The hate of the _burlesque_ (that which lacks dignity), _the lack of a
sense of Nature_ belongs to the seventeenth century.
98.
_Against Rousseau.--Alas!_ man is no longer sufficiently evil;
Rousseau's opponents, who say that "man is a beast of prey," are
unfortunately wrong. Not the corruption of man, but the softening and
moralising of him is the curse. In the sphere which Rousseau attacked
most violently, the _relatively_ strongest and most successful type of
man was still to be found (the type which still possessed the great
passions intact: Will to Power, Will to Pleasure, the Will and Ability
to Command). The man of the eighteenth century must be compared with
the man of the Renaissance (also with the man of the seventeenth
century in France) if the matter is to be understood at all: Rousseau
is a symptom of self-contempt and of inflamed vanity--both signs that
the dominating will is lacking: he moralises and seeks the _cause_ of
his own misery after the style of a revengeful man in the _ruling_
classes.
99.
_Voltaire--Rousseau._--A state of nature is terrible; man is a beast of
prey: our civilisation is an extraordinary _triumph_ over this beast of
prey in nature--this was _Voltaires_ conclusion. He was conscious of
the mildness, the refinements, the intellectual joys of the civilised
state; he despised obtuseness, even in the form of virtue, and the lack
of delicacy even in ascetics and monks.
The _moral depravity_ of man seemed to pre-occupy _Rousseau_; the words
"unjust," "cruel," are the best possible for the purpose of exciting
the instincts of the oppressed, who otherwise find themselves under
the ban of the _vetitum_ and of disgrace; _so that their conscience
is opposed to their indulging any insurrectional desires._ These
emancipators seek one thing above all: to give their party the great
accents and attitudes of _higher Nature_.
100.
_Rousseau_; the rule founded on sentiment; Nature as the source of
justice; man perfects himself in proportion as he approaches _Nature_
(according to Voltaire, in proportion _as he leaves Nature behind_).
The very same periods seem to the one to demonstrate the progress of
_humanity_ and, to the other, the increase of injustice and inequality.
Voltaire, who still understood _umanità_ in the sense of the
Renaissance, as also _virtù_ (as "higher culture"), fights for the
cause of the "_honnêtes gens_" "_la bonne compagnie_" taste, science,
arts, and even for the cause of progress and civilisation.
_The flare-up occurred towards 1760_: On the one hand the citizen
of Geneva, on the other _le seigneur de Ferney._ It is only from
that moment and henceforward that Voltaire was the man of his age,
the philosopher, the representative of Toleration and of Disbelief
(theretofore he had been merely _un bel esprit_). His envy and hatred
of Rousseau's success forced him upwards.
"_Pour 'la canaille' un dieu rémunérateur et vengeur_"--Voltaire.
The criticism of both standpoints in regard to the _value of
civilisation._ To Voltaire nothing seems finer than the _social
invention_: there is no higher goal than to uphold and perfect it.
_L'honnêteté_ consists precisely in respecting social usage; virtue
in a certain obedience towards various necessary "prejudices" which
favour the maintenance of society. _Missionary of Culture,_ aristocrat,
representative of the triumphant and ruling classes and their values.
But Rousseau remained a _plebeian,_ even as _hommes de lettres,_ this
was _preposterous_; his shameless contempt for everything that was not
himself.
The _morbid feature_ in Rousseau is the one which happens to have been
most admired and _imitated._ (Lord Byron resembled him somewhat, he
too screwed himself up to sublime attitudes and to revengeful rage--a
sign of vulgarity; later on, when Venice restored his equilibrium,
he understood what _alleviates most_ and does the _most good ...
l'insouciance_.)
In spite of his antecedents, Rousseau is proud of himself; but he is
incensed if he is reminded of his origin....
In Rousseau there was undoubtedly some brain trouble; in Voltaire--rare
health and lightsomeness. _The revengefulness of the sick_; his
periods of insanity as also those of his contempt of man, and of his
mistrust.
Rousseau's defence of _Providence_ (against Voltaire's Pessimism):
he _had need of_ God in order to be able to curse society and
civilisation; everything must be good _per se,_ because God had created
it; man _alone has corrupted man._ The "good man" as a man of Nature
was pure fantasy; but with the dogma of God's authorship he became
something probable and even not devoid of foundation.
_Romanticism_ à la _Rousseau_: passion ("the sovereign right of
passion"); "naturalness"; the fascination of madness (foolishness
reckoned as greatness); the senseless vanity of the weak; the
revengefulness of the masses elevated to the position of _justice_
("in politics, for one hundred years, the leader has always been this
invalid").
101.
_Kant_: makes the scepticism of Englishmen, in regard to the theory of
knowledge, _possible_ for Germans.
