must man display himself in his entirety; and this whole man is the man of understanding united with the man of heart and man of body,-but neither of these parts for self alone.-
The progress of the man of understanding, from the bodily man and through the man of feeling, is that of an ever increasing accommodation, just as his organ of expression, Speech, is the most mediate and dependent; for all the attributes that lie beneath him must be normally developed, before the conditions of his normal attributes can be at hand. But the most conditioned faculty is at like time the most exalted; and the joy in his own self, engendered by the knowledge of his higher, unsurpassable attributes, betrays the intellectual-man into the arrogant imagining that he may use those attributes which are really his foundation-props as the handmaids of his own caprice. The sovereign might of physical sensation and heart-emotion, however, breaks down his pride of intellect, as soon as these proclaim their sway as one which all men must obey in common, as that of feelings and emotions of the race. The isolated feeling, the separate emotion, which show themselves in the individual, aroused by this or that particular and personal contact with this or that particular phenomenon, he is able to suppress or subjugate in favour of a richer combination of manifold phenomena conceived by him; but the richest combination of all the phenomena that he can cognise leads him at last to Man as a species and an integral factor in the totality of Nature; and, in presence of this great, all-mastering phenomenon, his pride breaks down. He now can only will the universal, true, and unconditional; he yields himself, not to a love for this or that particular object, but to wide Love itself. Thus does the egoist become a communist, the unit all, the man God, the art-variety Art.
2. THE THREE VARIETIES OF HUMANISTIC (6) ART, IN THEIR ORIGINAL UNION.
The three chief artistic faculties of the entire man have once, and of their own spontaneous impulse, evolved to a trinitarian utterance of human Art; and this was in the primal, earliest manifested art-work, the Lyric, and its later, more conscious, loftiest completion, the Drama.
The arts of Dance, (7) of Tone, and Poetry: thus call themselves the three primeval sisters whom we see at once entwine their measures wherever the conditions necessary for artistic manifestment have arisen. By their nature they are inseparable without disbanding the stately minuet of Art; for in this dance, which is the very cadence of Art itself; they are so wondrous closely interlaced with one another, of fairest love and inclination, so mutually bound up in each other's life, of body and of spirit: that each of the three partners, unlinked from the united chain and bereft thus of her own life and motion, can only carry on an artificially inbreathed and borrowed life ;-not giving forth her sacred ordinances, as in their trinity, but now receiving despotic rules for mechanical movement.
As we gaze on this entrancing measure of the truest and most high-born Muses of artistic man, we see the three first stepping forward, each with her loving arm entwined around her sister's neck; then, now this one and now that, as though to show the others her beauteous form in full and individual symmetry, loosing herself from their embrace, and merely brushing with her utmost finger-tips the others' hands. Again the one, rapt by the spectacle of the twin-beauty of her close-locked sisters, bending herself before them; next the two, transported by her unique charm, greeting the one with tender homage; until at last, all three, tight-clasped, breast on breast, and limb to limb, melt with the fervour of love-kisses into one only, living shape of beauty.--Such is the love and life, the wooing and the winning of Art; its separate units, ever themselves and ever for each other, severing in richest contrast and re-uniting in most blissful harmony.
This is Art the free. The sweet and forceful impulse in that dance of sisters, is the impulse of Freedom; the love-kiss of their enlocked embraces, the transport of a freedom won.
The solitary unit is unfree, because confined and fettered in un-Love; the associate is free, because unfettered and unconfined through Love.-
In every creature that exists the mightiest impulse is that of its Life; this is the resistless force of the correlation of those conditions which have first called into being that which here exists,-thus, of those things or life- forces which, in that which has arisen through them, are that which they will to be-and, willing, can be-in this their point of common union. Man appeases his Life-need by taking from Nature: this is no theft, but a receiving, an adoptment, an absorption of that which, as a condition of man's life, wills to be adopted into and absorbed in him. For these conditions of man's Life, themselves his Life-needs, are not forsooth upheaved by birth,-rather do they endure and feed themselves within him and by him so long as e'er he lives; and the dissolution of their bond, itself is- Death.
