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 Nietzsche’s The Case of Wagner
and Nietzsche Contra Wagner

7354_Harvey & Ridley.indd 1 13/12/21 10:16 AM

 Edinburgh Critical Guides to Nietzsche
Series editors: Keith Ansell-Pearson and Daniel Conway

Guides you through the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), one of modernity’s
most independent, original and seminal minds

The Edinburgh Critical Guides to Nietzsche series brings Nietzsche’s writings

to life for students, teachers and scholars alike, with each text benefitting from
its own dedicated book. Every guide features new research and reflects the
most recent developments in Nietzsche scholarship. The authors unlock each
work’s intricate structure, explore its specific mode of presentation and explain
its seminal importance. Whether you are working in contemporary philosophy,
political theory, religious studies, psychology, psychoanalysis or literary theory,
these guides will help you to fully appreciate Nietzsche’s enduring significance
for contemporary thought.

Books in the series

Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, Tracy B. Strong and
Babette Babich
Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Sean Kirkland
Nietzsche’s Unfashionable Observations, Jeffrey Church
Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human, Ruth Abbey
Nietzsche’s Dawn, Katrina Mitcheson
Nietzsche’s Gay Science, Robert Miner
Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Charles Bambach
Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, Daniel Conway
Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality, Robert Guay
Nietzsche’s The Case of Wagner and Nietzsche Contra Wagner, Ryan Harvey and
Aaron Ridley
Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, Vanessa Lemm
Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ, Paul Bishop
Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, Matthew Meyer
Nietzsche’s Late Notebooks, Alan Schrift

Visit our website at edinburghuniversitypress.com/series-edinburgh-critical-

guides-to-nietzsche to find out more

7354_Harvey & Ridley.indd 2 13/12/21 10:16 AM

 Nietzsche’s The Case of
Wagner and Nietzsche
Contra Wagner

A Critical Introduction and Guide

Ryan Harvey and Aaron Ridley

7354_Harvey & Ridley.indd 3 13/12/21 10:16 AM

 Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in
the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject
areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge
scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic
works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website:
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© Ryan Harvey and Aaron Ridley, 2022

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The right of Ryan Harvey and Aaron Ridley to be identified as the authors
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Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003
(SI No. 2498).

7354_Harvey & Ridley.indd 4 13/12/21 10:16 AM

 Contents

Acknowledgements vii
Chronology viii
Primary Sources and Abbreviations xi

Introduction: The Case of Wagner 1

1. The Artwork of the Future: A Prelude to the Philosophy
of the Future 14
The artwork of the future 14
‘Athenian self-dissection’ and the decline of culture
at the hands of science 18
Science, redeemed by her defeat, reaches out to
her acknowledged victor: art 22
Vitalism and art 24
The Birth of Tragedy and the ‘music-making Socrates’ 26
Socrates, make music! 28
Knocking at the portals of the present and the future 32
We must now consider similar phenomena in
the present 33
2. The Pessimism of Strength: An Attempt to Revise the
Socratic and Tragic Cultures 41
The essence of tragic culture 41
An attempt to self-criticise 43
To ‘make music’ from the materials of life 48
The twilight of an idol 53
The uniting and dividing point of two cultures 59

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 vi contents

3. Music in the Microcosm and the Macrocosm 64

Becoming the legitimate heir and successor to
the pre-Socratics 64
Human, All Too Human and the beginning of
Nietzsche’s post-Wagnerian confrontation 67
Dawn on the horizon 71
The Gay Science 75
Beyond Good and Evil: prelude to a philosophy of
the future 81
Ecce Homo 87
4. Music as the Late Fruit of Every Culture 98
The Case of Wagner 98
The preface 101
The charges 107
Sections 1–2 108
Section 3 111
Sections 4–5 115
Section 6 124
Sections 7–8 149
Sections 9–10 164
Sections 11–12 174
5. The Case of Nietzsche; or, How to Become More
Wagnerian than Wagner 184
First postscript 184
Second postscript and epilogue 211
Conclusion 229
Coming full circle 229
A dangerous game 232

Glossary of Key Terms 240

Guide to Further Reading on The Case of Wagner
and Nietzsche Contra Wagner 245
Bibliography 247
Index 253

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 Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Dan Conway and Keith Ansell-Pearson

for inviting our contribution to the present series. Without their
encouragement and support, this work would not have been
possible. We also wish to thank two anonymous reviewers of our
preliminary proposal for both the generosity they showed towards
our initial project as well as the insightful commentary they pro-
vided in terms of how we might improve it.
Special thanks are also due to Marco Murelli and James
McGuiggan, both of whom read through early drafts of the manu-
script, either in whole or in part, and provided invaluable feedback
from their unique specialities and perspectives.

7354_Harvey & Ridley.indd 7 13/12/21 10:16 AM

 Chronology

1844 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche is born on 15 October

in Röcken, Saxony.
1849 Nietzsche’s father Ludwig, a Protestant minister, dies
of ‘softening of the brain’.
1850 Nietzsche’s younger brother, Joseph, dies, and the
family moves to Naumburg.
1858–64 He attends the elite boarding school Schulpforta on
a full scholarship that he received as the orphan of a
minister.
1864 Enrols at the University of Bonn to study theology,
although he no longer plans to become a minister. He
joins a fraternity, but resigns soon after.
1865 Follows the philologist Professor Albrecht Ritschl
to the University of Leipzig. He buys a copy of
Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation in
his landlord’s shop.
1865 Refuses to take Communion during his Easter visit
home to Naumburg.
1866 Publishes an essay on Theognis in a philological
journal edited by Ritschl.
1867 Enlists in an artillery regiment after managing to pass
a physical exam.
1868 Injures himself while riding. Reads Kuno Fischer’s
book on Kant. Meets Richard Wagner in a café in
Leipzig, through the mediation of Mrs Ritschl. After

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 Chronology ix

his 24th birthday becomes emancipated from his

guardian.
1869 Appointed Extraordinary Professor of Classical
Philology in Basel on Ritschl’s recommendation.
Renounces Prussian citizenship. Begins frequent
visits to Wagner in nearby Tribschen.
1870 Volunteers as a medical orderly in the Franco-Prussian
War, but after two months becomes ill with dysentery
and diphtheria.
1872 Publishes his first, controversial book, The Birth of
Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. Accompanies Wagner
to Bayreuth for the laying of the foundation stone for
the new opera house.
1873 Meets Paul Rée in Basel.
1873–75 Publishes Unfashionable Observations. Relationship with
Wagner begins to sour.
1876 Begins working with Peter Gast, who takes dictation
for an essay on Wagner. Visits the Bayreuth Festival
and sees Wagner for the last time in Sorrento.
1878 Publishes the first part of Human, All Too Human.
1879 Publishes the two additions to Human, All Too
Human. Resigns from Basel with a small pension.
Begins a long period of wandering, mostly through
Italy and Switzerland, staying in off-season boarding
houses.
1881 Publishes Daybreak.
1882 His friendship with Paul Rée ends. Publishes the first
edition of The Gay Science. In April travels to Rome,
meets Lou Salomé, and proposes marriage to her. She
declines and the relationship ends badly.
1883–84 Publishes Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
1884 Breaks with his sister Elisabeth over her fiancé’s anti-
Semitism.
1886 Publishes Beyond Good and Evil. Plans new editions of
previous works, for which he writes five new prefaces,
among other material.
1887 Writes On the Genealogy of Morality in July and August.
It is published in November in an edition of 600 copies.
He pays for the printing himself.

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 x Nietzsche’s The Case of Wagner

1888 Publishes The Case of Wagner. Writes The Anti-Christ,

Ecce Homo, Nietzsche Contra Wagner and Twilight of the
Idols.
1889 Suffers a breakdown and collapses in Turin, after writing
megalomaniacal postcards to many friends and celebri-
ties. He is retrieved by his friend Franz Overbeck, who
takes him to Basel. Nietzsche’s mother then takes him
to an asylum in Jena.
1890 Nietzsche is moved to his mother’s apartment in Jena,
and then to Naumburg. His sister Elisabeth returns to
Germany from Paraguay. She later takes control of her
brother’s literary estate.
1894 Elisabeth founds the Nietzsche Archive, which houses
Nietzsche and his papers.
1896 Elisabeth moves Nietzsche and the Archive to Weimar.
1900 Dies in Weimar on 25 August.

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 Primary Sources and Abbreviations

Nietzsche

AT Attempt at a Self-Criticism, in Nietzsche 1993

BGE Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche 2014
BT The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche 1993
CW The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche 1967
D Dawn, Nietzsche 2011
DS ‘David Strauss, Confessor and Writer’, in Nietzsche 1995b
EH Ecce Homo, Nietzsche 1989
GM On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche 1998
GS Gay Science, Nietzsche 1974
HAH1 Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche 1995a
HAH2 Assorted Opinions and Maxims/The Wanderer and his Shadow,
Nietzsche 2013
HL ‘On the Utility and Liability of History for Life’, in Nietzsche
1995b
KSB Kritische Studienausgabe, Sämtliche Briefe, Nietzsche 1986
NCW Nietzsche Contra Wagner, Nietzsche 2005
SE ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, in Nietzsche 1995b
SL Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche 1969, 1985
TI Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche 1968
TSZ Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche 1933
UF Unpublished Fragments and Notebooks, Nietzsche 1999, 2009,
2013, 2019

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 xii Nietzsche’s The Case of Wagner

WB ‘Richard Wagner in Bayreuth’, in Nietzsche 1995b

Textual references are followed by the section number and sec-

tion name when necessary. Nietzsche’s notebook entries (as UF)
are followed by notebook entry reference and date of entry.
For Nietzsche’s selected letters in English (as SL), we specify
the date of publication and page number, but we also include the
corresponding reference for the letters in German (as KSB), which
cite the volume number and page, and include the addressee and
letter date.

Schopenhauer

BM ‘On the Basis of Morality’, in Schopenhauer 2009

FW ‘Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will’, in Schopenhauer
2009
PP 1 Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. 1, Schopenhauer 2014
PP 2 Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. 2, Schopenhauer 2015
WWR 1 The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, Schopenhauer
2014
WWR 2 The World as Will and Representation, vol. 2, Schopenhauer
1966

Textual references are followed by section or chapter number and

name as necessary.With the exception of WWR 2, we have relied
on the Cambridge Edition of Schopenhauer’s Works.

Cosima Wagner

CWD 1 Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, vol. 1, Wagner 1978/1980

CWD 2 Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, vol. 2, Wagner 1978/1980
DBCW 1 Die Briefe Cosima Wagners an Friedrich Nietzsche, vol. 1,
Wagner 1938–40
DBCW 2 Die Briefe Cosima Wagners an Friedrich Nietzsche, vol. 2,
Wagner 1938–40

Textual references to CWD are followed by the page and date of

entry. For Cosima’s letters to Nietzsche (as DBCW), which only

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 Primary Sources and Abbreviations xiii

exist in the German original, textual references are followed by

the page and letter date.

Richard Wagner

BB Richard Wagner’s Diaries, aka the ‘Brown Book’, Wagner 1980

PW Prose Works in 8 Volumes, Wagner 1893–97
SLRW Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, Wagner 1987

Textual references to PW are followed by the volume number

and page. For Wagner’s selected letters in English (as SLRW), tex-
tual references are followed by the page number and include the
addressee and letter date. Textual references to BB are followed by
the page number and date of entry.

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7354_Harvey & Ridley.indd 14 13/12/21 10:16 AM
 Introduction: The Case of Wagner

He has wounded me, the one who awakened me.

UF 28[6], spring–summer 1878

Of all the books that Nietzsche produced during the final year of
his productive life, The Case of Wagner is the only one that was
published during those closing months of 1888 – indeed it was
rushed to be so. Why? Considering that the book itself runs to
hardly sixty pages in the German original and prima facie seems
to be just another attack on Wagner and his music, The Case of
Wagner today tends to be lumped into that larger mass of the
much more familiar and distinguished collection of books that
Nietzsche produced that year, including The Anti-Christ, Twi-
light of the Idols and Ecce Homo, and so is typically passed over by
anthologists as being, on the whole, inconsequential to his phi-
losophy more generally.
Indeed, as it presently stands, the majority of Nietzsche’s
commentators have not been terribly interested in his relation-
ship with Wagner: they have been inclined to regard Nietzsche’s
obsession with him as a biographical quirk, and have ignored
his last and most substantial discussion of Wagner as a result.
Yet Nietzsche’s preoccupation with Wagner was indeed a lifelong
obsession. No other topic or figure more consistently and persis-
tently shows up in Nietzsche’s books from beginning to end as
does Wagner and his theories. Nietzsche not only felt strongly
enough about Wagner to write a book about him and then to
anthologise many of his earlier remarks in his Nietzsche Contra
Wagner, he also turned to a discussion of Wagner – sometimes at
length, sometimes disguised as ‘the artist’ – in every single book

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 2 Nietzsche’s The Case of Wagner

that he ever wrote. It is this that makes the scholarly neglect of

The Case of Wagner so surprising.
At the same time, and yet outside of the traditional scholar-
ship on Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner is not by any means a new
subject matter of philosophical debate. In some respects, it has
taken on a life of its own. But in this case one might wonder
why it has the status of a philosophical problem at all. What does
Wagner have to do with philosophy more broadly, and why is
there a ‘case’ against him? Why have philosophers since the time
of Nietzsche found it necessary to take him on? These become
very interesting questions in their own right, for what they seem
to suggest is that Wagner’s art, not only as a creative deed, but
also in terms of the historical and philosophical exegesis in which
he contextualised it, really might have exposed some kind of raw
nerve when it came to the relationship between philosophy and
art. One need only point out that some of the most enduring
charges against Wagner have been made by thinkers or philoso-
phers who were artists themselves. This fact alone suggests – and
it is certainly the case in the historical lineage of Wagner criticism
from Nietzsche to Mann to Heidegger to Adorno – that taking
on Wagner has been motivated in large part by an ambivalent
kind of admiration for him.1 In this sense the intellectual tradition
of taking on Wagner, or what amounts to ‘the case of Wagner as
a genre’, has been marked, at least since the time of Nietzsche,
by artists who are philosophers (or philosophers who are artists)
to once again set the relationship between philosophy and art to
rights, however they happen to see that right.
So how then should we understand Nietzsche’s case of Wagner?
On the one hand, the mere fact that the case of Wagner persists to
the present day and is taken up by a number of modern think-
ers under the banner of Wagner criticism does surprisingly little to
clarify this point. On the other hand, if the case of Wagner does not
simply or exclusively refer to a circumscribed event in the history

1
 his is never truer than with Adorno (1981), whose ‘case’ against Wagner is significant,
T
in Tanner’s own estimation, for demonstrating ‘how a thinker of genius can be led
by reacting to Wagner’s art into wild postures of rejection, and sneaking admiration’
(1996: 225).

