The Art-Work Of The Future

3. THE PAINTER'S ART.

Just as, when we are denied the pleasure of hearing the symphonic playing of an orchestra, we seek to recall our enjoyment by a pianoforte rendering; just as, when we are no longer permitted to gaze upon the colours of an oil-painting in a picture-gallery, we strive by aid of an engraving to refresh the impression which they have left, (33) so had Painting, if not in her origination, yet in her artistic evolution, to answer to the yearning need of calling back to memory the lost features of the living Human Artwork.

We must pass by her raw beginnings, when, like Sculpture, she sprang from the as yet unartistic impulse toward the symbolising of religious ideas; for she first attained artistic significance at the epoch when the living artwork of Tragedy was paling, and the brilliant tints of Painting sought to fix the vision of those wondrous, pregnant scenes which no longer offered their immediate warmth of life to the beholder.

Thus the Grecian artwork solemnised its after-math in Painting. This harvest was not that which sprang by natural necessity from the wealth of Life; its necessity was the rather that of Culture; it issued from a conscious, arbitrary motive, to wit the knowledge of the loveliness of Art, united with the wilful purpose to force, as it were, this loveliness to linger in a life to which it no longer belonged instinctively as the unconscious, necessary expression of that life's inmost soul. That Art which, unbidden and of her own accord, had blossomed from the communion of the People's life, had likewise by her active presence, and through the regardal of her demeanour, called up the mental concept (Begriff) of her essence; for it was not the idea of Art that had summoned her to life, but herself; the actual breathing Art, had evolved the "Idea" from out herself.

The artistic power of the Folk, thrusting forward with all the necessity of a nature-force, was dead and buried; what it had done, lived only now in memory, or in the artificial reproduction. Whereas the Folk, in all its actions and especially in its self-wrought destruction of national, pent-up insularity, has through all time proceeded by the law of inner necessity, and thus in thorough harmony with the majestic evolution of the human race: the lonely spirit of the Artist-to whose yearning for the beautiful the unbeauteous manifestments of the People's life-stress must ever stay a dark enigma-could only console itself by looking backward to the artwork of a bygone era, and, recognising the impossibility of arbitrarily relivening that artwork, could only make this solace as lasting as might be, by freshening up with lifelike details the harvest of its recollections,-just as through a portrait we preserve to our memory the features of a loved lost friend. Hereby Art herself became an object of art; the "idea" derived from her became her law; and cultured art-the art that can be learnt, and always points back to itself-began its life-career. The latter, as we may see to-day, can be pursued without a halt in the least artistic times and amid the most sordid circumstances,-yet only for the selfish pleasure of isolated, life-divorced, and art-repining Culture.-

The senseless attempt to reconstruct the Tragic Artwork by purely imitative reproduction-such as was engaged in, for instance, by the poets of the Alexandrian court-was most advantageously avoided by Painting; for she gave up the lost as lost, and answered the impulse to restore it by the cultivation of a special, and peculiar, artistic faculty of man. Though this faculty required a greater variety of media for its operation, yet Painting soon won a marked advantage over Sculpture. The sculptor's work displayed the material likeness of the whole man in lifelike form, and, thus far, stood nearer to the living artwork of self-portraying man than did the painter's work, which was only able to render, so to speak, his tinted shadow. As in both counterfeits, however, the breath of Life was unattainable, and motion could only be indicated to the thought of the spectator, to whose phantasy its conceivable extension must be left to be worked out by certain natural laws of inductive reasoning,-so Painting, in that she looked still farther aside from the reality, and depended still more on artistic illusion than did Sculpture, was able to take a more ideal poetic flight than she. Finally, Painting was not obliged to content herself with the representation of this one man, or of that particular group or combination to which the art of Statuary was restricted; rather, the artistic illusion became so preponderant a necessity to her, that she had not only to draw into the sphere of her portrayal a wealth of correlated human groups extended both in length and breadth, but also the circle of their extrahuman surroundings, the scenes of Nature herself. Hereon is based an entirely novel step in the evolution of man's artistic faculties, both perceptive and executive: namely, that of the inner comprehension and reproduction of Nature, by means of Landscape-painting.

This moment is of the highest importance for the whole range of plastic art: it brings this art-which began, in Architecture, with the observation and artistic exploitation of Nature for the benefit of Man,-which in Sculpture, as though for the deification of Man, exalted him as its only subject-to its complete conclusion, by turning it at last, with ever growing understanding, entirely back from Man to Nature; and this inasmuch as it enabled plastic art to take her by the hand of intimate friendship, and thus, as it were, to broaden Architecture out to a full and lifelike portraiture of Nature. Human Egoism, which in naked Architecture was forever referring Nature to its own exclusive self; to some extent broke up in Landscape-painting, which vindicated Nature's individual rights and prompted artistic Man to loving absorption into her, in order there to find himself again, immeasurably amplified.

When Grecian painters sought to fix the memory of the scenes which had erstwhile been presented to their actual sight and hearing in the Lyric, in the lyrical Epos, and in the Tragedy, and to picture them again in outline and in colour-without a doubt they considered men alone as worthy objects of their exhibition; and it is to the so-called historical tendency that we owe the raising of Painting to her first artistic height. As she thus preserved the united artwork green in memory, so when the conditions that summoned forth the passionate preservation of these memories vanished quite away, there yet remained two byways open, along which the art of Painting could carry on her further independent self-development: the Portrait and-the Landscape. True, that Landscape had already been appropriated for the necessary background of the scenes from Homer and the Tragic poets: but at the time of their painting's prime the Greeks looked on landscape with no other eye than that with which the peculiar bent of the Grecian character had caused them to regard the whole of Nature. With the Greeks, Nature was merely the distant background of the human being: well in the foreground stood Man himself; and the Gods to whom he assigned the force controlling Nature were anthropomorphic gods. He sought to endue everything he saw in Nature with human shape and human being; as humanised, she had for him that endless charm in whose enjoyment it was impossible for his sense of beauty to look on her from such a standpoint as that of our modern Judaistic utilism, and make of her a mere inanimate object of his sensuous pleasure. However, he but cherished this beautiful relationship between himself and Nature from an involuntary error: in his anthropomorphosis of Nature he credited her with human motives which, necessarily contrasted with the true character of Nature, could be only arbitrarily assumed as operating within her.

As Man, in all his life and all his relations to Nature, acts from a necessity peculiar to his own being, he unwittingly distorts her character when he conceives Nature as behaving not according to her own necessity but to that of Man. Although this error took a beauteous form among the Greeks, while among other races, especially those of Asia, its utterances were for the most part hideous, it was none the less destructive in its influence on Hellenic life. When the Hellenian broke adrift from his ancestral bond of national communion, when he lost the standard of life's beauty that he had drawn from it instinctively, he was unable to replace this needful standard by one derived from a correct survey of surrounding Nature. He had unconsciously perceived in Nature a coherent, encompassing Necessity for just so long as this same Necessity came before his consciousness as a ground condition of his communal life. But when the latter crumbled into its egoistic atoms, when the Greek was ruled by naught but the caprice of his own selfwill, no longer harmonised by brotherhood, or eventually submitted to an arbitrary outer force that gained its leverage from this general selfwill,-then with his faulty knowledge of Nature, whom he deemed as capricious as himself and the worldly might that governed him, he lacked the certain standard by which he could have learnt to measure out himself again; that standard which Nature offers as their highest boon to those men who recognise her innermost necessity and learn to know the eternal harmony of her creative forces, working in widest compass through every separate unit.

