Richard Wagner: The Art-Work of the Future (1849): Part II Chapter 5
Derrick Everett
If fashion permitted us to take up again the old and genuine style of
speech, and write instead of "Dichten" "Tichten"; then should we gain
in the group of names for the three primeval human arts, "Tanz-, Ton-
und Ticht-kunst" (Dance, Tone, and Poetry), a beautiful word-picture of
the nature of this trinity of sisters, namely a perfect Stabreim, such
as is native to the spirit of our language. This Stabreim, moreover,
would be especially appropriate by reason of the position which it
gives to "Tichtkunst" (Poetry): as the last member of the 'rhyme,' this
word would first decide that rhyme; since two alliterative words are
only raised to a perfect Stabreim by the advent or begettal of the
third; so that without this third member the earlier pair are merely
accidental, being first shown as necessary factors by the presence of
the third; as man and wife are first shown in their true and necessary
interdependence by the child which they beget.
But just as the effective operation of this rhyme works backward from
the close to the commencement, so does it also press onward with no
less necessity in the reverse direction: the earlier members, truly,
gain their first significance as rhyme by the advent of the closing
member, but the closing member is not so much as conceivable without
the earlier pair. Thus the poetic art can absolutely not create the
genuine art-work and this is only such an one as is brought into direct
physical existence, without those arts to which the physical show
belongs directly. Thought, that mere phantom of reality, is formless by
itself; and only when it retraces the road on which it rose to birth,
can it attain artistic perceptibility. In the poetic art, the purpose
of all art comes first to consciousness: but the other arts contain
within themselves the unconscious necessity that forms this purpose.
The art of Poetry is the creative process by which the art-work steps
into life: but out of nothing, only the god of the Israelites can
create some-thing; the poet must have that something; and that
something is the whole artistic man, who proclaims in the arts of Dance
and Tone the physical longing become a longing of the soul, which
through its force first generates the poetic purpose and finds in that
its absolution, in its attainment its own appeasing.
Wheresoever the people made poetry -- and only by the people, or in the
footsteps of the people, can poetry be really made -- there did the
poetic purpose (die dichterische Absicht) rise to life alone upon the
shoulders of the arts of Dance and Tone, as the head of the fully-
fledged human being. The lyrics of Orpheus would never have been able
to turn the savage beasts to silent, placid adoration, if the singer
had but given them forsooth some dumb and printed verse to read: their
ears must be enthralled by the sonorous notes that came straight from
the heart, their carrion-spying eyes be tamed by the proud and graceful
movements of the body; in such a way that they should recognise
instinctively in this whole man no longer a mere object for their maw,
no mere objective for their feeding-, but for their hearing- and their
seeing-powers; before they could be attuned to duly listen to his moral
sentences.
Neither was the true folk-epic by any means a mere recited poem: the
songs of Homer, such as we now possess them, have issued from the
critical siftings and compilings of a time in which the genuine epos
had long since ceased to live. When Solon made his laws and Pisistratus
introduced his political regime, men searched among the ruins of the
already fallen epos of the people and pieced the gathered heap together
for reading service; much as in the Hohenstaufen times they did with
the fragments of the otherwise lost Nibelungen-lieder. But before these
epic songs became the object of such literary care, they had flourished
mid the people, eked out by voice and gesture, as a bodily enacted
art-work; as it were, a fixed and crystallised blend of lyric song and
dance, with predominant lingering on portrayal of the action and
reproduction of the heroic dialogue. These epic-lyrical performances
form the unmistakable middle stage between the genuine older lyric and
tragedy, the normal point of transition from the one to the other.
Tragedy was, therefore, the entry of the art-work of the people upon
the public arena of political life; and we may take its appearance as
an excellent touchstone for the difference in procedure between the
art-creating of the people and the mere literary-historical making of
the so-called cultured art-world. At the very time when live-born epos
became the object of the critical dilettantism of the court of
Pisistratus, it had already shed its blossoms in the people's life; yet
not because the people had lost its true afflatus, but since it was
already able to surpass the old, and from persistent artistic sources
to build the less perfect art-work up, until it became the more
perfect. For while those pedants and professors in the prince's castle
were labouring at the construction of a literary Homer, pampering their
own unproductivity with their marvel at their wisdom, by aid of which
they yet could only understand the thing that long had passed from
life; Thespis had already slid his car to Athens, had set it up beside
the palace walls, dressed out his stage and, stepping from the chorus
of the people, had trodden its boards; no longer did he shadow forth
the deeds of heroes, as in the epos, but in these heroes' guise enacted
them.
