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Stefan George - Studies
The extreme
statement of this attitude of mind is to be found in Huysmans,
and receives explicit expression in the following passages from
A Rebours. In a preface written twenty years later the author
describes how the work came into existence. It was to have
been a brief fantasy:
Je me figurais un monsieur Folantin. . . qui a ddcouvert
dans l'artifice un derivatif au degout qui lui inspirent les
tracas de la vie et les moeurs americains de son temps.
In the novel itself the hero Des Esseintes describes nature thus:
Cette sempiternelle radoteuse a maintenant use la debon-
naire admiration des vrais artistes, et le moment est venu oil
il s'agit de la remplacer, autant que faire se pourra par
l'artifice.
These are the ideas which are put into practice by the hero of the
Algabal poems, the Late Roman Emperor Heliogabalus, and
they represent in extreme form the ideas of George--exaggerated,
over-coloured, the idea of artificiality forced almost into a cari-
cature of itself.
In the spiritual pilgrimage of George to which each volume
of poems bears witness, Algabal represents the stage in which
artificiality is glorified and a complete abandonment to it is
essayed and tested as a possible solution in the search for a
satisfying mode of life. George, like Huysmans, rejected it,
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? but in the working out of the problems of his own being in
terms of the emperor-priest he created a work of richness of
colouring, rhetorical splendour and a certain outmoded beauty.
The identification of George with Algabal is of course not com-
plete. It is not so much with the perverse and cruel tyrant, which
according to history he was, but with one who was both priest
and emperor and thus set aside by his position from the ordinary
life oFlnan^in that sense 'dedicated' as George felt himself to
_ be as a poet.
The work is dedicated to the memory of King Ludwig II of
Bavaria, the patron of Wagner, the lover of the arts, who sought
to realize in concrete form the dreams of his romantic soul,
who rejected life as he experienced it in the civilization around
him, attempted to create an artificial mode of life of his own and
ultimately died by drowning. In the Aufschrift George addresses
the king as 'a derided martyr king' and speaks of himself as
'his younger brother'.
Algabal is divided into three parts: Im Untergrund; Tage;
Andenken. The first describes the emperor's subterranean
palace and gardens, and it is in this part that the rejection of
nature and the glorification of artificiality appear most clearly.
The second part, Tage, records Incidents and situations in the
life of Algabal during the years of his rule. The third, Andenken,
gives, as its title suggests, his memories and musings upon that
period of rule after it is over. Part I has four poems: the first
describes in a general way the realm he has created.
Wo ausser dem seinen kein wille schaltet
Und wo er dem licht und dem wetter gebeut.
The second describes the golden room, the third the silver
room of his underground palace; the fourth his subterranean
garden. Thus he speaks of it:
Mein garten bedarf nicht luft und nicht warme/
Der garten den ich mir selber erbaut
Und seiner vogel leblose schwarme
Haben noch nie einen friihling geschaut.
Tage gives impressions of the life and of the character of
Algabal. In him there is also that duality which appears in
different forms in these early poems of George: tender and cruel,'
-, beauty-loving and vindictive, a thinker and a voluptuary, asking
himself after he has put his subjects to death whether he has
V- really hated them; satisfied with himself that he has killed a
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? 'pair of lovers sleeping beneath a tree and thus prevented them
from waking to a life which would have interrupted the enjoy-
^> ment of their love; putting a slave to death who had disturbed
his doves while he was feeding them, and then causing the slave's
name to be inscribed in the golden goblet from which he drank
vtiie following evening.
This collection of poems is unlike much of the early works of
George in so far as the poet has made a coherent symbol for
himself in the person of Algabal and lived through a certain
phase of experience in his imagined hero. The same pattern
recurs, though less definitely, and with an unnamed hero in
Die Hangenden Garten. But this phase of experience is now
over--a solution has been tried but has proved inadequate;
new experiences must be sought and put to the test. At the end
of Algabal stands the poem Vogelschau--'Weisse schwalben
sah ich fliegen' (white swallows I saw flying); it represents a
turning away from the exotic, from the world of 'Unnatur',
symbolized in underground palaces and gardens, from the
artificiality of a realm constructed entirely by the hand of man
in defiance of nature. The 'bunte Haher' (gaily coloured jays)
of the 'Wald der Tusferi' (wood of Tusferi) of the second stanza;
the 'Raben' (ravens) and 'schwarze Dohlen' (black daws) of the
third stanza are representative of all that, and we come in the
final stanza to the 'weisse Schwalben' again but now no longer
'in dem Winde hell und heiss' (in the bright and burning wind)
but 'in dem Winde kalt und klar' (in the cold and clear wind).
This poem forms the transition from the atmosphere of the
world of Algabal to one in which there prevails a more tonic
and astringent air, which gives the atmosphere for the next
collection: Das Buch der Hirten.
The poems of this collection have as their setting the Greece
of the idylls, not the heroic Greece but the every-day pastoral,
bucolic life. The second collection, Das Buch der Sagen und
Sange, has the Middle Ages for its setting; the third, Das Buch
der Hangenden Garten, the Orient. In none of the collections
is there any attempt at an archaeological, reconstruction of a
past age. The civilizations chosen are symbols of states of mind
of the poet--stages in his search for illumination of the signifi-
cance of life. Each one represents an attitude to life, of which the
? figures which appear in the poems are representatives; and the
poems in all these books are concerned with imaginary figures.
v These may well be projections of the poet's inner life, but each
poem considered individually and apart from its setting still
remains a self-contained evocation of a person, a mood, a situa-
tion, thus carrying out the principle announced in Die Blatter
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? filr die Kunst that the aim of jjoetry was presentation, not re-
flection, the transformation of the poetical idea into & concrete
^ form. In no one of the poems appears a character vouched for
^. by history; but the figures, though imaginary, are nevertheless,
typical of a situation or of the period of which they are repre-
_ sentative. In this collection appears clearly for the first time the
very marked habit of the later George to present characters,
which interest not so much by their individual qualities as by
their existence as types, so that a certain statue-like quality is
common to most of them.
The contrast between Algabal--George's most colourful and
brilliant achievement so far--and Das Buch der Hirten could
not be greater. From the violent exoticism of the earlier work
he passes to an atmosphere of cool serenity, and the colours
are correspondingly subdued to pastel shades; from the rejection
of nature and the febrile determination^to create an artificial
,world, to the acceptance of the ordinary life of nature, and to
the picture of a life lived in accordance with it--in accordance
with nature, that is, as it is moulded by immemorial custom and
manifests itself in the communal life of man, unchallenged by
the arbitrariness of the will of the individual. Here are no
passions at work, but a calm following of that which seems to
be the natural order of man's life, though the presentation is
tinged by a certain melancholy, which is indeed apparent in all
the early volumes: the sisters who on the anniversary of the
death of their bridegrooms recall their loss; the shepherd
who set forth for the day in charge of his sheep; the wrestler
who is unaware of the fame which his skill has brought him; the
youths who have been brought up to be servants in the temple
but are not chosen for that office; the first born who must wander
forth from their homes to seek a living elsewhere. All these
figures accept their fate unquestioningly, and of their accept-
ance a feeling of serenity is begotten, which is deepened by the
poetic treatment itself: the measured, moderate statement, the
coolness of presentation. Nothing here excites or distresses
intensely--everything has the calm and simplicity of figures on
a frieze: the music of the verse is very subdued and solemnly
moving; its metrical form the long unrhymed line.
The periods chosen in these collections are, as has been said,
symbols of states of mind of the poet. Thus though they are
successively investigated and presented, they exist also con-
temporaneously. In turning away from bucolic Greece, George
is not rejecting it as he had rejected the world of Algabal.
No single period symbolizes his whole ideal of life; it is in the
combination of the three that this consisfsT"~ ~~
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? It has been said that George's ideal of life lies in the synthesis
of the three elements of which man is compounded: 'Geist,
Seele und Leib' (spirit, soul and body); though in his later
works more importance is assigned to 'Leib'. The terms as used
by George defy an exact definition but it may roughly be said
that 'Geist' represents the living in accordance with ones destiny;
'Seele' the elements of enthusiasm, devotion and loyalty ^'Lfiib'-
^tne recognition of the body^and_the sensuous. Ufe. In passing
""from Das Buck der Mr ten to Das Buch der Sagen und Sange
we find ourselves again in a world--the world of the Middle.
