/lit/ - Literature

>>19714220
>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 [142] 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 [143] 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."

>>19690359
>The science of Æsthetics has at all times laid down Unity as a chief requirement from the artwork. In the abstract this Unity is difficult to dialectically define, and its misapprehension has led to many and grave mistakes. It comes out the plainest in the perfect artwork itself, for it is it that moves us to unbroken interest, and keeps the broad impression ever present. Indisputably this result is the most completely attained by the living represented drama; wherefore we have no hesitation in declaring the Drama the most perfect of artworks.
>The modern drama has a twofold origin: the one a natural, and peculiar to our historic evolution, namely, the romance the other an alien, and grafted on our evolution by reflection, namely, the Greek drama as looked at through the misunderstood rules of Aristotle.
>The real kernel of all our poesy may be found in the romance. In their endeavor to make this kernel as tasty as possible, our poets have repeatedly had recourse to a closer or more distant imitation of the Greek drama.
>The topmost flower of that drama which sprang directly from romance we have in the plays of Shakespeare; in the farthest removal from this drama, we find its diametrical opposite in the tragedie of Racine. Between these two extremes our whole remaining dramatic literature sways undecided to and fro. In order to apprehend the exact character of this wavering, we must look a little closer into the natural origin of our drama.
>As I am writing no history of the modern drama, but, agreeably to my object, have only to point out in its twofold development the chief lines along which the root difference between those two evolutionary paths is plainest visible, I have passed over the Spanish theatre, since in it alone those d iverse paths are characteristically crossed with one another. This makes it indeed of the highest significance in itself, but to us it affords no antitheses so marked as the two we find, with determinant influence upon all newer evolution of the drama , in Shakespeare and the French tragedie.

>>19675713
>the Feast of Thyestes would have been impossible among the Indians; but with such ghastly pictures could the human fancy play, now that the murder of man and beast had nothing strange for it. And why should the imagination of civilised modern man recoil in horror from such pictures, when it has accustomed itself to the sight of a Parisian slaughter-house in its early-morning traffic, and perhaps of a field of carnage on the evening of some glorious victory? In truth we seem to have merely improved on the spirit of Thyestes' feast, developing a heartless blindness to things that lay before our oldest ancestors in all their naked horror

>the Greek mind did not indeed avoid the awful side of life, but turned this very knowledge to a matter of artistic contemplation: it saw the terrible with wholest truth, but this truth itself became the spur to a re-presentment whose very truthfulness was beautiful. In the workings of the Grecian spirit we thus are made spectators of a kind of pastime, a play in whose vicissitudes the joy of Shaping seeks to counteract the awe of Knowing. Content with this, rejoicing in the semblance, since it has banned therein its truthfulness of knowledge, it asks not after the goal of Being, and like the Parsee creed it leaves the fight of Good and Evil undecided; willing to pay for a lovely life by death, it merely strives to beautify death also.

>as the sight of bullocks offered to the gods had become an abomination to us, in our neat water-swilled shambles a daily blood-bath is concealed from all who at their mid-day meal shall feast upon the limbs of murdered household animals dressed up beyond all recognition.

>>19669873
Still waiting for a film adaptation of Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg.

>>19665889
Wagner is more to blame for Hitler than Nietzsche.

>>19657625
>At lunch a recollection of Aeschylus’s chorus (the female hare and the eagle) causes him to remark on the nobility of this outlook, and he feels it was things like this that might have led to accusations of blasphemy against Aeschylus, this connection between holiness and Nature was probably at the bottom of the Eleusinian mysteries.

>Herr v. Stein reads to us the translation he has made of Aeschylus’s chorus, and it seems to us very good. “That is religion,” R. exclaims.

>R. then speaks again about this wonderful poem, which contains everything that one can call religion.

>A lot more about Aeschylus’s chorus, he says one could write a whole book about it.

>In the morning we talked at length about religion and art. R. describes how art works in metaphors and allegories as such but at the same time conveys to the emotions the truth behind the dogmas. Aeschylus’s Oresteia, he says, is undoubtedly more profound than all the Eleusinian mysteries.

>Speaking of the first scene in [Aeschylus’s] Choephoroi with its surgings and its constantly returning flow, he says, “I know something else like this: Trist. and Isolde in the 2nd act.”

>>19615164
>Homer really was the poetic par excellence, the source of all poetic art, the true creator

>mods deleted thread on Wagner's poetry
What's their problem?

Is the Ring the greatest drama ever written?

