A History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950 : English Criticism, 1900-1950 [1 ed.] 0300033788, 0300050399, 9780300033786

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Citation preview

A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM I7JO-I9JO IN EIGHT VOLUMES I.

The Later Eighteenth Century

2. The Romantic Age

3. The Age of Transition 4. The Later Nineteenth Century 5. English Criticism, 1900-1950 6. American Criticism, 1900-1950 7. German, Russian, and Eastern European Criticism, 1900-1950

8.

French, Italian, and Spanish Criticism, 1900-1950

OTHER BOOKS BY RENE WELLEK

Immanuel Kant in England The Rise of English Literary History Theory of Literature

(with Austin Warren)

Concepts of Criticism Essays on Czech Literature Confrontations: Studies in the Intellectual and Literary Relations between Germany, England, and the United States during the Nineteenth Century Discriminations: F urther Concepts of Criticism Four Critics: Croce, Valery, Lukacs, Ingarden The Attack on Literature & Other Essays

A HISTORY OF MODERN

Criticism:

1750-1950

/

BY RENE WELLEK

VOLUME 7 German, Russian, and Eastern European Criticism, I900-I950

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

New Haven and London

Copyright© 1991 &y Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, includ­ ing illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted &y Sections 107 and 108 of the U .S. Copyright Law and except &y reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Set in Baskerville types &y Brevis Press, Bethany, Connecticut. Printed in the United States of America &y Vail-Ballou Press, Binghamton, New York.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data (Revised for vol. 7) Wellek, Rene. A history of modern criticism: 1750-1950. Includes bibliographies and indexes. Contents: v. 1. The later eighteenth century. -v. 2. The romantic age. - [etc.] - v. 7. German, Russian, and E astern European criticism, 1900-1950. I.

Criticism-History. I. Modern criticism.

II. Title.

PN 86.W4

82-12918

801'.95'09

ISBN 0-300-03378-8 (v. 5 : alk. paper) ISBN 0-300-05039-9 (v. 7 : alk. paper)

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

IO

9

8

7

6

5 4

3

2

I

To Nonna

CON TEN TS

Preface

XI

Acknowledgments

Xlll

Introduction

xv

PART I. GERMAN CRITICISM, 1900-19 50

1

1. Thomas Mann

4

2. German Symbolism Friedrich Gundolf Ernst Bertram Max Kommerell Hugo von Hofmannsthal Rudolf Kassner Rudolf Borchardt Hermann Broch

43 53 57 62

3· The Journalist-Critics Alfred Kerr and Friedrich Sieburg Kasimir Edschmid and Expressionism

70 70 73

4· Three Thinkers Sigmund Freud Carl Gustav Jung Martin Heidegger

75 75 81 85

16 16 26 29

5· The Scholar-Critics in the Romance Literatures Karl Vossler Ernst Robert Curtius Erich Auerbach Leo Spitzer

92 93 97 11 3 1 34

6. The Scholar-Critics in German Literature Oskar Walzel Josef Nadler Wolfgang Kayser Emil Staiger

154 155 157 15 8 160

vii

CONTENTS

Vlll 7 . The Marxist Critics Alfred Dahlin Walter Benjamin Bertolt Brecht Georg Lukacs PART II. RUSSIAN CRITICISM, 1900-19 50

17 4 i 74 181 20 4 20 9

247

8. A Backward Glance Nikolay Mikhailovsky Konstantin Leontiev Vasily Rozanov Lev Shestov

254 25 4 256 258

9. Futurism

261

25 9

io. The Poets Dmitry Merezhkovsky Andrey Bely Aleksandr Blok Vyacheslav Ivanov Osip Mandelstam

265 265 27 1

i i. The Marxists

298 29 8 300 302 30 5 308

Literary Criticism under Lenin and Stalin Georgy Plekhanov Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Maxim Gorky Leon Trotsky Valerian Pereverzev

27 4 280 29 2

31 3

12. Literary History-Writing

316

13. Russian Formalism Viktor Shklovsky Boris Eikhenbaum

318 327 332

Yury Tynyanov Boris Tomashevsky

339 347

14. D. S. Mirsky

348

15. Mikhail Bakhtin

354

16. Roman Jakobson

37 2

PART III . EASTERN EUR O PEAN CRITICISM, 1900-19 50

377

17 . Poland Roman Ingarden

37 9 37 9

CONTENTS

lX

18. Czechoslovakia Modern Czech Criticism and Literary Scholarship Jan Mukafovsky: The Literary Theory and Aesthetics of the Prague School

41 1

Bibliographies and Notes

4 27

Index of Names

445

Index of Topics and Terms

457

399 399

PRE F A CE

READERS OF THESE VOLUMES will be aware of the fact that chapters and sections are composed in somewhat different styles and methods of ref­ erence. Some are fully documented, every sentence or even fragment of a sentence quoted is supplied with the page numbers of the book or pe­ riodical. But other chapters or sections at times refer in a less specific way to the book or article discussed and commented upon. The explanation for this discrepancy is very simple. In 1 986 I had an accident that im­ mobilized me. Since then I have been bedridden and have been and still am unable to frequent the Yale University library. I have been compelled to rely on the services of secretaries, mainly students connected with Yale. They brought me books and periodicals and took down dictation which they copied and brought back in typescript for my revision. I checked these pages, corrected them if necessary, and saw that they were incor­ porated into the manuscript in proper order. This explanation serves also as an apology for any shortcomings, which are ultimately all my own. I have incurred a large debt to a number of young men and women which I want here to acknowledge with sincere gratitude. Here is the list of those whom I remember. The last two, Ralph Burr, Jr. , and Steven Davis, must be singled out with especially deep feelings of gratitude, as they took care of the final stages of the manuscript. Previously, the late Birgit Baldwin (a gifted student of comparative literature who was killed by a drunken driver in November 1 988) and Thomas Nolden had been my mainstays. Lowry Nelson, Jr. , oversaw the whole project and, with Caroline Murphy of Yale University Press, put the typescript into its final shape for the compositor.

R. W.

New Haven, Connecticut January 199 1

XI

A C KNO W L E D GM E N TS

I usE the following articles of mine, sometimes expanded, cut, and changed. Friedrich Gundolf: "The Literary Criticism of Friedrich Gundolf," Con­ temporary Literature 9 ( 1 968) : 3 94-405 . Also in Criticism: Speculative and Analytical Essays, ed. L. S. Dembo ( 1 968), 1 20-3 i . Max Kommerell : "Max Kommerell as Critic of Literature, " in Teilnahme und Spiegelung: Festschrift fur Horst Rudiger, ed. Beda Allemann and Er­ win Koppe n ( 1 975) , 485-98. Hermann Broch : "The Literary Criticism of Hermann Broch," The New Criterion, 4 Dec. 1 985, pp. 75-8 i . Reprinted in Hermann B roch: Litera­ ture, Philosophy, Politics: The Yale Broch Symposium, 1986, ed . Stephen D . Dowden ( 1 988), 6 1-70. Ernst Robert Curtius: "The Literary Criticism of Ernst Robert Curtius," PTL: A journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature 3 ( 1 978) : 2 5-44. Erich Auerbach : Review of Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, in Kenyon Review 1 6 ( 1 954) : 2 99-307. Also "Auerbach and Vico," Lettere Italiane 3 1 ( 1 979) : 457-69. Leo Spitzer: "Leo Spitzer ( 1 887- 1 960) ," Comparative Literature 1 2 ( 1 960) : 3 1 0-34. Reprinted in my book Discriminations: Further Concepts of Crit­ icism ( 1 970) , 1 87-2 24. Walter Benjamin : "The Early Literary Criticism of Walter Benjamin," Rice University Studies: Studies in German in Memory of Robert L. Kahn 57 ( 1 97 1 ) : 1 2 3-34. Also "Walter Benjamin's Literary Criticism in His Marxist Phase," The Personality of the Critic, ed. Joseph P. Strelka (Yearbook of Comparative Criticism 6 [ 1 973]), 1 68-7 8 . Georg Lukacs : "Georg Lukacs ( 1 885- 1 97 1 ), " i n my book Four Critics: Croce, Valery, Lukacs, Ingarden ( 1 98 1 ) , 37-54. Vyacheslav Ivanov : "The Literary Criticism of Vyacheslav Ivanov," in Vyacheslav Ivanov: Poet, Critic and Philosopher, ed . Robert Louis Jackson and Lowry Nelson, Jr. ( 1 986) , 2 20-3 5 . Xlll

XIV

A CKNOWLEDGMENTS

Russian Formalism : "Russian Formalism," Arcadia: Zeitschrift fur ver­ gleichende Literaturwissenschaft 6 (1971): 175-86. Reprinted in my book The Attack on Literature and Other Essays (1982), 119-34. Also in Russian Modernism: Culture and the Avant-garde, 1900-1930, ed. George Gibian and H. W. Tjalsma (1976), 31-48. Mikhail Bakhtin : "Bakhtin's View of Dostoevsky: ' Polyphony' and 'Car­ nivalesque'," Dostoevsky Studies 1 f1980): 31-39. Roman In garden: "Roman In garden (1893-1970 )," in my Four Critics, 5573. Also "An Answer to Roman Ingarden," in Komparatistik: Festschrift fur Zoran Konstantinovic, ed. Fridrun Rimer and Klaus Zerinschek (1981), 21-26.

Czech Criticism : "Modern Czech Criticism and Literary Scholarship," Harvard Slavic Studies 2 (1954): 343-58. Jan Mukafovsky: The Literary Theory and Aesthetics of the Prague School, Michigan Slavic Contributions, ed . Ladislav Matejka (1969). Reprinted in my Discriminations, 275-303.

IN TRODUCTION

IN CONTEMPLATING European literary criticism, one is struck by the enor­ mous changes that came about in the first half of the twentieth century. I concluded the fourth volume of this History with the contrast between Mallarme and Tolstoy: one as an extreme formalist or, more correctly, an idolator of language, and the other as an extreme moralist concerned with the message of his writing. This contrast is overdrawn. Mallarme and Tol­ stoy are obviously extremes; between them, on the scale ranging from formalism to moralism, there are many critics who present points of view which are somewhere in between, nearer the center. One of the arguments of my introductory reflections, which defended my method of presenting portraits of individual writers, was precisely that at nearly the same time the most diverse and contradictory views were presented by individual critics. The idea that there are clearly indepen­ dent trends in twentieth-century European criticism is an illusion. Still, if we look at the whole of criticism during that span of time, we can discern distinct changes that will allow us to make some generalizations. There is obviously a survival of the older methods and procedures, a persistence easily characterized by a general intellectualism which contrasts with a new irrationalism encroaching on literary criticism, particularly after the great upheavals of the two world wars. One cannot of course ignore the great differences among countries , partly due to their political fortunes and local traditions. One can hardly overrate the impact of nationalism, which for diverse reasons became extremely intense in the years before the Second World War. The strong anti-Romantic reaction against the nineteenth century in France exalted a new classicism which it identified with French nationalism. This nationalism was sometimes combined with a revival of Thomism, a version of Aristotelianism. One is familiar with the nationalistic extremes to which German literary scholarship was driven under the influence of Nazism before and during the Second World War. The methods of the actual style of writing criticism changed considxv

XVI

IN T R OD U C T I ON

erably, succumbing more and more to professionalism. Much of twen­ tieth-century criticism is academic and seems to have lost touch with the wider reading public. Here, too, however, it is difficult to generalize. One needs to investigate the circumstances country by country, paying close attention to the growing dominance of the university and to the disrepute into which journalistic criticism-which often had nothing new to offer­ had fallen, though sometimes, as with, the German critic Alfred Kerr, it made high claims for criticism as an: art form. Such claims have been revived more recently in an attempt to exalt criticism as a form of free creation. Different kinds of irrationalism have flourished in the twentieth cen­ tury, pushing aside all attempts to rationalize the poetic process, except in a few writers in the tradition of Poe and Baudelaire who at least inter­ mittently thought of poetry as a deliberative craft. Irrationalism in the West was largely determined by the philosophy of Bergson, who attacked nineteenth-century positivism and exalted flux, change, and the elan vital, the stream of time and the stream of consciousness. The emphasis is on life-meaning, in literary-critical contexts, largely feelings and actual ex­ perience, with the consequence that sincerity became a great slogan and standard of poetry. In Germany even earlier, Wilhelm Dilthey empha­ sized experience and communicated this critical creed to Ortega y Gasset in Spain . The emphasis on lived experience (experience vecue) is still con­ cerned with the life of the conscious mind . Psychoanalysis of the Freudian type became confined to the struggles of the individual to clarify and purge himself of the obscure complexes of childhood . A different version of Freudian psychoanalysis is the Jungian collective unconscious, which is of much greater interest for a study of literature in that it is connected with the concept of myth. " Myth and poetry" is one of the great themes of twentieth-century criticism . Be­ lief in a collective mythology may easily lead to a version of surrealism and a validation of automatic writing which spell the death of criticism, since writings set down through some sovereign and inexplicable power can hardly be judged and criticized as aesthetic objects. Another major motif is the ideal of an organic aesthetics, derived from Platonism or neo-Platonism and mediated by the German Idealism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This is picked up by Bene­ detto Croce, the most influential aesthetician of the early twentieth cen­ tury, and transmitted from him to various critical schools in Europe and the United States. The overcoming of the dichotomy of form and content is the leading theme, which is also later attempted by Husserlian Phenom­ enology. Ingarden's The Literary Work of Art is an ingenious attempt to sys-

IN T R OD U C T I ON

xvu

tematize Husserl's insights, which in Russian Formalism and the Prague Linguistic Circle brought about new formulations for the totality of aes­ thetic functions, particularly in the writings of the early Roman Jakobson. A new motif arose with Existentialism, from Heidegger directly and more influentially through Sartre, who had read and absorbed Heidegger. This turn toward inner experience is central for those who have been called "Critics of Consciousness" and who use the term cog#o for the center of the human spirit. They insist that their theory is not psychological, though I think that in practice its main proponents either are concerned with psychological phenomena, such as dreaming and imagination (lean­ ing toward a Jungian mysticism), or, as with Poulet, are inclined to indulge in speculations about man's relationship to time and space. This turn to­ ward some deep inner experience of poetry can lead to a kind of silence which nonetheless has to be expressed in language. Blanchot has exposed the paradox of this cult. It is obviously difficult to generalize beyond these main trends in twentieth-century European criticism, trends which are often confined to one country or school of criticism and subject to various influences. For instance, twentieth-century Marxist criticism is as much indebted to Hegel as to the materialism and positivism of Marx. Thus one has Hegelian Marxism in both the early Lukacs and in the differently motivated Bakh­ tin, who is on the surface Marxist but was apparently a deep religious thinker. Moreover, Marxism in Russia, supposedly international, was in practice highly nationalistic. Finally, one should not underestimate the hardy persistence of academic methodology (concern with sources and influences, biography, themes, and history) and of journalistic method­ ology as practiced in newspapers and critical journals, often quite un­ touched by these new trends.

PART I GERMAN CRITICISM r900-1950

(

IN THE PAGES THAT FOLLOW I shall discuss individual critics, concentrat­ ing on their ideas and opinions, and alluding to their biographies only when this seems necessary for an understanding of the changes in their writings. In certain cases the catastrophes of the twentieth century have influenced German literary criticism so heavily that one can hardly neglect the political events that often set the course of history. The Nationalist Socialist purge shortly after i933 not only affected Jewish scholars and writers ; it also persuaded or forced those others who had followed conventional paths to accommodate themselves to the political mood of the times, as they often faced a readership or a student audience raised on National Socialist ideology. One of the few reminiscences of German literary history of the time is Benno von Wiese's Ich erziihle mein Leben. Here one finds a frank ac­ count of how a young professor at Erlangen thought it wise to join the party early in i933, a move which saved his life during the Second World War. It would be interesting to give a full account of the fate of German studies of this time, which in many cases was purely in the service of the Nazi cause. Yet in light of the great upheavals, it is perhaps surpris­ ing to find individual critics who managed to preserve a consistent out­ look, seemingly unaffected, over the course of these years. Austria and Switzerland represent extreme cases. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, a rep­ resentative Austrian figure, was faced with the breakup of the Austro­ Hungarian monarchy only late in his short life. The Swiss were fortunate enough to be able to continue in their ways unaffected by Nazism.

3

l:

T HOM AS M A NN

(1 875-1955)

THOMAS MANN can serve as a representative figure of the interdepen­ dence of literary criticism and political upheaval. He grew up in the na­ tionalistic atmosphere of the Bismarck Reich and after the outbreak of the First World War sided with the German point of view unreservedly, denouncing France and Western civilization while exalting "German­ ness" (Deutschheit) . His Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, based on articles written during the First World War, was published in 1 9 1 8 . After the armistice, Mann was converted to the new regime of parliamentary de­ mocracy and became something of a semi-official spokesman for it. In Munich, Mann gave a speech before an audience of students, with Fried­ rich Ebert and Gerhart Hauptmann-the new German president and the revered dramatist-sitting in the front row. They listened for a good hour to a plea for democracy, sprinkled with quotations from Walt Whitman's Democratic Vistas and Novalis' Die Christenheit oder Europa, two texts written in very different circumstances, decades apart, quite incompatible in vo­ cabulary and ethos (RA, 2 : 1 1 f. ) . Eleven years later Hitler rose t o power, and Mann left Germany t o be­ come the mouthpiece of the emigration, denouncing the Hitler regime in print and on the radio throughout the war. He returned to Europe in 1 950, dissatisfied with American policies and praising Henry Wallace for signing the Stockholm Peace Declaration. He felt himself to be a figure symbolic of German history in those fateful years. In 1 95 2 , after two years in Switzerland in which he demonstratively avoided Germany, he went to Frankfurt and then to Weimar to deliver a speech on Schiller that ended with a fervent plea for German unification. Thomas Mann's activity as a literary critic was in some ways marginal to his work as a novelist. It would be very difficult to isolate his literary criticism from his preoccupation with cultural criticism, his interest in national types and the contrasts between German and French culture. It would likewise be difficult to isolate his criticism from the mass of com­ ments, often critical, that he made about his own work, or from his fie4

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5

tionalized allegory of the case of Germany-Doktor Faustus-or the elaborate explanation of its origins in Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus, with its con­ stant references to literary figures. Possibly one could say that Lotte in Wei­ mar is also literary criticism; it certainly implies a picture of Goethe, whom Mann, in more prosaic tones elsewhere in his many articles on Goethe, placed at the center of his criticism. Lotte's fictive visit to Weimar, set by Mann in 1822, supposed of course a profound knowledge of the late Goethe and his whole entourage-Eckermann, Reimer, and other inter­ locutors. Mann has a definite conception of what criticism is and what its message should be. He speaks of a Nietzschean critical perspective in which the boundary between art and criticism is uncertain, constituting a poetic crit­ icism (AN, 27). He constantly emphasizes the biographical method; the critic should look to the person behind the work, to the life and fate of the writer (RA, I: 264). All criticism, he says elsewhere, should be bio­ graphical: the biographical is the truly human element in criticism (RA, I :738). In other contexts he praises Arthur Eloesser for his writings on the history of German literature, which breathe a spiritual joy of life, the nature or essence of all creative criticism (GW, 10:727). Mann recognizes that critics are rarer than poets (AN, 218), and he is somewhat surprised at the high social standing of criticism in France. He met Edmondjaloux who, even as a critic, Mann tells us, belongs in the first rank of men of letters (GW, 10:707). Though Mann himself calls Nietzsche's criticism of Wagner the "strong­ est critical experience of my days" (RA, I: 126), he seems not to have fol­ lowed contemporary German criticism with any attention. A close friend of his, however, was Ernst Bertram, a member of the George circle, and through him he was introduced and converted to the literary history and criticism of the other members of that circle. Mann praises Friedrich Gun­ dolf in particular very highly. Later he discovered Dmitry Merezhkovsky. He calls him "the great Russian critic" (AG, 192) and admires his book on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky immensely, as well as his book on Gogol, which he calls "moving and exciting" (GW, 11:94). He constantly returns to his antitheses between Tolstoy, the seer of the body, and Dostoevsky, the seer of the spirit. Mann met Merezhkovsky in Paris in 1940 and was somewhat disappointed, as he probably had difficulty communicating in French. Mann reasserted that he was no "petit bourgeois" (RA, I: 536). Still, his contacts with current German criticism are rather scanty. Yet Mann has a great deal to say about many problems of poetics, which he had probably not even read but simply heard about and talked about with his brother and friends. One of his preoccupations is his annoyance