-Ages--which seemed to George at this time to have produced
. ^harmonized and unified life, just as the Greece of the earlier
collection had done,T)ut of a different kind. Again we have poems
presenting characteristic figures of a period--for George it is
largely the period of chivalry and song, with religious devotion
as an integraTeTement of it. Thus: the youth keeping watch
before the altar on the eve of his being dubbed a knight (Sporen-
wache); the companions in arms; the hermit; the knight and
his lady parting at dawn; the group of knights-errant in search
of the grail; the knight who sleeps when he should be watching;
poems suggested by the 'Minnedienst' of the twelfth century;
a hymn in praise of the Virgin--all motifs taken from the civiliza-
tion of the Middle Ages. Again there is no attempt at antiquarian
resuscitation of a past age. George lets his imagination wander
through mediaeval times and identifies aspects of his own inner
life with certain figures, certain characteristic situations. The
theme of dedication and passion in conflict recurs once or
. twice: in Der Ritter der sich verschlief, and more markedly in
Sporenwache, in which for a moment the youth forgets his
religious dedication during the vigil and the picture,of a maiden
he had once seen passes before his thoughts,
The beautiful youth in heroic pose or hVneroic function is
one of the characteristic figures which appears in all these early
collections. It is central with George, for it is the symbol at this
stage of 'das schone Leben'; it occurs again in Der Teppich des
Lebens and ultimately transcends even the symbolical and be-
comes the realization of 'das schone Leben' in the ideal figure
of Maximin in Der Siebente Ring and Der Stern des Bundes.
The poems of the next collection: Die Hangenden Garten1
are more akin to the poems of Algabal, though without their
violence and cult of artificiality. After the bucolic world of the
shepherds and the heroic world of the Middle Ages, the world
of this oriental ruler is assayed as a symbol of the sensuous life.
1 Schoenberg set fifteen of these poems to music in 1906.
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? Thus after the life of the spirit and the life of soul, the life of the
hody is examined as a possible mode from which satisfaction
may be obtained. As in Algabal a certain vague succession of
events, hinted at rather than stated, forms the string upon which
the poems are threaded, so in this collection there is a central
figure, though he is not named. Ruler and priest, he neglects
his functions as such for love; half of his country is overrun by
the enemy; he goes as a minstrel slave to the court of another
ruler; gives this up, too, from an inner dissatisfaction and a
sense of the valuelessness of all activity. In the last poem but one,
he is seen looking back upon all he has lost. He hears voices
from the stream--the last poem, Stimmen im Strome,--which
call to him and promise him recovery, refuge and peace. But
even this may not bring satisfaction. Beyond it is annihilation,
dissolution, absorption into the elements. This poem with its
floating, swaying music (largely due to the frequent use of pres-
ent participles) represents this in symbolical form in the voices
of the water nymphs who draw him down to the pleasures of
their life beneath the waves, promising him ultimate bliss in his
dissolution and transformation into the waves themselves.
In so far as the three worlds represented in the three books
are spirit, soul and body, at the end of the third book the syn-
thesis of the three has not been achieved, though no one of
the three has been rejected. It is no doubt logical that the end
of the book which is symbolical of 'Leib' should be dissolution,
since that is the end of the body and all that pertains thereto.
A comparison between the last poems in each of the three collec-
tions reveals a positive note only in the second one, which re-
presents 'Seele' in the hymn to the Virgin Lilie der Aue. The
last poem in Das Buch der Hirten is called Das Ende des
Siegers and suggests that the hero in the last resort will be over-
come. Wounded by the monster which escapes him, with a
wound that will not heal, he ends in pitiable decay. It would
seem therefore that in so far as no synthesis has yet been
brought about between the claims of spirit, soul and body, the
most positive and enduring value is that offered by 'Seele'. The
conflict 'Weihe-Leidenschaft' which appears in the earlier
collections fades out with Das Buch der Hangenden Garten.
The next volume establishes a connection with the earlier
ones by its very title. The poet still upon his 'Pilgerfahrten',
after essaying all these modes of experience, having rejected
some and turned aside from the exclusive acceptance of any,
turns back to his own soul and holds communion with himself
in. the park-like landscape of Das Jahr der Seele. The settings of
the earlier collection had been drawn from the historical past
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? or the exotic or the artificially imaginative. Here the back-
ground is nature, but nature moulded and controlled by the
hand of man and almost in its particular form created by it.
The background is to a great extent revealed by suggestion
rather than by direct description; but with the colours, the
atmosphere, the feel of Autumn, Winter and Summer as much
conditioning the 'Stimmungen' of the 'ich' and 'du' of the poems
as conditioned by them. What belongs to nature exclusively and
is not the effect of the hand of man is primarily the ordered pro-
cession of the seasons, and even from this Spring has been omitted.
The volume entitled Das Jahr der Seele1 falls again into three
parts, of which the first is the one covered by the title; the second
part is devoted to poems concerned with personal friends; the
third is called Traurige Tdnze. The first part has a further tri-
partite division: Nach der Lese (Autumn), Waller im Schnee
(Winter) and Sieg des Sommers. In all of them the atmosphere
of the particular season is sensitively caught and expressed.
In a preface warning the readers not to try and identify places
I or characters George wrote: 'Seldom are 'ich' and 'du' so much
the same soul as in this book'. With this indication from George
it seems justifiable to assume that^hey represent the soul of the
poet communing with itself. The first part of the book suggests
a point of repose, of self-collection after the experiences recorded
in the works already passed under review ^s it perhaps in nature
after all that the illumination will be found? But there seems a
weariness, a sense of the fruitlessness of his quest, there is no
Spring in the year of his soul, and a certain melancholy hangs
over the whole giving it a music of its own. There is almost a
renunciation of hope and the acceptance of a second-best until
the real illumination, now almost despaired of, makes its appear-
ance. Throughout the work the fiction of a 'du', of the presence
of a second person, is maintained; and this 'du' is a gracious
visitor, Vfho understands and soothes the distress of one who is
seeking direction in life and awaiting illumination. The sugges-
tion, at least, that the companion (a woman) is not the Beloved
herself but one who must be accepted in her place, is given in
poems two and three. But the atmosphere of the whole work is
tentative, vaguely expectant, and indeed the Angel, who is to
bring the illumination in Der Teppich des Lebens, is prefigured in
the lines:
Driiben an dem strand ein bruder
Winkt das frohe banner schwenkend.
1 Schoenberg set one poem from this volume to music; Webern also
one for mixed chorus a capella. ".
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? But all is symbolical--the 'ich' and the 'du', the seasons of the
year; and the park in which the lovers walk is the soul of the
poet. '~
. The poems are all written in four-lined stanzas and with few
^exceptions in eleven syllabled lines,- so that throughout the
i>worlcTeminine rhymes predominate. It is no doubt partly this
which gives to this collection a musical quality which has made
it the most popular and the most quoted form of George's
works. It is not even necessary to perceive the symbolic mean-
. ing in order to realize that here are poems which will bear com-
^ parison in purely jDoetic quality, even in the most conventional
acceptance of the term, with favourite anthology pieces in
German literature.
Umkreisen wir den stillen teich
In den die Wasserwege miinden!
Du suchst mich heiter zu ergriinden
Ein wind umweht uns friihlings-weich.
Die bla? tter die den boden gilben
Verbreiten neuen wolgeruch /
Du sprichst mir nach in klugen silben
Was mich erfreut im bunten buch.
Doch weisst du auch vom tiefen gliicke
Und scha? tzest du die stumme tra? ne?
Das auge schattend auf der briicke
Verfolgest du den zug der schwa? ne.
Doubtless this poem is symbolical, though its symbolical sig-
nificance is notapparent on the surface, deeper than which the
,ingenuous reader need not penetrate in order to perceive its
poetical beauty, and this fact makes its acceptance more easy.
The same may be said also of the poem in Waller im Schnee:
Die blume die ich mir am fenster hege
Verwahrt vorm froste in der grauen scherbe
Betriibt mich nur trotz meiner guten pflege
Und ha? ngt das haupt als ob sie langsam sterbe
Um ihrer friihem bliihenden geschicke
Erinnerung aus meinem sinn zu merzen
Erwa? hl ich scharfe waffen und ich knicke
Die blasse blume mit dem kranken herzen.
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? Was soil sie nur zur bitternis mir taugen?
Ich wu? nschte dass vom fenster sie verschwande . . .
Nun heb ich wieder meine leeren augen
Und in die leere nacht die leeren hande.
Like the former poem it can be appreciated without its symbolic
reference which, however, is here more easily recognized: the
sickly flower, the poet's decision to cut it, the sense of emptiness
which is the result of his action--all this refers to some inward
circumstances, such as the deliberate crushing of a hope, an
ambition, a love.
The second part of the volume consists of poems addressed to
George's personal friends, and circumstances connected with
their reunions. Part of their significance is inevitably lost to
those readers who are unacquainted either with the friends or
with the circumstances, but there are some poems among them
concerned with George's own inner life and situation at this
time which are illuminating in that respect. The third part of the
collection, Traurige Tdnze, moves back again into an atmosphere
tinged with the melancholy of the poems of Das Jahr der Seele.
