Part 6

_Voltaire--Rousseau._--A state of nature is terrible; man is a beast of prey: our civilisation is an extraordinary _triumph_ over this beast of prey in nature--this was _Voltaires_ conclusion. He was conscious of the mildness, the refinements, the intellectual joys of the civilised state; he despised obtuseness, even in the form of virtue, and the lack of delicacy even in ascetics and monks.

The _moral depravity_ of man seemed to pre-occupy _Rousseau_; the words "unjust," "cruel," are the best possible for the purpose of exciting the instincts of the oppressed, who otherwise find themselves under the ban of the _vetitum_ and of disgrace; _so that their conscience is opposed to their indulging any insurrectional desires._ These emancipators seek one thing above all: to give their party the great accents and attitudes of _higher Nature_.

100.

_Rousseau_; the rule founded on sentiment; Nature as the source of justice; man perfects himself in proportion as he approaches _Nature_ (according to Voltaire, in proportion _as he leaves Nature behind_). The very same periods seem to the one to demonstrate the progress of _humanity_ and, to the other, the increase of injustice and inequality.

Voltaire, who still understood _umanità_ in the sense of the Renaissance, as also _virtù_ (as "higher culture"), fights for the cause of the "_honnêtes gens_" "_la bonne compagnie_" taste, science, arts, and even for the cause of progress and civilisation.

_The flare-up occurred towards 1760_: On the one hand the citizen of Geneva, on the other _le seigneur de Ferney._ It is only from that moment and henceforward that Voltaire was the man of his age, the philosopher, the representative of Toleration and of Disbelief (theretofore he had been merely _un bel esprit_). His envy and hatred of Rousseau's success forced him upwards.

"_Pour 'la canaille' un dieu rémunérateur et vengeur_"--Voltaire.

The criticism of both standpoints in regard to the _value of civilisation._ To Voltaire nothing seems finer than the _social invention_: there is no higher goal than to uphold and perfect it. _L'honnêteté_ consists precisely in respecting social usage; virtue in a certain obedience towards various necessary "prejudices" which favour the maintenance of society. _Missionary of Culture,_ aristocrat, representative of the triumphant and ruling classes and their values. But Rousseau remained a _plebeian,_ even as _hommes de lettres,_ this was _preposterous_; his shameless contempt for everything that was not himself.

The _morbid feature_ in Rousseau is the one which happens to have been most admired and _imitated._ (Lord Byron resembled him somewhat, he too screwed himself up to sublime attitudes and to revengeful rage--a sign of vulgarity; later on, when Venice restored his equilibrium, he understood what _alleviates most_ and does the _most good ... l'insouciance_.)

In spite of his antecedents, Rousseau is proud of himself; but he is incensed if he is reminded of his origin....

In Rousseau there was undoubtedly some brain trouble; in Voltaire--rare health and lightsomeness. _The revengefulness of the sick_; his periods of insanity as also those of his contempt of man, and of his mistrust.

Rousseau's defence of _Providence_ (against Voltaire's Pessimism): he _had need of_ God in order to be able to curse society and civilisation; everything must be good _per se,_ because God had created it; man _alone has corrupted man._ The "good man" as a man of Nature was pure fantasy; but with the dogma of God's authorship he became something probable and even not devoid of foundation.

_Romanticism_ à la _Rousseau_: passion ("the sovereign right of passion"); "naturalness"; the fascination of madness (foolishness reckoned as greatness); the senseless vanity of the weak; the revengefulness of the masses elevated to the position of _justice_ ("in politics, for one hundred years, the leader has always been this invalid").

101.

_Kant_: makes the scepticism of Englishmen, in regard to the theory of knowledge, _possible_ for Germans.

(1) By enlisting in its cause the interest of the German's religious and moral needs: just as the new academicians used scepticism for the same reasons, as a preparation for Platonism (_vide_ Augustine); just as Pascal even used _moral_ scepticism in order to provoke (to justify) the need of belief;

(2) By complicating and entangling it with scholastic flourishes in view of making it more acceptable to the German's scientific taste in form (for Locke and Hume, alone, were too illuminating, too clear--that is to say, judged according to the German valuing instinct, "too superficial").

