The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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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 “Tannhauser”). 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_(8) 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_.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.