Like these they are all in four-lined stanzas, but here each poem
consists of three stanzas. The length of line has a greater variety
than in those of the earlier groups. Some--Dies leid und diese
last for instance--are lyrics of weariness and despair. This
weariness is lightened in some of the poems by the determination
to make the best of what is available, to be thankful for what is,
since the great illumination has not come; to welcome autumn
because there has been no spring. The mood sways up and
down, from poem to poem. 'lf they are dances they are sad
dances. As in Das Jahr der Seele there is the assumption of a
companionship of 'ich' and 'du' and many of the poems are
addressed to the 'du'. The following poem gives the prevailing
mood of the whole group: acceptance of and gratitude for what is,
with a sense that it is a second best, that something has been missed
which would have solved all problems and realized all aspirations:
Es lacht in dem steigenden jahr dir
Der duft aus dem garten noch leis.
Flicht in dem flatternden haar dir
Eppich und ehrenpreis.
Die wehende saat ist wie gold noch/
Vielleicht nicht so hoch mehr und reich /
Rosen begru? ssen dich hold noch/
Ward auch ihr glanz etwas bleich.
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? Verschweigen wir was uns verwehrt ist /
Geloben wir glu? cklich zu sein
Wenn auch nicht mehr uns beschert ist
Als noch ein rundgang zu zwein.
But throughout the prevailing melancholy of these poems there
is* a sense of expectancy; and the coming of illumination which
is heralded in the last poem of Waller im Schnee by the appear-
ance of the brother on the shore who 'beckons, waving his
joyous banner' is repeated in the lines:
Mein feuchtes auge spa? ht nur fern
Nach diesem Einen aus der gern
Die harfe reich und wohlgestimmt
Der unsre goldne harfe nimmt i
Nor is there absent an element which varies the dominating
tone of melancholy: the note of admonition or self-encourage-
ment--for as in Das Jahr der Seele, the 'ich' and 'du' must
ultimately be considered parts of the poet's own soul. Thus one
poem concludes with the lines:
Nicht vor der eisigen firnen
Drohendem ra? tsei erschrick
Und zu den ernsten gestirnen
Hebe den suchenden blick!
\
And there are other poems in which the same note is struck, v
\
VI
The tendency to see George as a figure of masterfulness, of
complete self-possession, to which the later volumes lend some
evidence has been extended to cover the whole of his life. This
is a simplification of his personality which is not justified. Up
to and including Das Jahr der Seele there is a continuous refer-
ence in the poems to states of mind which are far from indicating
such a convinced attitude of self-possession. As has been sug-
gested, all these earlier collections express a seeking and proving
of possible modes of life, and in all of them there are poems
which are the expressions of uncertainty, misgiving, doubt and
even of world-weariness and despair, so that on the whole it
may be said that a sense of melancholy prevails, not least in
Das Jahr der Seele and in Traurige Ta? nze. It is only from Der
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? Teppich des Lebens onwards that the personality of George, as
v revealed in his poetry, presents the appearance under which
he is generally envisaged, and emerges as that of one whose attitude
to life is a positive one: masterful, autocratic, even dictatorial.
For the poems included in Der Teppich des Lebens (1899),
above all in the poems of the Vorspiel, announce the illumina-
tion, the promise of fulfilment, the attainment of which had been
the aspiration recorded in all the earlier poems. The Vorspiel
is also in a more inward sense a prelude--a prelude to the revela-
tion of Maximin, which forms the core of the following volume:
Der Siebente Ring. Der Teppich des Lebens has again a tripartite
division; Vorspiel; Teppich des Lebens; Lieder von Traum
und Tod. With this volume a new idea enters George's poetry
--the idea of a message. The idea of a mission had been implicit
in his poetry from the beginning; now it becomes more explicit,
\ fortified by the message. In the Vorspiel, it is as yet a message
delivered to him by the Angel; but in the later volumes it will
become a message which he himself is called to deliver to his
country and his generation. In the twenty-four poems which
make up the Vorspiel the ideal of life which is to be his is
announced by the Angel to him, and the various tentative modes
represented in the earlier volumes coalesce and are crystallized
inj:he ideal of 'das schone leben', which is henceforth to
determine his thinking.
The first poem describes the appearance of the Angel to the
almost despairing poet: he comes as the messenger of 'das
. /schone leben', and it is noteworthy that his voice is almost
identical with that of the poet-- 'und seine stimme fast der
meinen glich' from which it is to be assumed that here again--
as in Das Jahr der Seele--there is an externalization of a part of
George's own inner life, the part that has now found an adjust-
ment to the claims of spirit, soul and body. , in which adjust-
ment 'das schone leben' is realized, and the manifestation, of
Jdas schone leben' is the body. In the successive poems--all
poems of equal length (four quatrains of solemn and sustained
movement) the Angel announces and the poet accepts a certain
mode of life. He will live in solitude, at the most only among a
few chosen companions all of whom share his ideals with him.
The course of his life will now be altered: no longer will he jour-
ney to foreign lands; the landscape of his native land, the land-
scape of the Rhine will be his chosen province, from which he
will speak to his own people.
It is at this point that George takes up the rfile of the German
poet; and though this is often held against him, the charge
seems hardly a legitimate one. His assumption of this rdle
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? contains no chauvinistic elements; and if he assumes it half
way through his career, it must be remembered that most other
German poets, Holderlin, for instance, were such from the be-
ginning, and it is odd to find fault with a poet for being primarily
the poet of his own country. Moreover his Germanism is so shot
through with Greek elements that he might have said with
Holderlin: 'The Greeks are indispensable to us'. Indispensable
because in his view (as in Holderlin's) Germans could only real-
ize themselves as Germans by assimilating the ideal life of
Greece to their lives. In the seventh poem, the Angel lays downs
for the poet the course he is to pursue: turning aside from all \
controversy even with the sages, contemplating life from a point
of vantage, assessing the value of things but taking no care to
acquire them; following not Christianity but the spirit of
Greece--''Hellas ewig unsre liebe'.
The poet has descended now from his ivory tower to the
street. 'Du stiegest ab von deinem hohen hause zum wege. '
_ There he will still remain, a stranger from a distant shore to the
multitude whom he has hitherto avoided. They cannot under-
stand him; but now and again a kindred spirit will comprehend
his ideals and a community will be established:
Nur manchmal bricht aus ihnen edles feuer
Und offenbart dir dass ihr bund nicht schande.
Dann sprich: in starker schmerzgemeinschaft euer
Erfass ich eure bru? derlichen hande.
Already in these poems of the Vorspiel appears the prophetic
idea of a new community of race and people. The poet is to take
up his place among those leaders and rulers in the world of the
spirit whose influence has spread over centuries. He feels his
mission as a leader in that world confirmed; and he conceives
of history as the sum of these great and heroic personalities--of
whom he himself is one--who are the vital factors in the develop-
ment of mankind. The Vorspiel is the central manifesto of
George's doctrine of life.
The actual Teppich des Lebens forms the second part of the
collection and is introduced by the poem Der Teppich (The
Tapestry). This explains the title of the volume. The poems are
to give pictures of characteristic figures which make up the
pattern of fife, illuminate aspects of it and declare its signifi-
cance. They are individual figures, but all presented with a
simplicity, abstractness and sometimes allusiveness which
make them rather types and symbols than differentiated indi-
viduals, and with a general tendency to see them heroically as
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? figures taken from a primitive form of life. All the poems are in
the same form as those of the Vorspiel. They include such poems
as Urlandschaft--a picture of a primaeval landscape into which
man makes his irruption; Der Freund der Fluren--the gardener
tending his plants; Der Jiinger--the disciple; DieFremde--the
strange woman who comes to the village, creates disturbance
there by her allurements, and disappears leaving behind only
the child which she has borne there. Characteristic figures
are represented already in Das Buch der Hirten and Das Buck
der Sagen und Sange with their settings of antiquity or the
Middle Ages. George's method here is not new to him, but it
has received confirmation from the message of the Angel. It
continues throughout the later volumes. Such poems may be
described, making use of George's own title for a number of
poems in this collection, as Standbilder--Standbilder der
Menschheit (Statues of the human race); heroically seen, some-
times presenting in rather abstract fashion typical aspects of life,
and calculated to stimulate a sense of human greatness and
pride, though not all represent admirable aspects of human life.
The next volume, Der Siebente Ring1, which did not appear
until eight years later, is considerably larger than any of the
others and is of primary importance, for it embodies the ideas
enunciated in the Vorspiel of Der Teppich des Lebens, embodies
in fact in the person of Maximin 'das schone leben', whose
messenger had visited George in the earlier volume. It is divided
into seven parts, and the fourth, the central one, entitled
Maximin, is the core of the work, anticipated in the first three
parts, and reflected upon those that follow it. It is in this volume
that George appears not only as the poet with a message, but
also as the seer; and thus the thought content of his poems
acquires increasing importance. George himself in the opening
poem entitled Das Zeitgedicht anticipates the surprise which
his contemporaries will feel when faced with the change in his
poetry and in the poet himself; that he whom they formerly
blamed for his aesthetic withdrawal from life (whilst they
themselves rushed into it with uproar and hideous greed); he
whose inner struggles and torments they had failed to recognize
--that he should have exchanged his pipings for the brazen
notes of the trumpet. Where they see change however there is
in reality continuation, for it may be that all beauty, strength
and greatness will arise tomorrow from the calm flutings of a
youth.
