Part VIII — Peoples and Fatherlands

Eighth Part:

Peoples and Fatherlands.

240 I heard, once again for the first time, Richard Wagner’s overture to The Mastersingers: this is a magnificent, overloaded, heavy, late art, proud enough to presume, as a condition of being understood, that two centuries of music are still alive—it does the Germans credit that such pride did not miscalculate! What juices and forces, what seasons and climates are not mingled here! At one moment it strikes us as ancient, at another as foreign, austere, and excessively young; it is as arbitrary as it is pompously traditional, not infrequently roguish, still more often coarse and rough—it has fire and courage, and at the same time the slack, sallow skin of fruit that ripens too late. It streams broad and full: and suddenly a moment of inexplicable hesitation, as though a gap were opening between cause and effect, an oppression that sets us dreaming, almost a nightmare—but already the old current of well-being is spreading and widening again, well-being of the most manifold kind, happiness old and new, very much including the artist’s happiness in himself, which he has no wish to conceal, his astonished, happy awareness of his mastery of the means employed here—new, newly acquired, untried artistic means, as he seems to reveal to us. All in all, no beauty, no South, nothing of the southern sky’s fine clarity, nothing of grace, no dance, scarcely a will to logic; even a certain clumsiness, which is further underscored, as though the artist wanted to tell us: “It is part of my intention”; a cumbersome costume, something arbitrarily barbaric and ceremonious, a shimmering of learned and venerable treasures and lace; something German, in the best and worst sense of the word, something manifold, formless, and inexhaustible in the German way; a certain German might and superabundance of soul that has no fear of hiding among the refinements of decadence—perhaps feeling most at home there; a true, authentic emblem of the German soul, at once young and outmoded, worn-out and still overrich in future. This kind of music best expresses what I think of the Germans: they belong to the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow—they have no today as yet.

241 We “good Europeans”: we too have hours when we permit ourselves a hearty bout of fatherland fever, a tumble and relapse into old loves and narrownesses—I have just given a sample of it—hours of national surges, patriotic constrictions, and all sorts of other antiquated floods of feeling. More ponderous spirits than ours may take longer to finish with what, for us, is confined to hours and plays itself out within hours: half a year for some, half a lifetime for others, according to the speed and strength with which they digest and “metabolize.” Indeed, I could imagine dull, hesitant races that, even in our swift-moving Europe, would need half a century to overcome such atavistic attacks of fatherland fever and clinging to the soil, and return to reason, by which I mean “good Europeanism.” And as my thoughts wander over this possibility, I happen to overhear a conversation between two old “patriots”—both were evidently hard of hearing and spoke all the louder for it. “He thinks as much of philosophy and knows as much about it as a peasant or a fraternity student,” said one. “He is still innocent. But what does that matter today! This is the age of the masses: they fall on their bellies before anything massive. In politics too. A statesman who piles up a new Tower of Babel for them, some monstrosity of empire and power, is what they call ‘great’—what does it matter that we more cautious, more reserved people are not yet ready to abandon the old belief that only a great thought gives greatness to an action or a cause. Suppose a statesman put his people in the position of having to pursue ‘grand politics’ from then on, something for which they are by nature ill-equipped and ill-prepared: so that they would have to sacrifice their old, dependable virtues for the sake of a new, dubious mediocrity—suppose a statesman condemned his people to ‘politicking’ altogether, when until then they had had better things to do and think about, and deep in their souls could not rid themselves of a wary disgust at the restlessness, emptiness, and noisy bickering of the peoples who really do live for politics—suppose such a statesman goaded his people’s sleeping passions and appetites awake, made a blot of their former shyness and pleasure in standing apart, a fault of their love of foreign things and their secret boundlessness, devalued their most heartfelt inclinations, turned their consciences inside out, narrowed their minds, made their taste ‘national’—what! A statesman who did all this, for whom his people would have to do penance throughout the future, if they have a future: would such a statesman be great?” “Undoubtedly!” the other old patriot answered vehemently. “Otherwise he could not have done it! Perhaps it was mad to want such a thing? But perhaps everything great was merely mad at first!” “Misuse of words!” his interlocutor shouted back. “Strong! Strong! Strong and mad! Not great!” The old men had visibly grown heated as they shouted their “truths” in each other’s faces like this; but I, in my happiness and my beyond, considered how soon a stronger man would become master over the strong; also that there is compensation for the spiritual flattening of one people, namely the deepening of another.—

242 Call what is now supposed to distinguish Europeans “civilization” or “humanization” or “progress”; call it simply, without praise or blame, by the political formula Europe’s democratic movement: behind all the moral and political foregrounds to which such formulas point, a tremendous physiological process is taking place, increasingly gathering momentum—the process by which Europeans are growing alike, their increasing detachment from the conditions under which races bound to climate and social estate arise, their growing independence from any particular milieu that would like to inscribe itself on body and soul for centuries with the same demands—in other words, the slow emergence of an essentially supranational and nomadic kind of human being whose typical distinction, physiologically speaking, is a maximum of adaptive skill and strength. This process of the European’s becoming, whose tempo can be delayed by great relapses, though perhaps precisely through them it gains and grows in vehemence and depth—the still-raging storm and stress of “national feeling” belongs here, as does the anarchism now emerging—this process will probably lead to results that its naive promoters and eulogists, the apostles of “modern ideas,” would least like to reckon with. The very same new conditions under which, on average, a leveling and mediocratizing of humanity will develop—a useful, industrious, versatile, capable human herd animal—are eminently suited to giving rise to exceptional human beings of the most dangerous and attractive quality. For while that adaptive strength, which tries out ever-changing conditions and begins a new task with each generation, almost with each decade, rules out a powerful type altogether; while the overall impression of such future Europeans will probably be that of versatile, talkative, weak-willed, extremely employable workers who need a master, a commander, as they need their daily bread; while, then, Europe’s democratization amounts to the production of a type prepared for slavery in the subtlest sense: in individual and exceptional cases, the strong human being will have to turn out stronger and richer than perhaps ever before—thanks to the freedom from prejudice in his schooling, thanks to the tremendous variety of practice, art, and mask. What I meant to say is: Europe’s democratization is at the same time an involuntary arrangement for breeding tyrants—the word understood in every sense, including the most spiritual.

243 I am pleased to hear that our sun is moving rapidly toward the constellation Hercules: and I hope that human beings on this earth will follow the sun’s example in this. And we in the lead, we good Europeans!—

244 There was a time when people customarily singled the Germans out as “deep”: now that the most successful type of the new German character covets quite different honors, and perhaps finds everything deep lacking in “dash,” it is almost timely and patriotic to doubt whether that former praise was not a delusion—in short, whether German depth is not fundamentally something else and something worse—and something that, thank God, we are successfully getting rid of. Let us therefore try to learn anew about German depth: all we need is a little vivisection of the German soul.—The German soul is above all manifold, diverse in origin, more assembled and superimposed than truly built: that comes of its ancestry. A German bold enough to assert that “two souls, alas, live in my breast” would do the truth a grave injustice; more precisely, he would fall short of the truth by many souls. As a people of the most monstrous mixing and blending of races, perhaps even with a preponderance of the pre-Aryan element, as a “people of the middle” in every sense, the Germans are more elusive, expansive, contradictory, unknown, incalculable, surprising, even frightening to themselves than other peoples are: they slip out of definition and thereby already drive the French to despair. It is characteristic of the Germans that among them the question “What is German?” never dies out. Kotzebue certainly knew his Germans well enough: “We have been recognized!” they cheered him—but Sand too believed he knew them. Jean Paul knew what he was doing when he angrily declared himself against Fichte’s mendacious but patriotic flatteries and exaggerations—but Goethe probably thought differently about the Germans than Jean Paul, even if he agreed with him about Fichte. What did Goethe really think about the Germans?—But he never spoke plainly about many things around him, and throughout his life understood the art of subtle silence—he probably had good reasons for it. One thing is certain: it was not “the Wars of Liberation” that made him look up more joyfully, any more than the French Revolution—the event that caused him to rethink his Faust, indeed the whole problem of “the human being,” was Napoleon’s appearance. There are words of Goethe’s in which, as though speaking from abroad, he dismisses with impatient severity what Germans count among their sources of pride: on one occasion he defines the famous German depth of feeling as “indulgence toward others’ weaknesses and one’s own.” Is he wrong?—It is characteristic of the Germans that one is seldom entirely wrong about them. The German soul has passages and connecting passages within it; it has caves, hiding places, castle dungeons; its disorder has much of mystery’s charm; the German knows the back ways to chaos. And as everything loves its own likeness, so the German loves clouds and everything unclear, in process, twilit, damp, and veiled: the uncertain, the unformed, the shifting, every kind of growth, he feels to be “deep.” The German himself does not exist, he becomes, he “develops.” “Development” is therefore the distinctively German discovery and masterstroke in the great realm of philosophical formulas—a ruling concept that, allied with German beer and German music, works to Germanize all Europe. Foreigners stand astonished and attracted before the riddles posed by the contradictory nature at the bottom of the German soul (which Hegel systematized and Richard Wagner most recently set to music). “Good-natured and treacherous”—such a pairing, absurd in reference to any other people, is unfortunately justified all too often in Germany: just live among Swabians for a while! The ponderousness of the German scholar, his social tastelessness, goes frighteningly well with an inward tightrope walking and nimble audacity that has already taught all the gods to be afraid. If you want the “German soul” demonstrated before your eyes, just look into German taste, German arts and customs: what peasant indifference toward “taste”! How the noblest and the commonest stand side by side! How disorderly and rich this whole household of the soul is! The German drags his soul around; he drags around everything he experiences. He digests his events badly, never gets “finished” with them; German depth is often only a slow and labored “digestion.” And as all chronic invalids, all dyspeptics, incline toward ease, so the German loves “openness” and “honesty”: how easy it is to be open and honest!—Today this trusting, obliging, cards-on-the-table quality of German honesty is perhaps the most dangerous and fortunate disguise the German commands: it is his true Mephistophelean art, with which he can “still go far”! The German lets himself go, looking on with faithful, blue, empty German eyes—and immediately foreigners mistake him for his dressing gown!—What I meant to say is: let “German depth” be what it will—just between ourselves, perhaps we may permit ourselves a laugh at it?—we do well to go on honoring its appearance and good name, and not to sell off our old reputation as a people of depth too cheaply for Prussian “dash” and Berlin wit and sand. It is wise for a people to make itself pass, to let itself pass, for deep, for clumsy, for good-natured, for honest, for unwise: it might even be—deep! Finally: one should live up to one’s name—it is not for nothing that we are called the “tiusche” people, the deceiving people…

