/lit/ - Literature

>>23531166
Wagner's dramas.

>At lunch we touched on the subject of Countess Pourtales, R.s former friend, who completely ignored his presence in Berlin. I tell R. I find it incomprehensible that such a woman should allow so mean-looking a man as Joachim to gain an influence over her. "Oh," says R., "such women know that it is only through deeds that they can mean anything to us, whereas people like Joachim fasten themselves to the individuals whose influence is important to them, and these they flatter. Besides, women are slaves to the will, which dominates them. ‘Have you eyes?’ asks Hamlet, but this is not a matter of eyes, it is something darker. It is the energy of the will, not intelligence, not beauty, which fascinates a woman. Perhaps Nature thinks this offers more protection for her and her brood. The man of intelligence is irresponsible, etc."

>>23530783
>Around five o’clock he goes to bed, then gets up again and reads with interest some of Tolstoy’s Russian novel War and .Peace, which I have recommended to him, starting at the point I myself have reached. He is pleased by the observations on the art of war, saying that he, too, regards the warrior genius simply as a schoolmaster, like Moltke, for instance. One cannot ascribe such deeds as the siege of Metz to a single warrior genius but, rather, to the disciplined character and intelligence of officers and men.

>The conversation at lunch is very cheerful; R. is continuing to read the Russian novel with great interest and relates several things from it, how, for example, in his naivete Napoleon wished to receive the Boyars in Moscow!

>He does not go out today, but reads Tolstoy’s novel with interest. —

>However, to my surprise, he disciplines himself in the evening to be friendly, spending part of the time playing whist with my father and part talking to Jouk., Marie Gr., and me, mainly about Tolstoy’s novel, in which he particularly praises old Kutusov.

>We play whist, and to end the evening, R. reads to me from Tolstoy’s novel the episodes of the innocent man condemned to death and the poor dog howling when its master, the soldier, is shot dead!

>Since I am slowly getting on with Tolstoy’s novel, we talk about Nap. and the strange admiration he inspired in his contemporaries.

A special feature of the Greeks, which I believe is not to be found among us, is the sanctity and divinity of the curse laden individual who is being punished in behalf of a whole generation. Oedipus is quite godlike in his harshness against Polynices, it could be Zeus himself speaking, which is why, when he lays aside his last mortal frailty, he is at once summoned to the gods. That appears to us harsh, for we do not share the religious feelings of the Greeks.
— Richard Wagner

>>23451919
>If Dante once again was dowered with the Seer's eye—for he saw the Divine, though not the moving shapes of gods, as Homer—when we come to Ariosto things have faded to the fanciful refractions of Appearance; whereas Cervantes spied between the glintings of such arbitrary fancies the old-poetic world-soul's cloven quick, and sets that cleavage palpably before us in the lifelike actions of two figures seen in dream.

>The four most original characters literature has given us: Hamlet, Falstaff, D.Q. and Sancho.

>>23439399
>I have been thinking again about Don Quixote and, considering it from the angle of its ironic outlook on the world, I was reminded of a dialogue by Plato; it is in him, too, this irony, but there it appears free, confident, nothing is pressing on it. Whereas one senses the horrible pressure of Catholicism on Cervantes’s noble spirit; the way he finds it necessary to make the poor Moresco praise the Inquisition! In the Greek one sees the Olympic wreath, in the Spaniard the starving poet, treated by the nobility, just as D.Q. was treated, like a plaything, in a world hostile to things of the spirit. Oh, the misery of having been born in this millennium!

>>23413749
>The four most original characters literature has given us: Hamlet, Falstaff, D.Q. and Sancho.

>>23276274
>In the evening finished the Grimm essay; R. disputes the glorification of the English language in it; he says the only language which can be recognized as really beautiful is the one which is still attached to its roots, and it is a false optimism which induced Grimm to say that the mixing of the Latin and Germanic languages had produced perfection; such mixtures, R. says, are an evil, and the purer a language remains as it develops, the more significant it is. “Of course,” he concludes, “Grimm had given up all hope of a German culture (and one can’t blame him), and he was glad that at least one severed tribe had managed to get as far as the English and their culture had done.”

