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From a lecture



You summoned me to speak to you about a poet of our times, or about a few poets, or perhaps about poetry as such. You are therefore presumably curious to hear what I might have to say. We are all young here, and thus, to all appearance, nothing could seem more convenient, more harmless. I don’t think it would be very difficult for me to put together a few hundred adjectives and verbs that would provide you with fifteen minutes of entertainment. I believe this chiefly for the very reason that I know we are all young and I have a good sense of which tune you like to dance to. It is singularly easy to ingratiate oneself with the generation to which one belongs. After all, “we” is a beautiful word, the lands of our fellow citizens unfold like vast backdrops stretching to the seas, even to the stars, and beneath our feet lie all the yesteryears layered in transparent abysses like prisoners in confinement. And speaking of the poetry of today, there are several varieties that are agreeable but deceptive. And all of you in this room are especially used to hearing talk about the arts. You have an infinite number of catchwords and proper names in your heads, and they all mean something to you. You have advanced to such a point that nothing whatsoever any longer displeases you. Indeed, I would have to conceal the fact that most of those names mean nothing to me, absolutely nothing; that not even the smallest part of what these names signify satisfies me in any way. I would have to conceal the fact that I have come to believe, in all seriousness, that one should hardly speak of the arts at all, indeed can hardly speak of them at all; that it is only the most insignificant and meaningless aspects of the arts which do not, by their silent nature, elude discourse entirely, and that the further one delves into the innermost depths of the arts, the more silent one becomes. So I would have to conceal the great difference in our ways of thinking. But the spring outside and the city we live in, with its many churches and many gardens and many kinds of people, and that strange, beguiling, acquiescent element of life itself would come to my aid with so many colorful veils that you would be led to believe I had made sacrifice with you when in fact I made sacrifice against you, and you would praise me for it.

         On the other hand, I believe it might not be excessively difficult for me to adjust myself, in an unexpected and almost diverting opposition, to your tastes and your aesthetic habits. But whether you would receive the propositions in which I might attempt to unfold such matters with the smile of the augurs and the over-seasoned feuilleton readers, or whether you would listen to me with a restrained aversion, in no case would I flatter myself that I had been understood by you; in no case would I suppose that you had taken cognizance of my opinion otherwise than formally and in semblance. I would find myself attacked with arguments that do not strike me and defended by arguments that do not shield me. I would sometimes feel helpless like a child not yet of age, and other times beyond all possibility of mutual understanding, like a man grown too old, and all of this on my own ground, in the one area I may possibly understand something about. For a certain sense of good manners would prevent you from shifting the debate into neighboring territories such as history, the history of manners, or sociology, which are entirely closed off to me on account of my ignorance. Yet even on my own modest field, I would see you wielding heavy weapons against what I consider mere scarecrows, and I would see you lightly pressing across the brooks I hold to be abyssally deep and mortally strong, with eternal borders. But I would be the most suspicious if you were to agree with me, for then I would be doubly persuaded that you had taken figuratively all that I had meant literally, or that some other delusion had intervened.

         All the praise I can bestow upon my poet would appear to you meager: only thinly and faintly would it sound across a broad chasm of silence to reach you. Your critics and judges of art, when they praise, spew from their mouths like water-spouting Tritons: their praise rests upon fragments and parts, mine upon the whole; their admiration upon the relative, mine upon the absolute.

         I believe that the very conception of the whole in art has altogether been lost. Nature and imitation have been fused into a monstrous compound, as in the Panoramas and Cabinets of Wax Figures. The idea of poetry has been reduced to that of an ornate confession. Certain words of Goethe’s are to blame for this enormous confusion, too subtly figurative to be correctly grasped by biographers and note-takers. One recalls those perilous metaphors about the occasional poem and of “writing something from one’s soul.” I cannot think of anything more akin to panorama than the way in which “Werther” has been handled in the Goethe biographies, with those shameless specifications as to how far the material substance of the experience extends and where the painted background begins. They have thereby created for themselves a new organ with which to enjoy the formless. The decomposition of the spiritual in art has, in recent decades, been jointly promoted by philologists, journalists, and pseudo-poets. The fact that we no longer understand each other at all, that I find it harder to speak to you about a poet of your time and your language than an English traveler might truly be able to convey to you something of the customs and the world-conception of an Asiatic people, this stems from a great heaviness and ugliness that many dust-devouring minds have brought into our culture.

         I do not know whether, amidst all that wearisome chatter about individuality, style, conviction, mood, and so forth, you’ve lost the awareness that the material of poetry is words, that a poem is a weightless web of words that—through their arrangement, their sound and their content, through their linking of the memory of what is seen and the memory of what is heard with the element of movement—evoke a precisely circumscribed, dreamily lucid, fugitive condition of the soul which we call Stimmung, mood. If you find your way back to this definition of the lightest of the arts, you will have cast off something like a tangled burden of conscience. The words are everything, the words with which one can evoke what has been seen and heard into a new existence and, according to inspired laws, present it as something in motion. There is no direct path from poetry to life, nor from life to poetry. The word as bearer of a life and its dreamlike fraternal word which may appear in a poem strive apart and float past one another, alien, like the two buckets of a well. No external law excludes from art all reasoning, all wrangling with life, every direct reference to it, every imitation; it is simply that such things cannot live there, no more than a cow in the treetops.