245 The “good old” days are gone; in Mozart they sang their final song—how fortunate we are that his rococo still speaks to us, that his “good society,” his tender raptures, his childish delight in chinoiserie and curlicues, his courtesy of heart, his longing for the delicate, the amorous, the dancing, the blissfully tearful, his faith in the South, may still appeal to some remnant in us! Ah, someday this too will be over!—But who can doubt that the understanding and savoring of Beethoven will be over even sooner!—For he was only the dying echo of a transition and a rupture in style, and not, like Mozart, the dying echo of a great European taste that had lasted centuries. Beethoven is the intervening event between an old, overripe soul that is constantly breaking and a future, excessively young soul that is constantly coming; over his music lies that twilight of eternal losing and eternal, extravagant hoping—the same light in which Europe lay bathed when it dreamed with Rousseau, when it danced around the Revolution’s tree of liberty and finally all but worshiped before Napoleon. But how quickly precisely this feeling is now fading, how difficult even knowing of this feeling has already become—how foreign to our ears is the language of Rousseau, Schiller, Shelley, Byron, in whom, taken together, the same destiny of Europe found its way into words that knew how to sing in Beethoven!—What came afterward in German music belongs to Romanticism, that is, historically speaking, to a movement still shorter, still more fleeting, still more superficial than that great interlude, that transition of Europe from Rousseau to Napoleon and to the emergence of democracy. Weber: but what are Der Freischütz and Oberon to us today! Or Marschner’s Hans Heiling and The Vampire! Or even Wagner’s Tannhäuser! This is music that has fallen silent, though not yet been forgotten. Besides, all this Romantic music was not noble enough, not music enough, to hold its own anywhere but in the theater and before the crowd; from the outset it was second-rank music that counted for little among genuine musicians. It was different with Felix Mendelssohn, that halcyon master who, for the sake of his lighter, purer, happier soul, was quickly revered and just as quickly forgotten: as the beautiful interlude of German music. As for Robert Schumann, however, who took things heavily and from the outset was also taken heavily—he is the last to have founded a school—do we not now regard it as good fortune, a chance to breathe, a liberation, that precisely this Schumannesque Romanticism has been overcome? Schumann, fleeing into the “Saxon Switzerland” of his soul, half Werther, half Jean Paul by nature, certainly not Beethoven! Certainly not Byron!—his Manfred music is a blunder and a misunderstanding to the point of injustice—Schumann with his taste, which was fundamentally a petty taste (namely, a dangerous inclination, doubly dangerous among Germans, toward quiet lyricism and drunken indulgence in feeling), constantly stepping aside, shyly slipping away and withdrawing, a noble, tender soul reveling in sheer anonymous happiness and pain, a kind of girl and “do not touch me” from the start: this Schumann was already no more than a German event in music, no longer a European one as Beethoven was, as Mozart had been to a still more comprehensive degree—with him, German music faced its greatest danger: losing its voice for the soul of Europe and sinking into mere fatherland fever.—

246 What torture books written in German are for anyone who has a third ear! How reluctantly he stands beside that slowly revolving swamp of sounds without resonance, of rhythms without dance, which Germans call a “book”! And the German who reads books, at that! How lazily, how reluctantly, how badly he reads! How many Germans know, and demand of themselves that they know, that there is art in every good sentence—art that must be divined if the sentence is to be understood! A misunderstanding about its tempo, for instance: and the sentence itself has been misunderstood! That there must be no doubt about the rhythmically decisive syllables; that a break in an overstrict symmetry must be felt as intentional and as a charm; that one must lend every staccato, every rubato a subtle, patient ear; that one must divine the sense in the sequence of vowels and diphthongs, and how delicately and richly they can take on and change color in succession: who among book-reading Germans has enough goodwill to acknowledge duties and demands of this kind, and to listen for so much art and intention in language? In the end, one simply “has no ear for it”: and so the strongest contrasts of style go unheard, and the subtlest artistry is wasted as if before the deaf.—These were my thoughts when I noticed how clumsily and unsuspectingly people confused two masters of the art of prose: one whose words drip down hesitantly and coldly, as though from the ceiling of a damp cave—he counts on their muffled sound and echo—and another who handles his language like a supple rapier, feeling from his arm down to his toes the dangerous happiness of the quivering, oversharp blade that wants to bite, hiss, cut.—

247 How little German style has to do with sound and ears is shown by the fact that precisely our good musicians write badly. The German does not read aloud, not for the ear, but only with his eyes: he has put his ears away in a drawer. Ancient people, when they read—it happened rarely enough—read something aloud to themselves, and in a loud voice; people were astonished if someone read quietly and privately wondered why. In a loud voice: that means with all the swellings, inflections, turns of tone, and changes of tempo that gave the ancient public world such pleasure. In those days the laws of written style were the same as those of spoken style; and the latter’s laws depended in part on the astonishing training and refined needs of the ear and larynx, in part on the strength, endurance, and power of ancient lungs. A period, in the ancient sense, is above all a physiological whole, insofar as a single breath holds it together. Such periods as occur in Demosthenes and Cicero, swelling twice and sinking twice, and all within a single breath: these are delights for ancient people, who knew from their own training how to appreciate the excellence involved, the rare and difficult achievement of delivering such a period—we moderns, we short-winded people in every sense, really have no right to the grand period! After all, these ancients were themselves all amateurs in oratory, consequently connoisseurs, consequently critics—with this they drove their orators to the utmost; just as, in the last century, when all Italian men and women knew how to sing, virtuosity in singing (and with it the art of melody) reached its height among them. In Germany, however (until very recently, when a kind of parliamentary eloquence began to stir its young wings, shyly and clumsily enough), there was really only one kind of public speaking that approached an art: speaking from the pulpit. In Germany the preacher alone knew what a syllable, what a word weighs, how a sentence strikes, leaps, plunges, runs, runs to its close; he alone had a conscience in his ears, often enough a bad conscience: for there is no lack of reasons why proficiency in speech is seldom achieved by a German, and almost always too late. The masterpiece of German prose is therefore, in all fairness, the masterpiece of its greatest preacher: the Bible has been the best German book so far. Measured against Luther’s Bible, almost everything else is merely “literature”—a thing that did not grow in Germany and therefore did not and does not grow into German hearts, as the Bible did.

248 There are two kinds of genius: one that above all begets and wants to beget, and another that willingly lets itself be fertilized and gives birth. And likewise, among peoples of genius there are those to whom the woman’s problem of pregnancy and the secret task of shaping, ripening, perfecting have fallen—the Greeks, for example, were a people of this kind, as are the French—and others that must fertilize and become the cause of new orders of life—like the Jews, the Romans, and, one asks in all modesty, the Germans?—Peoples tormented and enraptured by unknown fevers and irresistibly driven out of themselves, in love with and lusting after foreign races (those that “let themselves be fertilized”), and at the same time domineering, like everything that knows itself full of procreative forces and consequently “by the grace of God.” These two kinds of genius seek each other, like man and woman; but they also misunderstand each other—like man and woman.

