Language
has never
become the master in him as it has in the real poet; on the
contrary it is he who has become master in language or rather
26
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become the master in him as it has in the real poet; on the
contrary it is he who has become master in language or rather
26
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Stefan George - Studies
His attitude to the Germany of
his day, to its political and economic ambitions, its satisfaction
with the state of culture attained, is at least as contemptuous
as that of Nietzsche in Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen. The word
Prussian, describing in any sense George's attitude of mind, is
singularly out of place, as is apparent in the partially destroyed
poem entitled Bismarck, in which his abhorrence and contempt
for all that Prussia stood for were so plainly stated that he felt it
unwise to publish it. The Templer of the poem, the body of
1 In Der Siebente Ring. The substance of the lines is given in this
and the preceding paragraph.
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? young men whose achievements are the imperishable acts and
turning points in the history of the world, form an ideal brother-
hood. They move about their affairs in silence on paths which
are not acclaimed by fame; they have been nurtured in remote
regions; their successors are not of the same tribe as they are;
they are denizens of the wide world and not of any particular
country. Theirs is a universal brotherhood of men, united by J
a common heroic spirit, not of men united in some definite j L. > . /
organization. Indeed all organizations which sought to unite
men, to bring them into subjection to some mass community,
not least the youth organizations prevalent in George's later
years under the name of Wandervogel or Ju? endbev^gungen,
were highly distasteful to him. It was to the individual that he
addressed himself, and upon whom he sought to exercise his
influence, impressing upon each an aristocratic ideal of life, I
rejecting the, for him, false ideals of democracy. For him the
idea of the leader and his followers was fundamental. But the
followers were intimately connected with the leader and the
relationship was a personal one; a mass following was repugnant
to him. That there were dangers in this idea is evident. Question-
able above all is the requirement of absolute loyalty of the disciple
to the leader, at least as long as man remains a fallible being.
But loyalty is a good and beautiful thing in itself, and should not
be denigrated because it can be perverted to ignoble and evil
ends. The mass application of the principle was something which
George did not envisage, and when it occurred, slavish, un-
critical and utilized for the promulgation of ideas which he
abhorred, he turned aside from it with that nausea which is
naturally aroused by caricature of something deeply cherished.
Similarly the idea that George glorified war as something
'holy' is mistaken. It is based upon a phrase quoted out of its
context in a poem in Der Stern des Bundes. The poem begins
with an indictment of those who, in their hubris, sought to
erect an ever higher edifice of vainglory; now threatened by its
collapse they are afraid of suffocating under its ruins. Too late,
the prophet exclaims: madness, pestilence and war will destroy
them in their thousands and tens of thousands. It is here that
the word iheilig' occurs, applied equally to madness, pestilence
and war. It is used in the sense of belonging to the gods, not as
a blessing bestowed upon man, but as a dire fate which impends
over him.
In 1906, when the political situation in the Balkans seemed
to make war inevitable, Hofmannsthal wrote to George asking
his help in persuading the leading literary men in Germany and
England to sign an appeal for lasting peace between the two
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? countries. George refused. But these were the reasons he gave:
'War is only the final result of senseless activities which for
years have recklessly been directed towards it. The attempt of
a few individuals to plaster over the breach seems to me to
have no effect. '
It seems necessary to clear away these crude charges against
George. They are based upon an inadequate familiarity with his
actual writings, and have their origin not in the words which he
actually wrote, but in the legend which was the creation of
ignorance and hostility. There is doubtless much that is open
to criticism in the ideals and the methods of George, but the
ideal was that of 'das schone Leben', in which ihe conflicting
^elements in the nature of man were brought into harmony, and
were allowed to function in beauty under the control of the
spirit. In his idea of the good life neither the glorification of war
nor material ostentation and national aggrandizement nor a
complacent acceptance of democracy could play a part; indeed
these were felt to be its most obvious enemies.
Ill
When George turned his attention to the writing of poetry in the
later eighties of the century, the great lyric impulse in German
poetry coming from Goethe had reached its end, stung to death
by the irony of Heine. The tradition of 'Gefu? hlslyrik'--the
immediate expression of feeling--still continued, but its practi-
tioners were minor poets whose sentimentalities merely re-
iterated themes and emotions which the earlier poets had
exhausted. The popular writers of lyrics were castigated in the
literary essays Kritische Waffengange of the Brothers Hart,
which appeared in the middle of the decade. The only lyric
poet of any originality and stature was the Swiss Conrad Ferdi-
nand Meyer, the precursor of the symbolic lyric in German
literature. And it is significant that in the anthology of German
lyric poetry made by George later, Meyer is the only writer of the
second half of the century who is included. George's poems
written before 1890, and considered by him merely as prentice
work, were not collected and published until 1901, and appear
now under the title of Die Fibel (The Hornbook) as the first
volume of the collected works.
It was, as has already been indicated, George's visit to Paris
in 1889, his meeting with the Symbolist poet Albert de Saint
Paul, and through him his acquaintance with the group of ,
Symbolist poets of whom Mallarme was the centre, which
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? determined for George the type of poem he was to write, and
evoked in him a conscious acceptance of their methods. 'A
conscious acceptance'; for it is with George, in whom all is
deliberate, not merely the question of an influence unconsciously
imbibed, but of a decision taken. Unpremeditatedness, whether
in song or in life itself, is not a characteristic of George. Indeed
a deliberate reaction against the all too unpremeditated or not
sufficiently premeditated poetry of his German contemporaries
was part of his own poetic impulse--if impulse be the right
name for something in which the functioning of the will played
so important a part. But the methods of the French Symbolists
were not accepted without certain modifications on the part
of George, so that in a comparison of his poems with those of
his French contemporaries it will be seen that there was no
question of slavish imitation. In some respects indeed, in the
actual handling of his subject matter, George reveals a kinship
with Conrad Ferdinand Meyer.
A brief survey of French poetry at the time will show George's
divergence and originality. When he came under the influence
of French poetry the vogue of Parnassianism was already past.
The Elephants of Leconte de Lisle had lumbered across the
endless plains and had at last disappeared; and though, no
doubt, the Condor was still planing over the Andes it too was
lost to sight. The period in which it was considered to be the
function of poetry to give an exact picture of objective nature, ^
was now over, and the Symbolists who had superseded the
Parnassians aimed at giving only so much of external nature as
was necessary to constitute a symbol for the itat d'ame of the
poet which was to be communicated. The result was that precise
description was no longer required nor desired, and that ob-
jective lineaments were dissolved into movement, vagueness and
imprecision with a marked tendency towards achieving musical
rather than plastic effects. This went together with a general
lack of concern about the exact comprehensibility of a poem.
Suggestion and evocation were the demands of the French Sym-
bolists. Mallarm6 speaks of the new art of poetry as rejecting the
material objects of nature, and of a direct thought which gives
order to them, as something brutal. It is the horror of the forest
and not the dense trees of which the forest is composed which
the poet can hope to enclose within his volume. But George, in
so far as he desires a renewal of German poetry, is faced with a v
different situation. 'For in France', as Carl August Klein wrote,'
'the perfection of Parnassianism, to which we have not attained,
has been abandoned'. With this realization George sets out to
combine elements inherent in both types of poetry; Parnassian
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? strictness of form and precision of line with the more fluid
movement of the Symbolists. But there are also other diver-
gences from his Symbolist models. He never made use of free
rhythms because the very name seemed to him a contradiction
in terms, a denial of the element of form. He wrote: 'Free
rhythms is as much as saying white blackness: he who cannot
move in rhythm should confine himself to prose. The strictest
measure is at the same time the greatest freedom'. He rejected
also the tendency to be unconcerned about the comprehensibility
of a poem. Klein, who often enunciates the underlying principles
of George's poems, where George is content to let the poems
speak for themselves, wrote: 'In contrast to the youngest genera-
tion [he is referring to the youngest school of French poets]
who dissolve the forms, his are strictly regular, never lacking
comprehensibility and the disciplined concentration which gives
a clear outline to the whole'. In later years George declared his
debt and gratitude to the French poets of his youth in the poem
Franken:1
Es war am schlimmsten kreuzweg meiner fahrt. . .
Hier die gemiednen gaue wo der ekel v
Mir schwoll vor allem was man pries und u? bte /
Ich ihrer und sie meiner gotter lachten.
Wo ist dein dichter/ arm und prahlend volk?
Nicht einer ist hier.
Disgusted with the civilization of his own , country he turned
to France, and found there 'en France dulce Terre' the things
which were dear to him, signalizing by name the writers Villiers
de ITsle Adam, Verlaine and Mallarm6. When his first slight
volume of poems entitled Hymnen appeared, his adherence to
the principles and methods of the French Symbolists was
apparent, while the underlying principles of poetry in accord-
ance with which he was to work were set forth in the early
numbers of Die Blatter fur die Kunst. These statements in
prose of the aims and ideals of the group of young men who
shared George's ideas were possibly not all written by George
himself, for it was his conviction that the renewal of German
poetry should be manifested in actual poems rather than in
statements of what it was or aimed at being. But since they find
a place in the journal it must be assumed that George approved
them as constituting, even if in fragmentary form, the manifesto
of the new school of poetry of which he was the main represent-
1 In Der Siebente Ring.
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? ative. The first number contains the following announcement
of policy:
The name of this publication announces already in part
what its aims are: to serve art, especially poetry and letters,
whilst excluding all that has reference to the state and
society.