_Kant_: a poor psychologist and mediocre judge of human nature, made hopeless mistakes in regard to great historical values (the French Revolution); a moral fanatic _à la_ Rousseau; with a subterranean current of Christian values; a thorough dogmatist, but bored to extinction by this tendency, to the extent of wishing to tyrannise over it, but quickly tired, even of 'scepticism; and not yet affected by any cosmopolitan thought or antique beauty ... a _dawdler_ and a _go-between,_ not at all original (like _Leibnitz,_ something between mechanism and spiritualism; like _Goethe,_ something between the taste of the eighteenth century and that of the "historical sense" [which _is_ essentially a sense of exoticism]; like _German music,_ between French and Italian music; like Charles the Great, who mediated and built bridges between the Roman Empire and Nationalism--a dawdler _par excellence_).

102.

In what respect have the _Christian_ centuries with their Pessimism been _stronger_ centuries than the eighteenth--and how do they correspond with the _tragic_ age of the Greeks?

The nineteenth century _versus_ the eighteenth. How was it an heir?--how was it a step backwards from the latter? (more lacking in "spirit" and in taste)--how did it show an advance on the latter? (more gloomy, more realistic, _stronger_).

103.

How can we _explain_ the fact that we feel something in common with the _Campagna romana?_ And the high mountain chain?

Chateaubriand in a letter to M. de Fontanes in 1803 writes his first impression of the _Campagna romana._

The President de Brosses says of the _Campagna romana_: "Il fallait que Romulus fût ivre quand il songea à bâtir une ville dans un terrain aussi laid."

Even Delacroix would have nothing to do with Rome, it frightened him. He loved Venice, just as Shakespeare, Byron, and Georges Sand did. Théophile Gautier's and Richard Wagner's dislike of Rome must not be forgotten.

Lamartine has the language for Sorrento and Posilippo.

Victor Hugo raves about Spain, "parce que aucune autre nation n'a moins emprunté à l'antiquité, parce qu'elle n'a subi aucune influence classique."

104.

The _two great attempts_ that were made to overcome the eighteenth century:

_Napoleon,_ in that he called man, the soldier, and the great struggle for power, to life again, and conceived Europe as a political power.

_Goethe,_ in that he imagined a European culture which would consist of the whole heritage of what humanity had _attained to_ up to his time.

German culture in this century inspires mistrust--the music of the period lacks that complete element which liberates and binds as well, to wit--Goethe.

The pre-eminence of _music_ in the romanticists of 1830 and 1840. Delacroix. Ingres--a passionate musician (admired Gluck, Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart), said to his pupils in Rome: "Si je pouvais vous rendre tous musiciens, vous y gagneriez comme peintres"--likewise Horace Vernet, who was particularly fond of Don Juan (as Mendelssohn assures us, 1831); Stendhal, too, who says of himself: "Combien de lieues ne ferais-je pas à pied, et à combien de jours de prison ne me soumetterais-je pas pour entendre _Don Juan ou le Matrimonio segreto_; et je ne sais pour quelle autre chose je ferais cet effort." He was then fifty-six years old.

The borrowed forms, for instance: Brahms as a typical "Epigone," likewise Mendelssohn's cultured Protestantism (a former "soul" is turned into poetry posthumously ...)

--the moral and poetical substitutions in Wagner, who used _one_ art as a stop-gap to make up for what another lacked.

--the "historical sense," inspiration derived from poems, sagas.

--that characteristic transformation of which G. Flaubert is the most striking example among Frenchmen, and Richard Wagner the most striking example among Germans, shows how the romantic belief in love and the future changes into a longing for nonentity in 1830-50.

106.

How is it that German music reaches its culminating point in the age of German romanticism? How is it that German music lacks Goethe? On the other hand, how much Schiller, or more exactly, how much "Thekla"[5] is there not in Beethoven!