249 Every people has its own Tartuffery, and calls it its virtues.—The best of what one is, one does not know—cannot know.

250 What does Europe owe the Jews?—Many things, good and bad, and above all one thing that belongs to the best and worst at once: the grand style in morality, the fearfulness and majesty of infinite demands, infinite meanings, the whole Romanticism and sublimity of moral questionabilities—and consequently the very most attractive, ensnaring, exquisite part of those plays of color and seductions into life in whose afterglow the sky of our European culture, its evening sky, is now glowing—perhaps burning out. We artists among spectators and philosophers are—grateful to the Jews for this.

251 One must accept it as part of the bargain if all sorts of clouds and disturbances pass over the mind of a people suffering from national nervous fever and political ambition, wanting to suffer from them—in short, little attacks of stupefaction: among today’s Germans, for example, now anti-French stupidity, now anti-Jewish, now anti-Polish, now Christian-Romantic, now Wagnerian, now Teutonic, now Prussian stupidity (just look at these poor historians, Sybel and Treitzschke with their thickly bandaged heads)—and whatever else they may be called, these little befuddlements of the German mind and conscience. May I be forgiven that I too, during a brief, venturesome stay in a thoroughly infected region, was not entirely spared the disease and, like everyone else, already began forming thoughts about things that are no business of mine: the first sign of political infection. About the Jews, for instance: listen.—I have yet to meet a German who was well-disposed toward the Jews; and however unconditional the rejection of actual anti-Semitic agitation by all cautious and politically minded people may be, even this caution and political calculation are directed not against the kind of feeling itself, but only against its dangerous excess, particularly against the tasteless and shameful expression of that excessive feeling—there must be no delusion about this. That Germany has quite enough Jews, that the German stomach, the German blood has difficulty (and will continue to have difficulty for a long time) coping even with this quantity of “Jew”—as the Italian, the Frenchman, the Englishman have coped, thanks to a more vigorous digestion—this is the clear declaration and language of a general instinct that one must listen to and act on. “Let no more new Jews in! And especially lock the gates toward the East (toward Austria too)!” Thus commands the instinct of a people whose type is still weak and indeterminate, so that it could easily be blurred, easily extinguished by a stronger race. The Jews, however, are beyond all doubt the strongest, toughest, and purest race now living in Europe; they know how to assert themselves even under the worst conditions (better, in fact, than under favorable ones), through certain virtues that people today would like to brand as vices—thanks above all to a resolute faith that has no need to be ashamed before “modern ideas”; if they change, they change only as the Russian Empire makes its conquests—as an empire that has time and is not of yesterday—namely, according to the principle “as slowly as possible!” A thinker who has Europe’s future on his conscience will, in all the plans he makes for that future, reckon with the Jews as with the Russians, as the factors that are for the present the surest and most probable in the great play and struggle of forces. What is called a “nation” in Europe today, and is really more a thing made than born (indeed, sometimes looks confusingly like a thing invented and painted) is in any case something in process, young, easily shifted, not yet a race, let alone something more lasting than bronze like the Jewish type: these “nations” should take great care to avoid all hotheaded rivalry and hostility! That the Jews, if they wanted—or if they were forced to it, as the anti-Semites seem to want—could already have the upper hand, indeed quite literally dominion over Europe, is certain; that they are not working and planning toward this is equally certain. For the time being, on the contrary, they want and wish, even with a certain importunity, to be absorbed and assimilated into Europe, by Europe; they thirst to be settled somewhere at last, accepted, respected, and to put an end to the nomadic life, to the “eternal Jew”—and one should take good note of this inclination and urge (which perhaps itself already expresses a softening of Jewish instincts) and meet it halfway: for which purpose it might be useful and fair to expel the anti-Semitic loudmouths from the country. Meet it halfway with all caution, selectively; much as the English nobility does. Clearly, the stronger and already more firmly stamped types of the new German character could enter into relations with them with the least misgiving—for example, the aristocratic officer from the March of Brandenburg: it would be interesting in many ways to see whether the genius of money and patience (and above all a little intellect and intellectuality, of which there is a plentiful lack in the place indicated) could not be added, bred into the hereditary art of commanding and obeying—in both of which the country indicated is a classic example today. But here it is fitting to break off my cheerful Germanomania and ceremonial oration: for I am already touching on what I take seriously, on the “European problem” as I understand it, on the breeding of a new caste ruling over Europe.—

252 They are no philosophical race, these English: Bacon signifies an attack on the philosophical spirit altogether; Hobbes, Hume, and Locke a debasement and depreciation of the concept “philosopher” for more than a century. Against Hume, Kant rose and raised himself; it was of Locke that Schelling was entitled to say: “I despise Locke”; in the struggle against the English-mechanistic making of a blockhead of the world, Hegel and Schopenhauer (with Goethe) were of one mind, those two hostile brother-geniuses in philosophy who strove apart toward opposite poles of the German spirit, doing each other the kind of injustice that only brothers do.—What England lacks and has always lacked was well enough known to that half-actor and rhetorician, that tasteless muddlehead Carlyle, who tried through passionate grimaces to conceal what he knew about himself: namely, what Carlyle lacked—real power of intellect, real depth of intellectual vision, in short, philosophy.—It is characteristic of such an unphilosophical race that it holds firmly to Christianity: it needs Christianity’s discipline for its “moralization” and humanization. The Englishman, gloomier, more sensual, stronger-willed, and more brutal than the German, is precisely for that reason, as the commoner of the two, also more pious than the German: he has that much more need of Christianity. To more sensitive nostrils, even this English Christianity has a genuinely English side-odor of spleen and alcoholic excess, against which it is used, for good reasons, as a remedy—the subtler poison, that is, against the coarser: a subtler poisoning is indeed already progress among coarse peoples, a step toward spiritualization. English coarseness and peasant earnestness are still most tolerably disguised, or rather interpreted and reinterpreted, through Christian gestures and through praying and psalm-singing; and for that herd of drunken and dissolute beasts that once learned to grunt morally under the sway of Methodism, and lately again as the “Salvation Army,” a convulsion of penitence may really be the relatively highest achievement of “humanity” to which it can be raised: that much one may fairly concede. But what offends even in the most humane Englishman is his lack of music, speaking figuratively (and not figuratively)—he has no rhythm or dance in the movements of his soul and his body, indeed not even a desire for rhythm and dance, for “music.” Listen to him speak; watch the most beautiful Englishwomen walk—no country on earth has more beautiful doves and swans—finally: listen to them sing! But I ask too much…

253 There are truths best recognized by mediocre minds because they are most suited to them; there are truths that have charm and seductive power only for mediocre spirits:—one is driven toward this perhaps unpleasant proposition precisely now, since the spirit of respectable but mediocre Englishmen—I name Darwin, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer—is beginning to gain the upper hand in the middle region of European taste. Indeed, who would wish to doubt the usefulness of such spirits ruling for a time? It would be a mistake to consider precisely the high-natured spirits who fly apart from the rest particularly skilled at establishing, collecting, and forcing into conclusions a multitude of little commonplace facts—as exceptions, they are from the outset in no favorable position toward the “rules.” After all, they have more to do than merely know—namely, to be something new, to mean something new, to embody new values! The gulf between knowing and being able is perhaps greater, also more uncanny, than one thinks: the capable person in the grand style, the creator, may possibly have to be an ignorant one—while, on the other hand, a certain narrowness, dryness, and industrious thoroughness, in short, something English, may be no bad qualification for scientific discoveries of Darwin’s kind.—Finally, let us not forget that the English have already once, with their profound averageness, caused an overall depression of the European spirit: what people call “modern ideas” or “the ideas of the eighteenth century” or even “French ideas”—in other words, what the German spirit rose against in profound disgust—was of English origin, there can be no doubt of it. The French were only the apes and actors of these ideas, also their best soldiers, and unfortunately their first and most thorough victims: for through the damnable Anglomania of “modern ideas,” the French soul ultimately became so thin and emaciated that today one remembers its sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, its deep, passionate strength, its inventive nobility, almost with disbelief. But one must hold fast with one’s teeth to this proposition of historical fairness, defending it against the moment and against appearances: European nobility—of feeling, of taste, of manners, in short, the word taken in every high sense—is France’s work and invention; European vulgarity, the plebeianism of modern ideas—England’s.—