It desires an art of the mind--an art for art's sake. There-
fore it stands in contrast to that outmoded and second-rate
school which had its origin in a mistaken conception of reality;
it cannot, further, concern itself with world reforms and
dreams of happiness for all in which at present the source of
all that is new is seen; these may be very beautiful but they
belong to spheres other than that of poetry.
We consider it a merit that we do not begin with precepts,
but with actual works of poetry which will illustrate our
intentions and from which later the rules may be derived.
It is thus from the outset an art of the mind which is de-
manded, one in which it is essential, in the reader as well as the
"poet, that the mind should co-operate. This requirement is
fulfilled by the poetry of GeQrgei. lhe mind of the reader must
be at work if he is to derive any satisfaction from it. But this
does not mean that poetry must be the expression of thought.
George writes: *A^oem ij_nj^. the. xeproduction of_a thought,
but of a mood [stimmung]'; and again: 'We do jiot_desire the
. invention of stories but the reproduction of moods; not re-
flection but presentation; not entertainment but impression'.
This principle is maintained consistently in all George's poems,
even in the hortatory poems in the later volumes. Again: 'the
worth of a poem is determined--not by the meaning, otherwise
it would be wisdom, instruction,--but by the form'.
Thus from the beginning stress is laid upon form,, which is
apprehended as a severe discipline. But discipline and form do
not exclude the element of song which is an essential of poetry;
and the importance of the musical element in poetry is signalized
in the following statement: 'The deepest insight, the strongest
impression are still no guarantee of a good poem. Both jnust
first be transposed into the vocal tune which demands a certain
_ tranquillity or even joy. That explains why every poem is unreal
which conveys black without a ray of light. * One of the charges
made against the poetry of George is that it lacks music. That
charge has been denied by Sir Maurice Bowra, who claims for
the poetry of George a greater quality of music than is to be
found in the poems of Lenau and Morike, the accredited masters
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? of music in German lyrical poetry. The claim may be felt to be
exaggerated; the earlier and later poets do not differ in degrees
of music; the difference is one of mode. A Gregorian chant is as
much music as an anthem by Mendelssohn; and in contrast to
Brentano, Lenau and Morike, the music of George has a severer
tone. Even of the poems which George entitles Lieder it may be
said that the movement of the melody is stately rather than
lively; it processes, it does not dance.
The symbolical nature of George's poetry is adumbrated in
the following passages:
The symbol is as old as language and poetry themselves.
Individual words can be symbols, individual parts of a
work as well as the complete content of an artistic creation
may be a symbol. This last is also called the deeper signifi-
cance which is inheientjn every important work of art.
To see the symbolical significance is the natural outcome of
intellectual maturity and depth.
In later prose contributions to Die Blatter fiir die Kunst
criticisms and objections made against it are refuted or explained
away, but throughout the twenty-seven years of its existence it
maintained unmodified the standpoint which it had taken up/
in its first number. /
Twelve series (Folgen) of the Blatter appeared between the
years 1892 and 1919, each series consisting of five numbers, the
later series appearing less regularly than the earlier ones.
George contributed both prose and verse. Prose passages,
except those by George himself, were in the earlier numbers un-
signed. His own comprised appreciations of German writers of
the past (Jean Paul), cameos of descriptive writing, and a pre-
face to his Maximin. All of his prose output which he selected
for publication is contained in the seventeenth volume of the
complete edition of his works, and bears the title Tage und
Taten. It contains less than a hundred pages. In spite of the
declared intention in the earlier numbers of the Blatter to
eschew the statement of precepts and reflections, these elements
creep in to some extent in the passages headed 'Merkspruche
und Betrachtungen' which appear unsigned in its pages. But
by far the greatest number of pages are devoted to poems, and
pride of place is given to those of George himself. Extracts from
volumes not yet published made their first appearance here, and
these will be considered in due course. B"t apart from the poems
of George and those of Hofmannsthal Wuich are printed in the
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? early Folgen, and a few by Dauthendey, the contributions are
by poets whose names are not likely to figure largely in the
history of German lyrical poetry, though some of them (Wolfs-
kehl, for instance) are known today to discriminating circles of
readers.
George's choice of the poems which he considered worthy of
publication was highly individual, and was determined by what
he called 'das Niveau' (the level) which would appear to have
meant conformity with his. principles of_excellence of form and
diction and a proper respect for the dignity of poetry: in short
the acceptance of the attitude that poetry must be, in the old
significance of the term, 'poetical' and preserve a poetical
atmosphere. It is the poetry--to name a few of the accredited
English poets who were contemporary--of Ernest Dowson
(some of whose poems George translated), Lionel Johnson,
William Watson, Laurence Binyon and perhaps even Stephen
Phillips. Of course the contributions of George himself and
those of Hofmannsthal (many of the most exquisite of his
early poems) are of a higher standard than those of some of
their English contemporaries mentioned; but in the poems
which fill the greater number of the pages, poems by little-
known or today entirely unknown poets, there is a frequent
apostrophizing of the poet's lute or lyre, swans glide over dark
waters, the poet's fate is deplored or extolled. The titles of many
poems greet the reader's eye with a sense of familiarity:
Salambo; Herodias; Ariadne; Persephonia; Kalypso; Konig
Kofetua und die Bettlerin; whilst a whole world of troubadour
romanticism is concentrated in the title Wie ein edler Sanger
sang und wie eine schdne Dame darauf starb.
It is difficult to see how the regeneration of German poetry
was to be brought about by the example of the poems judged
worthy of publication in Die Blatter filr die Kunst, except in so
far as they were models of careful and clean workmanship and
thus were a living reproach to careless and slipshod writing;
and this was admittedly part of the reform of German poetry
which George and those who shared his convictions were
undertaking. George was intransigent in his rejection of the
poetry by his contemporaries which did not conform to his own
conception of what it should be. Thus he referred to that of
Richard Dehmel, a poet whose work was highly rated at that time
and is still accorded a respectable place in the history of German
literature, as 'Dreck'. And the friendly relations with Dehmel
on the part of one of the few women with whom George stood
in some sort of familiarity caused him to break off all acquaint-
ance with her. In his personal relations as in his attitude to
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? poetry George was ruthless. Even in the prose passages in the
Blatter not by George himself, there is often a sweeping con-
demnation of much that sets itself up as having cultural value
in German literature of the day; such statements, for instance,
as: 'The fact that there is no possibility in Germany of an artistic
or poetical event is a proof that we live in a cultural state of the
second rank', or that neither in Switzerland nor in the northern
countries could works be offered to the public as cultural
achievements such as are offered in Germany.
IV
In the history of German poetry the name of Platen stands for
the cultivation of formal beauty in verse. As such he is acclaimed
and revered by those later poets and schools of poets who have
stressed the importance of form; and as such he is quoted with ap-
proval and respect by George; indeed George sometimes couples
his name with that of Goethe. He was attacked by Heine in a
prose work entitled Die Bader von Lucca in the twenties of the
nineteenth century, an attack in which there is much that is
scurrilous and concerned with him as a personality. But in the
following passage an attempt is made by Heine--who is re-
presentative of an antithetical conception and practice of poetry
--to define certain characteristics of Platen as a poet, and this
has its bearing upon George as well. It should be noted that
Platen was much concerned with poetry in set forms and with
metrical complications, and that the excessive preoccupation
with these elements in the art of poetry was repugnant and, one
may feel, incomprehensible to Heine, so that where he found it
he was apt to reject the works in which he felt it to be obtrusive.
He writes:
Though the muses are not favourable to Platen, yet he has
the genius of language in his power, or rather he knows how
to do violence to it. . . The deeper notes of nature, as we
find them in folk songs, in children and in other poets have
never burst forth from the soul of Platen . . . The anxious
compulsion which he has to impose upon himself in order to
say anything, he calls 'a great deed in words'--so utterly
unknown to him is the very nature of poetry that he does not
understand that the Word is a 'deed' only with the rhetorician,
and that with the poet it is an 'event'.
Language has never
become the master in him as it has in the real poet; on the
contrary it is he who has become master in language or rather
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? of language, like a virtuoso on his instrument. The greater
the advance he made in the direction of technical skill, the
greater was the opinion he had of his virtuosity; his skill
extended over every form, he could versify the most difficult
passages, he often, one may say, wrote poems on the G string.
The distinction between two types of poet adumbrated in the
above passage is a real one, though exaggerated here by Heine.
Nor is true poetry, as Heine suggests, the prerogative of the
type of poet to which he belongs and from which Platen is so
categorically excluded. But it is clear that George stands on the
same side as Platen, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer and Theophile
Gautier; whilst in the world of French contemporary poetry
many of George's friends belonged there too. Defined as Heine
defines it in respect of Platen, the function of the poet is to be
the master of the word (pronouncements of Oscar Wilde claim
the same achievement for himself in regard to words, i. e. lord
of language), not its minister. That George's attitude to language
falls into line with the whole trend of his nature becomes imme-
diately apparent. Like Platen he doubtless approved and took
to heart the Venetian Epigram which Goethe coined to stigma-
tize his countrymen: 'Eine Kunst nur treibt er und will sie
nicht lernen: die Dichtkunst'. It was precisely against the un-
premeditated outpourings of those poets who would not recog-
nize that poetry was, as Novalis said, 'eine strenge Kunst', that
Platen, and sixty years later George, undertook a campaign on
behalf of correctness of form and selectiveness of language, with
the recognition that poetry like every other art had to be learned
before it could be practised with propriety.
