The Case of Wagner Complete Works, Volume 8 · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
3.
Perhaps you are beginning to perceive how very much this music _improves_ me?--_Il faut méditerraniser la musique:_ and I have my reasons for this principle ("Beyond Good and Evil," pp. 216 _et seq._). The return to Nature, health, good spirits, youth, _virtue!_--And yet I was one of the most corrupted Wagnerites.... I was able to take Wagner seriously. Oh, this old magician! what tricks has he not played upon us! The first thing his art places in our hands is a magnifying glass: we look through it, and we no longer trust our own eyes.--Everything grows bigger, _even Wagner grows bigger...._ What a clever rattlesnake. Throughout his life he rattled "resignation," "loyalty," and "purity" about our ears, and he retired from the _corrupt_ world with a song of praise to chastity! !--And we believed it all....
Or that the venerable Almighty, after having compromised himself morally in all manner of ways, is at last delivered by a free spirit and an immoralist? (the case in the "Ring"). Admire, more especially this last piece of wisdom! Do you understand it? I--take good care not to understand it.... That it is possible to draw yet other lessons from the works above mentioned,--I am much more ready to prove than to dispute. That one may be driven by a Wagnerian ballet to desperation--_and_ to virtue! (once again the case in "Tannhäuser"). That not going to bed at the right time may be followed by the worst consequences (once again the case of "Lohengrin"),--That one can never be too sure of the spouse one actually marries (for the third time, the case of "Lohengrin"). "Tristan and Isolde" glorifies the perfect husband who, in a certain case, can ask only one question: "But why have ye not told me this before? Nothing could be simpler than that!" Reply: "That I cannot tell thee. And what thou askest, That wilt thou never learn."
"Lohengrin" contains a solemn ban upon all investigation and questioning. In this way Wagner stood for the Christian concept, "Thou must and shalt _believe!_" It is a crime against the highest and the holiest to be scientific.... The "Flying Dutchman" preaches the sublime doctrine that woman can moor the most erratic soul, or to put it into Wagnerian terms "save" him. Here we venture to ask a question. Supposing that this were actually true, would it therefore be desirable?--What becomes of the "eternal Jew" whom a woman adores and _enchains?_ He simply ceases from being eternal; he marries,--that is to say, he concerns us no longer.--Transferred into the realm of reality, the danger for the artist and for the genius--and these are of course the "eternal Jews"--resides in woman: _adoring_ women are their ruin. Scarcely any one has sufficient character not to be corrupted--"saved" when he finds himself treated as a God:--he then immediately condescends to woman.--Man is a coward in the face of all that is eternally feminine: and this the girls know.--In many cases of woman's love, and perhaps precisely in the most famous ones, the love is no more than a refined form of _parasitism,_ a making one's nest in another's soul and sometimes even in another's flesh--Ah! and how constantly at the cost of the host!
We know the fate of Goethe in old-maidish moralin-corroded Germany. He was always offensive to Germans, he found honest admirers only among. Jewesses. Schiller, "noble" Schiller, who cried flowery words into their ears,--he was a man after their own heart. What did they reproach Goethe with?--with the Mount of Venus, and with having composed certain Venetian epigrams. Even Klopstock preached him a moral sermon; there was a time when Herder was fond of using the word "Priapus" when he spoke of Goethe. Even "Wilhelm Meister" seemed to be only a symptom of decline, of a moral "going to the dogs." The "Menagerie of tame cattle," the worthlessness of the hero in this book, revolted Niebuhr, who finally bursts out in a plaint which _Biterolf_[2] might well have sung: "nothing so easily makes a painful impression as _when a great mind despoils itself of its wings and strives for virtuosity in something greatly inferior, while it renounces more lofty aims."_ But the most indignant of all was the cultured woman: all smaller courts in Germany, every kind of "Puritanism" made the sign of the cross at the sight of Goethe, at the thought of the "unclean spirit" in Goethe.--This history was what Wagner set to music. He _saves_ Goethe, that goes without saying; but he does so in such a clever way that he also takes the side of the cultured woman.
Goethe gets saved: a prayer saves him, a cultured woman _draws him out of the mire._ --As to what Goethe would have thought of Wagner?--Goethe once set himself the question, "what danger hangs over all romanticists: the fate of romanticists?" His answer was: "To choke over the rumination of moral and religious absurdities." In short: _Parsifal...._ The philosopher writes thereto an epilogue. _Holiness_--the only remaining higher value still seen by the mob or by woman, the horizon of the ideal for all those who are naturally short-sighted. To philosophers, however, this horizon, like every other, is a mere misunderstanding, a sort of slamming of the door in the face of the real beginning of their world,--their danger, their ideal, their desideratum.... In more polite language: _La Philosophie ne suffit pas au grand nombre. Il lui faut la sainteté...._
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.