and the
Goncourts
?
Nietzsche - v15 - Will to Power - b
In the presence of ugliness equilibrium is lacking
in a mechanical sense : ugliness limps and
stumbles the direct opposite of the godly agility
of the dancer.
The æsthetic state represents an overflow of
means of communication as well as a condition of
extreme sensibility to stimuli and signs. It is
the zenith of communion, and transmission
between living creatures; it is the source of
languages. In it, languages, whether of signs,
sounds, or glances, have their birthplace. The
richer phenomenon is always the beginning: our
abilities are subtilised forms of richer abilities.
But even to-day we still listen with our muscles,
we even read with our muscles.
Every mature art possesses a host of conventions
as a basis : in so far as it is a language. Con-
vention is a condition of great art, not an obstacle
to it. .
Every elevation of life likewise elevates
the power of communication, as also the under-
standing of man. The power of living in other
people's souls originally had nothing to do with
morality, but with a physiological irritability of
suggestion : "sympathy," or what is called
“altruism," is merely a product of that psycho-
motor relationship which is reckoned as spirituality
(psycho-motor induction, says Charles Féré).
People never communicate a thought to one
.
.
## p. 254 (#284) ############################################
254
THE WILL TO POWER.
a
v another: they communicate a movement, an
imitative sign which is then interpreted as a
thought.
810.
Compared with music, communication by means
of words is a shameless mode of procedure; words
reduce and stultify; words make impersonal ;
words make common that which is uncommon.
811.
.
It is exceptional states that determine the
artist-such states as are all intimately related
and entwined with morbid symptoms, so that it
would seem almost impossible to be an artist
· without being ill.
The physiological conditions which in the artist
become moulded into a "personality," and which,
to a certain degree, may attach themselves to any
man:-
(1) Intoxication, the feeling of enhanced power ;
the inner compulsion to make things a mirror of
one's own fulness and perfection.
(2) The extreme sharpness of certain senses,
so that they are capable of understanding a totally
different language of signs—and to create such a
language (this is a condition which manifests itself
in some nervous diseases); extreme susceptibility
out of which great powers of communion are
developed; the desire to speak on the part of
everything that is capable of making signs; a need
of being rid of one's self by means of gestures
## p. 255 (#285) ############################################
THE WILL TO POWER IN ART.
255
and attitudes; the ability of speaking about one's
self in a hundred different languages—in fact, a
state of explosion.
One must first imagine this condition as one in
which there is a pressing and compulsory desire of
ridding one's self of the ecstasy of a state of tension,
by all kinds of muscular work and movement;
also as an involuntary co-ordination of these move-
ments with inner processes (images, thoughts,
desires)--as a kind of automatism of the whole
muscular system under the compulsion of strong
stimuliacting from within; the inability to
resist reaction; the apparatus of resistance is
also suspended. Every inner movement (feeling,
thought, emotion) is accompanied by vascular
changes, and consequently by changes in colour,
temperature, and secretion.
The suggestive power
of music, its "suggestion mentale. "
(3) The compulsion to imitate: extreme irritabil.
ity, by means of which a certain example becomes
contagious—a condition is guessed and represented
merely by means of a few signs. A complete
picture is visualised by one's inner consciousness,
and its effect soon shows itself in the movement
of the limbs,—in a certain suspension of the will
(Schopenhauer ! ! ! ! ). A sort of blindness and
deafness towards the external world, the realm
of admitted stimuli is sharply defined.
This differentiates the artist from the layman
(from the spectator of art): the latter reaches the
height of his excitement in the mere act of appre-
hending: the former in giving—and in such a way
that the antagonism between these two gifts is not
.