6

G E RMAN

C RI T I C I SM,

t

900-1950

at the prevalent distinction between poet and man of letters. He felt him­ self to be both and resented being put under the rubric of Schriftsteller. He several times alludes to the "infertile critical mania of contrasting Dichter­ tum and Schriftstellertum" (AG, 147), and once he calls these antitheses "in­ sipid" because they seem by implication to lead to mere dead chatter about German poets and un-German, un-national Schriftsteller (RA, 1:216). He knows that Emerson in Representative Men classified Goethe as a man of letters but Shakespeare as a poet. I r;i 1932, Mann himself wrote a long paper on Goethe's career as a man of letters ("Goethes Laufbahn als Schriftsteller," AG, 146-79). Mann felt clearly this issue as touching his own sin of contrasting his own career with that of his brother Heinrich, whom he labeled a "Zivilisationsliterat" (CW, 12: i88). Mann feels that literature has some kind of power independent of a person's will. In the late essay "Versuch iiber Tschekhow" (CW, 9:84369) he speaks of the spirit and self-will of literature which made "Chekhonte," an early pseudonym of the trivial purveyor of anecdotes and little vignettes, change into Chekhov, the great storyteller (850). And later and elsewhere Mann ascribes to the spirit of literature all morally ennobling advancement of the human race (RA, i: 116). Mann is by no means an aesthete ; he always rejects aestheticism in the sense of l'art pour l'art, as understood at the turn of the century, and thinks of writing about literature as moralistic. In the preface to the periodical Mann edited during the Second World War, Maf3 und Wert, he emphati­ cally asserted that we cannot be aesthetes, though he tried to keep the periodical free of the daily politics of the German emigration (CW, 12 :802). He can be very harsh about the worship of beauty. Beauty, if it did not have truth on its side, would be an empty chimera (AG, 337). On the whole, he does not think of literature as an art, like painting, sculp­ ture, or music. It has a function that is finally metaphysical. Here Mann seems to be quite dependent on Schopenhauer in his view of the blessings of art. After his return to Europe in 1952, however, a disillusioned and embittered Mann concludes in a desperate mood that art has no power, is only a consolation (AN, 442). At other times, he seems to waver between a Schopenhauerian and a Nietzschean view of art. Art is called once, echo­ ing Nietzsche, "a strengthening and heightening of life" (AN, 355), and elsewhere he speaks of art as leading to "blessed contemplation," to a re­ demption of the will. It is puzzling to hear once that the "sense of sacrifice" (Opfersinn) is the "sense of all art" ; this seems to refer to something like the duty of renunciation which he praises in Goethe. In "Die Kunst des Romans" ( 1939), Mann's main concern is the defense of the novel and its supremacy (AN, 387-401). He is, I think, sometimes

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7

of two minds, asserting that it is wrong to rank the genres (AN, 363). But in practice he is constantly concerned with refuting Schiller's famous say­ ing that the novelist is "the half-brother of the poet," a saying, after all, uttered in the eighteenth century, when the novel as an art form was just emerging. Mann employs the same strategy to defend the novel as did the novelists of the eighteenth century, likening the novel to the ancient epic, to Homer. He sees the nineteenth century as producing "epic burdens" (epische Laster) : Balzac, Tolstoy, and Wagner (AG, 399). The concept of the epic to him is connected with the concept of the sea and music, meaning something vast and endless. Mostly, however, the novel is contrasted with the theater, though Thomas Mann gave several speeches on the theater in which he is very careful not to deprecate it. There is an early "Versuch iiber das Theater" (CW, 10:23-62), which again rejects as "madness" the idea of a hierarchy of genres but still asserts that theater is not literature and ascribes the German worship of the theater to a pride in culture (Bildung) . He thinks that in future the theater may take the place of the church. But mostly he thinks of the theater as "something happily anarchistic, a cultural relic" (RA, l: 1 12). An oration after the death of Max Reinhardt in 1943, how­ ever, shows no sense of condescension toward the theater. Mann praises the theater as a festival, a play of colors, as a mediator between dream and reality (CW, 10:490). Actually, Mann always thinks of Wagner as the great theater man, the one who made theater a national institution again, though in later pronouncements on Wagner he recognizes that Bayreuth has become a meeting place of snobs and nouveaux riches (AN, 586). But Mann of course knows that the power of Wagner is by no means only literary, but comes from the music which swept him away even as a boy. He rejected all criticisms against Wagner by appealing to the greatness of his music and to the conception of the Ring des Nibelungen as a grand epic that draws on the deepest sources not only of the nation but of mankind. Mann always thinks of the novel in terms of Realism. Goethe and Tol­ stoy are for him the great realists. In his essay on Anna Karenina ( 1939), Mann speaks of Tolstoy's "undying realism" (AG, 326). Goethe and Tol­ stoy are both of this world, though "the corporeal-pagan world" (AG, 233). Elsewhere Goethe is called "a sensual realist" (RA, l:26) and, most sur­ prisingly, we are told that Realism is an "eruption of Germanity" (RA, i:26). Mann is completely committed to the distinction between Realism, which refers to the early nineteenth-century novel, and Naturalism, which he considers only a phase of the drama at the end of the century. Mann says that the naturalistic theater is a coarse contradictio in adjecto (RA, I: 104), for nothing can be naturalistic in the theater. He considers Nat-

8

G E R M AN

C R I T I C I S M,

1900-1950

uralism still not completely dead, as it preserves its value because of its "ethic of empathy" (Mitleidsethos; RA, 1:2 8 5). Thomas Mann is by no means opposed to Romanticism. He has a very good grasp of the historical circumstances of German Romanticism and discusses it with an often sur­ prisingly intimate knowledge of its achievements, not only in poetry and the novel, but in the different branches of humanistic learning. Still, he always thinks of Realism as conveying "truth," in contrast to Romanticism. He says strikingly: "Truth needs the illusion of reality in order to be ten­ able as art" (RA, 1:311). Mann's Realism includes an intimate relation to real-life models. He got into trouble very early on this point, with his paper "Bilse und Ich" (AN, 19-30). Bilse was an obscure novelist who was sued for libeling a supposed model in real life. He immediately appealed to Mann's Buddenbrooks as being full of real-life models and yet escaping any libel action. Mann de­ fends Bilse while showing his contempt for his book Die kleine Garni.son, and he emphasizes that he is not alone in using live models. Turgenev is his great example; Mann accepts the unsubstantiated view that his Ba­ zarov is modeled on a provincial doctor (AN, 21). What is decisive is not the story (die Fabel ) , but the soul (die Beseelung; AN, 23). There is an abys­ mal difference between reality and poetic shaping. All the pronounce­ ments of artists are only "on account of you, the public." "The artist," he quotes, "who does not surrender his whole self is a useless fellow" (AN, 30). On the whole, Mann has little use for invention. It is no criterion of value; Shakespeare's plots are cited as an argument (AN, 21-22). Mann is not at all apologetic in taking, copying or using details from other books, as a letter to Erich Auerbach shows (12 October 1951; CW, 11:691-93). Auerbach was apparently quite undisturbed to discover that a passage from Mimesis in Old French was used in Der Enviihlte (The holy sinner) . Mann wrote to him that "the two dozen words which I picked out from the dialogue were particularly well-useable, because in the delicate situ­ ation, a stammer half or totally incomprehensible to an average reader was called for. I owe them to you. . . . But are they not quite nicely and surprisingly fitted into a completely different context? The Found indeed becomes to a certain extent the Invented" (GW, 2:693). Beyond biography and life, Mann is mainly interested in national types. He constantly harps on the difference between the Germans and the French and gives an often surprisingly varied characterization of the Ger­ man nature or mind. Sometimes it seems to be not even very favorable, as when he speaks of the "childish and majestic German mind" (RA, 1 :335). At times, he defends the German inclination "to the abyss, to de­ formity, to chaos"; but elsewhere he says that the Germans are "the true

9

T H O M A S M ANN

favorites of life" (RA, I:402). He can say that the idea of the middle, of the center, is a German idea, the German idea, which he then identifies with B ilrgerlichkeit Goethe's renunciation is an imperative of all spiritual "Deutschtum" (RA, 1: 12 )-but he can also make such strange assertions as that the German way is "the way of death" (AN, 362), or that Tristan und Isolde could come only from German life, from its high, solemn con­ cept of art. Mann would often claim that Germans are uninterested in politics: "the German spirit, socially and politically, is fundamentally apathetic" (AG, 560; RA, 2:621). But he deplores this disengagement or disinterest in pol­ itics in later pronouncements, where he speaks of the illusion that one can be an unpolitical Kulturmensch, an illusion "which is guilty of Germany's misery" (AG, 463). He can also make such a strange pronouncement as saying that music is "an obstacle to German humanity" (AN, 218), but at other times, he is aware that nations change in history; even their char­ acter is nothing "stiff, unchangeable, firm and final" (RA, I :336). In prac­ tice, Mann is constantly appealing to the German tradition of Luther, Diirer, Wilhelm Raabe (CW, 10:410), and to the model of Goethe: "He is the greatest, because he was the most German, and the most German because the greatest" (RA, 2: 274). Leo Spitzer has spoken of similar ar­ guments in French, Spanish, and Italian as "national tautology" (Roman­ ische Forschungen 64 [1952): 241). If we survey the individual essays by Thomas Mann, we observe quite marked stages. There are a few scattered early writings before the First World War. During that war, Mann composed his Betrachtungen eines Un­ politischen, which contains an elaborate attack on the views of his brother Heinrich, based largely on Heinrich's article on Zola. The book is studded with literary references and allusions. After the war, Thomas Mann con­ verted to democracy and developed his critical activity on a fairly large scale: the years between 1920 and 1933 are the period of the best and best-known essays on Goethe and Tolstoy. This critical activity was again interrupted by the Nazis' coming to power and Mann's emigration, during which literature played, deliberately, only a minor part. After his return to Switzerland in 1952, Mann wrote some of his finest essays, which have a different mood and outlook from the earlier writing. The pre-1914 essays can be safely neglected. I have already commented on "Bilse und Ich," the piece which defends the freedom of the artist to use live models. The lyrical, descriptive account of Eichendorff 's Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts is hardly a piece of criticism, though Thomas Mann valued it highly and included it in his Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (CW, 12:375-83). In this tract his tone completely changed. He had become -

10

G E R M AN C RI TI CI S M ,

1900 -1950

often violently polemical in the attack on his brother, an attack that had to be concealed, as Heinrich lived in Munich and Thomas was afraid that his criticism would be considered a denunciation to the German police. Heinrich is constantly called "Zivilisationsliterat" for his sympathy in the essay on Zola with Western ideas of democracy and with Dreyfus (188f.). Mann has no use for Zola-he calls him "an epic giant of bestial sen­ suality." He disparages in the strongest terms the last works of Zola, the so-called Four Gospels, not only as coarse and artistically inferior but as revolting and unreadal51e (508-09). Mann, in this book, which professes to be completely nonpolitical, still attacks the West in very general terms, often using quotations from Dostoevsky's Diary of a Writer to buttress his conception. Russian literature is constantly played up as the great anti­ Western manifesto. Mann had called it the "holy literature" in Tonio Kroger, and says that he only later discovered that the Danish novelist Hermann Bang (1857-19 12) had first called it so (438). The whole book turns around this contrast between the nations, though I am sometimes uncer­ tain how seriously such generalizations are meant to be taken. For in­ stance, the conclusion on page 489 cannot be taken literally: "the beautiful Englishman, the polished Frenchman, the humane Russian, the knowing German." And one wonders whether Bildung is really a "specifically Ger­ man concept." Criticism is consistently seen as nothing other than morals, and aesthe­ ticism is elaborately attacked, partly with examples from Schiller's Die Braut von Messina and Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Mann is deeply shocked by the death scene of Emma with the apothecary and the priest quarreling next to the corpse (224). The Betrachtungen contains many literary ref­ erences; one sees Mann's admiration for Russian literature in general, for Dostoevsky as the hero and prophet, for Tolstoy and Turgenev and even Gogol. He seems to have read widely in everything available in German translation. His admiration for Knut Hamsun comes out (380), and for Claudel's L 'Annonce faite a Marie, in spite of Claudel's violent anti-German pronouncements (404-06). Mann disparages German Expressionism yet calls Dostoevsky an expressionist, apparently in a different sense, and at­ tacks D'Annunzio, whom he calls "the ape of Wagner, a debauchee of words" (577). After the end of the First World War, Mann wrote his longest and most impressive articles, the series devoted to Goethe and Tolstoy. "Goethe and Tolstoy" (GW, 9:58-173) is his most famous attempt to compare the two giants, both of whom he greatly admired, and many of the observations there are acute and well-phrased. Mann is a master of physiognomical and psychological portraiture and most skillful in using anecdotes and

T H O M A S M ANN

11

out-of-the-way stories. For instance, he tells several times the jocular story of Goethe imagining himself a British peer of the realm in the eighteenth century and when asked why he thinks he would be reborn as a peer, comparing himself, as a Frankfurt patrician, to a British peer. They have the same social standing. Goethe constantly emphasizes what he calls "the innate merits," ascribing them to heredity or talent. The main object of the comparison between Goethe and Tolstoy is the question of nobility, which is really tipped heavily against Tolstoy. Tolstoy, though a count, is less noble than Goethe, Mann argues, as his behavior in later life shows. Mann apparently feels that everything is due to heredity, to what is called here "predestination" (Cnadenwahl ) , which is beyond any human control. This grace he sees also in Tolstoy's life, except in the very last years, when he quarreled with his wife, lived in isolation, and finally fled his house to die in a railway station. Somehow, although Mann knows very well that there is continuity in Tolstoy's life and that even the early Tolstoy was preoccupied with the new religion he would invent, Mann dislikes the later Tolstoy who repudiated his early works and affected the life of a peasant. Mann sees a great similarity between the two great men in their emphasis on the body, and he contrasts them here and elsewhere with spiritual writers like Schiller and Dostoevsky. Mann particularly loved Tol­ stoy's Anna Karenina. In his introduction to an American translation, the praise could not be higher (CW, 9 : 6 2 2-39) . He conveys a true sense of Tolstoy's love for the heroine, without quite realizing that in the later parts of the book Tolstoy clearly turns against her. He is, however, shocked by Tolstoy's rejection of his early work. Among the many essays of the time, the "Rede iiber Lessing" (CW, 9 : 2 2 9-45) shows Mann's particular interest in the title "poet"; he is not satisfied with the term Schriftsteller for Lessing ( 2 3 2 ) , as apparently he was not satisfied to have the title "poet" denied to himself, though this is largely implicit in that particular speech. In the article on Adelbert von Chamisso (CW, 9 : 35-54), Mann seems to misunderstand Peter Schlemihls wundersame Ceschichte completely; he never alludes to the Hebrew legend or to the obvious mythical meaning. Mann assumes, apparently unaware of the history of the theme, that Schlemihl is an invention of Fouque, who on a walk thought up the business of the lost shadow. Mann rejects the idea that this story should be called a fairy tale; it is rather a "fantastic Novelle" (48) , partly because he takes very seriously the developments which, to my mind, spoil the original story in the long idyll with the child of the chief forester. Mann sees the shadow only as an allegory for solidity, as a symbol of "civic solidarity" (57), an interpretation that impoverishes the story and its meaning.

12

G E R M AN

CRITICISM,

t

900 - 1950

One of the strangest of Mann's performances is the article on Dostoev­ sky, called "Dostoevsky-With Moderation," written as an introduction to a collection of Dostoevsky's short stories in English (1945). In this piece, Mann makes much of the supposed criminality of Dostoevsky-a saint and criminal at once-and of his supposed confession of violating an underage girl. He speaks of Stavrogin's Confession as an unpublished por­ tion of the novel The Possessed, which according to Merezhkovsky describes the rape of a little girl. Mann says that Dostoevsky confessed this to Tur­ genev in Saint Petersburg, where he narrated the plot of a story he had planned in his youth to the horror of the presiding mother of the house­ hold. A reading of Dostoevsky is considered, surprisingly, the inspiration for the concept of the eternal retutn in Nietzsche. The eternal return is obviously at least as old as the pre-Socratics. But Mann's essay contains other strange opinions and is marred by the misdating of The Eternal Hus­ band. One of Dostoevsky's most mature works, it clearly belongs to the year i868, but Mann dates it to 1848, before the time of Dostoevsky's trial and deportation. In the German translation of this introduction, printed in 1946, Mann altered the discussion; he discovered, as anybody could have told him, that Stavrogin's Confession is nothing mysterious and un­ published but can be found in the Modern Library edition of The Possessed in English. He could have gone to a bookshop in Los Angeles and bought it, but he depended on the mysterious hints of Merezhkovsky dating from i902. Mann discovered that Stavrogin's Confession is readily available, and therefore suppressed these mysterious hints in later editions, yet kept the story about Dostoevsky's supposed confession, though he doubted that Dostoevsky could have told it to Turgenev. The whole business of Dos­ toevsky's criminality is totally misconceived. Dostoevsky no doubt lived with criminals when he was in the Siberian stockade; had sympathy for them and possibly understood their behavior; but there is not the slightest evidence that he himself committed a crime. The story of the violation of the girl is obviously an episode in Stavrogin's early life, invented to depict his cruel and criminal nature, but all the evidence we know absolves Dos­ toevsky completely from any criminal action. He was, in general, a con­ servative and solid citizen in spite of his gambling fits during his stays in Europe. But the evidence of the correspondence, of witnesses, and of writ­ ings refutes Mann's distorted view of Dostoevsky with his "profound, criminal, saintly face." The influence of Dostoevsky on Nietzsche is also grossly overstated, as Nietzsche read Dostoevsky only in the very last two years of his conscious life, after all his writings were concluded, except possibly Ecce Homo. Nietzsche admired Dostoevsky as a psychologist but

