No More Learning

Pessimism in art ? --The artist gradually learns to like for their own sake, those means which bring about the condition of msthetic elation; extreme delicacy and glory of colour, definite delineation, quality of tone; distinctness where in normal conditions distinctness is absent. All distinct things, all nuances, in so far as they recall extreme degrees of power which give rise to intoxication, kindle this feeling of intoxication by association ;----the effect of works of art is the excitation of the state which creates art, of aesthetic intoxication.
The essential feature in art is its power of perfecting existence, its production of perfection and plenitude; art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence. . . . What does a pessimistic art signify? Is it not a contradictio? ----Yes. ----Schopenhauer is in error when he makes certain works of art serve the
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purpose of pessimism. Tragedy does not teach "resignation. " . . . To represent terrible and questionable things in itself, the sign of an instinct of power and magnificence in the artist; he doesn't fear them. There no such thing as a pessimistic art. . . Art affirms. affirms. But Zola? and the Goncourts? ---the things they show us are ugly their reason, however, for showing them to us their love of ugliness. .
don't care what you say! You simply deceive yourselves you think otherwise--What relief Dostoievsky is!
822.
If have sufficiently initiated my readers into the doctrine that even "goodness," in the whole comedy of existence, represents form of exhaus tion, they will now credit Christianity with con sistency for having conceived the good to be the ugly. In this respect Christianity was right.
absolutely unworthy of a philosopher to say that "the good and the beautiful are one"; he should add " and also the true," he deserves to be thrashed. Truth ugly.
Art with us in order that we may not perish through truth.
823.
Moralising tendencies may be combated with art. Art freedom from moral bigotry and philosophy la Little Jack Horner: or may be the mockery of these things. The flight to Nature,
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where beauty and terribleness are coupled. The concept of the great man.
--Fragile, useless souls-de-luxe, which are dis concerted by mere breath of wind, " beautiful souls. "
--Ancient ideals, in their inexorable hardness and brutality, ought to be awakened, as the mightiest of monsters that they are.
--We should feel boisterous delight in the
of how all moralised artists become worms and actors without know--
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-The falsity of art, its immorality, must be
brought into the light of day.
--The " fundamental idealising powers " (sensu
ality, intoxication, excessive animality) should be brought to light.
824.
Modern counterfeit practicesin the arts: regarded as necessary--that to say, as fully in keeping with the needs most proper to the modern soul.
The gaps in the gifts, and still more in the education, antecedents, and schooling of modern artists, are now filled up in this way :--
First: A less artistic public sought which capable of unlimited love (and capable of falling on its knees before personality). The superstition of our century, the belief in " genius," assists this process. .
Secondly Artists harangue the dark instincts of the dissatisfied, the ambitious, and the self-deceivers of democratic age: the importance of poses.
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Third/y : The procedures of one art are trans ferred to the realm of another; the object of art is confounded with that of science, with that of the Church, or with that of the interests of the race (nationalism), or with that of philosophy--4 man rings all bells at once, and awakens the vague suspicion that he is a god.
Fourth/y: Artists flatter women, sufferers, and indignant folk. Narcotics and opiates are made to preponderate in art. The fancy of cultured people, and of the readers of poetry and ancient history, is tickled.
825.
We must distinguish between the " public " and the " select "; to satisfy the public a man must be a charlatan to-day, to satisfy the select he will be a virtuoso and nothing else. The geniuses peculiar to our century overcame this distinction, they
were great for both; the great charlatanry of Victor Hugo and Richard Wagner was coupled with such genuine virtuosity that it even satisfied the most refined artistic connoisseurs. This is why greatness is lacking: these geniuses had a double outlook; first, they catered for the coarsest needs, and then for the most refined.
826.
False "accentuation": (1) In romanticism; this unremitting "eayressz'vo" is not a sign of strength, but of a feeling of deficiency;
(2) Picturesque music, the so-called dramatic
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kind, is above all easier (as is also the brutal scandalmongering and the juxtaposition of facts and traits in realistic novels);
( 3) "Passion " as amatter of nerves and exhausted souls ; likewisethedelightin high mountains, deserts, storms, orgies, and disgusting details,--in bulkiness and massiveness (historians,forinstance) ; as a matter of fact, there is actually a cult of exaggerated feel ings (how is it that in stronger ages art desired
just the opposite--a restraint of passion P);
(4) The preference for exciting materials (Erotica
or Socialistica or Pathologica): all these things are the signs of the style of public that is being catered for to-day--that is to say, for overworked, absentminded, or enfeebled
to be affected.
827.