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THE WILL TO POWER.
only natural but even desirable. Each of these states
has an opposite standpoint-to demand of the
artist that he should have the point of view of the
spectator (of the critic) is equivalent to asking
him to impoverish his creative power. . . . In this
respect the same difference holds good as that which
exists between the sexes : one should not ask the
artist who gives to become a woman—to “receive. "
Our æsthetics have hitherto been women's
æsthetics, inasmuch as they have only formulated
the experiences of what is beautiful, from the point
of view of the receivers in art. In the whole of
philosophy hitherto the artist has been lacking . . .
i. e. as we have already suggested, a necessary
fault: for the artist who would begin to under-
stand himself would therewith begin to mistake
himself-he must not look backwards, he must
not look at all; he must give. —It is an honour
for an artist to have no critical faculty; if he can
criticise he is mediocre, he is modern.
812.
Here I lay down a series of psychological states
as signs of flourishing and complete life, which
to-day we are in the habit of regarding as morbid.
But, by this time, we have broken ourselves of
the habit of speaking of healthy and morbid as
opposites: the question is one of degree, what
I maintain on this point is that what people call
healthy nowadays represents a lower level of that
which under favourable circumstances actually
would be healthy-that we are relatively sick. . . .
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THE WILL TO POWER IN ART.
257
The artist belongs to a much stronger race. That
which in us would be harmful and sickly, is natural
in him. But people object to this that it is pre-
cisely the impoverishment of the machine which
renders this extraordinary power of comprehending
every
kind of suggestion possible: e. g. our hysteri-
cal females.
An overflow of spunk and energy may quite as
well lead to symptoms of partial constraint, sense
hallucinations, peripheral sensitiveness, as a poor
vitality does—the stimuli are differently deter-
mined, the effect is the same, . . . What is not
'the same is above all the ultimate result; the
extreme torpidity of all morbid natures, after their
nervous eccentricities, has nothing in common with
the states of the artist, who need in no wise
repent his best moments. . .
He is rich enough
for it all: he can squander without becoming
poor.
Just as we now feel justified in judging genius
as a form of neurosis, we may perhaps think the
same of artistic suggestive power, — and our
artists are, as a matter of fact, only too closely
related to hysterical females ! ! ! This, however,
is only an argument against the present day, and
not against artists in general.
The inartistic states are: objectivity, reflection
suspension of the will . . . (Schopenhauer's scandal-
ous misunderstanding consisted in regarding art as
a mere bridge to the denial of life). . . The in-
artistic states are: those which impoverish, which
subtract, which bleach, under which life suffers
the Christian.
R
VOL. II.
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THE WILL TO POWER.
813.
The modern artist who, in his physiology, is
next of kin to the hysteric, may also be classified
as a character belonging to this state of morbid-
ness. The hysteric is false,—he lies from the
love of lying, he is admirable in all the arts of
dissimulation,-unless his morbid vanity hood-
wink him. This vanity is like a perpetual fever
which is in need of stupefying drugs, and which
recoils from no self-deception and no farce that
promises it the most fleeting satisfaction. (The
incapacity for pride and the need of continual
revenge for his deep-rooted self-contempt,—this is
almost the definition of this man's vanity. )
The absurd irritability of his system, which
makes a crisis out of every one of his experiences,
and sees dramatic elements in the most insignifi-
cant occurrences of life, deprives him of all calm
reflection : he ceases from being a personality, at
most he is a rendezvous of personalities of which
first one and then the other asserts itself with
barefaced assurance. Precisely on this account he
is great as an actor : all these poor will-less people,
whom doctors study so profoundly, astound one
through their virtuosity in mimicking, in trans-
figuration, in their assumption of almost any
character required.
814.
Artists are not men of great passion, despite all
their assertions to the contrary both to themselves
and to others. And for the following two reasons :
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THE WILL TO POWER IN ART.
259
they lack all shyness towards themselves (they
watch themselves live, they spy upon themselves,
they are much too inquisitive), and they also lack
shyness in the presence of passion (as artists they
exploit it). Secondly, however, that vampire,
their talent, generally forbids them such an ex-
penditure of energy as passion demands. --A man
who has a talent is sacrificed to that talent; he
lives under the vampirism of his talent.
A man does not get rid of his passion by re-
producing it, but rather he is rid of it if he is able
to reproduce it. (Goethe teaches the reverse, but
it seems as though he deliberately misunderstood
himself here from a sense of delicacy. )
815.