A natural corollary to this insistence upon the formal and
stylistic elements in poetry is the preoccupation with the choice
of words, which implies generally a rejection of the current
vocabulary and a preference for words which are not in normal
usage. 'Dormer un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu' may be
interpreted in two ways. The more correct way would seem to
be to use the words of every day speech, but in such a way that
their inherent meaning is not obscured by the careless and trite
application of them. In this sense it may be said that Heine has
claims to be considered a master if only an intermittent one, for
he is able to take even the clich6 and endow it with a significance
which it does not possess in the mouth of the general public.
Another way is that which was taken by Klopstock, Platen,
Meyer and George in German poetry, namely to substitute for
the generally used word one which for some reason or other has
a loftier, usually more recondite quality, sometimes even a
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? periphrastic turn of phrase, as in Klopstock's odes 'Brot' be-
comes 'des Halmes Frucht', and 'Schlittschuh' 'Wasserkothurn'.
George carries this second procedure further than any of his
predecessors, and it adds to the difficulty in the understanding
of his poems to find words which are both recondite and archaic
(though doubtless linguistically justified). Nor can it be asserted
that these esoteric words are in themselves necessarily more
beautiful than the everyday words for which they are substitutes.
(Thus it would be difficult to maintain that 'blust' is more
euphonious than 'bliite'. ) But their presence serves to produce
the air of guarded aloofness which invests his poetry: an air
which is heightened by yet other methods, calculated to keep
the domain of poetry within an enclosure which is separated
from actual life. George did not wish to make it easy of access; it
was a hortus inclusus, which was open only to those who were
prepared to make an effort to reach it.
This preservation of the realm of poetry as a world in itself
is further stressed by the upholding of the fiction that the poet
is still living in that conventionally accepted 'poetical' age of
simplicity, when the utensils of his craft were tablets and the
stylus, and his dress the singing robes of the rhapsode. Thus
George in an early poem writes of himself, as the poet: 'Er hat
den griffel der sich straubt zu fiihren' ('He has to use the stylus
which resists'), therein signalizing another aspect of the com-
position of poetry, as conceived by him and those who have
shared his views: namely the difficulty which the poet himself
experiences in composition. Even in the very late poems, in which
contemporary civilization is being criticized and condemned,
the poet has about him the atmosphere of the vates, and it is
more natural to think of him in a flowing robe than wearing a
frock coat and a knotted tie. The same fiction of the poet
living in the primitive days of poetry is to be found in the works
of George's French contemporaries, for instance in those of
Henri de R6gnier, some of which George translated. Thus in
L'Accueil the poet makes use of a 'calame de roseau, Dont la
pointe subtile aide k fixer le mot, Sur la tablette lisse et couverte
de cire'. And though his clothes are ragged, when his visitors
expect him to be 'drap6 de pourpre hautaine', it is in 'une robe
de laine, Qui se troue a F6paule et se dechire au bras' that he is
dressed, and by no means in knickerbockers and Norfolk
jacket.
In spite of George's insistence upon comprehensibility
together with precision of line as an essential element in a poem,
he did not meet his readers more than halfway. Apart from the
use of recondite words, he added to the difficulty of an immediate
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? apprehension of his meaning by devices of printing, such as
the absence of capital letters where the German usage expects
them, and the reduction of the signs of punctuation (in that
over-punctuated language) to a minimum. It would of course
be absurd to suggest that these devices were intended to make
his poems more difficult to understand. The aim was primarily
an aesthetic one, connected with the appearance of the printed
page. To all questions of typography, the fount used, the dispo-
sition of the print upon the page, the decoration of the binding
and pages, he gave detailed personal attention. Gothic type
as well as gothic script he abhorred, and Die Blatter fiir die
Kunst contains the statement that Germany cannot expect
to become a civilized country whilst it retains a barbarous type
of print. As far as the reduction of the marks of punctuation is
concerned, the disappearance in particular of commas from the
pages of his works was not merely in the interest of the appear-
ance of the page, but was also due to his opinion that the gram-
matical division of sentences which the comma marks conflicted
with the poetical rhythm, which calls for other pauses. Under-
lying this last consideration is George's idea that poetry should
be spoken rather than read from the page. He had his own mode
of reading, which was a slow solemn declamation based upon
the intoning of the office in the Catholic church.
To these surface difficulties to the understanding of George's
poetry--the deeper ones are no more than those to which every
serious poet may legitimately lay claim as his right--may be
added (at any rate for readers outside Germany) the concen-
trated and compact use of language, whereby he avoids, as far
as possible, the little connecting colourless words--prepositions,
articles and conjunctions. This forces him often to the genitive
construction; 'ich forschte bleichen eifers nach dem horte'; or
he avoids the preposition by means of present and perfect parti-
ciples; or prefers such turns of phrase as: 'ich ihrer und sie
meiner gotter lachten' instead of 'ich lachte u? ber ihre gotter
und sie lachten u? ber meine'. The elimination of so many of
these little connecting words, whilst it produces an effect of
compactness, has also the effect of slowing down the movement
of the line by the greater tightness of verbal texture.
No doubt the symbolical type of poem presents difficulties
which are absent in a poem which is the immediate expression
of feeling. The Symbolist poet gives expression to his poetical
idea not in the language of direct emotion, but in the presenta-
tion of some image of a thing, a person, a situation, which is the
symbol of the idea; unless therefore he uses generally accepted
symbols, or such as are easily decipherable, he runs the risk of
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? being difficult of comprehension. George writes almost ex-
clusively symbolical poems, and in the earlier volume where
the presentation of a 'Stimmung' (un etat d'dme) is primarily
his aim, the basic significance of the poem is easily revealed
by the appositeness of the symbol chosen. Thus Die Spange
at the end of Pilgerfahrten and Vogelschau at the end of
Algabal, by their place in the order of poems, hint at once at
some significance with regard to the poet's situation. In Das
Jahr der Seele the poem which begins 'Die blume, die ich mir
am fenster hege' sheds its material significance and reveals its
emotional message on a first reading; even in the last volume,
Das Neue Reich, the poem Das Lied is manifestly beneath its
legendary narrative a statement of the poet's lot on earth. Butnot
all of George's poems yield up their symbolical meaning so reacP
2y. It may perhaps be legitimately assumed that such poems
have in their composition a more conscious effort of the will, a
greater attention to the elements of form and the deliberate
choice of words than the poems which are the direct expression
of feeling, and such poems as come, so to speak, surging up
unhampered from the subconscious--as Goethe's poem Uber
alien Gipfeln ist Ruh would appear to have done if the tradi-
tional account of its composition be the true one. But the over-
insistence on the song-like element in lyrical poetry is as re-
strictive as the undue emphasis upon the element of form. The
unpremeditatedness of song of the German poets who were
unduly influenced by the Volkslied at the beginning of the
nineteenth century led them to write countless poems which
were trite and trivial in content, and had little but their facile
tunefulness to recommend them. These were the poems which
had determined the conventional standard of German lyrical
poetry throughout the century, and they were the touchstone
by which George's formed and fashioned art was tested and
usually rejected.
From all that has been said it will be apparent that George
was a very self-conscious and deliberate poet, in whom the ele-
ments of will and intention were manifestly at work in the
process of composition. He took upon himself the role of poet
and in the light of his conception and conviction of what it
should be, he played his rdle with conscientiousness and un-
remitting attention. But it was his very awareness of himself as
il fabbro which aroused a feeling of hostility to his poetry--
strengthened by the recognition of a similar principle in the
conduct of his life--a feeling which expressed itself in such dis-
approving terms as 'mannered', 'artificial' and 'unnatural' by
the general public.
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? Qoethe insisted that it was the characteristic of jail art that
it was not nature;. and the demand that art should be ^natural'
is made only by those who have failed to recognize that essential
distinction. As long as the divergencies of art from nature do
not obtrude themselves--for they are present in all art--they
are tacitly accepted and overlooked. But the artist who, like
George, makes it clear that he is fully aware of the distinction
and is working in accordance with this awareness, creates a
stumbling block which makes his acceptance by the general
public difficult and exposes him to resentment and often ridicule.
This was the situation in which George found himself during
the greater part of his creative life as a poet in regard to all but
a small and discriminating body of readers.
V
In the growing uncertainty and questioning of values in the
second half of the nineteenth century art became a moral
problem which found expression in the writings of various
investigators into the nature of society, notably in the works of
Tolstoi. In Germany the dramatist and critic JPaul Ernst found
it necessary to assign to art an ethical function as a means of
educating 'das Volk. ' before he could with a quietened conscience
devote himself to literature as a profession. Ten years later
y , in the early writings of Thomas Mann the dubiety of art be-
\ came one of the main themes. For Stefan George however no
such problem arose. But the unquestioned acceptance of
aestheticism with him is made possible by the assimilation to
> it of two essentially ethical ideas, the ideas of dedication ( Weihe)
,". ^-and discipline (Zucht). These are the controlling forces to which
^ all the poetry of George is subject; and they manifestly imply
. a sense of responsibility in the practice of his art, which may be
implicit in many poets but is rarely so explicitly revealed as in
George. The first poem in the early Hymnen is entitled Weihe.
