August 3, 2025 • 61 mins
https://www.solgoodmedia.com Listen to hundreds of audiobooks, thousands of short stories, and ambient sounds all ad free! "Daily Deep Thought" offers a moment of philosophical reflection each day, diving deep into a single thought or idea. It's a mental workout designed to stretch your cognitive abilities and provide a deeper understanding of the philosophical underpinnings of our world.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter eight, Peoples and Countries two hundred forty. I heard
once again for the first time Richard Wagner's overture to
the Master Singer. It is a piece of magnificent, gorgeous,
heavy latter day art, which has the pride to presuppose
(00:23):
two centuries of music as still living, in order that
it may be understood. It is an honor to Germans
that such a pride did not miscalculate. What flavors and forces,
what seasons and climes do we not find mingled in it?
It impresses us at one time as ancient, at another
(00:44):
time as foreign, bitter, and too modern. It is as
arbitrary as it is pompously traditional. It is not infrequently roguish,
still oftener, rough and coarse. It has fire and courage,
and at the same time the loose, dun colored skin
of fruits which ripen too late. It flows broad and full,
(01:09):
and suddenly there is a moment of inexplicable hesitation, like
a gap that opens between cause and effect, an oppression
that makes us dream, almost a nightmare. But already it
broadens and widens anew the old stream of delight, the
most manifold delight of old and new happiness, including especially
(01:33):
the joy of the artist in himself, which he refuses
to conceal, his astonished, happy cognizance of his mastery of
the expedients here employed, the new, newly acquired, imperfectly tested
expedients of art, which he apparently betrays to us. All
(01:54):
in all, however, no beauty, no south, nothing of the
delicate southern clearness of the sky, nothing of grace, no dance,
hardly a will to logic, a certain clumsiness, even which
is also emphasized, as though the artist wishes to say
to us it is part of my intention. A cumbersome drapery,
(02:19):
something arbitrarily barbaric and ceremonious, a flaring of learned, in
venerable conceits and witticisms. Something German in the best and
worst sense of the word, something in the German style, manifold,
formless and inexhaustible, A certain German potency and super plenitude
(02:41):
of soul which is not afraid to hide itself under
the raffigements of decadence, which perhaps feels itself more at ease.
There a real, genuine token of the German soul, which
is at the same time young and aged to ripe,
and yet still too rich in futurity. This kind of
(03:06):
music expresses best what I think of the Germans. They
belong to the day before yesterday, and the day after
to morrow. They have, as yet know, to day two
hundred forty one. We good Europeans, we also have hours
(03:27):
when we allow ourselves of warm hearted patriotism a plunge
and relapse into old loves and narrow views. I have
just given an example of it, hours of national excitement,
of patriotic anguish, and all other sorts of old fashioned
floods of sentiment. Duller spirits may perhaps only get done
(03:49):
with what confines its operations in us to ours, and
plays itself out in hours in a considerable time, some
in half a year, others in half a lifetime, according
to the speed and strength with which they digest and
change their material. Indeed, I could think of sluggish, hesitating races, which,
(04:11):
even in our rapidly moving Europe would require half a century.
Ere they could surmount such atavistic attacks of patriotism and
soil attachment and return once more to reason, that is
to say, to good Europeanism. And while digressing on this possibility,
I happen to become an ear witness of a conversation
(04:32):
between two old patriots. They were evidently both hard of hearing,
and consequently spoke all the louder. He has as much
and knows as much philosophy as a peasant or a
coarse student, said the one. He is still innocent. But
what does that matter? Nowadays? It is the age of
(04:54):
the masses. They lie on their belly before everything that
is massive, and they also in politics the statesman who
rears up for them a new tower of babel, some
monstrosity of empire and power they call great. What does
it matter that we more prudent and conservative ones do
not meanwhile give up the old belief that it is
(05:17):
only the great thought that gives greatness to an action
or affair. Supposing a statesman were to bring his people
into the position of being obliged henceforth to practice high politics,
for which they were by nature badly endowed and prepared,
so that they would have to sacrifice their old and
reliable virtues out of love, to a new and doubtful mediocrity.
(05:41):
Supposing a statesman were to condemn his people generally to
practice politics when they have hitherto had something better to
do and think about, and when in the depths of
their souls they have been unable to free themselves from
a prudent loathing of the restlessness, emptiness, and noisy wranglings
of the essentially politics practice in nations. Supposing such a
(06:04):
statesman were to stimulate the slumbering passions and avidities of
his people, were to make a stigma out of their
former diffidence and delight in aloofness, an offense out of
their exoticism and hidden permanency. Were to depreciate their most
radical proclivities, subvert their consciences, make their minds narrow, and
(06:25):
their tastes national. What a statesman who should do all this,
which his people would have to do penance for throughout
their whole future. If they had a future, such a
statesman would be great, would he, undoubtedly, replied the other
old patriot vehemently. Otherwise he could not have done it.
(06:50):
It was mad, perhaps to wish such a thing. But
perhaps everything great has been just as mad as its
commencement misuse of war. The words, cried his interlocutor, contradictorily. Strong, strong, strong,
and mad, not great. The old men had obviously become
(07:12):
heated as they thus shouted their truths in each other's faces.
But I, in my happiness and a partness, considered how
soon a stronger one may become master of the strong,
And also that there is a compensation for the intellectual
superficializing of a nation, namely in the deepening of another
(07:35):
two hundred forty two, whether we call it civilization or
humanizing or progress, which now distinguishes the European, whether we
call it simply without praise or blame by the political
formula the democratic movement in Europe. Behind all the moral
(07:56):
and political foregrounds pointed to by such formulas, an immense
physiological process goes on, which is ever extending the process
of the assimilation of Europeans, their increasing detachment from the
conditions under which climatically and hereditarily united races originate, their
(08:16):
increasing independence of every definite milieu that for centuries would
fain inscribe itself with equal demands on soulent body. That
is to say, the slow emergence of an essentially supernational
and nomadic species of man who possesses physiologically speaking, a
maximum of the art and power of adaptation as his
(08:38):
typical distinction this process of the evolving European, which can
be retarded in its tempo by great relapses, but will
perhaps just gain and grow thereby in vehemence and depths.
The still raging storm and stress of national sentiment pertains
to it, and also the anarchism which is appearing at present.
(09:02):
This process will probably arrive at results on which its
naive propagators and panegyrists, the apostles of modern ideas would
least care to reckon the same new conditions under which,
on an average a leveling and mediocrizing of man will
take place. A useful, industrious, variously serviceable, and clever, gregarious
(09:27):
man are in the highest degrees suitable to give rise
to exceptional men of the most dangerous and attractive qualities.
For while the capacity for adaptation, which is every day
changing conditions and begins a new work with every generation,
almost with every decade, makes the powerfulness of the type impossible.
(09:51):
While the collective impression of such future Europeans will probably
be that of numerous talkative, weak willed, and very handy
work workmen who require a master a commander as they
require their daily bread. While therefore the democratizing of Europe
will tend to the production of a type prepared for slavery.
(10:12):
In the most subtle sense of the term. This strong
man will necessarily, in individual and exceptional cases, become stronger
and richer than he has perhaps ever been before, owing
to the unprejudicedness of his schooling, owing to the immense
variety of practice, art and disguise, I meant to say
(10:34):
that the democratizing of Europe is at the same time
an involuntary arrangement for the rearing of tyrants, taking the
word in all its meanings, even in its most spiritual
sense two hundred forty three. I hear with pleasure that
(10:54):
our son is moving rapidly towards the constellation Hercules, and
I hope that the men on this earth will do
like the Sun. And we foremost we good Europeans. Two
hundred and forty four. There was a time when it
was customary to call Germans deep by way of distinction.
