Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Richard Wagner in Bayreuthbut along a different path to where the higher self is at home; andconversely, the latter descends to earth and in everything earthlyrecognizes its own image. If it were possible to speak in this fashionof the ultimate goal and issue of this evolution and still remainintelligible, then it would also be possible to discover the inetaphysicalexpression which would describe a lengthy, intermediatestage in this evolution; but I doubt if the former can be done, and Ishall therefore not attempt the latter either. This intermediate stagecan be distinguished historically from the earlier and later stageswith two phrases: Wagner becomes a social revolutionary, Wagnerrecognizes that the only artist there has been hitherto is the poetizingfolk. * He was led to both by the ruling idea which, after that period ofgreat despair and atonement, appeared before him in a new shapeand more powerfully than ever. Influence, incomparable influenceby means of the theatre! - but over whom? He shuddered when herecalled those whom he had hitherto sought to influence. From hisown experience he knew the whole shameful situation in which artand artists find themselves: how a soulless or soul-hardened society,which calls itself good but is in fact evil, counts art and artists asamong its retinue of slaves whose task it is to satisfy its imagined needs.Modern art is luxury: he grasped that fact, as he did the fact that itmust stand or fall with the society to which it belongs. Just as it hasemployed its power over the powerless, over the folk, in the mosthardhearted and cunning fashion so as to render them ever moreserviceable, base and less natural, and to create out of them the modern'worker', so it has deprived the folk of the greatest and purestthings its profoundest needs moved it to produce and in which, asthe true and only artist, it tenderly expressed its sou'! - its mythology,its song, its dance, its linguistic inventiveness - in order to distil fromthem a lascivious antidote to the exhaustion and boredom of itsexistence, the arts of today. How this society came into being, how itknew how to imbibe new strength from apparently antagonisticspheres of power, how for example Christianity degenerated tohypocrisy and superficiality and allowed itself to be used as a shieldagainst the fo lk, as a fortress for this society and its property, andhow science and scholarship offered themselves only too pliably to* Paraphrasing Wagner, here and elsewhere in this essay, Nietzsche uses the wordVolk in the sense in which Wagner used it, i.e. the 'people' or the 'nation' as a cultural,as opposed to political, entity. This sense of Volk has an English analogue in thephrases 'folk-story' and 'folk-music'; and, although the word by itselfis now archaic inEnglish, there seems to be no alternative to using it here.229