But it is a powerful, outreaching comprehension such as is not given to two of one race in a generation. In Nietzsche I think sometimes I found what the word comprehension means, (namely), a wide reaching out, then a skillful pulling together of many far powers, with the quick, firm, magic welding into one; the swift, clean focus.
However important Nietzsche may be as philosopher, I am sure his greatest merit is as master of words. In the German tongue, his is virtuosity. He recreates the language, as a Pope once said d’Annunzio had done with Italian. He has made possible a new, a different tempo. He has increased too its flexibility. Ruskin has not written with greater joy of art of Turner, than Nietzsche of music that charmed him. Nietzsche can do such things with words as Wagner with tone. The power of the two has kinships broader than racial, the kinship of men who had climbed patiently to heights.
Nietzsche declares that the appearance of Napoleon in the world made Goethe change his opinion of man. Evidently Napoleon demonstrated something that not even the imagination of a Goethe could reach. The Little Grandson of the Great Revolution made men of genius open their eyes. In few has there been such will to power.
Wagner in music, and Nietzsche in Also Sprach Zarathustra, were among originators of modern art. Zarathustra was perhaps the first new verse. The movement has been carried on by other nations. I am not sure that Germany did not discover the modern world. England seldom originates.
Nietzsche speaks of loving the south as a school of healing. There we hear the poet. He thinks music in the north grows pale, yellow, sick for the sun. There his longing burst forth. There was something resplendent, tropical, luxurious, in Nietzsche, which the north could not let flower. The soul of Nietzsche resembled glowing canvasses of Turner. It was filled with the same bursts of light. He needed, to be happy, effective, some equatorial land of the soul, lighted by greater suns of forthcoming strange civilizations, whose boundaries are non-geographical, where his superhuman dreams could find encouragement. While his body was bounded by Germany, his mind lived anywhere, at will.
In modern art, even France is borrower, like England. France habituated to lead the way, because her new art came from Wagner, and the north. It was in the glowing, resplendent mirror of his music, that brilliant, receptive France, surprised at first and not a little vexed, caught the thought, vision, of strange, revolutionary, æsthetic ways, which later she tried to persuade herself she found first, then pursued alone. Wagner, in short, taught expression, something different. He was first to fit closely, and with skill, another garment to the soul, the soul that had changed after the Great Revolution, and was no more capable of holding proudly the princely toga.
The range of emotions, expressions, is greater in modern art than in classic art. And certainly more richly, subtly shaded. Modern art does not let a fragment slip away. It takes account of the ugly, brutal, disgusting, obscene. Classical art preserved only beauty. It skimmed the cream, then threw the milk away. The ages have made us poor. Now we must take care of the milk beneath. Now we must set about making cheese. Now we must not disdain peasant work.
Among early ones to take firm stand against the classic order, were Wagner with tone, Nietzsche with words, Delacroix with color. Classic art was a straight line. Modern art is a line infinitely curved. But fresh complexities were creeping into life, with gradual rise to power of the masses of voracious appetite, multiple mood. Art is not now for aristocrats of superb culture. It is not made for a lonely Petronius in the silence, the secrecy of a violet-perfumed palace.
I enjoyed greatly the noble, chiseled art of Greeks and Romans. I enjoy in a different way the emotional whirlwind of the rough undistinguished moderns, with blinding dust, noisy upheavals, less accomplished expression, childish uncertainties, and the knowledge that no one knows where it may sweep us. But it may be merely a prolongation of habit of reading! I have faith that developments are to be prodigious. I know complexities will be considerable. In light of what has been accomplished, the prose of Landor is as remote, as delicately carved Alexandrian gems from the commodities of Woolworth. The new art is for the masses; the old art was for the intellectual aristocrats, the people of trained taste.
The youth of mankind rings in the trumpets of Wagner. Youth means achievement. And hope! The music of Wagner is a conquest of Rome. It is another down-pouring of the barbarian from the troubled, sad, mist-covered north.