Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Richard Wagner in Bayreuthunderstand him. Already this chorus is making the art-centres ofmodern man tremble; whenever the breath of his spirit has waftedinto these gardens, everything withered and ready to fall there hasbeen shaken; and even more eloquent than this trembling is auniversal uncertainty: no one knows any longer where the influenceof Wagner may not suddenly break out. He is quite incapable ofregarding the welfare of art as being in any way divorced from thegeneral welfare: wherever the modern spirit represents a danger ofany kind, there with the most observant mistrust he also suspects adanger to art. In his imagination he takes apart the building of ourcivilization and lets nothing decayed, nothing frivolously constructed,escape; if he encounters firm walls or durable foundations, he atonce thinks of a way of employing them as bulwarks and protectiveroofs for his art. He lives like a fugitive whose aim is to preserve, nothimself, but a secret; like an unfortunate woman who wants to savethe life of the child she carries in her womb, not her own: he lives likeSieglinde, 'for the sake of love' . *For it is, to be sure, a life full of torment and shame, to be a homelesswanderer in a world to which one nonetheless has to speak andof which one has to make demands, which one despises and yet isunable to do without - it is the actual predicament of the artist of thefuture; he cannot, like the philosopher, hunt after knowledge all byhimself in a dark corner, for he needs human souls as mediators withthe future, public institutions as guarantees of this future, as bridgesbetween the now and the hereafter. His art is not to be embarked onthe ship of the written word, as the philosopher's work can be: artwants peifonners as transmitters, not letters and notes. Across wholestretches of Wagner's life there resounds a fear that he will not meetthese performers and that, instead of the practical example he oughtto give them, he will be fo rced to confine himself to indications inwriting, and instead of active demonstration present the merestshadow of it to those who read books, which means on the wholethose who are not artists.Wagner as a writer is like a brave man whose right hand has beencut off and who fights on with his left: he always suffers when hewrites, because a temporarily ineluctable necessity has robbed himI of the ability to communicate in the way appropriate to him, in the* In Die Walkure, Sieglinde, the mother of Siegfried, is urged by Briinnhilde to 'livefor the sake of love' by saving herself from the wrath of Wotan, not for her own sake,but for that of the child she is carrying.247