7354_Harvey & Ridley.indd 2 13/12/21 10:16 AM

 Introduction 3

of ideas inaugurated by Nietzsche in the last year of his produc-

tive life, then the question that we should really ask is the one that
attempts to clarify precisely this point; namely, what do we mean
by the case of Wagner? Are we referring to the case of Wagner as
Nietzsche initiated it and so understood it, or are we referring to
the case of Wagner as some kind of ideological genre? These are
very important questions to consider in their own right, for when it
comes to understanding what the case of Wagner actually signifies
for philosophy, there is no question that Nietzsche plays a unique
and critical role in determining it, both in terms of how that case
arose as well as the charges in which that case consists. And yet
Nietzsche’s case of Wagner is, in both its origins and its intentions,
hardly clear at all.
Meanwhile for those commentators who have ventured to
write about, or at least touch upon, Nietzsche’s now infamous
polemic against Wagner, the vast majority have stopped dissatisfy-
ingly short of explaining what the case of Wagner actually is and
why it matters for philosophy, and instead remain more or less
content with acknowledging that the case itself has its origins in
some kind of influence that Wagner exerted on Nietzsche.2 But in
order for this kind of truism to explain what the case of Wagner
is and why it matters for philosophy, we would have to go far
beyond the mere fact that the influence existed, and investigate
instead what the nature of that influence was. If we discount from
our tally the mere fact that the influence existed, most of the
literature written about the two has done very little to actually
analyse it.3
It is also unfortunate that, in general, Nietzsche’s commenta-
tors have shown far less familiarity with Wagner than the latter’s

2
 ven Bryan Magee’s more or less pioneering work in this area, titled Wagner and Philoso-
E
phy (2000), gets nowhere near the mark in this respect.
3
As far as Nietzsche’s biographers are concerned, Julian Young’s more recent philosophical
biography (Young 2010) is about as well researched and thoroughly detailed as one could
desire in a work of this kind, and yet despite his comprehensive treatment of Nietzsche’s
life, for the most part he steers clear of the philosophical connections between the two.
Again, we are not concerned with the mere fact that the history occurred, but rather what
that history signifies in so occurring.

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 4 Nietzsche’s The Case of Wagner

commentators have with Nietzsche. For instance, even though

Nietzsche plays a minor role in what is an otherwise incredibly
detailed study of Wagner, Westernhagen’s biography (1981) dem-
onstrates considerable understanding of the dynamics between the
two men. The same can be said for Geck’s more recent excep-
tional treatment of Wagner (Geck 2013), which highlights just
how closely art and life were merged for Wagner – the very
themes indeed that preoccupied Nietzsche throughout his entire
productive life. Perhaps, however, it is Borchmeyer’s study which
shows the most impressive acquaintance with Nietzsche’s thought
and the influence that both Wagner and his prose works exerted
on it. Yet despite how obvious the influence is here, Nietzsche’s
commentators are virtually silent. In this respect, it would seem
that the traditional portrait that Nietzsche scholars have been try-
ing to paint of Nietzsche and his philosophy for the past half cen-
tury or so would just as soon prefer that Wagner’s influence not
exist, or what is effectively the same thing, that it be reduced to
one that is essentially negligible to the total value of Nietzsche’s
philosophy.
There are, however, precedents for perspective, and in many
respects the pioneering scholarship of Nietzsche’s first modern-
day champion, Walter Kaufmann, has unfortunately set the tone
for this preconception. In fact, nowhere is the nature of this one-
sided partiality so conspicuously on display than in the footnote
Kaufmann rather presumptuously adds to the end of section 15 of
his groundbreaking translation of The Birth of Tragedy in which he
proclaims that

the book might well end at this point . . . the discussion

of the birth and death of tragedy is finished in the main,
and the following celebration of the rebirth of tragedy
[in the ten-section panegyric of Wagner] weakens the
book and was shortly regretted by Nietzsche himself.
(Nietzsche 1967: 98n)

As Michael Tanner commented in his introduction to the White-

side translation, Kaufmann’s statement ‘is written from the stand-
point of someone who not only had no interest in Wagner, but

7354_Harvey & Ridley.indd 4 13/12/21 10:16 AM

 Introduction 5

who wished Nietzsche never had either’ (Nietzsche 1993: xi).

Yet despite his partisanship, Kaufmann’s knowledge of Nietzsche
was extensive, and so he surely must have known that Nietzsche
himself had acknowledged that the essay had been modelled on
Wagner’s essay ‘The Destiny of Opera’,4 and that its metaphysical
themes of ‘illusion’ and ‘reality’ are virtually identical with those
found in Wagner’s ‘Beethoven’ essay, which itself had relied on
Schopenhauer’s claim that the art of music accesses the noumenal
order most directly in order to argue that the musical genius alone
has access to a reality that is far more invariant than the shifting,
illusory ‘light-world’ before our eyes.5
Indeed, as is well known, Wagner’s own meditations on the
philosophy of Advaita Vedanta had exposed him to the notion
that reality in the absolute sense is predicated only of that which is
self-existent, and that all else that exists by reason of its inherence
in something other must be deemed Māyā in the metaphysical
sense.6 Thus from the standpoint of the immutable and self-exist-
ent, the ‘light-world before our eyes’ can only ever be a compara-
tive dualism, a dream world or a Māyā in the metaphysical sense.7
The analogy here is pregnant, for much like dreaming, we fail to
realise while in the midst of it that we are in truth the cogniser,
the cognised and the cognition; yet until we awaken, we believe
that our subjectivity is bound by the forms of experience that gov-
ern the dream world instead of recognising that both they and

4
‘Well then, the design is settled – to be modelled on Wagner’s The Destiny of Opera –
rejoice with me!’ SL (1969: 82 [KSB 3: 243]), letter to Carl von Gersdorff, 18 November
1871.
5
Both Borchmeyer (1991: 110–12, 169–70) and Köhler (2004: 517–21), another Wagner
commentator, seem to recognise this thesis, albeit with varying degrees of insight.
6
That the universe as a whole is a Māyā is not to deny that it possesses a relative reality,
only that it is not self-existent. This is a subtlety in Indian philosophy that Nietzsche
never grasped.
7
Although he clearly amalgamates the terminology of Buddhist and Vedantic thought,
an early note in Wagner’s diary, known as the Brown Book, clearly reveals the themes
he would later try to expound in his ‘Beethoven’ essay, and which we later find, quite
obviously, in The Birth of Tragedy:
‘Truth = nirvana = night
Music = Brahman = twilight
Poetry = samsara = day’ BB 148 (18 May 1868).

7354_Harvey & Ridley.indd 5 13/12/21 10:16 AM

 6 Nietzsche’s The Case of Wagner

the judgements of reality we make in accordance with them are

valid only for the dream world. Hence the implications here for
Wagner’s own arguments were quite significant, for if the com-
mon denominator of both the dream world and the waking world
lay in the subject or self as different orders of conscious reality that
we can and do experience and cross-correlate, then there must be
by analogy still more invariant, fundamental orders of conscious
reality with which subjectivity is unified as well. It is the unique
role of the musical genius, Wagner maintained, to apprehend these
more invariant orders – in his case, to behold the will-to-life as the
abstract form or Idea of the world – in order to give it both repre-
sentation and expression for the ‘light-world’ before our eyes and
the ‘sound-world’ before our ears (PW 5: 65–72, ‘Beethoven’).
For if ‘I AM’ the universal subject – the true zero-point of all sub-
jectivity – and therefore the fulcrum from which even the most
universal form of world-reality depends, then this notion, in which
all that is created is ‘art’ and therefore ‘illusion’, was cast into the
more acceptable ‘classical’ dichotomy between the Apollonian and
Dionysian as a means to explain the genesis of Greek tragedy and
the apogee of its culture and is, for better or worse, the real key to
the metaphysical theses found in The Birth of Tragedy.8
Yet this says nothing at all about the arguments we find in the
essay about culture, which heavily depend on Wagner’s Zurich
essays, especially ‘The Artwork of the Future’. This latter essay is
central not only to Nietzsche’s entire discussion of the birth and
death of tragedy, but likewise, Wagner’s arguments that connect
life and art as the conditio sine qua non of a flourishing culture and
thus make the creative deed the genuine metaphysical activity of
human beings, is found to be at the very core of Nietzsche’s case
of Wagner.

8
 or Wagner’s explanation of the compromise between the Apollonian and Dionysian
F
elements in Greek tragedy, see his essay ‘The Destiny of Opera’ (PW 5: 138–9).
On the connection between transcendent fatalism, transcendental idealism and the
dream-like nature of our existence, see Schopenhauer’s essay ‘On the Transcendent
Speculation on the Apparent Deliberateness in the Fate of the Individual’ in PP 1,
especially pp. 191–7, which quite vividly lays out the epistemological and metaphysi-
cal backdrop for The Birth of Tragedy.

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 Introduction 7

Suffice it to say, then, that our purpose in this volume is to

try to move Nietzsche’s engagement with Wagner back to centre
stage, where it belongs. And since the nature of our inquiry is
concerned with interpreting The Case of Wagner as a text, it follows
that the primary object of our inquiry must be to demonstrate the
nature and extent of Wagner’s intellectual influence on Nietzsche
precisely in order to unravel the logic behind Nietzsche’s enig-
matic case of Wagner. After all, it is the nature of this influence
that drives Nietzsche’s case of Wagner in the first place. This
inquiry will in turn help us to address the auxiliary question that is
invariably bound up with the nature of that influence; namely, in
what sense does Nietzsche’s case of Wagner become a matter for
philosophy?
In order to do justice to the arguments and to make sense
of the challenge that Nietzsche fashions against Wagner, it will
be necessary to attend to some of the personal and intellectual
dimensions of Nietzsche’s relationship with Wagner which
inform the narrative context of the claims we encounter in the
text itself. It is our contention that Wagner and his theories
dominated Nietzsche’s intellectual life, and that The Case of
Wagner as a text must be seen, at least from Nietzsche’s perspec-
tive, as a very real duel with Wagner over the final meaning
of culture. Without attending to this background about how
Wagner’s influence informed Nietzsche’s final position as a phi-
losopher, The Case of Wagner can be seen as little more than a
curiosity, since the fundamental issues at stake – including why
Wagner and his theories were important enough for Nietzsche
to return to again and again, and therefore why it matters for
philosophy – will remain perpetually overlooked.
Our approach to the interpretation of both The Case of Wagner
and Nietzsche Contra Wagner will permit us to identify and define
the trajectory of a number of overarching themes in Nietzsche’s
work as a whole, and to demonstrate how they crystallise into
his final and most substantial discussion of Wagner as a result. In
this respect, our approach is especially relevant when we come
to consider Nietzsche Contra Wagner, for as it stands, the latter
is essentially an anthology of Nietzsche’s earlier remarks about
Wagner taken from his previous books, but what little original

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 8 Nietzsche’s The Case of Wagner

material it does contain presupposes a direct acquaintance with

his relationship with Wagner. Without this contextual backdrop,
the book itself is – and will remain – utterly enigmatic. Taken as
a whole then, our intention here is meant not only to guide, but
to educate, Nietzsche’s readers about why Wagner mattered so
much to him.
The object of our investigation will be partitioned roughly
into three phases. The first is concerned with establishing the
nature of Wagner’s intellectual influence on Nietzsche, which
culminates not merely in the production of The Birth of Tragedy,
but beyond it to a handful of philosophical commitments about
the creative deed and its connection with a flourishing culture.
While the circumstances that surround The Birth of Tragedy are
generally seen as the time of Nietzsche’s greatest intellectual con-
vergence with Wagner and the height of his ‘pro-Wagnerian’
position, our concern here is to explain what it is in particular
about his early ‘pro-Wagnerian’ position that permanently condi-
tioned Nietzsche’s approach to art and life, as these commitments
will become highly relevant for his eventual case against Wagner.
The second phase is concerned with examining these philosophi-
cal commitments in light of what might be called Nietzsche’s
‘post’ or ‘contra-Wagnerian’ position. Here we find, as a text,
Nietzsche’s Attempt at a Self-Criticism to be especially significant
in framing the nature of this contrast.9 The Attempt functions
both as a preamble and a postscript to The Birth of Tragedy, and in
doing so, binds the discourse between forward and backward by
reclaiming what had passed for the culture of the present up until
then (namely Wagner) into an expectation of what is to come
for the future (namely Nietzsche). Penned only two years before
The Case of Wagner itself, the Attempt records some of Nietzsche’s
most relevant philosophical objections against Wagner by empha-
sising, on the one hand, the substance and continuity of his ear-
lier ‘pro-Wagnerian’ commitments in the context of his present
philosophical project, while on the other, untethering them from

9
The Attempt was written in 1886, fourteen years after the original publication of The Birth
of Tragedy, and was appended to the edition of BT that was issued that year.

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 Introduction 9

Schopenhauer and Wagner, the heroes of the original essay. In

this sense, there is perhaps no better hermeneutic focal point for
analysing the contrast between his ‘pro’ and ‘contra Wagnerian’
positions than the Attempt. We then turn to a focused, diachronic
examination of Nietzsche’s post-Wagnerian works, which allows
us to trace this contrast, and indeed to articulate in precisely what
sense Nietzsche’s philosophical commitments towards the creative
deed and its connection with a flourishing culture – the very pre-
suppositions central to his ‘pro-Wagnerian’ position of culture –
become the basis for the case he builds against Wagner and his art.
Once we have established the theoretical framework on which
Nietzsche’s case of Wagner is built and through which his per-
sonal challenge to Wagner derives its meaning, we will be pre-
pared to inaugurate the third phase of our investigation through
the formal analysis of The Case of Wagner.
Structurally, we begin in Chapter 1 by examining one of
Wagner’s most important and philosophically significant essays
from his Zurich period, ‘The Artwork of the Future’. The reason
we begin our analysis with this essay will become apparent in the
sequel, but suffice it to say that ‘The Artwork of the Future’ is
remarkable for its philosophical commitment to what we call the
ontology of vitalism, and for the role it plays, both diagnostically
and prescriptively, in explaining the decline of art as culture from
the time of the ancients, as well as the conditions that might bring
about its rebirth. The essay is also noteworthy for fingering the
origins of this decline in the ancient world through what Wagner
had identified as ‘Athenian self-dissection’. In this sense, ‘The
Artwork of the Future’ presents us with one of Wagner’s most
explicit arguments about the connection between life and art on
the one hand, and the so-called ‘decline of art at the hands of sci-
ence’ on the other. Finally, but perhaps no less significantly, the
essay opines, with Wagner largely speaking for himself, that only
when the conditions that brought about tragedy in the ancient
world had been seeded – that is, only when art and life were
reunited through the universal art forms of poetry and drama –
would the ‘artist of the future’ be at hand. Needless to say, the
significance of the ‘artist of the future’ and its relationship to the
decline and rebirth of cultures is very clearly laid out.