Modern art is the art of tyrannising. A coarse and salient definiteness in delineation; the motive simplified into a formula; formula tyrannise. Wild arabesques within the lines; overwhelming masses, before which the senses are confused; brutality in coloration, in subject~matter, in the desires. Examples: Zola, Wagner, and, in a more spiritualised degree, Taine. Hence logic, massiveness, and brutality.
828.
In regard to the painter: Tous ces modernes sont des pae'tes qui ont voulu e? tre peintres. L'un a
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Such people must be tyrannised over in order
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cherche' des drames dans l'histoire, l'autre des scenes de moeurs, celui ci traduit des religions, celui la une
One imitates Raphael, another the early Italian masters. The landscapists employ trees and clouds in order to make odes and
elegies. Not one is simply a painter; they are all archaeologists, psychologists, and impresarios of one or another kind of event or theory. . They
philosophie.
enjoy our erudition and our philosophy.
they are full, and too full, of general ideas.
like a form, not because it is what it
because of what expresses. They are the scions of learned, tormented, and reflecting generation, a thousand miles away from the Old Masters who never read, and only concerned themselves with feasting their eyes.
829.
Like us, They but
? At bottom, even Wagner's music, in so far as stands for the whole of French romanticism, literature: the charm of exoticism (strange times, customs, passions), exercised upon sensitive cosy corner people. The delight of entering into ex tremely distant and prehistoric lands to which books lead one, and by which means the whole horizon painted with new colours and new possibilities. . Dreams of still more distant and unexploited worlds; disdain of the boulevards.
For Nationalism, let us not deceive ourselves, also only form of exoticism. . . Romantic
musicians merely relate what exotic books have
made of them: people would fain
exotic sensations and passions according to
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Florentine and Venetian taste; finally they are satisfied to look for them in an image. . The essential factor the kind of novel desire, the desire to imitate, the desire to live as people have lived once before in the past, and the disguise and dissimulation of the soul. . Romantic art only an emergency exit from defective " reality. "
The attempt to perform new things: revolution, Napoleon. Napoleon represents the passion of new spiritual possibilities, of an extension of the soul's domain.
The greater the debility of the will, the greater the extravagances in the desire to feel, to repre sent, and to dream new things--The result of the excesses which have been indulged in: an insatiable thirst for unrestrained feelings. Foreign literatures afford the strongest spices.
3o.
Winckelmann's and Goethe's Greeks, Victor
Orientals, Wagner's Edda characters, Walter Scott's" Englishmen of the thirteenth century--some day the whole comedy will be exposed! All of was disproportionately historical and false, but--modern.
831.
Concerning the characteristics of national
Hugo's
in regard to the strange and to the borrowed--
English genius vulgarises and makes realistic everything sees;
genius
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The French whittles down, simplifies, rational
ises, embellishes ;
The German muddles, compromises, involves,
and infects everything with morality ;
The Italian has made by far the freest and
most subtle use of borrowed material, and has enriched it with a hundred times more beauty than it ever drew out of it: it is the richest genius, it had the most to bestow.
832.
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The jews, with Heinrich Heine and Offenbach, approached genius in the sphere of art. The latter was the most intellectual and most high spirited satyr, who as a musician abided by great tradition, and who, for him who has
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mental and, at bottom, degenerate musicians of German romanticism.
833.
Ofenbach: French music imbued with Voltaire's intellect, free, wanton, with a slight sardonic grin, but clear and intellectual almost to the point of banality (Offenbach never titivates), and free from the ngnardise of morbid or blond-Viennese
sensuality.
834.
If by artistic genius we understand the most consummate freedom within the law, divine ease, and facility in overcoming the greatest
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27!
difficulties, then Offenbach has even more right to the title genius than Wagner has. Wagner
heavy and clumsy: nothing more foreign to
him than the moments of wanton
which this clown Offenbach achieves as many as five times, six times, in nearly every one of his buffooneries. But by genius we ought perhaps to understand something else.
835.
" musie. "--French, German, and Italian music. (Our most debased periods in
Concerning
perfection
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excessive study of the history of strange civilisa tions, has become master of opera--Stage music and musicians' music--It an error to suppose that what Wagner composed was a farm: was rather formlessness. The possibilities of dramatic construction have yet to be discovered--Rhythm. " Expression " at all costs. Harlotry in instru mentation. ---All honour to Heinrich Schiitz; all
honour to Mendelssohn: in them we find an
political
element of Goethe, but nowhere else!
find another element of Goethe coming to blossom in Rahel third element in Heinrich Heine. )
836.
Descriptive music leaves reality to work its effects alone. . All these kinds of art are easier, and more easy to imitate; poorly gifted
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people have recourse to them. The appeal to the instincts; suggestive art.
837.