But the Life-need of man's life-needs is the need of Love. As the conditions of natural human life are contained in the love-bond of subordinated nature-forces, which craved for their agreement, their redemption, their adoption into the higher principle, Man; so does man find his agreement, his redemption, his appeasement, likewise in something higher; and this higher thing is the human race, the fellowship of man, for there is but one thing higher than man's self, and that is-Men. But man can only gain the stilling of his life-need through Giving, through Giving of himself to other men, and in its highest climax, to all the world of human beings. The monstrous sin of the absolute egoist is that he sees in (fellow) Men also nothing but the natural conditionments of his own existence, and-albeit in a quite particular, barbaric-cultivated manner-consumes them like the fruits and beasts of nature; thus will not give, but only take.
Now as Man is not free except through Love, neither is anything that proceeds, or is derived, from him. Freedom is the satisfaction of an imperative Need, and the highest freedom is the satisfaction of the highest need: but the highest human need is Love.
No living thing can issue from the true and undistorted nature of mankind or be derived from it, unless it fully answers to the characteristic essence of that nature: but the most characteristic token of this essence is the need of Love.
Each separate faculty of man is limited by bounds; but his united, agreed, and reciprocally helping faculties-and thus his faculties in mutual love of one another-combine to form the self-completing, unbounded, universal faculty of men. Thus too has every artistic faculty of man its natural bounds, since man has not one only Sense but separate Senses; while every faculty springs from its special sense, and therefore each single faculty must find its bounds in the confines of its correlated sense. But the boundaries of the separate senses are also their joint meeting-points, those points at which they melt in one another and each agrees with each: and exactly so do the faculties that are derived from them touch one another and agree. Their confines, therefore, are removed by this agreement; but only those that love each other can agree, and 'to love' means: to acknowledge the other, and at like time to know one's self. Thus Knowledge through Love is Freedom; and the freedom of man's faculties is-All-faculty.
Only the Art which answers to this 'all-faculty' of man is, therefore, free; and not the Art-variety, which only issues from a single human faculty. The Arts of Dance, of Tone, of Poetry, are each confined within their several bounds; in contact with these bounds each feels herself unfree, be it not that, across their common boundary, she reaches out her hand to her neighbouring art in unrestrained acknowledgment of love. The very grasping of this hand lifts her above the barrier; her full embrace, her full absorption in her sister-i.e. her own complete ascension beyond the set-up barrier-casts down the fence itself. And when every barrier has thus fallen, then are there no more arts and no more boundaries, but only Art, the universal, undivided.
It is a sorry misconception of Freedom-that of the being who would fain be free in loneliness. The impulse to loose one's self from commonalty, to be free and independent for individual self alone, can only lead to the direct antithesis of the state so arbitrarily striven after: namely to utmost lack of self-dependence.-Nothing in Nature is self-dependent excepting that which has the conditionments of its self-standing not merely in itself; but also outside of itself: for the inner are first possible by virtue of the outer. That which would separate (8) itself must, necessarily, first have that from which to separate. He who would fain be nothing but himself; must first know what he is; but this he only learns by distinguishing from what he is not: were he able to lop off entirely that which differs from him, then were he himself no differentiated entity, and thus no longer cognisable by himself. In order to will to be the whole thing which of and in himself he is, the individual must learn to be absolutely not the thing he is not; but the thing that is absolutely what he is not, is that thing which lies apart from him; and only in the fullest of communion with that which is apart from him, in the completest absorption into the commonalty of those who differ from him, can he ever be completely what he is by nature, what he must be, and as a reasonable being, can but will to be. Thus only in Communism does Egoism find its perfect satisfaction.
That Egoism, however, which has brought such immeasurable woe into the world and so lamentable a mutilation and insincerity into Art, is of another breed to the natural and rational egoism which finds its perfect
