Soul of the Age (10 page)

 

Tübingen, October 2, 1898

Thank you for your greetings from Nürnberg. I'm glad that you didn't force yourself to write a more formal letter, and just to prove that I don't want to be the kind of correspondent who simply tots up credits and debits, or questions and answers, I'm getting back to you unbidden.

This is a long, lonely Sunday; I find it impossible to spend the entire day doing intellectual work, and during the past two months all my friends have been away on their travels. I have just come back from a walk. I sat along the splendid path lined with linden trees, and watched the leaves falling and the children playing. An aging, independent scholar disturbed my musings—a desiccated, lonely, and embittered bachelor known as “skullhead.” For years now he has been living all alone. He injected his bitter mockery into the elegy I had just begun, and walked around those paths with me for a whole hour, talking and grumbling. It was a strange thing to watch: he couldn't help making bitter and angry jokes, yet he needed so badly to talk about himself and be sociable that he thrust himself upon me in a manner I found almost moving.

I'm in my room now, alternating between writing and reading. Schleiermacher's letters are propped open in front of me, and I'm reading them eagerly and with great pleasure. Alongside them is the copybook full of memories that I once mentioned. I'd love to show it to you. The uncovered past is here beside this fresh page, and I'm comparing my active life now to my phlegmatic dreams back then. And that brings to mind my only decent, worthwhile friendship during these years, and I think gratefully of you. I have often been poor, hard-bitten, embittered, but when I examine my life now, I realize that your concern has invigorated and encouraged me, and that I'm on my way uphill.

Just imagine! I have bought myself a violin again, and love fooling around with it, since I enjoy this harmless mode of introspection and meditation.

I don't have any opportunity here to socialize with women, and this makes me feel even closer to you. I always found my relations with women especially meaningful, and miss them even more than family life; I have always profited greatly from the experience of having female company. Especially now, for since I stopped going to social gatherings and ceased drinking beer and wine in the pubs—out of a sense of revulsion and also for health reasons—my friends here have increasingly failed to meet my needs.

Once I get used to the idea of ditching my independent studies for a bit, I may go off wandering—who knows?—maybe next year. It is my inner isolation that makes me long for lots of conversations and activities with people, whom I could really love and learn something from.

An indirect result of this empty life devoid of social contacts is that my mind doubles its expectations of my solitary pursuits. My mind lusts after studies that I simply don't have the free time to pursue; it squints at Plato and chides me every day for not having read the works of Kant and Hegel. I feel those summits are beyond the scope of my studies in literary aesthetics, and if I were leading a more active life, they would certainly lose much of their appeal. Actually, I'm not historically or philosophically minded, although I do have a critical bent; I find life the best test for my heartbeat, works of beauty for my eye, and euphonious song for my ear. My muse cherishes above all else the play of light, feverish colors, the quivering of delicate sounds, music rather than sculpture.

So you see, I was serious when I said I would tell you something about myself. The twilight is interrupting me, and I shall finish now, so I can devote the lamplight to my books.

Where are you now? And were you able to find what you're looking for? In exchange for this glimpse of my solitary retreat, just send me a little whiff of the wide world and all those treasures you are seeing.

TO MARIE HESSE

Tübingen, December 2, 1898

There is no way I would ever refuse to listen attentively to what you have to say. I can see that you read the poems carefully
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and kept an eye out for the genuine article. What should I say about your opinion? I believe you are absolutely right in some cases, in others it's a matter of insignificant differences of interpretation, and in others still you touch upon things that to me have the force of law. But what's the point? I wish to thank you for reading all the lyrics so lovingly, and also for going beyond them and thinking of me with such heartfelt solicitude.

Just two things by way of justification! First of all, the very title
Romantic Lyrics
suggests a confession that is aesthetic as well as personal. I believe that they mark the end of a phase and that it just isn't right to draw conclusions from them about my future work. The manuscript has been finished since spring—I have been lonelier, quieter, and more clearheaded ever since. Second, after a lot of reflection, I felt that, in putting it together and deciding which songs to include or omit, I couldn't let myself be swayed by anything personal. The little book was not intended as a miscellany, but rather as a unified whole, a series of modulations and variations on one basic Romantic motif.

Believe me, Mother, your verdict was more important to me than any of the reviews; I'm much in awe of your judgment and sensitivity. Besides, our hearts are not at such a remove that I would find your motherly admonitions and worries incomprehensible and unworthy of respect. You have no idea how many of them seem true to me, even though, despite my best intentions, I'm unable at present to make them my own. When I think of my difficult years, how can there be any part of me left that is ungrateful and doesn't want to submit to you!

I have been having headaches since the day before yesterday arid am using phenacetin with good results. I was healthy for so long that I now feel a bit Subdued and dispirited. You will always have to make plenty of allowances for me and my letters!

