The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
849.
_Concerning the future. Against the romanticism of great passion._--We must understand how a certain modicum of coldness, lucidity, and hardness is inseparable from all classical taste: above all consistency, happy intellectuality, "the three unities," concentration, hatred of all feeling, of all sentimentality, of all _esprit,_ hatred of all multiformity, of all uncertainty, evasiveness, and of all nebulosity, as also of all brevity, finicking, prettiness and good nature. Artistic formulæ must not be played with: life must be remodelled so that it should be forced to formulate itself accordingly. It is really an exhilarating spectacle which we have only learned to laugh at quite recently, because we have only seen through it quite recently: this spectacle of Herder's, Winckelmann's, Goethe's, and Hegel's contemporaries claiming that they had rediscovered the classical ideal ... and at the same time, Shakespeare! And this same crew of men had scurvily repudiated all relationship with the classical school of France! As if the essential principle could not have been learnt as well here as elsewhere! ... But what people wanted was "nature," and "naturalness": Oh, the stupidity of it! It was thought that classicism was a kind of naturalness! Without either prejudice or indulgence we should try and investigate upon what soil a classical taste can be evolved. The hardening, the simplification, the strengthening, and the bedevilling of man are inseparable from classical taste. Logical and psychological simplification. A contempt of detail, of complexity, of obscurity.
The romanticists of Germany do not protest against classicism, but against reason, against illumination, against taste, against the eighteenth century. The essence of romantico-Wagnerian music is the opposite of the classical spirit. The will to unity (because unity tyrannises. _e.g._ the listener and the spectator), but the artist's inability to tyrannise over himself where it is most needed--that is to say, in regard to the work itself (in regard to knowing what to leave out, what to shorten, what to clarify, what to simplify). The overwhelming by means of masses (Wagner, Victor Hugo, Zola, Taine).
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.