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 10 Nietzsche’s The Case of Wagner

Looking then towards The Birth of Tragedy, it is an easy matter

to demonstrate that Nietzsche marshalled what amounts to Wag-
nerian theses from first to last by arguing that the so-called Socratic
culture, which had destroyed the culture of vitalism on which the
tragedy of the ancient world had been built, should itself be seen
in its final death throes, while by contrast the vitalism inherent
in both Schopenhauer’s philosophy and Wagner’s music dramas
signifies the tangible promise for the rebirth of a new European
culture. In this respect, we will show that Nietzsche’s earliest
meditations on the problem of culture were completely domi-
nated by the problems introduced by Wagner’s aesthetics and the
promise that he himself represented for the rebirth of a new Euro-
pean culture. It is in this context that we grapple with the symbol
of what Nietzsche had then called the ‘music-making Socrates’,
which, as far as we know, has never been sufficiently analysed
by the secondary literature on Nietzsche. Yet we maintain that
this symbol, which specifically designates the form of a culture, and
which initially represented Wagner and his music as the fulfilment
of that culture, ultimately came to signify what Nietzsche sought
for himself contra Wagner. Therefore the symbol of the ‘music-
making Socrates’, and what later came to be more broadly associ-
ated with the idea of the ‘philosopher who practices music’, holds
the key to why Nietzsche’s case of Wagner becomes a matter for
philosophy.
By utilising a close textual analysis in The Birth of Tragedy, we
point out that the most fundamental problem at stake in fomenting
the ‘music-making Socrates’ as a cultural form is the question of
whether Socratism and art in their present forms are polar oppo-
sites. At the core of this examination, however, and guided once
again by the steady hand of Wagner, Nietzsche’s intention here is
to point out that, in the first place, Socratic culture, which has both
inherited and incorporated a very long tradition of the rational as
first presented by the figure of Socrates, and thus has historically
overemphasised rationality at the expense of creativity in accord-
ance with his precedent, is actually (and quite ironically) indebted
to the creative vision of Plato and his artistic depiction of Socrates.
After all, it is the Socrates of Plato (not the Socrates of Xenophon)
through whom we have moulded our history of the rational, and

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 Introduction 11

yet this depiction of rationality is embedded in an incredibly rich

work of art, and so implicitly relies on the deed of Plato. Through
his Dialogues, which signify the artistic deed as such, it is Plato and
not Socrates who proves de facto that such a fusion between life,
science and art was actually possible. Thus, in the context of regen-
erating a declining and moribund Western culture which had had
its origins in the ‘devitalizing nature’ of Greek science, the primary
thesis we find in The Birth of Tragedy is that life and art are at the
basis of even the Socratic culture itself – that alleged enemy of all
art – and that consequently rationality and vitality in the Western
canon should have never been divorced from one another. Con-
sequently, the ‘music-making Socrates’ as we find it in The Birth of
Tragedy signifies a cultural form in which rationality and creativity
must reunite for the purposes of art and life.
In light of these developments, the central issue that we exam-
ine in Chapter 2 is how this cultural form changed after Nietzsche
had broken away from Wagner. In this sense, Nietzsche’s Attempt
provides us with some very important clues as to the nature of his
‘post-Wagnerian’ position, and in particular, the rival conception
of culture that by that time he had worked out to counter Wagner.
As we will show, the basis of this rivalry lay in Nietzsche’s desire
to fuse the disciplines of philosophy and music for the purposes of
life and thus to embody the cultural form of the ‘philosopher who
practices music’ contra Wagner. In the context of the Attempt, this
forces Nietzsche to take up the very models of philosophical and
artistic vitalism, and thus the ‘heroes’ of the original essay point-
ing towards the rebirth of culture – Schopenhauer and Wagner –
specifically in order to refute them. By maintaining, in the first
place, that the true ethical implication of Schopenhauer’s vital-
ism entails the unconditional assertion, not the negation, of the
will for life, and that affirmation itself is necessary for the pur-
pose of life, Nietzsche contends here that the original ‘heroes’ in
actuality represent the very antitheses of philosophical and artistic
vitalism, and that contrary to the bombastic, ‘totally German’ and
‘un-Greek’ culture that Wagnerism had come to signify,
Nietzsche’s challenge to Wagner lay precisely in his attempt to
philosophically and artistically resolve the problem of culture at
the individual level.

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 12 Nietzsche’s The Case of Wagner

Given that affirmation, not negation, is entailed by the phi-

losophy of vitalism and that Nietzsche’s concern is to resolve
the problem of culture at the individual level contra Wagner,
we explore what this means in greater detail in Chapter 3 by
using a cross-section of excerpts drawn from Nietzsche’s ‘post-
Wagnerian’ writings to illustrate how this rival conception of
culture was at pains to compete with Wagner and Wagner-
ism over the cultural form of the ‘philosopher who practices
music’, and that this competition culminates in his Zarathustra
as the deed that proved (in Nietzsche’s frame of reference) that
he had, in effect, achieved precisely what Wagner could not.
In the meantime, we note that Nietzsche takes full advantage
of the fact that Wagner and Wagnerism had come to signify
decline, and moreover for precisely those reasons that Wagner
himself had identified in his ‘Artwork of the Future’.
By the time we begin our formal analysis of The Case of
Wagner, which is the object of Chapters 4 and 5, it will be
clear that Nietzsche’s case of Wagner indisputably possesses
an underlying structure to it in which Nietzsche simply holds
Wagner to account for his theoretical arguments about the con-
nection between vitalism and art on the one hand, and its rela-
tionship to the decline of culture on the other. By appealing
to Wagner’s own theory about the conditions that govern the
decline and rebirth of culture, as well as his ‘failure’ to live up
to it in his final works, Nietzsche simply held Wagner and his
‘artwork of the future’ to account in order to become a foil
for his Zarathustra. Once Nietzsche could convince his readers
that Wagner’s art had fallen victim to his own theories about
what governs the decline and rebirth of culture, it followed
that Nietzsche could declare himself to be the true ‘philosopher
who practices music’ with his Zarathustra, and therefore the
true heir of the tragic culture in perfect consistency with his
‘pro-Wagnerian’ period. In light of these presuppositions, it
becomes far easier to grasp the principal ‘charges’ that make up
The Case of Wagner, and both our detailed analysis and subse-
quent discussion of the text itself will reflect this.
Looked at in this way, we argue that Nietzsche’s case of Wagner
is a case of psychological hegemony in which Nietzsche’s personal

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 Introduction 13

challenge to Wagner had come to be grafted on to Wagner’s own

arguments about the organic logic that governs the decline and
rebirth of culture, and was then used as the backdrop for his war
against Wagner over the meaning of the ‘philosopher who prac-
tices music’ for culture. In light of these conclusions, we offer our
final perspective on Nietzsche’s case of Wagner by observing that
he plays a very dangerous game in his stated task of ‘overcom-
ing’ Wagner, precisely because the case he makes against Wagner
is completely bound up with the case he makes for himself. These
final observations in turn provide us with some very suggestive
notions about Nietzsche’s case of Wagner, and how it is fundamen-
tally different from the so-called ‘case of Wagner as a genre’. In
order then to examine just how pervasive this influence was – in
fact to prove that Nietzsche was under the influence of Wagner,
and that Wagner was on his agenda from The Birth of Tragedy to The
Case of Wagner – let us get down to particulars.

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 1
The Artwork of the Future:
A Prelude to the Philosophy
of the Future

The artwork of the future

In 1849, shortly after Wagner had settled in Zurich as a political
exile after his role in the Dresden uprising, he sat down to, in
his words, ‘pour my heart out to the world’.1 His chief concern
was to ‘come to a precise understanding of the issues involved’
in his more immediate artistic creations for all those who sup-
ported him. Otherwise, Wagner opined, ‘we shall all spend the
rest of our lives groping around in a loathsome world of half-lit
forms . . . in which the benighted traveller can see nothing at all
but where he continues to clutch desperately and piously at long
familiar objects to guide him on his way’.2 The result was his essay
‘The Artwork of the Future’, and the consequence for much that
follows was, as we shall see, decisive.
The chief concerns of Wagner’s essay are twofold. On the
one hand, the essay is concerned with analysing the art forms of
modernity and then explaining their deterioration from earlier,
more integrated forms. On the other hand, it is concerned with
creating and sustaining works of art that possess the features of
those earlier, more integrated forms as a means to achieve a kind
of radical rebirth of culture.
In order to ground his genealogical analysis of art and culture,
Wagner frames his discussion of humanity and nature and their

1
SLRW: 177, letter to Ferdinand Heine, 19 November 1849.
2
SLRW: 176, letter to Theodor Uhlig, 16 September 1849.

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 The Artwork of the Future 15

relationship to one another by first appealing to a philosophical

orientation that is best captured by the term vitalism. As this ori-
entation is central not only to Wagner’s analysis of art and culture
more generally but to his philosophy as a whole, it is important
to grasp the meaning of this term in order to facilitate much of
what follows. Vitalism, especially in the Wagnerian sense, should
be understood as a philosophical orientation that gives the category
of life ontological priority over the categories of mind or intellect,
and that points to an existence or reality that can never be known
in the exclusively conceptual sense. In this respect, vitalism main-
tains that the category of life is not only fundamental and original,
but that it pervades the category of mind or intellect, which are
regarded as secondary and derivative. In this sense, then, mind and
nature, Wagner maintains, are not ultimate terms in dialectical ten-
sion, but are in reality comprehended by a category that embraces
them both: life. But as the principle of intellect is derived from
that of life and attains its clearest and most precise focus within the
consciousness of man, the fundamental problem, Wagner argued,
is that man’s identity with life became progressively restricted to
the self-conscious focal point of one’s own egoistic ‘I’ as an entity
that was separate and apart from nature.3 As a consequence, nature
itself soon came to be regarded as a term that was foreign to man’s
own essence – an ‘object’ separate and apart from man himself.
To remedy this severance, man soon developed science in order
to delve into nature, and by dissecting, analysing and systematising
his observations, slowly learned to aid his understanding about the
essence of both nature and themselves.
Yet as science clarifies the essence of both man and nature
and their relationship to one another, this clarification in the end
can only ever point back to the principle of life itself – the source
indeed from which both man and nature spring. It is this clarify-
ing power of science, Wagner argues, that teaches man not only
to understand and recognise the cyclical necessity that attaches
to all mineral, vegetable, animal and human manifestations on

3
 or simplicity’s sake we have followed the translation of Wagner’s essays in using ‘man’
F
to convey the idea of humanity and the human being in the abstract.

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 16 Nietzsche’s The Case of Wagner

earth, the totality of which flourish and pass away on a planet that
is itself governed by cyclical revolutions; it is the recognition of
cyclical necessity as a fundamental law of life in nature that will
finally bring man over to art, for it is only through art that a com-
prehensive vision of life can be depicted which in some measure
represents the necessary truths of man and nature in their relation-
ship to life itself.4
Wagner goes on to argue that man will never be that which
he can and should be ‘until his Life is a true mirror of nature’
(PW 1: 71) – in other words, until man recognises the necessity
of life within himself as the only real power. Until then only arbi-
trary powers, not necessary ones, will hold sway over the psyche
of man in the form of dogmas – religious, scientific or other-
wise – or those of patriotism and other nationalistic prejudices.
Therefore modern man, according to Wagner, must advance his
knowledge past the dialectical tension that exists between mind
and nature in order to firmly establish it in the recognition that
he and nature are truly one as a conscious, experiential fact. Only
in this way can art as culture be born again. Wagner summarises

4
In the very first section of his essay, Wagner summarises this monumental teleology as
plainly as can be: ‘From the moment when man perceived the difference between himself
and nature, and thus commenced his own development as man, by breaking loose from
the unconsciousness of natural animal life and passing over into conscious life – when he
thus first looked at nature in the face and from the first feelings of his dependency on her,
thereby aroused, evolved the faculty of thought – from that moment did error begin, as
the earliest utterance of consciousness. But error is the mother of knowledge; and the
history of the birth of knowledge out of error is the history of the human race, from the
myths of primal ages down to the present day . . . Through this knowledge does nature
grow conscious of herself; and verily by man himself, who only through discriminating
between himself and nature has attained that point where he can apprehend her, by mak-
ing her his “object”. But this distinction is merged once more, when man recognizes the
essence of nature as his very own, and perceives the same necessity in all the elements
and lives around him, and therefore in his own existence no less than in nature’s being;
thus not only recognizing the mutual bond of union between all natural phenomena, but
also his own community with nature. If nature then, by her solidarity with man, attains
in man her consciousness, and if man’s life is the very activation of this consciousness . . .
so does man’s life itself gain understanding by means of science, which makes this human
life in turn an object of experience. But the activation of the consciousness attained by
science, the portrayal of the Life that it has learnt to know, the impress of this life’s neces-
sity and truth, is – Art’ (PW 1: 70–1).

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 The Artwork of the Future 17

this thesis with well-nigh perfect precision on the following page

of his essay when he states that

The path of science lies from error to knowledge, from

fancy to reality, from religion to nature. In the beginning
of science, therefore, man stands toward Life in the same
relation as he stood toward the phenomena of Nature
when he first commenced to part his life from hers. Science
takes over the arbitrary concepts of the human brain, in
their totality; while, by her side, Life follows in its totality
the instinctive evolution of Necessity. Science thus bears
the burden of the sins of Life, and expiates them by her
own self-abrogation; she ends in her direct antithesis, in
the knowledge of Nature, in the recognition of the uncon-
scious, instinctive, and therefore real, inevitable, and physi-
cal. The character of science is therefore finite: that of Life,
unending; just as error is of time, but Truth eternal . . .
The end of science is the justifying of the unconscious, the
giving of self-consciousness to Life, the re-instatement of
the senses in their perceptive rights, the sinking of caprice
in the world-Will of Necessity. Science is therefore the
vehicle of knowledge, her procedure mediate, her goal an
intermediation; but Life is the great ultimate, a law unto
itself. As science melts away into the recognition of the
ultimate and self-determinate reality, of actual Life itself:
so does this avowal win its frankest, most direct expression
in art, or rather in the work of art . . . The art-work, thus
conceived as an immediate vital act, is therewith the per-
fect reconcilement of science with Life, the laurel-wreath
which the vanquished, redeemed by her defeat, reaches in
joyous homage to her acknowledged victor. (PW 1: 72–3)

From this excerpt we are provided with a vivid conceptual schema

of the unfolding of man and nature for conscious life. The intel-
lect, which had once been severed from life to look upon nature
as its object, evolved into the faculty of self-conscious reason. And
through the clarifying power of science as its highest achieve-
ment, reason in man has recognised that it is in truth identical with

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 18 Nietzsche’s The Case of Wagner

life itself, and so consciously returns to the source from which

both reason and nature sprang in order to reflect back to nature
the principle of life as ‘the great ultimate’, and to consecrate this
knowledge in the immediate vital act that is the work of art. The
implication of Wagner’s thesis can hardly be skirted: art is the truly
metaphysical activity of man.

‘Athenian self-dissection’ and the decline of

culture at the hands of science
As we can see, the principle of life is for Wagner the ultimate
ontological category: it is the source from which both human-
ity and nature spring as well as the depths into which both are
resolved. But for Wagner, there is a very big difference between
what he deems ‘an unconscious life-pulse’ which follows the
instinctual necessity of nature, and the recognition of this necessity
as a conscious, experiential fact. The former is necessarily collec-
tive, because the unconscious life-pulse at the basis of manifesta-
tion has yet to attain the stamp of self-conscious cognition through
individualised expression. Indeed ‘the folk’, Wagner tells us, is the
essence of all those ‘who feel a common and collective want’, but
do so only dimly and instinctually, for they have yet to cognise
this ‘want of necessity’ apart from the collective (PW 1: 75). But
when individual cognition attains conscious identification with the
instinctual necessity of nature, and then strives as a consequence
to bring forth this vital force to conscious expression in the work
of art, only then does the light of cognition ‘uphold to life the
picture of its own existence, and lift unconscious life to conscious
knowledge of itself’ (PW 1: 197). Thus we find that the genuinely
expressive or creative act is driven by this ‘want of necessity’ and
that it arises organically from within the collective womb of ‘the
folk’; but only the artist qua genius is capable of bringing forth this
unconscious life-pulse to concrete expression in the work of art.
Having argued up to this point in the essay that the need
for art is no arbitrary matter, Wagner then singles out the one
example of an art form whose ‘glorious fruits’ had arisen from
the unconscious depths of the folk: ‘Before what phenomenon’,
Wagner asks us, ‘do we stand with more humiliating sense of the

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 The Artwork of the Future 19

impotence of our frivolous culture, than before the art of the Hel-
lenes?’ (PW 1: 89). In the context of Wagner’s essay the nature
of this question is significant, for Wagner’s case study of Greek
tragedy from this point forward functions both diagnostically and
prescriptively in the arguments about culture that ensue. Now,
before we consider the nature of his arguments, we should point
out that it is immaterial whether or not the art of tragedy arose in
the manner specified by Wagner. What is important is that Greek
tragedy signified a historical art form that could accommodate the
philosophical framework Wagner had applied to it, in which art
as culture could be defined and deduced.
According to Wagner, Greek tragedy attained the summit of
artistic perfection in its portrayal of life, for by its poetry, music,
symbol and mime, Greek tragedy had been able to depict the
great truth that life in nature is cyclical, as both man and nature
are equally subject to its necessity, and that the element of vital
time, therefore, is tragic.5 In this regard, Greek tragedy had been
the only art form of antiquity to have plumbed the depths of life
in order to ‘uphold to life the picture of its own existence’; and
as this insight and portrayal of life is precisely the object of art
according to Wagner’s thesis, art in this sense would be synony-
mous with culture.
Using the music drama of Greek antiquity as the prototype of
an earlier, more integrated form of art, Wagner begins by sketch-
ing out a genealogical analysis of the art forms that have since
come down to modernity, tracing their separation from the Greek
prototype, and explaining the nature of that separation almost
exclusively in terms of a vitalistic cause. In particular, Wagner
argues that the forms of art that we now possess have long since
bifurcated the ‘total man’ into forms that address themselves either
to the ‘inner’ or ‘outer’ man, but not both, as was once the case
for the music drama of Greek antiquity.