(1) By enlisting in its cause the interest of the German's religious
and moral needs: just as the new academicians used scepticism for the
same reasons, as a preparation for Platonism (_vide_ Augustine); just
as Pascal even used _moral_ scepticism in order to provoke (to justify)
the need of belief;
(2) By complicating and entangling it with scholastic flourishes in
view of making it more acceptable to the German's scientific taste in
form (for Locke and Hume, alone, were too illuminating, too clear--that
is to say, judged according to the German valuing instinct, "too
superficial").
_Kant_: a poor psychologist and mediocre judge of human nature, made
hopeless mistakes in regard to great historical values (the French
Revolution); a moral fanatic _à la_ Rousseau; with a subterranean
current of Christian values; a thorough dogmatist, but bored to
extinction by this tendency, to the extent of wishing to tyrannise
over it, but quickly tired, even of 'scepticism; and not yet affected
by any cosmopolitan thought or antique beauty ... a _dawdler_ and a
_go-between,_ not at all original (like _Leibnitz,_ something between
mechanism and spiritualism; like _Goethe,_ something between the taste
of the eighteenth century and that of the "historical sense" [which
_is_ essentially a sense of exoticism]; like _German music,_ between
French and Italian music; like Charles the Great, who mediated and
built bridges between the Roman Empire and Nationalism--a dawdler _par
excellence_).
102.
In what respect have the _Christian_ centuries with their Pessimism
been _stronger_ centuries than the eighteenth--and how do they
correspond with the _tragic_ age of the Greeks?
The nineteenth century _versus_ the eighteenth. How was it an
heir?--how was it a step backwards from the latter? (more lacking in
"spirit" and in taste)--how did it show an advance on the latter?
(more gloomy, more realistic, _stronger_).
103.
How can we _explain_ the fact that we feel something in common with the
_Campagna romana?_ And the high mountain chain?
Chateaubriand in a letter to M. de Fontanes in 1803 writes his first
impression of the _Campagna romana._
The President de Brosses says of the _Campagna romana_: "Il fallait
que Romulus fût ivre quand il songea à bâtir une ville dans un terrain
aussi laid."
Even Delacroix would have nothing to do with Rome, it frightened him.
He loved Venice, just as Shakespeare, Byron, and Georges Sand did.
Théophile Gautier's and Richard Wagner's dislike of Rome must not be
forgotten.
Lamartine has the language for Sorrento and Posilippo.
Victor Hugo raves about Spain, "parce que aucune autre nation n'a
moins emprunté à l'antiquité, parce qu'elle n'a subi aucune influence
classique."
104.
The _two great attempts_ that were made to overcome the eighteenth
century:
_Napoleon,_ in that he called man, the soldier, and the great struggle
for power, to life again, and conceived Europe as a political power.
_Goethe,_ in that he imagined a European culture which would consist
of the whole heritage of what humanity had _attained to_ up to his time.
German culture in this century inspires mistrust--the music of the
period lacks that complete element which liberates and binds as well,
to wit--Goethe.
The pre-eminence of _music_ in the romanticists of 1830 and 1840.
Delacroix. Ingres--a passionate musician (admired Gluck, Haydn,
Beethoven, Mozart), said to his pupils in Rome: "Si je pouvais vous
rendre tous musiciens, vous y gagneriez comme peintres"--likewise
Horace Vernet, who was particularly fond of Don Juan (as Mendelssohn
assures us, 1831); Stendhal, too, who says of himself: "Combien de
lieues ne ferais-je pas à pied, et à combien de jours de prison ne me
soumetterais-je pas pour entendre _Don Juan ou le Matrimonio segreto_;
et je ne sais pour quelle autre chose je ferais cet effort." He was
then fifty-six years old.
The borrowed forms, for instance: Brahms as a typical "Epigone,"
likewise Mendelssohn's cultured Protestantism (a former "soul" is
turned into poetry posthumously ...)
--the moral and poetical substitutions in Wagner, who used _one_ art as
a stop-gap to make up for what another lacked.
--the "historical sense," inspiration derived from poems, sagas.
--that characteristic transformation of which G. Flaubert is the most
striking example among Frenchmen, and Richard Wagner the most striking
example among Germans, shows how the romantic belief in love and the
future changes into a longing for nonentity in 1830-50.
106.
How is it that German music reaches its culminating point in the age of
German romanticism? How is it that German music lacks Goethe? On the
other hand, how much Schiller, or more exactly, how much "Thekla"[5] is
there not in Beethoven!
Schumann has Eichendorff, Uhland, Heine, Hoffman, Tieck, in him.
Richard Wagner has Freischütz, Hoffmann, Grimm, the romantic Saga,
the mystic Catholicism of instinct, symbolism, "the free-spiritedness
of passion" (Rousseau's intention). The _Flying Dutchman_ savours of
France, where _le ténébreux_ (1830) was the type of the seducer.
_The cult of music,_ the revolutionary romanticism of form. Wagner
_synthesises_ German and French romanticism.