Thus the theme is announced from the beginning, and in some
of the other early poems its importance is illustrated by refer-
ences to another element, Leidenschaft (passion), which, since
it is inimical to the poet's absolute dedication to his art is re-
presented as an invasion of the sanctuary of poetry by the emo-
tions of ordinary life. The expression of Zucht in the world
of art is crystallized in the idea of form, that is to say in the
unremitting effort of the poet to achieve perfection of form.
With Paul Ernst the idea of form is screwed up into a sort of
moral compulsion and converted into an operative element in
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? the disciplining of man's ethical being. Thomas Mann, however,
in the following decade perceives its twofold possibilities, and
speaks in Der Tod in Venedig not only of its ethical quality--
'als Ergebnis und Ausdruck der Zucht' (the outcome and ex-
pression of discipline)--but also of its amoral and even immoral
potentialities, since it can be applied to subject matter of all
kinds and thus legitimatize the poet's occupation with all that
falls under the heading of what Mann stigmatizes as 'das Lieder-
liche' (the disreputable). But with George no such doubt and
misgivings were associated with the idea of form, nor indeed
with poetry as such at all. It was only in the abuse of poetry,
whether in a mistaken choice of subject matter or in an inade-
quate attention to its formal perfection, that he was concerned
to effect a reform. It was the idea of a mission which from the
beginning coloured his attitude to the practice of poetry, and
this mission was to be carried out not merely by the laying down
of certain principles with regard to it in the introductory pages
of Die Blatter fur die Kunst, but also in the actual poems which
he himself and those who shared his ideals wrote as examples of
the new ideal.
No man, however great a genius, is entirely outside the pre-
vailing taste of the period in which he lives, and George reveals
the fact that he belongs to the nineties of the last century both
in his acceptance of the idea of the autonomy of art and in his
particular conception of beauty itself. The reader of today will
often, especially when reading the earlier volumes, find himself
uneasily reminded of what was considered artistic or beautiful
in the nineties, and no longer is so: thus the artistic adornment
of the volumes itself, the description of the appearance of In-
spiration in the poem Weihe, of the Angel in Der Teppich des
Lebens and much of the attitudinizing and overcolourfulness of
Algabal.
George's collected works, including five volumes of trans-
lations and one of prose sketches, occupy eighteen volumes in
the collected edition; but the volumes contain as a rule not
more than 150 pages and the manner of printing is generous of
space. His earliest poems are dated 1886. He was then a youth
of eighteen. His last poems appeared in collected form in the
volume entitled Das Neue Reich issued in 1928. Extending
therefore over a period of forty years the poems offer the
opportunity to survey a poetical and indeed spiritual develop-
ment, and it seems most suitable to treat them chronologically.
If the idea of development be accepted it must be with the reser-
vation that no development in the quality of the poems is
implied, on the contrary it may be maintained with some justi-
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? fication that the poems of the middle period (Das Jahr der Seele,
Der Teppich des Lebens, and Der Siebente Ring) are the height
of George's poetic achievement. The poems in the later volumes,
notably in Der Stern des Bundes and to a considerable extent in
Das Neue Reich, are markedly different in form and subject
matter from the earlier ones; and the change which has taken
place in the poetry reflects the change in the spiritual life of the
poet himself, so that here in lhe more conventional sense the
word" development is apposite. That development reveals
George in the earlier stages as a seeker for illumination, for a
significance to life; finding it in his middle period, or rather
having it revealed to him; and then using that illumination to
survey the world of European civilization at the beginning of
the century and pass judgment upon it. Given the nature of the
subject matter in Der Stern des Bundes it is only to be expected
that poetry will set aside her more traditional charms and adopt
a severer and harsher mode of expression. One does not expect
from the prophet Jeremiah the sweetness of voice of the Song
of Solomon.
Die Fibel with its immature beginnings being left aside, the
first volume in which the determining and permanent literary
influences upon George are operative is the one which includes
Hymnen; Pilgerfahrten; Algabal (1892), the three parts of
which had been published separately before. It may be noted
that the tripartite arrangement within the volumes is common
to several of the later collections.
The first group, Hymnen, are in the manner of the French
Symbolists, more markedly so indeed than the poems in any
succeeding volume. The poet seeks to give in each of the poems
a presentation (Darstellung) of a transitory aspect of his inner
Jife (itat d'dme) by means of symbols which take the form
in many of the poems of aspects of landscape--narrowly circum-
scribed aspects such as of a terrace with vases; a corner of a
park with a fountain; a stretch of sea shore. All are evoked and
. suggested, not carried out in detail; but with a very noticeable
and already masterly employment of colour, which continues
indeed throughout the early volumes, as does the ability to make
skilful use of vowel sounds to produce a musical effect; for
instance, the whistling sound of the reeds in 'die hohen rohre
im linden winde ihre fahnen schwingen'. The first poem, Weihe,
represents the inner preparation of the poet for the coming
of Inspiration (die herrin) which consecrates him to bis function
as a poet. Inspiration descends; there is in the description
perhaps a recollection of Diana descending to kiss the sleeping
Endymion on Mount Latinos. The ideas of blessing bestowed
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? upon the poet, of purification and sacred acceptance, heighten
the religious sense of the poet's vocation. But together with the
idea of the dedication of the poet there is also the suggestion of
- the disturbing influences from the outside world, which seek to
turn him aside from his ideal task. These disturbing elements
are envisaged as. human love, and throughout this and the
following group of poems we have hints of a conflict between
these two elements in the being of the poet. But the love of
women plays no important role in the poetry of George, and
where it appears--mainly in the early volumes--it is never pre-
sented with enough intensity to make it convincing: the poet
turns too easily from feminine allurements to the claims of his
pen for the reader to fear that the temptation was very compel-
ling. In Das Jahr der Seele a shadowy 'Freundin' accompanies
the poet through the park of his soul and imparts some conso-
lation to his bereaved spirit. With her, woman disappears almost
entirely from George's poetry except in verses addressed to
\ friends. '
The group ends with a poem called Die Garten schliessen;
and the next group, Pilgerfahrten, is prepared for by the last
line: 'Pilger mit der hand am stabe'. The situation is given in
the Aufschrift to the next group I George as a pilgrim setting
forth in his search for illumination. Endowed with his gift of
poetry, feeling himself a dedicated being, but disturbed by
the allurements of life to which from time to time he yields, he
proceeds upon his solitary way; and the remainder of this volume
and the two succeeding ones show him seeking and proving,
yielding at times to passion, to melancholy and despair, and
communicating in symbolical form his inner experiences. )
Pilgerfahrten shows us more of the conflict between the dedi-
cated poet and those emotional disturbances which militate
against the carrying out of his sacred function: his fallings away
from his high calling through misgiving, world-wearinesSj
through ignoble contact with the life of the crowd. "There are
poems of admonition to himself; poems in which he conjures up
the journeys of his childhood; one in which the meaninglessness
of all growth is symbolized in the attitude of a woman as she
looks down upon the flowers in her garden:
Verdrossen wittert sie den stolz der dinge
Die nur zum blu? hen aufgesprossen sind.
1 The poem Die Fremde in Der Teppich des Lebens might indeed be
regarded as symbolizing woman as the intrusive element in the ordered
life.
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? This group contains two well-known poems: Miihle, lass die
arme still, and the already mentioned Die Spange. Both are
symbolical, the former more obscurely so than the latter; but
in the narrative subject matter--a number of white-robed girls
returning from their first communion and drowned by the break-
ing of the ice on the lake which they are crossing--there seems
to be a possibility of two interpretations. It may be said that the
surface meaning of the poem--the facts allusively narrated--
is not immediately easy to grasp.
One interpretation brings it into connection with the under-
lying conflict of these early volumes: the conflict between the
element of dedication in the poet's life and the hos^c forces. of
the world without. In this respect the white-robed communicants
represent clearly the element of dedication; the 'schwarze
Knaben', which draw them down into the dark waters of de-
struction, the forces which are at war with it. Hence it is a mood
of misgiving, even despair, which is symbolized. A second
interpretation makes the Stimmung which is symbolized the
poet's sense of insecurity in a universe where the life of man, con-
sciously controlled, is at the mercy of the darker, profounder,
irrational and incomprehensible forces. It is perhaps worth
noting with what verbal skill the metallic quality of the frozen
landscape is suggested.
The second poem, Die Spange {The Clasp), appears at the end
of the collection and its symbolical meaning is clear. 'The
Clasp' is George's art. Under the form of this image he is
saying that he wished to write cool, simple poetry, but that he
. has not yet acquired the maturity to do it. He will therefore
attempt another kind: the richly ornate, highly coloured,
"exotic type; and these indeed are the characteristics of the
poems in the succeeding group, Algabal. The change from the
one type of poetry to the other is signalized in the poem not
only in the verbal statement but in the difference in the use
of vowel sounds in the two stanzas; and the frequency and
stressing of the full 'o' sounds in the second stanza--there are
seven in three lines--makes the effect of a fanfare heralding the
appearance of splendour:
Ich wollte sie aus kiihlem eisen
Und wie ein glatter fester streif /
Doch war im schacht auf alien gleisen
So kein metall zum gusse reif.
