Thoughts Out Of Season - Part One by Friedrich Nietzsche 

 THE COMPLETE WORKS OF

 FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE The First Complete and Authorised English Translation

 EDITED BY

 DR. OSCAR LEVY VOLUME ONE

 THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON PART ONE _________________________________________________________________

 Of the First Impression of One Thousand Copies this is

 No. 1 FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE THOUGHTS OUT OF SEASON PART I

 DAVID STRAUSS, THE CONFESSOR AND THE WRITER

 RICHARD WAGNER IN BAYREUTH

 TRANSLATED BY

 ANTHONY M. LUDOVICI _________________________________________________________________

 CONTENTS. EDITORIAL NOTE

 NIETZSCHE IN ENGLAND (BY THE EDITOR)

 TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE TO DAVID STRAUSS AND RICHARD WAGNER IN REUTH

 DAVID STRAUSS, THE CONFESSOR AND THE WRITER

 RICHARD WAGNER IN BAYREUTH _________________________________________________________________

 EDITORIAL NOTE. _______

THE Editor begs to call attention to some of the difficulties he hadto encounter in preparing this edition of the complete works ofFriedrich Nietzsche. Not being English himself, he had to rely uponthe help of collaborators, who were somewhat slow in coming forward. They were also few in number; for, in addition to an exact knowledgeof the German language, there was also required sympathy and a certainenthusiasm for the startling ideas of the original, as well as aconsiderable feeling for poetry, and that highest form of it, religious poetry. 

Such a combination--a biblical mind, yet one open to new thoughts--wasnot easily found. And yet it was necessary to find translators withsuch a mind, and not be satisfied, as the French are and must be, witha free though elegant version of Nietzsche. What is impossible andunnecessary in French--a faithful and powerful rendering of thepsalmistic grandeur of Nietzsche --is possible and necessary inEnglish, which is a rougher tongue of the Teutonic stamp, andmoreover, like German, a tongue influenced and formed by an excellentversion of the Bible. The English would never be satisfied, asBible-ignorant France is, with a Nietzsche à l'Eau de Cologne--theywould require the natural, strong, real Teacher, and would prefer hisoutspoken words to the finely-chiselled sentences of the raconteur. Itmay indeed be safely predicted that once the English people haverecovered from the first shock of Nietzsche's thoughts, their biblicaltraining will enable them, more than any other nation, to appreciatethe deep piety underlying Nietzsche's Cause. 

As this Cause is a somewhat holy one to the Editor himself, he isready to listen to any suggestions as to improvements of style orsense coming from qualified sources. The Editor, during a recent visitto Mrs. Foerster-Nietzsche at Weimar, acquired the rights oftranslation by pointing out to her that in this way her brother'sworks would not fall into the hands of an ordinary publisher and hisstaff of translators: he has not, therefore, entered into anyengagement with publishers, not even with the present one, which couldhinder his task, bind him down to any text found faulty, or make himconsent to omissions or the falsification or "sugaring" of theoriginal text to further the sale of the books. He is therefore in aposition to give every attention to a work which he considers as of noless importance for the country of his residence than for the countryof his birth, as well as for the rest of Europe. 

It is the consciousness of the importance of this work which makes theEditor anxious to point out several difficulties to the youngerstudent of Nietzsche. The first is, of course, not to begin readingNietzsche at too early an age. While fully admitting that others maybe more gifted than himself, the Editor begs to state that he began tostudy Nietzsche at the age of twenty-six, and would not have been ableto endure the weight of such teaching before that time. Secondly, theEditor wishes to dissuade the student from beginning the study ofNietzsche by reading first of all his most complicated works. Nothaving been properly prepared for them, he will find the Zarathustraabstruse, the Ecce Homo conceited, and the Antichrist violent. Heshould rather begin with the little pamphlet on Education, theThoughts out of Season, Beyond Good and Evil, or the Genealogy ofMorals. Thirdly, the Editor wishes to remind students of Nietzsche'sown advice to them, namely: to read him slowly, to think over whatthey have read, and not to accept too readily a teaching which theyhave only half understood. By a too ready acceptance of Nietzsche ithas come to pass that his enemies are, as a rule, a far superior bodyof men to those who call themselves his eager and enthusiasticfollowers. Surely it is not every one who is chosen to combat areligion or a morality of two thousand years' standing, first withinand then without himself; and whoever feels inclined to do so ought atleast to allow his attention to be drawn to the magnitude of his task. _________________________________________________________________

 NIETZSCHE IN ENGLAND: AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY BY THE EDITOR. DEAR ENGLISHMEN, --In one of my former writings I have made the remarkthat the world would have seen neither the great Jewish prophets northe great German thinkers, if the people from among whom these eminentmen sprang had not been on the whole such a misguided, and, in theirmisguidedness, such a tough and stubborn race. The arrow that is tofly far must be discharged from a well distended bow: if, therefore, anything is necessary for greatness, it is a fierce and tenaciousopposition, an opposition either of open contempt, or of maliciousirony, or of sly silence, or of gross stupidity, an oppositionregardless of the wounds it inflicts and of the precious lives itsacrifices, an opposition that nobody would dare to attack who was notprepared, like the Spartan of old, to return either with his shield oron it. 

An opposition so devoid of pity is not as a rule found amongst you, dear and fair-minded Englishmen, which may account for the fact thatyou have neither produced the greatest prophets nor the greatestthinkers in this world. You would never have crucified Christ, as didthe Jews, or driven Nietzsche into madness, as did the Germans--youwould have made Nietzsche, on account of his literary faculties, Minister of State in a Whig Ministry, you would have invited JesusChrist to your country houses, where he would have been worshipped byall the ladies on account of his long hair and interesting looks, andtolerated by all men as an amusing, if somewhat romantic, foreigner. Iknow that the current opinion is to the contrary, and that yourcountry is constantly accused, even by yourselves, of its insularity;but I, for my part, have found an almost feminine receptivity amongstyou in my endeavour to bring you into contact with some ideas of mynative country--a receptivity which, however, has also this in commonwith that of the female mind, that evidently nothing sticks deeply, but is quickly wiped out by what any other lecturer, or writer, orpolitician has to tell you. I was prepared for indifference--I was notprepared for receptivity and that benign lady's smile, behind whichladies, like all people who are only clever, usually hide their inwardcontempt for the foolishness of mere men! I was prepared for abuse, and even a good fight--I was not prepared for an extremelyfaint-hearted criticism; I did not expect that some of my opponentswould be so utterly inexperienced in that most necessary work ofliterary execution. No, no: give me the Germans or the Jews forexecutioners: they can do the hanging properly, while the Englishhangman is like the Russian, to whom, when the rope broke, thehalf-hanged revolutionary said: "What a country, where they cannothang a man properly!" What a country, where they do not hangphilosophers properly--which would be the proper thing to do tothem--but smile at them, drink tea with them, discuss with them, andask them to contribute to their newspapers!

To get to the root of the matter: in spite of many encouraging signs, remarks and criticisms, adverse or benevolent, I do not think I havebeen very successful in my crusade for that European thought whichbegan with Goethe and has found so fine a development in Nietzsche. True, I have made many a convert, but amongst them are veryundesirable ones, as, for instance, some enterprising publishers, whoused to be the toughest disbelievers in England, but who have now cometo understand the "value" of the new gospel--but as neither thisgospel is exactly Christian, nor I, the importer of it, I am notallowed to count my success by the conversion of publishers andsinners, but have to judge it by the more spiritual standard of thequality of the converted. In this respect, I am sorry to say, mysuccess has been a very poor one. 

As an eager missionary, I have naturally asked myself the reason of myfailure. Why is there no male audience in England willing to listen toa manly and daring philosophy? Why are there no eyes to see, no earsto hear, no hearts to feel, no brains to understand? Why is mytrumpet, which after all I know how to blow pretty well, unable toshatter the walls of English prejudice against a teacher whose schoolcannot possibly be avoided by any European with a higher purpose inhis breast?. .. There is plenty of time for thought nowadays for a manwho does not allow himself to be drawn into that aimless bustle ofpleasure business or politics, which is called modern life becauseoutside that life there is--just as outside those noisy Orientalcities-a desert, a calmness, a true and almost majestic leisure, aleisure unprecedented in any age, a leisure in which one may arrive atseveral conclusions concerning English indifference towards the newthought. 

First of all, of course, there stands in the way the terrible abusewhich Nietzsche has poured upon the heads of the innocent Britishers. While France and the Latin countries, while the Orient and India, arewithin the range of his sympathies, this most outspoken of allphilosophers, this prophet and poet-philosopher, cannot find wordsenough to express his disgust at the illogical, plebeian, shallow, utilitarian Englishman. It must certainly be disagreeable to betreated like this, especially when one has a fairly good opinion ofone's self; but why do you take it so very, very seriously? DidNietzsche, perchance, spare the Germans? And aren't you accustomed tocriticism on the part of German philosophers? Is it not the ancientand time-honoured privilege of the whole range of them from Leibnitzto Hegel -- even of German poets, like Goethe and Heine -- to call youbad names and to use unkind language towards you? Has there not alwaysbeen among the few thinking heads in Germany a silent consent and anopen contempt for you and your ways; the sort of contempt youyourselves have for the even more Anglo-Saxon culture of theAmericans? I candidly confess that in my more German moments I havefelt and still feel as the German philosophers do; but I have also myEuropean turns and moods, and then I try to understand you and evenexcuse you, and take your part against earnest and thinking Germany. Then I feel like telling the German philosophers that if you, poorfellows, had practised everything they preached, they would have hadto renounce the pleasure of abusing you long ago, for there would nowbe no more Englishmen left to abuse! As it is, you have sufferedenough on account of the wild German ideals you luckily only partlybelieved in: for what the German thinker wrote on patient paper in hisstudy, you always had to write the whole world over on tender humanskins, black and yellow skins, enveloping ungrateful beings whosometimes had no very high esteem for the depth and beauty of Germanphilosophy. And you have never taken revenge upon the inspired mastersof the European thinking-shop, you have never reabused them, you havenever complained of their want of worldly wisdom: you have invariablysuffered in silence and agony, just as brave and staunch Sancho Panzaused to do. For this is what you are, dear Englishmen, and howeverwell you brave, practical, materialistic John Bulls and Sancho Panzasmay know this world, however much better you may be able to perceive, to count, to judge, and to weigh things than your ideal German Knight:there is an eternal law in this world that the Sancho Panzas have tofollow the Don Quixotes; for matter has to follow the spirit, even thepoor spirit of a German philosopher! So it has been in the past, so itis at present, and so it will be in the future; and you had betterprepare yourselves in time for the eventuality. For if Nietzsche werenothing else but this customary type of German philosopher, you wouldagain have to pay the bill largely; and it would be very wise on yourpart to study him: Sancho Panza may escape a good many sad experiencesby knowing his master's weaknesses. But as Nietzsche no longer belongsto the Quixotic class, as Germany seems to emerge with him from heryouthful and cranky nebulosity, you will not even have the pleasure ofbeing thrashed in the company of your Master: no, you will be thrashedall alone, which is an abominable thing for any right-minded humanbeing. "Solamen miseris socios habuisse malorum. "[6]*

[Footnote * : It is a comfort to the afflicted to have companions intheir distress. ]

The second reason for the neglect of Nietzsche in this country is thatyou do not need him yet. And you do not need him yet because you havealways possessed the British virtue of not carrying things toextremes, which, according to the German version, is an euphemism forthe British want of logic and critical capacity. You have, forinstance, never let your religion have any great influence upon yourpolitics, which is something quite abhorrent to the moral German, andmakes him so angry about you. For the German sees you acting as amoral and law-abiding Christian at home, and as an unscrupulous andMachiavellian conqueror abroad; and if he refrains from the reproachof hypocrisy, with which the more stupid continentals invariablycharge you, he will certainly call you a "British muddlehead. " Well, Imyself do not take things so seriously as that, for I know that men ofaction have seldom time to think. It is probably for this reason alsothat liberty of thought and speech has been granted to you, thelaw-giver knowing very well all the time that you would be much toobusy to use and abuse such extraordinary freedom. Anyhow, it might nowbe time to abuse it just a little bit, and to consider what anextraordinary amalgamation is a Christian Power with imperialisticideas. True, there has once before been another Christian conqueringand colonising empire like yours, that of Venice--but these Venetianswere thinkers compared with you, and smuggled their gospel into thepaw of their lion. .. . Why don't you follow their example, in order notto be unnecessarily embarrassed by it in your enterprises abroad? Inthis manner you could also reconcile the proper Germans, whoinvariably act up to their theories, their Christianity, theirdemocratic principles, although, on the other hand, in so doing youwould, I quite agree, be most unfaithful to your own traditions, whichare of a more democratic character than those of any other Europeannation. 

For Democracy, as every schoolboy knows, was born in an Englishcradle: individual liberty, parliamentary institutions, the sovereignrights of the people, are ideas of British origin, and have beenpropagated from this island over the whole of Europe. But as theprophet and his words are very often not honoured in his own country, those ideas have been embraced with much more fervour by other nationsthan by that in which they originated. The Continent of Europe hastaken the desire for liberty and equality much more seriously thantheir levelling but also level-headed inventors, and the ferventimagination of France has tried to put into practice all that wasquite hidden to the more sober English eye. Every one nowadays knowsthe good and the evil consequences of the French Revolution, whichswept over the whole of Europe, throwing it into a state of unrest, shattering thrones and empires, and everywhere undermining authorityand traditional institutions. While this was going on in Europe, theoriginator of the merry game was quietly sitting upon his islandsmiling broadly at the excitable foreigners across the Channel, fishing as much as he could out of the water he himself had socleverly disturbed, and thus in every way reaping the benefit from themighty fight for the apple of Eros which he himself had thrown amongstthem. As I have endeavoured above to draw a parallel between theGermans and the Jews, I may now be allowed to follow this up with onebetween the Jews and the English. It is a striking parallel, whichwill specially appeal to those religious souls amongst you whoconsider themselves the lost tribes of our race (and who are perhapseven more lost than they think), --and it is this: Just as the Jewshave brought Christianity into the world, but never accepted itthemselves, just as they, in spite of their democratic offspring, havealways remained the most conservative, exclusive, aristocratic, andreligious people, so have the English never allowed themselves to beintoxicated by the strong drink of the natural equality of men, whichthey once kindly offered to all Europe to quaff; but have, on thecontrary, remained the most sober, the most exclusive, the mostfeudal, the most conservative people of our continent. 

But because the ravages of Democracy have been less felt here thanabroad, because there is a good deal of the mediaeval building leftstanding over here, because things have never been carried to thatexcess which invariably brings a reaction with it--this reaction hasnot set in in this country, and no strong desire for the necessity ofit, no craving for the counterbalancing influence of a Nietzsche, hasarisen yet in the British mind. I cannot help pointing out the graveconsequences of this backwardness of England, which has arisen fromthe fact that you have never taken any ideas or theories, not evenyour own, seriously. Democracy, dear Englishmen, is like a stream, which all the peoples of Europe will have to cross: they will come outof it cleaner, healthier, and stronger, but while the others arealready in the water, plunging, puffing, paddling, losing theirground, trying to swim, and even half-drowned, you are still standingon the other side of it, roaring unmercifully about the poor swimmers, screamers, and fighters below, --but one day you will have to crossthis same river too, and when you enter it the others will just be outof it, and will laugh at the poor English straggler in their turn!

The third and last reason for the icy silence which has greetedNietzsche in this country is due to the fact that he has--as far as Iknow--no literary ancestor over here whose teachings could haveprepared you for him. Germany has had her Goethe to do this; Franceher Stendhal; in Russia we find that fearless curiosity for allproblems, which is the sign of a youthful, perhaps too youthfulnation; while in Spain, on the other hand, we have an old andexperienced people, with a long training away from Christianity underthe dominion of the Semitic Arabs, who undoubtedly left some of theirblood behind, --but I find great difficulty in pointing out any manover here who could serve as a useful guide to the heights of theNietzschean thought, except one, who was not a Britisher. I amalluding to a man whose politics you used to consider and whosewritings you even now consider as fantastic, but who, like anotherfantast of his race, may possess the wonderful gift of resurrection, and come again to life amongst you--to Benjamin Disraeli. 

The Disraelian Novels are in my opinion the best and only preparationfor those amongst you who wish gradually to become acquainted with theNietzschean spirit. There, and nowhere else, will you find the trueheroes of coming times, men of moral courage, men whose failures andsuccesses are alike admirable, men whose noble passions havealtogether superseded the ordinary vulgarities and moralities of lowerbeings, men endowed with an extraordinary imagination, which, however, is balanced by an equal power of reason, men already anointed with adrop of that sacred and noble oil, without which the HighPriest-Philosopher of Modern Germany would not have crowned his RoyalRace of the Future. 

Both Disraeli and Nietzsche you perceive starting from the samepessimistic diagnosis of the wild anarchy, the growing melancholy, thethreatening Nihilism of Modern Europe, for both recognised the dangerof the age behind its loud and forced "shipwreck gaiety, " behind itsbig-mouthed talk about progress and evolution, behind that veil ofbusiness-bustle, which hides its fear and utter despair--but for allthat black outlook they are not weaklings enough to mourn and letthings go, nor do they belong to that cheap class of society doctorswho mistake the present wretchedness of Humanity for sinfulness, andwish to make their patient less sinful and still more wretched. BothNietzsche and Disraeli have clearly recognised that this patient oftheirs is suffering from weakness and not from sinfulness, for whichlatter some kind of strength may still be required; both are thereforeentirely opposed to a further dieting him down to complete moralemaciation, but are, on the contrary, prescribing a tonic, aroborating, a natural regime for him --advice for which both doctorshave been reproached with Immorality by their contemporaries as wellas by posterity. But the younger doctor has turned the tables upontheir accusers, and has openly reproached his Nazarene colleagues withthe Immorality of endangering life itself, he has clearly demonstratedto the world that their trustful and believing patient was shrinkingbeneath their very fingers, he has candidly foretold these Christianquacks that one day they would be in the position of the quackskin-specialist at the fair, who, as a proof of his medical skill, used to show to the peasants around him the skin of a completly curedpatient of his. Both Nietzsche and Disraeli know the way to health, for they have had the disease of the age themselves, but theyhave--the one partly, the other entirely-- cured themselves of it, they have resisted the spirit of their time, they have escaped thefate of their contemporaries; they therefore, and they alone, knowtheir danger. This is the reason why they both speak so violently, whythey both attack with such bitter fervour the utilitarian andmaterialistic attitude of English Science, why they both so ironicallybrush aside the airy and fantastic ideals of German Philosophy--thisis why they both loudly declare (to use Disraeli's words) "that we arethe slaves of false knowledge; that our memories are filled with ideasthat have no origin in truth; that we believe what our fatherscredited, who were convinced without a cause; that we study humannature in a charnel house, and, like the nations of the East, paydivine honours to the maniac and the fool. " But if these two great mencannot refrain from such outspoken vituperation--they also lead theway: they both teach the divinity of ideas and the vileness of actionwithout principle; they both exalt the value of personality andcharacter; they both deprecate the influence of society andsocialisation; they both intensely praise and love life, but they bothpour contempt and irony upon the shallow optimist, who thinks itdelightful, and the quietist, who wishes it to be calm, sweet, andpeaceful. They thus both preach a life of danger, in opposition tothat of pleasure, of comfort, of happiness, and they do not onlypreach this noble life, they also act it: for both have with equaldetermination staked even their lives on the fulfilment of theirideal. 

It is astonishing--but only astonishing to your superficial student ofthe Jewish character--that in Disraeli also we find an almostNietzschean appreciation of that eternal foe of the Jewish race, theHellenist, which makes Disraeli, just like Nietzsche, confess that theGreek and the Hebrew are both amongst the highest types of the humankind. It is not less astonishing--but likewise easily intelligible forone who knows something of the great Jews of the Middle Ages--that inDisraeli we discover that furious enmity against the doctrine of thenatural equality of men which Nietzsche combated all his life. It wascertainly the great Maimonides himself, that spiritual father ofSpinoza, who guided the pen of his Sephardic descendant, when he thuswrote in his Tancred: "It is to be noted, although the OmnipotentCreator might have formed, had it pleased him, in the humblest of hiscreations, an efficient agent for his purpose that Divine Majesty hasnever thought fit to communicate except with human beings of the veryhighest order. "

But what about Christianity, to which Disraeli was sincerely attached, and whose creation he always considered as one of the eternal gloriesof his race? Did not the Divine Majesty think it fit then tocommunicate with the most humble of its creatures, with the fishermenof Galilee, with the rabble of Corinth, with the slaves, the women, the criminals of the Roman Empire? As I wish to be honest aboutDisraeli, I must point out here, that his genius, although the mostprominent in England during his lifetime, and although violentlyopposed to its current superstitions, still partly belongs to hisage--and for this very pardonable reason, that in his Jewish pride heoverrated and even misunderstood Christianity. He all but overlookedthe narrow connection between Christianity and Democracy. He did notsee that in fighting Liberalism and Nonconformity all his life, he wasreally fighting Christianity, the Protestant Form of which is at theroot of British Liberalism and Individualism to this very day. Andwhen later in his life Disraeli complained that the disturbance in themind of nations has been occasioned by "the powerful assault on theDivinity of the Semitic Literature by the Germans, " he overlookedlikewise the connection of this German movement with the sameProtestantism, from the narrow and vulgar middle-class of which havesprung all those rationalising, unimaginative, and merely cleverprofessors, who have so successfully undermined the ancient andvenerable lore. And thirdly, and worst of all, Disraeli neversuspected that the French Revolution, which in the same breath he oncecontemptuously denounced as "the Celtic Rebellion against Semiticlaws, " was, in spite of its professed attack against religion, reallya profoundly Christian, because a democratic and revolutionarymovement. What a pity he did not know all this! What a shower ofsplendid additional sarcasms he would have poured over thoseflat-nosed Franks, had he known what I know now, that it is theeternal way of the Christian to be a rebel, and that just as he hasonce rebelled against us, he has never ceased pestering and rebellingagainst any one else either of his own or any other creed. 

But it is so easy for me to be carried away by that favourite sport ofmine, of which I am the first inventor among the Jews--Christianbaiting. You must forgive this, however, in a Jew, who, while he hasbeen baited for two thousand years by you, likes to turn round nowthat the opportunity has come, and tries to indulge on his part alsoin a little bit of that genial pastime. I candidly confess it isdelightful, and I now quite understand your ancestors hunting mine asmuch as they could--had I been a Christian, I would, probably, havedone the same; perhaps have done it even better, for no one would nowbe left to write any such impudent truisms against me-- rest assuredof that! But as I am a Jew, and have had too much experience of theother side of the question, I must try to control myself in the midstof victory; I must judge things calmly; I must state fact honestly; Imust not allow myself to be unjust towards you. First of all, then, this rebelling faculty of yours is a Jewish inheritance, aninheritance, however, of which you have made a more than generous, atruly Christian use, because you did not keep it niggardly foryourselves, but have distributed it all over the earth, from Nazarethto Nishni-Novgorod, from Jerusalem to Jamaica, from Palestine toPimlico, so that every one is a rebel and an anarchist nowadays. But, secondly, I must not forget that in every Anarchist, and therefore inevery Christian, there is also, or may be, an aristocrat--a man who, just like the anarchist, but with a perfectly holy right, wishes toobey no laws but those of his own conscience; a man who thinks toohighly of his own faith and persuasion, to convert other people to it;a man who, therefore, would never carry it to Caffres and Coolis; aman, in short, with whom even the noblest and exclusive Hebrew couldshake hands. In Friedrich Nietzsche this aristocratic element whichmay be hidden in a Christian has been brought to light, in him theChristian's eternal claim for freedom of conscience, for his ownpriesthood, for justification by his own faith, is no longer used forpurposes of destruction and rebellion, but for those of command andcreation; in him--and this is the key to the character of thisextraordinary man, who both on his father's and mother's side was thedescendant of a long line of Protestant Parsons--the Christian andProtestant spirit of anarchy became so strong that he rebelled evenagainst his own fellow-Anarchists, and told them that Anarchy was alow and contemptible thing, and that Revolution was an occupation fitonly for superior slaves. But with this event the circle ofChristianity has become closed, and the exclusive House of Israel isnow under the delightful obligation to make its peace with its oncelost and now reforming son. 

The venerable Owner of this old house is still standing on itsthreshold: his face is pale, his expression careworn, his eyesapparently scanning something far in the distance. The wind--for thereis a terrible wind blowing just now--is playing havoc with his longwhite Jew-beard, but this white Jew-beard of his is growing blackagain at the end, and even the sad eyes are still capable of quiteyouthful flashes, as may be noticed at this very moment. For the eyesof the old Jew, apparently so dreamy and so far away, have suddenlybecome fixed upon something in the distance yonder. The old Jew looksand looks-- and then he rubs his eyes--and then he eagerly looksagain. And now he is sure of himself. His old and haggard face islighting up, his stooped figure suddenly becomes more erect, and atear of joy is seen running over his pale cheek into that long beardof his. For the old Jew has recognised some one coming from afar--someone whom he had missed, but never mentioned, for his Law forbade himto do this--some one, however, for whom he had secretly alwaysmourned, as only the race of the psalmists and the prophets canmourn--and he rushes toward him, and he falls on his neck and hekisses him, and he says to his servants: "Bring forth the best robeand put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and shoes on his feet. And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it and let us eat and bemerry!" AMEN. 

OSCAR LEVY. 

LONDON, January 1909. _________________________________________________________________

 TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. To the reader who knows Nietzsche, who has studied his Zarathustra andunderstood it, and who, in addition, has digested the works entitledBeyond Good and Evil, The Genealogy of Morals, The Twilight of theIdols, and The Antichrist, -- to such a reader everything in thisvolume will be perfectly clear and comprehensible. In the attack onStrauss he will immediately detect the germ of the whole ofNietzsche's subsequent attitude towards too hasty contentment and thefoolish beatitude of the "easily pleased"; in the paper on Wagner hewill recognise Nietzsche the indefatigable borer, miner andunderminer, seeking to define his ideals, striving afterself-knowledge above all, and availing himself of any contemporaryapproximation to his ideal man, in order to press it forward as theincarnation of his thoughts. Wagner the reformer of mankind! Wagnerthe dithyrambic dramatist!--The reader who knows Nietzsche will not bemisled by these expressions. 

To the uninitiated reader, however, some words of explanation are due, not only in regard to the two papers before us, but in regard toNietzsche himself. So much in our time is learnt from hearsayconcerning prominent figures in science, art, religion, or philosophy, that it is hardly possible for anybody to-day, however badly informedhe may be, to begin the study of any great writer or scientist with aperfectly open mind. It were well, therefore, to begin the study ofNietzsche with some definite idea as to his unaltered purpose, if heever possessed such a thing; as to his lifelong ideal, if he ever keptone so long; and as to the one direction in which he always travelled, despite apparent deviations and windings. Had he such a purpose, suchan ideal, such a direction? We have no wish to open a controversyhere, neither do we think that in replying to this question in theaffirmative we shall give rise to one; for every careful student ofNietzsche, we know, will uphold us in our view. Nietzsche had one verydefinite and unaltered purpose, ideal and direction, and this was "theelevation of the type man. " He tells us in The Will to Power: "All istruth to me that tends to elevate man!" To this principle he wasalready pledged as a student at Leipzig; we owe every line that heever wrote to his devotion to it, and it is the key to all hiscomplexities, blasphemies, prolixities, and terrible earnestness. Allwas good to Nietzsche that tended to elevate man; all was bad thatkept man stationary or sent him backwards. Hence he wrote DavidStrauss, the Confessor and Writer (1873). 

The Franco-German War had only just come to an end, and the keynote ofthis polemical pamphlet is, "Beware of the intoxication of success. "When the whole of Germany was delirious with joy over her victory, ata time when the unquestioned triumph of her arms tended rather toreflect unearned glory upon every department of her socialorganisation, it required both courage and discernment to raise thewarning voice and to apply the wet blanket. But Nietzsche did both, and with spirit, because his worst fears were aroused. Smug content(erbärmliches Behagen) was threatening to thwart his one purpose--theelevation of man; smug content personified in the German scholar wasgiving itself airs of omniscience, omnipotence, and ubiquity, and allthe while it was a mere cover for hidden rottenness and jejunepedantry. 

Nietzsche's attack on Hegelian optimism alone (pp. 46, 53-54), in thefirst paper, fully reveals the fundamental idea underlying this essay;and if the personal attack on Strauss seems sometimes to throw themain theme into the background, we must remember the author's ownattitude towards this aspect of the case. Nietzsche, as a matter offact, had neither the spite nor the meanness requisite for the purelypersonal attack. In his Ecce Homo, he tells us most emphatically: "Ihave no desire to attack particular persons--I do but use apersonality as a magnifying glass; I place it over the subject towhich I wish to call attention, merely that the appeal may bestronger. " David Strauss, in a letter to a friend, soon after thepublication of the first Thought out of Season, expresses his utterastonishment that a total stranger should have made such a dead set athim. The same problem may possibly face the reader on every page ofthis fssay: if, however, we realise Nietzsche's purpose, if weunderstand his struggle to be one against "Culture-Philistinism" ingeneral, as a stemming, stultifying and therefore degenerate factor, and regard David Strauss--as the author himself did, that is to say, simply as a glass, focusing the whole light of our understanding uponthe main theme-- then the Strauss paper is seen to be one of suchenormous power, and its aim appears to us so lofty, that, whatever ourviews may be concerning the nature of the person assailed, we areforced to conclude that, to Nietzsche at least, he was but theincarnation and concrete example of the evil and danger thenthreatening to overtake his country, which it was the object of thisessay to expose. 

When we read that at the time of Strauss's death (February 7th, 1874)Nietzsche was greatly tormented by the fear that the old scholar mighthave been hastened to his end by the use that had been made of hispersonality in the first Unzeitgemässe Betrachtung; when we rememberthat in the midst of this torment he ejaculated, "I was indeed notmade to hate and have enemies!"--we are then in a better position tojudge of the motives which, throughout his life, led him to engagesuch formidable opponents and to undertake such relentless attacks. Itwas merely his ruling principle that, all is true and good that tendsto elevate man; everything is bad and false that keeps man stationaryor sends him backwards. 

Those who may think that his attacks were often unwarrantable andill-judged will do well, therefore, to bear this in mind, thatwhatever his value or merits may have been as an iconoclast, at leastthe aim he had was sufficiently lofty and honourable, and that henever shirked the duties which he rightly or wrongly imagined wouldhelp him to

Wagner paper (1875-1876) we are faced by a somewhat different problem. Most readers who will have heard of Nietzsche's subsequentdenunciation of Wagner's music will probably stand aghast before thispanegyric of him; those who, like Professor Saintsbury, will fail todiscover the internal evidence in this essay which points soinfallibly to Nietzsche's real but still subconscious opinion of hishero, may even be content to regard his later attitude as the resultof a complete volte-face, and at any rate a flat contradiction of theone revealed in this paper. Let us, however, examine the internalevidence we speak of, and let us also discuss the purpose and spiritof the essay. 

We have said that Nietzsche was a man with a very fixed and powerfulideal, and we have heard what this ideal was. Can we picture him, then, --a young and enthusiastic scholar with a cultured love of music, and particularly of Wagner's music, eagerly scanning all his circle, the whole city and country in which he lived--yea, even the wholecontinent on which he lived--for something or some one that would sethis doubts at rest concerning the feasibility of his ideal? Can we nowpicture this young man coming face to face with probably one of thegreatest geniuses of his age--with a man whose very presence must havebeen electric, whose every word or movement must have imparted somepower to his surroundings--with Richard Wagner?

If we can conceive of what the mere attention, even, of a man likeWagner must have meant to Nietzsche in his twenties, if we can formany idea of the intoxicating effect produced upon him when thisattention developed into friendship, we almost refuse to believe thatNietzsche could have been critical at all at first. In Wagner, as wasbut natural, he soon began to see the ideal, or at least the means tothe ideal, which was his one obsession. All his hope for the future ofGermany and Europe cleaved, as it were, to this highest manifestationof their people's life, and gradually he began to invest his alreadygreat friend with all the extra greatness which he himself drew fromthe depths of his own soul. 

The friendship which grew between them was of that rare order in whichneither can tell who influences the other more. Wagner would oftendeclare that the beautiful music in the third act of Siegfried was tobe ascribed to Nietzsche's influence over him; he also adopted theyoung man's terminology in art matters, and the concepts implied bythe words "Dionysian" and "Apollonian" were borrowed by him from hisfriend's discourses. How much Nietzsche owed to Wagner may perhapsnever be definitely known; to those who are sufficiently interested toundertake the investigation of this matter, we would recommend HansBelart's book, Nietzsche's Ethik; in it references will be found whichgive some clue as to the probable sources from which the necessaryinformation may be derived. In any case, however, the reciprocaleffects of their conversations will never be exactly known; andalthough it would be ridiculous to assume that Nietzsche wasessentially the same when he left as when he met him, what the realnature of the change was it is now difficult to say. 

For some years their friendship continued firm, and grew ever more andmore intimate. The Birth Of Tragedy was one of the first publicdeclarations of it, and after its publication many were led toconsider that Wagner's art was a sort of resurrection of the DionysianGrecian art. Enemies of Nietzsche began to whisper that he was merelyWagner's "literary lackey"; many friends frowned upon the promisingyoung philologist, and questioned the exaggerated importance he wasbeginning to ascribe to the art of music and to art in general, intheir influence upon the world; and all the while Nietzsche's onethought and one aim was to help the cause and further the prospects ofthe man who he earnestly believed was destined to be the salvation ofEuropean culture. 

Every great ideal coined in his own brain he imagined to be the idealof his hero; all his sublimest hopes for society were presentedgratis, in his writings, to Wagner, as though products of the latter'sown mind; and just as the prophet of old never possessed the requisiteassurance to suppose that his noblest ideas were his own, butattributed them to some higher and supernatural power, whom he therebylearnt to worship for its fancied nobility of sentiment, so Nietzsche, still doubting his own powers, created a fetich out of nis mostdistinguished friend, and was ultimately wounded and well-nigh wreckedwith disappointment when he found that the Wagner of theGotterdammerung and Parsifal was not the Wagner of his own mind. 

While writing Ecce Homo, he was so well aware of the extent to whichhe had gone in idealising his friend, that he even felt able to say:"Wagner in Bayreuth is a vision of my own future. .. . Now that I canlook back upon this work, I would not like to deny that, at bottom, itspeaks only of myself" (p. 74). And on another page of the same bookwe read: ". .. What I heard, as a young man, in Wagnerian music, hadabsolutely nothing to do with Wagner: when I described Dionysianmusic, I only described what I had heard, and I thus translated andtransfigured all that I bore in my own soul into the spirit of the newart. The strongest proof of this is my essay, Wagner in Bayreuth: inall decidedly psychological passages of this book the reader maysimply read my name, or the name 'Zarathustra, ' wherever the textcontains the name 'Wagner'" (p. 68). 