Zeitgedichte are poems which attack contemporary social and
1 Schoenberg set two poems from this volume to music, Webern five.
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? political abuses and prevailing attitudes of mind which are felt
to be evil. They are nothing new in German literature. In
Heine's second collection of poems one division bears this
title. But Heine's Zeitgedichte are more direct in their attack
and often more scurrilous; those of George are basically con-
cerned with heroic judgments passed on the actual conditions
of civilization. In a second poem bearing the same title Das
Zeitgedicht describes itself as the voice of conscience, disturbing
the complacency of the contemporary world. George, unlike
Heine, uses the symbolic method of presentation which he has
maintained throughout: . pictures of the heroic past such as the
Porta Nigra of Trier; the tombs of ancient German kings at
Speier; or heroic and distinguished personalities such as Dante;
Nietzsche; Leo XIII; Boecklin; all these serve to stress by con-
trast the degeneracy of the present age and of the masses. This
part of the volume, however, and the following one (Gestalten)
stand somewhat apart from the poems which form the core of
the book: the third, fourth, fifth and sixth parts-- Gezeiten
(Tides); Maximin; Traumdunkel and Lieder. In these is cele-
brated the achievement, the manifestation of 'das schone Leben'
in the person of Maximin, the beautiful, gifted youth who is
deified by George.
It is this deification of Maximin that constitutes the stumbling
block for many an appreciative reader of George's poetry; and
indeed the various subtle and metaphysical interpretations of
the poet's cult of Maximin, offered by disciples, seem almost
calculated to make things worse. For Maximin emerges not
merely as a symbol of the godhead, but as the god himself:
Dem bist du kind / dem freund.
Ich seh in dir den Gott
Den schauernd ich erkannt
Dem meine andacht gilt.
The nearest approach to this relationship in literature is that
of Dante to Beatrice: but Beatrice is the symbol of Divine
Truth, not Divine Truth itself. In Maximin, in his presence as
long as he lives, in the cult of him after his death (a certain
parallel may be seen in Novalis's cult of the dead Sophie)
George finds the god incarnate, as well as the realization of 'das
schone Leben' which the Angel had announced to him. In
him the deity is embodied, and the body deified. George met
Maximin only a year or two before the boy's death, and he re-
mained ever after the centre of a quasi-religious, quasi-mystical
experience. This adoration is prefigured in earlier writings of
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? George, above all in the idea that nothing really exists except
in so far as it is 'gestaltet', receives form. From this hypostasis
of form there is perhaps only a step to the belief that the godhead
must manifest itself in the perfect body, indeed that the perfect
body is the godhead.
A statement in a later number of Die Blatter fiir die Kunst
(1910) will elucidate, even if it does not make acceptable, this
conception of the divine, attributed by the writer to the Greeks:
. . . of all the utterances of the thousands of years which are
known to us, the Greek idea that the body is god--the body
which is the symbol of transitoriness--was by far the most
creative,. . . by far the boldest and the most worthy of man-
kind, and surpasses in sublimity every other, including the
Christian one.
(The words 'der leib sei der gott'--are printed in large capitals. )
But whatever attitude may be taken to this experience of
George's, it is nevertheless clear that in this transformation of
a human being into a divinity George's seeking and striving
for significance in life found its fulfilment. Indeed it was pre-
pared by his exclusive concern with the education of male
youth and the continually recurring figure of the beautiful
young hero in the earlier poems. Thus there is a certain logic
in the Maximin climax to George's life. The figure of Maximin
dominates the whole of Der Siebente Ring, but there can be no
doubt that the poems which celebrate the more human relation-
ship of the master to the disciple, the delight in his presence,
the intensity of affection he evokes, the poignancy of grief felt
at his death are more impressive poetically, have a more spon-
taneous movement and possess a greater warmth than those
poems which are concerned with the deification of the boy. In
the poems celebrating the purely human relationship it would
seem that the spirit of love--and it was its only full flowering in
George's life--has broken down barriers and released constraints
of expression which are clearly felt in other parts of George's
oeuvre. In the division Gezeiten, in which the human inter-
course between George and Maximin finds expression, George's
poetic quality is at its finest, and some of this quality flows
over into the songs in the latter part of the volume, awakening
sympathy and tenderness for a grief which was manifestly so
deeply and poignantly felt. But this has reference primarily to
Maximin'the human being; with Maximin the god, the attempt
is made to surround him with all the attendant circumstance of
a godhead who triumphs over death and remains a living being
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? in the minds of his worshippers. And the reader remains
fundamentally unmoved. It is unlikely that many, outside of
George's own circle, will feel able to accept Maximin as a religious
revelation, even though they may accept him as a poetic inspira-
tion. They may rather regard ah the religious paraphernalia
as a sign of the urgent need of George's generation to find a
substitute for the gods who had disappeared. This, it seems, is the
only explanation for the strange fact that a youth of sixteen
years, unknown and unobserved until George observed him,
. endowed with whatever beauty and gilts of personality, should
- be found suitable to support divinity and should be divinely
proclaimed by so selective a spirit as George, and as a god im-
posed upon his followers. But the iigure of Maximin thus con-
ceived becomes for George a centre of light and a symbol of
^perfection; and by the standard of this symbol George tested
and indignantly rejected contemporary life. In the last volumes
of his poetry he judges, reproves, warns, admonishes and
foresees imminent destruction. Thus in Der Stern des Bundes
(1914) and Das Neue Reich (1928), the last two volumes, the
spirit of the Zeilgedichte and the spirit of the Maximin poems
combine to form a unity of inspiration.
In the poems of Der Stern des Bundesjil is the voice of
the poet-seer, poet-prophet which prevails. VVhere in the Zeit-
gedichte the evils of contemporary civilization are denounced
implicitly by reference to figures who stand in contrast to it,
in the later volume the attack is more direct. Raising his
voice as the seer, George warns against the degeneracy of
modern times, castigates the weaknesses and falseness of de-
mocracy, refutes the belief in a fallacious prosperity, pours
scorn upon materialism and the falsely optimistic idea of prog-
ress based upon it, deplores the absence of heroism, and fore-
sees still greater evils to come. It is the voice of one crying in
the wilderness that the day of judgment is at hand. The message
continues to be expressed in abstract, symbolic terms--no
reference is made to concrete instances, no names are mentioned
to be held up to obloquy, no place is named. Often the setting
seems to be suggested by classical themes or borrowed from the
Bible. Through this world of symbols the figure of George
passes, proclaiming the wrath to come, the destruction which is
now inevitable. In one poem he contrasts the present with
past times, scorning the belief of the present generation that
their times show greater freedom and tolerance than the Dark
Ages. These at least had a god on whose behalf cruel things
were done, but modern times have set up an idol in his place
and into its jaws they hurl their best. In another he cites, with-
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? out naming him, Nietzsche as the last warner, the last to show
the possibility of salvation. But the people paid no heed: they
continued to talk, to laugh, to mock. The warner departed--
now it is too late, no arm now will hold up the spokes of the
wheel which is rolling down into the void.
Der Stern des Bundes is a very homogeneous work, consisting
of short poems each of a dozen lines or so, mainly unrhymed.
It has a division called Eingang, followed by three books. The
spirit of which Maximin is the embodiment broods over the
whole. In the Eingang there are poems which suggest a com-
munion between the poet and the dead youth, who strengthens
and confirms him in his task. The first book contains the poems
as already described, hortatory, denunciatory, menacing. The
second book, like the Eingang, is concerned with Maximin and,
recalling the days of their earthly friendship, asserts a commu-
nion with him after his death. The third book contains poems of
admonition, which seem to be addressed not to a wider public
but rather to a chosen circle of initiates. And indeed in a pre-
fatory note attached to the public version George explains that
the book was intended originally for the friends of his inner
circle; but that appearing as it did immediately before the out-
break of war in 1914 it was interpreted as a breviary for the
men on the battlefields. This however was not his intention: 'The
events of 1914 made the minds of a wider public receptive for
a book which might have remained a secret book for years'. A
certain quasi-mystical note is present in these poems which is
new in George. For instance, the poem which begins:
Ich bin der Eine und bin Beide
Ich bin der zeuger bin der schoss
Ich bin der degen und die scheide
Ich bin das opfer bin der stoss.
It is only too easy to see how the words of the final chorus could
be interpreted as referring to the war upon which young Germans
were setting out, and how readily a nationalistic meaning could
be attached to them:
Gottes pfad ist uns geweitet
Gottes land ist uns bestimmt
Gottes krieg ist uns entzu? ndet
Gottes kranz ist uns erkannt.
But it was in intention for a smaller community and a different
campaign that the chorus was written.
