[23]

I.

EVERYTHING lives and lasts by the inner Necessity of its being, by its own nature's Need. It lay in the nature of the art of Tone, to evolve herself to a capability of the most definite and manifold expression; which capability, albeit the need thereof lay hid within her soul, she would never have attained, had she not been thrust into a position toward the art of Poetry in which she saw herself compelled to will to answer claims upon her utmost powers, even though those claims should ask from her a thing impossible.

Only in its Form, can a being utter itself: the art of Tone owed all her forms to Dance and Song. To the Word-poet, who merely wished to make use of Music for the heightening of his own vehicle of expression, in Drama, she appeared solely in that narrowed form of song-and-dance; in which she could not possibly betray to him the wealth of utterance whereof, in truth, she still was capable. Had the art of Tone remained once for all in a position toward the Word-poet such as the latter now occupies towards herself in Opera, then she could only have been employed by him in her meanest powers, nor would she ever have reached the capability of becoming that supremely mighty organ of expression that she is to-day. Music was therefore destined to credit herself with possibilities which, in very truth, were doomed to stay for her impossibilities; herself a sheer organ of expression, she must rush into the error of desiring to plainly outline the thing to be expressed; she must venture on the boastful attempt to issue orders and speak out aims there, where in truth she can only have to subordinate herself to an aim her essence cannot ever formulate (fassen) but to whose realising she gives, by this her subordination, its only true enablement.—

[24]

Along two lines has Music developed in that art-genre which she dominates, the Opera: along an earnest—with all the Tone-poets who felt lying on their shoulders the burthen of responsibility that fell to Music when she took upon herself alone the aim of Drama; along a frivolous— with all the Musicians who, as though driven by an instinctive feeling of the impossibility of achieving an unnatural task, have turned their backs upon it and, heedful only of the profit which Opera had won from an uncommonly widespread popularity, have given themselves over to an unmixed musical empiricism. It is necessary that we should commence by fixing our gaze upon the first, the earnest line.

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The musical basis of Opera was—as we know—nothing other than the Aria; this Aria, again, was merely the Folk-song as rendered by the art-singer before the world of rank and quality, but with its Word-poem left out and replaced by the product of the art-poet to that end commissioned. The conversion of the Folk-tune into the Operatic-aria was primarily the work of that art-Singer; whose concern was no longer for the right delivery of the tune, but for the exhibition of his throat-dexterity. It was he, who parcelled out the resting-points he needed, the alternation of more lively with more placid phrasing, the passages where, free from any rhythmic or melodic curb, he might bring his skill to bearing as it pleased him best. The Composer merely furnished the singer, the Poet in his turn the composer, with the material for their virtuosity.

The natural relation of the artistic factors of Drama was thus, at bottom, as yet not quite upheaved: it was merely distorted, inasmuch' as the Performer, the most necessary condition for Drama's possibility, represented but one solitary talent—that of absolute song-dexterity—and nowise [25] all the conjoint faculties of artist Man. This one distortion of the character of the Performer, however, sufficed to bring about the ultimate perversion of the natural relation of those factors: to wit, the absolute preferment of the Musician before the Poet. Had that Singer been a true, sound and whole Dramatic-performer, then had the Composer come necessarily into his proper position toward the Poet; since the latter would then have firmly spoken out the dramatic aim, the measure for all else, and ruled its realising. But the poet who stood nighest that Singer was the Composer,—the composer who merely helped the singer to attain his aim; while this aim, cut loose from every vestige of dramatic, nay even poetic bearing, was nothing other, through and through, than to show-off his own specific song-dexterity.

This original relation of the artistic factors of Opera to one another we have to stamp sharply on our minds, in order to clearly recognise, in the sequel, how this distorted relation became only all the more entangled through every attempt to set it straight.—

Into the Dramatic Cantata, to satisfy the luxurious craving of these eminent sirs for change in their amusements, there was dovetailed next the Ballet. Dance and Dance-tune, borrowed just as waywardly from the Folk-dance and its tune as was the operatic Aria from the Folk-song, joined forces with the Singer, in all the sterile immiscibility of un-natural things; while it naturally became the Poet's task, midst such a heaping-up of inwardly incongruous matter, to bind the samples of the diverse art-dexterities, now laid before him, into some kind of patchwork harmony. Thus, with the Poet's aid, an ever more obviously imperative dramatic cohesion was thrust on That which, in its actual self, was crying for no cohesion whatever; so that the aim of Drama—forced on by outward Want—was merely lodged (angegeben), by no means housed (aufgenommen). Song-tune and Dance-tune stood side by side in fullest, chillest loneliness, for exhibition of the agility of singer or of dancer; and only in that [26] which was to make shift to bind them, to wit the musically-recited dialogue, did the Poet ply his lowly calling, did the Drama peep out here and there.

Neither was Recitative itself, by any means, some new invention proceeding from a genuine urgence of Opera towards the Drama. Long before this mode of intoning was introduced into Opera, the Christian Church had used it in her services, for the recitation of biblical passages. The banal singsong of these recitals, with its more listlessly melodic than rhetorically expressive incidence of tone, had been early fixed by ritualistic prescript into an arid semblance, without the reality, of speech; and this it was that, merely moulded and varied by musical caprice, passed over into the Opera. So that, what with Aria, Dance-tune and Recitative, the whole apparatus of musical drama— unchanged in essence down to our very latest opera—was settled once for all. Further, the dramatic groundplans laid beneath this apparatus soon won a kindred stereotyped persistence. Mostly taken from an entirely misconstrued Greek mythology, they formed a theatric scaffolding from which all capability of rousing warmth of human interest was altogether absent, but which, on the other hand, possessed the merit of lending itself to the good pleasure of every composer in his turn; in effect, the majority of these texts were composed over and over again by the most diverse of musicians.—

The so famous revolution of Gluck, which has come to the ears of many ignoramuses as a complete reversal of the views previously current as to Opera's essence, in truth consisted merely in this: that the musical composer revolted against the wilfulness of the singer. The Composer, who, next to the Singer, had drawn the special notice of the public to himself—since it was he who provided the singer with fresh supplies of stuff for his dexterity—felt his province encroached upon by the operations of the latter, in exact measure as he himself was busied to shape that stuff according to his own inventive fancy, and thus secure that his work also, and perchance at last only his [27] work, might catch the ear of the audience. For the reaching of his ambitious goal there stood two ways open to the Composer: either, by use of all the musical aids already at his disposal, or yet to be discovered, to unfold the purely sensuous contents of the Aria to their highest, rankest pitch; or—and this is the more earnest path, with which we are concerned at present—to put shackles on Caprice's execution of that Aria, by himself endeavouring to give the tune, before its executions an expression answering to the underlying Word-text. As, by the nature of these texts, they were to figure as the feeling discourse of the dramatis personae, so had it already occurred, quite of itself to feeling singers and composers to furnish forth their virtuosity with an impress of the needful warmth; and Gluck was surely not the first who indited feeling airs, nor his singers the first who delivered them with fit expression. But that he spoke out with consciousness and firm conviction the fitness and necessity of an expression answering to the text-substratum, in Aria and Recitative, this it is that makes him the departure-point of an at any rate thorough change in the quondam situation of the artistic factors of Opera toward one another. Henceforth the sceptre of Opera passes definitely over to the Composer: the Singer becomes the organ of the Composer's aim, and this aim is consciously declared to be the matching of the dramatic contents of the text-substratum with a true and suitable expression. Thus, at bottom, a halt was only cried to the unbecoming and heartless vanity of the singing Virtuoso; but with all the rest of Opera's unnatural organism things remained on their old footing. Aria, Recitative and Dance-piece, fenced-off each from each, stand side by side as unaccommodated in the operas of Gluck as they did before him, and as, with scarcely an exception, they still stand to-day.

In the situation of the Poet toward the Composer not one jot was altered; rather had the Composer grown more dictatorial, since, with his declared consciousness of a higher mission—made good against the virtuoso Singer—he set [28] to work with more deliberate zeal at the arrangement of the opera's framework. To the Poet it never occurred to meddle with these arrangements; he could not so much as dream of Music, to which the Opera had owed its origin, in any other form than those narrow, close-ruled forms he found set down before him—as binding even upon the Musician himself. To tamper with these forms by advancing claims of dramatic necessity, to such an extent that they should cease to be intrinsic shackles on the free development of dramatic truth, would have seemed to him unthinkable; since it was precisely in these forms alone—inviolable even by the musician—that he could conceive of Music's essence. Wherefore, once engaged in the penning of an opera-text, he must needs pay even more painful heed than the musician himself to the observance of those forms; at utmost leave it to that musician, in his own familiar field, to carry out enlargements and developments, in which he could lend a helping hand but never take the initiative. Thus the Poet, who looked up to the Composer with a certain holy awe, rather confirmed the latter's dictatorship in Opera, than set up rival claims thereto; for he was witness to the earnest zeal the musician brought to his task.

It was Gluck's successors, who first bethought them to draw profit from this their situation for the actual widening of the forms to hand. These followers, among whom we must class the composers of Italian and French descent who wrote for the Paris opera-stage at quite the close of the past and beginning of the present century, gave to their vocal pieces not only a more and more thorough warmth and straightforwardness of expression, but a more and more extended formal basis. The traditional divisions of the Aria, though still substantially preserved, were given a wider play of motive; modulations and connecting phrases (Übergänge und Verbindungsglieder) were themselves drawn into the sphere of expression; the Recitative joined on to the Aria more smoothly and less waywardly, and, as a necessary mode of expression, it stepped into [29] that Aria itself. Another notable expansion was given to the Aria, in that—obediently to the dramatic need— more than one person now shared in its delivery, and thus the essential Monody of earlier opera was beneficially lost. Pieces such as Duets and Terzets were indeed known long before; but the fact of two or three people singing in one piece had not made the slightest essential difference in the character of the Aria: this had remained exactly the same in melodic plan and insistence on the tonality once started (Behauptung des einmal angeschlagenen thematischen Tones)—which bore no reference to any individual expression, but solely to a general, specifically-musical mood—and not a jot of it was really altered, no matter whether delivered as a monologue or duet, excepting at the utmost quite materialistic details, namely in that its musical phrases were either sung alternately by different voices, or in concert through the sheer harmonic device of combining two, three, or more voices at once. To apply that specifically-musical factor in such a way that it should be susceptible of a lively change of individual expression, was the object and the work of these composers, as shown in their handling of the so-called dramatic-musical Ensemble. The essential musical substance of this Ensemble was still, indeed, composed of Aria, Recitative and Dance-tune: only, when once a vocal expression in accord with the text-substratum had been recognised as a becoming claim to make on Aria and Recitative, the truthfulness of such expression must logically be extended to everything else in the text that betrayed a particle of dramatic coherence. From the honest endeavour to observe this logical consistency arose that broadening of the older musical forms, in Opera, which we meet in the serious operas of Cherubini, Méhul and Spontini. We may say that in these works there is fulfilled all that Gluck desired, or could desire; nay, in them is once for all attained the acme of all natural, i.e. in the best sense consequential, evolution on the original lines of Opera.

[30]

The most recent of these three masters, Spontini, was moreover so fully convinced that he had actually reached the highest point attainable in the genre of Opera; he had so firm a faith in the impossibility of ever seeing his exertions capped, that, in all the later art-productions wherewith he followed up the works of his great Paris period, he never made even the slightest attempt, as to form and import, to overstep the standpoint taken in those works. He obstinately refused to look upon the later, so-called "romantic" development of Opera as anything but its manifest decadence; so that he gave to people, with whom he afterwards discussed this matter, the impression of a man who was positively eaten up with himself and his works; whereas he was really only uttering a conviction based, in truth, upon a thoroughly sound view of the essence of Opera.. Surveying the demeanour of our Modern Opera, Spontini could say, with perfect justice: "Have you in any way developed the essential Form of the musical constituents of Opera, beyond what you find with me? Or have you, perchance, been able to bring forth any intelligible or healthy thing by actually quitting that form? Is not all the, unpalatable in your works the mere result of your stepping outside that form, and all the palatable a simple outcome of your adherence to it? Where will you find this Form more majestic, broader, or more capacious, than in my three grand Paris operas? And who will tell me that he has filled this Form with more glowing, more feeling, or more energic Contents, than I?"—

It would be hard to give Spontini's question any answer that should bewilder him; still harder, to prove to him that he is mad for taking us for madmen. Out of Spontini speaks the honest, confident voice of the absolute-musician, who there proclaims: "If the Musician per se, as ordainer of the Opera, desires to bring to pass the Drama, he cannot go a step farther than I have gone, without betraying his total incapacity for the task." But in this there unwittingly lies the corollary: "If you desire [31] more, you must address yourselves, not to the Musician, but—to the Poet."

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Now how did this Poet bear himself towards Spontini and his colleagues? With all the maturing of Opera's musical Form, with all the development of its innate powers of Expression, the position of the Poet had not altered in the slightest. He still remained the platform-dresser (004) for the altogether independent experiments of the Composer. When the latter, by attained success, felt growing his power of freer motion within those forms of his, he simply bade the poet serve him his material with less fear and trembling; he, as it were, shouted to him: "See what I can do! Don't incommode yourself; trust me to dissolve even your daringest dramatic combinations, gristle, bone and all, into my music!"—So the Poet was merely hurried along with the Musician; he would have been ashamed to bring his master wooden hobby-horses, now that master was able to mount a real live horse, for he knew the rider had bravely learnt to ply the reins— those musical reins which were to school the horse's prancings in the well-strewn opera-circus, and without which neither Poet nor Musician would have dared to mount, for fear the steed should clear the ring and gallop home to its own wild wind-blown pastures.

Thus, in the wake of the Composer, the Poet certainly won an access of importance; but only in exact degree as the musician mounted upwards in advance, and bade him merely follow. The strictly musical possibilities, as pointed out by the composer, the poet had to keep in eye as the only measure for all his orderings and shapings, nay even for his choice of Stuff; and thus, for all the fame that he began to reap also, he remained ever but [32] the skilful servant who was so handy at waiting on the "dramatic" composer. Seeing that the composer had gained no other view of the relative position of the poet than the one he found laid down already by the very nature of Opera, he could only regard himself as the de facto responsible agent, and thus in all good conscience stay rooted to the standpoint of Spontini as the fittest; for thereon he might flatter himself that he was doing all that hay within the powers of a musician who fain would see the Opera, as a Musical Drama, maintain its claim to rank as an artistic form.

That in the Drama itself however, there lay possibilities which could not be so much as approached within that art-form—if it were not to fall to pieces,—this, perhaps, is now quite clear to us, but could by no chance occur to the poet or composer of that epoch. Of all dramatic possibilities, they could only light on such as were realisable in that altogether settled and, of its very essence, hampered Opera-music form. The broad expansion, the lingering on a motive, which the Musician required in order to speak intelligibly in his form,—the purely musical accessories he needed as a preliminary to setting his bell a-swinging, so that it might sound out roundly, and especially might sound in a fashion to give fitting expression to a definite character,—made it from the first the Poet's duty to confine himself to dramatic sketches of one settled pattern, devoid of colour and affording ample elbow-room to the musician for his experiments. Mere stereotyped rhetoric phrases were the prime requirement from the poet, for on this soil alone could the musician gain room for the expansion that he needed, but which was yet in truth entirely undramatic. To have allowed his heroes to speak in brief and definite terms, surcharged with meaning, would have only drawn upon the poet the charge of turning out wares impracticable for the composer. Since, then, the poet felt himself constrained to put trite and meaningless phrases in the mouth of his heroes, even the best will in the world could not have enabled him either to infuse a [33] real character into persons who talked like that, or to stamp the sum-total of their actions with the seal of full dramatic truth. His drama was forever a mere make-believe of Drama; to pursue a real dramatic aim to its legitimate conclusions could not so much as occur to him. Wherefore, strictly speaking, he only translated Drama into the language of Opera, and, as a matter of fact, mostly adapted long-familiar dramas already played to death upon the acting stage, as was notably the case in Paris with the tragedies of the Théâtre Français. The dramatic aim, thus bare within and hollow, passed manifestly over into the mere intentions of the Composer; from him was That awaited which the Poet gave up from the first. To him alone—to the Composer—must it therefore fall, to clothe this inner void and nullity of the whole, so soon as ever he perceived it; and thus he found himself saddled with the unnatural task of, from his standpoint—from the standpoint of the man whose only duty it should have been to help to realise by the expression at his command an already fully-fledged dramatic aim—imagining and calling into life that aim itself. The Musician thus had virtually to pen the drama, to make his music not merely its expression but its content; and yet this content, by the very nature of affairs, was to be none other than the Drama's self!

It is here that the predicate "dramatic" most palpably begins to work a strange confusion in men's notions of the nature of Music. Music, which, as an art of expression, can in its utmost wealth of such expression be nothing more than true, has conformably therewith to concern itself alone with what it should express: in Opera this is unmistakably the Feeling of the characters conversing on the stage, and a music which fulfils this task with the most convincing effect is all that it ever can be. A music, however, which would fain be more than this, which should not connect itself with any object to be expressed, but desire to fill its place, i.e. to be alike that object: such a music is no longer any kind of music, but a fantastic, hybrid emanation from Poetry and Music, which in truth can only materialise itself as [34] caricature. With all its perverse efforts, Music, the in any way effective music, has actually remained naught other than Expression. But from those efforts to make it in itself a Content—and that, forsooth, the Content of a Drama—has issued That which we have to recognise as the consequential downfall of Opera, and therewith as an open demonstration of the radical un-nature of that genre of art.

If the foundation and intrinsic Content of Spontinian opera were void and hollow, and its musical investiture of Form both threadbare and pedantic, yet with all its narrowness it was a plain, sincere avowal of the limits that must bound this genre, without one is to drive its un-nature into raving madness. Modern opera, on the contrary, is the open proclamation of the actual advent of that madness. In order to approach its essence closer, let us now turn to that other line of Opera's evolution which we have denoted above as the frivolous, and by whose intercrossing with the serious line just dealt-with there has been brought to light that indescribable medley which we hear spoken of, and not seldom even by seemingly reasonable beings, as "modern Dramatic Opera."

[35]

II.

LONG before the time of Gluck—as we have already mentioned—it had occurred quite of itself to nobly-gifted, nobly-feeling singers and composers to equip the phrasing, (Vortrag) of the operatic Aria with a more sincere (innig) expression; amid all their song-dexterity, and despite their virtuose bravura, to work upon their hearers by conveying genuine feeling and true passion wherever the text permitted, and even where it brought nothing to meet such expression half-way. This step was due entirely to the individual disposition of the musical factors of Opera; and therein the true essence of Music was so far victorious over formalism, as she proclaimed herself that art whose very nature it is to be the immediate language of the heart.

If, in the evolution of Opera, we may call the line (Richtung) on which this noblest attribute of Music was raised on principle by Gluck and his followers into the ordainer of the drama, that of reflective Opera: on the other hand, we must call that other line, on which this attribute—especially on the Italian opera-stage—was unconsciously evinced by naturally-gifted musicians, the naïve line. It is characteristic of the first, that, coming to Paris as a foreign product, it matured under the eyes of a public which, in itself entirely unmusical, gives a far more cordial welcome to well-balanced, dazzling turns of speech than to any feeling Content of that speech; whereas the second, the naïve line, remained preeminently the property of the sons of Italy, the home of modern music.

Admitted that it was again a German, who displayed the utmost splendour of this line: yet was he called alone to this high office because his artist nature was as clear, as spotless, as unruffled as a shining sheet of water, to which the rare, the brightest flower of Italian music bent down its [36] head; to see therein, to know, to love the mirrored likeness of itself. This mirror, however, was but the surface of a deep, unending sea of yearning, which from the measureless fill of its being reached upwards to that surface, as for the utterance of its meaning; from the gentle greeting of that fair vision, bending down to it as though in thirst for knowledge of itself, to win a form, a fashioning, a beauty.

Whosoever insists on seeing in Mozart an experimenting musician who turns, forsooth, from one attempt to solve the operatic problem to the next, can only counterpoise this error by placing alongside of it another, and, for instance, ascribing naïvety to Mendelssohn when, mistrustful of his own powers, he took his cautious, hesitating steps along that endless stretch of road which lay between himself and Opera. (005) The naïve, truly inspired artist casts himself with reckless enthusiasm into his artwork; and only when this is finished, when it shows itself in all its actuality, does he win from practical experience that genuine force of Reflection which preserves him in general from illusions (die ihn allgemeinhin vor Täuschungen bewahrt), yet in the specific case of his feeling driven again to art-work by his inspiration, loses once more its power over him completely. There is nothing more characteristic of Mozart, in his career of opera-composer, than the unconcernedness wherewith he went to work: it was so far from occurring to him to weigh the pros and cons of the æsthetic problem involved in Opera, that he the rather engaged with utmost unconstraint in setting any and every operatic textbook offered him, almost heedless whether it were a thankful or a thankless task for him as pure musician. If we piece together all his æsthetic hints and sayings, culled from here and there, we shall find that the sum of his Reflection mounts no higher than his famous definition of his "nose." He was so utterly and entirely a musician, and nothing but musician, that through him we may also gain the clearest and most convincing view of the true and proper [37] position of the Musician toward the Poet Indisputably his weightiest and most decisive stroke for Music he dealt precisely in Opera,—in Opera, over whose conformation it never for a moment struck him to usurp the poet's right, and where he attempted nothing but what he could achieve by purely musical means. In return, however, through the very faithfulness and singleness of his adoption of the poet's aim—wherever and howsoever present—he stretched these purely musical means of his to such a compass that in none of his absolute-musical compositions, and particularly his instrumental works, do we see the art of Music so broadly and so richly furthered as in his operas. The noble, straightforward simplicity of his purely musical instinct, i.e. his intuitive penetration (unwillkürlichen Innehabens) into the arcana of his art, made it wellnigh impossible to him there to bring forth magical effects, as Composer, where the Poem was flat and meaningless. How little did this richest-gifted of all musicians understand our modern music-makers' trick of building gaudy towers of music upon a hollow, valueless foundation, and playing the rapt and the inspired where all the poetaster's botch is void and flimsy, the better to show that the Musician is the jack in office and can go any length he pleases, even to making something out of nothing—the same as the good God! O how doubly dear and above all honour is Mozart to me, that it was not possible to him to invent music for Tito like that of Don Giovanni, for Cosi fan tutte like that of Figaro! How shamefully would it have desecrated Music!

Music Mozart always made, but beautiful music he could never write excepting when inspired. Though this Inspiration must ever come from within, from his own possessions, yet it could only leap forth bright and radiant when kindled from without, when to the spirit of divinest Love within him was shewn the object worthy love, the object that in ardent heedlessness of self it could embrace. And thus would it have been precisely the most absolute of all Musicians, Mozart himself who would have long-since solved the [38] operatic problem past all doubt, who would have helped to pen the truest, fairest and completest Drama, if only he had met the Poet whom he only would have had to help. But he never met that Poet: at times it was a pedantically wearisome, at times a frivolously sprightly maker of opera-texts, that reached him Arias, Duets, and Ensemble-pieces to compose; and these he took and so turned them into music, according to the warmth they each were able to awake in him, that in every instance they received the most answering expression of which their last particle of sense was capable.

Thus did Mozart only prove the exhaustless power of Music to answer with undreamt fulness each demand of the Poet upon her faculty of Expression; for all his un-reflective method, the glorious musician revealed this power, even in the truthfulness of dramatic expression, the endless multiplicity of its motivation, in far richer measure than Gluck and all his followers. But so little was a fundamental principle laid down in his creations, that the pinions of his genius left the formal skeleton of Opera quite unstirred: he had merely poured his music's lava-stream into the moulds of Opera. Themselves, however, they were too frail to hold this stream within them; and forth it flowed to where, in ever freer and less cramping channels, it might spread itself according to its natural bent, until in the Symphonies of Beethoven we find it swollen to a mighty sea. Whereas in Instrumental music the innate capabilities of Music developed into boundless power, those Operatic-forms, like burnt-out bricks and mortar, stayed chill and naked in their pristine shape, a carcase waiting for the coming guest to pitch his fleeting tent within.

Only for the history of Music in general, is Mozart of so strikingly weighty moment; in no wise for the history of Opera in particular, as a specific genre of art. Opera, whose unnatural being was bound to life by no laws of genuine Necessity, was free to fall a ready booty to the first musical adventurer who came its way.

[39]

The unedifying spectacle presented by the art-doings of so-called followers of Mozart, we here may reasonably pass by. A tolerably long string of composers figured to themselves that Mozart's Opera was a something whose form might be imitated; wherewith they naturally overlooked the fact that this form was Nothing in itself, and Mozart's musical spirit Everything. But to reconstruct the creations of Spirit by a pedantic setting of two and two together, has not as yet succeeded in the hands of any one.

One thing alone remained to utter in those forms. Albeit Mozart, in unclouded naïvety, had evolved their purely musical-artistic content to its highest pitch, yet the real secret of the whole opera-embroglio, in keeping with its source of origin, was still to be laid bare to nakedest publicity in those same forms. The world was yet to be plainly told, and without reserve, what longing and what claim on Art it was, that Opera owed its origin and existence to: that this longing was by no means for the genuine Drama, but had gone forth towards a pleasure merely seasoned with the sauces of the stage; in no sense moving or inwardly arousing, but merely intoxicating and outwardly diverting. In Italy, where this—as yet unconscious—longing had given birth to Opera, it was at last to be fulfilled with open eyes.

This brings us back to a closer dealing with the essence of the Aria.

So long as Arias shall be composed, the root-character of that art-form will always betray itself as an absolute-musical one. The Folk-song issued from an immediate double-growth, a consentaneous action of the arts of Poetry and Tone. This art—as opposed to that almost only one we can now conceive, the deliberate art of Culture—we ought perhaps to scarcely style as Art; but rather to call it an instinctive manifestment of the Spirit of the Folk through the organ of artistic faculty. Here the Word-poem and the Tone-poem are one. It never happens to the Folk, to sing its songs without a 'text'; without the Words (Wortvers) the Folk would brook no Tune (Tonweise). [40] If the Tune varies in the course of time, and with the divers offshoots of the Folk-stem, so vary too the Words. No severing of these twain can the Folk imagine; for it they make as firmly knit a whole as man and wife.

The man of Luxury heard this Folk-song merely from afar; in his lordly palace he listened to the reapers passing by; what staves surged up into his sumptuous chambers were but the staves of Tone, whereas the staves of Poetry died out before they reached him. Now, if this Tone-stave may be likened to the delicate fragrance of the flower, and the Word-stave to its very chalice, with all its tender stamens: the man of luxury, solely bent on tasting with his nerves of smell, and not alike with those of sight, squeezed out this fragrance from the flower and distilled therefrom an extract, which he decanted into phials to bear about him at his lief, to sprinkle on his splendid chattels and himself whene'er he listed. To gladden his eyes with the flower itself, he must necessarily have sought it closer, have stepped down from his palace to the woodland glades, have forced his way through branches, trunks and bracken; whereto the eminent and leisured sir had not one spark of longing. With this sweet-smelling residue he drenched the weary desert of his life, the aching void of his emotions; and the artificial growth that sprang from this unnatural fertilising was nothing other, than the Operatic Aria. Into whatsoever wayward intermarriages it might be forced, it stayed still ever-fruitless, forever but itself, but what it was and could not else be: a sheer musical Substratum.

The whole cloud-body of the Aria evaporated into Melody; and this was sung, was fiddled, and at last was whistled, without its ever recollecting that it ought by rights to have a word-stave, or at the least a word-sense under it. Yet the more this extract, to give it some manner of stuff for physically clinging to, must yield itself to every kind of experiment—among which the most pompous was the serious pretext of the Drama,—the more folk felt that it was suffering by mixture with the threadbare [41] foreign matter, nay, was actually losing its own pungency and pleasantness.

Now the man from whom this perfume, unnatural as it was, acquired again a corpus, which, concocted though it was, at least imitated as cleverly as possible that natural body which had once breathed forth its very soul in fragrance; the uncommonly handy modeller of artificial flowers, which he shaped from silk and satin and drenched their arid cups with that distilled substratum, till they began to smell like veritable blooms;—this great artist was Joachimo Rossini.

In the glorious, healthy, single-hearted artist-nature of Mozart that melodic scent had found so fostering a soil, that it eke put forth again the bloom of noble Art which holds our inmost souls as captives still Yet even with Mozart it only found this food when the akin, the sound, the purely-human offered itself as Poetry, for wedding with his wholly musical nature; and it was wellnigh a stroke of Luck, that this repeatedly occurred for him. Where Mozart was left unheeded by this fecund god, there, too, the artificial essence of that scent could only toilsomely uphold its false, unnecessary life by artificial measures. Melody, however costly were its nurture, fell sick of chill and lifeless Formalism, the only heritage the early sped could leave his heirs; for in his death he took away with him—his Life.

What Rossini saw around him, in the first flower of his teeming youth, was but the harvesting of Death. When he looked upon the serious, so-called Dramatic Opera of France, he saw with the keen insight of young Joy-in-life a garish corpse; which even Spontini, as he stalked along in gorgeous loneliness, could no longer stir to life, since—as though for some solemn sacrament of Self—he had already embalmed himself alive. Driven by his prickling sense of Life, Rossini tore the pompous cerecloths from this corpse, as one intent on spying out the secret of its former being. Beneath the jewelled and embroidered trappings he disclosed the true life-giver of even this majestic mummy: [42] and that was—Melody.—When he looked upon the native Opera of Italy and the work of Mozart's heirs, he saw nothing but Death again; death in empty forms whose only life shewed out to him as Melody,—Melody downright, when stripped of that pretence of Character which must seem to him a hollow sham if he turned to what of scamped, of forced and incomplete had sprung therefrom.

To live, however, was what Rossini meant; to do this, he saw well enough that he must live with those who had ears to hear him. The only living thing he had come upon in Opera, was absolute Melody; so he merely needed to pay heed to the kind of melody he must strike in order to be heard. He turned his back on the pedantic lumber of heavy scores, and listened where the people sang without a written note. What he there heard was what, out of all the operatic box of tricks, had stayed the most unbidden in the ear: the naked, ear-delighting, absolute-melodic Melody; i.e. melody that was just Melody and nothing else; that glides into the ear—one knows not why; that one picks up—one knows not why; that one exchanges to-day with that of yesterday, and forgets again to-morrow—also, one knows not why; that sounds sad when we are merry, and merry when we are out of sorts; and that still we hum to ourselves—we haven't a ghost of knowledge why.

This Melody Rossini struck; and behold!—the mystery of Opera was laid bare. What reflection and æsthetic speculation had built up, Rossini's opera-melodies pulled down and blew it into nothing, like a baseless dream. The "dramatic" Opera met the fate of Learning with her problems: those problems whose foundation had really been mistaken insight, and which the deepest pondering could only make but more mistaken and insoluble; until at last the sword of Alexander sets to work, and hews the leathern knot asunder, strewing its thousand thongs on every side. This Alexander-sword is just the naked Deed; and such a deed Rossini did, when he made the opera-public of the world a witness to the very definite truth, that people were [43] merely wanting to hear "delicious melodies" where mistaken artists had earlier fancied to make Musical Expression do duty for the aim and contents of a Drama.

The whole world hurrahed Rossini for his melodies: Rossini, who so admirably knew how to make the employment of these melodies a special art. All organising of Form he left upon one side; the simplest, barrenest and most transparent that came to hand, he filled with all, the logical contents it had ever needed,—with narcotising Melody. Entirely unconcerned for Form, just because he left it altogether undisturbed, he turned his whole genius to the invention of the most amusing hocus-pocus for execution within those forms. To the singers, erstwhile forced to study the dramatic expression of a wearisome and nothing-saying 'text,' he said: "Do whatever you please with the words; only, before all don't forget to get yourselves liberally applauded for risky runs and melodic entrechats." Who so glad to take him at his word, as the singers?— To the instrumentists, erstwhile trained to accompany pathetic snatches of song as intelligently as possible in a smooth ensemble, he said: "Take it easy; only, before all don't forget to get yourselves sufficiently clapped for your individual skill, wherever I give you each his opportunity." Who more lavish of their thanks, than the instrumentists?—To the opera-librettist, who had erstwhile sweated blood beneath the self-willed orderings of the dramatic composer, he said: "Friend, you may put your nightcap on; I have really no more use for you." Who so obliged for such release from sour, thankless toil, as the opera-poet?

But who more idolised Rossini, for all these deeds of good, than the whole civilised world—so far as the Opera-house could hold it? And who had better reason, than it had? Who, with so much talent, had shewn it such profound consideration as Rossini?—Did he learn that the public of one city had a particular fancy for prima donna's runs, while another preferred a sentimental song: straightway he gave [44] his prima donnas nothing but runs, for the first city; for the second, only sentimental songs. Did he discover that here folk liked to hear the drum in the band: at once he made the overture to a rustic opera begin with a rolling of the drum. Was he told that people there were passionately fond of a crescendo, in ensemble-pieces: he sat down and wrote an opera in the form of a continuously recurring crescendo.—Only once had he cause to rue his complaisance. For Naples he was advised to be more careful with his construction: his more solidly built-up opera did not take; and Rossini resolved never in his life again to think of carefulness, even if advised to.—

Not the smallest charge of vanity or overweening selfconceit can we bring against Rossini, if, hooking at the vast success of his treatment of Opera, he laughed people in the face and told them he had found the true secret for which his predecessors had groped in vain. When he maintained that it would be easy for him to consign to oblivion the operas of his greatest forerunners, not excepting Mozart's Don Juan, by the simple expedient of composing the same subject over again in his own fashion, it was by no means arrogance that spoke out here, but the certain instinct of what the public really asked from Opera. In very deed, our musical pietists would have only had to see their own complete confusion, in the appearance of a Rossinian "Don Juan"; for it may be taken for granted that, with the genuine, verdict-giving theatrical public, Mozart's Don Juan must have had to yield—if not for ever, still for long enough—to that of Rossini. For this is the real turn that Rossini gave the opera-question: down to their last rag, his operas appealed to the Public; he made this Public, with all its whims and wishes, the determinative factor in the Opera.

If the opera-Public had at all possessed the character and significance of the Folk, in the proper sense of the word, Rossini must have seemed to us the most thorough-paced revolutionary in the whole domain of Art. In face of one section of our society, however, a section only to be regarded as an unnatural outgrowth from the Folk, and [45] which in its social superfluity, nay harmfulness, can only be looked on as the knot of caterpillars that erodes the healthy, nourishing leaves of the natural Folk-tree, and thence at most derives the vital force to flutter through a day's luxurious existence as a giddy swarm of butterflies; in face of such a Folk's-scum, which, gathering above a sediment of sordid filth, can rise to vicious elegance but never into sterling human culture; in short,—to give the thing its fittest name,—in face of our Opera-Public, Rossini was no more than a reactionary: whereas we have to view Gluck and his followers as methodic revolutionaries on principle, though powerless for radical results. Under the banner of the luxurious but only genuine Content of the Opera and its logical development, Joachimo Rossini reacted just as successfully against the doctrinaire maxims of the revolutionary Gluck as Prince Metternich, his great protector, under the banner of the inhuman but only veritable Content of European Statecraft and its logical enforcement, reacted against the doctrinaire maxims of the Liberal revolutionaries who, within this system of the State and with out a total upheaval of its unnatural Content, desired to instal the Human and the Reasonable in the selfsame forms which breathed that Content out of every pore. As Metternich, (006) with perfect logic on his side, could not conceive the State under any form but that of Absolute Monarchy: so Rossini, with no less force of argument, could conceive the Opera under no other form than that of Absolute Melody. Both men said: "Do you ask for Opera and State? Here you have them;—there are no others!"

With Rossini the real life-history of Opera comes to end. It was at end, when the unconscious seedling of its being had evolved to nakedest and conscious bloom; when the Musician had been avowed the absolute factor of this art work, invested with despotic power; when the taste of the theatre-Public had been recognised as the only standard [46] for his demeanour. It was at end, when all pretence of Drama had been scrupulously swept away; when the Performers had been allotted the showiest virtuosity of Song as their only task, and their hence-sprung claims on the Composer had been acknowledged as their most inalienable of rights. It was at end, when the great musical public had come to take quite characterless Melody for music s only Content, a bandbox of operatic 'numbers' for the only joinery of musical Form, the intoxication of an opera-night's narcotic fumes for the sole effect of music's Essence. It was at end—that day the deified of Europe, Rossini lolling in the rankest lap of luxury, deemed it becoming to pay the world-shy anchorite, the moody Beethoven, already held for half-insane, a ceremonial visit— —which the latter did not return. What thing may it have been, the wanton, roving eye of Italy's voluptuous son beheld, when it plunged unwitting in the eerie glance, the sorrow-broken, faint with yearning—and yet death-daring look of its unfathomable opposite? Did there toss before it the locks of that wild shock of hair, of the Medusa-head that none might look upon and live?—Thus much is certain: with Rossini died the Opera.—

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In Paris, however, that great city where the most educated connoisseurs and critics can even yet not comprehend what distinction there can possibly be between two famous composers, such as Beethoven and Rossini, excepting mayhap that the one turned his heaven-sent genius to the composition of Operas, the other to writing Symphonies,—in this splendid seat of modern music-wisdom was still to be drawn up a wonderful fresh lease of life for Opera. There is always a masterful hold on being, in everything that once exists. The Opera was an accomplished fact, just like the Byzantine Cæsardom; and just like that will it endure, so long as shall remain in force the unnatural conditions that uphold it—dead at core—in lingering life: until at last the untutored Turks arrive, who [47] once already put an end to the Byzantine Empire, and were even so unmannerly as to stable their wild horses in the gorgeous sanctuary of S. Sophia.

