astute silence—probably he had good reason for it. It is
certain that it was not the ‘Wars of Independence’ that
made him look up more joyfully, any more than it was the
French Revolution,—the event on account of which he
RECONSTRUCTED his ‘Faust,’ and indeed the whole
problem of ‘man,’ was the appearance of Napoleon. There
are words of Goethe in which he condemns with
impatient severity, as from a foreign land, that which
Germans take a pride in, he once defined the famous
German turn of mind as ‘Indulgence towards its own and
others’ weaknesses.’ Was he wrong? it is characteristic of
Germans that one is seldom entirely wrong about them.
The German soul has passages and galleries in it, there are
caves, hiding- places, and dungeons therein, its disorder
has much of the charm of the mysterious, the German is
well acquainted with the bypaths to chaos. And as
everything loves its symbol, so the German loves the
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clouds and all that is obscure, evolving, crepuscular, damp,
and shrouded, it seems to him that everything uncertain,
undeveloped, self-displacing, and growing is ‘deep". The
German himself does not EXIST, he is BECOMING, he
is ‘developing himself". ‘Development’ is therefore the
essentially German discovery and hit in the great domain
of philosophical formulas,— a ruling idea, which, together
with German beer and German music, is labouring to
Germanise all Europe. Foreigners are astonished and
attracted by the riddles which the conflicting nature at the
basis of the German soul propounds to them (riddles
which Hegel systematised and Richard Wagner has in the
end set to music). ‘Good-natured and spiteful’—such a
juxtaposition, preposterous in the case of every other
people, is unfortunately only too often justified in
Germany one has only to live for a while among Swabians
to know this! The clumsiness of the German scholar and
his social distastefulness agree alarmingly well with his
physical rope-dancing and nimble boldness, of which all
the Gods have learnt to be afraid. If any one wishes to see
the ‘German soul’ demonstrated ad oculos, let him only
look at German taste, at German arts and manners what
boorish indifference to ‘taste’! How the noblest and the
commonest stand there in juxtaposition! How disorderly
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and how rich is the whole constitution of this soul! The
German DRAGS at his soul, he drags at everything he
experiences. He digests his events badly; he never gets
‘done’ with them; and German depth is often only a
difficult, hesitating ‘digestion.’ And just as all chronic
invalids, all dyspeptics like what is convenient, so the
German loves ‘frankness’ and ‘honesty"; it is so
CONVENIENT to be frank and honest!—This
confidingness, this complaisance, this showing-the-cards of
German HONESTY, is probably the most dangerous and
most successful disguise which the German is up to
nowadays: it is his proper Mephistophelean art; with this
he can ‘still achieve much’! The German lets himself go,
and thereby gazes with faithful, blue, empty German
eyes—and other countries immediately confound him
with his dressing-gown!—I meant to say that, let ‘German
depth’ be what it will—among ourselves alone we perhaps
take the liberty to laugh at it—we shall do well to
continue henceforth to honour its appearance and good
name, and not barter away too cheaply our old reputation
as a people of depth for Prussian ‘smartness,’ and Berlin
wit and sand. It is wise for a people to pose, and LET itself
be regarded, as profound, clumsy, good-natured, honest,
and foolish: it might even be—profound to do so! Finally,
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we should do honour to our name—we are not called the
‘TIUSCHE VOLK’ (deceptive people) for nothing….
