This style and great passion
have this in common—that they scorn to please ;
that they forget to persuade; that they command:
that they will.
have this in common—that they scorn to please ;
that they forget to persuade; that they command:
that they will.
Nietzsche - v15 - Will to Power - b
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.
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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 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.
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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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THE WILL TO POWER IN ART.
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. . . . 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 persons,
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-
age 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 be added.
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;
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THE WILL TO POWER IN ART.
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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 ! --Was he really
misunderstood ? . . . Such is the case with five-
sixths of the artists of to-day. Wagner is their
Saviour: five-sixths, moreover, is the "lowest pro-
portion. ” In any case where Nature has shown
herself without reserve, and wherever culture is an
accident, a mere attempt, a piece of dilettantism,
the artist turns instinctively—what do I say?
I 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 is 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 is capable of
the grand style.
This style and great passion
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 is in one; to compel one's inner chaos
to assume form; to become consistent, simple, un-
equivocal, mathematical, law—this is the great
ambition here. By means of it one repels; nothing
* This is an adapted quotation from Goethe's poem, “The
Fisherman. ” The translation is E. A. Bowring's. —TR.
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THE WILL TO POWER.
The age
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 is a problem. 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 ?
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 and
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? . . .
I have 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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THE WILL TO POWER IN ART.
279
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 ästhetic 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 is it the expression of gratitude for happiness
experienced ? In the first case, it is romanticism;
in the second, it is 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 : 1. 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 it, who was promoted by it,
was the most mediocre, the most harmless and
gregarious type.
Homer as an apotheosis artist; Rubens also.
Music has not yet had such an artist.
The idealisation of the great criminal (the
feeling for his greatness) is Greek; the deprecia- -
tion, the slander, the contempt of the sinner, is
Judæo-Christian.
846.
Romanticism and its opposite. In regard to
all æsthetic values I now avail myself of this
fundamental distinction : in every individual case
I ask myself has hunger or has superabundance
been creative here? At first another distinction
might perhaps seem preferable, it is far more
obvious, -e. g. the distinction which decides whether
a desire for stability, for eternity, for Being, or
whether a desire for destruction, for change, for
Becoming, has been the cause of creation. But
both kinds of desire, when examined more closely,
prove to be ambiguous, and really susceptible of
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THE WILL TO POWER IN ART.
281
interpretation only according to that scheme already
mentioned and which I think is rightly preferred.
The desire for destruction, for change, for Be-
coming, may be the expression of an overflowing
power pregnant with promises for the future (my
term for this, as is well known, is Dionysian);
it may, however, also be the hate of the ill-con-
stituted, of the needy and of the physiologically
botched, that destroys, and must destroy, because
such creatures are indignant at, and annoyed by
everything lasting and stable.
The act of immortalising can, on the other hand,
be the outcome of gratitude and love: an art
which has this origin is always an apotheosis art;
dithyrambic, as perhaps with Rubens; happy, as
perhaps with Hafiz; bright and gracious, and shed-
ding a ray of glory over all things, as in Goethe.
But it may also, however, be the outcome of the
tyrannical will of the great sufferer who would
make the most personal, individual, and narrow trait
about him, the actual idiosyncrasy of his pain—in
fact, into a binding law and imposition, and who
thus wreaks his revenge upon all things by stamp-
ing, branding, and violating them with the image of
his torment. The latter case is romantic pessim-
ism in its highest form, whether this be Schopen-
hauerian voluntarism or Wagnerian music.
847.
It is a question whether the antithesis, classic and
romantic, does not conceal that other antithesis, the
active and the reactive.
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848.
In order to be a classic, one must be possessed
of all the strong and apparently contradictory gifts
and passions : but in such a way that they run in
harness together, and culminate simultaneously in
elevating a certain species of literature or art or
politics to its height and zenith (they must not do
this after that elevation has taken place . . . ). They
must reflect the complete state (either of a people
or of a culture), and express its most profound and
most secret nature, at a time when it is still stable
and not yet discoloured by the imitation of foreign
things (or when it is still dependent . . . ); not
a reactive but a deliberate and progressive spirit,
saying Yea in all circumstances, even in its
hate.
“And does not the highest personal value belong
thereto? ". . , . . It is worth considering whether
moral prejudices do not perhaps exercise their in-
fluence here, and whether great moral loftiness is
not perhaps a contradiction of the classical ? . . .