Spontini erred, when he deemed the Opera buried with himself, inasmuch as he took the Opera's "dramatic tendence" for its essence: he forgot the possibility of a Rossini, who very well could prove to him the contrary. When Rossini, with far more reason, held the Opera concluded with himself, he certainly erred less; inasmuch as he had recognised its essence, had laid it bare and brought it into general acceptance, and thus was justified in assuming that he might indeed be imitated, but never overbid. However, it had escaped even his reckoning, that from all the quondam tendencies of Opera a caricature might be cobbled up, which should be greeted not only by the Public, but also by the wiseacres of Art, as a new and substantial shape of Opera; for in the flower of his prime he never could have dreamt that it would some day occur to the Bankers, for whom he had always made their music, to make it for themselves.

Ah! how wroth he waxed, the else so easy-going master; how fierce he grew and evil-whimmed; to see himself outdone, if not in talent, yet in skill at exploiting the good-for-nothingness of public art! Ah! how was he now the "dissoluto punito," the cast-off courtezan; and with what rankling indignation at this shame, did he reply to the Paris Opera-director—who invited him, amid a momentary lull, to blow off a little tune again for the Parisians—that he would never come back until "the Jews had finished with their Sabbath there!" He was made to learn that, so long as God's wisdom rules the world, each fault will find its punishment: even the candour wherewith he had told the crowd the truth concerning Opera.—In righteous expiation of his sins, he became a fish-purveyor and church-composer.—

However, it is only by a wider circuit that we can reach an intelligible exposition of the essence of our modernest Opera.

[48]

III.

THE history of Opera, since Rossini, is at bottom nothing else but the history of operatic melody; of its application from an art-speculative, its execution from an effect-hunting standpoint.

Rossini's hugely successful method of procedure had unconsciously turned composers from all seeking for the dramatic Content of the Aria, all attempt to read into it any dramatically-consistent meaning. The Essence of Melody itself into which the whole scaffolding of Aria had evaporated, was the thing that now led captive both the instinct and the speculation of the Composer. One could not but perceive that, even in the Aria of Gluck and his followers, the Public had only been edified in exact measure as the general sentiment indicated in the text-substratum had received in the purely melodic portion of that Aria an expression which, in its kindred generality, merely shewed itself as absolute, ear-pleasing Tune. If this is already visible enough in the case of Gluck, it becomes quite palpable in that of his latest follower, Spontini. They all, these serious Musical-dramatists, had more or less deceived themselves, when they ascribed the effect of their music less to the purely melodic essence of its airs, than to the realisation of the dramatic aim with which they had written them. The opera-house in their time, and especially in Paris, was the rendezvous of æsthetic beaux esprits, and of a world of notables which plumed itself on likewise being witty and æsthetic. The serious æsthetic intention of these masters was greeted by this public with all respect; the nimbus of an artistic lawgiver streamed from the Musician who undertook to write the Drama in notes; his public, nothing loath, imagined it was being moved by the dramatic "declamation," whereas, in truth, it was only carried away by the [49] charm of the Aria's melody. When the Public then, at last emancipated by Rossini, dared to confess this openly and unabashed, it simply avowed an undeniable truth, and proved how logical and natural it was that, where Music was the. main affair, the end and aim,—not merely by an outward assumption, but in keeping with the whole artistic basis of this form of art,—there Poetry the handmaid, with all her hints of dramatic purpose, must stay helpless and effectless, leaving Music herself to call forth the whole effect by her individual powers. Every attempt to pass for dramatic and characteristic could only disfigure Music's genuine essence; and—once that Music wills not merely to help and cooperate in the reaching of a higher aim, but to operate entirely by and for herself—this essence speaks out alone in Melody, as the expression of a general emotion.

Every Opera-composer was plainly shewn this by Rossini's indisputable success. If a rejoinder still stood open to deeper-feeling musicians, it could only be the following: that they looked on the character of Rossinian melody not only as shallow and distasteful, but as by no means exhausting the essence of Melody. To such musicians the artistic project could not but present itself, to give this unquestioned power of Melody the whole full utterance of beauteous human Feeling (Empfindung) that is its own by birthright In the effort to fulfil this task, they carried the reaction of Rossini—right back behind the nature and the origin of Opera—to the very fount from which the Aria once had drawn its artificial life, to the restoration of the primal strains (Tonweise) of the Folk-song.

It was a German musician who first, and with remarkable success, called this transformation of Melody into being. Karl Maria von Weber reached his artistic manhood in an epoch of historic evolution wherein the waking pulse of Freedom as yet stirred less in men as units, than in the Folks as national masses. The feeling of Independence—not yet applied in politics to the Purely-human, and therefore not yet reading itself as absolutely and unconditionally an aspiration for purely-human independence [50] —sought still for grounds of vindication, as though inexplicable to itself and rather roused by chance than of necessity, and thought to find them in the National roots of Race. The resultant movement was more akin, in truth, to Restoration than to Revolution. In its farthest strayings it took the form of a passion for re-setting up the old and lapsed; and alone in quite recent days have we been taught the lesson, how this error could only lead to fresh-forged fetters on our evolution into truly human freedom. But in that we have been compelled to learn this, have we now been driven, with knowledge too, into the right road; and that by painful, aye, but healing force.

I have no idea of attempting to show the development of Opera as marching hand in hand with our political evolution; such a thesis allows too much room to wilful phantasy, for it not to run riot in the most absurd vagaries,—as indeed has already happened, in this reference, to a most unedifying pitch. I am far more concerned to demonstrate the unnatural and contradictory element in this art-genre, together with its manifest incapacity to really reach its professed aim, solely by a survey of its essence. However, the national line, as taken in the treatment of Melody, has in its import and its strayings, and finally in its ever plainer cleavages and barrenness,—the tokens of its error,—far too much parallelism with the errors of our political evolution of the last forty years, for the relationship to be quite passed by.

In Art, just as in Politics, this line has for its distinctive mark, that the error, lying at its base, appeared under a garment of bewitching beauty in its first instinctive innocence; but in its final selfish, cramped stiffneckedness, under one of loathsome hideosity. It was beautiful, so long as the first lispings of the soul of Freedom spoke out in it; it is repulsive now, when the soul of Freedom has already broken through it, and only vulgar Egoism can hold it artfully together.

In the case of Music the national line shewed all the more genuine beauty in its beginnings, as the specific character [51] of Music fits it more for the utterance of general, than of particular emotion. What with our romanticising poets betrayed itself as an ogling with the one eye at Roman-catholic mysticism and with the other at feudal-chivalric amours, (007) expressed itself in Music as homelike, deep and broad-breathed Tune, instinct with noble grace,—Tune as listened from the last vanishing sigh of the naïve spirit of the Folk.

The tone-poet of Der Freischütz, above all worth our love, was cut to the very heartstrings of his artistic purity by the voluptuous melodies of Rossini, in which the whole world had gone a-revelling. He could not allow that in them was bared the fount of genuine Melody; he needs must show the world that they were but an impure outflow of that fountain, and that the source itself, had man the wit to find it, still flowed in undisturbed limpidity. If those so eminent founders of the Opera had only bent a careless ear to the Folk's sweet song, now Weber hearkened to it with all the strain of fixed attention. If the scent of the lovely Folk's-bloom had risen from the fields and pierced the mansions of the luxurious music-world, to be there imprisoned in its portable distillates: a yearning for the vision of the flower itself (008) drove Weber down from the sumptuous halls into the meadow; and there he saw the bloom on the brink of the rippling brook, amid odorous wood-grasses, upon a bed of wondrous crinkled moss, beneath the dreamy whispering branches of trees grown gnarled with age. How the happy artist felt his heart-beat quicken at the sight, his breath grow light with all this fill of fragrance! He could not withstand the loving impulse, to bring to nerveless fellow-men this healing vision, this livening perfume, for a ransom from their madness; to tear the bloom itself from the godlike nurture of its woodlands, and hold it, the hallowedest of all created things, before a world of Luxury [52] bereft of blessing:—he plucked it!—Unhappy man!—Aloft in the banquet-hall he set the sweet shy flower, in a costly vase; daily he sprinkled it with freshest water from the forest stream. But lo I—the petals, chastely clasped before, unfold themselves as though to lax delights; unshamed the bloom lays bare its dainty stamens, and offers them, with horrible indifference, to the prying nose of every ribald rake. "What ails thee, flower?" the master cries, in agony of soul: "forget'st so soon the verdant meadow, that fostered thy virginity?" But one by one the petals fall; weary and wan, they shower upon the carpet; with one last breath of its own sweet scent, the flower sighs to the master: "I die but—since thou pluck'dst me!"—And with the bloom the master died. For it had been the soul of all his art, and this Art the upholding secret of his life.—In the meadow no more grew a flower I—From their uplands came the Tyrolean singers: they sang before Prince Metternich; he gave them letters of safe conduct to every court; and all the Lords and Bankers amused themselves, in their reeking salons, with the merry Jodel of the children of the Alps, with their songs in honour of their "Dierndel" (lassie). Now the ploughboys march to Bellinian Arias to the murder of their brothers, and dance with their Dierndel to Donizettian Opera-melodies; for—the flower bloomed no more!—

It is a characteristic feature of the German Folk-melody, that it less affects a brisk, compact and lively rhythm, than a long-breathed, lusty (froh) and yet plaintive swell. A German song without its harmony is to us unthinkable: everywhere we hear it sung in two 'voices' at the least; art instinctively feels challenged to supply the bass and so easily filled-in second 'inner voice,' and thus to have the whole body of Harmonic-melody before it. This melody is the basis of the Weberian Folk-opera: leaving aside all. local-national idiosyncrasies, it is of broad and general emotional expression; has no other adornment than the smile of sweetest and most natural sincerity (Innigkeit); and thus, by the indwelling force of its undisfigured grace, [53] it speaks directly to the hearts of men, no matter what their national peculiarity, simply because in it the Purely-human comes so unbesmeared to show. In the world-spread potency of Weber's Melody may we better recognise the essence of the German spirit, and its supposed predestination, than in those sham specific qualities with which the German people now is credited!— (009)

According to this Melody, does Weber shape the whole. Filled to the brim with it, whatever he had seen and would give forth, whatever in the farthest nook of Opera he had recognised as capable, or found means of making capable, of expression in this Melody,—be it only by breathing over it the perfume, or shaking on to it a dewdrop from the chalice, of the flower,—that he was bound to succeed in bringing to an exquisitely true and pertinent effect. And this Melody it was, that Weber made the actual factor of his Opera: through this melody the figment of Drama found in so far its realisement, as his whole drama was ab initio poured out in yearning to be taken up into this Melody, by it to be consumed, in it redeemed, and through it justified. If we look at the "Freischutz" drama in this light, we must give its poem exactly the same relation to Weber's music, as we give the poem of "Tancredi" towards its music by Rossini. Rossini's Melody laid down the lines of the poem of "Tancredi," precisely as much as Weber's Melody ordained Kind's poem of "Der Freischütz"; and Weber here was nothing other than Rossini there, excepting that this man was noble and senseful (sinnig) whereas that was frivolous and sensual (sinnlich). (010) Weber only opened [54] his arms so much the wider to take up the Drama, as his Melody was the veritable language of the heart, all true and undefiled: whatever ascended thereinto, was sheltered safe and sure from all disfigurement. Yet, for all its truthfulness, whatsoever was not utterable in this language, by reason of its limitation, even Weber toiled in vain to bring from out it. His stammering here may stand, for us, as the honest avowal of Music's inaptitude to herself become the genuine Drama: in other words, to allow the genuine Drama—and not one merely cut out to her order—to be taken up (aufgehen) into her; whereas, in right and reason, it is Music that must herself be taken up into this genuine Drama.

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We have now to continue the history of Melody.

When Weber in his search for Melody had harked back to the Folk, and when in the German Folk he found the happy attribute of naive heartiness (Innigkeit) without the cramp of national insularity (Sonderlichkeit), he had led the operatic composers of all the world to a stream which now, wherever they could spy it out, was pounced on as a not unlikely source of profit.

The first to follow, were the French composers; who bethought them of serving up the herb they found a native of their soil. For years the witty or sentimental "Couplet" had flourished on their Folk-stage, in the spoken play. By its nature more adapted for a gay—or if for a tender, certainly never for a tragic expression, it has quite of itself laid down the character of the dramatic genre into which it was taken with set purpose. The Frenchman is not made so as to allow of his emotions rising altogether into music; if his agitation mounts to a longing for Musical Expression, he must still retain the right of speech withal, or at the very least, of dancing. With him, where the Couplet ends there begins the Contredanse; without that, there is no room for music in his economy. In his Couplet speech is [55] so much the main affair, that he insists on singing it alone, and never with another; for otherwise one would not clearly understand the matter spoken. In the Contredanse, too, the dancers for the most part stand singly facing one another; each does by himself what he has to do, and mutual claspings of the pair only occur when the general character of the dance makes them absolutely inevitable. Thus, in the French Vaudeville, all the items of the musical apparatus stand singly side by side, merely strung together by the prattling Prose; and where the Couplet is sung by several people at once, this is accomplished in the most painful musical unison imaginable. The French Opera is an enlarged Vaudeville; its broader musical apparatus is borrowed, as to Form, from the so-called Dramatic-opera, but as to Content, from that virtuosic element which reached its rankest outgrowth in the hands of Rossini.

The distinctive blossom of this opera is now, and ever has been, the more spoken than chanted Couplet; its musical essence, the Rhythmic-melody of the Contredanse. To this national product, which had remained a mere subsidiary of the dramatic aim, and had never been strictly taken up into it, the French opera-composers turned back with set intention so soon as they observed on the one side the death of Spontinian-opera, on the other, the world-inebriating effect of Rossini's and, above all, the heart-searching influence of Weber's Melody. But the living Content of that native French production had already vanished; Vaudeville and Comic Opera had sucked so long at it, that its source could no longer flow within its parched-up bed. Where the nature-craving art-musicians listened longingly for the babbling of the brook, they could no more hear it for the prosy clip-clap of the mill, whose wheel their selves were working with the water turned from out its natural channel and brought in wooden conduits. Where they wanted to hear the People sing, there hummed nothing for them but the Vaudeville-factories that they were sick to death of.

So the great hunt for Folk-melodies in foreign lands [56] was given tongue. Already Weber himself, who found his home-bred flower a-dying, had diligently thumbed the pages of Forkel's illustrations of Arabian music, and taken thence a march for harem-guarders. Our Frenchmen were nimbler on their legs; they merely thumbed the pages of tourists' handbooks, and at once set off themselves to hear and see, at closer quarters, if anywhere a morsel of Folk's naïvety were left, and how it looked and sounded. Our greybeard civilisation became a child again; and childish greybeards have short shrift!—

Far off in fair, but much soiled Italy, whose musical fat Rossini had skimmed so elegantly for the starving art-world, there sat the careless master at his ease, looking out with an astonished smile at the picking and grabbing of the brave Parisian hunters for Folk-melodies. One of these was a capital horseman, and, whenever he dismounted after a smart canter, people knew that he had unearthed a right good melody which would bring him in a heap of money. This time he galloped, as one possessed, through all the piles of fish and fruit in the Naples market, sending everything flying right and left; cackles and curses sped behind him, threatening fists were reared in front,—and so with lightning-speed he scented out the notion of a splendid revolution of fruiterers and fishmongers. But there was still more yet to be made of the idea! Out to Portici stormed the Paris horseman, to the nets and wherries of the simple fisher-folk, who sing as they ply their trade; who pass their lives between sleeping and wrangling, playing with their wives or children and hurling knives at one another; who stab to death, but keep on singing. Master Auber, say now! that was a mighty fine ride, and better worth than one upon the Hippogryph that only soars into the clouds,—where, when all 's said and done, there's nothing to be caught but colds and sneezing!—The rider rode home; got off his horse; made Rossini an uncommonly handsome bow (he knew well enough the reason why); took extra-post for Paris; and what he polished off [57] with a turn of his wrist, was his famous "Stumme von Portici." (011)

This Stumme was the dumb-struck Muse of Drama, who wandered broken-hearted between the singing, raging throngs, and, tired of life, made away at last with herself and her hopeless sorrow in the artificial fury of a stage-volcano!—

Rossini gazed on the glittering spectacle from afar. Travelling to Paris, he thought it well to rest a while amid the snowy Alps of Switzerland, and there to hearken how the sturdy, healthy peasants divide their musical pastimes between their mountains and their cows. Arrived in Paris, he made Auber his civilest of bows (for he, too, knew what he was about), and, with all a happy father's pride, he shewed the world his youngest child, in a lucky moment christened "William Tell."

The "Dumb Girl of Portici" and "William Tell" henceforth became the poles round which the world of speculative opera-music revolved. A new recipe for galvanising the half-paralysed body of Opera had been found; so it now might live for just as long as one could discover anywhere a remnant of national peculiarity. All the countries of the Continent were ransacked, each province plundered, every Folk-stem drained of its last drop of musical blood; and the ardent extract was let off in blinding fireworks, to the supreme satisfaction of the princes and peddlers of the grand world of Opera. The German art-critics, on their side, discovered here a notable approximation of the Opera to its goal; for, behold l it had struck the "national," aye—if you will—the "historic" path. When all the world goes crazy, the Germans are in their seventh heaven; for they have so much the more to ponder, to unravel, to expound, and finally—so as to make themselves quite comfortable—to classify!—

Let us consider the operation of the National on Melody, and through it upon Opera.

The Folk-element has ever been the fruitful fount of [58] Art, so long as—free of all Reflection—it was able to lift itself by natural channels into Art-work. In Society, as in Art, we have merely fed upon the Folk, without our even knowing it. In our complete aloofness from the Folk, we have taken the fruit on which we lived for manna, for a gift dropped out of the clouds by heavenly Caprice into the mouths of us privileged persons, us elect of God, us plutocrats and geniuses. But when the manna was devoured, we looked ravenously round upon the orchards of the earth; and, robbers by the grace of God, we robbed their fruits with barefaced impudence, uncaring whether we had planted them or nursed them. Yea, the trees themselves we tore up by the roots,—to see if these might not be made quite tasty, or at any rate swallowable, by scientific cooking. And so have we dug up the whole fair native forest of the Folk, that with it we now stand naked, starving beggars.

Thus, so soon as ever it discovered its own sterility and drought, has Operatic Music thrown itself upon the Folk-song, and sucked it empty to its roots; in odious opera-melodies it flings the plundered Folk the stringy fruit-sheath, for pitiful and health-destructive food. But it too, this Operatic Melody, is now without a shadow of a prospect of fresh food. It has swallowed all there was to swallow; without one chance of fresh manuring, it falls unfruitful to the ground. In the death-throes of an expiring glutton, it gnaws at its own flesh; and this horrible assault upon itself is called by German critics a "Striving for higher Charakteristik," just as they christened the uprooting of those plundered orchards of the Folk "Emanzipation of the Masses"!—

The true Folk-element the opera-composer had not the wit to grasp; to have done this, he must himself have worked in the spirit and with the notions of the Folk, i.e. have been himself a part and parcel of it. Only the Insular (das Sonderliche), in which the particularity of Folkhood shows itself to him, could he lay hold of; and this is the National. The national colouring, already washed [59] entirely from out the upper classes, now lived on only in those sections of the Folk which, fastened to the furrow of the field, the shore, the upland valley, had been held back from any fertilising interchange of idiosyncrasies. It was therefore but a fossilised memento of the past, that fell into the hands of those freebooters; and in these hands,—which must pluck out the last fibre of its reproductive organs, or ever they could use it for their own luxurious caprice,— it could become nothing but a modish curiosity. Just as the modistes take at lief some hitherto-neglected foreign item of Folk-costume, and force it into their new-fangled finery: so Opera stripped the life of secluded nationalities of its scraps of melody and rhythm, and decked therewith the motley carcase of its outlived empty forms.

Upon the general demeanour of Opera, however, this procedure could not but exert a by no means unimportant influence: to wit, it brought about that change in the relation of Opera's executant factors to one another which, as already said, has been termed the "Emancipation of the Masses." Into this we must now look closer.

[60]

IV.

IN exact measure as any art-tendency draws near its prime, does it gain the power of closer, plainer, surer shaping. In the beginning, the Folk expresses by cries of Lyric rapture its marvel at the constant wonders of Nature's workings; in its efforts to master the object of that marvel, it condenses (verdichtet) the many-membered show of Nature into a God, and finally its God into a Hero. In this Hero, as in the convex mirror of its being, it learns to know itself; his deeds it celebrates in Epos, but itself in Drama re-enacts them. The tragic Hero of the Greeks stepped out from amid the Chorus, and, turning back to face it, cried: "Lo!—so does, so bears himself, a human being! What ye were hymning in wise saws and maxims, I set it up before you in all the cogence of Necessity."

Greek Tragedy, in its Chorus and its Heroes, combined the Public with the Art-work: the latter held before the Folk, not only itself, but also its own judgment on itself—as it were, a concrete meditation. Now the Drama ripened into Art-work in exact measure as the interpretative judgment of the Chorus so irrefutably expressed itself in the actions of the Heroes, that the Chorus was able to step down from the stage and back into the Folk itself; thus leaving behind it only actual partakers in the living Action. (012) Shakespeare's Tragedy unconditionally stands above that of Greece, in so far as it has enabled artistic technique to dispense with the necessity of a Chorus. With Shakespeare, the Chorus is resolved into divers individuals directly interested [61] in the Action, and whose doings are governed by precisely the same promptings of individual Necessity as are those of the chief Hero himself. Even their apparent subordination in the artistic framework is merely a result of the scantier points of contact they have in common with the chief Hero, and nowise of any technical undervaluing of these lesser personages; for wherever the veriest subordinate has to take a share in the main plot, he delivers himself entirely according to his personal characteristics, his own free fancy.

If, in the further course of modern dramatic art, the sharply outlined personalities of Shakespeare have lost more and more of their plastic individuality, and sunk at last to fixed and rigid character-masks, this must solely be ascribed to the influence of a State which has put everything into a regulation livery, and has crushed out with ever direr violence the right of free personality. The shadow-pantomime of hollow masks like these, all bare of inner individuality, is what became the dramatic basis of the Opera. The more void of contents were the personalities beneath these masks, the more fitted were they deemed for singing Operatic Arias. "Prince and Princess,"—that is the dramatic pivot round which the Opera has revolved, and round which, if one would only look a little closer, it still revolves to-day. No Individualism could possibly come to these operatic masks, excepting by a coat of paint; and so at last a local peculiarity of scene must make good what they forever lacked inside. Composers having exhausted all the melodic productivity of their art, and being obliged to borrow from the Folk its local tunes, at last the whole locale itself was seized upon: scenery, costume, and the moveable stock to fill them out—the Opera-Chorus, became at last the main affair, the Opera itself, and must cast from every side their rainbow light upon the "Prince and Princess," so as to keep the poor wretches in their paint-daubed singer-life.

So was the Drama's circle rounded back upon itself, to its eternal shame: the individual personages into which the [62] chorus of the Folk had crystallised, were melted down into a motley, conglomerate Surrounding, without a centre to surround. In the Opera this Surrounding, and nothing but it, cries out to us from the whole gigantic scenic apparatus, from the machinery, the painted canvas and the piebald dresses; and its voice is the voice of the Chorus, singing: "I am I, and there is none other Opera beside me!"

Undoubtedly, noble artists had earlier employed the trappings of the National; but it had only been able to exert a veritable charm where it was added as an occasional embellishment to a dramatic Stuff already livened by a characteristic plot, and where it was introduced without the slightest ostentation. How admirably did Mozart infuse a national colouring into his Osmin and his Figaro, without having to seek in Turkey or in Spain, or any handbooks, for the tint he wanted. That Osmin and that Figaro, however, were genuine individual characters, the happy inspirations of a poet, furnished with a true expression by the musician, and utterly impossible to be misrendered by any common-sense performer. The national trimmings of our modern opera-composers, on the other hand, are not applied to individualities like these, but are intended to give to a quite characterless subject some vestige of a spurious character, in justification and enlivenment of its intrinsically meaningless and colourless existence. The summit toward which all healthy Folkhood tends, the characterisation of the purely human, has been from the first degraded in our Opera to a colourless and nothing-saying mask for Aria-singers. This mask, forsooth, is now to be artfully enlivened by reflexion of the surrounding colours; wherefore the surrounding is painted thick with the glaringest and cryingest of splotches.

The Folk having been robbed of its Melody, at last the Folk itself has been dragged upon the stage, in order to brighten up the scene around the Aria-singer; yet this naturally could not be that Folk which had invented the [63] tune, but the well-schooled Mass, which now is marched hither and thither in beat with the operatic Aria. It was not the Folk, that was wanted, but the Mass: i.e. the material leavings of the Folk, from which the living spirit had been sucked dry. The massive Chorus of our modern opera is nothing else but the stage machinery set into motion and song, the dumb pageant of the coulisses translated into nimble noise. "Prince and Princess," with the best will in the world, had nothing more to say than their thousand-times repeated florid Aria: so one sought at last to vary the theme by making the whole theatre, from the wings right down to the last-hundredth chorister, join in the singing of that Aria, and indeed—the higher was the effect to mount—no longer in polyphonic harmony but in a downright thundrous unison. In the "Unisono," which has to-day become so fashionable, there is quite palpably revealed the inner purpose of this employment of the Masses; and, in an operatic sense, we hear the Masses quite fittingly "emancipated" when we hear them, as in the most famous passages of the most famous modern operas, delivering the same old worn-out Aria in hundred-throated unison. Thus, too, has our State of nowadays emancipated the Masses, when it makes them march battalion-wise in military uniform, wheel left and right, present and shoulder arms: when the Meyerbeerian "Huguenots" attain their highest pitch, we hear the selfsame thing as we see in a Prussian regiment of Guards. German critics—as remarked above—call it Emancipation of the Masses.

---

But, taken at bottom, the thus "emancipated" Surrounding was itself but a mask the more. If a truly characteristic life was absent from the chief personages of the opera, it could certainly be still less instilled into the mass-like apparatus. The reflected rays, that were to fall from this enlivening apparatus upon the hero and the heroine, could therefore only be of any effective service if the mask of this Surrounding also got itself, from here or [64] there outside, a coat of varnish that should cloak its inner emptiness. This varnish it gained from the historic costume, which must lend the national colouring a still more striking brilliance.

One might imagine that, with the introduction of the Historic element, it must have necessarily fallen to the lot of the Poet to take a determinative share in the shaping of Opera. Yet we shall soon be convinced of our mistake, if we remember the previous evolutionary course of Opera:

how it owed each phase of its development solely to the desperate struggle of the Musician to keep his work in artificial life; and how he had only been guided to the choice of the historic element, by no means through an imperious longing to yield himself to the Poet, but through the force of purely musical circumstances,—through a force which issued, in its turn, from the wholly unnatural proposal of the Musician to provide the Drama with both object and expression. We shall have to return later to the situation of the Poet toward our modernest Opera; for the moment let us follow undisturbed the actual factor of Opera, the Musician, and see into what a quandary his mistaken efforts were now to lead him.

Let him take on ne'er such airs and graces—the Musician could only give Expression, and nothing but Expression; he was therefore bound to lose even this faculty of true and sound Expression, in exact measure as, in his misguided eagerness to himself indite and shape the Object of expression, he purposely degraded that object to a vague and empty schema. As he had not asked the Poet for men, but the Mechanician for puppets, which he might drape according to his fancy, and daze the eye by the mere shimmer and arrangement of these draperies of his:

so now, since he could not possibly exhibit by these puppets the warm pulsings of the human frame, he was forced, amid the increasing poverty of his vehicle of expression, to hunt about at last for any new variety in the disposition of his folds and colours. But the Historic garb of Opera—so rich in opportunities because it allows the [65] most checkered play of clime and period—is really the property of the Scene-painter and Stage-tailor, and these two auxiliaries have in effect become the most important allies of the modern opera-composer. Still the Musician did not rest till he had adapted his tone-pallet to the requirements of Historic costume; for how should he, the creator of Opera, he who had turned the Poet into his lacquey, not find a means of distancing the painter and the tailor? Had he not dissolved the whole drama, plot and characters and all, into his music: and how should it stay beyond his power, to turn into musical water the drawings and colours of the painter and the tailor? He managed to tear down every dam, to open every sluice, that hedged the ocean from the land; and thus to drown the Drama, man and beast, paint-brush and scissors, in the deluge of his music!

The Musician was bound to fulfil his destiny of presenting German Criticism—for whom it is well-known that God's all-caring providence created Art—with the joy of an "Historic music." His high vocation full soon inspired him to find the way.

How must an "historic" music sound, to produce an effect in keeping with its name? To be sure, quite otherwise than a not-historic music. But wherein lay the difference? Clearly in this: that the "historic music" should differ as much from that we are now accustomed to, as the costume of a former epoch from that of the present day. Would it not be wisest then, just as one had copied faithfully the costumes of the date in question, to take one's music also from that epoch? Alas! this was not quite so easy, for in those epochs, so piquant in their costume, there was, barbarically enough, no Opera: a general type of operatic speech was therefore not to be borrowed from them. On the other hand, the people of those epochs sang in churches, and these church-hymns have about them, if one springs their chanting suddenly upon us, something strikingly foreign to our modern music. Excellent! Fetch out the Hymns! Religion shall take a turn upon the [66] stage! (013) So Music's want of an historic costume became a Christian operatic virtue. For the crime of stealing the Folk's-melody one procured oneself Roman-catholic and Evangelical-protestant absolution, in return for the service rendered to the Church in that, just as earlier the Masses, now Religion too—to follow logically the expression of German Criticism—was "emancipated" by Opera.

Thus the opera-composer became the redeemer of all the world; and in the deeply-inspired and self-lacerating rapture of the fervent Meyerbeer we have in any case to recognise the modern saviour, the bearer of the sins of the modern world.

However, this atoning "emancipation of the Church" could be only conditionally fulfilled by the musician. If Religion wished for the blessing of Opera, it must be reasonably content to take its fitting place among the other emancipates. Opera, as enfranchiser of the world, must rule Religion, and not Religion Opera; if the opera was to be turned into a church, then Religion would certainly not be emancipated by it, but it by Religion. For sake of the purity of historic musical-costume, Opera would by all means have been only too delighted to have solely to do with Religion, since the only serviceable historic music was to be found in the Church alone. But to have to do with nothing but monks and clergy, would have seriously interfered with the gaiety of Opera: for the real thing that was to be glorified by the emancipation of Religion was the Operatic Aria, that luxuriantly unfolded germ of all the opera's being; and its roots were nowise bathed in longing for devout self-concentration, but for an entertaining dissipation. (014) Strictly speaking, Religion was only to be used as a side-dish, just the same as in our well-regulated civic life: the 'piece of resistance' must still be "Prince and [67] Princess," with a due seasoning of villain, court-choir and folk-choir, scenery and dresses.

How on earth, though, was this highly respectable Opera-symposium to be translated into Historic music?—

Here stretched a blank expanse of clouds in face of the musician, a grey mist of unadulterated, absolute Invention: the challenge to creation out of nothing. But see, how quickly he took its measure! He had only to look to it that his music should always sound a shade different from what one might have ordinarily expected, and his music would at once sound quite outlandish (fremdartig), while a skilful snip by the stage-tailor would suffice to make it out-and-out "historic."

Music, as the highest power of Expression, was now assigned a quite new, an uncommonly piquant task: to take this Expression, which she 'had already gone so far as to turn into the Object of expression, and contradict it out of its own mouth. Expression—which, without an object worth expressing, was already in itself completely null—now denied itself in its endeavour to pose as that object; so that the resultant of our theories of the world's-creation, according to which a Something has been brought about by two negations, was to be set up for entire attainment by our opera-composers. We commend the outcome to German criticism, as "Emancipated Metaphysics."

Let us follow this course a little farther.—

If the composer wished to furnish a straightforward and appropriate Expression, he could not, with the best will in the world, do it otherwise than in that musical dialect which we recognise to-day as an intelligible musical utterance; but as he meant to henceforth lend it an Historic colouring, and as he could only deem this attainable, at bottom, by giving it a generally outlandish and unaccustomed twang, there stood chiefly at his service the expressional manner of an earlier musical epoch, which he might copy at his pleasure or borrow from according to his whim. In this way has the composer patched together from all the tasty peculiarities of style of various periods a [68] piebald jargon, which, taken on its merits, was in a fair way to meet his quest for outlandishness and unaccustomed ness. But musical-speech, once it is cut adrift from any Object worth expressing, once that it means to speak without a Content and according to the bare caprice of Operatic Aria,—i.e. to merely chirp and chatter,—is so completely given over to the tender mercies of the Mode, that it either has to submit itself to this Mode or, if luck is favouring, to rule it: that is, to bring it the very latest thing in modes. So that, in the event of his success, the jargon which the composer had invented in order to speak outlandishly—for sake of his Historic ends—becomes at once another Mode, which suddenly ceases to sound outlandish and turns into the dress we all are wearing, the speech we all are speaking. The composer cannot help despairing, to find himself thus everlastingly balked by his own inventions, in his effort to appear outlandish; he is therefore forced to hit upon some method of appearing outlandish for good and all, if he means to keep faith with his calling to "historic" music. Once for all, then, he must take pains to dislocate the very backbone of his most distorted utterance—since it has positively become a thing of Fashion by his own example: to cut the story short, he must make up his mind to say "No" where he really means "Yes," to give himself a joyous bearing where he has to express sorrow, to whine and whimper where his business is supreme delight. Yes indeed, only thus is it possible for him in every case to seem outlandish, odd, and as though sprung from God knows where; he must feign to be rightdown crazy, so as to appear "historico-characteristic." Thus have we won a truly brand-new element: the passion for the "historic" has turned into hysteric mania, and when the lights are turned up, this mania is found, to our intense delight, to be nothing else than—how shall we call it?—Eh!—Neoromantic.

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V.

To the distortion of all truth and nature, that we see practised on musical expression by the French so-called Neoromantists, there was furnished from a sphere of Tone-art lying entirely aside from Opera a seeming vindication, and above all a food-stuff, which we may easiest sum together under the title of a misunderstanding of (015) Beethoven.

It is very important to notice that, down to the present day, everything which has had a real and determinant influence upon the shaping of Opera has issued simply from the domain of Absolute Music; never from that of Poetry, nor from a healthy coöperation of both arts. As we found that from Rossini onwards the history of Opera had definitely narrowed itself to the history of operatic melody, so do we also see the whole bias given in recent times to the more and more historico-dramatic pose of Opera proceeding from that opera-composer who, in his forced endeavour to vary operatic-melody, has been driven step by step to take up into this melody of his even the figment of an historical Characteristique, and who has accordingly instructed the Poet what to supply to the Musician in keeping with his plan. But as this melody had hitherto been propagated artificially as vocal melody,—i.e. melody which, parted from the poetic conditions of its base, yet obtained in the Singer's mouth or throat fresh conditions for its further cultivation,—and as it had chiefly gained these fresh conditions by a renewed eavesdropping of the primal nature-melody from the mouth of the Folk: so did it turn its greedy ears at last to where Melody, parted this time from the Singer's mouth, had won its further life-conditions from the mechanism of the Instrument. Thus [70] Instrumental-melody, translated into the melody of operatic Song, (016) became the main factor in this fictive drama:—and this, in fact, was what was bound to happen in the long run to the unnatural genre of Opera!—

Whereas Operatic-melody, deprived of any actual fecundation by Poetry, could only pass from violence to violence, in its endeavour to uphold a toilsome, barren life: Instrumental-music, taking the harmonic strains of Dance and Song, separating them into smaller and ever smaller portions, augmenting and diminishing these portions, and building them up again into constantly varying forms, had won itself an idiomatic speech; a speech which, in any higher artistic sense, however, was arbitrary and incapable of expressing the Purely-human, so long as the longing for a clear and intelligible portrayal of definite, individual human feelings did not become its only necessary measure for the shaping of those melodic particles. That the expression of an altogether definite, a clearly-understandable individual Content, was in truth impossible in this language that had only fitted itself for conveying the general character of an emotion,—this could not be laid bare, before the arrival of that instrumental composer with whom the longing to speak out such a content first became the consuming impulse of all his artistic fashioning.

The history of Instrumental-music, from the moment when that longing first evinced itself, is the history of an artistic error; yet of one that ended, not in the demonstration of an impotence of Music's, like that of the Operatic genre, but with the revelation of a boundless inner power. The error of Beethoven was that of Columbus, (017) who merely [71] meant to seek out a new way to the old known land of India, and discovered a new world instead. Columbus took his error with him to the grave: he made his comrades swear a solemn oath, that this new world of his was still the ancient India; but, never so involved in error, his deed tore off the bandage from the old world's eyes, and taught it to see, past all denial, the actual figure of the earth in its undreamt fulness.—For us, too, has there been unveiled the exhaustless power of Music, through Beethoven's all-puissant error. Through his undaunted toil, to reach the artistically Necessary within an artistically Impossible, is shown us Music's unhemmed faculty of accomplishing every thinkable task, if only she consent to stay what she really is—an art of Expression.