254 Even now, France is still the seat of Europe’s most intellectual and refined culture and its high school of taste: but one must know how to find this “France of taste.” Those who belong to it keep themselves well hidden—it may be a small number in whom it lives and breathes, perhaps people who do not stand on the strongest legs, some fatalists, gloomy and sick, some pampered and artificial, people whose ambition is to hide themselves. They all have one thing in common: they stop their ears against the raging stupidity and noisy blather of the democratic bourgeois. Indeed, a stupefied and coarsened France now sprawls across the foreground—lately, at Victor Hugo’s funeral, it celebrated a veritable orgy of bad taste and self-admiration at once. Something else is common to them too: a goodwill to resist intellectual Germanization—and a still better inability to do so! Perhaps Schopenhauer is already more at home and more naturalized in this France of the intellect, which is also a France of pessimism, than he ever was in Germany; not to mention Heinrich Heine, who has long since entered the flesh and blood of Paris’s subtler and more demanding lyric poets, or Hegel, who today, in the shape of Taine—that is, the foremost living historian—exercises an almost tyrannical influence. As for Richard Wagner: the more French music learns to shape itself to the actual needs of the modern soul, the more it will “Wagnerize,” one may predict that—it is already doing enough of it! Nevertheless, there are three things that, despite all voluntary or involuntary Germanization and vulgarization of taste, the French can still proudly display today as their inheritance and possession, and as the unlost mark of an old cultural superiority over Europe: first, the capacity for artistic passions, for devotion to “form,” for which the expression art for art’s sake, among a thousand others, was invented—there has been no lack of such things in France for three centuries, and thanks to reverence for the “small number,” they have again and again made possible a kind of chamber music of literature whose equal is hard to find elsewhere in Europe. The second thing on which the French can base a superiority over Europe is their old, manifold culture of moral psychology, which means that on average, even among the newspapers’ minor novelists and chance habitués of the Paris boulevards, one finds a psychological sensitivity and curiosity of which, in Germany for instance, people have no conception (let alone the thing itself!). For this the Germans lack a few centuries of moral-psychological cultivation that, as I said, France did not spare itself; anyone who calls the Germans “naive” on that account is fashioning praise out of a deficiency. (As a contrast to German inexperience and innocence in psychological pleasure, which is not too distantly related to the dullness of German social intercourse—and as the most accomplished expression of a genuinely French curiosity and inventiveness in this realm of delicate shudders—one might take Henri Beyle, that remarkable, anticipatory, forerunning man who ran at a Napoleonic tempo through his Europe, through several centuries of the European soul, as a tracker and discoverer of that soul—it took two generations to catch up with him at all, to puzzle out a few of the riddles that tormented and enraptured him, this strange Epicurean and question-mark man who was France’s last great psychologist.) There is yet a third claim to superiority: in the French character there is a halfway successful synthesis of North and South, which enables them to understand many things and bids them do other things that an Englishman will never understand; their temperament, periodically turning toward the South and away from it, in which Provençal and Ligurian blood overflows from time to time, protects them against the dreadful northern gray on gray and the sunless conceptual ghostliness and anemia—our German disease of taste, against whose excess people have for the moment prescribed blood and iron with great determination, by which I mean “grand politics” (in keeping with a dangerous art of healing that teaches me to wait and wait, but as yet not to hope). Even now there is in France a preliminary understanding of and receptivity toward those rarer and rarely satisfied human beings who are too comprehensive to find satisfaction in any fatherland fever, and know how to love the South in the North and the North in the South—the born Mediterraneans, the “good Europeans.”—For them Bizet made music, this last genius to have seen a new beauty and seduction—to have discovered a piece of the South in music.

255 I consider a variety of precautions advisable toward German music. Suppose someone loves the South as I love it, as a great school of recovery, in the most intellectual and most sensual things, as an unrestrained fullness and transfiguration of sunlight spreading over an existence that is its own master and believes in itself: well, such a person will learn to take some care with German music, because in corrupting his taste again it also corrupts his health again. Such a southerner, not by descent but by faith, must, if he dreams of music’s future, also dream of music’s redemption from the North, and have in his ears the prelude to a deeper, mightier, perhaps more evil and mysterious music, a supra-German music that does not die away, turn yellow, fade at the sight of the blue, voluptuous sea and the Mediterranean sky’s brightness, as all German music does; a supra-European music that holds its own even before the desert’s brown sunsets, whose soul is kin to the palm tree and knows how to be at home and roam among great, beautiful, solitary beasts of prey… I could imagine a music whose rarest magic lay in its knowing nothing more of good and evil, except that perhaps some sailor’s homesickness, some golden shadows and tender weaknesses, would pass over it here and there: an art that saw the colors of a declining, almost incomprehensible moral world taking refuge with it from a great distance, and was hospitable and deep enough to receive such late fugitives.—

256 Thanks to the pathological estrangement that the madness of nationality has placed and still places between the peoples of Europe, thanks also to the short-sighted, quick-handed politicians who are on top today with its help and have no inkling how necessarily the divisive politics they practice can only be the politics of an interlude—thanks to all this and much else wholly unspeakable today, people now overlook, or arbitrarily and mendaciously reinterpret, the most unambiguous signs expressing the fact that Europe wants to become one. In all this century’s deeper and more comprehensive human beings, the true overall direction of the mysterious labor of their souls was to prepare the way for that new synthesis and tentatively to anticipate the European of the future: only with their foregrounds, or in weaker hours, in old age perhaps, did they belong to the “fatherlands”—they were merely resting from themselves when they became “patriots.” I am thinking of people like Napoleon, Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, Heinrich Heine, Schopenhauer: let no one resent my counting Richard Wagner among them too, about whom one must not be misled by his own misunderstandings—geniuses of his kind seldom have the right to understand themselves. Still less, of course, by the uncivilized noise with which people in France now resist and repel Richard Wagner—the fact remains nonetheless that French late Romanticism of the forties and Richard Wagner belong together in the closest and most intimate way. They are related in all the heights and depths of their needs, related at the root: it is Europe, the one Europe, whose soul, through their manifold and impetuous art, presses and yearns outward, upward—where? Into a new light? Toward a new sun? But who would want to state precisely what all these masters of new means of expression did not know how to state clearly? One thing is certain: the same storm and stress tormented them, they sought in the same way, these last great seekers! All of them ruled by literature down to their eyes and ears—the first artists with a world-literary education—most of them even writers and poets themselves, mediators and minglers of the arts and senses (as a musician Wagner belongs among painters, as a poet among musicians, as an artist altogether among actors); all of them fanatics of expression “at any price”—I single out Delacroix, Wagner’s closest relation—all great discoverers in the realm of the sublime, also of the ugly and ghastly, still greater discoverers in effect, in display, in the art of shop-window presentation, all possessed of talents far beyond their genius—virtuosos through and through, with uncanny access to everything that seduces, lures, compels, overturns, born enemies of logic and straight lines, greedy for the foreign, the exotic, the monstrous, the crooked, the self-contradictory; as human beings, Tantaluses of the will, plebeians risen in the world who knew themselves incapable, in life and creation, of a noble tempo, a lento—think of Balzac, for example—unbridled workers, almost self-destroyers through work; antinomians and rebels in morals, ambitious and insatiable people without balance or enjoyment; all of them finally breaking and sinking down at the Christian cross (and rightly so: for which of them would have been deep and original enough for a philosophy of the Antichrist?)—on the whole, a recklessly daring, magnificently violent, high-flying and upward-sweeping kind of higher human beings, who first had to teach their century—and it is the century of the crowd!—the concept “higher human being”… Let Richard Wagner’s German friends consult with themselves as to whether there is anything simply German in Wagnerian art, or whether its distinction is not precisely that it comes from supra-German sources and impulses: in considering this, one should not underestimate how indispensable precisely Paris was to the development of his type, Paris for which the depth of his instincts made him long at the most decisive time, and how the whole manner of his appearance, his self-apostleship, could reach completion only in the face of the French socialist model. Perhaps a subtler comparison will find, to the honor of Richard Wagner’s German nature, that he pushed everything further in strength, daring, hardness, height than a nineteenth-century Frenchman could—thanks to the fact that we Germans still stand closer to barbarism than the French—perhaps even the most remarkable thing Richard Wagner created is forever, and not merely today, inaccessible, beyond feeling and imitation, to the whole Latin race, so late in its development: the figure of Siegfried, that very free human being who may indeed be far too free, too hard, too cheerful, too healthy, too anti-Catholic for the taste of old, worn-out cultured peoples. This anti-Romance Siegfried may even have been a sin against Romanticism: well, Wagner amply made good that sin in his old, gloomy days, when—anticipating a taste that has since become politics—he began, with his own peculiar religious vehemence, if not to walk the road to Rome, at least to preach it.—So that these last words do not lead to misunderstanding, I will call a few vigorous rhymes to my aid; even less sensitive ears will hear from them what I want—what I want against the “last Wagner” and his Parsifal music.

