And now just a word en passant concerning Wagner's writings: they are among other things a school of shrewdness. The system of procedures of which Wagner disposes, might be applied to a hundred other cases,—he that hath ears to hear let him hear. Perhaps I may lay claim to some public acknowledgment, if I put three of the most valuable of these procedures into a precise form.

Everything that Wagner cannot do is bad.

Wagner could do much more than he does; but his strong principles prevent him.

Everything that Wagner can do, no one will [pg 030] ever be able to do after him, no one has ever done before him, and no one must ever do after him. Wagner is godly.

These three propositions are the quintessence of Wagner's writings;—the rest is merely—“literature”.

—Not every kind of music hitherto has been in need of literature; and it were well, to try and discover the actual reason of this. Is it perhaps that Wagner's music is too difficult to understand? Or did he fear precisely the reverse—that it was too easy,—that people might not understand it with sufficient difficulty?—As a matter of fact, his whole life long, he did nothing but repeat one proposition: that his music did not mean music alone! But something more! Something immeasurably more!… “Not music alone”—no musician would speak in this way. I repeat, Wagner could not create things as a whole; he had no choice, he was obliged to create things in bits, with “motives,” attitudes, formulÆ, duplications, and hundreds of repetitions, he remained a rhetorician in music,—and that is why he was at bottom forced to press “this means” into the foreground. “Music can never be anything else than a means”: this was his theory, but above all it was the only practice that lay open to him. No musician however thinks in this way.—Wagner was in need of literature, in order to persuade the whole world to take his music seriously, profoundly, “because it meant an infinity of things”, all his life he was the commentator of the “Idea.”—What does Elsa stand for? But without a doubt, Elsa is “the unconscious [pg 031] mind of the people” (—“when I realised this, I naturally became a thorough revolutionist”—).

Do not let us forget that, when Hegel and Schelling were misleading the minds of Germany, Wagner was still young: that he guessed, or rather fully grasped, that the only thing which Germans take seriously is—“the idea,”—that is to say, something obscure, uncertain, wonderful; that among Germans lucidity is an objection, logic a refutation. Schopenhauer rigorously pointed out the dishonesty of Hegel's and Schelling's age,—rigorously, but also unjustly, for he himself, the pessimistic old counterfeiter, was in no way more “honest” than his more famous contemporaries. But let us leave morality out of the question, Hegel is a matter of taste.… And not only of German but of European taste!… A taste which Wagner understood!—which he felt equal to! which he has immortalised!—All he did was to apply it to music—he invented a style for himself, which might mean an “infinity of things,”—he was Hegel's heir.… Music as “Idea.”—

And how well Wagner was understood!—The same kind of man who used to gush over Hegel, now gushes over Wagner, in his school they even write Hegelian.11 But he who understood Wagner best, was the German youthlet. The two words “infinity” and “meaning” were sufficient for this: at their sound the youthlet immediately began to feel exceptionally happy. Wagner did not conquer these boys with music, but with the “idea”:—it is [pg 032] the enigmatical vagueness of his art, its game of hide-and-seek amid a hundred symbols, its polychromy in ideals, which leads and lures the lads. It is Wagner's genius for forming clouds, his sweeps and swoops through the air, his ubiquity and nullibiety—precisely the same qualities with which Hegel led and lured in his time!—Moreover in the presence of Wagner's multifariousness, plenitude and arbitrariness, they seem to themselves justified—“saved”. Tremulously they listen while the great symbols in his art seem to make themselves heard from out the misty distance, with a gentle roll of thunder, and they are not at all displeased if at times it gets a little grey, gruesome and cold. Are they not one and all, like Wagner himself, on quite intimate terms with bad weather, with German weather! Wotan is their God, but Wotan is the God of bad weather.… They are right, how could these German youths—in their present condition,—miss what we others, we halcyonians, miss in Wagner? i.e.: la gaya scienza; light feet, wit, fire, grave, grand logic, stellar dancing, wanton intellectuality, the vibrating light of the South, the calm sea—perfection.…