To give to poetry a new purity, a perfection >
of form; to restore the Word to an innocence and clarity lost in
the careless traffic to which it had been subjected by writers
who had not realized their responsibility to the sacred instru-
ment it was their duty to preserve; this was the.
of form; to restore the Word to an innocence and clarity lost in
the careless traffic to which it had been subjected by writers
who had not realized their responsibility to the sacred instru-
ment it was their duty to preserve; this was the.
Stefan George - Studies
Tornlin: simone weil
Martin Turnell: jacques riviere
Bernard Wall: alessandro manzoni
Other titles are in preparation*
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? STEFAN GEORGE
BY
E. K. . BENNETT
NEW HAVEN
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
1954
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? Printed in the United States of America
All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced,
in whole or in part, in any form (except by reviewers
for the public press) without written permission from
the publishers.
gut
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? For
TERENCE WINDLE
M887135
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? CONTENTS
Introduction page 9
1 11
ii 18
in 20
iv 26
v 31
vi 45
vii 56
Appendix 59
Biographical Dates 62
Select Bibliography 63
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? Introduction
Unlike his contemporaries Rilke and Thomas Mann, Stefan
George has not excited great interest in the reading world out-
side his native country. Few translations of his poetry have
appeared in English and only occasional essays have attempted
an assessment of his place in modern European poetry. Even in
Germany he has not yet been given his definite place in the
order of its poets. For his importance has been much disputed,
and like Helena in the second part of Goethe's Faust he appears
as one greatly admired but also greatly blamed. The admiration
and the blame have concerned themselves not merely with his
poetry but with his personality, and the influence which his
personality had upon his contemporaries. That his poetry is
^ cold, mannered, too consciously willed, unmusical, is the
charge brought against it by his detractors; whilst as a person-
ality he has been charged with self-glorification, arrogance and
the perversion of_youth, now towards aestheticism, now towards
Nazisnv
A forceful and compelling personality may be an asset to a
poet; it is not necessarily one. Considered in itself its drawback
is that its greatest effectiveness can be felt only by those who
come into immediate contact with it--a limited number of
persons; the wider public knows of it only in so far as it is
revealed in his poetry or--more debatably--through rumours
and reports, and these tend on the whole to arouse aversion
rather than sympathy. Thus there was a George-legend, the
reaction to which was vaguely hostile among the general public
in Germany before there was any wide-spread acquaintance with
the poet's actual works. Some excuse for this hostile attitude to
George amongst the general public may be found in the deliber-
ate exclusiveness of the appeal which the poet made. Some
years passed and a number of volumes had been printed before
the actual publication of his works took place in the ordinary
way. The earlier volumes were addressed to and accessible only
to an elite. Only slowly and with the passing of years did George
acquire a 'public' and that a restricted one, so that it can be said
that his works never penetrated into the consciousness--far less
the affection--of a wide public, nor indeed did he ever wish
them to do so.
In 1914 when Der Stern des Bundes became to some extent
the breviary of the young intellectuals who set forth to war, they
were taking with them a book which was originally intended for
a circle of initiates. Some of Rilke's works, notably the Cornet
and Die Geschichten vom lieben Gott, became popular; no work
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? of George's ever did. He had devotees--the immediate members
of his circle--his avowed disciples; he had a certain limited
public among the intellectuals who were convinced of his
merits as a poet--a larger circle than that of his devotees; out-
side of that there was only an indifferent or even hostile world
mainly of detractors. Only towards the very end of his life did
George allow any of his poems to appear in anthologies--the
most easy means of access to a poet. Nor did any selection of his
poems in German appear until after his death. It may be said
that in withholding his assent to such forms of publication
George was wise, for his poems gain greatly by being read in
their proper framework; and in the arrangement of each volume
of his works the same principle of form is at work as in each
individual poem.
Many books have been written on Stefan George in German
by those who were actually members of his circle or those who
were closely connected with it. They are not in the strict sense
critical works. The personality of the poet impinges too greatly
upon the writers' consciousness for a critical attitude to the
poems to be possible for them. The principle of loyalty to the
Master hampers any freedom of judgment. The poetry is accepted
as great poetry and no detailed investigation of individual
poems is attempted. Where references are made to other poets
they are to Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe. It is tacitly assumed
that George's place is with these. To assign him a place beside
Platen or Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, with whom amongst German
poets he has formally the greatest affinity, would seem little
short of impiety. Yet, though he is unquestionably a greater
poet than either of these, he is equally unquestionably of a
lesser stature than Holderlin. Some of the latest important
writings on him are still written by those who actually knew
him. There are, nevertheless, indications in the essays occasion-
ally appearing in literary journals at present that there is a
growing feeling, after some years of neglect, that the time has
come for a more detached assessment of him, an assessment
which can be made only by those who did not come under
the immediate influence of his personality.
That he was a great and forceful personality there can be no
doubt; that he was a man of the highest intellectual ability
with an understanding and grasp of the problems of his age
seems equally indubitable; that he was a great poet in the strict-
est sense of the word 'great' cannot so easily be maintained.
And whether the atmosphere of grandeur which surrounded him
can convincingly be preserved when those who knew him and
helped to create it have passed away is even more problematical.
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? I
Stefan Anton George was born on the 12th July 1868, in Bu? des-
heim near Bingen on the Rhine, the son of a well-to-do owner
of vineyards who afterwards owned a wineshop in Bingen itself.
