Part 3 (1/2)

THE BRIEF OF A PSYCHOLOGIST

Preface

The following chapters have been selected from past works of mine, and not without care. Some of them date back as far as 1877. Here and there, of course, they will be found to have been made a little more intelligible, but above all, more brief. Read consecutively, they can leave no one in any doubt, either concerning myself, or concerning Wagner: we are antipodes. The reader will come to other conclusions, too, in his perusal of these pages: for instance, that this is an essay for psychologists and _not_ for Germans.... I have my readers everywhere, in Vienna, St Petersburg, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Paris, and New York-but _I have none_ in Europe's Flat-land-Germany.... And I might even have something to say to Italians whom I love just as much as I ... _Quousque tandem, Crispi_ ...

Triple alliance: a people can only conclude a _mesalliance_ with the ”Empire.”...

Friedrich Nietzsche.

Turin, _Christmas 1888_.

Wherein I Admire Wagner.

I believe that artists very often do not know what they are best able to do. They are much too vain. Their minds are directed to something prouder than merely to appear like little plants, which, with freshness, rareness, and beauty, know how to sprout from their soil with real perfection. The ultimate goodness of their own garden and vineyard is superciliously under-estimated by them, and their love and their insight are not of the same quality. Here is a musician who is a greater master than anyone else in the discovering of tones, peculiar to suffering, oppressed, and tormented souls, who can endow even dumb misery with speech. n.o.body can approach him in the colours of late autumn, in the indescribably touching joy of a last, a very last, and all too short gladness; he knows of a chord which expresses those secret and weird midnight hours of the soul, when cause and effect seem to have fallen asunder, and at every moment something may spring out of nonent.i.ty. He is happiest of all when creating from out the nethermost depths of human happiness, and, so to speak, from out man's empty b.u.mper, in which the bitterest and most repulsive drops have mingled with the sweetest for good or evil at last. He knows that weary shuffling along of the soul which is no longer able either to spring or to fly, nay, which is no longer able to walk, he has the modest glance of concealed suffering, of understanding without comfort, of leave-taking without word or sign; verily as the Orpheus of all secret misery he is greater than anyone, and many a thing was introduced into art for the first time by him, which hitherto had not been given expression, had not even been thought worthy of art-the cynical revolts, for instance, of which only the greatest sufferer is capable, also many a small and quite microscopical feature of the soul, as it were the scales of its amphibious nature-yes indeed, he is the master of everything very small. But this he refuses to be! His tastes are much more in love with vast walls and with daring frescoes!... He does not see that his spirit has another desire and bent-a totally different outlook-that it prefers to squat peacefully in the corners of broken-down houses: concealed in this way, and hidden even from himself, he paints his really great masterpieces, all of which are very short, often only one bar in length-there, only, does he become quite good, great and perfect, perhaps there alone.-Wagner is one who has suffered much-and this elevates him above other musicians.-I admire Wagner wherever he sets _himself_ to music-

Wherein I Raise Objections.

With all this I do not wish to imply that I regard this music as healthy, and least of all in those places where it speaks of Wagner himself. My objections to Wagner's music are physiological objections. Why should I therefore begin by clothing them in aesthetic formulae? aesthetic is indeed nothing more than applied physiology-The fact I bring forward, my ”_pet.i.t fait vrai_,” is that I can no longer breathe with ease when this music begins to have its effect upon me; that my foot immediately begins to feel indignant at it and rebels: for what it needs is time, dance, march; even the young German Kaiser could not march to Wagner's Imperial March,-what my foot demands in the first place from music is that ecstasy which lies in good walking, stepping and dancing. But do not my stomach, my heart, my circulation also protest? Are not my intestines also troubled? And do I not become hoa.r.s.e unawares? ... in order to listen to Wagner I require Geraudel's Pastilles.... And then I ask myself, what is it that my whole body must have from music in general? for there is no such thing as a soul.... I believe it must have relief: as if all animal functions were accelerated by means of light, bold, unfettered, self-reliant rhythms, as if brazen and leaden life could lose its weight by means of delicate and smooth melodies. My melancholy would fain rest its head in the haunts and abysses of perfection; for this reason I need music. But Wagner makes one ill-What do I care about the theatre? What do I care about the spasms of its moral ecstasies in which the mob-and who is not the mob to-day?-rejoices? What do I care about the whole pantomimic hocus-pocus of the actor? You are beginning to see that I am essentially anti-theatrical at heart. For the stage, this mob art _par excellence_, my soul has that deepest scorn felt by every artist to-day. With a stage success a man sinks to such an extent in my esteem as to drop out of sight; failure in this quarter makes me p.r.i.c.k my ears, makes me begin to pay attention. But this was not so with Wagner, next to the Wagner who created the most unique music that has ever existed there was the Wagner who was essentially a man of the stage, an actor, the most enthusiastic mimomaniac that has perhaps existed on earth, even as a musician. And let it be said _en pa.s.sant_ that if Wagner's theory was ”drama is the object, music is only a means”-his practice was from beginning to end ”the att.i.tude is the end, drama and even music can never be anything else than means.” Music as the manner of accentuating, of strengthening, and deepening dramatic poses and all things which please the senses of the actor; and Wagnerian drama only an opportunity for a host of interesting att.i.tudes!-Alongside of all other instincts he had the dictatorial instinct of a great actor in everything and, as I have already said, as a musician also.-On one occasion, and not without trouble, I made this clear to a Wagnerite _pur sang_,-clearness and a Wagnerite! I won't say another word. There were reasons for adding; ”For heaven's sake, be a little more true unto yourself! We are not in Bayreuth now. In Bayreuth people are only upright in the ma.s.s; the individual lies, he even lies to himself. One leaves oneself at home when one goes to Bayreuth, one gives up all right to one's own tongue and choice, to one's own taste and even to one's own courage, one knows these things no longer as one is wont to have them and practise them before G.o.d and the world and between one's own four walls. In the theatre no one brings the finest senses of his art with him, and least of all the artist who works for the theatre,-for here loneliness is lacking; everything perfect does not suffer a witness.... In the theatre one becomes mob, herd, woman, Pharisee, electing cattle, patron, idiot-Wagnerite: there, the most personal conscience is bound to submit to the levelling charm of the great mult.i.tude, there the neighbour rules, there one _becomes_ a neighbour.”