Concerning a reasonable mode of life. Relative
chastity, a fundamental and shrewd caution in
regard to erotica, even in thought, may be a reason-
able mode of life even in richly equipped and
perfect natures. But this principle applies more
particularly to artists; it belongs to the best
wisdom of their lives. Wholly trustworthy voices
have already been raised in favour of this view,
e. g. Stendhal, Th. Gautier, and Flaubert. The artist
is perhaps in his way necessarily a sensual man,
generally susceptible, accessible to everything, and
capable of responding to the remotest stimulus or
suggestion of a stimulus. Nevertheless, as a rule
he is in the power of his work, of his will to
mastership, really a sober and often even a chaste
man. His dominating instinct will have him so:
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THE WILL TO POWER.
it does not allow him to spend himself haphazardly.
It is one and the same form of strength which is
spent in artistic, conception and in the sexual
act: there is only one form of strength. The
artist who yields in this respect, and who spends
himself, is betrayed: by so doing he reveals his
lack of instinct, his lack of will in general. It
may be a sign of decadence, -in any case it re-
duces the value of his art to an incalculable
degree.
>
.
816.
Compared with the artist, the scientific mari,
regarded as a phenomenon, is indeed a sign of a
certain storing-up and levelling-down of life (but
also of an increase of strength, severity, hardness,
and will-power). To what extent can falsity and
indifference towards truth and utility be a sign of
youth, of childishness, in the artist ? . . . Their
habitual manner, their unreasonableness, their
ignorance of themselves, their indifference to
"eternal values,” their seriousness in play, their
lack of dignity; clowns and gods in one; the
saint and the rabble. . . . Imitation as an imperi-
ous instinct. -Do not artists of ascending life and
artists of degeneration belong to all phases ? . . .
Yes!
817
Would any link be missing in the whole chain
of science and art, if woman, if woman's work, were
excluded from it? Let us acknowledge the
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THE WILL TO POWER IN ART.
261
exception-it proves the rule—that woman is
capable of perfection in everything which does not
constitute a work: in letters, in memoirs, in the
most intricate handiwork-in short, in everything
which is not a craft; and just precisely because in
the things mentioned woman perfects herself, be-
cause in them she obeys the only artistic impulse
in her nature, which is to captivate. . . . But
what has woman to do with the passionate indiffer-
ence of the genuine artist who sees more importance
in a breath, in a sound, in the merest trifle, than in
himself? --who with all his five fingers gropes for
his most secret and hidden treasures who attri-
butes no value to anything unless it knows how to
take shape (unless it surrenders itself, unless it
visualises itself in some way). Art as it is
practised by artists—do you not understand what
it is ? is it not an outrage on all our pudeurs? . . .
Only in this century has woman dared to try her
hand at literature (“ Vers la canaille plumière écriv-
assière,” to speak with old Mirabeau): woman now
writes, she now paints, she is losing her instincts.
And to what purpose, if one may put such a
question ?
818
“ form
A man is an artist to the extent to which he
regards everything that inartistic people call
as the actual substance, as the "prin-
cipal” thing. With such ideas a man certainly
belongs to a world upside down for hencefor-
ward substance seems to him something merely
formal,his own life included.
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THE WILL TO POWER.
819.
A sense for, and a delight in, nuances (which is
characteristic of modernity), in that which is not
general, runs counter to the instinct which finds
its joy and its strength in grasping what is typical:
like Greek taste in its best period. In this there
is an overcoming of the plenitude of life; restraint
dominates, the peace of the strong soul which is
slow to move and which feels a certain repug-
nance towards excessive activity is defeated. The
general rule, the law, is honoured and made
prominent: conversely, the exception is laid aside,
and shades are suppressed. All that which is firm,
mighty, solid, life resting on a broad and powerful
basis, concealing its strength-this "pleases": i. e.
it corresponds with what we think of ourselves.
820.
In the main I am much more in favour of
artists than any philosopher that has appeared
hitherto: artists, at least, did not lose sight of the
great course which life pursues; they loved the
things “of this world,”—they loved their senses.