TO HELENE VOIGT-DIEDERICHS

Tübingen, February 19, 1899

Your kind letter reached me unexpectedly early this time. Your inner eye must be unusually clear-sighted and you must have a remarkable sensitivity in personal matters, since you can read my entire being in a way nobody else can. The nighttime pages that you're holding in your hands originated during countless midnight walks on sleepless nights along streets, bridges, and avenues. These solitary hours under the swaying chestnut and plane trees have become an invaluable and purifying source of memory and reflection; my days have been refreshed and deepened by the cold breath of those nights. During that period I must have reviewed the memories of my entire life some hundred times; I had much cause for self-accusation and regret, since I discovered many extinguished stars in my firmament. But I felt that the remaining ones deserved to survive, and I made friends with my past. My wishes reflect the day and the hour; perhaps I shall never again be able to spend months in humble reflection discovering inner strengths the way I have since last summer. Often, when I had finished contemplating some memory and stood gazing into the dark Neckar, I would see standing beside me in a vision a friend, who was inwardly at one with me. Occasionally I had to smile and stretch out my hand, as if you were coming toward me and knew everything I had gone through and contemplated here in the dark.

On these strolls I'm often approached by the shadowy forms of future works, which have arisen from the depths, those large misty shapes. I used to greet them, and certainly recognized them emotionally, and yearned for a time when I could finish molding them. So I'm expecting two treasures, and wish one of them could be present to share my peace and happiness.

Nighttime sounds heard during one of those late walks—the branches creaking, the river murmuring, the sound of someone's footsteps one night—there is nothing more to those artlessly written pages in my copybook. I had intended to add a wreath in honor of my dear Chopin, but haven't found anything good enough yet.

On Shrove Tuesday a harlequin put his arm around me and asked: “Are you the ghost of the avenues?” I said yes and freed myself; he then called out after me: “If it's poetry you want, you'll have to come up with something more forceful than your ‘silken' Romantic verse.”

Today (Sunday) I had a most uncommonly pleasant experience. I was at one of the splendid Schapitz matinees and heard two Beethoven quartets, op. 59 III and op. 131. The minuet and allegro molto in the first piece are wonderfully elegant. In all of Germany one couldn't hear anything that would surpass the noble, exceptionally well-rehearsed and tightly disciplined Beethoven quartets of those four chamber musicians from Stuttgart. The audience is very small and just about every connoisseur is there. I really enjoy the whole thing. It takes some courage to give a public concert in that sober hall, in the morning light, standing there with just four stands, the instruments, and those virtually unknown Beethoven quartets. I find this Schapitz music unutterably refreshing. Just imagine: a string quartet on Sunday morning, without the lighting, jewelry, and pomp of the virtuosos, in front of barely a hundred listeners, with no gossipy intermissions and sparkling dresses, so that the audience is extremely attentive and has to do its best to fill the hall with applause. The four performers, on the other hand, are hardworking artists, who are superbly trained and work together cordially, without any trace of virtuoso egotism, to bring pure versions of these masterly old quartets to light. It's a great test for the audience: most drift away; limitations in intellect and education become quite clear. The opera fans are the first to leave; one senses with some embarrassment that the music and orchestra in the theaters have dulled even good ears and made it impossible for them to appreciate these elegant, but by no means pompous works of art. If you had heard today's andante ma non troppo, there would be no need for me to resort to words: the four violinists sitting on their little chairs, painfully misunderstood.

Now it has got very late, so
addio!
I'm eager to hear whether your husband has any use for my manuscript. My thanks for your letter, and also for your friendship. You know, the trust and understanding you have shown have created an echo in me, indeed more than an echo. With an expression of friendship

TO EUGEN DIEDERICHS

Tübingen, April 6, 1899

I was delighted to get your friendly letter. I fully agree with your plan to publish 600 copies;
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please let me know if you have any other suggestions. I fully realize that we cannot expect any great demand given the specific and perhaps all too personal nature of my little book. The very thought of those 600 customers makes me want to burst out laughing.

The twenty-one-year-old bookdealer's apprentice in Tübingen: “There I struggled through the three-year apprenticeship, which was anything but easy, and remained another year as the youngest employee in the store, with a salary of eighty marks monthly”

(
Above
) The
Petit Cénacle.
Left to right: Otto Erich Faber, Oskar Rupp, Ludwig Finckh, Carlo Hammelehle, Hesse

We were considered decadent and modern

And we believed it complacently.

In reality we were young gentlemen

Of extremely modest demeanor.

—
“To the Petit Cénacle”

(
Below
) Drinking Chianti in Fiesole, 1906

People warn you against the profession of poet,

Also against playing the flute, the drums, the violin,

Because riffraff of this sort

So often tend toward drinking and frivolity.

—
From Hesse's unpublished light verse

In accepting my book for your press, you are fulfilling an ardent wish of mine and I shall always appreciate and be grateful for what you have done. I would also like to thank you for giving such an honest account of your impression of me. I hope we can get to know each other at some point by discussing, e.g., the Proteus of “Romanticism.” Today I can only give you a hint: I was rather ill when I wrote most of my previous work and had to steal the time and mental energy from a busy professional life. For the time being I have shelved my larger plans. But I'm sure that you will eventually discover those qualities that you find lacking in me. All I can claim by way of literary assets is my painstaking reverence for language, and especially for its musical qualities. That is the keystone of
my
Romanticism: loving care of the language, which I envision as a rare old violin; many qualities are required for such a violin to last and continue sounding beautiful history, training, careful maintenance by expert hands. Of course what is language without the mind! Yet “morality is self-explanatory,” according to Vischer's
Auch Einer.
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Have you noticed also how sloppy, crude, and rather stilted the ordinary language of our contemporary literati is, even of poets, as if they intended to caricature Heine today, Nietzsche tomorrow.