>In spite of a violent headache, R. spoke a lot with me early this morning about the German language, which has in his opinion not yet displayed all its riches, “for Lessing, finding it in the state it then was, constructed words based on foreign conceptions, which then dominated everything. It is fortunately true that these constructions were in the spirit of the German language, but the language has not yet undergone a development coming from its own roots.”

>The German language, he says, is now the only one which, as J. Grimm says, can be studied physiologically, not just in order to speak it or to read the classical writers (in contrast to French, English, and Italian). —

>At lunch R. said that W. v. Humboldt was driving him to despair with all his drivel about his ideas, excellent as these may be in themselves. He also expresses his antipathy toward the English language; the fact that in it a Shakesp. has emerged does not disturb him—that is an anomaly; but imaginative writing is possible only in a language in-which one feels every word to be alive. The German language is still half alive. He cites the verb “sprechen’’ [“to speak”] as a living word, whereas “reden” [“to talk”] is a constructed, dead word. I think I understand correctly what he then added: that English was a created language (under H. VII), since before that time French was spoken, and that Shakespeare was able to work creatively with a language in the process of creation, rather like Dante; however, by the time the mixtum compositum was finally established, poetry was already dead.

>>23169371
>After lunch he sings a melody from a Beethoven quartet and says: “Beethoven is the best of them all, because he has beauty. There are really only two forms of art, sculpture and music, the latter infinitely greater than the former, because it owes nothing to the realities of life. Literature one can’t really acknowledge as an art form; Goethe, who thought himself born to be a sculptor, felt that, and that is why he did not balk at making those terrible alterations in Romo and Juliet.”

>>23164927
he was an absolute sigma that never stopped until he made it. We're lucky he didn't actually get caught before he made it.
I think that is the only secret to all the big guys. Just working nonstop, and having the will and determination to go all-in and commit every day.

>>23067578
>In the antique Orchestra, almost completely surrounded by the amphitheatre, the tragic Chorus stood as in the public's heart: its songs and dances, instrumentally accompanied, rapt the nation of spectators to a state of clairvoyance in which the hero, now appearing in his mask upon the stage, had all the import of a ghostly vision. Now, if we think of Shakespeare's stage as pitched within the Orchestra itself, we at once perceive what an uncommon power of illusion must have been expected of the mime, if he was to bring the drama to convincing life under the spectator's very eyes. To this stage transplanted to the orchestra our modern proscenium bears the relation of that theatrum in theatro of which Shakespeare makes repeated use, presenting the performers of his actual drama with a second piece performed upon that doubly fictive stage by players playing at being players. I fancy this feature proves an almost concious knowledge, on the poet's part, of the original ideality of those scenic conventions which he here employs according to their traditional misunderstanding and abuse. His Chorus had become the drama itself, and moved in the Orchestra with so realistic a naturalism that it well might end by feeling itself the audience, and expressing in that capacity its approval or disapproval of, or even but its interest in, a second stage-play acted to it. Highly characteristic, too, is the light in which this poet sets this second play: the "Murder of Gonzago" in Hamlet shews us the whole rhetorical-pathos of Academic Tragedy, to whose actors the poet gets sent from the orchestral main-stage itself the cry to "leave their damnable faces."

>>23019933
>"I, too, thought today of Tristan and the Symposium. In Tristan it is also Eros who holds sway, and what in the one is philosophy is music in the other."

>In the evening R. wants Coriolanus, and he delights in it, saying, "Here is race, this is something for Gobineau." I: "Tristan is the music which removes all barriers, and that means all racial ones as well."

