The Case of Wagner Complete Works, Volume 8 · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
10.
And now just a word _en passant_ concerning Wagner's writings: they are among other things a school of _shrewdness._ The system of procedures of which Wagner disposes, might be applied to a hundred other cases,--he that hath ears to hear let him hear. Perhaps I may lay claim to some public acknowledgment, if I put three ox the most valuable of these procedures into a precise form. Everything that Wagner _cannot_ do is bad. Wagner could do much more than he does; but his strong principles prevent him. Everything that Wagner _can_ do, no one will ever be able to do after him, no one has ever done before him, and no one must ever do after him: Wagner is godly.... These three propositions are the quintessence of Wagner's writings;--the rest is merely--"literature."
Do not let us forget that, when Hegel and Schelling were misleading the minds of Germany, Wagner was still young: that he guessed, or rather fully grasped, that the only thing which Germans take seriously is--"the idea,"--that is to say, something obscure, uncertain, wonderful; that among Germans lucidity is an objection, logic a refutation. Schopenhauer rigorously pointed out the dishonesty of Hegel's and Schelling's age,--rigorously, but also unjustly; for he himself, the pessimistic old counterfeiter, was in no way more "honest" than his more famous contemporaries. But let us leave morality out of the question, Hegel is a _matter of taste...._ And not only of German but of European taste! ... A taste which Wagner understood!--which he felt equal to! which he has immortalised!--All he did was to apply it to music--he invented a style for himself, which might mean an "infinity of things,"--he was _Hegel's_ heir.... Music as "Idea."--
And how well Wagner was understood!--The same kind of man who used to gush over Hegel, now gushes over Wagner; in his school they even _write_ Hegelian.[5] But he who understood Wagner best, was the German youthlet. The two words "infinity" and "meaning" were sufficient for this: at their sound the youthlet immediately began to feel exceptionally happy. Wagner did _not_ conquer these boys with music, but with the "idea":--it is the enigmatical vagueness of his art, its game of hide-and-seek amid a hundred symbols, its polychromy in ideals, which leads and lures the lads. It is Wagner's genius for forming clouds, his sweeps and swoops through the air, his ubiquity and nullibiety--precisely the same qualities with which Hegel led and lured in his time!--Moreover in the presence of Wagner's multifariousness, plenitude and arbitrariness, they seem to themselves justified--"saved." Tremulously they listen while the _great symbols_ in his art seem to make themselves heard from out the misty distance, with a gentle roll of thunder, and they are not at all displeased if at times it gets a little grey, gruesome and cold. Are they not one and all, like Wagner himself, on _quite intimate terms_ with bad weather, with German weather! Wotan is their God: but Wotan is the God of bad weather.... They are right, how could these German youths--in their present condition,--miss what we others, we _halcyonians,_ miss in Wagner? _i.e.: la gaya scienza;_ light feet, wit, fire, grave, grand logic, stellar dancing, wanton intellectuality, the vibrating light of the South, the calm sea--perfection....
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.