With the people, all is reality and deed; it does, and then rejoices in
the thought of its own doing. Thus the blithe people of Athens,
enflamed by persecution, hunted out from court and city the melancholy
sons of Pisistratus; and then bethought it how, by this its deed, it
had become a free and independent people. Thus it raised the platform
of its stage, and decked itself with tragic masks and raiment of some
god or hero, in order itself to be a god or hero: and tragedy was born;
whose fruits it tasted with the blissful sense of its own creative
force, but whose metaphysical basis it handed, all regardless, to the
brain-racking speculation of the dramaturgists of our modern court-
theatres.
Tragedy flourished for just so long as it was inspired by the spirit of
the people, and as this spirit was a veritably popular, i.e. a communal
one. When the national brotherhood of the people was shivered into
fragments, when the common bond of its religion and primeval customs
was pierced and severed by the sophist needles of the egoistic spirit
of Athenian self-dissection; then the people's art-work also ceased:
then did the professors and the doctors of the literary guilds take
heritage of the ruins of the fallen edifice, and delved among its beams
and stones; to pry, to ponder, and to re-arrange its members. With
Aristophanian laughter, the people relinquished to these learned
insects the refuse of its meal, threw art upon one side for two
millennia, and fashioned of its innermost necessity the history of the
world; the while those scholars cobbled up their tiresome history of
literature, by order of the supreme court of Alexander.
The career of poetry, since the breaking-up of tragedy, and since her
own departure from community with mimetic Dance and Tone, can be easily
enough surveyed -- despite the monstrous claims which she has raised.
The lonely art of poetry -- prophesied no more; she no longer showed
but only described; she merely played the go-between, but gave naught
from herself; she pieced together what true seers had uttered, but
without the living bond of unity; she suggested, without satisfying her
own suggestions; she urged to life, without herself attaining life; she
gave the catalogue of a picture-gallery, but not the paintings. The
wintry stem of speech, stripped of its summer wreath of sounding
leaves, shrank to the withered, toneless signs of writing: instead of
to the ear, it dumbly now addressed the eye; the poet's strain became a
written dialect; the poet's breath the scribbler's scrawl.
There sat she then, the lonely, sullen sister, behind her reeking lamp
in the gloom of her silent chamber -- a female Faust, who, across the
dust and mildew of her books, from out the uncontenting warp and woof
of thought, from off the everlasting rack of fancies and of theories,
yearned to step forth into real life; with flesh and bone, and spick
and span, to stand and go mid real men, a genuine human being. Alas!
the poor sister had cast away her flesh and bone in studied thought-
lessness; a disembodied soul, she could only now describe that which
she lacked, as she watched it from her gloomy chamber, through the shut
lattice of her thought, living and stirring its limbs amid the dear but
distant world of Sense; she could only picture, ever picture, the
beloved of her youth: "so looked his face, so swayed his limbs, so
glanced his eye, so rang the music of his voice." But all this
picturing and describing, however deftly she attempted to raise it to a
special art, how ingeniously soever she laboured to fashion it by forms
of speech and writing, for art's consoling recompense; it still was but
a vain, superfluous labour, the stilling of a need which only sprang
from a failing that her own caprice had bred; it was nothing but the
indigent wealth of alphabetical signs, distasteful in themselves, of
some poor mute.
The sound and sturdy man, who stands before us clad in panoply of
actual body, describes not what he wills and whom he loves; but wills
and loves, and imparts to us by his artistic organs the joy of his own
willing and his loving. This he does with highest measure of directness
in the enacted drama. But it is only to the straining for a shadowy
substitute, an artificially objective method of description -- on which
the art of poetry, now loosed from all substantiality, must exercise
her utmost powers of detail -- that we have to thank this million-
membered mass of ponderous tomes, by which she still, at bottom, can
only trumpet forth her utter helplessness. This whole impassable waste
of stored-up literature -- despite its million phrases and centuries of
verse and prose, without once coming to the living word -- is nothing
but the toilsome stammering of aphasic thought, in its struggle for
transmutation into natural articulate utterance.
