2
There is no reality, no “ideality,” which has not been touched in this book (touched! what a cautious euphemism!). Not only the eternal idols, but also the youngest—that is to say, the most senile: modern ideas, for instance. A strong wind blows between the trees and in all directions fall the fruit—the truths. There is the waste of an all-too-rich autumn in this book: you trip over truths. You even crush some to death, there are too many of them. Those things that you can grasp, however, are quite unquestionable; they are irrevocable decrees. I alone have the criterion of “truths” in my possession. I alone can decide.
It would seem as if a second consciousness had grown up in me, as if the “life-will” in me had thrown a light upon the downward path along which it has been running throughout the ages. The downward path—hitherto this had been called the road to “Truth.” All obscure impulse—”darkness and dismay”—is at an end, the “good man” was precisely he who was least aware of the proper way.[1] And, speaking in all earnestness, no one before me knew the proper way, the way upwards: only after my time could men once more find hope, life-tasks, and roads mapped out that lead to culture—I am the joyful harbinger of this culture. … On this account alone I am also a fatality.
3
Immediately after the completion of the above-named work, and without letting even one day go by, I tackled the formidable task of the Transvaluation with a supreme feeling of pride which nothing could equal; and, certain at each moment of my immortality, I cut sign after sign upon tablets of brass with the sureness of Fate.
The Preface came into being on 3rd September 1888. When, after having written it down, I went out into the open that morning, I was greeted by the most beautiful day I had ever seen in the Upper Engadine—clear, glowing with colour, and presenting all the contrasts and all the intermediary gradations between ice and the south. I left Sils-Maria only on the 20th of September.
I had been forced to delay my departure owing to floods, and I was very soon, and for some days, the only visitor in this wonderful spot, on which my gratitude bestows the gift of an immortal name. After a journey that was full of incidents, and not without danger to life,—as for instance at Como, which was flooded when I reached it in the dead of night,—I got to Turin on the afternoon of the 21 st.
Turin is the only suitable place for me, and it shall be my home henceforward. I took the same lodgings as I had occupied in the spring, 6111 Via Carlo Alberto, opposite the mighty Palazzo Carignano, in which Vittorio Emanuele was born; and I had a view of the Piazza Carlo Alberto and above it across to the hills. Without hesitating, or allowing myself to be disturbed for a single moment, I returned to my work, only the last quarter of which had still to be written. On the 30th September, tremendous triumph; the seventh day; the leisure of a god on the banks of the Po.[2] On the same day, I wrote the Preface to The Twilight of the Idols, the correction of the proofs of which provided me with recreation during the month of September. Never in my life have I experienced such an autumn; nor had I ever imagined that such things were possible on earth—a Claude Lorrain extended to infinity, each day equal to the last in its wild perfection.
[1] A witty reference to Goethe’s well-known passage in the Prologue to Faust:—
“A good man, though in darkness and dismay,
May still be conscious of the proper way.”
The words are spoken by the Lord.—TR.
[2] There is a wonderful promenade along the banks of the Po, for which Turin is famous, and of which Nietzsche was particularly fond.—TR.
The Case Of Wagner: A Musician’s Problem
1
In order to do justice to this essay a man ought to suffer from the fate of music as from an open wound.—From what do I suffer when I suffer from the fate of music? From the fact that music has lost its world-transfiguring, yea-saying character—that it is decadent music and no longer the flute of Dionysus. Supposing, however, that the fate of music be as dear to man as his own life, because joy and suffering are alike bound up with it; then he will find this pamphlet comparatively mild and full of consideration. To be cheerful in such circumstances, and laugh good-naturedly with others at one’s self,—ridendodicere severum[1] when the verum dicere would justify every sort of hardness,—is humanity itself.
Who doubts that I, old artillery-man that I am, would be able if I liked to point my heavy guns at Wagner?—Everything decisive in this question I kept to myself—I have loved Wagner.—After all, an attack upon a more than usually subtle “unknown person” whom another would not have divined so easily, lies in the meaning and path of my life-task. Oh, I have still quite a number of other “unknown persons” to unmask besides a Cagliostro of Music!
Above all, I have to direct an attack against the German people, who, in matters of the spirit, grow every day more indolent, poorer in instincts, and more honest who, with an appetite for which they are to be envied, continue to diet themselves on contradictions, and gulp down “Faith” in company with science, Christian love together with anti-Semitism, and the will to power (to the “Empire”), dished up with the gospel of the humble, without showing the slightest signs of indigestion. Fancy this absence of party-feeling in the presence of opposites! Fancy this gastric neutrality and “disinterestedness”!
Behold this sense of justice in the German palate, which can grant equal rights to all,—which finds everything tasteful! Without a shadow of a doubt the Germans are idealists. When I was last in Germany, I found German taste striving to grant Wagner and the Trumpeter of Sakkingen[2] equal rights; while I myself witnessed the attempts of the people of Leipzig to do honour to one of the most genuine and most German of musicians,—using German here in the old sense of the word,—a man who was no mere German of the Empire, the master Heinrich Schütz, by founding a Liszt Society, the object of which was to cultivate and spread artful (listige[3]) Church music. Without a shadow of doubt the Germans are idealists.
2
But here nothing shall stop me from being rude, and from telling the Germans one or two unpleasant home truths: who else would do it if I did not? I refer to their laxity in matters historical. Not only have the Germans entirely lost the breadth of vision which enables one to grasp the course of culture and the values of culture; not only are they one and all political (or Church) puppets; but they have also actually put a ban upon this very breadth of vision. A man must first and foremost be “German,” he must belong to “the race”; then only can he pass judgment upon all values and lack of values in history—then only can he establish them….
To be German is in itself an argument, “Germany, Germany above all,”[4] is a principle; the Germans stand for the “moral order of the universe” in history; compared with the Roman Empire, they are the up-holders of freedom; compared with the eighteenth century, they are the restorers of morality, of the “Categorical Imperative.” There is such a thing as the writing of history according to the lights of Imperial Germany; there is, I fear, anti-Semitic history—there is also history written with an eye to the Court, and Herr von Treitschke is not ashamed of himself.
Quite recently an idiotic opinion in historicis, an observation of Vischer the Swabian æsthete, since happily deceased, made the round of the German newspapers as a “truth” to which every German must assent The observation was this: “The Renaissance and the Reformation only together constitute a whole—the æsthetic rebirth, and the moral rebirth.” When I listen to such things, I lose all patience, and I feel inclined, I even feel it my duty, to tell the Germans, for once in a way, all that they have on their conscience. Every great crime against culture for the last four centuries lies on their conscience….
And always for the same reason, always owing to their bottomless cowardice in the face of reality, which is also cowardice in the face of truth; always owing to the love of falsehood which has become almost instinctive in them—in short, “idealism.” It was the Germans who caused Europe to lose the fruits, the whole meaning of her last period of greatness—the period of the Renaissance. At a moment when a higher order of values, values that were noble, that said yea to life, and that guaranteed a future,
