It is quite impossible otherwise: the observer who is confronted with
a nature such as Wagner's must, willy-nilly, turn his eyes from time
to time upon himself, upon his insignificance and frailty, and ask
himself, What concern is this of thine? Why, pray, art thou there at
all? Maybe he will find no answer to these questions, in which case he
will remain estranged and confounded, face to face with his own
personality. Let it then suffice him that he has experienced this
feeling; let the fact _that he has felt strange and embarrassed in the
presence of his own soul_ be the answer to his question For it is
precisely by virtue of this feeling that he shows the most powerful
manifestation of life in Wagner--the very kernel of his strength--that
demoniacal _magnetism_ and gift of imparting oneself to others, which is
peculiar to his nature, and by which it not only conveys itself to
other beings, but also absorbs other beings into itself; thus
attaining to its greatness by giving and by taking. As the observer is
apparently subject to Wagner's exuberant and prodigally generous
nature, he partakes of its strength, and thereby becomes formidable
_through him and to him_. And every one who critically examines himself
knows that a certain mysterious antagonism is necessary to the process
of mutual study. Should his art lead us to experience all that falls
to the lot of a soul engaged upon a journey, _i.e._ feeling sympathy
with others and sharing their fate, and seeing the world through
hundreds of different eyes, we are then able, from such a distance,
and under such strange influences, to contemplate him, once we have
lived his life. We then feel with the utmost certainty that in Wagner
the whole visible world desires to be spiritualised, absorbed, and
lost in the world of sounds. In Wagner, too, the world of sounds seeks
to manifest itself as a phenomenon for the sight; it seeks, as it
were, to incarnate itself. His art always leads him into two distinct
directions, from the world of the play of sound to the mysterious and
yet related world of visible things, and _vice versâ_. He is continually
forced--and the observer with him--to re-translate the visible into
spiritual and primeval life, and likewise to perceive the most hidden
interstices of the soul as something concrete and to lend it a visible
body. This constitutes the nature of the _dithyrambic dramatist_, if the
meaning given to the term includes also the actor, the poet, and the
musician; a conception necessarily borrowed from Æschylus and the
contemporary Greek artists--the only perfect examples of the
dithyrambic dramatist before Wagner. If attempts have been made to
trace the most wonderful developments to inner obstacles or
deficiencies, if, for instance, in Goethe's case, poetry was merely
the refuge of a foiled talent for painting; if one may speak of
Schiller's dramas as of vulgar eloquence directed into uncommon
channels; if Wagner himself tries to account for the development of
music among the Germans by showing that, inasmuch as they are devoid
of the entrancing stimulus of a natural gift for singing, they were
compelled to take up instrumental music with the same profound
seriousness as that with which their reformers took up
Christianity,--if, on the same principle, it were sought to associate
Wagner's development with an inner barrier of the same kind, it would
then be necessary to recognise in him a primitive dramatic talent,
which had to renounce all possibility of satisfying its needs by the
quickest and most methods, and which found its salvation and its means
of expression in drawing all arts to it for one great dramatic
display. But then one would also have to assume that the most powerful
musician, owing to his despair at having to appeal to people who were
either only semi-musical or not musical at all, violently opened a
road for himself to the other arts, in order to acquire that capacity
for diversely communicating himself to others, by which he compelled
them to understand him, by which he compelled the masses to understand
him. However the development of the born dramatist may be pictured, in
his ultimate expression he is a being free from all inner barriers and
voids: the real, emancipated artist cannot help himself, he must think
in the spirit of all the arts at once, as the mediator and intercessor
between apparently separated spheres, the one who reinstalls the unity
and wholeness of the artistic faculty, which cannot be divined or
reasoned out, but can only be revealed by deeds themselves. But he in
whose presence this deed is performed will be overcome by its gruesome
and seductive charm: in a flash he will be confronted with a power
which cancels both resistance and reason, and makes every detail of
life appear irrational and incomprehensible. Carried away from
himself, he seems to be suspended in a mysterious fiery element; he
ceases to understand himself, the standard of everything has fallen
from his hands; everything stereotyped and fixed begins to totter;
every object seems to acquire a strange colour and to tell us its tale
by means of new symbols;--one would need to be a Plato in order to
discover, amid this confusion of delight and fear, how he accomplishes
the feat, and to say to the dramatist: "Should a man come into our
midst who possessed sufficient knowledge to simulate or imitate
anything, we would honour him as something wonderful and holy; we
would even anoint him and adorn his brow with a sacred diadem; but we
would urge him to leave our circle for another, notwithstanding." It
may be that a member of the Platonic community would have been able to
chasten himself to such conduct: we, however, who live in a very
different community, long for, and earnestly desire, the charmer to
come to us, although we may fear him already,--and we only desire his
presence in order that our society and the mischievous reason and
might of which it is the incarnation may be confuted. A state of human
civilisation, of human society, morality, order, and general
organisation which would be able to dispense with the services of an
