The best instruction, the most conscientious schooling, the most thorough familiarity, yea, and even isolation, with the Old Masters,--all this only acts as a palliative, or, more strictly speaking, has but an illusory effect, because the first condition of the right thing is no longer in our bodies; whether this first condition be the strong race of a Händel or the overflowing animal spirits of a Rossini. Not everyone has the right to every teacher: and this holds good of whole epochs.--In itself it is not impossible that there are still remains of stronger natures, typical unadapted men, somewhere in Europe: from this quarter the advent of a somewhat belated form of beauty and perfection, even in music, might still be hoped for. But the most that we can expect to see are exceptional cases. From the rule, that corruption is paramount, that corruption is a fatality,--not even a God can save music. EPILOGUE And now let us take breath and withdraw a moment from this narrow world which necessarily must be narrow, because we have to make enquiries relative to the value of _persons._ A philosopher feels that he wants to wash his hands after he has concerned himself so long with the "Case of Wagner." I shall now give my notion of what is _modern._ According to the measure of energy of every age, there is also a standard that determines which virtues shall be allowed and which forbidden. The age either has the virtues of _ascending_ life, in which case it resists the virtues of degeneration with all its deepest instincts. Or it is in itself an age of degeneration, in which case it requires the virtues of declining life,--in which case it hates everything that justifies itself, solely as being the outcome of a plenitude, or a superabundance of strength. Æsthetic is inextricably bound up with these biological principles: there is decadent æsthetic, and _classical_ æsthetic,--"Beauty in itself" is just as much a chimera as any other kind of idealism.--Within the narrow sphere of the so-called moral values, no greater antithesis could be found than that of _master-morality_ and the morality of _Christian_ valuations: the latter having grown out of a thoroughly morbid soil. (--The gospels present us with the same physiological types, as do the novels of Dostoiewsky), the master-morality ("Roman," "pagan," "classical," "Renaissance"), on the other hand, being the symbolic speech of well-constitutedness, of _ascending_ life, and of the Will to Power as a vital principle. Master-morality _affirms_ just as instinctively as Christian morality _denies_ ("God," "Beyond," "self-denial,"--all of them negations). The first reflects its plenitude upon things,--it transfigures, it embellishes, it _rationalises_ the world,--the latter impoverishes, bleaches, mars the value of things; it _suppresses_ the world. "World" is a Christian term of abuse. These antithetical forms in the optics of values, are _both_ necessary: they are different