This thought, the highest and most conditioned faculty of artistic man,
had cut itself adrift from fair warm Life, whose yearning had begotten
and sustained it, as from a hemming, fettering bond that clogged its
own unbounded freedom: so deemed the Christian yearning, and believed
that it must break away from physical man, to spread in heaven's
boundless æther to freest waywardness. But this very severance was to
teach that thought and this desire how inseparable they were from human
nature's being: how high soever they might soar into the air, they
still could do this in the form of bodily man alone. In sooth, they
could not take the carcase with them, bound as it was, by laws of
gravitation; but they managed to abstract a vapoury emanation, which
instinctively took on again the form and bearing of the human body.
Thus hovered in the air the poet's Thought, like a human-outlined cloud
that spread its shadow over actual, bodily earth-life, to which it
evermore looked down; and into which it needs must long to shed itself;
just as from earth alone it sucked its steaming vapours. The natural
cloud dissolves itself, in giving back to earth the conditions of its
being: as fruitful rain it sinks upon the meadows, thrusts deep into
the thirsty soil, and steeps the panting seeds of plants, which open
then their rich luxuriance to the sunlight; to that light which
had erstwhile drawn the lowering cloud from out the fields. So should
the poet's thought once more impregnate life; no longer spread its idle
canopy of cloud twixt life and light.
What poetry perceived from that high seat, was after all but life: the
higher did she raise herself; the more panoramic became her view; but
the wider the connection in which she was now enabled to grasp the
parts, the livelier arose in her the longing to fathom the depths of
this great whole. Thus poetry turned to science, to philosophy. To the
struggle for a deeper knowledge of nature and of man, we stand indebted
for that copious store of literature whose kernel is the poetic musing
(gedankenhaftes Dichten) which speaks to us in human- and in natural-
history, and in philosophy. The livelier do these sciences evince the
longing for a genuine portrayal of the known, so much the nearer do
they approach once more the artist's poetry; and the highest skill in
picturing to the senses the phenomena of the universe, must be ascribed
to the noble works of this department of literature. But the deepest
and most universal science can, at the last, know nothing else but life
itself; and the substance and the sense of life are naught but man and
nature. Science, therefore, can only gain her perfect confirmation in
the work of art; in that work which takes both man and nature -- in so
far
as the latter attains her consciousness in man -- and shows them forth
directly. Thus the consummation of knowledge is its redemption into
poetry; into that poetic art, however, which marches hand in hand with
her sister arts towards the perfect artwork; and this artwork is none
other than the drama.
Drama is only conceivable as the fullest expression of a joint artistic
longing to impart something; while this longing, again, can only parley
with a common receptivity. Where either of these factors lacks, the
drama is no necessary, but merely an arbitrary art-product. Without
these factors being at hand in actual life, the poet, in his striving
for immediate presentation of the life that he had apprehended, sought
to create the drama for himself alone; his creation therefore fell,
perforce, a victim to all the faults of arbitrary dealing. Only in
exact measure as his own proceeded from a common impulse, and could
address itself to a common interest, do we find the necessary
conditions of drama fulfilled -- since the time of its recall to life
-- and the desire to answer those conditions rewarded with success.
A common impulse toward dramatic art-work can only be at hand in those
who actually enact the work of art in common; these, as we take it, are
the fellowships of players. At the end of the Middle Ages, we see such
fellowships arising directly from the people; while those who later
overmastered them and laid down their laws from the standpoint of
absolute poetic art, have earned themselves the fame of destroying
root-and-branch that which the man who sprang directly from such a
fellowship, and made his poems for and with it, had created for the
wonder of all time. From out the inmost, truest nature of the people,
Shakespeare created (dichtete) for his fellow-players that drama which
seems to us the more astounding as we see it rise by might of naked
speech alone, without all help of kindred arts. One only help it had,
the fantasy of his audience, which turned with active sympathy to greet
the inspiration of the poet's comrades. A genius the like of which was
never heard, and a group of favouring chances ne'er repeated, in common
made amends for what they lacked in common. Their joint creative force,
however, was need; and where this shows its nature-bidden might, there
man can compass even the impossible to satisfy it: from poverty grows
plenty, from want an overflow; the boorish figure of the homely
people's-comedian takes on the bearing of a hero, the raucous clang of
daily speech becomes the sounding music of the soul, the rude
scaffolding of carpet-hung boards becomes a world-stage with all its
wealth of scene. But if we take away this art-work from its frame of
fortunate conditions, if we set it down outside the realm of fertile
force which bore it from the need of this one definite epoch, then do
we see with sorrow that the poverty was still but poverty, the want but
want; that Shakespeare was indeed the mightiest. poet of all time, but
his artwork was not yet the work for every age; that not his genius,
but the incomplete and merely will-ing, not yet can-ning, spirit of his
age's art had made him but the Thespis of the tragedy of the future. In
the same relation as stood the car of Thespis, in the brief time-span
of the flowering of Athenian art, to the stage of Æschylus and
Sophocles: so stands the stage of Shakespeare, in the unmeasured spaces
of the flowering time of universal human art, to the Theatre of the
future. The deed of the one and only Shakespeare, which made of him a
universal man, a very god, is yet but the kindred deed of the solitary
Beethoven, who found the language of the artist-manhood of the future:
only where these twain Prometheus', Shakespeare and Beethoven, shall
reach out hands to one another; where the marble creations of Phidias
shall bestir themselves in flesh and blood; where the painted
counterfeit of nature shall quit its cribbing frame on the chamberwalls
of the egoist, and stretch its ample breadths on the warm-life-blown
framework of the future stage; there first, in the communion of all his
fellow-artists, will the poet also find redemption.