5
I t is important to note why we describe time here as ‘vital’, as there is an implicit distinc-
tion between the notion of ‘vital’ as opposed to ‘quantifiable’ or ‘mathematical time’.
While the essence of vital or living time is irreversible and therefore tragic, quantifiable or
mathematical time is clearly reversible.

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 20 Nietzsche’s The Case of Wagner

To explain what he means by the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ man,

Wagner begins by telling us that the faculty of vision is the stron-
gest sense organ corresponding to man’s outward nature. Vision is
the faculty responsible, in effect, for man’s perception of individ-
uation, and supports all intellectual judgements rooted in distinc-
tion and difference. Conversely, however, the faculty of hearing
is the strongest sense organ corresponding to man’s inward nature,
and especially through the art of music, undergirds all judgements
rooted in unity and sameness. Yet from this bifurcation of the
total man, we have art forms that have come down to the pres-
ent day which address themselves almost exclusively to the ‘outer
man’ (namely, the plastic arts of architecture, sculpture and paint-
ing) or to the ‘inner man’ (namely, the humanistic arts of dance,
poetry and music), and they do so, Wagner argues, not out of
any real necessity, but out of what he calls ‘egoistic excess’. And
while it is never directly stated, it nonetheless seems clear that
the fragmented nature of the art forms now in existence in every
way reflect humanity’s own fragmented psyche in its separation
from nature, and it is this relationship to nature that is responsible
for, and that conditions, the splintered, fractured and decadent art
forms as they presently stand.
What is especially noteworthy for our purposes is that Wagner
traces the original splintering of the art forms to a singular ground
or cause which, in his framework, has vital ramifications. In par-
ticular, Wagner tells us that

Tragedy flourished for just so long as it was inspired by

the spirit of the folk . . . but when the national brother-
hood of the Folk was shivered into fragments, when the
common bond of its religion and primeval customs was
pierced and severed by the sophist needles of the egoistic
spirit of Athenian self-dissection – then the folk’s art-
work also ceased: then did the professors and the doctors
of the literary guilds inherit the ruins of the fallen edifice,
and delved among its beams and stones to pry, to pon-
der, and to re-arrange its members. With the laughter
of Aristophanes, the folk relinquished to these learned
insects the refuse of its meal, threw art upon one side for

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 The Artwork of the Future 21

two millennia, and fashioned of its innermost necessity

the history of the world; all while those scholars cobbled
up their tiresome history of literature, by order of the
supreme court of Alexander. (PW 1: 136)

Indeed, as Wagner goes on to explain, once tragedy had been

rent asunder, the art of poetry no longer prophesied, ‘but only
described’ (PW 1: 137). It was not long afterwards that poetry
turned to science, and soon after to philosophy (PW 1: 139). In
other words, ‘the egoistic spirit of Athenian self-dissection’ ush-
ered in the event of science at the very moment that the ancient
music drama was flowering on Greek soil, thereby severing man
from himself, and in turn, the unconscious life-pulse at the basis
of all manifestation. Tragedy was destroyed, and in its stead we
were left with a 2,000-year-old record that testifies to the decline
of art at the hands of science – a trend that has culminated in the
creations of modern art, ‘the sexless, barren child of this dream’
(PW 1: 74).
If, therefore, we consider his thesis seriously, the diagnostic
aspect to Wagner’s case study of Greek tragedy signified an art
form in which the emphasis on the rational or logical aspect in
man had not yet created a schism between himself and nature,
and consequently the ‘unconscious life-pulse’ at the basis of
manifestation. One’s identity had not yet been bound up with,
and restricted to, the self-conscious focal point of one’s egoistic
‘I’ as that alone which is exclusively rational, and so had not
yet estranged itself from nature to look upon her as an object
separate and apart from oneself. Art, and therefore religion, were
still possible, for reason was still rooted in the principle of life,
allowing the artist to depict a total vision of the nature of exist-
ence. This is what gave the ancient music drama its terrible and
profound insight into existence as a whole, for here was a wis-
dom that arose from the unconscious depths of life and was then
symbolised, artistically, through the beat, the rhythm and the
periodicity of poetry, music and mime in the Greek chorus as the
truest expression of the ‘unconscious life force’ of folk. But this
all changed when ‘the egoistic spirit of Athenian self-dissection’
came on the scene.

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 22 Nietzsche’s The Case of Wagner

Science, redeemed by her defeat, reaches out to

her acknowledged victor: art
In Wagner’s estimation, the very existence of an art form that had
reached a high degree of synthesis in antiquity, and from which
the decline of the arts into their present forms could be traced,
provided in some sense its own justification. At the same time, the
diagnostic aspect of Wagner’s case study is central to his thesis about
the philosophical significance of art, and lays the foundations for his
subsequent criticism of the art forms of modernity. In this respect,
then, Wagner’s case study of the ancient music drama also func-
tioned prescriptively as a blueprint for how culture could be revi-
talised, and throughout the body of his essay Wagner provides us
with clues as to how the artwork of the future would be achieved.
We need only consider Wagner’s comments about the ‘art-
work of the future’ in the section of his essay titled ‘The Artist of
the Future’. It is here that we get perhaps the most fruitful com-
ments regarding the prescriptive nature of the music drama as a
blueprint for how art as culture could be revitalised. The declara-
tions that Wagner makes here are the culmination of his com-
pelling but tortuous meditations on the decline of art since the
time of the ancient Greeks, and in spirit accentuate the ontological
commitment to vitalism at the base of his entire argument about
culture. In this section, Wagner begins by asking what the present-
day life conditions must be in order for the separate art branches
that have come down to modernity to be reunited in the artwork
of the future. As each branch of art has its own specialised artist,
the artist of the future would have to be, at least in principle, one
who specialises in as many of the present-day art forms as possible.
At the same time, the artwork of the future cannot be created
according to an arbitrary canon, for only comparatively few art
forms are grounded in the immediate conditions of life. Therefore
to determine who the artist of the future will be, Wagner tells us
that we must first trace back his appearance to the art forms that
are grounded in the immediate conditions of life from which the
artwork of the future would arise. As we might expect, the art
forms in question are poetry and drama. So when it comes to the
question of who will become the artist of the future, Wagner tells

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 The Artwork of the Future 23

us that it will be ‘Without a doubt, the poet. But who will be the
poet? Indisputably the performer. Yet who, again, will be the per-
former? Necessarily, the fellowship of all the artists’ (PW 1: 195–6).6
Wagner goes on to tell us that ‘the Artwork of the Future is
an associate work, and only an associate demand can call it forth’
(PW 1: 196). And while Wagner’s ‘fellowship of artists’ implies a
communal effort in which the folk would once again become the
creative force from which the innovation of all genuine art would
be made possible, it seems hardly worth mentioning that Wagner,
with his own distinct specialities as both a librettist and a musi-
cian, was really nominating himself.7
The nature of dramatic action, Wagner reiterates, borrows all
its materials from the concrete particularities of life, while the dra-
matic art itself acts as a mirror to life by upholding to it ‘a picture
of its own existence’. Drama is therefore the consummate art form
of the ‘outer man’ and forms the intelligible bond that directly
links art with life.8 At the same time only music – or ‘tone poetry’
in Wagner’s nomenclature – directly accesses the feeling nature of
the ‘inner man’, for it is immediate and irrefutable.9 Therefore by
bringing together music and drama – and, in a manner of speaking,
Wagner’s own genius for these two art forms – the inner and outer
man would be reunified once again and the artwork of the future
would be achieved.

6
I n identifying poetry as one of the principal art forms of the artist of the future, Wagner
himself hastens to footnote the word ‘poet’, noting that the term itself should not be
restricted to its more traditional literary sense, but that it should be sufficiently broad to
include the notion of tone poetry (that is, music) as well (PW 1: 196 note 38).
7
This is especially clear when we consider Wagner’s explanation of the artist and his
relationship to the folk, as well as how he uses both Beethoven and Shakespeare in his
essay as the two examples whose universalising genius in the separate domains of music
and drama prefigure (to Wagner) Wagner’s own totalising art as symbols of the tendency
towards which the artwork of the future was pointing.
8
Compare PW 1: 196–7.
9
As Wagner remarks much earlier in the essay, ‘the inner man can only find direct com-
munication through the ear, and that by means of voice’s tone. Tone is the immediate
utterance of feeling and has its physical seat within the heart, whence start and whither
flow the waves of life-blood. Through the sense of hearing, tone urges forth from the
feeling of one heart to the feeling of its fellow’ (PW 1: 91).

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 24 Nietzsche’s The Case of Wagner

Vitalism and art

At this point, we can bring a couple of very important points
into focus regarding Wagner’s prescriptive blueprint for how art
as culture should be revitalised. First, as we have already pointed
out, the principle of life is the fundamental ontological category
for Wagner, and this ontology unquestionably points to a world-
view that is grounded in what we called vitalism. From this
philosophical orientation, one very important consequence for
Wagnerian aesthetics follows: if the category of life has prior-
ity over the categories of mind or intellect, then it follows that
all conceptual constructions which are not rooted in a creative
source can only possess instrumental, not absolute, values for life
and thought. For Wagner, the essence of life is fundamentally
creative, and that implies that all genuine conception is generative,
not discursive.10 This is perhaps most convincingly illustrated by
the fact that science, in Wagner’s analysis, will never know or
discover anything other than the principle of life itself – the very
principle that the artist instinctively recognises and, in the total
work of art, depicts (PW 1: 139).
Second, and perhaps more importantly, Wagner’s theses une-
quivocally imply that the artist of the future must be by turns
both a philosopher and an artist. Philosophically, the individual
artist must recognise the periodicity of nature and the necessity
of its cycles, and so must perceive that the unfolding of man,
and the evolution of his faculties, are, as a microcosm of nature,
governed by that very same periodicity and necessity. Accord-
ingly, the faculty of reason, through which nature ‘has attained
her consciousness in man’, will finally lead reason back to a con-
scious recognition that she and nature are identical, and through
nature, to the grounding that comprehends them both: to ‘life as
the great ultimate’.

10
I n this connection, it is noteworthy to point out that the ancients themselves called the
creative force in nature the λόγος σπερματικός (logos spermatikos). Hence the very idea
that the creative activity of the intellect is totally non-discursive, and becomes aware of
its object in a way that has nothing in common with reasoning from premises to conclu-
sions, is fundamental to the activity of the genius that Wagner so prized.

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 The Artwork of the Future 25

Artistically, however, the individual philosopher must tap into

the same creative source out of which both man and nature are
derived in order to hold up to life, through the mirror of art, the
innermost kernel of the world, the necessary truths of life itself.
Because all genuine conception is deemed to be creative or gen-
erative, the inescapable consequence is that the philosophical and
artistic drives must be united as a precondition for a flourishing
culture. Only then can the artwork of the future be achieved.
Furthermore, if the role of both philosopher and artist is to bring
this ‘unconscious life-pulse’ to conscious expression in the work
of art, then the artist of the future is in some manner a progenitor
in his or her capacity to realise both the elements of wisdom and
the expression of that wisdom from out of the collective womb
of the folk.
Third and finally, it should be clear that Wagner’s position on
cultures in general and flourishing ones in particular is that they
are always rooted in the presuppositions of vitalism. As a conse-
quence, there is a relationship between the strength and flourish-
ing of a given culture and the emphasis that that culture places on
the categories of life and instinct over the categories of mind and
intellect. The more a given culture emphasises and accentuates
the categories of mind or intellect over those of will and life, the
more anaemic, enervated and decadent that culture has become.
This is, in point of fact, the raison d’être of Wagner’s entire genea-
logical analysis of the arts that have come down to the present day
from the time of the ancients.
Taken together, then, we are now able to recognise how
Wagner’s case study of the ancient Greeks functions both diag-
nostically and prescriptively in his attempts to address the prob-
lem of culture and to clear the way for the artwork of the future.
Diagnostically, the decline of the arts from the more integrated
ancient forms was due almost entirely to a declining form of life
in which the categories of mind or intellect superseded those of
man’s unconscious instincts for life. This led to an increasingly
fractured sense of self estranged from nature, and eventually in
turn from man’s own instincts for life. As we now know, the death
of the tragic concept began with the ‘egoistic spirit of Athenian
self-dissection’. Yet just as the death of vitalism as a world-view

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 26 Nietzsche’s The Case of Wagner

had been responsible for the death of all genuine art as culture,
so too would its rebirth be the precondition of the rebirth of
art as culture. Therefore, prescriptively, Wagner’s case study of
the ancients is concerned, plainly and simply, with the conditions
according to which the rebirth of culture might be achieved.