Concerning our modern music--The decay of melody, like the decay of "ideas," and of the freedom of intellectual activity, is a piece of clumsiness and obtuseness, which is developing itself into new feats of daring and even into principles ;--in the end man has only the prin-' ciples of his gifts, or of his lack of gifts.
" Dramatic music "----nonsensel It is simply bad music. . . . "Feeling" and "passion" are merely substitutes when lofty intellectuality and the joy of it (e. g. Voltaire's) can no longer be attained. Expressed technically, " feeling " and " passion " are easier; they presuppose a much poorer kind of artist. The recourse to drama be trays that an artist is much more a master in tricky means than in genuine ones. To-day we have both dramatic painting and dramatic poetry, etc.
838.
What we lack in music is an aesthetic'which would impose laws upon musicians and give them a conscience; and as a result of this we lack a real contest concerning "principles. "---For as musicians we laugh at Herbart's velleities in this department just as heartily as we laugh at
? As a matter of fact, tremendous difliculties present themselves here. We no
Schopenhauer's.
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longer know on what basis to found our concepts of what " exemplary," "masterly," " perfect. " With the instincts of old loves and old admiration~ we grope about in realm of values, and we almost believe, " that good which pleases us. " . . am always suspicious when hear
people every where speak innocently of Beethoven as "classic":
what would maintain, and with some severity, that, in other arts, classic the very reverse of Beethoven. But when the complete and glaring dissolution of style, Wagner's so-called dramatic style, taught and honoured as exemplary, as masterly, as progressive, then my impatience exceeds all bounds. Dramatic style in music, as
? understood simply renunciation of all style whatever; the assumption that something else, namely, drama, hundred times more important than music. Wagner can paint; he does not use music for the sake of music, with
he accentuates attitudes; he poet. Finally he made an appeal to beautiful feelings and heaving breasts, just as all other theatrical artists
have done, and with all he converted women and even those whose souls thirst for culture to him. But what do women and the uncultured care about: music? All these people have no conscience for art: none Of them suffer when the first and fundamental virtues of an art are scorned and trodden upon in favour of that which merely secondary (as ancilla dramaturgica). What good can come of all extension in the means of expression, when that which expressed, art itself, has lost all its law and order? The picturesque pomp and power
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Of tones, the symbolism of sound, rhythm, the colour effects Of harmony and discord, the suggestive significance of music, the whole sensuality of this art which Wagner made prevail--it is all this that Wagner derived, developed, and drew out of music. Victor Hugo did something very similar for language: but already people in France are
'asking themselves, in regard to the case of Victor Hugo, whether language was not corrupted by
him; whether reason, intellectuality, and thorough conformity to law in language are not suppressed when the sensuality of expression is elevated to a high place? Is it not a sign of decadence that the poets in France have become plastic artists, and that the musicians of Germany have become actors and culturemongers?
839.
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? To-day there exists a sort of musical pes simism even among people who are not musi cians. Who has not met and cursed the confounded youthlet who torments his piano until it shrieks with despair, and who
single handed heaves the slime of the most lugubrious
and drabby harmonies before him? By so doing a man betrays himself as a pessimist. . . . It is open to question, though, whether he also proves himself a musician by this means. I for my part could never be made to believe it. A Wagneritepur sang is unmusical; he submits to the elementary forces of music very much
as a woman submits to the will of the man who hypnotises her--and in order to be able to
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do this he must not be made suspicious in rebus musicis et musicantibus by too severe or too delicate conscience. said "very much as "-- but in this respect spoke perhaps more than
Let any one consider the means which Wagner uses by preference, when he wishes to make an effect (means which for the greater
part he first had to invent); they are appallingly similar to the means by which hypnotist exercises his power (the choice of his movements, the general colour of his orchestration; the excruciating evasion of consistency, and fairness and squareness, in rhythm; the creepiness, the soothing touch, the mystery, the hysteria of his "unending melody"). And the condition to which the overture to Lohengrin, for instance, reduces the men, and still more the women, in the audience, so essentially different from the somnambulistic trance? On one occasion after the overture in question had been played, heard an Italian lady say, with her eyes half closed,
way in which female Wagnerites are adepts:
"
Religion in music--What large amount of satisfaction all religious needs get out of Wag nerian music, though this never acknowledged or even understood! How much prayer, virtue, unction, "virginity," "salvation," speaks through this music! Oh what capital this cunning
* " How the music makes one sleep ! "--TR.
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saint, who leads and seduces us back to every thing that was once believed in, makes out of the fact that he may dispense with words and concepts! . . . Our intellectual conscience has no need to feel ashamed--it stands apart--if any old instinct puts its trembling lips to the rim of forbid den philtres. . . . This is shrewd and healthy, and, in so far as it betrays a certain shame in regard to
the satisfaction of the religious instinct, it is even a good sign. . . . Cunning Christianity: the type Of the music which came from the "last Wagner. "
841.
