Wagner's letter to a young dramatist

[Anonymous No.23406429]

Sight, sight, real sight — is what all lack. "Where are your eyes? Your eyes?"—one might forever cry to this eternally gossiping and eavesdropping world, where staring takes the place of sight. Who once has truly seen, knows what to think of it.
More than all Philosophy, Ethnology and History, one hour of genuine sight once taught me. It was the closing day of the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1867. The schools had free admittance on that day. Arrested in my egress from the building by the entry of thousands of male and female pupils of the Paris schools, for a whole hour I remained lost in inspection of almost every unit in this population of a future. The experience of that passing hour took such portentous shape at last, that I fell into a fit of tears and sobbing: this was remarked by a spiritual Sister who was conducting one of the troops of girls with utmost heed and scarcely dared to lift her eyes at the gate of entrance; her glance met mine too fleetingly to possibly awake in her an understanding of my state; yet I had just been practising my sight so keenly, that in that glance I read an inexpressibly beautiful solicitude as soul of all her life. This seized me all the more impressively, as in not one of the countless rows of led and leaders had I met its fellow, or anything alike. On the contrary, each face had filled me with dismay and sorrow: I saw all vices of the world-metropolis in embryo; by side of sickliness and stuntedness came coarseness and bad passions, hebetude and smothering of natural animation, fear and shrinking hand in hand with brazenness and cunning. And all this led by cleric teachers, for the most part, dressed in the hideous elegance of the new-fangled priesthood; themselves quite will-less, strict and harsh, yet more obeying than obeyed. All without soul—except that one poor sister.

[Anonymous No.23406432]

A long deep silence rested me from the impression of that monstrous sight. Sight and silence: these after all may prove the elements of worthy rescue from this world. Only who lifts his voice from such a silence, may claim at length a hearing. You, my still so youthful friend, have won that right, at least in my eyes; and what I mean thereby, I now would state more plainly.
To speak of the things of this world seems mighty easy, since all the world can talk of nothing else: but so to shew them that themselves they speak, is lent to few. To the world one can only speak when one shuts it completely out of one's sight. Who could address a Reichstag meeting, for instance, if he literally saw it? The parliamentary orator declaims to an abstractum, to parties, opinions, which style themselves in their turn ''views" ("Anschauungen"); for all the people sitting there have changed to Views, and it is so hard to call them to account for insults because they say they never meant a person, but merely a view. I fancy that anyone who had mustered such an assembly man for man with seeing eyes, as fell to my lot with that Paris school-treat, would never say a word to it again in all his life. How indeed could he go on speaking to people to whom everything is shadow, mere view without perceptibility? Shew them the portraits of Gustavus Adolphus and Wallenstein, side by side, and ask them which of these two was the free hero, which the designing intriguer; they point to Wallenstein as the hero, and Gustavus as the plotter, because it is their " view."—
But these uninteresting nobodies, how different they seem at once when a Shakespeare bids them speak to us again: we hang upon their silliest words, those words the poet in his lifetime met by lofty silence. His silence here has turned to revelation; and the world from which we are transported, that world to which we now have nothing more to say, appears redeemed in the great poet's smile.

[Anonymous No.23406436]

And this is of the essence of Drama, that is no form of poetry, but the likeness of the world reflected by our silent soul. Let those gentry of "views" go on writing their plays by the hundred, to mirror back their views; they cannot mislead us if we seek our own way to the Drama by mastering the art, not of talking about men and things, but of letting them speak for themselves. The success of your very first attempts in this art, dear friend, is explained at once by your having made that see-ing silence yours; for only thence can spring the force to re-present the seen. You had looked on History and its events, and could summon them to speech because you shewed us neither altogether History nor its events, which will always be obscure to us, but let historic persons speak, the persons witnessed in their deeds and sufferings. That History, in which no century, no decad e'er goes by without its tale of wellnigh nothing but the human race's shame,—we will leave it to the views of our Professors, to confirm their faith in constant progress; we have to do with men whom, the greater their pre-eminence, the less has History at any time known what to make of: their overstepping of the common bounds of Will, impelled by stern necessity, alone can give us such a comprehensive survey of the world that we forget at last its history,—the see-er's only possible reconcilement to it.
And so your scenes, instead of being simply treatises in form of dialogue, have won that true dramatic life which fascinates at once with the delight of seeing. They treat of no abstractions: your figures and their surroundings step before us full of life, quite individual and unexchangeable,—here Catherine of Sienna, there Luther,—all clad in flesh and palpitant as these.
Yet it is unmistakable that your desire to dramatise arose from the over-fulness of your heart. That about which we are more and more averse to talk, must speak out of and for itself. True, that we have views, and real views too; whereas those Reichs-professors use the term in pure confusion, as they find they cannot even speak of notions of their own, but at the most opinions, and opinions borrowed from the ruling public ones. Our beholdings of the world, however, have become our great and intimate concern. We ask ourselves the fate of this acknowledged world; and as in it we suffer and see others suffer, we seek a cure, or haply an ennoblement of Suffering. If we with all existing things are doomed to founder, —in that, too, will we see a goal, and shape our course to founder nobly.