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? The poems are frequently difficult and obscure. Considered
as pure poetry there is little to charm in them and though they
v. may represent the summit of George's thought, they do not
.
statement of this attitude of mind is to be found in Huysmans,
and receives explicit expression in the following passages from
A Rebours. In a preface written twenty years later the author
describes how the work came into existence. It was to have
been a brief fantasy:
Je me figurais un monsieur Folantin. . . qui a ddcouvert
dans l'artifice un derivatif au degout qui lui inspirent les
tracas de la vie et les moeurs americains de son temps.
In the novel itself the hero Des Esseintes describes nature thus:
Cette sempiternelle radoteuse a maintenant use la debon-
naire admiration des vrais artistes, et le moment est venu oil
il s'agit de la remplacer, autant que faire se pourra par
l'artifice.
These are the ideas which are put into practice by the hero of the
Algabal poems, the Late Roman Emperor Heliogabalus, and
they represent in extreme form the ideas of George--exaggerated,
over-coloured, the idea of artificiality forced almost into a cari-
cature of itself.
In the spiritual pilgrimage of George to which each volume
of poems bears witness, Algabal represents the stage in which
artificiality is glorified and a complete abandonment to it is
essayed and tested as a possible solution in the search for a
satisfying mode of life. George, like Huysmans, rejected it,
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? but in the working out of the problems of his own being in
terms of the emperor-priest he created a work of richness of
colouring, rhetorical splendour and a certain outmoded beauty.
The identification of George with Algabal is of course not com-
plete. It is not so much with the perverse and cruel tyrant, which
according to history he was, but with one who was both priest
and emperor and thus set aside by his position from the ordinary
life oFlnan^in that sense 'dedicated' as George felt himself to
_ be as a poet.
The work is dedicated to the memory of King Ludwig II of
Bavaria, the patron of Wagner, the lover of the arts, who sought
to realize in concrete form the dreams of his romantic soul,
who rejected life as he experienced it in the civilization around
him, attempted to create an artificial mode of life of his own and
ultimately died by drowning. In the Aufschrift George addresses
the king as 'a derided martyr king' and speaks of himself as
'his younger brother'.
Algabal is divided into three parts: Im Untergrund; Tage;
Andenken. The first describes the emperor's subterranean
palace and gardens, and it is in this part that the rejection of
nature and the glorification of artificiality appear most clearly.
The second part, Tage, records Incidents and situations in the
life of Algabal during the years of his rule. The third, Andenken,
gives, as its title suggests, his memories and musings upon that
period of rule after it is over. Part I has four poems: the first
describes in a general way the realm he has created.
Wo ausser dem seinen kein wille schaltet
Und wo er dem licht und dem wetter gebeut.
The second describes the golden room, the third the silver
room of his underground palace; the fourth his subterranean
garden. Thus he speaks of it:
Mein garten bedarf nicht luft und nicht warme/
Der garten den ich mir selber erbaut
Und seiner vogel leblose schwarme
Haben noch nie einen friihling geschaut.
Tage gives impressions of the life and of the character of
Algabal. In him there is also that duality which appears in
different forms in these early poems of George: tender and cruel,'
-, beauty-loving and vindictive, a thinker and a voluptuary, asking
himself after he has put his subjects to death whether he has
V- really hated them; satisfied with himself that he has killed a
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? 'pair of lovers sleeping beneath a tree and thus prevented them
from waking to a life which would have interrupted the enjoy-
^> ment of their love; putting a slave to death who had disturbed
his doves while he was feeding them, and then causing the slave's
name to be inscribed in the golden goblet from which he drank
vtiie following evening.
This collection of poems is unlike much of the early works of
George in so far as the poet has made a coherent symbol for
himself in the person of Algabal and lived through a certain
phase of experience in his imagined hero. The same pattern
recurs, though less definitely, and with an unnamed hero in
Die Hangenden Garten. But this phase of experience is now
over--a solution has been tried but has proved inadequate;
new experiences must be sought and put to the test. At the end
of Algabal stands the poem Vogelschau--'Weisse schwalben
sah ich fliegen' (white swallows I saw flying); it represents a
turning away from the exotic, from the world of 'Unnatur',
symbolized in underground palaces and gardens, from the
artificiality of a realm constructed entirely by the hand of man
in defiance of nature. The 'bunte Haher' (gaily coloured jays)
of the 'Wald der Tusferi' (wood of Tusferi) of the second stanza;
the 'Raben' (ravens) and 'schwarze Dohlen' (black daws) of the
third stanza are representative of all that, and we come in the
final stanza to the 'weisse Schwalben' again but now no longer
'in dem Winde hell und heiss' (in the bright and burning wind)
but 'in dem Winde kalt und klar' (in the cold and clear wind).
This poem forms the transition from the atmosphere of the
world of Algabal to one in which there prevails a more tonic
and astringent air, which gives the atmosphere for the next
collection: Das Buch der Hirten.
The poems of this collection have as their setting the Greece
of the idylls, not the heroic Greece but the every-day pastoral,
bucolic life. The second collection, Das Buch der Sagen und
Sange, has the Middle Ages for its setting; the third, Das Buch
der Hangenden Garten, the Orient. In none of the collections
is there any attempt at an archaeological, reconstruction of a
past age. The civilizations chosen are symbols of states of mind
of the poet--stages in his search for illumination of the signifi-
cance of life. Each one represents an attitude to life, of which the
? figures which appear in the poems are representatives; and the
poems in all these books are concerned with imaginary figures.
v These may well be projections of the poet's inner life, but each
poem considered individually and apart from its setting still
remains a self-contained evocation of a person, a mood, a situa-
tion, thus carrying out the principle announced in Die Blatter
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? filr die Kunst that the aim of jjoetry was presentation, not re-
flection, the transformation of the poetical idea into & concrete
^ form. In no one of the poems appears a character vouched for
^. by history; but the figures, though imaginary, are nevertheless,
typical of a situation or of the period of which they are repre-
_ sentative. In this collection appears clearly for the first time the
very marked habit of the later George to present characters,
which interest not so much by their individual qualities as by
their existence as types, so that a certain statue-like quality is
common to most of them.
The contrast between Algabal--George's most colourful and
brilliant achievement so far--and Das Buch der Hirten could
not be greater. From the violent exoticism of the earlier work
he passes to an atmosphere of cool serenity, and the colours
are correspondingly subdued to pastel shades; from the rejection
of nature and the febrile determination^to create an artificial
,world, to the acceptance of the ordinary life of nature, and to
the picture of a life lived in accordance with it--in accordance
with nature, that is, as it is moulded by immemorial custom and
manifests itself in the communal life of man, unchallenged by
the arbitrariness of the will of the individual. Here are no
passions at work, but a calm following of that which seems to
be the natural order of man's life, though the presentation is
tinged by a certain melancholy, which is indeed apparent in all
the early volumes: the sisters who on the anniversary of the
death of their bridegrooms recall their loss; the shepherd
who set forth for the day in charge of his sheep; the wrestler
who is unaware of the fame which his skill has brought him; the
youths who have been brought up to be servants in the temple
but are not chosen for that office; the first born who must wander
forth from their homes to seek a living elsewhere. All these
figures accept their fate unquestioningly, and of their accept-
ance a feeling of serenity is begotten, which is deepened by the
poetic treatment itself: the measured, moderate statement, the
coolness of presentation. Nothing here excites or distresses
intensely--everything has the calm and simplicity of figures on
a frieze: the music of the verse is very subdued and solemnly
moving; its metrical form the long unrhymed line.
The periods chosen in these collections are, as has been said,
symbols of states of mind of the poet. Thus though they are
successively investigated and presented, they exist also con-
temporaneously. In turning away from bucolic Greece, George
is not rejecting it as he had rejected the world of Algabal.
No single period symbolizes his whole ideal of life; it is in the
combination of the three that this consisfsT"~ ~~
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? It has been said that George's ideal of life lies in the synthesis
of the three elements of which man is compounded: 'Geist,
Seele und Leib' (spirit, soul and body); though in his later
works more importance is assigned to 'Leib'. The terms as used
by George defy an exact definition but it may roughly be said
that 'Geist' represents the living in accordance with ones destiny;
'Seele' the elements of enthusiasm, devotion and loyalty ^'Lfiib'-
^tne recognition of the body^and_the sensuous. Ufe. In passing
""from Das Buck der Mr ten to Das Buch der Sagen und Sange
we find ourselves again in a world--the world of the Middle.
