The Art-Work Of The Future Page 8

  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; 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 frllowships of players. At the end of the Middle Ages, we see such fellowships arising directly from the Folk; 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 Folk, 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 Phantasy 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 Folk'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 AEschylus 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 ! (20) How must he wrench his tuning-key, how tug and stretch the strings, until at last they snapped with one great whine I-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 exigence, 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!

  Did Shakespeare, in his stress for unadulterated Life, take 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 Folk: 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 unbound 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 live, namely 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 Folk'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 Folk,- 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 an one from honest yearning, but alas I by the majority for no other reason than that the Theatre had imperceptibly become a more remunerative market than the counter of the Publisher.

  The judgment (21) 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." (22) 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 (23) 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 tributeto 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 (24) 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 egoistic 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 seeming-necessary form wherewith 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 n
ecessity, 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 burgher 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 in sooth 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 Literature-poesy (die litteraturpoesie) supplies the only solace-however sad and impotent I-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.