The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. — Nietzsche — John Shaqi
The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms.
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.