[P. 75] That it urged onward to this Theatre of our great poets, was the sole true progress in the evolutionary march of reborn art; what held back, nay, altogether stemmed that progress with the Italians, the invention of Modern Music, has – thanks again to great German masters equally unique – become the last enabling element for the birth of a dramatic art of whose expression and effect the Greek could not have dreamed. Every possibility of attaining to the highest has now been won: there stands a platform in front whereof, throughout all Europe, the Folk each evening throngs as driven by an unconscious longing to learn, where it is merely lured to idle pastime, the answer to the riddle of existence … .” [727W-{9-12/67} German Art and German Policy: PW Vol. IV, p. 70-71; p. 75]
[728W-{9-12/67} German Art and German Policy: PW Vol. IV, p. 77; P. 79]
[P. 77] “What ranks the art of the Mime so low in the eyes of other artists, is the very thing that makes his doings and effects so universal. (…)
[P. 79] So much … for the Theatre’s power. How to get at that power, we cannot learn before we have rightly grasped its mainspring; and this we shall only do when, without unmerited disdain, we acknowledge it to be the Mimetic-art itself.” [728W-{9-12/67} German Art and German Policy: PW Vol. IV, p. 77; p. 79]
[729W-{9-12/67} German Art and German Policy: PW Vol. IV, p. 79-80]
[P. 79] {FEUER} When we described the relation of the merely imitative Mime to the truly poetic ‘interpretative’ artist as resembling that of the monkey to the man, nothing was farther from our mind than an actual belittlement of his qualities. (…) Were the poetising artist ashamed to recognise himself as an originally merely-imitative mime developed into an ‘interpreter’ of Nature, then Man himself must be no less ashamed at finding himself again in Nature as a reasoning ape: but it would be very foolish of him, and simply prove that he had not got very far with the thing which distinguishes him from an un-reasoning ape. – The analogy adduced, however, will prove most luminous if, granting our descent from monkeys, we ask why Nature did not take her last step from Animal to Man from the elephant [P. 80] or dog, with whom we meet decidedly more-developed intellectual faculties than with the monkey? For, very profitably to our subject, this question can be answered by another: why from a pedant no poet, from a physiologist no sculptor or painter … ? – In Nature’s election of the ape, for her last and weightiest step, there lies a secret which calls us to deep pondering: whoso should fully fathom it, perchance could tell us why the wisest-constituted States fall through, ay, the sublimest Religions outlive themselves and yield to superstition or unbelief, whilst Art eternally shoots up, renewed and young, from out the ruins of existence.
{FEUER} (…) … we believe that in this analogy, when taken as representing the relation of man’s merely imitative to his ‘interpretative’ faculties, we have won a very helpful light wherewith to lighten the relations of realism and idealism in Art … . “ [729W-{9-12/67} German Art and German Policy: PW Vol. IV, p. 79-80]
[730W-{9-12/67} German Art and German Policy: PW Vol. IV, p. 80-82]
[P. 80] {FEUER} “What scares the plastic and poetic artists from contact with the mime, and fills them with a repugnance not entirely unakin to that of the man for the monkey, is not the thing