It is from this error alone, that arose those vast excesses of the Grecian mind which we see attaining under the Byzantine empire a pitch that quite obscures the old Hellenic character, yet which were but, at bottom, the normal blemishes of its good qualities. Philosophy might put forth its honestest endeavour to grasp the harmony of Nature: it only showed how impotent is the might of abstract Intellect. In defiance of all the saws of Aristotle, the Folk, in its desire to win itself an absolute bliss from the midst of this million-headed Egoism, formed itself a religion in which Nature was made the pitiful plaything of the quibbling search for human blessedness. It only needed the Grecian view of Nature's government by selfwilled, human-borrowed motives to be wedded to the Judao-oriental theory of her subservience to human Use,-for the disputations and decrees of Councils anent the essence of the Trinity, and the interminable strifes, nay national wars therefrom arising, to face astounded history with the irrefutable fruits of this intermarriage.

Towards the close of the Middle Ages, the Roman Church raised its assumption of the immobility of the earth to the rank of an article of belief: but it could not prevent America from being discovered, the conformation of the globe mapped out, and Nature's self at last laid so far bare to knowledge that the inner harmony of all her manifold phenomena has now been proved to demonstration. The impulse that led toward these discoveries sought, at like time, to find an utterance in that branch of art which was of all best fitted for its artistic satisfaction. With the Renaissance of Art, Painting also, in eager struggle for ennoblement, linked on her own new birth to the revival of the antique; beneath the shelter of the prosperous Church she waxed to the portrayal of its chronicles, and passed from these to scenes of veritable history and actual life, still profiting by the advantage that she yet could take her form and colour from this actual life. But the more the physical Present was crushed by the marring influence of Fashion, and the more the newer school of Historical painting, in order to be beautiful, saw itself compelled by the unlovehiness of Life to construct from its own fancy and to combine from styles and manners twice borrowed from arthistory- not from hife,-the farther did Painting, departing from the portraiture of modish man, strike out that path to which we owe the loving understanding of Nature in the Landscape.

Man, around whom the landscape had erstwhile grouped itself as round its egoistic centre, shrank ever smaller mid the fulness of his surroundings, in direct proportion as he bowed beneath the unworthy yoke of disfiguring Fashion in his daily life; so that at last he played the role in Landscape which before had been assigned to landscape as a foil to him. Under the given circumstances, we can only celebrate this advance of landscape as a victory of Nature over base and man-degrading Culture. For therein undisfigured Nature asserted herself; in the only possible mode, against her foe; inasmuch as, seeking for a sanctuary the while, she laid bare herself; as though from very Want, to the inner understanding of artistic Man.

Modern Natural Science and Landscape-Painting are the only outcomes of the Present which, either from an artistic or a scientific point of view, offer us the smallest consolation in our impotence, or refuge from our madness. Amid the hopeless splintering of all our art-endeavours, the solitary genius who for a moment binds them into almost violent union, may accomplish feats the more astounding as neither the need nor the conditions for his art-work are now to hand: the general concensus of the Painter's art, however, takes almost solely the direction of the Landscape. For here it finds exhaustless subjects, and thereby an inexhaustible capacity; whereas in every other attempt to shadow Nature forth, it can only proceed by arbitrary sifting, sorting, and selecting, to garner from our absolutely inartistic life an object worthy of artistic treatment.

The more the so-called Historical school of painting is busied with its efforts to build up and explain to us the genuine beauteous Man and genuine beauteous Life, by reminiscences from the farthest past; the more, with all its prodigious outlay of expedients, it confesses the heaviness of the burden imposed upon it, to seek to be more and other than behoves the nature of one single branch of art,-so much the more must it long for a redemption which, like that destined for Sculpture, can only consist in its ascension into that from which it drew the original force that gave to it artistic life; and this is even the living human Art-work, whose very birth from Life must heave away the conditions that made possible the being and the prospering of Painting as an independent branch of art. The man-portraying art of Painting will never find it possible to lead a healthy, necessary life--when, without a pencil or a canvas, in liveliest artistic setting, the beauteous Man portrays himself in full perfection. What she now toils to reach by honest effort, she then will reach in perfect measure, when she bequeaths her colour and her skill of composition to the living "plastic" of the real dramatic representant; when she steps down from her canvas and her plaster, and stands upon the Tragic stage; when she bids the artist carry out in his own person what she toiled in vain to consummate by heaping up of richest means without the breath of actual Life.

But Landscape-painting, as last and perfected conclusion of all the plastic arts, will become the very soul of Architecture ; she will teach us so to rear the stage for the dramatic Artwork of the Future that on it, herself imbued with life, she may picture forth the warm background of Nature for living, no longer counterfeited, Man.-

If we may thus regard the scene of the united Artwork of the Future as won by the highest power of Plastic-Art, and therewith as attained the inmost knowledge of familiar Nature: we may now proceed to take a closer view of the nature of this Artwork itself.

IV. OUTLINES OF THE ARTWORK OF THE FUTURE.

IF we consider the relation of modern art-so far as it is truly Art-to public life, we shall recognise at once its complete inability to affect this public life in the sense of its own noblest endeavour. The reason hereof is, that our modern art is a mere product of Culture and has not sprung from Life itself; therefore, being nothing but a hot-house plant, it cannot strike root in the natural soil, or flourish in the natural climate of the present. Art has become the private property of an artist-caste; its taste it offers to those alone who understand it; and for its understanding it demands a special study, aloof from actual life, the study of art-learning. This study, and the understanding to be attained thereby, each individual who has acquired the gold wherewith to pay the proffered delicacies of art conceives to.day that he has made his own: if, however, we were to ask the Artist whether the great majority of art's amateurs are able to understand him in his best endeavours, he could only answer with a deep-drawn sigh. But if he ponder on the infinitely greater mass of those who are perforce shut out on every side by the evils of our present social system from both the understanding and the tasting of the sweets of modern art, then must the artist of to-day grow conscious that his whole art-doings are, at bottom, but an egoistic, self-concerning business; that his art, in the light of public life, is nothing else than luxury and superfluity, a self-amusing pastime. The daily emphasised, and bitterly deplored abyss between so-called culture and un-culture is so enormous; a bridge between the two so inconceivable; a reconcilement so impossible; that, had it any candour, our modern art, which grounds itself on this unnatural culture, would be forced to admit, to its deepest shame, that it owes its existence to a life-element which in turn can only base its own existence on the utter dearth of culture among the real masses of mankind.