The family was peasant in origin, but the poet's father had be-
come affluent enough to enable his son to devote his life to
poetry without requiring of him that he should take up any of
the accepted money-making professions. There seem to have
been no parental conflicts: both father and mother accepted
tacitly the way of life their son had chosen. After the usual
school education George spent some time at the University of
Berlin. But the years of travel, rather than university studies,
completed an education based on the classical training of a
German Gymnasium (Darmstadt) in the latter half of the nine-
teenth century. From his childhood George had shown a great
interest in words, and whilst still a child he invented a language
of his own. Later in life he returned to this idea and carried it
out more fully in a sort of lingua franca, which included
Latin, Provencal, Catalan and Spanish elements; so fully indeed
was this artificial language developed that he was able to use it
for poetical composition, and two poems in Der Siebente Ring
were originally written in it. The last two lines of the poem
i Urspruenge in the same volume are written in the language he
invented as a child.
He was at home in many European languages; and his trans-
lations of English, French, Italian and Spanish poetry, as well as
his translations into English and French of his own poems, bear
witness to his mastery of these languages.
His travels took him to London, where he spent some
months, to France, Austria, Spain and Italy. His visits to France
and to Austria have outstanding importance in the history of
his career as a poet. In Paris he was introduced to the circle of
Symbolist poets, and accepted from them the then prevailing
Symbolist mode of poetry which determined his own develop-
ment as a poet. In Vienna he made the acquaintance of the young
Hofmannsthal, in whom he believed he had found a poet who
confirmed him in his own conception of poetry. With him,
however, he failed to establish a relationship on the lines which
he wished.
At home in Germany, where the greater part of his life was
spent, he lived for some years in Bingen in the house of his
parents. Later his chief centres of residence were Berlin, Munich
and Heidelberg, in each of which towns he had a pied-a-terre,
usually only a single room, in which he lived and received his
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? disciples. The last months of his life were spent in Italian Switzer-
land, whither he took refuge from his native country after it had
passed under the rule of National Socialism. Here he died on
the 4th December 1933.
George's mode of life as far as material things are concerned
was sober and unpretentious. Though he had well-to-do and
wealthy friends in whose homes he was made welcome, the
rooms in which he lived were furnished in a severe style, which
eschewed any attempt at luxury. His dress, though departing
sufficiently from the regular mode of male fashion to make him
a somewhat conspicuous figure, was likewise severe and formal.
Not only in that, however, but also in the dignity of his figure
and of his lineaments he commanded attention and respect. If
there was affectation in the way he presented himself to the out-
ward world, it was the affectation of simplicity, not of ostenta-
tion, and the severity of line which is one of the characteristics
of his poetry was also a characteristic of his whole visible being.
Those who knew him, even those whose acquaintance with him
was merely transient, testify to the arresting effect upon them
of his appearance, his glance, his speech. It may be said, and has
been said, that these effects were deliberately cultivated; but it
must in justice be admitted that nature had endowed him with
the materials from which to create his effects, and that in the
cultivation of them he was essentially proceeding along the
course which she had laid out for him. By following that
course both in his life and in his poetry he preserved the in-
tegrity of a personality controlled and ordered by the unity of
a positive idea. He was, in fact, in his personality, his mode of
life and his poetry, 'all of a piece'.
A personality of force communicates himself, when a poet,
not merely by the written word, but also by immediate contact
with other personalities, who are in sympathy with him and
receptive of his ideas and conception of life. The more compel-
ling he is as a personality the greater will be his authority and
hold over those whom he gathers up in the circle of his intimacy;
the greater his conviction and assurance of the rightness and
importance of his ideal, the more selective he will be in choosing
those to whom he communicates himself, and the closer and
more demanding will be his union with them. George's contact
with the world of men was primarily through the circle of friends
whom he had chosen as being in sympathy with his ideals, men
whose relationship with him was that of disciples to their master
or leader. Hofmannsthal was to have been the first of those
disciples, but would not accept the role.
It is this position of George as a leader and teacher surrounded
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? by a devoted circle of disciples which all his life placed him at
one remove from contact with ordinary humanity. It is as though
he could be reached only through the medium of his disciples,
to whom in the first place his words were addressed, for whom
primarily his personality existed, and by whom his poems were
more immediately comprehended. What is known of him as a
man, the significance of some of his later obscurer poems, the
esoteric wisdom which they contain, must pass through the
minds of his disciples before it can be understood by the outside
world. No other poet has worked quite in this way; but it is
characteristic of George. The circle around him began to form
very early in his career as a poet, and the printing of the first
number of Die Blatter fiir die Kunst (1892) gave the first
tangible evidence of the existence of such a band of men whose
unity consisted in their acceptance of the ideas of one central
and controlling personality. In the early days they were men of
George's own age, and many of them remained faithful to him
to the end of their lives; but as the years passed and George grew
older, they were selected from younger generations, and the
circle which surrounded the ageing George consisted largely of
talented and promising youths and young men, together with a
number of the old stalwarts from earlier generations.
The circle of young men around George--der George Kreis,
as it was known in Germany--may perhaps be described as an
assembly of men of intellectual interests and ability which had
something in common with the group of poets who enjoyed the
intimacy of Mallarme and were habitual visitors in the Rue de
Rome, and something in common with the circle of young men
who surrounded Socrates as described in the Platonic dialogues.
