It was on the long journey from Shakespeare's stage to the art-work of the future, that the poet was first to gain full consciousness of his unhappy loneliness. Out of the fellowship of actors, had the Dramatic poet evolved by natural law; but, in his foolish arrogance, he fain would now exalt himself above his comrades, and without their love, without their impulse, dictate the drama from behind his pedant desk to those from whose free gift of personation it could gain alone a natural growth, and to whose joint will he had only power to point the informing aim. Thus the organs of dramatic art, reduced to slavish drudgery, grew dumb before the poet, who desired not merely now to utter, but to dominate the artistic impulse. As the virtuoso presses or releases at his will the pianoforte's keys, so would the poet play upon the automaton troupe of actors; as on an instrument of wood and steel erected to display his own particular dexterity, and from which men should expect to hear no other thing but him the playing marvel. But the keys of the instrument made their own rejoinder to the ambitious egoist: the harder he hammered, in his gymnastic frenzy, the more they stuck and clattered.
Goethe once reckoned up but four weeks of pure happiness in all his well-filled life: his most unhappy years he made no special count of; but we know them :-they were those in which he sought to tune that jangling instrument for his use. This man of might was longing to take refuge from the soundless desert of art-literature in the living, sonorous art-work. Whose eye was surer, and wider-ranging in its knowledge of life than his? What he had seen, described, and pictured, he now would bring to ear upon that instrument. Great heavens! how deformed and past all recognition did his views of life confront him, when forced into this metric music ! (20) How must he wrench his tuning-key, how tug and stretch the strings, until at last they snapped with one great whine I-He was forced to see that everything is possible in this world, excepting that abstract spirit should govern men: where this spirit is not seeded in the whole sound man and blossomed out of him, it can never be poured into him from above. The egoistic poet can make mechanical puppets move according to his wish, but never turn machines to actual living men. From the stage where Goethe wished to make his men, he was chased at last by a performing poodle:-as an exemplary warning to all unnatural government from on high!
Where Goethe shipwrecked, it could but become "good tone" to look upon oneself as shipwrecked in advance: the poets still wrote plays, but not for the unpolished stage; simply for their cream-laid paper. Only the second- or third- rate poetasters, who here and there adapted their conceits to local exigence, still busied their brains with the players; but not the eminent poet, who wrote "out of his own head" and, of all the many hues of life, found only abstract, Prussian-territorial, black-on-white respectable. Thus happened the unheard-of: Dramas written for dumb reading!
Did Shakespeare, in his stress for unadulterated Life, take shelter in the uncouth scaffold of his People's-stage: so did the egoistic resignation of the modern dramatist content itself with the bookseller's counter; on which he laid him out for market half-dead and half-alive. Had the physically embodied drama cast itself upon the bosom of the Folk: so did the " published" incarnation of the play lie down beneath the feet of the art-critic's good pleasure. Accommodating herself to one servile yoke after the other, Dramatic Poetry swung herself aloft-in her own idle fancy-to unbound freedom. Those burdensome conditions under which alone a drama can step into life, she might now forsooth cast overboard without ado; for only that which wills to live, must hearken to necessity,-but that which wills to do much more than live, namely to lead a dead existence, can make of itself what it pleases: the most arbitrary is to it the most necessary; and the more her independence of the terms of physical show, the more freely could Poetry abandon herself to her own self-will and absolute self-admiration.
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.