Whether the moral monsters must not necessarily
be romantic in word and deed? Any such pre-
ponderance of one virtue over others (as in the
case of the moral monster) is precisely what with
most hostility counteracts the classical power in
equilibrium ; supposing a people manifested this
moral loftiness and were classical notwithstanding,
we should have to conclude boldly that they were
also on the same high level in immorality! this
was perhaps the case with Shakespeare (provided
that he was really Lord Bacon).
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849.
Concerning the future. Against the romanticism
of great passion. — We must understand how a
certain modicum of coldness, lucidity, and hard-
ness is inseparable from all classical taste: above
all consistency, happy intellectuality, “the three
unities,” concentration, hatred of all feeling, of all
sentimentality, of all esprit, hatred of all multi-
formity, of all uncertainty, evasiveness, and of all
nebulosity, as also of all brevity, finicking, pretti-
ness and good nature. Artistic formulæ must not
be played with : life must be remodelled so that
it should be forced to formulate itself accordingly.
It is really an exhilarating spectacle which we
have only learned to laugh at quite recently, be-
cause we have only seen through it quite recently :
this spectacle of Herder's, Winckelmann's, Goethe's,
and Hegel's contemporaries claiming that they had
rediscovered the classical ideal . . . and at the same
time, Shakespeare! And this same crew of men
had scurvily repudiated all relationship with the
classical school of France ! As if the essential
principle could not have been learnt as well here
as elsewhere! . . . But what people wanted was
"nature," and "naturalness": Oh, the stupidity of
it ! It was thought that classicism was a kind of
naturalness!
Without either prejudice or indulgence we should
try and investigate upon what soil a classical taste
can be evolved. The hardening, the simplification,
the strengthening, and the bedevilling of man are
inseparable from classical taste. Logical and
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THE WILL TO POWER.
psychological simplification. A contempt of de-
tail, of complexity, of obscurity.
The romanticists of Germany do not protest
against classicism, but against reason, against
illumination, against taste, against the eighteenth
century.
The essence of romantico-Wagnerian music is
the opposite of the classical spirit.
The will to unity (because unity tyrannises : e. g.
the listener and the spectator), but the artist's in-
ability to tyrannise over himself where it is most
needed that is to say, in regard to the work it-
self (in regard to knowing what to leave out, what
to shorten, what to clarify, what to simplify). The
overwhelming by means of masses (Wagner, Victor
Hugo, Zola, Taine).
850.
The Nihilism of artists. --Nature is cruel in
her cheerfulness; cynical in her sunrises. We are
hostile to emotions. We flee thither where Nature
moves our senses and our imagination, where we
have nothing to love, where we are not reminded
of the moral semblances and delicacies of this
northern nature; and the same applies to the arts.
We prefer that which no longer reminds us of
good and evil. Our moral sensibility and tender-
ness seem to be relieved in the heart of terrible
and happy Nature, in the fatalism of the senses and
forces. Life without goodness.
Great well-being arises from contemplating
Nature's indifference to good and evil.
No justice in history, no goodness in Nature.
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THE WILL TO POWER IN ART.
285
That is why the pessimist when he is an artist
prefers those historical subjects where the absence
of justice reveals itself with magnificent simplicity,
where perfection actually comes to expression-
and likewise he prefers that in Nature, where her
callous evil character is not hypocritically concealed,
where that character is seen in perfection. . . .
The Nihilistic artist betrays himself in willing and
preferring cynical history and cynical Nature.
851.
What is tragic ? -Again and again I have
pointed to the great misunderstanding of Aristotle
in maintaining that the tragic emotions were the
two depressing emotions-fear and pity. Had he
been right, tragedy would be an art unfriendly to
life: it would have been necessary to caution people
against it as against something generally harmful
and suspicious. Art, otherwise the great stimulus
of life, the great intoxicant of life, the great will
to life, here became a tool of decadence, the hand-
maiden of pessimism and ill-health (for to sup-
pose, as Aristotle supposed, that by exciting these
emotions we thereby purged people of them, is
simply an error). Something which habitually
excites fear or pity, disorganises, weakens, and dis-
courages: and supposing Schopenhauer were
right in thinking that tragedy taught resignation
(i. e, a meek renunciation of happiness, hope, and
of the will to live), this would presuppose an art
in which art itself was denied. Tragedy would
then constitute a process of dissolution; the in-
stinct of life would destroy itself in the instinct of
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THE WILL TO POWER.
art. Christianity, Nihilism, tragic art, physiological
decadence; these things would then be linked,
they would then preponderate together and assist
each other onwards-downwards. . . . Tragedy
would thus be a symptom of decline.