The Kreis partook of the nature of both, but differed from
either. In its earlier days it was concerned more especially with
the discussion and promulgation of new ideas of poetry, and
manifested itself in the printing of the early numbers of Die
Blatter fiir die Kunst. But the influence of George upon it was
more authoritarian than that of Mallarme upon the habitues of
the Rue de Rome, or of Socrates upon the young men of Athens,
for though some attached themselves to Socrates more closely,
his interest in them claimed no absolute adherence to any doc-
trines as a requirement. But like the attitude of Socrates, the
attitude of George to his disciples was in essence a paedagogic
one, and as time went on and the difference in age between
the Master and his followers became necessarily greater, the
paedagogic element emerged more clearly.
It was not merely a conception of poetry which the disciples
were required to share with the Master, but a conception of
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? life; and what had originally been an aesthetic training (in
which indeed ethical elements were already present) became
ultimately a more explicitly ethical one, in which order, measure,
discipline and the idea of a dedicated life were the qualities
stressed. Membership of this group was not easily obtained,
though the Master was on the look-out for suitable candidates.
(Boehringer in his book Mem Bild von Stefan George gives an ac-
count of George's mistaken decision with regard to the admission
of one apparently suitable candidate, which is not without its hu-
morous side. ) Once incorporated in the circle, absolute loyalty was
demanded of the members; and though the suggestion of tyranny
is firmly repudiated by those who were members, to the
outside public the attitude of George may easily appear to have
been tyrannical, at least autocratic. Some members broke away;
differences of opinion upon matters of importance led to ex-
clusion--marriage, for instance, might be construed as a breach
of loyalty to the Master; friction between individual members
might lead to the expulsion of one or more; the publication of
a work of learning which did not meet with George's approval
called down severe reproof upon the author. To George's credit
it must be said that the attitude of Anti-Semitism in some of his
disciples was one of the causes which led to the most violent
upheaval in the history of the circle.
The Kreis aroused in the minds of the inadequately informed
general public disapproval and derision; sometimes specific
charges were made against it, for instance that it alienated
young men from their parents and homes; on the whole, it was
regarded as an assembly of affectedly superior and fantastically
minded youths who had placed themselves under the domination
of a pretentious and not very highly approved poet who was
both in his poetry and in his life something of a charlatan. In
truth it would seem that what had originally been an organic
growth, the natural development from the seed of one forceful
personality who had attracted around himself companions who
shared his views and in a lesser degree his gifts in aesthetic
matters, had hardened into something more artificial and self-
conscious.
But underlying the formation of the circle, and the foundation
of the journal Die Blatter fur die Kunst, is a principle which
unites in a general idea the seemingly so disparate poems of the
younger and the elder George--the idea of a mission. Obscured
to some extent by the aestheticism of the early poems, it is
nevertheless there, though it does not emerge clearly until the
publication of Der Siebente Ring. To the young George the
cultural decay of his time was already apparent--apparent most
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? pressingly in German poetry, for t^epoetry_qf an age was for
him the key to the civilization of the age itself. Others were
equally aware of the decay of civilization; and the German Natu-
ralists, whose earliest works appeared at the same time as
the earliest works of George, manifested their disapproval of
contemporary German literature and life in their plays, novels
and to a lesser degree their lyrical poetry. But the form and
methods of their reaction were not such that George could
partner or even accept them. Where they revolted against
contemporary literature because of its triviality and the remote-
ness in subject matter from the problems of the day, George
was in revolt against the carelessness, the neglect of formal
beauty which characterized the German poetry popular in his
youth. The question of formal beauty was not one which had
any part in the Naturalists' aim to create a new type of literature.
Their methods and preoccupations were to George merely a
further indication of the degeneracy of contemporary poetry.
He abhorred them.
To give to poetry a new purity, a perfection >
of form; to restore the Word to an innocence and clarity lost in
the careless traffic to which it had been subjected by writers
who had not realized their responsibility to the sacred instru-
ment it was their duty to preserve; this was the. aim, the obliga-
tion imposed upon him, his mission, to which he devoted him-
self more exclusively in his early works. Poetry, in Germany,
had for George lost its dignity, its sanctity; it was his task to
restore it to its high estate.
George's reaction to the decay of civilization which surrounded
him was not to put forward plans for the reformation of the
world--Weltverbesserungsplane are rejected as the subject
matter of poetry in the early numbers of Die Blatter filr die
Kunst--but to create for himself a mode of life which in itself
would be the exemplary realization of his protest against the
prevailing sloth of the spirit. 'To make', as Eric Gill wrote, 'a
corner of good living in the chaos of the world'. The regenera-
tion of poetry with which he began would imperceptibly bring
about the regeneration of society: the circle of young men who
assembled around him would automatically, having imbibed the
ideas of the Master, form a league of youth to carry these ideas
out into the world and so bring about a new order of life. Though
the theoretical statement of aims in the earliest numbers of Die
Blatter fiir die Kunst was exclusively concerned with the re-
generation of poetry, as the title of the journal suggested, by
the end of the century a contributor (it may not have been George
himself, for the prose contributions are unsigned) could write,
no doubt too optimistically, of the generation which had been
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? nourished on the ideas of the Master: that the light of Hellas
had descended upon the youth of our age, inspiring them with
an ardent aspiration for a life in which beauty manifests itself in
the body and in the mind as the principle of proportion, causing
them to reject the shallow culture of the day and the outmoded
barbarism of the past; and, neither rigid in their uprightness
nor ignoble in their submissiveness, to advance through life
with heads erect, recognizing themselves as members of a great
people and not of one individual tribe among many.
