/lit/ - Literature

>>23411272
Difficult as this is, we believe that we can most surely gain insight into the nature of music as art by considering the work of the inspired musician. In many respects this must be fundamentally different from the work of other artists. We had to recognise that with the latter it had to start from the pure will-free contemplation of objects just as it has to be produced again for the onlooker by the effect of the presented artwork. Such an object which is by pure contemplation to be elevated to Idea does not present itself to the musician; for his music is in itself an idea of the world in which the world directly presents its nature, while in other arts it is presented only through the intermediary of cognition. This can only be understood as the individual Will (reduced to silence in the visual artist by pure contemplation) being awakened in the musician as universal Will and as such being well and truly recognised itself, over and above all contemplation, as self-conscious. Hence the very differing circumstances of the creative musician and the designing artist; hence the fundamentally different effect of music and painting. Here a sense of deep calm; there the highest stimulation of the Will. But this means only that we are here thinking of the Will caught up in the individual as well as in the delusion that it is distinct from the nature of things outside himself, a Will which transcends its boundaries only in pure disinterested contemplation of objects. On the other hand, the Will of the musician at once feels itself united above all bounds of individuality: for hearing opens the gate through which the world comes to him and he to it. This breaking down of all boundaries of appearance must necessarily evoke in the inspired musician an incomparable sense of rapture. In this rapture the Will recognises itself as all-powerful: it does not have silently to refrain from observation but it proclaims itself aloud as a conscious idea of the world. Only one state can surpass his: that of the saint, especially since his circumstances are constant and imperturbable, whereas the musician’s rapturous vision has to alternate with the constantly returning state of his individual consciousness; and we must consider this state the more wretched in that his enthusiasm had raised him higher above all boundaries of individuality. The sufferings with which the musician has to pay for the enthusiasm which so captivates us, may make him seem more worthy of veneration than other artists, with some claim, indeed, to sainthood. For his art truly relates to the complex of the other arts as does religion to the church.

Carlyle has plainly proved to us the natural relation of all Colonies to their mother-land: as boughs lopped off a tree and rooted bear none but its own life within them, grow old and die with it, so the farthest transplantations of a people's branches remain directly bound up with its life; they may wear the illusive look of youth, but rest upon the selfsame root on which the trunk has thriven, aged, turned sere, and dies. History teaches us that new stocks alone can start new life upon the soil of older and decaying peoples, but fall into a like decay when crossed with these. And should there be a possibility of the German stocks returning to a vitality quite lost to the so-called Latin world through its total Semitising, it could only be because their natural development had been arrested by their grafting on that world, and, led by their historic sufferings to knowledge of their imminent degeneration, they now were driven to save their purer remnant by transplanting it anew to virgin soil. To recognise this remnant, to prove it still alive in us and sound of seed, might then become our weightiest task: and, cheered by such a demonstration, could we but frame our measures on the laws of Nature—who offers us in visible mould the only proper guidance to all fashioning of both the individual and the species—we then might feel more justified in asking what may be the goal of this so enigmatic being of the world.
A difficult task indeed; all hurry must imperil the attempt at its solution: the sharper we thought to draw the outlines of the future, the less surely would they represent the natural course of things. Above all, our wisdom won in service of the modern State would have to hold its peace entirely, since State and Church could have no lesson for us save the warning of their dire example. None too far from the desired attainment could we begin, to keep the purely-Human in harmonious concord with the ever-Natural. If soberly we march ahead with measured steps, we shall know that we are continuing the life-work of our great poet, and feel ourselves conducted on the "rightful path" by his propitious footprints.
I have no need, my friend, to challenge you to take your share in such a work: in the best of senses you are engaged therein already.

Richard Wagner.
Venice, 31. January 1883.

>>23183722
Wagner on the benefits of studying the Greeks:

>In the past century, when the School was labouring under the full incubus of pedantry and what we now call "Zopf" ("pigtail"), there evolved from it a Winckelmann, a Lessing, Wieland, and a Goethe. When Lessing cast himself upon the Theatre, he was excommunicated by the School: yet Lessing, of all men, is quite unthinkable without the education he received in just that School. Rightly enough: for that School still clove to the classic principle of Humanism, whence had issued the great figures, and great movements of the era of Rebirth and Reformation. Greek and Roman classics formed the ground work of these schools, in which the purely utilitarian was as good as unknown, or not yet advocated. Despite the character of utter dryness and sterility that necessarily stamped itself upon classical studies in the days of the German spirit's deepest decline, through their lack of any living fecundation from just that spirit, the Schools at least maintained alive the source of all fair humanising culture of more recent times; in a similar, though converse, fashion as the Mastersingers of Nuremburg, at the prime of classic Humanism, preserved for the eye of genius the old-German mode of poetry. It was a time of fairest hope, when Goethe, nursed in that school of Classic pedantry, sang his stalwart praises of the scoffed-at and forgotten Hans Sachs; when he triumphantly expounded Erwin's Strassburg minster to the world,—when the spirit of old Classicism took fresh life unto itself from the poet-warmth of our great masters, and from the stage the "Bride of Messina" re-illumed in age and youth the study of the mighty Greeks. Then 'twas no shame for the School, to go hand in hand with the Theatre: the teacher knew that what his pupils could not learn from him, they there would learn, and with him—noble, vibrant warmth in the judgment of those great problems of life to which the pupil was then brought up.

Cont

>>23010279
>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.

>>22475647
>Fashion's invention is therefore mechanical. But the mechanical is herein distinguished from the artistic: that it fares from derivative to derivative, from means to means, to finally bring forth but one more mean, the Machine. Whereas the artistic strikes the very opposite path: throws means on means behind it, pierces through derivative after derivative, to arrive at last at the source of every derivation, of every mean, in Nature's self, and there to slake its need in understanding.
>Thus the Machine is the cold and heartless ally of luxury-craving men. Through the machine have they at last made even human reason their liege subject; for, led astray from Art's discovery, dishonoured and disowned, it consumes itself at last in mechanical refinements, in absorption into the Machine, instead of in absorption into Nature in the Art-work.
- The Artwork of the Future

>In no other way do the French show us that they are the dominant people in present day civilisation than by the fact that our imagination enters the realm of the absurd if we suppose for a moment that we can liberate ourselves from their fashion. We at once recognise that a ‘German fashion’ in opposition to French fashion would be ridiculous; and, since we naturally rebel against its domination, we finally see that we are the victims of a real curse from which only an absolutely fundamental rebirth can redeem us. Our entire nature would have to change in such a way that the very concept of fashion would have completely to lose its meaning for the way we shape even our external life.

>Given the constant need for novelty (since fashion itself can never produce anything really new) an alternation of extremes is placed at the disposal of fashion as the only way out: it is actually this tendency onto which our creative artists, oddly advised, finally latch in order to produce once more noble art forms (though not of course of their own invention). The classical style and rococo, gothic and renaissance, now alternate; factories deliver Laocoön groups, Chinese porcelain, copies of Raphael and Murillo, Etruscan vases, medieval tapestries; also furniture à la Pompadour, plaster figures à la Louis XIV; the architect incorporates the whole into the Florentine style and crowns it with an Ariadne group.
>‘Modern art’ now also becomes a new principle for the aesthetician: its originality consists of its total lack of originality and its immeasurable advantage lies in its realisation of all styles of art, which have now become familiar to all and sundry and usable by every one according to arbitrary taste.
- Beethoven

It is not difficult to see how Parisian culture is for Wagner the antecedent of a globalised 'culture' of production and cultural sterility.