As we have already hinted, there are evidences of his havingsubconsciously discerned the REAL Wagner, even in the heyday of theirfriendship, behind the ideal he had formed of him; for his eyes weretoo intelligent to be deceived, even though his understanding refusedat first to heed the messages they sent it: both the Birth of Tragedyand Wagner in Bayreuth are with us to prove this, and not merely whenwe read these works between the lines, but when we take such passagesas those found on pp. 115, 149, 150, 151, 156, 158, 159 of this bookquite literally. 

Nietzsche's infatuation we have explained; the consequent idealisationof the object of his infatuation he himself has confessed; we havealso pointed certain passages which we believe show beyond a doubtthat almost everything to be found in The Case of Wagner and Nietzschecontra Wagner was already subconscious in our author, long before hehad begun to feel even a coolness towards his hero: let those whothink our interpretation of the said passages is either strained orunjustified turn to the literature to which we have referred and judgefor themselves. It seems to us that those distinguished critics whocomplain of Nietzsche's complete volte-face and his uncontrollablerecantations and revulsions of feeling have completely overlooked thisaspect of the question. 

It were well for us to bear in mind that we are not altogether free todispose of Nietzsche's attitude to Wagner, at any given period intheir relationship, with a single sentence of praise or of blame. After all, we are faced by a problem which no objectivity ordispassionate detachment on our parts can solve. Nietzsche endowedboth Schopenhauer and Wagner with qualities and aspirations so utterlyforeign to them both, that neither of them would have recognisedhimself in the images he painted of them. His love for them wasunusual; perhaps it can only be fully understood emotionally by us:like all men who are capable of very great love, Nietzsche lent theobjects of his affection anything they might happen to lack in the wayof greatness, and when at last his eyes were opened, genuine pain, notmalice, was the motive of even the most bitter of his diatribes. 

Finally, we should just like to give one more passage from Ecce Homobearing upon the subject under discussion. It is particularlyinteresting from an autobiographical standpoint, and will perhapsafford the best possible conclusion to this preface. 

Nietzsche is writing about Wagner's music, and he says: "The worldmust indeed be empty for him who has never been unhealthy enough forthis 'infernal voluptuousness'; it is allowable and yet almostforbidden to use a mystical expression in this behalf. I suppose Iknow better than any one the prodigies Wagner was capable of, thefifty worlds of strange raptures to which no one save him could soar;and as I stand to-day--strong enough to convert even the mostsuspicious and dangerous phenomenon to my own use and be the strongerfor it--I declare Wagner to be the great benefactor of my life. Something will always keep our names associated in the minds of men, and that is, that we are two who have suffered moreexcruciatingly--even at each other's hands--than most men are able tosuffer nowadays. And just as Wagner is merely a misunderstanding amongGermans, so am I and ever will be. You lack two centuries ofpsychological and artistic discipline, my dear countrymen!. .. But itwill be impossible for you ever to recover the time now lost" (p. 43). 

 ANTHONY M. LUDOVICI. _________________________________________________________________

 DAVID STRAUSS, THE CONFESSOR AND THE WRITER. DAVID STRAUSS _______

 I. Public opinion in Germany seems strictly to forbid any allusion to theevil and dangeious consequences of a war, more particularly when thewar in question has been a victorious one. Those writers, therefore, command a more ready attention who, regarding this public opinion asfinal, proceed to vie with each other in their jubilant praise of thewar, and of the powerful influences it has brought to bear uponmorality, culture, and art. Yet it must be confessed that a gieatvictory is a great danger. Human nature bears a triumph less easilythan a defeat; indeed, it might even be urged that it is simpler togain a victory of this sort than to turn it to such account that itmay not ultimately proxe a seiious rout. 

But of all evil results due to the last contest with France, the mostdeplorable, peihaps, is that widespread and even universal error ofpublic opinion and of all who think publicly, that German culture wasalso victorious in the struggle, and that it should now, therefore, bedecked with garlands, as a fit recognition of such extraordinaryevents and successes. This error is in the highest degree pernicious:not because it is an error, --for there are illusions which are bothsalutary and blessed, --but because it threatens to convert our victoryinto a signal defeat. A defeat? --I should say rather, into theuprooting of the "German Mind" for the benefit of the "German Empire. "

Even supposing that the fight had been between the two cultures, thestandard for the value of the victor would still be a very relativeone, and, in any case, would certainly not justify such exaggeratedtriumph or self-glorification. For, in the first place, it would benecessary to ascertain the worth of the conquered culture. This mightbe very little; in which case, even if the victory had involved themost glorious display of arms, it would still offer no warrant forinordinate rapture. 

Even so, however, there can be no question, in our case, of thevictory of German culture; and for the simple reason, that Frenchculture remains as heretofore, and that we depend upon it asheretofore. It did not even help towards the success of our arms. Severe military discipline, natural bravery and sustaining power, thesuperior generalship, unity and obedience in the rank and file--inshort, factors which have nothing to do with culture, wereinstrumental in making us conquer an opponent in whom the mostessential of these factors were absent. The only wonder is, thatprecisely what is now called "culture" in Germany did not prove anobstacle to the military operations which seemed vitally necessary toa great victory. Perhaps, though, this was only owing to the fact thatthis "thing" which dubs itself "culture" saw its advantage, for once, in keeping in the background. 

If however, it be permitted to grow and to spread, if it be spoilt bythe flattering and nonsensical assurance that it has beenvictorious, --then, as I have said, it will have the power to extirpateGerman mind, and, when that is done, who knows whether there willstill be anything to be made out of the surviving German body!

Provided it were possible to direct that calm and tenacious braverywhich the German opposed to the pathetic and spontaneous fury of theFrenchman, against the inward enemy, against the highly suspiciousand, at all events, unnative "cultivation" which, owing to a dangerousmisunderstanding, is called "culture" in Germany, then all hope of areally genuine German "culture"--the reverse of that"cultivation"--would not be entirely lost. For the Germans have neverknown any lack of clear-sighted and heroic leaders, though these, often enough, probably, have lacked Germans. But whether it bepossible to turn German bravery into a new direction seems to me tobecome ever more and more doubtful; for I realise how fully convincedevery one is that such a struggle and such bravery are no longerrequisite; on the contrary, that most things are regulated assatisactorily as they possibly can be--or, at all events, thateverything of moment has long ago been discovered and accomplished: ina word, that the seed of culture is already sown everywhere, and isnow either shooting up its fresh green blades, or, here and there, even bursting forth into luxuriant blossom. In this sphere, not onlyhappiness but ecstasy reigns supreme. I am conscious of this ecstasyand happiness, in the ineffable, truculent assurance of Germanjournalists and manufacturers of novels, tragedies, poems, andhistories (for it must be clear that these people belong to onecategory), who seem to have conspired to improve the leisure andruminative hours--that is to say, "the intellectual lapses"--of themodern man, by bewildering him with their printed paper. Since thewar, all is gladness, dignity, and self-consciousness in this merrythrong. After the startling successes of German culture, it regardsitself, not only as approved and sanctioned, but almost as sanctified. It therefore speaks with gravity, affects to apostrophise the GermanPeople, and issues complete works, after the manner of the classics;nor does it shrink from proclaiming in those journals which are opento it some few of its adherents as new German classical writers andmodel authors. It might be supposed that the dangers of such an abuseof success would be recognised by the more thoughtful and enlightenedamong cultivated Germans; or, at least, that these would feel howpainful is the comedy that is being enacted around them: for what intruth could more readily inspire pity than the sight of a cripplestrutting like a cock before a mirror, and exchanging complacentglances with his reflection! But the "scholar" caste willingly allowthings to remain as they are, and re too much concerned with their ownaffairs to busy themselves with the care of the German mind. Moreover, the units of this caste are too thoroughly convinced that their ownscholarship is the ripest and most perfect fruit of the age--in fact, of all ages--to see any necessity for a care of German culture ingeneral; since, in so far as they and the legion of their brethren areconcerned, preoccupations of this order have everywhere been, so tospeak, surpassed. The more conscientious observer, more particularlyif he be a foreigner, cannot help noticing withal that no greatdisparity exists between that which the German scholar regards as hisculture and that other triumphant culture of the new German classics, save in respect of the quantum of knowledge. Everywhere, whereknowledge and not ability, where information and not art, hold thefirst rank, --everywhere, therefore, where life bears testimony to thekind of culture extant, there is now only one specific Germanculture--and this is the culture that is supposed to have conqueredFrance?

The contention appears to be altogether too preposterous. It wassolely to the more extensive knowledge of German officers, to thesuperior training of their soldiers, and to their more scientificmilitary strategy, that all impartial Judges, and even the Frenchnation, in the end, ascribed the victory. Hence, if it be intended toregard German erudition as a thing apart, in what sense can Germanculture be said to have conquered? In none whatsoever; for the moralqualities of severe discipline, of more placid obedience, have nothingin common with culture: these were characteristic of the Macedonianarmy, for instance, despite the fact that the Greek soldiers wereinfinitely more cultivated. To speak of German scholarship and cultureas having conquered, therefore, can only be the outcome of amisapprehension, probably resulting from the circumstance that everyprecise notion of culture has now vanished from Germany. 

Culture is, before all things, the unity of artistic style, in everyexpression of the life of a people. Abundant knowledge and learning, however, are not essential to it, nor are they a sign of itsexistence; and, at a pinch, they might coexist much more harmoniouslywith the very opposite of culture--with barbarity: that is to say, with a complete lack of style, or with a riotous jumble of all styles. But it is precisely amid this riotous jumble that the German of to-daysubsists; and the serious problem to be solved is: how, with all hislearning, he can possibly avoid noticing it; how, into the bargain, hecan rejoice with all his heart in his present "culture"? Foreverything conduces to open his eyes for him--every glance he casts athis clothes, his room, his house; every walk he takes through thestreets of his town; every visit he pays to his art-dealers and to histrader in the articles of fashion. In his social intercourse he oughtto realise the origin of his manners and movements; in the heart ofour art-institutions, the pleasures of our concerts, theatres, andmuseums, he ought to become apprised of the super- and juxta-positionof all imaginable styles. The German heaps up around him the forms, colours, products, and curiosities of all ages and zones, and therebysucceeds in producing that garish newness, as of a country fair, whichhis scholars then proceed to contemplate and to define as "Modernismper se"; and there he remains, squatting peacefully, in the midst ofthis conflict of styles. But with this kind of culture, which is, atbottom, nothing more nor less than a phlegmatic insensibility to realculture, men cannot vanquish an enemy, least of all an enemy like theFrench, who, whatever their worth may be, do actually possess agenuine and productive culture, and whom, up to the present, we havesystematically copied, though in the majority of cases without skill. 

Even supposing we had really ceased copying them, it would still notmean that we had overcome them, but merely that we had lifted theiryoke from our necks. Not before we have succeeded in forcing anoriginal German culture upon them can there be any question of thetriumph of German culture. Meanwhile, let us not forget that in allmatters of form we are, and must be, just as dependent upon Paris nowas we were before the war; for up to the present there has been nosuch thing as a original German culture. 

We all ought to have become aware of this, of our own accord. Besides, one of the few who had he right to speak to Germans in terms ofreproach Publicly drew attention to the fact. "We Germans are ofyesterday, " Goethe once said to Eckermann. "True, for the last hundredyears we have diligently cultivated ourselves, but a few centuries mayyet have to run their course before our fellow-countrymen becomepermeated with sufficient intellectuality and higher culture to haveit said of them, it is a long time since they were barbarians. "

 II. If, however, our public and private life is so manifestly devoid ofall signs of a productive and characteristic culture; if, moreover, our great artists, with that earnest vehemence and honesty which ispeculiar to greatness admit, and have admitted, this monstrousfact--so very humiliating to a gifted nation; how can it still bepossible for contentment to reign to such an astonishing extent amongGerman scholars? And since the last war this complacent spirit hasseemed ever more and morerready to break forth into exultant cries anddemonstrations of triumph. At all events, the belief seems to be rifethat we are in possession of a genuine culture, and the enormousincongruity of this triumphant satisfaction in the face of theinferiority which should be patent to all, seems only to be noticed bythe few and the select. For all those who think with the public mindhave blindfolded their eyes and closed their ears. The incongruity isnot even acknowledged to exist. How is this possible? What power issufficiently influential to deny this existence? What species of menmust have attained to supremacy in Germany that feelings which are sostrong and simple should he denied or prevented from obtainingexpression? This power, this species of men, I will name--they are thePhilistines of Culture. 

As every one knows, the word "Philistine" is borrowed from thevernacular of student-life, and, in its widest and most popular sense, it signifies the reverse of a son of the Muses, of an artist, and ofthe genuine man of culture. The Philistine of culture, however, thestudy of whose type and the hearing of whose confessions (when hemakes them) have now become tiresome duties, distinguishes himselffrom the general notion of the order "Philistine" by means of asuperstition: he fancies that he is himself a son of the Muses and aman of culture. This incomprehensible error clearly shows that he doesnot even know the difference between a Philistine and his opposite. Wemust not be surprised, therefore, if we find him, for the most part, solemnly protesting that he is no Philistine. Owing to this lack ofself-knowledge, he is convinced that his "culture" is the consummatemanifestation of real German culture; and, since he everywhere meetswith scholars of his own type, since all public institutions, whetherschools, universities, or academies, are so organised as to be incomplete harmony with his education and needs, wherever he goes hebears with him the triumphant feeling that he is the worthy championof prevailing German culture, and he frames his pretensions and claimsaccordingly. 

If, however, real culture takes unity of style for granted (and evenan inferior and degenerate culture cannot be imagined in which acertain coalescence of the profusion of forms has not taken place), itis just possible that the confusion underlying theCulture-Philistine's error may arise from the fact that, since hecomes into contact everywhere with creatures cast in the same mould ashimself, he concludes that this uniformity among all "scholars" mustpoint to a certain uniformity in German education--hence to culture. All round him, he sees only needs and views similar to his own;wherever he goes, he finds himself embraced by a ring of tacitconventions concerning almost everything, but more especially mattersof religion and art. This imposing sameness, this tutti unisono which, though it responds to no word of command, is yet ever ready to burstforth, cozens him into the belief that here a culture must beestablished and flourishing. But Philistinism, despite its systematicorganisation and power, does not constitute a culture by virtue of itssystem alone; it does not even constitute an inferior culture, butinvariably the reverse--namely, firmly established barbarity. For theuniformity of character which is so apparent in the German scholars ofto-day is only the result of a conscious or unconscious exclusion andnegation of all the artistically productive forms and requirements ofa genuine style. The mind of the cultured Philistine must have becomesadly unhinged; for precisely what culture repudiates he regards asculture itself; and, since he proceeds logically, he succeeds increating a connected group of these repudiations--a system ofnon-culture, to which one might at a pinch grant a certain "unity ofstyle, " provided of course it were Ot nonsense to attribute style tobarbarity. If he have to choose between a stylish act and itsopposite, he will invariably adopt the latter, and, since this ruleholds good throughout, every one of his acts bears the same negativestamp. Now, it is by means of this stamp that he is able to identifythe character of the "German culture, " which is his own patent; andall things that do not bear it are so many enemies and obstacles drawnup against him. In the presence of these arrayed forces theCulture-Philistine either does no more than ward off the blows, orelse he denies, holds his tongue, stops his ears, and refuses to facefacts. He is a negative creature--even in his hatred and animosity. Nobody, however, is more disliked by him than the man who regards himas a Philistine, and tells him what he is--namely, the barrier in theway of all powerful men and creators, the labyrinth for all who doubtand go astray, the swamp for all the weak and the weary, the fettersof those who would run towards lofty goals, the poisonous mist thatchokes all germinating hopes, the scorching sand to all those Germanthinkers who seek for, and thirst after, a new life. For the mind ofGermany is seeking; and ye hate it because it is seeking, and becauseit will not accept your word, when ye declare that ye have found whatit is seeking. How could it have been possible for a type like that ofthe Culture-Philistine to develop? and even granting its development, how was it able to rise to the powerful Position of supreme judgeconcerning all questions of German culture? How could this have beenpossible, seeing that a whole procession of grand and heroic figureshas already filed past us, whose every movement, the expression ofwhose every feature, whose questioning voice and burning eye betrayedthe one fact, that they were seekers, and that they sought that whichthe Culture-Philistine had long fancied he had found--to wit, agenuine original German culture? Is there a soil--thus they seemed toask--a soil that is pure enough, unhandselled enough, of sufficientvirgin sanctity, to allow the mind of Germany to build its house uponit? Questioning thus, they wandered through the wilderness, and thewoods of wretched ages and narrow conditions, and as seekers theydisappeared from our vision; one of them, at an advanced age, was evenable to say, in the name of all: "For half a century my life has beenhard and bitter enough; I have allowed myself no rest, but have everstriven, sought and done, to the best and to the utmost of myability. "

What does our Culture-Philistinism say of these seekers? It regardsthem simply as discoverers, and seems to forget that they themselvesonly claimed to be seekers. We have our culture, say her sons; forhave we not our "classics"? Not only is the foundation there, but thebuilding already stands upon it--we ourselves constitute thatbuilding. And, so saying, the Philistine raises his hand to his brow. 

But, in order to be able thus to misjudge, and thus to grantleft-handed veneration to our classics, people must have ceased toknow them. This, generally speaking, is precisely what has happened. For, otherwise, one ought to know that there is only one way ofhonouring them, and that is to continue seeking with the same spiritand with the same courage, and not to weary of the search. But tofoist the doubtful title of "classics" upon them, and to "edify"oneself from time to time by reading their works, means to yield tothose feeble and selfish emotions which all the paying public maypurchase at concert-halls and theatres. Even the raising of monumentsto their memory, and the christening of feasts and societies withtheir names--all these things are but so many ringing cash payments bymeans of which the Culture-Philistine discharges his indebtedness tothem, so that in all other respects he may be rid of them, and, aboveall, not bound to follow in their wake and prosecute his searchfurther. For henceforth inquiry is to cease: that is the Philistinewatchword. 

This watchword once had some meaning. In Germany, during the firstdecade of the nineteenth century, for instance, when the heyday andconfusion of seeking, experimenting, destroying, promising, surmising, and hoping was sweeping in currents and cross-currents over the land, the thinking middle-classes were right in their concern for their ownsecurity. It was then quite right of them to dismiss from their mindswith a shrug of their shoulders the omnium gatherum of fantastic andlanguage-maiming philosophies, and of rabid special-pleadinghistorical studies, the carnival of all gods and myths, and thepoetical affectations and fooleries which a drunken spirit may beresponsible for. In this respect they were quite right; for thePhilistine has not even the privilege of licence. With the cunningproper to base natures, however, he availed himself of theopportunity, in order to throw suspicion even upon the seeking spirit, and to invite people to join in the more comfortable pastime offinding. His eye opened to the joy of Philistinism; he saved himselffrom wild experimenting by clinging to the idyllic, and opposed therestless creative spirit that animates the artist, by means of acertain smug ease--the ease of self-conscious narrowness, tranquillity, and self-sufficiency. His tapering finger pointed, without any affectation of modesty, to all the hidden and intimateincidents of his life, to the many touching and ingenuous joys whichsprang into existence in the wretched depths of his uncultivatedexistence, and which modestly blossomed forth on the bog-land ofPhilistinism. 

There were, naturally, a few gifted narrators who, with a nice touch, drew vivid pictures of the happiness, the prosaic simplicity, thebucolic robustness, and all the well-being which floods the quartersof children, scholars, and peasants. With picture-books of this classin their hands, these smug ones now once and for all sought to escapefrom the yoke of these dubious classics and the command which theycontained--to seek further and to find. They only started the notionof an epigone-age in order to secure peace for themselves, and to beable to reject all the efforts of disturbing innovators summarily asthe work of epigones. With the view of ensuring their owntranquillity, these smug ones even appropriated history, and sought totransform all sciences that threatened to disturb their wretched easeinto branches of history--more particularly philosophy and classicalphilology. Through historical consciousness, they saved themselvesfrom enthusiasm; for, in opposition to Goethe, it was maintained thathistory would no longer kindle enthusiasm. No, in their desire toacquire an historical grasp of everything, stultification became thesole aim of these philosophical admirers of "nil admirari. " Whileprofessing to hate every form of fanaticism and intolerance, what theyreally hated, at bottom, was the dominating genius and the tyranny ofthe real claims of culture. They therefore concentrated and utilisedall their forces in those quarters where a fresh and vigorous movementwas to be expected, and then paralysed, stupefied, and tore it toshreds. In this way, a philosophy which veiled the Philistineconfessions of its founder beneath neat twists and flourishes oflanguage proceeded further to discover a formula for the canonisationof the commonplace. It expatiated upon the rationalism of all reality, and thus ingratiated itself with the Culture-Philistine, who alsoloves neat twists and flourishes, and who, above all, considershimself real, and regards his reality as the standard of reason forthe world. From this time forward he began to allow every one, andeven himself, to reflect, to investigate, to astheticise, and, moreparticularly, to make poetry, rnusic, and even pictures--not tomention systems philosophy; provided, of course, that everything weredone according to the old pattern, and that no assault were made uponthe "reasonable" and the "real"--that is to say, upon the Philistine. The latter really does not at all mind giving himself up, from time totime, to the delightful and daring transgressions of art or ofsceptical historical studies, and he does not underestimate the charmof such recreations and entertainments; but he strictly separates "theearnestness of life" (under which term he understands his calling, hisbusiness, and his wife and child) from such trivialities, and amongthe latter he includes all things which have any relation to culture. Therefore, woe to the art that takes itself seriously, that has anotion of what it may exact, and that dares to endanger his income, his business, and his habits! Upon such an art he turns his back, asthough it were something dissolute; and, affecting the attitude of a. Guardian of chastity, he cautions every unprotected virtue on noaccount to look. 

Being such an adept at cautioning people, he is always grateful to anyartist who heeds him and listens to caution. He then assures hisprotege that things are to be made more easy for him; that, as akindred spirit, he will no longer be expected to make sublimemasterpieces, but that his work must be one of two kinds--either theimitation of reality to the point of simian mimicry, in idylls orgentle and humorous satires, or the free copying of the best-known andmost famous classical works, albeit with shamefast concessions to thetaste of the age. For, although he may only be able to appreciateslavish copying or accurate portraiture of the present, still he knowsthat the latter will but glorify him, and increase the well-being of"reality"; while the former, far from doing him any harm, rather helpsto establish his reputation as a classical judge of taste, and is nototherwise troublesome; for he has, once and for all, come to termswith the classics. Finally, he discovers the general and effectiveformula "Health" for his habits, methods of observation, judgments, and the objects of his patronage; while he dismisses the importunatedisturber of the peace with the epithets "hysterical" and "morbid. " Itis thus that David Strauss--a genuine example of the satisfait inregard to our scholastic institutions, and a typical Philistine--it isthus that he speaks of "the philosophy of Schopenhauer" as being"thoroughly intellectual, yet often unhealthy and unprofitable. " It isindeed a deplorable fact that intellect should show such a decidedpreference for the "unhealthy" and the "unprofitable"; and even thePhilistine, if he be true to himself, will admit that, in regard tothe philosophies which men of his stamp produce, he is conscious of afrequent lack of intellectuality, although of course they are alwaysthoroughly healthy and profitable. 

Now and again, the Philistines, provided they are by themselves, indulge in a bottle of wine, and then they grow reminiscent, and speakof the great deeds of the war, honestly and ingenuously. On suchoccasions it often happens that a great deal comes to light whichwould otherwise have been most stead-fastly concealed, and one of themmay even be heard to blurt out the most precious secrets of the wholebrotherhood. Indeed, a lapse of this sort occurred but a short whileago, to a well-known aesthete of the Hegelian school of reasoning. Itmust, however, be admitted that the provocation thereto was of anunusual character. A company of Philistines were feasting together, incelebration of the memory of a genuine anti-Philistine--one who, moreover, had been, in the strictest sense of the words, wrecked byPhilistinism. This man was Holderlin, and the afore-mentioned aesthetewas therefore justified, under the circumstances, in speaking of thetragic souls who had foundered on "reality"--reality being understood, here, to mean Philistine reason. But the "reality" is now different, and it might well be asked whether Holderlin would be able to find hisway at all in the present great age. "I doubt, " says Dr. Vischer, "whether his delicate soul could have borne all the roughness which isinseparable from war, and whether it had survived the amount ofperversity which, since the war, we now see flourishing in everyquarter. Perhaps he would have succumbed to despair. His was one ofthe unarmed souls; he was the Werther of Greece, a hopeless lover; hislife was full of softness and yearning, but there was strength andsubstance in his will, and in his style, greatness, riches and life;here and there it is even reminiscent of AEschylus. His spirit, however, lacked hardness. He lacked the weapon humour; he could notgrant that one may be a Philistine and still be no barbarian. " Not thesugary condolence of the post-prandial speaker, but this last sentenceconcerns us. Yes, it is admitted that one is a Philistine; but, abarbarian?--No, not at any price! Unfortunately, poor Holderlin couldnot make such flne distinctions. If one reads the reverse ofcivilisation, or perhaps sea-pirating, or cannibalism, into the word"barbarian, " then the distinction is justifiable enough. But what theaesthete obviously wishes to prove to us is, that we may bePhilistines and at the same time men of culture. Therein lies thehumour which poor Holderlin lacked and the need of which ultimatelywrecked him. [7]*

[Footnote * : Nietzsche's allusion to Holderlin here is full of tragicsignificance; for, like Holderlin, he too was ultimately wrecked anddriven insane by the Philistinism of his age. --Translator's note. ]

On this occasion a second admission was made by the speaker: "It isnot always strength of will, but weakness, which makes us superior tothose tragic souls which are so passionately responsive to theattractions of beauty, " or words to this effect. And this was said inthe name of the assembled "We"; that is to say, the "superiors, " the"superiors through weakness. " Let us content ourselves with theseadmissions. We are now in possession of information concerning twomatters from one of the initiated: first, that these "We" stand beyondthe passion for beauty; secondly, that their position was reached bymeans of weakness. In less confidential moments, however, it was justthis weakness which masqueraded in the guise of a much more beautifulname: it was the famous "healthiness" of the Culture-Philistine. Inview of this very recent restatement of the case, however, it would beas well not to speak of them any longer as the "healthy ones, " but asthe "weakly, " or, still better, as the "feeble. " Oh, if only thesefeeble ones were not in power! How is it that they concern themselvesat all about what we call them! They are the rulers, and he is a poorruler who cannot endure to be called by a nickname. Yes, if one onlyhave power, one soon learns to poke fun--even at oneself. It cannotmatter so very much, therefore, even if one do give oneself away; forwhat could not the purple mantle of triumph conceal? The strength ofthe Culture-Philistine steps into the broad light of day when heacknowledges his weakness; and the more he acknowledges it-- the morecynically he acknowledges it--the more completely he betrays hisconsciousness of his own importance and superiority. We are living ina period of cynical Philistine confessions. Just as Friedrich Vischergave us his in a word, so has David Strauss handed us his in a book;and both that word and that book are cynical. 

 III. Concerning Culture-Philistinism, David Strauss makes a doubleconfession, by word and by deed; that is to say, by the word of theconfessor, and the act of the writer. His book entitled The Old Faithand the New is, first in regard to its contents, and secondly inregard to its being a book and a literary production, an uninterruptedconfession; while, in the very fact that he allows himself to writeconfessions at all about his faith, there already lies a confession. Presumably, every one seems to have the right to compile anautobiography after his fortieth year; for the humblest amongst us mayhave experienced things, and may have seen them at such closequarters, that the recording of them may prove of use and value to thethinker. But to write a confession of one's faith cannot but beregarded as a thousand times more pretentious, since it takes forgranted that the writer attaches worth, not only to the experiencesand investigations of his life, but also to his beliefs. Now, what thenice thinker will require to know, above all else, is the kind offaith which happens to be compatible with natures of the Straussianorder, and what it is they have "half dreamily conjured up" (p. 10)concerning matters of which those alone have the right to speak whoare acquainted with them at first hand. Whoever would have desired topossess the confessions, say, of a Ranke or a Mommsen? And these menwere scholars and historians of a very different stamp from DavidStrauss. If, however, they had ever ventured to interest us in theirfaith instead of in their scientific investigations, we should havefelt that they were overstepping their limits in a most irritatingfashion. Yet Strauss does this when he discusses his faith. Nobodywants to know anything about it, save, perhaps, a few bigotedopponents of the Straussian doctrines, who, suspecting, as they do, asubstratum of satanic principles beneath these doctrines, hope that hemay compromise his learned utterances by revealing the nature of thoseprinciples. These clumsy creatures may, perhaps, have found what theysought in the last book; but we, who had no occasion to suspect asatanic substratum, discovered nothing of the sort, and would havefelt rather pleased than not had we been able to discern even a dashof the diabolical in any part of the volume. But surely no evil spiritcould speak as Strauss speaks of his new faith. In fact, spirit ingeneral seems to be altogether foreign to the book-- more particularlythe spirit of genius. Only those whom Strauss designates as his "We, "speak as he does, and then, when they expatiate upon their faith tous, they bore us even more than when they relate their dreams; be they"scholars, artists, military men, civil employes, merchants, or landedproprietors; come they in their thousands, and not the worst people inthe land either!" If they do not wish to remain the peaceful ones intown or county, but threaten to wax noisy, then let not the din oftheir unisono deceive us concerning the poverty and vulgarity of themelody they sing. How can it dispose us more favourably towards aprofession of faith to hear that it is approved by a crowd, when it isof such an order that if any individual of that crowd attempted tomake it known to us, we should not only fail to hear him out, butshould interrupt him with a yawn? If thou sharest such a belief, weshould say unto him, in Heaven's name, keep it to thyself! Maybe, inthe past, some few harmless types looked for the thinker in DavidStrauss; now they have discovered the "believer" in him, and aredisappointed. Had he kept silent, he would have remained, for these, at least, the philosopher; whereas, now, no one regards him as such. He no longer craved the honours of the thinker, however; all he wantedto be was a new believer, and he is proud of his new belief. In makinga written declaration of it, he fancied he was writing the catechismof "modern thought, " and building the "broad highway of the world'sfuture. " Indeed, our Philistines have ceased to be faint-hearted andbashful, and have acquired almost cynical assurance. There was a time, long, long ago, when the Philistine was only tolerated as somethingthat did not speak, and about which no one spoke; then a period ensuedduring which his roughness was smoothed, during which he was foundamusing, and people talked about him. Under this treatment hegradually became a prig, rejoiced with all his heart over his roughplaces and his wrongheaded and candid singularities, and began totalk, on his own account, after the style of Riehl's music for thehome. 

"But what do I see? Is it a shadow? Is it reality? How long and broadmy poodle grows!"

For now he is already rolling like a hippopotamus along "the broadhighway of the world's future, " and his growling and barking havebecome transformed into the proud incantations of a religious founder. And is it your own sweet wish, Great Master, to found the religion ofthe future? "The times seem to us not yet ripe (p. 7). It does notoccur to us to wish to destroy a church. " But why not, Great Master?One but needs the ability. Besides, to speak quite openly in thelatter, you yourself are convinced that you Possess this ability. Lookat the last page of your book. There you actually state, forsooth, that your new way "alone is the future highway of the world, which nowonly requires partial completion, and especially general use, in orderalso to become easy and pleasant. "

Make no further denials, then. The religious founder is unmasked, theconvenient and agreeable highway leading to the Straussian Paradise isbuilt. It is only the coach in which you wish to convey us that doesnot altogether satisfy you, unpretentious man that you are! You tellus in your concluding remarks: "Nor will I pretend that the coach towhich my esteemed readers have been obliged to trust themselves withme fulfils every requirement, . .. All through one is much jolted" (p. 438). Ah! you are casting about for a compliment, you gallant oldreligious founder! But let us be straightforward with you. If yourreader so regulates the perusal of the 368 pages of your religiouscatechism as to read only one page a day--that is to say, if he takeit in the smallest possible doses-then, perhaps, we should be able tobelieve that he might suffer some evil effect from the book--if onlyas the outcome of his vexation when the results he expected fail tomake themselves felt. Gulped down more heartily, however, and as muchas possible being taken at each draught, according to the prescriptionto be recommended in the case of all modern books, the drink can workno mischief; and, after taking it, the reader will not necessarily beeither out of sorts or out of temper, but rather merry andwell-disposed, as though nothing had happened; as though no religionhad been assailed, no world's highway been built, and no profession offaith been made. And I do indeed call this a result! The doctor, thedrug, and the disease--everything forgotten! And the joyous laughter!The continual provocation to hilarity! You are to be envied, Sir; foryou have founded the most attractive of all religions --one whosefollowers do honour to its founder by laughing at him. 

 IV. The Philistine as founder of the religion of the future--that is thenew belief in its most emphatic form of expression. The Philistinebecomes a dreamer--that is the unheard-of occurrence whichdistinguishes the German nation of to-day. But for the present, in anycase, let us maintain an attitude of caution towards this fantasticexaltation. For does not David Strauss himself advise us to exercisesuch caution, in the following profound passage, the general tone ofwhich leads us to think of the Founder of Christianity rather than ofour particular author? (p. 92): "We know there have been nobleenthusiasts--enthusiasts of genius; the influence of an enthusiast canrouse, exalt, and produce prolonged historic effects; but we do notwish to choose him as the guide of our life. He will be sure tomislead us, if we do not subject his influence to the control ofreason. " But we know something more: we know that there areenthusiasts who are not intellectual, who do not rouse or exalt, andwho, nevertheless, not only expect to be the guides of our lives, but, as such, to exercise a very lasting historical influence into thebargain, and to rule the future;--all the more reason why we shouldplace their influence under the control of reason. Lichtenberg evensaid: "There are enthusiasts quite devoid of ability, and these arereally dangerous people. " In the first place, as regards theabove-mentioned control of reason, we should like to have candidanswers to the three following questions: First, how does the newbeliever picture his heaven? Secondly, how far does the courage lenthim by the new faith extend? And, thirdly, how does he write hisbooks? Strauss the Confessor must answer the first and secondquestions; Strauss the Writer must answer the third. 