It seems clear therefore that in spirit the influence of George
within his circle by this time was more akin to that of Socrates
than that of Mallarme. George's ideal was that of the controlled
life. In the chaos and abandonment of contemporary civilization
he aimed at the establishment of an example of individual
life in which the soul, the spirit and the body were combined in
a harmonious unity of co-operation and control. George was
brought up in the Catholic faith, and of it he retained the sense
of discipline. But fundamentally he drew his inspiration from
the ideas of classical antiquity. In Der Teppich des Lebens the
Angel who brings him the message of his life contrasts the accept-
ance of Christian ideals with that of Greece; and whilst admitting
the validity of the former for the great mass of mankind, claims
for a smaller select group allegiance to the faith of Hellas. Upon
their banners is inscribed the watchword: 'Hellas ewig unsre
liebe'.
The 'third humanism', as it is sometimes designated, dis-
penses with a transcendental god and places the godhead in man
_ himself. In this humanism George reveals a spiritual arrogance
greater than that of any other writer. The dead god for whom,
. with Nietzsche, the substitute is to be found in the future in the
Superman, is for George a living god still, is in the present, is
? embodied in man. Man is the criterion and measure of all things,
which have interest and significance for George only in so far as
they minister to man. It is man who, as in Goethe's poem Das
Gottliche--which is a glorification of man, not of the gods--
distinguishes, selects and judges, who can give eternal duration
to the moment. Control is for George a function of power. Under-
lying the idea of control is the aspiration, the prerogative of
power; the insistent urge to bring life, and not merely the poet's
own ethical life, under his spiritual control. All that cannot be
brought under this dominion, that has not been shaped (gestal-
tet) by the spirit of man, arouses in George misgivings, suspicion,
alarm. It is an alien realm to him with which he cannot or will
not become familiar. He is Apolline, and turns away with distaste
from the Dionysian. All that partakes of the Dionysian or
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? orgiastic is hostile to the creation of that ordered, controlled
and formed existence which was in some degree his achievement
as well as his aspiration.
Thus his attitude to nature, to which he js jaasnsitive except
in so far as If is humanize J by the presence of man in it. . Sabine
Lepsius1 records the strange feeling she had, when walking
with George in the country, that he seemed to be out of place, to
be in an element which was alien to him; and in the immediately
following incident of the infant child which turned from him in
terror, she widens the significance of her original feeling to
suggest that wherever nature manifested itself in its spontaneous
and uncontrolled being George was a stranger. Mature is fox-
^him, one may say, always landscape background; its existence in
its own right is a disturbing aspect of it to be ignored if possible
or at least passed over in silence. The poem Urlandschaft in
Der Teppich des Lebens, which apparently glorifies a primaeval
landscape, is in reality a manifestation of this attitude of mind
towards nature, for the poem, as its last lines reveal, is in fact
not a celebration of primaeval landscape but of its elimination
as such by the irruption into it of the human pair:
Des ackers froh des segens neuer miihn
Erzvater grub erzmutter molk
Das schicksal nahrend fur ein ganzes volk. 2
Mankind has, in fact, taken possession of nature and is preparing
to take it under control and exploit it for its own purposes.
Even George's attitude to nature as the source of all life, en-
visaged as a female figure, the nourisher of existence, brooding
in the depths of being over the springs from which all life flows,
is one of control, transformed into compulsion if she be re-
calcitrant to man's will:
Und wenn die grosse Nahrerin im zorne
Nicht mehr sich mischend neigt am untern borne /
In einer weltnacht starr und miide pocht:
So kann nur einer der sie stets befocht
Und zwang und nie verfuhr nach ihrem rechte
Die hand ihr pressen/ packen ihre flechte/
1 Sabine Lepsius and her husband were friends of George in Berlin
and promoted an interest in his poetry. The incident is recorded in her
book, Stefan George, Geschichte einer Freundschaft (1935).
2 English translations of quoted passages, which are by the author
throughout, will be found in the Appendix on page 59.
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? Dass sie ihr werk willfahrig wieder treibt:
Den leib vergottet und den gott verleibt.
The poem, Templer1, in which these lines occur is highly re-
vealing. The sacred band of young men is acclaimed, an ideal
fellowship it is true, but one which recalls the disciples of
George. All the immemorial deeds and necessary changes which
the world requires are performed by men who are members of
this fellowship. And not only in the world of action do they im-
pose their will, but upon the order of human life as determined
by nature. If nature should refuse to carry on her task in some
dark period of the world, only one who has constantly combatted
her and exercised compulsion upon her and never has proceeded
in accordance with her laws is able to force her to pursue lier
task obediently. But what is her task? It is, as George enunciates
it: to deify the body, and make bodily the deity. The final step
has been taken, both in the exercise of control and in the separa-
tion from nature. Her task has been imposed upon her, not by
God but by man. George's fundamental obsession with power,
expressed even in Els ideal of a highly disciplined personal life,
stands openly revealed. The ideal of humanism has been exalted
to a supreme, magnificent but impious height. The superman
has been realized. Man, nature and God have been subjected to
human compulsion.