The only thing which, in the position thus assigned to her, our Modern Art should be able to effect-and among honest folk, indeed, endeavours-namely, the spreading abroad of culture, she cannot do; and simply for the reason that, for Art to operate on Life, she must be herself the blossom of a natural culture, i.e., such an one as has grown up from below, for she can never hope to rain down culture from above. Therefore, taken at its best, our "cultured" art resembles an orator who should seek to address himself in a foreign tongue to a people which does not understand it: his highest flights of rhetoric can only lead to the most absurd misunderstandings and confusion.-

Let us first attempt to trace the theoretic path upon which Modern Art must march forward to redemption from her present lonely, misprised station, and toward the widest understanding of general public Life. That this redemption can only become possible by the practical intermediation of public Life, will then appear self-evident

We have seen that Plastic Art can only attain creative strength by going to her work in unison with artistic Man, and not with men who purpose mere utility.

Artistic Man can only fully content himself by uniting every branch of Art into the common Artwork: in every segregation of his artistic faculties he is unfree, not fully that which he has power to be; whereas in the common Artwork he is free, and fully that which he has power to be.

The true endeavour of Art is therefore all-embracing: each unit who is inspired with a true art-instinct develops to the highest his own particular faculties, not for the glory of these special faculties, but for the glory of general Manhood in Art.

The highest conjoint work of art is the Drama: it can only be at hand in all its possible fulness, when in it each separate branch of art is at hand in its own utmost fulness.

The true Drama is only conceivable as proceeding from a common urgence of every art towards the most direct appeal to a common public. In this Drama, each separate art can only bare its utmost secret to their common public through a mutual parleying with the other arts; for the purpose of each separate branch of art can only be fully attained by the reciprocal agreement and co-operation of all the branches in their common message.

Architecture can set before herself no higher task than to frame for a fellowship of artists, who in their own persons portray the life of Man, the special surroundings necessary for the display of the Human Artwork. Only that edifice is built according to Necessity, which answers most befittingly an aim of man: the highest aim of man is the artistic aim; the highest artistic aim-the Drama. In buildings reared for daily use, the builder has only to answer to the lowest aim of men: beauty is therein a luxury. In buildings reared for luxury, he has to satisfy an unnecessary and unnatural need: his fashioning therefore is capricious, unproductive, and unlovely. On the other hand, in the construction of that edifice whose every part shall answer to a common and artistic aim alone,- thus in the building of the Theatre, the master-builder needs only to comport himself as artist, to keep a single eye upon the art-work. In a perfect theatrical edifice, Art's need alone gives law and measure, down even to the smallest detail. This need is twofold, that of giving and that of receiving, which reciprocally pervade and condition one another. The Scene has firstly to comply with all the conditions of "space" imposed by the joint (gemeinsam) dramatic action to be displayed thereon: but secondly, it has to fulfil those conditions in the sense of bringing this dramatic action to the eye and ear of the spectator in intelligible fashion. In the arrangement of the space for the spectators, the need for optic and acoustic understanding of the artwork will give the necessary law, which can only be observed by a union of beauty and fitness in the proportions; for the demand of the collective (gemeinsam) audience is the demand for the artwork, to whose comprehension it must be distinctly led by everything that meets the eye.(34)

Thus the spectator transplants himself upon the stage, by means of all his visual and aural faculties; while the performer becomes an artist only by complete absorption into the public. Everything, that breathes and moves upon the stage, thus breathes and moves alone from eloquent desire to impart, to be seen and heard within those walls which, however circumscribed their space, seem to the actor from his scenic standpoint to embrace the whole of humankind; whereas the public, that representative of daily life, forgets the confines of the auditorium, and lives and breathes now only in the artwork which seems to it as Life itself, and on the stage which seems the wide expanse of the whole World.

Such marvels blossom from the fabric of the Architect, to such enchantments can he give a solid base, when he takes the purpose of the highest human artwork for his own, when he summons forth the terms of its enlivening from the individual resources of his art. On the other hand, how rigid, cold, and dead does his handiwork appear when, without a higher helpmeet than the aim of luxury, without the artistic necessity which leads him, in the Theatre, to invent and range each detail with the greatest sense of fitness, he is forced to follow every speculative whim of his self-glorifying caprice; to heap his masses and trick out his ornament, in order to stereotype to-day the vanity of some boastful plutocrat, to-morrow the honours of a modernised Jehovah!

But not the fairest form, the richest masonry, can alone suffice the Dramatic Artwork for the perfectly befitting spacial terms of its appearance. The Scene which is to mount the picture of Human Life must, for a thorough understanding of this life, have power to also show the lively counterfeit of Nature, in which alone artistic Man can render up a speaking likeness of himself. The casings of this Scene, which look down chill and vacantly upon the artist and the public, must deck themselves with the fresh tints of Nature, with the warm light of heaven's aether, to be worthy to take their share in the human artwork. Plastic Architecture here feels her bounds, her own unfreedom, and casts herself, athirst for love, into the arms of Painting, who shall work out her redemption into fairest Nature.

Here Landscape-painting enters, summoned by a common need which she alone can satisfy. What the painter's expert eye has seen in Nature, what he now, as artist, would fain display for the artistic pleasure of the full community, he dovetails into the united work of all the arts, as his own abundant share. Through him the scene takes on complete artistic truth: his drawing, his colour, his glowing breadths of light, compel Dame Nature to serve the highest claims of Art. That which the landscape-painter, in his struggle to impart what he had seen and fathomed, had erstwhile forced into the narrow frames of panel-pictures,-whät he had hung up on the egoist's secluded chamber-walls, or had made away to the inconsequent, distracting medley of a picture-barn,-therewith will he henceforth fill the ample framework of the Tragic stage, calling the whole expanse of scene as witness to his power of recreating Nature. The illusion which his brush and finest blend of colours could only hint at, could only distantly approach, he will here bring to its consummation by artistic practice of every known device of optics, by use of all the art of 'lighting. The apparent roughness of his tools, the seeming grotesqueness of the method of so-called 'scene-painting,' will not offend him; for he will reflect that even 'the finest camel's-hair brush is but a humiliating instrument, when compared with the perfect Artwork; and the artist has no right to pride until he is free, i.e., until his artwork is completed and alive, and he, with all his helping tools, has been absorbed into it. But the finished artwork that greets him from the stage will, set within this frame and held before the common gaze of full publicity, immeasurably more content him than did his earlier work, accomplished with more delicate tools. He will not, forsooth, repent the right to use this scenic space to the benefit of such an artwork, for sake of his earlier disposition of a flat-laid scrap of canvas! For as, at the very worst, his work remains the same no matter what the frame from which it looks, provided only it bring its subject to intelligible show: so will his artwork, in this framing, at any rate effect a livelier impression, a greater and more universal understanding, than the whilom landscape picture.

