Ecce Homo Complete Works, Volume Seventeen · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
5
As I am speaking here of the recreations of my life, I feel I must express a word or two of gratitude for that which has refreshed me by far the most heartily and most profoundly. This, without the slightest doubt, was my intimate relationship with Richard Wagner. All my other relationships with men I treat quite lightly; but I would not have the days I spent at Tribschen--those days of confidence, of cheerfulness, of sublime flashes, and of profound moments--blotted from my life at any price. I know not what Wagner may have been for others; but no cloud ever darkened _our_ sky. And this brings me back again to France,--I have no arguments against Wagnerites, and _hoc genus omne_ who believe that they do honour to Wagner by believing him to be like themselves; for such people I have only a contemptuous curl of my lip. With a nature like mine, which is so strange to everything Teutonic, that even the presence of a German retards my digestion, my first meeting with Wagner was the first moment in my life in which I breathed freely: I felt him, I honoured him, as a foreigner, as the opposite and the incarnate contradiction of all "German virtues."
We who as children breathed the marshy atmosphere of the fifties, are necessarily pessimists in regard to the concept "German"; we cannot be anything else than revolutionaries--we can assent to no state of affairs which allows the canting bigot to be at the top. I care not a jot whether this canting bigot acts in different colours to-day, whether he dresses in scarlet or dons the uniform of a hussar.[2] Very well, then! Wagner was a revolutionary--he fled from the Germans.... As an artist, a man has no home in Europe save in Paris; that subtlety of all the five senses which Wagner's art presupposes, those fingers that can detect slight gradations, psychological morbidity--all these things can be found only in Paris. Nowhere else can you meet with this passion for questions of form, this earnestness in matters of _mise-en-scène,_ which is the Parisian earnestness _par excellence._ In Germany no one has any idea of the tremendous ambition that fills the heart of a Parisian artist. The German is a good fellow. Wagner was by no means a good fellow.... But I have already said quite enough on the subject of Wagner's real nature (see _Beyond Good and Evil,_ Aphorism 269), and about those to whom he is most closely related. He is one of the late French romanticists, that high-soaring and heaven-aspiring band of artists, like Delacroix and Berlioz, who in their inmost nacres are sick and incurable, and who are all fanatics of _expression,_ and virtuosos through and through.... Who, in sooth, was the first intelligent follower of Wagner? Charles Baudelaire, the very man who first understood Delacroix--that typical decadent, in whom a whole generation of artists saw their reflection; he was perhaps the last of them too.... What is it that I have never forgiven Wagner? The fact that he condescended to the Germans--that he became a German Imperialist.... Wherever Germany spreads, she _ruins_ culture.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.