This theory may be refuted in the most cold-
blooded way, namely, by measuring the effect of
a tragic emotion by means of a dynamometer
The result would be a fact which only the bottom-
less falsity of a doctrinaire could misunderstand:
that tragedy is a tonic. If Schopenhauer refuses
to see the truth here, if he regards general depres-
sion as a tragic condition, if he would have informed
the Greeks (who to his disgust were not "re-
signed") that they did not firmly possess the
highest principles of life: it is only owing to
his parti pris, to the need of consistency in his
system, to the dishonesty of the doctrinaire—that
dreadful dishonesty which step for step corrupted
the whole psychology of Schopenhauer (he who
had arbitrarily and almost violently misunderstood
genius, art itself, morality, pagan religion, beauty,
knowledge, and almost everything).
852.
The tragic artist. Whether, and in regard to
what, the judgment "beautiful” is established is a
question of an individuals or of a people's strength
The feeling of plenitude, of overflowing strength
(which gaily and courageously meets many an
obstacle before which the weakling shudders)—the
feeling of power utters the judgment "beautiful”
concerning things and conditions which the in-
stinct of impotence can only value as hateful and
"
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THE WILL TO POWER IN ART.
287
!
ugly. The flair which enables us to decide whether
the objects we encounter are dangerous, problem-
atic, or alluring, likewise determines our ästhetic
Yea. (“This is beautiful,” is an affirmation).
From this we see that, generally speaking, a
preference for questionable and terrible things is a
symptom of strength; whereas the taste for pretty
and charming trifles is characteristic of the weak
and the delicate. The love of tragedy is typical
{
of strong ages and characters: its non plus ultra
is perhaps the Divina Commedia. It is the heroic
spirits which in tragic cruelty say Yea unto them-
selves: they are hard enough to feel pain as a
pleasure.
On the other hand, supposing weaklings desire
to get pleasure from an art which was not designed
for them, what interpretation must we suppose they
would like to give tragedy in order to make it suit
their taste? They would interpret their own feel-
ings of value into it: e. g. the "triumph of the
móral order of things,” or the teaching of the
"uselessness of existence," or the incitement to
"resignation” (or also half-medicinal and half-
moral outpourings, d la Aristotle). Finally, the
art of terrible natures, in so far as it may excite
the nerves, may be regarded by the weak and ex-
hausted as a stimulus: this is now taking place,
for instance, in the case of the admiration meted
out to Wagner's art. A test of man's well-being
and consciousness of power is the extent to which
he can acknowledge the terrible and questionable
character of things, and whether he is in any need
of a faith at the end.
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THE WILL TO POWER.
This kind of artistic pessimism is precisely the
reverse of that religio-moral pessimism which
suffers from the corruption of man and the
enigmatic character of existence: the latter in-
sists upon deliverance, or at least upon the hope
of deliverance. Those who suffer, doubt, and dis-
trust themselves,—the sick, in other words,-have
in all ages required the transporting influence of
visions in order to be able to exist at all (the
notion "blessedness" arose in this way). A
similar case would be that of the artists of
decadence, who at bottom maintain a Nihilistic
attitude to life, and take refuge in the beauty of
form,-in those select cases in which Nature is
perfect, in which she is indifferently great and in-
differently beautiful. (The “love of the beautiful”
may thus be something very different from the
ability to see or create the beautiful: it may be
the expression of impotence in this respect. ) The
most convincing artists are those who make
harmony ring out of every discord, and who
benefit all things by the gift of their power and
inner harmony: in every work of art they merely
reveal the symbol of their inmost experiences-
their creation is gratitude for their life.
The depth. of the tragic artist consists in the
fact that his æsthetic instinct surveys the more
remote results, that he does not halt shortsightedly
at the thing that is nearest, that he says Yea to
the whole cosmic economy, which justifies the
terrible, the evil, and the questionable; which
more than justifies it.
## p. 289 (#319) ############################################
THE WILL TO POWER IN ART.
289
!
853
Art in the “ Birth of Tragedy. "
I.
The conception of the work which lies
right in the background of this book, is extra-
ordinarily gloomy and unpleasant: among all the
types of pessimism which have ever been known
hitherto, none seems to have attained to this degree
of malice. The contrast of a true and of an ap-
parent world is entirely absent here: there is but
one world, and it is false, cruel, contradictory,
seductive, and without sense. A world thus
constituted is the true world.