The Birth of Tragedy and the

‘music-making Socrates’
Having examined Wagner’s essay in some depth, it is impor-
tant that we turn our attention briefly to The Birth of Tragedy,
Nietzsche’s first published work, and the essay that formally estab-
lished his alliance with Wagner as the artist of the future. The
nature of this investigation is highly significant, for as we shall see,
the idea behind the ‘philosopher who practices music’ – or what
Nietzsche calls here in The Birth of Tragedy the ‘music-making
Socrates’ – not only designates the form of a culture and thus the
‘turning point’ to bring about the rebirth of art as culture, much
as Wagner’s essay had done; it is also the central symbol around
which Nietzsche’s subsequent ‘war in aesthetics’ with Wagner
revolves. By recognising the value of this symbol through the
analysis that we provide, we will finally be able to grasp the the-
oretical foundations that animate the case of Wagner and from
which the terms of Nietzsche’s dispute with him derive their chief
thrust and significance.
There are three sections in The Birth of Tragedy that allude
to the figure of the ‘music-making Socrates’, and it is important
to point out that all three either directly prefigure Nietzsche’s
extended panegyric to Wagner (§§14 and 15) or are part and
parcel with it (§17). Superficially at least, the historical figure of
Socrates and the ‘music-making Socrates’ possess very different
valuations in The Birth of Tragedy, so it is important to grasp how
these two figures are related to one another and in what sense the
‘music-making Socrates’ in particular becomes necessary for the
rebirth of tragic culture.
While BT 12 has been singled out by countless commentators
as the definitive section in which Nietzsche pins responsibility
on the historical figure of Socrates for having destroyed Greek

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 The Artwork of the Future 27

tragedy, we can now affirm that this censure has its origins in
Wagner’s essay from more than twenty years previously. But
what makes this censure particularly significant is that, much like
Wagner’s treatment of the problem in his own essay, Nietzsche
understands the historical figure of Socrates as part of a larger
trend, that is, as a symbol of the tendency or direction towards
which the tragic culture was heading. In BT 14, Nietzsche tells us
that the anti-Dionysiac tendency towards tragedy, as typified by
the optimistic element of dialectic, had been around and at work
destroying the roots of the chorus ‘with the rod of its syllogisms’
already in the time of Sophocles, and that the figure of Socrates
‘was simply its most magnificent expression’.
As he pursues the thread of this argument into section 15, it is
clear that Nietzsche views the historical appearance of Socrates,
more than anything else, as the prototype of an instinct that ran
counter to the creative instincts that conceived the tragic cul-
ture; namely, ‘the prototype of theoretical man’ (BT 15). Through
the historical figure of Socrates, this new instinct found expres-
sion in the idea that ‘rational thought, guided by causality, can
penetrate to the depths of being, and that it is capable not only
of knowing but even of correcting being’ (BT 15). Yet this new
instinct, which saw error as the embodiment of evil, was itself
(to Nietzsche) rooted in error, precisely because it was uprooted
from the principle of life.11 What followed from the ‘inverted
instincts’ of Socrates was the rise of modern ‘theoretical man’ and,
in effect, the decline of culture at the hands of science. Thus,
when Nietzsche tells us, as he does towards the close of BT 14,
that we ‘must not shirk the question of where such a phenom-
enon as Socrates was pointing’ in the midst of this anti-Dionysiac
tendency, we can be certain that it was not the mere historical

11
 ote that what is especially outrageous to Nietzsche is that the value of the concept has
N
been inverted in the person of Socrates to that which distinguishes, defines, analyses,
criticises and, in general, discursively reasons from premises to conclusions. In other
words, the concept no longer generates, so that what had once been seen as primary and
original (that is, life itself) is now regarded through the concept as somehow secondary
and derivative. As Nietzsche notes in BT 13, Socrates’ instinct for life, and ‘the tremen-
dous driving-wheel of logical Socratism’ behind him was inverted and antipodal.

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 28 Nietzsche’s The Case of Wagner

figure of Socrates that was problematic for the tragic culture, but
rather what his appearance signified by so emerging.
As far as Nietzsche’s arguments are concerned in BT 15, which
on the whole attempt to connect the significance of Socrates
with the advent of modern theoretical man, Nietzsche flatly tells
us that ‘we cannot help but see Socrates as the turning point, the
vortex of world history’ (BT 15). In other words, the historical
figure of Socrates is the most magnificent expression of a culture
committed to the idea that rationality must be divorced from
the creative instincts for life – an instinct that, as we know from
Wagner’s analysis, runs counter to the tragic age of the Greeks.

Socrates, make music!

While the ‘immediate effect of the Socratic impulse led inexora-
bly to the dissolution of Dionysiac tragedy’ (BT 14), Nietzsche
acknowledges at the same time that the phenomenon of Socrates
cannot be regarded as an altogether ‘negative agent of destruc-
tion’ (BT 14), and he supports this contention by appealing to the
nature of the Platonic dialogues as a whole. Now the question
of course becomes, why? The answer to this question is critical,
for in what immediately follows, it soon becomes clear that the
nature of the dialogues themselves is intimately bound up with
the question of whether Socratism and art are the polar opposites
that they at first seem to be, and whether they were seen to be
so even in the time of Socrates himself. By appealing to Plato’s
depiction of the final moments in the life of Socrates, Nietzsche’s
endeavour here is to test, at least in part, the rigidity of this oppo-
sition, for it is precisely at this point in BT 14 that we encoun-
ter, for the first time, the question of whether the ‘artistic’ or
‘music-making Socrates’ is a contradiction in terms, and whether
the appearance of such a phenomenon becomes necessary for the
rebirth of culture. In this respect, it is essential for us to grasp
how the Platonic dialogues function in the arguments that ensue,
and what their relationship is to the nature of the ‘music-making
Socrates’ for culture.
In order to test this opposition, Nietzsche begins by recount-
ing an anecdote given in Plato’s Phaedo. The scene is Socrates’

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 The Artwork of the Future 29

cell on the day of his execution. His friends enter to visit him
one last time and Socrates is soon asked why, when he had never
written a single line of poetry, he was now composing a hymn to
Apollo and putting some of Aesop’s fables into verse. In response,
Socrates tells his friends that he had often had a dream in which he
was told to ‘make and cultivate music’, but he had always thought
that his dream was bidding him do what he was doing already,
which was the study of philosophy. Doubts, however, had crept
in, and according to Nietzsche, these doubts were indicative of
a very real deficiency in Socrates’ approach to philosophy, for as
Nietzsche goes on to tell us

Where art was concerned, the despotic logician had the

sense of a lacuna, a void, something of a reproach, of a
possibly neglected duty . . . Until shortly before his death,
he drew comfort from the idea that his philosophy was
the highest of the arts, spurning the notion that a deity
might remind him of ‘vulgar, popular music.’ To salve his
conscience entirely, he finally resolved in prison to make
the very art he held in such low esteem. And with this atti-
tude he wrote a hymn to Apollo and put some Aesopian
fables into verse . . . This voice of the Socratic dream vision
is the only indication that he ever gave any consideration to the
limitations of logic. He was obliged to ask: ‘Is that which is
unintelligible to me necessarily unintelligent? Might there
be a realm of wisdom from which the logician is excluded?
Might art even be a necessary correlative and supplement to sci-
ence?’ (BT 14, our emphasis)

When we examine Nietzsche’s interpretation of this anecdote, its

most outwardly apparent feature is that it introduces an element
of ambiguity as to whether the ‘despotic logician’ might have
recognised the limitations of logic in the final moments of his life.
However, the rhetorical effect of this tension, which Nietzsche
introduces but leaves us to resolve, is deliberate, for if the ‘des-
potic logician’ might have doubted the totalising nature of logic
during the final moments of his life, it follows that the nature of
this ambiguity might very well open up a further uncertainty as

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 30 Nietzsche’s The Case of Wagner

to whether, in fact, there are limitations to logic of which modern

theoretical man should be apprised. In other words, Nietzsche’s
interpretation of the anecdote is specifically framed in order to
test a point of Wagnerian propaganda regarding the limitations of
science, and how those limits, once recognised, might bring forth
the genuine work of art.12
In light of these statements, Nietzsche’s interpretation of
the anecdote in the Phaedo now becomes clear. According to
Nietzsche, Socrates had simply been misinterpreting his divine
sign all along, but it was only during the final moments of his life
that a genuine afflatus walked in on the maieutic master: here,
just hours before his death, Socrates was made to realise that there
is a somewhat that is more fundamental than reason, or at the
very least correlative to it, and that music does, in fact, speak to
it. ‘After all’, Socrates reasoned, ‘music is certainly intelligible, so
perhaps my logic for what is intelligible is simply the definition of
what is intelligible from the limitation of my own point of view.’
The logical consequence of this realisation, Nietzsche implies, is
that Socrates had only practised one part of the great art, but not
the great art in its entirety, and during the final moments of his
life his divine sign had made this perfectly clear.
Yet notwithstanding, we are still left wondering what this anec-
dote implies about the ‘music-making Socrates’ as a cultural form
and how it is connected with the rebirth of culture. Accordingly
it is here that we encounter what one might call a meta-narrative
problem connected with our understanding of ‘modern theoreti-
cal man’. While there is no question that the Platonic dialogues as
a whole have been indispensable in shaping the notion of what is
rational right down to the present day, there is at the same time
one critical insight that is perpetually overlooked in tracing this
narrative history of ‘the rational’ back to the historical Socrates as
the prototype of modern theoretical man: to see Socrates as the
symbol of rationality who routinely triumphs over his vanquished
and exhausted foes with the oft-repeated formula that only what is
rational is beautiful, and whose singular insistence on this equation

12
Compare PW 1: 72–3, ‘Artwork of the Future’.

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 The Artwork of the Future 31

soon became the intellectual imperative of science, is to completely

disregard the fact that this is a depiction of the rational as a world-view,
and it is a depiction moreover that has been built upon art as the
immediate vital act of life – Plato’s in particular. There is no ques-
tion that the dialogues themselves are concerned with cultivating
our own understanding, but it is also true that as the image of dia-
lectical intelligibility, Socrates himself has been presented to us as a
work of art, and it is precisely this image of Socrates that Plato cre-
ated and embedded within an incredibly rich artistic presentation.13
Thus when we consider the symbol of the dying Socrates,
so filled with dramatic life and so rich in invention, a symbol so
powerful that the image itself soon became the emblem over the
portals of science symbolising its own ‘inverted instincts’ towards
life (according to Nietzsche’s arguments), we must also recognise
in the same moment that this archetypal depiction of rationality
was created by none other than Plato – that same Plato who, in
his early youth, had written tragedies, epigrams and dithyrambs
before he had ‘burnt his writings in order to become a pupil of
Socrates’ (BT 14). Plato may have ardently desired to reveal the
dialectical greatness of his master to the world, and yet ‘from com-
plete artistic necessity he had to create an art form that was related on a
deep level to the art forms already in existence, which he repudi-
ated’ (BT 14, our emphasis). Indeed, Nietzsche points out that
the Platonic dialogues as a whole are a mixture of all available
styles, which almost seem as if ‘tragedy had absorbed all earlier
genres within itself’ to find itself ‘hovering somewhere between
narrative, lyric poetry and drama, between prose and poetry’ (BT
14), and perhaps, indeed, music besides.14
What, then, are we to make of these claims? Very simply,
Nietzsche’s arguments imply that for all of his professed devo-
tion to the dialectic method, Plato had to resort to his creative

13
 ompare Schopenhauer’s thoughts on the Socrates of Plato as opposed to that of
C
Xenophon in PP 1, ‘Fragments for the History of Philosophy’, 3.
14
In his essay ‘The Destiny of Opera’, Wagner notes that Plato was the first to unify
myth, epic and dramatic invention in his dialogues in order to set ‘philosophic theses in
a quasi-popular light’, and for which his principal teachings are consciously formulated
and embedded within ‘directly witnessed scenes from life’ (PW 6: 138).

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 32 Nietzsche’s The Case of Wagner

instinct after all. Plato’s instinct for tragedy finally triumphed

over his newly found ‘rational’ love for dialectics, so that when
it came to composing his dialogues, it was the fusion of these
two elements – rationality and creativity – that produced not
only the totalising and comprehensive world-view of science as
given through the figure of Socrates, but also an entirely new
genre of art in the process, for in his wake, Nietzsche reminds
us, ‘Plato gave posterity the model for a new art form – the
novel’ (BT 14).
The moral of the story, of course, is that rationality cannot be
divorced from the creative instincts for life, which is the very urge
or desire to which music speaks, but it is Plato and not Socrates
who ultimately furnishes us with this insight. And when we exam-
ine the Platonic dialogues as a whole, it quickly becomes apparent
that these two elements are not divorced from one another, but
are on the contrary in perfect harmony.

Knocking at the portals of the present and

the future
Through our analysis of BT 14, we discovered that the cultural
form of the ‘music-making Socrates’ implies the fusion of the
rational and creative elements of consciousness, a phenomenon
that is especially marked in the figure of Plato. But in the context
of Nietzsche’s arguments here, what does the advocacy of this
position mean for the decline and rebirth of art as culture as we
find them in BT 15, shortly before he appeals to the figure of
the ‘music-making Socrates’ for the second time? The principal
meaning is that we must come to recognise that art is the immedi-
ate vital act of life, for once we do (according to the Wagnerian
thesis), it ‘becomes the perfect reconcilement of science with life,
the laurel-wreath which the vanquished, redeemed by her defeat,
reaches out in homage to her acknowledged victor’ (PW 1: 73,
‘Artwork of the Future’).
In other words, once science ‘melts away’ into the recognition
of life as the ‘ultimate self-determinate reality’ (PW 1: 73), we
shall see ‘the insatiable, optimistic zest for knowledge, exemplified
in the figure of Socrates, transformed into tragic resignation and

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 The Artwork of the Future 33

a need for art’ (BT 15). It is this imminent decline of the Socratic
culture that leads Nietzsche to ‘knock agitatedly at the portals of
the present and the future’ at the climax of BT 15 in favour of a
new cultural ‘transformation’; for only when rationality is united
to the creative instincts for life will it ‘lead to ever-new configura-
tions of genius, and particularly that of the music-making Socrates’
(BT 15). To be perfectly clear, the new form of culture must
unite the philosophical and artistic drives (as Wagner had claimed
was necessary), for only this ‘configuration’ would lead to the
rebirth of tragic knowledge.

We must now consider similar phenomena in

the present
Knowing as we do now that the historical Socrates and the
‘music-making Socrates’ symbolise two totally different valua-
tions, and that the latter in particular is intimately bound up with
Wagner’s prescriptive thesis for how the rebirth of culture might
be achieved, we can hardly be surprised at what Nietzsche tells
us next at the beginning of BT 16. Specifically, he informs us
that the nature of this example is meant ‘to explain how tragedy
perishes when deprived of the spirit of music just as sure as it can
be born only of that spirit’ (BT 16, our emphasis), and the value of
this explanation, as Nietzsche plainly states here, is meant for us
‘frankly’ to ‘consider similar phenomena in the present’ (BT 16).
In other words, the reason Nietzsche appeals to the decline of
Greek tragedy as well as the conditions that might vindicate its
rebirth is precisely in order to highlight the organic and dynamic
similarities between the conditions of the past and those of the
present.
While the specific metaphysical claims that follow are outside
the immediate scope of this book, the discussion of culture that
ensues makes it clear that the philosophy of Schopenhauer and the
music dramas of Wagner are promoted as the necessary ingredients
for the rebirth of the tragic spirit, and that they are in some man-
ner analogous to the early tragic philosophies of the pre-Socratics
and the dawn of tragedy in the person of Aeschylus before it suc-
cumbed to the dialectical impulse of syllogistic thought and an

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 34 Nietzsche’s The Case of Wagner

optimistic faith in the explicability of nature. By marking out the

problem of modern Socratic culture in terms that are antitheti-
cal to the spirit of tragedy – and by extension Wagner’s art – it is
clear that Nietzsche defines their relationship as one of opposing
tendencies in dialectical tension. It is in this spirit that we encoun-
ter Nietzsche’s final allusion to the figure of the ‘music-making
Socrates’ in section 17 of The Birth of Tragedy.
Given the emphasis we have placed on grasping the concep-
tual framework of Wagner’s arguments about the decline and
rebirth of culture that are at work in The Birth of Tragedy, it is
worth reproducing the relevant passage in its entirety.

