Fontenelle threw into his immortal _Dialogues of the Dead_, were
regarded by his age as paradoxes and amusements of a not unscrupulous
wit; even the highest judges of taste and intellect saw nothing more in
them,—indeed, Fontenelle himself perhaps saw nothing more. Then
something incredible takes place: these thoughts become truths! Science
proves them! The game becomes serious! And we read those dialogues with
a feeling different from that with which Voltaire and Helvetius read
them, and we involuntarily raise their originator into another and _much
higher_ class of intellects than they did.—Rightly? Wrongly?
95.
_Chamfort._—That such a judge of men and of the multitude as Chamfort
should side with the multitude, instead of standing apart in
philosophical resignation and defence—I am at a loss to explain, except
as follows:—There was an instinct in him stronger than his wisdom, and
it had never been gratified: the hatred against all _noblesse_ of blood;
perhaps his mother's old and only too explicable hatred, which was
consecrated in him by love of her,—an instinct of revenge from his
boyhood, which waited for the hour to avenge his mother. But then the
course of his life, his genius, and alas! most of all, perhaps, the
paternal blood in his veins, had seduced him to rank and consider
himself equal to the _noblesse_—for many, many years! In the end,
however, he could not endure the sight of himself, the "old man" under
the old _régime_, any longer; he got into a violent, penitential
passion, and _in this state_ he put on the raiment of the populace as
_his_ special kind of hair-shirt! His bad conscience was the neglect of
revenge.—If Chamfort had then been a little more of the philosopher, the
Revolution would not have had its tragic wit and its sharpest sting; it
would have been regarded as a much more stupid affair, and would have
had no such seductive influence on men's minds. But Chamfort's hatred
and revenge educated an entire generation; and the most illustrious men
passed through his school. Let us but consider that Mirabeau looked up
to Chamfort as to his higher and older self, from whom he expected (and
endured) impulses, warnings, and condemnations,—Mirabeau, who as a man
belongs to an entirely different order of greatness, as the very
foremost among the statesman-geniuses of yesterday and to-day.—Strange,
that in spite of such a friend and advocate—we possess Mirabeau's
letters to Chamfort—this wittiest of all moralists has remained
unfamiliar to the French, quite the same as Stendhal, who has perhaps
had the most penetrating eyes and ears of any Frenchman of _this_
century. Is it because the latter had really too much of the German and
the Englishman in his nature for the Parisians to endure him?—while
Chamfort, a man with ample knowledge of the profundities and secret
motives of the soul, gloomy, suffering, ardent—a thinker who found
laughter necessary as the remedy of life, and who almost gave himself up
as lost every day that he had not laughed,—seems much more like an
Italian, and related by blood to Dante and Leopardi, than like a
Frenchman. One knows Chamfort's last words: "_Ah! mon ami_," he said to
Sieyès, "_je m'en vais enfin de ce monde, où il faut que le cœur se
brise ou se bronze_—." These were certainly not the words of a dying
Frenchman.
96.
_Two Orators._—Of these two orators the one arrives at a full
understanding of his case only when he yields himself to emotion; it is
only this that pumps sufficient blood and heat into his brain to compel
his high intellectuality to reveal itself. The other attempts, indeed,
now and then to do the same: to state his case sonorously, vehemently,
and spiritedly with the aid of emotion,—but usually with bad success. He
then very soon speaks obscurely and confusedly; he exaggerates, makes
omissions, and excites suspicion of the justice of his case: indeed, he
himself feels this suspicion, and the sudden changes into the coldest
and most repulsive tones (which raise a doubt in the hearer as to his
passionateness being genuine) are thereby explicable. With him emotion
always drowns the spirit; perhaps because it is stronger than in the
former. But he is at the height of his power when he resists the
impetuous storm of his feeling, and as it were scorns it; it is then
only that his spirit emerges fully from its concealment, a spirit
logical, mocking, and playful, but nevertheless awe-inspiring.
97.
_The Loquacity of Authors._—There is a loquacity of anger—frequent in
Luther, also in Schopenhauer. A loquacity which comes from too great a
store of conceptual formulæ, as in Kant. A loquacity which comes from
delight in ever new modifications of the same idea: one finds it in
Montaigne. A loquacity of malicious natures: whoever reads writings of
our period will recollect two authors in this connection. A loquacity
which comes from delight in fine words and forms of speech: by no means
rare in Goethe's prose. A loquacity which comes from pure satisfaction
in noise and confusion of feelings: for example in Carlyle.
98.