II
If the words 'obsession with power' be used, however, the idea
(so frequently imputed to George) must be guarded against
that this is in any way connected with political ideas, and that
it implies any belief in the ideas of German aggrandizement or
in the achievements of the second Empire. It is in the world of
the spirit that his power rules. 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.
Martin Turnell: jacques riviere
Bernard Wall: alessandro manzoni
Other titles are in preparation*
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? STEFAN GEORGE
BY
E. K. . BENNETT
NEW HAVEN
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
1954
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? Printed in the United States of America
All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced,
in whole or in part, in any form (except by reviewers
for the public press) without written permission from
the publishers.
gut
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? For
TERENCE WINDLE
M887135
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? CONTENTS
Introduction page 9
1 11
ii 18
in 20
iv 26
v 31
vi 45
vii 56
Appendix 59
Biographical Dates 62
Select Bibliography 63
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? Introduction
Unlike his contemporaries Rilke and Thomas Mann, Stefan
George has not excited great interest in the reading world out-
side his native country. Few translations of his poetry have
appeared in English and only occasional essays have attempted
an assessment of his place in modern European poetry. Even in
Germany he has not yet been given his definite place in the
order of its poets. For his importance has been much disputed,
and like Helena in the second part of Goethe's Faust he appears
as one greatly admired but also greatly blamed. The admiration
and the blame have concerned themselves not merely with his
poetry but with his personality, and the influence which his
personality had upon his contemporaries. That his poetry is
^ cold, mannered, too consciously willed, unmusical, is the
charge brought against it by his detractors; whilst as a person-
ality he has been charged with self-glorification, arrogance and
the perversion of_youth, now towards aestheticism, now towards
Nazisnv
A forceful and compelling personality may be an asset to a
poet; it is not necessarily one. Considered in itself its drawback
is that its greatest effectiveness can be felt only by those who
come into immediate contact with it--a limited number of
persons; the wider public knows of it only in so far as it is
revealed in his poetry or--more debatably--through rumours
and reports, and these tend on the whole to arouse aversion
rather than sympathy. Thus there was a George-legend, the
reaction to which was vaguely hostile among the general public
in Germany before there was any wide-spread acquaintance with
the poet's actual works. Some excuse for this hostile attitude to
George amongst the general public may be found in the deliber-
ate exclusiveness of the appeal which the poet made. Some
years passed and a number of volumes had been printed before
the actual publication of his works took place in the ordinary
way. The earlier volumes were addressed to and accessible only
to an elite. Only slowly and with the passing of years did George
acquire a 'public' and that a restricted one, so that it can be said
that his works never penetrated into the consciousness--far less
the affection--of a wide public, nor indeed did he ever wish
them to do so.
In 1914 when Der Stern des Bundes became to some extent
the breviary of the young intellectuals who set forth to war, they
were taking with them a book which was originally intended for
a circle of initiates. Some of Rilke's works, notably the Cornet
and Die Geschichten vom lieben Gott, became popular; no work
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? of George's ever did. He had devotees--the immediate members
of his circle--his avowed disciples; he had a certain limited
public among the intellectuals who were convinced of his
merits as a poet--a larger circle than that of his devotees; out-
side of that there was only an indifferent or even hostile world
mainly of detractors. Only towards the very end of his life did
George allow any of his poems to appear in anthologies--the
most easy means of access to a poet. Nor did any selection of his
poems in German appear until after his death. It may be said
that in withholding his assent to such forms of publication
George was wise, for his poems gain greatly by being read in
their proper framework; and in the arrangement of each volume
of his works the same principle of form is at work as in each
individual poem.
Many books have been written on Stefan George in German
by those who were actually members of his circle or those who
were closely connected with it. They are not in the strict sense
critical works. The personality of the poet impinges too greatly
upon the writers' consciousness for a critical attitude to the
poems to be possible for them. The principle of loyalty to the
Master hampers any freedom of judgment. The poetry is accepted
as great poetry and no detailed investigation of individual
poems is attempted. Where references are made to other poets
they are to Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe. It is tacitly assumed
that George's place is with these. To assign him a place beside
Platen or Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, with whom amongst German
poets he has formally the greatest affinity, would seem little
short of impiety. Yet, though he is unquestionably a greater
poet than either of these, he is equally unquestionably of a
lesser stature than Holderlin. Some of the latest important
writings on him are still written by those who actually knew
him. There are, nevertheless, indications in the essays occasion-
ally appearing in literary journals at present that there is a
growing feeling, after some years of neglect, that the time has
come for a more detached assessment of him, an assessment
which can be made only by those who did not come under
the immediate influence of his personality.
That he was a great and forceful personality there can be no
doubt; that he was a man of the highest intellectual ability
with an understanding and grasp of the problems of his age
seems equally indubitable; that he was a great poet in the strict-
est sense of the word 'great' cannot so easily be maintained.
And whether the atmosphere of grandeur which surrounded him
can convincingly be preserved when those who knew him and
helped to create it have passed away is even more problematical.
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? I
Stefan Anton George was born on the 12th July 1868, in Bu? des-
heim near Bingen on the Rhine, the son of a well-to-do owner
of vineyards who afterwards owned a wineshop in Bingen itself.