Here we are concerned with the question of whether the

opposing power to which tragedy succumbed will always
have the strength to obstruct the artistic reawakening of
tragedy and the tragic philosophy. If the tragedy of the
ancients was diverted from its course by the dialectical
impulse towards knowledge and scientific optimism, we
might conclude from this that there is a never-ending
struggle between the theoretical and the tragic philoso-
phies. And only after the scientific spirit has been taken
to its limits, and had been forced by the demonstration of
those limits to renounce its claim to universal validity, can
we hope for a rebirth of tragedy. We might employ the
symbol of the music-making Socrates, in the sense discussed
earlier, to describe that cultural form. (BT 17)

Once again, the parallels with the Wagnerian thesis are unmis-
takable, and from this passage we can finally fashion the argu-
ment’s overall structure. According to the tenor of the general
argument, Greek tragedy, which had succumbed to the ‘Athenian
self-dissection’ of Socratic culture, had, at the same time, severed
humanity from themselves and from their creative instincts for
life. Consequently the nature of music, which is the consummate
art form of the inner man, disappeared from the drama once the
category of reason superseded that of life itself, and this in turn led
to the ‘decline of art at the hands of science’. But as the ‘deepest
and most universal science can know nothing else but life itself’,

7354_Harvey & Ridley.indd 34 13/12/21 10:16 AM

 The Artwork of the Future 35

science ‘can only gain her perfect confirmation in the work of

art’ (PW 1: 139). In other words, only when ‘science melts away
into the recognition of the ultimate self-determinate reality, of
actual life itself’ (PW 1: 73) will the scientific spirit be taken to
its limits, and only then can we hope to win this acknowledge-
ment through the work of art. Once this happens, the severed art
forms of music and drama will once more be unified, and only
then will ‘inner’ and ‘outer man’, the will and its representation,
the Dionysian and the Apollonian, find themselves in harmony
once again. This is the formula for the artwork of the future and,
as Nietzsche acknowledges, the symbol of the ‘music-making
Socrates’ describes this cultural form.
Yet in order to pave the way for the rebirth of tragedy,
the teleology of the ‘music-making Socrates’ must combat the
‘anti-Dionysiac tendency’ of ‘blind science’ and ‘knowledge
at all costs’ by restoring the relationship between art and life.
This implies that the teleology of the ‘music-making Socrates’
is utterly antipodal to the teleology of the historical Socrates
and his school, an instinct that completely ‘negates culture’ (UF
21[11], summer 1872–early 1873). And if these two phenom-
ena stand in an antipodal relationship to one another, then the
phenomenon of Socrates on the one hand and the ‘philoso-
pher who speaks music’ on the other represents the dividing
and uniting point of two cultural tendencies in antithetical ten-
sion. Figure 1 helps us to envision how this organic form to art
as culture is structured. With this diagram before us, we are in
a much better position to grasp the significance of what usu-
ally passes for Wagnerian propaganda in the remaining sections
of The Birth of Tragedy. As far as both thinkers are concerned,
modernity had reached the bottommost point of the downward
swing in a declining culture, and the solution, in the form of an
extended panegyric to Wagner, is precisely what The Birth of
Tragedy purports to provide: the ‘philosopher who speaks music’
must materialise in order to restore the relationship between art
and life.
As we can see, between the emerging Socratic culture and
the precipitous decline of the tragic culture in the ancient world,
the figure of Socrates stood as the destructive force behind one

7354_Harvey & Ridley.indd 35 13/12/21 10:16 AM

 36 Nietzsche’s The Case of Wagner

Reason divorced
from the creative instincts for life =
‘Socrates’

The Rebirth of Culture The Decline of Culture

The birth of tragedy The death of tragedy

Dionysian culture Socratic culture
Tragic knowledge Egoistic knowledge
Unity of drives Fragmentation of drives

Pre-Socratics : Aeschylus :: Socrates : Euripides ::

Schopenhauer : Wagner Socratic culture : Opera

Rationality fused to the

creative instincts for life =
‘Music-making Socrates’
Philosopher Who Speaks Music

Figure 1.1 Nietzsche’s ‘pro-Wagnerian’ conception of culture

world-view and yet the progenitor of another, thereby symbolis-

ing the dividing and uniting point of two cultures in contradictory
or antithetical tension. Indeed, we know according to Nietzsche’s
own diagnosis that ‘the decline of Greek tragedy seems necessarily
to have been the result of a curious dissociation of the two primal
artistic drives, a process that went hand in hand with a degen-
eration and transformation of the character of the Greek people’
(BT 23). Poetry and music were transformed into science and
philosophy,15 and the most ‘magnificent expression’ of this anti-
Dionysiac instinct was the historical figure of Socrates. Yet based
on our analysis of Wagner’s ‘Artwork of the Future’ as well as the
rebirth of the tragic concept as it occurs in The Birth of Tragedy, we

15
With the decline of tragedy, ‘poetry turned to science, to philosophy’ (PW 1: 139,
‘Artwork of the Future’).

7354_Harvey & Ridley.indd 36 13/12/21 10:16 AM

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—Ah, would the lifeless body stay! But no:
Change upon change till,—who may recognize
What did soul service, in the dusty heap?
What energy of Aristophanes
Inflames the wreck Balaustion saves to show?
Ashes be evidence how fire—with smoke—
All night went lamping on! But morn must rise.
The poet—I shall say—burned up and, blank,
Smouldered this ash, now white and cold enough.

Nay, Euthukles! for best, though mine it be,

Comes yet! Write on, write ever, wrong no word!

Add, first,—he gone, if jollity went too,

Some of the graver mood, which mixed and marred,
Departed likewise. Sight of narrow scope
Has this meek consolation: neither ills
We dread, nor joys we dare anticipate,
Perform to promise. Each soul sows a seed—
Euripides and Aristophanes;
Seed bears crop, scarce within our little lives;
But germinates—perhaps enough to judge—
Next year?

Whereas, next year brought harvest-time!

For, next year came, and went not, but is now,
Still now, while you and I are bound for Rhodes
That 's all but reached!—and harvest has it brought,
Dire as the homicidal dragon-crop!
Sophokles had dismissal ere it dawned,
Happy as ever; though men mournfully
Plausive,—when only soul could triumph now,
And Iophon produced his father's play,—
Crowned the consummate song where Oidipous
Dared the descent 'mid earthquake-thundering,
And hardly Theseus' hands availed to guard
Eyes from the horror as their grove disgorged
Eyes from the horror, as their grove disgorged
Its dread ones, while each daughter sank to ground.

Then Aristophanes, on heel of that,

Triumphant also, followed with his "Frogs:"
Produced at next Lenaia,—three months since,—
The promised Main-Fight, loyal, license-free!
As if the poet, primed with Thasian juice,
(Himself swore—wine that conquers every kind
For long abiding in the head) could fix
Thenceforward any object in its truth,
Through eyeballs bathed by mere Castalian dew,
Nor miss the borrowed medium,—vinous drop
That colors all to the right crimson pitch
When mirth grows mockery, censure takes the tinge
Of malice!

All was Aristophanes:

There blazed the glory, there shot black the shame!
Ay, Bacchos did stand forth, the Tragic God
In person! and when duly dragged through mire,—
Having lied, filched, played fool, proved coward, flung
The boys their dose of fit indecency,
And finally got trounced to heart's content,
At his own feast, in his own theatre
(—Oh, never fear! 'T was consecrated sport,
Exact tradition, warranted no whit
Offensive to instructed taste,—indeed,
Essential to Athenai's liberty,
Could the poor stranger understand!) why, then—
He was pronounced the rarely-qualified
To rate the work, adjust the claims to worth,
Of Aischulos (of whom, in other mood,
This same appreciative poet pleased
To say, "He 's all one stiff and gluey piece
Of back of swine's-neck!")—and of Chatterbox
Who, "twisting words like wool," usurped his seat
 o, t st g o ds e oo , usu ped s seat
In Plouton's realm: "the arch-rogue, liar, scamp
That lives by snatching-up of altar-orts,"
—Who failed to recognize Euripides?

Then came a contest for supremacy—

Crammed full of genius, wit and fun and freak.
No spice of undue spite to spoil the dish
Of all sorts,—for the Mystics matched the Frogs
In poetry, no Seiren sang so sweet!—
Till, pressed into the service (how dispense
With Phaps-Elaphion and free foot-display?)
The Muse of dead Euripides danced frank,
Rattled her bits of tile, made all too plain
How baby-work like "Herakles" had birth!
Last, Bacchos—candidly disclaiming brains
Able to follow finer argument—
Confessed himself much moved by three main facts:
First,—if you stick a "Lost his flask of oil"
At pause of period, you perplex the sense,—
Were it the Elegy for Marathon!
Next, if you weigh two verses, "car"—the word,
Will outweigh "club"—the word, in each packed line!
And—last, worst fact of all! in rivalry
The younger poet dared to improvise
Laudation less distinct of—Triphales?
(Nay, that served when ourself abused the youth!)
Pheidippides—(nor that's appropriate now!)
Then,—Alkibiades, our city's hope,
Since times change and we Comics should change too!
These three main facts, well weighed, drew judgment down,
Conclusively assigned the wretch his fate—
"Fate due," admonished the sage Mystic choir,
"To sitting, prate-apace, with Sokrates,
Neglecting music and each tragic aid!"
—All wound-up by a wish "We soon may cease
From certain griefs, and warfare, worst of them!"
—Since, deaf to Comedy's persistent voice,
War still raged, still was like to rage. In vain
Had Sparté cried once more, "But grant us Peace,
We give you Dekeleia back!" Too shrewd
Was Kleophon to let escape, forsooth,
The enemy—at final gasp, besides!

So, Aristophanes obtained the prize,

And so Athenai felt she had a friend
Far better than her "best friend," lost last year;
And so, such fame had "Frogs" that, when came round
This present year, those Frogs croaked gay again
At the great Feast, Elaphebolion-month.
Only—there happened Aigispotamoi!

And, in the midst of the frog-merriment,

Plump o' the sudden, pounces stern King Stork
On the light-hearted people of the marsh!
Spartan Lusandros swooped precipitate,
Ended Athenai, rowed her sacred bay
With oars which brought a hundred triremes back
Captive!

And first word of the conqueror

Was "Down with those Long Walls, Peiraios' pride!
Destroy, yourselves, your bulwarks! Peace needs none!"
And "We obey" they shuddered in their dream.

But, at next quick imposure of decree—

"No longer democratic government!
Henceforth such oligarchy as ourselves
Please to appoint you!"—then the horror-stung
Dreamers awake; they started up a-stare
At the half-helot captain and his crew
—Spartans, "men used to let their hair grow long,
To fast, be dirty, and just—Sokratize"—
Whose word was "Trample on Themistokles!"
Whose word was Trample on Themistokles!

So, as the way is with much misery,

The heads swam, hands refused their office, hearts
Sunk as they stood in stupor. "Wreck the Walls?
Ruin Peiraios?—with our Pallas armed
For interference?—Herakles apprised,
And Theseus hasting? Lay the Long Walls low?"

Three days they stood, stared,—stonier than their walls.

Whereupon, sleep who might, Lusandros woke:

Saw the prostration of his enemy,
Utter and absolute beyond belief,
Past hope of hatred even. I surmise
He also probably saw fade in fume
Certain fears, bred of Bakis-prophecy,
Nor apprehended any more that gods
And heroes,—fire, must glow forth, guard the ground
Where prone, by sober day-dawn, corpse-like lay
Powerless Athenai, late predominant
Lady of Hellas,—Sparté's slave-prize now!
Where should a menace lurk in those slack limbs?
What was to move his circumspection? Why
Demolish just Peiraios?

"Stay!" bade he:

"Already promise-breakers? True to type,
Athenians! past, and present, and to come,—
The fickle and the false! No stone dislodged,
No implement applied, yet three days' grace
Expire! Forbearance is no longer-lived.
By breaking promise, terms of peace you break—
Too gently framed for falsehood, fickleness!
All must be reconsidered—yours the fault!"

Wherewith, he called a council of allies.

Pent up resentment used its privilege
Pent-up resentment used its privilege,—
Outburst at ending: this the summed result.

"Because we would avenge no transient wrong

But an eternity of insolence,
Aggression,—folly, no disasters mend,
Pride, no reverses teach humility,—
Because too plainly were all punishment,
Such as comports with less obdurate crime,
Evadable by falsehood, fickleness—
Experience proves the true Athenian type,—
Therefore, 't is need we dig deep down into
The root of evil; lop nor bole nor branch.
Look up, look round and see, on every side,
What nurtured the rank tree to noisome fruit!
We who live hutted (so they laugh) not housed,
Build barns for temples, prize mud-monuments,
Nor show the sneering stranger aught but—men,—
Spartans take insult of Athenians just
Because they boast Akropolis to mount,
And Propulaia to make entry by,
Through a mad maze of marble arrogance
Such as you see—such as let none see more!
Abolish the detested luxury!
Leave not one stone upon another, raze
Athenai to the rock! Let hill and plain
Become a waste, a grassy pasture-ground
Where sheep may wander, grazing goats depend
From shapeless crags once columns! so at last
Shall peace inhabit there, and peace enough."

Whereon, a shout approved "Such peace bestow!"

Then did a Man of Phokis rise—O heart!

Rise—when no bolt of Zeus disparted sky,
No omen-bird from Pallas scared the crew,
Rise—when mere human argument could stem
No foam-fringe of the passion surging fierce,
Baffle no wrath-wave that o'er barrier broke—
Who was the Man of Phokis rose and flung
A flower i' the way of that fierce foot's advance,
Which—stop for?—nay, had stamped down sword's assault!
Could it be He stayed Sparté with the snatch—
"Daughter of Agamemnon, late my liege,
Elektra, palaced, once a visitant
To thy poor rustic dwelling, now I come?"

Ay, facing fury of revenge, and lust

Of hate, and malice moaning to appease
Hunger on prey presumptuous, prostrate now—
Full in the hideous faces—last resource,
You flung that choric flower, my Euthukles!

And see, as through some pinhole, should the wind

Wedgingly pierce but once, in with a rush
Hurries the whole wild weather, rends to rags
The weak sail stretched against the outside storm—
So did the power of that triumphant play
Pour in, and oversweep the assembled foe!
Triumphant play, wherein our poet first
Dared bring the grandeur of the Tragic Two
Down to the level of our common life,
Close to the beating of our common heart.
Elektra? 'T was Athenai, Sparté's ice
Thawed to, while that sad portraiture appealed—
Agamemnonian lady, lost by fault
Of her own kindred, cast from house and home,
Despoiled of all the brave inheritance,
Dowered humbly as befits a herdsman's mate,
Partaker of his cottage, clothed in rags,
Patient performer of the poorest chares,
Yet mindful, all the while, of glory past
When she walked darling of Mukenai, dear
B d O t t th Ki fM !
Beyond Orestes to the King of Men!

So, because Greeks are Greeks, though Sparté's brood,

And hearts are hearts, though in Lusandros' breast,
And poetry is power, and Euthukles
Had faith therein to, full-face, fling the same—
Sudden, the ice-thaw! The assembled foe,
Heaving and swaying with strange friendliness,
Cried, "Reverence Elektra!"—cried, "Abstain
Like that chaste Herdsman, nor dare violate
The sanctity of such reverse! Let stand
Athenai!"

Mindful of that story's close,

Perchance, and how,—when he, the Herdsman chaste,
Needs apprehend no break of tranquil sleep,—
All in due time, a stranger, dark, disguised,
Knocks at the door: with searching glance, notes keen,
Knows quick, through mean attire and disrespect,
The ravaged princess! Ay, right on, the clutch
Of guiding retribution has in charge
The author of the outrage! While one hand,
Elektra's, pulls the door behind, made fast
On fate,—the other strains, prepared to push
The victim-queen, should she make frightened pause
Before that serpentining blood which steals
Out of the darkness where, a pace beyond,
Above the slain Aigisthos, bides his blow
Dreadful Orestes!