_In Honour of Shakespeare._—The best thing I could say in honour of
Shakespeare, _the man_, is that he believed in Brutus and cast not a
shadow of suspicion on the kind of virtue which Brutus represents! It is
to him that Shakespeare consecrated his best tragedy—it is at present
still called by a wrong name,—to him and to the most terrible essence of
lofty morality. Independence of soul!—that is the question at issue! No
sacrifice can be too great there: one must be able to sacrifice to it
even one's dearest friend, though he be also the grandest of men, the
ornament of the world, the genius without peer,—if one really loves
freedom as the freedom of great souls, and if _this_ freedom be
threatened by him:—it is thus that Shakespeare must have felt! The
elevation in which he places Cæsar is the most exquisite honour he could
confer upon Brutus; it is thus only that he lifts into vastness the
inner problem of his hero, and similarly the strength of soul which
could cut _this knot_!—And was it actually political freedom that
impelled the poet to sympathy with Brutus,—and made him the accomplice
of Brutus? Or was political freedom merely a symbol for something
inexpressible? Do we perhaps stand before some sombre event or adventure
of the poet's own soul, which has remained unknown, and of which he only
cared to speak symbolically? What is all Hamlet-melancholy in comparison
with the melancholy of Brutus!—and perhaps Shakespeare also knew this,
as he knew the other, by experience! Perhaps he also had his dark hour
and his bad angel, just as Brutus had them!—But whatever similarities
and secret relationships of that kind there may have been, Shakespeare
cast himself on the ground and felt unworthy and alien in presence of
the aspect and virtue of Brutus:—he has inscribed the testimony thereof
in the tragedy itself. He has twice brought in a poet in it, and twice
heaped upon him such an impatient and extreme contempt, that it sounds
like a cry,—like the cry of self-contempt. Brutus, even Brutus loses
patience when the poet appears, self-important, pathetic, and obtrusive,
as poets usually are,—persons who seem to abound in the possibilities of
greatness, even moral greatness, and nevertheless rarely attain even to
ordinary uprightness in the philosophy of practice and of life. "He may
know the times, _but I know his temper_,—away with the jigging
fool!"—shouts Brutus. We may translate this back into the soul of the
poet that composed it.
99.
_The Followers of Schopenhauer._—What one sees at the contact of
civilized peoples with barbarians,—namely, that the lower civilization
regularly accepts in the first place the vices, weaknesses, and excesses
of the higher; then, from that point onward, feels the influence of a
charm; and finally, by means of the appropriated vices and weaknesses,
also allows something of the valuable influence of the higher culture to
leaven it:—one can also see this close at hand and without journeys to
barbarian peoples, to be sure, somewhat refined and spiritualised, and
not so readily palpable. What are the German followers of _Schopenhauer_
still accustomed to receive first of all from their master:—those who,
when placed beside his superior culture, must deem themselves
sufficiently barbarous to be first of all barbarously fascinated and
seduced by him. Is it his hard matter-of-fact sense, his inclination to
clearness and rationality, which often makes him appear so English, and
so unlike Germans? Or the strength of his intellectual conscience, which
_endured_ a life-long contradiction of "being" and "willing," and
compelled him to contradict himself constantly even in his writings on
almost every point? Or his purity in matters relating to the Church and
the Christian God?—for here he was pure as no German philosopher had
been hitherto, so that he lived and died "as a Voltairian." Or his
immortal doctrines of the intellectuality of intuition, the apriority of
the law of causality, the instrumental nature of the intellect, and the
non-freedom of the will? No, nothing of this enchants, nor is felt as
enchanting; but Schopenhauer's mystical embarrassments and shufflings in
those passages where the matter-of-fact thinker allowed himself to be
seduced and corrupted by the vain impulse to be the unraveller of the
world's riddle: his undemonstrable doctrine of _one will_ ("all causes
are merely occasional causes of the phenomenon of the will at such a
time and at such a place," "the will to live, whole and undivided, is
present in every being, even in the smallest, as perfectly as in the sum
of all that was, is, and will be"); his _denial of the individual_ ("all
lions are really only one lion," "plurality of individuals is an
appearance," as also _development_ is only an appearance: he calls the
opinion of Lamarck "an ingenious, absurd error"); his fantasy about
_genius_ ("in æsthetic contemplation the individual is no longer an
individual, but a pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of
knowledge," "the subject, in that it entirely merges in the contemplated
object, has become this object itself"); his nonsense about _sympathy_,
and about the outburst of the _principium individuationis_ thus rendered
possible, as the source of all morality; including also such assertions
as, "dying is really the design of existence," "the possibility should
not be absolutely denied that a magical effect could proceed from a
person already dead":—these, and similar _extravagances_ and vices of
the philosopher, are always first accepted and made articles of faith;
for vices and extravagances are always easiest to imitate, and do not
require a long preliminary practice. But let us speak of the most
celebrated of the living Schopenhauerians, Richard Wagner.—It has
happened to him as it has already happened to many an artist: he made a
mistake in the interpretation of the characters he created, and
misunderstood the unexpressed philosophy of the art peculiarly his own.