(11:19):
But now that the most successful type of New Germanism
is covetous of quite other honors, and perhaps missus smartness
in all that has depths, it is almost opportune and
patriotic to doubt whether we did not formally deceive ourselves
without commendation. In short, whether the German depths is not,
(11:41):
at bottom something different and worse, and something from which,
thank god, we are on the point of successfully ridding ourselves.
Let us try, then to relearn with regard to German depths.
The only thing necessary for the purpose is a little
vivisection of the German soul. The German soul is above
(12:04):
all manifold, varied in its source, aggregated and superimposed, rather
than actually built. This is owing to its origin. A
German who would emboden himself to assert two souls alas
dwell in my breast, would make a bad guess at
the truth, or, more correctly, he would come far short
(12:26):
of the truth about the number of souls. As a
people made up of the most extraordinary mixing and mingling
of races, perhaps even with the preponderance of the pre
aryan element, as the people of the center, in every
sense of the term, the Germans are more intangible, more ample,
(12:47):
more contradictory, more unknown, more incalculable, more surprising, and even
more terrifying than other people are to themselves. They escape
definition and are thereby alone the despair of the French.
It is characteristic of the Germans that the question what
(13:09):
is German? Never dies out among them. Kotzebu certainly knew
his Germans well enough, we are known they cried jubilantly
to him. But Zand also thought he knew them. Jean
Paul knew what he was doing when he declared himself
incensed at Fichtu's lying but patriotic flatteries and exaggerations. But
(13:32):
it is probable that Gutter sought differently about Germans from
Jean Paul, even though he acknowledged him to be right.
With regard to Fichte. It is a question what Gute
really thought about the Germans, But about many things around
him he never spoke explicitly, and all his life he
knew how to keep in astute silence. Probably he had
(13:56):
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
(14:16):
of Napoleon. There are words of Gutu in which he
condemns with impatient severity as from a foreign land, that
which Germans take pride in. He wants to find the
famous German turn of mind as indulgence towards its own
and others weaknesses. Was he wrong? It is characteristic of
(14:42):
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 well acquainted with
the bypaths to chaos. And as everything loves its symbol,
(15:07):
so the German loves the 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
(15:33):
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 laboring to Germanize all Europe.
Foreigners are astonished and attracted by the riddles which the
(15:54):
conflicting nature at the basis of the German soul propounds
to them riddles which Hegel systematized, and Richard Wagner has
in the end such to music, good natured and spiteful.
Such a juxtaposition preposterous in the case of every other people,
(16:14):
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.
(16:38):
If any one wishes to see that 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 commonists stand there in juxtaposition, How
dis orderly and how rich is the whole constitution of
(17:00):
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 depths is often
only a difficult hesitating digestion, and just as all chronic invalids,
(17:21):
all the speptics like what is convenient so that 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 perhaps the most dangerous and
most successful disguise which the German is up to nowadays.
(17:46):
It is his proper Mephistophilian 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
(18:07):
say that let German depths be what it will. Among
ourselves alone, we perhaps take the liberty to laugh at it.
We shall do well to continue henceforth to honor its
appearance and good name, and not barter away too cheaply
our old reputation as a people for depths, for Prussian
smartness and Berlin wit and sand. It is wise for
(18:32):
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 we should do honor to our name.
We are not called the tuschefolk deceptive people for nothing.
(18:55):
Two hundred forty five. The good old time is past.
It sung 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,
(19:19):
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
(19:41):
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's that
is always coming. There is spread over his music the
(20:04):
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 an adoration before Napoleon. But
how rapidly does this very sentiment now pale? How difficult
(20:28):
nowadays is even the apprehension of this sentiment. How strangely
does the language of Roussau, Schiller, Shelley, and Byron sant
to our ear, in whom, collectively the same fate of
Europe was able to speak, which knew how to sing
in Beethworven. Whatever German music came afterwards, belongs to Romanticism,
(20:50):
that is to say, to a movement which historically considered
was still shorter, more fleeting, and more superficial than the
Great Interlude the transition of Europe from Roussort to Napoleon
and to the rise of democracy Weber, But what do
we care nowadays of Freischitz and Aubern, or Marchioness, Hans
(21:13):
Heiling and Vampurre, or even Wagner's Tannheuser 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 theater and before the masses.
(21:34):
From the beginning it was second rate music, which was
little thought of by genuine musicians. It was different with
Felix Mendelssohn, that Halsion 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
(21:59):
to Robert Schumann, who took things seriously and has been
taken seriously from the first, he 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
(22:20):
Switzerland of his soul with a half verte 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,
(22:41):
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 reveled in nothing but anonymous
(23:01):
joy and sorrow from the beginning, a sort of girl
and newly metangerer. 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
(23:22):
greatest danger, that of losing the voice for the soul
of Europe and sinking into a merely national affair two
hundred forty six. 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
(23:45):
without tune 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 unconsiderate obligatory
to know that there is art in every good sentence,
(24:05):
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 rihysm determining syllables. That one
should feel the breaking of the too rigid symmetry as
intentional and as a charm. That one should lend a
(24:28):
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 complaisent enough to recognize
(24:49):
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,
as it were, squandered on the deaf. These were my
(25:10):
thoughts when I noticed how clumsily and unintuitively two masters
in the art of prose writing have been confounded. One
whose words drop 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 to his
(25:33):
toes feels the dangerous bliss of the quivering over sharp
blade which wishes to bite, hiss and cut two hundred
forty seven. 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
(25:58):
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
(26:19):
the reason of it in a loud voice, that is
to say, with other 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
(26:44):
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 one blath. Such periods as occur
and Demosthenis in Cicero, swelling twice and sinking twice, and
(27:08):
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 in
the big period we modern men, who are short of
breath in every sense. These ancients, indeed, were all of
(27:31):
them diletanti 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
(27:53):
elevation in Germany. However, until quite recently, when a kind
of places form 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
(28:17):
who knei the weight of a syllable or a word
in what manner of sentence strikes, springs, rushes, flows and
comes to a close. He alone had a conscience in
his ears. Often enough about conscience, for reasons are not
lacking by proficiency in oratory should be especially seldom attained
by a German, or almost always too late. The masterpiece
(28:42):
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 Lutter's Bible. Almost everything else
is merely literature, something which has not grown in jams,
and therefore has not taken and does not take root
(29:03):
in German hearts, as the Bible has done two hundred
forty eight. 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,
(29:25):
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,
(29:47):
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 belonging for foreign ways, such
as let themselves be fructified and with all imperiors, like everything,
(30:07):
conscious of being full of generative force, and consequently empowered
by the grace of God. These two kinds of geniuses
seek each other like man and woman, but they also
misunderstand each other, like man and woman two hundred and
forty nine. Every nation has its own tartufery, and calls
(30:33):
that its virtue. One does not know cannot know the best.
That is, in one two hundred and fifty what Europe
owes to the Jews. Many things good and bad, and
above all one thing of the nature, both of the
(30:53):
best and the worst, the grand style and morality, the
fearfulness and majesty of inner infinite demands, of infinite significations,
the whole romanticism and sublimity of moral questionableness, and consequently
just the most attractive, ensnaring and exquisite element in those
(31:14):
iridescences and allurements to life in the after sene of
which the sky of our European culture, its evening sky
now glows, perhaps glows out. For this we artists, among
the spectators and philosophers, are grateful to the Jews two
(31:35):
hundred fifty one. It must be taken into the bargain
if various clouds and disturbances, in short slight attacks of
stupidity pass over the spirit of a people that suffers
and wants to suffer from national nervous fever and political ambition.
