[...] But permit me to say something on the subject of water! - I admit right away that you do well to follow your present diet, and that I am indescribably happy to know that it has been so beneficial for your health of body. That we can all be redeemed from the current state of so thoroughly unnatural a condition only by means of this radical element is certain. Lack of healthy food, on the one hand, an excess of lavish enjoyment, on the other, but, above all, our way of life in general, which is entirely contrary to nature, all this has reduced us to a level of degeneracy which we can transcend only by means of a complete renewal of our twisted organism. Superfluity and deprivation, these are the two destructive enemies of present-day humanity. But if you take the trouble to ask yourself the basic question of what we mean by the word “superfluous”, you will find - as find you must - that everything is superfluous that encloses the walls of a town - and not only what consumes this superfluity, but what produces it, too. All of us who live in towns are condemned to the most joyless suicide. But how do things stand with the population of our villages? Do not all their efforts similarly pass merely from deprivation to superfluity? Here, too, as much as in the towns, excessive work corrupts people to the extent that all they cherish is that selfsame desire for superfluity which makes them think of idle repose as something desirable, being the only contrast to excessive work they can understand. Only universal activity is in itself enjoyable, and a pleasure per se: but we are all bound to a specific activity by the law of property, an activity which finds an outlet only in the direction of one profession, which absorbs only one of our faculties, and which does so to such a violent degree that our total capacity is consumed by it, so that we see in this one daily preoccupation our physical ruin and moral undoing - in other words, our enemy, disgusting, loathsome and wearying work which we finally confuse with activity in general, wishing therefore only to be able to exchange it for absolute and idle repose. In the country, such work has the additionally loathsome aspect that, as a result of their total and exclusive preoccupation with beasts of the field and with dung, people are themselves turned into beasts of the dunghill! Wherever we turn in the civilized world, we see how degenerate man has become for the reasons given above - but we are justified in despairing of this world only if we consider these reasons to be eternally binding. But it is precisely these reasons against which the true spirit of revolution rebels: and what we need to recognize this fact is certainly not a training in metaphysics but the destruction of these misleading teachings in favour of a quite simple natural need. But what, then, is the purport of socialism? Those who preach it no longer understand what it is, because their desire is for organization. Its sole purport is to make superfluity and deprivation impossible. Thus the people do not need to be taught, but simply told they are right! And, indeed, they are telling themselves this with increasing conviction, now that they have seen how trust in their leaders has led to their own unhappiness. Do they not need merely to observe the present political muddle to know what to think of politics? If ever there was a period in history conducive to remedying an error with the speed of lightning, it is the period of today’s reactionism! Do you believe that a human being will still fight for politics? Indeed you do, for you have said that you can imagine victory for the revolution only through a new and compulsory association of constitutional and democratic thinkers. I tell you - no one will lift a finger in support of democracy, since every political revolution has become utterly impossible. In politics there is no one who is still blind to the facts: everyone knows how disreputable our political conditions are: only the fact that behind them lies the social question gives people enough feeble courage to hold out. We no longer have a movement, apart from the one that is decidedly socialist, but socialist in a quite different sense from the one that our socialists dream of: everything else will remain weak and powerless till then. - You ask me now: “Where are these people hiding who will bring about this necessary overthrow? I see nothing but the most pitiful of people around me, philistines and cowards, and even in the lower reaches I see only obtuseness and a pack-horse mentality!” My dearest Uhlig, recall that day during the Dresden uprising when you met me on the Zwinger promenade and asked me in trepidation and with some concern whether I was not afraid that, at best, the result would be mob-rule? - You had been alarmed by the sight of those same people you now appear to seek in vain! The fact that these people were still tied to the apron-strings of politics, that they bowed their heads in respectful silence before higher political aims which they saw embodied in their leaders, that they were not yet the people they really are nor their actions those that they will one day be, that they showed obedience where they should have acted - it was this alone that subjugated them and made them appear to you as they did - men who were drunk on politics, and who blustered their way through the streets of the town - which they might have set fire to, with all the judicial splendour of our fair city of Dresden, had it only been granted them to act in accord with the fury they felt in their hearts. I have seen these people again in Paris and Lyons, and now know the future course of the world. - Until now we have encountered expressions of enslaved human nature only in crimes that disgust and appal us! - Whenever murderers and thieves now set fire to a house, the deed rightly strikes us as base and repugnant: - but how shall it seem to us if the monster that is Paris is burned to the ground, if the conflagration spreads from town to town, and if we ourselves, in our wild enthusiasm, finally set fire to these uncleansable Augean stables for the sake of a breath of fresh air? - With complete level-headedness and with no sense of dizziness, I assure you that I no longer believe in any other revolution save that which begins with the burning down of Paris: - no more June battles will be fought there, - for men now hold themselves in reverence, but these are no longer the prison cells in which they are turned into beasts. - Does that alarm you? - Think on these things calmly and honestly, - you will come to the same conclusion! Strong nerves will be needed, and only true human beings will survive the revolution, i.e. those whose humanity is the product of need and the most grandiose terror. - “Can anything useful emerge from all this?” - Just wait and see how we recover from this fire-cure: if necessary I could finish painting this picture, I could even imagine how a man of enthusiasm might here and there summon together the living remnants of our former art and how he might say to them - who among you desires to help me perform a drama? Only those people will answer who genuinely share that desire, for there will no longer be money available, but those who respond will at once reveal to the world, in a rapidly erected wooden structure, what art is. - At all events, it will all happen quickly, for you can see there is no question here of gradual progress: our redeemer will destroy with furious speed all that stands in our way! - When? - I do not know, for nothing is being achieved here, - but one thing I do know is that the coming storm will exceed all earlier ones to the same degree that the February Revolution exceeded our expectations of 1847. - There is only one step still to be taken, and that step is imperatively necessary.
- Look, just as we need a water-cure to heal our bodies, so we need a fire-cure in order to remedy (i.e. destroy) the cause of our illness - a cause that is all around us. Shall we return then to a state of nature, shall we reacquire the human animal’s ability to live to be 200 years old? God forbid! Man is a social, all-powerful being only through culture. Let us not forget that culture alone grants us the power to enjoy life to the full as only mankind can enjoy it. True enjoyment, however, consists in distilling a specific concentrate out of the general fund of things worth enjoying, so that we can assimilate in an instant what time and the elements have to offer us in a widely divergent context. Who, at the moment of enjoyment, thinks of the permanence of that enjoyment? If we think of permanence, the enjoyment itself immediately fades. Let us fill our lives with true substance, let us delight in our activities, whether those activities involve the giving or the receiving of pleasure, and we shall never be frightened by the thought of those activities coming to an end, for that end will itself be a form of action. Why should we worry whether we live to be 100 or only 30, as long as we live a life of enjoyment: - life per se is a mere abstraction, active enjoyment is what matters. Believe me - water will restore us to our former health, but we shall not be truly healthy until we can also drink wine without harm to ourselves! -
My companions are coming; I must close now!
I hope you have had enough this time! Fare you well, and don’t try juggling with the lamp or you’ll set your bed alight!
Fare you well, and my very best wishes from
Yours,
R.W.
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 117