with more and more distinctness. The artist can only attain the power of convincing portraiture, when he has been able to sink himself with fullest sympathy into the essence of the character to be portrayed. In ‘Elsa’ I saw, from the commencement, my desired antithesis to Lohengrin, -- yet naturally, not so absolute an antithesis as should lie far removed from his own nature, but rather the other half of his being, -- the antithesis which is included in his general nature and forms the necessarily longed-for complement of his specific man-hood. Elsa is the unconscious, the undeliberate (Unwillkuerliche), into which Lohengrin’s conscious, deliberate (willkuerliche) being yearns to be redeemed; but this yearning, again, is itself the unconscious, undeliberate Necessity in Lohengrin, whereby he feels himself akin to Elsa’s being. Through the capability of this ‘unconscious consciousness,’ such as I myself now felt [P. 347] alike with Lohengrin, the nature of Woman also – and that precisely as I felt impelled to the faithfullest portrayal of its essence – came to ever clearer understanding in my inner mind. Through this power I succeeded in so completely transferring myself to this female principle, that I came to an entire agreement with its utterance by my loving Elsa. I grew to find her so justified in the final outburst of her jealousy, that from this very outburst I learnt first to thoroughly understand the purely-human element of love … . … this woman, who can love but thus and not otherwise, who, by the very burst of her jealousy, wakes first from out the thrill of worship into the full reality of love, and by her wreck reveals its essence to him who had not fathomed it as yet, this glorious woman, before whom Lohengrin must vanish, for reason that his own specific nature could not understand her, -- I had found her now: and the random shaft that I had shot towards the treasure dreamt but hitherto unknown, was my own Lohengrin, whom now I must give up as lost; to track more certainly the footsteps of that true Woman-hood, which should one day bring to me and all the world redemption, after Man-Hood’s egoism, even in its noblest form, had shivered into self-crushed dust before her. Elsa, the Woman, -- Woman hitherto un-understood by me, and understood at last, -- that most positive expression of the purest instinct of the senses, -- made me a Revolutionary at one blow. She was the Spirit of the [P. 348] Folk, for whose redeeming hand I too, as artist-man, was longing. – But this treasure trove [Hoard? i.e., ‘Hort’?] of Knowledge lay hid, at first, within the silence of my lonely heart: only slowly did it ripen into loud avowal!” [573W-{6-8/51} A Communication To My Friends: PW Vol. I, p. 346-348]
[574W-{6-8/51} A Communication To My Friends: PW Vol. I, p. 357-358]
[P. 357] {FEUER} “In the struggle to give the wishes of my heart artistic shape, andin the ardour to discover what thing it was that drew me so resistlessly to the primal source of old home Sagas, I drove step by step into the deeper regions of antiquity, where at last to my delight, and truly in the utmost reaches of old time, I was to light upon the fair young form of [P. 358] Man, in all the freshness of his force. My studies thus bore me, through the legends of the Middle Ages, right down to their foundation in the old-Germanic Mythos; one swathing after another, which the later legendary lore had bound around it, I was able to unloose, and thus at last to gaze upon it in its chastest beauty. What here I saw, was no longer the Figure of conventional history, whose garment claims our interest more than does the actual shape inside; but the real naked Man … .
{FEUER} {Pre-SCHOP} At like time I had sought this human being inHistory too. Here offered themselves relations, and nothing but relations; the human being I could only see in so far as the relations ordered him: and not as he
