The Portable Nietzsche (80 page)

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.

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.

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.

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 disappointment 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.