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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THE WILL TO POWER IN ART.
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. . . . 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 persons,
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-
age 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 be added.
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;
## p. 277 (#307) ############################################
THE WILL TO POWER IN ART.
277
-
.
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 ! --Was he really
misunderstood ? . . . Such is the case with five-
sixths of the artists of to-day. Wagner is their
Saviour: five-sixths, moreover, is the "lowest pro-
portion. ” In any case where Nature has shown
herself without reserve, and wherever culture is an
accident, a mere attempt, a piece of dilettantism,
the artist turns instinctively—what do I say?
I 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 is 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 is capable of
the grand style.
This style and great passion
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 is in one; to compel one's inner chaos
to assume form; to become consistent, simple, un-
equivocal, mathematical, law—this is the great
ambition here. By means of it one repels; nothing
* This is an adapted quotation from Goethe's poem, “The
Fisherman. ” The translation is E. A. Bowring's. —TR.
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THE WILL TO POWER.
The age
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 is a problem. 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 ?
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 and
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? . . .
I have 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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THE WILL TO POWER IN ART.
279
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 ästhetic 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 is it the expression of gratitude for happiness
experienced ? In the first case, it is romanticism;
in the second, it is 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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THE WILL TO POWER.
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 : 1. 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 it, who was promoted by it,
was the most mediocre, the most harmless and
gregarious type.
Homer as an apotheosis artist; Rubens also.
Music has not yet had such an artist.
The idealisation of the great criminal (the
feeling for his greatness) is Greek; the deprecia- -
tion, the slander, the contempt of the sinner, is
Judæo-Christian.
846.
Romanticism and its opposite. In regard to
all æsthetic values I now avail myself of this
fundamental distinction : in every individual case
I ask myself has hunger or has superabundance
been creative here? At first another distinction
might perhaps seem preferable, it is far more
obvious, -e. g. the distinction which decides whether
a desire for stability, for eternity, for Being, or
whether a desire for destruction, for change, for
Becoming, has been the cause of creation. But
both kinds of desire, when examined more closely,
prove to be ambiguous, and really susceptible of
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THE WILL TO POWER IN ART.
281
interpretation only according to that scheme already
mentioned and which I think is rightly preferred.
The desire for destruction, for change, for Be-
coming, may be the expression of an overflowing
power pregnant with promises for the future (my
term for this, as is well known, is Dionysian);
it may, however, also be the hate of the ill-con-
stituted, of the needy and of the physiologically
botched, that destroys, and must destroy, because
such creatures are indignant at, and annoyed by
everything lasting and stable.
The act of immortalising can, on the other hand,
be the outcome of gratitude and love: an art
which has this origin is always an apotheosis art;
dithyrambic, as perhaps with Rubens; happy, as
perhaps with Hafiz; bright and gracious, and shed-
ding a ray of glory over all things, as in Goethe.
But it may also, however, be the outcome of the
tyrannical will of the great sufferer who would
make the most personal, individual, and narrow trait
about him, the actual idiosyncrasy of his pain—in
fact, into a binding law and imposition, and who
thus wreaks his revenge upon all things by stamp-
ing, branding, and violating them with the image of
his torment. The latter case is romantic pessim-
ism in its highest form, whether this be Schopen-
hauerian voluntarism or Wagnerian music.
847.
It is a question whether the antithesis, classic and
romantic, does not conceal that other antithesis, the
active and the reactive.
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THE WILL TO POWER.
848.
In order to be a classic, one must be possessed
of all the strong and apparently contradictory gifts
and passions : but in such a way that they run in
harness together, and culminate simultaneously in
elevating a certain species of literature or art or
politics to its height and zenith (they must not do
this after that elevation has taken place . . . ). They
must reflect the complete state (either of a people
or of a culture), and express its most profound and
most secret nature, at a time when it is still stable
and not yet discoloured by the imitation of foreign
things (or when it is still dependent . . . ); not
a reactive but a deliberate and progressive spirit,
saying Yea in all circumstances, even in its
hate.
“And does not the highest personal value belong
thereto? ". . , . . It is worth considering whether
moral prejudices do not perhaps exercise their in-
fluence here, and whether great moral loftiness is
not perhaps a contradiction of the classical ? . . .