>>19602748

>>19580804
>But when Athens turned its eyes to Sparta, the worm of general egoism was already gnawing its destructive path into this fair State too. The Peloponnesian War had dragged it, all unwilling, into the whirlpool of the newer times; and Sparta had only been able to vanquish Athens by the very weapons which the Athenians had erewhile made so terrible and unassailable to it. Instead of their simple iron−bars those tokens of contempt for money, as compared with human worth the minted gold of Asia was heaped within the Spartan's coffers; leaving behind the ancient, frugal "public mess," he retired to his sumptuous banquet between his own four walls; and the noble love of man to man whose motive had been an even higher one than that of love to woman degenerated, as it had already done in the other Hellenic states, into its unnatural counterpart.
>The redemption of woman into participation in the nature of man is the outcome of christian-Germanic evolution. The Greek remained in ignorance of the psychic process of the ennobling of woman to the rank of man, To him everything appeared under its direct, unmediated aspect,—woman to him was woman, and man was man; and thus at the point where his love to woman was satisfied in accordance with nature, arose the spiritual demand for man.
>the process of the emancipation of women goes ahead only amid ecstatic convulsions. Love—tragedy.

>>19578594
He was scared of the real master.

>>19566176
>Though we have not been attempting an account of Art's historical development from the religious idea, but simply an outline of their mutual affinities, yet that historic career must be touched upon in dealing with the circumstance that it was almost solely plastic art, and that of Painting in particular, which could present the religious dogmas—originally themselves symbolical—in an ideally figurative form. Poetry, on the contrary, was constrained by their very symbolism to adhere to the form laid down by canon as a matter of realistic truth and implicit credence. As these dogmas themselves were figurative concepts, so the greatest poetic genius—whose only instruments are mental figures—could remodel or explain nothing without falling into heterodoxy, like all the philosopher-poets of the earliest centuries of the Church, who succumbed to the charge of heresy. Perhaps the poetic power bestowed on Dante was the greatest e'er within the reach of mortal; yet in his stupendous poem it is only where he can hold the visionary world aloof from dogma, that his true creative force is shewn, whereas he always handles the dogmatic concepts according to the Church's principle of literal credence; and thus these latter never leave that lowering artificiality to which we have already alluded, confronting us with horror, nay, absurdity, from the mouth of so great a poet.

Was he right?

>>19565713
>The redemption of woman into participation in the nature of man is the outcome of christian-Germanic evolution. The Greek remained in ignorance of the psychic process of the ennobling of woman to the rank of man, To him everything appeared under its direct, unmediated aspect,—woman to him was woman, and man was man; and thus at the point where his love to woman was satisfied in accordance with nature, arose the spiritual demand for man.
>the process of the emancipation of women goes ahead only amid ecstatic convulsions. Love—tragedy.

>the work of Homer is no unconscious fashioning of Nature's, but something infinitely higher; perhaps, the plainest manifestation of a godlike knowledge of all that lives.

>Perhaps the poetic power bestowed on Dante was the greatest e'er within the reach of mortal

>[Shakespeare's] work is the only veritable Drama; and what that implies, as work of Art, is shewn by our rating its author the profoundest poet of all time.

Why can't he make up his mind?

>>19553820

>>19531310
>'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.'
>One day, over lunch, Wagner rates Plato's Symposium above all other literary works: 'In Shakespeare we see Nature as it is, here we have the artistic awareness of the benefactor added; what would the world know about redeeming beauty without Plato?'
>One night they decide that there are seven great books. 'Over supper we discussed our indispensables and classified them thus: Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Plato's Symposium, Cervantes Don Quixote, the whole of Shakespeare, and Goethe's Faust.' (Dante likely being forgotten rather than ignored)
>'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!'

>The science of Æsthetics has at all times laid down Unity as a chief requirement from the artwork. In the abstract this Unity is difficult to dialectically define, and its misapprehension has led to many and grave mistakes. It comes out the plainest in the perfect artwork itself, for it is it that moves us to unbroken interest, and keeps the broad impression ever present. Indisputably this result is the most completely attained by the living represented drama; wherefore we have no hesitation in declaring the Drama the most perfect of artworks.

>>19513804
>[Richard] earnestly reproached Malwida [von Meysenbug] for not having her ward baptised. This was not right, he said, not everyone could fashion his religion for himself, and particularly in childhood one must have a feeling of cohesion. Nor should one be left to choose: rather it should be possible to say, You have been christened, you belong through baptism to Christ, now unite yourself once more with him through Holy Communion. Christening and Communion are indispensable, he said. No amount of knowledge can ever approach the effect of the latter. People who evade religion have a terrible shallowness, and are unable to feel anything in a religious spirit. (Cosima's Diary entry for 12 December 1873)

>>19509260
>The redemption of woman into participation in the nature of man is the outcome of christian-Germanic evolution. The Greek remained in ignorance of the psychic process of the ennobling of woman to the rank of man, To him everything appeared under its direct, unmediated aspect,—woman to him was woman, and man was man; and thus at the point where his love to woman was satisfied in accordance with nature, arose the spiritual demand for man.