Klutaimnestra, wise
This time, forebore; Elektra held her own;
Saved was Athenai through Euripides,
Through Euthukles, through—more than ever—me,
Balaustion, me, who, Wild-pomegranate-flower,
Felt my fruit triumph, and fade proudly so!
But next day, as ungracious minds are wont,
The Spartan, late surprised into a grace,
Grew sudden sober at the enormity,
And grudged, by daybreak, midnight's easy gift;
Splenetically must repay its cost
By due increase of rigor, doglike snatch
At aught still left dog to concede like man.
Rough sea, at flow of tide, may lip, perchance,
Smoothly the land-line reached as for repose—
Lie indolent in all unquestioned sway;
But ebbing, when needs must, all thwart and loth,
Sea claws at sand relinquished strugglingly.
So, harsh Lusandros—pinioned to inflict
The lesser penalty alone—spoke harsh,
As minded to embitter scathe by scorn.

"Athenai's self be saved then, thank the Lyre!

If Tragedy withdraws her presence—quick,
If Comedy replace her,—what more just?
Let Comedy do service, frisk away,
Dance off stage these indomitable stones,
Long Walls, Peiraian bulwarks! Hew and heave,
Pick at, pound into dust each dear defence!
Not to the Kommos—eleleleleu
With breast bethumped, as Tragic lyre prefers,
But Comedy shall sound the flute, and crow
At kordax-end—the hearty slapping-dance!
Collect those flute-girls—trash who flattered ear
With whistlings, and fed eye with caper-cuts,
While we Lakonians supped black broth or crunched
Sea-urchin, conchs and all, unpricked—coarse brutes!
Command they lead off step, time steady stroke
To spade and pickaxe, till demolished lie
Athenai's pride in powder!"

Done that day—

Th t i t th f dd fM hi th!
That sixteenth famed day of Munuchion-month!
The day when Hellas fought at Salamis,
The very day Euripides was born,
Those flute-girls—Phaps-Elaphion at their head—
Did blow their best, did dance their worst, the while
Sparté pulled down the walls, wrecked wide the works,
Laid low each merest molehill of defence,
And so the Power, Athenai, passed away!

We would not see its passing! Ere I knew

The issue of their counsels,—crouching low
And shrouded by my peplos,—I conceived,
Despite the shut eyes, the stopped ears,—by count
Only of heart-beats, telling the slow time,—
Athenai's doom was signed and signified
In that assembly,—ay, but knew there watched
One who would dare and do, nor bate at all
The stranger's licensed duty,—speak the word
Allowed the Man from Phokis! Naught remained
But urge departure, flee the sights and sounds,
Hideous exultings, wailings worth contempt,
And pressed to other earth, new heaven, by sea
That somehow ever prompts to 'scape despair.

Help rose to heart's wish; at the harbor-side,

The old gray mariner did reverence
To who had saved his ship, still weather-tight
As when with prow gay-garlanded she praised
The hospitable port and pushed to sea.
"Convoy Balaustion back to Rhodes, for sake
Of her and her Euripides!" laughed he.

Rhodes,—shall it not be there, my Euthukles,

Till this brief trouble of a lifetime end,
That solitude—two make so populous!—
For food finds memories of the past suffice,
Maybe, anticipations,—hope so swells,—
 aybe, a t c pat o s, ope so s e s,
Of some great future we, familiar once
With who so taught, should hail and entertain?
He lies now in the little valley, laughed
And moaned about by those mysterious streams,
Boiling and freezing, like the love and hate
Which helped or harmed him through his earthly course.
They mix in Arethousa by his grave.
The warm spring, traveller, dip thine arms into,
Brighten thy brow with! Life detests black cold!

I sent the tablets, the psalterion, so

Rewarded Sicily; the tyrant there
Bestowed them worthily in Phoibos' shrine.
A gold-graved writing tells—"I also loved
The poet, Free Athenai cheaply prized—
King Dionusios,—Archelaos-like!"

And see if young Philemon,—sure one day

To do good service and be loved himself,—
If he too have not made a votive verse!
"Grant, in good sooth, our great dead, all the same,
Retain their sense, as certain wise men say,
I 'd hang myself—to see Euripides!"
Hands off, Philemon! nowise hang thyself,
But pen the prime plays, labor the right life,
And die at good old age as grand men use,—
Keeping thee, with that great thought, warm the while,—
That he does live, Philemon! Ay, most sure!
"He lives!" hark,—waves say, winds sing out the same,
And yonder dares the citied ridge of Rhodes
Its headlong plunge from sky to sea, disparts
North bay from south,—each guarded calm, that guest
May enter gladly, blow what wind there will,—
Boiled round with breakers, to no other cry!
All in one choros,—what the master-word
They take up?—hark! "There are no gods, no gods!
Glory to God—who saves Euripides!"
PRINCE HOHENSTIEL-
SCHWANGAU
SAVIOUR OF SOCIETY
 Ὕδραν φονεύσας, μυρίων τ' ἄλλον πόνων
διῆλφον ἀγέλας ...
τὸ λοίσθιον δὲ τονδ' ἔτλην τάλας πόνον,
... δ ῶ μ α θ ρ ι γ κ ῶ σ α ι κ α κ ο ῖ ς.

I slew the Hydra, and from labor pass'd

To labor—tribes of labors! Till, at last,
Attempting one more labor, in a trice,
Alack, with ills I crowned the edifice.

This poem, written in Scotland in 1871, shortly after the downfall of

Napoleon III., was published in December of the same year. The
suggestion of the emperor is transparent, and Browning writing in
January, 1872, to Miss Isa Blagden, says of it: "I am glad you have
got my little book, and seen for yourself whether I make the best or
the worst of the case. I think, in the main, he meant to do what I
say, and, but for weakness—grown more apparent in his last years
than formerly—would have done what I say he did not. I thought
badly of him at the beginning of his career, et pour cause: better
afterward, on the strength of the promises he made, and gave
indications of intending to redeem. I think him very weak in the last
miserable year. At his worst I prefer him to Thiers's best. I am told
my little thing is succeeding—sold 1400 in the first five days, and
before any notice appeared." And again, to the same correspondent:
"I am glad you like what the editor of the Edinburgh calls my
eulogium on the second empire—which it is not, any more than what
another wiseacre affirms it to be, 'a scandalous attack on the old
constant friend of England'—it is just what I imagine the man might,
if he pleased, say for himself." Mrs. Browning's well-known
enthusiasm for Napoleon III. as instanced in her poems
unquestionably gave distinctness to Browning's own reflections. The
motto is from the Hercules Furens of Euripides, vv. 1276–1280, and
the translation is presumably by Browning. There is a palace Hohen-
Schwangau, built by the Bavarian mad king Ludwig.
You have seen better days, dear? So have I—
And worse too, for they brought no such bud-mouth
As yours to lisp "You wish you knew me!" Well,
Wise men, 't is said, have sometimes wished the same,
And wished and had their trouble for their pains.
Suppose my Œdipus should lurk at last
Under a pork-pie hat and crinoline,
And, latish, pounce on Sphinx in Leicester Square?
Or likelier, what if Sphinx in wise old age,
Grown sick of snapping foolish people's heads,
And jealous for her riddle's proper rede,—
Jealous that the good trick which served the turn
Have justice rendered it, nor class one day
With friend Home's stilts and tongs and medium-ware,—
What if the once redoubted Sphinx, I say,
(Because night draws on, and the sands increase,
And desert-whispers grow a prophecy,)
Tell all to Corinth of her own accord,
Bright Corinth, not dull Thebes, for Laïs' sake,
Who finds me hardly gray, and likes my nose,
And thinks a man of sixty at the prime?
Good! It shall be! Revealment of myself!
But listen, for we must co-operate;
I don't drink tea: permit me the cigar!

First, how to make the matter plain, of course—

What was the law by which I lived. Let 's see:
Ay, we must take one instant of my life
Spent sitting by your side in this neat room:
Watch well the way I use it, and don't laugh!
Here 's paper on the table, pen and ink:
Give me the soiled bit—not the pretty rose!
See! having sat an hour, I 'm rested now,
Therefore want work: and spy no better work
For eye and hand and mind that guides them both,
D i thi i t t th t d
During this instant, than to draw my pen
From blot One—thus—up, up to blot Two—thus—
Which I at last reach, thus, and here 's my line
Five inches long and tolerably straight:
Better to draw than leave undrawn, I think,
Fitter to do than let alone, I hold,
Though better, fitter, by but one degree.
Therefore it was that, rather than sit still
Simply, my right-hand drew it while my left
Pulled smooth and pinched the moustache to a point.

Now I permit your plump lips to unpurse:

"So far, one possibly may understand
Without recourse to witchcraft!" True, my dear.
Thus folks begin with Euclid,—finish, how?
Trying to square the circle!—at any rate,
Solving abstruser problems than this first,
"How find the nearest way 'twixt point and point."
Deal but with moral mathematics so—
Master one merest moment's work of mine,
Even this practising with pen and ink,—
Demonstrate why I rather plied the quill
Than left the space a blank,—you gain a fact,
And God knows what a fact 's worth! So proceed
By inference from just this moral fact
—I don't say, to that plaguy quadrature,
"What the whole man meant, whom you wish you knew,"
But, what meant certain things he did of old,
Which puzzled Europe,—why, you 'll find them plain,
This way, not otherwise: I guarantee,
Understand one, you comprehend the rest.
Rays from all round converge to any point:
Study the point then ere you track the rays!
The size o' the circle 's nothing; subdivide
Earth, and earth's smallest grain of mustard-seed,
You count as many parts, small matching large
If you can use the mind's eye: otherwise
If you can use the mind s eye: otherwise,
Material optics, being gross at best,
Prefer the large and leave our mind the small—
And pray how many folk have minds can see?
Certainly you—and somebody in Thrace
Whose name escapes me at the moment. You—
Lend me your mind then! Analyze with me
This instance of the line 'twixt blot and blot
I rather chose to draw than leave a blank,
Things else being equal. You are taught thereby
That 't is my nature, when I am at ease,
Rather than idle out my life too long,
To want to do a thing—to put a thought,
Whether a great thought or a little one,
Into an act, as nearly as may be.
Make what is absolutely new—I can't,
Mar what is made already well enough—
I won't: but turn to best account the thing
That 's half-made—that I can. Two blots, you saw
I knew how to extend into a line
Symmetric on the sheet they blurred before—
Such little act sufficed, this time, such thought.

Now, we 'll extend rays, widen out the verge,

Describe a larger circle; leave this first
Clod of an instance we began with, rise
To the complete world many clods effect.
Only continue patient while I throw,
Delver-like, spadeful after spadeful up,
Just as truths come, the subsoil of me, mould
Whence spring my moods: your object,—just to find,
Alike from handlift and from barrow-load,
What salts and silts may constitute the earth—
If it be proper stuff to blow man glass,
Or bake him pottery, bear him oaks or wheat—
What 's born of me, in brief; which found, all 's known.
If it were genius did the digging-job
If it were genius did the digging job,
Logic would speedily sift its product smooth
And leave the crude truths bare for poetry;
But I 'm no poet, and am stiff i' the back.
What one spread fails to bring, another may.
In goes the shovel and out comes scoop—as here!

I live to please myself. I recognize

Power passing mine, immeasurable, God—
Above me, whom he made, as heaven beyond
Earth—to use figures which assist our sense.
I know that he is there as I am here,
By the same proof, which seems no proof at all,
It so exceeds familiar forms of proof.
Why "there," not "here"? Because, when I say "there"
I treat the feeling with distincter shape
That space exists between us: I,—not he,—
Live, think, do human work here—no machine,
His will moves, but a being by myself,
His, and not he who made me for a work,
Watches my working, judges its effect,
But does not interpose. He did so once,
And probably will again some time—not now,
Life being the minute of mankind, not God's,
In a certain sense, like time before and time
After man's earthly life, so far as man
Needs apprehend the matter. Am I clear?
Suppose I bid a courier take to-night—
(... Once for all, let me talk as if I smoked
Yet in the Residenz, a personage:
I must still represent the thing I was,
Galvanically make dead muscle play,
Or how shall I illustrate muscle's use?)
I could then, last July, bid courier take
Message for me, post-haste, a thousand miles.
I bid him, since I have the right to bid,
And, my part done so far, his part begins;
 d, y pa t do e so a , s pa t beg s;
He starts with due equipment, will and power,
Means he may use, misuse, not use at all,
At his discretion, at his peril too.
I leave him to himself: but, journey done,
I count the minutes, call for the result
In quickness and the courier quality,
Weigh its worth, and then punish or reward
According to proved service; not before.
Meantime, he sleeps through noontide, rides till dawn,
Sticks to the straight road, tries the crooked path,
Measures and manages resource, trusts, doubts
Advisers by the wayside, does his best
At his discretion, lags or launches forth,
(He knows and I know) at his peril too.
You see? Exactly thus men stand to God:
I with my courier, God with me. Just so
I have his bidding to perform; but mind
And body, all of me, though made and meant
For that sole service, must consult, concert
With my own self and nobody beside,
How to effect the same: God helps not else.
'T is I who, with my stock of craft and strength,
Choose the directer cut across the hedge,
Or keep the foot-track that respects a crop.
Lie down and rest, rise up and ran,—live spare,
Feed free,—all that 's my business: but, arrive,
Deliver message, bring the answer back,
And make my bow, I must: then God will speak,
Praise me or haply blame as service proves.
To other men, to each and every one,
Another law! what likelier? God, perchance,
Grants each new man, by some as new a mode,
Intercommunication with himself,
Wreaking on finiteness infinitude;
By such a series of effects, gives each
Last his own imprint: old yet ever new
 ast s o p t o d yet e e e
The process: 't is the way of Deity.
How it succeeds, he knows: I only know
That varied modes of creatureship abound,
Implying just as varied intercourse
For each with the creator of them all.
Each has his own mind and no other's mode.
What mode may yours be? I shall sympathize!
No doubt, you, good young lady that you are,
Despite a natural naughtiness or two,
Turn eyes up like a Pradier Magdalen
And see an outspread providential hand
Above the owl's-wing aigrette—guard and guide—
Visibly o'er your path, about your bed,
Through all your practisings with London-town.
It points, you go; it stays fixed, and you stop;
You quicken its procedure by a word
Spoken, a thought in silence, prayer and praise.
Well, I believe that such a hand may stoop,
And such appeals to it may stave off harm,
Pacify the grim guardian of this Square,
And stand you in good stead on quarter-day:
Quite possible in your case; not in mine.
"Ah, but I choose to make the difference,
Find the emancipation?" No, I hope!
If I deceive myself, take noon for night,
Please to become determinedly blind
To the true ordinance of human life,
Through mere presumption—that is my affair,
And truly a grave one; but as grave I think
Your affair, yours, the specially observed,—
Each favored person that perceives his path
Pointed him, inch by inch, and looks above
For guidance, through the mazes of this world,
In what we call its meanest life-career
—Not how to manage Europe properly,
But how keep open shop, and yet pay rent,
 ut o eep ope s op, a d yet pay e t,
Rear household, and make both ends meet, the same.
I say, such man is no less tasked than I
To duly take the path appointed him
By whatsoever sign he recognize.
Our insincerity on both our heads!
No matter what the object of a life,
Small work or large,—the making thrive a shop,
Or seeing that an empire take no harm,—
There are known fruits to judge obedience by.
You 've read a ton's weight, now, of newspaper—
Lives of me, gabble about the kind of prince—
You know my work i' the rough; I ask you, then,
Do I appear subordinated less
To hand-impulsion, one prime push for all,
Than little lives of men, the multitude
That cried out, every quarter of an hour,
For fresh instructions, did or did not work,
And praised in the odd minutes?