For instance, among present day Germans there is alternately the
(31:58):
anti French folly, the anti Semitic folly, the anti Polish folly,
the Christian Romantic folly, the Wagnerian folly, the Teutonic folly,
the Prussian folly. Just look at all those poor historians,
the Zubils and Treichchus and their closely bandaged heads, and
whatever else, These little obscurations of the German spirit and
(32:21):
conscience may be called. May it be forgiven me that I, too,
when on a short, daring sojourn into very infected ground,
did not remain wholly exempt from the disease, but, like
every one else, began to entertain thoughts about matters which
did not concern me. The first symptom of political infection
(32:43):
about the Jews, for instance, listened to the following. I
have never yet met a German who was favorably inclined
to the Jews, and however, decided the repudiation of actual
antisemitism may be on the part of all prudence and
political men. This prudence and policy is not, perhaps directed
(33:05):
against the nature of the sentiment itself, but only against
its dangerous excess, and especially against the distasteful and infamous
expression of this excess of sentiment. On this point, we
must not deceive ourselves that Germany has amply sufficient Jews,
that the German stomach, the German blood has difficulty and
(33:29):
will long have difficulty, in disposing only of this quantity
of Jew as the Italians, the Frenchman and the Englishman
have done by means of a stronger digestion. That is,
the unmistakable declaration and language of a general instinct to
which one must listen and according to which one must act.
(33:51):
Let no more Jews come in and shut the doors,
especially towards the East, also towards Austria. Thus commands the
instinct of a people whose nature is still feeble and uncertain,
so that it could be easily wiped out, easily extinguished
by a stronger race. The Jews, however, are beyond all
(34:13):
doubt the strongest, toughest and purest race at present living
in Europe. They know how to succeed even under the
worst conditions, in fact, better than under favorable ones, by
means of virtues of some sort, which one would like
nowadays to label as vices, owing above all to a
(34:33):
resolute faith which does not need to be ashamed before
modern ideas. They alter only when they do alter in
the same way that the Russian Empire makes its conquest
as an empire that has plenty of time and is
not of yesterday, namely, according to the principle, as slowly
(34:54):
as possible, a thinker who has the future of Europe
at heart, will, in all his perspectives concerning the future,
calculate upon the Jews as you will calculate upon the
Russians as above all the surest and likeliest factors in
the great play and battle of forces. That which is
(35:15):
at present called a nation in Europe, and is really
rather a race factor than nata, perhaps sometimes confusingly similar
to a race fictor et picta is in every case
something evolving, young, easily displaced, and not yet a race,
(35:37):
much less such a race euperhenis, as the Jews are.
Such nations should most carefully avoid all hot headed rivalry
and hostility. It is certain that the Jews, if they desired,
or if they were driven to it, as the Antisemites
seemed to wish, could have the ascendancy nay literally the
(35:58):
supremacy over Europe. That they are not working and planning
for that end is equally certain. Meanwhile, they rather wish
and desire, even somewhat importunely, to be absorbed and absorbed
by Europe. They long to be finally settled, authorized, and
respected somewhere, and wish to put an end to the
(36:21):
nomadic life to the wandering Jew. And one should certainly
take account of this impulse and tendency and make advances
to it. It possibly betokens a mitigation of the Jewish instincts,
for which purpose it would perhaps be useful and fair
to banish the anti Semitic bawlers out of the country.
(36:44):
One should make advances with all prudence and with selection,
pretty much as the English nobility do. It stands to
reason that the most powerful and strongly marked types of
New Germanism could enter into relation with the Jews with
the least hesitation, for instance, the nobleman officer from the
Prussian border. It would be interesting in many ways to
(37:06):
see whether the genius for money and patience, and especially
some intellect and intellectuality sadly lacking in the place referred to,
could not, in addition, be annexed and trained to the
hereditary art of commanding and obeying, for both of which
the country in question has now a classic reputation. But
(37:29):
here it is expedient to break off my festal discourse
at my sprightly Teutonomania, for I have already reached my
serious topic, the European problem, as I understand it, the
rearing of a new ruling caste for Europe two hundred
and fifty two. They are not a philosophical race. The
(37:53):
English bacon represents an attack on the philosophical spirit, generally Hobbes, Hume,
and Lock, an abasement and a depreciation of the idea
of a philosopher for more than a century. It was
against Hume that Cunt up rose and raised himself. It
(38:13):
was Locke, of whom Schelling rightly said jimypriez Lock. In
the struggle against the English mechanical stratification of the world.
Hegel and Schortenhauer, along with Gutter, were of one accord,
the two hostile brother geniuses in philosophy, who pushed in
different directions towards the opposite poles of German thought, and
(38:35):
thereby wronged each other, as only brothers will do. What
is lacking in England and has always been lacking. That
half actor and rhetorician knew well enough the absurd muddle
head Carlyle, who sought to conceal under passionate grimaces, what
he knew about himself, namely, what was lacking in Carlyle,
(38:58):
real power of intellect, real depths of intellectual perception. In
short philosophy, it is characteristic of such an unphilosophical race
to hold on firmly to Christianity. They need its discipline
for moralizing and humanizing. The Englishman more gloomy, sensual, headstrong
(39:21):
and brutal than the German is for that very reason,
as the baser of the two also the most pious,
he has all the more need of Christianity to finer nostrils.
This English Christianity itself has still a characteristic English taint
of spleen and alcoholic excess, for which, owing to good reasons,
(39:45):
it is used as an antidote the finer poison to
neutralize the couser. A finer form of poisoning is in
fact a step in advance with coarse mannered people, a
step towards spiritualization. The English coarseness and rustic de Murnus
(40:06):
is still most satisfactorily disguised by Christian pantomime and by
praying and psalm singing, or more correctly, it is thereby
explained and differently expressed. And for the herd of drunkards
and rakes, who formerly learned moral grunting under the influence
of Methodism, and more recently as the Salvation army, a
(40:30):
penitential fit may really be the relatively highest manifestation of
humanity to which they can be elevated. So much may
reasonably be admitted that, however, which offends even in the
humanist Englishman is his lack of music. To speak, figuratively
(40:51):
and also literally, he has neither rism nor dance in
the movements of his soul in body, indeed, not even
the desire for rihysm and dance for music. Listen to
him speaking, Look at the most beautiful englishwoman walking in
no country on earth are their more beautiful doves and swans? Finally,
(41:13):
listen to them singing. But I asked too much two
hundred fifty three. There are truths which are best recognized
by mediocre minds because they are best adapted for them.
There are truths which only possess charms and seductive power
for mediocre spirits. One is pushed to this probably unpleasant
(41:36):
conclusion now that the influence of respectable but mediocre Englishman
I may mention Darwin, John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer
begins to gain the ascendancy of the middle class region
of European taste. Indeed, who could doubt that it is
a useful thing for such minds to have the ascendancy
(41:57):
for a time. It would be an error to consider
the highly developed and independently soaring minds as specially qualified
for determining and collecting many little common facts and deducing
conclusions from them. As exceptions, they are rather from the
first in no very favorable position towards those who are
(42:20):
the rules. After all, they have more to do than
merely to perceive. In effect, they have to be something new,
They have to signify something new, They have to represent
new values. The gulf between knowledge and capacity is perhaps
greater and also more mysterious than one thinks. The capable
(42:43):
man in the grand style the creator will possibly have
to be an ignorant person, while on the other hand,
for scientific discoveries like those of Darwin, a certain narrowness, aridity,
and industrious carefulness short something English may not be unfavorable
for arriving at them. Finally, let it not be forgotten
(43:07):
that the English, with their profound mediocrity, brought about once
before a general depression of European intelligence. What is called
modern ideas or the ideas of the eighteenth century or
French ideas, that consequently against which the German mind rose
(43:29):
up with profound disgust, is of English origin. There is
no doubt about it. The French were only the apes
and actors of these ideas their best soldiers, and likewise
alas their first and profoundest victims. For owing to the
diabolical anglomania of modern ideas, the Enfrancais has in the
(43:52):
end become so thin and emaciated that at present one
recalls its sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, its profound, passionate strength,
its inventive excellency, almost with disbelief. One must, however, maintain
this verdict of historical justice in a determined manner, and
defend against it present prejudices and appearances. The European noblesse
(44:19):
of sentiment, taste and manners, taking the word in every
high sense, is the work and invention of France. The
European ignobleness, the plebeianism of modern ideas, is England's work
and invention two hundred and fifty four. Even at present,
(44:42):
France is still the seat of the most intellectual and
refined culture of Europe. It is still the high school
of taste. But one must know how to find this
France of taste. He who belongs to it keeps himself
well concealed. They may be a small number in whom
it lives and is embodied besides perhaps being men who
(45:05):
do not stand upon the strongest legs, in part fatalists, hypochondriacs, invalids,
in part persons overindulged, over refined, such as have the
ambition to conceal themselves. They have all something in common.