T H O M A S M ANN

thought of him as a decadent, as a figure he would have strongly repu­ diated. The center of Mann's criticism is Goethe. He is according to Mann the g.reat model in every way-the greatest German and apparently the great­ est man who ever lived. Mann recognizes his pagan traits but finally comes to the conclusion that Goethe is "tinged with Christianity," that "his in­ tellectual countenance has a Gothic aspect through suffering." Goethe is for him an "ethnic divinity, an eruption of that Germanic aristocratic hea­ thendom along with Luther and Bismarck" (GW, 9:135). Mann makes an elaborate attempt to defend Goethe's behavior during the war of libera­ tion-he thinks of him as "unpatriotic to his German core" (kerndeutscher Unpatriot) , a man who has a truly cosmopolitan feeling which, however, does not prevent him from being a good German, for Goethe is the "model and perfecter not only of his people, but of humanity." Much is made of Goethe's invention of the term Weltliteratur. Still, Goethe is con­ sistently seen as a Burger, as a patrician from an old independent city­ like Mann himself, who came from Lubeck. Implicitly Mann condemns Gundolf 's attempt to make Goethe a kind of heroic figure, a statue of antique mold, almost inhuman in its grandeur. The essay on Cervantes, "Meerfahrt mit Don Quijote" (GW, 9:427-77), makes many good points in a framework that I find often distasteful in its jocularity; it was written on board ship on Mann's first trip to America and exploits the little events of the voyage and the other passengers with condescending and supercilious comments. Still, the discussion of Don Qµixote, which Mann read in German translation, is often very perceptive. Cervantes lowers and raises his hero at the same time. He has a respect for his creation that is constantly growing. Mann remarks that it must be a unique event in world literature that the fictional hero lives in the glory of his reputation: the court of the duke in the second part knows the pair Don Quixote and Sancho Panza from reading about them. Mann rightly considers the adventure with the lion to be the high point of the novel and is disappointed with a conclusion he considers feeble, though he sees that the death of Don Quixote is logically needed. The three essays Mann wrote after his return to Europe in 1951 are all of high caliber. The essay on Kleist, which began as a lecture and was translated for an American edition of the stories of Kleist, is largely preoc­ cupied with him as an unhappy, rebellious, suicidal victim of his time (GW, 9:823-42). It praises the stories extravagantly, admiring the style and the extreme violence of some of the events and issues, particularly the hor­ rible business with Michael Kohlhaas and the ambiguities of the Marquise von 0 . . . Kleist is thought of as exploring the confusion of feelings, a

GERMAN CRITIC I SM,

1900 -1950

theme which is also dominant in Amphitryon, to which Mann had devoted an earlier detailed essay, taking the reader through the play almost scene by scene ("Kleists Amphitryon"; CW, 9:187-228). Very little criticism is attempted in these two essays on Kleist whose art of high tension seems in my view excessively admired. The "Versuch iiber Tschekhow" already cited, written in Mann's last year, seems to me one of his finest essays. It shows deep human sympathy for a man whose modesty appeals to Mann, though the self-confessed modesty seemed to him a strategic mistake. He also admires Chekhov's skepticism, such as in the words he puts in the mouth of the professor in "A Tedious Tale," who answers the young woman's desire for an expla­ nation of the meaning of life by saying, "I don't know" (855). Mann com­ ments that this professed ignorance is often made to sound ridiculous by the strange and helplessly bombastic way in which his characters discuss this question of the meaning of life (855). Mann singles out Chekhov's almost nihilistic reflections on art, citing "as things are, the life of an artist has no sense" (858). The artist works solely for the amusement of that unclean animal, man, and thereby supports the present order of things. Mann collects the pronouncements of Chekhov which could be inter­ preted as pointing toward a better future life: "life," he quotes Doctor Korolyov in "A Doctor's Visit," "will be beautiful in fifty years" (863), a passage which has been interpreted by the Soviets as a forecast of their revolution. Actually, Mann points out that Chekhov had not the slightest relationship to the working class, and had also no passionate relationship with women: he treats them all with irony. Even letters to his wife are extremely reserved and "are sustained in a roguishly ironic manner" (867). Mann likes this irony against fame-Chekhov doubts the meaning and value of his activity-and concludes by quoting again the professor's reply to the young woman who asks, "What shall I do?"-"On my honor and conscience, I don't know" (869). The last essay on Schiller was read in abbreviated form in Stuttgart and Weimar in May 1955 at a commemoration of the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of Schiller's death (CW, 9:870-952). Mann's admiration for Schiller is unbounded. He has great sympathy for him also as a human being and describes very well his struggle against his early environment and then against his illness, tuberculosis. He begins the essay with a grue­ some description of Schiller's funeral, which was far from solemn. The coffin was dumped into a treasury vault; there was no clergy present and only a few acquaintances, certainly not Goethe (870-75). Mann is abso­ lutely uncritical about Schiller's literary production-there is never any­ thing unfavorable said even about such doubtful works as Die Jungfrau von

T H O M A S M ANN

Orleans or Maria Stuart. Implicitly Mann knows what is really great: he pays most attention, quite rightly, to Wallenstein and goes over the play with great sympathy for the depiction of the hero and the whole conflict, quot­ ing lavishly, treating some scenes in great detail (896-914). Much attention is paid to Schiller's relationship with Goethe, which is described in considerable detail (933-46), showing Goethe's own early dislike and even contempt for Schiller and even his later restraint: he never, for instance, answered Schiller's address "Dear Friend" (937). It seems, however, going a bit far to speak of "tender contempt." Goethe, especially after Schiller's death, became more and more impressed by his fame and memory. He seemed determined to reject any critical skepti­ cism, possibly of his own, when he said, "I take the liberty to consider Schiller a poet and a great poet" (943). Mann devotes also some fine pages to discussing Schiller's relationship with women and to praising his poems on general issues (Gedankenlyrik), like "Ideal und Leben" (874). He speaks most enthusiastically about the little-known poem "Das Gluck," of which he says that "nothing more beau­ tiful, noble and holy can be found in the whole realm of feeling and lan­ guage" (935); he even defends and likes "Das Lied von der Glocke" (875), or the fragment "Deutsche GroBe," which recalls, he says, the Pushkin speech of Dostoevsky (923). This resemblance would be merely accidental, as "Deutsche GroBe" exists only in prose fragments and a few verse stan­ zas, discovered and first published in 1902. The Russian relation is em­ phasized in the interest and admiration Mann has for the fragment Demetrius (924-27), which he thinks would have become the greatest of Schiller's twelve dramas. A special Mannian note comes in the discussion of the early operetta Semele, which he says was "my first literary love" (929) and which he compares to Kleist's Amphitryon. The essay ends with a kind of appeal to unity for divided Germany in the name of Schiller, whose "striving for the beautiful, true and good, for inner freedom, art, love, and peace, for a saving respect for mankind before himself " (951) seem to Thomas Mann the most needed and vital demands of the time.

2:

GE R M A N S YM B OL IS M

FR IE DR IC H G UND OL F ( 1 8 80- 1 9 3 1 )

IN June 1923, when I was not yet twenty, I attended, at Heidelberg, a single lecture by Friedrich Gunaolf. A tall, darkly handsome man, stand­ ing in the light of the window, turned his profile with a strong nose self­ consciously to the large audience filling the hall and recited, in a level monotone, a lecture that could have been printed, word for word, in any of his books. I now remember little except the aura of a solemn ceremony, and the worshipful attitude of the listeners. Later, in the afternoon, a visit to his house-on the strength of an introduction from Marianne Weber, the widow of Max Weber-revealed a more humane human being: a bril­ liant talker accustomed to the deference of his disciples. (He was then not quite forty-three years of age.) Gundolf 's occupancy of what, after Berlin, was the most prestigious chair of German literature-to which he was appointed in spite of his ostentatious contempt for footnotes, acknowl­ edgments, polemics, and bibliographies-and the wide sale of his books, Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist (1911) and Goethe (1916), made him the representative figure of the victory of the new literary scholarship over that of the nineteenth century: its factualism, its dependence on external biography, its accumulation of filiations, parallels, sources, and ana­ logues-in short, the antiquarianism dominating the German (and not only the German) universities. The year before I had entered the Czech University of Prague in order to study Germanic philology. I had soon been disillusioned by the train­ ing; I did not care for Gothic vocalism and consonantism, nor for the (anyhow largely fictional) biographies of dozens of Minnesiinger nor for the sources of Grillparzer's Libussa nor even for the precise itinerary of the Nibelungen down the Danube to their doom. Gundolf 's books-free of pedantry, dazzling for the boldness of their generalizations and the au­ thoritative tone of their judgments-seemed to hold up a new hope for what literary history could be or could become. But somehow I was subtly i6

GERMAN SYMBOLISM

repelled by what I had seen at Heidelberg. I could not but feel that the implied demand for complete allegiance and even abject subservience to a creed was foreign to my nature. I gave up the idea of studying under Gundolf and soon shifted in Prague from Germanic philology to English literature, where a sensible and concerned teacher, Vilem Mathesius (later the founder of the Prague Linguistic Circle), taught me to read Chaucer and Spenser and even H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw. I recall this day years ago not for any self-indulgence in autobiograph­ ical reminiscence but as an explanation of the peculiar mood with which I approached the rereading of Gundolf 's writings after many years of neglect. I tried to evoke the fascination these writings had for me and many contemporaries and tried to account for the fading of my interest which obviously has been shared by many other readers of my generation. Clearly it involves the general reaction against Gundolf 's master, Stefan George, the deep suspicion with which he is viewed as a prophet of the Third Reich, though he himself went into voluntary exile under the Nazis and though Gundolf, as a Jew, would have suffered persecution from them if he had lived long enough. A good defense can be made against the accusations of Fascism or pre-Nazism hurled, for instance, by Georg Lukacs at the circle with which he was himself loosely associated in his early years. Still, there is no denying that the adoration and even adulation which exalted George not only as a great poet but as a prophet, leader, master, and even head of a spiritual "state" who imposed tasks on his disciples, banished them from his presence when they failed to meet his demands, and, in general, cultivated contempt for the public, was profoundly un­ democratic. George must be seen in the context of late nineteenth-century aestheticism, in the company of Mallarme and his aristocratic gestures, in the wake of Nietzsche and his exaltation of the superman, and he must be put into the peculiar German context of a reaction against the shabby philistinism of the Hohenzollern Empire, against the dominance of Nat­ uralism and the decline of poetry into inconsequential ornament or sen­ timental consolation. George himself was hardly a literary critic, but the importance of his model and his, mainly oral, instruction in directing the change of literary taste and even the style and methods of the literary criticism of his fol­ lowers must not be underrated. His scattered statements collected in Tage und Taten ( 1 903) suffice to bring out his basic attitude: the emphasis, at first at least, on art for art's sake and certainly the purity of art inimical to daily politics, the worship of form and language, of poetic language set off by sound, diction, and even print and paper from vulgar use; the ex-

18

G E R M AN C R I T I C I S M ,

1900-1950

altation of a few great poets of the past: Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe; the discovery of Holderlin and the rediscovery of Jean Paul; the intro­ duction, in George's translations, of Baudelaire, Mallarme, Verlaine, and the Dutch Albert Verwey; the harsh rejection of the nineteenth century and of the whole romantic tradition. Surprisingly, George was able to attract and to inspire a group of men who were or became scholars and critics. Of this group, Gundolf, who met George when he was only nineteen, was to become the one writer whose influence would be most profoundly felt in German scholarship and lit­ erary criticism. Gundolf 's book on George (1920) was a late act of hom­ age, extravagant in its adoration, which does not even hint that pupil and master had come to a parting of the ways. The published correspondence shows Gundolf 's agonized squirmi_ngs under the master's disapproval of his association with Elisabeth Salomon, whom he was later to marry. But even to the day of his death Gundolf lived under George's shadow: he kept the promise of his last letter to George in 1926, announcing his mar­ riage; "I shall not desert you even though you reject me" (BR, 372). Still, as a critic and literary historian, Gundolf developed his method (if not his judgments and attitudes) independently of George. He studied, after all, under Erich Schmidt at the University of Berlin and published a fairly conventional thesis on Caesar in German Literature ( 1 903); it antic­ ipates the later book on Caesar, the History ofHis Fame ( 1 924), which centers on the concept of the "image," the "legend" of a great man, which was one of the overriding concerns of the George circle: a restitution of hero­ worship, a belief in the exemplary power of the great men in history. Gundolf 's first (and possibly his best) book of literary history, Shake­ speare und der deutsche Geist ( 1 9 1 1 ), assumes also an almost prescriptive power for Shakespeare in Germany. The whole history of German liter­ ature from the seventeenth century to the Romantic movement is con­ ceived of as a struggle to approach Shakespeare; his language, his poetry, his tragic or comic feeling, not only through translations and adaptations or critical estimates but in creative competition and in drama as well as in the lyric or the novel. The book combines, with amazing success, a close though highly selective look at the stylistic details of German translations and imitations of Shakespeare with sweeping generalizations about the progress of the German literary language and culture. The German lan­ guage is conceived as originally incapable of adequately rendering Shake­ speare. The incredibly crude versions of Shakespeare demonstrate the low state of comprehension in the seventeenth century; Shakespeare was then understood only as brute matter, external plot (Stoff) ; in the eigh­ teenth century, with Lessing and Wieland, Shakespeare was at last ap-

G E R M AN

SYMBOLISM

preciated as form (Form) ; while only with Herder and Goethe can one speak of a comprehension of Shakespeare as import, as meaning (Gehalt) , as a totality. The neat triad of progression leads up to August Wilhelm Schlegel's version, which is praised as fully adequate. The poetic con­ quests of Goethe have lifted the German language to the level of Shake­ speare. Similarly the progress of German criticism of Shakespeare is traced in neat stages from enemies such as Gottsched, to apologists such as Elias Schlegel and Bodmer, to defenders (Lessing), panegyrists (Herder), and zealots such as the dramatists classed as "Sturm und Drang." Epigram­ matically, Gundolf formulates the contrast between Lessing and Herder: "Lessing justifies Shakespeare before the Greeks by saying: Shakespeare is also art, while Herder does the same, saying : The Greeks are also na­ ture" (SudG, 203). One can object to details in the book. The almost uncritical acceptance of August Wilhelm Schlegel's translation surprises, particularly as Gun­ dolf spent years on a translation of his own which reproduced Shake­ speare in a baroque, tortuous, bookish language often far removed from the polished, somewhat Schillerian performance of his predecessor. Nor can one quite sympathize with Gundolf 's characterization of the German Romantic movement which he sees as purely destructive, ironic, and un­ creative. One may wonder at the contradiction between the allusion to Bergson (SudG, 58) and his sense of flux, the basic conception of history as a play of forces or a stream of tendencies rather than a row of books or even a series of persons with the almost playful dryness of some clas­ sifications and enumerations. Still, Gundolf produced a history of Shake­ speare's influence in Germany which is also a cross section through German literature and thought of such convincing power of formulation and concrete observation that compared to it all older treatments seem mere accumulations of lifeless materials. Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist did not, except in tone, break with the tradition of German Geistesgeschichte. It relies, too much to my mind, on the dualistic typologies of the German tradition emanating from Schiller's treatise on naive and sentimental poetry, on the contrasts between classical and romantic, Apollonian and Dionysiac art, the seesaw between form and movement, sculpture and music, "attracting" and "expansive" geniuses, synthesis and analysis or the antinomy of intellect and passion, reason and imagination, rationalism and irrationalism. Thus Gundolf 's book on Goethe ( 1 9 1 6) means a radical break; it focuses on one person so exclu­ sively that we hardly hear or feel anything of the history of the time or the history of literature before or around him.

20

GERMAN CRI TICI SM,

1900-1950

Gundolf, in his Goethe, aims at a special kind of monograph: the evo­ cation and construction of a "figure" (Gestalt) which is conceived as a union of life and work (G, i ) . Gundolf rejects external biography (and tells us very little of it); he, rightly to my mind, sees the center of any literary study in the works of an author, while letters, diaries, and conversations at most serve as corroborating evidence. But he still does not want to write criticism in the usual sense of judging books. He sees the works as a form of life, or, as he say s in a Spinozistic formula, "Life and work are only diverse attributes of one and the same substance, of a spiritual-corporeal unity which appears as both form and movement simultaneously " (G, i ) . This unity of being and becoming is, metaphorically, described as "a globe of forces" (G, 15) rather than a linear growth. Works are compared to "annual rings on a tree." Goethe, and implicitly every creative man, fulfills an inner necessity, a predetermined fate, an unalterable pattern. Works are thus written without any external aims (G, 14), compulsively, instinc­ tively. The artist, we are told many times, experiences differently from an ordinary man (G, 2), in terms anticipating his work, and thus puts himself above and beyond any moralistic criticism. Gundolf, with almost comic solemnity, defends Goethe's desertion of Friederike Brion as a necessity of his nature, as a needed sacrifice to Goethe's future (G, 144-145). In constant variations we hear of Goethe's "inborn entelechy" (G, 14) and the "demonic unity or the mutual penetration of the inner and outer forces in his life" (G, 235). Gundolf sees something predestined, fated but also internally antici­ pated in Goethe's meeting Herder or Charlotte von Stein. This leads him to such extravagancies as seeing Goethe's friends assembled around as his "own system of human ty pes" (G, 2 11) or saying that he "composed the poems to Friederike not because he met her but he met her because these songs vibrated in him" (G, 58). The tone of adoration reaches heights of absurdity when Goethe is seriously referred to as "Zeus" (G, 741) and when Eckermann's Gespriiche mil Goethe in der letzten Jahren seines Lebens are called "not a printed textbook or a collected harvest of wisdom but a Gos­ pel, i.e. the voice of a holy figure" (G, 746). The eminently human and even bourgeois figure of Goethe is raised onto a pedestal so high that he disappears in a cloud of incense. Still, in spite of the monotonously solemn tone, Gundolf does make dis­ tinctions which allow him to rank Goethe's works and to discriminate among and within them. Goethe appears as an "original man in a deriv­ ative world" (G, 26), constantly struggling for an assertion of the inner sources of his being against the outer impact of civilization. Gundolf draws the famous distinction between Urerlebnisse and Bildungserlebnisse (which

G E R M AN

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21

he must have picked up from Herman Nohl). Urerlebnis is everything re­ ligious, titanic, and erotic; Bildungserlebnis is, for example, "the German past, the encounter with Shakespeare, with classical antiquity, with Italy, with the Orient and with the whole German society of his time" (G, 2 7 ) . Occasionally he allows for a third element: the setting, the house, the fam­ ily, the city, and the landscape (G, 49) . The Urerlebnis is not necessarily first chronologically. It may appear later in life or at least achieve expression only late. Goethe's earliest writings contain nothing from which one would be able to divine his Urerlebnis. They are wholly dominated by Bildungserleb­ nisse (G, 35). This conflict is constantly used as a standard of judgment, with the preference for the Urerlebnis unquestioned. Thus Gundolf can discern a relatively tame Urerlebnis in six poems of the Leipzig period (G, 59) . In Gotz von Berlichingen, he criticizes the ascendency given to Bildungs­ erlebnis at the expense of Urerlebnis; the latter being so modified as to be rendered unrecognizable (G, 1 24). One could put it all more simply: Gotz seems to Gundolf too much concerned with history and local color; and where Gundolf senses a personal concern with the guilt Goethe sup­ posedly felt for his desertion of Friederike, he sees it as disguised in the relationship between Weislingen and Adelheide. But clearly Adelheide is conceived as an imitation of Cleopatra, a comparison (rejected by Gun­ dolf ) which should have demonstrated the absurdity of identifying the demonic Adelheide with the simple village girl Friederike, the daughter of a clergyman in Alsace. Though Gundolf rejects indignantly the model-hunting of older schol­ arship and the literal interpretation of Goethe's own assertion that his works are "one great confession" (G, 1 50), he cannot finally extricate him­ self from the psychologism inherent in the whole concept of Erlebnis de­ rived from Dilthey. It is an appeal to immediacy, spontaneity, sincerity, which, in a criticism concerned with the value of art, is a criterion of doubt­ ful relevance. Much of the world's poorest art is deeply felt love poetry or fervent religious and patriotic verse. In practice, Gundolf, like most Germans, prefers an art outside the Latin tradition of making, of inven­ tion and contrivance. Fortunately the distinction of Urerlebnis and Bildungserlebnis is often re­ placed by another, more literary one: that between the lyrical, symbolical, and allegorical (G, 1 6) . "Lyrical" is nearest to the core of a man's being, closest to Urerlebnis. Werther and Tasso (recognized by Jean-Jacques Ampere as a "gesteigerter Werther") are praised for being lyrical, for embodying Goethe's Urerlebnis (G, 27) in spite of their novelistic or dramatic form. In the lyric the identity of form and content is complete. The lyrical poet