? I distinguish between courage before
courage before things, and courage on paper. The latter was the courage of David Strauss, for instance. I distinguish again between the courage before witnesses and the courage without witnesses: the courage of a Christian, or of be lievers in God in general, can never be the cour
without witnesses--but on this score alone Christian courage stands condemned. Finally, I
distinguish between the courage which is tempera mental and the courage which is the fear of fear; a single instance of the latter kind is moral courage. To this list the courage of despair should beadded.
This is the courage which Wagner possessed. His attitude in regard to music was at bottom a desperate one. He lacked two things which go to make up a good musician: nature and nurture, the predisposition for music and the discipline and
schooling which music requires. He had courage: out Of this deficiency he established a principle;
age
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he invented a kind of music for himself. The dramatic music which he invented was the music which he was able to compose,-its limitations are Wagner's limitations.
And he was misunderstood l--Was he really misunderstood? . Such the case with five sixths of the artists of to-day. Wagner their Saviour: five-sixths, moreover, the "lowest pro portion. " In any case where Nature has shown
herself without reserve, and wherever culture an accident, mere attempt, piece of dilettantism, the artist turns instinctively--what do say ? --
mean enthusiastically, to Wagner; as the poet says: " Half drew he him, and half sank he. " '
842.
- " Music" and the grand style. The greatness of an artist not to be measured by the beautiful feelings which he evokes: let this belief be left to the girls. It should be measured according to the extent to which he approaches the grand style, according to the extent to which he capable of
the grand style. This style and great
have this in common--that they scorn to please; that they forget to persuade; that they command:
that they will. To become master of the chaos which in one; to compel one's inner chaos to assume form; to become consistent, simple, un equivocal, mathematical, law--this the great ambition here. By means of one repels; nothing
* This an adapted quotation from Goethe's poem, "The Fisherman. " The translation E. A. Bowring's. -TR.
passion
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so much endears people to such powerful men as this,--a desert seems to lie around them, they impose silence upon all, and awe every one with the greatness Of their sacrilege. . . . All arts know this kind of aspirant to the grand style: why are they absent in music? Never yet has a musician built as that architect did who erected the Palazzo Pitti. . . . This isaproblem. Does music
perhaps belong to that culture in which the reign of powerful men of various types is " already at an end? Is the concept " grand style in fact a con tradiction of the soul of music,--of "the Woman " in our music? . . .
With this I touch upon the cardinal question: how should all our music be classified? The age of classical taste knows nothing that can be com pared with it: it bloomed when the world of the Renaissance reached its evening, when "freedom " had already bidden farewell to both men
their customs--is it characteristic of music to be Counter-Renaissance? Is'music, perchance, the
sister of the baroque style, seeing that in any case they were contemporaries? Is not music, modern music, already decadence? . . .
Ihave put my finger before on this question: whether music is not an example of Counter Renaissance art? whether it is not the next of kin' to the baroque style? whether it has not. grown in Opposition to all classic taste, so that any
aspiration to classicism is forbidden by the very nature of music?
The answer to this most important of all questions of values would not be a very doubtful
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one, if people thoroughly understood the fact that music attains to its highest maturity and plenitude as romanticism--likewise as a reactionary move ment against classicism.
Mozart, a delicate and lovable soul, but quite eighteenth century, even in his serious lapses . Beethoven, the first great romanticist according to the French conception of romanticism, just as Wagner is the last great romanticist . . . both Of them are instinctive opponents of classical taste, of severe style--not to speak Of "grand"
in this regard. -
843.
? Romanticism: an ambiguous question, like all modern questions.
The asthetic conditions are twofold :--
The abundant and generous, as opposed to the
' seeking and the desiring.
844.
A romanticist is an artist whose great dis satisfaction with himself makes him productive-- who looks away from himself and his fellows, and sometimes, therefore, looks backwards.
845.
Is art the result of dissatisfaction with reality ? or the expression of gratitude for happiness experienced? In the first case, romanticism; in the second, glorification and dithyramb (in short, apotheosis art): even Raphael belongs to this, except for the fact that he was guilty of the
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duplicity of having defied the appearance of the Christian view of the world. He was thankful for life precisely where it was not exactly Christian.
With a moral interpretation the world is in sufferable; Christianity was the attempt to over come the world with morality: i. e. to deny it. In
praxi such a mad experiment--an imbecile eleva tion of man above the world--could only end in
-_the beglooming, the dwarfing, and the impoverish ment of mankind: the only kind of man who gained anything by who was promoted by was the most mediocre, the most harmless and gregarious type.