They keep their ears closed in presence of the delirious
(45:26):
folly and noisy spouting of the democratic bourgeois. In fact,
a besotted and brutalized France at present broads in the foreground.
It recently celebrated a veritable orgy of bad taste and
at the same time of self admiration in the funeral
of Victor Igau. There is also something else common to them,
(45:49):
a predilection to resist intellectual Germanizing, and a still greater
inability to do so. In this France of intellect, which
is also a France of pessimism, Schopenhauer has become more
at home and more indigenous than he has ever been
in Germany, not to speak of Heinrich Heine, who has
(46:09):
long ago been reincarnated in the more refined and fastidious
lyricists of Paris or of Hegel, who are present in
the form of ten the first of living historians exercises
an almost tyrannical influence. As regards Richadwagner. However, the more
(46:32):
French music learns to adapt itself to the actual needs
of the Ames Moudernes, the more will it, Wagner write,
one can safely predict that beforehand it is already taking
place sufficiently. There are, however, three things which the French
can still boast of with pride, as their heritage and possession,
(46:54):
and as indelible tokens of their ancient intellectual superiority in Europe,
in spite of all voluntary or involuntary Germanizing and vulgarizing
of taste. Firstly, the capacity for artistic emotion, for devotion
to form, for which the expression la pour lar, along
(47:16):
with numerous others, has been invented. Such capacity has not
been lacking in France for three centuries, and owing to
its reverence for the small number, it has again and
again made a sort of chamber music of literature possible,
which is sought for in Vain elsewhere in Europe. The
(47:37):
second thing whereby the French can lay claim to his
superiority over Europe is their ancient, many sided moralistic culture.
Owing to which one finds on an average even in
the petty romancier of the newspapers and chance boulevardier de Paris,
a psychological sensitiveness and curiosity of which, for example, one
(48:00):
has no conception to say nothing of the thing itself.
In Germany, the Germans lack a couple of centuries of
the 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
(48:23):
the opposite of the German inexperience and innocence in voloptato 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
(48:43):
thrills or rebel. May be noted that remarkably anticipatory and
forerunning man, who with a Napoleonic tempo, traversed his Europe,
in fact several centuries of the European soul as a
surveyor and discoverer their a. It has required two generations
(49:04):
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
(49:27):
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 poor Monsalle and Ligurian blood froths over, preserves them
(49:51):
from the dreadful northern gray in gray, from sunless conceptual specterism,
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
(50:14):
art which bids me wait and wait, but not yet hope.
There is still in France a pre understanding and ready
welcome for those rarer and rarely gratified men who are
too comprehensive to find satisfaction of any kind. To fatherlandism
and know how to love the South when in the North,
(50:34):
and the north, when in the South the born Midlanders,
the good Europeans for them busy has made music. This
latest genius who has seen a new beauty and seduction,
who has discovered a piece of the South in music
two hundred fifty five. I hold that many precautions should
(50:59):
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 solo profusion and effulgence which overspreads a
sovereign existence, believing in itself. While such a person will
(51:23):
learn to be somewhat on his guard against German music,
because in injuring his taste anew, it will also injure
his health. In you, 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 a North. It must have
(51:45):
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
(52:07):
music which holds its own even in presence of the
brown sunsets of the desert, 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
(52:28):
that here and there, perhaps some sailor's homesickness, some golden
shadows and tender weaknesses, might sweep lightly over it. An
art which, from the far distance would see the colors
of a sinking and almost incomprehensible moral world fleeing towards it,
and would be hospitable enough and profound enough to receive
(52:50):
such belated fugitives two hundred fifty six. 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
(53:12):
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
(53:34):
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 labor of their
souls was to prepare the way for that new synthesis,
and tentatively to anticipate the European of the future. Only
(53:59):
in their similarations, 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, Geta, Beethoven, Stendael, Heinrich, Heine Schortenhauer. It must
(54:19):
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 has now resisted and
(54:39):
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 a kin,
fundamentally akin in all the heights and depths of their requirements.
(55:02):
It is Europe, the one Europe whose soul presses urgently
and longingly outwards and upwards in their multifarios and boisterous art,
whither into a new light towards a new sun. But
who would attempt to express accurately what all these masters
(55:23):
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 seekers,
all of them steeped in literature to their eyes and ears,
the first artists of universal literary culture, for the most part,
(55:48):
even themselves, writers, poets, intermediaries and blenders of the art
and the senses. Wagner as musician is reckoned among painters,
as among musicians, as artists generally among actors, all of
them fanatics for expression at any cost. I especially mentioned
(56:11):
de la Croix, the nearest related to Wagner, all of
them great discoverers of the realm, of the sublime, also
of the loathsome and dreadful, yet greater discovers in effect
in display in the art of the show shop, all
of them talented far beyond their genius, out and out virtuosi,
(56:34):
with mysterious accesses to all that seduces, allures, constrains, and upsets,
born enemies of logic and the straight line, hankering after
the strange, the exotic, the monstrous, the crooked, and the
self contradictory as men, tantaluses of the will plebeian parvenu
(56:57):
who knew themselves to be incapable of a noble tees
tempo or a volento 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,
(57:20):
all of them finally shattering and sinking down at the
Christian cross, And with right and reason for who 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
(57:43):
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 Rikadwagner advise together as to
whether there is anything surely German in the Wagnerian art,
(58:04):
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 in the development
of his type, which the strength of his instincts made
him long to visit at the most decisive time, and
(58:25):
how the held 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 honor of Richadwagner's German nature that
he has acted in everything with more strength, daring, severity
(58:48):
and elevation than the 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 Richadvagner is not only at present but
forever inaccessible, incomprehensible, and inimitable to the whole latter day
(59:12):
Latin race. The figure of Sigfrid, that very free man
who was 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 Syfrid. Well. Wagner had
(59:38):
owned amply for this sin. In his old sad days,
when anticipating a taste which has meanwhile passed into politics,
he began with a religious vehemence peculiar to him to
preach at least the way to Rome, if not walk
Therein that these last words may not be misunderstood, I
(01:00:00):
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
partiphile music, is this our mode. From German heart came
this vexed ululating from German body. This self lacerating is ours.
(01:00:24):
This priestly hand dullation, this incense, fuming exaltation is ours,
This faltering falling shambling, this quite uncertain ding dong dangling,
this sly nun ogling over our bell ringing, this holy
(01:00:47):
faults enruptured heaven o'er springing? Is this our mode? Think well,
ye still wait for admission? For what ye hear is
Rome Rome's faith by in tuition, end of chapter eight
Chapter eight, Peoples and Countries two hundred forty. I heard
once again for the first time Richard Wagner's overture to
the Master Singer. It is a piece of magnificent, gorgeous,
heavy latter day art, which has the pride to presuppose
(00:23):
two centuries of music as still living, in order that
it may be understood. It is an honor to Germans
that such a pride did not miscalculate. What flavors and forces,
what seasons and climes do we not find mingled in it?