Beethoven's error, however, alike with the boon of his artistic deed, we could not fully estimate until we were in a position to survey his works in their totality, until he and his works had become for us a rounded whole, and until the artistic labours of his followers—who adopted into their own creations the error of the master, without either the right of ownership or the giant force of that longing of his—had shewn us the error in its clearest light. The contemporaries and immediate successors of Beethoven, on the other hand, saw in his separate works, whether in the magical impression of the whole or the peculiar shaping of its details, precisely That alone which, always according to the strength of their receptivity and comprehension, was obvious to them at a glance. So long as Beethoven was at unison with the spirit of his musical era, and simply embedded the flower of that spirit in his works: so long could the reflex of his art-production prove nothing but beneficial to his surroundings. But from the time when, in concord with the moving sorrows of his life, there awoke in the artist a longing for distinct expression of specific, characteristically individual emotions,—as though to unbosom himself to the intelligent sympathy of fellow men,—and this longing grew into an ever more compulsive force; from the time when he began to care [72] less and less about merely making music, about expressing himself agreeably, enthrallingly or inspiritingly in general, within that music; and instead thereof, was driven by the Necessity of his inner being to employ his art in bringing to sure and seizable expression a definite Content that absorbed his thoughts and feelings:—thenceforth begins the agony of this deep-stirred man and imperatively straying (nothwendig irrenden) artist. Upon the curious hearer who did not understand him, simply because the inspired man could not possibly make himself intelligible to such an one, these mighty transports and the half-sorrowful, half- blissful stammerings of a Pythian inspiration, could not but make the impression of a genius stricken with madness.

In the works of the second half of his artistic life, Beethoven is un-understandable—or rather mis-understandable—mostly just where he desires to express a specific, individual Content in the most intelligible way. He passes over the received, involuntary conventions of the Absolute-musical, i.e. its anyway recognisable resemblance—in respect of expression and form—to the dance- or song-tune; he chooses instead a form of speech which often seems the mere capricious venting of a whim, and which, loosed from any purely musical cohesion, is only bound together by the bond of a Poetic purpose impossible to render into Music with full poetic plainness. The greater portion of Beethoven's works of this period must be regarded as instinctive efforts (unwillkürliche Versuche) to frame a speech to voice his longing; so that they often seem like sketches for a picture, as to whose subject indeed the master was at one with himself, but not as to its intelligible grouping. The picture itself he could not carry out, until he had tuned its subject to the pitch of his expressional powers, had seized it in its more general meaning and translated its individual features into the native tints of Tone, and thus in a measure had 'musicalised' his very subject. If there had come before the world only these finished pictures, in which Beethoven spoke out his thoughts with delightful clearness and comprehensibility, then the misunderstanding about [73] himself, that the master gave rise to, would at any rate have had a less bewildering and misguiding effect on others. But Musical Expression, in its divorce from the conditionments of expression, had already fallen a prey to the relentless necessity of mere modish likes and dislikes, and therefore to all the conditionings of Mode itself. Certain melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic features would flatter the ear to-day so temptingly, that people used them to satiety; but after a brief to-morrow they would be worn out to such a pitch, that they would suddenly sound intolerable or ridiculous to ears of taste. Now, he who made it his business to catch the public's fancy, could think nothing more important than to appear as new as possible in those features of absolute-musical expression which we have just characterised; and seeing that the food for such a newness could only come from the art-domain of Music itself,—was nowhere to be borrowed from the changing shows of Life,—that musician was bound to see a most productive quarry in those very works of Beethoven which we have denoted as the sketches for his greater paintings, and in which the struggle for discovery of a new basis of musical language, with its excursions in all directions, often shewed itself in certain spasmodic traits (kramphaften Zügen) that perforce must strike the unintelligent listener as odd, original, bizarre, and in any case quite new. The abrupt contrastment, the hasty intersection, and above all the often wellnigh simultaneous utterance, of accents of joy and sorrow, ecstasy and horror, closely woven each with each,—such as the master's seeking instinct mingled in the strangest harmonic melismi and rhythms, to form fresh terms for definitely expressing individual moments of emotion,—all this, seized merely by its formal surface, fell into the technical forcing-pit of those composers who in the adoption of Beethoven's peculiarities espied a rich manuring for their Music-for-all-the-world. Whereas the majority of older musicians could only comprehend and sanction that element in the works of Beethoven which lay the farthest from the master's individual being and appeared but as the crowning flower of [74] an earlier, less anxious period of musical art: the younger note-setters have chiefly copied the externals and singularities of the later Beethovenian manner.

However, as there were only externals to be copied, since the Content of those idioms was doomed to stay the unspoken secret of the master, so necessity commanded that some sort of inner subject should be sought for them, some subject that, despite its inevitable generality, might afford a pretext for employing those features which pointed so strongly to the particular and individual. This subject was naturally to be found alone beyond the bounds of Music; and this again, for unmixed Instrumental-music, could only be within the realm of Phantasy. A programme, reciting the heads of some subject taken from Nature or human Life, was put into the hearer's hands; and it was left to his imaginative talent to interpret, in keeping with the hint once given, all the musical freaks that one's unchecked license (Willkür) might now let loose in motley chaos.

German musicians stood close enough to the spirit of Beethoven, to keep aloof from the wildest antics that sprang from this misunderstanding of the master. They sought to save themselves from the consequences of that expressional manner, by polishing down its most jutting angles; by taking up again the older fashions of expression, and weaving them into these newest, they formed themselves an artificial mixture that we can only call a general Abstract style of music, in which one might go on music-ing with great propriety and respectability for quite a length of time without much fear of its being seriously disturbed by drastic individualities. If Beethoven mostly gives us the impression of a man who has something to tell us, which yet he cannot plainly impart: on the other hand these modern followers of his appear like men who, often in a charmingly circumstantial fashion, impart to us the news that they have nothing at all to say.—

[75]

It was in Paris, however, that great devourer of all artistic tendencies, that a Frenchman gifted with uncommon musical intelligence pursued the above-named tendence to its uttermost extreme. Hector Berlioz is the immediate and most energetic offshoot of Beethoven on that side from which the latter turned away so soon—as I have above described—as he pressed forward from the sketch to the actual picture. The often crabbed and hasty penstrokes in which Beethoven, without a closer scrutiny, jotted down his attempts at finding new methods of expression, were almost the only heirloom of the great artist that fell into the eager pupil's hands. Was it a suspicion that Beethoven's most finished picture, his Last Symphony, would also be the very last work of its kind, that restrained Berlioz in his own interest—for he, too, wished to create great works—from searching those pictures for the master's actual trend (Drang)?—a trend which surely headed somewhere else, than toward the appeasement of a mere fantastic whim. Certain it is, that Berlioz' artistic inspiration was fed upon an enamoured staring at those strangely crumpled penstrokes: horror and ecstasy seized him at the sight of the enigmatic symbols in which the master had bound both ecstasy and horror in one common spell, to show by them the secret which he never could speak out in Music and yet believed he could speak therein alone. At this sight the starer was seized at last with giddiness; in wild confusion there danced a garish, witch-like chaos before eyes whose natural vision yielded to a purblind polyopia (Vielsichtigkeit), in which the dazed one fancied he was looking on human forms with all the hues of flesh, when there were really nothing but ghostly skeletons playing their tricks upon his fancy. But this spectre-roused vertigo was Berlioz' only inspiration: when he woke from it he saw, with all the exhaustion of an opium-eater, a chilling void around him, which he now endeavoured to animate by artificially resummoning the fever of his dream; and this he could only manage by a toilsome re-arrangement of his musical household-stuff.

[76]

In his struggle to note down the apparitions of his gruesomely excited fancy, so as to present them accurately and palpably to the incredulous, hidebound world of his Parisian surroundings, Berlioz forced his enormous musical intelligence to a hitherto undreamt-of technical power. What he had to say to people was so wonderful, so unwonted, so entirely unnatural, that he could never have said it out in homely, simple words: he needed a huge array of the most complicated machines, in order to proclaim by help of many-wheeled and delicately adjusted Mechanism what a simple human Organism could not possibly have uttered—just because it was so quite un-human. We know, now, the supernatural wonders wherewith a priesthood once deluded childlike men into believing that some good god was manifesting himself to them: it was nothing but Mechanism, that ever worked these cheating wonders. Thus to-day again the super-natural, just because it is the un-natural, can only be brought before a gaping public by the wonders of mechanics; and such a wonder is the secret of the Berliozian Orchestra. Each height and depth of this Mechanism's capacity has Berlioz explored, with the result of developing a positively astounding knowledge, and if we mean to recognise the inventors of our present industrial machinery as the benefactors of modern State-humanity, then we must worship Berlioz as the veritable saviour of our world of Absolute-music; for he has made it possible to musicians to produce the most wonderful effect, from the emptiest and most un-artistic Content of their music-making, by an unheard marshalling of mere mechanical means.

Berlioz himself, in the beginning of his artistic career, was certainly not attracted by the glory of a mere mechanical inventor: in him there dwelt a genuine artistic stress (Drang), and this stress was of a burning, a consuming kind. That, in order to content this stress, he was driven by the unsound and the un-human along the line above-discussed, to such a point that he needs must sink as artist into mechanism, as supernatural, fantastic dreamer into an all-devouring materialism: this makes of him not [77] only a warning example,—but so much the more a deeply to be deplored phenomenon as he to-day is still consumed with a genuinely artistic yearning, notwithstanding that he lies already buried hopelessly beneath the desert waste of his machines.

He is the tragic sacrifice to a tendency whose results have been exploited from another side with the most grievous unabashedness, the most heedless self-complacency in all the world. The Opera, to which we shall now return, has swallowed down the Neoromanticism of Berlioz, too, as a plump, fine-flavoured oyster, whose digestion has conferred on it anew a brisk and well-to-do appearance.

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From the sphere of Absolute-music an enormous increase in means of manifold Expression had been brought to Opera by the modern orchestra, by the orchestra that—in the opera-composer's sense—was now prepared to bear itself "dramatically." Formerly the Orchestra had never been anything beyond the rhythmic and harmonic bearer of the opera-melody: however richly equipped in this its station, yet it was always subordinated to that melody; and where it even reached so far as to take a direct share or interest in its delivery, still it really only served to render mistress Melody more dazzling and more proud, by sumptuously adorning, as it were, her court. Everything that belonged to the necessary accompaniment of the dramatic-action was taken from the sphere of Pantomime or Ballet, whose melodic expression had evolved from the Folkdance-tune by precisely the same laws as Operatic Aria had evolved from the tune of the Folksong. Just as the one tune had owed its development and tricking-out o the wayward fancy of the Singer, and finally of the novelty-hunting Composer, so had the other owed its to that of the Dancer and Pantomimist. In neither had it been possible to tamper with its essential roots, since these lay beyond the soil of operatic art, were incognisable and [78] inaccessible to the factors of Opera; and this essence was enunciated in that hard-and-fast (scharf gezeichneten) rhythmic and melismic Form, whose surface the composer might haply vary, but never wash away its outlines with out completely drowning himself in a chaos of the most hopelessly indefinite expression. Thus Pantomime itself had been domineered over by Dance-melody. The pantomimist could deem nothing expressible by gestures but what this Dance - melody, sternly chained to certain rhythmic and melismic conventions, was able to accompany with any degree of fitness. He was strictly bound to measure his movements and gestures, and consequently what they were intended to express, by the standard of the music's powers; by these to mould and stereotype himself and his individual powers,—exactly as in Opera the singing-actor must temper his dramatic powers to those of the stereotyped Aria-expression, and leave his own quite undeveloped, albeit entitled by the nature of the case to the real determinative voice. (018)

In this anti-natural relation of the artistic factors to one another, in both Pantomime and Opera, musical-expression had been starved into the barest formalism. Above all the Orchestra, as accompanist of dance or pantomime, had not been able to gain that faculty of expression which it must needs have reached if this subject of accompaniment, to wit the Dramatic pantomime, had ventured to evolve according to its own exhaustless inner powers, and thus in itself to offer the Orchestra the material for genuine invention. Even in Opera nothing else had been possible to the Orchestra, when accompanying pantomimic movements, but that tied-down, banal rhythmic-melodic expression: by luxuriance and glitter of surface colour alone, had one sought to indue it with variety.

Now, in independent Instrumental-music this fixed expression had been broken down, and that by actually smiting its rhythmic and melodic Form to pieces, from [79] which new and endlessly diverse forms were moulded according to purely musical design. Mozart still commenced his Symphonies with an entire melody, which he then, as though in sport, divided contrapuntally into smaller and smaller portions. Beethoven's most distinctive creation began with these divided pieces, from which he built before our very eyes an ever loftier and richer edifice. Berlioz, however, was delighted with the intricate and gay confusion into which he shook those fractions; and the hugely complicated machine, the kaleidoscope in which he rattled parti-coloured stones together, he took and reached it to the modern opera-composer in his Orchestra.

These splintered and atomic melodies, whose fragments he might join together at his lief—the more without rhyme or reason, the more quaintly and surprisingly—the Opera-composer now lifted from the orchestra into the voice itself However fantastically whimsical this sort of melodic practice might appear in purely orchestral pieces, yet here everything could be excused; for the difficulty, nay impossibility of expressing oneself in Music alone, with full distinctness, had already betrayed even the most earnest masters into a like fantastic whimsicality. But in Opera, where the sharp-cut word of Poetry afforded the musician a quite natural basis for a sure, infallible expression, this scandalous confounding of all expression, this supercilious maiming of each still healthy organ of expression, such as is exhibited in the modernest Opera's preposterous stringing-together of utterly alien and radically diverse melodic elements—this we can only ascribe to the complete development of madness in the composer; who, in his arrogant pretension to bring about the Drama by his sole absolute-musical powers, with merely labourer's assistance from the Poet, was necessarily bound to arrive where we see him arrived to-day amid the ridicule of every man of common sense.

In virtue of his hugely swollen musical apparatus, the Composer, who since Rossini's time had only developed his frivolous side and lived on absolute Opera-melody, now felt [80] called to boldly advance from the standpoint of melodic frivolity to the further stage of dramatic "Characteristique." As such a "Characteristicist" is the most famous opera-composer of modern times acclaimed; and that not only by the public, who had long-since been made his deeply compromised accomplice in the assault upon Music's truth, but also by the art-critics. In view of the greater melodic purity of former epochs, and compared therewith, 'tis true the Meyerbeerian melody is upbraided by our criticists as frivolous and flimsy (gehaltlos); but in regard of the quite new marvels in the way of "Characteristique" that have blossomed from his music this composer is meted out a plenary indulgence,—which involves the corollary that, after all, one considers a musical-dramatic Characteristique only possible when couched in a frivolous and flimsy Melodique: a consideration which in its turn can only fill the æsthetician with an utter distrust of the whole genre of Opera—

Let us briefly survey the nature of this modern "Characteristique," as exhibited in Opera.

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VI.

MODERN "CHARACTERISTIQUE," in Opera, is something essentially different from its counterpart in the pre-Rossinian era, in the tendency of Gluck or of Mozart

In declaimed Recitative, as in be-sung Aria, Gluck—with full retention of these forms, and amid his instinctive carefulness to comply with the wonted claims upon their purely musical content—was consciously concerned to reproduce as faithfully as possible by his Musical Expression the emotion indicated in the 'text,' and above all to never sacrifice the purely declamatory accent of the verse in favour of this musical expression. He took pains to speak correctly and intelligibly in his music.

Mozart, by reason of a nature wholly sound at core, could never speak otherwise than correctly. He pronounced with the selfsame clearness the rhetorical 'pigtail' and the genuine dramatic accent: with him grey was always grey, and red red; only that this grey and this red were equally bathed with the freshening dew of his music, were resolved into all the nuances of the primordial colour, and thus appeared as many-tinted grey, as many-tinted red. Instinctively his music ennobled all the conventional stage-characters presented him, by polishing, as it were, the rough-hewn stone, by turning all its facets to the light, and finally by fixing it in that position where the light could smite it into brightest play of colour. In this way was he able to lift the characters of "Don Juan," for instance, into such a fulness of expression that a writer like Hoffmann could fall on the discovery of the deepest, most mysterious relations between them, relations of which neither poet nor musician had been ever really conscious. Certain it is, however, that Mozart could not possibly have made his music characteristic in such sort, [82] had the characters themselves not been already present in the poet's work. The more we are able to look through the glowing tints of Mozart's music to the ground behind, with the greater sureness do we recognise the sharp and definite penstrokes of the Poet, whose lines and touches first prescribed the colours of the Musician, and without whose skill that wondrous music would have straightway been impossible.

But the amazingly lucky relationship between Poet and Composer, that we have found in Mozart's masterwork, we see completely vanishing again in the further evolution of Opera; until, as we have already noticed, Rossini quite abolished it, making absolute Melody the only authentic factor of Opera, to which all other interests, and above all the coöperation of the Poet, had wholly to subordinate themselves. We further saw that Weber's objection to Rossini was only directed against this Melody's shallowness and want of character; by no means against the unnatural position of the Musician toward the Drama. On the contrary, Weber only added to this unnaturalness, in that he assigned himself a still more heightened position, as against the Poet, by a characteristic ennobling of his Melody; a position loftier in exact degree as his melody outtopped Rossini's in just that point of nobility of character. To Rossini the Poet hung on like a jolly trencherman, whom the Composer—distinguished, but affable person that he was—treated to his heart's content with oysters and champagne; so that, in the whole wide world, the Poet found himself nowhere better off than with the famous maestro. Weber, on the other hand, from unbending faith in the characteristic pureness of his one and indivisible Melody, tyrannised over the Poet with dogmatic cruelty, and forced him to erect the very stake on which the wretch was to let himself be burnt to ashes for the kindling of the fire of Weber's melody. The poet of "Der Freischütz," entirely without his own knowledge, had committed this act of suicide: from out his very ashes he protested, while the flames of Weber's fire were already filling all the [83] air; he called to the world that these flames were really leaping forth from him. But he made a radical mistake; his wooden logs gave forth no flame until they were consumed—destroyed: their ashes alone, the prosaic dialogue, could he claim as his property after the fire.

After the "Freischütz" Weber sought him out a more accommodating poet; for a new opera he took into his pay a lady, from whose more unconditional subservience he even demanded that, after the burning of the funeral pile, she should not leave behind so much as the last ashes of her prose: she should allow herself to be consumed flesh and bone in the furnace of his melody. From Weber's correspondence with Frau von Chezy, during the preparation of the text of "Euryanthe," we learn with what painstaking care he felt again compelled to rack the last drop of blood from a poetic helper; how he rejects and prescribes, and once more prescribes and rejects; here cuts, there asks for more; insists on lengthenings here and shortenings there,—nay extends his orders even to the characters themselves, their motives and their actions. Was he in this, mayhap, a peevish malcontent, or a boastful parvenu who, inflated by the success of his "Freischütz," desired to play the despot where by rights he should have obeyed? No, no! Out of his mouth there spake alone the honourable artist-care of the Musician, who, tempted by stress of circumstance, had undertaken to construct the Drama itself from Absolute-melody. Weber here was led into a serious error, but into an error which was necessarily bound to take him. He had lifted Melody to its fairest, most feeling height of nobleness; he wanted now to crown it as the Muse of Drama herself, and by her strenuous hand to chase away the whole ribald pack of profaners of the stage. As in the "Freischütz" he had led each lyric fibre of the opera-poem into this Melody, so now he wished to shower down the Drama from the beams of his melodic planet. One might almost say that the melody for his "Euryanthe" was ready before a line of its poem; to provide the latter, he only [84] wanted someone who should take his melody completely into ear and heart, and merely poetise upon it. Since this was not practicable, however, he and his poetess fell into a fretful theoretic quarrel, in which a clear agreement was possible from neither the one side nor the other,—so that in this case of all others, when calmly tested, we may plainly see into what painful insecurity men of Weber's gifts and artistic love of truth may be misled, by holding fast to a fundamental artistic error.

After all was done, the Impossible was bound to stay impossible for Weber too. Spite all his suggestions and instructions to the Poet, he could not procure a dramatic groundwork which he might entirely dissolve into his Melody; because he wished to call into being a genuine drama, and not merely a play filled out with lyric moments, where—as in "Der Freischütz"—he would need to employ his music for nothing but those lyric moments. In the text of "Euryanthe," besides the dramatic-lyric elements,—for which, as I have expressed myself; the melody was ready in advance,—there was still so much of additional matter quite foreign to Absolute Music, that Weber was unable to get command of it by his Melody proper. If this text had been the work of a veritable poet, who should only have called upon the musician for aid, in the same manner as the musician had now called upon the poet: then this musician, in his affection for the proffered drama, would never have had a moment's hesitancy. Where he recognised no fitting Stuff to feed or vindicate his broader musical expression, he would only have deployed his lesser powers, to wit of furnishing an accompaniment subordinate but ever helpful to the whole; and only where the fullest musical expression was necessarily conditioned by the Stuff itself, would he have entered with his fullest powers. The text of "Euryanthe," however, had sprung from the converse relationship between poet and musician, and wherever the Composer—the virtual author of that opera—should by rights have stood aside or withdrawn into the background, there he [85] now could only see a doubled task, namely that of imprinting on a musically quite sterile stuff a stamp which should be musical throughout. In this Weber could have succeeded only if he had turned to music's frivolous line; if, looking quite aside from truth, he had given rein to the epicurean element, and set death and the devil to amusing melodies à la Rossini But this was the very thing against which Weber lodged his strongest artistic protest: his melody should be everywhere characteristic, i.e. true and answering to each emotion of his subject. Thus he was forced to betake himself to some other expedient.

Wherever his broad-breathed melody—mostly ready in advance, and spread above the text like a glittering garment—would have done that text too manifest a violence, there Weber broke this melody itself in pieces. He then took up the separate portions of his melodic building, and, always according to the declamatory requirements of the words, re-joined them together into a skilful mosaic; which latter he coated with a film of fine melodic varnish, in order thus to preserve for the whole construction an outward show of Absolute Melody, detachable as much as possible from the text-words. The desired illusion, however, he did not succeed in effecting.

Not only Rossini, but Weber himself had made Absolute Melody so decidedly the main content of Opera, that, wrested from its dramatic framework and even stripped of its text-words, it had passed over to the Public in its barest nakedness. A melody must be able to be fiddled and blown, or hammered-out upon the pianoforte, without thereby losing the smallest particle of its individual essence, if it was ever to become a real melody for the public. To Weber's operas, too, the public merely went to hear as many of such melodies as possible, and the musician was terribly mistaken when he flattered himself that he would see that lacquered declamatory mosaic accepted as Melody by this public: for, to tell the truth, that was what the composer 'really made for. Though in [86] the eyes of Weber himself that mosaic could only be justified by the words of the text, yet on the one side the public was entirely indifferent—and that with perfect justice—to those words; while on the other side it transpired that this text itself had not been quite suitably reproduced in the music. For it was just this immature half-melody that turned the attention of the hearer away from the words, and made him look out anxiously for the formation of a whole melody that never came to light,—so that any longing for the presentment of a poetic thought was throttled in advance, while the enjoyment of a melody was all the more painfully curtailed as the longing for it was roused indeed, but never satisfied. Beyond the passages in "Euryanthe" where the composer's artistic judgment could hold his own broad natural melody completely justified, we see in that work his higher artistic efforts only crowned with true and beautiful success where, for love of truth, he quite renounces Absolute-melody, and—as in the opening scene of the first act—gives the noblest, most faithful musical expression to the emotional dramatic declamation (Rede) as such; where he therefore sets the aim of his own artistic labours no longer in the music but in the poem, and merely employs his music for the furthering of that aim: which, again, could be attained by nothing but Music with such fulness and so convincing truth.

Criticism has never dealt with "Euryanthe" in the measure that its uncommonly instructive Content deserves. The Public gave an undecided voice, half stirred, half chagrined. Criticism, which at bottom always waits upon the public voice, in order—according to its own intention of the moment—either from that and the outward success to take its cue, or else to doggedly oppose it: this Criticism has never been able to take proper stock of the utterly contradictory elements that cross each other in this work, to sift them carefully, and from the composer's endeavour to unite them into one harmonious whole to find a warrant for its ill-success. Yet never, so long as Opera has existed, [87] has there been composed a work in which the inner contradictions of the whole genre have been more consistently worked out, more openly exhibited, by a gifted, deeply-feeling and truth-loving composer, for all his high endeavour to attain the best. These contradictions are: absolute, self-sufficing melody, and—unflinchingly true dramatic expression. Here one or the other must necessarily be sacrificed,—either Melody or Drama. Rossini sacrificed the Drama; the noble Weber wished to reinstate it by force of his more judicious (sinnigeren) melody. He had to learn that this was an impossibility. Weary and exhausted by the troubles of his "Euryanthe," he sank back upon the yielding pillow of an oriental fairy-dream; through the wonder-horn of Oberon he breathed away his last life's-breath.

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What this noble, lovable Weber, aglow with a pious faith in the omnipotence of his pure Melody, vouchsafed him by the fairest spirit of the Folk,—what he had striven for in vain, was undertaken by a friend of Weber's youth, by Jacob Meyerbeer; but from the standpoint of Rossinian melody.

Meyerbeer passed through all the phases of this Melody's development; not from an abstract distance, but in a very concrete nearness, always on the spot. As a Jew, he owned no mother-tongue, no speech inextricably entwined among the sinews of his inmost being: he spoke with precisely the same interest in any modern tongue you chose, and set it to music with no further sympathy for its idiosyncrasies than just the question as to how far it shewed a readiness to become a pliant servitor to Absolute Music. This attribute of Meyerbeer's has given occasion to a comparison of him with Gluck; for the latter, too, although a German, wrote operas to French and Italian texts. As a fact, Gluck did not create his music from the instinct of Speech (which in such a case must always be the mother-speech): what he, as Musician, was concerned with in his attitude [88] toward Speech (die Sprache), was its Rhetoric (die Rede), that utterance of the speech-organism which merely floats upon the surface of this myriad of organs. Not from the generative force of these organs, did his productive powers mount through the Rhetoric into the Musical-expression; but from the sloughed-off Musical-expression he harked back to the Rhetoric, merely so as to give that baseless Expression some ground of vindication. Thus every tongue might well come equally to Gluck, since he was only busied with his rhetoric: if Music, in this transcendental line, had been able to pierce through the Rhetoric into the very organism of Speech, it must then have surely had to entirely transform itself.—In. order not to interrupt the course of my argument, I must reserve this extremely weighty topic for thorough investigation in a more appropriate place; for the present I content myself with commending to notice, that Gluck's concern was with an animated Rhetoric in general—no matter in what tongue, —since in that alone did he find a vindication for his melody; whereas since Rossini this Rhetoric has been completely swallowed up in Absolute-melody, leaving only its materialest of frameworks, its vowels and its consonants, as a scaffolding for musical tone.

Meyerbeer, through his indifference to the spirit of any tongue, and his hence-gained power to make with little pains its outer side his own (a faculty our modern education has brought within the reach of all the well-to-do), was quite cut out for dealing with Absolute Music divorced from any lingual ties. Moreover, he thus was able to witness on the spot the salient features in the aforesaid march of Opera-music's evolution: everywhere and everywhen he followed on its footsteps. Above all is it noteworthy that he merely followed on this march, and never kept abreast of; to say nothing of outstripping it. He was like the starling who follows the ploughshare down the field, and merrily picks up the earthworm just uncovered in the furrow. Not one departure is his own, but each he has eavesdropped from his forerunner, exploiting it with monstrous [89] ostentation; and so swiftly that the man in front has scarcely spoken a word, than he has bawled out the entire phrase, quite unconcerned as to whether he has caught the meaning of that word; whence it has generally arisen, that he has actually said something slightly different from what the man in front intended. But the noise of the Meyerbeerian phrase was so deafening, that the man in front could no longer arrive at bringing out his own real meaning: willy-nilly, if only to get a word in edgeways, he was forced at last to chime into that phrase.

In Germany alone was Meyerbeer unsuccessful, in his search for a new-fledged phrase to anyhow fit the word of Weber: what Weber uttered from the fill of his melodic life, could not be echoed in the lessoned, arid formalism of Meyerbeer. At last, disgusted with the fruitless toil, he betrayed his friend by listening to Rossini's siren strains, and departed for the land where grew those raisins (Rosinen). Thus he became the weathercock of European opera-music, the vane that always veers at first uncertain with the shift of wind, and only comes to a standstill when the wind itself has settled on its quarter. Thus Meyerbeer in Italy composed operas à la Rossini, precisely till the larger wind of Paris commenced to chop, and Auber and Rossini with their "Stumme" and their "Tell" blew the new gale into a storm! With one bound, was Meyerbeer in Paris! There he found, however, in the Frenchified Weber (need I recall "Robin des bois"?) and the be-Berliozed Beethoven, certain moments to which neither Auber nor Rossini had paid attention, as lying too far out of their way, but which Meyerbeer in virtue of his cosmopolitan capacity knew very well to valuate. He summed up all his overhearings in one monstrous hybrid phrase, whose strident outcry put Rossini and Auber to sudden silence: "Robert," the grim "Devil," set his clutches on them all.

In the survey of our operatic history, there is something most painful about being only able to speak good of the dead, and being forced to pursue the living with remorseless bitterness!—But if we want to be candid, since we must, [90] we have to recognise that the departed masters of this art deserve alone the martyr's crown; if they were victims to an illusion, yet that illusion shewed in them so high and beautiful, and they themselves believed so earnestly its sacred truth, that they offered up their whole artistic lives in sorrowful, yet joyful sacrifice thereto. No living and still active Tone-setter any longer strives from inner stress for such a martyrdom; the illusion now is laid so bare, that no more can anyone repose implicit trust in it. Bereft of faith, nay, robbed of joy, operatic art has fallen, at the hand of its modern masters, to a mere commercial article. Even the Rossinian wanton smile is now no more to be perceived; all round us nothing but the yawn of ennui, or the grin of madness! Almost we feel most drawn towards the aspect of the madness (Wahnsinn); in it we find the last remaining breath of that illusion (Wahn) from which there blossomed once such noble sacrifice. The juggling side of the odious exploitation of our modern opera-affairs we will therefore here forget, now that we must call before us the work of the last surviving and still active hero of operatic composition: that aspect could only fill us with indignation, whereby we might perhaps be betrayed into inhuman harshness towards a personage, did we lay on it alone the burden of the foul corruption of those affairs which surely hold this personage the more a captive as to us it seems set upon their dizziest peak, adorned with crown and sceptre. Do we not know that Kings and Princes, precisely in their most arbitrary dealings, are now the greatest slaves of all? —No, in this king of operatic music let us only look upon the traits of Madness, by which he appears to us an object of regret and warning, not of scorn! For the sake of everlasting Art, we must learn to read the symptoms of this madness; because by its contortions shall we plainest recognise the illusion that gave birth to an artistic genre, as to whose erroneous basis we must thoroughly clear up our minds before ever we can gain the healthy, youthful courage to set rejuvenating hands to Art itself.

To this inquiry we may now press on with rapid step, as [91] we have already shewn the essence of that Madness, and have only to observe a few of its most salient features in order to be quite sure about it.

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We have seen the frivolous Opera-melody—i.e. that robbed of any real connexion with the poem's text—grow big with taking up the tune of National-song, and seen it swell into the pretence of Historic Characteristique. We have further noticed how, with an ever-dwindling individualisation of the chief rôles in the musical drama, the character of the Action was more and more allotted to the—"emancipated"—masses, from whom this Character was then to fall as a mere reflex on the main transactors. We have remarked that only by an Historic costume could the surrounding Mass be stamped with any distinctive, at all cognisable character; and have seen the Composer, so as to maintain his supremacy against the Scene-painter and Stage-tailor—to whom had virtually fallen the merit of establishing the historic Characteristique,—compelled to outdo them by the most unwonted application of his purely-musical nostrums. Finally, we have seen how the most desperate departure in Instrumental-music brought the composer an extraordinary sort of mosaique-melody, whose waywardest of combinations offered the means of appearing strange and outlandish, whenever he had a fancy that way,—and how, by a miraculous employment of the Orchestra, calculated solely for material surprise, he believed he could imprint on such a method the stamp of a quite special Characteristique.

Now we must not leave out of sight that, after all, this whole conjuncture could never have arisen without the Poet's confederacy; wherefore we will turn, for a moment, to an examination of the modernest relationship of the Musician to the Poet.

Through Rossini the new operatic tendency started decidedly from Italy: there the Poet had degenerated into [92] an utter nonentity. But with the transshipment of Rossini's tendency to Paris, the position of the Poet also altered. We have already denoted the peculiarities of French Opera, and found that its kernel was the entertaining conversation (der unterhaltende Wortsinn) of the Couplet. In French Comic-opera the Poet had erstwhile relinquished to the Composer but a limited field, which he was to cultivate for himself while the poet abode in undisputed possession of the ground-estate. Now although, in the nature of the thing, that musical terrain had gradually so encroached upon the rest that it took up in time the whole estate, yet the Poet still held the title-deeds, and the Musician remained a mere feoffee, who certainly regarded the entire fief as his hereditary property, but notwithstanding—as in the whilom Romo-German Empire—owed allegiance to the Emperor as his feudal lord. The Poet enfeoffed, and the Musician enjoyed. In this situation alone, have there ever come to light the healthiest of Opera's progeny, when viewed as a Dramatic genre. The Poet honestly bestirred himself to invent characters and situations, to provide an entertaining and enthralling piece, which only in its final elaboration did he trim for the Musician and the latter's Forms; so that the actual weakness of these French opera-poems lay more in the fact that, by their very Content, they mostly called for no music at all, than in that they were swamped by Music in advance. On the stage of the Opéra Comique this entertaining, often delightfully witty genre was in its native element; and in it the best work was always done when the music could enter with unforced naturalness into the poetry.

This genre was now translated by Scribe and Auber into the pompous phraseology of so-called "Grand Opera." In the "Muette de Portici" we still can plainly recognise a well-planned theatric piece, in which the dramatic interest is nowhere as yet subordinated with manifest intention to a purely musical one: only, in this poem the dramatic-action is already essentially transferred to the operations of the surrounding Mass, so that the main transactors behave more as talking representatives of the mass, than as real [93] Persons who act from individual necessity. So shack already, arrived before the imposing chaos of Grand Opera, did the Poet hold the reins of the opera carriage; those reins he was soon to drop upon the horses' backs! But whereas in the "Muette," and in "Tell," the Poet still kept the reins within his hand, since it occurred to neither Auber nor Rossini to do anything else but just take their musical ease and melodious comfort in the stately opera-coach—unworried as to how and whither the well-drilled coachman steered its wheels,—now Meyerbeer, to whom that rank melodic ease did not come so in the grain, felt impelled to seize the coachman's reins, and by the zig-zag of his route arouse the needful notice, which he could not succeed in attracting to himself so long as he quietly sat in the coach, with no other company than his own musical personality.—

Merely in scattered anecdotes has it come to our ears, what painful torments Meyerbeer inflicted on his poet, Scribe, during the sketching of his opera-subjects. But if we paid no heed to any of these anecdotes, and knew absolutely nothing of the mysteries of those opera-confabulations between Scribe and Meyerbeer, we should still see clearly by the resultant poems themselves what a pothersome, bewildering incubus must have weighed on the else so rapid, so easy-working and quick-witted Scribe, when he had to cobble up those bombastical, rococo texts for Meyerbeer. While Scribe continued to write fluent, often interestingly planned dramatic poems for other composers; texts in any case worked out with considerable natural skill, and at least based always on a definite plot, with easily intelligible situations to suit that plot,—yet this uncommonly expert poet turned out for Meyerbeer the veriest fustian, the lamest galimathias; actions without a plot, situations of the most insane confusion, characters of the most ridiculous buffoonery. This could never have come about by natural means: so easily does no sober judgment, like that of Scribe, submit to the experiments of craziness. Scribe must first have had his brain unhinged for him, [94] before he conjured up a" Robert the Devil"; he must have first been robbed of all sound sense for dramatic-action, before he lent himself in the "Huguenots" to the mere compilation of scene-shifters' nuances and contrasts; he must have been violently initiated into the mysteries of Historical hanky-panky, before he consented to paint a "Prophet" of the sharpers.—

We here perceive a determinant influence of the Composer on the Poet, akin to that which Weber exerted on the poetess of "Euryanthe": but from what diametrically opposite motives! Weber wanted a Drama that could pass with all its members, with every scenic nuance, into his noble, soulful Melody:—Meyerbeer, on the contrary, wanted a monstrous piebald, historico-romantic, diabolico-religious, fanatico-libidinous, sacro-frivolous, mysterio-criminal, autolyco-sentimental dramatic hotch-potch, therein to find material for a curious chimeric music,—a want which, owing to the indomitable buckram of his musical temperament, could never be quite suitably supplied. He felt that, with all his garnered store of musical effects, there was still a something wanting, a something hitherto non-existent, but which he could bring to bearing were he only to collect the whole thing from every farthest cranny, heap it together in one mass of crude confusion, dose it well with stage gunpowder and lycopodium, and spring it crashing through the air. What he wanted therefore from his librettist, was, so to speak, an inscenation of the Berliozian Orchestra; only—mark this well!—with the most humiliating degradation of it to the sickly basis of Rossini's vocal trills and fermate—for sake of "dramatic" Opera. To bring the whole stock of elements of musical effect into some sort of harmonious concord through the Drama, would have necessarily appeared to him a sorry way of setting about his business; for Meyerbeer was no idealistic dreamer, but, with a keen practical eye to the modern opera-public, he saw that by a harmonious concord he would have gained no one to his side, whereas by a rambling hotch-potch he must certainly catch the moods [95] of all, i.e. of each man in his line. So that nothing was more important for him, than a maze of mad cross-purposes, and the merry Scribe must sweat blood to concoct a dramatic medley to his taste. In cold-blooded care the musician stood before it, calmly meditating as to which piece of the monstrosity he could fit out with some particular tatter from his musical store-room, so strikingly and cryingly that it should appear quite out-of-the-ordinary, and therefore—"characteristic."

