112 Nietzschefertilizers, journalism, and the postal system. There are no further
grounds to dodge reality and pursue metaphysics and religion. If physics
takes flight, the highfliers of metaphysics come crashing down and
should therefore resign themselves to live respectably on the flat earth.
A sense of reality will produce the wonders of the future; we should not
be carried away by art. In small doses, art is certainly useful and good,
even indispensable. Precisely because our world has turned into one
huge machine, the following metaphor also applies: "there are not only
callous wheels at work in it; soothing oil pours out as well" (1,188; DS §
6). Art is just this sort of soothing oil. Strauss calls the music of Haydn
an "honest soup"; Beethoven is a "confection." When he hears the
Eroica, Strauss gets the irresistible urge "to kick over the traces and seek
adventure" (1,185; DS § 5), but he soon returns to the bliss of the com-
monplace in the fever and excitement of a united Germany. Nietzsche
heaped mockery and scorn on this "creeping enthusiasm in felt slippers"
(1,182; DS $ 4).
We sense in Nietzsche all the indignation of a man who fancies him-
self in the heart of the wodd when contemplating art, especially music,
and who finds his true essence "under the spell of art" (1,452; WB § 4).
For this reason, he opposed the attitude that art is a pleasant trifle—pos-
sibly even the most pleasant of all trifles, but still just a trifle.
The German Romantics delighted in casting aspersions on bourgeois
desecrators of art, whom Nietzsche later called "cultivated philistines."
E. T. A. Hoffmann's musical conductor Kreisler breaks up a musical
evening that promises "pleasant entertainment and diversion" with a
fast and furious rendition of the Goldberg Variations. In Hoffmann's
well-known detective story "Mademoiselle de Scudéri," the artist figure
is a goldsmith whose disdain for the public escalates from derision to
homicide. These Romantic stories portray the war of art against the
philistines of art and their utilitarian oudook. Nietzsche's critique of
David Friedrich Strauss was firmly situated in this tradition. Nietzsche
reveled in the vindictiveness of an indignant art lover: "woe to all vain
masters and the whole aesthetic kingdom of heaven if ever the young