The family was peasant in origin, but the poet's father had be-
come affluent enough to enable his son to devote his life to
poetry without requiring of him that he should take up any of
the accepted money-making professions. There seem to have
been no parental conflicts: both father and mother accepted
tacitly the way of life their son had chosen. After the usual
school education George spent some time at the University of
Berlin. But the years of travel, rather than university studies,
completed an education based on the classical training of a
German Gymnasium (Darmstadt) in the latter half of the nine-
teenth century. From his childhood George had shown a great
interest in words, and whilst still a child he invented a language
of his own. Later in life he returned to this idea and carried it
out more fully in a sort of lingua franca, which included
Latin, Provencal, Catalan and Spanish elements; so fully indeed
was this artificial language developed that he was able to use it
for poetical composition, and two poems in Der Siebente Ring
were originally written in it. The last two lines of the poem
i Urspruenge in the same volume are written in the language he
invented as a child.
He was at home in many European languages; and his trans-
lations of English, French, Italian and Spanish poetry, as well as
his translations into English and French of his own poems, bear
witness to his mastery of these languages.
His travels took him to London, where he spent some
months, to France, Austria, Spain and Italy. His visits to France
and to Austria have outstanding importance in the history of
his career as a poet. In Paris he was introduced to the circle of
Symbolist poets, and accepted from them the then prevailing
Symbolist mode of poetry which determined his own develop-
ment as a poet. In Vienna he made the acquaintance of the young
Hofmannsthal, in whom he believed he had found a poet who
confirmed him in his own conception of poetry. With him,
however, he failed to establish a relationship on the lines which
he wished.
At home in Germany, where the greater part of his life was
spent, he lived for some years in Bingen in the house of his
parents. Later his chief centres of residence were Berlin, Munich
and Heidelberg, in each of which towns he had a pied-a-terre,
usually only a single room, in which he lived and received his
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? disciples. The last months of his life were spent in Italian Switzer-
land, whither he took refuge from his native country after it had
passed under the rule of National Socialism. Here he died on
the 4th December 1933.
George's mode of life as far as material things are concerned
was sober and unpretentious. Though he had well-to-do and
wealthy friends in whose homes he was made welcome, the
rooms in which he lived were furnished in a severe style, which
eschewed any attempt at luxury. His dress, though departing
sufficiently from the regular mode of male fashion to make him
a somewhat conspicuous figure, was likewise severe and formal.
Not only in that, however, but also in the dignity of his figure
and of his lineaments he commanded attention and respect. If
there was affectation in the way he presented himself to the out-
ward world, it was the affectation of simplicity, not of ostenta-
tion, and the severity of line which is one of the characteristics
of his poetry was also a characteristic of his whole visible being.
Those who knew him, even those whose acquaintance with him
was merely transient, testify to the arresting effect upon them
of his appearance, his glance, his speech. It may be said, and has
been said, that these effects were deliberately cultivated; but it
must in justice be admitted that nature had endowed him with
the materials from which to create his effects, and that in the
cultivation of them he was essentially proceeding along the
course which she had laid out for him. By following that
course both in his life and in his poetry he preserved the in-
tegrity of a personality controlled and ordered by the unity of
a positive idea. He was, in fact, in his personality, his mode of
life and his poetry, 'all of a piece'.
A personality of force communicates himself, when a poet,
not merely by the written word, but also by immediate contact
with other personalities, who are in sympathy with him and
receptive of his ideas and conception of life. The more compel-
ling he is as a personality the greater will be his authority and
hold over those whom he gathers up in the circle of his intimacy;
the greater his conviction and assurance of the rightness and
importance of his ideal, the more selective he will be in choosing
those to whom he communicates himself, and the closer and
more demanding will be his union with them. George's contact
with the world of men was primarily through the circle of friends
whom he had chosen as being in sympathy with his ideals, men
whose relationship with him was that of disciples to their master
or leader. Hofmannsthal was to have been the first of those
disciples, but would not accept the role.
It is this position of George as a leader and teacher surrounded
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? by a devoted circle of disciples which all his life placed him at
one remove from contact with ordinary humanity. It is as though
he could be reached only through the medium of his disciples,
to whom in the first place his words were addressed, for whom
primarily his personality existed, and by whom his poems were
more immediately comprehended. What is known of him as a
man, the significance of some of his later obscurer poems, the
esoteric wisdom which they contain, must pass through the
minds of his disciples before it can be understood by the outside
world. No other poet has worked quite in this way; but it is
characteristic of George. The circle around him began to form
very early in his career as a poet, and the printing of the first
number of Die Blatter fiir die Kunst (1892) gave the first
tangible evidence of the existence of such a band of men whose
unity consisted in their acceptance of the ideas of one central
and controlling personality. In the early days they were men of
George's own age, and many of them remained faithful to him
to the end of their lives; but as the years passed and George grew
older, they were selected from younger generations, and the
circle which surrounded the ageing George consisted largely of
talented and promising youths and young men, together with a
number of the old stalwarts from earlier generations.
The circle of young men around George--der George Kreis,
as it was known in Germany--may perhaps be described as an
assembly of men of intellectual interests and ability which had
something in common with the group of poets who enjoyed the
intimacy of Mallarme and were habitual visitors in the Rue de
Rome, and something in common with the circle of young men
who surrounded Socrates as described in the Platonic dialogues.