Thus, in the eyes of our art-Criticism, he developed the powers of Music into historical Characteristique, and brought matters so far that he was told, as the most delicate compliment, that the texts of his operas were terribly poor stuff but what wonders his music knew how to make out of this wretched rubbish!—So the utmost triumph of Music was reached: the Composer had razed the Poet to the ground, and upon the ruins of operatic- poetry the Musician was crowned the only authentic poet!—

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The secret of Meyerbeer's operatic music is—Effect. If we wish to gain a notion of what we are to understand by this "Effect" ("Effekt"), it is important to observe that in this connection we do not as a rule employ the more homely word" Wirkung" [lit. "a working"]. Our natural feeling can only conceive of "Wirkung" as bound up with an antecedent cause: but here, where we are instinctively in doubt as to whether such a correlation subsists, or are even as good as told that it does not subsist at all, we look perplexedly around us for a word to anyhow denote the impression which we think we have received from, e.g., the music-pieces of Meyerbeer; and so we fall upon a foreign word, not directly appealing to our natural feeling, such as just this word "Effect." If, then, we wish to define what we understand by this word, we may translate "Effect" by "a Working, without a cause" ("Wirkung ohne Ursache").

[96]

As a fact, the Meyerbeerian music produces, on those who are able to edify themselves thereby, a Working-without-a-cause. This miracle was only possible to the extremest music, i.e. to an expressional power which—in Opera—had from the first sought to make itself more and more independent of anything worth expressing, and had finally proclaimed its attainment of complete independence by reducing to a moral and artistic nullity the Object of expression, which alone should have given to this Expression its being, warranty and measure; by reducing it to such a degree that this object now could only gain its being, warranty and measure from a mere act of grace on the part of Music,—an act which had thus itself become devoid of any real expression. This act of grace, however, could only be made possible in conjunction with other coefficients of absolute-Working. In the extremest Instrumental-music appeal had been made to the vindicating force of Phantasy, to which a programme, or mayhap a mere title, had given an extramusical leverage: in Opera this leverage was to be materialised, i.e. the imagination was to be absolved from any painful toil. What had there been programmatically adduced from moments of the phenomenal life of Man or Nature, was here to be presented in the most material reality, so as to produce a fantastic Working without the smallest fellow-working of the Phantasy. This material leverage the Composer borrowed from the scenic apparatus, inasmuch as he took also purely for their own sake the workings it was able to produce, i.e. absolved them from the only object that, lying beyond the realm of Mechanism and on the soil of life-portraying Poetry, could have given them conditionment and vindication.—Let us explain our meaning clearly by one example, which will at the same time characterise the most exhaustively the whole of Meyerbeerian art.

Let us suppose that a poet has been inspired with the idea of a hero, a champion of light and freedom, in whose breast there flames an all-consuming love for his downtrod brother-men, afflicted in their holiest rights. The poet [97] wishes to depict this hero at the zenith of his career, in the full radiance of his deeds of glory, and chooses for his picture the following supreme moment. With thousands of the Folk—who have left house and home, left wife and children, to follow his inspiring call, to conquer or to die in fight against their powerful oppressors—the hero has arrived before a fortressed city, which must be stormed by his unpractised mob, if the work of freedom is to come to a victorious issue. Through earlier hardships and mishaps, disheartenment has spread apace; evil passions, discord and confusion are raging in his hosts: all is lost, if all shall not be won to-day. This is a plight in which heroes wax to their fullest grandeur. In the solitude of the night just past the hero has taken counsel of the god within him, of the spirit of the purest love for fellow-men, and with its breath has sanctified himself; and now the poet takes him in the grey of dawn, and leads him forth among those hosts, who are already wavering as to whether they should prove coward beasts or godlike heroes. At his mighty voice, the Folk assemble. That voice drives home into the inmost marrow of these men, who now alike grow conscious of the god within them: they feel their hearts uplifted and ennobled, and their inspiration in its turn uplifts the hero to still loftier heights; from inspiration he presses on to deed. He seizes the standard and waves it high towards those fearful walls, the embattled city of the foe, who, so long as they lie secure behind their trenches, make impossible a better future for mankind. "On, then, comrades! To die or conquer! This city must be ours!"—The poet now has reached his utmost confines: upon the boards he wills to show the one instant when this high-strung mood steps suddenly before us with all the plainness of a great reality; the scene must now become for us the stage of all the world; Nature must now declare herself a sharer in this exaltation; no longer can she stay a chilling, chance bystander. Lo! sacred Want compels the poet:—he parts the cloudy curtains of the morn, and at his word the [98] streaming sun mounts high above the city, that city henceforth hallowed to the victory of the inspired.

Here is the flower of all-puissant Art, and this wonder blossoms only from the art of Drama.

Only, the opera-composer has no longing for wonders such as blossom merely from the dramatic-poet's inspiration and may be effectuated by a picture taken lovingly from Life itself: he wishes for the effect but not the cause, since the latter lies outside his sway. In a leading scene of Meyerbeer's "Prophète," where the externals resemble those just described, we obtain for the ear the purely physical effect of a hymn-like melody, listened from the Folk-song and swelled into a sound like thunder: for the eye, that of a sunrise in which there is positively nothing for us to see but a master-stroke of Mechanism. The Object that should be fired by that melody, should be shone on by this sun, the inspired hero who from very ecstasy must pour his soul into that melody, who at the stressful climax of Necessity called forth the dawning of this sun,—the warranty, the kernel of the whole luxuriant dramatic fruit,—is absolutely not to hand. (019) In his place there functions a characteristically-costumed tenor, whom Meyerbeer has commissioned through his private-secretary poet, Scribe, to sing as charmingly as possible and at the same time behave a wee bit communistically, in order that the gentry might have an extra dash of piquancy to think [99] into the thing. The hero of whom we spoke before, is some poor devil who out of sheer weakness has taken on the rôle of trickster, and finally bewails in the most pitiful fashion—by no means any error, any fanatical hallucination, which might at a pinch have called for a sun to shine on it,—but solely his weakness and mendacity.

What considerations may have joined forces to call into the world such an unworthy object under the title of a "Prophet," we will here leave unexplored; let it suffice us to observe the resultant, which is instructive enough in all conscience. First, we see in this example the complete moral and artistic dishonourment of the Poet, in whose work even those who are most favourably disposed to the Composer can find no single hair's-breadth of merit: so!— the poetic aim is no longer to attract us in the slightest; on the contrary, it is to revolt us. The Performer is now to interest us as nothing but a costumed Singer; in the above-named scene, he can only do this by his singing of that aforesaid melody, which makes its effect entirely for itself—as Melody. Wherefore the sun is likewise to work entirely for itself, namely as a successful theatrical copy of the authentic sun: so that the ground of its 'working' comes not at all into the province of Drama, but into that of sheer Mechanics,—the only thing left for us to think about when it puts in its appearance; for how alarmed the composer would be, if one chose to take this appearance as an intentional transfiguration of the hero, in his capacity of champion of mankind! No, no: for him and his public, everything must be done to turn such thoughts away, and guide attention solely to that master-stroke of mechanism. And thus in this unique scene, so heaped with honours by the public, the whole of Art is resolved into its mechanical integers: the externals of Art are turned into its essence; and this essence we find to be—Effect, the absolute Effect, i.e. the stimulus of an artificial love-titillation, without the potence of an actual taste of Love.

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[100]

I have not taken upon myself to offer a criticism of Meyerbeer's operas, but merely to shew by them the essence of our modernest Opera, in its hang with the whole class in general. Though the nature of my subject has often compelled me to give my exposition the character of a historic survey, yet I have had to resist the being led aside into historic detail-writing. If I had to characterise in particular the calling and talent of Meyerbeer for dramatic composition, I should have for very sake of truth, which I here am labouring to bare completely, to lay the strongest stress upon one remarkable phenomenon in his works.—In Meyerbeer's music there is shewn so appalling an emptiness, shallowness and artistic nothingness, that— especially when compared with by far the larger number of his musical contemporaries—we are tempted to set down his specific musical capacity at zero. However, it is not that despite all this he has reaped such great successes with the European opera-public, which should fill us with wonderment; for this miracle is easily explained by a glance at that Public itself:—no, it is a purely artistic observation, which here should rivet and instruct us. We observe, namely, that for all the renowned composer's manifest inability to give by his unaided musical powers the slightest sign of artistic life, nevertheless in certain passages of his operatic music he lifts himself to the height of the most thoroughly indisputable, the very greatest artistic power. These passages are products of a genuine inspiration, and if we look a little closer we shall also see whence this inspiration derived its stimulus—namely, from the Poetic situation. Where the poet forgot his hampering regard for the musician, where amid his work of dramatic compilation he stumbled on a moment in which the free, the freshening breath of human Life might come and go,—there he suddenly transmits this breath alike to the musician, as a gust of Inspiration; and now the composer, who had exhausted all the resources of his musical ancestry without being able to strike one solitary spark of real Invention, is at a blow empowered to find the richest, noblest, most [101] heart-searching musical Expression. I here would chiefly call, to mind certain features in the well-known plaintive love-scene of the Fourth Act of the "Huguenots," and above all the invention of that wondrous moving melody in G-flat major, by side of which—sprung as it is, like a fragrant flower, from a situation which stirs each fibre of the human heart to blissful pain—there is very little else, and certainly none but the most perfect of Music's works, that can be set. This I signalise with the sincerest joy and frank enthusiasm, because precisely in this phenomenon is the real essence of Art presented in so clear and irrefutable a fashion, that we can but see with rapture how the faculty for genuine art-creation must come to even the most corrupted music-maker, so soon as he treads the soil of a Necessity stronger than his self-seeking Caprice; of a necessity which suddenly guides his erring footsteps, to his own salvation, into the paths of sterling Art

But, that here we can only mention separate features, and not one whole great track—not e.g. the entire love-scene to which I have referred, but only scattered moments in it,—this compels us to above all ponder well the gruesome nature of that Madness, which nips in the folded bud the musician's noblest faculties, and stamps upon his muse the sickly smile of odious complaisance, or else the ghastly grin of crazy tyranny. This madness is the musician's passion to supply for himself, and by his own powers, what he does not in himself and of his powers possess, and in whose joint establishment he can only take a share when it is brought him by the individual powers of another. Through this unnatural eagerness of the Musician to satisfy his vanity, namely to exhibit his possessions (Vermögen) in the dazzling light of a measureless capacity, he has reduced these possessions-ample enough, in all truth—to that beggarly array in which the Meyerbeerian opera-music now appears. In her self-seeking endeavour to force her narrow forms upon the Drama as of sole validity, this Opera-music has exposed their wretched stiffness and unyieldingness, till [102] they have grown past any bearing with. In her mania for seeming rich and many-sided, she has sunk, as a musical art, to the utmost spiritual penury, been driven to borrowing from the most material Mechanism. In her egoistic feint of affording an exhaustive dramatic Characteristique by sheerly musical means, she has ended by losing all power of natural Expression, and won instead the doubtful honours of a contortionist and mountebank.—

As I said at the beginning, that the error in the Operatic art-genre consisted in "that a Means of expression (Music) had been made the end, while the End of expression (the Drama) had been made a means,"—so the heart of the illusion, and finally of that madness which has exposed the Operatic art-genre in its rankest un-naturalness to the ridicule of all, we must thus denote:

that this means of Expression wanted of itself to prescribe the aim of Drama.

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VII.

WE have reached the end;—for we have followed Music's powers in Opera to the proclamation of her utter impotence.

When to-day we talk of Opera-music, in any stricter sense, we speak no longer of an Art, but of a mere article of Fashion. Only the Critic, who feels no stir of artistic necessity within him, can still expound his hopes or fears about the future of Opera. The Artist—provided he does not degrade himself into a speculator on the Public—shews by the very fact of his seeking for outlets aside from Opera, and particularly his soliciting the energetic participation of the Poet, that he takes the Opera itself for dead already.

But here, in this to-be-solicited participation of the Poet, do we touch the point as to which we must reach a conscious clearness, bright as day, if we want to grasp and set fast in its genuine, its healthy naturalness the relation between Musician and Poet This relation must be one completely opposite to that wonted heretofore, so entirely changed that, for his own welfare, the Musician will only settle down to it when he dismisses every memory of the old unnatural union, whose last-remaining bond could but draw him back into the old unfruitful madness.

In order to get the clearest notion of this sane and only salutary relation that is to come, we must once more denote the nature of our present music, in brief but definite terms.—

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We shall quickest reach a lucid survey, if we tersely sum up Music's nature in the concept, Melody.

As the inner is both ground and conditionment of the outer, but in the outer comes the inner first to plain and

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definite show, so are Harmony and Rhythm indeed the shaping organs, but Melody the first real Shape of music. Harmony and Rhythm are the blood, flesh, nerves and bones, with all the entrails, and like these, when we look upon the finished, living man, stay closed against the gazing eye; Melody, on the other hand, is this finished Man himself, just how he shews his body to our eye. In gazing on this man we view alone the supple shape, as expressed in the form-giving demarcations of the outward skin; we linger on the most expressive aspect of this shape, in the features of his face; and finally we pause before the eye, the most life-full and communicative utterance of the whole man: who through this organ—which, in its turn, obtains its power-of-imparting solely from its quite universal faculty for taking up the utterances of the surrounding world—at once reveals the most convincingly his inner soul. So is Melody the most perfect expression of the inner being of Music, and every true melody, conditioned by this inmost being, speaks also through that eye to us; that eye which most expressively imparts to us this Inmost, but always so that we see alone the flashing of the pupil, and not the inner, in itself still formless organism in all its nakedness.

When the Folk invented melodies, it proceeded like the natural bodily-man, who, by the instinctive exercise of sexual functions, begets and brings forth Man; this finished Man, arrived at light of day, reveals himself at once by his outer stature: not first, forsooth, by his hidden inner organism. Greek Art still apprehended this Man by his outer stature alone, and strove to mould his faithful, lifelike counterfeit—at last in bronze and marble. Christianity, on the contrary, proceeded anatomically: it wanted to find man's soul; it opened and cut up his body, and bared all that formless inner organism at which our gaze rebelled, because it neither is nor should be set there for the eye. (020) In searching for the soul, however, [105] we had slain the body; in hunting for the source of Life we had destroyed its utterance, and thus arrived at nothing but dead entrails, which only in completely unbroken faculty of utterance could be at all conditionments of Life. But the searched-for soul, in truth, is nothing other than the life: wherefore what remained over, for Christian anatomy to look upon, was only—Death.

Christianity had choked the organic impulse of the Folk's artistic life, its natural force of procreation: it had hacked into its flesh, and with dualistic scissors had played havoc with even its artistic organism. Community, in which alone the Folk's artistic force of procreation can mount to the full power of perfect art-creation, belonged to Catholicism: only in solitude, where fractions of the Folk—far distant from the highways of associate life—found themselves alone with Nature and each other, was there preserved in its childlike simpleness and straitened indigence the Folkslied, so indivorcibly ingrown with Poetry.

If for the moment we turn aside from this, we see Music taking in the realm of cultured-art an amazing new development: from its anatomically disjoined, its inwardly slaughtered organism, we see it making for a new life-evolution by piecing together its severed organs and allowing them to freshly coalesce.—In the Christian Church-song Harmony had independently matured itself. Its natural life-need now drove it of necessity to utterance as Melody; for that utterance, however, it could not dispense with the hold on form and movement given by the organ of Rhythm; and this it took, as an arbitrary, more fancied than actual standard, from Dance. The new union could only be an artificial one. Just as Poetry had been constructed by the rules which Aristotle had abstracted from the tragic poets, so must Music be dressed by scientific canons and assumptions. This was at the time when men, in sooth, were to be made by scholarly recipes, and from chemical decoctions. Such a Man did bookish music endeavour to construct: Mechanism was to set up Organism, or else replace it. [106] But, in truth, the restless mainspring of this mechanical inventiveness drove ever toward the genuine Man, the man who was to be re-erected from out the Concept, and thus was finally to wake to real organic life.—We here impinge upon the whole vast course of modern manhood's evolution!—

But the man whom Music wished to erect, was really none other than Melody, i.e., the moment of most definite, most convincing utterance of her actual hiving, inner organism. The farther Music evolved, in this necessary longing to become a human being, the more decisively do we see the struggle for a plain melodic message wax into a positively painful yearning; and in the works of no musician do we see this yearning grow to such a stress and power, as in the great Instrumental works of Beethoven. In these we marvel at the gigantic efforts of Mechanism longing to become a Man; efforts to resolve its every component part into the flesh and blood of an actual living organism, and through that to reach an unerring utterance as Melody.

In this respect, the characteristic, decisive course of our whole art-evolution shows out with Beethoven by far more genuinely than with our Opera-composers. These apprehended Melody as something lying outside the realm of their art-production, as something ready-made; Melody, in whose organic generation they had taken absolutely no part, they snatched from the mouth of the Folk, thus tearing it loose from its Organism, and applied it just according to their wayward whim, without ever being able to justify it by anything but their own luxurious pleasure. If that Folk's-melody was the outward Shape of man, then in a sense the Opera-composers stripped this man of his skin and covered therewith a puppet, as though to give it a human look: but with it they could only dupe at most the civilised savages of our purblind opera-public.

With Beethoven, on the contrary, we perceive the natural thrust of Life, to breed Melody from out music's inner Organism. In his weightiest works, he by no means posits Melody as something ready in advance, but in a measure lets it be born from Music's organs before our very eyes; he [107] inducts us into this act of bearing, inasmuch as he sets it before us in all its organic Necessity. But his most decisive message, at last given us by the master in his magnum opus, is the necessity he felt as Musician to throw himself into the arms of the Poet, in order to compass the act of begetting the true, the unfailingly real and redeeming Melody. To become a human being, Beethoven perforce must become an entire, i.e. a social (gemeinsamer) being, subjected to the generic conditionments of the manly and the womanly.—What an earnest, deep and yearning brooding unveiled at last to the endless-gifted master the limpid melody wherewith he broke into the Poet's words: "Joy, thou fairest spark of Godhead!" ("Freude, schöner Götterfunken!").—With this Melody is solved withal the mystery of Music: we know now, we have won the faculty, to be with consciousness organically-working artists.—

Let us linger now beside the weightiest point of our investigation, and let us take the "Freude"-melody of Beethoven for guide.—

The Folk'smelody, at its rediscovery on the part of Culture-musicians, afforded us a twofold interest: that of joy in its native beauty, where we met it undisfigured in the Folk, and that of inquiry into its inner organism. The joy in it, speaking accurately, was bound to stay unfruitful for our art-production; to imitate the form and content of this melody too, with any success, we should have had to restrict our movements within an art-variety similar to the Folkslied itself; nay, we should ourselves have had to be Folk-artists in the strictest sense, in order to win the faculty for such an imitation. We should thus have had—intrinsically—not to imitate it at all, but as Folk ourselves, to invent it.

In bondage to another sort of art-procedure—differing by all the breadth of heaven from that of the Folk—we could at best apply this melody in the crudest sense, and that amid surroundings and conditions which must necessarily disfigure it. At bottom, the history of Operatic Music goes always back to the history of this melody alone; a history in which according to certain laws like those of ebb and flow, [108] the periods of taking up and re-taking up the Folksmelody alternate with periods of advancing and finally overwhelming corruption and disfigurement thereof.—Those musicians who became the most painfully conscious of this evil attribute of the Folksmelody, when converted into Operatic Aria, saw themselves therefore driven with more or less plainly felt necessity to take thought for the organic Begettal of Melody itself. The Opera-composer stood the nearest to the discovery of the needful process; yet with him, of all others, it must inevitably fail, because he stood in an utterly false relation to the only fructifying element, that of Poetry; because, in his unnatural and usurpatorial attitude, he had in a measure robbed that element of its begetting organs. In his distorted attitude towards the Poet the Composer might try his hardest, but wherever the Feeling soared to the height of a melodic outpour he must bring with him his ready-made melody, because the Poet had à priori to adapt himself to the entire form in which that melody was to declare itself: this Form, moreover, had so imperious an influence over the shaping of the opera-melody, that in truth it prescribed its substantial Content as well.

This Form was taken from the Folkslied-tune; its outermost shape, the change and reiteration of movement in rhythmic time-measures, was even borrowed from the Dance-tune,—which latter, however, was originally one and the same thing as the Song-tune. This Form was merely varied in, but has itself remained the irremovable scaffold of the Opera-aria right down to the present day. Within it alone, was a melodic structure thinkable; and naturally, this stayed always such a structure as was strictly governed by that scaffold in advance. The musician, seeing that once he stepped within this Form he could no longer invent but merely vary, was robbed in advance of all power for the organic generation of Melody; for true Melody is, as we have seen, itself the utterance of an inner organism; to arise organically, therefore, it must have shaped for itself its very Form, and a form entirely adequate to explicitly convey [109] its inner essence. On the other hand, the melody that was constructed from the Form, could never be anything but an imitation of the pristine melody which. had first spoken in that selfsame form. (021) With many opera-composers we therefore see an endeavour to break this Form: yet such an attempt could only have proved artistically successful, provided suitable new forms were found. Yet again, the new Form could only have been a genuine art-form, provided it shewed itself as the explicit utterance of a specific musical Organism: but every musical organism is by its nature—a womanly; it is merely a bearing, and not a begetting factor; the begetting-force lies clean outside it, and without fecundation by this force it positively cannot bear.—Here lies the whole secret of the barrenness of modern music!

We have denoted Beethoven's artistic procedure in his weightiest Instrumental works as "our induction into the act of bearing Melody." Let us keep well in view this characteristic fact, however, that though only in the progress of his tone-piece, does the master set his full melody before us as a finished whole, yet this melody is to be subsumed as already finished in the artist's mind from the beginning. He merely broke at the outset the narrow Form,—that very Form against which the opera-composer had striven in vain,—he shattered it into its component parts, in order to unite them by organic creation into a new whole; and this he did, by setting the component parts of different melodies in changeful contact with each other, as though to show the organic affinity of the seemingly most diverse of such parts, and therewith the prime affinity of those different [110] melodies themselves. Beethoven but discloses to us here the inner organism of Absolute Music: his concern was, in a sense, to restore this organism from its mechanical state (diesen Organismus aus der Mechanik hersustellen), to vindicate its inner life, and to show it at its livingest in the very act of Bearing. But what he employed to fertilise this organism, was still the Absolute Melody; he thus put life into this organism only so far as he practised it in Bearing—so to say—and indeed, let it re-bear an already finished melody. Precisely through that process, however, he found himself driven on to supply this musical organism, now freshly quickened into bearing-power, with the fecundating seed as well; and this he took from the Poet's power of begetting. Far as he was from any æsthetic experimenting, yet Beethoven, here taking up unconsciously the spirit of our whole artistic evolution, could not go to work otherwise than speculatively, in a certain sense. He himself had by no means been- spurred to instinctive creation by the begetting Thought of a Poet, but in his desire for Music-bearing he had looked around him for the Poet. Thus even his "Freude"-melody does not as yet appear invented for, or through, the Poet's verse, but merely conceived with an eye to Schiller's poem after an incitation by its general contents. First where, in the progress of this poem, Beethoven is worked-up by its contents into a dramatic directness, (022) do we see his melodic combinations springing ever more definitely from the diction also; so that at last the unprecedented many-sidedness of his music s Expression answers to the highest sense, at any rate, both of the poem and its wording; and with such directness, that the music, once divorced from the poem, would appear to us no longer thinkable or comprehensible.

This is the point where we see the results of our æsthetic inquiry into the organism of the Volkslied confirmed with. startling plainness by an artistic Deed. Just as the living [111] Folk's-melody is inseparable from the living Folk's-poem, at pain of organic death, so can Music's organism never bear the true, the living Melody, except it first be fecundated by the Poet's Thought. Music is the bearing woman, the Poet the begetter; and Music had therefore reached the pinnacle of madness, when she wanted, not only to bear, but also to beget.

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Music is a woman.

The nature of Woman is love: but this love is a receiving (empfangende), and in receival (Empfängniss) an unreservedly surrendering, love.

Woman first gains her full individuality in the moment of surrender. She is the Undine who glides soulless through the waves of her native element, till she receives her soul through love of a man. The look of innocence in a woman's eye is the endlessly pellucid mirror in which the man can only see the general faculty for love, till he is able to see in it the likeness of himself. When he has recognised himself therein, then also is the woman's all-faculty condensed into one strenuous necessity, to love him with the all-dominant fervour of full surrender.

The true woman loves unconditionally, because she must. She has no choice, excepting where she does not love. But where she must love, there she experiences a vast constraint (Zwang), which withal develops for the first time her Will. (023) This Will, which rebels against that constraint, is the first and mightiest stirring (Regung) of the individuality of the beloved object; and, taken up by sympathy into the woman, it is that individuality which has gifted her with Will and Individuality. (024) This is the honourable pride (Stolz) of woman, a pride that comes solely from the force of the [112] individuality that has won her and constrains her with all the exigence (Noth) of Love. For sake of the cherished boon she strives against the constraint of Love itself until, beneath the all-dominance of this constraint, she learns that both it and her own pride are but the energising of the individuality which she has taken up; that Love and the beloved object are one, that without them she has neither force nor will, that from the instant when she first felt pride she was already conquered (vernichtet). The plain avowal of this conquest is then the effective offering of woman's last surrender: her pride ascends with consciousness into that only thing which she can sense, can feel, can think—nay, what she is,—into love for this one man.—

A woman who loves not with this pride of surrender, truly does not love at all. But a woman who does not love at all, is the most odious, most unworthy spectacle in the world. Let us adduce the characteristic types of such ladies!

Some one has very appropriately called the modern Italian opera-music a wanton. A courtezan may pride herself on always remaining her self; she never steps outside herself, never sacrifices herself but when she wishes for either pleasure or profit in return, and in this case she only offers to the joys of others that portion of her being which she can lightly enough dispose of, since it has become an object of her own caprice. In the embraces of the courtezan the Woman is never present, but only a portion of her physical organism: from love she reaps no individuality, but gives herself in general to the general world. Thus the wanton is an undeveloped, wasted woman: yet she at least fulfils the physical functions of the female sex, by which we can still—albeit with regret—detect the Woman in her.

French opera-music passes rightly for a coquette. The coquette adores to be admired, nay even loved: but her peculiar joy at being admired and loved she can only taste, providing she herself be snared by neither love nor admiration [113] for the object she inspires with each. The profit she seeks is delight in herself, satisfaction of her vanity: the whole enjoyment of her life lies in being admired and loved; and this would be instantly disturbed, were she herself to feel either love or admiration for another. Were she in love, she would be robbed of her self-enjoyment; for in Love she must necessarily forget herself, and make surrender to the distressful, often suicidal enjoyment of another. From nothing, therefore, does the coquette so guard herself, as from Love, in order to preserve untouched the only thing she loves—to wit her Self; that being which yet gains its force of tempting, its practised individuality, from the love-approach of Man alone; from whom the coquette thus withholds his own possession. Wherefore the coquette loves from thievish Egoism, and her vital force is icy coldness. In her the nature of Woman is perverted to its odious opposite; from her chilling smile, which only mirrors back our broken likeness, we turn mayhap, in desperation, to the Italian wanton.

But there is still another type of unsexed dames, a type that fills us with the utmost horror: this is the prude, as which the so-called "German" (025) opera-music must pass for us.—It may happen to the courtezan, that the caresses of some ardent youth shall suddenly awake in her the sacrificial glow of Love,—as witness the God and the Bayadere!—; it may fall out that the coquette, who is always playing at love, shall one day find herself the victim of this game, and caught, for all the battlings of her vanity, in a net where she now bewails with tears the losing of her will. But never will this beauteous human lot befall the [114] woman who guards her spotlessness with the fanaticism of orthodox belief,—the woman whose Virtue consists in lovelessness on principle. The prude has been brought up in all the regulations of decorum, and from earliest youth has heard the word "love" pronounced with a flutter of uneasiness. Her heart filled with Dogma, she steps into the world, looks coyly round her, perceives the courtezan and the coquette, smites her pious breast, and cries: "I thank thee, Lord, that I am not as these!"—Her life-force is Decorum, her only will the denial of love, which she knows no else than in the likeness of the courtezan and the coquette. Her virtue is the avoiding of crime, her works unfruitfulness, her soul the pride of insolence.—And yet how near is this woman, of all others, to the most disgusting fall! In her bigoted heart there stirs no love, but in her ambushed flesh a vulgar lust. We know the conventicles of the self-righteous, the respectable towns where bloomed the flower of the "saints"! (026) We have seen the prude fall headlong into all the vices of her French and Italian sisters,—only, still further tainted by the arch-vice of hypocrisy, and alas without one glimmer of originality!—

Let us turn from this revolting sight, and ask: What kind of woman must true music be?

A woman who really loves, who sets her virtue in her pride, her pride, however, in her sacrifice; that sacrifice whereby she surrenders, not one portion of her being, but her whole being in the amplest fulness of its faculty—when [115] she conceives. But in joy and gladness to bear the thing conceived, this is the deed of Woman,—and to work deeds the woman only needs to be entirely what she is, but in no way to will something: for she can will but one thing—to be a woman! To man, therefore, woman is the ever clear and cognisable measure of natural infallibility, (Untrüglichkeit), for she is at her perfectest when she never quits the sphere of beautiful Instinctiveness (Unwillkürlichkeit), to which she is banned by that which alone can bless her being,—by the Necessity of Love.

And here, again, I point you to the glorious musician in whom Music was all that in a human being she ever can be, if in all the fulness of her essence she is to stay precisely music and nothing else but music. Look on Mozart!—Was he haply a lesser musician because he was Musician out-and-out, because he could not, would not, be anything other than Musician? Take his "Don Juan"! Where else has music won so infinitely rich an Individuality, been able to characterise so surely, so definitely, and in such plenteous fill as here,—where the Musician, by the very nature of his art, was in no whit other than an unconditionally-loving Woman?

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—Yet, let us halt, and precisely here, to put ourselves the searching question: Who then must be the Man, whom this Woman is to love so unreservedly? Before we give away this woman's love, let us well ponder whether the counter-love of the Man is something haply to be got by begging, or something that he also needs for his redemption.

Let us closely view the Poet!

[119]

[0.]

WHEN LESSING laboured in his "Laocöon" to discover and map out the bounds of Poetry and Painting, he had in his eye that poetry which was already mere description (Schilderei). He starts from lines of comparison and demarcation which he draws between the plastic group portraying the scene of Laocöon's death-struggle, and that description of the same scene as sketched by Virgil in his "Æneid," an epos written for dumb reading. Though in the course of his inquiry Lessing touches on Sophocles, again he has only in mind the literary Sophocles, such as alone exists for us; or, if he takes into his purview the poet's Tragic Artwork in all its life of actual performance, he instinctively places it outside any comparison with the works of Sculpture or Painting: since not the living Tragic Artwork is bounded as against these plastic arts, but these, compared with that, find in their straitened natures their necessary bounds. Wherever Lessing sets up limits and boundaries for Poetry, he does not mean the dramatic Artwork directly brought before the senses by physical performance, that Artwork which sums in itself each factor of the plastic arts, in highest potence such as it alone can reach, and by its power has first brought to these their higher potentiality of artistic life; but he means the exiguous phantom of this Artwork, the narrating, depicting, literary poem, appealing to the imagination and not the senses—the form in which that force of imagination has been turned into the virtual performer, toward which the poem merely acts as stimulus.

Such an artificial art, 'tis true, can only produce an effect at all by the exactest observance of boundaries and limits, since she must be ever on her watch to guard the unlimited force of imagination—which has here to play the performer's [120] rôle in place of her—from any bewildering digression, and thus to guide it to the one fixed point at which she can display her purposed object as definitely and distinctly as possible. But it is to the force of imagination alone, that all the egoistically severed arts address themselves; and especially the Plastic art, which can only bring into play the weightiest moment of Art, namely motion, by appealing to the Phantasy. All these arts merely suggest: an actual representation would to them be possible only could they parley with the universality of man's artistic receptivity, could they address his entire sentient (sinnlichen) organism, and not his force of imagination; for the true Artwork can only be engendered by an advance from imagination into actuality, i.e. physicality (Sinnlichkeit).

Lessing's honest endeavour to map out the boundaries of those severed art-varieties, which can no longer directly represent but merely figure (schildern), is foolishly misunderstood to-day by those to whom the huge difference between those arts and the one veritable Art remains a thing incomprehensible. Inasmuch as they keep before their eye these separate art-varieties alone, all powerless in themselves for a direct impersonation, they naturally can only assign to each of these arts—and thus (as they must deem) to Art in general—the task of overcoming with as little disturbance as possible the difficulty of giving the force of imagination a firm leverage in their figuring. To heap the means of this their figuring, can only confuse the Figur ing itself—with which I quite agree,—and by distressing or distracting the Phantasy through the presentation of disparate means, can only turn it from a full grasp of the object.

Purity of the art-variety is therefore the first requisite for its comprehensibility, whereas an alloy (Mischung) from other art-varieties can only foul this comprehensibility. In fact we can imagine nothing more bewildering, than if the Painter, for instance, should want to show his subject in motion such as can be depicted by the Poet alone; the [121] acme of repulsiveness, however, we find in a painting where the poet's verses are written as issuing from some person's mouth. When the Musician—i.e. the absolute musician— attempts to paint, he brings-about neither music nor a painting; but if he wanted to accompany with his music the inspection of an actual painting, then he might be quite sure that no one would understand either the painting or his music. He who can only conceive the combination of all the arts into the Artwork as though one meant, for example, that in a picture-gallery and amidst a row of statues a romance of Goethe's should te read aloud while a symphony of Beethoven's was being played, (027) such a man does rightly enough to insist upon the severance of the arts, and to wish each unit left to help itself to the plainest possible depicting of its subject in its own way. But, that our modern æstheticians [orig. ed. "State-æstheticians"] should rank the Drama also as an art-variety, and as such assign it to the Poet for his special property, in the sense that the blending with it of another art, like that of Music, would need apology but could by no means gain acquittal—this is to draw from Lessing's definition a conclusion for which there is not one trace of support in the original. These people, however, see in Drama nothing but a branch of literature, a species of poesy such as the romance or didactic poem; only with this difference, that, instead of being merely read, it is to be learnt by rote by several persons, declaimed, accompanied with gestures, and lit up by the footlights. To be sure, to the stage-performance of a literary-drama its musical embellishment would bear almost the same relation as though it were executed in presence of an easel-ed painting, and therefore the so-called Melodrama has been branded as a genre of most pernicious medley. But this [122] drama, the only one our literarians have in mind, is just as little a true Drama as a clavichord (028) is an orchestra, to say nothing of a troupe of singers. The literary drama owes its origin to the same egoistic spirit of our general art-development as does the clavichord, and by the latter will I endeavour to make plain this course in brief.

The oldest, truest, most beautiful organ of music, the organ to which alone our music owes its being, is the human voice. The most naturally was it counterfeited by the wind-instrument, and this again by the stringed instrument: the symphonic concord of an orchestra of wind and strings, again, was counterfeited by the Organ; the unweildy Organ, in its turn, was replaced by the handy clavichord. The most noticeable thing in this march of events, from the primal organ of the human voice to the clavichord, is the sinking of music to an ever greater lack of Expression. The instruments of the orchestra, though they had already lost the articulations (Sprachlaut) of the human voice, were still able to sufficiently counterfeit the human tone, in its endless variety and lively alternation of expressional power; the organ-pipes could only retain this tone in respect of its Time-duration, but no longer of its changeable Expression; till at last the clavichord merely hinted at this tone itself, and left its actual body to be thought-out by the ear's imagination. Thus in the clavichord we have an instrument which does nothing more than delineate music.

But how came it, that the musician finally contented himself with a toneless instrument? From no other ground than a desire to make music for himself alone, without any mutual aid from others. The human voice, which intrinsically requires the use of Speech, to pronounce itself melodically, is an individual; only the concurrence of several such [123] individuals, can produce symphonic harmony. The wind and stringed instruments stood near the human voice in this degree, that they alike retained that individual character, whereby each of them possessed a definite, however richly modulable a colour, and for the production of harmonic effects they were likewise forced to work together. In the Christian Organ all these living individualities were already ranged into a register of dead pipes, which raised their mechanical voices to the glory of God at the masterful key-tread of the one and indivisible performer. On the clavichord at last the virtuoso, without so much as the help of another (the organ-player had still required a bellows-blower), could set a multitude of hammers a-clattering to his private glory; for the hearer, deprived of all delight from music's tone, was only left the entertainment (029) of bewondering the keyboard-hitter's skill.—Assuredly, our whole Modern Art is like the clavichord: in it each unit does the work of a community, but alas! in bare abstracto and with an utter dearth of tone. Hammers—but no Men!—

From the standpoint of the clavichord (030) let us follow back the Literary-drama, whose doors our æsthetes bar with such puritanic pride against the noble breath of Music; let us follow it back to the origin of this clavichord—and what do we find? We find at last the living tone of human speech, which is one and the same with the singing tone, and with out which we should have known neither clavichord nor Literary-drama.

[124]

I.

(031)

THE MODERN DRAMA has a twofold origin: the one a natural, and peculiar to our historic evolution, namely the Romance,—the other an alien, and grafted on our evolution by reflection, namely the Greek Drama as looked at through the misunderstood rules of Aristotle.

The real kernel of all our poesy may be found in the Romance. In their endeavour to make this kernel as tasty as possible, our poets have repeatedly had recourse to a closer or more distant imitation of the Greek Drama.—

The topmost flower of that Drama which sprang directly from Romance, we have in the plays of Shakespeare; in the farthest removal from this Drama, we find its diametrical opposite in the "Tragédie" of Racine. Between these two extremes our whole remaining dramatic literature sways undecided to and fro. In order to apprehend the exact character of this wavering, we must look a little closer into the natural origin of our Drama.

