moralistic work requisite thereto, which, as we have said,
France has not grudged: those who call the Germans
‘naive’ on that account give them commendation for a
defect. (As the opposite of the German inexperience and
innocence IN VOLUPTATE PSYCHOLOGICA, which
is not too remotely associated with the tediousness of
German intercourse,—and as the most successful
expression of genuine French curiosity and inventive
talent in this domain of delicate thrills, Henri Beyle may
be noted; that remarkable anticipatory and forerunning
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man, who, with a Napoleonic TEMPO, traversed HIS
Europe, in fact, several centuries of the European soul, as a
surveyor and discoverer thereof:—it has required two
generations to OVERTAKE him one way or other, to
divine long afterwards some of the riddles that perplexed
and enraptured him—this strange Epicurean and man of
interrogation, the last great psychologist of France).—
There is yet a THIRD claim to superiority: in the French
character there is a successful half-way synthesis of the
North and South, which makes them comprehend many
things, and enjoins upon them other things, which an
Englishman can never comprehend. Their temperament,
turned alternately to and from the South, in which from
time to time the Provencal and Ligurian blood froths over,
preserves them from the dreadful, northern grey-in-grey,
from sunless conceptual-spectrism and from poverty of
blood—our GERMAN infirmity of taste, for the excessive
prevalence of which at the present moment, blood and
iron, that is to say ‘high politics,’ has with great resolution
been prescribed (according to a dangerous healing art,
which bids me wait and wait, but not yet hope).—There
is also still in France a pre-understanding and ready
welcome for those rarer and rarely gratified men, who are
too comprehensive to find satisfaction in any kind of
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fatherlandism, and know how to love the South when in
the North and the North when in the South—the born
Midlanders, the ‘good Europeans.’ For them BIZET has
made music, this latest genius, who has seen a new beauty
and seduction,—who has discovered a piece of the
SOUTH IN MUSIC.
255. I hold that many precautions should be taken
against German music. Suppose a person loves the South
as I love it—as a great school of recovery for the most
spiritual and the most sensuous ills, as a boundless solar
profusion and effulgence which o’erspreads a sovereign
existence believing in itself—well, such a person will learn
to be somewhat on his guard against German music,
because, in injuring his taste anew, it will also injure his
health anew. Such a Southerner, a Southerner not by
origin but by BELIEF, if he should dream of the future of
music, must also dream of it being freed from the
influence of the North; and must have in his ears the
prelude to a deeper, mightier, and perhaps more perverse
and mysterious music, a super-German music, which does
not fade, pale, and die away, as all German music does, at
the sight of the blue, wanton sea and the Mediterranean
clearness of sky—a super-European music, which holds its
own even in presence of the brown sunsets of the desert,
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whose soul is akin to the palm-tree, and can be at home
and can roam with big, beautiful, lonely beasts of prey … I
could imagine a music of which the rarest charm would be
that it knew nothing more of good and evil; only that here
and there perhaps some sailor’s home-sickness, some
golden shadows and tender weaknesses might sweep
lightly over it; an art which, from the far distance, would
see the colours of a sinking and almost incomprehensible
MORAL world fleeing towards it, and would be
hospitable enough and profound enough to receive such
belated fugitives.