The Kreis partook of the nature of both, but differed from
either. In its earlier days it was concerned more especially with
the discussion and promulgation of new ideas of poetry, and
manifested itself in the printing of the early numbers of Die
Blatter fiir die Kunst. But the influence of George upon it was
more authoritarian than that of Mallarme upon the habitues of
the Rue de Rome, or of Socrates upon the young men of Athens,
for though some attached themselves to Socrates more closely,
his interest in them claimed no absolute adherence to any doc-
trines as a requirement. But like the attitude of Socrates, the
attitude of George to his disciples was in essence a paedagogic
one, and as time went on and the difference in age between
the Master and his followers became necessarily greater, the
paedagogic element emerged more clearly.
It was not merely a conception of poetry which the disciples
were required to share with the Master, but a conception of
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? life; and what had originally been an aesthetic training (in
which indeed ethical elements were already present) became
ultimately a more explicitly ethical one, in which order, measure,
discipline and the idea of a dedicated life were the qualities
stressed. Membership of this group was not easily obtained,
though the Master was on the look-out for suitable candidates.
(Boehringer in his book Mem Bild von Stefan George gives an ac-
count of George's mistaken decision with regard to the admission
of one apparently suitable candidate, which is not without its hu-
morous side. ) Once incorporated in the circle, absolute loyalty was
demanded of the members; and though the suggestion of tyranny
is firmly repudiated by those who were members, to the
outside public the attitude of George may easily appear to have
been tyrannical, at least autocratic. Some members broke away;
differences of opinion upon matters of importance led to ex-
clusion--marriage, for instance, might be construed as a breach
of loyalty to the Master; friction between individual members
might lead to the expulsion of one or more; the publication of
a work of learning which did not meet with George's approval
called down severe reproof upon the author. To George's credit
it must be said that the attitude of Anti-Semitism in some of his
disciples was one of the causes which led to the most violent
upheaval in the history of the circle.
The Kreis aroused in the minds of the inadequately informed
general public disapproval and derision; sometimes specific
charges were made against it, for instance that it alienated
young men from their parents and homes; on the whole, it was
regarded as an assembly of affectedly superior and fantastically
minded youths who had placed themselves under the domination
of a pretentious and not very highly approved poet who was
both in his poetry and in his life something of a charlatan. In
truth it would seem that what had originally been an organic
growth, the natural development from the seed of one forceful
personality who had attracted around himself companions who
shared his views and in a lesser degree his gifts in aesthetic
matters, had hardened into something more artificial and self-
conscious.
But underlying the formation of the circle, and the foundation
of the journal Die Blatter fur die Kunst, is a principle which
unites in a general idea the seemingly so disparate poems of the
younger and the elder George--the idea of a mission. Obscured
to some extent by the aestheticism of the early poems, it is
nevertheless there, though it does not emerge clearly until the
publication of Der Siebente Ring. To the young George the
cultural decay of his time was already apparent--apparent most
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? pressingly in German poetry, for t^epoetry_qf an age was for
him the key to the civilization of the age itself. Others were
equally aware of the decay of civilization; and the German Natu-
ralists, whose earliest works appeared at the same time as
the earliest works of George, manifested their disapproval of
contemporary German literature and life in their plays, novels
and to a lesser degree their lyrical poetry. But the form and
methods of their reaction were not such that George could
partner or even accept them. Where they revolted against
contemporary literature because of its triviality and the remote-
ness in subject matter from the problems of the day, George
was in revolt against the carelessness, the neglect of formal
beauty which characterized the German poetry popular in his
youth. The question of formal beauty was not one which had
any part in the Naturalists' aim to create a new type of literature.
Their methods and preoccupations were to George merely a
further indication of the degeneracy of contemporary poetry.
He abhorred them.
To give to poetry a new purity, a perfection >
of form; to restore the Word to an innocence and clarity lost in
the careless traffic to which it had been subjected by writers
who had not realized their responsibility to the sacred instru-
ment it was their duty to preserve; this was the. aim, the obliga-
tion imposed upon him, his mission, to which he devoted him-
self more exclusively in his early works. Poetry, in Germany,
had for George lost its dignity, its sanctity; it was his task to
restore it to its high estate.
George's reaction to the decay of civilization which surrounded
him was not to put forward plans for the reformation of the
world--Weltverbesserungsplane are rejected as the subject
matter of poetry in the early numbers of Die Blatter filr die
Kunst--but to create for himself a mode of life which in itself
would be the exemplary realization of his protest against the
prevailing sloth of the spirit. 'To make', as Eric Gill wrote, 'a
corner of good living in the chaos of the world'. The regenera-
tion of poetry with which he began would imperceptibly bring
about the regeneration of society: the circle of young men who
assembled around him would automatically, having imbibed the
ideas of the Master, form a league of youth to carry these ideas
out into the world and so bring about a new order of life. Though
the theoretical statement of aims in the earliest numbers of Die
Blatter fiir die Kunst was exclusively concerned with the re-
generation of poetry, as the title of the journal suggested, by
the end of the century a contributor (it may not have been George
himself, for the prose contributions are unsigned) could write,
no doubt too optimistically, of the generation which had been
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? nourished on the ideas of the Master: that the light of Hellas
had descended upon the youth of our age, inspiring them with
an ardent aspiration for a life in which beauty manifests itself in
the body and in the mind as the principle of proportion, causing
them to reject the shallow culture of the day and the outmoded
barbarism of the past; and, neither rigid in their uprightness
nor ignoble in their submissiveness, to advance through life
with heads erect, recognizing themselves as members of a great
people and not of one individual tribe among many.