The heaven of the new believer must, perforce, be a heaven upon earth;for the Christian "prospect of an immortal life in heaven, " togetherwith the other consolations, "must irretrievably vanish" for him whohas but "one foot" on the Straussian platform. The way in which areligion represents its heaven is significant, and if it be true thatChristianity knows no other heavenly occupations than singing andmaking music, the prospect of the Philistine, à la Strauss, is trulynot a very comforting one. In the book of confessions, however, thereis a page which treats of Paradise (p. 342). Happiest of Philistines, unroll this parchment scroll before anything else, and the whole ofheaven will seem to clamber down to thee! "We would but indicate howwe act, how we have acted these many years. Besides ourprofession--for we are members of the most various professions, and byno means exclusively consist of scholars or artists, but of militarymen and civil employes, of merchants and landed proprietors;. .. Andagain, as I have said already, there are not a few of us, but manythousands, and not the worst people in the country;--besides ourprofession, then, I say, we are eagerly accessible to all the higherinterests of humanity; we have taken a vivid interest, during lateyears, and each after his manner has participated in the greatnational war, and the reconstruction of the German State; and we havebeen profoundly exalted by the turn events have taken, as unexpectedas glorious, for our much tried nation. To the end of forming justconclusions in these things, we study history, which has now been madeeasy, even to the unlearned, by a series of attractively and popularlywritten works; at the same time, we endeavour to enlarge our knowledgeof the natural sciences, where also there is no lack of sources ofinformation; and lastly, in the writings of our great poets, in theperformances of our great musicians, we find a stimulus for theintellect and heart, for wit and imagination, which leaves nothing tobe desired. Thus we live, and hold on our way in joy. "

"Here is our man!" cries the Philistine exultingly, who reads this:"for this is exactly how we live; it is indeed our daily life. "[8]*And how perfectly he understands the euphemism! When, for example, herefers to the historical studies by means of which we help ourselvesin forming just conclusions regarding the political situation, whatcan he be thinking of, if it be not our newspaper-reading? When hespeaks of the active part we take in the reconstruction of the GermanState, he surely has only our daily visits to the beer-garden in hismind; and is not a walk in the Zoological Gardens implied by 'thesources of information through which we endeavour to enlarge ourknowledge of the natural sciences'? Finally, the theatres andconcert-halls are referred to as places from which we take home 'astimulus for wit and imagination which leaves nothing to bedesired. '--With what dignity and wit he describes even the mostsuspicious of our doings! Here indeed is our man; for his heaven isour heaven!"

[Footnote * : This alludes to a German student-song. ]

Thus cries the Philistine; and if we are not quite so satisfied as he, it is merely owing to the fact that we wanted to know more. Scaligerused to say: "What does it matter to us whether Montaigne drank red orwhite wine?" But, in this more important case, how greatly ought we tovalue definite particulars of this sort! If we could but learn howmany pipes the Philistine smokes daily, according to the prescriptionsof the new faith, and whether it is the Spener or the National Gazettethat appeals to him over his coffee! But our curiosity is notsatisfied. With regard to one point only do we receive more exhaustiveinformation, and fortunately this point relates to the heaven inheaven--the private little art-rooms which will be consecrated to theuse of great poets and musicians, and to which the Philistine will goto edify himself; in which, moreover, according to his own showing, hewill even get "all his stains removed and wiped away" (p. 433); sothat we are led to regard these private little art-rooms as a kind ofbath-rooms. "But this is only effected for some fleeting moments; ithappens and counts only in the realms of phantasy; as soon as wereturn to rude reality, and the cramping confines of actual life, weare again on all sides assailed by the old cares, "--thus our Mastersighs. Let us, however, avail ourselves of the fleeting moments duringwhich we remain in those little rooms; there is just sufficient timeto get a glimpse of the apotheosis of the Philistine-- that is to say, the Philistine whose stains have been removed and wiped away, and whois now an absolutely pure sample of his type. In truth, theopportunity we have here may prove instructive: let no one who happensto have fallen a victim to the confession-book lay it aside beforehaving read the two appendices, "Of our Great Poets" and "Of our GreatMusicians. " Here the rainbow of the new brotherhood is set, and he whocan find no pleasure in it "for such an one there is no help, " asStrauss says on another occasion; and, as he might well say here, "heis not yet ripe for our point of view. " For are we not in the heavenof heavens? The enthusiastic explorer undertakes to lead us about, andbegs us to excuse him if, in the excess of his joy at all the beautiesto be seen, he should by any chance be tempted to talk too much. "If Ishould, perhaps, become more garrulous than may seem warranted in thisplace, let the reader be indulgent to me; for out of the abundance ofthe heart the mouth speaketh. Let him only be assured that what he isnow about to read does not consist of older materials, which I takethe opportunity of inserting here, but that these remarks have beenwritten for their present place and purpose" (pp. 345-46). Thisconfession surprises us somewhat for the moment. What can it matter tous whether or not the little chapters were freshly written? As if itwere a matter of writing! Between ourselves, I should have been gladif they had been written a quarter of a century earlier; then, atleast, I should have understood why the thoughts seem to be sobleached, and why they are so redolent of resuscitated antiquities. But that a thing should have been written in 1872 and already smell ofdecay in 1872 strikes me as suspicious. Let us imagine some one'sfalling asleep while reading these chapters--what would he mostprobably dream about? A friend answered this question for me, becausehe happened to have had the experience himself. He dreamt of awax-work show. The classical writers stood there, elegantlyrepresented in wax and beads. Their arms and eyes moved, and a screwinside them creaked an accompaniment to their movements. He sawsomething gruesome among them--a misshapen figure, decked with tapesand jaundiced paper, out of whose mouth a ticket hung, on which"Lessing" was written. My friend went close up to it and learned theworst: it was the Homeric Chimera; in front it was Strauss, behind itwas Gervinus, and in the middle Chimera. The tout-ensemble wasLessing. This discovery caused him to shriek with terror: he waked, and read no more. In sooth, Great Master, why have you written suchfusty little chapters?

We do, indeed, learn something new from them; for instance, thatGervinus made it known to the world how and why Goethe was no dramaticgenius; that, in the second part of Faust, he had only produced aworld of phantoms and of symbols; that Wallenstein is a Macbeth aswell as a Hamlet; that the Straussian reader extracts the shortstories out of the Wanderjahre "much as naughty children pick theraisins and almonds out of a tough plum-cake"; that no complete effectcan be produced on the stage without the forcible element, and thatSchiller emerged from Kant as from a cold-water cure. All this iscertainly new and striking; but, even so, it does not strike us withwonder, and so sure as it is new, it will never grow old, for it neverwas young; it was senile at birth. What extraordinary ideas seem tooccur to these Blessed Ones, after the New Style, in their aestheticheaven! And why can they not manage to forget a few of them, moreparticularly when they are of that unaesthetic, earthly, and ephemeralorder to which the scholarly thoughts of Gervinus belong, and whenthey so obviously bear the stamp of puerility? But it almost seems asthough the modest greatness of a Strauss and the vain insignificanceof a Gervinus were only too well able to harmonise: then long live allthose Blessed Ones! may we, the rejected, also live long, if thisunchallenged judge of art continues any longer to teach his borrowedenthusiasm, and the gallop of that hired steed of which the honestGrillparzer speaks with such delightful clearness, until the whole ofheaven rings beneath the hoof of that galumphing enthusiasm. Then, atleast, things will be livelier and noisier than they are at thepresent moment, in which the carpet-slippered rapture of our heavenlyleader and the lukewarm eloquence of his lips only succeed in the endin making us sick and tired. I should like to know how a Hallelujahsung by Strauss would sound: I believe one would have to listen verycarefully, lest it should seem no more than a courteous apology or alisped compliment. Apropos of this, I might adduce an instructive andsomewhat forbidding example. Strauss strongly resented the action ofone of his opponents who happened to refer to his reverence forLessing. The unfortunate man had misunderstood;--true, Strauss diddeclare that one must be of a very obtuse mind not to recognise thatthe simple words of paragraph 86 come from the writer's heart. Now, Ido not question this warmth in the very least; on the contrary, thefact that Strauss fosters these feelings towards Lessing has alwaysexcited my suspicion; I find the same warmth for Lessing raised almostto heat in Gervinus--yea, on the whole, no great German writer is sopopular among little German writers as Lessing is; but for all that, they deserve no thanks for their predilection; for what is it, insooth, that they praise in Lessing? At one moment it is hiscatholicity-- the fact that he was critic and poet, archaeologist andphilosopher, dramatist and theologian. Anon, "it is the unity in himof the writer and the man, of the head and the heart. " The lastquality, as a rule, is just as characteristic of the great writer asof the little one; as a rule, a narrow head agrees only too fatallywith a narrow heart. And as to the catholicity; this is nodistinction, more especially when, as in Lessing's case, it was a direnecessity. What astonishes one in regard to Lessing-enthusiasts israther that they have no conception of the devouring necessity whichdrove him on through life and to this catholicity; no feeling for thefact that such a man is too prone to consume himself rapidly, like aflame; nor any indignation at the thought that the vulgar narrownessand pusillanimity of his whole environment, especially of his learnedcontemporaries, so saddened, tormented, and stifled the tender andardent creature that he was, that the very universality for which heis praised should give rise to feelings of the deepest compassion. "Have pity on the exceptional man!" Goethe cries to us; "for it washis lot to live in such a wretched age that his life was one longpolemical effort. " How can ye, my worthy Philistines, think of Lessingwithout shame? He who was ruined precisely on account of yourstupidity, while struggling with your ludicrous fetiches and idols, with the defects of your theatres, scholars, and theologists, withoutonce daring to attempt that eternal flight for which he had been born. And what are your feelings when ye think of Winckelman, who, in orderto turn his eyes from your grotesque puerilities, went begging to theJesuits for help, and whose ignominious conversion dishonours not him, but you? Dare ye mention Schiller's name without blushing? Look at hisportrait. See the flashing eyes that glance contemptuously over yourheads, the deadly red cheek--do these things mean nothing to you? Inhim ye had such a magnificent and divine toy that ye shattered it. Suppose, for a moment, it had been possible to deprive this harassedand hunted life of Goethe's friendship, ye would then have beenreponsible for its still earlier end. Ye have had no finger in any oneof the life-works of your great geniuses, and yet ye would make adogma to the effect that no one is to be helped in the future. But forevery one of them, ye were "the resistance of the obtuse world, " whichGoethe calls by its name in his epilogue to the Bell; for all of themye were the grumbling imbeciles, or the envious bigots, or themalicious egoists: in spite of you each of them created his works, against you each directed his attacks, and thanks to you eachprematurely sank, while his work was still unfinished, broken andbewildered by the stress of the battle. And now ye presume that ye aregoing to be permitted, tamquam re bene gesta, to praise such men! andwith words which leave no one in any doubt as to whom ye have in yourminds when ye utter your encomiums, which therefore "spring forth withsuch hearty warmth" that one must be blind not to see to whom ye arereally bowing. Even Goethe in his day had to cry: "Upon my honour, weare in need of a Lessing, and woe unto all vain masters and to thewhole aesthetic kingdom of heaven, when the young tiger, whoserestless strength will be visible in his every distended muscle andhis every glance, shall sally forth to seek his prey!"

 V. How clever it was of my friend to read no further, once he had beenenlightened (thanks to that chimerical vision) concerning theStraussian Lessing and Strauss himself. We, however, read on further, and even craved admission of the Doorkeeper of the New Faith to thesanctum of music. The Master threw the door open for us, accompaniedus, and began quoting certain names, until, at last, overcome withmistrust, we stood still and looked at him. Was it possible that wewere the victims of the same hallucination as that to which our friendhad been subjected in his dream? The musicians to whom Straussreferred seemed to us to be wrongly designated as long as he spokeabout them, and we began to think that the talk must certainly beabout somebody else, even admitting that it did not relate toincongruous phantoms. When, for instance, he mentioned Haydn with thatsame warmth which made us so suspicious when he praised Lessing, andwhen he posed as the epopt and priest of a mysterious Haydn cult;when, in a discussion upon quartette-music, if you please, he evenlikened Haydn to a "good unpretending soup" and Beethoven to"sweetmeats" (p. 432); then, to our minds, one thing, and one thingalone, became certain--namely, that his Sweetmeat-Beethoven is not ourBeethoven, and his Soup-Haydn is not our Haydn. The Master wasmoreover of the opinion that our orchestra is too good to performHaydn, and that only the most unpretentious amateurs can do justice tothat music--a further proof that he was referring to some other artistand some other work, possibly to Riehl's music for the home. 

But whoever can this Sweetmeat-Beethoven of Strauss's be? He is saidto have composed nine symphonies, of which the Pastoral is "the leastremarkable"; we are told that "each time in composing the third, heseemed impelled to exceed his bounds, and depart on an adventurousquest, " from which we might infer that we are here concerned with asort of double monster, half horse and half cavalier. With regard to acertain Eroica, this Centaur is very hard pressed, because he did notsucceed in making it clear "whether it is a question of a conflict onthe open field or in the deep heart of man. " In the Pastoral there issaid to be "a furiously raging storm, " for which it is "almost tooinsignificant" to interrupt a dance of country-folk, and which, owingto "its arbitrary connection with a trivial motive, " as Strauss soadroitly and correctly puts it, renders this symphony "the leastremarkable. " A more drastic expression appears to have occurred to theMaster; but he prefers to speak here, as he says, "with becomingmodesty. " But no, for once our Master is wrong; in this case he isreally a little too modest. Who, indeed, will enlighten us concerningthis Sweetmeat-Beethoven, if not Strauss himself--the only person whoseems to know anything about him? But, immediately below, a strongjudgment is uttered with becoming non-modesty, and precisely in regardto the Ninth Symphony. It is said, for instance, that this symphony"is naturally the favourite of a prevalent taste, which in art, andmusic especially, mistakes the grotesque for the genial, and theformless for the sublime" (p. 428). It is true that a critic as severeas Gervinus was gave this work a hearty welcome, because it happenedto confirm one of his doctrines; but Strauss is "far from going tothese problematic productions" in search of the merits of hisBeethoven. "It is a pity, " cries our Master, with a convulsive sigh, "that one is compelled, by such reservations, to mar one's enjoymentof Beethoven, as well as the admiration gladly accorded to him. " Forour Master is a favourite of the Graces, and these have informed himthat they only accompanied Beethoven part of the way, and that he thenlost sight of them. "This is a defect, " he cries, "but can you believethat it may also appear as an advantage?" "He who is painfully andbreathlessly rolling the musical idea along will seem to be moving theweightier one, and thus appear to be the stronger" (pp. 423-24). Thisis a confession, and not necessarily one concerning Beethoven alone, but concerning "the classical prose-writer" himself. He, thecelebrated author, is not abandoned by the Graces. From the play ofairy jests--that is to say, Straussian jests-- to the heights ofsolemn earnestness--that is to say, Straussian earnestness--theyremain stolidly at his elbow. He, the classical prose-writer, slideshis burden along playfully and with a light heart, whereas Beethovenrolls his painfully and breathlessly. He seems merely to dandle hisload; this is indeed an advantage. But would anybody believe that itmight equally be a sign of something wanting? In any case, only thosecould believe this who mistake the grotesque for the genial, and theformless for the sublime--is not that so, you dandling favourite ofthe Graces? We envy no one the edifying moments he may have, either inthe stillness of his little private room or in a new heaven speciallyfitted out for him; but of all possible pleasures of this order, thatof Strauss's is surely one of the most wonderful, for he is evenedified by a little holocaust. He calmly throws the sublimest works ofthe German nation into the flames, in order to cense his idols withtheir smoke. Suppose, for a moment, that by some accident, the Eroica, the Pastoral, and the Ninth Symphony had fallen into the hands of ourpriest of the Graces, and that it had been in his power to suppresssuch problematic productions, in order to keep the image of the Masterpure, who doubts but what he would have burned them? And it isprecisely in this way that the Strausses of our time demeanthemselves: they only wish to know so much of an artist as iscompatible with the service of their rooms; they know only theextremes-- censing or burning. To all this they are heartily welcome;the one surprising feature of the whole case is that public opinion, in matters artistic, should be so feeble, vacillating, and corruptibleas contentedly to allow these exhibitions of indigent Philistinism togo by without raising an objection; yea, that it does not even possesssufficient sense of humour to feel tickled at the sight of anunaesthetic little master's sitting in judgment upon Beethoven. As toMozart, what Aristotle says of Plato ought really to be applied here:"Insignificant people ought not to be permitted even to praise him. "In this respect, however, all shame has vanished--from the public aswell as from the Master's mind: he is allowed, not merely to crosshimself before the greatest and purest creations of German genius, asthough he had perceived something godless and immoral in them, butpeople actually rejoice over his candid confessions and admission ofsins--more particularly as he makes no mention of his own, but only ofthose which great men are said to have committed. Oh, if only ourMaster be in the right! his readers sometimes think, when attacked bya paroxysm of doubt; he himself, however, stands there, smiling andconvinced, perorating, condemning, blessing, raising his hat tohimself, and is at any minute capable of saying what the DuchesseDelaforte said to Madame de Staël, to wit: "My dear, I must confessthat I find no one but myself invariably right. "

 VI. A corpse is a pleasant thought for a worm, and a worm is a dreadfulthought for every living creature. Worms fancy their kingdom of heavenin a fat body; professors of philosophy seek theirs in rummaging amongSchopenhauer's entrails, and as long as rodents exist, there willexist a heaven for rodents. In this, we have the answer to our firstquestion: How does the believer in the new faith picture his heaven?The Straussian Philistine harbours in the works of our great poets andmusicians like a parasitic worm whose life is destruction, whoseadmiration is devouring, and whose worship is digesting. 

Now, however, our second question must be answered: How far does thecourage lent to its adherents by this new faith extend? Even thisquestion would already have been answered, if courage andpretentiousness had been one; for then Strauss would not be lackingeven in the just and veritable courage of a Mameluke. At all events, the "becoming modesty" of which Strauss speaks in the above-mentionedpassage, where he is referring to Beethoven, can only be a stylisticand not a moral manner of speech. Strauss has his full share of thetemerity to which every successful hero assumes the right: all flowersgrow only for him--the conqueror; and he praises the sun because itshines in at his window just at the right time. He does not even sparethe venerable old universe in his eulogies--as though it were only nowand henceforward sufficiently sanctified by praise to revolve aroundthe central monad David Strauss. The universe, he is happy to informus, is, it is true, a machine with jagged iron wheels, stamping andhammering ponderously, but: "We do not only find the revolution ofpitiless wheels in our world-machine, but also the shedding ofsoothing oil" (p. 435). The universe, provided it submit to Strauss'sencomiums, is not likely to overflow with gratitude towards thismaster of weird metaphors, who was unable to discover better similesin its praise. But what is the oil called which trickles down upon thehammers and stampers? And how would it console a workman who chancedto get one of his limbs caught in the mechanism to know that this oilwas trickling over him? Passing over this simile as bad, let us turnour attention to another of Strauss's artifices, whereby he tries toascertain how he feels disposed towards the universe; this question ofMarguerite's, "He loves me--loves me not--loves me?" hanging on hislips the while. Now, although Strauss is not telling flower-petals orthe buttons on his waistcoat, still what he does is not less harmless, despite the fact that it needs perhaps a little more courage. Strausswishes to make certain whether his feeling for the "All" is eitherparalysed or withered, and he pricks himself; for he knows that onecan prick a limb that is either paralysed or withered without causingany pain. As a matter of fact, he does not really prick himself, butselects another more violent method, which he describes thus: "We openSchopenhauer, who takes every occasion of slapping our idea in theface" (p. 167). Now, as an idea--even that of Strauss's concerning theuniverse--has no face, if there be any face in the question at all itmust be that of the idealist, and the procedure may be subdivided intothe following separate actions:--Strauss, in any case, throwsSchopenhauer open, whereupon the latter slaps Strauss in the face. Strauss then reacts religiously; that is to say, he again begins tobelabour Schopenhauer, to abuse him, to speak of absurdities, blasphemies, dissipations, and even to allege that Schopenhauer couldnot have been in his right senses. Result of the dispute: "We demandthe same piety for our Cosmos that the devout of old demanded for hisGod"; or, briefly, "He loves me. " Our favourite of the Graces makeshis life a hard one, but he is as brave as a Mameluke, and fearsneither the Devil nor Schopenhauer. How much "soothing oil" must heuse if such incidents are of frequent occurrence!

On the other hand, we readily understand Strauss's gratitude to thistickling, pricking, and slapping Schopenhauer; hence we are not sovery much surprised when we find him expressing himself in thefollowing kind way about him: "We need only turn over the leaves ofArthur Schopenhauer's works (although we shall on many other accountsdo well not only to glance over but to study them), etc. " (p. 166). Now, to whom does this captain of Philistines address these words? Tohim who has clearly never even studied Schopenhauer, the latter mightwell have retorted, "This is an author who does not even deserve to bescanned, much less to be studied. " Obviously, he gulped Schopenhauerdown "the wrong way, " and this hoarse coughing is merely his attemptto clear his throat. But, in order to fill the measure of hisingenuous encomiums, Strauss even arrogates to himself the right ofcommending old Kant: he speaks of the latter's General History of theHeavens of the Year 1755 as of "a work which has always appeared to menot less important than his later Critique of Pure Reason. If in thelatter we admire the depth of insight, the breadth of observationstrikes us in the former. If in the latter we can trace the old man'sanxiety to secure even a limited possession of knowledge--so it be buton a firm basis--in the former we encounter the mature man, full ofthe daring of the discoverer and conqueror in the realm of thought. "This judgment of Strauss's concerning Kant did not strike me as beingmore modest than the one concerning Schopenhauer. In the one case, wehave the little captain, who is above all anxious to express even themost insignificant opinion with certainty, and in the other we havethe famous prose-writer, who, with all the courage of ignorance, exudes his eulogistic secretions over Kant. It is almost incrediblethat Strauss availed himself of nothing in Kant's Critique of PureReason while compiling his Testament of modern ideas, and that he knewonly how to appeal to the coarsest realistic taste must also benumbered among the more striking characteristics of this new gospel, the which professes to be but the result of the laborious andcontinuous study of history and science, and therefore tacitlyrepudiates all connection with philosophy. For the Philistine captainand his "We, " Kantian philosophy does not exist. He does not dream ofthe fundamental antinomy of idealism and of the highly relative senseof all science and reason. And it is precisely reason that ought totell him how little it is possible to know of things in themselves. Itis true, however, that people of a certain age cannot possiblyunderstand Kant, especially when, in their youth, they understood orfancied they understood that "gigantic mind, " Hegel, as Strauss did;and had moreover concerned themselves with Schleiermacher, who, according to Strauss, "was gifted with perhaps too much acumen. " Itwill sound odd to our author when I tell him that, even now, he standsabsolutely dependent upon Hegel and Schleiermacher, and that histeaching of the Cosmos, his way of regarding things sub speciebiennii, his salaams to the state of affairs now existing in Germany, and, above all, his shameless Philistine optimism, can only beexplained by an appeal to certain impressions of youth, early habits, and disorders; for he who has once sickened on Hegel andSchleiermacher never completely recovers. 

There is one passage in the confession-book where the incurableoptimism referred to above bursts forth with the full joyousness ofholiday spirits (pp. 166-67). "If the universe is a thing which hadbetter not have existed, " says Strauss, "then surely the speculationof the philosopher, as forming part of this universe, is a speculationwhich had better not have speculated. The pessimist philosopher failsto perceive that he, above all, declares his own thought, whichdeclares the world to be bad, as bad also; but if the thought whichdeclares the world to be bad is a bad thought, then it followsnaturally that the world is good. As a rule, optimism may take thingstoo easily. Schopenhauer's references to the colossal part whichsorrow and evil play in the world are quite in their right place as acounterpoise; but every true philosophy is necessarily optimistic, asotherwise she hews down the branch on which she herself is sitting. "If this refutation of Schopenhauer is not the same as that to whichStrauss refers somewhere else as "the refutation loudly and jubilantlyacclaimed in higher spheres, " then I quite fail to understand thedramatic phraseology used by him elsewhere to strike an opponent. Hereoptimism has for once intentionally simplified her task. But themaster-stroke lay in thus pretending that the refutation ofSchopenhauer was not such a very difficult task after all, and inplayfully wielding the burden in such a manner that the three Gracesattendant on the dandling optimist might constantly be delighted byhis methods. The whole purpose of the deed was to demonstrate this onetruth, that it is quite unnecessary to take a pessimist seriously; themost vapid sophisms become justified, provided they show that, inregard to a philosophy as "unhealthy and unprofitable" asSchopenhauer's, not proofs but quips and sallies alone are suitable. While perusing such passages, the reader will grasp the full meaningof Schopenhauer's solemn utterance to the effect that, where optimismis not merely the idle prattle of those beneath whose flat brows wordsand only words are stored, it seemed to him not merely an absurd but avicious attitude of mind, and one full of scornful irony towards theindescribable sufferings of humanity. When a philosopher like Straussis able to frame it into a system, it becomes more than a viciousattitude of mind--it is then an imbecile gospel of comfort for the "I"or for the "We, " and can only provoke indignation. 

Who could read the following psychological avowal, for instance, without indignation, seeing that it is obviously but an offshoot fromthis vicious gospel of comfort?--"Beethoven remarked that he couldnever have composed a text like Figaro or Don Juan. Life had not beenso profuse of its snubs to him that he could treat it so gaily, ordeal so lightly with the foibles of men" (p. 430). In order, however, to adduce the most striking instance of this dissolute vulgarity ofsentiment, let it suffice, here, to observe that Strauss knows noother means of accounting for the terribly serious negative instinctand the movement of ascetic sanctification which characterised thefirst century of the Christian era, than by supposing the existence ofa previous period of surfeit in the matter of all kinds of sexualindulgence, which of itself brought about a state of revulsion anddisgust. 

"The Persians call it bidamag buden, The Germans say'Katzenjammer. '"[9]*

[Footnote * : Remorse for the previous night's excesses. --Translator'snote. ]

Strauss quotes this himself, and is not ashamed. As for us, we turnaside for a moment, that we may overcome our loathing. 

 VII. As a matter of fact, our Philistine captain is brave, even audacious, in words; particularly when he hopes by such bravery to delight hisnoble colleagues--the "We, " as he calls them. So the asceticism andself-denial of the ancient anchorite and saint was merely a form ofKatzenjammer? Jesus may be described as an enthusiast who nowadayswould scarcely have escaped the madhouse, and the story of theResurrection may be termed a "world-wide deception. " For once we willallow these views to pass without raising any objection, seeing thatthey may help us to gauge the amount of courage which our "classicalPhilistine" Strauss is capable of. Let us first hear his confession:"It is certainly an unpleasant and a thankless task to tell the worldthose truths which it is least desirous of hearing. It prefers, infact, to manage its affairs on a profuse scale, receiving and spendingafter the magnificent fashion of the great, as long as there isanything left; should any person, however, add up the various items ofits liabilities, and anxiously call its attention to the sum-total, heis certain to be regarded as an importunate meddler. And yet this hasalways been the bent of my moral and intellectual nature. " A moral andintellectual nature of this sort might possibly be regarded ascourageous; but what still remains to be proved is, whether thiscourage is natural and inborn, or whether it is not rather acquiredand artificial. Perhaps Strauss only accustomed himself by degrees tothe rôle of an importunate meddler, until he gradually acquired thecourage of his calling. Innate cowardice, which is the Philistine'sbirthright, would not be incompatible with this mode of development, and it is precisely this cowardice which is perceptible in the want oflogic of those sentences of Strauss's which it needed courage topronounce. They sound like thunder, but they do not clear the air. Noaggressive action is performed: aggressive words alone are used, andthese he selects from among the most insulting he can find. Hemoreover exhausts all his accumulated strength and energy in coarseand noisy expression, and when once his utterances have died away heis more of a coward even than he who has always held his tongue. Thevery shadow of his deeds--his morality--shows us that he is aword-hero, and that he avoids everything which might induce him totransfer his energies from mere verbosity to really serious things. With admirable frankness, he announces that he is no longer aChristian, but disclaims all idea of wishing to disturb thecontentment of any one: he seems to recognise a contradiction in thenotion of abolishing one society by instituting another--whereas thereis nothing contradictory in it at all. With a certain rudeself-satisfaction, he swathes himself in the hirsute garment of ourSimian genealogists, and extols Darwin as one of mankind's greatestbenefactors; but our perplexity is great when we find him constructinghis ethics quite independently of the question, "What is ourconception of the universe?" In this department he had an opportunityof exhibiting native pluck; for he ought to have turned his back onhis "We, " and have established a moral code for life out of bellumomnium contra omnes and the privileges of the strong. But it is to befeared that such a code could only have emanated from a bold spiritlike that of Hobbes', and must have taken its root in a love of truthquite different from that which was only able to vent itself inexplosive outbursts against parsons, miracles, and the "world-widehumbug" of the Resurrection. For, whereas the Philistine remained onStrauss's side in regard to these explosive outbursts, he would havebeen against him had he been confronted with a genuine and seriouslyconstructed ethical system, based upon Darwin's teaching. 

Says Strauss: "I should say that all moral action arises from theindividual's acting in consonance with the idea of kind" (p. 274). Putquite clearly and comprehensively, this means: "Live as a man, and notas an ape or a seal. " Unfortunately, this imperative is both uselessand feeble; for in the class Man what a multitude of different typesare included--to mention only the Patagonian and the Master, Strauss;and no one would ever dare to say with any right, "Live like aPatagonian, " and "Live like the Master Strauss"! Should any one, however, make it his rule to live like a genius--that is to say, likethe ideal type of the genus Man--and should he perchance at the sametime be either a Patagonian or Strauss himself, what should we thennot have to suffer from the importunities of genius-mad eccentrics(concerning whose mushroom growth in Germany even Lichtenberg hadalready spoken), who with savage cries would compel us to listen tothe confession of their most recent belief! Strauss has not yetlearned that no "idea" can ever make man better or more moral, andthat the preaching of a morality is as easy as the establishment of itis difficult. His business ought rather to have been, to take thephenomena of human goodness, such--for instance--as pity, love, andself-abnegation, which are already to hand, and seriously to explainthem and show their relation to his Darwinian first principle. But no;he preferred to soar into the imperative, and thus escape the task ofexplaining. But even in his flight he was irresponsible enough to soarbeyond the very first principles of which we speak. 

"Ever remember, " says Strauss, "that thou art human, not merely anatural production; ever remember that all others are human also, and, with all individual differences, the same as thou, having the sameneeds and claims as thyself: this is the sum and the substance ofmorality" (p. 277). But where does this imperative hail from? How canit be intuitive in man, seeing that, according to Darwin, man isindeed a creature of nature, and that his ascent to his present stageof development has been conditioned by quite different laws--by thevery fact that be was continually forgetting that others wereconstituted like him and shared the same rights with him; by the veryfact that he regarded himself as the stronger, and thus brought aboutthe gradual suppression of weaker types. Though Strauss is bound toadmit that no two creatures have ever been quite alike, and that theascent of man from the lowest species of animals to the exalted heightof the Culture--Philistine depended upon the law of individualdistinctness, he still sees no difficulty in declaring exactly thereverse in his law: "Behave thyself as though there were no suchthings as individual distinctions. " Where is the Strauss-Darwinmorality here? Whither, above all, has the courage gone?

In the very next paragraph we find further evidence tending to show usthe point at which this courage veers round to its opposite; forStrauss continues: "Ever remember that thou, and all that thoubeholdest within and around thee, all that befalls thee and others, isno disjointed fragment, no wild chaos of atoms or casualties, butthat, following eternal law, it springs from the one primal source ofall life, all reason, and all good: this is the essence of religion"(pp. 277-78). Out of that "one primal source, " however, all ruin andirrationality, all evil flows as well, and its name, according toStrauss, is Cosmos. 

Now, how can this Cosmos, with all the contradictions and theself-annihilating characteristics which Strauss gives it, be worthy ofreligious veneration and be addressed by the name "God, " as Straussaddresses it?--"Our God does not, indeed, take us into His arms fromthe outside (here one expects, as an antithesis, a somewhat miraculousprocess of being "taken into His arms from the inside"), but Heunseals the well-springs of consolation within our own bosoms. Heshows us that although Chance would be an unreasonable ruler, yetnecessity, or the enchainment of causes in the world, is Reasonitself. " (A misapprehension of which only the "We" can fail toperceive the folly; because they were brought up in the Hegelianworship of Reality as the Reasonable--that is to say, in thecanonisation of success. ) "He teaches us to perceive that to demand anexception in the accomplishment of a single natural law would be todemand the destruction of the universe" (pp. 435-36). On the contrary, Great Master: an honest natural scientist believes in theunconditional rule of natural laws in the world, without, however, taking up any position in regard to the ethical or intellectual valueof these laws. Wherever neutrality is abandoned in this respect, it isowing to an anthropomorphic attitude of mind which allows reason toexceed its proper bounds. But it is just at the point where thenatural scientist resigns that Strauss, to put it in his own words, "reacts religiously, " and leaves the scientific and scholarlystandpoint in order to proceed along less honest lines of his own. Without any further warrant, he assumes that all that has happenedpossesses the highest intellectual value; that it was thereforeabsolutely reasonably and intentionally so arranged, and that it evencontained a revelation of eternal goodness. He therefore has to appealto a complete cosmodicy, and finds himself at a disadvantage in regardto him who is contented with a theodicy, and who, for instance, regards the whole of man's existence as a punishment for sin or aprocess of purification. At this stage, and in this embarrassingposition, Strauss even suggests a metaphysical hypothesis--the driestand most palsied ever conceived--and, in reality, but an unconsciousparody of one of Lessing's sayings. We read on page 255: "And thatother saying of Lessing's-- 'If God, holding truth in His right hand, and in His left only the ever-living desire for it, although oncondition of perpetual error, left him the choice of the two, hewould, considering that truth belongs to God alone, humbly seize Hisleft hand, and beg its contents for Himself'-- this saying ofLessing's has always been accounted one of the most magnificent whichhe has left us. It has been found to contain the general expression ofhis restless love of inquiry and activity. The saying has always madea special impression upon me; because, behind its subjective meaning, I still seemed to hear the faint ring of an objective one of infiniteimport. For does it not contain the best possible answer to the rudespeech of Schopenhauer, respecting the ill-advised God who had nothingbetter to do than to transform Himself into this miserable world? if, for example, the Creator Himself had shared Lessing's conviction ofthe superiority of struggle to tranquil possession?" What!--a God whowould choose perpetual error, together with a striving after truth, and who would, perhaps, fall humbly at Strauss's feet and cry tohim, "Take thou all Truth, it is thine!"? If ever a God and a man wereill-advised, they are this Straussian God, whose hobby is to err andto fail, and this Straussian man, who must atone for this erring andfailing. Here, indeed, one hears "a faint ring of infinite import";here flows Strauss's cosmic soothing oil; here one has a notion of therationale of all becoming and all natural laws. Really? Is not ouruniverse rather the work of an inferior being, as Lichtenbergsuggests?--of an inferior being who did not quite understand hisbusiness; therefore an experiment, an attempt, upon which work isstill proceeding? Strauss himself, then, would be compelled to admitthat our universe is by no means the theatre of reason, but of error, and that no conformity to law can contain anything consoling, sinceall laws have been promulgated by an erratic God who even findspleasure in blundering. It really is a most amusing spectacle to watchStrauss as a metaphysical architect, building castles in the air. Butfor whose benefit is this entertainment given? For the smug and noble"We, " that they may not lose conceit with themselves: they maypossibly have taken sudden fright, in the midst of the inflexible andpitiless wheel-works of the world-machine, and are tremulouslyimploring their leader to come to their aid. That is why Strauss poursforth the "soothing oil, " that is why he leads forth on a leash a Godwhose passion it is to err; it is for the same reason, too, that heassumes for once the utterly unsuitable rôle of a metaphysicalarchitect. He does all this, because the noble souls already referredto are frightened, and because he is too. And it is here that we reachthe limit of his courage, even in the presence of his "We. " He doesnot dare to be honest, and to tell them, for instance: "I haveliberated you from a helping and pitiful God: the Cosmos is no morethan an inflexible machine; beware of its wheels, that they do notcrush you. " He dare not do this. Consequently, he must enlist the helpof a witch, and he turns to metaphysics. To the Philistine, however, even Strauss's metaphysics is preferable to Christianity's, and thenotion of an erratic God more congenial than that of one who worksmiracles. For the Philistine himself errs, but has never yet performeda miracle. Hence his hatred of the genius; for the latter is justlyfamous for the working of miracles. It is therefore highly instructiveto ascertain why Strauss, in one passage alone, suddenly takes up thecudgels for genius and the aristocracy of intellect in general. Whatever does he do it for? He does it out of fear--fear of the socialdemocrat. He refers to Bismarck and Moltke, "whose greatness is theless open to controversy as it manifests itself in the domain oftangible external facts. No help for it, therefore; even the moststiff-necked and obdurate of these fellows must condescend to look upa little, if only to get a sight, be it no farther than the knees, ofthose august figures" (p. 327). Do you, Master Metaphysician, perhapsintend to instruct the social democrats in the art of getting kicks?The willingness to bestow them may be met with everywhere, and you areperfectly justified in promising to those who happen to be kicked asight of those sublime beings as far as the knee. "Also in the domainof art and science, " Strauss continues, "there will never be a dearthof kings whose architectural undertakings will find employment for amultitude of carters. " Granted; but what if the carters should beginbuilding? It does happen at times, Great Master, as you know, and thenthe kings must grin and bear it. 

