such men as Napoleon, Goethe,
Beethoven, Stendhal, Heinrich Heine, Schopenhauer: it must not be
taken amiss if I also count Richard Wagner among them, about whom
one must not let oneself be deceived by his own misunderstandings
(geniuses like him have seldom the right to understand
themselves), still less, of course, by the unseemly noise with
which he is now resisted and opposed in France: the fact remains,
nevertheless, that Richard Wagner and the LATER FRENCH
ROMANTICISM of the forties, are most closely and intimately
related to one another. They are akin, fundamentally akin, in all
the heights and depths of their requirements; it is Europe, the
ONE Europe, whose soul presses urgently and longingly, outwards
and upwards, in their multifarious and boisterous art--whither?
into a new light? towards a new sun? But who would attempt to
express accurately what all these
masters of new modes of speech
could not express distinctly? It is certain that the same storm
and stress tormented them, that they SOUGHT in the same manner,
these last great seekers! All of them steeped in literature to
their eyes and ears--the first artists of universal literary
culture--for the most part even themselves writers, poets,
intermediaries and blenders of the arts and the senses (Wagner,
as musician is reckoned among painters, as poet among musicians,
as artist generally among actors); all of them fanatics for
EXPRESSION "at any cost"--I specially mention Delacroix, the
nearest related to Wagner; all of them great discoverers in the
realm of the sublime, also of the loathsome and dreadful, still
greater discoverers in effect, in display, in the art of the
show-shop; all of them talented far beyond their genius, out and
out VIRTUOSI, with mysterious accesses to all that seduces,
allures, constrains, and upsets; born enemies of logic and of the
straight line, hankering after the strange, the exotic, the
monstrous, the crooked, and the self-contradictory; as men,
Tantaluses of the will, plebeian parvenus, who knew themselves to
be incapable of a noble TEMPO or of a LENTO in life and action--
think of Balzac, for instance,--unrestrained workers, almost
destroying themselves by work; antinomians and rebels in manners,
ambitious and insatiable, without equilibrium and enjoyment; all
of them finally shattering and sinking down at the Christian
cross (and with right and reason, for who of them would have been
sufficiently profound and sufficiently original for an ANTI-
CHRISTIAN philosophy?);--on the whole, a boldly daring,
splendidly
overbearing, high-flying, and aloft-up-dragging class
of higher men, who had first to teach their century-and it is the
century of the MASSES--the conception "higher man." . . . Let the
German friends of Richard Wagner advise together as to whether
there is anything purely German in the Wagnerian art, or whether
its distinction does not consist precisely in coming from SUPER-
GERMAN sources and impulses: in which connection it may not be
underrated how indispensable Paris was to the development of his
type, which the strength of his instincts made him long to visit
at the most decisive time--and how the whole style of his
proceedings, of his self-apostolate, could only perfect itself in
sight of the French socialistic original. On a more subtle
comparison it will perhaps be found, to the honour of Richard
Wagner's German nature, that he has acted in everything with more
strength, daring, severity, and elevation than a nineteenth-
century Frenchman could have done--owing to the circumstance that
we Germans are as yet nearer to barbarism than the French;--
perhaps even the most remarkable creation of Richard Wagner is
not only at present, but for ever inaccessible, incomprehensible,
and inimitable to the whole latter-day Latin race: the figure of
Siegfried, that VERY FREE man, who is probably far too free, too
hard, too cheerful, too healthy, too ANTI-CATHOLIC for the taste
of old and mellow civilized nations. He may even have been a sin
against Romanticism, this anti-Latin Siegfried: well, Wagner
atoned amply for this sin in his old sad days, when--anticipating
a taste which has meanwhile
passed into politics--he began, with
the religious vehemence peculiar to him, to preach, at least, THE
WAY TO ROME, if not to walk therein.--That these last words may
not be misunderstood, I will call to my aid a few powerful
rhymes, which will even betray to less delicate ears what I mean
--what I mean COUNTER TO the "last Wagner" and his Parsifal music:--
--Is this our mode?--From German heart came this vexed ululating?
From German body, this self-lacerating? Is ours this priestly
hand-dilation, This incense-fuming exaltation? Is ours this
faltering, falling, shambling, This quite uncertain ding-dong-
dangling? This sly nun-ogling, Ave-hour-bell ringing, This wholly
false enraptured heaven-o'erspringing?--Is this our mode?--Think
well!--ye still wait for admission--For what ye hear is ROME--
ROME'S FAITH BY INTUITION!