It impresses us at one time as ancient, at another
(00:44):
time as foreign, bitter, and too modern. It is as
arbitrary as it is pompously traditional. It is not infrequently roguish,
still oftener, rough and coarse. It has fire and courage,
and at the same time the loose, dun colored skin
of fruits which ripen too late. It flows broad and full,
(01:09):
and suddenly there is a moment of inexplicable hesitation, like
a gap that opens between cause and effect, an oppression
that makes us dream, almost a nightmare. But already it
broadens and widens anew the old stream of delight, the
most manifold delight of old and new happiness, including especially
(01:33):
the joy of the artist in himself, which he refuses
to conceal, his astonished, happy cognizance of his mastery of
the expedients here employed, the new, newly acquired, imperfectly tested
expedients of art, which he apparently betrays to us. All
(01:54):
in all, however, no beauty, no south, nothing of the
delicate southern clearness of the sky, nothing of grace, no dance,
hardly a will to logic, a certain clumsiness, even which
is also emphasized, as though the artist wishes to say
to us it is part of my intention. A cumbersome drapery,
(02:19):
something arbitrarily barbaric and ceremonious, a flaring of learned, in
venerable conceits and witticisms. Something German in the best and
worst sense of the word, something in the German style, manifold,
formless and inexhaustible, A certain German potency and super plenitude
(02:41):
of soul which is not afraid to hide itself under
the raffigements of decadence, which perhaps feels itself more at ease.
There a real, genuine token of the German soul, which
is at the same time young and aged to ripe,
and yet still too rich in futurity. This kind of
(03:06):
music expresses best what I think of the Germans. They
belong to the day before yesterday, and the day after
to morrow. They have, as yet know, to day two
hundred forty one. We good Europeans, we also have hours
(03:27):
when we allow ourselves of warm hearted patriotism a plunge
and relapse into old loves and narrow views. I have
just given an example of it, hours of national excitement,
of patriotic anguish, and all other sorts of old fashioned
floods of sentiment. Duller spirits may perhaps only get done
(03:49):
with what confines its operations in us to ours, and
plays itself out in hours in a considerable time, some
in half a year, others in half a lifetime, according
to the speed and strength with which they digest and
change their material. Indeed, I could think of sluggish, hesitating races, which,
(04:11):
even in our rapidly moving Europe would require half a century.
Ere they could surmount such atavistic attacks of patriotism and
soil attachment and return once more to reason, that is
to say, to good Europeanism. And while digressing on this possibility,
I happen to become an ear witness of a conversation
(04:32):
between two old patriots. They were evidently both hard of hearing,
and consequently spoke all the louder. He has as much
and knows as much philosophy as a peasant or a
coarse student, said the one. He is still innocent. But
what does that matter? Nowadays? It is the age of
(04:54):
the masses. They lie on their belly before everything that
is massive, and they also in politics the statesman who
rears up for them a new tower of babel, some
monstrosity of empire and power they call great. What does
it matter that we more prudent and conservative ones do
not meanwhile give up the old belief that it is
(05:17):
only the great thought that gives greatness to an action
or affair. Supposing a statesman were to bring his people
into the position of being obliged henceforth to practice high politics,
for which they were by nature badly endowed and prepared,
so that they would have to sacrifice their old and
reliable virtues out of love, to a new and doubtful mediocrity.
(05:41):
Supposing a statesman were to condemn his people generally to
practice politics when they have hitherto had something better to
do and think about, and when in the depths of
their souls they have been unable to free themselves from
a prudent loathing of the restlessness, emptiness, and noisy wranglings
of the essentially politics practice in nations. Supposing such a
(06:04):
statesman were to stimulate the slumbering passions and avidities of
his people, were to make a stigma out of their
former diffidence and delight in aloofness, an offense out of
their exoticism and hidden permanency. Were to depreciate their most
radical proclivities, subvert their consciences, make their minds narrow, and
(06:25):
their tastes national. What a statesman who should do all this,
which his people would have to do penance for throughout
their whole future. If they had a future, such a
statesman would be great, would he, undoubtedly, replied the other
old patriot vehemently. Otherwise he could not have done it.
(06:50):
It was mad, perhaps to wish such a thing. But
perhaps everything great has been just as mad as its
commencement misuse of war. The words, cried his interlocutor, contradictorily. Strong, strong, strong,
and mad, not great. The old men had obviously become
(07:12):
heated as they thus shouted their truths in each other's faces.
But I, in my happiness and a partness, considered how
soon a stronger one may become master of the strong,
And also that there is a compensation for the intellectual
superficializing of a nation, namely in the deepening of another
(07:35):
two hundred forty two, whether we call it civilization or
humanizing or progress, which now distinguishes the European, whether we
call it simply without praise or blame by the political
formula the democratic movement in Europe. Behind all the moral
(07:56):
and political foregrounds pointed to by such formulas, an immense
physiological process goes on, which is ever extending the process
of the assimilation of Europeans, their increasing detachment from the
conditions under which climatically and hereditarily united races originate, their
(08:16):
increasing independence of every definite milieu that for centuries would
fain inscribe itself with equal demands on soulent body. That
is to say, the slow emergence of an essentially supernational
and nomadic species of man who possesses physiologically speaking, a
maximum of the art and power of adaptation as his
(08:38):
typical distinction this process of the evolving European, which can
be retarded in its tempo by great relapses, but will
perhaps just gain and grow thereby in vehemence and depths.
The still raging storm and stress of national sentiment pertains
to it, and also the anarchism which is appearing at present.
(09:02):
This process will probably arrive at results on which its
naive propagators and panegyrists, the apostles of modern ideas would
least care to reckon the same new conditions under which,
on an average a leveling and mediocrizing of man will
take place. A useful, industrious, variously serviceable, and clever, gregarious
(09:27):
man are in the highest degrees suitable to give rise
to exceptional men of the most dangerous and attractive qualities.
For while the capacity for adaptation, which is every day
changing conditions and begins a new work with every generation,
almost with every decade, makes the powerfulness of the type impossible.
(09:51):
While the collective impression of such future Europeans will probably
be that of numerous talkative, weak willed, and very handy
work workmen who require a master a commander as they
require their daily bread. While therefore the democratizing of Europe
will tend to the production of a type prepared for slavery.
(10:12):
In the most subtle sense of the term. This strong
man will necessarily, in individual and exceptional cases, become stronger
and richer than he has perhaps ever been before, owing
to the unprejudicedness of his schooling, owing to the immense
variety of practice, art and disguise, I meant to say
(10:34):
that the democratizing of Europe is at the same time
an involuntary arrangement for the rearing of tyrants, taking the
word in all its meanings, even in its most spiritual
sense two hundred forty three. I hear with pleasure that
(10:54):
our son is moving rapidly towards the constellation Hercules, and
I hope that the men on this earth will do
like the Sun. And we foremost we good Europeans. Two
hundred and forty four. There was a time when it
was customary to call Germans deep by way of distinction.
(11:19):
But now that the most successful type of New Germanism
is covetous of quite other honors, and perhaps missus smartness
in all that has depths, it is almost opportune and
patriotic to doubt whether we did not formally deceive ourselves
without commendation. In short, whether the German depths is not,
(11:41):
at bottom something different and worse, and something from which,
thank god, we are on the point of successfully ridding ourselves.
Let us try, then to relearn with regard to German depths.