256. Owing to the morbid estrangement which the
nationality-craze has induced and still induces among the
nations of Europe, owing also to the short-sighted and
hasty-handed politicians, who with the help of this craze,
are at present in power, and do not suspect to what extent
the disintegrating policy they pursue must necessarily be
only an interlude policy—owing to all this and much else
that is altogether unmentionable at present, the most
unmistakable signs that EUROPE WISHES TO BE
ONE, are now overlooked, or arbitrarily and falsely
misinterpreted. With all the more profound and large-
minded men of this century, the real general tendency of
the mysterious labour of their souls was to prepare the way
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for that new SYNTHESIS, and tentatively to anticipate
the European of the future; only in their simulations, or in
their weaker moments, in old age perhaps, did they belong
to the ‘fatherlands’—they only rested from themselves
when they became ‘patriots.’ I think of such men as
Napoleon, Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, Heinrich Heine,
Schopenhauer: it must not be taken amiss if I also count
Richard Wagner among them, about whom one must not
let oneself be deceived by his own misunderstandings
(geniuses like him have seldom the right to understand
themselves), still less, of course, by the unseemly noise
with which he is now resisted and opposed in France: the
fact remains, nevertheless, that Richard Wagner and the
LATER FRENCH ROMANTICISM of the forties, are
most closely and intimately related to one another. They
are akin, fundamentally akin, in all the heights and depths
of their requirements; it is Europe, the ONE Europe,
whose soul presses urgently and longingly, outwards and
upwards, in their multifarious and boisterous art—
whither? into a new light? towards a new sun? But who
would attempt to express accurately what all these masters
of new modes of speech could not express distinctly? It is
certain that the same storm and stress tormented them,
that they SOUGHT in the same manner, these last great
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seekers! All of them steeped in literature to their eyes and
ears—the first artists of universal literary culture—for the
most part even themselves writers, poets, intermediaries
and blenders of the arts and the senses (Wagner, as
musician is reckoned among painters, as poet among
musicians, as artist generally among actors); all of them
fanatics for EXPRESSION ‘at any cost’—I specially
mention Delacroix, the nearest related to Wagner; all of
them great discoverers in the realm of the sublime, also of
the loathsome and dreadful, still greater discoverers in
effect, in display, in the art of the show-shop; all of them
talented far beyond their genius, out and out VIRTUOSI,
with mysterious accesses to all that seduces, allures,
constrains, and upsets; born enemies of logic and of the
straight line, hankering after the strange, the exotic, the
monstrous, the crooked, and the self-contradictory; as
men, Tantaluses of the will, plebeian parvenus, who knew
themselves to be incapable of a noble TEMPO or of a
LENTO in life and action— think of Balzac, for
instance,—unrestrained workers, almost destroying
themselves by work; antinomians and rebels in manners,
ambitious and insatiable, without equilibrium and
enjoyment; all of them finally shattering and sinking down
at the Christian cross (and with right and reason, for who
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of them would have been sufficiently profound and
sufficiently original for an ANTI- CHRISTIAN
philosophy?);—on the whole, a boldly daring, splendidly
overbearing, high-flying, and aloft-up-dragging class of
higher men, who had first to teach their century-and it is
the century of the MASSES—the conception ‘higher
man.’ … Let the German friends of Richard Wagner
advise together as to whether there is anything purely
German in the Wagnerian art, or whether its distinction
does not consist precisely in coming from SUPER-
GERMAN sources and impulses: in which connection it
may not be underrated how indispensable Paris was to the
development of his type, which the strength of his
instincts made him long to visit at the most decisive
time—and how the whole style of his proceedings, of his
self-apostolate, could only perfect itself in sight of the
French socialistic original. On a more subtle comparison it
will perhaps be found, to the honour of Richard Wagner’s
German nature, that he has acted in everything with more
strength, daring, severity, and elevation than a nineteenth-
century Frenchman could have done—owing to the
circumstance that we Germans are as yet nearer to
barbarism than the French;— perhaps even the most
remarkable creation of Richard Wagner is not only at
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present, but for ever inaccessible, incomprehensible, and
inimitable to the whole latter-day Latin race: the figure of
Siegfried, that VERY FREE man, who is probably far too
free, too hard, too cheerful, too healthy, too ANTI-
CATHOLIC for the taste of old and mellow civilized
nations. He may even have been a sin against
Romanticism, this anti-Latin Siegfried: well, Wagner
atoned amply for this sin in his old sad days, when—
anticipating a taste which has meanwhile passed into
politics—he began, with the religious vehemence peculiar
to him, to preach, at least, THE WAY TO ROME, if not
to walk therein.—That these last words may not be
misunderstood, I will call to my aid a few powerful
rhymes, which will even betray to less delicate ears what I
mean —what I mean COUNTER TO the ‘last Wagner’
and his Parsifal music:—
—Is this our mode?—From German heart came this
vexed ululating? From German body, this self-lacerating?