—Is this still German?—

Did this sultry screech come from a German heart?Is this a German body tearing its flesh apart?Is this priestly spreading of hands German,This incense-scented teasing of the senses?And German, this halting, plunging, reeling,This uncertain bim-bam-dangling?These nunnish ogles, Ave bells all ringing,This whole false rapture, heaven past heaven winging?

—Is this still German?—

Consider! You still stand at the gate:—For what you hear is Rome—Rome’s faith without words!

Eighth Part:

Peoples and Fatherlands.

240 I listened, once again for the first time, to Richard Wagner’s overture to The Mastersingers. This is magnificent art: overloaded, heavy, and late in its development. It is proud enough to assume that anyone who understands it still has two centuries of music alive within them. It does the Germans credit that this pride was not misplaced! What juices and forces, what seasons and climates have been mixed here! At one moment it strikes us as ancient, at another as foreign, sharp, and excessively young. It is as arbitrary as it is grandly conventional. It is often mischievous, and still more often blunt and coarse. It has fire and courage, and at the same time the loose, pale skin of fruit that ripens too late. It pours along, broad and full. Suddenly there is a moment of unexplained hesitation, as though a gap were opening between cause and effect, a pressure that makes us dream, almost a nightmare. But already the old stream of pleasure spreads and broadens again: pleasure in every form, happiness old and new. Very much included is the artist’s pleasure in himself, which he does not want to hide: his astonished, happy awareness of his mastery of the means he uses here—new, newly acquired, untested artistic means, as he seems to be telling us. Taken as a whole, there is no beauty, no South, none of the South’s delicate brightness of sky, no grace, no dance, hardly even a will to logic. There is even a certain clumsiness, emphasized as though the artist wanted to tell us, “It is part of my intention.” There is a cumbersome costume, something arbitrary, barbaric, and ceremonial; a shimmer of learned and venerable treasures and lacework. Something German, in the best and worst sense of the word; something various, shapeless, and inexhaustible in a German way. A certain German strength and overflowing fullness of soul, unafraid to hide among the refinements of decay—perhaps feeling most at home precisely there. A true, genuine emblem of the German soul, at once young and out of date, excessively worn-out and still excessively rich in future possibilities. This kind of music best expresses what I think of the Germans: they belong to the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow—they do not yet have a today.

241 We “good Europeans” also have hours when we allow ourselves a hearty bout of patriotism, a plunge and relapse into old loves and narrow limits—I have just given an example. Hours of national excitement, patriotic anxieties, and all sorts of other old-fashioned floods of feeling. More cumbersome minds than ours may take longer to get through what, for us, is confined to hours and finishes playing itself out in hours. Some may take half a year, others half a lifetime, depending on the speed and strength with which they digest and “metabolize.” Yes, I can imagine dull, hesitant races that, even in our fast-moving Europe, would need half-centuries to overcome such ancestral attacks of patriotism and attachment to their own patch of earth, and return to reason—I mean to being “good Europeans.” While I wander through this possibility in my thoughts, I happen to overhear a conversation between two old “patriots.” Both were clearly hard of hearing, and spoke all the louder for it. “He thinks as much of philosophy, and knows as much about it, as a peasant or a fraternity student,” one said. “He is still innocent. But what does that matter today! This is the age of the masses: they throw themselves flat before anything massive. In politics, too. A statesman who piles up a new Tower of Babel for them, some monstrous structure of empire and power, is what they call ‘great.’ What does it matter that we more cautious, more reserved people have not yet abandoned the old belief that only a great thought gives greatness to a deed or a cause? Suppose a statesman put his people in a position where, from then on, they had to pursue ‘great politics,’ for which they are naturally poorly equipped and prepared. They would have to sacrifice their old, dependable virtues for the sake of a new, doubtful mediocrity. Suppose a statesman condemned his people to ‘politicking’ at all, although until then they had better things to do and think about, and deep in their souls could never shake off a wary disgust at the restlessness, emptiness, and noisy, quarrelsome devilry of peoples who actually live for politics. Suppose such a statesman stirred up his people’s sleeping passions and cravings, made a stain of their former shyness and their pleasure in standing aside, made a fault of their love of foreign things and their hidden boundlessness, devalued their deepest inclinations, turned their conscience inside out, narrowed their minds, made their taste ‘national.’ What! A statesman who did all this, for which his people would have to pay through their entire future, if they have a future—would such a statesman be great?” “Without question!” the other old patriot answered vehemently. “Otherwise he could not have done it! Perhaps it was mad to want such a thing? But perhaps everything great was only madness at first!” “Misuse of words!” the first shouted back. “Strong! Strong! Strong and mad! Not great!” The old men had visibly grown heated as they shouted their “truths” into each other’s faces. But I, in my happiness and my beyond, considered how soon a stronger man would become master over the strong. And also how the loss of depth in one people’s mind has its compensation: in the growing depth of another’s.

242 Call it “civilization,” “humanization,” or “progress,” this thing in which Europeans now seek their distinction. Or simply call it, without praise or blame, by a political formula: Europe’s democratic movement. Behind all the moral and political appearances these formulas point to, an enormous physiological process is taking place, increasingly in motion. Europeans are becoming more alike. They are increasingly breaking free of the conditions that produce races tied to a climate and a social class. They are becoming increasingly independent of any particular environment that would inscribe the same demands on body and soul for centuries. In other words, a basically supranational, nomadic kind of human being is slowly emerging, whose typical distinction, physiologically speaking, is the greatest possible skill and power of adaptation. This process of the European’s development can be slowed down by great relapses, but perhaps these are just what make it gain and grow in force and depth. The stormy passion for “national feeling” still raging today belongs here, as does the anarchism now emerging. This process will probably lead to results its naive supporters and spokespeople, the apostles of “modern ideas,” would least like to expect. The same new conditions that will, on average, level people out and make them mediocre—a useful, hardworking human herd animal, versatile and adaptable—are extremely well suited to producing exceptional people of the most dangerous and attractive kind. That power of adaptation, trying out ever-changing conditions and starting a new task with every generation, almost every decade, makes a powerful type impossible. The overall impression these future Europeans make will probably be that of versatile, talkative workers, weak in will and extremely employable, who need a master, someone to command them, as they need their daily bread. Thus Europe’s democratization amounts to producing a type prepared for slavery in its most refined sense. Yet in the individual, exceptional case, the strong person will have to turn out stronger and richer than perhaps ever before, thanks to an education free from prejudice, thanks to the enormous variety of practice, art, and masks. What I meant to say is this: Europe’s democratization is at the same time an unintended arrangement for breeding tyrants—taking that word in every sense, including the most intellectual.

243 I am pleased to hear that our sun is moving rapidly toward the constellation Hercules. And I hope that human beings on this earth will follow the sun’s example in this. And we in the lead, we good Europeans!—

