[682W-{9/60}Music of the Future, PW Vol. III, p. 318-319]
[P. 318] {FEUER} “The metaphysical necessity for the discovery of this quite new faculty of speech precisely in our times, appears to me to lie in the daily more conventional drift of modern word-languages. If we look closer at the evolutionary history of these languages, even to-day we meet in their so-called word-roots a rudiment that plainly shows us how at the first beginning the formation of the mental concept of an object ran almost completely parallel with the subjective feeling of it; and the supposition that the earliest Speech of man must have borne a great analogy with Song, might not perhaps seem quite ridiculous. Starting with a physical meaning for his words, in any case quite subjectively felt, the speech of man evolved along a more and more abstract line; so that at last there remained nothing but a conventional meaning, depriving the Feeling of any share in understanding the words, just as their syntax was made entirely dependent on rules to be acquired by learning. In necessary agreement with the moral evolution of mankind, there grew up equally in speech and manners a Convention, whose laws were no [P. 319] longer intelligible to natural Feeling, but were drilled into youth by maxims comprehensible to nothing but Reflection. Now ever since the modern European languages – divided into different stocks, to boot – have followed their conventional drift with a more and more obvious tendency, Music, on the other hand, has been developing a power of expression unknown to the world before. ‘Tis as though the purely-human Feeling, intensified by the pressure of a conventional civilisation, had been seeking an outlet for the operation of its own peculiar laws of speech; an outlet through which, unfettered by the laws of logical Thought, it might express itself intelligibly to itself. … Music’s modern evolution has answered to a profoundly inward need of mankind’s, and that, however unintelligible her tongue when judged by the laws of Logic, she must possess a more persuasive title to our comprehension than anything contained within those laws.” [682W-{9/60}Music of the Future, PW Vol. III, p. 318-319]
[683W-{9/60}Music of the Future, PW Vol. III, p. 319-320]
[P. 319] {FEUER} Poetry will lightly find the path thereto, and perceive her final ascension into Music to be her own, her inmost longing, so soon as she grows aware of a need in Music, herself, which Poetry alone can still. {FEUER} {SCHOP} To explain this need, let us first attest that ineradicable attribute of all human apperception which spurs it to find out the laws of [P. 320] Causality, and in presence of every impressive phenomenon to ask itself instinctively the question ‘Why?’ Even the hearing of a Symphonic tone-piece does not entirely silence this question; rather, since it cannot give the answer, it brings the hearer’s inductive faculty into a confusion which not only is liable to disquiet him, but also becomes the ground of a totally false judgment. To answer this disturbing, and yet so irremissible question, so that in a manner of speaking it is circumvented from the first, can only be the poet’s work. But it can succeed in the hands of none but that poet who is fully alive to Music’s tendence and exhaustless faculty of Expression, and therefore drafts his poem in such a fashion that it may penetrate the finest fibres of the musical tissue, and the spoken thought entirely dissolve into the feeling. Obviously, no other form of poetry can help us here, save that in which the poet no longer describes, but brings his subject into actual and convincing representment to the senses; and this sole form is Drama. Drama, at the moment of its actual scenic representation, arouses in the beholder such an intimate and instant interest in an action borrowed faithfully from life itself, at least in its possibilities, that man’s sympathetic Feeling already passes into that ecstatic state where it clean forgets the fateful question ‘Why?’, and
