Why I Am So Clever, Page 3

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  The highest conception of the lyric poet was given me by Heinrich Heine. I seek in vain in all the realms of millennia for an equally sweet and passionate music. He possesses that divine malice without which I cannot imagine perfection – I assess the value of people, of races according to how necessarily they are unable to separate the god from the satyr. – And how he employs German! It will one day be said that Heine and I have been by far the first artists of the German language – at an incalculable distance from everything which mere Germans have done with it. – I must be profoundly related to Byron’s Manfred: I discovered all these abysses in myself – I was ripe for this work at thirteen. I have no words, only a look for those who dare to say the word Faust in the presence of Manfred. The Germans are incapable of any conception of greatness: proof Schumann. Expressly from wrath against this sugary Saxon, I composed a counter-overture to Manfred, of which Hans von Bülow said he had never seen the like on manuscript paper: it constituted a rape on Euterpe. – When I seek my highest formula for Shakespeare I find it always in that he conceived the type of Caesar. One cannot guess at things like this – one is it or one is not. The great poet creates only out of his own reality – to the point at which he is afterwards unable to endure his own work … When I have taken a glance at my Zarathustra I walk up and down my room for half an hour unable to master an unendurable spasm of sobbing. – I know of no more heartrending reading than Shakespeare: what must a man have suffered to need to be a buffoon to this extent! – Is Hamlet understood? It is not doubt, it is certainty which makes mad … But to feel in this way one must be profound, abyss, philosopher … We all fear truth … And, to confess it: I am instinctively certain that Lord Bacon is the originator, the self-tormentor of this uncanniest species of literature: what do I care about the pitiable chatter of American shallow-pates and muddle-heads? But the power for the mightiest reality of vision is not only compatible with the mightiest power for action, for the monstrous in action, for crime – it even presupposes it … We do not know nearly enough about Lord Bacon, the first realist in every great sense of the word, to know what he did, what he wanted, what he experienced within himself … And the devil take it, my dear critics! Supposing I had baptized my Zarathustra with another name, for example with the name of Richard Wagner, the perspicuity of two millennia would not have sufficed to divine that the author of ‘Human, All Too Human’ is the visionary of Zarathustra …

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  Here where I am speaking of the recreations of my life, I need to say a word to express my gratitude for that which of all things in it has refreshed me by far the most profoundly and cordially. This was without any doubt my intimate association with Richard Wagner. I offer all my other human relationships cheap; but at no price would I relinquish from my life the Tribschen days, those days of mutual confidences, of cheerfulness, of sublime incidents – of profound moments … I do not know what others may have experienced with Wagner: over our sky no cloud ever passed. – And with that I return again to France – I cannot spare reasons, I can spare a mere curl of the lip for Wagnerians et hoc genus omne who believe they are doing honour to Wagner when they find him similar to themselves … Constituted as I am, a stranger in my deepest instincts to everything German, so that the mere presence of a German hinders my digestion, my first contact with Wagner was also the first time in my life I ever drew a deep breath: I felt, I reverenced him as a being from outside, as the opposite, the incarnate protest against all ‘German virtues’. – We who were children in the swamp-air of the fifties are necessarily pessimists regarding the concept ‘German’; we cannot be anything but revolutionaries – we shall acquiesce in no state of things in which the bigot is on top. It is a matter of complete indifference to me if today he plays in different colours, if he dresses in scarlet and dons the uniform of a hussar … Very well! Wagner was a revolutionary – he fled from the Germans … As an artist one has no home in Europe except in Paris: the délicatesse in all five senses of art which Wagner’s art presupposes, the fingers for nuances, the psychological morbidity, is to be found only in Paris. Nowhere else does there exist such a passion in questions of form, this seriousness in mise en scène – it is the Parisian seriousness par excellence. There is in Germany absolutely no conception of the tremendous ambition which dwells in the soul of a Parisian artist. The German is good-natured – Wagner was by no means good-natured … But I have already said sufficient (in ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ §256) as to where Wagner belongs, in whom he has his closest relatives: the French late romantics, that high-flying and yet exhilarating kind of artists such as Delacroix, such as Berlioz, with a fond of sickness, of incurability in their nature, sheer fanatics for expression, virtuosi through and through … Who was the first intelligent adherent of Wagner? Charles Baudelaire, the same as was the first to understand Delacroix, that typical décadent in whom an entire race of artists recognized themselves – he was perhaps also the last … What I have never forgiven Wagner? That he condescended to the Germans – that he became reichsdeutsch … As far as Germany extends it ruins culture. –

