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On Four Modern Humanists
Hofmannsthal Gundolph Curtius Kantorowicz
By Arthur R. Evans Jr. PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1970 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06174-0
CHAPTER 1
Hugo Von Hofmannsthal
as a Critic
By Egon Schwarz
RANGE
Every ... perfect thing we find lying in our path is a fragment that has strayed from a strange harmonious world, like meteorites which have somehow fallen down upon the paths of our earth. The task is now to call forth from the lost fragment, through a great exertion of the imagination, a momentary vision of that strange world. Whoever can accomplish this and is capable of such an exertion and concentration of the reproductive imagination will be a great critic. He will also be very just and very conciliatory because he will measure every work of art by an ideal, but a subjective ideal gained from the artist's personality, and he will sense the beauty of all that has been conceived and born in truth.
THESE WORDS, written by the young Hugo von Hofmannsthal and published in a Viennese journal in 1894 under the pseudonym "Loris," aim at describing the critical stance of Walter Pater. But they reveal several features just as characteristic of Hofmannsthal himself.
One of these is Platonism, a characteristic to remain with him to the end of his days in spite of many troubling challenges: art partakes of perfection and perfection in turn exists in a higher realm of the spirit, "a strange harmonious world." Tokens from this sacred sphere descend upon our commonplace earth only infrequently and mysteriously. The observer does not examine the laws governing their trajectory. He is content with noticing that they arrive "somehow." His task is to create for his readers, through an extraordinary exertion of his imaginative powers, a momentary vision of the spiritual world whence these fragments came. He who is capable of such feats of restoration, Loris decrees, is a great critic. He might as well have said "poet" for even though he is speaking of "reproductive imagination" the poet's mission on earth is likewise that of a mediator. The meteorite, to remain within the same metaphor, is of his own making but it is incomplete, a mere atom from that yonder world, allowing creator and receiver alike no more than a glimpse.
Similarly expressive of Hofmannsthal, and of impressionistic criticism in general, is the demand that the yardstick by which art is measured should be gained by an immersion in the work itself and not brought to it from without. The standards of judgment, no matter how benevolent and lenient with the imperfect condition of everything that takes on discernible shape, must be derived from an ideal. But the ideal ought not to be an alien abstraction; it should be a living form distilled from what the artist intended and not so much from what he accomplished.
Even the seemingly innocuous postulate at the end of this amazing passage, half hidden by the syntax, rather than openly proclaimed, is profoundly Hofmannsthalian. An insistence on the ethical origins of beauty is certainly not startling nor is it necessarily alien to Pater, Impressionism, or earlier intellectual currents; but we shall have occasion to observe that it is central to Hofmannsthal's personal development.
Hofmannsthal as a critic? This sounds like Leonardo as a designer of military fortifications or Casanova as the author of a Venetian history: both undeniable dimensions of the men but not the accomplishments that are conjured up immediately by the mere mention of their names. Of the millions of opera-goers who are fond of, say, the Rosenkavalier (The Cavalier of the Rose), not all remember the name of the librettist. But the educated among them know that without his unique collaboration with the composer there would be neither this opera nor such favorites of the repertoire as Ariadne, Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow), Arabella, or Die agyptische Helena.
There also is a growing awareness that, together with Max Reinhardt, Hofmannsthal is the founder of the Salzburg Festspiele, the oldest and most prestigious of Europe and that he wrote three distinguished morality plays for the occasion, thus rejuvenating the age-old theatrical form, Jedermann; its sequel, Das Salzburger Grosse Welttheater (The Salzburg Great Theatre of the World); and the apocalyptic tragedy Der Turm (The Tower). The latter two were fashioned after decades of creative effort from the Calderonian plays El gran teatro del mundo and La vida es sueño. But it is the former, Jedermann, embedded in the European Everyman tradition, that has become the center of the Salzburg Festspiele and has grown so well-known that it is regarded by countless spectators as an anonymous gift of nature for their edification. Thus the name of Hofmannsthal is paradoxically overshadowed even by his most popular contribution.
Above all, Hofmannsthal is for the literate public the author of a series of delightful comedies, the precious possession of a national literature not exactly abounding in comic masterpieces. It does not take great literary sophistication to recognize that in a play like Der Schwierige (The Difficult Man) the highest demands of what the French call "Ie comique sérieux" have been met: wit is wed to philosophical profundity, social satire coupled with character portrayal, symbolism with a touch of lightness and gaiety altogether rare in German letters. Similarly, Der Unbestechliche of 1922-23, largely true to such French models as Moliere and Marivaux, can be regarded as a variation of the farcical servo padrone theme and is nevertheless, to the initiated observer, a political allegory with strong theological overtones. Knowing that Hofmannsthal wrote these plays immediately after World War I, at a low point of his country's history and cognizant of Novalis' prescription that one must write comedies after a lost war, helps us understand this strange but eminently successful double perspective.