Nun aber soli sie also sein:
Wie eine grosse fremde dolde
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his day, to its political and economic ambitions, its satisfaction
with the state of culture attained, is at least as contemptuous
as that of Nietzsche in Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen. The word
Prussian, describing in any sense George's attitude of mind, is
singularly out of place, as is apparent in the partially destroyed
poem entitled Bismarck, in which his abhorrence and contempt
for all that Prussia stood for were so plainly stated that he felt it
unwise to publish it. The Templer of the poem, the body of
1 In Der Siebente Ring. The substance of the lines is given in this
and the preceding paragraph.
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? young men whose achievements are the imperishable acts and
turning points in the history of the world, form an ideal brother-
hood. They move about their affairs in silence on paths which
are not acclaimed by fame; they have been nurtured in remote
regions; their successors are not of the same tribe as they are;
they are denizens of the wide world and not of any particular
country. Theirs is a universal brotherhood of men, united by J
a common heroic spirit, not of men united in some definite j L. > . /
organization. Indeed all organizations which sought to unite
men, to bring them into subjection to some mass community,
not least the youth organizations prevalent in George's later
years under the name of Wandervogel or Ju? endbev^gungen,
were highly distasteful to him. It was to the individual that he
addressed himself, and upon whom he sought to exercise his
influence, impressing upon each an aristocratic ideal of life, I
rejecting the, for him, false ideals of democracy. For him the
idea of the leader and his followers was fundamental. But the
followers were intimately connected with the leader and the
relationship was a personal one; a mass following was repugnant
to him. That there were dangers in this idea is evident. Question-
able above all is the requirement of absolute loyalty of the disciple
to the leader, at least as long as man remains a fallible being.
But loyalty is a good and beautiful thing in itself, and should not
be denigrated because it can be perverted to ignoble and evil
ends. The mass application of the principle was something which
George did not envisage, and when it occurred, slavish, un-
critical and utilized for the promulgation of ideas which he
abhorred, he turned aside from it with that nausea which is
naturally aroused by caricature of something deeply cherished.
Similarly the idea that George glorified war as something
'holy' is mistaken. It is based upon a phrase quoted out of its
context in a poem in Der Stern des Bundes. The poem begins
with an indictment of those who, in their hubris, sought to
erect an ever higher edifice of vainglory; now threatened by its
collapse they are afraid of suffocating under its ruins. Too late,
the prophet exclaims: madness, pestilence and war will destroy
them in their thousands and tens of thousands. It is here that
the word iheilig' occurs, applied equally to madness, pestilence
and war. It is used in the sense of belonging to the gods, not as
a blessing bestowed upon man, but as a dire fate which impends
over him.
In 1906, when the political situation in the Balkans seemed
to make war inevitable, Hofmannsthal wrote to George asking
his help in persuading the leading literary men in Germany and
England to sign an appeal for lasting peace between the two
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? countries. George refused. But these were the reasons he gave:
'War is only the final result of senseless activities which for
years have recklessly been directed towards it. The attempt of
a few individuals to plaster over the breach seems to me to
have no effect. '
It seems necessary to clear away these crude charges against
George. They are based upon an inadequate familiarity with his
actual writings, and have their origin not in the words which he
actually wrote, but in the legend which was the creation of
ignorance and hostility. There is doubtless much that is open
to criticism in the ideals and the methods of George, but the
ideal was that of 'das schone Leben', in which ihe conflicting
^elements in the nature of man were brought into harmony, and
were allowed to function in beauty under the control of the
spirit. In his idea of the good life neither the glorification of war
nor material ostentation and national aggrandizement nor a
complacent acceptance of democracy could play a part; indeed
these were felt to be its most obvious enemies.
Ill
When George turned his attention to the writing of poetry in the
later eighties of the century, the great lyric impulse in German
poetry coming from Goethe had reached its end, stung to death
by the irony of Heine. The tradition of 'Gefu? hlslyrik'--the
immediate expression of feeling--still continued, but its practi-
tioners were minor poets whose sentimentalities merely re-
iterated themes and emotions which the earlier poets had
exhausted. The popular writers of lyrics were castigated in the
literary essays Kritische Waffengange of the Brothers Hart,
which appeared in the middle of the decade. The only lyric
poet of any originality and stature was the Swiss Conrad Ferdi-
nand Meyer, the precursor of the symbolic lyric in German
literature. And it is significant that in the anthology of German
lyric poetry made by George later, Meyer is the only writer of the
second half of the century who is included. George's poems
written before 1890, and considered by him merely as prentice
work, were not collected and published until 1901, and appear
now under the title of Die Fibel (The Hornbook) as the first
volume of the collected works.
It was, as has already been indicated, George's visit to Paris
in 1889, his meeting with the Symbolist poet Albert de Saint
Paul, and through him his acquaintance with the group of ,
Symbolist poets of whom Mallarme was the centre, which
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? determined for George the type of poem he was to write, and
evoked in him a conscious acceptance of their methods. 'A
conscious acceptance'; for it is with George, in whom all is
deliberate, not merely the question of an influence unconsciously
imbibed, but of a decision taken. Unpremeditatedness, whether
in song or in life itself, is not a characteristic of George. Indeed
a deliberate reaction against the all too unpremeditated or not
sufficiently premeditated poetry of his German contemporaries
was part of his own poetic impulse--if impulse be the right
name for something in which the functioning of the will played
so important a part. But the methods of the French Symbolists
were not accepted without certain modifications on the part
of George, so that in a comparison of his poems with those of
his French contemporaries it will be seen that there was no
question of slavish imitation. In some respects indeed, in the
actual handling of his subject matter, George reveals a kinship
with Conrad Ferdinand Meyer.
A brief survey of French poetry at the time will show George's
divergence and originality. When he came under the influence
of French poetry the vogue of Parnassianism was already past.
The Elephants of Leconte de Lisle had lumbered across the
endless plains and had at last disappeared; and though, no
doubt, the Condor was still planing over the Andes it too was
lost to sight. The period in which it was considered to be the
function of poetry to give an exact picture of objective nature, ^
was now over, and the Symbolists who had superseded the
Parnassians aimed at giving only so much of external nature as
was necessary to constitute a symbol for the itat d'ame of the
poet which was to be communicated. The result was that precise
description was no longer required nor desired, and that ob-
jective lineaments were dissolved into movement, vagueness and
imprecision with a marked tendency towards achieving musical
rather than plastic effects. This went together with a general
lack of concern about the exact comprehensibility of a poem.
Suggestion and evocation were the demands of the French Sym-
bolists. Mallarm6 speaks of the new art of poetry as rejecting the
material objects of nature, and of a direct thought which gives
order to them, as something brutal. It is the horror of the forest
and not the dense trees of which the forest is composed which
the poet can hope to enclose within his volume. But George, in
so far as he desires a renewal of German poetry, is faced with a v
different situation. 'For in France', as Carl August Klein wrote,'
'the perfection of Parnassianism, to which we have not attained,
has been abandoned'. With this realization George sets out to
combine elements inherent in both types of poetry; Parnassian
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? strictness of form and precision of line with the more fluid
movement of the Symbolists. But there are also other diver-
gences from his Symbolist models. He never made use of free
rhythms because the very name seemed to him a contradiction
in terms, a denial of the element of form. He wrote: 'Free
rhythms is as much as saying white blackness: he who cannot
move in rhythm should confine himself to prose. The strictest
measure is at the same time the greatest freedom'. He rejected
also the tendency to be unconcerned about the comprehensibility
of a poem. Klein, who often enunciates the underlying principles
of George's poems, where George is content to let the poems
speak for themselves, wrote: 'In contrast to the youngest genera-
tion [he is referring to the youngest school of French poets]
who dissolve the forms, his are strictly regular, never lacking
comprehensibility and the disciplined concentration which gives
a clear outline to the whole'. In later years George declared his
debt and gratitude to the French poets of his youth in the poem
Franken:1
Es war am schlimmsten kreuzweg meiner fahrt. . .
Hier die gemiednen gaue wo der ekel v
Mir schwoll vor allem was man pries und u? bte /
Ich ihrer und sie meiner gotter lachten.
Wo ist dein dichter/ arm und prahlend volk?
Nicht einer ist hier.
Disgusted with the civilization of his own , country he turned
to France, and found there 'en France dulce Terre' the things
which were dear to him, signalizing by name the writers Villiers
de ITsle Adam, Verlaine and Mallarm6. When his first slight
volume of poems entitled Hymnen appeared, his adherence to
the principles and methods of the French Symbolists was
apparent, while the underlying principles of poetry in accord-
ance with which he was to work were set forth in the early
numbers of Die Blatter fur die Kunst. These statements in
prose of the aims and ideals of the group of young men who
shared George's ideas were possibly not all written by George
himself, for it was his conviction that the renewal of German
poetry should be manifested in actual poems rather than in
statements of what it was or aimed at being. But since they find
a place in the journal it must be assumed that George approved
them as constituting, even if in fragmentary form, the manifesto
of the new school of poetry of which he was the main represent-
1 In Der Siebente Ring.
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? ative. The first number contains the following announcement
of policy:
The name of this publication announces already in part
what its aims are: to serve art, especially poetry and letters,
whilst excluding all that has reference to the state and
society.
