which 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
this, 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, although he be
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. From Schopenhauer comes Wagner's hatred of the Jews, to
whom he cannot 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 straight-forwardness, 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 foolishly 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 guidance
back to it.
104.