Basic writings of Nietzsche - By Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche & Walter Arnold Kaufmann Page 0,15

But there is something far worse in this book, something I now regret still more than that I obscured and spoiled Dionysian premonitions with Schopenhauerian formulations: namely, that I spoiled the grandiose Greek problem, as it had arisen before my eyes, by introducing the most modern problems! That I appended hopes where there was no ground for hope, where everything pointed all too plainly to an end! That on the basis of the latest German music I began to rave about “the German spirit” as if that were in the process even then of discovering and finding itself again—at a time when the German spirit, which not long before had still had the will to dominate Europe and the strength to lead Europe,11 was just making its testament and abdicating forever, making its transition, under the pompous pretense of founding a Reich, to a leveling mediocrity, democracy, and “modern ideas”!

Indeed, meanwhile I have learned to consider this “German spirit” with a sufficient lack of hope or mercy; also, contemporary German music, which is romanticism through and through and most un-Greek of all possible art forms—moreover, a first-rate poison for the nerves, doubly dangerous among a people who love drink and who honor lack of clarity as a virtue, for it has the double quality of a narcotic that both intoxicates and spreads a fog.

To be sure, apart from all the hasty hopes and faulty applications to the present with which I spoiled my first book, there still remains the great Dionysian question mark I raised—regarding music as well: what would a music have to be like that would no longer be of romantic origin, like German music—but Dionysian?

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But, my dear sir, what in the world is romantic if your book isn’t? Can deep hatred against “the Now,” against “reality” and “modern ideas” be pushed further than you pushed it in your artists’ metaphysics? believing sooner in the Nothing, sooner in the devil than in “the Now”? Is it not a deep bass of wrath and the lust for destruction that we hear humming underneath all of your contrapuntal vocal art and seduction of the ear, a furious resolve against everything that is “now,” a will that is not too far removed from practical nihilism and seems to say: “sooner let nothing be true than that you should be right, than that your truth should be proved right!”

Listen yourself, my dear pessimist and art-deifier, but with open ears, to a single passage chosen from your book—to the not ineloquent dragon-slayer passage which may have an insidious pied-piper sound for young ears and hearts. How now? Isn’t this the typical creed of the romantic of 1830, masked by the pessimism of 1850? Even the usual romantic finale is sounded—break, breakdown, return and collapse before an old faith, before the old God. How now? Is your pessimists’ book not itself a piece of anti-Hellenism and romanticism? Is it not itself something “equally intoxicating and befogging,” in any case a narcotic, even a piece of music, German music? But listen:

“Let us imagine a coming generation with such intrepidity of vision, with such a heroic penchant for the tremendous; let us imagine the bold stride of these dragon-slayers, the proud audacity with which they turn their back on all the weakling’s doctrines of optimism in order to ‘live resolutely’ in wholeness and fullness: would it not be necessary for the tragic man of such a culture, in view of his self-education for seriousness and terror, to desire a new art, the art of metaphysical comfort, to desire tragedy as his own proper Helen, and to exclaim with Faust:

Should not my longing overleap the distance

And draw the fairest form into existence?”12

“Would it not be necessary?”—No, thrice no! O you young romantics: it would not be necessary! But it is highly probable that it will end that way, that you end that way—namely, “comforted,” as it is written, in spite of all self-education for seriousness and terror, “comforted metaphysically”—in sum, as romantics end, as Christians.

No! You ought to learn the art of this-worldly comfort first; you ought to learn to laugh, my young friends, if you are hell-bent on remaining pessimists. Then perhaps, as laughers, you may some day dispatch all metaphysical comforts to the devil—metaphysics in front. Or, to say it in the language of that Dionysian monster who bears the name of Zarathustra:

“Raise up your hearts, my brothers, high, higher! And don’t forget your legs! Raise up your legs, too, good dancers; and still better: