The Struggle with the Daemon E-Book

Zweig Stefan

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

The Struggle with the Daemon is a brilliant analysis of the European psyche by the great novelist and biographer Stefan Zweig. In Struggle with the Daemon Stefan Zweig studies three giants of German literature and thought: Friedrich Hölderlin, Heinrich von Kleist and Friedrich Nietzsche — powerful minds whose ideas were at odds with the scientific positivism of their age; troubled spirits whose intoxicating passions drove them mad but inspired them to great works. In their struggle with their inner creative force, Zweig reflects the conflict at the heart of the European soul between science and art, reason and inspiration. Both highly personal and philosophically wide-ranging, this is one of the most fascinating of Zweig's renowned biographical studies.

Leseprobe

STEFAN ZWEIG

THE STRUGGLE WITH THE DAEMON

Translated from the German by Eden and Cedar Paul

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

Hölderlin

A SPLENDID COMPANY OF YOUTHS

CHILDHOOD

LIKENESS AS A STUDENT IN TÜBINGEN

THE POET’S MISSION

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF POESY

PHAETHON, OR ENTHUSIASM

SETTING FORTH INTO THE WORLD

A DANGEROUS ENCOUNTER

DIOTIMA

THE NIGHTINGALE S INGS IN THE DARK

HYPERION

THE DEATH OF EMPEDOCLES

HÖLDERLIN’ S POETRY

FALL INTO THE INFINITE

EMPURPLED OBSCURITY

SCARDANELLI

Kleist

THE HUNTED MAN

LIKENESS OF THE UNPORTRAYABLE

PATHOLOGY OF FEELING

PLAN OF LIFE

AMBITION

THE URGE TO DRAMATIC WRITING

WORLD AND TEMPERAMENT

THE TELLER OF TALES

LAST TIE

A PASS ION FOR DEATH

THE MUS IC OF DESTRUCTION

Nietzsche

A ONE-MAN DRAMA

TWOFOLD PORTRAIT

APOLOGIA FOR ILLNESS

THE DON JUAN OF THE INTELLECTUAL WORLD

PASS ION FOR S INCERITY

TRANS FORMATIONS IN SEARCH OF THE TRUE SELF

DI SCOVERY OF THE SOUTH

FLIGHT INTO MUSIC

THE SEVENTH SOLITUDE

DANCE OVER THE ABYSS

THE TEACHER OF FREEDOM

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About the Publisher

Copyright

To Sigmund Freud

I love those who know not how to live except through surrender, for they are on the way elsewhere.

Friedrich Nietzsche

INTRODUCTION

The harder it has been for a son of earth to win to freedom, The more mightily does he stir his fellow men.

Conrad Ferdinand Meyer

In the present work, just as in my earlier trilogy Three Masters, three imaginative writers are portrayed in a way which will show their spiritual fellowship, but this essential unity is not to be represented with undue concreteness, or as going beyond an allegorical similitude. I am not looking for rigid formulae in which to confine the spiritual, but am disclosing the forms of the spirit. If in my books I deliberately assemble mentalities of like complexion, I do so only after the manner of a painter who likes to hang his pictures in such a room and in such a way that the working of light and counter-light shall bring out analogies of type. Comparison always seems to me a fostering, nay, a formative medium, and I rejoice in it because it is applicable without undue constraint. It enriches where the use of crude formulae impoverishes; it intensifies values inasmuch as it creates illumination by means of unanticipated reflections, and provides a margin of vacant space wherein to enshrine each likeness. This secret of plastic presentation was already known to the first great master of literary portraiture, Plutarch, who in his Parallel Lives gave paired descriptions of a Greek notable and a Roman, that behind their personalities the shadow counterpart, the spiritual type, might be made plain. Just as that illustrious writer worked in the field of historical biography, so do I design to work in the kindred field of literary and characterological biography. Three Masters and The Struggle with the Daemon are the opening volumes of a series dealing with Master Builders, or an Attempt at the Typology of the Spirit. Far be it from me to dream of forcing the inhabitants of the world of genius into the pigeonholes of a rigid system. Fired by a passion for psychological study and driven by a creative urge, I do but follow my bent towards the sculpturing of the figures of those to whom I am bound by the most intimate sympathies. By my own limitations, barriers are imposed against a striving for completeness; nor do I regret such fragmentary treatment, which would only be a source of grief to one who believed that creative work could be systematised, and who should arrogantly suppose that the infinite universe of the mind might be confined within definite boundaries. The thing that allures me in my plan is that it reaches out into infinity and knows nothing of frontiers. Thus it is that, at once slowly and ardently, with hands working in a way that still seems strange even to myself, I continue to build a chance-begotten edifice upwards into the little portion of time that hangs dubiously over the life of every mortal.

Hölderlin, Kleist and Nietzsche are obviously alike even in respect of the outward circumstances of their lives; they stand under the same horoscopical aspect. One and all they were hunted by an overwhelming, a so-to-say superhuman power, were hunted out of the warmth and cosiness of ordinary existence into a cyclone of devastating passion, to perish prematurely amid storms of mental disorder, and one of them by suicide. With no moorings in their own epoch, misunderstood by their generation, they flashed like meteors athwart the night of their mission. They themselves knew not whither they were bound, nor had they any grasp of their significance, as they hurtled towards the infinite in a parabola which seemed scarcely to touch our world of actualities. A power greater than theirs was working within them, so that they felt themselves rushing aimlessly through the void. In their rare moments of full awareness of self, they knew that their actions were not the outcome of their own volition, but that they were thralls, were possessed (in both senses of the word) by a higher power, the daemonic.

“Daemonic”—this word has had so many connotations imposed upon it, has been so variously interpreted, in the course of its wanderings from the days of ancient religious mythology into our own time, that I must explain the sense in which I shall use it in this book. I term “daemonic” the unrest that is in us all, driving each of us out of himself into the elemental. It seems as if nature had implanted into every mind an inalienable part of the primordial chaos, and as if this part were interminably striving—with tense passion—to rejoin the superhuman, suprasensual medium whence it derives. The daemon is the incorporation of that tormenting leaven which impels our being (otherwise quiet and almost inert) towards danger, immoderation, ecstasy, renunciation and even self-destruction. But in those of common clay, this factor of our composition which is both precious and perilous proves comparatively ineffective, is speedily absorbed and consumed. In such persons only at rare moments, during the crises of puberty or when, through love or the generative impulse, the inward cosmos is heated to boiling point, does the longing to escape from the familiar groove, to renounce the trite and the commonplace, exert its mysterious sway. At other times the average man keeps a tight hand on any stirrings of the Faustian impulse, chloroforming it with the dicta of conventional morality, numbing it with work, restraining its wild waters behind the dams of the established order. By temperament and training the humdrum citizen is an inveterate enemy of the chaotic, not only in the outer world, but in himself as well. In persons of finer type, however, and above all in those with strongly productive inclinations, the unrestful element is ever at work, showing itself as dissatisfaction with the daily round, creating that “higher heart which afflicts itself” (Dostoevsky), that questioning spirit which expands with its yearnings into the abysses of the limitless universe. Whatever strives to transcend the narrower boundaries of self, o’erleaping immediate personal interests to seek adventures in the dangerous realm of enquiry, is the outcome of the daemonic constituent of our being. But the daemon is not a friendly and helpful power unless we can hold him in leash, can use him to promote a wholesome tension and to assist us on our upward path. He becomes a menace when the tension he fosters is excessive, and when the mind is a prey to the rebellious and volcanically eruptive urge of the daemonic. For the daemon cannot make his way back to the infinite which is his home except by ruthlessly destroying the finite and the earthly which restrains him, by destroying the body wherein, for a season, he is housed. He works, as with a lever, to promote expansion, but threatens in so doing to shatter the tenement. That is why those of an exceptionally “daemonic temperament”, those who cannot early and thoroughly subdue the daemon within them, are racked by disquietude. Ever and again the daemon snatches the helm from their control and steers them (helpless as straws in the blast) into the heart of the storm, perchance to shatter them on the rocks of destiny. Restlessness of the blood, the nerves, the mind, is always the herald of the daemonic tempest—and that is why we call daemonic those women who diffuse unrest wherever they go and who open the sluices to let loose the waters of destruction. The daemonic bodes danger, carries with it an atmosphere of tragedy, breathes doom.

Thus it comes to pass that everyone whose nature excels the commonplace, everyone whose impulses are creative, wrestles perforce with his daemon. This is a combat of titans, a struggle between lovers, the most splendid contest in which we mortals can engage. Many succumb to the daemon’s fierce onslaught as the woman succumbs to the passion of the impetuous male; they are overpowered by his preponderant strength; they feel themselves joyfully permeated by the fertilising element. Many subjugate him; their cold, resolute, purposive will constrains his ardours to accept their guidance even while he animates their energies. Often the embrace which is a wrestle and the wrestle which is an embrace persist for a lifetime. In the artist and his work the great encounter becomes, as it were, symbolical; his every nerve is thrilled by the sensuous union between his spirit and its perpetual seducer. Only in the creative genius does the daemonic succeed in making its way out of the shadows of feeling into the regions of language and of light, and we discern the daemon’s passionate features most plainly in those who have been mastered by him, in the imaginative writers whom he leads whithersoever he wills—in such as the three men I have chosen as most typical of their kind in the German world—Hölderlin, Kleist and Nietzsche. For if in an imaginative writer the daemon rules autocratically, there flames up in him a peculiar kind of art; he becomes, as it were, drunken with his art; he gives himself up to a frenzied, febrile creation; there occurs in him a spasmodic exaltation of spirit, convulsive, explosive, orgiastic, the * of the Greeks, characteristic of the prophet and the pythoness. The measureless, the superlative, is the first unmistakable token of this form of art—an unceasing endeavour to outdo oneself in the effort to reach that limitless sphere to which the daemonic properly belongs. Hölderlin, Kleist and Nietzsche were of the Promethean race which is in revolt against customary forms and tends thereby to destroy itself. The uncanny light of the daemon flashes from their eyes, and it is he who speaks through their lips. He continues, indeed, to speak through their lips when otherwise they would be dumb, and his strength makes itself manifest in them when nothing else remains to quicken the spirit and when the bodily forces are far advanced in decay. Never is the dread guest more plainly perceptible than when the mind of the host, rent asunder by formidable tensions, has collapsed, and the onlooker catches a glimpse of the inmost abysses where the daemon lurks. In all three of those whom this book concerns, daemonic strength (previously veiled) became conspicuous when the guiding intelligence of the ordinary self had tottered and fallen.

To throw light upon the mysterious essence of the writer who has been overpowered by his daemon, to elucidate the true nature of the daemonic, I have (faithful to my method of comparison) inconspicuously delineated an opposing player, as counterpart to the three tragical heroes. But the counterpart to the writer who soars upon the pinions of an uncontrolled daemonism is not one who is himself undaemonic. There is no art worthy of the name without daemonism, no great art that does not voice the music of the spheres. No one ever bore more convincing testimony to this than the arch foe of all that was daemonic, the man who was so unsympathetic to the lives of Kleist and of Hölderlin, namely, Goethe, who said to Eckermann of the daemonic: “Productivity of the highest kind, every notable aperçu … is subject to no one’s control and is uplifted above earthly power.” Great art cannot exist without inspiration, and inspiration derives from an unknown, from a region outside the domain of the waking consciousness. For me, the true counterpart of the spasmodically exalted writer, divinely presumptuous, carried out of himself by the exuberance of uncontrolled forces, is the writer who can master these forces, the writer whose mundane will is powerful enough to tame and to guide the daemonic element that has been instilled into his being. To guide as well as to tame, for daemonic power, magnificent though it be and the source of creative artistry, is fundamentally aimless, striving only to re-enter the chaos out of which it sprang. Unquestionably great art, art nowise inferior to the daemonic, emerges when an artist wins mastery over this elemental force and imposes on it whatever direction he pleases, when he “commands” poesy as Goethe commanded it, and gives the “incommensurable” a definite form; when, in a word, he becomes the daemon’s master instead of the daemon’s thrall.

Goethe—there you have the name for the antithetical type which holds symbolical sway throughout this book. Not merely as a scientist, not merely as a geologist, was Goethe “an adversary of Vulcanism”; in art, likewise, he championed the evolutionary against the eruptive, fighting with unusual bitterness against the convulsive, the volcanic, the daemonic manifestations of genius. Yet the embitterment shows more clearly than anything else that for him, too, the contest with the daemon had been the decisive problem of his art. In this field had taken place the struggle for its existence. He could not have regarded the daemon as so terrible an enemy had he not himself wrestled with the fiend, and looked shudderingly into the gorgon’s face. Somewhere in the thorny thicket of his youth, Goethe must have fought the battle to a finish. We learn it from Werther, the book in which he prophetically averted from himself the fate of Kleist and of Tasso, of Hölderlin and of Nietzsche! The encounter must have been alarming, for throughout life Goethe retained a fierce respect for and was inspired with an unconcealed fear of the powers of his formidable adversary. With the diviner’s skill, he recognised his enemy through all disguises—in Beethoven’s music, in Kleist’s Penthesilea, in Shakespeare’s tragedies, which in later years he desisted from reading (“it would disturb me”), and the more his thoughts and energies were directed into constructive work and concerned with self-preservation, the more sedulous was he to escape every possibility of such “disturbance”. He knew what was the upshot when an artist surrendered to the daemon; that was why he was ever on the alert to defend himself, and why he warned others against the lion in the path—though his warnings were fruitless. Goethe manifested as much heroic energy in saving himself from surrender as do the daemonic display in their self-surrender. He, too, was striving for supreme freedom; he was fighting to sustain a measure amid the immeasurable, and to secure his own fulfilment, whereas those others were surrendering to the urge towards the infinite.

Only in this sense have I contraposed Goethe’s figure to those of the thralls of the daemon, those of Hölderlin, Kleist and Nietzsche; not in the sense of any active rivalry (though such a rivalry existed in their lives). I needed a great voice of the obverse kind, to make it clear that though I venerate the Bacchic, the hymnic, the titanic as set forth in my account of the three imaginative writers to whose life and work this book is devoted, I do not regard these qualities as necessarily characteristic of the most valuable or of the sublimest art. The contrast between the two kinds of art seems to me, indeed, to bring us face to face with an intensely interesting problem in spiritual polarity, and I shall do well to give a plain account of certain aspects of this immanent antithesis. With something that approaches the clarity of mathematical formulae, the contrast, beginning in the abstract realm of form, extends into the most trifling episodes of the protagonists’ bodily lives, so that nothing but a direct comparison between Goethe and his daemonic counterparts will serve—as a comparison between supreme but divergent kinds of mental achievement—to throw light upon the enigma.

The first thing that is obvious in Hölderlin, Kleist and Nietzsche is their detachment from the world. The daemon plucks away from realities those whom he holds in his grip. Not one of the three had wife or children, any more than had their congeners Beethoven and Michelangelo; they had neither fixed home nor permanent possessions, neither settled occupation nor secure footing in the world. They were nomads, vagrants, eccentrics; they were despised and rejected; they lived in the shadows. Not one of them ever had a bed to call his own; they sat in hired chairs, wrote at hired desks and wandered from one lodging house to another. Nowhere did they take root; not even Eros could establish binding ties for those whom the jealous daemon had espoused. Their friendships were transitory, their appointments fugitive, their work unremunerative; they stood ever in vacant spaces and created in the void. Thus their existence was like that of shooting stars, which flash on indeterminable paths, whereas Goethe circled in a fixed orbit. Or (to return to a previous metaphor) Goethe was firmly established upon solid earth, into which his roots spread ever wider and deeper. He had wife and children and grandchildren; women garlanded his life; intercourse with a small group of tried and trusted friends suffused his leisure with content. He lived in a large, well-appointed house, which he filled by degrees with rarities and art treasures; he was comforted by the warmth of an assured reputation, unchallenged for the half-century and more during which he survived as an acknowledged master. He had offices and dignities conferred upon him, was a privy councillor and was styled “His Excellency”, and, on gala occasions, orders innumerable glittered on his broad chest. While those others developed their capacities for wild flights in the mental empyrean, but on the earth grew more unstable as the years passed, running hither and thither like hunted beasts, Goethe, increasingly subject to the force of terrestrial gravity, became continually more steadfast. Where he stood was the centre of his ego, and at the same time the intellectual focus of the nation. From this fixed point his tranquil activities embraced the world, his ties extending far beyond human fellowship to form attachments with the lower animals, with plants and with inanimate nature, wedding him creatively to the foundations of mundane existence.

Like Dionysus, the thralls of the daemon were torn to pieces by the titans; whereas Goethe, having subdued the daemon, was self-controlled to the end. His career was a strategic conquest of the world; whilst they, fighting heroically but without set purpose, were driven forth from the world and had to flee into the infinite. They were constrained to drag themselves away from the terrene in order to merge themselves in the supramundane, but Goethe need take only one step from the earth in order to find himself in the limitless expanse, or could slowly and patiently draw the limitless into his finite grasp. His method was thus essentially capitalistic, the method of capitalist accumulation. Year after year he stored a definite amount of experience as intellectual profit, entering it like a careful bookkeeper in his “diaries” and “annals”, his life bearing interest as a tilled field bears fruit. Hölderlin, Kleist and Nietzsche, on the other hand, were gamblers, staking their all with magnificent indifference upon the turn of a single card, to win or to lose a measureless prize; for the daemon loathes the tedious heaping up of petty gains in a savings box. Experience, which for a Goethe is the very core of life, was for them of no account; their sufferings taught them only how to feel more intensely; and, a prey to fitful enthusiasms, they lost track of their own selves. In contrast with them, Goethe was the unceasing learner, the book of life was for him something to be mastered conscientiously, diligently, page after page and line upon line; always he continued to regard himself as a student, and not until old age was upon him did he venture the mystical utterance:

I have learnt how to live; grant me, ye gods, more time.

For Kleist, Hölderlin and Nietzsche living was not to be learnt, nor worth learning; their intuition of a loftier existence was of far more significance than perception and sensuous experience. What their genius did not give them freehandedly did not exist for them. They cared for nothing but that which was poured for them out of his horn of plenty, and they could be spurred to exertion only by impulses from within, by the ardour of their superheated feelings. Fire became their element; flame, their mode of activity; and their lives were perpetually scorched in the furnaces which alone made their work possible. As time went on they grew ever more lonely, more estranged from the world of men; whereas for Goethe, hour by hour, each moment that ticked away was richer than those which had gone before. The daemon within them grew stronger, the lure of the infinite more overpowering; there was privation of life in the beauty they fashioned, and beauty gushed forth from their lack of personal joys.

These polar differences in outlook explain why geniuses of the one group and of the other (despite the kinship which genius gives) differ so profoundly in their valuations of reality. To the daemonic temperament reality seems inadequate—Hölderlin, Kleist and Nietzsche, each in his own way, were rebels against the established order. They would rather break than yield, uncompromising even at pain of death and annihilation. This makes them superb figures of tragedy—indeed, their whole life is one long tragedy. Goethe conversely (how frankly he understands himself!) admits to Zelter that he does not feel himself born to be a tragic dramatist, “for my temperament is conciliatory”. He does not, like those others, want unending warfare; as a “preservative” and “pacifying force”, he wants compromise and harmony. With a sentiment to which one can only give the name of piety, he subordinates himself to life as to a higher power, as to the supreme power, which he reveres in all its forms and phases, saying: “Life is good, whatever turn it takes.” But from those who are tormented by the daemon, and hounded by him through the world, nothing is further than the thought of paying homage to reality. They do not value reality at a pin’s fee; they revere nothing but the infinite, and for them art is the only way of reaching it. That is why they esteem art more than life, poesy more than reality. Like Michelangelo in his blind ardour hewing at thousands of blocks of marble, with frenzied zeal they cut their way along the dark galleries of the innermost self towards the sparkling stone revealed to them in their dreams as present in the hidden depths; whereas Goethe (like Leonardo) feels that art is but one of the manifold forms of life, dear to him just as science and philosophy are dear, a fragment, a small and effective constituent of his life. That is why the forms of daemonic activity grow more intensive, whilst those of a Goethe grow more extensive. Hölderlin, Kleist and Nietzsche transform their being in the direction of an overwhelming particularity, ostensibly unconditioned; Goethe moves continually in the direction of an increasingly comprehensive universality.

A love for extant reality directs Goethe’s aims (the aims of the anti-daemonic genius) towards security, towards a wise self-preservation. By their contempt for reality the daemonic geniuses are impelled to take gamblers’ chances, to march towards danger, towards violent self-expansion, ending in self-destruction. In Goethe, all forces work centripetally, moving from the periphery towards the core; in the daemonics the will-to-power operates centrifugally, striving away from the innermost circle of life, inevitably disrupting it. This flight into fathomless space, this overflow into the formless, is sublimated most conspicuously in a fondness for music. There, where shore and shape are lacking, they can drift unguided into their proper element, so that in decay Hölderlin and Nietzsche, and even the harsher-fibred Kleist, gave themselves up to its magic. Understanding is resolved into ecstasy, language into rhythm. Always (in Lenau likewise) music heralds the onrush of the daemonic spirit. On the other hand Goethe’s attitude towards music is “cautious and reserved”. He dreads its beguiling force, its capacity to distract the will towards unessentials; in his hours of strength he forcibly represses his interest in it—even in Beethoven. Only in moments of weakness, when he is ailing or in love, does he surrender to its charm. He finds his true element in drawing, in the plastic arts; in all that offers concrete forms; in all that imposes limits upon the vague, the shapeless; in all that hinders the disintegration of matter. The daemonics love that which unbinds, that which confers freedom, that which leads back into the chaos of feeling—but he, with his scientific instinct for self-preservation, grasps at everything which furthers individual stability; he acclaims order, normality, form and law.

In a hundred other ways I could dilate upon this fruitful contrast between those who mastered the daemon and those whom he held in thrall, but shall content myself with a reference to the geometrical as the plainest of them all. The formula of Goethe’s life was the circle, a closed curve; that of an existence perfectly rounded and self-contained, with a boundary returning ever into itself, perpetually equidistant from the centre, developing steadily outwards from within. That is why there is no culminating point in Goethe’s career, no topmost summit of production. His nature grew equably on every side. But, as already indicated, the daemonics’ curve is the parabola—a steep, impetuous ascent, an uprush into limitless space, a brusque change of direction, followed by a no less steep, a no less impetuous decline. The climax, both in respect of imaginative creation and in respect of the artist’s personal life, is reached immediately before the fall. There is a strange coincidence here. The collapse of the daemonics’ career, the personal collapse of Hölderlin and Kleist and Nietzsche, is an integral constituent of their destiny. This collapse is needed to complete the picture, just as the descending limb of the parabola completes the geometrical figure. Goethe’s death, on the other hand, is an inconspicuous point in the circle, adding naught of moment to the story of his life. He dies, not like those others, a mysterious, heroic, quasi-legendary death; he dies a patriarch, in his bed, and vainly has the popular myth that he died with the words “More light” on his lips endeavoured to give a symbolic or prophetic significance to his last hour. Such a life ends only because it has been fulfilled, but the life of the daemonic terminates in an explosion or a conflagration. In the latter case death compensates for the material poverty of life, surrounding its close with an aura of mystery, and he whose career has been a tragedy is vouchsafed a hero’s end.

Passionate self-surrender to absorption into the elemental, on the one hand, and passionate self-maintenance with a stubborn insistence upon personal guidance, on the other—both forms of the struggle with the daemon need fortitude, and both are glorious victories in the realm of mind. Alike in Goethe’s fulfilment of life and in the creative self-immolation of the daemonics, there is achieved (though in different ways) the same task—that of making unbounded demands upon life. If, in this book, I have contrasted the divergent types of character, it has been in order to reveal the antithetic beauties of the two. It has never been my wish to establish rival scales of value, and still less to lend weight to the conventional, nay, trivial diagnosis, that Goethe represented health and the thralls of the daemon disease, that Goethe was normal whilst they were pathological. This word “pathological” applies only to the lower world, the world of the unproductive; for when illness creates the imperishable it is no longer illness but a form of super-health, the best health there is. Even though the daemonic is at the utmost marge of life, and passes beyond that marge into untrodden and unattainable fields, it is nonetheless part of the very substance of mankind and lies within the sphere of the natural. For Nature herself, who for millenniums has conferred upon the seed its miracle of growth and has granted the embryo power to develop in the mother’s womb, Nature herself, though subject to law, knows her daemonic moments, her phases of outbreak and excess, when (in thunderstorms, in cyclones, in cataclysms) she fiercely lavishes her forces and seems bent on self-destruction. She too at times—though rarely, just as persons of daemonic type are rare—ceases to move in accordance with her usual bland routine, but only then, only in her outbursts, do we become aware of her full might. Nothing but the exceptional makes adequate appeal to our senses; nothing but dread of unfamiliar forces sets our feelings puissantly athrill. That is why the extraordinary is always the standard of greatness. Invariably, even in its most perplexing and most dangerous manifestations, the creative genius has a value supreme over other values, a meaning profounder than that of all other meanings.

