The Literary Drama can only redeem itself from this state of misery by becoming the actual living Drama. The path of that redemption has been repeatedly entered, and even in our latter days,-by many an one from honest yearning, but alas I by the majority for no other reason than that the Theatre had imperceptibly become a more remunerative market than the counter of the Publisher.
The judgment (21) of the public, in howsoever great a social disfigurement it may show itself; holds ever by the direct and physical reality; nay, the mutual give-and-take of the world of sense ( die Wechselwirkung des Sinnlichen) makes up, at bottom, what we call "publicity." (22) Had the impotent conceit of Poetry withdrawn her from this immediate interaction: so, as regards the Drama, had the players seized it for their own advantage. Most rightly does the public aspect (23) of the stage belong de facto to the performing fellowship alone; but where everything was selfishly dissundering,-like the poet from this fellowship, to which in the natural order of affairs he immediately belonged,- there did the fellowship itself cut through the common band which alone had made it an artistic one. Would the poet unconditionally see himself alone upon the stage,- did he thus dispute in advance the artistic value of the fellowship,-so, with far more natural excuse, did the individual actor break his bonds in order to unconditionally stamp himself as the only current coin; and herein he was supported by the encouraging plaudits of the Public, which ever holds by instinct to the sheer and absolute show.
The art of Comedy became through this the art of the Comedian, a personal virtuosity: i.e. that egoistic form of art which exists for its exclusive self and wills but the glory of the absolute personality. The common aim, through which alone the Drama becomes a work of Art, lay quite beyond the ken of the individual virtuoso; and that which should generate the art of comedy from out itself; as a common outcome of the spirit of communion,-to wit the dramatic Art-work,-that is entirely neglected by this virtuoso or this guild of virtuosi, who only seek the special thing that answers to their personal dexterity, the thing that alone can pay its tributeto their vanity. Yet hundreds of the best-skilled egoists, though all collected on one spot of earth, cannot fulfil that task which can only be the work of communism (Gemeinsamkeit); at least until they cease to be mere egoists. But so long as they are this, their ground of common action-only attainable under external pressure -is that of mutual hate and envy; and our theatre, therefore, often resembles the battlefield of the two lions, on which we can discover nothing but their tails, the sole remainder of their mutual meal off one another.
Nevertheless, where this very virtuosity of the performer makes up the total of the public's notion of theatric art, as in the generality of the French theatres and even in the opera-world of Italy, we have at hand a more natural expression of the bent to artistic exhibition, than where the 'abstract' poet would fain usurp this bent for his own self-glorification. Experience has often proved that from out that world of virtuosi, given a true heart to beat in unison with the artistic talent, there may come forth a dramatic performer who by one solitary impersonation (24) shall disclose to us the inmost essence of dramatic art far more distinctly than a hundred art-dramas per se. Where, on the other hand, dramatic art-poetry would experiment with living actors, she can only manage in the end to quite confuse both virtuosi and public; or else, for all her self-inflation, to betake herself to shamefullest subservience. She either brings but stillborn children into the world,- and that is the best result of her activity, for then she does no harm,-or else she inoculates her constitutional disease, of willing without can-ning, like a devastating plague into the still half-healthy members of the art of comedy. In any case she needs must follow the coercive laws of the most dependent lack of self-dependence: in order to attain some semblance of a form, she must look around for any form that may have sometime emanated from the life of genuine comedy. This then she almost always borrows, in our latest times, from the disciples of Molière alone.
With the lively, abstraction-hating people of France, the art of Comedy-in so far as it was not governed by the influence of the Court-lived for the most part its own indigenous life: amid the overpowering hostility to Art of our general social condition, whatever healthy thing has been able to evolve from Comedy, since the dying out of the Shakespearian drama, we owe to the French alone. But even among them-under pressure of the ruling world- geist that kills all common weal, whose soul is Luxury and Fashion-the true, complete, Dramatic Art-work could not so much as distantly appear: the only universal factor of our modern world, the spirit of usury and speculation, has with them also held each germ of true dramatic art in egoistic severance from its fellow. Art-forms to answer to this sordid spirit, however, the French dramatic school has found, without a doubt: with all the unseemliness of their contents, they evince uncommon skill in making these contents as palatable as may be; and these forms have this distinctive merit, that they have actually emanated from the inborn spirit of the French comedian's art, and thus from life itself.
Our German dramatists, in their longing for some seeming-necessary form wherewith to clothe the arbitrary contents of their poetic thought, and since they lacked the inborn plastic gift, set up this needful form in pure caprice; for they seized upon the Frenchman's 'scheme,' without reflecting that this scheme had sprung from quite another, and a genuine Need. But he who does not act from sheer necessity, may choose where'er he pleases. Thus our dramatists were not quite satisfied with their adoption of French forms: the stew still lacked of this or that, - a pinch of Shakespearian audacity, a spice of Spanish pathos, and, for a sauce, a remanet of Schiller's ideality or Iffland's burgher bonhomie. All this is now dished up with unheard archness, according to the French recipe, and served with journalistic reminiscences of the latest scandal; the favourite actor-since the real poet had not learnt how to play his comedies-provided with the rôle of some fictitious poet, wherever possible ;-with a further slice from here or there thrown in to suit the special circumstance-: and so we have the modernest dramatic art-work, the poet who in sooth writes down himself, i.e., his palpable poetic incapacity.
Enough! of the unexampled squalor of our theatric poetry I with which indeed we here have alone to do; since we need not draw the special subdivision of literary poesy within our closer ken. For, with our eyes directed toward the Artwork of the Future, we are seeking out Poetic art where she is struggling to become a living and immediate art, and this is in the Drama; not where she renounces every claim to this life-issue, and yet-for all her fill of thought -but takes the terms of her peculiar manufacture from the hopeless artistic unfitness of our modern public life. This Literature-poesy (die litteraturpoesie) supplies the only solace-however sad and impotent I-of the lonely human being of the Present who longs to taste poetic food. Yet the solace that she gives is truly but an access of the longing after Life, the longing for the living Artwork; for the urgence of this longing is her very soul,-where this does not speak out, does not proclaim itself with might and main, there has the last trace of verity departed from this poesy too. The more honestly and tumultuously, however, does it throb within her, so much the more veraciously does she admit her own unsolaceable plight, and confess the only possible assuagement of her longing, to be her own self-abrogation, her dissolution into Life, into the living Art-work of the Future.