It desires an art of the mind--an art for art's sake. There-
fore it stands in contrast to that outmoded and second-rate
school which had its origin in a mistaken conception of reality;
it cannot, further, concern itself with world reforms and
dreams of happiness for all in which at present the source of
all that is new is seen; these may be very beautiful but they
belong to spheres other than that of poetry.
We consider it a merit that we do not begin with precepts,
but with actual works of poetry which will illustrate our
intentions and from which later the rules may be derived.
It is thus from the outset an art of the mind which is de-
manded, one in which it is essential, in the reader as well as the
"poet, that the mind should co-operate. This requirement is
fulfilled by the poetry of GeQrgei. lhe mind of the reader must
be at work if he is to derive any satisfaction from it. But this
does not mean that poetry must be the expression of thought.
George writes: *A^oem ij_nj^. the. xeproduction of_a thought,
but of a mood [stimmung]'; and again: 'We do jiot_desire the
. invention of stories but the reproduction of moods; not re-
flection but presentation; not entertainment but impression'.
This principle is maintained consistently in all George's poems,
even in the hortatory poems in the later volumes. Again: 'the
worth of a poem is determined--not by the meaning, otherwise
it would be wisdom, instruction,--but by the form'.
Thus from the beginning stress is laid upon form,, which is
apprehended as a severe discipline. But discipline and form do
not exclude the element of song which is an essential of poetry;
and the importance of the musical element in poetry is signalized
in the following statement: 'The deepest insight, the strongest
impression are still no guarantee of a good poem. Both jnust
first be transposed into the vocal tune which demands a certain
_ tranquillity or even joy. That explains why every poem is unreal
which conveys black without a ray of light. * One of the charges
made against the poetry of George is that it lacks music. That
charge has been denied by Sir Maurice Bowra, who claims for
the poetry of George a greater quality of music than is to be
found in the poems of Lenau and Morike, the accredited masters
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? of music in German lyrical poetry. The claim may be felt to be
exaggerated; the earlier and later poets do not differ in degrees
of music; the difference is one of mode. A Gregorian chant is as
much music as an anthem by Mendelssohn; and in contrast to
Brentano, Lenau and Morike, the music of George has a severer
tone. Even of the poems which George entitles Lieder it may be
said that the movement of the melody is stately rather than
lively; it processes, it does not dance.
The symbolical nature of George's poetry is adumbrated in
the following passages:
The symbol is as old as language and poetry themselves.
Individual words can be symbols, individual parts of a
work as well as the complete content of an artistic creation
may be a symbol. This last is also called the deeper signifi-
cance which is inheientjn every important work of art.
To see the symbolical significance is the natural outcome of
intellectual maturity and depth.
In later prose contributions to Die Blatter fiir die Kunst
criticisms and objections made against it are refuted or explained
away, but throughout the twenty-seven years of its existence it
maintained unmodified the standpoint which it had taken up/
in its first number. /
Twelve series (Folgen) of the Blatter appeared between the
years 1892 and 1919, each series consisting of five numbers, the
later series appearing less regularly than the earlier ones.
George contributed both prose and verse. Prose passages,
except those by George himself, were in the earlier numbers un-
signed. His own comprised appreciations of German writers of
the past (Jean Paul), cameos of descriptive writing, and a pre-
face to his Maximin. All of his prose output which he selected
for publication is contained in the seventeenth volume of the
complete edition of his works, and bears the title Tage und
Taten. It contains less than a hundred pages. In spite of the
declared intention in the earlier numbers of the Blatter to
eschew the statement of precepts and reflections, these elements
creep in to some extent in the passages headed 'Merkspruche
und Betrachtungen' which appear unsigned in its pages. But
by far the greatest number of pages are devoted to poems, and
pride of place is given to those of George himself. Extracts from
volumes not yet published made their first appearance here, and
these will be considered in due course. B"t apart from the poems
of George and those of Hofmannsthal Wuich are printed in the
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? early Folgen, and a few by Dauthendey, the contributions are
by poets whose names are not likely to figure largely in the
history of German lyrical poetry, though some of them (Wolfs-
kehl, for instance) are known today to discriminating circles of
readers.
George's choice of the poems which he considered worthy of
publication was highly individual, and was determined by what
he called 'das Niveau' (the level) which would appear to have
meant conformity with his. principles of_excellence of form and
diction and a proper respect for the dignity of poetry: in short
the acceptance of the attitude that poetry must be, in the old
significance of the term, 'poetical' and preserve a poetical
atmosphere. It is the poetry--to name a few of the accredited
English poets who were contemporary--of Ernest Dowson
(some of whose poems George translated), Lionel Johnson,
William Watson, Laurence Binyon and perhaps even Stephen
Phillips. Of course the contributions of George himself and
those of Hofmannsthal (many of the most exquisite of his
early poems) are of a higher standard than those of some of
their English contemporaries mentioned; but in the poems
which fill the greater number of the pages, poems by little-
known or today entirely unknown poets, there is a frequent
apostrophizing of the poet's lute or lyre, swans glide over dark
waters, the poet's fate is deplored or extolled. The titles of many
poems greet the reader's eye with a sense of familiarity:
Salambo; Herodias; Ariadne; Persephonia; Kalypso; Konig
Kofetua und die Bettlerin; whilst a whole world of troubadour
romanticism is concentrated in the title Wie ein edler Sanger
sang und wie eine schdne Dame darauf starb.
It is difficult to see how the regeneration of German poetry
was to be brought about by the example of the poems judged
worthy of publication in Die Blatter filr die Kunst, except in so
far as they were models of careful and clean workmanship and
thus were a living reproach to careless and slipshod writing;
and this was admittedly part of the reform of German poetry
which George and those who shared his convictions were
undertaking. George was intransigent in his rejection of the
poetry by his contemporaries which did not conform to his own
conception of what it should be. Thus he referred to that of
Richard Dehmel, a poet whose work was highly rated at that time
and is still accorded a respectable place in the history of German
literature, as 'Dreck'. And the friendly relations with Dehmel
on the part of one of the few women with whom George stood
in some sort of familiarity caused him to break off all acquaint-
ance with her. In his personal relations as in his attitude to
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? poetry George was ruthless. Even in the prose passages in the
Blatter not by George himself, there is often a sweeping con-
demnation of much that sets itself up as having cultural value
in German literature of the day; such statements, for instance,
as: 'The fact that there is no possibility in Germany of an artistic
or poetical event is a proof that we live in a cultural state of the
second rank', or that neither in Switzerland nor in the northern
countries could works be offered to the public as cultural
achievements such as are offered in Germany.
IV
In the history of German poetry the name of Platen stands for
the cultivation of formal beauty in verse. As such he is acclaimed
and revered by those later poets and schools of poets who have
stressed the importance of form; and as such he is quoted with ap-
proval and respect by George; indeed George sometimes couples
his name with that of Goethe. He was attacked by Heine in a
prose work entitled Die Bader von Lucca in the twenties of the
nineteenth century, an attack in which there is much that is
scurrilous and concerned with him as a personality. But in the
following passage an attempt is made by Heine--who is re-
presentative of an antithetical conception and practice of poetry
--to define certain characteristics of Platen as a poet, and this
has its bearing upon George as well. It should be noted that
Platen was much concerned with poetry in set forms and with
metrical complications, and that the excessive preoccupation
with these elements in the art of poetry was repugnant and, one
may feel, incomprehensible to Heine, so that where he found it
he was apt to reject the works in which he felt it to be obtrusive.
He writes:
Though the muses are not favourable to Platen, yet he has
the genius of language in his power, or rather he knows how
to do violence to it. . . The deeper notes of nature, as we
find them in folk songs, in children and in other poets have
never burst forth from the soul of Platen . . . The anxious
compulsion which he has to impose upon himself in order to
say anything, he calls 'a great deed in words'--so utterly
unknown to him is the very nature of poetry that he does not
understand that the Word is a 'deed' only with the rhetorician,
and that with the poet it is an 'event'.
Language has never
become the master in him as it has in the real poet; on the
contrary it is he who has become master in language or rather
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? of language, like a virtuoso on his instrument. The greater
the advance he made in the direction of technical skill, the
greater was the opinion he had of his virtuosity; his skill
extended over every form, he could versify the most difficult
passages, he often, one may say, wrote poems on the G string.
The distinction between two types of poet adumbrated in the
above passage is a real one, though exaggerated here by Heine.
Nor is true poetry, as Heine suggests, the prerogative of the
type of poet to which he belongs and from which Platen is so
categorically excluded. But it is clear that George stands on the
same side as Platen, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer and Theophile
Gautier; whilst in the world of French contemporary poetry
many of George's friends belonged there too. Defined as Heine
defines it in respect of Platen, the function of the poet is to be
the master of the word (pronouncements of Oscar Wilde claim
the same achievement for himself in regard to words, i. e. lord
of language), not its minister. That George's attitude to language
falls into line with the whole trend of his nature becomes imme-
diately apparent. Like Platen he doubtless approved and took
to heart the Venetian Epigram which Goethe coined to stigma-
tize his countrymen: 'Eine Kunst nur treibt er und will sie
nicht lernen: die Dichtkunst'. It was precisely against the un-
premeditated outpourings of those poets who would not recog-
nize that poetry was, as Novalis said, 'eine strenge Kunst', that
Platen, and sixty years later George, undertook a campaign on
behalf of correctness of form and selectiveness of language, with
the recognition that poetry like every other art had to be learned
before it could be practised with propriety.