Is ours this priestly hand-dilation, This incense-fuming
exaltation? Is ours this faltering, falling, shambling, This
quite uncertain ding-dong- dangling? This sly nun-ogling,
Ave-hour-bell ringing, This wholly false enraptured
heaven-o’erspringing?—Is this our mode?—Think well!—
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ye still wait for admission—For what ye hear is ROME—
ROME’S FAITH BY INTUITION!
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CHAPTER IX: WHAT IS
NOBLE?
257. EVERY elevation of the type ‘man,’ has hitherto
been the work of an aristocratic society and so it will
always be—a society believing in a long scale of gradations
of rank and differences of worth among human beings,
and requiring slavery in some form or other. Without the
PATHOS OF DISTANCE, such as grows out of the
incarnated difference of classes, out of the constant out-
looking and down-looking of the ruling caste on
subordinates and instruments, and out of their equally
constant practice of obeying and commanding, of keeping
down and keeping at a distance—that other more
mysterious pathos could never have arisen, the longing for
an ever new widening of distance within the soul itself,
the formation of ever higher, rarer, further, more
extended, more comprehensive states, in short, just the
elevation of the type ‘man,’ the continued ‘self-
surmounting of man,’ to use a moral formula in a
supermoral sense. To be sure, one must not resign oneself
to any humanitarian illusions about the history of the
origin of an aristocratic society (that is to say, of the
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preliminary condition for the elevation of the type ‘man’):
the truth is hard. Let us acknowledge unprejudicedly how
every higher civilization hitherto has ORIGINATED!
Men with a still natural nature, barbarians in every terrible
sense of the word, men of prey, still in possession of
unbroken strength of will and desire for power, threw
themselves upon weaker, more moral, more peaceful races
(perhaps trading or cattle-rearing communities), or upon
old mellow civilizations in which the final vital force was
flickering out in brilliant fireworks of wit and depravity.
At the commencement, the noble caste was always the
barbarian caste: their superiority did not consist first of all
in their physical, but in their psychical power—they were
more COMPLETE men (which at every point also
implies the same as ‘more complete beasts’).
258. Corruption—as the indication that anarchy
threatens to break out among the instincts, and that the
foundation of the emotions, called ‘life,’ is convulsed—is
something radically different according to the organization
in which it manifests itself. When, for instance, an
aristocracy like that of France at the beginning of the
Revolution, flung away its privileges with sublime disgust
and sacrificed itself to an excess of its moral sentiments, it
was corruption:—it was really only the closing act of the
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corruption which had existed for centuries, by virtue of
which that aristocracy had abdicated step by step its lordly
prerogatives and lowered itself to a FUNCTION of
royalty (in the end even to its decoration and parade-
dress). The essential thing, however, in a good and healthy
aristocracy is that it should not regard itself as a function
either of the kingship or the commonwealth, but as the
SIGNIFICANCE and highest justification thereof—that it
should therefore accept with a good conscience the
sacrifice of a legion of individuals, who, FOR ITS SAKE,
must be suppressed and reduced to imperfect men, to
slaves and instruments. Its fundamental belief must be
precisely that society is NOT allowed to exist for its own
sake, but only as a foundation and scaffolding, by means of
which a select class of beings may be able to elevate
themselves to their higher duties, and in general to a
higher EXISTENCE: like those sun- seeking climbing
plants in Java—they are called Sipo Matador,— which
encircle an oak so long and so often with their arms, until
at last, high above it, but supported by it, they can unfold