22

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CRITICISM,

1 900- 1 95 0

does not write about spring or his beloved. He rather writes about the mood induced by external things or beings (G, 2 1 ) . The lyric thus ex­ presses the I-which would be good romantic poetics-but it must be, Gundolf insists, an I already formed or figured (G, 2 2 ) . The overflow of spontaneous feeling, the lyrical cry are not enough. "Motion becomes mel­ ody, voice word" (G, 1 0 1 ) . Up to the time of Goethe poets needed a symbol. Experience becomes word in Goethe, Hux language. The feeling needs no image. "It is sound incarnated" (G, 1 02 ) . Gundolf tried, by stylistic observations, to substan­ tiate this assumption of a total identity of sound and meaning, form and content. He makes much of Goethe's use of epithets of motion: the ad­ jectival use of the present participle, as in "tiirmende Ferne, fruchtende Fiille, heilig gluhend Herz" (towering distance, seed-bearing fullness, holy glowing heart; 1 03 ) , which conveys new feeling. The same effect is achieved by activating adjectives or verbs which usually indicate only sit­ uations or functions by an added adverb of direction, as in "Berge wolkig himmelan, griine herauf . . . entgegenbeben, angliihen" (mountains cloud­ like skyward, green upward . . . shake against, glow toward; 1 03 ) . The word combinations in which the most heterogeneous nouns o r ad­ jectives are yoked together, as in "Traumgliick, Nebelglanz, Wolkensteg, Scheideblick, silberprangend, schlangenwandelnd" (dream-happiness, mist­ glow, cloud-bridge, parting-glance, silver-shining, snake-ambling; 1 04), testify not only t o Goethe's love o f neologisms but t o the new union of sense and spirit, to the dissolution of the rational universe in a chaos of feeling. All these subtle observations (and many more) are to prove that Goethe is not writing about a subject or even expressing a definite state of mind but that somehow the state of mind is speaking itself (G, 98). There is no conflict between subject and state of mind: an irrational ex­ perience finds irrational expression (G, 99) . These groping attempts to circumscribe the real novelty of Goethe's lyrics serve, on the contrary, to remind us that the lyrics do have, after all, a discernible topic. Indeed, at times, they even state an argument, trace a progression, convey a mood or an ecstasy. These ends are achieved by the techniques found in all good poetry, before and after Goethe: rhythm, imagery, symbol, myth. There is no need to appeal to woolly identifications in describing Goethe's striv­ ing for dynamic, suggestive language. Gundolf uses the word symbol to mean something more specifically or­ ganized: a world of characters and actions, a myth which contrasts with the intellectual, contrived world of allegory. The distinction between sym­ bol and allegory had been made prominently on the first page of Shake­ speare und der deutsche Geist: "symbol expresses, is body. Allegory signifies,

GERMAN SYMBOLISM

23

is sign. Allegory is conventional. Allegory is relation. Symbol is essence." (SudG, 1-2). In symbolic art the I and the world coincide; in the lyric there is only the I and no world; in allegorical art a disparity between the I and the world opens up which has to be bridged, or related or "connected" artificially (G, 24). Symbols express the motions of the I in a material orig­ inally foreign to the poet but assimilated by the creative process (G, 23). "Symbolic art" corresponds to Eliot's "objective correlative" though in Eliot the "objective correlative" is the indispensable vehicle of genuine poetic expression. For Gundolf, on the other hand, symbolic art is a stage below the highest lyrical art in which the I is identified with the world, the distinction between subject and object abolished in what seems only a grandiose gesture toward the idea of a mystical union. Allegory is then the lowest form of art since it is contrived, artificial, intellectual. "Life and art are alogical" (SudG, 154) is Gundolf 's basic pre­ supposition. The poet is a poet because he feels and does not think, at least rationally. In practice, in the book on Goethe, Gundolf can describe Faust as reflecting the stages of Goethe's life (G, 766), as an organically growing work of art, while Die naturliche Tochter and Achilleis are con­ demned as concoctions of the brain, as lifeless academic exercises. Though he advocates like his master George a classical art and condemns every­ thing formless, Gundolf dismisses classicist theories almost contemp­ tuously. The concept of genre seems to him as meaningless as it was to Croce. Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso, Rabelais, Cervantes, and Shake­ speare paid no attention to traditional genres (G, 19). The monumental portraits of Goethe and George were followed by a much smaller book on Heinrich von Kleist (1922), which is meant to offer a warning example. Kleist appears as enacting the tragedy of a lonely soul without nation, without gods (K, 9). Compared to Lessing he seems a blockhead, to Schiller a confused fellow, to Goethe a barbarian (K, 15). In conscious opposition to the then accepted interpretation of Kleist as a forerunner of Naturalism, Gundolf sees him as an ecstatic, undisciplined visionary. Penthesilea becomes Kleist's most characteristic work while the tales and even Der Prinz von Homburg are neglected as not fitting into this picture of a man failing for lack of a community, myth, and nation (K, 45). The book on Kleist is accompanied by a series of essays (later collected into two volumes, Romantiker [ 1930] and Romantiker: Neue Falge [ 1931]) which are much more soberly descriptive and expository but show the same strong bias against anything romantic, chaotic, formless, problem­ atic, and fanciful. The paper on Friedrich Schlegel surprises by the ve­ hemence with which Gundolf condemns in Schlegel efforts one would think are Gundolf 's or George's own: the attempt to create a new myth

G E R M AN

C R I T I C I S M,

1 900- 1 950

(Ro, 62) and to invent new terminologies (Ro, 59). The surprisingly fa­ vorable essay on Buchner plays down his social protest while admiring the mood of Woyzeck: "as in Macbeth Scotland, in Romeo the South, in The Tem­ pest the enchanted island, free of all purposes of politics, of morals, even of reason" (Ro, 392). Buchner is a genius in the precise sense of the Latin word: "the bearer of mysterious powers of a supra- or infra-personal or­ igin" (Ro, 395). Gundolf thought of the two large volumes Shakespeare: sein Wesen und Werk ( 1 928) as the culmination of his intimate and long familiarity with the English poet. Oddly enough the book has not received any close at­ tention and has been, I believe, entirely ignored in the English-speaking world. Much of this neglect is simply due to its length and to the difficult, often tortuous and labored style in which it is written. But difficult Ger­ man books by Heidegger, Spengler, or Lukacs have found translators and audiences. Gundolf 's lack of impact must have deeper reasons. Gundolf 's Shakespeare is, first, quite unfashionably unhistorical: the dramatist is seen almost in complete isolation from his age and stage and even in conflict with his stage. Many scenes and even plays (e.g., Henry V and Henry VIII) are dismissed as concessions to the taste of the public. Hal's rejection of Falstaff and the whole plot leading to the death of Ro­ meo and Juliet are considered mere contrivances: only the first part of Henry IV and the garden and balcony scenes in Romeo andJuliet matter (Sh, I , 5 1 9 , 2 5 7 ) . Hamlet, we are told, was written "for himself " as "a gloomy monologue of the passionate creative heart." Formulated in the early book (SudG, 35), this view was developed at great length in the late one. Following the general pattern first traced by Edward Dowden in his Shakspere in 1 875, Gundolf assumes a spiritual autobiography behind the plays and sonnets. "His life is written in his work as precisely and clearly as Goethe's" (Sh, I I , 2 8 7 ) : a progression is construed from joyous Spring or Dawn, through the tragic years of sorrow, to the transfiguration achieved in the last romances: Shakespeare's winter or evening. The erotic breakthrough expressed in the sonnets is considered the central experience of Shakespeare's young life. Anne Hathaway and the children are, I believe, never even mentioned. Anachronistically, Shakespeare is interpreted consistently as a superman, a personality in Goethe's sense who is moving beyond good and evil, a pagan, a pantheist, a dionysiac creator obsessed by the dark forces. Much is, for instance, made of Gloucester's words: "As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; I T hey kill us for their sport," a passage which, for Gundolf, makes even the worst human crime insignificant. Unfortunately for Gundolf 's argument, Gloucester revokes this pronouncement when he later speaks of the "ever-

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25

gentle gods" and "the bounty and the benison of Heaven" and ends saying "henceforth I'll bear affliction." No doubt, in the many eloquent pages of the long chapter on King Lear, Gundolf succeeds in evoking the world of the play: the sense of the dark forces against man; but then he bogs down in labored sketches of all the main characters which often go astray in reckless confusions of fiction and reality. "Cordelia," we are told in the comment on the first scene (Sh, II, 235), "paralyzed by the badly put question and the quantitative answers of her sisters, is prevented from the immediate expression of her feeling and forced to formulate her love quantitatively as if the frenzy and slyness of the others had deprived her of the language of the heart." Thus, Gun­ dolf 's Shakespeare, in spite of its sophistication, fervor, and antithetical wit, is actually a very old-fashioned book. It shows no interest in Shakespeare as a man of the theater or as a contemporary of the other Elizabethan dramatists; it is untouched by the new concern for patterns of imagery, even though Gundolf notices the recurrent animal metaphors in King Lear, anticipating the much more systematic work of Caroline Spurgeon. And Gundolf quite explicitly rejects the Christian interpretation of Shake­ speare, emphasizing his secularism, even paganism. He goes so far as to speak of his "praying to the unknown god" (Sh, II, 416). Shakespeare's tragic sense, his feeling for the powers behind the surface of nature seem to him completely unchristian. In this view, Shakespeare is made over into a contemporary of Goethe and even of Nietzsche or George. It is difficult to avoid relegating Gundolf firmly to his own past and milieu; difficult not to see him as a propagandist for the dubious creed of George, for an inhuman hero-worship, an exclusive gesture or attitude, for a "mystery" which is hardly a mystery. One can see him also in the context of his philosophical affiliations: with Simmel and Bergson, with the whole tradition of the irrationalistic Lebensphilosophie first formulated, most influentially, in Germany by Wilhelm Dilthey. But we can also, in a history of literary studies, emphasize and admire Gundolf 's break with the dreary positivism of the nineteenth century, his resolute rejection of externalities, the assertion, new in its time and place, of absolute values in poetry and his intensely serious concentration on what matters in the poets he studied and worshiped: their insight into the nature of man, their power of creation, and their moral and spiritual elevation. There are old truths in this gospel and we might sometimes listen to the voice of a priest in this temple.

GERMA N CR I T IC I SM ,

1 900- 1 9 5 0

E R NS T BE R TR A M ( 1 8 8 9 - 1 9 5 7 ) Thomas Mann established a relationship with literary scholarship through Ernst Bertram , who reviewed his novel Konigliche Hoheit favorably and thus elicited a letter of praise from Mann, which led in 1 9 1 0 to constant intercourse. They lived almost next door to each other in Munich and saw each other frequently, establishing a friendship which became intimate during the First World War, which both interpreted nationalistically. They read to each other the chapters of Mann's Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen and Bertram's Nietzsche ( 1 9 1 8) so often and so intimately that they thought of these books as almost a common enterprise. Thomas Mann went so far as to speak of "our Nietzsche, " and they attempted to eliminate duplications of references and quotations, Mann usually ceding to the views of Ber­ tram. In a letter dated 2 1 September 1 9 1 8 , Mann praises Nietzsche to the skies for its mixture of philology and music, "music" used quite meta­ phorically (76) . Bertram was on the margins of academic scholarship, but the success of his Nietzsche book earned him a professorship at Cologne, where he remained in spite of Mann's attempt to lure him back to Munich. The later relationship between Mann and Bertram concerns us here only in passing. Their political differences became overt with the advent of Naz­ ism, to which Bertram confessed allegiance. Mann in 1 934 wrote him a letter in which he read him a lesson about the horrors of Nazism and broke off all contact, which later was only quite fleetingly renewed when Mann visited Cologne in 1 955 at a time when Bertram was in disgrace and could not teach or publish. Mann made no attempt to support his application for de-Nazification. The Nietzsche of Bertram, published in the same month as the Betrach­ tungen eines Unpolitischen, has the famous subtitle Versuch einer Mythologie, but this seems to me totally misleading. The book has nothing mytholog­ ical about it; only the introduction called "Legende" is in its phrasing heav­ ily dependent on Gundolf 's view that history writing creates and has to create a legend of the man : "The legend of a person is his effective and living image renewed for each new today" ( 1 0). The kind of literary his­ tory Bertram tries to write is the creation of a figure or a myth. The two are identical in his view : "History is an active creation of an image, not reportage, not copying, preservation of the past" ( 1 4) . Bertram ends this section with a quotation from Nietzsche: "The same text permits countless interpretations. There is no right interpretation" ( 1 4) . But this introduction i s not followed by any kind o f willful arbitrariness in Bertram's interpretation of Nietzsche-quite the contrary. Bertram

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makes a serious attempt to picture Nietzsche a s a person, relying o n in­ sights into Nietzsche's psychology based on his biography. There is a good deal about Nietzsche's ancestry and his unverifiable claim to be of Polish descent, and the book ends with the last breakdown of Nietzsche in Turin and the last letters, in which Nietzsche exalts himself to the heights of a prophet and even a god. Within this framework, Bertram studied Nietzsche mainly within broad topics like "Das deutsche Werden," which belabors his German or supposedly German absorption in the process of becoming rather than of being, or the localities where Nietzsche lived or which Bertram felt to be almost allegorical centers. There is an excellent chapter on Weimar illustrating Nietzsche's relationship to Goethe, which was entirely confined to the Goethe of the last years and of the conver­ sations with Eckermann, which Nietzsche considered the best German book. The chapter on Venice uses that city as a symbol of Nietzsche's long­ ing for the south. Portofino, to which a chapter is devoted, was for Nietzsche almost an allegorical landscape which allowed him to engage in extremes, conceiving it as a symbol of Zarathustra's walking on the heights. These chapters centered on localities are interrupted by a chapter on Adalbert Stifter's novel Der Nachsommer, which Nietzsche loved, and is used as a paradoxical contrast to Nietzsche's own life and feelings. Nothing was farther from Nietzsche than the beautiful quiet soul, the nostalgia for the unrecoverable. Nietzsche's indulgence in the feeling of autumn is then developed in a chapter on the only painter he ever cared for, Claude Lor­ rain. The feeling for the landscapes of Lorrain and for autumnal moods permeates much of Nietzsche's writing. Bertram knows how to use quotations from letters and poems to give an impressive feeling for Nietzsche's general attitude toward life. Napoleon is the subject of a chap­ ter, allowing Bertram to discuss the superman and the glorification of violence. Nietzsche's enmity toward Socrates merits a special chapter to­ ward the end of the book, while the chapter on Judas allows Bertram to take up what Nietzsche felt as his betrayal of Wagner. Bertram comments, interestingly, also on Dostoevsky, whose psychology is the expression of a will not to resist evil, as Nietzsche's own psychology is a form of surrender to evil ( 1 70) . Finally, to summarize Bertram's conception of Nietzsche, it amounts to a faith in the form of a complete betrayal of every faith and the saving of the divine by the murder of God. Bertram consistently plays down the positivistic side of Nietzsche, the Enlightenment period, which is, for in­ stance, played up in a book like Walter Kaufmann's, and he has hardly anything to say about the abstract issues which have absorbed Heidegger

G E RMAN C RI T IC I S M ,

1 900- 1 9 5 0

and Jaspers . One senses throughout Bertram Nietzsche's desire to revive the Greek philosophers before Plato and Socrates and Nietzsche's feeling that the individual is an incarnation of God (390) . Bertram rarely has anything harshly critical to say about Nietzsche, though he obviously does not care for his monomaniacal concern with the "return of the same" (Wiederkehr des Gleichen) . He cannot forget that Nietzsche was the son of a pastor, deeply imbued with Pietism and Lutheranism, and that his most extreme nihilism is only a mask for his sense of a religious mission. Nietzsche , not only in his last years, believed himself to be a prophet who would change the whole history of mankind , though that hubris is also a prophecy of the perdition of the prophet. Nietzsche is constantly seen as anticipating his fate, his breakdown into madness. And his life is seen as a tortuous struggle with himself and his three greatest models : Schopen­ hauer, Wagner, and Goethe, along with the Greeks who are always on his mind . I find this book very new in its method. I cannot think of any real an­ tecedent. It is finely written, somewhat mannered in style; this obviously pleased the circle of George, on the whole. George, however, refused his imprimatur for a long time, shocked by what he thought were trivial ref­ erences to subjects like Richard Dehmel and Thomas Mann's Death in Ven­ ice. Dehmel had to disappear from the printed version, but Bertram insisted and kept the reference to Death in Venice, which according to George was rubbish (29 1 ) . Thomas Mann thought the chapter "Ritter, Tod und Teufel" to be the central one, as it depicts Nietzsche's mind di­ vided between death and the devil, as he saw it in the etching of Albrecht Diirer. The devil in Mephistopheles often becomes in Nietzsche the sym­ bol of the German mind . Bertram was never a formal member of the George circle, but this book shares some of the idiosyncrasies of their publications : no notes, no index, no bibliography. The proximity of Gundolf, which Thomas Mann rec­ ognized in a letter of praise (Munich, 2 1 September 1 9 1 8) , is evident. Mann wrote that if one "places the Nietz.sche alongside Gundolf 's Goethe, one cannot help thinking of the high level of culture, instruction and spir­ ituality at which our literary history has arrived" (Briefe, 7 8 ) . Besides the Nietz.sche book, Bertram merits praise fo r reviving Stifter, appealing constantly to Nietzsche's love for him , and for his devotion to Holderlin, stimulating interest in the newly found hymns. In Moglichkeiten ( 1 958), an early review ( 1 9 1 0) of Flaubert's correspondence is reprinted which, for its time and place, is a remarkably sympathetic account of Flau­ bert's and Maupassant's view of the artist. An obituary in memory of Friedrich Gundolf ( 1 93 1 ) shows Bertram's loyalty to his friend and ,eol-

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league, making only a few reservations about the George circle which Ber­ tram never joined. He could not have written or published the speech after 1 93 3 .