Richard Wagner allowed himself to be misled by Hegel's influence till
the middle of his life; and he did the same again when later on he read
Schopenhauer's doctrine between the lines of his characters, and began
to express himself with such terms as "will," "genius," and "sympathy."
Nevertheless it will remain true that nothing is more counter to
Schopenhauer's spirit than the essentially Wagnerian element in Wagner's
heroes: I mean the innocence of the supremest selfishness, the belief in
strong passion as the good in itself, in a word, the Siegfried trait in
the countenances of his heroes. "All that still smacks more of Spinoza
than of me,"—Schopenhauer would probably have said. Whatever good
reasons, therefore, Wagner might have had to be on the outlook for other
philosophers than Schopenhauer, the enchantment to which he succumbed in
respect to this thinker, not only made him blind towards all other
philosophers, but even towards science itself; his entire art is more
and more inclined to become the counterpart and complement of the
Schopenhauerian philosophy, and it always renounces more emphatically
the higher ambition to become the counterpart and complement of human
knowledge and science. And not only is he allured thereto by the whole
mystic pomp of this philosophy (which would also have allured a
Cagliostro), the peculiar airs and emotions of the philosopher have all
along been seducing him as well! For example, Wagner's indignation about
the corruption of the German language is Schopenhauerian; and if one
should commend his imitation in this respect, it is nevertheless not to
be denied that Wagner's style itself suffers in no small degree from all
the tumours and turgidities, the sight of which made Schopenhauer so
furious; and that, in respect to the German-writing Wagnerians,
Wagneromania is beginning to be as dangerous as only some kinds of
Hegelomania have been. Schopenhauerian is Wagner's hatred of the Jews,
to whom he is unable to do justice, even in their greatest exploit: are
not the Jews the inventors of Christianity! The attempt of Wagner to
construe Christianity as a seed blown away from Buddhism, and his
endeavour to initiate a Buddhistic era in Europe, under a temporary
approximation to Catholic-Christian formulas and sentiments, are both
Schopenhauerian. Wagner's preaching in favour of pity in dealing with
animals is Schopenhauerian; Schopenhauer's predecessor here, as is well
known, was Voltaire, who already perhaps, like his successors, knew how
to disguise his hatred of certain men and things as pity towards
animals. At least Wagner's hatred of science, which manifests itself in
his preaching, has certainly not been inspired by the spirit of
charitableness and kindness—nor by the _spirit_ at all, as is
sufficiently obvious.—Finally, it is of little importance what the
philosophy of an artist is, provided it is only a supplementary
philosophy, and does not do any injury to his art itself. We cannot be
sufficiently on our guard against taking a dislike to an artist on
account of an occasional, perhaps very unfortunate and presumptuous
masquerade; let us not forget that the dear artists are all of them
something of actors—and must be so; it would be difficult for them to
hold out in the long run without stage-playing. Let us be loyal to
Wagner in that which is _true_ and original in him,—and especially in
this point, that we, his disciples, remain loyal to ourselves in that
which is true and original in us. Let us allow him his intellectual
humours and spasms, let us in fairness rather consider what strange
nutriments and necessaries an art like his _is entitled to_, in order to
be able to live and grow! It is of no account that he is often wrong as
a thinker; justice and patience are not _his_ affair. It is sufficient
that his life is right in his own eyes, and maintains its right,—the
life which calls to each of us: "Be a man, and do not follow me—but
thyself! thyself!" _Our_ life, also ought to maintain its right in our
own eyes! We also are to grow and blossom out of ourselves, free and
fearless, in innocent selfishness! And so, on the contemplation of such
a man, these thoughts still ring in my ears to-day, as formerly: "That
passion is better than stoicism or hypocrisy; that straightforwardness,
even in evil, is better than losing oneself in trying to observe
traditional morality; that the free man is just as able to be good as
evil, but that the unemancipated man is a disgrace to nature, and has no
share in heavenly or earthly bliss; finally, that _all who wish to be
free must become so through themselves_, and that freedom falls to
nobody's lot as a gift from Heaven." (_Richard Wagner in Bayreuth_, Vol.
