Lotte in Weimar: The Beloved Returns CH 7

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CHAPTER SEVEN 

Alas, that it should vanish! That my bright vision of 

the depths must so soon be gone again — as though the 

whim of a genie gave it and as suddenly snatclied it 

away — it fades into nothing, I emerge* So lovely it was! 

And now what? Where are we? Jena? Berka? Tenn- 

stadt? No, this is the Weimar bed-spread, the silken one, 

and the familiar hangings, the bell-puli. , . . What, what? 

Here's a brave showing, forsooth! Good for you, old 

man! Be not dismayed, gay old fellow tliat thou art! 

There was good cause, after all: what glorious limbs, 

how the goddess' bosom, fine resilient flesh, lay pressed 

into the shoulder of her handsome huntsman! How 

chin nestled to neck and slumber-rosy cheek, ambrosial 

little hand twined round the wrist of the glowing 

vigorous arm clasping her in its strong embrace! How 

little nose and mouth sought the breath from his dream- 

relaxed lips! And Cupid there beside them, half angered, 

half triumphant, swinging his bow. Halt there, halloo! 

While on the other side the bright-eyed beagles gazed 

and gambolled! At sight of that splendid picture how 

your heart leaped in your breast! But whence? Aha, I 

have it, of course, I'Orbetto, the Turchi, from the 

Dresden Gallery, Venus and Adonis. Think they'll 

restore the Dresden paintings, do they? Take care, my 

children! May turn out badly, if you 'want a quick job, 

and let bunglers try their hands. Lots of bungling in this 

world, deuce take it! They don't know how hard per- 

fection is, don’t even want it — ^just want to get off easy. 

Must tell them about the Academy of Restoration in 

Venice, with a director and twelve professors shut in to 

their delicate, dangerous task. Venus and Adonis. , , . 

The *‘Cupid and Psyche” was to have been done, long 

ago; some well-meaning friend reminds me, now and 

then, I gave the order, never tells me where to find the 

time. Must look at the copperplate Psyches by Dorigny 

in the Yellow Room, to refresh my idea — then just put 

it oft again! Good to put off, things always get better 

by waiting, no one can steal your thunder, no one take 

your ownest-own, no one get ahead of you, even trying 

to do the same. 

What does subject-matter amount to? Material — 

world’s full of it, lies about in the streets. Go ahead, 

children, take it, I need not present it to you, as I did 

Schiller the Tell, to make his high-flown revolutionary 

play — and all the while kept it for myself, the real, 

easy-going, epic, ironic thing, the Herculean Demos, 

caring not a tig for politics or power, and the comfort- 

able Tyrant having his fun with the women of the 

country. Do it yet, I will, just wait a bit: hexameters 

mellower, more married to the words, than even in 

Hermann or in Reineke. To grow, to grow! Grow like 

a tree, your crown ever broadening, then you are young. 

The way I now am, at my present stage, with ail my 

being beautifully broadening out, now would be the 

time to go at the “Cupid and Psyche.” Power, experience, 

dignity of age, youth’s kiss fresh on my lips — ^what light- 

ness, what loveliness might not follow! No one could 

dream how lovely, till it came out. Maybe in stanzas? 

Alas, there’s too much to do; in the press so much must 

perish! I wager even the Reformation cantata will 

languish. Thunder on Sinai Wide solitary space and 

breath of morn — so much I have fast. For the chorus of 

warrior shepherds Pandora might help. Sulamith, the 

beloved afar. . . . Beyond compare is my joy — in his love 

day and night. All that would be sport. But the central 

figure Himself, and the higher teaching, mind, ever 

misunderstood of the mob; isolation, soul’s utter anguish 

— ^yet ever consoling and giving strength. They shall see 

the old pagan got more out of Christianity than all the 

rest of them put together. But who shall play the fiddle 

to my w^ds? Who understand, who hearten and praise, 

before it come to the birth? Without it I lose my zest, 

I warn you — then I should like to know what you will 

have to celebrate the day! Alas, were He but here, who 

years ago departed— ten years it is, he turned his face 

away — to spur me on, to challenge, stimulate! Did I 

not fling you down the Demetrius, on account of the 

senseless difiiculties you made me with the production 

— however much I wanted to finish it, make it the most 

splendid memorial performance on any stage? Gave 

it up in a rage, because of your uninspired insistence on 

the commonplace; have yourselves to blame he died 

once again and once for ail, and was dead to you and 

to me, when I gave up trying, with all the inner know- 

ledge I had of him, to make him live again! How 

wretched I felt! More wretched than perhaps one ever 

is for others' faults. Did my zeal belie me? Did my own 

secret heart resist, my true intent? Did I make outward 

obstacles the excuse and sulk like Achilles in my tent? 

He, if I had died first, would have been up to finishing 

the Faust. God forbid! — I ought to have put a clause 

in my will! — But it was and remains a bitter grief, a 

bad rifiuto, a shocking defeat. Whereat my unquench- 

able friend here can do naught but droop for very 

shame. 

What is it of the clock? Did I awake to darkness? 

No, light from the garden peers through my blinds. 

Must be seven or near, by time-honoured rule; 'twas no 

genie snatched away my lovely scene, only my own 

seven-o’clock will, calling me to the business of the day, 

my will, awake and alert down there in the pregnant 

vale, like well-trained hound gazing wide-eyed on love- 

lorn Aphrodite, with look both understanding and 

remote. See you, he is Saint Gotthardt’s in the flesh, the 

same who snatches the bread from his master’s table to 

succour the starving Saint Roch, Must put dowm the 

saws for Saint Roch's day in my note-book — where is 

it? Left-hand drawer of the secretaire: When April’s dry 

The peasants sigh. When the willow-wren sings ere the 

vine doth sprout — a line of verse. And the one about 

the pike’s liver — ^what’s that but a reference to inspec- 

tion of entrails, genuine soothsaying, most primitive 

kind! Ah, the folk! The folk-nature, part of nature 

itself, elemental, earthy, pagan, full of folk- and nature- 

wisdom, fruitful soil of the unconscious, nourishing vale 

of renewed youth! How good to mingle with them at 

their immemorial feasts, fontanalia and maypole games, 

or like that time at Bingen, when we drank our wine 

at the long table ’neath the awning— smoke of melting 

fat, smell of fresh bread, sausages roasting over glowing 

ashes! That was a Christian feast, yet how mercilessly 

they strangled the stray badger and tore its bleeding 

flesh! Man cannot tarry long in his conscious mind; 

must take from time to time refuge in his unconscious, 

there his being has its roots. Maxims. Our dear departed 

friend knew or would know naught of all this. Haughty 

invalid, aristocrat of the conscious mind, touching he 

was, in his greatness and helplessness, and daft about 

freedom. They took him— absurd, it was — for a man 

of the people, and me for the courtly courtier — ^whereas 

he knew nothing whatever about the people, and less 

than nothing about the Germans. Well, and I liked him 

for that, nobody can get on with the Germans, be it in 

triuinph or defeat. Simply stood out. in all the purity 

of his sensitive soul and sickly body, incapable of getting 

down among them, for ever trying in all his mildness to 

think of baser souls as one with himself and lift them 

as in the arms of the Redeemer up to himself and the 

life of the mind. Yes,' he had much of Him whom in 

the cantata I seek to interpret. Childlike — ^and self- 

important too, had ambitions to play the man of affairs. 

Childlike indeed— yet very much the man too, too much, 

and more than is in nature to be; for the essentially 

man — ^intellect and free will — they are not nature. That 

made him, in the presence of the female, simply absurd. 

His feminine characters are laughable, and he thought 

of sexuality as a goading cruelty. Horrible, offensive 

and horrible! But what a gift withal, what soaring 

boldness of thought, what knowledge of the good, how 

far above and beyond the vile and vulgar herd — my 

equal, my only kindred soul, I shall not look again upon 

his like. What good taste, even in the tasteless, what 

sure feeling for the beautiful! Owned to all the gifts 

of fluency and elegance, incredibly bore witness to his 

freedom from his own physical state. Understood the 

said or only half-said, answered with utmost shrewdness; 

would call you to yourself, instruct you in your own 

thoughts, assert himself critically, make comparisons, 

even to being wearisome. Yes, yes, of course, the specu- 

lative and the intuitive mind, provided both have genius, 

can meet halfway; of course, tiie point was that this 

man who was not nature, who was nothing else but 

man, could be a genius, was a genius and stood beside 

me as an equal — the high place was the thing, and the 

equal rank — ^also, and just as much, to escape from 

poverty and be able to give a year for each play. A 

disagreeable, wily man, a climber. Did I ever like him? 

Never. Not his stalking gait, or his red hair, his freckles, 

his stoop, his hectic cheeks, his hooked nose for ever red 

with a cold! But never, long as I live, shall I forget his 

eyes, so deep a blue, so mild, so piercing, eyes of a 

Redeemer, Christ-eyes, speculator-eyes, both at once. 

How I mistrusted him — saw he wanted to exploit me. 

Wrote me that devilish clever letter, to win the ''Meistef' 

for the Horen he had just, on purpose, founded. Smelt 

the rat, you did! Came privately to an agreement with 

Unger. Insisted on having the Faust for the magazine 

and for Cotta. All most vexing, since he of all of them 

could understand the business of the objective style, 

after Italy, knew I had changed and the clay got hard. 

All most annoying. Kept at me, kept pushing me, 

because he was in a hurry. But time alone can bring 

things to pass. 

Yes, time one must have. Time is mercy — a kindly, 

unassuming boon, to him who will honour it and fill 

it diligently out. Unbeknown she does her work, quietly 

she brings daemonic intervention. I wait, and time 

encircles me. Doubtless she would perform her task 

more swiftly, were he still here. Yes, who can I talk to 

about the Faust, now that the man has taken leave of 

time? Knew all my problems, all the impossibilities, all 

the ways and means as well. Immensely quick-witted he 

was, lively, flexible, had a keen appreciation of the huge 

joke, and emancipation from prosy solemnity. After 

Helena had come in, did me good to have him praise 

my distillation of ^host and gargoyle into the classically 

beautiful and tragic; thought the union of the high and 

grotesque, the pure and fantastic might well produce a 

poetic tragelaph not to be despised. He saw Helena 

before he died, heard her first trimeters, his noble mind 

was impressed — that ought to cheer me on. Knew her, 

as well as did Chiron the rover, from whom I inquired 

of her. Smiled as he listened and heard how I had 

managed to imbue each word with the classic spirit: 

Much have I witnessed, e’en tho* the ringlets 

Youthfully cluster over my templesi 

Through all the clamour of warriors thronging 

Thick in their dust-clouds, heard I the frightful 

Voices of discord, gods in their anger 

Brazenly rising, ring through the field, 

RampartwardsI 

He smiled and nodded. ‘‘Capital!” said he. That much 

had his sanction, so far my mind is at rest, it need not be 

changed, he found it capital — smiled, so that I had to 

smile too, my reading turned to smiles. Not German 

here either, smiling at excellence — no German does so. 

They put on a grim face, not knowing culture is parody 

— ^love and parody. ... He nodded and smiled too, when 

the Chorus called Phoebus “the Knower”: 

Yet mayst thou boldly stand forth; 

For he beholds never the ugly, 

Nor hath his hallowed eye 

Ever the shadow seen. 

That pleased him, he recognized himself in it, it had his 

stamp. Then he turned round and began to carp: it was 

wrong to say shame and beauty ne’er together hand in 

hand their way pursue. Beauty, said he, was always 

shamefaced. Why should she be? asked I. Because, he 

said, she knows she rouses desire, and that conflicts with 

the spiritual, which she represents. I answered him: 

Then desire ought to be ashamed; but she is not, perhaps 

because she is aware that she herself represents longing 

for the spiritual. He laughed at that, we laughed 

together. Now there’s no one to laugh with. He left 

me behind, confident I should find my way through, 

discover the right hoop to bind in all the multifarious 

matter of my design. He saw all that. Knew Faust had 

to be brought into contact with active life — easier said 

than done, and did the good man imagine it was news to 

me? Long ago, when the whole plan was vague, still 

cloudy as a child’s dream, did I not make ray Faust 

translate not In the beginning was the Word, or Sense, 

or Power, but In the beginning was the Deed! 

Dunque, dunque! Wnat’s for to-day? Gird thyself up 

to seize the joyous task, thyself to industry arouse; late 

resting in the shade of leisure, now find in labour stern 

thy pleasure, in duty see thy sweetest joy. Tinkle, 

tinkle, there goes the ‘little Faust,” the magic flute, 

where Homunculus and offspring are still one in the 

gleaming little phial. - . . Well, and what does the day 

demand of me? Oh, yes, devil take it, I have to render 

Serenissimus my judgment on the Isis scandal, wretched 

business I How one forgets down there! Yes, now comes 

up the spectre of the day to haunt me: must do the 

draught of the birthday Carmen to His Excellence von 

Voigt. Or rather, bless my soul, it must be written out 

and copied fair, his birthday is the 27th. And I’ve not 

got much yet, actually only a few lines, one of them good: 

Nature at last might aid herself to fathom. That’s good, 

reads well, has my mark, can carry the polite rubbish 

the rest of it has to be. That’s what society wants of 

you, when you have a “gift for poetry.” Ah, that gift 

for poetry! To the deuce with it! People think it’s the 

main thing. As though a man wrote the Werther at 

£our-and-twenty years and then lived and grew another 

four-and-forty without outgrowing poetry! As though 

a man of my parts had stopped where he was and was 

still satisfied with poetry-writing! Shoemaker, stick to 

your last — yes, if you are a shoemaker. The fools say I 

have forsaken poetry to waste my time in dilettante 

dabbling. How do they know it isn’t the poetry that’s 

the dabbling and the serious work lies somewhere else, 

namely in the whole of life? Quack, quack, let them 

quack, silly geese! The fools don’t know a great poet 

is first of all great and after that a poet Don’t see it’s 

all the same whether a man writes poetry or fights battles, 

like the battles of that man I met at Erfurt His lips 

smiled and his eyes were stern; behind my back, quite 

loud, for me to hear, he said: “That is a man/' Not 

“That is a poet/' Yet the fools think it is great to write 

the Divan but not at all great to produce the colour 

theory. 

Confound it, that reminds me of something else: the 

Pfafi book, the professorial opus against the colour 

theory. Pfaff is the wretch’s name. Sends me, “with his 

compliments/’ his impudent diatribe, has the cheek to 

send it here to my house! Typical Teutonic tactlessness: 

if I had the say, such people would be socially ostracised. 

But why should they not vent their guts on my scientific 

work, when they have already vented all they had on 

my poetry? Compared my Iphigenia with Euripides 

until there was nothing left of it, abused the Tasso, made 

the Eugenie hateful with their drivel about “smooth and 

cold as marble." Schiller too. Herder too, and that cack- 

ling de Stael woman — not to mention the bass-string of 

lowness, Dyck was the scribbling bass-string's name. 

Shame on me for remembering it or him! In fifteen years 

he will be as dead as he already is to*day, but I have to 

know him, because he lives with me in time. . . . That 

they dare to judge! That anybody may judge 1 It ought 

to be forbidden. A matter for the police, in my opinion, 

like Oken's Isis! Listen to their judgment and then 

tell me I ought to be for the Staies-Gcneral and the 

franchise and the freedom of the press, and Luden's 

Nemesis and the broadsheets of the Teutonic Students' 

League, and the People's Friend of Wieland's filiusl 

Simply monstrous. When the masses fight, they are 

respectable; but their opinions are not delectable. Put 

that down, stick it away — hide, hide! Why should I 

publish and give myself over to their mercy? One can 

still care only for what one keeps to oneself and for 

oneself. When it has all been handled over and chattered 

over, one has no more courage to go on. Could have 

done you the most wonderful sequel to the Eugenie, but 

however ready I was, you did not want to be pleased. 

I'd be glad to write just to entertain them — but they 

can't be entertained; a sour, unhumorous lot, no under- 

standing of life. Don't know there can be no life, without 

give-and-take and bonhomie, one has just to shut one’s 

eyes and trust God and let things be, so they can go on 

somehow or other. What does all man's work amount to, 

either the deeds or the poetry-writing, without love, and 

the stimulus of taking sides? Just so much dross. But 

they go on as though they were here to demand the 

Absolute, and had the vested right to it in their pockets. 

Damned spoil-sports I The stupider they are, the 

crabbeder! And yet one keeps on spreading out one's 

all before them, so trustfully — “and may it find favour 

in your eyesl" 

There now, there goes my cheery morning mood, all 

clouded over, blown on by gnawing corrosive thoughts. 

How do I feel? How is my sore arm? Bites shrewdly 

when I bend it. I always think a good night will mend 

matters; but sleep has no more its old power, one must 

just forget it. And the eczema on my leg? Adsuml as 

sure as morning dawns. Neither skin nor joints want to 

play the game. I wish I were at TennstMt, in the sulphur 

baths. Once I used to yearn for Italy, now I yearn for 

hot water to loosen my stiffening joints. So age alters 

our desires and brings us down, so man must come to 

his second fall. But what a wonderful thing it is about 

this fall, this growing old! A blessed invention of the 

everlasting Goodness — man fits into his circumstances 

and they into him, so that he is at one with them and 

they are his as he is theirs. You get old, you get to be an 

old man, and look down with contempt, albeit with 

benevolence, on youth, on the young fry about you. 

Would you care to be young again, the young cockerel 

you once were? Wrote the Wert her, did the young 

cockerel, with absurd facility, that was certainly some- 

thing, at his years. But to go on living, to get old — 

there’s the rub. All the heroism lies in enduring, in 

willing to live on and not die. And greatness only comes 

with age. A young man can be a genius, but he cannot 

be great. Greatness comes only with the weight, endur- 

ance, power, mental equipment of age. Mind and power 

are products of age, they are what make up greatness. 

Love too comes only then; what is any youthful love 

beside the spiritual and intellectual strength of love in 

age? What a callow, green-sickly thing is the love of 

youth, beside the head-turning flattery paid to lovely 

adolescence singled out by maturity and greatness— her 

tenderness exalted and adorned by the force of his 

mighty emotions! What beside the glowing bliss of age 

when the love of youth confers on it the boon of new 

life? Eternal Goodness, I thank thee! Life for ever 

fairer, richer, more instinct with joy and meaning, hence 

for ever more! 

That’s what I call restoration, renewal. If sleep can 

bring it no longer, then thinking can. So now let’s ring 

for Carl to fetch the coffee. Before he is warmed and 

refreshed the good man cannot properly tell how he 

feels, nor what he will be able to do. At first I wanted 

to malinger, stop in bed and let things slide. So much 

that infernal Pfaff did to me, and the thought that they 

won’t let my name be entered in the history of physics. 

But my good mind knew how to get me on my legs 

again, and the hot drink may do the rest. . . . Every 

morning I pull the bell-rope I am reminded the gilt 

handle is out of place here. A fine show-piece, ought 

to be in one of the reception-rooms instead of here in 

my cloister of the austere intellect, burrow to crawl in, 

kennel of care. Good that I arranged my quarters here, 

my quiet, spare, serious kingdom of the mind. Good for 

the little one too, so she could see the rear of the house 

was to be a retiro, not only for her and her family but 

for me as well, though on other grounds. That was — 

let’s see, summer of ’94, two years after we had rebuilt 

the house I had been presented with, and moved back 

into it. Period of my contributions to the science of 

optics — oh, mille excuses, my gentlemen of the guild, I 

mean of course only to the theory of colour, for how 

should a man venture to attempt anything in optics, 

unversed in geometry and yet daring to contradict 

Newton? A wrong-headed, sophistical man, consummate 

liar and protector of scholastic error — traduced heaven’s 

own daylight, held that its purity was composed of 

cloudy ingredients, its clarity a combination of elements 

each darker than itself. Evil-minded fool, darkener of 

counsel, stiff-necked teacher of false doctrine — ^we must 

not weary in assailing him. When I had grasped the 

opaque medium and understood that the utmost trans- 

parency was already the first degree of opaqueness, when 

I had found out that colour is modified light, then I had 

my fingers on die theory of colour; at least the founda- 

tion and cornerstone were there, the spectrum could 

give me no more trouble. As though it were not an 

opaque medium, the prism! Well I remember how I held 

the thing in front of my eyes in the room with the white- 

washed walls. Contrary to the theory, they remained as 

white as ever, nor did the pale-grey sky outside show 

any trace of colour. Only where something dark 

impinged on the white did any colour show: the cross- 

bars of the window came out in brightest colours. So 

there I had the rascal fast, for the first time I said the 

words aloud; the theory is false! And my very bowels 

leaped for joy, just like that other time when I saw so 

clear what I had known before by virtue of my good 

understanding with nature, that the little intermaxillary 

bone was the forerunner of the incisors in the human 

jaw. They wouldn’t believe it, they won’t believe it 

now about the theory of colour. A happy, painful, bitter 

time. Of course I made myself a burden, with my 

querulous insistence. Had I not shown, with my little 

bone and my metamorphosis of plants, that nature had 

not refused me a glimpse or so into her workshop? But 

they would not grant my calling, turned away their 

heads, shrugged their shoulders, and were huffy. You 

were a disturber of the peace. And so remain. They all 

make thee their salutations and each one hates thee to 

the death. Only the princes — they were something else. 

Unforgettable, how they respected and fostered my new 

passion. His Highness the Duke, kind as ever, offered 

me room and leisure to follow my apergu. Ernst and 

August at Gotha, one lent me his physics cabinet to 

work in, the other sent to England for my beautiful 

compound achromatic prisms. Gentlemen they are, 

gentlemen ! The pedants brushed me aside as a dabbler 

and troublemaker; but the Prince Primas in Erfurt 

followed all my experiments with the most gracious 

interest and did me the honour to make marginal notes 

in his own hand in the copy I sent him of my essay. 

Gentlemen, that is, have a feeling for dilettantism. To 

work for love of the work is ari&tocxatic, the aristocrat 

is an amateur. On the other hand, the guild, the trade, 

the profession, they are ail common. You talk of dabb- 

ling, you philistines — but have you ever dreamed how 

dilettantism is related to genius and comes close to the 

daemonic, just because it is not bound but free, so made 

as to see a thing with new eyes and an object not as 

tradition sees it but in its purity just as it is; not as 

the herd sees it, which always, whether the thing is 

physical or moral, always gets a second-hand view? I 

came from poetry to the arts, and from them to science; 

soon painting and sculpture and architecture were to 

me like mineralogy and botany and zoology — and so I 

must be a dilettante! Just as you say! When I was a 

lad I made the observation that the spire of Strassburg 

Cathedral was to have had a five-pointed finial, and the 

designs bore me out. But I am not to make observations 

on nature! As though the universe, the All, were not 

all one! As though only he who had unity would not 

be the one to understand it — ^as though Nature herself 

would not yield her secrets to him alone who was of 

her! 

The princes, and Schiller. He was a nobleman too, 

from head to foot, despite all his notions about freedom; 

had the naturalness of genius too, even though so wrong- 

headed, and behaving towards nature with such culpable 

arrogance. Yes, he was sympathetic, he believed, en- 

couraged me with his responsiveness. When I sent him 

the merest first draught of the history of the colour 

theory he had the vision to recognise in it the prototype 

of a history of the sciences, the romance of human 

thought, which would grow out of it in eighteen years. 

Ah, yes, he could see, could understand! He had the 

eye, the quality, the soaring imagination — ^were he still 

here, he could prick me on to write the Cosmos, the 

all-embracing history of nature I always felt I had to 

write, beginning with the geology so long ago. Who can 

do it, if not I? I say that of everything— but I cannot 

do it all, under conditions that make up my life and rob 

me of it at the same time. Time, time, give me time, good 

224 LOTTE IN WEIMAR 

Mother, I will do it all! When I was young I remember 

someone saying to me: You act as though we all lived a 

hundred and twenty years. Give it me, kmd, slow-moving 

Mother Nature, give me only that little space of ail 

the time thou hast to give, and I will take from others 

all those tasks thou wouldst see done, I can do them 

best of all. 

Two-and-twenty years I have had these rooms, and 

not one single change, save moving the canape out of 

the study to make room for my piles of papers. And yes, 

the first lady-in-waiting, the Egloffstein, gave me the 

arm-chair here by my bed. OtheTOise no change — yet in 

this unchanging setting what all has not happened, what 

a raging storm of labour, effort, birth-pangs, creation, 

has passed through it! What power to take pains has 

God given man! That thou honestly hast striven, 

whate’er cometh, God He knoweth! But time, time 

always went on over my head. The blood mounts to my 

temples, always, when I think of it. Two-and-twenty 

years — something has come of them, we have accom- 

plished something in that time; but it is aluxost a life- 

time, almost the whole life of a man. Hold fast the time! 

Guard it, watch over it, every hour, every minute! 

Unregarded it slips away, like a lizard, smooth, slippery, 

faithless, a pixy-wife. Hold every moment sacred. Give 

each clarity and meaning, each the weight of thine 

awareness, each its true and due fulfilment. Keep book 

of the day, account its each and every use. Le temps est 

le seul dont Vavarice soil louable. Music, now: has its 

perils for the clear mind. Yet a magic spell, to hold fast 

and stretch out the time, give it its own peculiar meaning. 

When my little one sings The God a^id the Bayadere , 

she ought not to sing it, it is too much her own story. 

When she sings Knowst Thou the Land? — tears came to 

my eyes, to hers too, the lovely beloved, whom I had 

dressed in turban and shawl — she and I, we stood among 

our friends and saw each other through the shining of 

our tears. And she, the clever little creature, said in her 

singing voice: *‘How slowly goes the time when music 

plays, and what manifold living and experience she com- 

presses within a little space! Yet when we listen absorbed, 

a long time seems to have passed. But what is time, 

that seems so long and so short?'* I praised her greatly 

for her apergu and agreed with all my heart. I answered: 

'‘Love and music, both are brief, and both eternal." 

Some such nonsense as that. I read The Seven Years* 

Sleeper j The Dance of the Dead, then Only This Heart 

Abidethj, then Never, Never Will I Lose Thee, then 

Mistress, Say, What Is*t Thou Whisper*st, then at last 

So on Rosy Wings of Morning I Was Borne to Thy Sweet 

Lips, The moon was full, the night grew late. Albert 

slumbered, Willemer slumbered, his hands, good man, 

folded across his stomach, and was made a mock. It was 

one o'clock when we parted. Felt so lively I had to take 

Boisser^e out on the balcony and show him, with a 

candle, the experiment of the coloured shadows. Saw her 

standing on her terrace, listening. 'Neath the moon to 

meet at evening have you made most sacred pledges — 

^'Avantir He might have stayed away a bit longer! 

“Right good morning to Your Excellence!" 

“H’m, yes, yes. Good morning. Set it down. Yes, 

good morning to you too, Carl." 

“Thank you, kindly, Your Excellence. It's no great 

matter to me; but I hope Your Excellence slept well." 

“Fairly, fairly. Odd, it seemed to me again, as you 

came in, that you were Stadelmann. Just habit. The 

Carl I had for years, you took the name from him. Must 

seem strange to you to be called Carl, when your real 

name — ^when actually your name is Ferdinand." 

“I never notice any more,. Your Excellence. We're 

used to that, in my profession. Once I used to be called 

Fritz. And for quite a while Battista." 

**Accidente! That’s what I call a versatile career. 

Battista Schreiber — that's a good name for you, Carl, 

you're a good scribe." 

“Thank you kindly, Excellence. Always at Your 

Excellence's service. Would Your Excellence like to 

dictate something lying in bed^' 

“Can't tell yet. Let me drink my coffee first. But 

draw the blinds, so I can see what sort of day it is. The 

new day. I've not overslept?" 

“Not a bit of it. Your Excellence. It is just past 

seven/* 

“Already past? That's because I lay awhile and 

thought my thoughts. — Carl?'* 

“Servant, Your Excellence.” 

“Have we still a good enough supply of the Oiffenbach 

zwieback?” 

“Well, Your Excellence, that depends on what Your 

Excellence means by 'good enouga — good enough for 

how long? We have enough for a few days yet.” 

“Quite right, I expressed myself badly. But the 

emphasis lay on the word 'supply/ 'For a few days' — 

that is not a supply.” 

“It is not, Your Excellence. Better say an almost 

exhausted supply.” 

“There, you see? In other words, not enough for a 

supply.” 

“Just so, Excellence. After all, Your Excellence always 

knows best.” 

“Yes, in the end it would mostly come to that. A 

supply that is giving out, so that you see the bottom of it, 

has something alarming. Mustn’t let the well run dry. 

Must take care to be able to dip from a full spring. In 

every field it is important to looK ahead.” 

“Your Excellence never spoke a truer word.” 

“Good, glad we agree. So now we must write to Frau 

Assessor Schlosser in Frankfurt and tell her to send us a 

good fat boxful. My parcels are always franked. Don't 

forget to remind me to %vTite. I enjoy these Offenbachs 

immensely, they are the only thing tastes good this time 

of day. Fresh zwieback, you know, is flattering to us 

old folk, it is crisp and seems hard, yet it is tender and 

easy to chew; so we get the illusion that we still bite as 

hard as sweet youth itself.” 

“But, Your Excellence, Your Excellence does not 

need such illusions. Your Excellence, if anybody does, 

is still dipping from a full spring, permit me to say.” 

“Yes, you may say so. Ah, good, the pure fresh air 

blows in, the morning air so sweet and virginal, and fans 

one round, so loving and familiar. How heavenly it is, 

new every morning, this rebirth of the world out of the 

night, to us all, old and young I It is a saying that youth 

goes with youth; yet this iresh young nature comes 

readily to us old folks too. Canst thou be glad, then I am 

thine, thine more than youth’s. For youth has no right 

understanding for youth, only age has that. Frightful it 

would be, if only age were to come to age! Must not 

come in, must stop outside by itself. . . . How goes the 

day? Rather dark?” 

‘‘A little dark. Your Excellence. The sun is overcast, 

and here and there higher up we have ” 

“Wait a bit. First go over and look at the barometer 

and thermometer outside the window. And use your 

eyes.” 

“Yes, Your Excellence. The barometer stands at 722 

millimetres. Your Excellence, and the thermometer at 13 

degrees Reaumur, outside temperature.” 

“Look at that. Now I can picture the troposphere. 

The breeze coming in seems rather damp, west-sou th- 

we.'t, I should say, and my arm tells the same story. Five 

or six cloud-banks; the overcast sky may have looked 

earlier like a downpour, but the wind has come up, the 

clouds show that, they are moving rapidly out of the 

north-west, as they did last night. It will soon scatter 

them and send them flying. There are long banks of 

cumulus heaped in the lower region — is that right? 

Above them slight cirrus and cirro-cumulus and arro- 

stratus, like sweepings, with patches of blue between. 

Have I got it more or less right?” 

“Perfectly correct. Your Excellence. I recognise the 

sweepings — ^they are sort of brushed along by the wind.” 

“I assume, then, that the wind in the upper regions is 

easterly; even if lower down it blows from the west, the 

cumulus will eventually break up into the prettiest little 

shoals of mackerel. Towards midday we may get a clear 

sky, by afternoon it may turn cloudy again. A change- 

able, contrary-minded day. I must practise Judging the 

cloud-formation from the barometer. Used to be no 

proper interest in these variables in the upper rcgiom; 

now a man has written a whole book about them, with 

an entire new terminology. Contributed a term myself, 

paries, for a bank of cloud. So now we can nail down 

these changeable humours and tell them to their faces 

what species and class they belong to. That is man*s 

prerogative on earth: to call things by name and put 

them in a system. They cast down their eyes before mm, 

so to speak, when he calls them by name, for to name is 

to command.*' 

"Shouldn't I take that down, Your Excellence? Or 

have you told it to Dr. Riemer, for him to make note 

of?" 

"Tut, tut, you mustn't pay so much attention." 

"But things must not be let get lost, Your Excellence, 

no matter how great the supply. That book on the 

clouds, I saw it lying next door, of course. A man is 

simply amazed at all the things Your Excellence takes 

notice of. The sphere of Your Excellence's interests 

must be called universal." 

"Simpleton! Where do you pick up such expressions?" 

"It's the truth. Your Excellence.^ — Shall I just look 

to see what your fine specimen of milkweed caterpillar 

is doing, and whether it is still eating?" 

"It won't eat any more, it has eaten enough, first out- 

side and then since I have had it under observation. It 

has already begun to spin itself in; you will see, if you 

like to look, how the gland secretion is forming the 

cocoon, soon it will be a chrysalis; still, I wonder if we 

shall see the transformation and the psyche slip out to 

live the brief and fluttering life it ate so much for when 

it was a worm.” 

"Yes, Your Excellence, these are the marvels of nature. 

But now what about the dictation?" 

"Right, yes, so be it. I must prepare the opinion for 

His Royal Highness the Duke in that accursed journal 

business. Be so good as to take this away and hand me 

the pages of notes and the pencil, I put them ready 

yesterday." 

"Here, Excellence. If I might be so bold and tell Your 

Excellence the truth, your copyist, Herr John, is here 

already and asked if there is anything for him. But I 

should like it so much if I might just stay and take down 

the opinion. There will be enough for the Herr Seae- 

tary to do after you get up.” 

‘'Yes, you may stay, just get ready. John always comes 

soon enough — though as a matter ot fact he is nearly 

always late." 

“Thank you very much indeed. Your Excellence." 

Pleasant fellow, well set up, nice manners serving and 

about my person. His flattery is not calculated — at least 

not wholly; some of it comes in part from real devotion 

and need to love something, mixed in with a little vanity. 

Good-natured, sensitive, fond of the women. I suspect 

he is going to quacks because he got an infection after 

we came back from TennstMt — ^if I am right, then I 

cannot keep him. Must speak to him, or tell August to 

— no, no, not August, better Rehbein. In the bordello 

the lad meets again the girl he loved, who tormented and 

tyrannised over him to the top of her bent. So now he 

gets his own back. Quite a pretty revenge. Something 

striking might be made out of it, light and hard, in per- 

fect style. Ah, if one only lived in a free, intellectual 

society, what powerful, extraordinary things one could 

write for iti Art’s natural ruthlessness is shackled and 

limited by all sorts of petty considerations. But it may 

be good for her; maybe she is all the more feared and 

loved, mysterious and powerful, wearing a veil instead 

of going naked, and only now and then giving a startling 

and rapturous glimpse of her native brazennessi Cruelty 

is one of the chief ingredients of love, and divided about 

equally between the sexes: cruelty of lust, ingratitude, 

callousness, maltreatment, domination. The same is true 

of the passive qualities, patience under suffering, even 

pleasure in ill usage. And five or six other perversities — 

if they are perversities — that may be a moral judgment 

— ^which, without adding anything else, are the chemical 

components of love. What if sweet love itself were put 

together out of nothing but sheer horrors, and the very 

purest just a compound of shadinesses we dare not con- 

fess to! Nil luce obscurius! Nothing darker than light 

— ^was Newton right after all? Well, no matter; at least 

the novel of European thought sprang from such ideas. 

Besides, one could not say light was ever the occasion 

of so much error, disorder, confusion, so much laying 

bare of the indispensable proprieties, as everywhere and 

every day love is! Karl August’s two families, the children 

— this Oken is attacking the Prince in the political field; 

will he stop there if we stir him up and keep on stirring 

him up, will he hesitate to attack m the private as well? 

Must make my master understand, quite baldly, the 

suppression of the sheet, the surgeon’s knife, is the only 

reasonable and effective means. No rebuke, no threat, 

certainly no stirring up the fiscal to inveigh against this 

impudent Catiline — no bringing a suit, as the good 

presiding ofiScer of the Ministry would like. They want 

to pick a quarrel with brains, poor souls. Much better 

leave it alone. They don’t understand. He will talk 

just as cleverly and impudently as he writes; give them 

replications — if he takes the trouble to answer the sum- 

mons — much better than any they could ever parry with; 

then they will have to choose between arresting him 

and letting him carry it off in triumph. Improper and 

insufferable anyhow, for a writer to be given a dressing- 

down like a schoolboy. Injurious to our culture and 

doesn't help the State. He is a man of merit and brains. 

If he starts undermining the State, we have to take away 

his tool, and punctum. But no threats, to make him 

sorry and act better in the future. Punish a leopard to 

make it change its spots! A man by nature bold and 

impudent — ^where shall he get modesty and restraint? 

He will simply go on as before, or else take refuge in 

irony, and in face of that you will be quite helpless. You 

do not know the resources of the mind. Force him, by 

half-measures, to greater subtlety — that will profit him 

more than it will you. Imagine the authorities follow- 

ing up his little games with charades and paper-games 

— playing the CEdipus to a sphinx like that! I should 

blush all over for them. 

And the fiscal’s charge? They want to haul him up 

before the Sanhedrin — and what is the catisa? High 

treason, they say. Where is the high treason? Can you 

call high treason what a man does in all openness as a 

citizen? Get things clear in your own heads before you 

cross swords in the name of law and order with such a 

shrewd and able destructeurl He will publish your 

charges with comments to show that he can prove all he 

says down to the smallest detail, and nobody can be 

punished for telling the truth! And where, in these 

divided times, is the tribunal you could entrust with the 

case? Are there not people sitting in the higher courts 

moved by the same revolutionary spirit as your culprit 

himself? Would you like to see him leave the court 

acquitted or even commended? It would look finer still 

to see a sovereign prince submitting these internal 

problems to a jurisdiction whose morale is shattered by 

the subversive times! No, it is no matter whatever for 

the courts, it must not be made so. It must be dealt 

wiA by the police, quietly, without publicity. Ignore 

the publisher entirely, attack the printer, make him 

liable if he prints the sheet. A silent, thoroughgoing 

rooting-out of the evil — ^and no revenge. You actually 

talk about avenging yourselves and do not see the mon- 

strousness of the admission. You, with your wrong- 

headed service to law and order! Do you want to add 

fuel to the flames we see about us, and give barbarism a 

free rein? Chastise with whips a man like that, deser- 

ving of a brilliant r 61 e in science — ^and how can you be 

sure that stupidity, once up in arms, will not chastise 

him with scorpions? May God forbid — God, and the 

eloquent and moving judgment I mean to render! — 

‘‘Ready, Carl?'* 

“Ready, Your Excellence!** 

“I have at all times made it my first care to carry out 

as quickly and exactly as lay in my power Your Royal 

Highness's gracious commands *’ 

“Just a little slower, if I might beg Your Excel- 

lence ** 

“Get on with it, butter-fingers! Abbreviate as best 

you can, else I will call John!** 

“And so forth. Your Royal Highness's most faithful 

and obedient servant. — ^There is the first draught. I 

have crossed out all that I had in my notes. You can 

just put it tidy a bit, it is not finished, it still says too 

much, composition not just what I want. When I have 

it before me I will put it in order and soften it down. 

Make it so I can read it, if possible before midday. Now 

111 get up. I can dictate no more letters now, this has 

taken up too much time, and I have so much for to- 

morrow. Une mer a boire — and every day just a few 

swallows. At noon I want the wagon, tell them in the 

stables. There will be no nimbus formation, it won't 

rain to-day. I will go with Herr Head Architect Coudray 

to inspect the new buildings in the Park; he may come 

back to dinner with me, and maybe Herr von Ziegesar 

too. What are we having to-day?” 

“Roast goose and pudding. Excellence.” 

“Have plenty of chestnuts in the stufiBng, they are 

filling.” 

“I will see to it. Your Excellence.” 

“Possibly one or two professors from the academy 

too. Part of the school is moving from the Esplanade into 

the hunting-lodge. I must go and inspect it. Put my 

dressing-gown here on the chair; 111 ring when I want 

you to do my hair. Go now. And Carl! Have my break- 

fast ready a little before ten, or not a minute later. Some 

cold partridge and a good Madeira. I am not my own 

man till I take a little something to warm the heart. 

Morning coffee is more for the head, it's the Madeira 

strengthens the heart.” 

“Of course. Your Excellence — and for poetry one needs 

them both.” 

“Be off, you rascal!” 

Holy water, pure and cold — ^holy not less in thy sober- 

ness than is the boon-and-blessing, sun-and-fire-combin- 

ing gift of the vine! Hail, water! Hail, fire ! Hail to the 

strong and simple hearts, the simple-heartedness which 

each day enjoys, like an adventure brave and new, that 

pure, first-given element, original refinement custom- 

staled! And hail to that refinement simple-heartedness 

can so mightily, so joyously embrace! For only here is 

culture, greatness. Fish in it fly, birds in it sky — pretty. 

Birds in it sky— quite a spacious, elemental little jest! 

Put it down. Might serve some time to show how one 

gets a happy thought. — ^Flow, water, flow, while earth 

stands fast! Stream free, O light, O love! O fire, leap 

up! Celebration of the elements already in the Pandora, 

that’s why I called it a festival play. They will enrich 

and enhance the festival in the second Walpurgis Night. 

Life is growth, what has been lived is weak, strengthened 

of the spirit it must be lived anew. Be the Elemental 

Four honoured no^v and ever morel I will keep that, it 

shall be the closing chorus of the mythological-biological 

ballet, the satiric nature-mystery. But only the light 

touch, the light touch! Last and highest effect of art is 

charm. No scowling sublimity — even at its best and most 

brilliant, even in Schiller, it falls tragically exhausted, 

betrays itself the product of moral feeling. No, no, the 

depths must laugh! Profundity must smile, glide gently 

in, and smiling yield itself to the initiate alone — that is 

the esoteric of our art. For the people, gay pictures; 

for the cognoscenti the mystery behind. You, my good 

man, were a democrat, you thought to offer the highest 

and best direct to the many, noble — and bald. But 

culture and the crowd, they do not square. Culture is 

the pick of society, understanding, a^eeing, discreetly 

smilmg. And its augur-smile is for the mischievous 

parody-nature of art, that utters shameless things with 

utter dignity, resolves the hardest riddles with an easy 

jest. 

This sponge— I have had it a long time: handy 

specimen of deep-seated animal life, from the primeval 

Thaletic slime. Long before the coming of naan, that 

was. In what bottom didst thou shape thyself and 

nourish thee to thy increase, strange skeleton for life, 

without life’s tender little soul? In the iEgean, per- 

chance? Hadst thou thy place on the Cyprian’s throne 

of iridescent shell? I blind my eyes with the stream 

gushing from thy pores, and they see the Neptunian 

triumph, the dripping rout: hippocamps, sea-dragons, 

ocean graces, Nereids, Tritons blowing short notes on 

wreathM horns — surrounding Galatea’s rainbow car 

they stream through the watery realm. . . . Good habit, 

that, to squeeze out the sponge on the back of your 

neck — ^hardens your whole body, if you can bear the 

shock without losing your breath. But for the neuralgia 

in my arm I would bathe in the river — as young 

mannerless fool, I would rush up by night with dripping 

hair and like an apparition startle the late-going good- 

man! All do the gods give, the Eternal, to their 

favourites, all! Long gone is the moonlit night when, 

stirred to thy depths, thy flesh and being all intoxicate, 

thou raountedst from the flood and gavest out the lines 

into the silver air. — ^In that self way the water streaming 

over your neck conjured up the vision of Galatea. 

Inspiration, fancy, idea as gitt of physical stimulation; 

healthy excitation, free and happy flow of blood, Antaean 

contact with nature and the elements. Mind, product of 

life, life that again in mind first truly lives. Each includes 

the other. Each has life from the other. What matter if 

the thought springing from joy of life thinks better of 

itself than it is? It is the joy that counts, self-satisfaction 

makes a poem of it Certainly there must be care in the 

joy, one must take care too, and thought for the right. 

Though, indeed, is not thought the care and pain of 

life? Then would the right be son of care and joy. 

From mother the blithe joy of life. . . . All seriousness 

springs from death and is reverence for it. But dread of 

death is despair of the idea — it is the stream of life run 

dry. We all go down in despair — ^honour, then, to 

despair! It will be your last thought. To eternity your 

last? Piety would have faith, that into the black 

renunciation of the life-forsaken soul might some time 

break the joyful ray of a higher life. . . . 

With the dust the spirit not dispersed. ... I could 

like piety, if it were not for the pious. Piety would be 

good, and the secret hoping and trusting and honouring 

of the mystery — if only the fools, in their arrogant con- 

ceit, had not made a fetish of it, and a “movement,*’ a 

bare-faced youth-triumph, neo-piety, neo-faith, neo- 

Christianity — ^and tied it up with all sorts of hypocrisy 

and fatherland rubbish ana bigoted, malcontent croak- 

ing, into a kind of green-sick philosophy, sinister indeed. 

Well,. well, we too were arrogant in our day, Herder and 

the rest of us in Strassburg, and inveighed against every- 

thing old; you celebrated Erwin and his minster and 

stoutly refused to let the flabby doctrine of new schools 

of beauty weaken your sense of the strong and crude 

and characteristic. That would be just after the hearts 

CHAPTER SEVEN 235 

of the modems, and flatter all the Gothic pietists; that 

is just why I suppressed it and kept it out of the collected 

works. But then Sulpice, my good, trusty, intelligent 

Boisser^e, appealed to my conscience on the score of 

the omission and rejection, and put me in wholesome 

touch with the revived tradition and my own early 

attitude. Praise be to the higher favour and my own 

inborn good fortune, that what might have been offen- 

sive and annoying came to me in such fine, upright 

guise, the good, reverent, cultured youth from Cologne, 

with his loyalty to old-German architecture and paint- 

ing and the value of folk- and ecclesiastical art. Opened 

my eyes, he did, to a lot I had not wanted to see. Van 

Eyck and the artists between him and Diirer, and 

Byzantine lower-Rhenish art. Youth comes to topple us 

old ones from our seats; I had tried to protect myself 

and shut out impressions of a new, upsetting kind. 

Then, all at once, in the gallery at Heidelberg, with 

Boisser^e, there opened a whole new world of form and 

colour, and pushed you out of the old rut of sensations 

and opinions — the old as youth, youth in the old — ^you 

learned what a good thing it is to give way when it 

means conquest, and to submit when submission spells 

freedom, because freedom has brought it about. Said as 

much to Sulpice. Thanked him for coming in all 

modesty and honest friendliness to win me over, to 

hitch me to his car— of course, they all come for that — 

to his plans for the completion of the Cologne Cathedral. 

He took all possible pains to make clear the national 

character and originality of old-German architecture, 

and how the Gothic had been more than just the result 

of Greek and Roman decline. 

Here the grotesque they find, 

Creation of a clouded mind. 

To be tlie highest in its sphere. 

Went about his affair so cleverly and neady, did the lad, 

was so clear and courteous, so sincere in all his diplomacy, 

I took a liking to him — ^and to his subject too. What a 

fine thing it is, to see a man love his subject like that! 

Makes him and his subject both worth while, even if it 

is nothing in itself. I smile when I recall his first visit, 

in 1811, we worked together over his copperplates from 

the lower Rhine, the Strassburg and Cologne designs 

and the Cornelius illustrations to Faust, and Meyer 

comes in and catches us at it. Casts an eye over the 

table, and I shout out: 'Took, Meyer, how the old times 

actually live again in these!’" Couldn’t trust his eyes 

when he saw what I was so taken up with. Grumbles 

and growls at the faults young Cornelius had faithfully 

taken over from the old-German style; opens his eyes 

wide at me several times when I calmly pass over his 

disapproval and praise the Blocksberg and Auerbach’s 

cellar and say that the movement of Faust’s arm as he 

offers it to Gretchen is a good invention. Looks quite 

dashed, gasps for breath, when he sees I don’t sweep all 

that barbarous Christian architecture off the table, but 

find the designs for the spires quite amazing and consent 

to admire the size of the pillared nave. Growls, looks at 

the designs, then at me, comes round, gives in, does the 

Polonius act — "It is back’d like a camel” — ^just a hanger- 

on, a snubbed and betrayed retainer, left in the lurch. 

Is there anything more diverting than to snub your 

satellites? Any better stolen pleasure than to run away 

from them, make fools of them? Any better joke than 

the sight of their dropped jaws when one finally has the 

courage to give them the slip? Of course, it’s easy to 

misunderstand, may look as though one had got on the 

wrong side; the pious may well think you are as pious 

as they. Actually, we can take pleasure in the absurd too, 

but only when we learn something from it. Folly is of 

interest too, we must keep our minds open to everything. 

Asked Sulpice to tell me something about the Protestant 

converts to Catholicism. Should like to understand the 

workings of their minds, how they came to do it. He 

thinks Herder had a good deal to do with it, and his 

philosophy of the history of humanity; but the times 

had contributed too, the tendency of the age. That I 

ought to know, we have something in common there, in 

fact there is always something in common even with 

fools, only it looks very diferent and has different 

results. The tendency of the age — thrones are shatter- 

CHAPTER SEVEN 237 

ing, empires quaking— well, I ought to know something 

about that, unless I mistake I have been through it too. 

Only the experience enables one man to span the cen- 

turies, gives him a millennial point of view, as it were, 

and another it makes a Catholic. Certainly that millen- 

nial point of view has something to do with tradition, 

if we only understood it. But the fools try to bolster up 

tradition with history and scholarship— as though that 

weren t the death of all tradition! Either one accepts it 

and concedes something to it from the beginning, or one 

does not accept it at all and is a regular carping philistine. 

But the Protestants— so said I to Sulpice— feel there is 

something missing, so they set up a sort of mysticism; 

because when something has to be born and can’t be, that 

is mysticism. How absurd they are! Don’t even under- 

stand how the Mass came into existence, and behave as 

though one could manufacture a Mass. If that makes 

you laugh, you are more pious than they. But then 

they think you are playing the pious with them. They 

will claim for themselves your little old-German 

pamphlet on the Main and the Rhine and the history 

of art there in the Dark Ages; they will lose no time in 

threshing out your little harvest and making a patriotic 

harvest-festival parading about with the empty straw. 

But no matter for them; they know nothing about free- 

dom. To give up existence in order to exist— certainly 

the trick will have been done. But it takes more than 

character, it takes mind, and the gift of renewal through 

mind. The beast’s life is short. But man can experience 

recurrence, he knows youth in age and the old as youth; 

it is given him to relive what he has lived, his is the 

heightened rejuvenescence that comes after the triumph 

over youthful fears, impotence, and lovelessness, me 

circle closes and shuts out death. 

Brought it all to me, the good Sulpice, so mannerly, so 

charmingly full of his theme, and only minded to hitch 

me to his car. Did not guess how much he brought, nor 

could have brought it had not the lamp been waiting for 

the light it kindled, had I not been ready for this chance 

that brought so much in its train and led to so much 

more than just the little old-German book. It was anno 

238 LOTTE IN WEIMAR 

'll he was with me; year by year after that came the 

Hammer translation with the introduction on the poet 

of Shiraz. Came the gift of inspiration, the recognition 

as in a glass, the blithe and mystical dream-play of 

metempsychosis, the all-embracing millennial spirit he 

invoked, the Corsican Timur, my mighty and sinister 

friend. Came my absorption in the history of mankind 

— ^when faith was great and reason small — my fruitful 

journey downwards to the patriarchs, then that other 

journey into my motherland, taken in foreknowing 

readiness: yet shalt thou love. Came Marianne. 

Needs not to know how all that hangs together, I have 

not told him, how it began with his coming, five years 

ago, it would not be right, might put ideas in his head, 

who himself was but an instrument and my tool, though 

minded with all due respect to make me his. One day he 

even had the idea of learning of me how to write, that 

he might better advance the idea he had at heart; even 

wanted to stop the winter in Weimar, to look over my 

shoulder and get some hints. Better not, my friend said 

I. My pagans here are often too much even for me, who 

am myself a pagan. Would be no good for you, you'd 

have no one but me to fall back on, and that would not 

be much, for I cannot always be with you. Spoken in 

all affection, like other such things I said. Praised his 

little writings and pronounced them good and well done, 

for they had the right note, that is always the chief thing. 

I could probably not do half so well, I have not a godly 

mind. Read aloud from the Italian Journey, where I 

praise Palladio to my heart's content and curse every- 

thing German including the climate and the architecture. 

Had tears in his eyes, the good lad. I hastily promised 

to strike out the offending passage, so he might see what 

a good soul I am. And just to please him I took out of 

the Divan the diatribe against the crucifix, the amber 

cross, that folly of the west and north. He found it too 

harsh and bitter, begged me to reject it. Good, said I, 

seeing it's you, I will cut it out. I will give it to my son, 

like other such things that might offend the public. He 

will enjoy it, and preserve it faithfully. So I will com- 

promise between burning and offending. . . . But he loves 

me none the less, and was so pleased with my sympathy 

for his balderdash, not only for the sake of his own affair 

but for mine as well. A listener comme il faut — how 

charmed he was with the Shortest Night and the windy 

sighs of love-smitten Aurora for her Hesperus, when I 

read it to him in the cold room, on our Neckarelz trip! 

What a good soul! Said the prettiest, most intuitive 

things about the relation of the Divan to Faust; was at 

all times an excellent travelling-companion and confi- 

dant, I relished opening my bosom to him as we drove 

or when we put up, told him things about my own life. 

Remember the journey from Frankfurt to Heidelberg, 

while the stars came out and I talked about Ottilie and 

how I loved and suffered for her — ^rattled on out of 

excitement, cold, and want of sleep — think I frightened 

him. . . . Fine road from Neckarelz up into the chalk 

hills, where we found petrifactions and fossil shells. 

Oberschaflenz, Buchen — ^we ate at midday in the inn 

garden at Hardtheim, and there was that young waitress 

who looked at me with her heart in her eyes, and I 

demonstrated to him how youth and Eros can make up 

for beauty. For she was not pretty, yet uncommonly 

attractive, and got more so as she grew excited and 

blushed, and pretended disdain, when she saw, as she 

was meant to do, that the strange gentleman was talking 

about her. He saw too, of course, that I was only talking 

so she could see I was talking about her, yet his bearing 

was perfect, neither embarrassed nor coarse — that was 

his Catholic culture — ^his presence was altogether accept- 

able and happy when I gave her the kiss, the kiss on 

the lips. 

Raspberries, with the sun on them, unmistakable smell 

of warm fruit. Are they making preserves in the house? 

No, not this time of year, must be in my own nose. 

Lovely fragrance, beautiful berries, swollen with juice 

under their dry velvety skin, warm with living fire, like 

women's lips. Love is the best of life, and of love the 

best the kiss: the poetry of love, seal of ardent desire, 

sensual and platonic, sacrament midway between spiritual 

beginning and fleshly end, sweet commerce, held in a 

higher sphere than the other and with the purer organs 

of breath and speech — spiritual because still discriminat- 

ing, still individual. . . . Bent back between thy hands 

that one and only head, beneath the lashes that serious, 

smiling gaze dissolving in thine; thy kiss says to it: I 

love thee, and I mean thee, precious particular of the 

divine All, expressly thee in all creation. For the other, 

procreation, is something else, anonymous, animal, at 

bottom without choice, shrouded in darkness. The kiss 

is joy, procreation is lust — God gave it to the worm. 

Well, in my time I have wormed it enough too; but 

after all the kiss is more my line, and the joy of the kiss, 

that fleeting visitation of conscious desire to fugitive 

beauty. There is the very same distinction between art 

and life. For the consummation of life for the human 

being, the making of children, is no affair of poetry’s, 

or of the spirit-kiss on the world’s raspberry lips. . . . 

Lotte’s lip-play with the canary-bird — the sweet way 

the little creature pressed its bill to her sweet lips and 

then made contact from one mouth to the ottier with 

its pretty picking — how daintily depraved, how shatter- 

ingly innocent! Well set-up, gifted young fool, already 

knew as much about art as about love and privately 

meant one when he made the other I A mere young 

cockerel and already quite prepared to betray love and 

life and human beings to his art! My loves, my outraged 

friends, it is a fait accompli, it has to come out for the 

Leipsic fair, forgive me if you can! I must be your 

debtor, yours and your children’s, good souls, for the 

evil hours my — call it what you will — brought down 

upon you. Bear with me, I beseech you! — It was about 

this time of year I wrote it, in those misty, far-off times. 

Came back to me, the very letter, when I had the first 

edition again in my hands this spring and went over the 

whole crazy invention for the first time in so many years. 

No chance that, it had to happen, reading it supplied 

the last link of all that began witn Sulpice’s visit. Belongs 

to the recurring phase, the blithe celebration of the 

recurrent feast . . . Capital, too, brilliantly done, con- 

gratulations, young popinjay! The interwoven osycho- 

logical motive, the solid richness of intuitive material. 

Picture of autumnal strayings and flower-pickings — ^good 

too. Very neat the letter where the young lady cons the 

list of her friends and can yield him to no one, in each 

finds some flaw. Might be out of Elective Affinities. So 

much skill and pains, along with so much vagrant un- 

controlled feeling, such tempests of yearning and revolt 

against the limitations of the individual, the prison walls 

of the human soul— no wonder it was a success; the man 

who began with it was certainly not small beer. How 

easy something is to do, he knows who thinks of it and 

puts it through. Easy and happy as art, by virtue of the 

epistolary form, makes it immediate, beginning over 

again from the beginning each time— a whole reference 

system of lyrical units. Takes talent, to make a thing 

hard for yourself and then see how to make it easy. 

Same thing with the Divan — ^marvellous, how it always 

is the same. Divan and Faust, yes, but Divan and Werther 

are even more closely related — ^same thing on different 

levels, ascent to a climax, repetition and refinement of 

life. So may it ever be, so go on ad infinitum — ^gain 

through penitential striving, at eternities arriving . . . 

much talk of kissing in both poems, early and late. Lotte 

at the piano, never so charming her lips as then, they 

seemed to open thirstily and drink in the sweet tones. 

Was she not already Marianne to the life, or, rather, 

was Marianne not Lotte, when she sang Mignon, and 

Albert sat there too, sleepy, complaisant? Really like 

a recurrent feast, this time; celebration and imitation of 

the original, solemn performance, timeless memorial 

rite; less life too than before, yet more, more intel- 

lectualised life. . , . Well now, the high and holy season 

is past, that reincarnation I shall see no more. Would, 

but have been shown I may not; that spells renunciation, 

ever abiding in hope of renewal. Only abide, the beloved 

will return to be kissed, ever young — rather haunts me, 

though, to think somewhere she still lives, old, her shape 

subdued to time; scarce as comforting and acceptable 

as the thought that the Werther lives on beside the 

Divan. 

But the Divan is better, it has got beyond the patho- 

logical and ripened into greatness, the lovers are a con- 

summate pair, soaring together towards higher spheres. 

Blood goes to my head when I think of all the young 

popinjay dragged in, in his frenzied search for motiva- 

tion: social rebellion, offended bourgeois pride — ^why 

did you have to bring that in, young simpleton, a bit of 

political tinder that takes away from the whole thing? 

The Emperor was quite right to condemn it; Why did 

you do that? he asked me. A good thing nobody paid 

it much heed, just swallow^ed it along with the other 

fiery excesses and felt sure it was not meant for direct 

effect. Silly, immature stuff, moreover subjectively false. 

My attitude towards the upper classes was always very 

well-affected — must certainly dictate a passage in the 

fourth part of the Life, that, thanks to the Gotz, I stood 

well with the aristocracy, however much the work 

offended established literary conventions. . . . Where is 

my dressing-gown? Ring for Carl to dress my hair. The 

readiness is all — somebody might come, Nice soft 

flannel, pleasant to my hands when I fold them across 

my back. Wore it mornings when I walked up and down 

in the arcade by the Rhine, at Winkel with the Brentanos 

and on the terrace at Willemer’s ‘‘Tannery,*’ No one 

dared speak to me, not to disturb my thoughts — though 

sometimes I hadn’t a thought in my head. Fine to be 

old and great; reverence there must be. Yes, w^here all 

has not the good coat been with me, familiar domestic 

habit on my travels, to assert my own permanent self 

and stand out against stranger ways! Like the silver cup 

I pack and carry with me everywhere and the wine I have 

toed and found good, so that I shall not lack them where 

I go. Enjoy the others and their ways, profit by them, 

yet prove that I and mine are no less good. Cling to 

your own, stand on your own legs — they may accuse me 

of being set in my ways — it is a silly reproach. Clinging 

stoutly to your ego, preserving your personal unity — 

— that is one thing, renewal and rejuvenescence are 

another, but there is no inconsistency — aW incontro: 

one finds these only in unity, in the closed circle of 

personality, that bids defiance to death. . . . “Make me 

fine, Figaro, Battista, whatever your name is; dress my 

hair, I have scraped away the stubble-field. You take 

me by the nose when you go at my lips, I cannot bear 

CHAPTER SEVEN 243 

it, it is an uncouth practice. Do you know the old story 

about the student who was a practical joker and laid a 

wager with his mates that he would pull an exalted old 

gentleman's nose? He introduced himself to the worthy 

as a barber and calmly proceeded, before everybody, to 

take him by the beak and turn the exalted head to and 

fro — the old gentleman took a fit out of sheer chagrin, 

and his son challenged the joker to a duel and gave him 

something to remember the joke by all his days." 

"I never heard the story. Your Excellence; but it 

depends on the spirit in which a man takes another by 

the nose — I assure Your Excellence " 

"Never mind, I like better to do it myself all the same. 

There isn't much to shave, from one day to the next. 

But dress my hair and powder it, and put the tongs to 

it here and there. You feel like a different man when 

your hair is put in its place, away from forehead and 

temples; then the frigate is stripped for action, and 

the head is clear. For the hair and the head inside it 

hang together, and what good is an uncombed brain? 

The neatest dressing, you know, was the old bag-wig and 

cadogan; you never saw it, you came in the middle of 

the Swedish period. But I begin farther back — I've gone 

through so many stages, short hair, long hair, formal hair, 

floating side-locks — seem to myself like the Wandering 

Jew, passing through the ages, himself always the same, 

customs and costumes changing on his very body, while 

he takes no heed." 

"That must have become Your Excellence very well, 

the queue and the hair rolled over the ears, and the 

embroidered coat." 

“Let me tell you, it was a good age, with decent and 

proper conventions; a little craziness had its value in the 

background, more than it has to-day. Tell me what 

freedom is, I always say, if it isn't becoming free. 

You mustn't think there were no human rights then. 

Masters and servants, yes, but those were ranks divinely 

appointed, each one worthy in its way. The master 

himself had respect not only for his own rank but for 

the servant's too, as being fixed by the hand of God. 

The more withal because in those times the view was 

 

more general that whether high or low, everybody had 

to put up with being human/’ 

“Well, Your Excellence, I'm sure I can't say. It seems 

to me the little fellows always have more to submit to, 

in practice it is safer not to have to depend too much on 

this respect of the high rank for the low/' 

“Maybe you are right. Would you have me quarrel 

with you — and me with my head in your hands so you 

can pull my hair or burn me with the tongs if you don’t 

like what I say? I would do well to hold my tongue.” 

“You have very fine hair, Your Excellence.” 

“Thin, I suppose you mean.” 

“It is only beginning to be a little thin On the fore^ 

head. No, I mean each single hair is fine; soft as silk, 

one seldom sees it like that in a man.” 

“Very good. I am of the stuff God made me of.” 

Was that indifferent or dissatisfied enough? Objective 

about my own parts? Parucchieri must always flatter--- 

the man takes on the manners of his trade, tries to feed 

my vanity. Doesn’t realise that even vanity has manifold 

sources and forms. How should he know it can be a 

profound preoccupation, serious and contemplative 

absorption in the self, passion for autobiography, com- 

pelling curiosity about the why and wherefore of one’s 

physical and moral being, nature’s devious ways, the 

hidden secrets of her dark laboratory, that produced 

this being which is you, to the wonder and aamiration 

of the world? A light word of flattery for my physical 

parts — he would think it just pleasantly tickled my ego. 

Actually, it refers to a mystery so joyful and profound, 

only to think of it brings my heart into my mouth! I 

am of the stuff nature made me out of. That is all there 

is to it. I am as I am and as I live. Well I know we get 

farther by acting unconsciously, like a bolt into the blue. 

And the autobiographical urge? Maybe not very con- 

sistent with the bold principle I just set out. But sup- 

pose it only applies to the process, to the edifying 

demonstration of how a genius develops (and that may 

be just scientific vanity). At bottom the curiosity is 

always there, the itch to understand the essence of the 

process, of the being not only as it is but as it has been, 

the far-flung sources of its life and experience. If thinkers 

think about the thought-process, why shall not also the 

worker think of him who works, if a work does come 

out of it — considering that all work may be nothing 

but a very vain preoccupation with the worker as a 

phenomenon — a highly egocentric performance, in short? 

Very fine, superfine hair. Here is my hand, resting on 

the powdering-cape. Doesn’t go with the fine hair, not 

a slender, spiritual, aristocratic paw at all. Broad and 

firm, a workman’s hand, shaped by generations of black- 

smiths and butchers. What mixture of power and 

delicacy, strength and weakness, coarseness and frailty, 

madness and common sense, the impossible and triumph 

over it — ^what ail must not have mingled by happy 

chance, as the centuries ran, to produce the phenomenon, 

the genius, in the end? In the end. Out of a series of 

bad things or good things there is finally born the 

phenomenal thing to amaze the world and bring it joy. 

Half-god and prodigy, marvel and monstrum — when I 

wrote that, I thought of them as one, I took one for the 

other, knew that there is always some amazement in joy, 

always in the half-divine a touch of the monstrous. Good 

or evil — ^what does nature reck, who recks so little of 

disease and healing? Through myself, nature, do I first 

of all know thee, through myself feel thee most pro- 

foundly. — ^You taught me that an ancient stock, before 

it dies out, can produce an individual holding in itself 

all its ancestral qualities, uniting all talents previously 

isolated or undeveloped, giving them for the first time 

full expression. Neatly formulated, carefully set down 

for the better instruction of mankind: natural science, 

deliberately decanted from your own not too canny 

essence. Egocentric, you may say. But shall he not be 

egocentric who knows himself to be the goal, the fulfil- 

ment, the consummation, the apotheosis, last and highest 

result of nature’s uttermost extreme of care and pains? 

Take this whole process of pairing and breeding of 

stocks, crossing and mating of clans throughout the 

centuries: the journeyman who comes from the next 

county to woo the master’s daughter; the wench of the 

count’s tailor or lackey, who marries the sworn surveyor 

or educated bailiff. Was all this hodgepodge, this 

quodlihet of mixed bloods, so especially privileged and 

favoured of the gods? But so the world was to find it, in 

me, its issue; for in me the most dangerous native 

tendencies have been subdued, civilised, purified, applied 

and compelled to good and great ends, by dint of a 

character sprung from somewhere else altogether. My 

ego — a balancing trick, only just achieved; a lucky stroke, 

just lucky enough; a sword-dance poised between diffi- 

culty and love of facility; a just barely possible that 

achieves genius — who know^s, perhaps genius is always 

just barely possible! They value the work, when it costs 

enough, the life nobody values. Try doing it yourselves, 

see if you don’t break your necks! 

What about my fear of marriage, my half-conscious 

sense that it was wrong and foolish to continue in the 

bourgeois ancestral pattern, and struggle on after the 

goal was already reached? There is my son, issue of an 

easy compromise, fruit of a light and lickerish union 

frowned on by society — who knows better than I that 

he is a by-blow and an after-clap? Nature pays him no 

heed — yet I have taken the notion to act as though I 

could and might begin again in him. As though marry- 

ing him to the little person, she being of the stock that 

made me turn tail, could inoculate us with Prussian 

blood and make an after-play at which Nature herself 

would yawn and shrug and go home to bed! I know it 

all. But knowing is one thing, feeling another; and 

feeling will have its rights, quand mime, whatever cold 

knowledge knows. It will look all pleasant and present- 

able at first; there will be a Lilli to preside over the house 

and smile at the old man’s gallantries, if God please there 

will be grandchildren, curly-haired ones — shadow grand- 

children, seed of the void in the heart. They will be 

loved despite faith or hope, simply out of feeling. 

She was without faith or hope or love, Cornelia, sister 

of my heart, my female alter ego. She was not born for 

wifehood. Her revulsion against her husband probably 

corresponded to my fear of wedlock. A nondescript 

human being, a riddle to others and herself, wandering 

aloof and bitter on this earth, a crabbed votary. Strange 

CHAPTER SEVEN J47 

it was, how in that first unnatural, detested childbed she 

passed away and died! Such was my sister in the flesh, 

the only other one of four children to survive — alas for 

her — those early days. Where are they now, that lovely 

little maid, and the strange, wilful, silent lad who was 

my brother? Gone long ago, vanished and scarce bewept, 

so far as I recall. Dreams, and three parts forgot, I 

should not know them again. Fate willed that I should 

stay and you should pass; you went before, and little 

was your loss. I live on in your stead, at your expense, 

and roll the stone for five. Am I so egoistic, so avid of 

life, that I murdered you by sucking up what you might 

have lived on? Profounder and more secret sins there 

are than those we actually and consciously weigh our- 

selves down with. This strange childbed bore fruit of 

one really unusual life and four deaths — perhaps that 

was due to the father’s being twice as old as the mother 

when he wooed her. Blest pair, vouchsafed to give a 

genius birth! And yet unblest! My blithe, happy- 

natured little mother — she ment her best years as nursing 

sister to a decrepit tyrant. Cornelia hated him — perhaps 

only because he gave her life. But was he not otherwise 

hateful? A querulous hypochondriac, who felt every 

draught of air a disturbance of the order of things: a 

cross-grained half-wit, too eccentric for any profession, 

a tedious pedant in any sphere. You took after him in 

many things; his size, his hearing and ways; his love of 

collecting, his formality, his many-sidedness, his pedantry 

—but you transmuted it. The older you grow, the 

stronger that shadowy form will come out in you. You 

will recognise and confess him, more and more proudly, 

consciously and defiantly assume and honour the father- 

image. Feeling, feeling— I believe in, honour it. Life 

could not be borne unless we glozed it over with warm, 

deceptive feeling. Yet beneath it always lies the icy cold- 

ness. You make yourself great, make yourself hated, tell- 

ing the ice-cold truth. And anon do penance and appease 

the world by merciful, heartening lies. My father was a 

shady character, late-bom child of elderly parents, his 

brother definitely out of his mind and died an imbecile— 

as did my fether too, in the end. My grandsire Textor 

was a ladies’ man; yes, that came of his light-hearted, 

aspiring temperament; a jolly rake, a callous, deliberate 

petticoat-chaser, always getting into trouble with out- 

raged husbands. But a clairvoyant too, had the gift of 

prophecy. Extraordinary mixture! Perhaps I had to kill 

off all my brothers and sisters to get the blend trans- 

mitted to me in some more tolerable, milder, more 

pleasing shape. Enough craziness left in me too, under- 

neath all the brilliance! If I had not inherited the knack 

of order, the trick of saving myself, a whole system of 

protective devices — where should I be? Madness I loathe 

— ^abhor from my soul, beyond all power to utter, hate 

in my bones all crack-brained geniuses and near-geniuses, 

all emotionalism, eccentric gesturing and posturing, 

extravagance! Boldness, yes, audacity, boldness is all, 

the one indispensable thing — but quiet, decorous, 

wedded to the proprieties, velvet-shod with irony. That 

is how I am, that is what I will. There was that chap — 

what was his name? Sonnenberg, they called him the 

Cimbrian. Came from Klopstock, rolling his eyes and 

tearing his hair — at bottom quite a decent fellow. His 

great affair was a poem on the Last Judgment, daft 

undertaking, without polish in its daftness. Formless, 

apocalyptic — he used to recite it like one possessed of 

the devil. Intolerable. Made me sick. The end was, the 

genius threw himself out of the window. Farewell, 

farewell! And absit omenl 

Good, now; he has put me to rights, made me dignified 

and elegant, a little like older, statelier times. When 

company comes, I will talk of trifles in a measured voice, 

soothing to both sides. Not a trace of the dark, inscrut- 

able genius these poor dear mediocrities love to gaze at 

and draw edification from their delicious shudders. My 

phiz must give them enough to talk about: my brow, 

and my belauded eyes — those, to judge from the pictures, 

come quite direct from my mother’s mother, born 

Lindheymer, Textor’s wife, as well as the shape of my 

skull and mouth, and my Mediterranean skin. The husk, 

the outwaid features, they were there a hundred years 

ago, with no more significance than just a female, a 

buxom, clever armful of a brunette. In my mother it 

CHAPTER SEVEN 249 

slumbered, she being of quite another cast. Then it 

came out in me, became the shape and person of that 

which I am. Took on an intellectual significance it 

never had before and never needed to get. How inevit- 

ably does my physical self express my mental? Couldn’t 

I have these same eyes without their being just Goethe’s 

eyes and nobody else’s? I mean to stick by the Lind- 

he/mers — probably the best thing in me. Pleasant to 

think their early seat, whence they took their name, lay 

close to the Roman wall, in the slope of the watershed, 

where the blood of ancients and barbarians has always 

mingled. Thence it comes, from there you get the eyes, 

the skin — your aloofness from the Germans, your per- 

ception of their vulgar strain; that scurvy misbegotten 

race, out of it, in spite of it, you take your life, your 

antipathy for it gnaws at a thousand roots that feed 

your very being. So you lead this unspeakably precarious, 

painful life, called to their instruction, isolated not only 

by your station but from the very outset by your instinct; 

grudgingly respected and honoured, picked flaws in 

wherever they can! Don’t I know they find me a burden, 

one and all? How could I appease them? I have 

moments when I would so gladly do so. It should be 

possible — sometimes it has been. For in your bones 

there is so much Sachs and Luther marrow; you even 

take a defiant pleasure in the fact, yet the very stamp 

and seal of your mind drives you to" lift and lighten it 

with all your gift of irony and charm of words. So they 

mistrust your German soul and you, they feel it an abuse, 

your fame is a source among them of hate and anguish. 

Sorry existence, spent wrestling and wrangling with my 

own blood — ^yet after all it is my bloody it bears me up. 

It must be so, I will not whine. That they hate clarity 

is not right. That they do not know the charm of truth, 

lamentable indeed. That they so love cloudy vapouring 

and berserker excesses, repulsive; wretched that they 

abandon themselves credulously to every fanatic scoundrel 

who speaks to their baser qualities, confirms them in 

their vices, teaches them nationality means barbarism 

and isolation. To themselves they seem great and 

glorious only when they have gambled away all that 

they had worth having. Then they look with jaundiced 

eyes on those whom foreigners love and respect, seeing in 

them the true Germany. No, I will not appease them. 

They do not like me — so be it, I like them neither, we 

are quits. What I have of Germany I will keep — ^and 

may the devil fly away with them and the philistine spite 

they think is German! They think they are Germany 

— but I am. Let the rest perish root and branch, it will 

survive in me. Do your best to fend me off, still I stand 

for you. But the thing is, I was born far more apt for 

appeasement than for tragedy. Appeasement, ,compro- 

mise — are they not all my striving? To assent, to allow, 

to give both sides play, balance, harmony. The combina- 

tion of all forces makes up the world; each is weighty, 

each worth developing, each gift reaches perfection only 

through itself. Individuality and society, consciousness 

and naivete, romanticism and practical sense, each equal, 

each alike complete. To accept, to refer, relate, to be 

the whole, to sname the partisans of every principle by 

rounding it out — ^and the other side too. . . . Humanity 

universal, ubiquitous; parody secretly directed against 

itself, the highest, the irresistible pattern, world-doimnion 

as irony and blithe both-sided betrayal! So then the 

tragedy falls away, falls down below where no mastery 

yet is, where my Germany yet is not, for my Germany 

consists in this very dominion and mastery, she repre- 

sents it — ^for that sort of Germany is freedom, is culture, 

universality, love. All this no less because as yet they 

do not know it. Tragedy between me and this people? 

Ah, yes, we may bicker and brawl. But above it all I 

celebrate an examplary reconcilement; harping deftly 

yet profoundly, I will marry the rhyming magic of the 

cloudy north with the trimetric spirit of the eternal azure 

sky — ^and from the embrace genius shall come. But say 

then why my words so sweetly flow. What comes with 

ease must issue from the heart 

*‘Did Your Excellency speak?*' 

**What? No — did I say anything? If so it was not to 

you. Must have been talking to myself— that comes, you 

know, with age, people mumble to themselves/' 

'It cannot be your age. Excellence, it must be just the 

liveliness of your thoughts. I wager you sometimes did 

it in your youth as well.” 

“Right there too. Much oftener than I do now I am 

old. Talking to oneself is silly, youth is a silly time, so 

it is fitting, but very likely not to age. When I was young 

I rantipoled about — ^when something throbbed inside my 

breast I gave the nonsense words and ’twas a verse.” 

“Yes, Your Excellence, that must be what people call 

the inspiration of genius.” 

“May be. for aught I know. Who haven’t it call it 

that. Character and good intentions have to make up 

afterwards for the native foolishness; what they do is at 

bottom better and more comprehensible. — ^Well, are you 

done at last? Can’t go on for ever, you know. From 

your point of view quite right — you take your own work 

for the most important thing; but these little trappings 

of life must keep their proper place.” 

“I see that. Your Excellence. But, after all, everything 

has to be advenant. And a man knows who it is he has 

under his hands. — Here is the hand-glass, if you ” 

“Very good, very good. Give me the cologne for my 

handkerchief. Ah, how good! What a pleasing, refresh- 

ing invention! They had it back in the time of the 

bag-wig. I’ve loved it all my life. The Emperor reeked 

of it from head to foot. Let’s hope he still has it on St. 

Helena. You see the little comforts and satisfactions of 

life become most important when the heroic deed, even 

life itself, is all over and done with. What a man, what 

a man! They have shut up that rebellious, intractable 

spirit in the impregnable wastes of ocean, so that we here 

can have peace and cultivate our gardens, . . . Quite 

right, too. The age of arms and ^pop^es is past, the king 

takes flight, the burgher is on top. We are in for a 

practical era, you will see: money, brains, business, trade, 

prosperity — wc may come to hope and believe that even 

Nature herself has turned sweet reason, renounced for 

ever all her fevers and fulminations, and perpetual peace 

is on the cards at last. Quite a refreshing idea — nothing 

whatever against it. But when you think how an 

elemental force like that must feel, with its powers all 

choked among watery wastes, a giant paralysed, chained 

to a rock, an /Etna smothered with ashes, boiling and 

seething down below with no outlet for its fires — and 

)ou\e got to remember that if lava destroys, it fertilises 

too — wiien you think of ail that, you feel such distress 

that you are almost tempted to pity — though pity is not 

a feeling proper to such a case. At least, one may hope 

lie has the eau-de-cologne. — I will go over now, Carl. 

Tell Herr John he may come.'* 

Helena, Saint Helena, that he should be sitting there, 

that so It should be called, by that name, her name whom 

I seek, my single craving, lovely as charming, charming 

as desired — that she should share the name with that 

rock of Promethean torture, my daughter and darling, 

all mine, belonging not to life and not to time! That 

longing ’tis chains my creative powers to this lifelong 

task, as yet unmastered — how strange a fabric is this 

weave of life, these destinies! Here now my work-room, 

morning sober, fresh and cool, abiding my next assault. 

Here my subsidia, stimulantia, sources, tools to lay the 

world of science under tribute to my creative aims. How 

burningly interesting all knowledge can become, when 

it serves to enrich and sustain a new creation! All 

irrelevant to its purpose and mind rejects — yet the mass 

oi the relevant grows ever greater. The older one grows, 

the farther one spreads afield; go on at this pace, soon 

there will be naught left outside! This treatise on plant 

diseases and malformations, must read more of it, this 

afternoon if I can, or this evening. Freaks and sports 

are full of meaning to the friend of all life! Maybe the 

pathological teaches us most about the norm; comes to 

me sometimes, setting out boldly on the track of disease 

we might best pierce the darkness of living forms. . . 

And here what joy in store for the discerning: Byron's 

Corsair and Lara, fine proud talent, must read more, 

in the Gries translation of Calderon too; the Ruckstiihl 

Treatise on the German Language has some stimulating 

things, must certainly give further study to Ernesti's 

Technologta Rhetorka. That sort of thing clears the 

mind and brightens the flame. These Orientalia — the 

ducal library has w^aited a good while for their return, 

the dates are long since past. Shall not have a single one 

of them, cannot give up my tools while I am on the 

Divan] make pencil marks in them too, nobody will dare 

grumble. Carmen panegyricum in laudem Muhammedis 

deuce take it, the birthday poem! Begins: Fanned by 

the mountain air, as fine as ether, On rocky summits of 

the wooded gorges — pretty stifE combination that, the 

top of a hollow! Never mind, let it go, it is a bold, 

rousing figure; if their gorge rises at it, let them swallow! 

Of these heights the sober face was the same kind of 

thing. Then comes the poet’s bower, not so pleasant, 

with cupids shooting arrows through the air. Thirdly 

we have intellectual society, shattered by Mars. Lastly 

sweet peace returns, even so our minds right-about-face, 

turn and turn again, make a virtue of necessity, get back 

at last to our past, to ancient tradition, and then the 

position of the crowd, who will have their claims allowed 

good, if you settle down to it after dictation you’ll 

get it together in twenty minutes. 

All this raw material and underpinning, never thought 

of itself as raw, but something in and of itself, with its 

own meaning and purpose, not just there for somebody 

to come along and squeeze out one drop of attar of roses 

and throw the rest away! Where does a man get the 

cheek to consider himself a god, and everything about 

him just trumpery, to exploit as he sees fit? To think of 

himself as the only mirror of the universe, and even of 

his friends — or those he regards as friends — ^as so much 

paper to write on? Sheer impudence and hubris} No, it 

IS nature and character, laid on one and borne in God’s 

name— enjoy it and forgive, it is there for your pleasure. 

Waring’s Journey to Shiraz, very useful; Memorabilia 

of the Orient, by August!, helpful in some ways; 

Klaproth’s Storehouse of Asia; Treasures of the Orient, 

edited by a society of amateurs— wonderful find for a 

society of dustmen! Must go over the couplets of Sheik 

Dshelaleddin Rumi, bright pleiades of the Arabian sky; 

the Repertorium of Biblical and Oriental Literature will 

be most useful for my notes. Here’s my Arabic grammar, 

must practise the florid script a bit, helps to get into 

closer contact. Contact, good word, expresses how you 

 

bore and burrow into some beautiful new world you 

have seized upon, dig away like possessed, till you know 

its secrets and can speak its tongue. And nobody sees 

the difference between imitated and invented detail. 

Queer sort of possession! Would surprise people to know 

how many books of travel and description a poet had 

to feed on for one little book of verses and sayings. Not 

just a mark of genius, they would think. When I was 

young, Werther was just making a sensation, there was 

a boorish chap named Bretschneider got worried about 

my conceit. Told me the root-and-branch truth about 

myself — or what he thought it was. Don't think so highly 

of yourself, my lad, said he. You're not so big a fish as 

you might think, with all the noise about that little tale 

of yours. What kind of brains have you got, when you 

come down to it? I know you: your judgment is mostly 

wroi]ig; at bottom you know that unless you take a long 

time to consider, your intelligence is not reliable; you 

are clever enough, with people you think have insight, 

to back down at once and not enter into serious discus- 

sion; you wouldn't run the risk of giving away your own 

weakness. That is the way you are. And you are an 

unsteady kind of fellow, won't stick to any one system, 

go jumping from one extreme to the other, you could be 

talked into being anything, a pietist as easy as a free- 

thinker, you are so easily influenced it cries to heaven! 

And yet you are overweeningly vain, you consider every- 

body a weakling but yourself, whereas you are the 

weakest of all — quite incapable of judging the few people 

you think have brains, you cannot test them and have 

to follow the opinion of the common herd. Once for all 

I tell you: one grain of ability you have, your gift for 

poetry. When you have carried some stuff round with 

you a very long time and mulled over it, and scraped 

together everything about it that might be useful — then 

it works, then something may come of it. You get an 

idea, it sticks in your head, or in your feelings; it is like 

a lump of clay in your hands, you try to work every- 

thing into it that you see, you think and dream of nothing 

but this one thing. That is the way you get it done, 

tlmt is all your genius comes to. Don't let your popularity 

put bees in your bonnet!— I can hear him still, queer 

chap, stickler for the truth, crank about knowledge, 

not spiteful at all, most likely suffered himself from his 

own keen critical insight, the ass! Clever ass, sharp- 

eyed, pessimistic ass— wasn’t he right after all? Thrice 

right, or at least twice and a half, in all he rubbed into 

you about your inconsistency, your lack of independence, 

your suggestible soul? And about your genius, that it 

was only good for getting impressions and carrying them 

a long time, finding subsidia and knowing how to use 

them? Would all this material have been here if the 

age had not had a weakness for Oriental studies before 

you came on the scene? Did you discover Hafiz on your 

own? No, Ha mm er did it for you, gave you a proper 

translation, and when you read it, anno Russia, ^u 

were fascinated by a book which was the intellectual 

vogue of the day. But you can read nothing without 

being affected by it, it gets into your blood and makes 

you want to do the same kind of thing. A new experi- 

ence like Hafiz makes you feel aeative. So you began 

writing poetry in the Persian style and sucking up what- 

ever served your turn in that ravishing new field, for 

the new masque you mean to put on. Independence— 

I’d like to know what it isl Enough that he was an 

original and, being one, did just as other fools have 

done! I was twenty years old then, but I left my hangers- 

on in the lurch and laughed at the “genius” school and 

its caricature of originality. I know why I did. Origin- 

ality! That kind is just crazy, distorted, art minus 

creation, barrenness, vanity, petty dried-up spinsterish- 

ness! I loathe and despise it Wiat I am after is the 

productive, male-female force, conceiving and procreat- 

ing, susceptible in the highest degree. Not for nothing 

do I look like that sturdy brown ancestress. I am the 

Lindheymer in male form, womb and seed, androgynous 

art, quick to receive, yet myself begetting, enriching 

the world with that I have received. So should Germans 

be, I am their image and pattern. World-receiving, 

world-mving, hearts wide open to admire and be fructi- 

fied. Great in understanding and in love, mediating 

spirits — ^for mediation is of the spirit too — so should 

Germans be, and such their destiny. Not this pig-headed 

craving to be a unique nation, this national narcissism 

that wants to make its own stupidity a pattern and 

power over the rest of the world! Unhappy folk! They 

will end in a smash. Do not understand themselves, that 

makes the rest of the world laugh at them, at first; but 

after a while the world hates them for it, and that is 

dangerous. Fate will smite them, for betraying them- 

selves and not wanting to be what in fact they are. She 

will scatter them over the earth like the Jews, and justly. 

For their best always lived in exile among them; and in 

exile only, in dispersion, will they develop all the good 

there is in them for the healing of the nations, and 

become the salt of the earth. . . . Somebody coughing, 

yes, there’s young Phthisicky a-knocking at the door. 

*‘Come along, come in, for heaven’s sake!” 

''Your humble servant, Herr Privy Councillor!” 

“So it’s you, John. Come along, how are you? — out 

of bed betimes to-day!” 

“Yes, indeed. Your Excellence is always early at 

work.” 

“No, no, I mean you. Y"ou are up and out sooner 

than usual.” 

“Oh, I beg pardon, I did not venture to suppose I was 

the subject of remark.” 

“Why not? Your misunderstanding is over-modest, 

seems to me. Is my son’s schoolmate, the good Latinist 

and law student, my faithful and fluent calligrapher, not 

worth mention?” 

“I thank Your Excellence most humbly. But even so, 

I could not expect that the first words of greeting from 

those revered lips should be a reproof. How else can I 

interpret the comment that to-day I reported early? The 

state of my chest and my long coughing fits before I can 

fall asleep sometimes force me to lie a little longer, but I 

thought I was safe in assuming that Your Excellency’s 

humanity — and besides, I see that you preferred CarPs 

services to mine, although I did announce my presence.” 

“Oh, get along with you, man! Stop uselessly darken- 

ing your own morning. First insinuates that I have been 

too harsh in my words, and then is insulted because I 

have been too gentle in my actions. I only dictated some- 

thing to Carl as I lay in bed, because he happened to be 

there. It was only official business. I have something 

much better for you. I meant no wrong by my words, 

I had no thought of saying anything behind your back! 

How could I help respecting your unfortunate weakness 

and making allowance for it? After all, we are all 

Christians. You have shot up so, I have to crane my 

neck as I stand, and then all the sitting over papers, 

among dusty old books — no wonder you wheezel It's 

only a disease of youth, you will outgrow it. When 1 

was twenty I spat blood myself, yet here I am, quite 

sound on my old pins. I like to stand with my hands 

clasped behind my back, chest well thrown out and 

shoulders back, like this. You let your shoulders sag and 

your chest cave in, you give up too easy, I tell you so 

in all Christian charity. You ought to hnd something 

to offset all that dust, man. Whenever you can, shake 

the dust from your feet, get out in the open, under the 

sky, ride, walk — I did that, it was the making of me. 

A man belongs out of doors, with the bare ground under 

his feet so that strength and power can run into him 

from the soil, like sap, and he can raise his eyes to the 

birds skied overhead. Civilization and the realm of the 

spirit are good things, great things, we are the last to 

dispute it. But without contact with the soil, the Antaean 

compensation, if I may so call it, they are plain ruin to a 

man. They put him in a morbid state; he even gets to 

be proud of being morbid, and clings to his ailment as 

though it were something honourable and advantageous. 

For there are advantages, let me tell you, even in illness. 

It sets you free, excuses you, much must be forgiven you 

for Christ's sake. If an ailing man makes pretensions, 

is finicking about his food, drinks too much; if he lacks 

self-discipline, seldom keeps to regular hours; he can 

count on your Christian forbearance not to reproach 

him, though he may worsen his lungs with tobacco smoke 

until the fog of it penetrates the whole house and he 

becomes a nuisance to other people who cannot stand 

it — I mean the smoke does, of course, not you, for I 

 

know that despite it all you are fond of me, I am dear 

to you, and it hurts you to have me complain of you.** 

“Grievously, Your Excellence, most grievously. I 

implore you to believe me. I am shocked to learn that 

the smoke from my pipe has penetrated the cracks despite 

all my precautions. For I well know Your Excellency*s 

aversion ** 

“Aversion. An aversion is a weakness. You turn the 

talk to my weaknesses. But we were talking about 

yours.** 

“Exclusively, Your Excellence. I deny none of them, 

and make no subterfuge to excuse them. I only beg you 

to believe me: if I have not overcome them, it is not that 

I presume upon my weak chest. I have no ground to 

presume upon my chest, I ought to beat upon it — my 

oreast, I mean — instead. Y’our Excellence may smile at 

that, but I say it in all seriousness. My weaknesses, yea, 

my vices, are inexcusable. Yet I yield to them from time 

to time, not because I am ill, but because of the con- 

fusion in my miserable suffering soul. My patron has 

such vast understanding of the human soul — it would 

be presumptuous in me to remind him that sometimes 

a young man will suffer from an emotional crisis that 

upsets the regular conduct of his life. He may go through 

a period when all his opinions and convictions are in a 

transitional stage, due to pressure from a new and com- 

pelling environment — until he no longer knows whether 

he is losing or finding himself.** 

“Well, my child, you have not betrayed much sign 

of such a crisis up till now. But I can make a guess what 

you are driving at. I will be frank with you, my friend. 

I knew nothing of your political flights or your Icarian 

passion of perfectionism. I did not know you were the 

author of that reckless anti-aristocratic broadside against 

the forced labour of the peasantry and in favour of a 

highly radical form of government. If I had, I would not 

have received you into my household, in spite of your 

good education and excellent hand. In fact, I have been 

censured for so doing by men of high position surprised 

at my action. Now, if I understand you — ^and my son 

has dropped hints to the same effect — you are about to 

come out of your fog, give up your revolutionary errors, 

and honestly try, in matters of State and practical govern- 

ment, to turn your mind towards the good and tradi- 

tional way of life. But I think you should be proud to 

ascribe this process of enlightenment to your own stout 

heart and lively understanding, not to any outward 

influences or deliberate pressure. I believe it cannot 

account for your moral qualms and distracted behaviour; 

anything so obviously healing should be accompanied by 

benefit to both body and mind. For the two are so closely 

connected that nothing can affect the one without the 

other, for better or worse. How can you thinlr your 

revolutionary humours and excesses had nothing to do 

with your lack of the Antaean compensation, the healthy 

contact with nature and the soil? To me, your invalidism 

and weak chest were the physical counterpart of the 

morbid notions in your mind. It all goes together. 

Give your body exercise and fresh air, avoid spirits and 

strong tobacco, and you will find your brain dwelling 

on ideas making for order and authority. Above aU, 

get rid of that wretched spirit of opposition. It is con- 

trary to nature to want to reform me world. Cultivate 

your own garden instead, aim at wholesome efficiency 

inside the existing order, and you will see your body, 

too, will gain robustness and become a stout and sturdy 

vessel for the enjoyment of life. There’s my advice, if 

you want to listen to it.” 

“Oh, how could I not. Your Excellence? How could 

I fail to accept with deepest gratitude such wise, experi- 

enced advice? It is borne in upon me that in time mese 

comforting assurances will take actual shape and bear 

fruit. But in the meantime I confess my present con- 

fusion and bewilderment. In the lofty and enlightened 

atmosphere of this house I have been passing laboriously 

through a period of transformation of all my thoughts 

and convictions; and if it has been attended by the pangs 

of parting I might perhaps claim some indulgence. Yet 

claim is not the word — ^for how could I claim aught? I 

can at most humbly express my hope. For such conver- 

sion in a man means resigning himself to the loss of much 

greater hopes — ^unripe and childish perhaps, in painful 

rebellion to his surroundings, yet sustaining and com- 

forting, lifting his soul up to harmony with a higher 

reality than the present. Idealists cherish a fond belief 

in a revolutionary cleansing of the nations, in a purified 

humanity united for freedom and the right; in short, in 

a kingdom of happiness and peace on earth under 

reason’s rule. To give up ail that, to reconcile oneself 

to the bitter if tonic fact that ever and always the blind 

pitiless forces will sway to and fro, alternately over- 

coming each other — that is not easy, it must always set 

up inward conflicts. And when, in the throes of such 

growing pains, a young man does resort for cheer to 

the bottle, or seeks to veil his troubled thoughts in the 

comforting haze from his pipe, may he not count on 

mild judgment from those, no matter how highly placed 

or powerful, who can sympathise with his struggles?” 

“Come, come, I call that rhetoric! You should have 

been a lawyer, so well you know the arts of special plead- 

ing. Maybe you will still become one. Perhaps not only 

a lawyer, an orator, but a poet, you have the art of 

making your pains interesting to others. No, not a poet; 

political fervour does not become them, politicians and 

patriots make poor poets, freedom is not a poetic theme. 

Your gift of words might well make you a writer and 

popular speaker. But let me tell you, you do ill to use 

it to put me in a bad light. As though contact with me 

had robbed you of belief in humanity and made you 

cynically hopeless of the future! Do I not wish you 

well? Can you blame me for thinking more of your 

personal welfare than humanity’s? Does that make me 

a Timon? Do not misunderstand me. I consider it per- 

fectly possibly, even probable, that our nineteenth cen- 

tury will not be merely a continuation of the eighteenth. 

It may open towards a new era, when we may rejoice at 

the sight of humanity pressing onward to new heights. 

Though actually things look as though an average level 

of culture would prevail, a mediocre culture, one of 

whose features will be that many people who ought not 

to, will concern themselves with problems of govern- 

ment. At the lowest level we shall have the young folk, 

deluded with the idea that they must have their say in 

CHAPTER SEVEN ^6i 

affairs of State; at the highest, an attitude which yields 

more than is proper, out of weakness or exaggerated 

liberalism. I am instructed in the weaknesses and dangers 

of a liberalism that so releases individual demands and 

desires that in the end you are at a loss to know which 

should be granted first. You will always find that too 

much kindness and moral sensibility from above will not 

do in the long run, when a mixed and often mischievous 

society has to be kept within the bounds of law and 

order. The law in all its severity must be enforced. That 

is essential. We have even begun to take a lax view of 

the responsibility of criminals. Medical testimony and 

expert opinion often contrive to help the wrongdoer 

escape just punishment. It takes a strong character to 

remain firm in face of general laxity. I give due credit 

for his strength of purpose to a young medical officer 

named Striegelmann, lately commended to me. A short 

time ago we had a case of a woman who killed her new- 

born child, and the court questioned her responsibility 

for the deed. Striegelmann gave his opinion that she was 

indeed fully responsible.” 

*'How I envy Dr. Striegelmann Your Excellency’s 

commendation! I shall dream of him, I feel sure, draw 

encouragement from his strength of purpose, intoxicate 

myself with the thought of it. Yes, intoxicate! Ah, I 

have not said all when I confessed to my benefactor the 

difficulties of my own conversion. I am impelled to make 

a clean breast, as to a father or a confessor. My change 

of heart, my new relation to law and order and tradition 

involved many pangs at parting from my immature and 

futile dreams. But there was something else — penible 

it is to utter it. There was a new, a dizzying, breath- 

taking ambition — and as before, so now, it drives me to 

my bottle and my pipe, to drown its voice, or, again, 

with their help to plunge deeper into the glowing depths 

of my new visions.” 

ambition? And what kind?” 

“It springs from the thought of the great advantages 

a convinced acknowledgment of authority and law have 

over the spirit of revolution. Revolution is martyrdom. 

Whereas acquiescence in authority means we are willing 

to serve power and to receive our share o£ its benefits. 

These are the new heart-swelling dreams which, in this 

process of change and growth, have driven the old ones 

out. My acceptance of authority carries with it my 

service; this easily makes clear to Your Excellence that 

I am eager to put theory into practice. The unexpected 

boon of this private talk emboldens me to make my 

request.” 

“Which is ?” 

“Surely I need not protest how much I prize my 

present employment, due to a school friendsnip with 

your honoured son. I appreciate to the full the advan- 

tages I have for two years enjoyed in a household so 

highly esteemed by me and all the world. On the other 

hand it would be absurd to imagine myself indispensable. 

I am one among many employed by Your Exceuence for 

subsidiary tasks: the Kammerrat himself, Dr. Riemer, 

the librarian Krauter, and your valet Carl. Again, I am 

well aware that I have given Your Excellence cause for 

complaint of late on account of these distractions of 

mine, and my chest trouble — all together I do not feel 

Your Excellence particularly values my services. Perhaps 

my exaggerated neight, my spectacles and pock-marks 

come into it too,” 

“Come, come, as far as that goes ” 

“My idea, my ardent wish is to exchange Your 

Excellence’s service for that of the State; more specifi- 

cally, a department affording favourable opportunity to 

apply my new and chastened convictions. There is a 

certain Captain Verlohren, a patron of my poor but 

worthy parents, living in Dresden and with personal 

contacts with several of the heads of the Prussian Censor- 

ship. If I might humbly beg Your Excellence to put in 

a word for me with Captain Verlohren, indicating my 

change of views, he might receive me for a time and in 

his turn recommend me to the proper authorities. In 

that way 1 might gratify my urgent wish to make my 

way up the ladder of the Censorship. And my gratitude 

to Your Excellence, so great already, would indeed 

become boundless.” 

“Well, John, that can certainly be done; I have no 

CHAPTER SEVEN 263 

objection to writing the letter to Dresden, and I should 

rejoice to help persuade the authorities in charge of the 

preservation of law and order to decide favourably on 

your case despite your former offences. I cannot say I 

am quite pleased with what you say of the ambitions 

connected with your change of heart. However, I am 

used to being not quite pleased, in a number of ways, 

about you, and you may well be glad of the fact, since 

it makes me readier to help you onward. I will write — 

let me see how to put it: shall we say I shall be glad to 

see time and space granted an able person to acknow- 

ledge his errors, avoid them, and redeem them by honest 

effort; and that I only hope this benevolent enterprise 

may succeed and lend conviction and courage for similar 

ones in future. Will that do?” 

“Splendidly, Your Excellence! I am utterly and 

completely ” 

“And do you think we might now for the present 

leave your affairs and come on to mine?” 

“Oh, Your Excellence, it is quite unpardonable ” 

“I have been standing here turning the pages of the 

Divan, they have increased by a few good things of late. 

I have put them in order and filled them out here and 

there, but there was enough already to divide into books, 

as you see: Book of Parables, Book of Zuleika, Book of 

the Cup-bearer — ^well, now, I am supposed to give some 

of them to put into a Ladies' Album. But I don't want 

to. I do not like to break the jewels from the chaplet 

as it rounds out, to display them singly between my 

fingers. I doubt if the single piece will show to advantage, 

it is the whole that counts, not the parts. I see it as a 

revolving dome, a kind of planetarium; besides, I hesitate 

to put any of these fabrications before an astonished 

public without the notes, the commentary I am writing 

to instruct the reader in the traditions and linguistic 

practices of the Orient from a historical point of view, 

by way of preparing them for my offering. On the other 

hand, one does not like to be mock-modest, and one 

does like to respond to the public demand by coming out 

with one's own little novelties and personal experiences 

s 

turned into light verse. What do you say — what shall 

I put into the Ladies’ Album?” 

“Perhaps this, Your Excellence: 'Tell It Only to the 

Wise Ones’ — it is so pregnant.” 

“No, not that one. I could not bear to. It was 

prompted by a singular inspiration, and is caviar to the 

general. It is all right in the book, but it is nothing for 

the Ladies’ Album. I agree with Hafiz, who was con- 

vinced that you please only by singing what people 

like to hear and can understand; now and then you may 

venture to slip in something a bit more diflBcuit. Not 

even art can get on without diplomacy. And this album 

is for ladies. 'With Woman Deal Forbearingly’ — that 

might do, if not for the line about the crooked rib: 'If 

you would bend her she breaks, Leave her alone she 

grows the crookeder' — that is offensive, it can only pass 

in a book with other things. 'May from this my writmg- 

reed Only charming things proceed’ — that’s the sort. 

The lighter, simpler, gayer ones; for instance: 'Young 

Adam was a lump of clay,’ or this about the frightened 

little drop that was vouchsafed hardness and permanence 

that it might become a splendid pearl in the Emperor’s 

crown. Or this that I wrote last year: 'In Paraaise by 

full moonlight,’ about God’s two loveliest thoughts. 

What do you say?” 

“Very good, Your Excellence. Perhaps also: ‘Never, 

never would I lose thee’ — with the fine lines: 'Thou 

my simple youth adorning With thy passion’s mighty 

power.’ ” 

"H’m, no, that is the feminine voice. I imagine the 

ladies prefer to hear the man’s and poet’s. For instance, 

the one just before it: 'If she find a heap of ashes She 

will say, he burned for me.’ ” 

“Very good. I confess I should have liked to choose 

just one — but I must content myself xvith cheerful 

acquiescence. Yet at least let me put in a warning about 

‘The Sun, the Helios of the Greeks’ — the rhyme you 

use smacks of dialect, the lines are in need of revision.” 