M A X KOM ME R E L L ( 1 90 2 - 1 9 4 4 ) Max Kommerell was the most eminent critic to emerge from under George's wing. But was he a critic? Hans Egon Holthusen, in his long and perceptive essay on Kommerell, concludes that he was "no critic but a scholar" ( 1 56). He is surely right if he defines a critic as a writer who prepares the soil for a new kind of poetry and achieves a revolution of taste such as T. S. Eliot did. But Holthusen seems mistaken when he limits Kommerell's achievement to interpretation, excluding evaluation. Kom­ merell has a scale of values, or rather several scales of values, that he em­ braced in succession. He is a critic if criticism means discourse on literature with the aim of preserving, restoring, and asserting values. It seems also an unduly narrow concept of criticism, at least in the usage prevalent in English-speaking countries, to exclude interpretation from criticism if interpretation is not merely explication de texte, or commentary, but a view of literature from an individual angle of vision. Kommerell was for several years ( 1 924-29) the secretary and traveling companion of Stefan George. After his specialized dissertation, Jean Pauls Verhiiltnis zu Rousseau ( 1 924), his first book, Der Dichter als Fuhrer in der deutschen Klassik ( 1 92 8) , is written in the solemn, exalted style of the George circle and is permeated by its pathos of German greatness and male friendship. Then something happened between Kommerell and the George group : the exact circumstances of the final break remain obscure, though we now know several letters to George and a diary entry which speaks of "humiliations" of an unspecified nature (Br, 1 8 2f.). Still, the outline of Kommerell's emancipation from the George circle and its doc­ trine is clear: Kommerell could not surrender his individuality and accept a claim to "obedience. " He particularly resented Friedrich Wolters' Stefan George und die Blatter fur die Kunst ( 1 930) , which, with George collaborat­ ing, created the image of a spiritual "state" with an orthodoxy enforced on its members. It was a defiant declaration of independence when Kom­ merell chose Hugo von Hofmannsthal as the topic of his inaugural lecture as Privatdozent at the University of Frankfurt (Br, 1 74). Thus the George circle considered Kommerell a renegade and something of a traitor. In Frankfurt Kommerell tried to establish himself as a respectable Ger­ manist. He wrote learnedly on Old German alliteration, on the German folk song and its effect on the German lyric, and finally produced an im-

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mensely erudite study, Lessing und Aristoteles ( 1 940) , written in a sober, scholarly style very different from the preciosities of his early work. Simultaneously with this scholarly activity, Kommerell slowly developed what could be called a third style. The early book on Jean Paul ( 1 933) is still within the charmed circle of George's taste. It freely acknowledges George's merits as a resuscitator of Jean Paul's fame. But the method of the book is radically different from that of Der Dichter a/,s Fuhrer. Later, essays on Schiller, Holderlin, Kleist, Grillparzer, and particularly Goethe construct a new and different image of the German classics. They are collected in three volumes : Geist und Buchstabe der Dichtung ( 1 939), Ge­ danken uber Gedichte ( 1 943), and the posthumous miscellanies Dichterische Welteifahrung ( 1 95 2 ) and Essays, Notizen, poetische Fragmente ( 1 969) . Slowly Kommerell's horizon widened beyond Germany. As a background for Jean Paul, Kommerell had studied Cervantes, Rousseau, Swift, and Sterne. He returned to Cervantes in two essays : one discussing humoristic personification in Don Qµixote (DW, 1 09-46) and one comparing Cervan­ tes' novel with Grimmelshausen's Simplizissimus (EN, 37-80) . In Lessing und Aristoteles close and sympathetic attention is paid to Corneille. An es­ say on the commedia dell'arte shows new understanding for an often de­ spised improvisatory art form (DW, 1 59-73). The taste for the Baroque, stimulated by his admiration for Hofmannsthal, led him to Calder6n, about whom he wrote his last substantial book (published 1 946). He wan­ dered even further afield with a fine characterization of Lady Murasaki's Japanese novel, Tale of Genji, which he read in Arthur Waley's English translation (DW, 83- 1 09). This opening toward world literature and with it the rejection of German classical aesthetics, or at least the acceptance of an alternate taste, can be seen as a symptom of Kommerell's inner em­ igration. His eloquent silence on many topics shows Kommerell's isolation in the Nazi period , when all his later work was written. He was, we are told , quickly cured of some initial sympathies for National Socialist ideas, mainly under the influence of the classical scholar Karl Reinhardt (Br, 2 8 ) . His career was slowed down because o f official disfavor. Only i n 1 94 1 , after eleven years as Privatdozent, did he become a professor at Marburg, where he died on July 25 , 1 944, at the age of forty-two of a liver ailment. He was thus isolated before and during the Second World War and could be rediscovered only when his writings were reprinted in the fifties. But these writings could not then appeal on topical grounds: they were not anti-Nazi, at least not overtly so ; they ignored Marxism ; they did not fit into the tradition of German Geistesgeschichte or Stilforschung. They were not, as has sometimes been asserted, Heideggerian. Kommerell's later writings show occasional traces of Heideggerian phraseology, but his re-

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lationship to Heidegger was far from that of a follower : he seems unaf­ fected by Heidegger's main doctrines of time, being, care, thing, and so forth. He did hear Heidegger lecture on "the thing" in November 1 93 6 (Br, 3 1 8) , and h e struck u p a friendship with two o f Heidegger's pupils, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Gerhard Kruger. In 1 94 1 he visited Heidegger in his Black Forest retreat. A letter describes the visit with considerable detachment (Br, 377ff.). Heidegger seemed to Kommerell "uninteresting as a person" (Br, 383). In a frank letter to Heidegger commenting on Hei­ degger's pamphlet on Holderlin's hymn Wenn wie am Feiertage ( 1 94 1 ) , Kommerell suggests that Heidegger translated this esoteric poem into an­ other esoteric language, his own, and speaks of Heidegger's comment as being not "an explication but a document of an encounter" (Br, 397). He concludes boldly : "Your treatise could be-I do not say that it is-a mis­ fortune" (Br, 402 ) . Heidegger in his answer seems to accept this rebuke because he felt then that even Sein und Zeit was a failure and that he was not yet ready to formulate his new thoughts (Br, 405). Other letters by Kommerell show that he agreed with criticisms of Heidegger's Holderlin interpretation : to Karl Reinhardt he admits that it was not nice of Hei­ degger to make Holderlin sound like him [Heidegger] (Br, 3 8 8) ; to Karl Schlechta he grants that Heidegger's pamphlet has "something clumsy, inappropriate, and pretentious about it, which comes from his under­ developed humanity" (Br, 403) ; to Gadamer he points out that Heideg­ ger's procedure is completely unhistorical (Br, 4 2 3 ) . Thus Kommerell rejects, though respectfully, Heidegger's interpretation of poetry. Kom­ merell could not have accepted Heidegger's concept of explication, "which understands the text not better than the author but differently" (Holzwege, 1 97), or his claim that "interpretation must show what is not in the words and is nevertheless said. To accomplish this, the interpreter must use vi­ olence" (Einfilhrung, 1 24). Rather, Kommerell believed that the task of criticism is "a return to the simplest, which is not always the easiest: the unbiased questioning of the subject matter" (GB, 7). "Explication is not free : it is an obligation" (GB, 76). Kommerell defends the aim of objec­ tivity, the objectivity of the problem (GB, 203). The critic must translate it into the language of his time. The usual dilemma proposed by the de­ fenders of traditional philology-either unhistorical subjectivity or expla­ nation in terms of history-is rejected. Subjectivity would do violence to the text; historical reconstruction would be sterile (GB, 202). Thus Kom­ merell displeased both parties : the Heideggerians and the traditional historians. His neglect, though comprehensible, is not justifiable, since Kommerell, in a brief lifespan, created a critical work of extraordinary vitality and diversity. This great diversity of styles and approaches, the

32

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astonishing power of metamorphosis seem to support his friends' impres­ sion of his protean adaptability and changeability, of his puckish humor and even clowning. But there is nothing of this in his critical writings, which often struggle for expression, grope tortuously for a phrase, or in­ dulge in metaphorical arabesques. Although his skill in classification and schematization occasionally leads him to excesses, he does make genuine critical judgments , if sometimes by implication only. But his books must be taken up, one by one. Kommerell's first book, Jean Pauls Verhiiltnis zu Rousseau ( 1 92 5 ) , is still schoolwork : a diligent dissertation surveying the literature on Jean Paul, the reception of Jean Paul in Germany, and the relation of Jean Paul to Rousseau on the evidence of the major novels. Deliberately, one must as­ sume, George's rediscovery of Jean Paul remains unmentioned ; praise goes out rather to two articles by Johannes Volkelt, the aesthetician, who alone, says Kommerell, penetrated into the depths of the Titan. Volkelt alone knew that Jean Paul's significance is not in his humor but "in the serious cosmic grounding of his sombre and serene figures" ( JV, 34). Kommerell, anticipating his later conception of Jean Paul, says, "The ver­ bally densest passages are the key to his poetic self. Language is first with him, then the world-view, then character, and, lastly, situations" ( JV, 29). Der Dichter als Fuhrer in der deutschen Klassik ( 1 92 8) is a "masterpiece," as Walter Benjamin recognized when he reviewed it admiringly, even though he expressed his distaste for the "phraseological thunder" (I I I : 2 55) and doubted the claim made i n the title for the German classics. The book is no ordinary literary history : it rather presents a scheme inter­ preting the relationships among the main German writers of the time in order to build up an image of a group of men which could serve as model for the reju venation of Germany. The exaltation of these writers as heroes and prophets is so extravagant and might, with our hindsight, be consid­ ered so fantastically unrelated to any concrete reality that we may be tempted to dismiss the book as a mere rhetorical exercise in German cul­ tural nationalism. But we must take seriously Kommerell's conviction that only the poet preserves the image of man in its totality or harmony (DF, 247), that he defeats or can defeat what today is called alienation-the specialization of man, his reduction to a creature of mere understanding or mere sentiment. The poet, for Kommerell, is the noble man who pre­ serves "degree," rank, the eternal scale of values. Only poets, he asserts, originate deep changes, breakthroughs in our times and souls (DF, 3 24). The poet defines his nation and its ideals . The great writers of the classic age are leaders, models, paradigms . At times, Schiller's essay Uber die iis­ thetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe van Briefen is the inspiration.

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"The cultivation of pure illusion, the joy in fine play is not, as people imag­ ine, an indulgence of the weak in blood, but the invention of strong men who are physicians and helpers of themselves and their nation" (DF, 378). It sounds like an exalted aestheticism which even gloats over the isolation of the poet, his opposition to his time. Holderlin, the loneliest of them, the man "struck by Apollo," is most urgently needed in Kommerell's time. It all may seem a harmless, high-minded utopia. But we would misun­ derstand Kommerell. The glorification of the nation's noblemen and free­ men, of its "natural aristocracy," becomes an explicit condemnation of the French Revolution (DF, 2 1 5) , the Enlightenment, of progress (DF, 2 5 2 ) and what he conceives to b e a n American-"a man without God, art, heaven, or soil" (DF, 1 20)-of "liberty" and "self-determination, " slogans which for Kommerell "ooze a pestilential breath" (DF, 2 1 6) . Holderlin is approved for praising "war as the highest national reality. In any one age only one nation can be elect: all other nations are second rank" (DF, 474). The very last sentence of the book greets the "morrow when the young will feel the birth of a new fatherland in flowing union and in the clanking of weapons, until then too deeply buried" (DF, 483). The poetic vocabu­ lary should not disguise the reference to the pressure for German rear­ mament, to the whole revolt against the Treaty of Versailles. The book has another leitmotif: friendship between men conceived in the exalted terms of Plato's dialogues. The physical homosexuality is toned down, though Kommerell, as an early letter shows, agreed with Hans Bliiher's rehabilitation of inversion (Br, 73). It is always contained in the ideal of a physical and spiritual unity of man. Thus Kommerell makes much of Goethe's and the Stolbergs' nude bathing in a Swiss lake, their bodies gleaming in the sun (DF, 1 45), or dwells at inordinate length on Schiller's plans for a drama, Die Malteser, because it concerns a male order and male friendships. The relationship between Goethe and Karl August, the Duke of Weimar, and the fictional friendship between Don Carlos and the Marquis Posa are celebrated. We hear little of women throughout the book. When the context demands it, Kommerell either disparages love poetry such as Klopstock's for Fanny as inferior, lacking the communal enthusiasm of his odes addressed to male friends (DF, 29), or he exalts it into an unearthly realm of heroic friendship like Holderlin's love for Diotima (DF, 453). As the male community is modeled on Greece, so all German literature of the classical period is considered a revival of Greece. The great German writers liberated their nation from the shack­ les of Christianity, from the belief in another world, the old contempt for nature and the human body. Reading Kommerell, one would hardly know that Klopstock was a Christian. There are only two mentions of Der Messias

34

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(DF, 1 9, 3 1 ), and even its title is avoided by calling it " a heroic poem with a spiritual theme" (DF, 1 5) . Christianity, we are told, cannot achieve form : it must combine with ancient Rome (DF, 37). Kommerell dislikes the Nordic mythology introduced by Klopstock and declares confidently that "the German soul has forever-through Winckelmann, Goethe, and Holderlin-been acclimated to Greek images" (DF, 59f. ) . Herder (a cler­ gyman, after all) , whom Goethe met in Strasbourg in 1 770, is depicted as a demonic man in touch with the primitive layers of history. A derivative passage about the Greek dithyramb and Dionysus worship is singled out as foreshadowing Nietzsche (DF, 70) . Herder somehow failed Goethe : he could not be Socrates or Plato to him. He was "locked up by thousand­ year-old norms, long ago suppressed into the unconscious" (DF, 88). The possibility of a "classical friendship" passed . "The whole German Hellas could be born only from the spirit and not from the spirit and blood" (DF, 88). To put it bluntly, Herder is chided for not being homosexual. The whole group of men is subjected to a process of strange rarifica­ tion : particularly Goethe and Holderlin are treated with religious awe. Strasbourg is a "holy spot" because the Baptist [Herder] found there the Anointed [Goethe] (DF, 79) . Karl August needed "the anointment by the poet in order to be a prince" (DF, 1 50) . Holderlin is a seer (DF, 483) who will create a new nation. "His poetry alone assures us that the same Fate rules over us [Germans] as over the Greeks" (DF, 470) . Holderlin gave the Germans "an immense right to power; a feeling of exclusive worth and rank. The land on which the Eagle of God descended knows no right but his own. He who denies his consecration is not only his adversary but also God's" (DF, 477). Goethe, we are told, "is the world-will itself, while the world-will merely used others" (DF, 3 1 ). Nationalist hubris could go no further. But this tone and these claims should not obscure the concrete discus­ sions of personal relationships and analyses of books conceived as a de­ veloping drama : Klopstock to begin with, the first to experience the Greek world, the first poet of a community, of antiquity and friendship, who felt the priestly mission of the poet (DF, 1 2 , 2 3 ) ; then Herder awakening Goethe ; Goethe struggling to emancipate himself from his pious friends, Lavater, Jacobi, and Leopold von Stolberg, and finally coming to Weimar, finding the prince, Karl August, a "demonic nature," to educate and thus to educate himself; then Schiller, at first a conspirator and rebel, finding his leader in Goethe, and then the duumvirate fighting the good fight against Philistinism and obscurantism. Then Jean Paul enters, ostensibly in revolt against the two leaders but in the Titan writing the legend of Weimar which is far from being anti-Weimar. Holderlin, at last, apart and

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alone, lived in a heroic world waiting fo r the birth o f his nation. Even his madness is seen as a "sacrifice for the nation yet unborn" (DF, 468). The grandiose simplicity of this picture is, we might object, achieved by ignoring or slighting large stretches of the literary landscape. Werther and Kabale und Liebe are barely mentioned. The whole Sturm und Drang is dis­ paraged (DF, 97) ; Kant is dismissed as a "disintegrator," a "three-quarter man" (DF, 208, 2 2 7 , 333£.), and the Schlegels are treated with contempt as dishonest scoundrels (DF, 2 70, 277). Finally one may wonder whether the whole concept of German Kl.a.ssik (a term unknown before the 1 880s; see Wellek, 55-89) is not a construct, a projection into the past. Kommerell much later admitted that Kl.a.ssik lived from the self-confidence of one man : Goethe (GG, 375). But in Der Dichter als Fuhrer this ideal of nobility and he­ roism is upheld in its Olympian beauty and set off so starkly that Kommerell can gibe at the "Nordic gloom" of Rembrandt (who dared to depict Gan­ ymede urinating) and the "shapeless ecstasy" of Beethoven (DF, 390). Kommerell's second book, Jean Paul ( 1 933), is totally different from Der Dichter als Fuhrer. Gone is the attention to male friendship, to the monu­ mental, and to the paradigmatic. Still, in the fashion of the George circle, we hear nothing of Jean Paul's biography, his social setting, his minor works, or the literature about him. There are, as in Gundolf 's Goethe, no footnotes, no identification of quotations. The book instead characterizes Jean Paul's mind and art by choosing as a starting point his experience of self-awareness, the illumination which he received when, in I 790, he discovered with some awe that "I am an I" ( JP, 1 1 ) . His art is seen as an "exaltation over the earth," as conveying "the feeling of the insignificance of all earthly doings" ( JP, 26). Jean Paul uses images of the earth as ar­ bitrarily as a musician uses tones ( JP, 2 7 ) . Metaphor, pictorial wit, is Jean Paul's main stylistic device, but there is no symbolization, no animation of nature in Jean Paul. He does not share the pantheism of Goethe and No­ valis. He remained a believer in a supernatural God . When, as in the Ti­ tan, he breaks out of this prison-house of language, man becomes rather a metaphor of nature. A "reversed transubstantiation" takes place ( JP, 29). It is useless to judge Jean Paul's novels in traditional terms. They admittedly lack "world" and "presence" ( JP, 59) . His characters do not act : they meditate or are convulsed by shocks from outside ( JP, 78). Every one of the novels contains a gallery of figures, each of whom has a soul, or rather a temper corresponding to a philosophy of life ( JP, 7 8f.) . The novels have no form, or rather an impure form that threatens at any mo­ ment to disintegrate into its elements ; yet these elements, in Kommerell's estimation, contain the germs of modern art. Jean Paul, Kommerell claims, is an innovator in psychology, comparable to Schopenhauer and

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Nietzsche (JP, 1 6) . He discovered the music of prose, which is not just rhythmical prose ( JP, 1 85 ) ; he is the master of the dream-novel, which would be the pure form of a Jean Paul novel if he had aimed at purity (JP, 1 85). Kommerell, for long stretches, seems to forget that Jean Paul was a humorist, a genre painter, indulging in drolleries and grotesqueries . Only in the second part o f the book does Kommerell expound and crit­ icize Jean Paul's theory of humor and analyze his practice. His humor begins by "laughter of the unconditioned self at its conditioned body" (]P, 30 1 ) . His humor is the highest subjectivity ; it is that very "exaltation over the earth. " Jean Paul's polemic against the presumed solipsism of Fichte only shows their deep affinity. In a surprising last page, Kommerell de­ rives this unfettered spirituality from the situation of the German bour­ geoisie, which since the self-assured Goethe (who was also a poet of the nobility) had lost its greatness. Jean Paul "wanted to arouse the laughter of the gods at Vanity Fair but instead aroused only horror at the rift in his mind , the rift in modern man , the man who has lost the road from spirit to life, who has lost the gesture" ( JP, 4 1 9). Benjamin, i n his laudatory review (1 1 1 : 4 1 3), suspects Kommerell of a "defamation of thinking," of a glorification of irresponsible fancy, and takes umbrage at his view of nineteenth-century German history. Surely Kommerell's emphasis on Jean Paul's affinity with Nietzsche is overdone. Nietzsche thought Jean Paul "a curse in a dressing gown" ( 1 1 1 : 2 54) . But the general tendency of the book to purge Jean Paul's humor of coziness , the idyllic and the sentimental, i s a fine rescue attempt, a true rehabili­ tation. One would have to be as familiar with Jean Paul's sprawling novels-each one like Tristram Shandy and Sartor Resartus conflated and multiplied many times-as was Kommerell if one were to attempt to judge the wealth of details discussed : the stylistic analyses, the account of the dreams, the interpretations of the eccentrics and humorists, of land­ scapes, situations, and scenes . Kommerell's admiration is greatest for the Titan, which he sees not simply as an attack on Weimar and aestheticism but also as a dream picture of the great man and the classical ideal, par­ ticularly in the figure of Albano (cf. DF, 376;JP, 2 2 6ff.) . Yet even for Kom­ merell the admired Jean Paul represents a failure. He becomes a symbol of modern man and modern art, divided within itself, divorced from the gods and the earth. Kommerell's next book, Lessing und Aristoteles ( 1 940) , shows again a complete change of topic and method. It is his only book which displays erudition almost ostentatiously : it has long footnotes and quotes lavishly in Greek, Latin, Italian, and French, tracing the history of the interpre­ tation of Aristotle's Poetics from Robortello to Lessing. The discussions of

