such contact will last. The moral would be: the good Lord would do better to spare us His revelations since He is not permitted to annul the laws of nature: nature – in this case human nature – is bound to take her revenge and destroy the revelation. This seems to me to be the meaning of most of those wonderful legends which are not the work of priests. What happened to Semele in the case of Zeus? [361W-{5/30/46}Letter to Hermann Franck: SLRW, p. 129-130]
[362W-{5/30/46}Letter to Hermann Franck: SLRW, p. 131]
[P. 131] {FEUER} … after I have had Lohengrin announce his lofty calling in a calm and solemn tone – instead of turning to Elsa with a bitter reproach, as he did in the earlier version, I now have him speak the following lines with the greatest possible emotion:
Oh Elsa! Think what thou hast done to me!
When at the first my glances turned on thee,
I felt love to my heart straightway had flown,
The Grail’s chaste service did my heart disown.
But having turned from God in love’s excess,
Atonement and remorse must I endure,
For ah! The shameful sin must I confess
Of deeming woman’s love divinely pure! –
Do you still think it necessary for him to mention the specific rule associated with the Grail which, although not expressly forbidding the Grail knights from committing such excesses, nevertheless discourages them from acting in this way? I think it should be sufficient for the audience to deduce from what Lohengrin says that the bonds of earthly love are, strictly speaking, unbecoming for a knight of the Grail. (I might add that I have not invented any part of this varying stipulation, -- this is exactly how it is in Wolfram.)” [362W-{5/30/46}Letter to Hermann Franck: SLRW, p. 131]
[363W-{1/1/47}Letter to Eduard Hanslick: SLRW, p. 134]
[P. 134] {FEUER} “Do not underestimate the power of reflection; the unconsciously created work of art belongs to periods remote from our own: the work of art of the most advanced period of culture can be produced only by a process of conscious creation. The Christian poetry of the Middles Ages, for ex., was immediate & unconscious: but no fully authentic work of art was produced at that time, -- that was something reserved for Goethe in our own age of objectivity. Only the most fertile human nature can effect this wondrous combination between the power of the reflective intellect, on the one hand, & the fecundity of the more direct creative power on the other.” [363W-{1/1/47}Letter to Eduard Hanslick: SLRW, p. 134]
[364W-{6-8/48} The Wibelungen – Revised summer of 1849: PW Vol. VII, p. 263]
[P. 263] {FEUER} Here we find Siegfried as the winner of the Nibelung’s Hoard and with it might unmeasurable. This Hoard, and the might in it residing, becomes the immovable centre round which all further shaping of the saga now revolves: the whole strife and struggle is aimed at this Hoard of the Nibelungen, as the epitome of earthly power, and he who owns it, who governs by it,