Schumann has Eichendorff, Uhland, Heine, Hoffman, Tieck, in him. Richard Wagner has Freischütz, Hoffmann, Grimm, the romantic Saga, the mystic Catholicism of instinct, symbolism, "the free-spiritedness of passion" (Rousseau's intention). The _Flying Dutchman_ savours of France, where _le ténébreux_ (1830) was the type of the seducer.

_The cult of music,_ the revolutionary romanticism of form. Wagner _synthesises_ German and French romanticism.

[Footnote 5: Thekla is the sentimental heroine in Schiller's _Wallenstein._--TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.]

107.

From the point of view only of his value to Germany and to German culture, Richard Wagner is still a great problem, perhaps a German misfortune: in any case, however, a fatality. But what does it matter? Is he not very much more than a German event? It also seems to me that to no country on earth is he less related than to Germany; nothing was prepared there for his advent; his whole type is simply strange amongst Germans; there he stands in their midst, wonderful, misunderstood, incomprehensible. But people carefully avoid acknowledging this: they are too kind, too square-headed--too German for that. "Credo quia absurdus est": thus did the German spirit wish it to be, in this case too--hence it is content meanwhile to believe everything Richard Wagner wanted to have believed about himself. In all ages the spirit of Germany has been deficient in subtlety and divining powers concerning psychological matters. Now that it happens to be under the high pressure of patriotic nonsense and self-adoration, it is visibly growing thicker and coarser: how could it therefore be equal to the problem of Wagner!

108.

The Germans _are_ not yet anything, but they are _becoming_ something; that is why they have not yet any culture;--that is why they cannot yet have any culture!--They are not yet anything: that means they are all kinds of things. They are _becoming_ something: that means that they will one day cease from being all kinds of things. The latter is at bottom only a wish, scarcely a hope yet. Fortunately it is a wish with which one can live, a question of will, of work, of discipline, a question of training, as also of resentment, of longing, of privation, of discomfort,--yea, even of bitterness,--in short, we Germans _will_ get something out of ourselves, something that has not yet been wanted of us--we want something _more_!

That this "German, as he is not as yet"--has a right to something better than the present German "culture"; that all who wish to become something better, must wax angry when they perceive a sort of contentment, an impudent "setting-oneself-at-ease," or "a process of self-censing," in this quarter: that is my second principle, in regard to which my opinions have not yet changed.

_(c)_ SIGNS OF INCREASING STRENGTH.

109.

First Principle: everything that characterises modern men savours of decay: but side by side with the prevailing sickness there are signs of a strength and powerfulness of soul which are still untried. _The same causes which tend to promote the belittling of men,_ also force _the stronger and rarer individuals upwards to greatness._

110.

_General survey: the ambiguous_ character of our _modern world_--precisely the same symptoms might at the same time be indicative of either _decline_ or _strength._ And the signs of strength and of emancipation dearly bought, might in view of traditional (or _hereditary_) appreciations concerned with the feelings, be _misunderstood_ as indications of weakness. In short, _feeling,_ as a _means of fixing valuations,_ is not _on a level with the times._

_Generalised_: Every valuation is always _backward_; it is merely the expression of the conditions which favoured survival and growth in a much earlier age: it struggles against new conditions of existence out of which it did not arise, and which it therefore necessarily misunderstands: it hinders, and excites suspicion against, all that is new.

111.

_The problem of the nineteenth century._--To discover whether its strong and weak side belong to each other. Whether they have been cut from one and the same piece. Whether the variety of its ideals and their contradictions are conditioned by a higher purpose: whether they are something higher.--For it might be _the prerequisite of greatness,_ that growth should take place amid such violent tension. Dissatisfaction, Nihilism, _might be a good sign._

112.

_General survey._--As a matter of fact, all abundant growth involves a concomitant process of _crumbling to bits_ and _decay_: suffering and the symptoms of decline _belong_ to ages of enormous progress; every fruitful and powerful movement of mankind has always _brought about_ a concurrent Nihilistic movement. Under certain circumstances, the appearance of _the extremest_ form of Pessimism and actual _Nihilism_ might be the sign of a process of incisive and most essential growth, and of mankind's transit into completely new conditions of existence. _This is what I have understood._

113.

