of this Socratic culture: Optimism, deeming itself absolute! Well, we
must not be alarmed if the fruits of this optimism ripen,--if society,
leavened to the very lowest strata by this kind of culture, gradually
begins to tremble through wanton agitations and desires, if the belief
in the earthly happiness of all, if the belief in the possibility of
such a general intellectual culture is gradually transformed into the
threatening demand for such an Alexandrine earthly happiness, into
the conjuring of a Euripidean _deus ex machina._ Let us mark this
well: the Alexandrine culture requires a slave class, to be able to
exist permanently: but, in its optimistic view of life, it denies the
necessity of such a class, and consequently, when the effect of its
beautifully seductive and tranquillising utterances about the "dignity
of man" and the "dignity of labour" is spent, it gradually drifts
towards a dreadful destination. There is nothing more terrible than
a barbaric slave class, who have learned to regard their existence
as an injustice, and now prepare to take vengeance, not only for
themselves, but for all generations. In the face of such threatening
storms, who dares to appeal with confident spirit to our pale and
exhausted religions, which even in their foundations have degenerated
into scholastic religions?--so that myth, the necessary prerequisite
of every religion, is already paralysed everywhere, and even in this
domain the optimistic spirit--which we have just designated as the
annihilating germ of society--has attained the mastery.
While the evil slumbering in the heart of theoretical culture gradually
begins to disquiet modern man, and makes him anxiously ransack the
stores of his experience for means to avert the danger, though not
believing very much in these means; while he, therefore, begins to
divine the consequences his position involves: great, universally
gifted natures have contrived, with an incredible amount of thought, to
make use of the apparatus of science itself, in order to point out the
limits and the relativity of knowledge generally, and thus definitely
to deny the claim of science to universal validity and universal ends:
with which demonstration the illusory notion was for the first time
recognised as such, which pretends, with the aid of causality, to be
able to fathom the innermost essence of things. The extraordinary
courage and wisdom of _Kant_ and _Schopenhauer_ have succeeded in
gaining the most, difficult, victory, the victory over the optimism
hidden in the essence of logic, which optimism in turn is the basis of
our culture. While this optimism, resting on apparently unobjectionable
_æterna veritates,_ believed in the intelligibility and solvability of
all the riddles of the world, and treated space, time, and causality
as totally unconditioned laws of the most universal validity, Kant, on
the other hand, showed that these served in reality only to elevate the
mere phenomenon, the work of Mâyâ, to the sole and highest reality,
putting it in place of the innermost and true essence of things, thus
making the actual knowledge of this essence impossible, that is,
according to the expression of Schopenhauer, to lull the dreamer still
more soundly asleep (_Welt als Wille und Vorstellung,_ I. 498). With
this knowledge a culture is inaugurated which I venture to designate as
a tragic culture; the most important characteristic of which is that
wisdom takes the place of science as the highest end,--wisdom, which,
uninfluenced by the seductive distractions of the sciences, turns
with unmoved eye to the comprehensive view of the world, and seeks to
apprehend therein the eternal suffering as its own with sympathetic
feelings of love. Let us imagine a rising generation with this
undauntedness of vision, with this heroic desire for the prodigious,
let us imagine the bold step of these dragon-slayers, the proud and
daring spirit with which they turn their backs on all the effeminate
doctrines of optimism in order "to live resolutely" in the Whole and in
the Full: would it not be necessary for the tragic man of this culture,
with his self-discipline to earnestness and terror, to desire a new
art, the art of metaphysical comfort,--namely, tragedy, as the Hellena
belonging to him, and that he should exclaim with Faust:
Und sollt' ich nicht, sehnsüchtigster Gewalt,
In's Leben ziehn die einzigste Gestalt?[21]
But now that the Socratic culture has been shaken from two directions,
and is only able to hold the sceptre of its infallibility with
trembling hands,--once by the fear of its own conclusions which it at
length begins to surmise, and again, because it is no longer convinced
with its former naïve trust of the eternal validity of its foundation,
--it is a sad spectacle to behold how the dance of its thought always
rushes longingly on new forms, to embrace them, and then, shuddering,
lets them go of a sudden, as Mephistopheles does the seductive Lamiæ.