It seems clear therefore that in spirit the influence of George
within his circle by this time was more akin to that of Socrates
than that of Mallarme. George's ideal was that of the controlled
life. In the chaos and abandonment of contemporary civilization
he aimed at the establishment of an example of individual
life in which the soul, the spirit and the body were combined in
a harmonious unity of co-operation and control. George was
brought up in the Catholic faith, and of it he retained the sense
of discipline. But fundamentally he drew his inspiration from
the ideas of classical antiquity. In Der Teppich des Lebens the
Angel who brings him the message of his life contrasts the accept-
ance of Christian ideals with that of Greece; and whilst admitting
the validity of the former for the great mass of mankind, claims
for a smaller select group allegiance to the faith of Hellas. Upon
their banners is inscribed the watchword: 'Hellas ewig unsre
liebe'.
The 'third humanism', as it is sometimes designated, dis-
penses with a transcendental god and places the godhead in man
_ himself. In this humanism George reveals a spiritual arrogance
greater than that of any other writer. The dead god for whom,
. with Nietzsche, the substitute is to be found in the future in the
Superman, is for George a living god still, is in the present, is
? embodied in man. Man is the criterion and measure of all things,
which have interest and significance for George only in so far as
they minister to man. It is man who, as in Goethe's poem Das
Gottliche--which is a glorification of man, not of the gods--
distinguishes, selects and judges, who can give eternal duration
to the moment. Control is for George a function of power. Under-
lying the idea of control is the aspiration, the prerogative of
power; the insistent urge to bring life, and not merely the poet's
own ethical life, under his spiritual control. All that cannot be
brought under this dominion, that has not been shaped (gestal-
tet) by the spirit of man, arouses in George misgivings, suspicion,
alarm. It is an alien realm to him with which he cannot or will
not become familiar. He is Apolline, and turns away with distaste
from the Dionysian. All that partakes of the Dionysian or
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? orgiastic is hostile to the creation of that ordered, controlled
and formed existence which was in some degree his achievement
as well as his aspiration.
Thus his attitude to nature, to which he js jaasnsitive except
in so far as If is humanize J by the presence of man in it. . Sabine
Lepsius1 records the strange feeling she had, when walking
with George in the country, that he seemed to be out of place, to
be in an element which was alien to him; and in the immediately
following incident of the infant child which turned from him in
terror, she widens the significance of her original feeling to
suggest that wherever nature manifested itself in its spontaneous
and uncontrolled being George was a stranger. Mature is fox-
^him, one may say, always landscape background; its existence in
its own right is a disturbing aspect of it to be ignored if possible
or at least passed over in silence. The poem Urlandschaft in
Der Teppich des Lebens, which apparently glorifies a primaeval
landscape, is in reality a manifestation of this attitude of mind
towards nature, for the poem, as its last lines reveal, is in fact
not a celebration of primaeval landscape but of its elimination
as such by the irruption into it of the human pair:
Des ackers froh des segens neuer miihn
Erzvater grub erzmutter molk
Das schicksal nahrend fur ein ganzes volk. 2
Mankind has, in fact, taken possession of nature and is preparing
to take it under control and exploit it for its own purposes.
Even George's attitude to nature as the source of all life, en-
visaged as a female figure, the nourisher of existence, brooding
in the depths of being over the springs from which all life flows,
is one of control, transformed into compulsion if she be re-
calcitrant to man's will:
Und wenn die grosse Nahrerin im zorne
Nicht mehr sich mischend neigt am untern borne /
In einer weltnacht starr und miide pocht:
So kann nur einer der sie stets befocht
Und zwang und nie verfuhr nach ihrem rechte
Die hand ihr pressen/ packen ihre flechte/
1 Sabine Lepsius and her husband were friends of George in Berlin
and promoted an interest in his poetry. The incident is recorded in her
book, Stefan George, Geschichte einer Freundschaft (1935).
2 English translations of quoted passages, which are by the author
throughout, will be found in the Appendix on page 59.
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? Dass sie ihr werk willfahrig wieder treibt:
Den leib vergottet und den gott verleibt.
The poem, Templer1, in which these lines occur is highly re-
vealing. The sacred band of young men is acclaimed, an ideal
fellowship it is true, but one which recalls the disciples of
George. All the immemorial deeds and necessary changes which
the world requires are performed by men who are members of
this fellowship. And not only in the world of action do they im-
pose their will, but upon the order of human life as determined
by nature. If nature should refuse to carry on her task in some
dark period of the world, only one who has constantly combatted
her and exercised compulsion upon her and never has proceeded
in accordance with her laws is able to force her to pursue lier
task obediently. But what is her task? It is, as George enunciates
it: to deify the body, and make bodily the deity. The final step
has been taken, both in the exercise of control and in the separa-
tion from nature. Her task has been imposed upon her, not by
God but by man. George's fundamental obsession with power,
expressed even in Els ideal of a highly disciplined personal life,
stands openly revealed. The ideal of humanism has been exalted
to a supreme, magnificent but impious height. The superman
has been realized. Man, nature and God have been subjected to
human compulsion.
II
If the words 'obsession with power' be used, however, the idea
(so frequently imputed to George) must be guarded against
that this is in any way connected with political ideas, and that
it implies any belief in the ideas of German aggrandizement or
in the achievements of the second Empire. It is in the world of
the spirit that his power rules. 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.