“Oh, let it standi The bear must growl as his forbears 

did. Well, we shall see. But come now, let us sit down, 

I will dictate from my Life.” 

**At your service. Your Excellence.” 

”My dear fellow, do stand up again! You are sitting 

on your coat-tails. If you do that for an hour they will 

look dreadful — wrinkled and crushed, and all in my 

service. Let them hang down from your chair, I beseech 

you.” 

“Thank you very much for your concern.” 

“Now we can begin — or rather go on, beginning is 

harder. At this time my position vis 4 -vis the upper 

classes was most favourable. Although in Werther the 

unpleasantnesses attending on contact between two 

different spheres. . . 

Ugh! Fm glad he s gone; good that breakfast came to 

interrupt us. Can’t abide the chap, God forgive me! He 

could not take up a position that would not go against 

my grain I I like the new one even worse than the old. 

If it had not been easy going to-day, with Hutten’s letter 

to Pirkheimer that I had among my papers, and about 

the goodwill of the aristocracy of that time, and the 

state of things in Frankfurt, I could not have stood him. 

He left a bad taste in my mind, let me have another 

good gulp of this liquid sunshine here with my bird’s 

wing. Way did I promise him that letter to Dresden? 

Vexes me that I did. The idea of drafting it tempted 

me, of course — danger in this love of expression and 

the well-turned phrase; makes us forget that words imply 

action, it is like a play, you make up opinions for a 

character who might or might not have them Did I 

have to help him further his nauseating ambitions? Now 

he will most likely turn into a zealot for law and order, 

a perfect Torquemada of legality. He will hound down 

the youth who are having the same dreams of freedom he 

once had. Had to save my face and praise him for 

his conversion; but the whole thing is a confounded 

nuisance. Why am I against the sweet freedom of the 

press? Because it only makes for mediocrity. Legal 

restrictions are good, an opposition without them goes 

stale. Limitations make it use its wits, a big advantage. 

A man entirely in the right need not mince his words: 

but a party is never entirely in the right, else it would 

not be a party. It has to use the indirect method, the 

French are models and marvels at that, whereas the 

Germans think their hearts are not in the right place 

unless they express their opinions straight from the 

shoulder. You don*t get far that way, in indirection! 

Oh, yes, culture! But all I mean is, necessity is the 

mother of invention, and this fellow John is a phthisicky 

fool. Government or opposition — six of one and half 

a dozen of the other — he actually thinks this silly shuffle 

of his is a soul-stirring event. 

That was a disgusting talk, penible, I feel it more and 

more now it is over. Like a harpy, fouling my meal with 

his filth. What does he think I am? What does he think 

I think? Does he think he now thinks as I do? Ass, ass! 

But why do I work myself up over him like this? Can 

it be my annoyance, or what amounts to actual suflEering, 

is the same kind as the soul-searching misgivings I really 

only have, not for such as him, but for my work, 

including every shade of doubt and fear and anxiety — 

because my work is my objective conscience! The 

pleasure of activity, that’s it! The fine, the great deed, 

that’s the thing. (What does he think of me?) Faust 

must be brought into active life, into public life, he 

must serve mankind. His striving, which shall bring 

him redemption, must take shape in a large political 

sense; the other, the great Phthisicky, he saw it and said 

it, and was not telling me anything new. Easy for him 

to say it, though, the word ‘’politics” did not set his 

teeth on edge like sour apples, the way it does mine. 

But why have I got Mephistopheles? I can use him 

to make up to myself for having to have the spirits of 

fame appear to Faust and praise the great deed. “Oh, 

fie on you for yearning after fame!” Notes in the desk, 

let's see. “By no means, this terrestrial sphere Gives 

ample scope for deeds of daring, Amazing things are 

e’en preparing, I feel new powers for bold employ. . . 

Gooa. “Bold employ” is capital — ^if it did not, un- 

fortunately, refer to something unpleasant But I must 

and will show that this tempestuous, disillusioned soul 

has to turn from metaphysical speculation to practical 

idealism if he is to fathom the human spirit as he 

saunters irresponsibly through the world of experience 

at his diabolic mentor's side. What was he, and what 

was I, when he lurked in his lair and tried to storm the 

heavens by dint of philosophising? Then had the poor 

E athetic affair with the little grisette? The song, and its 

ero — they had both to outgrow their boyish limitations 

and talented trifling, and become objective, actively 

human and mature. From the scholar's vault, the gallery 

of glooms at the Emperor’s court . . . hating all bounds, 

yearning beyond the height of the possible, here too the 

eternal seeker must play his constant role. But how 

reconcile his maturity and worldly wisdom with the 

rebelliousness of former days? Political idealism, 

panaceas for universal betterment — but he remains a 

starveling, hungering and thirsting after, the unattain- 

able. Hungering and thirsting — good, let me put that 

down. I’ll use it somewhere. That is realism, that is 

aristocratic, truly German to censure German ways with 

German words. . . . Make a bargain with authority, then 

so act as to establish a better, nobler, higher order of 

things on earth. Of course he fails to inspire Kaiser and 

court, they almost die of ennui, the Devil has to come in 

and save the situation with brag and bounce. The 

political enthusiast is reduced to the rank of maitre de 

plaisir, court engineer and contriver of fireworks. The 

carnival will be great sport. I can make a fine procession 

of masks, mythological figures and witty tomfooleries — 

sort of thing to give for Serenissimus’ birthday or an 

Imperial visit, only it would cost too much. Should end 

on a note of bitter irony. But at first he must be in 

earnest, must want to govern for the good of the people 

— must find the right key for the expression of his faith, 

find it, of course, in my own breast. Where have I got 

it? Here: ‘‘The human hearing's very keen. And 

splendid deeds can follow one clear word. Only too sore 

man feels his human need. And gladly counsel he will 

heed.” I like that. God Himself, the Positive Principle, 

the creative Goodness, might answer the Devil in those 

very words, and I agree, I side with the positive. Never 

had the misfortune to be in the opposition. Not my 

view, either, that Mephisto should talk in the Palatinate. 

Faust will not let him cross the threshold of the audience- 

chamber. Refuses to let magic or hocus-pocus in word 

or deed appear in the Imperial presence. The black 

art is at last lo be cleated from his path, here as in the 

Helena scenes. She too is only allowed by Persephone 

to revisit the earth on condition that all shall come about 

naturally and humanly, and her wooer win her love by 

the power of his passion alone. Fits wonderfully. I 

know of somebody who would be awake to the necessity, 

if he were only not asleep, alas! . . . And another con- 

dition there is too, everything depends on it, the 

absolute, all-important technique, me only hope of 

giving new life to the outworn theme of age and youth. 

I mean the light touch, simplicity, playfulness. Faery 

is the only wear. If I just think “my little jokes,'' then 

I can finish it. And what could even you, my friend, 

have against witty light-mindedness and the comic 

element? You alwa}s liked to talk about “unpoetic 

seriousness " And your educational essays, with the 

authority of your philosopher, praised almost pedanti- 

cally the scsthetic value of playfulness. Light though it 

be, not lightly is it done. And where you take lightness 

seriously, you may also take the serious lightly. 

There, or nowhere, is the place for my work. The 

classical Walpiirgis Night ... ay, my thoughts slip easily 

away from the political, I am not loth to forget it, I feel 

at bottom I should be better off if I decided to leave it 

out — ^just as I felt when I was talking with young Phthi- 

sicky and getting worked up about it, if only because it 

is a pity about the verses already written. The classical 

Walpurgis Night — to return to the happiest and most 

heartening thing I can think of — ah, what a grand game, 

how far beyond any court masquerade that shall be! 

A comedy, fraught with ideas, life-mysteries, witty, fan- 

tastic, Ovidian interpretations of man's origins — no 

solemnity, graceful, light-footed style, Menippian satire 

— is there a Lucian in the house? Yes, in the next room, 

I know exactly where, a subsidium. 1 will read him 

again. Moves my very entrails to think how the 

homunculus came to me, quite unexpected, in a kind of 

dream-inspiration — and I got him right — who would 

have thought he could be brought together with her, 

the loveliest, in the frame of life’s vast mystery; made 

the playfully scientific, Neptunian-Thaletic basis and 

motivation for the appearance of the highest type of 

human beauty? “The final product of ever advancing 

nature is the human being.” Yes, Winckelmann knew 

something about beauty and the humanism of the senses. 

He would have rejoiced in the audacity of including the 

biological prehistory of the beautiful in its manifestation. 

Would have liked the idea that the power of love helps 

make an entelechy of the monad, beginning as a little 

clot of organic mud at the bottom of the ocean, running, 

through uncounted time, the gamut of life’s lovely meta- 

morphoses, finally attaining its highest and finest form. 

The greatest intellectual feat in drama is the motivation. 

You did not care for it, my friend, you considered it 

beneath you, made bold to contemn it. But you see 

there is a kind of motivation daring enough to escape the 

reproach of pettiness. Has ever the entrance of a char- 

acter been prepared like this? Of course, it represents 

beauty itself, so that had to be special preparation. And 

it goes without saying it must all be suggested and 

implied, not expressed. All depends on the use of mock 

mythology and travesty. Anything like abstruse natural 

philosophy would jar on the requisite lightness of form. 

So in the Helena scenes a stately or severe classical 

delivery would be a satirical contradiction to the 

intrigues and illusions of the plot. Parody — I love to 

dwell on it. Much to think on, much to muse on in the 

slender strand of living — and of all the matter for musing 

there is in art, I find this the most strangely gay, the 

tenderest. To destroy without hatred, to abandon with 

a smile . . . imitation, yet a jesting mockery. To repro- 

duce the admired, the beloved, old and sacred pattern, 

on a plane and with a content that sets the stamp of 

parody — a product like the late, loose, ironic forms of 

post-Euxipidean tragedy. . . . Strange existence, solitary, 

unfriended, uncomprehended; coolly taking on myself 

in the heart of an uncultured folk to embrace all the 

culture of the world, from the age of faith to the 

conscious decline! 

270 LOTTE IN WEIMAR 

Winckelmann . , . 'Trecisely speaking, one may say 

there is but one single moment in which the beautiful 

human being is beautiful/' Extraordinary sentence. We 

capture in the metaphysical that instant in the life of the 

beautiful when, much admired and censured much, it 

appears in all its melancholy perfection. The eternity 

ot the moment, as our departed friend painfully 

immortalised it in a phrase. Dear and all too clear- 

sighted enthusiast and lover, with your intellectual 

absorption in the senses! Do I guess your secret, the 

moving spirit behind all your knowledge? The worship 

to-day without its votaries that bound you to Hellas? 

For your apergu only applies to masculine adolescence, 

to that exquisite moment in the life of the youth, cap- 

tured only in marble. Lucky for you, when we say 

“man," we mostly mean male; you could conceive your 

beauty as masculine as you liked. Whereas for me it 

came in youthful-feminine guise . . . yet perhaps not 

quite — ^for I can understand your device, and recall in 

all candour and enjoyment that comely blond waiter 

last summer on the Gaisberg, Boisser^e was there that 

time too, with his Catholic discretion. Sing thou only 

to the others, to the cup-bearer be silent. . . . 

In the whole moral and sensual world the thing 

whereon my whole life long I have most dwelt with 

horror and desire is seduction — inflicted or borne, active 

or passive, sweet and terrible, like a command laid on 

us by a god; the sin we sinlessly commit, guilty as tool 

and victim both; for to withstand it does not mean we 

cease to be seduced. It is the test no one withstands, it 

is so sweet, even to endure it spells defeat. It pleases the 

gods to send us sweet temptation, to make us suffer it, 

as its instruments, as patterns of all temptation and 

guilt, for the one is already the other. Never heard of 

a crime I could not have committed. Not committing 

it, you escape the earthly judge but not the heavenly. 

For in your heart you have committed it. Seduction by 

one’s own sex — that might be a revenge, a mocking 

retribution for seduction practised by oneself — ^Nar- 

cissus, for ever deluded by his own image. Revenge 

for ever bound up with seduction, trial not overcome 

by victory — that is the will o£ Brahma. Hence my horror 

and my desire, thinking on it. Hence the creative awe 

as I think of the poem dreamed and planned since early 

days, always and still to be put oft, the poem of the 

Brahman’s wife, the Pariah-goddess. There in all the 

accents of horror I mean to proclaim and celebrate 

seduction. Postponed it, kept it buried in my breast to 

dwell and grow, that proves to me its worth. Will not 

put it from me, nurse it to ripeness and beyond, bear 

it within me through all the ages of my life; some day 

the seed so young conceived will bear a late-born child, 

great with the weight of mysteries it holds, tempered, 

condensed, refined, like a Damascus blade forged from 

the finest steel — so I imagine its final form. 

Know right well the source, so many years ago, the 

same that brought me The God and the Bayadere : the 

German translation of The Journey to East India and 

China — a musty volume, yet stimulating, must be 

mouldering somewhere among my traps. Hardly remem- 

ber what itself was like, only how my mind seized on 

and shaped it for my own ends. A picture of women, 

holy, noble, pure, walking down to the river daily for 

fresh water, needing nor jar nor ewer for the task, for 

in their pious hands the water rounds into a splendid 

crystal ball. How I love this crystal ball, carried by the 

E ure wife of the pure Brahman in daily joyful ritual to 

er home: clear concrete symbol of untroubled clarity, 

untouched innocence, and its simple power. In the poet's 

sinless hand Water shapes a ball — ^yes, I am bent upon 

it, my crystal ball shall be this poem of seduction: the 

poet, much seduced, the tempting-greatly-tempted, he 

has the power and the gift, trie pure hand that shall 

shape the crystal ball. But not so the woman. The 

river mirrored for her the image of the divine youth, 

she lost herself in gazing, the unique divine apparition 

seized upon her soul and shook it. Then the water 

denied her, would not form the ball. She stumbles home- 

ward, her high lord sees her guilt and cries out for 

revenge. Drags the stricken guilty innocent to the 

sacrificial mound, strikes off her head. But the son 

threatens the avenging father to follow his mother to 

death, as widows do their husbands. It shall not be! 

Lo, truly the blood has not dried on the sword, it still 

flows fresh. Quick, join again head to body, say the 

prayer, bless the union with the sword, she will arise. So 

said, so done. Alas, alas! For on tliat mound of sacrifice 

two bodies are confused, the mother’s noble form and 

the corpse of a condemned woman of the pariah caste. 

In his haste the son placed his mother's head on the 

outcast’s body and healed it with the sword of judgment. 

A giant goddess arises, the goddess of the impure. — Make 

a poem of this, round and compress it to a crystal ball 

of words, pellucid, resilient. What more pregnant task? 

She became a goddess, but among gods, wdld her ^haviour, 

wise her willing. Before the eyes of the pure w^oman 

the vision blissful of the youth will hover, heavenly 

tender; but sinking down into her impure heart it 

kindles lust and madness and despair. Ever endures 

temptation. Ever will it be repeated, the divine dis- 

tracting vision, brush her garment as it passes, ever rising, 

ever sinking, ever brightening, ever fading — so hath 

Brahma willed. She stands before Brahma, the terrible 

goddess; warns him gently, rages at him, from her racked 

and heavy-laden, sore-bewildered heart-— and in the 

mercy of the Highest all suffering creatures share. 

I think Brahma fears the woman, for I fear her, fear 

her as my own conscience when she stands before me, 

wishing wisely, doing wildly — just so I dread the poem, 

put it off through the decades, knowing some day I must 

write it. — I ought to tinker at the birthday carmen, and 

put some more of the Italian Journey together. But this 

good aloneness, at my desk, the good warmth of the 

Madeira in my bones — they tempt me to more secret, 

curious tasks. In the poet’s sinless hand — 

"Who is it?” 

"A right good day to you, Father,” 

"Oh, it’s you, August, come on in.” 

"Am I disturbing? I hope not, you are putting away 

your papers so fast.” 

"Oh, my child — ^what is disturbing? Everything dis- 

turbs; the question is whether the disturbance is welcome 

or not.” 

'‘Yes, and that is just the question now. I cannot 

answer it, it must be addressed to the message I bring, 

not to me. Without it I should not have broken in on 

you at this hour.” 

“Glad to see you, but what is it?” 

“Since I am here, let me first ask if you have had a 

good night.” 

“Thank you, I feel refreshed, so far as that goes.” 

“Enjoyed your breakfast?” 

“Heartily. You question me like Rehbein.” 

“But I ask for the world. May I ask, too, what you 

were doing just now? Something interesting? The 

Life?” 

“Not precisely. The life it always is. But what is it 

you have brought? Must I drag it out of you?” 

“There is a visitor, Father. Somebody has come, from 

away, from out of the past, and is stopping at the 

Elephant. The town is on the qui vive about it. I heard 

the news before the letter came. An old acquaintance.” 

“An acquaintance? Old, eh? Don’t make such a 

pother over it.” 

“Heie is the note.” 

“ ‘Weimar, the 22nd — look once more upon a face 

— become so well known — nee Buff.* H’m. Curious. I 

call that a curious thing to happen. Don’t you? But wait 

a bit: I’ve something to show you too, to make you open 

your eyes and congratulate me. Look here! . . . Well, 

how do you like it?” 

“Marvellous!” 

“Makes you open your eyes, doesn’t it? Worth star- 

ing at, I tell you. Feast for the eyes. Present from Frank- 

furt for my collection. Some other minerals came too, 

from Westerwald and the Rhine. But this is much the 

finest. What should you say it is?” 

“A crystal,” 

“I should say so! A hyalite, a hyaline quartz, wonder- 

ful specimen both for size and purity. Ever seen such a 

piece before? I cannot look at it and think about it 

enough. What light, what transparency, what perfec- 

tion! It is a work of art, or rather a work of nature, a 

revelation of the cosmos, of immaterial space, that pro- 

jects its eternal geometry upon it and gives it dimensions. 

Nothing but shining facets and exact angles through and 

through, I call that perfect structurality. Just one single 

and entirely determining form and structure throughout, 

from wdthin outwards, continuously reproduced, deter- 

mining its axes, its crystallographic system. That is what 

gives the transparency, the affinity of such molecular 

bodies for light and the transmission of light. Want to 

know what I think? I think the gigantic and massive 

geometry of planes and angles in the Egyptian Pyramids 

had this same hidden meaning: their relation to light, 

to the sun. They are sun-monuments, giant crystals, 

mammoth imitations by man of cosmic immaterial 

concepts.” 

“That is vastly interesting, Father.” 

‘‘I should say! Has to do with duration too, time and 

death and eternity, for we observe that mere duration is 

only apparent triumph over death and time, mere dead 

being, with no growth since the beginning; because in it 

death ensues upon procreation. These crystalline pyra- 

mids last on through time and outlive millennia, but 

have no life or meaning — dead eternity, with no life- 

history. What happens to a thing, its biography, is what 

matters; and" the biography of anything so early com- 

pleted is poor and brier indeed. You see, such a sal 

(a salt, as the alchemists called all kinds of crystals, 

including snow-crystals, though our specimen is not a 

proper salt but a silicate), such a sal has just one single 

moment of growth and development, when the crystal 

lamella is thrown down by the mother-liquor and makes 

the point of departure for other lamellae, producing the 

geometric shape accordingly, faster or slower, to a larger 

or smaller size, that does not matter, for the smallest is 

as perfect as the largest and its biography was finished 

when the lamella was born. It just lasts on into time, 

like the Pyramids, even a million years; but time is out- 

side it, not inside, and that means it grows no older — 

not such a bad thing, if it were anything but mere lifeless 

persistence. The reason it has no time-life is that there 

is no breaking down to correspond with the building up. 

no disintegration to match the integration. True, the 

very tiniest crystals are not yet geometric, they do not 

have planes and surfaces, they are roundish and rather 

like organic nuclei. But the resemblance is only 

apparent, for the crystal is entirely structure from the 

very first, and as such is light, transparent, something 

to look at. The hitch is, it is death, or leads to death — 

in the case of crystals death follows immediately upon 

birth. Never death and eternal youth, as it would be 

were there an even balance between form and loss of 

form, between building up and breaking down. No, the 

scale does not balance; from the very beginning of life 

structure holds first place, in the organic world as welk 

and so we too crystallise and endure only in time, like 

the Pyramids. Empty duration, continuance in outer 

time, with no inner time, no biography. Animals are 

like that too, once they are full grown and structurally 

mature. Alimentation and reproduction go on mechani- 

cally and always the same, like crystalline accretion — 

all the rest of the time they live they are standing at the 

goal. Animals die early too — probably out of boredom. 

Can't stand completion and perfection and being at the 

goal. Everything, my dear boy, is tiresome and monoto- 

nous that has its being in time, instead of having time 

within itself and making its own time; not making 

straight ahead towards a goal but moving in its own 

circle, always at the end, yet always at the beginning. 

That would be the true kind of being, working in and 

on oneself, so that being and becoming, working and 

work, past and present were one and the same thing, 

and produced a permanence that would be endless pro- 

gress, growth, and perfectionment. And so on thence- 

forth. Well, take all this as comment on the clear little 

text you are looking at, and forgive me for preaching. — 

How goes the haymaking in the big garden?^' 

‘'It is done, Father. But I am at cross purposes with 

the farmer, he does not want to pay. He says the mowing 

and carting away balance the account, or actually leave 

something still owing. I will not let the fellow get away 

with it so easily, be sure of that. The second crop is 

worth money, and I will get it if I have to take him to 

court.*' 

'‘Good, good, you are in the right of it, one needs to 

watch out, A corsaire, corsaire et demi. Have you written 

to Frankfurt about the tax money?" 

“Not actually written. Father. My head is full of 

drafts, but I still hesitate to put my hand to it. That 

must be no milk-and-water letter, to refute their absurd 

claim that we are robbing the citizens of Frankfurt! It 

must be a crushing combination of dignity and irony, 

and force them to come to their senses. That takes some 

thinking out." 

“You are right, I would postpone it too. You have 

to wait for the propitious moment. I have hopes of 

getting the remission. If I could only wr^te myself, 

directly — but I must not appear." 

“Certainly not. In all such matters you must be pro- 

tected. That is a special need — and I was born to fill the 

gap. — What does the Frau Councillor say?" 

“How are things going at court?" 

“Oh, they are breaking their heads over the Prince's 

first redoute, we are to practise the quadrille again this 

afternoon. Nothing has been settled about the costumes 

to appear for the first time in the polonaise. We do not 

even know whether the polonaise is to be a go-as-you- 

please affair, or whether everybody is to conform to a 

single idea. At the moment people's wishes are very 

individual, probably because of what they can get hold 

of for a costume. The Prince declares he is going to be 

a noble savage; Staff wants to be a Turk, Marschall a 

French peasant, Stein a Savoyard, Madame Schumann 

insists on a classical costume and Frau Registrar Rents- 

chin on being a rustic maiden with a rake." 

“Hark ye, that is du dernier ridicule, A rustic maiden 

— Frau Rentschin ought to know what becomes her 

years. We'll have to stop her — a Roman matron is the 

most we can allow. If the Prince has decided to be a 

savage, that makes his intentions dear: he will amuse 

himself with the ancient gardener-girl and there will be 

a scandal. Seriously, August, I have a good mind to take 

things in hand myself, at least the polonaise. I am not 

for a lively go-as-you-please at all, there should be a 

central idea and a free kind of order and meaning. Just 

as in my Persian poetry, here too, and everywhere: there 

must be something as a guide, what w^e Germans call the 

leading spirit, if general satisfaction is to result. I have 

a masque in mind, and I’d be glad to play the director 

and herald. It needs some brief introduction, some music 

as well, mandolins, guitars, and theorbos. Yes, gardener- 

girls, if you like — pretty Florentine ones, in arbours, 

selling gay artificial flowers. To each girl a bronze- 

skinned gardener, with a great market-basket full of fruit 

— the bowers must run over with the whole year’s harvest, 

bud and blossom, flower and fruit, to feed the eye and 

fancy. Then fishermen and fowlers, with lines and nets; 

they mingle with the maidens and there follows a charm- 

ing game of flight and pursuit, of capture and escape — 

interrupted by a boisterous train of wood-cutters, repre- 

senting the inevitable element of rudeness and coarseness 

ever present in the charm. Then the herald invokes 

certain figures of classical mythology: on the heels of 

the Graces, dispensing loveliness as an odour, follow 

the grave Parc^e, Atropos, Lachesis, and Clotho, with 

spindle, distaff, and shears; close upon the three Furies 

— but mark me, these must not look a wild, repulsive 

crew, more like three comely young females, only with 

something snakelike and malign about them — there must 

lumber in a mountainous thing, a perfect colossus hung 

with carpets and topped by a little tower; in short, an 

elephant, with a slender female perched on its neck, 

driving it with a goad, and on the very tip the goddess 

sublime ” 

'*Yes, but — Father! Where could we get an elephant, 

and how could it get into the ” 

"‘Don’t be a spoil-sport! It would be easy to contrive 

some sort of frame, shaped like an animal, if one w^inted 

to, with trunk and tusks — it should move on wheels. 

The winged goddess on top would repiesent Victory, 

presiding deity of the scene. Beside the elephant must 

walk two stately female forms; the herald must announce 

them as Fear and Hope, laid in chains by Common Sense, 

who denounces them to the audience as bitter foes of 

mankind.” 

‘Is Hope to be an enemy too?'* 

“Yes, is she not, with quite as much justice as Fear? 

Consider how she weakens mankind, deluding them with 

sweet false thoughts, lulling their ears with whispers of 

life without care and good beyond their wildest dreams. 

— As for the Victory, she becomes the target at once of 

Thersites’ slavering spite, till the herald can stand it no 

longer, but must fail upon him with his staff. The 

dwarfish figure writhes and shrieks, rolls into a ball that 

turns before their eyes into an egg, it swells and bursts, 

out creeps a grisly pair, otter and bat, one crawls away on 

all fours, the other flaps up shadowy to the roof ” 

“But my dear, good Father, how ever could we 

represent all that, the exploding egg, the otter and bat?” 

“Dear me, with a little goodwill and inventiveness it 

could be done I But that should not be the end of the 

surprises. Next comes in a splendid car, drawn by four 

horses, driven by a perfect cupid of a boy; on it must sit 

a king, with round moon face under his turban. The 

herald does his courtly office and presents them: Moon- 

face is King Pluto, god of riches; the lovely boy, with 

jewelled spangles in his raven locks, who should he be 

but Poetry, in its quality as lavish giver, enriching the 

feast for Pluto King? Has but to snap his fingers, the 

rogue, and from them fall in glistering strings pearls and 

ouches, combs and crowns and priceless brooches — ^see 

how the base crowd struggle for the things!” 

“All very well for you. Father, with your pearls and 

ouches, of course you are thinking of ‘I scratch my head 

and rub my hands’ ” 

“They could just be trumpery gawds and counters; 

all I want is an allegorical representation of the relation 

between poesy and riches, giving and spending — calls up 

a picture of Venice, art flourishing like a bay tree in the 

rich soil of trade. The turbaned Pluto must say to the 

lovely boy: ‘This is my beloved son, in whom I am well 

pleased.’ ” 

“But, Father! He could not possibly say it like that 

—it would be “ 

“We might even try to contrive little tongues of flame, 

springing up iErom heads here and there, sign of the 

greatest gift in the hand of the charioteer: flames of the 

Spirit, leaping up on one head, dying down on another, 

leaping, blazing, seldom lasting, on most heads too soon 

consumed: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.*’ 

“But, Father, that would never do, never in the living 

world! Quite aside from the practical difficulties. It 

w^ould upset the court, offend the pious — it w^ould be 

blasphemy.” 

“Why call you such graceful, reverent allusion blas- 

phemous? Religious symbolism is a cultural treasure- 

house, wherein we have a perfect right to dip when we 

need use the familiar images to make visible and tangible 

some general aspect of spirit.” 

“But not just the same way as the other symbols, 

Father. You yourself may be capable of taking that view 

of religion, but the average spectator will not be, nor 

the court either, at least not in these times. The town 

follows the court, true, but the court also follows the 

town, and to-day, when religion has come back into its 

own, in society and among the young ” 

“Very well, bastal I will pack up my little puppet- 

play again, and my little spirit-flames, and say to you as 

the Pharisees said to Judas: ‘See thou to that!* And all 

sorts of fine things were to come: a procession of the 

great god Pan, the wild rout, prick-eared fauns and 

shrunk-legged satyrs, friendly dwarfs and nymphs and 

giants from the Harz — ^well, let be, I must see to use 

it in some other place, where I'll not be troubled -with 

your modish scruples. If you have no sense of humour, 

then I'm not your man! What were we talking about?” 

“We were speaking of the letter I brought you, 

Father. We ought to consider it and come to some 

decision. What has Frau Councillor Kestner written?” 

“Oh, yes, the letter. You brought me a billet-doux. 

What does she say? But wait: I wrote something too, 

Just read it first — un momentino, here it is, it is for the 

Divan!* 

“ ‘They say that geese are silly things. The proverb 

is but hollow; For one of them just turned around And 

beckoned me to follow/ Very neat. Father, very nice — 

or not so very nice, as you look at it. At any rate, it is no 

good as an answer to the letter/’ 

"No? I thought as much Then we must think, up 

anotlicr, m prose of course, the usual thing to distin- 

guished piigrans to Weimar: an invitation to dinner.” 

" I hat much at least. — The note is very well written.” 

“Oil, very. How long do you think the poor soul 

worked over it?” 

"People must look to their words wdien they write to 

you.” 

"Chilling thought.” 

"That IS the cultural discipline you exact.” 

"And tvhen I am dead they will say *Ugh!’ and go 

back to grunting as belore.” 

"I very much fear it.” 

"Don’t say ‘fear.’ Don’t grudge them the right to 

follow their natural bent. I do not w'ant to crush them.” 

"Why do you talk about crushing? Or about dying, 

indeed? You will remain to us for many years to come, 

our benevolent tyrant leading us onwards and upwards 

towards the Good and the Beautiful.” 

"Think so? I do not feel so extra well to-day. My 

arm hurts. And I had trouble with Phthisicky, and on 

top of it I dictated a long time, it affects the nervous 

system.” 

"In other wwds, you do not w^ant to go and pay your 

respects to the writer of this letter; and you would rather 

not decide wdiat to do about it.” 

"In other words, in other words. You have a %vay of 

drawing conclusions — not very gentle, you drag them 

out by the roots.” 

"Forgive me, I am only groping in the dark, to find 

out how you feel and what you want.” 

"Well, and so am L And in the dark, one is likely to 

see ghosts. When past and present become the same 

thing — they have always tended to do that, with nm — 

it is not surprising that the present should seem to be 

haunted. Very fine — in a poem. In life, rather terrify- 

ing. — You say the affair is making a stir in the towm?” 

"Quile a considerable one. Naturally enough. Crowds 

gather in front of the inn, they want to see the heroine 

of Werther. The police have their work cut out to keep 

order/' 

“What a silly lot! But, after all, the cultural level m 

Germany must be high if a thing like this can rouse such 

curiosity. — Penible, son. A penible, an execrable busi- 

ness. The past conspires with folly against me, to make 

trouble and create disorder. Why could not the old 

woman have spared me this?" 

“That is more than I can say. You see, Madame 

Kestner is quite within her rights. She is visiting her 

dear relatives, the Ridels." 

“Of course. Of course she is visiting them. She has a 

sweet tooth, she wants to taste a little more fame; little 

she knows how close together fame and notoriety lie. To 

begin with there is this stir amongst the common folk — 

but how Weimar society will love it and feed on it, gape 

and ogle and whisper and sneer! We must do all in our 

power to put a stop to it, we have to think the thing out 

carefully and act with decision. We wdll give a dinner 

for a small company, with her relatives; but otherwise 

keep aloof and give sensation-mongers nothing to feed 

on." 

“When shall the dinner be for. Father?" 

“In a few days. Some time shortly. The proper dis- 

tance, the due proportion. On the one hand we must 

have time to look at the situation and get used to it from 

a distance; on the other, better have it behind us than 

look forward to it too long. — ^Just now the cook and 

housemaid are busy with the washing." 

“It will all be back in the presses by the day after 

to-morrow." 

“Good, then three days from now." 

“Whom shall we have?” 

“Our nearest friends, with a few others — our usual 

circle slightly enlarged. Mother and daughter and their 

two relatives; Meyer and Riemer and their wives, 

Coudray or Rehbein perhaps, Hofkammerrat Kirms and 

Madame Kirms — who else?" 

“Uncle Vulpius?" 

“Certainly not, you are crazy!" 

'‘Aunt Charlotte?’' 

“Charlotte? You mean the Stein? Another absurd 

idea. Two Charlottes are a bit too much. I told you we 

must be circumspect. If she come, there will be a strained 

situation. If she decline, that will make talk too.” 

“Any of our neighbours? What about Herr Stephan 

Schiitze?” 

“The writer? Good, ask him. Engineer Werner, the 

geognost, from Freiburg, is in town, you might ask him, 

then there would be somebody for me to talk to,” 

“That makes sixteen.” 

“Some people may decline.” 

“Oh, no, theyll all be there. What sort of dress?” 

“Formal. The gentlemen full dress with decorations.” 

“As you wish. It is a gathering mostly of intimates, 

but the number will justify some formality. And it is a 

courtesy to the guests from away.” 

“So it seems to me.” 

“And we shall enjoy the opportunity of seeing you 

again with the White Falcon — I had almost said the 

Golden Fleece.” 

“That would have been a quaint slip, much too 

flattering to our infant honours.” 

“But I almost said it — probably because this meeting 

has an air of being a postscript to Egmont, In the 

Wetzlar days you had no Spanish court dress or decora- 

tions to appear to your Clarchen in.” 

“You seem to be in high spirits — they do not make for 

good taste.” 

“And a too fastidious taste may sometimes seem like 

fretfulness.” 

“I imagine both of us have other things to do this 

morning.” 

“Your first one being to write a reply to the note?*' 

“No, you must call. That will be both more and less. 

You will present my compliments and greetings. 1 have 

the honour to beg her presence at dinner.” 

“A great honour to me, to represent* you. I have 

seldom done it on a more pregnant occasion. Except 

perhaps at Wieland's funerat” 

*'l will see you at dinner/*