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37

catharsis, ethe, hamartia, necessity, probability, the three unities, recogni­ tion, mythos, and so on, deserve the attention of Aristotle scholars. They have been, I believe, almost completely ignored, at least outside of Ger­ many. Gerald Else's massive commentary on the Poetics mentions the book only once in a footnote on catharsis, as if retaliating for Kommerell's own total neglect of modern scholarship in English. Kommerell seems not to have known either Butcher or Bywater, Lane Cooper or L. J. Potts, though his point of view is rather similar to Butcher's. Only D. S. Margoliouth's edition of the Poetics ( 1 9 1 1 ) is twice referred to (LA, 5 1 , 2 5 2 ) . The value of the details of Kommerell's Aristotle interpretation cannot be investi­ gated here. But the book, besides its solid contribution to the history of criticism, has critical aims. Kommerell expounds the neoclassical tradi­ tion : its neglect of creativity, invention, "lived experience," subjectivity, the staples of the German tradition. "What to us [Germans] is self-evident, that the poet expresses himself and that he is the more poet the more immediately he does so, never occurred to anyone in long and happy pe­ riods of the art" (LA, 1 1 ). Kommerell describes Lessing's attempt to found a national German tradition and criticism based on a standard of prob­ ability and nature, a scheme of pure genres, a rational psychology, and a concept of the creative process which would deliberately aim at emotional effect. While Kommerell admires Lessing's theory of tragedy, his bour­ geois humanitarianism, he makes a great effort to describe Corneille's heroic stoicism sympathetically and to see the merits of an aesthetics of effect and even of rhetoric. He sees that Aristotle's concept of tragedy is psychological or (as Kommerell calls it) "anthropological, " that he consid­ ers tragedy "an institution to induce a specific disturbance. At the very beginning of European aesthetics, the very concept of the aesthetic is can­ celled" (LA, 58). There could be no stronger repudiation of the German aesthetic tradition. Still, simultaneously, in the late thirties, Kommerell returned to the he­ roes of Der Dichter als Fuhrer: to Schiller, Holderlin, and, above all, Goethe. His concept of the function of poetry has changed. Gone is the seer of the nation. Poetry rather widens our self-consciousness, makes us aware of our complete human nature. "The soul wants art in order to be com­ pletely its own self " (GG, 2 1 ) . Poetry serves self-recognition (GG, 2 7), tells us what is meant by our moods (GG, 28). Art supplements man. "The real self is reconciled with the lie of our lived life again and again by the truth of its unlived life" (DD, 3 1 ). But this truth is not a simple intellectual truth. "Representing does not mean knowing, and a poet can very well represent something he has not known" (GB, 1 76). Reading poetry, we may be dis­ couraged by the multitude of religious revelations and philosophical sys-

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terns. But if this happens to us, we have not grasped it as poetry : we have ignored what is peculiar to it and really wanted something else, presum­ ably religion and philosophy (CG, 50 1 ) . Poetry has the task of represent­ ing the life of the soul (GB, 1 75), not in general terms, but the life of one soul and one situation. It thus gives us experience of an inner life different from our own (GB, 1 80) . In the essay Schiller als Psychologe Kommerell assimilates Schiller's aes­ thetics to his own. He approves of Uber die iisthetische Erziehung des Menschen and thinks that Schiller's originality is in the insight that "only by art can man be educated" (GB, l g) . Also Schiller's historical scheme is accepted. Modernity means alienation, man's division within himself, and the aes­ thetic state of mind is the only way of reconciling man with himself (GB, i 94). Schiller saw that this alienation is necessary. "We are mutilated," but we cannot surrender abstract reason, technology, and categorical morals. The division is needed for the growth of man. Kommerell wonders only whether Schiller has at all considered the view that alienation belongs to the very nature of man (GB, i g6f. ) . Schiller's concept of art as play implies that art is "the only means of changing man's unconscious" (GB, 1 99). But Kommerell would rechristen Schiller's concept of play as dream, for "the reality of art has since his time become more mysterious, more menacing, more undisciplined" (GB, 205) . Nor can Kommerell be content with the contempt of illusion. "Art allows man an existence which is too wish-less to be called Life, and too demonic to be considered Illusion. It may be dispensable in the ordinary sense and still may be the ultimate condition for the breathing of the soul" (GB, 207). Art cannot be merely a pleasing illusion ; it is "rather an inverted carnival, an ecstasy of truth" (GB, 208). Nietzschean tones seem to sound. Dionysus is near. But such passages of theory are rare. Usually Kommerell settles down to his task of interpretation, close reading, rehabilitiation of specific texts. The two essays on Schiller attempt to free his image from the conventional worship at the shrine of his idealism (GB, 1 33). Kommerell sees Schiller rather as a profound psychologist of the unconscious, of man in action, of man in history. Schiller always shows that idea and action are irrec­ oncilable , that action reacts on the agent, isolates him, subdues, imprisons, and finally destroys him . Schiller appears not as a creator of characters, not as a follower of Shakespeare but rather in the wake of what Kommerell calls Baroque, presumably Calderon and the French classical tragedy ; "his men are places of debate, fields of competing demands" (GB, 1 36). Kom­ merell succeeds in showing how most of Schiller's plays-Wallenstein, the unfinished Demetrius, the plans for Die Malteser and Perkin Warbeck-are

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concerned with one and the same problem : corruption by action, the ines­ capability of transgression and guilt. While the essays on Schiller concern psychology and aesthetic theory, the three essays on the second part of Faust view the poem as being outside psychology, character development, and philosophy. Kommerell feels that we misunderstand Faust II if we try to follow Faust's education. Faust, he shows, is unaffected by the lessons of the world (GB, 1 6) . Faust is no Faust­ ian man (as he was seen before), no world conqueror, only a dike-builder, and even his dikes are illusion (GB, 2 3 ) . Mephisto, in the second part, is hardly a person. He is a form of thought, at times an ideal speaker, a commentator, not a character (GB, 1 3 , 1 8, 60) . The individual acts are almost separate. There is no drama except in the first half of the fifth act (GB, 3 1 ) . Kommerell comments perceptively on each act and scene, most strikingly in two essays on Faust und die Sorge and on the very last scene. He shows that there is no hint of bad conscience in Faust when he is visited by Care (GB, 84) . It cannot be said that Faust repudiates magic (GB, go) . It is rather Care that is rejected, since Care would mean relating every­ thing to another world . The blinding is Faust's death as suffering (GB, 1 1 1 ) , whereas the later physical death is much like death in a fairy tale; Faust dies of death (GB, 1 00£.). The last scene, as Kommerell interprets it, presents the mystery of God's mercy described exactly in its stages. The saving love is here both a pagan and a Christian eros. Death, which is at first annihilation, is answered by creation (GB, 1 3 1 ) . Kommerell con­ stantly insists that in Faust II there are no real characters, but only func­ tions to which the name of a person is given. Faust functions as "self­ assertion against the demons" (GB, 87). Causal relations are replaced by themes which are independent of the action (GB, 79). Faust is a "secular­ ized mystery play" (GB, 3 1 ) . Goethe's Aristophanic, unromantic irony per­ meates it, but in form the second part resembles Calderon more. It is wrong to judge it with the standards set by the first part. Gedanken iiber Gedichte ( 1 943) is almost totally devoted to an interpre­ tation of Goethe's poems. Kommerell tries to establish an ingenious clas­ sification that allows him to comment on individual poems at leisure while implying a scale of values, a progression that is not merely chronological. Kommerell claims that lyrical poetry as self-expression dates only from Goethe, but he is careful not to make Goethe a confessional poet. Goethe rather arrived at self-knowledge only through other things and other men (GG, 59). His experience is always experience understood, interpreted (GG, 74). There is distance and a comfortable satisfaction in Goethe's con­ templation of himself (GB, 59) . Goethe always needed a subject, an oc-

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casion. The advice "know thyself " was always suspect to him. Man knows himself only insofar as he knows the world. Kommerell traces the way from Goethe's early poetry, which feels into nature, animates nature so thoroughly that no outside object remains, to the "Orphic" poems such as Gott und Welt, where the subject has completely disappeared (CG, 2 1 5). Another essay discusses Goethe's lyrical cycles: the Leipzig poems, the Romische Elegien, and West-ostlicher Divan. The comment on the difference between Goethe's Roman love, a comfortable widow, and Tibullus' and Propertius' mistresses is amusing (CG, 2 3 1 f. ) . The Elegien are seen as an effort of simplification, as a sanctification of what Goethe had previously rejected as "a martyr of spiritual love" before his journey to Italy (CG, 239). West-ostlicher Divan is interpreted as Goethe's effort to be sponta­ neous in an elaborate style (CG, 2 69) . The difference between Goethe's own poems and those of Marianne von Willemer is brought out finely. The essay on Goethe's ballads makes great claims for their novelty : the way Goethe, by artificial means, recreated the popular ballad. For Kom­ merell the ballad is the more nearly perfect the more that is left unsaid (CG, 3 1 2 ) ; it must remain mysterious, uncanny (CG, 348f. ) , as if modern man still had something pagan in him. But Kommerell stresses that Goethe belongs to the Enlightenment (CG, 345) and does not succumb to the magic world-view. The ballads are also classified ingeniously, accord­ ing to style, motif, and (modern or ancient) idea (CG, 34 9 ) and are com­ mented upon sensitively. Only occasionally does a quirky opinion mar the effect of sympathetic submission to the text. Why deny that there is an erotic implication in Heidenroslein (GG, 3 2 9f.) or suggest that the motif of Die Braut von Korinth is not classical but Slavic (CG, 362)? Goethe appears as the first practitioner of free rhythms in German in the concluding essay, "Die Dichtung in freien Rhythmen und der Gott der Dichter. " There is no attempt to establish a continuity (GG, 43 1 ) . Rather, Kommerell argues that the free rhythm is at each point in its history an individual creation, a form of inspiration. Kommerell knows of the re­ lation to Pindar and the Bible but makes each poet seem completely different. Goethe's free rhythms-the early hymns on Prometheus, Gan­ ymede, Mohammed , and the Wanderer-use myth as a personal symbol (GG, 453), while Novalis' Hymnen an die Nacht depict the road from an­ tiquity through Christ to the Orient (CG, 455). Holderlin's hymns are often geographical myths (CG, 464) , prophecies not in the sense that Holderlin could announce what is coming but because he reveals what is hidden (CG, 480) . Recanting his earlier view of Holderlin as the prophet of the Germans, Kommerell suggests that the historic event prophesied is present only in the poem (CG, 48 1 ) . Kommerell returns to Holderlin

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several times, interpreting also the drama Empedocles as an esoteric au­ tobiography, distinguishing neat stages in the three versions, or com­ menting on the short odes ; he nonetheless comes to deny, though cautiously and tortuously, Holderlin's relevance to Kommerell's time. Prophecy is only a metaphor (DW, 1 79). If Holderlin speaks of powers such as the ether or the nation, he speaks of something that can be ex­ perienced but not understood, something expressible only in mythological terms (DW, l 76). Art appears here at its highest peak and at its end point; it keeps its secret (DW, 20 1 ) . A final ineffability behind the words is sug­ gested ; Holderlin's madness is its symbol. In a letter written a few weeks before his death addressed to the theologian Rudolf Bultmann, Kom­ merell rejects "the terribly pretentious and arbitrary Christology of Hol­ derlin and Novalis . " These poems may be great as art, but they are "evil horrors possible only among us [Germans]" (Br, 45 2 ) . The repudiation of his own past could not be more complete. The essays on other German topics differ greatly in interest. The piece on Grillparzer as "poet of loyalty" is oddly detached, sometimes dryly retelling the mere plot of a play. The essay on Heinrich von Kleist par­ allels the essay on Schiller as psychologist. Kommerell had commented privately on Kleist's "lack of esprit, lack of serenity, irony or charm" (Br, 2 3 5 ) , but in the essay Kleist is exalted as a great psychologist who "re­ turned mystery to the inner life of man" (GB, 3 1 6) . He is the poet of the "unspeakable, " the riddle, which is, however, unsolvable even though the technique of his dramas is interrogation and judicial trial. The long essay on Das Volk.slied und das deutsche Lied (DD, 7-65) is disappointing in that it ends lamely with reflections on Heinrich Heine which show that Kommerell at that time shared the prejudices against a "poet in the latest West-European sense," writing from Paris, ironic, detached, rootless (DD, 56) . Kommerell's last book is devoted to Calderon. As in the passages on Corneille in Lessing und Aristoteles or in the essay on the commedia dell'arte, Kommerell attempts to make the German reader understand an art which must have seemed obsolete and strange. Kommerell is not satisfied with the usual historical approach: expositions of Calderon's theology, of liturgy, of Counter-Reformation propaganda, of his psychology of faculties, or even of his code of honor. Kommerell sees Calderon's world as one of signs rather than as one of things. What is unique in Calderon is his "scenic imagination : his double gift of poet and stage-manager. Even as a poet he manages a stage ; conversely, his whole theater is spir­ itual and poetic" (C, 1 5) . Calderon's genius is not in the invention of themes for his plays but in "confronting life with a world of images that

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is as closed as a second reality, a world that exists only in art" (C, 1 5) . I n profuse detail, with a n astonishing command o f the enormous output o f Calder6n's plays , Kommerell describes this imaginary and pictorial world where everything stands for everything else (C, 1 9) , where a set of sym­ bols (such as the cave, the man in skins, the world as a stage} , rhetorical devices, types of scenes and characters are used as a treasure trove which the poet can draw upon with security. Calder6n is like a master of cer­ emonies who celebrates the magnificence of this world. "He is the hand which holds up nothing but gems. Nature and history are made up of the unheard-of and incredible" (C, 1 7) . But this celebration conceals the lament of man, the pain of existence, the fear of death and of the other world. In particular, the chapter "Zweifel an einer philosophischen Aus­ legung von 'Leben ein Traum' " deserves the attention of Hispanists, who have, I believe, ignored the book almost completely. Though Kommerell often emphasizes the remoteness of Calder6n's ethos and his ways of thinking (discussing, for instance, the use of what Auerbach calls figura) from his own, modern, Protestant bias, he hopes for a resurrection of poetic drama in the spirit of Calder6n. His own play Das kaiserliche Blut: ein Drama im barocken Stil ( 1 938) was such an attempt. In our context Kommerell's own poetic work cannot be discussed. It was too much out of tune with its time to leave any deep mark. But his criticism must not be consigned to oblivion. Even Dichter als Fuhrer, re­ pellent as it may be, is an astonishing performance that could hardly be paralleled outside of Germany. Who has given a similar monumental image of a group of writers in England, France, or Italy? One could think of F. 0. Matthiessen's American Renaissance ( 1 94 1 ) , but a gulf in tone and ideology divides these books. The book on Jean Paul, the "artist of the future" ( JP, 8 2 ) , is a decisive turning point in the interpretation of that neglected author. Lessing und Aristoteles is a substantial contribu­ tion to a history of criticism, erudite and persuasive. The later essays on the German classics are probably the best examples of close reading, the art of interpretation, in German. The way in which Kommerell eman­ cipated himself from the prejudices of German criticism , from the wor­ ship of Erlebnis, spontaneity, sincerity and came to understand stylized, highly conventional art-in part by being able to spread out into world literature-is so unique in Germany and shows such a grasp of literature in its broadest context that Kommerell can be called a comparatist if comparatist means a critic who has the totality of literature in his mind.

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H UG O VON HOFMA NNS THA L ( 1 8 7 4 - 1 9 2 9 ) Hofmannsthal is famous as a poet, novelist, and dramatist, a man of the theater, and librettist of Strauss's operas ; literary criticism is only a small part of his enormous output. I shall, however, confine myself to his lit­ erary criticism in a strict sense. As a comparatist, I can begin with praise of Hofmannsthal. He has a wide knowledge of the whole of European literature. In accord with a Viennese tradition, his early love went out to the French. Hofmannsthal's first reviews, which he published as a student in the Akademisches Gymnasium under the name Loris, were devoted to works by Paul Bourget, Maurice Barres, Amiel, and other current French authors. He studied Romance languages at the University of Vienna and wrote Uber den Sprachgebrauch bei den Dichtern der Plejade. Later he worked on a second thesis, Studie iiber die Entwicklung des Dichters Viktor Hugo, which, however, he never submitted. Besides these almost professional studies of French literary history, the young Hof­ mannsthal made contact with contemporary poetry. Stefan George brought him a copy of Mallarme's Apres-midi d'un faune (Briefwechsel zwischen George und Hofmannsthal [ 1 953) : 240) , he knew Baudelaire and Verlaine, and he even reviewed the poems of Francis Viele-Griffin ( 1 : 2 57). Hofmanns­ thal's interest in French literature persisted throughout his life. Balzac was his favorite author, to whom he devoted three essays. Later he was much occupied with Moliere (4 : 8 1 ) and also wrote an introduction to a German translation of St. John Perse's Anabase (4 :488). He met Anatole France, Maeterlinck, Gide, and Valery, and he admired Claude!. England was more remote from his interests, yet Hofmannsthal, like every educated German of his time, admired and knew Shakespeare, on whom he gave two speeches. He also wrote on those Englishmen of the late nineteenth century whom one could call members of the aesthetic movement. He admired, perhaps surprisingly, the early poems of Milton, L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, and rewrote Otway's Venice Preserved as Das gerettete Venedig. Much later, he became interested in O'Neill, the only American writer with whom he was ever much concerned. Hofmannsthal knew Italy since his youth, and often visited there. He reviewed D'An­ nunzio's first novel and later Manzoni's I promessi sposi (4 : 4 1 4) . He studied Calderon and used him for his own dramas. He was attracted by the Prometheus of a Romanian dramatist, Victor Eftimiu, whom he read in German translation (4 : 1 87). Ibsen was a great phenomenon of Hofmannsthal's youth. As a school­ boy, Hofmannsthal was introduced to his work and wrote his first article on "Die Menschen in lbsens Dramen. " He wrote little about Russian

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literature, though he occasionally alludes to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Dur­ ing the First World War, Hofmannsthal discovered Czech literature. He published in his Osterreichische Bibliothek a volume on Comenius, the seventeenth-century philosopher and pansophist from Moravia, as well as a collection of three Czech poets of the late nineteenth century­ Vrchlick y, Sova, and Brezina, in translations by the bilingual Prague poet Pavel Eisner. In 1 92 5 Eisner convinced Hofmannsthal to write an intro­ duction for a collection of Czech and Slovak folk songs (4: 1 07 ) . I t would b e a mistake to underrate Hofmannsthal's knowledge o f an­ tiquity. In school, he had learned Latin and Greek, but not so well that he could read the languages fluently. He read much in translation, how­ ever, and was enthusiastic about Rudolf Alexander Schroder's translation of Homer (3 : 87). Sophocles and Euripides obviously provide the back­ ground for his librettos Electra and the A gyptische Helena. Hofmannsthal also had some interest in the Orient. He was particularly attracted by Lafcadio Hearn's books on Japan. As a youth, he loved The Arabian Nights, and the Buddha translation of K. E. Neumann attracted his par­ ticular attention (4 : 65). Hofmannsthal's purview is wide, and his knowl­ edge is inclusive-especially when one compares him to other German critics and even scholars of his time. Finally, Hofmannsthal was an outstanding expert in German and Aus­ trian literature, at least that of the time of Goethe and the nineteenth century. After the First World War, he was also busy with the publication of anthologies, partly for patriotic and financial reasons. These testify to his thorough knowledge of the German novella and of many journalists and critics like Adam Muller and K. W. F. Solger who were little known at that time. Hofmannsthal's short biographies and commentaries are masterpieces of concision. There can be no doubt that he knew much about literary history. This has to do with his firm belief in the power both of tradition and of the Zeitgeist. While he often laments the lack of tradition among the Germans, he is convinced of the "omnipresence of the past" and can't find enough words of praise for the early nineteenth century : "The Germans were never so inwardly rich" (3 : 1 1 3). He de­ scribes beautifully the old Vienna of Bauernfeld's comedies ( 1 : 1 84) and can compare the generation of the Sturm und Drang to late German Classicism. The continuities of literary history were important to Hof­ mannsthal. Thus he sketches a history of the German ballad since Goethe's Braut van Korinth in the article "C. F. Meyers Gedichte" (4 : 2 74f.) and delineates the position of St. John Perse in the history of French poetry (4 : 488-89) . He attempts to describe the models of Schiller and Grillparzer. In the Grillparzer essay, the emphasis on Lessing and Ter-