-Ages--which seemed to George at this time to have produced
. ^harmonized and unified life, just as the Greece of the earlier
collection had done,T)ut of a different kind. Again we have poems
presenting characteristic figures of a period--for George it is
largely the period of chivalry and song, with religious devotion
as an integraTeTement of it. Thus: the youth keeping watch
before the altar on the eve of his being dubbed a knight (Sporen-
wache); the companions in arms; the hermit; the knight and
his lady parting at dawn; the group of knights-errant in search
of the grail; the knight who sleeps when he should be watching;
poems suggested by the 'Minnedienst' of the twelfth century;
a hymn in praise of the Virgin--all motifs taken from the civiliza-
tion of the Middle Ages. Again there is no attempt at antiquarian
resuscitation of a past age. George lets his imagination wander
through mediaeval times and identifies aspects of his own inner
life with certain figures, certain characteristic situations. The
theme of dedication and passion in conflict recurs once or
. twice: in Der Ritter der sich verschlief, and more markedly in
Sporenwache, in which for a moment the youth forgets his
religious dedication during the vigil and the picture,of a maiden
he had once seen passes before his thoughts,
The beautiful youth in heroic pose or hVneroic function is
one of the characteristic figures which appears in all these early
collections. It is central with George, for it is the symbol at this
stage of 'das schone Leben'; it occurs again in Der Teppich des
Lebens and ultimately transcends even the symbolical and be-
comes the realization of 'das schone Leben' in the ideal figure
of Maximin in Der Siebente Ring and Der Stern des Bundes.
The poems of the next collection: Die Hangenden Garten1
are more akin to the poems of Algabal, though without their
violence and cult of artificiality. After the bucolic world of the
shepherds and the heroic world of the Middle Ages, the world
of this oriental ruler is assayed as a symbol of the sensuous life.
1 Schoenberg set fifteen of these poems to music in 1906.
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? Thus after the life of the spirit and the life of soul, the life of the
hody is examined as a possible mode from which satisfaction
may be obtained. As in Algabal a certain vague succession of
events, hinted at rather than stated, forms the string upon which
the poems are threaded, so in this collection there is a central
figure, though he is not named. Ruler and priest, he neglects
his functions as such for love; half of his country is overrun by
the enemy; he goes as a minstrel slave to the court of another
ruler; gives this up, too, from an inner dissatisfaction and a
sense of the valuelessness of all activity. In the last poem but one,
he is seen looking back upon all he has lost. He hears voices
from the stream--the last poem, Stimmen im Strome,--which
call to him and promise him recovery, refuge and peace. But
even this may not bring satisfaction. Beyond it is annihilation,
dissolution, absorption into the elements. This poem with its
floating, swaying music (largely due to the frequent use of pres-
ent participles) represents this in symbolical form in the voices
of the water nymphs who draw him down to the pleasures of
their life beneath the waves, promising him ultimate bliss in his
dissolution and transformation into the waves themselves.
In so far as the three worlds represented in the three books
are spirit, soul and body, at the end of the third book the syn-
thesis of the three has not been achieved, though no one of
the three has been rejected. It is no doubt logical that the end
of the book which is symbolical of 'Leib' should be dissolution,
since that is the end of the body and all that pertains thereto.
A comparison between the last poems in each of the three collec-
tions reveals a positive note only in the second one, which re-
presents 'Seele' in the hymn to the Virgin Lilie der Aue. The
last poem in Das Buch der Hirten is called Das Ende des
Siegers and suggests that the hero in the last resort will be over-
come. Wounded by the monster which escapes him, with a
wound that will not heal, he ends in pitiable decay. It would
seem therefore that in so far as no synthesis has yet been
brought about between the claims of spirit, soul and body, the
most positive and enduring value is that offered by 'Seele'. The
conflict 'Weihe-Leidenschaft' which appears in the earlier
collections fades out with Das Buch der Hangenden Garten.
The next volume establishes a connection with the earlier
ones by its very title. The poet still upon his 'Pilgerfahrten',
after essaying all these modes of experience, having rejected
some and turned aside from the exclusive acceptance of any,
turns back to his own soul and holds communion with himself
in. the park-like landscape of Das Jahr der Seele. The settings of
the earlier collection had been drawn from the historical past
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? or the exotic or the artificially imaginative. Here the back-
ground is nature, but nature moulded and controlled by the
hand of man and almost in its particular form created by it.
The background is to a great extent revealed by suggestion
rather than by direct description; but with the colours, the
atmosphere, the feel of Autumn, Winter and Summer as much
conditioning the 'Stimmungen' of the 'ich' and 'du' of the poems
as conditioned by them. What belongs to nature exclusively and
is not the effect of the hand of man is primarily the ordered pro-
cession of the seasons, and even from this Spring has been omitted.
The volume entitled Das Jahr der Seele1 falls again into three
parts, of which the first is the one covered by the title; the second
part is devoted to poems concerned with personal friends; the
third is called Traurige Tdnze. The first part has a further tri-
partite division: Nach der Lese (Autumn), Waller im Schnee
(Winter) and Sieg des Sommers. In all of them the atmosphere
of the particular season is sensitively caught and expressed.
In a preface warning the readers not to try and identify places
I or characters George wrote: 'Seldom are 'ich' and 'du' so much
the same soul as in this book'. With this indication from George
it seems justifiable to assume that^hey represent the soul of the
poet communing with itself. The first part of the book suggests
a point of repose, of self-collection after the experiences recorded
in the works already passed under review ^s it perhaps in nature
after all that the illumination will be found? But there seems a
weariness, a sense of the fruitlessness of his quest, there is no
Spring in the year of his soul, and a certain melancholy hangs
over the whole giving it a music of its own. There is almost a
renunciation of hope and the acceptance of a second-best until
the real illumination, now almost despaired of, makes its appear-
ance. Throughout the work the fiction of a 'du', of the presence
of a second person, is maintained; and this 'du' is a gracious
visitor, Vfho understands and soothes the distress of one who is
seeking direction in life and awaiting illumination. The sugges-
tion, at least, that the companion (a woman) is not the Beloved
herself but one who must be accepted in her place, is given in
poems two and three. But the atmosphere of the whole work is
tentative, vaguely expectant, and indeed the Angel, who is to
bring the illumination in Der Teppich des Lebens, is prefigured in
the lines:
Driiben an dem strand ein bruder
Winkt das frohe banner schwenkend.
1 Schoenberg set one poem from this volume to music; Webern also
one for mixed chorus a capella. ".
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? But all is symbolical--the 'ich' and the 'du', the seasons of the
year; and the park in which the lovers walk is the soul of the
poet. '~
. The poems are all written in four-lined stanzas and with few
^exceptions in eleven syllabled lines,- so that throughout the
i>worlcTeminine rhymes predominate. It is no doubt partly this
which gives to this collection a musical quality which has made
it the most popular and the most quoted form of George's
works. It is not even necessary to perceive the symbolic mean-
. ing in order to realize that here are poems which will bear com-
^ parison in purely jDoetic quality, even in the most conventional
acceptance of the term, with favourite anthology pieces in
German literature.
Umkreisen wir den stillen teich
In den die Wasserwege miinden!
Du suchst mich heiter zu ergriinden
Ein wind umweht uns friihlings-weich.
Die bla? tter die den boden gilben
Verbreiten neuen wolgeruch /
Du sprichst mir nach in klugen silben
Was mich erfreut im bunten buch.
Doch weisst du auch vom tiefen gliicke
Und scha? tzest du die stumme tra? ne?
Das auge schattend auf der briicke
Verfolgest du den zug der schwa? ne.
Doubtless this poem is symbolical, though its symbolical sig-
nificance is notapparent on the surface, deeper than which the
,ingenuous reader need not penetrate in order to perceive its
poetical beauty, and this fact makes its acceptance more easy.
The same may be said also of the poem in Waller im Schnee:
Die blume die ich mir am fenster hege
Verwahrt vorm froste in der grauen scherbe
Betriibt mich nur trotz meiner guten pflege
Und ha? ngt das haupt als ob sie langsam sterbe
Um ihrer friihem bliihenden geschicke
Erinnerung aus meinem sinn zu merzen
Erwa? hl ich scharfe waffen und ich knicke
Die blasse blume mit dem kranken herzen.
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? Was soil sie nur zur bitternis mir taugen?
Ich wu? nschte dass vom fenster sie verschwande . . .
Nun heb ich wieder meine leeren augen
Und in die leere nacht die leeren hande.
Like the former poem it can be appreciated without its symbolic
reference which, however, is here more easily recognized: the
sickly flower, the poet's decision to cut it, the sense of emptiness
which is the result of his action--all this refers to some inward
circumstances, such as the deliberate crushing of a hope, an
ambition, a love.
The second part of the volume consists of poems addressed to
George's personal friends, and circumstances connected with
their reunions. Part of their significance is inevitably lost to
those readers who are unacquainted either with the friends or
with the circumstances, but there are some poems among them
concerned with George's own inner life and situation at this
time which are illuminating in that respect. The third part of the
collection, Traurige Tdnze, moves back again into an atmosphere
tinged with the melancholy of the poems of Das Jahr der Seele.
Like these they are all in four-lined stanzas, but here each poem
consists of three stanzas. The length of line has a greater variety
than in those of the earlier groups. Some--Dies leid und diese
last for instance--are lyrics of weariness and despair. This
weariness is lightened in some of the poems by the determination
to make the best of what is available, to be thankful for what is,
since the great illumination has not come; to welcome autumn
because there has been no spring. The mood sways up and
down, from poem to poem. 'lf they are dances they are sad
dances. As in Das Jahr der Seele there is the assumption of a
companionship of 'ich' and 'du' and many of the poems are
addressed to the 'du'. The following poem gives the prevailing
mood of the whole group: acceptance of and gratitude for what is,
with a sense that it is a second best, that something has been missed
which would have solved all problems and realized all aspirations:
Es lacht in dem steigenden jahr dir
Der duft aus dem garten noch leis.