It was on the long journey from Shakespeare's stage to the Art-Work of
the Future, that the poet was first to gain full consciousness of his
unhappy loneliness. Out of the fellowship of actors, had the dramatic
poet evolved by natural law; but, in his foolish arrogance, he fain
would now exalt himself above his comrades, and without their love,
without their impulse, dictate the drama from behind his pedant desk to
those from whose free gift of personation it could gain alone a natural
growth, and to whose joint will he had only power to point the
informing aim. Thus the organs of dramatic art, reduced to slavish
drudgery, grew dumb before the poet, who desired not merely now to
utter, but to dominate the artistic impulse. As the virtuoso presses or
releases at his will the pianoforte's keys, so would the poet play upon
the automaton troupe of actors; as on an instrument of wood and steel
erected to display his own particular dexterity, and from which men
should expect to hear no other thing but him the playing marvel. But
the keys of the instrument made their own rejoinder to the ambitious
egoist: the harder he hammered, in his gymnastic frenzy, the more they
stuck and clattered.
Goethe once reckoned up but four weeks of pure happiness in all his
well-filled life: his most unhappy years he made no special count of;
but we know them: they were those in which he sought to tune that
jangling instrument for his use. This man of might was longing to take
refuge from the soundless desert of art-literature in the living,
sonorous art-work. Whose eye was surer, and wider-ranging in its
knowledge of life than his? What he had seen, described, and pictured,
he now would bring to ear upon that instrument. Great heavens! how
deformed and past all recognition did his views of life confront him,
when forced into this metric music! How must he wrench his tuning-key,
how tug and stretch the strings, until at last they snapped with one
great whine! He was forced to see that everything is possible in this
world, excepting that abstract spirit should govern men: where this
spirit is not seeded in the whole sound man and blossomed out of him,
it can never be poured into him from above. The egoistic poet can make
mechanical puppets move according to his wish, but never turn machines
to actual living men. From the stage where Goethe wished to make his
men, he was chased at last by a performing poodle: as an exemplary
warning to all unnatural government from on high!
Where Goethe shipwrecked, it could but become "good tone" to look upon
oneself as shipwrecked in advance: the poets still wrote plays, but not
for the unpolished stage; simply for their cream-laid paper. Only the
second- or third- rate poetasters, who here and there adapted their
conceits to local requirements, still busied their brains with the
players; but not the eminent poet, who wrote "out of his own head" and,
of all the many hues of life, found only abstract, Prussian-
territorial, black-on-white respectable. Thus happened the unheard-of:
dramas written for dumb reading!
As Shakespeare, in his stress for unadulterated life, took shelter in
the uncouth scaffold of his people's stage, so did the egoistic
resignation of the modern dramatist content itself with the
bookseller's counter; on which he laid him out for market half-dead and
half-alive. Had the physically embodied drama cast itself upon the
bosom of the people: so did the "published" incarnation of the play lie
down beneath the feet of the art-critic's good pleasure. Accommodating
herself to one servile yoke after the other, dramatic poetry swung
herself aloft -- in her own idle fancy -- to unbounded freedom. Those
burdensome conditions under which alone a drama can step into life, she
might now forsooth cast overboard without ado; for only that which
wills to live, must hearken to necessity but that which wills to do
much more than just live, namely more than to lead a dead existence,
can make of itself what it pleases: the most arbitrary is to it the
most necessary; and the more her independence of the terms of physical
show, the more freely could poetry abandon herself to her own self-will
and absolute self-admiration.