The organ for all understanding of Nature, is Man: the landscape-painter had not only to impart to men this understanding, but to make it for the first time plain to them by depicting Man in the midst of Nature. Now by setting his artwork in the frame of the Tragic stage, he will expand the individual man, to whom he would address himself, to the associate manhood of full publicity, and reap the satisfaction of having spread his understanding out to that, and made it partner in his joy. But he cannot fully bring about this public understanding until he allies his work to a joint and all-intelligible aim of loftiest Art; while this aim itself will be disclosed to the common understanding, past all mistaking, by the actual bodily man with all his warmth of life. Of all artistic things, the most directly understandable is the Dramatic-Action (Handlung), for reason that its art is not complete until every helping artifice be cast behind it, as it were, and genuine life attain the faithfullest and most intelligible show. And thus each branch of art can only address itself to the understanding in proportion as its core-whose relation to Man, or derivation from him, alone can animate and justify the artwork-is ripening toward the Drama. In proportion as it passes over into Drama, as it pulses with the Drama's light, will each domain of Art grow all-intelligible, completely understood and justified. (35)

On to the stage, prepared by architect and painter, now steps Artistic Man, as Natural Man steps on the stage of Nature. What the statuary and the historical painter endeavoured to limn on stone or canvas, they now himn upon themselves, their form, their body's limbs, the features of their visage, and raise it to the consciousness of full artistic life. The same sense that led the sculptor in his grasp and rendering of the human figure, now leads the Mime in the handling and demeanour of his actual body. The same eye which taught the historical painter, in drawing and in colour, in arrangement of his drapery and composition of his groups, to find the beautiful, the graceful and the characteristic, now orders the whole breadth of actual human show. Sculptor and painter once freed the Greek Tragedian from his cothurnus and his mask, upon and under which the real man could only move according to a certain religious convention. With justice, did this pair of plastic artists annihilate the last disfigurement of pure artistic man, and thus prefigure in their stone and canvas the tragic Actor of the Future. As they once descried him in his undistorted truth, they now shall let him pass into reality and bring his form, in a measure sketched by them, to bodily portrayal with all its wealth of movement.

Thus the illusion of plastic art will turn to truth in Drama: the plastic artist will reach out hands to the dancer, to the mime, will lose himself in them, and thus become himself both mime and dancer.-So far as lies within his power, he will have to impart the inner man his feeling and his will-ing, to the eye. The breadth and depth of scenic space belong to him for the plastic message of his stature and his motion, as a single unit or in union with his fellows. But where his power ends, where the fulness of his will and feeling impels him to the uttering of the inner man by means of Speech, there will the Word proclaim his plain and conscious purpose: he becomes a Poet and, to be poet, a tone-artist (Tonkünstler). But as dancer, tone-artist, and poet, he still is one and the same thing: nothing other than executant, artistic Man, who, in the fullest measure of his faculties, imparts himself to the highest expression of receptive power.

It is in him, the immediate executant, that the three sister-arts unite their forces in one collective operation, in which the highest faculty of each comes to its highest unfolding. By working in common, each one of them attains the power to be and do the very thing which, of her own and inmost essence, she longs to do and be. Hereby: that each, where her own power ends, can be absorbed within the other, whose power commences where her's ends,-she maintains her own purity and freedom, her independence as that which she is. The mimetic dancer is stripped of his impotence, so soon as he can sing and speak; the creations of Tone win all-explaining meaning through the mime, as well as through the poet's word, and that exactly in degree as Tone itself is able to transcend into the motion of the mime and the word of the poet; while the Poet first becomes a Man through his translation to the flesh and blood of the Performer: for though he metes to each artistic factor the guiding purpose which binds them all into a common whole, yet this purpose is first changed from "will" to "can" by the poet's Will descending to the actor's Can.

Not one rich faculty of the separate arts will remain unused in the United Artwork of the Future; in it will each attain its first complete appraisement. Thus, especially, will the manifold developments of Tone, so peculiar to our instrumental music, unfold their utmost wealth within this Artwork; nay, Tone will incite the mimetic art of Dance to entirely new discoveries, and no less swell the breath of Poetry to unimagined fill. For Music, in her solitude, has fashioned for herself an organ which is capable of the highest reaches of expression. This organ is the Orchestra. The tone-speech of Beethoven, introduced into Drama by the orchestra, marks an entirely fresh departure for the dramatic artwork. While Architecture and, more especially, scenic Landscape-painting have power to set the executant dramatic Artist in the surroundings of physical Nature, and to dower him from the exhaustless stores of natural phenomena with an ample and significant background,-so in the Orchestra, that pulsing body of many-coloured harmony, the personating individual Man is given, for his support, a stanchless elemental spring, at once artistic, natural, and human.

The Orchestra is, so to speak, the loam of endless, universal Feeling, from which the individual feeling of the separate actor draws power to shoot aloft to fullest height of growth: it, in a sense, dissolves (36) the hard immobile ground of the actual scene into a fluent, elastic, impressionable æther, whose unmeasured bottom is the great sea of Feeling itself. Thus the Orchestra is like the Earth from which Antaeus, so soon as ever his foot had grazed it, drew new immortal life-force. Byits essence diametricallyopposed to the scenic landscape which surrounds the actor, and therefore, as to locality, most rightly placed in the deepened foreground outside the scenic frame, it at like time forms the perfect complement of these surroundings; inasmuch as it broadens out the exhaustless physical element of Nature to the equally exhaustless emotional element of artistic Man. These elements, thus knit together, enclose the performer as with an atmospheric ring of Art and Nature, in which, hike to the heavenly bodies, he moves secure in fullest orbit, and whence, withal, he is free to radiate on every side his feelings and his views of life,- broadened to infinity, and showered, as it were, on distances as measureless as those on which the stars of heaven cast their rays of light.

Thus supplementing one another in their changeful dance, the united sister-arts will show themselves and make good their claim; now all together, now in pairs, and again in solitary splendour, according to the momentary need of the only rule- and purpose-giver, the Dramatic Action. Now plastic Mimicry will listen to the passionate plaint of Thought; now resolute Thought will pour itself into the expressive mould of Gesture; now Tone must vent alone the stream of Feeling, the shudder of alarm; and now, in mutual embrace, all three will raise the Will of Drama to immediate and potent Deed. (For One thing there is that all the three united arts must will, in order to be free: and that one thing is the Drama: the reaching of the Drama's aim must be their common goal. Are they conscious of this aim, do they put forth all their will to work out that alone: so will they also gain the power to lop off from their several stems the egoistic offshoots of their own peculiar being; that therewith the tree may not spread out in formless mass to every wind of heaven, but proudly lift its wreath of branches, boughs and leaves, into its lofty crown.

The nature of Man, like that of every branch of Art, is manifold and over-fruitful: but one thing alone is the Soul of every unit, its most imperious bent (Nothwendigster Trieb), its strongest need-urged impulse. When this One Thing is recognised by man as his fundamental essence, then, to reach this One and indispensable, he has power to ward off every weaker, subordinated appetite, each feeble wish, whose satisfaction might stand between him and Its attainment. Only the weak and impotent knows no imperious, no mightiest longing of the soul: for him each instant is ruled by accidental, externally incited appetites which, for reason that they are but appetites, he never can allay; and therefore, hurled capriciously from one upon another, to and fro, he never can attain a real enjoyment. But should this need-reft one have strength to obstinately follow the appeasement of his accidental appetite, there then crop up in Life and Art those hideous, unnatural apparitions, the parasites of headlong egoistic frenzy, which fill us with such untold loathing in the murderous lust of despots, or in the wantonness of-modern operatic music. If the individual, however, feel in himself a mighty longing, an impulse that forces back all other desires, and forms the necessary inner urgence which constitutes his soul and being; and if he put forth all his force to satisfy it: he thus will also lift aloft his own peculiar force, and all his special faculties, to the fullest strength and height that e'er can lie within his reach.

