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.—256Owing to the pathological estrangement which the insanity of nationality has induced, and still induces, among the peoples of Europe; owing also to the shortsighted and quick-handed politicians who are at the top today with the help of this insanity, without any inkling that their separatist policies can of necessity only be entr’acte policies; owing to all this and much else that today simply cannot be said, the most unequivocal portents are now being overlooked, or arbitrarily and mendaciously reinterpreted—that Europe wants to become one.In all the more profound and comprehensive men of this century, the over-all direction of the mysterious workings of their soul was to prepare the way for this new synthesis and to anticipate experimentally the European of the future: only in their foregrounds or in weaker hours, say in old age, did they belong to the “fatherlandish”—they were merely taking a rest from themselves when they became “patriots.” I am thinking of such human beings as Napoleon, Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, Heinrich Heine, Schopenhauer: do not hold it against me when I include Richard Wagner, too, with them, for one should not allow oneself to be led astray about him by his own misunderstandings—geniuses of his type rarely have the right to understand themselves.Even less, to be sure, by the indecent noise with which people in France now close themselves off against him and resist him: the fact remains nevertheless that the late French romanticism of the forties and Richard Wagner belong together most closely and intimately.In all the heights and depths of their needs they are related, fundamentally related: it is Europe, the one Europe, whose soul surges and longs to get further and higher through their manifold and impetuous art—where? into a new light? toward a new sun? But who could express precisely what all these masters of new means of language could not express precisely? What is certain is that the same storm and stress tormented them and that they sought in the same way, these last great seekers!Literature dominated all of them up to their eyes and ears—they were the first artists steeped in world literature—and most of them were themselves writers, poets, mediators and mixers of the arts and senses (as a musician, Wagner belongs among painters; as a poet, among musicians; as an artist in general, among actors); all of them were fanatics of expression “at any price”—I should stress Delacroix, who was most closely related to Wagner—all of them great discoverers in the realm of the sublime, also of the ugly and gruesome, and still greater discoverers concerning effects, display, and the art of display windows—all of them talents far beyond their genius—virtuosos through and through, with uncanny access to everything that seduces, allures, compels, overthrows; born enemies of logic and straight lines, lusting after the foreign, the exotic, the tremendous, the crooked, the self-contradictory; as human beings, Tantaluses of the will, successful plebeians who knew themselves to be incapable, both in their lives and works, of a noble tempo, a lento41—take Balzac, for example—unbridled workers, almost self-destroyers through work; antinomians and rebels against custom, ambitious and insatiable without balance and enjoyment; all of them broke and collapsed in the end before the Christian cross (with right and reason: for who among them would have been profound and original42 enough for a philosophy of the Antichrist?)—on the whole, an audaciously daring, magnificently violent type of higher human beings who soared, and tore others along, to the heights—it fell to them to first teach their century—and it is the century of the crowd!—the concept “higher man”—Let the German friends of Richard Wagner ponder whether there is in Wagner’s art anything outright German, or whether it is not just its distinction that it derives from supra-German sources and impulses.Nor should it be underestimated to what extent Paris was indispensable for the development of his type, and at the decisive moment the depth of his instincts led him to Paris.His entire manner and self-apostolate could perfect itself only when he saw the model of the French socialists.Perhaps it will be found after a subtler comparison that, to the honor of Richard Wagner’s German nature, his doings were in every respect stronger, more audacious, harder, and higher than anything a Frenchman of the nineteenth century could manage—thanks to the fact that we Germans are still closer to barbarism than the French.Perhaps Wagner’s strangest creation is inaccessible, inimitable, and beyond the feelings of the whole, so mature, Latin race, not only today but forever: the figure of Siegfried, that very free man who may indeed be much too free, too hard, too cheerful, too healthy, too anti-Catholic for the taste of ancient and mellow cultured peoples.He may even have been a sin against romanticism, this anti-romantic Siegfried: well, Wagner more than atoned for this sin in his old and glum days when—anticipating a taste that has since then become political—he began, if not to walk, at least to preach, with his characteristic religious vehemence, the way to Rome
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