As a matter of fact, this union of impudence and weakness, of daringwords and cowardly concessions, this cautious deliberation as to whichsentences will or will not impress the Philistine or smooth him downthe right way, this lack of character and power masquerading ascharacter and power, this meagre wisdom in the guise ofomniscience, --these are the features in this book which I detest. If Icould conceive of young men having patience to read it and to valueit, I should sorrowfully renounce all hope for their future. And isthis confession of wretched, hopeless, and really despicablePhilistinism supposed to be the expression of the thousandsconstituting the "We" of whom Strauss speaks, and who are to be thefathers of the coming generation? Unto him who would fain help thiscoming generation to acquire what the present one does not yetpossess, namely, a genuine German culture, the prospect is a horribleone. To such a man, the ground seems strewn with ashes, and all starsare obscured; while every withered tree and field laid waste seems tocry to him: Barren! Forsaken! Springtime is no longer possible here!He must feel as young Goethe felt when he first peered into themelancholy atheistic twilight of the Système de la Nature; to him thisbook seemed so grey, so Cimmerian and deadly, that he could onlyendure its presence with difficulty, and shuddered at it as oneshudders at a spectre. 

 VIII. We ought now to be sufficiently informed concerning the heaven and thecourage of our new believer to be able to turn to the last question:How does he write his books? and of what order are his religiousdocuments?

He who can answer this question uprightly and without prejudice willbe confronted by yet another serious problem, and that is: How thisStraussian pocket-oracle of the German Philistine was able to passthrough six editions? And he will grow more than ever suspicious whenhe hears that it was actually welcomed as a pocket-oracle, not only inscholastic circles, but even in German universities as well. Studentsare said to have greeted it as a canon for strong intellects, and, from all accounts, the professors raised no objections to this view;while here and there people have declared it to be a religions bookfor scholars. Strauss himself gave out that he did not intend hisprofession of faith to be merely a reference-book for learned andcultured people; but here let us abide by the fact that it was firstand foremost a work appealing to his colleagues, and was ostensibly amirror in which they were to see their own way of living faithfullyreflected. For therein lay the feat. The Master feigned to havepresented us with a new ideal conception of the universe, and nowadulation is being paid him out of every mouth; because each is in aposition to suppose that he too regards the universe and life in thesame way. Thus Strauss has seen fulfilled in each of his readers whathe only demanded of the future. In this way, the extraordinary successof his book is partly explained: "Thus we live and hold on our way injoy, " the scholar cries in his book, and delights to see othersrejoicing over the announcement. If the reader happen to thinkdifferently from the Master in regard to Darwin or to capitalpunishment, it is of very little consequence; for he is too consciousthroughout of breathing an atmosphere that is familiar to him, and ofhearing but the echoes of his own voice and wants. However painfullythis unanimity may strike the true friend of German culture, it is hisduty to be unrelenting in his explanation of it as a phenomenon, andnot to shrink from making this explanation public. 

We all know the peculiar methods adopted in our own time ofcultivating the sciences: we all know them, because they form a partof our lives. And, for this very reason, scarcely anybody seems to askhimself what the result of such a cultivation of the sciences willmean to culture in general, even supposing that everywhere the highestabilities and the most earnest will be available for the promotion ofculture. In the heart of the average scientific type (quiteirrespective of the examples thereof with which we meet to-day) therelies a pure paradox: he behaves like the veriest idler of independentmeans, to whom life is not a dreadful and serious business, but asound piece of property, settled upon him for all eternity; and itseems to him justifiable to spend his whole life in answeringquestions which, after all is said and done, can only be of interestto that person who believes in eternal life as an absolute certainty. The heir of but a few hours, he sees himself encompassed by yawningabysses, terrible to behold; and every step he takes should recall thequestions, Wherefore? Whither? and Whence? to his mind. But his soulrather warms to his work, and, be this the counting of a floweret'spetals or the breaking of stones by the roadside, he spends his wholefund of interest, pleasure, strength, and aspirations upon it. Thisparadox--the scientific man--has lately dashed ahead at such a franticspeed in Germany, that one would almost think the scientific worldwere a factory, in which every minute wasted meant a fine. To-day theman of science works as arduously as the fourth or slave caste: hisstudy has ceased to be an occupation, it is a necessity; he looksneither to the right nor to the left, but rushes through allthings--even through the serious matters which life bears in itstrain--with that semi-listlessness and repulsive need of rest socharacteristic of the exhausted labourer. This is also his attitudetowards culture. He behaves as if life to him were not only otium butsine dignitate: even in his sleep he does not throw off the yoke, butlike an emancipated slave still dreams of his misery, his forced hasteand his floggings. Our scholars can scarcely be distinguished--and, even then, not to their advantage--from agricultural labourers, who inorder to increase a small patrimony, assiduously strive, day andnight, to cultivate their fields, drive their ploughs, and urge ontheir oxen. Now, Pascal suggests that men only endeavour to work hardat their business and sciences with the view of escaping thosequestions of greatest import which every moment of loneliness orleisure presses upon them--the questions relating to the wherefore, the whence, and the whither of life. Curiously enough, our scholarsnever think of the most vital question of all--the wherefore of theirwork, their haste, and their painful ecstasies. Surely their object isnot the earning of bread or the acquiring of posts of honour? No, certainly not. But ye take as much pains as the famishing andbreadless; and, with that eagerness and lack of discernment whichcharacterises the starving, ye even snatch the dishes from thesideboard of science. If, however, as scientific men, ye proceed withscience as the labourers with the tasks which the exigencies of lifeimpose upon them, what will become of a culture which must await thehour of its birth and its salvation in the very midst of all thisagitated and breathless running to and fro--this sprawlingscientifically?

For it no one has time--and yet for what shall science have time ifnot for culture? Answer us here, then, at least: whence, whither, wherefore all science, if it do not lead to culture? Belike tobarbarity? And in this direction we already see the scholar casteominously advanced, if we are to believe that such superficial booksas this one of Strauss's meet the demand of their present degree ofculture. For precisely in him do we find that repulsive need of restand that incidental semi-listless attention to, and coming to termswith, philosophy, culture, and every serious thing on earth. It willbe remembered that, at the meetings held by scholars, as soon as eachindividual has had his say in his own particular department ofknowledge, signs of fatigue, of a desire for distraction at any price, of waning memory, and of incoherent experiences of life, begin to benoticeable. While listening to Strauss discussing any worldlyquestion, be it marriage, the war, or capital punishment, we arestartled by his complete lack of anything like first-hand experience, or of any original thought on human nature. All his judgments are soredolent of books, yea even of newspapers. Literary reminiscences doduty for genuine ideas and views, and the assumption of a moderate andgrandfatherly tone take the place of wisdom and mature thought. Howperfectly in keeping all this is with the fulsome spirit animating theholders of the highest places in German science in large cities! Howthoroughly this spirit must appeal to that other! for it is preciselyin those quarters that culture is in the saddest plight; it isprecisely there that its fresh growth is made impossible--soboisterous are the preparations made by science, so sheepishly arefavourite subjects of knowledge allowed to oust questions of muchgreater import. What kind of lantern would be needed here, in order tofind men capable of a complete surrender to genius, and of an intimateknowledge of its depths--men possessed of sufficient courage andstrength to exorcise the demons that have forsaken our age? Viewedfrom the outside, such quarters certainly do appear to possess thewhole pomp of culture; with their imposing apparatus they resemblegreat arsenals fitted with huge guns and other machinery of war; wesee preparations in progress and the most strenuous activity, asthough the heavens themselves were to be stormed, and truth were to bedrawn out of the deepest of all wells; and yet, in war, the largestmachines are the most unwieldy. Genuine culture therefore leaves suchplaces as these religiously alone, for its best instincts warn it thatin their midst it has nothing to hope for, and very much to fear. Forthe only kind of culture with which the inflamed eye and obtuse brainof the scholar working-classes concern themselves is of thatPhilistine order of which Strauss has announced the gospel. If weconsider for a moment the fundamental causes underlying the sympathywhich binds the learned working-classes to Culture-Philistinism, weshall discover the road leading to Strauss the Writer, who has beenacknowledged classical, and tihence to our last and principal theme. 

To begin with, that culture has contentment written in its everyfeature, and will allow of no important changes being introduced intothe present state of German education. It is above all convinced ofthe originality of all German educational institutions, moreparticularly the public schools and universities; it does not ceaserecommending these to foreigners, and never doubts that if the Germanshave become the most cultivated and discriminating people on earth, itis owing to such institutions. Culture-Philistinism believes initself, consequently it also believes in the methods and means at itsdisposal. Secondly, however, it leaves the highest judgment concerningall questions of taste and culture to the scholar, and even regardsitself as the ever-increasing compendium of scholarly opinionsregarding art, literature, and philosophy. Its first care is to urgethe scholar to express his opinions; these it proceeds to mix, dilute, and systematise, and then it administers them to the German people inthe form of a bottle of medicine. What conies to life outside thiscircle is either not heard or attended at all, or if heard, is heededhalf-heartedly; until, at last, a voice (it does not matter whose, provided it belong to some one who is strictly typical of the scholartribe) is heard to issue from the temple in which traditionalinfallibility of taste is said to reside; and from that time forwardpublic opinion has one conviction more, which it echoes and re-echoeshundreds and hundreds of times. As a matter of fact, though, theaesthetic infallibility of any utterance emanating from the temple isthe more doubtful, seeing that the lack of taste, thought, andartistic feeling in any scholar can be taken for granted, unless ithas previously been proved that, in his particular case, the reverseis true. And only a few can prove this. For how many who have had ashare in the breathless and unending scurry of modern science havepreserved that quiet and courageous gaze of the struggling man ofculture--if they ever possessed it--that gaze which condemns even thescurry we speak of as a barbarous state of affairs? That is why thesefew are forced to live in an almost perpetual contradiction. Whatcould they do against the uniform belief of the thousands who haveenlisted public opinion in their cause, and who mutually defend eachother in this belief? What purpose can it serve when one individualopenly declares war against Strauss, seeing that a crowd have decidedin his favour, and that the masses led by this crowd have learned toask six consecutive times for the Master's Philistinesleeping-mixture?

If, without further ado, we here assumed that the Straussianconfession-book had triumphed over public opinion and had beenacclaimed and welcomed as conqueror, its author might call ourattention to the fact that the multitudinous criticisms of his work inthe various public organs are not of an altogether unanimous or evenfavourable character, and that he therefore felt it incumbent upon himto defend himself against some of the more malicious, impudent, andprovoking of these newspaper pugilists by means of a postscript. Howcan there be a public opinion concerning my book, he cries to us, ifevery journalist is to regard me as an outlaw, and to mishandle me asmuch as he likes? This contradiction is easily explained, as soon asone considers the two aspects of the Straussian book--the theologicaland the literary, and it is only the latter that has anything to dowith German culture. Thanks to its theological colouring, it standsbeyond the pale of our German culture, and provokes the animosity ofthe various theological groups--yea, even of every individual German, in so far as he is a theological sectarian from birth, and onlyinvents his own peculiar private belief in order to be able to dissentfrom every other form of belief. But when the question arises oftalking about Strauss THE WRITER, pray listen to what the theologicalsectarians have to say about him. As soon as his literary side comesunder notice, all theological objections immediately subside, and thedictum comes plain and clear, as if from the lips of one congregation:In spite of it all, he is still a classical writer!

Everybody--even the most bigoted, orthodox Churchman--pays the writerthe most gratifying compliments, while there is always a word or twothrown in as a tribute to his almost Lessingesque language, hisdelicacy of touch, or the beauty and accuracy of his aesthetic views. As a book, therefore, the Straussian performance appears to meet allthe demands of an ideal example of its kind. The theologicalopponents, despite the fact that their voices were the loudest of all, nevertheless constitute but an infinitesimal portion of the greatpublic; and even with regard to them, Strauss still maintains that heis right when he says: "Compared with my thousands of readers, a fewdozen public cavillers form but an insignificant minority, and theycan hardly prove that they are their faithful interpreters. It wasobviously in the nature of things that opposition should be clamorousand assent tacit. " Thus, apart from the angry bitterness whichStrauss's profession of faith may have provoked here and there, eventhe most fanatical of his opponents, to whom his voice seems to riseout of an abyss, like the voice of a beast, are agreed as to hismerits as a writer; and that is why the treatment which Strauss hasreceived at the hands of the literary lackeys of the theologicalgroups proves nothing against our contention that Culture-Philistinismcelebrated its triumph in this book. It must be admitted that theaverage educated Philistine is a degree less honest than Strauss, oris at least more reserved in his public utterances. But this fact onlytends to increase his admiration for honesty in another. At home, orin the company of his equals, he may applaud with wild enthusiasm, buttakes care not to put on paper how entirely Strauss's words are inharmony with his own innermost feelings. For, as we have alreadymaintained, our Culture-Philistine is somewhat of a coward, even inhis strongest sympathies; hence Strauss, who can boast of a triflemore courage than he, becomes his leader, notwithstanding the factthat even Straussian pluck has its very definite limits. If heoverstepped these limits, as Schopenhauer does in almost everysentence, he would then forfeit his position at the head of thePhilistines, and everybody would flee from him as precipitately asthey are now following in his wake. He who would regard this artful ifnot sagacious moderation and this mediocre valour as an Aristotelianvirtue, would certainly be wrong; for the valour in question is notthe golden mean between two faults, but between a virtue and afault--and in this mean, between virtue and fault, all Philistinequalities are to be found. 

 IX. "In spite of it all, he is still a classical writer. " Well, let ussee! Perhaps we may now be allowed to discuss Strauss the stylist andmaster of language; but in the first place let us inquire whether, asa literary man, he is equal to the task of building his house, andwhether he really understands the architecture of a book. From thisinquiry we shall be able to conclude whether he is a respectable, thoughtful, and experienced author; and even should we be forced toanswer "No" to these questions, he may still, as a last shift, takerefuge in his fame as a classical prose-writer. This last-mentionedtalent alone, it is true, would not suffice to class him with theclassical authors, but at most with the classical improvisers andvirtuosos of style, who, however, in regard to power of expression andthe whole planning and framing of the work, reveal the awkward handand the embarrassed eye of the bungler. We therefore put the question, whether Strauss really possesses the artistic strength necessary forthe purpose of presenting us with a thing that is a whole, totumponere?

As a rule, it ought to be possible to tell from the first rough sketchof a work whether the author conceived the thing as a whole, andwhether, in view of this original conception, he has discovered thecorrect way of proceeding with his task and of fixing its proportions. Should this most important Part of the problem be solved, and shouldthe framework of the building have been given its most favourableproportions, even then there remains enough to be done: how manysmaller faults have to be corrected, how many gaps require filling in!Here and there a temporary partition or floor was found to answer therequirements; everywhere dust and fragments litter the ground, and nomatter where we look, we see the signs of work done and work still tobe done. The house, as a whole, is still uninhabitable and gloomy, itswalls are bare, and the wind blows in through the open windows. Now, whether this remaining, necessary, and very irksome work has beensatisfactorily accomplished by Strauss does not concern us at present;our question is, whether the building itself has been conceived as awhole, and whether its proportions are good? The reverse of this, ofcourse, would be a compilation of fragments--a method generallyadopted by scholars. They rely upon it that these fragments arerelated among themselves, and thus confound the logical and theartistic relation between them. Now, the relation between the fourquestions which provide the chapter-headings of Strauss's book cannotbe called a logical one. Are we still Christians? Have we still areligion? What is our conception of the universe? What is our rule oflife? And it is by no means contended that the relation is illogicalsimply because the third question has nothing to do with the second, nor the fourth with the third, nor all three with the first. Thenatural scientist who puts the third question, for instance, shows hisunsullied love of truth by the simple fact that he tacitly passes overthe second. And with regard to the subject of the fourthchapter--marriage, republicanism, and capital punishment--Strausshimself seems to have been aware that they could only have beenmuddled and obscured by being associated with the Darwinian theoryexpounded in the third chapter; for he carefully avoids all referenceto this theory when discussing them. But the question, "Are we stillChristians?" destroys the freedom of the philosophical standpoint atone stroke, by lending it an unpleasant theological colouring. Moreover, in this matter, he quite forgot that the majority of mento-day are not Christians at all, but Buddhists. Why should one, without further ceremony, immediately think of Christianity at thesound of the words "old faith"? Is this a sign that Strauss has neverceased to be a Christian theologian, and that he has therefore neverlearned to be a philosopher? For we find still greater cause forsurprise in the fact that he quite fails to distinguish between beliefand knowledge, and continually mentions his "new belief" and the stillnewer science in one breath. Or is "new belief" merely an ironicalconcession to ordinary parlance? This almost seems to be the case; forhere and there he actually allows "new belief" and "newer science" tobe interchangeable terms, as for instance on page II, where he asks onwhich side, whether on that of the ancient orthodoxy or of modernscience, "exist more of the obscurities and insufficienciesunavoidable in human speculation. "

Moreover, according to the scheme laid down in the Introduction, hisdesire is to disclose those proofs upon which the modern view of lifeis based; but he derives all these proofs from science, and in thisrespect assumes far more the attitude of a scientist than of abeliever. 

At bottom, therefore, the religion is not a new belief, but, being ofa piece with modern science, it has nothing to do with religion atall. If Strauss, however, persists in his claims to be religious, thegrounds for these claims must be beyond the pale of recent science. Only the smallest portion of the Straussian book--that is to say, buta few isolated pages--refer to what Strauss in all justice might calla belief, namely, that feeling for the "All" for which he demands thepiety that the old believer demanded for his God. On the pages inquestion, however, he cannot claim to be altogether scientific; but ifonly he could lay claim to being a little stronger, more natural, moreoutspoken, more pious, we should be content. Indeed, what perhapsstrikes us most forcibly about him is the multitude of artificialprocedures of which he avails himself before he ultimately gets thefeeling that he still possesses a belief and a religion; he reaches itby means of stings and blows, as we have already seen. How indigentlyand feebly this emergency-belief presents itself to us! We shiver atthe sight of it. 

Although Strauss, in the plan laid down in his Introduction, promisesto compare the two faiths, the old and the new, and to show that thelatter will answer the same purpose as the former, even he begins tofeel, in the end, that he has promised too much. For the questionwhether the new belief answers the same purpose as the old, or isbetter or worse, is disposed of incidentally, so to speak, and withuncomfortable haste, in two or three pages (p. 436 et seq. -), and isactually bolstered up by the following subterfuge: "He who cannot helphimself in this matter is beyond help, is not yet ripe for ourstandpoint" (p. 436). How differently, and with what intensity ofconviction, did the ancient Stoic believe in the All and therationality of the All! And, viewed in this light, how does Strauss'sclaim to originality appear? But, as we have already observed, itwould be a matter of indifference to us whether it were new, old, original, or imitated, so that it were only more powerful, morehealthy, and more natural. Even Strauss himself leaves thisdouble-distilled emergency-belief to take care of itself as often ashe can do so, in order to protect himself and us from danger, and topresent his recently acquired biological knowledge to his "We" with aclear conscience. The more embarrassed he may happen to be when hespeaks of faith, the rounder and fuller his mouth becomes when hequotes the greatest benefactor to modern men-Darwin. Then he not onlyexacts belief for the new Messiah, but also for himself--the newapostle. For instance, while discussing one of the most intricatequestions in natural history, he declares with true ancient pride: "Ishall be told that I am here speaking of things about which Iunderstand nothing. Very well; but others will come who willunderstand them, and who will also have understood me" (p. 241). 

According to this, it would almost seem as though the famous "We" werenot only in duty bound to believe in the "All, " but also in thenaturalist Strauss; in this case we can only hope that in order toacquire the feeling for this last belief, other processes arerequisite than the painful and cruel ones demanded by the firstbelief. Or is it perhaps sufficient in this case that the subject ofbelief himself be tormented and stabbed with the view of bringing thebelievers to that "religious reaction" which is the distinguishingsign of the "new faith. " What merit should we then discover in thepiety of those whom Strauss calls "We"?

Otherwise, it is almost to be feared that modern men will pass on inpursuit of their business without troubling themselves overmuchconcerning the new furniture of faith offered them by the apostle:just as they have done heretofore, without the doctrine of therationality of the All. The whole of modern biological and historicalresearch has nothing to do with the Straussian belief in the All, andthe fact that the modern Philistine does not require the belief isproved by the description of his life given by Strauss in thechapter, "What is our Rule of Life?" He is therefore quite right indoubting whether the coach to which his esteemed readers have beenobliged to trust themselves "with him, fulfils every requirement. " Itcertainly does not; for the modern man makes more rapid progress whenhe does not take his place in the Straussian coach, or rather, he gotahead much more quickly long before the Straussian coach ever existed. Now, if it be true that the famous "minority" which is "not to beoverlooked, " and of which, and in whose name, Strauss speaks, "attaches great importance to consistency, " it must be just asdissatisfied with Strauss the Coachbuilder as we are with Strauss theLogician. 

Let us, however, drop the question of the logician. Perhaps, from theartistic point of view, the book really is an example of a. Well-conceived plan, and does, after all, answer to the requirementsof the laws of beauty, despite the fact that it fails to meet with thedemands of a well-conducted argument. And now, having shown that he isneither a scientist nor a strictly correct and systematic scholar, forthe first time we approach the question: Is Strauss a capable writer?Perhaps the task he set himself was not so much to scare people awayfrom the old faith as to captivate them by a picturesque and gracefuldescription of what life would be with the new. If he regardedscholars and educated men as his most probable audience, experienceought certainly to have told him that whereas one can shoot such mendown with the heavy guns of scientific proof, but cannot make themsurrender, they may be got to capitulate all the more quickly before"lightly equipped" measures of seduction. "Lightly equipped, " and"intentionally so, " thus Strauss himself speaks of his own book. Nordo his public eulogisers refrain from using the same expression inreference to the work, as the following passage, quoted from one ofthe least remarkable among them, and in which the same expression ismerely paraphrased, will go to prove:--

"The discourse flows on with delightful harmony: wherever it directsits criticism against old ideas it wields the art of demonstration, almost playfully; and it is with some spirit that it prepares the newideas it brings so enticingly, and presents them to the simple as wellas to the fastidious taste. The arrangement of such diverse andconflicting material is well thought out for every portion of itrequired to be touched upon, without being made too prominent; attimes the transitions leading from one subject to another areartistically managed, and one hardly knows what to admire most--theskill with which unpleasant questions are shelved, or the discretionwith which they are hushed up. "

The spirit of such eulogies, as the above clearly shows, is not quiteso subtle in regard to judging of what an author is able to do as inregard to what he wishes. What Strauss wishes, however, is bestrevealed by his own emphatic and not quite harmless commendation ofVoltaire's charms, in whose service he might have learned preciselythose "lightly equipped" arts of which his admirer speaks--granting, of course, that virtue may be acquired and a pedagogue can ever be adancer. 

Who could help having a suspicion or two, when reading the followingpassage, for instance, in which Strauss says of Voltaire, "As aphilosopher [he] is certainly not original, but in the main a mereexponent of English investigations: in this respect, however, he showshimself to be completely master of his subject, which he presents withincomparable skill, in all possible lights and from all possiblesides, and is able withal to meet the demands of thoroughness, without, however, being over-severe in his method"? Now, all thenegative traits mentioned in this passage might be applied to Strauss. No one would contend, I suppose, that Strauss is original, or that heis over-severe in his method; but the question is whether we canregard him as "master of his subject, " and grant him "incomparableskill"? The confession to the effect that the treatise wasintentionally "lightly equipped" leads us to think that it at leastaimed at incomparable skill. 

It was not the dream of our architect to build a temple, nor yet ahouse, but a sort of summer-pavilion, surrounded by everything thatthe art of gardening can provide. Yea, it even seems as if thatmysterious feeling for the All were only calculated to produce anaesthetic effect, to be, so to speak, a view of an irrational element, such as the sea, looked at from the most charming and rational ofterraces. The walk through the first chapters-- that is to say, through the theological catacombs with all their gloominess and theirinvolved and baroque embellishments--was also no more than anaesthetic expedient in order to throw into greater relief the purity, clearness, and common sense of the chapter "What is our Conception ofthe Universe?" For, immediately after that walk in the gloaming andthat peep into the wilderness of Irrationalism, we step into a hallwith a skylight to it. Soberly and limpidly it welcomes us: its muraldecorations consist of astronomical charts and mathematical figures;it is filled with scientific apparatus, and its cupboards containskeletons, stuffed apes, and anatomical specimens. But now, reallyrejoicing for the first time, we direct our steps into the innermostchamber of bliss belonging to our pavilion-dwellers; there we findthem with their wives, children, and newspapers, occupied in thecommonplace discussion of politics; we listen for a moment to theirconversation on marriage, universal suffrage, capital punishment, andworkmen's strikes, and we can scarcely believe it to be possible thatthe rosary of public opinions can be told off so quickly. At length anattempt is made to convince us of the classical taste of the inmates. A moment's halt in the library, and the music-room suffices to show uswhat we had expected all along, namely, that the best books lay on theshelves, and that the most famous musical compositions were in themusic-cabinets. Some one actually played something to us, and even ifit were Haydn's music, Haydn could not be blamed because it soundedlike Riehl's music for the home. Meanwhile the host had found occasionto announce to us his complete agreement with Lessing and Goethe, although with the latter only up to the second part of Faust. At lastour pavilion-owner began to praise himself, and assured us that he whocould not be happy under his roof was beyond help and could not beripe for his standpoint, whereupon he offered us his coach, but withthe polite reservation that he could not assert that it would fulfilevery requirement, and that, owing to the stones on his road havingbeen newly laid down, we were not to mind if we were very much jolted. Our Epicurean garden-god then took leave of us with the incomparableskill which he praised in Voltaire. 

Who could now persist in doubting the existence of this incomparableskill? The complete master of his subject is revealed; the lightlyequipped artist-gardener is exposed, and still we hear the voice ofthe classical author saying, "As a writer I shall for once cease to bea Philistine: I will not be one; I refuse to be one! But aVoltaire--the German Voltaire--or at least the French Lessing. "

With this we have betrayed a secret. Our Master does not always knowwhich he prefers to be--Voltaire or Lessing; but on no account will hebe a Philistine. At a pinch he would not object to being both Lessingand Voltaire--that the word might be fulfilled that is written, "Hehad no character, but when he wished to appear as if he had, heassumed one. "

 X. If we have understood Strauss the Confessor correctly, he must be agenuine Philistine, with a narrow, parched soul and scholarly andcommon-place needs; albeit no one would be more indignant at the titlethan David Strauss the Writer. He would be quite happy to be regardedas mischievous, bold, malicious, daring; but his ideal of bliss wouldconsist in finding himself compared with either Lessing orVoltaire--because these men were undoubtedly anything but Philistines. In striving after this state of bliss, he often seems to waver betweentwo alternatives--either to mimic the brave and dialectical petulanceof Lessing, or to affect the manner of the faun-like and free-spiritedman of antiquity that Voltaire was. When taking up his pen to write, he seems to be continually posing for his portrait; and whereas attimes his features are drawn to look like Lessing's, anon they aremade to assume the Voltairean mould. While reading his praise ofVoltaire's manner, we almost seem to see him abjuring the consciencesof his contemporaries for not having learned long ago what the modernVoltaire had to offer them. "Even his excellences are wonderfullyuniform, " he says: "simple naturalness, transparent clearness, vivacious mobility, seductive charm. Warmth and emphasis are also notwanting where they are needed, and Voltaire's innermost nature alwaysrevolted against stiltedness and affectation; while, on the otherhand, if at times wantonness or passion descend to an unpleasantly lowlevel, the fault does not rest so much with the stylist as with theman. " According to this, Strauss seems only too well aware of theimportance of simplicity in style; it is ever the sign of genius, which alone has the privilege to express itself naturally andguilelessly. When, therefore, an author selects a simple mode ofexpression, this is no sign whatever of vulgar ambition; for althoughmany are aware of what such an author would fain be taken for, theyare yet kind enough to take him precisely for that. The genial writer, however, not only reveals his true nature in the plain andunmistakable form of his utterance, but his super-abundant strengthactually dallies with the material he treats, even when it isdangerous and difficult. Nobody treads stiffly along unknown paths, especially when these are broken throughout their course by thousandsof crevices and furrows; but the genius speeds nimbly over them, and, leaping with grace and daring, scorns the wistful and timorous step ofcaution. 

Even Strauss knows that the problems he prances over are dreadfullyserious, and have ever been regarded as such by the philosophers whohave grappled with them; yet he calls his book lightly equipped! Butof this dreadfulness and of the usual dark nature of our meditationswhen considering such questions as the worth of existence and theduties of man, we entirely cease to be conscious when the genialMaster plays his antics before us, "lightly equipped, andintentionally so. " Yes, even more lightly equipped than his Rousseau, of whom he tells us it was said that he stripped himself below andadorned himself on top, whereas Goethe did precisely the reverse. Perfectly guileless geniuses do not, it appears, adorn themselves atall; possibly the words "lightly equipped" may simply be a euphemismfor "naked. " The few who happen to have seen the Goddess of Truthdeclare that she is naked, and perhaps, in the minds of those who havenever seen her, but who implicitly believe those few, nakedness orlight equipment is actually a proof, or at least a feature, of truthiEven this vulgar superstition turns to the advantage of the author'sambition. Some one sees something naked, and he exclaims: "What ifthis were the truth!" Whereupon he grows more solemn than is his wont. By this means, however, the author scores a tremendous advantage; forhe compels his reader to approach him with greater solemnity thananother and perhaps more heavily equipped writer. This isunquestionably the best way to become a classical author; henceStrauss himself is able to tell us: "I even enjoy the unsought honourof being, in the opinion of many, a classical writer of prose. "He hastherefore achieved his aim. Strauss the Genius goes gadding about thestreets in the garb of lightly equipped goddesses as a classic, whileStrauss the Philistine, to use an original expression of thisgenius's, must, at all costs, be "declared to be on the decline, " or"irrevocably dismissed. "

But, alas! in spite of all declarations of decline and dismissal, thePhilistine still returns, and all too frequently. Those features, contorted to resemble Lessing and Voltaire, must relax from time totime to resume their old and original shape. The mask of genius fallsfrom them too often, and the Master's expression is never more sourand his movements never stiffer than when he has just attempted totake the leap, or to glance with the fiery eye, of a genius. Preciselyowing to the fact that he is too lightly equipped for our zone, heruns the risk of catching cold more often and more severely thananother. It may seem a terrible hardship to him that every one shouldnotice this; but if he wishes to be cured, the following diagnosis ofhis case ought to be publicly presented to him:-- Once upon a timethere lived a Strauss, a brave, severe, and stoutly equipped scholar, with whom we sympathised as wholly as with all those in Germany whoseek to serve truth with earnestness and energy, and to rule withinthe limits of their powers. He, however, who is now publicly famous asDavid Strauss, is another person. The theologians may be to blame forthis metamorphosis; but, at any rate, his present toying with the maskof genius inspires us with as much hatred and scorn as his formerearnestness commanded respect and sympathy. When, for instance, hetells us, "it would also argue ingratitude towards my genius if I werenot to rejoice that to the faculty of an incisive, analyticalcriticism was added the innocent pleasure in artistic production, " itmay astonish him to hear that, in spite of this self-praise, there arestill men who maintain exactly the reverse, and who say, not only thathe has never possessed the gift of artistic production, but that the"innocent" pleasure he mentions is of all things the least innocent, seeing that it succeeded in gradually undermining and ultimatelydestroying a nature as strongly and deeply scholarly and critical asStrauss's--in fact, the real Straussian Genius. In a moment ofunlimited frankness, Strauss himself indeed adds: "Merck was always inmy thoughts, calling out, 'Don't produce such child's play again;others can do that too!'" That was the voice of the real Straussiangenius, which also asked him what the worth of his newest, innocent, and lightly equipped modern Philistine's testament was. Others can dothat too! And many could do it better. And even they who could havedone it best, i. E. Those thinkers who are more widely endowed thanStrauss, could still only have made nonsense of it. 

I take it that you are now beginning to understand the value I set onStrauss the Writer. You are beginning to realise that I regard him asa mummer who would parade as an artless genius and classical writer. When Lichtenberg said, "A simple manner of writing is to berecommended, if only in view of the fact that no honest man trims andtwists his expressions, " he was very far from wishing to imply that asimple style is a proof of literary integrity. I, for my part, onlywish that Strauss the Writer had been more upright, for then he wouldhave written more becomingly and have been less famous. Or, if hewould be a mummer at all costs, how much more would he not havepleased me if he had been a better mummer--one more able to ape theguileless genius and classical author! For it yet remains to be saidthat Strauss was not only an inferior actor but a very worthlessstylist as well. 