_A._

Starting out with a thoroughly courageous _appreciation_ of our men of to-day:--we must not allow ourselves to be deceived by appearance: this mankind is much less effective, but it gives quite different pledges of _lasting strength,_ its tempo is slower, but the rhythm itself is richer. _Healthiness_ is increasing, the real conditions of a healthy body are on the point of being known, and will gradually be created, "asceticism" is regarded with irony. The fear of extremes, a certain confidence in the "right way," no raving: a periodical self-habituation to narrower values (such as "mother-land," "science," etc.).

This whole picture, however, would still be _ambiguous_: it might be a movement either of _increase_ or _decline_ in Life.

_B._

The belief in "progress"--in lower spheres of intelligence, appears as increasing life: but this is self-deception;

in higher spheres of intelligence it is a sign of _declining_ life.

Description of the symptoms.

The unity of the aspect: uncertainty in regard to the standard of valuation.

Fear of a general "in vain."

Nihilism.

114.

As a matter of fact, we are no longer so urgently in need of an antidote against the first Nihilism: Life is no longer so uncertain, accidental, and senseless in modern Europe. All such tremendous _exaggeration_ of the value of men, of the value of evil, etc., are not so necessary now; we can endure a considerable diminution of this value, we may grant a great deal of nonsense and accident: the _power_ man has acquired now allows of a _lowering_ of the means of discipline, of which the strongest was the moral interpretation of the universe. The hypothesis "God" is much too extreme.

115.

If anything shows that our _humanisation_ is a genuine sign of _progress,_ it is the fact that we no longer require excessive contraries, that we no longer require contraries at all....

We may love the senses; for we have spiritualised them in every way and made them artistic;

We have a right to all things which hitherto have been most _calumniated._

116.

_The reversal of the order of rank._--Those pious counterfeiters--the priests--are becoming Chandala in our midst:--they occupy the position of the charlatan, of the quack, of the counterfeiter, of the sorcerer: we regard them as corrupters of the will, as the great slanderers and vindictive enemies of Life, and as the _rebels_ among the bungled and the botched. We have made our middle class out of our servant-caste--the Sudra--that is to say, our people or the body which wields the political power.

On the other hand, the Chandala of former times is paramount: the _blasphemers,_ the _immoralists,_ the independents of all kinds, the artists, the Jews, the minstrels--and, at bottom, all _disreputable_ classes are in the van.

We have elevated ourselves to _honourable_ thoughts,--even more, we determine what honour is on earth,--"nobility." ... All of us to-day are _advocates of life._--We _Immoralists_ are to-day the _strongest_ power: the other great powers are in need of us ... we re-create the world in our own image.

We have transferred the label "Chandala" to the _priests,_ the _backworldsmen,_ and to the deformed _Christian society_ which has become associated with these people, together with creatures of like origin, the pessimists, Nihilists, romanticists of pity, criminals, and men of vicious habits--the whole sphere in which the idea of "God" is that of _Saviour...._

We are proud of being no longer obliged to be liars, slanderers, and detractors of Life....

117.

_The advance_ of the nineteenth century upon the eighteenth (at bottom we _good Europeans_ are carrying on a war against the eighteenth century):

(1) "The return to Nature" is getting to be understood, ever more definitely, in a way which is quite the reverse of that in which Rousseau used the phrase--_away from idylls and operas!_

(2) Ever more decided, more anti-idealistic, more objective, more fearless, more industrious, more temperate, more suspicious of sudden changes, _anti-revolutionary_;

(3) The question of _bodily health_ is being pressed ever more decidedly in front of the health of "the soul": the latter is regarded as a condition brought about by the former, and bodily health is believed to be, at least, the prerequisite to spiritual health.

118.

If anything at all has been achieved, it is a more innocent attitude towards the senses, a happier, more favourable demeanour in regard to sensuality, resembling rather the position taken up by Goethe; a prouder feeling has also been developed in knowledge, and the "reine Thor"[6] meets with little faith.

[Footnote 6: This is a reference to Wagner's _Parsifal._ The character as is well known, is written to represent a son of heart's affliction, and a child of wisdom--humble, guileless, loving, pure, and a fool.--TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.]