Whether the moral monsters must not necessarily
be romantic in word and deed? Any such pre-
ponderance of one virtue over others (as in the
case of the moral monster) is precisely what with
most hostility counteracts the classical power in
equilibrium ; supposing a people manifested this
moral loftiness and were classical notwithstanding,
we should have to conclude boldly that they were
also on the same high level in immorality! this
was perhaps the case with Shakespeare (provided
that he was really Lord Bacon).
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283
849.
Concerning the future. Against the romanticism
of great passion. — We must understand how a
certain modicum of coldness, lucidity, and hard-
ness is inseparable from all classical taste: above
all consistency, happy intellectuality, “the three
unities,” concentration, hatred of all feeling, of all
sentimentality, of all esprit, hatred of all multi-
formity, of all uncertainty, evasiveness, and of all
nebulosity, as also of all brevity, finicking, pretti-
ness and good nature. Artistic formulæ must not
be played with : life must be remodelled so that
it should be forced to formulate itself accordingly.
It is really an exhilarating spectacle which we
have only learned to laugh at quite recently, be-
cause we have only seen through it quite recently :
this spectacle of Herder's, Winckelmann's, Goethe's,
and Hegel's contemporaries claiming that they had
rediscovered the classical ideal . . . and at the same
time, Shakespeare! And this same crew of men
had scurvily repudiated all relationship with the
classical school of France ! As if the essential
principle could not have been learnt as well here
as elsewhere! . . . But what people wanted was
"nature," and "naturalness": Oh, the stupidity of
it ! It was thought that classicism was a kind of
naturalness!
Without either prejudice or indulgence we should
try and investigate upon what soil a classical taste
can be evolved. The hardening, the simplification,
the strengthening, and the bedevilling of man are
inseparable from classical taste. Logical and
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THE WILL TO POWER.
psychological simplification. A contempt of de-
tail, of complexity, of obscurity.
The romanticists of Germany do not protest
against classicism, but against reason, against
illumination, against taste, against the eighteenth
century.
The essence of romantico-Wagnerian music is
the opposite of the classical spirit.
The will to unity (because unity tyrannises : e. g.
the listener and the spectator), but the artist's in-
ability to tyrannise over himself where it is most
needed that is to say, in regard to the work it-
self (in regard to knowing what to leave out, what
to shorten, what to clarify, what to simplify). The
overwhelming by means of masses (Wagner, Victor
Hugo, Zola, Taine).
850.
The Nihilism of artists. --Nature is cruel in
her cheerfulness; cynical in her sunrises. We are
hostile to emotions. We flee thither where Nature
moves our senses and our imagination, where we
have nothing to love, where we are not reminded
of the moral semblances and delicacies of this
northern nature; and the same applies to the arts.
We prefer that which no longer reminds us of
good and evil. Our moral sensibility and tender-
ness seem to be relieved in the heart of terrible
and happy Nature, in the fatalism of the senses and
forces. Life without goodness.
Great well-being arises from contemplating
Nature's indifference to good and evil.
No justice in history, no goodness in Nature.
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THE WILL TO POWER IN ART.
285
That is why the pessimist when he is an artist
prefers those historical subjects where the absence
of justice reveals itself with magnificent simplicity,
where perfection actually comes to expression-
and likewise he prefers that in Nature, where her
callous evil character is not hypocritically concealed,
where that character is seen in perfection. . . .
The Nihilistic artist betrays himself in willing and
preferring cynical history and cynical Nature.
851.
What is tragic ? -Again and again I have
pointed to the great misunderstanding of Aristotle
in maintaining that the tragic emotions were the
two depressing emotions-fear and pity. Had he
been right, tragedy would be an art unfriendly to
life: it would have been necessary to caution people
against it as against something generally harmful
and suspicious. Art, otherwise the great stimulus
of life, the great intoxicant of life, the great will
to life, here became a tool of decadence, the hand-
maiden of pessimism and ill-health (for to sup-
pose, as Aristotle supposed, that by exciting these
emotions we thereby purged people of them, is
simply an error). Something which habitually
excites fear or pity, disorganises, weakens, and dis-
courages: and supposing Schopenhauer were
right in thinking that tragedy taught resignation
(i. e, a meek renunciation of happiness, hope, and
of the will to live), this would presuppose an art
in which art itself was denied. Tragedy would
then constitute a process of dissolution; the in-
stinct of life would destroy itself in the instinct of
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THE WILL TO POWER.
art. Christianity, Nihilism, tragic art, physiological
decadence; these things would then be linked,
they would then preponderate together and assist
each other onwards-downwards. . . . Tragedy
would thus be a symptom of decline.