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ence is surprising. Hofmannsthal's favorite topic in his later years was the idea of the popular theatrical tradition in Austria, in which the drama of Weimar Classicism is firmly rooted. The mystery and morality plays, the puppet show, the Jesuit school drama, and the courtly opera with chorus, artifice, and processions are seen as layers of the truly theatrical forms in Goethe (3 :44 1 , 449), which Hofmannsthal then revived in the Salzburg Festival. The prominence given to the Catholic Baroque in Bavaria and Austria was strengthened by Hofmannsthal's admiration for Josef Nadler's Lite­ raturgeschichte der deutschen Stamme und Landschaften. This was for Hof­ mannsthal the only literary history possible. He praises this work as "great cultural politics" (4:493); it should become "the true house-keeping book [Hausbuch] of the Germans" (4 :496) . Hofmannsthal claims : "No one in our time has done more for the unification of the nation" (4 : 494) . He had reservations about Nadler's biological determinism , though, which later led Nadler into the camp of National Socialism. Here and there one finds a comparative outlook. Thus he alludes to Schiller's place in the tradition which reaches from Corneille through Victor Hugo to Sardou (2 : l 79f.) or he shows his familiarity with Italian, Hungarian, and Polish enthusiasm for Schiller, and his influence on Pushkin, Mickiewicz, Petofi, and Carlyle ( 2 : 1 79). In some early essays, one has the impression that the young ambitious student wishes to lay out his knowledge too ostentatiously. The atmospheric symbolism of Maurice Barres' Jardin de Berenice can hardly have anything to do with Teuerdank and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress ( 1 : 55), and a reference to Saint Augustine's City of God (secondhand from Schopenhauer) is far-fetched ( 1 :57). However, the characters he discusses in his essay on Ibsen's dra­ matic characters are convincingly compared to the heroes of Byron and Jens Peter Jacobsen ( 1 : l oo), and the later, thoughtful comparisons of Balzac and Goethe, Hauptmann and O'Neill, Grillparzer and Kleist reach their peak in his Blick auf den geistigen Zustand Europas. There he draws a sharp contrast between Dostoevsky, whom Hofmannsthal sees as "the intellectual master of the epoch," (4 : 77) and Goethe : "The fabric of [Dostoevsky's] life seems to invite and yield itself to suffering," while Goethe's "intellectual basis [is] the parrying of suffering, wise penetra­ tion and wise renunciation" (4 : 79). Everything I have briefly set down here is supported by Hofmanns­ thal's enthusiastic and tolerant temperament and justified by his theory of criticism. Hofmannsthal read and admired Dilthey ; his obituary of Dilthey associates him with "Lynceus's song, Goethe's deepest song of joy" (3 : 53 ) . Hofmannsthal shows that he understood Dilthey's herme-

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neutics: "There is an element of penetration, meditation and imitation in knowing. Complete understanding is in part identification" ( 1 : 335). Hofmannsthal can praise Ruskin for "his dithyrambic and visionary dis­ solution and re-creation" ( i : i oo), Pater for the "tension and condensa­ tion of the productive fantasy" ( 1 : 2 36), or Merezhkovsky's "creative shaping [gestaltend] criticism" ( 2 : 203), and find Jacques Riviere partic­ ularly congenial, because he "doesn't judge, doesn't dissect, but assists at the intellectual birth of a poem" (Neue Rundschau [ 1 92 5] : 55f. ) . Once, Hofmannsthal regrets that there is no precise translation for the beau­ tiful English term appreciation (Corona 6 [ 1 936] : 70). Appreciation is Hof­ mannsthal's critical ideal. He sees his admiration of all greatness as its own justification : "Who thinks greatly of himself will place himself in relation to all greatness" ( 1 : 330) . Hofmannsthal rejects criticism, which seems to him too rationalistic or analytical. He often denies "pursuing in any fashion the philosophy of art" (2 : 2 64) and admits, "I have almost nothing theoretical in me" ( 2 : 2 8 1 ). Usually, Hofmannsthal is of the opinion that "one should say practically nothing about the arts, can say practically nothing, that it is only the inessential and worthless quality of art which does not recede from discussion of itself by its mute being, and that one becomes that much quieter, once one has more deeply entered into the essence of the arts" ( i : 26off. ) . In the approving discussion of Alfred Berger's Studien und Kritiken, "something weirdly perverse . . . injurious to an innate pro­ found modesty," something "seductively immoral" is ascribed to the dis­ cussion of an artistic experience ( 1 : 3 29), and he often repeats that it is "really false to speak at all about poems" (3 : 383). This prohibition, which is after all contradicted by Hofmannsthal's entire work, can be seen as a parallel to the so-called skepticism toward language (Sprachskepsis) of the Brief des Lord Chandos. The fictive English author admits in brilliant sen­ tences : "I have completely lost the capacity to think or speak coherently about anything" (2 : 1 2 ) . The letter repeats an old insight into the inef­ fable which one can find everywhere. Sophocles has the Chorus recoil in fear from the profound silence of Antigone : "No pain is great for which one can find words . " Othello, Cordelia, and Macduff all speak of the unspeakable, and, since then, reticence-though somehow expressed by speech-has become fashionable ; one need only think of Samuel Beckett. Hofmannsthal knew at that time only the first volume of Fritz Mauthner's Beitriige zu einer Kritik der Sprache, which Hofmannsthal ac­ knowledged without comment in a letter to Mauthner of 3 November 1 902 (Hofmannsthal-Bliitter, H. 1 9-20 [ 1 978] : 3 3 ) , but he was completely right in recalling that Mauthner had expressed doubts about language

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in his early writings and that Novalis had spoken in a fashion similar to his own Lord Chandos. Hofmannsthal had long known that the metaphorical is "the actual innermost model of the human spirit," and that the metaphor was "the true root of all thought and speech" ( I : 2 20 ). As early as 1 897 he wrote that "the unreal, the pictorial expression is the heart and essence of all poetry" ( I : 333). But that is for Hofmannsthal no condemnation of lan­ guage-quite the contrary. In this he differs from Nietzsche, who con­ sidered truth merely as a "fluctuating host of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms" (Werke 3 [ 1 969) : 3 1 4) . Nietzsche is certainly the common source for Hofmannsthal's skepticism about language and the much later views of ultra-skeptical French thinkers like Jacques Derrida. But Hofmannsthal never carried his skepticism about language this far. Metaphor is precisely his most important critical tool ; he expects it to bring recognition, circumscribe the object, evoke it and bring it closer to the reader. In volume three of this History, I showed that the technique of meta­ phorical criticism-often misleadingly called "impressionistic" criticism­ surfaced at the beginning of the nineteenth century almost simulta­ neously in England, Germany, and France with Charles Lamb, Friedrich Schlegel, and Chateaubriand. One can attribute this invention to the demands of a new mixed public which had to be talked into reading; at the same time one must take into account the role of art and theater criticism, which had to resolve the problem of the description and as­ sessment of images and plots. Hofmannsthal belongs to this tradition, which in France with Gautier and in England with Pater and Swinburne sometimes degenerated into capricious fantasizing. Particularly in Hof­ mannsthal's early essays one finds much meaningless arabesque and empty froth as when he describes Ibsen's interior landscape as filled with "moonlight, fantastic shadows, wandering wind and dark seas, still mir­ rors" ( 1 : 1 1 2) , or when he characterizes Swinburne's "golden words" as "red and green gems" which yield "images, beautiful and eternal like the sparkling fruit-bowls of Benvenuto Cellini" ( 1 : i oo) . Or one thinks of the peculiar suggestion to a noble youth to read Grillparzer's Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen: "When the [youth] is beset by dreams, evenings under the white-blossoming trees, let him be Leander, pious before the gods, not suspecting death, swimming on the dark flood towards a tower from which a bright beacon shines full of promise" ( 2 : 35). One can only com­ ment soberly that at that time, and probably today as well, there is no good translation of Grillparzer's drama into English, and that it is read in England and America only by Germanists. This style appears to have

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conformed to the taste of his time ; fortunately, this manner o f writing disappears almost completely from his later works. Usually Hofmannsthal is content to call one's attention to the inade­ quacy of language. Goethe's West-ostlischer Divan calls forth something "inexpressible" (4: 1 64), and one of Goethe's poems has "stanzas of an ineffable magic" (4 : 1 63 ) . The frame of mind of three Grillparzer figures "belongs to those which do not allow for circumscription, for the creative inhabits it, which mocks classification" (4 : 1 2 5). In a discussion of a book by Lafcadio Hearn, Hofmannsthal asserts that "it is just as impossible to give an impression of their [the chapters'] contents as of a new perfume, as of the tone of a voice which the other has not heard" ( 2 : 1 2 3 ) . Hofmannsthal's consciousness o f the limits o f language most certainly strengthened his turn to theater and opera. For Hofmannsthal, gesture and music came to be new avenues to reality. But poetry-real poetry­ was, too. In the 1 9 2 7 talk Schrifttum als geistiger Raum der Nation he speaks of doubt about language (Sprachbezweifelung) as a crisis through which the writer must pass, in order "to rise to a concept of the healing function of language" (4 :402 ) . In an address at the International Congress of Critics in Salzburg that same year, he judges the antithesis between artist and critic as overcome : "In a constant evolution, the position of the critic has approached that of the artist, his inner fate that of the artist until they are hardly to be distinguished . The critics no longer hold up to us the firm criteria of a systematic aesthetics, which still gave a Hebbel so much trouble, but they struggle alongside us on terribly soft ground for something firm , our anxieties are also theirs , and in the stormy darkness that surrounds us, we hear their voices as those who struggle on the sea, hear the lamenting and fearfully warning though helping voices of the storm-buoys" (Hofmannsthal-Bliitter, H. 1 2 [ 1 974] : 4 2 5 ) . This rhetorical conclusion exaggerates Hofmannsthal's own tapping in the darkness. Although he challenged those who judged according to firm criteria, he was himself a pronounced appraiser of literature who declared his taste often and clearly. He was not merely selective ; he also pronounced judgment and condemnation . He was not only a self­ indulgent aesthete, as was currently the opinion, but was already in his early years a moral personality who clearly acknowledged his ethics, his convictions and beliefs. One sees this not only in his very general prej­ udices, as when he condemns the eighteenth century as "having known but reason and the present time" (4 : 4 1 8) , or when he turns from Nat­ uralism and shows no sympathy for Expressionism . His point o f view comes across more clearly i n his brusk, isolated opinions . He suspected very early Hermann Bahr, who later became his

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friend, of insincerity : "He is playing the coquette with optimism. He places himself in the foreground" ( I : 2 3 ) , and "I don't believe Hermann Bahr's Mutter" ( 1 : 1 5) . Although Hofmannsthal admired Ibsen greatly, he sees that The Master Builder is an allegory which makes its point by means of "hollow human-like puppets" ( 1 : 1 1 0). Hofmannsthal devotes an essay in the form of a dialogue to Gottfried Keller, whom he often appreciates. However, "the use of a charming irony" finally makes him impatient. One of the participants in this dialogue finds the mode of composition of Martin Salander "unpleasant . . . even silly" ( 2 : 1 98). Viele­ Griffin is a mere imitator of Verlaine, who lacks all directness ( 1 : 2 2 1 , 2 2 3 ) . Hofmannsthal soon saw through D'Annunzio, who was at first highly admired. He sees something "stiff and artificial" ( I : 245) in him, and often says that he is "no writer . . . but . . . an outstanding artist" ( 1 : 2 7 2 ) . Hofmannsthal hoped for a change after Le Vergini delle rocce but gave up on him when, in 1 9 1 2 , he read a canzone with invectives against Austria. He sees now in him "the most complete rebirth of a Giambattista Marino," even "the face of Pasquino, the face of Pietro Aretino" (3 : 8 2 ) . Even Goethe, whom he admires above all other poets, doesn't escape his criticism. In a treatment of Tasso, a discussion in dialogue format hardly concealing Hofmannsthal's personal views, one speaker sees "something forced . . . or something half untrue" in Goethe's attempt to make people of good society into a subject of drama ( 2 : 2 1 4) . The count­ ess Sanvitale is called "unbelievably unpleasant" ( 2 : 2 1 6) . Hofmannsthal's treatment of the poems of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer-which seems to me one of his best critical works in that it is detailed, concrete, and without rhetoric-shows how much Hofmannsthal despised the histori­ cal masquerade of the nineteenth century, "the world of the educated burgher grasping at everything for himself " ("die Welt des gebildeten, alles an sich raffenden Burgers"; 4 : 2 79), though he found a good word for the "muted , melodic grief " (4 : 2 80) of a handful of poems. He ob­ serves that Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl begins "wonderfully" but then be­ comes "dull and feeble" (3 : 1 09). Manzoni's I promessi sposi, in which he finds something of value, is however, "vapid and harmless, without any depth of feeling whatsoever, without any liveliness whatsoever, any wit," in spite of "taste and worldly wisdom" (4 : 4 1 6) . Between these opinions and the assertions o f ineffability, sometimes concealed by flowery metaphor, gapes a chasm. Hofmannsthal's knowl­ edge of classical aesthetics doesn't help him to bridge the gap, although he understands and accepts its principles. His classical ideal is the whole man, for which he often uses a citation from Addison (mediated by Lichtenberg) : "The whole man must move as one" ( 2 : 8 1 , 86; 3 : 1 2 ;

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4 : 409) . The work of art must also be a whole. Form and content are identical: "If you detach the form from the content, then you are no creative artist. Form is the meaning of content, content the being of form," Hofmannsthal says ( 2 : 2 8 1 ) . He continues : "All exists simulta­ neously in a work of art. The literary work is not only a whole; it must always mirror the great totality of existence," for "poetry is the spirit of the world ; an image of the world is always contained in the work of a poetic genius" ( i : 348). But this world picture is by no means a copy of nature, as the Naturalists would have it : "The poetic task is purification, organization, articulation of the raw material of life" (Aufzeichnungen [ 1 959] : 7 2 ) , in other words, idealization . Hofmannsthal's concept of the symbol is also that of German Classi­ cism, of Goethe and the Romantics. The "suggestion" of French Sym­ bolists does not suffice for him ; he still seeks a mystery behind the appearance. With Goethe, he understood the symbol as the identity of the particular and the general, as a process of the melting together of man and nature. In "Gesprach iiber Gedichte," he invented a completely fantastic account of the origins of this identity. The caveman, suddenly overcome by fear of death, grabs a knife and plunges it in the throat of the ram that lives with him : "That the animal could die for him became a great mystery, a great mysterious truth. The animal died, hence the symbolic sacrificial death." But the existence of man, "in the space of a breath, resolved itself into the alien existence" ( 2 : 1 04). This is for Hof­ mannsthal the origin of all poetry. But one doesn't believe in this fiction and doesn't understand what it is supposed to prove. It appears to be a gruesome, bloody version of "epiphany," of Wordsworth's "spots of time" or of moments of involuntary memory in Proust. In the "Briefe des Zuriickgekehrten" the speaker feels the smallest things, the most subtle impressions, as parts of his existence (2 : 3 2 9). He can then say, "for that reason, poetry never makes one thing stand for another" (2 : 89). I have, however, the impression that Hofmannsthal did not really believe in this reconciliation of man and nature. As far as one can tell from the pub­ lished essays , he was not able to do anything concrete with classical pre­ cepts. The precept of the oneness of form and content, sometimes called by him style, "undivided unity of the higher man," (4 : 1 3 8 ) , and the oneness of man and nature rather hindered his criticism. Hofmannsthal's conception of the writer and his message is also clas­ sical if one takes this as meaning a serious claim to dignity and effect and a serious sense of responsibility. George was certainly an early model ; yet Hofmannsthal distanced himself from George, for he could not suffer George's insistence on domination and-much more than

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George-hoped for broader impact on the masses, the Volk. The differ­ ence between the George circle and other German writers who saw themselves in conflict with the Prussian state of Kaiser Wilhelm and Hofmannsthal, who allied himself until the end of the First World War with the Austrian upper class, is startling. His own noble pride finds expression in his historical essays. In the attractive essay Shakespeares Ko­ nige und grof3e Herren, he explains that "the atmosphere of Shakespeare's work is nobility" (2 : 1 65), even when the action revolves around figures from the common people. Shakespeare's heroes not only have dignity and composure ; they have a "politeness of the heart" ( 2 : 1 70) which Hof­ mannsthal demonstrates by the examples of Lear's tone of voice toward Edgar, Richard I I 's treatment of the groom shortly before his murder, and Cleopatra with her attendants. Hofmannsthal has a strong sense of the importance of reader, public, and posterity. He sees that the prognosis can be dim where the so-called immortality of the writer is concerned : "The work of art perishes as a reality when the souls that could receive it are no longer there" ( 2 : 73 ) . Therefore h e considers "the effect a s the soul o f art, a s its body and soul . . . as its entire being," and sharper still: "A book is, for the greater part, the work of the reader, as the theater is of the spectator" (4 : 1 4 1 ) . Today this view occurs all over, in the aesthetics of reception of the Constance school, and in the reader-response school of America, which carries its thesis so far that the "lesser part" of the book is disavowed. "The reader is the poem," says an American theorist, and opens thereby the portals of caprice and anarchy in criticism. Hofmannsthal has too much respect for the great achievements of mankind. One could hardly speak more warmly and more beautifully of Homer, Goethe, Victor Hugo, or Grill­ parzer. The encomium on Beethoven aspires not only to a hymnodic lyricism-Beethoven is "a divine temple in the shape of a fortress" (4 : 3 1 )-but to the unusual thesis that all greatness in Germany is to be ascribed to the youthful period of Goethe, Schiller, and Herder before 1 800, that Goethe himself thereafter fell silent, so that only in Beethoven did the true voice of the nation remain (4 : 2 3) . The "voice o f the nation," o f the Volksgeist, became more and more the main criterion of Hofmannsthal's criticism . Since his youth he had been particularly struck by the difference between the Germans and the French, the German and French languages, German and French literature. Again and again, Hofmannsthal contrasts the presumedly traditionless German literature, lacking a canon, "knowing neither the attractive continuity of history nor the pliant bond of true national con­ viviality" (4 : 1 56), with the French tradition, which evokes and nominates

