Basic writings of Nietzsche - By Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche & Walter Arnold Kaufmann Page 0,274

“serves recreation;” that it “exhilarates;” that it “gives pleasure.” Let us never give pleasure! We are lost as soon as art is again thought of hedonistically.—That is bad eighteenth century.—Nothing on the other hand should be more advisable than a dose of—hypocrisy, sit venia verbo.6 That lends dignity.— And let us choose the hour when it is decent to look black, to heave sighs publicly, to heave Christian sighs, to make an exhibition of great Christian pity. “Man is corrupt: who redeems him? what redeems him?”—Let us not answer. Let us be cautious. Let us resist our ambition which would found religions. But nobody may doubt that we redeem him, that our music alone saves.—(Wagner’s essay, Religion and Art.)

7

Enough! Enough! My cheerful strokes, I fear, may have revealed sinister reality all too clearly—the picture of a decay of art, a decay of the artists as well. The latter, the decay of a character, could perhaps find preliminary expression in this formula: the musician now becomes an actor, his art develops more and more as a talent to lie. I shall have an opportunity (in a chapter of my main work, entitled “Toward a Physiology of Art”1) to show in more detail how this over-all change of art into histrionics is no less an expression of physiological degeneration (more precisely, a form of hystericism) than every single corruption and infirmity of the art inaugurated by Wagner: for example, the visual restlessness which requires one continually to change one’s position. One doesn’t understand a thing about Wagner as long as one finds in him merely an arbitrary play of nature, a whim, an accident. He was no “fragmentary,” “hapless,” or “contradictory” genius, as people have said. Wagner was something perfect, a typical decadent in whom there is no trace of “free will” and in whom every feature is necessary. If anything in Wagner is interesting it is the logic with which a physiological defect makes move upon move and takes step upon step as practice and procedure, as innovation in principles, as a crisis in taste.

For the present I merely dwell on the question of style.—What is the sign of every literary decadence? That life no longer dwells in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, the page gains life at the expense of the whole—the whole is no longer a whole.2 But this is the simile of every style of decadence: every time, the anarchy of atoms, disgregation of the will, “freedom of the individual,” to use moral terms—expanded into a political theory, “equal rights for all.” Life, equal vitality, the vibration and exuberance of life pushed back into the smallest forms; the rest, poor in life. Everywhere paralysis, arduousness, torpidity or hostility and chaos: both more and more obvious the higher one ascends in forms of organization. The whole no longer lives at all: it is composite, calculated, artificial, and artifact.—

Wagner begins from a hallucination—not of sounds but of gestures. Then he seeks the sign language of sounds for them. If one would admire him, one should watch him at work at this point: how he separates, how he gains small units, how he animates these, severs them, and makes them visible. But this exhausts his strength: the rest is no good. How wretched, how embarrassed, how amateurish is his manner of “development,” his attempt to at least interlard what has not grown out of each other. His manners recall those of the frères de Goncourt,3 who are quite generally pertinent to Wagner’s style: one feels a kind of compassion for so much distress. That Wagner disguised as a principle his incapacity for giving organic form, that he establishes a “dramatic style” where we merely establish his incapacity for any style whatever, this is in line with a bold habit that accompanied Wagner through his whole life: he posits a principle where he lacks a capacity (—very different in this respect, incidentally, from the old Kant who preferred another boldness: wherever he lacked a principle he posited a special human capacity).4

Once more: Wagner is admirable and gracious only in the invention of what is smallest, in spinning out the details. Here one is entirely justified in proclaiming him a master of the first rank, as our greatest miniaturist in music who crowds into the smallest space an infinity of sense and sweetness. His wealth of colors, of half shadows, of the secrecies of dying