This theory may be refuted in the most cold-
blooded way, namely, by measuring the effect of
a tragic emotion by means of a dynamometer
The result would be a fact which only the bottom-
less falsity of a doctrinaire could misunderstand:
that tragedy is a tonic. If Schopenhauer refuses
to see the truth here, if he regards general depres-
sion as a tragic condition, if he would have informed
the Greeks (who to his disgust were not "re-
signed") that they did not firmly possess the
highest principles of life: it is only owing to
his parti pris, to the need of consistency in his
system, to the dishonesty of the doctrinaire—that
dreadful dishonesty which step for step corrupted
the whole psychology of Schopenhauer (he who
had arbitrarily and almost violently misunderstood
genius, art itself, morality, pagan religion, beauty,
knowledge, and almost everything).
852.
The tragic artist. Whether, and in regard to
what, the judgment "beautiful” is established is a
question of an individuals or of a people's strength
The feeling of plenitude, of overflowing strength
(which gaily and courageously meets many an
obstacle before which the weakling shudders)—the
feeling of power utters the judgment "beautiful”
concerning things and conditions which the in-
stinct of impotence can only value as hateful and
"
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THE WILL TO POWER IN ART.
287
!
ugly. The flair which enables us to decide whether
the objects we encounter are dangerous, problem-
atic, or alluring, likewise determines our ästhetic
Yea. (“This is beautiful,” is an affirmation).
From this we see that, generally speaking, a
preference for questionable and terrible things is a
symptom of strength; whereas the taste for pretty
and charming trifles is characteristic of the weak
and the delicate. The love of tragedy is typical
{
of strong ages and characters: its non plus ultra
is perhaps the Divina Commedia. It is the heroic
spirits which in tragic cruelty say Yea unto them-
selves: they are hard enough to feel pain as a
pleasure.
On the other hand, supposing weaklings desire
to get pleasure from an art which was not designed
for them, what interpretation must we suppose they
would like to give tragedy in order to make it suit
their taste? They would interpret their own feel-
ings of value into it: e. g. the "triumph of the
móral order of things,” or the teaching of the
"uselessness of existence," or the incitement to
"resignation” (or also half-medicinal and half-
moral outpourings, d la Aristotle). Finally, the
art of terrible natures, in so far as it may excite
the nerves, may be regarded by the weak and ex-
hausted as a stimulus: this is now taking place,
for instance, in the case of the admiration meted
out to Wagner's art. A test of man's well-being
and consciousness of power is the extent to which
he can acknowledge the terrible and questionable
character of things, and whether he is in any need
of a faith at the end.
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THE WILL TO POWER.
This kind of artistic pessimism is precisely the
reverse of that religio-moral pessimism which
suffers from the corruption of man and the
enigmatic character of existence: the latter in-
sists upon deliverance, or at least upon the hope
of deliverance. Those who suffer, doubt, and dis-
trust themselves,—the sick, in other words,-have
in all ages required the transporting influence of
visions in order to be able to exist at all (the
notion "blessedness" arose in this way). A
similar case would be that of the artists of
decadence, who at bottom maintain a Nihilistic
attitude to life, and take refuge in the beauty of
form,-in those select cases in which Nature is
perfect, in which she is indifferently great and in-
differently beautiful. (The “love of the beautiful”
may thus be something very different from the
ability to see or create the beautiful: it may be
the expression of impotence in this respect. ) The
most convincing artists are those who make
harmony ring out of every discord, and who
benefit all things by the gift of their power and
inner harmony: in every work of art they merely
reveal the symbol of their inmost experiences-
their creation is gratitude for their life.
The depth. of the tragic artist consists in the
fact that his æsthetic instinct surveys the more
remote results, that he does not halt shortsightedly
at the thing that is nearest, that he says Yea to
the whole cosmic economy, which justifies the
terrible, the evil, and the questionable; which
more than justifies it.
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THE WILL TO POWER IN ART.
289
!
853
Art in the “ Birth of Tragedy. "
I.
The conception of the work which lies
right in the background of this book, is extra-
ordinarily gloomy and unpleasant: among all the
types of pessimism which have ever been known
hitherto, none seems to have attained to this degree
of malice. The contrast of a true and of an ap-
parent world is entirely absent here: there is but
one world, and it is false, cruel, contradictory,
seductive, and without sense. A world thus
constituted is the true world.