*mania

HÖLDERLIN

1770–1843

’Tis hard for mortals to recognise the pure of heart.

The Death of Empedocles

A SPLENDID COMPANY OF YOUTHS

Night would for ever reign supreme, and cold would be the earth,

The soul would be consumed by bitter need, did not the gods,

In their goodness, send down such youths from time to time

To refresh the wilting lives of mortal men.

The Death of Empedocles

WHEN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY WAS YOUNG, it was not fond of its young people. A new and ardent generation had arisen. Boldly and strenuously, in a Europe whose traditions had been shattered, it was marching from all quarters towards the dawn of unprecedented freedom. The bugles of the Revolution had awakened it, and, rejoicing in the springtime, it was inspired with a vigorous faith. Before he was thirty, Camille Desmoulins, with a hardy gesture, had razed the Bastille to the ground; a year or two older, Robespierre, the barrister from Arras, had made kings and emperors tremble before the blast of his decrees; Bonaparte, the little lieutenant, a Corsican by birth, had with his sword shaped the frontiers of Europe as he willed, and had seized the most splendid crown in the world—these deeds had made the impossible seem possible, had brought the splendours of the earth within the grasp of any man possessed of unshrinking courage. Youth’s hour had struck. In the warmth of the vernal showers, the fresh green shoots of enthusiasm were sprouting everywhere from the soil. Young folk were lifting their eyes towards the stars, were storming across the threshold of the coming century, their own by right divine. The eighteenth century had belonged to the old and the wise, to Voltaire and Rousseau, to Leibniz and Kant, to Haydn and Wieland, to the cautious and the patient, to the great and the learned; now the times had ripened for youth and valour, for passion and impetuousness. Mighty was the wave in which they swept forward. Never since the days of the Renaissance had Europe known a more magnificent surge of the spirit.

But the new century did not like this intrepid offspring. It dreaded the exuberance, was mistrustful of the ecstasy, of its youthful enthusiasts. Relentlessly it mowed down the crop as soon as the tender green showed above ground. By hundreds of thousands the most intrepid were slaughtered in the Napoleonic wars; for fifteen years the noblest and the best were ground to powder in this murderous mill; France, Germany, Italy, the snowfields of Russia and the deserts of Egypt were littered with their bones. Nor was it enough to slay the body; the soul likewise was destroyed. Murderous wrath did not stop short after weeding out the warriors. The axe fell with equal truculence upon dreamers and singers who had scarcely emerged from boyhood when the century was opening. Never before in so short a time had there been offered up such a hecatomb of writers and artists as those who went to their deaths soon after Schiller (not suspecting the imminence of his own doom) had acclaimed their genius. Never had Fate sickled such an abundance of illustrious and rathe-ripe figures. Never had the altar of the gods been sprinkled with so much divine blood.