Eh, my dear?
Such is the reason why I acquiesced
In doing what seemed best for me to do,
So as to please myself on the great scale,
Having regard to immortality
No less than life—did that which head and heart
Prescribed my hand, in measure with its means
Of doing—used my special stock of power—
Not from the aforesaid head and heart alone,
But every sort of helpful circumstance,
Some problematic and some nondescript:
All regulated by the single care
I' the last resort—that I made thoroughly serve
The when and how, toiled where was need, reposed
As resolutely at the proper point,
Braved sorrow, courted joy, to just one end:
Namely, that just the creature I was bound
To be, I should become, nor thwart at all
God's purpose in creation. I conceive
No other duty possible to man,—
Highest mind, lowest mind,—no other law
By which to judge life failure or success:
What folk call being saved or cast away.

Such was my rule of life; I worked my best,

Subject to ultimate judgment, God's not man's.
Well then, this settled,—take your tea, I beg,
And meditate the fact, 'twixt sip and sip,—
This settled—why I pleased myself, you saw,
By turning blot and blot into a line,
O' the little scale,—we 'll try now (as your tongue
Tries the concluding sugar-drop) what 's meant
To please me most o' the great scale. Why, just now,
With nothing else to do within my reach,
Did I prefer making two blots one line
To making yet another separate
Third blot, and leaving those I found unlinked?
It meant, I like to use the thing I find,
Rather than strive at unfound novelty:
I make the best of the old, nor try for new.
Such will to act, such choice of action's way,
Constitute—when at work on the great scale,
Driven to their farthest natural consequence
By all the help from all the means—my own
Particular faculty of serving God,
Instinct for putting power to exercise
Upon some wish and want o' the time, I prove
Possible to mankind as best I may.
This constitutes my mission,—grant the phrase,—
Namely, to rule men—men within my reach,
To order, influence and dispose them so
As render solid and stabilify
Mankind in particles, the light and loose,
For their good and my pleasure in the act.
Such good accomplished proves twice good to me—
Good for its own sake, as the just and right,
And, in the effecting also, good again
To me its agent, tasked as suits my taste.

Is this much easy to be understood

At first glance? Now begin the steady gaze!

My rank—(if I must tell you simple truth—

Telling were else not worth the whiff o' the weed
I lose for the tale's sake)—dear, my rank i' the world
Is hard to know and name precisely: err
I may, but scarcely overestimate
My style and title. Do I class with men
Most useful to their fellows? Possibly,—
Therefore, in some sort, best; but, greatest mind
And rarest nature? Evidently no.
A conservator, call me, if you please,
Not a creator nor destroyer: one
Who keeps the world safe. I profess to trace
The broken circle of society,
Dim actual order, I can redescribe
Not only where some segment silver-true
Stays clear, but where the breaks of black commence
Baffling you all who want the eye to probe—
As I make out yon problematic thin
White paring of your thumb-nail outside there,
Above the plaster-monarch on his steed—
See an inch, name an ell, and prophesy
O' the rest that ought to follow, the round moon
Now hiding in the night of things: that round,
I labor to demonstrate moon enough
For the month's purpose,—that society,
Render efficient for the age's need:
Preserving you in either case the old,
Nor aiming at a new and greater thing
Nor aiming at a new and greater thing,
A sun for moon, a future to be made
By first abolishing the present law:
No such proud task for me by any means!
History shows you men whose master-touch
Not so much modifies as makes anew:
Minds that transmute nor need restore at all.
A breath of God made manifest in flesh
Subjects the world to change, from time to time,
Alters the whole conditions of our race
Abruptly, not by unperceived degrees
Nor play of elements already there,
But quite new leaven, leavening the lump,
And liker, so, the natural process. See!
Where winter reigned for ages—by a turn
I' the time, some star-change, (ask geologists,)
The ice-tracts split, clash, splinter and disperse,
And there 's an end of immobility,
Silence, and all that tinted pageant, base
To pinnacle, one flush from fairy-land
Dead-asleep and deserted somewhere,—see!—
As a fresh sun, wave, spring and joy outburst.
Or else the earth it is, time starts from trance,
Her mountains tremble into fire, her plains
Heave blinded by confusion: what result?
New teeming growth, surprises of strange life
Impossible before, a world, broke up
And re-made, order gained by law destroyed.
Not otherwise, in our society
Follow like portents, all as absolute
Regenerations: they have birth at rare
Uncertain unexpected intervals
O' the world, by ministry impossible
Before and after fulness of the days:
Some dervish desert-spectre, swordsman, saint,
Lawgiver, lyrist,—oh, we know the names!
Quite other these than I Our time requires
Quite other these than I. Our time requires
No such strange potentate,—who else would dawn,—
No fresh force till the old have spent itself.
Such seems the natural economy.
To shoot a beam into the dark, assists:
To make that beam do fuller service, spread
And utilize such bounty to the height,
That assists also,—and that work is mine.
I recognize, contemplate, and approve
The general compact of society,
Not simply as I see effected good,
But good i' the germ, each chance that 's possible
I' the plan traced so far: all results, in short,
For better or worse of the operation due
To those exceptional natures, unlike mine,
Who, helping, thwarting, conscious, unaware,
Did somehow manage to so far describe
This diagram left ready to my hand,
Waiting my turn of trial. I see success,
See failure, see what makes or mars throughout.
How shall I else but help complete this plan
Of which I know the purpose and approve,
By letting stay therein what seems to stand,
And adding good thereto of easier reach
To-day than yesterday?

So much, no more!
Whereon, "No more than that?"—inquire aggrieved
Half of my critics: "nothing new at all?
The old plan saved, instead of a sponged slate
And fresh-drawn figure?"—while, "So much as that?"
Object their fellows of the other faith:
"Leave uneffaced the crazy labyrinth
Of alteration and amendment, lines
Which every dabster felt in duty bound
To signalize his power of pen and ink
By adding to a plan once plain enough?
By adding to a plan once plain enough?
Why keep each fool's bequeathment, scratch and blur
Which overscrawl and underscore the piece—
Nay, strengthen them by touches of your own?"

Well, that 's my mission, so I serve the world,

Figure as man o' the moment,—in default
Of somebody inspired to strike such change
Into society—from round to square,
The ellipsis to the rhomboid, how you please,
As suits the size and shape o' the world he finds.
But this I can,—and nobody my peer,—
Do the best with the least change possible:
Carry the incompleteness on, a stage,
Make what was crooked straight, and roughness smooth,
And weakness strong: wherein if I succeed,
It will not prove the worst achievement, sure,
In the eyes at least of one man, one I look
Nowise to catch in critic company:
To wit, the man inspired, the genius' self
Destined to come and change things thoroughly.
He, at least, finds his business simplified,
Distinguishes the done from undone, reads
Plainly what meant and did not mean this time
We live in, and I work on, and transmit
To such successor: he will operate
On good hard substance, not mere shade and shine.
Let all my critics, born to idleness
And impotency, get their good, and have
Their hooting at the giver: I am deaf—
Who find great good in this society,
Great gain, the purchase of great labor. Touch
The work I may and must, but—reverent
In every fall o' the finger-tip, no doubt.
Perhaps I find all good there 's warrant for
I' the world as yet: nay, to the end of time,—
Since evil never means part company
S ce e e e ea s pa t co pa y
With mankind, only shift side and change shape.
I find advance i' the main, and notably
The Present an improvement on the Past,
And promise for the Future—which shall prove
Only the Present with its rough made smooth,
Its indistinctness emphasized; I hope
No better, nothing newer for mankind,
But something equably smoothed everywhere,
Good, reconciled with hardly-quite-as-good,
Instead of good and bad each jostling each.
"And that 's all?" Ay, and quite enough for me!
We have toiled so long to gain what gain I find
I' the Present,—let us keep it! We shall toil
So long before we gain—if gain God grant—
A Future with one touch of difference
I' the heart of things, and not their outside face,—
Let us not risk the whiff of my cigar
For Fourier, Comte, and all that ends in smoke!

This I see clearest probably of men

With power to act and influence, now alive:
Juster than they to the true state of things;
In consequence, more tolerant that, side
By side, shall co-exist and thrive alike
In the age, the various sorts of happiness
Moral, mark!—not material—moods o' the mind
Suited to man and man his opposite:
Say, minor modes of movement—hence to there,
Or thence to here, or simply round about—
So long as each toe spares its neighbor's kibe,
Nor spoils the major march and main advance.
The love of peace, care for the family,
Contentment with what 's bad but might be worse—
Good movements these! and good, too, discontent,
So long as that spurs good, which might be best,
Into becoming better, anyhow:
Good—pride of country, putting hearth and home
I' the background, out of undue prominence:
Good—yearning after change, strife, victory,
And triumph. Each shall have its orbit marked,
But no more,—none impede the other's path
In this wide world,—though each and all alike,
Save for me, fain would spread itself through space
And leave its fellow not an inch of way.
I rule and regulate the course, excite,
Restrain: because the whole machine should march
Impelled by those diversely-moving parts,
Each blind to aught beside its little bent.
Out of the turnings round and round inside,
Comes that straightforward world-advance, I want,
And none of them supposes God wants too
And gets through just their hindrance and my help.
I think that to have held the balance straight
For twenty years, say, weighing claim and claim
And giving each its due, no less no more,
This was good service to humanity,
Right usage of my power in head and heart,
And reasonable piety beside.
Keep those three points in mind while judging me!
You stand, perhaps, for some one man, not men,—
Represent this or the other interest,
Nor mind the general welfare,—so, impugn
My practice and dispute my value: why?
You man of faith, I did not tread the world
Into a paste, and thereof make a smooth
Uniform mound whereon to plant your flag,
The lily-white, above the blood and brains!
Nor yet did I, you man of faithlessness,
So roll things to the level which you love,
That you could stand at ease there and survey
The universal Nothing undisgraced
By pert obtrusion of some old church-spire
I' the distance! Neither friend would I content,
Nor, as the world were simply meant for him,
Thrust out his fellow and mend God's mistake.
Why, you two fools,—my dear friends all the same,—
Is it some change o' the world and nothing else
Contents you? Should whatever was, not be?
How thanklessly you view things! There 's the root
Of the evil, source of the entire mistake:
You see no worth i' the world, nature and life,
Unless we change what is to what may be,
Which means,—may be, i' the brain of one of you!
"Reject what is?"—all capabilities—
Nay, you may style them chances if you choose—
All chances, then, of happiness that lie
Open to anybody that is born,
Tumbles into this life and out again,—
All that may happen, good and evil too,
I' the space between, to each adventurer
Upon this 'sixty, Anno Domini:
A life to live—and such a life! a world
To learn, one's lifetime in,—and such a world!
How did the foolish ever pass for wise
By calling life a burden, man a fly
Or worm or what 's most insignificant?
"O littleness of man!" deplores the bard;
And then, for fear the Powers should punish him,
"O grandeur of the visible universe
Our human littleness contrasts withal!
O sun, O moon, ye mountains and thou sea,
Thou emblem of immensity, thou this,
That and the other,—what impertinence
In man to eat and drink and walk about
And have his little notions of his own,
The while some wave sheds foam upon the shore!"
First of all, 't is a lie some three-times thick:
The bard,—this sort of speech being poetry,—
The bard puts mankind well outside himself
And then begins instructing them: "This way
I and my friend the sea conceive of you!
What would you give to think such thoughts as ours
Of you and the sea together?" Down they go
On the humbled knees of them: at once they draw
Distinction, recognize no mate of theirs
In one, despite his mock humility,
So plain a match for what he plays with. Next,
The turn of the great ocean-playfellow,
When the bard, leaving Bond Street very far
From ear-shot, cares not to ventriloquize,
But tells the sea its home-truths: "You, my match?
You, all this terror and immensity
And what not? Shall I tell you what you are?
Just fit to hitch into a stanza, so
Wake up and set in motion who 's asleep
O' the other side of you in England, else
Unaware, as folk pace their Bond Street now,
Somebody here despises them so much!
Between us,—they are the ultimate! to them
And their perception go these lordly thoughts:
Since what were ocean—mane and tail, to boot—
Mused I not here, how make thoughts thinkable?
Start forth my stanza and astound the world!
Back, billows, to your insignificance!
Deep, you are done with!"

Learn, my gifted friend,

There are two things i' the world, still wiser folk
Accept—intelligence and sympathy.
You pant about unutterable power
I' the ocean, all you feel but cannot speak?
Why, that 's the plainest speech about it all.
You did not feel what was not to be felt.
Well, then, all else but what man feels is naught—
The wash o' the liquor that o'erbrims the cup
Called man, and runs to waste adown his side,
Perhaps to feed a cataract,—who cares?
I 'll tell you: all the more I know mankind,
The more I thank God, like my grandmother,
For making me a little lower than
The angels, honor-clothed and glory-crowned:
This is the honor,—that no thing I know,
Feel or conceive, but I can make my own
Somehow, by use of hand or head or heart:
This is the glory,—that in all conceived,
Or felt or known, I recognize a mind
Not mine but like mine,—for the double joy,—
Making all things for me and me for Him.
There 's folly for you at this time of day!
So think it! and enjoy your ignorance
Of what—no matter for the worthy's name—
Wisdom set working in a noble heart,
When he, who was earth's best geometer
Up to that time of day, consigned his life
With its results into one matchless book,
The triumph of the human mind so far,
All in geometry man yet could do:
And then wrote on the dedication-page
In place of name the universe applauds,
"But, God, what a geometer art Thou!"
I suppose Heaven is, through Eternity,
The equalizing, ever and anon,
In momentary rapture, great with small,
Omniscience with intelligency, God
With man,—the thunder-glow from pole to pole
Abolishing, a blissful moment-space,
Great cloud alike and small cloud, in one fire—
As sure to ebb as sure again to flow
When the new receptivity deserves
The new completion. There 's the Heaven for me.
And I say, therefore, to live out one's life
I' the world here, with the chance,—whether by pain
Or pleasure be the process, long or short
The time, august or mean the circumstance
To human eye,—of learning how set foot
Decidedly on some one path to Heaven,
Touch segment in the circle whence all lines
Lead to the centre equally, red lines
Or black lines, so they but produce themselves—
This, I do say,—and here my sermon ends,—
This makes it worth our while to tenderly
Handle a state of things which mend we might,
Mar we may, but which meanwhile helps so far.
Therefore my end is—save society!

"And that 's all?" twangs the never-failing taunt

O' the foe—"No novelty, creativeness,
Mark of the master that renews the age?"
"Nay, all that?" rather will demur my judge
I look to hear some day, nor friend nor foe—
"Did you attain, then, to perceive that God
Knew what he undertook when he made things?"
Ay: that my task was to co-operate
Rather than play the rival, chop and change
The order whence comes all the good we know,
With this,—good's last expression to our sense,—
That there 's a further good conceivable
Beyond the utmost earth can realize:
And, therefore, that to change the agency,
The evil whereby good is brought about—
Try to make good do good as evil does—
Were just as if a chemist, wanting white,
And knowing black ingredients bred the dye,
Insisted these too should be white forsooth!
Correct the evil, mitigate your best,
Blend mild with harsh, and soften black to gray
If f ll ith d ti t
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