244 There was a time when people used to distinguish the Germans by calling them “deep.” Now the most successful type of the new German character hungers for quite different honors, and perhaps finds that everything with depth lacks “dash.” So it is almost timely and patriotic to wonder whether that old compliment did not deceive us. In short, whether German depth is not really something different and worse—and something we are, thank God, successfully getting rid of. Let us try, then, to relearn what German depth means. All that is needed is a little vivisection of the German soul. Above all, the German soul is many-sided and comes from various sources. It is more a collection of things put together and piled on top of one another than a real structure: that follows from its origins. A German bold enough to claim, “Two souls, alas, live in my breast,” would do the truth a serious injustice—or rather, would fall short of it by many souls. A people made from the most enormous mixture and stirring together of races, perhaps even with the pre-Aryan element predominating, a “people of the middle” in every sense, the Germans are harder to grasp, more wide-ranging, more contradictory, less known, less predictable, more surprising, even more frightening to themselves than other peoples are to themselves. They escape definition, and that alone drives the French to despair. It is characteristic of the Germans that the question “What is German?” never dies out among them. Kotzebue certainly knew his Germans well enough: “We have been understood!” they cheered at him—but Sand also thought he knew them. Jean Paul knew what he was doing when he angrily spoke out against Fichte’s lying but patriotic flattery and exaggeration. Yet Goethe probably thought differently about the Germans than Jean Paul did, even if he agreed with him about Fichte. What did Goethe actually think of the Germans? But he never spoke plainly about many things around him, and throughout his life he knew the subtle art of silence—probably for good reasons. What is certain is that it was not the “Wars of Liberation” that made him look up with greater joy, any more than the French Revolution did. The event that made him rethink his Faust, indeed the whole problem of “the human being,” was Napoleon’s appearance. There are remarks in which Goethe, as though speaking from abroad, passes judgment with impatient harshness on what the Germans take pride in. He once defines their famous depth of feeling as “indulgence toward other people’s weaknesses and one’s own.” Is he wrong? It is characteristic of the Germans that one is rarely entirely wrong about them. The German soul has passages and connecting passages within it; it has caves, hiding places, castle dungeons. Its disorder has much of the charm of mystery. The German knows the back ways into chaos. And just as everything loves what resembles it, the German loves clouds and everything unclear, developing, dim, damp, and veiled. Uncertainty, lack of shape, shifting, growth of every kind: these feel “deep” to him. The German himself does not exist: he is becoming, he is “developing.” So “development” is the truly German discovery and inspired invention in the great realm of philosophical formulas. It is a ruling concept that, allied with German beer and German music, works to Germanize all Europe. Foreigners stand amazed and attracted by the puzzles set them by the contradictory nature at the base of the German soul (which Hegel put into a system, and Richard Wagner most recently into music). “Good-natured and treacherous”—a combination that would be nonsense for any other people is unfortunately justified all too often in Germany. Just spend some time among Swabians! The German scholar’s clumsiness and lack of social taste go alarmingly well with an inner tightrope-walking and easy boldness that have already taught all the gods to be afraid. If you want the “German soul” demonstrated before your eyes, just look into German taste, German arts and customs. What peasant indifference to “taste”! How the noblest and the most vulgar stand side by side! What a disorderly, wealthy household this whole soul is! The German drags his soul around with him; he drags around everything he experiences. He digests events badly and never “finishes” with them. German depth is often nothing but a slow, difficult “digestion.” And just as all chronic invalids, all sufferers from indigestion, lean toward comfort, the German loves “openness” and “honest simplicity.” How comfortable it is to be open and simple! Perhaps the most dangerous and successful disguise the German knows today is this trusting, accommodating, cards-on-the-table quality of German honesty. It is his real art of Mephistopheles: with it he can “still go far”! The German lets himself go, looking on with faithful, blue, empty German eyes—and immediately foreigners mistake him for his dressing gown! What I meant to say is this: whatever “German depth” may be—and strictly between ourselves, perhaps we may allow ourselves a laugh at it?—we would do well to keep honoring its appearance and good name. We should not sell our old reputation as a people of depth too cheaply for Prussian “dash” and Berlin wit and sand. It is wise for a people to make itself pass, to let itself pass, for deep, clumsy, good-natured, honest, unwise. It might even be—deep! Finally, one should do one’s name credit: it is not for nothing that we are called the “tiusche” people, the deceiving people…

245 The “good old” days are gone; in Mozart they sang their final song. How lucky we are that his rococo still speaks to us! That his “good society,” his tender enthusiasm, his childish delight in Chinese things and decorative curls, his courtesy of heart, his desire for delicate things, for love, dance, and blissful tears, his faith in the South, can still appeal to some remnant within us! Ah, one day even that will be over! But who can doubt that understanding and enjoying Beethoven will end even sooner? He was only the final sound of a transition and break in style, not, like Mozart, the final sound of a great European taste that had lasted for centuries. Beethoven is the event between an old, worn-out soul, constantly breaking, and a future, excessively young soul, constantly arriving. Over his music lies that twilight of eternal loss and eternal, extravagant hope—the same light in which Europe lay bathed when it dreamed with Rousseau, danced around the Revolution’s tree of liberty, and finally all but worshiped Napoleon. But how quickly this very feeling is now fading! How hard it already is to know this feeling! How strange to our ears is the language of Rousseau, Schiller, Shelley, Byron, in whom, taken together, the same European destiny found its way into words that knew how to sing in Beethoven! What came afterward in German music belongs to Romanticism: in historical terms, a still shorter, more fleeting, more superficial movement than that great interlude, Europe’s passage from Rousseau to Napoleon and the rise of democracy. Weber—but what are Der Freischütz and Oberon to us today! Or Marschner’s Hans Heiling and The Vampire! Or even Wagner’s Tannhäuser! This music has died away, even if it has not yet been forgotten. Besides, all this Romantic music was not noble enough, not musical enough, to hold its ground anywhere but in the theater and before the crowd. From the start it was second-rate music, of little account among real musicians. It was different with Felix Mendelssohn, that serene master, quickly admired and just as quickly forgotten for his lighter, purer, happier soul: the beautiful episode in German music. As for Robert Schumann, who took things heavily and was himself taken heavily from the start—he is the last to have founded a school—do we not now consider it good fortune, a breath of relief, a liberation, that precisely this Schumann-style Romanticism has been overcome? Schumann, fleeing into the “Saxon Switzerland” of his soul, half like Werther, half like Jean Paul, certainly not like Beethoven! Certainly not like Byron! His Manfred music is a mistake and a misunderstanding to the point of injustice. Schumann, whose taste was fundamentally a small taste (a dangerous inclination, doubly dangerous among Germans, toward quiet lyric poetry and drunkenness of feeling), constantly stepping aside, shyly slipping away and drawing back, a noble, delicate creature reveling in nothing but nameless happiness and pain, a kind of girl and “do not touch me” from the start: this Schumann was already only a German event in music, no longer a European one like Beethoven, or, on a still broader scale, Mozart. With him, German music faced its greatest danger: losing its voice for Europe’s soul and sinking into mere patriotism.—

246 What torture books written in German are for anyone with a third ear! How reluctantly he stands beside the slowly swirling swamp of sounds without sound, rhythms without dance, that Germans call a “book”! And then the German who reads books! How lazily, how unwillingly, how badly he reads! How many Germans know, and demand that they themselves know, that every good sentence contains art—art that has to be detected if the sentence is to be understood! Misunderstand its tempo, for example, and the sentence itself is misunderstood! There must be no doubt about which syllables determine the rhythm. A break in an overly strict symmetry must be felt as intentional and appealing. Every staccato, every rubato calls for a sensitive, patient ear. One must guess the meaning in the succession of vowels and diphthongs, and how delicately and richly they can color and recolor one another as they follow in sequence. Which Germans who read books are willing enough to recognize duties and demands like these, and listen for so much art and intention in language? In the end, they simply “have no ear for it.” And so the sharpest contrasts in style go unheard, and the finest artistry is wasted as though on the deaf. These were my thoughts when I noticed how clumsily and cluelessly people confused two masters of prose. From one, the words drip down hesitantly and coldly, as though from the ceiling of a damp cave—he relies on their muffled sound and echo. The other handles his language like a flexible fencing sword, and feels, from his arm down to his toes, the dangerous pleasure of its quivering, excessively sharp blade, eager to bite, hiss, and cut.—

247 How little German style has to do with sound and ears is shown by the fact that our good musicians, in particular, write badly. The German does not read aloud, not for the ear, but only with his eyes: meanwhile he has put his ears away in a drawer. A person in antiquity, when he read—and it happened rarely enough—read something aloud to himself, in a loud voice. People were surprised if someone read quietly, and privately wondered why. In a loud voice: that means with all the swellings, inflections, changes in tone, and shifts of tempo that the public world of antiquity enjoyed. Then the laws of written style were the same as those of spoken style. Those laws depended partly on the astonishing training and refined needs of ear and throat, and partly on the strength, endurance, and power of ancient lungs. A periodic sentence, in the ancient sense, is above all a physiological whole, because one breath holds it together. Periodic sentences like those in Demosthenes and Cicero, swelling twice and falling twice, all within a single breath: these were delights for people of antiquity. From their own training, they knew how to appreciate the skill involved, the rarity and difficulty of delivering such a sentence. We modern people, short of breath in every sense, really have no right to the great periodic sentence! All those ancient people practiced speech themselves as amateurs, and were therefore knowledgeable listeners, and therefore critics. This drove their orators to the limit. In just the same way, in the last century, when all Italian men and women knew how to sing, virtuoso singing—and with it the art of melody—reached its height among them. But in Germany there was really only one kind of public speech with anything like artistry: speech from the pulpit. (Only in the most recent times has a kind of platform eloquence begun moving its young wings, shyly and clumsily enough.) In Germany, only the preacher knew what a syllable or a word weighs, how a sentence strikes, leaps, plunges, runs, runs to its end. Only he had a conscience in his ears, often enough a bad conscience. There is no lack of reasons why a German, in particular, rarely achieves skill in speech, and almost always too late. It is therefore only fair that the masterpiece of German prose is the masterpiece of its greatest preacher: so far, the Bible has been the best German book. Measured against Luther’s Bible, almost everything else is merely “literature”—a thing that did not grow in Germany, and so did not and does not grow into German hearts as the Bible did.

248 There are two kinds of genius: one that above all begets and wants to beget, and another that gladly lets itself be fertilized and gives birth. Similarly, among peoples of genius, some have been given the woman’s problem of pregnancy and the secret task of shaping, ripening, completing—the Greeks, for example, were such a people, as are the French. Others have to fertilize and become the cause of new orders of life—like the Jews, the Romans, and, to ask with all modesty, the Germans? Peoples tormented and delighted by unknown fevers, irresistibly driven out beyond themselves, in love with foreign races and lusting after them (races that “let themselves be fertilized”), and at the same time hungry to rule, like everything that knows it is full of reproductive power and therefore rules “by the grace of God.” These two kinds of genius seek each other, like man and woman. But they also misunderstand each other—like man and woman.

