now. But this is not something I have worked out theoretically – in spite of the fact that you will set eyes on my theory before you encounter the practical demonstration from which it derives: the theory came to me through my poem, ‘Siegfried’s Death’, in which I chanced quite spontaneously upon the language necessary for the music.” [557W-{5/31/51}Letter to Adolf Stahr: SLRW, p. 225]
[558W-{6-8/51} A Communication To My Friends: PW Vol. I, p. 286]
[P. 286] “The first artistic Will is nothing else than the contentment of the instinct-ive impulse to imitate what most attracts us.—
{FEUER} If I seek to gain myself a fairly satisfactory explanation of theartistic faculty, I can only do so by attributing it chiefly to the force of the receptive faculty (die Kraft des Empfaengnissvermogens). The un-artistic political temperament may be characterised thus: that from youth up it sets a check upon impressions from outside, which, in the course of the man’s development, mounts even to a calculation of the personal profit that this withstanding of the outer world will bring him, to a talent for referring this outer world to himself and never himself to it. On the other hand, the unpolitical, artistic temperament is marked by this one feature: that its owner gives himself up without reserve to the impressions which move his emotional being (Empfindungswesen) to sympathy. The motive power of these impressions, again, is in direct ratio to the force of the receptive faculty, which latter only gains the strength of an impulse to impart (Mittheilungsdrang) when they fill it to an ecstatic excess (entzueckenden Uebermaase).” [558W-{6-8/51} A Communication To My Friends: PW Vol. I, p. 286]
[559W-{6-8/51} A Communication To My Friends: PW Vol. I, p. 288-289]
[P. 288] {FEUER} “I attribute the force which we commonly call Genius solely to thefaculty which I have just described at length. That which operates so mightily upon this force that it must finally come forth to full productiveness, we have in truth to regard as the real fashioner and former, as the only furthering condition for that force’s efficacy, and this is the Art already evolved outside that separate force, the Art which from the artworks of the ancient and the modern world has shaped itself into a universal Substance, and hand in hand with actual Life, reacts upon the individual with the character of the force that I have elsewhere named the communistic. Amid these all-filling and all-fashioning influences of Art and Life, there thus remains to the Individual but one chief thing as his own: namely Force, vital force, force to assimilate the kindred and the needful; and this is precisely that receptive-force which I have denoted above, and which – so soon as it opens its arms in love without reserve – must necessarily, with the attainment of its perfect strength, become at last productive force.
{FEUER} In epochs when this force, like the force of Individuality in general, has been entirely crushed out by state-discipline, or by the complete fossilisation of the outward forms of Life and Arts – as in China, or in Europe towards the end of the Roman world-dominion – neither have those phenomena [P. 289] which we christen by The name ‘Genius’ ever come to light: a plain proof that they are not cast upon life by the caprice of God or Nature. On the other hand, these phenomena were just as little known in those ages when both creative forces, the individualistic and