[Anonymous No.23406440]

The course to which we thus devote our lives you have defined with such perfect plainness, simplicity and conclusive eloquence in your Solon's answer to a question of Croesus' ["Think'st thou, because I call myself philosopher, that I rate love and life as nothing worth? Nay, I know no surer truth than this: whatever be the mighty secret at the back of things, the approach to it stands open to us in this poor life of ours alone, and thus our perishable actions bear withal such earnest, deep, and ineluctable significance."], that I fain would stamp those words as fundamental theme of our further converse, and hence persuaded you to make them salient to the eye in type. Only in the light of that saying of your sage's, can the world seem worth our spending on it the sorest efforts of our lives, for only in such efforts can its meaning come to light. And even if the plan of your succeeding dramatic sketches was not dictated by a train of thoughts dependent on that fundamental theme, it yet was natural that each of them should stand in some relation to it. Thus you reach at last the picture "Homeless," with which you close your pregnant series for the present. As this displays an incident from modern life, it points us all directly back to life itself. Here we stand once more at brink of the abyss we dare not shun in coward dread, if we mean to prove our genuine saturation by that basic thought. Eh! it appears that deeds are wanted more than ever; though you yourself have truly shewn the curse that weighs on every action of the noblest, a curse which seems begotten of the world's dim consciousness that it is past all rescue. So, if our heart bids fair to sink, we'll call to mind your Solon. If we cannot redeem the world from its curse, yet active examples of most serious recognition of the possibility of future rescue may be given. We have to seek the paths which Nature herself may have prepared for us with tender care and forethought. These Goethe sought, and thus became so inspiriting a model to us. That the Devil himself must help the greybeard "Faust" to found a home for man's free action, may prove indeed that this foundation was yet no lasting refuge of the Pure: but it robbed the Devil of his mortgaged soul, for an angel of heaven loved the tireless one. In your comments on his "Wanderjahre" you have admirably shewn, my friend, how earnestly the poet tried to trace the preservative and evolutionary work of Nature in these social instincts of mankind: he was filled, beyond dispute, with the idea of a re-foundation of Society upon a new domain of earth. But with his usual perspicacity he saw that little could be awaited from mere emigration, if it had not been preceded by a new-birth of mind and spirit in the mother-home; and it was this he sought to set before us in inspiring emblems.

[Anonymous No.23406445]

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.

[Anonymous No.23406555]

>>23406429
What a pretentious fuckwad. I hate him.

>captcha: SSSS4

[Anonymous No.23406565]

>>23406555
>t. lacks sight

[Anonymous No.23406571]

>>23406565
The opposite actually. When I read that arrogant pricks words, I see nothing but Irony. He thinks everyone around him is the prototype of a doomed future, but it's him. He is the embodiment of the arrogance which has doomed White Christendom. He is a symptom of the disease. What an arrogant little man.

[Anonymous No.23406591]

>>23406571
No, it's small minded plebs like yourself who doomed this civilisation. The same instinct today that assumes an all white nation negates all larger questions is what led those in the 19th century into a total ignorance of the imminent dangers of modernity. Wagner could see the end coming.

[Anonymous No.23406596]

>>23406429
Lettuce be reality: Wagner is only popular with stormfags here. I’d wager that anons who like him consider themselves far right or Nazi sympathizers

[Anonymous No.23406648]

>>23406591
Wagner saw only a reflection of himself. A small arrogant man.

[Anonymous No.23406664]

>>23406571
I'd bet good money that this poster is a seething little nietzschefag who mindlessly consumes the opinions of his misanthropic prophet like they're gospel truth.

[Anonymous No.23406682]

>>23406664
You would lose that good money, lmao. I've never cared about Nietzsche in my life and I can't stand misanthropes.

Why do you posters, imbeciles who think they can infer all sorts of things about people (just like Wagner here), have this opinion of yourselves? You're always, ALWAYS wrong. I've yet to have a single one of you guess anything right about me, but you keep on doing it. Fucking hilarious.

[Anonymous No.23406817]

>>23406648
19th century Paris was hardly even Christian. It's the complete lack of the Christian spirit in Parisian culture that Wagner is describing. But if you tell a /pol/tard this it will fall on deaf ears, because 19th century Europe was 'muh trad Western civilisation'. Paris was an epicentre of decadence.

[Anonymous No.23407762]

>>23406596
If you actually care about art then Wagner is at the top of the game whether you're a Marxist or a Fascist.