To the reader who knows Nietzsche, who has studied his Zarathustra and
understood it, and who, in addition, has digested the works entitled
Beyond Good and Evil, The Genealogy of Morals, The Twilight of the
Idols, and The Antichrist,-- to such a reader everything in this
volume will be perfectly clear and comprehensible. In the attack on
Strauss he will immediately detect the germ of the whole of
Nietzsche's subsequent attitude towards too hasty contentment and the
foolish beatitude of the "easily pleased"; in the paper on Wagner he
will recognise Nietzsche the indefatigable borer, miner and
underminer, seeking to define his ideals, striving after
self-knowledge above all, and availing himself of any contemporary
approximation to his ideal man, in order to press it forward as the
incarnation of his thoughts. Wagner the reformer of mankind! Wagner
the dithyrambic dramatist!--The reader who knows Nietzsche will not be
misled 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 to
Nietzsche himself. So much in our time is learnt from hearsay
concerning prominent figures in science, art, religion, or philosophy,
that it is hardly possible for anybody to-day, however badly informed
he may be, to begin the study of any great writer or scientist with a
perfectly open mind. It were well, therefore, to begin the study of
Nietzsche with some definite idea as to his unaltered purpose, if he
ever possessed such a thing; as to his lifelong ideal, if he ever kept
one so long; and as to the one direction in which he always travelled,
despite apparent deviations and windings. Had he such a purpose, such
an ideal, such a direction? We have no wish to open a controversy
here, neither do we think that in replying to this question in the
affirmative we shall give rise to one; for every careful student of
Nietzsche, we know, will uphold us in our view. Nietzsche had one very
definite and unaltered purpose, ideal and direction, and this was "the
elevation of the type man." He tells us in The Will to Power: "All is
truth to me that tends to elevate man!" To this principle he was
already pledged as a student at Leipzig; we owe every line that he
ever wrote to his devotion to it, and it is the key to all his
complexities, blasphemies, prolixities, and terrible earnestness. All
was good to Nietzsche that tended to elevate man; all was bad that
kept man stationary or sent him backwards. Hence he wrote David
Strauss, the Confessor and Writer (1873).
The Franco-German War had only just come to an end, and the keynote of
this polemical pamphlet is, "Beware of the intoxication of success."
When the whole of Germany was delirious with joy over her victory, at
a time when the unquestioned triumph of her arms tended rather to
reflect unearned glory upon every department of her social
organisation, it required both courage and discernment to raise the
warning 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--the
elevation of man; smug content personified in the German scholar was
giving itself airs of omniscience, omnipotence, and ubiquity, and all
the while it was a mere cover for hidden rottenness and jejune
pedantry.
Nietzsche's attack on Hegelian optimism alone (pp. 46, 53-54), in the
first paper, fully reveals the fundamental idea underlying this essay;
and if the personal attack on Strauss seems sometimes to throw the
main theme into the background, we must remember the author's own
attitude towards this aspect of the case. Nietzsche, as a matter of
fact, had neither the spite nor the meanness requisite for the purely
personal attack. In his Ecce Homo, he tells us most emphatically: "I
have no desire to attack particular persons--I do but use a
personality as a magnifying glass; I place it over the subject to
which I wish to call attention, merely that the appeal may be
stronger." David Strauss, in a letter to a friend, soon after the
publication of the first Thought out of Season, expresses his utter
astonishment that a total stranger should have made such a dead set at
him. The same problem may possibly face the reader on every page of
this fssay: if, however, we realise Nietzsche's purpose, if we
understand his struggle to be one against "Culture-Philistinism" in
general, 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 upon
the main theme-- then the Strauss paper is seen to be one of such
enormous power, and its aim appears to us so lofty, that, whatever our
views may be concerning the nature of the person assailed, we are
forced to conclude that, to Nietzsche at least, he was but the
incarnation and concrete example of the evil and danger then
threatening to overtake his country, which it was the object of this
essay 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 might
have been hastened to his end by the use that had been made of his
personality in the first Unzeitgemässe Betrachtung; when we remember
that in the midst of this torment he ejaculated, "I was indeed not
made to hate and have enemies!"--we are then in a better position to
judge of the motives which, throughout his life, led him to engage
such formidable opponents and to undertake such relentless attacks. It
was merely his ruling principle that, all is true and good that tends
to elevate man; everything is bad and false that keeps man stationary
or sends him backwards.