Flicht in dem flatternden haar dir
Eppich und ehrenpreis.
Die wehende saat ist wie gold noch/
Vielleicht nicht so hoch mehr und reich /
Rosen begru? ssen dich hold noch/
Ward auch ihr glanz etwas bleich.
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? Verschweigen wir was uns verwehrt ist /
Geloben wir glu? cklich zu sein
Wenn auch nicht mehr uns beschert ist
Als noch ein rundgang zu zwein.
But throughout the prevailing melancholy of these poems there
is* a sense of expectancy; and the coming of illumination which
is heralded in the last poem of Waller im Schnee by the appear-
ance of the brother on the shore who 'beckons, waving his
joyous banner' is repeated in the lines:
Mein feuchtes auge spa? ht nur fern
Nach diesem Einen aus der gern
Die harfe reich und wohlgestimmt
Der unsre goldne harfe nimmt i
Nor is there absent an element which varies the dominating
tone of melancholy: the note of admonition or self-encourage-
ment--for as in Das Jahr der Seele, the 'ich' and 'du' must
ultimately be considered parts of the poet's own soul. Thus one
poem concludes with the lines:
Nicht vor der eisigen firnen
Drohendem ra? tsei erschrick
Und zu den ernsten gestirnen
Hebe den suchenden blick!
\
And there are other poems in which the same note is struck, v
\
VI
The tendency to see George as a figure of masterfulness, of
complete self-possession, to which the later volumes lend some
evidence has been extended to cover the whole of his life. This
is a simplification of his personality which is not justified. Up
to and including Das Jahr der Seele there is a continuous refer-
ence in the poems to states of mind which are far from indicating
such a convinced attitude of self-possession. As has been sug-
gested, all these earlier collections express a seeking and proving
of possible modes of life, and in all of them there are poems
which are the expressions of uncertainty, misgiving, doubt and
even of world-weariness and despair, so that on the whole it
may be said that a sense of melancholy prevails, not least in
Das Jahr der Seele and in Traurige Ta? nze. It is only from Der
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? Teppich des Lebens onwards that the personality of George, as
v revealed in his poetry, presents the appearance under which
he is generally envisaged, and emerges as that of one whose attitude
to life is a positive one: masterful, autocratic, even dictatorial.
For the poems included in Der Teppich des Lebens (1899),
above all in the poems of the Vorspiel, announce the illumina-
tion, the promise of fulfilment, the attainment of which had been
the aspiration recorded in all the earlier poems. The Vorspiel
is also in a more inward sense a prelude--a prelude to the revela-
tion of Maximin, which forms the core of the following volume:
Der Siebente Ring. Der Teppich des Lebens has again a tripartite
division; Vorspiel; Teppich des Lebens; Lieder von Traum
und Tod. With this volume a new idea enters George's poetry
--the idea of a message. The idea of a mission had been implicit
in his poetry from the beginning; now it becomes more explicit,
\ fortified by the message. In the Vorspiel, it is as yet a message
delivered to him by the Angel; but in the later volumes it will
become a message which he himself is called to deliver to his
country and his generation. In the twenty-four poems which
make up the Vorspiel the ideal of life which is to be his is
announced by the Angel to him, and the various tentative modes
represented in the earlier volumes coalesce and are crystallized
inj:he ideal of 'das schone leben', which is henceforth to
determine his thinking.
The first poem describes the appearance of the Angel to the
almost despairing poet: he comes as the messenger of 'das
. /schone leben', and it is noteworthy that his voice is almost
identical with that of the poet-- 'und seine stimme fast der
meinen glich' from which it is to be assumed that here again--
as in Das Jahr der Seele--there is an externalization of a part of
George's own inner life, the part that has now found an adjust-
ment to the claims of spirit, soul and body. , in which adjust-
ment 'das schone leben' is realized, and the manifestation, of
Jdas schone leben' is the body. In the successive poems--all
poems of equal length (four quatrains of solemn and sustained
movement) the Angel announces and the poet accepts a certain
mode of life. He will live in solitude, at the most only among a
few chosen companions all of whom share his ideals with him.
The course of his life will now be altered: no longer will he jour-
ney to foreign lands; the landscape of his native land, the land-
scape of the Rhine will be his chosen province, from which he
will speak to his own people.
It is at this point that George takes up the rfile of the German
poet; and though this is often held against him, the charge
seems hardly a legitimate one. His assumption of this rdle
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? contains no chauvinistic elements; and if he assumes it half
way through his career, it must be remembered that most other
German poets, Holderlin, for instance, were such from the be-
ginning, and it is odd to find fault with a poet for being primarily
the poet of his own country. Moreover his Germanism is so shot
through with Greek elements that he might have said with
Holderlin: 'The Greeks are indispensable to us'. Indispensable
because in his view (as in Holderlin's) Germans could only real-
ize themselves as Germans by assimilating the ideal life of
Greece to their lives. In the seventh poem, the Angel lays downs
for the poet the course he is to pursue: turning aside from all \
controversy even with the sages, contemplating life from a point
of vantage, assessing the value of things but taking no care to
acquire them; following not Christianity but the spirit of
Greece--''Hellas ewig unsre liebe'.
The poet has descended now from his ivory tower to the
street. 'Du stiegest ab von deinem hohen hause zum wege. '
_ There he will still remain, a stranger from a distant shore to the
multitude whom he has hitherto avoided. They cannot under-
stand him; but now and again a kindred spirit will comprehend
his ideals and a community will be established:
Nur manchmal bricht aus ihnen edles feuer
Und offenbart dir dass ihr bund nicht schande.
Dann sprich: in starker schmerzgemeinschaft euer
Erfass ich eure bru? derlichen hande.
Already in these poems of the Vorspiel appears the prophetic
idea of a new community of race and people. The poet is to take
up his place among those leaders and rulers in the world of the
spirit whose influence has spread over centuries. He feels his
mission as a leader in that world confirmed; and he conceives
of history as the sum of these great and heroic personalities--of
whom he himself is one--who are the vital factors in the develop-
ment of mankind. The Vorspiel is the central manifesto of
George's doctrine of life.
The actual Teppich des Lebens forms the second part of the
collection and is introduced by the poem Der Teppich (The
Tapestry). This explains the title of the volume. The poems are
to give pictures of characteristic figures which make up the
pattern of fife, illuminate aspects of it and declare its signifi-
cance. They are individual figures, but all presented with a
simplicity, abstractness and sometimes allusiveness which
make them rather types and symbols than differentiated indi-
viduals, and with a general tendency to see them heroically as
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? figures taken from a primitive form of life. All the poems are in
the same form as those of the Vorspiel. They include such poems
as Urlandschaft--a picture of a primaeval landscape into which
man makes his irruption; Der Freund der Fluren--the gardener
tending his plants; Der Jiinger--the disciple; DieFremde--the
strange woman who comes to the village, creates disturbance
there by her allurements, and disappears leaving behind only
the child which she has borne there. Characteristic figures
are represented already in Das Buch der Hirten and Das Buck
der Sagen und Sange with their settings of antiquity or the
Middle Ages. George's method here is not new to him, but it
has received confirmation from the message of the Angel. It
continues throughout the later volumes. Such poems may be
described, making use of George's own title for a number of
poems in this collection, as Standbilder--Standbilder der
Menschheit (Statues of the human race); heroically seen, some-
times presenting in rather abstract fashion typical aspects of life,
and calculated to stimulate a sense of human greatness and
pride, though not all represent admirable aspects of human life.
The next volume, Der Siebente Ring1, which did not appear
until eight years later, is considerably larger than any of the
others and is of primary importance, for it embodies the ideas
enunciated in the Vorspiel of Der Teppich des Lebens, embodies
in fact in the person of Maximin 'das schone leben', whose
messenger had visited George in the earlier volume. It is divided
into seven parts, and the fourth, the central one, entitled
Maximin, is the core of the work, anticipated in the first three
parts, and reflected upon those that follow it. It is in this volume
that George appears not only as the poet with a message, but
also as the seer; and thus the thought content of his poems
acquires increasing importance. George himself in the opening
poem entitled Das Zeitgedicht anticipates the surprise which
his contemporaries will feel when faced with the change in his
poetry and in the poet himself; that he whom they formerly
blamed for his aesthetic withdrawal from life (whilst they
themselves rushed into it with uproar and hideous greed); he
whose inner struggles and torments they had failed to recognize
--that he should have exchanged his pipings for the brazen
notes of the trumpet. Where they see change however there is
in reality continuation, for it may be that all beauty, strength
and greatness will arise tomorrow from the calm flutings of a
youth.