However, those who are old enough to remember directly or who are otherwise familiar with the fin de siècle know that the original Hofmannsthal cult goes back to the 1880's and had as its object a pupil of the Viennese Academic Gymnasium. At the ripe age of seventeen, when he still wore short trousers and had a nurse to watch over his comings and goings, he wrote the most intoxicatingly mellifluous German poems since Goethe, or at least Brentano, and such enchanting lyrical one-act plays that he immediately became the darling of the fastidious avant-garde of the day. Such precociousness was paralleled in literary history only by Wunderkinder like Keats and Rimbaud, and Hofmannsthal's contemporaries did not hesitate to assign him the same rank as that of these famous predecessors. His early fame was obscured when he ceased writing poetry and turned to nonlyrical pursuits which his erstwhile admirers did not understand. One of them, the Austrian writer and critic Hermann Bahr, went so far as to proclaim regretfully that Hofmannsthal should have died at twenty-five to retain his place of glory in the history of literature.
It was not until after World War II — when people in Germany and Austria were searching for models to venerate, writers who had lived in the European tradition and had at least endeavored to come to grips with the disintegrating forces of the century — that Hofmannsthal was rediscovered and a new vogue instituted. The fifteen-volume edition of his works, published by S. Fischer, uniting for the first time what had been scattered in a great many diffuse publications, helped make a large-scale post-war occupation with Hofmannsthal feasible. Not disconnected with this movement, largely academic and scholarly in character, was the publication of several volumes of Hofmannsthal's correspondence with a series of more or less famous contemporaries such as Rudolf Borchardt, Arthur Schnitzler, Eberhard von Bodenhausen, Carl Burckhardt, Helene von Nostitz, Edgar Karg von Bebenburg, Leopold von Andrian, Stefan George, Richard Strauss, and several others. (Incomplete collections of Hofmannsthal's epistolary exchanges with the latter two had appeared in the late thirties but these publications were overshadowed by National Socialism and the outbreak of World War II.) Thus many people have become acquainted with yet another aspect of his oeuvre, with Hugo von Hofmannsthal as a master of the epistolary style, which allowed him to turn forth different facets of his personality in each encounter with another individual. At the same time every one of these correspondences is a cultural monument illustrating the epoch from a great variety of points of view.
Confronted with a profusion of more familiar forms, Hofmannsthal's admirers rather neglected a very significant portion of his productivity, his critical essays. While the studies of his poetry, his Greek dramas, his morality plays, his comedies crowded shelf after shelf in the world's important libraries, relatively little attention was paid to his essayistic oeuvre in spite of the fact that it fills five of the fifteen volumes of the Steiner edition. There are a few dissertations dealing with Hofmannsthal's criticism, a few articles scattered in the learned journals, but the effort has been reluctant and must be continued before its results can be said to be adequate. The reason for this may be sought in the fact that the essay, a form occupying an indeterminate zone between journalism and creative writing, between factual reporting and imaginative elucidation of the world by an idiosyncratic personality, has never found much acclaim in the German-speaking world where more clear-cut categories seem to be preferred. Another impediment to a wide acceptance of Hofmannsthal's critical writings may have been, paradoxically, their brilliance. "Most people are prone to despise gracefulness," Richard Alewyn, one of the best connoisseurs of Hofmannsthal, quotes from Stendhal. He continues in his own words: "A deep distrust is rooted in the Protestant and especially the German genius against gracefulness. It much rather condones what is too obscure and difficult than the too bright and the too light. It is reluctant to recognize seriousness and depth without the predominance of loud pathos and heavy-handedness. It is hard for it to admit that something that glitters could be gold."
Hofmannsthal's critical essays glitter and are gold at the same time. It is in them that he can give free rein to an important impulse of his versatile mind which, without such liberation, might have become detrimental to his poetry, his dramatic works, and even his epistolary communications with friends and acquaintances: an unusually keen intelligence. It is once more Alewyn who puts this trait into proper perspective. "Hofmannsthal," he declares, "is one of the foremost in a generation of modern creative writers who are exceptionally intelligent and therefore great essayists. In the German language Thomas Mann and Robert Musil belong to this category; in French, Valéry and Sartre; in English, T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden. This intelligence does not necessarily speak for their rank as poets and creative writers, but it certainly does not speak against it either."