Those who may think that his attacks were often unwarrantable and
ill-judged will do well, therefore, to bear this in mind, that
whatever his value or merits may have been as an iconoclast, at least
the aim he had was sufficiently lofty and honourable, and that he
never shirked the duties which he rightly or wrongly imagined would
help him to
Wagner paper (1875-1876) we are faced by a somewhat different problem.
Most readers who will have heard of Nietzsche's subsequent
denunciation of Wagner's music will probably stand aghast before this
panegyric of him; those who, like Professor Saintsbury, will fail to
discover the internal evidence in this essay which points so
infallibly to Nietzsche's real but still subconscious opinion of his
hero, may even be content to regard his later attitude as the result
of a complete volte-face, and at any rate a flat contradiction of the
one revealed in this paper. Let us, however, examine the internal
evidence we speak of, and let us also discuss the purpose and spirit
of the essay.
We have said that Nietzsche was a man with a very fixed and powerful
ideal, 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 whole
continent on which he lived--for something or some one that would set
his doubts at rest concerning the feasibility of his ideal? Can we now
picture this young man coming face to face with probably one of the
greatest geniuses of his age--with a man whose very presence must have
been electric, whose every word or movement must have imparted some
power to his surroundings--with Richard Wagner?
If we can conceive of what the mere attention, even, of a man like
Wagner must have meant to Nietzsche in his twenties, if we can form
any idea of the intoxicating effect produced upon him when this
attention developed into friendship, we almost refuse to believe that
Nietzsche could have been critical at all at first. In Wagner, as was
but natural, he soon began to see the ideal, or at least the means to
the ideal, which was his one obsession. All his hope for the future of
Germany and Europe cleaved, as it were, to this highest manifestation
of their people's life, and gradually he began to invest his already
great friend with all the extra greatness which he himself drew from
the depths of his own soul.
The friendship which grew between them was of that rare order in which
neither can tell who influences the other more. Wagner would often
declare that the beautiful music in the third act of Siegfried was to
be ascribed to Nietzsche's influence over him; he also adopted the
young man's terminology in art matters, and the concepts implied by
the words "Dionysian" and "Apollonian" were borrowed by him from his
friend's discourses. How much Nietzsche owed to Wagner may perhaps
never be definitely known; to those who are sufficiently interested to
undertake the investigation of this matter, we would recommend Hans
Belart's book, Nietzsche's Ethik; in it references will be found which
give some clue as to the probable sources from which the necessary
information may be derived. In any case, however, the reciprocal
effects of their conversations will never be exactly known; and
although it would be ridiculous to assume that Nietzsche was
essentially the same when he left as when he met him, what the real
nature of the change was it is now difficult to say.
For some years their friendship continued firm, and grew ever more and
more intimate. The Birth Of Tragedy was one of the first public
declarations of it, and after its publication many were led to
consider that Wagner's art was a sort of resurrection of the Dionysian
Grecian art. Enemies of Nietzsche began to whisper that he was merely
Wagner's "literary lackey"; many friends frowned upon the promising
young philologist, and questioned the exaggerated importance he was
beginning to ascribe to the art of music and to art in general, in
their influence upon the world; and all the while Nietzsche's one
thought and one aim was to help the cause and further the prospects of
the man who he earnestly believed was destined to be the salvation of
European culture.