The only thing necessary for the purpose is a little
vivisection of the German soul. The German soul is above
(12:04):
all manifold, varied in its source, aggregated and superimposed, rather
than actually built. This is owing to its origin. A
German who would emboden himself to assert two souls alas
dwell in my breast, would make a bad guess at
the truth, or, more correctly, he would come far short
(12:26):
of the truth about the number of souls. As a
people made up of the most extraordinary mixing and mingling
of races, perhaps even with the preponderance of the pre
aryan element, as the people of the center, in every
sense of the term, the Germans are more intangible, more ample,
(12:47):
more contradictory, more unknown, more incalculable, more surprising, and even
more terrifying than other people are to themselves. They escape
definition and are thereby alone the despair of the French.
It is characteristic of the Germans that the question what
(13:09):
is German? Never dies out among them. Kotzebu certainly knew
his Germans well enough, we are known they cried jubilantly
to him. But Zand also thought he knew them. Jean
Paul knew what he was doing when he declared himself
incensed at Fichtu's lying but patriotic flatteries and exaggerations. But
(13:32):
it is probable that Gutter sought differently about Germans from
Jean Paul, even though he acknowledged him to be right.
With regard to Fichte. It is a question what Gute
really thought about the Germans, But about many things around
him he never spoke explicitly, and all his life he
knew how to keep in astute silence. Probably he had
(13:56):
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
(14:16):
of Napoleon. There are words of Gutu in which he
condemns with impatient severity as from a foreign land, that
which Germans take pride in. He wants to find the
famous German turn of mind as indulgence towards its own
and others weaknesses. Was he wrong? It is characteristic of
(14:42):
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 well acquainted with
the bypaths to chaos. And as everything loves its symbol,
(15:07):
so the German loves the 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
(15:33):
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 laboring to Germanize all Europe.
Foreigners are astonished and attracted by the riddles which the
(15:54):
conflicting nature at the basis of the German soul propounds
to them riddles which Hegel systematized, and Richard Wagner has
in the end such to music, good natured and spiteful.
Such a juxtaposition preposterous in the case of every other people,
(16:14):
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.
(16:38):
If any one wishes to see that 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 commonists stand there in juxtaposition, How
dis orderly and how rich is the whole constitution of
(17:00):
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 depths is often
only a difficult hesitating digestion, and just as all chronic invalids,
(17:21):
all the speptics like what is convenient so that 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 perhaps the most dangerous and
most successful disguise which the German is up to nowadays.
(17:46):
It is his proper Mephistophilian 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
(18:07):
say that let German depths be what it will. Among
ourselves alone, we perhaps take the liberty to laugh at it.
We shall do well to continue henceforth to honor its
appearance and good name, and not barter away too cheaply
our old reputation as a people for depths, for Prussian
smartness and Berlin wit and sand. It is wise for
(18:32):
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 we should do honor to our name.
We are not called the tuschefolk deceptive people for nothing.
(18:55):
Two hundred forty five. The good old time is past.
It sung 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,
(19:19):
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
(19:41):
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's that
is always coming. There is spread over his music the
(20:04):
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 an adoration before Napoleon. But
how rapidly does this very sentiment now pale? How difficult
(20:28):
nowadays is even the apprehension of this sentiment. How strangely
does the language of Roussau, Schiller, Shelley, and Byron sant
to our ear, in whom, collectively the same fate of
Europe was able to speak, which knew how to sing
in Beethworven. Whatever German music came afterwards, belongs to Romanticism,
(20:50):
that is to say, to a movement which historically considered
was still shorter, more fleeting, and more superficial than the
Great Interlude the transition of Europe from Roussort to Napoleon
and to the rise of democracy Weber, But what do
we care nowadays of Freischitz and Aubern, or Marchioness, Hans
(21:13):
Heiling and Vampurre, or even Wagner's Tannheuser 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 theater and before the masses.
(21:34):
From the beginning it was second rate music, which was
little thought of by genuine musicians. It was different with
Felix Mendelssohn, that Halsion 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
(21:59):
to Robert Schumann, who took things seriously and has been
taken seriously from the first, he 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
(22:20):
Switzerland of his soul with a half verte 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,
(22:41):
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 reveled in nothing but anonymous
(23:01):
joy and sorrow from the beginning, a sort of girl
and newly metangerer. 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
(23:22):
greatest danger, that of losing the voice for the soul
of Europe and sinking into a merely national affair two
hundred forty six. 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
(23:45):
without tune 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 unconsiderate obligatory
to know that there is art in every good sentence,
(24:05):
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 rihysm determining syllables. That one
should feel the breaking of the too rigid symmetry as
intentional and as a charm. That one should lend a
(24:28):
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 complaisent enough to recognize
(24:49):
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,
as it were, squandered on the deaf. These were my
(25:10):
thoughts when I noticed how clumsily and unintuitively two masters
in the art of prose writing have been confounded. One
whose words drop 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 to his
(25:33):
toes feels the dangerous bliss of the quivering over sharp
blade which wishes to bite, hiss and cut two hundred
forty seven. 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
(25:58):
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
(26:19):
the reason of it in a loud voice, that is
to say, with other 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
(26:44):
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 one blath. Such periods as occur
and Demosthenis in Cicero, swelling twice and sinking twice, and
(27:08):
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 in
the big period we modern men, who are short of
breath in every sense. These ancients, indeed, were all of
(27:31):
them diletanti 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
(27:53):
elevation in Germany. However, until quite recently, when a kind
of places form 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
(28:17):
who knei the weight of a syllable or a word
in what manner of sentence strikes, springs, rushes, flows and
comes to a close. He alone had a conscience in
his ears. Often enough about conscience, for reasons are not
lacking by proficiency in oratory should be especially seldom attained
by a German, or almost always too late. The masterpiece
(28:42):
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 Lutter's Bible. Almost everything else
is merely literature, something which has not grown in jams,
and therefore has not taken and does not take root
(29:03):
in German hearts, as the Bible has done two hundred
forty eight. 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,
(29:25):
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,
(29:47):
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 belonging for foreign ways, such
as let themselves be fructified and with all imperiors, like everything,
(30:07):
conscious of being full of generative force, and consequently empowered
by the grace of God. These two kinds of geniuses
seek each other like man and woman, but they also
misunderstand each other, like man and woman two hundred and
forty nine. Every nation has its own tartufery, and calls
(30:33):
that its virtue. One does not know cannot know the best.
That is, in one two hundred and fifty what Europe
owes to the Jews. Many things good and bad, and
above all one thing of the nature, both of the
(30:53):
best and the worst, the grand style and morality, the
fearfulness and majesty of inner infinite demands, of infinite significations,
the whole romanticism and sublimity of moral questionableness, and consequently
just the most attractive, ensnaring and exquisite element in those
(31:14):
iridescences and allurements to life in the after sene of
which the sky of our European culture, its evening sky
now glows, perhaps glows out. For this we artists, among
the spectators and philosophers, are grateful to the Jews two
(31:35):
hundred fifty one. It must be taken into the bargain
if various clouds and disturbances, in short slight attacks of
stupidity pass over the spirit of a people that suffers
and wants to suffer from national nervous fever and political ambition.