It is certainly the symptom of the "breach" which all are wont to speak
of as the primordial suffering of modern culture that the theoretical
man, alarmed and dissatisfied at his own conclusions, no longer dares
to entrust himself to the terrible ice-stream of existence: he runs
timidly up and down the bank. He no longer wants to have anything
entire, with all the natural cruelty of things, so thoroughly has he
been spoiled by his optimistic contemplation. Besides, he feels that
a culture built up on the principles of science must perish when it
begins to grow _illogical,_ that is, to avoid its own conclusions.
Our art reveals this universal trouble: in vain does one seek help by
imitating all the great productive periods and natures, in vain does
one accumulate the entire "world-literature" around modern man for
his comfort, in vain does one place one's self in the midst of the
art-styles and artists of all ages, so that one may give names to them
as Adam did to the beasts: one still continues the eternal hungerer,
the "critic" without joy and energy, the Alexandrine man, who is in
the main a librarian and corrector of proofs, and who, pitiable wretch
goes blind from the dust of books and printers' errors.
[21] Cf. Introduction, p. 14.
19.
We cannot designate the intrinsic substance of Socratic culture more
distinctly than by calling it _the culture of the opera_: for it is in
this department that culture has expressed itself with special naïveté
concerning its aims and perceptions, which is sufficiently surprising
when we compare the genesis of the opera and the facts of operatic
development with the eternal truths of the Apollonian and Dionysian.
I call to mind first of all the origin of the _stilo rappresentativo_
and the recitative. Is it credible that this thoroughly externalised
operatic music, incapable of devotion, could be received and cherished
with enthusiastic favour, as a re-birth, as it were, of all true music,
by the very age in which the ineffably sublime and sacred music of
Palestrina had originated? And who, on the other hand, would think of
making only the diversion-craving luxuriousness of those Florentine
circles and the vanity of their dramatic singers responsible for the
love of the opera which spread with such rapidity? That in the same
age, even among the same people, this passion for a half-musical
mode of speech should awaken alongside of the vaulted structure
of Palestrine harmonies which the entire Christian Middle Age had
been building up, I can explain to myself only by a co-operating
_extra-artistic tendency_ in the essence of the recitative.
The listener, who insists on distinctly hearing the words under the
music, has his wishes met by the singer in that he speaks rather than
sings, and intensifies the pathetic expression of the words in this
half-song: by this intensification of the pathos he facilitates the
understanding of the words and surmounts the remaining half of the
music. The specific danger which now threatens him is that in some
unguarded moment he may give undue importance to music, which would
forthwith result in the destruction of the pathos of the speech and
the distinctness of the words: while, on the other hand, he always
feels himself impelled to musical delivery and to virtuose exhibition
of vocal talent. Here the "poet" comes to his aid, who knows how to
provide him with abundant opportunities for lyrical interjections,
repetitions of words and sentences, etc.,--at which places the singer,
now in the purely musical element, can rest himself without minding the
words. This alternation of emotionally impressive, yet only half-sung
speech and wholly sung interjections, which is characteristic of the
_stilo rappresentativo,_ this rapidly changing endeavour to operate
now on the conceptional and representative faculty of the hearer, now
on his musical sense, is something so thoroughly unnatural and withal
so intrinsically contradictory both to the Apollonian and Dionysian
artistic impulses, that one has to infer an origin of the recitative
foreign to all artistic instincts. The recitative must be defined,
according to this description, as the combination of epic and lyric
delivery, not indeed as an intrinsically stable combination which
could not be attained in the case of such totally disparate elements,
but an entirely superficial mosaic conglutination, such as is totally
unprecedented in the domain of nature and experience. _But this was
not the opinion of the inventors of the recitative:_ they themselves,
and their age with them, believed rather that the mystery of antique
music had been solved by this _stilo rappresentativo,_ in which, as
they thought, the only explanation of the enormous influence of an
Orpheus, an Amphion, and even of Greek tragedy was to be found. The new