Wagner As A Danger.

1.

The aim after which more modern music is striving, which is now given the strong but obscure name of ”unending melody,” can be clearly understood by comparing it to one's feelings on entering the sea. Gradually one loses one's footing and one ultimately abandons oneself to the mercy or fury of the elements: one has to swim. In the solemn, or fiery, swinging movement, first slow and then quick, of old music-one had to do something quite different; one had to dance. The measure which was required for this and the control of certain balanced degrees of time and energy, forced the soul of the listener to continual sobriety of thought.-Upon the counterplay of the cooler currents of air which came from this sobriety, and from the warmer breath of enthusiasm, the charm of all good music rested-Richard Wagner wanted another kind of movement,-he overthrew the physiological first principle of all music before his time. It was no longer a matter of walking or dancing,-we must swim, we must hover.... This perhaps decides the whole matter. ”Unending melody” really wants to break all the symmetry of time and strength; it actually scorns these things-Its wealth of invention resides precisely in what to an older ear sounds like rhythmic paradox and abuse. From the imitation or the prevalence of such a taste there would arise a danger for music-so great that we can imagine none greater-the complete degeneration of the feeling for rhythm, _chaos_ in the place of rhythm.... The danger reaches its climax when such music cleaves ever more closely to naturalistic play-acting and pantomime, which governed by no laws of form, aim at effect and nothing more....

Expressiveness at all costs and music a servant, a slave to att.i.tudes-this is the end....

2.

What? would it really be the first virtue of a performance (as performing musical artists now seem to believe), under all circ.u.mstances to attain to a _haut-relief_ which cannot be surpa.s.sed? If this were applied to Mozart, for instance, would it not be a real sin against Mozart's spirit,-Mozart's cheerful, enthusiastic, delightful and loving spirit? He who fortunately was no German, and whose seriousness is a charming and golden seriousness and not by any means that of a German clodhopper.... Not to speak of the earnestness of the ”marble statue”.... But you seem to think that all music is the music of the ”marble statue”?-that all music should, so to speak, spring out of the wall and shake the listener to his very bowels?... Only thus could music have any effect! But on whom would the effect be made?

Upon something on which a n.o.ble artist ought never to deign to act,-upon the mob, upon the immature! upon the blases! upon the diseased! upon idiots! upon _Wagnerites_!...

A Music Without A Future.

Of all the arts which succeed in growing on the soil of a particular culture, music is the last plant to appear; maybe because it is the one most dependent upon our innermost feelings, and therefore the last to come to the surface-at a time when the culture to which it belongs is in its autumn season and beginning to fade. It was only in the art of the Dutch masters that the spirit of mediaeval Christianity found its expression-, its architecture of sound is the youngest, but genuine and legitimate, sister of the Gothic. It was only in Handel's music that the best in Luther and in those like him found its voice, the Judeo-heroic trait which gave the Reformation a touch of greatness-the Old Testament, _not_ the New, become music. It was left to Mozart, to pour out the epoch of Louis XIV., and of the art of Racine and Claude Lorrain, in _ringing_ gold; only in Beethoven's and Rossini's music did the Eighteenth Century sing itself out-the century of enthusiasm, broken ideals, and _fleeting joy_. All real and original music is a swan song-Even our last form of music, despite its prevalence and its will to prevail, has perhaps only a short time to live, for it sprouted from a soil which was in the throes of a rapid subsidence,-of a culture which will soon be _submerged_. A certain catholicism of feeling, and a predilection for some ancient indigenous (so-called national) ideals and eccentricities, was its first condition.