But the individual man, in full possession of health of body, heart, and mind, can experience no higher need than that which is common to all his kind; for, to be a true Need, it can only be such an one as he can satisfy in Community alone. The most imperious and strongest need of full-fledged artist-man, however, is to impart himself in highest compass of his being to the fullest expression of Community; and .this he only reaches with the necessary breadth of general understanding in the Drama. In Drama he broadens out his own particular being, by the portrayal of an individual personality not his own, to a universally human being. He must completely step outside himself, to grasp the inner nature of an alien personality with that completeness which is needful before he can portray it. This he will only Attain when he so exhaustively analyses this individual in his contact with and penetration and completion by other individualities,-and therefore also the nature of these other individualities themselves,-when he forms thereof so lively a conception, that he gains a sympathetic feeling of this complementary influence on his own interior being. The perfectly artistic Performer is, therefore, the unit Man expanded to the essence of the Human Species by the utmost evolution of his own particular nature.

The place in which this wondrous process comes to pass, is the Theatric stage; the collective art-work which it brings to light of day, the Drama. But to force his own specific nature to the highest blossoming of its contents in this one and highest art-work, the separate artist, like each several art, must quell each selfish, arbitrary bent toward untimely bushing into outgrowths unfurthersome to the whole; the better then to put forth all his strength for reaching of the highest common purpose, which cannot indeed be realised without the unit, nor, on the other hand, without the unit's recurrent limitation.

This purpose of the Drama, is withal the only true artistic purpose that ever can be fully realised; whatsoever lies aloof from that, must necessarily lose itself in the sea of things indefinite, obscure, unfree. This purpose, however, the separate art-branch will never reach alone, (37) but only all together; and therefore the most universal is at like time the only real, free, the only universally intelligible Art-work.

V. THE ARTIST OF THE FUTURE.

HAVING sketched in general outline the nature of the Art-work into which the whole art-family must be absorbed, to be there redeemed by universal understanding, it remains to ask: What are the life-conditions which shall summon forth the Necessity of this Art-work and this redemption? Will this be brought about by Modern Art, in impatient need of understanding, from out her own pre-meditated plan, by arbitrary choice of means, and with fixed prescription of the 'modus' of the union that she has recognised as necessary? Will she be able to draw up a constitutional chart, a tariff of agreement with the so-called un-culture of the Folk? And if she brought herself to stoop to this, would such an agreement be actually effected by that 'constitution'? Can Cultured Art press forward from her abstract standpoint into Life; or rather, must not Life press forward into Art,-Life bear from out itself its only fitting Art, and mount up into that,-instead of art (well understood: the Cultured Art, which sprang from regions outside Life) engendering Life from out herself and mounting thereinto?

Let us therefore first agree as to whom we must consider the creator of the Art-work of the Future; so that we may argue back from him to the life-conditions which alone can permit his art-work and himself to take their rise.

Who, then, will be the Artist of the Future? Without a doubt, the Poet. (38)

But who will be the Poet?

Indisputably the Performer (39) (Darsteller). Yet who, again, will be the Performer? Necessarily the Fellowship of all the Artists.-

In order to see the Performer and the Poet take natural rise, we must first imagine to ourselves the artistic Fellowship of the future; and that according to no arbitrary canon, but following the logical course which we are bound to take in drawing from the Art-work itself our conclusions as to those artistic organs which alone can call it into natural life.-

The Art-work of the Future is an associate work, and only an associate demand can call it forth. This demand, which we have hitherto merely treated theoretically, as a necessary essential of the being of each separate branch of art, is practically conceivable only in the fellowship of every artist; and the union of every artist, according to the exigencies of time and place, and for one definite aim, is that which forms this fellowship. This definite aim is the Drama, for which they all unite in order by their participation therein to unfold their own peculiar art to the acme of its being; in this unfoldment to permeate each other's essence, and as fruit thereof to generate the hiving, breathing, moving drama. But the thing that makes this sharing possible to all-nay that renders it necessary, and which without their coöperation can never come to manifestment-is the very kernel of the Drama, the dramatic Action (dramatische Handlung).

The dramatic Action, as the first postulate of Drama, is withal that moment in the entire art-work which ensures its widest understanding. Directly borrowed from Life, past or present, it forms the intelligible bond that links this work therewith; exactly in degree as it mirrors back the face of Life, and fitly satisfies its claim for understanding. The dramatic Action is thus the bough from the Tree of Life which, sprung therefrom by an unconscious instinct, has blossomed and shed its fruit obediently to vital laws, and now, dissevered from the stem, is planted in the soil of Art; there, in new, more beautiful, eternal life, to grow into the spreading tree which resembles fully in its inner, necessary force and truth the parent tree of actual Life. But now, become its 'objectivation,' it upholds to Life the picture of its own existence, and lifts unconscious Life to conscious knowledge of itself.

In the dramatic Action, therefore, the Necessity of the art-work displays itself; without it, or some degree of reference thereto, all art-fashioning is arbitrary, unneedful, accidental, unintelligible. The first and truest fount of Art reveals itself in the impulse that urges from Life into the work of art; for it is the impulse to bring the unconscious, instinctive principle of Life to understanding (verständniss) and acknowledgment as Necessity. (40 ) But the impulse toward agreement (verständigung) presupposes commonality: the Egoist has need of no one with whom to agree. Therefore, only from a life in common, can proceed the impulse toward intelligible objectification of this life by Art-work; the Community of artists alone can give it vent; and only in communion, can they content it. This impulse, however, can only find its full contentment in the faithful representation of an episode (Handlung) taken from Life: whilst only such an episode can be a fitting subject for artistic Treatment as has already come in Life to definite conclusion; as to which, as a series of causes and effects, (41) there can no longer be any doubt; and as to whose possible issue there is no longer room for arbitrary assumption. Only when a thing has been consummated in Life, can we grasp the necessity of its occurrence, the harmony of its separate movements. But an episode is not completed, until the Man who brought it about-who stood in the focus of a series of events which, as a feeling, thinking, will-ing person, he guided by the force of his own innate charactera-until this man is likewise no longer subject to our arbitrary assumptions as to his possible doings. Now, every man is subject to these so long as he lives: by Death is he first freed from this subjection, for then we know All that he did, and that he was. That action, therefore, must be the best fitted for dramatic art-and the worthiest object of its rendering-which is rounded off together with the life of the chief person that evolved it, and whose denouement is none other than the conclusion of the life of this one man himself.

Only that action is completely truthful - and can thoroughly convince us of its plain necessity-on whose fulfilment a man had set the whole strength of his being, and which was to him so imperative a necessity that he needs must pass over into it with the whole force of his character. But hereof he conclusively persuades us by this alone: that, in the effectuation of his personal force, he literally went under, he veritably threw overboard his personal existence, for sake of bringing to the outer world the inner Necessity which ruled his being.(42) He proves to us the verity of his nature, not only in his actions-which might still appear capricious so long as he yet were doing-but by the consummated sacrifice of his personality to this necessary course of action. The last, completest renunciation (Entäusserung) of his personal egoism, the demonstration of his full ascension into universalism, a man can only show us by his Death; and that not by his accidental, but by his necessary death, the logical sequel to his actions, the last fulfilment of his being.