Every great ideal coined in his own brain he imagined to be the ideal
of his hero; all his sublimest hopes for society were presented
gratis, in his writings, to Wagner, as though products of the latter's
own mind; and just as the prophet of old never possessed the requisite
assurance to suppose that his noblest ideas were his own, but
attributed them to some higher and supernatural power, whom he thereby
learnt to worship for its fancied nobility of sentiment, so Nietzsche,
still doubting his own powers, created a fetich out of nis most
distinguished friend, and was ultimately wounded and well-nigh wrecked
with disappointment when he found that the Wagner of the
Gotterdammerung and Parsifal was not the Wagner of his own mind.
While writing Ecce Homo, he was so well aware of the extent to which
he 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 can
look back upon this work, I would not like to deny that, at bottom, it
speaks only of myself" (p. 74). And on another page of the same book
we read: "... What I heard, as a young man, in Wagnerian music, had
absolutely nothing to do with Wagner: when I described Dionysian
music, I only described what I had heard, and I thus translated and
transfigured all that I bore in my own soul into the spirit of the new
art. The strongest proof of this is my essay, Wagner in Bayreuth: in
all decidedly psychological passages of this book the reader may
simply read my name, or the name 'Zarathustra,' wherever the text
contains the name 'Wagner'" (p. 68).
As we have already hinted, there are evidences of his having
subconsciously discerned the REAL Wagner, even in the heyday of their
friendship, behind the ideal he had formed of him; for his eyes were
too intelligent to be deceived, even though his understanding refused
at first to heed the messages they sent it: both the Birth of Tragedy
and Wagner in Bayreuth are with us to prove this, and not merely when
we read these works between the lines, but when we take such passages
as those found on pp. 115, 149, 150, 151, 156, 158, 159 of this book
quite literally.
Nietzsche's infatuation we have explained; the consequent idealisation
of the object of his infatuation he himself has confessed; we have
also pointed certain passages which we believe show beyond a doubt
that almost everything to be found in The Case of Wagner and Nietzsche
contra Wagner was already subconscious in our author, long before he
had begun to feel even a coolness towards his hero: let those who
think our interpretation of the said passages is either strained or
unjustified turn to the literature to which we have referred and judge
for themselves. It seems to us that those distinguished critics who
complain of Nietzsche's complete volte-face and his uncontrollable
recantations and revulsions of feeling have completely overlooked this
aspect of the question.
It were well for us to bear in mind that we are not altogether free to
dispose of Nietzsche's attitude to Wagner, at any given period in
their relationship, with a single sentence of praise or of blame.
After all, we are faced by a problem which no objectivity or
dispassionate detachment on our parts can solve. Nietzsche endowed
both Schopenhauer and Wagner with qualities and aspirations so utterly
foreign to them both, that neither of them would have recognised
himself in the images he painted of them. His love for them was
unusual; perhaps it can only be fully understood emotionally by us:
like all men who are capable of very great love, Nietzsche lent the
objects of his affection anything they might happen to lack in the way
of greatness, and when at last his eyes were opened, genuine pain, not
malice, was the motive of even the most bitter of his diatribes.
Finally, we should just like to give one more passage from Ecce Homo
bearing upon the subject under discussion. It is particularly
interesting from an autobiographical standpoint, and will perhaps
afford the best possible conclusion to this preface.
Nietzsche is writing about Wagner's music, and he says: "The world
must indeed be empty for him who has never been unhealthy enough for
this 'infernal voluptuousness'; it is allowable and yet almost
forbidden to use a mystical expression in this behalf. I suppose I
know better than any one the prodigies Wagner was capable of, the
fifty worlds of strange raptures to which no one save him could soar;
and as I stand to-day--strong enough to convert even the most
suspicious and dangerous phenomenon to my own use and be the stronger
for 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 more
excruciatingly--even at each other's hands--than most men are able to
suffer nowadays. And just as Wagner is merely a misunderstanding among
Germans, so am I and ever will be. You lack two centuries of
psychological and artistic discipline, my dear countrymen!... But it
will be impossible for you ever to recover the time now lost" (p. 43).
ANTHONY M. LUDOVICI.
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