Chapter 4 3

Have you seen how powerfully this music improves me? — Surrounded by music exactly as the land surrounds the inland sea: ① I have the basis for this formula (Chapter 2 of Beyond Good and Evil).Return to nature, health, clarity, youth, virtue! —and I am, after all, the most depraved Wagnerian... I was able to take Wagner seriously... Ah, the old magician!What tricks did he ask of us!The first thing his art offers us is a magnifying glass: people look in, people don't believe their eyes—everything gets bigger, and Wagner himself gets bigger... What an ingenious line Rattlesnake!He rang the big words "devotion", "loyalty" and "purity" to us all his life, and with the praise of chastity, he slipped back from the corrupt world! —and we believe in it...

①The original text is French —But you won't listen to me?Would you rather have Wagner's questions than Bizet's?Nor do I underestimate Wagner's problem, which has its magic.The question of salvation is even a respectable one.Wagner never thought so deeply about anything as he did about salvation: their operas were operas of salvation.Any one of his characters always wants to be saved: sometimes a little man, sometimes a little woman—that's his problem. --and how luxuriously he varies his subjects!What a rare and meaningful diversion!If not he, who can teach us that chastity saves interesting sinners with partiality (in Tonnhauser)?Or that the wandering Jew, once married, can be saved and live in peace (in "The Flying Dutchman")?Or do old courtesans prefer to be rescued from virgins (like Condry)? Or young hystericals prefer to be saved by their doctor (like in Lohengrin)? Or beautiful maidens prefer to be saved by a knight The knight is a Wagnerite (in "Meistersinger")? Or married women also like to be saved by a knight (such as Isolde)? Or after the "old god" is morally embarrassed everywhere, Salvation at last (in The Ring) by a free thinker and amoralist? You marvel at the depth of this last point! Do you understand it? I—beware of trying to understand it myself...People read from the above There are other lessons to be drawn, which I would rather prove than disprove. One can be led by a Wagnerian ballet to despair—and to virtue (see also Tannhauser)! If not to bed at the right time, The worst consequences (see also Lohengrin). One should never know exactly whom one is marrying (see still Lohengrin). - Tristan and Aesop Dessert celebrates the perfect husband who on one occasion had only one question: "But why didn't you tell me this sooner? It couldn't be easier!" The answer was:

"I cannot tell you; And what you asked, You will never experience it. " ①Condry, the heroine in Wagner's opera "Parsifal". ②This sentence was translated by the English translator J. N． Kennedy added according to the meaning of the context.See "Nietzsche's Complete Works" English version, Volume 8, page 6. Lohengrin contains a statement prohibiting research and questioning.Wagner uses this to justify the Christian notion that "you should and must believe."The scientific attitude is the highest and holiest crime.... "The Flying Dutchman" preaches a solemn dogma that women can stabilize--"rescue" in Wagnerian terms--the most insecure.Here we might as well ask a question.Assuming this is true, is it therefore desirable? —What would be the result of the "perpetually wandering Jew" worshiped and steadied by a woman?He simply stopped wandering forever; he married, he has nothing to do with us anymore. —Turning into reality: the danger of artists and geniuses (these are the "perpetually wandering Jews") lies in women, and their female admirers are their nemesis.No man is strong enough in character not to be destroyed -- not to be "saved," when he feels himself treated like a god, and he immediately condescends to women. —Man is cowardly before all eternal women, and little girls know it. —A woman's love, on many occasions, and perhaps especially in the most famous cases, is but a more refined parasitism, nesting for itself in an alien soul and sometimes even in an alien body --Ugh! How expensive it is always for the "owner of the house"!

Goethe's fate in spinster Germany is well known.In the eyes of the Germans, he was always immodest, and he only gained sincere admiration among Jewish women.Schiller, the "noble" Schiller, who shook the Germans' ears with great words—he was just what they wanted.What do they blame Goethe for? "Venus Hill"; and he created "Venice epigrams."Klopstock had already preached to him morally; at one time Herder was fond of using the word Priapus when speaking of Goethe.Even "William Meister" was seen as a sign of depravity and "morality".This "corral" and the "worthlessness" of its protagonists made Niebuhr and his ilk furious, and at last he uttered a sigh, in which Beatrolf would have sung so elegiacly: "A great soul What could be more painful than to break one's own wings, that he should forsake what is noble, and seek artifice in what is far baser." . . The small court and all kinds of moralists crossed themselves in front of Goethe, in front of Goethe's "dirty soul". — This history dominates Wagner's music.It is self-evident that he saves Goethe; but in this way: at the same time he shrewdly sided with the girls of high society.Goethe is saved: a prayer saves him, an upper-class girl saves him...

① Klopstock (Klopstock, 1724-1803), a German poet. ② Herder (Herder, 1744-1803), a German literary theorist and poet. ③Priapus (Priapus), the god of male fertility and the phallus in Greek and Roman mythology. ④ Niebhr (Niebhr, 1776-1831), a German historian. ⑤ Bit Rolf, a character in "Tonhauser". —What would Goethe think of Wagner? ——Goethe once asked himself a question: What is the danger and doom of romantics that threatens all romantics?His answer: "Suffocated by munching on moral paradoxes and religious paradoxes." In short: Parsifal. —The philosopher also adds a concluding remark to it.The sacred is perhaps the only higher value that the masses and women can still see, the ideal horizon for all creatures that are naturally myopic.For philosophers, however, any horizon is a pure misunderstanding, closing the door where their world—their perils, their ideals, their hopes—begins... To put it mildly: Philosophy is not for the majority; it requires holiness.

①The original text of this sentence is French.