A natural corollary to this insistence upon the formal and
stylistic elements in poetry is the preoccupation with the choice
of words, which implies generally a rejection of the current
vocabulary and a preference for words which are not in normal
usage. 'Dormer un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu' may be
interpreted in two ways. The more correct way would seem to
be to use the words of every day speech, but in such a way that
their inherent meaning is not obscured by the careless and trite
application of them. In this sense it may be said that Heine has
claims to be considered a master if only an intermittent one, for
he is able to take even the clich6 and endow it with a significance
which it does not possess in the mouth of the general public.
Another way is that which was taken by Klopstock, Platen,
Meyer and George in German poetry, namely to substitute for
the generally used word one which for some reason or other has
a loftier, usually more recondite quality, sometimes even a
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? periphrastic turn of phrase, as in Klopstock's odes 'Brot' be-
comes 'des Halmes Frucht', and 'Schlittschuh' 'Wasserkothurn'.
George carries this second procedure further than any of his
predecessors, and it adds to the difficulty in the understanding
of his poems to find words which are both recondite and archaic
(though doubtless linguistically justified). Nor can it be asserted
that these esoteric words are in themselves necessarily more
beautiful than the everyday words for which they are substitutes.
(Thus it would be difficult to maintain that 'blust' is more
euphonious than 'bliite'. ) But their presence serves to produce
the air of guarded aloofness which invests his poetry: an air
which is heightened by yet other methods, calculated to keep
the domain of poetry within an enclosure which is separated
from actual life. George did not wish to make it easy of access; it
was a hortus inclusus, which was open only to those who were
prepared to make an effort to reach it.
This preservation of the realm of poetry as a world in itself
is further stressed by the upholding of the fiction that the poet
is still living in that conventionally accepted 'poetical' age of
simplicity, when the utensils of his craft were tablets and the
stylus, and his dress the singing robes of the rhapsode. Thus
George in an early poem writes of himself, as the poet: 'Er hat
den griffel der sich straubt zu fiihren' ('He has to use the stylus
which resists'), therein signalizing another aspect of the com-
position of poetry, as conceived by him and those who have
shared his views: namely the difficulty which the poet himself
experiences in composition. Even in the very late poems, in which
contemporary civilization is being criticized and condemned,
the poet has about him the atmosphere of the vates, and it is
more natural to think of him in a flowing robe than wearing a
frock coat and a knotted tie. The same fiction of the poet
living in the primitive days of poetry is to be found in the works
of George's French contemporaries, for instance in those of
Henri de R6gnier, some of which George translated. Thus in
L'Accueil the poet makes use of a 'calame de roseau, Dont la
pointe subtile aide k fixer le mot, Sur la tablette lisse et couverte
de cire'. And though his clothes are ragged, when his visitors
expect him to be 'drap6 de pourpre hautaine', it is in 'une robe
de laine, Qui se troue a F6paule et se dechire au bras' that he is
dressed, and by no means in knickerbockers and Norfolk
jacket.
In spite of George's insistence upon comprehensibility
together with precision of line as an essential element in a poem,
he did not meet his readers more than halfway. Apart from the
use of recondite words, he added to the difficulty of an immediate
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? apprehension of his meaning by devices of printing, such as
the absence of capital letters where the German usage expects
them, and the reduction of the signs of punctuation (in that
over-punctuated language) to a minimum. It would of course
be absurd to suggest that these devices were intended to make
his poems more difficult to understand. The aim was primarily
an aesthetic one, connected with the appearance of the printed
page. To all questions of typography, the fount used, the dispo-
sition of the print upon the page, the decoration of the binding
and pages, he gave detailed personal attention. Gothic type
as well as gothic script he abhorred, and Die Blatter fiir die
Kunst contains the statement that Germany cannot expect
to become a civilized country whilst it retains a barbarous type
of print. As far as the reduction of the marks of punctuation is
concerned, the disappearance in particular of commas from the
pages of his works was not merely in the interest of the appear-
ance of the page, but was also due to his opinion that the gram-
matical division of sentences which the comma marks conflicted
with the poetical rhythm, which calls for other pauses. Under-
lying this last consideration is George's idea that poetry should
be spoken rather than read from the page. He had his own mode
of reading, which was a slow solemn declamation based upon
the intoning of the office in the Catholic church.
To these surface difficulties to the understanding of George's
poetry--the deeper ones are no more than those to which every
serious poet may legitimately lay claim as his right--may be
added (at any rate for readers outside Germany) the concen-
trated and compact use of language, whereby he avoids, as far
as possible, the little connecting colourless words--prepositions,
articles and conjunctions. This forces him often to the genitive
construction; 'ich forschte bleichen eifers nach dem horte'; or
he avoids the preposition by means of present and perfect parti-
ciples; or prefers such turns of phrase as: 'ich ihrer und sie
meiner gotter lachten' instead of 'ich lachte u? ber ihre gotter
und sie lachten u? ber meine'. The elimination of so many of
these little connecting words, whilst it produces an effect of
compactness, has also the effect of slowing down the movement
of the line by the greater tightness of verbal texture.
No doubt the symbolical type of poem presents difficulties
which are absent in a poem which is the immediate expression
of feeling. The Symbolist poet gives expression to his poetical
idea not in the language of direct emotion, but in the presenta-
tion of some image of a thing, a person, a situation, which is the
symbol of the idea; unless therefore he uses generally accepted
symbols, or such as are easily decipherable, he runs the risk of
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? being difficult of comprehension. George writes almost ex-
clusively symbolical poems, and in the earlier volume where
the presentation of a 'Stimmung' (un etat d'dme) is primarily
his aim, the basic significance of the poem is easily revealed
by the appositeness of the symbol chosen. Thus Die Spange
at the end of Pilgerfahrten and Vogelschau at the end of
Algabal, by their place in the order of poems, hint at once at
some significance with regard to the poet's situation. In Das
Jahr der Seele the poem which begins 'Die blume, die ich mir
am fenster hege' sheds its material significance and reveals its
emotional message on a first reading; even in the last volume,
Das Neue Reich, the poem Das Lied is manifestly beneath its
legendary narrative a statement of the poet's lot on earth. Butnot
all of George's poems yield up their symbolical meaning so reacP
2y. It may perhaps be legitimately assumed that such poems
have in their composition a more conscious effort of the will, a
greater attention to the elements of form and the deliberate
choice of words than the poems which are the direct expression
of feeling, and such poems as come, so to speak, surging up
unhampered from the subconscious--as Goethe's poem Uber
alien Gipfeln ist Ruh would appear to have done if the tradi-
tional account of its composition be the true one. But the over-
insistence on the song-like element in lyrical poetry is as re-
strictive as the undue emphasis upon the element of form. The
unpremeditatedness of song of the German poets who were
unduly influenced by the Volkslied at the beginning of the
nineteenth century led them to write countless poems which
were trite and trivial in content, and had little but their facile
tunefulness to recommend them. These were the poems which
had determined the conventional standard of German lyrical
poetry throughout the century, and they were the touchstone
by which George's formed and fashioned art was tested and
usually rejected.
From all that has been said it will be apparent that George
was a very self-conscious and deliberate poet, in whom the ele-
ments of will and intention were manifestly at work in the
process of composition. He took upon himself the role of poet
and in the light of his conception and conviction of what it
should be, he played his rdle with conscientiousness and un-
remitting attention. But it was his very awareness of himself as
il fabbro which aroused a feeling of hostility to his poetry--
strengthened by the recognition of a similar principle in the
conduct of his life--a feeling which expressed itself in such dis-
approving terms as 'mannered', 'artificial' and 'unnatural' by
the general public.
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? Qoethe insisted that it was the characteristic of jail art that
it was not nature;. and the demand that art should be ^natural'
is made only by those who have failed to recognize that essential
distinction. As long as the divergencies of art from nature do
not obtrude themselves--for they are present in all art--they
are tacitly accepted and overlooked. But the artist who, like
George, makes it clear that he is fully aware of the distinction
and is working in accordance with this awareness, creates a
stumbling block which makes his acceptance by the general
public difficult and exposes him to resentment and often ridicule.
This was the situation in which George found himself during
the greater part of his creative life as a poet in regard to all but
a small and discriminating body of readers.
V
In the growing uncertainty and questioning of values in the
second half of the nineteenth century art became a moral
problem which found expression in the writings of various
investigators into the nature of society, notably in the works of
Tolstoi. In Germany the dramatist and critic JPaul Ernst found
it necessary to assign to art an ethical function as a means of
educating 'das Volk. ' before he could with a quietened conscience
devote himself to literature as a profession. Ten years later
y , in the early writings of Thomas Mann the dubiety of art be-
\ came one of the main themes. For Stefan George however no
such problem arose. But the unquestioned acceptance of
aestheticism with him is made possible by the assimilation to
> it of two essentially ethical ideas, the ideas of dedication ( Weihe)
,". ^-and discipline (Zucht). These are the controlling forces to which
^ all the poetry of George is subject; and they manifestly imply
. a sense of responsibility in the practice of his art, which may be
implicit in many poets but is rarely so explicitly revealed as in
George. The first poem in the early Hymnen is entitled Weihe.
