[577W-{6-8/51} A Communication To My Friends: PW Vol. I, p. 366]
[P. 366] “Here it was, also, that I had the most urgent occasion to clear my mind as to the essential difference between the historico-political, and the purely-human life; and when I knowingly and willingly gave up the ‘Friedrich,’ in which I had approached the closest to that political life, and – by so much the clearer as to what I wished – gave preference to the ‘Siegfried,’ I had entered a new and most decisive period of my evolution, both as artist and as man: the period of conscious artistic will to continue on an altogether novel path, which I had struck with unconscious necessity, and whereon I now, as man and artist, press on to meet a newer world.” [577W-{6-8/51} A Communication To My Friends: PW Vol. I, p. 366]
[578W-{6-8/51} A Communication To My Friends: PW Vol. I, p. 375]
[P. 375] “… I derived my artistic bent, not from the Form – as almost all our modern artists have – but from the poetic Stuff.” [578W-{6-8/51} A Communication To My Friends: PW Vol. I, p. 375]
[579W-{6-8/51} A Communication To My Friends: PW Vol. I, p. 375]
[P. 375] {FEUER} “With the conception of ‘Siegfried,’ I had pressed forward to where I saw before me the Human Being in the most natural and blithest fulness of his physical life. No historic garment more, confined his limbs; no outwardly-imposed relation hemmed in his movements, which, springing from the inner fount of Joy-in-life, so bore themselves in face of all encounter, that error and bewilderment, though nurtured on the wildest play of passions, might heap themselves around until they threatened to destroy him, without the hero checking for a moment, even in the face of death, the welling outflow of that Inner fount; or even holding any thing the rightful master of himself and his own movements, but alone the natural outstreaming of his restless fount of life. It was ‘Elsa’ who had taught me to unearth this man: to me, he was the male-embodied spirit of perennial and sole creative instinct (Unwillkuer), of the doer of true Deeds, of Manhood in the utmost fulness of its inborn strength and proved loveworthiness.” [579W-{6-8/51} A Communication To My Friends: PW Vol. I, p. 375]
[580W-{6-8/51} A Communication To My Friends: PW Vol. I, p. 378-379]
[P. 378] {FEUER} “Just as with my ‘Siegfried,’ the force of my desire had borne me to the fount of the Eternal Human; so now, when I found this desire cut off by Modern Life from all appeasement, and saw afresh that the sole redemption lay in flight from out this life, in casting-off its claims on me by self-destruction, did I come to the fount of every modern rendering of such a situation – to Jesus of Nazareth the Man.
{FEUER} (…) When I considered the epoch and the general life-conditions in [P. 379] which so loving and so love-athirst a soul, as that of Jesus, unfolded itself, nothing seemed to me more natural than that this solitary One – who, fronted with a materialism (Sinnlichkeit) so honourless, so hollow, and so pitiful as that of the Roman world, and still more of the world subjected to the Romans, could not demolish it and build upon its wrack an order answering to his soul’s desire – should straightway long from out that world, from out the wider world at large, towards a better land Beyond, -- toward Death. Since I saw the modern world of nowadays a prey to worthlessness akin to that which then surrounded Jesus, so did I now recognise this longing, in