         “The value of a poem”—I avail myself here of the words of an author unknown to me but of worth—“the value of a poem is not decided by its meaning (for otherwise it would amount to wisdom or erudition), but by form. That is to say, by no means anything external, but rather that profoundly stirring quality in rhythm and sound by which, in all ages, the originators, the masters have distinguished themselves from their successors, the artists of a second order.

    Nor is the value of a poem determined by any single, however felicitous, detail in a line, stanza, or larger section. It is the composition, the relation of the individual parts to one another, the necessary sequence from one to the next, which alone marks poetry of a high order.” To this I add two remarks that almost arise on their own:

    The rhetorical, wherein life itself appears merely as material, and those reflections clothed in elevated language, have no claim to the name of poem.

    Concerning that alone which is decisive—the choice of words and the manner of their placing (rhythm)—it is, in the last resort, the artist’s tact and the hearer’s receptivity that must judge.

    This, which alone constitutes the essence of poetry, is most grievously misapprehended. In no art do I know an element more shamefully neglected than the adjective among the newer German so-called “poets.”  It is either carelessly inserted or employed with a deliberate garishness that benumbs everything. Yet even worse is the inadequacy of rhythmic sensibility. It seems that almost no one remembers that this is the lever of all effect. One would place a poet above all Germans of the last decades if one could say of him: he has adjectives that are not stillborn, and nowhere do his rhythms run counter to his will.

    Every rhythm bears within itself the invisible line of that movement which it can evoke; when rhythms grow rigid, the gesture of passion concealed within them becomes mere tradition, like those from which the ordinary, insignificant ballet is composed.

    I cannot truly comprehend those “individualities” that have no distinct tone of their own, whose inner movements accommodate themselves to an accidental rhythm. I can no longer bear to hear their Uhlandian, their Eichendorffian measures, and I envy no one who still can, nor his coarse ears.

    One’s own tone is everything; he who does not sustain it forfeits that inner freedom which alone can make the work possible. The boldest and the strongest is he who can place his words most freely; for there is nothing more difficult than to tear them from their fixed and false conjunctions. A new and daring combination of words is the most wondrous gift to the soul, no less than a statue of the boy Antinous, or a great vaulted gate.

    Let us be artists in words, as others are in white and colored stone, in chased bronze, in purified tones, or in dance. Let us be praised for our art, the rhetors for their conviction and force, the teachers of wisdom for their wisdom, the mystics for their illuminations. If, however, one desires confessions, they are to be found in the memoirs of statesmen and men of letters, in the confessions of physicians, of dancers and of opium-eaters. For those who know not how to distinguish the material from the artistic, art does not exist at all; though, to be sure, for them also there is writing enough.

    You are astonished at me. You are disappointed and find that I am expelling life from poetry for you.

    You are astonished that a poet should praise rules to you and should see in sequences of words and in measures the whole of poetry. There are already too many dilettantes who praise intentions, and the utterly worthless has its servants among all heavy heads. But pray be untroubled: I will give that life back to you. I know what life has to do with art. I love life. Or rather: I love nothing butlife. But I do not love it when one tries to fit ivory teeth into painted human figures or sets marble statues on the stone benches of a garden as though they were promenaders. You must unlearn the demand that one write in red ink in order to make it appear that one writes in blood.

    I have spoken to you too much about effect and too little about soul. And yet, for I regard effectas the soul of art, as its soul and its body, its core and its shell, as its entire, complete being. If it did not act, I should not know what it was there for. But if it acted through life, through what is material in it, I should again not know what it was there for. It has been said that among the arts there is perceptible a reciprocal striving to leave their own sphere of effect and to pursue the effects of a sister art; and as the common goal of all such straying elsewhere, music emerges clearly—for it is the art in which the material element has been overcome to the point of oblivion.

    The element of poetry is of a spiritual nature; it is the floating, infinitely multivalent words that hang suspended between God and creature. A well-intentioned school of poets of the half-past age has brought about much rigidity and narrowness of understanding by being overly liberal in comparing poems to cut stones, busts, jewels, and edifices.

    But what I’ve said above explains why poems are like those unassuming but enchanted cups in which each person sees the riches of their own soul, while impoverished souls see scarcely anything.

    From the Vedas and the Bible onward, all poetry can be seized only by the living, and enjoyed only by the living. A cut stone, a beautiful fabric always yields itself, but a poem perhaps only once in a lifetime. A great sophist reproached the poets of his age with knowing too little of the inwardness of words. But what do the people of this time know about the inwardness of life! Those who know not aloneness nor togetherness, not proudness nor humility, not weakness nor strength—how shall they recognize in poems the signs of solitude and humility and strength?

    The more fluently someone speaks, and the more powerful in him the thinking that is mere semblance, the farther he stands from the beginnings of the paths of life. And only by walking the paths of life—through the fatigues of its abysses and the fatigues of its summits—is the understanding of spiritual art earned. But those paths are long, and their ceaseless experiences wear one another down with such relentless force that the futility of all explaining, of all discoursing, settles upon the heart like a deadly yet divine paralysis, and those who truly understand are once more silent, like those who truly create.

You summoned me to speak to you about a poet. But I can tell you nothing that his poems cannot tell you, neither about him, nor about other poets, nor about poetry as such. Of what the sea is, one must least of all ask the fish. The most one learns from them is that it is not of wood.






Notes

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First printed in Die Zeit on 16 May 1896.

Though not named, the poets that Hofmannsthal refers to are Johan Peter Eckermann and Stefan George.