The celebration of such a Death is the noblest thing that men can enter on. It reveals to us in the nature of this one man, laid bare by death, the whole content of universal human nature. But we fix this revelation in surest hold of memory by the conscious representation of that Death itself and, in order to make its purport clear to us, by the representation of those actions which found their necessary conclusion in that death.(43) Not in the repulsive funeral rites which, in our neo-christian mode of life, we solemnise bymeaningless hymns and churchyard platitudes; but by the artistic re-animation of the lost one, by life-glad reproduction and portrayal of his actions and his death, in the dramatic Art-work, shall we celebrate that festival which lifts us living to the highest bliss of love for the departed, and turns his nature to our own.

Though the longing for this dramatic rite is present in the whole brotherhood of artists, and though that object alone can be a worthy one, and one that justifies the impulse toward its representation, which awakes in us this impulse in common: yet that Love which alone can be conceived as the active and effectual power hereto, has its unfathomable seat within the heart of each separate unit; in whom it exercises its specific motive force in accordance with his individual characteristics. This specific energy of Love will therefore show itself most strenuously in that unit who, by reason of his general character, or in this particular period of his life, feels drawn by the closest bond of affinity toward this particular Hero; who by his sympathy makes the nature of this hero the most especially his own, and trains his artistic faculties the fittest to requicken by his impersonation this hero, of all others, for the living memory of himself, his fellows, and the whole community. The might of individuality will never assert itself more positively than in the free artistic fellowship; since the incitation to resolves in common can only issue from precisely that unit in whom the individuality speaks out so strongly that it determines the free voices of the rest. The might of Individuality, however, will only be able to operate thus upon the fellowship in those specific cases where it has the wit to bring itself to real, and not to merely artificial, currency. Should an art-comrade proclaim his purpose to represent this one particular Hero, and thereto crave that mutual co-operation of the fellowship which alone can bring this to effect: he will not see his wish fulfilled until he has succeeded in arousing for his project the same love and enthusiasm which inspire himself, and which he can only impart to others when his individuality stands possessed of a force in complete accord with the specific object.

When once the artist has raised his project to a common one, by the energy of his own enthusiasm, the artistic undertaking becomes thenceforth itself an enterprise in common. But as the dramatic action to be represented has its focus in the Hero of that action, so does the common art-work group itself around the Representant of this hero. His fellow-actors, and all his other colleagues, bear to him the same relation in the art-work as that which the co-enacting persons-those, that is to say, who formed the foils of the hero's character and the 'objects' of his action,-and, withal, the general human and natural entourage,- bore in Life to the Hero; only with this difference, that the hero's impersonator shapes and arranges consciously that which came instinctively to the actual hero. In his stress for artistic reproduction of the Action, the performer thus becomes a poet; he arranges his own action, and all its living outward issues, in accordance with an artistic standard. But he only attains his special purpose in measure as he has raised it to a general aim, as every unit is clamorous to lend himself to the furtherance of this general aim,-therefore in exact measure as he himself, above all others, is able to surrender his own specific personal purpose to the general aim; and thus, in a sense, not merely represents in the art-work the action of the fêted hero, but repeats its moral lesson; insomuch as he proves by this surrender of his personality that he also, in his artistic action, is obeying a dictate of Necessity which consumes the whole individuality of his being. (44)

The free Artistic Fellowship is therefore the foundation, and the first condition, of the Art-work itself. From it proceeds the Performer, who, in his enthusiasm for this one particular hero whose nature harmonises with his own, now raises himself to the rank of Poet, of artistic Lawgiver to the fellowship; from this height, again, to descend to complete absorption in the fellowship. The function of this lawgiver is therefore never more than periodic, and is confined to the one particular occasion which has been prompted by his individuality and thereby raised to a common 'objective' for the art of all; wherefore his rule can by no means be extended to all occasions. The dictatorship of the poet-actor comes to its natural close together with the attainment of his specific purpose: that purpose which he had raised into a common one, and in which his personality was dissolved so soon as ever his message had been shared with the community. Each separate member may lift himself to the exercise of this dictatorship, when he bears a definite message which so far answers to his individuality that in its proclamation he has power to raise it to a common purpose. For in that artistic fellowship which combines for no other aim than the satisfaction of a joint artistic impulse, it is impossible that any other thing should come to definite prescription and resolve, than that which compasses the mutual satisfaction of this impulse: namely, Art herself, and the laws which summon forth her perfect manifestment by the union of the individual with the universal.-

In all the mutual federations of the Manhood of the Future, these selfsame laws of inner necessity will assert their sole determinative might. A natural and unforced association of men in larger or in smaller numbers, can only be called forth by a need they feel in common. The satisfaction of this need is the exclusive aim of the mutual undertaking: toward this aim are directed the actions of each unit, so long as the common need is alike his strongest personal need; this aim will then, and of itself, prescribe the laws for the associate action. For these laws are nothing but the fittest means for reaching the common goal. The knowledge of the fittest means is denied to him who is urged towards this goal by no sincere, imperative need: but where the latter is at hand, the certain knowledge of these means springs self-taught from the cogence of the need, and above all, from its communal character.

Natural unions have, therefore, only so long a natural continuance as the need on which they are grounded is a common one, and as its satisfaction is still to be accomplished: has the goal been reached, then this specific union is dissolved together with the need that called it forth; and first from fresh-arising needs will there likewise rise fresh unions of those who share these novel needs in common. Our modern States are thus far the most unnatural unions of fellow men, that-called into existence by mere external caprice, e.g. dynastic interests-they yoke together a certain number of men for once and all, in furtherance of an aim which either never answered to a need they shared in common, or, from the change of time and circumstance, is certainly no longer common to them now.-All men have but one lasting need in common; a need, however, which only in its most general purport abides in them in equal measure: this is the need to live and to be happy. Herein lies the natural bond of all mankind; a need to which our mother Earth may give us perfect answer.

In the reasonable state of Future Manhood, the special needs which take their rise, and mount aloft, in time and place and individuality, can alone lay down the bases of those special unions whose sum-total will make out the great association of all Mankind. These Unions will alternate, shape themselves afresh, unloose and knit themselves again, precisely as the Needs shall change and come back on their course. They will be lasting where they are of material sort, where they are rooted in the common ground and soil, and in general affect the intercourse of men in so far as this is necessarily founded on certain like-remaining, local limitations. But they will ever shape themselves anew, proclaim more complex and vivacious change, the more do they proceed from higher, universal, spiritual needs. Against the stiff political union of our time, upheld alone by outward force, the free communions of the Future in their pliant change-now spread out to bounds unheard-of, now linked in finest meshes-will display the future Human Life itself, whose inexhaustible charm will be preserved by ceaseless alternation of the richest individualities; whereas our present life, (45) with its fashion and red-tape uniformity, affords alas! the but too faithful likeness of the modern State, with its stations, its posts, its vested interests, (46) its standing armies-and whatever else it has of standing.