Zeitgedichte are poems which attack contemporary social and
1 Schoenberg set two poems from this volume to music, Webern five.
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? political abuses and prevailing attitudes of mind which are felt
to be evil. They are nothing new in German literature. In
Heine's second collection of poems one division bears this
title. But Heine's Zeitgedichte are more direct in their attack
and often more scurrilous; those of George are basically con-
cerned with heroic judgments passed on the actual conditions
of civilization. In a second poem bearing the same title Das
Zeitgedicht describes itself as the voice of conscience, disturbing
the complacency of the contemporary world. George, unlike
Heine, uses the symbolic method of presentation which he has
maintained throughout: . pictures of the heroic past such as the
Porta Nigra of Trier; the tombs of ancient German kings at
Speier; or heroic and distinguished personalities such as Dante;
Nietzsche; Leo XIII; Boecklin; all these serve to stress by con-
trast the degeneracy of the present age and of the masses. This
part of the volume, however, and the following one (Gestalten)
stand somewhat apart from the poems which form the core of
the book: the third, fourth, fifth and sixth parts-- Gezeiten
(Tides); Maximin; Traumdunkel and Lieder. In these is cele-
brated the achievement, the manifestation of 'das schone Leben'
in the person of Maximin, the beautiful, gifted youth who is
deified by George.
It is this deification of Maximin that constitutes the stumbling
block for many an appreciative reader of George's poetry; and
indeed the various subtle and metaphysical interpretations of
the poet's cult of Maximin, offered by disciples, seem almost
calculated to make things worse. For Maximin emerges not
merely as a symbol of the godhead, but as the god himself:
Dem bist du kind / dem freund.
Ich seh in dir den Gott
Den schauernd ich erkannt
Dem meine andacht gilt.
The nearest approach to this relationship in literature is that
of Dante to Beatrice: but Beatrice is the symbol of Divine
Truth, not Divine Truth itself. In Maximin, in his presence as
long as he lives, in the cult of him after his death (a certain
parallel may be seen in Novalis's cult of the dead Sophie)
George finds the god incarnate, as well as the realization of 'das
schone Leben' which the Angel had announced to him. In
him the deity is embodied, and the body deified. George met
Maximin only a year or two before the boy's death, and he re-
mained ever after the centre of a quasi-religious, quasi-mystical
experience. This adoration is prefigured in earlier writings of
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? George, above all in the idea that nothing really exists except
in so far as it is 'gestaltet', receives form. From this hypostasis
of form there is perhaps only a step to the belief that the godhead
must manifest itself in the perfect body, indeed that the perfect
body is the godhead.
A statement in a later number of Die Blatter fiir die Kunst
(1910) will elucidate, even if it does not make acceptable, this
conception of the divine, attributed by the writer to the Greeks:
. . . of all the utterances of the thousands of years which are
known to us, the Greek idea that the body is god--the body
which is the symbol of transitoriness--was by far the most
creative,. . . by far the boldest and the most worthy of man-
kind, and surpasses in sublimity every other, including the
Christian one.
(The words 'der leib sei der gott'--are printed in large capitals. )
But whatever attitude may be taken to this experience of
George's, it is nevertheless clear that in this transformation of
a human being into a divinity George's seeking and striving
for significance in life found its fulfilment. Indeed it was pre-
pared by his exclusive concern with the education of male
youth and the continually recurring figure of the beautiful
young hero in the earlier poems. Thus there is a certain logic
in the Maximin climax to George's life. The figure of Maximin
dominates the whole of Der Siebente Ring, but there can be no
doubt that the poems which celebrate the more human relation-
ship of the master to the disciple, the delight in his presence,
the intensity of affection he evokes, the poignancy of grief felt
at his death are more impressive poetically, have a more spon-
taneous movement and possess a greater warmth than those
poems which are concerned with the deification of the boy. In
the poems celebrating the purely human relationship it would
seem that the spirit of love--and it was its only full flowering in
George's life--has broken down barriers and released constraints
of expression which are clearly felt in other parts of George's
oeuvre. In the division Gezeiten, in which the human inter-
course between George and Maximin finds expression, George's
poetic quality is at its finest, and some of this quality flows
over into the songs in the latter part of the volume, awakening
sympathy and tenderness for a grief which was manifestly so
deeply and poignantly felt. But this has reference primarily to
Maximin'the human being; with Maximin the god, the attempt
is made to surround him with all the attendant circumstance of
a godhead who triumphs over death and remains a living being
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? in the minds of his worshippers. And the reader remains
fundamentally unmoved. It is unlikely that many, outside of
George's own circle, will feel able to accept Maximin as a religious
revelation, even though they may accept him as a poetic inspira-
tion. They may rather regard ah the religious paraphernalia
as a sign of the urgent need of George's generation to find a
substitute for the gods who had disappeared. This, it seems, is the
only explanation for the strange fact that a youth of sixteen
years, unknown and unobserved until George observed him,
. endowed with whatever beauty and gilts of personality, should
- be found suitable to support divinity and should be divinely
proclaimed by so selective a spirit as George, and as a god im-
posed upon his followers. But the iigure of Maximin thus con-
ceived becomes for George a centre of light and a symbol of
^perfection; and by the standard of this symbol George tested
and indignantly rejected contemporary life. In the last volumes
of his poetry he judges, reproves, warns, admonishes and
foresees imminent destruction. Thus in Der Stern des Bundes
(1914) and Das Neue Reich (1928), the last two volumes, the
spirit of the Zeilgedichte and the spirit of the Maximin poems
combine to form a unity of inspiration.
In the poems of Der Stern des Bundesjil is the voice of
the poet-seer, poet-prophet which prevails. VVhere in the Zeit-
gedichte the evils of contemporary civilization are denounced
implicitly by reference to figures who stand in contrast to it,
in the later volume the attack is more direct. Raising his
voice as the seer, George warns against the degeneracy of
modern times, castigates the weaknesses and falseness of de-
mocracy, refutes the belief in a fallacious prosperity, pours
scorn upon materialism and the falsely optimistic idea of prog-
ress based upon it, deplores the absence of heroism, and fore-
sees still greater evils to come. It is the voice of one crying in
the wilderness that the day of judgment is at hand. The message
continues to be expressed in abstract, symbolic terms--no
reference is made to concrete instances, no names are mentioned
to be held up to obloquy, no place is named. Often the setting
seems to be suggested by classical themes or borrowed from the
Bible. Through this world of symbols the figure of George
passes, proclaiming the wrath to come, the destruction which is
now inevitable. In one poem he contrasts the present with
past times, scorning the belief of the present generation that
their times show greater freedom and tolerance than the Dark
Ages. These at least had a god on whose behalf cruel things
were done, but modern times have set up an idol in his place
and into its jaws they hurl their best. In another he cites, with-
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? out naming him, Nietzsche as the last warner, the last to show
the possibility of salvation. But the people paid no heed: they
continued to talk, to laugh, to mock. The warner departed--
now it is too late, no arm now will hold up the spokes of the
wheel which is rolling down into the void.
Der Stern des Bundes is a very homogeneous work, consisting
of short poems each of a dozen lines or so, mainly unrhymed.
It has a division called Eingang, followed by three books. The
spirit of which Maximin is the embodiment broods over the
whole. In the Eingang there are poems which suggest a com-
munion between the poet and the dead youth, who strengthens
and confirms him in his task. The first book contains the poems
as already described, hortatory, denunciatory, menacing. The
second book, like the Eingang, is concerned with Maximin and,
recalling the days of their earthly friendship, asserts a commu-
nion with him after his death. The third book contains poems of
admonition, which seem to be addressed not to a wider public
but rather to a chosen circle of initiates. And indeed in a pre-
fatory note attached to the public version George explains that
the book was intended originally for the friends of his inner
circle; but that appearing as it did immediately before the out-
break of war in 1914 it was interpreted as a breviary for the
men on the battlefields. This however was not his intention: 'The
events of 1914 made the minds of a wider public receptive for
a book which might have remained a secret book for years'. A
certain quasi-mystical note is present in these poems which is
new in George. For instance, the poem which begins:
Ich bin der Eine und bin Beide
Ich bin der zeuger bin der schoss
Ich bin der degen und die scheide
Ich bin das opfer bin der stoss.
It is only too easy to see how the words of the final chorus could
be interpreted as referring to the war upon which young Germans
were setting out, and how readily a nationalistic meaning could
be attached to them:
Gottes pfad ist uns geweitet
Gottes land ist uns bestimmt
Gottes krieg ist uns entzu? ndet
Gottes kranz ist uns erkannt.
But it was in intention for a smaller community and a different
campaign that the chorus was written.
52
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-12-18 00:55 GMT / http://hdl. handle. net/2027/uc1. b3633336 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www. hathitrust. org/access_use#pd-google
? The poems are frequently difficult and obscure. Considered
as pure poetry there is little to charm in them and though they
v. may represent the summit of George's thought, they do not
.