For instance, among present day Germans there is alternately the
(31:58):
anti French folly, the anti Semitic folly, the anti Polish folly,
the Christian Romantic folly, the Wagnerian folly, the Teutonic folly,
the Prussian folly. Just look at all those poor historians,
the Zubils and Treichchus and their closely bandaged heads, and
whatever else, These little obscurations of the German spirit and
(32:21):
conscience may be called. May it be forgiven me that I, too,
when on a short, daring sojourn into very infected ground,
did not remain wholly exempt from the disease, but, like
every one else, began to entertain thoughts about matters which
did not concern me. The first symptom of political infection
(32:43):
about the Jews, for instance, listened to the following. I
have never yet met a German who was favorably inclined
to the Jews, and however, decided the repudiation of actual
antisemitism may be on the part of all prudence and
political men. This prudence and policy is not, perhaps directed
(33:05):
against the nature of the sentiment itself, but only against
its dangerous excess, and especially against the distasteful and infamous
expression of this excess of sentiment. On this point, we
must not deceive ourselves that Germany has amply sufficient Jews,
that the German stomach, the German blood has difficulty and
(33:29):
will long have difficulty, in disposing only of this quantity
of Jew as the Italians, the Frenchman and the Englishman
have done by means of a stronger digestion. That is,
the unmistakable declaration and language of a general instinct to
which one must listen and according to which one must act.
(33:51):
Let no more Jews come in and shut the doors,
especially towards the East, also towards Austria. Thus commands the
instinct of a people whose nature is still feeble and uncertain,
so that it could be easily wiped out, easily extinguished
by a stronger race. The Jews, however, are beyond all
(34:13):
doubt the strongest, toughest and purest race at present living
in Europe. They know how to succeed even under the
worst conditions, in fact, better than under favorable ones, by
means of virtues of some sort, which one would like
nowadays to label as vices, owing above all to a
(34:33):
resolute faith which does not need to be ashamed before
modern ideas. They alter only when they do alter in
the same way that the Russian Empire makes its conquest
as an empire that has plenty of time and is
not of yesterday, namely, according to the principle, as slowly
(34:54):
as possible, a thinker who has the future of Europe
at heart, will, in all his perspectives concerning the future,
calculate upon the Jews as you will calculate upon the
Russians as above all the surest and likeliest factors in
the great play and battle of forces. That which is
(35:15):
at present called a nation in Europe, and is really
rather a race factor than nata, perhaps sometimes confusingly similar
to a race fictor et picta is in every case
something evolving, young, easily displaced, and not yet a race,
(35:37):
much less such a race euperhenis, as the Jews are.
Such nations should most carefully avoid all hot headed rivalry
and hostility. It is certain that the Jews, if they desired,
or if they were driven to it, as the Antisemites
seemed to wish, could have the ascendancy nay literally the
(35:58):
supremacy over Europe. That they are not working and planning
for that end is equally certain. Meanwhile, they rather wish
and desire, even somewhat importunely, to be absorbed and absorbed
by Europe. They long to be finally settled, authorized, and
respected somewhere, and wish to put an end to the
(36:21):
nomadic life to the wandering Jew. And one should certainly
take account of this impulse and tendency and make advances
to it. It possibly betokens a mitigation of the Jewish instincts,
for which purpose it would perhaps be useful and fair
to banish the anti Semitic bawlers out of the country.
(36:44):
One should make advances with all prudence and with selection,
pretty much as the English nobility do. It stands to
reason that the most powerful and strongly marked types of
New Germanism could enter into relation with the Jews with
the least hesitation, for instance, the nobleman officer from the
Prussian border. It would be interesting in many ways to
(37:06):
see whether the genius for money and patience, and especially
some intellect and intellectuality sadly lacking in the place referred to,
could not, in addition, be annexed and trained to the
hereditary art of commanding and obeying, for both of which
the country in question has now a classic reputation. But
(37:29):
here it is expedient to break off my festal discourse
at my sprightly Teutonomania, for I have already reached my
serious topic, the European problem, as I understand it, the
rearing of a new ruling caste for Europe two hundred
and fifty two. They are not a philosophical race. The
(37:53):
English bacon represents an attack on the philosophical spirit, generally Hobbes, Hume,
and Lock, an abasement and a depreciation of the idea
of a philosopher for more than a century. It was
against Hume that Cunt up rose and raised himself. It
(38:13):
was Locke, of whom Schelling rightly said jimypriez Lock. In
the struggle against the English mechanical stratification of the world.
Hegel and Schortenhauer, along with Gutter, were of one accord,
the two hostile brother geniuses in philosophy, who pushed in
different directions towards the opposite poles of German thought, and
(38:35):
thereby wronged each other, as only brothers will do. What
is lacking in England and has always been lacking. That
half actor and rhetorician knew well enough the absurd muddle
head Carlyle, who sought to conceal under passionate grimaces, what
he knew about himself, namely, what was lacking in Carlyle,
(38:58):
real power of intellect, real depths of intellectual perception. In
short philosophy, it is characteristic of such an unphilosophical race
to hold on firmly to Christianity. They need its discipline
for moralizing and humanizing. The Englishman more gloomy, sensual, headstrong
(39:21):
and brutal than the German is for that very reason,
as the baser of the two also the most pious,
he has all the more need of Christianity to finer nostrils.
This English Christianity itself has still a characteristic English taint
of spleen and alcoholic excess, for which, owing to good reasons,
(39:45):
it is used as an antidote the finer poison to
neutralize the couser. A finer form of poisoning is in
fact a step in advance with coarse mannered people, a
step towards spiritualization. The English coarseness and rustic de Murnus
(40:06):
is still most satisfactorily disguised by Christian pantomime and by
praying and psalm singing, or more correctly, it is thereby
explained and differently expressed. And for the herd of drunkards
and rakes, who formerly learned moral grunting under the influence
of Methodism, and more recently as the Salvation army, a
(40:30):
penitential fit may really be the relatively highest manifestation of
humanity to which they can be elevated. So much may
reasonably be admitted that, however, which offends even in the
humanist Englishman is his lack of music. To speak, figuratively
(40:51):
and also literally, he has neither rism nor dance in
the movements of his soul in body, indeed, not even
the desire for rihysm and dance for music. Listen to
him speaking, Look at the most beautiful englishwoman walking in
no country on earth are their more beautiful doves and swans? Finally,
(41:13):
listen to them singing. But I asked too much two
hundred fifty three. There are truths which are best recognized
by mediocre minds because they are best adapted for them.
There are truths which only possess charms and seductive power
for mediocre spirits. One is pushed to this probably unpleasant
(41:36):
conclusion now that the influence of respectable but mediocre Englishman
I may mention Darwin, John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer
begins to gain the ascendancy of the middle class region
of European taste. Indeed, who could doubt that it is
a useful thing for such minds to have the ascendancy
(41:57):
for a time. It would be an error to consider
the highly developed and independently soaring minds as specially qualified
for determining and collecting many little common facts and deducing
conclusions from them. As exceptions, they are rather from the
first in no very favorable position towards those who are
(42:20):
the rules. After all, they have more to do than
merely to perceive. In effect, they have to be something new,
They have to signify something new, They have to represent
new values. The gulf between knowledge and capacity is perhaps
greater and also more mysterious than one thinks. The capable
(42:43):
man in the grand style the creator will possibly have
to be an ignorant person, while on the other hand,
for scientific discoveries like those of Darwin, a certain narrowness, aridity,
and industrious carefulness short something English may not be unfavorable
for arriving at them. Finally, let it not be forgotten
(43:07):
that the English, with their profound mediocrity, brought about once
before a general depression of European intelligence. What is called
modern ideas or the ideas of the eighteenth century or
French ideas, that consequently against which the German mind rose
(43:29):
up with profound disgust, is of English origin. There is
no doubt about it. The French were only the apes
and actors of these ideas their best soldiers, and likewise
alas their first and profoundest victims. For owing to the
diabolical anglomania of modern ideas, the Enfrancais has in the
(43:52):
end become so thin and emaciated that at present one
recalls its sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, its profound, passionate strength,
its inventive excellency, almost with disbelief. One must, however, maintain
this verdict of historical justice in a determined manner, and
defend against it present prejudices and appearances. The European noblesse
(44:19):
of sentiment, taste and manners, taking the word in every
high sense, is the work and invention of France. The
European ignobleness, the plebeianism of modern ideas, is England's work
and invention two hundred and fifty four. Even at present,
(44:42):
France is still the seat of the most intellectual and
refined culture of Europe. It is still the high school
of taste. But one must know how to find this
France of taste. He who belongs to it keeps himself
well concealed. They may be a small number in whom
it lives and is embodied besides perhaps being men who
(45:05):
do not stand upon the strongest legs, in part fatalists, hypochondriacs, invalids,
in part persons overindulged, over refined, such as have the
ambition to conceal themselves. They have all something in common.
