[P. 208] {FEUER} Only in the most perfect artwork therefore, in the Drama, can the insight of the experienced-one impart itself with full success; and for the very reason that, through employment of every artistic expressional-faculty of man, the poet’s aim (Absicht) is in Drama the most completely carried from the Understanding to the Feeling, -- to wit, is artistically imparted to the Feeling’s most directly receptive organs, the senses. The Drama, as the most perfect artwork, differs from all other forms of poetry in just this, -- that in it the Aim is lifted into utmost imperceptibility, by its entire realisation. In Drama, wherever the aim, i.e. the Intellectual Will, stays still observable, there the impression is also a chilling one; for where we see the poet still will-ing, we feel that as yet he can not. The poet’s can-ning, however, is the complete ascension of the Aim into the Artwork, the emotionalising of the intellect (Gefuehlswerdung des Verstandes).” [519W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 206-208]
[520W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 208-209]
[P. 208] {FEUER} “In presence of the Dramatic Artwork, nothing should remain for the combining Intellect to search for. Everything in it must come to an issue sufficient to set our [P. 209] Feeling at rest thereon; for in the setting-at-rest of this Feeling resides the repose, itself, which brings us an instinctive understanding of Life. In the Drama, we must become knowers through the Feeling. The Understanding tells us: ‘So is it,’ – only when the Feeling has told us: ‘So must it be.’ “ [520W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 208-209]
[521W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 212]
[P. 212] {FEUER} “ … even the simplest action confounds and bewilders the Understanding, which would fain regard it through the anatomical microscope, by the immensity of its ramifications: would it comprehend that action, it can only do so by discarding the microscope and fetching forth the image in which alone its human eye can grasp; and this comprehension is ultimately enabled by the instinctive Feeling – as vindicated by the Understanding. This image of the phenomena, in which alone the Feeling can comprehend them, … this image, for the Aim of the poet, who must likewise take the phenomena of Life and compress them from their view-less many-memberedness into a compact, easily survey-able shape, -- this image is nothing else but the Wonder. [521W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 212]
[522W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 213-214]
[P. 213] {FEUER} “The Wonder in the Poet’s work is distinguished from the Wonder in religious Dogma by this: that it does not, like the latter, upheave the nature of things, but the rather makes it comprehensible to the Feeling.
{FEUER} The Judaeo-Christian Wonder tore the connexion of natural phenomena asunder, to allow the Divine Will to appear as standing over Nature. In it a broad connexus of things was by no means condensed in favour of their understanding by the instinctive Feeling, but this Wonder was employed entirely for its own sake alone; people demanded it, as the proof of a suprahuman power, from him who gave himself for divine, and in whom they refused to believe till before the bodily eyes of men he had shown himself the lord of Nature, i.e. the arbitrary subverter of the natural order of things. This Wonder was therefore claimed from him one did not hold for authentic in himself and his natural dealings, but whom one proposed to first believe when he should have