Yet no alliances of men will enjoy a richer, more eventful change than those inspired by Art For in these each individuality, so soon as ever it has wit to utter itself in consonance with the spirit of community, will, by the exposition of its passing purpose, call forth a fresh alliance to realise that one specific purpose; inasmuch as it will widen out its own particular need to the Need of a brotherhood which this very need will have summoned into being. Each dramatic art-work, as it enters upon life, will therefore be the work of a new and never-hitherto-existing, and thus a never-to-be-repeated fellowship of artists: its communion will take its rise from the moment when the poet-actor of the hero's r6le exalts his purpose to the common aim of the comrades whom he needed for its exposition, and will be dissolved the very instant that this purpose is attained.

In this wise naught can pass into a standstill, in this artistic union: it is formed for the one sole aim, attained today, of celebrating this one particular hero; to be tomorrow, under entirely fresh conditions, and through the inspiring purpose of an entirely different individual, resolved into a fresh association. While this fresh association will be as distinct from that preceding it, as it will bring its work to light of day according to specific laws which, constituting the fittest means for the realisation of the new-adopted scheme, will evince themselves as likewise new and never matched quite thus before. (47)

Thus, and thus only, must the future Artist-guild be constituted, so soon as ever it is banded by no other aim than that of the Art-work. Who, then, will be the Artist of the Future? The poet? The performer? The musician? The plastician ?-Let us say it in one word: the Folk. That selfsame Folk to whom we owe the only genuine Art-work, still living even in our modern memory, however much distorted by our restorations; to whom alone we owe all Art itself.

When we repiece the past and consummated, in order to conjure up the picture of a particular object in the light of its general bearings on the history of mankind, we can depict its singlest traits with surest touch,-nay, from the minute regardal of such single traits there often springs for us the surest understanding of the whole, which we are forced to rescue from its hazy generalism by holding to this one particular feature. Thus in our present inquiry into the phenomena of Art, the wealth of details that confront us is so excessive that, in order to present our object in its general bearings, we can only venture to select a limited portion, and that which seems the best to illustrate our line of thought; lest otherwise we lose ourselves in branching by-ways, and our eyes be turned aside from the higher general goal. Now the case is exactly opposite, when we desire to portray a future state of things; we have only one scale for such a picture, and that lies, decidedly not in the spaces of the Future, on which the combination is to shape itself, but in the Past and in the Present; even there where all those conditions are still in lusty life which make the longed-for future state impossible to-day, and allow its sheer antithesis to seem an unavoidable necessity. The force of Need impels us to a general preconception; yet we can only grasp it, not simply by an ardent aspiration of the heart, but rather by a logical induction which tells us that this state will be the very opposite of the evil which we recognise in our system of to-day. All individual features (48) must stay, perforce, outside this preconception; since such could only figure as arbitrary assumptions of our phantasy, and must constantly bewray their nature as borrowed from the bad conditions of the present day. Only the consummated and fulfilled, can be matter of our knowledge; the lifelike shaping of the Future must be the work of Life itself alone! When this is brought to pass, we shall conceive at the first glance what to-day we could only palm off upon ourselves by the exercise of whim and fancy, submitted as we are to the insuperable influence of our present plight.

Nothing has been more destructive of human happiness, than this frenzied haste to regulate the Life of the Future by given present laws. This loathly care about the Future, which indeed is the sole heritage of moody, absolute Egoism, at bottom seeks but to preserve, to ensure what we possess to-day, for all our lifetime. It holds fast to Property-the to-all-eternity to be clinched and riveted, property-as the only worthy object of busy human forethought, and therefore seeks to do its best to swathe the Future's self-moved limbs, to pluck out by the roots its self-shaping quick of Life, as a poisonous and maddening sting; in order to protect from every careless jog this undying fund of Property, that it may ever re-engender and swell out the fodder for its comfortable chewing and devouring, by the natural law of five per cent. Just as in this chief anxiety of the modern State, Man is looked-on, to all future time, as an utterly feeble or eternally to-be-mistrusted being, which can only be maintained by Property, or restrained within the proper path by Law: so, in respect of Art and Artists, we view the Art-institute as the only safeguard of their common welfare. Without Academies, Statutes, and Institutions, Art seems to us to run the constant danger of-so to phrase it-giving up the ghost; for we cannot reconcile a free, a self-determining activity with our modern notions of an Artist. The reason of this, however, is that in sooth we are no genuine Artists, no more than we are genuine Men. And thus the feeling of our pitiful incapacity, entirely brought upon ourselves by cowardice and weakness, casts us back upon the everlasting care to frame fixed canons for the Future; by whose forcible upholding we, at bottom, but ensure that we shall never be true Artists, and never truthful Men.

So is it! We always look towards the Future with the eye of the Present, with the eye that can only measure all future generations by the standard it has borrowed from the Men of the Present, and sets up as the universal standard of mankind. If we have finally proved that the Folk must of necessity be the Artist of the future, we must be prepared to see the intellectual egoism of the artists of the Present break forth in contemptuous amazement at the discovery. They forget completely that in the days of national blood-brotherhood, which preceded the epoch when the absolute Egoism of the individual was elevated to a religion,-the days which our historians betoken as those of prehistoric myth and fable,-the Folk, in truth, was already the only poet, the only artist; that all their matter, and all their form-if it is to have any sound vitality-they can derive alone from the fancy of these art-inventive Peoples. On the contrary, they regard the Folk exclusively under the aspect lent it nowadays by their culture-spectacled eyes. From their lofty pedestal, they deem that only their direct antithesis, the raw uncultured masses, can mean for them "the Folk." As they look down upon the people, there rise but fumes of beer and spirits to their nostrils; they fumble for their perfumed handkerchiefs, and ask with civilised exasperation: "What! The rabble is in future to replace us in Art-making? The rabble, which does not so much as understand us, when we provide its art? Out of the reeking gin-shop, out of the smoking dung-heap, are we to see arise the mould of Beauty and of Art? "-

Quite so! Not from the filthy dregs of your Culture of to-day, not from the loathsome subsoil of your modern 'polite education,' not from the conditions which give your modern civilisation the sole conceivable base of its existence, shall arise the Art-work of the Future. Yet reflect! that this rabble is in no wise a normal product of real human nature, but rather the artificial outcome of your denaturalised culture; that all the crimes and abominations with which ye now upbraid this rabble, are only the despairing gestures of the battle which the true nature of Man wages against its hideous oppressor, modern Civilisation; and that these revolting features are nowise the real face of Nature, but rather the reflection of the hypocritical mask of your State-, and Criminal-Culture. Further reflect: that, where one portion of the social system busies itself alone with superfluous art and literature, another portion must necessarily redress the balance by scavenging the dirt of your useless lives; that, where fashion and dilettantism fill up one whole unneedful life, there coarseness and grossness must make out the substance of another hife,-a life ye cannot do without; that, where need-less luxury seeks violently to still its all-devouring appetite, the natural Need can only balance its side of the account with Luxury by drudgery and want, amidst the most deforming cares.

