pictures of their fancy, condensed itself at last to a passion for undertakings whose goal, after the thousand-times proved fruitlessness of mere adventures – should be the knowledge of the outer world, a tasting of the fruit of actual experiences reaped on a definite path of earnest, keen endeavour. Daring voyages of discovery undertaken with a conscious aim, and profound scientific researches grounded on their results, at last uncloaked to us the world as it really is. – By this knowledge was the Romance of the Middle Ages destroyed, and the delineation of fancied shows was followed by the delineation of their reality.
{FEUER} This reality, however, had stayed untroubled, undisfigured by our errors, in the phenomena of Nature alone, unreachable by our activity.” [494W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 164]
[495W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 166]
[P. 166] {FEUER} “The strife between the law-made State and the selfwill of the Individual it [Christianity] had been the less able to overcome, as the roots of its own origin and essence lay in that strife alone: were the individual man completely reconciled with the commonwealth – nay, should he find therein the fullest satisfaction of his bent toward happiness, then would all necessity of the Christian view be done away with, and Christianity itself would be practically annulled.” [495W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 166]
[496W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 167-168]
[P. 167] {FEUER} “What man instinctively had fled from, and yet in truth could never flee away from, must at last be recognised as rooted so deeply in our own heart and our involuntary view of the essence of things human, that a flight from it to outer realms was clean impossible. Returning from the endless breadths of Nature, where he had found the imaginings of our Phantasy refuted by the essence of things, we [P. 168] were necessarily driven to seek in a plain and lucid contemplation of human affairs the selfsame refutation for a visionary, a false opinion thereof; for we felt that we must have fed and formed those affairs themselves in the same way as we had earlier formed our erroneous opinions of the phenomena of Nature. The first and weightiest step toward knowledge consisted, therefore, in grasping the phenomena of Life according to their actuality: and that, at first, without passing any judgment on them, but with the single aim to bring before ourselves their actual facts and grouping as perspicuously and truthfully as possible. (…) The most unruffled mode of looking at the naked, undisfigured truth henceforth becomes the Poet’s plumb-line: to seize and exhibit human beings and their affairs as they are, and not as one had earlier imagined them, is from now the task alike of the Historian and of the Artist who fain would set before himself in miniature the actuality of Life, -- and Shakespeare was the unmatched master in this art, which let him find the shape for his Drama.” [496W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 167-168]
[497W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 168-169]
[P. 168] {FEUER} “Man can only be comprehended in conjunction with [P. 169] men in general, with his Surrounding; man divorced from this, above all the modern man, must appear of all things the most incomprehensible. The restless inner discord of this Man, who between ‘will’ and ‘can’ had created for himself a chaos of tormenting notions, driving him to war against himself, to self-