249 Every people has its own Tartuffe-style hypocrisy, and calls it its virtues. The best of what one is, one does not know—cannot know.

250 What does Europe owe the Jews? Many things, good and bad, and above all one thing that belongs to both the best and the worst: the grand style in morality, the terror and majesty of infinite demands, infinite meanings, all the romance and grandeur of moral uncertainties. And therefore precisely the most attractive, most ensnaring, most exquisite part of those plays of color and seductions into life, in whose afterglow the sky of our European culture, its evening sky, glows today—perhaps glows its last. We artists among spectators and philosophers are—grateful to the Jews for this.

251 We must accept that a people suffering from national nervous fever and political ambition, wanting to suffer from them, will have all kinds of clouds and disturbances pass over its mind—in short, little attacks of growing stupid. Among today’s Germans, for example, there is now anti-French stupidity, now anti-Jewish, now anti-Polish, now Christian-Romantic, now Wagnerian, now Teutonic, now Prussian (just look at those poor historians, Sybel and Treitzschke with their thickly bandaged heads), and whatever else these little fogs over the German mind and conscience may be called. May I be forgiven that I too, during a brief, risky stay in a highly infected area, was not entirely spared the disease. Like everyone else, I even began thinking about things that are none of my business: the first sign of political infection. About the Jews, for instance. Listen. I have never yet met a German who was well disposed toward the Jews. However unconditional all cautious, politically minded people may be in rejecting outright antisemitic agitation, their caution and policy are not directed against the kind of feeling itself. They oppose only its dangerous excess, especially the tasteless and shameful expression of that excessive feeling. We must not deceive ourselves about this. Germany has more than enough Jews; the German stomach, German blood, has trouble—and will have trouble for a long time yet—even coping with this amount of “Jew,” as the Italian, the Frenchman, the Englishman have coped through a stronger digestion. This is the clear statement and language of a general instinct that one must listen to and act upon. “Let no more Jews in! And especially lock the gates toward the East (including Austria)!” So commands the instinct of a people whose type is still weak and undefined, and could easily be blurred, easily erased by a stronger race. But the Jews are beyond all doubt the strongest, toughest, purest race now living in Europe. They know how to assert themselves even under the worst conditions—better, in fact, than under favorable ones—through certain virtues people today would like to stamp as vices. Above all, thanks to a firm faith that has no need to feel ashamed before “modern ideas.” If they change, they change only as the Russian Empire makes its conquests—as an empire that has time and was not born yesterday—namely, on the principle “as slowly as possible!” A thinker whose conscience bears responsibility for Europe’s future will, in all the plans he makes for that future, reckon with the Jews as with the Russians: as, for now, the most certain and probable factors in the great game and struggle of forces. What is called a “nation” in Europe today is really more a thing made than a thing born (indeed, sometimes almost indistinguishable from a thing invented and painted). In any case it is something developing, young, easily shifted, not yet a race, let alone something “more lasting than bronze,” as the Jewish type is. These “nations” should take careful precautions against any hotheaded rivalry and hostility! It is certain that the Jews, if they wanted—or if they were forced to it, as the antisemites seem to want—could already have the upper hand, indeed quite literally rule over Europe. It is equally certain that they are not working or planning toward this. For now, rather, they want and wish, even with some insistence, to be absorbed into Europe, absorbed by Europe. They thirst to be settled somewhere at last, accepted and respected, to put an end to the nomadic life, to the “Wandering Jew.” We should pay close attention to this inclination and urge—which may itself already express a softening of Jewish instincts—and meet it halfway. To that end, it might be useful and fair to expel the antisemitic loudmouths from the country. Meet it with every caution, selectively, roughly as the English nobility does. Clearly, the stronger, already more firmly formed types of the new German character could associate with them with the least concern—for example, the noble officer from the March of Brandenburg. It would be interesting in many ways to see whether the genius for money and patience could be added, bred into the hereditary art of commanding and obeying—in both of which the region just named is a classic example today. Above all, a little intelligence and intellectual life, which are abundantly lacking there. But here it is fitting to break off my cheerful German nationalism and ceremonial speech. I am already touching on what I take seriously, on the “European problem” as I understand it: the breeding of a new caste ruling over Europe.—

252 These English are no philosophical race. Bacon represents an attack on the philosophical spirit itself. Hobbes, Hume, and Locke lowered and devalued the concept “philosopher” for more than a century. Kant rose up, and rose higher, against Hume. It was of Locke that Schelling had the right to say, “I despise Locke.” Hegel and Schopenhauer, those two hostile brother-geniuses of philosophy, were at one—with Goethe—in the fight against the English-mechanistic stupefaction of the world. They strove apart toward opposite poles of the German mind, and in doing so wronged each other as only brothers can. That half-actor and rhetorician, the tasteless muddlehead Carlyle, knew well enough what England lacks and has always lacked. With passionate grimaces he tried to hide what he knew about himself: namely, what Carlyle lacked—real intellectual power, real depth of intellectual vision, in short, philosophy. It is characteristic of such an unphilosophical race that it clings firmly to Christianity. It needs Christianity’s discipline to “moralize” it and make it more human. The Englishman is gloomier, more sensual, stronger-willed, and more brutal than the German. Precisely for that reason, as the more vulgar of the two, he is also more devout: he needs Christianity even more. To more sensitive nostrils, even this English Christianity has a genuinely English undertone of melancholy and alcoholic excess. With good reason, it is used as a remedy against them—the subtler poison against the coarser. Among clumsy peoples, a subtler poisoning is indeed already progress, a step toward a more spiritual life. English clumsiness and peasant seriousness are most tolerably disguised—or rather, explained and reinterpreted—by Christian gestures, prayer, and psalm-singing. And for that brutish lot of drunkards and libertines, who formerly learned to grunt morally under the power of Methodism and have recently done so again as the “Salvation Army,” a fit of repentance may really be the relatively highest achievement of “humanity” to which they can be raised. It is only fair to grant that much. But what offends even in the most humane Englishman is his lack of music, to speak figuratively—and not figuratively. In the movements of his soul and body he has no rhythm or dance, indeed not even a desire for rhythm and dance, for “music.” Listen to him speak. Watch the most beautiful Englishwomen walk—no country on earth has more beautiful doves and swans. Finally, listen to them sing! But I am asking too much…

253 There are truths best understood by mediocre minds, because they suit those minds best. There are truths that have charm and seductive power only for mediocre minds. We are being pushed up against this perhaps unpleasant proposition just now, as the thinking of respectable but mediocre Englishmen—I name Darwin, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer—begins to gain the upper hand in the middle reaches of European taste. Indeed, who would question the usefulness of such minds ruling for a time? It would be a mistake to think that minds of a high order, flying off the common track, are particularly good at establishing, collecting, and forcing into conclusions a great many small, common facts. As exceptions, they are, from the start, in no favorable position toward the “rules.” After all, they have more to do than merely acquire knowledge: namely, to be something new, mean something new, represent new values! The gulf between knowing and being able to do may be greater, and more disturbing, than people think. The person capable on a grand scale, the creator, may have to be an ignorant person. On the other hand, a certain narrowness, dryness, and diligent care—in short, something English—may be quite a good qualification for scientific discoveries of Darwin’s kind. Finally, let us not forget that the English have already once brought about a general depression of the European mind through their profound averageness. What people call “modern ideas,” “the ideas of the eighteenth century,” or even “French ideas”—what the German mind rose against with deep disgust—was English in origin. There can be no doubt of that. The French were only the apes and actors of these ideas, also their best soldiers, and unfortunately also their first and most thorough victims. For the damnable English craze of “modern ideas” finally made the French soul so thin and wasted that today we remember its sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, its deep, passionate strength and inventive nobility, almost with disbelief. But we must grip this statement of historical fairness with our teeth and defend it against the present moment and present appearances: European nobility—in feeling, taste, manners, in short, taking the word in every higher sense—is France’s work and invention; European vulgarity, the plebeian character of modern ideas, is England’s.—