To strive after “spirituality," in cases where this
is not pure hypocrisy or self-deception, seems to
me to be either a misunderstanding, a disease, or a
cure, I wish myself, and all those who live with-
out the troubles of a puritanical conscience, and
who are able to live in this way, an ever greater
spiritualisation and multiplication of the senses.
Indeed, we would fain be grateful to the senses for
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THE WILL TO POWER IN ART.
263
their subtlety, power, and plenitude, and on that
account offer them the best we have in the
way
of
spirit. What do we care about priestly and meta-
physical anathemas upon the senses?
We no
longer require to treat them in this way: it is
a sign of well-constitutedness when a man like
Goethe clings with ever greater joy and heartiness
to the "things of this world”-in this way he
holds firmly to the grand concept of mankind,
which is that man becomes the glorifying power
of existence when he learns to glorify himself.
821.
Pessimism in art ? - The artist gradually learns
to like for their own sake, those means which
bring about the condition of asthetic 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 asthetic
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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THE WILL TO POWER.
as
purpose of pessimism. Tragedy does not teach
“resignation. ” . . . To represent terrible and
questionable things is, in itself, the sign of an
instinct of power and magnificence in the artist;
he doesn't fear them. . . . There is no such thing
a pessimistic art. . . . Art affirms. Job
affirms. But Zola ?
and the Goncourts ? -the
things they show us are ugly; their reason, however,
for showing them to us is their love of ugliness. . .
I don't care what you say! You simply deceive
yourselves if you think otherwise. —What a relief
Dostoievsky is !
822.
If I have sufficiently initiated my readers into
the doctrine that even "goodness," in the whole
comedy of existence, represents a 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.
It is absoiutely unworthy of a philosopher to
say that "the good and the beautiful are one”; if
he should add "and also the true,” he deserves to
be thrashed. Truth is ugly.
Art is with us in order that we may not perish
through truth.
823.
Moralising tendencies may be combated with
art. Art is freedom from moral bigotry and
philosophy à la Little Jack Horner: or it may be
the mockery of these things. The flight to Nature,
## p. 265 (#295) ############################################
THE WILL TO POWER IN ART.
265
where beauty and terribleness are coupled. The
concept of the great man.
-Fragile, useless souls-de-luxe, which are dis-
concerted by a 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 a boisterous delight in the
psychological perception of how all moralised
artists become worms and actors without know-
ing it.
-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 practices in the arts : regarded
as necessary—that is 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 is sought which is
capable of unlimited love (and is capable of
falling on its knees before a 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 a democratic age: the importance of poses.
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THE WILL TO POWER.
Thirdly : 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—a man
rings all bells at once, and awakens the vague
suspicion that he is a god.
Fourthly : 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 "expressivo" is not a sign of
strength, but of a feeling of deficiency;
(2) Picturesque music, the so-called dramatic
a
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THE WILL TO POWER IN ART.
267
kind, is above all easier (as is also the brutal
scandalmongering and the juxtaposition of facts
and traits in realistic novels);
(3)“Passion" as a matter of nerves and exhausted
souls; likewise the delightin 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 ? );
(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 people.
Such people must be tyrannised over in order
to be affected.
827.
Modern art is the art of tyrannising. A coarse
and salient definiteness in delineation; the motive
simplified into a formula; formulæ 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,
i
828.
In regard to the painter : Tous ces modernes sont
des poètes qui ont voulu étre peintres. L'un a
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THE WILL TO POWER.
cherché des drames dans l'histoire, l'autre des scènes
de moeurs, celui ci traduit des religions, celui là une
philosophie. 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 archæologists, psychologists, and impresarios
of one or another kind of event or theory. . They
enjoy our erudition and our philosophy. Like us,
they are full, and too full, of general ideas. They
like a form, not because it is what it is, but
because of what it expresses. They are the scions
of a 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.
At bottom, even Wagner's music, in so far as it
stands for the whole of French romanticism, is
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 is 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,
is also only a form of exoticism. . . . Romantic
musicians merely relate what exotic books have
made of them : people would fain experience
exotic sensations and passions according to
.
