The Case of Wagner: Complete Works, Volume 8 — Nietzsche — John Shaqi
The Case of Wagner: Complete Works, Volume 8
Nietzsche · en
There is, however, no need to multiply examples, seeing, as I have
said, that in the translations of Halévy's and Lichtenberger's
books the reader will find all the independent evidence he could
possibly desire, disproving the popular, and even the learned belief
that, in the two pamphlets before us we have a complete, apparently
unaccountable, and therefore "demented" _volte-face_ on Nietzsche's
part. Nevertheless, for fear lest some doubt should still linger in
certain minds concerning this point, and with the view of adding
interest to these essays, the Editor considered it advisable, in the
Second Edition, to add a number of extracts from Nietzsche's diary of
the year 1878 (ten years before "The Case of Wagner," and "Nietzsche
_contra_ Wagner" were written) in order to show to what extent those
learned critics who complain of Nietzsche's "morbid and uncontrollable
recantations and revulsions of feeling," have overlooked even the plain
facts of the case when forming their all-too-hasty conclusions. These
extracts will be found at the end of "Nietzsche _contra_ Wagner." While
reading them, however, it should not be forgotten that they were never
intended for publication by Nietzsche himself--a fact which accounts
for their unpolished and sketchy form--and that they were first
published in vol. xi. of the first German Library Edition (pp. 99-129)
only when he was a helpless invalid, in 1897. Since then, in 1901 and
1906 respectively, they have been reprinted, once in the large German
Library Edition (vol. xi. pp. 181-202), and once in the German Pocket
Edition, as an appendix to "Human-All-too-Human," Part II.
An altogether special interest now attaches to these pamphlets; for, in
the first place we are at last in possession of Wagner's own account
of his development, his art, his aspirations and his struggles, in the
amazing self-revelation entitled _My Life_[5]; and secondly, we now
have _Ecce Homo,_ Nietzsche's autobiography, in which we learn for the
first time from Nietzsche's own pen to what extent his history was that
of a double devotion--to Wagner on the one hand, and to his own life
task, the Transvaluation of all Values, on the other.
Readers interested in the Nietzsche-Wagner controversy will naturally
look to these books for a final solution of all the difficulties which
the problem presents. But let them not be too sanguine. From first
to last this problem is not to be settled by "facts." A good deal of
instinctive choice, instinctive aversion, and instinctive suspicion
are necessary here. A little more suspicion, for instance, ought
to be applied to Wagner's _My Life,_ especially in England, where
critics are not half suspicious enough about a continental artist's
self-revelations, and are too prone, if they have suspicions at all, to
apply them in the wrong place.