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its classics, can trace an unbroken lineage and values clarity, greatness, elan , and above all conviviality. In the introduction to his essay on Victor Hugo, Hofmannsthal formulates nicely the idea of tolerance : "The Ger­ mans in particular ought always to recall that they are neither the spirit of classical antiquity nor the human kat' exochen, but a nation like every other" ( 1 : 368) . Unfortunately, Hofmannsthal did not follow his own ad­ vice. Particularly in the earlier stages of the First World War, Hof­ mannsthal adopted the propaganda cliches of the Axis and perpetrated hateful generalizations : "Two elements interpenetrate in the German; in the same depths of the common power of Krupp-who demolishes the panzerforts and Zeppelin, Kant and Herder take root" (3 : 1 84) . During the First World War, Hofmannsthal became much more aware of the difference between Austria and Germany. An analysis of the Prussian and the Austrian character is clearly loaded in favor of the Austrian ( 3 : 407). In literary contexts, he stresses the particularity of Austrian literature, which possesses a "genuinely living theater, rooted in the Folk" (3 : 336) . Nestroy, "popular, indestructible" is compared to Kotzebue, who was "philistine , therefore quickly faded" (3 : 336) . Very early, Hofmanns­ thal spoke of the "introspective, finely sensitive and anxious [lebensiingst­ lich] Austrian temperament" ( 1 : 85 ) , which he sought in Grillparzer, Ferdinand von Saar, and Stifter. Hofmannsthal admired Grillparzer highly, calling attention to the later dramas in particular : "He is a master at combining the sensual and the soulful; he wished to communicate the soulful directly by means of the sensual" ( 2 : 78 ) . During the First World War, when Hofmannsthal sum­ marized Grillparzer's "political legacy," he showed more about his own continuing hope for an Axis victory, his own conception of Austria's mission , than about the rigors of Grillparzer's political thought. After Grillparzer, Stifter's Nachsommer is for Hofmannsthal "the greatest gift of Austria to Germany" (4 : 20 7 ) . It points to "a highly literary, nonethe­ less direct power of life" (4 : 2 1 6) . But after the First World War, Hof­ mannsthal saw that his ideal of a new Austria was a dream; a visit to Prague in June 1 9 1 7 shocked him severely. Now he writes resignedly to his publisher S. Fischer : "In a certain sense, I am perhaps the only Aus­ trian-I would call Schnitzler a Viennese, but no Austrian" ( 1 2 March 1 9 2 2 ) . He was, as he rightly suspected, quite isolated in his day, partic­ ularly as a critic. Judgment of his critical activity must indeed fall into two parts. His worldview, his cosmopolitanism, his sensitive empathetic capacity, his art of language are juxtaposed with his weakness in the art of critical anal­ ysis . The metaphorical "embroidery" (Stickerei, as Karl Kraus spitefully -

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called it) stands against his "politics of the popular spirit [Volksseelenpoli­ tik]" ( 1 :47). Lacking is a real middle term, a genuine critical touch in spite of convincing (though unsupported) judgments. Hofmannsthal himself declined early in his career all critical ambition. In a letter of 14 December 1 89 2 to Maria Herzfeld , who wanted to talk him into a career as critic, he wrote : "Why shouldn't I be allowed to stick with the witty subsidiary chit-chat. I don't want to make a career of this small talk about professional matters" (Brief an Maria Herzfeld [ 1 967 ] ) . That sounds much too modest considering his essayistic work. It is more than small talk; it is often judgment and characterization. One can also assume that Hofmannsthal was basically right in emphasizing the failure of criticism beside the essence of poetry and that he conveyed much literature to the public of his time, even with his metaphorical fancies. His critical activity is of historical significance, but it must nonetheless be seen-even from Hofmannsthal's perspective-as secondary. It is the poems, the dramas, and the tales that give proof of Hofmannsthal's own title to lasting fame.

R UD OL F KAS SNE R ( 1 8 7 3 - 1 9 5 9 ) Kassner wrote a great number of essays, book reviews, and monographs which could be called literary criticism. They are often straight report­ age, mere description of the books he read, characterizations and brief judgments of value-in other words, a type of criticism he himself con­ demned in others. According to Kassner, criticism should be completely neutral and factual. One sees in many of these articles that he was a student at the University of Vienna and in Berlin of the most prominent scholars, today known as Positivists. This is a title that seems to me mis­ leading, as they were hardly influenced by Positivism as it is understood in England and America, meaning John Stuart Mill, George Eliot, and others. Kassner's point of view is more correctly described as factualism, as an attempt to make literary history into a science in the sense that the author must restrain himself as much as possible and display only the factual state of affairs as he finds them . Actually, criticism as I under­ stand it is dismissed on many occasions. While a student in Prague, I discovered Kassner's Die Mystik, die Kiinst­ ler und das Leben ( 1 900) in the library of the English Seminar. At the time, I admired Kassner's exposition of the Platonic tradition of English poetry from Shelley to Swinburne. Yet on reading it again after so many years, I am disappointed to see that the essays are often superficial, engaging in largely biographical exposition. They hardly come to grips

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with the poetry itself, merely including extracts or paraphrasing the contents of some of the more reportable poems. The first essay, on Shelley, though partly biographical, attempts a di­ vision of his poetry into two groups : the love poems and the polemical poetry, including Prometheus Unbaund, which is described in considerable detail. The next essay, on Keats , quotes a good deal from his letters. Kassner emphasizes the novelty of Keats's conception of the impersonal poet but makes of him an aesthete playing with the masks of life and death . His description of Keats's works moves between high praise of the odes for their special kind of nobility and impressionistic reductiveness of the mood of these poems: "The tone is naive, the poet avoids reflec­ tion, and if he reflects, he does so like a child, with mere exclamations and laments" (3 : 5 1 2 ) . Kassner follows this reasonable characterization with a more fanciful judgment: "Keats chooses the lightest words, prefers simple sentences, the verses are dense like flowers and the whole stanza is full like a flowerbed" (3 : 5 1 2 ) . The third essay, on William Blake, re­ flects Kassner's wide reading, even in the prophetic books and particu­ larly The Faur Zoas. Kassner sees Blake as a glorified Christ, Christian in the sense of Kierkegaard's Christianity (3 : 5 26). Kassner admires the mysticism of the late poems Ahania and the Visions of the Daughters of Albion. He devotes an enthusiastic chapter to Rossetti, whom, with some reservations , he sees as one of the greatest poets. Rossetti's use of met­ aphor is, according to Kassner, often "dry like flowers hammered out in metal and much of it is witty and literary" (3 : 566) . Rossetti seems Ital­ ianate to Kassner, whereas Borchardt had thought him purely English with no real contact with Italian poetry in spite of his translations. Kass­ ner's chapter on Swinburne is a hymn to what seems to him the greatest poet of modern times, a genius after whom William Morris seems a mere craftsman. In the final essay, Kassner admires Browning but stresses his isolation ; Browning was a "lonely improviser, lonely and over-loud at the same time" (3 : 606) . He singles out Pippa Passes, which is as "true and just as deep as Hamlet and Keats" (3 : 6 1 4) . This book thus served as an eccentrically fine introduction to modern and platonizing English poetry. Kassner did not continue in this vein but turned to a philosophy of physiognomy, wherein physiognomy becomes the basis of a general phi­ losophy of nations, of men, and of history. The many works he devoted to this system are permeated with literary allusions and examples. His later writings in this line reflect, moreover, his continued interest in Rus­ sian literature . In a monograph on Gogol (6: 1 89f. ) , he comments on the different national spirits , making the usual gross comparisons : the in­ separability of life and work is particularly German (6: 1 96) ; the German

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glorifies nature, spiritualizes it, while the Russian feels himself in nature more sensual, more corporeal (6: 1 98); the Russian senses the abyss in the simple, the void, that which is without end and without form ; only the Russians have succeeded in showing a good man, the total man (like Prince Myshkin), quite different from the German superman. Yet Kass­ ner offers some interesting comparisons of Moliere's Harpagon and Go­ gol's Plyushkin in Dead Sauls. Harpagon offends against society by his stinginess, while Plyushkin, as sufferer and outcast, offends against life. Gogol's The Overcoat seems to Kassner one of the most Christian stories imaginable. Gogol's writings seem to him examples of Expressionism. This Russian Expressionism strikes Kassner as odd, for it is an art of a people without history (209). It is the antipode of the Baroque, which is always historical. According to Kassner, Gogol has discovered that real commonness is the horrible, the fatal, the flatness of the visage of Ivan Yakovlevich who awakes one morning without a nose. The common people, the impostors like Khlestakov or Chichikov, are kept hidden in Germany, even possibly in Wilhelm Meister. Only in Russia do they appear naked, without form, unclothed, and therefore fantastic, even eternal, and beyond measure "frightening and devilish" (6: 2 1 2 ) . This whole conception of Gogol seems to have been strongly influenced by Merezhkovsky's book on Gogol. It must have been a novelty in Germany, where Gogol was the least known of the great Russian writers. A later work of Kassner's, Buch der Erinnerung ( 1 946), contains charm­ ing and often lively memories of his childhood, as well as of his travels in North Africa, India and the West Indies, and what was then Turke­ stan. More important for a history of criticism are his Erinnerungen an Rainer Maria Rilke ( 1 926), which attempted to highlight the fundamental qualities of his personality and his oeuvre, and a speech posthumously commemorating Rilke's sixtieth birthday ( 1 935). The former begins with an account of Kassner's 1 9 1 4 visit to Duino, the castle on the Adriatic where, in 1 9 1 2 (Kassner mistakenly places it in 1 9 1 1 ) , Rilke had com­ posed the First and Second Elegies. This visit gave Kassner cause to recall Rilke in Paris, their meetings and intimate associations in 1 9 1 0 . Kassner is particularly concerned to point out the intellectual give-and-take that characterized their friendship. They discussed Kassner's views on the necessity of sacrifice in his Satze des Joghi. Rilke's Eighth Elegy was dedicated to Kassner, whose concept of return (Umkehr) Rilke found engagmg. Kassner points out Rilke's essential isolation and self-indulgence, both socially and in matters of religion. From this arose Rilke's love of the

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poor-their poverty made them non-bourgeois. Kassner speaks of Rilke's sympathy likewise for the "old maid" that Rilke found in himself. The beautiful woman per se could be an object of interest only for the dil­ ettante and the corrupt; love was work and contrary to the easy pleasure of the bourgeoisie. From Rilke's attitudes toward love Kassner derives the ornamental and playful qualities of his artistry, stressing Rilke's re­ jection of the self-consciously grand or heroic. Rilke's peculiar greatness, Kassner asserts, was in achieving a unity of form and content and in attempting to overcome art itself through a new mythology, a new art, a program Rilke found in the late poetry of Holderlin. In the much more elaborate speech on December 4 , 1 93 5 , Kassner attempts to locate Rilke in the history of ideas. He begins with a physi­ ognomical comparison of Nietzsche and Rilke, whereby Nietzsche is rep­ resented as the prophet and Rilke as the seer. Kassner addresses the posthumous volume Spate Gedichte and Rilke's letters, with high praise for the latter both as a key to the former and for their own beauty. He takes the occasion to defend the letters against the charge that they were composed with eventual publication in mind . Kassner finds the charge irrelevant since, according to him, Rilke never worked within the tradi­ tional German antithesis of Art versus Nature or its other permutations. In fact, says Kassner, all rhetoric that relies on such antithesis and ab­ straction is foreign to him . Kassner traces this back to Rilke's feeling for space , particularly one's inner space, and devotes the remainder of his speech to describing the spatial metaphors that permeate Rilke's work and their origins in Rilke's early interest in geometry and numbers. He compares Rilke to the actress Eleonora Duse, to whom he attrib­ uted the capacity to change the space of the stage into that of her soul and world . This almost geometrical aesthetic conception governs the mu­ sic of Rilke's verse, music which fills the space between body and soul; this Kassner calls the order of Orpheus. Nonetheless, Kassner is quick to point out, Rilke was no romantic, for he depended more on crafts­ manship than on intuition. In this he is allied to such sculptors as Rodin and such poets as Keats-though he is set apart from the latter by a greater depth , thus creating a world of space from one of surfaces. In this context, Kassner calls attention to the angels of Rilke's second Elegie, whom he calls "spaces of being" ( 2 6 2 ) , making it clear that Rilke's angels are not those of the Catholic-Christian tradition, nor purely platonic, representing a realm of thought and abstraction. For the space of Rilke's own soul, Kassner claims, is not that of a man plagued by sin and guilt but of one who has never been banished from paradise. Rilke's soul therefore remains whole, not split into spirit and being, flesh and spirit,

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reason and gratification ; this accounts fo r the absence o f any sense of the tragic or of history in Rilke's work. Kassner concludes the essay by pointing out Rilke's insusceptibility to Freudian analyses of creativity, since there was also no gap between Rilke's dreaming and his seeing. Finally, an essay on Thomas De Quincey in the collection Transfigura­ tion ( 1 946) is worth looking at, representative of both Kassner's critical methodology and his enduring interest in English literature. Kassner skillfully and accurately summarizes the contents of De Quincey's Confes­ sions of an Opium Eater, retelling it with a subdued sympathy which comes out particularly at the end, where the figure of De Quincey is exalted and given an almost saintly halo. De Quincey's suffering is seen as real and visionary at the same time. He becomes a representative of man who is both an animal-like creature in his thirst for physical enjoyment and at the same time a person who articulates something, like a higher music and magic, thus reflecting Kassner's own belief in a transcendental realm. The essay is well written and full of sympathy for the man and his ideas, but is marred at the end, at least to my mind, by the absurd view that De Quincey as a nineteenth-century liberal would have liked to get rid of the "De" of "De Quincey. " Kassner constantly calls him Quincey, a preposterous form which shows that he quite wrongly thought that the De in De Quincey is like the German "von," a title conferred by the state. Kassner belabors this misunderstanding at some length along with the mystical exaltation of the man as a secular saint. The essay might serve as an example of the contradiction in most of Kassner's critical works between the mystical physiognomies and the richly founded factual lib­ eralism of his political convictions, which for a time brought him, in his German nationalism, rather close to the tone of National Socialism, even as he remained a patriotic Austrian. In fact, he suffered a great deal of hardship in the Second World War, though he was finally able to flee from Germany to Switzerland , where he died in 1 959.

R UD OL F B OR C HA R D T ( 1 8 7 7 - 1 9 4 5 ) Rudolf Borchardt i s a n exceptional figure i n German criticism, i f only by virtue of the passion and eloquence with which he wrote and the fierce, stubborn dogmatism with which he asserted his views. This elo­ quence is most obvious in a volume of speeches (Reden; 1 955) transcribed from shorthand reports. Borchardt was able to speak for hours, impro­ vising on subjects that interested him and his audience, who for a time flocked to his lectures in Munich and Zurich. These speeches are in themselves a remarkable achievement, though their contents more or less

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overlap with the printed essays on similar topics, often almost identical in tone. Sometimes it is difficult to understand how an audience could have followed this torrent of eloquence devoted to a wholesale condem­ nation of his time, often not referring to any specific author or phenom­ enon but engaging in very general denunciations of our civilization. Borchardt belongs , as do practically all cultivated German citizens of the twentieth century, to those who deplore developments in Germany in the later nineteenth century. Borchardt was born in Konigsberg, the son of a Jewish businessman. He studied Romance philology and classics in Heidelberg, Bonn, and Gottingen. He was immensely erudite and had a considerable knowledge of all the early medieval languages : Provem;al, Old Catalan, Old Italian, and, of course, Old and Middle High German . When he became aware of his poetic vocation, he broke with philology without acquiring a de­ gree, hoping to make a living as a freelance poet. He discovered George and later Hofmannsthal, and his admiration for Hofmannsthal went to the most extravagant lengths. One could quote numerous passages referring to Hofmannsthal as "the greatest poet ever" (Prosa, l : 1 2 1 ). In the early Rede iiber Hofmannsthal ( 1 902 ), his enthusiasm for Hofmannsthal reaches heights that are almost incredible . While recognizing that George has raised the general level of poetry (Reden, 6 2 ) , Borchardt gives the crown to Hofmannsthal, who is seen as the creator of a great style, "the highest purely poetic expres­ sion of this age." Der Tod des Tizian, for instance, supposedly contains the most beautiful German verse since Faust. Borchardt established personal relations with Hofmannsthal and wrote a letter to the periodical Hof­ mannsthal edited , called the Eranos-Brief ( 1 9 24), which, while celebrating Hofmannsthal , is really a kind of autobiography with reflections mainly on the academic life and situation of Germany in the later nineteenth century. He has much to say about Hofmannsthal's classicism and "the unceasing music of your sorrow" (Prosa, l: 1 2 7) . I n Borchardt's conception of poetry and its history, the model of Croce is decisive, even though he often uses quite different terminology. Borchardt delivered a laudatory lecture on Croce in 1 92 6 prophesying that his eminence in the twentieth century would be comparable to that of Petrarch in the fifteenth , Erasmus in the sixteenth, or Voltaire in the eighteenth (Prosa, l : 1 3) , a prophecy which has not been fulfilled . Like Croce, Borchardt distinguishes between poetry and literature ( prosa, i : 3 8), and he shares Croce's admiration for the revival of the concept of the poet in Vico and Herder in the eighteenth century. While Borchardt condemns the Enlightenment in general in the most extravagant terms,

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he admires the discovery of the real essence of poetry made by Herder and Hamann, who speak of it as the mother tongue of the human race. Much is made of the Swiss Bodmer and of the whole revival of folk poetry and poetry in general which he sees as rooted in natural feelings and tradition. Borchardt detests the attempt to reduce poetry to "verbal art" (Reden, 1 2 5), as the poet is not a craftsman but is obsessed : "he doesn't write, he gets written" (Reden, 1 3 1 ) ; and poetry is always religious, "the whole Fatherland" (Reden, 1 39). The Germans are constantly cele­ brated as "that European nation which is deepest, fullest, and warmest of soul" (Reden, 1 1 0), which however was corrupted during the nine­ teenth century and become a mob. His condemnation of nineteenth-century poetry after Goethe is so sharp and wholesale that we have to mitigate that impression by glancing at Borchardt's own anthology Ewiger Vorrat deutscher Poesie, even though the anthology itself, like any anthology, is difficult to criticize. One cannot understand at times why so many poems by Schiller and Goethe are admitted and why certain well-known poems of the classics are excluded. The postscript is almost entirely devoted to a harsh review of nineteenth­ century German poetry, which is barely represented in the anthology. For instance, Chamisso is excluded completely as false and insincere, and Heine is reduced to a few fragments. The selection is totally arbitrary and in some ways incomprehensible. One sees that Borchardt avoids the ironical and jeering prosaic Heine, actually the pioneer of modern Ger­ man poetry. The postscript goes on to disparage Paul Heyse, C. F. Meyer, and even Nietzsche. I am puzzled by the high praise Borchardt bestows on Friedrich Riick­ ert for what seem to me the very stuffy academic specimens he includes, and one wonders about the harsh criticism of Annette von Droste­ H iilshoff. Borchardt, like Hofmannsthal, was inclined to the viewpoint of Josef Nadler, whom he praises in several essays as the greatest literary historian. Borchardt embraces his tribal view of German literary history, though he gives it an even more original and possibly extravagant inter­ pretation. The colonization of Germany in the early Middle Ages con­ stitutes the first stage of antiquity's impact on German literature. The second is that of the twelfth century, which for Borchardt is the great period of the Middle Ages. He defends what he calls a "science of me­ dieval antiquity" and writes interestingly on the continuity and coherence between Provern;al and Italy in the thirteenth century and the earliest medieval German poetry. A whole construction is then implied in which Dante is confined to the Middle Ages, with no influence on the Renais­ sance. Borchardt goes as far as to quote Francesco Flora that the