style was regarded by them as the re-awakening of the most effective
music, the Old Greek music: indeed, with the universal and popular
conception of the Homeric world _as the primitive world,_ they could
abandon themselves to the dream of having descended once more into the
paradisiac beginnings of mankind, wherein music also must needs have
had the unsurpassed purity, power, and innocence of which the poets
could give such touching accounts in their pastoral plays. Here we see
into the internal process of development of this thoroughly modern
variety of art, the opera: a powerful need here acquires an art, but
it is a need of an unæsthetic kind: the yearning for the idyll, the
belief in the prehistoric existence of the artistic, good man. The
recitative was regarded as the rediscovered language of this primitive
man; the opera as the recovered land of this idyllically or heroically
good creature, who in every action follows at the same time a natural
artistic impulse, who sings a little along with all he has to say, in
order to sing immediately with full voice on the slightest emotional
excitement. It is now a matter of indifference to us that the humanists
of those days combated the old ecclesiastical representation of man
as naturally corrupt and lost, with this new-created picture of the
paradisiac artist: so that opera may be understood as the oppositional
dogma of the good man, whereby however a solace was at the same time
found for the pessimism to which precisely the seriously-disposed
men of that time were most strongly incited, owing to the frightful
uncertainty of all conditions of life. It is enough to have perceived
that the intrinsic charm, and therefore the genesis, of this new form
of art lies in the gratification of an altogether unæsthetic need, in
the optimistic glorification of man as such, in the conception of the
primitive man as the man naturally good and artistic: a principle of
the opera which has gradually changed into a threatening and terrible
_demand,_ which, in face of the socialistic movements of the present
time, we can no longer ignore. The "good primitive man" wants his
rights: what paradisiac prospects!
I here place by way of parallel still another equally obvious
confirmation of my view that opera is built up on the same principles
as our Alexandrine culture. Opera is the birth of the theoretical man,
of the critical layman, not of the artist: one of the most surprising
facts in the whole history of art. It was the demand of thoroughly
unmusical hearers that the words must above all be understood, so
that according to them a re-birth of music is only to be expected
when some mode of singing has been discovered in which the text-word
lords over the counterpoint as the master over the servant. For the
words, it is argued, are as much nobler than the accompanying harmonic
system as the soul is nobler than the body. It was in accordance with
the laically unmusical crudeness of these views that the combination
of music, picture and expression was effected in the beginnings of
the opera: in the spirit of this æsthetics the first experiments
were also made in the leading laic circles of Florence by the poets
and singers patronised there. The man incapable of art creates for
himself a species of art precisely because he is the inartistic man
as such. Because he does not divine the Dionysian depth of music, he
changes his musical taste into appreciation of the understandable
word-and-tone-rhetoric of the passions in the _stilo rappresentativo,_
and into the voluptuousness of the arts of song; because he is unable
to behold a vision, he forces the machinist and the decorative artist
into his service; because he cannot apprehend the true nature of the
artist, he conjures up the "artistic primitive man" to suit his taste,
that is, the man who sings and recites verses under the influence
of passion. He dreams himself into a time when passion suffices to
generate songs and poems: as if emotion had ever been able to create
anything artistic. The postulate of the opera is a false belief
concerning the artistic process, in fact, the idyllic belief that every
sentient man is an artist. In the sense of this belief, opera is the
expression of the taste of the laity in art, who dictate their laws
with the cheerful optimism of the theorist.
Should we desire to unite in one the two conceptions just set forth
as influential in the origin of opera, it would only remain for us to
speak of an _idyllic tendency of the opera_: in which connection we
may avail ourselves exclusively of the phraseology and illustration of
Schiller.[22] "Nature and the ideal," he says, "are either objects of
grief, when the former is represented as lost, the latter unattained;
or both are objects of joy, in that they are represented as real.