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Searching the history of the world, since the decay of Grecian art, for an artistic period of which we may justly feel proud, we find that period in the so-called "Renaissance," a name we give to the termination of the Middle Ages and the commencement of a new era. Here the inner man is struggling, with a veritable giant's force, to utter himself. The whole ferment of that wondrous mixture, of Germanic individual Hero-dom with the spirit of Roman-Catholicising [125] Christendom, is thrusting from within outwards, as though in the externalising of its essence to rid itself of indissoluble inner scruples. Everywhere this thrust evinced itself as a passion for delineation of surface (Schilderung), and nothing more; for no man can give himself implicitly and wholly, unless he be at one within. But this the artist of the Renaissance was not; he only seized the outer surface, to flee from his inner discord. Though this bent proclaimed itself most palpably in the direction of the plastic arts, yet it is no less visible in poetry. Only, we must bear in mind that, whereas Painting had addressed itself to a faithful delineation of the living man, Poetry was already turning from this mere delineation to his representment (Darstellung), and that by stepping forward from Romance to Drama.

The poetry of the Middle Ages had already brought forth the Narrative poem and developed it to its highest pitch. This poem described men's doings and undergoings, and their sum of moving incident, in much the same way as the painter bestirred himself to present the characteristic moments of such actions. But the field of the poet who waived all living, direct portrayal of his Action by real men, was as unbounded as his reader's or hearer's force of imagination, to which alone he appealed. In this field he felt the more tempted into extravagant combinations of incidents and localities, as his vision embraced an ever wider horizon of outward actions going on around him, of actions born from the very spirit of that adventurous age. Man, at variance with himself, and seeking in art-production a refuge from his inward strife—just as he had earlier sought in vain to heal this strife itself by means of art (032) —felt no urgence to speak out a definite something of his inner being, but rather to go a-hunting for this Something in the world outside. In a sense he dissipated his inner thoughts, by an altogether wayward dealing with everything brought him from the outer world; and the more motley he could make his mixture of these diverse shows, the surer might he hope [126] to reach his instinctive goal, of inward dissipation. The master of this charming art, but reft of any inwardness, of any hold on soul,—was Ariosto.

But the less these shimmering pictures of Phantasy were able, after many a monstrous divagation, to distract in turn the inner man; and the more this man, beneath the weight of political and religious deeds of violence, found himself driven by his inner nature to an energetic counter-thrust: so much the plainer, in the class of poetry now under notice, do we see his struggle to become master of the multifarious stuff from within outwards, to give his fashionings a firm-set centre, and to take this centre, this axis of his art-work, from his own beholdings, (033) from his firm-set will-ing of Something in which his inner being may speak out. This Something is the matrix of the newer age, the condensing (034) of the individual essence to a definite artistic Will. From the vast mass of outward matters, which theretofore could never shew themselves diversified enough to please the poet, the component parts are sorted into groups akin; the multiple points of action are condensed into a definite character-drawing of the transactors. Of what unspeakable weight it is, for any inquiry into the nature of Art, that this inner urgence of the Poet, such as we may see before our very eyes, could at last content itself with nothing but reaching the plainest utterance through direct portrayal to the senses: in one word, that the romance became a drama! This mastery of the outward stuff, so as to shew the inner view of the essence of that stuff, could only be brought to a successful issue by setting the subject itself before the senses in all [127] the persuasiveness of actuality; and this was to be achieved in Drama and nothing else.

With fullest necessity did Shakespeare's Drama spring from Life and our historic evolution: his creation was just as much conditioned by the nature of our poetic art as the Drama of the Future, in strict keeping with its nature, will be born from the satisfaction of a need which Shakespearian Drama has aroused but not yet stilled.

Shakespeare—of whom we here must always think as in company with his forerunners, and only as their chief—condensed the narrative Romance into the Drama, inasmuch as he translated it, so to say, for performance on the stage. Human actions, erewhile merely figured by the narrative talk of poesy, he now gave to actual talking men to bring before both eye and ear,—to men who, so long as the performance hasted, identified themselves in look and bearing with the to-be-represented persons of the romance. For this he found a stage and actors, who till then had hidden from the Poet's eye,—like a subterranean stream of genuine Folk's-artwork, flowing secretly, yet flowing ever,—but, now that Want compelled him to their finding, were discovered swiftly by his yearning gaze. The characteristic of this Folk-stage, however, lay in that the mummers (035) addressed themselves to the eye, and intentionally, almost solely to the eye; whence their distinctive name. Their performances, being given in open places before a wide-stretched throng, could produce effect by almost nothing but gesture; and by gesture only actions can be rendered plainly, but not—if speech is lacking—the inner motives of such actions: so that the Play of these performers, by its very nature, bristled with just as grotesque and wholesale [128] odds and ends of Action, as the romance whose scrappy plethora of Stuff (zerstreute Vielstoffigkeit) the poet was labouring to compress. The poet, who looked towards this Folk's-play, could not but see that for want of an intelligible speech it was driven into a monstrous plethora of action; precisely as the narrative Romancist was driven thither, by his inability to actually display his talked-of persons and their haps. He needs must cry to these mummers: "Give me your stage; I give you my speech; and so we both are suited!"

In favour of Drama, we see the poet narrowing-down the Folk-stage to the Theatre. Exactly as the Action itself, through a clear exposition of the motives that called it forth, must be compressed into its weightiest definite moments: so did the necessity become evident, to compress the show-place also; and chiefly out of regard for the spectators, who now were not merely to see, but alike to plainly hear. Together with its effect upon the space, this curtailment had also to extend to the time-duration, of the dramatic play. The Mystery-stage of the Middle Ages, set up in spreading fields, in streets or open places of the towns, offered the assembled populace an entertainment lasting all day long, nay—as we even still may see—for several days on end: whole histories, the complete adventures of a lifetime, were represented; from these the constant ebb and flow of lookers-on might choose, according to their fancy, what most they cared to see. Such a performance formed a fitting pendant to the monstrously discursive Histories (Historien) of the Middle Ages themselves: just as mask-like in their dearth of character, in their lack of any individual stir of life, just as wooden and rough-hewn were the much-doing persons of these Histories be-read, as were the players of those beheld. For the same reasons that moved the poet to narrow down the Action and the Showplace, he had therefore to curtail the Time-length of performance also, since he wanted to bring to his spectators, no longer fragments, but a self-included whole; so that he took his spectator's power of giving continuous and [129] undivided attention to a fascinating subject, when set before him, as the measure for the length of that performance. An artwork which merely appeals to Phantasy, like the be-read romance, may lightly break the current of its message; since Phantasy is of so wayward a nature, that it hearkens to no other laws than those of whimsy chance. But that which steps before the senses, and would address them with persuasive, unmistakable distinctness, has not only to trim itself according to the quality, faculty and naturally bounded vigour of those senses, but to shew itself complete from top to toe, from beginning to end: if it would not, through sudden break or incompleteness of its exposition, appeal once more for needful supplementing to the Phantasy, to the very factor it had quitted for the senses.

Upon this narrowed stage one thing alone remained still left entirely to Phantasy,—the demonstration of the scene itself, wherein to frame the performers conformably with the local requirements of the action. Carpets hung the stage around; an easily shifted writing on a notice-board informed the spectator what place, whether palace or street, forest or field, was to be thought of as the scene. Through this one compulsory appeal to Phantasy, unavoidable by the stage-craft of those days, a door in the drama remained open to the motley-stuffed Romance and the much-doing History. As the poet, hitherto busied only with a speaking, bodily representation of the Romance, did not yet feel the necessity of a naturalistic representment of the surrounding Scene as well, neither could he experience the necessity of compressing the Action, to be represented, into a still more definite circumscription of its leading moments. We here see plain as day how it is Necessity alone that drives the artist toward a perfect shaping of the artwork; the artistic necessity that determines him to turn from Phantasy to Sense, to assist the indefinite force of fancy to a sure, intelligent operation through the senses. This necessity which shapes all Art, which alone can satisfy the artist's strivings, comes to us [130] solely from the definiteness of a universally sentient intuition (universell sinnlichen Anschauung): if we render complete justice to all its claims, then it drives us withal to the completest art-creation. Shakespeare, who did not yet experience this one necessity, of a naturalistic representment of the scenic surroundings, and therefore only so far sifted and compressed the redundance of his Dramatised Romance as he was bidden-to by the necessity he did experience,—to wit of narrowing the show-place, and curtailing the time-length, of an Action represented by men of flesh and blood,—Shakespeare, who within these limits quickened History and Romance into so persuasive, so characteristic a truth, that he shewed us human beings with individualities so manifold and drastic as never a poet before,—this Shakespeare nevertheless, through his dramas being not yet shaped by that single aforesaid necessity, has been the cause and starting-point of an unparalleled confusion in dramatic art for over two centuries, and down to the present day.

In the Shakespearian Drama the Romance and the loose-joined History had been left a door, as I have expressed it, by which they might go in and out at pleasure: this open door was the relinquishing to Phantasy the representment of the Scene. We shall see that the consequent confusion increased in exact degree as that door was relentlessly (036) shut from the other side, and as the felt deficiency of Scene, in turn, drove people into arbitrary deeds of violence against the living Drama.

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Amongst the so-called Romanic nations of Europe, with whom the adventure-hunting of the Romance—which tumbled every Germanic and Romanic element into one mass of wild confusion—had raged the maddest, this Romance had also become the most ill-suited for dramatising. [131] The stress to seize the motley utterances of earlier fantastic whim, and shape them by the strenuous inwardness of human nature into plain and definite show, was only exhibited in any marked degree by the Germanic nations, who made into their deed of Protestance the inward war of conscience against tormenting outward prescripts. The Romanic nations, who outwardly remained beneath the Catholic yoke, clove steadfastly to the line along which they had fled before the irreconcilable inward strife, in order to distract from without—as I have above expressed myself—their inward thoughts. Plastic art, and an art-of-poetry which—as descriptive—was kindred to the plastic, if not in utterance, yet in essence: these are the arts, externally distracting, diverting, and engaging, peculiar to these nations.

The educated Frenchman and Italian turned his back upon his native Folk's-play (037); in its raw simplicity and formlessness it recalled to him the whole chaos of the Middle Ages. which he had just been labouring to shake off him, like some heavy, troublous dream. No, he harked back to the historic feeders or his language, and chiefly from Roman (038) poets, the literary copiers of the Greeks, he chose his pattern for that drama which he set before the well-bred world of Gentlemen, in lieu of the Folk's-play that now could entertain alone the rabble. Painting and architecture, the principal arts of the Romanic Renaissance, [132] had made the eye of this web-bred world so full of taste, so exacting in its demands, that the rough carpet-hung platform of the British Shakespeare could not content it. For a show-place, the players in the Princes' palaces were given the sumptuous ball, in which, with a few minor modifications, they had to erect their Scene. Stability of Scene was set fast as the criterion for the whole drama; and in this the accepted line of taste of the well-bred world concurred with the modern origin of the drama placed before it, with the rules of Aristotle. The princely spectator, whose eye had been trained by Plastic-art into his best-bred organ of positive sensuous pleasure, had no lief that this sense of all others should be bandaged, to submit itself to sightless Phantasy; and that the less, as he shrank on principle from any excitation of the indefinite, medieval-shaping Phantasy. At the drama's each demand for Change of Scene, he must have been given the opportunity of seeing that scene displayed with strict fidelity to form and colour of its subject, to allow a change at all. But what was made possible in the later mixing of the two dramatic genres, it was by no means needful to ask for here, since from the other side the rules of Aristotle, by which alone this fictive drama was constructed, made Unity of Scene its weightiest condition. So that the very thing the Briton, with his organic creation of the drama from within, had left disregarded as an outer moment, became an outward-shaping 'norm' for the French drama; which thus sought to construct itself from without inwards, from Mechanism into Life.

Now, it is important to observe closely, how this outward Unity of Scene determined the whole attitude of the French drama, almost entirely excluding from this scene any representment of the action, and replacing it by the mere delivery of speeches (Rede). Thus the root poetic element of medieval and more recent life, the action-packed Romance, must also be shut out on principle from any representment on this Scene, since the introduction of its [133] multifarious stuff would have been rightdown impossible without a constant shifting. So that not only the outward form, but the whole cut of the plot, and finally its subject too, must be taken from those models which had guided the French playwright in planning out his form. He was forced to choose plots which did not need to be first condensed into a compact measure of dramatic representability, but such as lay before him already thus condensed.

From their native Sagas the Greek tragedians had condensed such stuffs, as the highest artistic outcome of those Sagas: the modern dramatist, starting with outward rules abstracted from these poems, and faced with the poetic element of his own era's (039) life, which was only to be mastered in an exactly opposite fashion, namely that of Shakespeare, could never compress it to such a density as should answer to the standard outwardly imposed; therefore nothing remained for him but a—naturally disfiguring—imitation and repetition of those already finished dramas. Thus in Racine's Tragédie we have Talk upon the scene, and behind the scene the Action; grounds of movement, with the movement cut adrift and turned outside; will-ing without can-ning. All art was therefore focused on the mere outside of Talk, and quite logically in Italy—whence the new art-genre had started—this soon lost itself in that musical delivery which we have already learnt to recognise as the specific content of opera-ware (des Opernwesens). The French Tragédie, also, of necessity passed over (040) into Opera: Gluck spoke aloud the actual content of this tragedy-ware. Opera was thus the premature bloom on an unripe fruit, grown from an unnatural, artificial soil. With what the Italian and French Drama began, to wit the outer form, to that must the newer Drama first attain by organic evolution from within, upon the path of Shakespeare's [134] Drama; then first will ripen, also, the natural fruit of Musical Drama. (041)

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Between these two extremes, however, between the Shakespearian and the Racinian Drama, did Modern Drama grow into its unnatural, mongrel shape; and Germany was the soil on which this fruit was reared.

Here Roman Catholicism continued side by side, in equal strength, with German Protestantism: only, each was so hotly engaged in combat with the other, that, undecided as the battle stayed, no natural art-flower came to light. The inward stress, which with the Briton threw itself into dramatic representment of History and Romance, remained with the German Protestant an obstinate endeavour to inwardly appease that inward strife itself. We have indeed a Luther, whose art soared up to the Religious Lyric; but we have no Shakespeare. On the other hand, the Roman-catholic South could never swing itself into that genial, light-minded oblivion of the inward conflict, wherewith the Romanic nations took up Plastic art: with gloomy earnestness it guarded its religious dream (Wahn). While the whole of Europe threw itself on Art, still Germany abode a meditant barbarian. Only what had already outlived itself outside, took flight to Germany, upon its soil to blossom through an after-summer. English comedians, (042) whom the performers of Shakespearian dramas had robbed of their bread at home, came over to Germany to play their grotesquely pantomimic antics before the Folk: not till long after, when it had likewise faded out of England, followed Shakespeare's Drama itself; German [135] players, fleeing from the ferule (043) of their wearisome dramatic tutors, laid hands on it and trimmed it for their use.

From the South, again, the Opera had forced its way in,—that outcome of Romanic drama. Its distinguished origin, in the palaces of Princes, commended it to German princes in their turn; so that these princes introduced the Opera into Germany, whereas—mark well!—the Shakespearian Play was brought in by the Folk.—In Opera the scenic penury of Shakespeare's stage was contrasted by its utmost opposite, the richest and most far-fetched mounting of the Scene. The Musical drama became in truth a peep-show (Schauspiel), whereas the Play (Schauspiel) remained a hear-play (Hörspiel). We need not here go far for reasons for the scenic and decorative extravagance of the opera-genre: this loose-limbed drama was constructed from without; and only from without, by luxury and pomp, could it be kept alive at all. One thing, however, it is important to observe: namely, that this scenic ostentation, with its unheard-of complexity and far-fetched change of exhibition to the Eye, proceeded from the same dramatic tendency which had originally set up unity-of-scene as its 'norm.' Not the Poet, who, when compressing the Romance into the Drama, had left its plethora of stuff thus far unhedged, as in that stuff's behoof he could change the scene as often and as swiftly as he chose, by mere appeal to phantasy,—not the Poet, from any wish to turn from that appeal-to-phantasy to a positive confirmation by the senses,—not he invented this elaborate mechanism for shifting actually presented scenes: but a longing for outward entertainment and constant change thereof, a sheer lust of the Eye, had called it forth. Had the poet devised this apparatus, we should have had to further suppose that he felt the necessity of a frequent change of Scene as a need, inherent in the drama's plethora of Stuff itself; and since the poet, as we have seen, was constructing organically from within outwards, this supposition would have as good as proved that the historic and romantic plethora-of-stuff [136] was a necessary postulate of the Drama: for only the unbending necessity of such a postulate could have driven him to invent a scenic apparatus whereby to enable that plethora of Stuff (Vielstoffigkeit) to also utter itself as a panoramic plethora of Scene (Vielscenigkeit). But the very reverse was the case. Shakespeare felt a necessity impelling him to represent History (044) and Romance dramatically; in the freshness of his ardour to content this impulse, there came to him no feeling of the necessity for a naturalistic (naturgetreuen) representment of the Scene as well;—had he experienced this further necessity, toward a completely convincing representment of the dramatic action, he would have sought to answer it by a still more careful sifting, a still more strenuous compression of the Romance's plethora of Stuff: and that in exactly the same way as he had contracted the show-place, abridged the time-length of performance, and for their sakes had already curtailed this plethora of Stuff itself. The impossibility of still further condensing the Romance—an insight which he certainly would have arrived at—must then have enlightened him as to the true nature of this Romance: namely, that its nature does not really correspond with that of Drama; a discovery which we could never make, till the undramatic plethora of History's Stuff was brought to our feeling by the actualisation of the Scene, whereas the circumstance that this Scene need only be suggested had alone made possible to Shakespeare the dramatised Romance.—

Now, the necessity of a representment of the Scene, in keeping with the place of action, could not for long remain unfelt; the medieval stage was bound to vanish, and make room for the modern. In Germany this was governed by the character of the Folk's mimetic art, which likewise, since the dying-out of Mystery and Passion plays, took its dramatic basis from the History and the Romance. At the time when German mimic art first took an upward swing—about the middle of the past century—this basis [137] was formed by the Burgher-romance, (045) in its keeping with the then Folk-spirit. It was by far more manageable, and especially less cumbered with material, than the Historic or Legendary (sagenhafte) romance that lay to Shakespeare's hand: a suitable representment of its local scenes could therefore be effected with far less outlay than would have been required for Shakespeare's dramatisations. The Shakespearian pieces taken up by these players had to submit to the most hampering adaptation on every side, in order to become performable by them at all. I here pass over every other ground and measure of this adaptation, and lay my finger on that of the purely scenic requirements, since it is the weightiest for the object of my present inquiry. (046) These players, the first importers of Shakespeare to the German stage, were so honest to the spirit of their art, that it never occurred to them to make his pieces representable by either accompanying his constant change of scene with a kaleidoscopic shifting of their own theatric scenery, or even for his sake renouncing any actual exhibition whatsoever of the scene, and returning to the sceneless medieval stage. No, they maintained the standpoint of their art, once taken up, and to it subordinated Shakespeare's plethora-of-scene; inasmuch as they downright left out those scenes which seemed to them of little weight, while the weightier ones they tacked together.

It was from the standpoint of Literature, that people first perceived what Shakespeare's art-work had lost hereby, and urged a restoration of the original form of these pieces for their performance too. For this, two opposite plans were broached. The first proposal, and the one not carried out, is Tieck's. Fully recognising the essence of Shakespearian Drama, Tieck demanded the restoration of [138] Shakespeare's stage, with its Scene referred to an appeal to Phantasy. This demand was thoroughly logical, and aimed at the very spirit of Shakespearian Drama. But, though a half attempt at restoration has time out of mind remained unfruitful, on the other hand a radical one has always proved impossible. Tieck was a radical restorer, to be honoured as such, but bare of influence.—The second proposal was directed to employing the gigantic apparatus of Operatic scenery for the representation of Shakespearian Drama too, by a faithful exhibition of the constant change of scene that had originally been only hinted at by him. Upon the newer English stage, people translated Shakespeare's Scene into the most realistic actuality (047); wonders of mechanism were invented, for the rapid change of the most elaborate stage-mountings: marches of troops and mimic battles were presented with astonishing exactitude. In the larger German theatres this course was copied.

In face of this spectacle, the modern Poet stood brooding and bewildered. As literature, Shakespearian Drama had given him the exalting impression of the most perfect poetic unity; so long as it had only addressed his phantasy, that phantasy had been competent to form therefrom a harmoniously rounded image: but now, with the fulfilment of his necessarily wakened longing to see this image embodied in a thorough representment to the senses, he saw it vanish suddenly before his very eyes. The embodiment of his fancy-picture had merely shewn him an unsurveyable mass of realisms and actualisms, out of which his puzzled eye absolutely could not reconstruct it. This phenomenon produced two main effects upon him, both of which resulted in a disillusionment as to Shakespeare's Tragedy. (048) Henceforth the Poet either renounced all wish to see his dramas acted on the stage, so as to be at peace again to model according to his [139] intellectual aim the fancy-picture he had borrowed from Shakespearian Drama,—i.e. he wrote literary-dramas for dumb reading;—or else, so as to practically realise his fancy-picture on the stage, he instinctively turned more or less towards the reflective type of drama, whose modern origin we have traced to the pseudo-antique (antikisirenden) drama, constructed according to Aristotle's rules of Unity.

Both these effects and tendencies are the guiding motives in the works of the two most important dramatic poets of modern times—Goethe and Schiller. With them I must therefore deal a little closer, so far at least as concerns the object of my present inquiry.

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Goethe began his career, as dramatic poet, by dramatising a full-blooded Germanic Feudal-romance (Ritterroman), "Götz von Berlichingen." The method of Shakespeare was quite faithfully followed here: the romance (049) with all its circumstantial details was in so far translated for the stage, as the narrowing of that stage and the abridgment of the time-length of performance would allow. But Goethe was already faced with a stage on which the Action's locale, however scantily and roughly, was yet exhibited with a definite intention to meet that Action's claims. This circumstance led the poet to revise for actual stage-performance a poem written rather from a literary, than a theatric standpoint. In its second shape, given it [140] out of consideration for scenic requirements, the poem has lost the freshness of Romance, without gaining in its stead the perfect strength of Drama.

Goethe next chose the material for his dramas chiefly from the Burgher-romance. The characteristic of this citizen romance consists in this: that its plot is completely cut adrift from any wider group of historic actions and associations, that it holds only to the social precipitate of these historical events for its conditioning medium (bedingende Umgebung), and within this medium—which at bottom is but the reaction of those historic incidents, with all their colour blotted out—evolves itself more according to certain humours (Stimmungen) tyrannously imposed on it thereby, than according to any inner motives strong enough for a completely plastic utterance. This plot is just as cramped and poor, as the humours which gave it birth are bare of freedom and self-dependent inwardness. Its dramatisation, however, answered to both the intellectual view-point of the public and, more especially, the outward possibilities of scenic representment; and that inasmuch as these threadbare plots brought to the practical 'mounting' no necessities which it could not answer out of hand. What a mind like Goethe's composed (dichtete) amid such limitations we must take as coming almost solely from his felt necessity of submitting to certain cramping maxims, if he were to bring about a drama at all, (050) and certainly far less from any voluntary submission to the cramped spirit of the Burgher-romance, or to the humours of the public which favoured its style of plot. But Goethe rescued himself from this limitation, and won the most unfettered freedom, by completely giving up the 'acting-drama.' In planning out his "Faust" he merely retained for the literary poem the advantages of a dramatic mode of statement, but left purposely out of sight the possibility of a scenic representment. In this poem, Goethe was the first to sound with full consciousness the keynote of the poetic element distinctive of the present age, the thrust of Thought [141] toward Actuality, though he could not yet give it artistic redemption in the actuality of Drama. Here stands the watershed (Scheidepunkt) between the medieval romance, sicklied to the shallowness of its burgher type, and the real dramatic matter of the Future. We must defer a closer entry upon the characteristics of this 'watershed': for the present let us hold it weighty, that Goethe, arrived at this watershed, could neither give us a genuine romance nor a genuine drama, but precisely a poem which enjoyed the advantages of both classes in an abstract artistic measure.

From this poem—which sent its plastic impulse threading through the poet's whole artistic life, like a welling vein of living water—let us here look aside, and follow Goethe's art-creation wherever we may find it turned, in fresh attempts, towards the Scenic Drama.

From the dramatised Burgher-romance—which in "Egmont" he had sought to raise to its highest pitch from within outwards, by extending its medium so as to embrace a widely-branching group of historical moments—Goethe had departed for good, with the sketch for his "Faust": if the Drama still had charms for him, as the most perfect branch of poetic art, it was chiefly through a regardal of it in its most perfect artistic form. This Form—which, in keeping with their degree of classical knowledge, had been only cognisable to the French and Italians as an outwardly constraining 'norm'—presented itself to the more enlightened gaze of German searchers as an integral moment-of-utterance of Greek Life: the warmth of that Form had power to enkindle them, when they had felt out for themselves the warmth of this life that lingered in its very monuments. The German poet grasped the fact, that the unitarian (einheitliche) Form of Grecian Tragedy could not be imposed upon the drama from outside, but must be vitalised afresh from within outwards, through a unitarian Content. The Content of modern life, which could utter itself intelligibly in nothing now but the Romance, it was impossible to compress into such plastic [142] unity that with an at all intelligible dramatic treatment it could have spoken through the Form of Grecian Drama, could have justified this Form, could, in fact, have begotten it of necessity. To the poet, here concerned with absolute-artistic Shaping, it was now only open to return—at least outwardly—to the method of the French; in order to justify the use of the Form of Greek Drama, for his artwork, he must also employ the finished Stuff of Grecian Mythos. But when Goethe laid hands on the finished stuff of "Iphigenia in Tauris," he proceeded exactly as did Beethoven in his weightiest symphonic pieces: just as Beethoven made himself master of the finished Absolute Melody, in a measure loosened it, broke it up, and fitted its limbs afresh together by a new organic vitalising, in order to make the organism of Music (051) itself capable of bearing melody,—so did Goethe lay hands on the finished Stuff of "Iphigenia in Tauris," resolved it into its component parts, and fitted these afresh together by an organically-vitalising act of poetic Shaping, in order thus to make the organism of Drama itself capable of begetting the perfect dramatic art-form.

But only with this already finished Stuff, could Goethe succeed in such a procedure: with none borrowed from modern life, or from Romance, might the poet reach a like success. (052) We shall come back to the reason of this phenomenon: let it suffice for now, to establish from a survey of Goethe's art-creation that the poet turned away from this attempt in Drama too, so soon as ever he had a mind for the (053) exhibition of Life itself, and not for absolute Art-creation. This Life, in its complex branchings, its will-less outward shaping by influences from far and near, even Goethe could subdue to an intelligible demonstration alone in Romance. The choicest flower of his modern worldview [143] (Weltanschauung) the poet could only give us in a delineation, in an appeal to Phantasy, and not in a direct dramatic representment,—so that Goethe's most pregnant art-creation must lose itself again in the Romance; the Romance from which, at the beginning of his poetic career, he had turned with a true Shakespearian stress toward Drama.—

Schiller; like Goethe, began with the Dramatised Romance, beneath the influence of Shakespearian Drama. The domestic and political Romance engaged his dramatic shaping-force, till he reached the modern source of this Romance, reached naked history itself, and from that endeavoured to construct the Drama without an intervener. Here it was, that the stubbornness of Historic matter, and its incompetence for presentment in a dramatic form, became manifest.—Shakespeare translated the dry but honest historic Chronicle into the living speech of Drama. This Chronicle outlined with exact fidelity, and step by step, the march of historical events and the deeds of those engaged therein: it went about its task without any criticism or individual views, and thus gave a daguerreotype of historic facts. Shakespeare had only to vivify this daguerreotype into a luminous oil-painting; he necessarily had to unriddle from the group of facts their underlying motives, and to imprint these on the flesh and blood of their transactors. For the rest, the historic scaffolding stayed entirely undisturbed by him: his stage allowed him that, as we have seen.—But in presence of the modern Scene, the poet soon perceived the impossibility of dressing History, for the play, with the chronicler's fidelity of Shakespeare: he grasped the fact, that only to the Romance—all heedless as to brevity or length—had it been possible to deck the Chronicle with lifelike portraits of its characters; and that only Shakespeare's stage, again, had permitted the compression of the Romance into a drama. If Schiller, then, sought in History itself for the stuff for Drama, this was with the wish and effort to submit the historic subject from the first to so directly poetic an [144] adaptation that it might be presented in the dramatic Form, which only in the utmost possible Unity can make itself intelligible. But in this very wish and effort, lies the reason for the nullity of our (054) Historic Drama. History is only history in virtue of its shewing us, with unconditional veracity, the naked doings of human beings: it does not give us men's inner thinkings, but merely lets us infer these thinkings from their doings. If, then, we believe we have rightly fathomed these thinkings, and if we wish to present history as vindicated by them, we can only do it in pure Historiography, or—with the utmost artistic warmth attainable—in the Historical Romance, i.e. in an art-form where we are not constrained by any outward consideration to disfigure the naked facts of history through a wilful sifting or compressing. We can make thoroughly intelligible to ourselves the thoughts which we have unriddled from the actions of historical persons, in no other way than by a faithful portrayal of the identical actions from which we have unriddled those thoughts. If, however, in order to make plain to ourselves the inner motives of action, we in any item alter or disfigure the actions which have thence arisen, for sake of their portrayal: then this necessarily involves a disfigurement of the thoughts as well, and therefore a total falsification of history itself. The poet who, avoiding the chronicler's exactitude, attempted to adapt historic subjects for the dramatic Scene,—and with this object, treated the facts of history according to his own artistic formula,—could bring neither History, nor yet a Drama, into being.

If, in illustration of the above-said, we compare Shakespeare's Historic dramas with Schiller's "Wallenstein," we shall see at a glance how here by the evasion of outward historical fidelity, the history's very Content is set awry as well; whereas there, by maintenance of the chronicler's exactitude, (055) the characteristic Content of the history is [145] brought to light with most persuasive truth. Without a doubt, Schiller was a greater expert than Shakespeare in historical inquiry, and in his purely-historic works (056) he fully makes amend for his handling of History as dramatic poet. But our present business is the statistical proof, that for Shakespeare indeed, upon whose stage appeal was made to Phantasy, might the stuff for Drama be borrowed from history; but not for us, who demand a sense-convincing exhibition of the Scene as well. For it was not possible even to Schiller, to compress the historic stuff, howsoever deliberately prepared by him, into the dramatic unity he had in mind. All which first gives to History its intrinsic life, the Surrounding that stretches far and wide, (057) and yet exerts its conditioning force upon the central point—all this, since he felt its delineation indispensable, he was forced to shift into an entirely independent, self-included adjunct, and to split his drama itself into two dramas: a very different matter to Shakespeare's handling of his serial historic dramas; for there we have whole life-careers of persons, who serve for a historical focus, parcelled off into their weightiest periods, whereas in "Wallenstein" only one such period, proportionally not (058) over-rich in matter, is divided into several sections merely for sake of circumstantially motivating a historical moment which is clouded into positive obscurity. In three plays, upon his stage, Shakespeare would have given the whole Thirty-years War.

This "dramatic poem"—as Schiller himself calls it—was nevertheless the most conscientious attempt to win from History, as such, material for the Drama.

In Drama's further evolution, we see Schiller henceforth dropping more and more his regard for History: on the [146] one hand, to employ it (059) merely as itself a clothing for an intellectual motive peculiar to the poet's own general phase of culture—on the other, to present this motive more and more definitely in a form of drama which, by the nature of the thing and especially since Goethe's many-sided attempts, had become the object of artistic speculation. With this purposed subordination and arbitrary regulation of the Stuff, Schiller fell ever deeper into the inevitable fault of a sheer reflective and rhetorical presentment of his subject; until at last he ruled it merely by the Form, which he took from Greek Tragedy as the most suitable for a purely artistic purpose. In his "Bride of Messina" he even went farther in his imitation of the Greek Form, than Goethe in his "Iphigenia." Goethe only went so far back to this Form, as thereby to fix the plastic unity of an Action: Schiller sought to shape the drama's Stuff itself, from out this Form. In this he approached the method of the French tragic poets; his only essential difference from them being, that he restored this Form more completely than had been possible to their limited knowledge of it, that he sought to vivify its Spirit, of which they knew absolutely nothing, and to stamp that spirit on the Stuff itself. Further, he adopted from the Greek tragedy its "Fate,"—at least so far as was possible to his understanding of it,—and constructed with this Fate a plot which, by its medieval costume, (060) was meant to afford a halfway-house between the Antique and our modern understanding. Never was anything so purposely planned from a purely art-historical standpoint, as this "Bride of Messina": what Goethe shadowed in his marriage of Faust with Helena, was here to be embodied through artistic speculation. But [147] this embodiment would not succeed at all: stuff and form were made alike so turbid, that neither did the sophisticated medieval Romance come to any effect, nor the antique Form to lucid view. Who may not learn a profound lesson, from this fruitless attempt of Schiller's?—In despair, himself he turned his back upon this form; in his last dramatic poem, "William Tell," by taking up again the form of dramatised Romance he sought to save at least his poetic freshness, which had markedly flagged beneath his æsthetic experimentings.

Thus we see the dramatic creativeness of Schiller, also, swaying between History and Romance—the real life element of our era's poetry—on the one side, and the perfect Form of the Grecian drama on the other: with every fibre of his poetic life he clung to the former, while his higher artistic shaping-impulse was driving him towards the latter.

What specially characterises Schiller, is that in him the thrust (Drang) towards the pure, the antique art-form, took the line of a thrust towards the Ideal in general. He was so bitterly distressed at not being able to fill this Form artistically with the contents of our own life-element, that at last he loathed any artistic employment of that element at all. Goethe's practical sense reconciled itself with our life-element, by giving up the perfect art-form and developing farther the only one in which this life can enounce itself intelligibly. Schiller never turned back again to the Romance proper; the Ideal of his higher artistic vision, as revealed to him in the antique art-form he made into the essence of true Art itself. But he only saw this Ideal from the standpoint of our present life's poetic incapacity; and, confounding the things of our life with those of Human Life in general, he could at last but picture Art as a thing divorced from Life, the utmost plenitude of Art as a thing to be dreamt of, but never more than approximately reachable.—

Thus Schiller stayed hovering between heaven and earth; and in this hovering hangs, after him, our whole dramatic [148] poetry. That heaven, however, is really nothing but the antique art-Form, and that earth the practical Romance of modern times. The newest school of dramatic poetry— which, as art, lives only on the attempts of Goethe and Schiller, now turned to literary monuments—has developed the aforesaid hovering between opposite tendencies into a positive reeling. Wherever it has left the field of mere literary dramatics, and engaged in representing Life, it has fallen back upon the dead level of the dramatised Burgher-romance, in order to produce an at all intelligible scenic effect; or if it has wanted to give voice to any higher import of Life, it has seen itself compelled to gradually strip off again its spurious dramatic plumes, and present itself to the dumb reader as a naked six- or nine-volume novel. (061)

To take our whole art-literary doings at one hasty glance, let us range their notable phenomena in the following order.

Our modern life-element can only be displayed, at once intelligibly and artistically, in the Romance. In the endeavour for a more effectual, more direct display of its Stuff, the Romance becomes dramatised. As each new poet recognises afresh the impossibility of this attempt, the Stuff, which distracts by its too-much-doing, is pounded down into first an unveracious, and next a completely purposeless [149] foundation for the modern stage-piece, i.e. the Play; which, in its turn, becomes a mere platform for the modern theatre-Virtuoso. From this play, so soon as he grows aware of his wrecking on the routine of the coulisses, the poet returns to undisturbed presentment of his Stuff in the romance; the perfect dramatic Form, which he had striven for in vain, he gets set before him as something foreign out-and-out, in an actual performance of the genuine Greek drama. Finally, in the literary-Lyric he attacks and ridicules,—laments and bewails the contrariness of our life-affairs; which appears to him, in the matter of Art, a contradiction between stuff and form,—in that of Life, a contradiction between man and nature.

It is noteworthy that the most recent epoch has shewn this irreconcilable contradiction so conspicuously in the daily history of its art, that any continuance in error with regard thereto must seem clean impossible to any man with half an eye. Whereas the Romance in every country (überall),—and especially among the French, (062) —after its last fantastic attempts at painting History, has thrown itself on the nakedest exhibition of the life of the present day; has taken this life by its most vicious social basis (lasterhaftesten sozialen Grundlage); and, with its own completed unloveliness as art-work, has employed its literary artifice (063) as a revolutionary weapon against this [150] life-base;—whereas the Romance, I say, has become an appeal to that revolutionary force of the Folk which shall destroy these life-foundations, — on the other hand a talented poet, who as creative artist had never found the ability to master any sort of Stuff for the actual Drama, induced an absolute monarch to command his Stage-intendant to produce before him with antiquarian fidelity a real Greek tragedy, for which a famous composer had to prepare the needful music. (064) In face of our present-day life, this Sophocleian Drama shewed itself as a clumsy artistic fib (Nothlüge): as a quibble patched up by artistic penury, to cloak the untruthfulness of our whole art-doings; as a prevarication which tried to lie away the true Want of our times, under all manner of artistic pretexts. Yet one plain truth this tragedy could not help unbaring: namely, that we have no Drama, and can have [151] no Drama; that our Literary-drama is every whit as far removed from the genuine Drama, as the pianoforte from the symphonic song of human voices; that in the Modern Drama we can arrive at the production of poetry only by the most elaborate devices of literary mechanism, just as on the pianoforte we only arrive at the production of music through the most complicated devices of technical mechanism,—in either case, however, a soulless poetry, a toneless music.—

With this Drama, at all events, true Music, the loving wife, has nothing at all to do. The coquette can approach this shrivelled man, to lure him into the net of her flirtations; the prude can unite herself with the impotent one, to journey with him into godliness; the wanton lets him pay her, and laughs at him behind his back: but the true, love-yearning woman turns away from him, unmoved!— (065)

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If, now, we want to pry a little closer into what has made this Drama impotent, we must get to the bottom of the Stuff on which it has fed. This Stuff was, as we saw, the Romance. To the essence of the Romance we must therefore turn our more particular attention.

