On the Genealogy of Morality (Chap. 4.4)

In a case like Wagner’s, which is in many ways an embarrassing one, although the example is typical, my opinion is that it’s certainly best to separate an artist far enough from his work, so that one does not take him with the same seriousness as one does his work. In the final analysis, he is only the precondition for his work, its maternal womb, the soil or, in some cases, the dung and manure, on and out of which it grows—and thus, in most cases, something that we must forget about, if we want to enjoy the work itself. Insight into the origin of a work is a matter for physiologists and vivisectionists of the spirit, never the aesthetic men, the artists—never! In a deep, fundamental, even terrifying way the poet and composer of Parsifal could not escape living inside and descending into the conflicts of the medieval soul, a hostile distance from all spiritual loftiness, rigour, and discipline, a form of intellectual perversity (if you will forgive the expression), any more than a pregnant woman can escape the repellent and strange aspects of pregnancy, something which, as I have said, one must forget if one wants to enjoy the child. We should be on our guard against that confusion which arises from psychological contiguity (to use an English word), a confusion in which even an artist can only too easily get caught up, as if he himself were what he can present, imagine, and express. In fact, the case is this: if that were what he was, he simply would not present, imagine, or express it. A Homer would not have written a poem about Achilles or a Goethe a poem about Faust if Homer had been an Achilles or if Goethe had been a Faust. A complete and entire artist is for ever separated from the “real,” from what actually is. On the other hand, one can understand how he can sometimes grow weary of this eternal “unreality” and falseness of his innermost existence to the point of desperation—and that he then makes an attempt for once to reach over into what is forbidden precisely to him, into reality, in an attempt truly to be. What success does he have? We can guess . . . That is the typical wishfulness of the artist: the same wishfulness which fell over Wagner once he’d grown old and for which he had to pay such a high, fatal price (—because of it he lost a valuable number of his friends). Finally, however, and quite apart from this mere wishfulness of his, who could not desire—for Wagner’s own sake—that he had taken his leave of us and his art in a different manner, not with a Parsifal, but more victoriously, more self-confidently, more like Wagner—less deceptive, less ambiguous about all his intentions, less like Schopenhauer, less nihilistic?