>>22850470
To the French, as representatives of modern civilisation, Shakespeare, considered seriously, to this day is a monstrosity; and even to the Germans he has remained a subject of constantly renewed investigation, with so little positive result that the most conflicting views and statements are forever cropping up again. Thus has this most bewildering of dramatists—already set down by some as an utterly irresponsible and untamed genius, without one trace of artistic culture—quite recently been credited again with the most systematic tendence of the didactic poet. Goethe, after introducing him in "Wilhelm Meister" as an "admirable writer," kept returning to the problem with increasing caution, and finally decided that here the higher tendence was to be sought, not in the poet, but in the embodied characters he brought before us in immediate action. Yet the closer these figures were inspected, the greater riddle became the artist's method: though the main plan of a piece was easy to perceive, and it was impossible to mistake the consequent development of its plot, for the most part pre-existing in the source selected, yet the marvellous "accidentiæ" in its working out, as also in the bearing of its dramatis personae, were inexplicable on any hypothesis of deliberate artistic scheming. Here we found such drastic individuality, that it often seemed like unaccountable caprice, whose sense we never really fathomed till we closed the book and saw the living drama move before our eyes; then stood before us life's own image, mirrored with resistless truth to nature, and filled us with the lofty terror of a ghostly vision. But how decipher in this magic spell the tokens of an "artwork"? Was the author of these plays a poet?

What little we know of his life makes answer with outspoken naïvety: he was a play-actor and manager, who wrote for himself and his troop these pieces that in after days amazed and poignantly perplexed our greatest poets; pieces that for the most part would not so much as have come down to us, had the unpretending prompt-books of the Globe Theatre not been rescued from oblivion in the nick of time by the printing-press. Lope de Vega, scarcely less a wonder, wrote his pieces from one day to the next in immediate contact with his actors and the stage; beside Corneille and Racine, the poets of façon, there stands the actor Molière, in whom alone production was alive; and midst his tragedy sublime stood Æschylus, the leader of its chorus.—Not to the Poet, but to the Dramatist must we look, for light upon the Drama's nature; and he stands no nearer to the poet proper than to the mime himself, from whose heart of hearts he must issue if as poet he means to "hold the mirror up to Nature."

>>22814981
The basis of the Shakespeare authorship question is an aesthetic problem mistaken for a historical one. From Wagner's lecture The Destiny of Opera:

>At anyrate we believe we shall really expedite the solution of an extremely difficult problem, if we define the Shakespearian Drama as a fixed mimetic improvisation of the highest poetic worth. For this explains at once each wondrous accidental in the bearing and discourse of characters alive to but one purpose, to be at this moment all that they are meant to seem to us to be, and to whom accordingly no word can come that lies outside this conjured nature; so that it would be positively laughable to us, upon closer consideration, if one of these figures were suddenly to pose as poet. This last is silent, and remains for us a riddle, such as Shakespeare.

From Cosima's diaries:

>In the evening R. reads some scenes from the conclusion of Henry IV, Part I; at lunch, talking of Goethe and Shakespeare, he had already said, “In the former one sees the great poet, how he arranges his material, how he shapes it; in the latter one sees none of that, he remains unfathomable; the only one like him is Homer, and that is why people have the idea that neither Homer nor Shakespeare ever existed.”

>>22812177
>The four most original characters literature has given us: Hamlet, Falstaff, D.Q. and Sancho.

>Goethe, Cervantes saw and created characters, D. Q., Sancho, Faust, Mephisto; Dante, Vergil were wanderers who looked around them, whereas Aeschylus spoke like a priest in the midst of a community. Shakespeare neither the one nor the other, the most enigmatic of them all.

>>22734733
>when we come to Luther, R. says, “The fellow was like me, had the writing itch, scribbled about everything.”

>>22705106
>While yesterday laughing over Gibbon’s childish description of the “barbarian” Germans, we find ourselves talking about J. Grimm’s incomparable achievements, and R. read me a few pages from his Mythology, which does indeed open up to one an entire world.

>In the evening Gibbon. Recalling his childish judgment on the Germans, R. says, “Yes, Jakob Grimm was a sort of mother figure.”

>In the evening Grimm’s German Language with much enjoyment. Reflections that myths have followed the same development as words; R. says, “Yes, history is rather monotonous, art provides the variation.”