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  All in all I could not have endured my youth without Wagnerian music. For I was condemned to Germans. If one wants to get free from an unendurable pressure one needs hashish. Very well, I needed Wagner. Wagner is the counter-poison to everything German par excellence – still poison, I do not dispute it … From the moment there was a piano score of Tristan – my compliments, Herr von Bülow! – I was a Wagnerian. The earliest works of Wagner I saw as beneath me – still too common, too ‘German’ … But I still today seek a work of a dangerous fascination, of a sweet and shuddery infinity equal to that of Tristan – I seek in all the arts in vain. All the strangenesses of Leonardo da Vinci lose their magic at the first note of Tristan. This work is altogether Wagner’s non plus ultra; he recuperated from it with the Meistersinger and the Ring. To become healthier – that is retrogression in the case of a nature such as Wagner … I take it for a piece of good fortune of the first rank to have lived at the right time, and to have lived precisely among Germans, so as to be ripe for this work: my psychologist’s inquisitiveness goes that far. The world is poor for him who has never been sick enough for this ‘voluptuousness of hell’: to employ a mystic’s formula is permissible, almost obligatory, here. I think I know better than anyone what tremendous things Wagner was capable of, the fifty worlds of strange delights to which no one but he had wings; and as I am strong enough to turn even the most questionable and most perilous things to my own advantage and thus to become stronger, I call Wagner the great benefactor of my life. That in which we are related, that we have suffered more profoundly, from one another also, than men of this century are capable of suffering, will eternally join our names together again and again; and as surely as Wagner is among Germans merely a misunderstanding, just as surely am I and always will be. – Two centuries of psychological and artistic discipline first, my Herr Germans! … But one cannot catch up that amount. –

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  I shall say another word for the most select ears: what I really want from music. That it is cheerful and profound, like an afternoon in October. That it is individual, wanton, tender, a little sweet woman of lowness and charm … I shall never admit that a German could know what music is. What one calls German musicians, the greatest above all, are foreigners, Slavs, Croats, Italians, Netherlanders – or Jews: otherwise Germans of the strong race, extinct Germans, like Heinrich Schütz, Bach and Handel. I myself am still sufficient of a Pole to exchange the rest of music for Chopin; for three reasons I exclude Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll, perhaps also a few things by Liszt, who excels all other musicians in the nobility of his orchestral tone; finally all that has grown up beyond the Alps – this side … I would not know how to get on without Rossini, even less without my south in music, the music of my Venetian maestro Pietro Gasti. And when I say beyond the Alps I am really saying only Venice. When I seek another word for music I never find any other word tha
n Venice. I do not know how to distinguish between tears and music – I do not know how to think of happiness, of the south, without a shudder of faintheartedness.

  Lately I stood at the bridge

  in the brown night.

  From afar there came a song:

  a golden drop, it swelled

  across the trembling surface.

  Gondolas, lights, music –

  drunken it swam out into the gloom …

  My soul, a stringed instrument,

  touched by invisible hands

  sang to itself in reply a gondola song,

  and trembled with gaudy happiness.

  – Was anyone listening?

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  In all this – in selection of nutriment, of place and climate, of recreation – there commands an instinct of self-preservation which manifests itself most unambiguously as an instinct for self-defence. Not to see many things, not to hear them, not to let them approach one – first piece of ingenuity, first proof that one is no accident but a necessity. The customary word for this self-defensive instinct is taste. Its imperative commands, not only to say No when Yes would be a piece of ‘selflessness’, but also to say No as little as possible. To separate oneself, to depart from that to which No would be required again and again. The rationale is that defensive expenditures, be they never so small, become a rule, a habit, lead to an extraordinary and perfectly superfluous impoverishment. Our largest expenditures are our most frequent small ones. Warding off, not letting come close, is an expenditure – one should not deceive oneself over this – a strength squandered on negative objectives. One can merely through the constant need to ward off become too weak any longer to defend oneself. – Suppose I were to step out of my house and discover, instead of calm and aristocratic Turin, the German provincial town: my instinct would have to blockade itself so as to push back all that pressed upon it from this flat and cowardly world. Or suppose I discovered the German metropolis, that builded vice where nothing grows, where every kind of thing, good and bad, is dragged in. Would I not in face of it have to become a hedgehog? – But to have spikes is an extravagance, a double luxury even if one is free to have no spikes but open hands …