imitative artist or mimic, is not perhaps so utterly inconceivable;
but this Perhaps is probably the most daring that has ever been
posited, and is equivalent to the gravest expression of doubt. The
only man who ought to be at liberty to speak of such a possibility is
he who could beget, and have the presentiment of, the highest phase of
all that is to come, and who then, like Faust, would either be obliged
to turn blind, or be permitted to become so. For we have no right to
this blindness; whereas Plato, after he had cast that one glance into
the ideal Hellenic, had the right to be blind to all Hellenism. For
this reason, we others are in much greater need of art; because it was
_in the presence of the realistic that our eyes began to see_, and we
require the complete dramatist in order that he may relieve us, if
only for an hour or so, of the insufferable tension arising from our
knowledge of the chasm which lies between our capabilities and the
duties we have to perform. With him we ascend to the highest pinnacle
of feeling, and only then do we fancy we have returned to nature's
unbounded freedom, to the actual realm of liberty. From this point of
vantage we can see ourselves and our fellows emerge as something
sublime from an immense mirage, and we see the deep meaning in our
struggles, in our victories and defeats; we begin to find pleasure in
the rhythm of passion and in its victim in the hero's every footfall
we distinguish the hollow echo of death, and in its proximity we
realise the greatest charm of life: thus transformed into tragic men,
we return again to life with comfort in our souls. We are conscious of
a new feeling of security, as if we had found a road leading out of
the greatest dangers, excesses, and ecstasies, back to the limited and
the familiar: there where our relations with our fellows seem to
partake of a superior benevolence, and are at all events more noble
than they were. For here, everything seemingly serious and needful,
which appears to lead to a definite goal, resembles only detached
fragments when compared with the path we ourselves have trodden, even
in our dreams,--detached fragments of that complete and grand
experience whereof we cannot even think without a thrill. Yes, we
shall even fall into danger and be tempted to take life too easily,
simply because in art we were in such deadly earnest concerning it, as
Wagner says somewhere anent certain incidents in his own life. For if
we who are but the spectators and not the creators of this display of
dithyrambic dramatic art, can almost imagine a dream to be more real
than the actual experiences of our wakeful hours, how much more keenly
must the creator realise this contrast! There he stands amid all the
clamorous appeals and importunities of the day, and of the necessities
of life; in the midst of Society and State--and as what does he stand
there? Maybe he is the only wakeful one, the only being really and
truly conscious, among a host of confused and tormented sleepers,
among a multitude of deluded and suffering people. He may even feel
like a victim of chronic insomnia, and fancy himself obliged to bring
his clear, sleepless, and conscious life into touch with somnambulists
and ghostly well-intentioned creatures. Thus everything that others
regard as commonplace strikes him as weird, and he is tempted to meet
the whole phenomenon with haughty mockery. But how peculiarly this
feeling is crossed, when another force happens to join his quivering
pride, the craving of the heights for the depths, the affectionate
yearning for earth, for happiness and for fellowship--then, when he
thinks of all he misses as a hermit-creator, he feels as though he
ought to descend to the earth like a god, and bear all that is weak,
human, and lost, "in fiery arms up to heaven," so as to obtain love
and no longer worship only, and to be able to lose himself completely
in his love. But it is just this contradiction which is the miraculous
fact in the soul of the dithyrambic dramatist, and if his nature can
be understood at all, surely it must be here. For his creative moments
in art occur when the antagonism between his feelings is at its height
and when his proud astonishment and wonder at the world combine with
the ardent desire to approach that same world as a lover. The glances
he then bends towards the earth are always rays of sunlight which
"draw up water," form mist, and gather storm-clouds. _Clear-sighted and
prudent, loving and unselfish at the same time_, his glance is
projected downwards; and all things that are illumined by this double
ray of light, nature conjures to discharge their strength, to reveal
their most hidden secret, and this through bashfulness. It is more
than a mere figure of speech to say that he surprised Nature with that
glance, that he caught her naked; that is why she would conceal her
shame by seeming precisely the reverse. What has hitherto been
invisible, the inner life, seeks its salvation in the region of the
visible; what has hitherto been only visible, repairs to the dark
ocean of sound: _thus Nature, in trying to conceal herself, unveils the
character of her contradictions_. In a dance, wild, rhythmic and
gliding, and with ecstatic movements, the born dramatist makes known
something of what is going on within him, of what is taking place in
nature: the dithyrambic quality of his movements speaks just as
eloquently of quivering comprehension and of powerful penetration as
of the approach of love and self-renunciation. Intoxicated speech
follows the course of this rhythm; melody resounds coupled with
speech, and in its turn melody projects its sparks into the realm of
images and ideas. A dream-apparition, like and unlike the image of
Nature and her wooer, hovers forward; it condenses into more human
shapes; it spreads out in response to its heroically triumphant will,
and to a most delicious collapse and cessation of will:--thus tragedy
is born; thus life is presented with its grandest knowledge--that of
tragic thought; thus, at last, the greatest charmer and benefactor
among mortals--the dithyrambic dramatist--is evolved.