Human, All-Too-Human: A Book For Free Spirits; Part II. Фридрих Вильгельм Ницше

composed and Schopenhauer philosophised above the heads of the Germans, and it was above their heads, in the same way, that Goethe wrote his Tasso, his Iphigenie. He was followed by a small company of highly cultured persons, who were educated by antiquity, life, and travel, and had grown out of German ways of thought. He himself did not wish it to be otherwise. – When the Romantics set up their well-conceived Goethe cult; when their amazing skill in appreciation was passed on to the disciples of Hegel, the real educators of the Germans of this century; when the awakening national ambition turned out advantageous to the fame of the German poets; when the real standard of the nation, as to whether it could honestly find enjoyment in anything, became inexorably subordinated to the judgment of individuals and to that national ambition, – that is, when people began to enjoy by compulsion, – then arose that false, spurious German culture which was ashamed of Kotzebue; which brought Sophocles, Calderon, and even the Second Part of Goethe's Faust on the stage; and which, on account of its foul tongue and congested stomach, no longer knows now what it likes and what it finds tedious. – Happy are those who have taste, even if it be a bad taste! Only by this characteristic can one be wise as well as happy. Hence the Greeks, who were very refined in such matters, designated the sage by a word that means “man of taste,” and called wisdom, artistic as well as scientific, “taste” (sophia).

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      Music as a Late-Comer in every Culture. – Among all the arts that are accustomed to grow on a definite culture-soil and under definite social and political conditions, music is the last plant to come up, arising in the autumn and fading-season of the culture to which it belongs. At the same time, the first signs and harbingers of a new spring are usually already noticeable, and sometimes music, like the language of a forgotten age, rings out into a new, astonished world, and comes too late. In the art of the Dutch and Flemish musicians the soul of the Christian middle ages at last found its fullest tone: their sound-architecture is the posthumous but legitimate and equal sister of Gothic. Not until Handel's music was heard the note of the best in the soul of Luther and his kin, the great Judæo-heroical impulse that created the whole Reformation movement. Mozart first expressed in golden melody the age of Louis xiv. and the art of Racine and Claude Lorrain. The eighteenth century – that century of rhapsody, of broken ideals and transitory happiness – only sang itself out in the music of Beethoven and Rossini. A lover of sentimental similes might say that all really important music was a swan-song. – Music is, in fact, not a universal language for all time, as is so often said in its praise, but responds exactly to a particular period and warmth of emotion which involves a quite definite, individual culture, determined by time and place, as its inner law. The music of Palestrina would be quite unintelligible to a Greek; and again, what would the music of Rossini convey to Palestrina? – It may be that our most modern German music, with all its pre-eminence and desire of pre-eminence, will soon be no longer understood. For this music sprang from a culture that is undergoing a rapid decay, from the soil of that epoch of reaction and restoration in which a certain Catholicism of feeling, as well as a delight in all indigenous, national, primitive manners, burst into bloom and scattered a blended perfume over Europe. These two emotional tendencies, adopted in their greatest strength and carried to their farthest limits, found final expression in the music of Wagner. Wagner's predilection for the old native sagas, his free idealisation of their unfamiliar gods and heroes, – who are really sovereign beasts of prey with occasional fits of thoughtfulness, magnanimity, and boredom, – his re-animation of those figures, to which he gave in addition the mediæval Christian thirst for ecstatic sensuality and spiritualisation – all this Wagnerian give-and-take with regard to materials, souls, figures, and words – would clearly express the spirit of his music, if it could not, like all music, speak quite unambiguously of itself. This spirit wages the last campaign of reaction against the spirit of illumination which passed into this century from the last, and also against the super-national ideas of French revolutionary romanticism and of English and American insipidity in the reconstruction of state and society. – But is it not evident that the spheres of thought and emotion apparently suppressed by Wagner and his school have long since acquired fresh strength, and that his late musical protest against them generally rings into ears that prefer to hear different and opposite notes; so that one day that high and wonderful art will suddenly become unintelligible and will be covered by the spider's web of oblivion? – In considering this state of affairs we must not let ourselves be led astray by those transitory fluctuations which arise like a reaction within a reaction, as a temporary sinking of the mountainous wave in the midst of the general upheaval. Thus, this decade of national war, ultramontane martyrdom, and socialistic unrest may, in its remoter after-effect, even aid the Wagnerian art to acquire a sudden halo, without guaranteeing that it “has a future” or that it has the future. It is in the very nature of music that the fruits of its great culture-vintage should lose their taste and wither earlier than the fruits of the plastic arts or those that grow on the tree of knowledge. Among all the products of the human artistic sense ideas are the most solid and lasting.

      1

      “Foreword” and “forword” would be the literal rendering of the play on words. – Tr.

      2

      The allusion is to the ending of the Second Part of Goethe's Faust– “das Ewig Weibliche Zieht uns hinan!” – “The Eternal Feminine Draweth us on!” – Tr.

      3

      It has been attempted to render the play on “Gewissen” and “Wissen.” – Tr.

      4

      Cf. John i. 1. – Tr.

      5

      The German word Mitfreude, coined by Nietzsche in opposition to Mitleid (sympathy), is untranslateable. – Tr.

      6

      Herostratus of Ephesus (in 356 b. c.) set fire to the temple of Diana in order (as he confessed on the rack) to gain notoriety. – Tr.

      7

      Quotation from Schiller, Don Carlos, i. 5. – Tr.

      8

      This, of course, refers to Jesus and Socrates. – Tr.

      9

      Queen of the Amazons, slain by Achilles in the Trojan War. – Tr.

      10

      From Schiller, Wallenstein's Lager: “Wer den Besten seiner Zeit genug gethan, der hat gelebt für alle Zeiten” (“He that has satisfied the best men of his time has lived for all time”).

1

“Foreword” and “forword” would be the literal rendering of the play on words. – Tr.

2

The allusion is to the