  Another form of sagacity and self-defence consists in reacting as seldom as possible and withdrawing from situations and relationships in which one would be condemned as it were to suspend one’s ‘freedom’, one’s initiative, and become a mere reagent. I take as a parable traffic with books. The scholar, who really does nothing but ‘trundle’ books – the philologist at a modest assessment about 200 a day – finally loses altogether the ability to think for himself. If he does not trundle he does not think. He replies to a stimulus (– a thought he has read) when he thinks – finally he does nothing but react. The scholar expends his entire strength in affirmation and denial, in criticizing what has already been thought – he himself no longer thinks … The instinct for self-defence has in his case become soft; otherwise he would defend himself against books. The scholar – a décadent. – This I have seen with my own eyes: natures gifted, rich and free already in their thirties ‘read to ruins’, mere matches that have to be struck if they are to ignite – emit ‘thoughts’. – Early in the morning at the break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one’s strength, to read a book – I call that vicious! –

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  At this point I can no longer avoid actually answering the question how one becomes what one is. And with that I touch on the masterpiece in the art of self-preservation – of selfishness … For assuming that the task, the vocation, the destiny of the task exceeds the average measure by a significant degree, there would be no greater danger than to catch sight of oneself with this task. That one becomes what one is presupposes that one does not have the remotest idea what one is. From this point of view even the blunders of life – the temporary sidepaths and wrong turnings, the delays, the ‘modesties’, the seriousness squandered on tasks which lie outside the task – have their own meaning and value. They are an expression of a great sagacity, even the supreme sagacity: where nosce te ipsum would be the recipe for destruction, self-forgetfulness, self-misunderstanding, self-diminution, -narrowing, -mediocratizing becomes reason itself. Expressed morally: love of one’s neighbour, living for others and other things can be the defensive measure for the preservation of the sternest selfishness. This is the exceptional case in which I, contrary to my rule and conviction, take the side of the ‘selfless’ drives: here they work in the service of selfishness, self-cultivation. – The entire surface of consciousness – consciousness is a surface – has to be kept clear of any of the great imperatives. Even the grand words, the grand attitudes must be guarded against! All of them represent a danger that the instinct will ‘understand itself’ too early ––. In the meantime the organizing ‘idea’ destined to rule grows and grows in the depths – it begins to command, it slowly leads back from sidepaths and wrong turnings, it prepares individual qualities and abilities which will one day prove themselves indispensable as means to achieving the whole – it constructs the ancillary capacities one after the other before it gives any hint of the dominating task, of the ‘goal’, ‘objective’, ‘meaning’. – Regarded from this side my life is simply wonderful. For the task of a revaluation of values more capacities perhaps were required than have dwelt together in one individual, above all antithetical capacities which however are not allowed to disturb or destroy one another. Order of rank among capacities; distance; the art of dividing without making inimical; mixing up nothing, ‘reconciling’ nothing; a tremendous multiplicity which is none the less the opposite of chaos – this has been the precondition, the protracted secret labour and artistic working of my instinct. The magnitude of its higher protection was shown in the fact I have at no time had the remotest idea what was growing within me – that all my abilities one day leapt forth suddenly ripe, in their final perfection. I cannot remember ever having taken any trouble – no trace of struggle can be discovered in my life, I am the opposite of an heroic nature. To ‘want’ something, to ‘strive’ after something, to have a ‘goal’, a ‘wish’ in view – I know none of this from experience. Even at this moment I look out upon my future – a distant future! – as upon a smooth sea: it is ruffled by no desire. I do not want in the slightest that anything should become other than it is; I do not want myself to become other than I am … But that is how I have always lived. I have harboured no desire. Someone who after his forty-fourth year can say he has never striven after honours, after women, after money! – Not that I could not have had them … Thus, for example, I one day became a university professor – I had never had the remotest thought of such a thing, for I was barely twenty-four years old. Thus two years earlier I was one day a philologist: in the sense that my first philological work, my beginning in any sense, was requested by my teacher Ritschl for his ‘Rheinisches Museum’. (Ritschl – I say it with respect – the only scholar gifted with genius whom I have encountered up to the present day. He was characterized by that pleasant depravity which distinguishes us Thuringians and which can render even a German sympathetic – to get to the truth we even prefer to go by secret paths. I should not with these words like to have in any way undervalued my close compatriot, the sagacious Leopold von Ranke …)