So long as ye intellectual egoists and egoistic purists shall blossom in your artificial atmosphere, there must needs be somewhere a "stuff" from whose vital juices ye may distil your own sweet perfumes; and this stuff from which ye have sucked out all its inbred scent, is but that foul-breathed rabble whose approach inspires you with disgust, and from whom ye only ward yourselves by that very perfume ye have squeezed from out its native comeliness. So long as a great portion of any nation, installed in State, Judiciary, and University-posts, squanders its precious vital forces on the most useless of employments: so long must an equally great, or even greater portion replace those squandered forces by its own employment in the harshest tasks of bare Utility. And-saddest tale of all I-when in this disproportionately burdened section of the Folk the sheerest utilitarianism has thus become the moving spirit of all its energy, then must the revolting spectacle be exhibited of absolute Egoism enforcing its laws of life on every hand and, from the visage of the town and country rabble, reflecting back its hatefullest grimaces upon yourselves. (49)

However, neither you nor this rabble do we understand by the term, the Folk: only when neither Ye nor It shall exist any longer, can we conceive the presence of the Folk. Yet even now the Folk is living, wherever ye and the rabble are not; or rather, it is living in your twin midst, but ye wist not of it. Did ye know it, then were ye yourselves the Folk; for no man can know the fulness of the Folk, without possessing a share therein. The highest educated alike with the most uneducated, the learned with the most unlearned, the high-placed with the lowly, the nestling of the amplest lap of luxury with the starveling of the filthiest den of Hunger, the ward of heartless Science with the wastrel of the rawest vice,-so soon as e'er he feels and nurtures in himself a stress which thrusts him out from cowardly indifference to the criminal assemblage of our social and political affairs, or heavy-witted submission thereunder,-which inspires him with loathing for the shallow joys of our inhuman Culture, or hatred for a Utilitarianism that brings its uses only to the need-less and never to the needy,-which fills him with contempt for those self-sufficient thralls, the despicable Egoists! or wrath against the arrogant outragers of human nature,-he, therefore, who not from this conglomerate of pride and baseness, of shamelessness and cringing, thus not from the statutory rights which hold this composite together, but from the fulness and the depth of naked human nature and the irrefutable right of its absolute Need, draws force for resistance, for revolt, for assault upon the oppressor of this nature,-he then who must withstand, revolt, and deal assault, and openly avows this plain necessity in that he gladly suffers every other sorrow for its sake, and, if need should be, will even offer up his life,-he, and he alone belongs to the Folk; for he and all his fellows feel a common Want.

This Want will give the Folk the mastery of Life, will raise it to the only living might. This Want once drove the Israelites, already turned to dull and sordid beasts of burden, through the waters of the salt Red Sea; and through the Red Sea also must Want drive us, if we are ever, cleansed from shame, to reach the promised land. We shall not drown beneath its waves; it is fatal only to the Pharaohs of this world, who once with host and captains, with horse and rider, were swallowed up therein,- those haughty, overweening Pharaohs who had forgotten that once a poor herdsman's son had through his prudent counsels saved their land and them from death by hunger! But the Folk, the chosen people, passed scathless through that sea towards the Land of Promise: and reached it when the desert sand had washed its body of the last remaining stain of slavery.-

Since the poor Israelites have led me thus into the region of the fairest of all poetry, the ever fresh and ever truthful poems of the Folk, I will take my leave-by way of moral-with the outline of a glorious Saga which long ago the raw, uncultured Folk of oldtime Germany indited for no other reason than that of inner, free Necessity.

Wieland the Smith, out of very joy in his handiwork, forged cunning trinkets for himself, and weapons keen and fair to see. One day as he was bathing on the shore, he saw a Swan-maiden (Schwanenjungfrau) come flying with her sisters through the air and, putting off her swan-apparel, plunge down into the sea. Aflame with sudden love, he rushed into the deeper waters; he wrestled with, and won the wondrous woman. Love, too, broke down her pride; in tender care for one another, they lived in blissful union.

A ring the Swan-maid gave to Wieland: this must he never let her win back from him; for greatly as she loved him, she had not lost her yearning for her ancient Freedom, for wind-borne passage to her happy island home; and this ring it was, that gave her strength to wing her flight. So Wieland wrought a goodly store of rings alike to that his Swan-wife gave him, and strung them on a hempen cord against his wall: amongst them all she should not recognise her own.

He came home once from journeying. Alack! There lay his house in ruins; his wife had flown away to farthest distance!

There was a King, Neiding (Envy) by name, who had heard much talk of Wieland's skill; he burned to trap the Smith, that thenceforth he might work for him alone. He found at last a valid pretext for such a deed of violence: the vein of gold which Wieland wrought into his smitheries belonged to Neiding's ground and soil; thus Wieland's art was a robbery of the royal possessions.-It was he who burst into the smithy; and now he fell upon the Smith himself; bound him with chains, and bore him off

Set down in Neiding's court, Wieland must hammer for the King all kinds of objects, useful, strong, and durable: harness, tools, and armour, by aid of which the King might broaden-out his realm. But since, for such a labour, Neiding must loose the captive's bonds, his care was how to leave his body free to move, yet hinder him from flight: and so he craftily bethought him of severing the sinews of poor Wieland's feet. For he rightly guessed that the Smith had only need of hands, and not of feet, to do his work.

Thus sate he then, in all his misery, the art-rich Wieland, the one-time blithesome wonder-smith: crippled, behind his anvil, at which he now must slave to swell his master's wealth; limping, lamed, and loathly, whene'er he strove to stand erect! Who might measure all his suffering, when he thought back to his Freedom, to his Art,-to his beloved wife! Who fathom all his grudge against this King, who had wrought him such an untold shame!

From his forge he gazed above to Heaven's blue, through which the Swan-maid once had flown to him; this air was her thrice-happy realm, through which she soared in blissful 'freedom, the while he breathed the smithy's stench and fume-all for the service of King Neiding's use! The shamed and self-bound man, should he never find his wife again!

Ha! since he was doomed to wretchedness for ever, since nevermore should joy or solace bloom for him,-if he yet might gain at least one only thing: Revenge, revenge upon this Neiding, who had brought him to this endless sorrow for his own base use! If it were only possible to sweep this wretch and all his brood from off the earth !-

Fearsome schemes of vengeance planned he; day by day increased his misery; and day by day grew ranker the desperate longing for revenge.-But how should he, the halting cripple, make ready for the battle that should lay his torturer low? One venturous forward step; and he must fall dishonoured to the ground, the plaything for his foeman's scorn!

"Thou dearest, distant wife! Had I thy wings! Had I thy wings, to wreak my vengeance, and swing myself aloft from out this shame ! "-

Then Want itself bent down its mighty pinions above the tortured Wieland's breast, and fanned its inspiration about his thoughtful brow. From Want, from terrible, all-powerful Want, the fettered artist learnt to mould what no man's mind had yet conceived. Wieland found it: found how to forge him WINGS. Wings whereon to mount aloft to wreak revenge on his tormentor,- Wings, to soar through Heaven's distance to the blessed island of his Wife!-

He did it: he fulfilled the task that utmost Want had set within him. Borne on the work of his own Art, he flew aloft; he rained his deadly shafts into King Neiding's heart ;-he swung himself in blissful, daring flight athwart the winds, to where he found the loved one of his youth.-

O sole and glorious Folk ! This is it, that thou thyself hast sung. Thou art thyself this Wieland ! Weld thou thy wings, and soar on high !