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II.

MAN is in a two-fold way a poet: in his beholding, and in his imparting.

His natural poetic-gift is the faculty of condensing into an inner image the phenomena presented to his senses from outside; his artistic, that of projecting this image outwards.

Just as the eye can only take up farther-lying objects in a proportionally diminished scale, so also the human brain—the inner starting-point of the eye, and that to whose activity, conditioned by the whole internal organism, the eye imparts the shows which it has gathered from without—can only grasp them in the diminished scale of the human individuality. Upon this scale, however, the functioning brain is able to take the phenomena, brought to it in a state of disruption from their native actuality, and shape them into new and comprehensive pictures by its double endeavour, to sift them or to group them; and this function of the brain, we call it Phantasy.

The Phantasy's unconscious effort is directed to becoming familiar with the actual measure of these shows, and this drives it to impart its image to the outer world; so to say—it tries to fit its image on to the reality, in order to compare it therewith. But this imparting to the outer world can only take an artistic, a mediated path; the senses, which instinctively took up the outer shows themselves, demand, for any imparting to them of a fancy- picture, that the man who fain would address them intelligibly should first have exercised and regulated his organ of utterance. Completely intelligible in its externalisation will the fancy-picture never be, until it re-presents to the senses the phenomena in the selfsame measure as that in which the latter had originally presented themselves to them; while by the final correspondence of the effect of [153] his message with his previous longing, does man first become insofar acquainted with the correct measure of the phenomena, as he recognises it for the measure in which they address themselves to men in general. No one can address himself intelligibly to any but those who see things in a like measure with himself: but this measure for his communication is the concentrated image of the things themselves, the image in which they present themselves to man's perception. This measure must therefore rest upon a view in common; for only what is perceptible to this common view allows, in turn, of being artistically imparted thereto: a man whose mode of viewing is not that of his fellow-men, neither can address himself to them artistically.—Only in a finite measure of inner viewing of the essence of things, has the artistic impulse-to-impart, since the memory of man, been able to develop itself to the faculty of explicit portrayal (überzeugendster Darstellung) to the senses : only from the Greek world-view, has the genuine Artwork of Drama been able as yet to blossom forth. But this drama's Stuff was the Mythos; and from its essence alone, can we learn to comprehend the highest Grecian art-work, and its Form that so ensnares us.

In the Mythos the Folk's joint poetic-force seizes things exactly as the bodily eye has power to see them, and no farther ; not as they in themselves really are. The vast multiplicity of surrounding phenomena, whose real association the human being cannot grasp as yet, gives him first of all an impression of unrest: in order to overcome this feeling of unrest he seeks for some connexion of the phenomena among themselves, some connexion which he may conceive as their First Cause. The real connexion, however, is only discoverable by the Understanding, which seizes the phenomena according to their reality; whereas the connexion invented by the man who is only able to seize the phenomena according to their directest impression upon himself, can merely be the work of Phantasy—and the Cause, thus subsumed for them, a mere product of his poetic imaginative-force. God and gods, are the first [154] creations of man's poetic force: in them man represents to himself the essence of natural phenomena as derived from a Cause. Under the notion of this Cause, however, he instinctively apprehends nothing other than his own human essence; on which alone, moreover, this imagined Cause is based. If the 'thrust' of the man who fain would overcome his inner disquietude at the multiplicity of phenomena, if this thrust makes toward representing as plainly as possible to himself their imagined cause,—since he can only regain his peace of mind through the selfsame senses wherethrough his inner being had been disquieted,—then he must also bring his God before him in a shape which not only shall the most definitely answer to his purely human manner of looking at things, but shall also be outwardly the most understandable by him. All understanding comes to us through love alone, and man is urged the most instinctively towards the essence of his own species. Just as the human form is to him the most comprehensible, so also will the essence of natural phenomena—which he does not know as yet in their reality—become comprehensible only through condensation to a human form. Thus in Mythos all the shaping impulse of the Folk makes toward realising to its senses a broadest grouping of the most manifold phenomena, and in the most succinct of shapes. At first a mere image formed by Phantasy, this shape behaves itself the more entirely according to human attributes, the plainer it is to become, notwithstanding that its Content is in truth a suprahuman and supranatural one: to wit, that joint operation of multi-human or omninatural force and faculty which, conceived as merely the concordant action of human and natural forces in general, is certainly both natural and human, but appears superhuman and supernatural by the very fact that it is ascribed to one imagined individual, represented in the shape of Man. (066) By its faculty of thus using its force of imagination [155] to bring before itself every thinkable reality and actuality, in widest reach but plain, succinct and plastic shaping, the Folk therefore becomes in Mythos the creator of Art ; for these shapes must necessarily win artistic form and content, if—which, again, is their individual mark—they have sprung from nothing but man's longing for a seizable portrait of things, and thus from his yearning to recognise in the object portrayed, nay first to know therein, himself and his own-est essence : that god-creative essence. Art, by the very meaning of the term, is nothing but the fulfilment of a longing to know oneself in the likeness of an object of one's love or adoration, to find oneself again in the things of the outer world, thus conquered by their representment. (067) In the object he has represented, the Artist says to himself: " So art thou so feel'st and thinkest thou. And so wouldst thou do if, freed from all the strenuous caprice of outward haps of ]ife, thou mightest do according to thy choice." Thus did the Folk portray in Mythos to itself its God; thus its Hero; and thus, at last, its Man.—

Greek Tragedy is the artistic embodiment of the spirit and contents of Greek Mythos. As in this Mythos the widest-ranging phenom en a were compressed into closer and ever closer shape, so the Drama took this shape and re-presented it in the closest, most compressed of forms. The view-in-common of the essence of things, which in Mythos had condensed itself from a view of Nature to a view of Men and morals, here appeals in its distinctest, most pregnant form to the most universal receptive-force of man ; and thus steps, as Art-work, from Phantasy into reality. As in Drama the shapes that had been in Mythos merely shapes of Thought, were now presented in actual bodily portrayal by living men : so the actually represented Action now compressed itself, in thorough keeping with the mythic essence, into a compact, plastic whole. If a [156] man's idea (Gesinnung) is only bared to us convincingly by his action, and if a man's character consists in the complete harmony between his idea and his action: then this action, and therefore also its underlying idea—entirely in the sense of the Mythos—gains significance, and correspondence with a wide-reaching Content, by its manifesting itself in utmost concentration. An action which consists of many parts, is either over-weighted, redundant, and unintelligible—when all these parts are of equally suggestive, decisive importance ; or it is petty, arbitrary and meaningless—when these parts are nothing but odds and ends of actions. The Content of an action is the idea that lies at the bottom of it : if this idea is a great one, wide of reach, and drawing upon man's whole nature in any one particular line, then it also ordains an action which shall be decisive, one and indivisible ; for only in such an action does a great idea reveal itself to us.

Now, by its nature, the Content of Greek Mythos was of this wide-reaching but compact quality; and in their Tragedy it likewise uttered itself, with fullest definition, as this one, necessary, and decisive Action. To allow this Action, in its weightiest significance, to proceed in a manner fully vindicated by the idea of its transactors—this was the task of the Tragic-poet ; to bring to understanding the Necessity of the action, by and in the demonstrated truth of the idea,—in this consisted the solution of that task. The unitarian Form of his artwork, however, lay already mapped out for him in the contours of the Mythos; which he had only to work up into a living edifice, but in no wise to break to pieces and newly fit together in favour of an arbitrarily-conceived artistic building. The Tragic-poet merely imparted the content and essence of the myth in the most conclusive and in telligible manner ; his Tragedy is nothing other than the artistic completion of the Myth itself; while the Myth is the poem of a life-view in common.

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[157]

Let us now try to make plain to ourselves, what is the life-view of the modern world which has found its artistic expression in the Romance.—

So soon as the reflective Understanding looked aside from the image, to inquire into the actuality of the things summed-up in it, the first thing it saw was an ever waxing multitude of units, where the poetic view had seen a whole. Anatomical Science began her work, and followed a diametrically opposite path to that of the Folk's-poem. Where the latter instinctively united, she separated purposely where it fain would represent the grouping, she made for an exactest knowledge of the parts: and thus must every intuition of the Folk be exterminated step by step, be overcome as heresy, be laughed away as childish. The nature-view of the Folk has dissolved into physics and chemistry, its religion into theology and philosophy, its commonwealth into politics and diplomacy, its art into science and æsthetics,—and its Myth into the historic Chronicle.—

Even the new world won from the Myth its fashioning force. From the meeting and mingling of two chief mythic rounds, which could never entirely permeate each other, never lift themselves into a plastic unity, there issued the medieval Romance.

In the Christian Mythos we find that That to which the Greek referred all outer things, what he had therefore made the sure-shaped meeting-place of all his views Nature and the World,—the Human being,—had become the à priori Incomprehensible, become a stranger to itself. The Greek, by a comparison of outward things with Man, had reached the human being from without: returning from his rovings through the breadth of Nature, he found in Man's stattire, in his instinctive ethical notions, both quieting and measure. But this measure was a fancied one, and realised in Art alone. With his attempt to deliberately realise it in the State, the contradiction between that fancy standard, and the reality of actual [158] human self-will, (068) revealed itself: insofar as State and Individual could only seek to uphold themselves by the openest overstepping of that fancy standard. When the natural custom had become an arbitrarily enacted Law, the racial commonweal an arbitrarily constructed political State, then the instinctive life-bent of the human being in turn resisted law and state with all the appearance of egoistic caprice. In the strife between that which man had recognised as good and right, such as Law and State, and that toward which his bent-to-happiness was thrusting him—the freedom of the Individual,—the human being must at last become incomprehensible to himself; and this confusion as to himself, was the starting-point of the Christian mythos. In this latter the individual man, athirst for reconcilement with himself, strode on towards a longed-for, but yet a Faith-vouchsafed redemption into an extra-mundane Being, in whom both Law and State were so far done away with, as they were conceived included in his unfathomable will. Nature, from whom the Greek had reached a plain conception of the Human being, the Christian had to altogether overlook: as he took for her highest pinnacle redemption-needing Man, at discord with himself, she could but seem to him the more discordant and accurst. Science, which dissected Nature into fragments, without ever finding the real bond between those fragments, could only fortify the Christian view of Nature.

The Christian myth, however, won bodily shape in the person of a man who suffered martyr's-death for the withstanding of Law and State; who, in his submission to judgment, vindicated Law and State as outward necessities; but through his voluntary death, withal, annulled [159] them both in favour of an inner Necessity, the liberation of the Individual through redemption into God. The enthralling power of the Christian myth consists in its portrayal of a transfiguration through Death. The broken, death-rapt look of an expiring dear one, who, already past all consciousness, for the last time sends to us the lightning of his glance, exerts on us an impression of the most poignant grief. But this glance is followed with a smile on the wan cheeks and blanching lips; a smile which, sprung in itself from the joyful feeling of triumph over Death's last agony, at onset of the final dissolution, yet makes on us the impression of a forebodal of over-earthly bliss, such as could only be won by extinction of the bodily man. And just as we have seen him in his passing, so does the departed one stay pictured in our memory: it removes from his image all sense of wilfulness or uncertainty in his physical life-utterance; our spiritual eye, the gaze of loving recollection, sees the henceforth but remembered one in the soft glamour of unsuffering, reposeful bliss. Thus the moment of death appears to us as the moment of actual redemption into God; for, through his dying, we think alone of the beloved as parted from all feeling of a Life whose joys we soon forget amid the yearning for imagined greater joys, but whose griefs, above all in our longing after the transfigured one, our minds hold fast as the essence of the sensation of Life itself.

This dying, with the yearning after it, is the sole true content of the Art which issued from the Christian myth; it utters itself as dread and loathing of actual life, as flight before it,—as longing for death. For the Greek, Death counted not merely as a natural, but also as an ethical necessity; yet only as the counterpart of Life, which in itself was the real object of all his viewings, including those of Art. The very actuality (069) and instinctive necessity of Life, determined of themselves the tragic death; which [160] in itself was nothing else but the rounding of a life fulfilled by evolution of the fullest individuality, of a life expended on making tell this individuality. To the Christian, however, Death was in itself the object. For him, Life had its only sacredness and warranty as the preparation for Death, in the longing for its laying down. The conscious stripping-off the physical body, achieved with the whole force of Will, the purposed demolition of actual being, was the object of all Christian art; which therefore could only be limned, described, but never represented, and least of all in Drama. (070) The distinctive element of Drama is its artistic realising of the Movement of a sharply outlined content A movement, however, can chain our interest only when it increases; a diminishing movement weakens and dissipates our interest,—excepting where a necessary lull is given expression to in passing. In a Greek drama the movement waxes from the beginning, with constantly accelerated speed, to the mighty storm of the catastrophe; whereas the genuine, unmixed Christian drama must perforce begin with the storm of life, to weaken down its movement to the final swoon of dying-out The Passion-plays of the Middle Ages represented the sufferings of Jesus in the form of a series of living pictures: the chief and most affecting of these pictures shewed Jesus hanging on the cross: hymns and psalms were sung during the performance.—The Legend, that Christian form of the Romance, could alone give charm to a portrayal of the Christian Stuff, because it appealed only to the Phantasy,—as alone was possible with this Stuff,—and not to physical vision. To Music alone, was it reserved to represent this Stuff to the senses also, namely by an outwardly perceptible motion; albeit merely in this wise, that she resolved it altogether into moments of Feeling, into blends of colour without drawing, expiring [161] in the tinted waves of Harmony in like fashion as the dying one dissolves from out the actuality of Life. (071)

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Of the myths which have worked decisively upon the life-views and art-fashionings of the modern era we now come to the other circle, and that opposed to the Christian myths. It is the native Saga of the newer European, but above all the German peoples.

Like that of the Hellenes, the Mythos of these peoples waxed from beholdings of Nature into picturings of Gods and Heroes. In the case of one of these sagas—that of Siegfried—we now may look with tolerable clearness into its primordial germ, which teaches us no little about the essence of myths in general. We here see natural phenomena, such as those of day and night, the rising and the setting sun, condensed by human Phantasy into personal agents revered or feared in virtue of their deeds; at last, from man-created Gods we see them transformed into actual human Heroes, supposed to have one-time really lived, and from whose loins existing stems and races have boasted themselves as sprung. The Mythos so reached into the heart of actual Life, giving shape and measure, revindicating claims and kindling men to deeds, where it not only was nurtured as a religious Faith but proclaimed itself as energised Religion. A boundless wealth of cherished haps and actions filled out the breadth of this religious Mythos, when fashioned into the Hero-saga: yet how manifold soever these sung and fabled actions might give themselves to be, they all arose as variations of one very definite type of events, which, on closer examination, we may trace back to one simple religious notion. In this [162] religious notion, taken from the beholding of Nature, the most varied utterances of the endless-branching Sagas—amid the undisturbed development of a specific Mythos—had each their ever-fruitful source. Let the shapings of the Saga enrich themselves as they might with fresh stores of actual events, among the countless stems and races: yet the poetic shaping of the new material was instinctively brought about in the one and only way that belonged to the poetic intuition for good and all, and this was rooted deeply in the same religious beholding of Nature which once had given birth to the primordial Mythos.

Thus these peoples' poetic shaping-force was a religious one withal, unconsciously common to them and rooted in their oldest intuition of the essence of things. On this root, however, Christianity now laid its hands. The enormous wealth of leaves and branches of the Germanic Folk-tree the Christians' pious passion for conversion could not come at; (072) but it tried to drag up the root wherewith that tree had anchored in the soil of being. Christianity upheaved the religious faith, the ground-view of Nature's essence, and supplanted it by a new belief, a new way of beholding, diametrically opposed to the older. Though it could not completely root out the old belief, at least it robbed it of its virile wealth of artist-force: and that which hitherto had sprung from out this force, the teeming amplitude of Saga, stayed now a bough cut off from stem and stringers, un-nourished by its vital sap and offering but a sorry sustenance to the Folk itself. Whereas the religious intuitions of the Folk had earlier formed a girth which bound into one whole each never so varied shaping of the Saga: since the rending of this girdle there now was nothing left beyond a loose entanglement of motley shapes, flitting holdless and disbanded to and fro, in a fancy henceforth merely bent on recreation but no more in itself creative. [163] The Mythos, grown incapable of procreation, dispersed itself into its individual hedged-off fractions; its unity into a thousandfold plurality; the kernel of its Action into a mass of many actions. These actions, in themselves but the individualisations of a great root-action—as it were the personal variations of the same one action that had been the necessary utterance of the spirit of the Folk—became splintered and disfigured to such a degree, that their separate parts could be pieced together again by arbitrary whim; and this to feed the restless impulse of a Phantasy which, maimed within and reft of power to shape without, could now devour alone the outer matter, but no longer give the inner from itself. The splintering and extinction of the German Epos, as evinced to us by the whirring figures of the "Heldenbuch," shews itself in a monstrous mass of actions, swelling all the larger the more has every genuine Content vanished from them.—

Through the adoption of Christianity the Folk had lost all true understanding of the original, vital relations of this Mythos, and when the life of its single body had been resolved by death into the myriad lives of a swarm of fables, the Christian religious-view was fitted under it, as though for its fresh quickening. By its intrinsic property, this view could do absolutely nothing more, than light up that corpse of Mythos and deck it with a mystic apotheosis. In a sense it justified the death of Myth, inasmuch as it set before itself those clumsy actions, that tangle of cross-purposes—in themselves no longer explicable or vindicable by any intelligible idea still proper to the Folk—in all their whimsical caprice, and, finding it impossible to assign an adequate motive to them, conveyed them to the Christian Death as their redeeming issue. (073) The Christian [164] Ritter-Romance (074) gives a faithful expression to the life of the Middle Ages, by beginning with the myriad leavings of the corpse of the ancient Hero-Mythos, with a swarm of actions whose true idea appears to us unfathomable and capricious, because their motives, resting on a view of life quite alien to the Christian's, had been lost to the poet: to expose the utter lack of rhyme or reason in these actions, and out of their own mouths to vindicate to the instinctive Feeling the necessity of their transactors' downfall,—be it by a sincere adoption of the Christian rules, which inculcated a life of contemplation and inaction, or be it by the uttermost effectuation of the Christian view, the martyr's-death itself,—this was the natural bent and purpose of the spiritual-poem of Chivalry.

The original Stuff of the pagan Mythos, however, had already swelled into the most extravagant complexity of 'actions,' by admixture of the Sagas of every nation—of Sagas cut adrift, like the Germanic, from their vital root. By Christianity every Folk, which adopted that confession, was torn from the soil of its natural mode of viewing, and the poems that had sprung therefrom were turned into playthings for the unchained Phantasy. In the multifarious intercourse of the Crusades, the orient and the occident had interchanged these stuffs, and stretched their manysidedness to a monstrosity. Whereas in earlier days the Folk included nothing but the homelike in its myths: now that its understanding of the homelike had been lost, it sought for recompense in a constant novelty of the outlandish. In its burning hunger, it gulped down everything foreign and unwonted: its voracious phantasy exhausted all the possibilities of human imagination,—to digest them into the wildest medley of adventures.

This bent at last the Christian view could no more guide, albeit itself, at bottom, had been its generator; for this bent was primarily nothing but the stress to flee from an un-understood reality, to gain contentment in a world [165] of fancy. But this fancied world, however great the divagations of Phantasy, still must take its archetype from the actual world and nothing else: the imagination finally could only do over again what it had done in Mythos; it pressed together all the realities of the actual world—all that it could comprehend—into close-packed images, in which it individualised the essence of totalities and thus furbished them into marvels of monstrosity. In truth this newer thrust of Phantasy, just as with the Mythos, made again toward finding the reality; and that, the reality of a vastly extended outer world. Its effectuation, in this sense, did not go long a-begging. The passion for adventures, in which men yearned to realise the pictures of their fancy, condensed itself at last to a passion for undertakings whose goal—after the thousand-times proved fruitlessness of mere adventures—should be the knowledge of the outer world, a tasting of the fruit of actual experiences reaped on a definite path of earnest, keen endeavour. Daring voyages of discovery undertaken with a conscious aim, and profound scientific researches grounded on their results, at last uncloaked to us the world as it really is.—By this knowledge was the Romance of the Middle Ages destroyed, and the delineation of fancied shows was followed by the delineation of their reality.

This reality, however, had stayed untroubled, undisfigured by our errors, in the phenomena of Nature alone, unreachable by our activity. On the reality of Human Life our errors had lain the most distorting hand of violence. To vanquish these as well, to know the life of Man in the Necessity of its individual and social nature; and finally, since that stands within our might, to shape it—this is the trend of humankind since ever it wrested to itself the outward faculty of knowing the phenomena of Nature in their genuine essence; for from this knowledge have we won the measure for the knowledge, also, of the essence of Mankind.

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[166]

The Christian life-view—which had unwittingly engendered this outward thrust of man, but of itself could neither feed nor guide it—had withdrawn into itself before this vision, had shrunk into a stolid Dogma, as though for sanctuary against a thing it could not comprehend. It is here that the intrinsic weakness and contradictoriness of this view bewrayed itself. Actual Life, and the ground of its phenomena, to it had ever been a thing incomprehensible. The strife between the law-made State and the selfwill (075) of the Individual it had been the less able to overcome, as the roots of its own origin and essence lay in that strife alone: were the individual man completely reconciled with the commonwealth—nay, should he find therein the fullest satisfaction of his bent toward happiness, then would all necessity of the Christian view be done away with, and Christianity itself be practically annulled. But as this view had originally sprung from that discord in the human mind, so Christianity, in its bearings toward the world, fed itself on the continuance of that discord, nothing else; and its purposed maintenance must therefore become the life-task of the Church, so soon as ever she grew fully conscious of her life spring.—

The Christian Church had also striven for unity: every vital manifestment was to converge in her, as the centre of all life. She was not, however, life's central, but its terminal point; for the secret of the truest Christian essence was Death. At the other terminus there stood the natural fount of Life itself, of which Death can only become master through its annihilation: but the power which ever led this life towards the Christian-death, was none other than the State itself. The State was the veritable lifespring of the Christian Church; this latter warred against herself, when she strove against the State. What the Church of the Middle Ages disputed, in her despotic but honest zeal for the Faith, was the remnant of old pagan ideas which expressed itself in the individual self-sanction of the worldly rulers. By imposing on these rulers the duty of seeking [167] their authority from divine sanction, through the Church as intermediary, she drove them to consolidate the absolute, four-square State, (076) as though she had felt that such a State was needful to her own existence. Thus the Church was obliged at last to help fortify her own antithesis, the State, so as to render possible her own existence by making it a dualistic one; she became herself a political might, because she felt that she could exist in none but a political world. The Christian life-view,—whose inner consciousness, rightly speaking, did away with the State,—now that it had condensed into a Church, not only became the vindicatrix of the State, but she brought its standing menace to the freedom of the Individual to such a pitch that henceforth man's outward-thrust turned towards his liberation from Church and State alike, as though to find in human life itself a final realising of the nature of things, which he had now beheld in their true essence.

But first the actuality (Wirklichkeit) of Life and its shows themselves, was to be explored in like fashion as the actuality of natural phenomena had been explored by voyages of discovery and scientific research. Men's thrust, directed heretofore to outward things, now turned back to the actuality of Social Life; and that with all the greater zeal as, after flight to the uttermost ends of the earth, they had never been able to rid themselves of these social conditions, but everywhere had stayed subjected to them. What man instinctively had fled from, and yet in truth could never flee away from, must at last be recognised as rooted so deeply in our own heart and our involuntary view of the essence of things human, that a flight from it to outer realms was clean impossible. Returning from the endless breadths of Nature, where we had found the imaginings of our Phantasy refuted by the essence of things, we [168] were necessarily driven to seek in a plain and lucid contemplation of human affairs the selfsame refutation for a visionary, a false opinion thereof; for we felt that we must have fed and formed those affairs themselves in the same way as we had earlier formed our erroneous opinions of the phenomena of Nature. The first and weightiest step toward knowledge consisted, therefore, in grasping the phenomena of Life according to their actuality: and that, at first, without passing any judgment on them, but with the single aim to bring before ourselves their actual facts and grouping as perspicuously and truthfully as possible. As long as seafarers had set before themselves the object of discovery according to preconceived opinions, so long did they always find themselves disillusioned by the reality at last perceived; wherefore the explorer of our life-affairs held himself freer and freer from prejudgment, the surer to reach the bottom of their actual essence. The most unruffled mode of looking at the naked, undisfigured truth henceforth becomes the Poet's plumb-line: to seize and exhibit human beings and their affairs as they are, and not as one had earlier imagined them, is from now the task alike of the Historian and of the Artist who fain would set before himself in miniature the actuality of Life,—and Shakespeare was the unmatched master in this art, which let him find the shape for his Drama.

Yet not in the actual Drama, as we have seen, was this actuality of Life to be portrayed artistically, but only in the describing, delineating Romance; and that for reasons which this Actuality itself alone can teach us.

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Man (077) can only be comprehended in conjunction with [169] men in general, with his Surrounding: man divorced from this, above all the modern man, must appear of all things the most incomprehensible. The restless inner discord of this Man, who between 'will' and 'can' had created for himself a chaos of tormenting notions, driving him to war against himself, to self-laceration and bodiless abandonment to the Christian death,—this discord was not so much to be explained, as Christianity had sought to do, from the nature of the Individual-man himself, as from the confusion wrought on this nature by an unintelligent view of the essence of Society. Those torturing notions, which disturbed this view, must needs be referred back to the reality that lay at bottom of them; and, as this reality, the investigator had to recognise the true condition of Human Society. Yet neither could this condition, in which a thousandfold authority was fed upon a millionfold (078) injustice and man was hedged from man by infranchisable barriers, first imagined and then realised,—neither could this be comprehended out of its mere self; out of historical traditions converted into rights, out of the heart of facts and finally of the spirit of historical events, out of the ideas which had called them forth, must it be unriddled.

Before the gaze of the Investigator, in his search for the human being, these historic facts upheaped themselves to so huge a mass of recorded incidents and actions, that the medieval Romance's plethora-of-Stuff seemed naked penury compared therewith. And yet this mass, whose closer regardal shewed it stretching into ever more intricate ramifyings, was to be pierced to its core by the searcher after the reality of man's affairs, in order to unearth from amidst its crushing waste the one thing that might reward such toil, the genuine undisfigured Man in all his nature's verity. Faced with an expanse of matters-of-fact beyond what his two eyes could grasp, the historical investigator must perforce set bounds to his avidity of research. From a broader conjunction, which he could only have suggested, [170] he must tear off fragments: by them to shew with greater exactitude a closer coherence, without which no historical representment can ever be intelligible. But even within the narrowest bounds, this coherence, through which alone an historic action is understandable, is only to be made possible by the most circumstantial setting forth of a Surrounding; in which, again, we can never take any sort of interest, until it is brought to view by the liveliest description. Through the felt necessity of such description, the Investigator must needs become a Poet again: but his method could only be one opposed outright to that of the dramatic-poet. The dramatic-poet compresses the Surrounding of his personages into proportions easy to take in, in order to allow their Action—which again he compresses, both in utterance and content, into a comprehensive main-action—to issue from the essential 'idea' of the Individual, to allow this individuality to come to a head therein, and by it to display Man's common essence along one of its definite lines.

The Romance-writer (Romandichter), on the other hand, has to explain the action of an historic chief-personage by the outer necessity of the Surrounding: in order to give us the impression of historic truth, he has above all to bring to our understanding the character of this Surrounding, since therein lie grounded all the calls which determine the individual to act thus and not otherwise. In the Historical Romance we try to make comprehensible to ourselves the man whom we positively cannot understand from a purely human standpoint. If we attempt to image to ourselves the action of an historic man as downright and purely human, it cannot but appear to us highly capricious, without rhyme or reason, and in any case unnatural, just because we are unable to vindicate the 'idea' of that action on grounds of purely-human nature. The idea of an historic personage is the idea of an Individual only in so far as he acquires it from a generally-accepted view of the essence of things; this generally-accepted view, however,—not being a purely-human one, nor therefore [171] valid for every place and time,—finds its only explanation in a purely Historic relation, which changes with the lapse of time and is never the same at two epochs. This relation, again, and its mutation we can only clear up to ourselves by following the whole chain of historic events, whose many-membered series has so worked upon a simpler historic-relation that it has taken this particular shape, and that precisely this idea has enounced itself therein as a commonly current view. Wherefore the Individual, in whose action this idea is to express itself, must be degraded to an infinitesimal measure of individual freedom, to make his action and idea at all comprehensible to us :—his idea, to be in any way cleared up, is only to be vindicated through the idea of his Surrounding; while this latter, again, can only make itself plain in a number of actions, which have to encroach the more upon the space of the artistic portrait, as only in its most intricate branching and extension can the Surrounding, also, become understood of us.

Thus the Romance-writer has to occupy himself almost solely with a description of the Surrounding, and to become understandable he must be circumstantial. On what the dramatist presupposes, for an understanding of the Surrounding, the romance-writer has to employ his whole powers of portrayal; the current view, on which the dramatist takes his footing from the first, the romance-writer has to cunningly develop and fix in the course of his portrayaL The Drama, therefore, goes from within outwards, (079) the Romance from without inwards. From a simple, universally intelligible Surrounding, the dramatist rises to an ever richer development of the Individuality; from a complex, toilsomely explained Surrounding, the romancewriter sinks exhausted to a delineation of the [172] Individual, which, poverty-stricken in itself, could be tricked-out with individuality by that Surrounding alone. In the Drama, a sinewy and fully self-developed individuality enriches its surrounding; in the Romance, the surrounding feeds the ravenings of an empty individuality. Thus the Drama lays bare to us the Organism of mankind, inasmuch as it shews the Individuality as the essence of the Species; whereas the Romance shews us the Mechanism of history, according to which the Species becomes the essence of the Individuality. (080) And thus also, the art-procedure in Drama is an organic one, in Romance a mechanical: for the Drama gives us the man, the Romance explains to us the citizen; the one shews us the fulness of Human nature, the other apologises for its penury on plea of the State. The Drama, then, shapes from innermost necessity, the Romance from outermost constraint

Yet the Romance was no arbitrary, but a necessary product of our modern march of evolution: it gave honest artistic expression to life-affairs which were only to be portrayed by it, and not by Drama. The Romance made for representing Actuality (Wirklichkeit); and its endeavour was so sincere, that at last it demolished itself, as art-work, in favour of this Actuality.

Its highest pitch, as an art-form, was reached by the Romance when, from the standpoint of purely artistic necessity, it made its own the Mythos' plan of moulding [173] types. Just as the medieval romance had welded into wondrous shapes the motley shows of foreign peoples, lands and climates: so the newer Historical-romance sought to display the motleyest utterances of the spirit of whole historic periods as issuing from the essence of one particular historic individual. In this procedure, the customary method of looking at history could but countenance the Romance-writer. In order to arrange the excess of historical facts for easy survey by our eye, we are accustomed to regard the -most prominent personalities alone, and in them to consider as embodied the spirit of a period. As such personalities, the wisdom of the chronicler has mostly bequeathed us the Rulers; those, from whose will and ordering the historic undertakings and State-economy were supposed to have issued. The unclear 'idea' and contradictory manner of action of these chiefs, but above all the circumstance that they never really reached their aimed-for goal, allowed us in the first place so far to misunderstand the spirit of history, that we deemed it necessary to explain the caprice (Willkür) in these rulers' actions by higher, inscrutable influences, guiding and foreordering the course and scope of history. Those factors (Faktoren) of history seemed to us will-less tools—or if wilful, yet self-contradictory—in the hands of an extrahuman, heavenly power. The end-results of history we posited as the cause of its movement, or as the goal toward which a higher, conscious spirit had therein striven from the beginning. Led by this view, the expounders or setters-forth of History believed themselves justified in deriving the seemingly arbitrary actions of its ruling personages from 'ideas'in which was mirrored back the imputed consciousness of a governing World-spirit: wherefore they destroyed the unconscious Necessity of these rulers' motives of action, and, so soon as they deemed they had sufficiently accounted for those actions, they displayed them as arbitrary out-and-out.—

Through this procedure alone, whereby historic actions could be disfigured and combined at will, did the Romance [174] succeed in inventing types, and in lifting itself to a certain height of art-work, whereon it might seem qualified anew for dramatisation. Our latter days have presented us with many such an Historical-drama, and the zest of making history in behoof of the dramatic form is nowadays so great, that our skilled historical stage-conjurors fancy the secret of history itself has been revealed for the sole benefit of the play-maker. They believe themselves all the more justified in their procedure, as they have even made it possible to invest History's dramatic installation (081) with the completest Unity of place and time: they have thrust into the inmost recesses of the whole historic mechanism, and have discovered its heart to be the antechamber of the Prince, where Man and the State make their mutual arrangements between breakfast and supper. That this artistic Unity and this History, however, are equal forgeries, and that a falsehood can only have a forged effect,—this has established itself plainly enough in the course of our present-day Historic Drama. But, that true history itself is no stuff for Drama,—this we now know also; since this Historical Drama has made it clear to us, that even the Romance could only reach its appointed height, as art-form, by sinning against the truth of history.

From this height the Romance stepped down again, in order, while giving up its aimed-for purity (082) as art-work, to engage in truthful portraiture of historic life.

The seeming Caprice in the actions of historical chief-personages could only be explained, to the honour of mankind, through discovering the soil from which those actions sprang of instinct and necessity. As one had earlier thought it incumbent to place this Necessity above, soaring over the historic personages and using them as tools of its transcendent wisdom; and as one at last had grown convinced of both the artistic and the scientific barrenness of this view: so thinkers and poets now sought for this [175] explanatory Necessity below, among the foundations of all history. The soil of history is man's social nature: from the individual's need to unite himself with the essence of his species, in order in Society (Gesellschaft) to bring his faculties into highest play, arises the whole movement of history. The historic phenomena are the outward mani festments of an inner movement, whose core is the Social Nature of man. But the prime motor of this nature is the Individual, who only in the satisfaction of his instinctive longing for Love (Liebesverlangen) can appease his bent-to-happiness. Now, to argue from this nature's manifestments to its core,—from the dead body of the completed Fact to go back upon the inner life of man's social bent, from which that fact had issued as a ready, ripe, and dying fruit,—in this was evinced the evolutionary march of modern times.

What the Thinker grasps by its essence, the Poet seeks to shew in its phenomena: the phenomena of human society, which he, too, had recognised as the soil of history, the Poet strove to set before him in a conjunction through which he might be able to explain them. As the most seizable conjunction of social phenomena he took the wonted surroundings of Burgher-life, in order by their description to explain to himself the man who, remote from any participation in the outward facts of history, yet seemed to him to condition them. However, this Burgher society, as I have before expressed myself, (083) was nothing but a precipitate from that history which weighed upon it from above,—at least in its outward form. Without a doubt, since the consolidation of the modern State, the world's new life-stir begins to centre in the burgher class: the living energy of historic phenomena weakens down in direct ratio as the burgher class endeavours to bring its claims to tell upon the State. But precisely through its inner lack of interest in the events of history, through its dull, indifferent looking-on, it bares to us the burden wherewith they weigh it down, and under which it [176] shrugs its shoulders in resigned ill-will. Our Burgher society is in so far no living organism, as its shaping is effected from Above, by the reaction of historic agencies. The physiognomy of Burgher society is the flattened, disfigured physiognomy of history, with all its expression washed out: what the latter expresses through living motion in the breath of Time, the former gives us in the dull expanse of Space. But this physiognomy is the mask of Burgher-society, under which it still hides from the human-seeking eye the Man himself: the artistic delineators of this society could only describe the features of that mask, not those of the veritable human being; the more faithful was their description, the more must the artwork lose in living force of expression.

If, then, this mask was lifted, to peer beneath it into the unvarnished features of human society, it was inevitable that a chaos of unloveliness and formlessness should be the first to greet the eye. Only in the garment of History had the human being—bred by this history, and by it crippled and degraded from his true sound nature,—preserved an aspect at all tolerable to the artist. This garment once removed, we were horrified to see nothing but a shrivelled, loathly shape, which bore no trace of resemblance to the true man, such as our thoughts had pictured in the fulness of his natural essence; no trace beyond the sad and suffering glance of the stricken unto death,—that glance whence Christianity had derived the transports of its inspiration (seine schwärmerische Begeisterung). The yearner for Art turned away from this sight: like Schiller, to dream him dreams of beauty in the realm of Thought; or like Goethe, to shroud the shape itself in a cloak of artistic beauty,—so well as it could be got to hang thereon. His romance of "Wilhelm Meister" was such a cloak, wherewith Goethe tried to make bearable to himself the sight of the reality: it answered to the naked reality of Modern Man for just so far as he was conceived and exhibited as struggling for an artistically beautiful Form.