 XI. Of course, the blame attaching to Strauss for being a bad writer isgreatly mitigated by the fact that it is extremely difficult inGermany to become even a passable or moderately good writer, and thatit is more the exception than not, to be a really good one. In thisrespect the natural soil is wanting, as are also artistic values andthe proper method of treating and cultivating oratory. This latteraccomplishment, as the various branches of it, i. E. Drawing-room, ecclesiastical and Parliamentary parlance, show, has not yet reachedthe level of a national style; indeed, it has not yet shown even atendency to attain to a style at all, and all forms of language inGermany do not yet seem to have passed a certain experimental stage. In view of these facts, the writer of to-day, to some extent, lacks anauthoritative standard, and he is in some measure excused if, in thematter of language, he attempts to go ahead of his own accord. As tothe probable result which the present dilapidated condition of theGerman language will bring about, Schopenhauer, perhaps, has spokenmost forcibly. "If the existing state of affairs continues, " he says, "in the year 1900 German classics will cease to be understood, for thesimple reason that no other language will be known, save the trumperyjargon of the noble present, the chief characteristic of which isimpotence. " And, in truth, if one turn to the latest periodicals, onewill find German philologists and grammarians already givingexpression to the view that our classics can no longer serve us asexamples of style, owing to the fact that they constantly use words, modes of speech, and syntactic arrangements which are fast droppingout of currency. Hence the need of collecting specimens of the finestprose that has been produced by our best modern writers, and ofoffering them as examples to be followed, after the style of Sander'spocket dictionary of bad language. In this book, that repulsivemonster of style Gutzkow appears as a classic, and, according to itsinjunctions, we seem to be called upon to accustom ourselves to quitea new and wondrous crowd of classical authors, among which the first, or one of the first, is David Strauss: he whom we cannot describe moreaptly than we have already--that is to say, as a worthless stylist. Now, the notion which the Culture-Philistine has of a classic andstandard author speaks eloquently for his pseudo-culture--he who onlyshows his strength by opposing a really artistic and severe style, andwho, thanks to the persistence of his opposition, finally arrives at acertain uniformity of expression, which again almost appears topossess unity of genuine style. In view, therefore, of the right whichis granted to every one to experiment with the language, how is itpossible at all for individual authors to discover a generallyagreeable tone? What is so generally interesting in them? In the firstplace, a negative quality--the total lack of offensiveness: but everyreally productive thing is offensive. The greater part of a German'sdaily reading matter is undoubtedly sought either in the pages ofnewspapers, periodicals, or reviews. The language of these journalsgradually stamps itself on his brain, by means of its steady drip, drip, drip of similar phrases and similar words. And, since hegenerally devotes to reading those hours of the day during which hisexhausted brain is in any case not inclined to offer resistance, hisear for his native tongue so slowly but surely accustoms itself tothis everyday German that it ultimately cannot endure its absencewithout pain. But the manufacturers of these newspapers are, by virtueof their trade, most thoroughly inured to the effluvia of thisjournalistic jargon; they have literally lost all taste, and theirpalate is rather gratified than not by the most corrupt and arbitraryinnovations. Hence the tutti unisono with which, despite the generallethargy and sickliness, every fresh solecism is greeted; it is withsuch impudent corruptions of the language that her hirelings areavenged against her for the incredible boredom she imposes ever moreand more upon them. I remember having read "an appeal to the Germannation, " by Berthold Auerbach, in which every sentence was un-German, distorted and false, and which, as a whole, resembled a soullessmosaic of words cemented together with international syntax. As to thedisgracefully slipshod German with which Edward Devrient solemnisedthe death of Mendelssohn, I do not even wish to do more than refer toit. A grammatical error--and this is the most extraordinary feature ofthe case--does not therefore seem an offence in any sense to ourPhilistine, but a most delightful restorative in the barren wildernessof everyday German. He still, however, considers all really productivethings to be offensive. The wholly bombastic, distorted, andthreadbare syntax of the modern standard author--yea, even hisludicrous neologisms--are not only tolerated, but placed to his creditas the spicy element in his works. But woe to the stylist withcharacter, who seeks as earnestly and perseveringly to avoid the tritephrases of everyday parlance, as the "yester-night monster blooms ofmodern ink-flingers, " as Schopenhauer says! When platitudes, hackneyed, feeble, and vulgar phrases are the rule, and the bad andthe corrupt become refreshing exceptions, then all that is strong, distinguished, and beautiful perforce acquires an evil odour. Fromwhich it follows that, in Germany, the well-known experience whichbefell the normally built traveller in the land of hunchbacks isconstantly being repeated. It will be remembered that he was soshamefully insulted there, owing to his quaint figure and lack ofdorsal convexity, that a priest at last had to harangue the people onhis behalf as follows: "My brethren, rather pity this poor stranger, and present thank-offerings unto the gods, that ye are blessed withsuch attractive gibbosities. "

If any one attempted to compose a positive grammar out of theinternational German style of to-day, and wished to trace theunwritten and unspoken laws followed by every one, he would get themost extraordinary notions of style and rhetoric. He would meet withlaws which are probably nothing more than reminiscences of bygoneschooldays, vestiges of impositions for Latin prose, and resultsperhaps of choice readings from French novelists, over whoseincredible crudeness every decently educated Frenchman would have theright to laugh. But no conscientious native of Germany seems to havegiven a thought to these extraordinary notions under the yoke of whichalmost every German lives and writes. 

As an example of what I say, we may find an injunction to the effectthat a metaphor or a simile must be introduced from time to time, andthat it must be new; but, since to the mind of the shallow-patedwriter newness and modernity are identical, he proceeds forthwith torack his brain for metaphors in the technical vocabularies of therailway, the telegraph, the steamship, and the Stock Exchange, and isproudly convinced that such metaphors must be new because they aremodern. In Strauss's confession-book we find liberal tribute paid tomodern metaphor. He treats us to a simile, covering a page and a half, drawn from modern road-improvement work; a few pages farther back helikens the world to a machine, with its wheels, stampers, hammers, and"soothing oil" (p. 432); "A repast that begins with champagne" (p. 384); "Kant is a cold-water cure" (p. 309); "The Swiss constitution isto that of England as a watermill is to a steam-engine, as awaltz-tune or a song to a fugue or symphony" (p. 301); "In everyappeal, the sequence of procedure must be observed. Now the meantribunal between the individual and humanity is the nation" (p. 165);"If we would know whether there be still any life in an organism whichappears dead to us, we are wont to test it by a powerful, even painfulstimulus, as for example a stab" (p. 161); "The religious domain inthe human soul resembles the domain of the Red Indian in America" (p. 160); "Virtuosos in piety, in convents"(p. 107); "And place thesum-total of the foregoing in round numbers under the account" (p. 205); "Darwin's theory resembles a railway track that is just markedout. .. Where the flags are fluttering joyfully in the breeze. " In thisreally highly modern way, Strauss has met the Philistine injunction tothe effect that a new simile must be introduced from time to time. 

Another rhetorical rule is also very widespread, namely, that didacticpassages should be composed in long periods, and should be drawn outinto lengthy abstractions, while all persuasive passages shouldconsist of short sentences followed by striking contrasts. On page 154in Strauss's book we find a standard example of the didactic andscholarly style--a passage blown out after the genuine Schleiermachermanner, and made to stumble along at a true tortoise pace: "The reasonwhy, in the earlier stages of religion, there appear many instead ofthis single Whereon, a plurality of gods instead of the one, isexplained in this deduction of religion, from the fact that thevarious forces of nature, or relations of life, which inspire man withthe sentiment of unqualified dependence, still act upon him in thecommencement with the full force of their distinctive characteristics;that he has not as yet become conscious how, in regard to hisunmitigated dependence upon them, there is no distinction betweenthem, and that therefore the Whereon of this dependence, or the Beingto which it conducts in the last instance, can only be one. "

On pages 7 and 8 we find an example of the other kind of style, thatof the short sentences containing that affected liveliness which soexcited certain readers that they cannot mention Strauss any morewithout coupling his name with Lessing's. "I am well aware that what Ipropose to delineate in the following pages is known to multitudes aswell as to myself, to some even much better. A few have already spokenout on the subject. Am I therefore to keep silence? I think not. Fordo we not all supply each other's deficiencies? If another is betterinformed as regards some things, I may perhaps be so as regardsothers; while yet others are known and viewed by me in a differentlight. Out with it, then! let my colours be displayed that it may beseen whether they are genuine or not. '"

It is true that Strauss's style generally maintains a happy mediumbetween this sort of merry quick-march and the other funereal andindolent pace; but between two vices one does not invariably find avirtue; more often rather only weakness, helpless paralysis, andimpotence. As a matter of fact, I was very disappointed when I glancedthrough Strauss's book in search of fine and witty passages; for, nothaving found anything praiseworthy in the Confessor, I had actuallyset out with the express purpose of meeting here and there with atleast some opportunities of praising Strauss the Writer. I sought andsought, but my purpose remained unfulfilled. Meanwhile, however, another duty seemed to press itself strongly on my mind--that ofenumerating the solecisms, the strained metaphors, the obscureabbreviations, the instances of bad taste, and the distortions which Iencountered; and these were of such a nature that I dare do no morethan select a few examples of them from among a collection which istoo bulky to be given in full. By means of these examples I maysucceed in showing what it is that inspires, in the hearts of modernGermans, such faith in this great and seductive stylist Strauss: Irefer to his eccentricities of expression, which, in the barren wasteand dryness of his whole book, jump out at one, not perhaps aspleasant but as painfully stimulating, surprises. When perusing suchpassages, we are at least assured, to use a Straussian metaphor, thatwe are not quite dead, but still respond to the test of a stab. Forthe rest of the book is entirely lacking in offensiveness --thatquality which alone, as we have seen, is productive, and which ourclassical author has himself reckoned among the positive virtues. Whenthe educated masses meet with exaggerated dulness and dryness, whenthey are in the presence of really vapid commonplaces, they now seemto believe that such things are the signs of health; and in thisrespect the words of the author of the dialogus de oratoribus are verymuch to the point: "illam ipsam quam jactant sanitatem non firmitatesed jejunio consequuntur. " That is why they so unanimously hate everyfirmitas, because it bears testimony to a kind of health quitedifferent from theirs; hence their one wish to throw suspicion uponall austerity and terseness, upon all fiery and energetic movement, and upon every full and delicate play of muscles. They have conspiredto twist nature and the names of things completely round, and for thefuture to speak of health only there where we see weakness, and tospeak of illness and excitability where for our part we see genuinevigour. From which it follows that David Strauss is to them aclassical author. 

If only this dulness were of a severely logical order! but simplicityand austerity in thought are precisely what these weaklings have lost, and in their hands even our language has become illogically tangled. As a proof of this, let any one try to translate Strauss's style intoLatin: in the case of Kant, be it remembered, this is possible, whilewith Schopenhauer it even becomes an agreeable exercise. The reasonwhy this test fails with Strauss's German is not owing to the factthat it is more Teutonic than theirs, but because his is distorted andillogical, whereas theirs is lofty and simple. Moreover, he who knowshow the ancients exerted themselves in order to learn to write andspeak correctly, and how the moderns omit to do so, must feel, asSchopenhauer says, a positive relief when he can turn from a Germanbook like the one under our notice, to dive into those other works, those ancient works which seem to him still to be written in a newlanguage. "For in these books, " says Schopenhauer, "I find a regularand fixed language which, throughout, faithfully follows the laws ofgrammar and orthography, so that I can give up my thoughts completelyto their matter; whereas in German I am constantly being disturbed bythe author's impudence and his continual attempts to establish his ownorthographical freaks and absurd ideas-- the swaggering foolery ofwhich disgusts me. It is really a painful sight to see a fine oldlanguage, possessed of classical literature, being botched by assesand ignoramuses!"

Thus Schopenhauer's holy anger cries out to us, and you cannot saythat you have not been warned. He who turns a deaf ear to suchwarnings, and who absolutely refuses to relinquish his faith inStrauss the classical author, can only be given this last word ofadvice--to imitate his hero. In any case, try it at your own risk; butyou will repent it, not only in your style but in your head, that itmay be fulfilled which was spoken by the Indian prophet, saying, "Hewho gnaweth a cow's horn gnaweth in vain and shorteneth his life; forhe grindeth away his teeth, yet his belly is empty. "

 XII. By way of concluding, we shall proceed to give our classicalprose-writer the promised examples of his style which we havecollected. Schopenhauer would probably have classed the whole lot as"new documents serving to swell the trumpery jargon of the presentday"; for David Strauss may be comforted to hear (if what follows canbe regarded as a comfort at all) that everybody now writes as he does;some, of course, worse, and that among the blind the one-eyed is king. Indeed, we allow him too much when we grant him one eye; but we dothis willingly, because Strauss does not write so badly as the mostinfamous of all corrupters of German--the Hegelians and their crippledoffspring. Strauss at least wishes to extricate himself from the mire, and he is already partly out of it; still, he is very far from beingon dry land, and he still shows signs of having stammered Hegel'sprose in youth. In those days, possibly, something was sprained inhim, some muscle must have been overstrained. His ear, perhaps, likethat of a boy brought up amid the beating of drums, grew dull, andbecame incapable of detecting those artistically subtle and yet mightylaws of sound, under the guidance of which every writer is content toremain who has been strictly trained in the study of good models. Butin this way, as a stylist, he has lost his most valuable possessions, and stands condemned to remain reclining, his life long, on thedangerous and barren shifting sand of newspaper style--that is, if hedo not wish to fall back into the Hegelian mire. Nevertheless, he hassucceeded in making himself famous for a couple of hours in our time, and perhaps in another couple of hours people will remember that hewas once famous; then, however, night will come, and with heroblivion; and already at this moment, while we are entering his sinsagainst style in the black book, the sable mantle of twilight isfalling upon his fame. For he who has sinned against the Germanlanguage has desecrated the mystery of all our Germanity. Throughoutall the confusion and the changes of races and of customs, the Germanlanguage alone, as though possessed of some supernatural charm, hassaved herself; and with her own salvation she has wrought that of thespirit of Germany. She alone holds the warrant for this spirit infuture ages, provided she be not destroyed at the sacrilegious handsof the modern world. "But Di meliora! Avaunt, ye pachyderms, avaunt!This is the German language, by means of which men express themselves, and in which great poets have sung and great thinkers have written. Hands off!" [10]*

[Footnote * : Translator's note. --Nietzsche here proceeds to quotethose passages he has culled from The Old and the New Faith with whichhe undertakes to substantiate all he has said relative to Strauss'sstyle; as, however, these passages, with his comments upon them, losemost of their point when rendered into English, it was thought best toomit them altogether. ]

To put it in plain words, what we have seen have been feet of clay, and what appeared to be of the colour of healthy flesh was onlyapplied paint. Of course, Culture-Philistinism in Germany will be veryangry when it hears its one living God referred to as a series ofpainted idols. He, however, who dares to overthrow its idols will notshrink, despite all indignation, from telling it to its face that ithas forgotten how to distinguish between the quick and the dead, thegenuine and the counterfeit, the original and the imitation, between aGod and a host of idols; that it has completely lost the healthy andmanly instinct for what is real and right. It alone deserves to bedestroyed; and already the manifestations of its power are sinking;already are its purple honours falling from it; but when the purplefalls, its royal wearer soon follows. 

Here I come to the end of my confession of faith. This is theconfession of an individual; and what can such an one do against awhole world, even supposing his voice were heard everywhere! In orderfor the last time to use a precious Straussism, his judgment onlypossesses "that amount of subjective truth which is compatible with acomplete lack of objective demonstration"--is not that so, my dearfriends? Meanwhile, be of good cheer. For the time being let thematter rest at this "amount which is compatible with a complete lack"!For the time being! That is to say, for as long as that is held to beout of season which in reality is always in season, and is now morethan ever pressing; I refer to. .. Speaking the truth. [11]*

[Footnote * : Translator's note. --All quotations from The Old Faithand the New which appear in the above translation have either beentaken bodily out of Mathilde Blind's translation (Asher and Co. , 1873), or are adaptations from that translation. ] _______

 RICHARD WAGNER IN BAYREUTH. I. FOR an event to be great, two things must be united--the loftysentiment of those who accomplish it, and the lofty sentiment of thosewho witness it. No event is great in itself, even though it be thedisappearance of whole constellations, the destruction of severalnations, the establishment of vast empires, or the prosecution of warsat the cost of enormous forces: over things of this sort the breath ofhistory blows as if they were flocks of wool. But it often happens, too, that a man of might strikes a blow which falls without effectupon a stubborn stone; a short, sharp report is heard, and all isover. History is able to record little or nothing of such abortiveefforts. Hence the anxiety which every one must feel who, observingthe approach of an event, wonders whether those about to witness itwill be worthy of it. This reciprocity between an act and itsreception is always taken into account when anything great or small isto be accomplished; and he who would give anything away must see to itthat he find recipients who will do justice to the meaning of hisgift. This is why even the work of a great man is not necessarilygreat when it is short, abortive, or fruitless; for at the moment whenhe performed it he must have failed to perceive that it was reallynecessary; he must have been careless in his aim, and he cannot havechosen and fixed upon the time with sufficient caution. Chance thusbecame his master; for there is a very intimate relation betweengreatness and the instinct which discerns the proper moment at whichto act. 

We therefore leave it to those who doubt Wagner's power of discerningthe proper time for action, to be concerned and anxious as to whetherwhat is now taking place in Bayreuth is really opportune andnecessary. To us who are more confident, it is clear that he believesas strongly in the greatness of his feat as in the greatness offeeling in those who are to witness it. Be their number great orsmall, therefore, all those who inspire this faith in Wagner shouldfeel extremely honoured; for that it was not inspired by everybody, orby the whole age, or even by the whole German people, as they are nowconstituted, he himself told us in his dedicatory address of the 22ndof May 1872, and not one amongst us could, with any show ofconviction, assure him of the contrary. "I had only you to turn to, "he said, "when I sought those who I thought would be in sympathy withmy plans, -- you who are the most personal friends of my own particularart, my work and activity: only you could I invite to help me in mywork, that it might be presented pure and whole to those who manifesta genuine interest in my art, despite the fact that it has hithertomade its appeal to them only in a disfigured and adulterated form. "

It is certain that in Bayreuth even the spectator is a spectacle worthseeing. If the spirit of some observant sage were to return, after theabsence of a century, and were to compare the most remarkablemovements in the present world of culture, he would find much tointerest him there. Like one swimming in a lake, who encounters acurrent of warm water issuing from a hot spring, in Bayreuth he wouldcertainly feel as though he had suddenly plunged into a more temperateelement, and would tell himself that this must rise out of a distantand deeper source: the surrounding mass of water, which at all eventsis more common in origin, does not account for it. In this way, allthose who assist at the Bayreuth festival will seem like men out ofseason; their raison-d'etre and the forces which would seem to accountfor them are elsewhere, and their home is not in the present age. Irealise ever more clearly that the scholar, in so far as he isentirely the man of his own day, can only be accessible to all thatWagner does and thinks by means of parody, --and since everything isparodied nowadays, he will even get the event of Bayreuth reproducedfor him, through the very un-magic lanterns of our facetiousart-critics. And one ought to be thankful if they stop at parody; forby means of it a spirit of aloofness and animosity finds a vent whichmight otherwise hit upon a less desirable mode of expression. Now, theobservant sage already mentioned could not remain blind to thisunusual sharpness and tension of contrasts. They who hold by gradualdevelopment as a kind of moral law must be somewhat shocked at thesight of one who, in the course of a single lifetime, succeeds inproducing something absolutely new. Being dawdlers themselves, andinsisting upon slowness as a principle, they are very naturally vexedby one who strides rapidly ahead, and they wonder how on earth he doesit. No omens, no periods of transition, and no concessions precededthe enterprise at Bayreuth; no one except Wagner knew either the goalor the long road that was to lead to it. In the realm of art itsignifies, so to speak, the first circumnavigation of the world, andby this voyage not only was there discovered an apparently new art, but Art itself. In view of this, all modern arts, as arts of luxurywhich have degenerated through having been insulated, have becomealmost worthless. And the same applies to the nebulous andinconsistent reminiscences of a genuine art, which we as modernEuropeans derive from the Greeks; let them rest in peace, unless theyare now able to shine of their own accord in the light of a newinterpretation. The last hour has come for a good many things; thisnew art is a clairvoyante that sees ruin approaching--not for artalone. Her warning voice must strike the whole of our prevailingcivilisation with terror the instant the laughter which its parodieshave provoked subsides. Let it laugh and enjoy itself for yet a whilelonger!

And as for us, the disciples of this revived art, we shall have timeand inclination for thoughtfulness, deep thoughtfulness. All the talkand noise about art which has been made by civilisation hitherto mustseem like shameless obtrusiveness; everything makes silence a dutywith us--the quinquennial silence of the Pythagoreans. Which of us hasnot soiled his hands and heart in the disgusting idolatry of modernculture? Which of us can exist without the waters of purification? Whodoes not hear the voice which cries, "Be silent and cleansed"? Besilent and cleansed! Only the merit of being included among those whogive ear to this voice will grant even us the lofty look necessary toview the event at Bayreuth; and only upon this look depends the greatfuture of the event. 

When on that dismal and cloudy day in May 1872, after the foundationstone had been laid on the height of Bayreuth, amid torrents of rain, and while Wagner was driving back to the town with a small party ofus, he was exceptionally silent, and there was that indescribable lookin his eyes as of one who has turned his gaze deeply inwards. The dayhappened to be the first of his sixtieth year, and his whole past nowappeared as but a long preparation for this great moment. It is almosta recognised fact that in times of exceptional danger, or at alldecisive and culminating points in their lives, men see the remotestand most recent events of their career with singular vividness, and inone rapid inward glance obtain a sort of panorama of a whole span ofyears in which every event is faithfully depicted. What, for instance, must Alexander the Great have seen in that instant when he caused Asiaand Europe to be drunk out of the same goblet? But what went throughWagner's mind on that day--how he became what he is, and what he willbe--we only can imagine who are nearest to him, and can follow him, upto a certain point, in his self-examination; but through his eyesalone is it possible for us to understand his grand work, and by thehelp of this understanding vouch for its fruitfulness. 

 II. It were strange if what a man did best and most liked to do could notbe traced in the general outline of his life, and in the case of thosewho are remarkably endowed there is all the more reason for supposingthat their life will present not only the counterpart of theircharacter, as in the case of every one else, but that it will presentabove all the counterpart of their intellect and their most individualtastes. The life of the epic poet will have a dash of the Epos init--as from all accounts was the case with Goethe, whom the Germansvery wrongly regarded only as a lyrist--and the life of the dramatistwill probably be dramatic. 

The dramatic element in Wagner's development cannot be ignored, fromthe time when his ruling passion became self-conscious and tookpossession of his whole being. From that time forward there is an endto all groping, straying, and sprouting of offshoots, and over hismost tortuous deviations and excursions, over the often eccentricdisposition of his plans, a single law and will are seen to rule, inwhich we have the explanation of his actions, however strange thisexplanation may sometimes appear. There was, however, an ante-dramaticperiod in Wagner's life--his childhood and youth-- which it isimpossible to approach without discovering innumerable problems. Atthis period there seems to be no promise yet of himself, and what onemight now, in a retrospect, regard as a pledge for his futuregreatness, amounts to no more than a juxtaposition of traits whichinspire more dismay than hope; a restless and excitable spirit, nervously eager to undertake a hundred things at the same time, passionately fond of almost morbidly exalted states of mind, and readyat any moment to veer completely round from calm and profoundmeditation to a state of violence and uproar. In his case there wereno hereditary or family influences at work to constrain him to thesedulous study of one particular art. Painting, versifying, acting, and music were just as much within his reach as the learning and thecareer of a scholar; and the superficial inquirer into this stage ofhis life might even conclude that he was born to be a dilettante. Thesmall world within the bounds of which he grew up was not of the kindwe should choose to be the home of an artist. He ran the constant riskof becoming infected by that dangerously dissipated attitude of mindin which a person will taste of everything, as also by that conditionof slackness resulting from the fragmentary knowledge of all things, which is so characteristic of University towns. His feelings wereeasily roused and but indifferently satisfied; wherever the boy turnedhe found himself surrounded by a wonderful and would-be learnedactivity, to which the garish theatres presented a ridiculouscontrast, and the entrancing strains of music a perplexing one. Now, to the observer who sees things relatively, it must seem strange thatthe modern man who happens to be gifted with exceptional talent shouldas a child and a youth so seldom be blessed with the quality ofingenuousness and of simple individuality, that he is so little ableto have these qualities at all. As a matter of fact, men of raretalent, like Goethe and Wagner, much more often attain toingenuousness in manhood than during the more tender years ofchildhood and youth. And this is especially so with the artist, who, being born with a more than usual capacity for imitating, succumbs tothe morbid multiformity of modern life as to a virulent disease ofinfancy. As a child he will more closely resemble an old man. Thewonderfully accurate and original picture of youth which Wagner givesus in the Siegfried of the Nibelungen Ring could only have beenconceived by a man, and by one who had discovered his youthfulness butlate in life. Wagner's maturity, like his adolesence, was also late inmaking its appearance, and he is thus, in this respect alone, the veryreverse of the precocious type. 

The appearance of his moral and intellectual strength was the preludeto the drama of his soul. And how different it then became! His natureseems to have been simplified at one terrible stroke, and dividedagainst itself into two instincts or spheres. From its innermostdepths there gushes forth a passionate will which, like a rapidmountain torrent, endeavours to make its way through all paths, ravines, and crevices, in search of light and power. Only a forcecompletely free and pure was strong enough to guide this will to allthat is good and beneficial. Had it been combined with a narrowintelligence, a will with such a tyrannical and boundless desire mighthave become fatal; in any case, an exit into the open had to be foundfor it as quickly as possible, whereby it could rush into pure air andsunshine. Lofty aspirations, which continually meet with failure, ultimately turn to evil. The inadequacy of means for obtaining successmay, in certain circumstances, be the result of an inexorable fate, and not necessarily of a lack of strength; but he who under suchcircumstances cannot abandon his aspirations, despite the inadequacyof his means, will only become embittered, and consequently irritableand intolerant. He may possibly seek the cause of his failure in otherpeople; he may even, in a fit of passion, hold the whole world guilty;or he may turn defiantly down secret byways and secluded lanes, orresort to violence. In this way, noble natures, on their road to themost high, may turn savage. Even among those who seek but their ownpersonal moral purity, among monks and anchorites, men are to be foundwho, undermined and devoured by failure, have become barbarous andhopelessly morbid. There was a spirit full of love and calm belief, full of goodness and infinite tenderness, hostile to all violence andself-deterioration, and abhorring the sight of a soul in bondage. Andit was this spirit which manifested itself to Wagner. It hovered overhim as a consoling angel, it covered him with its wings, and showedhim the true path. At this stage we bring the other side of Wagner'snature into view: but how shall we describe this other side?

The characters an artist creates are not himself, but the successionof these characters, to which it is clear he is greatly attached, mustat all events reveal something of his nature. Now try and recallRienzi, the Flying Dutchman and Senta, Tannhauser and Elizabeth, Lohengrin and Elsa, Tristan and Marke, Hans Sachs, Woden andBrunhilda, --all these characters are correlated by a secret current ofennobling and broadening morality which flows through them and becomesever purer and clearer as it progresses. And at this point we enterwith respectful reserve into the presence of the most hiddendevelopment in Wagner's own soul. In what other artist do we meet withthe like of this, in the same proportion? Schiller's characters, fromthe Robbers to Wallenstein and Tell, do indeed pursue an ennoblingcourse, and likewise reveal something of their author's development;but in Wagner the standard is higher and the distance covered is muchgreater. In the Nibelungen Ring, for instance, where Brunhilda isawakened by Siegfried, I perceive the most moral music I have everheard. Here Wagner attains to such a high level of sacred feeling thatour mind unconsciously wanders to the glistening ice-and snow-peaks ofthe Alps, to find a likeness there;-- so pure, isolated, inaccessible, chaste, and bathed in love-beams does Nature here display herself, that clouds and tempests--yea, and even the sublime itself--seem tolie beneath her. Now, looking down from this height upon Tannhauserand the Flying Dutchman, we begin to perceive how the man in Wagnerwas evolved: how restlessly and darkly he began; how tempestuously hestrove to gratify his desires, to acquire power and to taste thoserapturous delights from which he often fled in disgust; how he wishedto throw off a yoke, to forget, to be negative, and to renounceeverything. The whole torrent plunged, now into this valley, now intothat, and flooded the most secluded chinks and crannies. In the nightof these semi-subterranean convulsions a star appeared and glowed highabove him with melancholy vehemence; as soon as he recognised it, henamed it Fidelity--unselfish fidelity. Why did this star seem to himthe brightest and purest of all? What secret meaning had the word"fidelity" to his whole being? For he has graven its image andproblems upon all his thoughts and compositions. His works containalmost a complete series of the rarest and most beautiful examples offidelity: that of brother to sister, of friend to friend, of servantto master; of Elizabeth to Tannhauser, of Senta to the Dutchman, ofElsa to Lohengrin, of Isolde, Kurvenal, and Marke to Tristan, ofBrunhilda to the most secret vows of Woden--and many others. It isWagner's most personal and most individual experience, which hereveres like a religious mystery, and which he calls Fidelity; henever wearies of breathing it into hundreds of different characters, and of endowing it with the sublimest that in him lies, so overflowingis his gratitude. It is, in short, the recognition of the fact thatthe two sides of his nature remained faithful to each other, that outof free and unselfish love, the creative, ingenuous, and brilliantside kept loyally abreast of the dark, the intractable, and thetyrannical side. 

 III. The relation of the two constituent forces to each other, and theyielding of the one to the other, was the great requisite by whichalone he could remain wholly and truly himself. At the same time, thiswas the only thing he could not control, and over which he could onlykeep a watch, while the temptations to infidelity and its threateningdangers beset him more and more. The uncertainty derived therefrom isan overflowing source of suffering for those in process ofdevelopment. Each of his instincts made constant efforts to attain tounmeasured heights, and each of the capacities he possessed forenjoying life seemed to long to tear itself away from its companionsin order to seek satisfaction alone; the greater their exuberance themore terrific was the tumult, and the more bitter the competitionbetween them. In addition, accident and life fired the desire forpower and splendour in him; but he was more often tormented by thecruel necessity of having to live at all, while all around him layobstacles and snares. How is it possible for any one to remainfaithful here, to be completely steadfast? This doubt often depressedhim, and he expresses it, as an artist expressed his doubt, inartistic forms. Elizabeth, for instance, can only suffer, pray, anddie; she saves the fickle and intemperate man by her loyalty, thoughnot for this life. In the path of every true artist, whose lot is castin these modern days, despair and danger are strewn. He has many meanswhereby he can attain to honour and might; peace and plentypersistently offer themselves to him, but only in that form recognisedby the modern man, which to the straightforward artist is no betterthan choke-damp. In this temptation, and in the act of resisting it, lie the dangers that threaten him--dangers arising from his disgust atthe means modernity offers him of acquiring pleasure and esteem, andfrom the indignation provoked by the selfish ease of modern society. Imagine Wagner's filling an official position, as for instance that ofbandmaster at public and court theatres, both of which positions hehas held: think how he, a serious artist, must have struggled in orderto enforce seriousness in those very places which, to meet the demandsof modern conventions, are designed with almost systematic frivolityto appeal only to the frivolous. Think how he must have partiallysucceeded, though only to fail on the whole. How constantly disgustmust have been at his heels despite his repeated attempts to flee it, how he failed to find the haven to which he might have repaired, andhow he had ever to return to the Bohemians and outlaws of our society, as one of them. If he himself broke loose from any post or position, he rarely found a better one in its stead, while more than oncedistress was all that his unrest brought him. Thus Wagner changed hisassociates, his dwelling-place and country, and when we come tocomprehend the nature of the circles into which he gravitated, we canhardly realise how he was able to tolerate them for any length oftime. The greater half of his past seems to be shrouded in heavy mist;for a long time he appears to have had no general hopes, but onlyhopes for the morrow, and thus, although he reposed no faith in thefuture, he was not driven to despair. He must have felt like anocturnal traveller, broken with fatigue, exasperated from want ofsleep, and tramping wearily along beneath a heavy burden, who, farfrom fearing the sudden approach of death, rather longs for it assomething exquisitely charming. His burden, the road and thenight--all would disappear! The thought was a temptation to him. Againand again, buoyed up by his temporary hopes, he plunged anew into theturmoil of life, and left all apparatus behind him. But his method ofdoing this, his lack of moderation in the doing, betrayed what afeeble hold his hopes had upon him; how they were only stimulants towhich he had recourse in an extremity. The conflict between hisaspirations and his partial or total inability to realise them, tormented him like a thorn in the flesh. Infuriated by constantprivations, his imagination lapsed into the dissipated, whenever thestate of want was momentarily relieved. Life grew ever more and morecomplicated for him; but the means and artifices that he discovered inhis art as a dramatist became evermore resourceful and daring. Albeit, these were little more than palpable dramatic makeshifts andexpedients, which deceived, and were invented, only for the moment. Ina flash such means occurred to his mind and were used up. Examinedclosely and without prepossession, Wagner's life, to recall one ofSchopenhauer's expressions, might be said to consist largely ofcomedy, not to mention burlesque. And what the artist's feelings musthave been, conscious as he was, during whole periods of his life, ofthis undignified element in it, --he who more than any one else, perhaps, breathed freely only in sublime and more than sublimespheres, -- the thinker alone can form any idea. 

In the midst of this mode of life, a detailed description of which isnecessary in order to inspire the amount of pity, awe, and admirationwhich are its due, he developed a talent for acquiring knowledge, which even in a German--a son of the nation learned above allothers--was really extraordinary. And with this talent yet anotherdanger threatened Wagner--a danger more formidable than that involvedin a life which was apparently without either a stay or a rule, bornehither and thither by disturbing illusions. From a novice trying hisstrength, Wagner became a thorough master of music and of the theatre, as also a prolific inventor in the preliminary technical conditionsfor the execution of art. No one will any longer deny him the glory ofhaving given us the supreme model for lofty artistic execution on alarge scale. But he became more than this, and in order so to develop, he, no less than any one else in like circumstances, had to reach thehighest degree of culture by virtue of his studies. And wonderfully heachieved this end! It is delightful to follow his progress. From allsides material seemed to come unto him and into him, and the largerand heavier the resulting structure became, the more rigid was thearch of the ruling and ordering thought supporting it. And yet accessto the sciences and arts has seldom been made more difficult for anyman than for Wagner; so much so that he had almost to break his ownroad through to them. The reviver of the simple drama, the discovererof the position due to art in true human society, the poeticinterpreter of bygone views of life, the philosopher, the historian, the aesthete and the critic, the master of languages, the mythologistand the myth poet, who was the first to include all these wonderfuland beautiful products of primitive times in a single Ring, upon whichhe engraved the runic characters of his thoughts-- what a wealth ofknowledge must Wagner have accumulated and commanded, in order to havebecome all that! And yet this mass of material was just as powerlessto impede the action of his will as a matter of detail--howeverattractive--was to draw his purpose from its path. For the exceptionalcharacter of such conduct to be appreciated fully, it should becompared with that of Goethe, -- he who, as a student and as a sage, resembled nothing so much as a huge river-basin, which does not pourall its water into the sea, but spends as much of it on its way there, and at its various twists and turns, as it ultimately disgorges at itsmouth. True, a nature like Goethe's not only has, but also engenders, more pleasure than any other; there is more mildness and nobleprofligacy in it; whereas the tenor and tempo of Wagner's power attimes provoke both fear and flight. But let him fear who will, weshall only be the more courageous, in that we shall be permitted tocome face to face with a hero who, in regard to modern culture, "hasnever learned the meaning of fear. "

But neither has he learned to look for repose in history andphilosophy, nor to derive those subtle influences from their studywhich tend to paralyse action or to soften a man unduly. Neither thecreative nor the militant artist in him was ever diverted from hispurpose by learning and culture. The moment his constructive powersdirect him, history becomes yielding clay in his hands. His attitudetowards it then differs from that of every scholar, and more nearlyresembles the relation of the ancient Greek to his myths; that is tosay, his subject is something he may fashion, and about which he maywrite verses. He will naturally do this with love and a certainbecoming reverence, but with the sovereign right of the creatornotwithstanding. And precisely because history is more supple and morevariable than a dream to him, he can invest the most individual casewith the characteristics of a whole age, and thus attain to avividness of narrative of which historians are quite incapable. Inwhat work of art, of any kind, has the body and soul of the MiddleAges ever been so thoroughly depicted as in Lohengrin? And will notthe Meistersingers continue to acquaint men, even in the remotest agesto come, with the nature of Germany's soul? Will they not do more thanacquaint men of it? Will they not represent its very ripest fruit--thefruit of that spirit which ever wishes to reform and not to overthrow, and which, despite the broad couch of comfort on which it lies, hasnot forgotten how to endure the noblest discomfort when a worthy andnovel deed has to be accomplished?

