If the men were to be named who most strongly have affected the imagination and shaped the ideals of Germans since the days of Bismarck, there can be little doubt that the four men included in this volume would come foremost to most people’s minds. For there is not a German living today who has not, directly or indirectly, received a decisive impulse and lasting inspiration from Schopenhauer’s keen analysis of reality, from Richard Wagner’s glorification of sensuous emotion, from Emperor William’s noble conception of Germany’s intellectual and moral mission. It is particular satisfaction that the gracious permission of His Majesty the German Emperor made it possible to link him here, Through selections from his speeches dealing with religion, social reform, art, education, and sport, with those other three intellectual leaders of contemporary Germany; and Editors and Publishers of The German Classics desire, in this place also, to express their sincere gratitude for the favor bestowed upon them. That Max Klinger and Hans Thoma should have been foremost among the artists selected for the illustration of this volume, needs, I believe, no explanation. My Work, “wrote Schopenhauer in spring of 1818, “is a new philosophical system a highly consistent thought-order which has, up to this time, come into no man’s head. The book will later become the source and suggestion of a hundred others. It is equally far removed from the bombastic, empty and senseless wordiness of the new philosophical school and from the vague commonplace chit-chat of the pre-Kantian period. The style is clear yet forcible and, I may add, not without beauty; for only he who has genuine thoughts of his own has a genuine style. I set a high value on my work; for I regard it as the full fruit of my life.” One imagines that Schopenhauer’s publisher, Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus, to whom these words were written, must have smiled at the naïveté of these self-glorifications. Yet sober-minded commentators have repeated Schopenhauer’s estimate of his great work, The World as Will and Idea. ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER(Pages 1-140) “Arthur Schopenhauer and His Philosophy.” “The World as Will and Idea.” “Parerga and Paralipomena.” “On Genius” “On the Sufferings of the World.” “On Suicide.” “On Thinking for Oneself.” “On Style.” “On Women.” It is now universally acknowledge that Wagner was one of the great constructive forces of the nineteenth century a genius of such tremendous individuality that we cannot rejoice in the glorious art-works thereby created without at the same time granting that such a personality is of necessity egotistical and one-sided, and anything but clearheaded in settling abstract questions of race, religion, and politics. As to the styles of the Autobiography in distinction from the essays we find a great deal of real charm and wit. Wagner had a happy knack for story telling and the work reveals his astounding memory for details and the vividness of his emotional impressions. When Wagner was dealing with matters connected with his own special art he was on sure ground, and great praise must be given to his essays On Conducting, On the Application of Music to the Drama and to those which deal with the inner meaning and proper interpretation of certain masterpieces such as Beethoven’s Coriolanus Overture, his Third and Ninth Symphonies and Gluck’s Iphigenia’s in Aulis. These essays, although of prime importance only to the trained musician, yet contain much, which should be of interest to the general reader. They show that Wagner could be lucid, when unencumbered by abstract metaphysical theorizing, and they redound to his credit as much as the carefully planned treatise of a man of science. On the whole Wagner’s best piece of critical and esthetic writing is the essay on Beethoven (1871). The following selections present to the general reader a side comparatively little known of one of the great geniuses of German race, and should be helpful towards a more comprehensive estimate of his power and versatility. In this age of compromise it is stimulating to be brought into touch with any one so passionately in earnest as Wagner was, who proved once and for all that genius and ideality are indestructible, however much they may be hampered for a time. RICHARD WAGNER (Pages 141-252) “The Prose Works of Richard Wagner.” “Art and Revolution.” “Man and Art in General.” “The Art of Tone.” “The Art of Sculpture.” “Outlines of the Art Work of the Future.” “Opera and the Nature of Music.” “A Communication to My Friends.” “Beethoven.” “Speech at Weber’s Grave.” Let us from the very beginning state emphatically that Nietzsche does not advocate individualist or anarchistic ethics. But he wants to abolish the slave-morality, which according to him, Christianity has brought into the world and is upholding, for the racially predestined higher man, the real nobleman, and the ingredients material for his Superman or what he sometimes calls the good European. “My philosophy is directed towards establishing rank; not toward an individualistic morality. The mind of the herd is to prevail in the herd, - but not beyond it: the leader of the herd need a fundamentally different valuation of their own actions”. In the Styles and composition of Thus Spake Zarathustra he avowedly followed and develop Luther’s translation of the Bible. In the attempt to utilize the biblical styles for the utterance of boldest modern thought he left far behind him Lamennais, Walt Whitman, and Spitteler, to give examples from three languages. But the biblical after all, is only one of the elements of style and composition welded together so magically in his greatest artistic achievement formed the half-mythical person of the founder of Persian religion into the symbolical form of his own Zarathustra, the creator of the Superman, the prophet, seer, philosopher, and artist, embodying therein his ideal self, his teachings hopes, bitterness’s, his joys, his laughter, his restless and courageous struggle against himself and the world. FRIEDRICH WILHELM NIETZSCHE (Pages 253-524) “Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche.” “Thus Spake Zarathustra.” “The Use and Abuse of History.” “Aphorisms.” “The Drunken Song.” “Venice.” “Ecce Homo.” “To Richard Wagner.” “A Dancing Song to the Mistral Wind.” “The Wanderer.” “From Lofty Mountains.” Keywords: The German Classics Vol. 15, Majesty the German, German, Schopenhauer, Arthur, Ideals, Genius, Suicide, Prose, Richard Wagner, Beethoven, Friedrich, Wilhelm, History, Artistic, Art, Opera, Spake, Aphorism, Grave,

Book Details