'schools' proceeding for the most part from the individuality of a particular artist. These 'schools' were the guilds that gathered-in imitation, nay in repetition-round some great master in whom the soul of Music had individualised itself. So long as Music had not fulfilled her world-historical task: so long might the widely spreading branches of these schools grow up into fresh stems, under this or that congenial fertiliser. But so soon as that task had been accomplished by the greatest of all musical individualities, so soon as Tone had used the force of that individuality to clothe her deepest secrets with the broadest form in which she still might stay an egoistic, self-sufficient art,-so soon, in one word, as Beethoven had written his Last Symphony,-then all the musical guilds might patch and cobble as they would, to bring an absolute music-man to market: only a patched and cobbled harlequin, no sinewy, robust son of Nature, could issue now from out their workshops. After Haydn and Mozart, a Beethoven not only could, but must come; the genie of Music claimed him of Necessity, and without a moment's lingering-he was there. Who now will be to Beethoven what he was to Mozart and Haydn, in the realm of absolute music? The greatest genius would not here avail, since the genie of Music no longer needs him.
Ye give yourselves a bootless labour, when, as an opiate for your egoistic tingling for 'production', ye fain would deny the cataclysmic significance of Beethoven's Last Symphony; and even your obtuseness will not save you, by which ye make it possible not once to understand this work! Do what ye will; look right away from Beethoven, fumble after Mozart, gird you round with Sebastian Bach; write Symphonies with or without choruses, write Masses, Oratorios,-the sexless embryos of Opera !-make songs without words, and operas without texts-: ye still bring naught to light that has a breath of true life in it. For look ye,-ye lack Belief! the great belief in the necessity of what ye do! Ye have but the belief of simpletons, the false belief in the possible necessity of your own selfish caprice !-
In gazing across the busy wilderness of our musical art-world; in witnessing the hopeless sterility of this art- chaos, for all its everlasting ogling; in presence of this formless brew, whose lees are mouldering pedantic shamelessness, and from which, with all its solemn arrogance of musical 'old-master '-hood, at last but dissolute Italian opera-airs or wanton French cancan-tunes can rise as artificial distillate to the glare of modern public life ;-in short, in pondering on this utter creative incapacity, we look, without an instant's blenching, towards the great catastrophe which shall make an end of the whole unwieldy musical monstrosity, to clear free space for the Art- work of the Future; in which true Music will truly have no minor rôle to play, but to which both breath and breathing space are utterly forbidden on such a musical soil as ours. (16)
5. THE POETIC ART.
If wont or fashion permitted us to take up again the old and genuine style of speech, and write instead of 'Dichten' 'Tichten'; then should we gain in the group of names for the three primeval human arts, 'Tanz-, Ton- und Ticht-kunst' (Dance, Tone, and Poetry), a beautiful word-picture of the nature of this trinity of sisters, namely a perfect Stabreim, (17) such as is native to the spirit of our language. This Stabreim, moreover, would be especially appropriate by reason of the position which it gives to 'Tichtkunst' (Poetry): as the last member of the 'rhyme,' this word would first decide that rhyme; since two alliterative words are only raised to a perfect Stabreim by the advent or begettal of the third; so that without this third member the earlier pair are merely accidental, being first shown as necessary factors by the presence of the third,-as man and wife are first shown in their true and necessary interdependence by the child which they beget. (18)
But just as the effective operation of this rhyme works backward from the close to the commencement, so does it also press onward with no less necessity in the reverse direction: the beginning members, truly, gain their first significance as rhyme by the advent of the closing member, but the closing member is not so much as conceivable without the earlier pair. Thus the Poetic art can absolutely not create the genuine art-work-and this is only such an one as is brought to direct physical manifestment-without those arts to which the physical show belongs directly. Thought, that mere phantom of reality, is formless by itself; and only when it retraces the road on which it rose to birth, can it attain artistic perceptibility. In the Poetic art, the purpose of all Art comes first to consciousness: but the other arts contain within themselves the unconscious Necessity that forms this purpose. The art of Poetry is the creative process by which the Art-work steps into life: but out of Nothing, only the god of the Israelites can make some-thing,-the Poet must have that Something; and that something is the whole artistic man, who proclaims in the arts of Dance and Tone the physical longing become a longing of the soul, which through its force first generates the poetic purpose and finds in that its absolution, in its attainment its own appeasing.