Thus the theme is announced from the beginning, and in some
of the other early poems its importance is illustrated by refer-
ences to another element, Leidenschaft (passion), which, since
it is inimical to the poet's absolute dedication to his art is re-
presented as an invasion of the sanctuary of poetry by the emo-
tions of ordinary life. The expression of Zucht in the world
of art is crystallized in the idea of form, that is to say in the
unremitting effort of the poet to achieve perfection of form.
With Paul Ernst the idea of form is screwed up into a sort of
moral compulsion and converted into an operative element in
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? the disciplining of man's ethical being. Thomas Mann, however,
in the following decade perceives its twofold possibilities, and
speaks in Der Tod in Venedig not only of its ethical quality--
'als Ergebnis und Ausdruck der Zucht' (the outcome and ex-
pression of discipline)--but also of its amoral and even immoral
potentialities, since it can be applied to subject matter of all
kinds and thus legitimatize the poet's occupation with all that
falls under the heading of what Mann stigmatizes as 'das Lieder-
liche' (the disreputable). But with George no such doubt and
misgivings were associated with the idea of form, nor indeed
with poetry as such at all. It was only in the abuse of poetry,
whether in a mistaken choice of subject matter or in an inade-
quate attention to its formal perfection, that he was concerned
to effect a reform. It was the idea of a mission which from the
beginning coloured his attitude to the practice of poetry, and
this mission was to be carried out not merely by the laying down
of certain principles with regard to it in the introductory pages
of Die Blatter fur die Kunst, but also in the actual poems which
he himself and those who shared his ideals wrote as examples of
the new ideal.
No man, however great a genius, is entirely outside the pre-
vailing taste of the period in which he lives, and George reveals
the fact that he belongs to the nineties of the last century both
in his acceptance of the idea of the autonomy of art and in his
particular conception of beauty itself. The reader of today will
often, especially when reading the earlier volumes, find himself
uneasily reminded of what was considered artistic or beautiful
in the nineties, and no longer is so: thus the artistic adornment
of the volumes itself, the description of the appearance of In-
spiration in the poem Weihe, of the Angel in Der Teppich des
Lebens and much of the attitudinizing and overcolourfulness of
Algabal.
George's collected works, including five volumes of trans-
lations and one of prose sketches, occupy eighteen volumes in
the collected edition; but the volumes contain as a rule not
more than 150 pages and the manner of printing is generous of
space. His earliest poems are dated 1886. He was then a youth
of eighteen. His last poems appeared in collected form in the
volume entitled Das Neue Reich issued in 1928. Extending
therefore over a period of forty years the poems offer the
opportunity to survey a poetical and indeed spiritual develop-
ment, and it seems most suitable to treat them chronologically.
If the idea of development be accepted it must be with the reser-
vation that no development in the quality of the poems is
implied, on the contrary it may be maintained with some justi-
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? fication that the poems of the middle period (Das Jahr der Seele,
Der Teppich des Lebens, and Der Siebente Ring) are the height
of George's poetic achievement. The poems in the later volumes,
notably in Der Stern des Bundes and to a considerable extent in
Das Neue Reich, are markedly different in form and subject
matter from the earlier ones; and the change which has taken
place in the poetry reflects the change in the spiritual life of the
poet himself, so that here in lhe more conventional sense the
word" development is apposite. That development reveals
George in the earlier stages as a seeker for illumination, for a
significance to life; finding it in his middle period, or rather
having it revealed to him; and then using that illumination to
survey the world of European civilization at the beginning of
the century and pass judgment upon it. Given the nature of the
subject matter in Der Stern des Bundes it is only to be expected
that poetry will set aside her more traditional charms and adopt
a severer and harsher mode of expression. One does not expect
from the prophet Jeremiah the sweetness of voice of the Song
of Solomon.
Die Fibel with its immature beginnings being left aside, the
first volume in which the determining and permanent literary
influences upon George are operative is the one which includes
Hymnen; Pilgerfahrten; Algabal (1892), the three parts of
which had been published separately before. It may be noted
that the tripartite arrangement within the volumes is common
to several of the later collections.
The first group, Hymnen, are in the manner of the French
Symbolists, more markedly so indeed than the poems in any
succeeding volume. The poet seeks to give in each of the poems
a presentation (Darstellung) of a transitory aspect of his inner
Jife (itat d'dme) by means of symbols which take the form
in many of the poems of aspects of landscape--narrowly circum-
scribed aspects such as of a terrace with vases; a corner of a
park with a fountain; a stretch of sea shore. All are evoked and
. suggested, not carried out in detail; but with a very noticeable
and already masterly employment of colour, which continues
indeed throughout the early volumes, as does the ability to make
skilful use of vowel sounds to produce a musical effect; for
instance, the whistling sound of the reeds in 'die hohen rohre
im linden winde ihre fahnen schwingen'. The first poem, Weihe,
represents the inner preparation of the poet for the coming
of Inspiration (die herrin) which consecrates him to bis function
as a poet. Inspiration descends; there is in the description
perhaps a recollection of Diana descending to kiss the sleeping
Endymion on Mount Latinos. The ideas of blessing bestowed
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? upon the poet, of purification and sacred acceptance, heighten
the religious sense of the poet's vocation. But together with the
idea of the dedication of the poet there is also the suggestion of
- the disturbing influences from the outside world, which seek to
turn him aside from his ideal task. These disturbing elements
are envisaged as. human love, and throughout this and the
following group of poems we have hints of a conflict between
these two elements in the being of the poet. But the love of
women plays no important role in the poetry of George, and
where it appears--mainly in the early volumes--it is never pre-
sented with enough intensity to make it convincing: the poet
turns too easily from feminine allurements to the claims of his
pen for the reader to fear that the temptation was very compel-
ling. In Das Jahr der Seele a shadowy 'Freundin' accompanies
the poet through the park of his soul and imparts some conso-
lation to his bereaved spirit. With her, woman disappears almost
entirely from George's poetry except in verses addressed to
\ friends. '
The group ends with a poem called Die Garten schliessen;
and the next group, Pilgerfahrten, is prepared for by the last
line: 'Pilger mit der hand am stabe'. The situation is given in
the Aufschrift to the next group I George as a pilgrim setting
forth in his search for illumination. Endowed with his gift of
poetry, feeling himself a dedicated being, but disturbed by
the allurements of life to which from time to time he yields, he
proceeds upon his solitary way; and the remainder of this volume
and the two succeeding ones show him seeking and proving,
yielding at times to passion, to melancholy and despair, and
communicating in symbolical form his inner experiences. )
Pilgerfahrten shows us more of the conflict between the dedi-
cated poet and those emotional disturbances which militate
against the carrying out of his sacred function: his fallings away
from his high calling through misgiving, world-wearinesSj
through ignoble contact with the life of the crowd. "There are
poems of admonition to himself; poems in which he conjures up
the journeys of his childhood; one in which the meaninglessness
of all growth is symbolized in the attitude of a woman as she
looks down upon the flowers in her garden:
Verdrossen wittert sie den stolz der dinge
Die nur zum blu? hen aufgesprossen sind.
1 The poem Die Fremde in Der Teppich des Lebens might indeed be
regarded as symbolizing woman as the intrusive element in the ordered
life.
34
? ? 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
? This group contains two well-known poems: Miihle, lass die
arme still, and the already mentioned Die Spange. Both are
symbolical, the former more obscurely so than the latter; but
in the narrative subject matter--a number of white-robed girls
returning from their first communion and drowned by the break-
ing of the ice on the lake which they are crossing--there seems
to be a possibility of two interpretations. It may be said that the
surface meaning of the poem--the facts allusively narrated--
is not immediately easy to grasp.
One interpretation brings it into connection with the under-
lying conflict of these early volumes: the conflict between the
element of dedication in the poet's life and the hos^c forces. of
the world without. In this respect the white-robed communicants
represent clearly the element of dedication; the 'schwarze
Knaben', which draw them down into the dark waters of de-
struction, the forces which are at war with it. Hence it is a mood
of misgiving, even despair, which is symbolized. A second
interpretation makes the Stimmung which is symbolized the
poet's sense of insecurity in a universe where the life of man, con-
sciously controlled, is at the mercy of the darker, profounder,
irrational and incomprehensible forces. It is perhaps worth
noting with what verbal skill the metallic quality of the frozen
landscape is suggested.
The second poem, Die Spange {The Clasp), appears at the end
of the collection and its symbolical meaning is clear. 'The
Clasp' is George's art. Under the form of this image he is
saying that he wished to write cool, simple poetry, but that he
. has not yet acquired the maturity to do it. He will therefore
attempt another kind: the richly ornate, highly coloured,
"exotic type; and these indeed are the characteristics of the
poems in the succeeding group, Algabal. The change from the
one type of poetry to the other is signalized in the poem not
only in the verbal statement but in the difference in the use
of vowel sounds in the two stanzas; and the frequency and
stressing of the full 'o' sounds in the second stanza--there are
seven in three lines--makes the effect of a fanfare heralding the
appearance of splendour:
Ich wollte sie aus kiihlem eisen
Und wie ein glatter fester streif /
Doch war im schacht auf alien gleisen
So kein metall zum gusse reif.
Nun aber soli sie also sein:
Wie eine grosse fremde dolde
35
? ? Generated for (University of Chicago) on 2014-12-18 00:55 GMT / http://hdl. handle.