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THE WILL TO POWER IN ART.
269
Florentine and Venetian taste; finally they are
satisfied to look for them in an image. . . . The
essential factor is 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 oul. . . . Romantic art is
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.
830.
Winckelmann's and Goethe's Greeks, Victor
Hugo's Orientals, Wagner's Edda characters,
Walter Scott's Englishmen of the thirteenth
century—some day the whole comedy will be
exposed ! All of it was disproportionately
historical and false, but-modern.
831.
Concerning the characteristics of national
genius in regard to the strange and to the
borrowed
English genius vulgarises and makes realistic
everything it sees;
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THE WILL TO POWER.
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.
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 something
more than ears, is a real relief after the senti-
mental and, at bottom, degenerate musicians of
German romanticism.
833.
Offenbach: 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 mignardise 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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THE WILL TO POWER IN ART.
271
difficulties, then Offenbach has even more right to
the title genius than Wagner has. Wagner is
heavy and clumsy: nothing is more foreign to
him than the moments of wanton perfection
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.
Concerning "music. " -French, German, and
Italian music. (Our most debased periods in a
political sense are our most productive. The
Slavs ? )— The ballet, which is the outcome of
excessive study of the history of strange civilisa-
tions, has become master of opera. —Stage music
and musicians' music. It is an error to suppose
that what Wagner composed was a form : it 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 Schütz; all
honour to Mendelssohn: in them we find an
element of Goethe, but nowhere else! (We also.
find another element of Goethe coming to blossom
in Rahel; a 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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THE WILL TO POWER.
The appeal to
people have recourse to them.
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 "-nonsense! It is simply
bad music. . . . "Feeling” and “passion” are
“
merely substitutes when lofty intellectuality and
the joy of it (eg. 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 æsthetic 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
Schopenhauer's. As a matter of fact, tremendous
difficulties present themselves here.
We no
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THE WILL TO POWER IN ART.
273
"
longer know on what basis to found our concepts
of what is "exemplary," "masterly," "perfect. ”
With the instincts of old loves and old admiration
we grope about in a realm of values, and we almost
believe, “ that is good which pleases us. ” I
am always suspicious when I hear people every-
where speak innocently of Beethoven as a "classic":
what I would maintain, and with some severity, is
that, in other arts, a classic is the very reverse of
Beethoven. But when the complete and glaring
dissolution of style, Wagner's so-called dramatic
style, is taught and honoured as exemplary, as
masterly, as progressive, then my impatience
exceeds all bounds. Dramatic style in music, as
Wagner understood it, is simply renunciation
of all style whatever ; it is the assumption that
something else, namely, drama, is a hundred times
more important than music. Wagner can paint;
he does not use music for the sake of music, with
it he accentuates attitudes; he is a poet. Finally
he made an appeal to beautiful feelings and
heaving breasts, just as all other theatrical artists
have done, and with it 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 is merely
secondary (as ancilla dramaturgica). What good
can come of all extension in the means of expression,
when that which is expressed, art itself, has lost all
its law and order? The picturesque pomp and power
S
VOL. II.
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THE WILL TO POWER.
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 becoine
actors and culturemongers ?
839.
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 Wagnerite pur sang is unmusical; he submits
to the elementary forces of music very much
a woman submits to the will of the man
who hypnotises her—and in order to be able to
as
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275
.
do this he must not be made suspicious in rebus
musicis et musicantibus by a too severe or too
delicate conscience. I said “very much as "
but in this respect I spoke perhaps more than
a parable. 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 a 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 is 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, I heard
an Italian lady say, with her eyes half closed,
in a way in which female Wagnerites are adepts:
" Come si dorme con questa musica ! ” *
840.
Religion in music. —What a large amount of
satisfaction all religious needs get out of Wag-
nerian music, though this is 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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THE WILL TO POWER.
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 ashamedit stands apart—if any old
instinct puts its trembling lips to the rim of forbid-
den philtres.