Up to then the human shape had been veiled, no less for [177] the eye of the historical student than for that of the artist, in the costume of History or the uniform of the State: this costume left free play to fancy, this form (084) to disputations. Poet and Thinker had before them a vast assortment of discretionary shapes, among which they might choose at their artistic pleasure or arbitrary assumption a garment for the human being, whom they still conceived alone in that which was wrapped about him from without. Even Philosophy had allowed this garment to lead her astray, in respect of man's true nature; while the writer of Historical romances was—in a certain sense—a mere costume-drawer. With the baring of the actual shape of modern society, the Romance now took a more practical stand: the poet (085) could no longer extemporise artistic fancies, now that he had the naked truth unveiled before him, the actuality that filled the looker-on with horror, pity, and indignation. His business was only (Er brauchte nur) to display this actuality, without allowing himself to belie it,—he needed only to feel pity, and at once his passion became a vital force. He still could poetise (dichten), when he was bent alone on portraying the fearful immorality of our society: but the deep gloom, into which his own portrayings cast him, drove away all pleasure of poetic contemplation, in which he now could less and less delude himself; it drove him out into the actuality itself, there to strive for human society's now recognised real Need. On its path to practical reality the Romance-poem, too, stripped-off yet more and more its artistic garment: its possible Unity, as art-form, must part itself—to operate through the intelligence—into the practical plurality of everyday occurrences. An artistic bond was no longer possible, where everything was struggling to dissolve, where the strenuous bond of the Historic State was to be torn asunder. The Romance-poem turned to [178] Journalism; its content flew asunder, into political articles; its art became the rhetoric of the Tribune, the breath of its discourse a summons to the people.

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Thus the Poet's art has turned to politics: no one now can poetise, without politising. Yet the politician will never become a poet, precisely until he ceases to be a politician: but in a purely political world (086) to be not a politician, is as good as to say one does not exist at all; whosoever at this instant steals away from politics (wer sich jetzt noch unter der Politik hinwegstielt), he only belies his own being. The Poet cannot come to light again, until we have no more Politics.

Politics, however, are the secret of our history, and of the state of things therefrom arising. Napoleon put this clearly. He told Goethe that: the rôle of Fate in the ancient world is filled, since the empire of the Romans, by Politics. Let us lay to heart this saying of him who smarted in St Helena! In it is briefly summed the whole truth of what we have to comprehend before we can come to an understanding, also, about the Content and the Form of Drama.

[179]

III.

THE Greek Fate is the inner Nature-necessity, from which the Greek—because he did not understand it (087) —sought refuge in the arbitrary political State. Our Fate is the arbitrary political State, which to us shews itself as an outer necessity for the maintenance of Society; and from which we seek refuge in the Nature-necessity, because we have learnt to understand the latter, and have recognised it as the conditionment of our being and all its shapings.

The Nature-necessity utters itself the strongest and the most invincibly in the physical life-bent (Lebenstrieb) of the Individual,—less understandably, however, and more open to arbitrary interpretings, in the ethical views of society by which the instinctive impulse of the State-included Individual is finally influenced or judged. The life-bent of the Individual utters itself forever newly and directly, but the essence of Society is use and wont and its 'view' a mediated one. Wherefore the 'view' of Society, so long as it does not fully comprehend the essence of the Individual and its own genesis therefrom, is a hindering and a shackling one; and it becomes ever more tyrannical, in exact degree as the quickening and innovating essence of the Individual brings its instinctive thrust to battle against habit Recognising this thrust as a disturbance, from the standpoint of his ethical Wont, the Greek misinterpreted it in this wise: that he traced it to a conjuncture in which the individual agent was conceived as possessed by an influence robbing him of his freedom of action, of that freedom in which he would have done the ethically (sittlich) wonted thing. Since the Individual, through his deed committed against ethical Wont, had ruined himself in the eyes of [180] Society (vor der Gesellschaft); but yet, with [later] conscience of his deed, in so far re-entered the pale of Society as he condemned himself by its own conscience (aus ihrem Bewusstsein selbst): so the act of unconscious sinning appeared explicable through nothing but a curse which rested on him without his personal guiltiness. This curse—represented in the Mythos as the divine chastisement for a primordial crime, and as cleaving to one special stock until its downfall—is in truth nothing other than an embodiment of the might of Instinct (Unwillkür) working in the unconscious, Nature-bidden actions of the Individual; whereas Society appears as the conscious, the capricious (Willkürliche), the true thing to be explained and exculpated. Explained and exculpated will it only be, however, when its manner of viewing is likewise recognised as an instinctive one, and its conscience as grounded on an erroneous view of the essence of the Individual. (088)

Through the Myth of Œdipus, significant in so many other respects, let us make clear to ourselves this relation.

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Œdipus had slain a man who affronted and finally drove him into self-defence. In this, public opinion found nothing worthy of condemnation; for such-like cases were of common occurrence, and to be explained on the universally [181] intelligible principle of the necessity of warding off an attack Still less did Œdipus commit a crime, in that, as payment for a benefit conferred upon the land, he took its widowed Queen to wife.

But it transpired that the slaughtered man was not only the husband of this Queen, but also the father—and thus his widowed wife the mother—of Œdipus himself.

To men the reverence of children for their father, their love toward him, and love's eagerness to cherish and protect him in old age, were such instinctive feelings, and upon these feelings was so founded of itself the most essential ground-view (Grundanschauung) of human beings united by that very view into a Society, that a deed which wounded these feelings in their tenderest spot must perforce appear to them both incomprehensible and execrable. These feelings, moreover, were so strong and insurmountable that even the consideration, how that father had first attempted the life of his son, could not overpower them: certainly there was recognised in the death of Laïus a punishment for that earlier crime of his, so that we are unmoved by his destruction; nevertheless, this circumstance was incompetent to quiet us in any way concerning the deed of Œdipus, from which nothing could remove the stain of parricide.

Still more violently was roused the public horror, by the circumstance that Œdipus had wedded his own mother and begotten children of her.—In the life of the Family—the most natural, albeit the most straitened basis of Society—it had been established quite of itself, that betwixt parents and children, as betwixt the children of one pair, there is developed an inclination altogether different from that which proclaims itself in the sudden, violent commotion of sexual love. In the Family the natural ties between begetter and begotten become the ties of Wont; and only from out of Wont, again, is evolved a natural in clination of brothers and sisters toward one another. But the first attraction of sexual love is brought the stripling by an unwonted object, freshly fronting him from Life itself; this attraction is so overpowering, that it draws him [182] from the wonted surroundings of the Family, in which this attraction had never presented itself, and drives him forth to journey with the un-wonted. Thus sexual love is the revolutionary, who breaks down the narrow confines of the Family, to widen it itself into the broader reach of human Society. The intuition of the essence of family-love and its distinction from the love between the sexes is therefore an instinctive one, inspired by the very nature of the thing: it rests upon Experience and Wont, and is therefore a view which takes us with all the strength of an insuperable feeling.

Œdipus, who had espoused his mother and begotten children of her, is an object that fills us with horror and loathing, because he unatonably assaults our wonted relations towards our mother and the views which we have based thereon.

But if these views, now thriven into ethical conceptions (sittlichen Begriffen), were of so great strength only because they had issued instinctively from human nature's feeling, then we ask: Did Œdipus offend against this Human Nature, when he wedded his own mother?—Most certainly not. Else would revolted Nature have proclaimed her wrath, by permitting no children to spring from this union: yet Nature, of all others, shewed herself quite willing; Jocasta and Œdipus, who had met as two unwonted objects, loved each other; and it was only at the instant when it was made known to them from without that they were mother and son, that their love was first disturbed. Œdipus and Jocasta knew not, in what social relation they stood to one another: they had acted unconsciously, according to the natural instinct of the purely human Individual; from their union had sprung an enrichment of human Society, in the persons of two lusty sons and two noble daughters, on whom henceforth,as on their parents, there weighed the irremovable curse of that Society. The hapless pair, whose Conscience (Bewusstsein) stood within the pale of human Society, passed judgment on themselves when they became conscious of their unconscious crime: [183] by their self-annulling, for sake of expiation, they proved the strength of the social loathing of their action,—that loathing which had been their own through Wont, even before the action itself; but in that they had done the deed, despite this social conscience, they testified to the far greater, more resistless might of unconscious individual Human Nature.

How full of meaning it is, then, that precisely this Œdipus had solved the riddle of the Sphinx! In advance he uttered both his vindication and his own condemnal, when he called the kernel of this riddle Man. From the half-bestial body of the Sphinx, there fronted him at first the human Individual in its subjection to Nature: when the half brute-beast had dashed itself from its dreary mountain-stronghold into the shattering abyss below, the shrewd unriddler of its riddle turned back to the haunts of men; to let them fathom, from his own undoing, the whole, the Social Man. When he stabbed the light from eyes which had flamed wrath upon a taunting despot, had streamed with love towards a noble wife,—without power to see that the one was his father, the other his mother,—then he plunged down to the mangled carcass of the Sphinx, whose riddle he now must know was yet unsolved.—It is we who have to solve that riddle, to solve it by vindicating the instinct of the Individual from out Society itself; whose highest, still renewing and re-quickening wealth, that Instinct is.—

But let us next pursue the wider circuit of the Œdipus-saga, and see how Society (089) behaved itself, and whither its moral conscience went astray!—From the strifes of the sons of Œdipus there fell to Creon, brother of Jocasta, the rulership of Thebes. As [184] lord, he decreed that the corpse of Polynices, one of these two sons,—who together with Eteocles, the other, had fallen in mutual combat,—should be given unburied to the winds and vultures, whilst that of Eteocles was interred with all befitting pomp: whoever should act in contravention of the edict, should himself be buried alive. Antigone, the sister of both brothers,—she who had followed her blind father into banishment,—in full consciousness defied the edict, interred the corpse of her outlawed brother, and suffered the appointed punishment.—Here we see the State, which had imperceptibly waxed from out the Society, had fed itself on the latter's habit of view, and had so far become the attorney (Vertreter) of this habit that now it represented abstract Wont alone, whose core is fear and abhorrence of the thing unwonted. Armed with the power of this Wont, the State now turns upon Society itself, to crush it; inasmuch as it wards from it the natural sustenance of its being, in the holiest and most instinctive social feelings. The above-recited mythos shews us plainly how this came about, if we will only regard it a little closer.

What profit had Creon, from the decreeing of such a ruthless edict? And what made him deem it possible, that such an edict should not be abrogated by the general indignation of his people? Eteocles and Polynices, after the downfall of their father, had agreed to divide their inheritance, the rulership of Thebes, in this wise: that they should administer it by turns. Eteocles, who was the first to enjoy their common birthright, refused to make it over to his brother, when Polynices at the appointed time returned from voluntary exile to enjoy his spell of government. Thus Eteocles forswore his oath. Did oath-revering Society mete him punishment therefor? No: it supported him in his designs, designs which rested on a broken oath. Had men already lost all reverence for the sacredness of oaths? No, on the contrary: they cried aloud to the Gods, deploring the forswearal, for they feared [185] it would be avenged. But, despite their evil conscience, the citizens of Thebes acquiesced in the conduct of Eteocles, because the oath's object, the compact sworn between the brothers, at the moment seemed to them far more flagitious than the consequences of an act of perjury, which might haply be circumvented through gifts and sacrifices to the Gods. What pleased them not, was a change of rulers, a constant innovation, because Wont had already become their virtual lawgiver. Moreover, in this taking sides for Eteocles the citizens evinced their practical sense (090) of the nature of Property,—which everyone was only too glad to enjoy alone, without sharing it with another. Each citizen who recognised in Property the guarantee of wonted quiet, was ipso facto an accomplice of the unbrotherly deed of Eteocles, the supreme Proprietor. The might of self-serving Wont thus lent support to Eteocles; whilst against it fought the defrauded Polynices with all the heat of Youth. In him there only dwelt the feeling of an injury meet to be avenged: he assembled a host of like-feeling hero-hearted comrades, advanced upon the citadel of broken oaths, and summoned it to drive from out its walls the birthright-robbing brother. This mode of dealing, albeit prompted by a throughly justifiable wrath, yet appeared to the good citizens of Thebes as but another monstrous crime; for Polynices was unconditionally a very bad patriot, when he besieged his father-city. The friends of Polynices had gathered from every race: a purely human interest made them favour the cause of Polynices; wherefore they represented the Purely-human, Society in its widest and most natural sense, as against a straitened, narrow-hearted, self-seeking society which was imperceptibly shrinking, under their attacks, into the ossified State.—In order to end the lengthy war, the brothers called each other forth to single combat: both fell upon the field.—

[186]

The crafty Creon now surveyed these incidents in their conjunction, and recognised therein the essence of Public Opinion; seeing its kernel to be nothing but Wont, Care, and dislike of Innovation. The ethical view (sittliche Anschauung) of the nature of Society—which had still been so strong in the great-hearted Œdipus that, from loathing at his own unconscious outrage on it, he had annulled himself—lost its power in exact degree as the Purely-human, which inspired it, came into conflict with the strongest social interest, that of absolute Wont, i.e. of joint self-seeking. Wherever this ethical conscience fell into conflict with the practice of society, it severed from the latter and established itself apart, as Religion; whereas practical society shaped itself into the State. Morality (Sittlichkeit), which in Society had heretofore been something warm and living, in Religion remained merely something thought, something wished, but no longer able to be carried out. In the State, on the contrary, folk acted according to the practical judgments of Utility; and, if the moral conscience came by an offence,—why! it was appeased by religious observances quite innocuous to the State. Herewith the great advantage was this, that one gained someone, both in Religion and State, upon whom to shift one's sins: the crimes of the State the Prince (091) must smart for, but the Gods had to answer for offences against religious ethics.—Eteocles was the practical scapegoat of the new-made State: the consequences of his oath-break, the accommodating Gods had had to bring home to him; but the stability of the State—so they hoped, at least, though alas it did not so turn out!—the valiant [187] citizens of Thebes were to enjoy all to themselves. Whoever felt inclined to offer himself anew as such a scapegoat, was therefore to them most welcome: and that was the crafty Creon, who well knew how to make his own arrangements with the Gods; but not the over-heated Polynices, who for the simple breaking of an oath, forsooth, had knocked so rudely at the good city's gates.

But, from the intrinsic cause of the Laïds' tragic fate, Creon further recognised how extremely indulgent the Thebans were toward actual crimes, provided only they did not disturb the peaceful burghers' Wont. The father Laïus had been warned by the Pythia that a son, as yet un-born, would one day murder him. Merely to forestall any public annoyance, the honourable father gave secret orders to slay the newborn child, in some secluded spot. In this he shewed himself most considerate toward the moral sentiment of the Theban burghers, who, had the execution been carried out under their very eyes, would simply have resented the scandal and been obliged to pray an unwonted amount to their Gods, but would by no means have felt the horror needful to impel them practically to hinder the deed and punish the conscious murderer of his son; for their horror would at once have been choked down by the consideration, that through this deed at least the public peace would be preserved, whereas it must have been disturbed by the son—who, in any case, could only turn out a ne'er-do-weel. Creon had remarked that, on discovery of the inhuman deed of Laïus, that deed itself had, strictly speaking, called forth no righteous indignation; nay, that everyone would certainly have been better pleased, had the murder been really consummated, for then everything would have gone smoothly, and there would have been no such atrocious scandal as that which had so terribly upset the burghers for many a weary year. Quiet and Order, even at the cost of the most despicable outrage on human nature and the wonted morality itself,—at the cost of a conscious, deliberate murder of a child [188] by its own father, prompted by the most unfatherly self-regard,—this Quiet and Order were at any rate more worth considering than the most natural of human sentiments, which bids a father sacrifice himself to his children, not them to him.— What, then, had this Society become, whose natural moral-sense had been its very basis? The diametrical opposite of this its own foundation: the representative of immorality and hypocrisy. The poison which had palsied it, however, was—use-and-wont. The passion for use-and-wont, for unconditional quiet, betrayed it into stamping down the fount from which it might have ever kept itself in health and freshness; and this fount was the free, the self-determining Individual. Moreover, in its utmost palsy, Society has only had morality brought back to it, i.e. the truly human morality, by the Individual; by the Individual who, of the instinctive thrust of Nature's-necessity, has lifted up his hand against and morally annulled it. This glorious vindication of genuine Human Nature, also, is further inscribed in plainest letters on the world-historical myth we have before us.

Creon had become ruler: in him the people recognised the legitimate successor to Laïus and Eteocles; and this he confirmed in the eyes of every burgher, when he doomed the corpse of unpatriotic Polynices to the terrible shame of lack of burial, and thus his soul to eternal unrest. This was an edict of the highest political wisdom: by it Creon cemented his rule, inasmuch as he vindicated Eteocles, who by his oath-break had preserved the Quiet of the burghers; and inasmuch as he thus gave plainly to be understood that he, too, was willing to maintain the State in quiet and order by taking on his shoulders the burden of every offence against true human morals. Through his edict he at like time gave the surest, strongest proof of his friendly disposition toward the State: he struck Humanity across the face, and cried—long live the State!—

In this State there was but one sorrowing heart, in [189] which the feeling of Humanity had sought a shelter:—it was the heart of a sweet maiden, from whose soul there sprang into all-puissant beauty the flower of Love. Antigone knew nothing of politics;—she loved—Did she try to play the advocate for Polynices? Sought she for special pleadings, points of circumstance or lawful right, to explain his mode of dealing, to exculpate or justify his deed?—No ;—she loved him.—Was it because he was her brother, that she loved him ?—Was not Eteocles her brother, too,—were not Œdipus and Jocasta her parents? After the horrors that had come to pass, could she think of her family ties without a shudder? From them, the hideously disrupted ties of nearest nature, was she to win the strength for Love ?—No, she loved Polynices because of his misfortune, and because the highest power of Love alone could free him from his curse. What, then, was this love, which was not the love of sex, not love of child to parent, not love of sister for her brother?—It was the topmost flower of all. Amid the ruins of love of sex, of parents, and of brethren,—which Society had disowned and the State annulled,—there sprang, from the ineradicable seed of all these loves, the fullest flower of pure Human-love.

Antigone's love was fully conscious. She knew, what she was doing,—but she also knew that do it she must, that she had no choice but to act according to love's Necessity; she knew, that she had to listen to this unconscious, strenuous necessity of self-annihilation in the cause of sympathy; and in this consciousness of the Unconscious she was alike the perfect Human Being, the embodiment of Love in its highest fill and potence.—Antigone told the godly citizens of Thebes: Ye condemned my father and my mother, because they loved unwittingly; but ye condemned not Laïus, the witting murderer of his son, and ye sheltered Eteocles, his brother's foe: condemn then me, who deal from pure human-love alone,—so is the measure of your outrage brimmed!— —And lo!—the love-curse of Antigone annulled the State!—No hand was stirred to save [190] her, when she was led to death. The State-burghers wept, and prayed the Gods to take away the pain of pity for the wretched girl; they followed her with words of comfort: that so it was and so it must be; that the quiet and order of the State, alack! required Humanity to be made a victim!—But there, where all Love was born, was also born high Love's avenger. A stripling burned with sudden love towards Antigone; to his father he disclosed his plight, and begged that father's love to spare the victim: harshly was he thrust aside. Then the stripling stormed his loved one's grave, that grave which had erst received her living: he found her dead, and with his sword he pierced his loving heart. But this was the son of Creon, the son of the State personified: at sight of the dead body of the son who through Love perforce had cursed his father, the ruler became again a father. The sword of his son's love drove a deadly gash into his heart: wounded deep within, the State fell crashing to the ground, to become in death a Human Being.—

O holy Antigone! on thee I cry! Let wave thy banner, that beneath it we destroy and yet redeem!—

Wondrous! that, when the modern Romance had turned to Politics, and Politics become a bloody field of battle; when the Poet, in anxious yearning for the sight of a perfect art-form, induced a ruler to command the performance of an old Greek tragedy—this tragedy should have been none other than our "Antigone." One sought for the work in which this art-form was shewn the purest; and lo!—it was precisely the work whose content was the purest essence of humanity, the destructrix of the State!—How rejoiced were the learned old children, at this "Antigone" in the Court-theatre of Potsdam! They got strewn upon them from on high the roses which "Faust's" redeeming host of angels scatter down upon the tail-decked "devils thick and thin, with short and straight, and long and [191] crumpled horns": (092) but alas! the roses only roused in them that repulsive itching which they kindled in Mephistopheles,—not Love f—The "Eternal Womanly drew" them not "up," but the eternal old-womanly (das ewig Weibische) brought them wholly down!—

The incomparable thing about the Mythos is, that it is true for all time, and its content, how close soever its compression, is inexhaustible throughout the ages. The only task of the Poet, was to expound it. Even the Greek tragedian did not always stand in full unconstraint, before the myth he had to expound: the myth itself was mostly juster to the essence of the Individuality, than was the expounding poet. The tragedian had completely taken up the spirit of this Mythos into himself, however, in so far as he made the essence of the Individuality the irremovable centre of his artwork, from which the latter fed and refreshed itself on every hand. So undisfigured stood before the poet's soul this all-begetting essence-of-the-individuality, that therefrom a Sophocleian Ajax and Philoctetes could spring forth,—heroes whom no side- glance at the prudent world's opinion could lure from their nature's self-annihilating Necessity and truth, to drift into the shallow waters of Politics, on which the weather-wise Ulysses understood so masterly to ship him to and fro.

To-day we only need to faithfully expound the myth of Œdipus according to its inmost essence, and we in it win an intelligible picture of the whole history of mankind, from the beginnings of Society to the inevitable downfall of the State. The necessity of this downfall was foreboded in the Mythos: it is the part of actual history (der wirklichen Geschichte) to accomplish it.

Since the establishment of the political State, no single [192] step has been taken in history but, let it be directed with never so deliberate aim to that State's consolidation, has led towards its downfall. The State, as abstractum, has been ever on the point of going under, or more correctly, it has never so much as come to actuality; merely States in concreto have found—in perpetual change, as constantly incipient variations of an inexecutable theme—a violent, but yet an ever interrupted and contested footing. The State, as abstractum, is the fixed-idea of well-meaning but mistaken thinkers,—as concretum, the booty for the caprice of forceful or intriguing individuals, who fill the pages of our history with the record of their deeds. With this concrete State—whose substance Louis XIV. correctly designated as himself—we need not further occupy ourselves; its kernel, also, is bared us in the Œdipus-saga: as the seed of all offences we recognise the rulership of Laïus, since for sake of its undiminished possession he became an unnatural father. From this possession grown into an ownership (Eigenthum), which wondrously enough is looked on as the base of all good order, there issue all the crimes of myth and history.—Let us keep our eye upon the abstract State alone. The Thinkers of this State desired to plane down and equalise the imperfections of actual Society, according to a thought-out 'norm': yet that they retained these very imperfections (093) as a given thing, as the only thing to fit the "sinfulness" of human nature, and never went back to the real Man himself,—who from his at first instinctive, but at last erroneous views had called those inequalities into being, exactly as through Experience and the consequent correction of his errors he must also bring about, quite of itself, the perfect Society, i.e. one answering to the real Needs of men,—this was the grand error through which the Political State evolved itself to the unnatural height whence it fain would guide our Human Nature far below; that nature which it did [193] not understand at all, and understood the less, the more it fain would guide it.

The Political State lives solely on the vices of society, whose virtues are derived solely from the human individuality. Faced with the vices of society, which alone it can espy, the State cannot perceive the virtues which society acquires from that individuality. (094) In this situation it [the State] weighs on Society to such a degree, that the latter further turns its vicious side towards the Individuality, and thus must finally dry up its every source of sustenance, were the Necessity of individual instinct not stronger of nature than the arbitrary notions of the politician.—In their "Fate" the Greeks mistook the nature of the Individuality, because it disturbed Society's moral-wont: to battle against this Fate, they armed themselves with the political State. Now, our Fate is the political State, in which the free Individuality perceives its destroying Destiny (Schicksal). But the essence of the political State is caprice, whereas the essence of the free Individuality is necessity. (095) From out this Individuality, which we have recognised as in the right (als das Berechtigte) in its thousand-years' battle with the political State,—from this to organise (096) Society, is the conscious task imposed upon us for the Future. But to organise Society in this sense, means to base it on the free self-determining of the Individual, as its eternally exhaustless source. But, to bring the unconscious part of human nature to consciousness [194] within Society, and in this consciousness to know nothing other than the necessity common to every member of Society, namely of the Individual's own free self-determining,—this is as good as to say, annul the State; for through Society has the State marched on to a denial of the free self-determining of the Individual,—upon the death of that, has it lived.

[195]

IV.

FOR Art, with which alone our present inquiry is concerned, (097) there lies in the annulling of the State (Vernichtung des Staates) the following superlatively weighty 'moment.'

It all the more necessarily became the poet's task to display the battle in which the Individual sought to free himself from the political State or religious Dogma, as political life — remote from which the poet at last could merely lead a life of dreams—was more and more consciously filled by the changing hazards of that battle, as by its genuine Content. If we leave aside the religious State-poet, who even as artist offered up the human being with gruesome satisfaction to his idol, we then have solely before us the poet who, aching with undissembled fellow-feeling for the sufferings of the Individual, and as such an one himself, has turned to face the State, to face the world of Politics, with an exhibition of that Individual's struggle. By the nature of the thing, however, the individuality which the poet led into battle against the State was no purely human one, but an individuality conditioned by the State itself. It was of like genus with the State, included in it, and merely the opposite of that State's extremest apex.

A conscious individuality,—i.e. an individuality which determines us in this one particular case, to act so and not otherwise—we win alone within society, which brings us first the case in which we have to form decisions. The Individual without Society is completely unthinkable by us, as [196] an individuality; for first in intercourse with other individuals, is shewn the thing wherein we differ from them, wherein we are peculiar to ourselves. Now, when Society had grown into the political State, it governed (bedang) this Particularity of the individual by its own essence, just as much as the free Society had done: only, as a State, but far more strongly and categorically. No one can depict an individuality, without the Surrounding which conditions (bedingt) it as such: if this Surrounding was a natural one, giving ample breathing-space to the development of the individuality, and freely, elastically, and instinctively shaping itself anew by contact with that individuality,—then this Surrounding could be truly and strikingly denoted in the simplest of outlines; for only through an exhibition of the Individuality had the Surrounding, itself, to gain its characteristic idiosyncrasy. The State, however, is no such flexible, elastic Surrounding, but a stiff, dogmatic, fettering and domineering might; which lays down for the individual in advance, "So shalt thou think and deal I" The State has assumed the education of the individual's character: it takes possession of him already in the mother's womb, through foreordaining him an unequal share in the means toward social self-dependence; (098) by forcing its morale upon him, it takes away the instinctiveness of his viewing; and it appoints to him, as its own property, the standing he is to take toward his surrounding. The State-citizen has to thank the State for his individuality; but it is strictly nothing more than his predetermined standing toward the State, the standing in which his purely-human individuality is annulled for all his dealings and bounded, at the utmost, to the thoughts he may keep entirely to himself.

The dangerous corner of the human brain, into which the entire individuality had fled for refuge,—the State [197] endeavoured to sweep it out as well, by the aid of religious Dogma; but here the State was doomed to failure, since it could merely bring up hypocrites, i.e. State-burghers who deal otherwise than as they think. Yet it was from thinking, that there first arose the force to withstand the State. The first purely human stir of freedom manifested itself in warding off the bondage of religious dogma; and freedom of thought the State at last was forced to yield. How, then, does this sheer thinking individuality utter itself in its dealings?—So long as the State is to hand, the helpless thing will only be able to deal as a State-burgher, i.e. as an individuality whose way of dealing is not the counterpart of its way of thinking. The State-burgher is impotent to take a single step which is not set down for him in advance, as either a duty or a crime. The character of his duty and his crime is not one proper to his individuality; let him try as he may, to act upon his never so free thinking, yet he cannot step outside the State—to whom even his crime belongs. Only through death, can he cease to be a citizen of the State; thus only where he also ceases to be a human being.

The poet, then, who had to portray the battle of the Individuality against the State, could portray the State alone; but the free Individuality he could merely suggest to Thought. The State was the actual extant thing, in all its pomp of form and colour: whereas the Individuality was but the thing imagined, shapeless, colourless, and non-extant. All the features, contours and colours, which lend the Individuality its set, its definite and knowable artistic shape, the poet had to borrow from a Society politically divided up and compressed into a State; not to take them from the rightful individuality, which gains its own drawing and colour from contact with other individualities. The Individuality, thus merely thought-out but not portrayed could therefore be exhibited to nothing but the thought, and not to the directly-seizing feeling. Our Drama has therefore been an appeal to the Understanding,—not to the Feeling. It thus has taken the place of the Didactic-poem, [198] which exhibits a subject from the life only as far as it suits the conscious aim, of imparting a thought to the Understanding. But, to impart a thought to the Understanding the poet has to proceed just as circumspectly as, on the contrary, he must go to work with the greatest simplicity and straightforwardness when he addresses himself to the directly receptive Feeling. The Feeling seizes nothing but the actual (das Wirkliche), the physically enacted, the perceivable by the senses: to it one can only impart the fulfilled, the rounded-off, the thing that is just wholly what it is, just what at this instant (099) it can be. To the Feeling the at-one-with-itself alone is understandable; whatsoever is at variance with itself, what has not reached an actual and definite manifestment, confounds the Feeling and drives it into thinking,—drives it into an act of combination which does away with it as Feeling.

In order to convince it, the poet who turns towards the Feeling must be already so at one with himself, that he can dispense with any aid from the mechanism of Logic and address himself with full consciousness to the infallible receptive powers (Empfängniss) of the un-conscious, purely human Feeling. With this message of his he has therefore to proceed as straightforwardly and (in view of physical perception) as unconditionally, as the Feeling is addressed by the actual phenomenon itself—such as warmth, the wind, the flower, the animal, the man. But, in order to impart the highest thing impartable, and alike the most convincingly intelligible—the purely human Individuality—the modern dramatic poet, as I have pointed out, has to move along a directly opposite path. From out the enormous mass of its actual surroundings—in the visible measure, form-, and colour-giving State, and in History petrified into a State—he has first with infinite toil to reconstruct this Individuality; in order at last, as we have [199] seen, to do nothing more than exhibit it to the Thought. (100) The thing that our feeling involuntarily seizes in advance, is solely the form and colour of the State. From the earliest impressions of our youth, we see Man only in the shape and character given him by the State; the individuality drilled into him by the State our involuntary feeling takes for his real essence; we cannot seize him otherwise, than by those distinctive qualities which in truth are not his very own, but merely lent him by the State. To-day the Folk cannot conceive the human being otherwise than in the uniform of his 'class,' the uniform in which, from youth up, it sees his body clad; and the "Folk's-playwright," also, can address himself understandably to the Folk only when not for a single instant does he tear it from this State-burgherly illusion—which holds its unconscious Feeling captive to such a degree, that It would be placed in the greatest bewilderment if one attempted to reconstruct before it the actual human being beneath this visible semblance. (101) Wherefore, to exhibit the purely-human [200] individuality, the modern poet has to turn, not to the feeling, but to the understanding; since even to himself it is only a thought-out thing. For this, his method of procedure must be a hugely circumstantial one: all that the modern sentiment takes as the most comprehensible, he has, so to say, to slowly and circumspectly divest of its form and colour, under the very eyes of this sentiment, and, throughout this systematic stripping process, to gradually bring the Feeling round to Thinking; since, after all, the individuality he makes-for is nothing but a thing of thought. Thus the modern poet must turn aside from the feeling, to address the understanding: to him, Feeling is the obstacle; only when he has overcome It with the utmost caution, does he come to his main purpose, the demonstration of a thought to the Understanding.—

The understanding is thus, from first to last, the human faculty which the modern poet wishes to address; and with it he can only parley through the organ of the combining, dispersing, severing and re-piecing Understanding; through abstract and conditioned Word-speech, which merely describes and filters down the impressions and acquirements of the Feeling. Were our State itself a worthy object of Feeling, the poet, to reach his purpose, would have in a certain measure to pass over, in his drama, from tonespeech to word-speech: In Greek Tragedy such was very near the case, but from opposite reasons. (102) This Tragedy's basis was the Lyric, from which it advanced to word-speech in the same way as Society advanced from the natural, ethico-religious ties of Feeling, to the political State. The return from Understanding to Feeling will be the march of the Drama of the Future, in so far as we shall advance from the thought-out Individuality to the genuine one. But, from the very beginning of his work, the modern poet has to exhibit a Surrounding—the State—which is void of any purely-human sentiment, and therefore is un-communicable through the Feeling's highest utterance. So that he can only reach his purpose, at all, [201] through the organ of the 'combining' Understanding, through un-emotional modern speech; and rightly does the playwright of nowadays deem it unfitting, bewildering and disturbing, to employ Music for an object which can at best be intelligibly conveyed as Thought to the Understanding, but never to the Feeling as Emotion.

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But what sort of shaping of the Drama, in the sense aforesaid, would be called forth by the going-under of the State, by the rise of an organically healthy Society? (103)

Looked at reasonably, the Going-under of the State can mean nothing else but the self-realisement of Society's religious conviction (Bewusstsein) of its purely-human essence. By its very nature, this conviction can be no Dogma stamped upon us from without, i.e. it cannot rest on historical traditions, nor be drilled into us by the State. So long as any one of life's actions is demanded of us as an outward Duty, so long is the object of that action no object of Religious Conscience; for when we act from the dictates of religious conscience we act from out ourselves, we so act as we cannot act otherwise. But Religious Conscience means a universal conscience (allgemeinsames Bewusstsein); and conscience cannot be universal, until it knows the Unconscious, the Instinctive, the Purely-human, as the only true and necessary thing, and vindicates it by that knowledge. So long as the Purely-human shall loom before us in any troubledness soever, as it positively cannot [202] but do in the present state of our society, so long must we remain the prey to a million differences of opinion as to how the genuine Man should be. So long as, in error about his true essence, we form notions for ourselves as to how this essence might haply manifest, so long must we also strive for arbitrary Forms in which this imaginary essence is to manifest itself. So long, moreover, shall we have states and religions, till we have but one Religion and no longer any State. But, if this Religion must necessarily be a universal one, so can it be none other than the true and conscience-vindicated nature of Mankind (104) and every man must be capable of feeling this unconsciously, and in stinctively putting it into practice. This common human nature will be felt the strongest by the Individual as his own, his individual nature, such as in him it manifests itself as the trend to life and love: the contentment of this trend, it is, that drives the unit into Society; in which, by very reason that he can satisfy that trend in fellowship alone, he attains quite of himself the religious, i.e. the common con science, which vindicates his nature. In the free self-determining of the Individuality there therefore lies the basis of the social Religion of the Future; which will not have stepped into life, until this Individuality shall have received through Society its utmost furthering and vindication.—

The exhaustless variety of the relations of living individualities to one another, the endless fill of constantly new forms, exactly answering in their changefulness the idiosyncrasy of these vital relations, we are not in a position to so much as conceive; for until now we can only apprehend each human relationship in the shape of a [203] Right conferred by historical tradition, and in its prescription by a statutory 'norm of standing.' (106) But we may guess the measureless wealth of living individual relationships, if we take them as purely-human, ever fully and entirely present; i.e. if we think every extrahuman or non-present thing that in the State, as Property and historic Right, has placed itself between them, has torn asunder their ties of Love, has dis-individualised, Class-uniformed, and State-established them,—if we think this all sent far away.

Yet again, we can picture those relations in their greatest simplicity, if we take the most distinctive chief-'moments' (107) of individual human life,—which must also be the regulator of the life in common,—and sum in them the characteristic distinctions of Society itself: such as youth and age, growth and maturity, ardour and repose, activity and contemplation, instinct and conscience.

The 'moment' of Wont, which we have seen at its naïvest in the maintenance of socio-ethical concepts, but in its hardening into a State-political morale have found completely hostile to all development of the Individuality, and finally have recognised as a demoraliser and disowner of the Purely-human,—this Wont is nevertheless a valid 'moment' of instinctive human nature. If we examine a little closer, we shall find in it but one aspect of Man's manysidedness, which shews-out in the individual according [204] to his time of life. The human being is not the same in maturity as in youth: in youth we yearn for deeds, in age for rest. The disturbance of our quiet is just as grievous to us in old age, as is the hindrance of our activity in youth. Age's claim is vindicated, of itself, by the gradual exhaus tion of the bent toward action, whose profit is experience. Experience is doubtless in itself instructive and delectable, for the experienced man himself; for the non-experienced instructee, however, it can only have a determinant result when either his bent-to-action is weak and easily kept down, or the points of Experience are forced upon him as an inexorable standard for his dealings :—but only by such a constraint, is the natural activity of man in general to be weakened; this weakening therefore, which to a superficial glance seems absolute and grounded in sheer human nature, and by whose cause we seek to justify in turn those laws of ours which admonish to activity,—this weakening is but conditional.—

Just as human society received its first ethical concepts from the Family, so did it acquire therefrom its reverence for age. In the Family, however, this reverence was one called forth, conducted, conditioned and motived, by Love: the father before all loved his son; of love he counselled him; but, also out of love, he gave him scope. In Society this motiving love was lost, in exact degree as the reverence for the person transferred itself to fixed ideas and extra-human things which—unreal in themselves—did not stand toward us in that living reciprocity wherein Love is able to requite our reverence, i.e. to take from it its fear. The father, now become a God, could no more love us; the counsel of our elders, now become a Law, could no longer leave us our free play; the family, become a State, could no more judge us according to the instinctive forbearance of Love, but only according to the chilling edicts of moral compacts. The State—taken at its wisest—thrusts upon us the experiences of History, as the plumb-line for our dealings: yet we can only deal sincerely, when through our instinctive dealings themselves we reach experience; [205] an experience taught us by communications can only be resultful for us, when by our instinctive dealings we make it over again for ourselves. Thus the true, the reasonable love of age toward youth substantiates itself in this: that it does not make its own experiences the measure for youth's dealings, but points it toward a fresh experience, and enriches its own thereby; for the characteristic and convincing thing about an experience is its individual part, the specific, the knowable, which it acquires by being won from the spontaneous dealings of this one specific Individual in this one specific case.

