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828.
In regard to the painter: Tous ces modernes sont des potes qui ont voulu tre peintres, L'un a[Pg 268] cherch des drames dans l'histoire, l'autre des scnes de murs, celui ci traduit des religions, celui l 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 archologists, 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 extremely 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[Pg 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 soul.... 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 represent, 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;
The French whittles down, simplifies, rationalises, 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 sentimental and, at bottom, degenerate musicians of German romanticism.
833.
Offenbach; trench 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[Pg 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 civilisations, 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 instrumentation.—All honour to Heinrich Schtz; 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[Pg 272] people have recourse to them. The appeal to the instincts; suggestive art.
837.
Concerning our modern music.—The decay of melody, like the decay of "ideas," and of the freedom of intellectual activity, is a piece of clumsiness and obtuseness, which is developing itself into new feats of daring and even into principles;—in the end man has only the principles 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 (e.g. Voltaire's) can no longer be attained. Expressed technically, feeling and "passion" are easier; they presuppose a much poorer kind of artist. The recourse to drama betrays 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 sthetic 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[Pg 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 everywhere speak innocently of Beethoven as a "classic"; what I would maintain, and with some seventy, 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[Pg 274] of tones, the symbolism of sound, rhythm, the colour effects of harmony and discord, the suggestive significance of music, the whole sensuality of this art which Wagner made prevail—it is all this that Wagner derived, developed, and drew out of music. Victor Hugo did something very similar for language: but already people in France are asking themselves, in regard to the case of Victor Hugo, whether language was not corrupted by him, whether reason, intellectuality, and thorough conformity to law in language are not suppressed when the sensuality of expression is elevated to a high place? Is it not a sign of decadence that the poets in France have become plastic artists, and that the musicians of Germany have become actors and culturemongers?