[Footnote 5: Thekla is the sentimental heroine in Schiller's
_Wallenstein._--TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.]
107.
From the point of view only of his value to Germany and to German
culture, Richard Wagner is still a great problem, perhaps a German
misfortune: in any case, however, a fatality. But what does it
matter? Is he not very much more than a German event? It also
seems to me that to no country on earth is he less related than to
Germany; nothing was prepared there for his advent; his whole type
is simply strange amongst Germans; there he stands in their midst,
wonderful, misunderstood, incomprehensible. But people carefully avoid
acknowledging this: they are too kind, too square-headed--too German
for that. "Credo quia absurdus est": thus did the German spirit wish
it to be, in this case too--hence it is content meanwhile to believe
everything Richard Wagner wanted to have believed about himself. In all
ages the spirit of Germany has been deficient in subtlety and divining
powers concerning psychological matters. Now that it happens to be
under the high pressure of patriotic nonsense and self-adoration, it is
visibly growing thicker and coarser: how could it therefore be equal to
the problem of Wagner!
108.
The Germans _are_ not yet anything, but they are _becoming_ something;
that is why they have not yet any culture;--that is why they cannot
yet have any culture!--They are not yet anything: that means they are
all kinds of things. They are _becoming_ something: that means that
they will one day cease from being all kinds of things. The latter is
at bottom only a wish, scarcely a hope yet. Fortunately it is a wish
with which one can live, a question of will, of work, of discipline, a
question of training, as also of resentment, of longing, of privation,
of discomfort,--yea, even of bitterness,--in short, we Germans _will_
get something out of ourselves, something that has not yet been wanted
of us--we want something _more_!
That this "German, as he is not as yet"--has a right to something
better than the present German "culture"; that all who wish to
become something better, must wax angry when they perceive a sort of
contentment, an impudent "setting-oneself-at-ease," or "a process of
self-censing," in this quarter: that is my second principle, in regard
to which my opinions have not yet changed.
_(c)_ SIGNS OF INCREASING STRENGTH.
109.
First Principle: everything that characterises modern men savours of
decay: but side by side with the prevailing sickness there are signs of
a strength and powerfulness of soul which are still untried. _The same
causes which tend to promote the belittling of men,_ also force _the
stronger and rarer individuals upwards to greatness._
110.
_General survey: the ambiguous_ character of our _modern
world_--precisely the same symptoms might at the same time be
indicative of either _decline_ or _strength._ And the signs of strength
and of emancipation dearly bought, might in view of traditional
(or _hereditary_) appreciations concerned with the feelings, be
_misunderstood_ as indications of weakness. In short, _feeling,_ as a
_means of fixing valuations,_ is not _on a level with the times._
_Generalised_: Every valuation is always _backward_; it is merely the
expression of the conditions which favoured survival and growth in a
much earlier age: it struggles against new conditions of existence
out of which it did not arise, and which it therefore necessarily
misunderstands: it hinders, and excites suspicion against, all that is
new.
111.
_The problem of the nineteenth century._--To discover whether its
strong and weak side belong to each other. Whether they have been cut
from one and the same piece. Whether the variety of its ideals and
their contradictions are conditioned by a higher purpose: whether
they are something higher.--For it might be _the prerequisite of
greatness,_ that growth should take place amid such violent tension.
Dissatisfaction, Nihilism, _might be a good sign._
112.
_General survey._--As a matter of fact, all abundant growth involves a
concomitant process of _crumbling to bits_ and _decay_: suffering and
the symptoms of decline _belong_ to ages of enormous progress; every
fruitful and powerful movement of mankind has always _brought about_
a concurrent Nihilistic movement. Under certain circumstances, the
appearance of _the extremest_ form of Pessimism and actual _Nihilism_
might be the sign of a process of incisive and most essential growth,
and of mankind's transit into completely new conditions of existence.
_This is what I have understood._
113.
_A._
Starting out with a thoroughly courageous _appreciation_ of our men of
to-day:--we must not allow ourselves to be deceived by appearance: this
mankind is much less effective, but it gives quite different pledges
of _lasting strength,_ its tempo is slower, but the rhythm itself is
richer. _Healthiness_ is increasing, the real conditions of a healthy
body are on the point of being known, and will gradually be created,
"asceticism" is regarded with irony. The fear of extremes, a certain
confidence in the "right way," no raving: a periodical self-habituation
to narrower values (such as "mother-land," "science," etc.).
This whole picture, however, would still be _ambiguous_: it might be a
movement either of _increase_ or _decline_ in Life.
_B._
The belief in "progress"--in lower spheres of intelligence, appears as
increasing life: but this is self-deception;
in higher spheres of intelligence it is a sign of
_declining_ life.
Description of the symptoms.
The unity of the aspect: uncertainty in regard to the standard of
valuation.