Thus by the taking up of drama into literature, a mere new form was
found in which the art of poetry might indite herself afresh; only
borrowing from life the accidental stuff which she might twist and turn
to suit her solitary need, her own self-glorification. All matter and
each form were only there to help her introduce to the best graces of
the reader one abstract thought, the poet's idealised, beloved 'I.' How
faithlessly she forgot, the while, that she had first to thank them all
-- even the most complex of her forms -- to just this haughtily
despised material life! From the lyric through all the forms of poetry
down to this literary drama, there is not one which has not blossomed
in far purer and more noble shape from the bodily directness of the
people's life. What are all the products of the seeming spontaneous
action of abstract poetic art, exhibited in language, verse, and
expression, compared with the ever fresh-born beauty, variety, and
perfection of the people's lyric, whose teeming riches the spirit of
research is toiling now at last to drag from under the rubbish-heap of
ages?
But these folk-ballads are not so much as thinkable without their
twin-bred melodies: and what was not only said but also sung, was part
and parcel of life's immediate utterance. Who speaks and sings, at the
same time ex presses his feelings by gestures and by motion -- at least
whoever does this from sheer instinct, like the people -- though not
the tutored foundling of our song-professors. Where such an art still
flourishes, it finds of itself a constant train of fresh turns of
expression, fresh forms of composition ("Dichtung"); and the Athenians
teach us unmistakably, how, in the progress of this self-unfolding, the
highest artwork, tragedy, could come to birth. Opposed to this, the art
of poetry must ever stay unfruitful when she turns her back on life;
all her shaping then can never be aught else but that of fashion, that
of wilful combination; not invention. Unfortunate in her every rub with
Matter, she therefore turns for ever back to thought: that restless
mill-wheel of the wish, the ever craving, ever unstilled wish which --
thrusting off its only possible assuagement, in the world of sense --
must only wish itself eternally, eternally consume itself.
The literary drama can only redeem itself from this state of misery by
becoming the actual living drama. The path of that redemption has been
repeatedly entered, and even in our latter days; by many from good
intentions but, alas, by the majority for no other reason than that the
theatre had gradually become a more remunerative market than the
counter of the publisher.
The judgment of the public, in howsoever great a social disfigurement
it may show itself; holds ever by the direct and physical reality; nay,
the mutual give-and-take of the world of sense (die Wechselwirkung des
Sinnlichen) makes up, at bottom, what we call "publicity." Had the
impotent conceit of poetry withdrawn her from this immediate
interaction: so, as regards the drama, had the players seized it for
their own advantage. Most rightly does the public aspect of the stage
belong de facto to the performing fellowship alone; but where
everything was selfishly dissundering -- like the poet from this
fellowship, to which in the natural order of affairs he immediately
belonged -- there did the fellowship itself cut through the common band
which alone had made it an artistic one. Would the poet unconditionally
see himself alone upon the stage -- did he thus dispute in advance the
artistic value of the fellowship -- so, with far more natural excuse,
did the individual actor break his bonds in order to unconditionally
stamp himself as the only current coin; and herein he was supported by
the encouraging plaudits of the public, which ever holds by instinct to
the sheer and absolute show.
The art of comedy became through this the art of the comedian, a
personal virtuosity: i.e. that egoistic form of art which exists for
its exclusive self and wills but the glory of the absolute personality.
The common aim, through which alone the drama becomes a work of art,
lay quite beyond the ken of the individual virtuoso; and that which
should generate the art of comedy from out itself; as a common outcome
of the spirit of communion -- to wit the dramatic art-work -- that is
entirely neglected by this virtuoso or this guild of virtuosi, who only
seek the special thing that answers to their personal dexterity, the
thing that alone can pay its tribute to their vanity. Yet hundreds of
the best-skilled egoists, though all collected on one spot of earth,
cannot fulfil that task which can only be the work of communism
(Gemeinsamkeit); at least until they cease to be mere egoists. But so
long as they are this, their ground of common action -- only attainable
under external pressure -- is that of mutual hate and envy; and our
theatre, therefore, often resembles the battlefield of the two lions,
on which we can discover nothing but their tails, the sole remainder of
their mutual meal off one another.