I. of this Translation, pp. 199-200).
100.
_Learning to do Homage._—One must learn the art of homage, as well as
the art of contempt. Whoever goes in new paths and has led many persons
therein, discovers with astonishment how awkward and incompetent all of
them are in the expression of their gratitude, and indeed how rarely
gratitude _is able_ even to express itself. It is always as if something
comes into people's throats when their gratitude wants to speak, so that
it only hems and haws, and becomes silent again. The way in which a
thinker succeeds in tracing the effect of his thoughts, and their
transforming and convulsing power, is almost a comedy: it sometimes
seems as if those who have been operated upon felt profoundly injured
thereby, and could only assert their independence, which they suspect to
be threatened, by all kinds of improprieties. It needs whole generations
in order merely to devise a courteous convention of gratefulness; it is
only very late that the period arrives when something of spirit and
genius enters into gratitude. Then there is usually some one who is the
great receiver of thanks, not only for the good he himself has done, but
mostly for that which has been gradually accumulated by his
predecessors, as a treasure of what is highest and best.
101.
_Voltaire._—Wherever there has been a court, it has furnished the
standard of good-speaking, and with this also the standard of style for
writers. The court language, however, is the language of the courtier
who _has no profession_, and who even in conversations on scientific
subjects avoids all convenient, technical expressions, because they
smack of the profession; on that account the technical expression, and
everything that betrays the specialist, is a _blemish of style_ in
countries which have a court culture. At present, when all courts have
become caricatures of past and present times, one is astonished to find
even Voltaire unspeakably reserved and scrupulous on this point (for
example, in his judgments concerning such stylists as Fontenelle and
Montesquieu),—we are now, all of us, emancipated from court taste, while
Voltaire was its _perfecter_!
102.
_A Word for Philologists._—It is thought that there are books so
valuable and royal that whole generations of scholars are well employed
when through their efforts these books are kept genuine and
intelligible,—to confirm this belief again and again is the purpose of
philology. It presupposes that the rare men are not lacking (though they
may not be visible), who actually know how to use such valuable
books:—those men perhaps who write such books themselves, or could write
them. I mean to say that philology presupposes a noble belief,—that for
the benefit of some few who are always "to come," and are not there, a
very great amount of painful, and even dirty labour has to be done
beforehand: it is all labour _in usum Delphinorum_.
103.
_German Music._—German music, more than any other, has now become
European music; because the changes which Europe experienced through the
Revolution have therein alone found expression: it is only German music
that knows how to express the agitation of popular masses, the
tremendous artificial uproar, which does not even need to be very
noisy,—while Italian opera, for example, knows only the choruses of
domestics or soldiers, but not "the people." There is the additional
fact that in all German music a profound _bourgeois_ jealousy of the
_noblesse_ can be traced, especially a jealousy of _esprit_ and
_élégance_, as the expressions of a courtly, chivalrous, ancient, and
self-confident society. It is not music like that of Goethe's musician
at the gate, which was pleasing also "in the hall," and to the king as
well; it is not here said: "The knights looked on with martial air; with
bashful eyes the ladies." Even the Graces are not allowed in German
music without a touch of remorse; it is only with Pleasantness, the
country sister of the Graces that the German begins to feel morally at
ease—and from this point up to his enthusiastic, learned, and often
gruff "sublimity" (the Beethoven-like sublimity), he feels more and more
so. If we want to imagine the man of _this_ music,—well, let us just
imagine Beethoven as he appeared beside Goethe, say, at their meeting at
Teplitz: as semi-barbarism beside culture, as the masses beside the
nobility, as the good-natured man beside the good and more than "good"
man, as the visionary beside the artist, as the man needing comfort
beside the comforted, as the man given to exaggeration and distrust
beside the man of reason, as the crank and self-tormenter, as the
foolish, enraptured, blessedly unfortunate, sincerely immoderate man, as
the pretentious and awkward man,—and altogether as the "untamed man": it
was thus that Goethe conceived and characterised him, Goethe, the
exceptional German, for whom a music of equal rank has not yet been
found!—Finally, let us consider whether the present, continually
extending contempt of melody and the stunting of the sense for melody
among Germans should not be understood as a democratic impropriety and
an after-effect of the Revolution? For melody has such an obvious
delight in conformity to law, and such an aversion to everything
evolving, unformed and arbitrary, that it sounds like a note out of the
_ancient_ European regime, and as a seduction and re-duction back to it.
104.