And it is just to this kind of discomfort that Wagner always felthimself drawn by his study of history and philosophy: in them he notonly found arms and coats of mail, but what he felt in their presenceabove all was the inspiring breath which is wafted from the graves ofall great fighters, sufferers, and thinkers. Nothing distinguishes aman more from the general pattern of the age than the use he makes ofhistory and philosophy. According to present views, the former seemsto have been allotted the duty of giving modern man breathing-time, inthe midst of his panting and strenuous scurry towards his goal, sothat he may, for a space, imagine he has slipped his leash. WhatMontaigne was as an individual amid the turmoil of theReformation--that is to say, a creature inwardly coming to peace withhimself, serenely secluded in himself and taking breath, as his bestreader, Shakespeare, understood him, --this is what history is to themodern spirit today. The fact that the Germans, for a whole century, have devoted themselves more particularly to the study of history, only tends to prove that they are the stemming, retarding, andbecalming force in the activity of modern society--a circumstancewhich some, of course, will place to their credit. On the whole, however, it is a dangerous symptom when the mind of a nation turnswith preference to the study of the past. It is a sign of flaggingstrength, of decline and degeneration; it denotes that its people areperilously near to falling victims to the first fever that may happento be rife --the political fever among others. Now, in the history ofmodern thought, our scholars are an example of this condition ofweakness as opposed to all reformative and revolutionary activity. Themission they have chosen is not of the noblest; they have rather beencontent to secure smug happiness for their kind, and little more. Every independent and manly step leaves them halting in thebackground, although it by no means outstrips history. For the latteris possessed of vastly different powers, which only natures likeWagner have any notion of; but it requires to be written in a muchmore earnest and severe spirit, by much more vigorous students, andwith much less optimism than has been the case hitherto. In fact, itrequires to be treated quite differently from the way German scholarshave treated it until now. In all their works there is a continualdesire to embellish, to submit and to be content, while the course ofevents invariably seems to have their approbation. It is rather theexception for one of them to imply that he is satisfied only becausethings might have turned out worse; for most of them believe, almostas a matter of course, that everything has been for the best simplybecause it has only happened once. Were history not always a disguisedChristian theodicy, were it written with more justice and ferventfeeling, it would be the very last thing on earth to be made to servethe purpose it now serves, namely, that of an opiate againsteverything subversive and novel. And philosophy is in the same plight:all that the majority demand of it is, that it may teach them tounderstand approximate facts--very approximate facts--in order thatthey may then become adapted to them. And even its noblest exponentspress its soporific and comforting powers so strongly to the fore, that all lovers of sleep and of loafing must think that their aim andthe aim of philosophy are one. For my part, the most importantquestion philosophy has to decide seems to be, how far things haveacquired an unalterable stamp and form, and, once this question hasbeen answered, I think it the duty of philosophy unhesitatingly andcourageously to proceed with the task of improving that part of theworld which has been recognised as still susceptible to change. Butgenuine philosophers do, as a matter of fact, teach this doctrinethemselves, inasmuch as they work at endeavouring to alter the verychangeable views of men, and do not keep their opinions to themselves. Genuine disciples of genuine philosophies also teach this doctrine;for, like Wagner, they understand the art of deriving a more decisiveand inflexible will from their master's teaching, rather than anopiate or a sleeping draught. Wagner is most philosophical where he ismost powerfully active and heroic. It was as a philosopher that hewent, not only through the fire of various philosophical systemswithout fear, but also through the vapours of science and scholarship, while remaining ever true to his highest self. And it was this highestself which exacted from his versatile spirit works as complete as hiswere, which bade him suffer and learn, that he might accomplish suchworks. 

 IV. The history of the development of culture since the time of the Greeksis short enough, when we take into consideration the actual ground itcovers, and ignore the periods during which man stood still, wentbackwards, hesitated or strayed. The Hellenising of the world--and tomake this possible, the Orientalising of Hellenism--that doublemission of Alexander the Great, still remains the most importantevent: the old question whether a foreign civilisation may betransplanted is still the problem that the peoples of modern times arevainly endeavouring to solve. The rhythmic play of those two factorsagainst each other is the force that has determined the course ofhistory heretofore. Thus Christianity appears, for instance, as aproduct of Oriental antiquity, which was thought out and pursued toits ultimate conclusions by men, with almost intemperate thoroughness. As its influence began to decay, the power of Hellenic culture wasrevived, and we are now experiencing phenomena so strange that theywould hang in the air as unsolved problems, if it were not possible, by spanning an enormous gulf of time, to show their relation toanalogous phenomena in Hellenistic culture. Thus, between Kant and theEleatics, Schopenhauer and Empedocles, AEschylus and Wagner, there isso much relationship, so many things in common, that one is vividlyimpressed with the very relative nature of all notions of time. Itwould even seem as if a whole diversity of things were really all of apiece, and that time is only a cloud which makes it hard for our eyesto perceive the oneness of them. In the history of the exact scienceswe are perhaps most impressed by the close bond uniting us with thedays of Alexander and ancient Greece. The pendulum of history seemsmerely to have swung back to that point from which it started when itplunged forth into unknown and mysterious distance. The picturerepresented by our own times is by no means a new one: to the studentof history it must always seem as though he were merely in thepresence of an old familiar face, the features of which he recognises. In our time the spirit of Greek culture is scattered broadcast. Whileforces of all kinds are pressing one upon the other, and the fruits ofmodern art and science are offering themselves as a means of exchange, the pale outline of Hellenism is beginning to dawn faintly in thedistance. The earth which, up to the present, has been more thanadequately Orientalised, begins to yearn once more for Hellenism. Hewho wishes to help her in this respect will certainly need to begifted for speedy action and to have wings on his heels, in order tosynthetise the multitudinous and still undiscovered facts of scienceand the many conflicting divisions of talent so as to reconnoitre andrule the whole enormous field. It is now necessary that a generationof anti-Alexanders should arise, endowed with the supreme strengthnecessary for gathering up, binding together, and joining theindividual threads of the fabric, so as to prevent their beingscattered to the four winds. The object is not to cut the Gordian knotof Greek culture after the manner adopted by Alexander, and then toleave its frayed ends fluttering in all directions; it is rather tobind it after it has been loosed. That is our task to-day. In theperson of Wagner I recognise one of these anti-Alexanders: he rivetsand locks together all that is isolated, weak, or in any waydefective; if I may be allowed to use a medical expression, he has anastringent power. And in this respect he is one of the greatestcivilising forces of his age. He dominates art, religion, andfolklore, yet he is the reverse of a polyhistor or of a merecollecting and classifying spirit; for he constructs with thecollected material, and breathes life into it, and is a Simplifier ofthe Universe. We must not be led away from this idea by comparing thegeneral mission which his genius imposed upon him with the muchnarrower and more immediate one which we are at present in the habitof associating with the name of Wagner. He is expected to effect areform in the theatre world; but even supposing he should succeed indoing this, what would then have been done towards the accomplishmentof that higher, more distant mission?

But even with this lesser theatrical reform, modern man would also bealtered and reformed; for everything is so intimately related in thisworld, that he who removes even so small a thing as a rivet from theframework shatters and destroys the whole edifice. And what we hereassert, with perhaps seeming exaggeration, of Wagner's activity wouldhold equally good of any other genuine reform. It is quite impossibleto reinstate the art of drama in its purest and highest form withouteffecting changes everywhere in the customs of the people, in theState, in education, and in social intercourse. When love and justicehave become powerful in one department of life, namely in art, theymust, in accordance with the law of their inner being, spread theirinfluence around them, and can no more return to the stiff stillnessof their former pupal condition. In order even to realise how far theattitude of the arts towards life is a sign of their decline, and howfar our theatres are a disgrace to those who build and visit them, everything must be learnt over again, and that which is usual andcommonplace should be regarded as something unusual and complicated. An extraordinary lack of clear judgment, a badly-concealed lust ofpleasure, of entertainment at any cost, learned scruples, assumed airsof importance, and trifling with the seriousness of art on the part ofthose who represent it; brutality of appetite and money-grubbing onthe part of promoters; the empty-mindedness and thoughtlessness ofsociety, which only thinks of the people in so far as these serve orthwart its purpose, and which attends theatres and concerts withoutgiving a thought to its duties, --all these things constitute thestifling and deleterious atmosphere of our modern art conditions:when, however, people like our men of culture have grown accustomed toit, they imagine that it is a condition of their healthy existence, and would immediately feel unwell if, for any reason, they werecompelled to dispense with it for a while. In point of fact, there isbut one speedy way of convincing oneself of the vulgarity, weirdness, and confusion of our theatrical institutions, and that is to comparethem with those which once flourished in ancient Greece. If we knewnothing about the Greeks, it would perhaps be impossible to assail ourpresent conditions at all, and objections made on the large scaleconceived for the first time by Wagner would have been regarded as thedreams of people who could only be at home in outlandish places. "Formen as we now find them, " people would have retorted, "art of thismodern kind answers the purpose and is fitting-- and men have neverbeen different. " But they have been very different, and even now thereare men who are far from satisfied with the existing state ofaffairs--the fact of Bayreuth alone demonstrates this point. Here youwill find prepared and initiated spectators, and the emotion of menconscious of being at the very zenith of their happiness, whoconcentrate their whole being on that happiness in order to strengthenthemselves for a higher and more far-reaching purpose. Here you willfind the most noble self-abnegation on the part of the artist, and thefinest of all spectacles --that of a triumphant creator of works whichare in themselves an overflowing treasury of artistic triumphs. Doesit not seem almost like a fairy tale, to be able to come face to facewith such a personality? Must not they who take any part whatsoever, active or passive, in the proceedings at Bayreuth, already feelaltered and rejuvenated, and ready to introduce reforms and to effectrenovations in other spheres of life? Has not a haven been found forall wanderers on high and desert seas, and has not peace settled overthe face of the waters? Must not he who leaves these spheres of rulingprofundity and loneliness for the very differently ordered world withits plains and lower levels, cry continually like Isolde: "Oh, howcould I bear it? How can I still bear it?" And should he be unable toendure his joy and his sorrow, or to keep them egotistically tohimself, he will avail himself from that time forward of everyopportunity of making them known to all. "Where are they who aresuffering under the yoke of modern institutions?" he will inquire. "Where are my natural allies, with whom I may struggle against theever waxing and ever more oppressive pretensions of modern erudition?For at present, at least, we have but one enemy--at present!--and itis that band of aesthetes, to whom the word Bayreuth means thecompletest rout--they have taken no share in the arrangements, theywere rather indignant at the whole movement, or else availedthemselves effectively of the deaf-ear policy, which has now becomethe trusty weapon of all very superior opposition. But this provesthat their animosity and knavery were ineffectual in destroyingWagner's spirit or in hindering the accomplishment of his plans; itproves even more, for it betrays their weakness and the fact that allthose who are at present in possession of power will not be able towithstand many more attacks. The time is at hand for those who wouldconquer and triumph; the vastest empires lie at their mercy, a note ofinterrogation hangs to the name of all present possessors of power, sofar as possession may be said to exist in this respect. Thuseducational institutions are said to be decaying, and everywhereindividuals are to be found who have secretly deserted them. If onlyit were possible to invite those to open rebellion and publicutterances, who even now are thoroughly dissatisfied with the state ofaffairs in this quarter! If only it were possible to deprive them oftheir faint heart and lukewarmness! I am convinced that the wholespirit of modern culture would receive its deadliest blow if the tacitsupport which these natures give it could in any way be cancelled. Among scholars, only those would remain loyal to the old order ofthings who had been infected with the political mania or who wereliterary hacks in any form whatever. The repulsive organisation whichderives its strength from the violence and injustice upon which itrelies--that is to say, from the State and Society--and which sees itsadvantage in making the latter ever more evil and unscrupulous, --thisstructure which without such support would be something feeble andeffete, only needs to be despised in order to perish. He who isstruggling to spread justice and love among mankind must regard thisorganisation as the least significant of the obstacles in his way; forhe will only encounter his real opponents once he has successfullystormed and conquered modern culture, which is nothing more than theiroutworks. 

For us, Bayreuth is the consecration of the dawn of the combat. Nogreater injustice could be done to us than to suppose that we areconcerned with art alone, as though it were merely a means of healingor stupefying us, which we make use of in order to rid ourconsciousness of all the misery that still remains in our midst. Inthe image of this tragic art work at Bayreuth, we see, rather, thestruggle of individuals against everything which seems to oppose themwith invincible necessity, with power, law, tradition, conduct, andthe whole order of things established. Individuals cannot choose abetter life than that of holding themselves ready to sacrificethemselves and to die in their fight for love and justice. The gazewhich the mysterious eye of tragedy vouchsafes us neither lulls norparalyses. Nevertheless, it demands silence of us as long as it keepsus in view; for art does not serve the purposes of war, but is merelywith us to improve our hours of respite, before and during the courseof the contest, --to improve those few moments when, looking back, yetdreaming of the future, we seem to understand the symbolical, and arecarried away into a refreshing reverie when fatigue overtakes us. Dayand battle dawn together, the sacred shadows vanish, and Art is oncemore far away from us; but the comfort she dispenses is with men fromthe earliest hour of day, and never leaves them. Wherever he turns, the individual realises only too clearly his own shortcomings, hisinsufficiency and his incompetence; what courage would he have leftwere he not previously rendered impersonal by this consecration! Thegreatest of all torments harassing him, the conflicting beliefs andopinions among men, the unreliability of these beliefs and opinions, and the unequal character of men's abilities--all these things makehim hanker after art. We cannot be happy so long as everything aboutus suffers and causes suffering; we cannot be moral so long as thecourse of human events is determined by violence, treachery, andinjustice; we cannot even be wise, so long as the whole of mankinddoes not compete for wisdom, and does not lead the individual to themost sober and reasonable form of life and knowledge. How, then, wouldit be possible to endure this feeling of threefold insufficiency ifone were not able to recognise something sublime and valuable in one'sstruggles, strivings, and defeats, if one did not learn from tragedyhow to delight in the rhythm of the great passions, and in theirvictim? Art is certainly no teacher or educator of practical conduct:the artist is never in this sense an instructor or adviser; the thingsafter which a tragic hero strives are not necessarily worth strivingafter. As in a dream so in art, the valuation of things only holdsgood while we are under its spell. What we, for the time being, regardas so worthy of effort, and what makes us sympathise with the tragichero when he prefers death to renouncing the object of his desire, this can seldom retain the same value and energy when transferred toeveryday life: that is why art is the business of the man who isrecreating himself. The strife it reveals to us is a simplification oflife's struggle; its problems are abbreviations of the infinitelycomplicated phenomena of man's actions and volitions. But from thisvery fact--that it is the reflection, so to speak, of a simpler world, a more rapid solution of the riddle of life--art derives its greatnessand indispensability. No one who suffers from life can do without thisreflection, just as no one can exist without sleep. The more difficultthe science of natural laws becomes, the more fervently we yearn forthe image of this simplification, if only for an instant; and thegreater becomes the tension between each man's general knowledge ofthings and his moral and spiritual faculties. Art is with us toprevent the bow from snapping. 

The individual must be consecrated to something impersonal--that isthe aim of tragedy: he must forget the terrible anxiety which deathand time tend to create in him; for at any moment of his life, at anyfraction of time in the whole of his span of years, something sacredmay cross his path which will amply compensate him for all hisstruggles and privations. This means having a sense for the tragic. And if all mankind must perish some day--and who could question this!--it has been given its highest aim for the future, namely, toincrease and to live in such unity that it may confront its finalextermination as a whole, with one spirit-with a common sense of thetragic: in this one aim all the ennobling influences of man lielocked; its complete repudiation by humanity would be the saddest blowwhich the soul of the philanthropist could receive. That is how I feelin the matter! There is but one hope and guarantee for the future ofman, and that is that his sense for the tragic may not die out. If heever completely lost it, an agonised cry, the like of which has neverbeen heard, would have to be raised all over the world; for there isno more blessed joy than that which consists in knowing what weknow--how tragic thought was born again on earth. For this joy isthoroughly impersonal and general: it is the wild rejoicing ofhumanity, anent the hidden relationship and progress of all that ishuman. 

 V. Wagner concentrated upon life, past and present, the light of anintelligence strong enough to embrace the most distant regions in itsrays. That is why he is a simplifier of the universe; for thesimplification of the universe is only possible to him whose eye hasbeen able to master the immensity and wildness of an apparent chaos, and to relate and unite those things which before had lain hopelesslyasunder. Wagner did this by discovering a connection between twoobjects which seemed to exist apart from each other as though inseparate spheres--that between music and life, and similarly betweenmusic and the drama. Not that he invented or was the first to createthis relationship, for they must always have existed and have beennoticeable to all; but, as is usually the case with a great problem, it is like a precious stone which thousands stumble over before onefinally picks it up. Wagner asked himself the meaning of the fact thatan art such as music should have become so very important a feature ofthe lives of modern men. It is not necessary to think meanly of lifein order to suspect a riddle behind this question. On the contrary, when all the great forces of existence are duly considered, andstruggling life is regarded as striving mightily after consciousfreedom and independence of thought, only then does music seem to be ariddle in this world. Should one not answer: Music could not have beenborn in our time? What then does its presence amongst us signify? Anaccident? A single great artist might certainly be an accident, butthe appearance of a whole group of them, such as the history of modernmusic has to show, a group only once before equalled on earth, that isto say in the time of the Greeks, --a circumstance of this sort leadsone to think that perhaps necessity rather than accident is at theroot of the whole phenomenon. The meaning of this necessity is theriddle which Wagner answers. 

He was the first to recognise an evil which is as widespread ascivilisation itself among men; language is everywhere diseased, andthe burden of this terrible disease weighs heavily upon the whole ofman's development. Inasmuch as language has retreated ever more andmore from its true province--the expression of strong feelings, whichit was once able to convey in all their simplicity--and has always hadto strain after the practically impossible achievement ofcommunicating the reverse of feeling, that is to say thought, itsstrength has become so exhausted by this excessive extension of itsduties during the comparatively short period of modern civilisation, that it is no longer able to perform even that function which alonejustifies its existence, to wit, the assisting of those who suffer, incommunicating with each other concerning the sorrows of existence. Mancan no longer make his misery known unto others by means of language;hence he cannot really express himself any longer. And under theseconditions, which are only vaguely felt at present, language hasgradually become a force in itself which with spectral arms coercesand drives humanity where it least wants to go. As soon as they wouldfain understand one another and unite for a common cause, thecraziness of general concepts, and even of the ring of modern words, lays hold of them. The result of this inability to communicate withone another is that every product of their co-operative action bearsthe stamp of discord, not only because it fails to meet their realneeds, but because of the very emptiness of those all-powerful wordsand notions already mentioned. To the misery already at hand, man thusadds the curse of convention--that is to say, the agreement betweenwords and actions without an agreement between the feelings. Just as, during the decline of every art, a point is reached when the morbidaccumulation of its means and forms attains to such tyrannicalproportions that it oppresses the tender souls of artists and convertsthese into slaves, so now, in the period of the decline of language, men have become the slaves of words. Under this yoke no one is able toshow himself as he is, or to express himself artlessly, while only feware able to preserve their individuality in their fight against aculture which thinks to manifest its success, not by the fact that itapproaches definite sensations and desires with the view of educatingthem, but by the fact that it involves the individual in the snare of"definite notions, " and teaches him to think correctly: as if therewere any value in making a correctly thinking and reasoning being outof man, before one has succeeded in making him a creature that feelscorrectly. If now the strains of our German masters' music burst upona mass of mankind sick to this extent, what is really the meaning ofthese strains? Only correct feeling, the enemy of all convention, ofall artificial estrangement and misunderstandings between man and man:this music signifies a return to nature, and at the same time apurification and remodelling of it; for the need of such a return tookshape in the souls of the most loving of men, and, through their art, nature transformed into love makes its voice heard. 

Let us regard this as one of Wagner's answers to the question, Whatdoes music mean in our time? for he has a second. The relation betweenmusic and life is not merely that existing between one kind oflanguage and another; it is, besides, the relation between the perfectworld of sound and that of sight. Regarded merely as a spectacle, andcompared with other and earlier manifestations of human life, theexistence of modern man is characterised by indescribable indigenceand exhaustion, despite the unspeakable garishness at which only thesuperficial observer rejoices. If one examines a little more closelythe impression which this vehement and kaleidoscopic play of coloursmakes upon one, does not the whole seem to blaze with the shimmer andsparkle of innumerable little stones borrowed from formercivilisations? Is not everything one sees merely a complex ofinharmonious bombast, aped gesticulations, arrogant superficiality?--aragged suit of motley for the naked and the shivering? A seeming danceof joy enjoined upon a sufferer? Airs of overbearing pride assumed byone who is sick to the backbone? And the whole moving with suchrapidity and confusion that it is disguised and masked-- sordidimpotence, devouring dissension, assiduous ennui, dishonest distress!The appearance of present-day humanity is all appearance, and nothingelse: in what he now represents man himself has become obscured andconcealed; and the vestiges of the creative faculty in art, whichstill cling to such countries as France and Italy, are allconcentrated upon this one task of concealing. Wherever form is stillin demand in society, conversation, literary style, or the relationsbetween governments, men have unconsciously grown to believe that itis adequately met by a kind of agreeable dissimulation, quite thereverse of genuine form conceived as a necessary relation between theproportions of a figure, having no concern whatever with the notions"agreeable" or "disagreeable, " simply because it is necessary and notoptional. But even where form is not openly exacted by civilisedpeople, there is no greater evidence of this requisite relation ofproportions; a striving after the agreeable dissimulation, alreadyreferred to, is on the contrary noticeable, though it is never sosuccessful even if it be more eager than in the first instance. Howfar this dissimulation is agreeable at times, and why it must pleaseeverybody to see how modern men at least endeavour to dissemble, everyone is in a position to judge, according to, the extent to which hehimself may happen to be modern. "Only galley slaves know each other, "says Tasso, "and if we mistake others, it is only out of courtesy, andwith the hope that they, in their turn, should mistake us. "

Now, in this world of forms and intentional misunderstandings, whatpurpose is served by the appearance of souls overflowing with music?They pursue the course of grand and unrestrained rhythm with noblecandour--with a passion more than personal; they glow with the mightyand peaceful fire of music, which wells up to the light of day fromtheir unexhausted depths--and all this to what purpose?

By means of these souls music gives expression to the longing that itfeels for the company of its natural ally, gymnastics--that is to say, its necessary form in the order of visible phenomena. In its searchand craving for this ally, it becomes the arbiter of the whole visibleworld and the world of mere lying appearance of the present day. Thisis Wagner's second answer to the question, What is the meaning ofmusic in our times? "Help me, " he cries to all who have ears to hear, "help me to discover that culture of which my music, as therediscovered language of correct feeling, seems to foretell theexistence. Bear in mind that the soul of music now wishes to acquire abody, that, by means of you all, it would find its way to visiblenessin movements, deeds, institutions, and customs!" There are some menwho understand this summons, and their number will increase; they havealso understood, for the first time, what it means to found the Stateupon music. It is something that the ancient Hellenes not onlyunderstood but actually insisted upon; and these enlightened creatureswould just as soon have sentenced the modern State to death as modernmen now condemn the Church. The road to such a new though notunprecedented goal would lead to this: that we should be compelled toacknowledge where the worst faults of our educational system lie, andwhy it has failed hitherto to elevate us out of barbarity: in reality, it lacks the stirring and creative soul of music; its requirements andarrangements are moreover the product of a period in which the music, to which We seem to attach so much importance, had not yet been born. Our education is the most antiquated factor of our present conditions, and it is so more precisely in regard to the one new educational forceby which it makes men of to-day in advance of those of bygonecenturies, or by which it would make them in advance of their remoteancestors, provided only they did not persist so rashly in hurryingforward in meek response to the scourge of the moment. Through nothaving allowed the soul of music to lodge within them, they have nonotion of gymnastics in the Greek and Wagnerian sense; and that is whytheir creative artists are condemned to despair, as long as they wishto dispense with music as a guide in a new world of visible phenomena. Talent may develop as much as may be desired: it either comes too lateor too soon, and at all events out of season; for it is in the mainsuperfluous and abortive, just as even the most perfect and thehighest products of earlier times which serve modern artists as modelsare superfluous and abortive, and add not a stone to the edificealready begun. If their innermost consciousness can perceive no newforms, but only the old ones belonging to the past, they may certainlyachieve something for history, but not for life; for they are alreadydead before having expired. He, however, who feels genuine andfruitful life in him, which at present can only be described by theone term "Music, " could he allow himself to be deceived for one momentinto nursing solid hopes by this something which exhausts all itsenergy in producing figures, forms, and styles? He stands above allsuch vanities, and as little expects to meet with artistic wondersoutside his ideal world of sound as with great writers bred on oureffete and discoloured language. Rather than lend an ear to illusiveconsolations, he prefers to turn his unsatisfied gaze stoically uponour modern world, and if his heart be not warm enough to feel pity, let it at least feel bitterness and hate! It were better for him toshow anger and scorn than to take cover in spurious contentment orsteadily to drug himself, as our "friends of art" are wont to do. Butif he can do more than condemn and despise, if he is capable ofloving, sympathising, and assisting in the general work ofconstruction, he must still condemn, notwithstanding, in order toprepare the road for his willing soul. In order that music may one dayexhort many men to greater piety and make them privy to her highestaims, an end must first be made to the whole of the pleasure-seekingrelations which men now enjoy with such a sacred art. Behind all ourartistic pastimes-- theatres, museums, concerts, and the like--thataforementioned "friend of art" is to be found, and he it is who mustbe suppressed: the favour he now finds at the hands of the State mustbe changed into oppression; public opinion, which lays such particularstress upon the training of this love of art, must be routed by betterjudgment. Meanwhile we must reckon the declared enemy of art as ourbest and most useful ally; for the object of his animosity isprecisely art as understood by the "friend of art, "--he knows of noother kind! Let him be allowed to call our "friend of art" to accountfor the nonsensical waste of money occasioned by the building of histheatres and public monuments, the engagement of his celebratedsingers and actors, and the support of his utterly useless schools ofart and picture-galleries--to say nothing of all the energy, time, andmoney which every family squanders in pretended "artistic interests. "Neither hunger nor satiety is to be noticed here, but a dead-and-alivegame is played--with the semblance of each, a game invented by theidle desire to produce an effect and to deceive others. Or, worsestill, art is taken more or less seriously, and then it is itselfexpected to provoke a kind of hunger and craving, and to fulfil itsmission in this artificially induced excitement. It is as if peoplewere afraid of sinking beneath the weight of their loathing anddulness, and invoked every conceivable evil spirit to scare them anddrive them about like wild cattle. Men hanker after pain, anger, hate, the flush of passion, sudden flight, and breathless suspense, and theyappeal to the artist as the conjurer of this demoniacal host. In thespiritual economy of our cultured classes art has become a spurious orignominious and undignified need--a nonentity or a something evil. Thesuperior and more uncommon artist must be in the throes of abewildering nightmare in order to be blind to all this, and like aghost, diffidently and in a quavering voice, he goes on repeatingbeautiful words which he declares descend to him from higher spheres, but whose sound he can hear only very indistinctly. The artist whohappens to be moulded according to the modern pattern, however, regards the dreamy gropings and hesitating speech of his noblercolleague with contempt, and leads forth the whole brawling mob ofassembled passions on a leash in order to let them loose upon modernmen as he may think fit. For these modern creatures wish rather to behunted down, wounded, and torn to shreds, than to live alone withthemselves in solitary calm. Alone with oneself!--this thoughtterrifies the modern soul; it is his one anxiety, his one ghastlyfear. 

When I watch the throngs that move and linger about the streets of avery populous town, and notice no other expression in their faces thanone of hunted stupor, I can never help commenting to myself upon themisery of their condition. For them all, art exists only that they maybe still more wretched, torpid, insensible, or even more flurried andcovetous. For incorrect feeling governs and drills them unremittingly, and does not even give them time to become aware of their misery. Should they wish to speak, convention whispers their cue to them, andthis makes them forget what they originally intended to say; shouldthey desire to understand one another, their comprehension is maimedas though by a spell: they declare that to be their joy which inreality is but their doom, and they proceed to collaborate in wilfullybringing about their own damnation. Thus they have become transformedinto perfectly and absolutely different creatures, and reduced to thestate of abject slaves of incorrect feeling. 

 VI. I shall only give two instances showing how utterly the sentiment ofour time has been perverted, and how completely unconscious thepresent age is of this perversion. Formerly financiers were lookeddown upon with honest scorn, even though they were recognised asneedful; for it was generally admitted that every society must haveits viscera. Now, however, they are the ruling power in the soul ofmodern humanity, for they constitute the most covetous portionthereof. In former times people were warned especially against takingthe day or the moment too seriously: the nil admirari was recommendedand the care of things eternal. Now there is but one kind ofseriousness left in the modern mind, and it is limited to the newsbrought by the newspaper and the telegraph. Improve each shining hour, turn it to some account and judge it as quickly as possible!--onewould think modern men had but one virtue left--presence of mind. Unfortunately, it much more closely resembles the omnipresence ofdisgusting and insatiable cupidity, and spying inquisitiveness becomeuniversal. For the question is whether mind is present at allto-day;--but we shall leave this problem for future judges to solve;they, at least, are bound to pass modern men through a sieve. But thatthis age is vulgar, even we can see now, and it is so because itreveres precisely what nobler ages contemned. If, therefore, it lootsall the treasures of bygone wit and wisdom, and struts about in thisrichest of rich garments, it only proves its sinister consciousness ofits own vulgarity in so doing; for it does not don this garb forwarmth, but merely in order to mystify its surroundings. The desire todissemble and to conceal himself seems stronger than the need ofprotection from the cold in modern man. Thus scholars and philosophersof the age do not have recourse to Indian and Greek wisdom in order tobecome wise and peaceful: the only purpose of their work seems to beto earn them a fictitious reputation for learning in their own time. The naturalists endeavour to classify the animal outbreaks ofviolence, ruse and revenge, in the present relations between nationsand individual men, as immutable laws of nature. Historians areanxiously engaged in proving that every age has its own particularright and special conditions, -- with the view of preparing thegroundwork of an apology for the day that is to come, when ourgeneration will be called to judgment. The science of government, ofrace, of commerce, and of jurisprudence, all have that preparatorilyapologetic character now; yea, it even seems as though the smallamount of intellect which still remains active to-day, and is not usedup by the great mechanism of gain and power, has as its sole task thedefending--and excusing of the present

Against what accusers? one asks, surprised. 

Against its own bad conscience. 

And at this point we plainly discern the task assigned to modernart--that of stupefying or intoxicating, of lulling to sleep orbewildering. By hook or by crook to make conscience unconscious! Toassist the modern soul over the sensation of guilt, not to lead itback to innocence! And this for the space of moments only! To defendmen against themselves, that their inmost heart may be silenced, thatthey may turn a deaf ear to its voice! The souls of those few whoreally feel the utter ignominy of this mission and its terriblehumiliation of art, must be filled to the brim with sorrow and pity, but also with a new and overpowering yearning. He who would fainemancipate art, and reinstall its sanctity, now desecrated, must firsthave freed himself from all contact with modern souls; only as aninnocent being himself can he hope to discover the innocence of art, for he must be ready to perform the stupendous tasks ofself-purification and self-consecration. If he succeeded, if he wereever able to address men from out his enfranchised soul and by meansof his emancipated art, he would then find himself exposed to thegreatest of dangers and involved in the most appalling of struggles. Man would prefer to tear him and his art to pieces, rather thanacknowledge that he must die of shame in presence of them. It is justpossible that the emancipation of art is the only ray of hopeilluminating the future, an event intended only for a few isolatedsouls, while the many remain satisfied to gaze into the flickering andsmoking flame of their art and can endure to do so. For they do notwant to be enlightened, but dazzled. They rather hate light --moreparticularly when it is thrown on themselves. 

That is why they evade the new messenger of light; but he followsthem--the love which gave him birth compels him to follow them and toreduce them to submission. "Ye must go through my mysteries, " he criesto them; "ye need to be purified and shaken by them. Dare to submit tothis for your own salvation, and abandon the gloomily lighted cornerof life and nature which alone seems familiar to you. I lead you intoa kingdom which is also real, and when I lead you out of my cell intoyour daylight, ye will be able to judge which life is more real, which, in fact, is day and which night. Nature is much richer, morepowerful, more blessed and more terrible below the surface; ye cannotdivine this from the way in which ye live. O that ye yourselves couldlearn to become natural again, and then suffer yourselves to betransformed through nature, and into her, by the charm of my ardourand love!"