Wheresoever the Folk made poetry,-and only by the Folk, or in the footsteps of the Folk, can poetry be really made,-there did the Poetic purpose rise to life alone upon the shoulders of the arts of Dance and Tone, as the head of the full-fledged human being. The Lyrics of Orpheus would never have been able to turn the savage beasts to silent, placid adoration, if the singer had but given them forsooth some dumb and printed verse to read: their ears must be enthralled by the sonorous notes that came straight from the heart, their carrion-spying eyes be tamed by the proud and graceful movements of the body,-in such a way that they should recognise instinctively in this whole man no longer a mere object for their maw, no mere objective for their feeding-, but for their hearing- and their seeing-powers,-before they could be attuned to duly listen to his moral sentences.
Neither was the true Folk-epic by any means a mere recited poem: the songs of Homer, such as we now possess them, have issued from the critical siftings and compilings of a time in which the genuine Epos had long since ceased to live. When Solon made his laws and Pisistratus introduced his political regime, men searched among the ruins of the already fallen Epos of the Folk and pieced the gathered heap together for reading service,- much as in the Hohenstaufen times they did with the fragments of the lost Nibelungen-lieder. But before these epic songs became the object of such literary care, they had flourished mid the Folk, eked out by voice and gesture, as a bodily enacted Art-work; as it were, a fixed and crystallised blend of lyric song and dance, with predominant lingering on portrayal of the action and reproduction of the heroic dialogue. These epic-lyrical performances form the unmistakable middle stage between the genuine older Lyric and Tragedy, the normal point of transition from the one to the other.
Tragedy was therefore the entry of the Art-work of the Folk upon the public arena of political life; and we may take its appearance as an excellent touchstone for the difference in procedure between the Art-creating of the Folk and the mere literary-historical Making of the so-called cultured art-world. At the very time when live-born Epos became the object of the critical dilettantism of the court of Pisistratus, it had already shed its blossoms in the People's life-yet not because the Folk had lost its true afflatus, but since it was already able to surpass the old, and from unstanchable artistic sources to build the less perfect art-work up, until it became the more perfect. For while those pedants and professors in the Prince's castle were labou ring at the construction of a literary Homer, pampering their own unproductivity with their marvel at their wisdom, by aid of which they yet could only understand the thing that long had passed from life,-Thespis had already slid his car to Athens, had set it up beside the palace walls, dressed out his stage and, stepping from the chorus of the Folk, had trodden its planks; no longer did he shadow forth the deeds of heroes, as in the Epos, but in these heroes' guise enacted them.
With the Folk, all is reality and deed; it does, and then rejoices in the thought of its own doing. Thus the blithe Folk of Athens, enflamed by persecution, hunted out from court and city the melancholy sons of Pisistratus; and then bethought it how, by this its deed, it had become a free and independent people. Thus it raised the platform of its stage, and decked itself with tragic masks and raiment of some god or hero, in order itself to be a god or hero: and Tragedy was born; whose fruits it tasted with the blissful sense of its own creative force, but whose metaphysical basis it handed, all regardless, to the brain-racking speculation of the dramaturgists of our modern court-theatres.
Tragedy flourished for just so long as it was inspired by the spirit of the Folk, and as this spirit was a veritably popular, i.e. a communal one. When the national brotherhood of the Folk was shivered into fragments, when the common bond of its Religion and primeval Customs was pierced and severed by the sophist needles of the egoistic spirit of Athenian self-dissection,-then the Folk's art-work also ceased : then did the professors and the doctors of the literary guilds take heritage of the ruins of the fallen edifice, and delved among its beams and stones; to pry, to ponder, and to re-arrange its members. With Aristophanian laughter, the Folk relinquished to these learned insects the refuse of its meal, threw Art upon one side for two millennia, and fashioned of its innermost necessity the history of the world; the while those scholars cobbled up their tiresome history of Literature, by order of the supreme court of Alexander.
The career of Poetry, since the breaking-up of Tragedy, and since her own departure from community with mim