The first case furnishes the elegy in its narrower signification,
the second the idyll in its widest sense." Here we must at once call
attention to the common characteristic of these two conceptions in
operatic genesis, namely, that in them the ideal is not regarded as
unattained or nature as lost Agreeably to this sentiment, there was
a primitive age of man when he lay close to the heart of nature,
and, owing to this naturalness, had attained the ideal of mankind in
a paradisiac goodness and artist-organisation: from which perfect
primitive man all of us were supposed to be descended; whose faithful
copy we were in fact still said to be: only we had to cast off some
few things in order to recognise ourselves once more as this primitive
man, on the strength of a voluntary renunciation of superfluous
learnedness, of super-abundant culture. It was to such a concord of
nature and the ideal, to an idyllic reality, that the cultured man
of the Renaissance suffered himself to be led back by his operatic
imitation of Greek tragedy; he made use of this tragedy, as Dante made
use of Vergil, in order to be led up to the gates of paradise: while
from this point he went on without assistance and passed over from an
imitation of the highest form of Greek art to a "restoration of all
things," to an imitation of man's original art-world. What delightfully
naïve hopefulness of these daring endeavours, in the very heart of
theoretical culture!--solely to be explained by the comforting belief,
that "man-in-himself" is the eternally virtuous hero of the opera,
the eternally fluting or singing shepherd, who must always in the end
rediscover himself as such, if he has at any time really lost himself;
solely the fruit of the optimism, which here rises like a sweetishly
seductive column of vapour out of the depth of the Socratic conception
of the world.
The features of the opera therefore do not by any means exhibit the
elegiac sorrow of an eternal loss, but rather the cheerfulness of
eternal rediscovery, the indolent delight in an idyllic reality which
one can at least represent to one's self each moment as real: and in
so doing one will perhaps surmise some day that this supposed reality
is nothing but a fantastically silly dawdling, concerning which every
one, who could judge it by the terrible earnestness of true nature
and compare it with the actual primitive scenes of the beginnings of
mankind, would have to call out with loathing: Away with the phantom!
Nevertheless one would err if one thought it possible to frighten
away merely by a vigorous shout such a dawdling thing as the opera,
as if it were a spectre. He who would destroy the opera must join
issue with Alexandrine cheerfulness, which expresses itself so naïvely
therein concerning its favourite representation; of which in fact
it is the specific form of art. But what is to be expected for art
itself from the operation of a form of art, the beginnings of which
do not at all lie in the æsthetic province; which has rather stolen
over from a half-moral sphere into the artistic domain, and has been
able only now and then to delude us concerning this hybrid origin? By
what sap is this parasitic opera-concern nourished, if not by that
of true art? Must we not suppose that the highest and indeed the
truly serious task of art--to free the eye from its glance into the
horrors of night and to deliver the "subject" by the healing balm of
appearance from the spasms of volitional agitations--will degenerate
under the influence of its idyllic seductions and Alexandrine
adulation to an empty dissipating tendency, to pastime? What will
become of the eternal truths of the Dionysian and Apollonian in such
an amalgamation of styles as I have exhibited in the character of the
_stilo rappresentativo_? where music is regarded as the servant, the
text as the master, where music is compared with the body, the text
with the soul? where at best the highest aim will be the realisation
of a paraphrastic tone-painting, just as formerly in the New Attic
Dithyramb? where music is completely alienated from its true dignity
of being, the Dionysian mirror of the world, so that the only thing
left to it is, as a slave of phenomena, to imitate the formal character
thereof, and to excite an external pleasure in the play of lines and
proportions. On close observation, this fatal influence of the opera
on music is seen to coincide absolutely with the universal development
of modern music; the optimism lurking in the genesis of the opera and
in the essence of culture represented thereby, has, with alarming
rapidity, succeeded in divesting music of its Dionyso-cosmic mission
and in impressing on it a playfully formal and pleasurable character: a
change with which perhaps only the metamorphosis of the Æschylean man
into the cheerful Alexandrine man could be compared.
