It was while he was still panting in the mists of idealism that he wrote The Art-Work of the Future, in which the ?sthetic ideas that had been maturing in him during the latter part of the Dresden period found their first full expression.

The basis of his theory is again the belief that we shall not have a real art until we have a new and free humanity. "Man will never be what he can and should be, until his life is a true mirror of nature, a conscious following of the only real necessity, the inner natural necessity, and not subjected to an outer, imaginary, and so not a necessary but an arbitrary power." He is still vibrating with anger against the politicians of the day, to whom he attributes all the evils under the sun; and of course he idealises that mysterious abstraction "the Folk," to whom he sings a rapturous p?an.[340] It is the Folk alone that acts as Necessity dictates,—the Folk being defined as "the sum of all those who feel a common need"; while opposed to the Folk are all those "who feel no want," whose motive force is an artificial and egoistic need, satisfaction for which they seek in luxury,—"which can only be generated and maintained in opposition to and at the cost of the sacrifices of the needy." These were not the views he held upon luxury in later years, when he, one of the most luxurious-souled of men, had the opportunity to satisfy his cravings for silk dressing-gowns and lace shirts and other vanities of this world. His fulminations against luxury are simply the eternal cry of the Have-nots against the Haves.

He is, as always, discontented with the life and the art of his day, both of which seem to him fundamentally false and artificial. "The spirit, in its artistic striving for reunion with nature in the art-work, must either look forward with hope to the future, or mournfully practise resignation." He recognises that we can find redemption only in the art-work that is physically present to the senses (nur im sinnlich gegenw?rtigen Kunstwerke), "thus only in a truly art-needing, i.e. art-conditioning Present that shall bring forth art from its own natural truth and beauty": that is to say, he has faith in the power of Necessity, for which this work of the Future is reserved.... "The great united art-work, that must embrace all the genres of art and in some degree undo [verbrauchen] each of them in order to use it as a means to an end, to annul it in order to attain the common aim of all, namely, the unconditioned, immediate representation of perfected human nature,—this great united art-work we cannot recognise as the arbitrary need of the individual, but only as the inevitable [nothwendig denkbare] associated work of the humanity of the future."[341]

He proceeds to elaborate his idea of this united art-work, though the full exposition of it is only to be found in Opera and Drama. With his Teutonic passion for categorisation, he divides man up into neat mental parcels. The intellect has for its organ speech; the organ of feeling is tone. Speech gives determination to the otherwise indeterminate vocal tone: it is "the condensed element of the voice, and the word is the consolidated measure of tone." The whole man is the man of intellect (speech), heart (tone) and body (gesture). Thus the three primeval intertwining sisters of art are Dance, Tone, and Poetry: and true art is a union of the three. Such an art expresses all the faculties of man, whereas the separate arts,—the art-varieties, as he calls them,—only issue from and express this or that faculty. Art must appeal to the eye. "Unless it communicates itself to the eye, all art remains unsatisfying, and thus itself unsatisfied, unfree. No matter how fully it may express itself to the ear, or merely to the combining and mediately compensating faculty of thought [das kombinierende, mittelbar ersetzende Denkverm?gen], until it communicates itself intelligibly to the eye it remains only a thing that wills, and not yet fully can. Art, however, must can—it is from k?nnen that art, in our language, has acquired the appropriate name of Die Kunst."[342]

Each of the dissevered arts longs for reunion with the others, "Dance longs to pass over into Tone, there to find herself again and know herself; Tone in turn receives the marrowy frame of its structure from the rhythm of Dance.... But Tone\'s most living flesh is the human voice; the Word again is as it were the bony, muscular rhythm of the human voice." Thus the emotion that overflowed from Dance into Tone finds definition and certainty in the Word, and so is able to reveal itself clearly. The union of these three is "the united lyric art-work," of which the perfected form is the drama. Both the music and the poetry of to-day are impotent. He looks forward to "the overwhelming blow of fate that shall make an end of all the unwieldy musical trash, to make room for the art-work of the future." Nor can poetry alone create the genuine art-work, for no genuine art-work is possible without an appeal to the eye. Poetry should be written to be acted, not read. "The whole impenetrable medley of stored-up literature is in truth—in spite of its million phrases—nothing but the toilsome stammering of speech-impotent thought that longs to pass over into natural immediacy,—a stammering that has been going on for centuries, in verse and prose, without achieving the living Word." Shakespeare was to the art-work of the future no more than Thespis was to the perfected Greek drama. "The deed of the unique Shakespeare, which made a universal man, a very god of him, is yet only the deed of the solitary Beethoven, that revealed to him the language of the artistic manhood of the future. Only where these two Prometheus,—Shakespeare and Beethoven—shall reach out hands to one another; where the marble creations of Phidias shall become living, moving flesh and blood; where Nature, instead of being rep............