Thank you, my friend, for your beautiful tale! No doubt one can readily explain why everything I receive from you always arrives as though with some symbolic significance. Yesterday of all days, to the very hour and minute, your greetings arrived as though necessarily constrained by some magic charm. I was sitting at the piano; the old, gold pen was spinning its final web over the second act of Tristan and, hesitatingly and lingeringly, was just describing the fleeting joys of my lovers’ first tryst. When I am calm at last and can abandon myself to the enjoyment of my own creations, as happens when I am scoring a work, I often sink, at the same time, into an infinity of thoughts which involuntarily represent for me the entirely characteristic and, as far as the world is concerned, perpetually unfathomable nature of the poet or artist. I then perceive quite clearly what it is that is so wonderful and so completely contrary to people’s normal view of life, namely the fact that, whereas the world gets by and is held together solely by dint of experience, the poet’s intuition precedes all experience and, on the basis of his own unique potentiality, comprehends what it is that gives all experience its significance and its meaning. If you were a well-practised philosopher, I should refer you to the fact that what we have here is the best possible example of that same phenomenon which alone makes cognition possible, whereby the entire framework of space, time and causality in which the world is represented to us is prefigured in our brain as the latter’s most characteristic functions, so that these conditional qualities of all objects, namely their spatiality, temporality and causality, are already contained within our heads before we recognize these objects, since without them we should have no means of recognizing them at all. -
But what is raised above space, time and causality, and what does not require these expedients for us to recognize it, in other words, what is unconditioned by finality, of which Schiller says so memorably that it is uniquely true because it has never existed? this is something that can never be grasped by any common philosophy but is perceived by the poet with that same prefiguredness that lies within him, conditioning all that he creates and enabling him to represent this something with infallible certainty, - this something, I say, is more definite and more certain than any other object of our cognition, in spite of the fact that it involves no property of the world as we apprehend it through experience. -
It must inevitably strike him as an absolute miracle when this previously glimpsed, substantial something finally becomes a part of his own experience. His idea of it will then play a large part in his shaping of the experience; the purer and loftier the former, the more remote from the world and the more incomparable will be the latter. It will purify his will; his aesthetic interest will become a moral one; and his supreme poetic idea will be joined by a supreme moral consciousness. It will then be his task to put it to the test in the moral world, where he will be guided by that same foreknowledge which, in the form of his recognition of the aesthetic idea, persuaded him to represent the idea in a work of art, and which made it possible for him to experience it. -
The common world, which is entirely subjected to the influence of experience forced upon it from without, and which can grasp nothing that has not been more or less physically and palpably suggested to it, can never understand the poet’s attitude towards the world of his own experience. Such people will never be able to explain to themselves the striking certainty of his creations except by supposing him to have encountered them in his experience with the same immediacy with which they note everything down in their memory.
This is a phenomenon which I have perceived most strikingly in the case of my own works. My poetic conceptions have constantly been so far in advance of my experiences that I can regard my moral education as having been almost entirely determined and brought about by these conceptions. Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Nibelungs, Wodan, - they were all in my head before they were part of my experience. It will no doubt be easy for you to appreciate the curious relationship in which I now stand to Tristan. I can say so quite openly - since this is a phenomenon that belongs if not to the world then to the votive spirit - : never has an idea so clearly become a part of experience. How far the two were mutually predeterminative is such a strange and subtle question that every ordinary mode of perception will conceive of it only in the most inadequate and distorted form. Now that Savitri - and Parzival - fill my mind with a sense of presentiment and strive initially to form themselves into a poetic idea — : now, given my artistically completed work, to bend over my Tristan with a sense of calm that thinks in visual images, - now, who can guess what miracle must imbue me as I do so and wrest me from the world so that I can almost think of it as having been overcome? You can guess it, you know it! Yes, and in that you are no doubt alone! -
[...]
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 232