245. The ‘good old’ time is past, it sang itself out in
Mozart— how happy are WE that his ROCOCO still
speaks to us, that his ‘good company,’ his tender
enthusiasm, his childish delight in the Chinese and its
flourishes, his courtesy of heart, his longing for the
elegant, the amorous, the tripping, the tearful, and his
belief in the South, can still appeal to SOMETHING
LEFT in us! Ah, some time or other it will be over with
it!—but who can doubt that it will be over still sooner
with the intelligence and taste for Beethoven! For he was
only the last echo of a break and transition in style, and
NOT, like Mozart, the last echo of a great European taste
which had existed for centuries. Beethoven is the
intermediate event between an old mellow soul that is
constantly breaking down, and a future over-young soul
that is always COMING; there is spread over his music
the twilight of eternal loss and eternal extravagant hope,—
the same light in which Europe was bathed when it
dreamed with Rousseau, when it danced round the Tree
of Liberty of the Revolution, and finally almost fell down
in adoration before Napoleon. But how rapidly does
THIS very sentiment now pale, how difficult nowadays is
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even the APPREHENSION of this sentiment, how
strangely does the language of Rousseau, Schiller, Shelley,
and Byron sound to our ear, in whom COLLECTIVELY
the same fate of Europe was able to SPEAK, which knew
how to SING in Beethoven!—Whatever German music
came afterwards, belongs to Romanticism, that is to say, to
a movement which, historically considered, was still
shorter, more fleeting, and more superficial than that great
interlude, the transition of Europe from Rousseau to
Napoleon, and to the rise of democracy. Weber—but
what do WE care nowadays for ‘Freischutz’ and ‘Oberon’!
Or Marschner’s ‘Hans Heiling’ and ‘Vampyre’! Or even
Wagner’s ‘Tannhauser’! That is extinct, although not yet
forgotten music. This whole music of Romanticism,
besides, was not noble enough, was not musical enough,
to maintain its position anywhere but in the theatre and
before the masses; from the beginning it was second-rate
music, which was little thought of by genuine musicians.
It was different with Felix Mendelssohn, that halcyon
master, who, on account of his lighter, purer, happier soul,
quickly acquired admiration, and was equally quickly
forgotten: as the beautiful EPISODE of German music.
But with regard to Robert Schumann, who took things
seriously, and has been taken seriously from the first—he
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was the last that founded a school,—do we not now
regard it as a satisfaction, a relief, a deliverance, that this
very Romanticism of Schumann’s has been surmounted?
Schumann, fleeing into the ‘Saxon Switzerland’ of his
soul, with a half Werther-like, half Jean-Paul-like nature
(assuredly not like Beethoven! assuredly not like Byron!)—
his MANFRED music is a mistake and a misunderstanding
to the extent of injustice; Schumann, with his taste, which
was fundamentally a PETTY taste (that is to say, a
dangerous propensity—doubly dangerous among
Germans—for quiet lyricism and intoxication of the
feelings), going constantly apart, timidly withdrawing and
retiring, a noble weakling who revelled in nothing but
anonymous joy and sorrow, from the beginning a sort of
girl and NOLI ME TANGERE—this Schumann was
already merely a GERMAN event in music, and no
longer a European event, as Beethoven had been, as in a
still greater degree Mozart had been; with Schumann
German music was threatened with its greatest danger, that
of LOSING THE VOICE FOR THE SOUL OF
EUROPE and sinking into a merely national affair.
246. What a torture are books written in German to a
reader who has a THIRD ear! How indignantly he stands
beside the slowly turning swamp of sounds without tune
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and rhythms without dance, which Germans call a ‘book’!
And even the German who READS books! How lazily,
how reluctantly, how badly he reads! How many Germans
know, and consider it obligatory to know, that there is
ART in every good sentence—art which must be divined,
if the sentence is to be understood! If there is a
misunderstanding about its TEMPO, for instance, the
sentence itself is misunderstood! That one must not be
doubtful about the rhythm-determining syllables, that one
should feel the breaking of the too-rigid symmetry as
intentional and as a charm, that one should lend a fine and
patient ear to every STACCATO and every RUBATO,
that one should divine the sense in the sequence of the
vowels and diphthongs, and how delicately and richly they
can be tinted and retinted in the order of their
arrangement—who among book-reading Germans is
complaisant enough to recognize such duties and
requirements, and to listen to so much art and intention in
language? After all, one just ‘has no ear for it"; and so the
most marked contrasts of style are not heard, and the most
delicate artistry is as it were SQUANDERED on the
deaf.—These were my thoughts when I noticed how
clumsily and unintuitively two masters in the art of prose-
writing have been confounded: one, whose words drop
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down hesitatingly and coldly, as from the roof of a damp
cave—he counts on their dull sound and echo; and
another who manipulates his language like a flexible
sword, and from his arm down into his toes feels the
dangerous bliss of the quivering, over-sharp blade, which
wishes to bite, hiss, and cut.