If, however, in the exemplification herewith indicated we have rightly
associated the evanescence of the Dionysian spirit with a most
striking, but hitherto unexplained transformation and degeneration of
the Hellene--what hopes must revive in us when the most trustworthy
auspices guarantee _the reverse process, the gradual awakening of
the Dionysian spirit_ in our modern world! It is impossible for the
divine strength of Herakles to languish for ever in voluptuous bondage
to Omphale. Out of the Dionysian root of the German spirit a power
has arisen which has nothing in common with the primitive conditions
of Socratic culture, and can neither be explained nor excused
thereby, but is rather regarded by this culture as something terribly
inexplicable and overwhelmingly hostile,--namely, _German music_ as
we have to understand it, especially in its vast solar orbit from
Bach to Beethoven, from Beethoven to Wagner. What even under the most
favourable circumstances can the knowledge-craving Socratism of our
days do with this demon rising from unfathomable depths? Neither by
means of the zig-zag and arabesque work of operatic melody, nor with
the aid of the arithmetical counting board of fugue and contrapuntal
dialectics is the formula to be found, in the trebly powerful light[23]
of which one could subdue this demon and compel it to speak. What
a spectacle, when our æsthetes, with a net of "beauty" peculiar to
themselves, now pursue and clutch at the genius of music romping
about before them with incomprehensible life, and in so doing display
activities which are not to be judged by the standard of eternal beauty
any more than by the standard of the sublime. Let us but observe these
patrons of music as they are, at close range, when they call out so
indefatigably "beauty! beauty!" to discover whether they have the marks
of nature's darling children who are fostered and fondled in the lap
of the beautiful, or whether they do not rather seek a disguise for
their own rudeness, an æsthetical pretext for their own unemotional
insipidity: I am thinking here, for instance, of Otto Jahn. But let the
liar and the hypocrite beware of our German music: for in the midst
of all our culture it is really the only genuine, pure and purifying
fire-spirit from which and towards which, as in the teaching of the
great Heraclitus of Ephesus, all things move in a double orbit-all
that we now call culture, education, civilisation, must appear some day
before the unerring judge, Dionysus.
Let us recollect furthermore how Kant and Schopenhauer made it
possible for the spirit of _German philosophy_ streaming from the
same sources to annihilate the satisfied delight in existence of
scientific Socratism by the delimitation of the boundaries thereof; how
through this delimitation an infinitely profounder and more serious
view of ethical problems and of art was inaugurated, which we may
unhesitatingly designate as _Dionysian_ wisdom comprised in concepts.
To what then does the mystery of this oneness of German music and
philosophy point, if not to a new form of existence, concerning the
substance of which we can only inform ourselves presentiently from
Hellenic analogies? For to us who stand on the boundary line between
two different forms of existence, the Hellenic prototype retains the
immeasurable value, that therein all these transitions and struggles
are imprinted in a classically instructive form: except that we, as
it were, experience analogically in _reverse_ order the chief epochs
of the Hellenic genius, and seem now, for instance, to pass backwards
from the Alexandrine age to the period of tragedy. At the same time
we have the feeling that the birth of a tragic age betokens only a
return to itself of the German spirit, a blessed self-rediscovering
after excessive and urgent external influences have for a long time
compelled it, living as it did in helpless barbaric formlessness, to
servitude under their form. It may at last, after returning to the
primitive source of its being, venture to stalk along boldly and freely
before all nations without hugging the leading-strings of a Romanic
civilisation: if only it can learn implicitly of one people--the
Greeks, of whom to learn at all is itself a high honour and a rare
distinction. And when did we require these highest of all teachers more
than at present, when we experience _a re-birth of tragedy_ and are in
danger alike of not knowing whence it comes, and of being unable to
make clear to ourselves whither it tends.