It is the voice of Wagner's art which thus appeals to men. And thatwe, the children of a wretched age, should be the first to hear it, shows how deserving of pity this age must be: it shows, moreover, thatreal music is of a piece with fate and primitive law; for it is quiteimpossible to attribute its presence amongst us precisely at thepresent time to empty and meaningless chance. Had Wagner been anaccident, he would certainly have been crushed by the superiorstrength of the other elements in the midst of which he was placed, out in the coming of Wagner there seems to have been a necessity whichboth justifies it and makes it glorious. Observed from its earliestbeginnings, the development of his art constitutes a most magnificentspectacle, and--even though it was attended with greatsuffering--reason, law, and intention mark its course throughout. Under the charm of such a spectacle the observer will be led to takepleasure even in this painful development itself, and will regard itas fortunate. He will see how everything necessarily contributes tothe welfare and benefit of talent and a nature foreordained, howeversevere the trials may be through which it may have to pass. He willrealise how every danger gives it more heart, and every triumph moreprudence; how it partakes of poison and sorrow and thrives upon them. The mockery and perversity of the surrounding world only goad and spurit on the more. Should it happen to go astray, it but returns from itswanderings and exile loaded with the most precious spoil; should itchance to slumber, "it does but recoup its strength. " It tempers thebody itself and makes it tougher; it does not consume life, howeverlong it lives; it rules over man like a pinioned passion, and allowshim to fly just in the nick of time, when his foot has grown weary inthe sand or has been lacerated by the stones on his way. It can donought else but impart; every one must share in its work, and it is nostinted giver. When it is repulsed it is but more prodigal in itsgifts; ill used by those it favours, it does but reward them with therichest treasures it possesses, --and, according to the oldest and mostrecent experience, its favoured ones have never been quite worthy ofits gifts. That is why the nature foreordained, through which musicexpresses itself to this world of appearance, is one of the mostmysterious things under the sun--an abyss in which strength andgoodness lie united, a bridge between self and non-self. Who wouldundertake to name the object of its existence with anycertainty?--even supposing the sort of purpose which it would belikely to have could be divined at all. But a most blessed forebodingleads one to ask whether it is possible for the grandest things toexist for the purpose of the meanest, the greatest talent for thebenefit of the smallest, the loftiest virtue and holiness for the sakeof the defective and faulty? Should real music make itself heard, because mankind of all creatures least deserves to hear it, though itperhaps need it most? If one ponder over the transcendental andwonderful character of this possibility, and turn from theseconsiderations to look back on life, a light will then be seen toascend, however dark and misty it may have seemed a moment before. 

 VII. It is quite impossible otherwise: the observer who is confronted witha nature such as Wagner's must, willy-nilly, turn his eyes from timeto time upon himself, upon his insignificance and frailty, and askhimself, What concern is this of thine? Why, pray, art thou there atall? Maybe he will find no answer to these questions, in which case hewill remain estranged and confounded, face to face with his ownpersonality. Let it then suffice him that he has experienced thisfeeling; let the fact that he has felt strange and embarrassed in thepresence of his own soul be the answer to his question For it isprecisely by virtue of this feeling that he shows the most powerfulmanifestation of life in Wagner--the very kernel of his strength--thatdemoniacal magnetism and gift of imparting oneself to others, which ispeculiar to his nature, and by which it not only conveys itself toother beings, but also absorbs other beings into itself; thusattaining to its greatness by giving and by taking. As the observer isapparently subject to Wagner's exuberant and prodigally generousnature, he partakes of its strength, and thereby becomes formidablethrough him and to him. And every one who critically examines himselfknows that a certain mysterious antagonism is necessary to the processof mutual study. Should his art lead us to experience all that fallsto the lot of a soul engaged upon a journey, i. E. Feeling sympathywith others and sharing their fate, and seeing the world throughhundreds of different eyes, we are then able, from such a distance, and under such strange influences, to contemplate him, once we havelived his life. We then feel with the utmost certainty that in Wagnerthe whole visible world desires to be spiritualised, absorbed, andlost in the world of sounds. In Wagner, too, the world of sounds seeksto manifest itself as a phenomenon for the sight; it seeks, as itwere, to incarnate itself. His art always leads him into two distinctdirections, from the world of the play of sound to the mysterious andyet related world of visible things, and vice versa. He is continuallyforced--and the observer with him--to re-translate the visible intospiritual and primeval life, and likewise to perceive the most hiddeninterstices of the soul as something concrete and to lend it a visiblebody. This constitutes the nature of the dithyrambic dramatist, if themeaning given to the term includes also the actor, the poet, and themusician; a conception necessarily borrowed from Æschylus and thecontemporary Greek artists--the only perfect examples of thedithyrambic dramatist before Wagner. If attempts have been made totrace the most wonderful developments to inner obstacles ordeficiencies, if, for instance, in Goethe's case, poetry was merelythe refuge of a foiled talent for painting; if one may speak ofSchiller's dramas as of vulgar eloquence directed into uncommonchannels; if Wagner himself tries to account for the development ofmusic among the Germans by showing that, inasmuch as they are devoidof the entrancing stimulus of a natural gift for singing, they werecompelled to take up instrumental music with the same profoundseriousness as that with which their reformers took upChristianity, --if, on the same principle, it were sought to associateWagner's development with an inner barrier of the same kind, it wouldthen be necessary to recognise in him a primitive dramatic talent, which had to renounce all possibility of satisfying its needs by thequickest and most methods, and which found its salvation and its meansof expression in drawing all arts to it for one great dramaticdisplay. But then one would also have to assume that the most powerfulmusician, owing to his despair at having to appeal to people who wereeither only semi-musical or not musical at all, violently opened aroad for himself to the other arts, in order to acquire that capacityfor diversely communicating himself to others, by which he compelledthem to understand him, by which he compelled the masses to understandhim. However the development of the born dramatist may be pictured, inhis ultimate expression he is a being free from all inner barriers andvoids: the real, emancipated artist cannot help himself, he must thinkin the spirit of all the arts at once, as the mediator and intercessorbetween apparently separated spheres, the one who reinstalls the unityand wholeness of the artistic faculty, which cannot be divined orreasoned out, but can only be revealed by deeds themselves. But he inwhose presence this deed is performed will be overcome by its gruesomeand seductive charm: in a flash he will be confronted with a powerwhich cancels both resistance and reason, and makes every detail oflife appear irrational and incomprehensible. Carried away fromhimself, he seems to be suspended in a mysterious fiery element; heceases to understand himself, the standard of everything has fallenfrom his hands; everything stereotyped and fixed begins to totter;every object seems to acquire a strange colour and to tell us its taleby means of new symbols;--one would need to be a Plato in order todiscover, amid this confusion of delight and fear, how he accomplishesthe feat, and to say to the dramatist: "Should a man come into ourmidst who possessed sufficient knowledge to simulate or imitateanything, we would honour him as something wonderful and holy; wewould even anoint him and adorn his brow with a sacred diadem; but wewould urge him to leave our circle for another, notwithstanding. " Itmay be that a member of the Platonic community would have been able tochasten himself to such conduct: we, however, who live in a verydifferent community, long for, and earnestly desire, the charmer tocome to us, although we may fear him already, --and we only desire hispresence in order that our society and the mischievous reason andmight of which it is the incarnation may be confuted. A state of humancivilisation, of human society, morality, order, and generalorganisation which would be able to dispense with the services of animitative artist or mimic, is not perhaps so utterly inconceivable;but this Perhaps is probably the most daring that has ever beenposited, and is equivalent to the gravest expression of doubt. Theonly man who ought to be at liberty to speak of such a possibility ishe who could beget, and have the presentiment of, the highest phase ofall that is to come, and who then, like Faust, would either be obligedto turn blind, or be permitted to become so. For we have no right tothis blindness; whereas Plato, after he had cast that one glance intothe ideal Hellenic, had the right to be blind to all Hellenism. Forthis reason, we others are in much greater need of art; because it wasin the presence of the realistic that our eyes began to see, and werequire the complete dramatist in order that he may relieve us, ifonly for an hour or so, of the insufferable tension arising from ourknowledge of the chasm which lies between our capabilities and theduties we have to perform. With him we ascend to the highest pinnacleof feeling, and only then do we fancy we have returned to nature'sunbounded freedom, to the actual realm of liberty. From this point ofvantage we can see ourselves and our fellows emerge as somethingsublime from an immense mirage, and we see the deep meaning in ourstruggles, in our victories and defeats; we begin to find pleasure inthe rhythm of passion and in its victim in the hero's every footfallwe distinguish the hollow echo of death, and in its proximity werealise the greatest charm of life: thus transformed into tragic men, we return again to life with comfort in our souls. We are conscious ofa new feeling of security, as if we had found a road leading out ofthe greatest dangers, excesses, and ecstasies, back to the limited andthe familiar: there where our relations with our fellows seem topartake of a superior benevolence, and are at all events more noblethan they were. For here, everything seemingly serious and needful, which appears to lead to a definite goal, resembles only detachedfragments when compared with the path we ourselves have trodden, evenin our dreams, -- detached fragments of that complete and grandexperience whereof we cannot even think without a thrill. Yes, weshall even fall into danger and be tempted to take life too easily, simply because in art we were in such deadly earnest concerning it, asWagner says somewhere anent certain incidents in his own life. For ifwe who are but the spectators and not the creators of this display ofdithyrambic dramatic art, can almost imagine a dream to be more realthan the actual experiences of our wakeful hours, how much more keenlymust the creator realise this contrast! There he stands amid all theclamorous appeals and importunities of the day, and of the necessitiesof life; in the midst of Society and State--and as what does he standthere? Maybe he is the only wakeful one, the only being really andtruly conscious, among a host of confused and tormented sleepers, among a multitude of deluded and suffering people. He may even feellike a victim of chronic insomnia, and fancy himself obliged to bringhis clear, sleepless, and conscious life into touch with somnambulistsand ghostly well-intentioned creatures. Thus everything that othersregard as commonplace strikes him as weird, and he is tempted to meetthe whole phenomenon with haughty mockery. But how peculiarly thisfeeling is crossed, when another force happens to join his quiveringpride, the craving of the heights for the depths, the affectionateyearning for earth, for happiness and for fellowship--then, when hethinks of all he misses as a hermit-creator, he feels as though heought to descend to the earth like a god, and bear all that is weak, human, and lost, "in fiery arms up to heaven, " so as to obtain loveand no longer worship only, and to be able to lose himself completelyin his love. But it is just this contradiction which is the miraculousfact in the soul of the dithyrambic dramatist, and if his nature canbe understood at all, surely it must be here. For his creative momentsin art occur when the antagonism between his feelings is at its heightand when his proud astonishment and wonder at the world combine withthe ardent desire to approach that same world as a lover. The glanceshe then bends towards the earth are always rays of sunlight which"draw up water, " form mist, and gather storm-clouds. Clear-sighted andprudent, loving and unselfish at the same time, his glance isprojected downwards; and all things that are illumined by this doubleray of light, nature conjures to discharge their strength, to revealtheir most hidden secret, and this through bashfulness. It is morethan a mere figure of speech to say that he surprised Nature with thatglance, that he caught her naked; that is why she would conceal hershame by seeming precisely the reverse. What has hitherto beeninvisible, the inner life, seeks its salvation in the region of thevisible; what has hitherto been only visible, repairs to the darkocean of sound: thus Nature, in trying to conceal herself, unveils thecharacter of her contradictions. In a dance, wild, rhythmic andgliding, and with ecstatic movements, the born dramatist makes knownsomething of what is going on within him, of what is taking place innature: the dithyrambic quality of his movements speaks just aseloquently of quivering comprehension and of powerful penetration asof the approach of love and self-renunciation. Intoxicated speechfollows the course of this rhythm; melody resounds coupled withspeech, and in its turn melody projects its sparks into the realm ofimages and ideas. A dream-apparition, like and unlike the image ofNature and her wooer, hovers forward; it condenses into more humanshapes; it spreads out in response to its heroically triumphant will, and to a most delicious collapse and cessation of will:--thus tragedyis born; thus life is presented with its grandest knowledge-- that oftragic thought; thus, at last, the greatest charmer and benefactoramong mortals--the dithyrambic dramatist--is evolved. 

 VIII. Wagner's actual life--that is to say, the gradual evolution of thedithyrambic dramatist in him-- was at the same time an uninterruptedstruggle with himself, a struggle which never ceased until hisevolution was complete. His fight with the opposing world was grim andghastly, only because it was this same world--this alluringenemy--which he heard speaking out of his own heart, and because henourished a violent demon in his breast--the demon of resistance. Whenthe ruling idea of his life gained ascendancy over his mind--the ideathat drama is, of all arts, the one that can exercise the greatestamount of influence over the world--it aroused the most activeemotions in his whole being. It gave him no very clear or luminousdecision, at first, as to what was to be done and desired in thefuture; for the idea then appeared merely as a form oftemptation--that is to say, as the expression of his gloomy, selfish, and insatiable will, eager for power and glory. Influence--thegreatest amount of influence--how? over whom?--these were henceforwardthe questions and problems which did not cease to engage his head andhis heart. He wished to conquer and triumph as no other artist hadever done before, and, if possible, to reach that height of tyrannicalomnipotence at one stroke for which all his instincts secretly craved. With a jealous and cautious eye, he took stock of everythingsuccessful, and examined with special care all that upon which thisinfluence might be brought to bear. With the magic sight of thedramatist, which scans souls as easily as the most familiar book, hescrutinised the nature of the spectator and the listener, and althoughhe was often perturbed by the discoveries he made, he very quicklyfound means wherewith he could enthral them. These means were everwithin his reach: everything that moved him deeply he desired andcould also produce; at every stage in his career he understood just asmuch of his predecessors as he himself was able to create, and henever doubted that he would be able to do what they had done. In thisrespect his nature is perhaps more presumptuous even than Goethe's, despite the fact that the latter said of himself: "I always thought Ihad mastered everything; and even had I been crowned king, I shouldhave regarded the honour as thoroughly deserved. " Wagner's ability. His taste and his aspirations--all of which have ever been as closelyrelated as key to lock--grew and attained to freedom together; butthere was a time when it was not so. What did he care about the feeblebut noble and egotistically lonely feeling which that friend of artfosters, who, blessed with a literary and aesthetic education, takeshis stand far from the common mob! But those violent spiritualtempests which are created by the crowd when under the influence ofcertain climactic passages of dramatic song, that sudden bewilderingecstasy of the emotions, thoroughly honest and selfless--they were butechoes of his own experiences and sensations, and filled him withglowing hope for the greatest possible power and effect. Thus herecognised grand opera as the means whereby he might express hisruling thoughts; towards it his passions impelled him; his eyes turnedin the direction of its home. The larger portion of his life, his mostdaring wanderings, and his plans, studies, sojourns, and acquaintancesare only to be explained by an appeal to these passions and theopposition of the outside world, which the poor, restless, passionately ingenuous German artist had to face. Another artist thanhe knew better how to become master of this calling, and now that ithas gradually become known by means of what ingenious artifices of allkinds Meyerbeer succeeded in preparing and achieving every one of hisgreat successes, and how scrupulously the sequence of "effects" wastaken into account in the opera itself, people will begin tounderstand how bitterly Wagner was mortified when his eyes were openedto the tricks of the metier which were indispensable to a great publicsuccess. I doubt whether there has ever been another great artist inhistory who began his career with such extraordinary illusions and whoso unsuspectingly and sincerely fell in with the most revolting formof artistic trickery. And yet the way in which he proceeded partook ofgreatness and was therefore extraordinarily fruitful. For when heperceived his error, despair made him understand the meaning of modernsuccess, of the modern public, and the whole prevaricating spirit ofmodern art. And while becoming the critic of "effect, " indications ofhis own purification began to quiver through him. It seems as if fromthat time forward the spirit of music spoke to him with anunprecedented spiritual charm. As though he had just risen from a longillness and had for the first time gone into the open, he scarcelytrusted his hand and his eye, and seemed to grope along his way. Thusit was an almost delightful surprise to him to find that he was stilla musician and an artist, and perhaps then only for the first time. 

Every subsequent stage in Wagner's development may be distinguishedthus, that the two fundamental powers of his nature drew ever moreclosely together: the aversion of the one to the other lessened, thehigher self no longer condescended to serve its more violent and baserbrother; it loved him and felt compelled to serve him. The tenderestand purest thing is ultimately--that is to say, at the highest stageof its evolution-- always associated with the mightiest; the storminginstincts pursue their course as before, but along different roads, inthe direction of the higher self; and this in its turn descends toearth and finds its likeness in everything earthly. If it werepossible, on this principle, to speak of the final aims andunravelments of that evolution, and to remain intelligible, it mightalso be possible to discover the graphic terms with which to describethe long interval preceding that last development; but I doubt whetherthe first achievement is possible at all, and do not therefore attemptthe second. The limits of the interval separating the preceding andthe subsequent ages will be described historically in two sentences:Wagner was the revolutionist of society; Wagner recognised the onlyartistic element that ever existed hitherto--the poetry of the people. The ruling idea which in a new form and mightier than it had everbeen, obsessed Wagner, after he had overcome his share of despair andrepentance, led him to both conclusions. Influence, the greatestpossible amount of influence to be exercised by means of the stage!--but over whom? He shuddered when he thought of those whom he had, until then, sought to influence. His experience led him to realise theutterly ignoble position which art and the artist adorn; how a callousand hard-hearted community that calls itself the good, but which isreally the evil, reckons art and the artist among its slavish retinue, and keeps them both in order to minister to its need of deception. Modern art is a luxury; he saw this, and understood that it must standor fall with the luxurious society of which it forms but a part. Thissociety had but one idea, to use its power as hard-heartedly and ascraftily as possible in order to render the impotent--the people--evermore and more serviceable, base and unpopular, and to rear the modernworkman out of them. It also robbed them of the greatest and purestthings which their deepest needs led them to create, and through whichthey meekly expressed the genuine and unique art within their soul:their myths, songs, dances, and their discoveries in the department oflanguage, in order to distil therefrom a voluptuous antidote againstthe fatigue and boredom of its existence-- modern art. How thissociety came into being, how it learned to draw new strength foritself from the seemingly antagonistic spheres of power, and how, forinstance, decaying Christianity allowed itself to be used, under thecover of half measures and subterfuges, as a shield against the massesand as a support of this society and its possessions, and finally howscience and men of learning pliantly consented to become itsdrudges--all this Wagner traced through the ages, only to be convulsedwith loathing at the end of his researches. Through his compassion forthe people, he became a revolutionist. From that time forward he lovedthem and longed for them, as he longed for his art; for, alas! in themalone, in this fast disappearing, scarcely recognisable body, artificially held aloof, he now saw the only spectators and listenersworthy and fit for the power of his masterpieces, as he pictured them. Thus his thoughts concentrated themselves upon the question, How dothe people come into being? How are they resuscitated?

He always found but one answer: if a large number of people wereafflicted with the sorrow that afflicted him, that number wouldconstitute the people, he said to himself. And where the same sorrowleads to the same impulses and desires, similar satisfaction wouldnecessarily be sought, and the same pleasure found in thissatisfaction. If he inquired into what it was that most consoled himand revived his spirits in his sorrow, what it was that succeeded bestin counteracting his affliction, it was with joyful certainty that hediscovered this force only in music and myth, the latter of which hehad already recognised as the people's creation and their language ofdistress. It seemed to him that the origin of music must be similar, though perhaps more mysterious. In both of these elements he steepedand healed his soul; they constituted his most urgent need:--in thisway he was able to ascertain how like his sorrow was to that of thepeople, when they came into being, and how they must arise anew ifmany Wagners are going to appear. What part did myth and music play inmodern society, wherever they had not been actually sacrificed to it?They shared very much the same fate, a fact which only tends to provetheir close relationship: myth had been sadly debased and usurped byidle tales and stories; completely divested of its earnest and sacredvirility, it was transformed into the plaything and pleasing bauble ofchildren and women of the afflicted people. Music had kept itselfalive among the poor, the simple, and the isolated; the Germanmusician had not succeeded in adapting himself to the luxurioustraffic of the arts; he himself had become a fairy tale full Ofmonsters and mysteries, full of the most touching omens andauguries--a helpless questioner, something bewitched and in need ofrescue. Here the artist distinctly heard the command that concernedhim alone--to recast myth and make it virile, to break the spell lyingover music and to make music speak: he felt his strength for dramaliberated at one stroke, and the foundation of his sway establishedover the hitherto undiscovered province lying between myth and music. His new masterpiece, which included all the most powerful, effective, and entrancing forces that he knew, he now laid before men with thisgreat and painfully cutting question: "Where are ye all who suffer andthink as I do? Where is that number of souls that I wish to see becomea people, that ye may share the same joys and comforts with me? Inyour joy ye will reveal your misery to me. " These were his questionsin Tannhauser and Lohengrin, in these operas he looked about him forhis equals --the anchorite yearned for the number. 

But what were his feelings withal? Nobody answered him. Nobody hadunderstood his question. Not that everybody remained silent: on thecontrary, answers were given to thousands of questions which he hadnever put; people gossipped about the new masterpieces as though theyhad only been composed for the express purpose of supplying subjectsfor conversation. The whole mania of aesthetic scribbling and smalltalk overtook the Germans like a pestilence, and ith that lack ofmodesty which characterises both German scholars and Germanjournalists, people began measuring, and generally meddling with, these masterpieces, as well as with the person of the artist. Wagnertried to help the comprehension of his question by writing about it;but this only led to fresh confusion and more uproar, --for a musicianwho writes and thinks was, at that time, a thing unknown. The cryarose: "He is a theorist who wishes to remould art with hisfar-fetched notions--stone him!" Wagner was stunned: his question wasnot understood, his need not felt; his masterpieces seemed a messageaddressed only to the deaf and blind; his people-- an hallucination. He staggered and vacillated. The feasibility of a complete upheaval ofall things then suggested itself to him, and he no longer shrank fromthe thought: possibly, beyond this revolution and dissolution, theremight be a chance of a new hope; on the other hand, there might not. But, in any case, would not complete annihilation be better than thewretched existing state of affairs? Not very long afterwards, he was apolitical exile in dire distress. 

And then only, with this terrible change in his environment and in hissoul, there begins that period of the great man's life over which as agolden reflection there is stretched the splendour of highest mastery. Now at last the genius of dithyrambic drama doffs its last disguise. He is isolated; the age seems empty to him; he ceases to hope; and hisall-embracing glance descend once more into the deep, and finds thebottom, there he sees suffering in the nature of things, andhenceforward, having become more impersonal, he accepts his portion ofsorrow more calmly. The desire for great power which was but theinheritance of earlier conditions is now directed wholly into thechannel of creative art; through his art he now speaks only tohimself, and no longer to a public or to a people, and strives to lendthis intimate conversation all the distinction and other qualities inkeeping with such a mighty dialogue. During the preceding periodthings had been different with his art; then he had concerned himself, too, albeit with refinement and subtlety, with immediate effects: thatartistic production was also meant as a question, and it ought to havecalled forth an immediate reply. And how often did Wagner not try tomake his meaning clearer to those he questioned! In view of theirinexperience in having questions put to them, he tried to meet themhalf way and to conform with older artistic notions and means ofexpression. When he feared that arguments couched in his own termswould only meet with failure, he had tried to persuade and to put hisquestion in a language half strange to himself though familiar to hislisteners. Now there was nothing to induce him to continue thisindulgence: all he desired now was to come to terms with himself, tothink of the nature of the world in dramatic actions, and tophilosophise in music; what desires he still possessed turned in thedirection of the latest philosophical views. He who is worthy ofknowing what took place in him at that time or what questions werethrashed out in the darkest holy of holies in his soul--and not manyare worthy of knowing all this--must hear, observe, and experienceTristan and Isolde, the real opus metaphysicum of all art, a work uponwhich rests the broken look of a dying man with his insatiable andsweet craving for the secrets of night and death, far away from lifewhich throws a horribly spectral morning light, sharply, upon all thatis evil, delusive, and sundering: moreover, a drama austere in theseverity of its form, overpowering in its simple grandeur, and inharmony with the secret of which it treats--lying dead in the midst oflife, being one in two. And yet there is something still morewonderful than this work, and that is the artist himself, the man who, shortly after he had accomplished it, was able to create a picture oflife so full of clashing colours as the Meistersingers of Nurnberg, and who in both of these compositions seems merely to have refreshedand equipped himself for the task of completing at his ease thatgigantic edifice in four parts which he had long ago planned andbegun--the ultimate result of all his meditations and poetical flightsfor over twenty years, his Bayreuth masterpiece, the Ring of theNibelung! He who marvels at the rapid succession of the two operas, Tristan and the Meistersingers, has failed to understand one importantside of the life and nature of all great Germans: he does not know thepeculiar soil out of which that essentially German gaiety, whichcharacterised Luther, Beethoven, and Wagner, can grow, the gaietywhich other nations quite fail to understand and which even seems tobe missing in the Germans of to-day--that clear golden and thoroughlyfermented mixture of simplicity, deeply discriminating love, observation, and roguishness which Wagner has dispensed, as the mostprecious of drinks, to all those who have suffered deeply throughlife, but who nevertheless return to it with the smile ofconvalescents. And, as he also turned upon the world the eyes of onereconciled, he was more filled with rage and disgust than with sorrow, and more prone to renounce the love of power than to shrink in awefrom it. As he thus silently furthered his greatest work and graduallylaid score upon score, something happened which caused him to stop andlisten: friends were coming, a kind of subterranean movement of manysouls approached with a message for him--it was still far from beingthe people that constituted this movement and which wished to bear himnews, but it may have been the nucleus and first living source of areally human community which would reach perfection in some age stillremote. For the present they only brought him the warrant that hisgreat work could be entrusted to the care and charge of faithful men, men who would watch and be worthy to watch over this most magnificentof all legacies to posterity. In the love of friends his outlook beganto glow with brighter colours; his noblest care--the care that hiswork should be accomplished and should find a refuge before theevening of his life--was not his only preoccupation. Somethingoccurred which he could only understand as a symbol: it was as much asa new comfort and a new token of happiness to him. A great German warcaused him to open his eyes, and he observed that those very Germanswhom he considered so thoroughly degenerate and so inferior to thehigh standard of real Teutonism, of which he had formed an ideal bothfrom self-knowledge and the conscientious study of other great Germansin history; he observed that those very Germans were, in the midst ofterrible circumstances, exhibiting two virtues of the highestorder--simple bravery and prudence; and with his heart bounding withdelight he conceived the hope that he might not be the last German, and that some day a greater power would perhaps stand by his worksthan that devoted yet meagre one consisting of his little band offriends--a power able to guard it during that long period precedingits future glory, as the masterpiece of this future. Perhaps it wasnot possible to steel this belief permanently against doubt, moreparticularly when it sought to rise to hopes of immediate results:suffice it that he derived a tremendous spur from his environment, which constantly reminded him of a lofty duty ever to be fulfilled. 

His work would not have been complete had he handed it to the worldonly in the form of silent manuscript. He must make known to the worldwhat it could not guess in regard to his productions, what was hisalone to reveal--the new style for the execution and presentation ofhis works, so that he might set that example which nobody else couldset, and thus establish a tradition of style, not on paper, not bymeans of signs, but through impressions made upon the very souls ofmen. This duty had become all the more pressing with him, seeing thatprecisely in regard to the style of their execution his other workshad meanwhile succumbed to the most insufferable and absurd of fates:they were famous and admired, yet no one manifested the slightest signof indignation when they were mishandled. For, strange to say, whereashe renounced ever more and more the hope of success among hiscontemporaries, owing to his all too thorough knowledge of them, anddisclaimed all desire for power, both "success" and "power" came tohim, or at least everybody told him so. It was in vain that he maderepeated attempts to expose, with the utmost clearness, how worthlessand humiliating such successes were to him: people were so unused toseeing an artist able to differentiate at all between the effects ofhis works that even his most solemn protests were never entirelytrusted. Once he had perceived the relationship existing between oursystem of theatres and their success, and the men of his time, hissoul ceased to be attracted by the stage at all. He had no furtherconcern with aesthetic ecstasies and the exultation of excited crowds, and he must even have felt angry to see his art being gulped downindiscriminately by the yawning abyss of boredom and the insatiablelove of distraction. How flat and pointless every effect proved underthese circumstances-- more especially as it was much more a case ofhaving to minister to one quite insatiable than of cloying the hungerof a starving man-- Wagner began to perceive from the followingrepeated experience: everybody, even the performers and promoters, regarded his art as nothing more nor less than any other kind ofstage-music, and quite in keeping with the repulsive style oftraditional opera; thanks to the efforts of cultivated conductors, hisworks were even cut and hacked about, until, after they had beenbereft of all their spirit, they were held to be nearer theprofessional singer's plane. But when people tried to follow Wagner'sinstructions to the letter, they proceeded so clumsily and timidlythat they were not incapable of representing the midnight riot in thesecond act of the Meistersingers by a group of ballet-dancers. Theyseemed to do all this, however, in perfectly good faith--without thesmallest evil intention. Wagner's devoted efforts to show, by means ofhis own example, the correct and complete way of performing his works, and his attempts at training individual singers in the new style, werefoiled time after time, owing only to the thoughtlessness and irontradition that ruled all around him. Moreover, he was always inducedto concern himself with that class of theatricals which he mostthoroughly loathed. Had not even Goethe, m his time, once grown tiredof attending the rehearsals of his Iphigenia? "I suffer unspeakably, "he explained, "when I have to tumble about Wlth these spectres, whichnever seem to act as they should. " Meanwhile Wagner's "success" in thekind of drama which he most disliked steadily increased; so much so, indeed, that the largest theatres began to subsist almost entirelyupon the receipts which Wagner's art, in the guise of operas, broughtinto them. This growing passion on the part of the theatre-goingpublic bewildered even some of Wagner's friends; but this man who hadendured so much, had still to endure the bitterest pain of all--he hadto see his friends intoxicated with his "successes" and "triumphs"everywhere where his highest ideal was openly belied and shattered. Itseemed almost as though a people otherwise earnest and reflecting haddecided to maintain an attitude of systematic levity only towards itsmost serious artist, and to make him the privileged recipient of allthe vulgarity, thoughtlessness, clumsiness, and malice of which theGerman nature is capable. When, therefore, during the German War, acurrent of greater magnanimity and freedom seemed to run through everyone, Wagner remembered the duty to which he had pledged himself, namely, to rescue his greatest work from those successes and affrontswhich were so largely due to misunderstandings, and to present it inhis most personal rhythm as an example for all times. Thus heconceived the idea of Bayreuth. In the wake of that current of betterfeeling already referred to, he expected to notice an enhanced senseof duty even among those with whom he wished to entrust his mostprecious possession. Out of this two-fold duty, that event took shapewhich, like a glow of strange sunlight, will illumine the few yearsthat lie behind and before us, and was designed to bless that distantand problematic future which to our time and to the men of our timecan be little more than a riddle or a horror, but which to the fevvwho are allowed to assist in its realisation is a foretaste of comingjoy, a foretaste of love in a higher sphere, through which they knowthemselves to be blessed, blessing and fruitful, far beyond their spanof years; and which to Wagner himself is but a cloud of distress, care, meditation, and grief, a fresh passionate outbreak ofantagonistic elements, but all bathed in the starlight of selflessfidelity, and changed by this light into indescribable joy. 

It scarcely need be said that it is the breath of tragedy that fillsthe lungs of the world. And every one whose innermost soul has apresentiment of this, every one unto whom the yoke of tragic deceptionconcerning the aim of life, the distortion and shattering ofintentions, renunciation and purification through love, are notunknown things, must be conscious of a vague reminiscence of Wagner'sown heroic life, in the masterpieces with which the great man nowpresents us. We shall feel as though Siegfried from some place faraway were relating his deeds to us: the most blissful of touchingrecollections are always draped in the deep mourning of waning summer, when all nature lies still in the sable twilight. 

 IX. All those to whom the thought of Wagner's development as a man mayhave caused pain will find it both restful and healing to reflect uponwhat he was as an artist, and to observe how his ability and daringattained to such a high degree of independence. If art mean only thefaculty of communicating to others what one has oneself experienced, and if every work of art confutes itself which does not succeed inmaking itself understood, then Wagner's greatness as an artist wouldcertainly lie in the almost demoniacal power of his nature tocommunicate with others, to express itself in all languages at once, and to make known its most intimate and personal experience with thegreatest amount of distinctness possible. His appearance in thehistory of art resembles nothing so much as a volcanic eruption of theunited artistic faculties of Nature herself, after mankind had grownto regard the practice of a special art as a necessary rule. It istherefore a somewhat moot point whether he ought to be classified as apoet, a painter, or a musician, even using each these words in itswidest sense, or whether a new word ought not to be invented in orderto describe him. 

Wagner's poetic ability is shown by his thinking in visible and actualfacts, and not in ideas; that is to say, he thinks mythically, as thepeople have always done. No particular thought lies at the bottom of amyth, as the children of an artificial ulture would have us believe;but it is in itself a thought: it conveys an idea of the world, butthrough the medium of a chain of events, actions, and pains. The Ringof the Nihelung is a huge system of thought without the usualabstractness of the latter. It were perhaps possible for a philosopherto present us with its exact equivalent in pure thought, and to purgeit of all pictures drawn from life, and of all living actions, inwhich case we should be in possession of the same thing portrayed intwo completely different forms--the one for the people, and the otherfor the very reverse of the people; that is to say, men of theory. ButWagner makes no appeal to this last class, for the man of theory canknow as little of poetry or myth as the deaf man can know of music;both of them being conscious only of movements which seem meaninglessto them. It is impossible to appreciate either one of these completelydifferent forms from the standpoint of the other: as long as thepoet's spell is upon one, one thinks with him just as though one weremerely a feeling, seeing, and hearing creature; the conclusions thusreached are merely the result of the association of the phenomena onesees, and are therefore not logical but actual causalities. 

If, therefore, the heroes and gods of mythical dramas, as understoodby Wagner, were to express themselves plainly in words, there would bea danger (inasmuch as the language of words might tend to awaken thetheoretical side in us) of our finding ourselves transported from theworld of myth to the world of ideas, and the result would be not onlythat we should fail to understand with greater ease, but that weshould probably not understand at all. Wagner thus forced languageback to a more primeval stage in its development a stage at which itwas almost free of the abstract element, and was still poetry, imagery, and feeling; the fearlessness with which Wagner undertookthis formidable mission shows how imperatively he was led by thespirit of poetry, as one who must follow whithersoever his phantomleader may direct him. Every word in these dramas ought to allow ofbeing sung, and gods and heroes should make them their own--that wasthe task which Wagner set his literary faculty. Any other person inlike circumstances would have given up all hope; for our languageseems almost too old and decrepit to allow of one's exacting whatWagner exacted from it; and yet, when he smote the rock, he broughtforth an abundant flow. Precisely owing to the fact that he loved hislanguage and exacted a great deal from it, Wagner suffered more thanany other German through its decay and enfeeblement, from its manifoldlosses and mutilations of form, from its unwieldy particles and clumsyconstruction, and from its unmusical auxiliary verbs. All these arethings which have entered the language through sin and depravity. Onthe other hand, he was exceedingly proud to record the number ofprimitive and vigorous factors still extant in the current speech; andin the tonic strength of its roots he recognised quite a wonderfulaffinity and relation to real music, a quality which distinguished itfrom the highly volved and artificially rhetorical Latin languages. Wagner's poetry is eloquent of his affection for the German language, and there is a heartiness and candour in his treatment of it which arescarcely to be met with in any other German writer, save perhapsGoethe. Forcibleness of diction, daring brevity, power and variety inrhythm, a remarkable wealth of strong and striking words, simplicityin construction, an almost unique inventive faculty in regard tofluctuations of feeling and presentiment, and therewithal a perfectlypure and overflowing stream of colloquialisms--these are the qualitiesthat have to be enumerated, and even then the greatest and mostwonderful of all is omitted. Whoever reads two such poems as Tristanand the Meistersingers consecutively will be just as astonished anddoubtful in regard to the language as to the music; for he will wonderhow it could have been possible for a creative spirit to dominate soperfectly two worlds as different in form, colour, and arrangement, asin soul. This is the most wonderful achievement of Wagner's talent;for the ability to give every work its own linguistic stamp and tofind a fresh body and a new sound for every thought is a task whichonly the great master can successfully accomplish. Where this rarestof all powers manifests itself, adverse criticism can be but petty andfruitless which confines itself to attacks upon certain excesses andeccentricities in the treatment, or upon the more frequent obscuritiesof expression and ambiguity of thought. Moreover, what seemed toelectrify and scandalise those who were most bitter in their criticismwas not so much the language as the spirit of the Wagnerianoperas--that is to say, his whole manner of feeling and suffering. Itwere well to wait until these very critics have acquired anotherspirit themselves; they will then also speak a different tongue, and, by that time, it seems to me things will go better with the Germanlanguage than they do at present. 