The Going-under of the State means therefore the falling-away of the barrier which the egoistic vanity of Experience, in the form of Prejudice, has erected against the spontaneity of individual dealings. This barrier at present takes the place that naturally (108) belongs to love, and by its essence it is lovelessness: i.e. Experience eaten up with its own conceit; and at last, the violently prosecuted will to reap no more experiences,—the self-seeking narrow-mindedness of Habit, the cruel doggedness of Quiet.—Now, by Love the father knows that he has not as yet experienced enough, but that by the experiences of his child, which in love toward it he makes his own, he may endlessly enrich his being. In the aptitude for rejoicing at the deeds of others, whose import it knows to turn through love into a delight-worthy and delight-giving object for itself, consists the beauty of reposeful age. Where this repose is naturally at hand through Love, it is by no means a hindrance on the activity of youth, but the latter's furtherance. It is the giving space to the activity of youth in an element of Love; by the beholding of this activity, it becomes a highest artistic participation therein,—becomes the very life-element of Art in general. (109)

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Already-experienced age is able to take according to their characteristic import the deeds of youth, by which the latter unconsciously evinces its instinctive thrust, and to survey them in their full conjunction: it thus can vindicate these deeds more completely than their youthful agent, since it knows how to explain and consciously display them. In the repose of age we thus win the 'moment' of highest poetic faculty; and only that more youthful man can make this faculty his own, who wins that repose, i.e. that justness toward the phenomena of Life.—

The loving admonition of the experienced to the inexperienced, of the peaceful to the passionate, of the beholder to the doer, is given the most persuasively and resultfully by bringing faithfully before the instinctive agent his inmost being. He who is possessed with life's unconscious eagerness, will never be brought by general moral exhortations to a critical knowledge (zur urtheilfähigen Erkenntniss) of his own being, but this can only succeed entirely when in a likeness faithfully held up before him he is able to look upon himself; for right cognisance is re-cognition, just as right conscience is knowledge of our own Unconsciousness. The admonisher is the understanding, the experienced-one's conscious power of view: the thing to be admonished is the feeling, the unconscious bent-to-doing of the seeker for experience. The Understanding can know nothing other than the vindication of the Feeling; for, itself, it is but the quiet which follows on the begetting stir of Feeling. It can only vindicate itself, when it knows itself conditioned by instinctive Feeling; and Understanding justified by Feeling—no longer entangled in the feelings of this unit, but upright towards Feeling in general—is the Vernunft. (111) As Vernunfi the Understanding is so far [207] superior to the Feeling, as it can judge all-righteously the agency of individual feelings, in their contact with their objects and opposites; which latter likewise act from individual feelings. It is the highest social force, itself conditioned by Society alone; the force which knows to class the specialities of Feeling according to their proper genus; in that to re-discover them, and by that, again, to vindicate them. It is thus capable withal of rousing itself to utterance through Feeling, when it proposes to address itself merely to the man-of-feeling,—and Love lends to it the instrument therefor. It knows through the feeling of Love, which spurs it to impart, that to the man of passion—in midst of his instinctive dealing—that thing alone is understandable which addresses itself to his Feeling: were it to wish to address his Understanding, then in him it would take for granted that which even itself has first to win through its communication, and it must therefore stay ununderstood. (112) But Feeling only grasps the akin to itself; just as the naked Understanding—as such—can only parley with the Understanding. The Feeling stays cold amid the reflections of the Understanding: only the reality of an object kindred to itself can warm it into interest. This object must be the sympathetic image of the instinctive doer's own nature; and sympathetically it can only work, when it displays itself in an action vindicated by the self-same feeling which, from out this action and this vindication, he fellow-feels (mitfühlt) as his very own. Through this fellow-feeling he just as instinctively attains an understanding of his own individual nature, as by the objects and [208] opposites of his feeling and dealing—by whose contact his own feeling-and-dealing had evolved itself, in the image— he has also learnt the nature of those opposites; and this because, snatched out of himself by lively sympathy for his own likeness, he is carried on to take instinctive interest in the feelings and dealings even of his opposites, is tuned to acknowledgment of, and justice toward these opposites, since they no longer stand confronting the bias of his actual dealings.

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Only in the most perfect artwork therefore, in the Drama, can the insight of the experienced-one impart itself with full success; and for the very reason that, through employment of every artistic expression al-faculty of man, the poet's aim (Absicht) is in Drama the most completely carried from the Understanding to the Feeling,—to wit, is artistically imparted to the Feeling's most directly receptive organs, the senses. The Drama, as the most perfect artwork, differs from all other forms of poetry in just this,— that in it the Aim is lifted into utmost imperceptibility, by its entire realisation. In Drama, wherever the aim, i.e. the Intellectual Will, stays still observable, there the impression is also a chilling one; for where we see the poet still wilting, we feel that as yet he can not. The poet's canning, however, is the complete ascension of the Aim into the Artwork, the emotionalising of the intellect (die Gefühlswerdung des Verstandes). His aim he can only reach by physically presenting to our eyes the things of Life in their fullest spontaneity; and thus, by vindicating Life itself out of the mouth of its own Necessity; for the Feeling, to which he addresses himself, can understand this Necessity alone.

In presence of the Dramatic Artwork, nothing should remain for the combining Intellect to search for. Everything in it must come to an issue sufficient to set our [209] Feeling at rest thereon; for in the setting-at-rest of this Feeling resides the repose, itself, which brings us an instinctive understanding of Life. In the Drama, we must become knowers through the Feeling. (113) The Understanding tells us: "So is it,"—only when the Feeling has told us: "So must it be." Only through itself however, does this Feeling become intelligible to itself: it understands no other language than its own. Things which can only be explained to us by the infinite accommodations of the Understanding, embarrass and confound the Feeling. In Drama, therefore, an action can only be explained when it is completely vindicated by the Feeling; and it thus is the dramatic poet's task, not to invent actions, but to make an action so intelligible through its emotional Necessity, that we may altogether dispense with the intellect's assistance in its vindication. The poet therefore has to make his main scope the choice of the Action,—which he must so choose that, alike in its character as in its compass, it makes possible to him its entire vindication from out the Feeling; for in this vindication alone, resides the reaching of his aim.

An action which can only be explained on grounds of historic relations, un-based upon the Present; an action which can only be vindicated from the standpoint of the State, or understood alone by taking count of religious Dogmas stamped upon it from without,—not sprung from common views within,—such an action, as we have seen, is only representable to the Understanding, not to the Feeling. At its most successful, this was to be effected through narration and description, through appeal to the intellect's imaginative-force; not through direct presentment to the Feeling and its definitely-seizing organs, the senses: for we saw that those senses were positively unable to take-in the full extent of such an action, that in it there lay a mass of relations beyond all possibility of bringing to physical view and bound to be relegated, for their comprehension, [210] to the combining organ of Thought. In a politico-historical drama, therefore, it became the poet's business to eventually give out his Aim (114) quite nakedly—as such: the whole drama stayed unintelligible and unimpressive, if this Aim, in the form of a human 'moral,' did not at last quite visibly emerge from amid the desert waste of pragmatic motives, employed for sheer description's sake. In the course of such a piece, one asked oneself instinctively: "What is the poet trying to tell us?"

Now, an Action which is to justify itself before and through the Feeling, busies itself with no moral; its whole moral consists precisely in its justification by the instinctive human Feeling. It is a goal to itself, insofar as it has to be vindicated only and precisely by the feeling out of which it springs. Wherefore this Action can only be such an one as proceeds from relations the truest, i.e. the most seizable by the Feeling, the nighest to human emotions, and thus the simplest,—from relations such as can only spring from a human Society intrinsically at one with itself, uninfluenced by inessential notions and non-present grounds-of-right: a Society belonging to itself alone, and not to any Past.

However, no action of Life stands solitary and apart: it has always some sort of correlation with the actions of other men; through which it is conditioned alike as by the individual feelings of its transactor himself. The weakest correlation is that of mere petty, insignificant actions; which require for their explanation, less the strength of a necessary feeling, than the waywardness of whim. But the greater and more decisive an action is, and the more it can only be explained from the strength of a necessary feeling: in so much the more definite and wider a connexion does it also stand with the actions of others. A great action, one which the most demonstratively and exhaustively displays [211] the nature of Man along any one particular line, issues only from the shock of manifold and mighty opposites. But, for us to be able to rightly judge these opposites themselves, and to fathom their actions by the individual feelings of the transactors, a great action must be represented in a wide circle of relations; for only in such a circle, is it to be understood. The Poet's chief and especial task will thus consist in this: that at the very outset he shall fix his eye on such a circle, shall completely gauge its compass, shall scrutinise each detail of the relations contained therein, with heed both to its own measure and to its bearing on the main-action; this done, that he then shall make the measure of his understanding of these things the measure of their understandable-ness as a work of Art, by drawing-in this ample circle towards its central point, and thus condensing it into the periphery which gives an understanding of the central Hero. This condensation (Verdichtung) is the work proper to the poetising intellect (des dichtenden Verstandes); and this intellect is the centre and the summit of the whole man, who from thence divides himself into the receiver and the imparter.

As an object (Erscheinung) is seized in the first place by the outward-turned instinctive Feeling, and next is brought to the Imagination, as the earliest function of the brain: so the Understanding, which is nothing else but the imaginative-force as regulated by the actual Measure of the object, has to advance in turn through the Imagination to the instinctive Feeling—in order to impart what it now has recognised. In the Understanding objects mirror themselves as what they actually are; but this mirrored actuality is, after all, a mere thing of thought: to impart this thought-out actuality, the Understanding must display it to the Feeling in an image akin to what the Feeling had originally brought to it; and this image is the work of Phantasy. Only through the Phantasy, can the Understanding have commerce with the Feeling. The Understanding can only grasp the full actuality of an object, when it breaks the image, in which the object is brought it by the Phantasy, [212] and parcels it into its singlest parts; when it fain would bring these parts before itself again in combination, it has at once to cast for itself an image, which no longer answers strictly to the actuality of the thing, but merely in the measure wherein Man has power to recognise it. Thus even the simplest action confounds and bewilders the Understanding, which would fain regard it through the anatomical microscope, by the immensity of its ramifica tions: would it comprehend that action, it can only do so by discarding the microscope and fetching forth the image which alone its human eye can grasp; and this compre hension is ultimately enabled by the instinctive Feeling— as vindicated by the Understanding. This image of the phenomena, in which alone the Feeling can comprehend them, and which the Understanding, to snake itself in telligible to the Feeling, must model on that image which the latter originally brought it through the Phantasy,— this image, for the Aim of the poet, who must likewise take the phenomena of Life and compress them from their view less many-member-edness into a compact, easily surveyable shape,—this image is nothing else but the Wonder. (115)

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V.

THE WONDER in the Poet's work is distinguished from the (116) Wonder in religious Dogma by this: that it does not, like the latter, upheave the nature of things, but the rather makes it comprehensible to the Feeling.

The Judæo-Christian Wonder tore the connexion of natural phenomena asunder, to allow the Divine Will to appear as standing over Nature. In it a broad connexus of things was by no means condensed in favour of their understanding by the instinctive Feeling, but this Wonder was employed entirely for its own sake alone; people demanded it, as the proof of a suprahuman power, from him who gave himself for divine, and in whom they refused to believe till before the bodily eyes of men he had shewn himself the lord of Nature, i.e. the arbitrary subverter of the natural order of things. This Wonder was therefore claimed from him one did not hold for authentic in himself and his natural dealings, but whom one proposed to first believe when he should have achieved something unbelievable, something un-understandable. A fundamental denial of the Understanding was therefore the thing hypothecated in advance, both by the wonder-claimer and the wonder-worker: whereas an absolute Faith was the thing demanded by the wonder-doer, and granted by the wonder-getter.

Now, for the operation of its message, the poetising intellect has absolutely no concern with Faith, but only with an understanding through the Feeling. It wants to display a great connexus of natural phenomena in an image swiftly understandable, and this image must therefore [214] be one answering to the phenomena in such a way that the instinctive Feeling may take it up without a struggle, not first be challenged to expound it: whereas the characteristic of the Dogmatic Wonder consists just in this, that, through the obvious impossibility of explaining it, it tyrannously subjugates the Understanding despite the latter's instinctive search for explanation; and precisely in this subjugation, does it seek for its effect. The Dogmatic Wonder is therefore just as unfitted for Art, as the Poetic Wonder is the highest and most necessary product of the artist's power of beholding and displaying.

If we picture to ourselves more plainly the Poet's method in the moulding of his 'wonder,' we shall see in the first place that, in order to present in intelligible survey a great connexus of reciprocally conditioned actions, he must compress those actions themselves to a measure in which, for all their perspicuity, they shall yet lose nothing of the fulness of their Contents. A mere abridging or lopping-off of lesser 'moments' of action would of itself but mar the moments kept; since these stronger moments of the Action can only be vindicated to the Feeling as the climax (117) of its lesser moments. Wherefore the moments excised for sake of poetic clearing of space must be carried over into the retained chief-moments themselves, i.e. they must be included in the latter in some fashion cognisable to the Feeling. The reason why the Feeling cannot dispense with them is, that for an understanding of the main-action it needs withal a sentience of the motives from which it sprang, and which enounced themselves in those lesser moments-of-action. The crest (Spitze) of an action is in itself a fleeting moment, which is utterly meaningless as a pure matter-of-fact, if it does not appear as motived by ideas (Gesinnungen) that in themselves lay claim to our fellow-feeling: a heaping of such moments must rob the poet of all power of vindicating them to our Feeling; whereas it is this very vindication, this exposition of [215] motives, that has to fill the artwork's space,—which would be completely thrown away, were it filled with a mass of non-vindicable moments of action.

In the interest of intelligibleness, therefore, the poet has so to limit the number of his Action's moments, that he may win the needful space for the motivation of those retained. All those motives which lay hidden in the moments excised, (118) he must fit into the motives of his Main-action in such a way that they shall not appear detached; because in detachment they would also demand their own specific moments of action, the very ones excised. On the contrary, they must be so included in the Chief-motive, that they do not shatter, but strengthen it as a whole. But the strengthening of a motive makes also necessary a strengthening of the moment-of-action itself, which is nothing but the fitting utterance (die entsprechende Äusserung) of that motive. A strong motive cannot utter itself through a weak moment-of-action; both action and motive must thereby become un-understandable.—In order, then, to intelligibly enounce a Chief-motive thus strengthened by taking into it a number of motives which in ordinary life would only utter themselves through numerous moments-of-action, the action thereby conditioned must also be a strengthened, a powerful one, and in its unity more ample than any that ordinary life brings forth; seeing that in ordinary life the selfsame action would only have come to pass in company with many lesser actions, in a widespread space, and within a greater stretch of time. The poet who, in favour of the perspicuity of the thing, would draw-together not only these actions but this expanse of space and time as well, must not merely cut off parts, but condense the whole intrinsic contents. A condensement of the shape of actual life, however, can be comprehended by the latter only when—as compared with itself—it appears magnified, strengthened, [216] unaccustomed. It is just in his busy scattering through Time and Space, that Man cannot understand his own life-energy: but the image of this energy, as brought within the compass of his understanding, is what the Poet's shapings offer him for view; an image wherein this energy is condensed into an utmost-strengthened 'moment,' which, taken apart, most certainly seems wondrous and unwonted, yet shuts within itself its own unwontedness and wondrousness, and is in nowise taken by the beholder for a Wonder but apprehended as the most intelligible representment of reality.

In virtue of this Wonder, the poet is able to display the most measureless conjunctures (Zusammenhänge) in an all-intelligible Unity. The greater, the farther-reaching the conjuncture he desires to make conceivable, only the stronger has he to intensify the attributes of his shapings. Time and Space, to let them appear in keeping with the movement of these figures, he will alike condense from their amplest stretch, to shapings of his Wonder ;—the attributes of infinitely scattered moments of Time and Space will he just as much collect into one intensified attribute, as he had assembled the scattered motives into one Chief-motive; and the utterance of this attribute he will enhance as much, as he had strengthened the action issuing from that motive. Even the most unwonted shapes, which the poet has to evoke in this procedure, will never truly be un-natural; because in them Nature's essence is not distorted, but merely her utterances are gathered into one lucid image, such as is alone intelligible to artist-man. The poetic daring, which gathers Nature's utterances into such an image, can first for us be crowned with due success, precisely because through Experience we have gained a clear insight into Nature's essence.

So long as the phenomena of Nature were merely an 'objective' (119) of man's Phantasy, so long also must the [217] human imagination (Einbildungskraft) be subjected to them: moreover, their semblance governed and determined its view of the human phenomenal-world in such a way, that men derived the inexplicable in that world—that is to say, the unexplained--from the capricious orderings of an extranatural and extrahuman Power, which finally in the Miracle upheaved both Man and Nature. When the reaction against belief in miracles set in, even the Poet had to bow before the prosaic rationalism of the claim, that poetry should also renounce its Wonder; and this happened in the times when natural phenomena, theretofore regarded only with the eye of Phantasy, began to be made the object of scientific operations of the Understanding. The scientific Understanding, however, was so long unsettled about the essence of these phenomena, as it believed that only in an anatomical disclosing of all their inner minutiae could it set them comprehensibly before it. Positive about this essence have we only been, from the time when we learnt to look on Nature as a living Organism, not as an aimfully constructed Mechanism; from the time when we grew clear, that she was not a thing created, but herself the forever becom-ing; that she includes within herself the begetter and the bearer, the Manly and the Womanly; that Time and Space, by which we earlier had held her circumscribed, were but abstractions from her own reality; that, further, we may rest content with this knowledge in general, because we no longer need, for its confirmation, to assure ourselves of farthest distances by the calculations of Mathematics,--since in closest nearness, and in the tiniest fact of Nature, we may find proofs for the selfsame thing as that which the remotest distance can only send us in confirmation of our knowledge of Nature. Thenceforth, however, we also know that we are here to enjoy Nature, because we can enjoy her, i.e. we are qualified for such enjoyment But the most reasonable (vernunftigste) enjoyment of Nature is that which satisfies our universal aptitude for delight: in the universality of man's organs of reception, and in the highest enhancement of their aptitude [218] for delight, lies alone the measure according to which he has to enjoy; and the artist, who addresses himself to this highest aptitude for delight, has therefore to take this measure alone for the measure also of the phenomena he wishes to impart as a connected whole. This measure needs only to so far follow Nature's utterances, in her phenomena, as they have to answer to her intrinsic essence; nor does the poet disfigure that essence through his strengthening and intensifying, but—precisely in his utterance of it—he merely compresses it to a measure answering that of the most ardent human longing to understand a vast connexus of phenomena. It is just the fullest understanding of Nature, that first enables the poet to set her phenomena before us in wondrous shaping; for only in such shaping, do they become intelligible to us as the conditionments of human actions intensified.

Nature in her actual reality is only seen by the Understanding, which de-composes her into her separatest of parts; if it wants to display to itself these parts in their living organic connexion, then the quiet of the Understanding's meditation is involuntarily displaced by a more and more highly agitated mood, which at last remains nothing but a mood of Feeling. In this mood, Man unconsciously refers Nature once more to himself; for it is his individually human feeling, that has given him precisely the mood wherein he has apprehended Nature according to one particular impression. In Feeling's highest agitation, Man sees in Nature a sympathising being; and in truth the character of her phenomena governs also the character of man's mood, past all escaping. Only in the utmost egoistic coldness of the Understanding, can he withdraw himself from her immediate sphere of operation,—albeit even then he must confess to himself, that her more mediate influence still determines him.—In his times of great commotion man sees no longer any hasard, in his encounter with natural phenomena: whereas the utterances of Nature, though grounded on an organic concord of phenomena, yet [219] brush against our daily life with all the semblance of Caprice, and in our moods of indifference or egoistic preoccupation—when we have neither lief nor leisure to ponder on their founding in a natural concord—they appear to us as Hazard; which, according to our human purpose of the moment, we seek to either turn to our advantage or turn away as to our dis-advantage. Man deeply-moved, when he suddenly turns from his inner mood to face surrounding Nature, finds in her either an intensifying aliment, or an alterative stimulus, of his mood, —according to her passing aspect. By whatever Being he feels dominated or supported in such a fashion, to that Being man ascribes a power great in exact measure as he finds himself in a great mood. His own sense of hanging-together with Nature he instinctively feels expressed, as well, in a great hanging-together of Nature's passing phenomena with himself, with his own mood; his own enhanced or altered mood he recognises again in Nature, whose mightiest utterances he thus refers to himself, equally as he feels himself determined by them. In this sense of a great reciprocal operation the phenomena of Nature crowd together, before his Feeling, into a definite shape to which he assigns an individual emotion answering to their impression upon him and his own mood; to this shape he finally attributes organs—intelligible to himself—wherewith to speak-out that emotion. Then he speaks with Nature, and she answers him.—In this his colloquy with Nature does he not understand her better, than the regarder of her through the microscope? What does the latter understand of Nature, excepting what he has no need to understand? But the former perceives that part of her which is necessary to him in the highest agitation of his being, in an agitation wherein he understands Nature according to an infinitely greater compass, and understands her in such a way as the widest-reaching Understanding can never picture to itself. Here Man lo ves Nature; he ennobles her, and uplifts her to a sympathising sharer in the highest [220] mood of Man, whose physical existence she has unconsciously conditioned from out herself. (120)

If, then, we wish to define the Poet's work according to its highest power thinkable, we must call it the—vindicated by the clearest human Consciousness, the new-devised to answer the beholdings of an ever-present Life, the brought in Drama to a show the most intelligible,—the Mythos.

We now have only to ask ourselves, through what expressional means this Mythos is the most intelligibly to be displayed in Drama. For this, we must go back to that 'moment' of the whole artwork which conditions its very essence; and this is the necessary vindication of the action through its motives, for which the poetising Understanding turns to face the instinctive Feeling, upon the latter's unforced fellow-feeling to ground an understanding of them. We have seen that the condensation—so necessary for a practical understanding — of the manifold moments-of-action, immeasurably ramified in actual reality (in der realen Wirklichkeit), was conditioned by the poet's longing to display a great conjuncture of human life's phenomena, through which alone can the Necessity of these phenomena be grasped. This condensation he could only bring about, in keeping with his main scope, by taking-up into the motives of the moments chosen for actual representment all those motives which lay at bottom of the moments-of-action that he had discarded; and by vindicating their adoption, before the judgment-seat of Feeling, in that he let them appear as a strengthening of the Chief-motives; [221] which latter, in turn, conditioned of themselves a strengthening of their corresponding moments-of-action. Finally we saw that this strengthening of a moment of action could only be achieved by lifting it above the ordinary human measure, through the poetic figment (durch Dichtung) of the Wonder —in strict correspondence with human nature, albeit exalting and enhancing its faculties to a potency unreachable in ordinary life;—of the Wonder, which was not to stand beyond the bounds of Life, but to loom so large from out its very midst, that the shows of ordinary life should pale before it.—And now we have only to come to definite terms, as to wherein should consist the strengthening of the Motives which are to condition from out themselves that strengthening of the Moments of Action.

What is the meaning, in the sense indicated above, of a "Strengthening of the Motives"?

It is impossible—as we have already seen—that a heaping-up of motives can be the thing we mean; because motives thus crowded together, without any possible utterance as action, must remain unintelligible to the Feeling; and even to the Understanding—if explicable—they would still be reft of any vindication. (121) Many motives to a scanty action (Viele Motive bei gedrängter Handlung), could only appear petty, whimsical and irrelevant, and could not possibly be employed for a great action, excepting in a caricature. The strengthening of a motive cannot therefore consist in a mere addition of lesser motives, but in the complete absorption of many motives into this one. An interest (Interesse) common to divers men at divers times and under divers circumstances, and ever shaping itself afresh according to these diversities: such an interest—once that these men, these times and circumstances are typically alike at bottom, and in themselves make plain an [222] essential trait of human nature—is to be made the interest of one man, at one given time and under given circumstances. In the Interest of this man all outward differences are to be raised into one definite thing; in which, however, the Interest must reveal itself according to its greatest, most exhaustive compass. But this is as good as saying, that from this Interest all which savours of the particularistic and accidental must be taken away, and it must be given in its full truth as a necessary, purely human utterance of feeling (Gefühlsausdruck). Of such an emotional-utterance that man is incapable, who is not as yet at one with himself about his necessary Interest: the man whose feelings have not yet found the object strong enough to drive them to a definite, a necessary enunciation; but who, faced with powerless, accidental, unsympathetic outward things, still splits himself into two halves. But should this mighty object front him from the outer world, and either so move him by its strange hostility that he girds up his whole individuality to thrust it from him, or attract him so irresistibly that he longs to ascend into it with his whole individuality,—then will his Interest also, for all its definiteness, be so wide-embracing that it takes into it all his former split-up, forceless interests, and entirely consumes them.

The moment of this consumption is the act which the poet has to prepare for, by strengthening a motive in such sort, that a powerful moment-of-action may issue from it; and this preparation is the last work of his enhanced activity. Up to this point his organ of the poetising intellect, Word-speech, can do his bidding; for up to here he has had to set forth interests in whose interpreting and shaping a necessary feeling took no share as yet,—ilterests variously influenced by given circumstances from Without, without there being any definite working on Within in such a way as to drive the inner Feeling to a necessary, choiceless activity, in its turn determining the outer course of things. Here still reigned the combining Understanding, with its parcelling of parts and piecing-together of this or that detail in this [223] or that fashion; here it had not directly to display, but merely to shadow forth, to draw comparisons, to make like intelligible by like,—and for this, not only did its organ of Word-speech quite suffice, but it was the only one through which the intellect could make itself intelligible.—But where the thing prepared-for is to become a reality, where the poet has no longer to separate and compare, where he wants to let the thing that gainsays all Choice and definitely gives itself without conditions, the determinant motive strengthened to a determinative force—to let this proclaim itself in the very Utterance (Ausdruck) of a necessary, all-dominating feeling,—there he can no longer work with the merely shadowing, expounding (122) Word-speech, except he so enhance it as he has already enhanced the motive: and this he can only do by pouring it into Tone-speech.

[224]

VI.

TONE-SPEECH is the beginning and end of Word-speech: as the Feeling is beginning and end of the Understanding, as Mythos is beginning and end of History, the Lyric beginning and end of Poetry. The mediator between beginning and middle, as between the latter and the point of exit, is the Phantasy.

The march of this evolution is such, however, that it is no retrogression, but a progress to the winning of the highest human faculty; and it is travelled, not merely by Mankind in general, but substantially by every social Individual.

Just as in the unconscious Feeling lie all the germs for evolution of the Understanding, while this latter holds within it a necessitation to vindicate the unconscious feel ing, and the man who from out his Understanding vindicates this Feeling is first the man of Vernunft; just as in Mythos justified by History, which alike grew out of it, is first won a really intelligible image of Life: so does the Lyric also hold within itself each germ of the intrinsic art of Poetry, which necessarily can but end with speaking out the vindication of the Lyric; and this work of vindication is precisely the highest human Artwork, the Entire Drama (das vollkommene Drama).

The primal organ-of-utterance of the inner man, however, is Tone-speech, as the most spontaneous expression of the inner Feeling stimulated from without. A mode of Expression similar to that still proper to the beasts was, in any case, alike the first employed by Man; and this we can call before us at any moment,—as far as its substance goes,—by removing from our Word-speech its dumb [225] articulations (die stummen Mitlauter), and leaving nothing but the open sounds (die tönenden Laute). In these vowels, if we think of them as stripped of their consonants, and picture to ourselves the manifold and vivid play of inner feelings, with all their range of joy and sorrow, as given-out in them alone, we shall obtain an image of man's first emotional language; a language in which the stirred and high-strung Feeling could certainly express itself through nothing but a joinery of ringing tones, which altogether of itself must take the form of Melody. This melody, which was accompanied by appropriate bodily gestures in such a way that it appeared, itself in turn, to be nothing but the simultaneous inner expression of an outer announcement through those gestures, and therefore also took its time-measure—its Rhythm—from the changeful motion of those gestures, in such a manner that it returned it to them as the melodically-vindicated measure for their own announcement,—this rhythmic melody, which we should do wrong to set down as of poor effect and beauty, in view of the infinitely greater variety of man's emotional fund as compared with that of the beasts, and especially in view of its endless capacity for enhancement through interaction between the inner expression of the voice and the outer expression of the gestures, (123) —this melody, both by its nature and its origin, so thoroughly decreed the Measure for the word-verse, that the latter appears to have been governed by it to the extent of positive subordination,—as we still may see to-day by inspecting any genuine Volkslied; in which we shall always find the word-verse plainly governed by the melody, and so much so, that it often has to accommodate itself, even for the sense, to the melody's most intimate requirements.

This matter shews us very palpably the rise of Speech. (124) [226] In the Word, the ringing tones of pure emotional-speech seek as much to bring themselves to a distinguishment from one another, as the inner Feeling seeks to discriminate between the outer objects working on the senses, to tell its tale about them, and finally to make intelligible its inner thrust toward such a tale itself. In pure Tone-speech, with its tale of the received impression, the Feeling gave only itself to be understood; and this, supported by the gestures, it was quite competent to do, through its countless raisings and sinkings, prolongings and abridgings, intensifyings and abatings of the open sounds. To denote and distinguish between outer objects themselves, however, the Feeling must cast about it for something answering-to and embodying the impression of the object, for a distinctive garment wherewith to clothe the open tone; and this it borrowed from the Impression, and through it from the object itself. This garment it wove from dumb articulations, which it fitted on to the open sound as a prefix or suffix, (125) or even as both together, so that it was enveloped in them and held down to a definite, distinguishable announcement; in the same way as the object, thus distinguished, marked off and announced itself to the outer world by a garment— the animal by its skin, the tree by its bark, &c. The vowels thus clothed, and parcelled by such clothing, form the roots of speech through whose fitting and fixing together the whole sensuous edifice of our endless-branching Word-speech has been erected.

Let us first notice, however, with what instinctive foresight this Speech but very gradually left its nursing mother, Melody, and her breast-milk the open tone. In keeping with an unaffected view of Nature and a longing to impart the impressions of such a view, Speech set only the kindred and analogous together, in order not only to make plain the kindred by its analogy and explain the analogous by [227] its kinship, but also, through an Expression based on analogy and kinship of its own 'moments,' to produce a still more definite and intelligible impression upon the Feeling. Herein was evinced the sensuously composing (sinnlich dichtende) force of Speech. Through taking the open sound, employed for purely subjective expression of the feelings inspired by an object—in scale with its impression,—and clothing it with a garment of mute articulations, which stood to the Feeling as an objective expression borrowed from an attribute of the object itself, it had arrived at moulding different 'moments' of expression, in its speech-roots. Now, when Speech set these roots together according to their kinship and alike-ness, it made plain to the Feeling both the impression of the object and its answering expression, in equal measure, through an increased strengthening of that Expression; and hereby in turn, it denoted the object as itself a strengthened one,—namely, as an object strictly-speaking multiple, but one in essence through its kinship and alikeness. This 'composing moment' of Speech is its alliteration or Stabreim, in which we recognise the very oldest attribute of all poetic speech.

In Stabreim the kindred speech-roots are fitted to one another in such a way, that, just as they sound alike to the physical ear, they also knit like objects into one collective image in which the Feeling may utter its conclusions about them. Their sensuously cognisable resemblance they win either from a kinship of the vowel sounds, especially when these stand open in front, without any initial consonat; (126) or from the sameness of this initial consonant itself, which characterises the likeness as one belonging peculiarly to the object; (127) or again, from the sameness of the terminal consonant that closes up the root behind (as an assonance), provided the individualising force of the word lies in that terminal. (128) The distribution and arrangement of these [228] rhyming roots takes place by similar laws to those that lead us in every walk of Art to repeat, as necessary for an understanding, those motives on which we lay chief weight, and which we therefore so bestow between lesser motives, in turn conditioned by them, that they stand out plainly as the conditioning and essential ones.

As I must reserve till later a fuller treatment of this subject, for the purpose of demonstrating the Stabreim's possible operation upon our Music, I will at present content myself with pointing out in how strict a relation the Stabreim, and the Word-verse rounded-off thereby, once stood to that melody which we have to consider as the earliest message of a more complex human feeling, albeit a feeling rounding off its complexity into a unity. By that Melody we have to explain not only the dimensions of the Word-verse, but also the position and, in general, the attributes of the Stabreim which governed those dimensions; while the production of that Melody, again, was conditioned by man's natural capacity of breath and the possibility of giving out a number of stronger intonations in one breath. The duration of an outflow of the breath through the organ of song governed the dimensions of a segment of the melody, in which one pregnant portion of the sense must come to a conclusion. But this possible duration governed also the number of special intonations in one melodic segment: if these special intonations were of impassioned strength, and thus more rapidly consumed the breath, then this number was diminished,—or if, their strength being less, they did not require so swift a breath-consumption, then their number was increased. These intonations, which fell together with the gestures and thereby disposed themselves to a rhythmic measure, were in Speech condensed into the alliterative root-words, whose number and position they conditioned in the same way as the melodic segment, itself conditioned by the breath, determined the length and compass of the Verse.—How simple is an explanation and understanding of all Metrik, if only we take the reasonable pains to go back to the natural conditionments of all human [229] art-ability, from which alone can we also reach again to genuine art-production!—

But let us follow for the present the evolutionary career of Word-speech, and reserve for ourselves a later return to the Melody it left behind.—

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In exact degree as poesis (das Dichten) ceased to be a function of the Feeling and became a transaction of the Understanding, did the creative league of Gesture-, Tone-, and Word-speech, originally united in the Lyric, disband itself; Word-speech was the child that left its father and mother, to help itself along in the wide world alone.—As the number of objects and their relations to his Feeling increased before the adolescent's eye, so accumulated the words and combinations of Speech which were to answer to those added objects and relations. So long as this growing man still kept his eye on Nature, and was able to grasp her by his Feeling, so long also did he invent linguistic roots in characteristic keeping with the objects and their relations. But when amid the eventual stress of life he turned his back on this fruitful fountain of his powers of speech, then all his inventive-force was blighted, and he had to content himself with the harvest handed down to him but no longer a possession to be ever-newly reaped; in such-wise that,according to his need, he took his heritage of speech-roots and pieced them doubly and trebly together for extranatural objects, pared them down for sake of this his piecing, and above all marred them past all knowledge by evaporating the ring of their sounding vowels to the hasty clang of Talk; while, by heaping-up the dumb articulations needful for combining un-related roots, he wrinkled grievously the living flesh of Speech. When Speech had thus lost an instinctive understanding of her own roots—only possible through Feeling,—she naturally could no longer answer in these to the intonations of that fostering mother-melody. She either contented herself—where Dance remained an inseparable [230] portion of the Lyric, as in Greek antiquity—with snuggling as briskly as possible to the Rhythm of the melody: or she sought—where Dance had more and more completely swerved away from Lyric, as among the modern nations —for another bond of union with the melodic breathing- snatches; and this she procured in the end-rhyme.

The End-rhyme—to which we must also come back, on account of its attitude towards our music—set itself up at the exit of a melodic segment, without being able to answer the intonations (Betonungen) of the melody itself. It no longer knit the natural band of Tone- and Word-speech, in which the Stabreim brought its radical affinities to the melodic intonations within the purview of both the outer and the inner sense; but it merely fluttered at the loose end of the ribands of melody, toward which the word-verse fell into a more and more arbitrary and uncomplying attitude.—The more confusedly and circuitously this Word-speech must proceed, at last, to designate objects and relations belonging solely to social Convention, and no longer to the self-determining nature of things; the more she must busy herself to find terms for concepts which, themselves skimmed-off from natural phenomena, were to be employed in turn for combinations of these abstractions; the more, for this, she must screw up the original meaning of roots to accommodate a twofold and threefold meaning, ingeniously laid under them but merely to be thought out, no longer to be felt; and the more elaborately she had to equip the mechanical apparatus which was to bolster up, and set in motion, this system of screws and levers: so much the more shrewish and estranged did she become towards that primal melody (Urmelodie),—till at last she lost even the remotest memory of it, when, out of breath and reft of tone, she must flounder into the grey morass of Prose.

The Understanding, condensed from Feeling through the Phantasy, acquired in Prosaic word-speech an organ through which it could make itself intelligible alone, and in direct [231] ratio as it became un-intelligible to Feeling. In modern Prose we speak a language we do not understand with the Feeling, since its connection with the objects, whose impression on our faculties first ruled the moulding of the speech-roots, has become incognisable to us; a language which we speak as it was taught us in our youth,—not as, with waxing self-dependence of our Feeling, we haply seize, form, and feed it from ourselves and the objects we behold; a language whose usages and claims, based on the logic of the Understanding, we must unconditionally obey when we want to impart our thoughts. This language, in our Feeling's eyes, rests therefore on a convention which has a definite scope,—namely, to make ourselves thus far intelligible according to a given norm, in which we are to think and to dominate our feelings, that we may demonstrate to the Understanding an aim of the Understanding. Our Feeling—which quite of itself found unconscious expression in the primitive Speech—we can only describe in this language; and describe in a far more circuitous way than an object of the Understanding, because we are obliged to screw ourselves down from our intellectual language to its real stock, in the same way as we screwed ourselves up from that stock to it.—Our langu