254 Even now, France is the home of Europe’s most intellectual and refined culture, and its great school of taste. But one must know how to find this “France of taste.” Those who belong to it keep well hidden. Perhaps only a few people keep it alive in the flesh, and perhaps these do not stand on the strongest legs: some fatalists, gloomy people, sick people; others overdelicate and overartificial, people whose ambition is to remain hidden. They all share one thing: they stop their ears against the raging stupidity and noisy mouth of the democratic bourgeois. Indeed, a France grown stupid and coarse now rolls about in the foreground. Recently, at Victor Hugo’s funeral, it celebrated a real orgy of bad taste and, at the same time, self-admiration. They share something else too: a good will to resist intellectual Germanization—and an even better inability to do so! Perhaps Schopenhauer is already more at home, more settled, in this intellectual France, which is also a France of pessimism, than he ever was in Germany. Not to mention Heinrich Heine, who has long since passed into the flesh and blood of Paris’s more sensitive and demanding lyric poets. Or Hegel, who today, in the person of Taine—that is, the foremost living historian—exerts an almost tyrannical influence. As for Richard Wagner: the more French music learns to shape itself to the real needs of the modern soul, the more it will “Wagnerize.” One can predict that—it already does it enough! Nevertheless, there are three things the French can still proudly point to as their inherited possessions, as the unlost signs of an old cultural superiority over Europe, despite all the willing or unwilling Germanization and vulgarization of taste. First, their capacity for artistic passions, for devotion to “form,” for which the expression “art for art’s sake,” among a thousand others, was invented. Such things have not been lacking in France for three centuries. Thanks to respect for the “small number,” they have repeatedly made possible a kind of chamber music in literature, the equal of which is hard to find in the rest of Europe. The second basis on which the French can claim superiority over Europe is their old, many-sided culture of observing human morals and motives. Because of it, even among minor newspaper novelists and random people on the Paris boulevards, one generally finds a psychological sensitivity and curiosity of which, in Germany, for example, people have no concept—let alone the thing itself! The Germans lack a couple of centuries of such moral observation, centuries that, as I said, France did not spare itself. Anyone calling the Germans “naive” on this account turns a lack into a compliment. (As a contrast to German inexperience and innocence in psychological pleasure—which is not so distantly related to the dullness of German social life—and as the most successful expression of a genuinely French curiosity and inventiveness in this realm of delicate shudders, consider Henri Beyle. That remarkable man, always anticipating and running ahead, ran through his Europe, through several centuries of the European soul, at a Napoleonic tempo, scouting and discovering that soul. It took two generations to catch up with him at all, to guess some of the riddles that tormented and delighted this strange Epicurean and question-mark of a man, France’s last great psychologist.) There is a third claim to superiority. The French character contains a halfway successful synthesis of North and South. It lets them understand many things, and tells them to do other things, that an Englishman will never understand. Their temperament periodically turns toward and away from the South; from time to time the blood of Provence and Liguria overflows in it. This protects them from the dreadful northern gray on gray, the sunless world of ghostly concepts and thin blood—our German disease of taste. To treat its excess, people have just now very firmly prescribed blood and iron, meaning “great politics” (following a dangerous art of healing that teaches me to wait and wait, but so far not to hope). Even now, France offers an advance understanding and welcome to those rarer, rarely satisfied people who are too wide-ranging to find fulfillment in any patriotism, who know how to love the South in the North and the North in the South: the born Mediterraneans, the “good Europeans.” It was for them that Bizet made music, this latest genius to see a new beauty and seduction—to discover a piece of the South in music.

255 I think various precautions against German music are called for. Suppose someone loves the South as I love it: as a great school of recovery in the most intellectual and the most sensual things, as an untamed fullness and radiance of sunlight spreading over an existence that rules itself and believes in itself. Well, such a person will learn to be somewhat wary of German music. By spoiling his taste again, it also spoils his health again. Such a southerner, by faith rather than ancestry, if he dreams of music’s future, must also dream of music’s release from the North. He must hear in his ears the prelude to a deeper, more powerful, perhaps more evil and mysterious music. A music beyond the German, which does not die away, turn yellow, and fade at the sight of the blue, sensual sea and the clear Mediterranean sky, as all German music does. A music beyond the European, which holds its ground even before the desert’s brown sunsets, whose soul is related to the palm tree and knows how to feel at home and roam among great, beautiful, solitary beasts of prey… I could imagine a music whose rarest magic consisted in knowing nothing more of good and evil, except that perhaps some sailor’s homesickness, some golden shadows and tender weaknesses, might pass over it here and there. An art that would see the colors of a declining moral world, now almost impossible to understand, fleeing toward it from far away, and would be hospitable and deep enough to receive such late refugees.—

256 The madness of nationality has created, and still creates, a diseased estrangement among Europe’s peoples. Short-sighted, quick-handed politicians now ride high with its help, never suspecting how necessarily temporary, how much a mere interlude, their policy of division must be. Thanks to all this, and to much that cannot be spoken of at all today, the clearest signs that Europe wants to become one are now overlooked or willfully misinterpreted with lies. In all this century’s deeper and more wide-ranging people, the true overall direction of their souls’ mysterious work was to prepare the way for that new synthesis, and tentatively anticipate the European of the future. Only on their surfaces, or in weaker hours, perhaps in old age, did they belong to the “fatherlands.” When they became “patriots,” they were only resting from themselves. I am thinking of people like Napoleon, Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, Heinrich Heine, Schopenhauer. Do not hold it against me if I include Richard Wagner among them. We must not let his own misunderstandings mislead us about him: geniuses of his kind rarely have the right to understand themselves. Still less should we be misled by the uncivilized noise with which people in France now shut themselves off from Richard Wagner and resist him. The fact remains that French late Romanticism of the eighteen-forties and Richard Wagner belong together as closely and intimately as possible. They are related, fundamentally related, in every height and depth of their needs. It is Europe, the one Europe, whose soul pushes and yearns outward and upward through their varied and impetuous art—where to? Into a new light? Toward a new sun? But who would try to state precisely what all these masters of new means of expression could not state clearly? What is certain is that the same stormy drive tormented them, that they searched in the same way, these last great seekers! All were ruled by literature right down to their eyes and ears—the first artists educated in world literature. Most were themselves writers and poets, intermediaries and mixers of the arts and senses (as a musician Wagner belongs among painters, as a poet among musicians, as an artist in general among actors). All were fanatics of expression “at any price”—I single out Delacroix, Wagner’s closest relative. All were great discoverers in the realm of the sublime, also of the ugly and horrifying; still greater discoverers in effect, display, the art of shop windows. All had talents far exceeding their genius—virtuosos through and through, with uncanny access to everything that seduces, lures, compels, overturns. Born enemies of logic and straight lines, hungry for the foreign, the exotic, the monstrous, the crooked, the self-contradictory. As human beings they were Tantaluses of the will, plebeians who had risen, who knew themselves incapable of a noble pace, a slow pace, in life and creation—think of Balzac, for example. Unrestrained workers, almost destroying themselves through work; opponents of moral law and rebels against custom, ambitious and insatiable, without balance or enjoyment. All finally breaking and sinking down at the Christian cross (and rightly so: for which of them would have been deep and original enough for a philosophy of the Antichrist?). Taken as a whole, a recklessly daring, magnificently violent, high-flying and uplifting kind of higher human being, which first had to teach its century—and it is the century of the crowd!—the concept “higher human being”… Richard Wagner’s German friends may consult among themselves about whether there is anything simply German in Wagner’s art, or whether its very distinction is not that it comes from sources and drives beyond Germany. In doing so, they should not underestimate how indispensable Paris was to the formation of his type. In the most decisive period, his deepest instincts made him long for it. His whole manner of appearing in public, of being his own apostle, could reach completion only with the example of French socialists before him. Perhaps a more sensitive comparison will find, to the credit of Richard Wagner’s German nature, that he carried everything further in strength, daring, hardness, and height than a nineteenth-century Frenchman could have done—thanks to the fact that we Germans are still closer to barbarism than the French. Perhaps even the most remarkable thing Richard Wagner created is forever, not just today, inaccessible to the whole Latin race, now so late in its development: beyond its feeling, beyond its imitation. I mean the figure of Siegfried, that very free human being who may indeed be far too free, too hard, too cheerful, too healthy, too anti-Catholic for the taste of old, worn-out civilized peoples. This anti-Roman Siegfried may even have been a sin against Romanticism. Well, Wagner amply made up for this sin in his old, gloomy days when—anticipating a taste that has since become politics—he began, with his own religious vehemence, if not to walk the road to Rome, then at least to preach it. So that these last words do not lead anyone to misunderstand me, I will call on some vigorous rhymes. They will tell even less sensitive ears what I want—what I want in opposition to the “last Wagner” and his Parsifal music.

—Is this still German?—

Did this sultry shrieking come from a German heart?And is this tearing one’s own flesh a German body’s act?Is this spreading of priestly hands German,This incense-scented teasing of the senses?And is this faltering, falling, staggering German,This uncertain ding-dong dangling?This nunnish flirting, this Ave bell-ringing,All this falsely ecstatic piling of heaven upon heaven?

—Is that still German?—

Think! You are still standing at the gate:For what you hear is Rome—Rome’s faith without words!