Nevertheless, where this very virtuosity of the performer makes up the
total of the public's notion of theatric art, as in the generality of
the French theatres and even in the opera-world of Italy, we have at
hand a more natural expression of the bent to artistic exhibition, than
where the 'abstract' poet would fain usurp this bent for his own
self-glorification. Experience has often proved that from out that
world of virtuosi, given a true heart to beat in unison with the
artistic talent, there may come forth a dramatic performer who by one
solitary impersonation shall disclose to us the inmost essence of
dramatic art far more distinctly than a hundred art-dramas per se.
Where, on the other hand, dramatic art-poetry would experiment with
living actors, she can only manage in the end to quite confuse both
virtuosi and public; or else, for all her self-inflation, to betake
herself to shamefullest subservience. She either brings but stillborn
children into the world -- and that is the best result of her activity,
for then she does no harm -- or else she inoculates her constitutional
disease, of willing without can-ning, like a devastating plague into
the still half-healthy members of the art of comedy. In any case she
needs must follow the coercive laws of the most dependent lack of
self-dependence: in order to attain some semblance of a form, she must
look around for any form that may have sometime emanated from the life
of genuine comedy. This then she almost always borrows, in our latest
times, from the disciples of Molière alone.
With the lively, abstraction-hating people of France, the art of comedy
-- in so far as it was not governed by the influence of the Court --
lived for the most part its own indigenous life: amid the overpowering
hostility to art of our general social condition, whatever healthy
thing has been able to evolve from comedy, since the dying out of the
Shakespearian drama, we owe to the French alone. But even among them --
under pressure of the ruling world-geist that kills all common weal,
whose soul is Luxury and fashion -- the true, complete, dramatic
art-work could not so much as distantly appear: the only universal
factor of our modern world, the spirit of usury and speculation, has
with them also held each germ of true dramatic art in selfish
severance from its fellow. Art-forms to answer to this sordid spirit,
however, the French dramatic school has found, without a doubt: with
all the unseemliness of their contents, they evince uncommon skill in
making these contents as palatable as may be; and these forms have this
distinctive merit, that they have actually emanated from the inborn
spirit of the French comedian's art, and thus from life itself.
Our German dramatists, in their longing for some apparently necessary
form with which to clothe the arbitrary contents of their poetic
thought, and since they lacked the inborn plastic gift, set up this
needful form in pure caprice; for they seized upon the Frenchman's
'scheme,' without reflecting that this scheme had sprung from quite
another, and a genuine need. But he who does not act from sheer
necessity, may choose where'er he pleases. Thus our dramatists were not
quite satisfied with their adoption of French forms: the stew still
lacked of this or that: a pinch of Shakespearian audacity, a spice of
Spanish pathos, and, for a sauce, a remanet of Schiller's ideality or
Iffland's burgherly bonhomie. All this is now dished up with unheard
archness, according to the French recipe, and served with journalistic
reminiscences of the latest scandal; the favourite actor -- since the
real poet had not learnt how to play his comedies -- provided with the
rôle of some fictitious poet, wherever possible; with a further slice
from here or there thrown in to suit the special circumstance: and so
we have the modernest dramatic art-work, the poet who honestly writes
down himself, i.e., his palpable poetic incapacity.
Enough! of the unexampled squalor of our theatric poetry I with which
indeed we here have alone to do; since we need not draw the special
subdivision of literary poesy within our closer ken. For, with our eyes
directed toward the artwork of the future, we are seeking out poetic
art where she is struggling to become a living and immediate art, and
this is in the drama; not where she renounces every claim to this
life-issue, and yet -- for all her fill of thought -- but takes the
terms of her peculiar manufacture from the hopeless artistic unfitness
of our modern public life. This literary poesy (die Litteraturpoesie)
supplies the only solace -- however sad and impotent! -- of the lonely
human being of the present who longs to taste poetic food. Yet the
solace that she gives is truly but an access of the longing after life,
the longing for the living artwork; for the urgence of this longing is
her very soul, where this does not speak out, does not proclaim itself
with might and main, there has the last trace of verity departed from
this poesy too. The more honestly and tumultuously, however, does it
throb within her, so much the more veraciously does she admit her own
unsolaceable plight, and confess the only possible assuagement of her
longing, to be her own self-abrogation, her dissolution into life, into
the living Art-Work of the Future.
Let us ponder how this fervent, noble longing of literary poesy must
one day be responded to; and meanwhile let us leave our modern dramatic
poetry to the pompous triumphs of her own ridiculous vanity!
(Tr. W.A. Ellis, with some corrections and changes for readability)
--
Derrick Everett
======= Writing from 59°54'N 10°37'E =======
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