247. How little the German style has to do with
harmony and with the ear, is shown by the fact that
precisely our good musicians themselves write badly. The
German does not read aloud, he does not read for the ear,
but only with his eyes; he has put his ears away in the
drawer for the time. In antiquity when a man read—
which was seldom enough—he read something to himself,
and in a loud voice; they were surprised when any one
read silently, and sought secretly the reason of it. In a loud
voice: that is to say, with all the swellings, inflections, and
variations of key and changes of TEMPO, in which the
ancient PUBLIC world took delight. The laws of the
written style were then the same as those of the spoken
style; and these laws depended partly on the surprising
development and refined requirements of the ear and
larynx; partly on the strength, endurance, and power of
the ancient lungs. In the ancient sense, a period is above
all a physiological whole, inasmuch as it is comprised in
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one breath. Such periods as occur in Demosthenes and
Cicero, swelling twice and sinking twice, and all in one
breath, were pleasures to the men of ANTIQUITY, who
knew by their own schooling how to appreciate the virtue
therein, the rareness and the difficulty in the deliverance of
such a period;—WE have really no right to the BIG
period, we modern men, who are short of breath in every
sense! Those ancients, indeed, were all of them dilettanti
in speaking, consequently connoisseurs, consequently
critics—they thus brought their orators to the highest
pitch; in the same manner as in the last century, when all
Italian ladies and gentlemen knew how to sing, the
virtuosoship of song (and with it also the art of melody)
reached its elevation. In Germany, however (until quite
recently when a kind of platform eloquence began shyly
and awkwardly enough to flutter its young wings), there
was properly speaking only one kind of public and
APPROXIMATELY artistical discourse—that delivered
from the pulpit. The preacher was the only one in
Germany who knew the weight of a syllable or a word, in
what manner a sentence strikes, springs, rushes, flows, and
comes to a close; he alone had a conscience in his ears,
often enough a bad conscience: for reasons are not lacking
why proficiency in oratory should be especially seldom
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attained by a German, or almost always too late. The
masterpiece of German prose is therefore with good
reason the masterpiece of its greatest preacher: the BIBLE
has hitherto been the best German book. Compared with
Luther’s Bible, almost everything else is merely
‘literature’—something which has not grown in Germany,
and therefore has not taken and does not take root in
German hearts, as the Bible has done.
248. There are two kinds of geniuses: one which above
all engenders and seeks to engender, and another which
willingly lets itself be fructified and brings forth. And
similarly, among the gifted nations, there are those on
whom the woman’s problem of pregnancy has devolved,
and the secret task of forming, maturing, and perfecting—
the Greeks, for instance, were a nation of this kind, and so
are the French; and others which have to fructify and
become the cause of new modes of life—like the Jews, the
Romans, and, in all modesty be it asked: like the
Germans?— nations tortured and enraptured by unknown
fevers and irresistibly forced out of themselves, amorous
and longing for foreign races (for such as ‘let themselves be
fructified’), and withal imperious, like everything
conscious of being full of generative force, and
consequently empowered ‘by the grace of God.’ These
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two kinds of geniuses seek each other like man and
woman; but they also misunderstand each other—like man
and woman.
249. Every nation has its own ‘Tartuffery,’ and calls
that its virtue.—One does not know—cannot know, the
best that is in one.
250. What Europe owes to the Jews?—Many things,
good and bad, and above all one thing of the nature both
of the best and the worst: the grand style in morality, the
fearfulness and majesty of infinite demands, of infinite
significations, the whole Romanticism and sublimity of
moral questionableness—and consequently just the most