In the first place, however, no one who studies Wagner the poet andword-painter should forget that none of his dramas were meant to beread, and that it would therefore be unjust to judge them from thesame standpoint as the spoken drama. The latter plays upon thefeelings by means of words and ideas, and in this respect it is underthe dominion of the laws of rhetoric. But in real life passion isseldom eloquent: in spoken drama it perforce must be, in order to beable to express itself at all. When, however, the language of a peopleis already in a state of decay and deterioration, the word-dramatistis tempted to impart an undue proportion of new colour and form bothto his medium and to his thoughts; he would elevate the language inorder to make it a vehicle capable of conveying lofty feelings, and byso doing he runs the risk of becoming abstruse. By means of sublimephrases and conceits he likewise tries to invest passion with somenobility, and thereby runs yet another risk, that of appearing falseand artificial. For in real life passions do not speak in sentences, and the poetical element often draws suspicion upon their genuinenesswhen it departs too palpably from reality. Now Wagner, who was thefirst to detect the essential feeling in spoken drama, presents everydramatic action threefold: in a word, in a gesture, and in a sound. For, as a matter of fact, music succeeds in conveying the deepestemotions of the dramatic performers direct to the spectators, andwhile these see the evidence of the actors' states of soul in theirbearing and movements, a third though more feeble confirmation ofthese states, translated into conscious will, quickly follows in theform of the spoken word. All these effects fulfil their purposesimultaneously, without disturbing one another in the least, and urgethe spectator to a completely new understanding and sympathy, just asif his senses had suddenly grown more spiritual and his spirit moresensual, and as if everything which seeks an outlet in him, and whichmakes him thirst for knowledge, were free and joyful in exultantperception. Because every essential factor in a Wagnerian drama isconveyed to the spectator with the utmost clearness, illumined andpermeated throughout by music as by an internal flame, their authorcan dispense with the expedients usually employed by the writer of thespoken play in order to lend light and warmth to the action. The wholeof the dramatist's stock in trade could be more simple, and thearchitect's sense of rhythm could once more dare to manifest itself inthe general proportions of the edifice; for there was no more need of"the deliberate confusion and involved variety of tyles, whereby theordinary playwright strove in the interests of his work to producethat feeling of wonder and thrilling suspense which he ultimatelyenhanced to one of delighted amazement. The impression of idealdistance and height was no more to be induced by means of tricks andartifices. Language withdrew itself from the length and breadth ofrhetoric into the strong confines of the speech of the feelings, andalthough the actor spoke much less about all he did and felt in theperformance, his innermost sentiments, which the ordinary playwrighthad hitherto ignored for fear of being undramatic, was now able todrive the spectators to passionate sympathy, while the accompanyinglanguage of gestures could be restricted to the most delicatemodulations. Now, when passions are rendered in song, they requirerather more time than when conveyed by speech; music prolongs, so tospeak, the duration of the feeling, from which it follows, as a rule, that the actor who is also a singer must overcome the extremelyunplastic animation from which spoken drama suffers. He feels himselfincited all the more to a certain nobility of bearing, because musicenvelopes his feelings in a purer atmosphere, and thus brings themcloser to beauty. 

The extraordinary tasks which Wagner set his actors and singers willprovoke rivalry between them for ages to come, in the personificationof each of his heroes with the greatest possible amount of clearness, perfection, and fidelity, according to that perfect incorporationalready typified by the music of drama. Following this leader, the eyeof the plastic artist will ultimately behold the marvels of anothervisible world, which, previous to him, was seen for the first timeonly by the creator of such works as the Ring of the Nibelung --thatcreator of highest rank, who, like AEschylus, points the way to acoming art. Must not jealousy awaken the greatest talent, if theplastic artist ever compares the effect of his productions with thatof Wagnerian music, in which there is so much pure and sunny happinessthat he who hears it feels as though all previous music had been butan alien, faltering, and constrained language; as though in the pastit had been but a thing to sport with in the presence of those whowere not deserving of serious treatment, or a thing with which totrain and instruct those who were not even deserving of play? In thecase of this earlier kind of music, the joy we always experience whilelistening to Wagner's compositions is ours only for a short space oftime, and it would then seem as though it were overtaken by certainrare moments of forgetfulness, during which it appears to be communingwith its inner self and directing its eyes upwards, like Raphael'sCecilia, away from the listeners and from all those who demanddistraction, happiness, or instruction from it. 

In general it may be said of Wagner the Musician, that he endowedeverything in nature which hitherto had had no wish to speak with thepower of speech: he refuses to admit that anything must be dumb, and, resorting to the dawn, the forest, the mist, the cliffs, the hills, the thrill of night and the moonlight, he observes a desire common tothem all--they too wish to sing their own melody. If the philosophersays it is will that struggles for existence in animate and inanimatenature, the musician adds: And this will wherever it manifests itself, yearns for a melodious existence. 

Before Wagner's time, music for the most part moved in narrow limits:it concerned itself with the permanent states of man, or with what theGreeks call ethos. And only with Beethoven did it begin to find thelanguage of pathos, of passionate will, and of the dramaticoccurrences in the souls of men. Formerly, what people desired was tointerpret a mood, a stolid, merry, reverential, or penitential stateof mind, by means of music; the object was, by means of a certainstriking uniformity of treatment and the prolonged duration of thisuniformity, to compel the listener to grasp the meaning of the musicand to impose its mood upon him. To all such interpretations of moodor atmosphere, distinct and particular forms of treatment werenecessary: others were established by convention. The question oflength was left to the discretion of the musician, whose aim was notonly to put the listener into a certain mood, but also to avoidrendering that mood monotonous by unduly protracting it. A furtherstage was reached when the interpretations of contrasted moods weremade to follow one upon the other, and the charm of light and shadewas discovered; and yet another step was made when the same piece ofmusic was allowed to contain a contrast of the ethos--for instance, the contest between a male and a female theme. All these, however, arecrude and primitive stages in the development of music. The fear ofpassion suggested the first rule, and the fear of monotony the second;all depth of feeling and any excess thereof were regarded as"unethical. " Once, however, the art of the ethos had repeatedly beenmade to ring all the changes on the moods and situations whichconvention had decreed as suitable, despite the most astoundingresourcefulness on the part of its masters, its powers were exhausted. Beethoven was the first to make music speak a new language--till thenforbidden--the language of passion; but as his art was based upon thelaws and conventions of the ETHOS, and had to attempt to justifyitself in regard to them, his artistic development was beset withpeculiar difficulties and obscurities. An inner dramatic factor--andevery passion pursues a dramatic course--struggled to obtain a newform, but the traditional scheme of "mood music" stood in its way, andprotested--almost after the manner in which morality opposesinnovations and immorality. It almost seemed, therefore, as ifBeethoven had set himself the contradictory task of expressing pathosin the terms of the ethos. This view does not, however, apply toBeethoven's latest and greatest works; for he really did succeed indiscovering a novel method of expressing the grand and vaulting archof passion. He merely selected certain portions of its curve; impartedthese with the utmost clearness to his listeners, and then left it tothem to divine its whole span. Viewed superficially, the new formseemed rather like an aggregation of several musical compositions, ofwhich every one appeared to represent a sustained situation, but wasin reality but a momentary stage in the dramatic course of a passion. The listener might think that he was hearing the old "mood" music overagain, except that he failed to grasp the relation of the variousparts to one another, and these no longer conformed with the canon ofthe law. Even among minor musicians, there flourished a certaincontempt for the rule which enjoined harmony in the generalconstruction of a composition and the sequence of the parts in theirworks still remained arbitrary. Then, owing to a misunderstanding, thediscovery of the majestic treatment of passion led back to the use ofthe single movement with an optional setting, and the tension betweenthe parts thus ceased completely. That is why the symphony, asBeethoven understood it, is such a wonderfully obscure production, more especially when, here and there, it makes faltering attempts atrendering Beethoven's pathos. The means ill befit the intention, andthe intention is, on the whole, not sufficiently clear to thelistener, because it was never really clear, even in the mind of thecomposer. But the very injunction that something definite must beimparted, and that this must be done as distinctly as possible, becomes ever more and more essential, the higher, more difficult, andmore exacting the class of work happens to be. 

That is why all Wagner's efforts were concentrated upon the one objectof discovering those means which best served the purpose ofdistinctness, and to this end it was above all necessary for him toemancipate himself from all the prejudices and claims of the old"mood" music, and to give his compositions--the musicalinterpretations of feelings and passion--a perfectly unequivocal modeof expression. If we now turn to what he has achieved, we see that hisservices to music are practically equal in rank to those which thatsculptor-inventor rendered to sculpture who introduced "sculpture inthe round. " All previous music seems stiff and uncertain when comparedwith Wagner's, just as though it were ashamed and did not wish to beinspected from all sides. With the most consummate skill andprecision, Wagner avails himself of every degree and colour in therealm of feeling; without the slightest hesitation or fear of itsescaping him, he seizes upon the most delicate, rarest, and mildestemotion, and holds it fast, as though it had hardened at his touch, despite the fact that it may seem like the frailest butterfly to everyone else. His music is never vague or dreamy; everything that isallowed to speak through it, whether it be of man or of nature, has astrictly individual passion; storm and fire acquire the ruling powerof a personal will in his hands. Over all the clamouring charactersand the clash of their passions, over the whole torrent of contrasts, an almighty and symphonic understanding hovers with perfect serenity, and continually produces concord out of war. Taken as a whole, Wagner's music is a reflex of the world as it was understood by thegreat Ephesian poet--that is to say, a harmony resulting from strife, as the union of justice and enmity. I admire the ability which coulddescribe the grand line of universal passion out of a confusion ofpassions which all seem to be striking out in different directions:the fact that this was a possible achievement I find demonstrated inevery individual act of a Wagnerian drama, which describes theindividual history of various characters side by side with a generalhistory of the whole company. Even at the very beginning we know weare watching a host of cross currents dominated by one great violentstream; and though at first this stream moves unsteadily over hiddenreefs, and the torrent seems to be torn asunder as if it weretravelling towards different points, gradually we perceive the centraland general movement growing stronger and more rapid, the convulsivefury of the contending waters is converted into one broad, steady, andterrible flow in the direction of an unknown goal; and suddenly, atthe end, the whole flood in all its breadth plunges into the depths, rejoicing demoniacally over the abyss and all its uproar. Wagner isnever more himself than when he is overwhelmed with difficulties andcan exercise power on a large scale with all the joy of a lawgiver. Tobring restless and contending masses into simple rhythmic movement, and to exercise one will over a bewildering host of claims anddesires--these are the tasks for which he feels he was born, and inthe performance of which he finds freedom. And he never loses hisbreath withal, nor does he ever reach his goal panting. He strove justas persistently to impose the severest laws upon himself as to lightenthe burden of others in this respect. Life and art weigh heavily uponhim when he cannot play wit their most difficult questions. If oneconsiders the relation between the melody of song and that of speech, one will perceive how he sought to adopt as his natural model thepitch, strength, and tempo of the passionate man's voice in order totransform it into art; and if one further considers the task ofintroducing this singing passion into the general symphonic order ofmusic, one gets some idea of the stupendous difficulties he had toovercome. In this behalf, his inventiveness in small things as ingreat, his omniscience and industry are such, that at the sight of oneof Wagner's scores one is almost led to believe that no real work oreffort had ever existed before his time. It seems almost as if he toocould have said, in regard to the hardships of art, that the realvirtue of the dramatist lies in self-renunciation. But he wouldprobably have added, There is but one kind of hardship-- that of theartist who is not yet free: virtue and goodness are trivialaccomplishments. 

Viewing him generally as an artist, and calling to mind a more famoustype, we see that Wagner is not at all unlike Demosthenes: in him alsowe have the terrible earnestness of purpose and that strong prehensilemind which always obtains a complete grasp of a thing; in him, too, wehave the hand's quick clutch and the grip as of iron. LikeDemosthenes, he conceals his art or compels one to forget it by theperemptory way he calls attention to the subject he treats; and yet, like his great predecessor, he is the last and greatest of a wholeline of artist-minds, and therefore has more to conceal than hisforerunners: his art acts like nature, like nature recovered andrestored. Unlike all previous musicians, there is nothing bombasticabout him; for the former did not mind playing at times with theirart, and making an exhibition of their virtuosity. One associatesWagner's art neither with interest nor with diversion, nor with Wagnerhimself and art in general. All one is conscious of is of the greatnecessity of it all. No one will ever be able to appreciate whatseverity evenness of will, and self-control the artist required duringhis development, in order, at his zenith, to be able to do thenecessary thing joyfully and freely. Let it suffice if we canappreciate how, in some respects, his music, with a certain crueltytowards itself, determines to subserve the course of the drama, whichis as unrelenting as fate, whereas in reality his art was everthirsting for a free ramble in the open and over the wilderness. 

 X. An artist who has this empire over himself subjugates all otherartists, even though he may not particularly desire to do so. For himalone there lies no danger or stemming-force in those he hassubjugated--his friends and his adherents; whereas the weaker natureswho learn to rely on their friends pay for this reliance by forfeitingtheir independence. It is very wonderful to observe how carefully, throughout his life, Wagner avoided anything in the nature of headinga party, notwithstanding the fact that at the close of every phase inhis career a circle of adherents formed, presumably with the view ofholding him fast to his latest development He always succeeded, however, in wringing himself free from them, and never allowed himselfto be bound; for not only was the ground he covered too vast for onealone to keep abreast of him with any ease, but his way was soexceptionally steep that the most devoted would have lost his breath. At almost every stage in Wagner's progress his friends would haveliked to preach to him, and his enemies would fain have done sotoo--but for other reasons. Had the purity of his artist's nature beenone degree less decided than it was, he would have attained muchearlier than he actually did to the leading position in the artisticand musical world of his time. True, he has reached this now, but in amuch higher sense, seeing that every performance to be witnessed inany department of art makes its obeisance, so to speak, before thejudgment-stool of his genius and of his artistic temperament. He hasovercome the most refractory of his contemporaries; there is not onegifted musician among them but in his innermost heart would willinglylisten to him, and find Wagner's compositions more worth listening tothan his own and all other musical productions taken together. Manywho wish, by hook or by crook, to make their mark, even wrestle withWagner's secret charm, and unconsciously throw in their lot with theolder masters, preferring to ascribe their "independence" to Schubertor Handel rather than to Wagner. But in vain! Thanks to their veryefforts in contending against the dictates of their own consciences, they become ever meaner and smaller artists; they ruin their ownnatures by forcing themselves to tolerate undesirable allies andfriends And in spite of all these sacrifices, they still find perhapsin their dreams, that their ear turns attentively to Wagner. Theseadversaries are to be pitied: they imagine they lose a great deal whenthey lose themselves, but here they are mistaken. 

Albeit it is obviously all one to Wagner whether musicians compose inhis style, or whether they compose at all, he even does his utmost todissipate the belief that a school of composers should now necessarilyfollow in his wake; though, in so far as he exercises a directinfluence upon musicians, he does indeed try to instruct themconcerning the art of grand execution. In his opinion, the evolutionof art seems to have reached that stage when the honest endeavour tobecome an able and masterly exponent or interpreter is ever so muchmore worth talking about than the longing to be a creator at allcosts. For, at the present stage of art, universal creating has thisfatal result, that inasmuch as it encourages a much larger output, ittends to exhaust the means and artifices of genius by everyday use, and thus to reduce the real grandeur of its effect. Even that which isgood in art is superfluous and detrimental when it proceeds from theimitation of what is best. Wagnerian ends and means are of one piece:to perceive this, all that is required is honesty in art matters, andit would be dishonest to adopt his means in order to apply them toother and less significant ends. 

If, therefore, Wagner declines to live on amid a multitude of creativemusicians, he is only the more desirous of imposing upon all men oftalent the new duty of joining him in seeking the law of style fordramatic performances. He deeply feels the need of establishing atraditional style for his art, by means of which his work may continueto live from one age to another in a pure form, until it reaches thatfuture which its creator ordained for it. 

Wagner is impelled by an undaunted longing to make known everythingrelating to that foundation of a style, mentioned above, and, accordingly, everything relating to the continuance of his art. Tomake his work--as Schopenhauer would say-- a sacred depository and thereal fruit of his life, as well as the inheritance of mankind, and tostore it for the benefit of a posterity better able to appreciateit, --these were the supreme objects of his life, and for these he borethat crown of thorns which, one day, will shoot forth leaves of bay. Like the insect which, in its last form, concentrates all its energiesupon the one object of finding a safe depository for its eggs and ofensuring the future welfare of its posthumous brood, --then only to diecontent, so Wagner strove with equal determination to find a place ofsecurity for his works. 

This subject, which took precedence of all others with him, constantlyincited him to new discoveries; and these he sought ever more and moreat the spring of his demoniacal gift of communicability, the moredistinctly he saw himself in conflict with an age that was bothperverse and unwilling to lend him its ear. Gradually however, eventhis same age began to mark his indefatigable efforts, to respond tohis subtle advances, and to turn its ear to him. Whenever a small or agreat opportunity arose, however far away, which suggested to Wagner ameans wherewith to explain his thoughts, he availed himself of it: hethought his thoughts anew into every fresh set of circumstances, andwould make them speak out of the most paltry bodily form. Whenever asoul only half capable of comprehending him opened itself to him, henever failed to implant his seed in it. He saw hope in things whichcaused the average dispassionate observer merely to shrug hisshoulders; and he erred again and again, only so as to be able tocarry his point against that same observer. Just as the sage, inreality, mixes with living men only for the purpose of increasing hisstore of knowledge, so the artist would almost seem to be unable toassociate with his contemporaries at all, unless they be such as canhelp him towards making his work eternal. He cannot be loved otherwisethan with the love of this eternity, and thus he is conscious only ofone kind of hatred directed at him, the hatred which would demolishthe bridges bearing his art into the future. The pupils Wagnereducated for his own purpose, the individual musicians and actors whomhe advised and whose ear he corrected and improved, the small andlarge orchestras he led, the towns which witnessed him earnestlyfulfilling the duties of ws calling, the princes and ladies who halfboastfully and half lovingly participated in the framing of his plans, the various European countries to which he temporarily belonged as thejudge and evil conscience of their arts, --everything gradually becamethe echo of his thought and of his indefatigable efforts to attain tofruitfulness in the future. Although this echo often sounded sodiscordant as to confuse him, still the tremendous power of his voicerepeatedly crying out into the world must in the end call forthreverberations, and it will soon be impossible to be deaf to him or tomisunderstand him. It is this reflected sound which even now causesthe art-institutions of modern men to shake: every time the breath ofhis spirit blew into these coverts, all that was overripe or witheredfell to the ground; but the general increase of scepticism in alldirections speaks more eloquently than all this trembling. Nobody anylonger dares to predict where Wagner's influence may not unexpectedlybreak out. He is quite unable to divorce the salvation of art from anyother salvation or damnation: wherever modern life conceals a danger, he, with the discriminating eye of mistrust, perceives a dangerthreatening art. In his imagination he pulls the edifice of moderncivilisation to pieces, and allows nothing rotten, no unsoundtimber-work to escape: if in the process he should happen to encounterweather-tight walls or anything like solid foundations, he immediatelycasts about for means wherewith he can convert them into bulwarks andshelters for his art. He lives like a fugitive, whose will is not topreserve his own life, but to keep a secret-- like an unhappy womanwho does not wish to save her own soul, but that of the child lying inher lap: in short, he lives like Sieglinde, "for the sake of love. "

For life must indeed be full of pain and shame to one who can findneither rest nor shelter in this world, and who must neverthelessappeal to it, exact things from it, contemn it, and still be unable todispense with the thing contemned, --this really constitutes thewretchedness of the artist of the future, who, unlike the philosopher, cannot prosecute his work alone in the seclusion of a study, but whorequires human souls as messengers to this future, public institutionsas a guarantee of it, and, as it were, bridges between now andhereafter. His art may not, like the philosopher's, be put aboard theboat of written documents: art needs capable men, not letters andnotes, to transmit it. Over whole periods in Wagner's life rings amurmur of distress--his distress at not being able to meet with thesecapable interpreters before whom he longed to execute examples of hiswork, instead of being confined to written symbols; before whom heyearned to practise his art, instead of showing a pallid reflection ofit to those who read books, and who, generally speaking, therefore arenot artists. 

In Wagner the man of letters we see the struggle of a brave fighter, whose right hand has, as it were, been lopped off, and who hascontinued the contest with his left. In his writings he is always thesufferer, because a temporary and insuperable destiny deprives him ofhis own and the correct way of conveying his thoughts--that is to say, in the form of apocalyptic and triumphant examples. His writingscontain nothing canonical or severe: the canons are to be found in hisworks as a whole. Their literary side represents his attempts tounderstand the instinct which urged him to create his works and to geta glimpse of himself through them. If he succeeded in transforming hisinstincts into terms of knowledge, it was always with the hope thatthe reverse process might take place in the souls of his readers--itwas with this intention that he wrote. Should it ultimately be provedthat, in so doing, Wagner attempted the impossible, he would stillonly share the lot of all those who have meditated deeply on art; andeven so he would be ahead of most of them in this, namely, that thestrongest instinct for all arts harboured in him. I know of no writtenaesthetics that give more light than those of Wagner; all that canpossibly be learnt concerning the origin of a work of art is to befound in them. He is one of the very great, who appeared amongst us awitness, and who is continually improving his testimony and making itever clearer and freer; even when he stumbles as a scientist, sparksrise from the ground. Such tracts as "Beethoven, " "Concerning the Artof Conducting, " "Concerning Actors and Singers, " "State and Religion, "silence all contradiction, and, like sacred reliquaries, impose uponall who approach them a calm, earnest, and reverential regard. Others, more particularly the earlier ones, including "Opera and Drama, "excite and agitate one; their rhythm is so uneven that, as prose theyare bewildering. Their dialectics is constantly interrupted, and theircourse is more retarded than accelerated by outbursts of feeling; acertain reluctance on the part of the writer seems to hang over themlike a pall, just as though the artist were somewhat ashamed ofspeculative discussions. What the reader who is only imperfectlyinitiated will probably find most oppressive is the general tone ofauthoritative dignity which is peculiar to Wagner, and which is verydifficult to describe: it always strikes me as though Wagner werecontinually addressing enemies; for the style of all these tracts moreresembles that of the spoken than of the written language, hence theywill seem much more intelligible if heard read aloud, in the presenceof his enemies, with whom he cannot be on familiar terms, and towardswhom he must therefore show some reserve and aloofness, The entrancingpassion of his feelings, however, constantly pierces this intentionaldisguise, and then the stilted and heavy periods, swollen withaccessary words, vanish, and his pen dashes off sentences, and evenwhole pages, which belong to the best in German prose. But evenadmitting that while he wrote such passages he was addressing friends, and that the shadow of his enemies had been removed for a while, allthe friends and enemies that Wagner, as a man of letters, has, possessone factor in common, which differentiates them fundamentally from the"people" for whom he worked as an artist. Owing to the refining andfruitless nature of their education, they are quite devoid of theessential traits of the national character, and he who would appeal tothem must speak in a way which is not of the people--that is to say, after the manner of our best prose-writers and Wagner himself; thoughthat he did violence to himself in writing thus is evident. But thestrength of that almost maternal instinct of prudence in him, which isready to make any sacrifice, rather tends to reinstall him among thescholars and men of learning, to whom as a creator he always longed tobid farewell. He submits to the language of culture and all the lawsgoverning its use, though he was the first to recognise its profoundinsufficiency as a means of communication. 

For if there is anything that distinguishes his art from every otherart of modern times, it is that it no longer speaks the language ofany particular caste, and refuses to admit the distinctions "literate"and "illiterate. " It thus stands as a contrast to every culture of theRenaissance, which to this day still bathes us modern men in its lightand shade. Inasmuch as Wagner's art bears us, from time to time, beyond itself, we are enabled to get a general view of its uniformcharacter: we see Goethe and Leopardi as the last great stragglers ofthe Italian philologist-poets, Faust as the incarnation of a mostunpopular problem, in the form of a man of theory thirsting for life;even Goethe's song is an imitation of the song of the people ratherthan a standard set before them to which they are expected to attain, and the poet knew very well how truly he spoke when he seriouslyassured his adherents: "My compositions cannot become popular; he whohopes and strives to make them so is mistaken. "

That an art could arise which would be so clear and warm as to floodthe base and the poor in spirit with its light, as well as to melt thehaughtiness of the learned--such a phenomenon had to be experiencedthough it could not be guessed. But even in the mind of him whoexperiences it to-day it must upset all preconceived notionsconcerning education and culture; to such an one the veil will seem tohave been rent in twain that conceals a future in which no highestgood or highest joys exist that are not the common property of all. The odium attaching to the word "common" will then be abolished. 

If presentiment venture thus into the remote future, the discerningeye of all will recognise the dreadful social insanity of our presentage, and will no longer blind itself to the dangers besetting an artwhich seems to have roots only in the remote and distant future, andwhich allows its burgeoning branches to spread before our gaze when ithas not yet revealed the ground from which it draws its sap. How canwe protect this homeless art through the ages until that remote futureis reached? How can we so dam the flood of a revolution seeminglyinevitable everywhere, that the blessed prospect and guarantee of abetter future--of a freer human life--shall not also be washed awaywith all that is destined to perish and deserves to perish?

He who asks himself this question shares Wagner's care: he will feelhimself impelled with Wagner to seek those established powers thathave the goodwill to protect the noblest passions of man during theperiod of earthquakes and upheavals. In this sense alone Wagnerquestions the learned through his writings, whether they intendstoring his legacy to them--the precious Ring of his art--among theirother treasures. And even the wonderful confidence which he reposes inthe German mind and the aims of German politics seems to me to arisefrom the fact that he grants the people of the Reformation thatstrength, mildness, and bravery which is necessary in order to divert"the torrent of revolution into the tranquil river-bed of a calmlyflowing stream of humanity": and I could almost believe that this andonly this is what he meant to express by means of the symbol of hisImperial march. 

As a rule, though, the generous impulses of the creative artist andthe extent of his philanthropy are too great for his gaze to beconfined within the limits of a single nation. His thoughts, likethose of every good and great German, are more than German, and thelanguage of his art does not appeal to particular races but to mankindin general. 

But to the men of the future. 

This is the belief that is proper to him; this is his torment and hisdistinction. No artist, of what past soever, has yet received such aremarkable portion of genius; no one, save him, has ever been obligedto mix this bitterest of ingredients with the drink of nectar to whichenthusiasm helped him. It is not as one might expect, themisunderstood and mishandled artist, the fugitive of his age, whoadopted this faith in self-defence: success or failure at the hands ofhis contemporaries was unable either to create or to destroy itWhether it glorified or reviled him, he did not belong to thisgeneration: that was the conclusion to which his instincts led him. And the possibility of any generation's ever belonging to him issomething which he who disbelieves in Wagner can never be made toadmit. But even this unbeliever may at least ask, what kind ofgeneration it will be in which Wagner will recognise his "people, " andin which he will see the type of all those who suffer a commondistress, and who wish to escape from it by means of an art common tothem all. Schiller was certainly more hopeful and sanguine; he did notask what a future must be like if the instinct of the artist thatpredicts it prove true; his command to every artist was rather--

Soar aloft in daring flight Out of sight of thine own years! In thymirror, gleaming bright, Glimpse of distant dawn appears. 

 XI. May blessed reason preserve us from ever thinking that mankind will atany time discover a final and ideal order of things, and thathappiness will then and ever after beam down upon us uniformly, likethe rays of the sun in the tropics. Wagner has nothing to do with sucha hope; he is no Utopian. If he was unable to dispense with the beliefin a future, it only meant that he observed certain properties inmodern men which he did not hold to be essential to their nature, andwhich did not seem to him to form any necessary part of theirconstitution; in fact, which were changeable and transient; and thatprecisely owing to these properties art would find no home among them, and he himself had to be the precursor and prophet of another epoch. No golden age, no cloudless sky will fall to the portion of thosefuture generations, which his instinct led him to expect, and whoseapproximate characteristics may be gleaned from the cryptic charactersof his art, in so far as it is possible to draw conclusions concerningthe nature of any pain from the kind of relief it seeks. Nor willsuperhuman goodness and justice stretch like an everlasting rainbowover this future land. Belike this coming generation will, on thewhole, seem more evil than the present one--for in good as in evil itwill be more straightforward. It is even possible, if its soul wereever able to speak out in full and unembarrassed tones, that it mightconvulse and terrify us, as though the voice of some hithertoconcealed and evil spirit had suddenly cried out in our midst. Or howdo the following propositions strike our ears?--That passion is betterthan stocism or hypocrisy; that straightforwardness, even in evil, isbetter than losing oneself in trying to observe traditional morality;that the free man is just as able to be good as evil, but that theunemancipated man is a disgrace to nature, and has no share inheavenly or earthly bliss; finally, that all who wish to be free mustbecome so through themselves, and that freedom falls to nobody's lotas a gift from Heaven. However harsh and strange these propositionsmay sound, they are nevertheless reverberations from that futureworld, which is verily in need of art, and which expects genuinepleasure from its presence; they are the language ofnature--reinstated even in mankind; they stand for what I have alreadytermed correct feeling as opposed to the incorrect feeling that reignsto-day. 

But real relief or salvation exists only for nature not for that whichis contrary to nature or which arises out of incorrect feeling. Whenall that is unnatural becomes self-conscious, it desires but onething--nonentity; the natural thing, on the other hand, yearns to betransfigured through love: the former would fain not be, the latterwould fain be otherwise. Let him who has understood this recall, inthe stillness of his soul, the simple themes of Wagner's art, in orderto be able to ask himself whether it were nature or nature's oppositewhich sought by means of them to achieve the aims just described. 

The desperate vagabond finds deliverance from his distress in thecompassionate love of a woman who would rather die than be unfaithfulto him: the theme of the Flying Dutchman. The sweet-heart, renouncingall personal happiness, owing to a divine transformation of Love intoCharity, becomes a saint, and saves the soul of her loved one: thetheme of Tannhauser. The sublimest and highest thing descends asuppliant among men, and will not be questioned whence it came; when, however, the fatal question is put, it sorrowfully returns to itshigher life: the theme of Lohengrin. The loving soul of a wife, andthe people besides, joyfully welcome the new benevolent genius, although the retainers of tradition and custom reject and revile him:the theme of the Meistersingers. Of two lovers, that do not know theyare loved, who believe rather that they are deeply wounded andcontemned, each demands of the other that he or she should drink a cupof deadly poison, to all intents and purposes as an expiation of theinsult; in reality, however, as the result of an impulse which neitherof them understands: through death they wish to escape all possibilityof separation or deceit. The supposed approach of death loosens theirfettered souls and allows them a short moment of thrilling happiness, just as though they had actually escaped from the present, fromillusions and from life: the theme of Tristan and Isolde. 

In the Ring of the Nibelung the tragic hero is a god whose heartyearns for power, and who, since he travels along all roads in searchof it, finally binds himself to too many undertakings, loses hisfreedom, and is ultimately cursed by the curse inseparable from power. He becomes aware of his loss of freedom owing to the fact that he nolonger has the means to take possession of the golden Ring--thatsymbol of all earthly power, and also of the greatest dangers tohimself as long as it lies in the hands of his enemies. The fear ofthe end and the twilight of all gods overcomes him, as also thedespair at being able only to await the end without opposing it. He isin need of the free and fearless man who, without his advice orassistance--even in a struggle against gods--can accomplishsingle-handed what is denied to the powers of a god. He fails to seehim, and just as a new hope finds shape within him, he must obey theconditions to which he is bound: with his own hand he must murder thething he most loves, and purest pity must be punished by his sorrow. Then he begins to loathe power, which bears evil and bondage in itslap; his will is broken, and he himself begins to hanker for the endthat threatens him from afar off. At this juncture something happenswhich had long been the subject of his most ardent desire: the freeand fearless man appears, he rises in opposition to everythingaccepted and established, his parents atone for having been united bya tie which was antagonistic to the order of nature and usage; theyperish, but Siegfried survives. And at the sight of his magnificentdevelopment and bloom, the loathing leaves otan's soul, and he followsthe hero's history with the eye of fatherly love and anxiety. How heforges his sword, kills the dragon, gets possession of the ring, escapes the craftiest ruse, awakens Brunhilda; how the curse abidingin the ring gradually overtakes him; how, faithful in faithfulness, hewounds the thing he most loves, out of love; becomes enveloped in theshadow and cloud of guilt, and, rising out of it more brilliantly thanthe sun, ultimately goes down, firing the whole heavens with hisburning glow and purging the world of the curse, --all this is seen bythe god whose sovereign spear was broken in the contest with thefreest man, and who lost his power through him, rejoicing greatly overhis own defeat: full of sympathy for the triumph and pain of hisvictor, his eye burning with aching joy looks back upon the lastevents; he has become free through love, free from himself. 

And now ask yourselves, ye generation of to-day, Was all this composedfor you? Have ye the courage to point up to the stars of the whole ofthis heavenly dome of beauty and goodness and to say, This is ourlife, that Wagner has transferred to a place beneath the stars?

Where are the men among you who are able to interpret the divine imageof Wotan in the light of their own lives, and who can become evergreater while, like him, ye retreat? Who among you would renouncepower, knowing and having learned that power is evil? Where are theywho like Brunhilda abandon their knowledge to love, and finally robtheir lives of the highest wisdom, "afflicted love, deepest sorrow, opened my eyes"? and where are the free and fearless, developing andblossoming in innocent egoism? and where are the Siegfrieds, amongyou?

He who questions thus and does so in vain, will find himself compelledto look around him for signs of the future; and should his eye, onreaching an unknown distance, espy just that "people" which his owngeneration can read out of the signs contained in Wagnerian art, hewill then also understand what Wagner will mean to thispeople--something that he cannot be to all of us, namely, not theprophet of the future, as perhaps he would fain appear to us, but theinterpreter and clarifier of the past.