This passage is part of an attempt to characterize Hofmannsthal as a writer of letters, and it cannot be denied that the great Austrian exhibits remarkable critical acumen in his epistolary oeuvre. However, in a survey of Hofmannsthal's achievement as a critic, his essayistic work will be the primary concern. Criticism, for the purpose of this exploration, must be defined as any conscious confrontation on the part of the author with a literary, artistic, cultural, or even political phenomenon. It is clear then that from this point of view it would be legitimate to look for Hofmannsthal's critical utterances in his diaries, aphorisms, and even his poetic and dramatic works. For practical reasons, however, the majority of examples will be taken from his essays. They are of sufficient breadth and versatility to reveal his thought in many nuances.
We do not intend to confuse, if we can avoid it, Hofmannsthal's essays with his criticism. There are essays which cannot be regarded as critical in any sense. It ought, however, to be pointed out that his essays were the chief vehicles of Hofmannsthal's critical thought and that therefore the synonymous use of expressions like "critical essays," "essays," and "criticism" must be condoned as a pardonable practice in dealing with this author.
From 1891, when he was seventeen, till 1929, the year of his death, Hofmannsthal wrote critical essays dealing with French, English, German, Italian, Slavic, and even ancient letters. They range from poetry to biography, from the epic to the theatre, from literature to linguistics, as well as from books to such non-verbal arts as music and pantomime, dance and painting. His gallery of portraits includes not only Goethe and Balzac, Ibsen and Swinburne, Stefan George and d'Annunzio, Shakespeare and Calderón, Oscar Wilde and St.-John Perse, but also Beethoven, Gustav Mahler, Eleonora Duse, Ruth St. Denis, and so many others that they cannot be enumerated. Yet he is also willing, and in his mature years increasingly so, to abandon the world of art and books altogether and to describe places he visited or to address himself to problems of civilization touching upon the political questions of his day. His characterizations of Greece or Sicily, his distinction between Prussians and Austrians, his observations about language, his visions of Europe, and his warnings of the future belong to the most illuminating and often moving utterances of that period of history. And all of this is done with style and charm, humility and wisdom, an endless supply of information, and an inexhaustible wealth of humanity. Hugo von Hofmannsthal is a great European critic and a thorough acquaintance with his essayistic work is a complete education in itself.
INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT
Beginnings
Two things seem to be modern today: the analysis of life and the flight from life. Slight is the pleasure in action, in the play of the external and internal forces of life. ... One engages in the anatomy of one's own psychic life, or else one dreams. Reflection or imagination, mirror image or dream image. Modern are old furniture and young neuroses. It is modern to hear the psychological grass grow and the splashing in a purely phantastic world of miracles. Paul Bourget and Buddha are modern; splitting atoms and playing ball with the universe; modern is the dissection of a whim, a sigh, a scruple; and modern is the instinctive, almost somnambulistic devotion to every manifestation of beauty, to a color scheme, a sparkling metaphor, a marvelous allegory.
Anyone endowed with some historical sense will immediately recognize the coquettish aestheticizing quality of these sentences and be able to assign their origin to the last decade of the nineteenth century. Hofmannsthal began his career as a writer in the wake of finde-siècle Impressionism and l'art pour l'art. A whole generation found itself mirrored in his early work, complete with the glory and the misery of its aestheticism. Like a second Midas, that élite of artists transformed into beauty whatever it touched, and it starved to death from a want of life. They loved Hofmannsthal for his ability to capture their precious predicament in delicate words and exquisite images, and they lavished fame and admiration upon him. But a great deal of this was a misunderstanding. Every artist first stirs his wings in the atmosphere of his times before he learns how to soar above it. Every writer first toys with the ideas of his contemporaries. Goethe's Leipzig writings are Rococo and Holderlin's early poems are undistinguishable from those of Schiller. Werther was misunderstood by the sentimentalists of the 1770's just as was Hofmannsthal's "fool" by the aesthetes of the 1890's. The inadequacies of life in eighteenth-century Germany and the gifted individual's contempt for them were so movingly portrayed in Goethe's novel that his contemporaries donned Werther's blue tail-coat, yellow vest, and trousers as marks of protest. When the Werther fashion extended further, resulting in an epidemic of suicide, Goethe felt compelled to add as a motto to the second edition a cautionary poem which ended in Werther's exhortation to the reader: "Be a man and do not follow after me." Goethe regarded Wertherism, carried to its logical conclusion, as a disease, and he was able to diagnose it so well because he had had it himself. By the very act of describing it, he proved his convalescence. Similar was the lot of Hugo von Hofmannsthal. His admirers were able to recognize in Der Tor und der Tod (Death and the Fool) only the unfulfilled yearnings and frustrations of "the beautiful life," not its guilt. They thought the poet commiserated with them when he was actually taking them to task. He was Claudio's judge as well as his creator.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from On Four Modern Humanists by Arthur R. Evans Jr.. Copyright © 1970 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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