119.

We "_objective people._"--It is not "pity" that opens up the way for _us_ to all that is most remote and most strange in life and culture; but our accessibility and ingenuousness, which precisely does not "pity," but rather takes pleasure in hundreds of things which formerly caused pain (which in former days either outraged or moved us, or in the presence of which we were either hostile or indifferent). Pain in all its various phases is now interesting to us: on that account we are certainly _not_ the more pitiful, even though the sight of pain may shake us to our foundations and move us to tears: and we are absolutely not inclined to be more helpful in view thereof.

In this _deliberate_ desire to look on at all pain and error, we have grown stronger and more powerful than in the eighteenth century; it is a proof of our increase of strength (we have _drawn closer_ to the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries). But it is a profound mistake to regard our "romanticism" as a proof of our "beautified souls." We want _stronger_ sensations than all _coarser_ ages and classes have wanted. (This fact must not be confounded with the needs of neurotics and decadents; in their case, of course, there is a craving for pepper --even for cruelty.)

We are all seeking conditions _which are emancipated from_ the bourgeois, and to a greater degree from the priestly, notion of morality (every book which savours at all of priestdom and theology gives us the impression of pitiful _niaiserie_ and mental indigence). "Good company," in fact, finds everything insipid which is not forbidden and considered compromising in bourgeois circles; and the case is the same with books, music, politics, and opinions on women.

120.

_The simplification of man in the nineteenth century_ (The eighteenth century was that of elegance, subtlety, and generous feeling).--Not "return to nature"; for no natural humanity has ever existed yet. Scholastic, unnatural, and antinatural values are the rule and the beginning; man only reaches Nature after a long struggle--he never turns his "back" to her.... To be natural means, to dare to be as immoral as Nature is.

We are coarser, more direct, richer in irony towards generous feelings, even when we are beneath them.

Our _haute volée,_ the society consisting of our rich and leisured men, is more natural: people hunt each other, the love of the sexes is a kind of sport in which marriage is both a charm and an obstacle; people entertain each other and live for the sake of pleasure; bodily advantages stand in the first rank, and curiosity and daring are the rule.

Our attitude towards _knowledge_ is more natural; we are innocent in our absolute spiritual debauchery, we hate pathetic and hieratic manners, we delight in that which is most strictly prohibited, we should scarcely recognise any interest in knowledge if we were bored in acquiring it.

Our attitude to _morality_ is also more natural. Principles have become a laughing-stock; no one dares to speak of his "duty," unless in irony. But a helpful, benevolent disposition is highly valued. (Morality is located in _instinct_ and the rest is despised. Besides this there are few points of honour.)

Our attitude to _politics_ is more natural: we see problems of power, of the quantum of power, against another quantum. We do not believe in a right that does not proceed from a power which is able to uphold it. We regard all rights as conquests.

Our valuation of _great men and things_ is more natural: we regard passion as a privilege; we can conceive of nothing great which does not involve a great crime; all greatness is associated in our minds with a certain standing-beyond-the-pale in morality.

Our attitude to _Nature_ is more natural: we no longer love her for her "innocence," her "reason," her "beauty," we have made her beautifully devilish and "foolish." But instead of despising her on that account, since then we have felt more closely related to her and more familiar in her presence. She does _not_ aspire to virtue: we therefore respect her.

Our attitude towards _Art_ is more natural: we do not exact beautiful, empty lies, etc., from her; brutal positivism reigns supreme, and it ascertains things with perfect calm.

In short: there are signs showing that the European of the nineteenth century is less ashamed of his instincts; he has gone a long way towards acknowledging his unconditional naturalness and immorality, _without bitterness_: on the contrary, he is strong enough to endure this point of view alone.

To some ears this will sound as though _corruption_ had made strides: and certain it is that man has not drawn nearer to the "Nature" which Rousseau speaks about, but has gone one step farther in the civilisation before which Rousseau _stood in horror._ We have grown _stronger,_ we have drawn nearer to the seventeenth century, more particularly to the taste which reigned towards its close (Dancourt, Le Sage, Renard).

121.