Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Richard Wagner in BayreuthWagner addresses as a writer nonetheless have something in commonwhich distinguishes them fu ndamentally from that 'folk' fo rwhom he creates as an artist. In the refinement and unfruitfulness oftheir culture they are altogether divorced from the world of the folk, and hewho wants to make himself understood by them has to -speak in amanner divorced from that of the folk: as our best prose writers havedone and as Wagner also does. With what degree of self-constraintwe can guess. But the force of the drive, protective and as it weremotherly, which he brings to every sacrifice draws him back into theatmosphere of the scholar and the cultivated to which as a creator hehas said farewell for ever. He subjects himself to the language of cultureand to all its laws of communication, even though he was thefirst to feel the profound inadequacy of this fo rm of communication.For if there is anything that sets his art apart from all other art ofmodern times it is this: it no longer speaks the language of the cultureof a caste and in general no longer recognizes any distinctionbetween the cultivated and the uncultivated. It therewith sets itself inopposition to the entire culture of the Renaissance, which had previouslyenveloped us modern men in its light and shade. Bytransporting us for moments out of this mantle of light and shade,Wagner's art enables us for the first time to see how uniform thatwhole period was: Goethe and Leopardi then appear to us as the lastgreat fo llowers of the Italian philologist-poets, Faust as a representationof the riddle propounded by modern times of the theoreticalman who thirsts for real life - an enigma the furthest removed fromthe world of the folk; even the Goethean song is an imitation of afolk-song, not an example of it, and the poet well knew why headmonished one of his followers with the words: 'My things cannotbecome popular; whoever thinks they can and tries to make them sois in error.'That it was in any way possible for an art to exist which was sobright and warm that it would both enlighten the poor and lowly andmelt the arrogance of the learned was something that could not bedivined before it had come about. But now that it has come about, itmust transform every notion of education and culture in the spirit ofeveryone who experiences it; it will seem to him that a curtain hasbeen raised on a fu ture in which there are no longer any great andgood things except those which all hearts share in common. The illodour which has hitherto clung to the word 'common' will then havebeen removed from it.249