>In the evening finished the Grimm essay; R. disputes the glorification of the English language in it; he says the only language which can be recognized as really beautiful is the one which is still attached to its roots, and it is a false optimism which induced Grimm to say that the mixing of the Latin and Germanic languages had produced perfection; such mixtures, R. says, are an evil, and the purer a language remains as it develops, the more significant it is. “Of course,” he concludes, “Grimm had given up all hope of a German culture (and one can’t blame him), and he was glad that at least one severed tribe had managed to get as
far as the English and their culture had done.”

>R. talks about foreign words and the whole idea of literature and says, “What we cannot express in our own language has no value for us.” He shows me J. Grimm’s Ancient Germanic Law, which he has now received and which he is glad to possess. When I expatiate on the excellence of a person like J. G., who has so much feeling for the German identity, R. says he feels downright offended by the way Grimm is nowadays taken to task, just because of a few weaknesses he showed (as, for example, regarding the Celts).

>In the evening R. again tries to read Freytag to us, but it is of no avail. R. says: “How different when J. Grimm or Uhland speaks about these things—how one feels the truth of it all! This book gives one the feeling that it has already been chewed over before.”

>In the evening the history of the Arabs, in which I am put off both by Herr Dozy’s view of the Goths and also by Count Baudissin’s negligent translation. “None of these people know our language,” says R. “They haven’t studied Grimm, and are still basing themselves on Lessing. Good God, whether fur or vor—how vivid Grimm makes it all!”

>The German language, he says, is now the only one which, as J. Grimm says, can be studied physiologically, not just in order to speak it or to read the classical writers (in contrast to French, English, and Italian). —

>>22683142
>At breakfast we talk about Hamlet, and R. says he is convinced that after the appearance of the ghost Hamlet is completely mad, not that he feigns madness, but has really become so. —

>>22546193
George comes out of the Symbolists who were dominated by Wagner's influence, and never really exceeded him. George picked up Mallarme's ideas, which were formed in response to Wagner's challenge to poetry (implicit in the Gesamtkunstwerk), and developed them in his own way. He wrote a lot of poems on Wagnerian topics when he was younger like Litanei and Algabal. But even in his later move away from aestheticism the influence of Wagner abounds, most notably as Nietzsche's importance to him grew. Many of the most distinctive poetic elements in Zarathustra come from the Ring Cycle, written by Wagner according to his palingenetic ideal for the German language. Even in a perceived opposition to Wagner, such as religion of music, Wagner's influence is important as he was the first to sound the field in which this discussion of poetry and art raged. The relation between music and poetry, Apollo and Dionysus, art as religion, the revival of living myth, the historical destiny of the German language, opposition to modernity, etc. George's adoration of the 'word' is unimaginable except in the context of late 19th century aesthetics.

>>22537324
>“So far,” R. says, “we have been great in defence, dispelling alien elements which we could not assimilate; the Teutoburger Wald was a rejection of the Roman influence, the Reformation also a rejection, our great literature a rejection of the influence of the French; the only positive thing so far has been our music—-Beethoven.” “And Faust" I ask. “It is really just a sort of sketch,” R. says, “which Goethe himself looked upon in puzzlement, as a curiosity—he himself did not consider it a finished work of art.”

>He says Faust is the finest book ever written in the German language.

>Talking about Goethe and whether he can be regarded as the sum total of the German spirit, R. says, “I think he can, if one considers how he absorbed all the revivals and discoveries of the 18th century in this free manner; and in the ultimate things he was always full of prescience.”

>>22327932
>Then he spoke about Schumann and said, “No dedicated artist or poet goes mad, and it is no credit to Kleist that he committed suicide, for it is precisely this which marks out the artist—that through all torments he retains the serene capacity to observe.”

>The Bayreuther Blätter—an article on Kleist by Wolz., which I suggest we read—arouses his anger. He says one knows all Kleist’s mental struggles by heart, they were those of an adolescent schoolboy; what is this striving for truth supposed to mean? One is truthful, and that’s that.