They died in manifold ways, prematurely, in the hour of vigorous burgeoning. André Chénier, a young Apollo through whom classical Greece was reborn in France, was driven to the guillotine in one of the last tumbrils of the Terror. Had he been granted twenty-four hours more, had he survived the night between the eighth and the ninth of Thermidor, he would have been saved from the scaffold and would have been restored to his work as a poet in whom the spirit of the singers of ancient Greece had found a new home. But Destiny was inexorable, and would spare him no more than the others on whom her doom had been spoken. In England, after a long lapse into the commonplace, a lyrical genius had come to life, John Keats, delicately attuned to the beauties of the universe—to sing sweetly for a few short years and die at twenty-five. Shelley, his brother in the spirit, the ardent being to whom Nature had revealed her loveliest mysteries, mourned over his grave; Adonais was the sublimest elegy ever conceived by one poet for another; yet in little more than a year Shelley was drowned wantonly in a storm and his body was washed ashore on the Tyrrhene strand. Byron, Shelley’s friend and Goethe’s favourite heir, hastened to the spot to erect a pyre beside the southern sea and burn the poet’s corpse as Achilles burned that of his dead comrade-at-arms Patroclus; Shelley’s mortal remains thus flamed into the Italian skies, but Byron himself was to die of fever two years later at Missolonghi. Within a decade the finest lyrical voices of France and England were stilled for ever. Nor was Germany spared a like destiny. Novalis, whose mystical piety had given him insight into the secrets of nature, had his light too soon extinguished, like that of a taper in a draughty cell; Kleist blew out his brains in despair; Raimund, too, committed suicide; Georg Büchner perished of a nervous fever when only twenty-four; Wilhelm Hauff, a writer of fantasies, had no time for his genius to ripen, and went down to the tomb at the age of twenty-five; Schubert died of typhus before he was thirty-two. The members of this younger generation were laid low by the bludgeons and poisons of disease, by the frenzy of self-destruction, by the duellist’s pistol or the assassin’s dagger. Leopardi, the philosopher of despair, succumbed to a long and painful malady at thirty-nine; Bellini, the composer of Norma, was but thirty-four when illness carried him away; Griboyedov, the satirist, the brightest intelligence of awakening Russia, was the same age when stabbed in Tehran by a Persian. His body was brought to Tiflis, and it chanced that in the Caucasus, another great Russian genius, Pushkin, encountered the funeral procession. But Pushkin, too, died young, and by violence, being killed in a duel. Not one of these men lived to be forty, few of them to be thirty. The most luxuriant lyrical blossoming Europe had known was nipped in the bud; devastated was the splendid company of youths who in so many tongues were singing paeans to nature and glorifying the world. Lonely as Merlin in the enchanted forest, unacquainted with the new time, half forgotten and half legendary, Goethe, the ancient sage, lived on at Weimar; there were no lips but his, withered with age, to voice an Orphic lay. At once progenitor and inheritor of this new generation into which he had persisted, he cherished and tended the fires of poesy in a brazen urn.

One only of the splendid company, the most typical, survived for many, many years in the world whence the gods had fled—Hölderlin, whose fate was the strangest of them all. His lips were still ruddy; his ageing frame still moved to and fro across the German soil; still did he gaze through the window at the beloved landscape of the Neckar; he could still raise his eyes affectionately towards “Father Ether”, the eternal sky. But his senses were no longer awake, being shrouded in an unending dream. The jealous gods, though they had not slain him, had blinded the man who had made their secrets known, had treated him as they had treated Tiresias the seer. His mind was enwrapped in a veil. With disordered senses, this man, “sold into slavery to the celestial powers”, lived on for decades, dead to himself and to the world, while nothing but rhythms, waves of unmeaning sound, issued from his lips. The springtide with its blossoms came and went, the season he had been so fond of passed him by, for he noted neither its advent nor its going any more. Men flourished and died, and he paid no heed. Schiller and Goethe and Kant and Napoleon, the great figures of his prime, had preceded him into the grave; steam-driven trains were thundering on iron roads across the Germany of his youthful visions. Huge towns were arising, new territories were being formed, but naught in these great changes stirred the numb intelligence. His hair was grey. The ghost of the man he had once been, he tottered hither and thither through the streets of Tübingen, made mock of by the children, despised by the students, none of whom could discern the marvellous mind that lay dormant behind the tragic mask. Long time, now, since anyone had given a thought to Hölderlin. Towards the middle of the nineteenth century, Bettina von Arnim became aware that the poet whom in her youth she had acclaimed as a god was lingering on in a carpenter’s house, and she was as much startled as if one of the shades had come back to earth from Hades—so forgotten were Hölderlin’s glories, so faded was his name. When at length he died, his passing attracted no more attention in the German world than the falling of an autumn leaf. Workmen bore his coffin to the burial place. Of the thousands upon thousands of manuscript pages he left, many were torn up and burned, while others remained to yellow and moulder in one library or another. Unread, unrecognised by a whole generation was the message of this last and purest of the splendid company.

Like a Greek statue buried in the earth, Hölderlin’s image was hidden for decades in the rubbish heap of oblivion. But just as, in the end, careful and loving hands have disinterred the works of the ancient sculptors, so has it happened with Hölderlin, and our generation has been amazed at the beauty of this marble figure. He lives once more as the last embodiment of German Hellenism, his inspiration, as erstwhile, finding expression in song. The springtides that he proclaimed seem immortalised in his personality, and, with the transfigured visage of the illuminate, he has emerged from darkness into the light of a new dawn.