Richard Wagner: The Art-Work of the Future (1849): Chapter 6
Derrick Everett
It is not the lonely spirit, striving by means of art for redemption
into nature, that can frame the art-work of the future; only the spirit
of fellowship, fulfilled by life, can bring this work to pass. Yet the
lonely one can prefigure it to himself; and the thing that saves his
preconception from becoming a mere idle fancy, is the very character of
his striving: his striving after nature. The mind that casts back
longing eyes to nature, and therefore goes hungry in the modern
present, sees not alone in nature's great sum-total, but also in the
human nature that history lays before it, the human types from whose
study it may reconcile itself with life in general. It recognises in
this nature a type for all the future, already shown in narrower
bounds; to widen out these bounds to broadest compass, rests on the
imaginative faculty of its nature-craving instinct.
Two cardinal moments of his development lie clear before us in the
history of man: the generic national, and the unnational universal. If
we still look forward to the future for the completion of the second
evolutionary step, yet in the past we have the rounded-off conclusion
of the first set, clear as day, before our eyes. To what a pitch man
once -- so far as, governed by generic ancestry, by community of
mother-tongue, by similarity of climate, and the natural surroundings
of a common fatherland, he yielded himself unconsciously to the
influence of nature -- to what a pitch man once was able to develop
himself beneath these moulding influences, we have certainly full
reason to acknowledge with most heartfelt thanks. It is in the natural
customs of all peoples, so far as they embrace the normal man, and even
of those decried as most uncultured, that we first learn the truth of
human nature in its full nobility and in its real beauty. Not one true
virtue has been adopted by any religion as its god's command, but it
was already in these natural customs; not one genuine idea of human
right has the later civilised state developed -- though, alas, to the
point of complete distortion! -- but it already found its sure
expression in them; not one veritable discovery for the common weal has
later culture made her own -- with arrogant ingratitude! -- but she
derived it from the fruits of the homely understanding of the stewards
of those customs.
That art is not an artificial product -- that the need of art is not an
arbitrary issue, but an inbred craving of the natural, genuine, and
uncorrupted man -- who proves this in more striking manner than just
these peoples? Nay, whence shall our uneasy "spirit" derive its proofs
of art's necessity, if not from the testimony of this artistic instinct
and its glorious fruits afforded by these peoples fostered by nature,
by the great People itself? Before what phenomenon do we stand with
more humiliating sense of the impotence of our frivolous culture, than
before the art of the Greeks? To this, to the art of the darlings of
all-loving nature, of those fairest children whom the great glad Mother
holds up to us before the darksome cloud of modern modish culture, as
the triumphant tokens of what she can bring forth -- let us look far
hence to glorious Greek art, and gather from its inner understanding
the outlines for the art-work of the future! Nature has done all that
she could do -- she has given birth to the Hellenic people, has fed it
at her breast and formed it by her mother-wisdom; she sets it now
before our gaze with all a mother's pride, and cries to wide mankind
with mother-love: "This have I done for you; now, of your love for one
another, do ye that which ye can!"
Thus have we then to turn Hellenic art into human art; to loose from it
the stipulations by which it was but an Hellenic and not a universal
art. The garment of religion, in which alone it was the common art of
Greece, and after whose removal it could only, as an egoistic, isolated
art-species, fulfil the needs of luxury -- however fair -- but no
longer those of fellowship; this specific garb of the Hellenic religion
we must stretch out until its folds embrace the religion of the future,
the religion of universal manhood, and thus to gain already a foretaste
of the art-work of the future. But this bond of union, this religion of
the future, we wretched ones shall never clasp the while we still are
lonely individuals, regardless of how many of us feel the spur towards
the art-work of the future. The art-work is the living presentation of
religion; but religions spring not from the artist's brain; their only
origin is in the people.
Let us then -- without a spark of egoistic vanity, without attempting
to console ourselves with any kind of self-derived illusion, but
honestly, lovingly and hopefully devoted to the art-work of the future
-- content ourselves to-day by testing first the nature of the species
of art which, in their shattered segregation, make up the general
substance of our modern art; let us sharpen our gaze for this
examination by casting our glance over Hellenic art; and then let us
draw a bold and confident conclusion about the great and universal
art-work of the future!
---- END OF PART ONE ----
(Tr. W.A. Ellis, with some corrections and changes for readability)
--
Derrick Everett
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