>R. gets up in somewhat low spirits, we talk about life, and I ask him if he does not also feel that, if Kleist had known the teachings of Buddha and Schopenhauer, he would have lost his leanings toward suicide. He replies, “Yes.”

>>22244925
Some excerpts from Cosima Wagner's diaries about Hamlet:

>At breakfast we talk about Hamlet, and R. says he is convinced that after the appearance of the ghost Hamlet is completely mad, not that he feigns madness, but has really become so.

>After lunch, when he is crushing out his cigarette and making sure it is extinguished, he thinks of Othello and Desdemona [...]. Beyond words—also as drama; Hamlet, through the nature of its material, weakly based in comparison, R. remarks, it tends to lose itself in length; not killing [Claudius] because he is at prayer, making the journey to England—these are dramatically almost embarrassing, though entirely necessary for displaying character.

>Then he talks about actors, who put everything into words, and he thinks of the terrible meaning this free speaking acquires in the figure of Hamlet. He remarked how foolish it was to ascribe a general philosophical meaning to his “To be or not to be”—it was just Hamlet speaking.

>Then he wishes to talk of other things, he brings up “To be or not to be” and says it cannot be spoken too morbidly, indeed even sentimentally—it is a brooding, an outpouring, to which it is foolish to ascribe any philosophical meaning.

>>22218750
>He says he can well understand why Goethe, out of his sense of the sacredness of Nature, felt the urge to examine things individually, for one can never pay too much attention to the individual element—to pursue Nature as a whole, to see it as a cosmos, is foolishness.

>>22126110
Bloom was the inferior writer on Shakespeare. See Wagner's lecture The Destiny of Opera and essay Actors and Singers instead.

>>21890257
If you don't understand this you don't understand Shakespeare:

>To the French, as representatives of modern civilisation, Shakespeare, considered seriously, to this day is a monstrosity; and even to the Germans he has remained a subject of constantly renewed investigation, with so little positive result that the most conflicting views and statements are forever cropping up again. Thus has this most bewildering of dramatists—already set down by some as an utterly irresponsible and untamed genius, without one trace of artistic culture—quite recently been credited again with the most systematic tendence of the didactic poet. Goethe, after introducing him in "Wilhelm Meister" as an "admirable writer," kept returning to the problem with increasing caution, and finally decided that here the higher tendence was to be sought, not in the poet, but in the embodied characters he brought before us in immediate action. Yet the closer these figures were inspected, the greater riddle became the artist's method: though the main plan of a piece was easy to perceive, and it was impossible to mistake the consequent development of its plot, for the most part pre-existing in the source selected, yet the marvellous "accidentiæ" in its working out, as also in the bearing of its dramatis personae, were inexplicable on any hypothesis of deliberate artistic scheming. Here we found such drastic individuality, that it often seemed like unaccountable caprice, whose sense we never really fathomed till we closed the book and saw the living drama move before our eyes; then stood before us life's own image, mirrored with resistless truth to nature, and filled us with the lofty terror of a ghostly vision. But how decipher in this magic spell the tokens of an "artwork"? Was the author of these plays a poet?

>What little we know of his life makes answer with outspoken naïvety: he was a play-actor and manager, who wrote for himself and his troop these pieces that in after days amazed and poignantly perplexed our greatest poets; pieces that for the most part would not so much as have come down to us, had the unpretending prompt-books of the Globe Theatre not been rescued from oblivion in the nick of time by the printing-press. Lope de Vega, scarcely less a wonder, wrote his pieces from one day to the next in immediate contact with his actors and the stage; beside Corneille and Racine, the poets of façon, there stands the actor Molière, in whom alone production was alive; and midst his tragedy sublime stood Æschylus, the leader of its chorus.—Not to the Poet, but to the Dramatist must we look, for light upon the Drama's nature; and he stands no nearer to the poet proper than to the mime himself, from whose heart of hearts he must issue if as poet he means to "hold the mirror up to Nature."