They keep their ears closed in presence of the delirious
(45:26):
folly and noisy spouting of the democratic bourgeois. In fact,
a besotted and brutalized France at present broads in the foreground.
It recently celebrated a veritable orgy of bad taste and
at the same time of self admiration in the funeral
of Victor Igau. There is also something else common to them,
(45:49):
a predilection to resist intellectual Germanizing, and a still greater
inability to do so. In this France of intellect, which
is also a France of pessimism, Schopenhauer has become more
at home and more indigenous than he has ever been
in Germany, not to speak of Heinrich Heine, who has
(46:09):
long ago been reincarnated in the more refined and fastidious
lyricists of Paris or of Hegel, who are present in
the form of ten the first of living historians exercises
an almost tyrannical influence. As regards Richadwagner. However, the more
(46:32):
French music learns to adapt itself to the actual needs
of the Ames Moudernes, the more will it, Wagner write,
one can safely predict that beforehand it is already taking
place sufficiently. There are, however, three things which the French
can still boast of with pride, as their heritage and possession,
(46:54):
and as indelible tokens of their ancient intellectual superiority in Europe,
in spite of all voluntary or involuntary Germanizing and vulgarizing
of taste. Firstly, the capacity for artistic emotion, for devotion
to form, for which the expression la pour lar, along
(47:16):
with numerous others, has been invented. Such capacity has not
been lacking in France for three centuries, and owing to
its reverence for the small number, it has again and
again made a sort of chamber music of literature possible,
which is sought for in Vain elsewhere in Europe. The
(47:37):
second thing whereby the French can lay claim to his
superiority over Europe is their ancient, many sided moralistic culture.
Owing to which one finds on an average even in
the petty romancier of the newspapers and chance boulevardier de Paris,
a psychological sensitiveness and curiosity of which, for example, one
(48:00):
has no conception to say nothing of the thing itself.
In Germany, the Germans lack a couple of centuries of
the 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
(48:23):
the opposite of the German inexperience and innocence in voloptato 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
(48:43):
thrills or rebel. May be noted that remarkably anticipatory and
forerunning man, who with a Napoleonic tempo, traversed his Europe,
in fact several centuries of the European soul as a
surveyor and discoverer their a. It has required two generations
(49:04):
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
(49:27):
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 poor Monsalle and Ligurian blood froths over, preserves them
(49:51):
from the dreadful northern gray in gray, from sunless conceptual specterism,
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
(50:14):
art which bids me wait and wait, but not yet hope.
There is still in France a pre understanding and ready
welcome for those rarer and rarely gratified men who are
too comprehensive to find satisfaction of any kind. To fatherlandism
and know how to love the South when in the North,
(50:34):
and the north, when in the South the born Midlanders,
the good Europeans for them busy has made music. This
latest genius who has seen a new beauty and seduction,
who has discovered a piece of the South in music
two hundred fifty five. I hold that many precautions should
(50:59):
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 solo profusion and effulgence which overspreads a
sovereign existence, believing in itself. While such a person will
(51:23):
learn to be somewhat on his guard against German music,
because in injuring his taste anew, it will also injure
his health. In you, 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 a North. It must have
(51:45):
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
(52:07):
music which holds its own even in presence of the
brown sunsets of the desert, 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
(52:28):
that here and there, perhaps some sailor's homesickness, some golden
shadows and tender weaknesses, might sweep lightly over it. An
art which, from the far distance would see the colors
of a sinking and almost incomprehensible moral world fleeing towards it,
and would be hospitable enough and profound enough to receive
(52:50):
such belated fugitives two hundred fifty six. 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
(53:12):
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
(53:34):
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 labor of their
souls was to prepare the way for that new synthesis,
and tentatively to anticipate the European of the future. Only
(53:59):
in their similarations, 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, Geta, Beethoven, Stendael, Heinrich, Heine Schortenhauer. It must
(54:19):
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 has now resisted and
(54:39):
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 a kin,
fundamentally akin in all the heights and depths of their requirements.
(55:02):
It is Europe, the one Europe whose soul presses urgently
and longingly outwards and upwards in their multifarios and boisterous art,
whither into a new light towards a new sun. But
who would attempt to express accurately what all these masters
(55:23):
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 seekers,
all of them steeped in literature to their eyes and ears,
the first artists of universal literary culture, for the most part,
(55:48):
even themselves, writers, poets, intermediaries and blenders of the art
and the senses. Wagner as musician is reckoned among painters,
as among musicians, as artists generally among actors, all of
them fanatics for expression at any cost. I especially mentioned
(56:11):
de la Croix, the nearest related to Wagner, all of
them great discoverers of the realm, of the sublime, also
of the loathsome and dreadful, yet greater discovers in effect
in display in the art of the show shop, all
of them talented far beyond their genius, out and out virtuosi,
(56:34):
with mysterious accesses to all that seduces, allures, constrains, and upsets,
born enemies of logic and the straight line, hankering after
the strange, the exotic, the monstrous, the crooked, and the
self contradictory as men, tantaluses of the will plebeian parvenu
(56:57):
who knew themselves to be incapable of a noble tees
tempo or a volento 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,
(57:20):
all of them finally shattering and sinking down at the
Christian cross, And with right and reason for who 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
(57:43):
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 Rikadwagner advise together as to
whether there is anything surely German in the Wagnerian art,
(58:04):
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 in the development
of his type, which the strength of his instincts made
him long to visit at the most decisive time, and
(58:25):
how the held 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 honor of Richadwagner's German nature that
he has acted in everything with more strength, daring, severity
(58:48):
and elevation than the 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 Richadvagner is not only at present but
forever inaccessible, incomprehensible, and inimitable to the whole latter day
(59:12):
Latin race. The figure of Sigfrid, that very free man
who was 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 Syfrid. Well. Wagner had
(59:38):
owned amply for this sin. In his old sad days,
when anticipating a taste which has meanwhile passed into politics,
he began with a religious vehemence peculiar to him to
preach at least the way to Rome, if not walk
Therein that these last words may not be misunderstood, I
(01:00:00):
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
partiphile music, is this our mode. From German heart came
this vexed ululating from German body. This self lacerating is ours.
(01:00:24):
This priestly hand dullation, this incense, fuming exaltation is ours,
This faltering falling shambling, this quite uncertain ding dong dangling,
this sly nun ogling over our bell ringing, this holy
(01:00:47):
faults enruptured heaven o'er springing? Is this our mode? Think well,
ye still wait for admission? For what ye hear is
Rome Rome's faith by in tuition, end of chapter eight
Popular Podcasts
Fudd Around And Find Out
UConn basketball star Azzi Fudd brings her championship swag to iHeart Women’s Sports with Fudd Around and Find Out, a weekly podcast that takes fans along for the ride as Azzi spends her final year of college trying to reclaim the National Championship and prepare to be a first round WNBA draft pick. Ever wonder what it’s like to be a world-class athlete in the public spotlight while still managing schoolwork, friendships and family time? It’s time to Fudd Around and Find Out!
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.